18860	----	SHADOWS OF THE STAGE BY WILLIAM WINTER _"The best in this kind are but shadows"_ SHAKESPEARE NEW YORK MACMILLAN AND COMPANY AND LONDON 1893 COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY MACMILLAN & CO. Set up and electrotyped May, 1892. Large Paper Edition printed May. Ordinary Edition reprinted June, August, November, 1892; January, June, October, November, 1893. Norwood Press: J.S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith. Boston, Mass., U.S.A. TO Henry Irving IN MEMORY AND IN HONOUR OF ALL THAT HE HAS DONE TO DIGNIFY AND ADORN THE STAGE AND TO ENNOBLE SOCIETY THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED _"Cui laurus æternos honores Delmatico peperit triumpho"_ PREFACE. _The papers contained in this volume, chosen out of hundreds that the author has written on dramatic subjects, are assembled with the hope that they may be accepted, in their present form, as a part of the permanent record of our theatrical times. For at least thirty years it has been a considerable part of the constant occupation of the author to observe and to record the life of the contemporary stage. Since 1860 he has written intermittently in various periodicals, and since the summer of 1865 he has written continuously in the New York Tribune, upon actors and their art; and in that way he has accumulated a great mass of historical commentary upon the drama. In preparing this book he has been permitted to draw from his contributions to the Tribune, and also from his writings in Harper's Magazine and Weekly, in the London Theatre, and in Augustin Daly's Portfolio of Players. The choice of these papers has been determined partly by consideration of space and partly with the design of supplementing the author's earlier dramatic books, namely: Edwin Booth in Twelve Dramatic Characters; The Jeffersons; Henry Irving; The Stage Life of Mary Anderson; Brief Chronicles, containing eighty-six dramatic biographies; In Memory of McCullough; The Life of John Gilbert; The Life and Works of John Brougham; The Press and the Stage; The Actor and Other Speeches; and A Daughter of Comedy, being the life of Ada Rehan. The impulse of all those writings, and of the present volume, is commemorative. Let us save what we can._ _"Sed omnes una manet nox, Et calcanda semel via leti."_ W.W. APRIL 18, 1892. CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. THE GOOD OLD TIMES 13 II. IRVING IN FAUST 30 III. ADELAIDE NEILSON 47 IV. EDWIN BOOTH 63 V. MARY ANDERSON 90 VI. OLIVIA 119 VII. ON JEFFERSON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 130 VIII. ON JEFFERSON'S ACTING 151 IX. JEFFERSON AND FLORENCE 159 X. ON THE DEATH OF FLORENCE 169 XI. SHYLOCK AND PORTIA 178 XII. JOHN McCULLOUGH 185 XIII. CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN 206 XIV. LAWRENCE BARRETT 215 XV. IRVING IN RAVENSWOOD 226 XVI. MERRY WIVES AND FALSTAFF 243 XVII. ADA REHAN 258 XVIII. TENNYSON'S FORESTERS 269 XIX. ELLEN TERRY: MERCHANT OF VENICE 286 XX. RICHARD MANSFIELD 301 XXI. GENEVIEVE WARD 315 XXII. EDWARD S. WILLARD 322 XXIII. SALVINI 339 XXIV. IRVING AS EUGENE ARAM 348 XXV. CHARLES FISHER 367 XXVI. MRS. GILBERT 374 XXVII. JAMES LEWIS 379 XXVIII. A LEAF FROM MY JOURNAL 383 _"--It so fell out that certain players We o'er-raught on the way: of these we told him; And there did seem in him a kind of joy To hear of it."_ HAMLET. _"Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world--though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst--the cant of criticism is the most tormenting. I would go fifty miles on foot, for I have not a horse worth riding on, to kiss the hand of that man who will give up the reins of his imagination into his author's hands,--be pleased he knows not why and cares not wherefore."_ TRISTRAM SHANDY. SHADOWS OF THE STAGE. I. THE GOOD OLD TIMES. It is recorded of John Lowin, an actor contemporary with Shakespeare and associated with several of Shakespeare's greater characters (his range was so wide, indeed, that it included Falstaff, Henry the Eighth, and Hamlet), that, having survived the halcyon days of "Eliza and our James" and lingered into the drab and russet period of the Puritans, when all the theatres in the British islands were suppressed, he became poor and presently kept a tavern, at Brentford, called The Three Pigeons. Lowin was born in 1576 and he died in 1654--his grave being in London, in the churchyard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields--so that, obviously, he was one of the veterans of the stage. He was in his seventy-eighth year when he passed away--wherefore in his last days he must have been "a mine of memories." He could talk of the stirring times of Leicester, Drake, Essex, and Raleigh. He could remember, as an event of his boyhood, the execution of Queen Mary Stuart, and possibly he could describe, as an eye-witness, the splendid funeral procession of Sir Philip Sidney. He could recall the death of Queen Elizabeth; the advent of Scottish James; the ruffling, brilliant, dissolute, audacious Duke of Buckingham; the impeachment and disgrace of Francis Bacon; the production of the great plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; the meetings of the wits and poets at the Apollo and the Mermaid. He might have personally known Robert Herrick--that loveliest of the wild song-birds of that golden age. He might have been present at the burial of Edmund Spenser, in Westminster Abbey--when the poet brothers of the author of _The Faerie Queene_ cast into his grave their manuscript elegies and the pens with which those laments had been written. He had acted Hamlet,--perhaps in the author's presence. He had seen the burning of the old Globe Theatre. He had been, in the early days of Charles the First, the chief and distinguished Falstaff of the time. He had lived under the rule of three successive princes; had deplored the sanguinary fate of the martyr-king (for the actors were almost always royalists); had seen the rise of the Parliament and the downfall of the theatre; and now, under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, he had become the keeper of an humble wayside inn. It is easy to fancy the old actor sitting in his chair of state, the monarch of his tap-room, with a flagon of beer, and a church-warden pipe of tobacco, and holding forth, to a select circle of cronies, upon the vanished glories of the Elizabethan stage--upon the days when there were persons in existence really worthy to be called actors. He could talk of Richard Burbage, the first Romeo; of Armin, famous in Shakespeare's clowns and fools; of Heminge and Condell, who edited the First Folio of Shakespeare, which possibly he himself purchased, fresh from the press; of Joseph Taylor, whom it is said Shakespeare personally instructed how to play Hamlet, and the recollection of whose performance enabled Sir William Davenant to impart to Betterton the example and tradition established by the author--a model that has lasted to the present day; of Kempe, the original Dogberry, and of the exuberant, merry Richard Tarleton, after whom that comic genius had fashioned his artistic method; of Alleyne, who kept the bear-garden, and who founded the College and Home at Dulwich--where they still flourish; of Gabriel Spencer, and his duel with Ben Jonson, wherein he lost his life at the hands of that burly antagonist; of Marlowe "of the mighty line," and his awful and lamentable death--stabbed at Deptford by a drunken drawer in a tavern brawl. Very rich and fine, there can be no doubt, were that veteran actor's remembrances of "the good old times," and most explicit and downright, it may surely be believed, was his opinion, freely communicated to the gossips of The Three Pigeons, that--in the felicitous satirical phrase of Joseph Jefferson--all the good actors are dead. It was ever thus. Each successive epoch of theatrical history presents the same picturesque image of storied regret--memory incarnated in the veteran, ruefully vaunting the vanished glories of the past. There has always been a time when the stage was finer than it is now. Cibber and Macklin, surviving in the best days of Garrick, Peg Woffington, and Kitty Clive, were always praising the better days of Wilks, Betterton, and Elizabeth Barry. Aged play-goers of the period of Edmund Kean and John Philip Kemble were firmly persuaded that the drama had been buried, never to rise again, with the dust of Garrick and Henderson, beneath the pavement of Westminster Abbey. Less than fifty years ago an American historian of the stage (James Rees, 1845) described it as a wreck, overwhelmed with "gloom and eternal night," above which the genius of the drama was mournfully presiding, in the likeness of an owl. The New York veteran of to-day, although his sad gaze may not penetrate backward quite to the effulgent splendours of the old Park, will sigh for Burton's and the Olympic, and the luminous period of Mrs. Richardson, Mary Taylor, and Tom Hamblin. The Philadelphia veteran gazes back to the golden era of the old Chestnut Street theatre, the epoch of tie-wigs and shoe-buckles, the illustrious times of Wood and Warren, when Fennell, Cooke, Cooper, Wallack, and J.B. Booth were shining names in tragedy, and Jefferson and William Twaits were great comedians, and the beautiful Anne Brunton was the queen of the stage. The Boston veteran speaks proudly of the old Federal and the old Tremont, of Mary Duff, Julia Pelby, Charles Eaton, and Clara Fisher, and is even beginning to gild with reminiscent splendour the first days of the Boston Theatre, when Thomas Barry was manager and Julia Bennett Barrow and Mrs. John Wood contended for the public favour. In a word, the age that has seen Rachel, Seebach, Ristori, Charlotte Cushman, and Adelaide Neilson, the age that sees Ellen Terry, Mary Anderson, Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Henry Irving, Salvini, Coquelin, Lawrence Barrett, John Gilbert, John S. Clarke, Ada Rehan, James Lewis, Clara Morris, and Richard Mansfield, is a comparatively sterile period--"Too long shut in strait and few, thinly dieted on dew"--which ought to have felt the spell of Cooper and Mary Buff, and known what acting was when Cooke's long forefinger pointed the way, and Dunlap bore the banner, and pretty Mrs. Marshall bewitched the father of his country, and Dowton raised the laugh, and lovely Mrs. Barrett melted the heart, and the roses were "bright by the calm Bendemeer." The present writer, who began theatre-going in earnest over thirty years ago, finds himself full often musing over a dramatic time that still seems brighter than this--when he could exult in the fairy splendour and comic humour of _Aladdin_ and weep over the sorrows of _The Drunkard_, when he was thrilled and frightened by J.B. Booth in _The Apostate_, and could find an ecstasy of pleasure in the loves of Alonzo and Cora and the sublime self-sacrifice of Rolla. Thoughts of such actors as Henry Wallack, George Jordan, John Brougham, John E. Owens, Mary Carr, Mrs. Barrow, and Charlotte Thompson, together in the same theatre, are thoughts of brilliant people and of more than commonly happy displays of talent and beauty. The figures that used to be seen on Wallack's stage, at the house he established upon the wreck of John Brougham's Lyceum, often rise in memory, crowned with a peculiar light. Lester Wallack, in his peerless elegance; Laura Keene, in her spiritual beauty; the quaint, eccentric Walcot; the richly humorous Blake, so noble in his dignity, so firm and fine and easy in his method, so copious in his natural humour; Mary Gannon, sweet, playful, bewitching, irresistible; Mrs. Vernon, as full of character as the tulip is of colour or the hyacinth of grace, and as delicate and refined as an exquisite bit of old china--those actors made a group, the like of which it would be hard to find now. Shall we ever see again such an Othello as Edwin Forrest, or such a Lord Duberly and Cap'n Cuttle as Burton, or such a Dazzle as John Brougham, or such an Affable Hawk as Charles Mathews? Certainly there was a superiority of manner, a tinge of intellectual character, a tone of grace and romance about the old actors, such as is not common in the present; and, making all needful allowance for the illusive glamour that memory casts over the distant and the dim, it yet remains true that the veterans of our day have a certain measure of right upon their side of the question. In the earlier periods of our theatrical history the strength of the stage was concentrated in a few theatres. The old Park, for example, was called simply The Theatre, and when the New York playgoer spoke of going to the play he meant that he was going there. One theatre, or perhaps two, might flourish, in a considerable town, during a part of the year, but the field was limited, and therefore the actors were brought together in two or three groups. The star system, at least till the time of Cooper, seems to have been innocuous. Garrick's prodigious success in London, more than a hundred years ago, had enabled him to engross the control of the stage in that centre, where he was but little opposed, and practically to exile many players of the first ability, whose lustre he dimmed or whose services he did not require; and those players dispersed themselves to distant places--to York, Dublin, Edinburgh, etc.--or crossed the sea to America. With that beginning the way was opened for the growth of superb stock-companies, in the early days of the American theatre. The English, next to the Italians, were the first among modern peoples to create a dramatic literature and to establish the acted drama, and they have always led in this field--antedating, historically, and surpassing in essential things the French stage which nowadays it is fashionable to extol. English influence, at all times stern and exacting, stamped the character of our early theatre. The tone of society, alike in the mother country, in the colonies, and in the first years of our Republic, was, as to these matters, formal and severe. Success upon the stage was exceedingly difficult to obtain, and it could not be obtained without substantial merit. The youths who sought it were often persons of liberal education. In Philadelphia, New York, and Boston the stock-companies were composed of select and thoroughly trained actors, many of whom were well-grounded classical scholars. Furthermore, the epoch was one of far greater leisure and repose than are possible now--- when the civilised world is at the summit of sixty years of scientific development such as it had not experienced in all its recorded centuries of previous progress. Naturally enough the dramatic art of our ancestors was marked by scholar-like and thorough elaboration, mellow richness of colour, absolute simplicity of character, and great solidity of merit. Such actors as Wignell, Hodgkinson, Jefferson, Francis, and Blissett offered no work that was not perfect of its kind. The tradition had been established and accepted, and it was transmitted and preserved. Everything was concentrated, and the public grew to be entirely familiar with it. Men, accordingly, who obtained their ideas of acting at a time when they were under influences surviving from those ancient days are confused, bewildered, and distressed by much that is offered in the theatres now. I have listened to the talk of an aged American acquaintance (Thurlow Weed), who had seen and known Edmund Kean, and who said that all modern tragedians were insignificant in comparison with him. I have listened to the talk of an aged English acquaintance (Fladgate), who had seen and known John Philip Kemble, and who said that his equal has never since been revealed. The present day knows what the old school was,[1] when it sees William Warren, Joseph Jefferson, Charles Fisher, Mrs. John Drew, John Gilbert, J.H. Stoddart, Mrs. G.H. Gilbert, William Davidge, and Lester Wallack--the results and the remains of it. The old touch survives in them and is under their control, and no one, seeing their ripe and finished art, can feel surprise that the veteran moralist should be wedded to his idols of the past, and should often be heard sadly to declare that all the good actors--except these--are dead. He forgets that scores of theatres now exist where once there were but two or three; that the population of the United States has been increased by about fifty millions within ninety years; that the field has been enormously broadened; that the character of, the audience has become one of illimitable diversity; that the prodigious growth of the star-system, together with all sorts of experimental catch-penny theatrical management, is one of the inevitable necessities of the changed condition of civilisation; that the feverish tone of this great struggling and seething mass of humanity is necessarily reflected in the state of the theatre; and that the forces of the stage have become very widely diffused. Such a moralist would necessarily be shocked by the changes that have come upon our theatre within even the last twenty-five years--by the advent of "the sensation drama," invented and named by Dion Boucicault; by the resuscitation of the spectacle play, with its lavish tinsel and calcium glare and its multitudinous nymphs; by the opera bouffe, with its frequent licentious ribaldry; by the music-hall comedian, with his vulgar realism; and by the idiotic burlesque; with its futile babble and its big-limbed, half-naked girls. Nevertheless there are just as good actors now living as have ever lived, and there is just as fine a sense of dramatic art in the community as ever existed in any of "the palmy days"; only, what was formerly concentrated is now scattered. The stage is keeping step with the progress of human thought in every direction, and it will continue to advance. Evil influences impressed upon it there certainly are, in liberal abundance--not the least of these being that of the speculative shop-keeper, whose nature it is to seize any means of turning a penny, and who deals in dramatic art precisely as he would deal in groceries: but when we speak of "our stage" we do not mean an aggregation of shows or of the schemes of showmen. The stage is an institution that has grown out of a necessity in human nature. It was as inevitable that man should evolve the theatre as it was that he should evolve the church, the judiciary tribunal, the parliament, or any other essential component of the State. Almost all human beings possess the dramatic perception; a few possess the dramatic faculty. These few are born for the stage, and each and every generation contributes its number to the service of this art. The problem is one of selection and embarkation. Of the true actor it may be said, as Ben Jonson says of the true poet, that he is made as well as born. The finest natural faculties have never yet been known to avail without training and culture. But this is a problem which, in a great measure, takes care of itself and in time works out and submits its own solution. The anomaly, every day presented, of the young person who, knowing nothing, feeling nothing, and having nothing to communicate except the desire of communication, nevertheless rushes upon the stage, is felt to be absurd. Where the faculty as well as the instinct exists, however, impulse soon recognises the curb of common sense, and the aspirant finds his level. In this way the dramatic profession is recruited. In this way the several types of dramatic artist--each type being distinct and each being expressive of a sequence from mental and spiritual ancestry--are maintained. It is not too much to say that a natural law operates silently and surely behind each seemingly capricious chance, in this field of the conduct of life. A thoroughly adequate dramatic stock-company may almost be said to be a thing of natural accretion. It is made up, like every other group, of the old, the middle-aged, and the young; but, unlike every other group, it must contain the capacity to present, in a concrete image, each elemental type of human nature, and to reproduce, with the delicate exaggeration essential to dramatic art, every species of person; in order that all human life--whether of the street, the dwelling, the court, the camp, man in his common joys and sorrows, his vices, crimes, miseries, his loftiest aspirations and most ideal state--may be so copied that the picture will express all its beauty and sweetness, all its happiness and mirth, all its dignity, and all its moral admonition and significance, for the benefit of the world. Such a dramatic stock-company, for example (and this is but one of the commendable products of the modern stage), has grown up and crystallised into a form of refined power and symmetry, for the purpose to which it is devoted, under the management of Augustin Daly. That purpose is the acting of comedy. Mr. Daly began management in 1869, and he has remained in it, almost continually, from that time to this. Many players, first and last, have served under his direction. His company has known vicissitudes. But the organisation has not lost its comprehensive form, its competent force, and its attractive quality of essential grace. No thoughtful observer of its career can have failed to perceive how prompt the manager has been to profit by every lesson of experience; what keen perception he has shown as to the essential constituents of a theatrical troop; with what fine judgment he has used the forces at his disposal; with what intrepid resolution and expeditious energy he has animated their spirit and guided their art; and how naturally those players have glided into their several stations and assimilated in one artistic family. How well balanced, how finely equipped, how distinctively able that company is, and what resources of poetry, thought, taste, character, humour, and general capacity it contains, may not, perhaps, be fully appreciated in the passing hour. "_Non, si male nunc, et olim sic erit._" Fifty years from now, when perchance some veteran, still bright and cheery "in the chimney-nook of age," shall sit in his armchair and prose about the past, with what complacent exultation will he speak of the beautiful Ada Rehan, so bewitching as Peggy in _The Country Girl_, so radiant, vehement, and stormily passionate as Katherine; of manly John Drew, with his nonchalant ease, incisive tone, and crisp and graceful method; of noble Charles Fisher, and sprightly and sparkling James Lewis, and genial, piquant, quaint Mrs. Gilbert! I mark the gentle triumph in that aged reminiscent voice, and can respect an old man's kindly and natural sympathy with the glories and delights of his vanished youth. But I think it is not necessary to wait till you are old before you begin to praise anything, and then to praise only the dead. Let us recognise what is good in our own time, and honour and admire it with grateful hearts. * * * * * NOTE.--At the Garrick club, London, June 26, 1885, it was my fortune to meet Mr. Fladgate, "father of the Garrick," who was then aged 86. The veteran displayed astonishing resources of memory and talked most instructively about the actors of the Kemble period. He declared John Philip Kemble to have been the greatest of actors, and said that his best impersonations were Penruddock, Zanga, and Coriolanus. Mrs. Siddons, he said, was incomparable, and the elder Mathews a great genius,--the precursor of Dickens. For Edmund Kean he had no enthusiasm. Kean, he said, was at his best in Sir Edward Mortimer, and after that in Shylock. Miss O'Neill he remembered as the perfect Juliet: a beautiful, blue-eyed woman, who could easily weep, and who retained her beauty to the last, dying at 85, as Lady Wrixon Becher. [Footnote 1: This paper was written in 1888, and now, in 1892, Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Stoddart, Mrs. Drew, and Mrs. Gilbert are the only survivors of that noble group.] II. HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN FAUST. It is not surprising that the votaries of Goethe's colossal poem--a work which, although somewhat deformed and degraded with the pettiness of provincialism, is yet a grand and immortal creation of genius--should find themselves dissatisfied with theatrical expositions of it. Although dramatic in form the poem is not continuously, directly, and compactly dramatic in movement. It cannot be converted into a play without being radically changed in structure and in the form of its diction. More disastrous still, in the eyes of those votaries, it cannot be and it never has been converted into a play without a considerable sacrifice of its contents, its comprehensive scope, its poetry, and its ethical significance. In the poem it is the Man who predominates; it is not the Fiend. Mephistopheles, indeed, might, for the purpose of philosophical apprehension, be viewed as an embodied projection of the mind of Faust; for the power of the one is dependent absolutely upon the weakness and surrender of the other. The object of the poem was the portrayal of universal humanity in a typical form at its highest point of development and in its representative spiritual experience. Faust, an aged scholar, the epitome of human faculties and virtues, grand, venerable, beneficent, blameless, is passing miserably into the evening of life. He has done no outward and visible wrong, and yet he is wretched. The utter emptiness of his life--its lack of fulfilment, its lack of sensation--wearies, annoys, disgusts, and torments him. He is divided between an apathy, which heavily weighs him down into the dust, and a passionate, spiritual longing, intense, unsatisfied, insatiable, which almost drives him to frenzy. Once, at sunset, standing on a hillside, and looking down upon a peaceful valley, he utters, in a poetic strain of exquisite tenderness and beauty, the final wish of his forlorn and weary soul. It is no longer now the god-like aspiration and imperious desire of his prime, but it is the sufficient alternative. All he asks now is that he may see the world always as in that sunset vision, in the perfection of happy rest; that he may be permitted, soaring on the wings of the spirit, to follow the sun in its setting ("The day before me and the night behind"), and thus to circle forever round and round this globe, the ecstatic spectator of happiness and peace. He has had enough and more than enough of study, of struggle, of unfulfilled aspiration. Lonely dignity, arid renown, satiety, sorrow, knowledge without hope, and age without comfort,--these are his present portion; and a little way onward, waiting for him, is death. Too old to play with passion, too young not to feel desire, he has endured a long struggle between the two souls in his breast--one longing for heaven and the other for the world; but he is beaten at last, and in the abject surrender of despair he determines to die by his own act. A childlike feeling, responsive in his heart to the divine prompting of sacred music, saves him from self-murder; but in a subsequent bitter revulsion he utters a curse upon everything in the state of man, and most of all upon that celestial attribute of patience whereby man is able to endure and to advance in the eternal process of evolution from darkness into light. And now it is, when the soul of the human being, utterly baffled by the mystery of creation, crushed by its own hopeless sorrow, and enraged by the everlasting command to renounce and refrain, has become one delirium of revolt against God and destiny, that the spirit of perpetual denial, incarnated in Mephistopheles, steps forth to proffer guidance and help. It is as if his rejection and defiance had suddenly become embodied, to aid him in his ruin. More in recklessness than in trust, with no fear, almost with scorn and contempt, he yet agrees to accept this assistance. If happiness be really possible, if the true way, after all, should lie in the life of the senses, and not in knowledge and reason; if, under the ministrations of this fiend, one hour of life, even one moment of it, shall ever (which is an idle and futile supposition) be so sweet that his heart shall desire it to linger, then, indeed, he will surrender himself eternally to this at present preposterous Mephistopheles, whom his mood, his magic, and the revulsion of his moral nature have evoked:-- "Then let the death-bell chime the token! Then art thou from thy service free! The clock may stop, the hand be broken, And time be finished unto me." Such an hour, it is destined, shall arrive, after many long and miserable years, when, aware of the beneficence of living for others and in the imagined prospect of leading, guiding, and guarding a free people upon a free land, Faust shall be willing to say to the moment: "Stay, thou art so fair"; and Mephistopheles shall harshly cry out: "The clock stands still"; and the graybeard shall sink in the dust; and the holy angels shall fly away with his soul, leaving the Fiend baffled and morose, to gibe at himself over the failure of all his infernal arts. But, meanwhile, it remains true of the man that no pleasure satisfies him and no happiness contents, and "death is desired, and life a thing unblest." The man who puts out his eyes must become blind. The sin of Faust is a spiritual sin, and the meaning of all his subsequent terrible experience is that spiritual sin must be--and will be--expiated. No human soul can ever be lost. In every human soul the contest between good and evil must continue until the good has conquered and the evil is defeated and eradicated. Then, when the man's spirit is adjusted to its environment in the spiritual world, it will be at peace--and not till then. And if this conflict is not waged and completed now and here, it must be and it will be fought out and finished hereafter and somewhere else. It is the greatest of all delusions to suppose that you can escape from yourself. Judgment and retribution proceed within the soul and not from sources outside of it. That is the philosophic drift of the poet's thought expressed and implied in his poem. It was Man, in his mortal ordeal--the motive, cause, and necessity of which remain a mystery--whom he desired and aimed to portray; it was not merely the triumph of a mocking devil, temporarily victorious through ministration to animal lust and intellectual revolt, over the weakness of the carnal creature and the embittered bewilderment of the baffled mind. Mr. Irving may well say, as he is reported to have said, that he will consider himself to have accomplished a good work if his production of Faust should have the effect of invigorating popular interest in Goethe's immortal poem and bringing closer home to the mind of his public a true sense of its sublime and far-reaching signification. The full metaphysical drift of thought and meaning in Goethe's poem, however, can be but faintly indicated in a play. It is more distinctly indicated in Mr. Wills's play, which is used by Mr. Irving, than in any other play upon this subject that has been presented. This result, an approximate fidelity to the original, is due in part to the preservation of the witch scenes, in part to Mr. Irving's subtle and significant impersonation of Mephistopheles, and in part to a weird investiture of spiritual mystery with which he has artfully environed the whole production. The substance of the piece is the love story of Faust and Margaret, yet beyond this is a background of infinity, and over and around this is a poetic atmosphere charged with suggestiveness of supernatural agency in the fate of man. If the gaze of the observer be concentrated upon the mere structure of the piece, the love story is what he will find; and that is all he will find. Faust makes his compact with the Fiend. He is rejuvenated and he begins a new life. In "the Witch's Kitchen" his passions are intensified, and then they are ignited, so that he may be made the slave of desire and afterward if possible imbruted by sensuality. He is artfully brought into contact with Margaret, whom he instantly loves, who presently loves him, whom he wins, and upon whom, since she becomes a mother out of wedlock, his inordinate and reckless love imposes the burden of pious contrition and worldly shame. Then, through the puissant wickedness and treachery of Mephistopheles, he is made to predominate over her vengeful brother, Valentine, whom he kills in a street fray. Thus his desire to experience in his own person the most exquisite bliss that humanity can enjoy and equally the most exquisite torture that it can suffer, becomes fulfilled. He is now the agonised victim of love and of remorse. Orestes pursued by the Furies was long ago selected as the typical image of supreme anguish and immitigable suffering; but Orestes is less a lamentable figure than Faust--fortified though he is, and because he is, with the awful but malign, treacherous, and now impotent sovereignty of hell. To deaden his sensibility, destroy his conscience, and harden him in evil the Fiend leads him into a mad revel of boundless profligacy and bestial riot--denoted by the beautiful and terrible scene upon the Brocken--and poor Margaret is abandoned to her shame, her wandering, her despair, her frenzy, her crime, and her punishment. This desertion, though, is procured by a stratagem of the Fiend and does not proceed from the design of her lover. The expedient of Mephistopheles, to lull his prey by dissipations, is a failure. Faust finds them "tasteless," and he must return to Margaret. He finds her in prison, crazed and dying, and he strives in vain to set her free. There is a climax, whereat, while her soul is borne upward by angels he--whose destiny must yet be fulfilled--is summoned by the terrible voice of Satan. This is the substance of what is shown; but if the gaze of the observer pierces beyond this, if he is able to comprehend that terrific but woeful image of the fallen angel, if he perceives what is by no means obscurely intimated, that Margaret, redeemed and beatified, cannot be happy unless her lover also is saved, and that the soul of Faust can only be lost through the impossible contingency of being converted into the likeness of the Fiend, he will understand that a spectacle has been set before him more august, momentous, and sublime than any episode of tragical human love could ever be. Henry Irving, in his embodiment of Mephistopheles, fulfilled the conception of the poet in one essential respect and transcended it in another. His performance, superb in ideal and perfect in execution, was a great work--and precisely here was the greatness of it. Mephistopheles as delineated by Goethe is magnificently intellectual and sardonic, but nowhere does he convey even a faint suggestion of the god-head of glory from which he has lapsed. His own frank and clear avowal of himself leaves no room for doubt as to the limitation intended to be established for him by the poet. I am, he declares, the spirit that perpetually denies. I am a part of that part which once was all--a part of that darkness out of which came the light. I repudiate all things--because everything that has been made is unworthy to exist and ought to be destroyed, and therefore it is better that nothing should ever have been made. God dwells in splendour, alone and eternal, but his spirits he thrusts into darkness, and man, a poor creature fashioned to poke his nose into filth, he sportively dowers with day and night. My province is evil; my existence is mockery; my pleasure and my purpose are destruction. In a word, this Fiend, towering to the loftiest summit of cold intellect, is the embodiment of cruelty, malice, and scorn, pervaded and interfused with grim humour. That ideal Mr. Irving made actual. The omniscient craft and deadly malignity of his impersonation, swathed in a most specious humour at some moments (as, for example, in Margaret's bedroom, in the garden scene with Martha, and in the duel scene with Valentine) made the blood creep and curdle with horror, even while they impressed the sense of intellectual power and stirred the springs of laughter. But if you rightly saw his face, in the fantastic, symbolical scene of the Witch's Kitchen; in that lurid moment of sunset over the quaint gables and haunted spires of Nuremburg, when the sinister presence of the arch-fiend deepened the red glare of the setting sun and seemed to bathe this world in the ominous splendour of hell; and, above all, if you perceived the soul that shone through his eyes in that supremely awful moment of his predominance over the hellish revel upon the Brocken, when all the hideous malignities of nature and all those baleful "spirits which tend on mortal consequence" are loosed into the aerial abyss, and only this imperial horror can curb and subdue them, you knew that this Mephistopheles was a sufferer not less than a mocker; that his colossal malignity was the delirium of an angelic spirit thwarted, baffled, shattered, yet defiant; never to be vanquished; never through all eternity to be at peace with itself. The infinite sadness of that face, the pathos, beyond words, of that isolated and lonely figure--those are the qualities that irradiated all its diversified attributes of mind, humour, duplicity, sarcasm, force, horror, and infernal beauty, and invested it with the authentic quality of greatness. There is no warrant for this treatment of the part to be derived from Goethe's poem. There is every warrant for it in the apprehension of this tremendous subject by the imagination of a great actor. You cannot mount above the earth, you cannot transcend the ordinary line of the commonplace, as a mere sardonic image of self-satisfied, chuckling obliquity. Mr. Irving embodied Mephistopheles not as a man but as a spirit, with all that the word implies, and in doing that he not only heeded the fine instinct of the true actor but the splendid teaching of the highest poetry--the ray of supernal light that flashes from the old Hebrew Bible; the blaze that streams from the _Paradise Lost_; the awful glory through which, in the pages of Byron, the typical figure of agonised but unconquerable revolt towers over a realm of ruin:-- "On his brow The thunder-scars are graven; from his eye Glares forth the immortality of hell." Ellen Terry, in her assumption of Margaret, once more displayed that profound, comprehensive, and particular knowledge of human love--that knowledge of it through the soul and not simply the mind--which is the source of her exceptional and irresistible power. This Margaret was a woman who essentially loves, who exists only for love, who has the courage of her love, who gives all for love--not knowing that it is a sacrifice--and whose love, at last, triumphant over death, is not only her own salvation but that also of her lover. The point of strict conformity to the conception of the poet, in physique and in spiritual state, may be waived. Goethe's Margaret is a handsome, hardy girl, of humble rank, who sometimes uses bad grammar and who reveals no essential mind. She is just a delicious woman, and there is nothing about her either metaphysical or mysterious. The wise Fiend, who knows that with such a man as Faust the love of such a woman must outweigh all the world, wisely tempts him with her, and infernally lures him to the accomplishment of her ruin. But it will be observed that, aside from the infraction of the law of man, the loves of Faust and Margaret are not only innocent but sacred. This sanctity Mephistopheles can neither pollute nor control, and through this he loses his victims. Ellen Terry's Margaret was a delicious woman, and not metaphysical nor mysterious; but it was Margaret imbued with the temperament of Ellen Terry,--who, if ever an exceptional creature lived, is exceptional in every particular. In her embodiment she transfigured the character: she maintained it in an ideal world, and she was the living epitome of all that is fascinating in essential womanhood--glorified by genius. It did not seem like acting but like the revelation of a hallowed personal experience upon which no chill worldly gaze should venture to intrude. In that suggestive book in which Lady Pollock records her recollections of Macready it is said that once, after his retirement, on reading a London newspaper account of the production of a Shakespearean play, he remarked that "evidently the accessories swallow up the poetry and the action": and he proceeded, in a reminiscent and regretful mood, to speak as follows: "In my endeavour to give to Shakespeare all his attributes, to enrich his poetry with scenes worthy of its interpretation, to give to his tragedies their due magnificence and to his comedies their entire brilliancy, I have set an example which is accompanied with great peril, for the public is willing to have the magnificence without the tragedy, and the poet is swallowed up in display." Mr. Irving is the legitimate successor to Macready and he has encountered that same peril. There are persons--many of them--who think that it is a sign of weakness to praise cordially and to utter admiration with a free heart. They are mistaken, but no doubt they are sincere. Shakespeare, the wisest of monitors, is never so eloquent and splendid as when he makes one of his people express praise of another. Look at those speeches in _Coriolanus_. Such niggardly persons, in their detraction of Henry Irving, are prompt to declare that he is a capital stage manager but not a great actor. This has an impartial air and a sapient sound, but it is gross folly and injustice. Henry Irving is one of the greatest actors that have ever lived, and he has shown it over and over again. His acting is all the more effective because associated with unmatched ability to insist and insure that every play shall be perfectly well set, in every particular, and that every part in it shall be competently acted. But his genius and his ability are no more discredited than those of Macready were by his attention to technical detail and his insistence upon total excellence of result. It should be observed, however, that he has carried stage garniture to an extreme limit. His investiture of _Faust_ was so magnificent that possibly it may have tended in the minds of many spectators, to obscure and overwhelm the fine intellectual force, the beautiful delicacy, and the consummate art with which he embodied Mephistopheles. It ought not to have produced that effect--because, in fact, the spectacle presented was, actually and truly, that of a supernatural being, predominant by force of inherent strength and charm over the broad expanse of the populous and teeming world; but it might have produced it: and, for the practical good of the art of acting, progress in that direction has gone far enough. The supreme beauty of the production was the poetic atmosphere of it--the irradiation of that strange sensation of being haunted which sometimes will come upon you, even at noon-day, in lonely places, on vacant hillside, beneath the dark boughs of great trees, in the presence of the grim and silent rocks, and by the solitary margin of the sea. The feeling was that of Goethe's own weird and suggestive scene of the Open Field, the black horses, and the raven-stone; or that of the shuddering lines of Coleridge:-- "As one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And, having once turned round, walks on And turns no more his head, Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread." III. ADELAIDE NEILSON AS IMOGEN AND JULIET. Shakespeare's drama of _Cymbeline_ seems not at any time in the history of the stage to have been a favourite with theatrical audiences. In New York it has had but five revivals in more than a hundred years, and those occurred at long intervals and were of brief continuance. The names of Thomas Barry, Mrs. Shaw-Hamblin (Eliza Marian Trewar), and Julia Bennett Barrow are best remembered in association with it on the American stage. It had slept for more than a generation when, in the autumn of 1876, Adelaide Neilson revived it at Philadelphia; but since then it has been reproduced by several of her imitators. She first offered it on the New York stage in May 1877, and it was then seen that her impersonation of Imogen was one of the best of her works. If it be the justification of the stage as an institution of public benefit and social advancement, that it elevates humanity by presenting noble ideals of human nature and making them exemplars and guides, that justification was practically accomplished by that beautiful performance. The poetry of _Cymbeline_ is eloquent and lovely. The imagination of its appreciative reader, gliding lightly over its more sinister incidents, finds its story romantic, its accessories--both of the court and the wilderness--picturesque, its historic atmosphere novel and exciting, and the spirit of it tender and noble. Such a reader, likewise, fashions its characters into an ideal form which cannot be despoiled by comparison with a visible standard of reality. It is not, however, an entirely pleasant play to witness. The acting version, indeed, is considerably condensed from the original, by the excision of various scenes explanatory of the conduct of the story, and by the omission of the cumbersome vision of Leonatus; and the gain of brevity thereby made helps to commend the work to a more gracious acceptance than it would be likely to obtain if acted exactly according to Shakespeare. Its movement also is imbued with additional alacrity by a rearrangement of its divisions. It is customarily presented in six acts. Yet, notwithstanding the cutting and editing to which it has been subjected, _Cymbeline_ remains somewhat inharmonious alike with the needs of the stage and the apprehension of the public. For this there are several causes. One perhaps is its mixed character, its vague, elusive purpose, and its unreality of effect. From the nature of his story--a tale of stern facts and airy inventions, respecting Britain and Rome, two thousand years ago--the poet seems to have been compelled to make a picture of human life too literal to be viewed wholly as an ideal, and too romantic to be viewed wholly as literal. In the unequivocally great plays of Shakespeare the action moves like the mighty flow of some resistless river. In this one it advances with the diffusive and straggling movement of a summer cloud. The drift and meaning of the piece, accordingly, do not stand boldly out. That astute thinker, Ulrici, for instance, after much brooding upon it, ties his mental legs in a hard knot and says that Shakespeare intended, in this piece, to illustrate that man is not the master of his own destiny. There must be liberal scope for conjecture when a philosopher can make such a landing as that. The persons in _Cymbeline_, moreover--aside from the exceptional character of Imogen--do not come home to a spectator's realisation, whether of sympathy or repugnance. It is like the flower that thrives best under glass but shivers and wilts in the open air. Its poetry seems marred by the rude touch of the actual. Its delicious mountain scenes lose their woodland fragrance. Its motive, bluntly disclosed in the wager scene, seems coarse, unnatural, and offensive. Its plot, really simple, moves heavily and perplexes attention. It is a piece that lacks pervasive concentration and enthralling point. It might be defined as _Othello_ with a difference--the difference being in favour of _Othello_. Jealousy is the pivot of both: but in _Othello_ jealousy is treated with profound and searching truth, with terrible intensity of feeling, and with irresistible momentum of action. A spectator will honour and pity Othello, and hate and execrate Iago--with some infusion, perhaps of impatience toward the one and of admiration for the other--but he is likely to view both Leonatus and Iachimo with considerable indifference; he will casually recognise the infrequent Cymbeline as an ill-tempered, sonorous old donkey; he will give a passing smile of scornful disgust to Cloten--that vague hybrid of Roderigo and Oswald; and of the proceedings of the Queen and the fortunes of the royal family--whether as affected by the chemical experiments of Doctor Cornelius or the bellicose attitude of Augustus Cæsar, in reaching for his British tribute--he will be practically unconscious. This result comes of commingling stern fact and pastoral fancy in such a way that an auditor of the composition is dubious whether to fix his senses steadfastly on the one or yield up his spirit to poetic reverie on the other. Coleridge--whose intuitions as to such matters were usually as good as recorded truth--thought that Shakespeare wrote _Cymbeline_ in his youthful period. He certainly does not manifest in it the cogent and glittering dramatic force that is felt in _Othello_ and _Macbeth_. The probability is that he wrought upon the old legend of Holinshed in a mood of intellectual caprice, inclining towards sensuous and fanciful dalliance with a remote and somewhat intangible subject. Those persons who explain the immense fecundity of his creative genius by alleging that he must steadily have kept in view the needs of the contemporary theatre seem to forget that he went much further in his plays than there was any need for him to go, in the satisfaction of such a purpose, and that those plays are, in general, too great for any stage that has existed. Shakespeare, it is certain, could not have been an exception to the law that every author must be conscious of a feeling, apart from intellectual purpose, that carries him onward in his art. The feeling that shines through _Cymbeline_ is a loving delight in the character of Imogen. The nature of that feeling and the quality of that character, had they been obscure, would have been made clear by Adelaide Neilson's embodiment. The personality that she presented was typical and unusual. It embodied virtue, neither hardened by austerity nor vapid with excess of goodness, and it embodied seductive womanhood, without one touch of wantonness or guile. It presented a woman innately good and radiantly lovely, who amid severest trials spontaneously and unconsciously acted with the ingenuous grace of childhood, the grandest generosity, the most constant spirit. The essence of Imogen's nature is fidelity. Faithful to love, even till death, she is yet more faithful to honour. Her scorn of falsehood is overwhelming; but she resents no injury, harbours no resentment, feels no spite, murmurs at no misfortune. From every blow of evil she recovers with a gentle patience that is infinitely pathetic. Passionate and acutely sensitive, she yet seems never to think of antagonising her affliction or to falter in her unconscious fortitude. She has no reproach--but only a grieved submission--for the husband who has wronged her by his suspicions and has doomed her to death. She thinks only of him, not of herself, when she beholds him, as she supposes, dead at her side; but even then she will submit and endure--she will but "weep and sigh" and say twice o'er "a century of prayers." She is only sorry for the woman who was her deadly enemy and who hated her for her goodness--so often the incitement of mortal hatred. She loses without a pang the heirship to a kingdom. An ideal thus poised in goodness and radiant in beauty might well have sustained--as undoubtedly it did sustain--the inspiration of Shakespeare. Adelaide Neilson, with her uncommon graces of person, found it easy to make the chamber scene and the cave scenes pictorial and charming. Her ingenuous trepidation and her pretty wiles, as Fidele, in the cave, were finely harmonious with the character and arose from it like odour from a flower. The innocence, the glee, the feminine desire to please, the pensive grace, the fear, the weakness, and the artless simplicity made up a state of gracious fascination. It was, however, in the revolt against Iachimo's perfidy, in the fall before Pisanio's fatal disclosure, and in the frenzy over the supposed death of Leonatus that the actress put forth electrical power and showed how strong emotion, acting through the imagination, can transfigure the being and give to love or sorrow a monumental semblance and an everlasting voice. The power was harmonious with the individuality and did not mar its grace. There was a perfect preservation of sustained identity, and this was expressed with such a sweet elocution and such an airy freedom of movement and naturalness of gesture that the observer almost forgot to notice the method of the mechanism and quite forgot that he was looking upon a fiction and a shadow. That her personation of Imogen, though more exalted in its nature than any of her works, excepting Isabella, would rival in public acceptance her Juliet, Viola, or Rosalind, was not to be expected: it was too much a passive condition--delicate and elusive--and too little an active effort. She woke into life the sleeping spirit of a rather repellant drama, and was "alone the Arabian bird." Shakespeare's Juliet, the beautiful, ill-fated heroine of his consummate poem of love and sorrow, was the most effective, if not the highest of Adelaide Neilson's tragic assumptions. It carried to every eye and to every heart the convincing and thrilling sense equally of her beauty and her power. The exuberant womanhood, the celestial affection, the steadfast nobility, and the lovely, childlike innocence of Imogen--shown through the constrained medium of a diffusive romance--were not to all minds appreciable on the instant. The gentle sadness of Viola, playing around her gleeful animation and absorbing it as the cup of the white lily swallows the sunshine, might well be, for the more blunt senses of the average auditor, dim, fitful, evanescent, and ineffective. Ideal heroism and dream-like fragrance--the colours of Murillo or the poems of Heine--are truly known but to exceptional natures or in exceptional moods. The reckless, passionate idolatry of Juliet, on the contrary,--with its attendant sacrifice, its climax of disaster, and its sequel of anguish and death,--stands forth as clearly as the white line of the lightning on a black midnight sky, and no observer can possibly miss its meaning. All that Juliet is, all that she acts and all that she suffers, is elemental. It springs directly from the heart and it moves straight onward like a shaft of light. Othello, the perfection of simplicity, is not simpler than Juliet. In him are embodied passion and jealousy, swayed by an awful instinct of rude justice. In her is embodied unmixed and immitigable passion, without law, limit, reason, patience, or restraint. She is love personified and therefore a fatality to herself. Presented in that way--and in that way she was presented by Adelaide Neilson--her nature and her experience come home to the feelings as well as the imagination, and all that we know, as well as all that we dream, of beauty and of anguish are centred in one image. In this we may see all the terrors of the moving hand of fate. In this we may almost hear a warning voice out of heaven, saying that nowhere except in duty shall the human heart find refuge and peace--or, if not peace, submission. The question whether Shakespeare's Juliet be correctly interpreted is not one of public importance. It might be ever so correctly interpreted without producing the right effect. There have been many Juliets. There has, in our time, been no Juliet so completely fascinating and irresistible as that of Adelaide Neilson. Through the medium of that Shakespearean character the actress poured forth that strange, thrilling, indescribable power which more than anything else in the world vindicates by its existence the spiritual grandeur and destiny of the human soul. Neither the accuracy of her ideals nor the fineness of her execution would have accomplished the result that attended her labours and crowned her fame. There was an influence back of these--a spark of the divine fire--a consecration of the individual life--as eloquent to inform as it was potent to move. Adelaide Neilson was one of those strange, exceptional natures that, often building better than they know, not only interpret "the poet's dream" but give to it an added emphasis and a higher symbolism. Each element of her personality was rich and rare. The eyes--now glittering with a mischievous glee that seemed never to have seen a cloud or felt a sorrow, now steady, frank, and sweet, with innocence and trust,--could, in one moment, flash with the wild fire of defiance or the glittering light of imperious command, or, equally in one moment, could soften with mournful thought and sad remembrance, or darken with the far-off look of one who hears the waving wings of angels and talks with the spirits of the dead. The face, just sufficiently unsymmetrical to be brimful of character, whether piquant or pensive; the carriage of body,--easy yet quaint in its artless grace, like that of a pretty child in the unconscious fascination of infancy; the restless, unceasing play of mood, and the instantaneous and perfect response of expression and gesture,--all these were the denotements of genius; and, above all these, and not to be mistaken in its irradiation of the interior spirit of that extraordinary creature, was a voice of perfect music--rich, sonorous, flexible, vibrant, copious in volume, yet delicate as a silver thread--a voice "Like the whisper of the woods In prime of even, when the stars are few." It did not surprise that such a woman should truly act Juliet. Much though there be in a personality that is assumed, there is much more in the personality that assumes it. Golden fire in a porcelain vase would not be more luminous than was the soul of that actress as it shone through her ideal of Juliet. The performance did not stop short at the interpretation of a poetic fancy. It was amply and completely that--but it was more than that, being also a living experience. The subtlety of it was only equalled by its intensity, and neither was surpassed except by its reality. The moment she came upon the scene all eyes followed her, and every imaginative mind was vaguely conscious of something strange and sad--a feeling of perilous suspense--a dark presentiment of impending sorrow. In that was felt at once the presence of a nature to which the experience of Juliet would be possible; and thus the conquest of human sympathy was effected at the outset--by a condition, and without the exercise of a single effort. Fate no less than art participated in the result. Though it was the music of Shakespeare that flowed from the harp, it was the hand of living genius that smote the strings; it was the soul of a great woman that bore its vital testimony to the power of the universal passion. Never was poet truer to the highest truth of spiritual life than Shakespeare is when he invests with ineffable mournfulness--shadowy as twilight, vague as the remembrance of a dream--those creatures of his fancy who are preordained to suffering and a miserable death. Never was there sounded a truer note of poetry than that which thrills in Othello's, "If it were now to die," or sobs in Juliet's "Too early seen unknown, and known too late." It was the exquisite felicity of Adelaide Neilson's acting of Juliet that she glided into harmony with that tragical undertone, and, with seemingly a perfect unconsciousness of it--whether prattling to the old nurse, or moving, sweetly grave and softly demure, through the stately figures of the minuet--was already marked off from among the living, already overshadowed by a terrible fate, already alone in the bleak loneliness of the broken heart. Striking the keynote thus, the rest followed in easy sequence. The ecstasy of the wooing scene, the agony of the final parting from Romeo, the forlorn tremor and passionate frenzy of the terrible night before the burial, the fearful awakening, the desperation, the paroxysm, the death-blow that then is mercy and kindness,--all these were in unison with the spirit at first denoted, and through these was naturally accomplished its prefigured doom. If clearly to possess a high purpose, to follow it directly, to accomplish it thoroughly, to adorn it with every grace, to conceal every vestige of its art, and to cast over the art that glamour of poetry which ennobles while it charms, and while it dazzles also endears,--if this is greatness in acting, then was Adelaide Neilson's Juliet a great embodiment. It never will be forgotten. Its soft romance of tone, its splendour of passion, its sustained energy, its beauty of speech, and its poetic fragrance are such as fancy must always cherish and memory cannot lose. Placing this embodiment beside Imogen and Viola, it was easy to understand the secret of her extraordinary success. She satisfied for all kinds of persons the sense of the ideal. To youthful fancy she was the radiant vision of love and pleasure; to grave manhood, the image of all that chivalry should honour and strength protect; to woman, the type of noble goodness and constant affection; to the scholar, a relief from thought and care; to the moralist, a spring of tender pity--that loveliness, however exquisite, must fade and vanish. Childhood, mindful of her kindness and her frolic, scattered flowers at her feet; and age, that knows the thorny pathways of the world, whispered its silent prayer and laid its trembling hands in blessing on her head. She sleeps beneath a white marble cross in Brompton cemetery, and all her triumphs and glories have dwindled to a handful of dust. * * * * * NOTE ON CYMBELINE.--Genest records productions of Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_, in London, as follows: Haymarket, November 8, 1744; Covent Garden, April 7, 1746; Drury Lane, November 28, 1761; Covent Garden, December 28, 1767; Drury Lane, December 1, 1770; Haymarket, August 9, 1782; Covent Garden, October 18, 1784; Drury Lane, November 21, 1785, and January 29 and March 20, 1787; Covent Garden, May 13, 1800, January 18, 1806, June 3, 1812, May 29, 1816, and June 2, 1825; and Drury Lane, February 9, 1829; Imogen was represented, successively, by Mrs. Pritchard, Miss Bride, Mrs. Yates, Mrs. Barry, Mrs. Bulkley, Miss Younge, Mrs. Jordan, Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Pope, Miss Smith, Mrs. H. Johnston Miss Stephens, Miss Foote, and Miss Phillips. Later representatives of it were Sally Booth, Helen Faucit, and Laura Addison. IV. EDWIN BOOTH. There was a great shower of meteors on the night of November 13, 1833, and on that night, near Baltimore, Maryland, was born the most famous tragic actor of America in this generation, Edwin Booth. No other American actor of this century has had a rise so rapid or a career so early and continuously brilliant as that of Edwin Booth. His father, the renowned Junius Brutus Booth, had hallowed the family name with distinction and romantic interest. If ever there was a genius upon the stage the elder Booth was a genius. His wonderful eyes, his tremendous vitality, his electrical action, his power to thrill the feelings and easily and inevitably to awaken pity and terror,--all these made him a unique being and obtained for him a reputation with old-time audiences distinct from that of all other men. He was followed as a marvel, and even now the mention of his name stirs, among those who remember him, an enthusiasm such as no other theatrical memory can evoke. His sudden death (alone, aboard a Mississippi river steamboat, November 30, 1852) was pathetic, and the public thought concerning him thenceforward commingled tenderness with passionate admiration. When his son Edwin began to rise as an actor the people everywhere rejoiced and gave him an eager welcome. With such a prestige he had no difficulty in making himself heard, and when it was found that he possessed the same strange power with which his father had conquered and fascinated the dramatic world the popular exultation was unbounded. Edwin Booth went on the stage in 1849 and accompanied his father to California in 1852, and between 1852 and 1856 he gained his first brilliant success. The early part of his California life was marked by hardship and all of it by vicissitude, but his authentic genius speedily flamed out, and long before he returned to the Atlantic seaboard the news of his fine exploits had cleared the way for his conquest of all hearts. He came back in 1856-57, and from that time onward his fame continually increased. He early identified himself with two of the most fascinating characters in the drama--the sublime and pathetic Hamlet and the majestic, romantic, picturesque, tender, and grimly humorous Richelieu. He first acted Hamlet in 1854; he adopted Richelieu in 1856; and such was his success with the latter character that for many years afterward he made it a rule (acting on the sagacious advice of the veteran New Orleans manager, James H. Caldwell), always to introduce himself in that part before any new community. The popular sentiment toward him early took a romantic turn and the growth of that sentiment has been accelerated and strengthened by every important occurrence of his private life. In July 1860 he was married to a lovely and interesting woman, Miss Mary Devlin, of Troy, and in February 1863 she died. In 1867 he lost the Winter Garden theatre, which was burnt down on the night of March 22, that year, after a performance of John Howard Payne's _Brutus_. He had accomplished beautiful revivals of _Hamlet_, _Othello_, _The Merchant of Venice_, and other plays at the Winter Garden, and had obtained for that theatre an honourable eminence; but when in 1869 he built and opened Booth's Theatre in New York, he proceeded to eclipse all his previous efforts and triumphs. The productions of _Romeo and Juliet_, _Othello_, _Richelieu_, _Hamlet_, _A Winter's Tale_, and _Julius Cæsar_ were marked by ample scholarship and magnificence. When the enterprise failed and the theatre passed out of Edwin Booth's hands (1874) the play-going public endured a calamity. But the failure of the actor's noble endeavour to establish a great theatre in the first city of America, like every other conspicuous event in his career, served but to deepen the public interest in his welfare. He has more than retrieved his losses since then, and has made more than one triumphal march throughout the length and breadth of the Republic, besides acting in London and other cities of Great Britain, and gaining extraordinary success upon the stage of Germany. To think of Edwin Booth is immediately to be reminded of those leading events in his career, while to review them, even in a cursory glance, is to perceive that, notwithstanding calamities and sorrows, notwithstanding a bitter experience of personal bereavement and of the persecution of envy and malice, Edwin Booth has ever been a favourite of fortune. The bust of Booth as Brutus and that of John Gilbert as Sir Peter, standing side by side in the Players' Club, stir many memories and prompt many reflections. Gilbert was a young man of twenty-three, and had been six years on the stage, before Edwin Booth was born; and when, at the age of sixteen, Booth made his first appearance (September 10, 1849, at the Boston Museum, as Tressil to his father's Richard), Gilbert had become a famous actor. The younger man, however, speedily rose to the higher level of the best dramatic ability as well as the best theatrical culture of his time; and it is significant of the splendid triumph of tragic genius, and of the advantage it possesses over that of comedy in its immediate effect upon mankind, that when the fine and exceptional combination was made (May 21, 1888, at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York), for a performance of _Hamlet_ for the benefit of Lester Wallack, Edwin Booth acted Hamlet, with John Gilbert for Polonius, and Joseph Jefferson for the first Grave-digger. Booth has had his artistic growth in a peculiar period in the history of dramatic art in America. Just before his time the tragic sceptre was in the hands of Edwin Forrest, who never succeeded in winning the intellectual part of the public, but was constantly compelled to dominate a multitude that never heard any sound short of thunder and never felt anything till it was hit with a club. The bulk of Forrest's great fortune was gained by him with _Metamora_, which is rant and fustian. He himself despised it and deeply despised and energetically cursed the public that forced him to act in it. Forrest's best powers, indeed, were never really appreciated by the average mind of his fervent admirers. He lived in a rough period and he had to use a hard method to subdue and please it. Edwin Booth was fortunate in coming later, when the culture of the people had somewhat increased, and when the old sledge-hammer style was going out, so that he gained almost without an effort the refined and fastidious classes. As long ago as 1857, with all his natural grace, refinement, romantic charm, and fine bearing, his impetuosity was such that even the dullest sensibilities were aroused and thrilled and astonished by him,--and so it happened that he also gained the multitude. To think of these things is to realise the steady advance of the stage in the esteem of the best people, and to feel grateful that we do not live in "the palmy days"--those raw times that John Brougham used to call the days of light houses and heavy gas bills. Mrs. Asia Booth Clarke, wife of the distinguished and excellent comedian John S. Clarke, wrote a life of her father, Junius Brutus Booth, in which she has recounted interesting passages in his career, and chronicled significant and amusing anecdotes of his peculiarities. He was on the stage from 1813 to 1852, in which latter year he died, aged fifty-six. In his youth he served for a while in the British navy, showed some talent for painting, learned the printer's trade, wrote a little, and dabbled in sculpture--all before he turned actor. The powerful hostility of Edmund Kean and his adherents drove him from the London stage, though not till after he had gained honours there, and he came to America in 1821, and bought a farm near Baltimore, where he settled, and where his son Edwin (the seventh of ten children) was born. That farm remained in the family till 1880, when for the first time it changed hands. There is a certain old cherry-tree growing upon it--remarkable among cherry-trees for being large, tall, straight, clean, and handsome--amid the boughs of which the youthful Edwin might often have been found in his juvenile days. It is a coincidence that Edwin L. Davenport and John McCullough, also honoured names in American stage history, were born on the same day in the same month with Edwin Booth, though in different years. From an early age Edwin Booth was associated with his father in all the wanderings and strange and often sad adventures of that wayward man of genius, and no doubt the many sorrowful experiences of his youth deepened the gloom of his inherited temperament. Those who know him well are aware that he has great tenderness of heart and abundant playful humour; that his mind is one of extraordinary liveliness, and that he sympathises keenly and cordially with the joys and sorrows of others; and yet that he seems saturated with sadness, isolated from companionship, lonely and alone. It is this temperament, combined with a sombre and melancholy aspect of countenance, that has helped to make him so admirable in the character of Hamlet. Of his fitness for that part his father was the first to speak, when on a night many years ago, in Sacramento, they had dressed for Pierre and Jaffier, in _Venice Preserved_. Edwin, as Jaffier, had put on a close-fitting robe of black velvet. "You look like Hamlet," the father said. The time was destined to come when Edwin Booth would be accepted all over America as the greatest Hamlet of the day. In the season of 1864-65, at the Winter Garden theatre, New York, he acted that part for a hundred nights in succession, accomplishing a feat then unprecedented in theatrical annals. Since then Henry Irving, in London, has acted Hamlet two hundred consecutive times in one season; but this latter achievement, in the present day and in the capital city of the world, was less difficult than Edwin Booth's exploit, performed in turbulent New York in the closing months of the terrible civil war. The elder Booth was a short, spare, muscular man, with a splendid chest, a symmetrical Greek head, a pale countenance, a voice of wonderful compass and thrilling power, dark hair, and blue eyes. His son's resemblance to him is chiefly obvious in the shape of the head and face, the arch and curve of the heavy eyebrows, the radiant and constantly shifting light of expression that animates the countenance, the natural grace of carriage, and the celerity of movement. Booth's eyes are dark brown, and seem to turn black in moments of excitement, and they are capable of conveying, with electrical effect, the most diverse meanings--the solemnity of lofty thought, the tenderness of affection, the piteousness of forlorn sorrow, the awful sense of spiritual surroundings, the woful weariness of despair, the mocking glee of wicked sarcasm, the vindictive menace of sinister purpose, and the lightning glare of baleful wrath. In range of facial expressiveness his countenance is thus fully equal to that of his father. The present writer saw the elder Booth but once, and then in a comparatively inferior part--Pescara, in Shiel's ferocious tragedy of _The Apostate_. He was a terrible presence. He was the incarnation of smooth, specious, malignant, hellish rapacity. His exultant malice seemed to buoy him above the ground. He floated rather than walked. His glance was deadly. His clear, high, cutting, measured tone was the exasperating note of hideous cruelty. He was acting a fiend then, and making the monster not only possible but actual. He certainly gave a greater impression of overwhelming power than is given by Edwin Booth, and seemed a more formidable and tremendous man. But his face was not more brilliant than that of his renowned son; and in fact it was, if anything, somewhat less splendid in power of the eye. There is a book about him, called _The Tragedian_, written by Thomas R. Gould, who also made a noble bust of him in marble; and those who never saw him can obtain a good idea of what sort of an actor he was by reading that book. It conveys the image of a greater actor, but not a more brilliant one, than Edwin Booth. Only one man of our time has equalled Edwin Booth in this singular splendour of countenance--the great New England orator Rufus Choate. Had Choate been an actor upon the stage--as he was before a jury--with those terrible eyes of his, and that passionate Arab face, he must have towered fully to the height of the tradition of George Frederick Cooke. The lurid flashes of passion and the vehement outbursts in the acting of Edwin Booth are no doubt the points that most persons who have seen him will most clearly remember. Through these a spectator naturally discerns the essential nature of an actor. The image of George Frederick Cooke, pointing with his long, lean forefinger and uttering Sir Giles's imprecation upon Marrall, never fades out of theatrical history. Garrick's awful frenzy in the storm scene of King Lear, Kean's colossal agony in the farewell speech of Othello, Macready's heartrending yell in _Werner_, Junius Booth's terrific utterance of Richard's "What do they i' the north?" Forrest's hyena snarl when, as Jack Cade, he met Lord Say in the thicket, or his volumed cry of tempestuous fury when, as Lucius Brutus, he turned upon Tarquin under the black midnight sky--those are things never to be forgotten. Edwin Booth has provided many such great moments in acting, and the traditions of the stage will not let them die. To these no doubt we must look for illuminative manifestations of hereditary genius. Garrick, Henderson, Cooke, Edmund Kean, Junius Booth, and Edwin Booth are names that make a natural sequence in one intellectual family. Could we but see them together, we should undoubtedly find them, in many particulars, kindred. Henderson flourished in the school of nature that Garrick had created--to the discomfiture of Quin and all the classics. Cooke had seen Henderson act, and was thought to resemble him. Edmund Kean worshipped the memory of Cooke and repeated many of the elder tragedian's ways. So far, indeed, did he carry his homage that when he was in New York in 1824 he caused Cooke's remains to be taken from the vault beneath St. Paul's church and buried in the church-yard, where a monument, set up by Kean and restored by his son Charles, by Sothern, and by Edwin Booth, still marks their place of sepulture. That was the occasion when, as Dr. Francis records, in his book on old New York, Kean took the index finger of Cooke's right hand, and he, the doctor, took his skull, as relics. "I have got Cooke's style in acting," Kean once said, "but the public will never know it, I am so much smaller." It was not the imitation of a copyist; it was the spontaneous devotion and direction of a kindred soul. The elder Booth saw Kean act, and although injured by a rivalry that Kean did not hesitate to make malicious, admired him with honest fervour. "I will yield Othello to him," he said, "but neither Richard nor Sir Giles." Forrest thought Edmund Kean the greatest actor of the age, and copied him, especially in Othello. Pathos, with all that it implies, seems to have been Kean's special excellence. Terror was the elder Booth's. Edwin Booth may be less than either, but he unites attributes of both. In the earlier part of his career Edwin Booth was accustomed to act Sir Giles Overreach, Sir Edward Mortimer, Pescara, and a number of other parts of the terrific order, that he has since discarded. He was fine in every one of them. The first sound of his voice when, as Sir Edward Mortimer, he was heard speaking off the scene, was eloquent of deep suffering, concentrated will, and a strange, sombre, formidable character. The sweet, exquisite, icy, infernal joy with which, as Pescara, he told his rival that there should be "music" was almost comical in its effect of terror: it drove the listener across the line of tragical tension and made him hysterical with the grimness of a deadly humour. His swift defiance to Lord Lovell, as Sir Giles, and indeed the whole mighty and terrible action with which he carried that scene--from "What, are you pale?" down to the grisly and horrid viper pretence and reptile spasm of death--were simply tremendous. This was in the days when his acting yet retained the exuberance of a youthful spirit, before "the philosophic mind" had checked the headlong currents of the blood or curbed imagination in its lawless flight. And those parts not only admitted of bold colour and extravagant action but demanded them. Even his Hamlet was touched with that elemental fire. Not alone in the great junctures of the tragedy--the encounters with the ghost, the parting with Ophelia, the climax of the play-scene, the slaughter of poor old Polonius in delirious mistake for the king, and the avouchment to Laertes in the graveyard--was he brilliant and impetuous; but in almost everything that quality of temperament showed itself, and here, of course, it was in excess. He no longer hurls the pipe into the flies when saying "Though you may fret me, you can not play upon me"; but he used to do so then, and the rest of the performance was kindred with that part of it. He needed, in that period of his development, the more terrible passions to express. Pathos and spirituality and the mountain air of great thought were yet to be. His Hamlet was only dazzling--the glorious possibility of what it has since become. But his Sir Giles was a consummate work of genius--as good then as it ever afterward became, and better than any other that has been seen since, not excepting that of E.L. Davenport. And in all kindred characters he showed himself a man of genius. His success was great. The admiration that he inspired partook of zeal that almost amounted to craziness. When he walked in the streets of Boston in 1857 his shining face, his compact figure, and his elastic step drew every eye, and people would pause and turn in groups to look at him. The actor is born but the artist must be made, and the actor who is not an artist only half fulfils his powers. Edwin Booth had not been long upon the stage before he showed himself to be an actor. During his first season he played Cassio in _Othello_, Wilford in _The Iron Chest_, and Titus in _The Fall of Tarquin_, and he played them all auspiciously well. But his father, not less wise than kind, knew that the youth must be left to himself to acquire experience, if he was ever to become an artist, and so left him in California, "to rough it," and there, and in the Sandwich Islands and Australia, he had four years of the most severe training that hardship, discipline, labour, sorrow, and stern reality can furnish. When he came east again, in the autumn of 1856, he was no longer a novice but an educated, artistic tragedian, still crude in some things, though on the right road, and in the fresh, exultant vigour, if not yet the full maturity, of extraordinary powers. He appeared first at Baltimore, and after that made a tour of the south, and during the ensuing four years he was seen in many cities all over the country. In the summer of 1860 he went to England, and acted in London, Liverpool, and Manchester, but he was back again in New York in 1862, and from September 21, 1863 to March 23, 1867 he managed what was known as the Winter Garden theatre, and incidentally devoted himself to the accomplishment of some of the stateliest revivals of standard plays that have ever been made in America. On February 3, 1869 he opened Booth's Theatre and that he managed for five years. In 1876 he made a tour of the south, which, so great was the enthusiasm his presence aroused, was nothing less than a triumphal progress. In San Francisco, where he filled an engagement of eight weeks, the receipts exceeded $96,000, a result at that time unprecedented on the dramatic stage. The circumstances of the stage and of the lives of actors have greatly changed since the generation went out to which such men as Junius Booth and Augustus A. Addams belonged. No tragedian would now be so mad as to put himself in pawn for drink, as Cooke is said to have done, nor be found scraping the ham from the sandwiches provided for his luncheon, as Junius Booth was, before going on to play Shylock. Our theatre has no longer a Richardson to light up a pan of red fire, as that old showman once did, to signalise the fall of the screen in _The School for Scandal_. The eccentrics and the taste for them have passed away. It seems really once to have been thought that the actor who did not often make a maniac of himself with drink could not be possessed of the divine fire. That demonstration of genius is not expected now, nor does the present age exact from its favourite players the performance of all sorts and varieties of parts. Forrest was the first of the prominent actors to break away from the old usage in this latter particular. During the most prosperous years of his life, from 1837 to 1850, he acted only about a dozen parts, and most of them were old. The only new parts that he studied were Claude Melnotte, Richelieu, Jack Cade, and Mordaunt, the latter in the play of _The Patrician's Daughter_, and he "recovered" Marc Antony, which he particularly liked. Edwin Booth, who had inherited from his father the insanity of intemperance, conquered that utterly, many years ago, and nobly and grandly trod it beneath his feet; and as he matured in his career, through acting every kind of part, from a dandy negro up to Hamlet, he at last made choice of the characters that afford scope for his powers and his aspirations, and so settled upon a definite, restricted repertory. His characters were Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Iago, Richard the Second, Richard the Third, Shylock, Cardinal Wolsey, Benedick, Petruchio, Richelieu, Lucius Brutus, Bertuccio, Ruy Blas, and Don Cæsar de Bazan. These he acted in customary usage, and to these he occasionally added Marcus Brutus, Antony, Cassius, Claude Melnotte, and the Stranger. The range thus indicated is extraordinary; but more extraordinary still was the evenness of the actor's average excellence throughout the breadth of that range. Booth's tragedy is better than his elegant comedy. There are other actors who equal or surpass him in Benedick or Don Cæsar. The comedy in which he excels is that of silvery speciousness and bitter sarcasm, as in portions of Iago and Richard the Third and the simulated madness of Lucius Brutus, and the comedy of grim drollery, as in portions of Richelieu--his expression of those veins being wonderfully perfect. But no other actor who has trod the American stage in our day has equalled him in certain attributes of tragedy that are essentially poetic. He is not at his best, indeed, in all the tragic parts that he acts; and, like his father, he is an uneven actor in the parts to which he is best suited. No person can be said to know Edwin Booth's acting who has not seen him play the same part several times. His artistic treatment will generally be found adequate, but his mood or spirit will continually vary. He cannot at will command it, and when it is absent his performance seems cold. This characteristic is, perhaps, inseparable from the poetic temperament. Each ideal that he presents is poetic; and the suitable and adequate presentation of it, therefore, needs poetic warmth and glamour. Booth never goes behind his poet's text to find a prose image in the pages of historic fact. The spectator who takes the trouble to look into his art will find it, indeed, invariably accurate as to historic basis, and will find that all essential points and questions of scholarship have been considered by the actor. But this is not the secret of its power upon the soul. That power resides in its charm, and that charm consists in its poetry. Standing on the lonely ramparts of Elsinore, and with awe-stricken, preoccupied, involuntary glances questioning the star-lit midnight air, while he talks with his attendant friends, Edwin Booth's Hamlet is the simple, absolute realisation of Shakespeare's haunted prince, and raises no question, and leaves no room for inquiry, whether the Danes in the Middle Ages wore velvet robes or had long flaxen hair. It is dark, mysterious, melancholy, beautiful--a vision of dignity and of grace, made sublime by suffering, made weird and awful by "thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls." Sorrow never looked more wofully and ineffably lovely than his sorrow looks in the parting scene with Ophelia, and frenzy never spoke with a wilder glee of horrid joy and fearful exultation than is heard in his tempestuous cry of delirium, "Nay, I know not: is it the king?" An actor who is fine only at points is not, of course, a perfect actor. The remark of Coleridge about the acting of Edmund Kean, that it was like "reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning," has misled many persons as to Kean's art. Macready bears a similar testimony. But the weight of evidence will satisfy the reader that Kean was, in fact, a careful student and that he never neglected any detail of his art. This is certainly true of Edwin Booth. In the level plains that lie between the mountain-peaks of expression he walks with as sure a footstep and as firm a tread as on the summit of the loftiest crag or the verge of the steepest abyss. In 1877-78, in association with the present writer, he prepared for the press an edition of fifteen of the plays in which he acts, and these were published for the use of actors. There is not a line in either of those plays that he has not studiously and thoroughly considered; not a vexed point that he has not scanned; not a questionable reading that he has not, for his own purposes in acting, satisfactorily settled. His Shakespearean scholarship is extensive and sound, and it is no less minute than ample. His stage business has been arranged, as stage business ought to be, with scientific precision. If, as king Richard the Third, he is seen to be abstractedly toying with a ring upon one of his fingers, or unsheathing and sheathing his dagger, those apparently capricious actions would be found to be done because they were illustrative parts of that monarch's personality, warranted by the text and context. Many years ago an accidental impulse led him, as Hamlet, to hold out his sword, hilt foremost, toward the receding spectre, as a protective cross--the symbol of that religion to which Hamlet so frequently recurs. The expedient was found to justify itself and he made it a custom. In the graveyard scene of this tragedy he directs that one of the skulls thrown up by the first clown shall have a tattered and mouldy fool's-cap adhering to it, so that it may attract attention, and be singled out from the others, as "Yorick's skull, the king's jester." These are little things; but it is of a thousand little things that a dramatic performance is composed, and without this care for detail--which must be precise, logical, profound, vigilant, unerring, and at the same time always unobtrusive and seemingly involuntary--there can be neither cohesion, nor symmetry, nor an illusory image consistently maintained; and all great effects would become tricks of mechanism and detached exploits of theatrical force. The absence of this thoroughness in such acting as that of Edwin Booth would instantly be felt; its presence is seldom adequately appreciated. We feel the perfect charm of the illusion in the great fourth act of _Richelieu_--one of the most thrilling situations, as Booth fills it, that ever were created upon the stage; but we should not feel this had not the foreground of character, incident, and experience been prepared with consummate thoroughness. The character of Richelieu is one that the elder Booth could never act. He tried it once, upon urgent solicitation, but he had not proceeded far before he caught Joseph around the waist, and with that astonished friar in his arms proceeded to dash into a waltz, over which the curtain was dropped. He had no sympathy with the moonlight mistiness and lace-like complexity of that weird and many-fibred nature. It lacked for him the reality of the imagination, the trumpet blare and tempest rush of active passion. But Edwin Booth, coming after Forrest, who was its original in America, has made Richelieu so entirely his own that no actor living can stand a comparison with him in the character. Macready was the first representative of the part, as everybody knows, and his performance of it was deemed magnificent; but when Edwin Booth acted it in London in 1880, old John Ryder, the friend and advocate of Macready, who had participated with him in all his plays, said to the American tragedian, with a broken voice and with tears in his eyes, "You have thrown down my idol." Two at least of those great moments in acting that everybody remembers were furnished by Booth in this character--the defiance of the masked assailant, at Rouel, and the threat of excommunication delivered upon Barradas. No spectator possessed of imagination and sensibility ever saw, without utter forgetfulness of the stage, the imperial entrance of that Richelieu into the gardens of the Louvre and into the sullen presence of hostile majesty. The same spell of genius is felt in kindred moments of his greater impersonations. His Iago, standing in the dark street, with sword in hand, above the prostrate bodies of Cassio and Roderigo, and as the sudden impulse to murder them strikes his brain, breathing out in a blood-curdling whisper, "How silent is this town!" his Bertuccio, begging at the door of the banquet-hall, and breaking down in hysterics of affected glee and maddening agony; his Lear, at that supreme moment of intolerable torture when he parts away from Goneril and Regan, with his wild scream of revenges that shall be the terrors of the earth; his Richard the Third, with the gigantic effrontery of his "Call him again," and with his whole matchless and wonderful utterance of the awful remorse speech with which the king awakens from his last earthly sleep--those, among many others, rank with the best dramatic images that ever were chronicled, and may well be cited to illustrate Booth's invincible and splendid adequacy at the great moments of his art. Edwin Booth has been tried by some of the most terrible afflictions that ever tested the fortitude of a human soul. Over his youth, plainly visible, impended the lowering cloud of insanity. While he was yet a boy, and when literally struggling for life in the semi-barbarous wilds of old California, he lost his beloved father, under circumstances of singular misery. In early manhood he laid in her grave the woman of his first love--the wife who had died in absence from him, herself scarcely past the threshold of youth, lovely as an angel and to all that knew her precious beyond expression. A little later his heart was well-nigh broken and his life was well-nigh blasted by the crime of a lunatic brother that for a moment seemed to darken the hope of the world. Recovering from that blow, he threw all his resources and powers into the establishment of the grandest theatre in the metropolis of America, and he saw his fortune of more than a million dollars, together with the toil of some of the best years of his life, frittered away. Under all trials he has borne bravely up, and kept the even, steadfast tenor of his course; strong, patient, gentle, neither elated by public homage nor imbittered by private grief. Such a use of high powers in the dramatic art, and the development and maintenance of such a character behind them, entitle him to the affection of his countrymen, proud equally of his goodness and his renown. V. MARY ANDERSON: HERMIONE: PERDITA. On November 25, 1875 an audience was assembled in one of the theatres of Louisville, Kentucky, to see "the first appearance upon any stage" of "a young lady of Louisville," who was announced to play Shakespeare's Juliet. That young lady was in fact a girl, in her sixteenth year, who had never received any practical stage training, whose education had been comprised in five years of ordinary schooling, whose observation of life had never extended beyond the narrow limits of a provincial city, who was undeveloped, unheralded, unknown, and poor, and whose only qualifications for the task she had set herself to accomplish were the impulse of genius and the force of commanding character. She dashed at the work with all the vigour of abounding and enthusiastic youth, and with all the audacity of complete inexperience. A rougher performance of Juliet probably was never seen, but through all the disproportion and turbulence of that effort the authentic charm of a beautiful nature was distinctly revealed. The sweetness, the sincerity, the force, the exceptional superiority and singular charm of that nature could not be mistaken. The uncommon stature and sumptuous physical beauty of the girl were obvious. Above all, her magnificent voice--copious, melodious, penetrating, loud and clear, yet soft and gentle--delighted every ear and touched every heart. The impersonation of Juliet was not highly esteemed by judicious hearers; but some persons who saw that performance felt and said that a new actress had risen and that a great career had begun. Those prophetic voices were right. That "young lady of Louisville" was Mary Anderson. It is seldom in stage history that the biographer comes upon such a character as that of Mary Anderson, or is privileged to muse over the story of such a career as she has had. In many cases the narrative of the life of an actress is a narrative of talents perverted, of opportunity misused, of failure, misfortune, and suffering. For one story like that of Mrs. Siddons there are many like that of Mrs. Robinson. For one name like that of Charlotte Cushman or that of Helen Faucit there are many like that of Lucille Western or that of Matilda Heron--daughters of sorrow and victims of trouble. The mind lingers, accordingly, impressed and pleased with a sense of sweet personal worth as well as of genius and beauty upon the record of a representative American actress, as noble as she was brilliant, and as lovely in her domestic life as she was beautiful, fortunate, and renowned in her public pursuits. The exposition of her nature, as apprehended through her acting, constitutes the principal part of her biography. Mary Anderson, a native of California, was born at Sacramento, July 28, 1859. Her father, Charles Joseph Anderson, who died in 1863, aged twenty-nine, and was buried in Magnolia cemetery, Mobile, Alabama, was an officer in the service of the Southern Confederacy at the time of his death, and he is said to have been a handsome and dashing young man. Her mother, Marie Antoinette Leugers, was a native of Philadelphia. Her earlier years were passed in Louisville, whither she was taken in 1860, and she was there taught in a Roman Catholic school and reared in the Roman Catholic faith under the guidance of a Franciscan priest, Anthony Miller, her mother's uncle. She left school before she was fourteen years old and she went upon the stage before she was sixteen. She had while a child seen various theatrical performances, notably those given by Edwin Booth, and her mind had been strongly drawn toward the stage under the influence of those sights. The dramatic characters that she first studied were male characters--those of Hamlet, Wolsey, Richelieu, and Richard III.--and to those she added Schiller's Joan of Arc. She studied those parts privately, and she knew them all and knew them well. Professor Noble Butler, of Louisville, gave her instruction in English literature and elocution, and in 1874, at Cincinnati, Charlotte Cushman said a few encouraging words to her, and told her to persevere in following the stage, and to "begin at the top." George Vandenhoff gave her a few lessons before she came out, and then followed her début as Juliet, leading to her first regular engagement, which began at Barney Macaulay's Theatre, Louisville, January 20, 1876. From that time onward for thirteen years she was an actress,--never in a stock company but always as a star,--and her name became famous in Great Britain as well as America. She had eight seasons of steadily increasing prosperity on the American stage before she went abroad to act, and she became a favourite all over the United States. She filled three seasons at the Lyceum Theatre, London (from September 1, 1883, to April 5, 1884; from November 1, 1884, to April 25, 1885; and from September 10, 1887, to March 24, 1888), and her success there surpassed, in profit, that of any American actor who had appeared in England. She revived _Romeo and Juliet_ with much splendour at the London Lyceum on November 1, 1884, and she restored _A Winter's Tale_ to the stage, bringing forward that comedy on September 10, 1887, and carrying it through the season. She made several prosperous tours of the English provincial theatres, and established herself as a favourite actress in fastidious Edinburgh, critical Manchester, and impulsive but exacting Dublin. The repertory with which she gained fame and fortune included Juliet, Hermione, Perdita, Rosalind, Lady Macbeth, Julia, Bianca, Evadne, Parthenia, Pauline, The Countess, Galatea, Clarice, Ion, Meg Merrilies, Berthe, and the Duchess de Torrenueva. She incidentally acted a few other parts, Desdemona being one of them. Her distinctive achievements were in Shakespearean drama. She adopted into her repertory two plays by Tennyson, _The Cup_ and _The Falcon_, but never produced them. This record signifies the resources of mind, the personal charm, the exalted spirit, and the patient, wisely directed and strenuous zeal that sustained her achievements and justified her success. Aspirants in the field of art are continually coming to the surface. In poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and in acting--which involves and utilises those other arts--the line of beginners is endless. Constantly, as the seasons roll by, these essayists emerge, and as constantly, after a little time, they disappear. The process is sequent upon an obvious law of spiritual life,--that all minds which are conscious of the art impulse must at least make an effort toward expression, but that no mind can succeed in the effort unless, in addition to the art impulse, it possesses also the art faculty. For expression is the predominant necessity of human nature. Out of this proceed forms and influences of beauty. These react upon mankind, pleasing an instinct for the beautiful, and developing the faculty of taste. Other and finer forms and influences of beauty ensue, civilisation is advanced, and thus finally the way is opened toward that condition of immortal spiritual happiness which this process of experience prefigures and prophesies. But the art faculty is of rare occurrence. At long intervals there is a break in the usual experience of stage failure, and some person hitherto unknown not only takes the field but keeps it. When Garrick came out, as the Duke of Gloster, in the autumn of 1741, in London, he had never been heard of, but within a brief time he was famous. "He at once decided the public taste," said Macklin; and Pope summed up the victory in the well-known sentence, "That young man never had an equal, and will never have a rival." Tennyson's line furnishes the apt and comprehensive comment--"The many fail, the one succeeds." Mary Anderson in her day furnished the most conspicuous and striking example, aside from that of Adelaide Neilson, to which it is possible to refer of this exceptional experience. And yet, even after years of trial and test, it is doubtful whether the excellence of that remarkable actress was entirely comprehended in her own country. The provincial custom of waiting for foreign authorities to discover our royal minds is one from which many inhabitants of America have not yet escaped. As an actress, indeed, Mary Anderson was, probably, more popular than any player on the American stage excepting Edwin Booth or Joseph Jefferson; but there is a difference between popularity and just and comprehensive intellectual recognition. Many actors get the one; few get the other. Much of the contemporary criticism that is lavished upon actors in this exigent period--so bountifully supplied with critical observations, so poorly furnished with creative art--touches only upon the surface. Acting is measured with a tape and the chief demand seems to be for form. This is right, and indeed is imperative, whenever it is certain that the actor at his best is one who never can rise above the high-water mark of correct mechanism. There are cases that need a deeper method of inquiry and a more searching glance. A wise critic, when this emergency comes, is something more than an expert who gives an opinion upon a professional exploit. The special piece of work may contain technical flaws, and yet there may be within it a soul worth all the "icily regular and splendidly null" achievements that ever were possible to proficient mediocrity. That soul is visible only to the observer who can look through the art into the interior spirit of the artist, and thus can estimate a piece of acting according to its inspirational drift and the enthralling and ennobling personality out of which it springs. The acting of Mary Anderson, from the first moment of her career, was of the kind that needs that deep insight and broad judgment,--aiming to recognise and rightly estimate its worth. Yet few performers of the day were so liberally favoured with the monitions of dullness and the ponderous patronage of self-complacent folly. Conventional judgment as to Mary Anderson's acting expressed itself in one statement--"she is cold." There could not be a greater error. That quality in Mary Anderson's acting--a reflex from her spiritual nature--which produced upon the conventional mind the effect of coldness was in fact distinction, the attribute of being exceptional. The judgment that she was cold was a resentful judgment, and was given in a spirit of detraction. It proceeded from an order of mind that can never be content with the existence of anything above its own level. "He hath," said Iago, speaking of Cassio, "a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly." Those detractors did not understand themselves as well as the wily Italian understood himself, and they did not state their attitude with such precision; in fact, they did not state it at all, for it was unconscious with them and involuntary. They saw a being unlike themselves, they vaguely apprehended the presence of a superior nature, and that they resented. The favourite popular notion is that all men are born free and equal; which is false. Free and equal they all are, undoubtedly, in the eye of the law. But every man is born subject to heredity and circumstance, and whoever will investigate his life will perceive that he never has been able to stray beyond the compelling and constraining force of his character--which is his fate. All men, moreover, are unequal. To one human being is given genius; to another, beauty; to another, strength; to another, exceptional judgment; to another, exceptional memory; to another, grace and charm; to still another, physical ugliness and spiritual obliquity, moral taint, and every sort of disabling weakness. To the majority of persons Nature imparts mediocrity, and it is from mediocrity that the derogatory denial emanates as to the superior men and women of our race. A woman of the average kind is not difficult to comprehend. There is nothing distinctive about her. She is fond of admiration; rather readily censorious of other women; charitable toward male rakes; and partial to fine attire. The poet Wordsworth's formula, "Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles," comprises all that is essential for her existence, and that bard has himself precisely described her, in a grandfatherly and excruciating couplet, as "A creature not too bright and good For human nature's daily food." Women of that sort are not called "cold." The standard is ordinary and it is understood. But when a woman appears in art whose life is not ruled by the love of admiration, whose nature is devoid of vanity, who looks with indifference upon adulation, whose head is not turned by renown, whose composure is not disturbed by flattery, whose simplicity is not marred by wealth, who does not go into theatrical hysterics and offer that condition of artificial delirium as the mood of genius in acting, who above all makes it apparent in her personality and her achievements that the soul can be sufficient to itself and can exist without taking on a burden of the fever or dulness of other lives, there is a flutter of vague discontent among the mystified and bothered rank and file, and we are apprised that she is "cold." That is what happened in the case of Mary Anderson. What are the faculties and attributes essential to great success in acting? A sumptuous and supple figure that can realise the ideals of statuary; a mobile countenance that can strongly and unerringly express the feelings of the heart and the workings of the mind; eyes that can awe with the majesty or startle with the terror or thrill with the tenderness of their soul-subduing gaze; a voice, deep, clear, resonant, flexible, that can range over the wide compass of emotion and carry its meaning in varying music to every ear and every heart; intellect to shape the purposes and control the means of mimetic art; deep knowledge of human nature; delicate intuitions; the skill to listen as well as the art to speak; imagination to grasp the ideal of a character in all its conditions of experience; the instinct of the sculptor to give it form, of the painter to give it colour, and of the poet to give it movement; and, back of all, the temperament of genius--the genialised nervous system--to impart to the whole artistic structure the thrill of spiritual vitality. Mary Anderson's acting revealed those faculties and attributes, and those observers who realised the poetic spirit, the moral majesty, and the isolation of mind that she continually suggested felt that she was an extraordinary woman. Such moments in her acting as that of Galatea's mute supplication at the last of earthly life, that of Juliet's desolation after the final midnight parting with the last human creature whom she may ever behold, and that of Hermione's despair when she covers her face and falls as if stricken dead, were the eloquent denotements of power, and in those and such as those--with which her art abounded--was the fulfilment of every hope that her acting inspired and the vindication of every encomium that it received. Early in her professional career, when considering her acting, the present essayist quoted as applicable to her those lovely lines by Wordsworth:-- "The stars of midnight shall be dear To her, and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face." In the direction of development thus indicated she steadily advanced. Her affiliations were with grandeur, purity, and loveliness. An inherent and passionate tendency toward classic stateliness increased in her more and more. Characters of the statuesque order attracted her imagination--Ion, Galatea, Hermione--but she did not leave them soulless. In the interpretation of passion and the presentation of its results she revealed the striking truth that her perceptions could discern those consequences that are recorded in the soul and in comparison with which the dramatic entanglements of visible life are puny and evanescent. Though living in the rapid stream of the social world she dwelt aloof from it. She thought deeply, and in mental direction she took the pathway of intellectual power. It is not surprising that the true worth of such a nature was not accurately apprehended. Minds that are self-poised, stately, irresponsive to human weakness, unconventional and self-liberated from allegiance to the commonplace are not fully and instantly discernible, and may well perplex the smiling glance of frivolity; but they are permanent forces in the education of the human race. Mary Anderson retired from the stage, under the pressure of extreme fatigue, in the beginning of 1889 and entered upon a matrimonial life on June 17, 1890. It is believed that her retirement is permanent. The historical interest attaching to her dramatic career justifies the preservation of this commemorative essay. There is so much beauty in the comedy of _A Winter's Tale_--so much thought, character, humour, philosophy, sweetly serene feeling and loveliness of poetic language--that the public ought to feel obliged to any one who successfully restores it to the stage, from which it usually is banished. The piece was written in the maturity of Shakespeare's marvellous powers, and indeed some of the Shakespearean scholars believe it to be the last work that fell from his hand. Human life, as depicted in _A Winter's Tale_, shows itself like what it always seems to be in the eyes of patient, tolerant, magnanimous experience--the eyes "that have kept watch o'er man's mortality"--for it is a scene of inexplicable contrasts and vicissitudes, seemingly the chaos of caprice and chance, yet always, in fact, beneficently overruled and guided to good ends. Human beings are shown in it as full of weakness; often as the puppets of laws that they do not understand and of universal propensities and impulses into which they never pause to inquire; almost always as objects of benignant pity. The woful tangle of human existence is here viewed with half-cheerful, half-sad tolerance, yet with the hope and belief that all will come right at last. The mood of the comedy is pensive but radically sweet. The poet is like the forest in Emerson's subtle vision of the inherent exultation of nature:-- "Sober, on a fund of joy, The woods at heart are glad." Mary Anderson doubled the characters of Hermione and Perdita. This had not been conspicuously done until it was done by her, and her innovation, in that respect, was met with grave disapproval. The moment the subject is examined, however, objection to that method of procedure is dispelled. Hermione, as a dramatic person, disappears in the middle of the third act of Shakespeare's comedy and comes no more until the end of the piece, when she emerges as a statue. Her character has been entirely expressed and her part in the action of the drama has been substantially fulfilled before she disappears. There is no intermediate passion to be wrought to a climax, nor is there any intermediate mood, dramatically speaking, to be sustained. The dramatic environment, the dramatic necessities, are vastly unlike, for example, those of Lady Macbeth--one of the hardest of all parts to play well, because exhibited intermittently, at long intervals, yet steadily constrained by the necessity of cumulative excitement. The representative of Lady Macbeth must be identified with that character, whether on the stage or off, from the beginning of it to the end. Hermione, on the contrary, is at rest from the moment when she faints upon receiving information of the death of her boy. A lapse of sixteen years is assumed, and then, standing forth as a statue, she personifies majestic virtue and victorious fortitude. When she descends from the pedestal she silently embraces Leontes, speaks a few pious, maternal and tranquil lines (there are precisely seven of them in the original, but Mary Anderson added two, from "All's Well"), and embraces Perdita, whom she has not seen since the girl's earliest infancy. This is their only meeting, and little is sacrificed by the use of a substitute for the daughter in that scene. Perdita's brief apostrophe to the statue has to be cut, but it is not missed in the representation. The resemblance between mother and daughter heightens the effect of illusion, in its impress equally upon fancy and vision; and a more thorough elucidation is given than could be provided in any other way of the spirit of the comedy. It was a judicious and felicitous choice that the actress made when she selected those two characters, and the fact that her impersonation of them carried a practically disused Shakespearean comedy through a season of one hundred and fifty nights at the Lyceum Theatre in London furnishes an indorsement alike of her wisdom and her ability. She played in a stage version of the piece, in five acts, containing thirteen scenes, arranged by herself. While Mary Anderson was acting those two parts in London the sum of critical opinion seemed to be that her performance of Perdita was better than her performance of Hermione; but beneath that judgment there was, apparently, the impression that Hermione is a character fraught with superlatively great passions, powers, and qualities, such as are only to be apprehended by gigantic sagacity and conveyed by herculean talents and skill. Those vast attributes were not specified, but there was a mysterious intimation of their existence--as of something vague, formidable, and mostly elusive. But in truth Hermione, although a stronger part than Perdita, is neither complex, dubious, nor inaccessible; and Mary Anderson, although more fascinating in Perdita, could and did rise, in Hermione, to a noble height of tragic power--an excellence not possible for her, nor for anybody, in the more juvenile and slender character. Hermione has usually been represented as an elderly woman and by such an actress as is technically called "heavy." She ought to be represented as about thirty years of age at the beginning of the piece, and forty-six at the end of it. Leontes is not more than thirty-four at the opening, and he would be fifty at the close. He speaks, in his first scene, of his boyhood as only twenty-three years gone, when his dagger was worn "muzzled, lest it should bite its master"--at which time he may have been ten years old; certainly not more, probably less. His words, toward the end of act third, "so sure as this beard's gray," refer to the beard of Antigonus, not to his own. He is a young man when the play begins, and Polixenes is about the same age, and Hermione is a young woman. Antigonus and Paulina are middle-aged persons in the earlier scenes and Paulina is an elderly woman in the statue scene--almost an old woman, though not too old to be given in marriage to old Camillo, the ever-faithful friend. In Mary Anderson's presentation of _A Winter's Tale_ those details received thoughtful consideration and correct treatment. In Hermione is seen a type of the celestial nature in woman--infinite love, infinite charity, infinite patience. Such a nature is rare; but it is possible, it exists, and Shakespeare, who depicted everything, did not omit to portray that. To comprehend Hermione the observer must separate her, absolutely and finally, from association with the passions. Mrs. Jameson acutely and justly describes her character as exhibiting "dignity without pride, love without passion, and tenderness without weakness." That is exactly true. Hermione was not easily won, and the best thing known about Leontes is that at last she came to love him and that her love for him survived his cruel and wicked treatment, chastened him, reinstated him, and ultimately blessed him. Hermione suffers the utmost affliction that a good woman can suffer. Her boy dies, heart-broken, at the news of his mother's alleged disgrace. Her infant daughter is torn from her breast and cast forth to perish. Her husband becomes her enemy and persecutor. Her chastity is assailed and vilified. She is subjected to the bitter indignity of a public trial. It is no wonder that at last her brain reels and she falls as if stricken dead. The apparent anomaly is her survival for sixteen years, in lonely seclusion, and her emergence, after that, as anything but a forlorn shadow of her former self. The poet Shelley has recorded the truth that all great emotions either kill themselves or kill those who feel them. It is here, however, that the exceptional temperament of Hermione supplies an explanatory and needed qualification. Her emotions are never of a passionate kind. Her mind predominates. Her life is in the affections and therefore it is one of thought. She sees clearly the facts of her experience and condition, and she knows exactly how those facts look in the eyes of others. She is one of those persons who possess a keen and just prescience of events, who can look far into the future and discern those resultant consequences of the present which, under the operation of inexorable moral law, must inevitably ensue. Self-poised in the right and free from the disturbing force of impulse and desire, she can await the justice of time, she can live, and she can live in the tranquil patience of resignation. True majesty of the person is dependent on repose of the soul, and there can be no repose of the soul without moral rectitude and a far-reaching, comprehensive, wise vision of events. Mary Anderson embodied Hermione in accordance with that ideal. By the expression of her face and the tones of her voice, in a single speech, the actress placed beyond question her grasp of the character:-- "Good my lords, I am not prone to weeping, as our sex Commonly are--the want of which vain dew Perchance shall dry your pities--but I have That honourable grief lodged here, which burns Worse than tears drown." The conspicuous, predominant, convincing artistic beauty in Mary Anderson's impersonation of Hermione was her realisation of the part, in figure, face, presence, demeanour, and temperament. She did not afflict her auditor with the painful sense of a person struggling upward toward an unattainable identity. She made you conscious of the presence of a queen. This, obviously, is the main thing--that the individuality shall be imperial, not merely wearing royal attire but being invested with the royal authenticity of divine endowment and consecration. Much emphasis has been placed by Shakespeare upon that attribute of innate grandeur. Leontes, at the opening of the trial scene, describes his accused wife as "the daughter of a king," and in the same scene her father is mentioned as the Emperor of Russia. The gentleman who, in act fifth, recounts to Autolycus the meeting between Leontes and his daughter Perdita especially notes "the majesty of the creature, in resemblance of the mother." Hermione herself, in the course of her vindication--expressed in one of the most noble and pathetic strains of poetical eloquence in our language--names herself "a great king's daughter," therein recalling those august and piteous words of Shakespeare's Katharine:-- "We are a Queen, or long have thought so, certain The daughter of a king." Poor old Antigonus, in his final soliloquy, recounting the vision of Hermione that had come upon him in the night, declares her to be a woman royal and grand not by descent only but by nature:-- "I never saw a vessel of like sorrow, So filled and so becoming. In pure white robes, Like very sanctity, she did approach." That image Mary Anderson embodied, and therefore the ideal of Shakespeare was made a living thing--that glorious ideal, in shaping which the great poet "from all that are took something good, to make a perfect woman." Toward Polixenes, in the first scene, her manner was wholly gracious, delicately playful, innocently kind, and purely frail. Her quiet archness at the question, "Will you go yet?" struck exactly the right key of Hermione's mood. With the baby prince Mamillius her frolic and banter, affectionate, free, and gay, were in a happy vein of feeling and humour. Her simple dignity, restraining both resentment and grief, in face of the injurious reproaches of Leontes, was entirely noble and right, and the pathetic words, "I never wished to see you sorry, now I trust I shall," could not have been spoken with more depth and intensity of grieved affection than were felt in her composed yet tremulous voice. The entrance, at the trial scene, was made with the stateliness natural to a queenly woman, and yet with a touch of pathos--the cold patience of despair. The delivery of Hermione's defensive speeches was profoundly earnest and touching. The simple cry of the mother's breaking heart, and the action of veiling her face and falling like one dead, upon the announcement of the prince's death, were perfect denotements of the collapse of a grief-stricken woman. The skill with which the actress, in the monument scene--which is all repose and no movement--contrived nevertheless to invest Hermione with steady vitality of action, and to imbue the crisis with a feverish air of suspense, was in a high degree significant of the personality of genius. For such a performance of Hermione Shakespeare himself has provided the sufficient summary and encomium:-- "Women will love her, that she is a woman More worth than any man; men that she is The rarest of all women." It is one thing to say that Mary Anderson was better in Perdita than in Hermione, and another thing to say that the performance of Perdita was preferred. Everybody preferred it--even those who knew that it was not the better of the two; for everybody loves the sunshine more than the shade. Hermione means grief and endurance. Perdita means beautiful youth and happy love. It does not take long for an observer to choose between them. Suffering is not companionable. By her impersonation of Hermione the actress revealed her knowledge of the stern truth of life, its trials, its calamities, and the possible heroism of character under its sorrowful discipline. Into that identity she passed by the force of her imagination. The embodiment was majestic, tender, pitiable, transcendent, but its colour was the sombre colour of pensive melancholy and sad experience. That performance was the higher and more significant of the two. But the higher form of art is not always the most alluring--never the most alluring when youthful beauty smiles and rosy pleasure beckons another way. All hearts respond to happiness. By her presentment of Perdita the actress became the glittering image and incarnation of glorious youthful womanhood and fascinating joy. No exercise of the imagination was needful to her in that. There was an instantaneous correspondence between the part and the player. The embodiment was as natural as a sunbeam. Shakespeare has left no doubt about his meaning in Perdita. The speeches of all around her continually depict her fresh and piquant loveliness, her innate superiority, her superlative charm; while her behaviour and language as constantly show forth her nobility of soul. One of the subtlest side lights thrown upon the character is in the description of the manner in which Perdita heard the story of her mother's death--when "attentiveness wounded" her "till, from one sign of dolour to another, she did bleed tears." And of the fibre of her nature there is perhaps no finer indication than may be felt in her comment on old Camillo's worldly view of prosperity as a vital essential to the permanence of love:-- "I think affliction may subdue the cheek, But not take in the mind." In the thirty-seven plays of Shakespeare there is no strain of the poetry of sentiment and grace essentially sweeter than that which he has put into the mouth of Perdita; and poetry could not be more sweetly spoken than it was by Mary Anderson in that delicious scene of the distribution of the flowers. The actress evinced comprehension of the character in every fibre of its being, and she embodied it with the affluent vitality of splendid health and buoyant temperament--presenting a creature radiant with goodness and happiness, exquisite in natural refinement, piquant with archness, soft, innocent, and tender in confiding artlessness, and, while gleeful and triumphant in beautiful youth, gently touched with an intuitive pitying sense of the thorny aspects of this troubled world. The giving of the flowers completely bewitched her auditors. The startled yet proud endurance of the king's anger was in an equal degree captivating. Seldom has the stage displayed that rarest of all combinations, the passionate heart of a woman with the lovely simplicity of a child. Nothing could be more beautiful than she was to the eyes that followed her lithe figure through the merry mazes of her rustic dance--an achievement sharply in contrast with her usually statuesque manner. It "makes old hearts fresh" to see a spectacle of grace and joy, and that spectacle they saw then and will not forget. The value of those impersonations of Hermione and Perdita, viewing them as embodied interpretations of poetry was great, but they possessed a greater value and a higher significance as denotements of the guiding light, the cheering strength, the elevating loveliness of a noble human soul. They embodied the conception of the poet, but at the same time they illumined an actual incarnation of the divine spirit. They were like windows to a sacred temple, and through them you could look into the soul of a true woman--always a realm where thoughts are gliding angels, and feelings are the faces of seraphs, and sounds are the music of the harps of heaven. VI. HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN OLIVIA. It has sometimes been thought that the acting of Henry Irving is seen at its best in those impersonations of his that derive their vitality from the grim, ghastly, and morbid attributes of human nature. That he is a unique actor, and distinctively a great actor, in Hamlet, Mathias, Eugene Aram, Louis XI., Lesurque, and Dubosc, few judges will deny. His performances of those parts have shown him to be a man of weird imagination, and they have shown that his characteristics, mental and spiritual, are sombre. Accordingly, when it was announced that he would play Dr. Primrose--Goldsmith's simple, virtuous, homely, undramatic village-preacher, the _Vicar of Wakefield_,--a doubt was felt as to his suitability for the part and as to the success of his endeavour. He played Dr. Primrose, and he gained in that character some of the brightest laurels of his professional career. The doubt proved unwarranted. More than one competent observer of that remarkable performance has granted it an equal rank with the best of Henry Irving's achievements; and now, more clearly than before, it is perceived that the current of his inspiration flows as freely from the silver spring of goodness as from the dark and troubled fountain of human misery. On the first night of _Olivia_, at the Lyceum Theatre (it was May 27, 1885, when the present writer happened to be in London), Henry Irving's performance of Dr. Primrose was fettered by a curb of constraint. The actor's nerves had been strained to a high pitch of excitement and he was obviously anxious. His spirit, accordingly, was not fully liberated into the character. He advanced with cautious care and he executed each detail of his design with precise accuracy. To various auditors, for that reason, the work seemed a little Methodistical; and drab is a colour at which the voice of the scoffer is apt to scoff. But the impersonation of Dr. Primrose soon became equally a triumph of expression and of ideal; not only flowing out of goodness, but flowing smoothly and producing the effect of nature. It was not absolutely and identically the Vicar that Goldsmith has drawn, for its personality was unmarked by either rusticity or strong humour; but it was a kindred and higher type of the simple truth, the pastoral sweetness, the benignity, and the human tenderness of that delightful original. To invest goodness with charm, to make virtue piquant, and to turn common events of domestic life to exquisite pathos and noble exaltation was the actor's purpose. It was accomplished; and Dr. Primrose, thitherto an idyllic figure, existent only in the chambers of fancy, is henceforth as much a denizen of the stage as Luke Fielding or Jesse Rural; a man not merely to be read of, as one reads of Uncle Toby and Parson Adams, but to be known, remembered, and loved. Wills's drama of _Olivia_, based upon an episode in Goldsmith's story, is one of extreme simplicity. It may be described as a series of pictures displaying the consequences of action rather than action itself. It contains an abundance of incident, but the incident is mostly devoid of inherent dramatic force and therefore is such as must derive its chief effect from the manner in which it is treated by the actors who represent the piece. Nevertheless, the piece was found to be, during its first three acts, an expressive, coherent, interesting play. It tells its story clearly and entirely, not by narrative but by the display of characters in their relations to each other. Its language, flavoured here and there with the phraseology of the novel, is consistently appropriate. The fourth and last act is feeble. Nobody can sympathise with "the late remorse of love" in a nature so trivial as that of Thornhill, and the incident of the reconciliation between Olivia and her husband, therefore, goes for nothing. It is the beautiful relation between the father and his daughter that animates the play. It is paternal love that thrills its structure with light, warmth, colour, sincerity, moral force, and human significance. Opinion may differ as to the degree of skill with which Wills selected and employed the materials of Goldsmith's story; but nobody can justly deny that he wrought for the stage a practical dramatic exposition of the beauty and sanctity of the holiest relation that is possible in human life; and to have done that is to have done a noble thing. Many persons appear to think that criticism falls short of its duty unless it wounds and hurts. Goldsmith himself observed that fact. It was in the story of _The Vicar of Wakefield_ that he made his playful suggestion that a critic should always take care to say that the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains. Wills probably heard more than enough for his spiritual welfare about the faults of his piece; yet there is really nothing weak in the play except the conclusion. It is not easy to suggest, however, in what way the fourth act could be strengthened, unless it were by a recasting and renovation of the character of Squire Thornhill. But the victory was gained, in spite of a feeble climax. Many persons also appear to think that it is a sort of sacrilege to lay hands upon the sacred ark of a classic creation. Dion Boucicault, perceiving this when he made a play about _Clarissa Harlowe_, felt moved to deprecate anticipated public resentment of the liberties that he had taken with Richardson's novel. Yet it is difficult to see why the abundant details of that excellent though protracted narrative should not be curtailed, in order to circumscribe its substance within the limits of a practical drama. Jefferson was blamed for condensing and slightly changing the comedy of _The Rivals_. Yet the author, who probably knew something about his work, deemed it a wretchedly defective piece, and expressed the liveliest regret for having written it. Wills did not reproduce Goldsmith's Vicar upon the stage: in some particulars he widely diverged from it--and his work, accordingly, may be censured. Yet _The Vicar of Wakefield_ is far from being a faultless production, such as a divinity should be supposed to hedge. Critical students are aware of this. It is not worth while to traverse the old ground. The reader who will take the trouble--and pleasure--to refer to that excellent chapter on Goldsmith in Dr. Craik's _History of English Literature_ will find the structural defects of the novel specifically enumerated. If the dramatist has ignored many details he has at least extracted from the narrative the salient points of a consistent, harmonious story. The spectator can enjoy the play, whether he has read the original or not. At the end of its first act he knows the Vicar and his family, their home, their way of life, their neighbours, the two suitors for the two girls, the motives of each and every character, and the relations of each to all; and he sees, what is always touching in the spectacle of actual human life, the contrasted states of circumstance and experience surrounding and enmeshing all. After this preparation the story is developed with few and rapid strokes. Two of the pictures were poems. At the end of act first the Vicar, who has been apprised of the loss of his property, imparts this sad news to his family. The time is the gloaming. The chimes are sounding in the church-tower. It is the hour of evening prayer. The gray-haired pastor calls his loved ones around him, in his garden, and simply and reverently tells them of their misfortune, which is to be accepted submissively, as Heaven's will. The deep religious feeling of that scene, the grouping, the use of sunset lights and shadows, the melody of the chimes, the stricken look in the faces of the women and children, the sweet gravity of the Vicar--instinct with the nobleness of a sorrow not yet become corrosive and lachrymose, as is the tendency of settled grief--and, over all, the sense of blighted happiness and an uncertain future, made up a dramatic as well as a pictorial effect of impressive poetic significance. In act second--which is pictorial almost without intermission--there was a companion picture, when the Vicar reads, at his fireside, a letter announcing the restitution of his estate; while his wife and children and Mr. Burchell are assembled around the spinet singing an old song. The repose with which Henry Irving made that scene tremulous, almost painful, in its suspense, was observed as one of the happiest strokes of his art. The face and demeanour of Dr. Primrose, changing from the composure of resignation to a startled surprise, and then to almost an hysterical gladness, presented a study not less instructive than affecting of the resources of acting. Only two contemporary actors have presented anything kindred with Mr. Irving's acting in that situation and throughout the scene that is sequent on the discovery of Olivia's flight--Jefferson in America and Got in France. Evil is restless and irresistibly prone to action. Goodness is usually negative and inert. Dr. Primrose is a type of goodness. In order to invest him with piquancy and dramatic vigour Henry Irving gave him passion, and therewithal various attributes of charming eccentricity. The clergyman thus presented is the fruition of a long life of virtue. He has the complete repose of innocence, the sweet candour of absolute purity, the mild demeanour of spontaneous, habitual benevolence, the supreme grace of unconscious simplicity. But he is human and passionate; he shows--in his surroundings, in his quick sympathy with natural beauty, and in his indicated rather than directly stated ideals of conduct--that he has lived an imaginative and not a prosaic life; he is vaguely and pathetically superstitious; and while essentially grand in his religious magnanimity he is both fascinating and morally formidable as a man. Those denotements point at Henry Irving's ideal. For his method it is less easy to find the right description. His mechanical reiteration of the words that are said to him by Sophia, in the moment when the fond father knows that his idolised Olivia has fled with her lover; his collapse, when the harmless pistols are taken from his nerveless hands; his despairing cry, "If she had but died!"; his abortive effort to rebuke his darling child in the hour of her abandonment and misery, and the sudden tempest of passionate affection with which the great tender heart sweeps away that inadequate and paltry though eminently appropriate morality, and takes its idol to itself as only true love can do--those were instances of high dramatic achievement for which epithets are inadequate, but which the memory of the heart will always treasure. It was said by the poet Aaron Hill, in allusion to Barton Booth, that the blind might have seen him in his voice and the deaf might have heard him in his visage. Such a statement made concerning an actor now would be deemed extravagant. But, turning from the Vicar to his cherished daughter, that felicitous image comes naturally into the mind. To think of Ellen Terry as Olivia will always be to recall one especial and remarkable moment of beauty and tenderness. It is not her distribution of the farewell gifts, on the eve of Olivia's flight--full although that was of the emotion of a good heart torn and tortured by the conflict between love and duty--and it is not the desperate resentment with which Olivia beats back her treacherous betrayer, when, at the climax of his baseness, he adds insult to heartless perfidy. Those, indeed, were made great situations by the profound sincerity and the rich, woman-like passion of the actress. But there was one instant, in the second act of the play, when the woman's heart has at length yielded to her lover's will, and he himself, momentarily dismayed by his own conquest, strives to turn back, that Ellen Terry made pathetic beyond description. The words she spoke are simply these, "But I said I would come!" What language could do justice to the voice, to the manner, to the sweet, confiding, absolute abandonment of the whole nature to the human love by which it had been conquered? The whole of that performance was astonishing, was thrilling, with knowledge of the passion of love. That especial moment was the supreme beauty of it. At such times human nature is irradiated with a divine fire, and art fulfils its purpose. VII. ON JEFFERSON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Joseph Jefferson has led a life of noble endeavour and has had a career of ample prosperity, culminating in honourable renown and abundant happiness. He was born in Philadelphia, February 20, 1829. He went on the stage when he was four years old and he has been on the stage ever since. His achievements as an actor have been recognised and accepted with admiration in various parts of the world; in Australia and New Zealand and in England, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as in the United States. Among English-speaking actors he is the foremost living representative of the art of eccentric comedy. He has not, of late years, played a wide range of parts, but, restricting himself to a few characters, and those of a representative kind, the manner in which he has acted them is a perfect manner--and it is this that has gained for him his distinctive eminence. Jefferson, however, is not simply and exclusively an actor. His mind is many sided. He has painted landscape pictures of a high order of merit,--pictures in which elusive moods and subtle sentiments of nature are grasped with imaginative insight and denoted and interpreted with a free, delicate, and luminous touch. He has also addressed the public as an author. He has written an easy, colloquial account of his own life, and that breezy, off-hand, expeditious work,--after passing it as a serial through their Century Magazine,--the Century Company has published in a beautiful volume. It is a work that, for the sake of the writer, will be welcomed everywhere, and, for its own sake as well as his, will everywhere be preserved. Beginning a theatrical career nearly sixty years ago (1833), roving up and down the earth ever since, and seldom continuing in one place, Jefferson has had uncommon opportunities of noting the development of the United States and of observing, in both hemispheres, the changeful aspect of one of the most eventful periods in the history of the world. Actors, as a class, know nothing but the stage and see nothing but the pursuit in which they are occupied. Whoever has lived much among them knows that fact, from personal observation. Whoever has read the various and numerous memoirs that have from time to time been published by elderly members of that profession must have been amused to perceive that, while they conventionally agree that "all the world's a stage," they are enthusiastically convinced that the stage is all the world. Jefferson's book, although it contains much about the theatre, shows him to be an exception in this respect, even as he is in many others. He has seen many countries and many kinds of men and things, and he has long looked upon life with the thoughtful gaze of a philosopher as well as the wise smile of a humourist. He can, if he likes, talk of something besides the shop. His account of his life "lacks form a little," and his indifference to "accurate statistics"--which he declares to be "somewhat tedious"--is now and then felt to be an embarrassment. One would like to know, for instance, while reading about the primitive theatrical times, when actors sailed the western rivers in flatboats, and shot beasts and birds on the bank, precisely the extent and limits of that period. Nor is this the only queer aspect of the dramatic past that might be illumined. The total environment of a man's life is almost equally important with the life itself--being, indeed, the scenery amid which the action passes--and a good method for the writing of a biography is that which sharply defines the successive periods of childhood, youth, manhood, and age, and, while depicting the development of the individual from point to point, depicts also the entire field through which he moves, and the mutations, affecting his life, that occur in the historic and social fabric around him. Jefferson, while he has painted vigorously and often happily, on a large canvas, has left many spaces empty and others but thinly filled. The reader who accompanies him may, nevertheless, with a little care, piece out the story so as to perceive it as a sequent, distinct, harmonious, and rounded narrative. Meanwhile the companionship of this heedless historian is delightful--for whether as actor, painter, or writer, Jefferson steadily exerts the charm of a genial personality. You are as one walking along a country road, on a golden autumn day, with a kind, merry companion, who knows all about the trees that fringe your track and the birds that flit through their branches, and who beguiles the way with many a humorous tale and many a pleasant remembrance, now impressing your mind by the sagacity of his reflections, now touching your heart by some sudden trait of sentiment or pathos, and always pleasing and satisfying you with the consciousness of a sweet, human, broad, charitable, piquant nature. Although an autobiographer Jefferson is not egotistical, and although a moralist he is not a bore. There is a tinge of the Horatian mood in him--for his reader often becomes aware of that composed, sagacious, half-droll, quizzical mind that indicates, with grave gentleness, the folly of ambition, the vanity of riches, the value of the present hour, the idleness of borrowing trouble, the blessing of the golden medium in fortune, the absurdity of flatterers, and the comfort of keeping a steadfast spirit amid the inevitable vicissitudes of this mortal state. Jefferson has memories of a boyhood that was passed in Washington, Baltimore, and New York. He went to Chicago in 1838, when that place was scarcely more than a village--making the journey from New York to Buffalo in a canal-boat, and sailing thence, aboard a steamer, through the lakes of Erie, Huron, and Michigan. He travelled with his parents, and they gave dramatic performances, in which he assisted, in western towns. It was a time of poverty and hardship, but those ills were borne cheerfully--the brighter side of a hard life being kept steadily in view, and every comic incident of it being seen and appreciated. His father was a gentleman of the Mark Tapley temperament, who came out strong amid adverse circumstances, and the early disappearance from the book of that delightful person (who died in 1842, of yellow fever, at Mobile), is a positive sorrow. His mother, a refined and gentle lady, of steadfast character and of uncommon musical and dramatic talents and accomplishments, survived till 1849, and her ashes rest in Ronaldson's cemetery, in Philadelphia. Jefferson might have said much more about his parents, and especially about his famous grandfather, without risk of becoming tedious--for they were remarkably interesting people; but he was writing his own life and not theirs, and he has explained that he likes not to dwell much upon domestic matters. The story of his long ancestry of actors, which reaches back to the days of Garrick (for there have been five generations of the Jeffersons upon the stage), he has not mentioned; and the story of his own young days is hurried rapidly to a conclusion. He was brought on the stage, when a child, at the theatre in Washington, D.C., by the negro comedian Thomas D. Rice, who emptied him out of a bag; and thereupon, being dressed as "a nigger dancer," in imitation of Rice, he performed the antics of Jim Crow. He adverts to his first appearance in New York and remembers his stage combat with Master Titus; and he thinks that Master Titus must remember it also,--since one of that boy's big toes was nearly cut off in the fray. That combat occurred at the Franklin theatre, September 30, 1837--a useful fact that the autobiographer cares not to mention. He speedily becomes a young man, as the reader follows him through the first three chapters of his narrative,--of which there are seventeen,--and he is found to be acting, as a stock player, in support of James W. Wallack, Junius Brutus Booth, W.C. Macready, and Mr. and Mrs. J.W. Wallack, Jr. Upon the powers and peculiarities of those actors, and upon the traits of many others who, like them, are dead and gone (for there is scarcely a word in the book about any of his living contemporaries), he comments freely and instructively. He was "barn-storming" in Texas when the Mexican war began, and he followed in the track of the American army, and acted in the old Spanish theatre in Matamoras, in the spring of 1846; and, subsequently, finding that this did no good, he opened a stall there for the sale of coffee and other refreshments, in the corner of a gambling hell. He calls to mind the way of domestic life and the every-day aspect of houses, gardens, people, and manners in Matamoras, and those he describes with especial skill--deftly introducing the portraiture of a dusky, black-eyed, volatile Mexican girl, to whom he lost, temporarily, the light heart of youth, and whom he thinks that he might have married had he not deemed it prudent to journey northward toward a cooler clime. In New Orleans, at about that time, he first saw the then young comedian John E. Owens: and he records the fact that his ambition to excel as an actor was awakened by the spectacle of that rival's success. Owens has had his career since then,--and a brilliant one it was,--and now he sleeps in peace. After that experience Jefferson repaired to Philadelphia, and during the next ten years, from 1846 to 1856, he wrought in that city and in New York, Baltimore, Richmond, and other places, sometimes as a stock actor, sometimes as a star, and sometimes as a manager. He encountered various difficulties. He took a few serious steps and many comic ones. He was brought into contact with some individuals that were eminent and with some that were ludicrous. He crossed the Allegheny mountains in mid-winter, from Wheeling to Cumberland, in a cold stage-coach, and almost perished. He was a member of Burton's company at the Arch Street theatre, Philadelphia, and was one of the chorus in that great actor's revival of _Antigone_--which there is little doubt that the chorus extinguished. He was the low comedian in Joseph Foster's amphitheatre, where he sang _Captain Kidd_ to fill up the "carpenter scenes," and where he sported amid the turbulent rhetorical billows of _Timour the Tartar_ and _The Terror of the Road_. He acted in New York at the Franklin theatre and also at the Chatham. He managed theatres in Macon and Savannah, where he brought out the blithe Sir William Don; and one of the sprightliest episodes of his memoir is the chapter in which he describes that tall, elegant, nonchalant adventurer. Don was a Scotchman, born in 1826, who made his first appearance in America in November 1850 at the Broadway theatre, New York, and afterward drifted aimlessly through the provincial theatres. Don was married in 1857 to Miss Emily Sanders, and he died at Tasmania, March 19, 1862, and was buried at Hobartstown. Jefferson saw the dawn of promise in the career of Julia Dean,--when that beautiful girl was acting with him, in the stock--and afterwards he saw the noonday splendour of her prosperity; and he might have recalled, but that sad touches are excluded from his biography, her mournful decline. In 1853 he was stage manager of the Baltimore museum, for Henry C. Jarrett, and in 1854 he was manager of the Richmond theatre, for John T. Ford. Among the players whom he met, and who deeply influenced him, were James E. Murdoch, Henry Placide, Edwin Forrest, Edwin Adams, and Agnes Robertson. But the actor who most affected the youth of Joseph Jefferson, whose influence sank deepest into his heart and has remained longest in his memory and upon his style, was his half-brother, Charles Burke: and certainly, as a serio-comic actor, it may be doubted whether Charles Burke ever was surpassed. That comedian was born March 27, 1822, in Philadelphia, and he died in New York, November 10, 1854. Jefferson's mother, Cornelia Frances Thomás, born in New York, October 1, 1796, the daughter of French parents, was married in her girlhood to the Irish comedian Thomas Burke, who died in 1824; and she contracted her second marriage, with Jefferson's father, in 1826. Jefferson writes at his best in the description of scenery, in the analysis of character, and in the statement of artistic principles. His portraiture of Murdoch, as a comedian, is particularly clear and fine. His account of Julia Dean's hit, as Lady Priory, is excellent and will often be cited. His portrayal of the reciprocal action of Burton and Charles Burke, when they were associated in the same piece, conveys a valuable lesson. His anecdotes of Edwin Forrest present that grim figure as yet again the involuntary cause of mirth. It often was so. Jefferson, however, draws a veil of gentle charity over those misused powers, that perverse will, that wasted life. The most striking dramatic portraiture in the book is that bestowed on Charles Burke, William Warren, George Holland, Tom Glessing, and Edwin Adams. Those were men who lived in Jefferson's affections, and when he wrote about them he wrote from the heart. The sketch of Glessing, whom everybody loved that ever knew him, is in a touching strain of tender remembrance. Jefferson visited England and France in 1856, but not to act. At that time he saw the famous English comedians Compton, Buckstone, Robson, and Wright, and that extraordinary actor, fine alike in tragedy and comedy, the versatile Samuel Phelps. In 1857 he was associated with Laura Keene at her theatre in New York; and from that date onward his career has been upon a high and sunlit path, visible to the world. His first part at Laura Keene's theatre was Dr. Pangloss. Then came _Our American Cousin_, in which he gained a memorable success as Asa Trenchard, and in which Edward A. Sothern laid the basis of that fantastic structure of whim and grotesque humour that afterward became famous as Lord Dundreary. Sothern, Laura Keene, and William Rufus Blake, of course, gained much of Jefferson's attention at that time, and he has not omitted to describe them. His account of Blake, however, does not impart an adequate idea of the excellence of that comedian. In 1858 he went to the Winter Garden theatre, and was associated with the late Dion Boucicault. His characters then were Newman Hoggs, Caleb Plummer, and Salem Scudder--in _Nicholas Nickleby_, _The Cricket on the Hearth_, and _The Octoroon_. Mr. Boucicault told him not to make Caleb Plummer a solemn character at the beginning--a deliverance that Jefferson seems to have cherished as one of colossal wisdom. He made a brilliant hit in Salem Scudder, and it was then that he determined finally to assume the position of a star. "Art has always been my sweetheart," exclaims Jefferson, "and I have loved her for herself alone." No observer can doubt that who has followed his career. It was in 1859 that he reverted to the subject of Rip Van Winkle, as the right theme for his dramatic purpose. He had seen Charles Burke as Rip, and he knew the several versions of Washington Irving's story that had been made for the theatre by Burke, Hackett, and Yates. The first Rip Van Winkle upon the stage, of whom there is any record in theatrical annals, was Thomas Flynn (1804-1849). That comedian, the friend of the elder Booth, acted the part for the first time on May 24, 1828, at Albany. Charles B. Parsons, who afterward acted in many theatres as Rip, and ultimately became a preacher, was, on that night, the performer of Derrick. Jefferson's predecessors as Rip Van Winkle were remarkably clever men--Flynn, Parsons, Burke, Chapman, Hackett, Yates, and William Isherwood. But it remained for Jefferson to do with that character what no one else had ever thought of doing--to lift it above the level of the tipsy rustic and make it the poetical type of the drifting and dreaming vagrant--half-haunted, half-inspired, a child of the trees and the clouds. Jefferson records that he was lying on the hay in a barn in Paradise Valley, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1859, taking advantage of a rainy day to read Washington Irving's _Life and Letters_, when that plan came to him. It proved an inspiration of happiness to thousands of people all over the world. The comedian made a play for himself, on the basis of Charles Burke's play, but with one vital improvement--he arranged the text and business of the supernatural scene so that Rip only should speak, while the ghosts should remain silent. That stroke of genius accomplished his object. The man capable of that exploit in dramatic art could not fail to win the world, because he would at once fascinate its imagination while touching its heart. In 1861 Jefferson went to California and thence to Australia, and in the latter country he remained four years. He has written a fine description of the entrance to the harbour at Sydney. His accounts of "the skeleton dance," as he saw it performed by the black natives of that land; of his meeting with the haunted hermit in the woods; of the convict audience at Tasmania, for whom he acted in _The Ticket-of-Leave Man_; and of the entertainment furnished in a Chinese theatre, are compositions that would impart to any book the interest of adventure and the zest of novelty. Such pictures as those have a broad background; they are not circumscribed within the proscenium frame. The man is seen in those passages as well as the actor; and he plays his part well, amid picturesque surroundings of evil and peril, of tragedy and of pathos. In Australia Jefferson met Charles Kean and his wife (Ellen Tree), of whom his sketches are boldly drawn and his memories are pleasant. Mr. and Mrs. Kean afterward made their farewell visit to the United States, beginning, when they reached New York (from San Francisco, in April 1865), with _Henry VIII._, and closing with _The Jealous Wife_. In 1865 Jefferson went from Australia to South America and passed some time in Lima, where he saw much tropical luxury and many beautiful ladies--an inspiriting spectacle, fittingly described by him in some of the most felicitous of his fervent words. In June 1865 he reached London, and presently he came forth, at the Adelphi, as Rip Van Winkle,--having caused the piece to be rewritten by Mr. Boucicault, who introduced the colloquy of the children, paraphrased for it the recognition scene between King Lear and Cordelia, and kept Gretchen alive to be married to Derrick. Mr. Boucicault, however, had no faith in the piece or the actor's plan, and down to the last moment prophesied failure. Jefferson's success was unequivocal. Friends surrounded him and in the gentle and genial record that he has made of those auspicious days some of the brightest names of modern English literature sparkle on his page. Benjamin Webster, Paul Bedford, John Billington, John Brougham, and Marie Wilton were among the actors who were glad to be his associates. Robertson, the dramatist, was his constant companion--one of the most intellectual and one of the wittiest of men. Planché, aged yet hearty and genial (and no man had more in his nature of the sweet spirit of the comrade), speedily sought him. Charles Reade and Anthony Trollope became his cronies; and poor Artemas Ward arrived and joined the party just as Jefferson was leaving it--as bright a spirit, as kind a heart, and as fine and quaint a humourist as ever cheered this age--from which he vanished too soon for the happiness of his friends and for the fruition of his fame. "I was much impressed," says the comedian, "with Ward's genial manner; he was not in good health, and I advised him to be careful lest the kindness of London should kill him." That advice was not heeded, and the kindness of London speedily ended Ward's days. Jefferson came home in 1866 and passed ten years in America--years of fame and fortune, whereof the record is smooth prosperity. Its most important personal incident was his second marriage, on December 20, 1867, at Chicago, to Miss Sarah Warren. In July 1873 he made a voyage to Europe, with his wife and William Warren, the comedian, and remained there till autumn. From November 1, 1875 to April 29, 1876 and from Easter 1877 until midsummer he was again acting in London, where he redoubled his former success. In October 1877 he returned home, and since then he has remained in America. The chronicle that he has written glides lightly over these latter years, only now and then touching on their golden summits. The manifest wish of the writer has been to people his pages as much as possible with the men and women of his artistic circle and knowledge who would be likely to interest the reader. Robert Browning, Charles Kingsley, and George Augustus Sala come into the picture, and there is a pleasing story of Browning and Longfellow walking arm in arm in London streets till driven into a cab by a summer shower, when Longfellow insisted on passing his umbrella through the hole in the roof, for the protection of the cab-driver. Jefferson lived for one summer in an old mansion at Morningside, Edinburgh, and he dwells with natural delight on his recollections of that majestic city. He had many a talk, at odd times, with the glittering farceur Charles Mathews, about dramatic art, and some of this is recorded in piquant anecdotes. "By many," says the amiable annalist, "he was thought to be cold and selfish; I do not think he was so." There is a kind word for Charles Fechter, whose imitations of Frederick Lemaitre, in _Belphegor, the Mountebank_, live in Jefferson's remembrance as wonderfully graphic. There are glimpses of James Wallack, Walter Montgomery, Peter Richings, E.A. Sothern, Laura Keene, James G. Burnett, John Gilbert, Tyrone Power, Lester Wallack, John McCullough, John T. Raymond, Mr. and Mrs. Barney Williams, John Drew (the elder), F.S. Chanfrau, Charlotte Cushman, Mrs. Drake, and many others; and the record incorporates two letters, not before published, from John Howard Payne, the author of _Home, Sweet Home_--a melody that is the natural accompaniment of Jefferson's life. There is a pretty picture of that ancient supper-room at No. 2 Bulfinch Place, Boston--Miss Fisher's kitchen--as it appeared when William Warren sat behind the mound of lobsters, at the head of the table, while the polished pewters reflected the cheerful light, and wit and raillery enlivened the happy throng, and many a face was wreathed with smiles that now is dark and still forever. In one chapter Jefferson sets forth his views upon the art of acting; and seldom within so brief a compass will so many sensible reflections be found so simply and tersely expressed. The book closes with words of gratitude for many blessings, and with an emblematic picture of a spirit resigned to whatever vicissitudes of fortune may yet be decreed. Jefferson's memoir is a simple message to simple minds. It will find its way to thousands of readers to whom a paper by Addison or an essay by Hume would have no meaning. It will point for them the moral of a good life. It will impress them with the spectacle of a noble actor, profoundly and passionately true to the high art by which he lives, bearing eloquent testimony to its beauty and its worth, and to the fine powers and sterling virtues of the good men and women with whom he has been associated in its pursuit. It will display to them--and to all others who may chance to read it--a type of that absolute humility of spirit which yet is perfectly compatible with a just pride of intellect. It will help to preserve interesting traits of famous actors of an earlier time, together with bright stories that illumine the dry chronicle of our theatrical history. And, in its simple record of the motives by which he has been impelled, and the artistic purposes that he has sought to accomplish, it will remain an eloquent, vital, indestructible memorial to the art and the character of a great comedian, when the present reality of his exquisite acting shall have changed to a dim tradition and a fading memory of the past. VIII. ON JEFFERSON'S ACTING. Fifty years from now the historian of the American stage, if he should be asked to name the actor of this period who was most beloved by the people of this generation, will answer that it was Joseph Jefferson. Other actors of our time are famous, and they possess in various degrees the affection of the public. Jefferson is not only renowned but universally beloved. To state the cause of this effect is at once to explain his acting and to do it the honour to which it is entitled. That cause can be stated in a single sentence. Jefferson is at once a poetic and a human actor, and he is thus able to charm all minds and to win all hearts. His success, therefore, is especially important not to himself alone but to the people. Public taste is twofold. It has a surface liking, and it has a deep, instinctive, natural preference. The former is alert, capricious, incessant, and continually passes from fancy to fancy. It scarcely knows what it wants, except that it wants excitement and change. Those persons in the dramatic world who make a point to address it are experimental speculators, whose one and only object is personal gain, and who are willing and ready to furnish any sort of entertainment that they think will please a passing caprice, and thereby will turn a penny for themselves. To judge the public entirely by this surface liking is to find the public what Tennyson once called it--a many-headed beast. With that animal every paltry and noxious thing can be made, for a time, to flourish; and that fact leads observers who do not carefully look beneath the surface to conclude that the public is always wrong. But the deep preference of the public comes into the question, and observers who are able to see and to consider that fact presently perceive that the artist, whether actor or otherwise, who gives to the public, not what it says it wants but what it ought to have, is in the long run the victor. The deep preference is for the good thing, the real thing, the right. It is not intelligent. It does not go with thinking and reasoning. It does not pretend to have grounds of belief. It simply responds. But upon the stage the actor who is able to reach it is omnipotent. Jefferson conspicuously is an actor who appeals to the deep, instinctive, natural preference of humanity, and who reaches it, arouses it, and satisfies it. Throughout the whole of his mature career he has addressed the nobler soul of humanity and given to the people what they ought to have; and the actor who is really able to do that naturally conquers everything. It is not a matter of artifice and simulation; it is a matter of being genuine and not a sham. Still further, Jefferson has aroused and touched and satisfied the feelings of the people, not by attempting to interpret literature but by being an actor. An actor is a man who acts. He may be an uneducated man, deficient in learning and in mental discipline, and yet a fine actor. The people care not at all for literature. They do not read it, and they know nothing about it until it is brought home to their hearts by some great interpreter of it. What they do know is action. They can see and they can feel, and the actor who makes them see and feel can do anything with them that he pleases. It is his privilege and his responsibility. Jefferson is one of those artists (and they are few) who depend for their effects not upon what authors have written but upon impersonation. He takes liberties with the text. It would not perhaps be saying too much to say that he does not primarily heed the text at all. He is an actor; and speaking with reference to him and to others like him it would perhaps be well if those persons who write criticisms upon the stage would come to a definite conclusion upon this point and finally understand that an actor must produce his effects on the instant by something that he does and is, and not by rhetoric and elocution, and therefore that he should not be expected to repeat every word of every part, or to be a translator of somebody else, but that he must be himself. If we want the full, literal text of Shakespeare we can stop at home and read it. What we want of the actor is that he should give himself; and the true actor does give himself. The play is the medium. A man who acts Romeo must embody, impersonate, express, convey, and make evident what he knows and feels about love. He need not trouble himself about Shakespeare. That great poet will survive; while if Romeo, being ever so correct, bores the house, Romeo will be damned. Jefferson is an actor who invariably produces effect, and he produces it by impersonation, and by impersonation that is poetic and human. Jefferson's performance of Acres conspicuously exemplifies the principles that have been stated here. He has not hesitated to alter the comedy of _The Rivals_, and in his alteration of it he has improved it. Acres has been made a better part for an actor, and a more significant and sympathetic part for an audience. You could not care particularly for Acres if he were played exactly as he is written. You might laugh at him, and probably would, but he would not touch your feelings. Jefferson embodies him in such a way that he often makes you feel like laughing and crying at the same moment, and you end with loving the character, and storing it in your memory with such cherished comrades of the fancy as Mark Tapley and Uncle Toby. There is but little human nature in Acres as Sheridan has drawn him, and what there is of human nature is coarse; but as embodied by Jefferson, while he never ceases to be comically absurd, he becomes fine and sweet, and wins sympathy and inspires affection, and every spectator is glad to have seen him and to remember him. It is not possible to take that sort of liberty with every author. You can do it but seldom with Shakespeare; never in any but his juvenile plays. But there are authors who can be improved by that process, and Sheridan--in _The Rivals_, not in _The School for Scandal_--is one of them. And anyway, since it ought to be felt, known, understood, and practically admitted that an actor is something more than a telegraph wire, that his personal faculty and testimony enter into the matter of embodiment and expression, Jefferson's rare excellence and great success as Acres should teach a valuable lesson, correcting that pernicious habit of the critical mind which measures an actor by the printed text of a play-book and by the hide-bound traditions of custom on the stage. Jefferson has had a royal plenitude of success as an actor, chiefly with the part of Rip Van Winkle, but also with the characters of Caleb Plummer, Bob Brierly, Dr. Pangloss, Dr. Ollapod, Mr. Golightly, and Hugh de Brass. The reason of that success cannot be found in conventional adherence to stage customs and critical standards. Jefferson has gained his great power over the people--of which his great fame is the shadow--- by giving himself in his art--his own rich and splendid nature and the crystallised conclusions of his experience. As an artist, when it comes to execution, he leaves nothing to chance. The most seemingly artless of his proceedings is absolutely defined in advance, and never is what heedless observers call impulsive and spontaneous. But his temperament is free, fluent, opulent, and infinitely tender; and when the whole man is aroused, this flows into the moulds of literary and dramatic art and glorifies them. When you are looking at Jefferson as Acres in the duel scene in _The Rivals_, you laugh at him, but almost you laugh through your tears. When you see Jefferson as Rip Van Winkle confronting the ghosts on the lonely mountain-top at midnight, you see a display of imaginative personality quite as high as that of Hamlet in tremulous sensibility to supernatural influence, although wholly apart from Hamlet in altitude of intellect and in anguish of experience. The poetry of the impersonation, though, is entirely consonant with Hamlet, and that is the secret of Jefferson's exceptional hold upon the heart and the imagination of his time. The public taste does not ask Jefferson to trifle with his art. Its deep, spontaneous, natural preference feels that he is a true actor, and so yields to his power, and enjoys his charm, and is all the time improved and made fitter to enjoy it. He has reached as great a height as it is possible to reach in his profession. He could if he chose play greater parts than he has ever attempted; he could not give a better exemplification than he gives, in his chose and customary achievement, of all that is distinctive, beautiful, and beneficent in the art of the actor. IX. JEFFERSON AND FLORENCE IN OLD COMEDY. A revival of _The Heir at Law_ was accomplished in the New York season of 1890, with Joseph Jefferson in the character of Dr. Pangloss and William James Florence in that of Zekiel Homespun. That play dates back to 1797, a period in which a sedulous deference to conventionality prevailed in the British theatre, as to the treatment of domestic subjects; and, although the younger Colman wrote in a more flexible style than was possessed by any other dramatist of the time, excepting Sheridan, he was influenced to this extent by contemporary usage, that often when he became serious he also became artificial and stilted. The sentimental part of _The Heir at Law_ is trite in plan and hard in expression. Furthermore that portion of it which, in the character of Dr. Pangloss, satirises the indigent, mercenary, disreputable private tutors who constituted a distinct and pernicious class of social humbugs in Colman's day, has lost its direct point for the present age, through the disappearance of the peculiar type of imposture against which its irony was directed. Dr. Pangloss, nevertheless, remains abstractly a humorous personage; and when he is embodied by an actor like Jefferson, who can elucidate his buoyant animal spirits, his gay audacity, his inveterate good-nature, his nimble craft, his jocular sportiveness, his shrewd knowledge of character and of society, and his scholar-like quaintness, he becomes a delightful presence; for his mendacity disappears in the sunshine of his humour; his faults seem venial; and we entertain him much as we do the infinitely greater and more disreputable character of Falstaff,--knowing him to be a vagabond, but finding him a charming companion, for all that. This is one great relief to the hollow and metallic sentimentality of the piece. Persons like Henry Moreland, Caroline Dormer, and Mr. Steadfast would be tiresome in actual life; they belong, with Julia and Falkland and Peregrine and Glenroy, to the noble army of the bores, and they are insipid on the stage; but the association of the sprightly and jocose Pangloss with those drab-tinted and preachy people irradiates even their constitutional platitude with a sparkle of mirth. They shine, in spite of themselves. Colman's humour is infectious and penetrating. In that quality he was original and affluent. As we look along the line of the British dramatists for the last hundred years we shall find no parallel to his felicity in the use of comic inversion and equivoke, till we come to Gilbert. Though he was tedious while he deferred to that theatrical sentimentality which was the fashion of his day (and against which Goldsmith, in _She Stoops to Conquer_, was the first to strike), he could sometimes escape from it; and when he did escape he was brilliant. In _The Heir at Law_ he has not only illumined it by the contrast of Dr. Pangloss but by the unctuous humour and irresistible comic force of the character of Daniel Dowlas, Lord Duberly. Situations in a play, in order to be invested with the enduring quality of humour, must result from such conduct as is the natural and spontaneous expression of comic character. The idea of the comic parvenue is ancient. It did not originate with Colman. His application of it, however, was novel and his treatment of it--taking fast hold of the elemental springs of mirth--is as fresh to-day as it was a hundred years ago. French minds, indeed, and such as subscribe to French notions, would object that the means employed to elicit character and awaken mirth are not scientifically and photographically correct, and that they are violent. Circumstances, they would say, do not so fall out that a tallow-chandler is made a lord. The Christopher Sly expedient, they would add, is a forced expedient. Perhaps it is. But English art sees with the eyes of the imagination and in dramatic matters it likes to use colour and emphasis. Daniel Dowlas, as Lord Duberly, is all the droller for being a retired tallow-chandler, ignorant, greasy, conventional, blunt, a sturdy, honest, ridiculous person, who thinks he has observed how lords act and who intends to put his gained knowledge into practical use. We shall never again see him acted as he was acted by Burton, or by that fine actor William Rufus Blake, or even by John Gilbert--who was of rather too choleric a temperament and too fine a texture for such an oily and stupidly complacent personage. But whenever and however he is acted he will be recognised as an elemental type of absurd human nature made ludicrous by comic circumstances; and he will give rich and deep amusement. It is to be observed, in the analysis of this comedy, that according to Colman's intention the essential persons in it are all, at heart, human. The pervasive spirit of the piece is kindly. Old Dowlas, restricted to his proper place in life, is a worthy man. Dick Dowlas, intoxicated by vanity and prosperity, has no harm in him, and he turns out well at last. Even Dr. Pangloss--although of the species of rogue that subsists by artfully playing upon the weakness of human vanity--is genial and amiable; he is a laughing philosopher; he gives good counsel; he hurts nobody; he is but a mild type of sinner--and the satirical censure that is bestowed upon him is neither merciless nor bitter. Pangloss, in Milk Alley, spinning his brains for a subsistence, might be expected to prove unscrupulous; but the moraliser can imagine Pangloss, if he were only made secure by permanent good fortune, leading a life of blameless indolence and piquant eccentricity. From that point of view Jefferson formed his ideal of the character; and, indeed, his treatment of the whole piece denoted an active practical sympathy with that gentle view of the subject. He placed before his audience a truthful picture of old English manners; telling them, in rapid and cheery action, Colman's quaint story--in which there is no malice and no bitterness, but in which simple virtue proves superior to temptation, and integrity is strong amid vicissitudes--and leaving in their minds, at the last, an amused conviction that indeed "Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time." His own performance was full of nervous vitality and mental sparkle, and of a humour deliciously quaint and droll. Dr. Panglass, as embodied by Jefferson, is a man who always sees the comical aspect of things and can make you see it with him, and all the while can be completely self-possessed and grave without ever once becoming slow or heavy. There was an air of candour, of ingenuous simplicity, of demure propriety, about the embodiment, that made it inexpressibly funny. There was no effort and no distortion. The structure of the impersonation tingled with life, and the expression of it--in demeanour, movement, facial play, intonation and business--was clear and crisp, with that absolute precision and beautiful finish for which the acting of Jefferson has always been distinguished. He is probably the only American comedian now left, excepting John S. Clarke, who knows all the traditional embellishments that have gone to the making of this part upon the stage--embellishments fitly typified by the bank-note business with Zekiel Homespun; a device, however, that perhaps suggests a greater degree of moral obliquity in Dr. Pangloss than was intended by the author. It was exceedingly comical, though, and it served its purpose. Jefferson has had the character of Pangloss in his repertory for almost forty years. He first acted it in New York as long ago as 1857, at Laura Keene's theatre, when that beautiful woman played Cicely and when Duberly was represented by the lamented James G. Burnett. It takes the playgoer a long way back, to be thinking about this old piece and the casts that it has had upon the American stage. _The Heir at Law_ was a great favourite in Boston thirty years ago and more, when William Warren was in his prime and could play Dr. Pangloss with the best of them, and when Julia Bennett Barrow was living and acting, who could play Cicely in a way that no later actress has excelled. John E. Owens as Pangloss will never be forgotten. It was a favourite part with John Brougham. And the grotesque fun of John S. Clarke in that droll character has been recognised on both sides of the Atlantic. In Jefferson's impersonation of Dr. Pangloss the predominant beauty was spontaneous and perfectly graceful identification with the part. The felicity of the apt quotations seemed to be accidental. The manner was buoyant, but the alacrity of the mind was more nimble than the celerity of the body, and those wise and witty comments that Pangloss makes upon life, character, and manners flowed naturally from a brain that was in the vigour and repose of intense animation. The actor was completely merged in the character, which nevertheless his judgment dominated and his will directed. No other representative of Pangloss has quite equalled Jefferson in the element of authoritative and convincing sincerity. His demure sapience was of the most intense order and it arose out of great mental excitement. No other actor of the part has equalled him in softness and winning charm of humour. His embodiment of Dr. Pangloss has left in the memory of his time an image of eccentric character not less lovable than ludicrous. With Zekiel Homespun, an actor who is true to the author's plan will produce the impression of an affectionate heart, virtuous principles, and absolute honesty of purpose, combined with rustic simplicity. Florence easily reached that result. His preservation of a dialect was admirably exact. The soul of the part is fraternal love, and when Zekiel finds that his trusted friend has repulsed him and would wrong his sister, there is a fine flash of noble anger in the pride and scorn with which he confronts this falsehood and dishonour. Florence in days when he used to act the Irish Emigrant proved himself the consummate master of simple pathos. He struck that familiar note again in the lovely manner of Zekiel toward his sister Cicely, and his denotement of the struggle between affection and resentment in the heart of the brother when wounded by the depravity of his friend was not less beautiful in the grace of art than impressive in simple dignity and touching in passionate fervour. In point of natural feeling Zekiel Homespun is a stronger part than Dr. Pangloss, although not nearly so complex nor so difficult to act. The sentiments by which it is animated awaken instant sympathy and the principles that impel command universal respect. No actor who has attempted Zekiel Homespun in this generation on the American stage has approached the performance that was given by Florence, in conviction, in artless sweetness, in truth of passion, and in the heartfelt expression of the heart. Purists customarily insist that the old comedies are sacred; that no one of their celestial commas or holy hyphens can be omitted without sin; and that the alteration of a sentence in them is sacrilege. The truth stands, however, without regard to hysterics: and it is a truth that the old comedies owe their vitality mostly to the actors who now and then resuscitate them. No play of the past is ever acted with scrupulous fidelity to the original text. The public that saw the _Heir-at-Law_ and the _Rivals_, when Jefferson and Florence acted in them, saw condensed versions, animated by a living soul of to-day, and therefore it was impressed. The one thing indispensable on the stage is the art of the actor. X. ON THE DEATH OF FLORENCE. The melancholy tidings of the death of Florence came suddenly (he died in Philadelphia, after a brief illness, November 19, 1891), and struck the hearts of his friends not simply with affliction but with dismay. Florence was a man of such vigorous and affluent health that the idea of illness and death was never associated with him. Whoever else might go, he at least would remain, and for many cheerful years he would please our fancy and brighten our lives. His spirit was so buoyant and brilliant that it seemed not possible it could ever be dimmed. Yet now, in a moment, his light was quenched and there was darkness on his mirth. We shall hear his pleasant voice no more and see no more the sunshine of a face that was never seen without joy and can never be remembered without sorrow. The loss to the public was great. Few actors within the last forty years have stood upon a level with Florence in versatility and charm. His gentleness, his simplicity, his modesty, his affectionate fidelity, his ready sympathy, his inexhaustibly patience, his fine talents--all those attributes united with his spontaneous drollery to enshrine him in tender affection. William James Florence, whose family name was Conlin, was born in Albany, July 26, 1831. When a youth he joined the Murdoch Dramatic Association, and he early gave evidence of extraordinary dramatic talent. On December 9, 1849 he made his first appearance on the regular stage, at the Marshall theatre in Richmond, Virginia, where he impersonated Tobias, in _The Stranger_. After that he met with the usual vicissitudes of a young player. He was a member of various stock companies--notably that of W.C. Forbes, of the Providence museum, and that of the once-popular John Nickinson, of Toronto and Quebec--the famous Havresack of his period. Later he joined the company at Niblo's theatre, New York, under the management of Chippendale and John Sefton, appearing there on May 8, 1850. He also acted at the Broadway, under Marshall's management, and in 1852 he was a member of the company at Brougham's Lyceum. On January 1, 1853 he married Malvina Pray, sister of the wife of Barney Williams; and in that way those two Irish comedians came to be domestically associated. At that time Florence wrote several plays, upon Irish and Yankee subjects, then very popular, and he began to figure as a star--his wife standing beside him. They appeared at Purdy's National theatre, June 8, 1853, and then, and for a long time afterward, they had much popularity and success. Florence had composed many songs of a sprightly character (one of them, called _Bobbing Around_, had a sale of more than 100,000 copies), and those songs were sung by his wife, to the delight of the public. The Irish drama served his purpose for many years, but he varied that form of art by occasional resort to burlesque and by incursions into the realm of melodrama. One of his best performances was that of O'Bryan, in John Brougham's play of _Temptation, or the Irish Emigrant_, with which he often graced the stage of the Winter Garden. In that he touched the extremes of gentle humour and melting pathos. He was delightfully humorous, also, in Handy Andy, and in all that long line of Irish characters that came to our stage with Tyrone Power and the elder John Drew. He had exceptional talent for burlesque, and that was often manifested in his early days. _Fra Diavolo_, _Beppo_, _Lallah Rookh_, _The Lady of the Lions_, and _The Colleen Bawn_, were among the burlesques that he produced, and with those he was the pioneer. Engagements were filled by Mr. and Mrs. Florence, at the outset of their starring tour, in many cities of the republic, and everywhere they met with kindness and honour. Among the plays written by Florence were _The Irish Princess_, _O'Neil the Great_, _The Sicilian Bride_, _Woman's Wrongs_, _Eva_, and _The Drunkard's Doom_. On April 2, 1856 Mr. and Mrs. Florence sailed for England, and presently they appeared at Drury Lane theatre, where they at once stepped into favour. The performance of the _Yankee Gal_ by Mrs. Florence aroused positive enthusiasm--for it was new, and Mrs. Florence was the first American comic actress that had appeared upon the English stage. More than two hundred representations of it were given at that time. Florence used to relate that his fortunes were greatly benefited by his success in London, and he habitually spoke with earnest gratitude of the kindness that he received there. From that time onward he enjoyed almost incessant prosperity. A tour of the English provincial cities followed his London season. He acted at Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, and Dublin, and both his wife and himself became favourites--so that their songs were sung and whistled in the streets, wherever they went. Returning to the United States Mr. and Mrs. Florence renewed their triumphs, all over the land. In 1861 Florence played some of Burton's characters in Wallack's theatre--among them being Toodle and Cuttle. At a later period he made it a custom to lease Wallack's theatre during the summer, and there he produced many burlesques. In 1863, at the Winter Garden, he offered _The Ticket-of-Leave Man_ and acted Bob Brierly, which was one of the best exploits of his life. In 1867 Wallack's old theatre being then called the Broadway and managed by Barney Williams, he brought to that house the comedy of _Caste_ and presented it with a distribution of the parts that has not been equalled. The actors were Mrs. Chanfrau, Mrs. Gilbert, Mrs. Florence, William Davidge, Owen Marlowe, Edward Lamb, and Florence--who played George D'Alroy. In 1868 he presented _No Thoroughfare_ and enacted Obenreizer,--a performance that established his rank among the leading actors of the time. In 1876 he made a remarkable hit as the Hon. Bardwell Slote in the play of _The Mighty Dollar_, by Benjamin E. Woolff. That was the last important new play that he produced. During the last fifteen years of his life he offered selections from his accepted repertory. For a time he was associated with Jefferson--to whom he brought a strength that was deeply valued and appreciated, equally by that famous actor and by the public--acting Sir Lucius O'Trigger in _The Rivals_ and Zekiel Homespun in _The Heir-at-Law_. The power of Florence was that of impersonation. He was imaginative and sympathetic; his style was flexible; and he had an unerring instinct of effect. The secret of his success lay in his profound feeling, guided by perfect taste and perfect self-control. He was an actor of humanity, and he diffused an irresistible charm of truth and gentleness. His place was his own and it can never be filled. * * * * * An Epitaph. _Here Rest the Ashes of_ WILLIAM JAMES FLORENCE, _Comedian_. _His Copious and Varied Dramatic Powers, together with the Abundant Graces of his Person, combined with Ample Professional Equipment and a Temperament of Peculiar Sensibility and Charm, made him one of the Best and Most Successful Actors of his Time, alike in Comedy and in Serious Drama. He ranged easily from Handy Andy to Bob Brierly, and from Cuttle to Obenreizer. In Authorship, alike of Plays, Stories, Music, and Song, he was Inventive, Versatile, Facile, and Graceful. In Art Admirable; in Life Gentle; he was widely known, and he was known only to be loved._ HE WAS BORN IN ALBANY, N.Y., JULY 26, 1831. HE DIED IN PHILADELPHIA PENN., NOVEMBER 19, 1891. * * * * * By Virtue cherished, by Affection mourned, By Honour hallowed and by Fame adorned, Here FLORENCE sleeps, and o'er his sacred rest Each word is tender and each thought is blest. Long, for his loss, shall pensive Mem'ry show, Through Humour's mask, the visage of her woe, Day breathe a darkness that no sun dispels, And Night be full of whispers and farewells; While patient Kindness, shadow-like and dim, Droops in its loneliness, bereft of him, Feels its sad doom and sure decadence nigh,-- For how should Kindness live, when he could die! The eager heart, that felt for every grief, The bounteous hand, that loved to give relief, The honest smile, that blessed where'er it lit, The dew of pathos and the sheen of wit, The sweet, blue eyes, the voice of melting tone, That made all hearts as gentle as his own, The Actor's charm, supreme in royal thrall, That ranged through every field and shone in all-- For these must Sorrow make perpetual moan, Bereaved, benighted, hopeless, and alone? Ah, no; for Nature does no act amiss, And Heaven were lonely but for souls like this. XI. HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. In his beautiful production of _The Merchant of Venice_ Henry Irving restored the fifth act, the jailer scene, and the casket scenes in full, and the piece was acted with strict fidelity to Shakespeare. With Ellen Terry for Portia that achievement became feasible. With an ordinary actress in that character the comedy might be tedious--notwithstanding its bold and fine contrasts of character, its fertility of piquant incident, and its lovely poetry. Radiant with her fine spirit and beautiful presence, and animated and controlled in every fibre by his subtle and authoritative intellect, judiciously cast and correctly dressed and mounted, Henry Irving's revival of _The Merchant of Venice_ captured the public fancy; and in every quarter it was sincerely felt and freely proclaimed that here, at last, was the perfection of stage display. That success has never faded. The performance was round, symmetrical, and thorough--every detail being kept subordinate to intelligent general effect, and no effort being made toward overweening individual display. Shakespeare's conception of Shylock has long been in controversy. Burbage, who acted the part in Shakespeare's presence, wore a red wig and was frightful in form and aspect. The red wig gives a hint of low comedy, and it may be that the great actor made use of low comedy expedients to cloak Shylock's inveterate malignity and sinister purpose. Dogget, who played the part in Lord Lansdowne's alteration of Shakespeare's piece, turned Shylock into farce. Macklin, when he restored the original play to the stage--at Drury Lane, February 14, 1741--- wore a red hat, a peaked beard, and a loose black gown, playing Shylock as a serious, almost a tragic part, and laying great emphasis upon a display of revengeful passion and hateful malignity. So terrible was he, indeed, that persons who saw him on the stage in that character not infrequently drew the inference and kept the belief that he was personally a monster. His look was iron-visaged; the cast of his manners was relentless and savage. Quin said that his face contained not lines but cordage. In portraying the contrasted passions of joy for Antonio's losses and grief for Jessica's elopement he poured forth all his fire. When he whetted his knife, in the trial scene, he was silent, grisly, ominous, and fatal. No human touch, no hint of race-majesty or of religious fanaticism, tempered the implacable wickedness of that hateful ideal. Pope, who saw that Shylock, hailed it as "the Jew that Shakespeare drew"--and Pope, among other things, was one of the editors of Shakespeare. Cooke, who had seen Macklin's Shylock, and also those of Henderson, King, Kemble, and Yates, adopted, maintained, and transmitted the legend of Macklin. Edmund Kean, who worshipped Cooke, was unquestionably his imitator in Shylock; but it seems to have been Edmund Kean who, for the first time, gave prominence to the Hebraic majesty and fanatical self-consecration of that hateful but colossal character. Jerrold said that Kean's Shylock was like a chapter of Genesis. Macready--whose utterance of "Nearest his heart" was the blood-curdling keynote of his whole infernal ideal--declared the part to be "composed of harshness," and he saw no humanity in the lament for the loss of Leah's ring, but only a lacerated sense of the value of that jewel. Brooke, a great Shylock, concurred with Kean's ideal and made the Jew orientally royal, the avenger of his race, having "an oath in heaven," and standing on the law of "an eye for an eye." Edwin Forrest, the elder Wallack, E.L. Davenport, Edwin Booth, Bogumil Davison, and Charles Kean steadily kept Shylock upon the stage,--some walking in the religious track and some leaving it. But the weight of opinion and the spirit and drift of the text would justify a presentment of the Jew as the incarnation not alone of avarice and hate, but of the stern, terrible Mosaic law of justice. That is the high view of the part, and in studying Shakespeare it is safe to prefer the high view. There must be imagination, or pathos, or weirdness, or some form of humour, or a personal charm in the character that awakens the soul of Henry Irving and calls forth his best and finest powers. There is little of that quality in Shylock. But Henry Irving took the high view of him. This Jew "feeds fat the ancient grudge" against Antonio--until the law of Portia, more subtle than equitable, interferes to thwart him; but also he avenges the wrongs that his "sacred nation" has suffered. His ideal was right, his grasp of it firm, his execution of it flexible with skill and affluent with intellectual power. If memory carries away a shuddering thought of his baleful gaze upon the doomed Antonio and of his horrid cry of the summons "Come, prepare!" it also retains the image of a father convulsed with grief--momentarily, but sincerely--and of a man who at least can remember that he once loved. It was a most austere Shylock, inveterate of purpose, vindictive, malignant, cruel, ruthless; and yet it was human. No creature was ever more logical and consistent in his own justification. By purity, sincerity, decorum, fanaticism, the ideal was aptly suggestive of such men as Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes, and John Felton--persons who, with prayer on their lips, were nevertheless capable of hideous cruelty. The street scene demands utterance, not repression. The Jew raves there, and no violence would seem excessive. Macklin, Kean, Cooke, and the elder Booth, each must have been terrific at that point. Henry Irving's method was that of the intense passion that can hardly speak--the passion that Kean is said to have used so grandly in giving the curse of Junius Brutus upon Tarquin. But, there was just as much of Shylock's nature in Henry Irving's performance as in any performance that is recorded. The lack was overwhelming physical power--not mentality and not art. At "No tears but of my shedding" Henry Irving's Shylock took a strong clutch upon the emotions and created an effect that will never be forgotten. Ellen Terry's Portia long ago became a precious memory. The part makes no appeal to the tragic depths of her nature, but it awakens her fine sensibility, stimulates the nimble play of her intellect, and cordially promotes that royal exultation in the affluence of physical vitality and of spiritual freedom that so often seems to lift her above the common earth. There have been moments when it seemed not amiss to apply Shakespeare's own beautiful simile to the image of queen-like refinement, soft womanhood, and spiritualised intellect that this wonderful actress presented--"as if an angel dropped down from the clouds." Her Portia was stately, yet fascinating; a woman to inspire awe and yet to captivate every heart. Nearer to Shakespeare's meaning than that no actress can ever go. The large, rich, superb manner never invalidated the gentle blandishments of her sex. The repressed ardour, the glowing suspense, the beautiful modesty and candour with which she awaited the decision of the casket scene, showed her to be indeed all woman, and worthy of a true man's love. Here was no paltering of a puny nature with great feelings and a great experience. And never in our day has the poetry of Shakespeare fallen from human lips in a strain of such melody--with such teeming freedom of felicitous delivery and such dulcet purity of diction. XII. JOHN McCULLOUGH IN SEVERAL CHARACTERS. There is no greater gratification to the intellect than the sense of power and completeness in itself or the perception of power and completeness in others. Those attributes were in John McCullough's acting and were at the heart of its charm. His repertory consisted of thirty characters, but probably the most imposing and affecting of his embodiments was Virginius. The massive grandeur of adequacy in that performance was a great excellence. The rugged, weather-beaten plainness of it was full of authority and did not in the least detract from its poetic purity and ideal grace. The simplicity of it was like the lovely innocence that shines through the ingenuous eyes of childhood, while its majesty was like the sheen of white marble in the sunlight. It was a very high, serious, noble work; yet,--although, to his immeasurable credit, the actor never tried to apply a "natural" treatment to artificial conditions or to speak blank verse in a colloquial manner,--it was made sweetly human by a delicate play of humour in the earlier scenes, and by a deep glow of paternal tenderness that suffused every part of it and created an almost painful sense of sincerity. Common life was not made commonplace life by McCullough, nor blank verse depressed to the level of prose. The intention to be real--the intention to love, suffer, feel, act, defend, and avenge, as a man of actual life would do--was obvious enough, through its harmonious fulfilment; yet the realism was shorn of all triteness, all animal excess, all of those ordinary attributes which are right in nature, and wrong because obstructive in the art that is nature's interpretation. Just as the true landscape is the harmonious blending of selected natural effects, so the true dramatic embodiment is the crystallization of selected attributes in any given type of human nature, shown in selected phases of natural condition. McCullough did not present Virginius brushing his hair or paying Virginia's school-bills; yet he suggested him, clearly and beautifully, in the sweet domestic repose and paternal benignity of his usual life--making thus a background of loveliness, on which to throw, in lines of living light, the terrible image of his agonising sacrifice. And when the inevitable moment came for his dread act of righteous slaughter it was the moral grandeur, the heart-breaking paternal agony, and the overwhelming pathos of the deed that his art diffused--not the "gashed stab," the blood, the physical convulsion, the revolting animal shock. Neither was there druling, or dirt, or physical immodesty, or any other attribute of that class of the natural concomitants of insanity, in the subsequent delirium. A perfect and holy love is, in one aspect of it, a sadder thing to see than the profoundest grief. Misery, at its worst, is at least final: and for that there is the relief of death. But love, in its sacred exaltation,--the love of the parent for the child,--is so fair a mark for affliction that one can hardly view it without a shudder of apprehensive dread. That sort of love was personified in McCullough's embodiment of Virginius, and that same nameless thrill of fear was imparted by its presence,--even before the tragedian, with an exquisite intuition of art, made Virginius convey his vague presentiment, not admitted but quickly thrust aside, of some unknown doom of peril and agony. There was, in fact, more heart in that single piece of acting than in any hundred of the most pathetic performances of the "natural" school; and all the time it was maintained at the lofty level of classic grace. It would be impossible to overstate the excellence of all that McCullough did and said, in the forum scene--the noble severity of the poise, the grace of the outlines, the terrible intensity of the mood, the heartrending play of the emotions, the overwhelming delirium of the climax. Throughout the subsequent most difficult portraiture of shattered reason the actor never, for an instant, lost his steadfast grasp upon sympathy and inspiration. Every heart knew the presence of a nature that could feel all that Virginius felt and suffer and act all that Virginius suffered and acted; and, beyond this, in his wonderful investiture of the mad scenes with the alternate vacancy and lamentable and forlorn anguish of a special kind of insanity, every judge of the dramatic art recognised the governing touch of a splendid intellect, imperial over all its resources and instruments of art. Virginius as embodied by McCullough was a man of noble and refined nature; lovely in life; cruelly driven into madness; victorious over dishonour, by a deed of terrible heroism; triumphant over crime, even in forlorn and pitiable dethronement and ruin; and, finally, released by the celestial mercy of death. And this was shown by a poetic method so absolute that Virginius, while made an actual man to every human heart, was kept a hero to the universal imagination, whether of scholar or peasant, and a white ideal of manly purity and grace to that great faculty of taste which is the umpire and arbiter of the human mind. The sustained poetic exaltation of that embodiment, its unity as a grand and sympathetic personage, and its exquisite simplicity were the qualities that gave it vitality in popular interest, and through those it will have permanence in theatrical history. There were many subtle beauties in it. The illimitable tenderness, back of the sweet dignity, in the betrothal of Virginia to Icilius; the dim, transitory, evanescent touch of presentiment, in the forecasting of the festival joys that are to succeed the war; the self-abnegation and simple homeliness of grief for the dead Dentatus; the alternate shock of freezing terror and cry of joy, in the camp scene--closing with that potent repression and thrilling outburst, "Prudence, but no patience!"--a situation and words that call at once for splendid manliness of self-command and an ominous and savage vehemence; the glad, saving, comforting cry to Virginia, "Is she here?"--that cry which never failed to precipitate a gush of joyous tears; the rapt preoccupation and the exquisite music of voice with which he said, "I never saw thee look so like thy mother, in all my life"; the majesty of his demeanour in the forum; the look that saw the knife; the mute parting glance at Servia; the accents of broken reason, but unbroken and everlasting love, that called upon the name of the poor murdered Virginia; and then the last low wail of the dying father, conscious and happy in the great boon of death--those, as McCullough gave them, were points of impressive beauty, invested with the ever-varying light and shadow of a delicate artistic treatment, and all the while animated with passionate sincerity. The perfect finish of the performance, indeed, was little less than marvellous, when viewed with reference to the ever-increasing volume of power and the evident reality of afflicting emotion with which the part was carried. If acting ever could do good the acting of McCullough did. If ever dramatic art concerns the public welfare it is when such an ideal of manliness and heroism is presented in such an image of nobility. In Lear and in Othello,--as in Virginius,--the predominant quality of McCullough's acting was a profound and beautiful sincerity. His splendidly self-poised nature--a solid rock of truth, which enabled him, through years of patient toil, to hold a steadfast course over all the obstacles that oppose and amid all the chatter that assails a man who is trying to accomplish anything grand and noble in art--bore him bravely up in those great characters, and made him, in each of them, a stately type of the nobility of the human soul. As the Moor, his performance was well-nigh perfect. There was something a little fantastic, indeed, in the facial style that he used; and that blemish was enhanced by the display of a wild beast's head on the back of one of Othello's robes. The tendency of that sort of ornamentation--however consonant it may be deemed with the barbaric element in the Moor--is to suggest him as heedful of appearances, and thus to distract regard from his experience to his accessories. But the spirit was true. Simplicity, urged almost to the extreme of barrenness, would not be out of place in Othello, and McCullough, in his treatment of the part, testified to his practical appreciation of that truth. His ideal of Othello combined manly tenderness, spontaneous magnanimity, and trusting devotion, yet withal a volcanic ground-swell of passion, that early and clearly displayed itself as capable of delirium and ungovernable tempest. His method had the calm movement of a summer cloud, in every act and word by which this was shown. For intensity and for immediate, adequate, large, and overwhelming response of action to emotion, that performance has not been surpassed. There were points in it, though, at which the massive serenity of the actor's temperament now and then deadened the glow of feeling and depressed him to undue calmness; he sometimes recovered too suddenly and fully from a tempest of emotion--as at the agonising appeal to Iago, "Give me a living reason she's disloyal"; and he was not enough delirious in the speech about the sybil and the handkerchief. On the other hand, once yielded to the spell of desecrated feeling, his mood and his expression of it were immeasurably pathetic and noble. Those two great ebullitions of despair, "O, now forever," and "Had it pleased heaven," could not be spoken in a manner more absolutely heart-broken or more beautifully simple than the manner that was used by him. In his obvious though silent suffering at the disgrace and dismissal of Cassio; in the dazed, forlorn agony that blended with his more active passion throughout the scene of Iago's wicked conquest of his credulity; in his occasional quick relapses into blind and sweet fidelity to the old belief in Desdemona; in his unquenchable tenderness for her, through the delirium and the sacrifice; and in the tone of soft, romantic affection--always spiritualised, never sensual--that his deep and loving sincerity diffused throughout the work, was shown the grand unity of the embodiment; a unity based on the simple passion of love. To hear that actor say the one supreme line to Iago, "I am bound to thee forever," was to know that he understood and felt the meaning of the character, to its minutest fibre and its profoundest depth. There were touches of fresh and aptly illustrative "business" in the encounter of Othello and Iago, in the great scene of the third act. The gasping struggles of Iago heightened the effect of the Moor's fury, and the quickly suppressed impulse and yell of rage with which he finally bounded away made an admirable effect of nature. In the last scene McCullough rounded his performance with a solemn act of sacrifice. There was nothing animal, nothing barbaric, nothing insane, in the slaughter of Desdemona. It was done in an ecstasy of justice, and the atmosphere that surrounded the deed was that of awe and not of horror. For the character of King Lear McCullough possessed the imposing stature, the natural majesty, the great reach of voice, and the human tenderness that are its basis and equipment. No actor of Lear can ever satisfy a sympathetic lover of the part unless he possesses a greatly affectionate heart, a fiery spirit, and,--albeit the intellect must be shown in ruins,--a regal mind. Within that grand and lamentable image of shattered royalty the man must be noble and lovable. Nothing that is puny or artificial can ever wear the investiture of that colossal sorrow. McCullough embodied Lear as, from the first, stricken in mind--already the unconscious victim of incipient decay and dissolution; not mad but ready to become so. There is a subtle apprehensiveness all about the presence of the king, in all the earlier scenes. He diffuses disquietude and vaguely presages disaster, and the observer looks on him with solicitude and pain. He is not yet decrepit but he will soon break; and the spectator loves him and is sorry for him and would avert the destiny of woe that is darkly foreshadowed in his condition. McCullough gave the invectives--as they ought to be given--with the impetuous rush and wild fury of the avalanche; and yet they were felt to come out of agony as well as out of passion. The pathos of those tremendous passages is in their chaotic disproportion; in their lawlessness and lack of government; in the evident helplessness of the poor old man who hurls them forth from a breaking heart and a distracted mind. He loves, and he loathes himself for loving: every fibre of his nature is in horrified revolt against such lack of reverence, gratitude, and affection toward such a monarch and such a father as he knows himself to have been. The feeling that McCullough poured through those moments of splendid yet pitiable frenzy was overwhelming in its intense glow and in its towering and incessant volume. There was remarkable subtlety, also, in the manner in which that feeling was tempered. In Lear's meeting with Goneril after the curse you saw at once the broken condition of an aged, infirm, and mentally disordered man, who had already forgotten his own terrible words. "We'll no more meet, no more see one another" is a line to which McCullough gave its full eloquence of abject mournfulness and forlorn desolation. Other denotements of subtlety were seen in his sad preoccupation with memories of the lost Cordelia, while talking with the Fool. "I did her wrong" was never more tenderly spoken than by him. They are only four little words; but they carry the crushing weight of eternal and hopeless remorse. It was in this region of delicate, imaginative touch that McCullough's dramatic art was especially puissant. He was the first actor of Lear to discriminate between the agony of a man while going mad and the careless, volatile, fantastic condition--afflicting to witness, but no longer agonising to the lunatic himself--of a man who has actually lapsed into madness. Edwin Forrest--whose Lear is much extolled, often by persons who, evidently, never saw it--much as he did with the part, never even faintly suggested such a discrimination as that. To one altitude of Lear's condition it is probably impossible for dramatic art to rise--the mood of divine philosophy, warmed with human tenderness, in which the dazed but semi-conscious vicegerent of heaven moralises over human life. There is a grandeur in that conception so vast that nothing short of the rarest inspiration of genius can rise to it. The deficiences of McCullough's Lear were found in the analysis of that part of the performance. He had the heart of Lear, the royalty, the breadth; but not all of either the exalted intellect, the sorrow-laden experience, or the imagination--so gorgeous in its disorder, so infinitely pathetic in its misery. His performance of Lear signally exemplified, through every phase of passion, that temperance which should give it smoothness. The treatment of the curse scene, in particular, was extraordinarily beautiful for the low, sweet, and tender melody of the voice, broken only now and then--and rightly broken--with the harsh accents of wrath. Gentleness never accomplished more, as to taste and pathos, than in McCullough's utterance of "I gave you all," and "I'll go with you." The rallying of the broken spirit after that, and the terrific outburst, "I'll not weep," had an appalling effect. The recognition of Cordelia was simply tender, and the death scene lovely in pathos and solemn and affecting in tragic climax. Throughout _Othello_ and _King Lear_ McCullough's powers were seen to be curbed and guided, not by a cold and formal design but by a grave and sweet gentleness of mind, always a part of his nature, but more and more developed by the stress of experience, by the reactionary subduing influence of noble success, and by the definite consciousness of power. He found no difficulty in portraying the misery of Othello and of Lear, because this is a form of misery that flows out of laceration of the heart, and not from the more subtle wounds that are inflicted upon the spirit through the imagination. There was no brooding over the awful mysteries of the universe, nor any of that corroding, haunted gloom that comes of an over-spiritualised state of suffering, longing, questioning, doubting humanity. Above all things else Othello and Lear are human; and the human heart, above all things else, was the domain of that actor. The character of Coriolanus, though high and noble, is quite as likely to inspire resentment as to awaken sympathy. It contains many elements and all of them are good; but chiefly it typifies the pride of intellect. This, in itself a natural feeling and a virtuous quality, practically becomes a vice when it is not tempered with charity for ignorance, weakness, and the lower orders of mind. In the character of Coriolanus it is not so tempered, and therefore it vitiates his greatness and leads to his destruction. Much, of course, can be urged in his defence. He is a man of spotless honour, unswerving integrity, dauntless courage, simple mind, straightforward conduct, and magnanimous disposition. He is always ready to brave the perils of battle for the service of his country. He constantly does great deeds--and would continue constantly to do them--for their own sake and in a spirit of total indifference alike to praises and rewards. He exists in the consciousness of being great and has no life in the opinions of other persons. He dwells in "the cedar's top" and "dallies with the wind and scorns the sun." He knows and he despises with active and immitigable contempt the shallowness and fickleness of the multitude. He is of an icy purity, physical as well as mental, and his nerves tingle with disgust of the personal uncleanliness of the mob. "Bid them wash their faces," he says--when urged to ask the suffrages of the people--"and keep their teeth clean." "He rewards his deeds with doing them," says his fellow-soldier Cominius, "and looks upon things precious as the common muck of the world." His aristocracy does not sit in a corner, deedless and meritless, brooding over a transmitted name and sucking the orange of empty self-conceit: it is the aristocracy of achievement and of nature--the solid superiority of having done the brightest and best deeds that could be done in his time and of being the greatest man of his generation. It is as if a Washington, having made and saved a nation, were to spurn it from him with his foot, in lofty and by no means groundless contempt for the ignorance, pettiness, meanness, and filth of mankind. The story of Coriolanus, as it occurs in Plutarch, is thought to be fabulous, but it is very far from being fabulous as it stands transfigured in the stately, eloquent tragedy of Shakespeare. The character and the experience are indubitably representative. It was some modified form of the condition thus shown that resulted in the treason and subsequent ruin of Benedict Arnold. Pride of intellect largely dominated the career of Aaron Burr. More than one great thinker has split on that rock, and gone to pieces in the surges of popular resentment. "No man," said Dr. Chapin, in his discourse over the coffin of Horace Greeley, "can lift himself above himself." He who repudiates the humanity of which he is a part will inevitably come to sorrow and ruin. It is perfectly true that no intellectual person should in the least depend upon the opinions of others--which, in the nature of things, exist in all stages of immaturity, mutability, and error--but should aim to do the greatest deeds and should find reward in doing them: yet always the right mood toward humanity is gentleness and not scorn. "Thou, my father," said Matthew Arnold, in his tribute to one of the best men of the century, "wouldst not be saved alone." To enlighten the ignorant, to raise the weak, to pity the frail, to disregard the meanness, ingratitude, misapprehension, dulness, and petty malice of the lower orders of humanity--that is the wisdom of the wise; and that is accordant with the moral law of the universe, from the operation of which no man escapes. To study, in Shakespeare, the story of Coriolanus is to observe the violation of that law and the consequent retribution. "Battles, and the breath Of stormy war and violent death" fill up the first part of the tragedy as it stands in Shakespeare, and that portion is also much diversified with abrupt changes of scene; so that it has been found expedient to alter the piece, with a view to its more practical adaptation to the stage. While however it is not acted in strict accordance with Shakespeare its essential parts are retained and represented. Many new lines, though, occur toward the close. McCullough used the version that was used by Forrest, who followed in the footsteps of Cooper, the elder Vandenhoff, and James R. Anderson. There is, perhaps, an excess of foreground--a superfluity of fights and processions--by way of preparing for the ordeal through which the character of Coriolanus is to be displayed. Yet when Hecuba at last is reached the interest of the situation makes itself felt with force. The massive presence and stalwart declamation of Edwin Forrest made him superb in this character; but the embodiment of Coriolanus by McCullough, while equal to its predecessor in physical majesty, was superior to it in intellectual haughtiness and in refinement. An actor's treatment of the character must, unavoidably, follow the large, broad style of the historical painter. There is scant opportunity afforded in any of the scenes allotted to Coriolanus for fine touches and delicate shading. During much of the action the spectator is aware only of an imperial figure that moves with a mountainous grace through the fleeting rabble of Roman plebeians and Volscians, dreadful in war, loftily calm in peace, irradiating the conscious superiority of power, dignity, worth, and honourable renown. McCullough filled that aspect of the part as if he had been born for it. His movements had the splendid repose not merely of great strength but of intellectual poise and native mental supremacy. The "I must be found" air of Othello was again displayed, in ripe perfection, through the Roman toga. His declamation was as fluent and as massively graceful as his demeanour. If this actor had not the sonorous, clarion voice of John Kemble, he yet certainly suggested the tradition of the stately port and dominating step of that great master of the dramatic art. He looked Coriolanus, to the life. More of poetic freedom might have been wished, in the decorative treatment of the person--a touch of wildness in the hair, a tinge of imaginative exaltation in the countenance, an air of mischance in the gashes of combat. Still the embodiment was correct in its superficial conventionality; and it certainly possessed affecting grandeur. Whenever there was opportunity for fine treatment, moreover, the actor seized and filled it, with the easy grace of unerring intuition and spontaneity. The delicacy of vocalism, the movement, the tone of sentiment, and the manliness of condition--the royal fibre of a great mind--in the act of withdrawal from the senate, was right and beautiful. It is difficult not to over-emphasise the physical symbols of mental condition, in the street scene with "the voices"; but there again the actor denoted a fine spiritual instinct. To a situation like that of the banishment he proved easily equal: indeed, he gave that magnificent outburst of scorn with tremendous power: but it was in the pathetic scene with Volumnia and Virgilia that he reached the summit of the Shakespearean conception. The deep heart as well as the imperial intellect of Coriolanus must then speak. It is, for the distracted son, a moment of agonised and pathetic conflict: for McCullough it was a moment of perfect adequacy and consummate success. The stormy utterance of revolted pride and furious disgust, in the denial of Volumnia's request--the tempestuous outburst, "I will not do it"--made as wild, fiery, and fine a moment in tragic acting as could be imagined; but the climax was attained in the pathetic cry-- "The gods look down, and this unnatural scene They laugh at." XIII. CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. Making, one summer day, a pilgrimage to the grave of Charlotte Cushman, I was guided to the place of her rest by one of the labourers employed about the cemetery, who incidentally pronounced upon the deceased a comprehensive and remarkable eulogium. "She was," he said, "considerable of a woman, for a play-actress." Well--she was. The place of her sepulture is on the east slope of the principal hill in Mount Auburn. Hard by, upon the summit of the hill, stands the gray tower that overlooks the surrounding region and constantly symbolises, to eyes both far and near, the perpetual peace of which it is at once guardian and image. All around the spot tall trees give shade and music, as the sun streams on their branches and the wind murmurs in their leaves. At a little distance, visible across green meadows and the river Charles,--full and calm between its verdant banks,--rise the "dreaming spires" of Cambridge. Further away, crowned with her golden dome, towers old Boston, the storied city that Charlotte Cushman loved. Upon the spot where her ashes now rest the great actress stood, and, looking toward the city of her home and heart, chose that to be the place of her grave; and there she sleeps, in peace, after many a conflict with her stormy nature and after many sorrows and pains. What terrific ideals of the imagination she made to be realities of life! What burning eloquence of poesy she made to blaze! What moments of pathos she lived! What moods of holy self-abnegation and of exalted power she brought to many a sympathetic soul! Standing by her grave, on which the myrtle grows dense and dark, and over which the small birds swirl and twitter in the breezy silence, remembrance of the busy scenes of brilliant life wherein she used to move--the pictured stage, the crowded theatre, the wild plaudits of a delighted multitude--came strongly on the mind, and asked, in perplexity and sadness, what was the good of it all. To her but little. Fame and wealth were her cold rewards, after much privation and labour; but she found neither love nor happiness, and the fullest years of her life were blighted with the shadow of fatal disease and impending death. To the world, however, her career was of great and enduring benefit. She was a noble interpreter of the noble minds of the past, and thus she helped to educate the men and women of her time--to ennoble them in mood, to strengthen them in duty, to lift them up in hope of immortality. She did not live in vain. It is not likely that the American people will ever suffer her name to drift quite out of their remembrance: it is a name that never can be erased from the rolls of honourable renown. Charlotte Cushman was born on July 23, 1816, and she died on February 12, 1876. Boston was the place of her birth and of her death. She lived till her sixtieth year and she was for forty years an actress. Her youth was one of poverty and the early years of her professional career were full of labour, trouble, heart-ache, and conflict. The name of Cushman signifies "cross-bearer," and certainly Charlotte Cushman did indeed bear the cross, long before and long after, she wore the crown. At first she was a vocalist, but, having broken her voice by misusing it, she was compelled to quit the lyric and adopt the dramatic stage, and when nineteen years old she came out, at New Orleans, as Lady Macbeth. After that she removed to New York and for the next seven years she battled with adverse fortune in the theatres of that city and of Albany and Philadelphia. From 1837 to 1840 she was under engagement at the old Park as walking lady and for general utility business. "I became aware," she wrote, "that one could never sail a ship by entering at the cabin windows; he must serve and learn his trade before the mast. This was the way that I would henceforth learn mine." Her first remarkable hits were made in Emilia, Meg Merrilies, and Nancy--the latter in _Oliver Twist_. But it was not till she met with Macready that the day of her deliverance from drudgery really dawned. They acted together in New York in 1842 and 1843, and in Boston in 1844, and in the autumn of the latter year Miss Cushman went to England, where, after much effort, she obtained an opening in London, at the Princess's, and in 1845 made her memorable success as Bianca. "Since the first appearance of Edmund Kean, in 1814," said a London journal of that time, "never has there been such a _début_ on the stage of an English theatre." Her engagement lasted eighty-four nights (it was an engagement to act with Edwin Forrest), and she recorded its result in a letter to her mother, saying: "All my successes put together since I have been upon the stage would not come near my success in London, and I only wanted some one of you here to enjoy it with me, to make it complete." She acted Bianca, Emilia, Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Haller, and Rosalind. A prosperous provincial tour followed, and then, in December, 1845, she came out at the Haymarket, as Romeo, her sister Susan appearing as Juliet. Her stay abroad lasted till the end of the summer of 1849, and to that period belongs her great achievement as Queen Katharine. From the fall of 1849 till the spring of 1852 Miss Cushman was in America, and she was everywhere received with acclamation, gathering with ease both laurels and riches. When she first reappeared, October 8, 1849, at the old Broadway theatre, New York--as Mrs. Haller--she introduced Charles W. Couldock to our stage, on which he has ever since maintained his rank as a powerful and versatile actor. He acted the Stranger and subsequently was seen in the other leading characters opposite to her own. Miss Cushman's repertory then included Lady Macbeth, Queen Katharine, Meg Merrilies, Beatrice, Rosalind, Bianca, Julia, Mariana, Katharine, the Countess, Pauline, Juliana, Lady Gay Spanker, and Mrs. Simpson. Her principal male characters then, or later, were Romeo, Wolsey, Hamlet, and Claude Melnotte. In 1852 she announced her intention of retiring from the stage, and from that time till the end of her days she wavered between retirement and professional occupation. The explanation of this is readily divined, in her condition. There never was a time, during all those years, when she was not haunted by dread of the disease that ultimately destroyed her life. From 1852 to 1857 she lived in England, and in the course of that period she acted many times, in different cities. In December 1854, when dining with the Duke of Devonshire, at Brighton, she read _Henry VIII._ to the Duke and his guests, and in that way began her experience as a reader. In the autumn of 1857 she acted at Burton's theatre, New York, and was seen as Cardinal Wolsey, and in the early summer of 1858 she gave a series of "farewell" performances at Niblo's Garden--after which she again crossed the Atlantic and established her residence in Rome. In June 1860 the great actress came home again and passed a year in America. _Oliver Twist_ was given at the Winter Garden in the spring of 1861, when Miss Cushman acted Nancy, and J.W. Wallack, Jr., J.B. Studley, William Davidge, and Owen Marlowe were in the company. In 1863, having come from Rome for that purpose, Miss Cushman acted in four cities, for the benefit of the United States Sanitary Commission, and earned for it $8267. The seven ensuing years were passed by her in Europe, but in October 1870 she returned home for the last time, and the brief remainder of her life was devoted to public readings, occasional dramatic performances, and the society of friends. She built a villa at Newport, which still bears her name. She gave final farewell performances, in the season of 1874-1875, in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Her final public appearance was made on June 2, 1875, at Easton, Pennsylvania, where she gave a reading. Her death occurred at the Parker House, in Boston, February 18, 1876, and she was buried from King's chapel. There is a mournful pleasure in recalling the details of Miss Cushman's life and meditating upon her energetic, resolute, patient, creative nature. She was faithful, throughout her career, to high principles of art and a high standard of duty. Nature gave her great powers but fettered her also with great impediments. She conquered by the spell of a strange, weird genius and by hard, persistent labour. In this latter particular she is an example to every member of the dramatic profession, present or future. In what she was as a woman she could not be imitated--for her colossal individuality dwelt apart, in its loneliness, as well of suffering that no one could share as of an imaginative life that no one could fathom. Without the stage she would still have been a great woman, although perhaps she might have lacked an entirely suitable vehicle for the display of her powers. With the stage she gave a body to the soul of some of Shakespeare's greatest conceptions, and she gave soul and body both to many works of inferior origin. There is no likelihood that we shall ever see again such a creation as her Meg Merrilies. Her genius could embody the sublime, the beautiful, the terrible, and with all this the humorous; and it was saturated with goodness. If the love of beauty was intensified by the influence of her art, virtue was also strengthened by the force of her example and the inherent dignity of her nature. XIV. ON THE DEATH OF LAWRENCE BARRETT. [Obiit March 20, 1891.] The death of Lawrence Barrett was the disappearance of one of the noblest figures of the modern stage. During the whole of his career, in a public life of thirty-five years, he was steadily and continuously impelled by a pure and fine ambition and the objects that he sought to accomplish were always the worthiest and the best. His devotion to the dramatic art was a passionate devotion, and in an equal degree he was devoted to a high ideal of personal conduct. Doctrines of expediency never influenced him and indeed were never considered by him. He had early fixed his eyes on the dramatic sceptre. He knew that it never could be gained except by the greatest and brightest of artistic achievements, and to them accordingly he consecrated his life. Whenever and wherever he appeared the community was impressed with a sense of intellectual character, moral worth, and individual dignity. Many other dramatic efforts might be trivial. Those of Lawrence Barrett were always felt to be important. Most of the plays with which his name is identified are among the greatest plays in our language, and the spirit in which he treated them was that of exalted scholarship, austere reverence, and perfect refinement. He was profoundly true to all that is noble and beautiful, and because he was true the world of art everywhere recognised him as the image of fidelity and gave to him the high tribute of its unwavering homage. His coming was always a signal to arouse the mind. His mental vitality, which was very great, impressed even unsympathetic beholders with a sense of fiery thought struggling in its fetters of mortality and almost shattering and consuming the frail temple of its human life. His stately head, silvered with graying hair, his dark eyes deeply sunken and glowing with intense light, his thin visage pallid with study and pain, his form of grace and his voice of sonorous eloquence and solemn music (in compass, variety, and sweetness one of the few great voices of the current dramatic generation), his tremendous earnestness, his superb bearing, and his invariable authority and distinction--all those attributes united to announce a ruler and leader in the realm of the intellect. The exceeding tumult of his spirit enhanced the effect of this mordant personality. The same sleepless energy that inspired Loyola and Lanfranc burned in the bosom of this modern actor; and it was entirely in keeping with the drift of his character and the tenor of his life that the last subject that occupied his thoughts should have been the story of Becket, the great prelate--whom he intended to represent, and to whom in mental qualities he was nearly allied. In losing Lawrence Barrett the American stage lost the one man who served it with an apostle's zeal because he loved it with an apostle's love. The essential attributes that Lawrence Barrett did not possess were enchantment for the public and adequate and philosophic patience for himself. He gained, indeed, a great amount of public favour, and,--with reference to an indisputable lack of universal sympathy and enthusiasm,--he was learning to regard that as a natural consequence of his character which formerly he had resented as the injustice of the world. Men and women of austere mind do not fascinate their fellow-creatures. They impress by their strangeness. They awe by their majesty. They predominate by their power. But they do not involuntarily entice. Lawrence Barrett,--although full of kindness and gentleness, and, to those who knew him well, one of the most affectionate and lovable of men,--was essentially a man of austere intellect; and his experience was according to his nature. To some persons the world gives everything, without being asked to give at all. To others it gives only what it must, and that with a kind of icy reluctance that often makes the gift a bitter one. Lawrence Barrett, who rose from an obscure and humble position,--without fortune, without friends, without favouring circumstances, without education, without help save that of his talents and his will,--was for a long time met with indifference, or frigid obstruction, or impatient disparagement. He gained nothing without battle. He had to make his way by his strength. His progress involved continual effort and his course was attended with continual controversy and strife. When at last it had to be conceded that he was a great actor, the concession was, in many quarters, grudgingly made. Even then detraction steadily followed him, and its voice--though impotent and immeasurably trivial--has not yet died away. There came a time when his worth was widely recognised, and from that moment onward he had much prosperity, and his nature expanded and grew calmer, sweeter, and brighter under its influence. But the habit of warfare had got into his acting, and more or less it remained there to the last. The assertive quality, indeed, had long since begun to die away. The volume of needless emphasis was growing less and less. Few performances on the contemporary stage are commensurate with his embodiments of Harebell and Gringoire, in softness, simplicity, poetic charm, and the gentle tranquillity that is the repose of a self-centred soul. But his deep and burning desire to be understood, his anxiety lest his effects should not be appreciated, his inveterate purpose of conquest,--that overwhelming solicitude of ambition often led him to insist upon his points, to over-elaborate and enforce them, and in that way his art to some extent defeated itself by the excess of its eager zeal. The spirit of beauty that the human race pursues is the spirit that is typified in Emerson's poem of _Forerunners_--the elusive spirit that all men feel and no man understands. This truth, undiscerned by him at first, had become the conviction of his riper years; and if his life had been prolonged the autumn of his professional career would have been gentle, serene, and full of tranquil loveliness. The achievement of Lawrence Barrett as an actor was great, but his influence upon the stage was greater than his achievement. Among the Shakespearian parts that he played were Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Iago, Shylock, Leontes, Cassius, Wolsey, Richard III., Romeo, and Benedick. Outside of Shakespeare (to mention only a few of his impersonations) he acted Richelieu, Evelyn, Aranza, Garrick, Claude Melnotte, Rienzi, Dan'l Druce, Lanciotto, Hernani, King Arthur, and Ganelon. The parts in which he was superlatively fine,--and in some respects incomparable,--are Cassius, Harebell, Yorick, Gringoire, King Arthur, Ganelon, and James V., King of the Commons. In his time he had played hundreds of parts, ranging over the whole field of the drama, but as the years passed and the liberty of choice came more and more within his reach, he concentrated his powers upon a few works and upon a specific line of expression. The aspect of human nature and human experience that especially aroused his sympathy was the loneliness of beneficent intellectual grandeur, isolated by its supremacy and pathetic in its isolation. He loved the character of Richelieu, and if he had acted Becket, as he purposed to do, in Tennyson's tragedy, he would have presented another and a different type of that same ideal--lonely, austere, passionate age, defiant of profane authority and protective of innocent weakness against wicked and cruel strength. His embodiment of Cassius, with all its intensity of repressed spleen and caustic malevolence, was softly touched and sweetly ennobled with the majesty of venerable loneliness,--the bleak light of pathetic sequestration from human ties, without the forfeiture of human love,--that is the natural adjunct of intellectual greatness. He loved also the character of Harebell, because in that he could express his devotion to the beautiful, the honest impulses of his affectionate heart, and his ideal of a friendship that is too pure and simple even to dream that such a thing as guile can exist anywhere in the world. Toward the expression, under dramatic conditions, of natures such as those, the development of his acting was steadily directed; and, even if he fell short, in any degree, of accomplishing all that he purposed, it is certain that his spirit and his conduct dignified the theatrical profession, strengthened the stage in the esteem of good men, and cheered the heart and fired the energy of every sincere artist that came within the reach of his example. For his own best personal success he required a part in which, after long repression, the torrent of passion can break loose in a tumult of frenzy and a wild strain of eloquent words. The terrible exultation of Cassius, after the fall of Cæsar, the ecstasy of Lanciotto when he first believes himself to be loved by Francesca, the delirium of Yorick when he can no longer restrain the doubts that madden his jealous and wounded soul, the rapture of King James over the vindication of his friend Seyton, whom his suspicions have wronged--those were among his distinctively great moments, and his image as he was in such moments is worthy to live among the storied traditions and the bright memories of the stage. Censure seems to be easy to most people, and few men are rated at their full value while they are yet alive. Just as mountains seem more sublime in the vague and hazy distance, so a noble mind looms grandly through the dusk of death. So it will be with him. Lawrence Barrett was a man of high principle and perfect integrity. He never spoke a false word nor knowingly harmed a human being, in all his life. Although sometimes he seemed to be harsh and imperious, he was at heart kind and humble. Strife with the world, and in past times uncertainty as to his position, caused in him the assumption of a stern and frigid manner, but beneath that haughty reserve there was a great longing for human affection and a sincere humility of spirit. He never nurtured hostility. He had no memory for injuries; but a kindness he never forgot. His good deeds were as numerous as his days--for no day rolled over his head without its act of benevolence in one direction or another. He was as impulsive as a child. He had much of the woman in his nature, and therefore his views were impetuous, strong, and often strongly stated; but his sense of humour kept pace with his sensibility and so maintained the equilibrium of his mind. In temperament he was sad, pensive, introspective, almost gloomy; but he opposed to that tendency an incessant mental activity and the force of a tremendous will. In his lighter moods he was not only appreciative of mirth but was the cause of it. His humour was elemental and whatever aspect of life he saw in a comic light he could set in that light before the eyes of others. He had been a studious reader for many years and his mind was stored with ample, exact, and diversified information. He had a scholar's knowledge of Roman history and his familiar acquaintance with the character and career of the first Napoleon was extraordinary. In acting he was largely influenced by his studies of Edmund Kean and by his association with Charlotte Cushman. For a few years after 1864 his art was especially affected by that of Edwin Booth; but the style to which he finally gravitated was his own. He was not so much an impersonator as he was an interpreter of character, and the elocutionary part of acting was made more conspicuous and important by him than by any other tragedian since the days of Forrest and Brooke. It was a beautiful life prematurely ended. It was a brave, strong spirit suddenly called out of the world. To the dramatic profession the loss is irreparable. In the condition of the contemporary theatre there are not many hopeful signs. No doubt there will be bright days in the future, as there have been in the past. They go and they return. The stage declines and the stage advances. At present its estate is low. Few men like Lawrence Barrett remain for it to lose. Its main hope is in the abiding influence of such examples as he has left. The old theatrical period is fast passing away. The new age rushes on the scene, with youthful vigour and impetuous tumult. But to some of us,--who perhaps have not long to stay, and to whom, whatever be their fortune, this tumult is unsympathetic and insignificant,--the way grows darker and lonelier as we lay our garlands of eternal farewell upon the coffin of Lawrence Barrett. XV. HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN RAVENSWOOD. Merivale's play of _Ravenswood_, written in four acts, was acted in six. The first act consists of a single scene--an exterior, showing the environment of the chapel which is the burial place of the House of Ravenswood. A rockbound coast is visible, at some distance, together with the ruinous tower of Wolf's Crag--which is Ravenswood's sole remaining possession. This act presents the interrupted funeral of Alan Ravenswood, the father of Edgar,--introducing ten of the seventeen characters that are implicated in the piece, and skilfully laying the basis of the action by exhibiting the essential personalities of the story in strong contrast, and denoting their relations to each other. Each character is clearly and boldly drawn and with a light touch. The second act consists of three scenes--an antique library in the ancient manor-house of Ravenswood, a room in a roadside ale-house, and a room in the dilapidated tower of Wolf's Crag. This act rapidly develops the well-known story, depicting the climax of antagonism between the Lord Keeper Ashton and Edgar of Ravenswood and their subsequent reconciliation. The third act passes in a lovely, romantic, rural scene, which is called "the Mermaiden's Well,"--a fairy-like place in the grounds of Ravenswood,--and in this scene Edgar and Lucy Ashton, who have become lovers, are plighted by themselves and parted by Lucy's mother, Lady Ashton. The fourth and last act shows a room at Ravenswood, wherein is portrayed the betrothal of Lucy to Bucklaw, culminating in Edgar's sudden irruption; and finally, it shows the desolate seaside place of the quicksand in which, after he has slain Bucklaw, Edgar of Ravenswood is engulfed. The house that Scott, when he wrote the novel, had in his mind as that of Sir William Ashton is the house of Winston, which still is standing, not many miles from Edinburgh. The tower of Wolf's Crag was probably suggested to him by Fast Castle, the ruin of which still lures the traveller's eye, upon the iron-ribbed and gloomy coast of the North Sea, a few miles southeast of Dunbar--a place, however, that Scott never visited, and never saw except from the ocean. There is a beach upon that coast, just above Cockburnspath, that might well have suggested to him the quicksand and the final catastrophe. I saw it when the morning sun was shining upon it and upon the placid waters just rippling on its verge; and even in the glad glow of a summer day it was grim with silent menace and mysterious with an air of sinister secrecy. In the preparation of this piece for the stage all the sources and associations of the subject were considered; and the pictorial setting, framed upon the right artistic principle--that imagination should transfigure truth and thus produce the essential result of poetic effect--was elaborate and magnificent. And the play is the best one that ever has been made upon this subject. The basis of fact upon which Sir Walter Scott built his novel of the _Bride of Lammermoor_ is given in the introduction that he wrote for it in 1829. Janet Dalrymple, daughter of the first Lord Stair and of his wife Margaret Ross, had privately plighted herself to Lord Rutherford. Those lovers had broken a piece of gold together, and had bound themselves by vows the most solemn and fervent that passion could prompt. But Lord Rutherford was objectionable to Miss Dalrymple's parents, who liked not either his family or his politics. Lady Stair, furthermore, had selected a husband for her daughter, in the person of David Dunbar, of Baldoon; and Lady Stair was a woman of formidable character, set upon having her own way and accustomed to prevail. As soon as she heard of Janet's private engagement to Lord Rutherford she declared the vow to be undutiful and unlawful and she commanded that it should be broken. Lord Rutherford, a man of energy and of spirit, thereupon insisted that he would take his dismissal only from the lips of Miss Dalrymple herself, and he demanded and obtained an interview with her. Lady Stair was present, and such was her ascendency over her daughter's mind that the young lady remained motionless and mute, permitting her betrothal to Lord Rutherford to be broken, and, upon her mother's command, giving back to him the piece of gold that was the token of her promise. Lord Rutherford was deeply moved, so that he uttered curses upon Lady Stair, and at the last reproached Janet in these words: "For you, madam, you will be a world's wonder." After this sad end of his hopes the unfortunate gentleman went abroad and died in exile. Janet Dalrymple and David Dunbar meanwhile were married--the lady "being absolutely passive in everything her mother commanded or advised." As soon, however, as the wedded pair had retired from the bridal feast hideous shrieks were heard to resound through the house, proceeding from the nuptial chamber. The door was thereupon burst open and persons entering saw the bridegroom stretched upon the floor, wounded and bleeding, while the bride, dishevelled and stained with blood, was grinning in a paroxysm of insanity. All she said was, "Take up your bonny bridegroom." About two weeks later she died. The year of those events was 1669. The wedding took place on August 24. Janet died on September 12. Dunbar recovered, but he would never tell what occurred in that chamber of horror, nor indeed would he permit any allusion to the subject. He did not long survive the tragic event,--having been fatally injured, by a fall from his horse, when riding between Leith and Holyrood. He died on March 28, 1682. The death of Lord Rutherford is assigned to the year 1685. Such is the melancholy story as it may be gathered from Scott's preface. In writing his novel that great master of the art of fiction,--never yet displaced from his throne or deprived of his sceptre,--adopted fictitious names, invented fresh circumstances, amplified and elevated the characters, judiciously veiled the localities, and advanced the period of those tragical incidents to about the beginning of the eighteenth century. The delicate taste with which he used his materials has only been surpassed, in that beautiful composition, by the affluent genius with which he vitalised every part of his narrative. In no other of his many books has he shown a deeper knowledge than is revealed in that one of the terrible passion of love and of the dark and sinuous ways of political and personal craft. When _The Bride of Lammermoor_ was first published no mention was made in it of the true story upon which remotely it had been based; but by the time Scott came to write the preface of 1829 other writers had been less reticent, and some account of the Dalrymple tragedy had got into print, so that no reason existed for further silence on that subject. Sir Robert H.D. Elphinstone, writing in 1829, gave the tradition as follows: "When, after the noise and violent screaming in the bridal chamber comparative stillness succeeded and the door was forced, the window was found open, and it was supposed by many that the lover, Lord Rutherford, had, by the connivance of some of the servants, found means, during the bustle of the marriage feast, to secrete himself within the apartment, and that soon after the entry of the married pair, or at least as soon as the parents and others retreated and the door was made fast, he had come out from his concealment, attacked and desperately wounded the bridegroom, and then made his escape, by the window, through the garden. As the unfortunate bride never spoke after having uttered the words mentioned by Sir Walter, no light could be thrown on the matter by them. But it was thought that Dunbar's obstinate silence on the subject favoured the supposition of the chastisement having been inflicted by his rival. It is but fair to give the unhappy victim (who was, by all accounts, a most gentle and feminine creature) the benefit of an explanation on a doubtful point." Merivale, in dealing with this story, gave a conspicuous illustration of the essential dramatic faculty. The first act is the adroit expansion of a few paragraphs, in the second chapter of the novel, which are descriptive of the bleak, misty November morning when Alan Ravenswood was borne to the grave; but by the introduction of the Lord Keeper and of the village crones into that funeral scene he opened the whole subject, indicated all the essential antecedents of the story, and placed his characters in a posture of lively action. That the tone is sombre must be conceded, and people who think that the chief end of man is to grin might condemn the piece for that reason; but _Ravenswood_ is a tragedy and not a farce, and persons who wish that their feelings may not be affected should avoid tragedies. In the second act Ravenswood seeks Ashton at Ravenswood manor, intending to kill him in a duel, but his hand is stayed when he catches sight of Lucy Ashton's portrait. The incident of Edgar's rescue of Lucy is used in this scene. In a later scene Sir William Ashton and his daughter take refuge in Wolf's Crag, and the bewitchment of Ravenswood is accomplished. The quarrel between Edgar and Bucklaw is then given, as a basis for the ensuing rivalry and deadly conflict between them. In the third act there is a beautiful love-scene between Edgar and Lucy, the dialogue being especially felicitous in tenderness and grace and fraught with that reverential quality, that condition of commingled ecstasy and nobleness, which is always characteristic of the experience of this passion in pure natures. Lady Ashton's interruption of their happiness and the subsequent parting have a vigorous dramatic effect. The character of Lucy has been much strengthened, so that it differs from that of the original precisely as Desdemona differs from Ophelia; and the change is an improvement. The fourth act opens with "a song of choristers heard outside." The letters of Lucy and Edgar have been intercepted. The lady has been told that her lover is false. The suit of Bucklaw has been urged. The authority of the stern mother has prevailed over her daughter's will. It is the old story. "The absent are always wrong"--and Ravenswood is absent. Lucy Ashton yields to her fate. The marriage contract between Lucy and Bucklaw has just been signed when Ravenswood bursts into the group. From that point the action is animated equally with celerity and passion. The misery of Ravenswood utters itself in a swift stream of burning words. The grief of Lucy ends tragically in a broken heart and sudden death. The fight between Bucklaw and Ravenswood clashes for a moment but is abruptly finished on the moonlit sands, and Edgar is seen to leap down from a rock and rush away toward the manor, where, as his dying foe has told him, the faithful and innocent Lucy lies dead. He disappears and comes no more; but his old servant takes up from the beach a single black plume--the feather of a raven--which the tide has washed ashore, and which is the last relic and emblem of the vanished master of Ravenswood. The tragedy is kindred, as to its spirit, with _Romeo and Juliet_, and like that representative poem of love and death it is intensely passionate, sombre, and lamentable. The first and second acts of it pass in almost unrelieved shadow. It begins with a funeral; it incorporates the ingredients of misery, madness, and death; it culminates in a fatal duel; and it ends in a picture of mortal desolation, qualified only by a mute suggestion of spiritual happiness conveyed by the pictorial emblem of the promise of immortality. It is a poetical tragedy, conceived in the spirit and written in the manner of the old masters of the poetic art. The treatment of Scott's novel is marked by scrupulous fidelity, not indeed to every detail of that noble book, but to its essential quality and tone. The structure of the play reproduces in action substantially the structure of the original story. The scene in which Edgar and Lucy avow their love and pledge themselves to each other is written with exquisite grace and profound tenderness. The picture presented upon the stage when the lovers are parted was one of astonishing animation. The scene of the interrupted wedding and of Lucy Ashton's agony, distraction, and death was one of intense power and dramatic effect. The duel of Ravenswood and Bucklaw upon the desolate, moon-lit sands was invested with the excitement of suspense and with weird horror. And the final exposition of dramatic contrast,--when upon the wide, bleak beach, with the waste of vacant sea beyond and the eastern heaven lit with the first splendour of sunrise, the old man stooped to take up the raven's feather, the last relic of Ravenswood--was so entirely beautiful that the best of words can but poorly indicate its loveliness. For an audience able to look seriously at a serious subject, and not impatient of the foreground of gloom in which, necessarily, the story is enveloped at its beginning, this was a perfect work. The student of drama must go back many years to find a parallel to it, in interest of subject, in balance, in symmetry, and in sympathetic interpretation of character. There is a quality of Hamlet in the character of Ravenswood. He is by nature a man of a sad mind, and under the pressure of afflicting circumstances his sadness has become embittered. He takes life thoughtfully and with passionate earnestness. He is a noble person, finely sensitive and absolutely sincere, full of kindness at heart, but touched with gloom; and his aspect and demeanour are those of pride, trouble, self-conflict--of an individuality isolated and constrained by dark thoughts and painful experience. That is the mood in which Henry Irving conceived and portrayed him. You saw a picturesque figure, dark, strange, romantic--the gravity engendered by thought and sorrow not yet marring the bronzed face and the elastic movement of youth--and this personality, in itself fascinating, was made all the more pictorial by an investiture of romance, alike in the scenery and the incidents through which it moved. Around such a figure funereal banners well might wave, and under dark and lowering skies the chill wind of the sea might moan through monastic ruins and crumbling battlements. Edgar of Ravenswood, standing by his lonely hearth, beneath the groined arches of his seaside tower, revealed by the flickering firelight, looked the ideal of romantic manhood; the incarnation of poetic fancy and of predestinate disaster. Above the story of _Ravenswood_ there is steadily and continuously impending, and ever growing darker and coming nearer, the vague menace of terrible calamity. This element of mystery and dread was wrought into the structural fibre of Henry Irving's performance of the part, and consistently coloured it. The face of Edgar was made to wear that haunted look which,--as in the countenance of Charles the First, in Vandyke's portraits,--may be supposed, and often has been supposed, to foreshadow a violent and dreadful death. His sudden tremor, when at the first kiss of Lucy Ashton the thunder is heard to break above his ruined home, was a fine denotement of that subtle quality; and even through the happiness of the betrothal scene there was a hint of this black presentiment--just as sometimes on a day of perfect sunshine there is a chill in the wind that tells of approaching storm. All this is warranted by the prophetic rhymes which are several times spoken, beginning--"When the last lord of Ravenswood to Ravenswood shall ride." A crone, Ailsie Gourlay by name, embodied with grim and grisly vigour by Alice Marriott,--whose ample voice and exact elocution, together with her formidable stature and her faculty of identification with the character that she assumes and with the spirit of the story, made her of great value to this play--hovered around Ravenswood, and aided to keep this presage of evil doom fitfully present in the consciousness of its victim. Henry Irving gave to the part its perfectly distinct individuality, and in that respect made as fine a showing as he has ever made of his authority as an actor. There was never the least doubt as to what Ravenswood is and what he means. The peculiar elocution of Henry Irving, when he is under the influence of great excitement, is not effective upon all persons; but those who like it consider it far more touching than a more level, more sonorous, and more accurate delivery. He wrought a great effect in the scene of the marriage-contract. Indeed, so powerful, sincere, and true was the acting upon all sides, at this point, that not until the curtain began to descend was it remembered that we were looking upon a fiction and not upon a fact. This points to the peculiar power that Henry Irving and Ellen Terry conspicuously possess--of creating and maintaining a perfect illusion. During the earlier scenes the character of Lucy Ashton is chiefly marked by the qualities of sweetness and of glee. No one acquainted with the acting of Ellen Terry would need to be told how well and with what charming grace those qualities were expressed by her. In the scene of the wooing, at the Mermaiden's Well, Lucy Ashton was not a cold woman trying to make herself loved,--which is what most actresses habitually proffer upon the stage,--but a loving woman, radiant with the consciousness of the love that she feels and has inspired. Nothing could be imagined more delicate, more delicious, more enchanting than the high-bred distinction and soft womanlike tone of that performance. The character, at the climax of this scene, is made to manifest decision, firmness, and force; and the superb manner in which she set the maternal authority at naught and stood by her lover might seem to denote a nature that no tyranny could subdue. Subdued, however, she is, and forced to believe ill of her absent lover, and so the fatal marriage contract is signed and the crash follows. When Ellen Terry came on for that scene the glee had all vanished; the face was as white as the garments that enswathed her; and you saw a creature whom the hand of death had visibly touched. The stage has not at any time heard from any lips but her own such tones of pathos as those in which she said the simple words:-- "May God forgive you, then, and pity me-- If God can pity more than mothers do." It is not a long scene, and happily not,--for the strain upon the emotion of the actress was intense. The momentary wild merriment, the agony of the breaking heart, the sudden delirium and collapse, were not for an instant exaggerated. All was nature--or rather the simplicity, fidelity, and grace of art that make the effect of nature. Beautiful scenery, painted by Craven, framed the piece with appropriate magnificence. The several seaside pictures were admirably representative of the grandeur, the gaunt loneliness, and the glorious colour for which Scotland is so much loved. The public gain in that production was a revival of interest in one of the most famous novels in the language; the possession of a scenical pageant that filled the eye with beauty and strongly moved the imagination; a play that is successful in the domain of romantic poetry; a touching exemplification of the great art of acting; and once again the presentment of that vast subject,--the relation of heart to heart, under the dominion of love, in human society,--that more absorbs the attention, affects the character, and controls the destiny of the human race than anything else that is beneath the sun. XVI. THE MERRY WIVES AND FALSTAFF. Shakespeare wrote _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ in 1601, and during the Christmas holidays of that year it was presented upon the stage, before Queen Elizabeth and her court, at Windsor Castle. In 1602 it was published in London in quarto form, and in 1619 a reprint of that quarto was published there. The version that appears in the two quartos is considered by Shakespeare scholars to be spurious. The authentic text, no doubt, is that of the comedy as it stands in the first folio (1623). Shakespeare had written _Henry IV._--both parts of it--and also _Henry V._, when this comedy was acted, and therefore he had completed his portrait of Falstaff, whose life is displayed in the former piece and whose death is described in the latter. _Henry IV._ was first printed in 1598 (we know not when it was first acted), and it passed through five quarto editions prior to the publication of it in the folio of 1623. In the epilogue to the second part of that play a promise is made that the story shall be continued, "with Sir John in it," but it is gravely doubted whether that epilogue was written by Shakespeare. The continuation of the story occurs in _Henry V._, in which Falstaff does not figure, although he is mentioned in it. Various efforts have been made to show a continuity between the several plays in which Falstaff is implicated, but the attempt always fails. The histories contain the real Falstaff. The Falstaff of the comedy is another and less important man. If there really were a sequence of story and of time in the portraiture of this character plays would stand in the following order: 1, _Henry IV., Part First_; 2, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_; 3, _Henry IV., Part Second_; 4, _Henry V._ As no such sequence exists, or apparently was intended, the comedy should be viewed by itself. Its texture is radically different from that of the histories. One of the best Shakespeare editors, Charles Knight, ventures the conjecture that _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ was written first. Shakespeare invented the chief part of the plot, taking, however, a few things from Tarlton's _Newes out of Purgatorie_, which in turn was founded on a story called The _Lovers of Pisa_. It is possible also that he may have derived suggestions from a German play by Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick--a contemporary, who died in 1611--to which _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ bears some resemblance, and of which he may have received an account from English actors who had visited Germany, as the actors of his time occasionally did. Tradition declares that he wrote this comedy at the command of Queen Elizabeth, who had expressed a wish to see Falstaff in love. This was first stated by John Dennis, in the preface to an alteration of _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ which was made by him, under the name of _The Comical Gallant, or the Amours of Sir John Falstaff_, and was successfully acted at Drury Lane theatre. That piece, which is paltry and superfluous, appeared in 1702. No authority was given by Dennis for his statement about Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare's play. The tradition rests exclusively on his word. Rowe, Pope, Theobald, and other Shakespeare editors, have transmitted it to the present day, but it rests on nothing but supposition and it is dubious. Those scholars who accept the story of Dennis, and believe that Shakespeare wrote the piece "to order" and within a few days, usually fortify their belief by the allegation that the comedy falls short of Shakespeare's poetical standard, being written mostly in prose; that it degrades his great creation of Falstaff; that it is, for him, a trivial production; and that it must have been written in haste and without spontaneous impulse. If judgment were to be given on the quarto version of _The Merry Wives_, that reasoning would commend itself as at least plausible; but it is foolish as applied to the version in the folio, where the piece is found to be remarkable for nimbleness of invention, strength and variety of natural character, affluent prodigality of animal spirits, delicious quaintness, exhilarating merriment, a lovely pastoral tone, and many touches of the transcendent poetry of Shakespeare. Dennis probably repeated a piece of idle gossip that he had heard, the same sort of chatter that in the present day constantly follows the doings of theatrical people,--and is not accurate more than once in a thousand times. _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ is a brilliant and delightful comedy, quite worthy of its great author (though not in his most exalted mood), who probably wrote it because his mind was naturally impelled to write it, and no doubt laboured over it exactly as he did over his other writings: for we know, upon the testimony of Ben Jonson, who personally knew him and was acquainted with his custom as a writer, that he was not content with the first draught of anything, but wrote it a second time, and a third time, before he became satisfied with it. Dr. Johnson, who had studied Shakespeare as carefully as any man ever studied him, speaking of _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, says that "its general power--that power by which all works of genius should finally be tried--is such that perhaps it never yet had reader or spectator who did not think it too soon at an end." A comedy that deserves such praise as this--which assuredly is not misplaced--need not be dismissed as a pot-boiler. Knight's conjecture that _The Merry Wives_ was written before the histories were written is a plausible conjecture, and perhaps worthy of some consideration. It is not easy to believe that Shakespeare, after he had created Falstaff and thoroughly drawn him, was capable of lessening the character and making it almost despicable with paltriness--as certainly it becomes in _The Merry Wives_. That is not the natural way of an artistic mind. But it is easier to credit the idea that the Falstaff of _The Merry Wives_ was the first study of the character, although not first shown, which subsequently expanded into the magnificent humorous creation of the histories. Falstaff in the comedy is a fat man with absurd amorous propensities, who is befooled, victimised, and made a laughing-stock by a couple of frolicsome women, who are so much amused by his preposterous folly that they scarcely bestow the serious consideration of contempt and scorn upon his sensuality and insolence. No creature was ever set in a more ludicrous light or made more contemptible,--in a kindly, good-humoured way. The hysterical note of offended virtue is never sounded, nor is anywhere seen the averted face of shocked propriety. The two wives are bent on a frolic, and they will merrily punish this presumptuous sensualist--this silly, conceited, gross fellow, "old, cold, withered, and of intolerable entrails." If we knew no more of Falstaff than the comedy tells us of him we should by no means treasure him as we do now; but it is through the histories that we learn to know and appreciate him, and it is of the man portrayed there that we always unconsciously think when, in his humiliating discomfiture, we hear him declare that "wit may be made a Jack-a-lent when 'tis upon ill employment." For the Falstaff of the histories is a man of intellect, wisdom, and humour, thoroughly experienced in the ways of the world, fascinating in his drollery, human, companionable, infinitely amusing, and capable of turning all life to the favour of enjoyment and laughter--a man who is passionate in the sentiment of comradeship, and who, with all his faults (and perhaps because of some of them, for faultless persons are too good for this world), inspires affection. "Would I were with him," cries the wretched Bardolph, "wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in hell." It is not Bardolph only whose heart has a warm corner for the memory of the poor old jovial sinner, wounded to death by the falling off of friendship--the implacable hardness of new-born virtue in the regenerated royal mind. A comprehensive view of Falstaff--a view that includes the afflicting circumstances of his humiliation and of his forlorn and pathetic death not less than the roistering frolics and jocund mendacity of his life and character--is essential to a right appreciation of the meaning of him. Shakespeare is never a prosy moralist, but he constantly teaches you, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, that the moral law of the universe, working continually for goodness and not for evil, operates in an inexorable manner. Yet it is not of any moral consideration that the spectator of Falstaff upon the stage ever pauses to think. It is the humour of the fat knight that is perceived, and that alone. The thoughtful friends of Falstaff, however, see more in him than this, and especially they like not to think of him in a deplorable predicament. The Falstaff of _The Merry Wives_ is a man to laugh at; but he is not a man to inspire the comrade feeling, and still less is he a man to impress the intellect with the sense of a stalwart character and of illimitable jocund humour. Falstaff's friends--whose hearts are full of kindness for the old reprobate--have sat with him "in my Dolphin chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire," and "have heard the chimes at midnight" in his society, and they know what a jovial companion he is--how abundant in knowledge of the world; how radiant with animal spirits; how completely inexhaustible in cheerfulness; how copious in comic invective; how incessantly nimble and ludicrous in wit and in waggery; how strange a compound of mind and sensuality, shrewdness and folly, fidelity and roguery, brazen mendacity, and comic selfishness! They do not like to think of him as merely a fat old fool, bamboozled by a pair of sprightly, not over-delicate women, far inferior to him in mental calibre, and made a laughing-stock for Fenton and sweet Anne Page, and the lads and lassies of Windsor, and the chattering Welsh parson. "Have I lived," cried Falstaff, in the moment of his discomfiture, "to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English?" He is a hard case, an inveterate sinner, as worthless as any man well could be, in the eyes of decorum and respectability; but those who know him well grow to be fond of him, even if they feel that they ought to be ashamed of it, and they do not quite forgive the poet for making him contemptible. You can find many other figures that will make you laugh, but you can find no other figure that makes you laugh with such good reason. It seems incredible that Shakespeare, with his all-embracing mind and his perfect instinct of art, should deliberately have chosen to lessen his own masterpiece of humour. For Shakespeare rejoiced in Falstaff, even while he respected and recorded the inexorable justice of the moral law that decrees and eventually accomplishes his destruction. There is no one of his characters whose history he has traced with such minute elaboration. The conception is singularly ample. You may see Falstaff, as Shallow saw him, when he was a boy and page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk; you may see him all along the current of his mature years; his highway robberies on Gadshill; his bragging narrative to Prince Henry; his frolicsome, paternal, self-defensive lecture to the prince; his serio-comic association with the ragamuffin recruits at Coventry; his adroit escape from the sword of Hotspur; his mendacious self-glorification over the body of Harry Percy; his mishaps as a suitor to Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page; his wonderfully humorous interviews with the Chief-Justice and with Prince John of Lancaster; his junketings with Justice Shallow in Gloucestershire, and his rebuff and consternation at his first and last meeting with King Henry V.; and finally you may see him, as Mrs. Quickly saw him, on his death-bed, when "'a cried out God! God! God! three or four times," and when "his nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a babbled o' green fields." A good and faithful study of _King Henry IV._, and especially of the second part of that play, is essential for a right appreciation of Falstaff. Those scenes with the Chief-Justice are unmatched in literature. The knight stands royally forth in them, clothed with his entire panoply of agile intellect, robust humour, and boundless comic effrontery. But the arrogant and expeditious Falstaff of _The Merry Wives_--so richly freighted with rubicund sensuality, so abundant in comic loquacity, and so ludicrous in his sorry plights--is a much less complex person, and therefore he stands more level than the real Falstaff does with the average comprehension of mankind. The American stage, accordingly, by which more than by the printed book he has become known to our people, has usually given its preference to the Falstaff of the comedy. _The Merry Wives_ was first acted in New York on October 5, 1788 at the John Street theatre, with Harper as Falstaff. On April 1, 1807 it was produced at the old Park, and the Falstaff then was John E. Harwood. The same stage offered it again on January 16, 1829, with Hilson as Falstaff. A little later, about 1832, James H. Hackett took up the character of Falstaff, and from that time onward performances of _The Merry Wives_ occurred more frequently in different cities of America. Nor was the historical play neglected. On August 7, 1848 a remarkably fine production of the comedy was accomplished at the Astor Place Operahouse, New York, with Hackett as Falstaff, who never in his time was equalled in that character, and has not been equalled since. Another Falstaff, however, and a remarkably good one, appeared at Burton's theatre on August 24, 1850, in the person of Charles Bass. On March 14, 1853 _The Merry Wives_ was again given at Burton's theatre, and Burton himself played Falstaff, with characteristic humour; but Burton never acted the part as it stands in _Henry IV._ Hackett, who used both the history (Part I.) and the comedy, continued to act Falstaff almost to the end of his life and Hackett did not die till 1871. A distinguished representative of Falstaff in the early days of the American theatre--the days of the renowned Chestnut in Philadelphia--was William Warren (1767-1832), who came from England in 1796. In recent years the part has been acted by Benedict De Bar and by John Jack. The latest Falstaff in America was that embodied by Charles Fisher, who first assumed the character on November 19, 1872, at Daly's theatre, and whose performance was picturesque and humorous. On the English stage the historical play of _Henry IV._ was exceedingly popular in Shakespeare's time. The first Falstaff, according to Malone, whom everybody has followed as to this point, was John Heminge (1555-1630). After him came John Lowin (1572-1654), who is thought to have acted the part in the presence of Charles I. His successor seems to have been Lacy, who died in 1681. Next came Cartwright, and in 1699 or 1700 the great Betterton (1635-1710) assumed the fat knight, acting him in both parts of the history and in the comedy. Genest records twenty-two revivals of the first part of _Henry IV._ upon the London stage, at five different theatres, between 1667 and 1826; fifteen revivals of the second part between 1720 and 1821; and sixteen revivals of _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ between 1667 and 1811. Many English actors have played Falstaff since Betterton's time, an incomplete though sufficiently ample list of them comprising Estcourt, 1704; F. Bullock, 1713; J. Evans and J. Hall, 1715; Mills, 1716; Quin, "dignity and declamation," 1738; Berry, 1747; Love (whose true name was James Dance), 1762; Shuter, 1774; John Henderson, one of the greatest actors that ever lived, 1774; Mrs. Webb (once only), 1776; Ryder, 1786; Palmer, 1788; King, 1792; Fawcett, 1795; Stephen Kemble, who was so fat that he could play it without stuffing or bladder, 1802; Blissett, 1803; George Frederick Cooke, 1804; Bartley, 1812; Charles Kemble, 1824; Dowton, 1824; Elliston, 1826; and Samuel Phelps, 1846. The latest representative of Falstaff in England was H. Beerbohm-Tree, who, although a man of slender figure, contrived to simulate corpulence, and who manifested in his acting a fine instinct as to the meaning of the character and considerable resources of art in its expression, although the predominant individuality and the copious luxuriance of Falstaff's rosy and juicy humour were not within his reach. Upon the American stage the part is practically disused; and this is a pity, seeing that a source of great enjoyment and one of the most suggestive and fruitful topics that exist in association with the study of human nature are thus in a great degree sequestered from the public mind. Still it is better to have no Falstaff on the stage than to have it encumbered with a bad one; and certainly for the peculiar and exacting play of _Henry IV._ there are now no actors left: at least they are not visible in America. XVII. ADA REHAN. In browsing over the fragrant evergreen pages of Cibber's delightful book about the stage, and especially in reflecting upon the beautiful and brilliant women who, drawn by his magic pencil, dwell there, perpetual, in life, colour, and charm, the reflective reader may perhaps be prompted to remember that the royal line of stage beauties is not extinct, and that stage heroines exist in the present day who are quite as well worthy of commemoration as any that graced the period of Charles the Second or of good Queen Anne. Our age, indeed, has no Cibber to describe their loveliness and celebrate their achievements; but surely if he were living at this hour that courtly, characteristic, and sensuous writer--who saw so clearly and could portray so well the peculiarities of the feminine nature--would not deem the period of Ellen Terry and Marie Wilton, of Ada Rehan and Sarah Bernhardt and Genevieve Ward, of Clara Morris and Jane Hading, unworthy of his pen. As often as fancy ranges over those bright names and others that are kindred with them--a glittering sisterhood of charms and talents--the regret must arise that no literary artist with just the gallant spirit, the chivalry, the sensuous appreciation, the fine insight, and the pictorial touch of old Cibber is extant to perpetuate their glory. The hand that sketched Elizabeth Barry so as to make her live forever in a few brief lines, the hand that drew the fascinating and memorable portrait of Susanna Mountfort ("Down goes her dainty diving body to the ground, as if she were sinking under the conscious load of her own attractions")--what might it not have done to preserve for the knowledge of future generations the queens of the theatre who are crowned and regnant to-day! Cibber could have caught and reflected the elusive charm of such an actress as Ada Rehan. No touch less adroit and felicitous than his can accomplish more than the suggestion of her peculiar allurement, her originality, and her fascinating because sympathetic and piquant mental and physical characteristics. Ada Rehan, born at Limerick, Ireland, on April 22, 1860, was brought to America when five years old, and at that time she lived and went to school in Brooklyn. No one of her progenitors was ever upon the stage, nor does it appear that she was predisposed to that vocation by early reading or training. Her elder sisters had adopted that pursuit, and perhaps she was impelled toward it by the force of example and domestic association, readily affecting her innate latent faculty for the dramatic art. Her first appearance on the stage was made at Newark, New Jersey, in 1873, in a play entitled _Across the Continent_, in which she acted a small part, named Clara, for one night only, to fill the place of a performer who had been suddenly disabled by illness. Her readiness and her positive talent were clearly revealed in that effort, and it was thereupon determined in a family council that she should proceed; so she was soon regularly embarked upon the life of an actress. Her first appearance on the New York stage was made a little later, in 1873, at Wood's museum (it became Daly's theatre in 1879), when she played a small part in a piece called _Thorough-bred_. During the seasons of 1873-74-75 she was associated with the Arch Street theatre, Philadelphia,--that being her first regular professional engagement. (John Drew, with whom, professionally, Ada Rehan has been long associated, made his first appearance in the same season, at the same house.) She then went to Macaulay's theatre, Louisville, where she acted for one season. From Louisville she went to Albany, as a member of John W. Albaugh's company, and with that manager she remained two seasons, acting sometimes in Albany and sometimes in Baltimore. After that she was for a few months with Fanny Davenport. The earlier part of her career involved professional endeavours in company with the wandering stars, and she acted in a variety of plays with Edwin Booth, Adelaide Neilson, John McCullough, Mrs. Bowers, Lawrence Barrett, John Brougham, Edwin Adams, Mrs. Lander, and John T. Raymond. From the first she was devotedly fond of Shakespeare, and all the Shakespearian characters allotted to her were studied and acted by her with eager interest and sympathy. While thus employed in the provincial stock she enacted Ophelia, Cordelia, Desdemona, Celia, Olivia, and Lady Anne, and in each of those parts she was conspicuously good. The attention of Augustin Daly was first attracted to her in December 1877, when she was acting at Albaugh's theatre in Albany, the play being _Katharine and Petruchio_ (Garrick's version of the _Taming of the Shrew_), and Ada Rehan appearing as Bianca; and subsequently Daly again observed her as an actress of auspicious distinction and marked promise at the Grand Opera House, New York, in April 1879. Fanny Davenport was then acting in that theatre in Daly's strong American play of _Pique_--one of the few dramas of American origin that aptly reflect the character of American domestic life--and Ada Rehan appeared in the part of Mary Standish. She was immediately engaged under Daly's management, and in May 1879 she came forth at the Olympic theatre, New York, as Big Clemence in that author's version of _L'Assommoir_. On September 17, 1879, Daly's theatre (which had been suspended for about two years) was opened upon its present site, the southwest corner of Thirtieth Street and Broadway, and Ada Rehan made her first appearance there, enacting the part of Nelly Beers in a play called _Love's Young Dream_. The opening bill on that occasion comprised that piece, together with a comedy by Olive Logan, entitled _Newport_. On September 30 a revival of _Divorce_, one of Daly's most fortunate plays, was effected, and Ada Rehan impersonated Miss Lu Ten Eyck--a part originally acted (1873) by Fanny Davenport. From that time to this (1892) Ada Rehan has remained the leading lady at Daly's theatre; and there she has become one of the most admired figures upon the contemporary stage. In five professional visits to Europe, acting in London, Paris, Edinburgh, Dublin, Berlin, and other cities, she pleased judicious audiences and augmented her renown. Daly took his company of comedians to London for the first time in 1884, where they fulfilled an engagement of six weeks at Toole's theatre, beginning July 19. The second visit to London was made two seasons later, when they acted for nine weeks at the Strand theatre, beginning May 27, 1886. At that time they also played in the English provinces, and they visited Germany--acting at Hamburg and at Berlin, where they were much liked and commended. They likewise made a trip to Paris. Their third season abroad began at the Lyceum theatre, London, May 3, 1888, and it included another expedition to the French capital, which was well rewarded. Ada Rehan at that time impersonated Shakespeare's Shrew. It was in that season also that she appeared at Stratford-upon-Avon, where Daly gave a performance (August 3, 1888) in the Shakespeare Memorial theatre, for the benefit of that institution. The fourth season of Daly's comedians in London began on June 10, 1890, at the Lyceum theatre, and lasted ten weeks; and this was signalised by Ada Rehan's impersonation of Rosalind. The fifth London season extended from September 9 to November 13, 1891. This is an outline of her professional story; but how little of the real life of an actor can be imparted in a record of the surface facts of a public career! Most expressive, as a comment upon the inadequacy of biographical details, is the exclamation of Dumas, about Aimée Desclée: "Une femme comme celle-là n'a pas de biographie! Elle nous a émus, et elle en est morte. Voilà toute son historie!" Ada Rehan, while she has often and deeply moved the audience of her riper time, is happily very far from having died of it. There is deep feeling beneath the luminous and sparkling surface of her art; but it is chiefly with mirth that she has touched the public heart and affected the public experience. Equally of her, however, as of her pathetic sister artist of the French stage, it may be said that such a woman has no history. In a civilisation and at a period wherein persons are customarily accepted for what they pretend to be, instead of being seen and understood for what they are, she has been content to take an unpretentious course, to be original and simple, and thus to allow her faculties to ripen and her character to develop in their natural manner. She has not assumed the position of a star, and perhaps the American community, although favourable and friendly toward her, may have been somewhat slow to understand her unique personality and her superlative worth. The moment a thoughtful observer's attention is called to the fact, however, he perceives how large a place Ada Rehan fills in the public mind, how conspicuous a figure she is upon the contemporary stage, and how difficult it is to explain and classify her whether as an artist or a woman. That blending of complexity with transparency always imparts to individual life a tinge of piquant interest, because it is one denotement of the temperament of genius. The poets of the world pour themselves through all subjects by the use of their own words. In what manner they are affected by the forces of nature--its influences of gentleness and peace or its vast pageants of beauty and terror--those words denote; and also those words indicate the action, upon their responsive spirits, of the passions that agitate the human heart. The actors, on the other hand, assuming to be the interpreters of the poets, must pour themselves through all subjects by the use of their own personality. They are to be estimated accordingly by whatever the competent observer is able to perceive of the nature and the faculties they reveal under the stress of emotion, whether tragic or comic. Perhaps it is not possible--mind being limited in its function--for any person to form a full, true, and definite summary of another human creature. To view a dramatic performance with a consciousness of the necessity of forming a judicial opinion of it is often to see one's own thought about it rather than the thing itself. Yet, when all allowance is made for difficulty of theme and for infirmity of judgment, the observer of Ada Rehan may surely conclude that she has a rich, tender, and sparkling nature, in which the dream-like quality of sentiment and the discursive faculty of imagination, intimately blended with deep, broad, and accurate perceptions of the actual, and with a fund of keen and sagacious sense, are reinforced with strong individuality and with affluent and extraordinary vital force. Ada Rehan has followed no traditions. She went to the stage not because of vanity but because of spontaneous impulse; and for the expression of every part that she has played she has gone to nature and not to precept and precedent. The stamp of her personality is upon everything that she has done; yet the thinker who looks back upon her numerous and various impersonations is astonished at their diversity. The romance, the misery, and the fortitude of Kate Verity, the impetuous passion of Katharine, the brilliant raillery of Hippolyta, the enchanting womanhood of Rosalind--how clear-cut, how distinct, how absolutely dramatic was each one of those personifications! and yet how completely characteristic each one was of this individual actress! Our works of art may be subject to the application of our knowledge and skill, but we ourselves are under the dominance of laws which operate out of the inaccessible and indefinable depths of the spirit. Alongside of most players of this period Ada Rehan is a prodigy of original force. Her influence, accordingly, has been felt more than it has been understood, and, being elusive and strange, has prompted wide differences of opinion. The sense that she diffuses of a simple, unselfish, patient nature, and of impulsive tenderness of heart, however, cannot have been missed by anybody with eyes to see. And she crowns all by speaking the English language with a beauty that has seldom been equalled. XVIII. TENNYSON'S COMEDY OF THE FORESTERS. "Besides, the King's name is a tower of strength." Thousands of people all over the world honour, and ought to honour, every word that falls from the pen of Alfred Tennyson. He is a very great man. No poet since the best time of Byron has written the English language so well--that is to say, with such affluent splendour of imagination; such passionate vigour; such nobility of thought; such tenderness of pathos; such pervasive grace, and so much of that distinctive variety, flexibility, and copious and felicitous amplitude which are the characteristics of an original style. No poet of the last fifty years has done so much to stimulate endurance in the human soul and to clarify spiritual vision in the human mind. It does not signify that now, at more than fourscore, his hand sometimes trembles a little on the harp-strings, and his touch falters, and his music dies away. It is still the same harp and the same hand. This fanciful, kindly, visionary, drifting, and altogether romantic comedy of _Robin Hood_ is not to be tried by the standard that is author reared when he wrote _Ulysses_ and _Tithonus_ and _The Passing of Arthur_--that imperial, unapproachable standard that no other poet has satisfied. "Cold upon the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day." But though the passion be subdued and the splendour faded, the deep current of feeling flows on and the strong and tender voice can still touch the heart and charm the ear. That tide of emotion and that tone of melody blend in this play and make it beautiful. The passion is no longer that of _Enone_ and _Lucretius_ and _Guinevere_ and _Locksley Hall_ and _Maud_ and _The Vision of Sin_. The thought is no longer that of _In Memoriam_, with its solemn majesty and infinite pathos. The music is no longer that of _The May Queen_ and the _Talking Oak_ and _Idle Tears_. But why should these be expected? He who struck those notes strikes now another; and as we listen our wonder grows, and cannot help but grow, that a bard of fourscore and upward should write in such absolute sympathy with youth, love, hope, happiness, and all that is free and wandering and martial and active in the vicissitudes of adventure, the exploits of chivalry, and the vagabondish spirit of gypsy frolic. The fact that he does write in that mood points to the one illuminative truth now essential to be remembered. The voice to which we are privileged to listen, perhaps for the last time, is the voice of a great poet--by which is meant a poet who is able, not through the medium of intellect but through the medium of emotion, to make the total experience of mankind his own experience, and to express it not only in the form of art but with the fire of nature. The element of power, in all the expressions of such a mind, will fluctuate; but every one of its expressions will be sincere and in a greater or less degree will be vital with a universal and permanent significance. That virtue is in Alfred Tennyson's comedy of _Robin Hood_, and that virtue will insure for it an abiding endurance in affectionate public esteem. The realm into which this play allures its auditor is the realm of _Ivanhoe_--the far-off, romantic region of Sherwood forest, in the ancient days of stout king Richard the First. The poet has gone to the old legends of Robin Hood and to the ballads that have been made upon them, and out of those materials--using them freely, according to his fancy--he has chosen his scene and his characters and has made his story. It is not the England of the mine and the workshop that he represents, and neither is it the England of the trim villa and the formal landscape; it is the England of the feudal times--of gray castle towers, and armoured knights, and fat priests, and wandering minstrels, and crusades and tournaments; England in rush-strewn bowers and under green boughs; the England in which Wamba jested and Blondel sung. To enter into that realm is to leave the barren world of prose; to feel again the cool, sweet winds of summer upon the brow of youth; to catch, in fitful glimpses, the shimmer of the Lincoln green in the sunlit, golden glades of the forest, and to hear the merry note of the huntsman commingled, far away, with "horns of Elfland faintly blowing." The appeal is made to the primitive, elemental, poetical instinct of mankind; and no detail of realism is obtruded, no question of probability considered, no agony of the sin-tortured spirit subjected to analysis, no controversy promoted and no moral lesson enforced. For once the public is favoured with a serious poetical play, which aims simply to diffuse happiness by arousing sympathy with pleasurable scenes and picturesque persons, with virtue that is piquant and humour that is refined, with the cheerful fortitude that takes adversity with a smile, and with that final fortunate triumph of good over evil which is neither ensanguined with gore nor saddened with tears, nor made acrid with bitterness. The play is pastoral comedy, written partly in blank verse and partly in prose, and cast almost wholly out of doors--in the open air and under the greenwood tree--and, in order to stamp its character beyond doubt or question, one scene of it is frankly devoted to a convocation of fairies around Titania, their queen. The impulse that underlies this piece is the old, incessant, undying aspiration, that men and women of the best order feel, for some avenue of escape, some relief, some refuge, from the sickening tyranny of convention and the commonplace, and from the overwhelming mystery with which all human life is haunted and oppressed. A man who walks about in a forest is not necessarily free. He may be as great a slave as anybody. But the exalted imagination dwells upon his way of life as emancipated, breezy, natural, and right. That way, to the tired thinker, lie peace and joy. There, if anywhere--as he fancies--he might escape from all the wrongs of the world, all the problems of society, all the dull business of recording, and analysing, and ticketing mankind, all the clash of selfish systems that people call history, and all the babble that they call literature. In that retreat he would feel the rain upon his face, and smell the grass and the flowers, and hear the sighing and whispering of the wind in the green boughs; and there would be no need to trouble himself any more, whether about the past or the future. Every great intellect of the world has felt that wild longing, and has recorded it--the impulse to revert to the vast heart of Nature, that knows no doubt, and harbours no fear, and keeps no regret, and feels no sorrow, and troubles itself not at all. Matthew Arnold dreamily and perhaps austerely expressed it in _The Scholar Gypsy_. Byron more humanly uttered it in four well-remembered lines, of _Childe Harold_: "Oh, that the desert were my dwelling-place, With one fair spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race, And, hating nothing, love but only her." _Robin Hood_, as technical drama, is frail. Its movement, indeed, is not more indolent than that of its lovely prototypes in Shakespeare, _As You Like It_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. With all the pastorals Time ambles. But, on the other hand, Tennyson's piece is not a match for either of those Shakespearean works, in massiveness of dramatic signification or in the element of opportunity for the art of acting. Character, poetry, philosophy, humour, and suggestion it contains; but it contains no single scene in which its persons can amply put forth their full histrionic powers with essentially positive dramatic effect. Its charm resides more in being than in doing, and therefore it is more a poem than a play, and perhaps more a picture than a poem. It is not one of those works that arouse, agitate, and impel. It aims only to create and sustain a pleased condition; and that aim it has accomplished. No spectator will be deeply moved by it, but no spectator will look at it without delight. While, however, _Robin Hood_ as a drama is frail, it is not destitute of the dramatic element. It depicts a central character in action, and it tells a representative love story--a story in which the oppressive persecutor of impoverished age is foiled and discomfited, in which faithful affection survives the test of trial, and in which days of danger end at last in days of blissful peace. Traces of the influence of Shakespeare--exerted by his pastoral comedies and by the _Merry Wives of Windsor_--are obvious in it. There is no imitation; there is only kinship. The sources that Scott explored for some of the material used in _Ivanhoe_ also announce themselves. Many stories could be derived from the old Robin Hood ballads. The poet has only chosen and rearranged such of their incidents as would suit his purpose--using those old ballads with perfect freedom, but also using them with faultless taste. Robin Hood was born at Locksley, in the county of Nottingham, about 1160, when Henry the Second was king. His true name was Robert Fitzooth--a name that popular mispronunciation converted into Robin Hood--and he was of noble lineage. Old records declare him to have been the Earl of Huntingdon. He was extravagant and adventurous, and for reasons that are unknown he preferred to live in the woods. His haunts were chiefly Sherwood Forest, in Nottinghamshire, and Barnsdale, in Yorkshire. Among his associates were William Scadlock, commonly called Scarlet; Much, a miller's son; Friar Tuck, a vagabond monk; and Little John, whose name was Nailor. Robin Hood and his band were kind to the poor; but they robbed the rich and they were specially hard on the clergy. There is a tradition that a woman named Maid Marian went with Robin into the forest, but nothing is known about her. Robin lived till the age of eighty-seven, and he might have lived longer but that a treacherous relative, the prioress of Kirkley--to whose care he had entrusted himself in order that he might be bled--allowed him to bleed to death. At the time indicated in Tennyson's comedy--the year 1194, which was the year of King Richard's return from captivity in Germany--he was thirty-four years old. It is the year of _Ivanhoe_, and in the play as in the novel, the evil agent is the usurper Prince John. Fifteen characters take part in this comedy. Act first is called "The Bond and the Outlawry." The action begins in a garden before Sir Richard Lea's castle--or rather the dialogue begins there, by which the basis of the action is revealed. Maid Marian is Marian Lea, the daughter of Sir Richard. Walter Lea, the son of Sir Richard, has been captured by the Moors, and in order to pay the boy's ransom Sir Richard has borrowed a large sum of money from the Abbot of York. That debt must presently be paid; but Sir Richard does not see his way clear to its payment, and if he does not pay it he must forfeit his land. The Sheriff of Nottingham, a wealthy suitor for the hand of Marian, is willing to pay that debt, in case the girl will favour his suit. But Marian loves the Earl of Huntingdon and is by him beloved; and all would go well with those lovers, and with Sir Richard, but that the Earl of Huntingdon is poor. Poor though he be, however, he makes a feast, to celebrate his birthday, and to that festival Sir Richard and his daughter are bidden. Act first displays the joyous proceedings of that good meeting and the posture of those characters toward each other. The Sheriff of Nottingham intrudes himself upon the scene, accompanied by Prince John, who is disguised as a friar. The Prince has cast a covetous eye upon Marian, and, although he outwardly favours the wish of the Sheriff, he is secretly determined to seize her for himself. The revellers at Huntingdon's feast, unaware of the Prince's presence, execrate his name, and at length he retires, in a silent fury. Robin gives to Marian a remarkable ring that he has inherited from his mother. Later a herald enters and reads a proclamation from Prince John, declaring the Earl of Huntingdon to be a felon, and commanding his banishment. Robin cannot forcibly oppose that mandate, and he therefore determines to cast in his lot with Scarlet and Friar Tuck and other "minions of the moon," and thenceforward to live a free and merry life under the green boughs of Sherwood Forest. A year is supposed to pass. Act second, called "The Flight of Marian," begins with a song of the Foresters, in the deep wood--"There is no land like England." That is a scene of much gentle beauty, enhanced by Robin Hood's delivery of some of the finest poetry in the play, and also by the delicious music of Sir Arthur Sullivan. Robin descants upon freedom, and upon the advantage of dwelling beneath the sky rather than beneath a groined roof that shuts out all the meaning of heaven. There is a colloquy between Little John, who is one of Robin's men, and Kate, who is Marian's maid. Those two are lovers who quarrel and make it up again, as lovers will. Kate has come to the forest, bringing word of the flight of her mistress. Prince John has tried to seize Marian, and that brave girl has repulsed and struck him; and she and her father have fled--intending to make for France, in which land the old knight expects to find a friend who will pay his debt and save his estate. While Robin is considering these things he perceives the approach of Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and, thereupon, he takes refuge in the hut of an old witch and disguises himself in some of her garments. Prince John and the Sheriff, who are in pursuit of Sir Richard and Marian, find Robin in this disguise, and for a time they are deceived by him; but soon they penetrate his masquerade and assail him--whereupon some of his people come to his assistance, and he is reinforced by Sir Richard Lea. Prince John and his party are beaten and driven away. Sir Richard is exhausted, and Robin commits him to the care of the Foresters. Marian, arrayed as a boy, and pretending to be her brother Walter, has been present at this combat, as a spectator, and a sparkling scene of equivoke, mischief, and sentiment ensues between Marian and Robin. That scene Tennyson wrote and inserted for Ada Rehan, to whose vivacious temperament it is fitted, and whose action in it expressed with equal felicity the teasing temper of the coquette and the propitious fondness of the lover. Robin discovers Marian's identity by means of the ring that he gave her, and, after due explanation, it is agreed that she and her father will remain under his protection. Act third is called "The Crowning of Marian," and is devoted to pictures, colloquies, and incidents, now serious and now comical, showing the life of the Foresters and the humorous yet discriminative justice of their gypsy chief. Sir Richard Lea is ill and he cannot be moved. The outlaws crown Marian, with an oaken chaplet, and declare her to be their queen. Robin Hood vindicates his vocation, and in a noble speech on freedom--deriving his similes from the giant oak tree, as Tennyson has ever loved to do--declares himself the friend of the poor and the servant of the king; the absent Richard of the Lion Heart, for whose return all good men are eager. Various beggars, friars, and other travellers are halted on the road, in practical illustration of Robin's doctrine; comic incidents from the old ballads are reproduced; and so the episode ends merrily of these frolics in the wood. At that point a delicious fairy pageant is introduced, presenting Queen Titania and her elves and illustrating at once the grievance of the fairies against the men whose heavy feet have crushed their toads and bats and flowers and mystic rings, and Marian's dream of love. Sir Arthur Sullivan's music is here again used, and again it is felt to be characteristic, melodious, and uncommonly sweet and tender. Act fourth begins in a forest bower at sunrise. Marian and Robin meet there and talk of Sir Richard and of his bond to the Abbot of York--soon to fall due and seemingly to remain unpaid. Robin has summoned the Abbot and his justiciary to come into the forest and to bring the bond. King Richard, unrecognised, now arrives, and in submission to certain laws of the woodland he engages in an encounter of buffets, and prevails over all his adversaries. At the approach of the Abbot, however, fearing premature recognition, the monarch will flit away; but his gypsy friends compel him to accept a bugle, upon which he is to blow a blast when in danger. The Abbot and his followers arrive, and Robin Hood offers the money to redeem Sir Richard's bond; but, upon a legal quibble, the Abbot declines to receive it--preferring to seize the forfeited land. Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham appear, and Robin and his Foresters form an ambuscade. Sir Richard Lea has been brought in, upon his litter, and Marian stays beside him. Prince John attempts to seize her, but this time he is frustrated by the sudden advent of King Richard--from whose presence he slinks away. The myrmidons of John, however, attack the King, who would oppose them single-handed; but Friar Tuck snatches the King's bugle and blows a blast of summons--whereupon the Foresters swarm into the field and possess it. John's faction is dispersed, Marian is saved, the absent Walter Lea reappears, Sir Richard is assured of his estate, the Abbot and the Sheriff are punished, and Robin Hood and Maid Marian may wed--for now the good King Richard has come again to his own. The lyrics in the piece possess the charm of fluent and unaffected sweetness, and of original, inventive, and felicitous fancy, and some of them are tenderly freighted with that indescribable but deeply affecting undertone of pathetic sentiment which is a characteristic attribute of Tennyson's poetry. The characters in the comedy were creatures of flesh and blood to the author, and they come out boldly, therefore, on the stage. Marian Lea is a woman of the Rosalind order--handsome, noble, magnanimous, unconventional, passionate in nature, but sufficient unto herself, humorous, playful, and radiant with animal spirits. Ada Rehan embodied her according to that ideal. The chief exaction of the part is simplicity--which yet must not be allowed to degenerate into tameness. The sweet affection of a daughter for her father, the coyness yet the allurement of a girl for her lover, the refinement of high birth, the blithe bearing and free demeanour of a child of the woods, and the predominant dignity of purity and honour--those are the salient attributes of the part. Ada Rehan struck the true note at the outset--the note of buoyant health, rosy frolic, and sprightly adventure--and she sustained it evenly and firmly to the last. Every eye was pleased with the frank, careless, cheerful beauty of her presence, and every ear was soothed and charmed with her fluent and expressive delivery of the verse. In this, as in all of the important representations that Ada Rehan has given, the delightful woman-quality was conspicuously present. She can readily impersonate a boy. No actress since Adelaide Neilson has done that so well. But the crowning excellence of her art was its expression of essential womanhood. Her acting was never trivial and it never obtruded the tedious element of dry intellect. It refreshed--and the spectator was happier for having seen her. Many pleasant thoughts were scattered in many minds by her performance of Maid Marian, and no one who saw it will ever part with the remembrance of it. XIX. ELLEN TERRY: THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. It was perhaps an auspicious portent, it certainly is an interesting fact, that the first play that was ever acted in America at a regular theatre and by a regular theatrical company was Shakespeare's comedy of _The Merchant of Venice_. Such at least is the record made by William Dunlap, the first historian of the American theatre, who names Williamsburg, Virginia, as the place and September 5, 1752 as the date of that production. It ought to be noted, however (so difficult is it to settle upon any fact in this uncertain world), that the learned antiquarian Judge C.P. Daly, fortified likewise by the scrupulously accurate Ireland, dissents from Dunlap's statement and declares that Cibber's alteration of Shakespeare's _Richard the Third_ was acted by a regular company in a large room in Nassau Street, New York, at an earlier date, namely, on March 5, 1750. All the same, it appears to have been Shakespeare's mind that started the dramatic movement in America. The American stage has undergone great changes since that time, but both _The Merchant of Venice_ and _Richard the Third_ are still acted, and in the _Merchant_, if not in _Richard_, the public interest is still vital. In New York, under Edwin Booth's management, at the Winter Garden theatre, January 28, 1867, and subsequently at Booth's theatre, and in London, under Henry Irving's management, at the Lyceum theatre, November 1, 1879, sumptuous productions of the _Merchant_ have brilliantly marked the dramatic chronicle of our times. Discussion of the great character of Shylock steadily proceeds and seems never to weary either the disputants or the audience. The sentiment, the fancy, and the ingenuity of artists are often expended not only upon the austere, picturesque, and terrible figure of the vindictive Jew, but upon the chief related characters in the comedy--upon Bassanio and Portia, Gratiano and Nerissa, Lorenzo and Jessica, the princely and pensive Antonio, the august Duke and his stately senators, and the shrewd and humorous Gobbo. More than one painting has depicted the ardent Lorenzo and his fugitive infidel as they might have looked on that delicious summer night at Belmont when they saw "how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold," and when the blissful lover, radiant with happiness and exalted by the sublime, illimitable, unfathomable spectacle of the star-strewn firmament, murmured, in such heaven-like cadence, of the authentic music of heaven. It is not to be denied that lovely words are spoken to Jessica, and that almost equally lovely words are spoken by her. Essayists upon the _Merchant_ have generally accepted her without a protest--so much do youth and beauty in a woman count in the scale when weighed against duty and integrity. There is no indication that Shylock was ever unjust or unkind to Jessica. Whatever he may have been to others he seems always to have been good to her; and she was the child of that lost Leah of his youthful devotion whom he passionately loved and whom he mourned to the last. Yet Jessica not only abandoned her father and his religion, but robbed him of money and jewels (including the betrothal ring, the turquoise, that her mother had given to him), when she fled with the young Christian who had won her heart. It was a basely cruel act; but probably some of the vilest and cruelest actions that are done in this world are done by persons who are infatuated by the passion of love. Mrs. Jameson, who in her beautiful essay on Portia extenuates the conduct of Jessica, would have us believe that Shylock valued his daughter far beneath his wealth, and therefore deserved to be deserted and plundered by her; and she is so illogical as to derive his sentiments on this subject from his delirious outcries of lamentation after he learned of her predatory and ignominious flight. The argument is not a good one. Fine phrases do not make wrong deeds right. It were wiser to take Jessica for the handsome and voluptuous girl that certainly she is, and to leave her rectitude out of the question. Shakespeare in his drawing of her was true to nature, as he always is; but the student who wants to know where Shakespeare's heart was placed when he drew women must look upon creatures very different from Jessica. The women that Shakespeare seems peculiarly to have loved are Imogen, Cordelia, Isabella, Rosalind, and Portia--Rosalind, perhaps, most of all; for although Portia is finer than Rosalind, it is extremely probable that Shakespeare resembled his fellow-men sufficiently to have felt the preference that Tom Moore long afterward expressed: "Be an angel, my love, in the morning, But, oh! be a woman to-night." When Ellen Terry embodied Portia--in Henry Irving's magnificent revival of _The Merchant of Venice_--the essential womanhood of that character was for the first time in the modern theatre adequately interpreted and conveyed. Upon many play-going observers indeed the wonderful wealth of beauty that is in the part--its winsome grace, its incessant sparkle, its alluring because piquant as well as luscious sweetness, its impetuous ardour, its enchantment of physical equally with emotional condition, its august morality, its perfect candour, and its noble passion--came like a surprise. Did the great actress find those attributes in the part (they asked themselves), or did she infuse them into it? Previous representatives of Portia had placed the emphasis chiefly, if not exclusively, upon morals and mind. The stage Portia of the past has usually been a didactic lady, self-contained, formal, conventional, and oratorical. Ellen Terry came, and Portia was figured exactly as she lives in the pages of Shakespeare--an imperial and yet an enchanting woman, dazzling in her beauty, royal in her dignity, as ardent in temperament as she is fine in brain and various and splendid in personal peculiarities and feminine charm. After seeing that matchless impersonation it seemed strange that Portia should ever have been represented in any other light, and it was furthermore felt that the inferior, mechanical, utilitarian semblance of her could not again be endured. Ellen Terry's achievement was a complete vindication of the high view that Shakespearean study has almost always taken of that character, and it finally discredited the old stage notion that Portia is a type of decorum and declamation. Aside from Hazlitt, who thought that Portia is affected and pedantic, and who did not like her because he did not happen to appreciate her, the best analytical thinkers about Shakespeare's works have taken the high view of that character. Shakespeare himself certainly took it; for aside from her own charming behaviour and delightful words it is to be observed that everybody in the play who speaks of her at all speaks her praise. It is only upon the stage that she has been made artificial, prim, and preachy. That misrepresentation of her has, perhaps, been caused, in part, by the practice long prevalent in our theatre of cutting and compressing the play so as to make Shylock the chief figure in it. In that way Portia is shorn of much of her splendour and her meaning. The old theatrical records dwell almost exclusively upon Shylock, and say little if anything about Portia. In Shakespeare's time, no doubt, _The Merchant of Venice_ was acted as it is written, the female persons in it being played by boys, or by men who could "speak small." Alexander Cooke (1588-1614) played the light heroines of Shakespeare while the poet was alive. All students of the subject are aware that Burbage was the first Shylock, and that when he played the part he wore a red wig, a red beard, and a long false nose. No record exists as to the first Portia. The men who were acting female characters upon the London stage when that institution was revived immediately after the Restoration were Kynaston, James Nokes, Angel, William Betterton, Mosely, and Floid. Kynaston, it is said, could act a woman so well that when at length women themselves began to appear as actors it was for some time doubted whether any one of them could equal him. The account of his life, however, does not mention Portia as one of his characters. Indeed the play of _The Merchant of Venice_, after it languished out of sight in that decadence of the stage which ensued upon the growth of the Puritan movement in England, did not again come into use until it was revived in Lord Landsdowne's alteration of it produced at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1701, and even then it was grossly perverted. Forty years later, however, on St. Valentine's Day 1741, at Drury Lane, when Macklin regenerated the character of Shylock, the original piece was restored to the theatre. Women in the meantime had come upon the stage. The garrulous and delightful Pepys, who had seen Kynaston play a female part, records in his marvellous Diary that he first saw women as actors on January 3, 1661. Those were members of Killigrew's company, which preceded that of Davenant by several months, if not by a year; and therefore the common statement in theatrical books that the first woman that ever appeared on the English stage was Mrs. Sanderson, of Davenant's company, at Lincoln's Inn Fields, is erroneous: and indeed the name of the first English actress is as much unknown as the name of the first Portia. When Macklin restored Shakespeare's _Merchant of Venice_ to the stage it is not likely that the character of Portia was dwarfed, for its representative then was Kitty Clive, and that actress was a person of strong will. With Clive the long list begins of the Portias of the stage. She was thirty years old when she played the part with Macklin, and it is probable that she played it with dignity and certain that she played it with sparkling animation and piquant grace. The German Ulrici, whose descriptive epithets for Portia are "roguish and intellectual," would doubtless have found his ideal of the part fulfilled in Clive. The Nerissa that night was Mrs. Pritchard, then also thirty years old, but not so famous as she afterward became. The greatest actress on the British stage in the eighteenth century undoubtedly was Margaret Woffington (1719-1760). Sarah Siddons, to whom the sceptre passed, was only five years old when Woffington died. Both those brilliant names are associated with Portia. Augustin Daly's _Life of Woffington_--the best life of her that has been written, and one of the most sumptuous books that have been made--contains this reference to her performance of that part: "All her critics agree that her declamation was accurate and her gesture grace and nature combined; but in tragic or even dramatic speeches her voice probably had its limits, and in such scenes, being overtaxed, told against her. As Portia she appeared to great advantage; but when Lorenzo says, 'This is the voice, or I am much deceived, of Portia,' and Portia replies, 'He knows me, as the blind man knows the cuckoo, by the bad voice,' the audience laughed outright, and Woffington, conscious of her deficiency, with great good-humour joined with them in their merriment." The incident is mentioned in the _Table Talk_ (1825) of Richard Ryan, to which book Daly refers. Mrs. Siddons made her first appearance on the London stage as Portia December 29, 1775, and conspicuously failed in the part on that occasion, but she became distinguished in it afterward; yet it is probable that Mrs. Siddons expressed its nobility more than its tenderness, and much more than its buoyant and glittering glee, which was so entirely and beautifully given by Ellen Terry. After Peg Woffington and before Mrs. Siddons the most conspicuous Portia was Mrs. Dancer, whom Hugh Kelley, in his satirical composition of _Thespis_, calls a "moon-eyed idiot,"--from which barbarous bludgeon phrase the reader derives a hint as to her aspect. Some of the tones of Mrs. Dancer's voice were so tender that no one could resist them. Spranger Barry could not, for he married her, and after his death she became Mrs. Crawford. Miss Maria Macklin, daughter of the first true Shylock of the stage, acted Portia, April 13, 1776, with her father. She is recorded as an accomplished woman but destitute of genius--in which predicament she probably was not lonesome. On June 11, 1777 Portia was acted at the Haymarket by Miss Barsanti, afterward Mrs. Lister, an actress who, since she excelled in such parts as were customarily taken by Fanny Abington (the distinct opposite of Portia-like characters), must have been unsuited for it. The names of Miss Younge, Miss Farren, Miss E. Kemble, Miss Ryder, Mrs. Pope, Miss De Camp, and Miss Murray are in the record of the stage Portias that comes down to 1800. Probably the best of all those Portias was Mrs. Pope. The beautiful Mrs. Glover played Portia in 1809 at the Haymarket theatre. Mrs. Ogilvie played it, with Macready as Shylock (his first appearance in that part), on May 13, 1823. Those figures passed and left no shadow. Two English actresses of great fame are especially associated with Portia--Ellen Tree, afterward Mrs. Charles Kean, and Helen Faucit, now Lady Martin; and no doubt their assumptions of the part should be marked as exceptions from the hard, didactic, declamatory, perfunctory method that has customarily characterised the Portia of the stage. Lady Martin's written analysis of Portia is noble in thought and subtle and tender in penetration and sympathy. Charlotte Cushman read the text superbly, but she was much too formidable ever to venture on assuming the character. Portia is a woman who deeply loves and deeply rejoices and exults in her love, and she is never ashamed of her passion or of her exultation in it; and she says the finest things about love that are said by any of Shakespeare's women; the finest because, while supremely passionate, the feeling in them is perfectly sane. It is as a lover that Ellen Terry embodied her, and while she made her a perfect woman, in all the attributes that fascinate, she failed not, in the wonderful trial scene, to invest her with that fine light of celestial anger--that momentary thrill of moral austerity--which properly appertains to the character at the climax of a solemn and almost tragical situation. On the American stage there have been many notable representatives of the chief characters in _The Merchant of Venice_. In New York, when the comedy was done at the old John Street theatre in 1773, Hallam was Shylock and Mrs. Morris Portia. Twenty years afterward, at the same house, Shylock was played by John Henry, and Portia by Mrs. Henry, while the brilliant Hodgkinson appeared as Gratiano. Cooper, whose life has been so well written by that ripe theatrical scholar Joseph N. Ireland, in one of the books of the Dunlap Society, assumed Shylock in 1797 at the theatre just then opened in Greenwich Street. The famous Miss Brunton (then Mrs. Merry), was the Portia, and the cast included Moreton as Bassanio, Warren as Antonio, Bernard as Gratiano, and Blissett as Tubal. How far away and how completely lost and forgotten those once distinguished and admired persons are! Yet Cooper in his day was idolised: he had a fame as high, if not as widely spread, as that of Henry Irving or Edwin Booth at present. William Creswick--lately dead at an advanced age in London--was seen upon the New York stage as Shylock in 1840; Macready in 1841; Charles Kean in 1845. With the latter, Ellen Tree played Portia. Charles W. Couldock enacted Shylock on September 6, 1852, at the Castle Garden theatre, in a performance given to commemorate the alleged centenary of the introduction of the drama into America. The elder Wallack, the elder Booth, Edwin Forrest, G.V. Brooke, George Vandenhoff, Wyzeman Marshall, and E.L. Davenport are among the old local representatives of the Jew. Madam Ponisi used to play Portia, and so did Mrs. Hoey. In December 1858, when _The Merchant of Venice_ was finely revived at Wallack's theatre, with the elder Wallack as Shylock, the cast included Lester Wallack as Bassanio, John Brougham as Gratiano, A. W. Young--a quaintly comic actor, too soon cut off--as Launcelot Gobbo, Mary Gannon--the fascinating, the irresistible--as Nerissa, and handsome Mrs. Sloan as Jessica. The eminent German actor Davison played Shylock, in New York, in his own language; and many German actors, no one of them comparable with him, have been seen in it since. Lawrence Barrett often played it, and with remarkable force and feeling. The triumphs won in it by Edwin Booth are within the remembrance of many playgoers of this generation. When he last acted the Jew Helena Modjeska was associated with him as Portia. Booth customarily ended the piece with the trial scene, omitting the last act; and indeed that was long the stage custom; but with the true Portia of Ellen Terry and a good cast in general the last act went blithely and with superb effect. The comedy was not written for Shylock alone. He is a tremendous identity, but he is not the chief subject. The central theme is Portia and her love. That theme takes up a large part of the play,--which is like a broad summer landscape strewn with many-coloured flowers that flash and glitter in the sun, while slowly a muttering thunder-storm gathers and lowers, and presently sweeps overhead, casting one black shadow as it passes, and leaving the fragrant and glistening plain all the brighter and sweeter for the contrast with its defeated menace and vanishing gloom. XX. RICHARD MANSFIELD AS RICHARD THE THIRD. The ideal of Richard that was expressed by this actor did not materially differ from that which has been manifested by great tragic actors from Garrick to Booth. He embodied a demoniac scoffer who, nevertheless, is a human being. The infernal wickedness of Richard was shown to be impelled by tremendous intellect but slowly enervated and ultimately thwarted and ruined by the cumulative operation of remorse--corroding at the heart and finally blasting the man with desolation and frenzy. That, undoubtedly, was Shakespeare's design. But Richard Mansfield's expression of that ideal differed from the expression to which the stage has generally been accustomed, and in this respect his impersonation was distinctive and original. The old custom of playing Richard was to take the exaggerated statements of the opening soliloquy in a literal sense, to provide him with a big hump, a lame leg, and a fell of straight black hair, and to make him walk in, scowling, with his lower lip protruded, and declare with snarling vehemence and guttural vociferation his amiable purpose of specious duplicity and miscellaneous slaughter. The opening speech, which is in Shakespeare's juvenile manner--an orotund, verbose manner, which perhaps he had caught from Marlowe, and which he outgrew and abandoned--was thus utilised for displaying the character in a massed aspect, as that of a loathsome hypocrite and sanguinary villain; and, that being done, he was made to advance through about two-thirds of the tragedy, airily yet ferociously slaying everybody who came in his way, until at some convenient point, definable at the option of the actor, he was suddenly smitten with a sufficient remorse to account for his trepidation before and during the tent-scene; and thereafter he was launched into combat like a meteoric butcher, all frenzy and all gore, and killed, amid general acclamation, when he had fenced himself out of breath. That treatment of the character was, doubtless, in part a necessary consequence of Shakespeare's perfunctory adoption of the Tudor doctrine that Richard was a blood-boltered monster; but in a larger degree it was the result of Cibber's vulgar distortion of the original piece. The actual character of the king,--who seems to have been one of the ablest and wisest monarchs that ever reigned in England--has never recovered, and it never will recover, from the odium that was heaped upon it by the Tudor historians and accepted and ratified by the great genius of Shakespeare. The stage character of the king has been almost as effectually damned by the ingenious theatrical claptrap with which Cibber misrepresented and vulgarised Shakespeare's conception, assisted by the efforts of a long line of blood-and-thunder tragedians, only too well pleased to depict a gory, blathering, mugging miscreant, such as their limited intelligence enabled them to comprehend. The stage Richard, however, may possibly be redeemed. In Cibber he is everything that Queen Margaret calls him, and worse than a brute. In Shakespeare, although a miscreant, he is a man. The return to Shakespeare, accordingly, is a step in the right direction. That step was taken some time ago, although not maintained, first by Macready, then by Samuel Phelps, then by Edwin Booth, and then by Henry Irving. Their good example was followed by Richard Mansfield. He used a version of the tragedy, made by himself,--a piece indicative of thoughtful study of the subject as well as a keen intuitive grasp of it. He did not stop short at being a commentator. Aiming to impersonate a character he treated Shakespeare's prolix play in such a manner as to make it a practicable living picture of a past age. The version was in five acts, preserving the text of the original, much condensed, and introducing a few lines from Cibber. It began with a bright processional scene before the Tower of London, in which Elizabeth, Queen of Edward IV., was conspicuous, and against that background of "glorious summer" it placed the dangerous figure of the Duke of Gloster. It comprised the murder of Henry VI., the wooing of Lady Anne,--not in a London street, but in a rural place, on the road to Chertsey; the lamentation for King Edward IV.; the episode of the boy princes; the condemnation of Hastings,--a scene that brilliantly denotes the mingled artifice and savagery of Shakespeare's Gloster; the Buckingham plot; the priest and mayor scene; the temptation of Tyrrel; the fall of Buckingham; the march to battle; the episode of the spectres; and the fatal catastrophe on Bosworth Field. Enough of the story was thus related to satisfy the Shakespeare scholar. The notable peculiarity was the assumption that there are considerable lapses of time at intervals during the continuance of the story. The effort to reconcile poetry with history produced little if any appreciable practical result upon the stage,--seeing that an audience would not think of lapses of time unless those lapses were mentioned in the play-bill. An incessant continuity of action, a ceaseless rush and whirl of events, is the essential life of the play. No auditor can feel that Richard has waited twelve years before making any movement or striking any blow, after his aspiration that heaven will take King Edward and leave the world for him "to bustle in." That word "bustle" is a favourite word with Richard. And furthermore there is no development of his character in Shakespeare's play: there is simply the presentation of it, complete and rounded at the outset, and remaining invariably and inflexibly the same to the close. Mansfield, however, deduced this effect from his consideration of the flight of time: a contrast between Richard at nineteen and Richard at thirty-three, a contrast strongly expressive of the reactionary influence that an experience of evil deeds has produced upon a man who at first was only a man of evil thoughts and evil will. This imported into the performance a diversity of delineation without, however, affecting the formidable weight of the figure of Richard, or its brilliancy, or its final significance. The embodiment was splendid with it, and would be just as splendid without it. The presence of heart and conscience in that demoniac human creature is denoted by Shakespeare and must be shown by the actor. Precisely at what point his heaven-defying will should begin to waver is not defined. Mansfield chose to indicate the operation of remorse and terror in Richard's soul as early as the throne scene and before yet the king has heard that the royal boys have been murdered. The effect of his action, equally with the method of it, was magnificent. You presently saw him possessed of the throne for which he had so terribly toiled and sinned, and alone upon it, bathed in blood-red light, the pitiable personification of gorgeous but haunted evil, marked off from among mankind and henceforth desolate. Throughout that fine scene Mansfield's portrayal of the fearful struggle between wicked will and human weakness was in a noble vein of imagination, profound in its sincerity, affecting in its pathos, and pictorial in its treatment. In the earlier scenes his mood and his demeanour had been suffused with a cool, gay, mockery of elegant cynicism. He killed King Henry with a smile, in a scene of gloomy mystery that might have come from the pencil of Gustave Dore. He looked upon the mourning Lady Anne with cheerful irony and he wooed her with all the fervour that passion and pathos can engender in the behaviour of a hypocrite. His dissimulation with the princes and with the mayor and the nobles was to the last degree specious. One of his finest points was the temptation of Buckingham to murder the princes. There, and indeed at all points, was observed the absence of even the faintest reminiscence of the ranting, mouthing, flannel-jawed king of clubs who has so generally strutted and bellowed as Shakespeare's Gloster. All was bold and telling in the manner, and yet the manner was reticent with nature and fine with well-bred continence. With the throne scene began the spiritual conflict. At least it then began to be disclosed; and from that moment onward the state of Richard was seen to be that of Orestes pursued by the furies. But Mansfield was right, and was consistent, in making the monarch faithful in his devotion to evil. Richard's presentiments, pangs, and tremors are intermittent. In the great, empty, darkening throne-room, with its shadowy nooks and dim corners, shapeless and nameless spectres may momentarily come upon him and shake his strong spirit with the sinister menace of hell. Along the dark plains, on the fateful night before the battle, the sad ghosts may drift and wander, moaning and wailing in the ghastly gloom; and in that hour of haunted desolation the doomed king may feel that, after all, he is but mortal man, and that his pre-ordered destruction is close at hand and not to be averted; but Richard never deceives himself; never palters with the goodness that he has scorned. He dies as he has lived, defiant and terrible. Mansfield's treatment of the ghost scenes at Bosworth was novel, original, and poetic, and his death scene was not only a display of personal prowess but a reproduction of historical fact. With a detail like this the truth of history becomes useful, but in general the actor cannot safely go back of the Shakespearean scheme. To present Richard as he probably was would be to present a man of some virtue as well as great ability. Mansfield's acting revealed an amiable desire to infuse as much goodness as possible into the Shakespearean conception, but he obtained his chief success by acting the part substantially according to Shakespeare and by setting and dressing the play with exceptional if not altogether exact fidelity to the time, the places, and the persons that are implicated in the story. Shakespeare's Richard is a type of colossal will and of restless, inordinate, terrific activity. The objects of his desire and his effort are those objects which are incident to supreme power; but his chief object is that assertion of himself which is irresistibly incited and steadfastly compelled by the overwhelming, seething, acrid energy of his feverish soul, burning and raging in his fiery body. He can no more help projecting himself upon the affairs of the world than the malignant cobra can help darting upon its prey. He is a vital, elemental force, grisly, hectic, terrible, impelled by volcanic heat and electrified and made lurid and deadly by the infernal purpose of restless wickedness. No actor can impersonate Richard in an adequate manner who does not possess transcendent force of will, combined with ambitious, incessant, and restless mental activity. Mansfield in those respects is qualified for the character, and out of his professional resources he was able to supply the other elements that are requisite to its constitution and fulfilment. He presented as Richard a sardonic, scoffing demon, who nevertheless, somewhere in his complex nature, retains an element of humanity. He embodied a character that is tragic in its ultimate effect, but his method was that of the comedian. His portrayal of Richard, except at those moments when it is veiled with craft and dissimulation, or at those other and grander moments, infrequent but awful and agonising, when it is convulsed with terror or with the anguish of remorse, stood forth boldly in the sunshine, a crystallised and deadly sarcasm, equally trenchant upon itself and all the world, equally scornful of things human and things divine. That deadly assumption of keen and mordant mockery, that cool, glittering, malignant lightness of manner, was consistently sustained throughout the performance, while the texture of it was made continuously entertaining by diversity of colour and inflection, sequent on changing moods; so that Richard was shown as a creature of the possible world of mankind and not as a fiction of the stage. The part was acted by him: it was not declaimed. He made, indeed, a skilful use of his uncommon voice--keeping its tones light, sweet, and superficial during the earlier scenes (while yet, in accordance with his theory of development, Gloster is the personification of evil purpose only beginning to ripen into evil deed), and then permitting them to become deeper and more significant and thrilling as the man grows old in crime and haggard and convulsed in self-conflict and misery. But it was less with vocal excellence that the auditor was impressed than with the actor's identification with the part and his revelation of the soul of it. When first presented Gloster was a mocking devil. The murder of King Henry was done with malice, but the malice was enwrapped with glee. In the wooing of Lady Anne there was both heart and passion, but the mood was that of lightsome duplicity. It is not until years of scheming and of evil acts, engendering, promoting, and sustaining a condition of mental horror and torture, have ravaged his person and set their seal upon him, in sunken cheek and hollow eye, in shattered nerves and deep and thrilling voice, surcharged at once with inveterate purpose and with incessant agony, that this light manner vanishes, and the demeanour and action of the wicked monarch becomes ruthless, direct, and terrible. Whether, upon the basis of a play so discursive, so episodical, so irresolutely defined as Shakespeare's _Richard the Third_, that theory of the development of its central character is logically tenable is a dubious question. In Shakespeare the character is presented full-grown at the start, and then, through a confused tangle of historical events, is launched into action. Nevertheless in his practical application of it Mansfield made his theory effective by a novel, powerful, interesting performance. You could not help perceiving in Mansfield's embodiment that Gloster was passing through phases of experience--that the man changed, as men do change in life, the integral character remaining the same in its original fibre, but the condition varying, in accordance with the reaction of conduct upon temperament and conscience. Mansfield deeply moved his audience in the repulse of Buckingham, in the moody menace of the absent Stanley, in the denunciation of Hastings, and in the awakening from the dream on the night before the battle. Playgoers have seldom seen a dramatic climax so thrilling as his hysterical recognition of Catesby, after the moment of doubt whether this be not also a phantom of his terrific dream. It was not so much by startling theatrical effects, however, as by subtle denotements, now of the tempest and now of the brooding horror in the king's heart, that the actor gained his victory. The embodiment lacked incessant fiery expedition--the explosive, meteoric quality that astounds and dazzles. Chief among the beauties was imagination. The attitude of the monarch toward his throne--the infernal triumph, and yet the remorseful agony and withering fear--in the moment of ghastly loneliness when he knows that the innocent princes have been murdered and that his imperial pathway is clear, made up one of the finest spectacles of dramatic illumination that the stage has afforded. You saw the murderer's hideous exultation, and then, in an instant, as the single ray of red light from the setting sun streamed through the Gothic window and fell upon his evil head, you saw him shrink in abject fear, cowering in the shadow of his throne; and the dusky room was seemingly peopled with gliding spectres. That treatment was theatrical, but in no derogatory sense theatrical--for it comports with the great speech on conscience; not the fustian of Cibber, about mutton and short-lived pleasure, but the speech that Shakespeare has put into Richard's mouth; the speech that inspired Mansfield's impersonation--the brilliant embodiment of an intellectual man, predisposed to evil, who yields to that inherent impulse, and thereafter, although intermittently convulsed with remorse, fights with tremendous energy against the goodness that he scorns and defies, till at last he dashes himself to pieces against the adamant of eternal law. XXI. GENEVIEVE WARD: FORGET ME NOT. In the season of 1880-81 Genevieve Ward made a remarkably brilliant hit with her embodiment of Stephanie De Mohrivart, in the play of _Forget Me Not_, by Herman Merivale, and since then she has acted that part literally all round the world. It was an extraordinary performance--potent with intellectual character, beautiful with refinement, nervous and steel-like with indomitable purpose and icy glitter, intense with passion, painfully true to an afflicting ideal of reality, and at last splendidly tragic: and it was a shining example of ductile and various art. Such a work ought surely to be recorded as one of the great achievements of the stage. Genevieve Ward showed herself to possess in copious abundance peculiar qualities of power and beauty upon which mainly the part of Stephanie is reared. The points of assimilation between the actress and the part were seen to consist in an imperial force of character, intellectual brilliancy, audacity of mind, iron will, perfect elegance of manners, a profound self-knowledge, and unerring intuitions as to the relation of motive and conduct in that vast network of circumstance which is the social fabric. Stephanie possesses all those attributes; and all those attributes Genevieve Ward supplied, with the luxuriant adequacy and grace of nature. But Stephanie superadds to those attributes a bitter, mocking cynicism, thinly veiled by artificial suavity and logically irradiant from natural hardness of heart, coupled with an insensibility that has been engendered by cruel experience of human selfishness. This, together with a certain mystical touch of the animal freedom, whether in joy or wrath, that goes with a being having neither soul nor conscience, the actress had to supply--and did supply--by her art. As interpreted by Genevieve Ward the character was reared, not upon a basis of unchastity but upon a basis of intellectual perversion. Stephanie has followed--at first with self-contempt, afterward with sullen indifference, finally with the bold and brilliant hardihood of reckless defiance--a life of crime. She is audacious, unscrupulous, cruel; a consummate tactician; almost sexless, yet a siren in knowledge and capacity to use the arts of her sex; capable of any wickedness to accomplish an end, yet trivial enough to have no higher end in view than the reinvestiture of herself with social recognition; cold as snow; implacable as the grave; remorseless; wicked; but, beneath all this depravity, capable of self-pity, capable of momentary regret, capable of a little human tenderness, aware of the glory of the innocence she has lost, and thus not altogether beyond the pale of compassion. And she is, in externals,--in everything visible and audible,--the ideal of grace and melody. In the presence of an admirable work of art the observer wishes that it were entirely worthy of being performed and that it were entirely clear and sound as to its applicability--in a moral sense, or even in an intellectual sense--to human life. Art does not go far when it stops short at the revelation of the felicitous powers of the artist; and it is not altogether right when it tends to beguile sympathy with an unworthy object and perplex a spectator's perceptions as to good and evil. Genevieve Ward's performance of Stephanie, brilliant though it was, did not redeem the character from its bleak exile from human sympathy. The actress managed, by a scheme of treatment exclusively her own, to make Stephanie, for two or three moments, piteous and forlorn; and her expression of that evanescent anguish--occurring in the appeal to Sir Horace Welby, her friendly foe, in the strong scene of the second act--was wonderfully subtle. That appeal, as Genevieve Ward made it, began in artifice, became profoundly sincere, and then was stunned and startled into a recoil of resentment by a harsh rebuff, whereupon it subsided through hysterical levity into frigid and brittle sarcasm and gay defiance. For a while, accordingly, the feelings of the observer were deeply moved. Yet this did not make the character of Stephanie less detestable. The blight remains upon it--and always must remain--that it repels the interest of the heart. The added blight likewise rests upon it (though this is of less consequence to a spectator), that it is burdened with moral sophistry. Vicious conduct in a woman, according to Stephanie's logic, is not more culpable or disastrous than vicious conduct in a man: the woman, equally with the man, should have a social license to sow the juvenile wild oats and effect the middle-aged reformation; and it is only because there are gay young men who indulge in profligacy that women sometimes become adventurers and moral monsters. All this is launched forth in speeches of singular terseness, eloquence, and vigour; but all this is specious and mischievous perversion of the truth--however admirably in character from Stephanie's lips. Every observer who has looked carefully upon the world is aware that the consequences of wrongdoing by a woman are vastly more pernicious than those of wrongdoing by a man; that society could not exist in decency, if to its already inconvenient coterie of reformed rakes it were to add a legion of reformed wantons; and that it is innate wickedness and evil propensity that makes such women as Stephanie, and not the mere existence of the wild young men who are willing to become their comrades--and who generally end by being their dupes and victims. It is natural, however, that this adventurer--who has kept a gambling-hell and ruined many a man, soul and body, and who now wishes to reinstate herself in a virtuous social position--should thus strive to palliate her past proceedings. Self-justification is one of the first laws of life. Even Iago, who never deceives himself, yet announces one adequate motive for his fearful crimes. Even Bulwer's Margrave--that prodigy of evil, that cardinal type of infernal, joyous, animal depravity--can yet paint himself in the light of harmless loveliness and innocent gayety. _Forget Me Not_ tells a thin story, but its story has been made to yield excellent dramatic pictures, splendid moments of intellectual combat, and affecting contrasts of character. The dialogue, particularly in the second act, is as strong and as brilliant as polished steel. In that combat of words Genevieve Ward's acting was delicious with trenchant skill and fascinating variety. The easy, good-natured, bantering air with which the strife began, the liquid purity of the tones, the delicate glow of the arch satire, the icy glitter of the thought and purpose beneath the words, the transition into pathos and back again into gay indifference and deadly hostility, the sudden and terrible mood of menace, when at length the crisis had passed and the evil genius had won its temporary victory--all those were in perfect taste and consummate harmony. Seeing that brilliant, supple, relentless, formidable figure, and hearing that incisive, bell-like voice, the spectator was repelled and attracted at the same instant, and thoroughly bewildered with the sense of a power and beauty as hateful as they were puissant. Not since Ristori acted Lucretia Borgia has the stage exhibited such an image of imperial will, made radiant with beauty and electric with flashes of passion. The leopard and the serpent are fatal, terrible, and loathsome; yet they scarcely have a peer among nature's supreme symbols of power and grace. Into the last scene of _Forget Me Not_,--when at length Stephanie is crushed by physical fear, through beholding, unseen by him, the man who would kill her as a malignant and dangerous reptile,--Genevieve Ward introduced such illustrative "business," not provided by the piece, as greatly enhanced the final effect. The backward rush from the door, on seeing the Corsican avenger on the staircase, and therewithal the incidental, involuntary cry of terror, was the invention of the actress: and from that moment to the final exit she was the incarnation of abject fear. The situation is one of the strongest that dramatic ingenuity has invented: the actress invested it with a colouring of pathetic and awful truth. XXII. EDWARD S. WILLARD IN THE MIDDLEMAN AND JUDAH. E.S. Willard accomplished his first appearance upon the American stage (at Palmer's theatre, November 10, 1890), in the powerful play of _The Middleman_, by Henry Arthur Jones. A representative audience welcomed the modest and gentle stranger and the greeting that hailed him was that of earnest respect. Willard had long been known and esteemed in New York by the dramatic profession and by those persons who habitually observe the changeful aspects of the contemporary stage on both sides of the ocean; but to the American public his name had been comparatively strange. The sentiment of kindness with which he was received deepened into admiration as the night wore on, and before the last curtain fell upon his performance of Cyrus Blenkarn he had gained an unequivocal and auspicious victory. In no case has the first appearance of a new actor been accompanied with a more brilliant exemplification of simple worth; and in no case has its conquest of the public enthusiasm been more decisive. Not the least impressive feature of the night was the steadily increasing surprise of the audience as the performance proceeded. It was the actor's way to build slowly, and at the opening of the piece the poor inventor's blind ignorance of the calamity that is impending is chiefly trusted to create essential sympathy. Through those moments of approaching sorrow the sweet unconsciousness of the loving father was expressed by Willard with touching truth. In this he astonished even as much as he pleased his auditors; for they were not expecting it. One of the most exquisite enjoyments provided by the stage is the advent of a new actor who is not only new but good. It is the pleasure of discovery. It is the pleasure of contact with a rich mind hitherto unexplored. The personal appearance, the power of the eye, the variety of the facial expression, the tones of the voice, the carriage of the person, the salient attributes of the individual character, the altitude of the intellectual development, the quality of the spirit, the extent and the nature of those artistic faculties and resources that constitute the professional equipment,--all those things become the subject first of interested inquiry and next of pleased recognition. Willard is neither of the stately, the weird, the mysterious, nor the ferocious order of actor. There is nothing in him of either Werner, Manfred, or Sir Giles Overreach. He belongs not to either the tradition of John Kemble or of Edmund Kean. His personality, nevertheless, is of a distinctive and interesting kind. He has the self-poise and the exalted calm of immense reserve power and of tender and tremulous sensibility perfectly controlled. His acting is conspicuously marked by two of the loveliest attributes of art--simplicity and sincerity. He conceals neither the face nor the heart. His figure is fine and his demeanour is that of vigorous mental authority informed by moral purity and by the self-respect of a manly spirit. Goodness, although a quality seldom taken into the critical estimate, nevertheless has its part in spiritual constitution and in consequent effect. It was, for instance, an element of artistic potentiality in the late John McCullough. It operated spontaneously; and just so it does in the acting of Willard, who, first of all, gives the satisfying impression of being genuine. A direct and thorough method of expression naturally accompanies that order of mind and that quality of temperament. Every movement that Willard makes upon the stage is clear, free, open, firm, and of an obvious significance. Every tone of his rich and resonant voice is distinctly intended and is distinctly heard. There are no "flaws and starts." He has formed a precise ideal. He knows exactly how to embody and to utter it, and he makes the manifestation of it sharp, defined, positive, and cogent. His meaning cannot be missed. He has an unerring sense of proportion and symmetry. The character that he represents is shown, indeed, all at once, as a unique identity; but it is not all at once developed, the manifestation of it being made gradually to proceed under the stress of experience and of emotion. He rises with the occasion. His feelings are deep, and he is possessed of extraordinary power for the utterance of them--not simply vocal power, although that, in his case, is exceptional, but the rare faculty of becoming convulsed, inspired, transfigured, by passion, and of being swept along by it, and of sweeping along his hearers. His manner covers, without concealing, great intensity. This is such a combination of traits as must have existed--if the old records are read aright--in that fine and famous actor, John Henderson, and which certainly existed in the late Benjamin Webster. It has, however, always been rare upon the stage, and, like all rare jewels, it is precious. The actor who, from an habitual mood of sweet gravity and patient gentleness, can rise to the height of delirious passion, and there sustain himself at a poise of tempestuous concentration which is the fulfilment of nature, and never once seem either ludicrous or extravagant, is an actor of splendid power and extraordinary self-discipline. Such an actor is Willard. The blue eyes, the slightly olive complexion, the compact person, the picturesque appearance, the melodious voice, the flexibility of natural action, and the gradual and easy ascent from the calm level of domestic peace to the stormy summit of passionate ecstasy recall personal peculiarities and artistic methods long passed away. The best days of Edwin L. Davenport and the younger James Wallack are brought to mind by them. In the drama of _The Middleman_ Willard had to impersonate an inventor, of the absorbed, enthusiastic, self-regardless, fanatical kind. Cyrus Blenkarn is a potter. His genius and his toil have enriched two persons named Chandler, father and son, who own and conduct a porcelain factory in an English town of the present day. Blenkarn has two daughters, and one of them is taken from him by the younger Chandler. The circumstances of that deprivation point at disgrace, and the inventor conceives himself to have suffered an odious ignominy and irreparable wrong. Young Chandler has departed and so has Mary Blenkarn, and they are eventually to return as husband and wife; but Cyrus Blenkarn has been aroused from his reveries over the crucible and furnace,--wherein he is striving to discover a lost secret in the potter's art that will make him both rich and famous,--and he utters a prayer for vengeance upon these Chandlers, and he parts from them. A time of destitution and of pitiful struggle with dire necessity, sleepless grief, and the maddening impulse of vengeance now comes upon him, so that he is wasted almost to death. He will not, however, abandon his quest for the secret of his art. He may die of hunger and wretchedness; he will not yield. At the last moment of his trial and his misery--alone--at night--in the alternate lurid blaze and murky gloom of his firing-house--success is conquered: the secret is found. This climax, to which the preliminaries gradually and artfully lead, affords a great opportunity to an actor; and Willard greatly filled it. The old inventor has been bowed down almost to despair. Grief and destitution, the sight of his remaining daughter's poverty, and the conflict of many feelings have made him a wreck. But his will remains firm. It is not, however, until his last hope has been abandoned that his success suddenly comes--and the result of this is a delirium. That situation, one of the best in modern drama, has been treated by the author in such a manner as to sustain for a long time the feeling of suspense and to put an enormous strain upon the emotion and the resources of an actor. Willard's presentment of the gaunt, attenuated figure of Cyrus Blenkarn--hollow-eyed, half-frantic, hysterical with grief and joy--was the complete incarnation of a dramatic frensy; and this, being sympathetic, and moving to goodness and not to evil, captured the heart. It was a magnificent exhibition, not alone of the physical force that sometimes is so essential in acting but of that fervour of the soul without which acting is a mockery. The skill with which Willard reserved his power, so that the impersonation might gradually increase in strength, was one of the best merits of his art. Blenkarn's prayer might readily be converted into the climax of the piece, and it might readily be spoken in such a way that no effect would be left for the culmination in the furnace-room. Those errors were avoided, and during three out of the four acts the movement of the piece was fluent, continuous, and cumulative. In this respect both the drama and the performance were instructive. Henry Arthur Jones has diversified his serious scenes with passages of sportive humour and he has freighted the piece with conventional didacticism as to the well-worn question of capital and labour. The humour is good: the political economy need not detain attention. The value of the play does not reside in its teaching but in its dramatic presentation of strong character, individual experience, and significant story. The effect produced by _The Middleman_ is that of moral elevation. Its auditor is touched and ennobled by a spectacle of stern trial, pitiable suffering, and stoical endurance. In the purpose that presides over human destiny--if one may accept the testimony equally of history and of fiction--it appears to be necessary first to create strong characters and then to break them; and the manner in which they are broken usually involves the elements alike of dramatic effect and of pathos. That singular fact in mortal experience may have been noticed by this author. His drama is a forcible exposition of it. _The Middleman_ was set upon Palmer's stage in such a way as to strengthen the dramatic illusion by the fidelity of scenery. The firing-house, with its furnaces in operation, was a copy of what may be seen at Worcester. The picture of English life was excellent. When Willard played the part of Judah Llewellyn for the first time in America (December 29, 1890), he gained from a sympathetic and judicious audience a verdict of emphatic admiration. Judah Llewellyn is a good part in one of the most striking plays of the period--a play that tells an interesting and significant story by expressive, felicitous, and incessant action; affects the feelings by situations that are vital with dramatic power; inspires useful thought upon a theme of psychological importance; cheers the mind with a fresh breeze of satirical humour; and delights the instinct of taste by its crisp and pungent style. Alike by his choice of a comparatively original subject and his deft method in the treatment of it Henry Arthur Jones has shown a fine dramatic instinct; and equally in the evolution of character and the expression of experience and emotion he has wrought with feeling and vigour. Most of the plays that are written, in any given period, pass away with the period to which they appertain. _Judah_ is one of the exceptions; for its brilliantly treated theme is one of perennial interest, and there seems reason to believe, of a work so vital, that long after the present generation has vanished it still will keep its place in the theatre, and sometimes be acted, not as a quaint relic but as a living lesson. That theme is the psychic force in human organism. The author does not obtrude it; does not play the pedant with it; does not lecture upon it; and above all does not bore with it. He only uses it; and he has been so true to his province as a dramatist and not an advocate that he never once assumes to decide upon any question of doctrine that may be involved in the assertion of it. His heroine is a young woman who thinks herself to be possessed of a certain inherent restorative power of curing the sick. This power is of psychic origin and it operates through the medium of personal influence. This girl, Vashti Dethick, has exerted her power with some success. Other persons, having felt its good effect, have admitted its existence. The father of Vashti, an enterprising scamp, has thereupon compelled the girl to trade upon her peculiar faculty; little by little to assume miraculous powers; and finally to pretend that her celestial talent is refreshed and strengthened by abstinence from food, and that her cures are wrought only after she has fasted for many days. He has thus converted her into an impostor; yet, as her heart is pure and her moral principle naturally sound, she is ill at ease in this false position, and her mental distress has suddenly become aggravated, almost to the pitch of desperation, by the arrival of love. She has lost her heart to a young clergyman, Judah Llewellyn, the purity of whose spirit and the beauty of whose life are a bitter and burning rebuke to her enforced deceitfulness of conduct. Here is a woman innocently guilty, suddenly aroused by love, made sensitive and noble (as that passion commonly makes those persons who really feel it), and projected into a condition of aggrieved excitement. In this posture of romantic and pathetic circumstances the crisis of two lives is suddenly precipitated in action. Judah Llewellyn also is possessed of spiritual sensibility and psychic force. In boyhood a shepherd, he has dwelt among the mountains of his native Wales, and his imagination has heard the voices that are in rocks and trees, in the silence of lonely places, in the desolation of the bleak hills, and in the cold light of distant stars. He is now a preacher, infatuated with his mission, inspired in his eloquence, invincible in his tremendous sincerity. He sees Vashti and he loves her. It is the first thrill of mortal passion that ever has mingled with his devotion to his Master's work. The attraction between these creatures is human; and yet it is more of heaven than of earth. It is a tie of spiritual kindred that binds them. They are beings of a different order from the common order--and, as happens in such cases, they will be tried by exceptional troubles and passed through a fire of mortal anguish. For what reason experience should take the direction of misery with fine natures in human life no philosopher has yet been able to ascertain; but that it does take that direction all competent observation proves. To Vashti and Judah the time speedily comes when their love is acknowledged, upon both sides--the preacher speaking plainly; the girl, conscious of turpitude, shrinking from a spoken avowal which yet her whole personality proclaims. Yielding to her father's malign will she has consented to make one more manifestation of curative power, to go through once more,--and for the last time,--the mockery of a pretended fast. The scene is Lord Asgarby's house; the patient is Lord Asgarby's daughter--an only child, cursed with constitutional debility, the foredoomed victim of premature decline. This frail creature has heard of Vashti and believes in her, and desires and obtains her society. To Professor Dethick this is, in every sense, a golden opportunity, and he insists that the starvation test shall be thoroughly made. Lord Asgarby, willing to do anything for his idolised daughter, assents to the plan, and his scientific friend, cynical Professor Jopp, agrees, with the assistance of his erudite daughter, to supervise the experiment. Vashti will fast for several days, and the heir of Asgarby will then be healed by her purified and exalted influence. The principal scene of the play shows the exterior of an ancient, unused tower of Asgarby House, in which Vashti is detained during the fast. The girl is supposed to be starving. Her scampish father will endeavour to relieve her. Miss Jopp is vigilant to prevent fraud. The patient is confident. Judah, wishful to be near to the object of his adoration, has climbed the outer wall and is watching, beneath the window, unseen, in the warder's seat. The time is summer, the hour midnight, and the irrevocable vow of love has been spoken. At that supreme instant, and under conditions so natural that the picture seems one of actual life, the sin of Vashti is revealed and the man who had adored her as an angel knows her for a cheat. With a difference of circumstances that situation--in the fibre of it--is not new. Many a lover, male and female, has learned that every idol has its flaw. But the situation is new in its dramatic structure. For Judah the discovery is a terrible one, and the resultant agony is convulsive and lamentable. He takes, however, the only course he could be expected to take: he must vindicate the integrity of the woman whom he loves, and he commits the crime of perjury in order to shield her reputation from disgrace. What will a man do for the woman whom he loves? The attributes of individual character are always to be considered as forces likely to modify passion and to affect conduct. But in general the answer to that question may be given in three words--anything and everything! The history of nations, as of individuals, is never rightly read until it is read in the light of knowledge of the influence that has been exerted over them by women. Cleopatra, in ancient Egypt, changed the history of Rome by the ruin of Marc Antony. Another heroine recently toppled Ireland down the fire-escape into the back-yard. So goes the world. In Judah, however, the crime that is done for love is pursued to its consequence of ever-accumulative suffering, until at length, when it has been expiated by remorse and repentance, it is rectified by confession and obliterated by pardon. No play ever taught a lesson of truth with more cogent dramatic force. The cynical, humorous scenes are delightful. Willard's representation of Cyrus Blenkarn stamped him as one of the best actors of the age. His representation of Judah Llewellyn deepened that impression and reinforced it with a conviction of marked versatility. In his utterance of passion Willard showed that he has advanced far beyond the Romeo stage. The love that he expressed was that of a man--intellectual, spiritual, noble, a moral being and one essentially true. Man's love, when it is real, adores its object; hallows it; invests it with celestial attributes; and beholds it as a part of heaven. That quality of reverence was distinctly conveyed by the actor, and therefore to observers who conceive passion to be delirious abandonment (of which any animal is capable), his ardour may have seemed dry and cold. It was nevertheless true. He made the tempestuous torrent of Judah's avowal the more overwhelming by his preliminary self-repression and his thoughtful gentleness of reserve; for thus the hunger of desire was beautiful with devotion and tenderness; and while the actor's feelings seemed borne away upon a whirling tide of irresistible impulse his exquisite art kept a perfect control of face, voice, person, demeanour, and delivery, and not once permitted a lapse into extravagance. The character thus embodied will long be remembered as an image of dignity, sweetness, moral enthusiasm, passionate fervour, and intellectual power; but, also, viewed as an effort in the art of acting, it will be remembered as a type of consummate grace in the embodiment of a beautiful ideal clearly conceived. The effect of spiritual suffering, as conveyed in the pallid countenance and ravaged figure, in the last act, was that of noble pathos. The delivery of all the speeches of the broken, humiliated, haunted minister was deeply touching, not alone in music of voice but in denotement of knowledge of human nature and human suffering and endurance. The actor who can play such a part in such a manner is not an experimental artist. Rather let him be called--in the expressive words of one of his country's poets-- "Sacred historian of the heart And moral nature's lord." XXIII. SALVINI AS KING SAUL AND KING LEAR. Salvini was grander and finer in King Saul than in any other embodiment that he presented. He seized the idea wholly, and he executed it with affluent power. He brought to the part every attribute necessary to its grandeur of form and its afflicting sympathy of spirit. His towering physique presented, with impressive accuracy, the Hebrew monarch, chosen of God, who was "lifted a head and shoulders above the people." His tremulous sensibility, his knowledge of suffering, his skill in depicting it, his great resources of voice, his vigour and fineness of action, his exceptional commingling of largeness and gentleness--all these attributes combined in that performance, to give magnificent reality to one of the most sublime conceptions in literature. By his personation of Saul Salvini added a new and an immortal figure to the stage pantheon of kings and heroes. Alfieri's tragedy of _Saul_ was written in 1782-83, when the haughty, impetuous, and passionate poet was thirty-four years old, and at the suggestion of the Countess of Albany, whom he loved. He had suffered a bereavement at the time, and he was in deep grief. The Countess tried to console him by reading the Bible, and when they came upon the narrative of Saul the idea of the tragedy was struck out between them. The work was written with vigorous impulse and the author has left, in his autobiography, the remark that none of his tragedies cost him so little labour. _Saul_ is in five acts and it contains 1567 lines--of that Italian _versi sciolti_ which inadequately corresponds to the blank verse of the English language. The scene is laid in the camp of Saul's army. Six persons are introduced, namely, Saul, Jonathan, David, Michel, Abner, and Achimelech. The time supposed to be occupied by the action--or rather, by the suffering--of the piece is a single day, the last in the king's life. Act first is devoted to explanation, conveyed in warnings to David, by Jonathan, his friend, and Michel, his wife. Act second presents the distracted monarch, who knows that God has forsaken him and that death is at hand. In a speech of terrible intensity he relates to Abner the story of the apparition of Samuel and the doom that the ghost has spoken. His children humour and soothe the broken old man, and finally succeed in softening his mind toward David--whom he at once loves, dreads, and hates, as the appointed instrument of his destruction and the successor to his crown. Act third shows David playing upon the harp before Saul, and chanting Saul's deeds in the service and defence of Israel--so that he calms the agonised delirium of the haunted king and wins his blessing; but at last a boastful word makes discord in the music's charm, and Saul is suddenly roused into a ghastly fury. Acts fourth and fifth deal with the wild caprices and maddening agonies of the frenzied father; the ever-varying phenomena of his mental disease; the onslaught of the Philistines; the killing of his sons; the frequent recurrence, before his mind's eye, of the shade of the dead prophet; and finally his suicidal death. It is, in form, a classical tragedy, massive, grand, and majestically simple; and it blazes from end to end with the fire of a sublime imagination. Ardent lovers of Italian literature are fond of ranking _Saul_ with _Lear_. The claim is natural but it is not valid. In _Lear_--not to speak of its profound revelations of universal human nature and its vast philosophy of human life--there is a tremendous scope of action, through which mental condition and experience are dramatically revealed; and there is the deepest deep of pathos, because the highest height of afflicted goodness. In _Saul_ there is simply--upon a limited canvas, without adjuncts, without the suggestion of resources, without the relief of even mournful humour, and with a narrative rather than a dramatic background--the portraiture of a condition; and, because the man displayed is neither so noble nor so human, the pathos surcharging the work is neither so harrowing nor so tender. Yet the two works are akin in majesty of ideal, in the terrible topic of mental disease that shatters a king, and in the atmosphere of desolation that trails after them like a funeral pall; and it is not a wonder that Alfieri's Saul should be deemed the greatest tragedy ever originated in the Italian language. It attains a superb height, for it keeps an equal pace with the severe simplicity of the Bible narrative on which it is founded. It depicts the condition of an imaginative mind, a stately and robust character, an arrogant, fiery spirit, a kind heart, and a royal and regally poised nature, that have first been undermined by sin and the consciousness of sin, and then crazed by contact with the spirit world and by a nameless dread of the impending anger of an offended God. It would be difficult to conceive of a more distracting and piteous state. Awe and terror surround that august sufferer, and make him both holy and dreadful. In his person and his condition, as those are visible to the imaginative mind, he combined elements that irresistibly impress and thrill. He is of vast physical stature, that time has not bent, and of great beauty of face, that griefs have ravaged but not destroyed. He is a valiant and sanguinary warrior, and danger seems to radiate from his presence. He is a magnanimous king and a loving father, and he softens by generosity and wins by gentleness. He is a maniac, haunted by spectres and scourged with a whip of scorpions, and his red-eyed fury makes all space a hell and shatters silence with the shrieks of the damned. He is a human soul, burdened with the frightful consciousness of Divine wrath and poised in torment on the precipice that overhangs the dark, storm-beaten ocean of eternity. His human weakness is frighted by ghastly visions and indefinite horrors, against which his vain struggle only makes his forlorn feebleness more piteous and drear. The gleams of calm that fall upon his tortured heart only light up an abyss of misery--a vault of darkness peopled by demons. He is already cut off from among the living, by the doom of inevitable fate, and while we pity him we fear him. His coming seems attended with monstrous shapes; he diffuses dissonance; his voice is a cry of anguish or a wail of desolation; his existence is a tempest; there can be no relief for him save death, and the death that ends him comes like the blessing of tears to the scorched eyelids of consuming misery. That is the Saul of the Bible and of Alfieri's tragedy; and that is the Saul whom Salvini embodied. It was a colossal monument of human suffering that the actor presented, and no one could look upon it without being awed and chastened. Salvini's embodiment of King Lear was a remarkable manifestation of physical resources and of professional skill. The lofty stature, the ample and resonant voice, the copious animal excitement, the fluent elocution and the vigorous, picturesque, and often melodramatic movements, gestures, and poses of Salvini united to animate and embellish a personality such as would naturally absorb attention and diffuse excitement. Every artist, however, moves within certain specific and positive limitations--spiritual, mental, and physical. No actor has proved equal to every kind of character. Salvini, when he acted Hamlet, was unspiritual--giving no effect to the haunted tone of that part or to its weird surroundings; and when he acted Macbeth he was unimaginative, obscure, common, and therefore inadequate. The only Shakespearean character that he excelled in is Othello, and even in that his ideal displayed neither the magnanimity nor the tenderness that are in Shakespeare's conception. The chief attributes of the Moor that he interpreted were physical; the loftiest heights that he reached were terror and distracted grief; but he worked with a pictorial method and a magnetic vigour that enthralled the feelings even when they did not command the judgment. His performance of King Lear gave new evidence of his limitations. During the first two acts he made the king a merely restless, choleric, disagreeable old man, deficient in dignity, destitute of grandeur, and especially destitute of inherent personal fascination--of the suggestiveness of ever having been a great man. Lear is a ruin--but he has been a Titan; the delight of all hearts no less than the monarch of all minds. The actor who does not invest him with that inherent, overwhelming personal fascination does not attain to his altitude. The cruel afflictions that occur in the tragedy do not of themselves signify: the pity is only that they should occur to him. That is the spring of all the pathos. In Salvini's Lear there were beautiful moments and magnificent bits of action. "I gave you all" and "I'm cold myself" were exquisite points. He missed altogether, however, the more subtle significance of the reminiscent reference to Cordelia--as in "No more of that, I have noted it well"--and he gave, at the beginning, no intimation of impending madness. In fact he introduced no element of lunacy till he reached the lines about "red-hot spits" in Edgar's first mad scene. Much of Salvini's mechanism in Lear was crude. He put the king behind a table, in the first scene--which had the effect of preparation for a lecture; and it pleased him to speak the storm speech away back at the upper entrance, with his body almost wholly concealed behind painted crags. With all its moments of power and of tenderness the embodiment was neither royal, lovable, nor great. It might be a good Italian Lear: it was not the Lear of Shakespeare. Salvini was particularly out of the character in the curse scene and in the frantic parting from the two daughters, because there the quality of the man, behind the action, seemed especially common. The action, though, was theatrical and had its due effect. XXIV. HENRY IRVING AS EUGENE ARAM. Henry Irving's impersonation of Eugene Aram--given in a vein that is distinctly unique--was one of strange and melancholy grace and also of weird poetical and pathetic power. More than fifty years ago, just after Bulwer's novel on the subject of Eugene Aram was published, that character first came upon the stage, and its first introduction to the American theatre occurred at the Bowery, where it was represented by John R. Scott. Aram languished, however, as a dramatic person, and soon disappeared. He did not thrive in England, neither, till, in 1873, Henry Irving, who had achieved great success in _The Bells_, prompted W.G. Wills to effect his resuscitation in a new play, and acted him in a new manner. The part then found an actor who could play it,--investing psychological subtlety with tender human feeling and romantic grace, and making an imaginary experience of suffering vital and heartrending in its awful reality. The performance ranks with the best that Henry Irving has given--with _Mathias_, _Lesurques_, _Dubosc_, _Louis XI._, and _Hamlet_; those studies of the night-side of human nature in which his imagination and intellect and his sombre feeling have been revealed and best exemplified. Eugene Aram was born at Ramsgill, in Nidderdale, Yorkshire, in 1704. His father, Peter Aram, was a man of good family but becoming reduced in circumstances he took service as a gardener on the estate of Sir Edward Blackett, of Newby Hall. In 1710 Peter Aram and his family were living at Bondgate, near Ripon, and there Eugene went to school and learned to read the New Testament. At a considerably later period he was instructed, during one month, by the Rev. Mr. Alcock, of Burndall. This was the extent of the tuition that he ever received from others. For the rest he was self-taught. He had a natural passion for knowledge and he displayed wonderful industry in its acquisition. When sixteen years old he knew something of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and later he made himself acquainted with Chaldaic and Arabic. His occupation, up to this time, was that of assistant to his father, the gardener; but about 1720 he was employed in London as a clerk to a merchant, Mr. Christopher Blackett, a relative to his father's patron, Sir Edward. He did not remain there long. A serious illness prostrated him, and on recovering he returned to Nidderdale, with which romantic region his fate was to be forever associated. He now became a tutor, and not long after he was employed as such at a manor-house, near Ramsgill, called Gowthwaite Hall, a residence built early in the seventeenth century by Sir John Yorke, and long inhabited by his descendants. While living there he met and courted Anna Spance, the daughter of a farmer, at the lonely village of Lofthouse, and in 1731 he married her. The Middlesmoor registry contains the record of this marriage, and of the baptism and death of their first child. In 1734 Eugene Aram removed to Knaresborough, where he kept a school. He had, all this while, sedulously pursued his studies, and he now was a scholar of extraordinary acquirements, not only in the languages but in botany, heraldry, and many other branches of learning. His life seemed fair and his future bright: but a change was at hand. He had not resided long at Knaresborough before he became acquainted with three persons most unlike himself in every way. These men were Henry Terry, Richard Houseman, and Daniel Clarke. Houseman was a flax-dresser. Clarke was a travelling jeweller. All of them were intemperate; and it is supposed that the beginning of Eugene Aram's downfall was the appetite for drink. The confederacy that he formed with these men is not easily explicable, and probably it never has been rightly explained. The accepted statement is that it was a confederacy for fraud and theft. Clarke was reported to be the heir presumptive to a large fortune. He purchased goods, was punctual in his payments, and established his credit. He was supposed to be making purchases for a merchant in London. He dealt largely in gold and silver plate and in watches, and soon he made a liberal use of his credit to accumulate valuable objects. In 1744 he disappeared, and he never was seen or heard of again. His frauds became known, and the houses of Aram and Houseman, suspected as his associates, were searched, but nothing was found to implicate either of them. Soon after this event Aram left Knaresborough--deserting his wife--and proceeded to London, where for two years he had employment as a teacher of Latin. He was subsequently an usher at the boarding school of the Rev. Anthony Hinton, at Hayes, in Middlesex, and there it was observed that he displayed an extraordinary and scrupulous tenderness and solicitude as to the life and safety of even worms and insects--which he would remove from the garden walks and put into places of security. At a later period he found employment as a transcriber of acts of Parliament, for registration in chancery. Still later he became an usher at the Free School of Lynn, in Norfolk, where, among other labours, he undertook to make a comparative lexicon, and with this purpose collated over 3000 words in English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Celtic. He had ample opportunity to leave England but he never did so. At length, in 1759, a labourer who was digging for limestone, at a place known as St. Robert's Cave, Thistle Hill, near Knaresborough, came upon a human skeleton, bent double and buried in the earth. Suspicion was aroused. These bones, it was surmised, might be those of Daniel Clarke. His mysterious disappearance and his associates were remembered. The authorities sent forth and arrested Terry, Houseman, and Eugene Aram, and those persons were brought to their trial at York. A bold front would have saved them, for the evidence against them was weak. Aram stood firm, but Houseman quailed, and presently he turned "state's evidence" and denounced Aram as the murderer of Clarke. The accused scholar spoke in his own defence, and with astonishing skill, but he failed to defeat the direct and decisive evidence of his accomplice. Houseman declared that on the day of the murder Clarke, Aram, and himself were in company, and were occupied in disposing of the property which they had obtained; that Aram proposed to walk in the fields, and that they proceeded, thereupon, at nightfall, to the vicinity of St. Robert's Cave. Clarke and Aram, he said, went over the hedge and advanced toward the cave, and Aram struck Clarke several times upon the breast and head, and so killed him. It was a dark night, and in the middle of winter, but the moon was shining through drifting clouds, and Houseman said he could see the movement of Aram's hand but not the weapon that it held. He was about twelve yards from the spot of the murder. He testified that the body of Clarke was buried in the cave. The presiding justice charged against the prisoner and Eugene Aram was convicted and condemned. He subsequently, it is said, confessed the crime, alleging to the clergyman by whom he was attended that his wife had been led into an intrigue by Clarke, and that this was the cause of the murder. Here, doubtless, is the indication of the true nature of this tragedy. Aram, prior to his execution, was confined in York Castle, where he wrote a poem of considerable length and some merit, and also several shorter pieces of verse. On the morning of his execution it was found that he had opened a vein in his arm, with the intent to bleed to death, but the wound was staunched, and he was taken to Knaresborough and there hanged, and afterward his body was hung in chains in Knaresborough Forest. His death occurred on August 13, 1759, in the fifty-fifth year of his age. On the night before his execution he wrote a rhythmical apostrophe to death:-- "Come, pleasing rest! eternal slumber fall! Seal mine, that once must seal the eyes of all! Calm and composed my soul her journey takes; No guilt that troubles and no heart that aches." Such is the story of Eugene Aram--a story that has furnished the basis of various fictions, notably of Bulwer's famous novel, and which inspired one of the best of the beautiful poems of Thomas Hood. Wills gathered hints from it, here and there, in the making of his play; but he boldly departed from its more hideous and repulsive incidents and from the theory of the main character that might perhaps be justified by its drift. In the construction of the piece Henry Irving made many material suggestions. The treatment of the character of Aram was devised by him, and the management of the close of the second act denotes his felicity of invention. The play opens in the rose-garden of a rural rectory in the sweet, green valley of the shining Nidd. The time is twilight; the season summer; and here, in a haven of peace and love, the repentant murderer has found a refuge. Many years have passed since the commission of his crime, and all those years he has lived a good life, devoted to study, instruction, and works of benevolence. He has been a teacher of the young, a helper of the poor, and he has gained respect, affection, and honourable repute. He is safe in the security of silence and in the calm self-poise of his adamantine will. His awful secret sleeps in his bosom and is at rest forever. He has suffered much and he still suffers; yet, lulled into a false security by the uneventful lapse of years and by that drifting, desolate, apathetic recklessness which is sequent on the subsiding storm of passionate sorrow, he has allowed himself to accept a woman's love and to love her in return, and half to believe that his long misery has expiated his sin and that even for him there may be a little happiness yet possible on earth. Eugene Aram, the village school-master, and Ruth Meadows, the vicar's daughter, are betrothed lovers; and now, on the eve of their wedding morning, they stand together among the roses, while the sun is going down and the sweet summer wind plays softly in the leaves, and from the little gray church close by a solemn strain of music--the vesper hymn--floats out upon the stillness of the darkening day. The woman is all happiness, confidence, and hope; the man, seared and blighted by conscious sin and subdued by long years of patient submission to the sense of his own unworthiness, is all gentleness, solicitude, reverence, and sorrow. At this supreme moment, when now it seems that everything is surely well, the one man in the world who knows Eugene Aram's secret has become, by seeming chance, a guest in the vicarage; and even while Ruth places her hand upon her lover's heart and softly whispers, "If guilt were there, it still should be my pillow," the shadow of the gathering night that darkens around them is deepened by the blacker shadow of impending doom. The first act of the play is simply a picture. It involves no action. It only introduces the several persons who are implicated in the experience to be displayed, denotes their relationship to one another, and reveals a condition of feeling and circumstance which is alike romantic, pathetic, and perilous, and which is soon to be shattered by the disclosure of a fatal secret. The act is a preparation for a catastrophe. In the second act the opposed characters clash: the movement begins, and the catastrophe is precipitated. The story opens at nightfall, proceeds the same evening, and ends at the dawn of the ensuing day. The scene of act second is a room in the vicarage. Aram and Parson Meadows are playing chess, and Ruth is hovering about them and roguishly impeding their play. The purpose accomplished here is the exhibition of domestic comfort and content, and this is further emphasised by Ruth's recital of a written tribute that Aram's pupils have sent to him, on the eve of his marriage. Wounded by this praise the conscience-stricken wretch breaks off abruptly from his pastime and rushes from the room--an act of desperate grief which is attributed to his modesty. The parson soon follows, and Ruth is left alone. Houseman, their casual guest, having accepted the vicar's hospitable offer of a shelter for the night, has now a talk with Ruth, and he is startled to hear the name of Eugene Aram, and thus to know that he has found the man whose fatal secret he possesses, and upon whose assumed dread of exposure his cupidity now purposes to feed. In a coarsely jocular way this brutish creature provokes the indignant resentment of Ruth, by insinuations as to her betrothed lover's past life; and when, a little later, Ruth and Aram again meet, she wooingly begs him to tell her of any secret trouble that may be weighing upon his mind. At this moment Houseman comes upon them, and utters Aram's name. From that point to the end of the act there is a sustained and sinewy exposition, strong in spirit and thrilling in suspense,--of keen intellect and resolute will standing at bay and making their last battle for life, against the overwhelming odds of heaven's appointed doom. Aram defies Houseman and is denounced by him; but the ready adroitness and iron composure of the suffering wretch still give him supremacy over his foe--till, suddenly, the discovery is announced of the bones of Daniel Clarke in St. Robert's Cave, and the vicar commands Aram and Houseman to join him in their inspection. Here the murderer suffers a collapse. There has been a greater strain than even he can bear; and, left alone upon the scene, he stands petrified with horror, seeming, in an ecstasy of nameless fear, to look upon the spectre of his victim. Henry Irving's management of the apparition effect was such as is possible only to a man of genius, and such as words may record but never can describe. The third act passes in the churchyard. Aram has fled from the sight of the skeleton, and has fallen among the graves. It is almost morning. The ghastly place is silent and dark. The spirit of the murderer is broken, and his enfeebled body, long since undermined by the grief of remorse and now chilled by the night dews, is in the throes of death. The incidents of the closing scene are simple, but they are heart-breaking in their pathos and awful in their desolation. The fugitive Houseman finds Aram here, and spurns him as a whimpering lunatic. Then, in this midnight hour and this appalling place, alone in the presence of God, the murderer lifts his hands toward heaven, confesses his crime, and falls at the foot of the cross. Here Ruth finds him, and to her, with dying lips, he tells the story of the murder and of all that he has since endured. And just as his voice falters into silence and his heart ceases to beat, the diamond light of morning gleams in the eastern sky and the glad music of an anthem floats softly from the neighbouring church. Upon that beautifully significant picture the final curtain fell. Wills's literary framework for the display of character and experience is scarcely to be considered a perfect play. It begins by assuming on the part of its auditor a knowledge of the mystery upon which it is based. Such a knowledge the auditor ought certainly to have, but in presence of an exact drama he derives it from what he sees and not from remembrance of what he has read. The piece is, perhaps, somewhat irrational in making Aram a resident, under his own name, of the actual neighbourhood of his crime. It lowers the assumed nobility of his character, furthermore, by making this remorseful and constantly apprehensive murderer willing to yoke a sweet, innocent, and idolised woman to misery and shame by making her his wife. And it mars its most pathetic scene--the awful scene of the midnight confession in the churchyard--by making Eugene Aram declare, to the woman of his love, the one human being who comforts and sustains him on the brink of eternity, that he has loved another woman for whose sake he did the murder. Since the whole story was to be treated in a fanciful manner, a still wider license in the play of fancy would, perhaps, have had a more entirely gracious and satisfying effect. The language is partly blank verse and partly prose; and, while its tissue is rightly and skilfully diversified by judicious allowance for the effect of each character upon the garment of individual diction, and while its strain, here and there, rises to eloquence of feeling and beauty of imagery, there is a certain lack of firmness in its verbal fibre. The confession speech that has to be spoken by Aram comprises upward of ninety lines--and that is a severe and perilous strain upon an actor's power of holding the public interest. The beauties of the play, however, are many and strong. Its crowning excellence is that it gives dramatic permanence to a strangely interesting character. The knowledge of human nature that Henry Irving revealed in this part and the manner in which he revealed it were nothing less than wonderful. The moment he walked upon the scene you saw the blighted figure of a man who has endured, and is enduring, spiritual torment. The whole personality was suffused with a mournful strangeness. The man was isolated and alone. It was a purely ideal view of the character that the actor denoted; for he made Eugene Aram a noble, tender, gentle person, whom ungovernable passion, under circumstances of overwhelming provocation, had once impelled to an act of half-justifiable homicide, and who had for years been slowly dying with remorse. He touched no chord of terror, but only the chord of pity. Like his portrayal of Mathias, the picture showed the reactionary effect of hidden sin in the human soul; but the personality of the sufferer was entirely different. Each of those men has had experience of crime and of resultant misery, but no two embodiments could possibly be more dissimilar, alike in spiritual quality and in circumstances. Mathias is dominated by paternal love and characterised by a half-defiant, ever-vigilant, and often self-approbative pride of intellect, in being able to guard and keep a terrible and dangerous secret. Eugene Aram is dominated by a saint-like tenderness toward a sweet woman who loves him, and characterised by a profound, fitful melancholy, now humble and submissive, now actively apprehensive and almost frenzied. Only once does he stand at bay and front his destiny with a defiance of desperate will; and even then it is for the woman's sake rather than for his own. Henry Irving's acting made clear and beautiful that condition of temperament. A noble and affectionate nature, shipwrecked, going to pieces, doomed, but making one last tremendous though futile effort to avert the final and inevitable ruin--this ideal was made actual in his performance. The intellectual or spiritual value of such a presentment must depend upon the auditor's capacity to absorb from a tragedy its lessons of insight into the relations of the human soul to the moral government of the world. Many spectators would find it merely morbid and gloomy; others would find it superlatively illuminative and eloquent. Its artistic value the actor himself made evident to every comprehension. There is a moment of the performance when the originally massive and passionate character of Eugene Aram is suddenly asserted above his meekness, contrition, and sorrow; when, at the sound of his enemy's voice, he first becomes petrified with the sense of peril, and then calmly gathers all his powers to meet and conquer the danger. The splendid concentration, the perfect poise, the sustained intensity, the copious and amazing variety and force of emotion, and the positive, unerring, and brilliant art with which Henry Irving met that emergency and displayed that frightful and piteous aspect of assailed humanity, desperate and fighting for life, made up such an image of genius as seldom is seen and never will be forgotten. Rapid transition has ever been one of the commonest and most effective expedients used in histrionic art. This, on the contrary, was an example of sustained, prolonged, cumulative, artistic expression of the most harrowing and awful emotions with which the human soul can be convulsed; and it was a wonder of consummate acting. The same thoroughness of identification and the same astonishing adequacy of feeling pervaded the scene in the churchyard. At first, in the dusky starlight, only a shapeless figure, covered with a black cloak, was seen among the gravestones, crouched upon a tomb; but the man that rose, as if out of the grave, pallid, emaciated, ghastly, the spectre of himself, was the authentic image of majestic despair, not less sublime than pitiable, and fraught with a power that happiness could never attain. Not in our time upon the stage has such a lesson been taught, with such overwhelming pathos, of the utter helplessness of even the strongest human will, when once the soul has been vitiated by sin and the eternal law of right defied by mortal passion. In the supplication to his astonished accomplice the actor seemed like one transfigured, and there the haunted effect was extremely awful. XXV. CHARLES FISHER. In old times Charles Fisher often figured in the old comedies, and he was one of the last of the thin and rapidly lessening group of actors capable of presenting those pieces--wherein, although the substance be human nature, the manner is that of elaborate and diversified artifice. When he played Lieutenant Worthington, in _The Poor Gentleman_, he was a gentleman indeed--refined, delicate, sensitive, simply courageous, sustained by native integrity, and impressive with a dignity of manner that reflected the essential nobility of his mind; so that when he mistook Sir Robert Bramble for a bailiff, and roused that benevolent baronet's astonishment and rage, he brought forth all the comic humour of a delightful situation with the greatest ease and nature. He played Littleton Coke, Sir Harcourt Courtly, old Laroque--in which he gave a wonderful picture of the working of remorse in the frail and failing brain of age--and Nicholas Rue, in _Secrets worth Knowing_, a sinister and thrilling embodiment of avarice and dotage. He played Dr. Bland, the elegant medical cynic of _Nos Intimes_; De la Tour, the formidable, jealous husband of Henriette, in _Le Patte de Mouche_; Horace, in _The Country Squire_; Goldfinch, in which he was airy, sagacious, dashing, and superb, in _The Road to Ruin_; and Captain Cozzens, the nonchalant rascal of _The Knights of the Round Table_, which he embodied in a style of easy magnificence, gay, gallant, courageous, alert, imperturbable, and immensely comic. He was the original Matthew Leigh in Lester Wallack's romantic play of _Rosedale_ (1863). He acted Joseph Surface in the days when Lester Wallack used to play Charles, and he always held his own in that superior part. He was equally fine in Sir Peter and Sir Oliver. When the good old play of _The Wife's Secret_ was revived in New York, in 1864, he gave a dignified and impetuous performance of Sir Walter Amyott. I remember him in those parts, with equal wonder at his comprehensive variety of talent and admiration for his always adequate skill. I saw him as the volatile Ferment, in _The School of Reform_, and nothing could be more comic than his unwitting abuse of General Tarragon, in that blustering officer's presence, or his equally ludicrous scene of cross purposes with Bob Tyke. He was a perfect type, as Don Manuel Velasco, in _The Compact_, of the gallant, stately Spanish aristocrat. He excelled competition when, in a company that included George Holland, W. Holston, A.W. Young, Mark Smith, Frederick C.P. Robinson, and John Gilbert, he enacted the convict in _Never Too Late to Mend_. He was equally at home whether as the King in _Don Cæsar de Bazan_ or as Tom Stylus the literary hack, in _Society_. He passed easily from the correct and sentimental Sir Thomas Clifford, of _The Hunchback_, to the frivolous Mr. Willowear, of _To Marry or Not to Marry_. No one could better express than he did, when playing Wellborn, both pride of birth and pride of character. One of his most characteristic works was Hyssop, in _The Rent Day_. His scope and the rich resources of his experience are denoted in those citations. It is no common artist who can create and sustain a perfect illusion, and please an audience equally well, whether in such a part as Gilbert Featherstone, the villain, in _Lost in London_, or old Baptista, in _The Taming of the Shrew_. The playgoer who never saw Charles Fisher as Triplet can scarcely claim that he ever saw the part at all. The quaint figure, the well-saved but threadbare dress, the forlorn air of poverty and suffering commingled with a certain jauntiness and pluck, the profound feeling, the unconscious sweetness and humour, the spirit of mind, gentility, and refinement struggling through the confirmed wretchedness of the almost heart-broken hack--who that ever laughed and wept at sight of him in the garret scene, sitting down, "all joy and hilarity," to write his comedy, can ever forget those details of a true and touching embodiment? His fine skill in playing the violin was touchingly displayed in that part, and gave it an additional tone of reality. I once saw him acting Mercutio, and very admirable he was in the guise of that noble, brave, frolicsome, impetuous young gentleman. The intense vitality, the glancing glee, the intrepid spirit--all were preserved; and the brilliant text was spoken with faultless fluency. It is difficult to realise that the same actor who set before us that perfect image of comic perplexity, the bland and benevolent Dean, in _Dandy Dick_, could ever have been the bantering companion of Romeo and truculent adversary of fiery Tybalt. Yet this contrast but faintly indicates the versatile character of his mind. Fisher was upon the American stage for thirty-eight years, from August 30, 1852, when he came forth at Burton's theatre as Ferment. Later he went to Wallack's, and in 1872 he joined Daly's company, in which he remained till 1890. It may be conjectured that in some respects he resembled that fine comedian Thomas Dogget, to whom Sir Godfrey Kneller, the painter, said, "I can only copy Nature from the originals before me, while you vary them at pleasure and yet preserve the likeness." Like Dogget he played, in a vein of rich, hearty, jocose humour, and with great breadth of effect and excellent colour, the sailor Ben, in _Love for Love_. The resemblance was in mental characteristics, not physique--for Dogget was a slight and sprightly man, whereas Fisher could represent majesty as well as frolic. After he went to Daly's theatre he manifested a surprising range of faculty. He first appeared there on October 28, 1872, as Mr. Dornton, in _The Road to Ruin_, and on November 19, following, he acted Falstaff for the first time. He presented there the other Shakespearean parts of Leonatus, Armado, and Malvolio--the last of these being a model of fidelity to the poet, and now a classic in reputation. He also assumed Adam and Jaques. He presented the living image of Shakespeare himself, in _Yorick_, and his large, broad, stately style gave weight to Don Manuel, in _She Would and She Wouldn't_; to that apt type of the refined British aristocrat, Sir Geoffrey Champneys, in _Our Boys_; and to many a noble father or benevolent uncle of the adapted French society drama. Just as Dogget was supreme in such parts as Fondlewife, so was Fisher superb in the uxorious husband whom the demure child-wife bamboozles, in the comedies of Molière. No man has ever better depicted than he did a sweet nature shocked by calamity and bowed down with grief, or, as in Joe Chirrup, in _Elfie_, manliness chastened by affliction and ennobled by true love: yet his impersonation of Fagin was only second to that of J.W. Wallack, Jr.; his Moody, in _The Country Girl_, was almost tragic in its grim and grizzled wretchedness and snarling wrath; and I have seen him assume to perfection the gaunt figure and crazy mood of Noah Learoyd, in _The Long Strike_, and make that personality a terrible embodiment of menace. From the time he first acted the comic Major Vavasour, in _Henry Dunbar_, no actor of equal quaintness has trod our stage. He died on June 11, 1891, and was buried at Woodlawn. XXVI. MRS. G.H. GILBERT. Students of the English stage find in books on that subject abundant information about the tragedy queens of the early drama, and much likewise, though naturally somewhat less (because comedy is more difficult to discuss than tragedy), about the comedy queens. Mrs. Cibber still discomfits the melting Mrs. Porter by a tenderness even greater than the best of Belvideras could dispense. Mrs. Bracegirdle and Mrs. Oldfield still stand confronted on the historic page, and still their battle continues year after year. All readers know the sleepy voice and horrid sigh of Mrs. Pritchard in Lady Macbeth's awful scene of haunted somnambulism; the unexampled and unexcelled grandeur of Mrs. Yates in Medea; the infinite pathos of Mrs. Dancer (she that became in succession Mrs. Spranger Barry and Mrs. Crawford) and her memorable scream, as Lady Randolph, at "Was he alive?"; the comparative discomfiture of both those ladies by Mrs. Siddons, with her wonderful, wailing cry, as Isabella, "O, my Biron, my Biron," her overwhelming Lady Macbeth and her imperial Queen Katharine. The brilliant story of Peg Woffington and the sad fate of Mrs. Robinson, the triumphant career of Mrs. Abington and the melancholy collapse of Mrs. Jordan--all those things, and many more, are duly set down in the chronicles. But the books are comparatively silent about the Old Women of the stage--an artistic line no less delightful than useful, of which Mrs. G.H. Gilbert is a sterling and brilliant representative. Mrs. Jefferson, the great-grandmother of the comedian Joseph Jefferson, who died of laughter, on the stage (1766-68), might fitly be mentioned as the dramatic ancestor of such actresses as Mrs. Gilbert. She was a woman of great loveliness of character and of great talent for the portrayal of "old women," and likewise of certain "old men" in comedy. "She had," says Tate Wilkinson, "one of the best dispositions that ever harboured in a human breast"; and he adds that "she was one of the most elegant women ever beheld." Mrs. Gilbert has always suggested that image of grace, goodness, and piquant ability. Mrs. Vernon was the best in this line until Mrs. Gilbert came; and the period which has seen Mrs. Judah, Mrs. Vincent, Mrs. Germon, Mary Carr, Mrs. Chippendale, Mrs. Stirling, Mrs. Billington, Mrs. Drew, Mrs. Phillips, and Madam Ponisi, has seen no superior to Mrs. Gilbert in her special walk. She was in youth a beautiful dancer, and all her motions have spontaneous ease and grace. She can assume the fine lady, without for an instant suggesting the parvenu. She is equally good, whether as the formal and severe matron of starched domestic life, or the genial dame of the pantry. She could play Temperance in _The Country Squire_, and equally she could play Mrs. Jellaby. All varieties of the eccentricity of elderly women, whether serious or comic, are easily within her grasp. Betsy Trotwood, embodied by her, becomes a living reality; while on the other hand she suffused with a sinister horror her stealthy, gliding, uncanny personation of the dumb, half-insane Hester Dethridge. That was the first great success that Mrs. Gilbert gained, under Augustin Daly's management. She has been associated with Daly's company since his opening night as a manager, August 16, 1869, when, at the Fifth Avenue theatre, then in Twenty-fourth Street, she took part in Robertson's comedy of _Play_. The first time I ever saw her she was acting the Marquise de St. Maur, in _Caste_, on the night of its first production in America, August 5, 1867, at the Broadway theatre, the house near the southwest corner of Broadway and Broome Street, that had been Wallack's but now was managed by Barney Williams. The assumption of that character, perfect in every particular, was instinct with pure aristocracy; but while brilliant with serious ability it gave not the least hint of those rich resources of humour that since have diffused so much innocent pleasure. Most of her successes have been gained as the formidable lady who typifies in comedy the domestic proprieties and the Nemesis of respectability. It was her refined and severely correct demeanour that gave soul and wings to the wild fun of _A Night Off_. From Miss Garth to Mrs. Laburnum is a far stretch of imitative talent for the interpretation of the woman nature that everybody, from Shakespeare down, has found it so difficult to treat. This actress has never failed to impress the spectator by her clear-cut, brilliant identification with every type of character that she has assumed; and, back of this, she has denoted a kind heart and a sweet and gentle yet never insipid temperament--the condition of goodness, sympathy, graciousness, and cheer that is the flower of a fine nature and a good life. Scenes in which Mrs. Gilbert and Charles Fisher or James Lewis have participated, as old married people, on Daly's stage, will long be remembered for their intrinsic beauty--suggestive of the touching lines: "And when with envy Time, transported, Shall think to rob us of our joys, You'll in your girls again be courted, And I'll go wooing with my boys." XXVII. JAMES LEWIS. A prominent representative type of character is "the humorous man," and that is Shakespeare's phrase to describe him. Wit is a faculty; humour an attribute. Joseph Addison, Laurence Sterne, Washington Irving--whatever else they might have been they were humourists. Sir Roger de Coverley, Tristram Shandy, Uncle Toby, Diedrich Knickerbocker, Ichabod Crane--these and other creations of their genius stand forth upon their pages to exemplify that aspect of their minds. But the humourist of the pen may, personally, be no humourist at all. Addison's character was austere. Irving, though sometimes gently playful, was essentially grave and decorous. Comical quality in the humorous man whom nature destines for the stage must be personal. His coming brings with it a sense of comfort. His presence warms the heart and cheers the mind. The sound of his voice, "speaking oft," before he emerges upon the scene, will set the theatre in a roar. This was notably true of Burton and of William Warren. The glance, motion, carriage, manner, and the pause and stillness of such a man, instil merriment. Cibber says that Robert Nokes had a palpable simplicity of nature which was often as unaccountably diverting in his common speech as on the stage, John E. Owens, describing the conduct of a big bee in an empty molasses barrel, once threw a circle of his hearers, of whom I was one, almost into convulsions of laughter. Artemas Ward made people laugh the moment they beheld him, by his wooden composure and indescribable sapience of demeanour. The lamented Daniel E. Setchell, a comedian who would have been as famous as he was funny had he but lived longer, presented a delightful example of spontaneous humour. It is ludicrous to recall the simple gravity, not demure but perfectly solemn, with which, on the deck of a Hudson River steamboat, as we were passing West Point, he indicated to me the Kosciuszko monument, saying briefly, "That's the place where Freedom shrieked." It was the quality of his temperament that made his playfulness delicious. Setchell was the mental descendant of Burton, as Burton was of Reeve and as Reeve was of Liston. Actors illustrate a kind of heredity. Each species is distinct and discernible. Lester Wallack maintained the lineage of Charles Kemble, William Lewis, Elliston, and Mountfort--a line in which John Drew has gained auspicious distinction. John Gilbert's artistic ancestry could be traced back through Farren and Munden to King and Quin, and perhaps still further, to Lowin and Kempe. The comedian intrinsically comical, while in his characteristic quality eccentric and dry, has been exemplified by Fawcett, Blisset, Finn, and Barnes, and is conspicuously presented by James Lewis. No one ever saw him without laughter--and it is kindly laughter, with a warm heart behind it. The moment he comes upon the stage an eager gladness diffuses itself throughout the house. His refined quaintness and unconscious drollery capture all hearts. His whimsical individuality never varies; yet every character of the many that he has portrayed stands clearly forth among its companions, a distinct, unique embodiment. The graceful urbanity, the elaborate yet natural manner, the brisk vitality, the humorous sapience of Sir Patrick Lundy--how completely and admirably he expressed them! How distinct that fine old figure is in the remembrance of all who saw it! But he has never played a part that he did not make equally distinct. A painter might fill a gallery with odd, characteristic creations by merely copying his compositions of "make-up." The amiable professor in _A Night Off_, the senile Gunnion in _The Squire_, Lissardo in _The Wonder_, Grumio in _The Shrew_--those and many more he has made his own; while in the actor's province of making comic characters really comical to others there is no artist who better fulfils the sagacious, comprehensive injunction of Munden (imparted to a youthful actor who spoke of being "natural" in order to amuse), "Nature be d----d! Make the people laugh!" That, aside from all subtleties, is not a bad test of the comic faculty, and that test has been met and borne by the acting of James Lewis. XXVIII. A LEAF FROM MY JOURNAL. [November 23, 1867.] Thirty years hereafter many who are now active and honoured in dramatic life will be at rest--their work concluded, their achievements a fading tradition. But they will not be wholly forgotten. The same talisman of memory that has preserved to our time the names and the deeds of the actors of old will preserve to future times the names and the deeds that are distinguished now in the mimic world of the stage. Legend, speaking in the voice of the veteran devotee of the drama, will say, for example, that of all the actors of this period there was no light comedian comparable with Lester Wallack; that he could thoroughly identify himself with character,--though it did not always please him to do so; that his acting was so imaginative and so earnest as to make reality of the most gossamer fiction; and that his vivacity--the essential element and the crown of comedy-acting--was like the dew on the opening rose. And therewithal the veteran may quaff his glass to the memory of another member of the Wallack family, and speak of James Wallack as Cassius, and Fagin, and the Man-in-the-Iron-Mask, and the King of the Commons, and may say, with truth, that a more winning embodiment of bluff manliness and humour was never known to our stage than the versatile actor who made himself foremost in those characters. It will be impossible to remember him without recalling his intimate professional associate, Edwin L. Davenport. He was the only Brutus of his time, our old friend will say, and in his prime the best Macbeth on the American stage; and he could play almost any part in the drama, from the loftiest tragedy to mere trash; and he was an admirable artist in all that he did. There will be plenty of evidence to fortify that statement; and if the veteran shall also say that Wallack's company contained, at the same time, the best "old men" in the profession, no dissentient voice, surely, will challenge the names of George Holland, John Gilbert, James H. Stoddart, and Mark Smith. Cibber could play Lord Foppington at seventy-three; but George Holland played Tony Lumpkin at seventy-seven. A young part,--but the old man was as joyous as a boy and filled it with a boisterous, mischievous humour at once delightful and indescribable. You saw him to the best advantage, though, in Mr. Sulky, Humphrey Dobbin, and kindred parts, wherein the fineness of his temperament was veiled under a crabbed exterior and some scope was allowed for his superb skill in painting character. So the discourse will run; and, when it touches upon John Gilbert, what else than this will be its burden?--that he was perfection as the old fop; that his Lord Ogleby had no peer; that he was the oddest conceivable compound of dry humour, quaint manners, frolicsome love of mischief, honest, hearty mirth, manly dignity, and tender pathos. To Mark Smith it will render a kindred tribute. Squire Broadlands, Old Rapid, Sir Oliver Surface--they cannot be forgotten. Extraordinary truthfulness to nature, extraordinary precision of method, large humanity, strong intellect, and refined and delicate humour that always charmed and never offended--those were the qualities that enrolled him among the best actors of his time. And it will not be strange if Old Mortality passes then into the warmest mood of eulogium, as he strives to recall the admirable, the incomparable "old woman" Mrs. Vernon. She was a worthy mate of those worthies, he will exclaim. She could be the sweet and loving mother, gentle and affectionate; the stately lady, representative of rank and proud of it and true to it; and the most eccentric of ludicrous old fools. She was the ideal Mrs. Malaprop, and she surpassed all competitors in the character of Mrs. Hardcastle. Mary Gannon was her stage-companion and her foil, he will add--the merriest, most mischievous, most bewitching player of her time, in her peculiar line of art. As Hester, in _To Marry or Not to Marry_, and as Sophia, in _The Road to Ruin_, she was the incarnation of girlish grace and delicious ingenuousness, and also of crisp, well-flavoured mirth. No taint of tameness marred her acting in those kindred characters, and no air of effort made it artificial. Nor was Fanny Morant less remarkable for the glitter of comedy and for an almost matchless precision of method. So will our friend of the future prose on, in a vein that will be tedious enough to matter-of-fact people; but not tedious to gentle spirits who love the stage, and sympathise with its votaries, and keep alive its traditions--knowing that this mimic world is as real and earnest as the strife that roars and surges around it; that there as everywhere else humanity plays out its drama, whereof the moral is always the same--that whether on the stage or in the mart, on the monarch's throne or in the peasant's cot, "We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep." THE END. THE WORKS OF WILLIAM WINTER. SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND. 18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS. GRAY DAYS AND GOLD. 18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS. SHADOWS OF THE STAGE. 18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS. SHADOWS OF THE STAGE. Second Series. 18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS. OLD SHRINES AND IVY. 18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS. Also a Small Limited LARGE PAPER EDITION. 4 Vols. Uniform. $8.00. WANDERERS: A Collection of Poems. NEW EDITION. 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11717	----	Team THE PALMY DAYS OF NANCE OLDFIELD BY EDWARD ROBINS WITH PORTRAITS 1898 [Illustration: Mrs. Oldfield the celebrated Comedian] CONTENTS I. FROM TAVERN TO THEATRE II. AN ENTRE-ACTE III. A BELLE OF METTLE IV. MANAGERIAL WICKEDNESS V. A DEAD HERO VI. IN TRAGIC PATHS VII. NANCE AT HOME VIII. THE MIMIC WORLD IX. "GRIEF À LA MODE" X. THE BARTON BOOTHS XI. THE FADING OF A STAR APPENDIX PORTRAITS Frontispiece: Mrs. Anne Oldfield Title-page: Mrs. Oldfield in the Character of Fair Rosamond Colley Cibber in the Character of Sir Novelty Fashion Robert Wilks William Congreve Mrs. Anne Bracegirdle Mrs. Bracegirdle as the "Sultaness" Joseph Addison Mrs. Anne Oldfield Mr. Mills, Mrs. Porter, Mr. Cibber Sir John Vanbrugh Sir Richard Steele Barton Booth THE PALMY DAYS OF NANCE OLDFIELD CHAPTER I FROM TAVERN TO THEATRE "Out of question, you were born in a merry hour," says Don Pedro to the blithesome heroine of "Much Ado About Nothing." "No, sure, my lord," answers Beatrice. "My mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born." Surely a star, possibly Venus, must have danced gaily on a certain night in the year of grace 1683, when the wife of Captain Oldfield, gentleman by birth and Royal Guardsman by profession, brought into the busy, unfeeling world of London a pretty mite of a girl. 'Twas a year of grace indeed, for the little stranger happened to be none other than Anne Oldfield, whose elegance of manner, charm of voice and action and loveliness of face would in time make her the most delightful comedienne of her day. Perhaps she found no instant welcome, this diminutive maiden who came smiling into existence laden with a message from the sunshine; her father was richer in ancestry than guineas, and the arrival of another daughter may have seemed an honour hardly worth the bestowal.[A] But Thalia laughed, as well she might, and even the stern features of Melpomene relaxed a little in witnessing the birth of one who would prove almost as wondrous in tragedy, when she so minded, as she was fascinating in the gentler phases of her art. [Footnote A: According to Edmund Bellchambers, Anne Oldfield "would have possessed a tolerable fortune, had not her father, a captain in the army, expended it at a very early period."] Yet the laughter of Thalia and the unbending of her sister Muse were hardly likely to make much impression in the Oldfield household, where money had more admirers than mythology, and so we are not surprised to learn that, with the death of the gallant captain, this "incomparable sweet girl," who would ere long reconcile even a supercilious Frenchman to the English stage, had to seek her living as a seamstress. How she sewed a bodice or hemmed a petticoat we know not, nor do we care; it is far more interesting to be told that, though only in her early teens, the toiler with the needle found her greatest recreation in reading Beaumont and Fletcher's plays. The modern young woman, be her station high or low, would take no pleasure in such a literary occupation, but in the days of Nance Oldfield to con the pages of Beaumont and Fletcher was considered a privilege rather than a duty. Then, again, the little seamstress had a soul above threads and thimbles; her heart was with the players, and we can imagine her running off some idle afternoon to peep slyly into Drury Lane Theatre, or perhaps walk over into Lincoln's Inn Fields, where the noble Betterton and his companions had formed a rival company. The performance over, she hurries to the Mitre Tavern, in St. James's Market, and here she is sure of a warm welcome, as is but natural, since the Mrs. Voss who rules the destinies of the hostelry is Anne's elder sister[A]. Here the girl loves to spend those rare moments of leisure, reading aloud the comedies of long ago and dreaming of the future; and here, too, it is that dashing Captain Farquhar listens in amazement as she recites the "Scornful Lady." [Footnote A: According to one authority Mrs. Voss was Anne's aunt. We adhere, however, to Dr. Doran's account of the relationship.] George Farquhar--how his name conjures up a vision of all that is brilliant, rakish, and bibulous in the expiring days of the seventeenth century! It is easy to picture him, as he stands near the congenial bar of the tavern, entranced by the liquid tones and marvellous expression of Nance's youthful voice. He has a whimsical, good-humoured face, perhaps showing the rubicund effects of steady drinking (as whose features did not in those halcyon times of merry nights and tired mornings?), and a general air of loving the world and its pleasures, despite a secret suspicion that a hard-hearted bailiff may be lying in wait around the corner. His flowing wig may seem a trifle old, the embroidery on his once resplendent vest look sadly tarnished, and the cloth of his skirted coat exhibit the unmistakable symptoms of age, but, for all that, Captain Farquhar stands forth an honourable, high-spirited gentleman. And gentleman George Farquhar is both by birth and bearing. Was he not the son of genteel parents living in the North of Ireland, and did he not receive a polite education at the University in Dublin? So polite, indeed, has his training been that he is already the author of that wonderful "Love and a Bottle," a comedy wherein he amusingly holds the mirror up to English vices, including his own. And, speaking of vices, he can now look back to those salad days when he wrote verses of unimpeachable morality, setting forth, among other sentiments, that-- "The pliant Soul of erring Youth Is, like soft Wax, or moisten'd Clay, Apt to receive all heav'nly Truth, Or yield to Tyrant Ill the Sway. Shun Evil in your early Years, And Manhood may to Virtue rise; But he who, in his Youth, appears A Fool, in Age will ne'er be wise." Poor fellow! He never will be wise in the material sense; he will trip gracefully through life with more brains and bonhomie than worldly discretion, yet eclipsing many steadier companions by writing the "Recruiting Officer" and other sparkling plays, not forgetting "The Inconstant," which will last even unto the end of the nineteenth century. At present--and 'tis the present rather than the past or future that most concerns the captain--he holds a commission in the army, which he is foolish enough to relinquish later on, and he has come to the very sensible conclusion that he is far more at home in the writing of comedies than the acting therein. For he has been on the stage, and precipitately retired therefrom after accidently wounding a fellow performer[A]. In the course of two or three years Farquhar will make a desperate attempt to be mercenary by marrying a girl whom he supposes to be wealthy; he will find out his mistake, and then, like the thoroughbred that he is, will go on cherishing her as though she had brought him a ton of rent-rolls. When he is dead and gone, Chetwood, the veteran prompter of Drury Lane, will tell us, quaintly enough, how "it was affirm'd, by some of his near Acquaintance, his unfortunate Marriage shortened his Days; for his Wife (by whom he had two Daughters), through the Reputation of a great Fortune, trick'd him into Matrimony. This was chiefly the Fault of her Love, which was so violent that she was resolved to use all Arts to gain him. Tho' some Husbands, in such a Case, would have proved _mere Husbands_, yet he was so much charm'd with her Love and Understanding, that he liv'd very happy with her. Therefore when I say an unfortunate Marriage, with other Circumstances, conducted to the shortening of his Days; I only mean that his Fortune, being too slender to support a Family, led him into a great many Cares and Inconveniences." [Footnote A: Farquhar was playing in "The Indian Emperor" being cast for Guyomar, a character whose pleasant duty it is to kill Vasquez, the Spanish general. This particular Guyomar forgot to change his sword for a theatre foil, and in the subsequent encounter gave Vasquez too realistic a punishment]. No one would have appreciated the unconscious humour of Chetwood's assertion about "some husbands" more than Farquhar himself. One trembles to think, by the way what a "mere husband" must have been in the reigns of William or Anne. In the meantime we are almost forgetting young Mistress Oldfield, who is still reading the "Scornful Lady," and putting new life and grace into lines which nowadays seem a bit academic and musty. The captain has not forgotten her, however; on the contrary, he is so charmed with what he hears that he makes some flimsy excuse to get into that room behind the bar whence the silvery voice proceeds. There he first meets Nance, surrounded by what audience we know not, and is struck dumb at the lovely figure standing out in bashful relief, as it were, against a background of wine bottles and ale tankards. There is an awkward pause, no doubt, and if the girl of fifteen comes to a sudden stop in her recital, Farquhar is no less embarrassed on his part. The handsome, rosy face of a strapping tavern wench would not have startled him, but he was not gazing upon a bouncing serving maid or the hoydenish daughter of a prosperous innkeeper. He beheld a creature in all the gentle bloom of highbred beauty--tall, well-formed, and radiating a sort of natural elegance, with a fine-shaped, expressive face, to which great speaking eyes and a mouth half pensive, half smiling, lent an air of rare distinction. These were the eyes which in after years Anne would half close in a roguish way, as when, for instance, she meditated a brilliant stroke as Lady Betty Modish, and then, opening them defiantly, would make them glisten with the spirit of twinkling comedy. These were the eyes, too, which would shine forth such unutterable love when she played Cleopatra that one might well pardon the peccadilloes of poor Antony. But as yet there was no thought of drooping eyelids or amorous glances; all was natural, and nothing more so than the coyness of Nance upon seeing the author of "Love and a Bottle." Captain Farquhar had never before beheld this seamstress from King Street, Westminster, but she must have been familiar with the handsome figure of one who had drunk many a brimming glass at the Mitre Tavern. Thus, when he made bold to praise her elocution, she was not offended, and, although she ignored his request to continue the "Scornful Lady," Anne proved sufficiently mistress of the interruption to astonish the intruder by her "discourse and sprightly wit." That innate breeding, of which no amount of poverty could deprive her, came to the surface, to show that a woman of quality is none the worse for a surprise. Farquhar, bowing low with a grace that made his faded clothes seem the pink of fashion, poured forth a torrent of flowery compliments, which became all the stronger when he heard that the girl knew Beaumont and Fletcher nearly by heart. She must have blushed, looking prettier than ever, as the visitor went on; and how that young heart did leap as he predicted for her a glorious future on the stage! The stage! the _Ultima Thule_ of all her hopes! The very idea of acting filled her head with a thousand bewildering fancies, and, as she told Chetwood in after years, "I longed to be at it, and only wanted a little decent intreaties." The decent intreaties were forthcoming. Nance's mother, who evidently rejoiced in a prophetic spirit not given to all parents, strongly agreed with Farquhar's opinion that the young lady should try a theatrical career, and the upshot of the whole episode was that Captain Vanbrugh took an interest in the newly-found jewel. This was a high honour. Vanbrugh had not yet made for himself a reputation as an architect by building Blenheim Castle for the Marlboroughs, nor had he changed his title of Captain for Sir John; but he was a great man, nevertheless, a successful dramatist and a boon companion of Christopher Rich, manager of Drury Lane. When the enthusiastic Farquhar sounded the praises of Anne Oldfield the future Sir John quickly repaired to the sign of the Mitre, with which, no doubt, he was already familiar, and met the young enchantress of that historic little room behind the bar. The arrival of this second and more distinguished captain was evidently the signal for a family council. We can see them all--Nance, glowing with excitement, her Brahmin-like, aristocratic beauty heightened by a dash of natural colour, quite different from the rouge she might use later; Mrs. Voss, sleepy, comfortable, and well pleased; and Mrs. Oldfield, full of importance and maternal solicitude. Vanbrugh, with his good-humoured smile and military bearing, talks in a fatherly way to the daughter, is deeply impressed with her many attractions, and is not sorry to learn that her ambition is all for comedy. He promises to use his good offices with Mr. Rich to have her enrolled as a member of the Drury Lane company, keeps his word, too--something for a gentleman to do in the year 1699--and soon has the satisfaction of seeing his new protégée hobnobbing with Mrs. Verbruggen, Wilks, Cibber, and other players of the house, while drawing fifteen shillings a week for the privilege. To hobnob, receive a few shillings, and do next to nothing on the stage does not seem a glorious beginning for our heroine, but think of the inestimable luxury of brushing up against Colley Cibber. This remarkable man, who would be in turn actor, manager, playwright, and a pretty bad Poet Laureate before death would put an extinguisher on his prolific muses, had at first no exalted opinion of the newcomer's powers. "In the year 1699," he writes in that immortal biography of his,[A] "Mrs. Oldfield was first taken into the house, where she remain'd about a twelvemonth, almost a mute and unheeded, 'till Sir John Vanbrugh, who first recommended her, gave her the part of Alinda in the 'Pilgrim' revis'd. This gentle character happily became that want of confidence which is inseparable from young beginners, who, without it, seldom arrive to any excellence. Notwithstanding, I own I was then so far deceiv'd in my opinion of her, that I thought she had little more in her person that appeared necessary to the forming a good actress; for she set out with so extraordinary a diffidence, that it kept her too despondingly down to a formal, plain, (not to say)flat manner of speaking." [Footnote A: "An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber."] How strange it seems, as we peer back behind the scenes of history, to think of a theatrical _débutante_ rejoicing in an extraordinary diffidence. "Rather a cynical remark, isn't it?" the reader may ask. Well, perhaps it is, but these are piping times of advertising, when even genius has been known to employ a press agent. Nance Oldfield may have been almost mute for a twelvemonth, yet more than a few feminine novices, Anno Domino 1898, would never be content to remain silent; not only must they make a noise behind the footlights, but they feel it incumbent to be heard in the newspapers as well. Any dramatic editor could tell a weary tale of the importunities of a progressive young lady who wants to enlighten an aching public at least six times a week as to the number of her dresses, the colour of her hair, and the attention of her admirers. There is a blessed consolation in all this: the female with the trousseau, the champagned locks and the notoriety lasts no longer than the butterfly, and her place is soon taken by the girl who never bothers about the paragraphs, because she is sure to get them. To return to the more congenial subject of Oldfield, it is strange that so shrewd a Thespian as Cibber (who seems to have been clever in all things but poetry) was so long in coming to a real appreciation of her genius. He is manly enough to confess that not even the silvery tone of that honeyed voice could, "'till after some time incline my ear to any hope in her favour." "But public approbation," he tells us, "is the warm weather of a theatrical plant, which will soon bring it forward to whatever perfection nature has design'd it. However, Mrs. Oldfield (perhaps for want of fresh parts) seem'd to come but slowly forward 'till the year 1703." So slowly had she come forward indeed, that in 1702, Gildon, a now forgotten critic and dramatist, included her among the "meer Rubbish that ought to be swept off the stage with the Filth and Dust."[A] Time has avenged the actress for this slight; who, excepting the student of theatrical history, remembers Gildon? [Footnote A: From the "Comparison Between the Two Stages."] What is more to the purpose, Nance was able to avenge herself in the flesh, only a few months after these contemptuous lines had been penned. It happened at Bath, in the summer of 1703, and the story of her triumph, brief as it is, sounds quaint and pretty, as it comes down to us laden with a thousand suggestions of fashionable life in the reign of Queen Anne--a life made up of gossip and cards, drinking, gaming, patches and powder, fine clothes, full perriwigs and empty heads. What a picturesque lot of people there must have been at the great English spa that season, all anxious to get a glimpse of her plump majesty, who was staying there, and all willing enough to do anything except to test the waters or the baths from which the place first acquired fame. They were all there, the pretty maids and wrinkled matrons, the young rakes of twenty, ready for a frolic, and the old rakes of thirty too weary to do much more than go to the theatre and cry out, "Damme, this is a damn'd play." Then the children, who were always in the way, and the aged fathers of families who liked to swear at the dandified airs and newly imported French manners of their sons. And such sons as some of them were too--smart fellows, of whom the beau described in "The Careless Husband," may be taken as an example: one "that's just come to a small estate, and a great perriwig--he that sings himself among the women--he won't speak to a gentleman when a lord's in company. You always see him with a cane dangling at his button, his breast open, no gloves, one eye tuck'd under his hat, and a toothpick." What of the belles of the Bath? They seem to have been much after the fashion of their modern sisters, with their harmless little vanities, their love of expensive finery, and their pretty eyes ever watching for the main chance, or a chance man. Odsbodkins! but the world has changed very little, for even then we hear of dashing specimens of the New Woman, in the persons of ladies who affected men's hats, feathers, coats, and perriwigs, to such an extent that our dear friend Addison will gently rebuke them during the reign of the _Spectator_. He doubts if this masculinity will "smite more effectually their male beholders," for how would the sweet creatures themselves be affected "should they meet a man on horseback, in his breeches and jack-boots, and at the same time dressed up in a commode[A] and a night raile?" [Footnote A: A cumbersome head-dress made of lace or muslin.] How charming it would have been to watch the whole gay crew, just as Addison and Steele must have done, and to feel, like these two delightful philosophers, that you were a little above the surroundings. Poor Dick Steele may not always have been above those surroundings; we can fancy him taking things comfortably in some tippling-house, red-faced, happy, and winey, but even the most puritanical of us will forgive him. Read, by the way, what he says of the Spa's morals[A]--"I found a sober, modest man was always looked upon by both sexes as a precise, unfashioned fellow of no life or spirit. It was ordinary for a man who had been drunk in good company, or.... to speak of it next day before women for whom he had the greatest respect. He was reproved, perhaps, with a blow of the fan, or an 'Oh, fy!' but the angry lady still preserved an apparent approbation in her countenance. He was called a strange, wicked fellow, a sad wretch; he shrugs his shoulders, swears, receives another blow, swears again he did not know he swore, and all was well. You might often see men game in the presence of women, and throw at once for more than they were worth, to recommend themselves as men of spirit. I found by long experience that the loosest principles and most abandoned behaviour carried all before them in pretentions to women of fortune." [Footnote A: _Spectator_, No. 154. Steele is writing as Simon Honeycomb.] Into this merry throng came Anne Oldfield during that never-to-be-forgotten summer--not, however, as an equal, but as an humble player of the troupe from Drury Lane. They had moved down from London, these happy-go-lucky Bohemians, as they were wont to do each season, among them being the ubiquitous Cibber, the gentlemanly Wilks, and that very talented vagabond, George Powell. Powell it was who liked his brandy not wisely but too well, and who made such passionate love on the stage that Sir John Vanbrugh used to wax nervous for the fate of the actresses. One great artiste was missing, however. Mrs. Verbruggen was ill in London, and that shining exponent of light comedy, who Cibber said was mistress of more variety of humour than he ever knew in any one actress, would never more tread those boards which were dearer to her than life.[A] Before she disappears for ever from these "Palmy Days" let us read a page or two about her from the graphic pictures in that famous "Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber":-- * * * * * "As she was naturally a pleasant mimick, she had the skill to make that talent useful on the stage, a talent which may be surprising in a conversation, and yet be lost when brought to the theatre.... But where the elocution is round, distinct, voluble, and various, as Mrs. Montfort's was, the mimick there is a great assistant to the actor." [Footnote A: A brief memoir of Mrs. Verbruggen and her first husband, handsome Will Mountford, will be found in "Echoes of the Playhouse."] * * * * * Which reminds one that more than a baker's dozen of modern comedians, so called, are nothing less than mimics. However, this is digressing, and so we continue: "Nothing, tho' ever so barren, if within the bounds of nature, could be flat in her hands. She gave many heightening touches to characters but coldly written, and often made an author vain of his work that in itself had but little merit. She was so fond of humour, in what low part soever to be found, that she would make no scruple of defacing her fair form to come heartily into it;[A] for when she was eminent in several desirable characters of wit and humour in higher life, she would be in as much fancy when descending into the antiquated Abigail of Fletcher ('Scornful Lady') as when triumphing in all the airs and vain graces of a fine lady, a merit that few actresses care for. In a play of D'Urfey's, now forgotten, called the 'Western Lass,' which part she acted, she transformed her whole being, body, shape, voice, language, look, and features, into almost another animal, with a strong Devonshire dialect, a broad, laughing voice, a poking head, round shoulders, an unconceiving eye, and the most bediz'ning, dowdy dress that ever cover'd the untrain'd limbs of a Joan Trot. To have seen her here you would have thought it impossible the same creature could ever have been recover'd to what was as easy to her, the gay, the lively, and the desirable. Nor was her humour limited to her sex; for, while her shape permitted, she was a more adroit pretty fellow than is usually seen upon the stage. Her easy air, action, mien, and gesture quite chang'd, from the quoif to the cock'd hat and cavalier in fashion. People were so fond of seeing her a man, that when the part of Bays in the 'Rehearsal' had for some time lain dormant, she was desired to take it up, which I have seen her act with all the true coxcombly spirit and humour that the sufficiency of the character required." [Footnote A: Davies, in his "Life of Garrick," says of Peg Woffington that "in Mrs. Day, in the 'Committee,' she made no scruple to disguise her beautiful countenance by drawing on it the lines of deformity and the wrinkles of old age, and to put on the tawdry habilaments and vulgar manners of an old hypocritical city vixen."] Let us cry peace to her manes and then wander back to Mistress Oldfield, whom we have a very ungallant way of leaving from time to time. Well, Verbruggen having been taken out of the dramatic lists "most of her parts," as Colley chronicles, "were, of course, to be disposed of, yet so earnest was the female scramble for them, that only one of them fell to the share of Mrs. Oldfield, that of Leonora in 'Sir Courtly Nice'; a character of good plain sense, but not over elegantly written." A "female scramble" it must have been with a vengeance, as any one who knows aught of theatrical ambition will easily understand. The only really distinguished actress of the Drury Lane coterie _hors de combat_, and a bevy of feminine vultures of no particular pretension, anxiously waiting to dispose of her histrionic remains! Think of it, ye managers who have to subdue the passions and limit the extravagant hopes of your players, and pity poor, unfortunate Mr. Rich. Do you wonder that Nance only contrived to get the plain-spoken Leonora? The wonder of it is that she obtained any rôle whatsoever. Let Cibber continue the story, while he frankly confesses that even he could form a false estimate of a colleague: * * * * * "It was in this part Mrs. Oldfield surpris'd me into an opinion of her having all the innate powers of a good actress, though they were yet but in the bloom of what they promis'd. Before she had acted this part I had so cold an expectation from her abilities, that she could scarce prevail with me to rehearse with her the scenes she was chiefly concerned in with Sir Courtly, which I then acted. However, we ran them over with a mutual inadvertency of one another. I seem'd careless, as concluding that any assistance I could give her would be to little or no purpose; and she mutter'd out her words in a sort of mifty manner at my low opinion of her. But when the play came to be acted, she had just occasion to triumph over the error of my judgment, by the (almost) amazement that her unexpected performance awak'd me to; so forward and sudden a step into nature I had never seen; and what made her performance more valuable was that I knew it all proceeded from her own understanding, untaught and unassisted by any one more experienced actor." * * * * * In the original text, Cibber, in pursuance of that old-fashioned method of capitalising every third or fourth word without any particular rhyme or reason, has spelled occasion with a big O. Well he might, for it was, perhaps, the most important occasion in all the eventful life of Oldfield. She would win many a more popular triumph in days to come, but what were all of them compared to the honour of having compelled the writer to admit that he had blundered. "Though this part of Leonora in itself was of so little value, that when she got more into esteem it was one of the several she gave away to inferior actresses; yet it was the first (as I have observed) that corrected my judgment of her, and confirmed me in a strong belief that she could not fail in very little time of being what she was afterwards allow'd to be, the foremost ornament of our Theatre." It takes but slight exercise of fancy to see inside the stuffy little theatre of Bath, on that memorable summer afternoon, when "Sir Courtly Nice"[A] is produced, with Cibber in the foppish title-rôle and the fair unknown as Leonora, "Belguard's sister, in love with Farewell." Her fat, peaceful, and phlegmatic Majesty, Anne Stuart, is in the royal box, perhaps (although she is far from being a playgoer), and with her retinue may be seen her dearest of friends, Sarah Churchill, now Duchess of Marlborough, and the most brilliant political Amazon of her time. How appropriate, by-the-way, that they should be together at the comedy. The whole intimacy of the two, gentle Sovereign and fiery subject, is nothing more or less than a curious play, wherein Anne takes the rôle of Queen (unwillingly enough, poor thing, for she was born to be bourgeoise) and the Duchess assumes the leading part. Unfortunate "Mrs. Morley"![B] You have a weary time of it, trying to act up to royalty when you would be so much happier as a middle-class housewife, and, perhaps, you have never been more bored than you are to-day in viewing "Sir Courtly Nice." Nor can the performance be as delightful as it might otherwise prove to her of Marlborough; 'tis but a few months since her son, the Marquis of Blandford, had ended in small-pox a career which promised to carry on the greatness of his house. [Footnote A: "Sir Courtly Nice; or, It Cannot be," was from the pen of John Crown. In dedicating it to the Duke of Ormond, as can be seen in the original publication of the piece ("London, Printed by H.H. Jun. for R. Bently, in Russell street, Covent Garden, and Jos. Hindmarsh, at the Golden-Ball over against the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, MDCLXXXV"). The author says: "This comedy was Written by the Sacred Command of our late Most Excellent King, of ever blessed and beloved Memory (Charles II.). I had the great good fortune to please Him often at his Court in my Masque, on the Stage in Tragedies and Comedies, and so to advance myself in His good opinion; an Honour may render a wiser Man than I vain; for I believe he had more equals in extent of Dominion than of Understanding. The greatest pleasure he had from the Stage was in Comedy, and he often Commanded me to Write it, and lately gave me a Spanish Play called 'No' Puedeser Or, It Cannot Be' out of which I took part o' the Name and design o' this."] [Footnote B: It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that in the private correspondence between Anne and the Duchess of Marlborough, the former signed herself "Mrs. Morley," while her friend masqueraded as "Mrs. Freeman."] The comedy is about to begin as a common-looking person makes his appearance in the box. He is a dull, heavy fellow, who suggests nothing more strongly than a fondness for brown October ale and a good dinner into the bargain. Anne turns towards him with as affectionate a glance as she thinks it seeming to bestow in public. Is he not her husband, George of Denmark, and the father of all those children whom she never has succeeded in rearing to man's, or woman's, estate? He is a faithful consort, too, which is saying not a little in the days when Royal constancy, on the male side, is the rarest of jewels. George has vices, to be sure, but they belong to the stomach rather than the heart--that obese heart which, such as it is, the good Queen can call her own. "Hath your Royal Highness ever seen this Cibber act?" asked the Duchess, by way of making conversation. She never stands on ceremony with soft-pated George, and does not wait to speak until she is spoken to. "Cibber--Cibber--who be Cibber?" queries the Prince, a beery look in his eye, a foreign accent on his tongue. "He's the son of the sculptor, Caius Gabriel Cibber, your Highness." "I do not know--I do not know," mutters George drowsily. Then he falls asleep in the box, and snores so deeply that Manager Rich, who has been in the front of the house, pokes his inquisitive face into the poorly-lighted auditorium, and quickly pokes it back again. But hush! Wake up, Prince, and look at the stage. The play has begun, and some member of the company, we know not who, has recited the archaic prologue, which asks: "What are the Charmes, by which these happy Isles Hence gain'd Heaven's brightest and eternal smiles? What Nation upon Earth besides our own But by a loss like ours had been undone? Ten Ages scarce such Royal worths display As England lost, and found in one strange Day. One hour in sorrow and confusion hurld, And yet the next the envy of the World." [Illustration: COLLEY CIBBER In the character of "Sir Novelty Fashion, newly created Lord Foppington," in Vanbrugh's play of "The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger." _From the Painting by_ J. GRISONI, _the property of the Garrick Club_] The King is dead! Long live the Queen! The prologue was written in honour of his most Catholic Majesty James II. and his consort, Marie Beatrice of Modena, but the opening lines are admirably adapted to flatter Anne, and so they are retained, even though what follows happens to be new.[A] [Footnote A: The remainder of the original prologue, had it been recited, would have raised a storm.] But what care we for the prologue when the first scene is on and Violante and Leonora are confessing their respective love affairs, as women always do--on the stage. Leonora has a dragon of a brother who would compel her to marry that pink of empty propriety, Sir Courtly, but she rebels against the admirer selected for her, as all well-bred young women should in plays, and sets her heart upon another. In consequence there is trouble of the dear old romantic kind. "I never stir out, but as they say the Devil does, with chains and torments," Leonora tells Violante. "She that is my Hell at home is so abroad." "Vio. A New Woman? "LEO. No, an old Woman, or rather an old Devil; nay, worse than an old Devil, an old Maid. "Vio. Oh, there's no Fiend so Envious. "LEO. Right; she will no more let young People sin, than the Devil will let 'em be sav'd, out of envy to their happiness. "Vio. Who is she? "LEO. One of my own blood, an Aunt. "Vio. I know her. She of thy blood? She has not a drop of it these twenty years; the Devil of envy sucked it all out, and let verjuice in the roome." These lines are decidedly unfeminine and coarse, as viewed from a nineteenth century standard, and there is nothing in them to recommend the two girls to the particular favour of the audience. Yet, in the case of Leonora, they are given with such rare spirit, and the speaker, with her almost sensuous charm and the melody of that marvellous voice, is so fascinating, that the house is suddenly caught in some entrancing spell. Oldfield has burst upon it in all the sudden glory of a newly unfolded flower, and murmurs of admiration and surprise are heard on every side. More than this, Queen Anne, whose thoughts may have been far away with the dead Duke of Gloucester, betrays a sudden interest in the performance, and thus sets the fashion for all those around her, excepting his most sleepy Royal Highness, the Prince of Denmark. He dozes on; twenty angels from heaven would not disturb him. As the play proceeds, the curiosity centres around the new Leonora, so that even the scene where Sir Courtly is found making the most elaborate of toilets, with the assistance of a bevy of vocalists, does not exert the attraction to be found in the presence of Oldfield. The episode is all very funny, of course, and there is an appreciative titter when the fop defines the characteristics of a gentleman: "Complaisance, fine hands, a mouth well furnished-- "SERVANT. With fine language? "SIR COURTLY. Fine teeth, you sot; fine language belongs to pedants and poor fellows that live by their wits. Men of quality are above wit. 'Tis true, for our diversion, sometimes we write, but we ne'er regard wit. I write, but I never write any wit. "SERVANT. How then, sir? "SIR COURTLY. I write like a gentleman, soft and easy." It is only a titter, however, that Cibber can produce this afternoon, or evening,[A] nor does the audience take the usual relish in that touch-and-go rubbish of a duet sung by a supposed Indian and his love, a duet in which the former declares: "My other Females all Yellow, fair or Black, To thy Charmes shall prostrate fall, As every kind of elephant does To the white Elephant Buitenacke. And thou alone shall have from me Jimminy, Gomminy, whee, whee, whee, The Gomminy, Jimminy, whee." To which the lovely maiden answers: "The great Jaw-waw that rules our Land, And pearly Indian sea Has not so absolute Command As thou hast over me, With a Jimminy, Gomminy, Gomminy, Jimminy, Jimminy, Gomminy, whee." [Footnote A: Theatrical performances in this reign generally began at 5 p.m.] When the play is over Nance can take a new part, that of a feminine conqueror. She has overshadowed Colley Cibber, who is more dazed than chagrined at the _dénouement_, and she has proved more potent for the public amusement than all the beauties of "Jimminy, Gomminy," with its elephants, its jaw-waw, and its pearly Indian Sea. As she sits in the green-room, smiling in girlish triumph while she looks around at the beaux and players who crowd about her, anxious to worship the rising star, her eloquent glance falls on George Farquhar. There is a tear in his eye, but a radiant expression about the face. What does the Oldfield's success mean to the Captain? Perhaps Anne knows, as she throws him a tender recognition; perhaps she thinks of that song in "Sir Courtly Nice" which runs: "Oh, be kind, my dear, be kind, Whilst our Loves and we are Young; We shall find, we shall find, Time will change the face or mind, Youth will not continue long. Oh, be kind, my dear, be kind." CHAPTER II AN ENTRE-ACTE While Anne Oldfield is resting from her first triumph and preparing for another, let us glance for a moment at the theatrical conditions which surround her. Curious, perplexing conditions they are, marking as they do a transition between the brilliant but generally filthy period of the Restoration--a period in which some of the worst and some of the best of plays saw the light--and the time when the punctilio and artificial decency of the age will cast over the stage the cold light of formality and restraint. The nation is but slowly recovering from the licentiousness which characterised the merry reign of Charles II., that witty, sceptical sovereign, who never believed in the honesty of man nor the virtue of frail woman. The playwrights are recovering too, yet, if anything, more tardily than the people; for when a nasty cynicism, like that pervading the old comedies, is once boldly cultivated, many a long day must elapse ere it can be replaced by a cleaner, healthier spirit. Charles has surely had much to answer for at the bar of public opinion (a bar for which he evidently felt a profound contempt), and the evil influence which he and his Court exerted on the drama supplies one of the greatest blots on his moral 'scutcheon. Augustus William Schlegel, that foreigner who studied the literature of the English stage as few Britons have ever done, well pointed out that while the Puritans had brought Republican principles and religious zeal into public odium, this light-hearted monarch seemed expressly born to dispel all respect for the kingly dignity. "England was inundated with the foreign follies and vices in his train. The Court set the fashion of the most undisguised immorality, and this example was the more extensively contagious, as people imagined that they showed their zeal for the new order of things by an extravagant way of thinking and living. The fanaticism of the Republicans had been accompanied with true strictness of manners, and hence nothing appeared more convenient than to obtain the character of Royalists by the extravagant inclination for all lawful and unlawful pleasures. "The age of Louis XIV. was nowhere imitated with greater depravity. The prevailing gallantry at the Court of France was not without reserve and tenderness of feeling; they sinned, if I may so speak, with some degree of dignity, and no man ventured to attack what was honourable, though his own actions might not exactly coincide with it. The English played a part which was altogether unnatural to them; they gave themselves heavily up to levity; they everywhere confounded the coarsest licentiousness with free mental vivacity, and did not perceive that the sort of grace which is still compatible with depravity, disappears with the last veil which it throws off." As Schlegel goes on to say, we can easily imagine into what direction the tastes of the English people drifted under such auspices. "They possessed no real knowledge of the fine arts, and these were merely favoured like other foreign fashions and inventions of luxury. They neither felt a true want of poetry, nor had any relish for it; they merely wished to be entertained in a brilliant and light manner. The theatre, which in its former simplicity had attracted the spectators solely by the excellence of the dramatic works and the actors, was now furnished out with all the appendages with which we are at this day familiar; but what is gained in external decoration is lost in internal worth." In other words, the theatrical life and literature of the Restoration was morally rotten to the core. How that rottenness has been giving way, during the childhood of Nance Oldfield, to what may be styled a comparative decency, need not be described here. Suffice it to explain that such a change is taking place, and let us accordingly sing, rejoice and give thanks for small mercies. Thalia has ceased to be a wanton; she is fast becoming quite a respectable young woman, and as to Melpomene--well, that severe Muse is actually waxing religious. Religious? Yes, verily, for will not all good Londoners read in the course of a year or two that there will be a performance of "Hamlet" at Drury Lane "towards the defraying the charge of repairing and fitting up the chapel in Russell Court," said performance to be given "with singing by Mr. Hughes, and entertainment of dancing by Monsieur Cherier, Miss Lambro his scholar, and Mr. Evans. Boxes, 5s.; pit, 3s.; gallery, 2s.; upper gallery, 1s." Here was an ideal union of church and stage with a vengeance, the one being served by the other, and the whole thing done to the secular accompaniment of singing and dancing. For an instant the town was scandalised, but Defoe, that perturbed spirit for whom there was no such word as rest, saw the humour of the situation. "Hard times, gentlemen, hard times these are indeed with the Church," he informs the promoters of this ecclesiastical benefit, "to send her to the playhouse to gather pew-money. For shame, gentlemen! go to the Church and pay your money there, and never let the playhouse have such a claim to its establishment as to say the Church is beholden to her.... Can our Church be in danger? How is it possible? The whole nation is solicitous and at work for her safety and prosperity. The Parliament address, the Queen consults, the Ministry execute, the Armies fight, and all for the Church; but at home we have other heroes that act for the Church. Peggy Hughes sings, Monsieur Ramandon plays, Miss Santlow dances, Monsieur Cherier teaches, and all for the Church. Here's heavenly doings! here's harmony!" "In short," concludes the author of "Robinson Crusoe," "the observations on this most preposterous piece of Church work are so many, they cannot come into the compass of this paper; but if the money raised here be employed to re-edify this chapel, I would have it, as is very frequent, in like cases, written over the door in capital letters: 'This church was re-edified anno 1706, at the expense and by the charitable contribution of the enemies of the reformation of our morals, and to the eternal scandal and most just reproach of the Church of England and the Protestant religion. Witness our hands, "LUCIFER, Prince of Darkness,| and | _Churchwardens_."[A] HAMLET, Prince of Denmark, | [Footnote A: _Review_, June 20, 1706.] The "enemies of the reformation of our morals!" Defoe used the expression satirically, but how well it suited the minds of many pious persons, ranging all the way from bishops to humble laymen, who could see nothing in the theatre excepting the prospective flames of the infernal regions. Clergymen preached against the playhouse then, just as some of them have done since, and will continue so to do until the arrival of the Millennium. Oftentimes the criticisms of these well-meaning gentlemen had more than a grain of truth to make them half justifiable. The stage was still far from pure, in spite of the improvement which was going on steadily enough, and there is no denying the fact that several of the worst plays of the Restoration could still claim admirers. Even "Sir Courtly Nice," wherein occurs one of the most indecent passages ever penned, and one of the most suggestive of songs, was received without a murmur. Congreve was pardoned for his breaches of decorum, and Dryden was looked upon as quite proper enough for all purposes. The _morale_ of the players could hardly be called unimpeachable, at least in some instances, but the violations of social rules were not so open as they had been in the old days. Here and there a frail actress might depart from the stony path of virtue, or an actor give himself up to wine and the dodging of bailiffs, yet the attending scandals were not flaunted in the face of the public. In other words, there were Thespians of doubtful reputation then, just as there are now, and these black sheep helped materially to keep up against their white brethren that remarkable prejudice which has endured even unto the present decade. As a class, the players had no social position of any kind, although the great ones of the earth, the men of rank, never hesitated to hobnob with them when, like Mrs. Gamp, they felt "so dispoged." Even in the enlightened reign of Queen Anne, there existed among many intelligent persons the vague idea that one who trod the boards was nothing more or less than a vagabond, and we are not surprised to learn, therefore, that in a royal proclamation of the period, "players and mountebanks" are mentioned in the same sentence, as though there was little difference between them. Perhaps, the "artists" to whom the title of vagabond might be applied with a certain degree of justice were the strolling players, who seem to have been much after the fashion of others of their ilk, before and since. Good-natured, poverty-stricken barnstormers they doubtless were, living from-hand-to-mouth, and quite willing to go through the whole gamut of tragedy, from Shakespeare to Dryden, for the sake of a good supper. Here is a graphic picture of such a band of dramatic ne'er-do-wells, drawn by Dick Steele in the forty-eighth issue of the _Spectator_: "We have now at this place [this is a letter of an imaginary correspondent to 'Mr. Spectator'] a company of strollers, who are very far from offending in the impertinent splendor of the drama. They are so far from falling into these false gallantries, that the stage is here in his original situation of a cart. Alexander the Great was acted by a fellow in a paper cravat. The next day, the Earl of Essex seemd to have no distress but his poverty; and my Lord Foppington the same morning wanted any better means to show himself a fop than by wearing stockings of different colours.[A] In a word, though they have had a full barn for many days together, our itinerants are still so wretchedly poor, that without you can prevail to send us the furniture you forbid at the playhouse, the heroes appear only like sturdy beggars, and the heroines gypsies. We have had but one part which was performed and dressed with propriety, and that was Justice Clodpate. This was so well done, that it offended Mr. Justice Overdo, who, in the midst of our whole audience, was (like Quixote in the puppet show) so highly provoked, that he told them, if they would move compassion, it should be in their own persons and not in the characters of distressed princes and potentates. He told them, if they were so good at finding the way to people's hearts, they should do it at the end of bridges or church porches, in their proper vocation as beggars. This, the justice says, they must expect, since they could not be contented to act heathen warriors, and such fellows as Alexander, but must presume to make a mockery of one of the Quorum." [Footnote A: It must be remembered that theatrical costumes, as we see them to-day, did not exist. The art of dressing correctly, according to the nature of the character and the period in which the play was supposed to occur, was practically unknown. Even in after years we hear of Spranger Barry playing Othello in a gold-laced scarlet suit, small cocked hat, and knee-breeches, with silk stockings. Think of it, ye sticklers for realism! Dr. Doran narrates how Garrick dressed Hamlet in a court suit of black coat, "waistcoat and knee-breeches, short wig with queue and bag, buckles in the shoes, ruffles at the wrists, and flowing ends of an ample cravat hanging over his chest." Barton Booth's costume for Cato was even more of an anachronism. "The Cato of Queen Anne's day wore a flowered gown and an ample wig."] Poor strollers. There was a bit of stern philosophy in the advice of the justice, for they would probably have led a merrier and more luxurious life had they deserted the barns for the bridges and church-porches. Perhaps the same change would suit the wandering players who are to be found in these last years of the nineteenth century, travelling from one third-class hotel to another, and wondering whether they will ever make enough money to return home and sun themselves on the New York Rialto. Humble as they were in the time of Queen Anne, her Government saw fit to subject the strollers to what might be called police regulation, and the Master of the Revels, who was a censor of plays and a supervisor-in-general of theatrical matters, had to issue an imposing order setting forth that whereas "several Companies of Strolling Actors pretend to have Licenses from Noblemen,[A] and presume under that pretence to avoid the Master of the Revels, his Correcting their Plays, Drolls, Farces, and Interludes: which being against Her Majesty's Intentions and Directions to the said Master: These are to signifie That such Licenses are not of any Force or authority. There are likewise several Mountebanks Acting upon Stages, and Mountbanks on Horseback, Persons that keep Poppets, and others that make Shew of Monsters, and strange Sights of Living Creatures, who presume to Travel without the said Master of the Revels' Licence," &c. &c. The whole pronunciamento went to show that the despised strollers were not beneath the notice of a lynx-eyed Government. [Footnote A: A survival of the days when noblemen often had their own companies of actors, and were empowered to regulate the performances of these dramatic servants.] It is curious that the functionary to whom was assigned the important critical duty of revising plays should also be obliged to concern himself with the doings of puppets and country "side shows." Yet before the law there was very little if any difference between a performance of "Hamlet" by the great Betterton, and an exhibition of the marital infelicities of Punch and Judy. Are matters so much better now that we can afford to laugh at the incongruity? Do not theatres devoted to the "legitimate" and dime museums, the homes of triple-pated men, human corkscrews and other intellectual freaks, come under the same police supervision, and rank one and all within the same classification as "places of amusement?" Nay, to go further and fare worse, do not some of these very freaks regard themselves as fellow-workers in the dramatic vineyard made so fertile through the toil of a Booth, a Mansfield or a Terry? The writer has himself heard the manipulator of a marionette troupe (whose wife, by-the-way, posed in a curio hall as a "Babylonian Princess") speak of Sir Henry Irving as "a brother professional." This complacent individual had his prototype during the very period which we are considering. He was an artistic gentleman named Crawley, the happy manager of a puppet show which used to bring joy into the hearts of the merry people thronging the famous Bartholomew Fair. One fine day, as the manager was standing outside of his booth, he was put into a flutter of excitement by the approach of the mighty Betterton, in company with a country friend. The actor offered several shillings for himself and rustic as they were about to enter the show, but this was too much for Crawley. He saw the chance of his life, and took advantage of it. "No, no, sir," he said to "Old Thomas," with quite the patronising air of an equal, "we never take money of one another!" Betterton did not see the matter in the same light, and, indignantly throwing down the silver, stalked into the booth without so much as thanking the proprietor of the puppets. What a Bedlam of a place Bartholomew must have been, with its noise, its gew-gaws, bad beer, cheap shows, and riotous visitors. Ned Ward, to whose descriptions modern readers are indebted, partly through the aid of John Ashton,[A] for many a glimpse of old-time London life, has left us a vivid picture of the fair as it appeared to him. The entrance to it, he says, was like unto a "Belfegor's concert," with its "rumbling of drums, mixed with the intolerable squalling of catcalls and penny trumpets." Nor could the sense of smell have been much better catered to than that of hearing, owing to the "singeing of pigs and burnt crackling of over-roasted pork." Once within the enclosure he saw all sorts of remarkable things, including the actors, "strutting round their balconies in their tinsey robes and golden leather buskins;" the rope-dancers, and the dirty eating-places, where "cooks stood dripping at their doors, like their roasted swine's flesh." Ward also looked on at several comedies, or "droles," being enacted in the grounds, and, after coming to the conclusion that they were like "State fireworks," and "never do anybody good but those that are concerned in the show," he repaired to a dancing booth. Here he had the privilege of watching a woman "dance with glasses full of liquor upon the backs of her hands, to which she gave variety of motions, without spilling." [Footnote A: See Ashton's "Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne."] All this may have a curious interest, but it looks a trifle inconsistent, does it not, to lament the unjustness of connecting puppet entertainments and the like with the stage, and then deliberately devote space to the mysteries of Bartholomew Fair? It is more to the purpose to speak of the two theatres which claimed the attention of London playgoers in the year 1703--the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and the house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Of the two, Drury Lane was the more important in an historical sense, having been the house of the famous "King's Company," as the players of Charles II. were styled, and then of the combined forces formed in 1682 by the union of this organisation and the "Duke of York's Company." This was the house into which Nance Oldfield came as a modest _débutante_. It had been built from the designs of Wren, to replace the old theatre destroyed by fire in 1672. Cibber has sketched for us the second Drury Lane's interior, as it appeared in its original form, before the making of changes intended to enlarge the seating capacity. "It must be observed then, that the area or platform of the old stage projected about four feet forwarder (_sic_), in a semi-oval figure, parallel to the benches of the pit; and that the former lower doors of entrance for the actors were brought down between the two foremost (and then only) pilasters; in the place of which doors now the two stage boxes are fixt. That where the doors of entrance now are, there formerly stood two additional side-wings, in front to a full set of scenes, which had then almost a double effect in their loftiness and magnificence. "By this original form, the usual station of the actors, in almost every scene, was advanc'd at least ten foot nearer to the audience than they now can be; because, not only from the stage's being shorten'd in front, but likewise from the additional interposition of those stage boxes, the actors (in respect to the spectators that fill them) are kept so much more backward from the main audience than they us'd to be. But when the actors were in possession of that forwarder space to advance upon, the voice was then more in the centre of the house, so that the most distant ear had scarce the least doubt or difficulty in hearing what fell from the weakest utterance. All objects were thus drawn nearer to the sense; every painted scene was stronger; every grand scene and dance more extended; every rich or fine-coloured habit had a more lively lustre. Nor was the minutest motion of a feature (properly changing from the passion or humour it suited) ever lost, as they frequently must be in the obscurity of too great a distance. And how valuable an advantage the facility of hearing distinctly is to every well-acted scene, every common spectator is a judge. A voice scarce raised above the tone of a whisper, either in tenderness, resignation, innocent distress, or jealousy suppress'd, often have as much concern with the heart as the most clamorous passions; and when on any of these occasions such affecting speeches are plainly heard, or lost, how wide is the difference from the great or little satisfaction received from them? To all this the master of a company may say, I now receive ten pounds more than could have been taken formerly in every full house. Not unlikely. But might not his house be oftener full if the auditors were oftener pleas'd? Might not every bad house, too, by a possibility of being made every day better, add as much to one side of his account as it could take from the other." The latter portion of Colley's remarks will be echoed by our own audiences, which are so often doomed to see the most delicate of plays acted in barns of theatres where all the sensitive effects of dialogue and action are swallowed up in the immensity of stage and auditorium. There is nothing more dispiriting, indeed, both to performers and spectators, than the presentation of some comedy like the "School for Scandal" in a house far better suited to the picturesque demands of the "Black Crook" or the "County Circus." The theatre in Drury Lane, as Oldfield knew it, had a not over-cheerful interior, the most noticeable features of which included the pit, provided with backless benches, and surrounded by what would now be called the Promenade. The latter, as Misson informs us,[A] was taken up for the most part by ladies of quality. In addition to these quarters and the boxes, there were two galleries reserved for the common herd, but into which, no doubt, impecunious beaux, down in the heels and at the mouth, would frequently stray. [Footnote A: Henre Misson's "Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England."] The performances generally began at 5 o'clock, but that there were occasional lapses into unpunctuality, may be inferred from the following advertisement in the _Daily Courant_ of October 5, 1703: "Her Majesty's Servants of the Theatre Royal being return'd from the Bath, do intend, to-morrow, being Wednesday, the sixth of this instant October to act a Comedy call'd 'Love Makes a Man, or the Fop's Fortune.'[A] With singing and dancing. And whereas the audiences have been incommoded by the Plays usually beginning too late, the Company of the said Theatre do therefore give notice that they will constantly begin at Five a Clock without fail, and continue the same Hour all the Winter."[B] [Footnote A: One of Cibber's earlier plays.] [Footnote B: Quoted in "Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne."] To the _fin de siècle_ playgoer the idea of beginning a performance at so strange an hour seems nothing short of startling, until it be remembered that people of quality were then wont to dine between three and four o'clock of the afternoon. How they spent the earlier portion of the day is not hard to relate. The men of fashion rose tardily, feeling none the better, as a rule, for a night at club or tavern, and then lounged about as best they could, visiting, sauntering in the Mall,[A] or otherwise trying to pass the time until dinner. This solid meal over they were ready for the theatre, where they occasionally arrived in a state of unpleasant exhilaration, damning the play, ogling the women and making themselves as obnoxious as possible to the unfortunates who cared more for the stage than the commonplace audience. [Footnote A: "It seem'd to me as if the World was turn'd top-side turvy; for the ladies look'd like undaunted heroes, fit for government or battle, and the gentlemen like a parcel of fawning, flattering fops, that could bear cuckoldom with patience, make a jest of an affront, and swear themselves very faithful and humble servants to the petticoat; creeping and cringing in dishonor to themselves, to what was decreed by Heaven their inferiours; as if their education had been amongst monkeys, who (as it is said) in all cases give the preeminence to their females."--"The Mall as described by Ned Ward."] And the women: what of them? They played cards, often for highly respectable(?) stakes, or went to the theatre when there was nothing better to do, and frittered away the greater number of the twenty-four hours in a mode that the fashionable woman of 1898 would consider positively scandalous. Sometimes the dear creatures went for a stroll in the Mall, there to meet the English coxcombs with French manners, or else they paid a few visits. "Thus they take a sip of tea, then for a draught or two of scandal to digest it, next let it be ratafia, or any other favourite liquor, scandal must be the after draught to make it sit easy on their stomach, till the half hour's past, and they have disburthen'd themselves of their secrets, and take coach for some other place to collect new matter for defamation."[A] [Footnote A: Thomas Brown.] Drury Lane must have presented an animated but none the less disorderly scene any evening during the season when a popular play was to be given. Women in the boxes talking away for dear life, beaux walking about the house, chattering, ogling and laughing, or even sitting on the stage while the performance was in progress,[A] and the orange girls running around to sell their wares and, not infrequently, their own souls as well. [Footnote A: Owing in great part to the efforts of Queen Anne, this wretched custom of allowing a few spectators to sit on the stage was practically abolished before the close of the reign.] "Now turn, and see where loaden with her freight, A damsel stands, and orange-wench is hight; See! how her charge hangs dangling by the rim, See! how the balls blush o'er the basket-brim; But little those she minds, the cunning belle Has other fish to fry, and other fruit to sell; See! how she whispers yonder youthful peer, See! how he smiles and lends a greedy ear. At length 'tis done, the note o'er orange wrapt Has reach'd the box, and lays in lady's lap." These lines by Nicholas Rowe form a graphic but unsavoury picture of the demoralisation to be found in an early eighteenth century audience. Affairs were much better than they used to be in the _laissez-faire_ Restoration period, but, as may be imagined, there was still room for improvement. The rake, the cynic and the loosely-moraled women were still abroad in the land (have we quite done with them even yet?), and many a hard struggle would take place before the artificial restraint and decorum of the Georgian era would triumph over the mocking spirit of Charles Stuart and his professional idlers. In the meantime, as Shadwell relates, the rakes "live as much by their wits as ever; and to avoid the clinking dun of a boxkeeper, at the end of one act they sneak to the opposite side 'till the end of another; then call the boxkeeper saucy rascal, ridicule the poet, laugh at the actors, march to the opera, and spunge away the rest of the evening." And he goes on to say that "the women of the town take their places in the pit with their wonted assurance. The middle gallery is fill'd with the middle part of the city, and your high exalted galleries are grac'd with handsome footmen, that wear their master's linen."[A] [Footnote A: The footmen were sometimes sent, early in the afternoon, to keep places in the theatre until their masters or mistresses should arrive. They created so much disturbance, however, that a stop had to be put to the practice, and the servants were relegated to the upper gallery. To this they were given free admission.] And now for a few pages about Drury Lane's rival, the theatre within the walls of the old tennis court in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It was the home of the company headed by the noble Betterton, the "English Roscius," who had, in 1695, headed the revolt against the management of the other house. At that time the tide of popular success at Drury Lane had reached a rather low ebb, a painful circumstance due, no doubt, to the fickleness of a public that was beginning to tire of the favourite players and to betray a fondness for operatic and spectacular productions rather than the "legitimate." Christopher Rich, the manager of the theatre, was, like many of his kind, more given to considering the weight of his purse than the scant supply of sentiment with which nature might originally have endowed him, and so he tried to do two characteristic things. The salaries of his faithful employés should be reduced and the older members of the company retired into the background as much as possible. Younger faces must occupy the centre of the stage; even Betterton, the greatest actor of his time, should be supplanted in some of his parts by the dissolute George Powell, and the genius of Mrs. Barry,[A] whom Dryden thought the greatest actress he had ever seen, was to give way to the less matured charms of the lovely Anne Bracegirdle. [Footnote A: Mrs. Barry is said to have been a very elegant dresser; but, like most of her contemporaries, she was not a very correct one. Thus, in the "Unhappy Favourite," she played Queen Elizabeth, and in the scene of the crowning she wore the coronation robes of James II.'s Queen; and Ewell says she gave the audience a strong idea of the first-named Queen.--DORAN'S "Annals of the Stage."] Cibber relates the story in a sympathetic vein. "Though the success of the 'Prophetess' and 'King Arthur' (two dramatic operas in which the patentees[A] had embark'd all their hopes) was in appearance very great, yet their whole receipts did not so far balance their expense as to keep them out of a large debt, which it was publicly known was about this time contracted.... Every branch of the theatrical trade had been sacrificed to the necessary fitting out those tall ships of burthen that were to bring home the Indies. Plays of course were neglected, actors held cheap, and slightly dress'd, while singers and dancers were better paid, and embroider'd. These measures, of course, created murmurings on one side, and ill-humour and contempt on the other." [Footnote A: Alexander Davenant, Charles Killigrew, and Rich.] "When it became necessary therefore to lessen the charge, a resolution was taken to begin with the salaries of the actors; and what seem'd to make this resolution more necessary at this time was the loss of Nokes, Montfort and Leigh, who all dy'd about the same year. No wonder then, if when these great pillars were at once remov'd the building grew weaker and the audiences very much abated. Now in this distress, what more natural remedy could be found than to incite and encourage (tho' with some hazard) the industry of the surviving actors? But the patentees, it seems, thought the surer way was to bring down their pay in proportion to the fall of their audiences. To make this project more feasible they propos'd to begin at the head of 'em, rightly judging that if the principals acquiesc'd, their inferiors would murmur in vain. "To bring this about with a better grace, they, under pretence of bringing younger actors forward, order'd several of Betterton's and Mrs. Barry's chief parts to be given to young Powel and Mrs. Bracegirdle. In this they committed two palpable errors; for while the best actors are in health, and still on the stage, the public is always apt to be out of humour when those of a lower class pretend to stand in their places." And with a bit more of this timely philosophy--to which, let it be hoped, he ever lived up to himself--Colley goes on to say that, "tho' the giddy head of Powel accepted the parts of Betterton, Mrs. Bracegirdle had a different way of thinking, and desir'd to be excused from those of Mrs. Barry; her good sense was not to be misled by the insidious favour of the patentees; she knew the stage was wide enough for her success, without entering into any such rash and invidious competition with Mrs. Barry, and, therefore, wholly refus'd acting any part that properly belong'd to her." Then came the revolt, which the astute Betterton ("a cunning old fox" Gildon once dubbed him) seems to have managed with all the diplomacy of a Machiavelli. "Betterton upon this drew into his party most of the valuable actors, who, to secure their unity, enter'd with him into a sort of association to stand or fall together." In the meantime he pushed the war into Africa, or, to change the simile, determined to lead his people out of the land of bondage, as exemplified by Drury Lane, and settle down in a new theatre. Nay, the "cunning old fox" even went so far as to secure an interview with his most august sovereign, William of Orange. What an audience it must have been, with William, stiff, uncomfortable, and unintentionally repellant, confronted by the greatest of living "Hamlets" and a group of other players made brilliant by the presence of the imperial but not too moral Mistress Barry, the lovely Bracegirdle, breathing the perfume of virtue, real or assumed, and the fascinating Verbruggen.[A] Perhaps the King found them an interesting lot, perhaps he merely regarded them with the same good-natured curiosity he might have exhibited for a pack of mountebanks, but in either case he was determined, with that sombre seriousness so typical of him, to do his duty in the premises. So he listened patiently to their complaints, and the result of it all was that by the advice of the Earl of Dorset, the Lord Chamberlain, a royal licence, allowing the revolters to act in a separate theatre, was duly issued. A subscription for the erection of the new house was immediately opened, people of quality paid in anywhere from twenty to forty guineas a piece, and the whole affair assumed permanent shape. Poor, tired, pre-occupied William had done what was expected of him, lifting his eyes for the nonce from the real world, as represented by the map of Europe, to gaze upon his subjects of the mimic boards. [Footnote A: Mrs. Verbruggen and Joseph Williams seceded from the new company almost at once.] "My having been a witness of this unnecessary rupture," writes Cibber, "was of great use to me when, many years after, I came to be a menager myself. I laid it down as a settled maxim, that no company could flourish while the chief actors and the undertakers were at variance. I therefore made it a point while it was possible upon tolerable terms, to keep the valuable actors in humour with their station; and tho' I was as jealous of their encroachments as any of my co-partners could be, I always guarded against the least warmth in any expostulations with them; not but at the same time they might see I was perhaps more determin'd in the question than those that gave a loose to their resentment, and when they were cool were as apt to recede." Colley was shrewd enough in dealing with players, and, as any one who has ever had aught to do with them knows, the majority of Thespians must be treated with the greatest tact. They are sensitive and high-strung, yet often as unreasonable as children, and the man who can rule over them with ease should be snapped up by an appreciative government to conduct its most diplomatic of missions. With the theatrical stars of his own day Cibber seems to have been firm but prudent. "I do not remember," he tells us, "that ever I made a promise to any that I did not keep, and, therefore, was cautious how I made them." A fine sentiment, dear sir, eminently fit for a copy book, but we can well believe that your promises never erred on the side of extravagance. It is a fascinating subject, this study of old-time stage life--fascinating, at least for the writer, who is tempted to run on garrulously, describing the doings of Betterton in the new theatre, and then wandering off to speak of the establishment of Italian opera in England. But the limits of the chapter are reached; let us bid good-bye to "Old Thomas," whose "Setting sun still shoots a glimmering ray, Like ancient Rome, majestic in decay," and hasten to worship the rising sun, in the person of Mistress Oldfield. CHAPTER III A BELLE OF METTLE "For let me tell you, gentlemen, courage is the whole mystery of making love, and of more use than conduct is in war; for the bravest fellow in Europe may beat his brains out against the stubborn walls of a town--but "Women born to be controll'd, Stoop to the forward and the bold." These lines, taken hap-hazard from Colley Cibber's "Careless Husband," contain the very spirit and essence of that old English comedy wherein the hero was nothing more than a handsome rake and the heroine--well, not a straitlaced Puritan or a prude. They breathe of the time when honesty and virtue went for naught upon the stage, and the greatest honours were awarded to the theatrical Prince Charming who proved more unscrupulous than his fellows. Yet, strange as it may seem, the "Careless Husband" is a vast improvement, in point of decency, on many of the plays that preceded it, and marks a turning point in the moral atmosphere of those that came after. "He who now reads it for the first time," says Doran, "may be surprised to hear that in this comedy a really serious and eminently successful attempt to reform the licentiousness of the drama was made by one who had been himself a great offender. Nevertheless the fact remains. In Lord Morelove we have the first lover in English comedy, since licentiousness possessed it, who is at once a gentleman and an honest man. In Lady Easy we have what was hitherto unknown or laughed at--a virtuous married woman." To go further, it may be added that the story points an unexceptionable moral, proving that the best thing for a husband to do in this world is to be true to the legitimate companion of his joys and sorrows. With all this in favour of the "Careless Husband," it is a curious fact that the play, if presented in its original form, would not be tolerated by the audiences of to-day.[A] The dialogue is often coarse and suggestive, although for the most part full of sparkle and mother wit, while the plot smacks of intrigue, lying and adultery. But it is a fine work for all that; there is a delightful flavour about it, as of old wine, and we feel in reading each successive scene that we are uncorking a rare literary bottle of the vintage 1704. How much of the vintage of 1898 will stand, equally well, the uncorking process if applied in a century or two from now? How many plays in vogue at present will be read with pleasure at that distant period? Will they be the gruesome affairs of Ibsen, still tainted with their putrid air of unhealthy mentality, or the clever performances of Henry Arthur Jones; the dramas of Bronson Howard or the farcical skits of Mr. Hoyt? [Footnote A: Were the "Careless Husband" adapted to suit the exacting requirements of nineteenth century modesty, its brilliancy would be gone.] The "Careless Husband" has not been acted these many, many years, yet to all who treasure the historical memories of the stage it should be recalled with interest, for it was in this gay comedy that the ravishing Nance shone forth in all the silvery light of her resplendent genius. Read the pages of the old play in unsympathetic mood and they may look musty and worm-eaten, but imagine Oldfield as the sprightly Lady Betty Modish, the elegant Wilks as Sir Charles Easy, and Cibber[A] himself in the empty-headed rôle of Lord Foppington, and, presto! everything is changed. The yellow leaves are white and fresh, the words stand out clear and distinct, and it takes but a slight flight of fancy to hear the dingy auditorium of Drury Lane echoing and re-echoing with laughter. For 'twas at Drury Lane that the comedy first saw the light, in December 1704, and this was the cast: LORD MORELOVE .... Mr. Powell. LORD FOPPINGTON .... Mr. Cibber. SIR CHARLES EASY .... Mr. Wilks. LADY BETTY MODISE .... Mrs. Oldfield. LADY EASY .... Mrs. Knight. LADY GRAVEAIRS .... Mrs. Moore. MRS. EDGING .... Mrs. Lucas. [Footnote A: Wilks had a singular talent in representing the graces of nature; Cibber the deformity in the affectation of them.--STEELE.] How the performance came about let Cibber explain. The "Apologist" has been speaking of Oldfield's success in Leonora, and he goes on to say: "Upon this unexpected sally, then, of the power and disposition of so unforseen an actress, it was that I again took up the first two acts of the 'Careless Husband,' which I had written the summer before, and had thrown aside in despair of having justice done to the character of Lady Betty Modish by any one woman then among us; Mrs. Verbruggen being now in a very declining state of health, and Mrs. Bracegirdle out of my reach and engag'd in another company: But, as I have said, Mrs. Oldfield having thrown out such new proffers of a genius, I was no longer at a loss for support; my doubts were dispell'd and I had now a new call to finish it." [Illustration: ROBERT WILKS _After the Painting by_ JOHN ELLYS, 1732] And finish the play Cibber did, casting Nance for the volatile Lady Betty and producing it under the most brilliant auspices. The whole assignment of characters was admirable, but the first Lady Betty, bursting upon the town in sudden glory, threw all her companions into the shade. Never had such a fine lady of comedy been seen, said the critics; never had an actress (who was not expected to be over-versed in the affairs of the "quality") displayed such gentility, high-breeding and evidence of being--Heaven knew how--quite "to the manner born." Never was woman so bubbling over with humour, said the people. As for Colley, he was delighted, of course, but believing that an honest confession is good for the soul, even for the soul of a Poet Laureate, he has left us the following graceful tribute to the important part played by the actress in making the "Careless Husband" a success: "Whatever favourable reception this comedy has met with from the Publick, it would be unjust in me not to place a large share of it to the account of Mrs. Oldfield; not only from the uncommon excellence of her action, but even from her personal manner of conversing. There are many sentiments in the character of Lady Betty Modish that I may almost say were originally her own, or only dress'd with a little more care than when they negligently fell from her lively humour." Here we have a clue to that vivacity and _naïveté_ which distinguished Anne off the stage as well as on. Can it be that she, rather than Cibber, suggested this dashing bit of dialogue from the comedy: * * * * * "LADY BETTY. [_Meeting_ LADY EASY.] Oh! my dear! I am overjoyed to see you! I am strangely happy to-day; I have just received my new scarf from London, and you are most critically come to give me your opinion of it. "LADY EASY. O! your servant, madame, I am a very indifferent judge, you know: what, is it with sleeves? "LADY BETTY. O! 'tis impossible to tell you what it is! 'Tis all extravagance both in mode and fancy, my dear; I believe there's six thousand yards of edging in it--then such an enchanting slope from the elbow--something so new, so lively, so noble, so _coquet_ and charming--but you shall see it, my dear. "LADY EASY. Indeed I won't, my dear; I am resolv'd to mortify you for being so wrongfully fond of a trifle. "LADY BETTY. Nay, now, my dear, you are ill-natured. "LADY EASY. Why truly, I am half angry to see a woman of your sense so warmly concerned in the care of her outside; for when we have taken our best pains about it, 'tis the beauty of the mind alone that gives us lasting value. "LADY BETTY. Oh! my dear! my dear! you have been a married woman to a fine purpose indeed, that know so little of the taste of mankind. Take my word, a new fashion upon a fine woman is often a greater proof of her value than you are aware of. "LADY EASY. That I can't comprehend; for you see, among the men, nothing's more ridiculous than a new fashion. Those of the first sense are always the last that come into' em. "LADY BETTY. That is, because the only merit of a man is his sense; but doubtless the greatest value of a woman is her beauty; an homely woman at the head of a fashion, would not be allowed in it by the men, and consequently not followed by the women; so that to be successful in one's fancy is an evident sign of one's being admir'd, and I always take admiration for the best proof of beauty, as beauty certainly is the source of power, as power in all creatures is the height of happiness. "LADY EASY. At this rate you would rather be thought beautiful than good. "LADY BETTY. As I had rather command than obey. The wisest homely woman can't make a man of sense of a fool, but the veryest fool of a beauty shall make an ass of a statesman; so that, in short, I can't see a woman of spirit has any business in this world but to dress--and make the men like her. "LADY EASY. Do you suppose this is a principle the men of sense will admire you for? "LADY BETTY. I do suppose that when I suffer any man to like my person, he shan't dare to find fault with my principle. "LADY EASY. But men of sense are not so easilly humbled. "LADY BETTY. The easiest of any. One has ten thousand times the trouble with a coxcomb....The men of sense, my dear, make the best fools in the world: their sincerity and good breeding throws them so entirely into one's power, and gives one such an agreeable thirst of using them ill, to show that power--'tis impossible not to quench it." * * * * * Compare this bristling dialogue with the inane stuff that too often passes for comedy nowadays, and one finds all the difference between real humour and flippancy. We stand at the threshold of the twentieth century, boastfully proclaiming that we do everything better than ever could our ancestors, yet where are the new comedies that might hold a candle to the "Careless Husband," the "Inconstant," or the "School for Scandal?" We may be presumptuous enough, nevertheless, to hold up that much-quoted candle, but the light from it will burn pale and dim when placed near the golden glow of the past. Would that we could purify some of the old-time pieces and thus preserve them for future generations of theatre-goers. Alas! that is impossible, for to cleanse them with a sort of moral soap and water would destroy nearly all their delightful glitter. The lines of Lady Betty must have fairly sizzled with the fire of comedy as they fell from the pretty lips of Oldfield. No wonder that Londoners thought the character bewitching; no wonder that Cibber wrote so enthusiastically of the actress in that wonderful Apology. "Had her birth plac'd her in a higher rank of life," he notes, perhaps forgetting that her very descent entitled the poor sewing-girl to a position which poverty denied her, "she had certainly appear'd in reality what in this play she only excellently acted, an agreeably gay woman of quality a little too conscious of her natural attractions. I have often seen her in private societies where women of the best rank might have borr'd some part of her behaviour without the least diminution of their sense or dignity. And this very morning, when I am now writing at the Bath, November 11, 1738, the same words were said of her by a lady of condition, whose better judgment of her personal merit in that light has embolden'd me to repeat them." The best of us have a wee bit of snobbishness buried deep in the inmost recesses of our souls, and Colley, who was neither the best nor the worst of humanity, had this quality well developed. To see that one has but to read the above quotation between the lines. He loved a lord as ardently as did the next man, and he attached to rank the same exaggerated importance which pervades, with all the unwelcome odour of sickening incense, the literature of his age. As Macklin so well said of him, Nature formed Cibber for a coxcomb, and it is quite probable that he took greater delight in being thought a leader of fashion than a writer of charming plays. Indeed, he was careful to cultivate the society of young noblemen, and this he was able to do by virtue of his theatrical successes, and, more helpful still, by a levity of character which stuck to him despite his great earnestness in many directions. Perhaps his frivolity and his love of pleasure, including the delights of the gaming table, may have been half assumed; perhaps he was only playing one of his many parts. He certainly succeeded in the rôle; he enlivened the dissipations of many a beau by his quaint conceits and flashes of humour, and went on his way rejoicing that he could be the boon companion of twenty idle lords.[A] [Footnote A: Colley Cibber, one of the earliest of the dramatic autobiographers, is also one of the most amusing. He flourished in wig and embroidery, player, poet, and manager, during the Augustan age of Queen Anne, somewhat earlier and somewhat later. A most egregious fop, according to all accounts, he was, but a very pleasant one notwithstanding, as your fop of parts is apt to be. Pope gained but little in the warfare he waged with him, for this plain reason--that the great poet accuses his adversary of dullness, which was not by any means one of his sins, instead of selecting one of the numerous faults, such as pertness, petulance, and presumption, of which he was really guilty.--M.R. Mitford.] If he was surprised, therefore, that Oldfield could act the high-born woman of fashion, the "lady of condition," who shall blame him? A tavern does not seem the proper school for deportment, and, though one has the bluest blood in Christendom, humble surroundings may keep it from flowing very freely. Still, Anne was naturally a thoroughbred; the girl had a personal distinction which was hers by right of inheritance, and what she lacked in elegance she was quick to acquire as she grew into womanhood. It is a strange coincidence that the actress who in after years rejuvenated Lady Betty[A], and made her again a living, breathing creature, had at one period of her career been a tavern girl. Abington it was who seemed the very incarnation of aristocracy, and made the audience forget that, high as she stood upon the stage, she had once been almost in the gutter. [Footnote A: Mrs. Abington, one of the most graceful and spirited actresses of the eighteenth century, was born in 1731, shortly after the death of Oldfield. She had the honour of being the original Lady Teazle, a part which she rehearsed under the direction of Sheridan, and she enjoyed the further distinction of being detested by Garrick. The latter said of her: "She is below the thought of any honest man or woman."] The same welcome anomaly is noticed now, when the actresses who play the women of the "hupper circles" with the greatest delicacy and keenness of touch are frequently the products of the lower or middle class. On the other hand, the _dame de société_ who trips lightly from the drawing-room to the stage, amid the blare of trumpets and the excitement of her friends, usually fails to make a mark. To be sure, several of them have made marks--very black ones. Now let us turn the pages of the "Careless Husband," as we scan them in Lowndes's "British Theatre," and see if we cannot extract some amusement therefrom. The scene opens in the lodgings of Sir Charles Easy, who, like many other dramatic personages of the eighteenth century, has a name that signifies his character. Easy, Sir Charles is in every sense of the word, particularly easy as to morals, for the possession of a lovely wife does not prevent him from prosecuting an amour with a woman of quality, Lady Graveairs, or having a vulgar intrigue with the maid of his own spouse. In fine, he is a right amiable gentleman, according to the curious standards of long ago; a very prince of good fellows, who in these days would pass for a cad. We are hardly begun with the comedy before we are introduced to this paragon, who enters just after Lady Easy and the maid, Edging, have discovered fresh proofs of his flirtation with Lady Graveairs. Charles is inclined to be philosophical in a blasé, tired way, and he says: "How like children do we judge of happiness! When I was stinted in my fortune almost everything was a pleasure to me, because most things then being out of my reach, I had always the pleasure of hoping for 'em; now fortune's in my hand she's as insipid as an old acquaintance. It's mighty silly, faith, just the same thing by my wife, too; I am told she's extremely handsome [as though the sad devil didn't know it], nay, and have heard a great many people say she is certainly the best woman in the world--why, I don't know but she may, yet I could never find that her person or good qualities gave me any concern. In my eye, the woman has no more charms than my mother"--and we may be sure that Sir Charles had never bothered himself much about the attractions of the last named lady. Then the fair Edging comes to centre of stage and the following innocent dialogue ensues: * * * * * "EDGING. Hum--he takes no notice of me yet--I'll let him see I can take as little notice of him. [_She walks by him gravely, he turns her about and holds her; she struggles_.] Pray, sir! "SIR CHARLES. A pretty pert air that--I'll humour it--what's the matter, child--are you not well? Kiss me, hussy. "EDGING. No, the deuce fetch me if I do. [Here was a model servant, of course.] "SIR CHARLES. Has anything put thee out of humour, love? "EDGING. No, sir, 'tis not worthy my being out of humour at ... don't you suffer my lady to huff me every day as if I were her dog, or had no more concern with you--I declare I won't bear it and she shan't think to huff me. For aught I know I am as agreeable as she; and though she dares not take any notice of your baseness to her, you shan't think to use me so--" * * * * * But enough of this delectable conversation. The picture which it gives us is unpleasant and coarse; there is about it none of the glitter that can make vice so alluring. We will also skip an interview between Sir Charles and Lady Easy (who thinks it the part of diplomacy to hide her knowledge of her master's peccadilloes), and hurry on to the entrance of Lord Morelove, our hero. Morelove, who must have been admirably played by the fiery, impetuous Powell, is neither a libertine, nor, on the other hand, a prig; he is simply a gentlemanly and essentially human fellow who is consumed with an honest passion for Lady Betty Modish. Nay, he would be glad to marry the fine creature, but she has quarrelled with him and he is now telling Sir Charles all about it: * * * * * "So, disputing with her about the conduct of women, I took the liberty to tell her how far I thought she err'd in hers; she told me I was rude and that she would never believe any man could love a woman that thought her in the wrong in anything she had a mind to [Rather exacting, are you not, Lady Betty?], at least if he dared to tell her so. This provok'd me into her whole character, with as much spite and civil malice, as I have seen her bestow upon a woman of true beauty, when the men first toasted her:[A] so in the middle of my wisdom, she told me she desir'd to be alone, that I would take my odious proud heart along with me and trouble her no more. I bow'd very low, and as I left the room I vow'd I never wou'd, and that my proud heart should never be humbled by the outside of a fine woman. About an hour after, I whipp'd into my chaise for London, and have never seen her since." [Footnote A: Many of the wits of the last age will assert that the word (toast), in its present sense, was known among them in their youth, and had its rise from an accident at the town of Bath, in the reign of Charles II. It happened that, on a public day, a celebrated beauty of those times was in the Cross Bath, and one of the crowd of her admirers took a glass of the water in which the fair one stood, and drank her health to the company. There was in the place a gay fellow half fuddled, who offered to jump in, and swore, though he liked not the liquor, he would have the toast. He was opposed in his resolution; yet this whim gave foundation to the present honour which is done to the lady we mention in our liquors, who has ever since been called a Toast.--The _Tatler_.] * * * * * What a quaint, circumspect and very ceremonious affair must that lovers' row have been. No swearing, no slang or loud talking, but everything deliberate and in the best of form. Lady Betty telling Morelove to go about his business, and that quickly, but doing so with a stately elegance worthy of the great Mrs. Barry; the suitor bowing low, with his white hand pressed against that "odious proud heart" which is gently breaking at the thought of departing. What a nice painting it would make for a Watteau fan. Thus nearly all our characters have their entrances, Lady Betty is revealed to us through the medium of the lively dialogue quoted a few pages back, and then there is another stir. In comes Lord Foppington, otherwise Colley Cibber, in all the vapid glory of fine clothes, and a great periwig. A very prince of coxcombs, with his soft smile and conscious air of superiority--a mere bag of vanity, whose emptiness is partly hidden by gorgeous raiment, gold embroidery, rings, snuff-box, muff and what-not. With what genteel condescension does he greet Sir Charles; how gracefully nonchalant is he to my Lord Morelove. "My dear agreeable! _Que je t'embrasse! Pardi! Il y a cent ans que je ne t'ai veu_. My lord, I am your lordship's most obedient humble servant." So Foppington takes his place in the comedy, and begins to play his brainless but important part. He, the disconsolate Morelove, and the brilliant Lady Betty all meet at dinner with Sir Charles and Lady Easy. Of course the hero makes an unsuccessful attempt to regain the good graces of his inamorata, and, of course, the coxcomb carries on a violent flirtation with her in the angry face of his rival. With the meal over, and everybody on the _qui vive_, this scene ensues: * * * * * Enter Foppington (who has been chatting to the ladies and who now seeks the post-dinner conversation of his host and Lord Morelove). "FOPPINGTON. Nay, pr'ythee, Sir Charles, let's have a little of thee. We have been so chagrin without thee, that, stop my breath [what a bloodcurdling oath, so suggestive of the awful curses of our own _jeunesse d'orée_], the ladies are gone, half asleep, to church for want of thy company. "SIR CHARLES. That's hard indeed, while your lordship was among 'em. Is Lady Betty gone too? "FOP. She was just upon the wing. But I caught her by the snuff-box, and she pretends to stay to see if I'll give it her again or no. "MORE. Death! 'tis that I gave her, and the only present she ever would receive from me. [_Aside to_ SIR CHARLES.] Ask him how he came by it? "SIR CHARLES. Pr'ythee don't be uneasy. Did she give it to you, my lord? "FOP. Faith, Charles, I can't say she did or she did not, but we were playing the fool, and I took it--_à la_--pshah--I can't tell thee in French, neither, but Horace touches it to a nicety--'twas _Pignas direptum male pertinaci_. [_Nota Bene_: Our modern comedians seldom quote Horace; their humour is not of the classic kind.] "MORE. So! But I must bear it. If your lordship has a mind to the box, I'll stand by you in the keeping of it. "FOP. My lord, I'm passionately oblig'd to you, but I am afraid I cannot answer your hazarding so much of the lady's favour. "MORE. Not at all, my lord; 'tis possible I may not have the same regard to her frown that your lordship has. [Here's a bit of human nature. Morelove stands in awe of that frown, but he doth valiantly protest, and that too much, that the displeasure of Lady Betty is no more to him than a dozen of ciphers.] "FOP. That's a bite, I am sure--he'd give a joint of his little finger to be as well with her as I am. [_Aside_.] But here she comes! Charles, stand by me. Must not a man be a vain coxcomb now, to think this creature follow'd one? "SIR CHARLES. Nothing so plain, my lord. "FOP. Flattering devil." _Enter_ LADY BETTY. "LADY BETTY. Pshah, my Lord Foppington! Pr'ythee don't play the fool now, but give me my snuff-box. Sir Charles, help me to take it from him. "SIR CHARLES. You know I hate trouble, madame. "LADY BETTY. Pooh! you'll make me stay still; prayers are half over now. "FOP. If you'll promise me not to go to church, I'll give it you. "LADY BETTY. I'll promise nothing at all, for positively I will have it. [_Struggling with him_. "FOP. Then comparatively I won't part with it, ha! ha! [_Struggles with her_. "LADY BETTY. O you devil, you have kill'd my arm! Oh! Well--if you'll let me have it, I'll give you a better. "MORE. [_Aside to_ SIR CHARLES.] O Charles! that has a view of distant kindness in it. "FOP. Nay, now I keep it superlatively. I find there's a secret value in it. "LADY BETTY. O dismal! upon my word, I am only ashamed to give it you. Do you think I wou'd offer such an odious fancy'd thing to anybody I had the least value for? "SIR CHARLES. [_Aside to_ LORD MORELOVE.] Now it comes a little nearer, methinks it does not seem to be any kindness at all. "FOP. Why, really, madame, upon second view, it has not extremely the mode of a lady's utensil: are you sure it never held anything but snuff? "LADY BETTY. O! you monster! "FOP. Nay, I only ask because it seems to me to have very much the air and fancy of Monsieur Smoakandfot's tobacco-box. "MORE. I can bear no more. "SIR CHARLES. Why don't then; I'll step into the company and return to your relief immediately. [_Exit_. "MORE. [_To_ LADY BETTY.] Come, madame, will your ladyship give me leave to end the difference? Since the slightness of the thing may let you bestow it without any mark of favour, shall I beg it of your ladyship? "LADY BETTY. O my lord, no body sooner. I beg you give it my lord. [_Looking earnestly on_ LORD FOPPINGTON, _who, smiling, gives it to_ LORD MORELOVE _and then bows gravely to her_]. "MORE. Only to have the honour of restoring it to your lordship; and if there be any other trifle of mine your lordship has a fancy to, tho' it were a mistress, I don't know any person in the world who has so good a claim to my resignation." * * * * * In the hands of Powell, Cibber, and Oldfield this scene must have had all the sparkle of champagne; but let us hope, speaking of wine, that the prince of paragons, Morelove, was perfectly sober. Or shall we say comparatively sober?--for when bibulous George had just a dash of spirits within him (and that was nearly always) there came a roseate hue to his acting which rather added to its romantic colour. Sometimes this colour was laid on too garishly, as the supply of fire-water happened to be larger,[A] and Sir John Vanbrugh has himself left it on record that Powell, as Worthy, came well nigh spoiling the original production of the "Relapse." "I own," writes Sir John, "the first night this thing was acted, some indecencies had like to have happened; but it was not my fault. The fine gentleman of the play, drinking his mistress's health in Nantes brandy, from six in the morning to the time he waddled up upon the stage in the evening, had toasted himself up to such a pitch of vigour, I confess I once gave up Amanda for gone; and am since, with all due respect to Mrs. Rogers, very sorry she escaped; for I am confident a certain lady (let no one take it to herself that is handsome) who highly blames the play, for the barrenness of the conclusion, would then have allowed it a very natural close." It should be added that the Mrs. Rogers herein mentioned as playing Amanda was a capable tragic actress whose ambition it was to enact none but virtuous women. Her own virtue--but we are dipping into scandal.[B] [Footnote A: To the folly of intoxication he added the horrors of debt, and was so hunted by the sheriffs' officers that he usually walked the streets with a sword (sheathed) in his hand; and if he saw any of them at a distance, he would roar out, "Get on the other side of the way, you dog!" The bailiff, who knew his old customer, would obligingly answer, "We do not want you _now_, Master Powell." EDMUND BELLCHAMBERS.] [Footnote B: Her fondness for virtue on the stage she began to think might persuade the world that it had made an impression on her private life; and the appearance of it actually went so far that, in an epilogue to an obscure play, the profits of which were given to her, and wherein she acted a part of impregnable chastity, she bespoke the favour of the ladies by a protestation that in honour of their goodness and virtue she would dedicate her unblemished life to their example. Part of this vestal vow, I remember, was contained in the following verse:-- "Study to live the character I play." But alas! how weak are the strongest works of art when Nature besieges it.--CIBBER.] As for the "Careless Husband," the more one reads from it the more cause is there to regret the utter hopelessness of reviving a play so honeycombed by inuendo. How delightfully, for instance, would some of the badinage between Morelove and the spirited Lady Betty have been treated in the earlier days of the Daly Company, with John Drew and Miss Rehan as the lovers. We can picture the two, as they would have given the following lines, the one gentlemanly and effective, the other imperious, liquid-voiced, and radiant of humour: * * * * * "MORELOVE. Do you know, madame, I have just found out, that upon your account I have made myself one of the most ridiculous puppies upon the face of the earth--I have upon my faith! Nay, and so extravagantly such--ha! ha! ha!--that it's at last become a jest even to myself; and I can't help laughing at it for the soul of me; ha! ha! ha! "LADY BETTY. [_Aside_.] I want to cure him of that laugh now. My lord, since you are so generous, I'll tell you another secret. Do you know, too, that I still find (spite of all your great wisdom, and my contemptible qualities, as you are pleased now and then to call them), do you know, I say, that I see under all this, you still love me with the same helpless passion; and can your vast foresight imagine I won't use you accordingly, for these extraordinary airs you are pleased to give yourself.' [Talk of the independence of the 'New Woman.' Who could have been more self-assertive than this eighteenth century belle?] "MORE. O by all means, madame, 'tis as you should, and I expect it whenever it is in your power. [_Aside_] Confusion! "LADY BETTY. My lord, you have talked to me this half-hour without confessing pain. [_Pauses and affects to gape_.] Only remember it. "MORE. Hell and tortures! "LADY BETTY. What did you say, my lord? "MORE. Fire and furies! "LADY BETTY. Ha! ha! he's disorder'd. Now I am easy. My Lord Foppington, have you a mind to your revenge at piquet? "FOP. I have always a mind to an opportunity of entertaining your ladyship, madame. [LADY BETTY _coquets with_ LORD FOPPINGTON. "MORE. O Charles, the insolence of this woman might furnish out a thousand devils. "SIR CHARLES. And your temper is enough to furnish a thousand such women. Come away--I have business for you upon the terrace. "MORE. Let me but speak one word to her. "SIR CHARLES. Not a syllable; the tongue's a weapon you always have the worst at. For I see you have no guard, and she carries a devilish edge. "LADY BETTY. My lord, don't let anything I've said frighten you away; for if you have the least inclination to stay and rail, you know the old conditions; 'tis but your asking me pardon next day, and you may give your passion any liberty you think fit. "MORE. Daggers and death! [What a picturesque, old-fashioned oath, is it not? "Daggers and death!" Writers of English melodramas, please take notice.] "SIR CHARLES. Is the man distracted? "MORE. Let me speak to her now, or I shall burst.[A] "SIR CHARLES. Upon condition you'll speak no more of her to me, my lord, do as you please. "MORE. Pr'ythee pardon me--I know not what to do. "SIR CHARLES. Come along, I'll set you to work, I warrant you. Nay, nay, none of your parting ogles--will you go? "MORE. Yes, and I hope for ever. [_Exit_ SIR CHARLES _pulling away_ LORD MORELOVE." [Footnote A: Here is the way in which several of our refined farcical writers would have given it: MORELOVE. Let me speak to her now, or I shall burst. SIR CHARLES. Upon condition that you'll not burst here, in the parlour, do as you please.] * * * * * There is about this and many other scenes the fragrance of an old perfume, as of lavender. We take up the book after years of neglect, and the odour, which is not that of sanctity, is still perceptible--a potent reminder of the past. And Lady Betty Modish? She must be--well-nigh on to two hundred years old (a thousand florid pardons, sweet madame, for bringing in your age), but she is as blooming, saucy, and interesting as ever. What becomes of Betty in the comedy, the reader may ask. She goes on her triumphant way, the same cruel enchantress, until the last act, when she is quite ready to fall into the arms of Lord Morelove. Sir Charles Easy, touched by the constancy and devotion of his wife, announces that he will mend his wilful habits, and Lord Foppington, who flattered himself that Lady Betty was madly in love with him, accepts his dismissal with great good humour. Then we have a song setting forth how: "Sabina with an angel's face By Love ordain'd for joy, Seems of the Siren's cruel race, To charm and then destroy. "With all the arts of look and dress, She fans the fatal fire; Through pride, mistaken oft for grace, She bids the swains expire. "The god of Love, enraged to see The nymph defy his flame, Pronounced his merciless decree Against the haughty dame: "'Let age with double speed o'ertake her, Let love the room of pride supply; And when the lovers all forsake her, A spotless virgin let her die.'" Next, with the sound of this horrible warning ringing in our ears, Sir Charles steps forward to give the tag: "If then [turning to Lady Easy] the unkindly thought of what I have been hereafter shou'd intrude upon thy growing quiet, let this reflection teach thee to be easy: "Thy wrong, when greatest, most thy virtue prov'd; And from that virtue found, I blus'd and truly lov'd." So ends the comedy in a blaze of morality. We almost see Sir Charles fitting on a pair of newly-made wings, as he prepares to float away to some better planet; but let him go, by all means. We shall remain here and watch that fair sinner, Oldfield. CHAPTER IV MANAGERIAL WICKEDNESS Of all the vested rights that mankind is heir to none is more sacred than the right of an actor to abuse his manager. It is among the blessed privileges which help to make life cheerful and sunny, for, when all is said, what would be the joy of existence if we might not criticise those whom Providence has placed above us. Even a king may be abused, behind his royal back, and so an humble manager shall not escape. There was a manager of Oldfield's day who surely did not escape, and that was Christopher Rich, Esquire, one of the patentees of Drury Lane Theatre, and sole director, as a rule, in the affairs of that Thespian temple. Thespian temple, indeed! What cared Mr. Rich for Thespis or for art? He looked upon actors as a lot of cattle whose sole mission in life was to make him rich in pocket as well as in name, and who might, after the performance of that pious act, betake themselves to the Evil Gentleman for aught he cared. Several modern managers have been equally appreciative, but it is a comfort to reflect that a portion of the fraternity are vast improvements on crusty Christopher, who was described by a contemporary as "an old snarling lawyer, master and sovereign; a waspish, ignorant pettifogger in law and poetry; one who understands poetry no more than algebra; he wou'd sooner have the Grace of God than do everybody justice."[A] [Footnote A: Gildon's "Comparison Between the Two Stages."] This was the measly director in whose company Nance figured for a time, and for whom she must have had a profound if discreetly-concealed contempt. Cibber, who seems to have keenly gauged the man, has left us an account of how Rich[A] treated his actors. "He would laugh with them over a bottle and bite them in their bargains. He kept them poor, that they might not be able to rebel; and sometimes merry, that they might not think of it." How graphic is this picture, with its vision of sly, crafty Christopher, as he denies the players their well-earned wages and then hurries them off to a neighbouring tavern, there to get them hilarious on cheap wine and grudgingly to pay the reckoning. "All their articles of agreement," continues Colley, "had a clause in them that he was sure to creep out at, viz., their respective sallaries were to be paid in such manner and proportion as others of the same company were paid; which in effect made them all, when he pleas'd, but limited sharers of loss, and himself sole proprietor of profits; and this loss or profit they only had such verbal accounts of as he thought proper to give them. 'Tis true, he would sometimes advance them money (but not more than he knew at most could be due to them) upon their bonds; upon which, whenever they were mutinous, he would threaten to sue them. This was the net we danc'd in for several years. But no wonder we were dupes," whimsically adds Colley, "while our master was a lawyer." [Footnote A: Christopher Rich was the father of John Rich, a manager who excelled in pantomime, and who appreciated the "legitimate" as little as did his father.] And a very commonplace, foxy and inartistic lawyer he was, too, with his fondness for money bags and his willingness to oblige the town with anything it wanted. To his narrow mind there was no great difference between a lot of rope-dancers and a company of players, or, if there should be, the advantage was quite in favour of the former. We see the same commercial spirit to-day, when the average manager rents his house for one week to an Irving or a Mansfield, and perhaps turns it over, the following Monday night, to the tender mercies of performing dogs and cats. 'Tis all grist that comes to his mill, and what cares he whether that grist represent "Macbeth" or canine drama? Cibber was not above looking at the practical side of things, but he had no patience, nevertheless, with the Philistianism of Rich, who had that fatal fondness for "paying extraordinary prices to singers, dancers, and other exotick performers, which were as constantly deducted out of the sinking sallaries of his actors."[A] [Footnote A: Operatic singers and dancers, mostly recruited from the Continent, were fast becoming fashionable, and, as their appearance on the scene interfered with the profits of the actors, it may be imagined that the latter held the strangers in much contempt.] For it seems that Master Rich had not bought his share of the Drury Lane patent to elevate the stage, but rather to get a fortune therefrom. "And to say truth, his sense of everything to be shown there was much upon a level with the taste of the multitude, whose opinion and whose money weigh'd with him full as much as that of the best judges. [Colley was evidently thinking of himself as one of these judges.] His point was to please the majority who could more easilly comprehend anything they _saw_ than the daintiest things that could be said to them." Nay, Christopher actually went so far that he once sought the services of an elephant to add to the strength of his company, thus anticipating the realism of our own time, when a few cows, a horse or two, a lot of chickens and some real straw will cover a multitude of sins in the construction of a play.[A] Yet, sad to relate, the elephant was never allowed to lend weight to the drama, as "from the jealousy which so formidable a rival had rais'd in his dancers, and by his bricklayer's assuring him that if the walls were to be open'd wide enough for its entrance it might endanger the fall of the house [the old theatre in Dorset Garden, which Rich wished to use] he gave up his project, and with it so hopeful a prospect of making the receipts of the stage run higher than all the wit and force of the best writers had ever yet rais'd them to." [Footnote A: Apropos to the appearance of elephants on the stage, a capital anecdote is told by Colman in his "Random Records." Johnstone, a machinist employed at Drury Lane during the latter portion of the eighteenth century, was celebrated for his superior taste and skill in the construction of flying chariots, triumphal cars, palanquins, banners, wooden children to be tossed over battlements, and straw heroes and heroines to be hurled down a precipice; he was further famous for wickerwork lions, pasteboard swans, and all sham birds and beasts appertaining to a theatrical menagerie. He wished on a certain occasion to spy the nakedness of the enemy's camp, and therefore contrived to insinuate himself, with a friend, into the two-shilling gallery, to witness the night rehearsal of a pantomime at Covent Garden Theatre. Among the attractions of this Christmas foolery a real elephant was introduced, and in due time the unweildly brute came clumping down the stage, making a prodigious figure in a procession. The friend who sat close to Johnstone jogged his elbow, whispering, "This is a bitter bad job for Drury. Why, the elephant's _alive_!--he'll carry all before him, and beat you hollow. What d'ye think on't, eh?" "Think on't," said Johnstone, in a tone of the utmost contempt, "I should be very sorry if I couldn't make a much better elephant than that at any time!"] Yet it was under the auspices of such a man that Oldfield made several of her most brilliant successes, not forgetting the memorable appearance as Lady Betty. And all the while, no doubt, Mr. Rich was thinking how much more sensible an attraction would be an elephant or a tight-rope walker. But Nance, who had now a firm friend in Cibber, went merrily on her way, creating new characters in comedy and astonishing even her most enthusiastic admirers by the imposing air she could frequently give to a tragic part. In none of them, grave or gay, was she more charming than as Sylvia, the heroine of Farquhar's "Recruiting Officer," a play in which she graced man's clothes. Sylvia is a delightful creature who masquerades as a dashing youth, and thereby has the privilege of watching her lover, Captain Plume. Of course the deception is discovered, and all ends happily in the orthodox fashion [the only bit of orthodoxy about the performance, by-the-way]. The girl is allowed to marry the Captain and settles down, we may suppose, to the pleasures of domesticity and woman's gowns. The comedy was admirably acted throughout, Wilks, Cibber, and that prince of mimics, Dick Estcourt, being in the cast, and the seal of popular approval was quickly put upon the production. At present such a seal should bring hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars into the pockets of the author, but it is possible that a few paltry pounds represented the profits of Farquhar.[A] [Footnote A: The "Recruiting Officer" first saw the light in April 1706.] In the meantime the spirit of discontent was abroad among the members of the Drury Lane company. Well it might be when the manager of the house, as Cibber points out, "had no conception himself of theatrical merit either in authors or actors, yet his judgment was govern'd by a saving rule in both. He look'd into his receipts for the value of a play, and from common fame he judg'd of his actors. But by whatever rule he was govern'd, while he had prudently reserv'd to himself a power of not paying them more than their merit could get, he could not be much deceived by their being over or undervalued. In a word, he had with great skill inverted the constitution of the stage, and quite changed the channel of profits arising from it; formerly (when there was but one company) the proprietors punctually paid the actors their appointed sallaries, and took to themselves only the clear profits: But our wiser proprietor took first out of every day's receipts two shillings in the pound to himself; and left their sallaries to be paid only as the less or greater deficiencies of acting (according to his own accounts) would permit. What seem'd most extraordinary in these measures was, that at the same time he had persuaded us to be contented with our condition, upon his assuring us that as fast as money would come in we should all be paid our arrears." Lawyer Rich lived too soon. How useful would he have been in these latter days, when irresponsible managers infest the profession and turn an honest penny by trading on the credulity and unbusinesslike qualities of many a deluded player. The average manager pays his debts and is quite as stable and upright in his dealings as one could desire, but what can be said of the man who take companies "on the road," after making all sorts of glowing promises, and finally elopes with the money-box, leaving his actors stranded in a strange city. Incidents of this kind, which to the victims have more of tragedy than any play in their _repertoire_, occur almost every day during the theatrical season, but nothing is done to prevent the ever-increasing scandal. The erstwhile proprietor of the company returns by Pullman car to New York, complains loudly about "poor business," a "sunken fortune," &c., and then prepares to take out another combination. As for his dupes, who are probably half-starving in some third class western town, they may walk home on the railroad ties. Yes, Mr. Rich was evidently intended for a wider sphere and a more progressive age than those he had to adorn. But despite all his financial talents some of the best players in Drury Lane were ready to desert from that house the moment the chance came. [Illustration: WILLIAM CONGREVE By Sir GODFREY KNELLER, 1709] The chance did come, in the season of 1706-7, when Mrs. Oldfield, Wilks, Mrs. Rogers, and several others, went over to the handsome new theatre in the Haymarket, and were joined there later by Cibber. This imposing house was opened in the spring of 1705 by Congreve and Vanbrugh, and to it had gone Betterton and his associates at Lincoln's Inn Fields. But noble old Roscius, who had so long cast his welcome spell upon London theatre-goers, was getting old and feeble, and so were several of the other members; the spell was well-nigh broken, and not even a trial of that "new-fangled" style of entertainment, Italian opera,[A] could make the management a success. [Footnote A: How Italian opera was despised by certain critics of Queen Anne's reign has already been shown in "Echoes of the Playhouse." In his "Essay on the Operas after the Italian Manners," Dennis writes (1706): "If that is truly the most Gothic, which is the most oppos'd to Antick, nothing can be more Gothick than an Opera, since nothing can be more oppos'd to the ancient Tragedy, than the modern Tragedy in Musick, because the one is reasonable, the other ridiculous; the one is artful, the other absurd; the one beneficial, the other pernicious; in short, the one natural and the other monstrous."] Now enters upon the scene the redoubtable Owen Swiney, who plays a short but brilliant part in the theatrical world, and next, with all his money gone, enters upon a twenty years' exile on the Continent. Then he will come home, to be made Keeper of the King's Mews, and presently our Colley will immortalise him in one of those pen-portraits which make so many of the Poet Laureate's friends or foes stand out clear and distinct against the background of the "Apology." Here is the picture, fresh and beaming as ever: * * * * * "If I should farther say, that this person has been well known in almost every metropolis in Europe; that few private men, with so little reproach, run through more various turns of fortune; that, on the wrongside of three-score,[A] he has yet the open spirit of a hale young fellow of five and twenty; that though he still chuses to speak what he thinks to his best friends with an undisguised freedom, he is, notwithstanding, acceptable to many persons of the first rank and condition; that any one of them (provided he likes them) may now send him, for their service, to Constantinople at half a day's warning; that Time has not yet been able to make a visible change in any part of him but the colour of his hair, from a fierce coal-black to that of a milder milk-white: When I have taken this liberty with him, methinks it cannot be taking a much greater if I at once should tell you that this person was Mr. Owen Swiney." [Footnote A: Swiney, or MacSwiney, died in 1754, after making Peg Woffington his legatee] * * * * * Swiney was an ardent Irishman who had, for some mysterious reason, formed a friendship with Rich, and his advice and energy often stood the manager of Drury Lane in good stead. When, in the summer of 1706, Vanbrugh proposed that Swiney should lease the Haymarket, Sir John being anxious to relinquish management, just as Congreve had done some time before, cunning Christopher gave his consent, curiously enough, to what was nothing more or less than the setting up of a rival company of actors. In the first place, he probably looked upon his players as an encumbrance, since he was in the vein for operatic entertainments just then, and, furthermore, he pictured himself as a future monopolist controlling the destinies of two houses. For he never dreamed, did this haggling, pettifogging lawyer, that Swiney would swerve from the old time allegiance to him, and he felt so secure on this point that he privately encouraged the desertion of his own forces. He made one exception, however, by stipulating that Cibber should remain at Drury Lane. Colley was too experienced, too versatile a man to be lost with impunity; he could do everything in a theatre, from acting to writing good plays and bad poetry, and while the wily Rich chiefly depended upon his singers and dancers, he said "it would be necessary to keep some one tolerable actor with him, that might enable him to set those machines a going." It so happened that Cibber was one of the men that Swiney needed most, and, while the new manager of the Haymarket apparently acquiesced in the exception insisted on by Rich, it was not long before he showed his hand. It was a better hand than that of his whilom associate, who had been foolish enough to think that he held the trump card in the game. The card in question was a little matter of two hundred pounds owing from Swiney to Rich, and the latter fondly believed that this loan would bind the debtor to him as with hooks of steel. But we do not love men the more because they chance to be our creditors; sometimes, indeed, we love them the less for it, and so these two hundred pounds did not prevent the Celt from breaking over the traces of the Englishman. Let Cibber continue the story: * * * * * "The first word I heard of this transaction was by a letter from Swiney, inviting me to make one in the Hay-Market Company. whom he hop'd I could not but now think the stronger party. But I confess I was not a little alarm'd at this revolution. For I considered that I knew of no visible fund to support these actors but their own industry; that all his recruits from Drury Lane would want new cloathing; and that the warmest industry would be always labouring up hill under so necessary an expence, so bad a situation, and so inconvenient a theatre," &c. * * * * * In fine, Master Colley resolved that it would be the course of wisdom to stay at Drury Lane, where he seems to have enjoyed to an unusual degree the confidence of the very manager whom afterwards he did not hesitate to abuse. So when Cibber came up to London from Gloucestershire, where he had been spending his vacation, he returned to the fold of his old master. * * * * * "But I found our company so thinn'd that it was almost impracticable to bring any one tolerable play upon the stage. When I ask'd him where were his actors, and in what manner he intended to proceed? he reply'd, _Don't you trouble yourself, come along, and I'll shew you_. "He then led me about all the by-places in the house, and shew'd me fifty little backdoors, dark closets, and narrow passages in alterations and contrivances of which kind he had busied his head most part of the vacation; for he was scarce ever without some notable joyner or a bricklayer extraordinary, in pay, for twenty years. And there are so many odd obscure places about a theatre, that his genius in nook-building was never out of employment, nor could the most vain-headed author be more deaf to an interruption in reciting his works, than our wise master was while entertaining me with the improvements he had made in his invisible architecture; all which, without thinking any one part of it necessary, tho' I seem'd to approve, I could not help now and then breaking in upon his delight with the impertinent question of--_But, Master, where are your actors_?" * * * * * This exhibition of a spirit so commonplace and inartistic proved too much for Cibber. Perhaps he might have pardoned it had there been no salary owing him, for your greatest apostle of the drama will sometimes do a good deal of winking at glaring inconsistencies when a money _quid pro quo_ looms up in the distance. Here was a case, however, where the _quid pro quo_ loomed not at all, and the author of the "Careless Husband" became correspondingly disgusted. I told him (Rich) I came to serve him at a time when many of his best actors had deserted him; that he might now have the refusal of me; but I could not afford to carry the compliment so far as to lessen my income by it; that I therefore expected either my casual pay to be advanced, or the payment of my former sallary made certain for as many days as we had acted the year before. No, he was not willing to alter his former method; but I might chuse whatever parts I had a mind to act of theirs who had left him. * * * * * "When I found him, as I thought, so insensible, or impregnable, I look'd gravely in his face, and told him--He knew upon what terms I was willing to serve him, and took my leave." * * * * * Shortly after the interview Cibber joined the Haymarket company, and one result of his defection was an open quarrel between Rich and Swiney. This season of 1706-7 was a memorable one for Oldfield. She then played for the first time with the chaste Anne Bracegirdle,[A] whom she quickly cast into the shade. So apparent, indeed, was the shadow that the elder of the two retired from the stage in the course of a few months, in the very prime of her beauty. It was a pathetic incident, and yet the cloud had its silver lining. How often are we called upon to pity players who linger before the footlights long after they should have made their exits; instead of departing at the right moment, leaving behind them charming memories, they die by inches in full view of the audience. [Footnote A: "Mrs. Bracegirdle was perhaps a woman of a cold constitution," says Genest.] [Illustration: MRS. ANNE BRACEGIRDLE] Perhaps poverty keeps them at work, but, be that as it may, the public gives a sigh of relief when the few remaining sparks of genius are at last snuffed out. When one of them is taken from us, and we read of the death in the morning paper, we murmur, "Poor old Jones! Well, it's certainly time he shuffled off." Then we drink our coffee placidly, turn to some other news, and never think of him again. Many a once-beloved actor gets this cruel epitaph. There was nothing superannuated about Bracegirdle when she made her exit, for the actress still displayed that comeliness which had, until recently, held the attention of London. "She was of a lovely height," says Tony Aston, "with dark brown hair and eyebrows, black, sparkling eyes, and a fresh, blushy complexion; and, whenever she exerted herself, had an involuntary flushing in her breast, neck, and face, having continually a cheerful aspect, and a fine set of even white teeth; never making an exit, but that she left the audience in an imitation of her pleasant countenance." When Aston wrote Mrs. Bracegirdle was still living. "She has been off the stage these 26 years or more, but was alive July 20, 1747, for I saw her in the Strand, London, then--with the remains of charming Bracegirdle." Poor old Diana! Time brought her at least one revenge; she had outlived Nance Oldfield these many years.[A] [Footnote A: Bracegirdle died in September 1748.] "Bracey," as Cibber loved to call her, had just left the boards when George Farquhar's lively comedy, "The Beaux' Stratagem," was produced at the Haymarket. Perhaps she saw the performance from the audience side of the house, and was generous enough to admire the sparkle of Oldfield as Mrs. Sullen; and perhaps, as she was a very charitable body, Mistress Bracegirdle went to pay a last visit to the brilliant author of the play. For poor, worn-out Farquhar was dying, nor could the laughter with which the theatre re-echoed bring much merriment into that poverty-stricken home which he was so soon to leave for a world where there would be neither guineas nor debts. The ill man was game to the last, and his sense of humour never deserted him. When Oldfield was rehearsing Mrs. Sullen (a woman who separates from one husband only to have another, Archer, in prospect) she told Wilks that "she thought the author had dealt too freely with Mrs. Sullen, in giving her to Archer, without such a proper divorce as would be a security to her honor." Wilks, who was to play Archer, spoke of this criticism to Farquhar in the course of a visit to the dying playwright. "Tell her," gaily replied the latter, "that for her peace of mind's sake, I'll get a real divorce, marry her myself, and give her my bond she shall be a real widow in less than a fortnight." Poor fellow! He was faithful to Mistress Farquhar unto the end, but who shall say that he had forgotten the old days which began so fairly at the Mitre Tavern? [Illustration: MRS. BRACEGIRDLE As the Sultaness] Soon there will be another theatrical revolution by which the rival companies of the Haymarket and Drury Lane will be united under one management at the latter house, while Owen Swiney will be left free to devote his attention to Italian opera. This union comes about through the efforts of Colonel Brett[A], a very _débonnaire_ gentleman from Gloucestershire, whom Cibber, his warmest admirer, trots out for our inspection in the perennial "Apology." It appears that Sir Thomas Skipwith, who has a share in the Drury Lane Patent, becomes so disgusted with the antics of Rich and his refusal to make any accounting of the profits of the house, that he presents Brett with his interest.[B] To the Colonel the gift is a congenial one; he has passed many a pleasant hour behind the scenes at Drury Lane, and doubtless thinks that in doing so he writes himself down a very knowing dog. [Footnote A: Colonel Brett was the father of Anne Brett, who became a very dear friend of George I.] [Footnote B: Sir Thomas afterwards asserted that he only gave his share to Brett strictly "in trust."] Probably he is, for Cibber says that though he spent some time at the Temple, "he so little followed the Law there that his neglect of it made the Law (like some of his fair and frail admirers) very often follow him." As he had an uncommon share of social wit and a handsome person, with a sanguine bloom in his complexion, no wonder they persuaded him that he might have a better chance of fortune by throwing such accomplishments into the gayer world than by shutting them up in a study. * * * * * "The first view that fires the head of a young gentleman of this modish ambition just broke lose from business is to cut a figure (as they call it)in a side box at the play, from whence their next step is to the Green Room behind the scenes, sometimes their _non ultra_. Hither at last, then, in this hopeful quest of his fortune, came this gentleman-errant, not doubting but the fickle dame, while he was thus qualified to receive her, might be tempted to fall into his lap. And though possibly the charms of our theatrical nymphs might have their share in drawing him thither, yet in my observation the most visible cause of his first coming was a more sincere passion he had conceived, for a fair full-bottom'd perriwig which I then wore in my first play of the 'Fool in Fashion' in the year 1695." * * * * * This love affair would suggest what Mr. Gilbert calls: "A Passion à la Plato For a bashful young potato." were we not to remember that in Anne's time handsome full-bottomed periwigs were regarded with an enthusiasm far too fervid to be called Platonic. Actors made it a point to have this indispensable headgear as elaborate as possible, and it is even related that Barton Booth and Wilks actually paid forty guineas each "on the exorbitant thatching of their heads." * * * * * But let loquacious Colley have his say: "For it is to be noted that the _Beaux_ of those days were of a quite different cast from the modern stamp, and had more of the stateliness of the peacock in their mein than (which now seems to be their highest emulation) the pert air of a lap-wing. Now, whatever contempt philosophers may have for a fine perriwig, my friend, who was not to despise the world, but to live in it, knew very well that so material an article of dress upon the head of a man of sense if it became him, could never fail of drawing to him a more partial regard and benevolence than could possibly be hoped for in an ill-made one." * * * * * Brett expresses such an admiration for this particular full-bottomed periwig that Cibber is highly flattered, and the two are soon laughing themselves into the best of terms. Nay, they spend the night roistering over a bottle or two of wine, and dear, vain Colley, like many who come after him, falls into the belief that he is a bold, fast man. With an air of conscious rakishness that is charmingly ridiculous, he writes: "If it were possible the relation of the happy indiscretions which passed between us that night could give the tenth part of the pleasure I then received from them, I could still repeat them with delight." Instead of pausing, however, to relate those happy indiscretions, Cibber prattles on in his colloquial way, telling us that through the goodly offices of Sir Thomas Skipwith, Brett was introduced to the divorced wife of the Earl of Macclesfield, "a lady who had enough in her power to disencumber him of the world and make him every way easy for life."[A] [Footnote A: One story of the day made this woman the mother of Richard Savage.] "While he was in pursuit of this affair [coyly adds the Apologist] which no time was to be lost in (for the Lady was to be in town for but three weeks) I one day found him idling behind the scenes before the play was begun. Upon sight of him I took the usual freedom he allow'd me, to rate him roundly for the madness of not improving every moment in his power in what was of such consequence to him. [Oh, fie, thou worldly old Colley.] Why are you not (said I) where you know you only should be? If your design should once get wind in the town, the ill-will of your enemies or the sincerity of the Lady's friends may soon blow up your hopes, which in your circumstances of life cannot be long supported by the bare appearance of a gentleman." * * * * * And now Cibber announces that he expects to shock us, although the story he goes on to disclose is not in any sense improper. Could it be that according to his eighteenth century reverence for precedence the crime lay in the rough and tumble way in which, as he ventures to show, an humble player treated the future husband of a dethroned Countess. Here, at least, is the awful tale: * * * * * "After twenty excuses to clear himself of the neglect I had so warmly charged him with, he concluded them with telling me he had been out all the morning upon business and that his linnen was too much soil'd to be seen in company. Oh, ho! said I, is that all? Come along with me, we will soon get over that dainty difficulty. Upon which I haul'd him by the sleeve into my shifting-room, he either staring, laughing, or hanging back all the way. There, when I had lock'd him in, I began to strip off my upper cloaths, and bade him do the same; still he either did not or would not seem to understand me, and continuing his laugh, cry'd, What! is the puppy mad? No, No, only positive, said I; for look you, in short, the play is ready to begin, and the parts that you and I are to act to-day are not of equal consequence; mine of young Reveller (in 'Greenwich Park'[A]) is but a rake; but whatever you may be, you are not to appear so; therefore take my shirt and give me yours; for depend upon't, stay here you shall not, and so go about your business. [Footnote A: A play written by Mountford.] "To conclude, we fairly chang'd linnen, nor could his mother's have wrap'd him up more fortunately; for in about ten days he marry'd the Lady." * * * * * The gallant Colonel not only married the ex-Countess but became so flirtatious with at least one other woman that he suggested to Cibber the most _risqué_ scene in the "Careless Husband." This, then, was the model gentleman to whom Skipwith made over a share in the Drury Lane patent, and through whose efforts the rival companies were united in 1708. Swiney, according to the orders of the Lord Chamberlain, was to conduct the Haymarket for operatic performances, and the players were all to act at the older house. For a time life at the theatre went as merrily as a marriage bell. The public, of both high and low degree, crowded Drury Lane, and every one was happy excepting sour-faced Rich, who saw with disgust that the plausible, insinuating Brett was fast overshadowing him in the management. How wily Christopher schemed and schemed, and how the gay Colonel was finally compelled to relinquish his portion of the patent altogether, are details that need not be set forth here. It will suffice to say, that as a result of all this intriguing, affairs at Drury Lane assumed an almost chaotic character. Nor was it long before Owen Swiney entered into treaty with Wilks, Dogget, Mrs. Oldfield and Cibber, who were to come over to the Haymarket as the heads of a new company. In this episode the sunny spirit of Nance was brought prettily into the foreground. "When Mrs. Oldfield was nominated as a joint sharer in our new agreement to be made with Swiney [again is the quotation from Cibber], Dogget, who had no objection to her merit, insisted that our affairs could never be upon a secure foundation if there was more than one sex admitted to the management of them." Beastly, unchivalrous, narrow-minded Dogget. Were you alive to-day, how the New Woman would champ with rage. "He therefore hop'd that if we offer'd Mrs. Oldfield a _Carte Blanche_ instead of a share, she would not think herself slighted." And Oldfield, with the affability which sat so well upon her, did not think herself in the least slighted. She "receiv'd it rather as a favour than a disobligation. Her demands therefore were two hundred pounds a year certain, and a benefit clear of all charges, which were readily sign'd to." In the meantime Drury Lane is closed by order of the Lord Chamberlain,[A] on the ground that in seeking to take from the actors one-third of their benefit receipts the management have proceeded illegally. Soon the new forces of Swiney take possession of the Haymarket, and for a short time London has but one playhouse. Mayhap Mr. Rich is chagrined, or perhaps he is not ill-pleased, and in any case he extracts great comfort from a manifesto published in his behalf by the treasurer of Drury Lane, sweet-named Zachary Baggs. In this formidable document, which seeks to prove that the seceders are a lot of ingrates, Oldfield is held up to the public as a sad example of depravity. Her account with Master Rich is thus itemised: £ s. d. To Mrs. Oldfield, at 4 l. a week salary, which for 14 weeks and one day; she leaving off acting presently after her benefit (viz.) on the 17th of March last, 1708, though the benefit was intended for her whole nine months acting, and she refused to assist others in their benefits; her salary for these 14 weeks and one day came to, and she was paid 56 13 4 In January she required, and was paid ten guineas, to wear on the stage in some plays, during the whole season, a mantua petticoat that was given her for the stage and though she left off three months before she should, yet she hath not returned any part of the ten guineas 10 15 0 And she had for wearing in some plays a suit of boys cloaths on the stage; paid 2 10 9 By a benefit play; paid 62 7 8 [Footnote A: June 1709.] But what cares laughing Nance for Master Baggs' spiteful paragraph about the mantua petticoat. Mantua petticoat, forsooth! she has more artistic things to think about than that, and so pray do not plague her, gentle reader, with so commonplace an incident. Let her act on serenely until that glorious night in April 1713, when, back at Drury Lane, under the triumvirate of Cibber, Wilks and Dogget, she helps to make sedate Addison's equally sedate "Cato" a triumphant success. CHAPTER V A DEAD HERO "The soul, secur'd in her existence, smiles At the drawn dagger, and defies its point. The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years; But thou shall flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amidst the war of elements, The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds." So doth noble Cato philosophise when, in Addison's stately tragedy, he gazes on his sword and plans to admit the Grim Visitor whom the most of us wish to keep without our threshold until the last fatal moment. How those lines used to thrill the classic hearts of our ancestors; how Barton Booth, who "shook the stage, and made the people stare," could put into this mild plea for suicide a fervour that caused Drury Lane to ring with applause. What mattered it if the actor, as Pope related, wore a long wig and flowered gown? Cato was none the less himself for that, nor did Booth's elegance of delivery seem unwelcome because his clothes pictured the dandified spirit of the eighteenth century. "Cato!" The play is forgotten now, but there was magic in its name in the palmy days of its author, gentle, kindly Joseph Addison. So potent was that magic, such vivid impression did the fate of the grand old Roman make on more than one mind, when thus retold in lofty verse, that the tragedy was cited as a justification of self-destruction. "What Cato did, and Addison approved Cannot be wrong." These lines, written on a scrap of paper by Eustace Budgell, were found shortly after the death of that odd genius. From being an honoured contributor to the _Spectator_, Budgell descended to the depths of infamy, poverty, and despair, and so one day he threw himself out of a boat under London Bridge, and the waters of the Thames closed over him for ever. He owed his early prosperity to Addison, his cousin, and by way of gratitude he sought to throw upon his benefactor's memory the odium of this moist and melancholy exit from the world. Their lies no odium, nevertheless, where Addison is concerned. His own life may have been clouded towards the last by the mists of disappointment, but to us admiring moderns he is all sunshine. Not the fiery sunshine of summer, but the genial, dignified light of an autumn afternoon when nature seems in most reflective mood. For there was nothing impetuous or ardent in the composition of this good-humoured philosopher; and while he railed so well at the petty sins and vanities of the England in which he dwelt, the satire had naught of venom, malice, or uncharitableness. Nowadays Addison and the _Spectator_ go rolling down to fame together, an indivisible reminder--the very essence indeed--of the virtues, peccadilloes, greatness and meanness of early eighteenth century life. We may forget that Joe was quite a politician in his prime, we are even loth to recall that there was ever such a play as "Cato," but so long as the English language has power to charm, the dear old volumes of the _Spectator_ will stand out as a delightful landmark of that literature which forms the heritage of American and Briton alike. How fondly do we turn the pages of the well-read essays, with their pictures of good Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Honeycomb, and the rest of that happy crew. And over what portrait do we linger more lovingly than that of the _Spectator_ himself, wherein there is many a stroke of the pen that brings Addison in view. When he tells us, for instance: "I threw away my rattle before I was two months old, and would not make use of my coral until they had taken away the bells from it," the writer is indulging in a pretty bit of humour at the expense of his own sedate youth. * * * * * "I have passed my latter years," the philosopher goes on to say, "in this city (London), where I am frequently seen in most public places, though there are not above half a dozen of my select friends that know me.... There is no place of general resort wherein I do not often make my appearance: sometimes I am seen thrusting my head into a round of politicians at Will's,[A] and listening with great attention to the narratives that are made in those little circular audiences; sometimes I smoke a pipe at Child's,[B] and while I seem attentive to nothing but the postman, overhear the conversation of every table in the room. I appear on Sunday nights at St. James' coffee house, and sometimes join the little committee of politics in the inner room, as one who comes there to hear and improve. My face is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa Tree, and in the theatres both of Drury Lane and the Haymarket. I have been taken for a merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten years, and sometimes pass for a Jew in the assembly of stockbrokers at Jonathan's. In short, wherever I see a cluster of people, I always mix with them, though I never open my lips but in my own club." [Footnote A: Will's and Child's were popular coffee-houses, as were also the Grecian, St. James', and the Cocoa Tree.] [Footnote B: See footnote on page 97.] * * * * * It is easy to fancy Addison, shy but ever observant, mingling with the people who thronged the coffee-houses and there settled the affairs of the nation, discussed their neighbours, and sipped their coffee or stronger drink, as the case might be. He must have laughed in his sleeve many a time as he heard the know-it-alls predicting that the British nation was on the brink of perdition or announcing, in the most confidential of manners, the secret policies of his Christian Majesty, Louis XIV. of France. Probably Joe agreed with Steele, who, in speaking of a certain coffee-house, observed that in it men differed rather in the time of day wherein they made a figure, than in any real greatness above one another. [Illustration: JOSEPH ADDISON By SIR GODFREY KNELLER] "I, who am at the coffee-house at six in the morning," Dick writes on,[A] "know that my friend Beaver the haberdasher has a levee of more undissembled friends and admirers than most of the courtiers or generals of Great Britain. Every man about him has, perhaps, a newspaper in his hand; but none can pretend to guess what step will be taken in any one court of Europe, till Mr. Beaver has thrown down his pipe, and declares what measures the allies must enter into upon this new posture of affairs. Our coffee-house is near one of the inns of court, and Beaver has the audience and admiration of his neighbours from six till within a quarter of eight, at which time he is interrupted by the students of the house; some of whom are ready dressed for Westminster at eight in a morning, with faces as busy as if they were retained in every cause there; and others come in their night gowns to saunter away their time, as if they never designed to go thither. [Footnote A: _Spectator_, No. 49.] "I do not know that I meet in any of my walks, objects which move both my spleen and laughter so effectually as those young fellows at the Greecian, Squire's, Searle's, and all other coffee-houses adjacent to the law, who rise early for no other purpose but to publish their laziness. One would think these young virtuosos take a gay cap and slippers, with a scarf and party-coloured gown, to be ensigns of dignity; for the vain things approach each other with an air which shews they regard one another for their vestments. I have observed that the superiority among these proceeds from an opinion of gallantry and fashion. The gentleman in the strawberry sash, who presides so much over the rest, has, it seems, subscribed to every opera this last winter, and is supposed to receive favours from one of the actresses."[A] [Footnote A: Come, says my Friend, let us step into this Coffee House here; as you are a Stranger in the Town, it will afford you some Diversion. Accordingly in we went, where a parcel of Muddling Muckworms were as busy as so many Rats in an old Cheese Loft; some Going, some Coming, some Scribling, some Talking, some Drinking, some Smoaking, others Jangling: and the whole Room stinking of Tobacco, like a Dutch Scoot or a Boatswain's Cabbin. The Walls being hung with Gilt Frames, as a Farriers shop with Horse shoes; which contain'd abundance of Rarities viz. Nectar and Ambrosia, May Dew, Golden Elixirs, Popular Pills, Liquid Snuff, Beautifying Waters, Dentifrisis Drops, Lozenges, all as infallible as the Pope, Where every one above the rest Deservedly has gain'd the Name of Best (as the famous Saffold has it).--WARD.] As the day lengthens the scene changes. The gentleman with the strawberry sash and uncertain morals and his servile subjects disappear, giving place "to men who have business or good sense in their faces, and come to the coffee-house either to transact affairs or enjoy conversation. The persons to whose behaviour and discourse I have most regard, are such as are between these two sorts of men; such as have not spirits too active to be happy and well pleased in a private condition, not complexions too warm to make them neglect the duties and relations of life. Of this sort of men consist the worthier part of mankind; of these are all good fathers, generous brothers, sincere friends, and faithful subjects. Their entertainments are derived rather from reason than imagination; which is the cause that there is no impatience or instability in their speech or action. You see in their countenances they are at home, and in quiet possession of the present instant as it passes, without desiring to quicken it by gratifying any passion or prosecuting any new design. These are the men formed for society, and those little communities which we express by the word neighbourhood." Thus moved the panorama of the coffee-house. Perhaps nothing contributed more importantly to the gossip of the latter than did the mention of quiet Addison himself after the night in April, 1713, which witnessed the triumph of "Cato." The essayist had always possessed, like many other literary men, a secret longing to be the author of a prosperous tragedy, and in his earlier days made bold to submit a play to the inspection of Dryden. The poet read it with polite interest, and, on returning the manuscript to the author, expressed therefor his profound esteem, with many apologetic _et ceteras_, and only regretted that, in his humble opinion, the piece, if placed upon the stage, "would not meet with its deserved success." In other words, Dryden saw that Addison was sadly wanting in dramatic instinct, but was too forbearing to say this in plain, set terms. As for the young man, he must have felt much after the fashion of the aspiring writer who receives an article back from an unappreciative magazine with a printed slip warning him that "the rejection of manuscript does not imply lack of merit," &c. &c., the whole thing being intended as a moral cushion to break the suddenly descending spirits of the sender. Years later the great man was favoured with another cushion of this sort by no less a person than his friend Alexander Pope, whose august criticism he asked in behalf of "Cato." The major part of the play--all of it, in fact, excepting the last act--had been written when Addison first began to fall under the passionate influence of French tragedy, with its tiresome regularity of form and attempted imitation of the classic drama.[A] And a powerful influence it was in the days of good Queen Anne, so powerful, verily, that it almost emasculated the art of play-writing, and for a time well nigh bereft the stage of originality of thought or freedom of expression. Form, form, that was the cry still ringing in the ears of the author when he put the finishing touches to a production which was to be famous for the nonce, and then go down in the dark waters of oblivion with the wreck of many like it. [Footnote A: Just as the school of Racine and Boileau set its face against the extravagances of the romantic coteries, so Addison and his English followers, adopting the principles of the French classicists, applied them to the reformation of the English theatre. Hence arose a great revival of respect for the political doctrines of Aristotle, regard for the unities of time and place, attention to the proprieties of sentiment and diction--in a word, for all those characteristics of style afterwards summed up in the phrase "correctness."--W.J. COURTHOPE'S "Addison."] "When Mr. Addison," related Pope, "had finished his 'Cato,' he brought it to me, desired to have my sincere opinion of it, and left it with me for three or four days. I gave him my opinion of it sincerely, which was, 'that I thought he had better not act it, and that he would get reputation enough by only printing it.' This I said as thinking the lines well written, but the piece was not theatrical enough. Some time after Mr. Addison said 'that his own opinion was the same with mine, but that some particular friends of his, whom he could not disoblige, insisted on its being acted,'" These particular friends who were not to be disobliged seem to have been shining lights of the Whig party. It was feared that the Tories were conspiring to reinstate the male line of Stuart the moment Queen Anne should take herself to another world, and the friends of the Hanoverian succession grew sorely anxious. They were filled with delight, therefore, on hearing that Addison had, peacefully slumbering in his desk, a drama which, as Maynwaring explained, was written not for the love scenes, "but to support the old Roman and English public spirit."[A] Here was a chance to inspire the people with a passion for liberty; the story of Cato, served up in all the elegance of French style, should point a moral against the claims of the Pretender, and pure politics might thus be taught from the rostrum of a theatre! [Footnote A: Those who _affected_ to think liberty in danger, and had _affected_ likewise to think that a stage play might preserve it.--DR. JOHNSON.] So it came about that one fine day the company at Drury Lane began the rehearsal of "Cato," under circumstances, however, which hardly pointed to a successful production. There appears to have been some difficulty in the assignment of parts, and it is easy to imagine that at first the players exercised their prerogative of growling--a prerogative not calculated to dispel the doubts fast assailing Addison as to the outcome of the performance. Nance Oldfield made no fuss at playing Marcia, Cato's daughter, for she was ever disposed to be tractable; but when it came to casting the noble Roman himself the trouble began. The story runs that the part was first offered to Cibber, and that he sensibly refused it. Colley might make a delightful fop, but the playing of dandies could hardly lead one up very gracefully to the handling of Cato. Next came the suggestion that John Mills[A] should try the character, but fortunately he displayed no more enthusiasm for it than did Cibber. Cato was too old a person for him to act, he said, and so declined to have anything to do with the elderly hero. Afterwards he was cast for the less important rôle of Sempronius, which proved in every way a better disposition of affairs, for Mills was a plodder rather than a genius. He belonged to the order of actors to whom, in the present day, we apply the charitable word of painstaking, an adjective which shows very plainly the nature of the man, while it likewise allows the critic to escape the charge of unkindness. We all know the painstaking player, and always cheerfully acknowledge his virtues, but who shall blame us if, after giving him the benefit of his earnestness, we yawn and creep out into the lobby while he holds the stage? [Footnote A: Mills was considered one of the most useful actors that ever served in a theatre, but, though invested by the patronage of Wilks with many parts of the highest order, he had no pretensions to quit the secondary line in which he ought to have been placed.--BELLCHAMBERS.] That Mills sometimes inspired this feeling of boredom may be imagined from the way in which his performance of Macbeth was once received. To those who remembered how magnificently Betterton had played the part, the chill formalism of the new aspirant must have seemed presumptuous, and one night the contrast proved too much for a country gentleman possessed of more honesty than politeness. After watching the progress of the tragedy with growing indignation his feelings became unbearable at a certain point in the fourth act, where George Powell came on as Lennox. "For God's sake, George," shouted the squire, "give us a speech and let me go home!"[A] [Footnote A: "I recollect," says Bellchambers, "an incident of the same sort occurring at Bristol, where a very indifferent actor declaimed so long and to such little purpose that an honest farmer, who sat in the pit, started up with evident signs of disgust, and waving his hand, to motion the speaker off, cried out, 'Tak 'un away, tak 'un away, and let's have another.'"] Thus every one must have given a sigh of relief when industrious John objected to the age of Cato; every one, at least, excepting Wilks, who had taken this actor under his theatrical wing and sought to elevate him above one far greater than either of them--Barton Booth. The fact was that Wilks hid within his breast the troublesome, green-eyed monster of jealousy; he feared the rising genius of Booth, and, now that he was part manager of Drury Lane, probably took pains to keep the rival as much as possible in the background. Unfortunately for this plan of annihilation the screen provided in the commonplace person of Mills proved entirely too flimsy to hide the coming man. Barton Booth was in many ways an ideal actor, in that he was blessed with the poetic imagination and scholarship to understand his rôles and the tragic power to play them. He had, furthermore, a voice of marvellous resonance, an aristocratic bearing and a handsome face and figure which were sure to attract attention, whether he appeared upon the stage or amid the more genial confines of the Bedford coffee-house. It was to Booth, therefore, that Cato was finally assigned, the other masculine parts being handed over to Cibber, Mills, Wilks, Powell, Ryan, Bowman, and Keen. The latter was a popular actor of majestic mould who used to play the King in "Hamlet" (a rôle too often left to the mercies of third-rate mouthers) in a fashion which would have justified the loyal and historic gentleman who preferred that character to all others in the play. As already mentioned, Marcia was to be acted by Oldfield, and to Mistress Porter, who usually revelled in the delineation of high and mighty passions, was given gentle, tearful Lucia, daughter to Lucius (Keen). The rehearsals now went on apace, but evidently without much show of enthusiasm. Addison assisted, probably dispirited and nervous but outwardly unruffled, for he always presented a well-starched front to the watching-world. Honest Dick Steele looked on, and in that frank, ingenuous way he told his friends, with perhaps a suspicious flush on his winsome face and a swimming gleam in his eyes, that he was preparing to pack the theatre on the opening night in the interests of worried Joe. Poor, good-hearted Dick! Then there was Parson Swift, who sat behind the scenes with mild interest on his face and a sneer in that ugly, gnarled heart of his. "We stood on the stage," he writes to Stella, "and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompting every moment, and the poet directing them, and the drab that acts Cato's daughter (Mrs. Oldfield) out in the midst of a passionate part, and then calling out 'What's next?'" Lastly came the great Mr. Pope, with that poor, deformed body and brilliant mind. He was not content merely to be a "looker on in Vienna," or in Utica; he pottered around unceasingly, hobnobbed with Oldfield (who now began to take the liveliest interest in the play), and suggested several alterations in the text. Once Nance ventured to criticise a speech of Portius; the amiable Addison, unlike the fashion of some other amiable authors, heard her objections with approval, and soon Mr. Pope was again called into consultation. There was more hobnobbing, a change of diction, and the rehearsals continued. Then, to cap the climax of poetic condescension, little Alexander honoured "Cato" with a flowing prologue wherein he set forth, archaically enough, that "To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, To raise the genius, and to mend the heart, To make mankind in conscious virtue bold, Live o'er each scene, and be what they behold: For this the tragic Muse first trod the stage, Commanding tears to stream through every age; Tyrants no more their savage nature kept, And foes to virtue wonder'd how they wept." At last came the eventful evening of April 13, when "Cato" saw the light. The theatre was packed, just as Steele promised that it should be, yet the audience would have been large had Dick never existed. There were no press agents to "boom" matters, but as it became known that the Whigs stood sponsors for the tragedy there was a corresponding desire to be in either at its triumph or its death. The result has passed into history. The characters were, for the most part, finely acted, and the play was admired for its lofty sentiments and elegance of expression, while the Tories, _mirabile dictu_, vied with their enemies in enthusiastic tokens of approval. The Whigs went to the theatre expecting to appropriate all of Mr. Addison's illusions to the sacred cause of liberty, and what must have been their horror on finding that the Tories, refusing to be discomfited by any of those illusions, applauded as violently as did the friends of Hanover? Pope has left us a description of this first night, in a letter to Sir William Trumbull. "Cato," he writes, "was not so much the wonder of Rome in his days, as he is of Britain in ours; and though all the foolish industry possible has been used to make it thought a party play, yet what the author once said of another may the most properly in the world be applied to him on this occasion: "'Envy itself is dumb, in wonder lost, And factions strive who shall applaud him most.'[A] [Footnote A: From Addison's poem of "The Campaign," wherein the author sings of the greatness of Marlborough.] "The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party on the one side of the theatre, were echoed by the Tories on the other; while the author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause proceeding more from the hand than the head. This was the case too of the prologue writer, who was clapped into a staunch Whig at almost every two lines. I believe you have heard that after all the applause of the opposite faction, my lord Bolingbroke sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the box between one of the acts, and presented him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgement (as he expressed it) for defending the cause of liberty so well against a Perpetual Dictator.[A] The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced this way, and therefore design a present to the same Cato very speedily; in the meantime they are getting ready as good a sentence as the former on their side: so betwixt them it is probable that Cato (as Dr. Garth expressed it) may have something to live upon after he dies." [Footnote A: It is suggested by Macaulay that Lord Bolingbroke hinted at "the attempt which Marlborough had made to convert the Captain-Generalship into a patent office, to be held by himself for life." The anecdote of Pope gives us an amusing example of the stealing of Whig thunder by the clever Tories.] So important a rôle did politics play in this first performance of "Cato" that to many in the house the merits of the actors must have passed unrecognised. And yet those merits were striking. Who could have made a lovlier Marcia than did Nance; and how thoroughly she must have justified the passion of that most virtuous of princes, the sententious Juba. The character was not worthy of her genius, but that did not prevent this true artist from giving to it all manner of dignity and beauty. Who could help pitying her lover when Marcia first repelled his amorous advances: "I should be griev'd, young Prince, to think my presence Unbent your thoughts, and slacken'd 'em to arms, While, warm with slaughter, our victorious foe Threatens aloud, and calls you to the field." And when Marcia, having sent away the youth, explained: "His air, his voice, his looks, and honest soul Speak all so movingly in his behalf, I dare not trust myself to hear him talk," the apology came with such delicious grace and plaintiveness that the house forgot her coldness in sorrow for her woes. And Barton Booth? His superb acting of Cato raised him to such an airy pinnacle of fame that he soon became one of the managers of Drury Lane. The other players were evidently all more or less effective, barring Cibber, whose Syphax (the Numidian warrior who seeks the downfall of Cato), must have made the judicious grieve. Indeed we can easily believe that he used so many grotesque motions and spoke his lines with such a cracked voice as to win only ridicule and "a loud laugh of contempt." Lord Bolingbroke's gift of fifty guineas had a disturbing effect not only on the Whigs but on Manager Dogget as well. That worthy feared the success of "Cato" would cause Booth to claim a share in the direction of Drury Lane, as he did, of course, in a very short time. In the hopes of shutting off all pretensions to this honour by a paltry expedient Dogget thought that Cibber, Wilks and himself, as joint managers, could relieve themselves of every obligation by duplicating the generosity of the Tory statesman. "He insinuated to us (for he was a staunch Whig)" relates Colley, "that this present of fifty guineas was a sort of Tory triumph which they had no pretence to; and that for his part he could not bear that so redoubted a champion for liberty as Cato should be bought off to the cause of a contrary party. He therefore, in the seeming zeal of his heart, proposed that the managers themselves should make the same present to Booth which had been made him from the boxes the day before. This, he said, would recommend the equality and liberal spirit of our management to the town, and might be a means to secure Booth more firmly in our interest, it never having been known that the skill of the best actor had received so round a reward or gratuity in one day before. "Wilks, who wanted nothing but abilities to be reduc'd to tell him that it was my opinion that Booth would never be made easy by anything we could do for him, 'till he had a share in the profits and management; and that, as he did not want friends to assist him, whatever his merit might be before, every one would think since his acting of Cato, he had now enough to back his pretentions to it." In the end Cibber's objections were overruled, "and the same night Booth had the fifty guineas, which he receiv'd with a thankfulness that made Wilks and Dogget perfectly easy, insomuch that they seem'd for some time to triumph in their conduct, and often endeavour'd to laugh my jealousy out of countenance. But in the following winter the game happened to take a different turn; and then, if it had been a laughing matter," says Colley, "I had as strong an occasion to smile at their former security."[A] [Footnote A: After Booth was admitted into the management Dogget retired in disgust from Drury Lane, and brought suit against his former associates. He was decreed the sum of £600 for his share in the patent, with allowances for interest. "I desir'd," wrote Cibber, "we might all enter into an immediate treaty with Booth, upon the terms of his admission. Dogget still sullenly reply'd, that he had no occasion to enter into any treaty. Wilks then, to soften him, propos'd that, if I liked it, Dogget might undertake it himself. I agreed. No! he would not be concern'd in it. I then offer'd the same trust to Wilks, if Dogget approv'd of it. Wilks said he was not good at making of bargains, but if I was willing, he would rather leave it to me. Dogget at this rose up and said, we might both do as we pleas'd, but that nothing but the law should make him part with his property--and so went out of the room."] "So much for one result of 'Cato's' first performance. The play had a run of thirty-five nights and as cunning as Dogget, was so charm'd with the proposal that he long'd that moment to make Booth the present with his own hands; and though he knew he had no right to do it without my consent, had no patience to ask it; upon which I turned to Dogget with a cold smile [what a freezing, polar expression Cibber could put on when he desired] and told him, that if Booth could be purchas'd at so cheap a rate, it would be one of the best proofs of his economy we had ever been beholden to: I therefore desired we might have a little patience; that our doing it too hastily might be only making sure of an occasion to throw the fifty guineas away; for if we should be obliged to do better for him, we could never expect that Booth would think himself bound in honour to refund them." From this little conversation we see that art is not always the one beacon light of the player or the manager. Cibber argued with his natural shrewdness, but Wilks would not be convinced, and began, "with his usual freedom of speech," to treat the suggestion "as a pitiful evasion of their intended generosity." "But Dogget, who was not so wide of my meaning, clapping his hand upon mine, said, with an air of security, O! don't trouble yourself! there must be two words to that bargain; let me alone to manage that matter. Wilks, upon this dark discourse, grew uneasy, as if there were some secret between us that he was to be left out of. Therefore, to avoid the shock of his intemperance, I was the town crowded to the theatre. Even the good Queen, who must have been more or less bored at the fuss bestowed upon it, actually suggested that Mr. Addison should dedicate the tragedy to her Royal self. To inscribe a work to a sovereign means little or nothing in these days of republicanism, real or assumed, but Anne's request came as a great compliment It was a compliment, however, which had to be dispensed with, for Addison had already proposed to dedicate 'Cato' to the Duchess of Marlborough, and he harboured no wish to mortify the aggressive Sarah (now out of favour with the Queen) by acting upon the hint of her one-time friend and mistress. So the author diplomatically ignored both horns of the dilemma, or, in other words, determined to consecrate his tragedy neither to Queen nor Duchess." When June was well nigh ended the Drury Lane players transplanted "Cato" to the scholarly environment of Oxford, where, as friend Cibber tells us, "a great deal of that false, flashy wit and forc'd humour," which had been the delight of London, was rated at "its bare intrinsick value." The play was admirably suited to the temper of a university audience, and its success proved so great, its sentiment so uplifted, that Dr. Sandridge, Dean of Carlisle, wrote to Barton Booth expressing his wish that "all discourses from the pulpit were as instructive and edifying, as pathetic and affecting," as those provided by Mr. Addison. The "Apology" gives us an interesting account of the favour accorded to "Cato," above all other modern plays, by the dwellers in thoughtful Oxford. "The only distinguished merit allow'd to any modern writer was to the author of 'Cato,' which play being the flower of a plant raised in that learned garden (for there Mr. Addison had his education), what favour may we not suppose was due to him from an audience of brethren, who from that local relation to him might naturally have a warmer pleasure in their benevolence to his fame? But not to give more weight to this imaginary circumstance than it may bear, the fact was, that on our first day of acting it, our house was in a manner invested, and entrance demanded by twelve a clock at noon, and before one it was not wide enough for many who came too late for places. The same crowds continued for three days together (an uncommon curiosity in that place) and the death of Cato triumphed over the injuries of Caesar everywhere. To conclude, our reception at Oxford, whatever our merit might be, exceeded our expectation." The ladies and gentlemen of Drury Lane posted away from Oxford in a blaze of glory. They had actually behaved themselves, these despised mummers, and their contribution towards the repairing of a church was almost sufficient to bring them within the pale of holiness. "At our taking leave," writes Colley, jubilantly, "we had the thanks of the vice-Chancellor for the decency and order observ'd by our whole society, an honour which had not always been paid upon the same occasions; for at the act in King William's time I remember some pranks of a different nature had been complain'd of. Our receipts had not only enabled us (as I have observ'd) to double the pay of every actor, but to afford out of them towards the repair of St. Mary's Church the contribution of fifty pounds. Besides which, each of the three managers had to his respective share, clear of all charges, one hundred and fifty more for his one and twenty days' labour, which being added to his thirteen hundred and fifty shared in the winter preceding, amounted in the whole to fifteen hundred, the greatest sum ever known to have been shared in one year to that time. And to the honour of our auditors here and elsewhere be it spoken, all this was rais'd without the aid of those barbarous entertainments with which, some few years after (upon the re-establishment of two contending companies) we were forc'd to disgrace the stage to support it" The success of "Cato" proved as brilliant in a literary as in a dramatic sense. The play was translated into several languages, not forgetting the Latin, and even Voltaire was pleased, in after years, to come down from his critical throne and honour Mr. Addison's verses with his praise.[A] "The first English writer," he said, "who composed a regular tragedy and infused a spirit of elegance through every part of it was the illustrious Mr. Addison." Poor Shakespeare! [Footnote A: One sees in Voltaire (who observed that "Hamlet" "appears the work of a drunken savage") the old-fashioned tendency to belittle Shakespeare. This tendency has one of its most amusing reflections in a criticism by Hume, who said of the great poet that "a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold."] Smile as we may over that frigid elegance, it seemed none the less impressive in the days of auld lang syne, and even yet we hear echoes of the play in a round of familiar quotations. "The woman who deliberates is lost;" And "'Tis not in mortals to command success, But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it;" And "Curse on his virtues, they've undone his country." still fall lightly on our ear. But the tragedy is forgotten, and why seek to resurrect those once-beloved characters? Cato, Marcia, Juba, and the rest--figures of classic marble rather than of flesh and blood--have all gone to that bourne whence no stage travellers return. They lie buried 'mid all the pomp of mouldering books, and there let them peacefully decay. CHAPTER VI IN TRAGIC PATHS The average comedian will whisper, if you are fortunate enough to get him in confidential mood, that he was really designed by nature to tread the stately walks of tragedy; that had not cruel fate intervened he would now be enthralling the town with his Hamlet, Macbeth, or Othello, and that even yet he has not lost all hope of adorning the kingdom of Melpomene. But he is not to be believed, in at least ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, and while we listen politely to his story of blasted ambition our hearts are exceeding thankful that the chance he looked for never came. Nance Oldfield brilliantly reversed this order of things. Although she shone in comedy with the brighter light, she could play serious rôles with majesty and power, and feel, or pretend to feel, a trifle bored in so doing. "I hate to have a page dragging my train about," she used to cry, with a pout of the pretty mouth; "why don't they give Porter those parts? She can put on a better tragedy face than I can." Yet whatever might be the undoubted capabilities of Porter for assuming the tragic mask, audience and manager sometimes insisted that Nance should banish all the sunlight and becloud her features with the sorrows of a high-strung heroine. One of these heroines was Andromache, the title personage of "The Distressed Mother," an adaptation by Ambrose Philips of Racine's "Andromaque." This play seems heavy enough if we bother to read it now, but it had a thousand charms for theatre-goers in the days when Mr. Philips frequented Button's coffee-house and there hung up a cane which he threatened to use upon the body of the great Mr. Pope.[A] Addison, whom tradition credits with writing the entertaining epilogue, took all manner of interest in the tragedy, and the _Spectator_ treated it to an advance notice which we degenerates might term an unblushing "boom." [Footnote A: Pope had ventured to sneer at Philips' "Pastorals."] "The players, who know I am very much their friend," says the _Spectator_[A] "take all opportunities to express a gratitude to me for being so. They could not have a better occasion of obliging me, than one which they lately took hold of. They desired my friend Will Honeycomb to bring me the reading of a new tragedy; it is called 'The Distressed Mother.' I must confess, though some days are passed since I enjoyed that entertainment, the passions of the several characters dwell strongly upon my imagination; and I congratulate the age, that they are at last to see truth and human life represented in the incidents which concern heroes and heroines. The style of the play is such as becomes those of the first education, and the sentiments worthy those of the highest figure. It was a most exquisite pleasure to me, to observe real tears drop from the eyes of those who had long made it their profession to dissemble affliction; and the player, who read, frequently threw down the book, until he had given vent to the humanity which rose in him at some irresistible touches of the imagined sorrow." [Footnote A: _Spectator_, No. 290, February 1, 1711-12. This essay has been credited to Steele.] This picture of woe would hardly suit the theories of those hard-hearted players who believe that the true artist is never "carried away," or affected by the pathos of his part. Surely, the scene is ridiculous rather than imposing, and one is tempted to suggest, albeit with bated breath, that the _Spectator_ was indulging in a bit of good-natured exaggeration. Exaggeration did we say? The modern newspaper writer, who is always glad, when off duty, to call things by their plain names, would brand the notice of the "Distressed Mother" as a bare-faced puff. And who could quarrel with his scepticism? Actors are not in the habit of weeping over the reading of a play; they have little time for such briny luxury. Yet in this very number of the _Spectator_ we have George Powell, who was cast for Orestes in Mr. Philips' tragedy, writing that the grief which he is required to portray will seem almost real enough to choke his utterance. Here is what the hypocrite says: "Mr. SPECTATOR,--I am appointed to act a part in the new tragedy called 'The Distressed Mother.' It is the celebrated grief of Orestes which I am to personate; but I shall not act it as I ought, for I shall feel it too intimately to be able to utter it. I was last night repeating a paragraph to myself, which I took to be an expression of rage, and in the middle of the sentence there was a stroke of self-pity which quite unmanned me. Be pleased, Sir, to print this letter, that when I am oppressed in this manner at such an interval, a certain part of the audience may not think I am out; and I hope with this allowance, to do it with satisfaction.--I am, Sir, your most humble servant, GEORGE POWELL." Poor dashing, dissipated, brandy-bibbing George! Perhaps you had as keen an eye to the value of advertising as have certain players who never heard your name.[A] [Footnote A: The original cast of the "Distressed Mother" included Booth (Pyrrhus), Powell (Orestes), Mills (Pylades), Mrs. Oldfield (Andromache), and Mrs. Porter (Hermione).] The production of the "Distressed Mother" (March, 1712), was accompanied by an exciting popular demonstration which must for the nonce have made Powell quite forget those lines which gave him such exquisite sorrow. It all came from the jealousy of Mrs. Rogers, she of more virtue on the stage than off, and who always cherished, with the assistance of kind friends, a very sincere belief that her powers far exceeded those of Oldfield.[A] [Footnote A: The rivalry between Rogers and Oldfield once reached such a pass that Wilks sought to end it, and stop the complaints of the former's admirers, by a severe expedient. "Mr. Wilks," says Victor, "soon reduced this clamor to demonstration, by an experiment of Mrs. Oldfield and Mrs. Rogers playing the same part, that of Lady Lurewell in the 'Trip to the Jubilee;' but though obstinacy seldom meets conviction, yet from this equitable trial the tumults in the house were soon quelled (by public authority) greatly to the honour of Mr. Wilks. I am, from my own knowledge thoroughly convinced that Mr. Wilks had no other regard for Mrs. Oldfield but what arose from the excellency of her performances. Mrs. Roger's conduct might be censured by some for the earnestness of her passion towards Mr. Wilks, but in the polite world the fair sex has always been privileged from scandal."] So when Nance was cast for the distraught Andromache there was trouble. Rogers demanded the part, and on being refused set about to make things as unpleasant as possible for her detested rival. Friends of the disappointed actress packed Drury Lane when the "Distressed Mother" was performed, and the appearance of Oldfield was made the signal for a riot. Royal messengers and guards were sent to put an end to the disorder, but the play had to be stopped for that night. Colley, who had ever an eye to the pounds, shillings and pence, was disgusted at what he chose to call an exhibition of low malevolence. "We have been forced," he says, "to dismiss an audience of a hundred and fifty pounds, from a disturbance spirited up by obscure people, who never gave any better reason for it, than that it was their fancy to support the idle complaint of one rival actress against another, in their several pretentious to the chief part in a new tragedy. But as this tumult seem'd only to be the Wantonness of _English_ Liberty, I shall not presume to lay any further censure upon it." Finally the combined charms of Oldfield and the "Distressed Mother" triumphed, and young beaux who had helped to swell the riot were glad to come back meekly to Drury Lane and extol the attractions of Andromache. In the play itself Nance must have been all that the troublous part suggested, but it was when she tripped on gaily and gave the humorous epilogue that the house found her most delightful. She, who could reign so imperially in tragedy, had glided back to her better-loved kingdom of comedy, and what cared her captivated hearers if this self-same epilogue made an inharmonious ending to a serious play. It was quite enough that Andromache, with all her sufferings dispelled, should say melodiously: "I hope you'll own, that with becoming art, I've play'd my game, and topp'd the widow's part. My spouse, poor man, could not live out the play, But dy'd commodiously on wedding-day,[A] While I his relict, made at one bold fling, Myself a princess, and young Sty a King. You, ladies, who protract a lover's pain, And hear your servants sigh whole years in vain; Which of you all would not on marriage venture, Might she so soon upon her jointure enter?" [Footnote A: This is a coy reference to Pyrrhus, who was murdered while his marriage to Hector's widow was being celebrated with royal pomp. As he fell, it will be remembered, the King placed his crown upon the head of Andromache.] An epilogue leading off with these lines was hardly an appropriate ending to a tragedy, yet are we fastidious enough in these days to sneer at the anomaly? We have banished prologue and afterpiece as something old-fashioned and inartistic, but never turn one solitary eyelash when Hamlet follows up his death by rushing before the curtain and grinning his thanks. Desdemonas who come forward, after the smothering scene, to receive flowers, and Romeos and Juliets who rise from the tomb that they may bow and smirk before an audience--while we have such as these among us, let us not cast stones at the early playgoer. Addison has left, in the _Spectator_, a delightful story of dear old Sir Roger de Coverley's experience with the "Distressed Mother." Sir Roger, it appears, confessed that he had not seen a play for twenty years, and was very anxious to know "who this distressed mother was; and upon hearing that she was Hector's widow, he told me that her husband was a brave man, and that when he was a schoolboy he had read his life at the end of the dictionary."[A] So the old gentleman, accompanied by the _Spectator_, Captain Sentry, and a retinue of servants, set out in state for Drury Lane, and on arriving there went into the pit. [Footnote A: _Spectator_, No. 335.] "As soon as the house was full, and the candles lighted, my old friend stood up, and looked about him with that pleasure which a mind seasoned with humanity naturally feels in itself, at the sight of a multitude of people who seem pleased with one another, and partake of the same common entertainment. I could not but fancy to myself, as the old man stood up in the middle of the pit, that he made a very proper centre to a tragic audience. Upon the entering of Pyrrhus, the knight told me, that he did not believe the king of France himself had a better strut. I was indeed very attentive to my old friend's remarks, because I looked upon them as a piece of natural criticism, and was well pleased to hear him, at the conclusion of almost every scene, telling me that he could not imagine how the play would end. One while he appeared much concerned for Andromache; and a little while after for Hermione; and was extremely puzzled to think what would become of Pyrrhus. "When Sir Roger saw Andromache's obstinate refusal to her lovers importunities, he whispered me in the ear, that he was sure she would never have him; to which he added, with a more than ordinary vehemence, 'You can't imagine, sir, what it is to have to do with a widow.' Upon Pyrrhus's threatening afterwards to leave her, the knight shook his head, and muttered to himself, 'Ay, do if you can.' This part dwelt so much upon my friend's imagination, that at the close of the third act, as I was thinking of something else, he whispered me in my ear, 'These widows, sir, are the most perverse creatures in the world. But pray,' says he, 'you that are a critic, is the play according to your dramatic rules, as you call them? Should your people in tragedy always talk to be understood? Why, there is not a single sentence in this play that I do not know the meaning of.' "The fourth act very luckily began before I had time to give the old gentleman an answer. 'Well,' says the knight, sitting down with great satisfaction, 'I suppose we are now to see Hector's ghost,' He then renewed his attention, and, from time to time, fell a praising the widow. He made, indeed, a little mistake as to one of her pages, whom at his first entering he took for Astyanax; but quickly set himself right in that particular, though, at the same time he owned he should have been very glad to have seen the little boy, who, says he, must needs be a very fine child by the account that is given of him. Upon Hermione's going off with a menace to Pyrrhus, the audience gave a loud clap, to which Sir Roger added, 'On my word, a notable young baggage!'" We can imagine Sir Roger going, a year later, to see Mrs. Oldfield carry all before her as Jane Shore in Nicholas Rowe's play of that name. The author had once been an ardent admirer of the glacierlike but lovely Bracegirdle, at whose haughty shrine he long worshipped in the hopes that the ice of her reserve might some day melt; and the wits of the coffee-house were wont to say, not without a grain of truth, that when the poet wrote dramas to fit Bracegirdle as the heroine, the lovers therein always pleaded his own passion[A]. Now that the charmer had left the stage, Rowe was forced to entrust the title character of Jane Shore to Nance, who vowed, no doubt, she was thoroughly bored at having to walk once again through a vale of tears. But she made another triumph (the author himself coached her in the part), and helped to give the production all manner of success. [Footnote A: As Cibber says, Mrs. Bracegirdle "inspired the best authors to write for her, and two of them [Rowe and Congreve] when they gave her a lover in a play, seem'd palpably to plead their own passions, and make their private court to her in fictitious characters."] It is a curious fact that the writing of the tragedy was indirectly due to political disappointment. Rowe had set himself assiduously to the study of Spanish with the idea of securing from Lord Halifax a diplomatic position, and his reward for this energy was so intangible that he soon gave up hopes of foreign travel and turned his attention to the tribulations of Jane. In other words, the noble Halifax merely expressed his satisfaction that Mr. Rowe could now read "Don Quixote" in the original. Thus Nance played on, sometimes in comedy, and again in tragedy, when, despite her customary objections, the pages had to drag her train about. It was a train that swept all before it. The speaking of trains and pages suggests the fact that in old times the heroes and heroines of tragedy always wore, either in peculiarity of dress or pomp of surroundings, the badge of greatness. Nowadays a few bars of romantic music, to usher these characters on the stage, will suffice. But things were different then; our ancestors insisted that the aforesaid _dramatis personnae_ should be labelled, frilled and furbelowed. Addison has an interesting essay on the subject.[A] [Footnote A: _Spectator_, No. 42.] "But among all our tragic artifices," he says, "I am the most offended at those which are made use of to inspire us with magnificent ideas of the persons that speak. The ordinary method of making an hero, is to clap a huge plume of feathers upon his head which rises so very high, that there is often a greater length from his chin to the top of his head than to the sole of his foot. One would believe that we thought a great man and a tall man the same thing. This very much embarrasses the actor, who is forced to hold his neck extremely stiff and steady all the while he speaks; and notwithstanding any anxieties which he pretends for his mistress, his country, or his friends, one may see by his action, that his greatest care and concern is to keep the plume of feathers from falling off his head. For my own part, when I see a man uttering his complaints under such a mountain of feathers, I am apt to look upon him rather as an unfortunate lunatic, than a distressed hero. "As these superfluous ornaments upon the head make a great man, a princess generally receives her grandeur from those additional encumbrances that fall into her tail; I mean the broad sweeping train that follows her in all her motions, and finds constant employment for a boy who stands behind her to open and spread it to advantage. I do not know how others are affected at this sight, but I must confess my eyes are wholly taken up with the page's part; and, as for the queen, I am not so attentive to any thing she speaks, as to the right adjusting of her train, lest it should chance to trip up her heels, or incommode her, as she walks to and fro upon the stage. It is, in my opinion, a very odd spectacle to see a queen venting her passion in a disordered motion, and a little boy taking care all the while that they do not ruffle the tail of her gown. The parts that the two persons act on the stage at the same time are very different. The princess is afraid lest she should incur the displeasure of the king her father, or lose the hero, her lover, whilst her attendant is only concerned lest she should entangle her feet in her petticoat." In a succeeding paragraph the reader finds that a cherished nineteenth-century custom--the representing of a vast army by the employment of half-a-dozen ill-fed, unpainted supers--has at least the sanction of age: "Another mechanical method of making great men, and adding dignity to kings and queens, is to accompany them with halberts and battle-axes. Two or three shifters of scenes, with the two candle-snuffers, make up a complete body of guards upon the English stage; and by the addition of a few porters dressed in red coats, can represent above a dozen legions. I have sometimes seen a couple of armies drawn up together upon the stage, when the poet has been disposed to do honour to his generals. It is impossible for the reader's imagination to multiply twenty men into such prodigious multitudes, or to fancy that two or three hundred thousand soldiers are fighting in a room of forty or fifty yards in compass. Incidents of such a nature should be told, not represented." Addison remarks that "the tailor and painter often contribute to the success of a tragedy more than the poet," a trite saying which holds good now, and he ends his essay with the belief that "a good poet will give the reader a more lively idea of an army or a battle in a description, than if he actually saw them drawn up in squadrons and battalions, or engaged in the confusion of a fight. Our minds should be open to great conceptions, and inflamed with glorious sentiments by what the actor speaks, more than by what he appears. Can all the trappings or equipage of a king or hero give Brutus half the pomp and majesty which he receives from a few lines in Shakespeare?" Which is all very true, yet "the tailor and painter" will continue popular, no doubt, until the crack of doom. The month of December 1714 saw the reopening of the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, under letters patent originally granted by Charles II. to Christopher Rich, and restored by his broken-English Majesty George I. The renewal created a dangerous rival to Drury Lane, but it is not probable that the king worried over having planted such a thorn in the sides of Messrs. Steele, Booth, Wilks, and Cibber[A]. He remembered, he told Mr. Craggs, "when he had been in England before, in King Charles his time, there had been two theatres in London; and as the patent seemed to be a lawful grant, he saw no reason why two playhouses might not be continued." [Footnote A: On the death of Queen Anne the old licence or patent of Drury Lane lapsed, and when the new one was issued Steele was named therein as a partner.] Several useful players left Drury Lane to go over into Lincoln's Inn Fields,[A] chief among them being Mrs. Rogers, who felt greatly relieved in transferring her affectations of virtue to a house where she would no longer be overshadowed by the genius of Oldfield. As for Nance, she was faithful to the old theatre, and continued to be the fairest though perhaps the frailest of its pillars, notwithstanding the personal charms of Mrs. Horton. The latter was a strolling player recently admitted to the sacred precincts of Drury. She had been in the habit of "ranting tragedy in barns and country towns, and playing Cupid in a booth, at suburban fairs. The attention of managers was directed towards her; and Booth, after seeing her act in Southwark, engaged her for Drury Lane, where her presence was more agreeable to the public than particularly pleasant to dear Mrs. Oldfield."[B] [Footnote A: 'Tis true, they none of them had more than a negative merit, in being only able to do us more harm by their leaving us without notice, than they could do us good by remaining with us: For though the best of them could not support a play, the worst of them by their absence could maim it; as the loss of the least pin in a watch may obstruct its motion.--CIBBER.] [Footnote B: Dr. Doran's "Annals of the Stage."] So wagged the mimic world with Nance as its most attractive figure. Sometimes she laughed her way through a play; and again she committed suicide for the edification of the audience, as when she appeared in "Busiris." This was a windy tragedy by Dr. Young (he of the "Night Thoughts"), wherein Wilks, as Memnon, also had to kill himself. The performance was, naturally enough, far from cheerful, and no particular inspiration could have been obtained from the presence of Busiris himself, that semi-savage Egyptian king to whom Ovid referred: "'Tis said that Egypt for nine years was dry; Nor Nile did floods, nor heaven did rain supply. A foreigner at length informed the King That slaughtered guests would kindly moisture bring. The King replied, 'On thee the lot shall fall; Be thou, my guest, the sacrifice for all.'" Certainly a most ungenial host. There were times when Oldfield could even arouse enthusiasm amid the dullest and most unappealing surroundings. This she did, for instance, in the stupid "Sophonisba" of James Thomson, who could write delightful poetry about nature without being able to carry any of that nature into the art of play-making. It was in this artificial tragedy that the famous line occurred: "Oh Sophonisba! Sophonisba, o!" which was afterwards parodied by "Oh! Jemmy Thomson! Jemmy Thomson, oh!" and it was in the same ill-fated compilation that Cibber had the distinction of being hissed off the stage. The latter, unlike Oldfield, had a sneaking fondness for tragedy, and when "Sophonisba" was first read in the green room he appropriated to his own use the dignified character of Scipio. His egotism and foolishness had their full reward. For two nights successively, as Davies tells us, "Cibber was as much exploded as any bad actor could be. Williams, by desire of Wilks, made himself master of the part; but he, marching slowly, in great military distinction, from the upper part of the stage, and wearing the same dress as Cibber, was mistaken for him, and met with repeated hisses, joined to the music of cat-calls [notice, ye theatre-goers of 1898, that the cat-call is not the invention of the modern gallery god]; but, as soon as the audience were undeceived, they converted their groans and hisses to loud and long continued applause." Three years later, in 1733, Cibber retired from the stage. With Mrs. Oldfield the picture was far different. She could not make of Thomson's tragedy a success, yet she played Sophonisba (one of the last parts in which she was ever seen) with a grandeur of effect that well earned the undying gratitude of the author.[A] In after years her old admirers were wont to thrill with pleasure as they recalled the passionate intensity she gave to that much-quoted line, "Not one base word of Carthage, for thy soul," as she stood glaring at the astonished Massinissa. [Footnote A: Mrs. Oldfield, in the character of Sophonisba, has excelled what, even in the fondness of an author, I could either wish or imagine. The grace, dignity, and happy variety of her action have been universally applauded, and are truly admirable.--Thomson.] Among those who saw Sophonisba was Chetwood, whose "General History of the Stage" gives us many a charming glimpse of dead and gone actors. Dead and gone? Nay, rather let it be said that they still live in the ever fresh and graphic pages of contemporary critics, and thus refute the gentle pessimism of Mr. Henley when he asks so gracefully: "Where are the passions they essayed, And where the tears they made to flow? Where the wild humours they portrayed For laughing worlds to see and know? Othello's wrath and Juliet's woe? Sir Peter's whims and Timon's gall? And Millamant and Romeo? Into the night go one and all." "I was too young," says Chetwood, "to view her first dawn on the stage, but yet had the infinite satisfaction of her meridian lustre, a glow of charms not to be beheld but with a trembling eye! which held her influence till set in night." Of Nance's tendency to escape tragic plays the same writer tells us: "When 'Mithridates' was revived, it was with much difficulty she was prevail'd upon to take the part; but she perform'd it to the utmost length of perfection, and, after that, she seem'd much better reconcil'd to tragedy. What a majestical dignity in Cleopatra! and, indeed, in every part that required it: Such a finish'd figure on the stage, was never yet seen. In 'Calista, the Fair Penitent,' she was inimitable, in the third act, with Horatio, when she tears the letter with "'To atoms, thus! Thus let me tear the vile detested falsehood, The wicked lying evidence of shame!' "Her excellent clear voice of passion, with manner and action suiting, us'd to make me shrink with awe, and seem'd to put her monitor Horatio into a mousehole. I almost gave him up for a troublesome puppy; and though Mr. Booth play'd the part of Lothario, I could hardly lug him up to the importance of triumphing over such a finish'd piece of perfection, that seemed to be too much dignified to lose her virtue." * * * * * Perhaps the reader may think that this chapter, like several others, is (as the theatre-goer said of "Hamlet") too "deuced full of quotation." Yet what can give a better picture of old stage life than these quaint and often eloquent records of the past? Pray be lenient, therefore, thou kindly critic, if the most faded books of the theatrical library are taken down from the dusty shelf, and a few of the neglected pages are printed once again. As these very books seem all the better in their dingy bindings, so do the old ideas, the odd conceits, the stories that charmed dead generations, take on a keener zest when clothed in the formal language of other days. If we want to get that formal language in all its glory, let us bring from the library a copy of some early eighteenth-century tragedy. Shall we close our eyes and choose one at random? Well, what have we? The "Tamerlane" of our friend Nicholas Rowe, in which is set forth the story of the generous Emperor of Tartary, the "very glass and fashion of all conquerors." The play is prefaced by a fulsome "Epistle Dedicatory," addressed to the sacred person of the "Right Honourable William, Lord Marquis of Harrington," and showing, almost pathetically, how frequently the literary workers of Queen Anne's "golden age" were wont to beg the influence of some powerful patron. The dedication seems absolutely grovelling when viewed from the present standards, but Mr. Rowe and his friends saw therein nothing more remarkable than respectful homage to one of the world's great men. The republic of letters was then an empty name.[A] [Footnote A: "Tamerlane" was brought out in 1702, with Betterton in the title rôle.] The author of "Tamerlane" fears that in thus calling attention to the play he may appear guilty of "impertinence and interruptions," and, he adds, "I am sure it is a reason why I ought to beg your Lordship's pardon, for troubling you with this tragedy; not but that poetry has always been, and will still be the entertainment of all wise men, that have any delicacy in their knowledge." Then, after wasting a little necessary flattery on the noble marquis, he starts off into an unblushing eulogy of King William III., whose clemency was mirrored, supposedly, by the hero of the tragedy. "Some people [who do me a very great honour in it] have fancy'd, that in the person of Tamerlane, I have alluded to the greatest character of the present age. I don't know whether I ought not to apprehend a great deal of danger from avowing a design like that: It may be a task indeed worthy of the greatest genius, which this or any other time has produc'd; but therefore I ought not to stand the shock of a parallel lest it should be seen, to my disadvantage, how far the _Hero has transcended the poet's thoughts_"--and so on, _ad nauseam_. To turn the leaves of the play, after wading through the slime of the "Epistle," is to find amusing proof of the high-flown and at times bombastic expression which elicited such admiration from audiences of the old _régime_. (Do not laugh at it, reader; you tolerate an equal amount of absurdity in modern melodrama). The very first lines are charmingly suggestive of the starched and stately past. "Hail to the sun!" says the Prince of Tanais: "Hail to the sun! from whose returning light The cheerful soldier's arms new lustre take To deck the pomp of battle." Playwrights of Rowe's cult loved to hail the sun. Just why the orb of day had to be saluted with such frequency no one seemed able to determine, but the honour was continually bestowed, to the great edification of the groundlings. When Young wrote "Busiris," he paid so much attention to old Sol that Fielding burlesqued the learned doctor's weakness through the medium of "Tom Thumb," and wrote that "the author of 'Busiris' is extremely anxious to prevent the sun's blushing at any indecent object; and, therefore, on all such occasions, he addresses himself to the sun, and desires him to keep out of the way." After the Prince of Tanais's homage to the sun we hear something fulsome about the virtues of King William, alias Tamerlane: "No lust of rule, the common vice of Kings, No furious zeal, inspir'd by hot-brain'd priests, Ill hid beneath religion's specious name, E'er drew his temp'rate courage to the field: But to redress an injur'd people's wrongs, To save the weak one from the strong oppressor, Is all his end of war. And when he draws The sword to punish, like relenting Heav'n, He seems unwilling to deface his kind." A few lines later and we find one of the characters drawing a parallel between Tamerlane, otherwise William, and Divinity: "Ere the mid-hour of night, from tent to tent, Unweary'd, thro' the num'rous host he past, Viewing with careful eyes each several quarters; Whilst from his looks, as from Divinity, The soldiers took presage, and cry'd, Lead on, Great Alha, and our emperor, lead on, To victory, and everlasting fame." How changeth the spirit of each age! Imagine Bronson Howard or Augustus Thomas writing a play wherein the President of the United States was brought into such irreverent contact with the Deity.[A] [Footnote A: Yet it cannot be easily forgotten that a certain clergyman, preaching, several years ago, at the funeral of a rich man's son, compared the poor boy to Christ. And this very ecclesiastic probably looks upon the stage as a monument of sacrilegiousness.] But we need not follow the platitudes of Tamerlane and his companions, nor weep at the sententious wickedness of Bajazet, that ungrateful sovereign typifying Louis Quatorze, King of France, Prince of Gentlemen, and Right Royal Hater of His Protestant Majesty William of Orange. Heaven rest their souls! and with that pious prayer we may bid them farewell, as "Into the night go one and all." CHAPTER VII NANCE AT HOME "Home?" An actress at home? Does it not seem strange to apply the dear old English noun, so redolent of peace, and quiet, and privacy, to the feverish life of a mummer? We go, night after night, to see our favourite players shining 'mid the fierce glare of the footlights, watch them approvingly as they pass from rôle to rôle, and finally begin to believe, like the egotists we are, that they have no existence apart from the one we are pleased to applaud. What fools some of us must be to think there is never a time when the paint and powder, the tinsel and eternal artifice of the stage--yea, even our own condescending admiration--pall on the jaded spirits of the poor player. "How sparklingly is Miss Smith acting Lady Teazle to-night!" we say, elegantly pressing our hands together in token of august favour. We are entranced, and it follows, therefore, that the actress must be entranced likewise. Mayhap Miss Smith does not share the same ecstacy; perhaps, as she stands behind the screen in Joseph Surface's rooms, Sir Peter's wife is wishing that the comedy were ended and she were comfortably ensconced in her cosy little lodgings round the corner. She pictures that crackling wood fire, and her old terrier basking in the gentle heat, and the tea-urn hissing near by (or is it a cold bottle of beer in the portable refrigerator?) and in the background sweet good Mr. Smith, who does nothing but spend his lady's salary. In that temple of domesticity there are no thoughts of rouge, or paint-pots, or of Richard Brinsley Sheridan--it is merely home. Dost thou always hurry back to so attractive a one, thou patronising theatre-goer? Our Nance had a home to which she was glad enough to hurry back, like the aforesaid Miss Smith, after the play was over at Drury Lane. There was no husband there to await her, but a very devoted knight in the person of Mr. Arthur Maynwaring, who, though he gave not his name nor the ceremony of bell, book, and candle to the union, played the part of spouse to the fair charmer. The town looked with good-natured tolerance on the moral code, or the want thereof, of the frail one, just as other towns, in later days, have looked with equal benevolence upon the peccadillos of some petted favourite. The times were not of the straightlaced order and no one expected from an actress wonders of chastity or conventionality. Are we ourselves exacting where the Thespian is concerned? [Illustration: ANNE OLDFIELD By JONATHAN RICHARDSON] Fashion'd alike by Nature and by Art To please, engage, and interest ev'ry heart. In public life, by all who saw, approv'd; In private life, by all who knew her, lov'd. "Even her amours," says Chetwood in treating of Mistress Oldfield, "seemed to lose that glare which appears round the persons of the failing fair; neither was it ever known that she troubled the repose of any lady's lawful claim; and was far more constant than millions in the conjugal noose." Being thus acquitted of predatory designs upon the peace of English wives, and having the further virtue of constancy, a host of Londoners, men and women, high and low alike, gazed with charitable eyes upon Nance's private life. And she, dear girl, sinned on joyously. Mr. Maynwaring, who helped Oldfield to break the spirit of one commandment, was a brilliant figure in the reign of Queen Anne, albeit, like other brilliant figures of that period, he has passed into the darkness of oblivion. A clever dabbler in literature, an honest politician--a politician with scruples was as rare in those days as he is now--and a man of honour who could drink as much as his friends, the volatile Arthur was, perhaps, best known as the most attractive talker of the famous Kit-Cat Club. The Kit-Cat Club! What a wealth of anecdote doth its name conjure up to the student of the past! 'Twas in this famous organisation that noblemen and wits met on common ground, drank many a toast to the House of Hanover or to some reigning belle of London town, and exercised a patronising censorship over the world of letters. They were "the patriots that saved Briton," says Horace Walpole, in referring to their anti-Jacobitism, and yet the most of them are forgotten. If tradition is to be believed (and what siren is more comfortable to hearken unto than tradition?) these self-same patriots took their name of "Kit-Cats" from prosaic mutton pies. 'Twould be horrible to think on this gastronomic derivation of the title were we not to remember, quite fortunately, that geese saved classic Rome. Why, therefore, should not the preservers of perfidious Albion suggest the aroma of a lamb pasty? It seems that the Club had its first headquarters in Shire Lane, near Temple Bar, at the establishment of Christopher Cat, a pastrycook who helped to enliven the inner man by delicious meat pies dubbed "Kit-Cats." Hence the name of that notable coterie of Whigs which included Addison and Dick Steele, Congreve and His Grace of Devonshire.[A] [Footnote A: Our modern celebrated clubs are founded upon eating and drinking, which are points wherein most men agree, and in which the learned and illiterate, the dull and the airy, the philosopher and the buffoon, can all of them bear a part. The Kit-Cat itself is said to have taken its original from a mutton pie. The Beef-Steak and October clubs are neither of them averse to eating and drinking, if we may form a judgment of them from their respective titles.--ADDISON in the _Spectator_.] Maynwaring came of good English stock, and in early life showed the results of his relationship to the aristocratic house of Cholmondeley by supporting the lost cause of James II. So fervent an admirer was he of that apology for royalty that he took up the pen, if not the sword, in his behalf, and steeped the mightier weapon with satirical ink when he wrote a pamphlet entitled "The King of Hearts." Rumour paid to the young author an unintentional compliment by insisting that the brochure came from the great Mr. Dryden, but that genius denied the soft impeachment while gracefully praising the unknown writer. This pursuit of Jacobitism was varied by the study of law--a study "sometimes relieved with a temporary application to music and poetry"--and when the disconsolate Arthur had lost his father, and thereby gained 800 pounds a year, he drowned his sorrows by an almost exclusive devotion to "society and pleasantry." We are told[A] that on the ratification of the Peace of Ryswick he went to Paris, where he was exceedingly well received in consequence of the numerous introductory letters which had been furnished him from various quarters. He there contracted an intimacy with Boileau,-- "Whose rash envy would allow No strain that shamed his country's creaking lyre, That whetstone of the teeth, monotony in wire." [Footnote A: "Memoirs of the Celebrated Persons comprising the Kit-Cat Club."] "The French poet invited Maynwaring to his country seat, where he behaved to him in a very hospitable manner, and frequently conversed with him respecting the merits of our English poets, of whom, however, he affected to know but little, and for whom he pretended to care still less. Monsieur de la Fontaine was also at times one of their company, and always spoke in very respectful terms of the poetry of the sister nation. Boileau's pretending to be ignorant of Dryden 'argued himself unknown'; but, perhaps, another reason may be assigned why the French writers found it convenient to know as little as possible of their English contemporary, who in many of his admirable prefaces and dedications has taken some trouble to explain the frivolity of the French poets, their tiresome _petit maître-ship_, and all the finessing and trick with which they endeavour to make amends to their readers for positive deficiency of genius." After playing the _dilettante_ in France, Maynwaring returned home, and in time became a staunch Whig, a Government official, and, later on, a Member of Parliament. The cause of the Pretender knew him no more, and in future this brilliant gentleman would be one of the greatest friends of that stupid Hanoverian family which waited drowsily, across the sea, for the death of Anne. But what counted all the glamour of public life compared to the possession of Nance Oldfield and an honoured seat at the festive board of the Kit-Cat Club? Love and conviviality, youth and wit, carried the day, and through the influence of these seductive companions handsome Arthur failed to achieve greatness as a statesman. But when it came to waging political warfare against sour Swift, or to assisting Dick Steele with the "Tatler," or--better still--toasting some fair one at the Club,[A] this _bon viveur_ was in his finest mood. [Footnote A: The (Kit-Cat) club originated in the hospitality of Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, who, once a week, was host at the house in Shire Lane to a gathering of writers. In an occasional poem on the Kit-Cat club, attributed to Sir Richard Blackmore, Jacob is read backwards into Bocaj, and we are told: "One Night in Seven at this convenient seat Indulgent Bocaj did the Muses treat; Their Drink was gen'rous Wine and Kit-Cat's Pyes their Meat. Hence did th' Assembly's Title first arise, And Kit-Cat Wits spring first from Kit-Cat's Pyes." About the year 1700 this gathering of wits produced a club in which the great Whig chiefs were associated with foremost Whig writers, Tonson being secretary. It was as much literary as political, and its "toasting glasses," each inscribed with lines to a reigning beauty, caused Arbuthnot to derive its value from "its pell mell pack of toasts." Of old Cats and young Kits. Tonson built a room for the Club at Barn Elms to which each member gave his portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, who was himself a member. The pictures were on a new-sized canvas adopted to the height of the walls, whence the name "Kit-Cat" came to be applied generally to three-quarter length portraits.--HENRY MORLEY'S Notes on the _Spectator_.] It is to be supposed that at some time or other the health of Mistress Oldfield was drunk by the Kit-Cats, whose custom of honouring womankind in this bibulous way may have given rise to Pope's plaintive query: "Say why are beauties prais'd and honoured most, The wise man's passion, and the vain man's toast? Why deck'd with all that land and sea afford, Why Angels call'd, and angel-like adored?" And if the actress was thus deified or spiritualised, who drained his glass more fervently than did Arthur Maynwaring? For whatever may have been the faults of this dashing Whig, he had the courage of his sins, and took up his abode with Anne in the full light of day, as though a marriage ceremony were a bagatelle not worth the recollecting. The world was forgiving, to be sure, nor is it probable that either one of this easily-mated pair suffered any loss of public esteem by the union. Dukes--nay, even Duchesses--were glad to meet Nance, and Royalty allowed her to bask in the sunshine of its gracious approval. "She was to be seen on the terrace at Windsor, walking with the consorts of dukes, and with countesses, and wives of English barons, and the whole gay group might be heard calling one another by their Christian names." No wonder that the women of fashion, none of them saints, loved Oldfield and winked at the elasticity of her moral ethics. The dear creature was so bright in conversation, so full of _espièglerie_, and, still more important, she looked so charming in her succession of handsome toilettes, that she could be ever sure of a cordial welcome. "Flavia," as Steele calls her, "is ever well-dressed, and always the genteelest woman you meet, but the make of her mind very much contributes to the ornament of her body. She has the greatest simplicity of manners of any of her sex. This makes everything look native about her, and her clothes are so exactly fitted, that they appear, as it were, part of her person. Every one that sees her knows her to be of quality; but her distinction is owing to her manner, and not to her habit. Her beauty is full of attraction, but not of allurement. There is such a composure in her looks, and propriety in her dress, that you would think it impossible she should change the garb you one day see her in, for anything so becoming until you next day see her in another. There is no mystery in this, but that however she is apparelled, she is herself the same: for there is so immediate a relation between our thoughts and gestures that a woman must think well to look well." * * * * * Here, verily, was an actress who could set the town wild by the beauty and exquisite taste of her costumes, and who was conscientious enough, nevertheless, to keep the millinery phase of her art modestly in the background. You, ladies, who depend for theatrical success upon the elegance of your gowns, and fondly believe that fairness of face and litheness of figure will atone for a thousand dramatic sins, take pattern by the industry of Oldfield. It will be a much better pattern than those over which you are accustomed to worry your pretty heads. The enterprising dressmakers who go to the play to get inspiration for new clothes may cease to worship you, but think of the other sort of inspiration which you will give to lovers of the drama! Then shall there be no more announcements to the effect that, "Miss Lighthead will act Lady Macbeth in ten Parisian gowns made by Worth," or that when she treats us to the death of Marguerite Gautier (the aforesaid Mdlle. Gautier dying, as everybody knows, in actual poverty) "Miss Lighthead will wear diamonds representing one hundred thousand dollars." There is not much to say about the domesticity of Nance and Arthur Maynwaring. How could there be? The lady kept house for her lord and master with grace and modesty (if it seems not paradoxical to mention modesty in this alliance), and it is safe to believe that more than one member of the Kit-Cat Club often tasted a bit of beef and pudding, and sipped a glass of port, at the table of the happy pair. Congreve, the particular friend and _protégé_ of the host, must have dined more than once with brilliant Nance, regaling his plump being with the joy of food and drink, and wondering, perhaps, how any one could prefer the hostess to his particular _chère-amie_, Anne Bracegirdle. And Oldfield, of what did she think as she gazed into the rounded face of Mr. Congreve, or listened to the merry wit of her devoted liege? Did the ghost of poor, dead Farquhar ever arise before her, the reminder of a day when love was younger and passion stronger? Let us ask no impertinent questions. What with acting, and supping, and an easy conscience, Mistress Oldfield gaily trod the primrose path of dalliance, and Cupid hovered near, albeit there was no law to chain him to the scene. But one day he took to his wings and flew away, after witnessing the untimely death (November 1712) of Mr. Maynwaring. The latter made his exit with the assistance of three physicians, and Nance was near to smooth the departure.[A] Then came the funeral, and after that Mrs. Mayn--Mrs. Oldfield dried her lovely eyes (did she not have enough weeping to do when she played in tragedy?), and began once more to think upon the joys of existence. [Footnote A: He died at St. Albans, November 13, 1712, of a consumption, and was attended in his last illness by Doctors Garth, Radcliffe and Blackmore. In his will he appointed Mrs. Oldfield, the celebrated actress, his executrix, with whom he had lived for several years, and by whom he had a son, named Arthur Maynwaring. His estate was equally divided between this child, its mother and his sister.--"Memoirs of the Celebrated Persons Comprising the Kit-Kat Club."] When General Churchill, a nephew of the great Duke of Marlborough, suggested to the disconsolate widow-by-brevet that she should share his home, the proposal was accepted, and the actress entered for a second time into a free-and-easy compact, and for a second time remained faithful thereto until her new admirer went the way of Mr. Maynwaring. It was even rumoured--scandalous gossip!--that the two were married; and one day the Princess of Wales, afterwards Queen Caroline, asked the "incomparable sweet girl," who was attending a royal levee, whether such were indeed the case. "So it is said, may it please your Royal Highness," diplomatically replied Nance, "but we have not owned it yet." To Churchill our unsteady heroine presented one son, and it was through the marriage of the latter that the swift-running blood of Oldfield now courses through the veins of the first Earl of Cadogan's descendants.[A] This son and the one who bore the name of Maynwaring were the only two children credited, or discredited, to the actress, but there appears to have been a mysterious daughter, a Miss Dye Bertie, who became, as Mrs. Delany tells us, "the pink of fashion in the _beau monde_, and married a nobleman." It would not be wise, however, to peer too closely into the dim vista of the past. The picture might prove unpleasant. [Footnote A: Her son, Colonel Churchill, once, unconsciously, saved Sir Robert Walpole from assassination, through the latter riding home from the House in the Colonel's chariot instead of alone in his own. Unstable Churchill married a natural daughter of Sir Robert, and their daughter Mary married, in 1777, Charles Sloane, first Earl of Cadogan.... When Churchill and his wife were travelling in France, a Frenchman, knowing he was connected with poets or players, asked him if he was Churchill the famous poet. "I am not," said Mrs. Oldfield's son. "Ma foi!" rejoined the polite Frenchman, "so much the worse for you."--DR. DORAN.] Surely we may have charity for Oldfield, when she dispensed the same virtue to those around her. Towards none did she show it more sweetly than to that disreputable fraud and alleged man of genius, Richard Savage. In his own feverish day Dick Savage cut a literary swath more wide than enviable, but when he is viewed from the unsympathetic light of the present he seems merely a clever vagabond. Yet Dr. Johnson, who could be so stern towards some of his contemporaries, condescended to love the aforesaid vagabond, in a ponderous, elephantine way, and deified him by writing the life of the ingrate, or an apology therefor. Savage had, once upon a time, led the youthful Johnson more than a few feet away from the path of rectitude, but the philosopher forgave, without forgetting, the wiles of the tempter, and treated him with a generosity by no means deserved. In the years of his prosperity--and the remembrance did him credit--Johnson could never forget that Savage and himself had been poor together, and had often wandered through London with hardly a penny to show between them. * * * * * "It is melancholy to reflect," says Boswell, "that Johnson and Savage were sometimes in such extreme indigence that they could not pay for a lodging; so that they have wandered together whole nights in the streets. Yet in these almost incredible scenes of distress, we may suppose that Savage mentioned many of the anecdotes with which Johnson afterwards enriched the life of this unhappy companion, and those of other poets. "He told Sir Joshua Reynolds, that one night in particular, when Savage and he walked round St. James's Square for want of a lodging, they were not at all depressed by their situation; but in high spirits and brimful of patriotism, traversed the square for several hours, inveighed against the Minister, and resolved they would _stand by their country_." * * * * * The claim of Savage that he was the illegitimate son of the Countess of Macclesfield--a claim which he was always asserting to the point of coarseness--seems to have been the stock-in-trade of this vagabond's life. There never was proof that the relationship which he thus flaunted really existed; for, although the conduct of the Countess[A] was unpardonable, the poet could never show that he had been the mysterious infant which had this lady for its mother and Lord Rivers for an unnatural father. The child disappeared, and nothing more was ever known of its existence. [Footnote A: Anne Mason, wife of Charles Gerrard, first Earl of Macclesfield, was divorced from that nobleman by an Act of Parliament. Another earl, Richard Savage, Lord Rivers, was the co-respondent. This was the same Countess of Macclesfield who subsequently married Cibber's friend, Colonel Brett.] But Savage discovered, or affected to discover, that he was the missing one, and from that moment made the Countess miserable by his importunities for recognition and money, more particularly for the latter. "It was to no purpose," records Dr. Johnson, "that he frequently solicited her to admit him to see her; she avoided him with the most vigilant precaution, and ordered him to be excluded from her house, by whomsoever he might be introduced, and what reason soever he might give for entering it." And the Doctor, who had an abiding and very misplaced confidence in the fellow, adds plaintively: "Savage was at the same time so touched with the discovery of his real mother that it was his frequent practice to walk in the dark evenings for several hours before her door in hopes of seeing her as she might come by accident to the window, or cross her apartment with a candle in her hand." "Touched with the discovery," forsooth! 'Twas a species of blackmail cloaked in the guise of filial sentiment. This talented blackguard was wont to pray for alms from Mistress Oldfield; and that dear charitable creature (are not most actresses dear, charitable creatures?) would often waste her practical sympathy upon him. She despised the man, but, with that generosity so characteristic of her craft, was ever ready to relieve his necessities.[A] Well, well, how the glitter from a few guineas can envelop the fragile doner in a golden light, and throw over her faults the soft glow of forgiveness. [Footnote A: In this (Johnson's) "Life of Savage" 'tis related that Mrs. Oldfield was very fond of Mr. Savage's conversation, and allowed him an annuity during her life of £50. These facts are equally ill-grounded; there was no foundation for them. That Savage's misfortunes pleaded for pity, and had the desired effect on Mrs. Oldfield's compassion, is certain; but she so much disliked the man, and disapproved his conduct, that she never admitted him to her conversation, nor suffered him to enter her house. She indeed often relieved him with such donations as spoke her generous disposition. But this was on the solicitation of friends, who frequently set his calamities before her in the most piteous light; and, from a principle of humanity, she became not a little instrumental in saving his life.--CIBBER'S "Lives of the Poets."] Savage himself once turned player, and no one must have been more amused thereat than the Oldfield. It happened during the summer of 1723, when the poet, who was in his customary state of (theatrical) destitution, determined to replenish his shabby purse by bringing out a tragedy. While this play, "The Tragedy of Sir Thomas Overbury,"[A] was in rehearsal at Drury Lane, Colley Cibber kept the author in clothes, and the Laureate's son Theophilus, then a very young man, studied the part of Somerset. The principal actors were not in London just then, it being the off season, when the younger players strutted across the classic boards of the house, and Savage determined himself to enact Sir Thomas. He did so with melancholy results; even Johnson admits the failure of so presumptuous a leap before the footlights, "for neither his voice, look, nor gesture were such as were expected on the stage; and he was so much ashamed of having been reduced to appear as a player, that he always blotted out his name from the list when a copy of his tragedy was to be shown to his friends."[B] [Footnote A: Savage, with his usual bad taste, published this tragedy as the work of "Richard Savage, _son of the late Earl Rivers_."] [Footnote B: In the publication of his performance he was more successful, for the rays of genius that glimmered in it, that glimmered through all the mists which poverty and Cibber had been able to spread over it, procured him the notice and esteem of many persons eminent for their rank, their virtue, and their wit. Of this play, acted, printed, and dedicated, the accumulated profits arose to an hundred pounds, which he thought at that time a very large sum, having been never master of so much before. In the "Dedication," for which he received ten guineas, there is nothing remarkable. The preface contains a very liberal enconium on the blooming excellence of Mr. Theophilus Cibber, which Mr. Savage could not in the latter part of his life see his friends about to read without snatching the play out of their hands.--DR. JOHNSON.] What a sublime hypocrite our Richard was, to be sure. That he felt so keenly the disgrace (?) of "having been reduced to appear as a player" was, no doubt, a sentiment intended for the exclusive ear of the great lexicographer, whose prejudice against the stage and its followers was strong to the point of absurdity. Despite the qualms of the poet over exposing his sacred self to the gaze of an audience he had no sensitiveness in receiving the money of an actress, and he was willing enough to have her aid in another direction. That aid was cheerfully given once upon a time when Savage came dangerously near the scaffold. This prince of scamps and wanderer among the beery precincts of pot-houses happened to stroll one night, accompanied by two choice spirits (and himself full of spirits) into a disreputable coffee-house near Charing Cross. The three men rudely pushed their way into a parlour where some other roisterers were drinking; the intrusion was naturally resented, and as each and every one of the party chanced to be better filled with wine than with politeness, a brawl was the consequence. Swords were drawn and Savage killed a Mr. Sinclair, after which drunken act he cut the head of a barmaid who tried to hold him. Then more swearing, shrieking and sword-thrusting, a cry for soldiers, a flight from the coffee-house, and an almost instant arrest. A pretty picture, was it not? When Savage was put on trial for his life, he pleaded that the killing of Sinclair was done in self-defence, and his acquittal would probably have followed but for the shrewdness of the prosecution. This prosecution was conducted by Francis Page, whose severity Pope immortalised in the lines: "Slander or poison dread from Delia's rage Hard-words or hanging--if your judge be Page." Page surely understood human nature, or that portion of it appertaining to the average jurymen, and he disposed of Mr. Savage's defence by one well-directed blow when he said to the good men and true: "Gentlemen of the jury, you are to consider that Mr. Savage is a very great man, a much greater man than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; that he wears very fine clothes, much finer clothes than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; that he has abundance of money in his pocket, much more money than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; but, gentlemen of the jury, is it not a very hard case, gentlemen of the jury, that Mr. Savage should therefore kill you, or me, gentlemen of the jury." Whereupon the defendant began to make a speech in his own behalf, but his flow of eloquence was quenched by the judge, and the jury soon found Savage as well as Gregory, one of his companions in the drunken broil, to be guilty of murder. Many influences were now brought to bear on Queen Caroline, consort of George II., to secure a pardon for the rascal, but that good lady was for a time obdurate. She had heard a few choice stories anent the man, and among them, one which Dr. Johnson glosses over in this way: "Mr. Savage, when he had discovered his birth, had an incessant desire to speak to his mother, who always avoided him in public, and refused him admission into her house. One evening walking, as it was his custom, in the street that she inhabited, he saw the door of her house by accident open, he entered it, and, finding no person in the passage to hinder him, went upstairs to salute her. She discovered him before he entered her chamber, alarmed the family with the most distressful outcries, and when she had by her screams gathered them about her, ordered them to drive out of the house that villain who had forced himself in upon her and endeavoured to murder her. Savage, who had attempted with the most submissive tenderness to soften her rage, hearing her utter so detestable an accusation, thought it prudent to retire." Thus the Queen refused to interfere until the Countess of Hertford pleaded the cause of the imprisoned poet. In the meantime Mistress Oldfield interceded with the mighty Robert Walpole, and the result of all this wire-pulling was that Savage received the king's pardon,[A] being thus left free to continue the persecution of his alleged mother, to beg from friends and strangers alike, and to follow a mode of life which scandalised even his kindly biographer. And when Oldfield, the latchets of whose shoes he was not worthy to tie, played her last part and passed away from the earthly stage, Richard wore mourning for her, as for a mother, "but did not celebrate her in elegies;[B] because he knew that too great profusion of praise would only have revived those faults which his natural equity did not allow him to think less because they were committed by one who favoured him; but of which, though his virtue would not endeavour to palliate them, his gratitude would not suffer him to prolong the memory or diffuse the censure." [Footnote A: March 1728. It is cheerful to know that Mr. Gregory also escaped hanging. It was contended during the trial, and afterwards, that the testimony against both these defendants was more damning than the facts warranted.] [Footnote B: Nevertheless Savage did write a poem in Oldfield's honour, although he did not sign his virtuous name thereto. The verses are quoted by Chetwood. _Vide_ Chapter XI.] Poor, crusty Samuel! what rot you could write now and then, and how you did hate players and their craft. But may not the bewildered reader ask how the aphorisms of the doctor and the disreputable affairs of Savage concern that home life of Nance to which the chapter is presumably consecrated? In answer the writer can only cry "Peccavi," and, having done so, will sin boldly again by giving one more anecdote. The story concerns Savage, but Steele is the hero of it, and as winsome Dick is always welcome, we may take leave of the other Dick in a pleasant way. Savage was once desired by Sir Richard (says Johnson), with an air of the utmost importance, to come very early to his house the next morning. Mr. Savage came as he had promised, found the chariot at the door, and Sir Richard waiting for him and ready to go out. What was intended, and whither they were to go, Savage could not conjecture, and was not willing to inquire; but immediately seated himself with Sir Richard. The coachman was ordered to drive, and they hurried with the utmost expedition to Hyde Park Corner, where they stopped at a petty tavern and retired to a private room. Sir Richard then informed him that he intended to publish a pamphlet, and that he had desired him to come thither that he might write for him. He soon sat down to the work. Sir Richard dictated, and Savage wrote, till the dinner that had been ordered was put upon the table. Savage was surprised at the meanness of the entertainment, and after some hesitation ventured to ask for wine, which Sir Richard, not without reluctance, ordered to be brought. They then finished their dinner, and proceeded in their pamphlet, which they concluded in the afternoon. Mr. Savage then imagined his task over, and expected that Sir Richard would call for the reckoning and return home; but his expectations deceived him, for Sir Richard told him that he was without money, and that the pamphlet must be sold before the dinner could be paid for; and Savage was therefore obliged to go and offer their new production to sale for two guineas, which with some difficulty he obtained. Sir Richard then returned home, having retired that day only to avoid his creditors, and composed the pamphlet only to discharge his reckoning. Savage also told Johnson another merry tale of careless Dick. "Sir Richard Steele having one day invited to his house a great number of persons of the first quality, they were surprised at the number of liveries which surrounded the table; and after dinner, when wine and mirth had set them free from the observation of a rigid ceremony, one of them inquired of Sir Richard how such an expensive train of domestics could be consistent with his fortune. Sir Richard very frankly confessed that they were fellows of whom he would very willingly be rid. And being then asked why he did not discharge them, declared that they were bailiffs, who had introduced themselves with an execution, and whom, since he could not send them away, he had thought it convenient to embellish with liveries, that they might do him credit while they stayed. His friends were diverted with the expedient, and by paying the debt discharged their attendants, having obliged Sir Richard to promise that they should never again find him graced with a retinue of the same kind." These little pleasantries are echoes of the halcyon days when Steele thought Savage a very fine fellow, made him an allowance and even proposed to become the poet's father-in-law. But the recipient of all this favour was caddish enough to ridicule his patron, a kind friend mentioned the fact to Sir Richard, and the knight shut his doors on the ingrate. Let us, likewise, give the fellow his _congé_. CHAPTER VIII THE MIMIC WORLD We have seen that Oldfield affected to despise tragedy, and was wont to suggest Mistress Porter as a lady better suited than herself to the purposes of train-bearing. And as the present chapter will be devoted to a few of Nance's contemporaries let us linger, if only for an instant, over the imposing memory of one whom cynical Horace Walpole thought even finer than Garrick in certain scenes of passion. This "ornament to human nature," as a biographer warmly called the Porter, played her first childish part in a Lord Mayor's pageant during the reign of James II., appearing as the Genius of Britain, and incidentally falling under the august notice of another genius of Britain, the great Mr. Betterton. That worthy man regarded the little girl with prophetic eyes, saw in her a wealth of undeveloped talent, and was soon instructing the chit in the mysteries of dramatic art. Sometimes the actress-in-miniature revolted, poor mite ("she should have been in the nursery, the minx," says some practical reader) and then noble Thomas would give vent to an awful threat. She must speak and act as she was directed, or else--horrible thought--the child should be thrown into the basket of an orange-girl and buried under one of the vine leaves which hid the luscious fruit! And with that punishment hanging over her, the novice went on learning and originating, until one day London woke up to find a new tragedienne within its boundaries. [Illustration: Mr. Mills, Mrs. Porter, Mr. Cibber.] 'Twas a tragedienne, be it added, who possessed no wonderful charm of person. She was pleasing in figure and bearing, but her voice was naturally harsh, her features did not shine forth loveliness, and when the scene wherein she walked called neither for vehemence of feeling, nor melting tenderness, her elocution became a monotonous cadence.[A] Yet in moments of dramatic excitement, or in places where the deep note of pathos had to be sounded, Porter played with a distinction that either thrilled the spectator or reduced him to the verge of tears. She threw cadence and monotony to the four winds of heaven, or rather to the four corners of the stage, and spoke with the earnestness of one inspired. [Footnote A: Mrs. Porter was tall, fair, well-shaped, and easy and dignified in action. But she was not handsome, and her voice had a small degree of tremor. Moreover, she imitated, or, rather, faultily exceeded, Mrs. Barry in the habit of prolonging and toning her pronunciation, sometimes to a degree verging upon a chant; but whether it was that the public ear was at that period accustomed to a demi-chant, or that she threw off the defect in the heat of passion, it is certain that her general judgment and genius, in the highest bursts of tragedy, inspired enthusiasm in all around her, and that she was thought to be alike mistress of the terrible and the tender.--THOMAS CAMPBELL.] As Queen Catherine Mrs. Porter was all mournful grace and dignity, as Lady Macbeth she breathed of battle, murder and sudden death, and in the rôle of Belvidera she showed yet another phase of her incomparable art. "I remember Mrs. Porter, to whom nature had been so niggard in voice and face, so great in many parts, as Lady Macbeth, Alicia in 'Jane Shore,' Hermione in the 'Distressed Mother,' and many parts of the kind, that her great action, eloquence of look and gesture, moved astonishment; and yet I have heard her declare she left the action to the possession of the sentiments in the part she performed." Thus wrote Chetwood, whose good fortune it was to see Oldfield, and Porter, and a host of other famous players, not forgetting, in later days, the wonderful Garrick himself. Unlike several of her ilk, Mistress Porter could play the heroine off the stage as well as on. She lived at Heywoodhill, near Hendon, and used to wend her way homeward every night, at the conclusion of the play, in a one-horse chaise. The roads were dangerous, and highwaymen lurked in the neighbourhood, but the actress put her faith in Providence--and a brace of pistols which she always carried. The pistols came very nicely to her rescue one evening when a robber waylaid the chaise and put to the traveller the conventional question as to whether she most valued her money or her life. Nothing daunted by the impertinence of this ethical query, Mrs. Porter pointed one of the weapons at the intruder, and he, so goes the story, gracefully surrendered, for the reason that he was himself without firearms. The man made the best of the situation, however, by assuring the occupant of the vehicle that he was "no common thief," and had been driven to his present course by the wants of a starving family. He told her, at the same time, where he lived, and urged his distresses with such earnestness, that she spared him all the money in her purse, which was about ten guineas.[A] [Footnote A: Bellchambers' "Memoirs." This episode happened in the summer of 1731.] Thereupon the highwayman departed, and Mrs. Porter whipped up her horse. In her excitement she must have used the lash too freely, for the animal started to run, the chaise was overturned, and the actress dislocated her thigh bone. When she had in part recovered from the accident, the victim made up a purse of sixty pounds, subscribed among her friends, and sent it to the poverty-stricken family of the desperado. How Nance would have laughed at the story had she been at the theatre to hear it told. But there was no more merriment for this daughter of smiles; she was lying cold and still amid the stony grandeur of Westminster Abbey. Poor Porter outlived Oldfield for more than thirty years and, having also outlived an annuity settled upon herself, spent her declining days in what polite writers call straightened circumstances. One of the closing scenes of her career shows us a meeting between this veteran of the stage and Dr. Johnson, who could allow his kindness of heart and sense of generosity to overcome his hatred of things theatrical. It is easy to imagine the whole interview: the shrunken face of the Porter beaming all over with an appreciation of the honour paid her, and the Doctor full of benevolence and patronising courtesy, even to the extent of drinking cheap tea without a grumble. After the philosopher takes his leave he will likewise take with him a vivid memory of the beldam's many wrinkles--so many, indeed, that "a picture of old age in the abstract might have been taken from her countenance."[A] [Footnote A: Dr. Johnson was pleased to avow that "Mrs. Porter in the vehemence of rage, and Mrs. Clive in the sprightliness of humour, he had never seen equalled."] Of a different calibre was Lacy Ryan, an ill-trained genius who could shine pretty well in both tragedy and comedy and from whom, according to Foote, "... succeeding Richards took the cue, And hence his style, if not the colour, drew."[A] [Footnote A: Justice has scarcely been done to Ryan's merit. Garrick, on going with Woodward to see his Richard with a view of being amused, owned that he was astonished at the genius and power he saw struggling to make itself felt through the burden of ill-training, uncouth gestures, and an ungraceful and slovenly figure. He was generous enough to own that all the merit there was in his own playing of Richard he had drawn from studying this less fortunate player.--PERCY FITZGERALD.] Like Mrs. Porter, Ryan was a youthful disciple of Betterton, and was brought to the notice of Roscius in a curious fashion. One day, when Lacy had just begun, as a boy of sixteen or seventeen, to court the dramatic muses, he was cast for the rôle of Seyton, the old officer who attends on Macbeth, and was, no doubt, charmed with the assignment. To wait upon Macbeth, in however humble a capacity, was in itself no mean honour, and when the aforesaid Macbeth would be Betterton himself, the importance of the task was re-doubled. That afternoon Ryan came on the stage in all the glory of a full-bottomed wig (imagine playing Shakespeare these days with full-bottomed wigs) and a smiling young face, being very much pleased with himself and the world in general. To Betterton, who had expected to see in Seyton a henchman of mature years, and who up to this moment had been unconscious of Lacy's existence, the appearance of the boy came as a shock. Had the witches of the tragedy been turned into beautiful children he could not have been more surprised. However, he gave the new Seyton an encouraging look, and the stripling played the part in a way to earn the approbation of the great actor. After the performance was over, Betterton scolded old Downes, the prompter, for "sending a child to him instead of a man advanced in years." This anecdote seems to show that the art of "make-up" had not reached perfection in those times, for a few well-put strokes of the pencil should have destroyed the juvenile aspect of Seyton. It must not be supposed, nevertheless, that the decoration of the face was unknown, and an entry in Pepys' delightful diary proves that "make-up" of a certain kind flourished at the Restoration. "To the King's house," says Pepys, "and there going in met with Knipp, and she took us up into the tireing-rooms;[A] and to the women's shift, where Nell (Gwyne) was dressing herself, and was all unready, and is very pretty, prettier than I thought. (Imagine the gloating eyes of the old hypocrite.) And into the scene-room, and there sat down, and she gave us fruit: and here I read the questions to Knipp, while she answered me, through all her part of 'Flora's Figarys,' which was acted to-day. But, Lord! to see how they were both painted, would make a man mad, and did make me loath them: and what base company of men comes among them; and how loudly they talk! And how poor the men are in clothes, and yet what a show they make on the stage by candle-light, is very observable. But to see how Nell cursed, for having so few people in the pit, was strange," _et cetera_.[B] [Footnote A: Mrs. Knipp was an actress belonging to the King's Company and Mr. Pepys had for her a timid admiration.] [Footnote B: In his notes to Cibber's "Apology," Lowe suggests the plausible theory that young actors playing "juveniles" did not use any "make-up" or paint, but went on the stage with their natural complexion. He instances this paragraph from Cibber: "The first thing that enters into the head of a young actor is that of being a heroe: In this ambition I was soon snubb'd by the insufficiency of my voice; to which might be added an uniform'd meagre person (tho' then not ill-made) with a dismal pale complexion."] To leave the merry days of Charles II, and wander back to those of Queen Anne, it may be said that Ryan made his first success as the Marcus in the original production of "Cato." It was a success rather added to than otherwise by an adventure of which this actor was the unfortunate victim. "In the run of that celebrated tragedy," writes Chetwood, "he was accidently brought into a fray with some of our Tritons on the Thames; and, in the scuffle, a blow on the nose was given him by one of these water-bullies, who neither regard men or manners. I remember, the same night, as he was brought on the bier, after his suppos'd death in the fourth act of 'Cato,' the blood, from the real wound in the face, gush'd out with violence; that hurt had no other effect than just turning his nose a little, tho' not to deformity; yet some people imagine it gave a very small alteration to the tone of his voice, tho' nothing disagreeable." And a very good advertisement it was, no doubt. In later years another much-discussed accident befell Mr. Ryan. As he was going home from the theatre one night, the actor was attacked by a footpad, and received in his face two bullets which broke a portion of his jaw. "By the help of a lamp [again is the quotation from Chetwood] the robber knew Mr. Ryan, as I have been inform'd, begg'd his pardon for his mistake, and ran off. Of this hurt, too, he recover'd, after a long illness, and play'd with success, as before, without any seeming alteration of voice or face. His Royal Highness, upon this accident (was it the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II?) sent him a handsome present; and others, of the nobility, copy'd the laudable example of the second illustrious person in the three kingdoms." This was Lacy Ryan, who in his time played many different parts, among them Iago, Hamlet, Macduff, Captain Plume, and Orestes. He was not in any sense of the word a great actor, but he well adorned the station of theatrical life in which it had pleased heaven to place him, and strutted his lengthy hour upon the stage with much satisfaction to his companions and the public. Even when Ryan had to kill a bully in self-defence (it was a fellow named Kelly, who loved to haunt the coffee-houses, pick quarrels with peaceable citizens, and then half murder them), the world looked on approvingly, and averred that the player had acted with his usual conscientiousness. Another contemporary of Nance was Benjamin Johnson,[A] who achieved curiously enough some of his greatest successes in the plays of his namesake, the other Ben Jonson. He began life as a scene painter, but afterwards turned his attention to the front, rather than the back, of the stage--or, as he would humorously explain, "left the saint's occupation to take that of a sinner." Johnson seems to have been a man of the world, and he saw a good deal of life, even though he never passed through the rough-and-tumble adventures of Lacy Ryan. When he was born (1665) Betterton dominated the boards; when he died (1742) Garrick had become the talk of London; and it is probable that in his latter years Ben could tell many a story of interesting experiences. [Footnote A: Ben Johnson excelled greatly in all his namesake's comedies, then frequently acted. He was of all comedians the chastest and closest observer of nature. Johnson never seemed to know that he was before an audience; he drew his character as the poet designed it.--DAVIES.] There was one story, at least, that this actor used to relate with much unction after a visit which he once paid to Dublin. The hero of the affair was an Irishman, named Baker, who relieved the monotony of his work as a master pavior by acting Sir John Falstaff and other parts. When he was in the streets, overseeing the labours of his men, this pavior-artist usually rehearsed one of his characters, muttering the lines, gesticulating, and almost forgetting that he was without the sacred walls of a theatre. The workmen soon got accustomed to these out-of-door performances, and everything proceeded with the utmost smoothness, until one exciting day when Baker chanced to be alone with two new paviors. These recruits (countrymen from Cheshire) were much alarmed at a sudden change in the demeanour of their master, whose eyes began to roll and lips to move under the pressure of some strange emotion. Baker was merely rehearsing Falstaff; but the two men made up their little minds that he had lost his head, and they felt quite sure that their employer was a dangerous lunatic, when he gave them a piercing glance, and cried: "Soft! who are you? Sir Walter Blunt: there's honour for you! here's no vanity! I am as hot as molten lead, and as heavy too. God keep lead out of me!" "Wauns! I'se blunt enough to take care of you, I'se warrant you," shouted one of the workmen, who had now recovered what he presumed to be his wits, and thereupon he and his companion laid violent hands on Baker. A crowd soon gathered, and despite the indignant cries of the master-pavior, who declared he was never more sane, this son of Thespis was tied hand and foot, and carried home in triumph with a howling mob for attendants. That ended Mr. Baker's rehearsal for the nonce; and it is to be presumed that, when next he essayed the lusty Sir John, he made sure of an appreciative audience. It is a seductive occupation to delve into the lives of these bygone players, and there is always temptation to tarry long and lovingly amid such chequered careers. But, like poor Joe, of Dickens, we must keep moving on, and so leave Johnson and Baker for another actor who waits to strut across the stage of these "Palmy Days." Thomas Elrington is the new-comer; the same Elrington who sought to outshine the tragic Barton Booth, without possessing either the genius or the scholarship of that noble son of Melpomene. As a boy, Thomas was apprenticed by an impecunious father to an upholsterer in Covent Garden, but he cared more for the theatre than for his trade, and was, no doubt, regarded by his employer as a future candidate for the gallows. * * * * * "I remember when he was an apprentice," relates Chetwood, "we play'd in several private plays; when we were preparing to act 'Sophonisba, or Hannibal's Overthrow,' after I had wrote out my part of Massiva I carried him the book of the play to study the part of King Masinissa. I found him finishing a velvet cushion, and gave him the book: but alas! before he could secrete it, his master (a hot, voluble Frenchman), came in upon us, and the book was thrust under the velvet of the cushion. His master, as usual, rated him for not working, with a 'Morbleu! why a you not vark, Tom?' and stood over him so long that I saw, with some mortification, the book irrecoverably stitch'd up in the cushion never to be retriev'd till the cushion is worn to pieces. Poor Tom cast many a desponding look upon me when he was finishing the fate of the play, while every stitch went to both our hearts. "His master observing our looks, turn'd to me, and with words that broke their necks over each other for haste, abused both of us. The most intelligible of his great number of words were Jack Pudenges, and the like expressions of contempt. But our play was gone for ever. "Another time," continues the biographer, "we were so bold to attempt Shakespeare's 'Hamlet,' where our 'prentice Tom had the part of the Ghost, father to young Hamlet. His armour was composed of pasteboard, neatly painted. The Frenchman had intelligence of what we were about, and to our great surprise and mortification, made one of our audience. The Ghost in its first appearance is dumb to Horatio. While these scenes past, the Frenchman only muttered between his teeth, and we were in hopes his passion would subside; but when our Ghost began his first speech to Hamlet, 'Mark me,' he replied, 'Begar, me vil marke you presently!' and, without saying any more, beat our poor Ghost off the stage through the street, while every stroke on the pasteboard armour grieved the auditors (because they did not pay for their seats), insomuch that three or four ran after the Ghost, and brought him back in triumph, with the avenging Frenchman at his heels, who would not be appeas'd till our Ghost promised him never to commit the offence of acting again. A promise made, like many others, never to be kept." * * * * * Elrington ultimately became a favourite player with Dublin audiences, and then contested with Booth in the latter's own ground of London. He never equalled the classic Barton, yet made a success in tragedy, and was once asked (1728-9) to join the forces of Drury Lane for a term of years. He told the managers that he could not think of permanently leaving Ireland, where he was so well rewarded for his services, and added, "There is not a gentleman's house there to which I am not a welcome visitor," which shows that an actor can be a snob, like the worst of us. When Elrington died, two years after the taking off of Oldfield, his epitaph was written in these flattering lines:-- "Thou best of actors here interr'd, No more thy charming voice is heard, This grave thy corse contains: Thy better part, which us'd to move Our admiration, and our Love, Has fled its sad remains. "Tho' there's no monumental brass, Thy sacred relicks to encase, Thou wondrous man of art! A lover of the muse divine, O! Elrington, shall be thy shrine, And carve thee in his heart." One of Elrington's friends and artistic associates happened to be John Evans, a player possessed of talent, fatness, and indolence. As adventures seem to be in order in this chapter, let us recall two which occurred to this gentleman at a time when he was in high favour with the Irish. The first episode, making a warlike prologue to the second, had for its scene a tavern in the good city of Cork, where Evans had been invited to sup by some officers stationed in the neighbourhood. Jack responded gladly to the hospitable suggestion; the gathering proved a great success, the wine was circulated generously, and many toasts were offered. When the actor was called upon for a sentiment, he proposed the health of his gracious sovereign, Anne, whereat all in the company were pleased with the exception of one disloyal redcoat. Whether the latter had within him the contrariness which cometh with too liberal dalliance with the flowing bowl, or whether he chanced to be a Jacobite, further deponent sayeth not, but it is at least certain that the officer was not pleased at the honour paid to the Queen whose uniform he was willing to wear. So Mr. Malcontent leaves the room, and then sends up word to poor, inoffensive Jack, that he will be delighted to see that worthy below stairs; whereupon Jack quietly steals away and finds his would-be antagonist lurking behind a half-opened door. The soldier makes a lunge with his sword at the player, who succeeds in disarming the coward, and there the matter apparently stops. But the end was not yet. When Evans went to Dublin, he found that his late challenger was circulating a lie, which made it appear that the comedian had in somewise affronted the whole British Army. No sooner did Jack put his face upon the stage than a great clamour arose, and it was decreed by the bullies among the audience (of whom there are ever a few in every house), that no play should be presented until the culprit had publicly begged pardon for a sin which he never committed. The play was "The Rival Queens," the part assigned to Evans that of Alexander, but 'twas some time before this Alexander could be induced to crave the forgiveness of the excitable Dublinites. Finally he yielded to expediency, and, coming forward to the centre of the stage, expressed his contrition. At this, a puppy in the pit cried out "Kneel, you rascal!" and Evans, now thoroughly exasperated, tartly answered: "No, you rascal! I'll kneel to none but God, and my Queen." Then the performance began.[A] [Footnote A: "As there were many worthy gentlemen of the army who knew the whole affair, the new rais'd clamour ceas'd, and the play went through without any molestation, and, by degrees, things return'd to their proper channel By this we may see, it is some danger for an actor to be in the right."--CHETWOOD.] How Chetwood bubbles over with a stream of ever-flowing anecdote. Much that he gives us in his "General History of the Stage" is only gossip, yet what is there more fascinating than tittle-tattle about players? The gossip of the drawing-room is merely inane, or else scandalous; but shift the scene to the theatre, and a story no longer bores; it is consecrated by the sacrament of interest. Is any apology necessary, therefore, if the quotation marks be again brought into requisition. This time the anecdote is of Thomas Griffith, an excellent comedian, and a harmless poet. "After his commencing actor, he contracted a friendship with Mr. Wilks; which chain remained unbroke till the death of that excellent comedian. Tho' Mr. Griffith was very young, Mr. Wilks took him with him to London (from Dublin), and had him entered for that season at a small salary. The 'Indian Emperor' being ordered on a sudden to be played, the part of Pizarro, a Spaniard, was wanting, which Mr. Griffith procured, with some difficulty. Mr. Betterton being a little indisposed, would not venture out to rehearsal, for fear of increasing his indisposition, to the disappointment of the audience, who had not seen our young stripling rehearse. But, when he came ready, at the entrance, his ears were pierced with a voice not familiar to him. He cast his eyes upon the stage, where he beheld the diminutive Pizarro, with a truncheon as long as himself (his own words.) "He steps up to Downs, the prompter, and cry'd, 'Zounds, Downs, what sucking scaramouch have you sent on there?' 'Sir,' replied Downs, 'He's good enough for a Spaniard; the part is small.' Betterton return'd, 'If he had made his eyebrows his whiskers, and each whisker a line, the part would have been two lines too much for such a monkey in buskins.' "Poor Griffith stood on the stage, near the door, and heard every syllable of the short dialogue, and by his fears knew who was meant by it; but, happy for him, he had no more to speak that scene. When the first act was over (by the advice of Downs) he went to make his excuse with--'Indeed, Sir, I had not taken the part, but there was only I alone out of the play.' 'I! I!' reply'd Betterton, with a smile, 'Thou art but the tittle of an I.' Griffith seeing him in no ill humour told him, 'Indians ought to be the best figures on the stage, as nature had made them.' 'Very like,' reply'd Betterton, 'but it would be a double death to an Indian cobbler to be conquer'd by such a weazle of a Spaniard as thou art. And, after this night, let me never see a truncheon in thy hand again, unless to stir the fire.' ... He took his advice, laid aside the buskin, and stuck to the sock, in which he made a figure equal to most of his contemporaries. "Our genius flutters with the plumes of youth, But observation wings to steddy truth." No one can resist telling another story, this time of fat Charles Hulet, whose abilities were only equalled by his corpulence. Having been apprenticed to a bookseller, he straightway proceeded to take a violent interest in the drama, and would often while away the evenings by spouting Shakespeare and other authors. In lieu of a company to support him young Hulet would designate each chair in the kitchen to represent one of the characters in the play he was reciting. "One night, as he was repeating the part of Alexander, with his wooden representative of Clytus (an old elbow-chair), and coming to the speech where the old General is to be kill'd, this young mock Alexander snatch'd a poker instead of a javelin, and threw it with such strength against poor Clytus, that the chair was kill'd upon the spot, and lay mangled on the floor. The death of Clytus made a monstrous noise, which disturbed the master in the parlour, who called out to know the reason; and was answered by the cook below, 'Nothing, sir, but that Alexander has kill'd Clytus.'" * * * * * In latter days Hulet took great pride in the sonorous tones of his voice, and loved nothing more dearly than to steal up behind a man and startle the unsuspecting one by giving a very loud "Hem." It was a "Hem," however, which helped to make the actor's winding-sheet, for one fine day he repeated the trick, burst a blood-vessel, and died within twenty-four hours. Heaven bless all these merry vagabonds! We may not always wish to follow in their footsteps, but we like to keep near them and pry into their careless, happy lives. When the Bohemians enter a pot-house we are too virtuous, presumably, to go in likewise, but we stand without, to get a tempting whiff of hot negus and a snatch of some genial jest or tuneful song. Then, if our players stray, perchance, into the gloomy precincts of a pawn-shop, are we not quite prepared to steal up to the window and discover what tribute is being paid to mine uncle? And so, speaking of pot-houses, and negus, and pawn-shops, let us end our extracts from the invaluable Chetwood with this unconventional reminiscence of another player, Mr. John Thurmond. It was a custom at that time for persons of the first rank and distinction to give their birthday suits to the most favoured actors. I think Mr. Thurmond was honoured by General Ingolsby with his. But his finances being at the last tide of ebb, the rich suit was put in buckle (a cant word for forty in the hundred interest). One night, notice was given that the General would be present with the Government at the play, and all the performers on the stage were preparing to dress out in the suits presented. The spouse of Johnny (as he was commonly called) try'd all her arts to persuade Mr. Holdfast, the pawnbroker (as it fell out, his real name) to let go the cloaths for that evening, to be returned when the play was over. But all arguments were fruitless; nothing but the Ready, or a pledge of full equal value. Such people would have despised a Demosthenes, or a Cicero, with all their rhetorical flourishes, if their oratorian gowns had been in pledge. Well! what must be done? The whole family in confusion and all at their wits-end; disgrace, with her glaring eyes and extended mouth, ready to devour. Fatal appearance! * * * * * "At last Winny, the wife (that is, Winnifrede), put on a compos'd countenance (but, alas! with a troubled heart); stepp'd to a neighbouring tavern, and bespoke a very hot negus, to comfort Johnny in the great part he was to perform that night, begging to have the silver tankard with the lid, because, as she said, 'a covering, and the vehicle silver, would retain heat longer than any other metal,' The request was comply'd with, the negus carry'd to the playhouse piping hot, popp'd into a vile earthen mug--the tankard _l'argent_ travelled _incog_. under her apron (like the Persian ladies veil'd), popp'd into the pawnbroker's hands, in exchange for the suit--put on and play'd its part, with the rest of the wardrobe; when its duty was over, carried back to remain in its old depository; the tankard return'd the right road; and, when the tide flowed with its lunar influence, the stranded suit was wafted into safe harbour again, after paying a little for 'dry docking,' which was all the damage received." * * * * * And Mr. Chetwood adds: "Thus woman's wit (tho' some account it evil) With artful wiles can overreach the Devil." Among such as these, good, bad and indifferent, moral and otherwise, did Mistress Oldfield pass what hours she consecrated to the theatre. In the early years, when merely a poor, struggling postulant before the altar of fame, the girl must have been more or less intimate with her dramatic associates, but as time went on and Nance blazed into a star of the first magnitude, the old feeling of fellowship may have become weakened. Not that the actress was in any sense snobbish; rather let it be said that the circumstances of her celebrity proved quite enough, in the course of human affairs, to separate her from the other players. Indeed, one of her biographers relates that Oldfield always went in state to Drury Lane, accompanied by two footmen, and that she seldom spoke to any one of the actors.[A] [Footnote A: She always went to the house (_i.e._, the theatre) in the same dress she had worn at dinner in her visits to the houses of great people; for she was much caressed on account of her general merit, and her connection with Mr. Churchill. She used to go to the playhouse in a chair, attended by two footmen; she seldom spoke to any one of the actors, and was allowed a sum of money to buy her own clothes.--"General Biographical Dictionary."] Nance may have made her entry into the green-room amid royal auspices, but who can for a second believe that "she seldom spoke to any one of the actors"? There was in her composition too much of sunshine to warrant any such belief, and then we know that behind the scenes she was ever affable and friendly. If she did not brook familiarity which comes of contempt, and if she moved about among her companions with dignity, then so much the better. Of Nance's sweetness of temper and sterling common-sense, Cibber has left us an attractive memory. It seems that when the Drury Lane management determined to revive "The Provoked Wife" of Sir John Vanbrugh (January 1726), Colley suggested that Wilks should take a rest during the run of the piece, and allow Barton Booth to play the lover, Constant. The idea did not meet with Wilks' approval; "down dropt his brow, and fur'd were his features"; and the green-room became the scene of a violent spat between Cibber and himself, with Mrs. Oldfield and other members of the company as excited listeners. Finally the author of the "Apology" said: "Are you not every day complaining of your being over-labour'd? And now, upon the first offering to ease you, you fly into a passion, and pretend to make that a greater grievance than t'other: But, Sir, if your being in or out of the play is a hardship, you shall impose it upon yourself: The part is in your hand, and to us it is a matter of indifference now whether you take it or leave it." [Illustration: SIR JOHN VANBRUGH By Sir GODFREY KNELLER] Upon this Mr. Wilks "threw down the part upon the table, crossed his arms, and sate knocking his heel upon the floor, as seeming to threaten most when he said least." Hereupon Booth generously yielded up the much disputed Constant to his rival with the remark that "for his part, he saw no such great matter in acting every day; for he believed it the wholsomest exercise in the world; it kept the spirits in motion, and always gave him a good stomach"--and the elegant Barton, be it remembered, was a great eater. * * * * * "Here," says Cibber, "I observed Mrs. Oldfield began to titter behind her fan. But Wilks being more intent upon what Booth had said, reply'd, every one could best feel for himself, but he did not pretend to the strength of a pack-horse; therefore if Mrs. Oldfield would chuse anybody else to play with her, he should be very glad to be excus'd. This throwing the negative upon Mrs. Oldfield was, indeed, a sure way to save himself; which I could not help taking notice of, by saying it was making but an ill compliment to the company to suppose there was but one man in it fit to play an ordinary part with her. "Here Mrs. Oldfield got up, and turning me half round to come forward, said with her usual frankness, 'Pooh! you are all a parcel of fools, to make such a rout about nothing!' Rightly judging that the person most out of humour would not be more displeased at her calling us all by the same name. As she knew, too, the best way of ending the debate would be to help the weak, she said, she hop'd Mr. Wilks would not so far mind what had past as to refuse his acting the part with her; for tho' it might not be so good as he had been us'd to, yet she believed those who had bespoke the play would expect to have it done to the best advantage, and it would make but an odd story abroad if it were known there had been any difficulty in that point among ourselves. To conclude, Wilks had the part." Verily, Oldfield was a gentlewoman. CHAPTER IX "GRIEF À LA MODE" "UNDERTAKER [_To his men_]. Well, come you that are to be mourners in this house, put on your sad looks, and walk by me that I may sort you. Ha, you! a little more upon the dismal; [_forming their countenances_] this fellow has a good mortal look--place him near the corpse: that wainscot face must be o' top of the stairs; that fellow's almost in a fright (that looks as if he were full of some strange misery) at the entrance to the hall. So--but I'll fix you all myself. Let's have no laughing now on any provocation. [_Makes faces_.] Look yonder, that hale, well-looking puppy! You ungrateful scoundrel, did not I pity you, take you out of a great man's service, and shew you the pleasure of receiving wages? Did not I give you ten, then fifteen, now twenty shillings a week, to be sorrowful? and the more I give you, I think, the gladder you are. "_Enter a_ BOY. "BOY. Sir, the grave-digger of St. Timothy's in the Fields would speak with you. "UNDERTAKER. Let him come in. "_Enter_ GRAVE-DIGGER. "GRAVE-DIGGER. I carried home to your house the shroud the gentleman was buried in last night; I could not get his ring off very easilly, therefore I brought you the finger and all; and, sir, the sexton gives his service to you, and desires to know whether you'd have any bodies removed or not: if not, he'll let them be in their graves a week longer. "UNDERTAKER. Give him my service; I can't tell readilly: but our friend, Dr. Passeport, with the powder, has promised me six or seven funerals this week." * * * * * These extracts are not from the manuscript of a modern farce-comedy,[A] but belong to Steele's play of "The Funeral, or Grief à la Mode." If they have about them all the air of _fin-de-siècle_ wit, so much the more eloquently do they testify to the freshness of Dick's satire. Freshness, satire, and death! Surely the three ingredients seem unmixable; yet when poured into the crucible of Steele's genius they resulted in a crystal that sparkled delightfully amid the lights of a theatre--a crystal which might still shed brilliancy if some enterprising manager would exhibit it to a jaded public. [Footnote A: In "A Milk White Flag," a good specimen of "up-to-date" farce, Mr. Hoyt dallies entertainingly and discreetly with the blithesome topics of undertakers, corpses, and widows.] In "The Funeral" the author impaled, with many a merciless slash of the pen, the hypocrisy and vulgar flummery that characterised the whole gruesome ceremony of conducting to its earthly resting-place the body of a well-to-do sinner. For the average Englishman loved a funeral and all its ghastly accompaniments as passionately as though he had Irish blood in his veins, and often insisted upon investing the burial of his friends with the mockery, rather than the sincerity, of woe. Grief thus became a pleasure, and it was a pleasure, be it added, which was not taken too sadly. (Pardon the paradox.) The spirits of the deceased's many admirers had to be raised, and the enlivening process was set in motion by means of numerous libations, not of tea, but of lusty wine. When the wife of mine host of the "Crown and Sceptre" left this world of cooking and drinking, the women who crowded to the good lady's funeral had to drown their sorrows in a tun of red port,[A] and it is evident that at the burial of men the grief of the mourners required an equal amount of quenching. Indeed, the most absurd expenditures and preparations were made for what should be the simplest of ceremonies, and the result oftentimes proved garish in the extreme. As an example of the display in this direction, John Ashton quotes from the _Daily Courant_ a report of the obsequies of Sir William Pritchard, sometime Lord Mayor of London. After a vast deal of pomp wasted in St. Albans and other places upon the unappreciative and inanimate Pritchard, the remains reached the country seat of the deceased, in the county of Buckingham. "Where, after the body had been set out, with all ceremony befitting his degree, for near two hours, 'twas carried to the church adjacent in this order, viz., 2 conductors with long staves, 6 men in long cloaks two and two, the standard, 18 men in cloaks as before, servants to the deceas'd two and two, divines, the minister of the parish and the preacher, the helm and crest, sword and target, gauntlets and spurs, born by an officer of Arms, both in their rich coats of Her Majesty's Arms enbroider'd; the body, between 6 persons of the Arms of Christ's Hospital, St. Bartholomew's, Merchant Taylors Company, City of London, empaled coat and single coat; the chief mourner and his four assistants, followed by the relations of the defunct, &c."[B] In this aggregation of grandeur the mere bagatelle in the shape of a corpse seems almost completely overshadowed, and it is thus comforting to reflect that the latter finally had interment in a "handsome large vault, in the isle on the north side of the church, betwixt 7 and 8 of the clock that evening." The dear departed, or grief for his memory, frequently played but too small a rôle in all these trappings of despondency, and the insignificance of the deceased might only be likened to the secondary position of a man at his own wedding. It was all fuss and mortuary feathers, mourning rings and mulled wine in the one case, just as in the other it is entirely a show of bride and blushes, flounces and femininity. [Footnote A: In writing of the customs connected with old-time English funerals, Misson says: "The relations and chief mourners are in a chamber apart, with their more intimate friends; and the rest of the guests are dispersed in several rooms about the house. When they are ready to set out, they nail up the coffin, and a servant presents the company with sprigs of rosemary: Every one takes a sprig and carries it in his hand till the body is put into the grave, at which time they all throw their sprigs in after it. Before they set out, and after they return, it is usual to present the guests with something to drink, either red or white wine, boil'd with sugar and cinnamon, or some such liquor. Butler, the keeper of a tavern, told me there was a tun of red port drank at his wife's burial, besides mull'd white wine. Note, no men ever go to women's burials, nor the women to the men's; so that there were none but women at the drinking of Butler's wine. Such women in England will hold it out with the men, when they have a bottle before them, as well as upon t'other occasion, and tattle infinitely better than they."] [Footnote B: The will of Benjamin Dod, a Roman Catholic citizen of London (died 1714) runs in part as follows: "I desire four and twenty persons to be at my burial ... to every of which four and twenty persons ... I give a pair of white gloves, a ring of ten shillings value, a bottle of wine at my funeral, and half a crown to be spent at their return that night; to drink my soul's health, then on her Journey for Purification in order to Eternal Rest. I appoint the room, where my corpse shall lie, to be hung with black, and four and twenty wax candles to be burning; on my coffin to be affixed a cross and this inscription, _Jesus Hominum Salvator_. I also appoint my corpse to be carried in a herse drawn with six white horses, with white feathers, and followed by six coaches, with six horses to each coach, to carry the four and twenty persons.... Item, I give to forty of my particular acquaintance, not at my funeral, to every one of them a gold ring of ten shillings value.... As for mourning, I leave that to my executors hereafter nam'd; and I do not desire them to give any to whom I shall leave a legacy.... I will have no Presbyterian, Moderate Low Churchmen, or Occasional Conformists, to be at or have anything to do with my funeral. I die in the Faith of the True Catholic Church. I desire to have a tomb stone over me, with a Latin inscription, and a lamp, or six wax candles, to burn seven days and nights thereon."--_Vide_ ASHTON.] Was it any wonder that when Dick Steele, aetat twenty-six, an officer of Fusiliers, and a merry vagabond, wanted to redeem his reputation by writing a rollicking comedy, his thoughts turned to the satirising of the British undertaker? For the young man must prove to the town that he was not the hypocrite several of his kind friends had dubbed him. The fact was, that he had been virtuous enough to write a pious work entitled, "The Christian Hero," which he afterwards published, but as he had not grown sufficiently master of himself to live up to its golden precepts (nay, rather did he continue to spend his evenings in the taverns), the author came in for many a taunt and sneer. Why did he not practice what he preached? was the sarcastic query of his intimates. Yet there was no thought of cant in what the soldier had done. His design in issuing the "Christian Hero" was, as he explained in after years, "principally to fix upon his own mind a strong impression of virtue and religion, in opposition to a stronger propensity towards unwarrantable pleasures." This secret admiration was too weak; he therefore printed the book with his name, in hopes that a standing testimony against himself, and the eyes of the world (that is to say, of his acquaintances) upon him in a new light, would make him ashamed of understanding and seeming to feel what was virtuous, and living so contrary to life. But the man was weak where the author was willing, and thus gay Richard went on "living so contrary a life" with true Celtic perversity, and made of himself anything but a Christian Hero. Rather was he a jolly Pagan, with a passion for his wine and his coffee-house, and a kindly, merry word even for those who twitted him upon his inconsistency. It was plain, therefore, that he must be some other sort of hero, and so he evolved the brilliant satire of "The Funeral," to "enliven his character, and repel the sarcasms of those who abused him for his declarations relative to religion." [Illustration: SIR RICHARD STEELE By Sir GODFREY KNELLER] In the twinkling of an eye Steele became the spoiled darling of the day. The comedy, which was produced at Drury Lane in 1702, was the talk of the enthusiastic town, and the playwright arose from his beer-mugs, his wine-flagons, and his contemplation of ideal Christianity, to find himself famous. He had opened a new vein of satire, and a vein moreover which upheld virtue and laughed to scorn hypocrisy and vice. That was a moral which the dramatists of his epoch seldom taught.[A] And so the people crowded to the theatre, applauded the sentiment of the play, guffawed at the keen wit of the dialogue, and swore that this young rascal Steele was the prince of bright fellows. Then they went home--and revelled, as before, in the funerals of their friends. [Footnote A: The "Funeral" is the merriest and most perfect of Steele's comedies. The characters are strongly marked, the wit genial, and not indecent. Steele was among the first who set about reforming the licentiousness of the old comedy. His satire in the "Funeral" is not against virtue, but vice and silliness.--DR. DORAN.] What of this remarkable comedy? Its story turned upon the marriage of the elderly Lord Brumpton to a designing young minx who estranges the nobleman from his son, Lord Hardy, the gentlemanly, poverty-stricken leading man of the piece. When Brumpton has a cataleptic fit, and is apparently dead as a doornail, the spouse confides his body to the undertaker with feelings of serene pleasure. But let the lines of the play, or a portion thereof, unfold the situation. The scene is at Lord Brumpton's house; the nobleman has just been pronounced defunct, and Sable, the undertaker, has arrived. The latter, who is being bantered by two of the characters, Mr. Campley and Cabinet, is evidently a bit of a philosopher, albeit an uncanny one, for he says: * * * * * "There are very few in the whole world that live to themselves, but sacrifice their bosom-bliss to enjoy a vain show and appearance of prosperity in the eyes of others; and there is often nothing more inwardly distressed than a young bride in her glittering retinue, or deeply joyful than a young widow in her weeds and black train; of both which the lady of this house may be an instance, for she has been the one, and is, I'll be sworn, the other. "CABINET. You talk, Mr. Sable, most learnedly. "SABLE. I have the deepest learning, sir, experience; remember your widow cousin, that married last month. "CABINET. Ay, but how you'd you imagine she was in all that grief an hypocrite! Could all those shrieks, those swoonings, that rising falling bosom, be constrained? You're uncharitable, Sable, to believe it. What colour, what reason had you for it? "SABLE. First, Sir, her carriage in her concerns with me, for I never yet could meet with a sorrowful relict but was herself enough to make a hard bargain with me. Yet I must confess they have frequent interruptions of grief and sorrow when they read my bill; but as for her, nothing she resolv'd, that look'd bright or joyous, should after her love's death approach her. All her servants that were not coal-black must turn out; a fair complexion made her eyes and heart ake, she'd none but downright jet, and to exceed all example, she hir'd my mourning furniture by the year, and in case of my mortality, ty'd my son to the same article; so in six weeks time ran away with a young fellow." * * * * * And so on (with a cynicism of which, of course, no modern "funeral director" would be guilty--out loud), until the undertaker's men come on the scene. * * * * * "Where in the name of goodness have you all been?" asks SABLE. "Have you brought the sawdust and tar for embalming? Have you the hangings and the sixpenny nails, and my lord's coat of arms?" "SERVANT. Yes, sir, and had come sooner, but I went to the herald's for a coat for Alderman Gathergrease that died last night--he has promised to invent one against to-morrow." "SABLE. Ah! pox take some of our cits, the first thing after their death is to take care of their birth--let him bear a pair of stockings, he is the first of his family that ever wore one.... And you, Mr. Blockhead, I warrant you have not call'd at Mr. Pestle's the apothecary: will that fellow never pay me? I stand bound for all the poison in that starving murderer's shop: he serves me just as Dr. Quibus did, who promised to write a treatise against water-gruel, a healthy slop that has done me more injury than all the Faculty: look you now, you are all upon the sneer, let me have none but downright stupid countenances. I've a good mind to turn you all off, and take people out of the playhouse; but hang them, they are as ignorant of their parts as you are of yours.... Ye stupid rogues, whom I have picked out of the rubbish of mankind, and fed for your eminent worthlessness, attend, and know that I speak you this moment stiff and immutable to all sense of noise, mirth or laughter. [_Makes mouths at them as they pass by him to bring them to a constant countenance_.] So, they are pretty well--pretty well." [_Exit_. * * * * * When the stage is clear Lord Brumpton and his servant Trusty enter. The former has wakened from his cataleptic trance, as the faithful Trusty watched beside him, and is horrified to learn of Lady Brumpton's lack of grief. But hush; he will conceal himself, for here comes my lady, accompanied by her woman and confidant, Mistress Tattleaid. * * * * * "_Enter_ WIDOW _and_ TATTLEAID, _meeting and running to each other_. "WIDOW. Oh, Tattleaid, his and our hour has come! "TAT. I always said by his church yard cough, you'd bury him, and still you were impatient. "WIDOW. Nay, thou hast ever been my comfort, my confident, my friend, and my servant; and now I'll reward thy pains; for tho' I scorn the whole sex of fellows I'll give them hopes for thy sake; every smile, every frown, every gesture, humour, caprice and whimsy of mine shall be gold to thee, girl; thou shalt feel all the sweets and wealth of being a fine rich widow's woman. Oh! how my head runs my first year out, and jumps to all the joys of widowhood! If thirteen months hence a friend should haul one to a play one has a mind to see,[A] what pleasure t'will be when my Lady Brumpton's footman called (who kept a place for that very purpose) to make a sudden insurrection of fine wigs in the pit and side-boxes. Then, with a pretty sorrow in one's face, and a willing blush for being stared at, one ventures to look round, and bow to one of one's own quality. Thus [_very directly_] to a snug pretending fellow of no fortune. Thus [_as scarce seeing him_] to one that writes lampoons. Thus [_fearfully_] to one who really loves. Thus [_looking down_] to one woman-acquaintance, from box to box, thus [_with looks differently familiar_], and when one has done one's part, observe the actors do theirs, but with my mind fixed not on those I look at, but those that look at me. Then the serenades--the lovers! [A query--if the theatres were patronised only by those who looked solely at the stage, what would be the size of the audiences?] [Footnote A: A well-regulated widow kept herself at home for six weeks after the death of her husband, and denied herself the theatre and other public amusements for a twelvemonth.] "TAT. Oh, madam, you make my heart bound within me: I'll warrant you, madam, I'll manage them all; and indeed, madam, the men are really very silly creatures, 'tis no such hard matter--they rulers! they governors! I warrant you indeed. "WIDOW. Ay, Tattleaid, they imagine themselves mighty things, but government founded on force only, is a brutal power--we rule them by their affections, which blinds them into belief that they rule us, or at least are in the government with us. But in this nation our power is absolute; thus, thus, we sway--[_playing her fan_]. A fan is both the standard and the flag of England. I laugh to see men go on our errands, strut in great offices, live in cares, hazards and scandals, to come home and be fools to us in brags of their dispatches, negotiations, and their wisdoms--as my good dear deceas'd use to entertain me; which I, to relieve myself from, would lisp some silly request, pat him on the face. He shakes his head at my pretty folly, calls me simpleton; gives me a jewel, then goes to bed so wise, so satisfied, and so deceived." * * * * * This pleasant conversation Lord Brumpton overhears, as he does also the inmost secrets of his lawyer, Puzzle. The latter gentleman, who has studied hard to cheat his good-natured employer, and succeeded, is a daringly drawn satire on the pettifogging attorney of the period.[A] Note the following words of wisdom, _àpropos_ to the drawing of wills, which Mr. Puzzle addresses to his nephew. [Footnote A: Of the attorney of Queen Anne's day Ward wrote: "He's an Amphibious Monster, that partakes of two Natures, and those contrary; He's a great Lover both of Peace and Enmity; and has no sooner set People together by the Ears, but is Soliciting the Law to make an end of the Difference. His Learning is commonly as little as his Honesty; and his Conscience much larger than his Green Bag. Catch him in what Company soever, you will always hear him stating of Cases, or telling what notice my Lord Chancellor took of him, when he beg'd leave to supply the deficiency of his Counsel. He always talks with as great assurance as if he understood what he only pretends to know: And always wears a Band, and in that lies his Gravity and Wisdom. He concerns himself with no Justice but the Justice of a Cause: and for making an unconscionable Bill he outdoes a Taylor."] "PUZZLE. As for legacies, they are good or not, as I please; for let me tell you, a man must take pen, ink and paper, sit down by an old fellow, and pretend to take directions, but a true lawyer never makes any man's will but his own; and as the priest of old among us got near the dying man, and gave all to the Church, so now the lawyer gives all to the law. "CLERK. Ay, sir, but priests then cheated the nation by doing their offices in an unknown language. "PUZZLE. True, but ours is a way much surer; for we cheat in no language at all, but loll in our own coaches, eloquent in gibberish, and learned in jingle. Pull out the parchment [_referring to the will of_ LORD BRUMPTON], there's the deed; I made it as long as I could. Well, I hope to see the day when the indenture shall be the exact measure of the land that passes by it; for 'tis a discouragement to the gown, that every ignorant rogue of an heir should in a word or two understand his father's meaning, and hold ten acres of land by half-an-acre of parchment. Nay, I hope to see the time when that there is indeed some progress made in, shall be wholly affected; and by the improvement of the noble art of tautology, every Inn in Holborn an Inn of Court. Let others think of logic, rhetoric, and I know not what impertinence, but mind thou tautology. What's the first excellence in a lawyer? Tautology. What's the second? Tautology. What's the third? Tautology; as an old pleader said of action." * * * * * Who shall say that the tautological sentiments of Mr. Puzzle are not still inculcated? Nay, the whole play furnishes a capital instance of the truism that the world changes but little, and, furthermore, that the mould of nigh two centuries cannot spoil the wit of sparkling Steele. Ah, Dick! Dick! you may have been a sorry dog, with your toasts and your taverns, yet 'tis a thousand pities that a few dramatists of to-day cannot drink inspiration from the same cups. To continue our cheerful journey with this unusual "Funeral," we soon find ourselves introduced to Lord Hardy, the unjustly discarded son of Brumpton. Hardy is a high-spirited, honest man of quality, a trifle out at elbows just now, owing to the stoppage of financial supplies from the paternal mansion. His straits are oft severe, and it is fortunate that he has in Trim a faithful servant who knows so well how to keep the duns at bay. "Why, friend, says I [Trim is describing to Hardy his method of dealing with his lordship's creditors], how often must I tell you my lord is not stirring. His lordship has not slept well, you must come some other time; your lordship will send for him when you are at leisure to look upon money affairs; or if they are so saucy, so impertinent as to press a man of your quality for their own, there are canes, there's Bridewel, there's the stocks for your ordinary tradesmen; but to an haughty, thriving Covent Garden mercer, silk or laceman, your lordship gives your most humble service to him, hopes his wife is well; you have letters to write, or you would see him yourself, but you desire he would be with you punctually on such a day, that is to say, the day after you are gone out of town, Which shows very plainly that Trim could have earned large wages had he lived in the nineteenth century. These 'Palmy Days' are not long enough, however, to permit the introduction of all the characters, nor the outlining of the entire story, with its brisk love-interest. But this bit of dialogue, which occurs after Sable has discovered the much-alive Lord Brumpton, is too good to be ignored: "SABLE. Why, my lord, you can't in conscience put me off so; I must do according to my orders, cut you up, and embalm you, except you'll come down a little deeper than you talk of; you don't consider the charges I have been at already. "LORD BRUMPTON. Charges! for what? "SABLE. First, twenty guineas to my lady's woman for notice of your death (a fee I've before now known the widow herself go halves in), but no matter for that--in the next place, ten pounds for watching you all your long fit of sickness last winter-- "LORD BRUMPTON. Watching me? Why I had none but my own servants by turns! "SABLE. I mean attending to give notice of your death. I had all your long fit of sickness, last winter, at half a crown a day, a fellow waiting at your gate to bring me intelligence, but you unfortunately recovered, and I lost all my obliging pains for your service. "LORD BRUMPTON. Ha! ha! ha! Sable, thou'rt a very impudent fellow. Half a crown a day to attend my decease, and dost thou reckon it to me?" "SABLE.... I have a book at home, which I call my doomsday-book, where I have every man of quality's age and distemper in town, and know when you should drop. Nay, my lord, if you had reflected upon your mortality half so much as poor I have for you, you would not desire to return to life thus--in short, I cannot keep this a secret, under the whole money I am to have for burying you." * * * * * Of course Lady Brumpton is discomfited and disgraced at the end of the play, and, of course, Lord Brumpton is reconciled to his son--for Steele took care that virtue should be rewarded and the moral code otherwise preserved. As to her ladyship, who has proved a very entertaining sort of villain, we shall take leave of her in one of the best scenes of the comedy: "WIDOW. _[Reading the names of the visitors who have called to leave their condolences]_ Mrs. Frances and Mrs. Winnifred Glebe, who are they?" "TATTLEAID. They are the country great fortunes, have been out of town this whole year; they are those whom your ladyship said upon being very well-born took upon them to be very ill-bred." "WIDOW. Did I say so? Really I think it was apt enough; now I remember them. Lady Wrinkle--oh, that smug old woman! there is no enduring her affectation of youth; but I plague her; I always ask whether her daughter in Wiltshire has a grandchild yet or not. Lady Worth--I can't bear her company; [_aside_] she has so much of that virtue in her heart which I have in mouth only. Mrs. After-day--Oh, that's she that was the great beauty, the mighty toast about town, that's just come out of the small-pox; she is horribly pitted they say; I long to see her, and plague her with my condolence.... But you are sure these other ladies suspect not in the least that I know of their coming? "TAT. No, dear madam, they are to ask for me. "WIDOW. I hear a coach. [_Exit_ TATTLEAID.] I have now an exquisite pleasure in the thought of surpassing my Lady Sly, who pretends to have out-grieved the whole town for her husband. They are certainly coming. Oh, no! here let me--thus let me sit and think. [_Widow on her couch; while she is raving, as to herself_, TATTLEAID _softly introduces the ladies_.] Wretched, disconsolate, as I am!... Alas! alas! Oh! oh! I swoon! I expire! [_Faints_. "SECOND LADY. Pray, Mrs. Tattleaid, bring something that is cordial to her. [_Exit_ TATTLEAID. "THIRD LADY. Indeed, madam, you should have patience; his lordship was old. To die is but going before in a journey we must all take. _Enter_ TATTLEAID, _loaded with bottles_; THIRD LADY _takes a bottle from her and drinks_. "FOURTH LADY. Lord, how my Lady Fleer drinks! I have heard, indeed, but never could believe it of her. [_Drinks also_. "FIRST LADY. [_Whispers_.] But, madam, don't you hear what the town says of the jilt, Flirt, the men liked so much in the Park? Hark ye--was seen with him in a hackney coach. "SECOND LADY. Impudent flirt, to be found out! "THIRD LADY. But I speak it only to you. "FOURTH LADY. [_Whispers next woman_.] Nor I, but to no one. "FIFTH LADY. [_Whispers the_ WIDOW.] I can't believe it; nay, I always thought it, madam. "WIDOW. Sure, 'tis impossible the demure, prim thing. Sure all the world is hypocrisy Well, I thank my stars, whatsoever sufferings I have, I have none in reputation. I wonder at the men; I could never think her handsome. She has really a good shape and complexion but no mein; and no woman has the use of her beauty without mein. Her charms are dumb, they want utterance. But whither does distraction lead me to talk of charms? "FIRST LADY. Charms, a chit's, a girl's charms! Come, let us widows be true to ourselves, keep our countenances and our characters, and a fig for the maids. "SECOND LADY. Ay, since they will set up for our knowledge, why should not we for their ignorance? "THIRD LADY. But, madam, o' Sunday morning at church, I curtsied to you and looked at a great fuss in a glaring light dress, next pew. That strong, masculine thing is a knight's wife, pretends to all the tenderness in the world, and would fain put the unwieldly upon us for the soft, the languid. She has of a sudden left her dairy, and sets up for a fine town lady; calls her maid Cisly, her woman speaks to her by her surname of Mrs. Cherryfist, and her great foot-boy of nineteen, big enough for a trooper, is stripped into a laced coat, now Mr. Page forsooth. "FOURTH LADY. Oh, I have seen her. Well, I heartily pity some people for their wealth; they might have been unknown else--you would die, madam, to see her and her equipage: I thought her horses were ashamed of their finery; they dragged on, as if they were all at plough, and a great bashful-look'd booby behind grasp'd the coach, as if he had never held one. "FIFTH LADY. Alas! some people think there is nothing but being fine to be genteel; but the high prance of the horses, and the brisk insolence of the servants in an equipage of quality are inimitable. "FIRST LADY. Now you talk of an equipage, I envy this lady the beauty she will appear in a mourning coach, it will so become her complexion; I confess I myself mourned for two years for no other reason. Take up that hood there. Oh, that fair face with a veil! [_They take up her hood_. "WIDOW. Fie, fie, ladies. But I have been told, indeed, black does become-- "SECOND LADY. Well, I'll take the liberty to speak it, there is young Nutbrain has long had (I'll be sworn) a passion for this lady; but I'll tell you one thing I fear she'll dislike, that is, he is younger than she is. "THIRD LADY. No, that's no exception; but I'll tell you one, he is younger than his brother. "WIDOW. Talk not of such affairs. Who could love such an unhappy relict as I am? But, dear madam, what grounds have you for that idle story? "FOURTH LADY. Why he toasts you and trembles where you are spoke of. It must be a match. "WIDOW. Nay, nay, you rally, you rally; but I know you mean it kindly. "FIRST LADY. I swear we do. [TATTLEAID _whispers the_ WIDOW. "WIDOW. But I must beseech you, ladies, since you have been so compassionate as to visit and accompany my sorrow, to give me the only comfort I can now know, to see my friends cheerful, and to honour an entertainment Tattleaid has prepared within for you. If I can find strength enough I'll attend you; but I wish you would excuse me, for I have no relish of food or joy, but will try to get a bit down in my own chamber. "FIRST LADY. There is no pleasure without you. "WIDOW. But, madam, I must beg of your ladyship not to be so importune to my fresh calamity as to mention Nutbrain any more. I am sure there is nothing in it. In love with me, quotha!" [WIDOW _is led away. Exeunt_ LADIES. Thus runs the comedy, trippingly as the tongue of a gay _raconteur_. Sometimes the scenes are exaggerated, sometimes the characters may be overdrawn, but the satire is true, and the wit is of the best. Take, for instance, the picture reproduced above. Are not its colours--albeit bold and merciless--tinged with the redeeming hue of naturalness? And of you, fair daughters of Eve (if any of you condescend to read these pages), let the author ask one impertinent little question: Is there not something in the conversation of Dick Steele's First Lady, or his Second Lady, or all the other Ladies, which suggests the charity and intellectuality that doth hedge in an afternoon tea? CHAPTER X THE BARTON BOOTHS "Sweet are the charms of her I love, More fragrant than the damask rose; Soft as the down of turtle-dove, Gentle as winds when zephyr blows; Refreshing as descending rains, On sun-burnt climes, and thirsty plains." Thus rhapsodised the great Barton Booth, who could write harmless poetry when the cares of acting did not press too hard upon him. In this case the verses were addressed to the object of his passion, a lady who seems to have been, at first, a trifle parsimonious in her smiles; for, in another song intended for the same siren, the lover asks: "Can then a look create a thought Which time can ne'er remove? Yes, foolish heart, again thou'rt caught, Again thou bleed'st for Love. "She sees the conquest of her eyes, Nor heals the wounds she gave; She smiles when'er my blushes rise, And, sighing, shuns her Slave. "Then, Swain, be bold! and still adore her Still the flying fair pursue: Love, and friendship, still implore her, Pleading night and day for you." [Illustration: BARTON BOOTH] Who was this "flying fair" that the swain pursued with such despairing fervour? Nance Oldfield? Nay, there was no romance there, for while Booth could make the most exquisite stage love to the actress, he never carried that love beyond the mimic world. Rather was it the lovely Mistress Santlow, that dancing bit of sunshine, who turned the heads of many an amorous spectator, and had enough of the temptress about her to lead a mighty warrior from the path of domestic constancy, and bring a Secretary of State almost to the verge of matrimony.[A] She seemed the apotheosis of grace, did this merry, moving Hester, and when she forsook the art she so delightfully adorned, and took to the "legitimate," there were not a few among her admirers who regretted the change. "They mourned," says Dr. Doran, "as if Terpsichore herself had been on earth to charm mankind, and had gone never to return. They remembered, longed for, and now longed in vain for that sight which used to set a whole audience half distraught with delight, when in the very ecstacy of her dance, Santlow contrived to loosen her clustering auburn hair, and letting it fall about such a neck and shoulders as Praxiteles could more readily imagine than imitate, danced on, the locks flying in the air, and half-a-dozen hearts at the end of every one of them." [Footnote A: The Duke of Marlborough and Secretary Craggs respectively.] At the end of one of those locks was the throbbing heart of Barton Booth, which he had completely lost in watching the auburn hair and the poetic movements of the _coryphée:_ "But now the flying fingers strike the lyre, The sprightly notes the nymph inspire. She whirls around! she bounds! she springs! As if Jove's messenger had lent her wings. "Such were her lovely limbs, so flushed her charming face So round her neck! her eyes so fair! So rose her swelling chest! so flow'd her amber hair! While her swift feet outstript the wind, And left the enamor'd God of Day behind." Certes, Booth was in love when he wrote this eulogy. But however sprightly and deftly did this charmer pirouette, she could not deny herself the luxury of appearing as a regular actress. Her first venture in this direction was as the Eunuch of "Valentinian," wherein she donned boy's attire, and was much more successful in masculine garb than have been not a few better artists. From this part to that of Dorcas Zeal in Shadwell's play, "The Fair Quaker of Deal,"[A] was but a step, and a step, be it said, which for the moment consoled the public for her desertion from the ballet. According to Cibber, Santlow was the happiest incident in the fortune of the play, and the Laureate tells us that she was "then in the full bloom of what beauty she might pretend to."[B] He adds that "before this she had only been admired as the most excellent dancer, which perhaps might not a little contribute to the favourable reception she now met with as an actress in this character which so happily suited her figure and capacity: the gentle softness of her voice, the composed innocence of her aspect, the modesty of her dress, the reserv'd deceny of her gesture, and the simplicity of the sentiments that naturally fell from her, made her seem the amiable maid she represented. In a word, not the enthusiastick Maid of Orleans was more serviceable of old to the French army when the English had distressed them, than this fair Quaker was at the head of that dramatick attempt upon which the support of their weak society depended." [Footnote A: Produced at Drury Lane in February, 1710.] [Footnote B: It might appear from this remark of Colley's that the Santlow was not over handsome. Yet if a picture taken from life does not belie her the dancer was most fair to look upon.] This "weak society" was the new company recruited by William Collier for Drury Lane Theatre, and wherein could be found, in addition to the light-limbed Hester, such players as her adoring swain, Barton Booth, Theophilus Keen, George Powell, Francis Leigh, Mrs. Bradshaw and Mrs. Knight. Colley was at that time (1710) in opposition to Drury, his interest lying with the Hay market management, and it is very evident that the success of the "Fair Quaker"--a success made in face of the counter attraction furnished by the long trial of Dr. Sacheverel--went sorely against the grain with him.[A] The fact was that things at the Hay market were not flourishing, and the prosperity enjoyed by the Drury Lane comedy--and the Sacheverel show--seemed tantalising to bear. [Footnote A: Shadwell evidently had Cibber in mind when he wrote in the preface to the "Fair Quaker of Deal": "This play was written about three years since, and put into the hands of a famous comedian belonging to the Haymarket Playhouse, who took care to beat down the value of it so much as to offer the author to alter it fit to appear on the stage, on condition he might have half the profits of the third day; that is as much as to say, that it may pass for one of his, according to custom. The author not agreeing to this reasonable proposal, it lay in his hands till the beginning of this winter, when Mr. Booth read it, and liked it, and persuaded the author that, with a little alteration, it would please the town."] Even in after years Colley grew bitter in thinking of the "Fair Quaker," and could not help indulging in a dig at its expense when he came to write the "Apology." He likewise paid his satirical compliments to the new-fangled Italian opera which was given at the Haymarket during the season of 1709-10, on the days when the regular dramatic company did not appear. The opera had already proved a drawing attraction, but at the time here mentioned the popular interest in the performances had fallen off, and the dear and ever fickle public, of high and low degree, prefered either Drury Lane or the trial of Sacheverel to the artistic delights of music and the drama at the rival house. And so Cibber plaintively sighs. "The truth is, that this kind of entertainment [opera] being so entirely sensual, it had no possibility of getting the better of our reason but by its novelty; and that novelty could never be supported but by an annual change of the best voices, which, like the finest flowers, bloom but for a season, and when that is over are only dead nosegays. From this natural cause we have seen within these two years even Farinelli singing to an audience of five and thirty pounds, and yet, if common fame may be credited, the same voice, so neglected in one country, has in another had charms sufficient to make that crown sit easy on the head of a Monarch, which the jealousy of politicians (who had their views in his keeping it) fear'd, without some such extraordinary amusement, his Satiety of Empire might tempt him a second time to resign."[A] [Footnote A: The monarch alluded to was evidently Victor Amadeus, King of Sardinia. The tenor Farinelli (whose real name was Carlo Broschi) was born in the dukedom of Modena in 1705, and died 1782.] That Cibber knew something of the wrangles which inevitably follow in the wake of an operatic troupe may be seen from the next paragraph: "There is, too, in the very species of an Italian singer such an innate, fantastical pride and caprice, that the government of them (here at least) is almost impracticable. This distemper, as we were not sufficiently warn'd or apprized of, threw our musical affairs into perplexities we knew not easily how to get out of. There is scarce a sensible auditor in the Kingdom that has not since that time had occasion to laugh at the several instances of it. But what is still more ridiculous, these costly canary birds have sometimes infested the whole body of our dignified lovers of musick with the same childish animosities." It was merely an illustration of the melancholy fact that the heavenly maid of music is too often attended by the handmaiden of discord. But to continue: "Ladies have been known," says Colley, "to decline their visits upon account of their being of a different musical party. Caesar and Pompey made not a warmer division in the Roman Republick than those heroines, their country women, the Faustina and Cuzzoni, blew up in our commonwealth of academical musick by their implacable pretentions to superiority.[A] And while this greatness of soul is their unalterable virtue, it will never be practicable to make two capital singers of the same sex do as they should do in one opera at the same time! No, tho' England were to double the sums it has already thrown after them. For even in their own country, where an extraordinary occasion has called a greater number of their best to sing together, the mischief they have made has been proportionable; an instance of which, if I am rightly informed, happen'd at Parma, where upon the celebration of the marriage of that Duke, a collection was made of the most eminent voices that expence or interest could purchase, to give as complete an opera as the whole vocal power of Italy could form. [Footnote A: Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni Hasse, whose famous rivalry in 1726 and 1727 is here referred to, were singers of remarkable powers. Cuzzoni's voice was a soprano, her rival's a mezzo-soprana, and while the latter excelled in brilliant execution, the former was supreme in pathetic expression. Dr. Burney("History of Music," iv. 319) quotes from M. Quanta the statement that so keen was their supporter's party spirit, that when one party began to applaude their favourite, the other party hissed!--R.W. LOWE, "Notes to the Apology."] "But when it came to the proof of this musical project, behold! what woful work they made of it! every performer would be a Caesar or Nothing; their several pretentions to preference were not to be limited within the laws of harmony; they would all choose their own songs, but not more to set off themselves than to oppose or deprive another of an occasion to shine. Yet any one would sing a bad song, provided nobody else had a good one, till at last they were thrown together like so many feather'd warriors, for a battle-royal in a cock-pit, where every one was oblig'd to kill another to save himself! What pity it was these froward misses and masters of musick had not been engag'd to entertain the court of some King of Morocco, that could have known a good opera from a bad one! With how much ease would such a director have brought them to better order? But alas! as it has been said of greater things, "'Suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit.' "Imperial Rome fell by the too great strength of its own citizens! So fell this mighty opera, ruin'd by the too great excellency of its singers! For, upon the whole, it proved to be as barbarously bad as if Malice itself had composed it." It was a pity, no doubt, that the light of opera shone but dimly at the Haymarket, yet the ill wind which almost extinguished that light blew a blessing towards the nimble Santlow. For the dear creature prospered exceeding well as Dorcas Zeal; the heart of the public waxed warm toward the ex-dancer, and so did the cardiac organ of Barton Booth. A few years later Booth married the charmer, and she, having become virtuous and prim, made the remainder of his life a bed of domestic roses. And now for the brief story of Booth's dignified career. Barton came of good English stock, and his father, with a true British desire to rule the destinies of his family, mapped out a clerical life for the boy. But the latter had no thought of the pulpit, and from the time that he acted in the "Andria" of Terence, at Westminster School, his hope was all for the stage. 'Tis very easy to applaud that hope now; perhaps his relations looked upon it as a temptation offered by the Evil One. When he reached the mature age of seventeen, and had orders to begin his university training, what does the youth do but run away from home, and, taking the theatrical bull by the horns, appear on the Dublin boards. "He first apply'd to Mr. Betterton, then to Mr. Smith, two celebrated actors," says Chetwood, "but they decently refused him for fear of the resentment of his family. But this did not prevent his pursuing the point in view; therefore he resolv'd for Ireland, and safely arrived in June 1698. His first rudiments Mr. Ashbury[A] taught him, and his first appearance was in the part of Oroonoko, where he acquitted himself so well to a crowded audience, that Mr. Ashbury rewarded him with a present of five guineas, which was the more acceptable as his last shilling was reduced to brass (as he inform'd me). But an odd accident fell out upon this occasion. It being very warm weather, in his last scene of the play, as he waited to go on, he inadvertently wiped his face, that, when he enter'd, he had the appearance of a chimney-sweeper (his own words). At his entrance he was surprised at the variety of noises he heard in the audience (for he knew not what he had done), that a little confounded him, till he received an extraordinary clap of applause, which settled his mind. The play was desir'd for the next night of acting, when an actress fitted a crape to his face, with an opening proper for the mouth, and shap'd in form for the nose; but, in the first scene, one part of the crape slip'd off. 'And zounds!' said he (he was a little apt to swear), 'I look'd like a magpie. When I came off, they lamp-black'd me for the rest of the night, that I was flayed before it could be got off again.'"[B] [Footnote A: Joseph Ashbury, Master of the Revels, in Ireland, actor, and manager of the theatre in Dublin.] [Footnote B: Chetwood adds in a footnote: "The composition for blackening the face are ivory-black and pomatum, which is, with some pains, clean'd with fresh butter." "Oroonoko" was what we would now call a "black face" part.] But Booth was too much in earnest to be daunted by anything so trifling as the misplacing of a mask. He studied hard, despite a youthful liking for the jolly joys of Bacchus, and soon made for himself an enviable position upon the Dublin stage. For the youth had all the qualities that went toward the formation of a fine actor; he possessed keen dramatic instinct, poetic sensibility, a beautiful voice, a handsome person, and, above all, a dogged ambition. In after years, when his health began to fail and the sweets of success had, perhaps, become a trifle cloying, the tragedian often went through a part in a perfunctory manner.[A] But those early days in Ireland marked the sunrise of his genius--a time no less noble, in its freshness and promise, than the later glory of the noontide--and there was in his performance nothing but youthful ardour and devotion. [Footnote A: He (Booth) would play his best to a single man in the pit whom he recognised as a playgoer, and a judge of acting; but to an unappreciating audience he could exhibit an almost contemptuous disinclination to exert himself. On one occasion of this sort he was made painfully sensible of his mistake and a note was addressed to him from the stage-box, the purport of which was to know whether he was acting for his own diversion or in the service and for the entertainment of the public? On another occasion, with a thin house and a cold audience, he was languidly going through one of his usually grandest impersonations, namely, Pyrrhus. At his very dullest scene he started into the utmost brilliancy and effectiveness. His eye had just previously detected in the pit a gentleman, named Stanyan, the friend of Addison and Steele, and the correspondent of the Earl of Manchester. Stanyan was an accomplished man and a judicious critic. Booth played to him, with the utmost care and corresponding success. "No, no!" he exclaimed, as he passed behind the scenes, "I will not have it said at Button's that Barton Booth is losing his powers!"--DR. DORAN.] With that ardour, only whetted by his popularity in Dublin, Barton travelled to London (1701), and there offered respectful incense at the shrine of Betterton. 'Twas a shrine at which the public still worshipped; and when Roscius extended a helping hand to the kneeling postulant, and brought him before the patrons of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the success of Booth seemed assured. The latter never forgot the generosity and kindly interest of his idol, and he spoke with all the sincerity of gratitude when he once said: "When I acted the Ghost with Betterton (as Hamlet), instead of my awing him, he terrified me. But divinity hung round that man." Had he been of an egotistic mould Barton might have added, that his Ghost was considered hardly less effective than the Hamlet of the mighty Betterton. For a decade, or longer, Booth went on this prosperous way, gaining in favour with the theatre-goers, and increasing his artistic resources. During this period he married the daughter of a baronet, and she lived for six years, but not long enough to witness his triumphs in the "Distressed Mother" and the classic "Cato." As Chetwood well said, "Pyrrhus in the 'Distressed Mother' placed him in the seat of Tragedy, and Cato fixed him there." We have already read something of the "Distressed Mother," and of the production of Addison's tragedy, and so there is no need to linger over the episodes which caused Booth to be acclaimed Betterton's logical successor. We remember, likewise, that the original Cato was admitted to a share in the management of Drury Lane, as a result of the increased fame accruing from his impersonation of the grand old Roman. It was an incident, into which politics entered not a little; there were wires to pull, and Lord Bolingbroke had his hand in the theatrical pie. "To reward his merit," chronicles Chetwood, "he (Booth) was joined in the patent, tho' great interest was made against him by the other patentees, who, to prevent his soliciting his patrons at Court, then at Windsor, gave out plays every night, where Mr. Booth had a principal part. Notwithstanding this step, he had a chariot and six of a nobleman's waiting for him at the end of every play, that whipt him the twenty miles in three hours, and brought him back to the business of the theatre the next night." "He told me," adds the writer, "not one nobleman in the Kingdom had so many sets of horses at command as he had at that time, having no less than eight; the first set carrying him to Hounslow from London, ten miles; and the next set, ready waiting with another chariot to carry him to Windsor." Evidently the inspired Barton, with all his high-flown talent, had an eye for the main chance. In this respect he resembled one greater than he--David Garrick. Like Garrick, too, the enterprising Booth had his Peg Woffington, in the pretty person of Susan Mountford, a daughter of the great Mistress Verbruggen. He never placed a wedding-ring upon a finger of this young woman, but he gave her his protection after the death of the baronet's daughter, and continued to do so until the fragile creature ran off with a craven fellow named Minshull. This Minshull made away with over £3000, the sum of Susan's savings,[A] and the erring woman, alike false to her virtue and the destroyer of that virtue, ended her darkening days amid the clouds of insanity. [Footnote A: In the year 1714, they (Booth and Susan) bought several tickets in the State Lottery, and agreed to share equally whatever fortune might ensue. Booth gained nothing; the lady won a prize of 5000 pounds, and kept it. His friends counselled him to claim half the sum, but he laughingly remarked that there had never been any but a verbal agreement on the matter; and since the result had been fortunate for his friend, she should enjoy it all.--Dr. DORAN.] The picture is far prettier with Hester Santlow leaping into the affections of the actor, and finally marrying him according to the law of the land. She loved the great man tenderly, ministered to his wants with a wifely devotion which would hardly suit the "New Woman," and when he was wont to eat too much (for he had given up the flowing bowl[A] and must cultivate some other species of gluttony), the ex-dancer would have the dinner-table removed. [Footnote A: Booth told Cibber that he "had been for sometime too frank a lover of the bottle; but having had the happiness to observe into what contempt and distress Powel had plung'd himself by the same vice, he was so struck with the terror of his example, that he fix'd a resolution (which from that time to the end of his days he strictly observed) of utterly reforming it." And Colley adds; "An uncommon act of philosophy in a young man!"] Strange, is it not, that the wife who could be so full of constancy, and all the other virtues, previously lived a notoriously loose existence? For it had been the fate of Santlow to stand continually in the glare of that fierce light which beats upon the stage, and never, perhaps, did she give the town more to talk about than by her celebrated _rencontre_ with Captain Montague. The story affords a glimpse of the free-and-easy manners which sometimes prevailed in theatres, and will bear the telling, ere we bid farewell to its fair heroine. "About the year 1717," writes Cibber, "a young actress of a desirable person (Santlow), sitting in an upper box at the Opera, a military gentleman (Montague) thought this a proper opportunity to secure a little conversation with her, the particulars of which were probably no more worth repeating than it seems the Damoiselle then thought them worth listening to; for, notwithstanding the fine things he said to her, she rather chose to give the Musick the preference of her attention. This indifference was so offensive to his high heart, that he began to change the Tender into the Terrible, and, in short, proceeded at last to treat her in a style too grossly insulting for the meanest female ear to endur unresented. Upon which, being beaten too far out of her discretion, she turn'd hastily upon him with an angry look and a reply which seem'd to set his merit in so low a regard, that he thought himself oblig'd in honour to take his time to resent it. "This was the full extent of her crime, which his glory delay'd no longer to punish than 'till the next time she was to appear upon the stage. There, in one of her best parts, wherein she drew a favourable regard and approbation from the audience, he, dispensing with the respect which some people think due to a polite assembly, began to interrupt her performance with such loud and various notes of mockery, as other young men of honour in the same place had sometimes made themselves undauntedly merry with. Thus, deaf to all murmurs or entreaties of those about him, he pursued his point, even to throwing near her such trash as no person can be suppos'd to carry about him unless to use on so particular an occasion. "A gentlemen then behind the scenes,[A] being shock'd at his unmanly behaviour, was warm enough to say, that no man but a fool or a bully could be capable of insulting an audience or a woman in so monstrous a manner. The former valiant gentleman, to whose ear the words were soon brought by his spies, whom he had plac'd behind the scenes to observe how the action was taken there, came immediately from the pit in a heat, and demanded to know of the author of those words if he was the person that spoke them? to which he calmly reply'd, that though he had never seen him before, yet since he seem'd so earnest to be satisfy'd, he would do him the favour to own, that indeed the words were his, and that they would be the last words he should chuse to deny whoever they might fall upon. [Footnote A: Secretary Craggs.] "To conclude, their dispute was ended the next morning in Hyde Park, where the determin'd combatant who first ask'd for satisfaction was obliged afterwards to ask his life too; whether he mended it or not, I have not yet heard; but his antagonist in a few years afterwards died in one of the principal posts of the Government." There were no more such scenes after Santlow became Mrs. Barton Booth. Everything was respectability, and the voice of the turtle-dove appears to have been heard in the home of the happy couple. Yea, the husband waxed ecstatic after several years of married bliss, once more tuned his lyre, and burst forth into verses, wherein he set forth, among other things: "Happy the hour when first our souls were joined! The social virtues and the cheerful mind Have ever crowned our days, beguiled our pain; Strangers to discord and her clamorous train," &c. The lines suggest placidity of existence, and placid, indeed, was the married life of Booth, barring his moments of ill-health. When his career is compared to that of certain other players, it stands out in rather pleasant relief, by virtue of its even tenor and prosperity. It was free from the vicissitudes which have waylaid the paths of equally great artists, and the current of his genius ran on without a ripple, save that of sickness. There was one direction, however, wherein Booth found variety and excitement, and that was in the wondrous diversity of parts which he assumed. In tragedy, his work took a wide range, going all the way from Laertes to Othello, while he sallied forth now and again into the field of comedy, and emerged therefrom with honour. He did not, to be sure, distinguish himself so brilliantly as a comedian as he did in tragic garb, yet he wooed Thalia in a genteel way which seldom failed to please. Nay, it is chronicled that he impersonated capon-lined Falstaff in a fashion that amused even phlegmatic Queen Anne. But the actor of long ago thought nothing of such catholicity in art. He often worked like a horse, that he might later play like a god.[A] [Footnote A: To show the versatility of Booth it need only be mentioned that his parts (among many not herein named) included the Ghost, Laertes, Horatio and the Prince in "Hamlet," Dick in "The Confederacy," Captain Worthy in the "Fair Quaker of Deal," Pyrrhus, Cato, Young Bevil in the "Conscious Lovers," Tamerlane, Oronooko, Jaffier, Othello, King Lear, Hotspur, Wildair, Sir Charles Easy, Falstaff, Cassio, Macbeth, Banquo, Lennox, Henry VIII. and Cinna. Few living players can match such a repertoire.] Perhaps the most annoying disturbance which ever came into Booth's theatrical life, and not a great disturbance at that, was the jealousy which existed between Wilks and himself. Wilks was impetuous, bad tempered and crotchety, and it is possible that the envy was, originally, rather of his own making. But be that as it may, Booth suffered many a pang from the successes of the more dashing Wilks, and the latter never lost an opportunity of thwarting his associate. We remember how the commonplace Mills was pushed forward, with the idea of hiding the genius of Barton, and Cibber refers more than once to this short-sighted policy of Wilks. "And yet, again," he writes, "Booth himself, when he came to be a manager, would sometimes suffer his judgment to be blinded by his inclination to actors whom the town seem'd to have but an indifferent opinion of." And thereupon Colley asks "another of his old questions"--viz., "Have we never seen the same passions govern a Court! How many white staffs and great places do we find, in our histories, have been laid at the feet of a monarch, because they chose not to give way to a rival in power, or hold a second place in his favour? How many Whigs and Tories have changed their parties, when their good or bad pretentions have met with a check to their higher preferment?" The fact is that there was never any artistic sympathy between the two distinguished actors. Booth could play comedy, and play it quite well, but his soul was all for tragedy. On the other hand, while Wilks knew how to tread the sombre paths of high drama (he even made a creditable Hamlet), the comedian looked with more regard upon his own peculiar vein of work, the impersonation of the graceful, the genteel, and the elegantly picturesque. In one way the latter proved more generous than his rival. "It might be imagin'd," runs on Cibber, "from the difference of their natural tempers, that Wilks should have been more blind to the excellencies of Booth than Booth was to those of Wilks; but it was not so. Wilks would sometimes commend Booth to me; but when Wilks excell'd the other was silent."[A] [Footnote A: During Booth's inability to act ...Wilks was called upon to play two of his parts: Jaffier and Lord Hastings in "Jane Shore." Booth was, at times, in all other respects except his power to go on the stage, in good health, and went among the players for his amusement. His curiosity drew him to the playhouse on the nights when Wilks acted these characters, in which himself had appeared with uncommon lustre. All the world admired Wilks except his brother manager: amidst the repeated bursts of applause which he extorted, Booth alone continued silent.--DAVIES.] But all these petty heartburnings and jealousies were buried in the grave of Wilks. That incomparable player, whose sprightliness seemed to defy the grim tyrant, and who could act the lithesome youth upon the stage even though he had to hobble to his hackney-coach when the piece was ended, made his last exit in the autumn of 1732. Booth followed on the same long journey in the May of 1733, after an illness during which the great patient was dosed with crude mercury, bled, plastered, blistered, and otherwise helped onward to his death. Verily, it is a wonder that the physicians of old did not extinguish the whole human race. The still attractive Santlow (or rather Mrs. Booth) survived the tragedian, and her sorrow may have been assuaged by the remembrance that she was left the sole heir of her husband. "I have considered my circumstances," wrote Booth in his will, "and finding upon a strict examination that all I am now possessed of does not amount to two-thirds of the fortune my wife brought me on the day of our marriage, together with the yearly additions and advantages since arising from her laborious employment on the stage during twelve years past, I thought myself bound by honesty, honour, and gratitude due to her constant affection, not to give away any part of the remainder of her fortune at my death"; and with that eloquent stroke of the pen the testator cut off with nothing a sister and a brother whom he had sufficiently helped during his lifetime. Surely so noble an actor deserves an epitaph. Perhaps none could be more worthy than this estimate of the man, made by Aaron Hill: "He had learning to understand perfectly whatever it was his part to speak, and judgment to know how far it agreed or disagreed with his character. Hence arose a peculiar grace which was visible to every spectator, tho' few were at the pains of examining into the cause of their pleasure. He could soften, or slide over, with a kind of elegant negligence, the improprieties in a part he acted; while, on the contrary, he would dwell with energy upon the beauties, as if he exerted a latent spirit which had been kept back for such an occasion, that he might alarm, waken, and transport, to those places only, where the dignity of his own good sense could be supported with that of his author." If some players of to-day will take a lesson by this description, the judicious Booth need not have lived in vain. His soul, like that of the late lamented John Brown, will go marching on. CHAPTER XI THE FADING OF A STAR The life of Mistress Oldfield, like that of Barton Booth, was cast in pleasant places. Yet the lady had her little agitations, and found them, no doubt, rather an incentive to existence than otherwise. Take, for instance, the excitement surrounding the production, during the Drury Lane season of 1711-12, of Mrs. Centlivre's play, "The Perplexed Lovers." To the lovely Nance was entrusted the duty of speaking the epilogue thereto, wherein Prince Eugene (at that time on a visit to England) and the Duke of Marlborough were lauded in the true spirit of ancient flunkeyism. But the animosity which politics doth breed ran high, and the first night of the performance went by without the introduction of the eulogy. Some patriots objected to the sentiments which it contained, and the managers were cautious. As for Oldfield, she might have been cautious, too, and with reason, for she had received letters threatening her with dire pains and penalties if she spoke the offending words, but Anne stood ready to deliver them at whatsoever time the patentees might name. So when the second night of "The Perplexed Lovers" arrived, and a special licence from the Lord Chamberlain had been secured, the actress came valiantly forward and spoke the epilogue with success. Perhaps Eugene of Savoy thanked Mrs. Oldfield--let us hope that he did--and it is at least certain that after the withdrawal of the play his Highness sent Mrs. Centlivre an elaborate gold snuff-box.[A] [Footnote A: Speaking of the beau's outfit in the reign of Queen Anne, Ashton says: "His snuff-box, too, was an object of his solicitude, though, as the habit of taking snuff had but just come into vogue, there were no collections of them, and no beau had ever dreamed of criticizing a box, as did Lord Petersham, as, 'a nice Summer box.' ... Those of the middle classes were chiefly of silver, or tortoise-shell, or mother-of-pearl; sometimes of 'aggat' or with a 'Moco Stone' in the lid. A beau would sometimes either have a looking-glass, or the portrait of a lady inside the lid."] And who was the gratified Centlivre? A masculine looking female with a talent for play-writing, a tendency to appear in men's parts, and last, but far from least, a nice little wen adorning her left eyelid. She possessed other characteristics too, but those herein mentioned are the only ones which stand out clearly after the lapse of nearly two centuries. This doughty woman had been married twice before she went to Windsor, where she once more entered into the matrimonial noose, or rather, again inveigled an unfortunate into that treacherous device. The visit to the seat of Royalty was signalised by her acting of Alexander the Great, but from the atmosphere of Kings and Queens she passed without a murmur to the humbler air of a kitchen. In other words, she married a Mr. Centlivre, chief cook to her well-fed Majesty Queen Anne; and the mean-livered Pope would refer to her, later on, as "the cook's wife in Buckingham Court." She might, indeed, be a cook's wife, but she knew how to write with vivacity, and produced many an entertaining play. Among them were "A Bold Stroke for a Wife" and "The Wonder," that comedy which Garrick would so relish in after years. The nature of the aforesaid "Wonder" was explained in the satirical reflection of the secondary title, "A Woman Keeps a Secret!" And Mrs. Centlivre had this to say in her epilogue, upon the mooted question of feminine loquacity: "Keep a secret, says a beau, And sneers at some ill-natured wit below; But faith, if we should tell but half we know, There's many a spruce young fellow in this place, Wou'd never presume to show his face; Women are not so weak, what e'er men prate; How many tip-top beaux have had the fate, T'enjoy from mama's secrets their estate! Who, if her early folly had made known, Had rid behind the coach that's now their own." Mrs. Oldfield received fresh cause for nervousness, had she been of a timid temperament, when, some years later, during the season of 1717-18, Cibber's political play of "The Non-Juror" was brought out. The comedy was a blow aimed at the Jacobites and the Pretender, who had met with such disastrous treatment in the rebellion of 1715, and was a skilfully-wrought laudation of the Hanoverian dynasty.[A] [Footnote A: The piece was published and dedicated to George I., who acknowledged his sense of the honour by paying to Cibber the sum of two hundred guineas. That the good old prejudice against the stage was still in full force, despite the march of liberal ideas, is clearly shown in the author's address to the King: "Your comedians, Sir, are an unhappy society, whom some severe heads think wholly useless, and others, dangerous to the young and innocent. This comedy is, therefore, an attempt to remove that prejudice, and to show what honest and laudable uses may be made of the theatre, when its performances keep close to the true purposes of its institution." Cibber also referred to himself as "the lowest of your subjects from the theatre," and thus mirrored the servility of the golden Georgian era.] "About this time," writes Cibber, telling of the play's presentation, "Jacobitism had lately exerted itself by the most unprovoked rebellion that our histories have handed down to us since the Norman Conquest; I therefore thought that to set the authors and principles of that desperate folly in a fair light, by allowing the mistaken consciences of some their best excuse, and by making the artful Pretenders to Conscience as ridiculous as they were ungratefully wicked, was a subject fit for the honest satire of comedy, and what might, if it succeeded, do honour to the stage by showing the valuable use of it. And considering what numbers at that time might come to it as prejudiced spectators, it may be allow'd that the undertaking was not less hazardous than laudable." And hazardous the project certainly seemed; for, while the uprising in the interests of the Pretender had been ostensibly crushed, the spirit of "divine right" was as strong as ever; there were many worthy gentlemen who drank secret bumpers to the King--"over the water"--and the Hanoverian throne had as yet a precarious lodgment on English soil. It was expected, therefore, that these malcontents would have anything but an appetite for the theatrical feast set before them in the shape of the "Non-Juror," and would prove none the less disgusted because the play happened to be an adaptation of Molière's "Tartuffe." As the latter comedy depicts a self-indulgent, crawling hypocrite of the worst type, and is an eloquent sermon against sham, it may be imagined that the Jacobites were not over enthusiastic when they learned that the moral of "Tartuffe" was to be applied to them.[A] [Footnote A: Tartuffe, according to French tradition, is a caricature of the famous Père la Chaise (Confessor to Louis Quatorze), who had a weakness for the pleasures of the table, including truffles (tartuffes). After Cibber's day, Molière's play was again adapted into English, under the title of "The Hypocrite."] "Upon the hypocrisy of the French character," explains Cibber (who probably looked upon France, Papacy, and the Pretender as a threefold combination of sin), "I engrafted a stronger wickedness, that of an English Popish priest lurking under the doctrine of our own Church to raise his fortune upon the ruin of a worthy gentleman, whom his dissembled sanctity had seduc'd into the treasonable cause of a Roman Catholick outlaw. How this design, in the play, was executed, I refer to the readers of it; it cannot be mended by any critical remarks I can make in its favour. Let it speak for itself." The "Non-juror" did speak for itself, too, and that in decided terms.[A] The production entailed the scorn of the disaffected, and made for Cibber some lasting enemies, but the friends of government were strong, Cibber was lauded for his loyalty, and the comedy achieved a triumph. The vivacity of Oldfield's acting, as Maria, delighted all beholders, and it was further agreed that the performance was well given throughout. In the cast were Booth, Mills, Wilks, Cibber, Mrs. Porter, Mrs. Oldfield, and Walker. The Walker here mentioned was at that time a very young man, not over seventeen or eighteen years of age, and made his first hit in the "Non-juror." When the "Beggars' Opera" was subsequently brought out, the mighty Quin refused to play the highwayman, Macheath, and Walker willingly took the part and made therein the reputation of his life. But success turned his unsteady head. "He follow'd Bacchus too ardently, insomuch that his credit was often drown'd upon the stage, and, by degrees, almost render'd him useless." Ungrammatical, but to the point, Mr. Chetwood. [Footnote A: The success surpassed even expectation. It raised against Cibber a phalanx of implacable foes--foes who howled at everything of which he was afterwards the author; but it gained for him his advancement to the poet-laureateship, and an estimation which caused some people to place him, for usefulness to the cause of true religion, on an equality with the author of "The Whole Duty of Man."--DR. DORAN.] This Walker was a genius in a small fashion. He possessed an expressive face and manly figure, with a native buoyancy and humour which stood him in good stead in the character of Macheath, while he had the further gift of dominating a tragic scene with an assumption of tyrannic fire which must have been greatly admired by the theatre-goers of his time. He could not sing, to be sure, when he graced the "Beggars' Opera," but the audiences took the will for the deed, applauded his gaiety of action, and quickly pardoned his lyric short-comings. We are equally lenient nowadays to many a comic-opera comedian, so called. Chetwood tells us that Walker was the supposed author of two pieces, "The Quakers' Opera," and a tragedy styled "The Fate of Villainy." The latter, it appears, "he brought to Ireland in the year 1744, and prevailed on the proprietors (of the Dublin theatre) to act it, under the title of 'Love and Loyalty.' The second night was given out for his benefit; but not being able to pay in half the charge of the common expences, the doors were order'd to be kept shut." "But, I remember," laconically adds Chetwood, "few people came to ask the reason. However, I fear this disappointment hasten'd his death; for he survived it but three days; dying in the 44th year of his age, a martyr to what often stole from him a good understanding." "He who delights in drinking out of season, Takes wond'rous pains to drown his manly reason." Poor Walker! He is not the only actor who has perished from a mixture of wine and injured vanity. To return to the success of the "Non-juror," Cibber writes: "All the reason I had to think it no bad performance was, that it was acted eighteen days running, and that the party that were hurt by it (as I have been told) have not been the smallest number of my back friends ever since. But happy was it for this play that the very subject was its protection; a few smiles of silent contempt were the utmost disgrace that on the first day of its appearance it was thought safe to throw upon it; as the satire was chiefly employ'd on the enemies of the Government, they were not so hardy as to own themselves such by any higher disapprobation or resentment."[A] [Footnote A: The production of the "Non-juror" added Pope to the list of Cibber's enemies, the great poet's father having been a Non-juror.] Yet Cibber's enemies never failed to make things unpleasant for him if they could do so without running too great a risk. There was Nathaniel Mist, for instance, who published a Jacobite paper called _Mist's Weekly Journal_. This vindictive gentleman, whose political heresies once brought him to the pillory and a prison, began a systematic attack upon the actor-manager, and kept up the warfare for fifteen years. Once, when Colley was ill of a fever, Mist made up his journalistic mind that his enemy must have the good taste to depart the pleasures of this life. So he inserted the following paragraph in his paper: "Yesterday died Mr. Colley Cibber, late Comedian of the Theatre Royal, notorious for writing the 'Non-juror.'" The very day that this obituary appeared Cibber crawled out of the house, sick-faced but convalescent, and read the notice with keen interest. Whether he was amused thereat, or dubbed the joke a poor one, is a matter which he does not record, but he tells us that he "saw no use in being thought to be thoroughly dead before his time," and "therefore had a mind to see whether the town cared to have him alive again." "So the play of the 'Orphan' being to be acted that day, I quietly stole myself into the part of the Chaplain, which I had not been seen in for many years before. The surprise of the audience at my unexpected appearance on the very day I had been dead in the news, and the paleness of my looks, seem'd to make it a doubt whether I was not the ghost of my real self departed. But when I spoke, their wonder eas'd itself by an applause; which convinc'd me they were then satisfied that my friend Mist had told a fib of me. Now, if simply to have shown myself in broad life, and about my business, after he had notoriously reported me dead, can be called a reply, it was the only one which his paper while alive ever drew from me." The Jacobites could not interfere with the triumph of the "Non-juror," but they were shrewd enough to bide their time. That time came, as they thought, in 1728, when there was unfolded at Drury Lane a comedy which became famous under the title of "The Provoked Husband." The rough draft of the play was the work of Vanbrugh, now dead, but the dialogue and situations had been elaborated by Cibber. Here was a chance, therefore, to damn the latter writer, and accordingly the malcontents repaired to the theatre, hissed the performance roundly, and then went home with the comfortable reflection that they had gotten their revenge. Their revenge, however, was shortlived, for the general public liked the comedy, and soon flocked to its rescue. "On the first day of 'The Provok'd Husband,'" says the Poet Laureate, "ten years after the 'Non-juror' had appear'd, a powerful party, not having the fear of publick offence or private injury before their eyes, appeared most impetuously concerned for the demolition of it; in which they so far succeeded that for some time I gave it up for lost; and to follow their blows, in the publick papers of the next day it was attack'd and triumph'd over as a dead and damn'd piece: a swinging criticism was made upon it in general invective terms, for they disdain'd to trouble the world with particulars; their sentence, it seems, was proof enough of its deserving the fate it had met with. But this damn'd play was, notwithstanding, acted twenty-eight nights together, and left off at a receipt of upwards of a hundred and forty pounds; which happened to be more than in fifty years before could be then said of any one play whatsoever." The play was saved, and no one contributed more importantly to that result than did Mistress Oldfield. Her acting as the heroine, Lady Townley, was pronounced superb, and though she had now drifted into middle-age--was she not over forty?--Nance still seemed, on the stage at least, the incarnation of youth and grace. Is there not a certain English actress, now living (one, by-the-way, who plays Nance Oldfield and suggests her as well) who defies the inroads of time with equal carelessness.[A] [Footnote A: In the wearing of her person she (Oldfield) was particularly fortunate; her figure was always improving to her thirty-sixth year, but her excellence in acting was never at a stand. And Lady Townley, one of her last new parts, was a proof that she was still able to do more, if more could have been done for her.--GENEST.] Lady Townley is nothing more or less than a glorified, matured edition of Lady Betty Modish, and, therefore, a very charming woman. Charming, at least, on the boards of a theatre, if not upon the floor of a real drawing-room. For she has a love of pleasure which can hardly be called domestic, and her unfortunate husband, who would see more of her, is tempted to ask, in the very first scene of the play: "Why did I marry?" "While she admits no lover," Lord Townley soliloquises [for my lady is at least virtuous] "she thinks it a greater merit still, in her chastity, not to care for her husband; and while she herself is solacing in one continual round of cards and good company, he, poor wretch, is left at large to take care of his own contentment. 'Tis time, indeed, some care were taken, and speedily there shall be. Yet let me not be rash. Perhaps this disappointment of my heart may make me too impatient; and some tempers, when reproach'd, grow more untractable." And when Lady Townley, all graces and ribbons and laces, enters on the scene my lord meekly asks: * * * * * "Going out so soon after dinner, madam?" "Lady T. Lord, my Lord, what can I possibly do at home? "Lord T. What does my sister, Lady Grace, do at home? "Lady T. Why, that is to me amazing! Have you ever any pleasure at home? "Lord T. It might be in your power, madam, I confess, to make it a little more comfortable to me. "Lady T. Comfortable! and so, my good lord, you would really have a woman of my rank and spirit, stay at home to comfort her husband! Lord! what notions of life some men have! "Lord T. Don't you think, madam, some ladies notions are full as extravagant?" "Lady T. Yes, my lord, when tame doves live cooped within the pen of your precepts, I do think 'em prodigious indeed! "Lord T. And when they fly wild about this town, madam, pray what must the world think of 'em then? "Lady T. Oh! this world is not so ill bred as to quarrel with any woman for liking it. "Lord T. Nor am I, madam, a husband so well bred as to bear my wife's being so fond of it; in short, the life you lead, madam-- "Lady T. Is, to me, the pleasantest life in the world. "Lord T. I should not dispute your taste, madam, if a woman had a right to please nobody but herself. "Lady T. Why, whom would you have her please? "Lord T. Sometimes her husband. "Lady T. And don't you think a husband under the same obligation? "Lord T. Certainly. "Lady T. Why then we are agreed, my lord. For if I never go abroad till I am weary of being at home--which you know is the case--is it not equally reasonable, not to come home till one's a weary of being abroad? "Lord T. If this be your rule of life, madam, 'tis time to ask you one serious question. "Lady T. Don't let it be long acoming then, for I am in haste. "Lord T. Madam, when I am serious, I expect a serious answer. "Lady T. Before I know the question? [Here we can imagine Wilks, who played Lord Townley, waxing exceeding wroth at my lady.] "Lord T. Pshah--have I power, madam, to make you serious by intreaty? "Lady T. You have. "Lord T. And you promise to answer me sincerely. "Lady T. Sincerely. "Lord T. Now then recollect your thoughts, and tell me seriously why you married me? "Lady T. You insist upon truth, you say? "Lord T. I think I have a right to it. "Lady T. Why then, my lord, to give you at once a proof of my obedience and sincerity--I think--I married--to take off that restraint that lay upon my pleasures, while I was a single woman. "Lord T. How, madam, is any woman under less restraint after marriage than before it? "Lady T. O my lord! my lord! they are quite different creatures! Wives have infinite liberties in life that would be terrible in an unmarried woman to take. "Lord T. Name one. "Lady T. Fifty, if you please. To begin then, in the morning--a married women may have men at her toilet, invite them to dinner, appoint them a party in a stage box at the play; engross the conversation there, call 'em by their Christian names; talk louder than the players;--from thence jaunt into the city--take a frolicksome supper at an India house--perhaps, in her _gaieté de coeur_, toast a pretty fellow--then clatter again to this end of the town, break with the morning into an assembly, crowd to the hazard table, throw a familiar levant upon some sharp lurching man of quality, and if he demands his money, turn it off with a loud laugh, and cry--you'll owe it to him, to vex him! ha! ha! "Lord T. [_Aside_]. Prodigious!" It is related that so magnificently did Oldfield describe the pleasures of a woman of fashion that the audience echoed, with a different meaning, Lord Townley's comment, and showered her with plaudits. "Prodigious," indeed, must have been her acting. Nance was even more captivating, as the comedy progressed, and nowhere did she shine more brilliantly, it may be supposed, than in the following scene: "Lady Townley. Well! look you, my lord; I can bear it no longer! Nothing still but about my faults, my faults! An agreeable subject truly! "Lord T. Why, madam, if you won't hear of them, how can I ever hope to see you mend them? "Lady T. Why, I don't intend to mend them--I can't mend them--you know I have try'd to do it an hundred times, and--it hurts me so--I can't bear it! "Lord T. And I, madam, can't bear this daily licentious abuse of your time and character. "Lady T. Abuse! astonishing! when the universe knows, I am never better company than when I am doing what I have a mind to! But to see this world! that men can never get over that silly spirit of contradiction--why, but last Thursday, now--there you wisely amended one of my faults, as you call them--you insisted upon my not going to the masquerade--and pray, what was the consequence? Was not I as cross as the Devil, all the night after? Was not I forc'd to get company at home? And was it not almost three o'clock in the morning before I was able to come to myself again? And then the fault is not mended neither--for next time I shall only have twice the inclination to go: so that all this mending and mending, you see, is but darning an old ruffle, to make it worse than it was before. "Lord T. Well, the manner of women's living, of late, is insupportable, and one way or other-- "Lady T. It's to be mended, I suppose! Why, so it may, but then, my dear lord, you must give one time--and when things are at worst, you know, they may mend themselves! Ha! ha! "Lord T. Madam, I am not in a humour, now, to trifle. "Lady T. Why, then, my lord, one word of fair argument--to talk with you, your own way now--you complain of my late hours, and I of your early ones--so far we are even, you'll allow--but pray which gives us the best figure, in the eye of the polite world, my active, spirited three in the morning, or your dull, drowsy, eleven at night? Now, I think, one has the air of a woman of quality, and t'other of a plodding mechanic, that goes to bed betimes, that he may rise early, to open his shop--faugh! "LORD T. Fy, fy, madam! is this your way of reasoning? 'Tis time to wake you then. 'Tis not your ill hours alone that disturb me, but as often the ill company that occasion those ill hours. "LADY T. Sure I don't understand you now, my lord; what ill company do I keep? "LORD T. Why, at best, women that lose their money, and men that win it! or, perhaps, men that are voluntary bubbles at one game, in hopes a lady will give them fair play at another.[A] Then that unavoidable mixture with known rakes, conceal'd thieves, and sharpers in embroidery--or what, to me, is still more shocking, that herd of familiar chattering, crop-ear'd coxcombs, who are so often like monkeys, there would be no knowing them asunder, but that their tails hang from their head, and the monkey's grows where it should do. [Footnote A: Women gambled as passionately as did the men in the early part of the eighteenth century. Ashton quotes the following from the "Gaming Lady": "She's a profuse lady, tho' of a miserly temper, whose covetous disposition is the very cause of her extravagancy; for the desire of success wheedles her ladyship to play, and the incident charges and disappointments that attend it make her as expensive to her husband as his coach and six horses. When an unfortunate night has happen'd to empty her cabinet, she has many shifts to replenish her pockets. Her jewels are carry'd privately into Lombard street, and fortune is to be tempted the next night with another sum, borrowed of my lady's goldsmith at the extortion of a pawnbroker; and if that fails, then she sells off her wardrobe, to the great grief of her maids; stretches her credit amongst those she deals with, or makes her waiting woman dive into the bottom of her trunk, and lug out her green net purse full of old Jacobuses, in hopes to recover her losses by a turn of fortune, that she may conceal her bad luck from the knowledge of her husband."] "Lady T. And a husband must give eminent proof of his sense that thinks their powder puffs dangerous! "Lord T. Their being fools, madam, is not always the husband's security; or, if it were, fortune sometimes gives them advantages might make a thinking woman tremble. "Lady T. What do you mean? "Lord T. That women sometimes lose more than they are able to pay; and, if a creditor be a little pressing, the lady may be reduced to try if, instead of gold, the gentleman will accept of a trinket. "Lady T. My lord, you grow scurrilous; you'll make me hate you. I'll have you to know I keep company with the politest people in town, and the assemblies I frequent are full of such. "Lord T. So are the churches--now and then. "Lady T. My friends frequent them, too, as well as the assemblies. "Lord T. Yes; and would do it oftener if a groom of the chambers there were allowed to furnish cards to the company. "Lady T. I see what you drive at all this while. You would lay an imputation on my fame to cover your own avarice! I might take any pleasures, I find, that were not expensive. "Lord T. Have a care, madam; don't let me think you only value your chastity to make me reproachable for not indulging you in everything else that's vicious. I, madam, have a reputation, too, to guard that's dear to me as yours. The follies of an ungoverned wife may make the wisest man uneasy; but 'tis his own fault if ever they make him contemptible. "Lady T. My lord, you make a woman mad! "Lord T. You'd make a man a fool. "Lady T. If heaven has made you otherwise, that won't be in my power. "Lord T. Whatever may be in your inclination, madam, I'll prevent you making me a beggar, at least. "Lady T. A beggar! Croesus, I'm out of patience. I won't come home till four to-morrow morning. "Lord T. That may be, madam; but I'll order the doors to be locked at twelve. "Lady T. Then I won't come home till to-morrow night. "Lord T. Then, madam, you shall never come home again." [_Exit_ Lord Townley. * * * * * In the end, of course, Lady Townley is converted to the pleasures of domesticity, and ends the comedy by saying: "So visible the bliss, so plain the way, How was it possible my sense could stray? But now, a convert to this truth I come, That married happiness is never found from home." Perhaps when Oldfield delivered these virtuous lines, she thought to herself that happiness, even of the unmarried kind, was never very far away from home. But she forgot sentiment when she came back to give the breezy epilogue: "Methinks I hear some powder'd critics say Damn it, this wife reform'd has spoil'd the play! The coxcombs should have drawn her more in fashion, Have gratify'd her softer inclination, Have tipt her a gallant, and clinch'd the provocation. But there our bard stops short: for 'twere uncivil T'have made a modern belle all o'er a devil! He hop'd in honor of the sex, the age Would bear one mended woman--on the stage." Continuing, after diverse moral reflections, Nance made this appeal to her hearers: "You, you then, ladies, whose unquestion'd lives Give you the foremost fame of happy wives, Protect, for its attempt, this helpless play; Nor leave it to the vulgar taste a prey; Appear the frequent champion of its cause, Direct the crowd, and give yourselves applause." "Zounds, madam," cries a beau who is ogling a woman of quality in a stage box, "they say Anne Oldfield will never see forty-two again, but I'll warrant you, madam, she looks not a day older than yourself." And the woman of quality, who is over forty, bows at the compliment, as well she may. Bellchambers records that Lady Townley was universally regarded as Oldfield's _ne plus ultra_ in acting. "She slided so gracefully into the foibles, and displayed so humorously the excesses, of a fine woman too sensible of her charms, too confident in her strength, and led away by her pleasures, that no succeeding Lady Townley arrived at her many distinguished excellencies in the character."[A] And the writer goes on to say that "by being a welcome and constant visitor to families of distinction, Mrs. Oldfield acquired a graceful carriage in representing women of high rank, and expressed their sentiments in a manner so easy, natural, and flowing, that they appeared to be of her own genuine utterance." Pray, sir, what is there so remarkable about that? Had not Anne as gentle blood as that which coursed through the veins of many a lady of rank? [Footnote A: The Lady Townleys of later years included Mrs. Spranger Barry and the imposing Mistress Yates.] But the triumphs of the first Lady Townley were fast drawing to a close; the curtain would soon be rung down for ever upon that radiant face, with its angelic smile and dancing eyes, and the stage, whether Drury Lane or mother earth would see her no more. Ill health began to follow in her once careless path, and there were times when the duties of acting seemed almost unbearable. Yet she was a brave woman, and kept a merry front to the audience, although she was obliged, on occasions, to turn away from the house, that it might not see the tears of pain flowing down her cheek. Here was a combination of comedy and tragedy, with a vengeance! Still Nance went on, delighting the town as of yore, and putting into her last original rôle, that of Sophonisba, a fire which breathed not of sickness nor failing powers. At last there came a day when she played her final part, and left Drury Lane only to be driven tenderly home to her death-bed. Think of the pathos of this last performance, this giving up of all that was most alluring in life, and let none of us poor moderns presume to analyse the heart-broken woman's feelings as she said good-bye to the dear old theatre. Anne worshipped art, and the public, in turn, worshipped her; she had acted her many parts, laughed, cried, sinned, and waxed exceeding happy--and now she was to be cast out into the darkness. Must she not have shivered when she entered her house in Lower Grosvenor Street for the last time? Poor lovable creature! There could be for her now neither lights, nor laughter, nor applause; all would be gloom and weariness to the end. During the weeks which followed, the invalid received the untiring attentions of Mistress Saunders, who once upon a time played bouncing chambermaids, but who had, for ten years past, acted as a feminine _valet de chambre_ and general factotum for Mrs. Oldfield. And if ever she played well, 'twas in thus ministering to the dying wants of one who in health had been ever helpful and generous. Pope, who hated the great comedienne in his petty, spiteful way, has immortalised the intimacy of mistress and handmaiden in these lines: "'Odious! in woolen? 'twould a saint provoke!' Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke. 'No, let a charming Chintz and Brussels lace Wrap my cold limbs and shade my lifeless face; One would not sure be frightful when one's dead, And, Betty, give this cheek a little red.'"[A] [Footnote A: Pope's Moral Essays.] These ante-mortem directions had no further reality than the imagination of the poet; but it is easy to believe that the woman who had set the fashions for the town these many years would have enough of the feminine instinct left, though Death waited without, to plan a becoming funeral garb. Woollen, forsooth! It was a beastly law which required that all the dead should be buried in that material, and Nance shuddered when she thought of it.[A] [Footnote A: The dead were then buried in woolen, which was rendered compulsory by the Acts 30 Car. II. c. 3 and 36 ejusdem c. i. The first act was entitled "an Act for the lessening the importation of linnen from beyond the seas, and the encouragement of the woolen and paper manufactures of the kingdome." It prescribed that the curate of every parish, shall keep a register to be provided at the charge of the parish, wherein to enter all burials and affidavits of persons being buried in woolen; the affidavit to be taken by any justice of the peace, mayor, or such like chief officer in the parish where the body was interred.... It imposed a fine of five pounds for every infringement, one half to go to the informer, and the other half to the poor of the parish. This Act was only repealed by 54 Geo. III. c. 108, or in the year 1815. The material used was flannel, and such interments are frequently mentioned in the literature of the time.--ASHTON.] Soon there were no more thoughts of dress, no more plaintive shudders at the iniquity of the woollen act. The eyes whose kindly light had illumined the dull soul of many a playgoer, closed for ever on the 23rd of October, 1730, and the incomparable Oldfield was no more. Surely old Sol did not shine on London that day; surely he must have mourned behind the leaden English sky for one of his fairest daughters, that child of sunshine who brightened the world by her presence, and made her exit, as she did her entrance, with a smile. After the breath had left Anne's still lovely body, Mistress Saunders dressed her in a "Brussels lace head-dress, a Holland shift, with tucker and double ruffles of the same lace, and a pair of new kid gloves." It was, no doubt, the costume which the actress had commanded, and handsome she must have looked, as many an admirer took one last glimpse of the remains prior to the interment in Westminster Abbey. All that was mortal of Oldfield lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber,[A] and then there followed an elaborate funeral, at which were present a host of great men, and the two sons of the deceased, Mr. Maynwaring and young Churchill. Were these sons less grieved when they found that their mother had left them the major part of her fortune? [Footnote A: The solemn lying in state of an English actress in the Jerusalem Chamber, the sorrow of the public over their lost favourite, and the regret of friends in noble, or humble, but virtuous homes, where Mrs. Oldfield had been ever welcome, contrast strongly with the French sentiment towards French players. It has been already said, that as long as Clairon exercised the power, when she advanced to the footlights, to make the (then standing) pit recoil several feet, by the mere magic of her eyes, the pit, who enjoyed the terror as a luxury, flung crowns to her, and wept at the thought of losing her; but Clairon infirm was Clairon forgotten, and to a decaying actor or actress a French audience is the most merciless in the world. The brightest and best of them, as with us, died in the service of the public. Monfleury, Mondory, and Bricourt died of apoplexy, brought on by excess of zeal. Molière, who fell in harness, was buried with less ceremony than some favourite dog. The charming Lecouvreur, that Oldfield of the French stage, whose beauty and intellect were the double charm which rendered theatrical France ecstatic, was hurriedly interred within a saw-pit. Bishops might be exceedingly interested in, and unepiscopally generous to living actresses of wit and beauty, but the prelates smote them with a "Maranatha!" and an "Avaunt ye!" when dead.--DR. DORAN.] Later on Savage was inspired to write that famous poem of his, unsigned though it appeared, on the virtues of the departed: "Oldfield's no more! and can the Muse forbear O'er Oldfield's grave to shed a grateful tear? Shall she, the Glory of the British Stage, Pride of her sex, and wonder of the age; Shall she, who, living, charm'd th' admiring throng, Die undistinguish'd, and not claim a song? No; feeble as it is, I'll boldly raise My willing voice, to celebrate her praise, And with her name immortalise my lays. Had but my Muse her art to touch the soul, Charm ev'ry sense, and ev'ry pow'r control, I'd paint her as she was--the form divine, Where ev'ry lovely grace united shine; A mein majestic, as the wife of Jove; An air as winning as the Queen of Love: In ev'ry feature rival charms should rise, And Cupid hold his empire in her eyes. A soul, with ev'ry elegance refin'd, By nature, and the converse of mankind: Wit, which could strike assuming folly dead; And sense, which temper'd ev'ry thing she said; Judgment, which ev'ry little fault could spy; But candour, which would pass a thousand by: Such finish'd breeding, so polite a taste, Her fancy always for the fashion pass'd; Whilst every social virtue fir'd her breast To help the needy, succour the distrest; A friend to all in misery she stood, And her chief pride was plac'd in doing good. But now, my Muse, the arduous task engage, And shew the charming figure on the stage; Describe her look, her action, voice and mein, The gay coquette, soft maid, or haughty Queen. So bright she shone, in ev'ry different part, She gain'd despotic empire o'er the heart; Knew how each various motion to control, Sooth ev'ry passion, and subdue the soul: As she, o'er gay, or sorrowful appears, She claims our mirth, or triumphs in our tears. When Cleopatra's form she chose to wear We saw the monarch's mein, the beauty's air; Charmed with the sight, her cause we all approve, And, like her lover, give up all for love: Anthony's fate, instead of Caesar's choose, And wish for her we had a world to lose. But now the gay delightful scene is o'er, And that sweet form must glad our world no more; Relentless death has stop'd the tuneful tongue, And clos'd those eyes, for all, but death, too strong, Blasted that face where ev'ry beauty bloom'd, And to Eternal Rest the graceful Mover doom'd." In writing which Savage almost justified his existence. APPENDIX THEATRICAL CLAPTRAP (_What Addison has to say about it in the "Spectator_") No. 44. FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 1711. "Tu quid ego, et populus mecum desideret, audi." HOR. ARS POET. ver. 153. "Now hear what ev'ry auditor expects." ROSCOMMON. Among the several artifices which are put in practice by the poets to fill the minds of an audience with terror, the first place is due to thunder and lightning, which are often made use of at the descending of a god, or the rising of a ghost, at the vanishing of a devil, or at the death of a tyrant. I have known a bell introduced into several tragedies with good effect; and have seen the whole assembly in a very great alarm all the while it has been ringing. But there is nothing which delights and terrifies our English theatre so much as a ghost, especially when he appears in a bloody shirt. A spectre has very often saved a play, though he has done nothing but stalked across the stage, or rose through a cleft of it, and sunk again without speaking one word. There may be a proper season for these several terrors; and when they only come in as aids and assistances to the poet, they are not only to be excused, but to be applauded. Thus the sounding of the clock in "Venice Preserved" makes the hearts of the whole audience quake, and conveys a stronger terror to the mind than it is possible for words to do. The appearance of the ghost in "Hamlet" is a masterpiece in its kind, and wrought up with all the circumstances that can create either attention or horror. The mind of the reader is wonderfully prepared for his reception by the discourses that precede it. His dumb behaviour at his first entrance strikes the imagination very strongly; but every time he enters he is still more terrifying. Who can read the speech with which young Hamlet accosts him without trembling? "_Hor_. Look, my Lord, it comes! "_Ham_. Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn'd; Bring with thee airs from heav'n, or blasts from hell; Be thy events wicked or charitable; Thou com'st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee. I'll call thee Hamlet, King, Father, Royal Dane. Oh I answer me. Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements? Why the sepulchre, Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd, Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jaws To cast thee up again? What may this mean? That thou dead corse again in complete steel Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous?" I do not therefore find fault with the artifices above mentioned, when they are introduced with skill and accompanied by proportionable sentiments and expressions in the writings. For the moving of pity our principal machine is the handkerchief; and indeed in our common tragedies we should not know very often that the persons are in distress by anything they say, if they did not from time to time apply their handkerchiefs to their eyes. Far be it from me to think of banishing this instrument of sorrow from the stage; I know a tragedy could not subsist without it: all that I would contend for is to keep it from being misapplied. In a word, I would have the actor's tongue sympathise with his eyes. A disconsolate mother, with a child in her hand, has frequently drawn compassion from the audience, and has therefore gained a place in several tragedies. A modern writer, that observed how this had took in other plays, being resolved to double the distress, and melt his audience twice as much as those before him had done, brought a princess upon the stage with a little boy in one hand and a girl in the other. This too had a very good effect. A third poet being resolved to outwrite all his predecessors, a few years ago introduced three children with great success: and, as I am informed, a young gentleman, who is fully determined to break the most obdurate hearts, has a tragedy by him where the first person that appears upon the stage is an afflicted widow in her mourning weeds, with half a dozen fatherless children attending her, like those that usually hang about the figure of Charity. Thus several incidents that are beautiful in a good writer become ridiculous by falling into the hands of a bad one. But among all our methods of moving pity or terror, there is none so absurd and barbarous, and which more exposes us to the contempt and ridicule of our neighbours, than that dreadful butchering of one another, which is very frequent upon the English stage. To delight in seeing men stabbed, poisoned, racked, or impaled is certainly the sign of a cruel temper; and as this is often practised before the British audience, several French critics, who think these are grateful spectacles to us, take occasion from them to represent us as a people who delight in blood. It is indeed very odd to see our stage strewed with carcasses in the last scenes of a tragedy; and to observe in the wardrobe of the playhouse several daggers, poniards, wheels, bowls for poison, and many other instruments of death. Murders and executions are always transacted behind the scenes in the French theatre, which in general is very agreeable to the manners of a polite and civilised people; but as there are no exceptions to this rule on the French stage, it leads them into absurdities almost as ridiculous as that which falls under our present censure. I remember in the famous play of Corneille, written upon the subject of the Horatii and Curiatii, the fierce young hero, who had overcome the Curiatii one after another (instead of being congratulated by his sister for his victory, being upbraided by her for having slain her lover), in the height of his passion and resentment kills her. If anything could extenuate so brutal an action, it would be the doing of it on a sudden, before the sentiments of nature, reason, or manhood could take place in him. However, to avoid public bloodshed, as soon as his passion is wrought to its height, he follows his sister the whole length of the stage, and forbears killing her till they are both withdrawn behind the scenes. I must confess, had he murdered her before the audience, the indecency might have been greater; but as it is, it appears very unnatural, and looks like killing in cold blood. To give my opinion upon this case, the fact ought not to have been represented, but to have been told if there was any occasion for it. It may not be unacceptable to the reader to see how Sophocles has conducted a tragedy under the like delicate circumstance. Orestes was in the same condition with Hamlet in Shakespeare, his mother having murdered his father and taken possession of his kingdom in conspiracy with her adulterer. That young prince, therefore, being determined to revenge his father's death upon those who filled his throne, conveys himself by a beautiful stratagem into his mother's apartment, with a resolution to kill her. But because such a spectacle would have been too shocking to the audience, this dreadful resolution is executed behind the scenes. The mother is heard calling to her son for mercy, and the son answering her that she showed no mercy to his father; after which she shrieks out that she is wounded, and by what follows we find that she is slain. I do not remember that in any of our plays there are speeches made behind the scenes, though there are other instances of this nature to be met with in those of the ancients: and I believe my reader will agree with me that there is something infinitely more affecting in this dreadful dialogue between the mother and her son behind the scenes than could have been in anything transacted before the audience. Orestes immediately after meets the usurper at the entrance of his palace; and by a very happy thought of the poet avoids killing him before the audience, by telling him that he should live some time in his present bitterness of soul before he would despatch him, and by ordering him to retire into that part of the palace where he had slain his father, whose murder he would revenge in the very same place where it was committed. By this means the poet observes that decency, which Horace afterwards established as a rule, of forbearing to commit parricides or unnatural murders before the audience. "Nec pueros coram populo Medea trucidet," ARS POET. ver. 185. "Let not Medea draw her murd'ring knife, And spill her children's blood upon the stage." ROSCOMMON. The French have therefore refined too much upon Horace's rule, who never designed to banish all kinds of death from the stage; but only such as had too much horror in them, and which would have a better effect upon the audience when transacted behind the scenes. I would therefore recommend to my countrymen the practice of the ancient poets, who were very sparing of their public executions, and rather chose to perform them behind the scenes, if it could be done with as great an effect upon the audience. At the same time, I must observe, that though the devoted persons of the tragedy were seldom slain before the audience, which has generally something ridiculous in it, their bodies were often produced after their death, which has always in it something melancholy or terrifying; so that the killing on the stage does not seem to have been avoided only as an indecency, but also as an improbability. "Nec pueros coram populo Medea trucidet: Aut humana palam coquat exta nefarius Atreus; Aut in avem Progne vertatur, Cadmus in anguem. Quodcunque ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi." HOR. ARS. POET. ver. 185. "Medea must not draw her murd'ring knife, Nor Atreus there his horrid feast prepare; Cadmus and Progne's metamorphoses (She to a swallow turn'd, he to a snake); And whatsoever contradicts my sense, I hate to see, and never can believe." ROSCOMMON. I have now gone through the several dramatic inventions which are made use of by the ignorant poets to supply the place of tragedy, and by the skilful to improve it; some of which I could wish entirely rejected, and the rest to be used with caution. It would be an endless task to consider comedy in the same light, and to mention the innumerable shifts that small wits put in practice to raise a laugh. Bullock in a short coat, and Norris in a long one, seldom failed of this effect.[A] In ordinary comedies a broad and a narrow brimmed hat are different characters. Sometimes the wit of a scene lies in a shoulder-belt, and sometimes in a pair of whiskers. A lover running about the stage, with his head peeping out of a barrel, was thought a very good jest in King Charles the Second's time, and invented by one of the first wits of the age.[B] But because ridicule is not so delicate as compassion, and because the objects that make us laugh are infinitely more numerous than those that make us weep, there is a much greater latitude for comic than tragic artifices, and by consequence a much greater indulgence to be allowed them. [Footnote A: Addison's comment about these two favourite comedians shows that then, as now, eccentricity in dress formed a popular species of stage humour.] [Footnote B: Sir George Etherege, in his comedy of "The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub."] COMIC EPILOGUES _(From the "Spectator")_ No. 338. FRIDAY, MARCH 28, 1712. "Nil fuit unquam Sic dispar sibi." HOR. SAT. III. 1-1-18. "Made up of nought but inconsistencies." I find the tragedy of the "Distressed Mother" is published to-day. The author of the prologue,[A] I suppose pleads an old excuse I have read somewhere, of "being dull with design;" and the gentleman who writ the epilogue[B] has, to my knowledge, so much of greater moment to value himself upon, that he will easily forgive me for publishing the exceptions made against gaiety at the end of serious entertainments in the following letter: I should be more unwilling to pardon him, than anybody, a practice which cannot have any ill consequence, but from the abilities of the person who is guilty of it. [Footnote A: Steele.] [Footnote B: Addison credited Budgell with the epilogue.] "MR. SPECTATOR,--I had the happiness the other night of sitting very near you, and your worthy friend Sir Roger, at the acting of the new tragedy, which you have in a late paper or two so justly recommended. I was highly pleased with the advantageous situation fortune had given me in placing me so near two gentlemen, from one of which I was sure to hear such reflections on the several incidents of the play as pure nature suggested; and from the other, such as flowed from the exactest art and judgment; though I must confess that my curiosity led me so much to observe the knight's reflections that I was not so well at leisure to improve myself by yours. Nature, I found, played her part in the knight pretty well, till at the last concluding lines she entirely forsook him. You must know, Sir, that it is always my custom, when I have been well entertained at a new tragedy, to make my retreat before the facetious epilogue enters; not but that those pieces are often very well writ, but having paid down my half-crown, and made a fair purchase of as much of the pleasing melancholy as the poet's art can afford me, or my own nature admit of, I am willing to carry some of it home with me; and cannot endure to be at once tricked out of all, though by the wittiest dexterity in the world. However, I kept my seat the other night, in hopes of finding my own sentiments of this matter favoured by your friend's; when, to my great surprise, I found the knight, entering with equal pleasure into both parts, and as much satisfied with Mrs. Oldfield's gaiety, as he had been before with Andromache's greatness. Whether this were no more than an effect of the knight's peculiar humanity, pleased to find at last, that, after all the tragical doings, everything was safe and well, I do not know. But for my own part, I must confess I was so dissatisfied, that I was sorry the poet had saved Andromache, and could heartily have wished that he had left her stone-dead upon the stage. For you cannot imagine, Mr. Spectator, the mischief she was reserved to do me. I found my soul, during the action, gradually worked up to the highest pitch; and felt the exalted passion which all generous minds conceive at the sight of virtue in distress. The impression, believe me, Sir, was so strong upon me, that I am persuaded, if I had been let alone in it, I could at an extremity have ventured to defend yourself and Sir Roger against half a score of the fiercest Mohocks; but the ludicrous epilogue in the close extinguished all my ardour, and made me look upon all such noble achievements as downright silly and romantic. What the rest of the audience felt, I cannot so well tell. For myself I must declare, that at the end of the play I found my soul uniform, and all of a piece; but at the end of the epilogue, it was so jumbled together and divided between jest and earnest, that, if you will forgive me an extravagant fancy, I will here set it down. I could not but fancy, if my soul had at that moment quitted my body, and descended to the poetical shades in the posture it was then in, what a strange figure it would have made among them. They would not have known what to have made of my motley spectre, half comic and half tragic, all over resembling a ridiculous face, that, at the same time, laughs on one side, and cries on the other. The only defence, I think, I have ever heard made for this, as it seems to me the most unnatural tack of the comic tail to the tragic head, is this, that the minds of the audience must be refreshed, and gentlemen and ladies not sent away to their own homes with too dismal and melancholy thoughts about them: for who knows the consequence of this? We are much obliged indeed to poets for the great tenderness they express for the safety of our persons, and heartily thank them for it. But if that be all, pray, good Sir, assure them, that we are none of us like to come to any great harm; and that, let them do their best, we shall, in all probability, live out the length of our days, and frequent the theatres more than ever. What makes me more desirous to have some reformation of this matter is, because of an ill consequence or two attending it: for a great many of our church musicians being related to the theatre, they have, in imitation of these epilogues, introduced in their farewell voluntaries, a sort of music quite foreign to the design of church-services, to the great prejudice of well-disposed people. Those fingering gentlemen should be informed, that they ought to suit their airs to the place and business; and that the musician is obliged to keep to the text as much as the preacher. For want of this, I have found by experience a great deal of mischief. For when the preacher has often, with great piety, and art enough, handled his subject, and the judicious clerk has with the utmost diligence called out two staves proper to the discourse, and I have found in myself, and in the rest of the pew, good thoughts and dispositions, they have been all in a moment dissipated by a merry jig from the organ loft. One knows not what further ill effects the epilogues I have been speaking of may in time produce: but this I am credibly informed of, that Paul Lorrain[A] has resolved upon a very sudden reformation in his tragical dramas; and that, at the next monthly performance, he designs, instead of a penitential psalm, to dismiss his audience with an excellent new ballad of his own composing. Pray, Sir, do what you can to put a stop to these growing evils, and you will very much oblige your humble servant, "PHYSIBULUS." [Footnote A: At that time ordinary of Newgate; and who, in his accounts of the convicts executed at Tyburn, generally represented them as true penitents, and dying very well.] No. 341. TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 1712. "--Revocate animos, maestumque timorem Mittite--" VIRG. AEN.I. 206. "Resume your courage, and dismiss your care." DRYDEN. Having, to oblige my correspondent Physibulus, printed his letter last Friday, in relation to the new epilogue, he cannot take it amiss, if I now publish another, which I have just received from a gentleman who does not agree with him in his sentiments upon that matter. "Sir,--I am amazed to find an epilogue attacked in your last Friday's paper, which has been so generally applauded by the town, and received such honours as were never before given to any in an English theatre. "The audience would not permit Mrs. Oldfield to go off the stage the first night till she had repeated it twice; the second night the noise of _ancora_ was as loud as before, and she was again obliged to speak it twice; the third night it was called for a second time; and, in short, contrary to all other epilogues, which are dropped after the third representation of the play, this has already been repeated nine times. "I must own I am the more surprised to find this censure, in opposition to the whole town, in a paper which has hitherto been famous for the candour of its criticisms. "I can by no means allow your melancholy correspondent, that the new epilogue is unnatural, because it is gay. If I had a mind to be learned, I could tell him that the prologue and epilogue were real parts of the ancient tragedy; but every one knows, that on the British stage, they are distinct performances by themselves, pieces entirely detached from the play, and no way essential to it. "The moment the play ends, Mrs. Oldfield is no more Andromache, but Mrs. Oldfield; and though the poet had left Andromache stone-dead upon the stage, as your ingenious correspondent phrases it, Mrs. Oldfield might still have spoke a merry epilogue. We have an instance of this in a tragedy where there is not only a death, but a martyrdom.[A] St. Catherine was there personated by Nell Gwyn; she lies stone-dead upon the stage, but, upon those gentlemen's offering to remove her body, whose business it is to carry off the slain in our English tragedies, she breaks out into that abrupt beginning of what was a very ludicrous, but at the same time thought a very good epilogue:-- "'Hold: are you mad? you damn'd confounded dog! I am to rise and speak the epilogue.' [Footnote A: "Tyrannic Love; or, the Royal Martyr." By Dryden.] "This diverting manner was always practised by Mr. Dryden, who, if he was not the best writer of tragedies in his time, was allowed by every one to have the happiest turn for a prologue or an epilogue. The epilogues to 'Cleomenes,' 'Don Sebastian,' the 'Duke of Guise,' 'Aurengezebe,' and 'Love Triumphant,' are all precedents of this nature. "I might further justify this practice by that excellent epilogue which was spoken, a few years since, after the tragedy of 'Phaedra and Hippolitus;'[A] with a great many others, in which the authors have endeavoured to make the audience merry. If they have not all succeeded so well as the writer of this, they have however shown that it was not for want of good will. [Footnote A: By Edmund Neal.] "I must further observe, that the gaiety of it may be still the more proper, as it is at the end of a French play; since every one knows that nation, who are generally esteemed to have as polite a taste as any in Europe, always close their tragic entertainments with what they call a _petite pièce_, which is purposely designed to raise mirth, and send away the audience well pleased. The same person who has supported the chief character in the tragedy, very often plays the principal part in the _petite pièce_; so that I have myself seen, at Paris, Orestes and Lubin acted the same night by the same man. "Tragi-comedy, indeed, you have yourself, in a former speculation, found fault with very justly, because it breaks the tide of the passions, while they are yet flowing; but this is nothing at all to the present case, where they have already had their full course. "As the new epilogue is written conformably to the practice of our best poets, so it is not such an one, which, as the Duke of Buckingham says in his 'Rehearsal,' might serve for any other play; but wholly rises out of the occurrences of the piece it was composed for. "The only reason your mournful correspondent gives against this facetious epilogue, as he calls it, is, that he has a mind to go home melancholy. I wish the gentleman may not be more grave than wise. For my own part, I must confess, I think it very sufficient to have the anguish of a fictitious piece remain upon me while it is representing; but I love to be sent home to bed in a good humour. If Physibulus is however resolved to be inconsolable, and not to have his tears dried up, he need only continue his old custom, and when he has had his half-crown's worth of sorrow, slink out before the epilogue begins. "It is pleasant enough to hear this tragical genius complaining of the great mischief Andromache had done him. What was that? Why, she made him laugh. The poor gentleman's sufferings put me in mind of Harlequin's case, who was tickled to death. He tells us soon after, through a small mistake of sorrow for rage, that during the whole action he was so very sorry, that he thinks he could have attacked half a score of the fiercest Mohawks in the excess of his grief. I cannot but look upon it as a happy accident, that a man who is so bloody-minded in his affliction, was diverted from this fit of outrageous melancholy. The valour of this gentleman in his distress brings to one's memory the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, who lays about him at such an unmerciful rate in an old romance. I shall readily grant him that his soul, as he himself says, would have made a very ridiculous figure, had it quitted the body and descended to the poetical shades in such an encounter. "As to his conceit of tacking a tragic head with a comic tail, in order to refresh the audience, it is such a piece of jargon, that I don't know what to make of it. "The elegant writer makes a very sudden transition from the playhouse to the church, and from thence to the gallows. "As for what relates to the church, he is of opinion that these epilogues have given occasion to those merry jigs from the organ-loft, which have dissipated those good thoughts and dispositions he has found in himself, and the rest of the pew, upon the singing of two staves culled out by the judicious and diligent clerk. "He fetches his next thought from Tyburn; and seems very apprehensive lest there should happen any innovations in the tragedies of his friend Paul Lorrain. "In the mean time, Sir, this gloomy writer, who is so mightily scandalised at a gay epilogue after a serious play, speaking of the fate of those unhappy wretches who are condemned to suffer an ignominious death by the justice of our laws, endeavours to make the reader merry on so improper an occasion by those poor burlesque expressions of tragical dramas and monthly performances.--I am, Sir, with great respect, your most obedient, most humble servant, "PHILOMEDES." ON DRAMATIC CRITICS (_Addison in the "Spectator_") No. 592. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1714. "--Studium sine divite veni." HOR. ARS POET. 409. "Art without a vein." ROSCOMMON. I look upon the playhouse as a world within itself. They have lately furnished the middle region of it with a new set of meteors, in order to give the sublime to many modern tragedies. I was there last winter at the first rehearsal of the new thunder,[A] which is much more deep and sonorous than any hitherto made use of. They have a Salmonus behind the scenes who plays it off with great success. Their lightnings are made to flash more briskly than heretofore; their clouds are also better furbelowed, and more voluminous; not to mention a violent storm locked up in a great chest, that is designed for the "Tempest." They are also provided with above a dozen showers of snow, which, as I am informed, are the plays of many unsuccessful poets artificially cut and shredded for that use. Mr. Rymer's "Edgar" is to fall in snow, at the next acting of "King Lear," in order to heighten, or rather to alleviate, the distress of that unfortunate prince; and to serve by way of decoration to a piece which that great critic has written against. [Footnote A: Mr. Dennis's new and approved method of making thunder. Dennis had contrived this thunder for the advantage of his tragedy of "Appius and Virginia"; the players highly approved of it, and it is the same that is used at the present day. Notwithstanding the effect of this thunder, however, the play was coldy received, and laid aside. Some nights after, Dennis being in the pit at the representation of "Macbeth," and hearing the thunder made use of, arose from his seat in a violent passion, exclaiming with an oath, that that was his thunder. "See (said he) how these rascals use me: they will not let my play run, and yet they steal my thunder."--"Notes on the _Spectator_."] I do not indeed wonder that the actors should be such professed enemies to those among our nation who are commonly known by the name of critics, since it is a rule among these gentlemen to fall upon a play, not because it is ill written, but because it takes. Several of them lay it down as a maxim, that whatever dramatic performance has a long run, must of necessity be good for nothing; as though the first precept in poetry were "not to please." Whether this rule holds good or not, I shall leave to the determination of those who are better judges than myself; if it does, I am sure it tends very much to the honour of those gentlemen who have established it; few of their pieces having been disgraced by a run of three days, and most of them being so exquisitely written, that the town would never give them more than one night's hearing. I have great esteem for a true critic, such as Aristotle and Longinus among the Greeks; Horace and Quintilian among the Romans; Boileau and Dacier among the French. But it is our misfortune, that some, who set up for professed critics among us, are so stupid, that they do not know how to put ten words together with elegance or common propriety; and withal so illiterate, that they have no taste of the learned languages, and therefore criticise upon old authors only at second hand. They judge of them by what others have written, and not by any notions they have of the authors themselves. The words unity, action, sentiment and diction, pronounced with an air of authority, give them a figure among unlearned readers, who are apt to believe they are very deep because they are unintelligible. The ancient critics are full of the praises of their contemporaries; they discover beauties which escaped the observation of the vulgar, and very often find out reasons for palliating and excusing such little slips and oversights as were committed in the writings of eminent authors. On the contrary, most of the smatterers in criticism, who appear among us, make it their business to vilify and depreciate every new production that gains applause, to descry imaginary blemishes, and to prove, by farfetched arguments, that what pass for beauties in any celebrated piece are faults and errors. In short, the writings of these critics, compared with those of the ancients, are like the works of the sophists compared with those of the old philosophers. Envy and cavil are the natural fruits of laziness and ignorance; which was probably the reason that in the heathen mythology Momus is said to be the son of Nox and Somnus, of darkness and sleep. Idle men, who have not been at the pains to accomplish or distinguish themselves, are very apt to detract from others; as ignorant men are very subject to decry those beauties in a celebrated work which they have not eyes to discover. Many of our sons of Momus, who dignify themselves by the name of critics, are the genuine descendants of these two illustrious ancestors. They are often led into these numerous absurdities in which they daily instruct the people, by not considering that, first, there is sometimes a greater judgment shown in deviating from the rules of art than in adhering to them; and, secondly, that there is more beauty in the works of a great genius, who is ignorant of all the rules of art, than in the works of a little genius, who not only knows but scrupulously observes them. First, we may often take notice of men who are perfectly acquainted with all the rules of good writing, and notwithstanding choose to depart from them on extraordinary occasions. I could give instances out of all the tragic writers of antiquity who have shown their judgment in this particular; and purposely receded from an established rule of the drama, when it has made way for a much higher beauty than the observation of such a rule would have been. Those who have surveyed the noblest pieces of architecture and statuary, both ancient and modern, know very well that there are frequent deviations from art in the works of the greatest masters, which have produced a much nobler effect than a more accurate and exact way of proceeding could have done. This often arises from what the Italians call the _gusto grande_ in these arts, which is what we call the sublime in writing. In the next place, our critics do not seem sensible that there is more beauty in the works of a great genius, who is ignorant of the rules of art, than in those of a little genius who knows and observes them. It is of those men of genius that Terrence speaks in opposition to the little artificial cavillers of his time: "Quorum aemulari expotat negligentiam Potius quam istorum obscuram diligentiam." AND. PROL. 20. "Whose negligence he would rather imitate, than these men's obscure diligence." A critic may have the same consolation in the ill success of his play as Dr. South tells us a physician has at the death of a patient, that he was killed _secundum artem_. Our inimitable Shakespeare is a stumbling-block to the whole tribe of these rigid critics. Who would not rather read one of his plays, where there is not a single rule of the stage observed, than any production of a modern critic where there is not one of them violated![A] Shakespeare was indeed born with all the seeds of poetry, and may be compared to the stone in Pyrrhus's ring, which, as Pliny tells us, had the figure of Apollo and the nine Muses in the veins of it, produced by the spontaneous hand of Nature without any help from art. [Footnote A: With all his fondness for classic models, Addison breaks away from conventionality of form in this essay, and pays his tribute to the genius of Shakespeare. But critical Joe could never forget the bard's so-called "faults" of construction.] THEATRICAL PROPERTY (_Steele in "The Tatler," No. 42_) It is now twelve of the clock at noon, and no mail come in; therefore I am not without hopes that the town will allow me the liberty which my brother news-writers take in giving them what may be for information in another kind, and indulge me in doing an act of friendship, by publishing the following account of goods and moveables. This is to give notice, that a magnificent palace, with great variety of gardens, statues, and water works, may be bought cheap in Drury-lane; where there are likewise several castles, to be disposed of, very delightfully situated; as also groves, woods, forests, fountains, and country-seats, with very pleasant prospects on all sides of them; being the moveables of Christopher Rich, Esquire,[A] who is breaking up house-keeping, and has many curious pieces of furniture to dispose of, which may be seen between the hours of six and ten in the evening. [Footnote A: This essay was written (July, 1709) at the time that Drury Lane was closed, by order of the Lord Chamberlain.] THE INVENTORY. Spirits of right Nantz brandy, for lambent flames and apparitions. Three bottles and a half of lightning. One shower of snow in the whitest French paper. Two showers of a browner sort. A sea, consisting of a dozen large waves; the tenth bigger than ordinary, and a little damaged. A dozen and a half of clouds, trimmed with black, and well conditioned. A rainbow, a little faded. A set of clouds after the French mode, streaked with lightning and furbelowed. A new moon, something decayed. A pint of the finest Spanish wash, being all that is left of two hogsheads sent over last winter. A coach very finely gilt, and little used, with a pair of dragons, to be sold cheap. A setting-sun, a pennyworth. An imperial mantle, made for Cyrus the Great, and worn by Julius Caesar, Bajazet, King Harry the Eighth, and Signor Valentini. A basket-hilted sword, very convenient to carry milk in. Roxana's night-gown. Othello's handkerchief. The imperial robes of Xerxes, never worn but once. A wild boar killed by Mrs. Tofts[A] and Dioclesian. [Footnote A: A favourite singer of the day.] A serpent to sting Cleopatra. A mustard-bowl to make thunder with. Another of a bigger sort, by Mr. D----'s[A] directions, little used. [Footnote A: John Dennis, the critic.] Six elbow-chairs, very expert in country dances, with six flower-pots for their partners. The whiskers of a Turkish Pasha. The complexion of a murderer in a band-box; consisting of a large piece of burnt cork, and a coal-black peruke. A suit of clothes for a ghost, viz., a bloody shirt, a doublet curiously pinked, and a coat with three great eyelet-holes upon the breast. A bale of red Spanish wool. Modern plots, commonly known by the name of trapdoors, ladders of ropes, vizard-masques, and tables with broad carpets over them. Three oak-cudgels, with one of crab-tree; all bought for the use of Mr. Pinkethman.[A] [Footnote A: The comedian.] Materials for dancing; as masques, castanets, and a ladder of ten rounds. Aurengezebe's scymitar, made by Will Brown in Piccadilly. A plume of feathers, never used but by Oedipus and the Earl of Essex. There are also swords, halbards, sheep-hooks, cardinals' hats, turbans, drums, gallipots, a gibbet, a cradle, a rack, a cart-wheel, an altar, an helmet, a back-piece, a breast-plate, a bell, a tub, and a jointed baby. ACTORS AND AUDIENCE. (_From Cibber's "Apology_") Among our many necessary reformations, what not a little preserved to us the regard of our auditors was the decency of our clear stage, from whence we had now for many years shut out those idle gentlemen who seemed more delighted to be pretty objects themselves than capable of any pleasure from the play; who took their daily stands where they might best elbow the actor, and come in for their share of the auditor's attention. In many a laboured scene of the wannest humour and of the most affecting passion I have seen the best actors disconcerted, while these buzzing muscatos have been fluttering round their eyes and ears. How was it possible an actor, so embarrassed, should keep his impatience from entering into that different temper which his personated character might require him to be master of? Future actors may perhaps wish I would set this grievance in a stronger light; and, to say the truth, where auditors are ill-bred, it cannot well be expected that actors should be polite. Let me therefore show how far an artist in any science is apt to be hurt by any sort of inattention to his performance. While the famous Corelli,[A] at Rome, was playing some musical composition of his own to a select company in the private apartment of his patron-Cardinal, he observed, in the heighth of his harmony, his Eminence was engaging in a detached conversation, upon which he suddenly stopt short and gently laid down his instrument. The Cardinal, surprised at the unexpected cessation, asked him if a string was broke? To which Corelli, in an honest conscience of what was due to his musick, reply'd, "No, Sir, I was only afraid I enterrupted business." His Eminence, who knew that a genius could never shew itself to advantage where it had not its regards, took this reproof in good part, and broke off his conversation to hear the whole concerto played over again. [Footnote A: Arcangelo Corelli, the "father of modern instrumental music."] Another story will let us see what effect a mistaken offence of this kind had upon the French theatre, which was told me by a gentleman of the long robe, then at Paris, and who was himself the innocent author of it. At the tragedy of "Zaire," while the celebrated Mademoiselle Gossin[A] was delivering a soliloquy, this gentleman was seized with a sudden fit of coughing, which gave the actress some surprise and interruption; and his fit increasing, she was forced to stand silent so long that it drew the eyes of the uneasy audience upon him, when a French gentleman, leaning forward to him, asked him, If this actress had given him any particular offence, that he took so publick an occasion to resent it? The English gentleman, in the utmost surprise, assured him, So far from it, that he was a particular admirer of her performance; that his malady was his real misfortune, and if he apprehended any return of it, he would rather quit his seat than disoblige either the actress or the audience. [Footnote A: Jeanne, Catherine Gossin, of the Comédie Française.] This publick decency in their theatre I have myself seen carried so far that a gentleman in their second Loge, or middle-gallery, being observed to sit forward himself while a lady sate behind him, a loud number of voices called out to him from the pit, "_Place à la Dame! Place à la Dame_!" When the person so offending, either not apprehending the meaning of the clamour, or possibly being some John Trott who feared no man alive, the noise was continued for several minutes; nor were the actors, though ready on the stage, suffered to begin the play till this unbred person was laughed out of his seat, and had placed the lady before him. Whether this politeness observed at plays may be owing to their clime, their complexion, or their government, is of no great consequence; but if it is to be acquired, methinks it is a pity our accomplished countrymen, who every year import so much of this nation's gawdy garniture, should not, in this long course of our commerce with them, have brought over a little of their theatrical good-breeding too. INDEX Abington, Mrs. Actors and audience, Colley Cibber on Addison, Joseph his "Cato" Anne, Queen Anne's reign, Life in Queen Ashbury, Joseph Ashton's "Reign of Queen Anne" Aston, Tony Attorneys of Queen Anne's day Baggs, Zachary Baker of Dublin Barry, Spranger, Mrs. Spranger Barry, Mrs. Elizabeth Bartholomew Fair Bath life "Beaux' Stratagem," Farquhar's Bellchambers, Edmund Bertie, Miss Dye Betterton, Thomas Blackmore, Dr. (Sir Richard) Boileau Bolingbroke, Lord Booth, Barton Mrs. Barton _see also_ Santlow Boswell, James Bowman, an actor Bracegirdle, Anne Bradshaw, Mrs. Brett, Colonel Miss Anne Broschi, Carlo (Farinelli) Budgell, Eustace Bullock, an actor Burney, Dr. "Busiris," Young's Cadogan, Charles Sloane, 1st Earl Campbell, Thomas "Careless Husband," Cibber's Cat, Christopher Cat-calls "Cato," Addison's Centlivre, Mrs. her "Perplexed Lovers" Centlivre, Mr. Charles II., King Chener, Mons. Chetwood, W.R. "Christian Hero, The," Steele's Church and stage Church music and the theatre Churchill, General (Marlborough's nephew) Churchill, Colonel (Oldfield's son) Churchill, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough Churchill, Mary, Countess of Cadogan Cibber, Caius Gabriel Cibber, Colley "Cibber, Apology for the Life of" Cibber, Theophilus Clive, Mrs. Coffee-houses of Addison's day Collier, William Colman's "Random Records" Congreve Corelli, Arcangelo Costumes, Stage Courthorpe's "Addison" Covent Garden Theatre Craggs, Mr. Secretary Crawley, the showman Critics, Addison on dramatic Crown, John Cuzzoni, Francesca Davenant, Alexander Davies, T. Defoe, Daniel Delany, Mrs. Dennis, John, "Essay on the Operas" Diction of the eighteenth century "Distressed Mother, The," Philips' Dod, Benjamin Dogget, Thomas Doran, Dr. Dorset, Earl of Dorset, Garden Theatre Downes, the prompter Drama and the Restoration Dramatic critics (Addison) Dramatic writings, old and new Drury Lane Theatre Drury Lane, revolt of Betterton another exodus riot Drury Lane, Company Dryden "Duke of York's Company" D'Urfey's "Western Lass" "Echoes of the Playhouse" Elrington, Thomas Epilogues, Comic (The _Spectator_) Estcourt, Dick Eugene, Prince Evans, John "Fair Quaker of Deal," Shadwell's Farinelli Farquhar, Capt. George Faustina, Bordoni Hasse Fielding, Henry Fitzgerald, Percy Fontaine, Monsieur de la Foote, Samuel "Funeral, or Grief à la Mode, The," Steele's Funeral customs, old time Gambling women Garrick, David Garth, Dr. Genest, P. George I., King Gildon, Charles, Gossin, Jeane Catherine Gregory, Mr. Griffith, Thomas Gwyne, Nell Habits of society Halifax, Lord Haymarket Theatre, restricted to operas "Hearts, The King of," Maynwaring's Hendon, Heywoodhill Henley, Mr. Hertford, Countess of Hill, Aaron Horton, Mrs. Howard, Bronson Hoyt, Mr. Hughes, Mr. Hulet, Charles Ibsen "Inconstant, The," Farquhar's Ingolsby, General Italian opera "Jane Shore," Rowe's Jerusalem Chamber, Westminster Johnson, Dr. Samuel Johnstone, Drury Lane machinist Jones, Henry Arthur Jonson, Benjamin Keen, Theophilus Killigrew, Charles "King's Company, The" Kit-Cat Club Knight, Mrs. Knipp, Mrs. Lambro, Miss Lecouvreur, French actress Leigh, Francis Lincoln's Inn Field Theatre of 1695, re-opened "Lives of the Poets," Cibber's Lorrain, Rev. Paul Lowe, R.W. Macclesfield, Anne, 1st Countess of Macklin "Make-up," Art of Marlborough, _see_ Churchill Master of the Revels, office of Maynwaring, Arthur, Maynwaring, Mr. (Oldfield's son) "Milk White Flag, A," Mr. Hoyt's Mills, John Misson's, Henre, "Memoirs" Mist, Nathaniel _Mist's Weekly Journal_ Mitford, M.R. Mitre Tavern Molière Montagu, Captain Morley's "Notes on The _Spectator_" Mountford, Will Mountford, Mrs., _see_ Verbruggen Mountford, Susan Neal, Edmund, "Phaedra and Hippolitus" "Non-Juror, The," Cibber's Norris, an actor Oldfield, Captain Oldfield, Mrs. Oldfield, Anne (Nance) birth meets Farquhar introduced to Vanbrugh, joins the stage Bath _début_ first stage triumph Cibber's "Careless Husband" her success deportment as Sylvia in Farquhar's "Recruiting Officer" leaves Drury Lane for the Haymarket supplants Mrs. Bracegirdle salary at the Haymarket ---- and at Drury Lane as Andromache in "Distressed Mother" plays Marcia in "Cato" meets Alexander Pope tragic parts rivals produce a riot, her triumph as Jane Shore adheres to Drury Lane takes Sophonisba, praised by Thomson meridian lustre mistress of A. Maynwaring personal attractions accepts protection of Marlborough's nephew received at Court her natural children ancestress of Earls of Cadogan sympathy for Richard Savage intercedes for his life mourned by Savage contemporaries her equipage sweetness and common sense retains her bloom captivating as Lady Townley moved in polite circles ill-health, dies in Lower Grosvenor Street laid in State in the Jerusalem Chamber interred in Westminster Abbey Oldfield, Anne, elegy by Richard Savage Opera, Italian Operatic singers Oxford and the drama actors contribute to St. Mary's restoration fund Page, Francis Pepy's Diary "Perplexed Lovers, The," Centlivre's Philips, Ambrose Players in Queen Anne's time Pope, Alexander Porter, Mistress Powell, George Prince George of Denmark Pritchard, Sir William "Provoked Husband, The," Vanbrugh and Cibber's Radcliffe, Dr. "Recruiting Officer, The," Farquhar's Rich, Christopher Rich, John Rivers, Lord Rogers, Mrs. Rowe, Nicholas Russell Court Chapel Ryan, Lacy Sandridge, Dean Santlow, Hester _see also_ Booth, Mrs. Saunders, Mistress Savage, Richard Schlegel, Augustus Wm. "Scornful Lady, The" Shadwell, Thomas Sheridan, Richard Brinsley Side-shows "Sir Courtly Nice," Crown's "Sir Thomas Overbury," Savage's Skipworth, Sir Thomas Smith, an actor _Spectator, The_ Stage armies Stanyan, T. Steele, Sir Richard Strolling players Swift, Dean Swiney, Owen "Tamerlane," N. Rowe's "Tartuffe," Molière's Theatre and church and playgoers Theatrical dress claptrap, Addison on property, Sir R. Steele on Theatricals began, Hour Thomas, Augustus Thomson's "Sophonisba" Thurmond, John Toasts Toasting glasses Tofts, Mrs. Tonson, Jacob Trumbull, Sir William Vanbrugh, Sir John Verbruggen, Mrs. Voltaire Voss, Mrs. Walker, an actor Walpole, Horace Walpole, Sir Robert Ward, Ned Wig, cost of a full-bottomed Wilks, Robert William III., King Williams, Joseph Woffington, Peg "Wonder, The," Mrs. Centlivre's Woollen shrouds Yates, Mistress Young's, Dr., "Busiris" 
28492	----	*********************************************************************** * Transcriber's Note: Typo "gantlet" was replaced with "gauntlet" but * * all other spelling was retained as it appeared in the original text.* *********************************************************************** [Illustration: "HE WAS A NOTICEABLY HANDSOME FIGURE AS HE SAT ALONE IN THE BOX" [_See p. 31_] THE LIGHT OF THE STAR A Novel BY HAMLIN GARLAND AUTHOR OF "HESPER" "THE CAPTAIN OF THE GRAY-HORSE TROOP" ETC. ETC. NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS:: MCMIV THE LIGHT OF THE STAR Published May, 1904. THE LIGHT OF THE STAR I After the appointment with Miss Merival reached him (through the hand of her manager), young Douglass grew feverishly impatient of the long days which lay between. Waiting became a species of heroism. Each morning he reread his manuscript and each evening found him at the theatre, partly to while away the time, but mainly in order that he might catch some clew to the real woman behind the shining mask. His brain was filled with the light of the star--her radiance dazzled him. By day he walked the streets, seeing her name on every bill-board, catching the glow of her subtle and changeful beauty in every window. She gazed out at him from brows weary with splendid barbaric jewels, her eyes bitter and disdainful, and hopelessly sad. She smiled at him in framework of blue and ermine and pearls--the bedecked, heartless coquette of the pleasure-seeking world. She stood in the shadow of gray walls, a grating over her head, with deep, soulful, girlish eyes lifted in piteous appeal; and in each of these characters an unfathomed depth remained to vex and to allure him. Magnified by these reflections on the walls, haloed by the teeming praise and censure of the press, she seemed to dominate the entire city as she had come to absorb the best of his own life. What her private character really was no one seemed to know, in spite of the special articles and interviews with her managers which fed the almost universal adulation of her dark and changeful face, her savage and sovereign beauty. There was insolence in her tread, and mad allurement in the rounded beauty of her powerful white arm--and at his weakest the young playwright admitted that all else concerning her was of no account. At the same time he insisted that he was not involved with the woman--only with the actress. "I am not a lover--I am a playwright, eager to have my heroine adequately portrayed," he contended with himself in the solitude of his room, high in one of the great apartment buildings of the middle city. Nevertheless, the tremor in his nerves caused him thought. Her voice. Yes, that, too, was mysterious. Whence came that undertone like the moan of a weary wastrel tortured with dreams of idyllic innocence long lost? Why did her utterance, like her glorious face, always suggest some inner, darker meaning? There were times when she seemed old--old as vice and cruelty, hoarse with complaints, with curses, and then again her lips were childishly sweet, and her voice carried only the wistful accents of adolescence or the melody of girlish awe. On the night before his appointment she played _The Baroness Telka_, a lurid, lustful, remorseless woman--a creature with a vampire's heart and the glamour of Helen of Troy--a woman whose cheeks were still round and smooth, but whose eyes were alight with the flame of insanity--a frightful, hungry, soulless wretch. And as he sat at the play and watched that glittering, inexplicable woman, and thought of her rôles, Douglass asked himself: "How will she meet me to-morrow? What will be the light in her eyes when she turns them upon me? Will she meet me alone--haughty, weary with praise, or will she be surrounded by those who bow to her as to a queen?" This latter thing he feared. He had not been without experience with women--even with actresses; but no woman he had ever met had appealed to his imagination beyond the first meeting. Would it be so with Helen Merival? He had loved twice in his life, but not well enough to say so to either of his sweethearts. Around Myra's name clung the perfume and moonlight of summer evenings in the far-off mid-continent village where he was born, while Violet recalled the music, the comfort, and the security of a beautiful Eastern home. Neither of these sweet and lovely girls had won his heart completely. How was it that this woman of the blazoning bill-boards had already put more of passion into his heart than they of the pure and sheltered life? He did not deceive himself. It was because Helen could not be understood at a glance. She appealed to his imagination as some strange bird--alien voyager--fled from distant islands in dim, purple seas. She typed the dreams of adventuring youth seeking the princesses of other and more romantic lands. At times he shuddered with a fear that some hidden decay of Helen Merival's own soul enabled her to so horrify her audience with these desolating rôles, and when the curtain fell on _The Baroness_, he was resolved to put aside the chance of meeting the actress. Was it worth while to be made ashamed and bitter? She might stand revealed as a coarse and selfish courtesan--a worn and haggard enchantress whose failing life blazed back to youth only when on the stage. Why be disenchanted? But in the end he rose above this boyish doubt. "What does it matter whether she be true or false? She has genius, and genius I need for my play--genius and power," and in the delusion he rested. He climbed to his den in the tower as physically wearied as one exhausted with running a race, and fell asleep with his eyelids fluttering in a feverish dream. The hour of his appointment with her fell upon Sunday, and as he walked up the street towards her hotel the bells in a church on a side street were ringing, and their chimes filled his mind with memories of the small town from which he came. How peaceful and sweet the life of Woodstock seemed now. The little meeting-house, whose shingled spire still pointed at the stars, would always be sweet with the memory of Myra Thurber, whose timid clasp upon his arm troubled him then and pained him now. He had so little to give in return for her devotion--therefore he had given nothing. He had said good-bye almost harshly--his ambition hardening his heart to her appeal. Around him, in his dream of those far-off days, moved other agile forms--young lovers like Myra and himself, their feet creaking on the glittering snow. They stepped slowly, though the bells called and called. The moonlight was not more clear and untouched of baleful fire than Myra's sweet eyes looking up at him, and now he was walking the wet pavement of the great metropolis, with the clang and grind of cars all about him, on his way to meet a woman whose life was spent in simulating acts as destructive as Myra's had been serene and trustful. At the moment he saw his own life as a thread in some mysterious drama. "To what does it lead?" he asked, as he drew under the overhanging portal of the great hotel where the star made her home. It was to the man of the West a splendid place. Its builders had been lavish of highly colored marbles and mosaics, spendthrift of light and gilding; on every side shone the signs and seals of predatory wealth. Its walls were like costly confectionery, its ornaments insolent, its waste criminal. Every decorative feature was hot, restless, irreverent, and cruel, quite the sort of avenue one might expect to find in his walk towards the glittering woman of the false and ribald drama. "She chose her abode with instinctive bad taste," he said, bitterly; and again his weakness, his folly turned him cold; for with all his physical powers he was shy to the point of fear. He made a sober and singular spot in the blaze of the rotunda. So sombre was his look, so intent his gaze. Youths in high hats and shining shirt-fronts stood in groups conversing loudly, and in the resplendent dining-hall bediamonded women and their sleek-haired, heavy-jewelled partners were eating leisurely, attended by swarms of waiters so eager they trod upon one another's feet. The clerk eyed him in impassible silence as he took out his worn card-case, saying: "Please send my card to Miss Merival." "Miss Merival is not receiving any one this evening," the clerk answered, with a tone which was like the slap of a wet glove in the face. Douglass faced him with a look which made him reflect. "You will let her be the judge of that," he said, and his tone was that of one accustomed to be obeyed. The little man bowed. "Oh, certainly, Mr. Douglass, but as she left orders--" When the boy with his card had disappeared into the candy-colored distances, the playwright found himself again studying the face of his incomprehensible sorceress, who looked down upon him even at that moment from a bulletin-board on the hotel wall, Oriental, savage, and sullen--sad, too, as though alone in her solitary splendor. "She can't be all of her parts--which one of them will I find as I enter her room?" he asked himself for the hundredth time. "Miss Merival will see Mr. Douglass," said the bell-boy. "This way, sir." As he stepped into the elevator the young man's face grew stern and his lips straightened out into a grim line. It was absurd to think he should be so deeply moved by any woman alive, he who prided himself on his self-possession. Down a long hall on the tenth floor the boy led him, and tapped at a door, which was opened after a pause by a quiet woman who greeted him with outstretched hand, kindly cordial. "How do you do, Mr. Douglass? It is very good of you to come," she said, with the simplest inflection. "This must be an elder sister," he thought, and followed her into a large sitting-room, where a gray-haired woman and a young man were sipping after-dinner coffee. "Mother, this is Mr. Douglass, the author of _The Modern Stage_, the little book of essays we liked so well." The elderly lady greeted him cordially, but with a timid air. "And this is my brother Hugh," the young man gave Douglass's hand a firm and cordial grip. "Sit down, please--not there--over here, where the light will fall on you. I want to see how you look," she added, in smiling candor; and with that smile he recognized in his hostess the great actress. He was fairly dazed, and for the moment entirely wordless. From the very moment the door had opened to him the "glittering woman" had been receding into remote and ever remoter distances, for the Helen Merival before him was as simple, candid, and cordial as his own sister. Her voice had the home inflection; she displayed neither paint nor powder; her hair was plainly brushed--beautiful hair it was, too--and her dress was lovely and in quiet taste. Her face seemed plain at first, just as her stature seemed small. She was dark, but not so dark as she appeared on the stage, and her face was thinner, a little careworn, it seemed to him; and her eyes--"those leering, wicked eyes"--were large and deep and soft. Her figure was firm, compact, womanly, and modest in every line. No wife could have seemed more of the home than this famous actress who faced him with hands folded in her lap. He was stupefied. Suddenly he perceived the injustice and the crass folly of his estimate of her character, and with this perception came a broader and deeper realization of her greatness as an actress. Her real self now became more complex than his wildest imagined ideal of her. That this sweet and reflective girl should be the actress was as difficult to understand as that _The Baroness_ should be at heart a good woman. For five minutes he hardly heard what she said, so busy was his mind readjusting itself to this abrupt displacement of values. With noiseless suddenness all the lurid light which the advertiser had thrown around the star died away. The faces which mocked and mourned, the clutching hands, the lines of barbaric ornaments, the golden goblets of debauchery, the jewelled daggers, the poison phials--all those accessories, designed to produce the siren of the posters, faded out, and he found himself face to face with a human being like himself, a thoughtful, self-contained, and rather serious American girl of twenty-six or twenty-eight years of age. Not merely this, but her attitude towards him was that of a pupil. She lifted eyes to him as to one occupying an intellectual height. She began to tell him how much she enjoyed his little book on the drama, which a friend had recommended to her, but as soon as he had fairly recovered himself he led her away from his own work. "I am supposed to be an architect," he explained. "I write of the stage because I love it--and because I am a failure in my profession. My book is a very slight and unambitious attempt." "But you know the stage and its principles," she insisted; "and your view of the future is an inspiration to those of us who wish to do good work. Your letter was very helpful to me, for I am deeply discouraged just now. I am disgusted with the drama in which I work. I am weary of these unwholesome parts. You are quite right, I shall never do my best work so long as I am forced to assume such uncongenial rôles. They are all false, every one of them. They are good acting rôles, as acting goes; but I want plays that I can live as well as act. But my manager tells me that the public will not have me in anything else. Do you think they would? Is he right?" She ended in appeal. "I think the public will take you at your best in anything you do," he replied, with grave gallantry. "I don't know that managers are omniscient. They are only men like the rest of us." She smiled. "That is high treason; but I'm very much inclined to believe it is true. I am willing to concede that a theatre must be made to pay, but I am not content to think that this splendid art is always to be measured by the number of dollars which fall into the box-office. Take Westervelt as a type. What ideals has he? None whatever, save to find a play that will run forever and advertise itself." She had dreams, too, it seemed. She glowed with her plans, and as she timidly presented them Douglass perceived that the woman was entirely unconscious of the false glamour, the whirling light and tumult, which outsiders connected with her name. At the centre of the illumination she sat looking out upon the glorified bill-boards, the gay shop windows, the crowded auditoriums, a wholesome, kindly, intelligent woman, subject to moods of discouragement like himself, unwilling to be a slave to a money-grubber. Something in his face encouraged the story of her struggles. She passed to her personal history while he listened as one enthralled. The actress fled, and the woman drew near. She looked into the man's eyes frankly, unshrinkingly, with humor, with appeal. She leaned towards him, and her face grew exquisitely tender and beautiful. "Oh, it was a struggle! Mother kept boarders in order that Hugh and I might go to school--didn't you, dear old muz?" She laid her hand on her mother's knee, and the mother clasped it. "Father's health grew worse and worse, and at last he died, and then I had to leave school to help earn our living. I began to read for entertainments of various sorts. Father was a Grand Army man, and the posts took an interest in my reading. I really earned a thousand dollars the second year. I doubled that the next year, and considered myself a great public success." She smiled. "Mother, may I let Mr. Douglass see how I looked then?" The mother nodded consent, and the great actress, after a few moments' search, returned with a package of circulars, each bearing a piquant, girlish face. "There," she said, as she handed them to Douglass, "I felt the full ecstasy of power when that picture was taken. In this I wore a new gown and a new hat, and I was earning fifty dollars at each reading. My success fairly bewildered me; but oh, wasn't it glorious! I took mother out of a tenement and put her in a lovely little home. I sent Hugh to college. I refurnished the house. I bought pictures and rugs, for you know I continued to earn over two thousand a year. And what fun we had in spending all that money!" "But how did you reach the stage?" he asked. She laughed. "By way of 'the Kerosene circuit,' if you know what that means." "I've heard the phrase," he answered; "it corresponds to the old-time 'barn-storming,' doesn't it?" "It does." Hugh interposed. "I wouldn't go into that, sis." "Why not? It's great fun--now. I used to think it pretty tragic sometimes. Yes, I was nineteen when I went on the New England rural circuit--to give it a better name. Oh, I've been through all the steps! As soon as I felt a little secure about mother, I ventured to New York in answer to advertisements in _The Reflector_, and went out 'on the road' at 'fifteen per.'" These slang phrases seemed humorous as they came from her smiling lips, but Douglass knew some little part of the toil and discomfort they stood for. Her eyes danced with fun. "I played _The Lady of Lyons_ in a 'kitchen set,' and the death-scene in _East Lynne_ before a 'wood drop.' And my costumes were something marvellous, weren't they, mother? Well, this lasted two seasons--summer seasons; while I continued to read in winter in order to indulge my passion for the stage in summer and early autumn. Then I secured a small part in a real company, and at a salary that permitted me to send some money home. I knocked about the country this way two seasons more--that makes me twenty-two. I knew the office of every manager in New York by this time, but had been able to reach an audience with but one or two. They were kind enough, but failed to 'see anything' in me, as the phrase goes; and I was quite disheartened. Oh, 'the Rialto'!" Her face clouded and her voice softened. "It is a brilliant and amusing place to the successful, but to the girl who walks it seeking a theatrical engagement it is a heartless and cruel place. You can see them there to-day--girls eager and earnest and ready to work hard and conscientiously--haunting the agencies and the anterooms of the managers just as I did in those days--only five years ago." "It seems incredible," exclaimed Douglass. "I thought you came here from a London success." "So I did, and that is the miraculous chapter of my story. I went to London with Farnum--with only a little part--but McLennan saw me and liked my work, and asked me to take the American adventuress in his new play. And then--my fortune was made. The play was only a partial success, but my own position was established. I continued to play the gay and evil-minded French and Russian woman of the English stage till I was tired of them. Then I tried _Joan of Arc_ and _Charlotte Corday_. The public forced me back to _The Baroness Telka_, and to wealth and great fame; and then I read your little book, which seemed directed straight to me, and I asked Hugh to write you--now you have the 'story of me life.' I have had no struggle since--only hard work and great acclaim." She faced her mother with a proud smile. Then her face darkened. "But--there is always a but--I want New York to know me in some better way. I'm tired of these women with cigarettes and spangled dinner-gowns." She laid her hand again on her mother's knee, and the gentle old fingers closed around the firm, smooth wrist. "I've told mother that I will cut these rôles out. We are at last in a position to do as we please. I am now waiting for something worth while to come to me. That is my present situation, Mr. Douglass. I don't know why I've been so frank. Now let me hear your play." He flushed a little. "To tell the truth, I find it rather hard to begin. I feel as though I were re-enacting a worn-out scene in some way. Every other man in the car writes plays nowadays and torments his friends by reading to them, which, I admit, is an abominable practice. However, as I came here for that express purpose, I will at least outline my scenario." "Didn't you bring the play itself?" "Yes; but, really, I hesitate. It may bore you to death." "You could not write a play that would bore me--I am sure of that." "Very well," he soberly answered, and drew forth his manuscript. As if upon signal, the mother and her son rose to withdraw. "You are entirely justified," said Douglass, with some humor. "I quite understand your feelings." "We should like very much to hear it, but--" "No excuses, I beg of you. I wonder at Miss Merival's hardihood. I am quite sure she will live to repent her temerity." In this spirit of banter the playwright and the star were left alone with the manuscript of the play. As he read on, Douglass was carried out of his own impassivity by the changes in the face before him. It became once more elusive, duskily mysterious in its lines. A reflective shadow darkened the glorious eyes, veiled by drooping lids. Without knowing it, the actress took on from moment to moment the heart-trials of the woman of the play. In a subconscious way even as he read, Douglass analyzed and understood her power. Hers was a soul of swift and subtle sympathy. A word, a mere inflection, was sufficient to set in motion the most complicate and obscure conceptions in her brain, permitting her to comprehend with equal clarity the Egyptian queen of pleasure and the austere devotee to whom joy is a snare. From time to time she uttered little exclamations of pleasure, and at the end of each act motioned him to proceed, as if eager to get a unified impression. It was after eleven o'clock when he threw down the manuscript, and, white with emotion, awaited her verdict. She was tense with the strain, and her lashes were wet with tears, but her eyes were bright and her mind alert. She had already entered upon a new part, having been swept up into a region of resolution as far away from the pleasant hostess as from the heartless adventuress whose garments she had worn but the night before. With hands clasped between her knees, and shoulders laxly drooping, she brooded on the sorrows of his mimic world. "I will do your play," she said at last. "I will do it because I believe in its method and because I think it worthy of my highest powers." The blood rushed to the playwright's throat and a smarting heat dimmed his eyes. He spoke with difficulty. "I thank you," he said, hoarsely. "It is more than I expected; and now that you have promised to do it, I feel you ought not to take the risk." He could say no more, overcome by the cordial emphasis of her decision. "There is a risk, I will be frank with you; but your play is worth it. I have not been so powerfully moved in years. You have thrilled me. Really I cannot tell you how deeply your theme has sunk into my heart. You have the Northern conscience--so have I; that is why I rebel at being merely the plaything of a careless public. Yes, I will do your play. It is a work of genius. I hope you wrote it in a garret. It's the kind of thing to come from a diet of black bread and water." He smiled. "I live in a sort of garret, and my meals are frequently beans and brown bread. I hope that will do." "I am glad the bread is at least brown.... But you are tired. Leave the manuscript with me." He rose and she moved towards him with a gesture of confidence which made words impossible to him. "When we meet again I want you to tell me something of yourself.... Good-night. You will hear from me soon." She was regal as she said this--regal in her own proper person, and he went away rapt with wonder and admiration of the real Helen Merival as she now stood revealed to him. "She is greater than my dreams of her," he said, in a sort of rapture as he walked the street. "She is greater than she herself can know; for her genius is of the subtle, unspeakable deeps--below her own consciousness, beyond her own analysis. How much greater her art seems, now that I have seen her. It is marvellous! She will do my play, and she will succeed--her power as an actress would carry it to a success if it were a bad play, which it is not. My day has dawned at last." * * * * * Helen went to bed that night with a consciousness that something new and powerful had come into her life. Not merely the play and her determination to do it moved her--the man himself profoundly impressed her. His seriousness, his decision and directness of utterance, and the idealism which shone from his rugged, boyish face remained with her to the verge of sleep. He was very handsome, and his voice singularly beautiful, but his power to charm lay over and beyond these. His sincere eyes, his freedom from flippant slang, these impressed her with a sense of his reliability, his moral worth. "He is stern and harsh, but he is fine," she said to her mother next morning, "and his play is very strong. I am going to do it. You will like the part of _Lillian_. It has the Scotch sense of moral responsibility in it." II Douglass rose next morning with a bound, as if life had somehow become surcharged with fresh significance, fresh opportunity. His professional career seemed dull and prosaic--his critical work of small avail. His whole mind centred on his play. His was a moody, sensitive nature. Stern as he looked, and strong as he really was, he could be depressed by a trifle or exalted by a word. And reviewing his meeting with Helen in the light of the morning, he had more than a suspicion that he had allowed himself to talk too freely in the presence of the brother and mother, and that he had been over-enthusiastic, not to say egotistic; but he was saved from dejection by the memory of the star's great, brown-black eyes. There was no pretence in them. She had been rapt--carried out of conventional words and graces by something which rose from the lines he had written, the characters he had depicted. The deeper his scrutiny went the more important she became to him. She was not simple--she was very complex, and an artist of wonderful range, and certainty of appeal. He liked the plain and simple (almost angular) gestures and attitudes she used when talking to him. They were so broadly indicative of the real Helen Merival, and so far from the affectations he had expected to see. Of course, she was the actress--the mobility of her face, her command of herself, was far beyond that of any untrained woman, no matter how versatile; but she was nobly the actress, broadened and deepened by her art. He was very eager to see her again, and as the day wore on this desire grew to be an ache at his heart most disturbing. He became very restless at last, and did little but walk around the park, returning occasionally as the hour for the postman came. "I don't know why I should expect a letter from her. I know well the dilatory methods of theatrical people--and to-day is rehearsal, too. I am unreasonable. If I hear from her in a week I may count myself lucky." A message from the dramatic editor of _The Blazon_, asking him to do a special study of an English actor opening that night at the Broadway, annoyed him. "I can't do it," he answered. "I have another engagement." And recklessly put aside the opportunity to earn a week's board, so exalted was he by reason of the word of the woman. At dinner he lacked appetite entirely, and as he had taken but an egg and a cup of coffee for breakfast, and had missed luncheon altogether, he began to question himself as to the meaning of his ailment, with sad attempt at humor. "It isn't exactly as serious as dying. Even if she reconsiders and returns my play, I can still make a living." He would not admit that any other motive was involved. He had barely returned to his room before a knock at the door announced a boy with a note. As he took it in his hand his nerves tingled as though he had touched the wondrous woman's hand. The note was brief, yet fateful: "I enclose a ticket for the manager's box. I hope you can come. I want to talk about your play. I will send my brother to bring you in back to see me. I have been rehearsing all the afternoon, but I re-read the play this morning while in bed. I like it better and better, but you can do more with it--I feel that you have suppressed the poetry here and there. My quarrel with you realists is that you are afraid to put into your representations of life the emotions that make life a dynamic thing. But it is stirring and suggestive as it is. Come in and talk with me, for I am full of it and see great possibilities in the final act." His hands were tremulous and his eyes glowing as he put the note down and faced himself in the glass. The pleasure of meeting her again under such conditions made him forget, for the moment, the rôle she was to play--a part he particularly detested. Truly he was the most fortunate and distinguished of men--to be thus taken by the hand and lifted from nameless obscurity to the most desired position beside a great star. He dressed with unusual care, and was a noticeably handsome figure as he sat alone in the box; and elated, tense, self-conscious. When she came on and walked close down to the foot-lights nearest him, flashing a glance of recognition into his eyes, his breath quickened and his face flushed. A swift interchange of light and fire took place at the moment, her eyelids fell. She recoiled as if in dismay, then turned and apparently forgot him and every one else in the fervor of her art. A transforming readjustment of all the lines of her face took place. She became sinister, mocking, and pitiless. An exultant cruelty croaked in her voice. Minute, repulsive remodellings of her neck and cheeks changed her to a harpy, and seeing these evidences of her great genius Douglass grew bitterly resentful, and when she laughed, with the action of a vulture thrusting her head forward from the shoulders, he sickened and turned away. It was marvellous work, but how desecrating to her glorious womanhood. Coming so close on that moment of mystic tenderness it was horrible. "My God! She must not play such parts. They will leave their mark upon her." When the curtain fell he did not applaud, but drew back into the shadow, sullen, brooding, sorrowful. In the tableau which followed the recall, her eyes again sought for him (though she still moved in character), and the curtain fell upon the scene while yet she was seeking him. Here now began a transformation in the man. He had come to the theatre tremulous with eagerness to look upon her face, to touch her hand, but when her brother entered the box, saying, "Mr. Douglass, this is the best time to see my sister," he rose slowly with a curious reluctance. Through devious passages beneath the theatre, Hugh led the way, while with greater poignancy than ever before the young playwright sensed the vulgarity, the immodesty, and the dirt of the world behind and below the scenes. It was all familiar enough to him, for he had several friends among the actors, but the thought of one so sovereign as Helen in the midst of a region so squalid stung him. He was jealous of the actors, the scene-shifters, who were permitted to see her come and go. He was reserved and rather pale, but perfectly self-contained, as he entered the little reception-hall leading to her dressing-room. He faced her with a sense of dread--apprehensive of some disenchantment. She met him cordially, without the slightest reference to her make-up, which was less offensive than he had feared; but he winced, nevertheless, at the vulgarity of her part so skilfully suggested by paint and powder. She gave him her hand with a frank gesture. "You didn't applaud my scenes to-night," she said, with a smile as enigmatic as the one she used in _The Baroness_. His voice was curt with emotion as he replied, "No, I did not; I couldn't. They saddened me." "What do you mean?" she asked, with a startled, anxious paling beneath her rouge. His voice was low, but fiercely reproachful in answer. "I mean you should treat your beautiful self and your splendid art with greater consideration." "You mean I should not be playing such women? I know it--I hate them. But no one ever accused me of taking my art lightly. I work harder on these uncongenial rôles than upon any other. They require infinitely more effort, because I loathe them so." "I mean more than that. I am afraid to have you simulate such passions. They will leave their mark on you. It is defilement. Your womanhood is too fine, too beautiful to be so degraded." She put her hand to her bosom and looked about her restlessly. His intensity scared her. "I know what you mean, but let us not talk of that now; let us discuss your play. I want to suggest something for your third act, but I must dress now. You will wait, won't you? We will have a few minutes before I go on. Please sit here and wait for me." He acquiesced silently, as was his fashion. There was little of the courtier about him, but he became very ill at ease as he realized how significant his waiting must seem to those who saw him there. Deeply in the snare as he was, this sitting beside an actress's dressing-room door became intolerable to his arrogant soul, and he was about to flee when Hugh came back and engaged him in conversation. So gratified was Douglass for this kindness, he made himself agreeable till such time as Helen, in brilliant evening-dress, came out; and when Hugh left them together he was less assertive and brusque in manner. She was so luminous, so queenly, she dissipated his cloud of doubts and scruples, and the tremor of the boyish lover came back into his limbs as he turned to meet her. His voice all but failed him as he answered to her question. For some ten minutes from behind her mask she talked of the play with enthusiasm--her sweet eyes untouched of the part she was about to resume. At last she said: "There is my cue. Good-bye! Can you breakfast with us to-morrow, at eleven-thirty? It's really a luncheon. I know you are an early riser; but we will have something substantial. Will you come?" Her smooth, strong fingers closed cordially on his hand as she spoke, and he answered, quickly, "With the greatest pleasure in the world." "We can talk at our leisure then. Good-bye!" and as she opened the canvas door in the "box-scene" he heard her say, with high, cool, insulting voice, "Ah, my dear Countess, you are early." She was _The Baroness_ again. After the fall of the curtain at the end, Douglass slipped out upon the pavement, his eyes blinded by the radiant picture she made in her splendid bridal robes. It was desolating to see her represent such a rôle, such agony, such despair; and yet his feet were reluctant to carry him away. He was like a famishing man, who has been politely turned from the glittering, savory dining-room into the street--only his hunger, immaterial as light, was a thousand times keener than that of the one who lacks only bread and meat. He demanded her face, her voice, as one calls for sunlight, for air. He knew that this day, this night, marked a new era in his life. Old things were passed away--new things, sweet, incredible things, were now happening. Nothing like this unrest and deep-seated desire had ever come into his life, and the realization troubled him as a dangerous weakness. It enslaved him, and he resented it. He secured a new view on his play, also, with its accusing defiance of dramatic law and custom. In this moment of clear vision he was permitted a prevision of Helen struggling with the rebellious critics. Now that he had twice taken her hand he was no longer so indifferent to the warfare of the critics, though he knew they could not harm one so powerful as she. In the end of his tumult he wrote her a letter, wherein he began by begging her pardon for seeming to interfere in the slightest degree with her work in the world. His letter continued: "I have back of me the conscience of my Scotch forebears, and though my training in college and in my office has covered my conscience with a layer of office dust it is still there. Of course (and obviously) you are not touched by the words and deeds of the women you represent, but I somehow feel that it is a desecration of your face and voice to put them to such uses. That is the reason I dreaded to go back and see you to-night. If you were seeking praise of your own proper self, the sincerity of this compliment is unquestionable. I ought to say, 'I hope my words to-night did not disturb you,' but I will not, for I hope to see you speedily drop all such hideous characters as _The Baroness Telka_. I felt as an artist might upon seeing a glorious statue befouled with mire. I say this not because I wish you to do _Lillian_. In the light of last night's performance my own play is a gray autumn day with a touch of frost in the air. It is inconceivable that you should be vitally interested in it. I fear no play that I care to write will please a sufficient number of people to make its production worth your while. I release you from your promise. Believe me, I am shaken in my confidence to-night. Your audience seemed so heartless, so debased of taste. They applauded most loudly the things most revolting to me. Since I have come to know you I cannot afford to have you make a sacrifice of yourself to produce my play, much as I desire to see you in new characters." As he dropped this letter into the box a storm-wave of his former bitterness and self-accusation swept over him. "That ends another attempt to get my play staged. Her manager will unquestionably refuse to consider it." III Helen read Douglass's letter next morning while still in bed, and its forthright assault made her shiver. She did not attempt to deceive herself. She acknowledged the singular power of this young man to shake her, to change her course of action. From the first she acknowledged something almost terrifying in the appeal of his eyes, a power which he seemed unconscious of. His words of condemnation, of solicitude, troubled her as the praise of no other man in all her life had done. He had spoken to her soul, making her triumph over the vast audience loathsome--almost criminal. He was handsome--a manly man--but so were dozens of others of her wide acquaintance. His talent was undeniable, but he was still obscure, undeveloped, a failure as an architect, unambitious as a critic, though that was his best point. His articles in _The Blazon_ possessed unusual insight and candor. Beyond this she knew as little of him as of any other of the young newspaper men who sought her acquaintance, and yet he had somehow changed her world for her in these two meetings. She let the letter fall on her breast, and lay with her eyes fastened upon a big rose in a pot on the window-sill--the gift of another admirer. "I do know more of him. I know that he is strong, sincere. He does not flatter me--not even to win me to his play. He does not hasten to send me flowers, and I like him for that. If I were to take his point of view, all my rôles and half my triumphs would drop from me. But _is_ there not a subtle letting-down, a disintegration? May he not be right, after all?" She went over once more the talk of the few moments they had spent together, finding each time in all his words less to criticise and more to admire. "He does not conceal his hate," she said; and she might have added, "Or his love," for she was aware of her dominion, and divined, though she did not whisper it even to herself, that his change of attitude with regard to her rôles came from his change of feeling towards her. "He has a great career. I will not allow him to spoil his own future," she decided, at length, in her own large-minded way. And there were sweet, girlish lines about her mouth when her mother came in to inquire how she felt. "Very much like work, mamma, and I'm going to catch up on my correspondence. Mr. Douglass is coming to take breakfast with us, to talk about his play. I wish you would see that there is something that a big man can eat." * * * * * The note she sent in answer to his was like herself--firm, assured, but gentle: "MR. DOUGLASS,--'What came you out for to see--a reed shaken with the wind?' I know my own mind, and I am not afraid of my future. I should be sorry to fail, of course, especially on your account, but a _succès d'estime_ is certain in your case, and my own personal following is large enough--joined with the actual lovers of good drama--to make the play pay for itself. Please come to my combination breakfast and luncheon, as you promised, and we can arrange dates and other details of the production, for my mind is made up. I am going to do your play, come what will. I thank you for having started all my dormant resolutions into life again. I shall expect you at twelve-thirty." Having despatched this note by special messenger, she serenely set to work on less important matters, and met him in modish street dress--trim and neat and very far from the meretricious glitter of _The Baroness_. He was glad of this; he would have disliked her in négligée, no matter how "artistic." Her greeting was frank and unstudied. "I'm glad you've come. There are oceans of things to talk over." "There was nothing else for me to do but come," he replied, with a meaning light in his eyes. "Your letter was a command." "I'm sorry it takes a command to bring you to breakfast with us. True, this is not the breakfast to be given in your honor--that will come later." "It would be safer to have it before the play is produced," he replied, grimly. Helen turned to her brother. "Hugh, we have in Mr. Douglass a man not sanguine of the success of his play. What does that argue?" "A big hit!" he promptly replied. The servants came and went deftly, and Douglass quite lost sight of the fact that the breakfast-room was high in a tower-like hotel, for Helen's long engagement in the city had enabled her to make herself exceedingly comfortable even amid the hectic color and insistent gilt of the Hotel Embric. The apartment not only received the sun, a royal privilege in New York, but it was gay with flowers, both potted and in vases, and the walls were decorated with drawings of her own choosing. Only the furniture remained uncompromisingly of the hotel tone. "I did intend to refurnish, but mother, who retains a little of her old Scotch training, talked me out of it," Helen explained, in answer to a query. "Is there anything more hopelessly 'handsome' and shining than these chairs? There's so little to find fault with, and so little to really admire." "They're like a ready-made suit--unobjectionable, but not fit." "They have no soul. How could they have? They were made by machines for undistinguished millions." She broke off this discussion. "I am eager for a run through the park. Won't you go? Hugh is my engineer. Reckless as he looks, I find him quite reliable as a tinker, and you know the auto is still in the tinkery stage." "I have a feeling that it is still in the dangerous stage," he said. "But I will go." He said this in a tone of desperation which amused them all very much. It was impossible for him to remain glum in the midst of the good cheer of that luxurious little breakfast with the promise of a ride in the park in prospect. A few moments later a young girl, Miss Fanny Cummings, came in with a young man who looked like an actor, but was, in fact, Hugh's college-mate and "advance man" for Helen, and together they went down to the auto-car. There was a well-defined sense of luxury in being in Helen Merival's party. The attendants in the hotel were so genuinely eager to serve her, and the carefully considered comfort of everything she possessed was very attractive to a man like George Douglass, son of a village doctor, who had toiled from childhood to earn every dollar he spent. To ride in such swift and shining state with any one would have had extraordinary interest, and to sit beside Helen in the comparative privacy of the rear seat put a boyish glow of romance into his heart. Her buoyant and sunny spirit reacted on his moody and supersensitive nature till his face shone with pleasure. He forgot his bitter letter of the night before, and for the moment work and worry were driven from his world. He entered upon a dreamland--the city of menace disappeared. The avenue was gay with promenaders and thick with carriages. Other autos met them with cordial clamor of gongs, and now and then some driver more lawless than Hugh dashed past them in reckless race towards the park. The playwright had never seen so many of New York's glittering carriages, and the growing arrogance of its wealth took on a new aspect from his newly acquired viewpoint. Here were rapidly centring the great leaders of art, of music, of finance. Here the social climbers were clustering, eager to be great in a city of greatness. Here the chief ones in literature and the drama must come as to a market-place, and with this thought came a mighty uplift. "Surely success is now mine," he thought, exultantly, "for here I sit the favored dramatist of this wondrous woman." There was little connected conversation--only short volleys of jests as they whizzed along the splendid drives of the park--but Douglass needed little more than Helen's shining face to put him at peace with all the world. Each moment increased their intimacy. He told her of his stern old father, a country doctor in the West, of the way in which his brother and sisters were scattered from North to South, and how he came to set his face Eastward while all the others went West. "How handsome he is," thought Helen. "How beautiful you are," his glances said in answer, and both grew young beneath the touch of love. When they were once more in the hotel Helen cried out: "There! Isn't your brain washed clear of all doubts? Come, let's to work at the play." He looked down at her with eyes whose glow made her eyelids fall in maidenly defence. "I am capable of anything you ask," he said, with quiet power. After a long and spirited discussion of the last act she said: "Well, now, we'll put it in rehearsal as soon as you feel that it is ready. I believe in doing a part while the spell of its newness is on me. I shall put this on in place of the revival of _Rachel Endicott_." She rose on the wave of her enthusiasm. "I feel the part taking hold of me. I will make _Lillian's Duty_ the greatest success of my life, and the lion's share of both honor and money shall be yours." He left the hotel quite as exalted as he had been previously depressed. The pleasure of sitting by her side for four blessed hours enriched him to the point of being sorry for all the rest of the world. The Prince of Wales had been denied an introduction to her, he had read; therefore the Prince was poor. IV The reading of the play took place on the Monday morning following, and was an exceedingly formal and dignified function. The principal players came prepared to be politely interested, while some of the lesser minds were actually curious to taste the quality of the play as a piece of writing. As there was no greenroom in the Westervelt, the reading took place on the open stage, which was bleak and draughty. The company sat in a funereal semicircle, with the author, the star, and the manager in a short line facing them. All the men retained their overcoats, for the morning was miserably raw, and at Helen's positive command kept their heads covered; and the supernumerary women sat shivering in their jackets. Helen was regal in a splendid cloak of sable, otherwise there was little of the successful actress in her dress. At her suggestion a box-scene was set around them to keep off at least a part of the draught, and under these depressing conditions the reading proceeded. Douglass was visibly disheartened by the surroundings, but set manfully to work, and soon controlled the attention of all the players except two, who made it a boast that they had never read a play or listened to one. "I am interested only in me lines, me boy," said one of them. "And your acting shows it," replied Douglass, with quiet sarcasm, and proceeded to the second act. "You read that with greater power here than to me," said Helen. "I wish we could give it the same unity and sweep of expression as we act it." She addressed the company in her calm, clear voice: "I hope you will all observe carefully Mr. Douglass's reading. He is giving us most valuable advice in every inflection." Her attitude towards her company was admirable in its simplicity and reserve. It was plain that she respected their personalities and expected the same high courtesy from them. Some of the men were of the kind who say "My deah" to every woman, and "My deah boy" to the most casual acquaintance--vain, egotistical, wordy, and pompous; but one glance from Helen was sufficient to check an over-familiar hand in mid-air. The boldest of them did not clap her on the shoulder but once. The reading passed to a rather enthusiastic finish, and Douglass then said: "I have read the play to you carefully, because I believe--_I know_--that an intelligent rendition of your individual parts is impossible without a clear knowledge of the whole drama. My theories of a play and its representation are these: As an author, I see every detail of a scene as if it were a section of life. I know where all my people are at each moment of time, and their positions must be determined by the logic of the picture without any reference to those who wish to hold the centre of the stage. In a certain sense you are only different-colored pigments in my hands, to be laid on to form a unified painting. You must first of all learn to subordinate yourselves to the designs of the author. I know this sounds harsh--seems to reduce you to a very low level of intelligence; but, as a matter of fact, the most highly gifted of our actors to-day are those who are able to do this very thing--to carry in their minds a conception of the unity of a scene, never thrusting their personalities through it or out of it. I mention these points because I intend to assist in the rehearsals, and I don't want to be misunderstood." Helen interposed a word: "I need not say that I consider this a very powerful play--with that opinion you all agree, I am sure--but I want to say further that Mr. Douglass has the right to demand of each of us subordination to the inner design of his work. I am personally very glad always to avail myself of the author's criticism and suggestion. I hope you will all feel the same willingness to carry out Mr. Douglass's scenes as he has written them. Mr. Saunders, will you please give out the parts and call a rehearsal for to-morrow at ten o'clock sharp?" At this point all rose. Saunders, a plain little man, highly pleased with his authority, began to bustle about, bellowing boisterously: "Here you are now--everybody come letter-perfect to-morrow. Sharp at ten. No lagging." The players, accustomed to his sounding assumption of command, paid no attention other than to clutch their rolls of type-written manuscript. Each withdrew into the street with an air of haste. As Helen received her portion Saunders said: "Here, Miss Merival, is a fat part--must be yours. Jee-rusalem the golden! I'd hate to tackle that rôle." Douglass was ready to collar the ass for his impudent tone, but Helen seemed to consider it no more than the harmless howl of a chair sliding across the floor. She was inured to the old-time "assistant stage-manager." Turning to Douglass, she said, "Do you realize, Mr. Author, that we are now actually begun upon your play?" "No, I do not. I confess it all seems a make-believe--a joke." "You'll not think it a joke at the end of the week. It's terribly hard work to put on a big piece like this. If I seem apathetic in my part I beg you not to worry. I must save myself all I can. I never begin to act at rehearsal till I have thought the business all out in my mind. But come, you are to lunch with us in honor of the first rehearsal, and it is late." "It seems a deplorable thing that you must come every morning to this gloomy and repellent place--" "Ah! this is a part of our life the public knows nothing of. They all come to it--the divine Sarah, Duse--none are exempt. The glamour of the foot-lights at night does not warm the theatre at eleven of the morning." "I see it does not," he answered, lightly; but in reality he felt that something sweet and something regal was passing out of his conception of her. To see her even seated with these commonplace men and women detracted even from her glory, subjected her to the same laws. It was a relief to get out into the gay street--to her carriage, and to the hotel where the attendants hovered about her as bees about their queen. She was in high spirits all through the luncheon, and Douglass was carried out of his dark gravity by her splendid vitality, her humor, and her hopefulness. "All you need is a hearing," she said. "And you shall have that. Oh, but there is a wilderness of work before us! Can you design the scenes? I like to do that. It's like playing with doll-houses. I'll show you how. We'll leave the financial side of it to you, Hugh," she said, to her brother. "Come, Mr. Playwright," and they set to work with paste and card-board like a couple of children, and soon had models of all the sets. They seemed childish things indeed, but Helen was mistress of even the mechanical side of the stage, and these paste-pot sketches were of the greatest value to the scene-painter and the carpenter. V These three weeks of rehearsal formed the happiest time Douglass had ever known, for all things conspired to make each day brim with mingled work and worship. First of all, and above all, he was permitted to meet Helen each day, and for hours each day, without fear of gossip and without seeking for an excuse. Each morning, a little before ten, he left his room and went directly to the theatre to meet the company and the manager. The star, prompt as a clock, arrived soon after, and Douglass, beforehand, as a lover, was always there to help her from her carriage and to lead the way through the dark passage to the stage, where the pompous little Saunders was forever marshalling his uneasy vassals in joyous exercise of sovereignty. Helen was happy as a child during these days, and glowing with new ideas of "business" and stage-setting. "We will spare no work and no expense," she said, buoyantly, to Mr. Westervelt, her manager. "We have a drama worthy of us. I want every one of Mr. Douglass's ideas carried out." The manager did not know, as Douglass did, that some of the ideas were her own, and so took a melancholy view of every innovation. "You can't do that," he gloomily repeated. "The public won't stand for new things. They want the old scenes rehashed. The public don't want to think; it wants to laugh. This story is all right for a book, but won't do for a play. I don't see why you quit a good thing for a risk like this. It is foolish and will lose money," he added, as a climax. "Croak, you old raven--you'll be embarrassed when we fill your money-box," she replied, gayly. "You should have an ideal, Mr. Westervelt." "An ideal. What should I do with that?" Like most men, Douglass knew nothing about gowns in their constituent parts, but he had a specially keen eye for the fitting and beautiful in a woman's toilet, and Helen was a constant delight to him because of the distinction of her dresses. They were refined, yet not weakly so--simple, yet always alluring. Under the influence of her optimism (and also because he did not wish to have her apologize for him) he drew on his slender bank-account for funds to provide himself with a carefully tailored suit of clothes and a new hat. "How well you are looking!" she said, in soft aside, as he met her one morning soon after. "Your hat is very becoming." "I am made all over new _inside_--so I hastened to typify the change exteriorly. I am rejoiced if you like me in my 'glad rags,'" he replied. "You are really splendid," she answered, with admiring fervor. "Let us hurry through to-day; I am tired and want a spin in the park." "That is for you to say," he answered. "You are never tired," she sighed. "I wish I had your endurance." "It is the endurance of desperation. I am staking all I have on this venture." Then, in low-toned intensity, he added: "It hurts me to have you forced to go over and over these lines because of the stupidity of a bunch of cheap little people. Why don't you let me read your part?" "That would not be fair," she answered, quickly--"neither to them nor to you. No, I am an actress, and this is a part of my life. We are none of us exempt from the universal curse." "Royleston is our curse. Please let me kick him out the stage-door--he is an insufferable ass, and a bad actor besides." "He is an ass, but he can act. No, it's too late to change him now. Wait; be patient. He'll pull up and surprise you at the final rehearsal." At four o'clock they were spinning up Fifth Avenue, which resounded with the hoof-strokes of stately horses, and glittered with the light of varnished leather. The rehearsal was put far behind them. The day was glorious November, and the air sparkling without being chill. A sudden exaltation seized Helen. "It certainly is a beautiful world--don't you think so?" she asked. "I do now; I didn't two weeks ago," he replied, soberly. "What has brought the change?" "You have." He looked at her steadily. She chose to be evasive. "I had a friend some years ago who was in the deeps of despair because no one would publish her book. Once she had secured the promise of a real publisher that he would take it she was radiant. She thought the firm had been wondrously kind. They made thirty thousand dollars from the sale of her book. I am selfish--don't you think I'm not--I'm going to make fame and lots of money on your play." "I hope you may, for am I not to share in all your gold and glory? I have greater need of both than you. You already have all that mortal could desire. I don't believe I've told you what I called you before I met you--have I?" "No; what was it?" Her eyes widened with interest. "'The glittering woman.'" She looked puzzled. "Why that?" "Because of the glamour, the mystery, which surrounded your name." "Even now I don't see." He looked amused and cried out: "On my life, I believe you don't! Being at the source of the light, you can't see it, of course. It's like wearing a crown of electric lamps--others see you as a dazzling thing; you are in the dark. It is my trade to use words to express my meaning, but I confess my hesitation in trying to make you see yourself as I saw you. You were like a baleful, purple star, something monstrous yet beautiful. Your fame filled the world and fell into my garret chamber like a lurid sunrise. With your coming, mysterious posters bloomed and crimson letters blazed on street-walls. Praiseful paragraphs appeared in the newspapers, gowns and hats (named after you) and belt-buckles and shoes and cigarettes arranged themselves in the windows, each bearing your name." "What a load of tinsel for a poor little woman to carry around! How it must have shocked you to find me so commonplace! None of us escape the common fates. It is always a surprise to me to discover how simple the men of great literary fame are. A friend of mine once spent a whole evening with a great novelist without discovering who he was. She said to him when she found him out, 'I couldn't believe that any one I could meet could be great.' Really, I hope you will forgive me for not being as superhuman as my posters. It was the mystery of the unknown. If you knew all about me I would be entirely commonplace." She was more concerned about his opinion of her than she expressed in words. Her eagerness appeared in her voice. "I found you infinitely more womanly than I had supposed, and simpler. Even yet I don't see how you can carry this oppressive weight of advertising glory and still be--what you are." "You seem to hesitate to tell me what I am." "I do," he gravely answered, and for a moment she sat in silence. "There's one objection to your assisting at rehearsals," she said, irrelevantly. "You will lose all the intoxication of seeing your play freshly bodied forth. It will be a poor, old, ragged story for you at the end of the three weeks." "I've thought of that; but there are other compensations." "You mean the pleasure of having the work go right--" "Yes, partly that--partly the suggestion that comes from a daily study of it." But the greatest compensation of all--the joy in her daily companionship--he did not have the courage to mention, and though she divined other and deeper emotions she, too, was silent. VI In the wearisome grind of rehearsal, Douglass was deeply touched and gratified by Helen's efforts to aid him. She was always willing to try again, and remained self-contained even when the author flung down the book and paced the stage in a breathless rage. "Ah, the stupidity of these people!" he exclaimed, after one of these interruptions. "They are impossible. They haven't the brains of a rabbit. Take Royleston; you'd think he ought to know enough to read a simple line like that, but he doesn't. He can't even imitate my way of reading it. They're all so absorbed in their plans to make a hit--" "Like their star," she answered, with a gleam in her eyes, "and the author." "But our aims are larger." "But not more vital; their board and washing hang on their success." He refused to smile. "They are geese. I hate to have you giving time and labor to such numskulls. You should give your time to your own part." "I'm a quick study. Please don't worry about me. Come, let's go on; we'll forget all about it to-morrow," and with a light hand on his arm she led him back to the front of the stage, and the rehearsal proceeded. It was the hardest work he ever did, and he showed it. Some of the cast had to be changed. Two dropped out--allured by a better wage--and all the work on their characterizations had to be done over. Others were always late or sick, and Royleston was generally thick-headed from carousal at his club. Then there were innumerable details of printing and scenery to be decided upon, and certain overzealous minor actors came to him to ask about their wigs and their facial make-up. In desperation over the small-fry he took the stage himself, helping them in their groupings and exits, which kept him on his feet and keyed to high nervous tension for hours at a time, so that each day his limbs ached and his head swam at the close of the last act. He marvelled at Helen's endurance and at her self-restraint. She was always ready to interpose gently when hot shot began to fly, and could generally bring about a laugh and a temporary truce by some pacific word. Hugh and Westervelt both came to her to say: "Tell Douglass to let up. He expects too much of these people. He's got 'em rattled. Tell him to go and slide down-hill somewhere." "I can't do that," she answered. "It's his play--his first play--and--he's right. He has an ideal, and it will do us all good to live up to it." To this Hugh replied, with bitterness, "You're too good to him. I wish you weren't quite so--" He hesitated. "They're beginning to talk about it." "About what?" she asked, quickly. "About his infatuation." Her eyes grew steady and penetrating, but a slow, faint flush showed her self-consciousness. "Who are talking?" "Westervelt--the whole company." He knew his sister and wished he had not spoken, but he added: "The fellows on the street have noticed it. How could they help it when you walk with him and eat with him and ride with him?" "Well?" she asked, with defiant inflection. "What is to follow? Am I to govern my life to suit Westervelt or the street? I admire and respect Mr. Douglass very much. He has more than one side to him. I am sick of the slang of the Rialto and the greenroom. I'm tired of cheap witticisms and of gossip. With Mr. Douglass I can discuss calmly and rationally many questions which trouble me. He helps me. To talk with him enables me to take a deep breath and try again. He enables me to forget the stage for a few hours." Hugh remained firm. "But there's your own question--what's to be the end of it? You can't do this without getting talked about." She smiled, and the glow of her humor disarmed him. "Sufficient unto the end is the evil thereof. I don't think you need to worry--" Hugh was indeed greatly troubled. He began to dislike and suspect Douglass. They had been antipathetic from the start, and no advance on the author's part could bring the manager nearer. It was indeed true that the young playwright was becoming a marked figure on the street, and the paragrapher of _The Saucy Swells_ spoke of him not too obscurely as the lucky winner of "our modern Helen," which was considered a smart allusion. This paragraph was copied by the leading paper of his native city, and his father wrote to know if it were really true that he was about to marry a play-actress. This gave a distinct shock to Douglass, for it made definite and very moving the vague dreams which had possessed him in his hours of reflection. His hands clinched, and while his heart beat fast and his breath shortened he said: "Yes, I will win her if I can"; but he was not elated. The success of his play was still in the future, and till he had won his wreath he had no right to address her in any terms but those of friendship. In spite of the flood of advance notices and personal paragraphs, in spite of envious gossip, he lived on quietly in his attic-room at the Roanoke. He had few friends and no intimates in the city, and cared little for the social opportunities which came to him. Confident of success, he gave up his connection with _The Blazon_, whose editor valued his special articles on the drama so much as to pay him handsomely for them. The editor of this paper, Mr. Anderson, his most intimate acquaintance, was of the Middle West, and from the first strongly admired the robust thought of the young architect whose "notions" concerning the American drama made him trouble among his fellow-craftsmen. "You're not an architect, you're a critic," he said to him early in their accidental acquaintance. "Now, I want to experiment on you. I want you to see Irving to-night and write your impressions of it. I have a notion you'll startle my readers." He did. His point of view, so modern, so uncompromising, so unshaded by tradition, delighted Anderson, and thereafter he was able to employ the young playwright regularly. These articles came to have a special value to the thoughtful "artists" of the stage, and were at last made into a little book, which sold several hundred copies, besides bringing him to the notice of a few congenial cranks and come-outers who met in an old tavern far down in the old city. These articles--this assumption of the superior air of the critic--led naturally to the determination to write a play to prove his theories, and now that the play was written and the trial about to be made his anxiety to win the public was very keen. He had a threefold reason for toiling like mad--to prove his theories, to gain bread, and to win Helen; and his concentration was really destructive. He could think of nothing else. All his correspondence ceased. He read no more; he went no more to his club. His only diversions were the rides and the lunches which he took with Helen. With her in the park he was a man transformed. His heaviness left him. His tongue loosened, and together they rose above the toilsome level of the rehearsal and abandoned themselves to the pure joy of being young. Together they visited the exhibitions of painting and sculpture, and to Helen these afternoons were a heavenly release from her own world. It made no difference to her who objected to her friendship with Douglass. After years of incredible solitude and seclusion and hard work in the midst of multitudes of admirers and in the swift-beating heart of cities, with every inducement to take pleasure, she had remained the self-denying student of acting. Her summers had been spent in England or France, where she saw no one socially and met only those who were interested in her continued business success. Now she abandoned this policy of reserve and permitted herself the joys of a young girl in company with a handsome and honorable man, denying herself even to the few. She played badly during these three weeks, and Westervelt was both sad and furious. Her joyous companionship with Douglass, her work on his sane and wholesome drama, their discussions of what the stage should be and do unfitted her for the factitious parts she was playing. "I am going to drop all of these characters into the nearest abyss," she repeated each time with greater intensity. "I shall never play them again after your drama is ready. My contract with Westervelt has really expired so far as his exclusive control over me is concerned, and I will not be coerced into a return to such work." Her eyes were opened also to the effect of her characters on the audiences that assembled night after night to hear her, and she began to be troubled by the thousands of young girls who flocked to her matinées. "Is it possible that what I call 'my art' is debasing to their bright young souls?" she asked herself. "Is Mr. Douglass right? Am I responsible?" It was the depression of these moods which gave her corresponding elation as she met her lover's clear, calm eyes of a morning, and walked into the atmosphere of his drama, whose every line told for joy and right living as well as for serious art. Those were glorious days for her--the delicious surprise of her surrender came back each morning. She had loved once, with the sweet single-heartedness of a girl, shaken with sweet and yielding joy of a boyish face and a slim and graceful figure. What he had said she could not remember; what he was, no longer counted; but what that love had been to her mattered a great deal, for when he passed out of her life the glow of his worship remained in her heart, enabling her to keep a jealous mastery of her art and to remain untouched by the admiration of those who sought her favor in every city she visited. Douglass was amazed to find how restricted her social circle was. Eagerly sought by many of the great drawing-rooms of the city, she seldom went to even the house of a friend. "Her art is a jealous master," her intimates were accustomed to say, implying that she had remained single in order that she might climb higher on the shining ladder of fame, and in a sense this was true; but she was not sordid in her ambitions--she was a child of nature. She loved rocks, hills, trees, and clouds. And it was this elemental simplicity of taste which made Douglass the conquering hero that he was. She felt in him concrete, rugged strength and honesty of purpose, as wide as the sky from the polished courtesy and the conventional evasions of her urban admirers. "No, I am not a bit in society," she confessed, in answer to some remark from him. "I couldn't give up my time and strength to it if I wished, and I don't wish. I'd rather have a few friends in for a quiet little evening after the play than go to the swellest reception." During all this glorious time no shadow of approaching failure crossed their horizon. The weather might be cold and gray; their inner sky remained unspotted of any vapor. If it rained, they lunched at the hotel; if the day was clear they ran out into the country or through the park in delightful comradeship, gay, yet thoughtful, full of brisk talk, even argument, but not on the drama. She had said, "Once for all, I do not intend to talk shop when I am out for pleasure," and he respected her wishes. He had read widely though haphazardly, and his memory was tenacious, and all he had, his whole mind, his best thought, was at her command during those hours of recreation. He began to see the city from the angle of the successful man. It no longer menaced him; he even began to dream of dominating it by sheer force of genius. When at her side he was invincible. Her buoyant nature transformed him. Her faith, her joy in life was a steady flame; nothing seemed to disturb her or make her afraid. And she attributed this strength, this joyous calm, to his innate sense of power--and admired him for it. That he drew from her, relied upon her, never entered her conception of their relations to each other. Nevertheless, as the play was nearing its initial production the critics loomed larger. Together they ran over the list. "There is the man who resembles Shakespeare?" she asked. "He will be kindly." "And the fat man with shifty gray eyes?" "He will slate us, unless--" "And the big man with the grizzled beard?" "We'll furnish him a joke or two." "And the man who comes in on crutches?" "He'll slaughter us; he hates the modern." "Then the man who looks like Lincoln?" "He is on our side. But how about the man with the waxed mustache?" "He'll praise me." "And slit the playwright's ears. Well, I will not complain. What will the 'Free Lance' do--the one who accepts bribes and cares for his crippled daughter like an angel--what will he do?" "Well, that depends. Do you know him?" "I do not, and don't care to. That exhausts the list of the notables; the rest are bright young fellows who are ready to welcome a good thing. Some of them I know slightly, but I do not intend to do one thing, aside from my work, to win their support." "That is right, of course. Westervelt may take a different course." And in this confident way they approached the day of trial. Westervelt, watching with uneasy eyes the growing intimacy of his star and her playwright, began to hint his displeasure to Hugh, and at last openly to protest. "What does she mean?" he asked, explosively. "Does she dream of marrying the man? That would be madness! Death! Tell her so, my boy." Hugh concealed his own anxiety. "Oh, don't worry, they're only good comrades." Westervelt grunted with infinite contempt. "Comrades! If he is not making love to her I'm a Greek." Hugh was much more uneasy than the manager, but he had more sense than to rush in upon his famous sister with a demand. He made his complaint to the gentle mother. "I wish she would drop this social business with Douglass. He's a good fellow, but she oughtn't to encourage him in this way. What's the sense of having him on the string every blessed afternoon? Do you imagine she's in earnest? What does she mean? It would be fatal to have her marry anybody now--it would ruin her with the public. Besides, Douglass is only a poor grub of a journalist, and a failure in his own line of business. Can't we do something?" The mother stood in awe of her shining daughter and shook her head. "She is old enough to know her own mind, Hugh. I darena speak to her. Besides, I like Mr. Douglass." "Yes, he won you by claiming Scotch blood. I don't like it. She is completely absorbed in him. All I can hope is it won't last." "If she loves him I canna interfere, and if she doesna there is no need to interfere," replied Mrs. MacDavitt, with sententious wisdom. VII At the last moment, when face to face with the public, young Douglass lost courage. The stake for which he played was so great! Like a man who has put his last dollar upon the hazard, he was ready to snatch his gold from the boards. The whole thing seemed weakly tenuous at dress-rehearsal, and Royleston, half-drunk as usual, persistently bungled his lines. The children in the second act squeaked like nervous poll-parrots, and even Helen's sunny brow was darkened by a frown as her leading man stumbled along to a dead halt again and again. "Mr. Royleston," she said, with dismay and anger in her voice, "I beg of you to remember that this is a most serious matter." Her tone steadied the man, for he was a really brilliant and famous actor beginning to break. He grew courtly. "Miss Merival, I assure you I shall be all right to-night." At this Douglass, tense and hot, shouted an angry word, and rushed into the semi-darkness of the side aisle. There Helen found him when she came off, his face black with anger and disgust. "It's all off," he said. "That conceited fool will ruin us." "Don't take things too seriously," she pleaded. "Royleston isn't half so hopeless as he seems; he will come on to-night alert as a sparrow and astonish you. We have worked very hard, and the whole company needs rest now rather than more drill. To show your own worry would make them worse than they are." In the end he went back to his seat ashamed of his outburst of temper, and the rehearsal came to an end almost triumphantly, due entirely to the spirit and example of the star, who permitted herself to act for the first time. It was a marvellous experience to see her transformed, by the mere putting aside of her cloak, from the sweet-faced, thoughtful girl to the stern, accusing, dark, and tense woman of the play. Her voice took on the quivering intonation of the seeress, and her spread hand seemed to clutch at the hearts of her perfidious friends. At such moments Douglass sat entranced, afraid to breathe for fear of breaking the spell, and when she dropped her rôle and resumed her cloak he shivered with pain. It hurt him, also, to have her say to Royleston: "Now, to-morrow night I shall be here at the mirror when you enter; I will turn and walk towards you till I reach this little stand. I will move around this to the right," etc. It seemed to belittle her art, to render it mechanical, and yet he admitted the necessity; for those who were to play with her were entitled to know, within certain limits, where to find her in the scene. He began to regret having had anything to do with the rehearsal. It would have been so much more splendid to see the finished product of her art with no vexing memory of the prosaic processes of its upbuilding. She seemed to divine his feelings, and explained: "Up to a certain point every art is mechanical; the outlines of my acting are fixed, but within those limits I am guided by impulse. Even if I dared to rely on the inspiration of the moment my support cannot; they must know what I am going to do. I sincerely wish now that you had left us to our struggle; and yet we've had a good time, haven't we?" "The best of my whole life," he answered, fervently. "Now, let's rest. Let's go to the opera to-night, for to-morrow I cannot see you--no, nor Monday, either. I shall remain in seclusion all day in a darkened room. I must think my part all out alone. There in the dark I shall sleep as much as possible. Helen's 'unconscious cerebration' must now get in its work," she ended, laughingly. They all dined together at her table, and sat together in the box, while the vast harmonies of _Siegfried_ rose like sun-shot mist from beneath them. Helen was rapt, swept out of herself; and Douglass, with delicate consideration, left her alone with her musings, whose depth and intensity appeared in the lines of her sensitive face. He had begun to understand the sources of her power--that is to say, her fluid and instant imagination which permitted her to share in the joy of every art. Under the spell of a great master she was able to divine the passion which directed him. She understood the sense of power, the supreme ease and dignity of Ternina, of De Reszke, just as she was able to partake in the pride of the great athlete who wrestled upon the mat. She touched life through her marvellous intuition at a hundred points. He was not discouraged, therefore, when, as they were going out, she said, with a quick clasp of her hand on his arm, "This matchless music makes our venture seem very small." He understood her mood, and to a lesser degree shared it. "I don't want to talk," she said at the door of her carriage. "Good-bye till Monday night. Courage!" VIII Deprivation of Helen's companionship even for a day produced in Douglass such longing that his hours were misery, and, though Sunday was long and lonely, Monday stretched to an intolerable length. He became greatly disturbed, and could neither work nor sit still, so active was his imagination. He tried to sleep, but could not, even though his nerves were twitching for want of it; and at last, in desperate resolution, he set himself the task of walking to Grant's tomb and back, in the hope that physical weariness would benumb his restless brain. This good result followed. He was in deep slumber when the bell-boy rapped at his door and called, "Half-past six, sir." He sprang up, moved by the thought, "In two hours Helen will be entering upon that first great scene," and for the first time gave serious consideration to the question of an audience. "I hope Westervelt has neglected nothing. It would be shameful if Helen played to a single empty seat. I will give tickets away on the sidewalk rather than have it so. But, good Heavens, such a condition is impossible!" After dressing with great care, he hastened directly to the theatre. It was early, and as he stepped into the entrance he found only the attendants, smiling, expectant, in their places. A doubt of success filled him with sudden weakness, and he slipped out on the street again, not caring to be recognized by any one at that hour. "They will laugh at my boyish excitement," he said, shamefacedly. Broadway, the chief thoroughfare of the pleasure-seekers of all America, was just beginning to thicken with life. The cafés were sending forth gayly dressed groups of diners jovially crowding into their waiting carriages. Automobiles and cabs were rushing northward to meet the theatre-goers of the up-town streets, while the humbler patrons of the "family circles" and "galleries" of the play-houses lower down were moving southward on foot, sharing for a few moments in the brilliancy and wealth of the upper avenue. The surface cars, clamorous, irritable, and timid, jammed at the crossings like sheep at a river-ford, while overhead the electric trains thundered to and fro, crowded with other citizens also theatre-bound. It seemed that the whole metropolis, alert to the drama, had flung its health and wealth into one narrow stream, and yet, "in all these thousands of careless citizens, who thinks of _Lillian's Duty_?" thought the unnerved playwright. "What do these laughing, insatiate amusement-seekers care about any one's duty? They are out to enjoy life. They are the well-to-do, the well-fed, the careless livers. Many of them are keen, relentless business-men wearied by the day's toil. They are now seeking relaxation, and not at all concerned with acquiring wisdom or grace. They are, indeed, the very kind of men to whom my play sets the cold steel, and their wives, of higher purpose, of gentler wills, are, nevertheless, quite as incapable of steady and serious thought. Not one of them has any interest in the problem I have set myself to delineate." He was saved from utter rout by remembrance of Helen. He recalled the Wondrous Woman as she had seemed to him of old, striving to regain his former sense of her power, her irresistible fascination. He assured himself that her indirect influence over the city had been proven to be enormous, almost fantastic, though her worshippers knew the real woman not at all, allured only by the aureoled actress. Yes, she would triumph, even if the play failed, for they would see her at last in a congenial rôle wherein her nobility, her intellectual power would be given full and free expression. Her appeal to her worshippers would be doubled. When he returned to the theatre a throng of people filled the entrance-way, and he was emboldened to pass in--even bowed to the attendants and to Hugh, who stood in the lobby, in shining raiment, a _boutonnière_ in his coat, his face radiating confidence and pride. "We've got 'em coming," he announced, with glee. "We are all sold out--not a seat left, and only the necessary 'paper' out. They're curious to see her in a new rôle. You are made!" "I hope so," replied the playwright, weakly. "Tuesday night tells the story." Hugh laughed. "Why, man, I believe you're scared. We're all right. I can sniff victory in the air." This confidence, so far from inspiriting Douglass, still further depressed him, and he passed in and on up into the second gallery, where he had privately purchased a reserved seat with intent to sense for himself the feeling of the upper part of the house during the first act. Keeping his muffler pinned close so that his evening dress escaped notice, he found his way down to the railing quite secure from recognition by any one at the peep-hole of the curtain or in the boxes, and there took his seat to watch the late-comers ripple down the aisles. He was experienced enough to know that "first-nighters" do not always count and that they are sometimes false prophets, and yet he could not suppress a growing exaltation as the beautiful auditorium filled with men and women such as he had himself often called "representative," and, best of all, many of the city's artists and literarians were present. He knew also that the dramatic critics were assembling, jaded and worn with ceaseless attendance on worthless dramas, a condition which should have fitted them for the keener enjoyment of any fresh, original work, but he did not deceive himself. He knew from their snarling onslaughts on plays he had praised that they were not to be pleased with anything--at least not all of them at the same time. That they were friendly to Helen he knew, that they would praise her he was assured, but that they would "slate" his play he was beginning to find inevitable. As the curtain rose on the first scene he felt the full force of Helen's words, "You won't enjoy the performance at all." He began now to pay for the joy he had taken in her companionship. He knew the weakness of every actor, and suffered with them and for them. Royleston from the first tortured him by mumbling his lines, palpably "faking" at times. "The idiot, he'll fail to give his cues!" muttered Douglass. "He'll ruin the play." The children scared him also, they were so important to Helen at the close of the act. At last the star came on--so quietly that the audience did not at the moment recognize her, but when those nearest the stage started a greeting to her it was taken up all over the shining house--a magnificent "hand." Never before had Helen Merival appeared before an audience in character so near her own good self, and the lovely simplicity of her manner came as a revelation to those of her admirers who had longed to know more of her private character. For several minutes they applauded while she smilingly bowed, but at last the clapping died away, and each auditor shrugged himself into an easy posture in his chair, waiting for the great star to take up her rôle. This she did with a security and repose of manner which thrilled Douglass in spite of his intimate knowledge of her work at rehearsals. The subtlety of her reading, the quiet, controlled precision and grace of her action restored his confidence in her power. "She has them in her hand. She cannot fail." The act closed triumphantly, though some among the audience began to wince. Helen came before the curtain several times, and each time with eyes that searched for some one, and Douglass knew with definiteness that she sought her playwright in order that she might share her triumph with him. But a perverse mood had seized him. "This is all very well, but wait till the men realize the message of the play," he muttered, and lifted the programme to hide his face. A buzz of excited comment rose from below, and though he could not hear a word beyond the water-boy's call he was able to imagine the comment. "Why, how lovely! I didn't suppose Helen Merival could do a sweet, domestic thing like that." "Isn't her gown exquisite? I've heard she is a dainty dresser in real life, quite removed from the kind of thing she wears on the stage. I wish she were not so seclusive. I'd like to know her." "But do you suppose this is her real self?" "It must be. She doesn't seem to be acting at all. I must say I prefer her in her usual parts." "She's wonderful as _The Baroness_." "I never let my daughters see her in those dreadful characters--they are too bold; but they are both here to-night. I understood it was to be quite a departure." Douglass, knowing well that Hugh and the manager were searching for him, sat with face bent low until the lights were again lowered. "Now comes the first assault. Now we will see them wince." The second act was distinctly less pleasing to those who sat below him in the orchestra and dress circle. Applause was still hearty, but it lacked the fervor of the first act. He could see men turn and whisper to one another now and then. They laughed, of course, and remarked each to the other, "Brown, you're getting a 'slat' to-night." "They are cheering the actress, not the play," observed the author. The gallery, less sensitive or more genuinely patriotic, thundered on, applauding the lines as well as the growing power of Helen's impersonation. Royleston was at last beginning to play, the fumes of his heavy dinner having cleared away. He began to grip his lines, and that gave the star her first opportunity to forget his weakness and throw herself into her part. All in all, only a very discriminating ear could have detected a falling-off of favor in this act. The curtain was lifted four times, and a few feeble cries for the author were heard, chiefly from the first balcony. Here was the point whereat his hoped-for triumph was to have begun, but it did not. He was touched by an invisible hand which kept him to his seat, though he knew that Helen was waiting for him to receive, hand-in-hand with her, the honors of the act. Some foreknowledge of defeat clarified the young author's vision, and a bitter melancholy crept over him as the third act unrolled. "They will go out," he said to himself, "and they will not come back for the last act. The play is doomed to disaster." And a flame of hatred rose in his heart against the audience. "They are brutes!" he muttered. The scenes were deeply exciting, the clash of interest upon interest was swift, novel in sequence, and most dramatic in outcome, but the applause was sharp and spasmodic, not long continued and hearty as before. Some of the men who had clapped loudest at the opening now sat gnawing their mustaches in sullen resentment. Douglass divined their thought: "This is a confidence game. We came to be amused, and this fellow instructs in sociology. We didn't cough up two dollars to listen to a sermon; we came to be rested. There's trouble enough in the street without displaying it in a place of amusement. The fellow ought to be cut out." Others ceased to cheer because both acting and play had mounted beyond their understanding. Its grim humor, its pitiless character-drawing, wearied them. Audience and play, speaking generally, were at cross-purposes. A minority, it was true, caught every point, shouting with great joy, and a few, who disapproved of the play, but were most devoted admirers of Helen's art, joined half-heartedly in their applause. But the act closed dismally, notwithstanding its tremendous climax. A chill east wind had swept over the auditorium and a few sensitive souls shivered. "What right has Helen Merival to do a thing like this? What possesses her? It must be true that she is infatuated with this young man and produces his dreadful plays to please him." "They say she is carried away with him. He's very handsome, they tell me. I wish they'd call him out." A buzz of complaining talk on the part of those aggrieved filled in the interlude. The few who believed in the drama were valiant in its defence, but their arguments did not add to the good-will of those who loved the actress but detested the play. "This won't do," said the most authoritative critic, as a detachment lined up at the bar of the neighboring saloon. "Merival must lop off this young dramatist or he'll 'queer' her with her best friends. She mustn't attempt to force this kind of thing down our throats." "He won't last a week," said another. Their finality of tone resembled that of emperors and sultans in counsel. Douglass, sitting humped and motionless among his gallery auditors, was clearly aware that Helen was weary and agitated, yet he remained in his seat, his brain surging with rebellious passion. His perverse pride was now joined by shame, who seized him by the other arm and held him prisoner. He felt like fleeing down the fire-escape. The thought of running the gauntlet of the smirking attendants, the possibility of meeting some of the exultant dramatic critics, most of whom were there to cut him to pieces, revolted him. Their joyous grins were harder to face than cannon, therefore he cowered in his place during the long wait, his mind awhirl, his teeth set hard. There were plenty of empty seats in the orchestra when the curtain lifted on the last act. Several of the critics failed to return. The playwright dared not look at his watch, for the scenes were dragging interminably. His muscles ached with the sort of fatigue one feels when riding in a slow train, and he detected himself pushing with his feet as if to hurry the action. The galleries did not display an empty bench, but he took small comfort in this, for he was not a believer in the old-time theory of pleasing the gallery. "In this city the two-dollar seats must be filled," he said. "Helen is ruined if she loses them." He began to pity her and to blame himself. "What right had I to force my ferocious theories upon her?" he asked himself, and at the moment it seemed that he had completely destroyed her prestige. She was plainly dispirited, and her auditors looked at one another in astonishment. "Can this sad woman in gray, struggling with a cold audience and a group of dismayed actors, be the brilliant and beautiful Helen Merival?" That a part of this effect--most of it, in fact--lay in the rôle of _Lillian_ they had not penetration enough to distinguish; they began to doubt whether she had ever been the very great success and the powerful woman they had supposed her to be. The play did not really close, the audience began to dribble out before the last half of the act began, and the curtain went down on the final scene while scores of women were putting on their wraps. A loyal few called Helen before the curtain, and her brave attempt to smile made every friendly heart bleed. Douglass, stiff and sore, as one who has been cudgelled, rose with the crowd and made his way to one of the outside exits, eager to escape recognition, to become one of the indistinguishable figures of the street. A couple of tousled-headed students going down the stairway before him tossed him his first and only crumb of comfort. "It won't go, of course," said one, in a tone of conviction, "but it's a great play all the same." "Right, old man," replied the other, with the decision of a master. "It's too good for this town. What New York wants is a continuous variety show." Douglass knew keenly, deeply, that Helen needed him--was looking for him--but the thought of those who would be near at their meeting made his entrance of the stage door impossible. He walked aimlessly, drifting with the current up the street, throbbing, tense, and hot with anger, shame, and despair. At the moment all seemed lost--his play, his own position, and Helen. Helen would surely drop him. The incredible had happened--he had not merely defeated himself, he had brought battle and pain and a stinging reproof to a splendid, triumphant woman. The enormous egotism involved in this he did not at the moment apprehend. He was like a wounded animal, content merely to escape. He longed to reach her, to beg her pardon, to absolve her from any promise, and yet he could not face Westervelt. He revolted at the thought of meeting Royleston and Miss Carmichael and Hugh. "No; it is impossible. I will wait for her at the hotel." At this word he was filled with a new terror. "The clerks and the bell-boys will have learned of my failure. I cannot face them to-night." And he turned and fled as if confronted by serpents. "And yet I must send a message. I must thank Helen and set her free. She must not go through another such night for my sake." He ended by dropping into another hotel to write her a passionate note, which he sent by a messenger: "Forgive me for the part I have played in bringing this disaster upon you. I had no idea that anything I could say or do would so deeply injure you--you the Wondrous One. It was incredible--their disdain of you. I was a fool, a selfish boaster, to allow you to go into this thing. The possible loss of money we both discussed, but that any words of mine could injure you as an artist never came to me. Believe me, my dearest friend, I am astounded. I am crushed with the thought, and I dare not show my face among your friends. I feel like an assassin. I will call to-morrow--I can't do it to-night. I am bleeding at the heart because I have made you share the shame and failure which I feel to-night are always to be mine. I was born to be of the minority. Please don't give another thought to me or my play. Go your own way. Get back to the plays that please people. Be happy. You have the right to be happy, and I am a selfish, unthinking criminal whom you would better forget. Don't waste another dollar or another moment on my play--it is madness. I am overwhelmed with my debt to you, but I shall repay it some day." IX Helen was more deeply hurt and humiliated by her playwright's flight than by the apparent failure of the play, but the two experiences coming together fairly stunned her. To have the curtain go down on her final scenes to feeble and hesitating applause was a new and painful experience. Never since her first public reading had she failed to move and interest her audience. What had happened? What had so swiftly weakened her hold on her admirers? Up to that moment she had been sure that she could make any character successful. For a few moments she stood in the middle of the stage stifling with a sense of mortification and defeat, then turned, and without a word or look to any one went to her dressing-room. Her maid was deeply sympathetic, and by sudden impulse stooped and kissed her cheek, saying, "Never mind, Miss Merival, it was beautiful." This unexpected caress brought the tears to the proud girl's eyes. "Thank you, Nora. Some of the audience will agree with you, I hope." "I'm sure of it, miss. Don't be downcast." Hugh knocked at the door. "Can you come out?" "Not now, Hugh. In a few moments." "There are some people here to see you--" She wanted to say, "I don't want to see them," but she only said, "Please ask them to wait." She knew by the tone of her brother's voice that he, too, was choking with indignation, and she dreaded the meeting with him and with Westervelt. She was sustained by the hope that Douglass would be there to share her punishment. "Why had he not shown himself?" she asked again, with growing resentment. When she came out fully dressed she looked tired and pale, but her head was high and her manner proudly self-contained. Westervelt, surrounded by a small group of depressed auditors, among whom were Mrs. MacDavitt, Hugh, and Royleston, was holding forth in a kind of bellow. "It proves what? Simply that they will not have her in these preachy domestic parts, that's all. Every time she tries it she gets a 'knock.' I complain, I advise to the contrary. Does it do any good? No. She must chance it, all to please this crank, this reformer." The mother, reading the disappointment and suffering in Helen's white face, reached for her tremulously and drew her to her bosom. "Never mind what they say, Nellie; it was beautiful and it was true." Even Westervelt was awed by the calm look Helen turned on the group. "You are very sure of yourself, Mr. Westervelt, but to my mind this night only proves that this audience came to hear me without intelligent design." She faced the silent group with white and weary face. "Certainly Mr. Douglass's play is not for such an audience as that which has been gathering to see me as _The Baroness_, but that does not mean that I have no other audience. There is a public for me in this higher work. If there isn't, I will retire." Westervelt threw his hands in the air with a tragic gesture. "Retire! My Gott, that would be insanity!" Helen turned. "Come, mother, you are tired, and so am I. Mr. Westervelt, this is no place for this discussion. Good-night." She bowed to the friends who had loyally gathered to greet her. "I am grateful to you for your sympathy." There was, up to this time, no word of the author; but Hugh, as he walked by her side, broke out resentfully, "Do you know that beggar playwright--" "Not a word of him, Hugh," she said. "You don't know what that poor fellow is suffering. Our disappointment is nothing in comparison with his. Think of what he has lost." "Nonsense! He has lost nothing, because he had nothing to lose. He gets us involved--" "Hugh!" There was something in her utterance of his name which silenced him more effectually than a blow. "I produced this play of my own free will," she added, a moment later, "and I will take the responsibility of it." In the carriage the proud girl leaned back against the cushions, and pressed her two hands to her aching eyes, from which the tears streamed. It was all so tragically different from their anticipations. They were to have had a little supper of jubilation together, to talk it all over, to review the evening's triumph, and now here she sat chill with disappointment, while he was away somewhere in the great, heartless city suffering tortures, alone and despairing. The sweet, old mother put her arm about her daughter's waist. "Don't cry, dearie; it will all come right. You can endure one failure. 'Tis not as bad as it seems." Helen did not reply as she was tempted to do by saying, "It isn't my defeat, it is his failure to stand beside me and receive his share of the disaster." And they rode the rest of the way in sad silence. As she entered her room a maid handed her a letter which she knew to be from Douglass even before she saw the handwriting, and, without opening it, passed on into her room. "His message is too sacred for any other to see," she said to herself, with instant apprehension of the bitter self-accusation with which he had written. The suffering expressed by the scrawling lines softened her heart, her anger died away, and only big tears of pity filled her glorious eyes. "Poor boy! His heart is broken." And a desire to comfort him swelled her bosom with a passion almost maternal in its dignity. Now that his pride was humbled, his strong figure bowed, his clear brain in turmoil, her woman's tenderness sought him and embraced him without shame. Her own strength and resolution came back to her. "I will save you from yourself," she said, softly. When she returned to the reception-room she found Westervelt and Hugh and several of the leading actors (who took the evening's "frost" as a reflection on themselves, an injury to their reputations), all in excited clamor; but when they saw their star enter they fell silent, and Westervelt, sweating with excitement, turned to meet her. "You must not go on. It is not the money alone; it will ruin you with the public. It is not for you to lecture the people. They will not have it. Such a failure I have never seen. It was not a 'frost,' it was a frozen solid. We will announce _The Baroness_ for to-morrow. The pressmen are waiting below. I shall tell them?" His voice rose in question. "Mr. Westervelt, this is my answer, and it is final. I will not take the play off, and I shall expect you to work with your best energy to make it a success. One night does not prove _Lillian_ a failure. The audience to-night was not up to it, but that condemns the auditors, not the play. I do not wish to hear any more argument. Good-night." The astounded and crestfallen manager bowed his head and went out. Helen turned to the others. "I am tired of this discussion. One would think the sky had fallen--from all this tumult. I am sorry for you, Mr. Royleston, but you are no deeper in the slough than Miss Collins and the rest, and they are not complaining. Now let us sit down to our supper and talk of something else." Royleston excused himself and went away, and only Hugh, Miss Collins, Miss Carmichael, and the old mother drank with the star to celebrate the first performance of _Lillian's Duty_. "I have had a letter from Mr. Douglass," Helen said, softly, when they were alone. "Poor fellow, he is absolutely prostrate in the dust, and asks me to throw him overboard as our Jonah. Put yourself in his place, Hugh, before speaking harshly of him." "I don't like a coward," he replied, contemptuously. "Why didn't he face the music to-night? I never so much as set eyes on him after he came in. He must have been hiding in the gallery. He leads you into this crazy venture and then deserts you. A man who does that is a puppy." A spark of amusement lit Helen's eyes. "You might call him that when you meet him next." Hugh, with a sudden remembrance of the playwright's powerful frame, replied, a little less truculently: "I'll call him something more fit than that when I see him. But we won't see him again. He's out of the running." Helen laid her cheek on her folded hands, and, with a smile which cleared the air like a burst of sunshine, said, laughingly: "Hugh, you're a big, bad boy. You should be out on the ice skating instead of managing a theatre. You have no more idea of George Douglass than a bear has of a lion. This mood of depression is only a cloud; it will pass and you will be glad to beg his pardon. My faith in him and in _Lillian's Duty_ is unshaken. He has the artistic temperament, but he has also the pertinacity of genius. Come, let's all go to bed and forget our hurts." And with this she rose and kissed her mother good-night. Hugh, still moody, replied, with sudden tenderness: "It hurt me to see them go out on your last scene. I can't forgive Douglass for that." She patted his cheek. "Never mind that, Hughie. 'This, too, shall pass away.'" X At two o'clock, when Douglass returned to his hotel, tired and reckless of any man's scorn, the night clerk smiled and said, as he handed him a handful of letters, "I hear you had a great audience, Mr. Douglass." The playwright did not discover Helen's note among his letters till he had reached his room, and then, without removing his overcoat, he stood beneath the gas-jet and read: "MY DEAR AUTHOR,--My heart bleeds for you. I know how you must suffer, but you must not despair. A first night is not conclusive. Do not blame yourself. I took up your play with my eyes open to consequences. You are wrong if you think even the failure of this play (which I do not grant) can make any difference in my feeling towards you. The power of the lines, your high purpose, remain. Suppose it does fail? You are young and fertile of imagination. You can write another and better play in a month, and I will produce it. My faith in you is not weakened, for I know your work is good. I have turned my back on the old art and the old rôles; I need you to supply me with new ones. This is no light thing with me. I confess to surprise and dismay to-night, but I should not have been depressed had you been there beside me. I was deeply hurt and puzzled by your absence, but I think I understand how sore and wounded you were. Come in to see me to-morrow, as usual, and we will consider what can be done with this play and plan for a new one. Come! You are too strong and too proud to let a single unfriendly audience dishearten you. We will read the papers together at luncheon and laugh at the critics. Don't let your enemies think they have driven you into retirement. Forget them in some new work, and remember my faith in you is not shaken." This letter, so brave, so gravely tender and so generous, filled him with love, choked him with grateful admiration. "You are the noblest woman in the world, the bravest, the most forgiving. I will not disappoint you." His bitterness and shame vanished, his fists clinched in new resolution. "You are right. I can write another play, and I will. My critics shall laugh from the other side of their mouths. They shall not have the satisfaction of knowing that they have even wounded me. I will justify your faith in my powers. I will set to work to-morrow--this very night--on a new play. I will make you proud of me yet, Helen, my queen, my love." With that word all his doubts vanished. "Yes, I love her, and I will win her." In the glow of his love-born resolution he began to search among his papers for an unfinished scenario called _Enid's Choice_. When he had found it he set to work upon it with a concentration that seemed uncanny in the light of his day's distraction and dismay. _Lillian's Duty_ and the evening's bitter failure had already grown dim in his mind. Helen's understanding of him was precise. He was of those who never really capitulate to the storm, no matter how deeply they may sink at times in the trough of the sea. As everything had been against him up to that moment, he was not really taken by surprise. All his life he had gone directly against the advice and wishes of his family. He had studied architecture rather than medicine, and had set his face towards the East rather than the West. Every dollar he had spent he had earned by toil, and the things he loved had always seemed the wasteful and dangerous things. He wrote plays in secret when he should have been soliciting commissions for warehouses, and read novels when he should have been intent upon his business. "It was impossible that I should succeed so quickly, so easily, even with the help of one so powerful as Helen Merival. It is my fate to work for what I get." And with this return of his belief that to himself alone he must look for victory, his self-poise and self-confidence came back. He looked strong, happy, and very handsome next morning as he greeted the clerk of the Embric, who had no guile in his voice as he said: "Good-morning, Mr. Douglass. I hear that your play made a big hit last night." "I reckon it hit something," he replied, with easy evasion. The clerk continued: "My wife's sister was there. She liked it very much." "I am very glad she did," replied Douglass, heartily. As he walked over towards the elevator a couple of young men accosted him. "Good-morning, Mr. Douglass. We are from _The Blazon_. We would like to get a little talk out of you about last night's performance. How do you feel about the verdict." "It was a 'frost,'" replied Douglass, with engaging candor, "but I don't consider the verdict final. I am not at all discouraged. You see, it's all in getting a hearing. Miss Merival gave my play a superb production, and her impersonation ought to fill the theatre, even if _Lillian's Duty_ were an indifferent play, which it is not. Miss Merival, in changing the entire tone and character of her work, must necessarily disappoint a certain type of admirer. Last night's audience was very largely made up of those who hate serious drama, and naturally they did not like my text. All that is a detail. We will create our own audience." The reporters carried away a vivid impression of the author's youth, strength, and confidence, and one of them sat down to convey to the public his admiration in these words: "Mr. Douglass is a Western man, and boldly shies his buckskin into the arena and invites the keenest of his critics to take it up. If any one thinks the 'roast' of his play has even singed the author's wings, he is mistaken. He is very much pleased with himself. As he says, a hearing is a great thing. He may be a chopping-block, but he don't look it." Helen met her playwright with an anxious, tired look upon her face, but when he touched her fingers to his lips and said, "At your service, my lady," she laughed in radiant, sudden relief. "Oh, but I'm glad to see you looking so gay and strong. I was heart-sore for you last night. I fancied you in all kinds of torture." His face darkened. "I was. My blue devils assailed me, but I vanquished them, thanks to your note," he added, with a burning glance deep-sent, and his voice fell to a tenderness which betrayed his heart. "I think you are the most tolerant star that ever put out a hand to a poor author. What a beast I was to run away! But I couldn't help it then. I wanted to see you, but I couldn't face Westervelt and Royleston. I couldn't endure to hear them say, 'I told you so.' You understood, I'm sure of it." She studied him with admiring eyes. "Yes, I understood--later. At first I was crushed. It shook my faith in you for a little while." She put off this mood (whose recollected shadows translated into her face filled Douglass's throat with remorse) and a smile disclosed her returning sense of humor. "Oh, Hugh and Westervelt are angry--perfectly purple with indignation against you for leading me into a trap--" "I feared that. That is why I begged you to throw my play--" She laid a finger on her lips, for Mrs. MacDavitt came in. "Mother, here is Mr. Douglass. I told you he would come. I hope you are hungry. Let us take our places. Hugh is fairly used up this morning. Do you see that bunch of papers?" she asked, pointing at a ragged pile. "After breakfast we take our medicine." "No," he said, firmly. "I have determined not to read a line of them. To every word you speak I will listen, but I will not be harrowed up by a hodgepodge of personal prejudices written by my enemies before the play was produced or in a hurried hour between the fall of the curtain and going to press. I know too much about how these judgments are cooked up. I saw the faults of the play a good deal clearer than did any of those sleepy gentlemen who came to the theatre surfeited and weary and resentful of your change of programme." She looked thoughtful. "Perhaps you are right," she said, at last. "I will not read them. I know what they will say--" "I thought the play was very beautiful," said Mrs. MacDavitt. "And my Nellie was grand." Helen patted her mother's hand. "We have one loyal supporter, Mr. Douglass." "Ye've many more, if the truth were known," said the old mother, stoutly, for she liked young Douglass. "I believe that," cried Helen. "Did you consider that as I change my rôles and plays I must also, to a large extent, change my audience? The people who like me as _Baroness Telka_ are amazed and angered by your play. They will not come to see me. But there are others," she added, with a smile at the slang phrase. "I thought of that, but not till last night." "It will take longer to inform and interest our new public than any of us realized. I am determined to keep _Lillian_ on for at least four weeks. Meanwhile you can prune it and set to work on a new one. Have you a theme?" "I have a scenario," he triumphantly answered. "I worked it out this morning between two o'clock and four." She reached her hand to him impulsively, and as he took it a warm flush came into her face and her eyes were suffused with happy tears. "That's brave," she said. "I told them you could not be crushed. I knew you were of those who fight hardest when closest pressed. You must tell me about it at once--not this minute, of course, but when we are alone." When Hugh came in a few minutes later he found them discussing a new automobile which had just made a successful trial run. The play became the topic of conversation again, but on a different plane. Hugh was blunt, but not so abusive as he had declared his intention to be. "There's nothing in _Lillian_," he said--"not a dollar. We're throwing our money away. We might better close the theatre. We won't have fifty dollars in the house to-night. It's all right as a story, but it won't do for the stage." Douglass kept his temper. "It was too long; but I can better that in a few hours. I'll have a much closer-knit action by Wednesday night." As they were rising from the table Westervelt entered with a face like a horse, so long and lax was it. "They have burned us alive!" he exclaimed, as he sank into a chair and mopped his red neck. He shook like a gelatine pudding, and Helen could not repress a smile. "Your mistake was in reading them. We burned the critics." The manager stared in vast amaze. "You didn't read the papers?" "Not one." "Well, they say--" She stopped him. "Don't tell me what they say--not a word. We did our best and we did good work, and will do better to-night, so don't come here like a bird of ill-omen, Herr Westervelt. Go kill the critics if you feel like it, but don't worry us with tales of woe. Our duty is to the play. We cannot afford to waste nervous energy writhing under criticism. What is said is said, and repeating it only hurts us all." Her tone became friendly. "Really, you take it too hard. It is only a matter of a few thousand dollars at the worst, and to free you from all further anxiety I will assume the entire risk. I will rent your theatre." "No, no!" cried Hugh. "We can't afford to do that." "We can't afford to do less. I insist," she replied, firmly. The manager lifted his fat shoulders in a convulsive shrug. His face indicated despair of her folly. "Good Gott! Well, you are the doctor, only remember there will not be one hundred people in the house to-night." He began to recover speech. "Think of that! Helen Merival playing to empty chairs--in _my_ theatre. Himmel!" "It is sad, I confess, but not hopeless, Herr Westervelt. We must work the harder to let the thoughtful people of the city know what we are trying to do." "Thoughtful people!" Again his scorn ran beyond his words for a moment and his tongue grew German. "Doughtful beople. Dey dondt bay dwo tollors fer seats! _Our_ pusiness iss to attract the rich--the gay theatre-goers. Who is going to pring a theatre-barty to see a sermon on the stage--hay?" "You are unjust to _Lillian's Duty_. It is not a sermon; it is a powerful acting play--the best part, from a purely acting standpoint, I have ever undertaken to do. But we will not discuss that now. The venture is my own, and you will be safe-guarded. I will instruct my brother to make the new arrangement at once." With a final, despairing shrug the manager rose and went out, and Helen, turning an amused face to Douglass, asked, humorously: "Isn't he the typical manager?--in the clouds to-day, stuck in the mud to-morrow. Sometimes he is excruciatingly funny, and then he disgusts me. They're almost all alike. If business should be unexpectedly good to-night he would be a man transformed. His face would shine, he would grasp every actor by the hand, he would fairly fall upon your neck; but if business went down ten dollars on Wednesday night then look for the 'icy mitt' again. Big as he is he curls up like a sensitive plant when touched by adversity. He can't help it; he's really a child--a big, fat boy. But come, we must now consider the cuts for _Lillian_; then to our scenario." As the attendants whisked away the breakfast things Helen brought out the original manuscript of _Lillian's Duty_, and took a seat beside her playwright. "Now, what is the matter with the first act?" "Nothing." "I agree. What is out in the second?" "Needs cutting." "Where?" "Here and here and here," he answered, turning the leaves rapidly. "I felt it. I couldn't hold them there. Royleston's part wants the knife badly. Now, the third act?" "It is too diffuse, and the sociologic background gets obstinately into the foreground. As I sat there last night I saw that the interest was too abstract, too impersonal for the ordinary play-goer. I can better that. The fourth act must be entirely rewritten. I will do that this afternoon." She faced him, glowing with recovered joy and recovered confidence. "Now you are Richard once again upon his horse." "A hobby horse," he answered, with a laugh, then sobered. "In truth, my strength comes from you. At least you roused me. I was fairly in the grasp of the Evil One when your note came. Your splendid confidence set me free. It was beautiful of you to write me after I had sneaked away like a wounded coyote. I cannot tell you what your letter was to me." She held up a finger. "Hush! No more of that. We are forgetting, and you are becoming personal." She said this in a tone peculiarly at variance with the words. "Now read me the scenario of the new play. I am eager to know what has moved you, set you on high again." The creative fire began to glow in his eyes. "This is to be as individual, as poetic, as the other was sociologic. The character you are to play is that of a young girl who knows nothing of life, but a great deal of books. _Enid's_ whole world is revealed by the light which streams from the window of a convent library--a gray, cold light with deep shadows. She is tall and pale and severe of line, but her blue eyes are deep and brooding. Her father, a Western mine-owner, losing his second wife, calls on his daughter to return from the Canadian convent in which she has spent seven years. She takes her position as an heiress in his great house. She is plunged at once into the midst of a pleasure-seeking, thoughtless throng of young people whose interests in life seem to her to be grossly material. She becomes the prey of adventurers, male and female, and has nothing but her innate purity to defend her. Ultimately there come to her two men who type the forces at war around her, and she is forced to choose between them." As he outlined this new drama the mind of the actress took hold of _Enid's_ character, so opposite in energy to _Lillian_, and its great possibilities exalted her, filled her with admiration for the mind which could so quickly create a new character. "I see I shall never want for parts while you are my playwright," she said, when he had finished. "Oh, I can write--so long as I have you to write for and to work for," he replied. "You are the greatest woman in the world. Your faith in me, your forgiveness of my cowardice, have given me a sense of power--" She spoke quickly and with an effort to smile. "We are getting personal again." He bowed to the reminder. "I beg your pardon. I will not offend again." XI Helen's warning was not as playful as it seemed to her lover, for something in the glow of his eyes and something vibrant in the tones of his voice had disturbed her profoundly. The fear of something which he seemed perilously near saying filled her with unrest, bringing up questions which had thus far been kept in the background of her scheme of life. "Some time I shall marry, I suppose," she had said to one of her friends, "but not now; my art will not permit it. Wedlock to an actress," she added, "is almost as significant as death. It may mean an end of her playing--a death to her ambitions. When I decide to marry I shall also decide to give up the stage." "Oh, I don't know," replied the other. "There are plenty who do not. In fact, Mary Anderson is the exception. When the conquering one comes along you'll marry him and make him your leading man, the way so many others do." "When 'the conquering one' comes along I shall despise the stage," retorted Helen, with laughing eyes--"at least I'm told I will." "Pish! You'd give a dozen husbands for the joy of facing a big first-night audience. I tell Horace that if it comes to a matter of choice for me he'll have to go. Gracious goodness! I could no more live without the applause of the stage--" "How about the children?" "The children! Oh, that's different. The dear tots! Well, luckily, they're not absolutely barred. It's hard to leave the darlings behind. When I go on the road I miss their sweet little caresses; but I have to earn their bread, you see, and what better career is open to me." Helen grew grave also. "I don't like to think of myself as an _old_ actress. I want to have a fixed abiding-place when I am forty-five. Gray hairs should shine in the light of a fireside." "There's always peroxide," put in the other, and their little mood of seriousness vanished. It was, indeed, a very unusual situation for a young and charming actress. The Hotel Embric stood just where three great streams of wealth and power and fashion met and mingled. Its halls rustled with the spread silks of pride and glittered with the jewels of spendthrift vanity, and yet few knew that high in the building one of the most admired women of the city lived in almost monastic seclusion. The few men who recognized her in the elevator or in the hall bowed with deferential admiration. She was never seen in the dining-rooms, and it was known that she denied herself to all callers except a very few intimate friends. This seclusion--this close adherence to her work--added to her mystery, and her allurement in the eyes of her suitors increased as they sought vainly for an introduction. It was reported that this way of life was "all a matter of business, a cold, managerial proposition," a method of advertising; but so far as Helen herself was implicated, it was a method of protection. She had an instinctive dislike, almost a fear, of those who sought her acquaintance, and when Westervelt, with blundering tactlessness or impudent design, brought round some friends, she froze them both with a single glance. Furthermore, by denying herself to one she was able to escape the other, and thus save herself for her work; for though she had grown to hate the plays through which she reached the public, she believed in the power and the dignity of her art. It was a means of livelihood, it gratified her vanity; but it was more than this. In a dim way she felt herself in league with a mighty force, and the desire to mark an epoch in the American drama came to her. This, too, was a form of egotism, but a high form. "I do not care to return to the old," she said. "There are plenty of women to do _Beatrice_ and _Viola_ and _Lady Macbeth_. I am modern. I believe in the modern and I believe in America. I don't care to start a fad for Ibsen or Shaw. I would like to develop our own drama." "You will have to eliminate the tired business-man and his fat wife and their late dinners," said a cynical friend. "All business-men are not tired and all wives are not fat. I believe there is a public ready to pay their money to see good American drama. I have found a man who can write--" "Beware of that man," said the cynic, with a twofold meaning in his tone. "'He is a dreamer; let him pass.'" "I do not fear him," she replied, with a gay smile. XII Douglass now set to work on his second play with teeth clinched. "I will win out in spite of them," he said. "They think I am beaten, but I am just beginning to fight." As the days wore on his self-absorption became more and more marked. All his morning hours were spent at his writing, and when he came to Helen he was cold and listless, and talked of nothing but _Enid_ and her troubles. Even as they rode in the park his mind seemed forever revolving lines and scenes. In the midst of her attempt to amuse him, to divert him, he returned to his theme. He invited her judgments and immediately forgot to listen, so morbidly self-centred was he. He made no further changes in the book of _Lillian's Duty_, but put aside Westervelt's request with a wave of his hand. "I leave all that to Miss Merival," he said. "I can't give it any thought now." From one point of view Helen could not but admire this power of concentration, but when she perceived that her playwright's work had filled his mind to the exclusion of herself she began to suffer. Her pride resented his indifference, and she was saved from anger and disgust only by the beauty of the writing he brought to her. "The fury of the poet is on him. I must not complain," she thought, and yet a certain regret darkened her face. "All that was so sweet and fine has passed out of our intercourse," she sadly admitted to herself. "I am no longer even the great actress to him. Once he worshipped me--I felt it; now I am a commonplace friend. Is the fault in me? Am I one whom familiarity lessens in value?" She did not permit herself to think that this was a lasting change, that he had forever passed beyond the lover, and that she would never again fill his world with mystery and light and longing. And yet this monstrous recession was the truth. In the stress of his work the glamour had utterly died out of Douglass's conception of Helen, just as the lurid light of her old-time advertising had faded from the bill-boards and from the window displays of Broadway. As cold, black, and gray instantaneous photographs had taken the place of the gorgeous, jewel-bedecked, elaborate lithographs of the old plays, so now his thought of her was without warmth. Helen became aware, too, of an outside change. Her friends used this as a further warning. "You are becoming commonplace to the public," one said, with a touch of bitterness. "Your admirers no longer wonder. Go back to the glitter and the glory." "No," she replied. "I will regain my place, and with my own unaided character--and my lines," she added, with a return to her faith in Douglass. And yet her meetings with him were now a species of torture. Her self-respect suffered with every glance of his eyes. He resembled a man suffering from a fever. At times he talked with tiresome intensity about some new situation, quoting his own characters, beating and hammering at his scenes until Helen closed her eyes for very weariness. Only at wide intervals did he return to some dim realization of his indebtedness to her. One day he gratified her by saying, with a note of tenderness in his voice: "You are keeping the old play on; don't do it. Throw it away; it is a tract--a sermon." Then spoiled it all by bitterly adding, "Go back to your old successes." "You used to dislike me in such rôles," she answered, with pain and reproach in face and voice. "It will only be for a little while," he replied, with a swift return to his enthusiasm. "In two weeks I'll have the new part ready for you." But the sting of his advice remained long in the proud woman's heart. He went no more to the theatre. "I can't bear to see you playing to empty seats," he declared, in explanation, but in reality he had a horror of the scene of his defeat. He came to lunch less often, and when they went driving or visiting the galleries all the old-time, joyous companionship was gone. Not infrequently, as they stood before some picture or sat at a concert, he would whisper, "I have it; the act will end with _Enid_ doing so-and-so," and not infrequently he hurried away from her to catch some fugitive illumination which he feared to lose. He came to her reception-room only once of a Saturday afternoon, just before the play closed. "How is the house?" he asked, with indifference. "Bad." "Very bad?" "Oh yes." "I must work the harder," he replied, and sank into a sombre silence. He never came inside again. Helen was deeply wounded by this visit, and was sorely tempted to take him at his word and end the production, but she did not. She could not, so deep had her interest in him become. Loyal to him she must remain, loyal to his work. As his bank account grew perilously small, Douglass fell into deeps of black despair, wherein all imaginative power left him. At such times the lack of depth and significance in his work appalled him. "It is hopelessly poor and weak; it does not deserve to succeed. I've a mind to tear it in rags." But he resisted this spirit, partly restrained by some hidden power traceable to the influence of Helen and partly by his desire to retrieve himself in the estimation of the world, but mainly because of some hidden force in his own brain, and set to work each time filing and polishing with renewed care of word and phrase. Slowly the second drama took on form and quality, developing a web of purpose not unlike that involved in a strain of solemn music, and at the last the author's attention was directed towards eliminating minute inharmonies or to the insertion of cacophony with design to make the _andante_ passages the more enthrallingly sweet. As the play neared completion his absorption began to show results. He lost vigor, and Helen's eyes took anxious note of his weariness. "You are growing thin and white, Mr. Author," she said to him, with solicitude in her voice. "You don't look like the rugged Western Scotchman you were when I found you. Am I to be your vampire?" "On the contrary, I am to destroy you, to judge from the money you are losing on my wretched play. I begin to fear I can never repay you, not even with a great success. I have days when I doubt my power to write a successful drama." "You work too hard. You must not ruin your health by undue haste. A week or two will not make a killing difference with us. I don't mind playing _Lillian_ another month, if you need the time. It is good discipline, and, besides, I enjoy the part." "That is because you are good and loyal to a poor writer," he answered, with a break to humble appreciation of her bounty and her bravery. "Be patient with me," he pleaded. "_Enid_ will recoup you for all you have suffered. It will win back all your funds. I have made it as near pure poetry as our harsh, definite life and our elliptical speech will permit." And straightway his mind was filled with dreams of conquering, even while he faced his love, so strangely are courtship and ambition mingled in the heart of man. At last he began to exult, to boast, to call attention to the beauty of the lines spoken by _Enid_. "See how her simplicity and virginal charm are enhanced by the rugged, remorseless strength, and by the conscienceless greed of the men surrounding her, and yet she sees in them something admirable. They are like soldiers to her. They are the heroes who tunnel mountains and bridge cataracts. When she looks from her slender, white hands to their gross and powerful bodies she shudders with a sort of fearsome admiration." "Can all that appear in the lines?" "Yes. In the lines and in the acting; it _must_ appear in your acting," he added, with a note of admonition. Her face clouded with pain. "He begins to doubt my ability to delineate his work," she thought, and turned away in order that he might not know how deeply he had wounded her. XIII Helen's pride contended unceasingly with her love during the weeks of her lover's alienation; for, with all her sweet dispraise of herself, she was very proud of her place in the world, and it was not easy to bow her head to neglect. Sometimes when he forgot to answer her or rushed away to his room with a hasty good-bye, she raged with a perfectly justifiable anger. "You are selfish and brutal," she cried out after him on one occasion. "You think only of yourself. You are vain, egotistical. All that I have done is forgotten the moment you are stung by criticism," and she tried to put him aside. "What do his personal traits matter to me?" she said, as if in answer to her own charge. "He is my dramatist, not my husband." But when he came back to her, an absent-minded smile upon his handsome lips, holding in his hands some pages of exquisite dialogue, she humbled herself before him. "After all, what am I beside him? He is a poet, a creative mind, while I am only a mimic," and straightway she began to make excuses for him. "Have I not always had the same selfish, desperate concentration? Am I always a sweet and lovely companion? Certainly the artistic temperament is not a strange thing to me." Nevertheless, she suffered. It was hard to be the one optimist in the midst of so many pessimists. The nightly performance to an empty house wore on her most distressingly, and no wonder. She, who had never hitherto given a moment's troubled thought to such matters, now sat in her dressing-room listening to the infrequent, hollow clang of the falling chair seats, attempting thus to estimate the audience straggling sparsely, desolately in. To re-enter the stage after an exit was like an icy shower-bath. Each night she hoped to find the receipts larger, and indeed they did from time to time advance suddenly, only to drop back to desolating driblets the following night. These gains were due to the work of the loyal Hugh as advertising agent, or to some desperate discount sale to a club on the part of Westervelt, who haunted the front of the house, a pale and flabby wraith of himself, racking his brain, swearing strange, German oaths, and perpetually conjuring up new advertising devices. His suffering approached the tragic. His theatre, which had once rustled with gay and cheerful people, was now cold, echoing, empty, repellent. Nothing came from the balcony, wherein Helen's sweet voice wandered, save a faint, half-hearted hand-clapping. No one sat in the boxes, and only here and there a man wore evening-dress. The women were always intense, but undemonstrative. Under these sad conditions the music of the orchestra became factitious, a brazen clatter raised to reinforce the courage of the ushers, who flitted about like uneasy spirits. There were no carriages in waiting, and the audience returned to the street in silence like funeral guests from a church. Hugh remained bravely at his post in front. Each night after a careful toilet he took his stand in the lobby watching with calculating eye and impassive face the stream of people rushing by his door. "If we could only catch one in a hundred?" he said to Westervelt. "I never expected to see Helen Merival left like this. I didn't think it possible. I thought she could make any piece go. To play to fifty dollars was out of my reckoning. It is slaughter." Once his disgust topped all restraint, and he burst forth to Helen: "Look at this man Douglass. He bamboozles us into producing his play, then runs off and leaves us to sink or swim. He won't even change the lines--says he's working on a new one that will make us all 'barrels of money.' That's the way of these dramatists--always full of some new pipe-dream. Meanwhile we're going into the hole every night. I can't stand it. We were making all kinds of money with _The Baroness_. Come, let's go back to it!" His voice filled with love, for she was his ideal. "Sis, I hate to see you doing this. It cuts me to the heart. Why, some of these newspaper shads actually pretend to pity you--you, the greatest romantic actress in America! This man Douglass has got you hypnotized. Honestly, there's something uncanny about the way he has queered you. Brace up. Send him whirling. He isn't worth a minute of your time, Nellie--now, that's the fact. He's a crazy freak. Say the word and I'll fire him and his misbegotten plays to-night." To this Helen made simple reply. "No, Hugh; I intend to stand to my promise. We will keep _Lillian_ on till the new play is ready. It would be unfair to Mr. Douglass--" "But he has lost all interest in it himself. He never shows up in front, never makes a suggestion." "He is saving all his energy for the new play." Hugh's lips twisted in scorn. "The new play! Yes, he's filled with a lot of pale-blue moonshine now. He's got another 'idea.' That's the trouble with these literary chaps, they're so swelled by their own notions they can't write what the common audience wants. His new play will be a worse 'frost' than this. You'll ruin us all if you don't drop him. We stand to lose forty thousand dollars on _Lillian_ already." "Nevertheless, I shall give the new play a production," she replied, and Hugh turned away in speechless dismay and disgust. The papers were filled with stinging allusions to her failure. A shrewd friend from Boston met her with commiseration in her face. "It's a good play and a fine part," she said, "but they don't want you in such work. They like you when you look wicked." "I know that, but I'm tired of playing the wanton adventuress for such people. I want to appeal to a more thoughtful public for the rest of my stage career." "Why not organize a church like Mrs. Allinger?" sneered another less friendly critic. "The stage is no place for sermons." "You are horribly unjust. _Lillian's Duty_ is a powerful acting drama, and has its audience if I could reach it. Perhaps I'm not the one to do Mr. Douglass's work, after all," she added, humbly. Deep in her heart Helen MacDavitt the woman was hungry for some one to tell her that he loved her. She longed to put her head down on a strong man's breast to weep. "If Douglass would only open his arms to me I would go to him. I would not care what the world says." She wished to see him reinstate himself not merely with the public but in her own estimate of him. As she believed that by means of his pen he would conquer, she comprehended that his present condition was fevered, unnatural, and she hoped--she believed--it to be temporary. "Success will bring back the old, brave, sanguine, self-contained Douglass whose forthright power and self-confidence won my admiration," she said, and with this secret motive to sustain her she went to her nightly delineation of _Lillian_. She had lived long without love, and her heart now sought for it with an intensity which made her art of the highest account only as served the man she loved. Praise and publicity were alike of no value unless they brought success and happiness to him whose eyes called her with growing power. XIV At last the new play was finished and the author brought it and laid it in the hands of the actress as if it were a new-born child, and her heart leaped with joy. He was no longer the stern and self-absorbed writer. His voice was tender as he said, "I give this to you in the hope that it may regain for you what you have lost." The tears sprang to Helen's eyes, and a word of love rose to her lips. "It is very beautiful, and we will triumph in it." He seemed about to speak some revealing, sealing word, but the presence of the mother restrained him. Helen, recognizing the returning tide of his love, to which she related no self-seeking, was radiant. "Come, we will put it in rehearsal at once," she said. "I know you are as eager to have it staged as I. I will not read it. I will wait till you read it for the company to-morrow morning." "I do not go to that ordeal with the same joy as before," he admitted. The company met him with far less of interest in this reading of the second play, and his own manner was distinctly less confident. Hugh and Westervelt maintained silence, but their opposition was as palpable as a cold wind. Royleston's cynical face expressed an open contempt. The lesser people were anxious to know the kind of characters they were to play, and a few were sympathetically eager to hear the play itself. He read the manuscript with some assurance of manner, but made no suggestion as to the stage business, contenting himself with producing an effect on the minds of the principals; but as the girlish charm of _Enid's_ character made itself felt, the women of the company began to glow. "Why, it's very beautiful!" they exclaimed. Hugh, on the scent for another "problem," began to relax, and even Westervelt grunted a few words of approval, qualified at once by the whispered words, "Not a cent in it--not a cent." Royleston, between his acts, regarded the air with dreamy gaze. "I don't see myself in that part yet, but it's very good--very good." The reading closed rather well, producing the desired effect of "happy tears" on the faces of several of the feminine members of the cast, and Helen again spoke of her pleasure in such work and asked them to "lend themselves" to the lines. "This play is a kind of poem," she said, "and makes a direct appeal to women, and yet I believe it will also win its way to the hearts of the men." As they rose Douglass returned the manuscript to Helen with a bow. "I renounce all rights. Hereafter I am but a spectator." "I think you are right in not attempting rehearsals. You are worn and tired. Why don't you go away for a time? A sea voyage would do you good." "No, I must stay and face the music, as my father used to say. I do not wish to seem to run away, and, besides, I may be able to offer a suggestion now and then." "Oh, I didn't mean to have you miss the first night. You could come back for that. If you stay we will be glad of any suggestion at any time--won't we, Hugh?" Hugh refused to be brought into any marked agreement. "Of course, the author's advice is valuable, but with a man like Olquest--" "I don't want to see a single rehearsal," replied Douglass. "I want to have the joy this time of seeing my characters on the opening night fully embodied. If the success of the play depended upon my personal supervision, the case would be different, but it doesn't. I trust you and Olquest. I will keep away." Again they went to lunch together, but the old-time elation was sadly wanting. Hugh was silent and Douglass gloomy. Helen cut the luncheon for a ride in the park, which did them good, for the wind was keen and inspiriting and the landscape wintry white and blue and gold. She succeeded in provoking her playwright to a smile now and then by some audacious sally against the sombre silence of her cavaliers. They halted for half an hour in the upper park while she called the squirrels to her and fed them from her own hands--those wonderful hands that had so often lured with jewels and threatened with steel. No one seeing this refined, sweet woman in tasteful furs would have related her with the _Gismonda_ and _Istar_, but Douglass thrilled with sudden accession of confidence. "How beautiful she will be as _Enid_!" he thought, as, with a squirrel on her shoulder, she turned with shining face to softly call: "This is David. Isn't he a dear?" She waited until the keen-eyed rascals had taken her last nut, then slowly returned to the carriage side. "I like to win animals like that. It thrills my heart to have them set their fearless little feet on my arm." Hugh uttered a warning. "You want to be careful how you handle them; they bite like demons." "Oh, now, don't spoil it!" she exclaimed. "I'm sure they know me and trust me." Douglass was moved to their defence, and strove during the remainder of the ride to add to Helen's pleasure; and this effort on his part made her eyes shine with joy--a joy almost pathetic in its intensity. As they parted at the door of his hotel he said: "If you do not succeed this time I will utterly despair of the public. I know how sweet you will be as _Enid_. They must bow down before you as I do." "I will give my best powers to this--be sure nothing will be neglected at rehearsal." "I know you will," he answered, feelingly. She was better than her promise, laboring tirelessly in the effort to embody through her company the poetry, the charm, which lay even in the smaller rôles of the play. That one so big and brusque as Douglass should be able to define so many and such fugitive feminine emotions was a constant source of wonder and delight to her. The discovery gave her trust and confidence in him, and to her admiration of his power was added something which stole into her mind like music, causing foolish dreams and moments of reckless exaltation wherein she asked herself whether to be a great actress was not, after all, a thing of less profit than to be a wife and mother. She saw much less of him than she wished, for Hugh remained coldly unresponsive in his presence, and threw over their meetings a restraint which prevented the joyous companionship of their first acquaintanceship. More than this, Helen was conscious of being watched and commented upon, not merely by Hugh and Westervelt, but by guests of the hotel and representatives of the society press. Douglass, in order to shield her, and also because his position in the world was less secure than ever, returned to his self-absorbed, impersonal manner of speech. He took no part in the rehearsals, except to rush in at the close with some changes which he wished embodied at once, regardless of the vexation and confusion resulting. His brain was still perilously active, and not only cut and refined the dialogue, but made most radical modifications of the "business." Helen began to show the effects of the strain upon her; for she was not merely carrying the burden of _Lillian's Duty_, and directing rehearsals of the new piece--she was deeply involved in the greatest problem than can come to a woman. She loved Douglass; but did she love him strongly enough to warrant her in saying so--when he should ask her? His present poverty she put aside as of no serious account. A man so physically powerful, so mentally alert, was rich in possibilities. The work which he had already done entitled him to rank above millionaires, but that his very forcefulness, his strong will, his dominating idealism would make him her master--would inevitably change her relation to the world--had already changed it, in fact--she was not ready to acknowledge. Up to this time her love for the stage had been single-minded. No man had touched her heart with sufficient fire to disturb her serenity, but now she was not merely following where he led, she was questioning the value and morality of her avocation. "If I cannot play high rôles, if the public will not have me in work like this I am now rehearsing, then I will retire to private life. I will no longer be a plaything for the man-headed monster," she said one day. "You should have retired before sinking your good money in these Douglass plays," Hugh bitterly rejoined. "It looks now as though we might end in the police station." "I have no fear of that, Hugh; I am perfectly certain that _Enid_ is to regain all our losses." "I wish I had your beautiful faith," he made answer, and walked away. Westervelt said little to her during these days; he only looked, and his doleful gestures, his lugubrious grimaces, were comic. He stood to lose nothing, except possible profits for Helen. She was paying him full rental, but he claimed that his house was being ruined. "It will get the reputation of doing nothing but failures," he said to her once, in a last despairing appeal, and to this she replied: "Very well. If at the end of four weeks _Enid_ does not pull up to paying business I will release you from your contract. I will free your house of Helen Merival." "No, no! I don't want that. I want you, but I do not want this crazy man Douglass. You must not leave me!" His voice grew husky with appeal. "Return to the old plays, sign a five-year contract, and I will make you again rich." "There will be time to consider that four weeks hence." "Yes, but the season is passing." "Courage, mein Herr!" she said, with a smile, and left him almost in tears. XV As the opening night of _Enid's Choice_ drew near, Douglass suffered greater anxiety but experienced far less of nervous excitement than before. He was shaking rather than tense of limb, and did not find it necessary to walk the streets to calm his physical excitement. He was depressed by the knowledge that a second defeat would leave him not merely discredited but practically penniless. Nevertheless, he did not hide; on the contrary, he took a seat in one of the boxes. The audience he at once perceived was of totally different character and temper from that which greeted _Lillian_. It was quiet and moderate in size, rather less than the capacity of the orchestra seats, for Helen had asked that no "paper" be distributed. Very few were in the gallery, and those who were had the quietly expectant air of students. Only three of the boxes were occupied. The fashionables were entirely absent. Plainly these people were in their seats out of interest in the play or because of the known power of the actress. They were not flushed with wine nor heavy with late dinners. The critics were out again in force, and this gave the young author a little satisfaction, for their presence was indisputable evidence of the interest excited by the literary value of his work. "I have made a gain," he said, grimly. "Such men do not go gunning for small deer." But that they were after blood was shown by the sardonic grins with which they greeted one another as they strolled in at the door or met in the aisles. They expected another "killing," and were resolute to be thorough. From the friendly shelter of the curtain Douglass could study the house without being seen, and a little glow of fire warmed his heart as he recognized five or six of the best-known literary men of the city seated well down towards the front, and the fifteen minutes' wait before the orchestra leader took his seat was rendered less painful by his pride in the really high character of his audience; but when the music blared forth and the curtain began to rise, his blood chilled with a return of the fear and doubt which had assailed him at the opening of _Lillian's Duty_. "It is impossible that I should succeed," was his thought. However, his high expectation of pleasure from the performance came back, for he had resolutely kept away from even the dress rehearsal, and the entire creative force of his lines was about to come to him. "In a few moments my characters will step forth from the world of the disembodied into the mellow glow of the foot-lights," he thought, and the anticipated joy of welcoming them warmed his brain and the chill clutch of fear fell away from his throat. The dignity and the glow, the possibilities of the theatre as a temple of literature came to him with almost humbling force. He knew that Hugh and the actors had worked night and day towards this event--not for him (he realized how little they cared for him), but for Helen. She, dear girl, thought of everybody, and forgot herself in the event. That Westervelt and Hugh had no confidence in the play, even after dress rehearsal, and that they had ignored him as he came into the theatre he knew, but he put these slights aside. Westervelt was busy incessantly explaining to his intimates and to the critics that he no longer shared in Merival's "grazy schemes. She guarantees me, orderwise I would glose my theatre," he said, with wheezy reiteration. The first scene opened brilliantly in the home of Calvin Wentworth, a millionaire mine-owner. Into the garish and vulgarly ostentatious reception-room a pale, sweet slip of a girl drifted, with big eyes shining with joy of her home-coming. Some of the auditors again failed to recognize the great actress, so wonderful was her transformation in look and manner. The critics themselves, dazed for a moment, led in the cheer which rose. This warmed the house to a genial glow, and the play started with spirit. Helen, deeply relieved to see Douglass in the box, advanced towards him, and their eyes met for an instant in a lovers' greeting. Again that subtle interchange of fire took place. She looked marvellously young and light-hearted; it was hard to believe that she was worn with work and weakened by anxiety. Her eyes were bright and her hands like lilies. The act closed with a very novel piece of business and some very unusual lines passing between _Enid_ and _Sidney_, her lover. Towards this passage Douglass now leaned, uplifted by a sense of power, exulting in Helen's discernment, which had enabled her to realize, almost perfectly, his principal characters. He had not begun to perceive and suffer from the shortcomings of her support; but when _Enid_ left the stage for a few minutes, the fumbling of the subordinate actors stung and irritated him. They had the wrong accent, they roared where they should have been strong and quiet, and the man who played _Sidney_ stuttered and drawled, utterly unlike the character of the play. "Oh, the wooden ass!" groaned Douglass. "He'll ruin the piece." A burning rage swept over him. So much depended on this performance, and now--"I should have directed the rehearsals. I was a fool to neglect them. Why does she keep the sot?" And part of his anger flowed out towards the star. Helen, returning, restored the illusion, so complete was her assumption of the part, and the current set swiftly towards that unparalleled ending, those deeply significant lines which had come to the author only late in the week, but which formed, indeed, the very key to _Sidney's_ character--they were his chief enthusiasm in this act, suggesting, as they did, so much. Tingling, aching with pleasurable suspense, the author waited. The curtain fell on a totally different effect--with _Sidney_ reading utterly different lines! For a moment the author sat stunned, unable to comprehend what had happened. At last the revelation came. "They have failed to incorporate the changes I made. They have gone back to the weak, trashy ending which I discarded. They have ruined the scene utterly!" and, looking at two of the chief critics, he caught them in the act of laughing evilly, even as they applauded. With face set in rage, he made his way back of the curtain towards Helen's room. She met him at the door, her face shining with joy. "It's going! It's going!" she cried out, gleefully. His reply was like a blow in the face. "Why didn't you incorporate that new ending of the act?" he asked, with bitter harshness. Helen staggered, and her hands rose as if to shield herself from violence. She stammered, "I--I--I--couldn't. You see, the lines came so late. They would have thrown us all out. I will do so to-morrow," she added. "To-morrow!" he answered, through his set teeth. "Why to-morrow? To-night is the time. Don't you see I'm staking my reputation on to-night? To-night we win or lose. The house is full of critics. They will write of what we do, not of what we are _going_ to do." He began to pace up and down, trembling with disappointment and fury. He turned suddenly. "How about the second act? Did you make those changes in _Sidney's_ lines? I infer not," he added, with a sneer. Helen spoke with difficulty, her bosom heaving, her eyes fixed in wonder and pain on his face. "No. How could I? You brought them only yesterday morning; they would have endangered the whole act." Then, as the indignity, the injustice, the burning shame of his assault forced themselves into her mind, she flamed out in reproach: "Why did you come back here at all? Why didn't you stay away, as you did before? You are cruel, heartless!" The tears dimmed her eyes. "You've ruined my whole performance. You've broken my heart. Have you no soul--no sense of honor? Go away! I hate you! I'll never speak to you again! I hate you!" And she turned, leaving him dumb and staring, in partial realization of his selfish, brutal demands. Hugh approached him with lowering brows and clinched hands. "You've done it now. You've broken her nerve, and she'll fail in her part. Haven't you any sense? We pick you off the street and feed you and clothe you--and do your miserable plays--and you rush in here and strike my sister, Helen Merival, in the face. I ought to kick you into the street!" Douglass stood through this like a man whose brain is benumbed by the crashing echoes of a thunderbolt, hardly aware of the fury of the speaker, but this final threat cleared his mind and stung him into reply. "You are at liberty to try that," he answered, and an answering ferocity shone in his eyes. "I gave you this play; it's good work, and, properly done, would succeed. Ruin it if you want to. I am done with it and you." "Thank God!" exclaimed the brother, as the playwright turned away. "Good riddance to a costly acquaintance." Hardly had the street door clapped behind the blinded author when Helen, white and agitated, reappeared, breathlessly asking, "Where is he; has he gone?" "Yes; I am glad to say he has." "Call him back--quick! Don't let him go away angry. I must see him again! Go, bring him back!" Hugh took her by the arm. "What do you intend to do--give him another chance to insult you? He isn't worth another thought from you. Let him go, and his plays with him." The orchestra, roaring on its _finale_, ended with a crash. Hugh lifted his hand in warning. "There goes the curtain, Helen. Go on. Don't let him kill your performance. Go on!" And he took her by the arm. The training as well as the spirit and quality of the actress reasserted their dominion, and as she walked out upon the stage not even the searching glare of the foot-lights could reveal the cold shadow which lay about her heart. When the curtain fell on the final "picture" she fairly collapsed, refusing to take the curtain call which a goodly number of her auditors insisted upon. "I'm too tired," she made answer to Hugh. "Too heart-sick," she admitted to herself, for Douglass was gone with angry lights in his eyes, bearing bitter and accusing words in his ears. The temple of amusement was at the moment a place of sorrow, of despair. XVI Douglass knew before he had set foot upon the pavement that his life was blasted, that his chance of success and Helen's love were gone, forfeited by his own egotism, his insane selfishness; but it was only a half-surrender; something very stark and unyielding rose within him, preventing his return to ask forgiveness. The scorn, the contempt of Hugh's words, and the lines of loathing appearing for the first time in Helen's wonderfully sensitive face burned each moment deeper into his soul. The sorrows of _Enid's_ world rose like pale clouds above the immovable mountains of his shame and black despair. He did not doubt for a moment but that this separation was final. "After such a revelation of my character," he confessed, "she can do nothing else but refuse to see me. I have only myself to blame. I was insane," and he groaned with his torment. "She is right. Hugh is right in defending his household against me. My action was that of a fool--a hideous, egotistic fool." Seeking refuge in his room, he faced his future in nerveless dejection. His little store of money was gone, and his profession, long abandoned, seemed at the moment a broken staff--his place on the press in doubt. What would his good friend say to him now when he asked for a chance to earn his bread? He had flouted the critics, the dramatic departments of all the papers. In his besotted self-confidence he had cast away all his best friends, and with these reflections came the complete revelation of Helen's kindness--and her glittering power. Back upon him swept a realization of the paradise in which he had lived, in whose air his egotism had expanded like a mushroom. Leagued with her, enjoying her bounty and sharing in the power which her success had brought her, he had imagined himself a great writer, a man with a compelling message to his fellows. It seemed only necessary to reach out his hand in order to grasp a chaplet--a crown. With her the world seemed his debtor. Now he was a thing cast off, a broken boy grovelling at the foot of the ladder of fame. While he withered over his defeat the electric cars, gigantic insects of the dawn, began to howl and the trains on the elevated railway thundered by. The city's voice, which never ceases, but which had sunk to a sleepy murmur, suddenly awoke, and with clattering, snarling crescendo roar announced the coming of the tides of toilers. "I am facing the day," he said to himself, "and the papers containing the contemptuous judgments of my critics are being delivered in millions to my fellow-citizens. This thing I have gained--I am rapidly becoming infamous." His weakness, his shuddering fear made his going forth a torture. Even the bell-boy who brought his papers seemed to exult over his misery, but by sternly sending him about an errand the worn playwright managed to overawe and silence him, and then, with the city's leading papers before him, he sat down to his bitter medicine. As he had put aside the judgments of _Lillian's Duty_, with contemptuous gesture, so now he searched out every line, humbly admitting the truth of every criticism, instructed even by the lash of those who hated him. The play had closed unexpectedly well, one paper admitted, but it could never succeed. It was not dramatic of construction. Another admitted that it was a novel and pretty entertainment, a kind of prose poem, a fantasy of the present, but without wide appeal. Others called it a moonshine monologue--that a girl at once so naïve and so powerful was impossible. All united in praise of Helen, however, and, as though by agreement, bewailed her desertion of the rôles in which she won great renown. "Our advice, given in the friendliest spirit, is this: go back to the twilight of the past, to the costume play. Get out of the garish light of to-day. The present is suited only for a kind of crass comedy or Bowery melodrama. Only the past, the foreign, affords setting for the large play of human passion which Helen Merival's great art demands." "You are cheating us," wrote another. "There are a thousand little _ingénues_ who can play acceptably this goody-goody _Enid_, but the best of them would be lost in the large folds of your cloak in _The Baroness Telka_." Only one wrote in almost unmeasured praise, and his words, so well chosen, salved the smarting wounds of the dramatist. "Those who have seen Miss Merival only as the melodrama queen or the adventuress in jet-black evening dress have a surprise in store for them. Her _Enid_ is a dream of cold, chaste girlhood--a lily with heart of fire--in whose tender, virginal eyes the lust and cruelty of the world arouse only pity and wonder. So complete was Miss Merival's investiture of herself in this part that no one recognized her as she stepped on the stage. For a moment even her best friends sat silent." And yet this friend ended like the rest in predicting defeat. "The play is away over the heads of any audience likely to come to see it. The beringed and complacent wives of New York and their wine-befuddled husbands will find little to entertain them in this idyl of modern life. As for the author, George Douglass, we have only this to say: He is twenty years ahead of his time. Let him go on writing his best and be patient. By-and-by, when we have time to think of other things than money, when our wives have ceased to struggle for social success, when the reaction to a simpler and truer life comes--and it is coming--then the quality of such a play as _Enid's Choice_ will give its author the fame and the living he deserves." The tears came to Douglass's eyes. "Good old Jim! He knows I need comfort this morning. He's prejudiced in my favor--everybody will see that; and yet there is truth in what he says. I will go to him and ask for work, for I must get back to earning a weekly wage." He went down and out into the street. The city seemed unusually brilliant and uncaring. From every quarter of the suburbs floods of people were streaming in to work or to shop, quite unknowing of any one's misfortunes but their own, each intent on earning a living or securing a bargain. "How can I appeal to these motes?" he asked himself. "By what magic can I lift myself out of this press to earn a living--out of this common drudgery?" He studied the faces in the coffee-house where he sat. "How many of these citizens are capable of understanding for a moment _Enid's Choice_? Is there any subject holding an interest common to them and to me which would not in a sense be degrading in me to dramatize for their pleasure?" This was the question, and though his breakfast and a walk on the avenue cleared his brain, it did not solve his problem. "They don't want my ideas on architecture. My dramatic criticism interests but a few. My plays are a proved failure. What is to be done?" Mingled with these gloomy thoughts, constantly recurring like the dull, far-off boom of a sombre bell, was the consciousness of his loss of Helen. He did not think of returning to ask forgiveness. "I do not deserve it," he repeated each time his heart prompted a message to her. "She is well rid of me. I have been a source of loss, of trouble, and vexation to her. She will be glad of my self-revelation." Nevertheless, when he found her letter waiting for him in his box at the office he was smitten with sudden weakness. "What would she say? She has every reason to hate me, to cast me and my play to the winds. Has she done so? I cannot blame her." Safe in his room, he opened the letter, the most fateful that had ever come to him in all his life. The very lines showed the agitation of the writer: "MY DEAR AUTHOR,--Pardon me for my harshness last night, and come to see me at once. I was nervous and anxious, as you were. I should have made allowances for the strain you were under. Please forgive me. Come and lunch, as usual, and talk of the play. I believe in it, in spite of all. It must make its own public, but I believe it will do so. Come and let me hear you say you have forgotten my words of last night. I didn't really mean them; you must have known that." His throat filled with tenderness and his head bowed in humility as he read these good, sweet, womanly lines, and for the moment he was ready to go to her and receive pardon kneeling. But as he thought of the wrong he had done her, the misfortune he had brought upon her, a stubborn, unaccountable resolution hardened his heart. "No, I will not go back till I can go as her equal. I am broken and in disgrace now. I will not burden her generosity further." The thought of making his peace with Hugh, of meeting Westervelt's hard stare, aided this resolution, and, sitting at his desk, he wrote a long and passionate letter, wherein he delineated with unsparing hand his miserable failure. He took a pride and a sort of morbid pleasure in punishing himself, in denying himself any further joy in her company. "It is better for you and better for me that we do not meet again--at least till I have won the tolerance of your brother and manager and my own self-respect. The work I have done is honest work; I will not admit that it is wholly bad, but I cannot meet Hugh again till I can demand consideration. It was not so much the words he used as the tone. I was helpless in resenting it. That I am a beggar, a dangerous influence, I admit. I am appalled at the thought of what I have done to injure you. Cast me overboard. Not even your beauty, your great fame, can make my work vital to the public. I am too perverse, too individual. There is good in me, but it is evil to you. I no longer care what they say of me, but I feel every word derogatory of you as if it were a red-hot point of steel. I did not sleep last night; I spent the time in reconstructing myself. I confessed my grievous sins, and I long to do penance. This play is also a failure. I grew cold with hate of myself last night as I thought of the irreparable injury I had done to you. I here relinquish all claim to both pieces; they are yours to do with as you like. Take them, rewrite them, play them, or burn them, as you will. "You see, I am very, very humble. I have put my foolish pride underfoot. I am not broken. I am still very proud and, I fear, self-conceited, in spite of my severe lesson. _Enid_ is beautiful, and I know it, and it helps me write this letter, but I have no right to ask even friendship from you. My proved failure as a playwright robs me of every chance of meeting you on equal terms. I want to repay you, I _must_ repay you, for what you have done. If I could write now, it would be not to please myself, but to please you, to help you regain your dominion. I want to see you the radiant one again, speaking to throngs of happy people. If I could by any sacrifice of myself call back the homage of the critics and place you where I found you, the acknowledged queen of American actresses, I would do it. But I am helpless. I shall not speak or write to you again till I can come with some gift in my hand--some recompense for your losses through me. I have been a malign influence in your life. I am in mad despair when I think of you playing to cold and empty houses. I am going back to the West to do sash factories and wheat elevators; these are my _métier_. You are the one to grant pardon; I am the malefactor. I am taking myself out of your world. Forgive me and--forget me. Hugh was right. My very presence is a curse to you. Good-bye." XVII This letter came to Helen with her coffee, and the reading of it blotted out the glory of the morning, filling her eyes with smarting tears. It put a sudden ache into her heart, a fierce resentment. At the moment his assumed humbleness, his self-derision, his confession of failure irritated her. "I don't want you to bend and bow," she thought, as if speaking to him. "I'd rather you were fierce and hard, as you were last night." She read on to the end, so deeply moved that she could scarcely see the lines. Her resentment melted away and a pity, profound and almost maternal, filled her heart. "Poor boy! What could Hugh have said to him! I will know. It has been a bitter experience for him. And is this the end of our good days?" With this internal question a sense of vital loss took hold upon her. For the first time in her life the future seemed desolate and her past futile. Back upon her a throng of memories came rushing--memories of the high and splendid moments they had spent together. First of all she remembered him as the cold, stern, handsome stranger of that first night--that night when she learned that his coldness was assumed, his sternness a mask. She realized once again that at this first meeting he had won her by his voice, by his hand-clasp, by the swiftness and fervor of his speech; he had dominated her, swept her from her feet. And now this was the end of all their plans, their dreams of conquest. There could be no doubt of his meaning in this letter: he had cut himself off from her, perversely, bitterly, in despair and deep humiliation. She did not doubt his ability to keep his word. There was something inexorable in him. She had felt it before--a sort of blind, self-torturing obstinacy which would keep him to his vow though he bled for every letter. And yet she wrote again, patiently, sweetly, asking him to come to her. "I don't know what Hugh said to you--no matter, forgive him. We were all at high tension last night. I know you didn't intend to hurt me, and I have put it all away. I will forget your reproach, but I cannot have you go out of my life in this way. It is too cruel, too hopeless. Come to me again, your good, strong, buoyant self, and let us plan for the future." This message, so high, so divinely forgiving, came back to her unopened, with a line from the clerk on the back--"Mr. Douglass left the city this evening. No address." This laconic message struck her like a blow. It was as if Douglass himself had refused her outstretched hand. Her nerves, tense and quivering, gave way. Her resentment flamed up again. "Very well." She tore the note in small pieces, slowly, with painful precision, as if by so doing she were tearing and blowing away the great passion which had grown up in her heart. "I was mistaken in you. You are unworthy of my confidence. After all, you are only a weak, egotistical 'genius'--morbid, selfish. Hugh is right. You have proved my evil genius. You skulked the night of your first play. You alternately ignored and made use of me--as you pleased--and after all I had done for you you flouted me in the face of my company." She flung the fragments of the note into the fire. "There are your words--all counting for nothing." And she rose and walked out to her brother and her manager, determined that no sign of her suffering and despair should be written upon her face. The day dragged wearily forward, and when Westervelt came in with a sorrowful tale of diminishing demand for seats she gave her consent to a return to _Baroness Telka_ on the following Monday morning. The manager was jubilant. "Now we will see a theatre once more. I tought I vas running a church or a school. Now we will see carriages at the door again and some dress-suits pefore the orchestra. Eh, Hugh?" "I'm glad to see you come to your senses," said Hugh, ignoring Westervelt. "That chap had us all--" She stopped him. "Not a word of that. Mr. Douglass was right and his plays are right, but the public is not yet risen to such work. I admire his work just as much now as ever. I am only doubting the public. If there is no sign of increasing interest on Saturday we will take _Enid_ off. That is all I will say now." It seemed a pitiful, a monstrous thing. Hugh made no further protest, but that his queenly sister, after walking untouched through swarms of rich and talented suitors, should fall a victim to a poor and unknown architect, who was a failure at his own business as well as a playwright. Mrs. MacDavitt, who stood quite in awe of her daughter, and who feared the sudden, hot temper of her son, passed through some trying hours as the days went by. Helen was plainly suffering, and the mother cautioned the son to speak gently. "I fear she prized him highly--the young Douglass," she said, "and, I confess, I had a kin' o' liking for the lad. He was so keen and resolved." "He was keen to 'do' us, mother, and when he found he couldn't he pulled his freight. He could write, I'll admit that, but he wouldn't write what people wanted to hear. He was too badly stuck on his own 'genius.'" Helen went to her task at the theatre without heart, though she pretended to a greater enthusiasm than ever. But each time she entered upon the second act of the play a mysterious and solacing pleasure came to her. She enjoyed the words with which _Enid_ questions the life of her richest and most powerful suitor. The mingled shrewdness, simplicity, and sweetness of this scene always filled her with a new sense of Douglass's power of divination. Indeed, she closed the play each night with a sense of being more deeply indebted to him as well as a feeling of having been near him. Once she saw a face strangely like his in the upper gallery, and the blood tingled round her heart, and she played the remainder of the act with mind distraught. "Can it be possible that he is still in the city?" she asked herself. XVIII It was, indeed, the playwright. Each night he left his boarding-place, drawn by an impulse he could not resist, to walk slowly to and fro opposite the theatre entrance, calculating with agonized eye the meagre numbers of those who entered. At times he took his stand near the door in a shadowy nook (with coat-collar rolled high about his ears), in order to observe the passing stream, hoping, exulting, and suffering alternately as groups from the crowd paused for a moment to study the displayed photographs, only to pass on to other amusement with some careless allusion to the fallen star. This hurt him worst of all--that these motes, these cheap little boys and girls, could now sneer at or pity Helen Merival. "I brought her to this," he repeated, with morbid sense of power. "When she met me she was queen of the city; now she is an object of pity." This feeling of guilt, this egotism deepened each night as he watched the city's pleasure-seekers pace past the door. It was of no avail to say that the few who entered were of higher type than the many who passed. "The profession which Helen serves cannot live on the wishes of the few, the many must be pleased. To become exclusive in appeal is to die of hunger. This is why the sordid, commonplace playwrights and the business-like managers succeed while the idealists fail. There is an iron law of limitation here." "That is why my influence is destructive," he added, and was reassured in the justice of his resolution to take himself out of Helen's life. "Everything I stand for is inimical to her interests. To follow my path is to eat dry crusts, to be without comfort. To amuse this great, moiling crowd, to dance for them like a monkey, to pander to their base passions, this means success, and so long as her acting does not smirch her own soul what does it matter?" In such wise he sometimes argued in his bitterness and wrath. From the brilliant street, from the gay crowds rolling on in search of witless farce-comedy and trite melodrama, the brooding idealist climbed one night to the gallery to overlook a gloomy, empty auditorium. Concealing himself as best he could, he sat through the performance, tortured by some indefinable appeal in Helen's voice, hearing with cold and sinking heart the faint applause from the orchestra chairs which used to roar with bravos and sparkle with the clapping of white and jewelled hands. There was something horrifying in this change. In his morbid and overwrought condition it seemed murderous. At last a new resolution set his lips in a stern line, and when the curtain fell on the last act his mind was made up. "I will write one more play for the sensation-loving fools, for these flabby business men and their capon-stuffed wives. I will mix them a dramatic cocktail that will make them sit up. I will create a dazzling rôle for Helen, one that will win back all her old-time admirers. They shall come like a roaring tide, and she shall recoup herself for every loss--in purse and prestige." It was this night, when his face was white with suffering, that Helen caught a glimpse of him hanging across the railing of the upper balcony. He went no more to see her play. In his small, shabby room in a musty house on one of the old side streets he set to work on his new plan. He wrote now without fervor, without elation, plodding along hour after hour, erasing, interlining, destroying, rewriting. He toiled terribly. He permitted himself no fancy flights. He calculated now. "I must have a young and beautiful duchess or countess," he mused, bitterly. "Our democratic public loves to see nobility. She must peril her honor for a lover--a wonderful fellow of the middle-class, not royal, but near it. The princess must masquerade in a man's clothing for some high purpose. There must be a lord high chamberlain or the like who discovers her on this mission to save her lover, and who uses his discovery to demand her hand in marriage for his son--" In this cynical mood he worked, sustained only by the memory of "The Glittering Woman" whose power and beauty had once dazzled him. Slowly the new play took shape, and, try as he might, he could not keep out of it a line now and then of real drama--of literature. Each act was designed to end with a clarion call to the passions, and he was perfectly certain that the curtain would rise again and again at the close. At every point was glitter and the rush of heroics. He lived sparely, seeing no one, going out only at night for a walk in the square. To send to his brother or his father for money he would not, not even to write his wonder-working drama. His letters home, while brief, were studiedly confident of tone. The play-acting business and all those connected with it stood very remote from the farming village in which Dr. Donald Douglass lived, and when he read from his son's letters references to his dramas his mind took but slight hold upon the words. His replies were brief and to the point. "Go back to your building and leave the play-actors to themselves. They're a poor, uneasy lot at the best." To him an architect was a man who built houses and barns, with a personal share in the physical labor, a wholesome, manly business. The son understood his father's prejudices, and they formed a barrier to his approach when in need. On the morning of the fifteenth day _Alessandra_ went to the type-writer, and the weary playwright lifted his head and took a full, free breath. He was convinced beyond any question that this melodrama would please. It had all the elements which he despised, therefore it must succeed. His desire to see Helen now overpowered him. Worn with his toil and exultant in his freedom, he went out into the street to see what the world was doing. _Enid's Choice_ was still running. A slight gain at the end of the first week had enabled Helen to withhold her surrender to mammon. The second week increased the attendance, but the loss on the two plays was now very heavy, and Hugh and Westervelt and all her friends as well urged her to give way to the imperious public; but some deep loyalty to Douglass, some reason which she was not free to give, made her say, "No, while there is the slightest hope I am going to keep on." To her mother she said: "They are associated in my mind with something sweet and fine--a man's aspiration. They taste good in my mouth after all these years of rancid melodrama." To herself she said: "If they succeed--if they win the public--my lover will come back. He can then come as a conqueror." And the hope of this, the almost certain happiness and honor which awaited them both led her to devise new methods of letting the great non-theatre-going public know that in George Douglass's _Enid_ they might be comforted--that it was, indeed, a dramatic sign of promise. "We will give it a faithful trial here, then go on the road. Life is less strenuous in the smaller towns--they have time to think." Hugh and Westervelt counselled against any form of advertising that would seem to set the play in a class by itself, but Helen, made keen by her suffering, bluntly replied: "You are both wrong, utterly wrong. Our only possible chance of success lies in reaching that vast, sane, thoughtful public which seldom or never goes to the theatre. This public very properly holds a prejudice against the theatrical world, but it will welcome a play which is high and poetic without being dull. This public is so vast it makes the ordinary theatre-going public seem but a handful. We must change all our methods of printing." These ideas were sourly adopted in the third week, just when a note from Douglass reached her by the hand of a special messenger. In this letter he said: "I have completed another play. I have been grubbing night and day with incessant struggle to put myself and all my ideals aside--to give the public what it wants--to win your old admirers back, in order that I might see you playing once more to crowded and brilliant houses. It will succeed because it is diametrically opposed to all I have expressed. It is my sacrifice. Will you accept it? Will you read my play? Shall I send it to you?" Something went out from this letter which hurt Helen deeply. First of all there was a certain humble aloofness in his attitude which troubled her, but more significant still was his confessed departure from his ideals. Her brave and splendid lover had surrendered to the enemy--for her sake. Her first impulse was to write refusing to accept his sacrifice. But on second thought she craftily wrote: "I do not like to think of you writing to please the public, which I have put aside, but come and bring your play. I cannot believe that you have really written down to a melodramatic audience. What I will do I cannot say till I have seen your piece. Where have you kept yourself? Have you been West? Come and tell me all about it." To this self-contained note he replied by sending the drama. "No, I cannot come till Hugh and you have read and accepted this play. I want your manager to pass on _Alessandra_. You know what I mean. You are an idealist like myself. You will condemn this drama, but Westervelt may see in it a chance to restore the glitter to his theatre. Ask them both to read it--without letting them know who wrote it. If they accept it, then I can meet them again on equal terms. I long to see you; but I am in disgrace and infinitely poorer than when I first met you." Over this letter Helen pondered long. Her first impulse was to send the play back without reading it, but her love suggested another subterfuge. "I will do his will, and if Hugh and Westervelt find the play acceptable I will share in his triumph. But I will not do the play except as a last resort--for his sake. _Enid_ is more than holding its own. So long as it does I will not permit him to lower his splendid powers." To Hugh she carelessly said: "Here is another play--a melodrama, to judge from the title. Look it over and see if there is anything in it." As plays were constantly coming in to them, Hugh took this one quite as a matter of routine, with expectation of being bored. He was a little surprised next morning when she asked, "Did you look into that manuscript?" He answered: "No. I didn't get time." She could hardly conceal her impatience. "I wish you'd go over it this morning. From the title it's one of those middle-age Italian things that costume well." "Oh, is it?" he exclaimed. "Well, I'll get right at it." Her interest in it more than the title moved him. It was a most hopeful sign of weakening on her part. He came to lunch full of enthusiasm. "Say, sis, that play is a corker. There is a part in it that sees the _Baroness_ and goes her one better. If the last act keeps up we've got a prize-winner. Who's Edwin Baxter, anyhow?" Helen quietly stirred her tea. "I never heard the name before. A new man in the theatrical world, apparently." "Well, he's all right. I'm going over the whole thing again. Have you read it?" "No, I thought best to let you and Westervelt decide this time. I merely glanced at it." "Well, it looks like the thing to pull us out of our hole." That night Westervelt came behind the scenes with shining face. "I hope you will consent to do this new piece; it is a cracker-jack." He grew cautious. "It really is an immensely better piece of work than _The Baroness_, and yet it has elements of popularity. I have read it hastily. I shall study it to-night. If it looks as big to me to-morrow morning as now I will return to the old arrangement with you--if you wish." "How is the house to-night?" she asked. His face dropped. "No better than last night." He shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, ten or fifteen dollars, maybe. We can play all winter to two hundred dollars a night with this play. I do not understand such audiences. Apparently each man sends just one to take his place. There is no increase." "Well, report to me to-morrow about _Alessandra_, then I will decide upon the whole matter." In spite of herself she shared in the glow which shone on the faces of her supports, for the word had been passed to the leading members that they were going back to the old drama. "They've found a new play--a corking melodrama." Royleston straightened. "What's the subject?" "Middle-age Italian intrigue, so Hugh says--bully costumes--a wonder of a part for Merival." "Then we are on velvet again," said Royleston. The influence of the news ran through the action on the stage. The performance took on spirit and gusto. The audience immediately felt the glow of the players' enthusiasm, and warmed to both actress and playwright, and the curtain went down to the most vigorous applause of the entire run. But Westervelt did not perceive this, so engrossed was he in the new manuscript. Reading was prodigious labor for him--required all his attention. He was at the hotel early the next morning, impatient to see his star. As he waited he figured on a little pad. His face was flushed as if with drink. His eyes swam with tears of joy, and when Helen appeared he took her hand in both his fat pads, crying out: "My dear lady, we have found you a new play. It is to be a big production. It will cost a barrel of money to put it on, but it is a winner. Tell the writer to come on and talk terms." Helen remained quite cool. "You go too fast, Herr Westervelt. I have not read the piece. I may not like the title rôle." The manager winced. "You will like it--you must like it. It is a wonderful part. The costuming is magnificent--the scenes superb." "Is there any text?" Westervelt did not feel the sarcasm. "Excellent text. It is not Sardou--of course not--but it is of his school, and very well done indeed. The situations are not new, but they are powerfully worked out. I am anxious to secure it. If not for you, for some one else." "Very well. I will read the manuscript. If I like it I will send for the author." With this show of tepid interest on the part of his star Westervelt had to be content. To Hugh he complained: "The influence of that crazy Douglass is strong with her yet. I'm afraid she will turn down this part." Hugh was also alarmed by her indifference, and at frequent intervals during the day asked how she was getting on with the reading. To this query she each time replied: "Slowly. I'm giving it careful thought." She was, indeed, struggling with her tempted self. She was more deeply curious to read the manuscript than any one else could possibly be, and yet she feared to open the envelope which contained it. She did not wish to be in any sense a party to her lover's surrender. She knew that he must have written falsely and without conviction to have made such a profound impression on Westervelt. The very fact that the theme was Italian, and of the Middle Ages, was a proof of his abandonment of a cardinal principle, for he had often told her how he hated all that sort of thing. "What kind of a national drama would that be which dealt entirely with French or Italian mediæval heroes?" he had once asked, with vast scorn. It would win back her former worshippers, she felt sure of that. The theatre would fill again with men whose palates required the highly seasoned, the far-fetched. The critics would rejoice in their victory, and welcome Helen Merival to her rightful place with added fervor. The bill-boards would glow again with magnificent posters of Helen Merival, as _Alessandra_, stooping with wild eyes and streaming hair over her slain paramour on the marble stairway, a dagger in her hand. People would crowd again behind the scenes at the close of the play. The magazines would add their chorus of praise. And over against this stood the slim, poetic figure of _Enid_, so white of soul, so simple, so elemental of appeal. A whole world lay between the two parts. All that each stood for was diametrically opposed to the other. One was modern as the telephone, true, sound, and revealing. The other false from beginning to end, belonging to a world that never existed, a brilliant, flashing pageant, a struggle of beasts in robes of gold and velvet--assassins dancing in jewelled garters. Every scene, every motion was worn with use on the stage, and yet her own romance, her happiness, seemed to depend upon her capitulation as well as his. "If they accept _Alessandra_ he will come back to me proudly--at least with a sense of victory over his ignoble enemies. If I return it he will know I am right, but will still be left so deeply in my debt that he will never come to see me again." And with this thought she determined upon a course of action which led at least to a meeting and to a reconciliation between the author and the manager, and with the thought of seeing him again her heart grew light. When she came to the theatre at night Westervelt was waiting at the door. "Well?" he asked, anxiously. "What do you think of it?" "I have sent for the author," she answered, coldly. "He will meet me to-morrow at eleven. Come to the hotel and I will introduce him to you." "Splendid! splendid!" exclaimed the manager. "You found it suited to you! A great part, eh?" "I like it better than _The Baroness_," she replied, and left him broad-faced with joy. "She is coming sensible again," he chuckled. "Now that that crank is out of the way we shall see her as she was--triumphant." Again the audience responded to every line she spoke, and as she played something reassuring came up to her from the faces below. The house was perceptibly less empty, but the comfort arose from something more intangible than an increase of filled chairs. "I believe the tide has turned," she thought, exultantly, but dared not say so to Hugh. That night she sent a note to Douglass, and the words of her message filled him with mingled feelings of exultation and bitterness: "You have won! Westervelt and Hugh are crazy to meet the author of _Alessandra_. They see a great success for you, for me, for all of us. Westervelt is ready to pour out his money to stage the thing gorgeously. Come to-morrow to meet them. Come proudly. You will find them both ready to take your hand--eager to acknowledge that they have misjudged you. We have both made a fight for good work and failed. No one can blame us if we yield to necessity." The thought of once more meeting her, of facing her managers with confident gaze on equal terms, made Douglass tremble with excitement. He dressed with care, attempting as best he could to put away all the dust and odors of his miserable tenement, and went forth looking much like the old-time, self-confident youth who faced down the clerk. His mind ran over every word in Helen's note a dozen times, extracting each time new and hidden meanings. "If it is the great success they think it, my fortune is made." His spirits began to overleap all bounds. "It will enable me to meet her as an equal--not in worth," he acknowledged--"she is so much finer and nobler than any man that ever lived--but I will at least be something more than a tramp kennelled in a musty hole." His mind took another flight. "I can go home with pride also. Oh, success is a sovereign thing. Think of Hugh and Westervelt waiting to welcome me--and Helen!" When he thought of her his confident air failed him, his face flushed, his hands felt numb. She shone now like a far-off violet star. She had recovered her aloofness, her allurement in his mind, and it was difficult for him to realize that he had once known her intimately and that he had treated her inconsiderately. "I must have been mad," he exclaimed. It seemed months since he had looked into her face. The clerk he dreaded to meet was off duty, and as the elevator boy knew him he did not approach the desk, but went at once to Helen's apartments. She did not meet him at the door as he had foolishly expected. Delia, the maid, greeted him with a smile, and led him back to the reception-room and left him alone. He heard Helen's voice, the rustle of her dress, and then she stood before him. As he looked into her face and read love and pity in her eyes he lost all fear, all doubt, and caught her hand in both of his, unable to speak a word in his defence--unable even to tell her of his gratitude and love. She recovered herself first, and, drawing back, looked at him searchingly. "You poor fellow, you've been working like mad. You are ill!" "No, I am not ill--only tired. I have had only one thought, one aim since I saw you last, that was to write something to restore you to your old place----" "I do not want to be restored. Now listen, Lord Douglass. If I do _Alessandra_, it is because we both need the money and the prestige; but I do not despair, and you must not. Please let me manage this whole affair; will you?" "I am your slave." "Don't say such things. I don't want you to be humble. I want you to be as brave, as proud as before." She said this in such a tone that he rose to it. His face reset in lines of resolution. "I will not be humble with any other human being but you. I worship you." She stood for a moment looking at him fixedly, a smile of pride and tender dream on her lips, then said, "You must not say such things to me--not now." The bell rang. "Here comes your new-found admirers," she exclaimed, gleefully. "Now, you sit here, a little in the shadow, and I will bring them in." Douglass heard Hugh ask, eagerly, "Is he here?" "Yes, he is waiting for you." A moment later she re-entered, followed closely by Westervelt. "Herr Westervelt, let me introduce Mr. George Douglass, author of _Alessandra_, _Lillian's Duty_, and _Enid's Choice_." For an instant Westervelt's face was a confused, lumpy mass of amazement and resentment; then he capitulated, quick to know on which side his bread was buttered, and, flinging out a fat hand, he roared: "Very good joke. Ha! ha! You have fooled me completely. Mr. Douglass, I congratulate you. You have now given Helen Merival the best part she has ever had. You found we were right, eh?" Douglass remained a little stiff. "Yes, for the present we'll say you are right; but the time is coming--" Hugh came forward with less of enthusiasm, but his wall of reserve was melting. "I'm mighty glad to know that you wrote _Alessandra_, Douglass. It is worthy of Sardou, and it will win back every dollar we've lost in the other plays." "That's what I wrote it for," said Douglass, sombrely. Westervelt had no further scruples--no reservations. "Well, now, as to terms and date of production. Let's get to business." Helen interposed. "No more of that for to-day. Mr. Douglass is tired and needs recreation. Leave business till to-morrow. Come, let us go to mother; she is anxious to see you--and you are to breakfast with us in the good old spirit." It was sweet to sit with them again on the old footing--to be released from his load of guilty responsibility. To face the shining table, the dear old mother--and Helen! Something indefinably domestic and tender came from her hesitating speech and shone in her liquid, beaming eyes. The room swam in vivid sunshine, and seemed thus to typify the toiler's escape from poverty and defeat. "Don't expect me to talk," he said, slowly, strangely. "I'm too dazed, too happy to think clearly. I can't believe it. I have lived two months in a horrible nightmare; but now that the business men, the practical ones, say you are to be saved by me, I must believe it. I would be perfectly happy if only I had won the success on my own lines without compromise." "Put that aside," she commanded, softly. "The fuller success will come. We have that to work towards." XIX Helen insisted that her playwright should go back to the West for a month's rest. "I do not need rest, I need you," he answered, recklessly. "It fills me with content merely to see you." "Nevertheless, you must go. We don't need you here. And, besides, you interfere with my plans." "Is that true?" His eyes searched deep as he questioned. "I am speaking as the actress to the playwright." She pointed tragically to the door. "Go! Your poor old, lonely mother awaits you." "There are six in the family; she's my stepmother, and we don't get on smoothly." "Your father is waiting to congratulate you." "On the contrary. He thinks actresses and playwrights akin to 'popery.'" She laughed. "Well, then, go on my account--on your account. You are tired, and so am I--" "That is why I should remain, to relieve you, to help you. Or, do you mean you're tired of me?" "I won't say that; but I must not see you. I must not see any one. If I do this big part right, I must rest. I intend to sleep a good part of the time. I have sent for Henry Olquest, and I intend to put the whole of the stage end of this play in his hands. Our ideals are not concerned in this _Alessandra_, you remember." His face clouded. "That is true. I wish it were otherwise. But can you get Olquest?" "Yes; his new play has failed. 'Too good,' Westervelt said." "Oh, what blasphemy! To think Harry Olquest's plays are rejected, and on such grounds! You are right--as always. I will go." "Thank you!" "I am a little frazled, I admit, and a breath of mountain-air will do me good. I will visit my brother Walt in Darien. It's hard to go. My heart begins to ache already with prospective hunger. You have been my world, my one ambition for three months--my incessant care and thought." "All the more reason why you should forget me and things dramatic for a while. There is nothing so destructive to peace and tranquillity as the stage." "Don't I know that? When I was a youth in a Western village I became in some way the possessor of two small photographs of Elsie Melville. She was my ideal till I saw her, fifteen years later." Helen laughed. "Poor Elsie, she took on flesh dreadfully in her later years." "Nevertheless, those photographs started me on the road to the stage. I used to fancy myself as Macbeth, but I soon got switched into the belief that I could write plays. Now that I have demonstrated that"--his tone was a little bitter again--"I think I would better return to architecture." She silenced him. "All that we will discuss when you come back reinvigorated from the mountains." She turned to her desk. "I have something here for you. Here is a small check from Westervelt on account. Don't hesitate to take it. He was glad to give it." "It is the price of my intellectual honesty." "By no means!" She laughed, but her heart sickened with a sense of the truth of his phrase. "It's only a very small part payment. You can at least know that the bribe they offer is large." "Yes"--he looked at her meaningly--"the prize was too great for my poor resolution. All they can give will remain _part_ payment. I wonder if you will be compassionate enough to complete the purchase--" "_That_, too, is in the future," she answered, still struggling to be gayly reassuring, though she knew, perfectly well, that she was face to face with a most momentous decision and that an insistent, determined lover was about to be restored to confidence and pride. "And now, good-bye." And she gave him her hand in positive dismissal. He took the hand and pressed it hard, then turned and went away without speaking. * * * * * There was a hint of spring in the air the afternoon of his leaving. The wind came from the southwest, brisk and powerful. In the pale, misty blue of the sky a fleet of small, white clouds swam, like ships with wide and bellying sails, low down in the eastern horizon, and the sight of them somehow made it harder for Douglass to leave the city of his adoption. He was powerfully minded to turn back, to remain on the ferry-boat and land again on the towering island so heavily freighted with human sorrows, so brilliant with human joys, and only a realization that his presence might trouble and distract Helen kept him to his journey's westward course. As he looked back at the monstrous hive of men the wonder of Helen's personality came to him. That she alone, and unaided (save by her own inborn genius and her beauty), should have succeeded in becoming distinguished, even regnant, among so many eager and striving souls, overwhelmed him with love and admiration. He wondered how he could have assumed even for an instant the tone of a lover, the gesture of a master. "I, a poor, restless, penniless vagabond on the face of the earth--I presumed to complain of her!" he exclaimed, and shuddered with guilty disgust at thought of that night behind the scenes. In this mood he rode out into the West, which was bleak with winter winds and piled high with snow. He paused but a day with his father, whom he found busy prolonging the lives of the old people with whom the town was filled. It was always a shock to the son, this contrast between the outward peace and well-seeming of his native town and the inner mortality and swift decay. Even in a day's visit he felt the grim destroyer's presence, palpable as the shadow of a cloud. He hastened on to Darien, that curious mixture of Spanish-Mexican indolence and bustling American enterprise, a town wherein his brother Walt had established himself some years before. Walter Douglass was shocked by the change in his brother. "I can't understand how fourteen months in New York can reduce a lusty youth to the color of a cabbage and the consistency of a gelatine pudding. I reckon you'd better key yourself down to my pace for a while. Look at me!" The playwright smiled. "I haven't indulged myself too much. You can't hit a very high pace on twelve dollars a week." "Oh, I don't know. There are cheap brands of whiskey; and you can breathe the bad air of a theatre every night if you climb high enough. I know you've been too strenuous at some point. Now, what's the meaning of it all?" "I've been working very hard." "Shouldn't do it. Look at me. I never work and never worry. I play. I weigh two hundred pounds, eat well, sleep like a doorknob, make about three thousand dollars a year, and educate my children. I don't want to seem conceited, but my way of life appeals to me as philosophic; yours is too wasteful. Come, now, you're keeping back something. You might as well 'fess up. What _were_ you doing?" The playwright remained on his guard. "Well, as I wrote you, I had a couple of plays accepted and helped to produce them. There's nothing more wearing than producing a play. The anxiety is killing." "I believe you. I think the writing of one act would finish me. Yes, I can see that would be exciting business; but what's all this about your engagement to some big actress?" This brought the blood to the younger man's cheek, but he was studiedly careless in reply. "All newspaper talk. Of course, in rehearsing the play, I saw a great deal of Miss Merival, but--that's all. She is one of the most successful and brilliant women on the stage, while I--well, I am only a 'writing architect,' earning my board by doing a little dramatic criticism now and then. You need not put any other two things together to know how foolish such reports are." Walt seemed satisfied. "Well, my advice is: slow down to Darien time. Eat and sleep, and ride a bronco to make you eat more and sleep harder, and in two weeks you'll be like your old-time self." This advice, so obviously sound, was hard to follow, for each day brought a letter from Helen, studiously brief and very sparing of any terms of affection--frank, good letters, kindly but no more--and young Douglass was dissatisfied, and said so. He spent a large part of each morning pouring out upon paper the thoughts and feelings surging within him. He told her of the town, of the delicious, crisp climate--like October in the East--of the great snow-peaks to the West, of his rides far out on the plain, of his plans for the coming year. "I dug an old play out of my trunk to-day" (he wrote, towards the end of the first week). "It's the first one I ever attempted. It is very boyish. I had no problems in my mind then, but it is worth while. I am going to rewrite it and send it on to you, for I can't be idle. I believe you'll like it. It is a love drama pure and simple." To this she replied: "I am interested in what you say of your first play, but don't work--rest and enjoy your vacation." A few days later he wrote, in exultation: "I got a grip on the play yesterday and re-wrote two whole acts. I think I've put some of the glory of this land and sky into it--I mean the exultation of health and youth. I am putting you into it, too--I mean the adoration I feel for you, my queen! "Do you know, all the old wonder of you is coming back to me. When I think of you as the great actress my nerves are shaken. Is it possible that the mysterious Helen Merival is my Helen? I am mad to rush back to you to prove it. Isn't it presumptuous of me to say, 'My Helen'? But at this distance you cannot reprove me. I came across some pictures of you in a magazine to-day, and was thrilled and awed by them. I have not said anything of Helen MacDavitt to my people, but of the good and great actress Helen Merival I speak copiously. They all feel very grateful to you for helping me. Father thinks you at least forty. He could not understand how a woman under thirty could rise to such eminence as you have attained. Walt also takes it for granted you are middle-aged. He knows how long the various 'Maggies' and 'Ethels' and 'Annies' have been in public life. He saw something in a paper about us the other day, but took it as a joke. If this fourth play of mine comes off, and you find it worth producing, I shall be happy. It might counteract the baleful influence of _Alessandra_. I began to wonder how I ever did such a melodrama. Is it as bad as it seems to me now?... "I daren't ask how _Enid_ is doing. It makes me turn cold to think of the money you are losing. Wouldn't it pay to let the theatre go 'dark' till the new thing is ready?... "I am amazed at my temerity with you, serene lady. If I had not been filled with the colossal conceit of the young author, I never would have dared to approach--What I did during those mad weeks (you know the ones I mean) gives me such shame and suffering as I have never known, and my whole life is now ordered to make you forget that side of my character. I ask myself now, 'What would Helen have me do?' I don't say this humble mood will last. If _Alessandra_ should make a 'barrel of money,' I am capable of soaring to such heights of audacity that you will be startled." To this she replied: "I am not working at rehearsal more than is necessary. Mr. Olquest is a jewel. He has taken the whole burden of the stage direction off my hands. I lie in bed till noon each morning and go for a drive each pleasant afternoon. Our spring weather is gone. Winter has returned upon us again.... I miss you very much. For all the worry you gave us, we found entertainment in you. Don't trouble about the money we are losing. Westervelt is putting up all the cash for the new production and is angelic of manner--or means to be. I prefer him when in the dumps. He attends every rehearsal and is greatly excited over my part. He now thinks you great, and calls you 'the American Sardou.' ... I have put all our dismal hours behind me. 'All this, too, shall pass away.' ... I care not to what audacity you wing your way, if only you come back to us your good, sane, undaunted self once more." In this letter, as in all her intercourse with him, there was restraint, as though love were being counselled by prudence. And this was, indeed, the case. A foreboding of all that an acknowledgment of a man's domination might mean to her troubled Helen. The question, "How would marriage affect my plans," beset her, though she tried to thrust it away, to retire it to the indefinite future. Her love grew steadily, feeding upon his letters, which became each day more buoyant and manly, bringing to her again the sense of unbounded ambition and sane power with which his presence had filled her at their first meeting. "You are not of the city," she wrote. "You belong to the country. Think how near New York came to destroying you. You ought not to come back. Why don't you settle out there and take up public life?" His answer was definite: "You need not fear. The city will never again dominate me. I have found myself--through you. With you to inspire me I cannot fail. Public life! Do you mean politics? I am now fit for only one thing--to write. I have found my work. And do you think I could live anywhere without hope of seeing you? My whole life is directed towards you--to be worthy of you, to be justified in asking you to join your life to mine. These are my ambitions, my audacious desires. I love you, and you must know that I cannot be content with your friendship--your affection--which I know I have. I want your love in return. Not now--not while I am a man of words merely. As I now feel _Alessandra_ is a little thing compared with the sacrifice you have made for me. I have stripped away all my foolish egotism, and when I return to see you on the opening night I shall rejoice in your success without a tinge of bitterness. It isn't as if the melodrama were degrading in its appeal. It does not represent my literary ideals, of course, but it is not contemptible, it is merely conventional. My mind _has_ cleared since I came here. I see myself in proper relation to you and to the public. I see now that with the large theatre, with the long 'run' ideals, a play _must_ be very general in its appeal, and with such conditions it is folly for us to quarrel. We must have our own little theatre wherein we can play the subtler phases of American life--the phases we both rejoice in. If _Alessandra_ should pay my debt to you--- you see how my mind comes back to that thought--we will use it to build our own temple of art. As I think of you there, toiling without me, I am wild with desire to return to be doing something. I am ready now to turn my hand to any humble thing--to direct rehearsals, to design costumes, anything, only to be near you. One word from you and I will come." To this she replied: "No; on the contrary, you must stay a week longer. We have postponed the production on account of some extra scenic effect which Hugh wishes to perfect. They profess wonder now at your knowledge of scenic effect as well as your eye for costume and stage-setting. Your last letter disturbed me greatly, while it pleased me. I liked its tone of boyish enthusiasm, but your directness of speech scared me. I'm almost afraid to meet you. You men are so literal, so insistent in your demands. A woman doesn't know what she wants--sometimes; she doesn't like to be brought to bay so roundly. You have put so much at stake on _Alessandra_ that I am a-tremble with fear of consequences. If it succeeds you will be insufferably conceited and assured; if it fails we will never see you again. Truly the life of a star is not all glitter." This letter threw him into a panic. He hastened to disclaim any wish to disturb her. "If you will forgive me this time I will not offend again. I did not mean to press for an answer. I distinctly said that at present I have no right to do so. I daren't do so, in fact. I send you, under another cover, the youthful play which I call _The Morning_. Isn't that fanciful enough? It means, of course, that I am now just reaching the point in my life where the man of thirty-odd looks back upon the boy of eighteen with a wistful tenderness, feeling that the mystery of the world has in some sense departed with the morning. Of a certainty this idea is not new, but I took a joy in writing this little idyl, and I would like to see you do 'the wonderful lady I see in my dreams.' Can you find an actor who can do my lad of 'the poetic fancy'?" She replied to this: "Your play made me cry, for I, too, am leaving the dewy morning behind. I like this play; it is very tender and beautiful, and do you know I believe it would touch more hearts than your gorgeous melodrama. Mr. Howells somewhere beautifully says that when he is most intimate in the disclosures of his own feelings he finds himself most widely responded to--or something like that. I really am eager to do this play. It has increased my wonder of your powers. I really begin to feel that I know only part of you. First _Lillian's Duty_ taught me some of your stern Scotch morality. Then _Enid's Choice_ revealed to me your conception of the integrity of a good woman's soul--that nothing can debase it. _Alessandra_ disclosed your learning and your imaginative power. Now here I feel the poet, the imaginative boy. I will not say this has increased my faith in you--it has added to my knowledge of you. But I must confess to you it has made it very difficult for me to go on with _Alessandra_. All the other plays are in line of a national drama. _Alessandra_ is a bitter and ironical concession. _The Morning_ makes its splendor almost tawdry. It hurt me to go to rehearsal to-day. Westervelt's presence was a gloating presence, and I hated him. Hugh's report of the exultant 'I told you so's' of the dramatic critics sickened me--" Her letter ended abruptly, almost at this point. His reply contained these words: "It is not singular that you feel irritated by _Alessandra_ while I am growing resigned, for you are in daily contact with the sordid business. Tell me I may come back. I want to be at the opening. I know you will secure a great personal triumph. I want to see you shining again amid a shower of roses. I want to help take your horses from your carriage, and wheel you in glory through the streets as they used to do in olden times as tribute to their great favorites. I haven't seen a New York paper since I came West. I hope you have put _Enid_ away. What is the use wearing yourself out playing a disastrous rôle while forced to rehearse a new one? My longing to see you is so great that the sight of your picture on my desk is a sweet torture. Write me that you want me, dearest." She replied, very simply: "You may come. Our opening night is now fixed for Monday next. You will have just time to get here. All is well." To this he wired reply: "I start to-night. Arrive on Monday at Grand Central. Eleven-thirty." * * * * * Helen was waiting for him at the gate of the station in a beautiful spring hat, her face abloom, her eyes dancing, and the sight of her robbed him of all caution. Dropping his valise, he rushed towards her, intent to take her in his arms. She stopped him with one outstretched hand. "How well you look!" Her voice, so rich, so vibrant, moved him like song. "And you--you are the embodiment of spring." Then, in a low voice, close to her ear, he added: "I love you! I love you! How beautiful you are!" "Hush!" She lifted a finger in a gesture of warning. "You must not say such things to me--here." With the addition of that final word her face grew arch. Then in a louder tone: "I was right, was I not, to send you away?" "I am a new being," he answered, "morally and physically. But tell me, what is the meaning of these notices? Have you put _The Morning_ on in place of _Alessandra_?" Hugh interposed. "That's what she's done," and offered his hand with unexpected cordiality. "You take my breath away," said Douglass. "I can't follow your reckless campaigns." "We'll explain. We're not as reckless as we seem." They began to move towards the street, Hugh leading the way with the playwright's bag. Helen laughed at her lover's perplexity and dismay. "You look befoozled." "I am. I can't understand. After all that work and expense--after all my toilsome grind--my sacrifice of principles." She was close to his shoulder as she said, looking up at him with beaming, tender eyes: "That's just it. I couldn't accept your offering. After _The Morning_ came in, my soul revolted. I ordered the _Alessandra_ manuscript brought in. Do you know what I did with it?" "Rewrote it, I hope." Her face expressed daring, humor, triumph, but the hand lifted to the chin expressed a little apprehension as she replied: "Rewrote it? No, I didn't think of that. _I burned it._" He stopped, unconscious of the streaming crowds. "Burned it! I can't believe you. My greatest work--" "It is gone." The smile died out of her eyes, her face became very grave and very sweet. "I couldn't bear to have you bow your head to please a public not worthy of you. The play was un-American, and should not have been written by you." He was dazed by the enormous consequences of this action, and his mind flashed from point to point before he answered, in a single word: "Westervelt." Thereat they both laughed, and she explained. "It was dreadful. He raged, he shook the whole block as he trotted to and fro tearing his hair. I think he wished to tear my hair. He really resembled the elder Salvini as Othello--you know the scene I mean. I gave him a check to compensate him. He tore it up and blew it into the air with a curse. Oh, it was beautiful comedy. I told him our interview would make a hit as a 'turn' on the vaudeville stage. Nothing could calm him. I was firm, and _Alessandra_ was in ashes." They moved on out upon the walk and into the hideous clamor of Forty-second Street, his mind still busy with the significance of her news. Henry Olquest in an auto sat waiting for them. After a quick hand-shake Douglass lifted Helen to her place, followed her with a leap, and they were off on a ride which represented to him more than an association with success--it seemed a triumphal progress. Something in Helen's eyes exalted him, filled his throat with an emotion nigh to tears. His eyes were indeed smarting as she turned to say: "You are just in time for dress rehearsal. Do you want to see it?" "No, I leave it all to you. I want to be the author if I can. I want to get the thrill." "I think you will like our production. Mr. Olquest has done marvels with it. You'll enjoy it; I know you will. It will restore your lost youth to you." "I hope it will restore some of your lost dollars. I saw by the papers that you were still struggling with _Enid_. I shudder to think what that means. The other poor little play will never be able to lift that huge debt." "I'm not so sure about that," she gayly answered. "The rehearsals have almost resigned"--she pointed at Hugh's back--"him to the change." "I confess I was surprised by his cordial greeting." "Oh, he's quite shifted his point of view. He thinks _The Morning_ may 'catch 'em' on other grounds." "And you--you are radiant. I expected to find you worn out. You dazzle me." "You mustn't look at me then. Look at the avenue. Isn't it fine this morning?" He took her hint. "It is glorious. I feel that I am again at the centre of things. After all, this is our one great city, the only place where life is diverse enough to give the dramatist his material. I begin to understand the attitude of actors when they land from the ferry-boat, draw a long breath, and say, 'Thank God, I'm in New York again.'" "It's the only city in America where an artist can be judged by his peers. I suppose that is one reason why we love it." "Yes, it's worth conquering, and I'll make my mark upon it yet," and his tone was a note of self-mastery as well as of resolution. "It is a city set on a hill. To take it brings great glory and lasting honor." She smiled up at him again, a proud light in her eyes. "Now you are your good, rugged self, the man who 'hypnotized' me into taking _Lillian's Duty_. You'll need all your courage; the critics are to be out in force." "I do not fear them," he answered, as they whirled into the plaza and up to the side entrance of the hotel. "I've engaged a room for you here, Douglass," said Hugh, and the new note of almost comradeship struck the playwright with wonder. He was a little sceptical of it. "Very well," he answered. "I am reckless. I will stay one day." "Mother will be waiting to see you," said Helen, as they entered the hall. "She is your stanch supporter." "She is a dear mother. I wish she were my own." Each word he uttered now carried a hidden meaning, and some inner relenting, some sweet, secret concession which he dimly felt but dared not presume upon, gave her a girlish charm which she had never before worn in his eyes. They took lunch together, seated at the same table in the same way, and yet not in the same spirit. He was less self-centred, less insistent. His winter of proved inefficiency, his sense of indebtedness to her, his all-controlling love for her gave him a new appeal. He was at once tender and humorous as he referred again to _Alessandra_. "Well, now that my chief work of art is destroyed, I must begin again at the bottom. I have definitely given up all idea of following my profession. I am going to do specials for one of the weeklies. Anderson has interceded for me. I am to enter the ranks of the enemy. I am not sure but I ought to do a criticism of my own play to-morrow night." She was thinking of other things. "Tell me of your people. Did you talk of me to them? What did they say of me?" "They all think of you as a kind, middle-aged lady, who has been very good to a poor country boy." She laughed. "How funny! Why should they think me so old?" "They can't conceive how a mere girl can be so rich and powerful. How could they realize the reckless outpouring of gold which flows from those who seek pleasure to those who give it." She grew instantly graver. "They would despise me if they knew. I don't like being a mere toy of the public--a pleasure-giver and nothing else. Of course there are different ways of pleasing. That is why I couldn't do _Alessandra_. Tell me of your brother. I liked what you wrote of him. He is our direct opposite, isn't he? Does he talk as well as you reported, or were you polishing him a little?" "No, Walt has a remarkable taste in words. He has always been the literary member of our family, but is too lazy to write. He is content to grow fat in his little round of daily duties." "I wonder if we haven't lost something by becoming enslaved to the great city! Our pleasures are more intense, but they _do_ wear us out. Think of you and me to-morrow night--our anxiety fairly cancelling our pleasure--and then think of your brother going leisurely home to his wife, his babies, and his books. I don't know--sometimes when I think of growing old in a flat or a hotel I am appalled. I hate to keep mother here. Sometimes I think of giving it all up for a year or two and going back to the country, just to see how it would affect me. I don't want to get artificial and slangy with no interests but the stage, like so many good actresses I know. It's such a horribly egotistic business--" "There are others," he said. "Writers are bad enough, but actors and opera-singers are infinitely worse. Mother has helped me." She put her soft palm on her mother's wrinkled hand. "Nothing can spoil mother; nothing can take away the home atmosphere--not even the hotel. Well, now I must go to our final rehearsal. I will not see you again till the close of the second act. You must be in your place to-night," she said, with tender warning. "I want to see your face whenever I look for it." "I am done with running away," he answered, as he slowly released her hand. "I shall pray for your success--not my own." "Fortunately my success is yours." "In the deepest sense that is true," he answered. XX As Douglass entered the theatre that night Westervelt met him with beaming smile. "I am glad to see you looking so well, Mr. Douglass." He nodded and winked. "You are all right now, my boy. You have them coming. I was all wrong." "What do you mean?" "Didn't she tell you?" "You mean about the advance sale?--no." Westervelt grew cautious. "Oh--well, then, I will be quiet. She wants to tell you. She will do so." "Advance sale must be good," thought the playwright, as he walked on into the auditorium. The ushers smiled, and the old gatekeeper greeted him shortly. "Ye've won out, Mr. Douglass." "Can it be that this play is to mark the returning tide of Helen's popularity?" he asked himself, and a tremor of excitement ran over him, the first thrill of the evening. Up to this moment he had a curious sense of aloofness, indifference, as if the play were not his own but that of a stranger. He began now to realize that this was his third attempt to win the favor of the public, and according to an old boyish superstition should be successful. Helen had invited a great American writer--a gracious and inspiring personality--to occupy her box to meet her playwright, and once within his seat Douglass awaited the coming of the great man with impatience and concern. He was conscious of a great change in himself and his attitude towards Helen since he last sat waiting for the curtain to rise. "Nothing--not even the dropping of an act--could rouse in me the slightest resentment towards her." He flushed with torturing shame at the recollection of his rage, his selfish, demoniacal, egotistic fury over the omission of his pet lines. "I was insane," he muttered, pressing a hand to his eyes as if to shut out the memory of Helen's face as she looked that night. "And she forgave me! She must have known I was demented." And her sweetness, her largeness of sympathy again overwhelmed him. "Dare I ask her to marry me?" He no longer troubled himself about her wealth nor with the difference between them as to achievement, but he comprehended at last that her superiority lay in her ability to forgive, in her power to inspire love and confidence, in her tact, her consideration for others, her wondrous unselfishness. "What does the public know of her real greatness? Capable of imagining the most diverse types of feminine character, living each night on the stage in an atmosphere of heartless and destructive intrigue, she yet retains a divine integrity, an inalienable graciousness. Dare I, a moody, selfish brute, touch the hem of her garment?" In this mood he watched the audience gather--a smiling, cheerful-voiced, neighborly throng. There were many young girls among them, and their graceful, bared heads gave to the orchestra chairs a brilliant and charmingly intimate effect. The _roué_, the puffed and beefy man of sensual type, was absent. The middle-aged, bespangled, gluttonous woman was absent. The faces were all refined and gracious--an audience selected by a common interest from among the millions who dwell within an hour's travel of the theatre. Douglass fancied he could detect in these auditors the same feeling of security, of satisfaction, of comfort with which they were accustomed to sit down of an evening with a new book by a favorite author. "If I could but win a place like that," he exclaimed to himself, "I would be satisfied. It can be done when the right man comes." A dinner engagement delayed the eminent author, but he came in as the curtain was rising, and, shaking hands cordially, presented Mr. Rufus Brown, a visiting London critic. "Mr. Brown is deeply interested in your attempt to do an American play," said the great novelist. "I hope--I am sure he will witness your triumph to-night." Thereupon they took seats with flattering promptness in order not to miss a word of the play. Helen, coming on a moment after, was given a greeting almost frenziedly cordial, and when she bowed her eyes sought the box in which her lover sat, and the audience, seeing the distinguished novelist and feeling some connection between them, renewed their applause. Douglass, at the back of the box, rose and stood with intent to express to Helen the admiration, the love, and the respect which he felt for her. She was, indeed, "the beautiful, golden-haired lady" of whom he had written as a boy, and a singular timidity, a wave of worship went over him. He became the imaginative lad of the play, who stood in awe and worship of mature womanhood. The familiar Helen was gone, the glittering woman was gone, and in her place stood the ideal of the boy--the author himself had returned to "the land of morning glow"--to the time when the curl of a woman's lip was greater than any war. The boy on the stage chanted: "Where I shall find her I know not. But I trust in the future! To me She will come. I am not forgot. Out in the great world she's waiting, Perhaps by the shore of the sea, By the fabulous sea, where the white sand gleams, I shall meet her and know her and claim her. The beautiful, stately lady I see in my dreams." "I dare not claim her," said the man, humbled by her beauty. "I am not worthy of her." The applause continued to rise instant and cordial in support of players and play. Auditors, actors, and author seemed in singularly harmonious relation. As the curtain fell cries of approval mingled with the hand-clapping. The novelist reached a kindly hand. "You've found your public, my dear fellow. These people are here after an intelligent study of your other plays. This is a gallant beginning. Don't you think so, Brown?" "Very interesting attempt to dramatize those boyish fancies," the English critic replied. "But I don't quite see how you can advance on these idyllic lines. It's pretty, but is it drama?" "He will show us," replied the novelist. "I have great faith in Mr. Douglass. He is helping to found an American drama. You must see his other plays." Westervelt came to the box wheezing with excitement. "My boy, you are made. The critics are disarmed. They begin to sing of you." Douglass remained calm. "There is plenty of time for them to turn bitter," he answered. "I am most sceptical when they are gracious." The second act left the idyllic ground, and by force of stern contrast held the audience enthralled. The boy was being disillusioned. _The Morning_ had grown gray. Doubt of his ideal beset the poet. The world's forces began to benumb and appall him. His ideal woman passed to the possession of another. He lost faith in himself. The cloud deepened, the sky, overshadowed as by tempest, let fall lightning and a crash of thunder. So the act closed. The applause was unreservedly cordial--no one failed to join in the fine roar--and in the midst of it Douglass, true to his promise, hurried back to the scenes to find Helen. She met him, radiant with excitement. "My brave boy! You have won your victory. They are calling for you." He protested. She insisted. "No, no. It is _you_. I've been out. Hear them; they want the author. Come!" Dazed and wordless, weak from stage-fright, he permitted himself to be led forth into the terrifying glare of the footlight world. There his guide left him, abandoned him, pitifully exposed to a thousand eyes, helpless and awkward. He turned to flee, to follow her, but the roguish smile on her face, as she kissed her fingers towards him, somehow roused his pride and gave him courage to face the tumult. As he squared himself an awesome silence settled over the house--a silence that inspired as well as appalled by its expectancy. "Friends, I thank you," the pale and resolute author weakly began. "I didn't know I had so many friends in the world. Two minutes ago I was so scared my teeth chattered. Now I am entirely at my ease--you notice that." The little ripple of laughter which followed this remark really gave him time to think--gave him courage. "I feel that I am at last face to face with an audience that knows my work--that is ready to support a serious attempt at playwriting. I claim that a play may do something more than amuse--it may _interest_. There is a wide difference, you will see. To be an amusement merely is to degrade our stage to the level of a Punch-and-Judy show. I am sorry for tired men and weary women, but as a dramatist I can't afford to take their troubles into account. I am writing for those who are mentally alert and willing to support plays that have at least the dignity of intention which lies in our best novels. This does not mean gloomy plays or problem plays, but it does mean conscientious study of American life. If you like me as well after the close of the play"--he made dramatic pause--"well I shall not be able to sleep to-night. I sincerely thank you. You have given me a fair hearing--that is all I can ask--and I am very grateful." This little speech seemed to please his auditors, but his real reward came when Helen met him at the wings and caught his arm to her side in an ecstatic little hug. "You did beautifully! You make me afraid of you when you stand tall and grand like that. You were scared though. I could see that." "You deserted me," he answered, in mock accusation. "You led me into the crackling musketry and ran away." "I wanted to see of what metal you were made," she answered, and fled to her dressing-room to prepare for the final act. "Now for the real test," said the novelist, with a kindly smile. "I think we could all write plays if it were not for the difficulty of ending them." "I begin to tremble for my climax," Douglass answered. "It is so important to leave a sweet and sonorous sound in the ear at the last. It must die on the sense like the sound of a bell." "It's a remarkable achievement, do you know," began the English critic, "to carry a parable along with a realistic study of life. I can't really see how you're coming out." "I don't know myself," replied Douglass. The play closed quietly, with a subjective climax so deep, so true to human nature that it laid hold upon every heart. The applause was slow in rising, but grew in power till it filled the theatre like some great anthem. No one rose, no one was putting on wraps. The spell lasted till the curtain rose three times on the final picture. Douglass could not speak as the critic shook his hand. It was so much more affecting than he had dared to hope. To sit there while his ideals, his hopes, his best thoughts, his finest conceptions were thus gloriously embodied was the greatest pleasure of his life. All his doubt and bitterness was lost in a flood of gratitude to Helen and to the kindly audience. As soon as he could decently escape he hurried again to Helen. The stage this time was crowded with people. The star was hid, as of old, in a mob of her admirers, but they were of finer quality than ever before. The grateful acknowledgment of these good people was an inspiration. Every one smiled, and yet in the eyes of many of the women tears sparkled. Helen, catching sight of her lover, lifted her hand and called to him, and though he shrank from entering the throng he obeyed. Those who recognized him fell back with a sort of awe of his good-fortune. Helen reached her hand, saying, huskily, "I am tired--take me away." He took her arm and turned to the people still crowding to speak to her. "Friends, Miss Merival is very weary. I beg you to excuse her. It has been a very hard week for her." And with an air of mastery, as significant as it was unconscious he led her to her room. Safely inside the door she turned, and with a finger to her lips, a roguish light in her eyes, she said: "I want to tell you something. I can't wait any longer. _Enid's Choice_ ran to the capacity of the house last week." For a moment he did not realize the full significance of this. "What! _Enid's Choice_? Why, how can that be? I thought--" "We had twelve hundred and eighty dollars at the Saturday matinée and eleven hundred at night. Of course part of this was due to the knowledge that it was the last day of the piece, but there is no doubt of its success." A choking came to his throat, his eyes grew dim. "I can't believe it. Such success is impossible to me." "It is true, and that is the reason I was able to burn _Alessandra_." "And that is the reason Hugh and Westervelt were so cordial, and I thought it was all on account of the advance sale of _The Morning_!" "And this is only the beginning. I intend to play all your plays in a repertoire, and you're to write me others as I need them. And finally--and this I hate to acknowledge--you are no longer in my debt." "That I know is not true," he said. "Everything I am to-night I owe to you." "The resplendent author has made the wondrous woman very proud and yet very humble to-night," she ended, softly, with eyelashes drooping. "She has reared a giant that seeks to devour her." He caught her to his side. "Do you know what all this means to you and to me? It means that we are to be something more than playwright and star. It means that I will not be satisfied till your life and mine are one." She put him away in such wise that her gesture of dismissal allured. "You must go, dearest. Our friends are waiting, and I must dress. Some time I will tell you how much--you have become to me--but not now!" He turned away exultant, for her eyes had already confessed the secret which her lips still shrank from uttering. THE END 
33209	----	scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print archive. The dual alliance Marjorie Benton Cooke The Dual Alliance BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR * * * * * _Bambi_ _David_ _The Girl Who Lived in the Woods_ [Illustration: "But I--I hardly know you"] THE DUAL ALLIANCE BY MARJORIE BENTON COOKE ILLUSTRATED BY MARY GREENE BLUMENSCHEIN GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1915 _Copyright, 1915,_ INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE CO. _Copyright, 1915, by_ DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. ILLUSTRATIONS "But I--I hardly know you" _Frontispiece in color_ "He tended the fire that was between them" 88 "Every night at midnight Paul called her on the 'phone" 132 "Bob and Paul stood bowing and smiling" 160 PROLOGUE Barbara Garratry was thirty and Irish. To the casual observer the world was a bright coloured ball for her tossing. When she was a tiny mite her father had dubbed her "Bob, Son of Battle," because of certain obvious, warlike traits of character, and "Bob" Garratry she had been ever since. She had literally fought her way to the top, handicapped by poverty, very little education, the responsibility of an invalid and dependent father. She had been forced to make all her own opportunities, but at thirty she was riding the shoulders of the witch success. Her mother, having endowed her only child with the gift of a happy heart, went on her singing way into Paradise when Bob was three. Her father, handsome ne'er-do-well that he was, made a poor and intermittent living for them until the girl was fifteen. Then poor health overtook him, and Bob took the helm. At fifteen she worked on a newspaper, and discovered she had a picturesque talent for words. Literary ambition gripped her, a desire to make permanent use of the dramatic elements which she uncovered in her rounds of assignments. She had a nose for news and made a fair success, until she took to sitting up at night to write "real stuff" as she called it. Her nervous, high-strung temperament would not stand the strain, so, true to her Irish blood, she gave up the newspaper job, with its Saturday night pay envelope, and threw herself headlong into the uncharted sea of authorship. She began with short stories for magazines. Editors admitted her, responded to her personality--returned her tales. "If you could write the way you talk," they all said. Now Daddy Garratry had to eat, no matter how light she could go on rations, so she abandoned literature shortly for a position in a decorator's shop. Here, too, she found charm an asset. She worked eight hours a day, cooked for two of them, washed, sewed, took care of her invalid, lavished herself upon him, then wrote at night, undaunted by her first failure. She used her brain on the problem of success. When the manager of the shop put her in charge of their booth at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, because, as he said, "you can attract people," she recalled the consensus of editorial opinion, and made up her mind that personality was her real gift. The stage was the show window for that possession, so thither she turned her face at eighteen, and in due course of time joined the great army which follows the mirage of stage success. But Bob proved to be one of the god's anointed, and from the first the charm of her, her queer, haunting face, which some found ugly and some proclaimed beautiful, marked her for advance. She was radiantly happy in the work, and happier still that she was able to provide more comforts and luxuries for daddy, who was her idol. The real crux of her ambition was the day when she could give him everything his luxury-loving heart desired. She worked hard, she learned the trade of the theatre. She studied her audiences, noted their likes and dislikes, what they laughed at, and when they wept. Then once again she took up her abandoned pen and began to work on a play. She and daddy talked it, played it, mulled it over every waking hour for months. Then one historic day Bob read it to an audience of daddy and a manager--that was the beginning of the last lap of the race. The manager accepted it and left father and daughter in a state of ecstasy. "Well, dad, it looks like the real thing this time." "It does, Bobsie. Ye're not only the prettiest Garratry, but ye're the smartest of the clan!" "Blarney!" "I wish yer mither could see ye the day. Ye were such a queer mite, but smart--ye were always smart----" "What'll I buy ye with our fortune, daddy? A farm in the ould counthry and little pigs----" "No pigs for me! I'd like me a body servant in brass buttons to wait on me noight an' day. Whin I come down our marble stairs, I want to see him sthandin' there, attintion, so I can say, 'Jimmy--there's yer valley.'" "You funny old dad! What else? We'll get us a motor car----" "Shure, an' a counthry place--but no pigs----" "How about a yacht?" "We'll sthay on land, mavourneen, 'tis safer." "But we must go to Europe, cabin de luxe----" "I don't care if it's de luxe, if it's D-comfortable," he laughed. This was the beginning of a wonderful game of make-believe, which they played for months. Bob's comedy went into rehearsal at once, and every day when she came home, after hours spent in the theatre, she found daddy laughing over some new scheme he had devised for spending their fortune, when it came. They planned like magii with the magic carpet in their hands, ready to spread before them. They worked out tours of Europe, they built and rebuilt their country house. They endowed charities for newspaper writers and interior decorators--they planned a retreat for indigent magazine writers and an asylum for editors. Life was a joyous thing, stretching out ahead of them, full of colour and success, and then, on the very eve of the production of Bob's play, daddy died. Bob went through it all, the first night and what came after, like a wraith. The adulation and the praise that came to her were ashes instead of fire. Six years followed of success. Money, travel, friends, the love and admiration of great audiences came to her, but Bob found life stale. Lovers came a-plenty; she made them friends and kept them, or sent them on their way. Bob had everything the world's wife wants, and in her own heart she knew she had nothing. Generosity was her vice. Anybody in her profession, or out of it, who was in trouble, had only to go to Bob Garratry for comfort or for cash. There was usually a tired, discouraged girl recuperating out at Bob's bungalow, and in the summertime all the stage children she could find came to pay her visits and live on real milk and eggs. She interested herself in the girl student colonies in New York, and became their patron saint. She found that the girls in the Three Arts Club, and kindred student places--getting their musical and dramatic education with great sacrifice usually, either to their parents or themselves--had only such opportunities to hear the great artists of the day as the top galleries afforded. The dramatic students fared better than the others, she found, for they could get seats for twenty-five or fifty cents in the lofts of theatres, but the music students had to stand in line sometimes for two or three hours to buy a place in the gallery of the Metropolitan. As it was impossible to see anything from there, seated, they were accustomed to stand through the entire opera. For this privilege they paid one dollar. Bob learned what that dollar meant to most of them, an actual sacrifice, even privation. While rich patrons yawned below, these young idealists, the musical and dramatic hope of our future, leaned over the railing, up under the roof, trying to grasp the fine shades of expression which mark the finished artist. All this Bob Garratry learned, and raged at. She herself donated twenty-five student seats for every opera, and a lesser number for each good play. She interested some of her friends in the idea--with characteristic fervour she adopted all the students in New York, but even this large family did not fill the nooks and crannies of her empty heart. You felt it in her work--"the Celtic minor" as one critic said. Possibly Paul Trent expressed it best when he said: "Behind her every laugh you feel her dreein' her weird!" PART I "Mr. Trent, Miss Garratry is on the wire," said the stenographer to Trent, who sat at his desk making inroads on the piles of correspondence, official documents, and typewritten evidence which heaped his desk. "I told you I couldn't be interrupted," he replied sharply. "I explained that to her, when she called the first time. She says that if you don't speak to her she will come down here." He smiled reluctantly as he took up the receiver. "Good morning," he said. "What is the use of having a lawyer, if he acts like a Broadway manager?" she asked. "I wish you could see the pile of papers completely surrounding me," he answered. "I'm not interested in your troubles, I want mine attended to." "Entirely feminine." "Yes, it is selfish----" "I said feminine." "I heard you. I want you to lunch with me at two." "I cannot possibly do it," he interrupted her. "It isn't social, it is business, and it must be attended to to-day." "I'm sorry, but----" "Mr. Trent, I assure you it is a matter of serious importance. I feel justified in insisting upon your professional attention for one hour to-day. If you prefer, I will come to you." Trent's face showed his annoyance. "I cannot take time for lunch. I'll be there at three." "Thank you." He hung up the receiver impatiently and returned to his work. A few minutes before three he set out for the hotel where Barbara Garratry lived. He was annoyed at himself for coming--probably some foolishness which could just as well be attended to over the telephone. He knew the actress only slightly. He had acted as her attorney in one or two minor cases when she needed legal help. He had found her sensible and intelligent--for a woman. Susceptible to beauty, he had felt her charm, and even promised himself that some day he would take time to know her. She interested him, because all successful people interested him. It was his only measure. At forty he found himself envied by men, his seniors in his profession. He had served as State's attorney, he was on the eve of trying for a bigger prize, but to-day, as he made his way along the crowded street, in answer to Barbara Garratry's summons, his mood was a bit cynical. Life held no locked doors for him--he had peered behind them all, as Father Confessor. Men he found open books, women, thin volumes not worth the reading. To-day he had a sense of isolation from his fellows, a wave of loneliness, almost futility. This "average man," who passed him on the street, had his home, his wife, and children to match with Trent's "bigger issues." He was invited to Miss Garratry's sitting-room at once. Her maid admitted him, and she came to greet him. He was struck again with a certain poignant quality in her, although her smile was merry. "I know how furious you are at having to come." "On the contrary, I am honoured." "You are unremittingly courteous, considering that you are you." "Which means?" "I know in what poor esteem you hold women," she smiled. "You do me a great injustice," he began. "You do yourself one," she interrupted. "We're not so bad. However, the fact that we interest you so little makes it possible for you to do me a service." "I am glad." She waved him to a seat, and as she crossed the room he found himself wondering whether her floating gown was blue or violet or both. The primroses at her belt gave him pleasure. She gathered up some papers and laid them before him. "I wish to make my will. This is a list of my possessions and the distribution I wish made of them." He looked over the list, his eye appraising with surprise her investments. "You have been very successful." "Yes." "You wish me to have this typed, signed, witnessed, and filed with your other papers?" "If you please. I wish my body cremated and the ashes thrown into the sea," she added quietly. He glanced at her quickly. "You are ill? You are afraid of death?" "Afraid of death? No, I am seeking it." "What do you mean?" "I mean I do not wish to live any more-- I'm tired." He looked about him at the charming, flower-scented room, at the vibrant figure of the girl. "You mean you intend to end it--deliberately?" "Yes. Why not? There is not a living soul dependent on me to be affected by my going." "You don't think it's cowardice?" "I'm brave enough to be a coward. I've fought my way through and over every obstacle--even you say I've been successful. Now I'm tired-- I've got nothing to fight for, I'm Irish, and I'm lonesome." "But you're just at the top, ready to enjoy what you've fought for." "There's nothing in that. It's only the fight that counts." He understood that. "Why don't you marry, or have you?" "No, I have not. I don't want money or position. I can't marry a man who loves me when I'm only fond of him. I'd rather marry a stranger." "What made you begin the fight?" "I wanted things for daddy, and he died just before I won out." "Why don't you interest yourself in some cause? Women nowadays are----" "Suffrage or charity? The Irish are never satisfied with causes, man----" "There's Home Rule," he smiled. "The women have it," she retorted. "But it's ridiculous! Why, you've got everything in the world." "Do you think that?" she challenged him directly. He walked over to the window and looked out at the early winter sunset. Presently he came back and faced her. "No," he answered. She nodded. "I've thought it all out. I think I have the right. I'm at the top of my wave now, I don't want to sink slowly down into the trough of old age and mediocrity. I'm going." "When?" She laughed. "Oh, the day of execution isn't set. I want to get my house in order." "How are you going?" "I don't know. They're all rather ugly. I wanted you to have directions. I want you sent for." "Why did you select me?" curiously. "Because I thought you would understand." He walked up and down the room, his tall head bent, his eyes on the floor. She watched him absently, her mind far away. He roused her by stopping before her. "I do understand. I offer no opposition. You're of age, you know what you want. I make you a counter proposition. We will call a taxi, go to the courthouse, get a license and be married. We will spend six months together, as partners only. We each go on with our own work, but we share our problems and our pleasures. At the end of the six months, if you still want to go, I'll help you." She stared at him, utterly aghast. "But I--I hardly know you!" "You said you'd rather marry a stranger than a man you were merely fond of--so would I. I've felt this loneliness you speak of. I'd like to make this experiment. We are neither of us handicapped by sentiment--we start even." "But you don't like me--much." "Enough. As well as you like me. You're a good gambler. Get your hat and come along." "Six months! What difference will it make in a thousand years?" she questioned. "None." She stood on tiptoe, her two hands on his shoulders, and looked long into his eyes. He looked into hers frankly. In the end she nodded, went into the other room, came back at once, in hat and furs. "It's a new kind of suicide," she smiled, "come on." II In the cab a sort of terror of this madness came upon Bob. She glanced at this strange man beside her as if she had never seen him before. His handsome, aquiline profile was toward her as he gazed at the crowds passing. What was in his mind? Was he, too, longing to run? "It's getting colder. People are scurrying," he said casually. She steadied at his calm tone. A new courage, a new sense of adventure began to stir in her. They said very little on the drive; in fact, except for necessary questions they were almost entirely silent until they walked out of the courthouse, man and wife. Trent put her into the cab, gave an order, and got in after her. She looked at him intently: so much depended on these first few minutes. "Well, partner," he smiled, and took her gloved hand in a firm clasp for a minute. Her sigh of relief made him smile again, and then they both laughed. "I told him to go to my apartment. We'll make some tea and I'll pack a bag. I'd better join you at the hotel." "Your apartment is too----" "You couldn't be comfortable there with your maid." They disembarked at his quarters, and Bob made a tour of inspection. She hoped for an intimate glance into the man's personality, but the rooms were as impersonal as he was. Just books and pipes and man-litter. She made the tea while he packed his things. "Aren't you sorry to leave this?" she asked him. "Well, you can't have your cake and eat it. Every experiment has some disadvantages," he laughed. "When my season closes I'll keep house for you. I'm good at it." "Thank the Lord for that!" "No, I won't drag you over the 'well-known continent of Europe' for three months," she laughed, and he nodded gratefully. "I have a little place up in the hills where I go in the summer." "So have I." "Well, how will we manage it?" "Fifty-fifty," said he. "Half at yours and half at mine." They drank their tea and put away the things. When they were ready to go, Bob said, "I like this man-place." "We'll come here when you're tired of your girly-girly garden." They went to the hotel and announced their marriage to the manager and the clerk. Trent looked at a suite adjoining Barbara's. "It's all right. I'll send my things up to-morrow. Now you go and rest. What am I to call you?" "Everybody calls me Bob." "Then I'll say Barbara. Do you want to dine upstairs or in the restaurant?" "Restaurant," quickly. His swift glance brought explanation. "You embarrass me a little--yet. I have to get used to you, and the restaurant seems less--intimate." He nodded, smiling. "When do you go to the theatre?" "Seven o'clock. Are you coming?" "Certainly." "Dinner at six-fifteen. You'll hate that, won't you?" "There may be compensations," dryly. He held the door open for her, between the two suites. "Oh, bother that boy, he carried off the key to this door," he added. "We don't need it," she said. "Thank you," he bowed. Dinner was hurried and unsatisfactory. For the most part they were silent. Bob needed her reserves for the night's work, and deliberately set herself against the impulse to entertain him. He talked to her, as they drove to the theatre, so quietly and casually, that she knew she had dreamed it all--that he would go out of her life at the stage door. "Coming around later?" she asked. "Yes." She nodded and disappeared. When half an hour later she darted out on the stage before an enraptured audience, he found himself a part of the mob spirit which acclaimed her. Her charm was irresistible. He felt her as an artist, not as a woman, but she moved him keenly by her masterly performance. As the audience filed out he went into a nearby florist and bought the entire stock of Killarney roses. He carried them to her dressing-room, and when the maid admitted him, he dropped the mass in her lap. "For a wild Irish rose," said he. "Faith, little sisters, he's an Irishman himself," she laughed, burying her face in the bloom. They were interrupted by the manager, people to see her on various pretexts. Trent was driven into the ugly corridor. He was for the first time somewhat irritated by the situation. Appendage to a star! Had he for once in his carefully planned life completely lost his head, and risked everything on a wild gamble? When she came toward him, ready for the street, he pulled himself together. "Where shall we go? Do you mind the cafés?" "People stare so, I seldom go. But it is all right to-night, if you do not mind that." "Let's go to the Persian Garden and dance." "All right." Trent had never been in any public place with her, and he was totally unprepared for the effect she produced. As they followed the head waiter to a table, a noticeable whisper ran round the room, then silence. Then a youth, who had courage as well as champagne aboard, rose and lifted his glass. "On your feet, all of you! To Bob, God bless her!" With laughter everybody responded. Trent, slightly amused, secretly annoyed, watched Bob's expression. First astonishment, then concern for him, then genuine pleasure. They were not yet seated, so she lifted an imaginary glass to them. "Thank you, friends. Here's to a short life and a merry one for us all!" Applause greeted her, and as they took their seats she turned to Trent impulsively. "I'm so sorry," she said; "you hate it, of course, but don't. It's only because they really love me." "Suppose we don't try to explain things to each other, my lady." The music began, and he rose and held out his hand to her. She had not danced with him before, so when he swung her away with the ease of a master, she had a sense of surprised pleasure before she gave herself up to the joy of it. "I'd never have thought it of you, Paul," she said, as they took their seats. He laughed and lifted his glass. "To the partnership!" They drank to it gravely. Later when Paul unlocked her door for her, and turned to go on to his, she said: "Come in and talk over the party." "Aren't you tired?" "No. I feel as if I'd never sleep. I wish I were going on this minute, to play a new part before a Boston audience, on a rainy first night." "That would call forth all your powers," he laughed, and followed her in. As she pulled the cord of the last lamp, she felt his eyes on her. "Well, what do you think of me?" she challenged him. "I think you are an inspired artist and a beautiful woman," he evaded. She laughed at that. "That must be an old joke," he objected. "The whole thing is exquisitely funny: a strange man in my rooms at two in the morning compliments me on my art.... What do you want of life?" she added disconcertingly. His tongue shaped itself in an evasive reply, but the frank, boyish interest in her face changed his mind. "I want several things: One of them is to be governor of New York." "Good! I like people to know what they want and go after it." "It isn't so easy, you know." "All the better." "Do you know anything about politics?" "Lord, man, I'm Irish." She led him on to talk of the situation in the political game, to line up for her his allies and enemies; to outline his campaign policy. His candidacy was to be announced in a few days. She leapt at the points in advance of him, questioned this and that--he talked to her as to a lieutenant. The clock chimed and caught his attention. "Good heavens! why didn't you send me home?" "What's the use of sleeping when there's something to talk about--when there's a fight to plan for." "But my work must not interfere with your work." He came to shake hands with her. "It looks as if this partnership might prove a success." "I'm no prophet!" she defied him. Just before he closed the door he spoke: "But the election would not be until next fall----" "We could extend our contract," she retorted, and the door closed on his laugh. PART II It seems sometimes as if a Harlequin rules the world. When once your tired eyes rest on what you know to be the last trick in his bag--lo! he turns the empty sack upside down, and it spills surprises, like the widow's cruse. Some such master jest he played on Barbara. An absorbing interest had catapulted into her life, and wakened her like a bugle call. She had a fight on her hands and that means life to the Irish. Her extraordinary marriage made little real difference in the order of her days, except that she dined with an interesting man each night. He talked to her of the things he hoped to do, if the people of New York made him governor. Always, except when political dinners or party caucus kept him too late, she found him pacing the corridor outside her dressing-room. Courteous, urbane, he took her to supper with friends, to a café, or back to the hotel, where they had something to eat in Bob's sitting-room. This last arrangement suited her best, for then she could lead him to talk of the fight ahead. He sometimes asked her judgment. She felt his single-purposed strength in these talks; she plumbed the force which had made him a success at forty. "Why do you always make me talk about myself?" he asked her on one of these occasions of supper in her room. "I want you to be interested," she retorted. "You think me such an egotist?" "I think all successful people are egotists. Success isn't an accident, it is plan and work. You have to focus in on yourself all the time to belong to the master-class." "You don't talk about yourself--you're a success." "Oh, we'll come to me. It's all 'quiet along the Potomac' with me just now, but you're going into action." "Think of the egotists who are not a success." "Well, of course, a man who is merely in love with himself is in danger of a mésalliance," she added, laughing. "Go on! What is the saving grace for your egotists?" "I hate to be so bromidic." "I'm used to it." "Oh!" "Not in you--the rest of the world." "New York nearly lost a governor!" she warned him. "I save my egotist with a sense of humour, which is only a sense of proportion. Humour plus purpose." "What kind of purpose?" "To be selfish for unselfish ends." "Delightfully Irish," he admitted. The talk never drifted from the impersonal. They both unconsciously fought to keep up all the barriers of their formal relationship, but they both were constantly peering over the wall into the other's personality, hoping not to be caught at it. The day came when Trent's candidacy for governor was announced by his party. As he never saw Bob in the morning, the news came to her with her coffee and toast. She sent for all the papers and read them more diligently than she had ever searched for notices of her own triumphs. The bed looked like a sea of print, out of which she rose, a pink mermaid. When the last word was read, she took up the 'phone beside her bed and called Paul. The secretary told her he was in a conference. She asked if there was a message. "This is-- I am--Mrs. Trent," said Barbara, blushing furiously at her end of the line. "Oh, just a minute," amended the girl. After a bit she heard his crisp, short greeting. "Good-morning! This is Bob." "How are you?" "I've read every line in every paper. I'm so excited I had to call up. Could I do something--make a speech, or something like that?" "Wish you might-- I'd be nominated sure." She resented his flippancy, she was so in earnest. "I won't keep you; I know you're busy, Governor." "I'll take that as a prophecy. By the way, I may not be able to dine with you to-night." "Sorry! Good-bye." He frowned at her abrupt dismissal as he went back to work, then he forgot all about her. Bob set down the steel bar smartly. For some reason she was irritated at the interview. She had expressed herself with such emotion, and he had received it with such cool matter of factness. She treated herself to a mental shaking, which Englished might have read thus: "Look here, Barbara Garratry, this man is nothing to you but an interesting interlude between Now and the Hereafter. He asked you to marry him as an experiment. He laid stress on a lack of sentiment. Now don't you let your Irish feelings clutter things up. You fight for the fight's sake and leave the man out of it." She arose with much determination. She dressed and outlined a play to be called "The Governor." She read the noon editions. She put in a busy afternoon, disciplining her mind to keep away from the danger-zone, and as punishment she went to dine with some friends, so that she might miss the chance of seeing him, if he did come back to dine. Paul, in the meantime, worked like five men all day, with the unformed idea in the back of his brain that there was something he must do at seven o'clock. He was to speak at the Waldorf at eight, after a political dinner. The last conference was over a few minutes before seven. The unformed thought crystalized--he wanted to talk to Bob. It would rest him more than anything. He called a taxi and hurried to the hotel. He glowed with satisfaction at the thought of her, there, waiting for him. He laughed at himself and dashed to her door like an eager boy. The maid told him she had gone out to dine, and his disappointment was all out of proportion to the facts, as he told himself on his way to his room. Why shouldn't she go out to dinner? Just because this night was an important one to him was no reason why it should be to her. He was a man she had married for an experiment. He must not let her woman-lure get between him and his purpose. It was an older, grim-faced candidate for governor who went to the Waldorf an hour later. Bob's performance dragged that night. She had exhausted herself in forced gaiety at the dinner and she was furious at herself. When her maid reported Paul's appearance at her door, she denied to herself the wave of regret that swept over her. A party of friends came back after the play to carry her off for supper, but she pleaded a headache and got rid of them. She said to herself over and over as she dressed for the street, "I know he won't come to-night--he's too busy to remember." But when she stepped into the hall and looked for his tall figure, she felt a swift disappointment. She sent her maid on to the hotel alone, on some excuse, and she determined to walk herself. It was a cold, crisp night. Broadway was a blare of light, as poignant as a din of sound. Taxis honked, policemen shouted; bareheaded women and tall-hatted men hurried to the restaurants, the maelstrom of Broadway, nearing midnight, was in full tide. Bob turned from it toward the shadowy stretch of the avenue. The moon was clear and round, the heavens a blue plush vault. The broad shining street swept its gleaming length, with the misty lights reflecting themselves. Uptown the cathedral spires pricked the skyline, downtown was lost in grayness. Bob hesitated at the corner to buy an extra from a brass-lunged newsy, then stood an instant deciding which way to go. She wanted the solitude and calm of the night. A click of approaching footsteps caught her attention. She looked at the man who approached, head up, hands deep in his overcoat pockets, his long stride even and swift. Something about her caught his eye and he stopped before her in alarm. "Barbara!" "Why, it's you," she said stupidly. "What's happened? What are you doing here alone, at this hour?" "Trying to decide whether to walk uptown or downtown," she laughed. He drew her hand through his arm, and fell into step, facing uptown. "But, my dear girl, I can't have you alone on the streets like this." "Why don't you come after me then?" "I was on my way--I was detained," he answered seriously. "I was joking. I've always gone about alone since I was a child. I'm perfectly safe." "I don't like it, just the same. Where's your maid?" "Sent her home." "You wanted to be alone?" "Yes." He slowed down. "I don't mind you." "That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me," he remarked. "Do you want me to say nice things to you?" "I haven't any objection to it," he smiled. "Tell me about your day." "I came to tell you about it, before the banquet, and you'd flown." "You said you wouldn't be back. I've read all the extras up to this." She displayed the paper, and he smiled and put it in his pocket. He related the day's events; he even repeated the main points he had made in his speech, led on by her interest. "They're a bit afraid of me, even my friends. They think I've got the reform bug, that I'll go in for a lot of things that they think unessential." "Well, won't you?" "Yes, but it's good politics to keep that to yourself." "Don't you do it! Throw down all your cards and win out on what's in your hand." "That's your advice, is it? It might lose me the office." "I don't believe it. It takes nerve to state your intentions and invite the party to stay in or go out. The public cares more for nerve than party, I think." They walked and talked until the black mass of the Park blocked the way. Paul told her of the reform bills he wanted to get put through, bills that would cost him dear, because there were big vested interests in opposition. Bob listened, commented, urged him to fight on principle, not politics. They were so absorbed in themselves that the midnight crowds scattered and left the world to them. The walk downtown was over before they realized it. The cold night air, the exercise, or something had cleared the world of all difficulties for both of them. "I'm glad I met you," she nodded to him, as she laid her hand in his for good-night. "It was a fine walk; but no more gallivanting alone at night--without me," he warned her. "I make no promises and take no orders. I'm a free-lance and an anarchist. I'm agin the government." "Not agin the Governor, I hope?" "No such animal is dreamt of in my philosophy!" quoth she. II The months that followed that midnight walk were difficult ones. Trent had his law business to attend to, and endless demands were made upon his time and strength by political banquets and speechmaking. Bob felt as if she were primitive woman, tending the pot in the tent, waiting for her brave to rush in with news of war. Then she laughed at her own thoughts. A modern New York hotel was a poor substitute for a tent. She was not even of use as pot-tender, the chêf had succeeded to that profession. Paul fell into the habit of coming for short breathing spells between appointments. He reported every move to her and they talked each one over. Her counsel was often sure and wise. Barbara felt that he respected her intuitions, if not her judgment. "May I come in?" he asked one day at her door. "I have half an hour before I'm due in court, and I thought you might let me have a bite of lunch here with you, in peace and quiet." She crossed to the telephone and ordered the luncheon sent up at once. "You look very tired, Paul. Lie down there and be quiet until the lunch comes." He went to her couch and obeyed. His eyes closed. "Talk to me." She blushed for some reason, and went to throw a rug across his feet. He looked up at her smiling. "How shall I ever catch up with you, Barbara Garratry?" "Catch up?" "I make unconscionable demands on your time and patience. I ask myself what possible right I have to do it, assure myself I have none, and go right on imposing on you." "I'm glad to help--if I do. I told you I liked a fight." "Just at this moment peace seems the only good gift desirable to me." "Don't talk--rest." "Your voice rests me." "All right. Be quiet and I'll talk. I'll tell you the story of a play I'm going to do. It's called The Governor." He opened his eyes at that. "Yes, you suggested it to me, but you're not the hero." "Let's hear," he said. She outlined the situation and set the characters up before him. Her hero was to be a young ardent reform candidate for governor, visioning big things which he could do with his power of office. The party leaders let him talk--they winked and said the reform stuff was popular with the people just now, but when they got him to Albany they'd teach him a new song. The chief contributor to his campaign fund was to be a corporation which wanted the governor's veto to a bill infringing their absolutism. They convinced the young enthusiast of their absolute sympathy with his aims, as well as their own integrity of purpose, and then he is elected and goes to Albany. She was interrupted by the waiter with the lunch. She directed him to serve them. "Never mind the lunch--go on with 'The Governor'!" commanded Trent. "That's enough for this session. Come and eat your brief repast--time is nearly up." "But what are you going to have him do when he finds out the corporation is rotten?" While he ate his lunch he plied her with questions and objections. When he had finished, he hesitated at the door. "Let's talk about the play to-night. I'll come after you. For this relief much thanks; it was both mental and physical." This play, introduced as a soporific by Bob, proved a real bond. Trent became deeply interested in it, talked it, thought about it, contended fiercely over points. When Bob remarked that it was, after all, her play, and she would do with it as she saw fit, he always defended himself gravely. He debated the necessity of the love story. It took time which might be used for preachment. "Oh, you mere man," she exploded, "you can't go on disregarding women in this way. We're here, we've got to be admitted and considered." "Well, but----" "The governor's love affair will be of much more interest to an audience than the reform bills he puts through." "Stupid cattle!" "Of more interest to the governor, too," she added. "Heretic! You don't believe that." "Certainly I do." "You think that his courting a woman and having a few children is as important as what he can do for the whole State of New York?" She hesitated a moment, chin in hand. "I think that in so far as a man is normal he understands the needs of the people. It's normal for a man to marry and have a family. My governor will be a bigger man, if he wins this girl in the play." "But all that interrupts him, takes his mind off his bigger usefulness." "The bigger the man, the bigger his usefulness. Don't you see, you've got to feed all a man's needs, or a woman's, to get the highest results?" "Do you think everybody needs this, this food, as you call it?" "Do I think every baby needs mother's milk?" she inquired. "They don't all get it, and they live just the same." "Yes, but you can never say how much stronger they would have been with it," she smiled. "Irish sophistry," he remarked, but he found that talk recurring to him. She had phrased his own suspicion. "I take your advice about my campaign," he said. "So do I take yours about the play." "But you fight every step of the way." "That's the way the Irish show they're grateful," she laughed. But in her heart she was glad that at last her work began to interest him as much as his interested her. Of course this particular problem in the play was his own problem, so his interest was easily aroused. She saw how it rested him to forget entirely about his own work and take up this other man's difficulties. As the hot weather came upon them they debated the wisdom of moving out of town. Bob's season was running very late, holding on from week to week, so long as the audiences held. Trent was rushed to death. They met only for brief visits at odd hours. Even week-ends were occupied; he caught up with his correspondence on that holiday. "You look very pale these last few days, Barbara. Do go off to your bungalow, or to mine." "Will you come, too?" "Whenever I can. You see how my time is eaten up. But you could motor out at night, and spend your days out in the open. Don't think of me, you go--and be comfortable." "Do I get on your nerves?" He hesitated a moment. "I wonder sometimes what my nerves would have done without you. You are the only tonic they have." "Thanks. I'll stay until my season closes, then we can decide." He breathed a sigh which she flattered herself was relief. Two weeks later the theatre closed. The days were hot and dry. Bob was tired, and determined not to be worried about Trent, who was working to the limit of his endurance. When he came into her room the Sunday morning after her closing, she was shocked by him. "Well, Saint Francis, you look as if you had fasted forty days and forty nights." "I feel it--I'm all in." "I am going to leave you to-morrow." "What?" "I hate to think of you dying alone--better come along." "Where?" "I don't know. I'd like to go to some perfectly new place." "So would I. Is there such a thing?" "I'd like to rough it. Camp, skies for roof, all that kind of differentness." "Where could we go?" "I knew some people who went to Estes Park and loved it. How about that?" "Actual tents? You don't seem to suggest that sort of thing." "Log cabin, cook in the open, all day in the saddle. Come on, let's go!" "I'm nearly through with all I can do now. How long will it take you to get ready?" "Me? Oh, a day." "A day? Really?" "I'll take a steamer trunk----" "And a maid?" "No." "You'll go off gypsying with me alone, Barbara?" "Yes." "Give me directions. I'll get tickets to-morrow." So it was decided. Barbara plunged into dismantling her rooms and packing her things. She dispatched the maid and many trunks to the country. The next night, when Paul came in, she stood in the midst of the denuded rooms. "You actually did it. You Irish do put things through!" he exclaimed. "We do. Get the tickets?" "I did, and wired the ranchman. We go on the Century to Chicago." "Good!" "You're not afraid of this new experiment?" "Which one?" "Going off alone into the wilderness with me. We will be dependent on each other. No little 'convenances' in the woods, you know." "I'm not afraid. I'd go alone with my maid, and you would be some protection." He laughed, but not too readily. They set out next day, both too tired for any sense of adventure. Bob had the drawing-room, and Paul wandered in and out, interrupting her reading. The trip west, beyond Chicago, was uneventful and hot. It was only when they arrived at Loveland, where they took the motor into the Park, that their interest began to awaken. The ride into Estes along the narrow roads, winding between high cliffs on one side, the roaring, foaming, booming Big Thompson River on the other--higher and higher and wilder as it winds--whipped Bob's spirits into a froth of talk and laughter. Paul was conscious of a sense of peril in her nearness, in her charm. He warned himself of the great disadvantage of being the one of them who cared. "We start even," he had said on that eventful day. "I wonder how we'll end?" he mused, looking into her vivid face. "Odds on the Irish," she laughed, reading his thoughts. Whereupon he blushed guiltily. III They came into the valley itself, beyond the town of Estes, at sunset, and Bob gasped with the glory of it. A long strip of fertile green land, with the river winding across it many times, like a satin ribbon. The massive mountains of the Great Divide, snow-capped, pink-tipped, in the setting sun, stood guard over the valley like watchmen. As Paul watched Barbara's face he thought it was like a prayer of exultation. They drew up to the long, low brown ranch house and were welcomed by the proprietor. "Mighty glad to meet ye and have ye with us. Ye didn't say what size cabin ye wanted, but I took ye for a bride an' groom, and gave ye what the boys call the 'Bridal soot.'" Trent laughed and assured him they were easily "suited," so the man led them down the valley, beyond all the outhouses, tents, cabins, and shacks to a log cabin cut off from the rest by a strip of woods. "Nobody to interfere with ye here--lonesome as the top of Mill's Mountain," remarked their host at parting. Bob led the way about and Paul followed her. There were two rooms: one with a fireplace, intended for a sitting-room; it had a couch bed, however, and the minimum of furniture. The bedroom beyond was equally bare. A sort of shed, used by some former tenant as a kitchenette, was shut off by a low door. But out of the broad windows and the open doors was a glory that made man-made comforts seem unessential details. They made the circuit of their new domain, and laughed. "Are you frightened?" he asked her. "Not of this shack, nor the big mountains, nor you. It's fun." "I can get along, of course, but you don't seem to fit." "Wait till I get on my mountain clothes, then I'll fit. These Fifth Avenue things look so ridiculous. But you're not to fret about me, Paul. I've had plenty of roughing it. I have faced life without a bathroom before. If I'm not a good enough Roman to stand it, I'll go back east." "Let's go engage a guide and see what horses they have for us." They started for the corral back of the ranch house, where the ponies were grazing. They had to step off the road several times to let parties of laughing men and girls gallop past. A cowboy volunteered to bring in some ponies, and while they waited, a big, loose-jointed man sauntered over to them. "Howdy?" said he. "Good evening." "Strangers, ain't ye?" "Yes, we've just come." "East'ners?" "Tenderfeet from New York," laughed Bob. "We're gettin' used to you folks out here. Purty nigh all Noo Yawk State has been out here. Them your ponies?" he added, as the cowboy came up. "Yes, I telegraphed to have some reserved for us." Their new acquaintance gave the boy an order. "I'll show ye the pony you want, Ma'am. This here one is all right fer yer man, but that old sawbuck won't do fer ye." The cowboy came up with a fresh pony, ears back, eyes wide. He investigated the party thoroughly before he permitted Bob to rub his nose. "You're right, Mr.--a----" "Bill--Bill Hawkins. Sure I'm right. That's the pony fer her." "We want to make a good many trips around here, and we'll need a guide. Could you go with us?" Paul asked. "Yep." "All right, we want you," said Bob. "All ye got to do is to holler. When ye cal'clatin' to start?" "To-morrow. Let's go for two days up that biggest one," said Bob. "Cripes! She ain't goin' to lose no time. It'll hustle me some to git the camp outfit and the grub ready fer to-morrow." "All right, Bill, hustle!" smiled the lady. "Better be ready to start 'bout five o'clock. We can git breakfast up the mounting." Trent questioned her silently and she nodded. Supper at the ranch house was poor, and on the way back to their cabin Bob announced that hereafter she and Bill Hawkins would serve meals from the kitchenette on the cabin porch. They sat for a while on the tiny veranda, watching the dark shut down and lock in the valley. Then a new moon slid over a mountain peak into view, big yellow stars, close overhead, burst through the sky. "My! what stars! They are like yellow coryopsis flowers leaning out of the sky garden!" exclaimed Bob. "Shall I pick you a few to wear in your hair?" "'Twould be a pity to have them fade." "Then I'll get you the moon." "It's no good unless you get it for yourself, Governor." They talked casually and comfortably for half an hour, and then Bob announced that she was going to bed, so that she might get strength to face a five o'clock rising. They groped about for the candles, and by the dim light of one Paul lighted her to the bare bedchamber. "We'd better pack our knapsacks to-night. I'll get out the steamer rugs, too. I know you'll need one on that bunk of yours. Go see what is on it." He reported a cotton blanket and a comfortable made of pig iron. In due course of time they got things organized, and lights were out in the cabin at nine o'clock. Trent woke to a sound of laughter--peal after peal on the morning air. He sat up, listened, looked at his watch, sprang up and dressed. He went out around the cabin to the spot from which the laughter came, punctuated by a strange and unidentified noise. A slight boy in khaki breeches, shirt, and boots, with a wide-brimmed hat pulled down on his head, was conversing with a small gray burro, who lifted his long neck and emitted unearthly sounds, at which the boy laughed. "If that pet belongs to you, young man, you might lead him off my premises." "He's singing a hymn to the rising sun," said Bob, turning to him. "My word, you are Bob sure enough now," he exclaimed. "Comfy! No matter, you men like it." "We certainly like it on you," he remarked in surprised admiration. "Here's Bill," she interrupted him, as the guide rode up leading the ponies. He stared at Bob with delight. "Got an extry boy in this party, ain't we? How many of ye is there?" "According to my appetite there's six of me," she laughed. "I can't wait to go up any mountain before breakfast." "Wa'al, I got to thinkin' 'bout that, and I jest made a camp up the trail 'bout a mile, and the coffee's bilin' right now. Git yer blankets and knapsacks out, and we'll strop 'em on, an' git up there before it biles over." In ten minutes they were off after Bill, the ponies on the run. The air nipped with a touch of frost in it. The mountains stood out as clear as if they were cut out of coloured paper and pasted on the flat sky. As they neared Bill's camp the smell of coffee and bacon greeted them. "All the perfumes of Arabia can't touch that for smell," laughed Paul. Bill and a cowboy assistant served a breakfast that no New York hotel could surpass; the mountain air gave a zest that no hothouse fruit ever produced, as appetizer. They ate like hungry hounds, and an hour later, all packed and mounted, they said good-bye to the cowboy chêf and started on their way. Bill rode well in advance, then Bob, then Paul. Bob's pony was a constant amusement, he was too nervous for the average, inexperienced rider, so he had not been ridden much. He had a distinct suspicion of rocks, overhanging trees, and things that darted across the road. "He's a dancer. The equine Vernon Castle," Bob laughed, after a _pas seul_ in a narrow and most inconvenient spot. "Little too fresh. Don't you want to change with me?" "Not I." Sometimes the trail permitted them to ride side by side for a few minutes, and look off over the world spread below. "It's incredible--such peace," he said, as they drew their ponies to a halt. "That passeth understanding," she nodded. "I suppose this sense of awe, of rest, _is_ worship, _is_ religion." Barbara took a deep breath. "Yes, it makes you feel purified." The trail wound up and up. Every instant the view changed. There were difficulties to be met, where washouts had made the road almost impassable. It seemed only an hour or two later that they caught up with Bill, clearing a space to make a fire and cook the lunch. "Not lunch! Why, what time is it?" cried Bob. "One o'clock by my watch, ten minutes since we started by my mind, and six o'clock to-night by my appetite," said Paul. Seated on the ground, eating a thick sandwich and devouring Heinz's pickles, Barbara sighed ecstatically. "There never was such food," said she. "And that for your sated New York appetite!" laughed Paul. After lunch Bill decreed a rest for man and beast. He made a couch of pine needles for Bob, threw down her blanket on it, and betook himself off with the ponies. Bob stretched out on her bed, Trent sitting beside her to smoke. "Better take a nap," he suggested. "Oh, I'm not at all sleepy," said she, and was off before she finished the sentence. Trent sat, smiled, puffed, and looked off to the end of the world and back again at the sleeping girl. He lay on his back and stared up at the sky, glad of life, of health, glad, yes--he admitted it--glad of Barbara. When Bill came back Paul laid his hand on Bob's and brought her to a sitting position, rubbing her eyes and blinking from deep sleep. "I must have dropped off for a minute," she apologized. "Yes, an hour or two." "What?" "You've been asleep for an hour." "The divil I have! Did I miss anything?" "A million-dollar panorama." "Don't you let me sleep like that again, Paul Trent. I can sleep in a New York hotel to the tune of the Elevated. Did you sleep?" "Yes." "That helps some." They rode through the late afternoon, when the air was like amber; through the time of the setting sun, when the world was like a glass prism of many colours; through the shadow time, when long bars of blue lay below in the valley to mark the mountains. Then, just before the red disk burned into the mountain top and disappeared, Bill announced camp for the night. A mountain stream bounded and roared along beside the place. A hut had been set up by a logging gang, and a thick bed of hardwood chips and bark powder marked the spot where the forest giants had met their inglorious end. Bill attended to the ponies while Bob and Paul collected firewood. Supper was a silent function--the silence of people who understand each other and need not talk. Bob smiled at Paul when their eyes met, and for the rest, they looked off over a sample of God's handiwork that made man-talk as futile as monkey chatter. "Do ye want to sleep in the cabin, Mrs. Bob?" They both smiled at his appropriation of her name. "No, Bill, I want to sleep on that bank, in the tanbark beside the brook." "It'll keep ye awake. Awful noisy critter." "I don't care if it does. Besides, it won't. I'll pretend I'm a goldfish, and the mountain torrent is my home." Bill grinned at that. "Ye goin' to be a goldfish, too, Mr. Trent?" "I'll roll up here by the fire." "I'll take the cabin myself, then. Can ye keep awake till I clean up camp, or shall I shake down some beds now?" "No, no, you go ahead with the housekeeping. We won't go to bed for hours," Bob answered. She led the way up the trail a bit, Paul following. "Bill has real tact--he's there when you want him, and only then." "It is as near ideal as it can be," Paul assented. "You and I, and the world away," he added. "There isn't any world--there's just earth and sky and God," said Bob softly. "What about us?" "We aren't us. We're blue shadows; the night will sap us up." "No, no, I'm just beginning to be glad I'm I--to know what it means to live," he protested. "I wonder if that is something to be glad for?" she mused. It grew so dark that when Bill's shout reached them Paul had to grope his way down the trail first, Bob's hands on his shoulders as she came after him. Bill ordered them to turn in. They were to get an early start, and they needed sleep, because they were not broken in yet, they were still soft. "There's a rocky bowl full of mounting water down there, where ye can wash," he said, pointing. "Here's yer bed, Mrs. Bob, and yer blankets is over there by the fire, Mr. Trent. I'll call ye in the mornin', if the sun don't git ye up." He disappeared into the cabin, where a candle showed through the door. "Let's go look at the bath-tub," said Bob. They clung together and made their way to the spot where the rocks made a pool. The moon was up, but the trees threw mysterious shadows across the water. Bob took a stick and plumbed it. "It isn't deep." "No, only noisy, I think." "Paul, I'm going in. You go off up there in that clump of trees, so I can call you, if I drown." "You aren't going into that torrent now, in the dark!" "Yes, I am." "You're crazy!" "Please let me. It's perfectly safe, and I never wanted to do anything so much in my life." "You funny child!" he said, and walked off, according to orders. Bob slid out of her clothes and plunged boldly into the icy torrent. She jumped up and down and squealed, she tried to swim, she laughed up at the moon, and was back into her clothes in a jiffy. At her call Paul plunged out of the trees to the rescue. "Lost your nerve, did you?" "No, I've been in. It's wonderful. Now, I want a drink of brandy, and my bark bed." He laughed, came to the rescue with a flask, and led her to the place where Bill had spread her blankets. "Good-night, Undine Goldfish," said Paul, and left her. Presently, wrapped in her steamer rugs, she slid into sleep, like a mermaid into the sea. About three o'clock Paul turned over to throw a log on the fire, when a small figure, dragging blankets, came into view. "What's the matter?" "Oh, the night is so big and there's so much sky, it scares me." "Is the night sapping you up?" "Yes. I want to lie near the fire and you." "Poor kid, she wants the lights o' home. Lie here where it's warm." [Illustration: "He tended the fire that was between them"] So until morning she lay on one side, and Paul on the other, while he tended the fire that was between them. PART III All days are alike in the mountains, all days are marvellously different. It seems sometimes as if a giant hand must push the great hills into new positions and relationships. Then the sky artist makes such daring experiments in shape and colour, as no Cubist ever dreamed of. People say they tire of the mountains and prefer the sea, because it is ever changing, but no man with the seeing eye ever makes that mistake. The sea soothes or irritates, but the mountains rouse the spiritual sources of your being--they are vision makers; they stretch you to your fullest measure, if you go to them with yearning. The second day of their first expedition they jogged back to the ranch after an early supper on the heights. Barbara went on to the main house to see if hot water could be gotten for a bath, and came back chuckling. "The bath-tubs are in the laundry house. You get a ticket. I'm thirteen. I hope this isn't a popular hour." When she set forth laden with towels and soap Paul laughed. "The luxury-loving idol of Broadway makes for the distant laundry!" "I'd walk a mile for hot water to take this soreness out of my bones. You'd better get yourself a ticket." "Thanks, I'll go into the river." An hour later, in a soft frilly négligé, she joined him on the tiny veranda, where he sat smoking. He rose and bowed formally. "How did you leave New York, Madam? I'd no idea we had guests." "I'm only stopping over night," she retorted. "Are you alone in this wilderness?" "No, I have a boy with me named Bob--a most engaging companion. He is away this evening.... How were the laundry tubs?" She chuckled. "I had to do battle for mine. A man was just going into my bathroom when I appeared. I claimed it, I presented my check as proof; he said I had forfeited my chance by being late." "Western gallantry!" "He was from New England, on the contrary!" "What did you do?" "I bowed low and quoted Sir Philip Sydney: 'Sir,' said I, 'thy need is greater than mine.'" "Wasted, I'll warrant," laughed Trent. "Then what?" "There was another vacant tub, so I took that and we splashed in unison, in adjoining booths. The water was hot and I feel too good to be true. How was the river?" "Icy." "Isn't it wonderful to feel all of yourself like this?" "All of yourself?" "Yes, most of the time you only feel the part of yourself that hurts. Now I feel my blood jumping in my veins, my heart pumping, my lungs expanding. I have eyes and ears in my skin. I'm using all of me." "You've said it," he nodded appreciatively. "Let's spend most of our time in the hills, Paul. I like it better than this, don't you?" "Is this too domestic for you?" he teased. "I suppose so. I don't want to be too intimate with you." "You don't like me, on closer association?" "I didn't say that." "This kind of life is the ultimate test, I grant you that." "Yes, it is. It's a good place to get acquainted." She turned her eyes on him. "I've just met you up here." "Think you're going to like me?" "I don't know." "It is an awful responsibility." "What is--liking you?" "No, trying to make you like life well enough to stay on a while." "I'm staying until you're elected, anyhow." "If you should decide to stay on after that, what could I do to interest you?" She lifted her brows in question. "It's only the governor you're interested in--his fight, his success. I'm just the works inside his officialism." "Like the stick inside the scarecrow," she smilingly assented. "Exactly. Now will that scarecrow continue to interest you when he is set up in the gubernatorial field?" "Depends on how the 'big stick' acts. I love a fight, you know." "I see no peace ahead for me," he sighed. "Better take it now," she said. "Look off there--peace like frozen music. Is there such a thing as a fight for governor, as Broadway, marionettes on a stage, turmoil and unrest? Bad cess to 'em, I'm going to bed," she ended abruptly. "Good-night, Boy-Girl-Woman." When her light was out he spoke through the open window: "Why don't you want to be intimate with me?" "Oh, I think it's more interesting not to be," she answered. "Do you think our present relations are interesting?" "Rather," she answered sleepily. They rarely came to the cabin after this except for supplies and fresh clothes. Day after day they spent in the saddle up on the heights. Bill found them insatiable, they gave him no rest. Barbara was introduced to a trout line and a mountain brook trout of her own catching. After that she insisted on visiting all the streams for miles around, where trout were to be found. "Talk about a taste for whiskey, it's nothing to a taste for trout," said Bob. "More exclusive, too," Paul added. "You can get whiskey on every corner in New York, but real fresh mountain trout you travel for." "And work for, and suffer after!" The usual plan was to break camp early. Paul and Barbara would fish upstream, while Bill led the ponies and met them at an appointed place to eat the catch. In her hip boots, with her basket on her shoulder, Bob waded the swift-running streams, or stood on the rocks above, the sun bright, the air like a new life fluid, time measured only by an ever-pursuing appetite. Long talks with Paul at night, under the stars, hours of silence, save for a word now and then to her pony, sleep in the open, with a plunge in an ice pool at dawn. Life was reduced to the lowest common denominator, the natural companionship of man, woman, and nature. "How do you suppose we ever wandered so far away from the real things?" she asked him one day. "What do you count the real things?" curiously. "Life in the open; simple relations of people." "Is Bill your highest ideal of man? By that definition he has the things that count." "He's happier than either of us." "Happy nothing! He's contented--tight in the only rut he knows. His mind is as active as rutebaga." She laughed at the homely word, but he went on with the idea. "Do you think he thrills at your mountains--sings rude hymns to your sunsets? Not he. The mountains are made for tourists, tourists are made for guides. As for sunset, well, that means time to sleep." "Oh, Paul," she protested. "It's true. Your 'plain man of the soil' is a hero only in novels. In real life he is apt to be a grub." "I'd rather be a grub than a Broadway Johnny." "Oh, let's talk about a man," he suggested, smiling. "But where will you find him?" "Somewhere between your two extremes. A man's sensibilities have to be opened to nature by training, as his mind is to books. You said it yourself, 'he's got to use all of himself.'" In all their days of closest intercourse, there was no hint of sentiment. They were two good chums, off holiday making, that was all. What might come later, what was to be their ultimate relation, this sufficed for now. They both unconsciously protected this interim, this breathing space, before they faced a possible upheaval in their lives. The day was fair and the trout biting well. Barbara stood on a rock while Paul cast in midstream below her. All at once her line went taut and she began to play her fish. Nearer and nearer the edge of the high rock he drew her, more and more excited she became with the struggle. All at once Paul heard a mighty splash, and strode to the rescue. She sat shoulder deep in the swift stream, as she had fallen, but with grim determination she played her fish! "Take my line while I get up!" she ordered, transferring it. "Are you hurt?" he asked. "No, I sat down for the fun of it, Mister!" she snapped, as she got to her feet. "Give me that!" He grinned and resigned her rod to her and watched her land her antagonist. "There," said she, plumping him into Paul's basket. "He was a good fighter and a diplomat. He thought if he drowned me I'd let go." "He was a poor judge of character," Paul remarked. "Gee! I'm wet!" she exclaimed. "Naturally--you swam after him. I thought you were drowned when I heard the splash. We'd better follow Bill to camp and get you dried out." "Oh, no, not with them biting a mile a minute," she protested. "But you're wet to the skin." "I won't melt." "This isn't the last day of the world, you know. Have you got dry clothes in your kit?" "Shirt, but no breeches." "Bill will have to make a fire and hang you on the line." "I'll go, but you stay on. I'll come back when I'm dry." "Sure you can find the way alone?" She made a face at him. As she waded for the bank she addressed the fish that sped by her: "Go over and bite him!" Slopping water at every step she started for camp. When she saw he was watching her, she threw a shower of drops with a quick turn of her body. "Automatic fire extinguisher!" she called back. His laugh answered her. "That man has a nice laugh," she confided to the woods. Bill received her with whoops of joy, and set to work to dry her out. "You know how to make people very comfortable, Bill. Are you married?" she asked him. "Not jest now." "Does that mean that you have been or you're going to be?" "I had a wife fer a while, but she lit out with a logger thet played the fiddle." "Well, did you just let her go?" "Sure, she was gone when I heard 'bout it." "That was tough," she commiserated him. "Oh, I don't know. She didn't like it on a ranch. I got her in a mining camp, so natcherlly she thought it was slow out here. She was used to a shootin' or two on Sat'day nights." "Think of not liking it here!" "Wa'al, my likin' ain't your likin', ye know; no two the same. If I cud have played the fiddle, an ef I'd a had a hellofa temper, I might a kep' her. But there ye are." "You don't know where she is?" "Nope." "You don't miss her?" "Not so's ye'd notice." "You didn't have any children?" "Nope. Now let's talk about somethin' cheerful, like a lynchin'." She begged for a tale of his gold-mining days. He was usually a silent man, but once or twice over the fire at night they had succeeded in unlocking his lips, and from that time on his colourful cowboy language had delighted Barbara. At first he had been a little shy of her, but now they were fast friends. He always mentioned her to Trent as "the little feller," and he admitted that "she was the best all-round woman exhibit he ever saw." He had just reached the climax of his adventure when Paul came into camp. Barbara, wrapped in a blanket, sat beside the fire, while her clothes hung on the line behind her. Her face was alive with response to Bill's oratory. "I grabbed him round the middle, an' I swang him over my head, an' I sot him down so hard it jarred his ancestors," said he. Barbara's laugh greeted the phrase and Paul stalked in on them. "How is the little feller?" he asked. "He has to stay in a barrel till his duds dries out," said Bill. "He furgot to hang his clothes on the hickory-nut limb." "I've had the time of my life, listening to Bill. He knows more good stories than anybody in the world." "Listen at her! She's stringin' ye, Mr. Trent." He strode off to take in the clothes, big with pride. "Think you'll take cold?" asked Paul. "Cold? The only way a cold could get me would be to bite me. I'm the wellest thing on earth." "Broadway won't know you, you're so brown," he commented, looking down at her. "Broadway? What's that?" "A state of mind," he laughed. The days slid by with incredible swiftness. They extended their holiday twice to please Bill, who insisted on some special expeditions. A descent upon the cabin in the valley found a pile of mail awaiting them. "Shall we burn it without opening it?" Trent asked her. "And never go back?" she challenged him. "And never go back," he answered gravely. "Your proposition interests me," she said to lessen the tension. "This is a call to rehearsal." She held up the envelope. "And this is a summons from my party leaders," he remarked, matching her envelope with his. "What do you say, Barbara? Work or bolt?" She looked at him steadily for a long moment, then slit her envelope. He lifted his eyebrows slightly and began on his letters. "My call is for Monday. When is yours?" she said presently. "Mine is urgent, but Monday in New York is soon enough. That means we must leave here Friday morning." "This is Tuesday night. Let's go up once more, and come down Thursday night. We can pack in an hour. Let's say good-bye to it, up there." "Good-bye to what?" "To the mountains." So it was arranged, and they set out on their last climb. The weather was uncertain but Bob would hear of no postponement. "It seems as if we had always spent our days like this, as if we always would," she said as they rode. "But you wouldn't like that." "Probably not." As the day wore on and they went higher with each mile, clouds began to gather, and thunder rumbled far away, then nearer. "Goin' to git a storm," said Bill. "Good! That's the one big thing we haven't had in the way of experience," Bob answered. "Yer goin' to git it." "How far are we from shelter, Bill?" Trent asked. "There's a loggin' shack 'bout five miles up. We'd better jog along and git to it, fer when this here thing busts it's goin' to rip snort." They pushed the ponies into a trot on all the level spots, and they scrambled up the steep grades, as if they, too, sensed danger. The clouds grew blacker and blacker. "Those clouds bubble out of a huge cauldron," Bob said. Lightning began to crack across the sky, like fiery lashes of a whip. Bob reined up to watch. "Come on, Bob, hurry!" ordered Trent. "This is no stage storm, it's the real thing." The wind began to rise in intermittent gusts at first, then steadier, stronger, as if loosed from all restraint. The aspen trees and the ash bent to the earth in graceful salutations which fascinated Bob. A big tree trunk snapped somewhere, and they heard it fall with a noise like a groan. "Hurry up, folks, it's after us!" shouted Bill. Barbara answered with a shout of excitement and pleasure. They put their ponies to the run, sparing them neither for climb nor descent. The mountains seemed to rock about them; the noise of wind and thunder made speech impossible, little whirlwinds of dust and loose earth and stones enveloped them. Down below the valley was a black abyss. They sighted the shack and made a last frantic scramble for it. As Bill kicked in the door of the cabin the last full fury broke. Trent lifted Barbara off her pony and ran into the house with her. Then the two men tried to shut the door. "No, no, let it be open! It's wonderful to be a part of it!" cried the girl. She tried to stand in the door, but the wind whirled her aside as if she were a leaf. At her beckoning Paul stood beside her, holding her upright. It was like a war of worlds they looked upon. "Will the shack stand, Bill?" Paul called to him. "Can't say. Not if this wind keeps up." Crash and crack and hurricane of wind. Mountains blurred by distant rain, mountains streaked by lightning flashes. Then came the downpour: the rain deluged, it leapt out of the sky and pierced the earth like javelins. The men got the door closed, and tried to fit an old wash-pan into the window to keep out the torrent. Barbara watched them, so excited she could scarcely contain herself. She would have gone out into it, if they could be induced to let her. Finally the shack was as waterproof as they could make it, with every available thing stuffed round the cracks and the edges. Bill lit a candle, and Bob sat on the bunk, her feet drawn up under her. It was the one dry spot. They ate crackers and cheese and sardines for supper, with no chance to make a fire. "It seems trivial to eat, when all that wonder is happening out there," she protested. "Might as well eat as anything. Can't do nuthin' else," said Bill. "Pesky shame we can't make no coffee." "But look what _that's_ making, Bill!" she cried. "Makin' a pesky lot of noise," he grumbled. "The superman," jeered Paul. Little by little the artillery diminished. "He's calling them off--the god of war. What's his name?" she said. "Thor. Weren't you frightened?" he asked curiously. "No. It was worth all the dull days I've ever spent. I know how to go out now, Paul, if the time comes: up here, in glorious destruction!" "You queer, uncanny Celt," said he. Later they opened the door and ventured out. The earth was blotted out in blackness, as of the void before God spoke. They made for a rock a few feet from the cabin, and stood peering off into opaque nothingness. Barbara felt for Paul's hand and clung to it. They stood so for a space of time, silent. "I'm ready now to go back down. There's nothing more to learn up here. I know His peace and His wrath," she said at last. "Life seems simpler, somehow--and greater, much greater," he answered her. II Monday found them back in New York. As they drove from the station to the hotel they watched the passing panorama in silence. "It seems a little dwarfed, doesn't it?" Barbara said. "Yes. New York needs an occasional dose of absence, to keep the perspective true," he answered. They looked about the hotel living-room with a sense of its strangeness. The maid had everything in order, even to flowers everywhere. "I can't seem to remember why we clutter up with so many luxuries," Barbara sighed. "Are you a little sorry that you slit the envelope?" he teased her. "No. Are you sorry I did it?" "I had more to leave behind than you did." She looked her surprise. "I left the best playmate I ever had, up there in the hills." "You mean Bill?" impudently. "I mean the 'little feller'." "You must ask him to visit you." "No, he belongs to the hills and a heyday holiday. I doubt if Barbara Garratry, Broadway's darling, would care for that kid." "I'm partial to nice boys." "He might be fascinated with you, and make me jealous." "That is a joke," she laughed. "I had to make a sacrifice, too, you know." "You mean?" "I had to exchange a big boy chum for a possible governor, plain garden variety." "I wonder if that big boy and the little feller will ever play again?" "'I ain't no pruphut,' as Bill says." The morrow found them both buckling down to work. Paul went off to his office at nine, and Barbara was due at the theatre an hour later. He stopped at her door a moment before he left. "I seem to recall a great many truisms about the joy of work!" "It's flapdoodle," she agreed, "the stuff that dreams are made of." "No, speeches," he amended. For a few days they both felt cramped, they shifted the old burden of the day's work uneasily, but routine breaks down resistance in the end, and they fell into step with their tasks. Paul was driven every moment. Their hurried visits were unsatisfactory enough. Bob kept in touch with his plans and movements as well as she could, but her own work was trying. The late heat was exhausting, and rehearsing always tried her soul. "You act like a balky pony, Barbara Garratry," she scolded herself, "I wish Bill were here to give you a 'good jawin'." Paul appeared at night about seven, hot, tired, harassed. "Busy to-night?" "No." "What do you say to dinner on a roof garden--a city mountain top?" "Delighted. Are you speaking to-night?" "Yes, but not until late." "May I come?" "Oh, no, don't. I don't know why I dread so to have you in my audience." "But I've never heard you speak. Maybe you think I couldn't understand your speeches." "Or maybe I'm afraid you'll find out how much of them you inspire." They went to the garden on top of the Biltmore, and secured a table as far from people as possible. They looked off over the roofs, which in the half light took on romantic outlines of mosques and minarets. The twin spires of St. Patrick's were mistily dominating it all, as usual. Lights burst slowly, here, there, then the whole upper way was white with electric radiance. "This has a certain grandeur, too," Barbara said. He nodded acquiescence, reading her thought. "It inspires and stimulates, but it never rests you. I wonder why one's kind is so exhausting?" He indicated the garden, now full to the last seat. The chatter, the raised voices, the whirr of electric fans, they all taxed tired nerves to the snapping point. Barbara caught his weary look. "Do you use all that force we stored up in the hills?" she asked. "Of course. It's like a reserve army to a hard-pressed general." "Let me tell you how I use it. I can plunge into the calm that lies out there in the mountains, just as surely as I stepped into that icy stream the first night we were there. I lie down in it, I drink it, I steep myself in it, and I come out refreshed and renewed. Try it, it's a trick of imagination." The idea caught and held his attention for several minutes. "Thanks. I'll try that. You're working very hard, aren't you?" "Yes. I have to. I can't get interested. I want to go fishing." "Me, too," he laughed. "I've had bad news to-day." He leaned toward her quickly. "We are to open in Boston." "No?" "Yes. I must leave Sunday." "You don't like Boston? You don't want to go?" "No, I don't want to go." "Why?" eagerly. "Oh, I don't know. I'm more comfortable here." "Oh!" "You'll be glad to have me out of the way, while you're so busy." "On the contrary. I rarely see you, but it is a pleasure to think that you are here." "Thanks! Boston is suburban; if you could find time to----" "I may come?" She nodded. "I'll find time." Sunday she left for a month's absence. In a way she was glad to go. She realized that she needed time and solitude to think out several problems that confronted her. First and most important, she wanted to discover just how much of a part Paul Trent had come to play in her days. Removed entirely from the influence of his personality, she intended to free herself from him, look at him, and at herself impersonally. He had rushed away from a meeting to put her on the train, and his farewell had been as casual as if she were going to Brooklyn for the evening. It had piqued her a bit. Then angry at herself that she had wanted him anything but casual, she had punished him with an indifference which a more astute student of women would have detected at once as over played. She sighed over the growing complexity of the situation. Why could it not always be as simple and natural as it had been in the mountains? Monday was too busy for thoughts, rehearsal in the new theatre, getting settled in the new hotel, followed by a first night as climax. When she arrived at the theatre she found her dressing-room full of Killarney roses, with a telegram from Paul: "Irish roses have to do. I wish I could fill the room with mountain laurel." She was both touched and pleased. She knew he had taken time and thought from his busy day, and it gave her a thrill of happiness. It was enough to key her performance to a high note of joy which her audience felt at once. She was gladsome youth and daring, and she danced into their hearts, just as she had into the more hospitable affections of Broadway. There was no withstanding her. It was a triumph. Later when the manager came to her room to congratulate her, she said: "Yes, they liked me, but I'm not going to extend the run." "Why not, if the money's rolling in?" "I don't care if it is. I want to get back to New York." "You Irish are all crazy!" he remarked, with the Hebraic patience of one whose gods are all outraged. "She don't care for money, she likes New York," he mocked her. Her friends came back in numbers after the play. She was invited to sup, to dine, to play bridge, to take tea. She refused to go anywhere until she was rested after the strain of the first night, and when they had all departed, she hurried into her street clothes. All at once it came to her that there was no need of this rush. Paul would not be pacing the corridor to-night. With a sigh and a sudden acute sense of loneliness, she led the way to the hotel. As she stopped for her key the clerk told her that New York would call her at midnight. She hurried to her room, her heart beating, and as she opened the door the telephone rang. She flew to it. "Yes, yes, _Paul_!" she said, and scarcely knew her own voice. "Yes, great success. I was wonderful, thanks to you ... yes, I was so happy about the flowers and the telegram; it sang in my playing. Tell me about your day. What happened?" She listened attentively. "Everything all right, then. Empty?... You mean you miss me? I can't be sorry for that, Playmate." They talked on for several minutes. When good-nights were said, Bob crossed the room to lay off her cloak, smiling. She caught sight of herself in the mirror. "Why, Barbara Garratry," she said, staring at herself. "How can you look like that after a Boston opening?" Then she laughed. Friends absolutely closed in on her after the first few days. She had all she could do to protect herself. The days were crowded with little things, people and teas. She found herself too restless to work. She could not analyze her state of mind at all. Nothing interested her, people seemed unusually stupid and bromidic, she lost interest in the play she was writing and found the one she was playing a bore. She knew that her health was perfect and she could not make it out. In her search for something to divert her mind and serve as an escape from over-devoted admirers, she discovered a public municipal bath house, where she could go to swim. Clad in the shapeless blue garment provided by the bath house--Bob called it "the democratic toga"--she would shut her eyes and dive off the spring board, pretending that she was going into the mountain pool in the dark. The strength she had stored up in the hills stood her in good stead for the swimming races. Pauline, as she taught the girls to call her, was always, or nearly always, winner. Nobody suspected who she was, and she found great amusement in the occasional outburst of some matinee adorer, in regard to the charms of Bob Garratry. She heard marvellous yarns about herself, her unhappy marriage, her large group of children, her many lovers. "No, I haven't seen the lady," she answered one of them, "but I'll wager I can beat her swimming fifty yards." "Oh, she wouldn't _swim_!" protested the girl. "Wouldn't she? Poor sort, then," said "Pauline," trying the Australian Crawl. [Illustration: "Every night at midnight Paul called her on the 'phone"] Every night at midnight Paul called her on the 'phone, and this was the one vital hour of her day. He kept her as closely in touch with his campaigning as she had been in New York. In return he demanded news of her doings, her successes, and her friends. He announced that he was to go on a trip through the state, lasting a week, and she lamented to herself that their visits would cease, but he called her just the same from the different towns. One afternoon she sauntered down the hall to her room, after a series of alleged pleasures, including luncheon and two teas. She was tired and she vowed to herself that this was her last day of killing time. To-morrow she would force herself to work. She opened the door and was halfway across the room before she saw him smiling at her from the hearthrug. Her hand went to her heart swiftly as he came toward her, both hands out. "Barbara!" "Paul! But how--when----" "I ran away! We were in a town where we were to have a meeting. I was to be the main speaker. I don't know what happened to me: I just found myself on a train coming here, and here I am." He held her two hands and looked at her intently. "But how long have you been here? Why didn't you let me know?" "I wanted to surprise you. I've been pacing this room for one hour in punishment." "Oh, I'm sorry.... You're very thin and overworked, Governor." "I know it. The strain is over soon now, thank Heaven. But you--it's you I want to hear about; it's you I want to see, and listen to." He helped her with her coat, placed her chair, and when she was seated, he stood looking at her. "You think I've changed?" she smiled at him. "I never can remember how you look. It tantalizes me." "Oh, didn't I leave you any pictures?" "Pictures! I don't want any Miss Barbara Garratry advertisements. I know how she looks. It's _you_ I can't remember. You've had a big success here. Does it make you happy?" She shook her head. "Why not?" "No fight--too easy. That's one of my troubles: there seems to be so little for me to fight for in my work. Lord! that sounds self-satisfied. I don't mean it that way. I mean that developing as an artist is a peaceful process, rather. The days when I had to fight for my chance, fight for my part, fight the stage manager to let me do it my way, fight the audience to make it like me--oh, those were the days that counted! Daddy and I used to talk things over nights. He was cautious. He'd say: 'Well, ye' lose yer job if you do that,' but when I had done it, he used to laugh and say: 'Bob, son av battle, shure enough'." Paul laughed. "The dulness of being successful! There's something in it, Bob." "Of course there is. Report on your week, sir." "Well, the boys say it went all right, but I didn't seem to have my heart in it. I've been so restless, so sort of bored with people and things. I can't get down to work. I even find myself thinking of what I am going to say to you over the telephone, right in the middle of a speech, with a big audience out there in front of me." Barbara laughed. "I suppose I'm tired. I don't know what else can be the matter with me." She laughed again. "What is it that amuses you?" "Can't I laugh when I'm happy?" "Are you happy?" "Yes." "Why?" "Because I just found out something." "What?" "Secret." "Tell me?" "Maybe--some day." He stared at her again. "I know," she nodded, "I am a different girl from the one you married. I'm sorry, but it can't be helped." "If you're happy, you aren't thinking of--you're not wanting to die?" "Not until you're governor, anyway." "You always say that, Barbara. It terrifies me. You mean that if I win, you still may----" She rose and faced him. "Not to-night. I'll tell you my plans the night you are elected. Come along now, and eat of the sacred codfish." "You are a little glad to see me?" he asked her. "Oh, yes. Boston is boring me to death," she evaded him. "Damn Boston!" was his succinct reply. III As Trent's campaign neared its close, Barbara could tell by the weariness in his voice, over the 'phone, just how near he was to the end of his endurance. It fretted her constantly that she had to stay on in Boston, when she might look after him, make it easier for him if only she could be with him. Twice he came to Boston on flying visits, and the last time she almost decided to throw up her engagement and go back with him. He assured her that her absence was providential, that he could never see her, even if she were in the same hotel, that it was less tantalizing to have her away, than near and far. He never failed to say good-night by long distance. Sometimes the tired little boy note crept into it to disturb her slumbers. The week of the election arrived with excitement high. No gubernatorial campaign in years had been fought with such tenacity and fierceness. The entire state was lined up in rabid factions. Trent occasionally sent Barbara a package of newspapers from the smaller towns in the state and she read in one of Paul as "the embodiment of youth and courage, the two qualities most needed in the new governor. Full of enthusiasm for reforms that mean greater efficiency in our state government, yet tempered by a calm judgment and the experience which came to him in his brilliant career in the law." Next she read: "Paul Trent is the tool and mouthpiece of rampant reform. Once in the governor's chair, he will prove a dangerous factor to be dealt with by the people when it is too late." They accused him of every crime in the decalogue, this side of murder--and every virtue. They mentioned his mysterious marriage with a well-known actress as proof of his loose moral standards--as proof of his fine democratic ideas! The whole thing, viewed as a spectacle, made one of the absurd exhibits of our political system. When Barbara was not raging, perforce, she laughed. For the first three days of the week before election the New York call came once at one, twice later than that. Three or four meetings a night listened to Trent, and during the day he addressed crowds in the nearby towns. The day before election, at noon, Barbara entered her manager's office with an air of bravado. "Oh, good-morning. This is an honour," he smiled. "Wait a minute before you waste that smile! An understudy has got to go on for me to-night and to-morrow night." "What? Are you sick?" "No. I'm going to New York on an afternoon train. I'll come back on the midnight train to-morrow." "You will and you won't. That's a pretty high tone for you to take with me. What about the receipts--what about me--what am I to tell the public? That you don't like Boston, and you went to New York to buy a hat? Nice position you put me in, with the S. R. O. sign out every night. You think all you've got to do is to come in here, smiling sweetly, and say: 'I'm going to New York this afternoon.'" "I told you you'd regret that smile! Look here, Wolfson, you can like it or not, just as you please. I'm going to New York to help get my husband elected governor. If you've got the sense God is supposed to have given your race, you'll play it up big in the papers and make capital out of it. There aren't so many actresses married to governors, you know. You've got something exclusive!" "But he ain't governor!" "No, but he will be by to-morrow night. By the time you get it into the dear public's head, he will be, and I'll be back here. Get my point?" "Yes, but you're crazy!" "Granted--it's grand to be crazy! Give little Marcy a chance at my part; she deserves it. I'm off now. By-by." "I could break my contract with you for this!" She turned and came back. "Suits me perfectly. Let's settle it now. I don't want to come back to-morrow night, just for the trip," she said coolly. The poor little man was on the prongs of a toasting fork, and he knew it. He paced the floor and sputtered and raged. Bob looked at her watch. "I don't intend to miss my train. Do I come back or not?" "Oh, damn it, yes. Now get out." "You're a most obliging little man, Wolfson, but your temper is unspeakably bad." She smiled sweetly at him, and tripped out. All the way on the train she devised new ways of appearing to Trent. He had no least suspicion of her plans, and she intended to make the most of the dramatic possibilities of the situation. Her train did not get her into New York until after six. She knew Paul was to address half a dozen meetings, ending with the biggest of all at Cooper Union. She was not sure that she could find him even if she tried, but she intended to be at Cooper Union to lose herself in the crowd, and listen to him, watch him fire the last gun of his fight--their fight. Then--well, that would have to take care of itself. She drove to the hotel and met the cordial, unsurprised greeting of the clerk. Nothing "in heaven or earth beneath" can surprise a New York hotel clerk. She asked about Paul, when he came in, when he dined. "Lord, Mrs. Trent, I don't know when the man eats or sleeps. I don't think he does much of either." "How can I find out where he is to speak to-night? He does not know I'm here and I want to surprise him." "We've got some hand bills here." "Thanks! I'll be here until to-morrow night." She went to her own sitting-room which Trent was supposed to use during her absence. She ventured into his rooms, which looked unused and cheerless. She had a bath, dressed with unusual care, dined alone in her room studying Paul's itinerary between bites. Eight meetings announced him as headliner, with Cooper Union as the climax. She shook her head over it; he would be dead of weariness. At eight o'clock she called a taxi and started to the first meeting. She could not get within a block of the place. She tried the next and the next with the same results, so she ordered the driver to Cooper Union, hoping to beat the crowd there, as Paul was not announced until late. She paid her man and joined the mass of people wedged into a solid block of resistance before the building. "Is the hall full?" she asked the policeman. "Full? Sure, it's been full since six o'clock, Ma'am." "What's the attraction?" "Paul Trent, the nixt governor, is speakin' here to-night." "He must be popular." "Sure he's popular. He's got the right dope, that feller. He's the people's ch'ice, all roight, all roight." "I couldn't possibly get in there, could I?" "The governor's wife couldn't git in. If ye had a platform ticket ye might get in there." "How do I get to the platform door?" "I'll get ye through. Have yer ticket ready." He pushed and beat a way for her to the stage door, which was guarded by a fellow officer. "Tickut, lady?" he demanded. "I want to see Mr. John Kent." "He's Trent's manager. He's with him at the other meetings." "Who has this meeting in charge?" "If ye haven't got yer tickut, it's no use," he said, inspecting her suspiciously. "The idea of one Irishman sayin' no use to another," she laughed. "Are ye Irish?" "Phwat's the matter with yer eyes, man?" He grinned. "Give me your pencil." He obeyed. She wrote on her card and handed it to him. "You get that to the chairman of the meeting." He read it deliberately. "Fer the love av the green!" said he. "'Tis yersilf. I seen ye at the Comedy Theatre onct. Well, well!" The chairman himself hurried to the door to meet her in reply to the summons. "Miss Garratry-- I should say, Mrs. Trent, this is a pleasure." "I'd no idea I had to have a passport to hear my own husband speak." He led her in. "Let me sit back where no one will see me, please. Mr. Trent has no idea I am in town. I'd rather he didn't see me until after his speech." The chairman nodded, but he was much too astute a stage manager to let this opportunity pass. They stood at the back of the stage until the speaker finished, and then with an air he led Barbara down the very middle of the stage to a seat in the front row. "So sorry," he said, "the back seats are all full." Then he took the stage and introduced the next speaker, smiling at Barbara in such a way that every eye in the great mob was fixed upon her. The speaker began the regulation political speech, and Bob gave herself up to an excited study of the house, black with people to the very dome. She was too well versed in audiences not to feel its quality. In the meantime Paul was making slow progress from one meeting to the next. In the cab between stops he tried the mechanical transposition of himself into the mountains, according to Bob's suggestion. He must find some way to rest his tired brain. He pretended that he was sitting in the theatre in Boston watching Bob's play; he repeated the midnight walk they once took up the avenue. He wished he might ask her advice about the speech at Cooper Union. It would count a good deal, and her experienced knowledge of the psychology of audiences had helped him out many times before. She would know just the most effective thought to leave in the minds of the men who were to answer him at the polls to-morrow. For the first time he felt the need of her, not as brain or partner, but just as woman and wife. He wanted to put his tired head down on her shoulder and feel her cheek on his hair, her tenderness about him. He roused himself with a start. "What meeting is this, John?" "Eighth. Twenty-fifth ward." "Cooper Union after this!" "Yes. It's eleven now; we ought to make it by eleven-thirty." "Bother. We won't get through before one," said Paul, thinking of the long distance call to Boston. Back at Cooper Union the speaker sawed the air, and yelled himself hoarse, in the approved political speaking style of the old school. The crowd was bored with him. They kept up their enthusiasm by yelling, just to keep awake. When the orator sat down, some man in the audience leapt to his feet. "Mr. Chairman," he shouted, "let Bob speak. She can tell the truth about Paul Trent--she's married to him." In a flash the house had grasped the idea. "We want the Governor's lady! We want the Governor's lady!" they chanted. The place was a roar of sound. Bob's heart clamped tight with terror. She turned a white face to the chairman, who stood with raised hand, trying to quiet them. It was like pushing back the waves of the sea, the sound surged higher and more tempestuous. Into Bob's atrophied mind pierced the thought that this was her chance to help Paul, that she could play her own popularity to forward his cause, if she had the nerve. She had never made a speech in her life. She was trained in an art which makes no extemporaneous demand on the artist. Everything is set, prepared for, rehearsed. This all made the background of her mind, as she rose and nodded to the astonished chairman. Then as she walked to the speaker's desk and faced them, her fear fell away. There were the same old adoring faces she was used to. They were just human beings, not a jury to try her. She waived the chairman aside, when he tried in vain to introduce her. The crowd indulged in what might be termed "a mob fit." They yelled, deepening waves of sound; they stood up and waved handbills, with a crackling like flames; they stomped with their boots and whistled on their fingers. Bob watched and listened a moment, then her clear laugh rang out above the roar. She held up her hand and absolute quiet fell on them, as if a lid had been shut down on a bubbling pot. "Boys and girls, do be still!" called Bob. "I can't talk to a Roman mob like you, unless you're quiet. I'm scared to death as it is. I never made a speech before, and maybe I'm not going to make one now! "I've been to political meetings before. I'm Irish, so that goes without saying. My father used to say that if I'd been a man I'd have been a policeman. Ye know they call me Bob, son av Battle." "I bet you would, too. I'd vote for ye! Maybe you suffragettes will make it yet," the crowd interrupted her. "Are you making this speech or am I?" she called to them. "Shut up! Let her alone! Tell us what kind of a guy Trent is!" they called. "What I started to say, when I was so rudely interrupted, was this: I'm more interested in this political meeting than any I ever went to, because I'm more interested in the candidate for governor, and I want every man in this audience to vote for Paul Trent to-morrow on my say so." They expressed themselves on that point in the usual vocal way. Bob reached for the chairman's gavel, with a "Give me that thing!" which made them all laugh. She beat the desk until there was silence. "I think a man who is courteous, high minded, unselfish, and dependable in his relations with women is the kind of man to be dependable in his political relations. When Paul Trent says a thing is so, you can bank on its being so. If you send him to Albany to run this state, he'll run it. The politicians can't boss him, you can't boss him, and I can't boss him--(laughter)--but he'll do his conscientious best to run it right. You send him up there and see!" She smiled and nodded at them as she turned to take her seat; the crowd's sudden shout of welcome made her turn quickly. Paul was coming toward her. The look in his eyes held her so that she forgot the crowd, which was going into convulsions out in front. "My dear!" Paul said to her softly, taking her hand. She smiled up at him, turned back to the crowd in front, and with her hand still in his silenced them with a gesture. They scented a situation. "Friends," Paul began. "Save yer breath, Guv'nor, the Missus said it all," yelled a voice from the crowd. Everybody laughed. "Friends," Paul repeated, smiling, "I shall not try to improve on the Missus. If when you go to the polls to-morrow you think it is for the good of the State of New York that I should try to direct its government for two years, vote for me, and I'll thank the Missus. Mind you, I don't promise any miracles, but as far as any honest man can see what's right, I'll do it. Good-night to you." [Illustration: "Bob and Paul stood bowing and smiling"] Cooper Union has seen some exhibitions of excitement, but this was a prize example. Bob and Paul stood for ten minutes, hand in hand, bowing and smiling, before the crowd began to break up. Then the mob on the platform surrounded them, and it was half an hour before they made their escape. At the door Paul said to her: "I've got to meet my committee for half an hour, dearest. Will you go to the hotel and wait for me? I'll come as soon as I can." She nodded, and he put her into a cab at the door. The hour she waited for him seemed ten minutes, for she went over every step of their time together from the first day. He burst open the door at last, and came toward her, his face alight, his arms out, his whole need of her in his eyes. She put her two hands on his breast and held him away from her. "Paul, not one word to-night. No extra strain, no excitement. I want you to go to bed, now, at once. I shall be here until after the returns to-morrow night. Then we'll talk. Please, dear," she added softly, at the protest in his eyes. He bent and kissed her fingers. "I don't know how you're here, but it's wonderful," he said, and left her. The next day she scarcely saw him. She spent the time at the telephone or buying extras. All day long she busied herself with this, that, and the other thing, to keep her nerves in order. At seven Paul telephoned that he could not come to dine with her, but that he hoped to be back by ten. She forced herself to go to a nearby theatre to put in the early evening, but the only part of the entertainment that interested her was the election returns announced between the acts. Back at the hotel at ten, but no Paul. She packed her bag, and sent out for two tickets on the midnight train to Boston. At half-past ten he came, worn to a shred. "Well?" she cried, as he stood on the threshold. "We've won, Barbara. It seems to be a landslide." He came and stood before her. "Are you glad?" "Glad? Governor, aren't you?" "I suppose so. It seems unimportant somehow. I want something else so much more." "What?" "You--your love. I want to put my arms around you, I want to put my head down on your hair, and know that you're safe in my heart." "Lock me away there, Governor, that's my home," she whispered, and was in his arms. "Barbara, beloved, you don't want to go away from earth now?" he asked her, after long but pregnant silences. She lifted her head and kissed him gently. "Dear heart," said she with a sigh, "I want to live to be a hundred and ten." THE END 
36215	----	generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) Famous Prima Donnas [Illustration: EDNA MAY As Violet Grey in "The Belle of New York."] Famous Prima Donnas By Lewis C. Strang _Author of_ "_Famous Actors of the Day_," "_Famous Actresses of the Day_," "_Famous Stars of Light Opera_," "_Players and Plays of the Last Quarter Century_," _etc._ Illustrated L·C·PAGE·&·COMPANY BOSTON PUBLISHERS _Copyright 1900_ BY L. C. PAGE & COMPANY (INCORPORATED) _All rights reserved_ Third Impression, February, 1906 _COLONIAL PRESS_ _Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co._ _Boston, U. S. A._ CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE INTRODUCTION ix I. ALICE NIELSEN 1 II. VIRGINIA EARLE 21 III. LILLIAN RUSSELL 30 IV. JOSEPHINE HALL 46 V. MABELLE GILMAN 56 VI. FAY TEMPLETON 67 VII. MADGE LESSING 81 VIII. JESSIE BARTLETT DAVIS 88 IX. EDNA WALLACE HOPPER 104 X. PAULA EDWARDES 113 XI. LULU GLASER 120 XII. MINNIE ASHLEY 134 XIII. EDNA MAY 147 XIV. MARIE CELESTE 156 XV. CHRISTIE MACDONALD 172 XVI. MARIE DRESSLER 181 XVII. DELLA FOX 192 XVIII. CAMILLE D'ARVILLE 208 XIX. MARIE TEMPEST 222 XX. MAUD RAYMOND 233 XXI. PAULINE HALL 239 XXII. HILDA CLARK 253 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE EDNA MAY as Violet Grey in "The Belle of New York" _Frontispiece_ ALICE NIELSEN in "The Fortune Teller" 7 VIRGINIA EARLE as Winnifred Grey in "A Runaway Girl" 21 LILLIAN RUSSELL as "The Queen of Brilliants" 42 MABELLE GILMAN in "The Casino Girl" 56 FAY TEMPLETON singing the "coon" song, "My Tiger Lily" 67 MADGE LESSING 81 EDNA WALLACE-HOPPER 104 PAULA EDWARDES 113 LULU GLASER 120 MINNIE ASHLEY 134 CHRISTIE MACDONALD 172 MARIE DRESSLER 181 DELLA FOX 192 MARIE TEMPEST 222 Introduction The musical stage in the United States may be said to be a birthright rather than a profession. A critical examination of the conditions quickly shows one that the number of women at present prominent in light opera and kindred forms of entertainment, who have earned their positions by continued endeavor and logical development in their art, is comparatively small. The majority are, in fact, the happy victims of personality, who have been rushed into fame chiefly by chance and a fortunate combination of circumstances. They are without the requisite training, either in the art of singing or in the art of impersonation, that would entitle them to be seriously considered as great vocalists or as great actors. They are, however, past mistresses in the one essential for their profession,--the art of entertaining. The readiest proof of this peculiar state of affairs is the almost universal brevity of the careers of the women just now in the ascendancy in the musical drama. Ten years of professional life is more than many of them can claim. Arising suddenly into conspicuous popularity as they have, their reputations are founded, not on the sure basis of careful preparation and long and diversified experience, but on the uncertain qualities of personal magnetism and physical beauty. They shine with a glory that is perhaps deceptive in its brilliancy; they are the sought for by many managers, the beloved of a faddish public, and the much exploited of the newspaper press. The difficulties that encumbered the path of the compiler of this book, dealing with the women of the musical stage in this country, were numerous. First among them was the choice of subjects. The selection could not be made with deference to any classification by merit, for the triumphs of personality were not amenable to such a classification. The compiler was compelled by the conditions to bring his own personality into the case, and to choose entirely by preference. He could not be governed by an arbitrary standard of comparison; for how can personality, which is a quality, an impression, hardly a fact, and certainly not a method, be compared? In the present instance, the writer found it expedient to limit himself to those entertainers who have given at least some evidence of continued prominence. It may be, therefore, that a few names have been omitted which are rightly entitled to a place in a work of this kind. Nevertheless, the list is surely representative, even if it be not complete. After the subjects had been chosen, the question, how to treat them, at once became paramount. Again the bothersome limitations of personality asserted themselves; and one perceived immediately that criticism, meaning by that the consistent application of any comprehensive canon of dramatic art, was out of the question. The vocal art of the average light opera singer is imperfect, and the histrionic methods in vogue show little evidence of careful training: they are neither subtle nor complex. Indeed, the average woman in light opera is not an actress at all in the full meaning of the word. She does not fit herself into the parts that she is called upon to play, and she does not attempt expositions of character that will stand even the most superficial analysis. She acts herself under every circumstance. Describe in detail her work in a single rôle, and she is written down for all time. Yet, should one limit his critical vision to a single part, he not only fails to touch the main point at issue, but he runs the risk, as well, of self-deception and misunderstanding. The artistic worth of a player of personality is invariably overestimated after the first hearing; and the sure tendency of even the experienced observer, particularly if he be of sympathetic and sanguine temperament, and constantly on the watch for the slightest indication of unusual talent, is to mistake personality for art. The result is that, after indulging himself to the full in eloquent rhapsody, he encounters, upon a more intimate acquaintance, mortifying disillusionment. What is of genuine value in the player of personality is the elusive force that makes her a possibility on the stage, and the problem is to get that peculiar magnetism on paper. It is a problem unsolved so far as the writer is concerned. One can dodge above, below, and aroundabout a personality, but he cannot pierce directly into it. When it comes to the final word, one is left face to face with his stock of adjectives. Most unsatisfactory they are, too. None of them seems exactly to fit the case. They serve well enough, perhaps, to convey one individual's notions regarding the personality under discussion, but they are indeed lame and limping when it comes to presenting any definite idea of the personality itself. As for the biographical data in the book, they are as complete and as accurate as diligence and care can make them. The woman in music is conscientiously reticent regarding the details of her early struggles for position and reputation. Nothing would seem to be so satisfactory to her as a past dim and mystifying, a present of brilliancy unrivalled, and a future of rich and unshadowed promise. Famous Prima Donnas CHAPTER I ALICE NIELSEN Five years ago Alice Nielsen was an obscure church singer in Kansas City; to-day she is the leading woman star in light opera on the American stage. One feels an instinctive hesitation in putting her in the first place, however sure he may be that she is justly entitled to it. He anxiously seeks the country over for a possible rival. He feels that Alice Nielsen has hardly been tested as yet, for she has been only two seasons at the head of her own company, and she has not appeared in an opera which is of itself artistically worthy of serious consideration. Moreover, she is such a little thing,--a child, it would seem,--and is it safe to take seriously a child, even a child of so many and so potent fascinations? This feeling of doubt, caused by Miss Nielsen's stage youthfulness, is, it appears to me, the pith of the whole difficulty, and therein lurks a curious paradox. Alice Nielsen's great charms are her youth, her spontaneity, and her ingenuousness; but these very qualities are the ones that make one pause and consider before giving her the artistic rank that she has honestly earned. Alice Nielsen seems almost too human to be really great. She is too natural, too democratic, too free from conceit. She is never disdainful of her public, and she is never bored by her work. One cannot help being charmed by this little woman, who sings as if singing were the best fun in the world; who is so frankly happy when her audience likes her work and applauds her; and who goes soaring up and away on the high notes, sounding clear and pure above chorus and orchestra, without the slightest apparent effort and without a trace of affectation or of artificial striving for effect. Everybody who has ever written anything about Alice Nielsen has declared that she sings like a bird, freely, naturally, and easily, and this metaphor describes exactly the impression that she creates. Her voice one appreciates at once,--its volume and its colorful brilliancy, its great range, and its rich, sympathetic, and musical qualities; what he misses in her are the conventionalities of the prima donna,--the awe-inspiring stage presence, the impressive posings and contortious vocalizations. The world is very apt to take one at his own estimate until it gets very well acquainted with him. Alice Nielsen has never proclaimed herself a wonder, and the world has not yet fully made up its mind regarding her as an artist. It acknowledges her great personal charm, her delightful music, but it is not just sure whether she can act. I regard Miss Nielsen as a thoroughly competent actress in a limited field. She is fitted neither physically nor temperamentally for heroics, but she is fully equal to the requirements of operatic light comedy. She acts as she sings, simply and naturally, and her appeal to her audience is sure and straightforward. As an instance of this, take her striking first entrance in "The Singing Girl." She appears on a little bridge, which extends across the back of the stage. She runs quickly to the centre, then stops, stoops over with her hands on her knees in Gretchen fashion, and smiles with all her might. The action is quaint and attractive, and she wins the house at once. Alice Nielsen's smile is really a wonderful thing, and it is one proof that she knows something about acting. It never seems forced. Yet, when one stops to think, he must see that a girl cannot smile at the same time, night after night, without bringing to her aid a little art. To appear perfectly natural on the stage is the best possible acting, and that is just what Alice Nielsen does with her smile. However, "The Singing Girl," for which Victor Herbert wrote the music, Harry Smith the lyrics, and Stanislaus Stange the libretto, like "The Fortune Teller," in which Miss Nielsen made her début as a star during the season of 1898-99, was from any standpoint except the purely spectacular a pretty poor sort of an opera. There was a great deal to attract the eye. The costuming was sumptuous, the groupings and color effects novel and entrancing, and the action throughout mechanically spirited. Mr. Herbert's music, which was plainly written to catch the public fancy, fulfilled its purpose, though that was about all that could be said in its favor. It waltzed and it marched, and it broke continually into crashing and commonplace refrains. It was strictly theatrical music, with more color than melody, showy and pretentious, but without backbone. There was really only one song in the whole score that stuck to the memory, and that was Miss Nielsen's solo, "So I Bid You Beware." Possibly, even in this case I am giving Mr. Herbert more credit than belongs to him, for Miss Nielsen's interpretation of the ditty was nothing short of exquisite. She found a world of meaning in the simple words, coquetted and flirted with a fascinating girlishness that was entrancing, and flashed her merry blue eyes with an invitation so purely personal that for a moment the footlights disappeared. [Illustration: ALICE NIELSEN In "The Fortune Teller."] Mr. Stange's libretto was wofully weak. It seemed to be full of holes, and into these a trio of comedians were thrust with a recklessness born of desperation. What Mr. Stange did faithfully was to keep Miss Nielsen on the stage practically all the time that she was not occupied in taking off petticoats and putting on trousers--or else reversing the process. To be sure, he succeeded in bringing about these many changes with less bewilderment than did Harry Smith in the case of "The Fortune Teller," the plot of which no one ever confessed to follow after the first five minutes of the opening act. Alan Dale once described this peculiar state of affairs in the following characteristic fashion:-- "In 'The Fortune Teller' the astonishing Harry B. Smith, who must have gone about all summer perspiring librettos and dripping them into the laps of all the stars, has woven a rôle for Miss Nielsen that is stellar but difficult to comprehend. Miss Nielsen appeared as three people who are always changing their clothes. Just as the poor little woman has got through all her vocal exercises as Irma, Mr. Smith insists that she shall be Musette in other garbs. And no sooner has she appeared as Musette and sang something else than Mr. Smith rushes her off and claps her into another garb as Fedor. You don't know who she intends to be from one minute to another, and I am quite sure that she herself doesn't. The variety of dresses, tights, wraps, jackets, and hats sported by this ambitious and earnest little girl is simply astonishing. It must be very difficult to accomplish these chameleon-like changes without getting rattled. Miss Nielsen seemed to enjoy herself, however; and as for getting rattled, she coquetted with her audience as archly after the twelfth change as she did after the first." Alice Nielsen was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Her father, from whom she probably inherited her musical talent, was a Dane. He was an excellent violinist, but he was never able to turn his gifts to financial advantage. During the Civil War he fought on the Union side and received a severe wound that is believed to have been the indirect cause of his death, which occurred when Alice was about seven years old. Alice Nielsen's mother was of Irish parentage,--a woman of sturdy and sterling qualities. After the war the family settled in Warrensburg, Missouri, and remained there until after Mr. Nielsen's death. There were four children in the family, three girls and a boy, and Alice was next to the oldest. After the death of Mr. Nielsen, Mrs. Nielsen removed with her children to Kansas City and opened a boarding-house at the corner of Thirteenth and Cherry streets. Alice was at that time about eight years old. For some years she attended school at St. Teresa's Academy, and later she studied music and voice culture under a Kansas City music-teacher, Max Desci. Many years afterward this tutor claimed the whole credit for developing her voice and for "bringing her out," even going so far as to sue her for $8,000, which he alleged to be due him for music lessons. He lost the suit, however. Kansas City first began to talk of Alice Nielsen's voice after she became a member of the choir of St. Patrick's Church, with which she was connected for five years. She married the organist, Benjamin Neutwig, from whom she was divorced in 1898. After her marriage she continued to live in her mother's apartments at Thirteenth and Cherry streets, where, in fact, she made her home until she left Kansas City. Appreciating his wife's unusual gifts, Mr. Neutwig did much to develop them, and it was perhaps due to him as much as to any one else that she became something more than a church singer. The Kansas City friends of Alice Nielsen relate many interesting incidents of her early life, nearly all of which show indications of the spirit and strength of character that have done so much toward pushing her forward. The following anecdotes, told by a member of St. Patrick's Church choir, were published in the "Kansas City World":-- "I was in a grocery store near Twelfth and Locust streets with Alice one day, when she was about fifteen years old, I should judge. A couple of boys of her age were plaguing her. She took it good-naturedly for awhile, but finally warned them to let her alone. They persisted. Then becoming exasperated, she picked up an egg and threw it, hitting one of her tormentors squarely in the face. Of course the egg broke, and the boy's countenance was a sight for the gods. I understand she apologized afterward. This may be recorded as her first hit. "She joined the choir of St. Patrick's Church, Eight and Cherry streets, eleven years ago, and sang in it about five years, or until she left Kansas City to begin her operatic career. It was there she met Benjamin Neutwig, the organist. A great many persons were jealous of her vocal talents, nor were certain members of the church itself entirely exempt from twinges of envy. Indeed, a no less personage than she who was at that time choir leader manifested symptoms of this kind to a pronounced degree. "I remember one Easter service, Alice, then a girl of probably eighteen, was down to sing a solo in Millard's Mass. The leader was angry: she thought the solo should have been assigned to her. Alice knew of the hostility, and it worried her, but she rose bravely and started in. Scarcely had she sung the first line when the choir leader turned and gave Alice a hateful look. "It had the desired effect. The singer's voice trembled, broke, and was mute. She struggled bravely to regain her composure, but it was useless,--she could not prevail against that malevolent gaze from the choir leader. This, I believe, was the first and only time Alice Nielsen ever failed in public. "It is a wonder, in the face of petty jealousies of this kind, coupled with the poverty of her mother, which seemed an insurmountable barrier to a musical education, that Alice's talents were not lost to the world. For every influence tending to push her forward, there seemed a dozen counter influences tending to pull her back. As a child, I have seen her many a time on the street, barefooted, clothing poor and scant, running errands for her mother. Later in life, when she was almost a young lady, I have known her to sing in public, gowned in the cheapest material, and she would appear time after time in the same dress. On such occasions she was often wan and haggard, as if from anxiety or overwork. But once in a while she received the praise which she so richly merited. "One day Father Lillis received a letter from a travelling man who was stopping at the Midland, in which he asked the name of the young woman who sang soprano in the choir. He had attended church the day before, he said, and had heard her sing. 'It is the most wonderful voice I ever heard,' he wrote. 'That girl is the coming Florence Nightingale.' I don't know whether the letter was ever answered or not, but Alice came to know of the incident, and it pleased her. "Both before and after she joined the choir, Alice appeared in amateur theatricals and in church concerts. She was always applauded and appreciated, but it was in the character of a soubrette in 'Chantaclara,' a light opera put on at the Coates Opera House by Professors Maderia and Merrihew, that she created the most decided sensation. This was but a few weeks before she left Kansas City." Miss Nielsen bade farewell to Kansas City in 1892, going away with an organization that styled itself the Chicago Concert Company, and which planned to tour the small towns of Kansas and Missouri. This, her earliest professional experience, ended in disaster, and Miss Nielsen was stranded in St. Joseph, Missouri, before she had been out a week. It was an eventful week, however, and Miss Nielsen vividly recalls it. "We got out somewhere in far Missouri," said Miss Nielsen, "with the thermometer out of sight and hotels heated with gas jets and red flannel. Nobody had ever heard of us. I don't think that in some of the towns we struck they'd ever heard anything newer than the 'Maiden's Prayer,' and that was as much as they wanted. They called me 'the Swedish Nightingale,' and you can imagine how I felt,--a nightingale in such a climate, and Swedish at that. But I just sang for all I was worth and I tried to educate them, too. I sang the 'Angel's Serenade,' and they didn't like it, because when they tried to whistle it in the audience, they couldn't. We didn't carry any scenery; we just had a lot of sheets with us, and used to drape the stage ourselves. "One 'hall' we came to, there was no dressing-room, so we strung a sheet in one corner, and some one put a table behind with a lamp on it. The 'ladies of the company' (myself and the contralto) occupied this improvised dressing-room. Suddenly we discovered that we were unconsciously treating the audience to a shadow pantomime performance. There was only one way out of the difficulty,--we women must shield each other. So I held my skirts out while the contralto dressed, and she did the same for me. "I remember in one place we had managed to excite the hayseeds into coming to hear us, and the hall was quite full. We were giving a little operetta. Somehow or other it didn't seem to please the public, and they were in a mood to be disagreeable,--yes, restless. They wanted their money's worth; they were mean enough to say so. "We held a consultation behind our sheetings, and the tenor suddenly remembered that once upon a time, when he was a school-boy, he used to amuse his comrades with tricks. 'Could he do them now?' we asked. He would do his best, he said. So he got a wooden table, hammered a nail into it, bent it a little, and slipped a curtain ring on his finger. "The trick was to lift the table with the palm of the hand, the ring and nail being invisible. Just in the middle of the trick the nail broke. Well, I believe that audience was ready to mob us. The bass, seeing the situation, made a dive for the money in the front of the house, and we escaped. It was a packed house, too. There must have been as much as eight dollars." "Did you ever have to walk?" "Yes, indeed. We walked eight miles once to a town,--snowballed each other all the way. It was lots of fun. When we got there the local paper had an advance notice something like this: 'We are informed that "the Swedish Nightingale" and others intend to give a show in the schoolhouse to-night. Any one who pays money to go to their show will be sorry for it.' "The local manager, an Irishman, asked us to sing a little piece for him when we arrived. After we had done so, he said he had never heard anything so bad in all his life. As to the nightingale, he would give her three dollars to sing ballads, but the rest of the troupe were beneath contempt. His language was a dialect blue that was awful. I tell you it was hard luck singing in Missouri." In St. Joseph Miss Nielsen was fortunate enough to secure an engagement to sing in a condensed version of the opera "Penelope" at the Eden Musée. She received seventy-five dollars for her services, and this money paid the railroad fares of herself and some of the members of the defunct concert company to Denver, Colorado. There her singing attracted the attention of the manager of the Pike Opera Company, which she joined and accompanied to Oakland, California. Her first part with a professional opera company was that of Yum Yum in "The Mikado." The Pike Opera Company later played in San Francisco, and in that city she was heard in "La Perichole" by George E. Lask, the stage manager of the Tivoli Theatre, which was, and is still, I believe, given over to opera after the style of Henry W. Savage's various Castle Square Theatre enterprises in the East. Miss Nielsen was engaged for the Tivoli Company. She sang any small parts at first, but gradually arose until she became the prima donna of the organization. In all, she is said to have sung one hundred and fifty parts at the Tivoli, where she remained for two years. While she was singing Lucia, H. C. Barnabee of The Bostonians, which organization was then playing in San Francisco, read of her in the newspapers and went to hear her. The result was the offer of an engagement, which she accepted. Her first part with The Bostonians was Anita in "The War Time Wedding." Then she was given the small part of Annabelle in "Robin Hood." She also sang in "The Bohemian Girl" and was Ninette in "Prince Ananias." The next season she created Yvonne in "The Serenade," and was the hit of the opera,--so much of a hit, indeed, that nothing remained for her but to go starring in "The Fortune Teller." CHAPTER II VIRGINIA EARLE An accomplished and versatile artist is Virginia Earle, who, because of the variety of her attainments and the grace and finish of her art, is entitled to rank with the foremost soubrettes on the American stage. Miss Earle's ability has been tested in many forms of the drama. She has appeared in light opera, in extravaganza, in musical comedy, and in the Shakespearian drama. I question if there is another in her line now before the public who can claim any such extensive experience. [Illustration: VIRGINIA EARLE As Winnifred Grey in "A Runaway Girl."] It would be strange if this diversified endeavor had not had its effect on her art. In her we find united with a personality of curiously subtle charm an authority in action that is restful and refreshing. In her presentation of a part there is neither hesitancy nor misplaced endeavor. She always has command of herself and of the rôle that she is portraying. One never for a moment feels that she is to the slightest degree uncertain as regards the effect that she will produce on her audience. She knows what to do and how to do it. Yet, when one stops to think of it, her power over her audience is far in excess of what one would naturally expect. Miss Earle is by no means impressive in her stage presence. She cannot be called beautiful. Her singing voice is a modest instrument, though a wonderfully expressive one, it must be acknowledged. Her acting is quiet, even unassuming, but it is also plain, easily comprehended, and always appropriate. She apparently never does anything to attract attention, yet attention rarely fails to be centred on her. This, of course, is due to the finish of her art and a fine technique that makes its presence felt by its seeming absence. If Miss Earle cannot justly claim any exceptional advantages in the matter of physical beauty, she certainly has the greater advantage of an intensely magnetic personality. Her individuality, too, is thoroughly distinct. It is one of the paradoxes of acting that the more distinct the artist's individuality, the greater is his ability to set apart one from another the characters which he assumes. Miss Earle has this talent for making each one of her rôles a separate and distinct personage to a greater degree than any of her associates in the musical field. She does this, too, in a strictly legitimate way, by impersonation pure and simple without the aid of make-up. I remember especially what entirely different persons were her Mollie Seamore in "The Geisha" and her Winnifred Grey in "A Runaway Girl," so different, in fact, that one who knew her only in the first part found it hard to believe for some time that it really was she in the second part. Those who saw her in "The Geisha" cannot fail to recall the fascinating, quizzical squint that was continually getting into the mischievous Mollie's eyes. I know that I liked it so much that when I saw Miss Earle the next season as Winnifred Grey, the first thing I looked for was the squint. I was astonished to find that it was not there, and disappointed, too, for I had always associated the actress in my own mind with that squint. No sign of it could I perceive until the last act, when it came suddenly into view while she was singing the song about the boy with the various kinds of guesses. It gathered around the corners of her eyes, and it twinkled as merrily as ever. It made me quite happy again, for I felt that I should not be compelled to revise my imagination and repicture Miss Earle without the tantalizing squint. Miss Earle is a noteworthy example of the long time, the constant endeavor, and the faithful service that are sometimes required to win recognition in the important theatrical centres of the country. She had been many years on the stage before George Lederer finally gave her an engagement at the New York Casino. That was really the first chance that she ever had to prove herself something more than a one night stand favorite, and since that time she has only rarely played outside of New York. This long-delayed recognition was one of the freaks of fortune for which no one can account. She was apparently one of those unlucky persons who through no fault of their own start wrong. She was born in the West, in Cincinnati, Ohio, on August 6, 1873, and it was in the West that she remained for a number of seasons. Her theatrical career began when she was very young, and the Home Juvenile Opera Company was the means of introducing her to the stage. This was in 1887, and her first part was Nanki Poo in "The Mikado." Miss Earle also played leading rôles in the other Gilbert and Sullivan operas then so popular,--"Patience," "Pinafore," and "The Pirates of Penzance." Then she joined the Pike Opera Company and toured the West in a repertory of the best-known light operas. In San Francisco she was engaged by Hallen and Hart, the farce comedy team, and remained with them for two seasons, appearing in "Later On." Her next engagement was with Edward E. Rice, and under his management she went to Australia. Three years were spent there, during which time she acted Taggs in "The County Fair," Gabriel in "Evangeline," Madora in "The Corsair," Dan Deny in "Cinderella," and Columbia in Rice's "World's Fair." On her return to America she was engaged for Charles Hoyt's farce comedy, "A Hole in the Ground," acting the lunch counter girl; and after a short but successful season with this mess of nonsense she joined a company under the management of D. W. Truss & Company, playing "Wang" in the places too small for DeWolf Hopper to visit. For two seasons with this organization Miss Earle acted Della Fox's famous part of Mataya. Canary and Lederer of the New York Casino then secured her services, and under their management she assumed leading parts in "The Passing Show," "The Merry World," in which she doubled the rôles of Vaseline and Little Billee, in "Gay New York," and "The Lady Slavey." As soon as her contract with the Casino expired, Augustin Daly engaged her for his musical comedy company, where she succeeded Violet Lloyd as Mollie Seamore in "The Geisha." Not only did she present this part with ready skill, but she made a second hit as Flora in "Meg Merrilies." Nor did old comedy daunt her, for as still another Flora, maid to Ada Rehan in "The Wonder," her work was much praised. She crowned her success by appearing in Shakespeare, winning new laurels with her Ariel in "The Tempest." In all these impersonations her readiness in song was of service, but her vivacity counted for much; and, more than that, her magnetic influence over her audience, which it is impossible to analyze. A number of years before, Sarah Bernhardt had taken a fancy to Miss Earle's Taggs in "The County Fair," and had predicted a future for her. Notwithstanding this, however, it is not unlikely that Miss Earle herself would have been incredulous had any one told her a few months before, while she was playing Prince Rouge et Noir in "Gay New York," that within a year she would be a principal in Shakespeare at Daly's. Dora in "The Circus Girl" and Winnifred Grey in "A Runaway Girl" followed, and Miss Earle's conquest of New York was complete. She had won recognition at last as a soubrette who was an artist as well as a personality. After Mr. Daly's death Miss Earle returned to the New York Casino, appearing first as Percy Ethelbert Frederick Algernon Cholmondely in "The Casino Girl." This part by no means showed her at her best, although she did fully as well as could be expected with the material with which she had to work. CHAPTER III LILLIAN RUSSELL For many years Lillian Russell held without challenge and without serious rivalry the first place among light opera prima donnas in this country. Her triumphs followed one after the other in rapid succession, and her popularity in all the leading cities in the country--and she would visit none except leading cities--was remarkable. "Queen of Comic Opera" she was called; and what a vision of loveliness, she was, to be sure! the most perfect doll's face on the American stage, as some one described it. A golden-haired goddess, with big blue eyes that seemed a bit of June sky, and perfectly rounded cheeks, soft and dimpled like a baby's. There are two classes of women in the world,--pretty women, whom we see everywhere, and beautiful women, about whom we often read, but whom we seldom see in real life. Lillian Russell was emphatically a beautiful woman. She was almost an ideal. I remember her in all her perfection as Florella in "The Brigands," by W. S. Gilbert and Jacques Offenbach, during the season of 1888-89. Later she learned to act better than she did in those days,--but then she did not need to act. When one saw her, he forgot all about acting. He thought of nothing except Lillian Russell, her extraordinary loveliness of person, and her voice of golden sweetness. She compelled admiration that was almost personal homage. And she could sing, too! Her voice, a brilliant soprano, was rich, full, and complete, liquid in tone, pure and musical. From 1888 to 1896 were the days of her greatest successes, and the list of operas in which she appeared during that time is a remarkable one. Besides "The Brigands," there were "The Queen's Mate," "The Grand Duchess," "Poor Jonathan," "Apollo," "La Cigale," "Giroflé-Girofla," "The Mountebanks," "Princess Nicotine," "Erminie," "The Tzigane," "La Perichole," "The Little Duke," and "An American Beauty." Naturally enough, the Lillian Russell of to-day is not the Lillian Russell of ten years ago. Her great beauty has lost some of its freshness, and her voice, though by no means wholly past its usefulness, is worn by the years of constant use in the theatre. She still retains to a remarkable extent, however, her great personal hold on the public. Although the Lillian Russell of to-day fails to maintain the standard of the Lillian Russell of yesterday, there are but few light opera sopranos on the American stage who can fairly rival her even now, and there is no one who is at present what Lillian Russell was ten years ago. Lillian Russell was christened Helen Louise Leonard. Tony Pastor gave her the name of Lillian Russell, for the very practical reason, I believe, that it had so many "l's" in it, and consequently would look well on a bill-board. Little Miss Leonard was born in Clinton, Iowa. Her father was the proprietor and editor of the "Clinton Weekly Herald," and Lillian Russell's first press notice read as follows: "Born to Mr. and Mrs. Charles E. Leonard, at their home on Fourth Avenue, December 4, 1861, a bright baby girl, weighing nine and one-half pounds." In spite of the fact that this birth notice speaks of a high-sounding Fourth Avenue, Lillian Russell was born in an alley. The house in Clinton, in which the interesting event occurred, was situated in the rear of the office building of H. B. Horton, located on Fourth Avenue, between First and Second streets, and faced east on the alley running north and south between Third and Fourth avenues. At that time the house was situated almost in the centre of the business section across the street from the Iowa Central Hotel, then the largest hotel in the state and one of the finest west of Chicago. Shortly after the baby's birth the Leonard family removed from their abode on the alley to 408 Seventh Avenue, immediately in the rear of the Baptist Church, and at that time one of the finest residences in the town. Here the remainder of their days in Clinton was spent. During the first few years of her life there was nothing to distinguish Helen Louise Leonard from any other baby; but by the time she was two years old, she showed the marks of great beauty, having large blue eyes and golden hair. She was not reared among all the comforts of life. Her country editor father was not possessed of wealth, but was compelled to work hard on his prosperous, though none too well-paying newspaper, every day of his life. During the period of Lillian's babyhood, too, the war forced the prices of luxuries entirely beyond the reach of all but the rich. Lillian inherited her good looks from her father. Charles E. Leonard was a man of fine appearance, and always dressed in a faultless manner. When he went to Clinton in 1856 he was probably thirty years of age and showed plainly the marks of early culture and training. He, too, was a blond. That he was a man of marked ability is evidenced by the success he achieved in his profession in what was then a scattering Western settlement of not half a hundred houses all told, in the midst of a country unreclaimed and almost wholly unsettled. On December 18, 1856, he issued the first number of the "Clinton Herald," a weekly publication having as competitors two other well-established newspapers at Lyons, only one mile north in the same county. There was really no field at Clinton at that time for a newspaper, but Leonard thought otherwise. The panic of 1857 caught the enterprise in the weakness of infancy; but the paper survived the financial storm and eventually came forth on the top wave of success, all of which was undoubtedly due to the excellent business management of Leonard and the strong personality he threw into his work. When the general offices of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad were removed to Chicago in 1865, Mr. Leonard moved the fine job office connected with the "Herald" to that city, as the nucleus for the extensive printing establishment he later acquired. After the family moved to Chicago, Lillian Russell spent several years in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in that city. Her first music lessons were on the violin, and were given by Professor Nathan Dyer. Then she took vocal lessons from Professor Gill in Chicago. When the time came for him to show off his pupils, he gave a musicale in Chickering Hall. The fair-haired Lillian sang at this concert "Let Me Dream again" by Sullivan and "Connais-tu le Pays?" from "Mignon." The papers, of course, gave her complimentary notices, one declaring that she sang "like an old professional." Possibly it was this notice that first turned her mind toward the stage. For some time after that, however, she sang in St. John's Episcopal Church on the West Side, and studied with Madame Jennivally, who encouraged her in her ambition to become a grand opera singer. With the idea of studying for the grand opera stage, she went to New York to have her voice tried, and she had taken but a few lessons of the late Dr. Damrosch when Mrs. William E. Sinn persuaded her to join the chorus of Edward E. Rice's "Pinafore" company for the sake of the experience on the stage. This connection lasted about two months and was terminated by her first matrimonial experience, her marriage to Harry Braham, the musical director of the company. She retired from the stage for a time, but her domestic happiness did not last long. It then became a matter of necessity for her to get an engagement, and she applied in vain to such managers as McCaull and D'Oley Carte, who could find nothing in her voice to warrant them in giving her a chance. She finally succeeded in getting a position in a curious way. She was living in a theatrical boarding-house, and among her fellow-boarders was a girl who was engaged by Tony Pastor for a specialty act in his theatre, which at that time was situated on Broadway opposite Niblo's Garden. While calling at the house one day to complete some business transactions with this young woman, the variety manager heard Miss Russell singing in a neighboring room. He asked who she was and said he wanted to meet her. He did meet her, and at once offered her fifty dollars a week to sing ballads at his theatre. Fifty dollars a week was a good salary in those days, and the following Monday saw the name of Lillian Russell, "the English ballad singer," described as one of the leading attractions on the programme. "I was very cool and collected up to the time that I heard the first note of the orchestra," wrote Miss Russell, in describing her first experience at Pastor's. "From that moment until I had finished my third song, however, I was practically in a trance. I was told afterward that I did splendidly, but to this day I cannot tell what occurred after I went on the stage until I reached my dressing-room and donned my street clothes." She sung with considerable success such well-known songs as "The Kerry Dance" and "Twickenham Ferry." "The Kerry Dance," in fact, created a bit of a sensation. It was a style of vocal music quite new at that time in the variety theatres. When Mr. Pastor introduced his stage burlesques on "Olivette," "The Pirates of Penzance," and other popular operettas, Miss Russell took part in them, and she also appeared in Pastor's condensed version of "Patience." Then Colonel John A. McCaull enticed Miss Russell away from Mr. Pastor's by means of a larger salary, and she sang under his management in "The Snake Charmer" at the Bijou Opera House. Her next engagement was with a company under the management of Frank Sanger. It was a strong organization, and some of its members were Willie Edouin, Alice Atherton, Jacob Kruger, Lena Merville, and Marion Elmore. Its tour extended straight through the country to California; and the experience that Miss Russell gained with the distinguished artists of the company was invaluable to her. A season of concert work was followed by her engagement at the New York Casino, and her appearance in the "The Sorcerer" and "The Princess of Trebizonde." At this period in her career another man interfered, and the fair Lillian disappeared from the Casino, as did also Edward--they called him Teddy--Solomon, the leader of the orchestra. The couple went to England, where they remained two years, Miss Russell appearing in two operas which Solomon wrote for her,--"Virginia" at the Gaiety Theatre and "Polly" at the London Novelty Theatre. Miss Russell left Solomon when she learned that another woman claimed to be his wife and returned to the United States. She joined the Duff Opera Company, with which she remained until May, 1888, when she again resumed her place at the head of the New York Casino forces, singing first the Princess in "Nadjy," the part originated by Isabelle Urquhart, when the opera was first produced in New York. The revival ran for something like two hundred nights; and the popular "Nadjy" was succeeded by "The Brigands," which was also very successful. The years of her greatest success already referred to then followed. During the season of 1897-98 Miss Russell appeared with Della Fox and Jefferson DeAngelis in "The Wedding Day;" and her last appearances in opera were in April, 1899, in "La Belle Hélène" with Edna Wallace Hopper. During the season of 1899-1900, Miss Russell was with the Weber and Fields Company, whose clever burlesques make life in New York so merry. Miss Russell was recently asked which one of the many operas in which she had appeared was her favorite. "'The Grand Duchess,'" she replied emphatically. "That, to my mind, was one of the best comic operas ever written. Then I had a beautiful part in 'Giroflé-Girofla' and 'La Perichole,' but 'The Grand Duchess' was my favorite." [Illustration: LILLIAN RUSSELL As "The Queen of Brilliants."] Miss Russell also described interestingly her methods of working up a part:-- "How do I study my parts? Well, every one has his or her own peculiar idea of study and rehearsal, but the true artist always arrives at the same result, with the aid of a clever stage manager and musical conductor. When a part is handed to me, generally six weeks before the opening night, I read it through carefully, picture myself in different positions in the several scenes, and then I separate the music from the dialogue and study the music first. The majority of the operas in which I have recently appeared are of the French or Viennese school, and in the translation there will sometimes appear a word or a sentence that does not harmoniously fit the music. Of course this must be altered before it is finally committed to memory. Then, again, we are all inclined to think ourselves wise enough to improve upon the composer's work, and where a chance is found to introduce a phrase to show one's voice to better advantage, as a rule, the opportunity is not neglected. "After I become thoroughly conversant with the music, I take up the study of the dialogue. This, to a comic opera singer, is the hardest task of all; for it is written in the blue book that an interpreter of comic opera cannot act. The desire to overcome this prejudice often has a disastrous result; and instead of doing justice to the rôle and one's self, the fear of adverse criticism will be so overpowering that the delivery of the dialogue, and the attempt to convey the author's idea to the audience, become extremely painful alike to the auditor and the artist. A great many times I have formed my own conception of a part only to find myself entirely in the wrong at the first rehearsal; and then to undo what I had done and to grasp the new idea would confuse me for several days." To complete the Russell marriage record, it should be added that in January, 1894, during the run of "The Princess Nicotine," she became the wife of the tenor of the company, Signor Giovanni Perugini, known in private life as John Chatterton. This marriage also resulted unhappily, and was followed by a separation and a divorce. CHAPTER IV JOSEPHINE HALL Josephine Hall soared into a prominence that she had not before enjoyed, on the screechy strains of "Mary Jane's Top Note" in "The Girl from Paris" during the season of 1897-98. Previous to that, however, she had passed through a varied theatrical experience. She was born in Greenwich, Rhode Island, and came of a very well-known family. Like many others, she acquired her first taste for the stage by appearing in amateur theatricals. The story is that she ran away from home to become an actress, and journeyed to Providence, where she made it known at the stage door of one of the theatres that she was going to win fame by treading the boards, or die in the attempt. She was plain "Jo" Hall when she made her professional début as Eulalie in "Evangeline" at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, New York, under the management of Edward E. Rice. After this initial appearance in extravaganza, she forsook the musical stage entirely until she succeeded Paula Edwardes in the title rôle of "Mam'selle 'Awkins," although in the farces with which she was identified for a number of seasons, she usually was given a chance to introduce one or more comic songs. After she left Mr. Rice, she became a member of Eben Plympton's "Jack" company. Then she came under Charles Frohman's management, and was consistently successful in such parts as Evangeline in "All the Comforts of Home," Jennie Buckthorne in "Shenandoah," and Katherine Ten Broeck Lawrence in "Aristocracy." The last two plays, it will be remembered, were by Bronson Howard, and he once took occasion to remark that Miss Hall came nearer meeting his ideal of the two characters she impersonated than any other actress on the stage. Then came her big hit in "The Girl from Paris," in which she played the character part of Ruth, the slavey, and sang the ludicrous "Mary Jane's Top Note." How she happened to hit upon this fantastic conception, she once related as follows:-- "I felt that the song would not be a success unless I did something out of the ordinary. The context of the song indicated a high note, which was not given in London, so I conceived the notion of giving a high screech at the climax, which proved to be just what it needed. It was a difficult song to render effectively, as it had to be spoken almost entirely; and as I have a very good ear for music, I found it difficult to keep from singing. The high note had to be off key to make it more ridiculous. I couldn't have sung the song for any length of time, as the strain would have injured my speaking voice." During the first half of the season of 1899-1900, Miss Hall was the Praline in "The Girl from Maxim's,"--a French farce, undeniably dirty, but funny to those not saturated to the point of boredom with the foreign variety of low comedy, which has all the marks of being manufactured to order. It is farce which drives the spectator breathlessly along the road of hilarity by means of a rapidly moving series of mechanically conceived situations. "The Girl from Maxim's" was bluntly suggestive and crudely salacious, as are all these off-color French farces which are turned into English, but it was also bright and ingenious in its machine-like way, and it was in addition very well acted. Whatever patronage "The Girl from Maxim's" gained outside of New York--and it made money, so I have understood, both in Boston and Philadelphia--was given it, not because it was audacious, but solely on its merits as an entertainment. It has been shown time and time again that a farce, which is only salacious and nothing more, cannot live on the road. "The Turtle," which was boomed as the smuttiest thing that ever was, but which was also stupid and inane, never earned a dollar outside of New York. "Mlle. Fifi," which was both dirty and boresome, had a similar experience. "The Cuckoo," whose suggestiveness was much exploited, but whose only merits were an exceedingly smart last act and a very fine cast, was only mildly patronized. On the other hand, "Because She Loved Him So," a delightful farce and innocent enough for Sunday-school presentation, enjoyed two seasons of prosperity and kept two different companies of players employed. "At the White Horse Tavern," another fresh and unsmirched farce, also had a prosperous run. No, whatever success attended "The Girl from Maxim's" was rather in spite of, instead of traceable to, its filth. It had merit as a mirth-maker. Its spirit was unflagging, its ingenuity amazing, and its character studies capable. There was not a suspicion of a drag until a few minutes before the final curtain, when the indefatigable author, George Feydeau, seemed suddenly to lose his breath. Josephine Hall's Praline, with all her doubtful morals and her questionable freedom of speech and action, was an exceedingly attractive young woman. She bubbled with merriment, and never for a moment was she to the slightest extent worried even in the midst of the most bewildering complications. Her unfailing good humor was really the backbone of the play. Indeed, the faculty of making black appear white seems to be something of a specialty with Miss Hall, who has exuberance of spirits without vulgarity or coarseness, and whose unconventionality has coupled with it refinement and inherent delicacy. Her jollity is whole-souled without harshness. Hers is the witchery of personality joined to an art that is authoritative and complete in its own sphere. "Mam'selle 'Awkins" was an indifferent conglomeration of old stage jokes and tinkling music. That it should have succeeded at all was an odd chance, but that it should have entertained Philadelphia for so many weeks was indeed a mystery. Honorah 'Awkins was a Cockney, who, with a fortune acquired in the soap trade, was on the hunt for a titled husband. This was the plot. The part of Honorah was created by Paula Edwardes, who took her work rather seriously and went in for a touch of artistic character drawing. Miss Hall did not trouble herself much about imitating nature. She relied wholly on her ability to give her audience a good time. She played Mam'selle 'Awkins in a dazzling red wig and a complexion that suggested an hour or two over the kitchen stove, or better still, considering the antecedents of the fair Honorah, over the scrubbing board. Neither did Miss Hall go very heavily into the Cockney; she suggested rather than reproduced, and then fell back on her powers as a fun-maker to win out with her audiences. For her, this method filled the bill perfectly. Of course, we knew from previous experience that Miss Hall was a capable actress in the hurricane variety of farce, but she did not draw heavily on that side of her artistic equipment in "Mam'selle 'Awkins." She went in head over heels to be as entertaining as possible with the materials at hand,--which, it must be confessed, were not over abundant--and with whatever else she herself could devise. She walked the tight-rope of vulgarity with marvellous expertness, and because she was Josie Hall, one laughed instead of turning up his nose. In spite of the fact that she has been continually called upon to play all sorts of impossible foreigners, Miss Hall's humor is essentially the humor of the average American. It is fun straight out from the shoulder with the laugh just enough hidden to make it all the more enjoyable when it is discovered. It is not the heavy punning variety so mysteriously popular with the Englishman, nor the _double entendre_ of the Frenchman. Though she may act Cockneys and French grisettes to the end of the chapter, Miss Hall will always be what she was born,--a jolly American girl. And this suggests a brilliant idea,--one that may be novel to those who up to date have had her artistic fate in their hands. Why not give Miss Hall a chance to play the girl next door? Why scour Europe for a human specimen which only warps a personality that belongs right here at home? Try her once in a character--farcical naturally--that has some native stuff in it. Let her show us a girl whom we know first-hand as the genuine article. I think that the result would be a surprise for somebody. CHAPTER V MABELLE GILMAN Very much in evidence in the unusually strong and brilliant cast, even for the New York Casino, that lent its assistance to such good purpose in bringing into popular favor during the season of 1899-1900 that really amusing as well as highly colored vaudeville, "The Rounders," was Mabelle Gilman,--a young woman whose stage experience has been short, but whose histrionic and musical talent, remarkable beauty, winsome personality, and artistic temperament would seem to make comparatively safe the prophecy of an especially rosy future. Miss Gilman has two most valuable qualities that are many times lacking in girls who enter the musical field,--strength of character and will power. One has only to see her on the stage to be convinced that she is not one that will be content to drift willy-nilly with the tide on the calm sea of self-satisfaction and unambitious gratification. [Illustration: MABELLE GILMAN In "The Casino Girl."] Equipped, as I am sure she is, with a serious art purpose, and richly endowed, as I know that she is, with so much that brings success in the theatre, her reputation will not long be confined, as is at present the case, to the comparatively narrow limits of two or three of the most important theatrical centres. Indeed, when one considers her youth--she is not yet twenty years old--and the few seasons that she has been before the public, Miss Gilman's advancement has been little short of phenomenal. Although she was born and educated in San Francisco, the professional labors that have won for her her present position in musical comedy have been entirely confined to New York, with the exception of a single short engagement in Boston and another in London. This has been, on the whole, a fortunate circumstance, for it has undoubtedly kept her keyed up to her best endeavor, and it has also saved her from the energy-dissipating fatigue of constant travel, and the artistic inertia resulting from long association with a single part. On the other hand, it has unquestionably limited her reputation, and also deprived her of the lessons to be learned from acting before all sorts and conditions of humanity. The New York public is oddly provincial in its narrow self-sufficiency, but, worse than that, it has in a highly developed form the sheep instinct of follow-my-leader. It is both faddish and freakish, and on that account its judgments are not always to be trusted and its influence is sometimes to be deplored. New York is a wonderfully amusing city--to the outsider who watches its antics from a safe distance. It has the atmosphere of an excessively nervous woman, watching apprehensively a mouse-hole; it is constantly on the verge, occasionally in the very midst of, hysteria. It enjoys no intellectual calm, no quiet repose, no philosophical serenity. It is always gaping widely for a sensation, real or manufactured, eager as the child who is all eyes for the toy-balloon man in the Fourth of July crowd. Many times has this hysterical tendency moulded the affairs of the theatres in New York, and for that reason New York's judgment can be by no means the all in all to the country at large. A New York reputation, which means so much to the average man and woman connected with the stage in this country, may result in a temporarily inflated salary, but it does not necessarily promise long-continued success. Far from it! New York, after all, is merely a centre, not the centre, as the dwellers within its walls are firmly convinced is the case. It is not London monopolizing the whole of Great Britain, and it is not Paris, by common consent the privileged representative of France. In the case of Miss Gilman, however, the judgment of New York is fully justifiable. Rarely lovely as she is,--a perfect brunette type, black hair, black eyes, and expressive face,--she does not rely on her beauty, nor on the attractiveness of her personality for success; she is an actress as well. It should be understood that the spoken drama and the musical drama are two different things. The ideal of the first is to create an impression of naturalness and fidelity to nature. It has its conventions, but they are every one of them evils, which are continually being uprooted by the combined intelligence of the dramatist, the actor, and the theatre-goer. Conventions, on the other hand, are the very life of the musical drama, which is in its whole scheme a travesty on nature and a violation of dramatic art. The musical drama is art purposely artificial. Consequently, while the actor in the spoken drama strives to the best of his ability for sincerity and conviction, and feels that he has attained the highest when he causes the spectator of his mock frenzy to forget absolutely that the emotion engendered is only a wilful simulation of the genuine article, the actor in the musical comedy is purposely and frankly artificial. He is limited to presenting the symbol without in the least striving for deception. It is the quality of inherent insincerity that makes anything approaching sentiment dangerous in the musical drama. The highly dramatic and the essentially farcical can be utilized in this form of stage representation with equal facility; but when the musical drama approaches the comedy field of the spoken drama, it begins at once to tread on dangerous ground. For this reason Miss Gilman's greatest achievement in "The Rounders" was the remarkable success with which she accomplished the formidable task of mixing sentiment into a musical comedy. Her rôle of the little Quakeress married out of hand to a sportive Frenchman really had an element of pathos in it,--a hint of pathos, as it were, not enough to be ridiculous, but just enough to add a touch of human interest and character contrast to the picture, and thus to make Priscilla something more than a lay figure in a popular vaudeville. There was art in the characterization, the art of the sensitive and essentially feminine woman, and this art appealed strongly to the chivalrous side of man's nature; he felt at once the instinctive desire to protect this woman so remarkably impressive in her feminine way. So modest, so demure, so innocent, and so altogether appropriate was the quiet gray of the Quakeress gown worn by Miss Gilman, that the sight of her later on in the bathing suit that would not, perhaps, have caused much comment at Newport, was a distinct shock, while the dance that went with the bathing costume song--a dance of many boneless bendings and gymnastic kicks and contortionist feats--was only believed as a fact because it was seen. Theoretically, one would be justified in claiming that Miss Gilman never danced it. Moreover, according to all precedents, this astonishing exhibition should have destroyed at once and forever all the sentiment in Miss Gilman's Quakeress, but, as a matter of fact, it did nothing of the kind. When she resumed her quiet gray, she was again the same winsome, pathetic, in-need-of-protection little thing as before. A paradox such as this is only explainable in one way: the perpetrator of it knows how to act and is something more than a prettily decorated bit of personality. Another surprise, which Miss Gilman has in store for those who pass judgment regarding her complete artistic equipment at first sight of her face, is her singing voice. I know that I expected to hear the plaintive, faint, and indefinite piping that goes with so many girlishly innocent soubrettes. It proved, however, a full and satisfying soprano, rich and mellow, a soprano which did not make holes in the atmosphere on the top notes. She has had the advantage of instruction in singing from Mr. George Sweet of New York, who is justly proud of his pupil. While Miss Gilman was a student at Mills College in San Francisco, Augustin Daly heard her recite, and was sufficiently impressed with her ability to offer her a place in his New York company. She lost no time in coming East and at once signed with Mr. Daly for a term of five years. His death occurred before this contract had expired, and it was thus that it happened that Miss Gilman was free to join George W. Lederer's forces at the Casino in New York. While under the management of Mr. Daly, Miss Gilman played in "The Tempest" and "The Merchant of Venice." Her Jessica in the latter drama was an exquisitely charming bit, and received the especial commendation of Mr. Daly. Of the Daly musical comedy productions she appeared in "The Geisha," "The Circus Girl," "La Poupée," and "A Runaway Girl." Priscilla, in "The Rounders," was her first part at the Casino, and during the spring of 1900 she was one of the prominent features in "The Casino Girl," a Harry B. Smith product. The fineness of Miss Gilman's art as shown in this work was thus commented on:-- "The production brings distinctly to the front Miss Mabelle Gilman, one of the most conscientious young actresses on the stage. Miss Gilman's work shows that she is a careful student of her art. Everything is done by method, and yet with such ease and naturalness that one might imagine it was play and no work. Miss Gilman has a sweet, well-cultivated voice, and uses it apparently without effort, but to the greatest advantage." Miss Gilman's experience at the Casino has developed in her an appreciation of comedy and a quiet vein of humor that she had not previously shown. CHAPTER VI FAY TEMPLETON Born almost literally in the theatre, and cradled as a baby in a champagne wardrobe basket, a full-fledged "professional" at the tender age of three years, it would have been marvellous, indeed, if Fay Templeton had become anything else except an actress. When I heard these tales of Fay Templeton's life in the nursery period of her existence,--stories of how she had often slept in the dressing-room while her mother, Alice Vane, died nightly in the leading rôle of some old-time tragedy, of the nights and the days of travel, of all the nerve-racking hardships that made up the weary, weary life of the actor "on the road,"--I was strongly reminded of the early life of Minnie Maddern Fiske. Both were children of the theatre; and forthwith we who are not children of the theatre exclaim, how pathetic that is! So they seem to me, I must confess, these children without homes and without companions of their own age, knowing nothing of the pleasure of quarrelling and making up again, children whom one never thinks of as young, and yet who cannot really be old, brought up as they are in the indescribable and contradictory atmosphere that is characteristic of the stage, an atmosphere of hypocrisy and simple-mindedness, of contemptible smallness of spirit and self-sacrificing generosity, of petty spitefulness and frank good fellowship, of foolish jealousies and whole-souled democracy. With all their artificiality, superficiality, and self-sufficiency, I think that there is, on the whole, more frankness, sincerity, and honest selfishness among stage folks than among any other class of society. In certain respects, actors are in their relations with one another far less the actor than are many persons who are not supposed to act at all. [Illustration: FAY TEMPLETON Singing the "Coon" Song, "My Tiger Lily."] A strange thing must life seem to the child of the theatre, when he gets old enough to think about it. He looks upon the world topsy-turvy, as it were. The serious things of his life are the frivolities of the work-a-day world, and the viewpoint of these work-a-days must be a constant source of perplexity to him. He must wonder, for instance, why they go to the theatre at all, why they are so foolish as to spend money, which is such a rare and precious thing, to behold the commonplace and dreary business of play-acting. How he, the pitied one of the world of homes and domesticated firesides, in his turn must pity those easily beguiled individuals who practise theatre-going! How he must smile ironically at their sophisticated innocence and be even shocked at their unaccountable ignorance! Thus it happens that he pities us because we have illusions about things that he knows are the crudest delusions, and we pity him because he lives a life so far apart from ours that we can see nothing in it but hardship and unhappiness. We of the homes waste our tears on him who feels no need of a home, who, contented with his lot and glorying in his freedom, scorns publicly the narrow monotony of a seven A.M. to six P.M. with an hour off for luncheon at noon existence. Which is right? Both--and neither. But to return to Fay Templeton and Mrs. Fiske. Miss Templeton made her first appearance on the stage when she was three years old, dressed as a Cupid and singing fairy songs. Mrs. Fiske began even younger, and she, too, was a singer. Arrayed in a Scotch costume of her mother's making, she piped in a shrill treble between the tragedy and the farce a ballad about "Jamie Coming over the Meadow." After this infantile experiment, however, Mrs. Fiske forsook the lyric stage practically for good and all, although she did at one time play Ralph Rackstraw in Hooley's Juvenile Pinafore Company. Miss Templeton, on the other hand, clung faithfully to opera and the allied forms of theatrical entertainment, particularly that branch known as burlesque, in which she was and still is an adept without a compare. The nearest that she ever came to being identified with what player-folk delight to call the "legitimate" was when at the age of seven years she played Puck in Augustin Daly's production of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Grand Opera House in New York. This was considered a remarkable impersonation, especially for a child of seven, and it received the special commendation of Mr. Daly himself. Miss Templeton's success at so youthful an age was, to be sure, most unusual, but it was by no means inexplicable, if one only knew that she had had, even at that time, four years' experience on the stage, and that she had starred, principally throughout the West and South, at the head of a company managed by her father, John Templeton. The generalization that infant stage prodigies never amount to anything has fully as great a percentage of truth in its favor as any other generalization, but there are occasional exceptions. Mrs. Fiske, already referred to, was one; Della Fox was another; and Fay Templeton was a third, and possibly the most remarkable case of all. Mrs. Fiske at least had the advantage of the intellectual training of the classic drama, and Della Fox, after her precocious success as a child, was kept faithfully at school for a number of years by stern parental authority; but Fay Templeton during her childhood was continually associated--with the possible exception of Puck--with the lightest and frothiest in the theatrical business. More than that she was at the head of the company, the star, the praised and petted. Whoever saved her from herself and the disastrous results of childish self-conceit is entitled to the greatest credit. After her hit in New York in "A Midsummer's Night's Dream," Miss Templeton travelled to San Francisco with her father and James A. Herne. There she became a prima donna in miniature, and charmed the Californians, especially by her imitations of the prominent grand opera and comic opera artists of the day. Her San Francisco experience was followed by her appearance at Niblo's Garden, New York, as Parepa Rosa, Aimée, and Lucca. The next half-a-dozen years were spent principally in the South, where she starred in a repertory of which her Puck in "A Midsummer's Night's Dream" was the chief feature. Fay Templeton was fifteen years old when she became a recognized light opera star of national reputation. She was the original in this country and the best-known Bettina in "The Mascotte," and she also appeared in "Giroflé-Girofla." For two years she played Gabriel, which was created by Eliza Weatherby, one of the most beautiful of the Lydia Thompson burlesquers, in "Evangeline," and she was also in the revival of "The Corsair." At the Fourteenth Street Theatre, New York, in August, 1890, after a period of absence from the stage, Miss Templeton brought out the burlesque called "Hendrick Hudson; or, The Discovery of Columbus," by Robert Frazer and William Gill. This told an imaginary story of the meeting, at the El Dorado Spring in Florida, of Columbus lost on his third expedition to America, and Hudson. It was not an unfruitful theme for burlesque treatment, but the work itself was poorly put together, disconnected, and prone to drag. Neither was Miss Templeton herself all that could be desired. She was apparently in a state of transition. She had lost the roguish girlishness that made her Gabriel so charming, and she had not yet learned to give free rein to the rich individuality and the unctuous humor that are so characteristic of her work at the present time. No dramatic critic would say to-day, as was said at that time, of the production of "Hendrik Hudson," that "it must be written, in reluctant sorrow, that Miss Templeton was not sufficient in talent nor in charm to lead a burlesque company to great success." Miss Templeton was not seen again, after the short and inglorious career of "Hendrik Hudson," until she brought out "Mme. Favart" during the season of 1893-94. The piece that re-established her in public favor, however, was "Excelsior, Jr.;" New York, in particular, finding her impersonation of the up-to-date young man about town very much to its liking. After she joined the Weber and Fields organization in New York and unexpectedly shone forth as a marvellously entrancing interpreter of "coon" songs, she clinched her hold on the public with which she is now an established favorite. During the season of 1899-1900 Fay Templeton was identified with those two gorgeous productions, "The Man in the Moon" and "Broadway to Tokio," besides taking a flyer into vaudeville, where she first brought out her wonderful imitation of Fougère, the French chanteuse. In shows like "The Man in the Moon" and "Broadway to Tokio" one is expected to have nothing with him except the two senses of sight and hearing. It is the spectator's part to take what comes--and it is supposed to come constantly and rapidly--simply for the sake of the moment's fun that there may be in it. His cue is to laugh at the stage jokes of the hard-worked comedians, and to be dazzled into a semi-hypnotic state by the dancing women posturing amid marvellous effects of light and color. They are eminently entertainments to be felt and not thought about. One is constantly receiving new impressions, and just as constantly forgetting all about them. The result is that after the shows are all over, one is surprised to find that from the mass of material he has retained no one impression distinctly. He remembers only flashes here and there. One figure, however, was revealed by each and every one of these memory flashes,--that of Fay Templeton, whose wonderful versatility as an entertainer, and whose pure virtuosity as an artist, both of them given free rein in these spectacles, raised her head and shoulders above her associates in the two casts. In "The Man in the Moon" there was nothing else that evidenced half the art shown in her singing of the ditty "I Want a Filipino Man." It was, it is true, a fearfully suggestive study of elemental human passion, a song of hot blood and crude, unblushing animalism. But it was wonderfully well done, and the swing of its rhythmic sensuality was not to be resisted. Two things that Fay Templeton did in "Broadway to Tokio" I recall with especial vividness. One was her treatment of the cake-walk, commonly a prosaic, athletic exhibition of increasing boredom. She evolved from the conventional prancing of the gay soubrette a dance whose appeal to the imagination was intense, a dance into which might be read many meanings. Her cake-walk was the embodiment of languorous grace and the acme of sensuous charm. It breathed an atmosphere of tropical indolence. It suggested the lazy enjoyment of the cool of the evening after a long day of hot, fierce summer sunshine, the time when one dreams idly of fleshly delights. It was a dance teeming with passion, passion quiescent, which a breath would fan into a blaze. Miss Templeton's second remarkable achievement was her imitation of Fougère, or, better still, her impersonation of Fougère. It is difficult to describe intelligently just the effect of Miss Templeton's art in this specialty. It was not a photographic copy of the external Fougère; it was rather a reproduction of the Fougère personality. Indeed, she pictured only with indifferent fidelity the Fougère mannerisms, but she placed before one, with almost uncanny accuracy, the Fougère individuality and the Fougère stage appeal. It was, in fact, acting as distinguished from mimicking. Fay Templeton literally represented Fougère as she might a dramatist's imaginary personage. Temperamentally, Miss Templeton does not in the remotest way suggest Fougère. The French woman, indeed, is just what Fay Templeton is not. She is thin, she is nervous with a champagne sparkle, and she is perpetually and restlessly vivacious in her artificial French way. Fay Templeton is not thin, and her personality is far away from nervousness. Where Fougère would worry herself half to death, Fay Templeton would insist on solid comfort and plenty of time to think, even a chance to sleep, over the vexing problem. One pictures Fay Templeton as passing her leisure moments in the luxurious embrace of a thickly wadded couch piled high with the softest of pillows. Nor is hers the champagne temperament,--rather that of rich and mellow old Madeira, a wine of substance, of delicate aroma and of fruity flavor, which does not immediately bubble itself into a state of insipidness. CHAPTER VII MADGE LESSING Madge Lessing had been on the stage a number of years before she suddenly sprang full into the illuminating power of the limelight of publicity as the principal part of the astonishing success of that alluring beauty show, "Jack and the Beanstalk." At that time everybody made the discovery that no one knew exactly who she was, and Miss Lessing has succeeded even to this day in shrouding her early life in mystery. This much is known,--that she ran away from home to go on the stage. She came to the United States from London about 1890 and became a chorus girl at Koster and Bial's in New York. She remained in that humble position only a week, being promoted at one step to the title rôle in the burlesque, "Belle Hélène." Her next engagement was with the Solomon Opera Company, and this was followed by her appearance in "The Passing Show" and "The Whirl of the Town." [Illustration: MADGE LESSING.] As far as the casual theatre-goer was concerned, however, she did not exist until the Klaw and Erlanger production of "Jack and the Beanstalk." This extravaganza, like "1492," also the work of R. A. Barnet, was first brought out by the First Corps of Cadets of Boston, and it is still counted the greatest success that this brilliant troupe of amateurs ever had. In the Cadet performances the principals and chorus were all men, and naturally this order of things was changed when the extravaganza passed over into the professional hands. Otherwise it was given practically in its original form. Mr. Barnet struck a veritable gold mine when he hit upon the idea of dramatizing Mother Goose. "Jack" was his first ploughing of this field, and although he has worked it often since, he has not yet succeeded in getting from the old ground another crop so exactly suited to the popular taste. Mr. Barnet undoubtedly got his general scheme from the annual London pantomimes. His work was loosely constructed, and his lines were not all of them of the kind that readily cross the footlights. His wit, while wholly conventional, was also a trifle involved. It did not sparkle. His situations, on the other hand, were effective, and especially were they adaptable to expansion under the gentle administration of a stage manager with an eye for light and color and pleasing groupings. In the process of development the spectacular qualities of "Jack and the Beanstalk" came prominently into the foreground, while the literary qualities--a purely descriptive phrase, which in this connection gracefully designates a condition without stating a fact--were lost in the midst of the substitutions by players with specialties. The stage wit of actors has one advantage over that of writers of dialogue; it may not be analyzed, it may be utterly inane on examination, but it does crackle for the moment. In fact, it exists only because it crackles. Thus "Jack and the Beanstalk" became in the course of its evolution the conventional spectacular extravaganza of theatrical commerce, of which Mr. Barnet was the sponsor rather than the creator. It was also, at the time of its production, a marvellous exploitation of feminine loveliness, and the especial gem of the great array was the bewildering vision of physical perfection, Madge Lessing, in the principal boy's part of Jack. No great amount of histrionic talent was demanded of her, for her success depended, not so much on what she did as how she looked. Madge Lessing then and there established herself as the exception that proved the rule. I confess that I usually find the woman in tights a decided disillusionment. Instead of making a subtle and seductive appeal to the imagination, she is a prosaic fact; interesting, possibly, as an anatomical study, she loses in a peculiar way the fascinations of the feminine gender. When tights enter into the problem, there is a vast difference between the womanly woman and the womanish woman. The first is a rare and, I may also add, a pure delight. The second is merely an embarrassment. Miss Lessing belonged, in "Jack and the Beanstalk," to the class of womanly women. She was as femininely alluring amid the bald disclosures of unblushing fleshings as amid the tantalizing exasperations of swishing draperies. Her beauty was exuberant, voluptuous, pulse-stirring,--a laughing, happy face, crowned and encircled with tangled masses of dark brown hair, which made her head almost too large, to be sure, though size counted for little amid the ravishments of sparkling eyes and kissable dimples that danced in and out on either cheek. Miss Lessing walked through this part of Jack--walking through was all that was demanded of her--with a pretty unaffectedness that met all requirements, and she sang with a voice of considerable sweetness, but of no great power. Still, she has in a mild, inoffensive way some small ability as an actress. This was shown in "A Dangerous Maid" and in "The Rounders," which followed her engagement in that failure imported from London, "Little Red Riding Hood," which was brought out in Boston just before Christmas, 1899. In "The Rounders" Miss Lessing succeeded Mabelle Gilman as Priscilla during the run of that brisk vaudeville at the Columbia Theatre, Boston. It is a thankless task, that of successorship which results inevitably in direct comparisons, but Miss Lessing met the test surprisingly well. Without Miss Gilman's strength of personality and less apparent art, Miss Lessing indicated with unmistakable correctness the sentimental atmosphere of prudish modesty, which represents Priscilla as a dramatic character. With memories of "Jack and the Beanstalk"--they seem inevitable where Miss Lessing is concerned--one was a little bewildered at Priscilla's embarrassment in her ballet costume during the scene in Thea's dressing-room. This bewilderment was due to Miss Lessing's inability to impersonate. She is always Madge Lessing acting,--never Madge Lessing identified with another and wholly different personality; and at the sight of Madge Lessing embarrassed because she wore tights, one had a right to be bewildered. During the Spring of 1900 Miss Lessing also appeared in the title rôle of "The Lady Slavey" when that musical farce was revived in Boston. CHAPTER VIII JESSIE BARTLETT DAVIS The name and fame of Jessie Bartlett Davis are linked inseparably with the history of that prominent light opera organization, The Bostonians, with which she was connected for ten years, and from which she resigned during the summer of 1899. If the proprietors of The Bostonians had ever acknowledged that it were possible for any one to be a star in their troupe, that star would have been Mrs. Davis. To be sure, tradition would have been violated by such a procedure, for Mrs. Davis is a contralto, and tradition decrees that a soprano shall be the only woman star in opera. The composer naturally conceives his heroine as a soprano. In fact, his heroine must be a soprano in order that he may invent brilliants for her to sing. You cannot do that sort of thing for the mellow-toned contralto, and consequently she is never the centre of feminine interest. When a composer needs a contralto for a quartette or something of that kind, he usually puts her in tights and calls her a man, gets her as little involved in the plot as possible, gives her some heart-throbbing songs and uses her voice effectively for padding in the choruses, where the high notes of his heroine soprano shine like diamonds. There is, however, one seriously practical reason for the neglect of the contralto, Sopranos, good, bad, and indifferent, are almost as common as piano-players, but contraltos--even bad and indifferent contraltos--are rare enough to be noted when found; while contraltos that vocally are entitled to rank with the best light opera sopranos are so uncommon it is not strange that no one thought it worth while to write operas especially for them. When one does find such a contralto, he hears a quality of tone that is charged with sympathetic appeal. Where the soprano is sparkling, the contralto is thrilling. Where the soprano is vivacious, happy, delighting in the sunshine, the contralto is fervid, passionate, and throbbing with sentiment. In Mrs. Davis's case, with the voice is also united an attractive personality and comely face and figure, as well as no mean gifts as an actress. Mrs. Davis's natural voice is a magnificent instrument, but whether she made as much of it as she might, especially in later years, is a question. A large voice carries with it its responsibilities. The singer, with vast resources at his command, finds it so easy to make an impression on the unmusicianly auditor merely by letting the big voice go, to win applause by making a tremendous volume of sound, that one need not be surprised to discover in such a singer a growing tendency toward broad and somewhat coarse effects and a lessening appreciation of delicacy, of light and shade, of phrasing, and of the finer variations of expression. However, if Mrs. Davis has made such a criticism not altogether undeserved, it is equally true that she has never permitted herself--even after her performances of Alan-a-Dale in "Robin Hood" passed the two-thousandth mark--to become wholly a victim of musical charlatanism, which in the "Robin Hood" instance just cited would not only have been excusable but was wellnigh unavoidable. She has never been forgetful of the art of interpretation and of expression, and by means of her beautiful voice she has kept herself well in the lead among the light opera contraltos. Sympathy in a contralto is a prime essential. She must appeal to the heart with her rich, pulsating tones. It is not her province to electrify by vocal gymnastics; she is the conveyer of emotion. If this emotion be true and honest and sincere, then the singer brings a message that enriches, ennobles, and broadens; if, on the other hand, the emotion be false and artificial, the singer, however admirable her art in other respects, fails lamentably in a most important particular. The highest praise that can be given Mrs. Davis is that she has rarely failed to impress her audiences with the truth and sincerity of the emotion inspired by her music. Jessie Bartlett Davis was born in Morris, Illinois, a little town not far from Chicago, in 1866. She came from good New England stock, her parents having moved to Illinois from Keene, New Hampshire, where her father was the school-teacher, the leader of the church choir, and the instructor in music to the few persons in the town who cared to employ him in that capacity. One day he fell in love with a seventeen-year-old miss, who applied to him for a position as school-teacher, and shortly after married her. The Bartlett family was a large one,--four girls and four boys, besides Jessie, who might be called the pivot of the family, three of the boys being older and three of the girls younger than she. It is interesting to know, too, that during the Civil War Mrs. Davis's father enlisted and served his time as a soldier. There was no spare money in this household to spend on a musical education for Jessie Bartlett, who began to sing almost before she could talk. When she could scarcely toddle, she would climb on the stool before the old-fashioned melodeon, strike away at the notes of the instrument with her tiny fists, and sing at the top of her voice. Her father taught her all that he knew about music, and by the time that she was twelve years old, she was the leading spirit in every musical event in the town. Her voice was something tremendous,--"loud enough to drive every one out of the schoolhouse when I opened my mouth," according to her own statement. In fact, she was at that time chiefly concerned about the amount of noise that she could make, and she used her big voice at the fullest extent, habitually and wilfully drowning out anybody who dared to join in the singing when she was present. She sang in the church choir, and wherever else there was any one to listen to her. Finally, when she was fifteen years old, she became a member of Mrs. Caroline Richings Bernard's "Old Folks'" Concert Company at a salary of seven dollars a week, and her voice, even then, uncultivated as it was, attracted considerable attention. When the troupe disbanded in 1876, she returned to her home in Morris. Next she was given an engagement to sing in the Church of the Messiah in Chicago, and the whole family moved to that city with her. While singing in church, she also studied with Fred Root, son of George F. Root, the composer of many popular ballads. The "Pinafore" craze was directly responsible for Jessie Bartlett's entrance into opera. John Haverly heard her sing while he was making the rounds of the church choirs looking up members for the Chicago Church Choir "Pinafore" Company, and engaged her for the part of Little Buttercup at a salary of fifty dollars a week. It was therefore in this rôle that she made her début on the operatic stage. At the end of the season she married the manager, William J. Davis, who is at present prominently connected with theatrical affairs in Chicago. Mr. Davis firmly believed in his wife's future, and after her "Pinafore" engagement was over he advised her to decline all further offers until she had learned better how to use her voice. He took her to New York, where she became a pupil of Signor Albites. Then Colonel Mapleson, who was at that time managing Adelina Patti, heard her sing and advised her to study for grand opera. It happened, not long after, that the contralto who was to appear as Siebel in "Faust" with Patti was taken ill. There was no substitute in the company, and Colonel Mapleson came to Mrs. Davis in a great state of mind. It was then Saturday, and the performance of "Faust" was to be on the following Monday. Her teacher coached her in the part all that day, and Saturday night was spent in memorizing the words and music. Sunday was given over to a thorough drill in the customary stage business of Siebel's part, and the memorable Monday night found the aspirant ready, but fearful and trembling. "What frightened me more than anything else," said Mrs. Davis, "was the romanza that Siebel sings to Marguerita. I was so afraid of Patti, whom I considered a vocal divinity, that I finished the romanza without having dared to look her in the face. You can imagine my surprise, therefore, when she took my face in her hands and kissed me on both cheeks. Afterward in the wings she threw her arms around my neck, exclaiming: 'You're going to sing in grand opera, and I'm going to help you.' Adelina Patti's favor and influence did more for me than two years of hard study. There were only two weeks left of the opera season. During that time I appeared twice as Siebel in 'Faust,' and once as the shepherd boy in 'Dinorah.'" Colonel Mapleson evidently thought that he had made a find, for he offered to send Mrs. Davis to Italy, to give her three years of study with the greatest teachers in the world, every advantage and every opportunity, in short, to become a world-famous singer. In return for these favors Mrs. Davis was to sing under Colonel Mapleson's direction for three years. Personal reasons made it impossible for her to accept this offer, however, though she did not give up the idea of singing in grand opera. After the birth of her son, Mrs. Davis studied a year with Madame LaGrange in Paris. On her return she sang for a season in W. T. Carleton's company. Her principal parts were the drummer boy in "The Drum Major" and the German girl in "The Merry War." The next season found her in the American Opera Company, which included Fursch-Nadi, Emma Juch, and Pauline L'Allemand, with Theodore Thomas as musical conductor, and the season following that she was with the reorganized National Opera Company. "That was hard work," remarked Mrs. Davis, "all for no money, and so I got home to Chicago, tired, sick, and discouraged, and vowing that I would never sing in public as long as I lived." "But you changed your mind?" "Not immediately. While I was resting in Chicago the manager of The Bostonians came to see me to talk about an engagement. Agnes Huntington was their contralto, but they wanted to replace her. At first I said 'No!' point blank. I thought nothing would induce me to leave the comfort and seclusion of my home. Then the manager came to see me again, and--well, woman-like I changed my mind." During her first seasons with The Bostonians, Mrs. Davis's repertory was an extensive one and comprised the Marchioness in "Suzette," Dorothea in "Don Quixote," Cynisca in "Pygmalion and Galatea," Vladimir Samoiloff in "Fatinitza," Siebel in "Faust," Nancy in "Martha," Azucena in "The Troubadour," Carmen in "Carmen," and the Queen of the Gipsies in "The Bohemian Girl." Her great success as Alan-a-Dale in "Robin Hood," brought out at the Grand Opera House in Chicago on June 9, 1890, followed, and this part kept her busy for several seasons. While The Bostonians were on their long hunt--not yet finished, I believe--for a successor to "Robin Hood," Mrs. Davis appeared in "The Maid of Plymouth," "In Mexico," or, "A War-time Wedding," "The Knickerbockers," "Prince Ananias," and "The Serenade," with its beautiful "Song of the Angelus." I think it was in 1896 that Mrs. Davis estimated that she had sung "Oh, Promise Me," that popular interpolated song in "Robin Hood," something like five thousand times. "Robin Hood" had received at that time 2041 performances, and she had appeared in it all but twenty-five or thirty of them. "Oh, Promise Me" always got an encore, and often a double encore, which brought the number up to Mrs. Davis's estimate. "I don't tire so much of the acting of a rôle as I do singing the same words and music night after night," she continued. "I sang 'Oh, Promise Me' until I thought they ought to blow paper wads at me. One day in Denver I said to our conductor, Sam Studley, 'Sam, I'm so sick of "Oh, Promise Me" that I've made up mind to sing something else.' 'Jessie,' he said, 'I don't blame you!' So it was agreed that on the following night I would substitute another of DeKoven's sentimental songs. But they wouldn't have it. I had no sooner commenced singing it than there were shouts from all over the house of 'Oh, Promise Me!' 'We want "Oh, Promise Me!"' I managed to struggle through one verse, and then ran off the stage laughing. Then Mr. Studley struck up the introductory to 'Oh, Promise Me,' and I went back and satisfied the audience by singing their favorite ballad. It's an awful fate to become identified with a single song. "Being a singer is not like being an actress. If you are a singer, your voice must be your first care. An actress, if she gets over-tired, can go on and spare herself. A singer cannot. An actress can use less voice at one time than at another. A singer cannot. Now, over-fatigue, excitement, anxiety, all affect the voice by which the singer lives. "I had my grand opera experience. I wasn't very happy in it, although I had good rôles to sing--once in a while. I did not know how to protect myself. I was young then and too good-natured. I confess that while the work in grand opera was more to my taste, I was happier in light opera, and, after all, that is a great thing in the world. Sometimes I used to sigh for more serious work, for a heavier rôle, and in that way 'In Mexico' came to pass. I used to say sometimes 'Oh, I wish I could have a hard part; I am tired of rigging up to show my legs. I want something to do that is hard to do.' So when 'In Mexico' was read they said, 'Well, here's Mrs. Davis's serious part.'" That opera was, indeed, very serious, so serious, in fact, that the public would have nothing to do with it. It was brought out in San Francisco on October 28, 1895. The music was by Oscar Weil and the book by C. T. Dazey, the author of the popular melodrama "In Old Kentucky." CHAPTER IX EDNA WALLACE HOPPER A captivating atom of femininity was Edna Wallace when she succeeded Della Fox as the soubrette foil to the DeWolf Hopper's long-leggedness. What a happy girlish smile she had,--her eyes sparkled and danced so merrily, the little dimples in her cheeks were so altogether alluring! Edna Wallace Hopper never was much of a singer, but she was so pretty and so delicate that one never troubled himself about her voice; he was chiefly concerned lest she might thoughtlessly break into bits. She was vivacity itself, vivacity that never seemed noisy nor forced, just the spontaneous expression of natural blithesomeness; and her magnetism could not be escaped. Although she could not sing, she could act in her soubrettish way, for her little experience on the stage had been spent with plays and not with operas. [Illustration: Copyright, 1898, by B. J. Falk, Waldorf-Astoria, N. Y. EDNA WALLACE-HOPPER.] The art of the soubrette is about the hardest thing in the world to pin down for examination. In fact, in many cases, the word "art," in connection with the soubrette, is purely conventional; instinct would more correctly describe the means employed by her to gain her stage effects. Dramatic instinct is, of course, the corner-stone of the actor's mental equipment. Indeed, we all have to a degree that involuntary notion what to do under certain circumstances--wholly unexpected circumstances possibly--to create the impression we wish to make. Preachers have it abundantly, or else their words from the pulpit would be ineffective; lawyers are also exceptionally endowed with it, or else their addresses to the jury would be worse than useless; teachers, family physicians, the man who makes politics a profession, all must have the dramatic instinct to win any great success. In the case of the soubrette, dramatic instinct is limited in its field. She does not, as a general thing, attempt impersonation, and she never is called upon to do anything more than slightly ruffle the surface of emotional possibilities by a faint appeal to the sentiments. Her dramatic instinct is chiefly concerned in presenting to the best advantage an attractive personality and sparkling temperament backed up by a pretty face and a pleasing figure. Herein lies the difficulty of writing about soubrettes. Having called them happy, gay, graceful, altogether charming, one finds that he has nothing more to say. He cannot talk about their art, for their art is merely themselves, indefinable and impossible of description. He cannot talk about the characters they have played, for they have never played but one, and that themselves. Edna Wallace Hopper's Paquita in "Panjandrum," for example, was none other than her Estrelda in "El Capitan." The environment was different and the raiment was different, but the character was the same. Now a personality cannot be put on paper; it cannot be talked over except in the most superficial and unsatisfactory way. It can only be felt. When one has declared that a certain actor's personality is unusually attractive, he has spoken the last word. Edna Wallace Hopper, in common with all other light opera soubrettes, is a personality. She is there to be liked or disliked just as the notion happens to strike one; but whether one likes or dislikes her, there is no possible ground for an argument about the matter. This person here, who is unmoved by her presence, may claim that she cannot sing and that she is wholly artificial. That person there, who finds her altogether delightful, will declare that he does not care whether she sings or not, and such a dainty creature is she that her frank artificiality is a positive delight. Personally I have always found Edna Wallace Hopper exceptionally entertaining. I first bowed the knee before her smile and her coaxing dimples--a great deal of Mrs. Hopper's fascination is smiles and dimples--when she was very new to the stage, and I have never wholly escaped from their thraldom since that time. I acknowledge freely all her shortcomings,--her lack of versatility and resourcefulness, her narrowness of range,--but as long as she keeps her smile and her dimples, I am certain that I shall never be absolutely insensible to her allurements. She is wholly and fixedly a soubrette, a pretty, dancing, laughing creature without a suggestion of seriousness or the slightest trace of emotion. She is not to be studied, and she does not pretend to any depth of illusion. She is an impression, to be admired or scorned always in the present tense. Edna Wallace was born in San Francisco and was educated at the Vanness Seminary there. It was due entirely to Roland Reed, the light comedian, that the idea of going on the stage ever entered her head. Mr. Reed met Miss Wallace at a reception while he was playing in San Francisco in 1891. She was then not far from seventeen years old. Impressed with her vivacity, he laughingly offered her a position in his company, and, behold! the mischief was done. She accepted quickly; and although her parents did not approve of the plan in the least, she journeyed east during the summer, and in August made her appearance at the Boston Museum with Mr. Reed as Mabel Douglass in "The Club Friend." Two weeks later she acted in the same play at the Star Theatre in New York, where six weeks later she was given the leading ingénue rôle in "Lend Me Your Wife." She attracted the attention of Charles Frohman, and was engaged by him, appearing successively as Lucy Mortan in "Jane," Mrs. Patterby in "Chums," Margery in "Men and Women" and as Wilbur's Ann, the boisterous frontier maiden, in "The Girl I Left Behind Me." It was while she was acting in this play in June, 1893, that she was married to DeWolf Hopper. A few weeks after this, Della Fox, the Paquita in "Panjandrum," was taken suddenly ill and journeyed off to Europe. Mrs. Hopper jumped into the part and played it successfully until the end of the New York season. The following comment on Mrs. Hopper shortly after her first appearance in light opera is interesting:-- "A winsome little woman recently bounded into the affectionate regard of New York audiences at the Broadway Theatre. The severely critical may take occasion to compare her with her predecessor as Paquita in 'Panjandrum,'--possibly to her disadvantage in some instances,--but the fact still remains that the audiences like her immensely, because she is young, pretty, modest, and because she can act. Edna Wallace Hopper, if not able to sing quite as well as some comic opera performers, is a capable actress, and in this respect her advancement has been somewhat remarkable." In the fall Mrs. Hopper returned to Charles Frohman's management, but she was not long after released from her contract so that she could assume the part of Merope Mallow in DeWolf Hopper's production of "Dr. Syntax." This was a decidedly attractive bit of work natural and artistic. On the road she also assumed Della Fox's old character of Mataya in "Wang." When "El Capitan" was produced in Boston in April, 1896, she created the part of Estrelda, the hero-worshipping coquette, her first original rôle, by the way, in opera, for her character in "Dr. Syntax" was taken directly from a similar conception in "Cinderella at School." This was her last rôle with the Hopper organization, for while it was still a popular attraction, domestic difficulties separated her from Mr. Hopper, and she retired from the company at the expiration of her contract with Ben Stevens, the manager. Mrs. Hopper next appeared in "Yankee Doodle Dandy," an extravaganza of doubtful merit, and with Lillian Russell in a revival of "La Belle Hélène." During the season of 1899-1900, she shared the honors with Jerome Sykes in the extravaganza, "Chris and the Wonderful Lamp," acting the part of the sophisticated youth Chris. CHAPTER X PAULA EDWARDES [Illustration: PAULA EDWARDES.] One of the few young and pretty women making a specialty of eccentric comedy parts is Paula Edwardes, a Boston girl, who, starting at the foot of the ladder only a few seasons ago, has quickly claimed a position of prominence in the musical comedy world. Miss Edwardes's most recent characterizations have been two different varieties of the Cockney type in "A Runaway Girl" and "Mam'selle 'Awkins," but previous to that she gave a taste of her ability in this line of impersonation by creating in "The Belle of New York" the rôle of Mamie Clancy, the Bowery girl, a type of character which is nothing more nor less than an Americanized Cockney. I have no idea where Miss Edwardes picked up her weird and wonderful Cockney dialect, unless she got it during her short visit in London with "The Belle," for she was born and brought up in Boston, where, as every one knows, nothing is spoken except the purest of Emersonian English. Neither will I vouch for the accuracy of Miss Edwardes's importation. However, it sounds English enough, and it is certainly hard enough to understand to be the real thing. There are two ways of presenting a character study of the uncultivated types of civilized humanity. One is faithfully to imitate the original, sparing not in the least vulgarity, uncouthness, and coarseness. The comedy in this method is the crude product of incongruity and contrast. The second method is merely to retain a recognizable likeness to the original, to tone down the vulgarity, to reduce the uncouthness to a suggestion, and to rely for effect on an heightened sense of humor. There is also introduced in this second method of treatment a subtle, but nevertheless distinct, self-appreciation of one's own unfitness for polite society and social conventions,--a cynical atmosphere, as it were, that gives the study a touch of satire. The first method is usually adopted by the unpolished and unthinking actor of variety sketch training, and often, too, by the acrobatic and strictly mechanical comedian of light opera surroundings. It is comedy acting which proves vastly amusing to such as desire their theatrical entertainment as devoid as possible of any intellectual flavor, who do not care to hunt for a fine point, and who are bored by anything that suggests an intelligent appreciation of humor. The comedy of the second method is on a decidedly higher plane. It suggests more than it actually represents. It is more delicate in every way, and it requires a modicum of intelligence on the part of the spectator to be estimated at its full value. Miss Edwardes's Carmenita in "A Runaway Girl" was a genuine characterization. She did more than to array herself in garments of curious pattern, stain her face a gypsy tan and talk a Blackfriars-ish, or alleged Blackfriars-ish dialect, that was wellnigh incomprehensible; she also imparted an individuality to the rôle, and one got from her acting a distinct impression of Carmenita, the woman. Such was the case, too, with her Honorah in "Mam'selle 'Awkins." She evolved, from the precious little material that was given her, a personality. Josephine Hall, on the other hand, let the character go completely by the board, and relied entirely for success on her ability as an entertainer. I will not say which achieved the better results in this particular instance, for the entertainment in which they appeared was too absurd to be considered seriously even as an absurdity. Miss Edwardes, however, adopted the more artistic treatment of the two. Paula Edwardes went into the theatrical business on the strength of a voice, a face, and a figure, which is simply another way of saying that she began in the chorus. It happened in Boston, and the occasion was the professional production by Thomas Q. Seabrooke of the First Corps of Cadets' extravaganza, "Tobasco." Miss Edwardes was understudy for Elvia Crox, the leading soubrette, and a little luck came the chorus girl's way at the first matinée. Miss Crox declared that she was too ill to play, and Miss Edwardes took her part for the afternoon, succeeding so well that Miss Crox rapidly recovered her health and was able to appear at the evening performance. Nevertheless, the next season still found Miss Edwardes in the chorus, this time with Hoyt's "A Black Sheep." Again Boston was good to her, for when the company reached that city, Bettina Gerard, who was playing the Queen of Burlesque, was affected by the climate or something of that kind, threw up her part, and Miss Edwardes was pressed into service in the emergency. Her success was sufficient to put an end for good and all to her chorus experience. The following season Miss Edwardes was in "A Dangerous Maid" with Laura Burt and Madge Lessing, and then she created the part of Mamie Clancy in "The Belle of New York." She went to London with the original company, but after a few months she became tired of the fog and homesick for New York and the familiar surroundings of Broadway and the Rialto. So she resigned from "The Belle" cast and took the next steamer for the United States. Augustin Daly engaged her for Carmenita in "A Runaway Girl," and at the conclusion of the run of that piece in New York she was transferred to "The Great Ruby" in which she made quite a hit as Louise Jupp, the romantically inclined hotel cashier. In February, 1900, she appeared in "Mam'selle 'Awkins," creating the title rôle, and after that she acted in Boston and New York her old part of Carmenita in "A Runaway Girl." CHAPTER XI LULU GLASER [Illustration: LULU GLASER.] A very few years ago Lulu Glaser was known only as "Francis Wilson's new soubrette." That continued for several seasons after she succeeded the fascinating Marie Jansen,--she of the rippling laugh and the form of inscrutable perfection. Lulu Glaser was a bright, sparkling girl in those days of her earlier successes, winsome in personality and as pretty as a picture with her light fluffy hair and her eyes that still retained their girlishness. Her vivacity was remarkable, and her spirits were unflagging. She worked with all her might to please, and she was successful to an unusual degree. Too bad that those excellent qualities--vivacity, freshness, and unsophisticated youthfulness--should have so nearly proved her undoing! Too much kindness on the part of those who wished her only the utmost good, indiscriminate praise and the conventional applausive audience, together with association with Francis Wilson, an excellent comedian in his own line, but not a player who will bear imitation, have brought Miss Glaser to a most critical period in her career. Her personal popularity, it is true, has not suffered as yet,--at least, not to any appreciable extent,--but her reputation as an artist is already on the wane among discriminating judges. She should rank with the very best of our light opera soubrettes, but it would not be true to say that she does. Miss Glaser's utter lack of any notion of the inherent fitness of things and of her own position as a paid entertainer is shown most conspicuously and most persistently in her exasperating habit of "guying" every performance in which she participates. Here is a young woman of unquestioned talent both as an actress and a singer, bound down hill simply and solely for the want of restraining good sense and proper discipline. She is much in need of the fatherly advice of a hard-headed stage manager, who would curb that vivacity which has run riot and squelch effectively a condition of cocksureness that is amazing in its effrontery. The trick of "guying" may seem to those on the stage very pretty and highly amusing, but to an audience it is at first surprising, then bewildering, and finally utterly wearisome and disgusting. The actor, who systematically makes sport on the stage for the benefit of his fellow-players instead of attending to his own business of amusing those who have paid their money for entertainment, commits a breach of artistic etiquette that is wholly inexcusable. The stage is a dangerous place for one to give free rein to personal adoration. I have known actors who were free from conceit and complete self-satisfaction, but they are comparatively few. Fortunately, however, this generous estimate of one's own attainments does not often, as in Miss Glaser's case, intrude itself into the actor's art. Still, is her condition of mind to be wondered at? She was only a girl when she began to be the subject of kindly notoriety. She was praised, praised, praised, and, worst of all, she was without the restraining influence of a strict disciplinarian. From desiring above all else to please her audience, and with that end in view, giving lavishly on every occasion the very best that was in her, she developed a frame of mind that conceived her position to be directly opposite to what it really was. She began to feel that the favor was on her side,--that her audience should be grateful to her for taking part in the show. She acquired an atmosphere of condescension and patronage which would have been ridiculous if it had not been so provoking. This curious attitude was noticeable to a considerable extent in "The Little Corporal;" but it could be endured there, for "The Little Corporal" was, in comparison with the average, an opera not altogether without merit. In "Cyrano de Bergerac," however, that wretched misconception, Miss Glaser's egotism bloomed forth in an astonishing fashion. She was almost below the sphere of serious attention. It is painful to speak so harshly of a woman naturally so charming as Miss Glaser, whom I would be only too glad to eulogize in rainbow-hued words. I confess that I like her, but that is my weakness. Indeed, if I did not like her, and if I were not convinced of her genuine ability, I should not distress myself to the extent of being honest with her. Sometimes I have even thought that she had a sense of humor until her persistent "guying" knocked the notion out of my head. "Guying" does not signify a sense of humor. A sense of humor includes, besides the ability to comprehend a joke in a minstrel show, a saving appreciation of the ridiculous in one's self as well as in humanity at large. This quality of looking at one's self from the viewpoint of some one else is rare in man, but it is still rarer in woman. Woman, however, is more expert than man at "faking" a sense of humor. When Miss Glaser really gets down to business and makes fun wholly for her audience, she is a most entertaining little woman. Her talent for burlesque is unmistakable, although her characters do not always have the atmosphere of spontaneity. Her whole experience having been with Francis Wilson, it is not strange, perhaps, that she should have adopted some of his methods. A comic opera comedian, whose humor is so much a matter of individuality, is the last person in the world to be imitated. In many cases he is an acquired taste, and almost always he is only conventional, trading on a trick of personality. Lulu Glaser was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, on June 2, 1874, and continued to live there until she joined Francis Wilson's company in 1892. "I surely inherited no longing for the stage," once remarked Miss Glaser, "for none of my family ever had any professional connection with the theatre. I just had a passionate longing to sing. I talked of it incessantly, and finally father said to mother: 'Let her try it; she will never be satisfied until she does. You go with her to New York, and we shall see what comes of it.' So to New York my mother and I went, and through a friend who knew somebody else who knew Francis Wilson's leader of the orchestra, I got an introduction to this all-important personage. "Well, I think it was all of a month we had to wait before the interview could be arranged, and then one eventful day I sang for Mr. de Novellis on the stage of the Broadway Theatre. No, strangely enough, I wasn't nervous in the least. The song, I remember, was 'My Lady's Bower;' and when I had finished it, Mr. de Novellis said that he would suggest that I should see Mr. Wilson,--'the great Wilson,' as I described him in a letter to my father after the first interview. The company was to produce 'The Lion Tamer,' and Mr. Wilson made me understudy to Miss Marie Jansen, meantime giving me a place in the chorus. "My chance to sing alone came sooner than I anticipated, before I was ready for it, evidently, because on the night when Miss Jansen fell ill, and I was to take her place, I fainted before the curtain went up. But I was not discouraged. 'She is sure to do splendidly now,' said Mr. Wilson, when he heard of that faint. A few months later, Miss Jansen resigned to become a star, and Mr. Wilson informed me, while I was still in the chorus, that I was to have her place. And he regarded it as the greatest achievement of my life, that for the remaining weeks of the season I never told a soul of what was in store for me." During her first season Miss Glaser played, besides Angelina in "The Lion Tamer," Lazuli in "The Merry Monarch." Then she tried Javotte in "Erminie," which performance added greatly to her reputation. It is perhaps, the best thing that she has ever done, and certainly bears comparison with the work of other soubrettes in the part. Her next rôle was that of Elverine in "The Devil's Deputy," and from this came still more praise. The rather sedate--for a soubrette--character of Rita in "The Chieftain" was her next exploit. This was what might be termed a "straight" part, and was only given to Miss Glaser after two other rôles had been assigned to her. "The Chieftain" was produced in the fall of 1895. When Mr. Wilson secured the opera the previous spring, he told Miss Glaser that she was to play Dolly. "Very well," said she, not in the least surprised, for the rôle was precisely in her line. But she had scarcely begun to plan her conception of the character when somebody discovered that Dolly appeared only in the second and last acts. "That will never do, you know," said Mr. Wilson. "I tell you what we will do, you must be Juanita, the dancing girl. That is the soubrette part, after all." "Very well," said Miss Glaser again, with perfect confidence that she would be cast to the best advantage, whatever happened. The season ended, Miss Glaser went with her mother to their summer home at Sewickley, just out of Pittsburg, and Mr. Wilson sailed for Europe. He saw "The Chieftain" in London, and at once sent a cablegram to Sewickley: "You are to play Rita." This was indeed a surprise to Miss Glaser,--to be the dignified prima donna of the house bill! It almost took her breath away. "Do you think I can do it?" she asked Mr. Wilson, when he returned. "I will stake my reputation on it," was the prompt reply. So when Sullivan's opera was produced at Abbey's Theatre in New York in September, the public and the critics declared that Mr. Wilson's leading woman was as strong in the "straight" parts as she had proved herself to be in the lighter lines in which she had first won her reputation. "But, oh, wasn't I nervous that first night!" confessed Miss Glaser. "And didn't I pick up the papers the next morning with fear and trembling!" Miss Glaser, before the run of the opera was over, however, found her part in "The Chieftain" somewhat hampering, and she was pleased enough when Pierrette in "Half a King" placed her back in the ranks of the joyous and captivating soubrettes. Light-hearted, too, was her part in "The Little Corporal," a rôle which travelled all the way from the long skirts of a court lady to the not too tight trousers of a drummer boy in the French army. In "The Little Corporal" one could not help but notice how great an influence Mr. Wilson's clowning methods had exercised on Miss Glaser. Mr. Wilson, however, was artistic in his fooling, and was not given to overdoing the thing, which was not strange, for he had been at it a good many years. Miss Glaser especially worked to the limit the old "gag" popular with variety "artists," of laughing at the jokes on the stage as if they were impromptu affairs gotten up for her especial benefit. She did it rather well, although she did it too much. Perhaps because the jokes were funny and one laughed at them himself, one liked to think that Miss Glaser--some time before, of course--did see something funny in Mr. Wilson's remarks, and that she laughed at them now because she remembered how she had laughed at them at first. Marie Jansen used to laugh, too, when she was with Mr. Wilson, and her laugh was a wonderful achievement,--a thing of ripples, quavers, and gurgles. And this coincidence suggests a horrible thought. Possibly Mr. Wilson himself was to blame for these laughs. Possibly he stipulated in the bond that his soubrettes should laugh early and often at his jokes as a cue to the audience. In the early scenes of "The Little Corporal," regardless of laughs and all else, Miss Glaser was captivating, and her first song--it was something about a coquette, as I recall it--was a fetching bit of descriptive singing. During the season of 1899-1900, Miss Glaser played Roxane in "Cyrano de Bergerac," and Javotte in "Erminie." CHAPTER XII MINNIE ASHLEY [Illustration: MINNIE ASHLEY.] Artless girlishness, remarkable personal charm, and skill as an imaginative dancer scarcely equalled on the American stage, account for Minnie Ashley's sudden success in musical comedy. Aside from her dancing, which is artistic in every sense, she is by no means an exceptionally talented young woman. Nature was indeed good to her when it endowed her with a most fascinating personality, a pretty, piquant face, and a slim, graceful figure, but it was by no means lavish with other gifts most desirable. Miss Ashley's range as an actress is decidedly limited; she is not to the slightest degree versatile, and she has no notion at all of the art of impersonation. Her singing voice is more of an imagination than a reality, although one is sometimes deceived into believing that she can sing in a modest way by the admirable skill with which she uses the little voice that is hers. She has a due regard for its limitations, and she delights one by the clearness of her enunciation and the expressive daintiness of her interpretation of the simple ballads that show her at her best. Nothing could be more exquisitely charming than her art in such songs as "The Monkey on the Stick" and "The Parrot and the Canary" in "The Geisha," "A Little Bit of String" in "The Circus Girl," and "I'm a Dear Little Iris" and "This Naughty Little Maid" in "A Greek Slave." These songs are all of the same class,--little humorous narratives, or, better yet, funny stories set to music. Miss Ashley seems almost to recite them, so perfectly understandable is every word, yet she keeps to the tune at the same time. Not a point in the story is overlooked, and every phase of meaning is captivatingly illustrated in pantomime. Miss Ashley's pantomime, like her acting, is limited in quantity; so limited, in fact, that it suggests, after one becomes familiar with it, the fear that it is all mannerism. Even at that, I doubt if any one can escape its persuasive appeal, can remain absolutely cold and unresponsive before those eyes so full of roguish innocence, those lips smiling a challenge, and that pretty bobbing head shaking a negative that means yes. However, if he be unmoved by Miss Ashley's singing, he surely cannot resist her dancing. It is as an illustrative dancer that Miss Ashley is supreme. She is the one woman who comprehends dancing as something more than violent physical exercise, who appreciates the art of dancing in its classic sense as a means of symbolic and poetic expression. Minnie Ashley dances with her whole body moving in perfect unity and in perfect rhythm. She is the personification of grace from head to foot, and there is vivacity and joy and fulness of life in the saucy noddings of her head, the languorous sway of her form, the sinuous wavings of her arms and hands, and the bewildering mingling of billowy draperies and flashy, twinkling feet. When Minnie Ashley kicks, she does so delicately and deliberately,--kicks that end with a shiver and quiver of the toe-tips. It has been Miss Ashley's good fortune in most of her parts to be permitted to dance in long skirts. As Gwendolyn in "Prince Pro Tem," however, she wore the conventional soubrette skirt of knee length. It was surprising what a handicap it was to the full effectiveness of her dancing. Miss Ashley is not a whirlwind dancer; she does not sacrifice grace for speed, nor dignity for astounding contortions of the body. Knowing full well the value of the artistic repose and the crowning fascination of suggestion, she handles her draperies with that rare skill which makes them seem a part of herself. Their sweeping softness destroys all crude outlines, and they are at the same time tantalizing provokers of curiosity. The short skirt--blunt, plain-spoken, and tactless--compelled the substitution of abandon for sensuousness, and consequently a sacrifice of coquetry and suggestiveness. Minnie Ashley was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1875. Her family name was Whitehead. When she was very young her father and mother separated, her mother going to Boston and taking Minnie with her. The mother afterward was married to a man by the name of Ashley, and it was as Minnie Ashley that the dainty actress was always known during her girlhood in Boston. She lived and went to school both in Roxbury and the South End; and she learned her first dancing steps, as thousands of city children do, by tripping away on the sidewalk to the grinding music of the hand-organ. Her first appearances in public were made at the children's festivals on Washington's birthday in the old Music Hall, Boston. The first year she was the Queen of the Fairies with a number of other school-children as subjects; and the next year, after demonstrating that she could dance, she was promoted to the position of solo dancer, and a feature of the entertainment was her exposition of the intricacies of "The Sailor's Horn-pipe." Her native talent, so prettily shown at these children's festivals, attracted the attention of a teacher of dancing, who took Miss Minnie under her charge and gave the child the instruction that was necessary to develop her gifts to the best advantage. During the summer the teacher took her promising pupil to the summer resorts in the White Mountains. There the guests were charmed, and the boys and girls of ambitious parents were instructed in the art Terpsichorean. This lasted until Miss Minnie came to the conclusion that she was doing all the work while her companion was reaping most of the profits. So they quarrelled about it and separated, Miss Ashley returning to Boston firmly resolved to go upon the stage as a professional dancer. At that time Edward E. Rice was organizing a company to produce the R. A. Barnet spectacle, "1492," and to him Miss Ashley applied. She succeeded in getting a place in the chorus. When DeWolf Hopper brought out "El Capitan" in Boston in 1896, she was still in the chorus, although she was permitted to understudy Edna Wallace Hopper. Miss Ashley, however, had developed since the days of "1492," and although she was in the chorus, she was by no means of the chorus. Her individuality was so pronounced, her magnetism so potent, that the largest chorus could not conceal her. She literally stood forth from the group, a graceful and beautiful figure, animated, interesting, and pertly captivating. She had something of the spirit of France about her, or at least what we think is the spirit of France; and it was not altogether strange, therefore, that her first engagement outside the chorus should have been to act a French girl. This occurred in a musical comedy called "The Chorus Girl," which was brought out at the Boston Museum after the close of the regular season in 1898. "The Chorus Girl" was pretty poor stuff, but Miss Ashley's personal success was considerable. The following season J. C. Duff put "The Geisha" and "The Circus Girl" on the road, and Miss Ashley played Mollie Seamore in "The Geisha" and Dolly Wemyss in "The Circus Girl." In May, 1899, when "Prince Pro Tem," a musical comedy by R. A. Barnet and L. S. Thompson, which has never played a successful engagement outside of Boston, was revived, Miss Ashley appeared as Gwendolyn. Those who heard Josie Sadler sing "If I could only get a Decent Sleep" in "Broadway to Tokio," may be interested to know that this touching ballad was originally one of the chief hits of "Prince Pro Tem." "Prince Pro Tem," with its numerous deficiencies, had one thoroughly artistic character, Tommy Tompkins, the showman. Fred Lenox acted the part; and a capital bit of comedy it was, too, deliciously humorous in its depreciating self-sufficiency, wonderfully clever as a loving and sympathetic caricature, and thoroughly convincing as a sincere study of human nature, a Thackeray-like creation, which was worthy of a more pretentious setting than it received in Mr. Barnet's show. When "A Greek Slave" was produced in New York in November, 1899, that city discovered Minnie Ashley and forthwith shouted her name from the housetops. "A Greek Slave" was not a success, but Miss Ashley's Iris was. As the "New York Telegram" said:-- "And there is Minnie Ashley. A slim, graceful, attractive young woman, with scarcely the suggestion of her wonderful magnetic power in her slender outlines. Two minutes after she had made her entrance, the house was hers and all that therein was. She couldn't sing in the same country with Dorothy Morton. She couldn't act in a manner to warrant attention on that score--and she knew it, and didn't make any harrowing attempts to reach what was beyond her. She knew herself. There was part of the secret. She didn't endeavor to gather in impossibilities. She simply came out and played with that audience as a little child would play with a roomful of kittens. 'You may purr over me and lick my hand and look at me with your great, appreciative eyes,' she told her kittens, 'and in return, I will stroke you and soothe you, and charm you.' "And she certainly did charm that house. She has a pleasing little voice which she uses with utmost judiciousness. She has an innate grace and refinement that are most telling accomplishments. As she informed us in her opening song, 'I'm a Dear Little Iris,' a slave girl, who knows how to drape herself and how to execute the steps of the airiest, fairiest dances. There have been many times at the Metropolitan Opera House when great singers have been overwhelmed by the fierce applause of an emotional audience. Then the bravos have been shouted and the enthusiasm has reached a fever pitch. But before last night these scenes have formed no part of the programme at the Herald Square. Miss Ashley changed that old order, and changed it with the lightness and lack of perceptible effort which characterized her whole performance. The house simply went wild over this practically unknown girl. Her name was called again and again, and the encores of her pretty little songs stretched the opera out far beyond its legitimate length. The house admired the daintiness, the womanliness, and the suggestion of the thorough-bred in this young girl. The poise of her head, the poetical motion of her body, the total lack of self-consciousness, these were constant delights." "To Minnie Ashley," declared the "Boston Transcript," a few weeks later, when "A Greek Slave" was played in Boston, "fell nine-tenths of the honors of the performance, and she gave another impersonation fully as charming as those with which she has been associated in 'The Geisha,' 'The Circus Girl,' and 'Prince Pro Tem.' She was a dainty little slave, demure as was befitting the character, but with a way that was certainly irresistible. She is a real comédienne, and each of the points in the few funny lines that fell to her lot was capitally brought out. Especially clever was the song about 'The Naughty Little Girl' in the second act, where she made the hit of the evening. Nature never intended her to be a prima donna, but it gave her the power to sing a song like that in a way that leaves nothing to be desired, and when she dances--well, it doesn't matter in what language she dances; Latin, Japanese or Yankee, the result is just the same." While she was with DeWolf Hopper, Miss Ashley was married to William Sheldon, a half-brother of Walter Jones, from whom she was afterward separated. CHAPTER XIII EDNA MAY A pretty face and a gentle, winning personality brought Edna May into prominence in the most dramatic fashion. Edna May Petty, the daughter of E. C. Petty, a letter-carrier in Syracuse, New York, lovely to look upon and demure in manner, had some talent for singing, but more for dancing, when her parents yielded to her entreaties and said that she might go to New York to study for the stage. She was only sixteen years old. Hardly had she settled down to her singing and dancing lessons, however, when along came Fred Titus, at that time the holder of the hour bicycle record and one of the most prominent racing men in the country. They were married, but Edna May remained just as determined as ever to go on the stage. Her ambitions were forced for a time to be satisfied with occasional opportunities to substitute in church choirs. Her name first appeared on a playbill when "Santa Maria" was produced at Hammerstein's in New York, but the part was so small as to be practically non-existent. Then she was engaged for White's Farcical Comedy Company and appeared in Charles H. Hoyt's "A Contented Woman." At this point there is a dispute as regards Miss May's next move, or at least there was a dispute until manager and star patched up their difficulties. George W. Lederer was wont to claim that Edna May joined the chorus of his prospective "The Belle of New York" company. At the last moment, the woman whom he had engaged for leading part disappointed him. He had to do something quickly, and he cast about in his own chorus for a girl who might fill the part for a night or two until he could find someone to take it permanently. His discerning eye fell on the plaintive prettiness of Edna May. "She'll look the part, anyhow," he declared. So in this haphazard fashion, Violet Grey, the Salvation Army lassie, was passed over to her, and, presto! her fortune was made. "But it was not that way at all," pouted the gentle Miss May, after she had signed a contract to leave Mr. Lederer and return to London under some one else's care. "I never was in Mr. Lederer's chorus. I went to Mr. Lederer after I had been playing a small part in the 'Contented Woman' company. I begged him to put my name down for something even if it were ever and ever so little, and he gave me the part of Violet Grey in 'The Belle.'" At this time, also,--this period devoted by Miss May to the signing of the contracts, which never amounted to anything, after all,--a second dispute arose regarding Miss May's indebtedness to Mr. Lederer for her success in "The Belle." Mr. Lederer announced to a deeply impressed public that he had trained Miss May with the most extraordinary attention to detail. He had made her walk chalk-lines on the stage, and had written on the music-score minute directions regarding gestures, even indicating the exact point where she was captivatingly to cast down her eyes. "No, no, no," declared Miss May. "All that is very unkind and very untrue. He did not teach me all or nearly all I know about my art, and he did not have to write out gestures and full directions for my conduct on the stage. Not one word of this sort of thing was written in the score. Mr. Lederer rehearsed me, it is true, but not as if he were rehearsing a performing seal. He gave me an opportunity, and for that I am very grateful. But that is all he did. I am not such a fool as Mr. Lederer is always pretending to think me." However, regarding Miss May's extraordinary popular success in "The Belle of New York" in this country, and more especially in London, there can be no dispute. That is a fact discernible without opera glasses. It was, however, almost wholly a triumph of personality. Violet Grey is what actors call a "fat" part. The Salvation Army lassie, a quaint, subdued, almost pathetic figure, thrown in the midst of the contrasting hurly-burly and theatrical exaggerations of a typical musical farce, appeals irresistibly to the spectator's sympathy. She touches deftly the sentiments, for in her modest way she is a bit of real life, a touch of human nature, in surroundings where the men and women of every-day life are complete strangers. But Violet Grey is not a rôle to be acted. It is not, in the strictest sense, a dramatic character at all, merely a picture from life, set forth without comment and without exposition. One sees all that there is to see, the instant Violet Grey appears on the scene; he recognizes at once her reality and her fidelity to nature, and he falls a victim to her charm without further ado. The actress cast for this part must in a sense live it. She must, as Mr. Lederer said, "look the part;" she must suggest at a glance, modesty, demureness, quaintness, spirituality, and idealism. Coquetry, any notion of archness or frivolity, must be rigorously banished. There her responsibility practically ends, for folded hands, cast-down eyes, and the ability to sing a little do the rest. Success in such a part as Violet Grey affords not the slightest test of artistic ability, and Edna May's artistic future is still a matter of doubt. She has appeared in only one operetta aside from "The Belle,"--"An American Beauty," brought out in London by an American company in April, 1900. The remarkable feature of Miss May's career was the furore that she created in London, where, due as much to her personal popularity as to any other one thing, "The Belle of New York" ran for eighty-five weeks. It was wonderful, when one thinks of it, that sweet simplicity could do so much. Of course, when Miss May returned to this country in January, 1900, she had many pleasant remarks to make about the Londoners. Speaking of the opening night, she said: "I played the part during the long run in the United States, so I was very used to it, and there was nothing out of the ordinary about the first night in London, until the sensation caused by their tremendous applause came to me. There is nothing like it, nothing that approaches it. It is quite the most delicious sensation on earth. I don't expect ever to feel it again quite as I did that night. It's like the first kiss, you know, or the first anything. After that it's only repetition. "Success was particularly sweet to me at that time, but it was something of a shock. I wasn't looking for such a reception. They not only applauded, they shouted and deluged me with flowers. The next day I found myself talked about everywhere. I had done nothing but be natural, and do my best, yet they praised my talent. They kept my rooms flower-laden; they sent me rich gifts, and what was more,--oh, a great deal more,--they held out to me the hand of friendship, men and women alike, and made me one of them. "There is one of the most marked differences between London and New York. Here a girl who enters the profession is ostracized; there it is considered an added charm. Here if a girl of any social position chooses a stage career, it must be at a great personal sacrifice. There, whatever social prestige she may have will be an aid to her in her professional ambitions. One of the greatest helps to me in London was the way the genuine people of the aristocracy opened their doors to me, and made me welcome in their lives and homes. For my own part, I did not know that it was possible for so much happiness to come to a single life as I have realized during the past two years abroad." CHAPTER XIV MARIE CELESTE Almost as necessary as a singing voice to the young woman who would venture into light opera and musical comedy, are physical attractiveness and personal magnetism. An unusually good voice, daintiness of face and figure, and a winsome personality. Marie Celeste has, and she has one other quality which to me makes her work on the stage especially enjoyable. That is her total lack of affectation. When one sees her he is not conscious of that irritating screen of artificiality that so often darkens and sometimes hides completely the personality on the stage. An actor, to be effective, must show a personality of some sort. It may not be his own, but it should appear to be his own. The ability, under the conditions represented in the theatre, to convince an audience that the personality represented is a real personality constitutes that branch of acting known as impersonation. Actors try to accomplish this deception by various means. They bring to their aid wonderful skill in make-up and astonishing ingenuity in pantomime; but these external devices fail, every one of them, to produce the impression desired, unless the final effect on the mind of the person to be convinced is one of simplicity and sincerity. To create this impression of simplicity and sincerity, the actor must project his character mentally as well as reproduce it physically; he must appeal to the mind as well as to the eye; he must know human nature; he must study and experiment, and he must have the dramatic temperament. Simplicity and sincerity of this kind are none too common on the stage, and especially is one not apt to find them among the men and women who interpret any form of opera. There are two simple reasons for this. One is that the operatic singer who has a chance to study naturally enough seeks first of all to improve the voice on which he is so dependent. Acting he regards as something that can be quickly acquired from the ubiquitous stage manager. The second reason is that, even in the case of singers who can act, the artificiality of the operatic scheme--drama united with music--is bound to affect the player's art. The player in opera acts, not as men and women act, but as operatic tenors or sopranos or bassos have acted ever since opera came into being. In fact, we have become so accustomed to strutting tenors and mincing sopranos that we accept what they have to offer as a matter of course. If only they sing well and their inherent artificiality be not too ridiculous, we are satisfied. Yet when spontaneity and conviction are present, what a change in conditions they cause! They make opera--even the frivolous opera of the hardworking Harry B. Smith, who has what William J. Henderson calls the "operetta libretto habit"--seem real. One does not have to adopt the intended illusion by a sort of free-will process; it is forced on him. Marie Celeste is one of the few actresses in opera. She has spontaneity and conviction, simplicity and sincerity, and in particular refreshing and unconscious naïveté. Her personality is attractive, winsome, and thoroughly feminine, and her style is vivacious, sparkling, and refined. Her voice is a high soprano of considerable power, and might easily of itself have won her a place on the operatic stage. As a matter of fact, however, her greatest successes have been in parts where singing was something of a secondary consideration. Both physically and temperamentally, Miss Celeste is best fitted for soubrette rôles, parts that require appreciative humor, girlish charm, and artistic finish, ability to dance, and some pretensions as a ballad singer. Miss Celeste's dancing is dainty and graceful, without physical violence, and with a hint of the poetry of motion that makes dancing something more than an athletic feat. As Winnifred Grey in "A Runaway Girl"--a part in which personal charm counted for a great deal--Miss Celeste made a splendid impression largely through her ability as an actress. The music of the part was too low to show her voice to the best advantage, yet she sang the fetching "The Boy Guessed Right the Very First Time" song more effectively than any one I have ever heard. It is, of course, a simple enough ditty, which, however, demands considerable finesse, suggestive action, and a strain of humor to make it go as it should. The sentiment that she put into the second verse of the catchy little duet, "I Think 'twould Break my Heart," was exquisitely delicate and true. Except for a pretty moment at the end of the first act, there is little else than these two bits in the part, aside from an attractive monotony of brightness and happiness; and brightness and happiness, of course, are directly in the line of every musical comedy girl. Marie Celeste--her full name is Marie Celeste Martin--was born and brought up in New York City. So far as she knows, she was the first one of her family to go upon the stage. In fact, from her mother she inherited a strain of Quaker blood, which certainly would never have countenanced a theatrical career. Her mother's grandfather, however, was a Frenchman, and from him probably came her artistic temperament. He was a bit of an inventor in his way, though apparently not a very practical one, a man who dreamed of great things, but like Cotta in "The Schönberg-Cotta Family" failed to bring them to an issue in time to reap any material benefit. Of an original turn of mind and a sanguine temperament, he experimented with many inventions from which he expected to derive fortune and fame. None of them amounted to anything, however. Marie's father died when she was a girl studying music in the New York Conservatory, and she was obliged to look about for a means whereby to earn her livelihood. For some time she had thought of the stage,--say rather idly speculated regarding it as a possibility without ever really believing that she would sometime adopt it as her life-work. Naturally, therefore, it was to the stage that she turned at this time of adversity. Her ambition was opera. She knew that she had a voice, but she also knew that she could not act. With rare foresight in one so young, she made up her mind that the first thing for her to do was to learn to act, and she pluckily took an engagement in a stock company at Halifax, Nova Scotia. That was in 1890, and her first part was Fantile, the maid in Ben Teal's melodrama, "The Great Metropolis." "Mr. Teal, whom afterward I came to know very well, and I have often laughed over that," said Miss Celeste. "But it was hard work in that stock company. We changed the bill twice a week, and sometimes now I think how often I have sat with a dress-maker on one side of me and my part in a chair near my elbow on the other side, memorizing my lines while I sewed away for dear life on my costumes." Miss Celeste steadily gained in skill as an actress, and was given characters of increasing importance. She went with the company to Portland; and when she announced that she was going to leave the organization and look for an opening in opera, she was offered the position of leading woman as an inducement to stay. After Miss Celeste returned to New York, she studied singing for a time, and then was engaged for the farce comedy, "Hoss and Hoss," which exploited Charles Reed, now dead, and Willie Collier, who is at present emulating the example of Nat Goodwin and trying to make himself over into a legitimate comedian. The company opened at the Hollis Street Theatre in Boston, on January 12, 1892, and Miss Celeste's character was Polly Hoss. It was not really a character though, only a name, and she was engaged not to act, but to sing. Everybody in the company thought that she was a beginner, and she did not tell her associates how she had barely escaped being leading lady of a two-bills-a-week stock-company. "Hoss and Hoss" was a typical farce comedy of the Charles H. Hoyt school,--a plotless, formless thing, which was no play, but a vehicle. The chief object of the person that conceived it was to get every person in the company on the stage at the same time, toward the end of the third act. When this remarkable artistic feat was accomplished, a leading personage in the cast would remark with elaborate casualness:-- "Seeing we're all here and looking so well, suppose we have a little music." Forthwith every one on the stage fell into the nearest chair in a helpless sort of a way, as if life were a veritable snare and delusion, and the master of ceremonies continued:-- "Miss Jones, will you kindly favor us with that beautiful ballad entitled 'Way Down upon the Swanee River?'" And so they began, and thus they continued, until every one on the stage had his chance to air his talent before a highly entertained assemblage. It was not exactly a minstrel show, but it approached the minstrel territory. On the bill it was called the "olio." Miss Celeste's part in the "olio" was to sing a ballad; and as no one knew anything about her, she was placed almost at the end of the list of entertainers. When she came to talk with Frank Palmer, the musical director of the company, he asked her what song she had chosen. She told him, and then he wanted to know what she was going to give as an encore. "You know," said Miss Celeste, in telling me the story, "I wasn't very old, and I wasn't very big, and I was terribly nervous, and just a little frightened. I knew what I intended to sing, but it took all the courage I had to murmur gently, 'I'd like to sing, "Coming Thro' the Rye."' "Never shall I forget the expression of disgust on Mr. Palmer's face. "'I'll rehearse you, anyway,' was all he said. "But I didn't tell him that I had taken a little advantage of him. As a matter of fact, I had sung 'Coming Thro' the Rye' in Halifax, in a part which required a song, and in which the old melody seemed appropriate. I knew I could make a success of it. "We went on with the rehearsals,--Mr. Palmer and I,--and he was very kind and considerate after he heard me sing, transposed the music to a higher register, so as to show my voice to better advantage, and gave me any number of little points. When it was all arranged, he said:-- "'Now promise me one thing. Promise that you won't tell any one in the company what you are going to sing.' "I promised. I suppose he was afraid that some one of them would make fun of me. "'And you won't flunk, will you?' he added. "'No,' I said, 'I won't flunk.' "On the first night," continued Miss Celeste, "'Coming Thro' the Rye' brought me four or five recalls, and consequently after that the stage manager gave me a much better place in the 'olio.' That is the reason I call 'Coming Thro' the Rye' my mascot." After her farce comedy experience, Miss Celeste became a member of Lillian Russell's opera company, appearing as Paquita in "Giroflé-Girofla," Petita in "The Princess Nicotine," and Wanda in "The Grand Duchess." During the season of 1894-95 she was with Della Fox in "The Little Trooper," singing the part of Octavie most charmingly, and acting as understudy to Miss Fox, whose rôle she played many times. The next season she returned to Miss Russell's company, making so effective as to attract considerable attention the trifling part of Ninetta in "The Tzigane." She also sang Gaudalena in "La Perichole," and the Duchess de Paite in "The Little Duke." Miss Celeste was taken seriously ill in March, 1896, and her work during the following season was necessarily not very heavy. Under the management of Klaw and Erlanger she appeared as the Queen in "The Brownies," in which, by the way, she again sang "Coming Thro' the Rye;" and the following summer she made a decided hit as Peone Burn in the lively spectacle, "One Round of Pleasure." Mistress Mary in "Jack and the Beanstalk" followed, and then she succeeded Christie MacDonald as Minutezza in "The Bride Elect." Her last part was Winnifred Grey in "A Runaway Girl." Miss Celeste has also sung leading parts with the Castle Square Opera Company, under Henry W. Savage's management, in New York, and for a brief season in Boston. Her principal part with this organization was Santuzza in "Cavalleria Rusticana." "I suppose Mr. Savage thought I looked the part," said Miss Celeste, "and so he asked me to study it. I was really frightened at the idea. I told him that I had never tried anything heavy like Santuzza, and that tragedy was not in my line. He insisted that I attempt it, however, and so I did the best I could. I got into the part far better than I believed were possible, and the result surprised me. I don't think I could do anything with a rôle that runs the gamut of emotions, as they say. But Santuzza is all in one key, a perfect whirlwind, and after you once strike the pace she fairly carries you along with her own impetuosity. "What is the most enjoyable part I ever had?" said Miss Celeste, repeating my question. "That's easily answered: Mataya in 'Wang,' which I played during a summer engagement, just before DeWolf Hopper went to England. He's such a dear boy,--Mataya, I mean,--thinks he is so very sporty when he isn't at all, and then he's so very much in love. I was very fond of that boy. "I think there is a fascination about boys' parts, anyway. It is something of a study to do them just right, to be feminine and still not to be effeminate. An old stage manager once said to me, 'Be sure you please the women. That will bring them to the theatre, and they will bring the men.' The difficulty in playing boys is to please the women, and at the same time to keep your boy from being a poor, weak, colorless creature. One must never overstep the line of womanliness in seeking masculinity, and she must still make the character a real boy and not a girl disguised as a boy." CHAPTER XV CHRISTIE MACDONALD [Illustration: Copyright, 1896, by Aimé Dupont, N. Y. CHRISTIE MACDONALD.] After eight years of soubrette experience Christie MacDonald unexpectedly came into prima donnaship in February, 1900. A light opera called "The Princess Chic," book by Kirke LaShelle and music by Julian Edwards, had been living a quiet life at the Columbia Theatre, Boston, for several weeks. For some reason or other it did not seem to go just as it should. It was a good opera at that--much better than the average. Mr. LaShelle's book told a story with a genuine dramatic climax, and Mr. Edwards's music was charming,--simple but melodious. There was action enough apparently, but the performance dragged. It lacked snap and vigor. The prima donna rôle in this opera was one of great difficulty. It demanded an actress as well as a singer,--a woman who could be swaggering, audacious, and masculinely incisive as the Princess, masquerading as her own envoy, timid, modest, and shrinkingly feminine as the make-believe peasant girl, and finally queenly and royal as the Princess in her proper person. The plot of "The Princess Chic," by the way, paralleled history in a curious manner, and the story of how it was written was told me by Mr. LaShelle:-- "To begin with," said he, "'The Princess Chic' was not taken from the French, though there was a French vaudeville with the same title. I got the idea of the opera fixed in my mind after seeing Henry Irving play 'Louis XI.' during one of his visits to this country. You remember in that drama where the envoy from the Duke of Burgundy and his clanking guard march into Louis's presence. The envoy throws his mailed gauntlet at Louis's feet and exclaims, 'That is the answer of Charles the Bold!' or words to that effect, at any rate. "That kindled my admiration for Charles the Bold, and I have been admiring him ever since. Consequently when I wanted a comic opera and couldn't get any one to write it for me, I said to myself, 'Here's a chance for Charles the Bold.' I forthwith started in on what is now the second act of 'The Princess Chic,' and wrote backward and forward. "Now comes the odd part of the whole business. I had to have a woman for my opera, so I invented the Princess Chic. I had to have a plot,--I'm a bit old-fashioned, I know,--so I invented the intrigue of Louis XI. plotting to cause a revolt among the subjects of the Duke of Burgundy. I seemed to be getting along first-rate when it occurred to me that it wouldn't do any harm to delve a bit into history. So I delved. "You can imagine my astonishment when I found that I had unwittingly been duplicating to a startling extent historical fact. I discovered that there actually had been a Princess Chic. I learned that Louis XI. had thought to cause trouble in Charles's domain, and by this means to open a way for the seizure of that province for France. The Duke's bold move in arresting the King and holding him captive until the King agreed to a treaty that suited Charles was new to me, however, and I grabbed it quick. "Now you have the whole story of 'The Princess Chic.' Somebody has accused me of coquetting with history. I deny all coquetry. 'The Princess Chic' is to all intents and purposes genuine history, much nearer fact than many a historical drama that makes more pretences of sticking closely to the truth." However, history or no history, the opera did not act as it should, and Mr. LaShelle decided to try what the effect of a new prima donna would be. He wanted Camille D'Arville, but she was not available; and by some marvellous stroke of good fortune he hit upon Christie MacDonald. How he happened to do it is a mystery. Christie MacDonald was, of course, well known as a very amiable little lady with a decided fancy for short skirts and for frisky and vivacious characters, that sang prettily and danced nimbly. Never for a moment had she been associated with the dignified prima donna. Nor had she ever been guilty of seriousness. Moreover, if the whole truth were to be told, her voice--though sweet, delicate, musical, and skilfully controlled--was by no means strong. Decidedly Christie MacDonald had other things besides a voice to make her attractive. There was her personality, magnetically feminine, her temperament, so sunshiny and happy, and her face, not exactly pretty, but immensely attractive when fun lighted it up with smiles. Therefore Christie MacDonald's Princess Chic came as a great surprise. At first, she was apparently feeling her way in the rôle. She was, in fact, a model of discretion, but save in one particular her acting lacked force and conviction. As the peasant girl, in this three-sided impersonation, she was from the first exquisite. Never was the subtle attack of a modest maiden upon a susceptible man's heart more daintily or more fascinatingly exhibited. Under every circumstance Miss MacDonald was simple and straightforward in her methods, and absolutely free from affectation and self-consciousness. How thoroughly delightful that is! Singers, in particular, are the victims of conventional mannerisms, smiles that are meaningless and as a result expressionless, curious contortions with the eyes, and strange movements of the hands. How much they would gain by mastering the difficult art of artistically doing nothing! With so much that was good in evidence during her earliest presentations of the Princess Chic, with her faults those of omission rather than commission, it was only natural that Miss MacDonald should improve greatly as she became thoroughly familiar with the requirements of the part, and as she gained experience in acting it. Especially did she seem to catch the spirit of the Princess Chic masquerading as the handsome young envoy. She developed a most entrancing swagger and the most captivating nonchalance. Her voice, too, which at first seemed almost too light for Mr. Edwards's trying music, was heard to a much better advantage later; and in spite of its want of volume, it had a strange insistency, a peculiar penetrating quality, which enabled it to balance admirably the full chorus in the ensemble climaxes. Before she adopted the stage professionally, Christie MacDonald gained a little experience by taking small parts in several summer "snap" companies in her home city of Boston. Her parents were not altogether pleased at her theatrical aspirations, and even after she had been enrolled in 1892 as a member of Pauline Hall's company, she was persuaded to give up the engagement in deference to their wishes. Just at this critical point in her career, however, she chanced to meet Francis Wilson, who had "The Lion Tamer" in rehearsal. He heard her sing and liked her voice so well that he offered her a place in his company. The temptation was too strong to be resisted, and Miss MacDonald established herself under the Wilson banner. At first she was given only a small part in "The Lion Tamer," and at the same time understudied Lulu Glaser in both "The Lion Tamer" and "The Merry Monarch." The next season she played Marie, the peasant girl, in "Erminie," and during Miss Glaser's illness, Javotte. When "The Devil's Deputy" was brought out for the season of 1894-95, she created the rôle of Bob, the valet. She was a capital Mrs. Griggs in the pretty Sullivan opera, "The Chieftain," her singing of the topical song, "I Think there is Something in That," being especially popular. During the summer of 1896 she appeared in Boston in "The Sphinx," making a pleasing impression as Shafra. The following fall found her again with the Francis Wilson forces, playing Lucinde in "Half a King." That summer she filled another engagement in Boston as the Japanese maiden Woo Me, in the not-too-successful opera, "The Walking Delegate." It was a dainty part and charmingly done. The next season Miss MacDonald was engaged by Klaw and Erlanger for the Sousa opera, "The Bride Elect," with which she remained two seasons, and this was followed by her appearance in "The Princess Chic." CHAPTER XVI MARIE DRESSLER [Illustration: MARIE DRESSLER.] One cannot see Marie Dressler on the stage without being convinced that she is acting no one in the world but herself. Such, I believe, is the actual condition of affairs, although there are sometimes strange paradoxes in theatrical life. It would not be altogether extraordinary for the rollicking tomboy of the stage to be in private life the most retired and the most dignified person imaginable, a woman with spinster written all over her face and reeking in domesticity, with a decided fondness for tea, toast, and tidies. However, that is not the case with Marie Dressler. She has a mental quirk that keeps the incongruous side of life in her view practically all the time. She cannot help pricking constantly the bubble of mirth any more than she can help breathing. Her humor is just the kind that one would naturally expect to find as a companion to her overflowing physique,--ponderous, weighty, and a bit crude, perhaps, but spontaneous, real, and thoroughly good-natured. She never stabs with the keen shaft of cynical wit, and she does no business in the epigram market. Her specialty is incongruity, for Marie Dressler is a burlesquer in thought, word, and deed, and being a burlesquer she is of necessity absolutely without illusions. When one is so susceptible to the oddities, the inconsistencies, and the tragic pettiness of human affairs as she is, it is a toss-up whether or not his settled condition of mind, after a fair experience with the world, be one of gloomy pessimism or irresponsible optimism. Had Miss Dressler been by nature cold, suspicious, and inherently selfish, had she been unsympathetic and without the milk of human kindness, her instinct for incongruity would surely have turned her toward misanthropy. Her disposition, however, was rollicking, jovial, and fun-loving. She was naturally impulsive, generous, and warm-hearted. Consequently, life, even in its smallnesses and its meannesses, made her laugh. With the humorist's whimsical temperament she united also the happy faculty of being able to communicate to others by means of the theatre her comical view of things. Choosing to do this through the force of her own personality rather than by infusing her personality into a dramatist's conception, she became a droll, a professional jester. Miss Dressler's best-known and most characteristic work on the stage was done in the rôle of the boisterous music-hall singer, Flo Honeydew, in "The Lady Slavey." It was hardly a case of acting,--better call it a case of letting herself go. Marie Dressler without subterfuge presented herself in the guise of the unconventional Miss Honeydew. She seemed a big, overgrown girl and a thoroughly mischievous romp with the agility of a circus performer and the physical elasticity of a professional contortionist. To call her graceful would be an unpardonable accusation. Possibly she might have been graceful had she chosen to be; but what she was after principally was energy, and she got it,--whole car-loads of it. Her comic resource was inexhaustible, her animal spirits were irrepressible, and her audacity approached the sublime. Yet, amid all her amazing unconventionality and her astonishing athletic feats, one found, if he met her on her own plane of impersonal jollity, neither vulgarity nor suggestiveness. Her mental attitude toward her audience was absolutely clean and straightforward. She was not a woman cutting up antics and indulging in unseemly pranks, but a royal good fellow with an infinite variety of jest. With nothing especially tangible to offer as evidence, I have a suspicion that Marie Dressler, if she could escape from her reputation as a burlesquer, might act a "straight" part not at all badly. It is only a fine line between burlesque and legitimate acting, only a triflingly different mental attitude, which results in travesty instead of seriousness. Of course, the burlesque must be set forth with the proper amount of exaggeration to give point to the take-off, but that is only a matter of technique. Artificiality in actors and insincerity in dramatists very often result in unconscious burlesque. The melodramatic school is particularly prone to this most inartistic of blunders, and many a good laugh has followed lines that were supposed to be charged with the most highly colored sentiments and situations that were intended to be dramatically strong and impressive. One at all familiar with Miss Dressler's methods cannot have failed to notice her trick of beginning a speech with profound and even convincing seriousness and ending it in ridiculous contrast with a sudden drop from the dramatic to the commonplace. In spite of the fact that one knows for a certainty that she is fooling him, she succeeds invariably in making the first part of her sentence seem honest and sincere. Now, I do not believe that she could hit just the right key every time in these startling and laughter-provoking contrasts, if she did not have to an unusual extent the instinct for dramatic effect, which is so large a part of the equipment of the legitimate actor. However, I hope that she will never make the experiment. There are already enough serious actors of ordinary calibre, while the genuine burlesquer of Marie Dressler quality is rare indeed. Miss Dressler's versatility as a single entertainer was splendidly illustrated in a curious variety act, which was called "Twenty Minutes in Shirt Waists." It was devised for the sole purpose of showing off to the best advantage Miss Dressler's native talent for fun-making and travesty. It was mere hodge-podge, of course, with neither rhyme nor reason, but it did afford Miss Dressler every chance that she could desire to display her marvellous resource as a comic entertainer. The title of the sketch, "Twenty Minutes in Shirt Waists," suggested some sort of a disrobing act, but in that it was deceptive. Indeed, the title--and possibly it was all the better for that--had no connection at all with the act beyond the fact that Miss Dressler and her assistant, Adele Farrington, both wore shirt waists of spotless white. It was a very intimate and unstagy affair. The two entertainers called each other Marie and Adele, and they kept up the illusion of spontaneous comradeship by appearing, or seeming to appear, in the Eleanora Duse fashion, without facial make-up. The turn itself was a continuous "jolly," and Miss Dressler introduced before it was over about everything funny that she ever did in the theatre, including the amusing revolving hat of "The Lady Slavey" fame. Miss Dressler was born in Canada, and went on the stage when she was sixteen years old; and in spite of the fact that she was without experience,--in fact, before she had ever seen a comic opera,--she rather inverted the ordinary method of procedure, and started at once to play old women. Her first character was Katisha in "The Mikado" in a company managed by Jules Grau. The reason, so she claims, that she made a try at "old women" was because she was too big and healthy ever to meet with success as a soubrette. Her Katisha was sufficiently liked to convince her that light opera was just the place for her, and thus her theatrical career began. "I might state," remarked Miss Dressler, naïvely, in speaking of her early experiences, "that we members of the Grau Company were promised and were supposed to receive very good salaries. All we got, however, was the promises, and they came early and often. No, that is not altogether true: we got besides the promises twenty-five cents which was handed to each member of the company every night. It was supposed to be squandered in the purchase of beer. I forgot this little circumstance, for I did not drink beer, and consequently in my case the aforesaid quarter of a dollar was not forthcoming. This omission hurt me so much that I resigned from this enterprising organization, and wandered to Philadelphia. The exchequer was about as low as it well could be, and I was glad enough to take a place in the chorus of a summer company at eight dollars a week,--not a great deal, to be sure, but I got it, such as it was." Miss Dressler's next engagement was with the Bennett and Moulton Opera Company, from which Della Fox was also graduated. This organization played week stands in small cities and large towns, giving two performances a day and changing the bill every day. This may be said to have been Miss Dressler's school, for while under the Bennett and Moulton management she appeared in thirty-eight different operas and played every variety of part, from prima donna rôles to old women. Following this arduous experience on the road came her first appearance in New York at the Fifth Avenue Theatre as Cunigonde in "The Robber of the Rhine," an opera of which Maurice Barrymore, who wrote the book, and Charles Puerner, who composed the music, never had reason to feel proud. Her first New York success of any consequence, therefore, was not made until she appeared with Camille D'Arville in "Madeleine, or the Magic Kiss." Her next venture was as the Queen in "1492," the part which brought fame to that most accomplished woman impersonator, Richard Harlow. After the termination of this engagement she appeared for a time at the Garden Theatre, New York, under the management of A. M. Palmer, and then joined Lillian Russell in "Princess Nicotine." Her remarkable success in "The Lady Slavey" came next, and since then she has been seen in "Hotel Topsy Turvy," "The Man in the Moon," and vaudeville. CHAPTER XVII DELLA FOX [Illustration: Copyright, 1894, by J. B. Falk, Waldorf-Astoria, N. Y. DELLA FOX.] It was a dozen or fifteen years ago that the hard-working organization known as the Bennett and Moulton Opera Company was a frequent visitor to the small cities and large towns of New England. It played week stands with daily matinees, and it was, more than likely, the pioneer to flaunt in the theatrical field the conquering banner of "ten, twenty, thirty." I have every feeling of gratitude toward the Bennett and Moulton Opera Company, for it introduced me, at the modest rate of ten cents per introduction, which small sum purchased the right to sit aloft in the gallery, to all the famous old-time operettas,--"Olivette," "The Mascotte," "The Chimes of Normandy," and others. As I recall the annual performances of this obscure troupe, they were surprisingly good. At least, so they seemed to me, and I can laugh even now at the excruciatingly funny fellow who sang the topical song, "Bob up Serenely" in "Olivette." There was also a curious dance, I remember, that went with the song,--a spreading out simultaneously of arms and legs in jumping-jack fashion,--and we boys thought it vastly amusing. We clapped and stamped and whistled, and kept the poor comedian at work as long as our breath held out and long after his had gone. The last time that I saw the Bennett and Moulton Opera Company was in "Fra Diavolo," and the prima donna--the term seems ridiculous and absurd as I think of the person to whom it is applied--was a golden-haired little creature, wonderfully ample, tremendously in earnest, and strangely fascinating, a dainty slip of a girl, who seemed, in truth, only a child. I can see her now as she sat on the edge of the bed in the chamber scene, unfastening her shoes, singing very sweetly and very expressively her good-night song, all unconscious of the bold brigands who were watching the proceedings from their places of concealment. She charmed me as no singer in light opera ever had before, and the impression that she made upon me has never been lost. The child was Della Fox, of whom at that time no one had ever heard--Della Fox in the humblest of surroundings, but to me more fascinating than in any of the brilliant settings that have since been hers. I did not see Della Fox again until 1890, when she was playing Blanche in "Castles in the Air" with DeWolf Hopper. She had changed greatly in the few years, though far less than she has since the days of "Castles in the Air," "Wang," and "Panjandrum." Her appealing, unsophisticated girlishness had gone, and in its place was self-possession and authority. She was charming in her daintiness, provoking in her coquetry, a tantalizing atom of femininity. Her archness was not bold nor unwomanly, and her vivacity was well within the bounds of refinement and good taste. Her singing voice, too, was musical, though not over strong. Della Fox was born in St. Louis on October 13, 1872. Her father, A. J. Fox, was a photographer, who made something of a specialty of theatrical pictures; and thus Della's babyhood was passed, not exactly in the playhouse atmosphere, perhaps, but certainly in an atmosphere next door to that of the greasepaint and footlights. Her experience on the stage began when she was only seven years old as the midshipmate in a children's "Pinafore" company, which travelled in Missouri and Illinois for a season. She was an astonishingly precocious child, and many persons who watched her shook their heads and predicted that her talent had ripened too early, and that, as is the case with many promising stage children, she would never amount to anything. Apparently this midshipmate experience firmly established in Miss Della's childish mind the intention to become an actress. Her parents, however, succeeded in keeping her in school for a few years longer, though she appeared in several local performances where a child was needed. When she was nine years old, for instance, she acted for a week in St. Louis the child's part in the production of "A Celebrated Case" of which James O'Neill was the star, and she was also at one time with a "Muldoon's Picnic" company. Her first real professional experience, however, was obtained with an organization known as the Dickson Sketch Club. This was gotten up by four St. Louis young men, W. F. Dickson and W. G. Smythe, both of whom became prominent theatrical managers, Augustus Thomas, the playwright, and Edgar Smith, the author of several Casino pieces, and at present writer-in-ordinary to Weber and Fields. Mr. Thomas made a one-act play of Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett's story, "Editha's Burglar," and the company also appeared in a musical farce called "Combustion." Della Fox was the Editha in the play and the soubrette in the musical piece, while Mr. Thomas acted Bill Lewis, the burglar, and Mr. Smith was Paul Benton. Miss Fox's impersonation of Editha was, according to report, very good indeed. At any rate, the success of the play was sufficient to encourage the author to expand it to three-acts. The result was "The Burglar," one of the first plays in which Mr. E. H. Sothern appeared as a star. In the three-act version Sothern acted Bill Lewis, the burglar, and Elsie Leslie was Editha. Mr. Dickson, who is now connected with the business staff of the Alhambra in Chicago, referred not long ago to this early experience as a manager. "Yes," he said, "that was 'Gus' Thomas's début as a dramatic author. 'Gus' was in the box office with me at the Olympic in St. Louis, and he managed to find time during the leisure moments when he was not selling tickets to scribble ideas in dramatic form. He read me this little sketch, 'Editha's Burglar,' and asked me to give it a trial. Right across the street from the theatre lived Della Fox, daughter of a photographer, a precocious little miss, whose talents were always in requisition whenever there were any child's parts to be filled at the theatre. I used to send over for Della whenever there was a little part for her, and she was delighted to get away from school and skip and trip before the footlights. After 'Gus' had read the play to me, he suggested that Della should play little Editha, and as a result I was induced to put the piece on with the budding author in the principal rôle. It had a certain sort of success, and we went on a tour, using 'The Burglar' as a curtain raiser to another play called 'Combustion,' also from 'Gus' Thomas's pen. Later 'The Burglar' was produced in New York as a curtain-raiser to William Gillette's comedy, 'The Great Pink Pearl.' Gillette himself played the burglar, and Mr. Thomas was encouraged to expand his sketch into a pretentious three-act play, and it went on the road, making money for the managers and familiarizing the public with Augustus Thomas's name." Next came Miss Fox's connection with the Bennett and Moulton Company, with which she appeared in the leading soprano rôles of all the light operas,--"Fra Diavolo," "The Bohemian Girl," "The Pirates of Penzance," "Billie Taylor," "The Mikado," and "The Chimes of Normandy." Her success with this minor organization brought her to the notice of Heinrich Conried, who was getting together an opera company to appear in "The King's Fool." She was given the soubrette part, and created something of a stir wherever the opera was given by her singing of "Fair Columbia," one of the most popular songs of the piece. From Mr. Conried also she received about all the real instruction in dramatic art that she had ever had. When Davis and Locke, who had managed the Emma Juch Opera Company, decided to launch DeWolf Hopper as a star, they began to look about for a small-sized soubrette to act as a foil for Mr. Hopper's great height. George W. Lederer, of the New York Casino, suggested Della Fox, and accordingly she was engaged and opened with Hopper in "Castles in the Air" at the Broadway Theatre, New York, in May, 1890. Her success in this larger field was remarkable, and before the summer was over she was sharing the honors with Hopper and was just as strong a popular favorite as he. Her Blanche was a delightful creation throughout, but best remembered is the "athletic duet" in which she and Hopper gave amusing pantomimic representations of games of billiards, baseball, and other familiar sports. Her Mataya in "Wang," which was brought out in New York in the summer of 1891, was another triumph. This was, perhaps, the most artistic of all her rôles. She was cute, impish, and jaunty in turn as the Crown Prince, and, in addition, was a picture never to be forgotten in her perfect fitting white flannel suit, worn in the second act. It was in this act, too, that she sang the famous summer-night's song, which was whistled and hand-organed throughout the land. Next Miss Fox created the principal soubrette rôle in Mr. Hopper's opera "Panjandrum," in which she continued to appear until she made her début as a star in August, 1894, at the Casino, New York, in Goodwin and Furst's opera, "The Little Trooper." Her first season was extremely successful. The next year she was seen in "Fleur-de-lis," another Goodwin-Furst product. Writing of Miss Fox in this opera, Philip Hale said:-- "Disagreeable qualities in the customary performance of Miss Fox were not nearly so much in evidence as in some of her other characters. She was not so deliberately affected, she was not so brazen in her assurance. Even her vocal mannerisms were not so conspicuous. She almost played with discretion, and often she was delightful. Her self-introduction to her father was one long to be remembered. No wonder that the audience insisted on seeing it again and again. All in all, Miss Fox appeared greatly to her advantage." His criticism of the opera is also interesting: "It was March 31, 1885, that 'Pervenche,' an operetta, text by Duru and Chivot, music by Audran, was first produced at the Bouffes-Parisiens. Mrs. Thuillier-Leloir was the Pervenche, Maugé the Count des Escarbilles, and Mesnacker the Marquis de Rosolio. The honors of the evening, however, were borne away by Mr. and Mrs. Piccaluga, who were respectively Frederick and Charlotte. The opera did not please, and it ran only twenty-nine nights. Nor has it been revived. "In the time of Henry the Second, or Henry the Third, two nephews disputed the right to possess a castle in Touraine that had belonged to their late uncle, who died without will. Rosolio held the castle, and Escarbilles tried to dislodge him. By the will, found eventually, the castle belonged to Rosolio if Frederick, the son of Escarbilles, should marry Pervenche, the natural daughter of Rosolio. "The performance was in the main poor, and the music of Audran was not distinguished, they say. A romance of Frederick, a pastorale Tyrolienne sung by Charlotte at the end of the second act, and a duet of menders of faience in the third act, said to be the best of the three, alone seemed worthy of remark. "So much for 'Pervenche,' the libretto of which furnished the foundation for Mr. Goodwin's story and songs. Just how far Mr. Goodwin departed from the situations furnished by Messrs. Durn and Chivot, I am unable to say, for I never saw 'Pervenche' nor its libretto. However much he may be indebted, this can be truly said: he has written an entertaining book; the plot is coherent, and the situations laughable. The second act is admirable throughout. The colossal effrontery of the starved Rosolio in the castle manned by women disguised as soldiers, the reconciliation of the nephews, the exchange of reminiscences of gay student days in Paris, the discovery of the imposition, and the renewed hostilities,--these are amusing and well connected. Furthermore, the audience at the end of this act realizes at once the need of a third act, to clear up matters. Now this is rare in operetta of to-day. Even in the third act the interest never flags, although there was one dreadful moment, when it looked as though the old 'Mascotte' third-act business was to be introduced. Fortunately the suspicion was groundless, and the audience breathed freer and forgot its fears in the enjoyment of the delightful scenes between Des Escarbilles and the miller, and then the ghost. "Not so much can be said in praise of the music. It is the same old thing that has served in many operettas. There is a jingle, there are the inevitable waltz tunes that always sound alike. But the music gives the comedians an excuse for singing and dancing. It thus serves its turn and is promptly forgotten until another operetta comes, and the hearer has a vague impression that he has heard the tunes before." "The Wedding Day," with Della Fox, Lillian Russell, and Jefferson De Angelis in the cast, was brought out in the fall of 1897, and it revived to a degree old-time memories of players at the Casino. The opera itself proved to be of an order of merit recalling "Falka," "The Merry War," and "Nanon," the like of which had not appeared for many, many seasons. The music was ambitious without being dull, and some of the concerted numbers had genuine musicianly value. The story held its interest fairly well, though in spots it was too complicated, and at one point in the third act quite absurd. Still it was an excellent vehicle to display the talents of the so-called "triple alliance" of comic opera stars. Miss Fox, who had shown a decided tendency toward stoutness, had trained down to within hailing distance of her former slender lithesomeness, and she made a pretty and attractive bride. The following season found Miss Fox again an individual star, this time in "The Little Host." Her last appearances in opera were made in this piece, for after her season had begun in the fall of 1899, she was taken seriously ill, and for a long time her death was expected. She recovered partially, however, after months of illness, and in the spring of 1900 she appeared for a few months in vaudeville. Even this labor proved too much for her strength, and her friends were compelled to remove her to a place where she might have perfect rest. CHAPTER XVIII CAMILLE D'ARVILLE Camille D'Arville, like Lillian Russell, Pauline Hall, and Jessie Bartlett Davis, is one of the old guard, in American light opera. She has not appeared in opera for some time, for during the season of 1899-1900 she followed the general inclination and went into vaudeville. From these appearances it was apparent that her voice was not what it had been once--and little wonder that it had failed, when one recalls how continuously that voice has been in use since the owner left her Dutch home, forswore her own name of Neeltye Dykstra, and first learned to talk a prettily accentuated English. She still had in full the power to win an audience instantly and completely. Nor had she lost to any perceptible degree her rare good looks. A little fuller in the figure, perhaps, than she was five years ago, she carried herself with the same fine grace and perfect poise which were of themselves an art. Camille D'Arville has temperament, and she has style. It is these two qualities particularly that have brought her success so often in dashing cavalier parts, parts which require that a woman shall act either a man or a woman masquerading as a man. The modern comic opera librettist often has but one main purpose in mind, that is, to get his prima donna in tights as soon after the show begins as possible and keep her in them as long as practical. Indeed, if one were looking for a practical way to distinguish modern comic opera from extravaganza, he might find it in this matter of tights. If the leading woman represent a woman disguised as a man, she is an operatic prima donna; if, on the contrary, she be represented as a man from start to finish, she is merely principal "boy" in extravaganza. I suppose this tendency toward tights, which is so common as to be almost a light-opera conventionality, is an outgrowth or heritage from the old-fashioned burlesque. In fact, the difference between the modern comic opera and the burlesque of thirty years ago is purely one of degree. The relation between the two is similar to that between the variety show of eight years ago and the so-called "fashionable vaudeville" of to-day. Variety has been put through what managers of the large circuits call a refining process. There is no denying that the old-style variety show in most of its components was crude, noisy, and vulgar, and that its surroundings were scarcely favorable to the development of high art. But one was always sure of finding vigor and life--plenty of both--in the old-time varieties, and there were oftentimes spontaneity and humor--rude and bucolic, perhaps, but real, just the same--which one is not sure of meeting in the latter-day entertainments so carefully prepared for the mentally delicate and sensitive. Modern comic opera has adopted in a modified and refined form the chief characteristics--one of them the woman in tights and another of them the clown with his perfunctory low comedy--of the old-fashioned burlesque. Of course, the opera makes more pretensions than did the burlesque, and musically it is superficially superior, not necessarily more tuneful but orchestrated with more scholarly skill. Stage pageantry to-day is also much further developed, and spectacular effects are far more elaborate. The costuming is richer and more tasteful, and the women on the stage--if not actually younger and prettier--are certainly daintier and more feminine. The girlishness and natural beauty of many modern light-opera choruses are simply amazing. If we look beneath these externals, however, we find that the comic opera of to-day is hardly an advance over the burlesque of yesterday. There was good stuff in most of the old burlesques. They had original ideas, plenty of simple dramatic action, and some genuine comedy, but it is seldom that one finds any of these three essentials in the book of the modern comic opera. Not for ten years, I am tempted to declare, has there been written a light-opera libretto with sufficient intrinsic merit to attract the public attention without the assistance of the most magnetic personalities surrounded and set forth by the most gorgeous of stage accessories. Camille D'Arville's cavaliers--and in recent years she has not played a part that did not require male attire--are a direct heritage from the burlesque stage. When Camille D'Arville becomes a man, she makes the change from petticoats without the slightest show of self-consciousness. I heard her once termed the most modest woman in tights on the stage. That was simply an acknowledgment of her complete effacement of the personal equation. Yet her individuality was not at all diminished, her presence was inspiring, and her acting both vivacious and forceful. Camille D'Arville was born in 1863 in the village of Oldmarck, Province of Overyseel, Holland, and came of a family that had never shown any theatrical or especial musical talent. When she was twelve years old, her voice gave promise of developing into something more than the ordinary, and she was sent to the Conservatory at Amsterdam for instruction. Here she made her first appearance in concert in 1877. Later she went to Vienna, where she received further instruction, and also made a successful appearance in a one-act operetta. "I was a big girl fourteen or fifteen years old before I saw other lands than my own Holland," remarked Miss D'Arville, "and after I left Amsterdam I was on the Continent and in England for a long time before I returned home. I still claim Holland as my birthright, however, and I do not want to be called anything but Dutch. If I have a trace of French accent in speaking English, as some claim, it is not my fault. "But, do you know," she continued, "if it were purely a matter of inclination, I think I should much rather be an actress than to be a singer. Of course, I love music, but what can be more gratifying than to portray the heroines of Shakespeare and other great dramatists? But my natural endowment as a singer led me toward the operatic career. In opera I prefer a strong dramatic rôle, a part which has only one grand song if it afford plenty of opportunity for acting. "When did I first sing in public? Oh, I can't remember that. I appeared in concerts in Amsterdam when I was a girl, and by the time I entered my teens I took part in operatic performances given by the Conservatory pupils. Do you mean when did I make my real début in opera? I suppose that might be said to have occurred in March, 1883, at the Strand Theatre, London, in an operetta entitled 'Cymbria, or the Magic Thimble.'" Before this, however, Miss D'Arville had anything but a pleasant experience in London. She went there under the supposition that she had been engaged to sing in opera. The managerial promise she found to be worthless, and she had to be satisfied with a chance to earn a little money in a music hall. It was after several months of the most uncongenial toil that she finally gained recognition in "Cymbria." "Harry Paulton was responsible for that appearance," continued Miss D'Arville. "He heard me sing, and under his tuition I learned the words of the opera and sung them before I understood their meaning. It was not long, however, before I could speak English fairly well. The Dutch, you know, are famous linguists. "In October of the same year I created the part of Gabrielle Chevrette in 'La Vie,' an adaptation by H. B. Farnie of Offenbach's 'La Vie Parisienne.' The critics spoke very kindly of me then, but were much more generous in their praises when during the following spring I appeared as Fredegonda in a revival of M. Hervé's 'Chilperic' given at the Empire Theatre. Perhaps chief among my early successes was in 'Rip Van Winkle.' I succeeded Miss Sadie Martinot in the leading soprano part, and sang it until the end of the opera's long run. Fred Leslie was the Rip Van Winkle, and very fine he was, too. It was a pity he afterward became so thoroughly identified with burlesque." It was at the time of her first appearance in opera in England that the singer adopted the name of Camille D'Arville. It was chosen for euphony only, and had no significance whatever. After her success in "Rip Van Winkle" Miss D'Arville toured the English province with "Falka," and in 1887 returned to London to play in "Mynheer Jan." This was followed by an engagement at the Gaiety Theatre, and her position in London seemed established, when a quarrel with the management caused her to break her contract and she appeared at another theatre in the title rôle of "Babette." Miss D'Arville first came to this country in the spring of 1888, being under engagement to J. C. Duff; and her first appearance here was made in New York in April in "The Queen's Mate" in the cast with Lillian Russell. In the fall Miss D'Arville returned to London, where she appeared in "Carina," in which piece her charming archness was a feature. The Carl Rosa Company then engaged her to take the part of Yvonne in "Paul Jones," in which Agnes Huntington as the hero had taken the city by storm. With the same company she also created the title rôle in "Marjorie," which also enjoyed a long run. During the summer of 1889 Miss D'Arville became connected with the New York Casino, appearing in "La Fille de Madame Angot," "The Grand Duchess," and "Poor Jonathan." Back to London she hied herself once more, and for a time was heard at the Trocadero and Pavillon. Then she returned to the United States, and joined the Bostonians, with whom she sang Arline in "The Bohemian Girl," Maid Marion in "Robin Hood," and Katherine in a revival of "The Mascotte." She was probably the most satisfactory Maid Marion, all things considered, that ever sang the part. Certainly she was better as an actress than Marie Stone, who had previously taken the rôle, and she was physically better fitted to the character than Alice Nielsen. Critics, who up to that time had not been entirely satisfied with Miss D'Arville, claiming that her vocal method was bad and her acting oftentimes crude and meaningless, found her work in "Robin Hood" very much to their taste. "As a singer she has improved during the past year," said one. "Her tones are purer; she uses her voice with more discretion; and she has discovered that a scream is not synonymous with forte. She is vivacious; she lends a dramatic interest that has been sadly lacking in former performances of this company, when the members were too apt to mistake the audience for a congregation and the stage for a choir loft. She is fair to look upon, and yet she does not strive to monopolize attention." After quitting the Bostonians Miss D'Arville starred in Edward E. Rice's spectacular production of the extravaganza "Venus," which was first acted in Boston in September, 1893. Her dashing Prince Kam, that imaginary Thibetian potentate, who, finding no earthly beauty that satisfied his ideal, journeyed to Mars, where he succeeded in winning the love of Venus herself, was a thoroughly delightful characterization. "A Daughter of the Revolution," with which Miss D'Arville was next identified, was made over by J. Cheever Goodwin and Ludwig Engländer from a comic opera called "1776," produced some ten years before by a German company playing at the Thalia Theatre in New York. It achieved but limited popularity at that time, but in its revised form it was an agreeable, if not exactly exciting, entertainment. It was not an ideal comic opera, by any means. Too much of the machinery of construction was left visible for that. There were two characters, the dealer in military supplies and the laundress, so obviously dragged in simply because the low-comedy man needed a foil and a soubrette to play opposite to him, that one looked to see the marks of violence on their ears. But librettos are hard things to write--they must be or we should certainly find one now and then that is above reproach--so one would fain overlook jarring circumstances for the sake of the tuneful melodies of the score and the brisk action. Miss D'Arville sang well, and made an attractive picture in her series of becoming costumes. A starring tour in "Madeleine; or the Magic Kiss," a comic opera of considerable merit although it never won more than a fair degree of popularity, was her next venture, and then she was engaged to create the prima donna rôle of Lady Constance in "The Highwayman," a Reginald DeKoven and Harry B. Smith composition. A quarrel with the management while rehearsals were in progress caused her to retire from the company, however, and her place was taken by Hilda Clark. CHAPTER XIX MARIE TEMPEST [Illustration: MARIE TEMPEST.] No better characterization of Marie Tempest, that wonderfully fascinating personality which last appeared in this country during the season of 1893-94 in "The Algerian," have I ever seen than that written by Charles Frederick Nirdlinger and published several years ago in the "Illustrated American." "Nell Gwynne lives again in the person of Marie Tempest," declared Mr. Nirdlinger. "From out of a past tinkling with tuneful poesy, sparkling with the glory of palettes that limned only beauty and grace, bubbling with the merriment and gallantry of gay King Charlie's court, there trips down to moderns a most convincing counterfeit of that piquant creature. If one may trust imagination's ear, little Tempest sings as pretty Nell did: in the same tenuous, uncertain voice, with the same captivating tricks of tone, the same significant nuances, and the same amorous timbre. Tempest talks just as Nell did, and walks with the same sturdy stride,--there was nothing mincing about Nell,--and, if one may trust to fancy's eye, she looks just as Nell looked. I have seen Nell a hundred times, and so have you, dear reader. The mere sight of that curt, pert, and jadish name--Nell Gwynne--calls up that strangely alluring combination of features: the tip-tilted nose, the pouting lips, the eyes of a drowsy Cupid, the confident, impudent poise of the head. None of them fashioned to the taste of the painter or sculptor, but forming in their unity a face of pleasing witchery. "There is no record of Nell's artistic methods, of the school of her mimetic performance, or the style of her singing. All we know of that sort of thing we must gather from the rhymes and rhapsodies of the poets. Some of them wrote in prose, to be sure; but they were poets for all that, and poets are such an unreliable lot when it comes to judging such a girl as Nell. If she had any art, though, I'll be bound it was like Tempest's. There is but one way to be infinitely charming in the craft of the theatre,--the eternal verities of art prevent that it should be otherwise,--and whatever devices of mimic mechanism Nell employed must have been those of her modern congener. But she never studied in Paris, some sceptic will say, and Tempest did: how could Nell Gwynne have mastered the lightness of touch, the exquisite refinement of gesture, the infinity of significant byplay that constitute the distinctly Parisian method of Tempest? To that I would answer that Tempest's method is not distinctly Parisian, that it is not at all Parisian. She is a delightful artist, not because of her brief period of Gallic training, but in spite of it. "Elsewhere I have ventured an opinion on the subject of what we have been taught to regard as the French school of comic opera. That school, if we may judge of its academic principles and practices by the performances of some of its most proficient graduates, has nothing in common with the methods of Tempest. Wanton wiles and indecent suggestion,--these are the essential features of that ridiculously lauded French school; kicks and winks and ogling glances, postures of affected languor, and convincing feats of vicious sophistication. Where, in all that, is to be found the simple graciousness, the dainty, delicate, unobtrusive art of Marie Tempest? To liken her to the garish product of that French school--as well liken Carot's sensuous nymph of the wood to Bougereau's sensual nymph of the bath! For my own part, I don't believe Tempest belongs to any school, or if she does, it is a school of which she is at once mistress and sole pupil. Indeed, it may be doubted whether instruction and training have any considerable part in the charm of such a player. There are women of infinitely better method--not manner--of singing and acting; women with whom nature has dealt far more carefully and generously in beauty of face and figure; women even in no degree inferior to Tempest in innate allurement. But this little Englishwoman, with her svelte form and her bewitching face of ugly features, her tricky voice that makes one think of a thrush that has caught a cold, her impertinences and patronizing ways with her audience, has about her a vague, illusive something that makes of her the most fetching personality of the comic-opera stage." Marie Tempest, whose real name is Marie Etherington, was born in London in 1867. Her father died while she was a child, and she was educated abroad by her mother. Five or six years of her life were spent in a convent near Brussels. From there she was sent to Paris to finish her education, afterward going to London, where she became a student at the Royal Academy of Music. At that time she had no idea of going upon the stage. Her exceptional musical talent at once became apparent to the professors at the academy, notably Emanuel Garcia, who, although then upward of eighty years of age, took the liveliest interest in his young pupil. Miss Tempest worked so successfully with Garcia that within eighteen months of her entrance at the academy she had carried off from all other competitors the bronze, silver, and gold medals representing the highest rewards the academy could offer. She also studied for a time with Signor Randeggor, in London, and in 1886 made her first appearance on any stage at the London Comedy in "Boccaccio." It was a small part that she played in the London company managed by Arthur Henderson, and the salary which she received was four pounds a week. After that she created the soprano part in an opera called "The Fay o' Fire" at the Opera Comique, from thence returning for a few months to the Comedy Theatre to take Florence St. John's place in "Erminie." Miss Tempest then took an engagement with Augustus Harris at the Drury Lane in Hervise's comic opera, "Frivoli." In 1887 she joined Henry J. Leslie's company, then playing at the Prince of Wales's Theatre, London, in Alfred Cellier's opera, "Dorothy," in which she assumed the title rôle. In this part Miss Tempest made a very great success. She played in "Dorothy" for nearly nine hundred performances at the Prince of Wales and Lyric theatres. Subsequently she appeared at the Lyric in Cellier's opera of "Doris" and after that in "The Red Hussar." Although Miss Tempest was engaged chiefly in light opera, during these years she at various times undertook more serious work, frequently singing in oratorio and in the high-class London concerts. She came to this country for the first time in the spring of 1890, appearing in New York and after on tour as Kitty Carroll in "The Red Hussar." Her success was remarkable, and she at once became an established favorite. Although the prima donna of to-day might consider Kitty Carroll, with only its three changes of costume, from soldier to beggar girl and then to heiress, a veritable sinecure, Marie Tempest's skill in passing quickly from one character to another was ten years ago quite as much commented on as was her unquestionably artistic presentation of the triple rôles. She also repeated in this country her London success in "Dorothy," and sang in "Carmen" as well. Miss Tempest was next seen at the New York Casino as the successor to Lillian Russell and Pauline Hall. In the operetta, "The Tyrolean," she had a part scarcely equal to her abilities, although the nightingale song, which came in the last act, was a charming melody and was so delightfully sung by Miss Tempest as really to be the feature of the performance. In her peasant's dress Miss Tempest was the choicest of dainty morsels, a dream of fairylike loveliness. Her greatest success in this country, however, was "The Fencing Master" in which the prima donna rôle was peculiarly suited to her personality. This opera was built around the conceit of a master of fencing, who, not being blessed with a son to succeed him in his profession, brought up his daughter as a boy, and by severe training made her a most expert user of foil and sword. In this character Miss Tempest united remarkably well boyish freedom and masculine swagger with feminine charm and ingenuousness, and the picture that she made was one never to be forgotten. It was true, however, in spite of her great attractiveness in the part, that tights and tunic did take away a little of that subtle bewitchery, which was the root of her wonderful winsomeness in "Dorothy." It was a Boston critic, I believe, who said of her in this opera, that she suggested a Dresden china image that had hopped down from the mantel and committed an indiscretion. Still another, evidently a bit of a china connoisseur himself, applied the fancy porcelain simile with far more searching analysis. "She reminds one of a bit of Sèvres china," he declared, "although a pretty piece of Dresden would not be an inappropriate simile, especially when she is dressed in that picturesquely ragged costume in the first act. Sèvres china, however, is to an art connoisseur what truffles and pâte-de-foie gras are to an accomplished epicure." Whether she were Dresden china or Sèvres china, it mattered not; the main fact remained that a thoroughly feminine woman like Miss Tempest needed the fuss and feathers of feminine attire to bring out her attractions in the most effective way. That the public unconsciously felt this was proven even in "The Fencing Master," where her appearance in the last act in all the glory of court gown and flashing jewels was always the signal for the heartiest applause. In "The Algerian," by Reginald DeKoven and Glen MacDonough, which followed "The Fencing Master," being brought out in Philadelphia in September, 1893, Miss Tempest not only returned to the garb of her own sex, but appeared as well in her own auburn hair with that tiny irresistible curl hanging down the middle of her forehead, just like that of the little girl in the old ballad. At the close of the run of this opera in 1894, Miss Tempest returned to London. Her greatest hits of recent years in that city have been made as the heroine in "The Artist's Model" and as O Mimosa San in George Edwardes's original production of "The Geisha" at Daly's Theatre in London. CHAPTER XX MAUD RAYMOND High in the ranks of women low comedians who have been graduated from the variety theatre into musical comedy and extravaganza, is Maud Raymond, who fairly shares the honors with the Rogers Brothers in their popular vaudevilles. It would be unfair to call Miss Raymond an actress, for she does not aspire to be anything more than a delightful entertainer, whose unusual mimetic gifts and whose real or assumed sense of humor led her to adopt as the most natural thing imaginable the serious calling of making the world laugh. With her marked individuality, Miss Raymond drifted as a matter of course into character impersonation. In the days when she entered the varieties three distinct types of low-comedy characterizations were recognized--the Irish, the Dutch, and the negro. The first two were genuine burlesques, while the last named was the familiar minstrel type,--a great deal of burnt cork and an insignificant amount of genuine negro. Miss Raymond selected the Dutch type. Whether she was the first woman to attempt a Dutch character sketch, I do not know, but I am willing to risk the statement that she was the best one. An amazingly grotesque figure she presented, with her figure built on the lines of a meal sack with a string tied around the middle, and her huge sabots that clattered noisily every step she took. Her face was a study in ponderous stupidity, and her movements were slow and unwieldy. Yet, with all its grotesqueness, its mammoth exaggerations, there was human nature in the sketch and rich, full-blooded humor, the brutal, coarse humor of the soil, humor that had not been refined into flavorless delicacy nor polished into insipidness for the moral salvation of too easily shocked tenderlings. When the "coon" craze struck the stage, Miss Raymond was among the first to take that up, and she has clung faithfully to it ever since. Like all her work, her interpretation of the modern "coon" song is all her own. She does not reproduce so fantastically as some others the antics of the swell cake-walker, but she infuses into her work a rich humor that is infectious. In this one particular she resembles closely Miss May Irwin. May Irwin's "coon," however, is the Southern "mammy" type, while Maud Raymond's is of Northern city birth and training. In this aspect of her "coon" art, Miss Raymond seems nearer the progenitor of the up-to-date stage negro, who was, of course, the "nigger" minstrel of a number of decades ago. Miss Raymond's method was capitally illustrated in the song "I thought that he had Money in the Bank," which was introduced in "The Rogers Brothers in Wall Street" during the season of 1899-1900. Her dialect was by no means extraordinary. It had not the darky softness and twang, which one finds for instance so faithfully reproduced by Artie Hall. Miss Raymond, however, got a curious comic effect by twisting her words out of the corner of her mouth in a manner indescribable, by hunching up her shoulders, one a little higher than the other, thrusting her head forward, crooking her elbows, and letting her hands hang loose and lifeless as if they had been broken at the wrists. After seeing Miss Raymond's inimitable Dutch woman, I carried away the impression that she herself inclined toward embonpoint,--that she was grossly notoriously fat, in fact. Later observations, however, have caused me to revise that impression. Miss Raymond is not fat, merely comfortably plump. She is a decided brunette with rather irregular features, but features none the less attractive for that, snapping black eyes that seem always to sparkle with irrepressible merriment, and an inexhaustible amount of vivacity. Vivacity may, indeed, be said to be her specialty. It is always in evidence, and yet it never runs riot and it never becomes wearisome. Miss Raymond has been a vaudeville feature for the past twelve years. She made her first appearance with Rice and Barton's company, and afterward played two years with Harry Williams's Own Company. Her next appearance was in the soubrette part in "Bill's Boot," in which Joe J. Sullivan starred. She then joined Irwin Brothers' Company, in which she sang with great success. She spent several weeks in the Howard Athenæum Company when it was under James J. Armstrong's management, and finished the season with Fields and Hanson. Miss Raymond was specially engaged to play the soubrette rôle in Bolivar in Donnelly and Girard's "The Rainmakers." Those popular stars declared that the part had never been so well done as it was by Miss Raymond, but she was obliged to retire at the end of the season on account of illness. During the summer she appeared on the roof gardens and in the continuous houses. She joined Tony Pastor's company in the early fall, and played a season of fifteen weeks with that organization, meeting with great success. When the Rogers Brothers began starring with "The Reign of Error" in the fall of 1898, she was made a prominent feature of their company, and she continued with them as their leading support the following season in "The Rogers Brothers in Wall Street." She is also the wife of one of the brothers, though whether of Max or Gus I never can remember. CHAPTER XXI PAULINE HALL A very remarkable woman is Pauline Hall, whose stage career of twenty-five years encompasses every experience possible in light opera in this country. Miss Hall began as a dancer. She spent her apprenticeship in the chorus. She sang inconsequential rôles in opera, and she acted small parts in drama. She had her season in burlesque. She was for years the foremost figure in the best light-opera organization this country has ever known. She has starred, and she is to-day a better singer than the majority of her youthful contemporaries, a better actress than all except a very few of them, and a more satisfactory all-around artist--if the expression be permissible--than any of them. When I heard her sing with Francis Wilson in "Cyrano de Bergerac"--about the stupidest opera, by the way, ever produced--and in "Erminie" in the spring of 1900, I was amazed; her voice was in splendid condition, certainly better than it had been five years before, true in tone, clear, and without huskiness. It showed its wear only in the loss of the richness and sweetness--the music, one might say--of the old Casino days. In figure Miss Hall was trim and youthful. Her face was plump and rounded like a girl's. Her hair, cut short for boys' parts and coquettishly curled, retained its dark, almost black, hue, while her eyes--wonderfully handsome they always were--snapped and sparkled like a débutante's. Pauline Hall's fame reached its height during the long run of "Erminie" at the New York Casino. She was the originator of the rôle of the Erminie, and she sang in the opera in all the principal cities of the country. She was--and is still, for that matter--one of the finest formed women on the American stage, and her stately manner and graceful demeanor gained for her the sobriquet so commonly associated with her name--statuesque. During her subsequent starring career Miss Hall continued a popular favorite, although she was not consistently successful in obtaining operas of notable merit. "Puritania" met with excellent success, but "The Honeymooners" and "Dorcas" were neither of them strong enough to make any lasting impression. They were both of the familiar "prima donna in tights" type, and their librettos were without striking originality, and their scores showed only commonplace tunefulness. In spite of this handicap Miss Hall succeeded in maintaining--largely through the force of her personality and art--her place among the foremost in light opera in this country. During the season of 1899-1900 she most happily again became associated with Francis Wilson, who is also an "Erminie" product. Miss Hall, with her renewed youth and her years of experience, at once took a position in Wilson's company, second only to the star. In "Cyrano" she made Christian--a barren and sterile character--vigorous, picturesque, and attractive, while her Princess in "Erminie," barring the loss of vocal mellowness already referred to, was stronger than it was a dozen years ago. Pauline Hall's active life on the stage began when she was about fifteen years old. She was born in Cincinnati about 1860 in rather humble quarters in the rear of her father's apothecary shop on Seventh Street. She bore the somewhat formidable and decidedly German name of Pauline Fredericka Schmidgall, until she adopted the simple and harmonious stage name of Pauline Hall. It was in 1875, at Robinson's Opera House in Cincinnati, under the management of Colonel R. E. J. Miles, that Miss Hall made her first appearance on the stage. She began at the very bottom of the ladder, an "extra girl" in the chorus and a dancer in the ballet. Next she journeyed to the Grand Opera House in the same city, a theatre which was also under Colonel Miles's management, where she remained until the versatile Mr. Miles organized and put on the road his "America's Racing Association and Hippodrome," a circus-like enterprise. She was made a feature in the street parade tableaux of Mazeppa used to advertise the attraction, and a very effective figure she must have been, too, for she was a handsome girl and a picture of physical perfection. Besides luring the public to the show, Miss Hall entertained it after it got there by driving a Roman chariot in the races. After a summer of this exciting work Miss Hall returned to the theatre as a member of the chorus of the Alice Oates Opera Company, which was at that time making a Western tour under the management of the same Colonel Miles. Alice Oates was then in her prime, and the most popular operatic star in the country. She was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and educated in Louisville. When she was nineteen years old she made her début in Chicago in the Darnley burlesque, "The Field of the Cloth of Gold." She sang in "The Little Duke," "The Mascotte," "The Pretty Perfumer," "The Princess of Trebizonde," "The Grand Duchess," and "Olivette," and was one of the first of the many Ralph Rackstraws in "Pinafore" in this country. She died in Philadelphia on January 11, 1887, at the early age of thirty-seven years. She was small of figure and pretty of face, unusually so off the stage and dazzlingly so on the stage. Her voice was of rare compass and sympathetic in tone, and her acting was vivacious, dashing, and hearty. After leaving the Alice Oates Company, small parts in Samuel Colville Folly company gave Miss Hall a slight advance in the theatrical world, and then she made her first and only appearance in the "legitimate." She joined Mary Anderson's company, and for three or four months acted minor characters in the plays of Miss Anderson's repertory, which at that time was somewhat limited. Among Miss Hall's parts were Lady Capulet in "Romeo and Juliet" and the Widow Melnotte in Lord Bulwer Lytton's stilted melodrama, "The Lady of Lyons." In 1880, Miss Hall first began to be noticed by professional discoverers of stage talent. She was then a member of Edward E. Rice's "Surprise Party," with which she appeared in "Horrors" and "Revels." Next, in Rice's greatest success, "Evangeline," Miss Hall played Gabrielle and even Hans Wagner, being the first woman to try the droll character. In the fall of 1882 she went on a tour with J. H. Haverly's "Merry War" company, and sang the part of Elsa. With Haverly she also appeared in "Patience." Following this engagement she rejoined Mr. Rice's forces, and on December 1, 1883, opened with his company at the Bijou Opera House, New York, where she created the part of Venus in "Orpheus and Eurydice." She was a success from the start, and continued with Mr. Rice until the close of the run of the burlesque on March 15 of the following year, when she went with the company, under the management of Miles and Barton, on the road. On her return to New York, Miss Hall again appeared at the Bijou, on May 6, 1884, as Hasson in a revival of "Blue Beard," following this with another road experience that lasted until July. In August she began an engagement at Niblo's Garden, New York, as Loresoul in Poole and Gilmour's spectacular production of "The Seven Ravens." The part was a singing one, and Miss Hall added considerably to her popularity among the frequenters of the burlesque shows that were so largely patronized in those days. In February, 1885, Miss Hall was in the title rôle of "Ixion" at the Comedy Theatre, New York, though only for a short time, and on April 4 she made her first appearance in a German speaking part, singing Prince Orloffsky in "Die Fiedermaus" at the Thalia Theatre. On May 25 Miss Hall opened with Nat C. Goodwin at the Park Theatre, Boston, and created the character of Oberon in the travesty "Bottom's Dream." This was a failure, and in a few weeks Miss Hall returned to New York, where she signed with Rudolph Aronson of the Casino, making her first appearance as Ninon de l'Enclos in the English presentation of "Nanon." She did well with the part, and further increased the favorable impression that she had made by her Angelo in "Amorita" and her Saffi in "The Gipsy Baron." Next came "Erminie," which achieved a success as yet unequalled by any light opera in this country unless it be "Robin Hood." The successor to "Erminie" was "Nadjy," also a famous hit, in which, however, Miss Hall's part of the Princess Etelka was overshadowed by the character of Nadjy, the dancer, so captivatingly played by Marie Jansen in the original production. After "Nadjy" came "The Drum Major," which failed, however, to make any lasting impression. After leaving the Casino Miss Hall began her career as a star, appearing in "Puritania." This was followed the next year by "Amorita" and "Madame Favart," while "Puritania" was retained in her repertory. The season succeeding she brought out "The Honeymooners." During 1894-95 her operas were "La Belle Hélène," a revival of "The Chimes of Normandy," and "Dorcas." She then retired from the stage for a while, and afterward appeared in vaudeville until she joined Francis Wilson. "Puritania, or the Earl and the Maid of Salem," the best known and most successful of all her operas, was produced in Boston in the summer of 1892. The opera was written by C. M. S. McLellan, and Edgar Stillman Kelley was responsible for the music. The story of the opera was decidedly attractive. The action began in Salem. Elizabeth, a fair young miss of the town, had been accused of being a witch by Abigail, a confirmed woman-hater. Elizabeth was tried by the local tribunal and was condemned, chiefly because she had refused to wed Jonathan Blaze, the chief justice of the court. Just as the sentence was pronounced an English ship arrived in the harbor, and Vivian, Earl of Barrenlands, came ashore. He rescued Elizabeth from the mob, and captivated by her beauty proceeded to make love to her. Nothing would do but he must take her back to England with him. Smith, the Witch-finder-general to his Majesty Charles II., was indignant because Vivian had won the girl, and threatened to expose her as a witch to the king. The second act took place in a subterranean chamber under the king's palace, where Killsin Burgess, a conspirator, was plotting after the Guy Fawkes fashion to blow up everything. So deeply did he meditate on divers plots and treasons, that he fell asleep, lighted pipe in mouth and seated on a keg of gunpowder. The next scene showed the palace where King Charles had just bestowed his favor on Vivian and the future Countess of Barrenlands. Smith entered with Blaze and Abigail, and the trio denounced Elizabeth as a witch. Elizabeth, driven half mad by their false accusations, mockingly declared that she was a witch, and proceeded to "weave a spell." She summoned Asmodeus, the Prince of Eternal Darkness, to appear. A loud report was heard, and the form of Burgess was hurled through the air. The sparks from his pipe had ignited the keg of powder which exploded just as Elizabeth was pretending to display her powers. Of course, Elizabeth was condemned by the king on this _prima facie_ evidence; but Burgess, recognizing her as his daughter, confessed his conspiracy against the king, and all ended happily. Miss Hall gave the opera a first-class production, a fine cast, and handsome scenery. Louise Beaudet acted Elizabeth, and graceful and charming she was, too. Miss Hall herself played Vivian. Frederic Solomon was the original Witch-finder-general, and his conception of the character was thoroughly original. Jacques Kruger as the Judge, Eva Davenport as Abigail, John Brand as the King, and Alf Wheelan as the Conspirator were all happily chosen. The opera ran in Boston from June until September. Then Miss Hall took the opera on the road for a season. "Puritania" was tuneful and bright in action. The dialogue was often sparkling, the fun was spontaneous, and the three comedians had parts which had the added value of being characters. Vivian was admirably suited to Miss Hall's talents. Her songs were given with spirit, her acting had that freedom so characteristic of her "boys," while her costumes were pictorially gorgeous. Miss Hall's first husband was Edward White, whom she met in San Francisco in 1878, where he was engaged in mining enterprises. They were married in St. Louis in February, 1881. Eight years later Miss Hall secured a divorce from Mr. White, and in 1891 she was married to George B. McLellan, the manager of her company. CHAPTER XXII HILDA CLARK The divine gift of song has placed Hilda Clark, whose ability as an actress is by no means great, in a position of prominence in the theatrical world. She went on the stage because she could sing, and did not learn to sing because she was on the stage; and, owing to the fact that there is, always has been, and always will be a demand for attractive young women with pleasing singing voices, she has had her fair measure of success. Miss Clark has also the added charm of more than ordinary physical attractiveness. She is a blonde of prettily irregular features. Her personality is winning rather than compelling, and her stage presence is good, though there are times when this would have been improved by more bodily grace and freedom. Byron, who hated a "dumpy woman," would have found Miss Clark "divinely tall and most divinely fair," but very likely he would have advised her to take a mild course in calisthenics in order to acquire conscious control of a somewhat unruly physique. Hilda Clark comes of an old Southern family, several of whose members won military distinction. An ancestor of hers, Colonel Winston, was awarded a sword by Congress for his services in the Revolutionary War. Her great-grandfather, General Winston, was distinguished in the war of 1812, while several of her relatives were noted for gallantry during the Civil War. Miss Clark was born in Leavenworth, Kansas, in the early seventies. When her father, who was a banker, died, the family removed to Boston, where Miss Clark was educated. As she grew into womanhood, her voice attracted the attention of her friends, and by their advice she went to Europe, where she studied music for two years. On her return to this country she became the soprano of St. Mark's Church in New York City, and it was there that Willard Spenser, the composer of "The Princess Bonnie," first heard her sing. Miss Clark's voice is what is technically known as a soprano legere, and while she excels in floria music, her voice has considerable of that rare sympathetic quality possessed by coloratura singers. Her work in the theatre may be summed up in a few words. She made her début in the title rôle of "The Princess Bonnie" in September, 1895. After that she accepted the offer of The Bostonians, with whom she appeared for a season. In "The Serenade" she alternated in the rôle of Yvonne, the ballet dancer, with Alice Nielsen, and she also sung Maid Marian in "Robin Hood" and Arline in "The Bohemian Girl." Next she was engaged by Klaw and Erlanger. She created the part of Lady Constance in "The Highwayman" after Camille D'Arville, who was expected to take the character, had quarrelled with the stage manager over some detail in the action, and refused to have anything more to do with the opera. Miss Clark was quite successful in this character, and it may be said to have established her firmly in the ranks of the light opera prima donnas. Next came her appearance in the prima donna rôle of John Philip Sousa's opera "The Bride Elect," in which she is best known by the general public. Sousa is the most eminent composer for the bass drum and the cymbals that we have, and he can make music with more accents than any other man in the business. His powerful first and third beats set the feet to tapping and the head to nodding, and the American public thinks that it is great stuff. So it is, the finest music for a military parade that ever came out of a brass band. Sousa writes his music with a metronome at his elbow clacking out the marching cadence of 120 to the minute. Every time the machine clacks he puts in a bang on the big drum and a clash with the cymbals. Then he weaves a stately moving melody around the bangs and the clashes, marks the whole business "fortissimo," and lets it go. He does not bother much about originality. His strong point is marches, and he knows it. In "The Bride Elect," he gave us marches--shall we say "galore"? The score was undoubtedly catchy, and the tunes pleased for the moment. As for the book, which was also by Sousa, it was nothing to boast of. It served admirably as a ringer-in for the marches. Miss Clark's work in "The Bride Elect" was thoroughly satisfactory. She sang the music with splendid effect and with much brilliancy. Her acting, to be sure, was hardly all that could be desired, but, fortunately for her success, the book did not call for any great dramatic force. Miss Clark's career has been somewhat unusual in that she took at once a position of importance on the stage and has continued in positions of importance ever since. All this has happened because she could sing; and so busy has she been with her singing that she really has had no time to learn to act. In other words, in spite of her five years behind the footlights, she still lacks experience. The woman who starts in a humble capacity in the chorus and who climbs slowly to the heights of calciumdom may have at first very crude notions regarding action, but she learns as time goes on to be non-committal in gesture at least. She may not develop into a histrionic genius, but she does acquire facility in the conventions of light opera that so often stand for acting. It is of just this facility that Hilda Clark is most in need. Index "Algerian," Tempest, Marie, 222, 232. "All the Comforts of Home," Hall, Josephine, 47. "American Beauty," May, Edna, 152. Russell, Lillian, 32. American Opera Company, 98. "Amorita," Hall, Pauline, 247, 248. Anderson, Mary, 245. "Apollo," Russell, Lillian, 32. "Aristocracy," Hall, Josephine, 47. Aronson, Rudolph, 247. "Artist's Model," Tempest, Marie, 232. Ashley, Minnie, 134. Atherton, Alice, 40. "Babette," D'Arville, Camille, 217. Barnabee, H. C., 19. Barnet, R. A., 82, 83, 140, 141. Barrymore, Maurice, 190. Beaudet, Louise, 251. "Belle Hélène," Hall, Pauline, 248. Hopper, Edna Wallace, 112. Lessing, Madge, 82. Russell, Lillian, 42. "Belle of New York," Edwardes, Paula, 113, 118. May, Edna, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153. Bennett & Moulton Opera Company, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 199. Bernard, Caroline Richings, 94. Bernhardt, Sarah, 28. "Billie Taylor," Fox, Della, 199. "Bill's Boot," Raymond, Maud, 137. "Black Sheep," Edwardes, Paula, 117. "Blue Beard," Hall, Pauline, 246. "Boccaccio," Tempest, Marie, 227. "Bohemian Girl," Clark, Hilda, 256. D'Arville, Camille, 218. Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 99. Fox, Della, 199. Nielsen, Alice, 20. Bostonians, Clark, Hilda, 255, 256. D'Arville, Camille, 218, 219. Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 88, 98, 99. Nielsen, Alice, 19, 20. "Bottom's Dream," Hall, Pauline, 247. Braham, Harry, 38. Brand, John, 251. "Bride Elect," Celeste, Marie, 169. Clark, Hilda, 256, 257, 258. MacDonald, Christie, 180. "Brigands," Russell, Lillian, 31, 32, 42. "Broadway to Tokio," Templeton, Fay, 76, 78. "Brownies," Celeste, Marie, 169. Burnett, Mrs. Frances Hodgson, 197. Burt, Laura, 118. "Carina," D'Arville, Camille, 217. Carl Rosa Opera Company, 217, 218. Carleton Opera Company, 98. "Carmen," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 99. Tempest, Marie, 229. Casino, New York, 25, 27, 29, 40, 65, 66, 200, 201, 206, 218, 229, 240, 247, 248. "Casino Girl," Earle, Virginia, 29. Gilman, Mabelle, 65. Castle Square Opera Company, 19, 169. "Castles in the Air," Fox, Della, 194, 195, 200, 201. "Cavalleria Rusticana," Celeste, Marie, 169, 170. "Celebrated Case," Fox, Della, 196. Celeste, Marie, 156. Cellier, Alfred, 228. "Chantaclara," Nielsen, Alice, 14. "Chieftain," Glaser, Lulu, 128, 129, 130, 131. MacDonald, Christie, 180. "Chilperic," D'Arville, Camille, 216. "Chimes of Normandy," Fox, Della, 199. Hall, Pauline, 248. "Chorus Girl," Ashley, Minnie, 141. "Chris and the Wonderful Lamp," Hopper, Edna Wallace, 112. "Chums," Hopper, Edna Wallace, 110. "Cigale," Russell, Lillian, 32. "Cinderella," Earle, Virginia, 26. "Circus Girl," Ashley, Minnie, 135, 141. Earle, Virginia, 28. Gilman, Mabelle, 65. Clark, Hilda, 221, 253. "Club Friend," Hopper, Edna Wallace, 109. Collier, Willie, 164. "Combustion," Fox, Della, 197, 198, 199. Conried, Heinrich, 199, 200. "Contented Woman," May, Edna, 148. "Corsair," Earle, Virginia, 26. Templeton, Fay, 74. "County Fair," Earle, Virginia, 26. Crox, Elvia, 117. "Cymbria, or the Magic Thimble," D'Arville, Camille, 215, 216. "Cyrano de Bergerac," Glaser, Lulu, 124, 133. Hall, Pauline, 240, 242. Dale, Alan, 7, 8. Daly, Augustin, 27, 29, 64, 71, 118. "Dangerous Maid," Edwardes, Paula, 118. Lessing, Madge, 86. D'Arville, Camille, 190, 208, 256. "Daughter of the Revolution," D'Arville, Camille, 220, 221. Davenport, Eva, 251. Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 88, 208. Davis, William J., 95. Dazey, C. T., 103. DeAngelis, Jefferson, 42, 206. DeKoven, Reginald, 221, 232. Desci, Max, 9. "Devil's Deputy," Glaser, Lulu, 128. MacDonald, Christie, 179, 180. Dickson Sketch Club, 196, 197, 198, 199. Dickson, W. F., 196, 197, 198, 199. "Dinorah," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 97. "Don Quixote," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 99. "Dorcas," Hall, Pauline, 241, 248. "Doris," Tempest, Marie, 228. "Dorothy," Tempest, Marie, 228, 229, 232. Dressler, Marie, 181. "Dr. Syntax," Hopper, Edna Wallace, 111. "Drum Major," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 98. Hall, Pauline, 248. Duff, J. C., 141, 217. Duff Opera Company, 41. Duse, Eleanora, 187. Earle, Virginia, 21. "Editha's Burglar," Fox, Della, 197, 198, 199. Edouin, Willie, 40. Edwardes, George, 232. Edwardes, Paula, 47, 113. Edwards, Julian, 172, 178. "El Capitan," Ashley, Minnie, 140. Hopper, Edna Wallace, 107, 111. Engländer, Ludwig, 220. "Erminie," Glaser, Lulu, 128, 133. Hall, Pauline, 240, 242, 248. MacDonald, Christie, 179. Russell, Lillian, 32. Tempest, Marie, 227. "Evangeline," Earle, Virginia, 26. Hall, Josephine, 47. Hall, Pauline, 245. Templeton, Fay, 74. "Excelsior, Jr.," Templeton, Fay, 75. "Falka," D'Arville, Camille, 217. Farnie, H. B., 216. Farrington, Adele, 187. "Fatinitza," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 99. "Faust," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 96, 97, 99. "Fay o' Fire," Tempest, Marie, 228. "Fencing Master," Tempest, Marie, 230, 231, 232. "Fiedermaus," Hall, Pauline, 247. "Fille de Madame Angot," D'Arville, Camille, 218. First Corps of Cadets, 82, 117. Fiske, Minnie Maddern, 67, 70, 71, 72. "Fleur-de-lis," Fox, Della, 202. "Fortune Teller," Nielsen, Alice, 5, 7, 20. Fougère, 76, 78, 79, 80. "1492," 82. Ashley, Minnie, 140. Dressler, Marie, 190. Fox, Della, 27, 42, 72, 104, 110, 111, 168, 190, 192. "Fra Diavolo," Fox, Della, 193, 194, 199. Frazer, Robert, 74. "Frivoli," Tempest, Marie, 228. Frohman, Charles, 47, 109, 111. Fursch-Nadi, 98. Furst, William, 201, 202. Garcia, Emanuel, 227. "Geisha," Ashley, Minnie, 135, 141. Earle, Virginia, 23, 24, 27. Gilman, Mabelle, 65. Tempest, Marie, 232. Gerard, Bettina, 117. Gilbert, W. S., 19, 26, 31. Gill, William, 74. Gillette, William, 199. Gilman, Mabelle, 56, 86. "Gipsy Baron," Hall, Pauline, 247, 248. "Girl from Maxim's," Hall, Josephine, 49, 50, 51. "Girl from Paris," Hall, Josephine, 46, 48. "Girl I Left Behind Me," Hopper, Edna Wallace, 110. "Giroflé-Girofla," Celeste, Marie, 168. Russell, Lillian, 32, 42. Templeton, Fay, 74. Glaser, Lulu, 120, 179. Goodwin, J. Cheever, 201, 202, 204, 220. Goodwin, N. C., 164, 247. "Grand Duchess," Celeste, Marie, 168. D'Arville, Camille, 218. Russell, Lillian, 32, 42. Grau, Jules, 188, 189. "Great Metropolis," Celeste, Marie, 163. "Great Ruby," Edwardes, Paula, 118. "Greek Slave," Ashley, Minnie, 135, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146. Hale, Philip, 202, 203, 204, 205. "Half-a-King," Glaser, Lulu, 131. MacDonald, Christie, 180. Hall, Artie, 236. Hall, Josephine, 46, 116. Hall, Pauline, 179, 208, 229, 239. Hallen, Fred, 26. Hammerstein, Oscar, 148. Harlow, Richard, 191. Harris, Augustus, 228. Hart, Joseph, 26. Haverly, J. H., 85, 246. Henderson, Arthur, 227. Henderson, William J., 159. "Hendrik Hudson," Templeton, Fay, 74, 75. Herbert, Victor, 5, 6. Herne, James A., 73. "Highwayman," Clark, Hilda, 256. "Hole in the Ground," Earle, Virginia, 26. "Honeymooners," Hall, Pauline, 241, 248. Hopper, DeWolf, 27, 104, 110, 111, 140, 146, 170, 200, 201. Hopper, Edna Wallace, 42, 104, 140. "Horrors," Hall, Pauline, 245. "Hoss and Hoss," Celeste, Marie, 164, 165, 166, 167. "Hotel Topsy Turvy," Dressler, Marie, 191. Howard, Bronson, 47. Hoyt, Charles H., 26, 148, 164. Huntington, Agnes, 99, 218. "In Gay New York," Earle, Virginia, 27, 28. "In Mexico" (see "War Time Wedding"). Irwin, May, 235. "Ixion," Hall, Pauline, 247. "Jack," Hall, Josephine, 47. "Jack and the Beanstalk," Celeste, Marie, 169. Lessing, Madge, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87. "Jane," Hopper, Edna Wallace, 110. Jansen, Marie, 120, 127, 128, 248. Jones, Walter, 146. Juch, Emma, 98, 200. Kelley, Edgar Stillman, 249. "King's Fool," Fox, Della, 200. Klaw and Erlanger, 82, 169, 180, 256. "Knickerbockers," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 100. Koster and Bial's, 81. Kruger, Jacques, 251. "Lady of Lyons," Hall, Pauline, 245. "Lady Slavey," Dressler, Marie, 183, 184, 188, 191. Earle, Virginia, 27. Lessing, Madge, 87. L'Allemand, Pauline, 98. LaShelle, Kirk, 172, 173, 174, 175. Lask, George E., 19. "Later On," Earle, Virginia, 26. Lederer, George W., 25, 27, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 200. "Lend Me Your Wife," Hopper, Edna Wallace, 109. Lenox, Fred, 142. Leonard, Charles E., 33, 35. Leslie, Elsie, 197. Leslie, Fred, 216. Leslie, Henry J., 228. Lessing, Madge, 81, 118. "Lion Tamer," Glaser, Lulu, 127, 128. MacDonald, Christie, 179. "Little Corporal," Glaser, Lulu, 124, 131, 132. "Little Duke," Celeste, Marie, 108. Russell, Lillian, 32. "Little Host," Fox, Della, 207. "Little Red Riding Hood," Lessing, Madge, 86. "Little Trooper," Celeste, Marie, 168. Fox, Della, 168, 201, 202. Lloyd, Violet, 27. Lucia, Alice Nielsen as, 19. MacDonald, Christie, 169, 172. MacDonough, Glen, 232. "Madame Favart," Hall, Pauline, 248. Templeton, Fay, 75. "Madeleine, or, the Magic Kiss," D'Arville, Camille, 221. Dressler, Marie, 190. "Maid of Plymouth," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 100. "Mam'selle 'Awkins," Edwardes, Paula, 113, 116, 119. Hall, Josephine, 47, 52, 53. "Man in the Moon," Dressler, Marie, 191. Templeton, Fay, 76, 77. Mapleson, Colonel, 95, 96, 97. "Marjorie," D'Arville, Camille, 218. "Martha," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 99. Martinot, Sadie, 216. "Mascotte," D'Arville, Camille, 218. Templeton, Fay, 74. May, Edna, 147. McCaull, John A., 40. McLellan, C. M. S., 249. McLellan, George B., 252. "Meg Merrilies," Earle, Virginia, 27. "Men and Women," Hopper, Edna Wallace, 110. "Merchant of Venice," Gilman, Mabelle, 65. "Merry Monarch," Glaser, Lulu, 128. MacDonald, Christie, 179. "Merry War," Hall, Pauline, 246. "Merry World," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 98. Earle, Virginia, 27. "Midsummer Night's Dream," Templeton, Fay, 71, 73. "Mikado," Dressler, Marie, 188. Earle, Virginia, 26. Nielsen, Alice, 19. Miles, R. E. J., 243, 244. "Mountebanks," Russell, Lillian, 32. "Muldoon's Picnic," Fox, Della, 195. "Mynheer Jan," D'Arville, Camille, 217. "Nadjy," Hall, Pauline, 248. Russell, Lillian, 41. "Nanon," Hall, Pauline, 247. National Opera Company, 98. Neutwig, Benjamin, 10, 11. Nielsen, Alice, 1, 219, 255. Nirdlinger, Charles Frederick, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226. Oates, Alice, 243, 244. Offenbach, Jacques, 31, 216. "One Round of Pleasure," Celeste, Marie, 169. O'Neill, James, 196. "Orpheus and Eurydice," Hall, Pauline, 246. Palmer, A. M., 191. Palmer, Frank, 166, 167. "Panjandrum," Fox, Della, 194, 201. Hopper, Edna Wallace, 106, 110, 111. "Passing Show," Earle, Virginia, 27. Lessing, Madge, 82. Pastor, Tony, 33, 38, 39, 238. "Patience," Earle, Virginia, 26. Hall, Pauline, 246. Russell, Lillian, 40. Patti, Adelina, 96, 97. "Paul Jones," D'Arville, Camille, 218. "Penelope," Nielsen, Alice, 18. "Perichole," Celeste, Marie, 168. Nielsen, Alice, 19. Russell, Lillian, 32, 42. Perugini, Giovanni, 45. Pike Opera Company, 18, 26. "Pinafore," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 95. Earle, Virginia, 26. Fox, Della, 195, 196. Russell, Lillian, 37. "Pirates of Penzance," Earle, Virginia, 26. Fox, Della, 199. Plympton, Eben, 47. "Polly," Russell, Lillian, 41. "Poor Jonathan," D'Arville, Camille, 218. Russell, Lillian, 32. "Poupée," Gilman, Mabelle, 65. "Prince Ananias," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 100. Nielsen, Alice, 20. "Prince Pro Tem," Ashley, Minnie, 137, 141, 142. "Princess Bonnie," Clark, Hilda, 255. "Princess Chic," MacDonald, Christie, 172, 176, 177, 178, 180. "Princess Nicotine," Celeste, Marie, 168. Dressler, Marie, 191. Russell, Lillian, 32, 45. "Princess of Trebizonde," Russell, Lillian, 41, 42. Puerner, Charles, 190. "Puritania," Hall, Pauline, 241, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252. "Queen's Mate," D'Arville, Camille, 217. Russell, Lillian, 32. "Rainmakers," Raymond, Maud, 238. Raymond, Maud, 233. "Red Hussar," Tempest, Marie, 228, 229. Reed, Charles, 164. Reed, Roland, 109. Rehan, Ada, 28. "Reign of Error," Raymond, Maud, 238. "Revels," Hall, Pauline, 245. Rice, Edward E., 26, 37, 47, 140, 219, 245, 246. "Rip Van Winkle," D'Arville, Camille, 216, 217. "Robber of the Rhine," Dressler, Marie, 190. "Robin Hood," Clark, Hilda, 255. D'Arville, Camille, 218, 219. Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 91, 99, 100, 101. Nielsen, Alice, 20. Rogers Brothers, 233, 238. "Rogers Brothers in Wall Street," Raymond, Maud, 235, 236, 238. "Romeo and Juliet," Hall, Pauline, 245. Root, Fred, 94. Root, George F., 95. "Rounders," Gilman, Mabelle, 56, 61, 62, 63, 65, 86. Lessing, Madge, 86, 87. "Runaway Girl," Celeste, Marie, 160, 161, 169. Earle, Virginia, 23, 24, 28. Edwardes, Paula, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119. Gilman, Mabelle, 65. Russell, Lillian, 30, 168, 191, 206, 208, 217, 229. Sadler, Josie, 142. "Santa Maria," May, Edna, 148. Savage, Henry W., 19, 169. Seabrooke, Thomas Q., 117. "Serenade," Clark, Hilda, 255. Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 100. Nielsen, Alice, 20. "Seven Ravens," Hall, Pauline, 246, 247. Sheldon, William, 146. "Shenandoah," Hall, Josephine, 47. "Singing Girl," Nielsen, Alice, 4, 5. Smith, Edgar, 97. Smith, Harry B., 5, 7, 65, 159, 221. Smythe, W. G., 196. "Snake Charmer," Russell, Lillian, 40. Solomon, Edward, 41. Solomon, Frederic, 251. Solomon Opera Company, 82. "Sorcerer," Russell, Lillian, 40. Sothern, E. H., 197. Sousa, John Philip, 256, 257. Spenser, Willard, 255. "Sphinx," MacDonald, Christie, 180. Stange, Stanislaus, 5, 6. St. John, Florence, 228. Stone, Marie, 218. Sullivan, Arthur, 19, 26. Sullivan, Joe J., 237. "Suzette," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 99. Sykes, Jerome, 112. Teal, Ben, 163. "Tempest," Earle, Virginia, 28. Gilman, Mabelle, 65. Tempest, Marie, 222. Templeton, Fay, 67. Templeton, John, 72. Thomas, Augustus, 196, 197, 198, 199. Thomas, Theodore, 98. Thompson, L. S., 141. Titus, Fred, 147. Tivoli Opera Company, 19. "Tobasco," Edwardes, Paula, 117. "Troubadour," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 99. "Twenty Minutes in Shirt Waists," Dressler, Marie, 186, 187, 188. "Tyrolean," Tempest, Marie, 229, 230. "Tzigane," Celeste, Marie, 168. Russell, Lillian, 32. Urquhart, Isabelle, 41. Vane, Alice, 67. "Venus," D'Arville, Camille, 219, 220. "Vie," D'Arville, Camille, 216. "Virginia," Russell, Lillian, 41. "Walking Delegate," MacDonald, Christie, 180. "Wang," Celeste, Marie, 170. Earle, Virginia, 27. Fox, Della, 194, 201. Hopper, Edna Wallace, 111. "War Time Wedding," Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 100, 102, 103. Nielsen, Alice, 20. Weathersby, Eliza, 74. Weber and Fields, 42, 75, 197. "Wedding Day," Fox, Della, 206. Russell, Lillian, 42. Weil, Oscar, 103. Wheelan, Alf. C., 251. "Whirl of the Town," Lessing, Madge, 82. White, Edward, 252. Wilson, Francis, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 179, 240, 242, 249. "Wonder," Earle, Virginia, 28. "World's Fair," Earle, Virginia, 26. "Yankee Doodle Dandy," Hopper, Edna Wallace, 112. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_. Inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected as follows: Pages 176 and 212: "d'Arville" changed to "D'Arville" Page 198: "debut" changed to "début" Punctuation has been corrected without note. 
48049	----	ELLEN TERRY AND HER SISTERS [Illustration: _Photographed by_ _Window & Grove._ ELLEN TERRY AS PORTIA. _She first appeared in this part, one of the greatest of her Shakespearean creations, at the old Prince of Wales's Theatre in 1875, and resumed it at the Lyceum in 1879._ _Frontispiece._] ELLEN TERRY AND HER SISTERS BY T. EDGAR PEMBERTON AUTHOR OF "THE KENDALS;" "A MEMOIR OF E. A. SOTHERN;" "THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF T. W. ROBERTSON;" "CHARLES DICKENS AND THE STAGE;" "JOHN HARE, COMEDIAN;" "BRET HARTE: A TREATISE AND A TRIBUTE;" ETC. ETC. _WITH TWENTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS_ LONDON C. ARTHUR PEARSON, LIMITED HENRIETTA STREET 1902 _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ "THE KENDALS" Demy 8vo, with Portraits and numerous Illustrations. Price 16s. "One of the most interesting theatrical records that has been penned for some time."--_Outlook._ "A charming work.... Pithy and well arranged. Turned out with infinite credit to the publishers."--_Morning Advertiser._ "It leaves an impression like that of a piece in which the Kendals have played, an impression of pleasure, refinement, refreshment, and of the value of cherishing sweet and kindly feelings in art as in life. Few books can do that, and so this work has every prospect of being widely read."--_Scotsman._ LONDON: C. ARTHUR PEARSON, LIMITED _April 11, 1901._ MY DEAR FRIEND,-- You tell me that if I give you leave you can weave a story about me that will interest your readers. If that be so, you have my full permission to tell it, and it will please me to do anything in my power to assist you in your work. Whilst writing about me you will, I am sure, speak of those with whom I have been closely associated in my acting life, and make mention of the affectionate regard in which I hold them. Your intimate knowledge of all that concerns the stage will at least keep you right as to the facts of your pages. I suppose I must leave the fancy of them in your hands. Yours cordially, ELLEN TERRY. _To_ T. EDGAR PEMBERTON. [Illustration: _Label designed for his sister by Gordon Craig_] [Illustration: _Ellen Terry's book-label designed by Gordon Craig_] CONTENTS PAGE I. BEGINNINGS 1 II. FIRST APPEARANCES 29 III. THE BRISTOL STOCK COMPANY 57 IV. AT THE HAYMARKET THEATRE 74 V. KATE TERRY 91 VI. CHIEFLY AT THE QUEEN'S THEATRE 132 VII. IN TOTTENHAM STREET 142 VIII. IN SLOANE SQUARE 156 IX. SOME SPLENDID STROLLING 171 X. MARION AND FLORENCE TERRY 192 XI. HENRY IRVING 208 XII. AT THE LYCEUM THEATRE, 1878-1883 219 XIII. AT THE LYCEUM THEATRE, 1884-1901 252 XIV. ENDINGS 296 INDEX 311 VINE COTTAGE, KINGSTON VALE. [Illustration: _Ellen Terry's "Kingston Vale" letter-card heading designed by Gordon Craig_] [Illustration: _Ellen Terry's Monogram. Ellen Terry fecit_] LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ELLEN TERRY AS "PORTIA" _Frontispiece_ ELLEN TERRY WHEN EIGHT YEARS OF AGE _To face page_ 24 TOWER COTTAGE, WINCHELSEA 48 SMALLHYTHE FARM 80 BUST OF ELLEN TERRY BY W. BRODIE, R.S.A. 88 KATE TERRY 102 ELLEN TERRY'S COUNTRY HOME IN KINGSTON VALE 112 KATE TERRY AS "ARIEL" 120 HENRY IRVING IN 1868 136 ELLEN TERRY AS LORD TENNYSON'S "DORA" 174 MARION TERRY 194 ELLEN TERRY IN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY _circa_ 1878 222 ELLEN TERRY AS "OPHELIA" 224 ELLEN TERRY, 1881 242 ELLEN TERRY AS "BEATRICE" 250 ELLEN TERRY AS "VIOLA" 254 ELLEN TERRY AS "ELLALINE" 262 SIR HENRY IRVING AS "CARDINAL WOLSEY" 272 ELLEN TERRY AS "QUEEN GUINEVERE" 282 ELLEN TERRY AS "VOLUMNIA" 292 [Illustration: _Ellen Terry's "Winchelsea" book-plate designed by Gordon Craig_] ELLEN TERRY AND HER SISTERS CHAPTER I BEGINNINGS I know that to the majority of people who merely regard the theatre as a place for occasional recreation, it is a subject for amazement that others can exist who, not belonging to the theatrical profession, take an absorbing and lasting interest in the stage, and in those actors and actresses who have made its past history glorious, as well as in the artists who adorn and make it a delight in the present. I wonder how many of us truly realise the weight of Charles Dickens's words: "If any man were to tell me that he denied his acknowledgments to the stage, I would simply put to him one question--whether he remembered his first play?" Not only freely, but with gratitude, I acknowledge my indebtedness to the theatre, and it is certain that from that magic night when for the first time I saw the glitter of the footlights and watched the rise of the curtain, I entered upon a new and most fascinating life. Of course I was called "stage struck," and those who controlled me shook their heads, thought it a great pity, and did their best to thwart my inclinations. Concerning the stage and its attractions the parents of the "fifties" were less liberal-minded than those of to-day, and they had an unhappy knack of talking over the tendencies of their children with uncles and aunts who, without meaning to do the least kindly thing for them, seemed to regard their nephews and nieces as so many ready-made reprobates open to their interfering condemnation. Oh! those terrible uncles and aunts! In his pages the grand old novelist, Richardson, reflecting the manners of his time, made (apparently well meaning) ogres of them; the good and ever interesting Jane Austen only contrived to soften them down; and I hope my "fifties" saw the fag-end of them, for to-day they prove themselves to be reasonable and generous beings. But, as I say, I was set down as "stage struck," and I had to grow accustomed to the shoulder-shrug greeting of relatives, and the admonition that my first duty was to consider my father and mother. Never was anything so unfair. I was not in the ordinary sense of the word "stage struck." I was not fool enough to think that I could shine either as tragedian or comedian. I knew that a more prosaic life had been planned out for me, and I was prepared to enter into it; but, for a lurking fear that I should "take to the stage" (neither I nor my parents, nor my uncles and aunts, knew how this was to be done), I found myself compelled to read my beloved play-books and chronicles of great actors in private. When it was accidentally discovered that I had attempted to write a play there was real family trouble, and I am afraid that some of those who pretended to take interest in me wrote me down as "no good." No! It never could be understood that I really wanted to make a study of an art that appealed to me more strongly than its sisters, music and painting. Yet the three are so closely allied that in devotedly following my first love I learnt to appreciate her kith and kin. I pen these lines because I am certain that many others must have felt as I did, and do; and, while doing justice to other claims upon their life energies, have taken their keenest delight in the story of the stage. Yes; I am sure that to many of us the theatre has formed a little world of its own--a little world that we can enjoy and grasp--while the great world outside it is so apt to torture us with its perplexities, and half kill us with its seeming cruelties. And I think that the little world in which I and my brother enthusiasts delight is all the more appreciated when we understand that it, too, is beset with its anxieties and grievous disappointments, and is far from the dazzling, soul-soothing elysium we pictured in the halcyon days of our boyhood. Our hearts go out all the more freely to the actors and actresses who warm them when we realise that they, too, have their trials as well as their triumphs. Our admiration is redoubled when it is leavened with sympathy. It is all the more important, then, that our entertainers should know that this feeling exists among those for whom they devote the work of their lives. The artistic temperament is always more or less self-tormenting, and it is to be feared that my "little world," which shines so brightly over our great one, where sorrow has daily to be met and borne, is in itself a sorely troubled one. In that strange French play which has our great English tragedian, Edmund Kean, for its central figure, Alexandre Dumas, who knew everything that could be known about the theatre, caused his actor-hero to respond bitterly to the woman who loved him, and who opined that all his troubles must vanish when he reflects that he is recognised as the King of the Stage. "King! Yes, three times a week! King with a tinselled sceptre, paste diamonds, and a pinchbeck crown. I rule a kingdom of thirty-five feet, and subjects who are jealous of my power." Then, when she asks, "Why do you not give it up?" he replies with indignation, "Give up the stage? Ah! you don't realise that he who has once donned the robe of Nessus cannot take it off without lacerating his flesh. _I_ give up the stage?--renounce its excitement?--its glitter?--its triumphs? _I_ give up my throne to another? Never! while I've health and strength to walk the boards, and brains to interpret the poetry I love. Remember, an actor cannot leave his work behind him. He lives only in his own lifetime--his memory fades with the generation to which he belongs, he must finish as he has begun, die as he has lived--die, if fortune favours him, with the delicious sound of applause in his ears. But those who have not set foot upon a dangerous path do well to avoid it." The actor's complaint that his fame, however great, cannot be recollected many years beyond the time in which he lived is a very old one, and it must have been with this mournful view in his mind that David Garrick wrote:-- "The painter dead, yet still he charms the eye; While England lives his fame can never die. But he who struts his hour upon the stage Can scarce extend his fame for half an age; Nor pen nor pencil can the actor save, The art and artist share one common grave." The volumes of theatrical history and biography that have been written and become popular since Garrick's day, prove that this is not wholly true, that we are not ungrateful to those who have instructed and amused us on the stage, and that we shall not willingly let their honoured memories die. The fact that the depressing feeling that they and their work will "soon be forgotten" still exists among members of the theatrical profession is, I venture to believe, some excuse for records such as this being issued during the lifetime of the artist, while memory is green, and appreciation can be written at first hand. Even if such works give little or no pleasure to their living subjects, it may be borne in mind that they will probably be of service to those future stage historians who will permanently inscribe their names on the tablets of fame. The passionate declaration of Dumas's Kean that, despite his troubles and torments, he would never while life was in him leave the stage, is an old tale. Actors, as a rule, love to die in harness, and it was in the full knowledge of this that T. W. Robertson caused his stage David Garrick to reply to Alderman Ingot, when he offered to double or treble his income if he would abandon his profession, "Leave the stage? Impossible!" Poor Sothern, who created the part, was staying with me when his physician wrote saying that if he wished to prolong his life he must give up all work. After a moment's depression the actor with a sudden impulse snatched a portrait of himself as Garrick from my wall, tore it from its frame, and in a large, firm hand, wrote beneath it: "Leave the stage? Impossible!" I have no doubt that Charles Wyndham, who, after Sothern's death, took up the part, and made it one of the greatest successes of the modern stage, feels the full import of the words every time he speaks them. And if the actors suffer so do the dramatists, or at all events the would-be dramatists. In an admirable little book called "Play Writing," the author gives sound advice to the ever-growing, ever-complaining army of the unacted. "Dramatic authorship," he says, "is to the profession of literature as reversing is to waltzing--an agony within a misery. A man who means to be a dramatist must be prepared for a life of never-ending strife and fret--a brain and heart-exhausting struggle from the hour when, full of hope, he starts off with his first farce in his pocket to the days when, involuntarily taking the advice of one of the early masters of his own craft--to wit, old rare Ben Jonson--he leaves 'the loathed stage and the more loathsome age.'" And again, this anonymous but evidently experienced writer (I quote from him freely) declares that any dramatist could tales unfold of disappointments and delays, of hopes deferred, of chances dashed from the grasp at the very moment they seemed clutched, of weary waitings rewarded by failure, of enterprise and effort leading only to defeat, of hard work winning only loss. It has been suggested, too, in this connection, that any one sufficiently interested in such matters should make a list of the plays that in "preliminary paragraphs" are spoken of as "about to be produced," and which are never heard of again,--and that it should then be remembered that each of these unborn plays represents a very heavy heart being carried about for many a long day under somebody or other's waistcoat,--and means that somebody or other feels very sick and hopeless as he moves about his little world, trying to appear careless and to laugh it off,--that somebody or other grows very tired and weary of the struggle, and almost wishes now and then that it was over. But to the young playgoer who sits in front these troubles are unknown, and to him the theatre may well appear as the realisation of Fairyland, and a veritable Palace of Fancy. I believe there is another reason why men, if they would own it, have come to be grateful to the stage. Has it not to many been the scene in which they have first learned what it is to love? They may never have spoken to the divinities who inspired their boyish ardour, but they have been better and purer for it, and cherish the sweet recollection of it to their old age. Cannot we all enter into the feelings of young virgin-hearted Arthur Pendennis when he first saw the lovely Miss Fotheringay on the boards? Cannot we all understand how he followed the woman about and about, and when she was off the stage the house became a blank? and how, when the play was over, the curtain fell upon him like a pall? Poor Pendennis! He hardly knew what he felt that night. "It was something overwhelming, maddening, delicious; a fever of wild joy and undefined longing." And then how he woke the next morning, when, at an early hour, the rooks began to caw from the little wood beyond his bedroom windows; and at that very instant, and as his eyes started open, the beloved image was in his mind. "My dear boy," he heard her say, "you were in a sound sleep, and I would not disturb you: but I have been close by your pillow all this while; and I don't intend that you shall leave me. I am Love! I bring with me fever and passion; wild longing, maddening desire; restless craving and seeking. Many a long day ere this I heard you calling out for me; and behold now I am come." Yes, I am convinced that most of us have felt, rejoiced, and suffered as Arthur Pendennis did, and that we first caught the fever from the footlights. The attack may have been acute, and, in its apparent hopelessness, painful. But recovery brought with it the sweet knowledge that we had been permitted to understand the meaning of Heaven's greatest gift to mankind--Love. I know that there are many who only go to the theatre to carp and cavil, and impotently point out that if the management of the playhouse and the acting of all the parts had been placed in their hands a much better performance would have been provided; but I believe that even these would love to recall the dreamy illusions of their youth. Perhaps, in the hours of their solitude (and silence!), they do so. Why, in their soured maturity, these unhappy, self-imposed, and absolutely unconvincing critics go to the theatre to be (on their own declaration) bored and disgusted is to me a mystery. It is all the more a mystery when I know that they can thoroughly enjoy a variety hall. Of course, everything depends on the spirit in which we go to the theatre. Do you remember the difference of opinion expressed between Steerforth and David Copperfield on the night when they renewed the acquaintance of their boyhood at the Golden Cross Hotel? David had been to Covent Garden Theatre, and had there seen "Julius Cæsar." "To have," he says, "all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern task-masters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect. But the mingled reality and mystery of the whole show, the influence upon me of the poetry, the lights, the music, the company; the smooth, stupendous changes of glittering and brilliant scenery were so dazzling, and opened up such illimitable regions of delight, that when I came out into the rainy street I felt as if I had come from the clouds, where I had been leading a romantic life for ages, to a bawling, splashing, link-lighted, umbrella-struggling, hackney-coach jostling, patten-clicking, muddy, miserable world." And when he told the superior Steerforth of his innocent enjoyment, he had to listen to the laughing reply:-- "My dear young Davy--you are a very daisy. The daisy of the field, at sunrise, is not fresher than you are! I have been at Covent Garden, too, and there never was a more miserable business." In my own mind I am convinced that if we will we can always, to our great advantage and delight, keep up the enthusiasm of David Copperfield;--that to some of us the theatre, even when we know all about the fret and turmoil of the actor's life together with the tricks of the stage, may from boyhood to old age remain a Palace of Fancy. And have we not in the heroine of these pages--Ellen Terry--the very embodiment of Fancy,--the true Princess of our Palace, one of the Queens of our little stage world? Other great artists have delighted us with the perfection of their impersonations, but there is in the method or inspiration of Ellen Terry something so ethereal that in many of her characters she stands alone. If the drama is indeed the Cinderella of the arts, then Ellen Terry must have been touched by the magic wand of a Fairy Godmother so that she might dazzle the Prince's ballroom with her beauty, radiance, and ever fragrant sweetness, and win the admiration of his guests. But those who thoughtlessly and even contemptuously call the drama "Cinderella" probably do not know the origin of the familiar fairy-tale--how the little kitchen maid is Ushas, the Dawn Maiden of the Aryans, and the Aurora of the Greeks; and how the Prince is the Sun, ever seeking to make the Dawn his bride; and how the envious stepmother and sisters are the Clouds and the Night, which vainly strive to keep the Sun and the Dawn apart. It is pleasant to think of Cinderella as the Dawn Maiden. Poor little lady! She has suffered considerably in her transplantation to English soil. To me the magic word "Fancy" has ever been associated with the pure art of Ellen Terry, and whenever I see her on the stage the lines of John Keats comes rippling through my mind:-- "Oh! sweet Fancy! let her loose; Everything is spoilt by use; Where's the cheek that doth not fade, Too much gazed at? Where's the maid Whose lip mature is ever new? Where the eye, however blue, Doth not weary? Where's the face One would meet in every place? Where's the voice, however soft, One would hear so very oft? At a touch sweet pleasure melteth Like to bubbles when rain pelteth. Let, then, winged Fancy find Thee a mistress to her mind; Dulcet-eyed as Ceres' daughter Ere the god of Torment taught her How to frown and how to chide; With a waist and with a side White as Hebe's, when her zone Slipt its golden clasp, and down Fell her kirtle to her feet, While she held the goblet sweet, And Jove grew languid. Break the mesh Of the Fancy's silken leash; Quickly break her prison string, And such joys as these she'll bring-- Let the winged Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home." But it must be recorded that Fancy, as let loose and impersonated by Ellen Terry, is taken from the theatre in thousands of hearts, and that it enters into many a home circle where the memory of it gives unbounded and enduring pleasure. Into the simple homes of those who elbow each other in the gallery, as well as into the luxurious mansions of the wealthy folk who sit at their ease in the stalls. In many a workman's dwelling I have come across a carefully framed photograph of Ellen Terry, and a treasured play-bill kept in commemoration of a never-to-be-forgotten evening enjoyed in her realms of Fancy. But she did not drop from cloudland to delight us. Her great achievements have been won--as all great achievements are won--by early training, deep and constant study, hard work, and possibly, above all, by family tradition. In theatrical lore the name of Terry is, indeed, an old and honoured one. In Lockhart's beautiful biography of Sir Walter Scott, and again in the happily published Diary of the Magician of the North, we read much of the energetic Daniel Terry who was for many years connected with the Edinburgh stage, and who subsequently joined Yates in a memorable management of the Adelphi Theatre. Daniel Terry, with the appreciative eye of the true actor, set his heart upon making stage versions of the Waverley Novels, and though at first Scott (in common with all great novelists) objected to this process, it was subsequently allowed, and adapter and author became friends. It was in the spring of 1816 that Terry produced a dramatic piece entitled "Guy Mannering," which met with great success, and is still from time to time seen. "What share," says Lockhart, "the novelist had in this first specimen of what he used to call the art of 'Terryfying,' I cannot exactly say; but his correspondence shows that the pretty song of the Lullaby was not his only contribution to it; and I infer that he had taken the trouble to modify the plot, and rearrange, for stage purposes, a considerable part of the original dialogue." Of the intimacy that commenced and grew between the poet and the playwright, Lockhart records:-- "It was at a rehearsal of 'The Family Legend of Joanna Baillie' that Scott was first introduced to another theatrical performer, who ere long acquired a large share of his regard and confidence--Mr. Daniel Terry. He had received a good education, and been regularly trained as an architect; but abandoned that profession at an early period of life, and was now beginning to attract attention as a valuable actor in Henry Siddons's company. Already he and the Ballantynes were constant companions, and through his familiarity with them Scott had abundant opportunities of appreciating his many excellent and agreeable qualities. He had the manners and feelings of a gentleman. Like John Kemble, he was deeply skilled in the old literature of the drama, and he rivalled Scott's own enthusiasm for the antiquities of _vertu_. Their epistolary correspondence in after days was frequent, and none so well illustrates many of the poet's minor tastes and habits. As their letters lie before me they appear as if they had all been penned by the same hand. Terry's idolatry of his new friend induced him to imitate his writing so zealously that Scott used to say, if he were called upon to swear to any document, the utmost he could venture to attest would be, that it was either in his own hand or Terry's. The actor, perhaps unconsciously, mimicked him in other matters with hardly inferior pertinacity. His small lively features had acquired, before I knew him, a truly ludicrous cast of Scott's graver expression; he had taught his tiny eyebrow the very trick of the poet's meditative frown; and, to crown all, he so habitually affected his tone and accent that, though a native of Bath, a stranger could hardly have doubted he must be a Scotchman. These things afforded all their acquaintance much diversion; but perhaps no Stoic could have helped being secretly gratified by seeing a clever and sensible man convert himself into a living type and symbol of admiration." In the pages of his fascinating Diary (or "Journal") Scott records-- "_October 20, 1826_ (London).--At breakfast, Crofton Croker, author of the 'Irish Fairy Tales.' Something like Tom Moore. There were also Terry, Allan Cunningham, Newton, and others." "_October 21, 1826._--We returned to a hasty dinner in Pall Mall, and then hurried away to see honest Dan Terry's house, called the Adelphi Theatre, where we saw 'The Pilot,' from the American novel of that name. It is extremely popular, the dramatist having seized on the whole story, and turned the odious and ridiculous parts, assigned by the original author to the British, against the Yankees themselves. There is a quiet effrontery in this that is of a rare and peculiar character. The Americans were so much displeased, that they attempted a row--which rendered the piece doubly attractive to the seamen at Wapping, who came up and crowded the house night after night to support the honour of the British flag.... I was, however, glad to see honest Dan's theatre as full seemingly as it could hold. The heat was dreadful, and Anne was so very unwell that she was obliged to be carried into Terry's house--a curious dwelling, no larger than a squirrel's cage, which he has contrived to squeeze out of the vacant spaces of the theatre, and which is accessible by a most complicated combination of staircases and small passages. Here we had rare good porter and oysters after the play, and found Anne much better. She had attempted too much; indeed, I myself was much fatigued." Later comes a sadder note:-- "_February 3, 1827._--Terry has been pressed by Gibson for my debt to him. That I may get managed." And again-- "_April 15, 1828._--Got the lamentable news that Terry is totally bankrupt. This is a most unexpected blow, though his carelessness about money matters was very great. God help the poor fellow! He has been ill-advised to go abroad, but now returns to stand the storm--old debts, it seems, with principal and interest accumulated, and all the items which load a falling man. And wife, such a good and kind creature, and children. Alack! alack! I sought out his solicitor. There are £7000 or more to pay, and the only fund his share in the Adelphi Theatre, worth £5000 and upwards, and then so fine a chance of independence lost. That comes of not being explicit with his affairs. The theatre was a most flourishing concern. I looked at the books, and since have seen Yates. The ruin is inevitable, but I think they will not keep him in prison, but let him earn his bread by his very considerable talents. I shall lose the whole or part of £5000, which I lent him, but that is the last of my concern." And then follow these interesting and touching entries:-- "_May 8, 1828._--I have been of material assistance to poor Terry in his affairs." "_June 18, 1829._--Poor Terry is totally prostrated by a paralytic affection. Continuance of existence not to be wished for." "_July 9, 1829._--Many recollections die with poor Terry." Of his semi-partnership with his actor-friend, Sir Walter Scott, in a humorous mood, wrote:--"I have been made a dramatist whether I would or no. I believe my muse would be _Terry_fied into treading the stage even if I should write a sermon." Benjamin Terry, the father of the clever family who form the subject of these pages, became in his time very popular in Edinburgh, and it was there that he attracted the attention of Charles Kean, and obtained his offer for the actor's Mecca--London. But his experience had no doubt been earned in some of the old "circuits" that were the theatrical schools of his early days, and turned out many a true artist. The actors and actresses who thus served their apprenticeship to the stage assuredly had rough times of it, but they had for the most part joined the profession for the love of it--they adored Shakespeare and the authors of the "legitimate drama,"--and, in spite of tedious journeys from town to town, poor business, and bad theatrical accommodation at the end of them, looked forward to and enjoyed the evening's performance. Enthusiasm and hard work led to their reward, and many a poor strolling-player became a shining light on the London stage. When Ben Terry went on circuit, travelling actors were in better plight than they were in the days of poor Roger Kemble and his devoted wife, who travelled from town to town, and village to village, after the manner and under the difficulties and disadvantages of the time,--at some places being received with gracious favour, and at others treated like lepers and threatened with the stocks and whipping at the cart's tail, according as the great people were liberal minded or puritanical. But this struggling, persecuted Roger Kemble lived to see his daughter, Mrs. Siddons, and his son, John Philip, the stage idols of their day; and if sometimes his perturbed spirit could revisit Hereford (one of the cities of his early sorrows) he would realise the happy fact that the portraits of his never-to-be-forgotten family hold the places of honour on the Deanery walls. Since to the often ridiculed circuits of a bygone day we can trace such actors as the Kembles, the Robertsons, and the Terrys, surely we should hold them in honoured memory? Dickens turned them to comic account when he conceived the impossible but immortal Crummles family; but he put the true ring into the warm-hearted old manager's heart and voice when on bidding farewell to Nicholas, he said, "We were a very happy little company. You and I never had a word. I shall be very glad to-morrow morning to think that I saw you again, but now I almost wish you hadn't come." It is pleasant to think that in their own way the circuit players all formed happy little companies. To enjoy the work of our choice is, in spite of any drawbacks, one of the greatest sources of happiness. My esteemed friend, John Coleman, whose memory carries him back to the days of long ago, has told me that he met Mr. and Mrs. Ben Terry on the Worcester Circuit. He remembers the former as a handsome, fine-looking brown-haired man, and the wife as a tall, graceful creature, with an abundance of fair hair, and with big blue eyes set in a charming face. Years and years passed before he met his old-time friend again; but at the memorable banquet given to Henry Irving on the eve of his departure for his first tour in America, a grey-haired, dignified old gentleman, who sat next to him, told him that he was the "Ben Terry" of the dead and gone Worcester Circuit, and introduced him to his grandson, Gordon Craig. On that evening the old actor had good reason to be proud, for he could boast of being the father of one of the most gifted and cultured of histrionic families. "Think of it," writes Mr. Clement Scott, "Kate, with her lovely figure and comely features; Ellen, with her quite indescribable charm; Marion, with a something in her deeper, more tender, and more feminine than either of them; Florence, who became lovelier as a woman than as a girl; and the brothers Fred and Charles, both splendid specimens of the athletic Englishman." It was while the parent Terrys were fulfilling an engagement at Coventry--the interesting City of the Three Tall Spires--that their daughter Ellen was born. This was in the February of 1848, and quite a little feud has taken place between some of the good people of Coventry as to the precise house in which the important event took place. That it was on the 27th day of the second month of the year, and that the street was Market Street, one and all seem agreed, but several inhabitants of that thoroughfare have laid claim to be the occupiers, if not the owners of the shrine. No. 5 and No. 26 are the chief claimants of the honour (and in all seriousness it is no small honour), but as an "old nurse," who should know something about such things, has declared for No. 5, it stands first favourite; and a fact in its favour is that in the days of 1848 it was a popular lodging-house for actors. One can sympathise with No. 26, but the general vote must be given to No. 5. After all, it does not much matter, for who knows what changes have taken place in the old street during the last fifty years? Perhaps (but for pious pilgrims this is a dreadful thought!) _even the door numbers may have been changed_! With a few exceptions the birthplaces of celebrities are apt to be disappointing. My enthusiasm for famous artists once took me to Brecon so that I might visit the "Shoulder of Mutton" Inn, in which Sarah Kemble was born, but, though it was properly inscribed, it was not the interesting old tavern of my imagination, and manifest modern "improvements" made me content with a brief gaze at its exterior. It was at the beautiful Trinity Church at Coventry, on the 26th November 1773, that Sarah Kemble was married to Henry Siddons, the handsome young actor from Birmingham; and this brings me back to "leafy Warwickshire" (Warwickshire-men never forget that it is Shakespeare's county), and the Coventry of Ellen Terry's birthday in 1848. Now let me show how easily, by those who care about such things, theatrical history may be traced. Ellen Terry, as will soon be seen, was destined to make her earliest (though childish) successes with Charles Kean. Charles Kean had acted with his renowned father, Edmund Kean. Edmund Kean had in his childhood figured as one of the imps who danced around the cauldron in John Philip Kemble's revival of "Macbeth." Roger Kemble, the father of John Philip and Sarah Siddons, was the son of a Kemble who had been engaged by and was associated with Betterton. After "the King had got his own again" Betterton was acknowledged to be the legitimate successor to Burbage. Burbage was the first of our great tragic actors, and was the original performer of the greater number of Shakespeare's heroes--of Coriolanus, Brutus, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Shylock, Macbeth, Prince Hal, Henry V., and Richard III. In "Hamlet" Shakespeare enacted the touching character of the Ghost to the Prince created by Burbage; and so, in a rough and somewhat "House that Jack Built" fashion, the connection of such famous histrionic families as the Terrys can be traced back to the Elizabethan days, to Shakespeare, and the actors of his period. We may now follow the Ben Terrys and their pretty children to the London Princess's Theatre, where the experienced actor not only played many parts but became assistant stage-manager to Charles Kean. Considering the magnitude of the productions aimed at, this must have been a post of no small importance and responsibility. When the famous series of Shakespearean revivals demanded the appearance of clever children, what was more natural than a conference between Kean and his trusted lieutenant, and the recommendation by the fond father of the engagement of his gifted little daughters, Kate and Ellen? Their services were secured, and at a very early period of their lives they began to make stage history. Their achievements in the once famous Oxford Street playhouse will be recorded in the next chapter. In the meantime it is pleasant to touch upon some of Ellen Terry's impressions of her earliest childhood. In a charming series of papers entitled "Stray Memories," contributed by her to the _New Review_ about ten years ago, she thus delightfully as well as dutifully recalls memories of her father and mother. "It must be remembered," she says, "that my sister and I had the advantage of exceedingly clever and conscientious parents who spared no pains to bring out and perfect any talents that we possessed. My father was a very charming elocutionist, and my mother read Shakespeare beautifully, and then both were very fond of us and saw our faults with eyes of love, though they were unsparing in their corrections. And, indeed, they had need of all their patience, for, for my own part, I know I was a most troublesome, wayward pupil. However, 'the labour we delight in physics pain,' and I hope, too, that my more staid sister 'made it up to them.'" Can anything be prettier than this daintily recorded, and no doubt uncalled for admission? [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY WHEN EIGHT YEARS OF AGE. _The autograph shows her signature of to-day._ [_To face page 24._ ] With one more glimpse of her home-life in childhood I will bring this chapter of "Beginnings" to a close. Some time ago it occurred to those who are responsible for that always sprightly journal, _The Referee_, to ask some stage celebrities to contribute to their Yule-tide number their impressions of Christmas in their early days--of Christmas, the great and never-to-be-forgotten holiday of little folk. And this is what Ellen Terry conjured up:-- "Really," she said, "I have no Christmas experience worth recounting. Ever since I can remember, Christmas Day has been for me at first a day on which I received a good many keepsakes, and afterwards a day on which I gave a good many little gifts. "But well I remember one particular Christmas Day. I don't know that the remembrance is worth the telling, but I'll tell it all the same, because I was about seven years old, and went to 'a party.' "I was much admired, and I in turn admired greatly a dark, thin boy of about ten, who had recited 'The Burial of Sir John Moore' (so jolly on a Christmas Day!). This thin boy was always going down to eat something, and after the recitation he asked me to come down and have an ice. "You will, of course, understand that this was a _real_ party--a staying-up-late, low-necked dress, and fan sort of party. When we had eaten the ices he suggested some lobster salad--which I thought would be very nice. He went to fetch the salad and left me dreaming of him and of his beautiful dark hair. "Suddenly my dream was interrupted. "A fat boy with stubbly light hair and freckles on his nose stood grinning at me and asking me to have some lemonade. I didn't want any lemonade, and told him so. Thereupon he produced a whole bough of mistletoe from somewhere or another, and without more ado seized me by my head and kissed me, and kissed me, and kissed me,--grinning all the while. "I was in a rage, and flew at him like a little cat. He fled out of the room, up the stairs, I after him. I caught him on the landing, clawed him by the hair, and banged him, and dared him to kiss me again. "He cried, the coward, though he was eight or nine years old. Adding insult to injury, he said, 'He didn't want to,' and I was 'horrid.' "I thought he was horrid, for my pretty white frock was torn, and the thin dark boy, the boy I had fallen in love with, said I should not have spoken with such a cur, and that it 'served me right.' "My heart was broken for the first time, and that is why I remember, and always shall, that miserable Christmas Day." No doubt the impressionable and impulsive little lady has since delighted in as many joyous Christmas Days as, in year succeeding year, she has given happiness to the thousands and thousands who have revelled in, and been made the better for, the display of her genius. It is to be feared that the greatest of our stage artists never realise the amount of good that they do in the world. If they did they would not only have their reward in applauding audiences, but their re-reward in the knowledge that they have brought light, understanding, and lasting pleasure into countless homes. Through simple and cheerful paths the good Ben Terrys conducted their youthful daughters into the profession that Mrs. Kendal has humorously summed up as follows:-- So many, she declares, have wrong impressions of the stage. Some think they can jump into fame, and that there is no hard work; others think it is all hard work, and there is no reward. But, of course, there are many drawbacks, and people who only sit in the front of the theatre cannot possibly comprehend what it is until they have been behind the scenes and worked at it from childhood, as she has done. Every day, people write to her and ask the qualifications of an actress. Well, she should have the face of a goddess, the strength of a lion, the figure of a Venus, the voice of a dove, the temper of an angel, the grace of a swan, the agility of an antelope, and the skin of a rhinoceros; great imagination, concentration, an exquisite enunciation, a generous spirit, a loyal disposition, plenty of courage, a keen sense of humour, a high ideal of morality, a sensitive mind, and an original treatment of everything. She must be capable of being a kind sister, a good daughter, and an excellent wife; a judicious mother, an encouraging friend, and an enterprising grandmother! These, according to an undeniable authority, are the only qualities that are required for the stage! Mrs. Kendal's dictum reminds me of what her brother, T. W. Robertson--one of the best and most popular dramatists of his age--who had gone through a perfect torture of disappointment before the production of "Society" by the Bancrofts made his name famous and his path easy, caused one of his characters in a later play from his pen to say-- "Yes, I want to write a comedy." And when the answer came--"Well, write one; I should think it is easy enough--you've only got to be amusing, spirited, bright, and life-like. That's all!" "Oh, _that's_ all, is it?" ruefully responded the would-be comedy writer. CHAPTER II FIRST APPEARANCES The first appearances on the stage of Kate and Ellen Terry were in every respect triumphant, and in theatrical history will always be held worthy of record. A time-worn adage tells us not to judge by first appearances, but those experts who discerned the extraordinary promise of these children in the opportunities afforded them under the memorable Charles Kean _régime_, at the Princess's Theatre, proved themselves to be true dramatic critics. As to the very first public appearance of the heroine of these pages there has been much discussion. When any one deserts an avocation to "take to the stage," as the phrase goes, a first performance is a milestone on the road of life and is never forgotten. With children who, coming from a theatrical family, are, as it were, born to the stage, it is almost a matter of indifference, and is apt to become nebulous. Mrs. Kendal, for example, once frankly stated that she remembered little or nothing of her initial professional efforts until she was reminded of them by some of the mature actors who had appeared in the same pieces on those destined to be interesting occasions. There was a general feeling that Ellen Terry's first appearance was as Mamillius, the little son of King Leontes of Sicilia, in Kean's elaborate revival of "The Winter's Tale," until in the June of 1880 the eminent dramatic critic and stage historian, Mr. Dutton Cook, contributed an article to the unhappily defunct _Theatre Magazine_, in which he said:-- "Some four-and-twenty years ago, when the Princess's Theatre was under the direction of the late Charles Kean, there were included in his company two little girls, who lent valuable support to the management, and whose young efforts the playgoers of the time watched with kindly and sympathetic interest. Shakespearean revivals, prodigiously embellished, were much in vogue; and Shakespeare, it may be noted by the way, has testified his regard for children by providing quite a repertory of parts well suited to the means of juvenile performers. Lady Macduff's son has appeared too seldom on the scene, perhaps, to be counted; but Fleance, Mamillius, Prince Arthur, Falstaff's boy, Moth (Don Armado's page), King Edward V., and his brother, the Duke of York, Puck, and the other fairies of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' and even Ariel--these are characters specially designed for infantile players; and these, or the majority of these, were sustained at the Princess's Theatre, now by Miss Kate, and now by Miss Ellen Terry, who were wont to appear, moreover, in such other plays, serious or comic, poetic or pantomimic, as needed the presence and assistance of the pretty, sprightly, clever children. Out of Shakespeare, opportunities for Miss Kate Terry were found in the melodramas of 'The Courier of Lyons' (Sir Henry Irving's 'The Lyons Mail' of to-day), 'Faust and Marguerite,' and the comedy of 'Every One has his Fault.' The sisters figured together as the Princes murdered in the Tower, by Mr. Charles Kean as Richard III. What miniature Hamlets they looked in their bugled black velvet trunks, silken hose, and ostrich feathers! They were in mourning, of course, for their departed father, King Edward IV. My recollection of Miss Ellen Terry dates from her impersonation of the little Duke of York. She was a child of six, or thereabout, slim and dainty of form, with profuse flaxen curls, and delicately-featured face, curiously bright and arch of expression; and she won, as I remember, her first applause when, in clear resonant tones, she delivered the lines:-- 'Uncle, my brother mocks both you and me; Because that I am little, like an ape, He thinks that you should bear me on his shoulders.' Richard's representative meanwhile scowling wickedly and tugging at his gloves desperately, pursuant to paternal example and stage tradition. A year or two later and the baby actress was representing now Mamillius, and now Puck." Now, when he arrived at this point, Mr. Dutton Cook raised a hornet's nest about his ears. In the mind of playgoers it had been long decided that this all-important first appearance had been in the character of Mamillius. Where, then, did Mr. Dutton Cook's picturesquely described Duke of York come in? Mr. George Tawse, who modestly described himself as a "play-bill-worm," took great interest in the matter, and having carefully consulted the happily preserved documents in the British Museum, wrote many letters on the subject to Mr. Clement Scott, who was then the erudite editor of _The Theatre_. These communications attracting some notice (Mr. Tawse, be it noted, being all in favour of Mamillius), Mr. Scott appealed to headquarters, and Ellen Terry characteristically wrote to him:--"The very first time I ever appeared on any stage was on the first night of 'The Winter's Tale,' at the Princess's Theatre, with dear Charles Kean. As for the young Princes, them unfortunate little men, I never played--not neither of them--there! What a cry about a little wool! _P.S._--I was born in Coventry, 1848, and was, I think, about seven when I played in 'The Winter's Tale.'" Following up his careful researches, Mr. Tawse ultimately came to the conclusion that on April 28, 1856, Ellen Terry appeared at the Princess's as Mamillius in "The Winter's Tale"; on October 15, 1856, as Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; on December 26, 1857, as the Fairy "Golden Star" in "The White Cat" pantomime; on April 5, 1858, as Karl in "Faust and Marguerite"; on October 18, as Prince Arthur in "King John"; on November 17, as Fleance in "Macbeth"; and on December 28, of the same busy year, as "The Genius of the Jewels," in the pantomime of "The King of the Castle." As the lady has so strongly declared for Mamillius, and as Mr. Tawse thus champions her, I suppose the verdict must be accepted; and yet it seems very unlikely that such an accurate writer as Mr. Dutton Cook could have been mistaken concerning that impersonation of the little Duke of York. Can Ellen Terry have forgotten it? Knowing that she does not set sufficient value on her work, or the impression it makes on others, I think it very probable. Indeed, in all due deference to her and Mr. Tawse (for even play-bills will sometimes unwittingly lie), I like to give credit to Mr. Dutton Cook's miniature sister Hamlets in their bugled black velvet trunks, their silken hose, and ostrich feathers! As poor little Mamillius, cursed with a jealous yet respected father, and wondering what the troubles could be that existed between him and his unhappy, deeply-wronged mother, she must have been very sweet, and one can fancy what Charles Kean felt when he cried to his "boy"-- "Come, Sir Page, Look on me with your welkin eye." We have only to realise that in using the word "welkin" Shakespeare meant "heavenly," to get the expression of the anxious but inspired little Terry girl. And if this was indeed her first appearance, her dismissal by Leontes with the words, "Go play, Mamillius," was almost prophetic. But if Mr. Dutton Cook chanced to err on the much discussed first appearance question, he was certainly correct in his critical estimate of the two remarkable child actresses. "The public applauded these Terry sisters," he wrote, "not simply because of their cleverness and prettiness, their graces of aspect, the careful training they evidenced, and the pains they took to discharge the histrionic duties entrusted to them, but because of the leaven of genius discernible in all their performances--they were born actresses. "Children educated to appear becomingly upon the scene have always been obtainable, and upon easy terms; but here were little players who could not merely repeat accurately the words they had learnt by rote, but could impart sentiment to their speeches, could identify themselves with the characters they played, could personate and portray, could weep themselves that they might surely make others weep, could sway the emotions of crowded audiences. They possessed in full that power of abandonment to scenic excitement which is rare even among the most consummate of mature performers. They were carried away by the force of their own acting; there were tears not only in their voices but in their eyes; their mobile faces were quick to reflect the significance of the drama's events; they could listen, their looks the while annotating, as it were, the discourse they heard; singular animation and alertness distinguished all their movements, attitudes, and gestures. There was special pathos in the involuntary trembling of their baby fingers, and the unconscious wringing of their tiny hands; their voices were particularly endowed with musically thrilling qualities. I have never seen audiences so agitated and distressed, even to the point of anguish, as were the patrons of the Princess's Theatre on those bygone nights when little Prince Arthur, personated by either of the Terry sisters, clung to Hubert's knees as the heated iron cooled in his hands, pleading passionately for sight, touchingly eloquent of voice and action; a childish simplicity attendant ever upon all the frenzy, the terror, the vehemence, and the despair of the speeches and the situation. "Assuredly Nature had been very kind to the young actresses, and without certain natural graces, gifts, and qualifications, there can scarcely be satisfactory acting. All Romeo's passion may pervade you, but unless you can look like Romeo--or something like him--if your voice be weak or cracked, your mouth awry or your legs askew--it is vain to feel like him; you will not convince your audience of your sincerity, or induce them to sympathise in the least with your actions or sufferings; still less will you stir them to transports. Of course Genius makes laws unto itself, and there have been actors who have triumphed over very serious obstacles; but, as Mr. G. H. Lewes has observed, 'a harsh, inflexible voice, a rigid or heavy face, would prevent even a Shakespeare from being impressive and affecting on the stage.' The player is greatly dependent upon his personality. At the same time, mental qualities must accompany physical advantages. The constitutionally cold and torpid cannot hope to represent successfully excitement or passion. The actor must be _en rapport_ with the character he sustains, must sympathise with the emotions he depicts. A peculiar dramatic sensitiveness and susceptibility from the first characterised the sisters Terry; their nervous organisation, their mental impressibility and vivaciousness, not less than their personal charms and attractions, may be said to have ordained and determined their success upon the stage." Coming from this high source such trustworthy and carefully analysed appreciation is invaluable; but the criticism that I love best to preserve in connection with the early appearances of the little Terrys at the Princess's Theatre is that of John William Cole, the biographer of Charles Kean. Writing for a book (published in 1859), long before the girls had established their names, he said:-- "Before quitting the subject of 'King John' (1852) at the Princess's Theatre, it would be unjust not to name in a special sentence of approval the impressive acting of Miss Kate Terry, then a child of ten years of age, as Prince Arthur, and of Mr. Ryder as Hubert." In the revival of "King John" in 1858, Ellen Terry was the Prince Arthur, that sound actor, John Ryder (he had been one of the mainstays of Macready), again playing Hubert. Concerning the production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in 1856, Mr. Cole says: "Another remarkable evidence of the excellent training of the Princess's Theatre presented itself in the precocious talent of Miss Ellen Terry, a child of eight years of age, who played the merry goblin Puck, a part that requires an old head on young shoulders, with restless elfish animation, and an evident enjoyment of her own mischievous pranks." It is because Mr. Cole wrote and published, as it were, "upon the spot," that I consider his criticism not only discerning, but beyond all price. We all know how easy it is to prophesy after the event! Ellen Terry's recollections of her appearance as the infant Mamillius in "The Winter's Tale" are very vivid, as, indeed, they may be. In more ways than one it was a notable first night for the little maid. Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and the Princess Royal were present, and the next morning she woke to find herself with her foot on the first step of the steep stairs that lead to fame. No less an authority than the _Times_ declared that she had played her part with a vivacious precocity that proved her a worthy relation of her sister. No doubt there were that day rejoicings in the Terry family, and the sensitive child must have been rewarded for her own passing tribulations. "My young heart swelled with pride--I can recall the sensation now," she has declared, "when I was told what I had to do,"--and then comes the sad confession that she wept bitter and prolonged tears when the audience laughed when she fell over the rather ridiculous toy-cart with which Mamillius was ordered to "go play." She calls it her "first dramatic failure," and felt at the moment that her "career as an actress was ruined for ever." I wonder if that untoward episode of the toy-cart had anything to do with the extreme nervousness that, according to her own confession, the actress always suffers from on "first nights"? Probably not; for I believe all true stage artists are continually nervous--nervous for themselves, nervous for their audiences. She says to this day that she is so "high strung" on a first night that if she realised that there was an audience in front staring at her, she would fly away from the theatre and be far off "in two-twos." Yes, I fear that all of them, or, at all events, the best of them, undergo the enduring agonies of nervousness. Once Sothern and Toole were dining with me in Birmingham. In the evening the one had to play Lord Dundreary at the Theatre Royal, and the other Caleb Plummer at the Prince of Wales Theatre. They had acted these parts for many, many hundreds of times, and I had imagined that their approaching work would be mere pastime to them. But Sothern, speaking to his brother comedian, said, "I don't know how you feel, John, but I'm as nervous to-night as I was on my first appearance on the stage." To my amazement, Toole, who always seemed so at home with his audiences as to become one amongst them, confessed that he had the same feeling; and they agreed in saying that when an aspiring young actor conceitedly set forth as one of his qualifications for the profession the fact that "he did not know what nervousness meant," he was certain to do no good. "If you are not always anxious about your work," said Sothern, "always painfully desirous to be doing your best, you will soon lose whatever hold you may have on the public." And so said every one's friend--the genial John Toole. Surely this applies to other pursuits besides the art of acting? Ellen Terry has happier recollections of Puck than of Mamillius, and no wonder, for the part, although trying, is a delightful one. During the two hundred and fifty nights of the performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Princess's (a marvellous run for those days) she "revelled in the impish unreason of 'the sprite,'" and since then she has ever felt the charm of parts "where imagination can have free play, and there is no occasion to observe too closely the cold, hard rules of conventionality, and the fetters of dry-as-dust realism." Of her performances in the pantomimes, with which, at Christmas time, Charles Kean found it necessary to supplement his elaborate productions, we can only imagine (and that is easily done) that she was a very fascinating little fairy; and it seems equally certain that when she was called upon to appear in two lengthy entertainments on the same night, she must often have been a very tired little fairy. Concerning her representation of Prince Arthur in "King John," a pathetic little story is extant. At the point where she left the stage in the full and terrible knowledge that her eyes were to be burnt out, she at first (presumably at rehearsal) made her exit with such composure that she received a strong reprimand from Mrs. Kean, who told her that she must give expression to the anguish of the situation. This little scolding caused the easily affected child to shed such earnest tears that her monitress cried out, "Oh, if you can only do that on the stage, what a Prince Arthur you will be!" The hint was taken to heart and adopted, and the success of the impersonation was assured. The new Prince Arthur was honoured with a special call, and the critics were loud and unanimous in their praises, freely acknowledging the dramatic force of the performance, together with its delightful simplicity, tenderness, and truth to nature. No doubt her position in the theatre compelled Mrs. Kean to be from time to time an apparently harsh task-mistress, but little Ellen learnt to love her, and has always remembered with generously expressed gratitude the benefit she derived from her suggestions and lessons. But in spite of the hard work and childish troubles that she must have undergone, she speaks brightly of every one she met in that very early engagement at the Princess's. In his old age and infirmities she sympathetically recalls Harley, the eminent comedian for whom Charles Dickens was induced to write some of those ephemeral farces that in earlier days had fitfully flourished at the St. James's Theatre; she remembers affectionately her earnest but exacting dancing-master, Mr. Oscar Byrn, and the tiring hours that she spent under his determined rule; she conjures up with pride her first and only meeting with Macready, and how, when she apologised for accidentally jostling him while running to her dressing-room, he smiled, laughed, and then said, "Never mind, you are a very polite little girl, and you act very earnestly and speak very nicely;" and she is warm in the praises of Charles Kean, and lastingly appreciative of the strong impression made upon her by his vivid personality. But I fancy that the sunny nature of Ellen Terry has found good in everything, and, throughout her stage career, has shed brightness and warmth on the somewhat dingy world behind the scenes. My friend, Geneviève Ward, who has taken part with her in several of her memorable Lyceum triumphs, tells me that it is delightful to bear witness to her sweet disposition--a cultivated charm that prompts her to be generous, thoughtful, kind, and considerate to every one, and to make her genuinely anxious that the humblest actresses in the company, as well as the principals, should appear to the best advantage. Thus lovingly thinking of others, Ellen Terry makes herself loved, and by her radiant presence lightens many a weary heart. In her own gossamer-like and gem-bespangled "Stray Memories," she has written: "Why is it, I wonder, that pain is so deeply felt at the time, and that its memory fades so quickly, while joy flits by almost unperceived, and yet leaves such deep traces behind? At least, this is my experience. It may not be so with most people. They may, perhaps, suffer deeply and remember lightly; enjoy strongly and forget quickly. If so, I pity them with all my heart. When I sit down to write it is not the sad recollections that come crowding before me; it is the bright joyous moments which shape themselves most distinctly in my mind. 'Oh, what a light, frivolous nature you must have, then!' I hear some grave and reverend signior remark, if any such person ever deigns to read this flimsy chatter. Well, I am ready to plead guilty to the charge. I was made like that, and so Nature is to blame, and not I." Ours would be a gayer and happier world if Nature had cast more of us in the same mould. Another Princess's experience was her appearance as a diminutive "Tiger" page-boy in a farce by Edmund Yates, entitled "If the Cap Fits," and she confesses to the infinite pride she took in her pair of miniature and rather tight-fitting top-boots. Here again, though in a different way to her Shakespearean representations, genuine success was secured. In his interesting volumes of "Reminiscences" Edmund Yates records the production, saying, that "'If the Cap Fits' was admirably acted by, amongst others, Mr. Frank Mathews, Mr. Walter Lacy, and Miss Ellen Terry ... who played a juvenile groom, a 'tiger,' with great spirit and vivacity." And, much later on, he says: "In the present days of genuine heroine-worship, with recollections full upon us of Beatrice, Viola, Olivia, and Camma, it seems odd to read, in connection with this slight comedietta, that Miss Ellen Terry is worthy of praise for the spirit and point with which she played the part of a youthful groom." Evidently she believed in the same doctrine as, in his early days, Colley Cibber did. Weary of being told that the parts he wanted to attempt were "not in his way," he protested: "I think anything, naturally written, ought to be in everybody's way that pretends to be an actor." Ellen Terry could not agree with those critics who declared that Charles Kean went too far in the mounting of his plays. The theatre-goers of those days had not been taught to expect beautiful and correct scenery, and exact accuracy in costume; and some of them actually resented it, leaning to the view held by Kean's contemporary and friend, Dr. Westland Marston, who considered that in some of the spectacular revivals at the Princess's, unnecessary pageantry was not only introduced but absolutely obtruded. For example, he said that in the beautiful production of Richard II. a display of too minute correctness in armorial bearings, weapons and household vessels made the stage an auxiliary to the museum, and forced it to combine lessons on archæology with the display of character and passion. Such were the thanks that Charles Kean received for his indefatigable and scholarly research, and lavish expenditure! How he would have loved to hear his little Mamillius and winsome Puck declare in the days of her fame, and when hers had become a voice in the land greater than his own, that with rare perception he had opened his eyes to the absurd anachronisms in costume and accessories which prevailed at that period, and that he established a system which has been perfected by Sir Henry Irving and his contemporaries. To have been a pioneer in good work eventually means fame, but pioneers are apt to be distrusted by those who have not the courage to accompany them on their explorations. She also draws an apt comparison between the remuneration and work of the actors of the Charles Kean days and now. "Very young actors," she says (I again venture to quote from her "Stray Memories"), "sometimes complain of low salaries and long hours. I wish they could see Mr. Kean's salary-list--they would soon cease to grumble. Why, a young man to-day gets as much for carrying on a coal-box as an experienced actor then received for playing an important part. Then, how different the hours are! If a company now has to rehearse for four hours in the day it is thought a great hardship. But when I was a child rehearsals often used to last until four or five in the morning. What weary work it was to be sure! My poor little legs used to ache, and sometimes I could hardly keep my eyes open when I was on the stage. Often I used to creep into the green-room, which every one acquainted with the old Princess's will remember well; and there, curled up in the deep recess of the window, forget myself, my troubles, and my art--if you can talk of art in connection with a child of eight--in a delicious sleep." It is a pathetic little portrait, but the hard work, the early training and the weary hours resulted in well won, nay almost unique success, and an artistic career that has rejoiced the hearts of her fellow creatures, and will for ever live in the history of the stage. Charles Kean's memorable management of the Princess's Theatre came to an end in 1859, and with it terminated the engagement of the Terry family. In thinking of Charles Kean I always conjure up three pictures. The first one represents the dingy lodging in the now demolished Cecil Street, Strand, where his father, Edmund Kean, is staying with his devoted wife and three-year-old boy. The struggling strolling player has got his chance at last. He is to appear to-night as Shylock at Drury Lane. It is the night of January 14, 1814, and in theatrical lore is for ever memorable. "I must dine to-day," the nervous actor said--and for the first time in many days he indulged in the luxury of meat. "My God!" he exclaimed to his wife, "if I succeed I shall go mad!" As the church clocks were striking six he sallied forth from his meagre apartment with the parting words: "I wish I was going to be shot." In his hand he carried a small bundle--containing shoes, stockings, wig, and other trifles of costume, and so he trudged through the cold and foggy streets, and the thick slush of thawing snow that penetrated his worn boots and chilled him to the bone. And then the exultant return home after the curtain had fallen upon the wild enthusiasm of an electrified audience! Nearly mad with delight, and with half-frenzied incoherency he poured forth the story of his triumph. "Mary!" he cried to his wife, "you shall ride in your carriage yet! Charles," lifting the boy from his bed, "shall go to Eton!" Then followed his career of unexampled success and prosperity continually marred and at last ruined by the dissipated habits to which this giant among tragic actors allowed himself to become the unhappy victim--habits that wrecked his home and well-nigh ruined his reputation. Between 1814 and 1827 his earnings had amounted to £200,000, and yet when he died in 1833 everything he left behind him, all his presents and mementos, had to be sent to the hammer to pay his debts. The 25th March 1833 (here is my second picture) saw the end of his stage career. For the first and only time Edmund the father and Charles the son (who had been sent to Eton, but who had taken to the stage as most of the sons of true actors will) stood upon the London boards together, the one playing Othello, the other Iago. The event caused great excitement among playgoers, and the house was crammed to suffocation. But Edmund Kean went through his part "dying as he went," until he came to the "Farewell,"--and the strangely appropriate words--"Othello's occupation's gone." Then he gasped for breath, and, falling upon his son's shoulder, moaned, "I am dying, speak to them for me." Within a few months the restless spirit of Edmund Kean was at peace in the quiet churchyard at Richmond. The third picture has been limned by Dr. Westland Marston, and shows a sad little episode in the declining years of Charles Kean, a man who, devoid of the genius of his erring father, had ever attempted to promote the highest interests of his calling, and to do good in the world. "In the autumn of 1866," says my vivid word painter, "I chanced to be at Scarborough. The evening before leaving, when passing by one of the hotels--I think the Prince of Wales's--there appeared, framed in one of the windows, a worn, pallid face, with a look of deep melancholy abstraction. 'Charles Kean!' I exclaimed to myself, and prepared to retrace my way and call. But, having heard already that he had been seriously unwell while playing a round of provincial engagements, I thought it better not to disturb him or to bring home to him a grave impression as to his health, even by a card of enquiry. In little more than a year after this his death took place. It occurred in January 1868, when he had reached his fifty-seventh year.... His friends who are still amongst us will cherish the recollection of a high-principled gentleman, warm in his attachments, generous in extending to others the appreciation he coveted for himself, and gifted with a charm of simple candour that made even his weaknesses endearing." [Illustration: TOWER COTTAGE, WINCHELSEA. _Ellen Terry's country home._ [_To face page 48._ ] It is to be feared that in the theatrical career on which he started with so much energy and confidence Charles Kean met with lack of appreciation and much disappointment. I wonder what would have been the effect if the consoling words of George William Curtis (one of the most beautiful of American writers) had been wafted to him across the Atlantic? "Success," says Curtis, "is a delusion. It is an attainment--but who attains? It is the horizon, always bounding our path and therefore never gained. The Pope, triple-crowned, and borne with flabella through St. Peter's, is not successful--for he might be canonised into a saint. Pygmalion, before his perfect statue, is not successful,--for it might live. Raphael, finishing the Sistine Madonna, is not successful,--for her beauty has revealed to him a finer and an unattainable beauty." To the true artist such truths as these strike home, and I fear they often throw their cloud over the apparently ever sunny-minded Ellen Terry. It is a fact that she often feels she has failed where enthusiastic audiences, and even the most captious critics, testify to the fact that she has triumphed. But she knows that any seeming victory in human life is not final achievement, but a spur (often a cruel one) to endless endeavour. The artistic temperament must be more or less self-tormenting, and those who desire mere personal comfort should never attempt to cultivate it. Devoid of it they can smugly criticise, and with intense self-satisfaction condemn, the life work of those who well nigh exhaust their energies in order to provide them with entertainment. At the conclusion of the Princess's engagement Mr. Ben Terry seems to have been inspired by a happy thought. Probably he knew that in 1859 there were thousands of goody-goody people who did not like to be seen in a real theatre, but who would flock to see theatricals under the guise of "A Drawing-Room Entertainment." Possibly he was aware that the congregations of goody-goodies, who still had an idea that Mawworm was right when he declared that the playhouse was the devil's hot-bed, took an eager interest in reading anything that appeared concerning the stage. The youthful fame of Kate and Ellen Terry was well established. Their stars were in the ascendant, everybody (including the useful army of goody-goodies) wanted to see them;--why not let them appear in a "Drawing-Room Entertainment"? Perhaps I am wrong in hinting at such things as these in connection with the business arrangements of Mr. Ben Terry. Anyway, a "Drawing-Room Entertainment" was devised for the attractive sisters, and it became exceedingly popular. It was first brought out at the Royal Colosseum, Regent's Park, in those days a favourite place for amusements of this description. It proved so attractive that it ran for thirty consecutive nights, during which more than thirty thousand people paid for admission, and expressed their delight in the entertainment. Thus encouraged, it was taken on tour to the leading as well as the smaller provincial towns. Those who, like myself, remember the Colosseum as it used to be, and were in their juvenile days taken there as to one of the "Sights of London," will remember the weird, imitation stalactite caverns. Ellen Terry has confessed that it was amid the artificial gloom of these shams that she first studied Juliet. At least they served one good purpose! By the courtesy of Mr. Percy Fitzgerald I am able to give the following copy of the Terry programme. LECTURE HALL, CROYDON For One Night Only _Tuesday Evening, March 13th, 1860_ MISS KATE TERRY AND MISS ELLEN TERRY The original representatives of Ariel, Cordelia, Arthur, Puck, etc. (which characters were acted by them upwards of one hundred consecutive nights, and also before Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen), at the Royal Princess's Theatre, when under the management of Mr. Charles Kean, will present their new and successful ILLUSTRATIVE AND MUSICAL DRAWING-ROOM ENTERTAINMENT In Two Parts, entitled "DISTANT RELATIONS" AND "HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS" In which they will sustain several _CHARACTERS IN FULL COSTUME_ The second item on the modest little play-bill appears to have been the strong attraction. In this Kate Terry played the part of a charming young lady who is discovered eagerly expecting her younger brother's arrival home for his first holidays. She pictures to herself the innocent, tender-hearted, shy little fellow who only a few months ago was sent away "unwillingly to school," and she longs to kiss him, and once more pour out upon him her sweet sisterly sympathy. But to her astonishment, when Harry--(impersonated by Ellen Terry)--appears, she finds that in a very short period he has degenerated, and acquired the habits of a precocious, over-dressed, cigar-smoking, horsey little cad. After some amusing scenes, in which the shocked sister endeavours to appeal to the better senses of the irrepressible little monkey, she goes out, and returning disguised as a determined old gentlewoman, endeavours to replace gentle persuasion by superior force. In a way she succeeds, and then a cleverly brought about little episode shows her that beneath the shoddy veneer of her brother's silly would-be-manly habits his true heart beats and yearns towards her; and so they kiss and are friends again, and at curtain-fall the audience know that both for sister and brother the holidays will be happy ones. Kate Terry was admirable both as the dismayed girl and the elderly lady, and Ellen Terry caused abundant amusement as the impish schoolboy. "Distant Relations" was also a clever little sketch, and the entertainment was at once merry and interesting. Ellen Terry speaks with fond recollection of that little touring party of five, the odd number being made up by Mr. Sydney Naylor, who, in the capacity of pianist (he subsequently made for himself a well-known name), accompanied the father and mother and their two young daughters. For more than two years they gaily travelled from town to town, supremely happy in each other's society, always drawing large and appreciative audiences, and having every reason to be satisfied with the financial results of their experiment. No doubt it was a "good time," and probably all concerned in it were sorry when it came to an end; but even two years make a great difference in young ladies of tender age--all entertainments run their course--and more serious work had to be approached. London was naturally their goal, and Ellen Terry soon found an engagement at the Royalty Theatre. The little Soho playhouse--the scene of varying fortunes and many strange theatrical experiments--had just passed into the hands of a Madame Albina de Rhona, an attractive Parisian actress and _danseuse_. Having made her name in Paris and St. Petersburg, this ambitious lady had resolved to captivate London, and, as her appearances at the St. James's and Drury Lane Theatres had met with encouragement, she boldly resolved to try her luck as an English manageress. One of her first attractions at the Royalty (by the way, it was originally called the Royal Soho Theatre, and Madame de Rhona is credited with having given it its new and brighter name) was an adaptation of Eugene Sue's romance, "Atar-Gull." On the stage it was the grimmest and wildest of productions, and of all the strange pranks played on the boards of the Royalty, this must surely have been the strangest. It set forth a ghastly story of a negro who (the scene was laid in Jamaica), in order to avenge the death of his father, made it his life's business to murder every member of his master's family. The piece was replete with horrors and wholly unsuited to the little bandbox of a house, which, in later years, when the Broughs, Burnand, and other humorous writers were at their brightest, and when burlesque was true burlesque--witty, coherent, and cohesive, we associated with all that is exhilarating and mirth-provoking. Those who, with me, can conjure up the days of the "Patty" Oliver _régime_ will know what I mean. But all I have to do with the gruesome "Atar-Gull" is to make brief note of the part in it that Ellen Terry was called upon to play. It was that of a fair young girl named Clementine who (not unnaturally) has an aversion to the snakes that infest her environment. In order to cure her of this reprehensible prejudice, it occurs to some idiot (possibly an interfering aunt) to order a dead snake to be put in her room. This is an opportunity for the revengeful negro, and he contrives to give her a live and deadly reptile for her companion. With the living venomous creature coiled about her neck and body, and ever tightening its scaly, slimy hug, the terrified girl appears screaming on the stage. Into this horrible situation, and the opportunity it afforded her, the still childish Ellen Terry put her whole heart, and outscreamed all actresses, whether young or old. It was not one prolonged scream and then collapse. As her terror and agony seemed to increase, shriek succeeded shriek--a shriek for deliverance--a shriek of bodily anguish--and a shriek of hopeless despair. No doubt the effect was startling, and unquestionably it thrilled her audiences. It was all wonderfully done, and the fear of the wretched girl was depicted with almost painful fidelity. But the ridiculous, misplaced, and sensational play made the situation an absurd one. If it were repeated to-day we should think of the nonsense rhyme-- "There was a young lady of Russia, Who screamed so, that no one could hush her." As it was, it made many people laugh; but on the critics, who could "read between the lines," it left its impression, and gave hope of wondrous things to come. Happily, most of them lived to see them come. It was all a question of training. According to Ellen Terry's own account, Madame Albina de Rhona must have been a very difficult lady to work under, and yet her warm heart prompts her to speak to-day in affectionate terms of her second manageress. In the case of this gifted child the quality of mercy was never strained. Her tasks had to be endured, but she schooled herself to enjoy them, and she tried to love those with whom she worked. CHAPTER III THE BRISTOL STOCK COMPANY The engagement at the Royalty was only a stopgap, and at its termination the wise Mr. Ben Terry took his daughter "to school," in one of the famous stock companies that then most happily existed in all the large provincial towns. They were indeed "schools"--schools of a very practical order--and in them most of the leading actors of our generation graduated. Now that they have vanished, the great question among the would-be actors and actresses of to-day (or I should say among those who are in earnest) is "where can we find a true dramatic school?" Alas! too many of them abjure school, and, with the awkwardness (though very little of the timidity) of half-fledged birds, flutter blindly on to the stage, and blunder under the unwonted glare of footlights, to the bewilderment of the theatrical _habitués_ and the despair of critics, but apparently to the great satisfaction of themselves and their foolishly admiring friends. I am inclined to think that theatre-lovers who never lived in a large town in the good old stock company days missed one of the joys of life. The actors and actresses in those companies (I speak from personal experience) were our pride and our delight. Their names were familiar in our mouths and homes as household words. Eagerly we scanned the ever-changing play-bills to see what this or that favourite would do next; anxiously we turned to the newspaper to see if the privileged critic did full justice to them. They were, both on and off the stage, our local heroes, heroines, soul-inspirers, and mirth-provokers. They were familiar figures in our streets, and we loved to meet them. When, according to the custom of those days, the "stars" from London came down to be supported by the stock company, we were so loyal to the friends who delighted us all the year round that we pretended to think little or nothing of the stars. When, in due course, some of them moved on to London, we watched their careers with the deepest interest. In short, between the players and their patrons there existed a personal affection. If they did not know each other "off the stage," the magnetic touch was there, and it meant everything to those on both sides of the curtain. The result was painstaking and sound (if not always great) acting, and well-judged applause from fond and encouraging audiences. Under such conditions, actors who already had their hearts in their vocation, did not care how hard they worked, and constant experience, coupled with true endeavour, perfected them in their art. But it _was_ hard work! Edward Compton has told me that at the shortest notice he was called upon to study and play within one week important parts in "The Octoroon," "The Old Toll House," "Thirty Years of a Gambler's Life," and "Raby Rattler," and I believe Sir Henry Irving could record even harder experiences. But the firing of the clay brought out the colours on the porcelain, and the colours lasted. At the time when Ellen Terry was taken to one of these important schools, there was no better stock company in England than that brought together by Mr. J. H. Chute, the enterprising and far-seeing manager of the Theatre Royal, Bristol. Mr. Chute seemed to have a knack of gathering about him most of the promising young artists of the day, and certainly those who learnt their lessons under the roof of his academy did justice to his name. It is tantalising to think of a West of England stock company (Mr. Chute at that time was responsible for the Bath as well as the Bristol theatre) that, within a very short period, could boast of such a constellation of names as Madge Robertson (Mrs. Kendal), Marie Wilton (Lady Bancroft), Henrietta Hodson (Mrs. Labouchere), Kate Bishop, Kate and Ellen Terry, George Melville, Arthur Stirling, George and William Rignold, W. H. Vernon, David James, Charles Coghlan, Arthur Wood, John Rouse, and J. F. Cathcart. No wonder that in such a school, and with such schoolmates, Ellen Terry learnt very useful lessons. There was an abundance of work. One-act farces and genuine burlesques were then in vogue, and these, with tragedy or comedy, formed the day's rehearsal and the evening's bill. Every one took part in them, and both for brains and body it was sharp and onerous work. But they were enthusiasts; they were aware of their local popularity; they were ready to tackle anything that came in their way, and so their names were made. For example, Ellen Terry was cast for a part in a burlesque. She told the stage manager that she could neither sing nor dance. The reply was laconic and decisive: "_You've got to do it!_" "And I did, in a way," she says; "but it was the best thing that could happen to me, for it took the self-consciousness out of me--and, after a while, I thought it was capital fun, for the Bath and Bristol people were very kind." But it was not all burlesque. Relief to clever William Brough's "Endymion"--"Perseus and Andromeda; or the Maid and the Monster," and so forth, was found in serious drama, and sometimes in Shakespeare. Kate Terry had preceded her younger sister to Bristol, and speedily established herself as a favourite. Her Portia and Beatrice were already popular performances, and renewed zest was added to them when "Pretty Miss Ellen" was at hand to play Nerissa and Hero. During this useful engagement Ellen Terry formed an intense admiration for some of her co-mates. She fell in love with the beautiful singing voice of Madge Robertson (it was an open question then whether our Mrs. Kendal of to-day would devote herself to opera or drama), and she is especially warm in her praises of the finished acting of Charles Coghlan. How some of these budding artists crossed each other's paths in later and famous days we shall see in the course of these pages. From an old friend, who in the days of his youth aspired to be an actor, but, after a short trial, quitted the stage to make his name as journalist and author, I have received the following interesting notes:-- "You ask me, my dear Pemberton," he writes, "to give you my recollections of Ellen Terry in those now, alas! far-off days of my youth, when I was for a brief time connected in a very humble capacity with the Theatre Royal, Bristol. It was in the early sixties (1862, I think) that Ellen and her elder sister, Kate (now Mrs. Arthur Lewis), were engaged by the late James Henry Chute as members of his stock company, Kate playing the juvenile lead and the principal ladies in the classical burlesques, which were then the vogue and quite as attractive as the legitimate drama. The company also included Miss Henrietta Hodson (now Mrs. Labouchere), soubrette and principal boy, the late Charles Coghlan, light comedian, William and George Rignold, John Rouse, Mr. and Mrs. Robertson, and their daughter Madge, the latter only in her early 'teens, and Arthur Wood, 'first low comedian.' "Ellen Terry was then a girl of about fourteen, of tall figure, with a round, dimpled, laughing, mischievous face, a pair of merry, saucy grey eyes, and an aureole of golden hair, which she wore, in the words of a modern ditty, 'hanging down her back.' Although dwarfed, in a measure, as an actress, by the more experienced skill and the superior _rôles_ of her fascinating sister, Ellen soon became a great favourite in Bristol. Her popularity was largely due to her performances in two of the Brough brothers' burlesques--'Endymion' and 'Perseus and Andromeda.' In the former Miss Hodson played Endymion, Kate Terry was Diana, and Ellen, Cupid, and a very arch, piquant sprite, full of movement and laughter, Miss Ellen was. "She wore a loose short-skirted sort of tunic with a pair of miniature wings, and of course carried the conventional bow and quiver. Some of the more prudish of the Bristol theatre-goers--the same people who had been wont to roar over the vulgar comicalities of Johnny Rouse--were half inclined to be shocked at a scantiness of attire that even Mr. Chute himself was disposed to think (_i.e._ for the modest early sixties: to-day a Cupid _with a_ '_skirted_ tunic' would be considered sadly over-dressed) a 'little daring.' "But Ellen Terry's charm, her delightful grace and innate refinement, quite disarmed the prudes, and Cupid triumphed in front of the curtain as well as behind it, and lightly shot his darts in all directions. Miss Hodson was at that time a deservedly great favourite, but the Terry sisters unconsciously became the founders of a new cult among local playgoers, and set up an empire of their own; in fact, I am hardly exaggerating if I say that there were among the gilded youth of Bristol two rival factions--the Hodson faction and the Terry faction, whose friendly antagonism was as keen, if not as fatal, as that of the Montagues and the Capulets. "If my memory serves me right, Ellen was the Dictys of the other burlesque, Miss Hodson and Miss Kate Terry playing the two _rôles_ of the title. In one of these pieces Arthur Wood had to speak a line in which occurs the phrase, "such a mystery here." He made much nightly capital--for these burlesques had long runs considering they were played by a stock company in a provincial theatre--by emphasising the syllables of 'mystery,' so as to make the sentence sound 'such a Miss Terry here.' "I was only a general utility actor in that company, and I had to play one of the crowd in 'Perseus and Andromeda,' whose duty it was to be suddenly turned to stone, after the fashion of Lot's wife--only with a more studied artistic pose--at the sight of Medusa's head. In order to give _vraisemblance_ to the illusion, we of the populace were costumed in a parti-coloured fashion, one half white, the other half of some strong colour, and our faces were made up on one side only with a sort of whitewash. When, at the given signal, we turned round our white sides with the precision of soldiers at drill to the full stream of the limelight, striking simultaneously more or less statuesque attitudes, the situation was, for those days, effective, and nightly brought down the house and evoked a call for the manager. I recollect that before the production, in order to ascertain the effect of the whitewash, one or two of us, true to our profession of 'general utility,' had to put it on at a midnight rehearsal, after we had resumed our ordinary dress. Many years have elapsed since the incident, yet I can still hear the peals of musical laughter with which Ellen Terry greeted our intensely comical appearance, and I can still see the mischief and good-natured ridicule sparkling in her merry eyes. "If I had to describe her acting in those days, I should say its chief characteristic was a vivacious sauciness. Her voice already had some of the rich sympathetic quality which has since been one of her most distinctive charms. Although only in the first flush of a joyous girlhood, she was yet familiar enough with the stage to be absolutely at home on it, and in such complete touch with her audiences that she could afford to discard the serious spirit altogether, even when the situation demanded a less frivolous mood. That she made these little subordinate parts in the burlesques not only dominate the stage at the time, but also caused them to live in the memory all these years, is evidence enough of the compelling force and infection of her irrepressible mirthfulness. At rehearsals, even more than when acting, she was brimful of merriment, taking nothing gravely;--a gay, mercurial child, flitting about hither and thither with ever the same exuberant _insouciance_, the same defiant spirit of laughter, as if life and all its possibilities of tangle and tragedy had only a holiday meeting for her. As I look back on those bright and too brief 'salad' days, it seems to me that Ellen Terry might have been regarded as the epitome of that 'golden age' in which people 'fleeted the time carelessly.' "Mrs. Terry always accompanied her daughters to and from the theatre every night, and watched them from the wings during the whole time they were on the stage. They lodged during the season in Queen Square, then the recognised quarter for theatrical folks. The theatre itself was situated in King Street; I believe it still exists, but its glory, like that of Ichabod, has long since departed. A theatre in Park Row has superseded the famous old house where so many great actors and actresses were trained; and the whole neighbourhood round that building, once throbbing with artistic interest, has become sordid and neglected, and redolent of ship chandlery. But in the old times, outside the little narrow stage-door, crowds of dazzled Lotharios and stage-struck worshippers used to throng to see the 'Terrys' go home after the performance. Mrs. Terry played her part of duenna with uncommon vigilance, and it was little more than a snap-shot vision of three hurrying and well-wrapped up figures that rewarded the admirers for their patience. "I recollect one poor lad who was an assistant in a large drapery establishment in Wine Street, Bristol. He was infatuated with the beautiful Kate Terry, though he had never spoken to her, and probably he never even saw her off the stage. But he left bouquets and other gifts addressed to her at the stage-door, and as there was nothing to indicate who the donor was, or where he lived, she could not send them back. Sometime after this young fellow was arrested for embezzlement. He had taken his employer's money, partly in order to gratify a passion for the theatre, and partly to enable him to buy presents for the divinity whom he worshipped from afar. It was a painful little drama of real life; and I know that no one was more distressed than Miss Terry herself when she read the account of the magisterial proceedings in the paper. "I could tell you a lot about the 'Old Duke' tavern, the famous theatrical rendezvous of those days; but the 'Terrys,' of course, did not come on in that convivial scene. I am reminded, however, that one of its regular _habitués_ was Charley Adams, the theatre prompter, about whom many diverting stories might be told. Whenever there was a stage wait or anything went wrong, Charley lost his head entirely, and rushed about with 'language' on his lips and tears streaming down his cheeks. On one occasion the stage was kept waiting for George Rignold, the audience began to be impatient, and Charley was distracted. Ellen Terry happened to be standing in the prompt wing, and, rendered desperate by the growing delay, Charley, with forcible if florid eloquence, expressed in the true Bristol vernacular, pushed her on to the stage. 'Go on! go on!' he screamed, making the objective of his imperative mood fairly totter with adjectives. Miss Terry was, however, by no means embarrassed. She quietly took in the situation: her always welcome presence elicited a hearty cheer, and by the time she had crossed the stage and disappeared on the O.P. side, the missing actor had turned up and proceeded to 'smooth out the creases.' "Poor old Charley was often a butt for Ellen Terry's pleasant banter. He was a rather illiterate man, and made mistakes of speech which were an irresistible theme of ridicule with this mirthful maiden. How she laughed when he spoke of the 'Jorgon's' head, and called the statues 'statties,' and performed other amazing feats of verbal metamorphosis. "Charley was always at his best in the 'Old Duke' smoking-room with his long clay pipe, after his sixth 'small jug' of eleemosynary beer. Then he was confidential, impressive, sententious, and 'dear boy'd' every one with a friendship which was none the less sincere because its fount was somewhat alcoholic. It is many a year since the earth closed over thee, thou poor, excitable, and sometimes self-indulgent disciple of Thespis, but none who knew thee can ever have any but kindly memories of thy simple undisguised obsequiousness to the 'star,' and thy majestically patronising mien to the super. "I have used the name Ellen Terry throughout the above notes, but at that time she was always and to every one, 'Nelly.' She was announced as 'Miss Nelly Terry' in the play-bills, and I have an old friendly letter from her, written only a few months after she left Bristol, in which she signs herself 'Nelly.' The handwriting is angular and 'school-missish,' with no indication of the soundness and flexible strength which have since become its characteristics. "Perhaps I have laid too much stress on the two burlesque parts which have the deepest roots in my memory. 'Miss Nelly' played other parts; she was the 'walking lady' of the company, and I have (rather hazy) recollections of her in a crinolined dress in that fine old melodrama 'The Angel of Midnight; or, The Duel in the Snow'; as a fashionable dame in the glittering but immoral coterie which forms the personal background in 'The Marble Heart'; and as the _ingenue_ in a once popular comedietta entitled 'The Little Treasure.' "To say that she then showed unmistakable promise of the pre-eminent position to which she has since attained in English dramatic art would be to exhibit that 'after-the-event' wisdom which is so common a feature of modern prophecy. I will only say that we, the young fellows of that day, thought she was perfection; we toasted her in our necessarily frugal measures; we would gladly have been her hewers of wood and drawers of water. She had personal charm as well as histrionic skill. Her smiles were very sweet, but, alack for all of us, they were mathematically impartial." These jottings are not only interesting as regards the early career of Kate and Ellen Terry, but they prove my views as to the affection in which the famous old stock companies were held by their devoted provincial patrons. In these days of ephemeral touring troupes such a condition of things is impossible, and really earnest students of the drama starve for lack of nourishment. On April 2, 1862, the old Bath Theatre of many glorious memories was destroyed by fire; but James Henry Chute was not the man to be dismayed by disaster. Within a year it was rebuilt, and on March 4, 1863, was again ready for its faithful audiences. As the opening programme is now historic, it is well to reproduce it here:-- NEW THEATRE ROYAL, BATH. FIRST NIGHT. _Lessee and Manager_, JAMES HENRY CHUTE. _Prices_--The following scale of prices has been adopted for the opening night--Dress Circle, 5/-; Upper Circle, 3/-; Pit and Amphitheatre (entrance in Beaufort Square), 2/-; Gallery (entrance in St. John's Place), 1/-. No second price. _Prices of Admission after the first night_ will be as follows--Dress Circle, 4/-; second price, 2/6. Upper Boxes, 2/-; second price, 1/6. Pit, 1/6; second price, 1/-. Amphitheatre (entrance in St. John's Place), 1/-. Gallery, 6d. Private Boxes, 20/-, 25/-, 30/-. _Box Office_--The Box Office, under the direction of Mr. Gifford, for a few days will be at Mr H. N. King's Photographic Establishment, 42 Milsom Street, the proprietor having kindly placed his view-room at the service of the manager. _Leader of the Band_ Mr T. H. Salmon _Stage Manager_ Mr Marshall _Scenic Artist_ Mr G. Gordon DRAMATIC PROLOGUE-- _Written expressly for the occasion by_ G. F. Powell, Esq. The Spirit of the Past by Miss Henrietta Hodson The Spirit of the Future by Miss Ellen Terry (her first appearance here) The Spirit of the Hour (Lord Dundreary) by Mr W. Rignold The Spirit of the Times (Sensation) by Mr A. Wood The Spirit of Fashion by Miss Desborough (first appearance here) Fortune by Miss Elizabeth Burton Comedy by Mr Charles Coghlan (his first appearance) Tragedy by Mr George Yates (his first appearance) Mr Chute (Lessee and Manager) by Himself. "God save the Queen." _Verse and Chorus by the Company._ To be followed by Shakespeare's MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM As arranged for representation by Mr Charles Kean, and performed 150 times at the Royal Princess's Theatre. With entirely new Scenery, Costumes, Decorations, Appointments, Mechanical Appliances, and Mendelssohn's music. The Scenery by Mr W. Gordon, Mr George Gordon, Mr Geo. Philips, Mr Horne & Assistants. The Machinery by Mr Harwell. The Costumes by Miss Jarrett and Assistants. The Appointments by Mr Pritchard. The Action and Dances by Miss Powell. Music arranged by Mr J. L. Hatton & Mr Salmon. Theseus (Prince of Athens) Mr George Rignold Egeus (father to Hermia) Mr Robertson Lysander (in love with Hermia) Mr William Rignold Demetrius ( " " ) Mr Charles Coghlan Philostrate (Master of Revels Mr Brunel to Theseus) Quince (the Carpenter) Mr Marshall (first appearance these two years) Snug (the Joiner) Mr Douglas Gray Bottom (the Weaver) Mr A. Wood Flute (the bellows-mender) Mr H. Andrews Snout (the Tinker) Mr Marchant Starveling (the Tailor) Mr Gibson Hippolyta (Queen of the Amazons) Miss Louisa Thorne (first (betrothed to Theseus) appearance in Bath) Hermia (daughter to Egeus, in love Miss Elizabeth Burton with Lysander) Helena (in love with Demetrius) Miss Desborough Oberon (King of the Fairies) Miss Henrietta Hodson Titania (Queen of the Fairies) Miss Ellen Terry Puck, or Robin Goodfellow (a Fairy) Master Edmund Marshall First Singing Fairy Miss M. Cruse Second Singing Fairy Miss Madge Robertson Third Singing Fairy Miss F. Douglas Fairies who join in a shadow dance Miss Powell & her pupils Peablossom Miss Ellen Seymour Moth Miss E. Frailly Cobweb Master F. Marshall Mustard-seed Miss I. Marshall _Fairies_-- Demoiselles Margarets, Montague, Owen, Fanny Marshall, Bullock, Vaughan, Clarke, A. Clarke, Gibson, Marchant, Holmes, Wootton, etc. _Other Fairies attending their King and Queen_-- Misses Seymour, C. Wootten, Goodyer, Frailly, E. Frailly, C. Marchant, F. Marchant, Watts, etc. _Characters in Interlude performed by the Clowns_-- Pyramus, by Bottom; Wall, by Snout; Thisbe, by Flute; Moonshine, by Starveling; Lion, by Snug. _Attendants on_ Theseus & Hippolyta--Huntsman, Esquire, etc. The new Act-Drop by Messrs Grieve and Telbin. To conclude with the new and laughable Farce, by J. Wooler, Esq., called: MARRIAGE AT ANY PRICE Brownjohn Brown Mr Marshall (Of the Laburnums) Simon Gushington Mr William Rignold Tubs Mr Gibson Alick Mr Wilson Peter Peppercorn } Jemima Ann } Mr A. Wood Charley Bitt } Kate Gushington } Bob, Tiger } Miss Henrietta Hodson Jemima, a Housemaid } Alice, Niece to Brown Miss Madge Robertson. Matilda Peppercorn Miss Louisa Thorne Speaking by the light of to-day, this was indeed a rich cast, and it is interesting to note how Madge Robertson and Ellen Terry--destined to become the two greatest actresses of their generation--thus played together in their "'prentice days." No doubt the "singing fairy" of the evening inspired Titania with her admiration for Mrs. Kendal's exquisite voice. Long after their stock company days, the Terry Sisters held their well-merited and remarkable popularity in Bristol. That distinguished actor, W. H. Vernon, who, as we have seen, graduated as one of Mr. Chute's "young people," has told me how enthusiastically they were received when, with London honours thick upon them, they came to "star" in their old "school," in a piece called "A Sister's Penance," which had been a great success at the Adelphi Theatre. Vernon, who was "Miss Nelly's" lover on that occasion, was immensely struck by her merriment and high spirits at the rehearsal in the morning and (in contrast) her wonderful display of true emotion in the performance of the evening. In connection with Ellen Terry's next appearance in London, it is curious to note that in the famous Bath programme that preceded it, William Rignold should figure as "Lord Dundreary"--the "Spirit of the Hour"; and that she should be so aptly chosen for "The Spirit of the Future." CHAPTER IV AT THE HAYMARKET THEATRE The compiler of the Bath programme was right when he spoke of Lord Dundreary as the "Spirit of the Hour." The phenomenal success of the late E. A. Sothern in this eccentric and most original character, at the Haymarket Theatre, had taken all London (nay, all England) by storm. At the time of which I am writing the name of Dundreary was upon the lips of every one. Men cultivated Dundreary whiskers, and affected Dundreary coats, waistcoats, and trousers; indeed, Sothern had become such a good friend to the tailors that, if he would have accepted them, he might have been furnished, without any mention of payment, with clothes sufficient for a dozen lifetimes. His dressing-room at the Haymarket was crowded with parcels sent by energetic haberdashers, who knew that if by wearing it upon the stage he would set the fashion for a certain sort of necktie, or a particular pattern of shirt-cuff or collar, their fortunes would be half made; and hatters and boot-makers followed in the haberdashers' wake. Dundreary photographs were seen everywhere. "Dundrearyisms," as they came to be called, were the fashionable _mots_ of the day; and little books (generally very badly done) dealing with the imaginary doings of Dundreary under every possible condition, and in every quarter of the globe, were in their thousands sold at the street corners. Concerning Dundreary quite three parts of England went more than half mad, and not to know all about him and his deliciously quaint sayings and doings was to argue yourself unknown. The actor who not only caused but sustained all this excitement must have achieved something far greater than the mere creation of a new type of "stage swell." Dundreary was a study for the philosopher as well as a laughing-stock for the idler, and he thus became popular with all classes of the community. But in 1863 Sothern was growing tired of _toujours_ Dundreary. He was a restless as well as an ambitious actor, and he longed for a change. An Englishman by birth and training, all his great successes (including Dundreary) had been won in America, and he wished to show the Haymarket audiences what he could do in other characters. For the time being that fine old actor-manager, J. B. Buckstone, could not hear of his "Lordship" being out of the bill, so Sothern had to content himself with occasional afterpieces. Among the characters that he fancied was that of Captain Walter Maydenblush in that pretty little adaptation from the French, "La Joie de la Maison," entitled "The Little Treasure." It is a very effective light comedy part, but the mainstay of the piece is the "joy of the house," the sweet young girl, Gertrude. When the piece was first produced at the Haymarket this part had been played by Blanche Fane, the idol of her day, and it had also been made familiar to playgoers by the ever-fascinating Marie Wilton, now Lady Bancroft. Sothern knew very well that without an attractive Gertrude his Walter Maydenblush would go for nothing. Where was she to be found? Well, as we have seen, Ellen Terry had played the part in Bristol. Her growing fame had reached London, and she was engaged to re-create it at the Haymarket. Although the piece was a subordinate one, her ordeal was formidable, for she had to challenge comparison with her popular and gifted predecessors in a character that required an abundance of delicacy and finesse. Her success was instantaneous. In writing of it that outspoken critic and encyclopædia of dramatic lore, Edward Leman Blanchard, said:-- "She is very young, but shows no trace of immaturity either in her style or figure. Tall for her age, of prepossessing appearance, and with expressive features full of vivacity and intelligence, she secured at once the sympathies of her audience, and retained them by the joyous spirit and deep feeling with which she imbued the personation. In the girlish playfulness exhibited through the first act Miss Ellen Terry was especially happy, and in characters illustrative of a frank and impulsive temperament the young actress will prove a most desirable addition to the feminine strength of the stage." And so it was with all the leading critics, they, and delighted audiences, telling her that in a moment her permanent popularity in London was a thing assured. Of course she had in due course to support Lord Dundreary in "Our American Cousin," a play which, not very good to begin with, had, for the sake of Sothern's superbly droll performance, been whittled down to a mere nothing. With the exception of the characters of Asa Trenchard (and he had been converted into an absurd caricature of an American) and Mary Meredith, the one sympathetic woman of the piece, the other parts were indeed thankless ones, and it seems impossible to think that Ellen Terry, our greatest living Shakespearean actress, was once wasted on the insipid _role_ of Georgina, the affected girl on whom Dundreary was "spoony." Georgina was simply a foil for the ridiculous fop's unconscious and wonderfully uttered witticisms, and she had little more to do than to keep her countenance while the audiences roared with laughter at Sothern's wild but always coherent absurdities of speech and manner. Under this trying ordeal I have seen many Georginas break down and laugh heartily with their "kind friends in front," and I have reason to know that the mischief-loving Sothern, at the risk of missing his own points, often tried to make them do so. Of the sweet "Spirit of the Future," as this stage lay figure playing with the restless "Spirit of the Hour," Clement Scott has said:-- "When Ellen Terry played Georgina she was a young girl of enchanting loveliness. She was the ideal of every pre-Raphaelite painter, and had hair, as De Musset says, '_comme le blé_.' I always sympathised with Dundreary when he, within whispering distance of Ellen Terry's harvest-coloured hair, said: 'It makes a fellow feel awkward when he's talking to the back of a person's head.'" In the same inexhaustible play she was called upon, a little later on, to enact the prettily limned Mary Meredith. She says she did it "vilely"; but neither critics nor audiences agreed with her. Sothern, both on and off the stage, and both with men and women, was one of the most popular beings of his day, and it is therefore all the more surprising to hear Ellen Terry say that she could never like him. She admired him, but she could not understand his mania for practical joking. By some this has been thought odd, for it is known that she herself dearly loves a joke. I think I can explain her prejudice. Having begun one of his "sells," as he called them, Sothern did not know when to leave off, and he never seemed to reflect that it was unkind to practise his pleasantries on nervous young actors. That he did not mean to be unkind, and that if he felt he had made a mistake or had gone too far he was deeply penitent and anxious to make any atonement in his power, I, who knew him so intimately, can asseverate. But if he saw the chance of a "sell" he could hardly resist temptation, and many of those associated with him on the stage, and who did not understand his bewildering sense of humour, suffered in silence, and were secretly tortured by his odd and incessant pranks. I have no doubt this was poor Ellen Terry's position when she complains that he teased her--made her forget her part, and "look like an idiot." The following anecdote concerning the way in which he treated me (his personal friend!) and a little company of actors and actresses, working their hardest to gain a word of approbation from the great star of the period, will illustrate my meaning. In the days of many years ago he accepted a comedietta from my pen wildly called (Sothern gave it its title) "My Wife's Father's Sister," and the little piece was produced at the Theatre Royal, Brighton. He was anxious that I should be present at its first night, but I was unable to join him until its second representation. I was to be his guest, but when I entered his room at the Grand Hotel he seemed amazed and discomforted to see me. "What on earth brings _you_ here?" he exclaimed. "Why, to see you and my piece," I replied. "Then you didn't get my telegram last night?" he inquired. I told him that I had received no telegram and should be glad to know its purport. "Well," he said, in a vexed tone of voice, "I wired to beg you as a personal favour to me not to come to Brighton, but as you _are_ here, we'll say no more about it." Of course this did not satisfy me, and on being very hard pressed, he reluctantly told me that my poor little play had been a dead failure, and that he had telegraphed to me to stay away because he wanted to spare me humiliation. "But," I said, in an agony of disappointment, "the newspapers speak well of it!" "Yes," replied Sothern, "the critics here are good friends of mine, and I persuaded them that it was a sorry task to break a butterfly on a wheel. It was impossible for me at a moment's notice to get another after-piece ready to put in its place, but to-night 'My Wife's Father's Sister' will be played for the second and last time. Don't shirk seeing it, it will be a useful, if painful, lesson to you, and at supper to-night we'll try and find out where the fatal kink in it lies, for, as you know, I felt certain that it was going to be a hit." In spite of my friend's kindness, sympathy, and unbounded hospitality, I, crushed with mortification, spent a wretched afternoon, and in the early evening (Sothern, who was to play Dundreary, had preceded me) I wended my sad way to the theatre. On my walk I met a mutual friend. [Illustration: SMALLHYTHE FARM. _Ellen Terry's country retreat at Tenterden, Kent._ [_To face page 80._ ] "Well, how did the piece go last night?" he asked. "I was sorry I couldn't be there to see." Miserably I told him my bitter news, and how the play had failed. "Then I believe it was Sothern's fault," he said. "He was half mad on practical jokes last night, and one of the actors has told me how he declared that _you_ were in front, that you are a most exacting and irritable author, and that you were intensely annoyed at the grossly vulgar way in which, according to your reported views, your work was interpreted. One by one the actors and actresses had from his lips their dose of what they supposed, and _still_ suppose, to be _your_ harsh criticism. 'Abominable!' 'Atrocious!' and 'Actionable' were among the mildest expressions you were said to have used, and the poor people became so nervous that they hardly knew what they were doing. At the end of the performance Sothern told them collectively that you had left the theatre 'a shattered and prematurely old man.'" When I crept into an obscure corner of a private box that night, expecting to witness the complete failure of a number of nerveless artists to galvanise a dead play into life, I was very angry with Sothern. I felt that I had been "butchered" to make a "Roman Holiday," and I did not like the sensation. But, to my bewilderment, the comedietta went capitally, and applause of the right sort followed the fall of the curtain. At supper, Sothern, with that marvellous diamond-like sparkle in his speaking blue-grey eye which his friends so well remember, "gave away" the greater part of the story. That delighted and delightful familiar twinkle was sufficient to tell me the truth. "Oh!" I cried, "you have 'sold' me! I believe the piece went as well _last_ night as it did _to-night_!" "Much better," he replied calmly. "I sent you no telegram, but I could not resist the sell. Now light a cigar and be happy." And I was happy until, in the early hours of the morning, Sothern said, "By the way, I wonder how your supper party is getting on?" "My supper party?" I asked. "What do you mean?" "Oh," he replied, as he lighted another cigar, "now I think of it, I forgot to tell you that I mentioned to the performers in 'My Wife's Father's Sister' that you were so delighted with their marked improvement on the second night of the production that you wished to welcome them at a little supper you had ordered at the 'Old Ship.'" And I heard the next day that the poor "sold" people went and waited and came supperless away. And then I sneaked out of Brighton, leaving "My Wife's Father's Sister" behind me. I have never seen her since. This is only an example of Sothern's constant and, it must be owned, often exasperating practices. It was wonderful that some of his escapades were so easily forgiven, but those who narrowly watched his marvellous dexterity in keeping up the deceptions of his rapid invention, causing one practical joke to overtake another like sea waves; those who could understand his infectious vitality and quick sense of humour, were, even when they chanced to be the wrathful objects of his extravagancies, lost in admiration for his peculiar genius. In some way his temperament must have resembled that of the great David Garrick, whom he so often impersonated on the stage. Of the English Roscius it has been said that he was always acting, whether upon the stage, in his own house, in the houses of his friends, and even in the streets. He would suddenly stop in the middle of a public thoroughfare, and look up at the sky as if he saw something remarkable, until a crowd gathered about him, and then he would turn away with the wild stare of insanity. He could not sit down to have his hair dressed without terrifying the barber by making his face assume every shade of expression, from the deepest tragic gloom to the vacancy of idiotcy. His enemies ascribed these feats to a restless egotism that must always be conspicuous, but might they not rather have arisen from the over-exuberant animal spirits of "the cheerfulest man of his age"? Such, in a great measure, was Sothern's nature, and it is not to be wondered at if it sometimes jarred upon those who had to act with him, and who were desirous to do justice to themselves. I cannot suppose that his "My Wife's Father's Sister's" victims loved him any more than they did the innocent writer of these lines, or than Ellen Terry seems to have done. Such things are to be understood, but I cannot mention Edward Askew Sothern without recording the fact that to his intimate friends he was ever the most consistent, affectionate, and generous of men. At the hospitable table of Henry Irving I once met the famous American tragedian, the late John M'Cullough. Turning to me in the course of the evening, he said: "I am told you are a close friend of Ned Sothern's;" and when I answered "Yes," he said, as if it were a matter of course, "Then you love him." And that of all men who really knew him well was true. But if in Sothern Ellen Terry chanced to find an uncongenial fellow-actor, in another member of the Haymarket Company she made a friend, destined to play with her in some of her greatest subsequent triumphs. This was that grand old actor, Henry Howe, "dear old Mr. Howe," as she calls him, who was a staunch member of the once celebrated band of Haymarket comedians for forty years. Howe played the part of father to "the little treasure"; his kindly, winsome ways at once won her sympathy, and in the now forgotten play no scene was more successful than that in which the supposed parent and child, moved by the pathos of each other's acting, united in genuine tears. Macready aptly described Charles Kemble as a first-rate actor of second-rate parts, and the same somewhat lukewarm praise may be attributed to Henry Howe; but he was an actor who lent distinction to his profession, and his honoured memory should surely be kept green. It is odd to think of an actor being a Quaker, and yet throughout his long life Howe was a loyal member of the Society of Friends. It was the impression made upon him, when he was a mere boy, by the soul-inspiring acting of Edmund Kean as King Lear, that gave him a passion for the stage. With a cousin of his own age he contrived to take stolen pleasure in the gallery of Drury Lane Theatre, and on his way home, half-choked with enthusiasm and emotion, he said to his comrade, "I am going to be an actor." His family and friends did their utmost to dissuade him from this rash step, but fate willed that it should be taken, and the stage-struck lad became one of the most accomplished and self-respecting of the actors of his day. Although he never paraded it, I think he was always influenced by his simple religious faith. I well remember how, in the kindest of ways, he would warn the young fellows of those Sothern-Haymarket days against keeping late (and possibly loose) hours in London after curtain-fall. I can hear him now telling us of his long midnight walks to his beloved country home at Isleworth (beyond Brentford!), and of his active morning work in his garden on those days on which rehearsals did not call him to town. "And at such times," he would say, with a good-humoured shake of his head, "some of you are lying in bed trying to cure carefully manufactured head-aches." Years afterwards he became a notable member of the Lyceum Company, and served until his death under the banner of Henry Irving. During this period, and when with his chief and comrades he was fulfilling a fortnight's engagement in Birmingham, my good old friend, when on a visit to my house, made me his confidant in a little personal trouble. It was this. During the two weeks of his stay in the city he had only been called upon to act twice, and then only in small parts. I naturally thought that he felt hurt at apparent neglect, and I tried to say a few consolatory words to him. "Oh, it isn't _that_!" said the fine old gentleman, "I've no feeling on _that_ score; but the fact is, I am being paid a very handsome salary, and doing next to nothing for it. As things are, I know I am not earning it. I must speak to Irving about it, and tell him either my stipend must be reduced, or I must go." Shortly afterwards I saw him again. His fine face was radiant with smiles and his spirits were buoyant. He had had his interview with Irving, and the upshot of it was that no alteration could be made in his emolument, that he would be called upon to act whenever the repertory contained a part that could be suitably allotted to him, and that his "chief" would regard it as a great personal sorrow if his distinguished name did not figure as a member of his company. Thus did the most tactful and generous of managers make a time-honoured servant of the public easy in his pocket, and supremely happy in the retention of his _amour propre_. Frequenters of the Lyceum will remember how, even in the smallest of parts, Henry Howe was always sure of a hearty reception. This is only one amongst a thousand of the acts of tender consideration and unstinted liberality shown by Henry Irving towards those who have acted for and with him. But besides "little treasures," Georginas, and Mary Merediths, there were other opportunities for Ellen Terry at the Haymarket. She had the sympathy and encouragement of such sterling actors as Henry Compton and William Farren, the Chippendales, and the always kindly and attentive Walter Gordon, a gentleman who, on his retirement from the stage, resumed his own name, and was well known as William Aylmer Gowing. She played Julia in "The Rivals" to the Faulkland of Howe, the Sir Anthony Absolute of Chippendale, the Captain Absolute of William Farren, the Bob Acres of Buckstone, and the Mrs. Malaprop of Mrs. Chippendale. In "Much Ado about Nothing" she appeared as Hero to the Beatrice of Louisa Angell, and when that lady appeared as Letitia Hardy in "The Belle's Stratagem," Ellen Terry was the Lady Touchwood. Let it not be forgotten that her own bewitching Letitia was destined to be one of the most attractive of her comedy impersonations at the Lyceum. Thanks to Sothern, I was in those days quite at home at the Haymarket Theatre, and in "Walter Gordon" I found a true friend and adviser when, later on, I tried to write on things theatrical. He did much admirable work with his own pen, and was full of good stories of famous actors and actresses with whom he had played. I remember how he told me of an ephemeral entertainment by Sterling Coyne, entitled "Buckstone at Home," in which Ellen Terry, being then in a frolicsome mood, made an unexpected effect and sensation. In this wild production she had to appear as Britannia, and she was surrounded by the Knights of the Round Table. These stalwarts were supposed to be unable to remove a certain "property" stone, concerning which there was much superstition to the effect that it was so heavy that mortal could not stir it. The situation was meant to be taken seriously, but the light-hearted Britannia--possibly annoyed with the absurdity of the production and the poverty of her part in it, came forward, took the mock boulder in her hands, "played ball" with the flimsy thing, at the same time gleefully crying out--"Why, a child could toss it!" [Illustration: BUST OF ELLEN TERRY, BY W. BRODIE, R.S.A. _Presented to The Shakespeare Memorial, Stratford-on-Avon, by Sir Henry Irving._ [_To face page 88._ ] I wonder what she would have said if the recreant Sothern had thus committed himself! But in spite of occasional fits of joyousness this Haymarket engagement seems to have been a disappointment to her. She regarded it as one of her "lost opportunities,"--and in later days she would have given much to "find it again." By her own wish, however, it came to an early end. No doubt the ordeal was a severe one. She was exceedingly young, and she was called upon to vie with the picked comedians of her day. She acquitted herself not only bravely but with distinction, but no doubt her ever supersensitive nature (the inevitable if undesirable nature of the true artist) often whispered to her that she had blundered where she had really made a marked impression. Mrs. Siddons was wont to say that the player's nerves must be "made of cart ropes." Ellen Terry's highly-strung organisation seems to move on the slenderest of silken threads, and no doubt in those early days the strain of her public appearances were often a torment to her. In the June of 1863 Edward Leman Blanchard records her appearance at the Princess's Theatre, and her performance of Desdemona to the Othello of Walter Montgomery. This was an interesting event, for it witnessed the return of the little Mamillius and Prince Arthur of former days to the scene of her early successes, and this in a Shakespearean part in which she subsequently won great renown at the Lyceum. Not long after this, and to the intense regret of those who were carefully watching the rapid progress of her artistic career, she temporarily left the stage. Probably she found its duties too irksome to one of her restless, self-doubting nature. Men and women endowed with unusual talents are generally prone to have their own way, and it is perhaps well for the full fruition of those great gifts, that are to be a present boon and future memory to mankind, that they should follow it. Who would wantonly put Pegasus in the Pound? Even in those (to her) unpromising "Georgina" days Ellen Terry had shown real genius. Genius, as William Winter has beautifully put it, is the petrel, and like the petrel it loves the freedom of the winds and the waves. Just as the petrel of the ocean appears during its flight sometimes to touch the surface of the waves with its feet, so she had daintily fluttered across the boards which were for a time to lose her. CHAPTER V KATE TERRY Now that Ellen Terry has for a time said good-bye to the stage that so sorely missed her, I may pause to glance at the brilliant career of her elder sister Kate, who had been, as we have seen, the constant comrade of her 'prentice days. Apart from her conspicuous successes in the youthful Shakespearean characters at the Princess's, she had, before her engagement at that house came to an end, made a profound impression by the purity and pathos of her acting as Cordelia (she was a very young Cordelia) to the King Lear of Charles Kean. This was in the April of 1858. Even at that early age she had, as the saying goes, "arrived," and would no doubt have been promptly secured by any of the then existing London managers. But, wise in his generation, and conscious of his daughter's conspicuous talents, her father decided that she must have more practice before taking that place on the boards to which she should become entitled. It is interesting to show here one of the Charles Kean play-bills in which Kate Terry figured. To-day it reads curiously as the programme of a fashionable West End theatre. PRINCESS'S THEATRE, OXFORD STREET. Under the Management of Mr CHARLES KEAN, No. 3 Torrington Square. _This Evening, Saturday, January 3rd, 1852_, Will be presented Colman's play of the IRON CHEST Sir Edward Mortimer Mr Charles Kean Captain Fitzharding Mr Addison Wilford Mr J. F. Cathcart Adam Winterton Mr Meadows Rawbold Mr Ryder Samson Mr Harley Orson Mr C. Fisher Gregory Mr Rolleston Helen Miss Frankland Blanch Miss Murray Barbara Miss Mary Keeley After which (8th Time), a Grand Operatico, Tragico, Serio-Pastoralic, Nautico, Demoniaco, Cabalistico, ORIGINAL CHRISTMAS PANTOMIME, entitled, HARLEQUIN BILLY TAYLOR OR THE FLYING DUTCHMAN AND THE KING OF RARITONGO "Billy Taylor was a gay young fellow Full of mirth and full of glee, And his mind he did diskiver To a maiden fair and free." Scenery by Messrs Gordon, F. Lloyds, Dayes, etc. Decorations & Properties by Mr Moon. Dances arranged by Mr Flexmore. Machinery by Mr G. Hodson. Costumes by Mr Sefton and Miss Hoggins. Overture & Music composed & arranged by Mr R. Hughes. _The Pantomime by the brothers Sala and Mr George Ellis, by whom it has been produced._ BILLY TAYLOR (the "gay young fellow"--first Mr F. Cooke Schneider of his day & Knight afterwards of the Shears--frequently hot Harlequin, pressing, then pressed himself) Mr Cormack. ADMIRAL SIR LEE (FIELD MARSHAL OF THE HORSE-MARINES AFTERWARDS SCUPPER BLUE & TESTAMENTARY GUARDIAN PANTALOON, BLAZES of the Buoy at the Nore, Mr Paulo. hoisting his flag on board the _Thundererbomb_, 999 Guns) CALIMANCO the (King of Raritongo, the largest Mr Rolleston. xxxiiird of the Cannibal Islands--a slightly cracked sovereign, who, Mr Flexmore. wishing for change, is transformed into Clown. VANDERDECKEN (The Flying Dutchman, a decided Mr Collis. Voltigeur in pursuit of his prey) QUASHYHUBABOO (Prime Minister of Raritongo--Original Mr Edmonds. "Bones" but rather fleshy in appearance) MASTER REEFER (MIDSHIPMAN AND POWDER MONKEY MR LLOYD. RATTLIN in Ordinary on board the _Thundererbomb_) BACCYCHAW PIPES (Boatswain of the "gallant Mr J. Collins. _Thundererbomb_," ever ready with a quid for a quo) HORROSAMBO (Aide-de-Camp & Black Stick in Mr Stoakes. waiting to King of Raritongo) SIGNOR (First Violin Extraordinary at Mr F. Hartland. SIVORIENSTSAINTON the Nobility's Concerts) BOTTESERINI The PRINCESS (King of Raritongo's daughter, Mr Stacey. SACCASUTTAKONKA black, sweet and beautiful) PAULINA DI PANTO (popularly known as Pretty Poll Mr Daley. of Portsmouth Point, sojourning pro tem. in Tooley St.,--young, afterwards lovely, & attached to Billy Miss Carlotta Taylor--afterwards Columbine) Leclercq. BRITANNIA (Tutelary Genius of "Old Albion" Miss Kate continually ruling the Terry. waves) THE FAIRY (very well re(a)d in all branches, Miss Vivash. CORALIA particularly in corollaries) THE FAIRY (kept very close but determined Miss Desborough. NAUTILA to shell out & be a naughty-lass no more) DATE--ONCE UPON A TIME SCENE--NO WHERE PARTICULAR. _Coral Grottoes of the Genii of the Ocean._ Affectionate meeting of Coralia and Nautila--Various propositions for a "Fast" Fairy Spree, interrupted by the unexpected appearance of-- _Britannia enthroned on one of her "wooden walls."_ And attended by her trusty guard of Blue Jackets--Anger of Ocean Queen--Billy Taylor's destiny determined on, and hasty summons of dreaded Vanderdecken--Britannia issues her mandate, and Vanderdecken proceeds to seize the luckless Taylor of Tooley Street. _ROCKY PANORAMA OF INTERMINABLE GLOOM._ MONARCH MART OF FASHION Otherwise _Billy Taylor's shop in Tooley Street_. "Four and twenty tailors all of a row" (vide Old Song). Entrance of the fascinating Paulina di Panto Portsmoutho. "The course of true love never did run smooth." Preparations for the Nuptials, interrupted by press-ure from without. "Four and twenty stout young fellows, Clad they were in blue array, Came and pressed poor Billy Taylor, And straightway took him off to sea." TERRIFIC AND SANGUINARY COMBAT Between Billy Taylor and the Bold British Boatswain. Billy hors-de-combat. "Soon his true love followed arter, Under the name of Richard Carr; And her lily-white hands were daubed all over, With the nasty pitch and tar." _QUARTER-DECK OF THE "GALLANT THUNDERERBOMB."_ Quarter-deck festivities, of which Paulina (disguised as Richard Carr) partakes. GRAND NAUTICAL DOUBLE SHUFFLE GROG & BACCY HORNPIPE BY ALL THE CHARACTERS. "The _Flying Dutchman_ on the weather-bow"--Decks cleared for action--Bombarding, Boarding and General Blow-up!--and "Off we go to Turkey." _OEIL DE BOEUF IN KING CALIMANCO'S PALACE_ A Black King in a bad way--Glorious news--The White Man's come--Lombardy and Raritongo united. _JAMSETTJEEJEESETYERJIBBAHOY_. THE MARINE RESIDENCE of his MAJESTY OF RARITONGO. Sea Coast in the Distance. Billy cast ashore on the Island--Proposition for the hand of Princess--A crown of independence or a hard crust--and Portsmouth hard; the Crown wins--A Revolving Denouement: "When the Captain come for to hear on it, He werry much applauded what she'd done; And he quickly made her first lieutenant Of the gallant _Thundererbomb_." _REGAL AND FLORAL OVATION TO BRITANNIA._ MAGICAL METAMORPHOSIS. Harlequin, Mr Cormack. Pantaloon, Mr Paulo. Clown, Mr Flexmore. Columbine, Miss C. Leclerq. _EXTERIOR OF THE PUNCH OFFICE AND PICTURE FRAME MAKER'S SHOP._ How to take a portrait--Drawing taught in one Lesson. Light weights _v._ heavy weights--What d'ye take?--Port or sherry?--"A Blot in the Scutcheon"--A "Punch" for Two--Polkamania Extraordinary, and off we go to _A MODEL FARM YARD._ How should you like some apples?--The real unmistakable Cat's-head Codlin--Here's the Farmer--"An old man found a rude boy in one of his trees stealing apples" (vide Dr Dilworth) etc. etc. A headless tale--Eggs, and Young ones--Mr Cantelo outdone--Fowl robberies and foul blows--When is a horse not a horse?--When it's a Mare--That Mare's a hunter--No, that hunter's a Mayor--The Clown's introduction to the City Dignitaries--Stocks is down. _BRAHAM'S LOCK MANUFACTORY_ AND GENERAL OUTFITTER'S WAREHOUSE MYRIOTERPSICHOREORAMA. The meaning of which Mr Flexmore will take steps to explain. Tables and stools in any given quantity--Prize dahlias & new blooms. EXTERIOR OF THE COMFORTABLE CATCH'EM & KEEP'EM HOTEL Here's the Policeman--"Hullo! what are you doing here?" Love in the Kitchen _versus_ Cupboard Love. PAS DE PARAPLUIE, by Mr Flexmore. BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF _LONDON BY MOONLIGHT_ We haven't "got home" till morning; Don't, please don't--I'm so sleepy--Why, the sheets are damp--Never mind, the warming-pan's hot--"Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast." Yes, but not after two in the morning when you want to go to sleep, and have the tic-toorallo--"The Light of other days is Faded"--A Squall from Don Pasquale--Come gentil, anything but genteel--Mol-row! Mol-row! Puss! Puss! Puss!--Bang! Fire!--Affairs take a rapid turn--Hush! Let's go to bed! What a smell of fire! Smoke! fire! blazes! firemen! policemen! old men! young men! boys! kids! row! rattles! riot! rumpus & revolution. _INTERIOR OF A CONFECTIONER'S SHOP._ Love & Pastry--Send for a policeman--When 'em waters I sees, an' I screems--Below zero--Up to fever heat. A Christmas Polka Cake and a Trifle for Children, Old & Young. _THE FLORAL REALMS OF LIGHT_ _THE NEW PANTOMIME_ Every Evening. MONDAY . . THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. TUESDAY . . THE IRON CHEST AND BETSY BAKER. WEDNESDAY . . HAMLET. THURSDAY . . THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. Acting Manager, Mr Emden. Musical Director, Mr R. Hughes. Stage Manager, Mr G. Ellis. Ballet Master, Mr Flexmore. Dress Circle 5/. Boxes 4/. Pit 2/. Gallery 1/. Second price: Dress Circle 2/6. Boxes 2/. Pit 1/. Gallery 6d. Orchestra stalls 6/, which may be retained entire evening. Private Boxes £2. 12s. 6d.; £2. 2s. 0d.; & £1. 11s. 6d. Box Office open from 11 to 5 o'clock. Doors open at 6.30. Performance to commence at 7.0. Half price will commence as near 9.0 as is consistent with the non-interruption of the performance. Gallery door in Castle Street. Children in arms cannot possibly be admitted. Private boxes & stalls may be obtained at the libraries; & of Mr Massingham at Box Office of the Theatre, Oxford St., where places for Dress Circle and Boxes may be secured. Applications respecting the bills to be addressed to Mr Treadaway, Stage Door. _VIVANT REGINA ET PRINCEPS._ * * * * * The result of her father's wise policy was that Kate Terry was fully equipped when, in 1860, she commenced her engagement at the St. James's Theatre, under the management of Mr. Alfred Wigan, whose company included Miss Herbert (who soon became the manageress of the house), Mrs. Alfred Wigan, Miss Nelly Moore, Mr. Terry, Mr. Dewar, and Mr. Emery. Young, beautiful, gifted, well practised in the art that she evidently loved, Kate Terry was well calculated to secure the praise of the critics and the heart of the public. At first the characters entrusted to her were comparatively small, but she industriously tended the firmly planted sapling that was destined to grow, flourish, and yield glorious as well as abundant fruit. Even the greatest of histrionic geniuses have to wait for their chances, and Kate Terry's first real opportunity did not come until 1862. A version, by Mr. Horace Wigan, of Victorien Sardou's fine comedy, "Nos Intimes," entitled "Friends or Foes," was in course of presentation, and Miss Herbert's company then included the honoured names of George Vining, Frank and Mrs. Frank Mathews, W. H. Stephens, and F. Charles. This play has been made familiar to later and present-day playgoers as "Peril," the clever adaptation by Clement Scott and B. C. Stephenson, which seems likely to hold the stage for many a long year to come. It proved one of the trump cards of the Bancrofts at the old Prince of Wales's Theatre, and its subsequent revivals have always been attended by success. The Lady Ormonde of "Friends or Foes" was, of course, played by Miss Herbert, and Kate Terry had to content herself with quite a minor part; but she was the conscientious understudy of her manageress, and, when that delightful artiste suddenly fell ill, the burden of the piece--at a moment's notice--had to be borne upon the shoulders of the younger actress. Her triumph was instantaneous and complete. Bravely, and with consummate skill, she went through her trying ordeal, and when the curtain fell it was evident that her permanent popularity on the London stage was secure. It is ridiculous to depend upon that "will-o'-the-wisp" called "luck"; but there is no doubt that if we are ready for it, and promptly avail ourselves of it, _chance_ will sometimes do us a good turn. But no one can afford to neglect the truth of the old warning reminding us that opportunities are very sensitive things, and that if you slight them on their first visit you seldom see them again. Of that memorable performance at the St. James's, Clement Scott says:-- "On that never-to-be-forgotten night this young girl, Kate Terry, made an astounding success. Her name was scarcely known; no one knew that we had amongst us a young actress of so much beauty, talent, and, what was more wonderful still, true dramatic power, for the temptation scene wants acting, and not the kind of trifling that we see in these modern and amateurish days." The next morning, Tom Taylor in the _Times_ let himself go, and blew the trumpet in praise of the new actress, Kate Terry. Her fame was made from that minute. She never turned back. Quickly she became the stage divinity of her day, and she remained the idol of London playgoers until, on her early marriage, she retired into private life. Those who saw her will never forget either her personal charm or the perfection of her art, and they will, I think, like to take a glimpse with me into a cherished past. We are told that times of special happiness should be regarded as a sort of reserve fund, to be drawn upon in dark or cloudy days, and the evenings of long ago, when we delighted in the acting of Kate Terry, were times of exceeding happiness. The little world of the theatre in which we have revelled is still open to us, and it is always pleasant to turn over the brightest pages of its history. Many of us know how old fox-hunters are never so happy as when they are recalling the glorious "runs" of the past. How they met at Quinton Cross Roads; found "one of the right sort" in Bamkin's Gorse; ran him at a rattling pace over Lickford Common; had a check in Bowler's Wood; lost him in Messer's Osier Beds; found him again, and followed him over that dangerous water jump, Priddis Brook, low lying, as it broadly flows between thick quick-set hedges; and finally ran him to earth in Linnecor Coppice. So are old playgoers supremely content when with congenial souls they discuss the famous and favourite actors and actresses they have seen and admired in bygone days. So they will follow them from their initial efforts in the provinces, through their series of triumphs in this or that London theatre. To such theatrical enthusiasts as these their collections of old play-bills are as precious and replete with pleasurable reminiscences as are the "pads" of many defunct reynards nailed to the stable doors of the fox-hunter. At about the time when Kate Terry made her unmistakable mark at the St. James's, Charles Albert Fechter was the actor-hero of the hour. He came to fulfil his trying ordeal in London with great credentials. Charles Dickens had described seeing him first, quite by accident, in Paris, having strolled in to a little theatre there one night. "He was making love to a woman," Dickens wrote, "and he so elevated her as well as himself by the sentiment in which he enveloped her, that they trod in a purer ether, and in another sphere, quite lifted out of the present. 'By heavens!' I said to myself, 'a man who can do this can do anything. I never saw two people more purely and instantly elevated by the power of love. The man has genius in him which is unmistakable.'" [Illustration: _Photograph by_] [_London Stereoscopic Co._ KATE TERRY. _Taken when she was acting with Fechter at the Lyceum, and won the admiration of Charles Dickens._ [_To face page 102._] In due course Fechter, having made his triumph on English boards, became the manager of the Lyceum Theatre. It was a great undertaking for a French actor, for he had to contend against the conservatism of not only our audiences, but of English actors and critics. That he was the best "love-maker" our stage had seen was readily admitted, and the fascination of his love-scenes was certain to be an attraction. But no actor can make the success of a love-scene unless he is assisted by a perfectly accomplished and responsive actress. Who was to be the heroine of Fechter's reign at the Lyceum? She was found in Kate Terry, and she right worthily shared in his notable victories. One of the earliest productions was the first English version of the French play that (in spite of many other and differently named versions) has been made familiar to us as "The Duke's Motto." In this Kate Terry appeared as Blanche de Nevers, and in speaking of the impersonation Charles Dickens, who, for the sake of his friend Fechter, was inclined to be very critical, said that it was "perfectly charming,"--"the very best piece of womanly tenderness he had ever seen on the stage." No doubt Kate Terry contributed largely to Fechter's Lyceum successes. She could not only act, but she so threw herself into her characters that she could _listen_ to those who acted with her, and let her audiences not only see, but believe that she was listening with all her heart and soul. The exercise of this rarely displayed histrionic gift was invaluable in the beautiful love-scenes of Fechter. But in her girlish days Kate Terry had shown that she understood the value of action on the stage, and knew that when deftly handled it could make an even deeper impression than words. Speaking of Charles Kean's great production of "Henry the Fifth" at the Princess's in 1859 the notoriously keen critic of the _Athenæum_ said:--"The union of England and France in one kingdom is the ambitious sentiment of the play, and the heroism of the English character the spirit that pervades the scenes. This is exemplified in the small as well as the great incidents, and in none, in acting, did it come out more significantly than in the little part of the boy belonging to the Pistol group of characters at the end of the first act. Miss Kate Terry, as the impersonator of the brave youth, in the heroic and pleasing attitude with which he listened to the sound of the drum, and the measured march with which he followed delightedly the spirit-stirring music, showed us at once the sympathetic gallantry of the English lad going to the wars. There was in it an intelligible indication of the wonderful daring by which the battle of Agincourt was won. To men who were once such lads as he nothing was impossible. The trait was well brought out; and that little bit of acting, in regard to its completeness, was the gem of the performance." And so Kate Terry shared in Fechter's Lyceum conquests, and in "Bel Demonio, a Love Story," adapted by John Brougham from the French drama "L'Abbaye de Castro," she played Lena to his Angelo. A little later she was the "pretty Ophelia" to the much discussed Hamlet of Fechter, and again honours were divided. How critics differed concerning the new Hamlet! Writing long after the glamour of the impersonation has passed away, Clement Scott has told us how Hamlet was represented "in a new way, in a fresh style, with carefully considered new business; with a sweetly pathetic face showing 'the fruitful river of the eye,' and in a long flaxen Danish wig. "'A Frenchman play Hamlet!'" he says. "There was a yell of execration in the camp of the old school of playgoers, and the feathers began to fly. Hamlet in a fair wig indeed! Hamlet in broken English! Oh! you should have heard the shouts of indignation, the babble of prejudice! The upholders of the mouthing, moaning, gurgling Hamlets--the Hamlets who obeyed every precept in his advice to the players, and 'imitated nature so abominably,' the Hamlets who strutted and stormed--held indignation meetings at their clubs, and metaphorically threw their 'scratch wigs' into the air with rage and indignation. "I, of course, became the easiest convert to the new Fechter school, and elected to serve under his brilliant banner. In fact, I will candidly own that I never quite understood Hamlet until I saw Fechter play the Prince of Denmark. Phelps and Charles Kean impressed me with the play; but with Fechter I loved the play, and was charmed as well as fascinated by the player." I am among the many who yielded to that charm, and wish that the delightful experience of seeing Fechter's Hamlet and Kate Terry's Ophelia might be repeated. When, early in 1870, Fechter left England for America, Charles Dickens contributed to the _Atlantic Monthly_ an article in his praise. "I cannot," said the great novelist, "wish my friend a better audience than he will find in the American people, and I cannot wish them a better actor than they will find in my friend." Charles Dickens, it will be remembered, was one of the keenest of all dramatic critics. His admiration for Fechter's much discussed rendering of Hamlet is expressed in the following words:-- "Perhaps no innovation in art was ever accepted with so much favour by so many intelligent persons, pre-committed to, and pre-occupied by, another system, as Fechter's Hamlet. I take this to have been the case (as it unquestionably was in London), not because of its picturesqueness, not because of its novelty, not because of its many scattered beauties, but because of its perfect consistency with itself. Its great and satisfying originality was in its possessing the merit of a distinctly conceived and executed idea. Fechter's Hamlet, a pale woe-begone Norseman, with long flaxen hair, wearing a strange garb, never associated with the part upon the English stage (if ever seen there at all), and making a piratical sweep upon the whole fleet of little theatrical prescriptions without meaning, or like Dr. Johnson's celebrated friend, with only one idea in them, and that a wrong one, never could have achieved its extraordinary success but for its animation by one pervading purpose, to which all changes were made intelligently "sub-servient." And yet of Fechter's Hamlet in America, William Winter, that greatest and most deservedly honoured of transatlantic critics and authorities on things theatrical, has said:-- "About 1861 Charles Fechter appeared upon the English stage and gave an extraordinary performance of Hamlet. It subsequently (1869-70) reached America. It was 'the rage' on both sides of the sea. In a technical sense it was a performance of ability, but it was chiefly remarkable for light hair and bad English. Fanny Kemble tells a story of a lady who, at a dinner in London, was asked by a neighbouring guest whether she had seen Mr. Fechter as Hamlet. 'No,' she said, 'I have not; and I think I should not care to hear the English blank verse spoken by a foreigner.' The inquirer gazed meditatively upon his plate for some time, and then said, 'But, Hamlet _was_ a foreigner, wasn't he?' "That is the gist of the whole matter. We were to have the manner of 'nature' in blank verse. We were to have Hamlet in light hair, because Danes are sometimes blonde. We were to have the great soliloquy on life and death omitted, because it stops the action of the play.[1] We were to have the blank verse turned into a foreigner's English prose. We were to have Hamlet crossing his legs upon the gravestone, as if he were Sir Charles Coldstream; and this was to be 'nature.' Mr. Fechter's plan may have been finely executed, but it was radically wrong, and it could not be rightly accepted. Some courage was required to oppose it, because Mr. Fechter had come to us (to me among others) personally commended by no less a man than the great Charles Dickens." But if critics differed with regard to the merits of Fechter's Hamlet, there was a perfect chorus of praise for the exquisitely portrayed Ophelia of Kate Terry. It is interesting to note that this victory was won on the same stage on which, in the same part, Ellen Terry was to commence her stage history-making engagement with Henry Irving. When Fechter's brief reign at the Lyceum came to an end, Kate Terry went to support Henry Neville at the Olympic Theatre. This admirable actor was then at the height of his still well sustained popularity. Handsome, graceful, endowed with a beautiful voice, and a master of his art, Henry Neville was an ideal hero of romance, and though to-day he elects to play quieter parts, and to delight his audiences with his rich appreciation of comedy, he looks as young and dashing as he did in the days of 1864. Kate Terry's first appearance at the little Wych Street playhouse was in a piece entitled "The Hidden Hand," an adaptation by Tom Taylor, from the French drama by MM. D'Ennery and Edmond, called "L'Aieule." She and Henry Neville distinguished themselves in the characters of Lord and Lady Penarvon, and the company included Miss Louisa Moore, Miss Lydia Foote, Miss Nelly Farren, and Charles Coghlan. Later came Sterling Coyne's comedy called "Everybody's Friend," which, under the title of "The Widow Hunt," was destined in later years to be made famous by that admirable American comedian, John Sleeper Clarke. Who, having seen it, will ever forget the delicious drollery of his Major Wellington de Boots? The Major of the Olympic days was Mr. Walcot, who, although announced as an American actor, was an Englishman by birth. Kate Terry was the Mrs. Swansdown, Henry Neville the Felix Featherley, and Mrs. Leigh Murray Mrs. Major de Boots. Other successes were made in Tom Taylor's five-act drama "Settling Day," and the same playwright's "The Serf." The production of the latter piece being the "benefit" night of the gifted actress, she delivered an address written for her by the grateful author. In "Twelfth Night" Kate Terry doubled the parts of Viola and Sebastian; and a notable hit was made in Tom Taylor's stage version of Miss Braddon's novel "Henry Dunbar." In Leicester Buckingham's "Love's Martyrdom" she again distinguished herself. On June 20, 1866, she again took a benefit at the theatre she had served so well, and on this occasion appeared for the first time as Julia in "The Hunchback" of Sheridan Knowles, and once more delivered an address specially written for her by Tom Taylor. But the great event of the evening was the appearance (also for the first time) of Ellen Terry as the sprightly Helen. In order that she might serve her sister she made this brief departure from her retirement, and acted with great spirit and animation. A little later on she appeared at the Prince's Theatre at Manchester in the first performance of a new play by Dion Boucicault originally called "The Two Lives of Mary Leigh" but subsequently renamed "Hunted Down." This proved to be a memorable evening. Not only did Kate Terry add to her laurels as the heroine, but Henry Irving, in the character of Rawdon Scudamore, made his first great impression. Hitherto he had only been known as a very earnest actor in the provincial stock companies--but in this play he found his chance, seized it, and made his mark. Irving, who was then most anxious to get to London, made a stipulation with Boucicault before he accepted the part to the effect that if he succeeded he should have the opportunity of appearing in it in the production of the play in the metropolis. This was acceded to, and on the opening night the dramatist was so struck with his splendid performance that he induced his friend and brother playwright, Charles Reade, to travel to Manchester in order that he might see this remarkable impersonation. It was then that these two experts decided that in Henry Irving they saw the coming leading actor of his day. On November 5, 1866, "Hunted Down" was produced at the St. James's Theatre, with Miss Herbert in the character created by Kate Terry; Rawdon Scudamore at once "took the town" and excited the admiration of the critics, and so the name and fame of Henry Irving were made out of material that has never faded. It is curious to remember that our famous actor's first great success was made with Kate Terry, and that most of his later triumphs have been shared with Ellen Terry. Kate Terry's next London home was the Adelphi Theatre. There she created the character of Anne Carew in Tom Taylor's evergreen play "A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing" (a part that was in after years most beautifully played by Mrs. Kendal at the St. James's), and won great favour in "A Sister's Penance," by Tom Taylor and A. W. Dubourg. In the latter production she was associated with Miss Fanny Hughes, John Billington, and Hermann Vezin. "Good acting by Kate Terry" is the verdict pronounced upon the piece in the pages of Edward Leman Blanchard's happily preserved diary. Probably Kate Terry's sojourn at the Adelphi will be best remembered by her exquisitely tender rendering of the sweet character of Dora in Charles Reade's happy stage version of Tennyson's poem bearing that name. We all know the touching story telling that-- "With farmer Allan at the farm abode William and Dora; William was his son, And she his niece--" We remember how the stern old man desired that the cousins should marry, and we know that while Dora would willingly give her heart to William, he is cold to her. We recall his scene with his father and how he said-- "I cannot marry Dora; by my life I will not marry Dora." Then the old man Was wroth, and doubled up his hands, and said:-- "You will not, boy! you dare to answer thus! But in my father's time a father's word was law, And so it shall be now for me." [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY'S COUNTRY HOME IN KINGSTON VALE. _Its mistress is at the gate of her charming "Vine Cottage."_ [_To face page 112._ ] Then we follow William out of the house whose doors are mercilessly closed behind him, see him marry his sweetheart Mary, know that all things fail with him until despair brings him to his death-bed. Now we realise the depth and unselfishness of Dora's love. She goes to the aid of the woman who has really spoilt her life's dream of happiness, and through her dead darling's child endeavours to secure poor stricken Mary's prosperity by a reconciliation with the still angry and always stubborn farmer Allan. Her simple, loving plan succeeds. The child softens the obdurate heart-- "And all at once the old man burst in sobs:-- 'I have been to blame, to blame. I have killed my son. I have killed him--but I loved him, my dear son. May God forgive me! I have been to blame. Kiss me, my children.' Then they clung about The old man's neck, and kissed him many times. And all the man was broken with remorse; And all his love came back a hundredfold; And for three hours he sobb'd o'er William's child, Thinking of William. So those four abode Within one house together; and as years Went forward, Mary took another mate; But Dora lived unmarried to her death." Yes, we all know the finely conceived and tenderly told story of love, anger, self-effacement, and forgiveness, but I do not think that any of us realised the manifold beauties of Dora's character until it was interpreted to us by Kate Terry. The portrait was painted in the most delicate tints, but beneath the surface of it the pure mind and devoted heart were ever apparent. The impersonation must have been truly satisfying to the poet who always had a longing to see the children of his fancy on the stage. The critic of the _Examiner_ was right when he spoke of Kate Terry's Dora as "still a thoroughly country girl, simple, yet shrewd, with depths of womanly feeling, and little feminine piquancies; meek as a mouse, but with something in her of the power of angels, she trips on her way of quiet loving-kindness in a shabby hat and cotton gloves, and morsel of silk cape over a dress with a narrow skirt. Her uncle gives her money for fine dress; but of that, and of all that she can call hers to give, the utmost toll is taken for the sustenance of the unhappy outcasts. How touching it all is, and true with the real poetry of life, we feel throughout; the interest in the character rises steadily as the play goes on, and culminates as it should in the last scene." It would be very wrong to take leave of Dora without saying a word of praise with regard to the Farmer Allan of Henry Neville. It was a virile, as well as a pathetic, embodiment of a firmly drawn but not too sympathetic, and, consequently, very difficult character. Soon after this, the rumour reached envious playgoers that Kate Terry was about to become the wife of Mr. Arthur Lewis--a gentleman very well known in literary and artistic circles--and that her marriage would involve her retirement from the stage. Crowded were the houses that then assembled to see their favourite as Juliet, Beatrice, Julia, Pauline, and in other great characters. On the 2nd September, 1867, she gave her farewell performance, and the occasion was thus recorded in the _Times_:-- "It is seldom that the theatrical chronicler has to describe a scene like that at the Adelphi on Saturday, when Miss Kate Terry took her farewell of the stage as Juliet. Successes, demonstrations, and ovations of a kind may be made to order; but the scene of Saturday was one of those genuine, spontaneous, and irrepressible outbursts of public recognition which carry their credentials of sincerity along with them. The widespread feeling that the stage is losing one of its chosen ornaments had been manifested by the full houses, more and more crowded on each successive night, which, even at this deadest of the dead season, have been attracted to the Adelphi by Miss Terry's farewell performances. Their attraction came to its climax and its close on Saturday, when the theatre was crammed from the orchestra to the remotest nook in the gallery where a spectator could press or perch, with such an audience as we have never before seen gathered within its walls. "At the conclusion of the tragedy, in the course of which Miss Terry was called for at the end of each act, except the fourth, when the good taste of the more intelligent part of the audience suppressed the demand, Miss Terry came on before the curtain in obedience to a thundering summons from every part of the house, and almost overcome with the combined excitement of the part and the occasion, stood for some moments curtseying and smiling under the showers of bouquets and the storm of kindly greeting. Nor when she had retired with her armful of flowers--looking in the white robe and dishevelled hair of Juliet's death scene, as she used to look in Ophelia--was the audience satisfied. Again Miss Terry was recalled, and again she appeared to receive the loud and long-continued plaudits of the crowd. Then the stalls began to clear. But the storm of voices and clapping of hands continued from pit, boxes, and gallery, through the overture of the farce, swelling till it threatened to grow into a tempest. The curtain rose for the farce; still the thunder roared. One of the actors, quite inaudible in the clamour, began the performance, but the roar grew louder and louder, till at last Mr. Phillips came on, in the dress of Friar Lawrence, and with a stolidity so well assumed that it seemed perfectly natural, asked, in the stereo-typed phrase of the theatre, the pleasure of the audience. '_Kate Terry!_' was the reply from a chorus of a thousand stentorian voices; and then the fair favourite of the night appeared once more, pale, and dressed to leave the theatre, and when the renewed roar of recognition had subsided, in answer to her appealing dumb show, spoke, with pathetic effort, a few hesitating words, evidently the inspiration of the moment, but more telling than any set speech, to this effect:--'How I wish from my heart I could tell you how I feel your kindness, not to-night only, but through the many years of my professional life. What can I say to you but thanks, thanks and good-bye!' After this short and simple farewell, under a still louder salvo of acclamation, unmistakably proving itself popular by its hearty uproariousness, the young actress, almost overpowered by the feelings of the moment, retired with faltering steps, and the crowded audience poured out of the house, their sudden exit _en masse_ being in itself one of the most flattering tributes to the actress whose last appearance had drawn them together. "We have to turn over the pages of theatrical history in order to find a parallel to this demonstration of affection coupled to gratitude. And after the excitement of it was over, we, who had learnt to love her perfectly portrayed art and sweet presence, sighed to think that she would no longer grace the stage." Continuing, the _Times_ critic said:-- "This remarkable manifestation of popular favour and regard is worth recording, not only as a striking theatrical incident, which those who were present can never forget, but because it proves that the frequenters of even the pit and gallery of a theatre where, till Miss Terry came, the finer springs of dramatic effect have very rarely been drawn on, can rapidly be brought to recognise and value acting of a singularly refined and delicate kind--so refined and delicate indeed that some of those who profess to guide the public taste have been apt to insist on its wanting physical power. On Saturday night it was made evident to demonstration, if other evidence had been wanting, that Miss Terry had wrought her spells over the frequenters of pit and gallery as well as of boxes and stalls. In the interests of refined dramatic art this is a cheering set-off to many indications that seem to make the other way. It shows that if the theatrical masses--those who are roughly lumped up as the 'British Public'--are unable to discriminate nicely between diamonds and paste, and so take a good deal of coarse glassware for real stones, they are nevertheless susceptible to the influence of refined, earnest, intelligent, and conscientious acting when they have the rare opportunity of seeing it. How well Miss Terry's acting merits all these epithets has been abundantly proved, not only through her recent course of farewell performances, in which she has filled a range of parts so widely different as to show a variety of power in itself as rare as the grace, refinement, intelligence, and feeling she has put into her acting from four years old to four-and-twenty." Surely few actresses have won such heartfelt and well-merited words of praise as these? No wonder that the thousands to whom she had given endless delight grudged her her early won freedom from the perpetual anxieties of stage life. The Romeo of that eventful evening was her long-time stage comrade, Henry Neville. For more than thirty years Kate Terry was absent from the stage, but her name lived as a sweet memory in the minds of those who had been fortunate enough to appreciate her rare and perfectly cultured gifts. In the spring of 1898 she was induced to emerge from her retirement to support her old friend, John Hare, in Mr. Stuart Ogilvie's comedy, "The Master," at the Globe Theatre. Unluckily, the part that she had consented to play afforded her few opportunities, the lady she represented being simply a sweet and gentle wife and mother, with a pleasant presence, a delightful smile, and a voice (the sweet voice of days gone by) characterised by very winning tenderness. In itself a charming part, but not one that gave scope for acting. But in this piece she had the intense satisfaction of seeing her clever and beautiful daughter, Miss Mabel Terry Lewis, make a marked impression on critical West End audiences. Indeed, this charming young lady was one of the chief attractions of "The Master." In the autumn of the same year it was my privilege to sit by Mrs. Arthur Lewis (and to hear the ever-to-be-remembered Kate Terry voice) while her daughter was playing with John Hare and his company at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham. The piece was T. W. Robertson's "Ours." John Hare was in his original character of the Russian Prince Perovsky, and the Blanche Haye was Miss Mabel Terry Lewis. The young artiste played the part with an unaffected girlishness, imbued with true tenderness, that touched all hearts, and it was evident that this latest recruit from the famous Terry family was worthy to bear her honoured name. It was pretty to watch the mother, the former heroine of a hundred stage victories, as with the skill of an expert she noted how her sweet young daughter won her way into the marked sympathy of her audience. By way of interesting records of the early appearances of these famous Terry sisters, I am able to produce here some matter that I hope my readers will like to have brought under their notice. The bills of the "Royal Entertainments" given "By Command" in 1852 and 1853 at Windsor Castle are now historic. It will be seen that in them both Kate Terry and her father took part. The bill of "The Winter's Tale" at the Princess's in which both of the sisters appeared was given to me by Ellen Terry. It dates (after one hundred and two nights) her first appearance as the baby boy Mamillius. [Illustration: KATE TERRY AS "ARIEL." _In Charles Kean's revival of "The Tempest" at the Princess's Theatre, 1856. The young actress was then twelve years old._ [_To face page 120._ ] I am permitted to produce _in extenso_ the letter in which Charles Dickens, writing to his friend Macready, referred to the impression made upon him by Kate Terry's acting with Fechter. There is a pleasant little history attached to this letter of which, when he wrote it, Dickens never dreamt. In due course, and in common, alas! with too many household gods, it came under the hammer of the auctioneer. Henry Irving, with that delicate tact and taste which distinguish his every action (and which must mean much preceding thought in the life of an over busy man), bought it, and, on a Christmas Day, sent it as the most delightful of Christmas cards to the Kate Terry of those bygone times. The letter from Tom Taylor to Ben Terry, in which he signifies his warm approval of his daughter's acting in his greatest stage success, "The Ticket-of-Leave Man," is very noteworthy. The Manchester bill (October 4th and 5th, 1867) shows that Kate Terry after her London farewell felt bound to say good-bye to her loyal friends and admirers in Lancashire; that Charles Wyndham was among her supporters; and that her sister Ellen (although she had declared that she had retired from the stage) came to the fore in honour of her sister. The picture of Kate Terry as Ariel was taken in 1856 when she was only twelve years old! ROYAL ENTERTAINMENT--BY COMMAND. Her Majesty's servants will perform at Windsor Castle, _On Friday, February 6th_, 1852, Shakespeare's Historical Play, in five acts, of KING JOHN. King John Mr Charles Kean Prince Henry (his son, afterwards King Miss Robertson Henry III.) Arthur (son of Geoffrey, late Duke of Bretagne, Miss Kate Terry elder son of King John) William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury Mr James Vining Robert Bigot, Earl of Norfolk Mr G. Everett William Mareshall, Earl of Pembroke Mr Wynn Geoffrey Fitzpiers, Earl of Essex (chief Justiciary Mr Stacey of England) Hubert de Burgh (Chamberlain to the King) Mr Phelps Robert Falconbridge (son of Sir Robert Falconbridge) Mr Meadows Philip Falconbridge (his half-brother, bastard Mr Alfred Wigan son to King Richard I.) Philip, King of France Mr C. Fisher Lewis, the Dauphin Mr Stanton Archduke of Austria Mr Ryder Cardinal Pandulph (the Pope's Legate) Mr Graham Chatillon, Comte de Nevers (ambassador from Mr C. Wheatleigh France to King John) Giles (Vicomte de Melun) Mr J. F. Cathcart Peter of Pomfret (a Prophet) Mr Parsloe Citizen of Angiers Mr Addison English Knight Mr Paulo English Herald Mr Rolleson French Herald Mr F. Cooke Attendants on Hubert Mr Daly & Mr Stoakes Elinor (widow of King Henry II. & Mother Miss Phillips of King John) Constance (mother to Arthur) Mrs Charles Kean Blanch (daughter to Alphonso, King of Castile Miss Murray & Niece to King John) King John's Pages Miss J. Lovell & Miss Hastings Attendants on Constance Miss Maurice & Miss Clifford Director Mr Charles Kean Assistant Director Mr George Ellis Theatre arranged & Scenery painted by Mr Thomas Grieve. ROYAL ENTERTAINMENT--BY COMMAND. Her Majesty's servants will perform at Windsor Castle, _On Friday, January 7th, 1853_, Shakespeare's Historical Play of KING HENRY THE FOURTH. (Part Second) King Henry IV. Mr Phelps Henry, Prince of Wales Mr A. Wigan Thomas, Duke of Clarence Mr Stirling Prince John of Lancaster Mr G. Everett Prince Humphrey of Gloster Miss J. Lovell Earl of Westmoreland Mr F. Vining Lord Chief Justice Mr Cooper Scroop, Archbishop of York Mr Diddear Lord Mowbray Mr H. Mellon Lord Hastings Mr H. Vining Sir John Falstaff Mr Bartley Poins Mr H. Marston Pistol Mr Ryder Bardolph Mr Wilkinson Robin Miss Kate Terry Justice Shallow Mr Meadows Justice Silence Mr Harley Gower Mr Graham Davy Mr Clarke Mouldy Mr Stacey Shadow Mr J. Chester Wart Mr Terry Feeble Mr S. Cowell Bull Calf Mr R. Romer Fang Mr Worrell Snare Mr H. Vezin The King's Pages Mr Brazier and Mr Tomlinson Dame Quickly Mrs W. Daly Director Mr Charles Kean Assistant Director Mr George Ellis Theatre arranged & Scenery painted by Mr Thomas Grieve. ROYAL ENTERTAINMENT--BY COMMAND. Her Majesty's servants will perform at Windsor Castle, _On Thursday, November 10th, 1853_, Shakespeare's Historical play, in five acts, of KING HENRY THE FIFTH. The Chorus Mr Bartley King Henry the Fifth Mr Phelps Duke of Glo'ster (brothers to Miss Young Duke of Bedford the King) Mr Rousby Duke of Exeter (uncle to King) Mr Cooper Earl of Salisbury Mr F. Cooke Earl of Westmoreland Mr Belford Archbishop of Canterbury Mr Henry Marston Bishop of Ely Mr Lacy Earl of Cambridge (conspirators Mr F. Vining Lord Scroop against the King) Mr Meagerson Sir Thomas Grey Mr Harris Sir Thomas Erpingham (officers in King Mr Addison Captain Gower Henry's army) Mr J. F. Cathcart Captain Fluellen Mr Lewis Ball Bates (soldiers in Mr J. W. Ray Williams the same) Mr Howe Nym Mr C. Fenton Bardolf (formerly servants Mr Wilkinson Pistol to Falstaff) Mr Harley (now soldiers in same) Boy (servant to them) Miss Kate Terry Charles the Sixth, King of France. Mr Lunt Lewis, the Dauphin Mr Leigh Murray Duke of Burgundy Mr G. Bassil The Constable of France Mr Graham Governor of Harfleur Mr Josephs Montjoy (a French Herald) Mr Mortimer Isabel (Queen of France) Mrs Ternan Katherine (daughter of Charles & Isabel) Miss T. Bassano Quickly (Pistol's wife, an Hostess) Mrs H. Marston Scene at the beginning of the play lies in England, but afterwards wholly in France. Director Mr Charles Kean Assistant Director Mr George Ellis Theatre arranged & Scenery painted by Mr Thomas Grieve. PRINCESS'S THEATRE LAST FIVE NIGHTS OF THE SEASON Which will terminate on Friday next, the 22nd Instant, when THE WINTER'S TALE Will have completed an Uninterrupted Series of ONE HUNDRED AND TWO Representations _On Monday, August 18th; Tuesday, 19th; Wednesday, 20th; Thursday, 21st; and Friday, 22nd, 1856_ The Performance will commence with (37th, 38th, 39th, 40th, and 41st times) a New Farce MUSIC HATH CHARMS Mr Alfred Poppleton Pertinax Mr David Fisher (an Englishman, residing in Paris) Captain Bremont Mr Raymond Madame Mathilde de La Roche Miss Carlotta Leclercq M. Rabinel Mr Brazier Adrien de Beauval Mr Barsby Lucille Miss M. Ternan Victoire Miss Clifford Guests--Mr Collis, Mr Warren, Miss Hunt, & Miss E. Lovell * * * * * After which (98th, 99th, 100th, 101st, & 102nd Times) Shakespeare's Play of The WINTER'S TALE The Scenery under the direction of Mr Grieve, and painted by Mr Grieve, Mr W. Gordon, Mr F. Lloyds, Mr Cuthbert, Mr Dayes, Mr Morgan, Mr G. Gordon, and numerous assistants. Music and Overture composed for the occasion by Mr J. L. Hatton. Dances and Action by Mr Oscar Byrn. Decorations and Appointments by Mr E. W. Bradwell. Dresses by Mrs & Miss Hoggins. Machinery by Mr G. Hodsdon. Peruquier, Mr Asplin (of No. 13 New Bond Street). For authorities of Costumes, see End of Book, Published and sold in the Theatre. Performance terminates by a quarter past eleven. Leontes (King of Sicilia) Mr Charles Kean Mamillius (his son) Miss Ellen Terry Camillo } { Mr Graham Antigonus } (Sicilian Lords) { Mr Cooper Cleomenes } { Mr J. F. Cathcart Dion } { Mr G. Everett Two other Sicilian Lords Mr Barsby & Mr Raymond Elder of the Council Mr Rolleston Officer of the Court of Judicature Mr Terry An Attendant on young Prince Mamillius Mr Brazier Polixenes (King of Bithynia) Mr Ryder Florizel (his son) Miss Heath Archidamus (a Bithynian lord) Mr H. Mellon A Mariner Mr Paulo Keeper of the Prison Mr Collett An old Shepherd (reputed father of Perdita) Mr Meadows Clown (his son) Mr H. Saker Servant to the old Shepherd Miss Kate Terry Autolycus (a rogue) Mr Harley Time, as Chorus Mr F. Cooke Hermione (Queen to Leontes) Mrs Charles Kean Perdita (daughter to Leontes & Hermione) Miss Carlotta Leclercq Pauline, (wife to Antigonus) Mrs Ternan Emilia (a Lady) Miss Clifford Two other ladies attending on the Queen Miss Eglinton & Miss M. Ternan Mopsa } { Miss J. Brougham & } (Shepherdesses) { Dorcas } { Miss E. Brougham Lords, Ladies & Attendants; Satyrs for a Dance; Shepherds, Shepherdesses, Guards, &c. * * * * * SCENE:--_Sometimes in Sicilia. Sometimes in Bithynia._ _Thursday, 19th February 1863._ "MY DEAREST MACREADY,--I have just come back from Paris, where the Readings--Copperfield, Dombey and Trial, and Carol and Trial, have made a sensation which modesty (my natural modesty) renders it impossible for me to describe. You know what a noble audience the Paris audience is! They were at their very noblest with me. "I was very much concerned by hearing hurriedly from Georgey that you were ill. But when I came home at night she showed me Kate's letter, and that set me up again. Ah! you have the best of companions and nurses, and can afford to be ill now and then, for the happiness of being so brought through it. But don't do it again, yet awhile, for all that. "Legouvé (whom you remember in Paris as writing for the Ristori) was anxious that I should bring you the enclosed. A manly and generous effort, I think? Regnier desired to be warmly remembered to you. He has been losing money in speculation, but looks just as of yore. "Paris generally is about as wicked and extravagant as in the days of the Regency. Madame Viardot in the Orphée, most splendid. An opera of 'Faust,' a very sad and noble rendering of that sad and noble story. Stage management remarkable for some admirable, and really poetical effects of light. In the more striking situations, Mephistopheles surrounded by an infernal red atmosphere of his own. Marguerite by a pale blue mournful light. The two never blending. After Marguerite has taken the jewels placed in her way in the garden, a weird waning draws on, and the bloom fades from the flowers, and the leaves of the trees droop and lose their fresh green, and mournful shadows overhang her chamber window, which was innocently bright and gay at first. I couldn't bear it, and gave in completely. "Fechter doing wonders over the way here with a picturesque French drama. Miss Kate Terry in a small part in it, perfectly charming. You may remember her making a noise years ago, doing a boy at an Inn in the 'Courier of Lyons'? She has a tender love-scene in this piece, which is a really beautiful and artistic thing. I saw her do it at about three in the morning of the day when the theatre opened, surrounded by shavings and carpenters, and (of course) with that inevitable hammer going; and I told Fechter 'that is the very best piece of womanly tenderness I have ever seen on the stage, and you will find no Audience can miss it.' It is a comfort to add that it was instantly seized upon, and is much talked of. "Stanfield was very ill for some months; then suddenly picked up, and is really rosy and jovial again. Going to see him when he was very despondent, I told him the story of Fechter's piece (then in rehearsal) with appropriate action; fighting a duel with the washing-stand, defying the bedstead, and saving the life of the sofa-cushion. This so kindled his old theatrical ardour, that I think he turned the corner on the spot. "With love to Mrs. Macready and Katie, and (be still, my heart!) Benvenuta, and the exiled Johnny (not too attentive at school, I hope?), and the personally-unknown young Parr,--Ever, my dearest Macready, your most affectionate "CHARLES DICKENS." "CANTERBURY, FOUNTAIN HOTEL, _Saturday, 15th August 1868._ "DEAR MR. TERRY,--I am desirous of letting you know my opinion of Kate's acting of May Edwards in 'The Ticket-of-Leave Man,' here. "My impression, in the most general form I can state it, is simply this, that I have never had any one character in any piece I have written, from first to last, impersonated so entirely to my satisfaction. She played with a grace, intelligence, and delicacy and truth of feeling which completely carried away the audience, and what is more--the author. If she had played the part in town I should think it would have doubled the success of the piece. "You are quite at liberty to make this opinion of mine known in any quarter where you may think it useful to your daughter that it should be known.-- Yours very truly, TOM TAYLOR. "Mr. B. TERRY." PRINCE'S THEATRE, MANCHESTER. _Proprietors_ The Manchester Public Entertainments Company Limited. Beddoes Peacock, Thorncliffe Grove, Chorlton-upon-Medlock. _Friday and Saturday, October 4th and 5th, 1867_, FOR THE BENEFIT OF MISS KATE TERRY And her last two appearances on any stage. The Performance will commence with an Original Drama, in Three Acts, called-- PLOT AND PASSION Fouché (Duke of Otranto, Minister of Police) Mr J. G. Warde M. Desmarets (Head of Secret Department of Police) Mr F. J. Cathcart (first time) The Marquis de Cevennes (a Legitimist) Mr R. Soutar Berthier (Prince of Neuchatel, Grand Chamberlain) Mr J. G. Nicholson De Neuville (Secretary to de Cevennes) Mr Charles Wyndham (first time) Jabot (House Steward to Madame de Fontanges) Mr P. Rae Grisbouille (a Subordinate of Desmarets) Mr William Mortimer Madame de Fontanges Miss Kate Terry Cecile (her maid) Miss Ellen Leigh SCENE.--_Acts 1st & 3rd, in Paris. Act 2nd, near Prague._ Between the First and Second Acts of the Drama The Band will play the "Kate Terry Valse" (published by Hopwood & Crew) Performed by command before the Sultan, Viceroy, & His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, by the Band of the 1st Life Guards. Dedicated by the composer, Mr Henry King of Bath, to Miss Kate Terry. * * * * * On Friday to conclude with & on Saturday to commence with the LITTLE SAVAGE Major Choker Mr Shephard Mr John Parker Mr Charles Wyndham Mr Lionel Larkins Mr J. Robins Jonathan Mr R. Soutar Lady Barbara Choker Mrs Chas. Jones Kate Dalrymple Miss Ellen Terry Musical Director Mr Williams Doors open at seven o'clock. Performance to commence at half-past. Private Boxes £3. 3s. and £1. 11s. 6d. Prices:--Stalls 6/. Lower Circle 5/. Upper Circle 2/. Pit 1/. Gallery 6d. Box Office open from eleven to two. CHAPTER VI CHIEFLY AT THE QUEEN'S THEATRE As the carrier-dove invariably, and often after a period of long absence, wings its way back to its first home, so in due time Ellen Terry, bringing with her her long-desired message, fluttered back to the stage. We have seen how in 1866 she appeared at the Olympic, playing Helen to her sister's Julia, in "The Hunchback." This was a special occasion, but in the following year she, to the great delight of the public, entered once more on a regular engagement. This was at the Queen's Theatre in Longacre, and it came at the right time. In the August of 1867 playgoers had mourned for the loss of their beloved Kate Terry. In the following October Ellen Terry was at hand to take her place in their hearts. In the previous June she had acted at the Holborn Theatre in a short-lived play by Tom Taylor, entitled "The Antipodes, or Ups and Downs of Life." In it she had the support of a good company, which included that wonderful actress Charlotte Saunders; but though the drama dealt more or less effectively with the racing element in England and the digging element in Australia, it gave little or no chance to the performers, and is only mentioned here for purposes of record. It was at the Queen's that the new laurels were to be won. To the playgoers of to-day, who are accustomed to the theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue and the Charing Cross Road, and who are even inclined to regard the historic Strand as a decaying home for the players, it may seem strange to think of houses in Holborn and Longacre, but the Queen's was in its brief day very popular, and to mention it conjures up many happy memories. It was there that John L. Toole appeared in some of his best domestic comedy parts, with such actors as Henry Irving, Lionel Brough, Charles Wyndham, John Clayton, and Henrietta Hodson for his comrades; it was there that all London flocked to see Hermann Vezin in F. C. Burnand's convincing drama, "The Turn of the Tide" (founded upon the then deservedly popular novel, "The Morals of Mayfair"), and in W. G. Wills's first ambitious play, "Hinko"; and it was there that Shakespearean students revelled in Samuel Phelps's perfect impersonation of Bottom the Weaver, and George Rignold's striking, nay, almost startling, rendering of Caliban. Alas! for its many memories, the Queen's Theatre is no more, and, instead of stage, footlights, and auditorium, its walls encase the works of a Longacre carriage-building firm. When, on its opening night, Ellen Terry joined this now defunct playhouse, its fortunes were controlled by Alfred Wigan, with Charles Reade--who, as we all know, was one of the greatest literary geniuses of his time--for an ally. I meet young people to-day who tell me they have never read this fine novelist's glorious romance, "The Cloister and the Hearth," and say they "don't think they should like it." I am truly sorry for them. Charles Reade, although his works were greedily snapped up by the publishers, loved the stage, had great faith in his own plays, and took endless trouble over their production. His drama, "The Double Marriage," was taken from his novel, "White Lies" (which had been suggested by a French play from the pen of Auguste Maquet, entitled "Le Chateau de Grantier"), and it was produced at the Queen's on October 24th, 1867. It is said that when a quick critic found out the source of the plot, Charles Reade was very angry, and it seems difficult to believe that so great a man should annex another writer's story without acknowledgment. The cast of "The Double Marriage" was not only a strong but a very interesting one. Ellen Terry and Fanny Addison played the heroines; Alfred Wigan was the hero, Charles Wyndham had an effective part, and in a smaller one Lionel Brough made his _début_ on the London stage. Contrary to all expectation, and in spite of excellent acting, "The Double Marriage" did not attract the public. I shall always think that the play deserved a better fate. Years afterwards, on a provincial tour, it was revived by Arthur Dacre and his wife, the well-remembered Amy Roselle. Poor things! They had great faith in their venture, and had expended much money on special scenery and costumes. It was effective enough, and ought to have been attractive, but "bad luck" once more attended it, and I fear it was one of the many disappointments that led to the unfortunate Dacres' tragic end. At the Queen's "The Double Marriage" soon gave way to a revival of Tom Taylor's perennial "Still Waters Run Deep." In this Ellen Terry played to admiration the by no means easy character of Mrs. Mildmay. Alfred Wigan resumed his original character of the self-contained John Mildmay; Mrs. Wigan was the Mrs. Sternhold; and Charles Wyndham (destined to become the best of all John Mildmays) the Captain Hawkesley. On December 26th a very interesting event took place. Garrick's one-act excision from "The Taming of the Shrew," dubbed "Katherine and Petruchio," was revived, and in it Ellen Terry played for the first time with Henry Irving. Critics very much differed as to the merits of the new "shrew" and her "tamer," and, indeed, they had not much chance in this abridged version of the comedy of displaying their ability, but in face of later theatrical history the meeting is noteworthy. It is a matter for regret that these distinguished artists have not included "The Taming of the Shrew" in their noble Shakespearean repertory at the Lyceum. Possibly they have been deterred by the perfect success made in the leading characters by their American contemporaries, Ada Rehan and John Drew. It has remained for them to show Shakespeare's comedy in all its glory. In her "Stray Memories," Ellen Terry has thus recorded the impression made upon her by Henry Irving in those early days:-- "From the first," she says, "I noticed that Mr. Irving worked more concentratedly than all the other actors put together, and the most important lesson of my working life I learnt from him, that to do one's work well one must _work continually_, live a life of constant self-denial for that purpose, and, in short, keep one's nose upon the grindstone. It is a lesson one had better learn early in stage life, I think, for the bright, glorious, healthy career of an actor is but brief at the best." A very pleasant recollection of these days is Ellen Terry's appearance with John Clayton in Francis Talfourd's pretty comedietta, "A Household Fairy," which, with Mr. H. T. Craven and Miss Wyndham in the two parts that form the cast was first produced at the St. James's Theatre on December 24th, 1859. In later years it was admirably performed at the Globe Theatre, Henry Neville playing Julian de Clifford, and Lydia Foote, Catherine. But the sprightly, warm-hearted, and at the same time serious, "Kitty" of the Queen's added lustre to the author's meaning, and was, as he intended her to be, a veritable fairy of the fireside. [Illustration: HENRY IRVING IN 1868. _It was at this period of his career that he first played with Ellen Terry at the Queen's Theatre. Long Acre._ [_To face page 136._ ] But at the close of this brief engagement Ellen Terry again said _au revoir_ (luckily it was not _adieu_) to the stage, and for seven years her gracious presence was withdrawn from us. During this period she became the wife of Mr. Charles Wardell, a gentleman well known to playgoers as Charles Kelly, the name he adopted when, retiring from his position as an officer in a first-class cavalry regiment, he followed his inclinations and took to the stage. In parts of what may be called a stolid type Charles Kelly had, in his day, no rival, and his successes were many. The character of Richard Arkwright in Tom Taylor's interesting drama, "Arkwright's Wife," was, probably, his greatest original achievement; but, as we shall presently see, he did admirable work in Shakespearean drama as well as in the modern plays in which his services were highly esteemed, and always in request. He was also an excellent comedian. When John Hare first gave his inimitable performance of Lord Kilclare in "A Quiet Rubber" at the Court Theatre, the honours were pretty equally divided between him and Charles Kelly, who, as the hasty-tempered but high-minded Irish gentleman, Mr. Sullivan, gave a masterly sketch of Hibernian character. We were all sorry when our well-beloved petrel once more betook herself to the freedom of the winds and the waves; but we waited patiently in the certain hope that she would again return to the shore fringed by the footlights. In the earliest days of 1874 London theatre lovers who were not behind the scenes were puzzled as to who an "eminent actress" could be who, "after a long period of retirement," was announced to appear at the Queen's Theatre as the heroine of Charles Reade's drama, "The Wandering Heir." With Mrs. John Wood in the character the piece had already made its mark, but that talented actress was under contract to appear elsewhere, and horses had to be swopped in the middle of a stream. Until almost the last moment the secret of the vague announcement was well kept, and then to the general joy it was discovered that the "dark lady" was Ellen Terry. Of course her admirers rallied round her to a man--and woman--and her difficult task of succeeding an eminent artiste in a newly created part was not only fulfilled to perfection but crowned with well won approbation. There was no false note about the praise. The "wanderer" was not extolled because she was Ellen Terry, but because of the true excellence of her acting. The enthusiasm of her reception and the appreciation of her critics must have warmed her heart and encouraged her, for she has said that from that time until the present she has never lost zest for her work. Of this notable impersonation of Charles Reade's Philippa Chester (by the way, the play was no doubt suggested by the famous Tichborne case, which was then the talk of the hour), the critic of the _Daily Telegraph_ said:-- "Miss Ellen Terry possesses exactly the qualifications demanded by such a character as Philippa, and the undiminished brightness and buoyancy of her style became at once apparent in the scene when the hoyden dwells with such delight on her love of boyish pastimes, yet shows how much she retains of girlish modesty and simplicity. Hardly less effective when the action is transferred to America, and Philippa appears in male attire, was her generous devotion to the interests of James Annesley--while the struggle under masculine garb to veil repeated signs of strong womanly devotion was most artistically indicated. Mr. Charles Reade's drama of 'The Wandering Heir,' which possesses a highly-interesting story wrought out with remarkable ingenuity, has thus become endowed with an additional element of attraction, and the prosperous career of a piece having a peculiar significance at the present time promises to be prolonged far beyond the hundred nights it has already nearly attained." When his tenancy of the Queen's Theatre came to an end, the energetic Charles Reade took his plays and his loyal little company over Westminster Bridge to "Astley's," of immortal memory, and there Ellen Terry distinguished herself not only as Philippa Chester, but as Susan Merton in the famous "Never Too Late to Mend," which, admirable as it was in its volume form, became even more popular when transferred by its masterly author to the stage. Even after this lapse of time the stirring drama, teaching as it does the most useful of lessons, is a good one to conjure with, and in the provinces, at least, is always sure to attract its faithful pit and gallery. Ellen Terry speaks very affectionately of clever and determined Charles Reade, and cherishes the memory of the time when she served under his somewhat formidably waved banner. "Dear, lovable, aggravating, childlike, crafty, gentle, obstinate, and entirely delightful and interesting Charles Reade," she calls him--and we may be quite sure that while she, despite his foibles, understood his great genius and noble heart, he, in his turn, appreciated her sweet nature and unlimited talents. Before taking leave of "The Wandering Heir" I must make mention of Edmund Leathes, who was the original James Annesley of the cast. He was a gifted as well as a graceful actor, he made his name as an author, and he vanished from us all too soon. From the days of 1874 to these of 1901 Ellen Terry has always been with us. The carrier-dove had this time come home for good, and the message that she has constantly repeated has been ever a sweet one to those many thousands who, all unknown to her, not only admire but love her. CHAPTER VII IN TOTTENHAM STREET In 1875 Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft decided to make a bold experiment at the old Prince of Wales' Theatre in Tottenham Street. In that little playhouse which, thanks to their taste and admirable management, had become the favourite resort of playgoers far and near; in the birthplace and home of the sweet and memorable series of T. W. Robertson's comedies, they would soar to Shakespeare, and give an elaborate as well as an artistic production of "The Merchant of Venice." As far as the company was concerned the cast presented few difficulties. Charles F. Coghlan, who was deservedly regarded as one of the finest and most powerful actors of his day, was to have his chance as Shylock, and, since Mrs. Kendal, who was playing with John Hare at the Court Theatre, was not available, all that was wanted was an ideal Portia. She was found in Ellen Terry, and in some ways the engagement was the most eventful episode in her artistic career. April 17th was the night of the revival, and even those who had illimitable faith in the Bancrofts were amazed at the scenic treat that had been prepared for them. It seemed incredible that such perfect pictures of Venice, exact in every detail, and painted and modelled from drawings specially taken from the beautiful city of the sea, could be displayed on the small stage. They charmed the eye and satisfied the mind. Venice in all its beauty seemed to have transported some of its loveliest spots to dingy Tottenham Street, and a convincing colour was given to the performance such as had not hitherto been seen. The costumes were equally artistic and appropriate,--the parts had been well and very carefully distributed, the success of the production seemed assured,--but in spite of its undeniable, and in many respects unequalled, excellences, it proved unattractive, and had to be speedily withdrawn. The disappointment centred itself, where it had been least expected, in Charles Coghlan's Shylock, and "The Merchant of Venice," without a strongly appreciative and audience satisfying Jew of Venice is doomed to collapse. It was in this way that the beautifully painted and firmly built house of cards tumbled down. It was, and is, inexplicable. Charles Coghlan had over and over again proved himself to be the best of actors. Critics, aware of his latent power, had thought him thrown away on the comparatively trivial parts he had been called upon to play, and felt certain that when he could "let himself go," he would electrify. The power was there--in after years it made itself manifest; but, for some strange reason, it lay dormant in his Shylock--or at any rate in his Shylock of 1875. There was no lapse of memory on the actor's part--no physical breakdown. The character had evidently been most carefully studied, and the delivery of Shakespeare's lines left little or nothing to be desired. Apparently the actor had made the fatal mistake of thinking that Shylock was one of those strong parts that would--in theatrical parlance--"play itself." He was utterly wrong. If Shylock does not reveal himself in his distinctly true colours, not even the ideal Portia can prevent his fading from the picture, and leaving Shakespeare's canvas a blank. David Garrick's contemporary, Charles Macklin, whose name will ever live as the first appreciative impersonator of this superbly drawn character--as full of light as it is of shade--said of his first appearance in it, and when he had from the outset found his audience in sympathy with him:-- "These encomiums warmed but did not overset me. I knew where I should have the pull, which was in the third act, and reserved myself accordingly. At this period I threw out all my fire; and as the contrasted passions of joy for the merchant's losses and grief for the elopement of Jessica, open a fine field for an actor's powers, I had the good fortune to please beyond my wildest expectations. "The whole house was in an uproar of applause. The trial scene wound up the fulness of my reputation; here I was well listened to; and here I made such a silent yet forcible impression upon the audience that I retired from this great attempt well satisfied. "On my return to the green-room after the play was over, it was crowded with nobility and critics, who all complimented me in the warmest and most unbounded manner; and the situation I found myself in, I must confess, was one of the most flattering and intoxicating in my whole life. "No money, no title, could purchase what I felt. And let no man tell me after this what fame will not inspire a man to do, and how far the attainment of it will not remunerate his greatest labours. By Heaven, sir, though I was not worth fifty pounds in the world at the time, yet let me tell you that I was Charles the Great for that night." Soon after this success Macklin received an invitation to dine with Bolingbroke and Pope at Battersea. The latter's couplet on his performance-- "This is the Jew That Shakespeare drew," is well known, and the nineteenth night of the run being his benefit, Bolingbroke sent him a purse containing twenty guineas, such a present being then considered a compliment. On April 17, 1875, poor Charles Coghlan was anything but Charles the Great. Always careful in the details of his make-up, he was a picturesque figure, but his expectant audience waited in vain for the effect that should have been made by the "pull" in the third act--for the fire that was never thrown out--and for the forcible impression of the trial scene. The "nobility and critics" were in front, but they could not compliment the new Shylock, and had sadly to admit that he was anything but the Jew that Shakespeare drew. Charles Coghlan seemed for the moment to have forgotten that Shakespeare meant his matchless text to be illuminated by the actor. He ought to have borne in mind Mrs. Micawber's adage: "Things cannot turn up of themselves. We must in a measure assist them to turn up." No doubt his grave and unaccountable mistake killed the production, and from it the Bancrofts must have suffered not only bitter disappointment, but heavy pecuniary loss. It is pleasant to remember how in their published records they very lightly touch upon the shortcomings of their stage comrade. But the Bancrofts were ever kindly and generous, and in every way merit the honours that have been conferred upon them. Were they not the pioneers of a new, tasteful, and pure departure in English dramatic art? Is it not to them that we owe the evergreen comedies of Robertson and the refined theatrical school that he founded? It is wonderful that thus heavily handicapped with an insipid Shylock the Portia of the evening made a never-to-be-forgotten triumph. But triumph she did, and all along the line. It at once became apparent that we had amongst us an actress who could play the heroines of Shakespeare in a manner that would vie with her great predecessors in the parts, and that she would endow them with new graces and sweet fancies of her own. Such an actress was sorely needed, and we were grateful for her timely advent. Well did Joseph Knight say of Ellen Terry and that famous night at the pleasant little theatre in Tottenham Street, "She had revealed the gifts which are the rarest on the English stage." Continuing, he wrote: "More adequate expression has seldom been given to the light-heartedness of maidenhood, the perplexities and hesitations of love, and the inevitable content of gratified aspirations and ambitions. Not less successful were the scenes of badinage. Portia's address before the court was excellent, and the famous speech on mercy assumed new beauties from a correct and exquisite delivery. A very noteworthy point in the performance was the womanly interest in Shylock--the endeavour to win him, for his own sake, from the pursuit of his grim resolve. The delivery of the lines-- "'Shylock, there's thrice thy money offered thee,' and "'Have by some surgeon, Shylock, on your charge To stop his wounds, lest he do bleed to death,' were dictated by sublime compassion." In accord with this was the opinion of Dutton Cook, who wrote:-- "With all the charms of aspect and graces of manner indispensable to the impersonation of the heiress of Belmont, Miss Terry is gifted with a voice of silvery and sympathetic tone, while her elocutionary method should be prized by her fellow actors. Portia has been presented now with tragedy queen airs, and now with vivacity of the soubrette sort--as when in Garrick's time Mrs. Clive played the part, and made a point of mimicking the more famous barristers of her time; indeed, a nice combination of stateliness, animation, sentiment, archness, poetry, tenderness, and humour is required of the actress entrusted with the character. Miss Terry's Portia leaves little to be desired; she is singularly skilled in the business of the scene, and assists the action of the drama by great care and inventiveness with regard to details. There is something of passion in the anxiety with which she watches Bassanio's choice of the leaden casket; while the confession of her love which follows upon that incident is delivered with a depth of feeling such as only a mistress of her art could accomplish." And so it was with all the critics. Probably there never was an occasion on which they were so unanimous. In the presence of true genius we must all agree. How difficult it is to define the word "genius." To my mind it has never been so well done as by George William Curtis, who said-- "The secret of the rose's sweetness, of the bird's ecstasy, of the sunset's glory, that is the secret of genius." Certainly this seems to sum up the genius of Ellen Terry. Since that night when she first played Portia, it has never lost its hold upon the public, or its influence upon our stage. With an equally magnetic Shylock the Bancrofts' brave venture with "The Merchant of Venice" would surely have run for many months, and in view of the deep impression she has made, it must have been a great disappointment to Ellen Terry that this was not to be. She did not know then that both in England and America her Portia would prove an ever-recurring joy. It was ordained that as Ophelia she should commence her long and brilliant series of Shakespearean impersonations with Henry Irving at the Lyceum, but it was as Portia at the Bancrofts' Prince of Wales' Theatre that she first won all our hearts, from the scholarly critic of our greatest poet, to those who only regard "The Merchant of Venice" as an interesting play that they pay their money to see. Portia will, I think, ever sparkle as the brightest gem in her well bejewelled crown. Being human, Ellen Terry must have felt somewhat chagrined that the fiasco of Charles Coghlan's Shylock should, for a time, banish her Portia, and it is characteristic of her generous nature that a few months later she should be playing, for a single performance, Pauline Deschappelles to his Claude Melnotte at the Princess's Theatre. It was one of those ephemeral stage experiments that could lead to no immediate good. It involved much study, great anxiety, and hard work. Probably in undertaking the task Ellen Terry was actuated by the unselfish desire to help to reinstate her old comrade of the Bristol days in the public estimation. I know that in the long period of her unalterably established fame she has ever been the first to help a fellow actor fallen by the way. If this was her desire she succeeded beyond her expectations. As Claude Melnotte Coghlan did much to redeem his recent unfortunate venture, and as Pauline she evoked pæans of praise. Writing of this performance Joseph Knight said that its effect was to set the seal upon a growing reputation, and to make evident the fact that an actress of a high, if not the highest, order had arisen in our midst. He felt, as every one felt, that in Ellen Terry an artist had developed in whom there was that perception of analogies, that insight into mysteries, and that power of interpretation on which the world has bestowed the name of genius. "Circumstances," he truly remarked, "took Miss Terry from the stage at a time when men dimly perceived in her the promise which has since been realised. It is probable that some delay in that maturity of style indispensable to perfection in histrionic art has resulted from this break in her career. The interval can scarcely have been misspent, however, since Miss Terry reappeared on the stage with ripened powers and with improved methods." In saying that her presentation of Pauline "comprised a series of pictures each more graceful than the preceding," he echoed the general opinion; but I do not think that the great mass of enthusiastic playgoers could be with him when he added that they were "all too good for the lackadaisical play in which she appeared." Poor "Lady of Lyons"! There are still a little band of your faithful admirers who hate to hear you condemned as you are to-day, as tawdry, cheap, and artificial. They look back fondly on happy and soul-stirring hours spent with you in the past; they know that you can still hold intelligent, if somewhat sentimentally inclined, audiences spellbound; and they believe that if any later-day dramatist could write a play containing as good a character for a stage heroine, he would reap a fortune. But among the superfine, my sweet "Lady of Lyons," you are condemned as "old-fashioned," and your loyal followers, if they open their lips in your praise, must be content to share the same ridicule and fate. It is very terrible to be old-fashioned; but I, for one, shall be true to you as long as I live. In the course of his criticism the writer said, "It is too early yet to gauge fully the talent which has revealed itself. It seems probable that Miss Terry's powers will be restrained to depicting the grace, tenderness, and passion of love. In the short scene in the third act, in which Pauline chides her lover for treachery, the actress scarcely rose to the requisite indignation. Limiting, however, what is to be hoped for her within the bounds indicated, what chance is there not afforded? Juliet, in the stronger scenes, would be, we should fancy, outside the physical resources of the artist. Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, Imogen, Miranda, and a score of other characters of the most delicate and fragrant beauty, are, however, all within what appears to be her range. In the present state of public feeling respecting the Shakespearean drama, it will be strange indeed if some manager does not take the opportunity of mounting some of those plays for which her talent is so eminently adapted. The period during which an actress can play such parts with effect is brief; and a portion of Miss Terry's career has already been lost so far as the stage is concerned. There will be regrettable waste if talent, so specially suited to the Shakespearean drama, is confined to Lord Lytton's facile sentiment and sparkling rhetoric." Do not heed these final words, dear "Lady of Lyons." Believe me, there are still many hundreds of gardeners' sons, Princes of Coma, and Colonel Moiriers, ready to be your lovers, and worship at your feet. Twenty-six fruitful years have elapsed since the foregoing criticism was written, and we can be wise after the event. Joseph Knight has proved himself to be a good prophet, but by the light of to-day we know that he might have added to his list of Shakespearean characters within Ellen Terry's range. To the regret of all, we have not yet seen her Rosalind and Miranda, but she has triumphed as Viola and Imogen, and (though she did not satisfy every one in the part) has proved that her physical and artistic resources were equal to the portrayal of the passion and sorrow of Juliet. She has shone as Beatrice, Cordelia, Desdemona, Lady Anne, and Ophelia; she has astonished us and excited our admiration as Queen Katherine and Lady Macbeth, and has even made a great personal success as the determined Volumnia. Add to these the Mamillius, Puck, Prince Arthur, Katherine, and other parts of earlier days, and we see what a Shakespearean record has been made. During her engagement at the Prince of Wales' Theatre, she also appeared as Clara Douglas in Lord Lytton's comedy, "Money"; as Mabel Vane in Charles Reade's and Tom Taylor's "Masks and Faces"; and as Blanche Haye in one of the many revivals of T. W. Robertson's "Ours." In each of these characters her peculiar grace and distinction, coupled with tenderness, were apparent, but none of them offered her a chance worthy of her now fully recognised power. In H. J. Byron's comedy, "Wrinkles; or, A Tale of Time," she was doomed to disappointment. Byron, as a writer for the stage, was then in the zenith of his fame. Everywhere his comedies and burlesques were in demand, and it was only natural that he should receive a commission for a play from his old friends the Bancrofts. Writing for the best comedy company in London, and with Ellen Terry, the idol of the hour, designed for his heroine, he no doubt intended to produce his masterpiece; but, somehow, "Wrinkles" failed. Indeed, on the first night, failure was in the air. Not only did the piece prove unattractive in itself, but (a most unusual thing for any play directed by the Bancrofts) it seemed hardly ready for production. Hereby hangs a characteristic story of poor Byron. At the end of the third act ("Wrinkles" possessed four), though no open hostility had been displayed, his dramatic instinct told him that his work was doomed. Inwardly suffering the torments of the defeated playwright, but outwardly putting on a brave show of _nonchalance_, he lounged about the front of the house. The long waits between the acts had already been a source of dissatisfaction, and now had come the weariest interval of all. Added to this, sounds were heard behind the act-drop as of a carpenter sawing wood, suggesting--ominously suggesting--that the scenery was defective. "What on earth are they doing, Byron?" asked a friend. The poor author was gloomy and dejected, but, even at his own expense, he could never resist a joke. "I don't know," he said, "but _I hope they're cutting out the last act_!" The last act was not cut out, but it did not save the already foundering play, and the part in which Ellen Terry had been intended to shine (she did not appear in it) flickered out. But her engagement in Tottenham Street will ever be remembered by her first appearance as Portia, and to the Bancrofts we owe her introduction to one of her greatest parts. "How I loved playing Portia," she has said. "I have tried five or six different ways of treating her. Unfortunately, the way I think the _best_ way does not find response with my audiences." Be that as it may, she continues to play Portia in a way that her critics as well as friends deem the best, and assuredly it requires no alteration. May she thus go on playing it for many a year to come! CHAPTER VIII IN SLOANE SQUARE At this time the Bancrofts' old and well loved comrade, John Hare, was acting and managing in friendly rivalry with them at the original Court Theatre in Sloane Square. In 1876, the Kendals, having concluded a most prosperous season with him, left to fulfil an engagement in Tottenham Street, and he secured the services of Ellen Terry, whose husband, Charles Kelly, was already serving under his banner. Before he went to fulfil his first engagement in America, John Hare entrusted me with the task of writing his biography, and, apart from my own observations of them, I became very well acquainted with the history of the series of plays in which Ellen Terry appeared in the dainty Chelsea playhouse. Her first venture in her new home was as Kate Hungerford, in an original comedy by Charles Coghlan, entitled "Brothers," of which great things were expected. The cast included John Hare, Charles Kelly, H. B. Conway (one of the handsomest young actors of his day), G. W. Anson (a born comedian), Miss Bessie Hollingshead (the pretty and gifted daughter of the valiant and erudite John Hollingshead), and the always delightful Mrs. Gaston Murray. It was a cleverly written play, and the acting had the _ensemble_ that John Hare had striven so hard and so successfully to impart, but it did not "draw the town," and it was very speedily succeeded by a revival of Tom Taylor and A. W. Dubourg's charming comedy, "New Men and Old Acres," in which Ellen Terry played the part created by Mrs. Kendal on the original production of the piece at the Haymarket Theatre, and Hare followed Chippendale as Vavasour. By all concerned this was so beautifully performed, and by the indefatigable actor-manager so perfectly stage-managed, that solid and lasting success was assured. The good work that was being done was generously as well as generally recognised, and the critical _Athenæum_ spoke for the public when it said:-- "Without going to the best Parisian theatres, it is not easy to rival the performance now given, and there even the majority of the impersonations would call for notice. The result is highly gratifying to the public, unused to spectacles such as are now presented to it, and is most honourable to the management.... We may congratulate accordingly Mr. Hare and his company upon a performance that lifts off a portion of the reproach under which we have lain, and that is the more noteworthy inasmuch as of the dozen actors concerned in the performance, there is no one that does not deserve praise." The character of Lilian Vavasour had been so inseparably associated with the name of Mrs. Kendal, who when she first appeared in it was still using her maiden name (well loved by the public) of Madge Robertson, that it must have been difficult for Ellen Terry to take it up, as it were, at second-hand. That she succeeded in it to admiration, and once more secured a long run for the pretty comedy, speaks volumes for her talent and personal charm. I suppose nowadays "New Men and Old Acres" would be called "old-fashioned." Many of us would like to see it again as played by those dozen actors who all "deserved praise." Early in 1877 it was apparent that Henry Compton, the veteran Haymarket comedian, whose name will ever rank with the greatest of his art, would be unable to return to the active work of the stage. By his professional brothers and sisters he was both loved and respected, and they resolved to give evidence to their sympathy by organising a history-making benefit performance. This was given at Drury Lane Theatre on March 1. The substantial item on the bill of fare was Lord Lytton's "Money," with a cast that included the well-known names of Henry Neville, John Hare, W. H. Kendal, Benjamin Webster (he emerged from his retirement to play his original character of Graves, and it was his last appearance on the stage), David James, and Squire Bancroft. Mrs. Bancroft played Lady Franklin; Mrs. Kendal, Clara Douglas; and Ellen Terry, Georgina Vesey. All concerned in this undertaking were anxious to do honour to the name of Henry Compton, and the happy thought was conceived of inviting his son, Edward Compton, then a young fellow "serving his time" with the provincial stock companies, to play the central part of Alfred Evelyn. It was a nervous first appearance in London for so youthful and inexperienced an actor, but he performed his task bravely, and delighted his worthy father as well as his audience. He has often told me of the kindly encouragement he received from the great artists by whom he so unexpectedly found himself surrounded. Since then, as the founder and indefatigable manager of the Compton Comedy Company, he has helped many excellent actors and actresses to reach the coveted London boards. As a motto to "Money," the following cynical lines are often used-- "It's a very good world that we live in, To lend, or to spend, or to give in, But to beg, or to borrow, or get what's your own, It's the very worst world that ever was known." In the little world of the theatre lending and giving ungrudgingly goes on; the worthy, unfortunate, and unasking beggar is (to put him in that light) charitably treated; and one will cheerily help another to obtain his own. Until October 1877, "New Men and Old Acres" pursued its prosperous course, and by that time John Hare was ready with one of his most ambitious efforts. This was the production of Lord Lytton's posthumous work, "The House of Darnley," and concerning it I cannot do better than quote Dutton Cook, when he said: "A critic wrote concisely of the late Lord Lytton's play of 'Not so Bad as we Seem' that it was 'not so good as we expected.' Perhaps a like judgment might fairly be passed upon the noble author's posthumous comedy, 'The House of Darnley.' It was inevitable, however, that Lord Lytton's fame should stimulate hope unduly. The author of 'The Lady of Lyons' and 'Money' may reasonably be reckoned the most successful dramatist" (let it be remembered that this was written in 1877) "of the nineteenth century. It may be said at once that with those established works the new comedy cannot afford comparison. But in estimating the worth of 'The House of Darnley' it is very necessary to bear in mind the peculiar conditions under which it is submitted to the public. The play was left in an unfinished state; the whole of the last act has been furnished by Mr. Coghlan, who was without other clue than his fancy could suggest as to the original design of the dramatist. More than any other literary work, a drama must benefit by revision and reconsideration on the part of the author; in such wise weak points in construction may be strengthened, gaps in the story supplied, the dialogue braced, and the action quickened." That in the face of all these very properly pointed out difficulties success should have been won, speaks volumes for the tact of the courageous manager, and the skill of his fellow-workers. Let me again quote my authority:-- "With all its defects," he says, "'The House of Darnley' secures the attention and the respect of the audience, and succeeds in right of its own good qualities, and not merely because of the esteem in which the performances of its departed author are generally held. If the theme be weak, it is yet strongly handled, and demonstrates sufficiently the wit and the humour and the literary accomplishments of the late Lord Lytton. The comedy has been provided for with the good taste and liberality which have so laudably distinguished Mr. Hare's management." Ellen Terry acted with great distinction as Lady Juliet, and excellent work was done by John Hare, Charles Kelly, Alfred Bishop, Amy Roselle, and others, but, interesting though it was, the play did not long hold the stage. There was another performance in 1877 that must not be forgotten. This was on June 20th, at the Gaiety Theatre, for the benefit of Charles Lamb Kenney, who had through illness lasting over a considerable time been unable to ply his facile pen. "The School for Scandal" was the _pièce de résistance_, and it was then that Ellen Terry appeared for the first time as Lady Teazle. Charles Kelly was the Sir Peter; Henry Neville, Charles Surface; and John Clayton, Joseph Surface. By those who remember the prodigiously long run of Sheridan's masterpiece at the Vaudeville Theatre, the last mentioned performances of the admirably contrasted brothers will ever be borne in appreciative memory. Mrs. Arthur Stirling was the Mrs. Candour; and Mrs. Alfred Mellon the Lady Sneerwell. As may be imagined Ellen Terry played Lady Teazle with winsome high spirits in the earlier acts, and plaintive remorse in the great screen scene. John Hare's next venture at the Court Theatre was not successful. In spite of the care lavished upon its production, and of much clever acting on the part of the company, Tom Taylor's comedy "Victims," originally presented at the Haymarket in 1857, failed to attract audiences in 1878, and was speedily withdrawn. Withdrawn, it may be unhesitatingly said, in favour of his greatest managerial success--the stage version by W. G. Wills of Oliver Goldsmith's immortal story "The Vicar of Wakefield," entitled "Olivia." John Hare suggested the subject to Wills, and it was at once seized with the characteristic avidity of a prolific and graceful writer. No one who knew that unquestionable, but all too kindly and erratic, genius will be surprised to hear that the first draft of the play was for stage purposes impossible. It was made up of scenes of great beauty hopelessly choked with vast quantities of irrelevant matter. It was not consecutively written, but was jotted down at random in untidy copy-books, on the backs of used envelopes, chance scraps of paper, and even on the eager but unmethodical author's wristbands. At one time the task of bringing all this heterogeneous matter into workmanlike form seemed to be a hopeless one, but with full faith in his project and his author, John Hare was not to be baffled. Night after night the two sat up together, and the play was re-constructed and re-written in accordance with the practical managerial views. When it was at last completed the dramatist prudently withdrew from the scene. W. G. Wills had no interest in or talent for stage management, and he wisely left the production in the experienced hands of John Hare, only attending the perfected rehearsal on the eve of the first performance. John Hare can rarely be induced to talk about himself or his work, but in connection with this production he is inclined to be somewhat enthusiastic. "The beauty of the subject," he told me, "made the stage management of this play profoundly interesting to me, and stimulated my imagination and inventive powers to a greater height than I had ever reached. By working out the whole scheme of the play in my home study I planned all the movements and minute stage directions, so that at the very first rehearsal it practically was the same as when it was presented to the public. The part of the Vicar I offered in the first instance to Alfred Wigan, making every effort to induce him to return to the stage in order that he might create this beautiful character. I could not induce him, however, to face the footlights again. So Hermann Vezin became the 'Court' Vicar, and how admirably he played the part we all know." No one grudges Hermann Vezin his well-won success in the part, but some of us who ponder over things theatrical, sometimes wonder whether, if the Court Theatre had had another manager, and the services of John Hare had been available, he might not have been induced to impersonate Dr. Primrose. The part of Olivia had of course been designed for Ellen Terry, and how much she was pleased with it is proved by the following little note impulsively dashed off to the author:-- "COURT THEATRE, _Monday, March 5, 1878_. "DEAR MR. WILLS,--I can't tell you how _much_ I was delighted with the play, and with my part, but I _was_ delighted! "I only hope I shall be able to please you in my part of the work.--Believe me to be, very sincerely yours, ELLEN TERRY." Indeed, she always liked to study the words of this author. At the Lyceum, in addition to the repetition of Olivia, she played his Queen Henrietta Maria in the revivals of "Charles I."; his Ruth Meadows in "The Fate of Eugene Aram," and his Margaret in "Faust." Concerning "Charles I.," she wrote to him (this letter was published by Mr. Freeman Wills in his highly interesting memoir of his brother):-- "I'm just returned from our last rehearsal of 'Charles I.,' and, coming home in my carriage, have been reading the last act, and I can't help writing to thank you and bless you for having written those _five last pages_. Never, _never_ has anything more beautiful been written in English--I know no other language. They are perfection; and I--often as I've acted with Henry Irving in the play--am _all melted_ at reading it again. An immortality for you for this alone." She greatly grieved over her well-loved author's death, and concerning it wrote to her friend, Alfred C. Calmour:-- "22 BARKSTON GARDENS, EARL'S COURT, S.W., _December 15, 1891_. "Thank you for writing. Wretched news, is it not? A genius and a dear fellow. I know how much you will miss him, and I'm very sorry for you and for myself too. "I hope he was conscious and had folk he cared for by him.--Yours ever, ELLEN TERRY." She is indeed the most charming of letter writers, and, if it were permissible, it would be pleasant to fill a chapter with her lively, as well as sympathetic, correspondence with the famous men and women of her day; but she very strongly, as well as very rightly, holds the opinion that to publish private letters intended for one person only is like asking an audience to put their ears to a keyhole and listen to a private conversation. But to return to "Olivia." The beautiful play was produced at the Court Theatre on 30th March 1878, and at once won its well deserved victory. The first-night audience having watched the course of the story with that breathless silence which is the highest form of applause, having been over and over again moved to tears, became, at the fall of the curtain, a demonstrative one, and the unrestrained enthusiasm of the plaudits could be heard without Sloane Square. The critics were in their appreciation and praises as loud as the audience, and Ellen Terry's triumph was complete. She was the idolised heroine of a memorable evening. "Mr. Wills," said Dutton Cook, "has been fortunate not merely in his performers, but also in his manager. Mr. Hare demonstrated anew that he has elevated theatrical decoration to the rank of a fine art; indeed, his painstaking and outlay in placing the play upon the stage justify suspicion that it was produced almost as much for its pictorial as for its dramatic merits. In either case, advantage has been taken of the opportunity to present a special reflection of the artistic aspects of the last century with regard to furniture and costumes, china and glass, &c. A sort of devout care has been expended upon the veriest minutiæ of upholstery and ironmongery; a fond ingenuity is apparent in every direction of the scene; and the foibles and fancies of those who love, or imagine that they love, cuckoo clocks, brass fenders, carved oak, blue and white crockery, and such matters, have been very liberally considered and catered for. Prettier pictures have not, indeed, been seen upon the stage than are afforded by the Primrose family, their friends and neighbours, goods and chattels, and general surroundings in this play of 'Olivia.' "But a higher claim to distinction arises from the method of its representation. In the hands of Miss Ellen Terry, Olivia becomes a character of rare dramatic value, more nearly allied, perhaps, to the Clarissa of Richardson than to the heroine of Goldsmith. The actress's singular command of pathetic expression obtains further manifestation. The scene of Olivia's farewell to her family, all unconscious of the impending blow her flight is to inflict upon them, is curiously affecting in its subtle and subdued tenderness; while her indignation and remorse upon discovering the perfidy of Thornhill are rendered with a vehemence of emotion and tragic passion, such as the modern theatre has seldom exhibited. "Only an artist of distinct genius could have ventured upon the impulsive abrupt movement by means of which she thrusts from her the villain who has betrayed her, and denotes the intensity of her scorn of him, the completeness of her change from loving to loathing. "Miss Terry is not less successful in the quieter passages of the drama, while her graces of aspect and manner enable her to appear as Olivia even to the full satisfaction of those most prepossessed concerning the personal charms of that heroine--so beloved of painters and illustrators--to whom have been dedicated so many acres of canvas, so many square feet of boxwood." This criticism well sums up the general opinion. Joseph Knight was equally full of praise, and said: "Miss Terry was altogether life-like as Olivia, and much of her business was extremely natural and touching. It was full of suggestion, and, in one point at least, when she repelled the further advances of the man who had wronged her, it touched absolute greatness." Clement Scott pays his tribute as follows:--"'Olivia,' as I first saw it at the Court Theatre, is a memory that will never die while life lasts. It is one of the most precious souvenirs in my collection.... Words fail to convey an adequate impression of the original Olivia--the spoiled child and darling of the English home as portrayed by Ellen Terry. I see the idol of her old father's heart. Vividly and clearly is presented to my memory the scene where Olivia, under the hypnotic influence of love, bids farewell to her loved ones, scattering around her little treasures, and that 'white face at the window,' when 'Livy' is on the high road to destruction. All that was pathetic enough; but the dramatic effect was bound to follow, and it came with vivid truth in the great scene between Ellen Terry and William Terriss. At that time, both actor and actress were perfect specimens of manly beauty and feminine grace. Terriss was just the dare-devil, defiant creature, handsome to a fault, that women like Olivia love. He looked superb in his fine clothes, and his very insolence was fascinating and attractive. "When Olivia struck Squire Thornhill in her distraction and impotent rage, an audible shudder went through the audience. It was all so unexpected. But the truth of it was shown by the prolonged and audible 'Oh!' that accompanied it. When we talk of the Ellen Terry manner, and her indescribable charm, may I ask, were they ever better shown than in the scene where Olivia kisses the holly from the hedge at home, and then hangs it on a chair and dances round it with childish delight? And so it went on from perfection to perfection. For me there will only be one Olivia--Ellen Terry." No wonder that this fascinating Olivia became the rage of the day. Her photographs went like wildfire; the milliners' windows were full of Olivia hats, caps, 'kerchiefs, and other items of feminine adornment; everywhere such dainty trifles were in evidence; and how many little "Olivias" were christened in 1878 it would be hard to say. Among the pretty schoolgirls who figured in the play a young aspirant for dramatic honours made her first appearance on the stage. This was Kate Rorke. How highly Ellen Terry thought of her sister artist's talents will be seen in the course of these pages. She has ever been ready to recognise merit in her fellow-workers--ever willing to render them a helping hand. Ellen Terry has modestly declared that it was because of her popularity as Olivia that Henry Irving invited her to be his helpmate in his great projects for his management of the Lyceum Theatre. It was not only this: many things pointed to the fact that she was destined to be the greatest Shakespearean actress of the latter years of the nineteenth century. CHAPTER IX SOME SPLENDID STROLLING In the early autumn of 1878, before entering upon her all-important Lyceum engagement, Ellen Terry, accompanied by her husband, appeared in some of our leading provincial cities. Everywhere they were most warmly welcomed, and the experiment proved so successful that, even after her Lyceum duties seemed sufficient to engross all her time and attention, it was, during a period extending over two years, repeated. That was a splendid time for the so-called "country" playgoer. I well recall how within one week at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham (this was in 1879), I saw Ellen Terry in her matchless rendering of Portia in "The Merchant of Venice," as Ophelia in "Hamlet," as Lady Teazle in the "School for Scandal," and as Lilian in "New Men and Old Acres." I would gladly live that week over again. In Shakespearean characters Charles Kelly was not, I think, seen at his best, but in his comedy parts he was admirable, and there is always an interest in seeing husband and wife act together. Actors and actresses love playing to ardent and sympathetic provincial audiences. Their absolutely unrestrained appreciation and applause delight them. The intent faces and eager ears, bent on losing neither a movement of the expression nor an inflection of the voice, act as a tonic to them; there is magnetism between the stage and the house, and under such conditions acting is sure to be at its best. There is nothing _blasé_ about the provincial playgoer. He pays for a play that he wants to see, and if he is pleased he expresses his gratitude in no uncertain terms. If he is disappointed he goes sadly and quietly away, but he is never rude to those who have done their best to entertain him. "Boos" and author-baiting are happily unknown in the provinces, and no doubt this is why actors of eminence are fond of exploiting new plays in the country before exposing them to the exasperating risks of a London first night. It seems astounding that people should exist who can wantonly deride the failure of anxious authors and actors, who, having honestly sought to conquer, are miserably conscious of their own defeat. No play can be depended upon until it has gone through the ordeal of a public performance. If the piece that has read well and rehearsed well fails to grip the public, the sensitive actors and author are the first to feel it, and surely in their keen disappointment they should be spared the humiliation of rowdyism. Not long ago there was a discussion as to the "rights" of first-night audiences to "boo" a new play and the performers in it. The views of leading actors and dramatists were sought, and Ellen Terry replied as follows:-- "I so entirely believe in the verdict of the great public that I long to have the first night of a new play over and done with, for it is, to my mind, the second night which tells me of the future good or bad fortune of the play and of our efforts. On the first night there are one's friends, so many so prejudiced; and one's enemies--not so many, but equally prejudiced, and so it seems to me that the first night scarcely counts. Then comes the second night, and all the nights. I can't tell how much it affects me--moves me--the enthusiasm, the attention, the encouragement. I just adore the public, and the public loves me back again. I know it, feel it, and am grateful for it. It refreshes my heart." "ELLEN TERRY." This is very prettily put, and it is all very true, but such a universal favourite is hardly a judge with regard to the feelings of her less loved sisters who are subject to the baseness and vulgarity of a detestable faction of first-nighters. I may be told that provincial audiences can be very noisy, and even unruly, and it must be admitted that the gallery "gods," when packed together like dried figs in a wooden drum, are apt to be unpleasantly emphatic concerning their discomfort; but their objections are raised against each other, and rarely refer to the stage. Moreover, when anything really good or impressive is offered to them they will at once forget their grievances and become as quiet as mice. As an instance of this, I recall an evening at the Prince of Wales' Theatre, Birmingham, when Henry Irving was announced to appear as Shylock. It had been raining hard all day, and the streets were filthy with hopeless slush. As the evening drew in the torrents descended pitilessly, but in spite of them great crowds of the faithful had assembled before the doors of the pit and gallery hours earlier than they would be opened to them. Long before curtain-rise the house was uncomfortably crowded. Outside it was wet and muggy. Inside it was oppressively close, and the hot atmosphere was redolent with the odour of saturated clothing and sodden shoe leather. Ill-temper was in the air, and at the commencement of the play the actors were greatly troubled by the noisy quarrels that arose among playgoers ill bestowed. Then Henry Irving made his striking entrance, and, instantaneously, all was silent. As if by magic, he, aided by Ellen Terry as Portia, held his audience as in a vice, and continued to do so until the end of the performance. The only sounds heard in the theatre were those of boisterous applause and ejaculations of half suppressed gratification and emotion. It was a great tribute to the power exercised by the true acting of a masterpiece. [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS LORD TENNYSON'S "DORA." _Played in the Provinces in 1879. In London the part was created by Kate Terry._ [_To face page 174._ ] Ellen Terry must ever bear in fond memory those splendid strolling days when the hearts of her sturdy audiences went out to her, and she, bewitchingly, responded to them. On the 1878 tour she relied chiefly on her former success as Lilian in "New Men and Old Acres," and her appearance in her sister Kate's original character of Dora, in the Tennyson-Reade play of that name. This not only conjured up happy reminiscences, but was in itself a sweetly tender and sympathetic impersonation. Charles Kelly, too, was very well placed in Henry Neville's old part of Farmer Allan, and in his make-up looked a perfect picture. I often maintain that, if they only knew it, provincial theatre lovers have certain advantages over Londoners. Here is a case in point. They saw Ellen Terry as Dora. In 1878 they also had the opportunity of seeing her as Iris, in an adaptation by Alfred Thompson of "La Revanche d'Iris," called "All is Vanity." In it were the elements of popularity, but it was short-lived. She and her husband subsequently appeared in it at a benefit performance given at the Lyceum on behalf of that sound actor of the old school, Henry Marston, and then it was forgotten. In 1879 the Terry-Kelly programme was augmented by the production of an ephemeral version by Mrs. Comyns Carr of the everlasting "Frou Frou," entitled "Butterfly." Guided as it has been, and happily still is, by that great authority on dramatic art, Sir Edward Russell, the _Liverpool Daily Post_ has always been famous for its theatrical criticisms, and in dealing with these days it is interesting to cull the following lines from its columns:-- "We cannot find words to express the charm with which Miss Terry, than whom there is no more tender and graceful actress on the British stage, invests the character of Butterfly, but those who can appreciate versatility of acting should see her play the part, and then ask themselves the question--'Could any one do it better?' She was most ably supported by Mr. Charles Kelly and Miss Fanny Pitt, whose acting greatly contributed to the success of the piece." Of "New Men and Old Acres" the same authority rightly said:-- "It is seldom that such a piece is rendered with such perfection as that which the leading members of the cast succeeded in achieving. There is only one word which can adequately describe Miss Terry's personation of Lilian Vavasour, and that word is perfection. Natural and graceful in expression, with an inexhaustible vivacity, she maintains an unbroken spell, which is only deepened by each fresh stroke of humour and girlish outburst of sentiment, accompanied by a bewitching artillery of attitude and expression. The acting of Mr. Charles Kelly as Mr. Brown, the quiet, self-possessed man of business, was excellent in the extreme." Of her reading of Lady Teazle in the screen scene of "The School for Scandal," it was recorded that her tenderly, tremulous, and broken accents touchingly conveyed the womanly contrition which so pathetically points the moral of a dramatic incident in which human infirmity, passion, perfidy, generosity of sentiment, and youthful gaiety and frivolity are so wonderfully and skilfully blended. And of her Dora, it was "something more than a mere stage-picture--a living, breathing reality, a perfect embodiment of Tennyson's conception." In the September of 1880 a very interesting event took place, and as it foreshadowed one of my heroine's greatest subsequent triumphs I shall speak of it at length--or rather, I shall take the liberty of letting that eminent critic, Mr. Davenport Adams, speak for me. "On Friday, September 3rd, Miss Ellen Terry will play Beatrice _for the first time on any stage_ at the Grand Theatre, Leeds." That was his text for an article from his pen that appeared in that unhappily defunct periodical, _The Theatre_ magazine. "I forget," he continues, "when and where I first cast eyes on this delectable announcement. It may have been here, it may have been there. I only know that when I saw it I came to an immediate and irrevocable resolution. Miss Terry as Beatrice! Why, it was one of the dreams of my existence! I say 'one of the dreams,' because I had hoped, and still hope, to see Miss Terry not only as Beatrice, but as Viola, and Imogen, and Rosalind, and perchance as Juliet, if the gods but prove propitious. But Miss Terry as Beatrice! To me it was an 'opening paradise.' My dreams were coming true. Here was the first instalment, and who should say when the remainder might not be realised? Assuredly there might be some who would resist such an attraction as the above; but I was not among them. Friday, September 3rd, saw me duly speeding northwards as fast as the Midland Railway Company could be induced to carry me. I had never been in Leeds before, and I do not hesitate to say that, save under similar provocation, I have no anxiety to go there again. Yet what cannot the imagination do for one? For me, on this occasion, Leeds was 'apparelled in celestial light.' Boar Lane and Briggate became for the nonce the primrose path which led me to the halcyon doors of the Grand Theatre. And fine doors they are! Everything is a little new, perhaps; there is nothing of the venerable temple of the drama about this brand-new building, with its imposing frontage and evident commodiousness. Clearly, you say to yourself, this is a specimen of recent handiwork, and requires time in which to mellow; but once get through the delightfully cool passages, which lead from the vestibule to the stalls--once put your foot within the auditorium--and you are charmed with everything you see. It may be all very fresh, but it is all very magnificent and impressive. _O si sic omnes!_ If every theatre roof were but so high--if every pit were but so spacious and well-lighted--if every circle, upper circle, and gallery were but so gracefully superimposed one above the other--and, especially, if everywhere there were such a rich profusion of decoration as one sees around one! Evidently there could be no more gorgeous frame for the picture which Miss Terry was about to paint for us. "It was Miss Terry's benefit night, and every stall was taken. This seemed to be the case, too, with the circle, and may have been so with other portions of the house. It seemed as if the pit were crammed, and in the stalls standing room was diligently sought for. It was obvious that Leeds playgoers had understood the nature of the treat that was before them. Whether it was that Miss Terry was personally the attraction of the evening, or whether Miss Terry as Beatrice had drawn the crowd, I cannot say. Suffice it that the crowd was, and that the crowd soon showed itself to be delighted." I cannot refrain from quoting this at length, because it supports my contention as to the privileges and appreciation of provincial audiences. "In the meantime," my authority goes on to say, "one did not occupy much time in looking round. It was not a London _première_, and certainly I did not hope to see a single face I knew. Yet, what was this? I could not be mistaken. There at any rate were two faces which I could not fail to recognise. At least, if that winsome countenance were not that of Miss Marion Terry, and if that not less winsome countenance beyond were not that of Miss Florence Terry--twin roses on one stalk--then did mine eyes deceive me. For myself, I opine that I was not deceived, and that Miss Terry's first appearance as Beatrice was witnessed not only by the art-lovers of the wood and iron metropolis, but by two of her sisters, both in art and by blood. "It was not long before the curtain rose, and disclosed to us the entrance of 'Leonato, Hero, Beatrice, and others.' The Beatrice was immediately singled out, and loud and long was the applause with which she was received--applause which she insisted, first, upon sharing with the Hero (not the heroine) of the evening (Miss Ruth Francis),[2] but which she was compelled afterwards to acknowledge for herself. The opening scene, as everybody knows, plunges us at once _in medias res_. Beatrice shows by her first utterance what way her thoughts are tending, and this strikes the key-note of the comedy. Her first expression is a gibe at Benedick, and when, shortly afterwards, the 'Signior Montano' himself appears upon the scene, the war of wits immediately begins. Let it be said _in limine_ that Miss Terry at once asserted herself as the very Beatrice that Shakespeare drew. That she would do so as far as personal presence was concerned was to be expected. Never was any one so well fitted to represent the 'pleasant spirited' lady, whose charms of face and figure are as irresistible as her verbal daggers. Somehow or other Miss Terry always is a perfect vision of the picturesque. Others may surpass her in special and particular marks of beauty or of manner, but no lady on the modern stage is so much of a picture in herself, or falls so readily into the composition of the larger picture formed by the combinations of a drama. "In this case Beatrice seemed to be bodily before us. Ere she had opened her mouth she had already begun to fill the imagination. We do not have many opportunities nowadays of seeing the heroine of 'Much Ado,' but here was the only Beatrice who had hitherto completely fulfilled the requirements of the part, so far as the outward and visible person is concerned. I cannot describe the vision. I admit my incompetency so to do without a blush. A pen is useless. It is the brush of a Millais that is wanted. The picture is in my mind, but not even a Ruskin could put it on paper. For, to the mere details of face and figure and attire, have to be added all the indescribable charm of facial expression and of bodily movement--of tone, of laugh, of gesture, and of bearing--which neither the penman nor the painter can successfully reproduce. "For such a character as that of Beatrice Miss Terry is, in fact, by nature indicated. Characteristics, which elsewhere might be out of place, are here in keeping. Miss Terry is tall, and Beatrice should be tall; a little woman could hardly have said and done such things as she says and does. Miss Terry has high spirits, and so has Beatrice; they are of the essence of her character, and without them she cannot be reproduced. Miss Terry has charm of manner as well as incisiveness of speech, and so has Beatrice, with whom the 'poniards' of her tongue are half blunted by the fascination of her smile. You would think that her eyes pierced as keenly as her words, but it is not so; the words may wound, but the eyes mitigate or charm away pain. So with Miss Terry. Speeches which in any other mouth would grate upon us are in hers but so many incitements to admiration and regard. "And if Miss Terry is thus personally fitted for the character, it need hardly be said that it is quite within the range of her artistic capability. Indeed, it is well within the range of many less admirable artists. It is a straightforward character. There is no mystery about it. Two different notions of Beatrice are, I should say, scarcely possible--her nature is so entirely on the surface. She tells us herself that she was 'born to speak all mirth and no matter.' 'She was born,' says Don Pedro, 'in a merry hour.' Benedick calls her 'My Lady Disdain' and 'Lady Tongue.' 'Shrewd of tongue,' according to her uncle, she also 'apprehends passing shrewdly.' In a word, she is clever, she is high-spirited, she is witty; but she is more. She can feel keen indignation, and for all her 'mocking at her suitors,' she can look tenderly upon one at least. For obviously she loves Benedick, more or less, from the beginning. Her first inquiry is for him, and she thinks him worthy of her most unsparing raillery. She sneers at him so pointedly that all the world marks the fact and smiles at it. Nothing seems more natural to the bystanders than that they should make a match. "And so, it seems to me, Miss Terry sees the character. In the very first scene she pursues Benedick with her flouts and quips, and evidently takes pleasure in the encounter. Though she hits so hard there is evidently an _arrière pensée_ of respect for the gallant cavalier whose 'approved valour' cannot but impress her, whilst his 'quick wit' not unmingled with self-satisfaction spurs her on to action. One can see that when she scoffs at marriage it is with no more real sincerity than Benedick displays on the same subject. Her wit must have its way; conscious of possessing it, she is fain to exercise it. She revels in the contempt she pours upon the 'sons of Adam.' And so in the scene in which she taunts the masked Benedick to desperation. It is all done in pure _diablerie_. It is simple mischief, inspired by keen delight at finding her butt so agreeably vulnerable. That she is no mere shrill-tongued termagant is shown in the passage where she so gracefully turns off the Don's gallant offer of his heart and hand. And as for her deeper nature--the real Beatrice, hidden underneath the everyday veneer of wit and raillery--what could be more truly descriptive of it than the scene in which, led into the belief that Benedick is really fond of her, she says farewell to maiden pride and to contempt, and prepares to 'tame' her 'wild heart' to his 'loving hand'? The accusation brought against her cousin is not less effective in arousing the latent forces of her character; and the church scene, in its combination of passionate anger against Hero's slanderers, and charming half-confession of affection felt, is conclusive in its testimony to the open naturalness of the character which Miss Terry has so aptly and admirably conceived. As for the _technique_ of the performance, it must be remembered that it was a first assumption. Miss Terry _may_ have played the part somewhere before September 3rd, but the fact is not recorded, and there is no reason to believe that the announcement of 'first time' was anything but literally true. And that being the case, it would be unfair to expect the impersonation to be _totus teres atque rotundus_. Miss Terry has all the ultra-sensitiveness of the true artist, and it is not improper to suggest that, on the occasion in question, she was not entirely mistress of her powerful resources. The most experienced players are the most nervous on first nights. And assuredly there are points in which Miss Terry will improve upon her first assumption of this latest part of hers. Some artists grow into their _rôles_, and Miss Terry is one of them. Her Portia nowadays is very much superior to what it was when played originally at the Prince of Wales'. And no doubt Miss Terry, who has since played Beatrice at Manchester and elsewhere, during her provincial tour, has already added the touches necessary to make the representation as near perfection as art and aptitude can make it. No doubt every word, every phrase, every sentence now has its due weight and effect communicated to it; no doubt details of 'business' have been arranged until there is now no room for further elaboration; no doubt the character, thoroughly grasped in the study, has by this time been thoroughly grasped upon the stage. On the first night it was hardly possible not to notice the nervousness indicated in the opening scene, and throughout there were slight slips in the words, and occasional misplacements of due emphasis, together with a lack of perfect roundness in the general form of the assumption. The artist was obviously to a great extent feeling her way. "And yet how enjoyable and admirable was the assumption! In spite of these minor blemishes of execution, it was yet Shakespeare's Beatrice, I repeat, who stood and moved and spoke before us. The impression made at the beginning was continued to the close, gathering in force and effectiveness as it went. The raillery against marriage, and the wit combats with Benedick, were carried off with exhilarating vivacity, so that applause and laughter followed inevitably upon both. The former was accompanied by a running fire of cachinnation from the delighted audience. The next point was made when Benedick was charmingly chaffed as the 'Prince's jester,' and the short but exquisite _rencontre_ with Don Pedro was evidently very much relished. The first 'call' was made when Beatrice came to summon her knight to dinner. The curtain fell on this, and Miss Terry and Mr. Kelly had both to bow their acknowledgments. Then came the scene in which Beatrice listens in the arbour to the delusive tale of Ursula and Hero. The short speech which follows was very agreeably declaimed; and when, declaring her belief in Benedick's deserts, Beatrice sank upon the seat in one of those attitudes possible only to Miss Terry, the impression made was naturally very great indeed. The chief scene for Beatrice is, however, in the church after the bridal party has dispersed, all save herself and Benedick. Up to that point she has little to do but contribute her share of byplay to the situation (always appropriately done by Miss Terry), to comfort her cousin with all sorts of feminine attention, and incidentally to make that vehement declaration-- 'Oh, on my soul, my cousin is belied!' which gives the earliest indication of the characteristic outburst that is to follow. In that outburst itself, Miss Terry was hardly sufficiently varied in her representation of the feeling which is supposed to consume her. It was very impressive, especially in the sudden violence of her 'Kill Claudio!' but it wanted that absolute adaptability of means to end which has no doubt been communicated to it since. Best of all, perhaps, was the brief exchange of love vows with Benedick; a very brief but charming and beautifully-indicated episode in a scene which, as a whole, pleased the audience mightily, and secured for both the artists a persistent 'call.' After this, as we all know, Beatrice has but two short appearances on the stage, which serve chiefly to complete the picture, but, on this occasion, served further to consummate the triumph which, anything or everything notwithstanding, was unquestionably and deservedly accorded to Miss Terry. The curtain fell, in fact, upon an unmistakable popular success which it wanted only practice and experience to convert into a permanent artistic victory. "It should be recorded that Miss Terry was effectively seconded throughout by Mr. Kelly. That able and accomplished actor was the Benedick of the occasion, and a very acceptable performance did he give. I confess I was not altogether prepared for the excellence of the effect created by Mr. Kelly in this _rôle_. His very make-up was a surprise. Could this gallant cavalier--bearded, whiskered, and moustached, with the bronze of battle on his cheeks, and just the faintest _soupçon_ of the dandy and the lady-killer in his manner--be the quiet, serious-minded Brown of 'New Men and Old Acres' in another guise? It was a revelation. And if the appearance of Mr. Kelly was a revelation, so, to some extent, was his enjoyable and largely satisfying rendering of the _rôle_ itself. Mr. Kelly's conception of Benedick is that of a man who has passed the first flush of youth, has seen many men and cities, has had his experience of 'the fair,' and is inclined to think somewhat lightly of them, save, indeed, of this 'Lady Disdain,' who so stabs him with her words. It is easy to see that he is not indifferent to her charms, else why is he so affected by her quips and cranks? else why is he so readily converted from his vaunted woman-hatred? It is easy, too, to see that this stalwart knight, of 'noble strain' and of 'quick wit,' is the very man on whom such a woman as Beatrice would naturally bestow her thoughts. He, too, has his deeper nature as well as she. And Mr. Kelly brought out the various differentia of the character very artistically. The woman-hatred was soon seen to be skin deep. The irritation at the 'chaff' of Beatrice was skilfully indicated without being over-done. The soliloquy in reference to his 'not impossible she' was spoken with excellent abandon, whilst the speech after his supposed discovery of Beatrice's love for him was admirable in its delineation of delighted surprise. Equally successful was Mr. Kelly in the scene where Benedick is badgered by Claudio and Don Pedro, and that other passage in which he conveys his challenge to the former. The unconscious comedy of the one was as well considered as the serious dignity of the other.... For the rest, I have but one regret in reference to this performance, and that is, that the exigencies of the play do not permit Beatrice to be upon the stage throughout the whole of the comedy. Dogberry and Verges are inimitable, and Benedick is everywhere acceptable; but still if Shakespeare had only given us a little more of this not least charming of his charming heroines! Could he have foreseen the Beatrice of Miss Ellen Terry, he would, perhaps, have done so. And yet, I do not know. Too much exhilaration is not good for us, and it is perhaps the truest mercy that Beatrice should not be for ever scattering about her verbal diamonds, and that Miss Ellen Terry should not for ever make the stage brilliant and enchanting by her delightful presence." The cast of this memorable Leeds production was in many ways an interesting one. Mr. Philip Beck was Don Pedro; Mr. C. Brookfield, Don John; Mr. Norman Forbes, Claudio; Mr. Arthur Mood, Dogberry; Mr. Lin Rayne, Verges; and Miss Elinor Aickin, Ursula. How, in accordance with Davenport Adams' prediction, Ellen Terry's Beatrice developed into a "permanent artistic victory" we all know to-day. Undoubtedly, and as we shall presently see, it was one of the finest, and in some respects (for her comedy is so winsome) one of the most attractive of her long series of Shakespearean triumphs at the Lyceum. What a series it has been! It is not surprising that she should say--"I seem to have made the acquaintance and to _know_ quite intimately some noble people--Hamlet and Ophelia, Portia, Benedick, and Beatrice, Romeo and Juliet, Viola, the Macbeths. All this makes me rejoice and wonder how it is that I'm not a superior person! I have dwelt with such very good company. It has been all sunshine, with a wee cloud here and there to give zest to life; and my lines have been laid in pleasant places. How terrible it must be to have to do the work one abhors!" It is because she has done the work that she loves, and has made the sweet tenderness of her love for it so manifest, that she has continually stirred the imagination, and lastingly won the hearts of her audiences. CHAPTER X MARION AND FLORENCE TERRY While Ellen Terry was firmly cementing her popularity and ever adding to her fame, two of the younger members of her gifted family had come to the front to add to the honour of the name they bore. These were her sisters, Marion and Florence. It is generally understood that the _début_ of Florence Terry was made in 1870, while the first appearance of Marion Terry was delayed until 1873, but I think there may have been a good many previous tentative performances. The Terrys always believed in groundwork, and we may be sure that these young ladies were carefully taught the art of acting. My old friend, W. H. Vernon, has told me how, when he was fulfilling his long engagement under Henry Neville's management at the Olympic Theatre, the two young sisters played with him in an old-fashioned one-act drama by John Howard Payne, entitled "Love in Humble Life." Their mother was constantly with them, and Kate Terry used to "coach" her sisters at rehearsal. They were quite unaccustomed to the stage, but, says my friend, "the Terry charm was there, crude, and unformed as it all was." "Love in Humble Life" does not offer much scope for acting, and the girls had to content themselves with playing on alternate nights the one feminine character of Christine. In 1870 Florence Terry was certainly ripe for a public appearance in a piece of importance. On June 15th, at the Adelphi--the theatre in which, it will be remembered, her sister Kate had said her farewell--she went through the ordeal and acquitted herself right worthily. The piece was an English version of Molière's "Le Malade Imaginaire," entitled "The Robust Invalid," and her part was that of Louison. Although his name did not appear in the bills, it was generally understood that the adaptation was from the pen of the Terrys' old and well-tried friend, Charles Reade, and the chance was a good one for the young artiste. Vining and Mrs. Seymour were in the cast and all went well. In connection with "Le Malade Imaginaire," it can never be forgotten that Molière was playing his own creation in it when he broke a blood-vessel. Gallantly he struggled on to the hour of curtain fall, and then, in a dying state, was taken to his home. In the November of 1870 Florence Terry was engaged to play Little Nell at the Olympic Theatre in Andrew Halliday's stage version of "The Old Curiosity Shop"; probably one of the best adaptations from Dickens (how unsatisfactory they all are!) that has been seen in the theatre. No one who saw it will forget the exquisite pathos and tenderness with which she endowed the character of the sorely tried, yet always gentle-souled and trusting child. She made us think, as Bret Harte has sweetly put it, that we "Read aloud the book wherein the Master Had writ of 'Little Nell,'" and she took us by the hand until, "on English meadows," her audiences "Wandered and lost their way." No doubt she was greatly helped by the deeply impressive and affecting portrayal by George Belmore of the weak-minded but affectionate old grandfather. The two made a perfect picture. The Quilp of the cast, in the person of clever John Clarke, is a thing that, in its effective, savage, grotesque, and always true realism, haunts the memory. Marion Terry made her first bold, histrionic plunge in 1873. This was at the Crystal Palace, when she played Ophelia to the Hamlet of Steele Mackaye. Mackaye was the _protégé_ of Tom Taylor, and the then leading English dramatist made a new acting version of Shakespeare's masterpiece for his behoof. Great things were expected of it, but the production merely excited passing curiosity, and though it was taken to the Shakespeare-loving provinces it soon flickered out. Thus did Marion and Florence Terry--"twin roses on one stalk," as Davenport Adams called them--take the rank of Princesses in Stage Land. [Illustration: _Photograph by_ [_Lallie Charles._ MARION TERRY. _Showing her autograph, 1901._ [_To face page 194._ ] The career of Florence Terry was destined to be a brief one, but, happily, Marion Terry is still with us, still charming us; and every one will agree with Clement Scott's words--"She is one of the very few actresses I have known who has never gone back from her gentle career of continued success. On and on she has wended her way, improving and improving. With her gifted sisters, some characters have suited her better than others; but from the old Olympic days down to the present time I never remember to have been disappointed with Marion Terry, or wished she had not appeared in such and such a character." In 1874 she became a prominent member of Henry Neville's company at the Olympic, appearing (_inter alia_) in an English version of "Le Mariage de Figaro," by James Mortimer, entitled "A School for Intrigue." Henry Neville was the Almaviva, Edward Righton the Figaro, and Emily Fowler the Suzanne. Later, in a revival of "Much Ado about Nothing," she made a very winsome Hero to the Beatrice of Emily Fowler, the Benedick of Henry Neville (this was a delightful reproduction of Shakespeare's spirited picture), the Don Pedro of W. H. Vernon, the Dogberry of Edward Righton, and the Verges of G. W. Anson. Then she migrated to the Strand Theatre, to play in some of H. J. Byron's pleasant comedies, such as "Old Sailors" and "Weak Woman." Of the last-named play, Edward Leman Blanchard (never inclined to be enthusiastic) said that it was "a brightly written and most ingeniously constructed piece; excellently acted, and having a well-deserved success." As its heroine, Marion Terry became very popular, and successes were also made by Ada Swanborough, W. H. Vernon, J. G. Grahame, Harry Cox, and Edward Terry. In the hands of the last-named admirable comedian--and thanks to the excellence of his acting in the eccentric character of Captain Ginger--"Weak Woman" still holds the stage. On September 11th, 1876, came the young actress's first great chance, and right worthily she availed herself of it. On that evening W. S. Gilbert's three-act drama, "Dan'l Druce, Blacksmith," was produced at the Haymarket Theatre, and to her was allotted the one feminine, but all-important, part of Dorothy. The dramatist had avowedly taken the episode of the first act--the finding by the saturnine blacksmith of a wee but winning girl-baby in his lonely hermitage--a mere hut by the sea-shore--from George Eliot's beautiful story, "Silas Marner," but that was all the better, for it formed the prelude to a most interesting play. In it Marion Terry made an instantaneous success by the absolute simplicity of her acting. With a grip rare in so young an artiste, she had realised her author's meaning; her love-scenes (with Forbes Robertson) were finely presented, and, throughout the two acts in which she appeared, her quietly won victory was from the first apparent, and ultimately complete. With such actors as Hermann Vezin, Henry Howe, Odell, and Forbes Robertson, she easily held her own, and shared in the honours of a notable artistic success. In the October of 1877 there was a greater and even a unique triumph. This was in W. S. Gilbert's whimsically conceived and wittily written farcical comedy "Engaged,"--in its way a gem of the first water, with its every facet cut and polished to the point of resplendency. Good as was the acting of George Honey as Cheviot Hill, Fred Dewar as Angus Macalister, Harold Kyrle (Kyrle Bellew) as Belvawney, Henry Howe as Mr. Symperson, Lucy Buckstone as Miss Symperson, Emily Thorne as Mrs. Macfarlane, and Julia Stewart as the "Lowland Lassie," Maggie Macfarlane, the Belinda Treherne of Marion Terry capped them one and all. It was, indeed, an impersonation as humorous as it was original. If it had not been interpreted as she interpreted it, the very fabric of the work might have fallen; but the extreme cleverness of her acting in a most difficult part held it up, and she became a joy to all endowed with a true sense of fun. It will be remembered that the character is that of a young lady who, apparently steeped in romantic notions, possesses a remarkably matter-of-fact mind. She manifestly believes in herself, but, under the surface of her honeyed rhodomontade, she has to let the audience see the under-current of her secret and worldly aspirations. Badly done, the character would have been impossible. Handled as it was by Marion Terry it became not only delicious in its humour, but strangely convincing. Let us listen to the ring of one or two of the sentences with which she was called upon to deal. In the first act she meets the susceptible Cheviot Hill; he immediately falls in love with her, and in reply to his words of gushing admiration she says-- "I cannot deny that there is much truth in the sentiments you so beautifully express, but I am, unhappily, too well aware that, whatever advantages I may possess, personal beauty is not among the number." And when he has replied-- "How exquisitely modest is this chaste insensibility to your own singular loveliness! How infinitely more winning than the bold-faced self-appreciation of underbred country girls!" She answers-- "I am glad, sir, that you are pleased with my modesty. It has often been admired." The whole house rocked with laughter, and there, on the stage, stood the graceful, pretty, and impassive girl, who, in a very remarkable way, had given meaning to the writer's every word. Her lines were so ridiculous, yet so telling, that we all felt it a wonder that she did not laugh with us. No! Like the perfect, well-graced actress she has ever been, she lived in her part, and seemed absolutely to forget that she was playing to a crowded audience. One more instance. In the third act the amorous Cheviot returns from his mission to Scotland to find that during his absence his two English lady-loves, Belinda Treherne and Minnie Symperson, have (at least) been amusing themselves with the dangerous Belvawney. Prompted by absurd jealousy, the ridiculous man expostulates; he cannot bear to hear that the girls, who ought to have been pining for him, have been amused by the impostor's conjuring tricks, that they have, in short, to use his own words, been "Belvawneying." The following conversation ensues:-- MINNIE. Have you seen him (Belvawney) bring a live hen, two hair-brushes, and a pound and a half of fresh butter out of his pocket-handkerchief? CHEVIOT. No, I have not had that advantage. BELINDA. It is a thrilling sight. CHEVIOT. So I should be disposed to imagine. Pretty goings on in my absence. You seem to forget that you two girls are engaged to be married to _me_! BELINDA. Ah, Cheviot, do not judge us harshly. We love you with a reckless fervour that thrills us to the very marrow--(_to_ MINNIE) don't we, darling? But the hours crept heavily without you, and when, to lighten the gloom in which we were plunged, the kindly creature swallowed a live rabbit, and brought it out, smothered with onions, from his left boot, we could not choose but smile. The good soul has promised to teach _me_ the trick. Could anything be more superlatively or irresistibly ludicrous than this? And yet Marion Terry, with an unmoved and quietly angelic face, spoke the words as if she absolutely believed in them, and scored a success for the author that he could hardly have anticipated. Again, when with all her own carefully planned motives in full play, Belinda comes dressed in funereal and stately black to the home of her rival, Minnie Symperson, on the day of that outwardly artless young lady's strictly "quiet" wedding with the fickle and faithless Cheviot Hill, she serenely says: "At last I am in my darling's home, the home of the bright, blythe, carolling thing that lit, as with a ray of heaven's sunlight, the murky gloom of my miserable schooldays. But what do I see? Tarts? Ginger wine? There are rejoicings of some kind afoot. Alas! I am out of place here. What have I in common with tarts? Oh, I am ill attuned to scenes of revelry," and then takes a tart, and, with calm appreciation, eats it. Once more the house shook with merriment, but she remained as composed as if she were taking part in some solemn and sacred rite. Many very clever actresses have since played the part, but they have perforce acted on the lines originally laid down by its creatress. They have all been popular, but there has been only one and incomparable Belinda Treherne, and she was Marion Terry. To those who could appreciate its extreme cleverness, "Engaged" made a delightful and even fascinating entertainment, though it has truly been said that the play afforded a picture of humanity more cynical than had been painted since the days of Swift. In March 1879, Marion Terry earned another debt of gratitude from W. S. Gilbert. This was at the Olympic Theatre in "Gretchen," a play in four acts. The author stated that the leading idea of this work was suggested by Goethe's "Faust," but that, with the exception of a scene between Mephisto and Martha, the dialogue was original. It was not only original but brilliant, and if the piece failed to draw the multitude it was through no fault of its author. Joseph Knight said of it:-- "Never, perhaps, in the history of letters has an experiment been tried bolder or more startling than that of Mr. Gilbert in the production of 'Gretchen.' When Dryden and Davenant and their successors undertook to remove the crude work of Shakespeare to suit their own more cultivated tastes, there was nothing especially courageous in the action. The fame of Shakespeare did not then stand on the pinnacle in the sight of all men it has subsequently occupied. From its first appearance, however, the 'Faust' of Goethe took intellectual Europe by storm. So sensible is Mr. Gilbert of the worth of the work with which he deals, he justifies his own effort on the one ground that the play he alters is not suited to dramatic exposition, and he fortifies his opinion on this point by quoting the assertion of Schlegel, in his lecture on German drama, that 'Faust' runs out in all directions beyond the limits of the theatre." To the thoughtful, "Gretchen" was a most interesting production, and no doubt much of its charm was due to the gentle and maidenly style, and quiet earnestness of Marion Terry as its deeply sinned against heroine. We have only to take these three important and original characters--Dorothy, Belinda Treherne, and Gretchen--to prove that she is not only a consummate, but a curiously versatile actress. But the three striking triumphs did not follow each other in succession. In 1877 she had, at the Haymarket, followed Mrs. Kendal (this, seeing what a matchless performance that had been was a formidable ordeal) as Galatea, and won much and well-merited praise--and in the following year she supported Sothern as the heroine of that ill-fated production, "The Crushed Tragedian," by H. J. Byron. That was poor Sothern's last bid for popularity in an original character, and its failure in London (it had been a great success in America) was a disappointment from which he never quite recovered. Concerning it he had written:-- "It appeared to me that if I could good-naturedly satirise the old school of acting, contrasting it through the several characters with the present school, I should arrive at the same effects in another manner which were produced in Dundreary; that is to say, that though stigmatised by everybody as a very bad tragedian, I should gain the sympathy of the audience in the satire, however much they might laugh at my peculiarities. The character is not an imitation of any one actor I have ever seen. I have simply boiled down all the old school tragedians as I boiled down all the fops I had met before I played Dundreary. I tested the piece in Philadelphia, and its success was immediate. In my judgment, 'The Crushed Tragedian,' if not the best part in my repertory, is likely to command popular favour at once wherever it is performed, and to retain its hold upon the stage for many years." Before producing the piece in London he had, according to his custom, "tried" it in the provinces, and in Birmingham it was most enthusiastically received. Sothern was in high spirits that night. "I have got my second Dundreary success," he declared to me; "I didn't know how my 'Fitz' would go in England, but I see it's all right, and, mark me, this means five hundred nights at the Haymarket!" Full of assurance he left the next day for London. In the evening "The Crushed Tragedian" was produced at the Haymarket, and--well, the sad fate of that version of Byron's play is a matter of theatrical history. The next day he wrote: "An organised system to d--n the piece. Rows of hissers. We'll see who'll win!" We know now who won--and I fear that the loss of that game told heavily on Sothern's heart. It is not for me to defend, in the face of abler critics, "The Crushed Tragedian," but I think that all who saw the impersonation will allow that it contained many touches by no means unworthy of the creator of Dundreary. It was, however, _caviare_ to the general, and in London failed to attract. In the midst of his disappointment Sothern told me how delighted he was with the acting of Marion Terry in the character of Florence Bristowe. As the old prompter Henry Howe was excellent. Her next engagement was with the Bancrofts at the old Prince of Wales' Theatre, and her first important part there was that of Mabel Holne in James Albery's adaptation of Victorien Sardou's "Les Bourgeois de Pont-Arcy," entitled "Duty." In all these impersonations it was aptly said (in the words of Ruskin)--she possessed "a serenity of effortless grace." Of course within the limits of these pages it is impossible to follow her throughout her distinguished career. On several occasions she has followed her sister Ellen in some of her most famous parts, playing Olivia, Clara Douglas, and Margaret in the famous Lyceum version of "Faust." Her blind girl in "The Two Orphans," and her sweetly tender Mrs. Errol in "Little Lord Fauntleroy," will never be forgotten. Her successes with George Alexander at the St. James's Theatre in "Sunlight and Shadow," "The Idler," "Lady Windermere's Fan," "Liberty Hall," and other plays, are fresh in the memory; and so is her appearance at the Criterion Theatre with Charles Wyndham in "The Physician." Her acting as Lady Valerie in this play by Henry Arthur Jones was indeed charming. In the same author's "Michael and his Lost Angel," produced by Forbes Robertson at the Lyceum, her acting of a most difficult character was summed up by that sternest of critics, William Archer, as "perfect." And so, indeed, it was. She also did good work with the Bancrofts in some of their revivals of the Robertson comedies, especially distinguishing herself as Blanche Haye in "Ours," and Bella in "School." The comparatively brief stage career of Florence Terry is necessarily less noteworthy, but she is gratefully remembered in the provinces as Olivia, as Lady Betty Noel in Tom Taylor's stirring historical play "Lady Clancarty," as Dorothy in W. S. Gilbert's "Dan'l Druce," and as Jenny Northcote in the same brilliant author's evergreen "Sweethearts." She also figured in some of the great Lyceum productions. In "The Merchant of Venice" she was a very pretty and engaging Nerissa, and she was entrusted with the character of the unfortunate Lady Ellen in the revival of the younger Colman's drama "The Iron Chest," in which Henry Irving took John Philip Kemble's original character of Sir Edward Mortimer. In all these parts she evinced the almost unique persuasive charm possessed by her sisters. On June 21, 1882, in view of her forthcoming marriage and retirement from the stage, a singularly interesting event took place at the Savoy Theatre. In W. S. Gilbert's dainty fairy play "Broken Hearts," Marion Terry appeared as the Lady Hilda and Florence Terry as the Lady Vavir, parts originally taken at the Court Theatre by Mrs. Kendal and Miss Hollingshead. This was followed by the trial scene from "The Merchant of Venice," in which Henry Irving was the Shylock, Ellen Terry the Portia, Marion Terry the Clerk, and Florence Terry the Nerissa. Thus, and for the first and last time, the three gifted sisters appeared on the stage together. Florence Terry (Mrs. William Morris) died in 1896. It is surely good for the old playgoer to conjure up such recollections as these. Some of us already live more in the past than in the present, and one's pleasure is the sum of happy memories of other times and faces gone. CHAPTER XI HENRY IRVING Before Ellen Terry gratefully and gracefully acknowledges the great roar of welcome that greeted her on her first appearance on the Lyceum stage, it seems right to say a few words concerning Henry Irving and his position in the theatrical world at the time when (not far short of twenty-five years ago) he made this all-important engagement. He had already achieved far greater things than he could have dreamt of in his toilsome 'prentice days, and for some time had deservedly been recognised as the head and leader of his profession, as an actor whose name will live with those of Burbage, Betterton, David Garrick, Edmund Kean, and the other histrionic giants of the past, whose memories we cherish. Not suddenly, but by dint of sheer hard work, the victory had been won, and those who had in his earlier days detected his genius were very proud of him. I had seen him in the days when he acted as a more or less obscure member of the good old provincial stock companies, when he was often called upon to appear in three plays on one night, and earned little or no money for his services. He has told me of an engagement when with his poor salary in hopeless arrear he was compelled (armed with a well-studied appeal) to thrust himself into the managerial presence, and to be rewarded with--a _cigar_! Never had a young actor so many formidable conditions to face. His first appearance on any stage was at Sunderland, in the September of 1856, and, in representing the small part of the Duke of Orleans in Lord Lytton's "Richelieu," the first words he uttered, behind the footlights, were (surely there was something prophetic about them!), "Here's to our enterprise!" How little did those who acted with him that night, and looked down upon him as a novice, think that as Richelieu himself he would ultimately win that chorus of applause which forms the world's tribute to genius. But poor young Irving's "enterprise" at first appeared to be a forlorn hope. While at Sunderland he suffered terribly from nervousness, and, being cast for the subordinate part of Cleomenes in "A Winter's Tale," he broke down. He had been called upon at very short notice to take the character, and, through no fault of his own, had inadequately studied it. He got through the first four acts well enough, but when in the fifth act he had to speak alone, his presence of mind, and his memory, entirely left him. He could not remember a word of his part; he merely muttered, "Come on to the market-place, and I'll tell you further," and rushed off the stage in despair. Then the local critics were down upon him, and his friends warned him to abandon an effort that was evidently beyond his powers. But young though he was, and disheartened though he must have been, Henry Irving had faith in himself, and determined to overcome all obstacles. He had to work hard, and he had to live hard, but his career, though often crossed by the forbidding stream of discouragement, was one of steady progress, and his comrades of these struggling days have told me that whatever he had to endure (and the endurance must have been as bitter as it was long), he never forgot to be that thing so impossible of definition, and so capable of recognition--a gentleman. Indeed, having from the very outset keenly watched his public career, while I have for many years been privileged to enjoy his personal friendship, I have often thought that Henry Irving might have taken for his motto the well-known lines:-- "The World has battle-room for all, Go! fight, and conquer if ye can; But if ye rise, or if ye fall, Be each, pray God, a gentleman." One of his most charming characteristics is that he has never forgotten an old friend. _Videlicet_: in the troubled days of 1856 there was playing at the Sunderland theatre a comedian named Sam Johnson. He never achieved great things, but he encouraged the anxious aspirant with kindly words, and in the after years he found himself an honoured member of the famous Lyceum company. In these early days I did not see any performance by Henry Irving that could strictly be called impressive, and yet, to me, and to many others, there was something in his appearance and manner that was singularly attractive. We did not realise it then, but no doubt it was that subtle charm that, for want of a better name or definition, we call, in an actor, "magnetism." Added to this was his wonderful capacity for painstaking, which, according to Thomas Carlyle, is the very essence of genius. For some time he was a member of the well-conducted stock company of the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh. The late Robert Wyndham, the genial and highly-esteemed proprietor of that historic playhouse, once told me that though in those early days he did not look upon Henry Irving as a particularly promising actor, he was always struck with the intense care that he took over any part entrusted to him, however small and insignificant it might be. "I am certain," he said, "that Henry Irving, without being in the least degree a fop, would have gone without his dinner in order to buy a 'button-hole,' or any such trivial adornment that he thought might add, even in the minutest degree, to the effect of the part in which he had to appear." But for a long time the critics were painfully and, as I think, perversely against him. They either did not understand or waywardly resented the crack of the new whip. In 1865, at the Prince of Wales' Theatre, Birmingham, I saw him play Laertes to the Hamlet of Fechter. It was an original Laertes, and not modelled on the perfunctory reading of the part generally adopted by the ordinary provincial stock-actor of those days. To me, and I am sure to the large majority of the audience, it was a very interesting and entirely satisfying performance, but it was recorded by a local critic as "as bad as could be." This is only one example of many little stabs that must have wounded him at the time. But I noticed that he never altered his methods, and in due season he convinced his would-be censors that he knew more than they did. From the time when he played Rawdon Scudamore at the St. James' Theatre, to the day when he made his first great triumph as Mathias at the Lyceum, it was my good fortune to see him in nearly all his London impersonations--as Harry Dornton in "The Road to Ruin," as Bob Gassitt in H. J. Byron's "Dearer than Life" (in which at the Queen's Theatre he shared honours with J. L. Toole and Lionel Brough), as Compton Kerr in Dion Boucicault's much discussed "Formosa" at Drury Lane, as Mr. Chevenix in H. J. Byron's "Uncle Dick's Darling" at the Gaiety, and in many other parts (one and all played with the touch of a master); until at the Vaudeville Theatre, as Digby Grant in James Albery's "Two Roses," he put the seal to his reputation. How some of us, who had faithfully followed him about from theatre to theatre, carefully watching and delighting in his growing reputation, rejoiced when we knew that he had conquered his opponents and become a king of the stage. How excited we were when in "The Bells" at the Lyceum he made the world ring with his praises. It was when he was playing the part of Redburn in H. J. Byron's "Lancashire Lass" at the Queen's Theatre that he excited the admiration of Charles Dickens. Some years later the eldest son of the great novelist said in the course of a speech that his father had spoken with enthusiasm of "a young fellow in the play who sits at the table and is bullied by Sam Emery; his name is Henry Irving, and if that young man does not one day come out as a great actor, I know nothing of art." Charles Dickens might have seen Henry Irving's graphic impersonation of Bill Sikes in a poor stage version of "Oliver Twist," in which Toole used to revel in the character of "The Artful Dodger," but he did not live to appreciate his life-like impersonation of Jingle. Sensitive as the author always was with regard to the interpretation of his creations in the theatre, that inimitable and realistic stage-portrait would surely have satisfied him. Never, it may safely be said, has any actor been more popular than Henry Irving, not only with the public but with members of his own profession. That he deserves his popularity no one who has studied his remarkable career will deny; that he has won it "facing fearful odds" his most intimate friends and ardent admirers must candidly admit. Even to-day, when his fame is so firmly established, that he could, if it troubled him at all, laugh at adverse and hostile criticism, we find any number of self-constituted and ridiculously complacent censors ready to tell us that he won his spurs by a fluke, and that he cannot be regarded as a great actor. Men existed who said the same of Betterton, Garrick, and Kean. But how absurd it is to hear such opinions when we know that, thanks to him, the Lyceum Theatre has for years and years been the cherished resort of all that is intellectual in modern life. When he first began to make his successes, and had the jealousy that he has long since vanquished to fight, his so-called "mannerisms" (and is it not a truism that there never was an actor, or, for the matter of that, author, yet without some mannerism or speciality that made him a man of mark and so attracted the public to his piping?) were mercilessly caricatured and lampooned, and a weaker man might well have been crushed under the heaps of ill-natured ridicule that were, mud-like, hurled at him. But an indomitable worker as well as a brave and generous man he rose superior to it all, and in a few busy, and no doubt very anxious, years the difficult sum was done in order that it might be incontestably proved, and to the satisfaction and advantage of all except the croakers, who even less than any one else understand their own croakings, our great English actor of to-day holds his throne. "What a blessed thing it is," said wise Oliver Wendell Holmes, "that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors" (and original actors take rank amongst the best of authors), "contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left." No actor more conclusively proves the rightly held theory that the perfection of dramatic art can only be achieved by early apprenticeship and many years devoted to earnest study and incessant hard work than Henry Irving. In a period of three and a half years he had played no fewer than four hundred and twenty-eight parts before his claim to be regarded as one of the most promising actors of his day was even considered. Well might the actor ponder over Chaucer's beautiful lines-- "The lyfe so short, The crafte so long to lerne, The essay so hard, So sharpe the conquering." If he cared to make one, Henry Irving's reply to his detractors might well be that he has stood the inexorable test of time. Since he first wore his laurels a new and very critical generation has sprung up--a generation that has little or no respect for tradition, that has abundant choice of entertainment, and only cares to pay for what it chooses to see. Face to face with this somewhat intractable tribe, Henry Irving has for more than a quarter of a century held his own, and America has united with England in hailing him as the living master of dramatic art in its purest and highest form. From the first he was wise enough to know that even the best and greatest of men, to say nothing of the greatest and best of actors, cannot afford to stand alone. As a matter of consequence he surrounds himself with a company composed of the best dramatic talent of the day, and his productions are mounted with a general and generous richness, and a minute attention to detail never, until his time, attempted on the stage. Then take the quality of the plays produced at the Lyceum, as compared with those morbid and unsavoury ones that during recent years we have seen in too many leading playhouses. Somebody wondered the other day why Adam had never been made the hero of a play, and a cynic suggested that it is because it is not possible to mix up his name with that of some married woman. If Adam is to have his stage chance it must be under the unsullied banner of Henry Irving. Great as a leader of men as he has proved himself to be, modesty and unselfishness are prominent among his characteristics. Although Queen Victoria, in recognition of his personal worth and public services, created him a Knight (let it be remembered this was the first time that such a distinction had been conferred upon an actor), he still loves to be called plain Henry Irving. Proud as he was--and is--of the honour that, through him, has been bestowed upon his profession, on the day when he was privileged to call himself "Sir Henry" in the play-bills, he merely put his pen through the prefix "Mr.," so that he might remain to the public, as well as to his friends, "Henry Irving." When Ellen Terry was asked, "Have you got used to Sir Henry's title?" she prettily replied, "Oh yes! He has been a Prince in my eyes for many years;" and in doing so she unconsciously spoke for all his associates. Well, in 1878, Irving, having completed his brilliant engagements with the renowned Bateman family, found himself not only the chief actor and attraction, but manager of the Lyceum Theatre. "His first effort," says Percy Fitzgerald, "was to gather round him an efficient and attractive company. It became presently known that Ellen Terry was to be his partner and supporter on the stage, and it was instantly, and almost electrically, felt that triumph had been already secured. People could see in advance, in their mind's eye, the gifted pair performing together in a series of romantic plays; they could hear the voices blending, and feel the glow of dramatic enjoyment. This important step was heartily acclaimed. No manager ever started on his course cheered by such tokens of goodwill and encouragement, though much of this was owing to a natural and selfish anticipation of coming enjoyment." To-day we know how that dream of enjoyment has been realised, and how, under the reign of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry at the Lyceum, we have found, in the words of the poet Campbell-- "The spell o'er hearts Which only acting lends, The youngest of the Sister Arts Where all their beauty blends. For ill can Poetry express Full many a tone of thought sublime, And Painting, mute and motionless, Steals but a glance of time. But by the mighty Actor brought Illusion's perfect triumphs come, Verse ceases to be airy thought And Sculpture to be dumb." CHAPTER XII AT THE LYCEUM THEATRE, 1878-1883 Those who are truly interested in the stage must be more or less familiar with a Lyceum first-night under the reign of Henry Irving. He has made the long series of them prominent among the events of the day, and rich and poor alike are eager to be present. We know how the frequenters of the cheaper parts of the house will, in order to obtain good seats, assemble and wait patiently in the Strand from sunrise to sundown; we know how difficult it is to obtain seats at the besieged box-office; we know how from the front row of the pit to the back seats of the gallery the house is densely packed with an audience assembled to hear and see all that is noblest in English dramatic art. It is more than impressive to watch the faces of the patient and expectant pit; and to listen to the sounds in the eager and impulsive gallery; while as to the stalls and boxes, in them you see the cream of those who are distinguished in the paths of art, science, and literature. It is magnificent to be able to command such an audience; on the other hand it must be formidable to face it. It was to such an assemblage as this that Ellen Terry had to make her bow when on the evening of December 30, 1878, she first appeared at the Lyceum, playing Ophelia to the Hamlet of Henry Irving. No doubt it was a trying and anxious moment for her, but the true ring in the long and loud welcome which greeted her on the threshold of the home in which she was destined to do so much noble work must have gone to her heart, and assured her that all would be well. It was indeed a momentous evening in the history of our stage. Of it Dutton Cook said:-- "Mr. Irving's managerial career has commenced most auspiciously. The opening representation was, indeed, from first to last, triumphant. A distinguished audience filled to overflowing the re-decorated Lyceum Theatre, and the new _impresario_ was received with unbounded enthusiasm. These gratifying evidences of goodwill were scarcely required, however, to convince Mr. Irving that his enterprise carried with it very genial sympathy. His proved devotion to his art, his determination to uphold the national drama to its utmost, have secured for him the suffrages of all classes of society. And it is recognised that he has become a manager, not to enhance his position as an actor--for already he stands in the front rank of his profession--but the better to promote the interests of the whole stage, and to serve more fully, to gratify more absolutely, the public and his patrons. Let it be added, as a minor matter, that he has followed the good examples set by Mr. Hollingshead and Mr. Bancroft, and has been careful of the comfort of his audience, neither permitting them to be pinched for room, nor subjecting them to those petty imposts which, like so many turnpike dues, have so persistently impeded the visitor on his passage from the street to his seat within the theatre. "The tragedy of 'Hamlet' was well chosen for the first performance under the new management--as Hamlet Mr. Irving has obtained his greatest success. It has been said that no actor has ever been known to fail as Hamlet; it may be added that no actor has ever as Hamlet completely satisfied critical opinion. To many the play is a metaphysical study wholly unsuited for theatrical exhibition; 'an enigmatic work,' as Schlegel says, 'resembling those irrational equations in which a fraction of unknown magnitude always remains that will in no way admit of solution.' To many Hamlet is a mysterious and complex character, beyond the power of histrionic art adequately to interpret. Mr. Irving can, at any rate, point to the fact that, four years ago, for two hundred nights in succession, he played Hamlet to delighted crowds at the Lyceum. Weighed against popular success so consummate and prodigious, objections of any kind are as but feathers in the scale; and even those least disposed to accept this latest stage portraiture of Hamlet can afford to admit that the picture is in itself consistent and harmonious, the work of an ingenious and intellectual artist." Yes, there were some who (in a hopeless minority) were still indisposed to accept the new Prince of Denmark, but by the sensible and appreciative his impersonation by Henry Irving will ever be honoured as one of the most complete, harmonious, profound, and artistic seen on the stage. Never was more thought given to the study and representation of very small phases of Hamlet's character. The result was a powerful, refined, graceful, intelligent interpretation in every detail, and as such it was applauded by the public. Of Ellen Terry's acting on that memorable evening my authority says:-- "An Ophelia so tender, so graceful, so picturesque, and so pathetic, has not been seen in the theatre since Macready's Hamlet, many years ago, found his Ophelia in the person of Miss Priscilla Horton. In characters of this class, the heroines of genuine poetry, Miss Terry is now without a rival, is indeed unapproached by any other actress upon our stage. Her personal graces and endowments, her elocutionary skill, her musical speech, and, above all, her singular power of depicting intensity of feeling, are most happily combined, as the audience was quick to discover and applaud in this very exquisite presentment of Ophelia." [Illustration: _Photograph by_ [_Window & Grove._ ELLEN TERRY IN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY, _CIRCA_ 1878. [_To face page 222._ ] In summing up the performance, Joseph Knight said:-- "Of Mr. Irving's Hamlet we have already spoken. It is not greatly changed. The outline is distinctly the same as before, though much pains have been bestowed on the filling up. We do not accept as new readings the delivery while sitting of speeches formerly spoken standing, or other like alterations in arrangement. Nor do we feel that changes of method as regards matters of detail call for special comment. The one vital alteration of conception appears to consist in presenting Hamlet as under the influence of an overmastering love for Ophelia. A knowledge of his own weakness seems to inspire him when, subsequently addressing Horatio, he says-- "Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of hearts." The chief grace in the new representation consisted in the delivery of the speeches to Ophelia in the third act. In this the mocking tone did not for a moment hide the profound emotion under which Hamlet laboured, and the hands which repulsed her petitioning hands trembled with passionate longing. That this view of Hamlet is correct will scarcely be disputed. That he loved Ophelia he declared over her grave; that he felt it his duty, under the influence of a task such as that enjoined him, to erase from the table of his memory all 'trivial fond records,' he also states. The indications of the pain it costs a nature such as this, quick in resolution and shrinking and incapable in action, to inflict on the woman he loves the grief it is yet necessary she should sustain, are well conceived. That they were effective in action was ascribable to a great extent to the admirable acting of Miss Terry. Picturesque, tender, and womanly throughout, Miss Terry on one or two occasions gave an inspired rendering of Ophelia. The support she afforded Mr. Irving was of the utmost importance, and the scene before the play has probably never been so well rendered." I think it well to quote these undoubted authorities, lest readers might think that in my palpable admiration for these artists my personal judgment would be biassed. I cannot end my little record of the auspicious evening of December 30, 1878, without noting that then Bram Stoker assumed his position as chief in the front of the house. How much he has done to make the Lyceum Theatre popular its frequenters fully recognise. Always genial and courteous, he plays the important part of host right well, cheerily attending to the comforts of one and all. Probably he would prefer to devote the whole of his time to writing his tenderly conceived and well loved romances (do we not owe to him "Under the Sunset," "The Snake's Pass," "The Shoulder of Shasta," and many other graceful fancies?); but happily for us, though we want more of his charming books, he remains true to his post, and has made himself as well liked in the provinces as he is in London. [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS "OPHELIA." _From a portrait by Charles Campbell in the possession of Sir Henry Irving, and kindly lent by him for reproduction in these pages. Charles Campbell was a fellow-worker with Sir Edward Burne Jones. His premature death cut short a most promising career._ [_To face page 224._ ] Speaking of Ellen Terry's triumph as Ophelia, Percy Fitzgerald tells us that "on this momentous night of trial she thought she had completely failed, and, without waiting for the fifth act, she flung herself into the arms of a friend, repeating, 'I have failed, I have failed!' She drove up and down the Thames Embankment half-a-dozen times before she found courage to go home." The newspapers of the next morning must have given her assurance that for her was no such word as fail! The next production at the Lyceum was "The Lady of Lyons." Of Ellen Terry's appreciative rendering of the character of Pauline I have already spoken. It need only be said now that it exercised its former charm. Henry Irving had evidently given great thought to the study of Claude Melnotte, and at times he was deeply impressive; but the part cannot take rank amongst his greatest successes. Then came a revival of the stage version by W. G. Wills of Thomas Hood's "The Dream of Eugene Aram," which had, of course, been suggested by the impression made through Henry Irving's graphic recitation of that thrilling poem. In this Ellen Terry succeeded Isabel Bateman as Ruth Meadows, but "Eugene Aram" is a one-part play, and affords few chances for an actress. Again she followed Isabel Bateman in the revival of W. G. Wills' beautiful play, "Charles I.," which was given on June 27, 1879. As the pathetically-drawn Queen Henrietta Maria, Ellen Terry once more had her opportunity, and she grasped it. The hapless Queen ranks as one of her most sympathetic and womanly impersonations, and she played it with even more than her wonted sweetness when the play was reproduced at the Lyceum as recently as June 23, 1901. As Charles Stuart, Henry Irving unquestionably finds at once one of his most dignified and pathetic creations. For nearly thirty years the play has held the stage, and in view of that very rare fact it is interesting to recall its original production. This was in the September of 1872, under Colonel Bateman's Lyceum management, when Henry Irving had made his notable success in "The Bells," and was the talk of the town. Both by manager and actor much anxiety was felt as to the next play to be produced, and they were both delighted when W. G. Wills suggested the story of the unhappy Charles I. as a subject. In common with most successful plays it had its tribulations before it faced the footlights. Though possessed of true feeling and inspiration, the author was carried away by his ardour into a neglect of the canons of the stage, writing masses of poetry of inordinate length, which he brought to his friends at the theatre, until at last they began to despair. Many changes had to be made before the poem could be brought into satisfactory shape. Originally, the piece opened with the second act, but the practical Colonel Bateman exclaimed: "Oh, bother politics! Give us some domestic business." This led to the introduction of the tranquil, pastoral scene at Hampton Court. The closing scene, as desired by the author, represented the capture of the King on the field of battle. "Won't do," said the Colonel bluntly; "must wind up with another domestic act." Sorely perplexed by this requirement, which they felt was necessary, both author and actor tried many expedients without success, until one evening the manager suddenly called out, "Look at the last act of 'Black-Eyed Susan!'" And so it came about that the affecting farewell between the doomed Charles and his weeping Queen was due to Douglas Jerrold's time-honoured nautical play. That "Charles I." was an immediate stage success is a matter of ancient history, and in an odd way it had bold advertisement. One of those vehement and amusing discussions which occasionally arise out of a play, and furnish prodigious excitement for the public, was aroused by the conception taken of Cromwell, which was, in truth, opposed to tradition; for the Protector was exhibited as willing to condone the King's offences, and to desert his party, for the considerations of a marriage designed to gratify his own social ambition. This ludicrous view, based on some loose gossip, was, reasonably enough, thought to degrade Cromwell's character, and the point was debated with much fierceness. It was also argued that the dramatist had made Charles not only a hero and a martyr, but also a modern gentleman with superior manners and a melancholy smile. But the public forgave the slanders for the sake of the prettiness and the pathos of the domestic scenes. The play was not only revived in 1879 but in 1883, and again in 1893. In 1901 it exercised all its old charm. The best advice to those who go to see it is not to expect historical accuracy, but, without criticism of the dramatist's portraits of the King and Cromwell, to heartily enjoy a delightful and soul-stirring drama. It is only the other day that Ellen Terry said, "There is nothing more beautifully pathetic in the world than Sir Henry Irving's Charles." And she is right. At the end of this busy season, in the last days of hot July, Ellen Terry, on the occasion of her manager's benefit, played Lady Anne to his Gloucester in the first act of "Richard III.," and then, as we have seen in a former chapter, she started on her provincial tour. She did not return to London until the late autumn. On November 1, 1879, we first saw that beautiful revival of "The Merchant of Venice," which, thanks to Ellen Terry's Portia and Henry Irving's Shylock, became one of the greatest of the long series of Lyceum triumphs, and remains to this day one of the most attractive items in the Irving repertory. His impersonation of the "Jew that Shakespeare drew" is as instinct with purpose to-day as it was in 1879. I know that there are some critics who declare that he imparts so much dignity to the character that he dwarfs the other portraits in the play. That is true of the actor, but surely these critics are wrong? Most students of Shakespeare realise that Shylock never became actively malignant until the Christians, who on the Rialto had insulted him, who had called him misbeliever and cut-throat dog, and spat upon his Jewish gaberdine, had robbed him of his daughter and his ducats. Then the sufferance that he declared to be the badge of all his tribe broke down. Then, being a man as well as a Jew, he became, not unrighteously, savage, showed his teeth, and, living in a cruel age (when human torture was a thing of every day), viciously resolved to have his "pound of flesh." It is hardly likely that he thought it would come in his way when, in "a merry sport," he signed the bond with Antonio. That is the filled-in picture that Henry Irving gives us of this wonderfully outlined character. We may be horrified at the vindictive moods of his Shylock, but we understand him, and realise the cruel wrongs that have worked him up to a frenzied hatred of his bantering tormentors. He makes us see the patient endurance and personal dignity of the man, and, if at the end of the grandly wrought story we cannot quite sympathise with him, we are called upon to acknowledge the infinite patience of his punishment. To thousands and thousands of playgoers, and to those who dearly love their Shakespeare, Henry Irving has illumined the superbly limned design of Shylock. Of Ellen Terry's Portia, in the days of the Bancrofts at the old Prince of Wales' Theatre, I have already spoken. In 1879 it was found to be as good as ever--nay, better than ever--for not only had time ripened her talent, but brought her into contact with a virile Shylock. She has indeed made the character her own, and this fact has been long acknowledged not only in England but in America. It remains to-day exactly what it has ever been, a perfectly executed realisation of one of Shakespeare's most beautiful feminine creations. And, indeed, whether it be in her handsome Italian gowns, or disguised as the "young and learned doctor" from Padua, she makes a lovely and most fascinating picture. Her illustration of the wonderful text leaves nothing to be desired. It carries with it the inspiration of genius, and yet it is all so sweetly natural. "As the gentle rain from heaven," it "drops upon the place beneath," and in the hearts of her hearers sets new, bright, and fragrant thoughts upspringing; while throughout it all runs the refined essence of dainty humour. Whenever I see such perfectly soul-satisfying Shakespearean portraits as these, I think of the matchless stained-glass windows in our grand churches and old cathedrals. Beautiful in themselves, as they are now, their designs must have at one time been crude and cold in the hands of their originators. But filled in with softly, yet richly-coloured and exquisitely blended glass (not with the hot reds, violent blues, and gaudy ambers that hopelessly disfigure so many modern efforts in this direction), they seem to soothe while they illuminate, and ineffaceably fulfil their earnest, bright, and inspiring intention. On December 10, 1879, a benefit performance was given at the Lyceum, on behalf of William Belford, an actor who had done splendid service under Samuel Phelps at Sadler's Wells, and who in later years had been prime favourite as principal comedian at the Strand Theatre. He was not only a fine actor, but a prince among good fellows, and pre-eminent in the London Bohemia of those days, the happy home of the literary men, artists, and actors, of which Geoffrey Prowse wrote:-- "The longitude's rather uncertain, The latitude's equally vague; But that person I pity who knows not the city, The beautiful city of Prague." In 1879 poor Belford's health broke down. Like many of his kind in the good-natured, easy-going, and absolutely unselfish circles to which he belonged, he had made little or no provision for such a disaster, and right cheerfully his friends came to his aid, just as in stage-land friends invariably do. Henry Irving played his famous character of Digby Grant in "The Two Roses," and this was supplemented by a performance of the "Trial" scene from "Pickwick," in which many prominent actors appeared. Ellen Terry, who had met William Belford in the Charles Kean days at the Princess's, very appropriately, as well as very beautifully, delivered an address from the deft pen of Clement Scott, which ran as follows:-- "To one and all a welcome! That's the way To point a prologue, or to start a play; But something tells me that your thoughts are tending Towards one who starts no more--whose play is ending. Nay, look not sad; no suppliant appears To chase your smiles and undermine your tears; I ask your sympathy, but it were folly To join dear Belford's name with melancholy. On such a merry heart rare friendship waits; To him Bohemia threw wide her gates! Up started he the first at laughter's call, Had found at clubs best welcome of them all. Full of rare anecdote and riper wit, Favoured by stalls and idolised by pit; An airy butterfly, who held in hand The mirth of Sadler's Wells, the fun of Strand, Varied and versatile, but ever cheery; Now Gratiano, mocking, now Dundreary, He was the sunshine that existence mellows-- Friend, guide, comedian, and best of fellows! Why do I say 'he was,' and seem to cast A present favourite into the past? He's with us yet, and could he but address you, I'd say for you, 'Shake hands, old friend, God bless you!' There ran a rumour lately through the town,' 'O have you heard! poor Belford's breaking down!' A gentleman, and Spartan like the rest, Too proud to show the fox that gnawed his breast, He murmured not, sat waiting, did not shirk, And to the last hoped against hope for work, Till those who loved him saw in eyes grown dim The pain he'd saved from others, clung to him. I'd have you know--tell it from south to north, Our friend hung back--_his_ friends have led him forth, And we were right--the public heart we knew, The stage's favourites belong to you! Behind the curtain, one and all rejoice, To join their work to your responsive voice; We've done no more to-day for our sick friend Than we shall keep on doing to the end; In our freemasonry there's this relief, We share life's triumphs--but we share its grief. Nor for ourselves in thanks we stretch our hand, But for the stricken soldier of our band; You found him sorrowing, and gave him ease, A sight of home and country, waving trees, And all the blest retirement, deep and wild, That soothes the body, helpless as a child! Through me our absent friend would like to say You've done a noble charity to-day; For after years of uncomplaining strife, You've saved anxiety and promised life; But, best of all, as antidote to pain, Back to his face you've brought the smiles again. So promise me, before you all depart, To wear 'Sweet William' ever next your heart!" Triumphantly the "Merchant of Venice" pursued its course until, in May 1880, its last act was omitted, and it was succeeded by "Iolanthe," a version by W. G. Wills of Henrik Hertz's Danish play, "King René's Daughter." The chief character in this had been a favourite one with that consummate artiste, Helen Faucit (Lady Theodore Martin). The piece was exquisitely staged, and finely played by Ellen Terry and Henry Irving; it was very tender, and very touching, but it has not taken a permanent place in the Lyceum repertory. On January 3, 1881, Lord Tennyson's two-act drama, "The Cup," the "great little play," as Ellen Terry called it, was produced, and another great victory was gained. Clement Scott considers her acting in this to have been one of the finest of her many inspirations, and says:-- "Ellen Terry as Camma, aptly realised the poet's lines-- 'The lark first takes the sunlight on his wing, But you, twin sister of the morning sun, Forelead the Sun!' Who that ever heard it can forget the pathos of Ellen Terry as she parted from Sinnatus, and delivered these lovely lines-- 'He is gone already; Oh, look! yon grove upon the mountain--white In the sweet moon, as with a lovelier snow! But what a blotch of blackness underneath! Sinnatus, you remember,--yea you must-- That there three years ago, the vast vine-bowers Ran to the summit of the trees and dropt Their streamers earthward, which a breeze of May Took ever and anon and opened out, The purple zone of hill and heaven; there You told your love; and like the swaying vines-- Yea, with our eyes, our hearts, our prophet hopes, Let in the happy distance, and that all But cloudless heaven which we have found together In our three married years! You kissed me there For the first time. Sinnatus, kiss me now.' I for one" (and here Clement Scott speaks for many of us) "shall never forget the end of the play, with the libations poured in honour of Artemis, and amidst music and flowers and processions, faultless in colour, and of classic pomp, making the dull mind live in another age, we hear intoned with strophe and antistrophe of chanting chorus, the double appeal by Camma and Synorix, containing as it does the most impassioned poetry of the play. "I said at the time, 'If there ever was a play that from its intrinsic merits demanded a second, if not a third visit, it is "The Cup." At present the landscape of Mr. W. Telbin, and the decorative splendour of Mr. Hawes Craven's Temple of Artemis, absorb all attention. We seem to see before us the concentrated essence of such fascinating art as that of Sir Frederick Leighton and Mr. Alma Tadema in a breathing and tangible form. Not only do the grapes grow before us, and the myrtles blossom, the snow-mountains change from silver-white at daytime to roseate hues at dawn, not only are the Pagan ceremonies acted before us with a reality and fidelity that almost baffles description, but in the midst of all this scenic allurement glide the classical draperies of Miss Ellen Terry, who is the exact representative of the period she enacts, while following her we find the eager glances of the fate-haunted Mr. Irving. The pictures that dwell on the memory are countless, and not to be effaced in spell or witchery by any of the most vaunted productions of the stage, even in an era devoted to archæology. We see, as we travel back through the enchanting vista, the first meeting of Synorix and Camma--he with his long red hair and haunting eyes, his weird pale face and swathes of leopard skins; she with her grace of movement, unmatched in our time, clad in a drapery sea-weed tinted, with complexion as clear as in one of Sir Frederick Leighton's classical pictures, and with every pose studied but still natural. "We remember Camma as she reclined on the low couch with her harp, moaning about her husband's late-coming, and can recall the hungry eyes of Synorix, as he drank in the magic of her presence. All was good here, the tenderness of the woman, the wicked eagerness of her lover, the quick impulsive energy of the husband. Difficult as it was to study the acting, when so much had to be seen, still it was felt that Mr. Irving, Mr. Terriss, and Miss Ellen Terry had well opened the tragedy long before the first curtain fell. "There were time and opportunity, at any rate, to comprehend the subtlety of Mr. Irving's expression in that long soliloquy--how well it was broken up, and how face accorded with action when Sinnatus lay dead, and the frightened Camma had fled to the sanctuary of the Temple. With the first act but little fault could be found. The fastidious among the audience who complained of dulness and want of action, possibly forgot that whilst their eyes were feasting on the scenery, their ears were closed to the poetry, and on another visit will confess how much meaning and study were at the first blush lost to them. With the aid of the text, the beauties hidden for the moment will reappear. As for the second act, with its groupings, its grace, its centre figures and surroundings, its hymns to Artemis, its chants and processions, we are inclined to doubt if the stage has ever given to educated tastes so rare a treat. In the old days, such pictures might have been caviare to the general public, but the public at the Lyceum is one of culture and a very high order of intelligence. Such poems are necessarily for the fastidious and the elegant in mind and scholarship; but granted the right of the stage to demand such poetic studies, it would be impossible for modern scenic art to give them more splendour and completeness. �sthetic tastes have had their necessary ridicule and banter, for everything that is affected is hateful to the ordinary English nature; but here, in this Temple of Artemis, when Miss Ellen Terry, veiled as the Galatian priestess, stands by the incense-bearing tripod, and Mr. Henry Irving, robed in the scarlet of Rome's tributary King, comes to demand his anxiously expected bride, there is an aiming at the beautiful and thorough, most creditable in itself and distinctly worthy of respect." No doubt the production of "The Cup" was a bright feather in the managerial cap of Henry Irving, and Ellen Terry took her full share in its colours. Let me hark back a little to recall an evening in the previous Lyceum season when I was fortunate enough to hear Ellen Terry's thrilling rendering of the one character in Monk Lewis's dramatic poem, "The Captive." This strange writer, with his skulls and his crossbones, his coffins and shrouds, his ghosts and his goblins, is rarely read now; but for the sake of the actress's performance in it this weird piece of work was well worth revival. In the memoirs of Lewis we come across a letter written to his mother in 1803, just before the first performance of "The Captive." "The 'monodrama' (as he called it) 'comes out,' he says, on Tuesday. I have not yet been at a single rehearsal. It cannot possibly succeed." In one way it did succeed. At Covent Garden Mrs. Litchfield (a famous actress in her day) recited the fearsome lines allotted to the wretched maniac prisoner. The character is that of a mad-woman, and Mrs. Litchfield's embodiment of the author's horrible imaginings, combined with the scenic effects and other startling appearances which, with his usual skill, he introduced into the piece, threw a portion of the audience--whose nerves were unable to withstand the dreadful truth of the language--into hysterics, and the whole theatre into confusion and horror. Never, it is said, did Covent Garden present such an appearance of agitation and dismay. Ladies bathed in tears, others fainting, and some shrieking with terror--while such of the audience who were able to avoid demonstrations like these sat aghast with pale horror painted on their countenances. In another letter to his mother, Lewis says: "The papers will have already informed you that the monodrama has failed. It proved much too terrible for representation, and two people went into hysterics during the performance, and two more after the curtain dropped. It was given out again with a mixture of applause and disapprobation, but I immediately withdrew the piece. In fact, the subject (which was merely a picture of madness) was so uniformly distressing to the feelings that at last I felt my own a little painfully, and as to Mrs. Litchfield she almost fainted away. I did not expect that it would succeed, and of course am not disappointed at its failure. The only chance was whether pity would make the audience weep, but instead of that terror threw them into fits, and of course there was an end of my monodrama." At the Lyceum Ellen Terry brought about no such scene as that created by Mrs. Litchfield at Covent Garden. It is true that she harrowed as well as held her audience, and that the memory of her acting must haunt all who witnessed this bold venture; but her art was delicate as well as intense, and she was able to draw those tears so desired by the author. It is a pity that he could not see his "monodrama" at the Lyceum in 1880. On April 16, 1881, "The Cup" was preceded by Mrs. Cowley's comedy, "The Belle's Stratagem," with Ellen Terry as Letitia Hardy. She played the part with invincible vivacity and perfect grace, and in the picturesque costumes of a bygone period, looked like a portrait by an old master come to life. But what a thing to do! Camma and Letitia Hardy--tragedy and comedy--in one evening! It was a proof alike of her marvellous versatility and her great power of physical endurance. To the delight of his admirers, Henry Irving resumed his old part of Doricourt, and played it brilliantly. By the way, in connection with this impersonation, there is another instance of an actor thinking he has failed where he has really succeeded. Of his first appearance at the St. James' Theatre in the character, he has said:--"I was cast for Doricourt, a part which I had never played before, and which I thought did not suit me. I felt that this was the opinion of the audience soon after the play began. The house appeared to be indifferent, and I believed that failure was conclusively stamped upon my work, when suddenly, upon my exit after the mad scene, I was startled by a burst of applause, and so great was the enthusiasm of the audience that I was compelled to reappear upon the scene, a somewhat unusual thing except upon the operatic stage." Despite his doubts the part has remained one of the best and one of the most popular of his comedy incarnations. Of the new Letitia Hardy, Clement Scott truly said:--"She is as Georgian in her comedy graces as before she was Pagan in her rites as the priestess Camma. Entering heart and soul into the spirit of the play, she attacks it with a wilfulness and an abandon that are indescribable. She trips and floats through the scenes. There is no effort in anything that she does; and when she assumes the character of the hoyden it is in the finest spirit of refined and disciplined fun. With every chance for exaggeration, the rein is never relaxed, and so captivating is the spirit of the artiste that she makes the audience hold its breath to the point of tension, and is rewarded with the quick response of unrestrained applause. Equally charming is the temptation scene at the minuet; and when Miss Terry, mask in hand, floats, glides, and coquets around the bewildered Doricourt, one's mind recalls the records of fascination in varied romance, and understands, possibly for the first time, what Circe might have done to Ulysses--how the fair-haired German nymphs of the Lorelei turned the heads of dreamy knights--how Undine weaved her spells--and how old Merlin collapsed under the influence of the wily Vivien. Unknowingly, Miss Ellen Terry is a poem." [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY. _On tour. Birmingham, 1881._ [_To face page 242._ ] In the autumn of 1880 the great American tragedian, Edwin Booth, came to England to fulfil an engagement at the Princess's Theatre, and his reception had not been one to make those who take loving interest in the dramatic art of this country proud. How well I remember poor Sothern (he was then in his dying days) waxing wroth over the neglect with which the man whom he declared to be the "finest and most graceful actor in the world" was treated. I think many others felt the same, and Henry Irving, at least, was determined that his great rival should not recross the Atlantic until he had had a fair hearing in London. With characteristic generosity and delightful courage, he invited Booth to appear with him at the Lyceum in Othello, so that the leaders of English and American dramatic art might be seen on the stage together, and in all courtesy cross swords, alternating the finely-balanced yet splendidly contrasted parts of the Moor and Iago. The invitation was cordially accepted, and in both countries the event is regarded as one of the most interesting in modern theatrical history. The general consensus of opinion was that Booth triumphed as Othello, and that Irving eclipsed him as Iago. No doubt Othello is by far the most difficult part to play, and it was better suited to the classical style of Booth than to the methods of Irving, who, while he has reverence for tradition, delights in taking a path of his own making. In some characters this is a distinct advantage, and his Iago was supreme. It will be remembered that Ellen Terry was already familiar with the character of the gentle Desdemona, and she played it with infinite charm and inexpressible pathos. Hers must have been a difficult task, for both Booth and Irving took different readings of Othello and Iago, and she had to adapt herself to both. Hazlitt said:--"All circumstances considered, and platonics out of the question, if we were to cast the complexion of Desdemona physiognomically, we should say that she had a very fair skin and very light auburn hair, inclining to yellow." In Ellen Terry Hazlitt would have found his ideal, not only in appearance but in art. For Henry Irving's benefit at the end of the season she played Helen to his Modus in those happily conceived comedy scenes from "The Hunchback" of Sheridan Knowles in which the two figure. She once more proved herself to be the most piquant of comediennes, and the Modus was delightfully sketched. In the opening attraction of the next Lyceum season, which commenced in the January of 1882, Ellen Terry did not appear. This was a revival of "The Two Roses," for by this time playgoers were anxious to resume acquaintance with Henry Irving in his first great original character, that of Digby Grant. In Lyceum history the occasion is noteworthy, for it introduced to its boards--as the blind Caleb Deecie--George Alexander. Alexander had been touring in the country under the management of the younger Robertson, and those who took the trouble to watch him with discriminating eye had predicted for him a brilliant future. So admirable was he in a character part in a humorous piece called "The Guv'nor," that his name, extolled by discerning provincial critics, reached Irving's ears, and thus he won his first engagement in London. His admirable work at the Lyceum Theatre, before he went into management on his own account, and by his tact, taste, and personality once more made the St. James's (a playhouse which since the departure of John Hare and the Kendals had been allowed to droop) the resort of intellectual as well as fashionable London, is well remembered. It is a grand thing for a young and then comparatively unknown actor to reflect that, with infinite credit to himself, and to the great satisfaction of the public, he played such vitally important parts as Faust to the Margaret of Ellen Terry, and Macduff to the Macbeth of Henry Irving. But the great production of this season was "Romeo and Juliet." Never, probably, was a Shakespearean play so superbly mounted. All the resources of art were lavished upon it, and cost was apparently outside consideration. The result was a series of stage pictures that were absolutely entrancing. If I were writing a history of the Lyceum under the management of Henry Irving I should gladly dwell on these things, and on the work that he, both as manager and actor, put into them, but I must remember that my text is Ellen Terry, and, save for the all-important part which she took in them, pass them briefly by. Other writers have vividly described these matchless representations in their entirety, and I must content myself with a fragment here and there. My canvas is a small one, and my picture must be that of my heroine. If my accounts of the Lyceum revivals are brief it is not from lack of appreciation of them, and happily the memory of them is green. So it is with the later impersonations of Ellen Terry, and they will require no lengthy record at my hands. Her Juliet did not quite satisfy all the critics, but she played the part for one hundred and thirty nights to crowded and enthusiastic audiences, and surely there could be no better criterion of success? If, when compared with other Juliets, the extremely exacting part did not seem to suit her as well as others she had played, if it was held to be inferior to her Ophelia, and below her Portia, the impersonation won its way to the hearts of the people, and in the public mind it increased rather than lessened her reputation. Sarah Bernhardt, who was loud in her praises of the performance, said to her sister artiste--"How _can_ you act in this way every night?" "It is the audience," said Ellen Terry. "They inspire me!" She might have added that she inspired her audiences. After the first performance she once more thought, nay, even insisted, that she had failed. She wrote to a friend--"A thousand thanks for your letter. The fact remains that Juliet was a horrid failure. _And I meant so well!_ I am very sad, but I thank you. _It is not the critics._ I knew it all on Wednesday night." She knew far more, and had no reason to be sad, when, at the close of the season, after an extraordinary run, "Romeo and Juliet" was withdrawn. On October 11, 1882, Shakespearean tragedy gave way to Shakespearean comedy, and "Much Ado about Nothing" was staged. We have seen how, at Leeds, Ellen Terry had tried herself as Beatrice. She had proved that the character suited her to perfection, and confidence in herself no doubt helped her to make one of the most striking of her many triumphs. Clement Scott has such delightful ideas of Ellen Terry in connection with the character of Beatrice, that I must be permitted to quote him:-- "Two passages from 'Much Ado about Nothing,'" he says, "have always seemed to me to convey exactly the idea of Ellen Terry, both in youth and womanhood; they suggest that extraordinary 'charm' that the actress recently in America was unable to define, though I, for one, could have embodied it in two words, 'Ellen Terry.' The passages from Shakespeare to which I allude are these-- "DON PEDRO. Will you have me, lady? "BEATRICE. No, my lord, unless I might have another for working days; your grace is too costly to wear every day. But I beseech your grace pardon me; I was born to speak all mirth and no matter. "DON PEDRO. Your silence most offends me, and to be merry best becomes you; for, out of the question, you were born in a merry hour. "BEATRICE. No sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that I was born! Cousins, God give you joy! "Now, if William Shakespeare had had the model before him, he could not have drawn a more perfect picture of Ellen Terry than this. She was indeed 'born to speak all mirth and no matter.' If ever lovely woman was 'born in a merry hour' it was Ellen Terry, for she can scarcely be serious for an hour together, and is never happier than when she is playing some practical joke on her more serious companions. "And who, whilst life lasts, can ever forget how the actress in the character of Beatrice, one of the most enchanting personations of my time, one of the most exquisite realisations of a Shakespearean heroine that any of us have ever seen, spoke those words, 'No sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that I was born.' Why, it was not Beatrice, but Ellen Terry, personated by Ellen Terry. It was a revelation. The other quotation from the same play, 'Much Ado about Nothing,' is Hero's description of her cousin Beatrice, which is simply Ellen Terry in action. 'For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs Close by the ground, to hear our conference.' "Is not this an exact description of the Ellen Terry movement which others so ludicrously attempt to imitate? She does not run off the stage, or skip up the steps of an Italian garden. She simply floats seemingly on the air. A more exquisitely graceful movement has never been seen from any other actress. But Shakespeare has hit it. She like 'a lapwing runs close by the ground.' It is the skimming of a bird in the air. Ellen Terry did that lapwing run to perfection when she was sent to invite Benedick to dinner, and left him with the famous chaffing rejoinder-- 'You have no stomach, signior; fare you well.' "And up the marble steps ran the lapwing." How true this is, all who have been fortunate enough to witness Ellen Terry's bewitching impersonation of Beatrice, will acknowledge. It was a faultless performance, and, as we all know, Henry Irving was equally happy as Benedick. I need not say more. "Much Ado about Nothing" was acted two hundred and twelve times, and might have continued to run, but the day came when the Lyceum company had to think seriously of their departure on their first American tour. With this in view the piece was withdrawn, and all the plays in the now rich repertory were carefully revived. On July 15, 1883, at a benefit performance, Ellen Terry played the small part of Clementine in "Robert Macaire," to the Macaire of Henry Irving, and the Jacques Strop of J. L. Toole. The part was, of course, beneath her notice, but she undertook it in a good cause, and her performance must be recorded in these pages. Irving has always regarded the character of Macaire with affection, and certainly he depicts the devil-may-care and by no means unamusing robber in effectively lurid tints. The piece, however, belongs to a bygone age, and is only interesting to those who, while seeing it, can conjure up the past. [Illustration: _Photograph by_ [_Window & Grove._ ELLEN TERRY AS "BEATRICE." _Lyceum, 1882_: "_There was a star danced, and under that I was born._" [_To face page 250._ ] In October 1883 the whole company sailed for New York, leaving a great gap in the English theatrical world. I wonder if they quite realised how much they would be missed? I have always found it difficult to make popular actors understand how fervently they are loved, and of what value their presence is to those who love them. CHAPTER XIII AT THE LYCEUM THEATRE--1884-1901 In 1884, flushed with their triumphant American victories, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and their faithful followers returned to the Lyceum. They commenced operations with a reproduction of "Much Ado about Nothing," but this soon gave way to a long promised revival of "Twelfth Night." This had given rise to many pleasant expectations. It was confidently thought that the character of Malvolio would fit Irving like a glove, and it was certain that in Ellen Terry we should find the sweetest of Violas. In the usual beautiful, tasteful, and costly style attendant upon a Lyceum production, the piece was staged on July 8, and why it failed to please the audience is a mystery that remains unsolved. It is ridiculous to plead that it was a very hot night, and that the packed house, through being uncomfortably warm, became unruly and offensive. We expect hot weather in July, and those who object to the interior of a theatre under such conditions generally stay away. Probably, if there is any explanation of the matter beyond the blatant vulgarity of a disreputable gang of foul first-nighters, it is that "Twelfth Night," not having been played for a long time in London, was as Greek to the ignorant in the house, and was not understood. Be all this as it may, so much low behaviour greeted the actor-manager on the fall of the curtain that he sharply rebuked the coarse-minded malcontents, saying, "I can't understand how a company of earnest comedians and admirable actors, having these three cardinal virtues of actors--being sober, clean, and perfect--and having exercised their abilities on one of the most difficult of plays, can have given any cause for dissatisfaction." Opinions differ as to these after-curtain-fall demonstrations on the part of disappointed actors. Probably they had better be omitted, but we all understand that human nature has its limits of endurance. The annoyed actor is provoked in the heat of a miserable moment to reprove insulting audiences, and one cannot wholly wonder at it. A writer who, in cold blood, challenges his adverse critics is very foolish indeed, for he not only advertises the fact that he has had a whipping, but has smarted under it. Those who in any way choose to come before the public challenge criticism. It cannot be all honey, and if an occasional dose of vinegar is unpalatable to them they had better retire into their shells. But there was little or no excuse for the rowdies who ridiculed the Lyceum production of "Twelfth Night." No doubt the play was in some respects unfortunately cast. The Sir Toby Belch, the Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the Clown, and the Maria, missed the humour of their practical joking, and this greatly handicapped Henry Irving, who had elected to play Malvolio from a somewhat serious point of view. After putting the question "Is it a good part?" _Mr. Punch_ said of his performance: "Good enough in its proper place in the piece, no doubt, but when emphasised, developed, and elevated by an eminent tragedian holding such a position as does the manager of the Lyceum, to a height of tragic melodrama, then Malvolio is no longer the middle-aged, conceited, puritanical donkey who is a fair butt for the malicious waiting-maid, two stupid sots, and a professional fool, but he becomes at once a grave and reverend signior, a Grand Duchess's trusted major-domo, faithfully discharging the duties of which he has an exaggerated opinion, and the very last person to be the subject of an idiotic practical joke, the stupidity of which is intensified by its wanton cruelty. And in the end he gains the public sympathy for his sufferings, just as Shylock does." Whether Henry Irving meant his audiences to sympathise with Malvolio is more than I can say. It was certainly very instructive, as well as very enjoyable, to see the part played from that point of view. [Illustration: _Photograph by_ [_Window & Grove._ ELLEN TERRY AS "VIOLA." _First played by her at the Lyceum, July 8, 1884._ [_To face page 254._ ] But however critics might differ with regard to individual performances in this unappreciated production, concerning Ellen Terry's Viola there was but one opinion. It was simply charming, being at once full of fun and vivacity, and clothed with modesty. The performance ranked with her best Shakespearean impersonations, and it is a thousand pities that it was not seen oftener. It is interesting to note that the part of Viola's brother and counterpart, Sebastian, was played by Ellen Terry's brother, Fred Terry, who was then in the early days of his successful career. The likeness, both in face, expression, and manner between the two was remarkable, and the episode of their thus acting together was very pleasing. In 1885, after another prosperous tour in America, W. G. Wills' stage version of "The Vicar of Wakefield" was revived, Ellen Terry now playing her famous character of Olivia to the Dr. Primrose of Henry Irving. She repeated her former triumph, and, as the dear old country parson, he was most happily placed. Since then, the delightful play has taken a permanent and honoured place in the Lyceum repertory. In the December of this year, W. G. Wills' adaptation of "Faust" was staged. Of course I cannot dwell on the splendours of this production. At the time some of the professed students of Goethe were prone to run it down, declaring (generally without seeing a representation of it) that the poem had been turned into a pantomime. These quidnuncs did not know the necessities of the three hours' traffic of the stage. In spite of them the striking and artistic acting version of a Titanic work drew the public, and, as a matter of fact, Henry Irving's enterprise induced more people to read Goethe than had ever been known. To thousands a closed book had been opened. "Faust" had a prolonged run, and how much this was due to the captivating Margaret of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving (who seemed to revel in the part of Mephistopheles) would be the first to admit. It was indeed a performance replete with pathos and poetry, and she alone gave the indispensable feminine interest to a great work destined to hold its place upon the stage, and in the minds of all earnest playgoers and students of the drama. It was in 1885 that Charles Kelly died, leaving his widow with her two children, who, under the names of Ailsa Craig and Gordon Craig, have already done excellent work upon the stage and in other branches of art. With such a lasting success as this on hand, with a rich repertory to fall back upon, and American tours to interfere with London work, new productions at the Lyceum now become few and far between. In 1886, Irving revived one of his favourite old farces, "Raising the Wind." It was a treat to see him once more enjoying his ingeniously and comically conceived interpretation of Jeremy Diddler, but the character of Peggy offered no real opportunity to Ellen Terry. She made a sweet picture, and it was good-natured of her to act in such a piece, and that is all that can be said. But it gives an opportunity of noting how truly great artists are always willing to play small parts. It is only the self-sufficient semi-amateur who must be Hamlet or nothing. "I love to be a _useful_ actress," is Ellen Terry's constant cry. On July I, 1887, at a benefit performance generously given on behalf of Dr. Westland Marston, Byron's "Werner" was performed, Henry Irving playing the gloomy hero to the Josephine of Ellen Terry. It was an interesting experiment, but, although immense pains were taken over the production, it was not repeated. Werner had been a favourite part with Macready, and I can never think of the piece without recalling an anecdote that was told me by another veteran actor of the old school--Henry Loraine. Loraine and a brother tragedian had had a difference of opinion concerning the "gouts" of blood mentioned in "Macbeth"--in the famous dagger soliloquy-- "I see thee still; And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, Which was not so before." Was the correct pronunciation of "gout" as here used the same as the dread malady "gout" from which so many of us suffer? That was the dispute--concerning it a small wager was made--and it was determined that the great Macready should be the referee. In his declining days, and a ripe old age, Macready was then living in peaceful retirement at Cheltenham, and Loraine, who had been an old comrade of his, called upon him. He was admitted, but he found the once vigorous man sadly ill and weak. He was lying back in an arm-chair wistfully gazing at the virile portrait of himself as Werner that has been made familiar to the public by the print-sellers. On hearing this friend's name, the old actor endeavoured to rouse himself, and, being asked the momentous question as to the "gouts," said with animation: "Of course it is as _I_ always pronounced it,'goots'--it rhymes with 'roots,'--it rhymes with 'roots.'" And then he seemed to forget his friend's presence, and, as it were, fading away, fell back in his chair, and, with a deep sigh, resumed his contemplation of the once active Werner. In 1887 the opportunity for a new "creation" occurred, and it is interesting to see how Ellen Terry availed herself of it. To my friend Alfred C. Calmour I am indebted for the history of his graceful poetical play "The Amber Heart." In common with all plays "The Amber Heart" had its vicissitudes. Indeed, it would be an interesting thing to write a history of successful plays, and the anxieties of their authors before they were safely landed for gratifying production. How many pieces have lain neglected for years until some chance coming in their way disclosed their merit! But the troubles of "The Amber Heart" were neither many nor keen. Written in 1886, the piece was read first of all to Mary Anderson, who, then in the zenith of her invincible popularity, was playing at the Lyceum. It was at the suggestion of the ill-fated William Terriss that the author submitted it to this charming and accomplished lady. Having heard the play, she was most enthusiastic about it. "Lovely! lovely!" she repeated after the author had read it; "if it can only be produced I am sure we shall have a success." But that season's arrangements having already been fixed gave no chance for it. It was then suggested to Ellen Terry, for whom, indeed, it had originally been written, but who so far had been unable to consider it because of her existing engagements. However, in reply to the author's final question as to whether she could seriously entertain it, she telegraphed, "Yes, with pleasure, to-day at twelve." This was January 6, 1887. The author read the play to her, and she, too, was most enthusiastic. "I'll do it, I'll do it!" she exclaimed; "I've longed for such a part." The difficulty, of course, was how to get it done. Ellen Terry was then playing Margaret in "Faust," and rehearsing other plays besides, and, of course, she was pledged to the arrangements of Henry Irving. At length it was decided that it should be produced at the Haymarket Theatre on May 7th for a matinee. The theatre was arranged for, and the date advertised, when the already too busy actress found that she could not fulfil her promise until a month later. This, of course (and naturally to the intense disappointment of the author), unsettled everything. The following month the Haymarket passed into new managerial hands, and so the piece could not be done there. Then, following his invariable custom, Henry Irving generously stepped into the breach, and offered his friend, the dramatist, the free use of the Lyceum for the production. That difficulty was, at length, satisfactorily settled, but the casting of the piece was not easily effected. The casting of plays for tentative performances seldom is. Ultimately, and after an infinity of trouble, he had good cause to congratulate himself. Ellen Terry, E. S. Willard, and Beerbohm Tree! Never before, and never since, have this talented trio appeared together, and the minor parts were played by excellent actors and actresses. "If I were to write volumes," says my friend, "I could not say how hard Miss Terry worked to make the piece a success. Her whole soul was thrown into it." At the rehearsals her enthusiasm fired her companions. Everything was done most lovingly, and on the eventful afternoon, June 7, 1887, an audience assembled at the Lyceum which was almost as unique as the cast of the play. Mrs. Keeley represented the older generation of actresses, and Miss Mary Moore the younger, and many, like Ada Cavendish, David James, and William Terriss, who have since passed away, were present. Before the curtain went up his heroine wrote to the dramatist:-- "You will have a great success, I hope and pray. I believe in this, and nobody will be so glad then as your sincere friend, Ellen Terry." After the first act (which had gone splendidly) he went behind the scenes. "Oh, dear, dear! how bad I am!" she said, suffering (quite unnecessarily) from her usual "first performance" misgivings. "My tongue is parched, and I can't get a smile out of the part." She was terribly anxious to make a great success for her author. At the end of the second act, which was received with rare enthusiasm, he again saw her. She was crying, for she was still "Ellaline"--the heart-broken maiden, whose lover had tired of her. After a while she smiled through her tears, and said, "I think I was a little better in that act." Her modest appreciation of what was acknowledged to be a noble dramatic achievement showed the true nature of the woman. The effect on the audience in the parting scene at the end of this act was greater than written description can convey. Mrs. Keeley declared that, with all her experience, she had never witnessed anything so fine, and she afterwards wrote to the author: "I am glad to have lived to see such grand acting as Miss Terry's was yesterday afternoon." Then Ellen Terry wrote to him: "I hope you are pleased. I am so sorry about one thing yesterday. From nervousness my acting of the first act was strained and artificial, and I confess that I entirely ruined and _missed_ your first beautiful soliloquy in the second act! I am _truly_ sorry! I know that you are a good creature, and view all my efforts from the point of view of my _intentions_ since I succeeded better in some bits. Although I may never play the part again, I never will cease to love the play for its own sake, and to regard and esteem my friend who wrote it--_for me_--I do believe." [Illustration: _Photography by_ [_Window & Grove._ ELLEN TERRY AS "ELLALINE." _In Alfred C. Calmont's Poetical Fancy, "The Amber Heart." Lyceum, June 7, 1887._ [_To face page 262._ ] Poor self-tormenting lady! From first to last she had played the part to perfection--and every one but herself knew it. However, in that charming letter, so characteristic of her modesty, she unwittingly endowed the author with one of his most esteemed possessions. He was indeed to be envied! Henry Irving wrote to him: "Yesterday was a veritable triumph for you and Miss Terry. Her performance was a lovely, never-to-be-forgotten thing--beautiful in conception and perfect in execution." So delighted was he with her success in this original character that he purchased the play and made her a present of it. When it is remembered that he took no part in the victory it will be understood that he is not a selfish actor. This was doubly proved when in the following year (1888) the piece was staged for a run in the evening bill, with Hermann Vezin and George Alexander in the cast. It was again well received, and ran through a season. Sir Edward Burne-Jones wrote of it:-- "I went to the Lyceum Theatre yesterday for the third time to see your beautiful poetic fairy play. It is a most inspiring work to a painter--and Miss Terry's performance a revelation of loveliness. It is not acting--it is a glimpse into Nature itself. Is there any one like her? I think not. I had not been in a theatre for twenty years before I went to see 'The Amber Heart.'" Lord Leighton wrote--"Beautiful!--beautiful! Acting and play beautiful! A sweet and abiding memory." In America the play was received with the same enthusiasm. Miss Terry wrote as follows after its production in New York: "'The Amber Heart' went splendidly. It made a distinct sensation, and I wish you had been there. The people simply love it--just as they did at home." Ellen Terry's next task was in some ways the most difficult she has been called upon to undertake. When it was known that she was to appear as Lady Macbeth, those (and they were in an overwhelming majority) who associated the character with the majestic, awe-inspiring methods of Mrs. Siddons, and who, going back to the Garrick period, recalled a formidable-looking picture of Mrs. Yates as the Thane's wife with forbidding hooped skirts and a dagger remorselessly clutched in each determined hand, shook their heads, and anticipated failure. How could the graceful, gracious, tender-eyed, sweet-voiced, gentle Ellen Terry grasp such a part as this? Stage tradition had claimed Lady Macbeth for its own, and very few playgoers reflected that, as a matter of fact, it would be more likely that Macbeth would be persuaded by a beautiful and fascinating wife than he would be commanded by a cold and imperious one. To fight against these firmly fixed ideas was a most formidable undertaking, but, anxious though she must have been, Ellen Terry went to work with a brave heart. On November 6, 1888, she wrote (from Margate) to her friend, Alfred C. Calmour:-- "My holiday is nearly over, and somehow I wish it was just going to begin! However, I feel pretty content. Since I last saw you I have been N., S., E., and W. I have seen _very few_ people, and I have been absorbed by Lady Mac, who is _quite unlike_ her portrait by Mrs. Siddons! She is _most feminine_, and altogether, now that I have come to _know the lady well_, I think the _portrait is much the grander of the two_! But I mean to try at a true _likeness_, as it is more within my means. Like a good friend, send on the notes you spoke of--the notes on Macbeth. I'm staying here to get away from people and to be quiet, but I shall come up for your play, 'Widow Winsome,' if you do it on the 15th. I'm _so_ glad you'll have a good cast. Katie Rorke is _quite_ the best of our young ones." Kate Rorke, it will be remembered, commenced her stage career at the Court Theatre when Ellen Terry was in the first flush of her success as Olivia. This clearly shows that she was intent on giving her own original reading of Lady Macbeth. Clement Scott has recorded a very interesting conversation that took place between them after the production. In the course of it she said:-- "Although I know I cannot do what I want to do in this part, I don't even _want_ to be a 'fiend,' and I _can't_ believe for a moment that Lady Macbeth did _conceive_ that murder--that _one_ murder. Most women break the law during their lives; few women realise the consequences of what they do to-day.... I do believe that at the end of that banquet, that poor wretched creature was brought through agony and sin to repentance, and was forgiven. Surely she called the spirits to be made bad, because she knew she was not so very bad?" And in response to the inquiry--"But was Lady Macbeth good?" she said:-- "No, she was not good, but not so much worse than many women you know.... Was it not nice of an actress--she sent me Mrs. Siddons' shoes! not to wear, but to keep. I wish I could have stood in 'em! She played Lady Macbeth--_her_ Lady Macbeth, not Shakespeare's; and if I _could_ I would have done hers, for Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth was a fool to it. But, at the same time, I don't think I'd even care to try to imitate her imitators.... I wish I could have seen Helen Faucit in the part. I do believe she was the rightest, although not to be looked at by the side of the Siddons portrait as a single effective figure." Now all this goes to prove that though Ellen Terry believed that the "Siddons" view of the character was the most effective from the theatrical point of view, she was not what Shakespeare meant, and that she had resolutely determined to give it her own reading. On the 29th of December 1888, the tragedy was performed before a crowded, distinguished, and excited audience. What a picture Ellen Terry looked in her queenly and exquisitely-designed robes and her long plaits of squirrel-coloured hair! One could understand a man doing anything at the bidding of such a lovely, commanding, yet withal winsome creature. This made her influence over Macbeth very easy of comprehension, and, so far, a great point was gained; but I remember thinking that night that the new Lady Macbeth seemed, as the play advanced, to become an encumbrance rather than a support to her husband, and that she left him to fight his losing battle alone. She seemed to content herself with presenting an attractive, affectionate, and devoted wife, who could rule her husband at will, and encouraged him in his crimes because she thought they would advance his ambition. Despite her collusion in the series of cruel murders that were designed to clear the Thane of Cawdor's way to the throne, she was always feminine, and far sooner than he, she collapsed under the weight of their mutual guilt. That the impersonation proved singularly attractive is beyond all doubt, and it was well summed up in the words:-- "Miss Terry's Lady Macbeth filled every one with wonder and admiration. As in the case of her Queen Katherine, it seemed a miracle of energy and dramatic inspiration triumphing over physical difficulties and habitual associations. The task was herculean, and even those who objected could not restrain their admiration." Indeed, we were all heart and soul with Henry Irving, when, at the fall of the curtain, and in response to ringing cheers, he said:-- "Our dear friend, Ellen Terry, in appearing as Lady Macbeth for the first time, has undertaken, as you may suppose, a desperate task, but I think no true lover of art could have witnessed it without being deeply interested, and without a desire to witness it again." He was right: his and her admirers came over and over again, and "Macbeth" was not withdrawn until June 29, 1889. In the April of 1889 a very interesting event took place. Having received the royal command, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and the Lyceum Company appeared before Her Majesty Queen Victoria, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and many other members of the Royal Family, at what was for the nonce dubbed the "Theatre Royal, Sandringham." For the occasion the ballroom had been converted into a miniature Lyceum, the proscenium and act-drop of the theatre having been produced on a smaller scale. The following was the programme:-- V.R. THEATRE ROYAL, SANDRINGHAM. Royal Entertainment. By command of their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales, before Her Majesty the Queen. _On Friday Evening, April 26th, 1889._ "THE BELLS." A drama in three acts from the "Juif Polonais" of MM. Erckmann--Chatrian. Mathias Mr Henry Irving Walter Mr Howe Hans Mr Johnson Christian Mr Alexander Dr Zimmer Mr Haviland Notary Mr Coveney President of the Court Mr Tyars Mesmerist Mr Archer Catherine Mrs Pauncefort Sozel Miss Linden Annette Miss Coleridge ALSACE, 1833. After which the Trial Scene from "THE MERCHANT OF VENICE." Shylock Mr Henry Irving Duke of Venice Mr Howe Antonio Mr Wenman Bassanio Mr Alexander Salarino Mr Harvey Gratiano Mr Tyars Clerk of Court Mr Coveney Nerissa Miss Linden Portia Miss Ellen Terry Director, Mr Irving; Assistant Director, Mr Loveday; Musical Director, Mr Ball. The Scenery painted by Mr Hawes Craven; the Act-drop painted by Mr Hann. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN. After the performance, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry had the honour of being presented to Queen Victoria, who expressed herself with enthusiasm as to their respective impersonations. Subsequently, through the Prince of Wales, her Majesty presented the great actor with a pair of handsome diamond and gold sleeve-links, and the reigning Portia with a brooch, as beautiful as it was costly. In her next Lyceum part, that of Catherine Duval, in the revival of Watts Phillips's stirring French Revolution drama, "The Dead Heart" (Sept. 28, 1889), Ellen Terry did all she had to do with her usual taste, and evinced much pathos; but the character afforded her no really great chance. The occasion was, however, a very interesting one, for Gordon Craig (Edward Wardell, who had made his first appearance on the stage in America as the boy Joey, in "The Fate of Eugene Aram") played with great skill the part of Arthur, the handsome son of Catherine, after she had become the wife of the Count de St. Valery. It was pleasant to see the mother and son thus playing together, though looking at her it seemed almost impossible that the relationship could exist. Indeed, one writer was induced to predict that the situation would in due course be reversed, and that Ellen Terry, "blessed with perennial youth and undecaying beauty, will successfully portray a character, in some happily-chosen drama, in which she will pose as the daughter of her own son." On the 20th September 1890, Henry Irving produced Hermann Merivale's stage-version of Scott's great story, "The Bride of Lammermoor," entitled "Ravenswood," in which he played the ill-fated Edgar, and she was the Lucy Ashton. Here again, it seemed to me, that her opportunities were few and far between, though, of course, she seized and made the most of them whenever they came in her way, and thus wove wonders out of rather scant material. In her picturesque costumes she looked most charming, and she has told me that she "dearly loved" the part. In the next production, the famous revival of "Henry VIII.," in which as far as scenery, costumes, and general splendour were concerned, the Lyceum manager excelled himself, the actress made a veritable _tour de force_. Her Queen Katherine was, as Percy Fitzgerald truly said, an _astonishing_ performance, and took even her greatest admirers by surprise. She made the same gigantic effort as she did with Lady Macbeth to interpret a vast character, and one that might well have seemed beyond her strength. It did not aim at being the _great_ Queen Katherine of Sarah Siddons. As in the former instance, Ellen Terry founded her conception on different lines, and acted up to her own ideas with marvellous truth and effect. We believed in, and sympathised with, this earnest and tender-hearted woman, and hated those who persecuted her and hunted her down. She could, and did show irritation, indignation, and hot anger, but beneath it all she let us see the woman's heart, and we knew that it was wrongly and cruelly lacerated. Her victory over those who had pinned their faith on the Siddons reading of the character was complete, and, considering the great difficulties that lay in her path, it was a great one. The pathetic resignation of her death-scene was a piece of beautiful acting ever to be remembered. Among the dainty gentlewomen attendant upon this heart-touching Queen Katherine was a charming young lady, who figured in the play-bills as Ailsa Craig. This was Ellen Terry's daughter and inseparable companion, Edith Wardell. From Queen Katherine to Cordelia is a very far cry, and yet when she felt it to be her duty to undertake the difficult task Ellen Terry did not shirk her responsibility to her manager. It is true, that with the modesty that always goes hand in hand with true genius, she said that she would like to resign the character of King Lear's favourite child to a younger actress, and volunteered to appear in the character of the Fool. That would have been such a bewitching interpretation of one of Shakespeare's most carefully etched characters that it seems a pity it was lost to us; but Henry Irving was right in his judgment. He had determined that his audiences should see Ellen Terry as Cordelia; they saw her, and rejoiced in a new and striking triumph. [Illustration: _Photography by_ _W. & D. Downey._ SIR HENRY IRVING AS "CARDINAL WOLSEY." _In "Henry VIII." in the Lyceum revival of 1892._ [_To face page 272._ ] How vividly I recall that anxious first night of November 10, 1892. First impressions are generally the best, and therefore I do not hesitate to repeat what I wrote in the early hours of the succeeding November 11:-- "In penning these lines it is not so much my intention to enter into critical judgment on our leading actor's rendering of the most noble and exacting of Shakespearean characters, but rather to give my readers some description of one of the most notable 'first nights' of the modern stage. Under the Irving sway all first nights are important, but this one was especially so, for to the present generation of theatre-goers 'King Lear' is, from an acting point of view, practically an unknown play. There can be few amongst us now who can recall Macready's revival of 1838, that of Phelps in 1845, or Charles Kean's elaborate production of 1858--of which it was said that 'he had equalled his Hamlet and Louis the Eleventh.' That is exactly what every one hoped Henry Irving would do. More he could not do. Edwin Booth played Lear for a few nights at the Princess's in 1881--and it has, fitfully, been seen in the provinces, but to all intents and purposes the tragedy has for many years been laid on the shelf. What was Irving going to do with it? That was the question asked by every one in the house last night, and if his performance is to be judged by the tumultuous applause that greeted his first entrance, that followed him throughout the play, and that called and recalled him at the end of each act, he had done well indeed. And what a house it was! My comfortable and easily arrived at seat happened to be in the last row of the stalls, and consequently I overheard the conversation of the front rows of the pit--which has been rightly called the mouth through which the final verdict of the house is given. Here were any number of ladies who, bringing books, refreshments, and camp-stools with them, had patiently waited for five hours in the pit entrance of the theatre during a foggy and comfortless November afternoon in order to obtain good seats, and who spoke not only cheerfully, but even boastfully, of their experiences! Such a tribute to the popularity of the actor is surely noteworthy. It mattered nothing to them that the fog got into the theatre and set them coughing, that their camp-stools were sadly in their way, that the play was a long one, and some of the 'waits' were tedious. Eleven o'clock arrived, and there was still an act to be played, but their allegiance was as unshaken as their applause was undiminished. With such a loyal following as this, Henry Irving has no cause to fear a rival. The upper parts of the house were packed. Every available seat in circles and gallery was occupied, and the private boxes can only be described as 'boiling over.' But the fifteen rows of densely thronged stalls formed the centre of attraction. From the first it was noticeable that the house was almost as much interested in the house as in the play. Men stood up to see and be seen, and opera-glasses were as plentiful as blackberries in October. The eager pittites exchanged surmises and certainties with regard to celebrities--and, probably unconscious of the interest they were arousing, celebrities displayed themselves to the best possible advantage, and exchanged greetings with brother and sister celebrities. To give the names of those present would be to quote the very pick of the literary, artistic, scientific, and aristocratic world. That the critics, reporters, and artists were there in full force, goes without saying, and most of them seemed busy, some taking notes of the performance on the stage, others jotting down the names of the lions among the audience, and many making lightning-like sketches of those present, both on the stage and in the auditorium. But, after all, 'the play's the thing,' and it may be briefly said that this was followed with unflagging interest, and listened to with breathless silence. By the time this appears in print[3] those who are interested in things theatrical will have had an opportunity of reading the critical verdict of our leading dramatic censors on Henry Irving's Lear, and Ellen Terry's Cordelia. Whatever the ultimate popularity of these impersonations may be, there was but one opinion in the crowded and brilliant audience of last night. The people seemed never tired of cheering, and late though the hour was when the curtain fell, no one moved until Henry Irving, who throughout the evening looked 'every inch a king,' was compelled to give utterance to a few well-chosen words of heartfelt thanks. His first night of 'Lear,' he said, would be one of the happiest of his memories. A pleasant feature of the evening was the right loyal welcome given to Henry Howe, who, now playing the old man, tenant to Gloster, was the King of France in the Macready revival of fifty-five years ago." Ellen Terry has told me that it was one of the most nervous and anxious first nights she had experienced, and it might well be so, for the task of all concerned in this great production was a heavy one. But though critical opinion differed as to some points in the representation--though sapient playgoers shook their heads, and, quoting Charles Lamb, declared that "King Lear" should never be acted, there was no argument as to the merits of the new Cordelia. Her maidenly simplicity and delicately expressed, though manifestly intense, love for her father touched the right chord, and once more she won all our hearts. Her initial popularity in the character continued throughout the long and, I believe, unprecedented run of the play. No wonder that Ellen Terry is fond of saying that she is a "useful" actress to her manager. That, she declares, has always been her desire, and while under an engagement she considers it her duty to play any part that is offered to her and to do her best with it. Though she will not say so, I believe I am right in feeling that she is justifiably proud of having, in quick succession, succeeded in such widely divergent Shakespearean characters as the imperious Queen Katherine (a part in which I am inclined to think she actually satisfied that fastidious critic--_herself_) and the gentle Cordelia. And here let me emphasise the fact that she repudiates the suggestion that it was her ambition to play Lady Macbeth. She had no desire for the part, but when called upon to take it she did not shirk the task. Her next original impersonation was that of Fair Rosamund in Lord Tennyson's beautiful play, "Becket," which was brought out at the Lyceum on February 6, 1893. It did not tax her strength very much, but no one who witnessed the impersonation will forget its exquisite tenderness or her perfect delivery of such lines as-- "Rainbow, stay, Gleam upon gloom, Bright as my dream, Rainbow, stay! But it passes away, Gloom upon gleam, Dark as my doom-- O rainbow, stay." It is a delightful thing to read Tennyson. To hear his words interpreted by Ellen Terry is a revelation. In connection with "Becket," I have another little story to tell indicative of my heroine's never-ending unselfishness. Geneviève Ward, who, it will be remembered, played most magnificently as Queen Eleanor, has told me how, in that strong and stormy scene between the jealous Queen and the luckless Rosamund, the stage moon was wont to show a little undue favouritism towards the fair denizen of the bower, flooding her with radiance and leaving her vindictive visitor in comparative obscurity. "This," to quote my friend's own words, "hurt Ellen Terry's sense of justice, and more than once she has turned her back upon the audience, and gently rebuked the too partial moon by a tragic line thrown into the wings--'Take it off me and turn it on Miss Ward.'" Such anecdotes could be told by all the artists who have appeared with her, but this one will suffice. Against this I may tell a counter story. Amongst Ellen Terry's treasures there is a ring that was given to her by Geneviève Ward. When she shows it to her friends, she says, "Queen Eleanor, you see, is not at all vindictive to Rosamund off the stage." When "Becket" had run its course, and pending another great production, some revivals were given. Amongst them was Charles Reade's one-act play--"Nance Oldfield." Most of us know the pretty, imaginative story as related by Ellen Terry's early friend and mentor, Charles Reade. Mistress Nance Oldfield, it will be remembered, was one of the earliest and most popular of English actresses. She made her first appearance in 1699, and was the darling of the stage until she died in 1730, and, with nobles supporting her pall, was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. History records of her that she was not only an admirable actress, but a good and charitable woman, and it is from this pleasant point of view that Charles Reade has limned her in his dainty little cabinet picture. In his play her mission is to cure the love that a romantic young man has conceived for her through seeing her on the stage. How, in order to do this, she converts herself from the most charming of women into a veritable "tom-boyish" hoyden, is known to all who delight in the graceful and consummate art of Ellen Terry. When she is playing this part, her vivacity and high spirits seem to know no bounds, but her winsomeness always fascinates her audiences. The little piece is ever followed with intense interest mingled with much laughter, and the only regret is that it comes to an all too early end. It lives and will live as long as Ellen Terry chooses to play it. By the way, it is on record that a descendant of the original Mistress Oldfield has said, "Anne Oldfield herself could not have played the character better." The part has also been admirably handled by Geneviève Ward. Later on, at a special performance at Daly's Theatre, Ellen Terry appeared in a short piece by George Moore and "John Oliver Hobbes," entitled "Journeys End in Lovers Meeting." It was very interesting; but the little candle soon flickered out, and the experiment only calls for passing record. No doubt, before, and certainly ever since, the days of Sir Thomas Malory and the printing by Caxton of "Morte d'Arthur," the Arthurian legends have had a fascination for English-thinking folk. The publication of Tennyson's immortal "Idylls of the King" added a new zest to the glorious old romances, and great delight was expressed when it was announced that Henry Irving and Ellen Terry were to appear as the blameless King and his beautiful Queen in a stage version of the familiar, pathetic, and very human legend of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot. The project had often been mooted, and several leading dramatists had been named as likely to be entrusted with the important and difficult work, but at last the choice fell on Comyns Carr, and right well he performed his task, writing in fluent blank verse, and telling his story in the true dramatic way. The play was produced on January 12, 1895, and made a profound impression. The beauty of the scenery designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and the melody of the music that had been composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan, added much to the reality of a presentment which, in its way, was one of the most captivating things ever seen on the stage. No doubt the production surpassed everything that had gone before it in the splendour of its setting, and its effect upon critical audiences. In this connection it was truly pointed out that it said much for the power of the principal performers that their art was not overwhelmed by the magnificence of its surroundings. Their triumph as artists was only the greater because it was won under circumstances that were really adverse to the actor. The tendency of these magnificently staged plays is undoubtedly to make the individual performer wither, as the composition in its entirety of scenery, grouping, and accessories grows more and more. A fault that some playgoers found with "King Arthur" was that it afforded few acting opportunities to Henry Irving. The character of the spotless consort of Guinevere, who stands out so nobly in the legends and idylls, somehow seemed unsympathetic when seen upon the stage. Is it, I wonder, that mixed audiences follow the all-seeing Shakespeare when he said, "They say best men are moulded out of faults, and, for the most, become much more the better for being a little bad?" In one of his clever plays Sydney Grundy goes so far as to suggest that such a very good man as King Arthur might be to an ordinary human being "a little difficult to live with." If such be the case, abundant pardon should be meted out to the erring Guinevere. As for Ellen Terry as Guinevere she not only looked a perfect picture, but made the most of every line allotted to her in one of the most touching and pathetic characters that (outside Shakespeare) she has been called upon to play. Mention of this production would not be complete without record of the splendid acting of Johnston Forbes Robertson as Lancelot--and the striking effect made by Geneviève Ward as Morgan le Fay. [Illustration: _Photograph by_ [_Window & Grove._ ELLEN TERRY AS "QUEEN GUINEVERE." _In Comyns Carr's drama "King Arthur," Lyceum, 1895._ [_To face page 282._ ] I cannot think that "King Arthur" lived as long as it should have done, but I fear it came at a time when frivolous playgoers were so absorbed in the dresses and doings of the Giggling Girl--the Gurgling Girl--the Gargling Girl--or whatever that volatile and versatile young lady was for the moment presenting, that they could not do much homage to Sir Thomas Malory, Lord Tennyson, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Sir Arthur Sullivan, and Sir Henry Irving--for it was at this period that our great actor-manager was honoured with his well-won knighthood. In the early autumn of 1896 a new Shakespearean prize was offered to Ellen Terry, and she eagerly seized upon and materially profited by it. Contenting himself with the unsympathetic part of Iachimo (how admirably he played it!), Henry Irving resolved to revive the far too seldom seen "Cymbeline," and of course the ideal Imogen was at hand. "I love the part!" says Ellen Terry with her infectious enthusiasm, and, loving it, she brought it out in all its beauty and fragrance just as the beneficent sun unfolds the petals and extracts the sweet scent of the rose. Agreeing as I do with every word he says on the subject, I must here once more quote my good friend, Clement Scott:-- "Ellen Terry," he writes, "astonished dramatic students with her Imogen on September 22, 1896. Ellen Terry's Imogen was not only a surprise--it was a revelation. It may not satisfy the old school, but it will certainly delight the new. It is not the reading of Helen Faucit, the best of the Imogens remembered; it may be picked to pieces by schoolmen and students; it was of course un-Shakespearean; but Ellen Terry's Imogen is Ellen Terry with twenty years or more off her merry shoulders. I can only describe Ellen Terry's Imogen as her Beatrice mingled with her Rosalind that might have been. "No, it was not that; it was Ellen Terry, that peculiar amalgam of witchery, charm, and wilfulness which has baffled every critic of her work. I shall be told that this is not Imogen; but it is Ellen Terry's Imogen, and she held her audience in the palm of her hand. Imogen was never played in like fashion before. The scene in which Imogen was summoned by her dear milord to Milford Haven may not be Shakespearean, but it was pure Ellen Terry at her best. "She bounds about the stage like a young fawn, she kisses her hand, she kisses her dear lord's letter, she is a wilful madcap and a romp. Is this Imogen, the King's daughter, the serious, thoughtful Imogen of Shakespeare? Who cares? What does it matter to the audience? It is the Imogen of Ellen Terry, and she has undoubtedly made out a good case. "It may be heresy to the old school to hear an actress interpolating asides and adding remarks and breaking in upon the text with charming gestures, but Ellen Terry does it, and every one loves her for doing it. "So far so good for the earlier and middle scenes. There was a hesitating period, and an Ellen Terry period; but when we got to the Fidèle scenes then came the revelation, the touching of the heart, the true tears. There was only one remark in the house, 'Oh, what a Rosalind she would have made!' And many added, 'and ought to make.' Here in these scenes we had comedy of the finest flavour, and pathos exquisitely true. Few will forget the eminently Rosalind-like incident of the sword at the entrance to the cave--it was the bloody 'kerchief over again--and few indeed will fail to admire the nervous passion, the really eloquent grief, over the supposed body of the headless Posthumus. "The success of the Fidèle scenes nerved the actress to a fresh attack, and in the grand reconciliation scene she played with the romance and activity of a girl of eighteen. It was a surprising effort from first to last; and of all the Shakespearean essays of this delightful artist, from her own stand-point, this was assuredly the best. "Hitherto I should have said Beatrice; but here we have Beatrice with the pathetic touches of Rosalind superadded. Miss Terry is a model Shakespearean boy; there is no doubt about that, and has both laughter and tears at her winsome command. "The loss of such a Rosalind to the stage as Ellen Terry would, and must have been, has ever formed a subject for regret with her warmest and most enthusiastic admirers. If ever woman lived who displayed in advance the temperament of Rosalind, it was Ellen Terry. What affection she would have shown for Celia; what tears would have been shed, and what anxiety displayed for Orlando at the wrestling bout; with what incomparable humour such a Rosalind would have started on her romantic journey; and oh! the scenes with Orlando in the forest, the love, the sport, the joyousness, the masquerading, and the tears, it makes one almost sad to know and feel what we have lost in this incomparable Rosalind." Ellen Terry's performance in "Cymbeline" also excited the admiration of the French critic, Augustin Filon, who, in an article in the _Débâts_, headed "Une Grande Tragédienne," said that her Imogen prevented him from seeing the "absurdities" of the play! Much more than that, she compelled him to accept them. He had only to open his eyes and his ears and Imogen was before him. Her style is marked by a simplicity which, to inexperienced spectators, may seem the absence of art, but which, as a matter of fact, is the perfection of art. She entirely forgets that two thousand persons are following her movements and listening to her words. No glance at the audience, no intonation bearing traces of study, no obvious effort to delight! Désiré Nisand, referring to the _débuts_ of Rachel, remarked, "This girl showed me that I had never understood Corneille or Racine." The same might be said of Ellen Terry, that "noble artist," in regard to Shakespeare. Augustin Filon, it will be seen from this, has little or no patience with those who say that Shakespeare should be read instead of seen on the stage. He quotes the lines between Imogen and the attendant in the bedchamber scene-- "What hour is it?" "Almost midnight, madam." "If thou canst wake by four o' the clock, I prithee call me." The French censor had not hitherto seen the significance of these words. Ellen Terry's performance served to enlighten him. "She seemed to say," he records, "'Poor girl, it is not your fault if your mistress has sorrows which deprive her of sleep. Unhappy princesses are not the only people in the world. You need rest; get thee to bed, and if you oversleep yourself you are already forgiven.' All this," continues the writer, "is suggested by Ellen Terry's delivery of this simple speech." In his interesting book on the English stage the same critic says: "Ellen Terry has not only been an incarnation, delicate, moving, impassioned, of Shakespeare's heroines, but has in her pure and sweet elocution set the poet's dream to music." Ellen Terry has, indeed, always found favour, not only with French critics, but with her sisters and brothers of the Parisian stage. Sarah Bernhardt has said of her: "She is perfectly delightful, and is one of my best friends. The greatest treat I can give myself, and a pleasure to which I can look forward for months, is to see her act. She is as near absolute perfection as any one can be. In her, English dramatic art has a splendid exponent." Again she declared: "Ellen Terry and Henry Irving are perfect! I adore them!--particularly the former. What grace, what ease! It is not acting at all, but the real character before one's eyes. In comedy she is unequalled, at any rate in English-speaking countries, while Henry Irving, in certain emotional parts, it would be hard to surpass." Coquelin aîné loves her acting--"Angélique, très sympathétique, très tendre!" he once cried, after a glance at her through an opera-glass. "Mais c'est charmant! Elle a des vraies larmes dans ses yeux!" By the way, the _Saturday Review_ once instituted an interesting comparison between Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry. "The latter," the writer said, "is to the English stage what the other is to the French. The two actresses are superficially about as unlike as may be, and yet their method is radically the same; or, in other words, they are both true actresses. It must, of course, be admitted that Ellen Terry has not yet had such opportunities of displaying her powers as have fallen to the lot of Sarah Bernhardt; nor has she yet attained the perfection of art which Sarah Bernhardt can, when she chooses to take the trouble, display; but to her, as to Sarah Bernhardt, one may safely apply the much-misused term of genius. Like Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry has the semblance of spontaneousness; and, like her, she is always identified with every thought and habit of every character that she represents. There is further likeness between the two, in that both are excellent both in tragedy and comedy. It is, however, as Ophelia that Ellen Terry has won for herself a place in the first rank of actresses." It should be noted that this was written in 1879, long before Ellen Terry had made her subsequent triumphs in that long list of great characters chronicled in these pages. On April 10, 1897, Ellen Terry was called upon to pit herself against another famous French actress--Réjane. This was as Madame Sans-Gêne in Comyns Carr's excellent English adaptation of Victorien Sardou and Emile Moreau's play bearing that name. The ordeal was a trying one. It had been freely suggested and honestly thought that the broad comedy of the character would not be suitable to the methods of our sweet English actress. She soon put all doubts to rest, and, in spite of great difficulties, achieved a success that was in its way unique. Writing after the performance, William Archer, who always weighs his words and never unduly praises, said that Ellen Terry was "a born comedian, and throws herself with immense gusto into this sympathetic part." Coquelin, who was present at the first performance, and who naturally might have been somewhat biassed in favour of his famous compatriot, was enthusiastic. Without for a moment undervaluing the splendid performance of Réjane, he declared that Ellen Terry had "won his heart." "She is full of gaiety," he said, "and enters fully into the spirit of the _rôle_. Her exquisite freshness in the laundry scene, when she discomfits that shy conspirator, Fouché, by putting a hot hissing iron near his cheek, and her movements in the scene of the Emperor's study, twenty years later, when she astonishes the same Fouché, who has become Duke of Otranto, by the brilliant schemes which she explains to him, and which he successfully adopts, stand unsurpassed. She is natural, bright, impulsive, and embodies the character from first to last. Sir Henry Irving's realisation of Napoleon is--even to a professional actor--an astonishing performance. His incarnation of the great Emperor is superb all through the two important final acts of the play." Coming from such a source this is indeed high praise, and really it seems needless to add to it. Happily Ellen Terry is still playing the part, and playing it to perfection. Truly has it been said that her laughter is as infectious as her sympathy. The ready tear which springs to the eye at the misfortunes of the Count de Neipperg is as spontaneous and as moving as the victorious smile with which she drives home her sallies against Caroline, Queen of Naples. If she misses some of that wily petulance which belongs to Parisian gaminerie, she more than makes amends by the downright straightforwardness, the rich flow of humour, and the disinterested kindness which enter so largely into the composition of Lefebvre's plebeian and lovable wife. Madame Sans-Gêne is undoubtedly one of Ellen Terry's happiest creations. On the first of January 1898, Laurence Irving's ambitious, interesting, and in many respects powerful play, "Peter the Great," was produced at the Lyceum. It was essentially "a man's play," and as the Empress Catherine, Ellen Terry had few chances. Nevertheless she acted very finely, and the portrait worthily fills a place in her well-stocked gallery. She had already appeared with much success in America in a short piece by the same author, entitled "Godefroi and Yolande." This had a magnificent first-night reception, and she has told me how, when the curtain fell, Henry Irving stepped forward, and in a few graceful words thanked the applauding audience for the approval with which his son's work had been greeted. "The Medicine Man," the joint work of H. D. Traill and Robert Hichens, which succeeded "Peter the Great," proved a great disappointment, and Ellen Terry's appearance as Sylvia Wynford need only be mentioned for purposes of record. In the April of 1899 Laurence Irving was again to the fore with his excellent English version of Victorien Sardou's striking play, "Robespierre." In the character of Clarice de Malucon, Ellen Terry had not one of her greatest opportunities, but she acted with her unvarying and invincible charm, and at once arrested and held the sympathy of her audiences. It was a sweet and womanly performance. Her one great scene came with Henry Irving, and superbly they both played it. It is, indeed, intensely dramatic. Robespierre discovers the terrible fact that Clarice's boy, Olivier, whom he has condemned to the guillotine, is his own son; and then his one frenzied idea is to save his life. But, Dictator though he is, he is surrounded by traitors and suspects; he already knows that his own life trembles in the balance; the task is a difficult one, and Olivier obstinately refuses to accept any favour at his hated hands. Then follows a scene in which the distracted father and mother (for after long years of separation and silence they are now together again) watch the ghastly tumbrils as they drag their victims to the guillotine, trembling lest in one of them they should see their doomed child. During these heartrending moments of suspense Ellen Terry was assuredly seen at her best. Henry Irving's triumph as Robespierre was emphatic. [Illustration: _Photograph by_ [_Window & Grove._ ELLEN TERRY AS "VOLUMNIA." _In the Lyceum revival of "Coriolanus," 1901._ [_To face page 292._ ] On April 15, 1901, the long promised production of "Coriolanus" was staged at the Lyceum. As long ago as 1879 Henry Irving had announced his intention of appearing as the noble Roman in company with Ellen Terry as Volumnia. At that time a writer said:-- "Some surprise may, perhaps, be felt at the circumstance that it is in contemplation to assign the character of Volumnia to Ellen Terry; but the part is by tradition, and by reason of its intrinsic importance, the lawful inheritance of the leading tragic actress of the company. It was one of Mrs. Siddons' famous impersonations, though it was complained she had not the good sense to follow Mrs. Woffington's example as to her face, and consequently was on the stage as off, Kemble's sister, not his mother. No doubt a resolute conscientious employment of the arts which suggest the autumn of life will be needed to enable Ellen Terry to enact Henry Irving's mother, but the part is a very fine one, and there can be no question that in the hands of this actress the great scene of the fifth act, in which the Roman mother's eloquent and impassioned pleading finally moves the proud heart of her son, would, in her hands, produce a powerful impression." Now time has dealt so tenderly with our charming actress that there was as much need of this suggested "making up" in 1901 as there had been in 1879; but she had the good sense not to overdo it. There was no more reason why the mother of Coriolanus should be a very old woman than there was for Mr. Vincent Crummles to convert himself into a decrepit octogenarian when he was called upon _in loco parentis_ to bestow the fair hand of Miss Henrietta Petowker in marriage to Mr. Lillyvick. The consequence was that, acting the part with impressive composure, save where intense vigour was demanded, she made such a stately figure as the handsome Roman matron that she became a treat to the eye as well as to the ear. For the rest she completely fulfilled the predictions of the writer of 1879, being admirable throughout, and especially so in that grand scene to which he alluded. She played in a more womanly and gentle vein than was the custom with her distinguished predecessors in the part, but the performance was none the less welcome or telling on that account. What a wonderful list of impersonations--from the prattling Mamillius to the dignified Volumnia! Has any other actress achieved so much? CHAPTER XIV ENDINGS I cannot conclude this volume before recording the personal impressions that Ellen Terry has made upon me. It will be feebly done, for what writer could pen a true word picture of such a beneficently radiant creature? I am, from my friendship with her, fully justified in saying (she would call this one of the fancies of my book, but I know that it is a fact!) that her chief delights in life are, in the first place, her power of making her friends and her associates happy; in the second place, her own joy in existence. When with her even the most depressed spirit is buoyed up. Her quick sympathy and ready interest in the concerns of all with whom she comes into contact brings sunshine into their lives. In common with us all she has had her troubles and anxieties, and upon her the effect has been to create a keen and ever active desire to alleviate the distresses and difficulties of others. Hand in hand with her go encouragement and consolation. A word of sympathy from her, coupled with a look from those earnest, eloquent eyes, is the best tonic in the world. And while she can weep with those who weep, she can rejoice with those who rejoice--and she loves to rejoice. It may very safely be said that she never uttered an ill-natured word concerning a fellow-creature. "Why should I?" she says, when taxed with this somewhat unusual trait in her character. "All the world seems to say kind things about me. I am happy in knowing it, and thus I love the world and all who live upon it. Why shouldn't I?" There certainly is no reason for it, and she may be convinced that those who have seen her in the world love her. Apart from this general, generous, and genial affection for humankind, her devotion is centred in her son and daughter. Very pretty it is to see her motherly pride in their successes, whether histrionic or artistic. Happily, her tender solicitude is well rewarded. Both Gordon and Ailsa Craig are making names for themselves, and doing work of which any parent might well be proud. Very vividly she recalls her childish days, and, with a sympathetic friend, she is by no means averse to talking of them. It is as pleasant as it is touching to hear her conjure up memories of her own parents and to note the true respect, added to the heartfelt affection, with which she talks of them. I use the word "respect" advisedly, because, in these days (and more's the pity), filial "respect" seems to belong to the past. Possibly, it is as much the fault of parents as of children, but in any case it is a thing to be deplored. Of course, Ellen Terry's first stage recollection is her appearance as the infant Mamillius, when she saw "the Queen Victoria, the Prince Consort, the Princess Royal, and the Prince of Wales" in the royal box, and was, as a matter of consequence, so awestruck that she could hardly articulate her words. She played this part for one hundred and two nights without a break--a marvellous record for so young a child. This long run of "The Winter's Tale" showed that even in the "fifties," when long runs were almost unknown, a Shakespearean play, faultlessly staged, and admirably acted, could attract a prolonged succession of audiences. During their engagement with the Charles Keans, she tells me (by the way, she is never tired of singing the praises of Mrs. Kean), she and her sister Kate studied--ay, and carefully studied--all the feminine characters of each play they acted in. This fact she tries to impress on the countless young ladies who want to adopt acting as a profession, and who apply to her for advice. "What do you know?--what have you studied?" she asks them. "Could you, for example, undertake to play Hero to a Beatrice; Nerissa to a Portia; or Celia to a Rosalind?" Their almost invariable reply is that they have studied nothing--that they have only an ambition to "go on the stage." Then she will advise them to devote themselves to learning and understanding such parts in case an opportunity should come in their way. Poor young ladies! I don't suppose they like such advice, for assuredly they all want to begin as Beatrice, Portia, or Rosalind. Neither, I am sure, are they aware that they lacerate the tender heart of the great actress because she feels she can do nothing for them. No one knows better than Ellen Terry that life-long devotion to her art is the only way by which a true actress can reach the goal of her ambition, and there maintain her place. She maintains, moreover, that she should be taught to turn her hand to anything. "When I played Titania at Bath," she says with a laugh, "I made my own dress. It was long, and of transparent, clinging white, all 'crinkled' by washing and wringing." She limns a pretty little sketch of herself as she set forth with her father to seek her engagement with Mademoiselle Albina di Rhona at the Royalty Theatre. "I borrowed Kate's new bonnet--pink silk, trimmed with black lace--and was engaged _at once_. I thought I looked nice in that bonnet, and father said pink was my colour." Evidently she thought that her bonnet rather than herself had found favour with the manageress. Speaking of her Haymarket engagement she declares that she had no _real_ reason to dislike poor Sothern, and regrets that she ever publicly expressed a feeling with which we are all familiar, and which is best described in the words, "I do not like thee, Dr. Fell." She admits that at this time she was very good as poor, maliciously maligned Hero, but she qualifies this little bit of self-commendation by avowing that she played Lady Touchwood vilely. Merrily she recalls her appearance as Britannia, making her entrance up a trap in a huge pearl which opened to allow her egress. On this occasion King Edward VII. and Queen Alexandra, then, of course, the Prince and Princess of Wales, came to the theatre for the first time since their marriage, and modestly sat in the shadow of a large stage-box. Louise Keeley (afterwards Mrs. Montague Williams) had to sing a song concerning the "Invisible Prince," and by deftly introducing a few improvised lines contrived to let the audience know the state of affairs. Accordingly the uproarious applause of a loyal house stopped the performance until the Royal bride and bridegroom emerged from their obscurity, came to the front of their box, and gracefully and gratefully bowed their thanks. It was an exciting moment for Ellen Terry when, in 1878, Henry Irving asked her to accept an engagement at the Lyceum, to play Ophelia. So far, she had not seen his Hamlet, and to do so she travelled to Birmingham. His beautiful, thoughtful, and always human impersonation at once captivated her. "No other Hamlet," she enthusiastically exclaims, "have I _seen_!--_Not in the same hemisphere!_ And yet I have seen Charles Kean, Fechter, Salvini, and Rossi play the part." Concerning her own successes she is very reticent, but I think I speak the truth when I say that she very properly plumes herself on her immediate triumph as Ophelia, and that she cherishes the lines of the writer who said:-- "Ophelia, then, is an image or personification of innocent, delicious, feminine youth and beauty, and she passes before us in the two phases of sanity and delirium. Ellen Terry presented her in this way. The embodiment is fully within her reach, and it is one of the few unmistakably perfect creations with which dramatic art has illumined literature and adorned the stage. Ellen Terry was born to play such a part, and she is perfect in it. There is no other word for such an achievement." In speaking of her sister artistes she is always generous, and often enthusiastic. She holds that as a pathetic actress there is no one equal to Mrs. Kendal, and she declares that in purely poetic characters her sister Marion is not to be excelled. Indeed, her sympathy with her fellow-workers is unbounded. In this connection a pretty little story has been told by the Baroness von Zedlitz concerning a conversation she had with Ellen Terry with regard to Signora Duse. "Although," said the eager English actress of the great Italian actress, "we cannot talk fluently to each other, we became fast friends on the evening of our first meeting. I had seen her in the 'Dame aux Camélias,' and was so overpowered that I sobbed aloud. She heard that I was present, and asked me after the performance to come and see her on the stage. Our meeting was in accordance with our emotional temperaments. She rushed to me across the stage, and I fell weeping into her arms. The tears were a great relief. I could not have expressed my admiration better than by my tears. Later on we spent many a pleasant hour together, and I came to love her as a sister." But much as she loves her art, and her companions in art, I believe her chief delight exists in the quiet of the country. Every one must have a hobby, and her pleasant pastime is to possess picturesque rural homes that she can call her own. Thus she is the happy proprietress of Tower Cottage, Winchelsea; of Smallhythe Farm, Tenterden; and of Vine Cottage, Kingston Vale. To one or other of these sweet spots, surrounded by fragrant country gardens, she loves to hie herself as often as may be from her beautiful London home in more prosaic Barkston Gardens, and in all her houses her chief aim is to make her friends happy. For what most people would call the luxuries of life she seems to care little, but with regard to its niceties she is pleasingly fastidious. Her furniture must be in the best of taste, her pictures must be truly good, and the books that she cherishes must not only be delicately bound, but "extra illustrated" by her own hand, and adorned with quaint book-plates, for which her clever son Gordon Craig is responsible. Indeed, and as might have been anticipated, refinement is the essence of her existence. So far I have said little of Ellen Terry's successes in America, and, indeed, they have been a repetition of her triumphs in England, but, anxious to be certain of the impression she really created there, I asked my kind friend, William Winter, the distinguished _doyen_ of American critics, to give me his frank opinion. He replies as follows:-- "MY DEAR MR. PEMBERTON,--Your story of Miss Ellen Terry's life, and your estimate of her acting, have not left anything for any one else to say, and yet your kind wish for a tribute from the present writer must not be denied. Observation on this subject has extended over a period of twenty-five years, and first impressions have only been deepened in the lapse of time. The actress is great, but the woman is greater than the actress, and in the final analysis of Miss Terry's acting, it will be found that her enchantment is that of a unique personality. Only to name the characters that she has made her own--the characters in which she is not only unrivalled but unapproachable--is to point directly to this conclusion. Those characters are Ophelia, Portia, Beatrice, Wills' Olivia, and Goethe's Margaret. She has played many other parts, and given great pleasure by the playing of them, and revealed rare qualities of nature and fine faculties of art: in each and every one of these, and in others of slighter fabric and narrower import, her acting has often afforded, if not invariably the ground for unqualified applause, at least the means of enjoyment and always the occasion of thoughtful study; but her revelation of personality, in a natural embodiment of ideal womanhood, has never been so ample as in those five characters just mentioned. She possesses a marvellously blithe spirit, and, in some of her moods, she revels in the exuberance of frivolous humour. With persons of extreme sensibility that trait--an almost hysterical propensity for mirth, as a relief to the strain of serious feeling--is not unusual; but ultimately, she is a woman of passionate heart, of profound tenderness, and of a most ardently poetic imagination. Nature has been more kind to her--more profuse in the liberality of good gifts--than to any other woman on the stage in our time; for it has endowed her with a commanding yet winsome figure; a stately head, mantled with golden hair; a countenance of piquant charm and exquisite mobility; the grey eyes of genius, through which a brave, pure and noble soul looks frankly into the face of all the world; vocal organs of exceptional power; a voice of delicious cadences and melting sweetness; symmetry of person and natural grace of action; and, within the external equipment it has placed a woman's heart to feel; a woman's unerring intuition to perceive; the gipsy's freedom of spirit, that breaks away from all convention; and the poet's kinship with nature, in everything that is grand and beautiful. Her acting has revealed her as more a spirit than a mind; as one who reaches conclusions instantly, by divination and not by analysis; as a wonderful, complex creature of nerves and impulses; wayward in fancy, strange and erratic, yet lovely with simplicity; and always, at last--surviving every vicissitude--the authentic image of goodness and truth. Not improbably the actress believes that she has carefully and deftly reasoned her way to every effect of inspiration that she produced in the mad scene of Ophelia, in Margaret's ecstasy of love, and in Olivia's unspeakably pathetic surrender; but such effects as those are not planned, they happen; like some of Shakespeare's own happiest lines, they rise out of 'Thought's interior sphere' (as Emerson calls it), and they leap, full-statured, into an immortality of beauty. Her embodiments of Beatrice and Portia were more the creatures of design, yet into them also the unpremeditated allurement of her enchanting womanhood found its way, and the wild heart of Beatrice evoked a tender sympathy, and the moral grandeur of Portia--warmed with human passion--entranced the feelings as much as it impressed the mind. Portia, on the stage, had always been didactic and oratorical until Miss Ellen Terry played the part, liberating all its piquant sweetness, alluring loveliness, and passionate ardour; since which time it has been acted as a lover, not as a preacher. More to her than to any one else the stage of to-day owes the benefits accruing from the growth of a natural style in acting--a style which yet does not sacrifice the ideal, nor degrade poetry to the level of prose. This style has been caught up and imitated in every direction--a thing, however intrinsically desirable, that never would have happened but for the magical achievement of her personality, affecting actors no less than auditors, and making her--to use a line from an old poet--'Mistress of Arts, and Hearts, and Everything.' This view might be enforced by particular examination of each of Miss Terry's representative embodiments, but that process--which would require a volume--is impracticable here. Her acting is, of course, irregular and uneven--the under-woods, full of bramble-roses, not the trim garden, with its rows of tulips and beds of moss, but it is all the more potent for that reason. Her first performance in America (October 30, 1883) was that of Queen Henrietta Maria, in Wills' beautiful play of 'Charles I.,' and the dominion that she then established over the public mind in this country has ever since remained unbroken. Her later visits to America were made in 1884, 1886--when she came as a traveller, not to act-1887, 1893, 1895, and 1899; and now, as these words are written--in fervent admiration of rare genius consistently and continually devoted to great subjects and the welfare of society as affected by the arts--she is once more speeding to these shores, where her presence will always be honoured and her memory always cherished.--Faithfully yours, "WILLIAM WINTER. "NEW BRIGHTON, STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK, _October 11, 1901_." To this it is my great privilege to add a letter from that charming lady who, coming to us from America, fascinated us all under her maiden name of Mary Anderson. "THE COURT FARM, BROADWAY, WORCESTERSHIRE, _September 11, 1901_. "DEAR MR. PEMBERTON,--It is delightful to hear you are writing a life of Ellen Terry. I congratulate you upon having such a subject for your next book, and I congratulate her on having you to tell her story, so replete with success--more, with triumph. "My first meeting with her was about eighteen years ago; I had come to England to act, and I was very young and retiring, and I felt strange and very home sick. I went to the Lyceum one night when Sir Henry Irving, then Mr. Irving, was acting in 'The Merchant of Venice.' I thought the Lyceum, like most of the London theatres, did not compare favourably with those of America, either in size, decoration, or comfort; but when the curtain arose on that performance, it was a revelation to me, not only in perfect acting, but in showing me how a play could be staged. I had seen photographs of Ellen Terry (none of which really do her justice), but when she came upon the stage--floating rather than walking--I was enslaved by her grace, her beauty, and her magnetic influence. She seemed to me like a radiant creature from some other sphere; but even she, like everything and everybody during those few weeks in England, seemed far away and very strange. There was a knock at the box door, and there stood the lovely lady herself, with her graceful white hands held out in cordial welcome. Many and dear were her phrases; and her good wishes for my success when I should take possession of the stage upon which she was then acting, rang true, and came from a really generous good will. "In an instant I felt she had drawn aside that sad veil of strangeness. She was indeed the ideal _sister_ artist. I mention this act of hers as it illustrates the kind of kind acts she is ever doing. Her heart is of gold. She has, on the stage as well as off, a fascination for men; but she has more--a power of enkindling real affection and enthusiasm in the hearts of women. No woman has perhaps more loyal and devoted women friends, and this, as far as character and disposition are concerned, is in my estimation the longest and finest feather in her beautifully plumed cap. "Warm greetings to all your home circle from us both. Ever sincerely yours, "MARY ANDERSON DE NAVARRO." Can I add anything to this? I think not. I know that in dealing with books of this description conscientious censors sometimes say they are replete with eulogy, and offer little or no criticism. If I extol Ellen Terry I do so with a clear conscience and a full heart. I can never forget the happy hours and enlightenment she has given me, and I believe that all my fellow-playgoers will think that I have treated my subject from the right point of view. Why should not our great geniuses of art and literature know, whilst they are amongst us, that we appreciate their work, and love them for the sweet lessons that they teach us? Shakespeare, who never went amiss, caused his Hermione to say-- "Our praises are our wages." Happily Ellen Terry is still in the full ripeness of her great and constantly maturing gifts, and no thought of her retirement has yet troubled the lovers and students of the stage. If, in the course of years to come (and may they be far off), she deserts us for her dear country cottages, we might well, in grand chorus, repeat those lovely lines that occur in "Cymbeline"--and, in repeating them, recall the bitter and trembling anxieties that, in order to give us pleasure, she has undergone-- "Fear no more the heat o' the sun, Nor the furious winter's rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone and ta'en thy wages." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Fechter did not discard that soliloquy, but expressed to Lester Wallack, who mentioned it to William Winter, his opinion that the omission of that passage would be advantageous to the movement of the play; and he always spoke it as if it were prose.] [Footnote 2: Here is another proof of a fact I have already emphasised, _i.e._ Ellen Terry's invariable and sweet unselfishness.] [Footnote 3: This was written for, and appeared in, an evening paper.] INDEX Actors, and first nights, 172; fleeting fame of, 5; generosity of, 159; love to die in harness, 6; nervousness of great, 39 Adams, Mr. Davenport, criticism by, 177 Alexander, George, at the Lyceum, 245 Anderson, Mary (Madame de Navarro), letter of, about Ellen Terry, 307 Archer, William, 290 Bancrofts, the, as managers, 146 Belford Benefit at the Lyceum, the, 232 Bernhardt, Sarah, on Irving and Ellen Terry, 288 Betterton, facts about, 23 Blanchard, Edward Leman, criticism of Ellen Terry by, 76 Booth, Edwin, at the Lyceum, 243 Bristol Stock Company, famous members of the, 59, 61 "Broken Hearts," the three Terry sisters in, 206 Buckstone, J. B., and E. A. Sothern, 75 Burbage, facts about, 23 Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, designer of the scenery of "King Arthur," 281; on the "Amber Heart," 259 Byron, H. J., plays by, 154, 202, 212, 213 Calmour, Alfred C., history of his play, "The Amber Heart," 259; letter from Ellen Terry to, 265 "Charles I.," the writing of the play, 227 Chute, Mr. J. H., theatrical company under, 59 "Cinderella," the origin of the tale of, 12 Circuit players in the olden days, 20 Clayton, John, in "A Household Fairy," 136 Coghlan, Charles, as Claude Melnotte, 150; as Shylock, 143 Cole, John William, tribute by, 36 Coleman, John, a memory by, 20 Command performance of "The Bells," &c., 269 Compton, Edward, experiences of, 59; plays in his father's benefit, 159 Compton, Henry, encourages Ellen Terry, 87; benefit for, 153 Conway, H. B., at the Court Theatre, 156 Cook, Mr. Dutton, criticisms by, 32, 148, 161, 166, 220 Coquelin, criticisms of the Lyceum "Madame Sans-Gêne" by, 291; on Ellen Terry, 288, 290 Craig, Gordon, 256, 270, 303 Craig, Miss Ailsa, 256, 272 De Rhona, Madame Albina, at the Royalty Theatre, 53 Dickens, Charles, admiration of, for Fechter, 106; letter of, to Macready, 120, 127 Dramatists, hints to, 7; what they have to aim at, 28 Duse, Signora, and Ellen Terry, 302 Farren, William, at the Haymarket, 87 Fechter, Charles, as Hamlet, 105; facts about, 102; leading lady of, 103 Filon, Augustin, criticism of Ellen Terry by, 286 First nights at the Lyceum, 219 Fitzgerald, Percy, criticisms by, 217, 225. Garrick, David, idiosyncrasies of, 83 Gordon, Walter, facts about, 87 Hare, John, production of "Old Men and New Acres" by, 157; production of "Olivia" by, 163; production of "The House of Darnley" by, 163 Howe, Henry, a memory of, 85; in "King Lear," 276 Irving, Laurence, plays by, 292 Irving, Sir Henry, adverse criticisms of, 212; as Charles I., 226; as Napoleon, 291; as Shylock, 147, 229; attracts the notice of Charles Dickens, 213; criticism of his first night at the Lyceum, 220; criticism of his Hamlet, 223; engages Ellen Terry as leading lady, 217; his first appearance, 209; his first night as King Lear, 273-276; his first success, 3; in his great rôles, 212; in "Werner," 257; modesty of, 217; never forgets old friends, 210; on his rôle of Doricourt, 241; popularity of, 214; Sarah Bernhardt on, 288; the good taste of, 216; twenty-five years ago, 208 Kean, Charles, at the Princess's Theatre, 30, 40; Ben Terry, assistant-manager to, 23; early days of, 22; latter days of, 48; the mounting of his plays, 44; three memories of, 46 Kean, Edmund, facts about, 22; last act of, 47; his appearance as Shylock, 46; the end of his career, 47 Kean, Mrs., as stage-mistress to Ellen Terry, 40, 41 Kelly (Wardell), Charles, as an actor, 137; as Benedick, 188; death of, 256 Kemble, John Philip, facts about, 23 Kemble, Roger, facts about, 19 Kemble, Sarah, marriage of, 22 Kendal, Mrs., on her profession, 27 Kenney, Charles Lamb, benefit for, 161 Knight, Joseph, criticisms by, 147, 168, 201, 223 Lacy, Walter, in "If the Cap Fits," 43 Leathes, Edmund, facts about, 140 Litchfield, Mrs., as "The Captive," 239 Lyceum Company sail for New York, 251 Mackaye, Steele, as Hamlet, 194 Macklin, Charles, on Shylock, 144 M'Cullough, John, a meeting with, 84 Marston, Dr. Westland, views of, on spectacular revivals, 44, 48 Mathews, Frank, in "If the Cap Fits," 43 Molière, the death of, 193 Neville, Henry, as Farmer Allan, 114; his company at the Olympic, 195; supported by Kate Terry, 108 Olympic Theatre, famous cast at the, 109 Queen Victoria's acknowledgments to Irving and Ellen Terry, 270 Queen's Theatre, Longacre, the past of, 133 Reade, Charles, as a playwright, 134 Rignold, William, as Lord Dundreary, 73 Robertson, Forbes, as Lancelot, 283 Robertson, T. W., story of, 28 Rorke, Kate, Ellen Terry's opinion of, 265; first appearance of, 170 Royal entertainments, bills of, 122-126 Ryder, John, as Hubert, 37 Scott, Clement, address written by, 233; criticisms by, 21, 78, 100, 105, 168, 235, 242, 248, 284 Siddons, Henry, facts about, 22 Siddons, Sarah, facts about, 22, 23 Sothern, E. A., as Dundreary, 74; in "The Crushed Tragedian," 203; practical jokes of, 79-82; story of, 39; tribute to, 84 St. James' Theatre, cast under the management of Mr. Alfred Wigan at, 98 Stage, the, according to Mrs. Kendal, 27; fascination of, 1-8; our first enthusiasm for, 10 Stoker, Bram, at the Lyceum, 224 Success, definition of, 49 Tawse, Mr. George, on Ellen Terry's first appearance, 32 Taylor, Tom, letter from, to Mr. Ben Terry, 129 Terriss, William, Ellen Terry and, 169 Terry, Ben, at the Princess's Theatre, 23; career of, 18; family of, the, 21; pen-portrait of, 20 Terry, Daniel, a contemporary of Sir Walter Scott, 14, 15; extracts from Scott's diary about, 16-18 Terry, Ellen, a queen of actresses, 11; and Harley, 41; and her son in "The Dead Heart," 270; and Kate Terry at the Royal Colosseum, Regent's Park, 50; and Macready, 41; and Miss Geneviève Ward in "Becket," 278; and Mrs. Kendal, 61; and Oscar Byrn, 41; appears at the Haymarket, 76; as a pantomime fairy, 40; as Cordelia, 272; as Gertrude in "The Little Treasure," 76; as Irving's Ophelia, 222; as Juliet, 246; as Lady Macbeth, 267; as Lady Teazle, 162; as Letitia Hardy, 241; as Madame Sans-Gêne, 290; as Mamillius, 37; as Margaret in "Faust," 256; as Nance Oldfield, 279; as Olivia, 166; as Philippa Chester, 139; as Portia at the old Prince of Wales', 142, at the Lyceum, 229-231; as Prince Arthur, 40; as Puck, 39; as Viola, 255; as Volumnia, 293; at six years old, 31; at the Court Theatre, 156; at the Queen's Theatre, 132; at the Royalty, 54; Augustin Filon's tribute to, 286; billed for the opening night of the New Theatre Royal, Bath, 70; birth of, 21; Christmas Day, experiences of, 25; Clement Scott on her Beatrice, 248-250; compares the work and pay of past and present actors, 45; comparison between her and Sarah Bernhardt, 289; Coquelin's opinion of, 288; criticism of her Imogen, by Clement Scott, 284-286; criticism of her Olivia, 167; criticism of her Portia, 147-148; dates of her earliest performances, 32; Davenport Adams on Ellen Terry as Beatrice, 177-190; earliest impression of Irving, 136; early criticism of, 37; experiences of, in the Bristol Stock Company, 60; extract from her "Stray Memories," 42; first appearance of, 30, at the Lyceum, 220; first performance with Sir Henry Irving, 135; her criticism of Mrs. Kendal, 301; her criticism of Signora Duse, 302; her first success with Charles Kean, 22; her rôles at the Court Theatre, 156; her rôles at the Haymarket, 88; her touring rôles in 1878, 175; impression created by, in America, 303-307; impressions of her earliest childhood, 24; in "Charles I.," 226; in "Cymbeline," 283; in "Eugene Aram," 226; in "A Household Fairy," 136; in "Godefroi and Yolande," 292; in "Henry VIII.," 271; in "If the Cap Fits," 43; in "Iolanthe," 234; in "King Arthur," 281; in "Masks and Faces," 153; in "Money," 153; in "Our American Cousin," 77-79; in "Ours," 153; in "Peter the Great," 292; in "Ravenswood," 271; in "Robespierre," 292; in "Still Waters Run Deep," 145; in "The Amber Heart," 261-263; in the Bristol Stock Company, 57; in "The Cup," 235; in "The Lady of Lyons," 151; Joseph Knight's tribute to, 147; letter to Mr. Wills, 164; life-long devotion to her art, 299; lovableness of, 42; marriage of, to Mr. Charles Wardell (Charles Kelly), 137; marvellous powers as a child, 34-36; Miss Geneviève Ward's tribute, 42; on nervousness of, on first nights, 38; audiences, 173; on her rôle as Portia, 155; on her Shakespearean triumphs, 190; personal impressions made by, 296-303; plays to Claude Melnotte, 150; preparing for Lady Macbeth, 264; programme of, in 1860, 51; reappears in "The Wandering Heir," 138; reminiscences by, 24. 299-303; reminiscences of, by an actor in the Bristol Company, 61-69; rendering of "The Captive" by, 239; returns to star at Bristol, 73; Sarah Bernhardt on, 288; Shakespearean record of, 153; still with us, 310; time-honoured theatrical name, a, 13; touring with her husband, 171; tribute of, to Charles Reade, 140 Terry, Florence, as Little Nell, 193; brief stage career of, 205-206; death of, 206; in "The Robust Invalid," 193 Terry, Fred, as Sebastian, 255 Terry, Kate, as Dora, 112; as Fechter's leading lady, 103; as Ophelia, 106; at the Adelphi, 111; at the St. James's, 98; bids farewell to the stage as Juliet, 115; demonstration provoked by, 116-118; early criticism of, 37; farewell speech on her retirement, 117; first appearance of, 31; in "Friends or Foes," 99; in "Home for the Holidays," 52; in "Hunted Down," 110; in the Bristol Stock Company, 60; marvellous powers as a child, 34-36; play-bill with her name, under Charles Kean's management, 92-98; plays with Henry Neville, 109; reminiscences of, 66; rôles played by her at the Olympic, 109; the idol of playgoers, 101 Terry, Marion, as Gretchen, 201; Clement Scott on, 195; criticism of her Gretchen, 202; first appearance of, in 1873, 194; her rôles at the Olympic, 195; in "Dan'l Druce, Blacksmith," 196; in "Engaged," 197-200; with Forbes Robertson, 205; with George Alexander, 205; with the Bancrofts, 204 Terry-Lewis, Miss Mabel, in "Ours," 119-120 "The Amber Heart," cast of, 261 Theatrical stock companies, 57 Toole, John L., in "Robert Macaire," 250 Tree, Beerbohm, in "The Amber Heart," 261 "Twelfth Night" at the Lyceum, 252 Vernon, W. H., on the Terry sisters, 73 Vezin, Hermann, as the Vicar of Wakefield, 164 Ward, Miss Geneviève, at the Lyceum, 278, 282; tribute of, to Ellen Terry, 42 Willard, E. S., in "The Amber Heart," 261 Wills, W. G., as a playwright, 162; Ellen Terry's affection for his plays, 164 Winter, William, letter of, about Ellen Terry, 303 Wyndham, Charles, acts with Ellen Terry at the Queen's Theatre, 134; acts with Kate Terry at Manchester, 121 Wyndham, Robert, criticism of Henry Irving by, 211 Yates, Edmund, farce by, 43 THE END Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. Edinburgh & London "The Kendals" BY T. EDGAR PEMBERTON AUTHOR OF "THE LIFE OF SOTHERN," "JOHN HARE," ETC. Demy 8vo, with Portraits and numerous Illustrations. =Price 16s.= EXTRACTS FROM PRESS REVIEWS _OUTLOOK_ "One of the most interesting theatrical records that has been penned for some time." _MORNING ADVERTISER_ "A charming work.... Pithy and well arranged. Turned out with infinite credit to the publishers." _SCOTSMAN_ "It leaves an impression like that of a piece in which the Kendals have played, an impression of pleasure, refinement, refreshment, and of the value of cherishing sweet and kindly feelings in art as in life. Few books can do that, and so this work has every prospect of being widely read." _DRAMATIC WORLD_ "Full of interesting information, delightfully told, and illustrated by a succession of charming photographs." _WESTMINSTER GAZETTE_ "We would recommend this account of the Kendals' art to all who take an interest in the theatre." [_See over_ LONDON: C. ARTHUR PEARSON, LIMITED EXTRACTS FROM PRESS REVIEWS--continued. _BLACK AND WHITE_ "A highly interesting volume.... Mr. Pemberton has done his task well." _MORNING POST_ "To those who are interested in the history of the contemporary stage this volume will be particularly welcome. Mr. Pemberton has collected and grouped his facts with considerable skill, and his story reads easily and consecutively." _GLOBE_ "The author has brought together a number of biographic details not hitherto to be found within the covers of any single publication. The pictorial illustrations, also, are numerous and attractive." _MANCHESTER GUARDIAN_ "This volume should give pleasure and satisfaction to thousands whose happiest theatrical associations are connected with these distinguished and typical artists." _SKETCH_ "An interesting record of hearty, heartful work and well-earned success." _ABERDEEN FREE PRESS_ "Mr. Pemberton has already given us some excellent books, but in this he has produced a biography which is at once charming and fascinating reading." _DAILY TELEGRAPH_ "Extremely interesting." _ATHEN�UM_ "The story is well told, and constitutes agreeable reading, and the volume is a pleasing record of artistic achievement." LONDON: C. ARTHUR PEARSON, LIMITED * * * * * +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber Notes: | | | | P.68. 'alchoholic' changed to 'alcoholic' in 'somewhat alcoholic'. | | P.86' 'Ilseworth' changed to 'Isleworth' according to map referenced | | of the area. | | P.109. 'callid' changed to 'called' in 'called "L'Aieule."'. | | P.268. 'beeing' changed to 'being' in 'being deeply interested'. | | Fixed various punctuation. | | Note: underscores to surround _italic text_, and = around | | =bold text=. | | | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
28271	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 28271-h.htm or 28271-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/8/2/7/28271/28271-h/28271-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/8/2/7/28271/28271-h.zip) SEVEN MILES TO ARDEN by RUTH SAWYER Author of _The Primrose Ring_ Illustrated Harper & Brothers Publishers New York & London SEVEN MILES TO ARDEN Copyright, 1915, 1916, by The Curtis Publishing Company Copyright, 1915, 1916, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America Published April, 1916 * * * * * BOOKS BY RUTH SAWYER SEVEN MILES TO ARDEN. Illustrated. Post 8vo THE PRIMROSE RING. Illustrated. Post 8vo HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK * * * * * [Illustration: (See page 220) "Where twin oaks rustle in the wind There waits a lad for Rosalind"] _TO HIMSELF_ _It leads away, at the ring o' day, On to the beckoning hills; And the throstles sing by the holy spring Which the Blessed Virgin fills. White is the road and light is the load, For the burden we bear together. Our feet beat time on the upward climb That ends in the purpling heather. There is spring in the air and everywhere The throb of a life new-born, In mating thrush and blossoming brush, In the hush o' the glowing morn. Our hearts bound free as the open sea; Where now is our dole o' sorrow? The winds have swept the tears we've wept-- And promise a braver morrow. But this I pray as we go our way: To find the Hills o' Heather, And, at hush o' night, in peace to light Our roadside fire together._ CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. THE WAY OF IT 1 II. A SIGN-POST POINTS TO AN ADVENTURE 12 III. PATSY PLAYS A PART 25 IV. THE OCCUPANT OF A BALMACAAN COAT 39 V. A TINKER POINTS THE ROAD 48 VI. AT DAY'S END 64 VII. THE TINKER PLAYS A PART 85 VIII. WHEN TWO WERE NOT COMPANY 106 IX. PATSY ACQUIRES SOME INFORMATION 121 X. JOSEPH JOURNEYS TO A FAR COUNTRY 139 XI. AND CHANCE STAGES MELODRAMA INSTEAD OF COMEDY 153 XII. A CHANGE OF NATIONALITY 165 XIII. A MESSAGE AND A MAP 191 XIV. ENTER KING MIDAS 202 XV. ARDEN 216 XVI. THE ROAD BEGINS ALL OVER AGAIN 231 SEVEN MILES TO ARDEN I THE WAY OF IT Patsy O'Connell sat on the edge of her cot in the women's free ward of the City Hospital. She was pulling on a vagabond pair of gloves while she mentally gathered up a somewhat doubtful, ragged lot of prospects and stood them in a row before her for contemplation, comparison, and a final choice. They strongly resembled the contents of her steamer trunk, held at a respectable boarding-house in University Square by a certain Miss Gibb for unpaid board, for these were made up of a jumble of priceless and worthless belongings, unmarketable because of their extremes. She had time a-plenty for contemplation; the staff wished to see her before she left, and the staff at that moment was consulting at the other end of the hospital. Properly speaking, Patsy was Patricia O'Connell, but no one had ever been known to refer to her in that cold-blooded manner, save on the programs of the Irish National Plays--and in the City Hospital's register. What the City Hospital knew of Patsy was precisely what the American public and press knew, what the National Players knew, what the world at large knew--precisely what Patricia O'Connell had chosen to tell--nothing more, nothing less. They had accepted her on her own scanty terms and believed in her implicitly. There was one thing undeniably true about her--her reality. Having established this fact beyond a doubt, it was a simple matter to like her and trust her. No one had ever thought it necessary to question Patsy about her nationality; it was too obvious. Concerning her past and her family she answered every one alike: "Sure, I was born without either. I was found by accident, just, one morning hanging on to the thorn of a Killarney rose-bush that happened to be growing by the Brittany coast. They say I was found by the Physician to the King, who was traveling past, and that's how it comes I can speak French and King's English equally pure; although I'm not denying I prefer them both with a bit of brogue." She always thought in Irish--straight, Donegal Irish--with a dropping of final g's, a bur to the r's, and a "ye" for a "you." Invariably this was her manner of speech with those she loved, or toward whom she felt the kinship of sympathetic understanding. To those who pushed their inquisitiveness about ancestry to the breaking-point Patsy blinked a pair of steely-blue eyes while she wrinkled her forehead into a speculative frown: "Faith! I can hearken back to Adam the same as yourselves; but if it's some one more modern you're asking for--there's that rascal, Dan O'Connell. He's too long dead to deny any claim I might put on him, so devil a word will I be saying. Only--if ye should find by chance, any time, that I'd rather fight with my wits than my fists, ye can lay that to Dan's door; along with the stubbornness of a tinker's ass." People had been known to pry into her religion; and on these Patsy smiled indulgently as one does sometimes on overcurious children. "Sure, I believe in every one--and as for a church, there's not a place that goes by the name--synagogue, meeting-house, or cathedral--that I can't be finding a wee bit of God waiting inside for me. But I'll own to it, honestly, that when I'm out seeking Him, I find Him easiest on some hilltop, with the wind blowing hard from the sea and never a human soul in sight." This was approximately all the world and the press knew of Patsy O'Connell, barring the fact that she was neighboring in the twenties, was fresh, unspoiled, and charming, and that she had played the ingénue parts with the National Players, revealing an art that promised a good future, should luck bring the chance. Unfortunately this chance was not numbered among the prospects Patsy reviewed from the edge of her hospital cot that day. The interest of the press and the public approval of the National Irish Players had not proved sufficient to propitiate that iron-hearted monster, Financial Success. The company went into bankruptcy before they had played half their bookings. Their final curtain went down on a bit of serio-comic drama staged, impromptu, on a North River dock, with barely enough cash in hand to pay the company's home passage. On this occasion Patsy had missed her cue for the first time. She had been left in the wings, so to speak; and that night she filled the only vacant bed in the women's free ward of the City Hospital. It was pneumonia. Patsy had tossed about and moaned with the racking pain of it, raving deliriously through her score or more of rôles. She had gone dancing off with the Faery Child to the Land of Heart's Desire; she had sat beside the bier in "The Riders to the Sea"; she had laughed through "The Full o' Moon," and played the Fool while the Wise Man died. The nurses and doctors had listened with open-eyed wonder and secret enjoyment; she had allowed them to peep into a new world too full of charm and lure to be denied; and then of a sudden she had settled down to a silent, grim tussle with the "Gray Brother." This was all weeks past. It was early June now; the theatrical season was closed for two months, with no prospects in the booking agencies until August. In the mean time she had eight dollars, seventy-six cents, and a crooked sixpence as available collateral; and an unpaid board bill. Patsy felt sorry for Miss Gibb, but she felt no shame. Boarding-house keepers, dressmakers, bootmakers, and the like must take the risk along with the players themselves in the matter of getting paid for their services. If the public--who paid two dollars a seat for a performance--failed to appear, and box-office receipts failed to margin their salaries, it was their misfortune, not their fault; and others had to suffer along with them. But these debts of circumstance never troubled Patsy. She paid them when she could, and when she could not--there was always her trunk. The City Hospital happened to know the extent of Patsy's property; it is their business to find out these little private matters concerning their free patients. They had also drawn certain conclusions from the facts that no one had come to see Patsy and that no communications had reached her from anywhere. It looked to them as if Patsy were down and out, to state it baldly. Now the Patsys that come to free wards of city hospitals are very rare; and the superintendent and staff and nurses were interested beyond the usual limits set by their time and work and the professional hardening of their cardiac region. "She's not to leave here until we find out just who she's got to look after her until she gets on her feet again, understand"--and the old doctor tapped the palm of his left hand with his right forefinger, a sign of important emphasis. Therefore the day nurse had gone to summon the staff while Patsy still sat obediently on the edge of her cot, pulling on her vagabond gloves, reviewing her prospects, and waiting. "My! but we'll miss you!" came the voice from the woman in the next bed, who had been watching her regretfully for some time. "It's my noise ye'll be missing." And Patsy smiled back at her a winning, comrade sort of smile. "You kind o' got us all acquainted with one another and thinkin' about somethin' else but pains and troubles. It'll seem awful lonesome with you gone," and the woman beyond heaved a prodigious sigh. "Don't ye believe it," said Patsy, with conviction. "They'll be fetching in some one a good bit better to fill my place--ye see, just." "No, they won't; 'twill be another dago, likely--" "Whist!" Patsy raised a silencing finger and looked fearsomely over her shoulder to the bed back of her. Its inmate lay covered to the cheek, but one could catch a glimpse of tangled black hair and a swarthy skin. Patsy rose and went softly over to the bed; her movement disturbed the woman, who opened dumb, reproachful eyes. "I'll be gone in a minute, dear; I want just to tell you how sorry I am. But--sure--Mother Mary has it safe--and she's keeping it for ye." She stooped and brushed the forehead with her lips, as the staff and two of the nurses appeared. "Faith! is it a delegation or a constabulary?" And Patsy laughed the laugh that had made her famous from Dublin to Duluth, where the bankruptcy had occurred. "It's a self-appointed committee to find out just where you're going after you leave here," said the young doctor. Patsy eyed him quizzically. "That's not manners to ask personal questions. But I don't mind telling ye all, confidentially, that I haven't my mind made yet between--a reception at the Vincent Wanderlusts'--or a musicale at the Ritz-Carlton." "Look here, lassie"--the old doctor ruffled his beard and threw out his chest like a mammoth pouter pigeon--"you'll have to give us a sensible answer before we let you go one step. You know you can't expect to get very far with that--in this city," and he tapped the bag on her wrist significantly. Patsy flushed crimson. For the first time in her life, to her knowledge, the world had discovered more about her than she had intended. Those humiliating eight dollars, seventy-six cents, and the crooked sixpence seemed to be scorching their way through the leather that held them. But she met the eyes looking into hers with a flinty resistance. "Sure, 'twould carry me a long way, I'm thinking, if I spent it by the ha'penny bit." Then she laughed in spite of herself. "If ye don't look for all the world like a parcel of old mother hens that have just hatched out a brood o' wild turkeys!" She suddenly checked her Irish--it was apt to lead her into compromising situations with Anglo-Saxon folk, if she did not leash her tongue--and slid into English. "You see, I really know quite a number of people here--rather well--too." "Why haven't they come to see you, then?" asked the day nurse, bluntly. Patsy eyed her with admiration. "You'd never make a press agent--or a doctor, I'm afraid; you're too truthful." "You see," explained the old doctor, "these friends of yours are what we professional people term hypothetical cases. We'd like to be sure of something real." One of Patsy's vagabond gloves closed over the doctor's hand. "Bless you all for your goodness! but the people are more real than you think. Everybody believes I went back with the company and I never bothered them with the truth, you see. I've more than one good friend among the theatrical crowd right here; but--well, you know how it is; if you are a bit down on your luck you keep away from your own world, if you can. There is a girl--just about my own age--in society here. We did a lot for her in the way of giving her a good time when she was in Dublin, and I've seen her quite a bit over here. I'm going to her to get something to do before the season begins. She may need a secretary or a governess--or a--cook. Holy Saint Martin! but I can cook!" And Patsy clasped her hands in an ecstatic appreciation of her culinary art; it was the only one of which she was boastful. "I'll tell you what," said the old doctor, gruffly, "we will let you go if you will promise to come back if--if no one's at home. It's against rules, but I'll see the superintendent keeps your bed for you to-night." "Thank you," said Patsy. She waved a farewell to the staff and the ward as she went through the door. "I don't know where I'm going or what I shall be finding, but if it's anything worth sharing I'll send some back to you all." The staff watched her down the corridor to the elevator. "Gee!" exclaimed the youngest doctor, his admiration working out to the surface. "When she's made her name I'm going to marry her." "Oh, are you?" The voice of the old doctor took on its habitual tartness. "Acute touch of philanthropy, what--eh?" Patricia O'Connell swung the hospital door behind her and stepped out into a blaze of June sunshine. "Holy Saint Patrick! but it feels good. Now if I could be an alley cat for two months I could get along fine." She cast a backward look toward the granite front of the City Hospital and her eyes grew as blue and soft as the waters of Killarney. "Sure, cat or human, the world's a grand place to be alive in." II A SIGN-POST POINTS TO AN ADVENTURE Marjorie Schuyler sat in her own snug little den, her toy ruby spaniel on a cushion at her feet, her lap full of samples of white, shimmering crêpes and satins. She fingered them absent-mindedly, her mind caught in a maze of wedding intricacies and dates, and whirled between an ultimate choice between October and June of the following year. The world knew all there was to know about Marjorie Schuyler. It could tell to a nicety who her paternal and maternal grandparents were, back to old Peter Schuyler's time and the settling of the Virginian Berkeleys. It could figure her income down to a paltry hundred of the actual amount. It knew her age to the month and day. In fact, it had kept her calendar faithfully, from her coming-out party, through the periods of mourning for her parents and her subsequent returns to society, through the rumors of her engagements to half a dozen young leaders at home and abroad, down to her latest conquest. The last date on her calendar was the authorized announcement of her engagement to young Burgeman. Hence the shimmering samples and the relative values of October and June for a wedding journey. And the world knew more than these things concerning Marjorie Schuyler. It knew that she was beautiful, of regal bearing and distinguished manner. An aunt lived with her, to lend dignity and chaperonage to her position; but she managed her own affairs, social and financial, for herself. If the world had been asked to choose a modern prototype for the young, independent American girl of the leisure class, it is reasonably safe to assume it would have named Marjorie Schuyler. As for young Burgeman, the world knew him as the Rich Man's Son. That was the best and worst it could say of him. "I think, Toto," said Marjorie Schuyler to her toy ruby spaniel, "it will be June. There is only one thing you can do with October--a church wedding, chrysanthemums, and oak leaves. But June offers so many possible variations. Besides, that gives us both one last, untrammeled season in town. Yes, June it is; and we'll not have to think about these yet awhile." Whereupon she dropped the shimmering samples into the waste-basket. A maid pushed aside the hangings that curtained her den from the great Schuyler library. "There's a young person giving the name of O'Connell, asking to see you. Shall I say you are out?" "O'Connell?" Marjorie Schuyler raised a pair of interrogatory eyebrows. "Why--it can't be. The entire company went back weeks ago. What is she like--small and brown, with very pink cheeks and very blue eyes?" The maid nodded ambiguously. "Bring her up. I know it can't be, but--" But it was. The next moment Marjorie Schuyler was taking a firm grip of Patsy's shoulders while she looked down with mock disapproval at the girl who reached barely to her shoulder. "Patsy O'Connell! Why didn't you go home with the others--and what have you done to your cheeks?" Patsy attacked them with two merciless fists. "Sure, they're after needing a pinch of north-of-Ireland wind, that's all. How's yourself?" Marjorie Schuyler pushed her gently into a great chair, while she herself took a carved baronial seat opposite. The nearness of anything so exquisitely perfect as Marjorie Schuyler, and the comparison it was bound to suggest, would have been a conscious ordeal for almost any other girl. But Patsy was oblivious of the comparison--oblivious of the fact that she looked like a wood-thrush neighboring with a bird of paradise. Her brown Norfolk suit was a shabby affair--positively clamoring for a successor; the boyish brown beaver--lacking feather or flower--was pulled down rakishly over her mass of brown curls, and the vagabond gloves gave a consistent finish to the picture. And yet there was that about Patsy which defied comparison even with Marjorie Schuyler; moreover--a thrush sings. "Now tell me," said Marjorie Schuyler, "where have you been all these weeks?" Patsy considered. "Well--I've been taking up hospital training." "Oh, how splendid! Are you going over with the new Red Cross supply?" Patsy shook her head. "You see, they only kept me until they had demonstrated all they knew about lung disorders--and fresh-air treatment, and then they dismissed me. I'm fearsome they were after finding out I hadn't the making of a nurse." "That's too bad! What are you going to do now?" An amused little smile twitched at the corners of Patsy's mouth; it acted as if it wanted to run loose all over her face. "Sure, I haven't my mind made--quite. And yourself?" "Oh--I?" Marjorie Schuyler leaned forward a trifle. "Did you know I was engaged?" "Betrothed? Holy Saint Bridget bless ye!" And the vagabond gloves clasped the slender hands of the American prototype and gave them a hard little squeeze. "Who's himself?" "It's Billy Burgeman, son of _the_ Burgeman." "Old King Midas?" "That's a new name for him." "It has fitted him years enough." Patsy's face sobered. "Oh, why does money always have to mate with money? Why couldn't you have married a poor great man--a poet, a painter, a thinker, a dreamer--some one who ought not to be bound down by his heels to the earth for bread-gathering or shelter-building? You could have cut the thongs and sent him soaring--given the world another 'Prometheus Unbound.' As for Billy Burgeman--he could have married--me," and Patsy spread her hands in mock petition. Marjorie Schuyler laughed. "You! That is too beautifully delicious! Why, Patsy O'Connell, William Burgeman is the most conventional young gentleman I have ever met in my life. You would shock him into a semi-comatose condition in an afternoon--and, pray, what would you do with him?" "Sure, I'd make a man of him, that's what. His father's son might need it, I'm thinking." Marjorie Schuyler's face became perfectly blank for a second, then she leaned against the baronial arms on the back of her seat, tilted her head, and mused aloud: "I wonder just what Billy Burgeman does lack? Sometimes I've wondered if it was not having a mother, or growing up without brothers or sisters, or living all alone with his father in that great, gloomy, walled-in, half-closed house. It is not a lack of manhood--I'm sure of that; and it's not lack of caring, for he can care a lot about some things. But what is it? I would give a great deal to know." "If the tales about old King Midas have a thruppence worth of truth in them, it might be his father's meanness that's ailing him." Marjorie Schuyler shook her head. "No; Billy's almost a prodigal. His father says he hasn't the slightest idea of the value of money; it's just so much beans or shells or knives or trading pelf with him; something to exchange for what he calls the real things of life. Why, when he was a boy--in fact, until he was almost grown--his father couldn't trust Billy with a cent." "Who said that--Billy or the king?" "His father, of course. That's why he has never taken Billy into business with him. He is making Billy win his spurs--on his own merits; and he's not going to let him into the firm until he's worth at least five thousand a year to some other firm. Oh, Mr. Burgeman has excellent ideas about bringing up a son! Billy ought to amount to a great deal." "Meaning money or character?" inquired Patsy. Marjorie Schuyler looked at her sharply. "Are you laughing?" "Faith, I'm closer to weeping; 'twould be a lonesome, hard rearing that would come to a son of King Midas, I'm thinking. I'd far rather be the son of his gooseherd, if I had the choosing." She leaned forward impulsively and gathered up the hands of the girl opposite in the warm, friendly compass of those vagabond gloves. "Do ye really love him, _cailin a'sthore_?" And this time it was her look that was sharp. "Why, of course I love him! What a foolish question! Why should I be marrying him if I didn't love him? Why do you ask?" "Because--the son of King Midas with no mother, with no one at all but the king, growing up all alone in a gloomy old castle, with no one trusting him, would need a great deal of love--a great, great deal--" "That's all right, Ellen. I'll find her for myself." It was a man's voice, pitched overhigh; it came from somewhere beyond and below the inclosing curtains and cut off the last of Patsy's speech. "That's funny," said Marjorie Schuyler, rising. "There's Billy now. I'll bring him in and let you see for yourself that he's not at all an object of sympathy--or pity." She disappeared into the library, leaving Patsy speculating recklessly. They must have met just the other side of the closed hangings, for to Patsy their voices sounded very near and close together. "Hello, Billy!" "Listen, Marjorie; if a girl loves a man she ought to be willing to trust him over a dreadful bungle until he could straighten things out and make good again--that's true, isn't it?" "Billy Burgeman! What do you mean?" "Just answer my question. If a girl loves a man she'll trust him, won't she?" "I suppose so." "You know she would, dear. What would the man do if she didn't?" The voice sounded strained and unnatural in its intensity and appeal. Patsy rose, troubled in mind, and tiptoed to the only other door in the den. "'Tis a grand situation for a play," she remarked, dryly, "but 'tis a mortial poor one in real life, and I'm best out of it." She turned the knob with eager fingers and pulled the door toward her. It opened on a dumbwaiter shaft, empty and impressive. Patsy's expression would have scored a hit in farce comedy. Unfortunately there was no audience present to appreciate it here, and the prompter forgot to ring down the curtain just then, so that Patsy stood helpless, forced to go on hearing all that Marjorie and her leading man wished to improvise in the way of lines. "... I told you, _forged_--" Patsy was tempted to put her fingers in her ears to shut out the sound of his voice and what he was saying, but she knew even then she would go on hearing; his voice was too vibrant, too insistent, to be shut out. "... my father's name for ten thousand. I took the check to the bank myself, and cashed it; father's vice-president.... Of course the cashier knew me.... I tell you I can't explain--not now. I've got to get away and stay away until I've squared the thing and paid father back." "Billy Burgeman, did you forge that check yourself?" "What does that matter--whether I forged it or had it forged or saw it forged? I tell you I cashed it, knowing it was forged. Don't you understand?" "Yes; but if you didn't forge it, you could easily prove it; people wouldn't have to know the rest--they are hushing up things of that kind every day." A silence dropped on the three like a choking, blinding fog. The two outside the hangings must have been staring at each other, too bewildered or shocked to speak. The one inside clutched her throat, muttering, "If my heart keeps up this thumping, faith, he'll think it's the police and run." At last the voice of the man came, hushed but strained almost to breaking. To Patsy it sounded as if he were staking his very soul in the words, uncertain of the balance. "Marjorie, you don't understand! I cashed that check because--because I want to take the responsibility of it and whatever penalty comes along with it. I don't believe father will ever tell. He's too proud; it would strike back at him too hard. But you would have to know; he'd tell you; and I wanted to tell you first myself. I want to go away knowing you believe and trust me, no matter what father says about me, no matter what every one thinks about me. I want to hear you say it--that you will be waiting--just like this--for me to come back to when I've squared it all off and can explain.... Why, Marjorie--Marjorie!" Patsy waited in an agony of dread, hope, prayer--waited for the answer she, the girl he loved, would make. It came at last, slowly, deliberately, as if spoken, impersonally, by the foreman of a jury: "I don't believe in you, Billy. I'm sorry, but I don't believe I could ever trust you again. Your father has always said you couldn't take care of money; this simply means you have got yourself into some wretched hole, and forging your father's name was the only way out of it. I suppose you think the circumstances, whatever they may be, have warranted the act; but that act puts a stigma on your name which makes it unfit for any woman to bear; and if you have any spark of manhood left, you'll unwish the wish--you will unthink the thought--that I would wait--or even want you--ever--to come back." A cry--a startled, frightened cry--rang through the rooms. It did not come from either Marjorie or her leading man. Patsy stood with a vagabond glove pressed hard over her mouth--quite unconscious that the cry had escaped and that there was no longer need of muzzling--then plunged headlong through the hangings into the library. Marjorie Schuyler was standing alone. "Where is he--your man?" "He's gone--and please don't call him--that!" "Go after him--hurry--don't let him go! Don't ye understand? He mustn't go away with no one believing in him. Tell him it's a mistake; tell him anything--only go!" While Patsy's tongue burred out its Irish brogue she pushed at the tall figure in front of her--pushed with all her might. "Are ye nailed to the floor? What's happened to your feet? For Heaven's sake, lift them and let them take ye after him. Don't ye hear? There's the front door slamming behind him. He'll be gone past your calling in another minute. Dear heart alive, ye can't be meaning to let him go--this way!" But Marjorie Schuyler stood immovable and deaf to her pleading. Incredulity, bewilderment, pity, and despair swept over Patsy's face like clouds scudding over the surface of a clear lake. Then scorn settled in her eyes. "I'm sorry for ye, sorry for any woman that fails the man who loves her. I don't know this son of old King Midas; I never saw him in my life, and all I know about him is what ye told me this day and scraps of what he had to say for himself; but I believe in him. I know he never forged that check--or used the money for any mean use of his own. I'd wager he's shielding some one, some one weaker than he, too afeared to step up and say so. Why, I'd trust him across the world and back again; and, holy Saint Patrick! I'm going after him to tell him so." For the second time within a few seconds Marjorie Schuyler listened and heard the front door slam; then the goddess came to life. She walked slowly, regally, across the library and passed between the hangings which curtained her den. Her eyes, probably by pure chance, glanced over the shimmering contents of the waste-basket. A little cold smile crept to the corners of her mouth, while her chin stiffened. "I think, Toto," she said, addressing the toy ruby spaniel, "that it will not be even a June wedding," and she laughed a crisp, dry little laugh. III PATSY PLAYS A PART Patsy ran down the steps of the Schuyler house, jumping the last four. As her feet struck the pavement she looked up and down the street for what she sought. There it was--the back of a fast-retreating man in a Balmacaan coat of Scotch tweed and a round, plush hat, turning the corner to Madison Avenue. Patsy groaned inwardly when she saw the outlines of the figure; they were so conventional, so disappointing; they lacked simplicity and directness--two salient life principles with Patsy. "Pshaw! What's in a back?" muttered Patsy. "He may be a man, for all his clothes;" and she took to her heels after him. As she reached the corner he jumped on a passing car going south. "Tracking for the railroad station," was her mental comment, and she looked north for the next car following; there was none. As far as eye could see there was an unbroken stretch of track--fate seemed strangely averse to aiding and abetting her deed. "When in doubt, take a taxi," suggested Patsy's inner consciousness, and she accepted the advice without argument. She raced down two blocks and found one. "Grand Central--and drive--like the devil!" As the door clicked behind her her eye caught the jumping indicator, and she smiled a grim smile. "Faith, in two-shilling jumps like that I'll be bankrupt afore I've my hand on the tails of that coat." And with a tired little sigh she leaned back in the corner, closed her eyes, and relaxed her grip on mind and will and body. A series of jerks and a final stop shook her into a thinking, acting consciousness again; she was out of the taxi in a twinkling--with the man paid and her eyes on the back of a Balmacaan coat and plush hat disappearing through a doorway. She could not follow it as fast as she had reckoned. She balanced corners with a stout, indeterminate old gentleman who blocked her way and insisted on wavering in her direction each time she tried to dodge him. In her haste to make up for those precious lost seconds she upset a pair of twins belonging to an already overburdened mother. These she righted and went dashing on her way. Groups waylaid her; people with time to kill sauntered in front of her; wandering, indecisive people tried to stop her for information; and she reached the gate just as it was closing. Through it she could see--down a discouraging length of platform--a Balmacaaned figure disappearing into a car. "Too late, lady; train's leaving." It was well for Patsy that she was ignorant of the law governing closing gates and departing trains, for the foolish and the ignorant can sometimes achieve the impossible. She confronted the guard with a look of unconquerable determination. "No, 'tisn't; the train guard is still on the platform. You've got to let me through." She emphasized the importance of it with two tight fists placed not overgently in the center of the guard's rotundity, and accompanied by a shove. In some miraculous fashion this accomplished it. The gate clanged at Patsy's back instead of in her face, as she had expected. A bell rang, a whistle tooted, and Patsy's feet clattered like mad down the platform. A good-natured brakeman picked her up and lifted her to the rear platform of the last car as it drew out. That saved the day for Patsy, for her strength and breath had gone past summoning. "Thank you," she said, feebly, with a vagabond glove held out in proffered fellowship. "That's the kindest thing any one has done for me since I came over." "Are ye--" "Irish--same as yourself." "How did ye know?" "Sure, who but an Irishman would have had his wits and his heart working at the same time?" And with a laugh Patsy left him and went inside. Her eye ran systematically down the rows of seats. Billy Burgeman was not there. She passed through to the next car, and a second, and a third. Still there was no back she could identify as belonging to the man she was pursuing. She was crossing a fourth platform when she ran into the conductor, who barred her way. "Smoking-car ahead, lady; this is the last of the passenger-coaches." Patsy had it on the end of her tongue to say she preferred smoking-cars, intending to duck simultaneously under the conductor's arm and enter, willy-nilly. But the words rolled no farther than the tongue's edge. She turned obediently back, re-entering the car and taking the first seat by the door. For this her memory was responsible. It had spun the day's events before her like a roulette wheel, stopping precisely at the remark of Marjorie Schuyler's concerning William Burgeman: "He's the most conventional young gentleman I ever saw in my life. Why, you would shock--" A strange young woman doling out consolation to him in a smoking-car would be anything but a dramatic success; Patsy felt this all too keenly. He was decidedly not of her world or the men and women she knew, who gave help when the need came regardless of time, place, acquaintanceship, or sex. "Faith, he's the kind that will expect an introduction first, and a month or two of tangoing, tea-drinking, and tennis-playing; after which, if I ask his permission, he might consider it proper--" Patsy groaned. "Oh, I hate the man already!" "Ticket!" "Ticket? What for?" "What for? Do you think this is a joy ride?" The conductor radiated sarcasm. Patsy crimsoned. "I haven't mine. I--I was to--meet my--aunt--who had the ticket--and--she must have missed the train." "Where are you going?" "I--I--Why, I was telling--My aunt had the tickets. How would I know where I was going without the tickets?" The conductor snorted. Patsy looked hard at him and knew the time had come for wits--good, sharp O'Connell wits. She smiled coaxingly. "It sounds so stupid, but, you see, I haven't an idea where I am going. I was to meet my aunt and go down with her to her summer place. I--I can't remember the name." Her mouth drooped for the fraction of a second, then she brightened all over. "I know what I can do--very probably she missed the train because she expects to be at the station to meet me--I can look out each time the train stops, and when I see her I can get off. That makes it all right, doesn't it?" And she smiled in open confidence as a sacrificial maiden might have propitiated the dragon. But it was not reciprocated. He eyed her scornfully. "And who pays for the ticket?" "Oh!" Patsy caught her breath; then she sent it bubbling forth in a contagious laugh. "I do--of course. I'll take a ticket to--just name over the stations, please?" The conductor growled them forth: "Hampden, Forestview, Hainsville, Dartmouth, Hudson, Arden, Brambleside, Mayberry, Greyfriars--" "What's that last--Greyfriars? I'll take a ticket to Greyfriars." She said it after the same fashion she might have used in ordering a mutton chop at a restaurant, and handed the conductor a bill. When he had given her the change and passed on, still disgruntled, Patsy allowed herself what she called a "temporary attack of private prostration." "Idiot!" she groaned in self-address. "Ye are the biggest fool in two continents; and the Lord knows what Dan would be thinking of ye if he were topside o' green earth to hear." Whereupon she gripped one vagabond glove with the other--in fellow misery; and for the second time that afternoon her eyes closed with sheer exhaustion. * * * * * The train rumbled on. Each time it stopped Patsy watched the doorway and the window beside her for sight of her quarry; each time it started again she sighed inwardly with relief, glad of another furlough from a mission which was fast growing appalling. She had long since ceased to be interested in Billy Burgeman as an individual. He had shrunk into an abstract sense of duty, and as such failed to appeal or convince. But as her interest waned, her determination waxed; she would get him and tell him what she had come for, if it took a year and a day and shocked him into complete oblivion. She was saying this to herself for the hundredth time, adding for spice--and artistic finish--"After that--the devil take him!" when the train pulled away from another station. She had already satisfied herself that he was not among the leaving passengers. But suddenly something familiar in a solitary figure standing at the far end of the gravel embankment caught her eye; it was back toward her, and in the quick passing and the gathering dusk she could make out dim outlines only. But those outlines were unmistakable, unforgetable. "A million curses on the house of Burgeman!" quoth Patsy. "Well, there's naught for it but to get off at the next station and go back." The conductor watched her get off with a distinct feeling of relief. He had very much feared she was not a responsible person and in no mental position to be traveling alone. Her departure cleared him of all uneasiness and obligation and he settled down to his business with an unburdened mind. Not so Patsy. She blinked at the vanishing train and then at her empty hands, with the nearest she had ever come in her life to utter, abject despair. She had left her bag in the car! When articulate thinking was possible she remarked, acridly, "Ye need a baby nurse to mind ye, Patricia O'Connell; and I'm not sure but ye need a perambulator as well." She gave a tired little stretch to her body and rubbed her eyes. "I feel as if this was all a silly play and I was cast for the part of an Irish simpleton; a low-comedy burlesque--that ye'd swear never happened in real life outside of the county asylums." A headlight raced down the track toward her and the city, and she gathered up what was left of her scattered wits. As the train slowed up she stepped into the shadows, and her eye fell on the open baggage-car. She smiled grimly. "Faith! I have a notion I like brakemen and baggagemen better than conductors." And so it came to pass as the train started that the baggageman, who happened to be standing in the doorway, was somewhat startled to see a small figure come racing toward it out of the dusk and land sprawling on the floor beside him. "A girl tramp!" he ejaculated in amazement and disgust, and then, as he helped her to her feet, "Don't you know you're breaking the law?" She laughed. "From the feelings, I thought it was something else." She sobered and turned on him fiercely. "I want ye to understand I've paid my fare on the train out, which entitled me to one continuous passage--_with my trunk_. Well, I'm returning--_as my trunk_, I'll take up no more room and I'll ask no more privileges." "That may sound sensible, but it's not law," and the man grinned broadly. "I'm sorry, miss, but off you go at the next station." "All right," agreed Patsy; "only please don't argue. Sure, I'm sick entirely of arguing." She dropped down on a trunk and buried her face in her hands. The baggageman watched her, hypnotized with curiosity and wonder. At the next station he helped her to drop through the opening she had entered, and called a shamefaced "good-by" after her in the dusk. She hunted up the station-agent and received scanty encouragement: Very likely he had seen such a man; there were many of that description getting off every day. They generally went to the Inn--Brambleside Inn. The season was just open and society people were beginning to come. No, there was no conveyance. The Inn's 'buses did not meet any train after the six-thirty from town, unless ordered especially by guests. Was she expected? Patsy was about to shake her head when a roadster swung around the corner of the station and came to a dead stop in front of where she and the station-master were standing. The driver peered at her through his goggles in a questioning, hesitating manner. "Is this--are you Miss St. Regis?" he finally asked. "Miriam St. Regis?" Patsy intended it for a question, realizing even as she spoke the absurdity of inquiring the name of an English actress at such a place. But the driver took it for a statement of identity. "Yes, of course, Miss Miriam St. Regis. Mr. Blake made a mistake and thought because your box came from town you'd be coming that way. It wasn't until your manager, Mr. Travis, telephoned half an hour ago that he realized you'd be on that southbound train. Awfully sorry to have kept you waiting. Step right in, please." Whereupon the driver removed himself from the roadster, assisted her to a seat, covered her with a rug--for early June evenings can be rather sharp--and the next moment Patsy found herself tearing down a stretch of country road with the purr of a motor as music to her ears. "Sure, I don't know who wrote the play and starred me in it," she mused, dreamily, "but he certainly knows how to handle situations." For the space of a few breaths she gave herself over completely to the luxury of bodily comfort and mental inertia. It seemed as if she would have been content to keep on whirling into an eternity of darkness--with a destination so remote, and a mission so obscure, as not to be of the slightest disturbance to her immediate consciousness. All she asked of fate that moment was the blessedness of nothing; and for answer--her mind was jerked back ruthlessly to the curse of more complexities. The lights of a large building in the distance reminded her there was more work for her wits before her and no time to lose. "I must think--think--think, and it grows harder every minute. If Miriam St. Regis is coming here, it means, like as not, she's filling in between seasons, entertaining. Well, until she comes, they're all hearty welcome to the mistake they've made. And afterward--troth! there'll be a corner in her room for me the night, or Saint Michael's a sinner; either way, 'tis all right." The driver unbundled her and helped her out as courteously as he had helped her in. He led the way across a broad veranda to the main entrance, and there she fell behind him as he pushed open the great swinging door. "Oh, that you, Masters? Did Miss St. Regis come?" "Sure thing, sir; she's right here." The next moment Patsy stood in a blaze of lights between a personally conducting chauffeur and a pompous hotel manager, who looked down upon her with distrustful scrutiny. She was wholly aware of every inch of her appearance--the shabbiness of her brown Norfolk suit, the rakishness of her boyish brown beaver hat, and the vagabond gloves. But of what value is the precedent of having been found hanging on the thorn of a Killarney rose-bush by the Physician to the King, of what value is the knowledge of past kinship with a certain Dan O'Connell, if one allows a little matter of clothes to spoil one's entrance and murder one's lines? The blood came flushing back into Patsy's cheeks, turning them the color of thorn bloom, and her eyes deepened to the blue of Killarney, sparkling as when the sun goes a-dancing. She smiled--a fresh, radiant, witching smile upon that clay lump of commercialism--until she saw his appraisement of her treble its original figure. Then she said, sweetly: "I have had rather a hard time getting here, Mr. Blake; making connections in your country is not always as simple as one might expect. My room, please." And with an air of a grand duchess Patsy O'Connell, late of the Irish National Players, Dublin, and later of the women's free ward of the City Hospital, led the way across one of the most brilliant summer hotel foyers in America. As she entered the elevator a young man stepped out--a young man with a small, blond, persevering mustache, a rather thin, esthetic, melancholy face, and a myopic squint. He wore a Balmacaan of Scotch tweed and carried a round, plush hat. Patsy turned to the bell-boy. "Did that man arrive to-night?" "Yes, miss; I took him up." "What is his name--do you know?" "Can't say, miss. I'll find out, if you like." "There is no need. I rather think I know it myself." And under her breath she ejaculated, "Saint Peter deliver us!" IV THE OCCUPANT OF A BALMACAAN COAT Safe in her room, with the door closed and locked, Patsy stood transfixed before a trunk--likewise closed and locked. "Thank Heaven for many blessings!" she said, fervently. "Thank Heaven Miriam St. Regis has worn wigs of every conceivable color and style on the stage, so there is small chance of any one here knowing the real color of her hair. Thank Heaven she's given to missing her engagements and not wiring about it until the next day. Thank Heaven I've played with her long enough to imitate her mannerisms, and know her well enough to explain away the night, if the need ever comes. Thank Heaven that George Travis is an old friend and can help out, if I fail. Thank Heaven for all of these! But, holy Saint Patrick! how will I ever be getting inside that box?" On the heels of her fervor came an inspiration. Off came her gloves and hat, off came coat and skirt, blouse and shoes, and into the closet they all went. For, whereas Patsy could carry off her shabbiness before masculine eyes, she had neither the desire nor the fortitude to brave the keener, more critical gaze of her own sex. It was always for the women that Patsy dressed, and above all else did she stand in awe of the opinion of the hotel chambermaid, going down in tottering submission before it. Unlocking her door, she rang the bell; then crept in between the covers of her bed, drawing them up about her. The chambermaid came and Patsy ordered the housekeeper. The housekeeper came and Patsy explained to her the loss of her bag--the loss of the keys was only implied; it was a part of Patsy's creed of life never to lie unless cornered. She further implied that she was entertaining no worry, as a well-appointed hotel always carried a bunch of skeleton trunk keys for the convenience of their guests. Patsy's inspiration worked to perfection. In a few minutes the Inn had proved itself a well-appointed hostelry, and the trunk stood open before her. Alone again, she slipped out of bed--to lock the door and investigate. A wistaria lounging-robe was on in a twinkling, with quilted slippers to match. Then Patsy's eager fingers drew forth a dark emerald velvet, with bodice and panniers of gold lace, and she clasped it ecstatically in her arms. "Miriam always had divine taste, but the faeries must have guided her hand for the choosing of this. Sure, I'd be feeling like a king's daughter if I wasn't so weak and heartsick. I feel more like a young gosling that some one has coaxed out of its shell a day too soon. Is it the effect of Billy Burgeman, I wonder, or the left-overs from the City Hospital, or an overdose of foolishness--or hunger, just?" "Miss St. Regis" dined in her own room, and she dined like a king's daughter, with an appetite whetted by weeks of convalescing, charity fare. Even the possible appearance at any minute of her original self offered no terrors for her in the presence of such a soul-satisfying, hunger-appeasing feast. * * * * * At nine-thirty that evening, when the manager sent the hall-boy to call her, she looked every inch the king's daughter she had dined. The hall-boy, accustomed to "creations," gave her a frank stare of admiration, which Patsy noted out of the tail of her eye. She was ravishing. The green and gold brought out the tawny red glint of her hair, which was bound with two gold bands about the head, ending in tiny emerald clasps over the barely discoverable tips of her ears; little gold shoes twinkled in and out of the clinging green as she walked. "Faith! I feel like a whiff of Old Ireland herself," was Patsy O'Connell's subconscious comment as "Miss St. Regis" crossed the stage; and something of the feeling must have been wafted across the footlights to the audience, for it drew in its breath with a little gasp of genuine appreciation. She heard it and was grateful for the few seconds it gave her to look at the program the manager had handed her as she was entering. It had never occurred to her that Miss St. Regis might arrange her program beforehand, that the audience might be expecting something definite and desired in the form of entertainment. It took all the control of a well-ordered Irish head to keep her from bolting for the little stage door after one glance at the paper. Her eye had caught the impersonation of two American actresses she had never seen, the reading of a Hawaiian love poem she had never heard of, and scenes from two plays she had never read. It was all too deliciously, absurdly horrible for words; and then Patsy O'Connell geared up her wits, as any true kinswoman of Dan's should. In a flash there came back to her what the company had done once when they were playing one-night stands and the wrong scenery had come for the play advertised. It was worth trying here. "Dear people," said Patsy O'Connell-St. Regis, smiling at the audience as one friend to another, "I have had so many requests from among you--since I made out my program--to give instead an evening of old Irish tales, that I have--capitulated; you shall have your wish." The almost unbelievable applause that greeted her tempted her to further wickedness. "Very few people seem ever to remember that I had an Irish grandfather, Denis St. Regis, and that I like once in a while to be getting back to the sod." There was something so hypnotic in her intimacy--this taking of every one into her confidence--that one budding youth forgot himself entirely and naïvely remarked, "It's a long way to Tipperary." That clinched her success. She might have chanted "Old King Cole" and reaped a houseful of applause. As it was, she turned faery child and led them all forth to the Land of Faery--a world that neighbored so close to the real with her that long ago she had acquired the habit of carrying a good bit of it about with her wherever she went. It was small wonder, therefore, that, at the end of the evening, when she fixed upon a certain young man in the audience--a man with a persevering mustache, an esthetic face, and a melancholy, myopic squint--and told the last tale to him direct, that he felt called upon to go to her as she came down the steps into the ball-room and express his abject, worshipful admiration. "That's all right," Patsy cut him short, "but--but--it would sound so much nicer outside, somewhere in the moonlight--away from everybody. Wouldn't it, now?" This sudden amending of matter-of-factness with arch coquetry would have sounded highly amusing to ears less self-atuned than the erstwhile wearer of the Balmacaan. But he heard in it only the flattering tribute to a man chosen of men; and the hand that reached for Patsy's was almost masterful. "Oh, would you really?" he asked, and he almost broke his melancholy with a smile. "It must be my clothes," was her mental comment as he led her away; "they've gone to my own head; it's not altogether strange they've touched his a bit. But for a man who's forged his father's name and lost the girl he loved and then plunged into mortal despair, he's convalescing terribly fast." They had reached a quiet corner of the veranda. Patsy dropped into a chair, while her companion leaned against a near-by railing and looked down at her with something very like a soulful expression. "I might have known all along," Patsy was thinking, "that a back like that would have a front like this. Sure, ye couldn't get a real man to dress in knee-length petticoats." And then, to settle all doubts, she faced him with grim determination. "I let you bring me here because I had something to say to you. But first of all, did you come down here to-night on that five-something train from New York?" The man nodded. "Did you get to the train by a Madison Avenue car, taken from the corner of Seventy-seventh Street, maybe?" "Why, how did you know?" The melancholy was giving place to rather pleased curiosity. "How do I know!" Patsy glared at him. "I know because I've followed you every inch of the way--followed you to tell you I believed in you--you--you!" and her voice broke with a groan. "Oh, I say, that was awfully good of you." This time the smile had right of way, and such a flattered, self-conscious smile as it was! "You know everybody takes me rather as a joke." "Joke!" Patsy's eyes blazed. "Well, you're the most serious, impossible joke I ever met this side of London. Why, a person would have to dynamite his sense of humor to appreciate you." "I don't think I understand." He felt about in his waistcoat pocket and drew forth a monocle, which he adjusted carefully. "Would you mind saying that again?" Patsy's hands dropped helplessly to her lap. "I couldn't--only, after a woman has trailed a man she doesn't know across a country she doesn't know to a place she doesn't know--and without a wardrobe trunk, a letter of credit, or a maid, just to tell him she believes in him, he becomes the most tragically serious thing that ever happened to her in all her life." "Oh, I say, I always thought they were pretty good; but I never thought any one would appreciate my poetry like that." "Poetry! Do you--do that, too?" "That's all I do. I am devoting my life to it; that's why my family take me a little--flippantly." A faint streak of hope shot through Patsy's mind. "Would you mind telling me your name?" "Why, I thought you knew. I thought you said that was why you wanted to--to--Hang it all! my name's Peterson-Jones--Wilfred Peterson-Jones." Patsy was on her feet, clasping her hands in a shameless burst of emotion while she dropped into her own tongue. "Oh, that's a beautiful name--a grand name! Don't ye ever be changing it! And don't ye ever give up writing poetry; it's a beautiful pastime for any man by that name. But what--what, in the name of Saint Columkill, ever happened to Billy Burgeman!" "Billy Burgeman? Why, he came down on the train with me and went back to Arden." Patsy threw back her head and laughed--laughed until she almost feared she could not stop laughing. And then she suddenly became conscious of the pompous manager standing beside her, a yellow sheet of paper in his hand. "Will you kindly explain what this means?" and he slapped the paper viciously. "I'll try to," said Patsy; "but will you tell me just one thing first? How far is it to Arden?" "Arden? It's seven miles to Arden. But what's that got to do with this? This is a wire from Miss St. Regis, saying she is ill and will be unable to fill her engagement here to-night! Now, who are you?" "I? Why, I'm her understudy, of course--and--I'm--so happy--" Whereupon Patricia O'Connell, late of the Irish National Players and later of the women's free ward of the City Hospital, crumpled up on the veranda floor in a dead faint. V A TINKER POINTS THE ROAD The Brambleside Inn lost one of its guests at an inconceivably early hour the morning after Patsy O'Connell unexpectedly filled Miss St. Regis's engagement there. The guest departed by way of the second-floor piazza and a fire-escape, and not even the night watchman saw her go. But it was not until she had put a mile or more of open country between herself and the Inn that Patsy indulged in the freedom of a long breath. "After this I'll keep away from inns and such like; 'tis too wit-racking to make it anyways comfortable. I feel now as if I'd been caught lifting the crown jewels, instead of giving a hundred-guinea performance for the price of a night's bed and board and coming away as poor as a tinker's ass." A smile caught at the corners of her mouth--a twitching, memory smile. She was thinking of the note she had left folded in with the green-and-gold gown in Miriam St. Regis's trunk. In it she had stated her payment of one Irish grandfather by the name of Denis--in return for the loan of the dress--and had hoped that Miriam would find him handy on future public occasions. Patsy could not forbear chuckling outright--the picture of anything so unmitigatedly British as Miriam St. Regis with an Irish ancestor trailing after her for the rest of her career was too entrancing. An early morning wind was blowing fresh from the clover-fields, rose-gardens, and new-leafed black birch and sassafras. Such a well-kept, clean world of open country it looked to Patsy as her eye followed the road before her, on to the greening meadows and wooded slopes, that her heart joined the chorus of song-sparrow and meadow-lark, who sang from the sheer gladness of being a live part of it all. She sighed, not knowing it. "Faith! I'm wishing 'twas more nor seven miles to Arden. I'd like to be following the road for days and days, and keeping the length of it between Billy Burgeman and myself." Starting before the country was astir, she had met no one of whom she could inquire the way. A less adventuresome soul than Patsy might have sat herself down and waited for direction; but that would have meant wasting minutes--precious minutes before the dawn should break and she should be no longer sole possessor of the road and the world that bounded it. So Patsy chose the way for herself--content that it would lead her to her destination in the end. The joy of true vagabondage was rampant within her: there was the road, urging her like an impatient comrade to be gone; there was her errand of good-will giving purpose to her journey; and the facts that she was homeless, penniless, breakfastless, a stranger in a strange country, mattered not a whit. So thoroughly had she always believed in good fortune that somehow she always managed to find it; and out of this she had evolved her philosophy of life. "Ye see, 'tis this way," she would say; "the world is much like a great cat--with claws to hide or use, as the notion takes it. If ye kick and slap at it, 'twill hump its back and scratch at ye--sure as fate; but if ye are wise and a bit patient ye can have it coaxed and smoothed down till it's purring to make room for ye at any hearthside. And there's another thing it's well to remember--that folks are folks the world over, whether they are wearing your dress and speaking your tongue or another's." And as Patsy was blessed in the matter of philosophy--so was she blessed in the matter of possessions. She did not have to own things to possess them. There was no doubt but that Patsy had a larger share of the world than many who could reckon their estates in acreage or who owned so many miles of fenced-off property. She held a mortgage on every inch of free roadway, rugged hilltop, or virgin forest her feet crossed. She claimed squatters' rights on every bit of shaded pasture, or sunlit glade, or singing brook her heart rejoiced in. In other words, everything outside of walls and fences belonged to her by virtue of her vagabondage; and she had often found herself pitying the narrow folk who possessed only what their deeds or titles allotted to them. And yet never in Patsy's life had she felt quite so sure about it as she did this morning, probably because she had never before set forth on a self-appointed adventure so heedless of means and consequences. "Sure, there are enough wise people in the world," she mused as she tramped along; "it needs a few foolish ones to keep things happening. And could a foolish adventuring body be bound for a better place than Arden!" She rounded a bend in the road and came upon a stretch of old stump fencing. From one of the stumps appeared to be hanging a grotesque figure of some remarkable cut; it looked both ancient and romantic, sharply silhouetted against the iridescence of the dawn. Patsy eyed it curiously. "It comes natural for me to be partial to anything hanging to a thorn, or a stump; but--barring that--it still looks interesting." As she came abreast it she saw it was not hanging, however. It was perched on a lower prong of a root and it was a man, clothed in the most absolute garment of rags Patsy had ever seen off the legitimate stage. "From an artistic standpoint they are perfect," was Patsy's mental tribute. "Wouldn't Willie Fay give his Sunday dinner if he could gather him in as he is, just--to play the tinker! Faith! those rags are so real I wager he keeps them together only by the grace of God." As she stopped in front of the figure he turned his head slowly and gazed at her with an expression as far away and bewildered as a lost baby's. In the half-light of the coming day he looked supernatural--a strange spirit from under the earth or above the earth, but not of the earth. This was borne in upon Patsy's consciousness, and it set her Celtic blood tingling and her eyes a-sparkling. "He looks as half-witted as those back in the Old Country who have the second sight and see the faeries. Aye, and he's as young and handsome as a king's son. Poor lad!" And then she called aloud, "'Tis a brave day, this." "Hmm!" was the response, rendered impartially. Patsy's alert eyes spied a nondescript kit flung down in the grass at the man's feet and they set a-dancing. "Then ye _are_ a tinker?" "Hmm!" was again the answer. It conveyed an impression of hesitant doubt, as if the speaker would have avoided, if he could, the responsibility of being anything at all, even a tinker. "That's grand," encouraged Patsy. "I like tinkers, and, what's more, I'm a bit of a vagabond myself. I'll grant ye that of late years the tinkers are treated none too hearty about Ireland; but there was a time--" Patsy's mind trailed off into the far past, into a maze of legend and folk-tale wherein tinkers were figures of romance and mystery. It was good luck then to fall in with such company; and Patsy, being more a product of past romance than present civilization, was pleased to read into this meeting the promise of a fair road and success to her quest. Moreover, there was another appeal--the apparent helpless bewilderment of the man himself and his unreality. He was certainly not in possession of all his senses, from whatever world he might have dropped; and helplessness in man or beast was a blood bond with Patsy, making instant claim on her own abundant sympathies and wits. She held the tinker with a smile of open comradeship while her voice took on an alluring hint of suggestion. "Ye can't be thinking of hanging onto that stump all day--now what road might ye be taking--the one to Arden?" For some minutes the tinker considered her and her question with an exaggerated gravity; then he nodded his head in a final agreement. "Grand! I'm bound that way myself; maybe ye know Arden?" "Maybe." "And how far might it be?" "Seven miles." Patsy wrinkled her forehead. "That's strange; 'twas seven miles last night, and I've tramped half the distance already, I'm thinking. Never mind! What's behind won't trouble me, and the rest of the way will soon pass in good company. Come on," and she beckoned her head in indisputable command. Once again he considered her slowly. Then, as if satisfied, he swung himself down from his perch on the stump fence, gathered up his kit, and in another minute had fallen into step with her; and the two were contentedly tramping along the road. "The man who's writing this play," mused Patsy, "is trying to match wits with Willie Shakespeare. If any one finds him out they'll have him up for plagiarizing." She chuckled aloud, which caused the tinker to cast an uneasy glance in her direction. "Poor lad! The half-wits are always suspicious of others' wits. He thinks I'm fey." And then aloud: "Maybe ye are not knowing it, but anything at all is likely to happen to ye to-day--on the road to Arden. According to Willie Shakespeare--whom ye are not likely to be acquainted with--it's a place where philosophers and banished dukes and peasants and love-sick youths and lions and serpents all live happily together under the 'Greenwood Tree.' Now, I'm the banished duke's own daughter--only no one knows it; and ye--sure, ye can take your choice between playing the younger brother--or the fool." "The fool," said the tinker, solemnly; and then of a sudden he threw back his head and laughed. Patsy stopped still on the road and considered him narrowly. "Couldn't ye laugh again?" she suggested when the laugh was ended. "It improves ye wonderfully." An afterthought flashed in her mind. "After all's said and done, the fool is the best part in the whole play." After this they tramped along in silence. The tinker kept a little in advance, his head erect, his hands swinging loosely at his sides, his eyes on nothing at all. He seemed oblivious of what lay back of him or before him--and only half conscious of the companion at his side. But Patsy's fancy was busy with a hundred things, while her eyes went afield for every scrap of prettiness the country held. There were meadows of brilliant daisies, broken by clumps of silver poplars, white birches, and a solitary sentinel pine; and there was the roadside tangle with its constant surprises of meadowsweet and columbine, white violets--in the swampy places--and once in a while an early wild rose. "In Ireland," she mused, "the gorse would be out, fringing the pastures, and on the roadside would be heartsease and faery thimbles, and perhaps a few late primroses; and the meadow would be green with corn." A faint wisp of a sigh escaped her at the thought, and the tinker looked across at her questioningly. "Sure, it's my heart hungering a bit for the bogland and a whiff of the turf smoke. This exile idea is a grand one for a play, but it gets lonesome at times in real life. Maybe ye are Irish yourself?" "Maybe." It was Patsy's turn to glance across at the tinker, but all she saw was the far-away, wondering look that she had seen first in his face. "Poor lad! Like as not he finds it hard remembering where he's from; they all do. I'll not pester him again." He looked up and caught her eyes upon him and smiled foolishly. Patsy smiled back. "Do ye know, lad, I've not had a morsel of breakfast this day. Have ye any money with ye, by chance?" The tinker stopped, put down his kit, and hunted about in his rags where the pocket places might be; but all he drew forth were his two empty hands. He looked down the stretch of road they had come with an odd twist to his mouth, then he burst forth into another laugh. "Have ye been playing the pigeon, and some one plucked ye?" she asked, and went on without waiting for his answer. "Never mind! We'll sharpen up our wits afresh and earn a breakfast. Are ye handy at tinkering, now?" "You bet I am!" said the tinker. It was the longest speech he had made. * * * * * At the next farm Patsy turned in, with a warning to the tinker to do as he was told and to hold his tongue. It was a thoroughly well-kept-looking farm, and she picked out what she decided must be the side door, and knocked. A kindly-faced, middle-aged woman opened it, and Patsy smiled with the good promise of her looks. "We are two--down on our luck, and strangers hereabouts. Have ye got any tinkering jobs for my man there? He's a bit odd and says little; but he can solder a broken pot or mend a machine with the best. And we'll take out our pay in a good, hearty meal." "There be a pile of dishes in the pantry I've put by till we was goin' to town--handles off and holes in the bottom. He can mend them out on the stoop, if he likes. I've got to help with berry-pickin'; we're short-handed this season." "Are ye, just? Then I'm thinking I'll come in handy." Patsy smiled her smile of winning comradeship as she stooped and picked up a tray of empty berry-boxes that stood by the door; while the woman's smile deepened with honest appreciation. "My! but you are willing folks; they're sometimes scarce 'round here." "Faith, we're hungry folks--so ye best set us quickly to work." They left the tinker on the stoop, surrounded by a heterogeneous collection of household goods. Patsy cast an anxious backward glance at him, but saw that he was rolling up the rags that served for sleeves, thereby baring a pair of brawny, capable-looking arms, while he spread his tools before him after the manner of a man who knows his business. "Fine!" commented Patsy, with an inner satisfaction. "He may be foolish, but I bet he can tinker." They picked berries for an hour or more, and then Patsy turned too and helped the woman get dinner. They bustled about in silence to the accompanying pounding and scraping of the tinker, who worked unceasingly. When they sat down to dinner at last there was a tableful--the woman and her husband, Patsy, the tinker, and the "hands," and before them was spread the very best the farm could give. It was as if the woman wished to pay their free-will gift of service with her unstinted bounty. "We always ask a blessin'," said the farmer, simply, folding his hands on the table, about to begin. Then he looked at Patsy, and, with that natural courtesy that is common to the true man of the soil, he added, "We'd be pleased if you'd ask it." Patsy bowed her head. A little whimsical smile crept to her lips, but her voice rang deep with feeling: "For food and fellowship, good Lord, we thank Thee. Amen!" And she added under her breath, "And take a good grip of the Rich Man's son till we get him." * * * * * The late afternoon found them back on the road once more. They parted from the farmer and his wife as friend parts with friend. The woman slipped a bundle of food--bread, cheese, and meat left from the dinner, with a box of berries--into Patsy's hand, while the man gave the tinker a half-dollar and wished him luck. Patsy thanked them for both; but it was not until they were well out of earshot that she spoke to the tinker: "They are good folk, but they'd never understand in a thousand years how we came to be traveling along together. What folks don't know can't hurt them, and 'tis often easier holding your tongue than trying to explain what will never get through another's brain. Now put that lunch into your kit; it may come in handy--who knows? And God's blessing on all kind hearts!" Whereupon the tinker nodded solemnly. They had tramped for a mile or more when they came to a cross-roads marked by a little white church. From the moment they sighted it Patsy's feet began to lag; and by the time they reached the crossing of the ways she had stopped altogether and was gazing up at the little gold cross with an odd expression of whimsical earnestness. "Do ye know," she said, slowly, clasping the hands long shorn of the vagabond gloves--"do ye know I've told so many lies these last two days I think I'll bide yonder for a bit, and see can Saint Anthony lift the sins from me. 'Twould make the rest o' the road less burdensome--don't ye think?" The tinker looked uncomfortably confused, as though this sudden question of ethics or religion was too much for his scattered wits. He dug the toe of his boot in the gravel of the church path and removed his cap to aid the labor of his thinking. "Maybe--" he agreed at last. "An' will I be waitin' for you--or keepin' on?" "Ye'll wait, of course," commanded Patsy. She had barely disappeared through the little white door, and the tinker thrown himself down with his back to the sign-post which marked the roads, when a sorrel mare and a runabout came racing down the road over which they had just come. There were two men in the runabout, both of them tense and alert, their heads craned far in advance of the rest of them, their eyes scanning the diverging roads. "I cal'ate she's gone that way." The driver swung the whip, indicating the road that ran south. "Wall--I cal'ate so, too," agreed the other. "But then again--she mightn't." They reined in and discovered the tinker. "Some one passed this way sence you been settin' there?" they inquired almost in unison. "I don't know"--the tinker's fingers passed hurriedly across his eyes and forehead, by way of seeking misplaced wits--"some one might be almost any one," he smiled, cheerfully. "Look here, young feller, if you're tryin' to be smart--" the driver began, angrily; but his companion silenced him with a nudge and a finger tapped significantly on the crown of his hat. He moderated his tone: "We're after a girl in a brown suit and hat--undersized girl. She was asking the way to Arden. Seen any one of that description?" "What do you want with her?" "Never mind," growled the first man. But the second volunteered meager information, "She's a suspect. Stayed last night in the Inn and this morning a couple of thousand dollars' worth of diamonds is missin'; that's what we want her for." The tinker brightened perceptibly. "Guess she went by in a wagon half an hour ago--that way. I think I saw her," and as the men turned southward down the road marked Arden he called after them, "Better hurry, if you want to catch her; the wagon was going at a right smart pace." He waited for their backs to be turned and for the crack of the whip that lifted the heels of the sorrel above the dashboard before she plunged, then, with amazing speed, of mind as well as of body, he wrenched every sign from the post and pitched them out of sight behind a neighboring stone wall. The dust from departing wheels still filled the air when Patsy stepped out of the cross-roads church, peacefully radiant, and found the tinker sitting quietly with his back against the post. "So ye are still here. I thought ye might have grown tired of my company, after all, and gone on." Patsy laughed happily. "Now do ye know which road goes to Arden?" "Sure," and the tinker joined in her laugh, while he pointed to the straight road ahead, the road that ran west, at right angles to the one the runabout had taken. "Come on, then," said Patsy; "we ought to be there by sundown." She stopped and looked him over for the space of a second. "Ye are improving wonderfully. Mind! ye mustn't be getting too keen-witted or we'll have to be parting company." "Why?" "That's the why!" And with this satisfactory explanation she led the way down the road the tinker had pointed. VI AT DAY'S END Their road went the way of the setting sun, and Patsy and the tinker traveled it leisurely--after the fashion of those born to the road, who find their joy in the wandering, not in the making of a distance or the reaching of a destination. Since they had left the cross-roads church behind Patsy had marked the tinker casting furtive glances along the way they had come; and each time she marked, as well, the flash of a smile that lightened his face for an instant when he saw that the road still remained empty of aught but themselves. "It's odd," she mused; "he hasn't the look of a knave who might fear a trailing of constables at his heels; and yet--and yet his wits have him pestered about something that lies back of him." Once it was otherwise. There was a rising of dust showing on one of the hills they had climbed a good half-hour before. When the tinker saw it he reached of a sudden for Patsy's hand while he pointed excitedly beyond pasture bars ahead to a brownish field that lay some distance from the road. "See, lass, that's sorrel. If you'll break the road along with me I'll show you where wild strawberries grow, lots of 'em!" Her answer was to take the pasture bars at a run as easily as any country-bred urchin. The tinker swung himself after her, an odd wisp of a smile twisting the corners of his mouth, just such a smile as the fool might wear on the road to Arden. The two raced for the sorrel-tops--the tinker winning. When Patsy caught up he was on his knees, his head bare, his eyes sparkling riotously, running his fingers exultantly through the green leaves that carpeted the ground. "See," he chuckled, "the tinker knows somethin' more 'n solder and pots." Patsy's eyes danced. There they were--millions of the tiny red berries, as thick and luscious as if they had been planted in Elysian fields for Arcadian folk to gather. "The wee, bonnie things!" she laughed. "Now, how were ye afther knowing they were here?" The tinker cocked his head wisely. "I know more 'n that; I know where to find yellow lady's-slippers 'n' the yewberries 'n' hummin'-bird nests." She looked at him joyfully; he was turning out more and more to her liking. "Could ye be showing them to me, lad?" she asked. The tinker eyed her bashfully. "Would you--care, then?" "Sure, and I would;" and with that she was flat on the ground beside him, her fingers flying in search of strawberries. So close they lay to the earth, so hidden by the waving sorrel and neighboring timothy, that had a whole county full of constables been abroad they could have passed within earshot and never seen them there. With silence between them they ate until their lips were red and the cloud of dust on the hill back of them had whirled past, attendant on a sorrel mare and runabout. They ate until the road was quite empty once more; and then the tinker pulled Patsy to her feet by way of reminding her that Arden still lay beyond them. "Do ye know," said Patsy, after another silence and they were once more afoot, "I'm a bit doubtful if the banished duke's daughter ever tasted anything half as sweet as those berries on her road to Arden; or, for that matter, if she found her fool half as wise. I'm mortial glad ye didn't fall off that stump this morning afore I came by to fetch ye off." The tinker doffed his battered cap unexpectedly and swept her an astounding bow. "Holy Saint Christopher!" ejaculated Patsy. "Ye'll be telling me ye know Willie Shakespeare next." But the tinker answered with a blank stare, while the far-away, bewildered look of fear came back to his eyes. "Who's he? Does he live 'round here?" he asked, dully. Patsy wrinkled a perplexed forehead. "Lad, lad, ye have me bursting with wonderment! Ye are a rare combination, even for an Irish tinker; but if ye are a fair sample of what they are over here, sure the States have the Old Country beaten entirely." And the tinker laughed as he had laughed once before that day--the free, untrammeled laugh of youth, while he saucily mimicked her Irish brogue. "Sure, 'tis the road to Arden, ye were sayin', and anythin' at all can happen on the way." The girl laughed with him. "And ye'll be telling me next that this is three hundred years ago, and romance and Willie Shakespeare are still alive." Her mind went racing back to the "once-upon-a-time days," the days when chivalry walked abroad--before it took up its permanent residence between the covers of story-books--when poets and saints, kings' sons and--tinkers journeyed afar to prove their manhood in deeds instead of inheritances; when it was no shame to live by one's wits or ask hospitality at any strange door. Ah--those were the days! And yet--and yet--could not those days be given back to the world again? And would not the world be made a merrier, sweeter place because of them? If Patsy could have had her way she would have gone forth at the ring of each new day like the angel in the folk tale, and with her shears cut the nets that bound humanity down to petty differences in creed or birth or tongue. "Faith, it makes one sick," she thought. "We tell our children the tales of the Red Branch Knights--of King Arthur and the Knights of the Grail--and rejoice afresh over the beauty and wonder of them; we stand by the hour worshiping at the pictures of the saints--simple men and women who just went about doing kindness; and we read the Holy Book--the tales of Christ with his fishermen, wandering about, looking for some good deed to do, some helpfulness to give, some word of good cheer to speak; and we pray, 'Father, make us good--even as Thou wert.' And what does it all mean? We hurry through the streets afeared to stop on the corner and succor a stranger, or ashamed to speak a friendly word to a troubled soul in a tram-car; and we go home at night and lock our doors so that the beggar who asked for a bit of bread at noon can't come round after dark and steal the silver." Patsy sighed regretfully--if only this were olden times she would not be dreading to find Arden now and the man she was seeking there. The tinker caught the sigh and looked over at her with a puzzled frown. "Tired?" he asked, laconically. "Aye, a bit heart-tired," she agreed, "and I'm wishing Arden was still a good seven miles away." Whereupon the tinker turned his head and grinned sheepishly toward the south. * * * * * The far-away hills had gathered in the last of the sun unto themselves when the two turned down the main street of a village. It was unquestionably a self-respecting village. The well-tarred sidewalks, the freshly painted meeting-house neighboring the engine-house "No. 1," the homes with their well-mowed lawns in front and the tidily kept yards behind--all spoke of a decency and lawfulness that might easily have set the hearts of the most righteous of vagabonds a-quaking. Patsy looked it carefully over. "Sure, Arden's no name for it at all. They'd better have called it Gospel Center--or New Canaan. 'Twould be a grand place, though, to shut in all the Wilfred Peterson-Joneses, to keep them off the county's nerves--and the rich men's sons, to keep them off the public sympathy. But 'tis no place for us, lad." The tinker shifted his kit from one shoulder to the other and held his tongue. Their entrance was what Patsy might have termed "fit." The dogs of the village were on hand; that self-appointed escort of all doubtful characters barked them down the street with a lusty chorus of growls and snarls and sharp, staccato yaps. There were the children, too, of course; the older ones followed hot-foot after the dogs; the smaller ones came, a stumbling vanguard, sucking speculative thumbs or forefingers, as the choice might be. The hurly-burly brought the grown-ups to windows and doors. "'Hark! hark! the dogs do bark, the beggars are coming to town,'" quoted Patsy, with a grim little smile, and glanced across at the tinker. He was blushing fiercely. "Never mind, lad. 'Tis better being barked into a town than bitten out of it." For answer the tinker stopped and folded his arms sullenly. "I'm not such a fool I can't feel somethin'. Don't you reckon I know the shame it is to be keepin' a decent woman company with these rags--and no wits?" "If I've not misplaced my memory, 'twas myself that chose the company, and 'twas largely on account of those very things, I'm thinking. Do ye guess for a minute that if ye had been a rich man's son in grand clothes--and manners to match--I'd ever have tramped a millimeter with ye?" She smiled coaxingly. "Faith! there's naught the matter with those rags; a king's son might be proud o' them. As for foolishness, I've known worse faults in a man." The tinker winced imperceptibly, and all unconsciously Patsy went on: "'Tis the heart of a man that measures him, after all, and not the wits that crowd his brain or the gold that lines his pockets. Oh, what do the folks who sit snug by their warm hearthsides, knitting their lives into comfortables to wrap around their real feelings and human impulses, ever know about their neighbors who come in to drink tea with them? And what do the neighbors in turn know about them? If I had my way, I'd tumble the whole sit-by-the-fire-and-gossip world out of doors and set them tramping the road to somewhere; 'tis the surest way of getting them acquainted with themselves and the neighbors. For that matter, all of us need it--just once in so often. And so--to the road, say I, with a fair greeting to all alike, be they king's son or beggar, for the road may prove the one's the other afore the journey's done." "Amen!" said the tinker, devoutly, and Patsy laughed. They had stopped in the middle of the street, midway between the church and the engine-house, Patsy so absorbed in her theories, the tinker so absorbed in Patsy, that neither was aware of the changed disposition of their circling escort until a cold, inquisitive nose and a warm, friendly tongue brought them to themselves. Greetings were returned in kind; heads were patted, backs stroked, ears scratched--only the children stood aloof and unconvinced. That is ever the way of it; it is the dogs who can better tell glorious vagabondage from inglorious rascality. "Sure, ye can't fool dogs; I'd be taking the word of a dog before a man's anywhere when it comes to judging human beings." Patsy looked over her shoulder at the children. "Ye have the creatures won over entirely; 'tis myself might try what I could do with the wee ones. If we had the dogs and the childther to say a good word for us--faith! the grown-ups might forget how terribly respectable they were and make us welcome for one night." A sudden thought caught her memory. "I was almost forgetting why I had come. Hunt up a shop for me, lad, will ye? There must be one down the street a bit; and if ye'll loan me some of that half-crown the good man paid for your tinkering, I'd like to be having a New York News--if they have one--along with the fixings for a letter I have to be writing. While ye are gone I'll bewitch the childther." And she did. When the tinker returned she was sitting on the church steps, the children huddled so close about her that she was barely distinguishable in the encircling mass of shingled heads, bobby curls, pigtails and hair-ribbons. Deaf little ears were being turned to parental calls for supper--a state of affairs unprecedented and unbelievable; while Patsy was bringing to an end the tale of Jack, the Irish hero of a thousand and one adventures. "And he married the king's daughter--and they lived happier than ye can tell me--and twice as happy as I can tell ye--in a castle that had a window for every day in the year." "That would make a fine endin' for any lad's story," said the tinker, soberly. "'A window for every day in the year' would mean a whole lot of cheerfulness and sunshine, wouldn't it?" Patsy nodded. "But don't those who take to the road fetch that castle along with them? Sure, there it is"--and her hand swept toward the skyline an encompassing circle about them--"with the sun flooding it from dawn to day's end." She turned to the eager faces about her, waiting for more. "Are ye still there? Faith! what have I been hearing this half-hour but hungry childther being called for tea. 'Twas 'Joseph' from the house across the way, and 'Rebecca' from off yonder, and 'Susie May' from somewhere else. Away with yez all to your mothers!" And Patsy scattered them as if they had been a flock of young sheep, scampering helter-skelter in all directions. But one there was who lagged behind, a little boy with an old, old face, who watched the others go and then crept closer, held by the spell of the tale. He pulled at Patsy's sleeve to gain attention. "I'm--I'm Joseph. Was it true--most of it?" She nodded a reply as solemn as his question, "Aye, as true as youth and the world itself." "And would it come true for another boy--any boy--who went a-tramping off like that? Would he find--whatever he was wishin' for?" And even as he spoke his eyes left hers and went searching for the far-away hills--and what might lie beyond. "Come here, little lad." Patsy drew him to her and put two steadying hands on his shoulders. She knew that he, too, had heard the call of the road and the longing to be gone--to be one with it, journeying to meet the mysterious unknown--was upon him. "Hearken to me: 'Tis only safe for a little lad to be going when he has three things to fetch with him--the wish to find something worth the bringing home, the knowledge of what makes good company along the way, and trust in himself. When ye are sure of these, go; but ye'll no longer be a little lad, I'm thinking. And remember first to get the mother's blessing and 'God-speed,' same as Jack; a lad's journey ends nowhere that begins without that." He went without a word, but content; and his eyes brimmed with visions. Patsy watched him tenderly. "Who knows--he may find greatness on his road. Who knows?" The tinker dropped the bundle he had brought back from the store into her lap, but she scarcely heeded him. Her eyes were looking out into the gathering dusk while her voice sank almost to a whisper. "_Ochone!_ but I've always envied that piper fellow from Hamelin town. Think of being able to gather up all the childther hereabouts, eager, hungry-hearted childther with mothers too busy or deaf to heed them, and leading them away to find their fortunes! Wouldn't that be wonderful, just?" "What kind of fortunes?" asked the tinker. "What but the best kind!" Patsy thought for a moment, and smiled whimsically while her eyes grew strangely starry in that early twilight. "Wouldn't I like to be choosing those fortunes, and wouldn't they be an odd lot, entirely! There'd be singing hearts that had learned to sing above trouble; there'd be true fellowship--the kind that finds brotherhood in beggars as well as--as prime ministers; there'd be peace of soul--not the kind that naps by the fire, content that the wind doesn't be blowing down his chimney, but the kind that fights above fighting and keeps neighbor from harrying neighbor. Troth, the world is in mortial need of fortunes like the last." "And wouldn't you be choosin' gold for a fortune?" asked the tinker. Patsy shook her head vehemently. "Why not?" "That's the why!" Suddenly Patsy clenched her hands and shook two menacing fists against the gathering dark. "I hate gold, along with the meanness and the lying and the thieving and the false judgment it brings into the world." "But the world can't get along without it," reminded the tinker, shrewdly. "Aye, but it can. It can get along without the hoarded gold, the inherited gold, the cheating, bribing, starving gold--that's the kind I mean, the kind that gets into a man's heart and veins until his fingers itch to gild everything he touches, like the rich man in the city yonder." "What rich man? I thought the--I thought the city was full o' rich men." "Maybe; but there's just one I'm thinking of now; and God pity him--and his son." The tinker eyed her stupidly. "How d'you know he has a son?" Patsy laughed. "I guessed--maybe." Then she looked down in her lap. "And here's the news--with no light left to read it by; and I'm as hungry as an alley cat--and as tired as two. Ye'd never dream, to hear me talking, that I'd never had much more than a crooked sixpence to my name since I was born; and here I am, with that gone and not a slither to buy me bed or board for the night." The tinker looked down at her with an altogether strange expression, very different from anything Patsy had seen on his face all day. Had she chanced to catch it before it flickered out, it might have puzzled even her O'Connell wits to fathom the meaning of it. For it was as if the two had unexpectedly changed places, and the tender pity and protectiveness that had belonged to her had suddenly become his. "Never mind, lass; there's board in the kit for to-night--what the farm wife put up; and there's this left, and I'll--I'll--" He did not finish; instead he dropped a few coins in her hand, the change from the half-dollar. Then he set about sweeping the dust from the step with his battered cap and spreading their meager meal before her. They ate in silence, so deep in the business of dulling their appetites that they never noticed a small figure crossing the street with two goblets and a pitcher hugged tight in his arms. They never looked up until the things were set down beside them and a voice announced at their elbow, "Mother said I could bring it; it's better 'n eatin' dry." It was Joseph; and the pitcher held milk, still foamy from a late milking. He looked at Patsy a moment longingly, as if there was more he wanted to ask; but, overcome with a sudden bashful confusion, he took to his heels and disappeared around the corner of the meeting-house before they had time even to give thanks. The tinker poured the goblets full, handed Patsy's to her with another grave bow, and, touching his to hers, said, soberly, "Here's to a friendly lass--the first I ever knew, I reckon." For an instant she watched him, puzzled and amused; then she raised her glass slowly in reply. "And here's to tinkers--the world over!" When everything but the crumbs were eaten she left him to scatter these and return Joseph's pitcher while she went to get "the loan of a light from the shopkeeper, and hunt up the news." * * * * * The store was store, post-office, and general news center combined. The news was at that very moment in process of circulation among the "boys"--a shirt-sleeved quorum from the patriarchs of the town circling the molasses-keg--the storekeeper himself topped it. They looked up as Patsy entered and acknowledged her "Good evening" with that perfect indifference, the provincial cloak in habitual use for concealing the most absolute curiosity. The storekeeper graciously laid the hospitality of his stool and counter and kerosene-lamp at her feet; in other words, he "cal'ated she was welcome to make herself t' home." All of which Patsy accepted. She spread out the newspaper on the counter in front of her; she unwrapped a series of small bundles--ink, pen, stamped envelope, letter-pad, and pen-holder, and eyed them with approval. "The tinker's a wonder entirely," she said to herself; "but I would like to be knowing, did he or did the shopkeeper do the choosing?" Then she remembered the thing above all others that she needed to know, and swung about on the stool to address the quorum. "I say--can you tell me where I'd be likely to find a--person by the name of Bil--William Burgeman?" "That rich feller's boy?" Patsy nodded. "Have you seen him?" The quorum thumbed the armholes of their vests and shook an emphatic negative. "Nope," volunteered the storekeeper; "too early for him or his sort to be diggin' out o' winter quarters." "Are you sure? Do you know him?" "Wall, can't say exactly ef I know him; but I'd know ef he'd been hangin' round, sartin. Hain't been nothin' like him loose in these parts. Has there, boys?" The quorum confirmed the statement. Patsy wrinkled up a perplexed forehead. "That's odd. You see, he should have been here last night, to-day at the latest. I had it from somebody who knew, that he was coming to Arden." "Mebby he was," drawled the storekeeper, while the quorum cackled in appreciation; "but this here is a good seven miles from Arden." Patsy's arms fell limp across the counter, her head followed, and she sat there a crumpled-up, dejected little heap. "By Jack-a-diamonds!" swore the storekeeper. "She 'ain't swoomed, has she, boys?" The quorum were on the verge of investigating when she denied the fact--in person. "Where am I? In the name of Saint Peter, what place is this?" "This? Why, this is Lebanon." She smiled weakly. "Lebanon! Sounds more like it, anyhow. Thank you." She turned about and settled down to the paper while the "boys" reverted to their original topic of discussion. There were two items of news that interested her: Burgeman, senior, was critically ill; he had been ill for some time, but there had been no cause for apprehension until the last twenty-four hours; and Marjorie Schuyler had left for San Francisco--on the way to China. She was to be gone indefinitely. "The heathen idols and the laundrymen are welcome to her," growled Patsy, maliciously. "If they'd only fix her with the evil eye, or wish such a homesickness and lovesickness on her that 'twould last for a year and a day, I'd forgive her for what she's made me wish on myself." Having relieved her mind somewhat, she was able to attend to the business of the letter with less inward discomfort. The letter was written to George Travis, already known as the manager of Miss St. Regis. He was the head of a well-known theatrical managerial firm in New York, and an old friend and well-wisher of Patsy's. In it she explained, partly, her continued sojourn in America, and frankly confessed to her financial needs. If he had anything anywhere that she could do until the fall bookings with her own company, she would be most humbly grateful. He might address her at Arden; she had great hopes of reaching there--some day. There was a postscript added in good, pure Donegal: And don't ye be afeared of hurting my pride by offering anything too small. Just at present I'm like old Granny Donoghue's lean pig--hungry for scrapings. As she sealed the envelope a shadow fell athwart the counter. Patsy looked up to find the tinker peering at her sharply. "You look clean tuckered out," he announced, baldly; then he laid a coaxing hand on her arm. "I want you to come along with me. Will you, lass? I've found a place for you--a nice place. I've been talkin' to Joseph's mother, an' she's goin' to look after you for the night." Patsy's face crinkled up all over; the tinker could not have told--even if he had been in possession of all his senses--whether she was going to laugh or cry. As it turned out, she did neither; she just sighed, a tired, contented little sigh, slipping off the stool and dropping the letter into the post-box. When she faced the tinker again her eyes were misty, and for all her courage she could not keep the quivering from her lips. She reached up impulsive, trusting hands to his shoulders: "Lad--lad--how were ye ever guessing that I'd reached the end o' my wits and was needing some one to think for me? Holy Saint Michael! but won't I be mortial glad to be feeling a respectable, Lebanon feather-bed under me!" * * * * * As the tinker led her out of the store the quorum eyed her silently for a moment. For a brief space there was a scraping of chairs and clearing of throats, indicative of some important comment. "What sort of a lookin' gal did that Green County sheriff say he was after?" inquired the storekeeper at last. "Small, warn't it?" suggested one of the quorum. "Yep, guess it was. And what sort o' clothes did he say she wore?" "Brown!" chorused the quorum. "Wall, boys"--the storekeeper wagged an accusing thumb in the direction of the recently vacated stool--"she was small, warn't she? An' she's got brown clothes, hain't she? An' she acts queer, doan't she?" The quorum nodded in solemn agreement. "But she doan't look like no thief," interceded the youngest of the "boys." He couldn't have been a day over seventy, and it was more than likely that he was still susceptible to youth and beauty! The rest glowered at him with plain disapproval, while the storekeeper shifted the course of his thumb and wagged it at him instead. "Si Perkins, that's not for you to say--nor me, neither. That's up to Green County; an' I cal'ate I'll 'phone over to the sheriff, come mornin', an' tell him our suspicions. By Jack-a-diamonds! I've got to square my conscience." The quorum invested their thumbs again and cleared their throats. VII THE TINKER PLAYS A PART There is little of the day's happenings that escapes the ears of a country boy. Every small item of local interest is so much grist for his mill; and there is no more reliable method for a stranger to collect news than a sociable game of "peg" interspersed with a few casual but diplomatic questions. The tinker played "peg" the night after he and Patsy reached Lebanon--on the barn floor by the light of a bleary-eyed lantern with Joseph and his brethren, and thereby learned of the visit of the sheriff. Afterward he sawed and split the apportioned wood which was to pay for Patsy's lodging, and went to sleep on the hay in a state of complete exhaustion. But, for all that, Patsy was wakened an hour before sun-up by a shower of pebbles on the tin roof of the porch, just under her window. Looking out, she spied him below, a silencing finger against his lips, while he waved a beckoning arm toward the road. Patsy dressed and slipped out without a sound. "What has happened ye?" she whispered, anxiously, looking him well over for some symptoms of sickness or trouble. His only reply was a mysterious shake of the head as he led the way down the village street, his rags flapping grotesquely in the dawn wind. There was nothing for Patsy to do except to follow as fast as she could after his long, swinging strides. Lebanon still slept, close-wrapped in its peaceful respectability; even the dogs failed to give them a speeding bark. They stole away as silently as shadows, and as shadows went forth upon the open road to meet the coming day. A mile beyond the township stone the tinker stopped to let Patsy catch up with him; it was a very breathless, disgruntled Patsy. "Now, by Saint Brendan, what ails ye, lad, to be waking a body up at this time of day? Do ye think it's good morals or good manners to be trailing us off on a bare stomach like this--as if a county full of constables was at our heels? What's the meaning of it? And what will the good folk who cared for us the night think to find us gone with never a word of thanks or explanation?" The tinker scratched his chin meditatively; it was marked by a day's more growth than on the previous morning, which did not enhance his comeliness or lessen his state of vagabondage. There was something about his appearance that made him out less a fool and more an uncouth rascal; one might easily have trusted him as well as pitied him yesterday--but to-day--Patsy's gaze was critical and not over-flattering. He saw her look and met it, eye for eye, only he still fumbled his chin ineffectually. "Have you forgot?" he asked, a bit sheepishly. "There were the lady's-slippers; you said as how you cared about findin' 'em; and they're not near so pretty an' bright if they're left standin' too long after the dew dries." Patsy pulled a wry little smile. "Is that so? And ye've been after making me trade a feather-bed and a good breakfast for--for the best color of lady's-slippers. Well, if I was Dan instead of myself, standing here, I'd be likely to tell ye to go to the devil--aye, an' help ye there with my two fists." Her cheeks were flushed and all the comradeship faded quickly from her eyes. The tinker said never a word, only his lips parted in a coaxing smile which seemed to say, "Please go on believing in me," and his eyes still held hers unwaveringly. And the tinker's smile won. Bit by bit Patsy's rigid attitude of condemnation relaxed; the comradeship crept back in her eyes, the smile to her lips. "Heigho! 'Tis a bad bargain ye can't make the best of. But mind one thing, Master Touchstone! Ye'll find the right road to Arden this time or ye and the duke's daughter will part company--for all Willie Shakespeare wrote it otherwise." He nodded. "We can ask the way 's we go. But first we'll be gettin' the lady's-slippers and some breakfast. You'll see--I'll find them both for you, lass"; and he set off with his swinging stride straight across country, wagging his head wisely. Patsy fell in behind him, and the road was soon out of sight and earshot. * * * * * It was just about this time that the storekeeper at Lebanon got the Green County sheriff on the 'phone, and squared his conscience. "I cal'ate she's the guilty party," were his closing remarks. "She'd never ha' lighted out o' this 'ere town afore Christian folks were out o' bed ef she hadn't had somethin' takin' her. And what's more, she's keepin' bad company." And so it came about that all the time the sorrel mare was being harnessed into the runabout the tinker was leading Patsy farther afield. And so it came to pass that when the mare's heels were raising the dust on the road between Lebanon and Arden, they were following a forest brook, deeper and deeper, into the woods. They found it the most cheery, neighborly, and comfortable kind of a brook, the quiet and well-contained sort that one could step at will from bank to bank, and see with half an eye what a prime favorite it was among its neighbors. Patsy and the tinker marked how close things huddled to it, even creeping on to cover stones and gravel stretches; there were moss and ferns and little, clinging things, like baby's-breath and linnea. The major part of the bird population was bathing in the sunnier pools, soberly or with wild hilarity, according to disposition. The tinker knew them all, calling to them in friendly fashion, at which they always answered back. Patsy listened silently, wrapped in the delight and beauty of it. On went the brook--dancing here in a broken patch of sunshine--quieting there between the banks of rock-fern and columbine, to better paint their prettiness; and all the while singing one farther and farther into the woods. She was just wondering if there could be anything lovelier than this when the tinker stopped, still and tense as a pointer. She craned her head and looked beyond him--looked to where the woods broke, leaving for a few feet a thinly shaded growth of beech and maple. The sunlight sifted through in great, unbroken patches of gold, falling on the beds of fern and moss and--yes, there they were, the promised lady's-slippers. A little, indrawn sigh of ecstasy from Patsy caused the tinker to turn about. "Then you're not hatin' gold when you find it growin' green that-a-way?" he chuckled. Patsy shook her head with vehemence. "Never! And wouldn't it be grand if nature could be gathering it all up from everywhere and spinning it over again into the likes of those! In the name o' Saint Francis, do ye suppose if the English poets had laid their two eyes to anything so beautiful as what's yonder they'd ever have gone so daffy over daffodils?" "They never would," agreed the tinker. Patsy studied him with a sharp little look. "And what do ye know about English poets, pray?" His lower jaw dropped in a dull, foolish fashion. "Nothin'; but I know daff'dils," he explained at last. And at that moment the call of a thrush came to them from just across the glade. Patsy listened spellbound while he sang his bubbling song of gladness through half a score of times. "Is it the flowers singing?" she asked at last, her eyes dancing mischievously. "It might be the souls o' the dead ones." The tinker considered thoughtfully a moment. "Maybe the souls o' flowers become birds, same as ours becomes angels--wouldn't be such a deal o' difference--both takin' to wings and singin'." He chuckled again. "Anyhow, that's the bellbird; and I sent him word yesterday by one o' them tattlin' finches to be on hand just about this time." "Ye didn't order a breakfast the same way, did ye?" The tinker threw back his head and laughed. "I did, then," and, before Patsy could strip her tongue of its next teasing remark, he had vanished as quickly and completely as if magic had had a hand in it. A crescendo of snapping twigs and rustling leaves marked his going, however; and Patsy leaped the brook and settled herself, tailor fashion, in the midst of the sunshine and the lady's-slippers. She unpinned the rakish beaver and tossed it from her; off came the Norfolk jacket, and followed the beaver. She eyed the rest of her costume askance; she would have sorely liked to part with that, too, had she but the Lord's assurance that He would do as well by her as he had by the lilies of the field or the lady's-slippers. "'Tis surprising how wearisome the same clothes can grow when on the back of a human being--yet a flower can wear them for a thousand years or more and ye never go tired of them. I'm not knowing why, but--somehow--I'd like to be looking gladsome--to-day." She stretched her arms wide for a minute, in a gesture of intense longing; then the glory of the woods claimed her again and she gave herself over completely to the wonder and enjoyment of them. Her eyes roamed about her unceasingly for every bit of prettiness, her ears caught the symphony of bird and brook and soughing wind. So still did she sit that the tinker, returning, thought for a moment that she had gone, and stood, knee-deep in the brakes, laden to the chin and covered with the misery of poignant disappointment. For him all the music of the place had turned to laughing discord--until he spied her. "I thought"--his tongue stumbled--"I was thinkin' you had gone--sudden-like--same as you came--down the road yesterday." He paused a moment. "You wouldn't go off by yourself and leave a lad without you said somethin' about it first, would you?" "I'll not leave ye till we get to Arden." "An'--an' what then?" "The road must end for me there, lad. What I came to do will be done, and there'll be no excuse for lingering. But I'll not forget to wish ye 'God-speed' along your way before I go." A sly look came into the tinker's eyes. Patsy never saw it, for he was bending close over the huge basket he had brought; she only caught a tinge of exultation in his voice as he said, "Then that's a'right, if you'll promise your comp'ny till we fetch up in Arden." With that he went busily about preparations for breakfast, Patsy watching him, plainly astonished. He gathered bark and brush and kindled a fire on a large flat rock which he had moved against a near-by boulder. About it he fastened a tripod of green saplings, from which he hung a coffee-pot, filled from the brook. "I'm praying there's more nor water in it," murmured Patsy. And a moment later, as the tinker shook out a small white table-cloth from the basket and spread it at her feet, she clasped her hands and repeated with perfect faith, "'Little goat bleat, table get set'; I smell the coffee." Out of the basket came little green dishes, a pat of butter, a jug of cream, a bowl of berries, a plate of biscuits. "Riz," was the tinker's comment as he put down the last named; and then followed what appeared to Patsy to be round, brown, sugared buns with holes in them. These he passed twice under her nose with a triumphant flourish. "And what might they be?" Her curiosity was reaching the breaking-point. "If ye bring out another thing from that basket I'll believe ye're in league with Bodh Dearg himself, or ye've stolen the faeries' trencher of plenty." For reply the tinker dived once more beneath the cover and brought out a frying-pan full of bacon, and four white eggs. "Think whatever you're mind to, I'm going to fry these." But after he had raked over the embers to his complete satisfaction and placed the pan on them, he came back and, picking up one of the "brown buns," slipped it over Patsy's forefinger. "This is a wishin'-ring," he announced, soberly, "though most folks calls 'em somethin' different. Now if you wish a wish--and eat it--all but the hole, you'll have what you've been wishin' for all your life." "How soon will ye be having it?" "In as many days as there are bites." So Patsy bit while the tinker checked them off on his fingers. "One, two, three, four, five, six. You'll get your wish by the seventh day, sure, or I'm no tinker." [Illustration: "If you wish a wish and eat it--all but the hole, you'll have what you've been wishin' for all your life."] "But are ye?" Patsy shook the de-ringed finger at him accusingly. "I'm beginning to have my doubts as to whether ye're a tinker at all. Ye are foolish one minute, and ye've more wits than I have the next; I've caught ye looking too lonesome and helpless to be allowed beyond reach of our mother's kerchief-end, and yet last night and the day ye've taken care of me as if ye'd been hired out to tend babies since ye were one yourself. As for your language, ye never speak twice the same." The tinker grinned. "That bacon's burnin'; I--cal'ate I'd better turn it, hadn't I?" "I--cal'ate you had," and Patsy grinned back at him derisively. The tinker was master of ceremonies, and he served her as any courtier might have served his liege lady. He shook out the diminutive serviette he had brought for her and spread it across her lap; he poured her coffee and sweetened it according to direction; he even buttered her "riz" biscuits and poured the cream on her berries. "Are ye laboring under the delusion that the duke's daughter was helpless, entirely?" she asked, at length. The tinker shook an emphatic negative. "I was just thinkin' she might like things a mite decent--onct in a while." "Lad--lad--who in the wide world are ye!" Patsy checked her outburst with a warning hand: "No--don't ye be telling me. Ye couldn't turn out anything better nor a tinker--and I'd rather keep ye as I found ye. So if ye have a secret--mind it well; and don't ye be letting it loose to scare the two of us into over-wise, conventional folk. We'll play Willie Shakespeare comedy to the end of the road--please God!" "Amen!" agreed the tinker, devoutly, as he threw her portion of fried eggs neatly out of the pan into her plate. It was not until she was served that he looked after his own wants; then they ate in silence, both too hungry and too full of their own thoughts to loosen their tongues. Once the tinker broke the silence. "Your wish--what was it?" he asked. "That's telling," said Patsy. "But if ye'll confess to where ye came by this heavenly meal, I might confess to the wish." He rubbed his chin solemnly for an instant; then he beamed. "I'll tell ye. I picked it off o' the fern-tops and brambles as I came along." "Of course ye did," agreed Patsy, with fine sarcasm, "and for my wish--I was after thinking I'd marry the king's son." They looked at each other with the teasing, saucy stare of two children; then they laughed as care-free and as merrily. "Maybe you'll get your wish," he suggested, soberly. "Maybe I will," agreed Patsy, with mock solemnity. A look of shrewdness sprang into the tinker's face. "But you said you hated gold. You couldn't marry a king's son 'thout havin' gold--lots of it." "Aye--but I could! Couldn't I be making him throw it away before ever I'd marry him?" And Patsy clapped her hands triumphantly. "An' you'd marry him--poor?" The tinker's eyes kindled suddenly, as he asked it--for all the world as if her answer might have a meaning for him. Patsy never noticed. She was looking past him--into the indistinguishable wood-tangle beyond. "Sure, we wouldn't be poor. We'd be blessed with nothing--that's all!" For those golden moments of romancing Patsy's quest was forgotten; they might have reached Arden and despatched her errand, for all the worriment their loitering caused her. As for the tinker, if he had either a mission or a destination he gave no sign for her to reckon by. They dallied over the breakfast; they dallied over the aftermath of picking up and putting away and stamping out the charred twigs and embers; and then they dallied over the memory of it all. Patsy spun a hundred threads of fancy into tales about the forest, while the tinker called the thickets about them full of birds, and whistled their songs antiphonally with them. "Do ye know," said Patsy, with a deep sigh, "I'm happier than ye can tell me, and twice as happy as I can tell ye." "An' this, hereabouts, wouldn't make a bad castle," suggested the tinker, irrelevantly. What Patsy might have answered is not recorded, for they both happened to look up for the first time in a long space and saw that the sky above their heads had grown a dull, leaden color. They were no longer sitting in the midst of sunlight; the lady's-slippers had lost their golden radiance; the brook sounded plaintive and melancholy, and from the woods fringing the open came the call of the bob-white. "He's singin' for rain. Won't hurt a mite if we make toward some shelter." The tinker pulled Patsy to her feet and gathered up the basket and left-overs. "Hurry," said Patsy, with a strange, little, twisted smile on her lips. "Of course I was knowing, like all faery tales, it had to have an ending; but I want to remember it, just as we found it first--sprinkled with sunshine and not turning dull and gray like this." She started plunging through the woods, and the tinker was obliged to turn her about and set her going right, with the final instruction to follow her nose and he would catch up with her before she had caught up with it. She had reached the road, however, and thunder was grumbling uncomfortably near when the tinker joined her. "It's goin' to be a soaker," he announced, cheerfully. "Then we'd better tramp fast as we can and ask the first person we pass, are we on the right road to Arden." They tramped, but they passed no one. The road was surprisingly barren of shelters, and, strangely enough, of the two houses they saw one was temporarily deserted and the other unoccupied. The wind came with the breaking of the storm--that cold, piercing wind that often comes in June as a reminder that winter has not passed by so very long before. It whipped the rain across their faces and cut down their headway until it seemed to Patsy as if they barely crawled. They came to a tumble-down barn, but she was too cold and wet to stop where there was no fire. "Any place that's warm," she shouted across to the tinker; and he shouted back, as they rounded the bend of the road. "See, there it is at last!" The sight of a house ahead, whose active chimney gave good evidence of a fire within, spurred Patsy's lagging steps. But in response to their knocking, the door was opened just wide enough to frame the narrow face of a timid-eyed, nervous woman who bade them be gone even before they had gathered breath enough to ask for shelter. "Faith, 'tis a reminder that we are no longer living three hundred years ago," Patsy murmured between tightening lips. "How long in, do ye think, the fashion has been--to shut doors on poor wanderers?" At the next house, a half-mile beyond, they fared no better. The woman's voice was curter, and the uninviting muzzle of a bull-terrier was thrust out between the door and the woman's skirts. As they turned away Patsy's teeth were chattering; the chill and wet had crept into her bones and blood, turning her lips blue and her cheeks ashen; even the cutting wind failed to color them. "Curse them!" muttered the tinker, fiercely. "If I only had a coat to put around you--anything to break the wind. Curse them warm and dry inside there!" and he shook his fist at the forbidden door. Patsy tried to smile, but failed. "Faith! I haven't the breath to curse them; but God pity them, that's all." Before she had finished the tinker had a firm grip of her arm. "Hang it! If no one will take us in, we'll break in. Cheer up, lass; I'll have you by a crackling good fire if I have to steal the wood." He hurried her along--somewhere. Weariness and bodily depression closed her eyes; and she let him lead her--whither she neither wondered nor cared. Time and distance ceased to exist for her; she stumbled along, conscious of but two things--a fear that she would be ill again with no one to tend her, and a gigantic craving for heat--heat! When she opened her eyes again they had stopped and were standing under a shuttered window at what appeared to be the back of a summer cottage; the tinker was prying a rock out of the mud at their feet. In a most business-like manner he used it to smash the fastening of the shutters, and, when these were removed, to break the small, leaded pane of glass nearest the window-fastening. It was only a matter of seconds then before the window was opened and Patsy boosted over the sill into the kitchen beyond. "Ye'd best stand me in the sink and wring me out, or I'll flood the house," Patsy managed to gasp. "I'd do it myself, but I know, if I once let go of my hands, I'll shake to death." The tinker followed her advice, working the water out of her dripping garments in much the same fashion that he would have employed had she been a half-drowned cat. In spite of her numbness Patsy saw the grim humor of it all and came perilously near to a hysterical laugh. The tinker unconsciously forestalled it by shouldering her, as if she had been a whole bag of water-soaked cats, and carrying her up the stairs. After looking into three rooms he deposited her on the threshold of a fourth. "It has the look of women folks; you're sure to find some left-behind clothes o' theirs hanging up somewhere. Come down when you're dry an' I'll have that fire waiting for you." What followed was all a dream to Patsy's benumbed senses: the search in drawers and closets for things to put on, and the finding of them; the insistent aching of fingers and arms in trying to adjust them, and the persistent refusal of brain to direct them with any degree of intelligence. She came down the stairs a few minutes later, dragging a bundle of wet clothes after her, and found the tinker kneeling by the hearth, still in his dripping rags, and heaping more logs on the already blazing fire. He rose as she came toward him, took the clothes from her and dropped them on the hearth. He seemed decidedly hazy and remote as he brought a steamer rug from somewhere and wrapped it about her; his voice, as he coaxed her over to the couch, apparently came from miles away. As Patsy sank down, too weary to speak, the figure above her took upon itself once more that suggestion of unearthliness that it had worn when she had discovered it at dawn--hanging to the stump fencing. For an instant the glow of the fire threw the profile into the same shadowy outlines that the rising sun had first marked for her; and the image lingered even after her eyes had closed. "Sure, he's fading away like Oisiu, Gearoidh Iarla, and all of them in the old tales," she thought, drowsily. "Like as not, when I open my eyes again he'll be clear gone." This was where the dream ended and complete oblivion began. * * * * * How long it lasted she could not have told; she only knew she was awake at last and acutely conscious of everything about her; and that she was warm--warm--warm! The room was dark except for the firelight; but whether it was evening or night or midnight, she could not have guessed. She found herself speculating in a hazy fashion where she was, whose house they had broken into, and what the tinker had done with himself. She had a vague, far-away feeling that she ought to be disturbed over something--her complete isolation with a strange companion on a night like this; but the physical contentment, the reaction from bodily torture, drugged her sensibilities. She closed her eyes lazily again and listened to the wind howling outside with the never-ceasing accompaniment of beating rain. She was content to revel in that feeling of luxury that only the snugly housed can know. A sound in the room roused her. She opened her eyes as lazily as she had closed them, expecting to find the tinker there replenishing the fire; instead--She sat up with a jerk, speechless, rubbing her eyes with two excited fists, intent on proving the unreality of what she had seen; but when she looked again there it was--the clean-cut figure of a man immaculate in white summer flannels. The blood rushed to Patsy's face; mortification, dread, sank into her very soul; the drug of physical contentment had lost its power. For the first time in her life she was dominated by the dictates of convention. She cursed her irresponsible love of vagabondage along with her freedom of speech and manner and her lack of conservative judgment. These had played her false and shamed her womanhood. The Patsys of this world are not given to trading on their charm or powers of attraction to win men to them--it is against their creed of true womanhood. Moreover, a man counts no more than a woman in their sum total of daily pleasure, and when they choose a comrade it is for human qualities, not sexualities. And because of this, this particular Patsy felt the more intensely the humiliation and challenge of the moment. She hated herself; she hated the man, whoever he might be; she hated the tinker for his share in it all. Anger loosened her tongue at last. "Who, in the name of Saint Bridget, are ye?" she demanded. And the man in white flannels threw back his head and laughed. VIII WHEN TWO WERE NOT COMPANY The laughter would have proved contagious to any except one in Patsy's humor; and, as laughing alone is sorry business, the man soon sobered and looked over at Patsy with the merriment lingering only in his eyes. "By Willie Shakespeare, it's the duke's daughter in truth!" The words made little impression on her; it was the laugh and voice that puzzled her; they were unmistakably the tinker's. But there was nothing familiar about face, figure, or expression, although Patsy studied them hard to find some trace of the man she had been journeying with. With a final bewildered shake of the head her eyes met his coldly, mockingly. "My name is Patricia O'Connell"--her voice was crisp and tart; "it's the Irish for a short temper and a hot one. Now maybe you will have the grace to favor me with yours." "Just the tinker," he complied, amiably, "and very much at your service." This was accompanied by a sweeping bow. Patsy had marked that bow on two previous occasions, and it testified undeniably to the man's identity. Yet Patsy's mind balked at accepting it; it was too galling to her pride, too slanderous of her past judgment and perceptibilities. A sudden rush of anger brought her to her feet, and, coming over to the opposite side of the hearth, she faced him, flushed, determined, and very dignified. It is to be doubted if Patsy could have sustained the latter with any degree of conviction if she could have seen herself. Straying strands of still damp hair curled bewitchingly about her face, bringing out the roundness of cheek and chin and the curious, guileless expression of her eyes. Moreover, the coquettish gown she wore was entrancing; it was a light blue, tunic affair with wide baby collar and cuffs, and a Roman girdle; and she had found stockings to match, with white buckskin pumps. It had been blind chance on her part--this making of a toilet, but the effect was none the less adorable--and condemning to dignity. This was evidently appreciated by the tinker, for his face was an odd mixture of grotesque solemnity and keen enjoyment. Patsy was altogether too flustered to diagnose his expression, but it added considerably to the temperature of the O'Connell temper. In view of the civilized surroundings and her state of dignity Patsy had taken to King's English with barely a hint of her native brogue. "If you are the tinker--and I presume you are--I should very much appreciate an explanation. Would you mind telling me how you happened to be hanging onto that stump, in rags, and looking half-witted when I--when I came by?" "Why--just because I was a tinker," he laughed. "Then what are you now?" "Once a tinker, always a tinker. I'm just a good-for-nothing; good to mend other people's broken pots, and little else; knowing more about birds than human beings, and poor company for any one saving the very generous-hearted." Patsy stamped her foot. "Why can't you play fair? Isn't it only decent to tell who you are and what you were doing on the road when I found you?" "You know as well as I what I was doing--hanging onto the stump and trying to gather my wits. And don't you think it would be nicer if you talked Irish? It doesn't make a lad feel half as comfortable or as much at home when he is addressed in such perfect English." Patsy snorted. "In a minute I'll not be addressing you at all. Do you think, if I had known you were what you are, I would ever have been so--so brazen as to ask for your company and tramp along with you for--_two_ days--or be here, now? Oh!" she finished, with a groan and a fierce clenching of her fists. "No, I don't think so. That's why I didn't hurry about gathering up the wits; it seemed more sociable without them. I wouldn't have bothered with them now, only I couldn't stay in those rags any longer; it wouldn't have been kind to the furniture or the people who own it. These togs were the only things that came anywhere near to fitting me; and, somehow, a three-days' beard didn't match them. Lucky for me, Heaven blessed the house with a good razor, and, presto! when the beard and the rags were gone the wits came back. I'm awfully sorry if you don't like them--the wits, I mean." "Sure, ye must be!" Unconsciously Patsy had stepped back onto her native sod and her tongue fairly dripped with irony. "So ye thought ye'd have a morsel o' fun at the expense of a strange lass, while ye laughed up your sleeve at how clever ye were." "See here! don't be too hard, please! That foolishness was real enough; I had just been knocked over the head by the kind gentleman from whom I borrowed the rags. I paid him a tidy sum for the use of them, and evidently he thought it was a shame to leave me burdened with the balance of my money. Arguing wouldn't have done any good, so he took the simplest way--just sandbagged me and--" "Was it much money?" "Mercy, no! Just a few dollars, hardly worth the anæsthesia." "And ye were--half-witted, then?" "Half? A bare sixteenth! It wasn't until afternoon--until we reached the church at the cross-roads--that I really came into full possession--" The sentence trailed off into an inexplicable grin. "And after that, 'twas I played the fool." Patsy's eyes kindled. The tinker grew serious; he dug his hands deep into his capacious white flannels as if he were very much in earnest. "Can't you understand? If I hadn't played foolish you would never have let me wander with you--you just said so. I knew that, and I was selfish, lonely--and I didn't want to give you up. You can't blame me. When a man meets with genuine comradeship for the first time in his life--the kind he has always wanted, but has grown to believe doesn't exist--he's bound to win a crumb of it for himself, it costs no more than a trick of foolishness. Surely you understand?" "Oh, I understand! I'm understanding more and more every minute--'tis the gift of your tongue, I'm thinking--and I'm wondering which of us will be finding it the pleasantest." She flashed a look of unutterable scorn upon him. "If ye were not half-witted, would ye mind telling me how we came to be taking the wrong road at the church?" The tinker choked. "Aye, I thought so. Ye lied to me." "No, not exactly; you see--" he floundered helplessly. "Faith! don't send a lie to mend a lie; 'tis poor business, I can promise ye." "Well,"--the tinker's tone grew dogged--"was it such a heinous sin, after all, to want to keep you with me a little longer?" The fire in Patsy's eyes leaped forth at last. "Sin, did ye say? Faith! 'tis the wrong name ye've given it entirely. 'Twas amusement, ye meant; the fun of trading on a girl's ignorance and simple-heartedness; the trick of getting the good makings of a tale to tell afterward to other fine gentlemen like yourself." "So you think--" "Aye, I think 'twas a joke with ye--from first to last. Maybe ye made a wager with some one--or ye were dared to take to the road in rags--or ye did it for copy; ye're not the first man who has done the like for the sake of a new idea for a story. 'Twas a pity, though, ye couldn't have got what ye wanted without making a girl pay with her self-respect." The tinker winced, reaching out a deprecatory hand. "You are wrong; no one has paid such a price. There are some natures so clear and fine that chance and extremity can put them anywhere--in any company--without taking one whit from their fineness or leaving one atom of smirch. Do you think I would have brought you here and risked your trust and censorship of my honor if you had not been--what you are? A decent man has as much self-respect as a decent woman, and the same wish to keep it." But Patsy's comprehension was strangely deaf. "'Tis easy enough trimming up poor actions with grand words. There'd have been no need of risking anything if ye had set me on the right road this morning; I would have been in Arden now, where I belong. But that wasn't your way. 'Twas a grand scheme ye had--whatever it might be; and ye fetch me away afore the town is up and I can ask the road of any one; and ye coax me across pastures and woods, a far cry from passing folk and reliable information; and ye hold me, loitering the day through, till ye have me forgetting entirely why I came, along with the promise laid on me, and the other poor lad--Heaven help him!" "Oho!" The tinker whistled unconsciously. "Oho!" mimicked Patsy; "and is there anything so wonderfully strange in a lass looking after a lad? Sure, I'm hating myself for not minding his need better; and, Holy Saint Michael, how I'm hating ye!" She ran out of the room and up the stairway. The tinker was after her in a twinkling. He reached the foot of the stairs before she was at the top. "Please--please wait a minute," he pleaded. "If there's another--lad, a lad you--love, that I have kept you from--then I hate myself as much as you do. All I can say is that I didn't think--didn't guess; and I'm no end sorry." Patsy leaned over the banisters and looked down at him through eyes unmistakably wet. "What does it matter to ye if he's the lad I love or not? And can't a body do a kindness for a lad without loving him?" "Thank Heaven! she can. You have taught me that miracle--and I don't believe the other lad will grudge me these few hours, even if you do. Who knows? My need may have been as great as his." Patsy frowned. "All ye needed was something soft to dull your wits on; what he's needing is a father--and mother--and sweetheart--and some good 1915 bonds of human trust." The tinker folded his arms over the newel-post and smiled. "And do you expect to be able to supply them all?" "God forbid!" Patsy laughed in spite of herself. And the tinker, scoring a point, took courage and went on: "Don't you suppose I realize that you have given me the finest gift a stranger can have--the gift of honest, unconditional friendship, asking no questions, demanding no returns? It is a rare gift for any man--and I want to keep it as rare and beautiful as when it was given. So please don't mar it for me--now. Please--!" His hands went out in earnest appeal. The anger was leaving Patsy's face; already the look of comradeship was coming back in her eyes; her lips were beginning to curve in the old, whimsical smile. And the tinker, seeing, doubled his courage. "Now, won't you please forgive me and come down and get some supper?" She hesitated and, seeing that her decision was hanging in the balance, he recklessly tried his hand at tipping the scales in his favor. "I'm no end of a good forager, and I've rooted out lots of things in tins and jars. You must be awfully hungry; remember, it's hours since our magical breakfast with the lady's-slippers." Patsy's fist banged the railing with a startling thud. "I'll never break fast with ye again--never--never--never! Ye've blighted the greenest memory I ever had!" And with that she was gone, slamming the door after her by way of dramatic emphasis. * * * * * It was a forlorn and dejected tinker that returned alone to the empty hearthside. The bright cheer of the fire had gone; the room had become a place of shadows and haunting memories. For a long time he stood, brutally kicking one of the fire-dogs and snapping his fingers at his feelings; and then, being a man and requiring food, he went out into the pantry where he had been busily preparing to set forth the hospitality of the house when Patsy had wakened. But before he ate he found a tray and covered it with the best the pantry afforded. He mounted the stairs with it in rather a lagging fashion, being wholly at sea concerning the temperature of his reception. His conscience finally compromised with his courage, and he put the tray down outside Patsy's door. It was not until he was half-way down the stairs again that he called out, bravely, "Oh--I say--Miss--O'Connell; you'd better change your mind and eat something." He waited a good many minutes for an answer, but it came at last; the voice sounded broken and wistful as a crying child's. "Thank--you!" and then, "Could ye be after telling me how far it is from here to Arden?" "Let me see--about--seven miles;" and the tinker laughed; he could not help it. The next instant Patsy's door opened with a jerk and the tray was precipitated down the stairs upon him. It was the conclusive evidence of the O'Connell temper. But the tinker never knew that Patsy wept herself remorsefully to sleep; and Patsy never knew that the last thing the tinker did that night was to cut a bedraggled brown coat and skirt and hat into strips and burn them, bit by bit. It was not altogether a pleasant ceremony--the smell of burning wool is not incense to one's nostrils; and the tinker heaved a deep sigh of relief as the last flare died down into a heap of black, smudgy embers. "That Green County sheriff will have a long way to go now if he's still looking for a girl in a brown suit," he chuckled. Sleep laid the O'Connell temper. When Patsy awoke her eyes were as serene as the patches of June sky framed by her windows, and she felt at peace with the world and all the tinkers in it. "'Twould be flattering the lad too much entirely to make up with him before breakfast; but I'll be letting him tramp the road to Arden with me, and we'll part there good friends. Troth, maybe he was a bit lonesome," she added by way of concession. She sprang out of bed with a glad little laugh; the day had a grand beginning, spilling sunshine and bird-song into every corner of her room, and to Patsy's optimistic soul a good beginning insured a better ending. As she dressed she planned that ending to her own liking and according to the most approved rules of dramatic construction: The tinker should turn out a wandering genius, for in her heart she could not believe the accusations she had hurled against him the night past; when they reached Arden they would come upon the younger Burgeman, contemplating immediate suicide; this would give her her cue, and she would administer trust and a general bracer with one hand as she removed the revolver with the other; in gratitude he would divulge the truth about the forgery--he did it to save the honor of some lady--after which the tinker would sponsor him, tramping him off on the road to take the taste of gold out of his mouth and teach him the real meaning of life. Patsy had no difficulty with her construction until she came to the final curtain; here she hesitated. She might trail off to find King Midas and square Billy with him, or--the curtain might drop leaving her right center, wishing both lads "God-speed." Neither ending was entirely satisfactory, however; the mental effect of the tinker going off with some one else--albeit it was another lad--was anything but satisfying. The house was strangely quiet. Patsy stopped frequently in her playmaking to listen for some sounds of human occupancy other than her own, but there was none. "Poor lad! Maybe I killed him last night when I kicked the tea-things down the stairs after him; or, most likely, the O'Connell temper has him stiffened out with fear so he daren't move hand or foot." A moment later she came down the stairs humming, "Blow, blow, thou winter wind," her eyes dancing riotously. Now, by all rights, dramatic or otherwise, the tinker should have been on hand, waiting her entrance. But tinker there was none; nothing but emptiness--and a breakfast-tray, spread and ready for her in the pantry. Curiosity, uneasiness mastered her pride and she called--once--twice--several times. But there came no answering sound save the quickening of her own heart-beats under the pressure of her held breath. She was alone in the house. A feeling of unutterable loneliness swept over Patsy. She came back to the stairs and stood with her hands clasping the newel-post--for all the world like a shipwrecked maiden clinging to the last spar of the ship. No, she did not believe a shipwrecked person could feel more deserted--more left behind than she did; moreover, it was an easier task to face the inevitable when it took the form of blind, impersonal disaster. When it was a matter of deliberate, intentional human motives--it became well-nigh unbearable. Had the tinker gone to be rid of her company and her temper? Had he decided that the road was a better place without her? Maybe he had taken the matter of the other lad too seriously--and, thinking them sweethearts, had counted himself an undesired third, and betaken himself out of their ways. Or--maybe--he was fearsome of constables--and had hurried away to cover his trail and leave her safe. "Maybe a hundred things," moaned Patsy, disconsolately; "maybe 'tis all a dream and there's no road and no quest and no Rich Man's son and no tinker, and no anything. Maybe--I'll be waking up in another minute and finding myself back in the hospital with the delirium still on me." She closed her eyes, rubbed them hard with two mandatory fists, then opened them to test the truth of her last remark; and it happened that the first object they fell on was a photograph in a carved wooden frame on the mantel-shelf in the room across the hall. It was plainly visible from where Patsy stood by the stairs--it was also plainly familiar. With a run Patsy was over there in an instant, the photograph in her hands. "Holy Saint Patrick, 'tis witchcraft!" she cried under her breath. "How in the name of devils--or saints--did he ever get this taken, developed, printed, and framed--between the middle of last night and the beginning of this morning!" For Patsy was looking down at a picture of the tinker, in white flannels, with head thrown back and laughing. IX PATSY ACQUIRES SOME INFORMATION With the realization that the tinker was gone, the empty house suddenly became oppressive. Patsy put down the photograph with a quick little sigh, and hunted up the breakfast-tray he had left spread and ready for her, carrying it out to the back porch. There in the open and the sunshine she ate, according to her own tabulation, three meals--a left-over supper, a breakfast, and the lunch which she was more than likely to miss later, She was in the midst of the lunch when an idea scuttled out of her inner consciousness and pulled at her immediate attention. She rose hurriedly and went inside. Room after room she searched, closet after closet. In one she came upon a suit of familiar white flannels; and she passed them slowly--so slowly that her hands brushed them with a friendly little greeting. But the search was a barren one, and she returned to the porch as empty-handed and as mystified as she had left it; the heap of ashes on the hearth held no meaning for her, and consequently told no tales. "'Tis plain enough what's happened," she said, soberly, to the sparrows who were skirmishing for crumbs. "Just as I said, he was fearsome of those constables, after all, and he's escaped in my clothes!" The picture of the tinker's bulk trying to disguise itself behind anything so scanty as her shrunken garments proved too irresistible for her sense of humor; she burst into peal after peal of laughter which left her weak and wet-eyed and dispelled her loneliness like fog before a clearing wind. "Anyhow, if he hasn't worn them he's fetched them away as a wee souvenir of an O'Connell; and if I'm to reach Arden in any degree of decency 'twill have to be in stolen clothes." But she did not go in the blue frock; the realization came to her promptly that that was no attire for the road and an unprotected state; she must go with dull plumage and no beguiling feathers. So she searched again, and came upon a blue-and-white "middy" suit and a dark-blue "Norfolk." The exchange brought forth the veriest wisp of a sigh, for a woman's a woman, on the road or off it; and what one has not a marked preference for the more becoming frock? Patsy proved herself a most lawful housebreaker. She tidied up and put away everything; and the shutter having already been replaced over the broken window by the runaway tinker, she turned the knob of the Yale lock on the front door and put one foot over the threshold. It was back again in an instant, however; and this time it was no lawful Patsy that flew back through the hall to the mantel-shelf. With the deftness and celerity of a true housebreaker she de-framed the tinker and stuffed the photograph in the pocket of her stolen Norfolk. "Sure, he promised his company to Arden," she said, by way of stilling her conscience. Then she crossed the threshold again; and this time she closed the door behind her. The sun was inconsiderately overhead. There was nothing to indicate where it had risen or whither it intended to set; therefore there was no way of Patsy's telling from what direction she had come or where Arden was most likely to be found. She shook her fist at the sun wrathfully. "I'll be bound you're in league with the tinker; 'tis all a conspiracy to keep me from ever making Arden, or else to keep me just seven miles from it. That's a grand number--seven." A glint of white on the grass caught her eye; she stooped and found it to be a diminutive quill feather dropped by some passing pigeon. It lay across her palm for a second, and then--the whim taking her--she shot it exultantly into the air. Where it fell she marked the way it pointed, and that was the road she took. It was beginning to seem years ago since she had sat in Marjorie Schuyler's den listening to Billy Burgeman's confession of a crime for which he had not sounded in the least responsible. That was on Tuesday. It was now Friday--three days--seventy-two hours later. She preferred to think of it in terms of hours--it measured the time proportionally nearer to the actual feeling of it. Strangely enough, it seemed half a lifetime instead of half a week, and Patsy could not fathom the why of it. But what puzzled her more was the present condition of Billy Burgeman, himself. As far as she was concerned he had suddenly ceased to exist, and she was pursuing a Balmacaan coat and plush hat that were quite tenantless; or--at most--they were supported by the very haziest suggestion of a personality. The harder she struggled to make a flesh-and-blood man therefrom the more persistently did it elude her--slipping through her mental grasp like so much quicksilver. She tried her best to picture him doing something, feeling something--the simplest human emotion--and the result was an absolute blank. And all the while the shadow of a very real man followed her down the road--a shadow in grotesquely flapping rags, with head flung back. A dozen times she caught herself listening for the tramp of his feet beside hers, and flushed hotly at the nagging consciousness that pointed out each time only the mocking echo of her own tread. Like the left-behind cottage, the road became unexpectedly lonely and discouraging. "The devil take them both!" she sputtered at last. "When one man refuses to be real at all, and the other pesters ye with being too real--'tis time to quit their company and let them fetch up where and how they like." But an O'Connell is never a quitter; and deep down in Patsy's heart was the determination to see the end of the road for all three of them--if fate only granted the chance. She came to a cross-roads at length. She had spied it from afar and hailed it as the end of her troubles; now she would learn the right way to Arden. But Patsy reckoned without chance--or some one else. The sign-boards had all been ripped from their respective places on a central post and lay propped up against its base. There was little information in them for Patsy as she read: "Petersham, five miles; Lebanon, twelve miles; Arden, seven miles--" The last sign went spinning across the road, and Patsy dropped on a near-by stone with the anguish of a great tragedian. "Seven miles--seven miles! I'm as near to it and I know as much about it as when I started three days ago. Sure, I feel like a mule, just, on a treadmill, with Billy Burgeman in the hopper." A feeling of utter helplessness took possession of her; it was as if her experiences, her actions, her very words and emotions, were controlled by an unseen power. Impulse might have precipitated her into the adventure, but since her feet had trod the first stretch of the road to Arden chance had sat somewhere, chuckling at his own comedy--making, while he pulled her hither and yon, like a marionette on a wire. Verily chance was still chuckling at the incongruity of his stage setting: A girl pursuing a strange man, and a strange sheriff pursuing the girl, and neither having an inkling of the pursuit or the reason for it. On one thing her mind clinched fast, however: she would at least sit where she was until some one came by who could put her right, once and for all; rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief--she would stop whoever came first. The arpeggio of an automobile horn brought her to her feet; the next moment the machine careened into sight and Patsy flagged it from the middle of the road, the lines of her face set in grim determination. "Would you kindly tell me--" she was beginning when a girl in the tonneau cut her short: "Why, it's Patsy O'Connell! How in the name of your blessed Saint Patrick did you ever get so far from home?" The car was full of young people, but the girl who had spoken was the only one who looked at all familiar. Patsy's mind groped out of the present into the past; it was all a blind alley, however, and led nowhere. The girl, seeing her bewilderment, helped her out. "Don't you remember, I was with Marjorie Schuyler in Dublin when you were all so jolly kind to us? I'm Janet Payne--those awful 'Spitsburger Paynes'"--and the girl's laugh rang out contagiously. The laugh swept Patsy's mind out into the open. She reached out and gripped the girl's hand. "Sure, I remember. But it's a long way from Dublin, and my memory is slower at hearkening back than my heart. A brave day to all of you." And her smile greeted the carful indiscriminately. "Oh!"--the girl was apologetic--"how beastly rude I am! I'm forgetting that you don't know everybody as well as everybody knows you. Jean Lewis, Mrs. Dempsy Carter, Dempsy Carter, Gregory Jessup, and Jay Clinton--Miss Patricia O'Connell, of the Irish National Players. We are all very much at your service--including the car, which is not mine, but the Dempsy Carters'." "Shall we kidnap Miss O'Connell?" suggested the owner. "She appears an easy victim." Janet Payne clapped her hands, but Patsy shook a decided negative. "That's the genius of the Irish," she laughed; "they look easy till you hold them up. I'm bound for Arden, and must make it by the quickest road if you'll point it out to me." "Why, of course--Arden; that accounts for you perfectly. Stupid that I didn't think of it at once. What part are you playing?" Janet Payne accompanied the question with unmistakable eagerness. Patsy shot a shrewd glance at the girl. Was she indulging in good-natured banter, or had she learned through Marjorie Schuyler of Patsy's self-imposed quest, and was seeking information in figurative speech? Patsy decided in favor of the former and answered it in kind: "Faith! I'm not sure whether I've been cast for the duke's daughter--or the fool. I can tell ye better after I reach Arden." And she turned abruptly as if she would be gone. But the girl held her back. "No, you don't. We are not going to lose you like that. We'll kidnap you, as Dempsy suggested, till after lunch; then we'll motor you back to Arden. You'll get there just about as soon." Patsy had not the slightest intention of yielding; her mind and her feet were braced against any divergence from the straight road now; but the man Janet Payne had called Gregory Jessup said something that scattered her resolutions like so much chaff. "You've simply got to come, Miss O'Connell." And he leaned over the side of the car in boyish enthusiasm. "Last summer Billy Burgeman used to read to me the parts of Marjorie's letters that told about you, and they were great! We were making up our minds to go to Ireland and see if you were real when your company came to America. After that Marjorie would never introduce us after the plays, just to be contrary. You wouldn't have the heart to grudge us a little acquaintanceship now, would you?" "Billy Burgeman," repeated Patsy. "Do you know him?" Dempsy Carter interposed. "They're chums, Miss O'Connell. I'll wager there isn't a soul on earth that knows Billy as well as Greg does." "That's hard on Marjorie, isn't it?" asked Janet Payne. "Oh, hang Marjorie!" The sincerity of Gregory Jessup's emotion somewhat excused his outburst. "Why, I thought they were betrothed!" Patsy looked innocent. "They were. What they are now--Heaven only knows! Marjorie Schuyler has gone to China, and Billy has dropped off the face of the earth." A sudden silence fell on the cross-roads. It was Patsy who broke it at last. "Well?" A composite, interrogative stare came from the carful. Patsy laughed bewitchingly. "For a crowd of rascally kidnappers, you are the slowest I ever saw. Troth, in Ireland they'd have it done in half the time." The next instant Patsy was lifted bodily inside, and, amid a general burst of merriment, the car swung down the road. * * * * * It was a picnic lunch--an elaborate affair put up in a hamper, a fireless cooker, and a thermos basket; and it was spread on a tiny, fir-covered peninsula jutting out into a diminutive lake. It was an enchanting spot and a delicious lunch, with good company to boot; but, to her annoyance, Patsy found herself continually comparing it unfavorably with a certain vagabond breakfast garnished with yellow lady's-slippers, musicianed by throstles, and served by a tinker. "Something is on your mind, or do you find our American manners and food too hard to digest comfortably?" Gregory Jessup had curled up unceremoniously at her feet, balancing a caviar sandwich, a Camembert cheese, and a bottle of ale with extraordinary dexterity. "I was thinking about--Billy Burgeman." He cast a furtive look toward the others beyond them. They seemed engrossed for the moment in some hectic discussion over fashions, and he dropped his voice to a confidential pitch: "I can't talk Billy with the others; I'm too much cut up over the whole thing to stand hearing them hold an autopsy over Billy's character and motives." He stopped abruptly and scanned Patsy's face. "I believe a chap could turn his mind inside out with you, though, and you'd keep the contents as faithfully as a safe-deposit vault." Patsy smiled appreciatively. "Faith! you make me feel like Saint Martin's chest that Satan himself couldn't be opening." "What did he have in it?" "Some good Christian souls." "Contents don't tally--mine are some very un-Christian thoughts." He abandoned the sandwich and cheese, and settled himself to the more serious business of balancing his remarks. "Billy and I work for the same engineering firm; he walked out for lunch Tuesday and no one has seen him since--unless it's Marjorie Schuyler. Couldn't get anything out of the old man when I first went to see him, and now he's too ill to see any one. Marjorie said she really didn't know where he was, and quit town the next day. Now maybe they don't either of them know what's happened any more than I do; but I think it's infernally queer for a man to disappear and say nothing to his father, the girl he's engaged to, or his best friend. Don't you?" Patsy's past training stood stanchly by her. She played the part of the politely interested listener--nothing more--and merely nodded her head. "You see," the man went on, "Billy has a confoundedly queer sense of honor; he can stretch it at times to cover nearly everybody's calamities and the fool shortcomings of all his acquaintances. Why, it wasn't a month ago a crowd of us from the works were lunching together, and the talk came around to speculating. Billy's hard against it on principle, but he happened to say that if he was going in for it at all he'd take cotton. What was in Billy's mind was not the money in it, but the chance to give the South a boost. Well, one of the fellows took it as a straight tip to get rich from the old man's son and put in all he had saved up to be married on; lost it and squealed. And Billy--the big chump--claimed he was responsible for it--that, being the son of his father, he ought to know enough to hold his tongue on some subjects. He made it good to the fellow. I happen to know, for it took every cent of his own money and his next month's salary into the bargain--and that he borrowed from me." "Wouldn't his father have helped him out?" Gregory Jessup gave a bitter little laugh. "You don't know the old man or you wouldn't ask. He is just about as soft-hearted and human as a Labrador winter. I've known Billy since we were both little shavers--and, talk about the curse of poverty! It's a saintly benediction compared to a fortune like that and life with the man who made it." "And--himself, Billy--what does he think of money?" "I'll tell you what he said once. He had dropped in late after a big dinner where he had been introduced to some one as the fellow who was going to inherit sixty millions some day. Phew! but he was sore! He walked miles--in ten-foot laps--about my den, while he cursed his father's money from Baffin Bay to Cape Horn. 'I tell you, Greg,' he finished up with, 'I want enough to keep the cramps out of life, that's all; enough to help the next fellow who's down on his luck; enough to give the woman I marry a home and not a residence to live in, and to provide the father of my kiddies with enough leisure for them to know what real fatherhood means. I bet you I can make enough myself to cover every one of those necessities; as for the millions, I'd like to chuck them for quoits off the Battery.'" For a moment Patsy's eyes danced; but the next, something tumbled out of her memory and quieted them. "Then why in the name of Saint Anthony did he choose to marry Marjorie Schuyler?" "That does seem funny, I know, but that's a totally different side of Billy. You see, all his life he's been falling in with people who made up to him just for his money, and his father had a confounded way of reminding him that he was bound to be plucked unless he kept his wits sharp and distrusted every one. It made Billy sick, and yet it had its effect. He's always been mighty shy with girls--reckon his father brought him up on tales of rich chaps and modern Circes. Anyway, when he met Marjorie Schuyler it was different--she had too much money of her own to make his any particular attraction, and he finally gave in that she liked him just for himself. That was a proud day for him, poor old Bill!" "And did she--could she really love him?" Patsy asked the question of herself rather than the man beside her. But he answered it promptly: "I don't believe Marjorie Schuyler has anything to love with; it was overlooked when she was made. That's what's worrying me. If he's got into a scrape he'd tell Marjorie the first thing; and she's not the understanding, forgiving kind. He hasn't any money; he wouldn't go to his father; and because he's borrowed from me once, he's that idiotic he wouldn't do it again. If Marjorie has given him his papers he's in a jolly blue funk and perfectly capable of going off where he'll never be heard of again. Hang it all! I don't see why he couldn't have come to me?" Patsy said nothing while he replenished her plate and helped himself to another sandwich. At last she asked, casually, "Did the two of you ever have a disagreement over Marjorie Schuyler?" "He asked me once just what I thought of her, and I told him. We never discussed her again." "No?" Inwardly Patsy was tabulating why Billy Burgeman had not gone to his friend when Marjorie Schuyler failed him. He would hardly have cared to criticize the shortcomings of the girl he loved with the man who had already discovered them. "What are you two jabbering about?" Janet Payne had left her group and the hectic argument over fashions. "Sure, we're threshing out whether it's the Irish or the suffragettes will rule England when the war is over." "Well, which is it?" "Faith! the answer's so simple I'm ashamed to give it. The women will rule England--that's an easy matter; but the Irish will rule the women." "Then you are one of the old-fashioned kind who approves of a lord and master?" Gregory Jessup looked up at her quizzically. "'Tis the new fashion you're meaning; having gone out so long since, 'tis barely coming in yet. I'd not give a farthing for the man who couldn't lead me; only, God help him! if he ever leaves his hands off the halter." The laugh that followed gave Patsy time to think. There was one more question she must be asking before the others joined them and the conversation became general. She turned to Janet Payne with a little air of anxious inquiry. "Maybe you'd ask the rascally villain who kidnapped me, when he has it in his mind to keep his promise and fetch me to Arden?" As the girl left them Patsy turned toward Gregory Jessup again and asked, softly: "Supposing Billy Burgeman has fallen among strangers? If they saw he was in need of friendliness, would it be so hard to do him a kindness?" The man shook his head. "The hardest thing in the world. Billy Burgeman has been proud and lonely all his life, and it's an infernal combination. You may know he's out and out aching for a bit of sympathy, but you never offer it; you don't dare. We could never get him to own up as a little shaver how neglected and lonely he was and how he hated to stay in that horrible, gloomy Fifth Avenue house. It wasn't until he had grown up that he told me he used to come and play as often as they would let him--just because mother used to kiss him good-by as she did her own boys." Gregory Jessup looked beyond the firs to the little lake, and there was that in his face which showed that he was wrestling with a treasured memory. When he spoke again his voice sounded as if he had had to grip it hard against a sign of possible emotion. "You know Billy's father never gave him an allowance; he didn't believe in it--wouldn't trust Billy with a cent. Poor little shaver--never had anything to treat with at school, the way the rest of the boys did; and never even had car-fare--always walked, rain or shine, unless his father took him along with him in the machine. Billy used to say even in those days he liked walking better. Mother died in the winter--snowy time--when Billy was about twelve; and he borrowed a shovel from a corner grocer and cleared stoops all afternoon until he'd made enough to buy two white roses. Father hadn't broken down all day--wouldn't let us children show a tear; but when Billy came in with those roses--well, it was the children who finally had to cheer father up." Patsy sprang to her feet with a little cry. "I must be going." She turned to the others, a ring of appeal in her voice. "Can't we hurry a bit? There's a deal of work at Arden to be done, and no one but myself to be doing it." "Rehearsals?" asked Janet Payne. And Patsy, unheeding, nodded her head. There was a babel of nonsense in the returning car. Patsy contributed her share the while her mind was busy building over again into a Balmacaan coat and plush hat the semblance of a man. "Sure, I'm not saying I can make out his looks or the color of his eyes and hair, but he's real, for all that. Holy Saint Patrick, but he's a real man at last, and I'm liking him!" She smiled with deep contentment. X JOSEPH JOURNEYS TO A FAR COUNTRY Having established the permanent reality of Billy Burgeman to her own satisfaction, Patsy's mind went racing off to conjure up all the possible things Billy and the tinker might think of each other as soon as chance should bring them together. Whereas it was perfectly consistent that Billy should shun the consolation and companionship of his own world, he might follow after vagabond company as a thirsty dog trails water; and who could slake that thirst better than the tinker? For a second time that day she pictured the two swinging down the open road together; and for the second time she pulled a wry little smile. The car was nearing the cross-roads from which Patsy had been originally kidnapped. She looked up to identify it, and saw a second car speeding toward them from the opposite direction, while between the two plodded a solitary little figure, coming toward them, supported by a mammoth pilgrim staff. It was a boy, apparently conscious of but the one car--theirs; and he swerved to their left--straight into the path of the car behind--to let them pass. They sounded their horns, waved their hands, and shouted warnings. It seemed wholly unbelievable that he should not understand or that the other car would not stop. But the unbelievable happened; it does sometimes. Before Gregory Jessup could jump from their machine the other car had struck and the boy was tossed like a bundle of empty clothing to the roadside beyond. The nightmarish suddenness of it all held them speechless while they gaped at the car's driver, who gave one backward glance and redoubled his speed. Patsy was the first out of the tonneau, and she reached the boy almost as soon as Gregory Jessup. "Damn them! That's the second time in my life I've seen a machine run some one down and sneak--" He broke off at Patsy's sharp cry: "Holy Mary keep him! 'Tis the wee lad from Lebanon!" By this time the rest of the carful had gathered about them; and Dempsy Carter--being a good Catholic--bared his head and crossed himself. "'Tis wee Joseph of Lebanon," Patsy repeated, dully; and then to Dempsy Carter, "Aye, make a prayer for him; but ye'd best do it driving like the devil for the doctor." They left at once with her instructions to get the nearest doctor first, and then to go after the boy's parents. Gregory Jessup stayed behind with her, and together they tried to lift the still, little figure onto some rugs and pillows. Then Patsy crept closer and wound her arms about him, chafing his cheeks and hands and watching for some sign of returning life. The man stood silently beside them, holding the pilgrim staff, while his eyes wandered from Patsy to the child and back to Patsy again, her face full of harboring tenderness and a great suffering as she gathered the little boy into her arms and pressed her warm cheek against the cold one. Only once during their long wait was the silence broken. "'Tis almost as if he'd slipped over the border," Patsy whispered. "Maybe he's there in the gray dusk--a wee shadow soul waiting for death to loosen its wings and send it lilting into the blue of the Far Country." "How did you happen to know him?" "Chance, just. I stopped to tell him a tale of a wandering hero and he--" She broke off with a little moan. "_Ochone!_ poor wee Joseph! did I send ye forth on a brave adventure only to bring ye to this?" Her fingers brushed the damp curls from his forehead. "Laddy, laddy, why didn't ye mind the promise I laid on ye?" The doctor was kindly and efficient, but professionally non-committal. The boy was badly injured, and he must be moved at once to the nearest house. Somehow they lifted Joseph and held him so as to break the jar of stone and rut as the doctor drove his car as carefully as he could down the road leading to the nearest farm-house. There they were met with a generous warmth of sympathy and hospitality; the spare chamber was opened, and the farm wife bustled about, turning down the bed and bringing what comforts the house possessed. The doctor stayed as long as he could; but the stork was flying at the other end of the township, and he was forced to leave Patsy in charge, with abundant instructions. Soon after his leaving the Dempsy Carters returned without Joseph's parents; they had gone to town and were not expected home until "chore time." "All right," Patsy sighed. "Now ye had best all go your ways and I'll bide till morning." "But can you?" Janet Payne asked it, wonderingly. "I thought you said you had to be in Arden to-day?" A smile, whimsical and baffling, crept to the corners of Patsy's mouth. "Sure, life is crammed with things ye think have to be done to-day till they're matched against a sudden greater need. Chance and I started the wee lad on his journey, and 'twas meant I should see him safe to the end, I'm thinking. Good-by." Gregory Jessup lingered a moment behind the others; his eyes were suspiciously red, and the hands that gripped Patsy's shook the least bit. "I wanted to say something: If--if you should ever happen to run up against Billy Burgeman--anywhere--don't be afraid to do him a kindness. He--he wouldn't mind it from you." Patsy leaned against the door and watched him go. "There's another good lad. I'd like to be finding him again, too, some day." She pressed her hands over her eyes with a fierce little groan, as if she would blot out the enveloping tragedy along with her surroundings. "Faith! what is the meaning of life, anyway? Until to-day it has seemed such a simple, straight road; I could have drawn a fair map of it myself, marking well the starting-point and tracing it reasonably true to the finish. But to-night--to-night--'tis all a tangle of lanes and byways. There's no sign-post ahead--and God alone knows where it's leading." She went back to the spare chamber and took up her watching by the bedside; and for the rest of that waning day she sat as motionless as everything else in the room. The farm wife came and went softly, in between her preparations for supper. When it was ready she tried her best to urge Patsy down-stairs for a mouthful. But the girl refused to stir. "I couldn't. The wee lad might come back while I was gone and find no one to reach him a hand or smile him a welcome." A little later, as the dark gathered, she begged two candles and stood them on the stand beside the bed. Something in her movements or the flickering light must have pierced his stupor, for Joseph moaned slightly and in a moment opened his eyes. Patsy leaned over him tenderly; could she only keep him content until the mother came and guard the mysterious borderland against all fear or pain, "Laddy, laddy," she coaxed, "do ye mind me--now?" The veriest wisp of a smile answered her. "And were ye for playing Jack yourself, tramping off to find the castle with a window in it for every day in the year?" Her voice was full of gentle, teasing laughter, the voice of a mother playing with a very little child. "I'm hoping ye didn't forget the promise--ye didn't forget to ask for the blessing before ye went, now?" No sound came; but the boy's lips framed a silent "No." In another moment his eyes were drooping sleepily. * * * * * Night had come, and with it the insistent chorus of tree-toad and katydid, interspersed with the song of the vesper sparrow. From the kitchen came the occasional rattle of dish or pan and the far-away murmur of voices. Patsy strained her ears for some sound of car or team upon the road; but there was none. Again the lids fluttered and opened; this time Joseph smiled triumphantly. "I thought--p'r'aps--I hadn't found you--after all--there was--so many ways--you might ha' went." He moistened his lips. "At the cross-roads--I wasn't quite--sure which to be takin', but I took--the right one, I did--didn't I?" There was a ring of pride in the words, and Patsy moistened her lips. Something clutched at her throat that seemed to force the words back. "Aye," she managed to say at last. "An' I've--found you now--you'll have to--promise me not to go back--not where they can get you. Si Perkins said--as how they'd soon forget--if you just stayed away long enough." The boy looked at her happily. "Let's--let's keep on--an' see what lies over the next hill." To Patsy this was all an unintelligible wandering of mind; she must humor it. "All right, laddy, let's keep on. Maybe we'll be finding a wood full of wild creatures, or an ocean full of ships." "P'r'aps. But I'd rather--have it a big--big city. I never--saw a city." "Aye, 'tis a city then"--Patsy's tone carried conviction--"the grandest city ever built; and the towers will be touching the clouds, and the streets will be white as sea-foam; and there will be a great stretch of green meadow for fairs--" "An' circuses?" "What else but circuses! And at the entrance there will be a gate with tall white columns--" The sound Patsy had been listening for came at last through the open windows: the pad-pad-pad of horses' hoofs coming fast. Joseph looked past Patsy and saw for the first time the candles by his bed. His eyes sparkled. "They _are_--woppin' big columns--an' at night--they have lighted lamps on top--all shinin'. Don't they?" "Aye, to point the way in the dark." "It's dark--now." The boy's voice lagged in a tired fashion. "Maybe we'd best hurry--then." A door slammed below, and there was a rustle of tongues. "Who'll be 'tendin' the city gates?" asked Joseph. "Who but the gatekeeper?" Muffled feet crept up the stairs. "Will he let us in?" "He'll let ye in, laddy; I might be too much of a stranger." "But I could speak for you. I--I wouldn't like--goin' in alone in the dark." "Bless ye! ye'd not be alone." Patsy's voice rang vibrant with gladness. "Now, who do you think will be watching for ye, close to the gate? Look yonder!" Joseph's eyes went back to the candles, splendid, tall columns they were, with beacon lamps capping each. "Who?" Dim faces looked at him through the flickering light; but there was only one he saw, and it brought the merriest smile to his lips. "Why--'course it's mother--sure's shootin'!" * * * * * Early the next morning Patsy waited on the braided rug outside the spare chamber for Joseph's mother to come out. "I've been praying ye'd not hate me for the tale I told the little lad that day, the tale that brought him--yonder. And if it isn't overlate, I'd like to be thanking ye for taking me in that night." The woman looked at her searchingly through swollen lids. "I cal'ate there's no thanks due; your man paid for your keep; he sawed and split nigh a cord o' wood that night--must ha' taken him 'most till mornin'." She paused an instant. "Didn't--he"--she nodded her head toward the closed door behind her--"never tell you what brought him?" "Naught but that he wanted to find me." "He believed in you," the woman said, simply, adding in a toneless voice: "I cal'ate I couldn't hate you. I never saw any one make death so--sweet like--as you done for--him." Patsy spread her hands deprecatingly. "Why shouldn't it be sweet like? Faith! is it anything but a bit of the very road we've been traveling since we were born, the bit that lies over the hill and out of sight?" She took the woman's work-worn hands in hers. "'Tis terrible, losing a little lad; but 'tis more terrible never having one. God and Mary be with ye!" When Patsy left the house a few minutes later Joseph's pilgrim staff was in her hands, and she stopped on the threshold an instant to ask the way of Joseph's father. The good man was dazed with his grief and he directed Patsy in terms of his own home-going: "Keep on, and take the first turn to your right." So Patsy kept on instead of returning to the cross-roads; and chance scored another point in his comedy and continued chuckling. * * * * * Meanwhile Joseph's father went back to the spare chamber. "'S she gone?" inquired Joseph's mother. "Yep." "You know, the boy believed in her." "Yep, I know." "Well, I cal'ate we've got to, too." "Sure thing!" "Ye'll never say a word, then--about seein' her; nuthin' to give the sheriff a hint where she might be?" "Why, mother!" The man laid a hand on her shoulder, looking down at her with accusing eyes. "Hain't you known me long enough to know I couldn't tell on any one who'd been good to--" He broke off with a cough. "And what's more, do you think any one who could take our little boy's hand and lead him, as you might say, straight to heaven--would be a thief? No, siree!" * * * * * It was a sober, thoughtful Patsy that followed the road, the pilgrim staff gripped tightly in her hand. She clung to it as the one tangible thing left to her out of all the happenings and memories of her quest. The tinker had disappeared as completely as if the earth had swallowed him, leaving behind no reason for his going, no hope of his coming again; Billy Burgeman was still but a flimsy promise; and Joseph had outstripped them both, passing beyond her farthest vision. Small wonder, then, that the road was lonely and haunted for Patsy, and that she plodded along shorn of all buoyancy. Her imagination began playing tricks with her. Twice it seemed as if she could feel a little lad's hand, warm and eager, curled under hers about the staff; another time she found herself gazing through half-shut eyes at a strange lad--a lad of twelve--who walked ahead for a space, carrying two great white roses; and once she glanced up quickly and saw the tinker coming toward her, head thrown back and laughing. Her wits had barely time to check her answering laugh and hands outstretching, when he faded into empty winding road. The morning was uneventful. Patsy stopped but once--to trundle a perambulator laden with washing and twins for its small conductor, a mite of a girl who looked almost too frail to breast the weight of a doll's carriage. Even Patsy puffed under the strain of the burden. "How do you do it?" she gasped. "Well, I started when them babies was tiny and the washin' was small; an' they both growed so gradual I didn't notice--much. An' ma don't make me hurry none." "How many children are there?" "Nine. Last's just come. Pa says he didn't look on him as no blessin', but ma says the Lord must provide--an' if it's babies, then it's babies." She stopped and clasped her hands after the fashion of an ancient grandmother tottering in the nineties: "Land o' goodness, I do think an empty cradle's an awful dismal thing to have round. Don't you?" Patsy agreed, and a moment later unloaded the twins and the washing for the child at her doorstep. Soon after this she caught her first glimpse of the town she was making. "If luck will only turn stage-manager," she thought, "and put Billy Burgeman in the center of the scene--handy, why, I'll promise not to murder my lines or play under." It was not luck, however, but chance, still pulling the wires; and accordingly he managed Patsy's entrance as he wished. The town had one main street, like Lebanon, and in front of the post-office in a two-seated car sat a familiar figure. There was the Balmacaan coat and the round plush hat; and to Patsy, impulsive and heart-strong, it sufficed. She ran nearly the length of the street in her eagerness to reach him. XI AND CHANCE STAGES MELODRAMA INSTEAD OF COMEDY "A brave day to ye!" A little bit of everything that made Patsy was wrapped in the smile she gave the man in the Balmacaan coat standing by the wheel-guard of the car before the town post-office, a hand on the front seat. "Maybe ye're not knowing it, but it's a rare good day for us both. If you'll only take me for a spin in your car I'll tell you what brings me--and who I am--if you haven't that guessed already." Plainly the occupant of the coat and the car was too much taken by surprise to guess. He simply stared; and by that stare conveyed a heart-sinking impression to Patsy. She looked at the puffed eyes and the grim, unyielding line of the mouth, and she wanted to run. It took all the O'Connell stubbornness, coupled with the things Gregory Jessup had told her about his friend, to keep her feet firm to the sidewalk and her resolution. "Maybe," she thought, "he's just taken on the look of a rascal because he thinks the world has written him down one. That's often the way with a man; and often it takes but a bit of kindness to change it. If I could make him smile--now--" Her next remark accomplished this, but it did not mend matters a whit. Patsy's heart turned over disconsolately; and she was safety-locking her wits to keep them from scattering when she made her final plea. "I'm not staying long, and I want to know you; there's something I have to be saying before I go on my way. 'Twould be easiest if you'd take me for a ride in your car; we could talk quieter there." She tried to finish with a reasonably cheerful look, but it was a tragic failure. The man was looking past her to the post-office beyond, and the things Patsy had seemed to feel in his face suddenly rose to the surface and revealed themselves with an instant's intensity. Patsy followed the look over her shoulder and shrank away perceptibly. In the doorway of the office stood another man, younger and more--pronounced. It could mean but one thing: Billy Burgeman had lost his self-respect along with Marjorie Schuyler and had fallen in with foul company. There were natures that crumbled and went to pieces under distrust and failure--natures that allowed themselves to be blown by passion and self-pity until they burned down into charred heaps of humanity. She had met a few of them in her life; but--thank God!--there were only a few. She found herself praying that she might not have come too late. Just what she would do or say she could not tell; but she must make him understand that he was not the arbiter of his own life, that in spite of what he had found, there were love and trust and disinterested kindness in the world, lots of it. Money might be a curse, but it was a curse that a man could raise for himself; and a little lad who could shovel snow for half a day to earn two white roses for a dead friend was too fine to be lost out of life's credit-sheet. She did not wait for any invitation; silently, with a white face, she climbed into the car and sat with hands folded about the pilgrim staff. It was as if she had taken him for granted and was waiting for his compliance to her will. And he understood. He moved the starter, and, as the motor began its chugging, he called out to the man in the doorway: "Better not wait for me. I seem to have a date with--a lady." There was an unpleasant intonation on the last word. "Please take a quiet road--where there will not be much passing," commanded Patsy. She did not speak again until the town lay far behind and they were well on that quiet road. Then she turned partly toward him, her hands still clasped, and when she spoke it was still in the best of the king's English--she had neither feeling nor desire for the intimacy of her own tongue. "I know it must seem a bit odd to have me, a stranger, come to you this way. But when a man's family and betrothed fail him--why, some one must--make it up--" He turned fiercely. "How did you know that?" "I--she--Never mind; I know, that's all. And I came, thinking maybe you'd be glad--" "Of another?" he laughed coarsely, looking her over with an appraising scrutiny. "Well, a fellow might have a worse--substitute." Patsy crimsoned. It seemed incredible that the man she had listened to that day in Marjorie Schuyler's den, who had then gripped her sympathies and thereby pulled her after him in spite of past illness and all common sense, should be the man speaking now. And yet--what was it Gregory Jessup had said about him? Had he not implied that old King Midas had long ago warped his son's trust in women until he had come to look upon them all as modern Circes? And gradually shame for herself changed into pity for him. What a shabby performance life must seem to such as he! She had an irresistible desire to take him with her behind the scenes and show him what it really was; to point out how with a change of line here, a new cue there, and a different drop behind; with a choice of fellow-players, and better lights, and the right spirit back of it all--what a good thing he could make of his particular part. But would he see--could she make him understand? It was worth trying. "You are every bit wrong," she said, evenly. "Look at me. Do I look like an adventuress? And haven't you ever had anybody kind to you simply because they had a preference for kindness?" The two looked at each other steadily while the machine crawled at minimum speed down the deserted road. Her eyes never flinched under the blighting weight of his, although her heart seemed to stop a hundred times and the soul of her shrivel into nothing. "Well," she heard herself saying at last, "don't you think you can believe in me?" The man laughed again, coarsely. "Believe in you? That's precisely what I'm doing this minute--believing in your cleverness and a deuced pretty way with you. Now don't get mad, my dear. You are all daughters of Eve, and your intentions are very innocent--of course." Pity and sympathy left Patsy like starved pensioners. The eyes looking into his blazed with righteous anger and a hating distrust; they carried to him a stronger, more direct message than words could have done. His answer was to double the speed of the car. "Stop the car!" she demanded. "Oh, ho! we're getting scared, are we? Repenting of our haste?" The grim line of his mouth became more sinister. "No man relishes a woman's contempt, and he generally makes her pay when he can. Now I came for pleasure, and I'm going to get it." An arm shot around Patsy and held her tight; the man was strong enough to keep her where he wished her and steer the car down a straight, empty road. "Remember, I can prove you asked me to take you--and it was your choice--this nice, quiet spin!" She sat so still, so relaxed under his grip that unconsciously he relaxed too; she could feel the gradual loosening of joint and muscle. "Why didn't you scream?" he sneered at length. "I'm keeping my breath--till there's need of it." Silence followed. The car raced on down the persistently empty road; the few houses they passed might have been tenantless for any signs of human life about them. In the far distance Patsy could see a suspension-bridge, and she wished and wished it might be closed for repairs--something, anything to bring to an end this hideous, nightmarish ride. She groaned inwardly at the thought of it all. She--Patricia O'Connell--who would have starved rather than play cheap, sordid melodrama--had been tricked by chance into becoming an actual, living part of one. She wondered a little why she felt no fear--she certainly had nothing but distrust and loathing for the man beside her--and these are breeders of fear. Perhaps her anger had crowded out all other possible emotion; perhaps--back of everything--she still hoped for the ultimate spark of decency and good in him. Her silence and apparent apathy puzzled the man. "Well, what's in your mind?" he snapped. "Two things: I was thinking what a pity it was you let your father throw so much filth in your eyes, that you grew up to see everything about you smirched and ugly; and I was wondering how you ever came to have a friend like Gregory Jessup and a fancy for white roses." "What in thunder are you talking--" But he never finished. The scream he had looked for came when he had given up expecting it. Patsy had wrenched herself free from his hold and was leaning over the wind-shield, beckoning frantically to a figure mounted on one of the girders of the bridge. It was a grotesque, vagabond figure in rags, a battered cap on the back of its head. "Good God!" muttered the man in the car, stiffening. Luckily for the tinker the car was running again at a moderate speed; the man had slowed up when he saw the rough planking over the bridge, and his hand had not time enough to reach the lever when the tinker was upon him. The car came to an abrupt stop. Patsy sank back on the seat, white and trembling, as she watched the instant's grappling of the two, followed by a lurching tumble over the side of the car to the planking. The fall knocked them apart, and for the space of a few quick breaths they half rose and faced each other--the one almost crazed with fury, the other steady, calm, but terrifyingly determined. Before Patsy could move they were upon each other again--rolling about in the dust, clutching at each other's throat--now half under the car, now almost through the girders of the bridge, with Patsy's voice crying a warning. Again they were on their feet, grappling and hitting blindly; then down in the dust, rolling and clutching. It was plain melodrama of the most banal form; and the most convincing part of it all was the evident personal enmity that directed each blow. Somehow it was borne in upon Patsy that her share in the quarrel was an infinitesimal part; it was the old, old scene in the fourth act: the hero paying up the villain for all past scores. Like the scene in the fourth act, it came to an end at last. The time came when no answering blow met the tinker's, when the hand that gripped his throat relaxed and the body back of it went down under him--breathless and inert. Patsy climbed out of the car to make room for the stowing away of its owner. He was conscious, but past articulate speech and thoroughly beaten; and the tinker kindly turned the car about for him and started him slowly off, so as to rid the road of him, as Patsy said. It looked possible, with a careful harboring of strength and persistence, for him to reach eventually the starting-point and his friend of the post-office. As his trail of dust lengthened between them Patsy gave a sigh of relieved content and turned to the tinker. "Faith, ye are a sight for a sore heart." Her hand slid into his outstretched one. "I'll make a bargain with ye: if ye'll forgive and forget the unfair things I said to ye that night I'll not stay hurt over your leaving without notice the next morning." "It's a bargain," but he winced as he said it. "It seems as if our meetings were dependent on a certain amount of--of physical disablement." He smiled reassuringly. "I don't really mind in the least. I'd stand for knockout blows down miles of road, if they would bring you back--every time." "Don't joke!" Patsy covered her face. "If--if ye only knew--what it means to have ye standing there this minute!" She drew in her breath quickly; it sounded dangerously like a sob. "If ye only knew what ye have saved me from--and what I am owing ye--" Her hands fell, and she looked at him with a sudden shy concern. "Poor lad! Here ye are--a fit subject for a hospital, and I'm wasting time talking instead of trying to mend ye up. Do ye think there might be water hereabouts where we could wash off some of that--grease paint?" But the tinker was contemplating his right foot; he was standing on the other. "Don't bother about those scratches; they go rather well with the clothes, don't you think? It's this ankle that's bothering me; I must have turned it when I jumped." "Can't ye walk on it? Ye can lean on this"--she passed him the pilgrim staff--"and we can go slowly. Bad luck to the man! If I had known ye were hurt I'd have made ye leave him in the road and we'd have driven his machine back to Arden for him." She looked longingly after the trail of dust. "Your ethics are questionable, but your geography is worse. Arden isn't back there." "What do ye mean? Why, I saw Arden, back yonder, with my own eyes--not an hour ago." "No, you didn't. You saw Dansville; Arden is over there," and the tinker's hand pointed over his shoulder at right angles to the road. "Holy Saint Branden!" gasped Patsy. "Maybe ye'll have the boldness, then, to tell me I'm still seven miles from it?" "You are." But this time he did not laugh--a smile was the utmost he could manage with the pain in his ankle. Patsy looked as if she might have laughed or cried with equal ease. "Seven miles--seven miles! Tramp the road for four days and be just as near the end as I was at the start--" An expression of enlightenment shot into her face. "Faith, I must have been going in a circle, then." The tinker nodded an affirmative. "And who in the name of reason was the man in the car?" "That's what I'd like to know; the unmitigated nerve of him!" he finished to himself. His chin set itself squarely; his face had grown as white as Patsy's had been and his eyes became doggedly determined. "If it isn't a piece of impertinence, I'd like to ask how you happened to be with him, that way?" Patsy flushed. "I'm thinking ye've earned the right to an answer. I took him for the lad I was looking for. I thought the place was Arden, and--and the clothes were the same." "The clothes!" the tinker repeated it in the same bewildered way that had been his when Patsy first found him; then he turned and grasped Patsy's shoulders with a sudden, inexplicable intensity. "What's the name of the lad--the lad you're after?" "I'll tell you," said Patsy, slowly, "if you'll tell me what you did with my brown clothes that morning before you left." And the answer to both questions was a blank, baffling stare. XII A CHANGE OF NATIONALITY The railroad ran under the suspension-bridge. Patsy could see the station not an eighth of a mile down the track, and she made for it as being the nearest possible point where water might be procured. The station-master gave her a tin can and filled it for her; and ten minutes later she set about scrubbing the tinker free of all the telltale make-up of melodrama. It was accomplished--after a fashion, and with persistent rebelling on the tinker's part and scolding on Patsy's. And, finally, to prove his own supreme indifference to physical disablement, he tore the can from her administering hands, threw it over the bridge, and started down the road at his old, swinging stride. "Is it after more lady's-slippers ye're dandering?" called Patsy. "More likely it's after a pair of those wingèd shoes of Perseus; I'll need them." But his stride soon broke to a walk and then to a lagging limp. "It's no use," he said at last; "I might keep on for another half-mile, a mile at the most; but that's about all I'd be good for. You'll have to go on to Arden alone, and you can't miss it this time." Patsy stopped abruptly. "Why don't ye curse me for the trouble I have brought?" She considered both hands carefully for a minute, as if she expected to find in them the solution to the difficulty, then she looked up and away toward the rising woodland that marked Arden. "Do ye know," she said, wistfully, "I took the road, thinking I could mend trouble for that other lad; and instead it's trouble I've been making for every one--ye, Joseph, and I don't know how many more. And instead of doling kindness--why, I'm begging it. Now what's the meaning of it all? What keeps me failing?" "'There's a divinity that shapes'--" began the tinker. But Patsy cut him short. "Ye do know Willie Shakespeare!" He smiled, guiltily. "I'm afraid I do--known him a good many years." "He's grand company; best I know, barring tinkers." She turned impulsively and, standing on tiptoe, her fingers reached to the top of his shoulders. "See here, lad, ye can just give over thinking I'll go on alone. If I'm cast for melodrama, sure I'll play it according to the best rules; the villain has fled, the hero is hurt, and if I went now I'd be hissed by the gallery. I've got ye into trouble and I'll not leave ye till I see ye out of it--someway. Oh, there's lots of ways; I'm thinking them fast. Like as not a passing team or car would carry ye to Arden; or we might beg the loan of a horse for a bit from some kind-hearted farmer, and I could drive ye over and bring the horse back; or we'll ask a corner for ye at a farm-house till ye are fit to walk--" "We are in the wrong part of the country for any of those things to happen. Look about! Don't you see what a very different road it is from the one we took in the beginning?" Patsy looked and saw. So engrossed had she been in the incidents of the last hour or more that she had not observed the changing country. Here were no longer pastures, tilled fields, houses with neighboring barn-yards, and unclaimed woodland; no longer was the road fringed with stone walls or stump fencing. Well-rolled golf-links stretched away on either hand as far as they could see; and, beyond, through the trees, showed roofs of red tile and stained shingle; and trimmed hedges skirted everything. "'Tis the rich man's country," commented Patsy. "It is, and I'd crawl into a hole and starve before I'd take charity from one of them." "Sure and ye would. When a body's poor 'tis only the poor like himself he'd be asking help of. Don't I know! What's yonder house?" She broke off with a jerk and pointed ahead to a small building, sitting well back from the road, partly hidden in the surrounding clumps of trees. "It's a stable; house burned down last year and it hasn't been used by any one since." "And I'll wager it's as snug as a pocket inside--with fresh hay or straw, plenty to make a lad comfortable. Isn't that grand good luck for ye?" The tinker found it hard to echo Patsy's enthusiasm, but he did his best. "Of course; and it's just the place to leave a lad behind in when a lass has seven miles to tramp before she gets to the end of her journey." "Is that so?" Patsy's tone sounded suspiciously sarcastic. "Well, talking's not walking; supposing ye take the staff in one hand and lean your other on me, and we'll see can we make it before this time to-morrow." They made it in another hour, unobserved by the few straggling players on the links. The stable proved all Patsy had anticipated. She watched the tinker sink, exhausted, on the bedded hay, while she pulled down a forgotten horse-blanket from a near-by peg to throw over him; then she turned in a business-like manner back to the door. "Are you going to Arden?" came the faint voice of the tinker after her. "I might--and then again--I mightn't. Was there any word ye might want me to fetch ahead for ye?" "No; only--perhaps--would you think a chap too everlastingly impertinent to ask you to wait there for him--until he caught up with you?" "I might--and then again--I mightn't." At the door she stopped, and for the second time considered her hands speculatively. "It wouldn't inconvenience your feelings any to take charity from me, would it, seeing I'm as poor as yourself and have dragged ye into this common, tuppenny brawl by my own foolishness?" "You didn't drag me in; I had one foot in already." "I thought so," Patsy nodded, approvingly; her conviction had been correct, then. "And the charity?" "Yes, I'd take it from you." The tinker rolled over with a little moan composed of physical pain and mental discomfort. But in another moment he was sitting upright, shaking a mandatory fist at Patsy as she disappeared through the door. "Remember--no help from the quality! I hate them as much as you do, and I won't have them coming around with their inquisitive, patronizing, supercilious offers of assistance to a--beggar. I tell you I want to be left alone! If you bring any one back with you I'll burn the stable down about me. Remember!" "Aye," she called back; "I'll be remembering." * * * * * She reached the road again; and for the manyeth time since she left the women's free ward of the City Hospital she marshaled all the O'Connell wits. But even the best of wits require opportunity, and to Patsy the immediate outlook seemed barren of such. "There's naught to do but keep going till something turns up," she said to herself; and she followed this Micawber advice to the letter. She came to the end of the grounds which had belonged to the burned house and the deserted stable; she passed on, between a stretch of thin woodland and a grove of giant pines; and there she came upon a cross-road. She looked to the right--it was empty. She looked to the left--and behold there was "Opportunity," large, florid, and agitated, coming directly toward her from one of the tile-roofed houses, and puffing audibly under the combined weight of herself and her bag. "Ze depôt--how long ees eet?" she demanded, when she caught sight of Patsy. The accent was unmistakably French, and Patsy obligingly answered her in her mother-tongue. "I cannot say exactly; about three--four kilometers." "Opportunity" dropped her bag and embraced her. "Oh!" she burst out, volubly. "Think of Zoë Marat finding a countrywoman in this wild land. _Moi_--I can no longer stand it; and when madame's temper goes _pouffe_--I say, it is enough; let madame fast or cook for her guests, as she prefer. I go!" "_Eh, bien!_" agreed the outer Patsy, while her subjective consciousness addressed her objective self in plain Donegal: "Faith! this is the maddest luck--the maddest, merriest luck! If yonder Quality House has lost one cook, 'twill be needing another; and 'tis a poor cook entirely that doesn't hold the keys of her own pantry. Food from Quality House needn't be choking the maddest tinker, if it's paid for in honest work." Having been embraced by "Opportunity," Patsy saw no reason for wasting time in futile sympathy that might better be spent in prompt execution. She despatched the woman to the station with the briefest of directions and herself made straight for Quality House. She was smiling over her appearance and the incongruities of the situation as she rang the bell at the front door and asked for "Madame" in her best parisien. The maid, properly impressed, carried the message at once; and curiosity brought madame in surprising haste to the hall, where she looked Patsy over with frank amazement. "Madame speak French? Ah, I thought so. Madame desires a cook--_voilà!_" The abruptness of this announcement turned madame giddy. "How did you know? Mine did not leave half an hour ago; there isn't another French cook within five miles; it is unbelievable." "It is Providence." Patsy cast her eyes devoutly heavenward. "You have references--" "References!" Patsy shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. "What would madame do with references? She cannot eat them; she cannot feed them to her guests. I can cook. Is that not sufficient?" "But--you do not think--It is impossible that I ever employ a servant without references. And you--you look like anything in the world but a French cook." "Madame is not so foolish as to find fault with the ways of Providence, or judge one by one's clothes? Who knows--at this moment it may be _à la mode_ in Paris for cooks to wear sailor blouses. Besides, madame is mistaken; I am not a servant. I am an artist--a culinary artist." "You can cook, truly?" "But yes, madame!" "Excellent sauces?" "_Mon Dieu_--Béchamel--Hollandaise--chaud-froid--maître d'hôtel--Espagnole--Béarnaise--" Patsy completed the list with an ecstatic kiss blown into the air. Madame sighed and spoke in English: "It is unbelievable--absurd. I shouldn't trust my own eyes or palate if I sat down to-night to the most remarkable dinner in the world; but one must feed one's guests." She looked Patsy over again. "Your trunk?" "Trunk? Is it toilettes or sauces madame wishes me to make for her guests? _Ma foi!_ Trunks--references--one is as unimportant as the other. Is it not enough for the present if I cook for madame? Afterward--" She ended with the all-expressive shrug. Evidently madame conceded the point, for without further comment she led the way to the kitchen and presented the bill of fare for dinner. "'For twelve,'" read Patsy. "And to-morrow is Sunday. Ah, Providence is good to madame, _mais-oui?_" But madame's thoughts were on more practical matters. "Your wages?" "One hundred francs a week, and the kitchen to myself. I, too, have a temper, madame." Patsy gave a quick toss to her head, while her eyes snapped. * * * * * That night the week-end guests at Quality House sat over their coffee, volubly commenting on the rare excellence of their dinner and the good fortune of their hostess in her possession of such a cook. Madame kept her own counsel and blessed Providence; but she did not allow that good fortune to escape with her better judgment--or anything else. She ordered the butler, before retiring, to count the silver and lock it in her dressing-room; this was to be done every night--as long as the new cook remained. And the new cook? Her work despatched, and her kitchen to herself, she was free to get dinner for one more of madame's guests. "Faith! he'd die of a black fit if he ever knew he was a guest of Quality House--and she'd die of another if she found out whom she was entertaining. But, glory be to Peter! what neither of them knows won't hurt them." And Patsy, unobserved, opened the back door and retraced the road to the deserted stable with a full basket and a glad heart. She found the tinker under some trees at the back, smoking a disreputable cuddy pipe with a worse accompaniment of tobacco. When he saw her he removed it apologetically. "It smells horrible, I know. I found it, forgotten, on a ledge of the stable, but it keeps a chap from remembering that he is hungry." "Poor lad!" Patsy knelt on the ground beside him and opened her basket. "Put your nose into that, just. 'Tis a nine-course dinner and every bit of the best. Faith! 'tis lucky I was found on a Brittany rose-bush instead of one in Heidelberg, Birmingham, or Philadelphia; and if ye can't be born with gold in your mouth the next best thing is a mixing-spoon." "Meaning?" queried the tinker. "Meaning--that there's many a poor soul who goes hungry through life because she is wanting the knowledge of how to mix what's already under her nose." The tinker looked suspiciously from the contents of the basket to Patsy, kneeling beside it, and he dropped into a shameless mimicry of her brogue. "Aye, but how did she come by--what's under her nose? Here's a dinner for a king's son." "Well, I'll be letting ye play the king's son instead of the fool to-night, just, if ye'll give over asking any more questions and eat." "But"--he sniffed the plate she had handed him with added suspicion--"roast duck and sherry sauce! Honest, now--have ye been begging?" "No--nor stealing--nor, by the same token, have I murdered any one to get the dinner from him." There was fine sarcasm in her voice as she returned the tinker's searching look. "Then where did it come from? I'll not eat a mouthful until I get an honest answer." The tinker put the plate down beside him and folded his arms. Patsy snorted with exasperation. "Was I ever saying ye could play the king's son? Faith! ye'll never play anything but the fool--first and last." Her voice suddenly took on a more coaxing tone; she was thinking of that good dinner growing cold--spoiled by the man's ridiculous curiosity. "I'll tell ye what--if ye'll agree to begin eating, I'll agree to begin telling ye about it--and we'll both agree not to stop till we get to the end. But Holy Saint Martin! who ever heard of a man before letting his conscience in ahead of his hunger!" The bargain was made; and while the tinker devoured one plateful after another with a ravenous haste that almost discredited his previous restraint, Patsy spun a fanciful tale of having found a cluricaun under a quicken-tree. With great elaboration and seeming regard for the truth, she explained his magical qualities, and how--if you were clever enough to possess yourself of his cap--you could get almost anything from him. "I held his cap firmly with the one hand and him by the scruff of the neck with the other; and says I to him, 'Little man, ye'll not be getting this back till ye've fetched me a dinner fit for a tinker.' 'Well, and good,' says he, 'but ye can't find that this side of the King's Hotel, Dublin; and that will take time.' 'Take the time,' says I, 'but get the dinner.' And from that minute till the present I've been waiting under that quicken-tree for him to make the trip there and back." Patsy finished, and the two of them smiled at each other with rare good humor out under the June stars. Only the tinker's smile was skeptical. "So--ye are not believing me--" Patsy shammed a solemn, grieved look. "Well--I'll forgive ye this time if ye'll agree that the dinner was good, for I'd hate like the devil to be giving the wee man back his cap for anything but the best." With laggard grace the tinker stretched his hands over the now empty basket and gripped Patsy's. "Lass, lass--what are you thinking of me? Faith! my manners are more ragged than my clothes--and I'm not fit to be a--tinker. The dinner was the best I ever ate, and--bless ye and the cluricaun!" Patsy cooked for three days at Quality House, that the tinker might feast night and morning to his heart's content while his ankle slowly mended. But he still persisted questioning concerning his food--where and how Patsy had come by it; she still maintained as persistent a silence. "I've come by it honestly, and 'tis no charity fare," was the most she would say, adding by way of flavor: "For a sorry tinker ye are the proudest I ever saw. Did ye ever know another, now, who wanted a written certificate of moral character along with every morsel he ate?" According to wage agreement she had the kitchen to herself; no one entered except on matters of necessity; no one lingered after her work was despatched. Madame came twice daily to confer with Patsy on intricacies of gestation, while she beamed upon her as a probationed soul might look upon the keeper of the keys of Paradise. But the days held more for Patsy than sauces and entrées and pastries; they held gossip as well. Soupçons were served up on loosened tongues, borne in through open window and swinging door--straight from the dining-room and my lady's chamber. Most of it passed her ears, unheeded; it was but a droning accompaniment to her measuring, mixing, rolling, and baking--until news came at last that concerned herself--gossip of the Burgemans, father and son. The butler and the parlor maid were cleaning the silver in the pantry--and the slide was raised. As transmitters of gossip they were more than usually concerned, for had not the butler at one time served in the house of Burgeman, and the maid dusted next door? Therefore every item of news was well ripened before it dropped from either tongue, and Patsy gathered them in with eager ears. The master of Quality House happened to be a director of that bank on which the Burgeman check of ten thousand had been drawn. It had been the largest check drawn to cash presented at the bank; and the teller had confessed to the directors that he would never have paid over the money to any one except the old man's son. In fact, he had been so much concerned over it afterward that he had called up the Burgeman office, and had been much relieved to have the assurance of the secretary that the check was certified and perfectly correct. Not a second thought would have been given to the matter had not the secretary's resignation been made public the next day--the day Billy Burgeman disappeared. Patsy's ears fairly bristled with interest. "That's news, if it is gossip. Where is the secretary now? And which of them has the ten thousand?" The director had touched on the subject of the check the next day when business had demanded his presence at the Burgeman home. The result had been distinctly baffling. Not that the director could put his finger on any one suspicious point in the behavior of Burgeman, senior; but it left him with the distinct impression that the father was shielding the son. "Aye, that's what Billy said his father would do--shield him out of pride." Patsy dusted the flour from her arms and stood motionless, thinking. Burgeman, senior, had offered only one remark to the director, given cynically with a nervous jerking of the shoulders and twitching of the hands: "He was needing pocket-money, a small sum to keep him in shoe-laces and collar-buttons, I dare say. That's the way rich men's sons keep their fathers' incomes from getting too cumbersome." Burgeman, senior, had been ill then--confined to his room; but the next day his condition had become alarming. He was now dying at his home in Arden and his son could not be found. These last two statements were not merely gossip, but facts. Patsy listened impatiently to the parlor maid arguing the matter of Billy's guilt with the butler. Their work was finished, and they were passing through the kitchen on their way to the servants' hall. "Of course he took it"--the maid's tone was positive--"those rich men's sons always are a bad lot." "'E didn't take it, then. 'Is father's playin' some mean game on 'im--that's what. Hi worked five months hin that 'ouse an' Hi'd as lief work for the devil!" And the butler pounded his fist for emphasis. It took all Patsy's self-control to refrain from launching into the argument herself, and that in the Irish tongue. She saved herself, however, by resorting to that temper of which she had boasted, and hurled at the two a torrent of words which sounded to them like the most horrible pagan blasphemy, and from which they fled in genuine horror. In reality it was the names of all the places in France that Patsy could recall with rapidity. When the kitchen was empty once more Patsy systematically gathered together all that she knew and all that she had heard of Billy Burgeman, and weighed it against the bare possible chance she might have of helping him should she continue her quest. And in the end she made her decision unwaveringly. "Troth! a conscience is a poor bit of property entirely," she sighed, as she stood the pâté-shells on the ledge of the range to dry. "It drives ye after a man ye don't care a ha'penny about, and it drives ye from the one that ye do. Bad luck to it!" * * * * * That night Patsy sat under the trees with the tinker while he ate his supper. A half-grown moon lighted the feast for them, for Patsy took an occasional mouthful at the tinker's insistence that dining alone was a miserably unsociable affair. "To watch ye eat that pâté de fois gras a body would think ye had been reared on them. Honest, now, have ye ever tasted one before in your life?" "I have." "Then--ye have sat at rich men's tables?" "Or perhaps I have begged at rich men's doors. Maybe that is how I came to have a distaste for their--charity." "Who are ye? Ye know I'd give the full of my empty pockets to know who ye are, and what started ye tramping the road--in rags." The tinker considered a moment. "Perhaps I took the road because I believed it led to the only place I cared to find. Perhaps I lost the way to it, as you lost yours to Arden, and in the losing I found--something else. Perhaps--perhaps--oh, perhaps a hundred things; but I'll make another bargain with you. I'll tell you all about it when we reach Arden, if you'll tell me the name of the lad you came to find." "I'll do more than that--I'll bring ye together and let ye help mend him," and she stretched forth her hand to clinch the bargain. They sat in silence under the spattering of moonlight that sifted down through the branches; for the moment the tinker had forgotten his hunger. "Well?" queried Patsy at last. "A ha'penny for them." "I'm thinking the same old thoughts I've thought a hundred times already--since that first day: What makes you so different from everybody else? What ever sent you out into the world with your gospel of kindness--on your lips and in your hands?" "Would ye really like to know?" Patsy's fingers stole through the grass about them. "Faith! the world's not so soft and green as this under every one's feet. Ye see 'twas by a thorn I was found hanging to that Killarney rose-bush in Brittany, and I've always remembered the feeling of it." "I always suspected that the people who fell heir to stinging memories generally went through life hugging their own troubles, and letting the rest of the world hug theirs." "I don't believe it!" Patsy shook her head fiercely. "What's the use of all the pain and sorrow and trouble scattered about everywhere if it can't put a cure for others into the hands of those who have first tasted it? And what better cure can ye find than kindness; isn't it the best thing in the world?" "Is it? Can it cure--gold?" "And why not? If every man had more kindness than he had gold, would neighbor ever have to fear neighbor or childther go hungry for love?" The tinker did not answer, and Patsy went on with a deepening intensity: "I'll tell ye a tale--a foolish tale that keeps repeating itself over and over in my memory like the tick-tick-tick of a clock. Ye know that the Jesuit Fathers say--give them the care of a child till he's ten and nothing afterward matters. Well, it's true; a child can feel all the sweetness or bitterness, hunger or plenty, that life holds before he is that age even." Patsy stopped. A veery was singing in the woods close by, and she listened for a moment. "Hearken to that bird, now. A good-for-naught lad may have stolen his nest, or a cat filched his young, or his sons and daughters flown away and left him; but he'll sing, for all that. 'Tis a pity the rest of us can't do as well." "Yes," agreed the tinker, "but the story--" "Aye, the story. It begins with a wee white cottage in Brittany, fronted by roses and backed by great cliffs and the open sea." Patsy clasped her hands about her knees, while her eyes left the shadow of the trees and traveled to the open where the moonlight spread silvery clear and unbroken. And the tinker, watching, knew that her eyes were seeing the things of which she was telling. "A wee white cottage--the roses and the cliffs," repeated Patsy, "and a great, grim, silent figure of a man sitting there idle all day, watching a little lass at her play. Just the man and the child. And the trouble in his mind that had kept the man silent and idle was an old, old trouble--old as the peopled world itself. "Long before, he had married a woman who cared for two things--love and gold; and he had but the one to give her. She had been a great actress, a favorite at the Comédie Française; but she left her work and all the applause and adulation for him, an expatriated Irishman with naught but a great love, because she thought she cared for love more. They had been wonderfully happy at first; he wrote beautiful verses about her--and his beloved motherland, and she said them for him in that wonderful singing voice of hers that had made her the idol of half of France. And she had made a game of their poverty in the wee white cottage with the roses--until her child was born and poverty could no longer be played at. Then work became drudgery, and love naught. The woman went back to her theater--and another man, a man who had gold a-plenty. And the child grew up playing alone beside the silent, grim Irishman. "Then one day the child played with no one by to watch her; the man had walked over the cliff and forgot ever to come back. Aye, and the child played on till dark came and she fell asleep--there on the door-sill, under the roses. 'Twas a neighbor, passing, that found her, and carried her home to put to bed with her own children. After that the child was taken away to a convent, and the rich children called her '_la pauvre petite_,' shared their saints'-days' gifts with her, and bought her candles that she might make a _novena_ to bring her father back again. But 'twas her mother it brought instead." Patsy stopped again to listen to the veery; he was not singing alone now, and she smiled wistfully. "See! he's found a friend, a comrade to sing with him. That's grand!" Then she went back to the story: "The child was taken from the convent in the night and by somber-clad servants who seemed in a great hurry. She was brought a long way to a château, one of the oldest and most beautiful in the south of France; and a small, shrivel-faced man in royal clothes met her at the door and carried her up great marble stairs to a chamber lighted by two tall candles, just. They stopped on the threshold for a breath, and the child saw that a woman was lying in the canopied bed--a very, very beautiful woman. To the child she seemed some goddess--or saint. "'Here is the child,' said the man; and the woman answered: 'Alone, Réné. Remember you promised--alone.' "After that the man left them together--the dying woman and her child. Ah!--how can I be telling you the way she fondled and caressed her! How starved were the lips that touched the child's hair, cheeks, and eyelids! And when her strength failed she drew the child into her tired arms and whispered fragments of prayers, haunting memories, pitiful regrets. Of all the things she said the child remembered but one: 'Gold buys plenty for the body, but nothing for the heart--nothing--nothing!' "And that kept repeating itself over and over in the child's mind. She remembered it all through the night after they had taken her away from those lifeless arms and she lay awake alone in a terrifying, dark room; she remembered it all through the long day when she sat beside the gorgeous catafalque that held her mother, and watched the tall candles in the dim chapel burn lower and lower and lower. And that was why she refused to stay afterward--and be taken care of by the shrivel-faced man in that oldest and most beautiful château. Instead she slipped out early one morning, before any one was awake to see and mark the way she went. It is unbelievable, sometimes, how children who have the will to do it can lose themselves. And so this child--alone--went out into the world, empty-handed, seeking life." "But did she go empty-handed?" asked the tinker. "Aye, but not empty-hearted, thank God!" "And wherever the child went, she carried with her that hatred of gold," mused the tinker. "Aye; why not? She had learned how pitifully little it was worth, when all's said and done. 'Twas her father's name she heard last on her mother's lips, and it was their child she prayed for with her dying breath." Patsy sprang to her feet. "Do ye see--the moon will be beating me to bed, and 'twas a poor tale, after all. How is your foot?" "Better--much better." "Would ye be able to travel on it to-morrow?" The tinker shook his head. "The day after, perhaps." "Well, keep on coaxing it. Good night." And she had picked up her basket and was gone before the tinker could stumble to his feet. * * * * * When the tinker woke the next morning the basket stood just inside the stable door, linked through the pilgrim's staff. On investigation it proved to contain his breakfast and an envelope, and the envelope contained a ten-dollar bill and a letter, which read: DEAR LAD,--I'll be well on the road when you get this; and with a tongue in my head and luck at my heels, please God, I'll reach Arden this time. You need not be afraid to use the money--or too proud, either. It was honestly earned and the charity of no one; you can take it as a loan or a gift--whichever you choose. Anyhow, it will bring you after me faster--which was your own promise. Yours in advance, P. O'CONNELL Surprise, disappointment, indignation, amusement, all battled for the upper hand; but it was a very different emotion from any of these which finally mastered the tinker. He smoothed the bill very tenderly between his hands before he returned it to the envelope; but he did something more than smooth the envelope. And meanwhile Patsy tramped the road to Arden. XIII A MESSAGE AND A MAP This time there was no mistaking the right road; it ran straight past Quality House to Arden--unbroken but for graveled driveways leading into private estates. Patsy traveled it at a snail's pace. Now that Arden had become a definitely unavoidable goal, she was more loath to reach it than she had been on any of the seven days since the beginning of her quest. However the quest ended--whether she found Billy Burgeman or not, or whether there was any need now of finding him--this much she knew: for her the road ended at Arden. What lay beyond she neither tried nor cared to prophesy. Was it not enough that her days of vagabondage would be over--along with the company of tinkers and such like? There might be an answer awaiting her to the letter sent from Lebanon to George Travis; in that case she could in all probability count on some dependable income for the rest of the summer. Otherwise--there were her wits. The very thought of them wrung a pitiful little groan from Patsy. "Faith! I've been overworking Dan's legacy long enough, I'm thinking. Poor wee things! They're needing rest and nourishment for a while," and she patted her forehead sympathetically. Of one thing she was certain--if her wits must still serve her, they should do so within the confines of some respectable community; in other words, she would settle down and work at something that would provide her with bed and board until the fall bookings began. And, the road and the tinker would become as a dream, fading with the summer into a sweet, illusive memory--and a photograph. Patsy felt in the pocket of her Norfolk for the latter with a sudden eagerness. It had been forgotten since she had found the tinker himself; but, now that the road was lengthening between them again, it brought her a surprising amount of comfort. "There are three things I shall have to be asking him--if he ever fetches up in Arden, himself," mused Patsy as she loitered along. "And, what's more, this time I'll be getting an answer to every one of them or I'm no relation of Dan's. First, I'll know the fate of the brown dress; he hadn't a rag of it about him--that's certain. Next, there's that breakfast with the lady's-slippers. How did he come by it? And, last of all, how ever did this picture come on the mantel-shelf of a closed cottage where he knew the way of breaking in and what clothes would be hanging in the chamber closets? 'Tis all too great a mystery--" "Why, Miss O'Connell--what luck!" Patsy had been so deep in her musing that a horse and rider had come upon her unnoticed. She turned quickly to see the rider dismounting just back of her; it was Gregory Jessup. "The top o' the morning to ye!" She broke into a glad laugh, blessing that luck, herself, which had broken into her disquieting thoughts and provided at least fair company and some news--perhaps. She held out her hand in hearty welcome. "Are ye 'up so early or down so late'?" "I might ask that, myself. Is it the habit of celebrated Irish actresses to tramp miles between sun-up and breakfast?" "'Tis a habit more likely to fasten itself on French cooks, I'm thinking," and Patsy smiled. "Then how is a man to account for you?" "He'd best not try; I'm a mortial poor person to account for. Maybe I'm up early--getting my lines for the next act." "Of course. What a stupid duffer I am! You must find us plain, plodding Americans horribly short-witted sometimes. Don't you?" Patsy shook a contradiction. "It's your turn, now. What fetched ye abroad at this hour?" Gregory Jessup slipped his arm through the horse's bridle and fell into step with her. "Principally because I like the early morning better than any other part of the day; it's fresh and sweet and unspoiled--like some Irish actresses. There--please don't mind my crude attempt at poetic--simile," for Patsy's eyes had snapped dangerously. "If you only knew how rarely poetry or compliments ever came to roost on this dry tongue, you really wouldn't want to discourage them when it does happen. Besides, there was another reason for my being up--a downright foolish reason." Gregory Jessup accompanied the remark with a downright foolish smile, and then lapsed into silence. In this fashion they walked to the bend of the road where another graveled driveway branched forth; and here the horse stopped of his own accord and whinnied. "This is the Dempsy Carters' place--where I'm stopping," Gregory explained. "Aye, but the other reason?" Patsy reminded him, her eyes friendly once more. "Oh--the other reason; I told you it was a foolish one." He stood rubbing his horse's nose and looking over the road they had come for some seconds before he finally confessed to it. "It's Billy, you see. Somehow it occurred to me that if he should be in trouble and at the same time knowing his father was sick--dying--he might be hanging around somewhere near here--uncertain just what to do--and not wanting any one to see him. In that case, the best time to run across him would be early morning before the rest of the people were awake and up. Don't you think so?" "It sounds more sensible than foolish; but I don't think ye'll ever find him that way. If he was clever enough to let the earth swallow him up, he's clever enough to keep swallowed. There's but one way to reach him--and it's been in my mind since yester-eve." A look of surprise came into Gregory Jessup's face. "Why, Miss O'Connell! I had no idea what I said that day would fasten Billy on your mind like this. It's awfully good of you; and he's a perfect stranger--" Patsy broke in with a whimsical chuckle. "Aye, I've grown overpartial to strangers of late; but ye hearken to me. Ye'll have to leave a sign by the roadside for him--if ye want to reach him. Otherwise he'll see ye first and be gone before ever ye know he's about." "What kind of a sign?" "Faith! I'm not sure of that yet--myself. It must be something that will put trust back in a lad and tell him to come home." "And where would you put it?" "Where? On the roadside, just, anywhere along the road he's used to tramping." Gregory Jessup's face lost its puzzled frown and became suddenly illumined with an inspiration. "I know! By Hec! I've got it! There's that path that runs down from the Burgeman estate to our old cottage. It was a short cut for us kids, and we were almost the only ones to use it. Billy would be far more likely to take that than the highroad--and it leads to the Burgeman farm, too, run by an old couple that simply adore Billy. He might go there when he wouldn't go anywhere else. That's the place for a message. But what message?" "I know!" Patsy clapped her hands. "Have ye a scrap of paper anywheres about ye--and a pencil?" Hunting through the pockets of his riding-clothes, Gregory Jessup discovered a business letter, the back of which provided ample writing space, and the stub of a red-ink pencil. "We use 'em in the drafting-room," he explained. "If these will do--here's a desk," and he raised the end of his saddle, supporting it with a large expanse of palm. Patsy accepted them all with a gracious little nod, and, spreading the paper on the improvised desk, she wrote quickly: "If it do come to pass That any man turn ass," Thinking the world is blind And trust forsworn mankind, "Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame": Here shall he find Both trust and peace of mind, An he but leave all foolishness behind. "With apologies to Willie Shakespeare," Patsy chuckled again as she returned paper and pencil to their owner. "Ye put it somewhere he'd be likely to look--furninst something that would naturally take his notice." "I know just the spot--and they're in blossom now, too. I'll fasten it to a rock, there, wedge it in the cracks. Billy won't miss it if he comes within yards of the place." He grasped Patsy's hand with growing fervor that gave promise of developing suddenly into almost anything. "You're a brick, Miss O'Connell--a solid gold brick of a girl, and I wish--" "Take care!" warned Patsy. "Ye're not improving as fast in your compliments as ye might--and there's no poetry in gold--for me." Gregory Jessup looked puzzled, but his fervor did not abate one whit. "I want you to promise me if you ever need a friend--if there is anything I can ever do--" "Ye can," interrupted Patsy, "and ye can do it now. Take that riding-crop of yours and draw me a map in the dust there of the country hereabouts--ye can make a cross for Arden.... That's grand. Now where would ye put Brambleside Inn? And is it seven miles from there to Arden?" Gregory nodded an affirmative while he considered Patsy with grave perplexity. Patsy saw it, and smiled reassuringly. "'Tis all right. I've always had a great interest entirely to know the geography of every new country--and I haven't the wits to discover it for myself. Now where would ye put the cross-roads and the Catholic church? And where would Lebanon be? Aye--Did ye ever see an old tabby chasing her tail? Faith! 'tis a very intelligent spectacle, I'm thinking. Now where might ye put the cross-roads where ye picked me up with the Dempsy Carters?... And Dansville?... and the railroad bridge? ... and the golf links, back yonder?" She stood for many minutes, studying the rough chart in the dust at her feet. The connecting lines of roads between the places named made fully a hundred and twenty degrees of a circle about the cross marking Arden. And as chance would have it, every one of the encircling towns measured approximately seven miles from the central cross. Patsy smiled, and the smile grew to a chuckle--and the chuckle to a long, rippling laugh. Patsy was forced to hold her sides with the ache of it. "I know ye think I'm crazy--but 'tis the rarest bit of humor this side of Ireland. Willie Shakespeare himself would steal it if he could to put in one of his comedies. There is just one thing I'd like to be knowing--how much of it was chance, and how much was the tricks of a tinker?" "I don't think I understand," mumbled Gregory Jessup. "Of course ye don't," agreed Patsy. "I don't, myself. But there's one thing more I'll be telling ye--if ye'll swear never to let it pass your lips?" Patsy paused for dramatic effect while Gregory Jessup bound himself twice over to secrecy. "Well," she said, at length, "'tis this: If I had the road to travel again I'd pray to Saint Brendan to keep my feet fast to the wrong turn. That's what!" Patsy left him, still looking after her in a puzzled fashion; and with quickening steps she passed out of sight. But once again did she stop; and again it was by a graveled driveway. She was deep in green memories when a figure in nurse's uniform coming down the drive caught her attention. She was immediately reminded of two facts: that the Burgeman estate was in Arden, and that Burgeman senior was dying. Impulsively she turned toward the nurse. "Is Mr. Burgeman any better this morning?" "We hardly expect that." The nurse's tone was cordial but professionally cautious. "I know"--Patsy nodded wisely, as if she had been following the case professionally herself--"but there is often a last rallying of strength. Isn't there?" "Sometimes. I hardly think there will be anything very lasting in Mr. Burgeman's case. There are moments, now, when his strength and will are remarkably vigorous--any other man would be in his bed." "Oh! Then he is--up?" "He's taken about on a wheeled chair or cot. He is too restless to stay in any place very long. He seems more contented outdoors, where he can watch--" She broke off abruptly. "Lovely morning--isn't it? Good-by." She turned about and went up the drive again. Patsy watched her go, a strange, brooding look in her eyes. "So--he likes to be out of doors best--where he can be watching. And if a body chanced to trespass that way--she might come upon him, sudden like, and stay long enough to set him a-thinking. Would it be too late, now, I wonder?" She resumed her way--and her memories. She passed a half-dozen more driveways and she climbed a hill; and when she came to the top she found herself looking down on a thickly wooded hamlet. Spires and gabled roofs broke the foliage here and there, and on the rising slope beyond towered a veritable forest. Patsy stood on the brink of the hill and gazed down long and thoughtfully; at last she flung out her arms in an impetuous gesture of confirmation, while the old, whimsical smile crept into her lips. "'Aye, now am I in Arden, the more fool I; when I was at home, I was in a better place--but travelers must be content.'" And taking a firm grip of her memories, her wits, and her courage, she went down the hill. XIV ENTER KING MIDAS When Patsy at last reached Arden she went direct to the post-office and was there confronted by a huge poster occupying an entire wall: THE SYLVAN PLAYERS Under the Management of Geo. Travis Presenting Wm. Shakespeare's Comedy "AS YOU LIKE IT" In the Forest of Arden, on the Estate of Peterson-Jones, Esq. The date given was Wednesday, the day following; and the cast registered her name opposite Rosalind. "So that's the answer to the letter I wrote, and a grand answer it is. And that's the meaning of Janet Payne's remarks, and I never guessed it." She heaved the faintest wisp of a sigh--it might have been pleasure; it might have been a twinge of pain. "And I'm to be playing the Duke's daughter, after all, at the end of the road." She went to the general delivery and asked for mail. The clerk responded with three letters; Patsy almost whistled under her breath. Retiring to a corner, she looked them over and opened first the one from George Travis: DEAR IRISH PATSY,--You are a lucky beggar, and so am I. Here comes the news of Miriam St. Regis's illness and the canceling of all of her summer engagements in the same mail as your letter. Just think of it! Here you are actually in Arden all ready for me to pick up and put in Miriam's place without having to budge from my desk. The Sylvan Players open with "As You Like It." If the critics like it--and you--as well as I think they will, I'll book you straight through the summer. Felton's managing for me, so please report to him on Monday when he gets there. I may run down myself for a glimpse of your work. Yours, G. TRAVIS. P. S. More good luck. We are just in time to get your name on the posters; and unless my memory greatly deceives me, you will be able to walk right into all of Miriam's costumes. "Aye, they'll fit," agreed Patsy, with a chuckle. The second letter was from Felton--dated Monday. He was worried over her continued absence. He had not found her registered at either of the two hotels, and the postal clerk reported her mail uncalled for. Would she come to the Hillcrest Hotel at once. The third was from Janet Payne, expressing her grief over Joseph's death, and their disappointment at finding her gone the next morning when they motored over to take her to Arden. They were all looking forward to seeing her play on Wednesday. Patsy returned the letters to their envelopes and marveled that her new-found prosperity should affect her so drearily. Why was she not elated, transported with the surprise and the sudden promise of success? She was free to go now to a good hotel and sign for a room and three regular meals a day. She could wire at once to Miss Gibbs, of the select boarding-house, and have her trunk down in twenty-four hours. In very truth, her days of vagabondage were over, yet the fact brought her no happiness. She hunted Felton up at the hotel and explained her absence: "Just a week-end at one of the fashionable places. No, not exactly professional. No, not social either. You might call it--providential, like this." The morning was spent meeting her fellow-players--going over the text, trying on the St. Regis costumes, adjourning at last to the estate of Peterson-Jones. Until the middle of the afternoon they were busy with rehearsals: the mental tabulating of new stage business, the adapting of strange stage property, the accustoming of one's feet to tread gracefully over roots and tangling vines and slippery patches of pine needles instead of a good stage flooring. And through all this maze Patsy's mind played truant. A score of times it raced off back to the road again, to wait between a stretch of woodland and a grove of giant pines for the coming of a grotesque, vagabond figure in rags. "Come, come, Miss O'Connell; what's the matter?" Felton's usual patience snapped under the strain of her persistent wit-wandering. "I've had to tell you to change that entrance three times." "Aye--and what is the matter?" Patsy repeated the question remorsefully. "Maybe I've acquired the habit of taking the wrong entrance. What can you expect from any one taking seven days to go seven miles. I'm dreadfully sorry. If you'll only let me off this time I promise to remember to-morrow; I promise!" * * * * * The day had been growing steadily hotter and more sultry. By five o'clock every one who was doing anything, and could stop doing it, went slothfully about looking for cool spots and cooler drinks. Burgeman senior, alone with his servants on the largest estate in Arden, ordered one of the nurses to wheel him to the border of his own private lake--a place where breezes blew if there were any about--and leave him there alone until Fitzpatrick, his lawyer, came from town. And there he was sitting, his eyes on nothing at all, when Patsy scrambled up the bank of the lake and dropped breathless under a tree--not three feet from him. "Merciful Saint Patrick! I never saw you! Maybe I'm trespassing, now?" "You are," agreed Burgeman senior in a colorless voice. "But I hardly think any one will put you off the grounds--at least until you have caught your breath." "Thank you. Maybe the grounds are yours, now?" she questioned again. The sick man signified they were by a slight nod. "Well, 'tis the prettiest place hereabouts." Patsy offered the information as if she had made the discovery herself and was generously sharing it with him. "I'm a stranger; and when I saw yon bit of cool, gray water, and the pines clustering round, and the wee green faery isle in the midst--with the bridge holding onto it to keep it from disappearing entirely--and the sand so white, and the lawns so green--why, it looked like a Japanese garden set in a great sedge bowl. Do you wonder I had to come closer and see it better?" Burgeman said nothing; but the ghost of a feeling showed, the greed of possession. "And it all belongs to you. You bought it all--the lake and the woods and the lawns." It was not a question, but a statement. "I own three miles in every direction." "Except that one." Patsy smiled as she pointed a finger upward. "Did you ever think how generous the blessed Lord is to lend a bit of His sky to put over the land men buy and fence in and call 'private property'? It's odd how a body can think he owns something because he has paid money for it; and yet the things that make it worth the owning he hasn't paid for at all." "What do you mean?" "Would you think much of this place if you couldn't be looking yonder and watching the clouds scud by, all turning to pink and flame color and purple as the sun gathers them in? What would you do if no wild flowers grew for you, or the birds forgot you in the spring and built their nests and sang for your neighbor instead? And can you hire the sun to shine by the day, or order the rain by the hogshead?" Burgeman senior was contemplating her with genuine amazement. "I do not believe I have ever heard any one put forth such extraordinary theories before. May I ask if you are a socialist?" "Bless you, no! I am a very ordinary human being, just; principally human." "Do you know who I am?" For an instant Patsy looked at him without speaking; then she answered, slowly: "You have told me, haven't you? You are the master of the place, and you look a mortal lonely one." "I--am." The words seemed to slip from his lips without his being at all conscious of having spoken. "And the money couldn't keep it from you." There was no mockery in her tone. "'Tis pitifully few comforts you can buy in life, when all's said and done." "Comforts!" The sick man's eyes grew sharp, attacking, with a force that had not been his for days. "You are talking now like a fool. Money is the only thing that can buy comforts. What comforts have the poor?" "Are you meaning butlers and limousines, electric vibrators and mud-baths? Those are only cures for the bodily necessities and ills that money brings on a man: the over-feeding and the over-drinking and the--under-living. But what comforts would they bring to a troubled mind and a pinched heart? Tell me that!" "So! You would prefer to be poor--more pastorally poetic?" Burgeman sneered. "More comfortable," corrected Patsy. "Mind you, I'm not meaning starved, ground-under-the-heel poverty, the kind that breeds anarchists and criminals. God pity them, too! I mean the man who is still too poor to reckon his worth to a community in mere money, who, instead, doles kindness and service to his neighbors. Did you ever see a man richer than the one who comes home at day's end, after eight hours of good, clean work, and finds the wife and children watching for him, happy-eyed and laughing?" The sick man stirred uneasily. "Well--can't a rich man find the same happiness?" "Aye, he can; but does he? Does he even want it? Count up the rich men you know, and how many are there--like that?" No answer being given, Patsy continued: "Take the richest man--the very richest man in all this country--do you suppose in all his life he ever saw his own lad watching for him to come home?" "What do you know about the richest man--and his son?" The sick man had for a moment become again a fiercely bitter, fighting force, a power given to sweeping what it willed before it. He sat with hands clenched, his eyes burning into the girl's on the ground beside him. "I know what the world says." "The world lies; it has always lied." "You are wrong. It is a tongue here and a tongue there that bears false witness; but the world passes on the truth; it has to." "You forget"--Burgeman senior spoke with difficulty--"it is the rich who bear the burdens of the world's cares and troubles, and what do they get for it? The hatred of every one else, even their sons! Every one hates and envies the man richer and more powerful than himself; the more he has the more he is feared. He lives friendless; he dies--lonely." Patsy rose to her knees and knelt there, shaking her fist--a composite picture of supplicating Justice and accusing Truth. She had forgotten that the man before her was sick--dying; that he must have suffered terribly in spirit as well as body; and that her words were so many barbed shafts striking at his soul. She remembered nothing save the thing against which she was fighting: the hard, merciless possession of money and the arrogant boast of it. "And you forget that the burden of trouble which the brave rich bear so nobly are troubles they've put into the world themselves. They hoard their money to buy power; and then they use that power to get more money. And so the chain grows--money and power, money and power! I heard of a rich man once who turned a terrible fever loose all over the land because he bribed the health inspectors not to close down his factories. And after death had swept his books clean he gave large sums of money to stamp out the epidemic in the near-by towns. Faith! that was grand--the bearing of that trouble! And why are the rich hated? Why do they live friendless and die lonely? Not because they hold money, not because they give it away or help others with it. No! But because they use it to crush others, to rob those who have less than they have, to turn their power into a curse. That's the why!" Patsy, the fanatic, turned suddenly into Patsy, the human, again. The fist that had been beating the air under his nose dropped and spread itself tenderly on the sick man's knee. "But I'm sorry you're lonely. If there was anything you wanted--that you couldn't buy and I could earn for you--I would get it gladly." "I believe you would," and the confession surprised the man himself more than it did Patsy. "Who are you?" he asked at last. "No one at all, just; a laggard by the roadside--a lass with no home, no kin, and that for a fortune," and she flung out her two empty hands, palm uppermost, and laughed. "And you are audacious enough to think you are richer than I." This time there was no sneer in his voice, only an amused toleration. "I am," said Patsy, simply. "You have youth and health," he conceded, grudgingly. "Aye, and trust in other folks; that's a fearfully rich possession." "It is. I might exchange with you--all this," and his hand swept encompassingly over his great estate, "for that last--trust in other folks--in one's own folks!" "Maybe I'd give it to you for nothing--a little of it at any rate. See, you trust me; and here's--trust in your son." Patsy's voice dropped to a whisper; she leaned forward and opened one of the sick man's hands, then folded the fingers tightly over something that appeared to be invisible--and precious. "Now, you believe in him, no matter what he's done; you believe he wouldn't wrong you or himself by doing anything base; you believe that he is coming back to you--to break the loneliness, and that he'll find a poor, plain man for a father, waiting him. Don't you remember the prodigal lad--how his father saw him a long way off and went to meet him? Well, you can meet him with a long-distance trust--understanding. And there's one thing more; don't you be so blind or so foolish as to crush him with the weight of 'all this.' Mind, he has the right to the making of his own life--for a bit at least; and it's your privilege to give him that right--somehow. You've still a chance to keep him from wanting to pitch your money for quoits off the Battery." Patsy sprang to her feet; but Burgeman senior had reached forward quickly and caught her skirt, holding it in a marvelously firm grip. "Then you do know who I am; you've known it all along." "I know you're the master of all this, and your lad is the Rich Man's Son; that's all." "And you think--you think I have no right to leave my son the inheritance I have worked and saved for him." "I think you have no right to leave him your--greed. 'Tis a mortal poor inheritance for any lad." "Your vocabulary is rather blunt." Burgeman smiled faintly. "But it is very refreshing. It is a long time since naked truth and I met face to face." "But will it do you any good--or is it too late?" Patsy eyed him contemplatively. "Too late for what?" "Too late for the inheritance--too late to give it away somewhere else--or loan it for a few years till the lad had a chance to find out if he could make some decent use of it himself. There's many ways of doing it; I have thought of a few this last half-hour. You might loan it to the President to buy up some of the railroads for the government--or to purchase the coal or oil supply; or you might offer it as a prize to the country that will stop fighting first; or it might buy clean politics into some of the cities--or endow a university." She laughed. "It's odd, isn't it, how a body without a cent to her name can dispose of a few score millions--in less minutes?" "If you please, sir." A motionless, impersonal figure in livery stood at a respectful distance behind the wheel-chair. Neither of them had been conscious of his presence. "Well, Parsons?" "Mr. Billy, sir, has come back, sir. He and Mr. Fitzpatrick came together. Shall I bring them out here or wheel you inside, sir?" "Inside!" Burgeman senior almost shouted it. Then he turned to Patsy and there was more than mere curiosity in his voice: "Who are you?" "No one at all, just; a laggard by the roadside," she repeated, wistfully. And then she added in her own Donegal: "But don't ye let the lagging count for naught. Promise me that!" The sick man turned his head for a last look at her. "Such a simple promise--to throw away the fruits of a lifetime!" Bitterness was in his voice again, but Patsy caught the muttering under his breath. "I might think about the boy, though, if the Lord granted me time." "Amen!" whispered Patsy. She scrambled down the bank the way she had come. For a moment she stopped by the lake and skimmed a handful of white pebbles across its mirrored surface. She watched the ripples she had made spread and spread until they lost themselves in the lake itself, leaving behind no mark where they had been. "Yonder's the way with the going and coming of most of us, a little ripple and naught else--unless it is one more stone at the bottom." She heaved a sigh. "Well, the quest is over, and I've never laid eyes on the lad once. But it's ended well, I'm thinking; aye, it's ended right for him." XV ARDEN Summer must have made one day in June purposely as a setting for a pastoral comedy; and chance stole it, like a kindly knave, and gave it to the Sylvan Players. Never did a gathering of people look down from the rise of a natural amphitheater upon a fairer scene; a Forest of Arden, built by the greatest scenic artist since the world began. Birds flew about the trees and sang--whenever the orchestra permitted; a rabbit or two scuttled out from under rhododendron-bushes and skipped in shy ingénue fashion across the stage; while overhead a blue, windless sky spread radiance about players and audience alike. Shorn of so much of the theatricalism of ordinary stage performances, there was reality and charm about this that warmed the spectators into frequent bursts of spontaneous enthusiasm which were as draughts of elixir to the players. Those who were playing creditably played well; those who were playing well excelled themselves, and Patsy outplayed them all. She lived every minute of the three hours that spanned the throwing of Charles, the wrestler, and her promise "to make all this matter even." There was no touch of coarseness in her rollicking laughter, no hoydenish swagger in her masquerading; it was all subtly, irresistibly feminine. And George Travis, watching from the obscurity of a back seat, pounded his knee with triumph and swore he would make her the greatest Shakespearean actress of the day. As Hymen sang her parting song, Patsy scanned the sea of faces beyond the bank of juniper which served instead of footlights. Already she had picked out Travis, Janet Payne and her party, the people from Quality House, who still gaped at her, unbelieving, and young Peterson-Jones, looking more melancholy, myopic, and poetical than before. But the one face she hoped to find was missing, even among the stragglers at the back; and it took all her self-control to keep disappointment and an odd, hurt feeling out of her voice as she gave the epilogue. On the way to her tent--a half-score of them were used as dressing-rooms behind the stage--George Travis overtook her. "It's all right, girl. You've made a bigger hit than even I expected. I'm going to try you out in--" Patsy cut him short. "You sat at the back. Did you see a vagabond lad hanging around anywhere--with a limp to him?" The manager looked at her with amused toleration. "Does a mere man happen to be of more consequence this minute than your success? Oh, I say, that's not like you, Irish Patsy!" She crimsoned, and the manager teased no more. "We play Greyfriars to-morrow and back to Brambleside the day after; and I've made up my mind to try you out there in Juliet. If you can handle tragedy as you can comedy, I'll star you next winter on Broadway. Oh, your future's very nearly made, you lucky girl!" But Patsy, slipping into her tent, hardly heard the last. If they played Greyfriars the next day, that meant they would leave Arden on the first train after they were packed; and that meant she was passing once and for all beyond tramping reach of the tinker. There was a dull ache at her heart which she attempted neither to explain nor to analyze; it was there--that was enough. With impatient fingers she tore off Rosalind's wedding finery and attacked her make-up. Then she lingered over her dressing, hoping to avoid the rest of the company and any congratulatory friends who might happen to be browsing around. She wanted to be alone with her memories--to have and to hold them a little longer before they should grow too dim and far away. A hand scratched at the flap of her tent and Janet Payne's voice broke into her reverie: "Can't we see you, please, for just a moment? We'll solemnly promise not to stay long." Patsy hooked back the flap and forced the semblance of a welcome into her greeting. "It was simply ripping!" chorused the Dempsy Carters, each gripping a hand. Janet Payne looked down upon her with adoring eyes. "It was the best, the very best I've ever seen you or any one else play it. For the first time Rosalind seemed a real girl." But it was the voice of Gregory Jessup that carried above the others: "Have you heard, Miss O'Connell? Burgeman died last night, and Billy was with him. He's come home." "Faith! then there's some virtue in signs, after all." A hush fell on the group. Patsy suddenly put out her hand. "I'm glad for you--I'm glad for him; and I hope it ended right. Did you see him?" "For a few minutes. There wasn't time to say much; but he looked like a man who had won out. He said he and the old man had had a good talk together for the first time in their lives--said it had given him a father whose memory could never shame him or make him bitter. I wanted to tell you, so you wouldn't have him on your mind any longer." She smiled retrospectively. "Thank you; but I heaved him off nearly twenty-four hours ago." Left to herself again, she finished her packing; then tying under her chin a silly little poke-bonnet of white chiffon and corn-flowers, still somewhat crushed from its long imprisonment in a trunk, she went back for a last glimpse of the Forest and her Greenwood tree. The place was deserted except for the teamsters who had come for the tents and the property trunks. A flash of white against the green of the tree caught her eye; for an instant she thought it one of Orlando's poetic effusions, overlooked in the play and since forgotten. Idly curious, she pulled it down and read it--once, twice, three times: Where twin oaks rustle in the wind, There waits a lad for Rosalind. If still she be so wond'rous kind, Perchance she'll ease the fretted mind That naught can cure--but Rosalind. With a glad little cry she crumpled the paper in her hand and fled, straight as a throstle to its mate, to the giant twin oaks which were landmarks in the forest. Her eyes were a-search for a vagabond figure in rags; it was small wonder, therefore, that they refused to acknowledge the man in his well-cut suit of gray who was leaning partly against the hole of a tree and partly on a pilgrim staff. She stood and stared and gave no sign of greeting. "Well, so the Duke's daughter found her rhyme?" "I'm not knowing whether I'll own ye or not. Sure, ye've no longer the look of an honest tinker; and maybe we'd best part company now--before we meet at all." But the tinker had her firmly by both hands. "That's too late now. I would have come in rags if there'd been anything left of them, but they are the only things I intend to part company with. And do you know"--he gripped her hands tighter--"I met an acquaintance as I came this way who told me, with eyes nearly popping out of his head, that the wonderful little person who had played herself straight into hundreds of hearts had actually been his cook for three days. Oh, lass! lass! how could you do it!" "Troth! God made me a better cook than actress. Ye wouldn't want me to be slighting His handiwork entirely, would ye?" The tinker shook his head at her. "Do you know what I wanted to say to every one of those people who had been watching you? I wanted to say: 'You think she is a wonderful actress; she is more than that. She is a rare, sweet, true woman, better and finer than any play she may act in or any part she may play in it. I, the tinker, have discovered this; and I know her better than does any one else in the whole world.'" "Is that so?" A teasing touch of irony crept into Patsy's voice. "'Tis a pity, now, the manager couldn't be hearing ye; he might give ye a chance to understudy Orlando." "And you think I'd be content to understudy any one! Why, I'm going to pitch Orlando straight out of the Forest of Arden; I'm going to pull Willie Shakespeare out of his grave and make him rewrite the whole play--putting a tinker in the leading role." "And is it a tragedy ye would have him make it?" "Would it be a tragedy to take a tinker 'for better--for worse'?" "Faith! that would depend on the tinker." "Oh-ho, so it's up to the tinker, is it? Well, the tinker will prove it otherwise; he will guarantee to keep the play running pure comedy to the end. So that settles it, Miss Patricia O'Connell--alias Rosalind, alias the cook--alias Patsy--the best little comrade a lonely man ever found. I am going to marry you the day after to-morrow, right here in Arden." Patsy looked at him long and thoughtfully from under the beguiling shadow of the white chiffon, corn-flower sunbonnet. "'Tis a shame, just, to discourage anything so brave as a self-made--tinker. But I'll not be here the day after to-morrow. And what's more, a man is a fool to marry any woman because he's lonely and she can cook." The tinker's eyes twinkled. "I don't know. A man might marry for worse reasons." Then he grew suddenly sober and his eyes looked deep into hers. "But you know and I know that that is not my reason for wanting you, or yours for taking me." "I didn't say I would take ye." This time it was Patsy's eyes that twinkled. "Do ye think it would be so easy to give up my career--the big success I've hoped and worked and waited for--just--just for a tinker? I'd be a fool to think of it." She was smiling inwardly at her own power of speech, which made what she held as naught sound of such immeasurable consequence. But the tinker smiled outwardly. "Where did you say you were going to be the day after to-morrow?" "That's another thing I did not say. If ye are going to marry me 'tis your business to find me." She freed her hands and started off without a backward glance at him. "Patsy, Patsy!" he called after her, "wouldn't you like to know the name of the man you're going to marry?" She turned and faced him. Framed in the soft, green fringe of the trees, she seemed to him the very embodiment of young summer--the free, untrammeled spirit of Arden. Ever since the first he had been growing more and more conscious of what she was: a nature vital, beautiful, tender, untouched by the searing things of life--trusting and worthy of trust; but it was not until this moment that he realized the future promise of her. And the realization swept all his smoldering love aflame into his eyes and lips. His arms went out to her in a sudden, passionate appeal. "Patsy--Patsy! Would the name make any difference?" "Why should it?" she cried, with saucy coquetry. "I'm marrying the man and not his name. If I can stand the one, I can put up with the other, I'm thinking. Anyhow, 'twill be on the marriage license the day after to-morrow, and that's time enough." "Do you really mean you would marry a man, not knowing his name or anything about his family--or his income--or--" "That's the civilized way, isn't it?--to find out about those things first; and afterward it's time enough when you're married to get acquainted with your man. But that's not the way that leads off the road to Arden--and it's not my way. I know my man now--God bless him." And away she ran through the trees and out of sight. The tinker watched the trees and underbrush swing into place, covering her exit. So tense and motionless he stood, one might have suspected him of trying to conjure her back again by the simple magic of heart and will. It turned out a disappointing piece of conjuring, however; the green parted again, but not to redisclose Patsy. A man, instead, walked into the open, toward the giant oaks, and one glimpse of him swept the tinker's memory back to a certain afternoon and a cross-roads. He could see himself sitting propped up by the sign-post, watching the door of a little white church, while down the road clattered a sorrel mare and a runabout. And the man that drove--the man who was trailing Patsy--was the man that came toward him now, looking for--some one. "You haven't seen--" he began, but the tinker interrupted him: "Guess not. I've been watching the company break up. Rather interesting to any one not used to that sort of thing--don't you think?" The man eyed him narrowly; then cautiously he dropped into an attitude of exaggerated indifference. "It sure is--young feller. Now you hain't been watchin' that there leadin' lady more particularly, have you? I sort o' cal'ate she might have a takin' way with the fellers," and he prodded the tinker with a jocular thumb. The tinker responded promptly with a foolish grin. "Maybe I have; but the luck was dead against me. Guess she had a lot of friends with her. I saw them carry her off in triumph in a big touring-car--probably they'll dine her at the country club." The man did not wait for further exchange of pleasantries. He took the direction the tinker indicated, and the tinker watched him go with a suppressed chuckle. "History positively stutters sometimes. Now if that property-man knew what he was talking about the company will be safe out of Arden before a runabout could make the country club and back." But the tinker's mirth was of short duration. With a shout of derision, he slapped the pocket of his trousers viciously. "What a confounded fool I am! Why in the name of reason didn't I give them to him and stop this sleuth business before it really gets her into trouble? Of all the idiotic--senseless--" and, leaning on the pilgrim staff, he slowly hobbled in the same direction he had given the man. * * * * * One last piece of news concerning Billy Burgeman came to Patsy before she left Arden that afternoon. Gregory Jessup was at the station to see her off, and he took her aside for the few minutes before the train arrived. "I tried to get Billy to join me--knew it would do him good to meet you; but he wouldn't budge. I rather think he's still a trifle sore on girls. Nothing personal, you understand?" Patsy certainly did--far better than his friend knew. In her heart she was trying her best to be interested and grateful to the Rich Man's Son for his unconscious part in her happiness. Had it not been for him there would have been no quest, no road; and without the road there would have been no tinker; and without the tinker, no happiness. It was none the less hard to be interested, however, now that her mind had given over the lonely occupation of contemplating memories for that most magical of all mental crafts--future-building. She jerked up her attention sharply as Gregory Jessup began speaking again. "Billy told me just before I came down why he had gone away; and I wanted to tell you. I don't know how much you know about the old man's reputation, but he was credited with being the hardest master with his men that you could find either side of the water. In the beginning he made his money by screwing down the wages and unscrewing the labor--and no sentiment. That was his slogan. Whether he kept it up from habit or pure cussedness I can't tell, but that's the real reason Billy would never go into his father's business--he couldn't stand his meanness. The old man's secretary forged a check for ten thousand; Billy caught him and cashed it himself--to save the man. He shouldered the guilt so his father wouldn't suspect the man and hound him." "I know," said Patsy, forgetting that she was supposed to know nothing. "But why in the name of all the saints did the secretary want to forge a check?" "Why does any one forge? He needs money. When Billy caught him the old fellow went all to pieces and told a pretty tough story. You see, he'd been Burgeman's secretary for almost twenty years, given him the best years of his life--slaved for him--lied for him--made money for him. Billy said his father regarded him as an excellent piece of office machinery, and treated him as if he were nothing more. The poor chap had always had hard luck; a delicate wife, three or four children who were eternally having or needing something, and poor relations demanding help he couldn't refuse. Between doctors' bills and clothing--and the relatives--he had no chance to save. At last he broke down, and the doctor told him it was an outdoor life, with absolute freedom from the strain of serving a man like Burgeman--or the undertaker for him. So he went to Burgeman, asked him to loan him the money to invest in a fruit-farm, and let him pay it off as fast as he could." "Well?" Patsy was interested at last. "Well, the old man turned him down--shouted his 'no sentiment' slogan at him, and shrugged his shoulders at what the doctor said. He told him, flat, that a man who hadn't saved a cent in twenty years couldn't in twenty years more; and he only put money into investments that paid. The poor chap went away, frantic, worked himself into thinking he was entitled to that last chance; and when Billy heard the story he thought so, too. In the end, Billy cashed the check, gave the secretary the money, and they both cleared out. He knew, if his father ever suspected the truth, he would have the poor chap followed and dragged back to pay the full penalty of the law--he and all his family with him." Patsy smiled whimsically. "It sounds so simple and believable when you have it explained; but it would have been rather nice, now, if Billy Burgeman could have known that one person believed in him from the beginning without an explanation." "Who did?" "Faith! how should I know? I was supposing, just." But as Patsy climbed onto the train she muttered under her breath: "We come out even, I'm thinking. If he's missed knowing that, I've missed knowing a fine lad." XVI THE ROAD BEGINS ALL OVER AGAIN On the second day following Patsy played Juliet at Brambleside, and more than satisfied George Travis. While his mind was racing ahead, planning her particular stardom on Broadway, and her mind was pestering her with its fears and uncertainties into a state of "private prostration," the manager of the Brambleside Inn was telephoning the Green County sheriff to come at once--he had found the girl. So it came about at the final dropping of the curtain, as Patsy was climbing down from her bier, that four eagerly determined men confronted her, each plainly wishful to be the first to gain her attention. "Well," said the tinker, pointedly, "are you ready?" "It's all settled." Travis was jubilant. "You'll play Broadway for six months next winter--or I'm no manager." It was the manager of the Brambleside Inn and the Green County sheriff, however, who gave the greatest dramatic effect. They placed themselves adroitly on either side of Patsy and announced together: "You're under arrest!" "Holy Saint Patrick!" Patsy hardly knew whether to be amused or angry. With the actual coming of the tinker, and the laying of her fears, her mind seemed strangely limp and inadequate. Her lips quivered even as they smiled. "Maybe I had best go back to my bier; you couldn't arrest a dead Capulet." But George Travis swept her aside; he saw nothing amusing in the situation. "What do you mean by insulting Miss O'Connell and myself by such a performance? Why should she be under arrest--for being one of the best Shakespearean actresses we've had in this country for many a long, barren year?" "No! For stealing two thousand dollars' worth of diamonds from a guest in this hotel the night she palmed herself off as Miss St. Regis!" The manager of the Inn bit off his words as if he thoroughly enjoyed their flavor. "But she never was here," shouted Travis. "Yes, I was," contradicted Patsy. "And she sneaked off in the morning with the jewels," growled the manager. "And I trailed over the country for four days, trying to find the girl in a brown suit that he'd described--said she was on her way to Arden. I'd give a doggoned big cigar to know where you was all that time." And there was something akin to admiration in the sheriff's expression. But Patsy did not see. She was looking hard at the tinker, with an odd little smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. The tinker smiled back, while he reached deep into his trousers pocket and brought out a small package which he presented to the sheriff. "Are those what you are looking for?" They were five unset diamonds. "Well, I'll be hanged! Did she give them to you?" The manager of the Inn looked suspiciously from the tinker to Patsy. "No; she didn't know I had them--didn't even know they existed and that she was being trailed as a suspected thief. Why, what's the matter?" For Patsy had suddenly grown white and her lips were trembling past control. "Naught--naught they could understand. But I'm finding out there was more than one quest on the road to Arden, more than one soul who fared forth to help another in trouble. And my heart is breaking, just, with the memory of it." And Patsy sank back on the bier and covered her face. "What is it, dear?" whispered a distressed tinker. "Don't ask--now--here. Sometime I'll be telling ye." "Well"--the sheriff thumbed the armholes of his vest in a business-like manner--"I cal'ate we've waited about long enough, young man; supposin' you explain how you come to have those stones in your possession; and why you lied to me about her and sent me hiking off to that country club--when you knew durned well where she was." The tinker laughed in spite of himself. "Certainly; it's very simple. I found these, in a suit of rags which I saw on a tramp the morning you lost the diamonds--and Miss O'Connell. I liked the rags so well that I paid the tramp to change clothes with me; he took mine and gave me his, along with a knockout blow for good measure." The manager of the Inn interrupted with an exclamation of surprise: "So! You were the young fellow they picked up senseless by the stables that morning. When the grooms saw the other man running, they made out it was you who had struck him first." "Wish I had. But I squared it off with him a few days later," the tinker chuckled. "At the time I couldn't make out why he struck me except to get the rest of the money I had; but of course he wanted to get the stones he'd sewed up in these rags and forgotten. I began to suspect something when I found you trailing Miss O'Connell." "See here, young man, and wasn't you the feller that put me on the wrong road twice?" The sheriff laid a hand of the law suggestively against his chest. The tinker chuckled again. "I certainly was. It would have been pretty discouraging for Miss O'Connell if you'd found her before we had the defense ready; and it would have been awkward for you--to have to take a lady in custody." "I cal'ate that's about right." And the sheriff relaxed into a grin. Suddenly he turned to the manager of the Inn and pounded his palm with his fist. "By Jupiter! I betcher that there tramp is the feller that's been cleanin' up these parts for the past two years. Hangs round as a tramp at back doors and stables, and picks up what information he needs to break into the house easy. Never hitched him up in my mind to the thefts afore--but I cal'ate it's the one man--and he's it." "Guess you're right," the tinker agreed. "Last Saturday, when I came upon him again--in an automobile--still in my clothes, we had a final fight for the possession of the rags, which I still wore, and the--" But he never finished. Patsy had sprung to her feet and was looking at him, bewilderment, accusation, almost fright, showing through her tears. "Your clothes--your clothes! You wore a--Then you are--" "Hush!" said the tinker. He turned to the others. "I think that is all, gentlemen. I searched the rags after I had finished my score with the thief and found the stones. I brought them over this afternoon to return to their rightful owner. I might have returned them that day after the play--but I forgot until the sheriff had gone. You are entirely welcome. Good afternoon!" He dismissed them promptly, but courteously, as if the stage had been his own drawing-room and the two had suddenly expressed a desire to take their leave. At the wings he left them and came back direct to George Travis. "There is more thieving to be done this afternoon, and I am going to do it. I am going to steal your future star, right from under your nose; and I shall never return her." "What do you mean?" Travis stared at him blankly. "Just what I say; Miss O'Connell and I are to be married this afternoon in Arden." "That's simply out of the--" Patsy, who had found her tongue at last, laid a coaxing hand on Travis's arm. "No, it isn't. I wired Miriam yesterday--to see if she was really as sick as you thought. She was sick; but she's ever so much better and her nerves are not going to be nearly as troublesome as she feared. She's quite willing to come back and take her old place, and she'll be well enough next week." Patsy's voice had become vibrant with feeling. "Now don't ye be hard-hearted and think I'm ungrateful. We've all been playing in a bigger comedy than Willie Shakespeare ever wrote; and, sure, we've got to be playing it out to the end as it was meant to be." "And you mean to give up your career, your big chance of success?" Travis still looked incredulous. "Don't you realize you'll be famous--famous and rich!" he emphasized the last word unduly. It set Patsy's eyes to blazing. "Aye, I'd no longer be like Granny Donoghue's lean pig, hungry for scrapings. Well, I'd rather be hungry for scrapings than starving for love. I knew one woman who threw away love to be famous and rich, and I watched her die. Thank God she's kept my feet from that road! Sure, I wouldn't be rich--" She choked suddenly and looked helplessly at the tinker. "Neither would I." And he spoke with a solemn conviction. In the end Travis gave in. He took his disappointment and his loss like the true gentleman he was, and sent them away with his blessing, mixed with an honest twinge of self-pity. It was not, however, until Patsy turned to wave him a last farewell and smile a last grateful smile from under the white chiffon, corn-flower sunbonnet that he remembered that convention had been slighted. "Wait a minute," he said, running after them. "If I am not mistaken I have not had the pleasure of meeting your--future husband; perhaps you'll introduce us--" For once in her life Patsy looked fairly aghast, and Travis repeated, patiently, "His name, Irish Patsy--I want to know his name." The tinker might have helped her out, but he chose otherwise. He kept silent, his eyes on Patsy's as if he would read her answer there before she spoke it to Travis. "Well," she said at last, slowly, "maybe I'm not sure of it myself--except--I'm knowing it must be a good tinker name." And then laughter danced all over her face. "I'll tell ye; ye can be reading it to-morrow--in the papers." Whereupon she slipped her arm through the tinker's, and he led her away. And so it came to pass that once more Patsy and the tinker found themselves tramping the road to Arden; only this time it was down the straight road marked, "Seven Miles," and it was early evening instead of morning. "Do ye think we'll reach it now?" inquired Patsy. "We have reached it already; we're just going back." "And what happened to the brown dress?" "I burned it that night in the cottage--to fool the sheriff." "And I thought that night it was me ye had tricked--just for the whim of it. Did ye know who I was--by chance?" "Of course I knew. I had seen you with the Irish Players many, many times, and I knew you the very moment your voice came over the road to me--wishing me 'a brave day.'" The tinker's eyes deepened with tenderness. "Do you think for a moment if I hadn't known something about you--and wasn't hungering to know more--that I would have schemed and cheated to keep your comradeship?" "Ye might tell me, then, how ye came to know about the cottage--and how your picture ever climbed to the mantel-shelf?" "You know--I meant to burn that along with the dress--and I forgot. What did you think when you discovered it?" "Faith! I thought it was the picture of the truest gentleman God had ever made--and I fetched it along with me--for company." The tinker threw back his head and laughed as of old. "What will poor old Greg say when he finds it gone? Oh, I know how you almost stole his faithful old heart by being so pitying of his friend--and how you made the sign for him to follow--" "Aye," agreed Patsy, "but what of the cottage?" "That belongs to Greg's father; he and the girls are West this summer, so the cottage was closed." "And the breakfast with the throstles and the lady's-slippers?" The tinker laid his finger over her lips. "Please, sweetheart--don't try to steal away all the magic and the poetry from our road. You will leave it very barren if you do--'I'm thinking.'" Silence held their tongues until curiosity again loosened Patsy's. "And what started ye on the road in rags? Ye have never really answered that." "I have never honestly wanted to; it is not a pleasant answer." He drew Patsy closer, and his hands closed over hers. "Promise you will never think of it again, that you and I will forget that part of the road--after to-day?" Patsy nodded. "I borrowed the rags so that it would take a pretty smart coroner to identify the person in it after the train had passed under the suspension-bridge from which he fell--by accident. Don't shudder, dear. Was it so terrible--that wish to get away from a world that held nothing, not even some one to grieve? Remember, when I started there wasn't a soul who believed in me, who would care much one way or another--unless, perhaps, poor old Greg." "Would ye mind letting me look at the marriage license? I'd like to be seeing it written down." The tinker produced it, and she read "William Burgeman." Then she added, with a stubborn shake of the head, "Mind, though, I'll not be rich." "You will not have to be. Father has left me absolutely nothing for ten years; after that I can inherit his money or not, as we choose. It's a glorious arrangement. The money is all disposed of to good civic purpose, if we refuse. I am very glad it's settled that way; for I'm afraid I would never have had the heart to come to you, dear, dragging all those millions after me." "Then it is a free, open road for the both of us; and, please Heaven! we'll never misuse it." She laughed joyously; some day she would tell him of her meeting with his father; life was too full now for that. The tinker fell into his old swinging stride that Patsy had found so hard to keep pace with; and silence again held their tongues. "Do you think we shall find the castle with a window for every day in the year?" the tinker asked at last. "Aye. Why not? And we'll be as happy as I can tell ye, and twice as happy as ye can tell me. Doesn't every lad and lass find it anew for themselves when they take to the long road with naught but love and trust in their hearts--and their hands together? They may find it when they're young--they may not find it till they're old--but it will be there, ever beckoning them on--with the purple hills rising toward it. And there's a miracle in the castle that I've never told ye: no matter how old and how worn and how stooped the lad and his lass may have grown, there he sees her only fresh and fair and she sees him only brave and straight and strong." She stopped and faced him, her hands slipping out of his and creeping up to his shoulders and about his neck. "Dear lad--promise me one thing!--promise me we shall never forget the road! No matter how snugly we may be housed, or how close comfort and happiness sit at our hearthside--we'll be faring forth just once in so often--to touch earth again. And we'll help to keep faith in human nature--aye, and simple-hearted kindness alive in the world; and we'll make our friends by reason of that and not because of the gold we may or may not be having." "And do you still think kindness is the greatest thing in the world?" "No. There is one thing better; but kindness tramps mortal close at its heels." Patsy's hands slipped from his shoulders; she clasped them together in sudden intensity. "Haven't ye any curiosity at all to know what fetched me after ye?" "Yes. But there is to-morrow--and all the days after--to tell me." "No, there is just to-day. The telling of it is the only wedding-gift I have for ye, dear lad. I was with Marjorie Schuyler in the den that day you came to her and told her." "You heard everything?" "Aye." "And you came, believing in me, after all?" "I came to show you there was one person in the world who trusted you, who would trust you across the world and back again. That's all the wedding-gift I have for ye, dear, barring love." And then and there--in the open road, still a good three miles from the Arden church--the tinker gathered her close in the embrace he had kept for her so long. * * * * * Transcriber's note: Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise, every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and intent. 
12326	----	[Illustration: Ellen Terry drawn from photographs by Albert Sterner] THE STORY OF MY LIFE RECOLLECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS BY ELLEN TERRY [Illustration] ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. MCMIX _1908, The McClure Company_ 1907, 1908, The S.S. McClure Company 1907, 1908, Ellen Terry TO EDY CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. A CHILD OF THE STAGE, 1848-56 The Charles Keans, 1856 Training in Shakespeare, 1856-59 II. ON THE ROAD, 1859-61 Life in a Stock Company, 1862-63 1864 III. ROSSETTI, BERNHARDT, IRVING, 1865-67 My First Impressions of Henry Irving IV. A SIX-YEAR VACATION, 1868-74 V. THE ACTRESS AND THE PLAYWRIGHT, 1874. Portia, 1875 Tom Taylor and Lavender Sweep VI. A YEAR WITH THE BANCROFTS VII. EARLY DAYS AT THE LYCEUM VIII. WORK AT THE LYCEUM IX. LYCEUM PRODUCTIONS X. LYCEUM PRODUCTIONS (_continued_) XI. AMERICA: THE FIRST OF EIGHT TOURS What Constitutes Charm XII. SOME LIKES AND DISLIKES XIII. THE MACBETH PERIOD XIV. LAST DAYS AT THE LYCEUM My Stage Jubilee Apologia The Death of Henry Irving Alfred Gilbert and others "Beefsteak" Guests at the Lyceum Bits From My Diary INDEX LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Ellen Terry Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Terry Charles Kean and Ellen Terry in 1856 Ellen Terry in 1856 Ellen Terry at Sixteen "The Sisters" (Kate and Ellen Terry) Ellen Terry at Seventeen George Frederick Watts, R.A. Ellen Terry as Helen in "The Hunchback" Henry Irving Head of a Young Girl (Ellen Terry) Henry Irving Ellen Terry as Portia Henry Irving as Matthias in "The Bells" Henry Irving as Philip of Spain Henry Irving as Hamlet Lily Langtry William Terriss as Squire Thornhill in "Olivia" Ellen Terry as Ophelia Ellen Terry as Beatrice Sir Henry Irving Irving as Louis XI Ellen Terry as Henrietta Maria Ellen Terry as Camma in "The Cup" Ellen Terry as Iolanthe Ellen Terry as Letitia Hardy in "The Belle's Stratagem" Edwin Thomas Booth Ellen Terry as Juliet Two Portraits of Ellen Terry as Beatrice Ellen Terry's Favourite Photograph as Olivia Eleanora Duse with Lenbach's Child Ellen Terry as Margaret in "Faust" Ellen Terry as Ellaline in "The Amber Heart" Miss Ellen Terry in 1883 The Bas-relief Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson Miss Terry and Sir Henry Irving Sarah Holland, Ellen Terry's Dresser Miss Rosa Corder Miss Ellen Terry with her Fox-terriers Miss Ellen Terry in 1898 Sir Henry Irving Miss Ellen Terry Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth Sir Henry Irving Ellen Terry as Lucy Ashton in "Ravenswood" Henry Irving as Cardinal Wolsey in "Henry VIII." Ellen Terry as Nance Oldfield Ellen Terry as Kniertje in "The Good Hope" Ellen Terry as Imogen Henry Irving as Becket Sir Henry Irving Ellen Terry as Rosamund in "Becket" Ellen Terry as Guinevere in "King Arthur" "Olivia" Miss Terry's Garden at Winchelsea Ellen Terry as Hermione in "The Winter's Tale" INTRODUCTION "When I read the book, the biography famous, And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life? And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life!) Why even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my real life. Only a few hints--a few diffused faint clues and indirections I seek ... to trace out here." WALT WHITMAN. For years I have contemplated telling this story, and for years I have put off telling it. While I have delayed, my memory has not improved, and my recollections of the past are more hazy and fragmentary than when it first occurred to me that one day I might write them down. My bad memory would matter less if I had some skill in writing--the practiced writer can see possibilities in the most ordinary events--or if I had kept a systematic and conscientious record of my life. But although I was at one time conscientious and diligent enough in keeping a diary, I kept it for use at the moment, not for future reference. I kept it with paste-pot and scissors as much as with a pen. My method was to cut bits out of the newspapers and stick them into my diary day by day. Before the end of the year was reached Mr. Letts would have been ashamed to own his diary. It had become a bursting, groaning dust-bin of information, for the most part useless. The biggest elastic band made could hardly encircle its bulk, swelled by photographs, letters, telegrams, dried flowers--the whole making up a confusion in which every one but the owner would seek in vain to find some sense or meaning. About six years ago I moved into a smaller house in London, and I burnt a great many of my earlier diaries as unmovable rubbish. The few passages which I shall quote in this book from those which escaped destruction will prove that my bonfire meant no great loss! Still, when it was suggested to me in the year of my stage jubilee that I ought to write down my recollections, I longed for those diaries! I longed for anything which would remind me of the past and make it live again for me. I was frightened. Something would be expected of me, since I could not deny that I had had an eventful life packed full of incident, and that by the road I had met many distinguished and interesting men and women. I could not deny that I had been fifty years on the stage, and that this meant enough material for fifty books, if only the details of every year could be faithfully told. But it is not given to all of us to see our lives in relief as we look back. Most of us, I think, see them in perspective, of which our birth is the vanishing point. Seeing, too, is only half the battle. How few people can describe what they see! While I was thinking in this obstructive fashion and wishing that I could write about my childhood like Tolstoi, about my girlhood like Marie Bashkirtseff, and about the rest of my days and my work like many other artists of the pen, who merely, by putting black upon white, have had the power to bring before their readers not merely themselves "as they lived," but the most homely and intimate details of their lives, the friend who had first impressed on me that I ought not to leave my story untold any longer, said that the beginning was easy enough: "What is the first thing you remember? Write that down as a start." But for my friend's practical suggestion it is doubtful if I should ever have written a line! He relieved my anxiety about my powers of compiling a stupendous autobiography, and made me forget that writing was a new art, to me, and that I was rather old to try my hand at a new art. My memory suddenly began to seem not so bad after all. For weeks I had hesitated between Othello's "Nothing extenuate, nor write down aught in malice," and Pilate's "What is truth?" as my guide and my apology. Now I saw that both were too big for my modest endeavor. I was not leaving a human document for the benefit of future psychologists and historians, but telling as much of my story as I could remember to the good, living public which has been considerate and faithful to me for so many years. How often it has made allowances for me when I was nervous on first nights! With what patience it has waited long and uncomfortable hours to see me! Surely its charity would quickly cover my literary sins. I gave up the search for a motto which should express my wish to tell the truth so far as I know it, to describe things as I see them, to be faithful according to my light, not dreading the abuse of those who might see in my light nothing but darkness. I shut up "Othello" and did not try to verify the remark of "jesting" Pilate. The only instruction that I gave myself was to "begin at the beginning." E.T. THE STORY OF MY LIFE I A CHILD OF THE STAGE 1848-1856 This is the first thing I remember. In the corner of a lean-to whitewashed attic stood a fine, plain, solid oak bureau. By climbing up on to this bureau I could see from the window the glories of the sunset. My attic was on a hill in a large and busy town, and the smoke of a thousand chimneys hung like a gray veil between me and the fires in the sky. When the sun had set, and the scarlet and gold, violet and primrose, and all those magic colors that have no names, had faded into the dark, there were other fires for me to see. The flaming forges came out, and terrified while they fascinated my childish imagination. What did it matter to me that I was locked in and that my father and mother, with my elder sister Kate, were all at the theater? I had the sunset, the forges, and the oak bureau. I cannot say how old I was at this time, but I am sure that it wasn't long after my birth (which I can't remember, although I have often been asked to decide in which house at Coventry I was born!). At any rate, I had not then seen a theater, and I took to the stage before many years had passed over my head. Putting together what I remembered, and such authentic history as there is of my parents' movements, I gather that this attic was in theatrical lodgings in Glasgow. My father was an actor, my mother an actress, and they were at this time on tour in Scotland. Perhaps this is the place to say that father was the son of an Irish builder, and that he eloped in a chaise with mother, who was the daughter of a Scottish minister. I am afraid I know no details of their romance. As for my less immediate ancestry, it is "wropt in mystery." Were we all people of the stage? There was a Daniel Terry who was not only a famous actor in his day, but a friend of Sir Walter Scott's. There was an Eliza Terry, an actress whose portrait appears in _The Dramatic Mirror_ in 1847. But so far as I know I cannot claim kinship with either Eliza or Daniel. I have a very dim recollection of anything that happened in the attic, beyond the fact that when my father and mother went to the theater every night, they used to put me to bed and that directly their backs were turned and the door locked, I used to jump up and go to the window. My "bed" consisted of the mattress pulled off their bed and laid on the floor--on father's side. Both my father and my mother were very kind and devoted parents (though severe at times, as all good parents are), but while mother loved all her children too well to make favorites, I was, I believe, my father's particular pet. I used to sleep all night holding his hand. One night I remember waking up to find a beautiful face bending over me. Father was holding a candle so that the visitor might see me better, and gradually I realized that the face belonged to some one in a brown silk dress--the first silk dress that I had ever seen. This being from another world had brown eyes and brown hair, which looked to me very dark, because we were a white lot, very fair indeed. I shall never forget that beautiful vision of this well-dressed woman with her lovely complexion and her gold chain round her neck. It was my Aunt Lizzie. I hold very strongly that a child's earliest impressions mould its character perhaps more than either heredity or education. I am sure it is true in my case. What first impressed me? An attic, an oak bureau, a lovely face, a bed on the floor. Things have come and gone in my life since then, but they have been powerless to efface those early impressions. I adore pretty faces. I can't keep away from shops where they sell good old furniture like my bureau. I like plain rooms with low ceilings better than any other rooms; and for my afternoon siesta, which is one of my institutions, I often choose the floor in preference to bed or sofa. What we remember in our childhood and what we are told afterwards often become inextricably confused in our minds, and after the bureau and Aunt Lizzie, my memory is a blank for some years. I can't even tell you when it was first decided that I was to go on the stage, but I expect it was when I was born, for in those days theatrical folk did not imagine that their children _could_ do anything but follow their parents' profession. I must depend now on hearsay for certain facts. The first fact is my birth, which should, perhaps, have been mentioned before anything else. To speak by the certificate, I was born on the 27th of February, 1848, at Coventry. Many years afterwards, when people were kind enough to think that the house in which I was born deserved to be discovered, there was a dispute as to which house in Market Street could claim me. The dispute was left unsettled in rather a curious way. On one side of the narrow street a haberdasher's shop bore the inscription, "Birthplace of Ellen Terry." On the other, an eating-house declared itself to be "the original birthplace"! I have never been able to arbitrate in the matter, my statement that my mother had always said that the house was "on the right-hand side, coming from the market-place," being apparently of no use. I have heard lately that one of the birthplaces has retired from the competition, and that the haberdasher has the field to himself. I am glad, for the sake of those friends of mine who have bought his handkerchiefs and ties as souvenirs. There is, however, nothing very attractive about the house itself. It is better built than a house of the same size would be built now, and it has a certain old-fashioned respectability, but that is the end of its praises. Coventry itself makes up for the deficiency. It is a delightful town, and it was a happy chance that made me a native of Warwickshire, Shakespeare's own county. Sarah Kemble married Mr. Siddons at Coventry too--another happy omen. I have acted twice in my native town in old days, but never in recent years. In 1904 I planned to act there again, but unfortunately I was taken ill at Cambridge, and the doctors would not allow me to go to Coventry. The morning my company left Cambridge without me, I was very miserable. It is always hateful to disappoint the public, and on this occasion I was compelled to break faith where I most wished to keep it. I heard afterwards from my daughter (who played some of my parts instead of me) that many of the Coventry people thought I had never meant to come at all. If this should meet their eyes, I hope they will believe that this was not so. My ambition to play at Coventry again shall be realized yet.[1] [Footnote 1: Since I wrote this, I have again visited my native town--this time to receive its civic congratulations on the occasion of my jubilee, and as recently as March of the present year I acted at the new Empire Theater.] At one time nothing seemed more unlikely than that I should be able to act in another Warwickshire town, a town whose name is known all over the world. But time and chance and my own great wish succeeded in bringing about my appearance at Stratford-on-Avon. I can well imagine that the children of some strolling players used to have a hard time of it, but my mother was not one to shirk her duties. She worked hard at her profession and yet found it possible not to _drag_ up her children, to live or die as it happened, but to bring them up to be healthy, happy, and wise--theater-wise, at any rate. When her babies were too small to be left at the lodgings (which she and my father took in each town they visited as near to the theater as possible), she would bundle us up in a shawl and put us to sleep in her dressing-room. So it was, that long before I spoke in a theater, I slept in one. Later on, when we were older and mother could leave us at home, there was a fire one night at our lodgings, and she rushed out of the theater and up the street in an agony of terror. She got us out of the house all right, took us to the theater, and went on with the next act as if nothing had happened. Such fortitude is commoner in our profession, I think, than in any other. We "go on with the next act" whatever happens, and if we know our business, no one in the audience will ever guess that anything is wrong--that since the curtain last went down some dear friend has died, or our children in the theatrical lodgings up the street have run the risk of being burnt to death. My mother had eleven children altogether, but only nine survived their infancy, and of these nine, my eldest brother, Ben, and my sister Florence have since died. My sister Kate, who left the stage at an age when most of the young women of the present day take to it for the first time, and made an enduring reputation in a few brilliant years, was the eldest of the family. Then came a sister, who died, and I was the third. After us came Ben, George, Marion, Flossie, Charles, Tom, and Fred. Six out of the nine have been on the stage, but only Marion, Fred, and I are there still. Two or three members of this large family, at the most, were in existence when I first entered a theater in a professional capacity, so I will leave them all alone for the present. I had better confess at once that I don't remember this great event, and my sister Kate is unkind enough to say that it never happened--to me! The story, she asserts, was told of her. But without damning proofs she is not going to make me believe it! Shall I be robbed of the only experience of my first eight years of life? Never! During the rehearsals of a pantomime in a Scottish town (Glasgow, I think. Glasgow has always been an eventful place to me!), a child was wanted for the Spirit of the Mustard-pot. What more natural than that my father should offer my services? I had a shock of pale yellow hair, I was small enough to be put into the property mustard-pot, and the Glasgow stage manager would easily assume that I had inherited talent. My father had acted with Macready in the stock seasons both at Edinburgh and Glasgow, and bore a very high reputation with Scottish audiences. But the stage manager and father alike reckoned without their actress! When they tried to put me into the mustard-pot, I yelled lustily and showed more lung-power than aptitude for the stage. "Pit your child into the mustard-pot, Mr. Terry," said the stage manager. "D--n you and your mustard-pot, sir!" said my mortified father. "I won't frighten my child for you or anyone else!" But all the same he was bitterly disappointed at my first dramatic failure, and when we reached home he put me in the corner to chasten me. "_You'll_ never make an actress!" he said, shaking a reproachful finger at me. It is _my_ mustard-pot, and why Kate should want it, I can't think! She hadn't yellow hair, and she couldn't possibly have behaved so badly. I have often heard my parents say significantly that they had no trouble with _Kate_! Before she was four, she was dancing a hornpipe in a sailor's jumper, a rakish little hat, and a diminutive pair of white ducks! Those ducks, marked "Kate Terry," were kept by mother for years as a precious relic, and are, I hope, still in the family archives! I stick to the mustard-pot, but I entirely disclaim the little Duke of York in Richard III., which some one with a good memory stoutly insists he saw me play before I made my first appearance as Mamilius. Except for this abortive attempt at Glasgow, I was never on any stage even for a rehearsal until 1856, at the Princess's Theater, when I appeared with Charles Kean in "A Winter's Tale." The man with the memory may have seen Kate as one of the Princes in the Tower, but he never saw me with her. Kate was called up to London in 1852 to play Prince Arthur in Charles Kean's production of "King John," and after that she acted in all his plays, until he gave up management in 1859. She had played Arthur during a stock season at Edinburgh, and so well that some one sang her praises to Kean and advised him to engage her. My mother took Kate to London, and I was left with my father in the provinces for two years. I can't recall much about those two years except sunsets and a great mass of shipping looming up against the sky. The sunsets followed me about everywhere; the shipping was in Liverpool, where father was engaged for a considerable time. He never ceased teaching me to be useful, alert, and quick. Sometimes he hastened my perceptive powers with a slipper, and always he corrected me if I pronounced any word in a slipshod fashion. He himself was a beautiful elocutionist, and if I now speak my language well it is in no small degree due to my early training. It was to his elocution that father owed his engagement with Macready, of whom he always spoke in terms of the most affectionate admiration in after years, and probably it did him a good turn again with Charles Kean. An actor who had supported Macready with credit was just the actor likely to be useful to a manager who was producing a series of plays by Shakespeare. Kate had been a success at the Princess's, too, in child parts, and this may have reminded Mr. Kean to send for Kate's father! At any rate he was sent for towards the end of the year 1853 and left Liverpool for London. I know I cooked his breakfasts for him in Liverpool, but I haven't the slightest recollection of the next two years in London. As I am determined not to fill up the early blanks with stories of my own invention, I must go straight on to 1856, when rehearsals were called at the Princess's Theater for Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale." THE CHARLES KEANS 1856 The Charles Keans from whom I received my first engagement, were both remarkable people, and at the Princess Theater were doing very remarkable work. Kean the younger had not the fire and genius of his wonderful father, Edmund, and but for the inherited splendor of his name it is not likely that he would ever have attained great eminence as an actor. His Wolsey and his Richard (the Second, not the Third) were his best parts, perhaps because in them his beautiful diction had full scope and his limitations were not noticeable. But it is more as a stage reformer than as an actor that he will be remembered. The old happy-go-lucky way of staging plays, with its sublime indifference to correctness of detail and its utter disregard of archaeology, had received its first blow from Kemble and Macready, but Charles Kean gave it much harder knocks and went further than either of them in the good work. It is an old story and a true one that when Edmund Kean made his first great success as Shylock, after a long and miserable struggle as a strolling player, he came home to his wife and said: "You shall ride in your carriage," and then, catching up his little son, added, "and Charley shall go to Eton!" Well, Charley did go to Eton, and if Eton did not make him a great actor, it opened his eyes to the absurd anachronisms in costumes and accessories which prevailed on the stage at that period, and when he undertook the management of the Princess's Theater, he turned his classical education to account. In addition to scholarly knowledge, he had a naturally refined taste and the power of selecting the right man to help him. Planché, the great authority on historical costumes, was one of his ablest coadjutors, and Mr. Bradshaw designed all the properties. It has been said lately that I began my career on an unfurnished stage, when the play was the thing, and spectacle was considered of small importance. I take this opportunity of contradicting that statement most emphatically. Neither when I began nor yet later in my career have I ever played under a management where infinite pains were not given to every detail. I think that far from hampering the acting, a beautiful and congruous background and harmonious costumes, representing accurately the spirit of the time in which the play is supposed to move, ought to help and inspire the actor. Such thoughts as these did not trouble my head when I acted with the Keans, but, child as I was, the beauty of the productions at the Princess's Theater made a great impression on me, and my memory of them is quite clear enough, even if there were not plenty of other evidence, for me to assert that in some respects they were even more elaborate than those of the present day. I know that the bath-buns of one's childhood always seem in memory much bigger and better than the buns sold nowadays, but even allowing for the natural glamor which the years throw over buns and rooms, places and plays alike, I am quite certain that Charles Kean's productions of Shakespeare would astonish the modern critic who regards the period of my first appearance as a sort of dark-age in the scenic art of the theater. I have alluded to the beauty of Charles Kean's diction. His voice was also of a wonderful quality--soft and low, yet distinct and clear as a bell. When he played Richard II. the magical charm of this organ was alone enough to keep the house spellbound. His vivid personality made a strong impression on me. Yet others only remember that he called his wife "Delly," though she was Nelly, and always spoke as if he had a cold in his head. How strange! If I did not understand what suggested impressions so different from my own, they would make me more indignant. "Now who shall arbitrate? Ten men love what I hate, Shun what I follow, slight what I receive. Ten who in ears and eyes Match me; they all surmise, They this thing, and I that: Whom shall my soul believe?" What he owed to Mrs. Kean, he would have been the first to confess. In many ways she was the leading spirit in the theater; at the least, a joint ruler, not a queen-consort. During the rehearsals Mr. Kean used to sit in the stalls with a loud-voiced dinner-bell by his side, and when anything went wrong on the stage, he would ring it ferociously, and everything would come to a stop, until Mrs. Kean, who always sat on the stage, had set right what was wrong. She was more formidable than beautiful to look at, but her wonderful fire and genius were none the less impressive because she wore a white handkerchief round her head and had a very beaky nose! How I admired and loved and feared her! Later on the fear was replaced by gratitude, for no woman ever gave herself more trouble to train a young actress than did Mrs. Kean. The love and admiration, I am glad to say, remained and grew. It is rare that it falls to the lot of anyone to have such an accomplished teacher. Her patience and industry were splendid. It was Mrs. Kean who chose me out of five or six other children to play my first part. We were all tried in it, and when we had finished, she said the same thing to us all: "That's very nice! Thank you, my dear. That will do." We none of us knew at the time which of us had pleased her most. At this time we were living in the upper part of a house in the Gower Street region. That first home in London I remember chiefly by its fine brass knocker, which mother kept beautifully bright, and by its being the place to which I was sent my first part! Bound in green American cloth, it looked to me more marvelous than the most priceless book has ever looked since! I was so proud and pleased and delighted that I danced a hornpipe for joy! Why was I chosen, and not one of the other children, for the part of Mamilius? some one may ask. It was not mere luck, I think. Perhaps I was a born actress, but that would have served me little if I had not been able to _speak_! It must be remembered that both my sister Kate and I had been trained almost from our birth for the stage, and particularly in the important branch of clear articulation. Father, as I have already said, was a very charming elocutionist, and my mother read Shakespeare beautifully. They were both very fond of us and saw our faults with eyes of love, though they were unsparing in their corrections. In these early days they had need of all their patience, for I was a most troublesome, wayward pupil. However, "the labor we delight in physics pain," and I hope, too, that my more staid sister made it up to them! The rehearsals for "A Winter's Tale" were a lesson in fortitude. They taught me once and for all that an actress's life (even when the actress is only eight) is not all beer and skittles, or cakes and ale, or fame and glory. I was cast for the part of Mamilius in the way I have described, and my heart swelled with pride when I was told what I had to do, when I realized that I had a real Shakespeare part--a possession that father had taught me to consider the pride of life! But many weary hours were to pass before the first night. If a company has to rehearse four hours a day now, it is considered a great hardship, and players must lunch and dine like other folk. But this was not Kean's way! Rehearsals lasted all day, Sundays included, and when there was no play running at night, until four or five the next morning! I don't think any actor in those days dreamed of luncheon. (Tennyson, by the way, told me to say "luncheon"--not "lunch.") How my poor little legs used to ache! Sometimes I could hardly keep my eyes open when I was on the stage, and often when my scene was over, I used to creep into the greenroom and forget my troubles and my art (if you can talk of art in connection with a child of eight) in a delicious sleep. At the dress-rehearsals I did not want to sleep. All the members of the company were allowed to sit and watch the scenes in which they were not concerned, from the back of the dress-circle. This, by the way, is an excellent plan, and in theaters where it is followed the young actress has reason to be grateful. In these days of greater publicity when the press attend rehearsals, there may be strong reasons against the company being "in front," but the perfect loyalty of all concerned would dispose of these reasons. Now, for the first time, the beginner is able to see the effect of the weeks of thought and labor which have been given to the production. She can watch from the front the fulfillment of what she has only seen as intention and promise during the other rehearsals. But I am afraid that beginners now are not so keen as they used to be. The first wicked thing I did in a theater sprang from excess of keenness. I borrowed a knife from a carpenter and made a slit in the canvas to watch Mrs. Kean as Hermione! Devoted to her art, conscientious to a degree in mastering the spirit and details of her part, Mrs. Kean also possessed the personality and force to chain the attention and indelibly imprint her rendering of a part on the imagination. When I think of the costume in which she played Hermione, it seems marvelous to me that she could have produced the impression that she did. This seems to contradict what I have said about the magnificence of the production. But not at all! The designs of the dresses were purely classic; but then, as now, actors and actresses seemed unable to keep their own period and their own individuality out of the clothes directly they got them on their backs. In some cases the original design was quite swamped. No matter what the character that Mrs. Kean was assuming, she always used to wear her hair drawn flat over her forehead and twisted tight round her ears in a kind of circular sweep--such as the old writing-masters used to make when they attempted an extra grand flourish. And then the amount of petticoats she wore! Even as Hermione she was always bunched out by layer upon layer of petticoats, in defiance of the fact that classical parts should not be dressed in a superfluity of raiment. But if the petticoats were full of starch, the voice was full of pathos--and the dignity, simplicity, and womanliness of Mrs. Charles Kean's Hermione could not have been marred by a far more grotesque costume. There is something, I suppose, in a woman's nature which always makes her remember how she was dressed at any specially eventful moment of her life, and I can see myself, as though it were yesterday, in the little red-and-silver dress I wore as Mamilius. Mrs. Grieve, the dresser--"Peter Grieve-us," as we children called her--had pulled me into my very pink tights (they were by no means _tight_ but very baggy, according to the pictures of me), and my mother had arranged my hair in sausage curls on each side of my head in even more perfect order and regularity than usual. Besides my clothes, I had a beautiful "property" to be proud of. This was a go-cart, which had been made in the theater by Mr. Bradshaw, and was an exact copy of a child's toy as depicted on a Greek vase. It was my duty to drag this little cart about the stage, and on the first night, when Mr. Kean as Leontes told me to "go play," I obeyed his instructions with such vigor that I tripped over the handle and came down on my back! A titter ran through the house, and I felt that my career as an actress was ruined forever. Even now I remember how bitterly I wept, and how deeply humiliated I felt. But the little incident, so mortifying to me, did not spoil my first appearance altogether. _The Times_ of May 1, 1856, was kind enough to call me "vivacious and precocious," and "a worthy relative of my sister Kate," and my parents were pleased (although they would not show it too much), and Mrs. Kean gave me a pat on the back. Father and Kate were both in the cast, too, I ought to have said, and the Queen, Prince Albert, and the Princess Royal were all in a box on the first night. To act for the first time in Shakespeare, in a theater where my sister had already done something for our name, and before royalty, was surely a good beginning. From April 28, 1856, I played Mamilius every night for one hundred and two nights. I was never ill, and my understudy, Clara Denvil, a very handsome, dark child with flaming eyes, though quite ready and longing to play my part, never had the chance. I had now taken the first step, but I had taken it without any notion of what I was doing. I was innocent of all art, and while I loved the actual doing of my part, I hated the labor that led up to it. But the time was soon to come when I was to be fired by a passion for work. Meanwhile I was unconsciously learning a number of lessons which were to be most useful to me in my subsequent career. TRAINING IN SHAKESPEARE 1856-1859 From April 1856 until 1859 I acted constantly at the Princess's Theater with the Keans, spending the summer holidays in acting at Ryde. My whole life was the theater, and naturally all my early memories are connected with it. At breakfast father would begin the day's "coaching." Often I had to lay down my fork and say my lines. He would conduct these extra rehearsals anywhere--in the street, the 'bus--we were never safe! I remember vividly going into a chemist's shop and being stood upon a stool to say my part to the chemist! Such leisure as I had from my profession was spent in "minding" the younger children--an occupation in which I delighted. They all had very pretty hair, and I used to wash it and comb it out until it looked as fine and bright as floss silk. It is argued now that stage life is bad for a young child, and children are not allowed by law to go on the stage until they are ten years old--quite a mature age in my young days! I cannot discuss the whole question here, and must content myself with saying that during my three years at the Princess's I was a very strong, happy, and healthy child. I was never out of the bill except during the run of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," when, through an unfortunate accident, I broke my toe. I was playing Puck, my second part on any stage, and had come up through a trap at the end of the last act to give the final speech. My sister Kate was playing Titania that night as understudy to Carlotta Leclercq. Up I came--but not quite up, for the man shut the trapdoor too soon and caught my toe. I screamed. Kate rushed to me and banged her foot on the stage, but the man only closed the trap tighter, mistaking the signal. "Oh, Katie! Katie!" I cried. "Oh, Nelly! Nelly!" said poor Kate helplessly. Then Mrs. Kean came rushing on and made them open the trap and release my poor foot. "Finish the play, dear," she whispered excitedly, "and I'll double your salary!" There was Kate holding me up on one side and Mrs. Kean on the other. Well, I did finish the play in a fashion. The text ran something like this-- "If we shadows have offended (Oh, Katie, Katie!) Think but this, and all is mended, (Oh, my toe!) That you have but slumbered here, While these visions did appear. (I can't, I can't!) And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, (Oh, dear! oh, dear!) Gentles, do not reprehend; (A big sob) If you pardon, we will mend. (Oh, Mrs. Kean!)" How I got through it, I don't know! But my salary was doubled--it had been fifteen shillings, and it was raised to thirty--and Mr. Skey, President of Bartholomew's Hospital, who chanced to be in a stall that very evening, came round behind the scenes and put my toe right. He remained my friend for life. I was not chosen for Puck because I had played Mamilius with some credit. The same examination was gone through, and again I came out first. During the rehearsals Mrs. Kean taught me to draw my breath in through my nose and begin a laugh--a very valuable accomplishment! She was also indefatigable in her lessons in clear enunciation, and I can hear her now lecturing the ladies of the company on their vowels. "A, E, I, O, U, my dear," she used to say, "are five distinct vowels, so don't mix them all up together, as if you were making a pudding. If you want to say, 'I am going on the river,' say it plainly and don't tell us you are going on the 'riv_ah_!' You must say _her_, not _har_; it's _God_, not _Gud_: rem_on_strance, not rem_un_strance," and so forth. No one ever had a sharper tongue or a kinder heart than Mrs. Kean. Beginning with her, I have always loved women with a somewhat hard manner! I have never believed in their hardness, and have proved them tender and generous in the extreme. Actor-managers are very proud of their long runs nowadays, but in Shakespeare, at any rate, they do not often eclipse Charles Kean's two hundred and fifty nights of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Princess's. It was certainly a very fascinating production, and many of the effects were beautiful. I, by the way, had my share in marring one of these during the run. When Puck was told to put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes, I had to fly off the stage as swiftly as I could, and a dummy Puck was whirled through the air from the point where I disappeared. One night the dummy, while in full flying action, fell on the stage, whereupon, in great concern for its safety, I ran on, picked it up in my arms, and ran off with it amid roars of laughter! Neither of the Keans was acting in this production, but there was some one in authority to give me a sound cuff. Yet I had such excellent intentions. 'Tis ever thus! I reveled in Puck and his impish pranks, and unconsciously realized that it was a part in which the imagination could run riot. I believe I played it well, but I did not _look_ well, and I must contradict emphatically the kind assumption that I must have been a "delightful little fairy." As Mamilius I was really a sweet little thing, but while I was playing Puck I grew very gawky--not to say ugly! My hair had been cut short, and my red cheeks stuck out too much. I was a sight! The parts we play influence our characters to some extent, and Puck made me a bit of a romp. I grew vain and rather "cocky," and it was just as well that during the rehearsals for the Christmas pantomime in 1857 I was tried for the part of the Fairy Dragonetta and rejected. I believe that my failure was principally due to the fact that Nature had not given me flashing eyes and raven hair--without which, as everyone knows, no bad fairy can hold up her head and respect herself. But at the time I felt distinctly rebuffed, and only the extreme beauty of my dress as the maudlin "good fairy" Goldenstar consoled me. Milly Smith (afterwards Mrs. Thorn) was Dragonetta, and one of her speeches ran like this: "Ungrateful Simple Simon (darting forward) You thought no doubt to spite me! That to this Royal Christening you did not invite me! BUT--(Mrs. Kean: "_You must plaster that 'but' on the white wall at the back of the gallery._")-- But on this puling brat revenged I'll be! My fiery dragon there shall have her broiled for tea!" At Ryde during the previous summer my father had taken the theater, and Kate and I played in several farces which the Keeleys and the great comedian Robson had made famous in London. My performances as Waddilove and Jacob Earwig had provoked some one to describe me as "a perfect little heap of talent!" To fit my Goldenstar, I must borrow that phrase and describe myself as a perfect little heap of vanity. It was that dress! It was a long dress, though I was still a baby, and it was as pink and gold as it was trailing. I used to think I looked _beautiful_ in it. I wore a trembling star on my forehead, too, which was enough to upset any girl! One of the most wearisome, yet essential details of my education is connected with my first long dress. It introduces, too, Mr. Oscar Byrn, the dancing-master and director of crowds at the Princess's. One of his lessons was in the art of walking with a flannel blanket pinned on in front and trailing six inches on the floor. My success in carrying out this maneuver with dignity won high praise from Mr. Byrn. The other children used to kick at the blanket and progress in jumps like young kangaroos, but somehow I never had any difficulty in moving gracefully. No wonder then that I impressed Mr. Byrn, who had a theory that "an actress was no actress unless she learned to dance early." Whenever he was not actually putting me through my paces, I was busy watching him teach the others. There was the minuet, to which he used to attach great importance, and there was "walking the plank." Up and down one of the long planks, extending the length of the stage, we had to walk first slowly and then quicker and quicker until we were able at a considerable pace to walk the whole length of it without deviating an inch from the straight line. This exercise, Mr. Byrn used to say, and quite truly, I think, taught us uprightness of carriage and certainty of step. "Eyes right! Chest out! Chin tucked in!" I can hear the dear old man shouting at us as if it were yesterday; and I have learned to see of what value all his drilling was, not only to deportment, but to clear utterance. It would not be a bad thing if there were more "old fops" like Oscar Byrn in the theaters of to-day. That old-fashioned art of "deportment" is sadly neglected. The pantomime in which I was the fairy Goldenstar was very frequently preceded by "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the two parts on one night must have been fairly heavy work for a child, but I delighted in it. In the same year (1858) I played Karl in "Faust and Marguerite," a jolly little part with plenty of points in it, but not nearly as good a part as Puck. Progress on the stage is often crab-like, and little parts, big parts, and no parts at all must be accepted as "all in the day's work." In these days I was cast for many a "dumb" part. I walked on in "The Merchant of Venice" carrying a basket of doves; in "Richard II." I climbed up a pole in the street scene; in "Henry VIII." I was "top angel" in the vision, and I remember that the heat of the gas at that dizzy height made me sick at the dress-rehearsal! I was a little boy "cheering" in several other productions. In "King Lear" my sister Kate played Cordelia. She was only fourteen, and the youngest Cordelia on record. Years after I played it at the Lyceum when I was over forty! The production of "Henry VIII." at the Princess's was one of Charles Kean's best efforts. I always refrain from belittling the present at the expense of the past, but there were efforts here which I have never seen surpassed, and about this my memory is not at all dim. At this time I seem to have been always at the side watching the acting. Mrs. Kean's Katherine of Aragon was splendid, and Charles Kean's Wolsey, his best part after, perhaps, his Richard II. Still, the lady who used to stand ready with a tear-bottle to catch his tears as he came off after his last scene rather overdid her admiration. My mental criticism at the time was "What rubbish!" When I say in what parts Charles Kean was "best," I don't mean to be assertive. How should a mere child be able to decide? I "think back" and remember in what parts I liked him best, but I may be quite wide of the mark. In those days audiences liked plenty for their money, and a Shakespeare play was not nearly long enough to fill the bill. English playgoers in the early 'fifties did not emulate the Japanese, who go to the theater early in the morning and stay there until late at night, still less the Chinese, whose plays begin one week and end the next, but they thought nothing of sitting in the theater from seven to twelve. In one of the extra pieces which these hours necessitated, I played a "tiger," one of those youthful grooms who are now almost a bygone fashion. The pride that I had taken in my trembling star in the pantomime was almost equaled now by my pride in my top-boots! They were too small and caused me insupportable suffering, but I was so afraid that they would be taken away if I complained, that every evening I used to put up valorously with the torture. The piece was called "If the Cap Fits," but my boots were the fit with which I was most concerned! Years later the author of the little play, Mr. Edmund Yates, the editor of _The World_--wrote to me about my performance as the tiger: "When on June 13, 1859 (to no one else in the world would I breathe the date!) I saw a very young lady play a tiger in a comedietta of mine called 'If the Cap Fits,' I had no idea that that precocious child had in her the germ of such an artist as she has since proved herself. What I think of her performance of Portia she will see in _The World_." In "The Merchant of Venice" though I had no speaking part, I was firmly convinced that the basket of doves which I carried on my shoulder was the principal attraction of the scene in which it appeared. The other little boys and girls in the company regarded those doves with eyes of bitter envy. One little chorus boy, especially, though he professed a personal devotion of the tenderest kind for me, could never quite get over those doves, and his romantic sentiments cooled considerably when I gained my proud position as dove-bearer. Before, he had shared his sweets with me, but now he transferred both sweets and affections to some more fortunate little girl. Envy, after all, is the death of love! Mr. Harley was the Launcelot Gobbo in "The Merchant of Venice"--an old gentleman, and almost as great a fop as Mr. Byrn. He was always smiling; his two large rows of teeth were so _very_ good! And he had pompous, grandiloquent manners, and wore white gaiters and a long hanging eye-glass. His appearance I should never have forgotten anyhow, but he is also connected in my mind with my first experience of terror. It came to me in the greenroom, the window-seat of which was a favorite haunt of mine. Curled up in the deep recess I had been asleep one evening, when I was awakened by a strange noise, and, peeping out, saw Mr. Harley stretched on the sofa in a fit. One side of his face was working convulsively, and he was gibbering and mowing the air with his hand. When he saw me, he called out: "Little Nelly! oh, little Nelly!" I stood transfixed with horror. He was still dressed as Launcelot Gobbo, and this made it all the more terrible. A doctor was sent for, and Mr. Harley was looked after, but he never recovered from his seizure and died a few days afterwards. Although so much of my early life is vague and indistinct, I can always see and hear Mr. Harley as I saw and heard him that night, and I can always recollect the view from the greenroom window. It looked out on a great square courtyard, in which the spare scenery, that was not in immediate use, was stacked. For some reason or other this courtyard was a favorite playground for a large company of rats. I don't know what the attraction was for them, except that they may have liked nibbling the paint off the canvas. Out they used to troop in swarms, and I, from my perch on the window-seat, would watch and wonder. Once a terrible storm came on, and years after, at the Lyceum, the Brocken Scene in "Faust" brought back the scene to my mind--the thunder and lightning and the creatures crawling on every side, the _grayness_ of the whole thing. All "calls" were made from the greenroom in those days, and its atmosphere was, I think, better than that of the dressing-room in which nowadays actors and actresses spend their time during the waits. The greenroom at the Princess's was often visited by distinguished people, among them Planché, the archaeologist, who did so much for Charles Kean's productions, and Macready. One night, as with my usual impetuosity I was rushing back to my room to change my dress, I ran right into the white waistcoat of an old gentleman! Looking up with alarm, I found that I had nearly knocked over the great Mr. Macready. "Oh, I _beg_ your pardon!" I exclaimed in eager tones. I had always heard from father that Macready was the greatest actor of all, and this was our first meeting. I was utterly abashed, but Mr. Macready, looking down with a very kindly smile, only answered: "Never mind! You are a very polite little girl, and you act very earnestly and speak very nicely." I was too much agitated to do anything but continue my headlong course to my dressing-room, but even in those short moments the strange attractiveness of his face impressed itself on my imagination. I remember distinctly his curling hair, his oddly colored eyes full of fire, and his beautiful, wavy mouth. When I first described this meeting with Macready, a disagreeable person wrote to the papers and said that he did not wish to question my veracity, but that it was utterly impossible that Macready could ever have brought himself to go to the Princess's at this time, because of the rivalry between him and Charles Kean. I know that the two actors were not on speaking terms, but very likely Macready had come to see my father or Mr. Harley or one of the many members of Kean's company who had once served under him. The period when I was as vain as a little peacock had come to an end before this. I think my part in "Pizarro" saw the last of it. I was a Worshiper of the Sun, and in a pink feather, pink swathings of muslin, and black arms, I was again struck by my own beauty. I grew quite attached to the looking-glass which reflected that feather! Then suddenly there came a change. _I began to see the whole thing._ My attentive watching of other people began to bear fruit, and the labor and perseverance, care and intelligence which had gone to make these enormous productions dawned on my young mind. _One must see things for oneself._ Up to this time I had loved acting because it was great fun, but I had not loved the grind. After I began to rehearse Prince Arthur in "King John," a part in which my sister Kate had already made a great success six years earlier, I understood that if I did not work, I could not act. And I wanted to work. I used to get up in the middle of the night and watch my gestures in the glass. I used to try my voice and bring it down and up in the right places. And all vanity fell away from me. At the first rehearsals of "King John" I could not do anything right. Mrs. Kean stormed at me, slapped me. I broke down and cried, and then, with all the mortification and grief in my voice, managed to express what Mrs. Kean wanted and what she could not teach me by doing it herself. "That's right, that's right!" she cried excitedly, "you've got it! Now remember what you did with your voice, reproduce it, remember everything, and do it!" When the rehearsal was over, she gave me a vigorous kiss. "You've done very well," she said. "That's what I want. You're a very tired little girl. Now run home to bed." I shall never forget the relief of those kind words after so much misery, and the little incident often comes back to me now when I hear a young actress say, "I can't do it!" If only she can cry with vexation, I feel sure that she will then be able to make a good attempt at doing it! There were oppositions and jealousies in the Keans' camp, as in most theaters, but they were never brought to my notice until I played Prince Arthur. Then I saw a great deal of Mr. Ryder, who was the Hubert of the production, and discovered that there was some soreness between him and his manager. Ryder was a very pugnacious man--an admirable actor, and in appearance like an old tree that has been struck by lightning, or a greenless, barren rock; and he was very strong in his likes and dislikes, and in his manner of expressing them. "D'ye suppose he engaged me for my powers as an actor?" he used to say of Mr. Kean. "Not a bit of it! He engaged me for my d----d archaeological figure!" One night during the run of "King John," a notice was put up that no curtain calls would be allowed at the end of a scene. At the end of my scene with Hubert there was tremendous applause, and when we did not appear, the audience began to shout and yell and cheer. I went off to the greenroom, but even from there I could still hear the voices: "Hubert! Arthur!" Mr. Kean began the next scene, but it was of no use. He had to give in and send for us. Meanwhile old Ryder had been striding up and down the greenroom in a perfect fury. "Never mind, ducky!" he kept on saying to me; and it was really quite unnecessary, for "ducky" was just enjoying the noise and thinking it all capital fun. "Never mind! When other people are rotting in their graves, ducky, you'll be up there!" (with a terrific gesture indicative of the dizzy heights of fame). When the message came to the greenroom that we were to take the call, he strode across the stage to the entrance, I running after him and quite unable to keep up with his long steps. In "Macbeth" I was again associated with Ryder, who was the Banquo when I was Fleance, and I remember that after we had been dismissed by Macbeth: "Good repose the while," we had to go off up a flight of steps. I always stayed at the top until the end of the scene, but Mr. Ryder used to go down the other side rather heavily, and Mr. Kean, who wanted perfect quiet for the dagger speech, had to keep on saying: "Ssh! ssh!" all through it. "Those carpenters at the side are enough to ruin any acting," he said one night when he came off. "I'm a heavy man, and I can't help it," said Ryder. "Oh, I didn't know it was _you_," said Mr. Kean--but I think he did! One night I was the innocent cause of a far worse disturbance. I dozed at the top of the steps and rolled from the top to the bottom with a fearful crash! Another night I got into trouble for not catching Mrs. Kean when, as Constance, in "King John," she sank down on to the ground. "Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it!" I was, for my sins, looking at the audience, and Mrs. Kean went down with a _run_, and was naturally very angry with me! In 1860 the Keans gave up the management of the Princess's Theater and went to America. They traveled in a sailing vessel, and, being delayed by a calm, had to drink water caught in the sails, the water supply having given out. I believe that although the receipts were wonderful, Charles Kean spent much more than he made during his ten years of management. Indeed, he confessed as much in a public announcement. The Princess's Theater was not very big, and the seats were low-priced. It is my opinion, however, that no manager with high artistic aims, resolute to carry them out in his own way, can ever make a fortune. Of the other members of the company during my three years at the Princess's, I remember best Walter Lacy, who was the William Terriss of the time. He knew Madame Vestris, and had many entertaining stories about her. Then there were the Leclercqs, two clever sisters, Carlotta and Rose, who did great things later on. Men, women and children alike worked hard, and if the language of the actors was more Rabelaisian than polite, they were good fellows and heart and soul devoted to their profession. Their salaries were smaller and their lives were simpler than is the case with actors now. Kate and I had been hard at work for some years, but our parents had no notion of our resting. We were now to show what our training had done for us in "A Drawing-room Entertainment." II ON THE ROAD 1859-1861 From July to September every year the leading theaters in London and the provincial cities were closed for the summer vacation. This plan is still adhered to more or less, but in London, at any rate, some theaters keep their doors open all the year round. During these two months most actors take their holiday, but when we were with the Keans we were not in a position to afford such a luxury. Kate and I were earning good salaries for our age,[1] but the family at home was increasing in size, and my mother was careful not to let us think that there never could be any rainy days. I am bound to say that I left questions of thrift, and what we could afford and what we couldn't entirely to my parents. I received sixpence a week pocket-money, with which I was more than content for many years. Poor we may have been at this time, but, owing to my mother's diligent care and cleverness, we always looked nice and neat. One of the few early dissipations I can remember was a Christmas party in Half Moon Street, where our white muslin dresses were equal to any present. But more love and toil and pride than money had gone to make them. I have a very clear vision of coming home late from the theater to our home in Stanhope Street, Regent's Park, and seeing my dear mother stitching at those pretty frocks by the light of one candle. It was no uncommon thing to find her sewing at that time, but if she was tired, she never showed it. She was always bright and tender. With the callousness of childhood, I scarcely realized the devotion and ceaseless care that she bestowed on us, and her untiring efforts to bring us up as beautifully as she could. The knowledge came to me later on when, all too early in my life, my own responsibilities came on me and quickened my perceptions. But I was a heartless little thing when I danced off to that party! I remember that when the great evening came, our hair, which we still wore down our backs, was done to perfection, and we really looked fit to dance with a king. As things were, I _did_ dance with the late Duke of Cambridge! It was the most exciting Christmas Day in my life. [Footnote 1: Of course, all salaries are bigger now than they were then. The "stars" in old days earned large sums--Edmund Kean received two hundred and fifty pounds for four performances--but the ordinary members of a company were paid at a very moderate rate. I received fifteen shillings a week at the Princess's until I played Puck, when my salary was doubled.--E.T.] Our summer holidays, as I have said, were spent at Ryde. We stayed at Rose Cottage (for which I sought in vain when I revisited the place the other day), and the change was pleasant, even though we were working hard. One of the pieces father gave at the theater to amuse the summer visitors was a farce called "To Parents and Guardians." I played the fat, naughty boy Waddilove, a part which had been associated with the comedian Robson in London, and I remember that I made the unsophisticated audience shout with laughter by entering with my hands covered with jam! Father was capital as the French usher Tourbillon; and the whole thing went splendidly. Looking back, it seems rather audacious for such a child to have attempted a grown-up comedian's part, but it was excellent practice for that child! It was the success of these little summer ventures at Ryde which made my father think of our touring in "A Drawing-room Entertainment" when the Keans left the Princess's. The entertainment consisted of two little plays "Home for the Holidays" and "Distant Relations," and they were written, I think, by a Mr. Courtney. We were engaged to do it first at the Royal Colosseum, Regent's Park, by Sir Charles Wyndham's father, Mr. Culverwell. Kate and I played all the parts in each piece, and we did quick changes at the side worthy of Fregoli! The whole thing was quite a success, and after playing it at the Colosseum we started on a round of visits. In "Home for the Holidays," which came first on our little programme, Kate played Letitia Melrose, a young girl of about seventeen, who is expecting her young brother "home for the holidays." Letitia, if I remember right, was discovered soliloquizing somewhat after this fashion: "Dear little Harry! Left all alone in the world, as we are, I feel such responsibility about him. Shall I find him changed, I wonder, after two years' absence? He has not answered my letters lately. I hope he got the cake and toffee I sent him, but I've not heard a word." At this point I entered as Harry, but instead of being the innocent little schoolboy of Letitia's fond imagination, Harry appears in loud peg-top trousers (peg-top trousers were very fashionable in 1860), with a big cigar in his mouth, and his hat worn jauntily on one side. His talk is all of racing, betting, and fighting. Letty is struck dumb with astonishment at first, but the awful change, which two years have effected, gradually dawns on her. She implores him to turn from his idle, foolish ways. Master Harry sinks on his knees by her side, but just as his sister is about to rejoice and kiss him, he looks up in her face and bursts into loud laughter. She is much exasperated, and, threatening to send some one to him who will talk to him in a very different fashion, she leaves the stage. Master Hopeful thereupon dons his dressing-gown and smoking cap, and, lying full length upon the sofa, begins to have a quiet smoke. He is interrupted by the appearance of a most wonderful and grim old woman in blue spectacles--Mrs. Terrorbody. This is no other than "Sister Letty," dressed up in order to frighten the youth out of his wits. She talks and talks, and, after painting vivid pictures of what will become of him unless he alters his "vile ways," leaves him, but not before she succeeds in making him shed tears, half of fright and half of anger. Later on, Sister Letty, looking from the window, sees a grand fight going on between Master Harry and a butcher-boy, and then Harry enters with his coat off, his sleeves tucked up, explaining in a state of blazing excitement that he "_had_ to fight that butcher-boy, because he had struck a little girl in the street." Letty sees that the lad has a fine nature in spite of his folly, and appeals to his heart and the nobility of his nature--this time not in vain. "Distant Relations" was far more inconsequent, but it served to show our versatility, at any rate. I was all things by turns, and nothing long! First I was the page boy who admitted the "relations" (Kate in many guises). Then I was a relation myself--Giles, a rustic. As Giles, I suddenly asked if the audience would like to hear me play the drum, and "obliged" with a drum solo, in which I had spent a great deal of time perfecting myself. Long before this I remember dimly some rehearsal when I was put in the orchestra and taken care of by "the gentleman who played the drum," and how badly I wanted to play it too! I afterwards took lessons from Mr. Woodhouse, the drummer at the Princess's. Kate gave an imitation of Mrs. Kean as Constance so beautifully that she used to bring tears to my eyes, and make the audience weep too. Both of us, even at this early age, had dreams of playing all Mrs. Kean's parts. We knew the words, not only of them, but of every female part in every play in which we had appeared at the Princess's. "Walking on is so dull," the young actress says sometimes to me now, and I ask her if she knows all the parts of the play in which she is "walking on." I hardly ever find that she does. "I have no understudy," is her excuse. Even if a young woman has not been given an understudy, she ought, if she has any intention of taking her profession as an actress seriously, to constitute herself an understudy to every part in the piece! Then she would not find her time as a "super" hang heavy on her hands. Some of my readers may be able to remember the "Stalactite Caverns" which used to form one of the attractions at the Colosseum. It was there that I first studied the words of Juliet. To me the gloomy horror of the place was a perfect godsend! Here I could cultivate a creepy, eerie sensation, and get into a fitting frame of mind for the potion scene. Down in this least imposing of subterranean abodes I used to tremble and thrill with passion and terror. Ah, if only in after years, when I played Juliet at the Lyceum, I could have thrilled an audience to the same extent! After a few weeks at the Colosseum, we began our little tour. It was a very merry, happy time. We traveled a company of five, although only two of us were acting. There were my father and mother, Kate and myself, and Mr. Sydney Naylor, who played the very important part of orchestra. With a few exceptions we made the journeys in a carriage. Once we tramped from Bristol to Exeter. Oh, those delightful journeys on the open road! I tasted the joys of the strolling player's existence, without its miseries. I saw the country for the first time.... When they asked me what I was thinking of as we drove along, I remember answering: "Only that I should like to run wild in a wood for ever!" At night we stayed in beautiful little inns which were ever so much more cheap and comfortable than the hotels of to-day. In some of the places we were asked out to tea and dinner and very much fêted. An odd little troupe we were! Father was what we will call for courtesy's sake "Stage Manager," but in reality he set the stage himself, and did the work which generally falls to the lot of the stage manager and an army of carpenters combined. My mother used to coach us up in our parts, dress us, make us go to sleep part of the day so that we might look "fresh" at night, and look after us generally. Mr. Naylor, who was not very much more than a boy, though to my childish eyes his years were quite venerable, besides discoursing eloquent music in the evenings, during the progress of the "Drawing-room Entertainment," would amuse us--me most especially--by being very entertaining himself during our journeys from place to place. How he made us laugh about--well, mostly about nothing at all. We traveled in this way for nearly two years, visiting a new place every day, and making, I think, about ten to fifteen pounds a performance. Our little pieces were very pretty, but very slight, too; and I can only suppose that the people thought that "never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it," for they received our entertainment very well. The time had come when my little brothers had to be sent to school, and our earnings came in useful. When the tour came to an end in 1861, I went to London with my father to find an engagement, while Kate joined the stock company at Bristol. We still gave the "Drawing-room Entertainment" at Ryde in the summer, and it still drew large audiences. In London my name was put on an agent's books in the usual way, and presently he sent me to Madame Albina de Rhona, who had not long taken over the management of the Royal Soho Theater and changed its name to the Royalty. The improvement did not stop at the new play. French workmen had swept and garnished the dusty, dingy place and transformed it into a theater as dainty and pretty as Madame de Rhona herself. Dancing was Madame's strong point, but she had been very successful as an actress too, first in Paris and Petersburg, and then in London at the St. James's and Drury Lane. What made her go into management on her own account I don't know. I suppose she was ambitious, and rich enough for the enterprise. At this time I was "in standing water," as Malvolio says of Viola when she is dressed as a boy. I was neither child nor woman--a long-legged girl of about thirteen, still in short skirts, and feeling that I ought to have long ones. However, when I set out with father to see Madam de Rhona, I was very smart. I borrowed Kate's new bonnet--pink silk trimmed with black lace--and thought I looked nice in it. So did father, for he said on the way to the theater that pink was my color. In fact, I am sure it was the bonnet that made Madame de Rhona engage me on the spot! She was the first Frenchwoman I had ever met, and I was tremendously interested in her. Her neat and expressive ways made me feel very "small," or rather _big_ and clumsy, even at the first interview. A quick-tempered, bright, energetic little woman, she nearly frightened me out of my wits at the first rehearsal by dancing round me on the stage in a perfect frenzy of anger at what she was pleased to call my stupidity. Then something I did suddenly pleased her, and she overwhelmed me with compliments and praise. After a time these became the order of the day, and she soon won my youthful affections. "Gross flattery," as a friend of mine says, "is good enough for me!" Madame de Rhona was, moreover, very kind-hearted and generous. To her generosity I owed the first piece of jewelery I ever possessed--a pretty little brooch, which, with characteristic carelessness, I promptly lost! Besides being flattered by her praise and grateful for her kindness, I was filled with great admiration for her. She was a wee thing--like a toy, and her dancing was really exquisite. When I watched the way she moved her hands and feet, despair entered my soul. It was all so precise, so "express and admirable." Her limbs were so dainty and graceful--mine so big and unmanageable! "How long and gaunt I am," I used to say to myself, "and what a pattern of prim prettiness she is!" I was so much ashamed of my large hands, during this time at the Royalty, that I kept them tucked up under my arms! This subjected me to unmerciful criticism from Madame Albina at rehearsals. "Take down your hands," she would call out. "_Mon Dieu!_ It is like an ugly young _poulet_ going to roost!" In spite of this, I did not lose my elegant habit for many years! I was only broken of it at last by a friend saying that he supposed I had very ugly hands, as I never showed them! That did it! Out came the hands to prove that they were not so _very_ ugly, after all! Vanity often succeeds where remonstrance fails. The greenroom at the Royalty was a very pretty little place, and Madame Albina sometimes had supper-parties there after the play. One night I could not resist the pangs of curiosity, and I peeped through the keyhole to see what was going on! I chose a lucky moment! One of Madame's admirers was drinking champagne out of her slipper! It was even worth the box on the ear that mother gave me when she caught me. She had been looking all over the theater for me, to take me home. My first part at the Royalty was Clementine in "Attar Gull." Of the play, adapted from a story by Eugene Sue, I have a very hazy recollection, but I know that I had one very effective scene in it. Clementine, an ordinary fair-haired ingenue in white muslin, has a great horror of snakes, and, in order to cure her of her disgust, some one suggests that a dead snake should be put in her room, and she be taught how harmless the thing is for which she had such an aversion. An Indian servant, who, for some reason or other, has a deadly hatred for the whole family, substitutes a live reptile. Clementine appears at the window with the venomous creature coiled round her neck, screaming with wild terror. The spectators on the stage think that the snake is dead, and that she is only screaming from "nerves," but in reality she is being slowly strangled. I began screaming in a frantic, heartrending manner, and continued screaming, each cry surpassing the last in intensity and agony. At rehearsal I could not get these screams right for a long time. Madame de Rhona grew more and more impatient and at last flew at me like a wild-cat and shook me. I cried, just as I had done when I could not get Prince Arthur's terror right, and then the wild, agonized scream that Madame de Rhona wanted came to me. I _reproduced_ it and enlarged it in effect. On the first night the audience applauded the screaming more than anything in the play. Madame de Rhona assured me that I had made a sensation, kissed me and said I was a genius! How sweet and pleasant her flattering words sounded in my young and inexperienced ears I need hardly say. Looking back to it now, I know perfectly well why I, a mere child of thirteen, was able to give such a realistic display of horror. I had the emotional instinct to start with, no doubt, but if I did it well, it was because I was able to imagine what would be _real_ in such a situation. I had never _observed_ such horror, but I had previously _realized_ it, when, as Arthur, I had imagined the terror of having my eyes put out. Imagination! imagination! I put it first years ago, when I was asked what qualities I thought necessary for success upon the stage. And I am still of the same opinion. Imagination, industry, and intelligence--"the three I's"--are all indispensable to the actress, but of these three the greatest is, without any doubt, imagination. After this "screaming" success, which, however, did not keep "Attar Gull" in the bill at the Royalty for more than a few nights, I continued to play under Madame de Rhona's management until February 1862. During these few months new plays were being constantly put on, for Madame was somehow not very fortunate in gauging the taste of the public. It was in the fourth production--"The Governor's Wife," that, as Letty Briggs, I had my first experience of what is called "stage fright." I had been on the stage more than five years, and had played at least sixteen parts, so there was really no excuse for me. I suspect now that I had not taken enough pains to get word-perfect. I know I had five new parts to study between November 21 and December 26. Stage fright is like nothing else in the world. You are standing on the stage apparently quite well and in your right mind, when suddenly you feel as if your tongue had been dislocated and was lying powerless in your mouth. Cold shivers begin to creep downwards from the nape of your neck and all up you at the same time, until they seem to meet in the small of your back. About this time you feel as if a centipede, all of whose feet have been carefully iced, has begun to run about in the roots of your hair. The next agreeable sensation is the breaking out of a cold sweat all over. Then you are certain that some one has cut the muscles at the back of your knees. Your mouth begins to open slowly, without giving utterance to a single sound, and your eyes seem inclined to jump out of your head over the footlights. At this point it is as well to get off the stage as quickly as you can, for you are far beyond human help. Whether everybody suffers in this way or not I cannot say, but it exactly describes the torture I went through in "The Governor's Wife." I had just enough strength and sense to drag myself off the stage and seize a book, with which, after a few minutes, I reappeared and ignominiously read my part. Whether Madame de Rhona boxed my ears or not, I can't remember, but I think it is very likely she did, for she was very quick-tempered. In later years I have not suffered from the fearsome malady, but even now, after fifty years of stage-life, I never play a new part without being overcome by a terrible nervousness and a torturing dread of forgetting my lines. Every nerve in my body seems to be dancing an independent jig on its own account. It was at the Royalty that I first acted with Mr. Kendal. He and I played together in a comedietta called "A Nice Quiet Day." Soon after, my engagement came to an end, and I went to Bristol, where I gained the experience of my life with a stock company. LIFE IN A STOCK COMPANY 1862-1863 "I think anything, naturally written, ought to be in everybody's way that pretends to be an actor." This remark of Colley Cibber's long ago struck me as an excellent motto for beginning on the stage. The ambitious boy thinks of Hamlet, the ambitious girl of Lady Macbeth or Rosalind, but where shall we find the young actor and actress whose heart is set on being useful? _Usefulness!_ It is not a fascinating word, and the quality is not one of which the aspiring spirit can dream o' nights, yet on the stage it is the first thing to aim at. Not until we have learned to be useful can we afford to do what we like. The tragedian will always be a limited tragedian if he has not learned how to laugh. The comedian who cannot weep will never touch the highest levels of mirth. It was in the stock companies that we learned the great lesson of usefulness; we played everything--tragedy, comedy, farce, and burlesque. There was no question of parts "suiting" us; we had to take what we were given. The first time I was cast for a part in a burlesque I told the stage manager I couldn't sing and I couldn't dance. His reply was short and to the point. "You've got to do it," and so I did it in a way--a very funny way at first, no doubt. It was admirable training, for it took all the self-consciousness out of me to start with. To end with, I thought it capital fun, and enjoyed burlesque as much as Shakespeare. What was a stock company? I forget that in these days the question may be asked in all good faith, and that it is necessary to answer it. Well, then, a stock company was a company of actors and actresses brought together by the manager of a provincial theater to support a leading actor or actress--"a star"--from London. When Edmund Kean, the Kembles, Macready, or Mrs. Siddons visited provincial towns, these companies were ready to support them in Shakespeare. They were also ready to play burlesque, farce, and comedy to fill out the bill. Sometimes the "stars" would come for a whole season; if their magnitude were of the first order, for only one night. Sometimes they would rehearse with the stock company, sometimes they wouldn't. There is a story of a manager visiting Edmund Kean at his hotel on his arrival in a small provincial town, and asking the great actor when he would rehearse. "Rehearse! I'm not going to rehearse--I'm going to sleep!" "Have you any instructions?" "Instructions! No! Tell 'em to keep at a long arm's length away from me and do their d----d worst!" At Bristol, where I joined Mr. J.H. Chute's stock company in 1861, we had no experience of that kind, perhaps because there was no Kean alive to give it to us. And I don't think that our "worst" would have been so very bad. Mr. Chute, who had married Macready's half-sister, was a splendid manager, and he contrived to gather round him a company which was something more than "sound." Several of its members distinguished themselves greatly in after years. Among these I may mention Miss Marie Wilton (now Lady Bancroft) and Miss Madge Robertson (now Mrs. Kendal). Lady Bancroft had left the company before I joined it, but Mrs. Kendal was there, and so was Miss Henrietta Hodson (afterwards Mrs. Labouchere). I was much struck at that time by Mrs. Kendal's singing. Her voice was beautiful. As an example of how anything can be twisted to make mischief, I may quote here an absurd tarradiddle about Mrs. Kendal never forgetting in after years that in the Bristol stock company she had to play the singing fairy to my Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The simple fact, of course, was that she had the best voice in the company, and was of such infinite value in singing parts that no manager in his senses would have taken her out of them. There was no question of my taking precedence of her, or of her playing second fiddle to me. Miss Hodson was a brilliant burlesque actress, a good singer, and a capital dancer. She had great personal charm, too, and was an enormous favorite with the Bristol public. I cannot exactly call her a "rival" of my sister Kate's, for Kate was the "principal lady" or "star," and Henrietta Hodson the "soubrette," and, in burlesque, the "principal boy." Nevertheless, there were certainly rival factions of admirers, and the friendly antagonism between the Hodsonites and the Terryites used to amuse us all greatly. We were petted, spoiled, and applauded to our heart's content, but I don't think it did us any harm. We all had scores of admirers, but their youthful ardor seemed to be satisfied by tracking us when we went to rehearsal in the morning and waiting for us outside the stage-door at night. When Kate and I had a "benefit" night, they had an opportunity of coming to rather closer quarters, for on these occasions tickets could be bought from members of the company, as well as at the box-office of the theater. Our lodgings in Queen Square were besieged by Bristol youths who were anxious to get a glimpse of the Terrys. The Terrys demurely chatted with them and sold them tickets. My mother was most vigilant in her rôle of duenna, and from the time I first went on the stage until I was a grown woman I can never remember going home unaccompanied by either her or my father. The leading male members of Mr. Chute's stock company were Arthur Wood (an admirable comedian), William George Rignold, W.H. Vernon, and Charles Coghlan. At this time Charles Coghlan was acting magnificently, and dressing each of his characters so correctly and so perfectly that most of the audience did not understand it. For instance, as Glavis, in "The Lady of Lyons," he looked a picture of the Directoire fop. He did not compromise in any single detail, but wore the long straggling hair, the high cravat, the eye-glass, bows, jags, and tags, to the infinite amusement of some members of the audience, who could not imagine what his quaint dress meant. Coghlan's clothes were not more perfect than his manner, but both were a little in advance of the appreciation of Bristol playgoers in the 'sixties. At the Princess's Theater I had gained my experience of long rehearsals. When I arrived in Bristol I was to learn the value of short ones. Mr. Chute took me in hand, and I had to wake up and be alert with brains and body. The first part I played was Cupid in "Endymion." To this day I can remember my lines. I entered as a blind old woman in what is known in theatrical parlance as a "disguise cloak." Then, throwing it off, I said: "Pity the poor blind--what no one here? Nay then, I'm not so blind as I appear, And so to throw off all disguise and sham, Let me at once inform you who I am! I'm Cupid!" Henrietta Hodson as Endymion and Kate as Diana had a dance with me which used to bring down the house. I wore a short tunic which in those days was considered too scanty to be quite nice, and carried the conventional bow and quiver. In another burlesque, "Perseus and Andromeda," I played Dictys; it was in this piece that Arthur Wood used to make people laugh by punning on the line: "Such a mystery (Miss Terry) here!" It was an absurd little joke, but the people used to cheer and applaud. At the end of my first season at Bristol I returned to London for a time to play at the Haymarket under Mr. Buckstone, but I had another season at Bristol in the following year. While my stage education was progressing apace, I was, through the influence of a very wonderful family whose acquaintance we made, having my eyes opened to beautiful things in art and literature. Mr. Godwin, the architect and archaeologist, was living in Bristol when Kate and I were at the Theater Royal, and we used to go to his house for some of the Shakespeare readings in which our Bristol friends asked us to take part. This house, with its Persian rugs, beautiful furniture, its organ, which for the first time I learned to love, its sense of design in every detail, was a revelation to me, and the talk of its master and mistress made me _think_. At the theater I was living in an atmosphere which was developing my powers as an actress and teaching me what work meant, but my mind had begun to grasp dimly and almost unconsciously that I must do something for myself--something that all the education and training I was receiving in my profession could not do for me. I was fourteen years old at Bristol, but I now felt that I had never really lived at all before. For the first time I began to appreciate beauty, to observe, to feel the splendor of things, to _aspire_! I remember that in one of the local papers there had appeared under the headline "Jottings" some very wonderful criticisms of the performances at the theater. The writer, whoever he was, did not indulge in flattery, and in particular he attacked our classical burlesques on the ground that they were ugly. They were discussing "Jottings" one day at the Godwins' house, and Kate said it was absurd to take a burlesque so seriously. "Jottings" was all wrong. "I don't know," said our host. "Even a burlesque can be beautiful." Afterwards he asked me what I thought of "Jottings," and I confessed that there seemed to me a good deal of truth in what had been said. I had cut out all that he had written about us, read it several times, and thought it all very clever, most amusing--and generally right. Later on I found that Mr. Godwin and "Jottings" were one and the same! At the Godwins' I met Mr. Barclay, Mr. Hine, William Burges the architect, and many other people who made an impression on my young mind. I accepted their lessons eagerly, and found them of the greatest value later on. In March 1863 Mr. Chute opened the Theater Royal, Bath, when, besides a specially written play symbolic of the event, his stock company performed "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Titania was the first Shakespeare part I had played since I left Charles Kean, but I think even in those early days I was more at home in Shakespeare than anything else. Mr. Godwin designed my dress, and we made it at his house in Bristol. He showed me how to damp it and "wring" it while it was wet, tying up the material as the Orientals do in their "tie and dry" process, so that when it was dry and untied, it was all crinkled and clinging. This was the first lovely dress that I ever wore, and I learned a great deal from it. Almost directly after that appearance at Bath I went to London to fulfill an engagement at the Haymarket Theater, of which Mr. Buckstone was still the manager and Sothern the great attraction. I had played Gertrude Howard in "The Little Treasure" during the stock season at Bristol, and when Mr. Buckstone wanted to do the piece at the Haymarket, he was told about me. I was fifteen at this time, and my sense of humor was as yet ill-developed. I was fond of "larking" and merry enough, but I hated being laughed _at_! At any rate, I could see no humor in Mr. Sothern's jokes at my expense. He played my lover in "The Little Treasure," and he was always teasing me--pulling my hair, making me forget my part and look like an idiot. But for dear old Mr. Howe, who was my "father" in the same piece, I should not have enjoyed acting in it at all, but he made amends for everything. We had a scene together in which he used to cry, and I used to cry--oh, it was lovely! Why I should never have liked Sothern, with his wonderful hands and blue eyes, Sothern, whom every one found so fascinating and delightful, I cannot say, and I record it as discreditable to me, not to him. It was just a case of "I do not like thee, Dr. Fell." I admired him--I could not help doing that--but I dreaded his jokes, and thought some of them very cruel. Another thing I thought cruel at this time was the scandal which was talked in the theater. A change for the better has taken place in this respect--at any rate, in conduct. People behave better now, and in our profession, carried on as it is in the public eye, behavior is everything. At the Haymarket there were simply no bounds to what was said in the greenroom. One night I remember gathering up my skirts (we were, I think, playing "The Rivals" at the time), making a curtsey, as Mr. Chippendale, one of the best actors in old comedy I ever knew, had taught me, and sweeping out of the room with the famous line from another Sheridan play: "Ladies and gentlemen, I leave my character behind me!" I see now that this was very priggish of me, but I am quite as uncompromising in my hatred of scandal now as I was then. Quite recently I had a line to say in "Captain Brassbound's Conversion," which is a very helpful reply to any tale-bearing. "As if any one ever knew the whole truth about anything!" That is just the point. It is only the whole truth which is informing and fair in the long run, and the whole truth is never known. I regard my engagement at the Haymarket as one of my lost opportunities, which in after years I would have given much to have over again. I might have learned so much more than I did. I was preoccupied by events outside the theater. Tom Taylor, who had for some time been a good friend to both Kate and me, had introduced us to Mr. Watts, the great painter, and to me the stage seemed a poor place when compared with the wonderful studio where Kate and I were painted as "The Sisters." At the Taylors' house, too, the friends, the arts, the refinements had an enormous influence on me, and for a time the theater became almost distasteful. Never at any time in my life have I been ambitious, but at the Haymarket I was not even passionately anxious to do my best with every part that came in my way--a quality which with me has been a good substitute for ambition. I was just dreaming of and aspiring after another world, a world full of pictures and music and gentle, artistic people with quiet voices and elegant manners. The reality of such a world was Little Holland House, the home of Mr. Watts. So I confess quite frankly that I did not appreciate until it was too late, my advantages in serving at the Haymarket with comrades who were the most surpassingly fine actors and actresses in old comedy that I have ever known. There were Mr. Buckstone, the Chippendales, Mr. Compton, Mr. Farren. They one and all thoroughly understood Sheridan. Their bows, their curtseys, their grand manner, the indefinable _style_ which they brought to their task were something to see. We shall never know their like again, and the smoothest old-comedy acting of this age seems rough in comparison. Of course, we suffer more with every fresh decade that separates us from Sheridan. As he gets farther and farther away, the traditions of the performances which he conducted become paler and paler. Mr. Chippendale knew these traditions backwards. He might even have known Sheridan himself. Charles Reade's mother did know him, and sat on the stage with him while he rehearsed "The School for Scandal" with Mrs. Abingdon, the original Lady Teazle in the part. Mrs. Abingdon, according to Charles Reade, who told the story, had just delivered the line, "How dare you abuse my relations?" when Sheridan stopped the rehearsal. "No, no, that won't do at all! It mustn't be _pettish_. That's shallow--shallow. You must go up stage with, 'You are just what my cousin Sophy said you would be,' and then turn and sweep down on him like a volcano. 'You are a great bear to abuse my relations! How _dare_ you abuse my relations!'" I want to refrain, in telling the story of my life, from praising the past at the expense of the present. It is at best the act of a fogey and always an easy thing to do, as there are so few people who can contradict one. Yet even the fear of joining hands with the people who like every country but their own, and every age except that in which they live, shall not deter me from saying that although I have seen many improvements in actors and acting since I was at the Haymarket, I have never seen artificial comedy acted as it was acted there. Not that I was much good at it myself. I played Julia in "The Rivals" very ill; it was too difficult and subtle for me--ungrateful into the bargain--and I even made a blunder in bringing down the curtain on the first night. It fell to my lot to finish the play--in players' language, to speak the "tag." Now, it has been a superstition among actors for centuries that it is unlucky to speak the "tag" in full at rehearsal. So during the rehearsals of "The Rivals," I followed precedent and did not say the last two or three words of my part and of the play, but just "mum, mum, mum!" When the first night came, instead of dropping my voice with the last word in the conventional and proper manner, I ended with an upward inflection, which was right for the sense, but wrong for the curtain. This unexpected innovation produced utter consternation all round me. The prompter was so much astounded that he thought there was something more coming and did not give the "pull" for the curtain to come down. There was a horrid pause while it remained up, and then Mr. Buckstone, the Bob Acres of the cast, who was very deaf and had not heard the upward inflection, exclaimed loudly and irritably: "Eh! eh! What does this mean? Why the devil don't you bring down the curtain?" And he went on cursing until it did come down. This experience made me think more than ever of the advice of an old actor: "Never leave your stage effects to _chance_, my child, but _rehearse_, and find out all about it!" How I wished I had rehearsed that "tag" and taken the risk of being unlucky! For the credit of my intelligence I should add that the mistake was a technical one, not a stupid one. The line was a question. It _demanded_ an upward inflection; but no play can end like that. It was not all old comedy at the Haymarket. "Much Ado About Nothing" was put on during my engagement, and I played Hero to Miss Louisa Angell's Beatrice. Miss Angell was a very modern Beatrice, but I, though I say it "as shouldn't," played Hero beautifully! I remember wondering if I should ever play Beatrice. I just _wondered_, that was all. It was the same when Miss Angell played Letitia Hardy in "The Belle's Stratagem," and I was Lady Touchwood. I just wondered! I never felt jealous of other people having bigger parts; I never looked forward consciously to a day when I should have them myself. There was no virtue in it. It was just because I wasn't ambitious. Louise Keeley, a pretty little woman and clever, took my fancy more than any one else in the company. She was always merry and kind, and I admired her dainty, vivacious acting. In a burlesque called "Buckstone at Home" (in which I played Britannia and came up a trap in a huge pearl, which opened and disclosed me) Miss Keeley was delightful. One evening the Prince and Princess of Wales (now our King and Queen) came to see "Buckstone at Home." I believe it was the very first time they had appeared at a theater since their marriage. They sat far back in the royal box, the ladies and gentlemen of their suite occupying the front seats. Miss Keeley, dressed as a youth, had a song in which she brought forward by the hand some well-known characters in fairy tales and nursery rhymes--Cinderella, Little Boy Blue, Jack and Jill, and so on, and introduced them to the audience in a topical verse. One verse ran: "Here's the Prince of Happyland, Once he dwelt at the Lyceum; Here's another Prince at hand, But being _invisible_, you can't see him!" Probably the Prince of Wales must have wished the singer at--well, not at the Haymarket Theater; but the next minute he must have been touched by the loyal greeting that he received. When the audience grasped the situation, every one--stalls, boxes, circle, pit, gallery--stood up and cheered and cheered again. Never was there a more extraordinary scene in a playhouse--such excitement, such enthusiasm! The action of the play came to a full stop, but not the cheers. They grew louder and louder, until the Prince came forward and bowed his acknowledgments. I doubt if any royal personage has ever been so popular in England as he was. Of course he is popular as King too, but as Prince of Wales he came nearer the people. They had more opportunities of seeing him, and they appreciated his untiring efforts to make up by his many public appearances for the seclusion in which the Queen lived. 1864 In the middle of the run of "The American Cousin" I left the stage and married. Mary Meredith was the part, and I played it vilely. I was not quite sixteen years old, too young to be married even in those days, when every one married early. But I was delighted, and my parents were delighted, although the disparity of age between my husband and me was very great. It all seems now like a dream--not a clear dream, but a fitful one which in the morning one tries in vain to tell. And even if I could tell it, I would not. I was happy, because my face was the type which the great artist who had married me loved to paint. I remember sitting to him in armor for hours and never realizing that it was heavy until I fainted! The day of my wedding it was very cold. Like most women, I always remember what I was wearing on the important occasions of my life. On that day I wore a brown silk gown which had been designed by Holman Hunt, and a quilted white bonnet with a sprig of orange-blossom, and I was wrapped in a beautiful Indian shawl. I "went away" in a sealskin jacket with coral buttons, and a little sealskin cap. I cried a great deal, and Mr. Watts said, "Don't cry. It makes your nose swell." The day I left home to be married, I "tubbed" all my little brothers and sisters and washed their fair hair. Little Holland House, where Mr. Watts lived, seemed to me a paradise, where only beautiful things were allowed to come. All the women were graceful, and all the men were gifted. The trio of sisters--Mrs. Prinsep--(mother of the painter), Lady Somers, and Mrs. Cameron, who was the pioneer in artistic photography as we know it to-day--were known as Beauty, Dash, and Talent. There were two more beautiful sisters, Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Dalrymple. Gladstone, Disraeli and Browning were among Mr. Watts' visitors. At Freshwater, where I went soon after my marriage, I first saw Tennyson. As I write down these great names I feel almost guilty of an imposture! Such names are bound to raise high anticipations, and my recollections of the men to whom some of the names belong are so very humble. I sat, shrinking and timid, in a corner--the girl-wife of a famous painter. I was, if I was anything at all, more of a curiosity, of a side-show, than hostess to these distinguished visitors. Mr. Gladstone seemed to me like a suppressed volcano. His face was pale and calm, but the calm was the calm of the gray crust of Etna. To look into the piercing dark eyes was like having a glimpse into the red-hot crater beneath. Years later, when I met him again at the Lyceum and became better acquainted with him, this impression of a volcano at rest again struck me. Of Disraeli I carried away even a scantier impression. I remember that he wore a blue tie, a brighter blue tie than most men would dare to wear, and that his straggling curls shook as he walked. He looked the great Jew before everything. But "there is the noble Jew," as George Meredith writes somewhere, "as well as the bestial Gentile." When I first saw Henry Irving made up as Shylock, my thoughts flew back to the garden-party at Little Holland House, and Disraeli. I know I must have admired him greatly, for the only other time I ever saw him he was walking in Piccadilly, and I crossed the road, just to get a good look at him. I even went the length of bumping into him on purpose. It was a _very little_ bump! My elbow just touched his, and I trembled. He took off his hat, muttered, "I beg your pardon," and passed on, not recognizing me, of course; but I had had my look into his eyes. They were very quiet eyes, and didn't open wide. I love Disraeli's novels--like his tie, brighter in color than any one else's. It was "Venetia" which first made me see the real Lord Byron, the real Lady Byron, too. In "Tancred" I recall a description of a family of strolling players which seems to me more like the real thing than anything else of the kind in fiction. It is strange that Dizzy's novels should be neglected. Can any one with a pictorial sense fail to be delighted by their pageantry? Disraeli was a heaven-born artist, who, like so many of his race, on the stage, in music, and elsewhere, seems to have had an unerring instinct for the things which the Gentile only acquires by labor and training. The world he shows us in his novels is big and swelling, but only to a hasty judgment is it hollow. Tennyson was more to me than a magic-lantern shape, flitting across the blank of my young experience, never to return. The first time I saw him he was sitting at the table in his library, and Mrs. Tennyson, her very slender hands hidden by thick gloves, was standing on a step-ladder handing him down some heavy books. She was very frail, and looked like a faint tea-rose. After that one time I only remember her lying on a sofa. In the evenings I went walking with Tennyson over the fields, and he would point out to me the differences in the flight of different birds, and tell me to watch their solid phalanxes turning against the sunset, the compact wedge suddenly narrowing sharply into a thin line. He taught me to recognize the barks of trees and to call wild flowers by their names. He picked me the first bit of pimpernel I ever noticed. Always I was quite at ease with him. He was so wonderfully simple. A hat that I wore at Freshwater suddenly comes to my remembrance. It was a brown straw mushroom with a dull red feather round it. It was tied under my chin, and I still had my hair down. It was easy enough to me to believe that Tennyson was a poet. He showed it in everything, although he was entirely free from any assumption of the poetical rôle. That Browning, with his carefully brushed hat, smart coat, and fine society manners was a poet, always seemed to me far more incomprehensible than his poetry, which I think most people would have taken straightforwardly and read with a fair amount of ease, if certain enthusiasts had not founded societies for making his crooked places plain, and (to me) his plain places very crooked. These societies have terrorized the ordinary reader into leaving Browning alone. The same thing has been tried with Shakespeare, but fortunately the experiment in this case has proved less successful. Coroners' inquests by learned societies can't make Shakespeare a dead man. At the time of my first marriage, when I met these great men, I had never had the advantage--I assume that it _is_ an advantage!--of a single day's schooling in a _real school_. What I have learned outside my own profession I have learned from my environment. Perhaps it is this which makes me think environment more valuable than a set education, and a stronger agent in forming character even than heredity. I should have written the _externals_ of character, for primal, inner feelings are, I suppose, always inherited. Still, my want of education may be partly responsible for the unsatisfactory blankness of my early impressions. As it takes two to make a good talker, so it takes two to make a good hero--in print, at any rate. I was meeting distinguished people at every turn, and taking no notice of them. At Freshwater I was still so young that I preferred playing Indians and Knights of the Round Table with Tennyson's sons, Hallam and Lionel, and the young Camerons, to sitting indoors noticing what the poet did and said. I was mighty proud when I learned how to prepare his daily pipe for him. It was a long churchwarden, and he liked the stem to be steeped in a solution of sal volatile, or something of that kind, so that it did not stick to his lips. But he and all the others seemed to me very old. There were my young knights waiting for me; and jumping gates, climbing trees, and running paper-chases are pleasant when one is young. It was not to inattentive ears that Tennyson read his poems. His reading was most impressive, but I think he read Browning's "Ride from Ghent to Aix" better than anything of his own, except, perhaps, "The Northern Farmer." He used to preserve the monotonous rhythm of the galloping horses in Browning's poem, and made the words come out sharply like hoofs upon a road. It was a little comic until one got used to it, but that fault lay in the ear of the hearer. It was the right way and the fine way to read this particular poem, and I have never forgotten it. In after years I met Tennyson again, when with Henry Irving I acted in two of his plays at the Lyceum. When I come to those plays, I shall have more to say of him. Gladstone, too, came into my later life. Browning I saw once or twice at dinner-parties, but knew him no better than in this early period, when I was Nelly Watts, and heedless of the greatness of great men. "To meet an angel and not to be afraid is to be impudent." I don't like to confess to it, but I think I must have been, according to this definition, _very_ impudent! One charming domestic arrangement at Freshwater was the serving of the dessert in a separate room from the rest of the dinner. And such a dessert it always was!--fruit piled high on great dishes in Veronese fashion, not the few nuts and an orange of some English households. It must have been some years after the Freshwater days, yet before the production of "The Cup," that I saw Tennyson in his carriage outside a jeweler's shop in Bond Street. "How very nice you look in the daytime," he said. "Not like an actress!" I disclaimed my singularity, and said I thought actresses looked _very_ nice in the daytime. To him and to the others my early romance was always the most interesting thing about me. When I saw them in later times, it seemed as if months, not years, had passed since I was Nelly Watts. Once, at the dictates of a conscience perhaps over fastidious, I made a bonfire of my letters. But a few were saved from the burning, more by accident than design. Among them I found yesterday a kind little note from Sir William Vernon Harcourt, which shows me that I must have known him, too, at the time of my first marriage and met him later on when I returned to the stage. "You cannot tell how much pleased I am to hear that you have been as happy as you deserve to be. The longer one lives, the more one learns not to despair, and to believe that nothing is impossible to those who have courage and hope and youth--I was going to add beauty and genius." (_This is the sort of thing that made me blush--and burn my letters before they shamed me!_) "My little boy is still the charm and consolation of my life. He is now twelve years old, and though I say it that should not, is a perfect child, and wins the hearts of all who know him." That little boy, now in His Majesty's Government, is known as the Right Honorable Lewis Harcourt. He married an American lady, Miss Burns of New York. Many inaccurate stories have been told of my brief married life, and I have never contradicted them--they were so manifestly absurd. Those who can imagine the surroundings into which I, a raw girl, undeveloped in all except my training as an actress, was thrown, can imagine the situation. Of one thing I am certain. While I was with Signor--the name by which Mr. Watts was known among his friends--I never had one single pang of regret for the theater. This may do me no credit, but it is _true_. I wondered at the new life, and worshiped it because of its beauty. When it suddenly came to an end, I was thunderstruck; and refused at first to consent to the separation, which was arranged for me in much the same way as my marriage had been. The whole thing was managed by those kind friends whose chief business in life seems to be the care of others. I don't blame them. There are cases where no one is to blame. "There do exist such things as honest misunderstandings," as Charles Reade was always impressing on me at a later time. There were no vulgar accusations on either side, and the words I read in the deed of separation, "incompatibility of temper"--a mere legal phrase--_more_ than covered the ground. Truer still would have been "incompatibility of _occupation_," and the interference of well-meaning friends. We all suffer from that sort of thing. Pray God one be not a well-meaning friend one's self! "The marriage was not a happy one," they will probably say after my death, and I forestall them by saying that it in many ways was very happy indeed. What bitterness there was effaced itself in a very remarkable way. I saw Mr. Watts but once face to face after the separation. We met in the street at Brighton, and he told me that I had grown! I was never to speak to him again. But years later, after I had appeared at the Lyceum and had made some success in the world, I was in the garden of a house which adjoined Mr. Watt's new Little Holland House, and he, in his garden, saw me through the hedge. It was then that I received from him the first letter that I had had for years. In this letter he told me that he had watched my success with eager interest, and asked me to shake hands with him in spirit. "What success I may have," he wrote, "will be very incomplete and unsatisfactory if you cannot do what I have long been hesitating to ask. If you cannot, keep silence. If you can, one word, 'Yes,' will be enough." I answered simply, "Yes." After that he wrote to me again, and for two or three years we corresponded, but I never came into personal contact with him. As the past is now to me like a story in a book that I once read, I can speak of it easily. But if by doing so I thought that I might give pain or embarrassment to any one else, I should be silent about this long-forgotten time. After careful consideration it does not seem to me that it can be either indiscreet or injurious to let it be known that this great artist honored and appreciated my efforts and strife in my art; that this great man could not rid himself of the pain of feeling that he "had spoiled my life" (a chivalrous assumption of blame for what was, I think, a natural, almost inevitable, catastrophe), and that long after all personal relation had been broken off, he wrote to me gently, kindly,--as sympathetically ignoring the strangeness of the position, as if, to use his own expression, "we stood face to face on the brink of an universal grave." When this tender kindness was established between us, he sent me a portrait-head that he had done of me when I was his wife. I think it a very beautiful picture. He did not touch it except to mend the edges, thinking it better not to try to improve it by the work of another time. In one of these letters he writes that "there is nothing in all this that the world might not know." Surely the world is always the better for having a little truth instead of a great deal of idle inaccuracy and falsehood. That is my justification for publishing this, if justification be needed. If I did not fulfill his too high prophecy that "in addition to your artistic eminence, I feel that you will achieve a solid social position, make yourself a great woman, and take a noble place in the history of your time," I was the better for his having made it. If I had been able to look into the future, I should have been less rebellious at the termination of my first marriage. Was I so rebellious, after all? I am afraid I _showed_ about as much rebellion as a sheep. But I was miserable, indignant, unable to understand that there could be any justice in what had happened. In a little more than two years I returned to the stage. I was practically _driven_ back by those who meant to be kind--Tom Taylor, my father and mother, and others. _They_ looked ahead and saw clearly it was for my good. It _was_ a good thing, but at the time I hated it. And I hated going back to live at home. Mother furnished a room for me, and I thought the furniture hideous. Poor mother! For years Beethoven always reminded me of mending stockings, because I used to struggle with the large holes in my brothers' stockings upstairs in that ugly room, while downstairs Kate played the "Moonlight Sonata." I caught up the stitches in time to the notes! This was the period when, though every one was kind, I hated my life, hated every one and everything in the world more than at any time before or since. III ROSSETTI, BERNHARDT, IRVING 1865-1867 Most people know that Tom Taylor was one of the leading playwrights of the 'sixties as well as the dramatic critic of _The Times_, editor of _Punch_, and a distinguished Civil Servant, but to us he was more than this--he was an institution! I simply cannot remember when I did not know him. It is the Tom Taylors of the world who give children on the stage their splendid education. We never had any education in the strict sense of the word, yet, through the Taylors and others, we _were_ educated. Their house in Lavender Sweep was lovely. I can hardly bear to go near that part of London now, it is so horribly changed. Where are its green fields and its chestnut-trees? We were always welcome at the Taylors', and every Sunday we heard music and met interesting people--Charles Reade among them. Mrs. Taylor had rather a hard outside--she was like Mrs. Charles Kean in that respect--and I was often frightened out of my life by her; yet I adored her. She was in reality the most tender-hearted, sympathetic woman, and what an admirable musician! She composed nearly all the music for her husband's plays. Every Sunday there was music at Lavender Sweep--quartet playing with Madame Schumann at the piano. Tom Taylor was one of the most benign and gentle of men, a good and a loyal friend. At first he was more interested in my sister Kate's career than in mine, as was only natural; for, up to the time of my first marriage, Kate had a present, I only a future. Before we went to Bristol and played with the stock company, she had made her name. At the St. James's Theater, in 1862, she was playing a small part in a version of Sardou's "Nos Intimes," known then as "Friends and Foes," and in a later day and in another version as "Peril." Miss Herbert--the beautiful Miss Herbert, as she was appropriately called--had the chief part in the play (Mrs. Union), and Kate, although not the understudy, was called upon to play it at a few hours' notice. She had from childhood acquired a habit of studying every part in every play in which she was concerned, so she was as ready as though she had been the understudy. Miss Herbert was not a remarkable actress, but her appearance was wonderful indeed. She was very tall, with pale gold hair and the spiritual, ethereal look which the aesthetic movement loved. When mother wanted to flatter me very highly, she said that I looked like Miss Herbert! Rossetti founded many of his pictures on her, and she and Mrs. "Janie" Morris were his favorite types. When any one was the object of Rossetti's devotion, there was no extravagant length to which he would not go in demonstrating it. He bought a white bull because it had "eyes like Janie Morris," and tethered it on the lawn of his home in Chelsea. Soon there was no lawn left--only the bull! He invited people to meet it, and heaped favors on it until it kicked everything to pieces, when he reluctantly got rid of it. His next purchase was a white peacock, which, very soon after its arrival, disappeared under the sofa. In vain did Rossetti "shoo" it out. It refused to budge. This went on for days. "The lovely creature won't respond to me," said Rossetti pathetically to a friend. The friend dragged out the bird. "No wonder! It's _dead_!" "Bulls don't like me," said Rossetti a few days later, "and peacocks aren't homely." It preyed on his mind so much that he tried to repair the failure by buying some white dormice. He sat them up on tiny bamboo chairs, and they looked sweet. When the winter was over, he invited a party to meet them and congratulate them upon waking up from their long sleep. "They are awake now," he said, "but how quiet they are! How full of repose!" One of the guests went to inspect the dormice more closely, and a peculiar expression came over his face. It might almost have been thought that he was holding his nose. "Wake up, little dormice," said Rossetti, prodding them gently with a quill pen. "They'll never do _that_," said the guest. "They're _dead_. I believe they have been dead some days!" Do you think Rossetti gave up live stock after this? Not a bit of it. He tried armadillos and tortoises. "How are the tortoises?" he asked his man one day, after a long spell of forgetfulness that he had any. "Pretty well, sir, thank you.... That's to say, sir, there ain't no tortoises!" The tortoises, bought to eat the beetles, had been eaten themselves. At least, the shells were found full of beetles. And the armadillos? "The air of Chelsea don't suit them," said Rossetti's servant. They had certainly left Rossetti's house, but they had not left Chelsea. All the neighbors had dozens of them! They had burrowed, and came up smiling in houses where they were far from welcome. This by the way. Miss Herbert, who looked like the Blessed Damosel leaning out "across the bar of heaven," was not very well suited to the line of parts that she was playing at the St. James's, but she was very much admired. During the run of "Friends and Foes" she fell ill. Her illness was Kate's opportunity. From the night that Kate played Mrs. Union, her reputation was made. It was a splendid chance, no doubt, but of what use would it have been to any one who was not ready to use it? Kate, though only about nineteen at this time, was a finished actress. She had been a perfect Ariel, a beautiful Cordelia, and had played at least forty other parts of importance since she had appeared as a tiny Robin in the Keans' production of "The Merry Wives of Windsor." She had not had her head turned by big salaries, and she had never ceased working since she was four years old. No wonder that she was capable of bearing the burden of a piece at a moment's notice. The Americans cleverly say that "the lucky cat _watches_." _I_ should add that the lucky cat _works_. Reputations on the stage--at any rate, enduring reputations--are not made by chance, and to an actress who has not worked hard the finest opportunity in the world will be utterly useless. My own opinion of my sister's acting must be taken for what it is worth--and that is very little. I remember how she looked on the stage--like a frail white azalea--and that her acting, unlike that of Adelaide Neilson, who was the great popular favorite before Kate came to the front, was scientific. She knew what she was about. There was more ideality than passionate womanliness in her interpretations. For this reason, perhaps, her Cordelia was finer than her Portia or her Beatrice. She was engaged at one time to a young actor, called Montagu. If the course of that love had run smooth, where should I have been? Kate would have been the Terry of the age. But Mr. Montagu went to America, and, after five years of life as a matinée idol, died there. Before that, Arthur Lewis had come along. I was glad because he was rich, and during his courtship I had some riding, of which in my girlhood I was passionately fond. Tom Taylor had an enormous admiration for Kate, and during her second season as a "star" at Bristol he came down to see her play Juliet and Beatrice and Portia. This second Bristol season came in the middle of my time at the Haymarket, but I went back, too, and played Nerissa and Hero. Before that I had played my first leading Shakespeare part, but only at one matinée. An actor named Walter Montgomery was giving a matinée of "Othello" at the Princess's (the theater where I made my first appearance) in the June of 1863, and he wanted a Desdemona. The agents sent for me. It was Saturday, and I had to play it on Monday! But for my training, how could I have done it? At this time I knew the words and had _studied_ the words--a very different thing--of every woman's part in Shakespeare. I don't know what kind of performance I gave on that memorable afternoon, but I think it was not so bad. And Walter Montgomery's Othello? Why can't I remember something about it? I only remember that the unfortunate actor shot himself on his wedding-day! Any one who has come with me so far in my life will realize that Kate Terry was much better known than Ellen at the time of Ellen's first retirement from the stage. From Bristol my sister had gone to London to become Fechter's "leading lady," and from that time until she made her last appearance in 1867 as Juliet at the Adelphi, her career was a blaze of triumph. Before I came back to take part in her farewell tour (she became engaged to Mr. Arthur Lewis in 1866), I paid my first visit to Paris. I saw the Empress Eugénie driving in the Bois, looking like an exquisite waxwork. Oh, the beautiful _slope_ of women at this period! They sat like lovely half-moons, lying back in their carriages. It was an age of elegance--in France particularly--an age of luxury. They had just laid down asphalt for the first time in the streets of Paris, and the quiet of the boulevards was wonderful after the rattling London streets. I often went to three parties a night; but I was in a difficult position, as I could not speak a word of the language. I met Tissot and Gambard, who had just built Rosa Bonheur's house at Nice. I liked the Frenchmen because they liked me, but I didn't admire them. I tried to learn to smoke, but I never took kindly to it and soon gave it up. What was the thing that made me homesick for London? _Household Words._ The excitement in the 'sixties over each new Dickens can be understood only by people who experienced it at the time. Boys used to sell _Household Words_ in the streets, and they were often pursued by an eager crowd, for all the world as if they were carrying news of the "latest winner." Of course I went to the theater in Paris. I saw Sarah Bernhardt for the first time, and Madame Favart, Croisette, Delaunay, and Got. I never thought Croisette--a superb animal--a "patch" on Sarah, who was at this time as thin as a harrow. Even then I recognized that Sarah was not a bit conventional, and would not stay long at the Comédie. Yet she did not put me out of conceit with the old school. I saw "Les Précieuses Ridicules" finely done, and I said to myself then, as I have often said since: "Old school--new school? What does it matter which, so long as it is _good enough_?" Madame Favart I knew personally, and she gave me many useful hints. One was never to black my eyes _underneath_ when "making up." She pointed out that although this was necessary when the stage was lighted entirely from beneath, it had become ugly and meaningless since the introduction of top lights. The friend who took me everywhere in Paris landed me one night in the dressing-room of a singer. I remember it because I heard her complain to a man of some injustice. She had not got some engagement that she had expected. "It serves you damn right!" he answered. "You can't sing a bit." For the first time I seemed to realize how brutal it was of a man to speak to a woman like that, and I _hated_ it. Long afterwards, in the same city, I saw a man sitting calmly in a _fiacre_, a man of the "gentlemanly" class, and ordering the _cocher_ to drive on, although a woman was clinging to the side of the carriage and refusing to let go. She was a strong, splendid creature of the peasant type, bareheaded, with a fine open brow, and she was obviously consumed by resentment of some injustice--mad with it. She was dragged along in one of the busiest streets in Paris, the little Frenchman sitting there smiling, easy. How she escaped death I don't know. Then he became conscious that people were looking, and he stopped the cab and let her get in. Oh, men! Paris! Paris! Young as I was, I fell under the spell, of your elegance, your cleanness, your well-designed streets, your nonchalant gaiety. I drank coffee at Tortoni's. I visited the studio of Meissonier. I stood in the crowd that collected round Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair," which was in the Salon that year. I grew dead sick of the endless galleries of the Louvre. I went to the Madeleine at Easter time, all purple and white lilies, and fainted from trying to imagine ecstasy when the Host was raised.... I never fainted again in my life, except once from _anger_, when I heard some friends whom I loved slandering another friend whom I loved more. Good-bye to Paris and back to London, where I began acting again with only half my heart. I did very well, they said, as Helen in "The Hunchback," the first part I played after my return; but I cared nothing about my success. I was feeling wretchedly ill, and angry too, because they insisted on putting my married name on the bills. After playing with Kate at Bristol and at the Adelphi in London, I accepted an engagement to appear in a new play by Tom Taylor, called "The Antipodes." It was a bad play, and I had a bad part, but Telbin's scenery was lovely. Telbin was a poet, and he has handed on much of his talent to his son, who is alive now, and painted most of our Faust scenery at the Lyceum--he and dear Mr. Hawes Craven, who so loved his garden and could paint the flicker of golden sunshine for the stage better than any one. I have always been friendly with the scene-painters, perhaps because I have always taken pains about my dresses, and consulted them beforehand about the color, so that I should not look wrong in their scenes, nor their scenes wrong with my dresses. Telbin and Albert Moore together did up the New Queen's Theater, Long Acre, which was opened in October, 1867, under the ostensible management of the Alfred Wigans. I say "ostensible," because Mr. Labouchere had something to do with it, and Miss Henrietta Hodson, whom he afterwards married, played in the burlesques and farces without which no theater bill in London at that time was complete. The Wigans offered me an engagement, and I stayed with them until 1868, when I again left the stage. During this engagement I acted with Charles Wyndham and Lionel Brough, and, last but not least, with Henry Irving. Mrs. Wigan, _née_ Leonora Pincott, did me the honor to think that I was worth teaching, and took nearly as much pains to improve me as Mrs. Kean had done at a different stage in my artistic growth. Her own accomplishments as a comedy actress impressed me more than I can say. I remember seeing her as Mrs. Candour, and thinking to myself, "This is absolutely perfect." If I were a teacher I would impress on young actresses never to move a finger or turn the eye without being quite certain that the movement or the glance _tells_ something. Mrs. Wigan made few gestures, but each one quietly, delicately indicated what the words which followed expressed. And while she was speaking she never frittered away the effect of that silent eloquence. One of my besetting sins was--nay, still is--the lack of repose. Mrs. Wigan at once detected the fault, and at rehearsals would work to make me remedy it. "_Stand still!_" she would shout from the stalls. "Now you're of value!" "Motionless! Just as you are! _That's_ right." A few years later she came to see me at the Court Theater, where I was playing in "The House of Darnley," and afterwards wrote me the following very kind and encouraging letter: "_December 7, 1877._ "Dear Miss Terry,-- "You have a very difficult part in 'The House of Darnley.' I know no one who could play it as well as you did last night--but _you_ could do it much better. You would vex me much if I thought you had no ambition in your art. You are the one young actress of my day who can have her success entirely in her own hands. You have all the gifts for your noble profession, and, as you know, your own devotion to it will give you all that can be learned. I'm very glad my stage direction was useful and pleasant to you, and any benefit you have derived from it is overpaid by your style of acting. You cannot have a 'groove'; you are too much of an artist. Go on and prosper, and if at any time you think I can help you in your art, you may always count on that help from your most sincere well-wisher "LEONORA WIGAN." Another service that Mrs. Wigan did me was to cure me of "fooling" on the stage. "_Did_ she?" I thought I heard some one interrupt me unkindly at that point! Well, at any rate, she gave me a good fright one night, and I never forgot it, though I will not say I never laughed again. I think it was in "The Double Marriage," the first play put on at the New Queen's. As Rose de Beaurepaire, I wore a white muslin Directoire dress and looked absurdly young. There was one "curtain" which used to convulse Wyndham. He had a line, "Whose child is this?" and there was I, looking a mere child myself, and with a bad cold in my head too, answering: "It's _bine_!" The very thought of it used to send us off into fits of laughter. We hung on to chairs, helpless, limp, and incapable. Mrs. Wigan said if we did it again, she would go in front and hiss us, and she carried out her threat. The very next time we laughed, a loud hiss rose from the stagebox. I was simply paralyzed with terror. Dear old Mrs. Wigan! The stories that have been told about her would fill a book! She was exceedingly plain, rather like a toad, yet, perversely, she was more vain of her looks than of her acting. In the theater she gave herself great airs and graces, and outside it hobnobbed with duchesses and princesses. This fondness for aristocratic society gave additional point to the story that one day a blear-eyed old cabman in capes and muffler descended from the box of a disreputable-looking growler, and inquired at the stage-door for Leonora Pincott. "Any lady 'ere of that name?" "No." "Well, I think she's married, and changed her name, but she's 'ere right enough. Tell 'er I won't keep 'er a minute. I'm 'er--old father!" In "Still Waters Run Deep" I was rather good as Mrs. Mildmay, and the rest of the cast were admirable. Mrs. Wigan was, of course, Mrs. Sternhold. Wyndham, who was afterwards to be such a splendid Mildmay, played Hawksley, and Alfred Wigan was Mildmay, as he had been in the original production. When the play is revived now, much of it seems very old-fashioned, but the office scene strikes one as freshly and strongly as when it was first acted. I don't think that any drama which is vital and _essential_ can ever be old-fashioned. MY FIRST IMPRESSION OF HENRY IRVING One very foggy night in December 1867--it was Boxing Day, I think--I acted for the first time with Henry Irving. This ought to have been a great event in my life, but at the time it passed me by and left "no wrack behind." Ever anxious to improve on the truth, which is often devoid of all sensationalism, people have told a story of Henry Irving promising that if he ever were in a position to offer me an engagement I should be his leading lady. But this fairy story has been improved on since. The newest tale of my first meeting with Henry Irving was told during my jubilee. Then, to my amazement, I read that on that famous night when I was playing Puck at the Princess's, and caught my toe in the trap, "a young man with dark hair and a white face rushed forward from the crowd and said: 'Never mind, darling. Don't cry! One day you will be queen of the stage.' It was Henry Irving!" In view of these legends, I ought to say all the more stoutly that, until I went to the Lyceum Theater, Henry Irving was nothing to me and I was nothing to him. I never consciously thought that he would become a great actor. He had no high opinion of _my_ acting! He has said since that he thought me at the Queen's Theater charming and individual as a woman, but as an actress _hoydenish_! I believe that he hardly spared me even so much definite thought as this. His soul was not more surely in his body than in the theater, and I, a woman who was at this time caring more about love and life than the theater, must have been to him more or less unsympathetic. He thought of nothing else, cared for nothing else; worked day and night; went without his dinner to buy a book that might be helpful in studying, or a stage jewel that might be helpful to wear. I remember his telling me that he once bought a sword with a jeweled hilt, and hung it at the foot of his bed. All night he kept getting up and striking matches to see it, shifting its position, rapt in admiration of it. He had it all in him when we acted together that foggy night, but he could express very little. Many of his defects sprang from his not having been on the stage as a child. He was stiff with self-consciousness; his eyes were dull and his face heavy. The piece we played was Garrick's boiled-down version of "The Taming of the Shrew," and he, as Petruchio, appreciated the humor and everything else far more than I did, as Katherine; yet he played badly, nearly as badly as I did; and how much more to blame I was, for I was at this time much more easy and skillful from a purely technical point of view. Was Henry Irving impressive in those days? Yes and no. His fierce and indomitable will showed itself in his application to his work. Quite unconsciously I learned from watching him that to do work well, the artist must spend his life in incessant labor, and deny himself everything for that purpose. It is a lesson we actors and actresses cannot learn too early, for the bright and glorious heyday of our success must always be brief at best. Henry Irving, when he played Petruchio, had been toiling in the provinces for eleven solid years, and not until Rawdon Scudamore in "Hunted Down" had he had any success. Even that was forgotten in his failure as Petruchio. What a trouncing he received from the critics who have since heaped praise on many worse men! I think this was the peculiar quality in his acting afterwards--a kind of fine temper, like the purest steel, produced by the perpetual fight against difficulties. Socrates, it is said, had every capacity for evil in his face, yet he was good as a naturally good man could never be. Henry Irving at first had everything against him as an actor. He could not speak, he could not walk, he could not _look_. He wanted to do things in a part, and he could not do them. His amazing power was imprisoned, and only after long and weary years did he succeed in setting it free. A man with a will like that _must_ be impressive! To quick-seeing eyes he must, no doubt. But my eyes were not quick, and they were, moreover, fixed on a world outside the theater. Better than his talent and his will I remember his courtesy. In those days, instead of having our salaries brought to our dressing-rooms, we used to wait in a queue on Treasury Day to receive them. I was always late in coming, and always in a hurry to get away. Very gravely and quietly Henry Irving used to give up his place to me. I played once more at the Queen's after Katherine and Petruchio. It was in a little piece called "The Household Fairy," and I remember it chiefly through an accident which befell poor Jack Clayton through me. The curtain had fallen on "The Household Fairy," and Clayton, who had acted with me in it, was dancing with me on the stage to the music which was being played during the wait, instead of changing his dress for the next piece. This dancing during the entr'acte was very popular among us. Many a burlesque quadrille I had with Terriss and others in later days. On this occasion Clayton suddenly found he was late in changing, and, rushing upstairs to his dressing-room in a hurry, he missed his footing and fell back on his head. This made me very miserable, as I could not help feeling that I was responsible. Soon afterwards I left the stage for six years, without the slightest idea of ever going back. I left it without regret. And I was very happy, leading a quiet, domestic life in the heart of the country. When my two children were born, I thought of the stage less than ever. They absorbed all my time, all my interest, all my love. IV A SIX-YEAR VACATION 1868-1874 My disappearance from the stage must have been a heavy blow to my father and mother, who had urged me to return in 1866 and were quite certain that I had a great future. For the first time for years they had no child in the theater. Marion and Floss, who were afterward to adopt the stage as a profession, were still at school; Kate had married; and none of their sons had shown any great aptitude for acting. Fred, who was afterwards to do so well, was at this time hardly out of petticoats. Perhaps it was because I knew they would oppose me that I left the stage quite quietly and secretly. It seemed to outsiders natural, if regrettable, that I should follow Kate's example. But I was troubling myself little about what people were thinking and saying. "They are saying--what are they saying? Let them be saying!" Then a dreadful thing happened. A body was found in the river,--the dead body of a young woman very fair and slight and tall. Every one thought that it was my body. I had gone away without a word. No one knew where I was. My own father identified the corpse, and Floss and Marion, at their boarding-school, were put into mourning. Then mother went. She kept her head under the shock of the likeness, and bethought her of "a strawberry mark upon my left arm." (_Really_ I had one over my left knee.) That settled it, for there was no such mark to be found upon the poor corpse. It was just at this moment that the news came to me in my country retreat that I had been found dead, and I flew up to London to give ocular proof to my poor distracted parents that I was alive. Mother, who had been the only one not to identify the drowned girl, confessed to me that she was so like me that just for a second she, too, was deceived. You see, they knew I had not been very happy since my return to the stage, and when I went away without a word, they were terribly anxious, and prepared to believe the first bad tidings that came to hand. It came in the shape of that most extraordinary likeness between me and that poor soul who threw herself into the river. I was not twenty-one when I left the stage for the second time, and I haven't made up my mind yet whether it was good or bad for me, as an actress, to cease from practicing my craft for six years. Talma, the great French actor, recommends long spells of rest, and says that "perpetual indulgence in the excitement of impersonation dulls the sympathy and impairs the imaginative faculty of the comedian." This is very useful in my defense, yet I could find many examples which prove the contrary. I could never imagine Henry Irving leaving the stage for six months, let alone six years, and I don't think it would have been of the slightest benefit to him. But he had not been on the stage as a child. If I was able to rest so long without rusting, it was, I am sure, because I had been thoroughly trained in the technique of acting long before I reached my twentieth year--an age at which most students are just beginning to wrestle with elementary principles. Of course, I did not argue in this way at the time! As I have said, I had no intention of ever acting again when I left the Queen's Theater. If it is the mark of the artist to love art before everything, to renounce everything for its sake, to think all the sweet human things of life well lost if only he may attain something, do some good, great work--then I was never an artist. I have been happiest in my work when I was working for some one else. I admire those impersonal people who care for nothing outside their own ambition, yet I detest them at the same time, and I have the simplest faith that absolute devotion to another human being means the greatest _happiness_. That happiness was now mine. I led a most unconventional life, and experienced exquisite delight from the mere fact of being in the country. No one knows what "the country" means until he or she has lived in it. "Then, if ever, come perfect days." What a sensation it was, too, to be untrammeled by time! Actors must take care of themselves and their voices, husband their strength for the evening work, and when it is over they are too tired to do anything! For the first time I was able to put all my energies into living. Charles Lamb says, I think, that when he left the East India House, he felt embarrassed by the vast estates of time at his disposal, and wished that he had a bailiff to manage them for him, but I knew no such embarrassment. I began gardening, "the purest of human pleasures"; I learned to cook, and in time cooked very well, though my first essay in that difficult art was rewarded with dire and complete failure. It was a chicken! Now, as all the chickens had names--Sultan, Duke, Lord Tom Noddy, Lady Teazle, and so forth--and as I was very proud of them as living birds, it was a great wrench to kill one at all, to start with. It was the murder of Sultan, not the killing of a chicken. However, at last it was done, and Sultan deprived of his feathers, floured, and trussed. I had no idea _how_ this was all done, but I tried to make him "sit up" nicely like the chickens in the shops. He came up to the table looking magnificent--almost turkey-like in his proportions. "Hasn't this chicken rather an odd smell?" said our visitor. "How can you!" I answered. "It must be quite fresh--it's Sultan!" However, when we began to carve, the smell grew more and more potent. _I had cooked Sultan without taking out his in'ards!_ There was no dinner that day except bread-sauce, beautifully made, well-cooked vegetables, and pastry like the foam of the sea. I had a wonderful hand for pastry! My hour of rising at this pleasant place near Mackery End in Hertfordshire was six. Then I washed the babies. I had a perfect mania for _washing_ everything and everybody. We had one little servant, and I insisted on washing her head. Her mother came up from the village to protest. "Never washed her head in my life. Never washed any of my children's heads. And just look at their splendid hair!" After the washing I fed the animals. There were two hundred ducks and fowls to feed, as well as the children. By the time I had done this, and cooked the dinner, the morning had flown away. After the midday meal I sewed. Sometimes I drove out in the pony-cart. And in the evening I walked across the common to fetch the milk. The babies used to roam where they liked on this common in charge of a bulldog, while I sat and read. I studied cookery-books instead of parts--Mrs. Beeton instead of Shakespeare! Of course, I thought my children the most brilliant and beautiful children in the world, and, indeed, "this side idolatry," they were exceptional, and they had an exceptional bringing up. They were allowed no rubbishy picture-books, but from the first Japanese prints and fans lined their nursery walls, and Walter Crane was their classic. If injudicious friends gave the wrong sort of present, it was promptly burned. A mechanical mouse in which Edy, my little daughter, showed keen interest and delight, was taken away as being "realistic and common." Only wooden toys were allowed. This severe training proved so effective that when a doll dressed in a violent pink silk dress was given to Edy, she said it was "vulgar"! By that time she had found a tongue, but until she was two years old she never spoke a word, though she seemed to notice everything with her grave dark eyes. We were out driving when I heard her voice for the first time: "There's some more." She spoke quite distinctly. It was almost uncanny. "More what?" I asked in a trembling voice, afraid that having delivered herself once, she might lapse into dumbness. "Birds!" The nursemaid, Essie, described Edy tersely as "a piece," while Teddy, who was adored by every one because he was fat and fair and angelic-looking, she called "the feather of England." "The feather of England" was considered by his sister a great coward. She used to hit him on the head with a wooden spoon for crying, and exhort him, when he said, "Master Teddy afraid of the dark," to be a _woman_! I feel that if I go maundering on much longer about my children, some one will exclaim with a witty and delightful author when he saw "Peter Pan" for the seventh time: "Oh, for an hour of Herod!" When I think of little Edy bringing me in minute branches of flowers all the morning, with the reassuring intelligence that "there are lots more," I could cry. But why should any one be interested in that? Is it interesting to any one else that when she dug up a turnip in the garden for the first time, she should have come running in to beg me to come quick: "Miss Edy found a radish. It's as big as--as big as _God_!" When I took her to her first theater--it was Sanger's Circus--and the clown pretended to fall from the tightrope, and the drum went bang! she said: "Take me away! take me away! you ought never to have brought me here!" No wonder she was considered a dour child! I immediately and humbly obeyed. It was truly the simple life we led in Hertfordshire. From scrubbing floors and lighting fires, cooking, gardening, and harnessing the pony, I grew thinner than ever--as thin as a whipping-post, a hurdle, or a haddock! I went to church in blue-and-white cotton, with my servant in silk. "I don't half like it," she said. "They'll take you for the cook, and me for the lady!" We kept a goat, a dear fellow whom I liked very much until I caught him one day chasing my daughter. I seized him by his horns to inflict severe punishment; but then I saw that his eyes were exactly like mine, and it made me laugh so much that I let him go and never punished him at all. "Boo" became an institution in these days. She was the wife of a doctor who kept a private asylum in the neighboring village, and on his death she tried to look after the lunatics herself. But she wasn't at all successful! They kept escaping, and people didn't like it. This was my gain, for "Boo" came to look after me instead, and for the next thirty years I was her only lunatic, and she my most constant companion and dear and loyal friend. We seldom went to London. When we did, Ted nearly had a fit at seeing so many "we'els go wound." But we went to Normandy, and saw Lisieux, Mantes, Bayeux. Long afterwards, when I was feeling as hard as sandpaper on the stage, I had only to recall some of the divine music I had heard in those great churches abroad to become soft, melted, able to act. I remember in some cathedral we left little Edy sitting down below while we climbed up into the clerestory to look at some beautiful piece of architecture. The choir were practicing, and suddenly there rose a boy's voice, pure, effortless, and clear.... For years that moment stayed with me. When we came down to fetch Edy, she said: "Ssh! ssh! Miss Edy has seen the angels!" Oh, blissful quiet days! How soon they came to an end! Already the shadow of financial trouble fell across my peace. Yet still I never thought of returning to the stage. One day I was driving in a narrow lane, when the wheel of the pony-cart came off. I was standing there, thinking what I should do next, when a whole crowd of horsemen in "pink" came leaping over the hedge into the lane. One of them stopped and asked if he could do anything. Then he looked hard at me and exclaimed: "Good God! it's Nelly!" The man was Charles Reade. "Where have you been all these years?" he said. "I have been having a very happy time," I answered. "Well, you've had it long enough. Come back to the stage!" "No, never!" "You're a fool! You ought to come back." Suddenly I remembered the bailiff in the house a few miles away, and I said laughingly: "Well, perhaps, I would think of it if some one would give me forty pounds a week!" "Done!" said Charles Reade. "I'll give you that, and more, if you'll come and play Philippa Chester in 'The Wandering Heir.'" He went on to explain that Mrs. John Wood, who had been playing Philippa at the New Queen's, of which he was the lessee, would have to relinquish the part soon, because she was under contract to appear elsewhere. The piece was a great success, and promised to run a long time if he could find a good Philippa to replace Mrs. Wood. It was a kind of Rosalind part, and Charles Reade only exaggerated pardonably when he said that I should never have any part better suited to me! In a very short time after that meeting in the lane, it was announced that the new Philippa was to be an actress who was returning to the stage "after a long period of retirement." Only just before the first night did anyone guess who it was, and then there was great excitement among those who remembered me. The acclamation with which I was welcomed back on the first night surprised me. The papers were more flattering than they had ever been before. It was a tremendous success for me, and I was all the more pleased because I was following an accomplished actress in the part. It is curious how often I have "followed" others. I never "created" a part, as theatrical parlance has it, until I played Olivia at the Court, and I had to challenge comparison, in turn, with Miss Marie Wilton, Mrs. John Wood and Mrs. Kendal. Perhaps it was better for me than if I had had parts specially written for me, and with which no other names were associated. The hero of "The Wandering Heir," when I first took up the part of Philippa, was played by Edmund Leathes, but afterward by Johnston Forbes-Robertson. Everyone knows how good-looking he is now, but as a boy he was wonderful--a dreamy, poetic-looking creature in a blue smock, far more of an artist than an actor--he promised to paint quite beautifully--and full of aspirations and ideals. In those days began a friendship between us which has lasted unbroken until this moment. His father and mother were delightful people, and very kind to me always. Everyone was kind to me at this time. Friends whom I had thought would be estranged by my long absence rallied round me and welcomed me as if it were six minutes instead of six years since I had dropped out of their ken. I was not yet a "made" woman, but I had a profitable engagement, and a delightful one, too, with Charles Reade, and I felt an enthusiasm for my work which had been wholly absent when I had returned to the stage the first time. My children were left in the country at first, but they came up and joined me when, in the year following "The Wandering Heir," I went to the Bancrofts at the Prince of Wales's. I never had the slightest fear of leaving them to their own devices, for they always knew how to amuse themselves, and were very independent and dependable in spite of their extreme youth. I have often thanked Heaven since that, with all their faults, my boy and girl have never been lazy and never dull. At this time Teddy always had a pencil in his hand, when he wasn't looking for his biscuit--he was a greedy little thing!--and Edy was hammering clothes onto her dolls with tin-tacks! Teddy said poetry beautifully, and when he and his sister were still tiny mites, they used to go through scene after scene of "As You Like It," for their own amusement, not for an audience, in the wilderness at Hampton Court. They were by no means prodigies, but it did not surprise me that my son, when he grew up, should be first a good actor, then an artist of some originality, and should finally turn all his brains and industry to new developments in the art of the theater. My daughter has acted also--not enough to please me, for I have a very firm belief in her talents--and has shown again and again that she can design and make clothes for the stage that are both lovely and effective. In all my most successful stage dresses lately she has had a hand, and if I had anything to do with a national theater, I should, without prejudice, put her in charge of the wardrobe at once! I may be a proud parent, but I have always refrained from "pushing" my children. They have had to fight for themselves, and to their mother their actual achievements have mattered very little. So long as they were not lazy, I have always felt that I could forgive them anything! And now Teddy and Edy--Teddy in a minute white piqué suit, and Edy in a tiny kimono, in which she looked as Japanese as everything which surrounded her--disappear from these pages for quite a long time. But all this time, you must understand, they are educating their mother! Charles Reade, having brought me back to the stage, and being my manager into the bargain, was deeply concerned about my progress as an actress. During the run of "The Wandering Heir" he used to sit in a private box every night to watch the play, and would send me round notes between the acts, telling me what I had done ill and what well in the preceding act. Dear, kind, unjust, generous, cautious, impulsive, passionate, gentle Charles Reade. Never have I known anyone who combined so many qualities, far asunder as the poles, in one single disposition. He was placid and turbulent, yet always majestic. He was inexplicable and entirely lovable--a stupid old dear, and as wise as Solomon! He seemed guileless, and yet had moments of suspicion and craftiness worthy of the wisdom of the serpent. One moment he would call me "dearest child"; the next, with indignant emphasis, "_Madam_!" When "The Wandering Heir" had at last exhausted its great popularity, I went on a tour with Charles Reade in several of his plays. In spite of his many and varied interests, he had entirely succumbed to the magic of the "irresistible theater," and it used to strike me as rather pathetic to see a man of his power and originality working the stage sea at nights, in company with a rough lad, in his dramatic version of "Hard Cash." In this play, which was known as "Our Seaman," I had a part which I could not bear to be paid twenty-five pounds a week for acting. I knew that the tour was not a financial success, and I ventured to suggest that it would be good economy to get some one else for Susan Merton. For answer I got a fiery "Madam, you are a rat! You desert a sinking ship!" My dear old companion, Boo, who was with me, resented this very much: "How can you say such things to my Nelly?" "Your Nelly!" said Charles Reade. "I love her a thousand times better than you do, or any puling woman." Another time he grew white with rage, and his dark eyes blazed, because the same "puling woman" said very lightly and playfully: "Why did poor Nell come home from rehearsal looking so tired yesterday? You work her too hard." He thought this unfair, as the work had to be done, and flamed out at us with such violence that it was almost impossible to identify him with the kind old gentleman of the Colonel Newcome type whom I had seen stand up at the Tom Taylors', on Sunday evenings, and sing "The Girl I Left Behind Me" with such pathos that he himself was moved to tears. But, though it was a painful time for both of us, it was almost worth while to quarrel with him, because when we made it up he was sure to give me some "treat"--a luncheon, a present, or a drive. We both felt we needed some jollification because we had suffered so much from being estranged. He used to say that there should be no such word as "quarrel," and one morning he wrote me a letter with the following postscript written in big letters: "THERE DO EXIST SUCH THINGS AS HONEST MISUNDERSTANDINGS. "There, my Eleanora Delicia" (this was his name for me, my real, full name being Ellen Alicia), "stick that up in some place where you will often see it. Better put it on _your looking-glass_. And if you can once get those words into your noddle, it will save you a world of unhappiness." I think he was quite right about this. Would that he had been as right in his theories about stage management! He was a rare one for realism. He had _preached_ it in all his plays, and when he produced a one-act play, "Rachael the Reaper," in front of "The Wandering Heir," he began to practice what he preached--jumped into reality up to the neck! He began by buying _real_ pigs, _real_ sheep, a _real_ goat, and a _real_ dog. _Real_ litter was strewn all over the stage, much to the inconvenience of the unreal farm-laborer, Charles Kelly, who could not compete with it, although he looked as like a farmer as any actor could. They all looked their parts better than the real wall which ran across the stage, piteously naked of _real_ shadows, owing to the absence of the _real_ sun, and, of course, deficient in the painted shadows which make a painted wall look so like the real thing. Never, never can I forget Charles Reade's arrival at the theater in a four-wheeler with a goat and a lot of little pigs. When the cab drew up at the stage-door, the goat seemed to say, as plainly as any goat could: "I'm dashed if I stay in this cab any longer with these pigs!" and while Charles Reade was trying to pacify it, the piggies escaped! Unfortunately, they didn't all go in the same direction, and poor dear Charles Reade had a "divided duty." There was the goat, too, in a nasty mood. Oh, his serious face, as he decided to leave the goat and run for the pigs, with his loose trousers, each one a yard wide at least, flapping in the wind! "That's a relief, at any rate," said Charles Kelly, who was watching the flight of the pigs. "I sha'n't have those d----d pigs to spoil my acting as well as the d----d dog and the d----d goat!" How we all laughed when Charles Reade returned from the pig-hunt to rehearsal with the brief direction to the stage manager that the pigs would be "cut out." The reason for the real wall was made more evident when the real goat was tied up to it. A painted wall would never have stood such a strain. On the first night, the real dog bit Kelly's real ankles, and in real anger he kicked the real animal by a real mistake into the orchestra's real drum. So much for realism as practiced by Charles Reade! There was still something to remind him of the experiment in Rachael, the circus goat. Rachael--he was no she, but what of that?--was given the free run of the garden of Reade's house at Knightsbridge. He had everything that any normal goat could desire--a rustic stable, a green lawn, the best of food. Yet Rachael pined and grew thinner and thinner. One night when we were all sitting at dinner, with the French windows open onto the lawn because it was a hot night, Rachael came prancing into the room, looking happy, lively, and quite at home. All the time, while Charles Reade had been fashing himself to provide every sort of rural joy for his goat, the ungrateful beast had been longing for the naphtha lights of the circus, for lively conversation and the applause of the crowd. You can't force a goat any more than you can force a child to live the simple life. "N'Yawk's the place," said the child of a Bowery tenement in New York, on the night of her return from an enforced sojourn in Arcady. She hated picking daisies, and drinking rich new milk made her sick. When the kind teacher who had brought her to the country strove to impress her by taking her to see a cow milked, she remarked witheringly to the man who was milking: "Gee! You put it in!" Rachael's sentiments were of the same type, I think. "Back to the circus!" was his cry, not "Back to the land!" I hope, when he felt the sawdust under his feet again (I think Charles Reade sent him back to the ring), he remembered his late master with gratitude. To how many animals, and not only four-footed ones, was not Charles Reade generously kind, and to none of them more kind than to Ellen Terry. V THE ACTRESS AND THE PLAYWRIGHT THE END OF MY APPRENTICESHIP 1874 The relation between author and actor is a very important element in the life of the stage. It is the way with some dramatists to despise those who interpret their plays, to accuse us of ruining their creations, to suffer disappointment and rage because we do not, or cannot, carry out their ideas. Other dramatists admit that we players can teach them something; but I have noticed that it is generally in "the other fellow's" play that we can teach them, not in their own! As they are necessary to us, and we to them, the great thing is to reduce friction by sympathy. The actor should understand that the author can be of use to him; the author, on his side, should believe that the actor can be of service to the author, and sometimes in ways which only a long and severe training in the actor's trade can discover. The first author with whom I had to deal, at a critical point in my progress as an actress, was Charles Reade, and he helped me enormously. He might, and often did, make twelve suggestions that were wrong; but against them he would make one that was so right that its value was immeasurable and unforgettable. It is through the dissatisfaction of a man like Charles Reade that an actress _learns_--that is, if she is not conceited. Conceit is an insuperable obstacle to all progress. On the other hand, it is of little use to take criticism in a slavish spirit and to act on it without understanding it. Charles Reade constantly wrote and said things to me which were not absolutely just criticism; but they directed my attention to the true cause of the faults which he found in my performance, and put me on the way to mending them. A letter which he wrote me during the run of "The Wandering Heir" was such a wonderful lesson to me that I am going to quote it almost in full, in the hope that it may be a lesson to other actresses--"happy in this, they are not yet so old but they can learn"; unhappy in this, that they have never had a Charles Reade to give them a trouncing! Well, the letter begins with sheer eulogy. Eulogy is nice, but one does not learn anything from it. Had dear Charles Reade stopped after writing "womanly grace, subtlety, delicacy, the variety yet invariable truthfulness of the facial expression, compared with which the faces beside yours are wooden, uniform dolls," he would have done nothing to advance me in my art; but this was only the jam in which I was to take the powder! Here followed more jam--with the first taste of the powder: "I prefer you for my Philippa to any other actress, and shall do so still, even if you will not, or cannot, throw more vigor into the lines that need it. I do not pretend to be as good a writer of plays as you are an actress [_how naughty of him!_], but I do pretend to be a great judge of acting in general. [_He wasn't, although in particular details he was a brilliant critic and adviser._] And I know how my own lines and business ought to be rendered infinitely better than any one else, except the Omniscient. It is only on this narrow ground I presume to teach a woman of your gifts. If I teach you Philippa, you will teach me Juliet; for I am very sure that when I have seen you act her, I shall know a vast deal more about her than I do at present. "No great quality of an actress is absent from your performance. Very often you have _vigor_. But in other places where it is as much required, or even more, you turn _limp_. You have limp lines, limp business, and in Act III. limp exits instead of ardent exits." Except in the actual word used, he was perfectly right. I was not _limp_, but I was exhausted. By a natural instinct, I had produced my voice scientifically almost from the first, and I had found out for myself many things, which in these days of Delsarte systems and the science of voice-production, are taught. But when, after my six years' absence from the stage, I came back, and played a long and arduous part, I found that my breathing was still not right. This accounted for my exhaustion, or limpness and lack of vigor, as Charles Reade preferred to call it. As for the "ardent" exits, how right he was! That word set me on the track of learning the value of moving off the stage with a swift rush. I had always had the gift of being rapid in movement, but to _have_ a gift, and to _use_ it, are two very different things. I never realized that I was rather quick in movement until one day when I was sitting on a sofa talking to the famous throat specialist, Dr. Morell Mackenzie. In the middle of one of his sentences I said: "Wait a minute while I get a glass of water." I was out of the room and back so soon that he said, "Well, go and get it then!" and was paralyzed when he saw that the glass was in my hand and that I was sitting down again! _Consider!_ That was one of Charles Reade's favorite expressions, and just hearing him say the word used to make me consider, and think, and come to conclusions--perhaps not always the conclusions that he wished, but suggested by him. In this matter of "ardent" exit, he wrote: "The swift rush of the words, the personal rush, should carry you off the stage. It is in reality as easy as shelling peas, if you will only go by the right method instead of by the wrong. You have overcome far greater difficulties than this, yet night after night you go on suffering ignoble defeat at this point. Come, courage! You took a leaf out of Reade's dictionary at Manchester, and trampled on two difficulties--impossibilities, you called them. That was on Saturday, Monday you knocked the poor impossibilities down. Tuesday you kicked them where they lay. Wednesday you walked placidly over their prostrate bodies!" The difficulty that he was now urging me to knock down was one of _pace_, and I am afraid that in all my stage life subsequently I never quite succeeded in kicking it or walking over its prostrate body! Looking backward, I remember many times when I failed in rapidity of utterance, and was "pumped" at moments when swiftness was essential. Pace is the soul of comedy, and to elaborate lines at the expense of pace is disastrous. Curiously enough, I have met and envied this gift of pace in actors who were not conspicuously talented in other respects, and no Rosalind that I have ever seen has had enough of it. Of course, it is not a question of swift utterance only, but of swift thinking. I am able to think more swiftly on the stage now than at the time Charles Reade wrote to me, and I only wish I were young enough to take advantage of it. But youth thinks _slowly_, as a rule. _Vary the pace._ Charles Reade was never tired of saying this, and, indeed, it is one of the foundations of all good acting. "You don't seem quite to realize," he writes in the letter before me, "that uniformity of pace leads inevitably to languor. You should deliver a pistol-shot or two. Remember Philippa is a fiery girl; she can snap. If only for variety, she should snap James' head off when she says, 'Do I _speak_ as if I loved them!'" My memories of the part of Philippa are rather vague, but I know that Reade was right in insisting that I needed more "bite" in the passages when I was dressed as a boy. Though he complimented me on my self-denial in making what he called "some sacrifice of beauty" to pass for a boy, "so that the audience can't say, 'Why, James must be a fool not to see she is a girl,'" he scolded me for my want of bluntness. "Fix your mind on the adjective 'blunt' and the substantive 'pistol-shot'; they will do you good service." They did! And I recommend them to anyone who finds it hard to overcome monotony of pace and languor of diction. "When you come to tell old Surefoot about his daughter's love," the letter goes on, "you should fall into a positive imitation of his manner: crest, motionless, and hands in front, and deliver your preambles with a nasal twang. But at the second invitation to speak out, you should cast this to the winds, and go into the other extreme of bluntness and rapidity. [_Quite right!_] When you meet him after the exposure, you should speak as you are coming to him and stop him in mid-career, and _then_ attack him. You should also (in Act II.) get the pearls back into the tree before you say: 'Oh, I hope he did not see me!'" Yes, I remember that in both these places I used to muddle and blur the effect by doing the business and speaking at the same time. By acting on Reade's suggestion I gained confidence in making a pause. "After the beating, wait at least ten seconds longer than you do--to rouse expectation--and when you do come on, make a little more of it. You ought to be very pale indeed--even to enter with a slight totter, done moderately, of course; and before you say a single word, you ought to stand shaking and with your brows knitting, looking almost terrible. Of course, I do not expect or desire to make a melodramatic actress of you, but still I think you capable of any effect, provided _it is not sustained too long_." A truer word was never spoken. It has never been in my power to _sustain_. In private life, I cannot sustain a hatred or a resentment. On the stage, I can pass swiftly from one effect to another, but I cannot fix _one_, and dwell on it, with that superb concentration which seems to me the special attribute of the tragic actress. To sustain, with me, is to lose the impression that I have created, not to increase its intensity. "The last passage of the third act is just a little too hurried. Break the line. 'Now, James--for England and liberty!'" I remember that I never could see that he was right about that, and if I can't see a thing I can't do it. The author's idea must become mine before I can carry it out--at least, with any sincerity, and obedience without sincerity would be of small service to an author. It must be despairing to him, if he wants me to say a line in a certain way, to find that I always say it in another; but I can't help it. I have tried to act passages as I have been told, just _because_ I was told and without conviction, and I have failed miserably and have had to go back to my own way. "Climax is reached not only by rush but by increasing pace. Your exit speech is a failure at present, because you do not vary the pace of its delivery. Get by yourself for one half-hour--if you can! Get by the seaside, if you can, since there it was Demosthenes studied eloquence and overcame mountains--not mole-hills like this. Being by the seaside, study those lines by themselves: 'And then let them find their young gentleman, and find him quickly, for London shall not hold me long--no, nor England either.' "Study to speak these lines with great volubility and fire, and settle the exact syllable to run at." I remember that Reade, with characteristic generosity, gave me ten pounds and sent me to the seaside in earnest, as he suggests my doing, half in fun, in the letter. "I know you won't go otherwise," he said, "because you want to insure your life or do something of that sort. Here! go to Brighton--go anywhere by the sea for Sunday! Don't thank me! It's all for Philippa." As I read these notes of his on anti-climax, monotony of pace, and all the other offenses against scientific principles of acting which I committed in this one part, I feel more strongly than ever how important it is to master these principles. Until you have learned them and practiced them you cannot afford to discard them. There is all the difference in the world between departure from recognized rules by one who has learned to obey them, and neglect of them through want of training or want of skill or want of understanding. Before you can be eccentric you must know where the circle is. This is accepted, I am told, even in shorthand, where the pupil acquires the knowledge of a number of signs, only for the purpose of discarding them when he is proficient enough to make an individual system. It is also accepted in music, where only the advanced pianist or singer can afford to play tricks with _tempo_. And I am sure it should be accepted in acting. Nowadays acting is less scientific (except in the matter of voice-production) than it was when I was receiving hints, cautions, and advice from my two dramatist friends, Charles Reade and Tom Taylor; and the leading principles to which they attached importance have come to be regarded as old-fashioned and superfluous. This attitude is comparatively harmless in the interpretation of those modern plays in which parts are made to fit the actors and personality is everything. But those who have been led to believe that they can make their own rules find their mistake when they come to tackle Shakespeare or any of the standard dramatists in which the actors have to fit themselves to the parts. Then, if ever, technique is avenged! All my life the thing which has struck me as wanting on the stage is _variety_. Some people are "tone-deaf," and they find it physically impossible to observe the law of contrasts. But even a physical deficiency can be overcome by that faculty for taking infinite pains which may not be genius but is certainly a good substitute for it. When it comes to pointing out an example, Henry Irving is the monument, the great mark set up to show the genius of _will_. For years he worked to overcome the dragging leg, which seemed to attract more attention from some small-minded critics (sharp of eye, yet how dull of vision!) than all the mental splendor of his impersonations. He toiled, and he overcame this defect, just as he overcame his disregard of the vowels and the self-consciousness which in the early stages of his career used to hamper and incommode him. His _self_ was to him on a first night what the shell is to a lobster on dry land. In "Hamlet," when we first acted together after that long-ago Katherine and Petruchio period at the Queen's, he used to discuss with me the secret of my freedom from self-consciousness; and I suggested a more swift entrance on the stage from the dressing-room. I told him that, in spite of the advantage in ease which I had gained through having been on the stage when still a mere child, I should be paralyzed with fright from over-acute realization of the audience if I stood at the wing for ten minutes, as he was in the habit of doing. He did not need me then, nor during the run of our next play, "The Lady of Lyons"; but when it came to Shylock, a quite new part to him, he tried the experiment, and, as he told me, with great comfort to himself and success with the audience. Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite. Even up to the last five years of his life, Henry Irving was striving, striving. He never rested on old triumphs, never found a part in which there was no more to do. Once when I was touring with him in America, at the time when he was at the highest point of his fame, I watched him one day in the train--always a delightful occupation, for his face provided many pictures a minute--and being struck by a curious look, half puzzled, half despairing, asked him what he was thinking about. "I was thinking," he answered slowly, "how strange it is that I should have made the reputation I have as an actor, with nothing to help me--with no equipment. My legs, my voice--everything has been against me. For an actor who can't walk, can't talk, and has no face to speak of, I've done pretty well." And I, looking at that splendid head, those wonderful hands, the whole strange beauty of him, thought, "Ah, you little know!" PORTIA 1875 The brilliant story of the Bancroft management of the old Prince of Wales's Theater was more familiar twenty years back than it is now. I think that few of the youngest playgoers who point out, on the first nights of important productions, a remarkably striking figure of a man with erect carriage, white hair, and flashing dark eyes--a man whose eye-glass, manners, and clothes all suggest Thackeray and Major Pendennis, in spite of his success in keeping abreast of everything modern--few playgoers, I say, who point this man out as Sir Squire Bancroft could give any adequate account of what he did for the English theater in the 'seventies. Nor do the public who see an elegant little lady starting for a drive from a certain house in Berkeley Square realize that this is Marie Wilton, afterward Mrs. Bancroft, now Lady Bancroft, the comedienne who created the heroines of Tom Robertson, and, with her husband, brought what is called the cup-and-saucer drama to absolute perfection. We players know quite well and accept with philosophy the fact that when we have done we are forgotten. We are sometimes told that we live too much in the public eye and enjoy too much public favor and attention; but at least we make up for it by leaving no trace of our short and merry reign behind us when it is over! I have never, even in Paris, seen anything more admirable than the ensemble of the Bancroft productions. Every part in the domestic comedies, the presentation of which, up to 1875, they had made their policy, was played with such point and finish that the more rough, uneven, and emotional acting of the present day has not produced anything so good in the same line. The Prince of Wales's Theater was the most fashionable in London, and there seemed no reason why the triumph of Robertson should not go on for ever. But that's the strange thing about theatrical success. However great, it is limited in its force and duration, as we found out at the Lyceum twenty years later. It was not only because the Bancrofts were ambitious that they determined on a Shakespearean revival in 1875: they felt that you can give the public too much even of a good thing, and thought that a complete change might bring their theater new popularity as well as new honor. I, however, thought little of this at the time. After my return to the stage in "The Wandering Heir" and my tour with Charles Reade, my interest in the theater again declined. It has always been my fate or my nature--perhaps they are really the same thing--to be very happy or very miserable. At this time I was very miserable. I was worried to death by domestic troubles and financial difficulties. The house in which I first lived in London, after I left Hertfordshire, had been dismantled of some of its most beautiful treasures by the brokers. Pressure was being put on me by well-meaning friends to leave this house and make a great change in my life. Everything was at its darkest when Mrs. Bancroft came to call on me and offered me the part of Portia in "The Merchant of Venice." I had, of course, known her before, in the way that all people in the theater seem to know each other, and I had seen her act; but on this day, when she came to me as a kind of messenger of Fate, the harbinger of the true dawn of my success, she should have had for me some special and extraordinary significance. I could invest that interview now with many dramatic features, but my memory, either because it is bad or because it is good, corrects my imagination. "May I come in?" An ordinary remark, truly, to stick in one's head for thirty-odd years! But it was made in such a _very_ pretty voice--one of the most silvery voices I have ever heard from any woman except the late Queen Victoria, whose voice was like a silver stream flowing over golden stones. The smart little figure--Mrs. Bancroft was, above all things, _petite_--dressed in black--elegant Parisian black--came into a room which had been almost completely stripped of furniture. The floor was covered with Japanese matting, and at one end was a cast of the Venus of Milo, almost the same colossal size as the original. Mrs. Bancroft's wonderful gray eyes, examined it curiously. The room, the statue, and I myself must all have seemed very strange to her. I wore a dress of some deep yellow woolen material which my little daughter used to call the "frog dress," because it was speckled with brown like a frog's skin. It was cut like a Viollet-le-Duc tabard, and had not a trace of the fashion of the time. Mrs. Bancroft, however, did not look at me less kindly because I wore aesthetic clothes and was painfully thin. She explained that they were going to put on "The Merchant of Venice" at the Prince of Wales's, that she was to rest for a while for reasons connected with her health; that she and Mr. Bancroft had thought of me for Portia. Portia! It seemed too good to be true! I was a student when I was young. I knew not only every word of the part, but every detail of that period of Venetian splendor in which the action of the play takes place. I had studied Vecellio. Now I am old, it is impossible for me to work like that, but I never acknowledge that I get on as well without it. Mrs. Bancroft told me that the production would be as beautiful as money and thought could make it. The artistic side of the venture was to be in the hands of Mr. Godwin, who had designed my dress for Titania at Bristol. "Well, what do you say?" said Mrs. Bancroft. "Will you put your shoulder to the wheel with us?" I answered incoherently and joyfully, that of all things I had been wanting most to play in Shakespeare; that in Shakespeare I had always felt I would play for half the salary; that--oh, I don't know what I said! Probably it was all very foolish and unbusinesslike, but the engagement was practically settled before Mrs. Bancroft left the house, although I was charged not to say anything about it yet. But theater secrets are generally _secrets de polichinelle_. When I went to Charles Reade's house at Albert Gate on the following Sunday for one of his regular Sunday parties, he came up to me at once with a knowing look and said: "So you've got an engagement." "I'm not to say anything about it." "It's in Shakespeare!" "I'm not to tell." "But I know. I've been thinking it out. It's 'The Merchant of Venice.'" "Nothing is settled yet. It's on the cards." "I know! I know!" said wise old Charles. "Well, you'll never have such a good part as Philippa Chester!" "No, Nelly, never!" said Mrs. Seymour, who happened to overhear this. "They call Philippa a Rosalind part. Rosalind! Rosalind is not to be compared with it!" Between Mrs. Seymour and Charles Reade existed a friendship of that rare sort about which it is easy for people who are not at all rare, unfortunately, to say ill-natured things. Charles Reade worshiped Laura Seymour, and she understood him and sympathized with his work and his whims. She died before he did, and he never got over it. The great success of one of his last plays, "Drink," an adaptation from the French, in which Charles Warner is still thrilling audiences to this day, meant nothing to him because she was not alive to share it. The "In Memoriam" which he had inscribed over her grave is characteristic of the man, the woman, and their friendship: HERE LIES THE GREAT HEART OF LAURA SEYMOUR I liked Mrs. Seymour so much that I was hurt when I found that she had instructed Charles Reade to tell Nelly Terry "not to paint her face" in the daytime, and I was young enough to enjoy revenging myself in my own way. We used to play childish games at Charles Reade's house sometimes, and with "Follow my leader" came my opportunity. I asked for a basin of water and a towel and scrubbed my face with a significant thoroughness. The rules of the game meant that everyone had to follow my example! When I had dried my face I powdered it, and then darkened my eyebrows. I wished to be quite frank about the harmless little bit of artifice which Mrs. Seymour had exaggerated into a crime. She was now hoist with her own petard, for, being heavily made up, she could not and would not follow the leader. After this Charles Reade acquitted me of the use of "pigments red," but he still kept up a campaign against "Chalky," as he humorously christened my powder-puff. "Don't be pig-headed, love," he wrote to me once; "it is because Chalky does not improve you that I forbid it. Trust unprejudiced and friendly eyes and drop it altogether." Although Mrs. Seymour was naturally prejudiced where Charles Reade's work was concerned, she only spoke the truth, pardonably exaggerated, about the part of Philippa Chester. I know no part which is a patch on it for effectiveness; yet there is little in it of the stuff which endures. The play itself was too unbusiness like ever to become a classic. Not for years afterwards did I find out that I was not the "first choice" for Portia. The Bancrofts had tried the Kendals first, with the idea of making a double engagement; but the negotiations failed. Perhaps the rivalry between Mrs. Kendal and me might have become of more significance had she appeared as Portia at the Prince of Wales's and preferred Shakespeare to domestic comedy. In after years she played Rosalind--I never did, alas!--and quite recently acted with me in "The Merry Wives of Windsor"; but the best of her fame will always be associated with such plays as "The Squire," "The Ironmaster," "Lady Clancarty," and many more plays of that type. When she played with me in Shakespeare she laughingly challenged me to come and play with her in a modern piece, a domestic play, and I said, "Done!" but it has not been done yet, although in Mrs. Clifford's "The Likeness of the Night" there was a good medium for the experiment. I found Mrs. Kendal wonderful to act with. No other English actress has such extraordinary skill. Of course, people have said we are jealous of each other. "Ellen Terry Acts with Lifelong Enemy," proclaimed an American newspaper in five-inch type, when we played together as Mistress Page and Mistress Ford in Mr. Tree's Coronation production of "The Merry Wives of Windsor." But the enmity did not seem to worry us as much as the newspaper men over the Atlantic had represented. It was during this engagement in 1902 that a young actor who was watching us coming in at the stage-door at His Majesty's one day is reported to have said: "Look at Mr. Tree between his two 'stars'!" "You mean Ancient Lights!" answered the witty actress to whom the remark was made. However, "e'en in our ashes burn our wonted fires," or, to descend from the sublime to the ridiculous, and from the poetry of Gray to the pantomime gag of Drury Lane and Herbert Campbell, "Better to be a good old has-been than a never-was-er!" But it was long before the "has-been" days that Mrs. Kendal decided not to bring her consummately dexterous and humorous workmanship to the task of playing Portia, and left the field open for me. My fires were only just beginning to burn. Success I had had of a kind, and I had tasted the delight of knowing that audiences liked me, and had liked them back again. But never until I appeared as Portia at the Prince of Wales's had I experienced that awe-struck feeling which comes, I suppose, to no actress more than once in a lifetime--the feeling of the conqueror. In homely parlance, I knew that I had "got them" at the moment when I spoke the speech beginning, "You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand." "What can this be?" I thought. "_Quite_ this thing has never come to me before! _This is different!_ It has never been quite the same before." It was never to be quite the same again. Elation, triumph, being lifted on high by a single stroke of the mighty wing of glory--call it by any name, think of it as you like--it was as Portia that I had my first and last sense of it. And, while it made me happy, it made me miserable because I foresaw, as plainly as my own success, another's failure. Charles Coghlan, an actor whose previous record was fine enough to justify his engagement as Shylock, showed that night the fatal quality of _indecision_. A worse performance than his, carried through with decision and attack, might have succeeded, but Coghlan's Shylock was not even bad. It was _nothing_. You could hardly hear a word he said. He spoke as though he had a sponge in his mouth, and moved as if paralyzed. The perspiration poured down his face; yet what he was doing no one could guess. It was a case of moral cowardice rather than incompetency. At rehearsals no one had entirely believed in him, and this, instead of stinging him into a resolution to triumph, had made him take fright and run away. People felt that they were witnessing a great play with a great part cut out, and "The Merchant of Venice" ran for three weeks! It was a pity, if only because a more gorgeous and complete little spectacle had never been seen on the English stage. Veronese's "Marriage in Cana" had inspired many of the stage pictures, and the expenditure in carrying them out had been lavish. In the casket scene I wore a dress like almond-blossom. I was very thin, but Portia and all the ideal _young_ heroines of Shakespeare ought to be thin. Fat is fatal to ideality! I played the part more stiffly and more slowly at the Prince of Wales's than I did in later years. I moved and spoke slowly. The clothes seemed to demand it, and the setting of the play developed the Italian feeling in it, and let the English Elizabethan side take care of itself. The silver casket scene with the Prince of Aragon was preserved, and so was the last act, which had hitherto been cut out in nearly all stage versions. I have tried five or six different ways of treating Portia, but the way I think best is not the one which finds the heartiest response from my audiences. Has there ever been a dramatist, I wonder, whose parts admit of as many different interpretations as do Shakespeare's? There lies his immortality as an acting force. For times change, and parts have to be acted differently for different generations. Some parts are not sufficiently universal for this to be possible, but every ten years an actor can reconsider a Shakespeare part and find new life in it for his new purpose and new audiences. The aesthetic craze, with all its faults, was responsible for a great deal of true enthusiasm for anything beautiful. It made people welcome the Bancrofts' production of "The Merchant of Venice" with an appreciation which took the practical form of an offer to keep the performances going by subscription, as the general public was not supporting them. Sir Frederick and Lady Pollock, James Spedding, Edwin Arnold, Sir Frederick Leighton and others made the proposal to the Bancrofts, but nothing came of it. Short as the run of the play was, it was a wonderful time for me. Everyone seemed to be in love with me! I had sweethearts by the dozen, known and unknown. Most of the letters written to me I destroyed long ago, but the feeling of sweetness and light with which some of them filled me can never be destroyed. The task of reading and answering letters has been a heavy one all my life, but it would be ungrateful to complain of it. To some people expression is life itself. Half my letters begin: "I cannot help writing to tell you," and I believe that this is the simple truth. I, for one, should have been poorer, though my eyes might have been stronger, if they _had_ been able to help it. There turns up to-day, out of a long-neglected box, a charming note about "The Merchant of Venice" from some unknown friend. "Playing to such houses," he wrote, "is not an encouraging pursuit; but to give to human beings the greatest pleasure that they are capable of receiving must always be worth doing. You have given me that pleasure, and I write to offer you my poor thanks. Portia has always been my favorite heroine, and I saw her last night as sweet and lovely as I had always hoped she might be. I hope that I shall see you again in other Shakespearean characters, and that nothing will tempt you to withhold your talents from their proper sphere." The audiences may have been scanty, but they were wonderful. O'Shaughnessy, Watts-Dunton, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Gilbert, and, I think Swinburne were there. A poetic and artistic atmosphere pervaded the front of the house as well as the stage itself. TOM TAYLOR AND LAVENDER SWEEP I have read in some of the biographies of me that have been published from time to time, that I was chagrined at Coghlan's fiasco because it brought my success as Portia so soon to an end. As a matter of fact, I never thought about it. I was just sorry for clever Coghlan, who was deeply hurt and took his defeat hardly and moodily. He wiped out the public recollection of it to a great extent by his Evelyn in "Money," Sir Charles Pomander in "Masks and Faces," and Claude Melnotte in "The Lady of Lyons," which he played with me at the Princess's Theater for one night only in the August following the withdrawal of "The Merchant of Venice." I have been credited with great generosity for appearing in that single performance of "The Lady of Lyons." It was said that I wanted to help Coghlan reinstate himself, and so on. Very likely there was some such feeling in the matter, but there was also a good part and good remuneration! I remember that I played Lytton's proud heroine better then than I did at the Lyceum five years later, and Coghlan was more successful as Melnotte than Henry Irving. But I was never really _good_. I tried in vain to have sympathy with a lady who was addressed as "haughty cousin," yet whose very pride had so much inconsistency. How could any woman fall in love with a cad like Melnotte? I used to ask myself despairingly. The very fact that I tried to understand Pauline was against me. There is only one way to play her, and to be bothered by questions of sincerity and consistency means that you will miss that way for a certainty! I missed it, and fell between two stools. Finding that it was useless to depend upon feeling, I groped after the definite rules which had always governed the delivery of Pauline's fustian, and the fate that commonly overtakes those who try to put old wine into new bottles overtook me. I knew for instance, exactly how the following speech ought to be done, but I never could do it. It occurs in the fourth act, where Beauseant, after Pauline has been disillusioned, thinks it will be an easy matter to induce the proud beauty to fly with him: "Go! (_White to the lips._) Sir, leave this house! It is humble; but a husband's roof, however lowly, is, in the eyes of God and man, the temple of a wife's honor. (_Tumultuous applause._) Know that I would rather starve--aye, _starve_--with him who has betrayed me than accept _your_ lawful hand, even were you the prince whose name he bore. (_Hurrying on quickly to prevent applause before the finish._) _Go!_" It is easy to laugh at Lytton's rhetoric, but very few dramatists have had a more complete mastery of theatrical situations, and that is a good thing to be master of. Why the word "theatrical" should have come to be used in a contemptuous sense I cannot understand. "Musical" is a word of praise in music; why not "theatrical" in a theater? A play in any age which holds the boards so continuously as "The Lady of Lyons" deserves more consideration than the ridicule of those who think that the world has moved on because our playwrights write more naturally than Lytton did. The merit of the play lay, not in its bombast, but in its situation. Before Pauline I had played Clara Douglas in a revival of "Money," and I found her far more interesting and possible. To act the _balance_ of the girl was keen enjoyment; it foreshadowed some of that greater enjoyment I was to have in after years when playing Hermione--another well-judged, well-balanced mind, a woman who is not passion's slave, who never answers on the spur of the moment, but from the depths of reason and divine comprehension. I didn't agree with Clara Douglas's sentiments but I saw her point of view, and that was everything. Tom Taylor, like Charles Reade, never hesitated to speak plainly to me about my acting, and, after the first night of "Money," wrote me a letter full of hints and caution and advice: "As I expected, you put feeling into every situation which gave you the opportunity, and the truth of your intention and expression seemed to bring a note of nature into the horribly sophisticated atmosphere of that hollow and most claptrappy of all Bulwerian stage offenses. Nothing could be better than the appeal to Evelyn in the last act. It was sweet, womanly and earnest, and rang true in every note. "_But_ you were nervous and uncomfortable in many parts for want of sufficient rehearsal. These passages you will, no doubt, improve in nightly. I would only urge on you the great importance of studying to be quiet and composed, and not fidgeting. There was especially a trick of constantly twiddling with and looking at your fingers which you should, above all, be on your guard against.... I think, too, you showed too evident feeling in the earlier scene with Evelyn. A blind man must have read what you felt--your sentiment should be more masked. "Laura (Mrs. Taylor) absolutely hates the play. We both thought--detestable in his part, false in emphasis, violent and coarse. Generally the fault of the performance was, strange to say for that theater, overacting, want of repose, point, and finish. With you in essentials I was quite satisfied, but _quiet_--not so much movement of arms and hands. Bear this in mind for improvement; and go over your part to yourself with a view to it. "The Allinghams have been here to-day. They saw you twice as Portia, and were charmed. Mrs. Allingham wants to paint you. Allingham tells me that Spedding is going to write an article on your Portia, and will include Clara Douglas. I am going to see Salvini in 'Hamlet' to-morrow morning, but I would call in Charlotte Street between one and two, on the chance of seeing you and talking it over, and amplifying what I have said. "Ever your true old friend, "TOM TAYLOR." A true old friend indeed he was! I have already tried to convey how much I owed to him--how he stood by me and helped me in difficulties, and said generously and unequivocally, at the time of my separation from my first husband, that "the poor child was not to blame." I was very fond of my own father, but in many ways Tom Taylor was more of a father to me than my father in blood. Father was charming, but Irish and irresponsible. I think he loved my sister Floss and me most because we were the lawless ones of the family! It was not in his temperament to give wise advice and counsel. Having bequeathed to me light-heartedness and a sanguine disposition, and trained me splendidly for my profession in childhood, he became in after years a very cormorant for adulation of me! "Duchess, you might have been anything!" was his favorite comment, when I was not living up to his ideas of my position and attainments. And I used to answer: "I've played my cards for what I want." Years afterwards, when he and mother used to come to first nights at the Lyceum, the grossest flattery of me after the performance was not good enough for them. "How proud you must be of her!" someone would say. "How well this part suits her!" "Yes," father would answer, in a sort of "is-that-all-you-have-to-say" tone. "But she ought to play Rosalind!" To him I owe the gaiety of temperament which has enabled me to dance through the most harsh and desert passages of my life, just as he used to make Kate and me dance along the sordid London streets as we walked home from the Princess's Theater. He would make us come under his cloak, partly for warmth, partly to hide from us the stages of the journey home. From the comfortable darkness one of us would cry out: "Oh, I'm so tired! Aren't we nearly home? Where are we, father?" "You know Schwab, the baker?" "Yes, yes." "Well, we're _not_ there yet!" As I grew up, this teasing, jolly, insouciant Irish father of mine was relieved of some of his paternal duties by Tom Taylor. It was not Nelly alone whom Tom Taylor fathered. He adopted the whole family. At Lavender Sweep, with the horse-chestnut blossoms strewing the drive and making it look like a tessellated pavement, all of us were always welcome, and Tom Taylor would often come to our house and ask mother to grill him a bone! Such intimate friendships are seldom possible in our busy profession, and there was never another Tom Taylor in my life. When we were not in London and could not go to Lavender Sweep to see him, he wrote almost daily to us. He was angry when other people criticised me, but he did not spare criticism himself. "Don't be Nelly Know-all," I remember his saying once. "_I_ saw you floundering out of your depth to-night on the subject of butterflies! The man to whom you were talking is one of the greatest entomologists in Europe, and must have seen through you at once." When William Black's "Madcap Violet" was published, common report said that the heroine had been drawn for Ellen Terry, and some of the reviews made Taylor furious. "It's disgraceful! I shall deny it. Never will I let it be said of you that you could conceive any vulgarity. I shall write and contradict it. Indiscreet, high-spirited, full of surprises, you may be, but vulgar--never! I shall write at once." "Don't do that," I said. "Can't you see that the author hasn't described me, but only me in 'New Men and Old Acres'?" As this was Tom Taylor's own play, his rage against "Madcap Violet" was very funny! "There am I, just as you wrote it. My actions, manners, and clothes in the play are all reproduced. You ought to feel pleased, not angry." When his play "Victims" was being rehearsed at the Court Theater, an old woman and old actress who had, I think, been in the preceding play was not wanted. The day the management gave her her dismissal, she met Taylor outside the theater, and poured out a long story of distress. She had not a stocking to her foot, she owed her rent, she was starving. Wouldn't Mr. Taylor tell the management what dismissal meant to her? Wouldn't he get her taken back? Mr. Taylor would try, and Mr. Taylor gave her fifteen pounds in the street then and there! Mrs. Taylor wasn't surprised. She only wondered it wasn't thirty! "Tom the Adapter" was the Terry dramatist for many years. Kate played in many of the pieces which, some openly, some deviously, he brought into the English stage from the French. When Kate married, my turn came, and the interest that he had taken in my sister's talent he transferred in part to me, although I don't think he ever thought me her equal. Floss made her first appearance in the child's part in Taylor's play "A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing," and Marion her first appearance as Ophelia in his version of "Hamlet"--perhaps "perversion" would be an honester description! Taylor introduced a "fool" who went about whacking people, including the Prince, by way of brightening up the tragedy. I never saw my sister's Ophelia, but I know it was a fine send-off for her and that she must have looked lovely. Oh, what a pretty young girl she was! Her golden-brown eyes exactly matched her hair, and she was the winsomest thing imaginable! From the first she showed talent. From Taylor's letters I find--and, indeed, without them I could not have forgotten--that the good, kind friend never ceased to work in our interests. "I have recommended Flossy to play Lady Betty in the country." "I have written to the Bancrofts in favor of Forbes-Robertson for Bassanio." (Evidently this was in answer to a request from me. Naturally, the Bancrofts wanted someone of higher standing, but was I wrong about J. Forbes-Robertson? I think not!) "The mother came to see me the other day. I was extremely sorry to hear the bad news of Tom." (Tom was the black sheep of our family, but a fascinating wretch, all the same.) "I rejoice to think of your coming back," he writes another time, "to show the stage what an actress should be." "A thousand thanks for the photographs. I like the profile best. It is most Paolo Veronesish and gives the right notion of your Portia, although the color hardly suggests the golden gorgeousness of your dress and the blonde glory of the hair and complexion.... I hope you have seen the quiet little boxes at ----'s foolish article." (This refers to an article which attacked my Portia in _Blackwood's Magazine_.) "Of course, if ---- found his ideal in ---- he must dislike you in Portia, or in anything where it is a case of grace and spontaneity and Nature against affectation, over-emphasis, stilt, and false idealism--in short, utter lack of Nature. How _can_ the same critic admire both? However, the public is with you, happily, as it is not always when the struggle is between good art and bad." I quote these dear letters from my friend, not in my praise, but in his. Until his death in 1880, he never ceased to write to me sympathetically and encouragingly; he rejoiced in my success the more because he had felt himself in part responsible for my marriage and its unhappy ending, and had perhaps feared that my life would suffer. Every little detail about me and my children, or about any of my family, was of interest to him. He was never too busy to give an attentive ear to my difficulties. "'Think of you lovingly if I can'!" he writes to me at a time when I had taken a course for which all blamed me, perhaps because they did not know enough to pardon enough--_savoir tout c'est tout pardonner_. "Can I think of you otherwise than lovingly? _Never_, if I know you and myself!" Tom Taylor got through an enormous amount of work. Dramatic critic and art critic for the _Times_, he was also editor of _Punch_ and a busy playwright. Everyone who wanted an address written or a play altered came to him, and his house was a kind of Mecca for pilgrims from America and from all parts of the world. Yet he all the time occupied a position in a Government office--the Home Office, I think it was--and often walked from Whitehall to Lavender Sweep when his day's work was done. He was an enthusiastic amateur actor, his favorite part being Adam in "As You Like It," perhaps because tradition says this was a part that Shakespeare played; at any rate, he was very good in it. Gilbert and Sullivan, in very far-off days, used to be concerned in these amateur theatricals. Their names were not associated then, but Kate and I established a prophetic link by carrying on a mild flirtation, I with Arthur Sullivan, Kate with Mr. Gilbert! Taylor never wasted a moment. He pottered, but thought deeply all the time; and when I used to watch him plucking at his gray beard, I realized that he was just as busy as if his pen had been plucking at his paper. Many would-be writers complain that the necessity of earning a living in some other and more secure profession hinders them from achieving anything. What about Taylor at the Home Office, Charles Lamb at East India House, and Rousseau copying music for bread? It all depends on the point of view. A young lady in Chicago, who has written some charming short stories, told me how eagerly she was looking forward to the time when she would be able to give up teaching and devote herself entirely to a literary career. I wondered, and said I was never sure whether absolute freedom in such a matter was desirable. Perhaps Charles Lamb was all the better for being a slave at the desk for so many years. "Ah, but then, Charles Lamb wrote so little!" was the remarkable answer. Taylor did not write "so little." He wrote perhaps too much, and I think his heart was too strong for his brain. He was far too simple and lovable a being to be great. The atmosphere of gaiety which pervaded Lavender Sweep arose from his generous, kindly nature, which insisted that it was possible for everyone to have a good time. Once, when we were rushing to catch a train with him, Kate hanging onto one arm and I onto the other, we all three fell down the station steps. "Now, then, none of your jokes!" said a cross man behind us, who seemed to attribute our descent to rowdyism. Taylor stood up with his soft felt hat bashed over one eye, his spectacles broken, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed! Lavender Sweep was a sort of house of call for everyone of note. Mazzini stayed there some time, and Steele Mackaye, the American actor who played that odd version of "Hamlet" at the Crystal Palace with Polly as Ophelia. Perhaps a man with more acute literary conscience than Taylor would not have condescended to "write up" Shakespeare; perhaps a man of more independence and ambition would not have wasted his really fine accomplishment as a playwright for ever on adaptations. That was his weakness--if it was a weakness. He lived entirely for his age, and so was more prominent in it than Charles Reade, for instance, whose name, no doubt, will live longer. He put himself at the mercy of Whistler, once, in some Velasquez controversy of which I forget the details, but they are all set out, for those who like mordant ridicule, in "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies." When Tom Taylor criticised acting he wrote as an expert, and he often said illuminating things to me about actors and actresses which I could apply over again to some of the players with whom I have been associated since. "She is a curious example," he said once of an actress of great conscientiousness, "of how far seriousness, sincerity, and weight will supply the place of almost all the other qualities of an actress." When a famous classic actress reappeared as Rosalind, he described her performance as "all minute-guns and _minauderies_, ... a foot between every word, and the intensity of the emphasis entirely destroying all the spontaneity and flow of spirits which alone excuse and explain; ... as unlike Shakespeare's Rosalind, I will stake my head, as human personation could be!" There was some talk at that time (the early 'seventies) of my playing Rosalind at Manchester for Mr. Charles Calvert, and Tom Taylor urged me to do it. "Then," he said charmingly, "I can sing my stage Nunc Dimittis." The whole plan fell through, including a project for me to star as Juliet to the Romeo of a lady! I have already said that the Taylors' home was one of the most softening and culturing influences of my early life. Would that I could give an impression of the dear host at the head of his dinner-table, dressed in black silk knee-breeches and velvet cutaway coat--a survival of a politer time, not an affectation of it--beaming on his guests with his _very_ brown eyes! Lavender is still associated in my mind with everything that is lovely and refined. My mother nearly always wore the color, and the Taylors lived at Lavender Sweep! This may not be an excellent reason for my feelings on the subject, but it is reason good enough. "Nature repairs her ravages," it is said, but not all. New things come into one's life--new loves, new joys, new interests, new friends--but they cannot replace the old. When Tom Taylor died, I lost a friend the like of whom I never had again. VI A YEAR WITH THE BANCROFTS My engagement with the Bancrofts lasted a little over a year. After Portia there was nothing momentous about it. I found Clara Douglas difficult, but I enjoyed playing her. I found Mabel Vane easy, and I enjoyed playing her, too, although there was less to be proud of in my success here. Almost anyone could have "walked in" to victory on such very simple womanly emotion as the part demanded. At this time friends who had fallen in love with Portia used to gather at the Prince of Wales's and applaud me in a manner more vigorous than judicious. It was their fault that it got about that I had hired a claque to clap me! Now, it seems funny, but at the time I was deeply hurt at the insinuation, and it cast a shadow over what would otherwise have been a very happy time. It is the way of the public sometimes, to keep all their enthusiasm for an actress who is doing well in a minor part, and to withhold it from the actress who is playing the leading part. I don't say for a minute that Mrs. Bancroft's Peg Woffington in "Masks and Faces" was not appreciated and applauded, but I know that my Mabel Vane was received with a warmth out of all proportion to the merits of my performance, and that this angered some of Mrs. Bancroft's admirers, and made them the bearers of ill-natured stories. Any unpleasantness that it caused between us personally was of the briefest duration. It would have been odd indeed if I had been jealous of her, or she of me. Apart from all else, I had met with my little bit of success in such a different field, and she was almost another Madame Vestris in popular esteem. When I was playing Blanche Hayes in "Ours," I nearly killed Mrs. Bancroft with the bayonet which it was part of the business of the play for me to "fool" with. I charged as usual; either she made a mistake and moved to the right instead of to the left, or _I_ made a mistake. Anyhow, I wounded her in the arm. She had to wear it in a sling, and I felt very badly about it, all the more because of the ill-natured stories of its being no accident. Miss Marie Tempest is perhaps the actress of the present day who reminds me a little of what Mrs. Bancroft was at the Prince of Wales's, but neither nature nor art succeed in producing two actresses exactly alike. At her best Mrs. Bancroft was unapproachable. I think that the best thing I ever saw her do was the farewell to the boy in "Sweethearts." It was exquisite! In "Masks and Faces" Taylor and Reade had collaborated, and the exact share of each in the result was left to one's own discernment. I remember saying to Taylor one night at dinner when Reade was sitting opposite me, that I wished he (Taylor) would write me a part like that. "If only I could have an original part like Peg!" Charles Reade, after fixing me with his amused and _very_ glittering eye, said across the table: "I have something for your private ear, Madam, after this repast!" And he came up _with_ the ladies, sat by me, and, calling me "an artful toad"--a favorite expression of his for me!--told me that _he_, Charles Reade and no other, had written every line of Peg, and that I ought to have known it. I _didn't_ know, as a matter of fact, but perhaps it was stupid of me. There was more of Tom Taylor in Mabel Vane. I played five parts in all at the Prince of Wales's, and I think I may claim that the Bancrofts found me a _useful_ actress--ever the dull height of my ambition! They wanted Byron--the author of "Our Boys"--to write me a part in the new play, which they had ordered from him, but when "Wrinkles" turned up there was no part which they felt they could offer me, and I think Coghlan was also not included in the cast. At any rate, he was free to take me to see Henry Irving act. Coghlan was always raving about Irving at this time. He said that one evening spent in watching him act was the best education an actor could have. Seeing other people act, even if they are not Irvings, is always an education to us. I have never been to a theater yet without learning something. It must have been in the spring of 1876 that I received this note: "Will you come in our box on Tuesday for Queen Mary? Ever yours, "CHARLES T. COGHLAN. "P.S.--I am afraid that they will soon have to smooth their wrinkled front of the P. of W. Alas! Hélas! Ah, me!" This postscript, I think, must have referred to the approaching withdrawal of "Wrinkles" from the Prince of Wales's, and the return of Coghlan and myself to the cast. Meanwhile, we went to see Irving's King Philip. Well, I can only say that he never did anything better to the day of his death. Never shall I forget his expression and manner when Miss Bateman, as Queen Mary (she was _very_ good, by the way), was pouring out her heart to him. The horrid, dead look, the cruel unresponsiveness, the indifference of the creature! While the poor woman protested and wept, he went on polishing up his ring! Then the tone in which he asked: "Is dinner ready?" It was the perfection of quiet malignity and cruelty. The extraordinary advance that he had made since the days when we had acted together at the Queen's Theater did not occur to me. I was just spellbound by a study in cruelty, which seemed to me a triumphant assertion of the power of the actor to create as well as to interpret, for Tennyson never suggested half what Henry Irving did. We talk of progress, improvement, and advance; but when I think of Henry Irving's Philip, I begin to wonder if Oscar Wilde was not profound as well as witty when he said that a great artist moves in a cycle of masterpieces, of which the last is no more perfect than the first. Only Irving's Petruchio stops me. But, then, he had not found himself. He was not an artist. "Why did Whistler paint him as Philip?" some one once asked me. How dangerous to "ask why" about anyone so freakish as Jimmy Whistler. But I answered then, and would answer now, that it was because, as Philip, Henry, in his dress without much color (from the common point of view), his long, gray legs, and Velasquez-like attitudes, looked like the kind of thing which Whistler loved to paint. Velasquez had painted a real Philip of the same race. Whistler would paint the actor who had created the Philip of the stage. I have a note from Whistler written to Henry at a later date which refers to the picture, and suggests portraying him in all his characters. It is common knowledge that the sitter never cared much about the portrait. Henry had a strange affection for the wrong picture of himself. He disliked the Bastien Lepage, the Whistler, and the Sargent, which never even saw the light. He adored the weak, handsome picture by Millais, which I must admit, all the same, held the mirror up to one of the characteristics of Henry's face--its extreme refinement. Whistler's Philip probably seemed to him not nearly showy enough. Whistler I knew long before he painted the Philip. He gave me the most lovely dinner-set of blue and white Nanking that any woman ever possessed, and a set of Venetian glass, too good for a world where glass is broken. He sent my little girl a tiny Japanese kimono when Liberty was hardly a name. Many of his friends were my friends. He was with the dearest of those friends when he died. The most remarkable men I have known were, without a doubt, Whistler and Oscar Wilde. This does not imply that I liked them better or admired them more than the others, but there was something about both of them more instantaneously individual and audacious than it is possible to describe. When I went with Coghlan to see Henry Irving's Philip I was no stranger to his acting. I had been present with Tom Taylor, then dramatic critic of _The Times_, at the famous first night at the Lyceum in 1874, when Henry Irving put his fortune, counted not in gold, but in years of scorned delights and laborious days--years of constant study and reflection, of Spartan self-denial, and deep melancholy--I was present when he put it all to the touch "to win or lose it all." This is no exaggeration. Hamlet was by far the greatest part that he had ever played, or was ever to play. If he had failed--but why pursue it? He could not fail. Yet the success on the first night at the Lyceum in 1874 was not of that electrical, almost hysterical splendor which has greeted the momentous achievements of some actors. The first two acts were received with indifference. The people could not see how packed they were with superb acting--perhaps because the new Hamlet was so simple, so quiet, so free from the exhibition of actors' artifices which used to bring down the house in "Louis XI" and in "Richelieu," but which were really the _easy_ things in acting, and in "Richelieu" (in my opinion) not especially well done. In "Hamlet" Henry Irving did not go to the audience. He made them come to him. Slowly but surely attention gave place to admiration, admiration to enthusiasm, enthusiasm to triumphant acclaim. I have seen many Hamlets--Fechter, Charles Kean, Rossi, Frederick Haas, Forbes-Robertson, and my own son, Gordon Craig, among them, but they were not in the same hemisphere! I refuse to go and see Hamlets now. I want to keep Henry Irving's fresh and clear in my memory until I die. When he engaged me to play Ophelia in 1878 he asked me to go down to Birmingham to see the play, and that night I saw what I shall always consider the _perfection_ of acting. It had been wonderful in 1874. In 1878 it was far more wonderful. It has been said that when he had the "advantage" of my Ophelia, his Hamlet "improved." I don't think so. He was always quite independent of the people with whom he acted. The Birmingham night he knew I was there. He played--I say it without vanity--for me. We players are not above that weakness, if it be a weakness. If ever anything inspires us to do our best it is the presence in the audience of some fellow-artist who must in the nature of things know more completely than any one what we intend, what we do, what we feel. The response from such a member of the audience flies across the footlights to us like a flame. I felt it once when I played Olivia before Eleonora Duse. I felt that she felt it once when she played Marguerite Gauthier for me. When I read "Hamlet" now, everything that Henry did in it seems to me more absolutely right, even than I thought at the time. I would give much to be able to record it all in detail--but it may be my fault--writing is not the medium in which this can be done. Sometimes I have thought of giving readings of "Hamlet," for I can remember every tone of Henry's voice, every emphasis, every shade of meaning that he saw in the lines and made manifest to the discerning. Yes, I think I could give some pale idea of what his Hamlet was if I read the play. "Words! words! words!" What is it to say, for instance, that the cardinal qualities of his Prince of Denmark were strength, delicacy, distinction? There was never a touch of commonness. Whatever he did or said, blood and breeding pervaded him. His "make-up" was very pale, and this made his face beautiful when one was close to him, but at a distance it gave him a haggard look. Some said he looked twice his age. He kept three things going at the same time--the antic madness, the sanity, the sense of the theater. The last was to all that he imagined and thought, what charity is said by St. Paul to be to all other virtues. He was never cross or moody--only melancholy. His melancholy was as simple as it was profound. It was touching, too, rather than defiant. You never thought that he was wantonly sad and enjoying his own misery. He neglected no _coup de théâtre_ to assist him, but who notices the servants when the host is present? For instance, his first entrance as Hamlet was, what we call in the theater, very much "worked up." He was always a tremendous believer in processions, and rightly. It is through such means that Royalty keeps its hold on the feeling of the public, and makes its mark as a Figure and a Symbol. Henry Irving understood this. Therefore, to music so apt that it was not remarkable in itself, but merely a contribution to the general excited anticipation, the Prince of Denmark came on to the stage. I understood later on at the Lyceum what days of patient work had gone to the making of that procession. At its tail, when the excitement was at fever heat, came the solitary figure of Hamlet, looking extraordinarily tall and thin. The lights were turned down--another stage trick--to help the effect that the figure was spirit rather than man. He was weary--his cloak trailed on the ground. He did _not_ wear the miniature of his father obtrusively round his neck! His attitude was one which I have seen in a common little illumination to the "Reciter," compiled by Dr. Pinches (Henry Irving's old schoolmaster). Yet how right to have taken it, to have been indifferent to its humble origin! Nothing could have been better when translated into life by Irving's genius. The hair looked blue-black, like the plumage of a crow, the eyes burning--two fires veiled as yet by melancholy. But the appearance of the man was not single, straight or obvious, as it is when I describe it--any more than his passions throughout the play were. I only remember one moment when his intensity concentrated itself in a straightforward, unmistakable emotion, without side-current or back-water. It was when he said: "The play's the thing With which to catch the conscience of the King." and, as the curtain came down, was seen to be writing madly on his tablets against one of the pillars. "Oh, God, that I were a writer!" I paraphrase Beatrice with all my heart. Surely a _writer_ could not string words together about Henry Irving's Hamlet and say _nothing, nothing_. "We must start this play a living thing," he used to say at rehearsals, and he worked until the skin grew tight over his face, until he became livid with fatigue, yet still beautiful, to get the opening lines said with individuality, suggestiveness, speed, and power. _Bernardo:_ Who's there? _Francisco:_ Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself. _Bernardo:_ Long live the King! _Francisco:_ Bernardo? _Bernardo:_ He. _Francisco:_ You come most carefully upon your hour. _Bernardo:_ 'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco. _Francisco:_ For this relief much thanks; 'tis bitter cold.... And all that he tried to make others do with these lines, he himself did with every line of his own part. Every word lived. Some said: "Oh, Irving only makes Hamlet a love poem!" They said that, I suppose, because in the Nunnery scene with Ophelia he was the lover above the prince and the poet. With what passionate longing his hands hovered over Ophelia at her words: "Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind." His advice to the players was not advice. He did not speak it as an actor. Nearly all Hamlets in that scene give away the fact that they are actors, and not dilettanti of royal blood. Irving defined the way he would have the players speak as an _order_, an instruction of the merit of which he was regally sure. There was no patronizing flavor in his acting here, not a touch of "I'll teach you how to do it." He was swift--swift and simple--pausing for the right word now and again, as in the phrase "to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature." His slight pause and eloquent gesture was the all-embracing word "Nature" came in answer to his call, were exactly repeated unconsciously years later by the Queen of Roumania (Carmen Sylva). She was telling us the story of a play that she had written. The words rushed out swiftly, but occasionally she would wait for the one that expressed her meaning most comprehensively and exactly, and as she got it, up went her hand in triumph over her head. "Like yours in 'Hamlet,'" I told Henry at the time. I knew this Hamlet both ways--as an actress from the stage, and as an actress putting away her profession for the time as one of the audience--and both ways it was superb to me. Tennyson, I know, said it was not a perfect Hamlet. I wonder, then, where he hoped to find perfection! James Spedding, considered a fine critic in his day, said Irving was "simply hideous ... a monster!" Another of these fine critics declared that he never could believe in Irving's Hamlet after having seen "_part_ (sic) of his performance as a murderer in a commonplace melodrama." Would one believe that any one could seriously write so stupidly as that about the earnest effort of an earnest actor, if it were not quoted by some of Irving's biographers? Some criticism, however severe, however misguided, remains within the bounds of justice, but what is one to think of the _Quarterly_ Reviewer who declared that "the enormous pains taken with the scenery had ensured Mr. Irving's success"? The scenery was of the simplest--no money was spent on it even when the play was revived at the Lyceum after Colonel Bateman's death. Henry's dress probably cost him about £2! My Ophelia dress was made of material which could not have cost more than 2_s._ a yard, and not many yards were wanted, as I was at the time thin to vanishing point! I have the dress still, and, looking at it the other day, I wondered what leading lady now would consent to wear it. At all its best points, Henry's Hamlet was susceptible of absurd imitation. Think of this well, young actors, who are content to play for safety, to avoid ridicule at all costs, to be "natural"--oh, word most vilely abused! What sort of _naturalness_ is this of Hamlet's? "O, villain, villain, smiling damned villain!" Henry Irving's imitators could make people burst with laughter when they took off his delivery of that line. And, indeed, the original, too, was almost provocative of laughter--rightly so, for such emotional indignation has its funny as well as its terrible aspect. The mad, and all are mad who have, as Socrates put it, "a divine release from the common ways of men," may speak ludicrously, even when they speak the truth. All great acting has a certain strain of extravagance which the imitators catch hold of and give us the eccentric body without the sublime soul. From the first I saw this extravagance, this bizarrerie in Henry Irving's acting. I noticed, too, its infinite variety. In "Hamlet," during the first scene with Horatio, Marcellus and Bernardo, he began by being very absent and distant. He exchanged greetings sweetly and gently, but he was the visionary. His feet might be on the ground, but his head was towards the stars "where the eternal are." Years later he said to me of another actor in "Hamlet": "_He_ would never have seen the ghost." Well, there was never any doubt that Henry Irving saw it, and it was through his acting in the Horatio scene that he made us sure. As a bad actor befogs Shakespeare's meaning, so a good actor illuminates it. Bit by bit as Horatio talks, Hamlet comes back into the world. He is still out of it when he says: "My father! Methinks I see my father." But the dreamer becomes attentive, sharp as a needle, with the words: "For God's love, let me hear." Irving's face, as he listened to Horatio's tale, blazed with intelligence. He cross-examined the men with keenness and authority. His mental deductions as they answered were clearly shown. With "I would I had been there" the cloud of unseen witnesses with whom he had before been communing again descended. For a second or two Horatio and the rest did not exist for him.... So onward to the crowning couplet: "... foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o'erwhelm them to men's eyes." After having been very quiet and rapid, very discreet, he pronounced these lines in a loud, clear voice, dragged out every syllable as if there never could be an end to his horror and his rage. I had been familiar with the scene from my childhood--I had studied it; I had heard from my father how Macready acted in it, and now I found that I had a _fool_ of an idea of it! That's the advantage of study, good people, who go to see Shakespeare acted. It makes you know sometimes what is being done, and what you never dreamed would be done when you read the scene at home. As one of the audience I was much struck by Irving's treatment of interjections and exclamations in "Hamlet." He breathed the line: "O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt," as one long yearning, and, "O horrible, O horrible! most horrible!" as a groan. When we first went to America his address at Harvard touched on this very subject, and it may be interesting to know that what he preached in 1885 he had practiced as far back as 1874. "On the question of pronunciation, there is something to be said which I think in ordinary teaching is not sufficiently considered. Pronunciation should be simple and unaffected, but not always fashioned rigidly according to a dictionary standard. No less an authority than Cicero points out that pronunciation must vary widely according to the emotions to be expressed; that it may be broken or cut with a varying or direct sound, and that it serves for the actor the purpose of color to the painter, from which to draw variations. Take the simplest illustration. The formal pronunciation of A-h is 'Ah,' of O-h, 'Oh,' but you cannot stereotype the expression of emotion like this. These exclamations are words of one syllable, but the speaker who is sounding the gamut of human feeling will not be restricted in his pronunciation by dictionary rule. It is said of Edmund Kean that he never spoke such ejaculations, but always sighed or groaned them. Fancy an actor saying: 'My Desdemona! Oh! oh! oh!' "Words are intended to express feelings and ideas, not to bind them in rigid fetters; the accents of pleasure are different from the accents of pain, and if a feeling is more accurately expressed as in nature by a variation of sound not provided by the laws of pronunciation, then such imperfect laws must be disregarded and nature vindicated!" It was of the address in which these words occur that a Boston hearer said that it was felt by every one present that "the truth had been spoken by a man who had learned it through living and not through theory." I leave his Hamlet for the present with one further reflection. It was in _courtesy_ and _humor_ that it differed most widely from other Hamlets that I have seen and heard of. This Hamlet was never rude to Polonius. His attitude towards the old Bromide (I thank you, Mr. Gelett Burgess, for teaching me that word which so lightly and charmingly describes the child of darkness and of platitude) was that of one who should say: "You dear, funny old simpleton, whom I have had to bear with all my life--how terribly in the way you seem now." With what slightly amused and cynical playfulness this Hamlet said: "I had thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well; they imitated humanity so abominably." Hamlet was by far his greatest triumph, although he would not admit it himself--preferring in some moods to declare that his finest work was done in Macbeth, which was almost universally disliked. When I went with Coghlan to see Irving's Philip, this "Hamlet" digression may have suggested that I was not in the least surprised at what I saw. Being a person little given to dreaming, and always living wholly in the present, it did not occur to me to wonder if I should ever act with this marvelous man. He was not at this time lessee of the Lyceum--Colonel Bateman was still alive--and I looked no further than my engagement at the Prince of Wales's, although in a few months it was to come to an end. Although I was now earning a good salary, I still lived in lodgings at Camden Town, took an omnibus to and from the theater, and denied myself all luxuries. I did not take a house until I went to the Court Theater. It was then, too, that I had my first cottage--a wee place at Hampton Court where my children were very happy. They used to give performances of "As You Like It" for the benefit of the Palace custodians--old Crimean veterans, most of them--and when the children had grown up these old men would still ask affectionately after "little Miss Edy" and "Master Teddy," forgetting the passing of time. My little daughter was a very severe critic! I think if I had listened to her, I should have left the stage in despair. She saw me act for the first time as Mabel Vane, but no compliments were to be extracted from her. "You _did_ look long and thin in your gray dress." "When you fainted I thought you was going to fall into the orchestra--you was so _long_." In "New Men and Old Acres" I had to play the piano while I conducted a conversation consisting on my side chiefly of haughty remarks to the effect that "blood would tell," to talk naturally and play at the same time. I "shied" at the lines, became self-conscious, and either sang the words or altered the rhythm of the tune to suit the pace of the speech. I grew anxious about it, and was always practicing it at home. After much hard work Edy used to wither me with: "_That's_ not right!" Teddy was of a more flattering disposition, but very obstinate when he chose. I remember "wrastling" with him for hours over a little Blake poem which he had learned by heart, to say to his mother: "When the voices of children are heard on the green, And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast, And everything else is still. Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, And the dews of the night arise, Come, come, leave off play, and let us away, Till morning appears in the skies. No, no, let us play, for yet it is day, And we cannot go to sleep. Besides, in the sky the little birds fly, And the hills are all covered with sheep...." All went well until the last line. Then he came to a stop. _Nothing_ would make him say sheep! With a face beaming with anxiety to please, looking adorable, he would offer any word but the right one. "And the hills are all covered with--" "With what, Teddy?" "Master Teddy don't know." "Something white, Teddy." "Snow?" "No, no--does snow rhyme with 'sleep'?" "Paper?" "No, no. Now, I am not going to the theater until you say the right word. What are the hills covered with?" "People." "Teddy, you're a very naughty boy." At this point he was put in the corner. His first suggestion when he came out was: "Grass? Trees?" "Are grass or trees white?" said the despairing mother with her eye on the clock, which warned her that, after all, she would have to go to the theater without winning. Meanwhile, Edy was murmuring: "_Sheep_, Teddy," in a loud aside, but Teddy would _not_ say it, not even when both he and I burst into tears! At Hampton Court the two children, dressed in blue and white check pinafores, their hair closely cropped--the little boy fat and fair (at this time he bore a remarkable resemblance to Laurence's portrait of the youthful King of Rome), the little girl thin and dark--ran as wild as though the desert had been their playground instead of the gardens of this old palace of kings! They were always ready to show visitors (not so numerous then as now) the sights; prattled freely to them of "my mamma," who was acting in London, and showed them the new trees which they had assisted the gardeners to plant in the wild garden, and christened after my parts. A silver birch was Iolanthe, a maple Portia, an oak Mabel Vane. Through their kind offices many a stranger found it easy to follow the intricacies of the famous Maze. It was a fine life for them, surely, this unrestricted running to and fro in the gardens, with the great Palace as a civilizing influence! It was for their sake that I was most glad of my increasing prosperity in my profession. My engagement with the Bancrofts was exchanged at the close of the summer season of 1876 for an even more popular one with Mr. John Hare at the Court Theater, Sloane Square. I had learned a great deal at the Prince of Wales's, notably that the art of playing in modern plays in a tiny theater was quite different from the art of playing in the classics in a big theater. The methods for big and little theaters are alike, yet quite unlike. I had learned breadth in Shakespeare at the Princess's, and had had to employ it again in romantic plays for Charles Reade. The pit and gallery were the audience which we had to reach. At the Prince of Wales's I had to adopt a more delicate, more subtle, more intimate style. But the breadth had to be there just the same--as seen through the wrong end of the microscope. In acting one must possess great strength before one can be delicate in the right way. Too often weakness is mistaken for delicacy. Mr. Hare was one of the best stage managers that I have met during the whole of my long experience in the theater. He was snappy in manner, extremely irritable if anything went wrong, but he knew what he wanted, and he got it. No one has ever surpassed him in the securing of a perfect _ensemble_. He was the Meissonier among the theater artists. Very likely he would have failed if he had been called upon to produce "King John," but what better witness to his talent than that he knew his line and stuck to it? The members of his company were his, body and soul, while they were rehearsing. He gave them fifteen minutes for lunch, and any actor or actress who was foolish or unlucky enough to be a minute late, was sorry afterwards. Mr. Hare was peppery and irascible, and lost his temper easily. Personally, I always got on well with my new manager, and I ought to be grateful to him, if only because he gave me the second great opportunity of my career--the part of Olivia in Wills's play from "The Vicar of Wakefield." During this engagement at the Court I married again. I had met Charles Wardell, whose stage name was Kelly, when he was acting in "Rachael the Reaper" for Charles Reade. At the Court we played together in several pieces. He had not been bred an actor, but a soldier. He was in the 66th Regiment, and had fought in the Crimean War; been wounded, too--no carpet knight. His father was a clergyman, vicar of Winlaton, Northumberland--a charming type of the old-fashioned parson, a friendship with Sir Walter Scott in the background, and many little possessions of the great Sir Walter's in the foreground to remind one of what had been. Charlie Kelly, owing to his lack of training, had to be very carefully suited with a part before he shone as an actor. But when he was suited--his line was the bluff, hearty, kindly, soldier-like Englishman--he was better than many people who had twenty years' start of him in experience. This is absurdly faint praise. In such parts as Mr. Brown in "New Men and Old Acres," the farmer father in "Dora," Diogenes in "Iris," no one could have bettered him. His most ambitious attempt was Benedick, which he played with me when I first appeared as Beatrice at Leeds. It was in many respects a splendid performance, and perhaps better for the play than the more polished, thoughtful, and deliberate Benedick of Henry Irving. Physically a manly, bulldog sort of a man, Charles Kelly possessed as an actor great tenderness and humor. It was foolish of him to refuse the part of Burchell in "Olivia," in which he would have made a success equal to that achieved by Terriss as the Squire. But he was piqued at not being cast for the Vicar, which he could not have played well, and stubbornly refused to play Burchell. Alas! many actors are just as blind to their true interests. We were married in 1876; and after I left the Court Theater for the Lyceum, we continued to tour together in the provinces during vacation time when the Lyceum was closed. These tours were very successful, but I never worked harder in my life! When we played "Dora" at Liverpool, Charles Reade, who had adapted the play from Tennyson's poem, wrote: "Nincompoop! "What have you to fear from me for such a masterly performance! Be assured nobody can appreciate your value and Mr. Kelley's as I do. It is well played all round." VII EARLY DAYS AT THE LYCEUM It is humiliating to me to confess that I have not the faintest recollection of "Brothers," the play by Coghlan, in which I see by the evidence of an old play-bill that I made my first appearance under Mr. Hare's management. I remember another play by Coghlan, in which Henry Kemble made one of his early appearances in the part of a butler, and how funny he was, even in those days, in a struggle to get rid of a pet monkey--a "property" monkey made of brown wool with no "devil" in it, except that supplied by the comedian's imagination. We trusted to our acting, not to real monkeys and real dogs to bring us through, and when the acting was Henry Kemble's, it was good enough to rely upon! Charles Coghlan seems to have been consistently unlucky. Yet he was a good actor and a brilliant man. I always enjoyed his companionship; found him a pleasant, natural fellow, absorbed in his work, and not at all the "dangerous" man that some people represented him. Within less than a month from the date of the production of "Brothers," "New Men and Old Acres" was put into the Court bill. It was not a new play, but the public at once began to crowd to see it, and I have heard that it brought Mr. Hare £30,000. My part, Lilian Vavasour, had been played in the original production by Mrs. Kendal, but it had been written for me by Tom Taylor when I was at the Haymarket, and it suited me very well. The revival was well acted all round. Charles Kelly was splendid as Mr. Brown, and Mr. Hare played a small part perfectly. H.B. Conway, a young actor whose good looks were talked of everywhere, was also in the cast. He was a descendant of Lord Byron's, and had a look of the _handsomest_ portraits of the poet. With his bright hair curling tightly all over his well-shaped head, his beautiful figure, and charming presence, Conway created a sensation in the 'eighties almost equal to that made by the more famous beauty, Lillie Langtry. As an actor he belonged to the Terriss type, but he was not nearly as good as Terriss. Of his extraordinary failure in the Lyceum "Faust" I shall say something when I come to the Lyceum productions. After "New Men and Old Acres," Mr. Hare tried a posthumous play by Lord Lytton--"The House of Darnley." It was _not_ a good play, and I was _not_ good in it, although the pleasant adulation of some of my friends has made me out so. The play met with some success, and during its run Mr. Hare commissioned Wills to write "Olivia." I had known Wills before this through the Forbes-Robertsons. He was at one time engaged to one of the girls, but it was a good thing it ended in smoke. With all his charm, Wills was not cut out for a husband. He was Irish all over--the strangest mixture of the aristocrat and the sloven. He could eat a large raw onion every night like any peasant, yet his ideas were magnificent and instinct with refinement. A true Bohemian in money matters, he made a great deal out of his plays--and never had a farthing to bless himself with! In the theater he was charming--from an actor's point of view. He interfered very little with the stage management, and did not care to sit in the stalls and criticise. But he would come quietly to me and tell me things which were most illuminating, and he paid me the compliment of weeping at the wing while I rehearsed "Olivia." _I_ was generally weeping, too, for Olivia, more than any part, touched me to the heart. I cried too much in it, just as I cried too much later on in the Nunnery scene in "Hamlet," and in the last act of "Charles I." My real tears on the stage have astonished some people, and have been the envy of others, but they have often been a hindrance to me. I have had to _work_ to restrain them. Oddly enough, although "Olivia" was such a great success at the Court, it has never made much money since. The play could pack a tiny theater; it could never appeal in a big way to the masses. In itself it had a sure message--the love story of an injured woman is one of the cards in the stage pack which it is always safe to play--but against this there was a bad last act, one of the worst I have ever acted in. It was always being tinkered with, but patching and alteration only seems to weaken it. Mr. Hare produced "Olivia" perfectly. Marcus Stone designed the clothes, and I found my dresses--both faithful and charming as reproductions of the eighteenth century spirit--stood the advance of time and the progress of ideas when I played the part later at the Lyceum. I had not to alter anything. Henry Irving discovered the same thing about the scenery and stage management. They could not be improved upon. There was very little scenery at the Court, but a great deal of taste and care in selection. Every one was "Olivia" mad. The Olivia cap shared public favor with the Langtry bonnet. That most lovely and exquisite creature, Mrs. Langtry, could not go out anywhere, at the dawn of the 'eighties, without a crowd collecting to look at her! It was no rare thing to see the crowd, to ask its cause, to receive the answer, "Mrs. Langtry!" and to look in vain for the object of the crowd's admiring curiosity. This was all the more remarkable, and honorable to public taste, too, because Mrs. Langtry's was not a showy beauty. Her hair was the color that it had pleased God to make it; her complexion was her own; in evening dress she did not display nearly as much of her neck and arms as was the vogue, yet they outshone all other necks and arms through their own perfection. "No worker has a right to criticise _publicly_ the work of another in the same field," Henry Irving once said to me, and Heaven forbid that I should disregard advice so wise! I am aware that the professional critics and the public did not transfer to Mrs. Langtry the actress the homage that they had paid to Mrs. Langtry the beauty, but I can only speak of the simplicity with which she approached her work, of her industry, and utter lack of vanity about her powers. When she played Rosalind (which my daughter, the best critic of acting _I_ know, tells me was in many respects admirable), she wrote to me: "Dear Nellie,-- "I bundled through my part somehow last night, a disgraceful performance, and _no_ waist-padding! Oh, what an impudent wretch you must think me to attempt such a part! I pinched my arm once or twice last night to see if it was really me. It was so sweet of you to write me such a nice letter, and then a telegram, too! "Yours ever, dear Nell, "LILLIE. "P.S.--I am rehearsing, all day--'The Honeymoon' next week. I love the hard work, and the thinking and study." Just at this time there was a great dearth on the stage of people with lovely diction, and Lillie Langtry had it. I can imagine that she spoke Rosalind's lines beautifully, and that her clear gray eyes and frank manner, too well-bred to be hoydenish, must have been of great value. To go back to "Olivia." Like all Hare's plays, it was perfectly cast. Where all were good, it will be admitted, I think, by every one who saw the production, that Terriss was the best. "As you stand there, whipping your boot, you look the very picture of vain indifference," Olivia says to Squire Thornhill in the first act, and never did I say it without thinking how absolutely _to the life_ Terriss realized that description! As I look back, I remember no figure in the theater more remarkable than Terriss. He was one of those heaven-born actors who, like kings by divine right, can, up to a certain point, do no wrong. Very often, like Dr. Johnson's "inspired idiot," Mrs. Pritchard, he did not know what he was talking about. Yet he "got there," while many cleverer men stayed behind. He had unbounded impudence, yet so much charm that no one could ever be angry with him. Sometimes he reminded me of a butcher-boy flashing past, whistling, on the high seat of his cart, or of Phaethon driving the chariot of the sun--pretty much the same thing, I imagine! When he was "dressed up" Terriss was spoiled by fine feathers; when he was in rough clothes, he looked a prince. He always commanded the love of his intimates as well as that of the outside public. To the end he was "Sailor Bill"--a sort of grown-up midshipmite, whose weaknesses provoked no more condemnation than the weaknesses of a child. In the theater he had the tidy habits of a sailor. He folded up his clothes and kept them in beautiful condition; and of a young man who had proposed for his daughter's hand he said: "The man's a blackguard! Why, he throws his things all over the room! The most untidy chap I ever saw!" Terriss had had every sort of adventure by land and sea before I acted with him at the Court. He had been midshipman, tea-planter, engineer, sheep-farmer, and horse-breeder. He had, to use his own words, "hobnobbed with every kind of queer folk, and found myself in extremely queer predicaments." The adventurous, dare-devil spirit of the roamer, the incarnate gipsy, always looked out of his insolent eyes. Yet, audacious as he seemed, no man was ever more nervous on the stage. On a first night he was shaking all over with fright, in spite of his confident and dashing appearance. His bluff was colossal. Once when he was a little boy and wanted money, he said to his mother: "Give me £5 or I'll jump out of the window." And she at once believed he meant it, and cried out: "Come back, come back! and I'll give you anything." He showed the same sort of "attack" with audiences. He made them believe in him the moment he stepped on to the stage. His conversation was extremely entertaining--and, let me add, ingenuous. One of his favorite reflections was: "Tempus fugit! So make the most of it. While you're alive, gather roses; for when you're dead, you're dead a d----d long time." He was a perfect rider, and loved to do cowboy "stunts" in Richmond Park while riding to the "Star and Garter." When he had presents from the front, which happened every night, he gave them at once to the call-boy or the gas-man. To the women-folk, especially the plainer ones, he was always delightful. Never was any man more adored by the theater staff. And children, my own Edy included, were simply _daft_ about him. A little American girl, daughter of William Winter, the famous critic, when staying with me in England, announced gravely when we were out driving: "I've gone a mash on Terriss." There was much laughter. When it had subsided, the child said gravely: "Oh, you can laugh, but it's true. I wish I was hammered to him!" Perhaps if he had lived longer, Terriss would have lost his throne. He died as a beautiful youth, a kind of Adonis, although he was fifty years old when he was stabbed at the stage-door of the Adelphi Theater. Terriss had a beautiful mouth. That predisposed me in his favor at once! I have always been "cracked" on pretty mouths! I remember that I used to say "Naughty Teddy!" to my own little boy just for the pleasure of seeing him put out his under-lip, when his mouth looked lovely! At the Court Terriss was still under thirty, but doing the best work of his life. He _never_ did anything finer than Squire Thornhill, although he was clever as Henry VIII. His gravity as Flutter in "The Belle's Stratagem" was very fetching; as Bucklaw in "Ravenswood" he looked magnificent, and, of course, as the sailor hero in Adelphi melodrama he was as good as could be. But it is as Thornhill that I like best to remember him. He was precisely the handsome, reckless, unworthy creature that good women are fools enough to love. In the Court production of "Olivia," both my children walked on to the stage for the first time. Teddy had such red cheeks that they made all the _rouged_ cheeks look quite pale! Little Edy gave me a bunch of real flowers that she had picked in the country the day before. Young Norman Forbes-Robertson was the Moses of the original cast. He played the part again at the Lyceum. How charming he was! And how very, very young! He at once gave promise of being a good actor and of having done the right thing in following his brother on to the stage. At the present day I consider him the only actor on the stage who can play Shakespeare's fools as they should be played. Among the girls "walking on" was Kate Rorke. This made me take a special interest in watching what she did later on. No one who saw her fine performance in "The Profligate" could easily forget it, and I shall never understand why the London public ever let her go. It was during the run of "Olivia" that Henry Irving became sole lessee of the Lyceum Theater. For a long time he had been contemplating the step, but it was one of such magnitude that it could not be done in a hurry. I daresay he found it difficult to separate from Mrs. Bateman and from her daughter, who had for such a long time been his "leading lady." He had to be a little cruel, not for the last time, in a career devoted unremittingly and unrelentingly to his art and his ambition. It was said by an idle tongue in later years that rich ladies financed Henry Irving's ventures. The only shadow of foundation for this statement is that at the beginning of his tenancy of the Lyceum, the Baroness Burdett-Coutts lent him a certain sum of money, every farthing of which was repaid during the first few months of his management. The first letter that I ever received from Henry Irving was written on July 20, 1878, from 15A, Grafton Street, the house in which he lived during the entire period of his Lyceum management. "Dear Miss Terry,-- "I look forward to the pleasure of calling upon you on Tuesday next at two o'clock. "With every good wish, believe me, sincerely, "HENRY IRVING." The call was in reference to my engagement as Ophelia. Strangely characteristic I see it now to have been of Henry that he was content to take my powers as an actress more or less on trust. A mutual friend, Lady Pollock, had told him that I was the very person for him; that "all London" was talking of my Olivia; that I had acted well in Shakespeare with the Bancrofts; that I should bring to the Lyceum Theater what players call "a personal following." Henry chose his friends as carefully as he chose his company and his staff. He believed in Lady Pollock implicitly, and he did not--it is possible that he could not--come and see my Olivia for himself. I was living in Longridge Road when Henry Irving first came to see me. Not a word of our conversation about the engagement can I remember. I did notice, however, the great change that had taken place in the man since I had last met him in 1867. Then he was really almost ordinary looking--with a mustache, an unwrinkled face, and a sloping forehead. The only wonderful thing about him was his melancholy. When I was playing the piano once in the greenroom at the Queen's Theater, he came in and listened. I remember being made aware of his presence by his sigh--the deepest, profoundest, sincerest sigh I ever heard from any human being. He asked me if I would not play the piece again. The incident impressed itself on my mind, inseparably associated with a picture of him as he looked at thirty--a picture by no means pleasing. He looked conceited, and almost savagely proud of the isolation in which he lived. There was a touch of exaggeration in his appearance--a dash of Werther, with a few flourishes of Jingle! Nervously sensitive to ridicule, self-conscious, suffering deeply from his inability to express himself through his art, Henry Irving, in 1867, was a very different person from the Henry Irving who called on me at Longridge Road in 1878. In ten years he had found himself, and so lost himself--lost, I mean, much of that stiff, ugly, self-consciousness which had encased him as the shell encases the lobster. His forehead had become more massive, and the very outline of his features had altered. He was a man of the world, whose strenuous fighting now was to be done as a general--not, as hitherto, in the ranks. His manner was very quiet and gentle. "In quietness and confidence shall be your strength," says the Psalmist. That was always like Henry Irving. And here, perhaps, is the place to say that I, of all people, can perhaps appreciate Henry Irving least justly, although I was his associate on the stage for a quarter of a century, and was on the terms of the closest friendship with him for almost as long a time. He had precisely the qualities that I never find likable. He was an egotist--an egotist of the great type, _never_ "a mean egotist," as he was once slanderously described--and all his faults sprang from egotism, which is in one sense, after all, only another name for greatness. So much absorbed was he in his own achievements that he was unable or unwilling to appreciate the achievements of others. I never heard him speak in high terms of the great foreign actors and actresses who from time to time visited England. It would be easy to attribute this to jealousy, but the easy explanation is not the true one. He simply would not give himself up to appreciation. Perhaps appreciation is a _wasting_ though a generous quality of the mind and heart, and best left to lookers-on, who have plenty of time to develop it. I was with him when he saw Sarah Bernhardt act for the first time. The play was "Ruy Blas," and it was one of Sarah's bad days. She was walking through the part listlessly, and I was angry that there should be any ground for Henry's indifference. The same thing happened years later, when I took him to see Eleonora Duse. The play was "La Locandiera," in which to my mind she is not at her very best. He was surprised at my enthusiasm. There was an element of justice in his attitude towards the performance which infuriated me, but I doubt if he would have shown more enthusiasm if he had seen her at her very best. As the years went on he grew very much attached to Sarah Bernhardt, and admired her as a colleague whose managerial work in the theater was as dignified as his own, but of her superb powers as an actress, I don't believe he ever had a glimmering notion! Perhaps it is not true, but, as I believe it to be true, I may as well state it: _It was never any pleasure to him to see the acting of other actors and actresses._ All the same, Salvini's Othello I know he thought magnificent, but he would not speak of it. How dangerous it is to write things that may not be understood! What I have written I have written merely to indicate the qualities in Henry Irving's nature, which were unintelligible to me, perhaps because I have always been more woman than artist. He always put the theater first. He lived in it, he died in it. He had none of what I may call my _bourgeois_ qualities--the love of being in love, the love of a home, the dislike of solitude. I have always thought it hard to find my inferiors. He was sure of his high place. He was far simpler than I in some ways. He would talk, for instance, in such an ingenuous way to painters and musicians that I blushed for him. But I know now that my blush was far more unworthy than his freedom from all pretentiousness in matters of art. _He never pretended._ One of his biographers has said that he posed as being a French scholar. Such a thing, and all things like it, were impossible to his nature. If it were necessary in one of his plays to say a few French words, he took infinite pains to learn them and said them beautifully. Henry once told me that in the early part of his career, before I knew him, he had been hooted because of his thin legs. The first service I did him was to tell him they were beautiful, and to make him give up padding them. "What do you want with fat, podgy, prize-fighter legs!" I expostulated. Praise to some people at certain stages of their career is more developing than blame. I admired the very things in Henry for which other people criticized him. I hope this helped him a little. I brought help, too, in pictorial matters. Henry Irving had had little training in such matters--I had had a great deal. Judgment about colors, clothes and lighting must be _trained_. I had learned from Mr. Watts, from Mr. Godwin, and from other artists, until a sense of decorative effect had become second nature to me. Before the rehearsals of "Hamlet" began at the Lyceum I went on a provincial tour with Charles Kelly, and played for the first time in "Dora," and "Iris," besides doing a steady round of old parts. In Birmingham I went to see Henry's Hamlet. (I have tried already, most inadequately, to say what it was to me.) I had also appeared for the first time as Lady Teazle--a part which I wish I was not too old to play now, for I could play it better. My performance in 1877 was not finished enough, not light enough. I think I did the screen scene well. When the screen was knocked over I did not stand still and rigid with eyes cast down. That seemed to me an attitude of guilt. Only a _guilty_ woman, surely, in such a situation would assume an air of conscious virtue. I shrank back, and tried to hide my face--a natural movement, so it seemed to me, for a woman who had been craning forward, listening in increasing agitation to the conversation between Charles and Joseph Surface. I shall always regret that we never did "The School for Scandal," or any of the other classic comedies, at the Lyceum. There came a time when Henry was anxious for me to play Lady Teazle, but I opposed him, as I thought that I was too old. It should have been one of my best parts. "Star" performances, for the benefit of veteran actors retiring from the stage, were as common in my youth as now. About this time I played in "Money" for the benefit of Henry Compton, a fine comedian who had delighted audiences at the Haymarket for many years. On this occasion I did not play Clara Douglas as I had done during the revival at the Prince of Wales's, but the comedy part, Georgina Vesey. John Hare, Mr. and Mrs. Kendal, Henry Neville, Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft, and, last but not least, Benjamin Webster, who came out of his retirement to play Graves--"his original part"--were in the cast. I don't think that Webster ever appeared on the stage again, although he lived on for many years in an old-fashioned house near Kennington Church, and died at a great age. He has a descendant on the stage in Mr. Ben Webster, who acted with us at the Lyceum, and is now well known both in England and America. Henry Compton's son, Edward, was in this performance of "Money." He was engaged to the beautiful Adelaide Neilson, an actress whose brilliant career was cut off suddenly when she was riding in the Bois. She drank a glass of milk when she was overheated, was taken ill, and died. I am told that she commanded £700 a week in America, and in England people went wild over her Juliet. She looked like a child of the warm South, although she was born, I think, in Manchester, and her looks were much in her favor as Juliet. She belonged to the ripe, luscious, pomegranate type of woman. The only living actress with the same kind of beauty is Maxine Elliott. Adelaide Neilson had a short reign, but a most triumphant one. It was easy to understand it when one saw her. She was so gracious, so feminine, so lovely. She did things well, but more from instinct than anything else. She had no science. Edward Compton now takes his own company round the provinces in an excellent répertoire of old comedies. He has done as much to make country audiences familiar with them as Mr. Benson has done to make them familiar with Shakespeare. I come now to the Lyceum rehearsals of November, 1878. Although Henry Irving had played Hamlet for over two hundred nights in London, and for I don't know how many nights in the provinces, he always rehearsed in cloak and rapier. This careful attention to detail came back to my mind years afterwards, when he gave readings of Macbeth. He never gave a public reading without first going through the entire play at home--at home, that is to say, in a miserably uncomfortable hotel. During the first rehearsal he read every one's part except mine, which he skipped, and the power that he put into each part was extraordinary. He threw himself so thoroughly into it that his skin contracted and his eyes shone. His lips grew whiter and whiter, and his skin more and more drawn as the time went on, until he looked like a livid thing, but beautiful. He never got at anything _easily_, and often I felt angry that he would waste so much of his strength in trying to teach people to do things in the right way. Very often it only ended in his producing actors who gave colorless, feeble and unintelligent imitations of him. There were exceptions, of course. When it came to the last ten days before the date named for the production of "Hamlet," and my scenes with him were still unrehearsed, I grew very anxious and miserable. I was still a stranger in the theater, and in awe of Henry Irving personally; but I plucked up courage, and said: "I am very nervous about my first appearance with you. Couldn't we rehearse _our_ scenes?" "_We_ shall be all right!" he answered, "but we are not going to run the risk of being bottled up by a gas-man or a fiddler." When I spoke, I think he was conducting a band rehearsal. Although he did not understand a note of music, he felt, through intuition, what the music ought to be, and would pull it about and have alterations made. No one was cleverer than Hamilton Clarke, Henry's first musical director, and a most gifted composer, at carrying out his instructions. Hamilton Clarke often grew angry and flung out of the theater, saying that it was quite impossible to do what Mr. Irving required. "Patch it together, indeed!" he used to say to me indignantly, when I was told off to smooth him down. "Mr. Irving knows nothing about music, or he couldn't ask me to do such a thing." But the next day he would return with the score altered on the lines suggested by Henry, and would confess that the music was improved. "Upon my soul, it's better! The 'Guv'nor' was perfectly right." His Danish march in "Hamlet," his Brocken music in "Faust," and his music for "The Merchant of Venice" were all, to my mind, exactly _right_. The brilliant gifts of Clarke, before many years had passed, "o'er-leaped" themselves, and he ended his days in a lunatic asylum. The only person who did not profit by Henry's ceaseless labors was poor Ophelia. When the first night came, I did not play the part well, although the critics and the public were pleased. To myself I _failed_. I had not rehearsed enough. I can remember one occasion when I played Ophelia really well. It was in Chicago some ten years later. At Drury Lane, in 1896, when I played the mad scene for Nelly Farren's benefit, and took farewell of the part for ever, I was just _damnable_! Ophelia only _pervades_ the scenes in which she is concerned until the mad scene. This was a tremendous thing for me, who am not capable of _sustained_ effort, but can perhaps manage a _cumulative_ effort better than most actresses. I have been told that Ophelia has "nothing to do" at first. I found so much to do! Little bits of business which, slight in themselves, contributed to a definite result, and kept me always in the picture. Like all Ophelias before (and after) me, I went to the madhouse to study wits astray. I was disheartened at first. There was no beauty, no nature, no pity in most of the lunatics. Strange as it may sound, they were too _theatrical_ to teach me anything. Then, just as I was going away, I noticed a young girl gazing at the wall. I went between her and the wall to see her face. It was quite vacant, but the body expressed that she was waiting, waiting. Suddenly she threw up her hands and sped across the room like a swallow. I never forgot it. She was very thin, very pathetic, very young, and the movement was as poignant as it was beautiful. I saw another woman laugh with a face that had no gleam of laughter anywhere--a face of pathetic and resigned grief. My experiences convinced me that the actor must imagine first and observe afterwards. It is no good observing life and bringing the result to the stage without selection, without a definite idea. The idea must come first, the realism afterwards. Perhaps because I was nervous and irritable about my own part from insufficient rehearsal, perhaps because his responsibility as lessee weighed upon him, Henry Irving's Hamlet on the first night at the Lyceum seemed to me less wonderful than it had been at Birmingham. At rehearsals he had been the perfection of grace. On the night itself, he dragged his leg and seemed stiff from self-consciousness. He asked me later on if I thought the ill-natured criticism of his walk was in any way justified, and if he really said "Gud" for "God," and the rest of it. I said straight out that he _did_ say his vowels in a peculiar way, and that he _did_ drag his leg. I begged him to give up that dreadful, paralyzing waiting at the side for his cue, and after a time he took my advice. He was never obstinate in such matters. His one object was to _find out_, to _test_ suggestion, and follow it if it stood his test. He was very diplomatic when he meant to have his own way. He never blustered or enforced or threatened. My first acquaintance with this side of him was made over my dresser for Ophelia. He had heard that I intended to wear black in the mad scene, and he intended me to wear white. When he first mentioned the subject, I had no idea that there would be any opposition. He spoke of my dresses, and I told him that as I was very anxious not to be worried about them at the last minute, they had been got on with early and were now finished. "Finished! That's very interesting! Very interesting. And what--er--what colors are they?" "In the first scene I wear a pinkish dress. It's all rose-colored with her. Her father and brother love her. The Prince loves her--and so she wears pink." "Pink," repeated Henry thoughtfully. "In the nunnery scene I have a pale, gold, amber dress--the most beautiful color. The material is a church brocade. It will 'tone down' the color of my hair. In the last scene I wear a transparent, black dress." Henry did not wag an eyelid. "I see. In mourning for her father." "No, not exactly that. I think _red_ was the mourning color of the period. But black seems to me _right_--like the character, like the situation." "Would you put the dresses on?" said Henry gravely. At that minute Walter Lacy came up, that very Walter Lacy who had been with Charles Kean when I was a child, and who now acted as adviser to Henry Irving in his Shakespearean productions. "Ah, here's Lacy. Would you mind, Miss Terry, telling Mr. Lacy what you are going to wear?" Rather surprised, but still unsuspecting, I told Lacy all over again. Pink in the first scene, yellow in the second, black-- You should have seen Lacy's face at the word "black." He was going to burst out, but Henry stopped him. He was more diplomatic than that! "They generally wear _white_, don't they?" "I believe so," I answered, "but black is more interesting." "I should have thought you would look much better in white." "Oh, no!" I said. And then they dropped the subject for that day. It _was_ clever of him! The next day Lacy came up to me: "You didn't really mean that you are going to wear black in the mad scene?" "Yes, I did. Why not?" "_Why not!_ My God! Madam, there must be only one black figure in this play, and that's Hamlet!" I did feel a fool. What a blundering donkey I had been not to see it before! I was very thrifty in those days, and the thought of having been the cause of needless expense worried me. So instead of the _crêpe de Chine_ and miniver, which had been used for the black dress, I had for the white dress Bolton sheeting and rabbit, and I believe it looked better. The incident, whether Henry was right or not, led me to see that, although I knew more of art and archaeology in dress than he did, he had a finer sense of what was right for the _scene_. After this he always consulted me about the costumes, but if he said: "I want such and such a scene to be kept dark and mysterious," I knew better than to try and introduce pale-colored dresses into it. Henry always had a fondness for "the old actor," and would engage him in preference to the tyro any day. "I can trust them," he explained briefly. In the cast of "Hamlet" Mr. Forrester, Mr. Chippendale, and Tom Mead worthily repaid the trust. Mead, in spite of a terrible excellence in "Meadisms"--he substituted the most excruciatingly funny words for Shakespeare's when his memory of the text failed--was a remarkable actor. His voice as the Ghost was beautiful, and his appearance splendid. With his deep-set eyes, hawklike nose, and clear brow, he reminded me of the Rameses head in the British Museum. We had young men in the cast, too. There was one very studious youth who could never be caught loafing. He was always reading, or busy in the greenroom studying by turns the pictures of past actor-humanity with which the walls were peopled, or the present realities of actors who came in and out of the room. Although he was so much younger then, Mr. Pinero looked much as he does now. He played Rosencrantz very neatly. Consummate care, precision, and brains characterized his work as an actor always, but his chief ambition lay another way. Rosencrantz and the rest were his school of stage-craft. Kyrle Bellew, the Osric of the production, was another man of the future, though we did not know it. He was very handsome, a tremendous lady-killer! He wore his hair rather long, had a graceful figure, and a good voice, as became the son of a preacher who had the reputation of saying the Lord's Prayer so dramatically that his congregation sobbed. Frank Cooper, a descendant of the Kembles, another actor who has risen to eminence since, played Laertes. It was he who first led me onto the Lyceum stage. Twenty years later he became my leading man on the first tour I took independently of Henry Irving since my tours with my husband, Charles Kelly. VIII WORK AT THE LYCEUM When I am asked what I remember about the first ten years at the Lyceum, I can answer in one word: _Work_. I was hardly ever out of the theater. What with acting, rehearsing, and studying--twenty-five reference books were a "simple coming-in" for one part--I sometimes thought I should go blind and mad. It was not only for my parts at the Lyceum that I had to rehearse. From August to October I was still touring in the provinces on my own account. My brother George acted as my business manager. His enthusiasm was not greater than his loyalty and industry. When we were playing in small towns he used to rush into my dressing-room after the curtain was up and say excitedly: "We've got twenty-five more people in our gallery than the Blank Theater opposite!" Although he was very delicate, he worked for me like a slave. When my tours with Mr. Kelly ended in 1880 and I promised Henry Irving that in future I would go to the provincial towns with him, my brother was given a position at the Lyceum, where, I fear, his scrupulous and uncompromising honesty often got him into trouble. "Perks," as they are called in domestic service, are one of the heaviest additions to a manager's working expenses, and George tried to fight the system. He hurt no one so much as himself. One of my productions in the provinces was an English version of "Frou-Frou," made for me by my dear friend Mrs. Comyns Carr, who for many years designed the dresses that I wore in different Lyceum plays. "Butterfly," as "Frou-Frou" was called when it was produced in English, went well; indeed, the Scots of Edinburgh received it with overwhelming favor, and it served my purpose at the time, but when I saw Sarah Bernhardt play the part I wondered that I had had the presumption to meddle with it. It was not a case of my having a different view of the character and playing it according to my imagination, as it was, for instance, when Duse played "La Dame aux Camélias," and gave a performance that one could not say was _inferior_ to Bernhardt's, although it was so utterly _different_. No people in their right senses could have accepted my "Frou-Frou" instead of Sarah's. What I lacked technically in it was _pace_. Of course, it is partly the language. English cannot be phrased as rapidly as French. But I have heard foreign actors, playing in the English tongue, show us this rapidity, this warmth, this fury--call it what you will--and have just wondered why we are, most of us, so deficient in it. Fechter had it, so had Edwin Forrest. When strongly moved, their passions and their fervor made them swift. The more Henry Irving felt, the more deliberate he became. I said to him once: "You seem to be hampered in the vehemence of passion." "I _am_," he answered. This is what crippled his Othello, and made his scene with Tubal in "The Merchant of Venice" the least successful _to him_. What it was to the audience is another matter. But he had to take refuge in speechless rage when he would have liked to pour out his words like a torrent. In the company which Charles Kelly and I took round the provinces in 1880 were Henry Kemble and Charles Brookfield. Young Brookfield was just beginning life as an actor, and he was so brilliantly funny off the stage that he was always a little disappointing _on_ it. My old manageress, Mrs. Wigan, first brought him to my notice, writing in a charming little note that she knew him "to have a power of _personation_ very rare in an unpracticed actor," and that if we could give him varied practice, she would feel it a courtesy to her. I had reason to admire Mr. Brookfield's "powers of personation" when I was acting at Buxton. He and Kemble had no parts in one of our plays, so they amused themselves during their "off" night by hiring bath-chairs and pretending to be paralytics! We were acting in a hall, and the most infirm of the invalids visiting the place to take the waters were wheeled in at the back, and up the center aisle. In the middle of a very pathetic scene I caught sight of Kemble and Brookfield in their bath-chairs, and could not _speak_ for several minutes. Mr. Brookfield does not tell this little story in his "Random Reminiscences." It is about the only one that he has left out! To my mind he is the prince of storytellers. All the cleverness that he should have put into his acting and his play-writing (of which since those early days he has done a great deal) he seems to have put into his life. I remember him more clearly as a delightful companion than an actor, and he won my heart at once by his kindness to my little daughter Edy, who accompanied me on this tour. He has too great a sense of humor to resent my inadequate recollection of him. Did he not in his own book quote gleefully from an obituary notice published on a false report of his death, the summary: "Never a great actor, he was invaluable in small parts. But after all it is at his club that he will be most missed!" In the last act of "Butterfly," as we called the English version of "Frou-Frou," where the poor woman is dying, her husband shows her a locket with a picture of her child in it. Night after night we used a "property" locket, but on my birthday, when we happened to be playing the piece, Charles Kelly bought a silver locket of Indian work and put inside it two little colored photographs of my children, Edy and Teddy, and gave it to me on the stage instead of the "property" one. When I opened it, I burst into very real tears! I have often wondered since if the audience that night knew that they were seeing _real_ instead of assumed emotion! Probably the difference did not tell at all. At Leeds we produced "Much Ado About Nothing." I never played Beatrice as well again. When I began to "take soundings" from life for my idea of her, I found in my friend Anne Codrington (now Lady Winchilsea) what I wanted. There was before me a Beatrice--as fine a lady as ever lived, a great-hearted woman--beautiful, accomplished, merry, tender. When Nan Codrington came into a room it was as if the sun came out. She was the daughter of an admiral, and always tried to make her room look as like a cabin as she could. "An excellent musician," as Benedick hints Beatrice was, Nan composed the little song that I sang at the Lyceum in "The Cup," and very good it was, too. When Henry Irving put on "Much Ado About Nothing"--a play which he may be said to have done for me, as he never really liked the part of Benedick--I was not the same Beatrice at all. A great actor can do nothing badly, and there was so very much to admire in Henry Irving's Benedick. But he gave me little help. Beatrice must be swift, swift, swift! Owing to Henry's rather finicking, deliberate method as Benedick, I could never put the right pace into my part. I was also feeling unhappy about it, because I had been compelled to give way about a traditional "gag" in the church scene, with which we ended the fourth act. In my own production we had scorned this gag, and let the curtain come down on Benedick's line: "Go, comfort your cousin; I must say she is dead, and so farewell." When I was told that we were to descend to the buffoonery of: _Beatrice:_ Benedick, kill him--kill him if you can. _Benedick:_ As sure as I'm alive, I will! I protested, and implored Henry not to do it. He said that it was necessary: otherwise the "curtain" would be received in dead silence. I assured him that we had often had seven and eight calls without it. I used every argument, artistic and otherwise. Henry, according to his custom, was gentle, would not discuss it much, but remained obdurate. After holding out for a week, I gave in. "It's my duty to obey your orders, and do it," I said, "but I do it under protest." Then I burst into tears. It was really for his sake just as much as for mine. I thought it must bring such disgrace on him! Looking back on the incident, I find that the most humorous thing in connection with it was that the critics, never reluctant to accuse Henry of "monkeying" with Shakespeare if they could find cause, never noticed the gag at all! Such disagreements occurred very seldom. In "The Merchant of Venice" I found that Henry Irving's Shylock necessitated an entire revision of my conception of Portia, especially in the trial scene, but here there was no point of honor involved. I had considered, and still am of the same mind, that Portia in the trial scene ought to be very _quiet_. I saw an extraordinary effect in this quietness. But as Henry's Shylock was quiet, I had to give it up. His heroic saint was splendid, but it wasn't good for Portia. Of course, there were always injudicious friends to say that I had not "chances" enough at the Lyceum. Even my father said to me after "Othello": "We must have no more of these Ophelias and Desdemonas!" "_Father!_" I cried out, really shocked. "They're second fiddle parts--not the parts for you, Duchess." "Father!" I gasped out again, for really I thought Ophelia a pretty good part, and was delighted at my success with it. But granting these _were_ "second fiddle" parts, I want to make quite clear that I had my turn of "first fiddle" ones. "Romeo and Juliet," "Much Ado About Nothing," "Olivia," and "The Cup" all gave me finer opportunities than they gave Henry. In "The Merchant of Venice" and "Charles I." they were at least equal to his. I have sometimes wondered what I should have accomplished without Henry Irving. I might have had "bigger" parts, but it doesn't follow that they would have been better ones, and if they had been written by contemporary dramatists my success would have been less durable. "No actor or actress who doesn't play in the 'classics'--in Shakespeare or old comedy--will be heard of long," was one of Henry Irving's sayings, by the way, and he was right. It was a long time before we had much talk with each other. In the "Hamlet" days, Henry Irving's melancholy was appalling. I remember feeling as if I had laughed in church when he came to the foot of the stairs leading to my dressing-room, and caught me sliding down the banisters! He smiled at me, but didn't seem able to get over it. "Lacy," he said some days later, "what do you think! I found her the other day sliding down the banisters!" Some one says--I think it is Keats, in a letter--that the poet lives not in one, but in a thousand worlds, and the actor has not one, but a hundred natures. What was the real Henry Irving? I used to speculate! His religious upbringing always left its mark on him, though no one could be more "raffish" and mischievous than he when entertaining friends at supper in the Beefsteak Room, or chaffing his valued adjutants, Bram Stoker and Loveday. H.J. Loveday, our dear stage manager, was, I think, as absolutely devoted to Henry as anyone except his fox-terrier, Fussie. Loveday's loyalty made him agree with everything that Henry said, however preposterous, and didn't Henry trade on it sometimes! Once while he was talking to me, when he was making up, he absently took a white lily out of a bowl on the table and began to stripe and dot the petals with the stick of grease-paint in his hand. He pulled off one or two of the petals, and held it out to me. "Pretty flower, isn't it?" "Oh, don't be ridiculous, Henry!" I said. "You wait!" he said mischievously. "We'll show it to Loveday." Loveday was sent for on some business connected with the evening's performance. Henry held out the flower obtrusively, but Loveday wouldn't notice it. "Pretty, isn't it?" said Henry carelessly. "Very," said Loveday. "I always like those lilies. A friend of mine has his garden full of them, and he says they're not so difficult to grow if only you give 'em enough water." Henry's delight at having "taken in" Loveday was childish. But sometimes I think Loveday must have seen through these innocent jokes, only he wouldn't have spoiled "the Guv'nor's" bit of fun for the world. When Henry first met him he was conducting an orchestra. I forget the precise details, but I know that he gave up this position to follow Henry, that he was with him during the Bateman régime at the Lyceum, and that when the Lyceum became a thing of the past, he still kept the post of stage manager. He was literally "faithful unto death," for it was only at Henry's death that his service ended. Bram Stoker, whose recently published "Reminiscences of Irving" have told, as well as it ever _can_ be told, the history of the Lyceum Theater under Irving's direction, was as good a servant in the front of the theater as Loveday was on the stage. Like a true Irishman, he has given me some lovely blarney in his book. He has also told _all_ the stories that I might have told, and described every one connected with the Lyceum except himself. I can fill _that_ deficiency to a certain extent by saying that he is one of the most kind and tender-hearted of men. He filled a difficult position with great tact, and was not so universally abused as most business managers, because he was always straight with the company, and never took a mean advantage of them. Stoker and Loveday were daily, nay, hourly, associated for many years with Henry Irving; but, after all, did they or any one else _really_ know him? And what was Henry Irving's attitude. I believe myself that he never wholly trusted his friends, and never admitted them to his intimacy, although they thought he did, which was the same thing to _them_. From his childhood up, Henry was lonely. His chief companions in youth were the Bible and Shakespeare. He used to study "Hamlet" in the Cornish fields, when he was sent out by his aunt, Mrs. Penberthy, to call in the cows. One day, when he was in one of the deep, narrow lanes common in that part of England, he looked up and saw the face of a sweet little lamb gazing at him from the top of the bank. The symbol of the lamb in the Bible had always attracted him, and his heart went out to the dear little creature. With some difficulty he scrambled up the bank, slipping often in the damp, red earth, threw his arms round the lamb's neck and kissed it. _The lamb bit him!_ Did this set-back in early childhood influence him? I wonder! He had another such set-back when he first went on the stage, and for some six weeks in Dublin was subjected every night to groans, hoots, hisses, and cat-calls from audiences who resented him because he had taken the place of a dismissed favorite. In such a situation an actor is not likely to take stock of _reasons_. Henry Irving only knew that the Dublin people made him the object of violent personal antipathy. "I played my parts not badly for me," he said simply, "in spite of the howls of execration with which I was received." The bitterness of this Dublin episode was never quite forgotten. It colored Henry Irving's attitude towards the public. When he made his humble little speeches of thanks to them before the curtain, there was always a touch of pride in the humility. Perhaps he would not have received adulation in quite the same dignified way if he had never known what it was to wear the martyr's "shirt of flame." This is the worst of my trying to give a consecutive narrative of my first years at the Lyceum. Henry Irving looms across them, reducing all events, all feelings, all that happened, and all that was suggested, to pigmy size. Let me speak _generally_ of his method of procedure in producing a play. First he studied it for three months himself, and nothing in that play would escape him. Some one once asked him a question about "Titus Andronicus." "God bless my soul!" he said. "I never read it, so how should I know!" The Shakespearean scholar who had questioned him was a little shocked--a fact which Henry Irving, the closest observer of men, did not fail to notice. "When I am going to do 'Titus Andronicus,' or any other play," he said to me afterwards, "I shall know more about it than A---- or any other student." There was no conceit in this. It was just a statement of fact. And it may not have been an admirable quality of Henry Irving's, but all his life he only took an interest in the things which concerned the work that he had in hand. When there was a question of his playing Napoleon, his room at Grafton Street was filled with Napoleonic literature. Busts of Napoleon, pictures of Napoleon, relics of Napoleon were everywhere. Then, when another play was being prepared, the busts, however fine, would probably go down to the cellar. It was not _Napoleon_ who interested Henry Irving, but _Napoleon for his purpose_--two very different things. His concentration during his three months' study of the play which he had in view was marvelous. When, at the end of the three-months, he called the first rehearsal, he read the play exactly as it was going to be done on the first night. He knew exactly by that time what he personally was going to do on the first night, and the company did well to notice how he read his own part, for never again until the first night, though he rehearsed with them, would he show his conception so fully and completely. These readings, which took place sometimes in the greenroom or Beefsteak Room at the Lyceum, sometimes at his house in Grafton Street, were wonderful. Never were the names of the characters said by the reader, but never was there the slightest doubt as to which was speaking. Henry Irving swiftly, surely, acted every part in the piece as he read. While he read, he made notes as to the position of the characters and the order of the crowds and processions. At the end of the first reading he gave out the parts. The next day there was the "comparing" of the parts. It generally took place on the stage, and we sat down for it. Each person took his own character, and took up the cues to make sure that no blunder had been made in writing them out. Parts at the Lyceum were written, or printed, not typed. These first two rehearsals--the one devoted to the reading of the play, and the other to the comparing of the parts, were generally arranged for Thursday and Friday. Then there was two days' grace. On Monday came the first stand-up rehearsal on the stage. We then did one act straight through, and, after that, straight through again, even if it took all day. There was no luncheon interval. People took a bite when they could, or went without. Henry himself generally went without. The second day exactly the same method was pursued with the second act. All the time Henry gave the stage his personal direction, gave it keenly, and gave it whole. He was the sole superintendent of his rehearsals, with Mr. Loveday as his working assistant, and Mr. Allen as his prompter. This despotism meant much less wasted time than when actor-manager, "producer," literary adviser, stage manager, and any one who likes to offer a suggestion are all competing in giving orders and advice to a company. Henry Irving never spent much time on the women in the company, except in regard to position. Sometimes he would ask me to suggest things to them, to do for them what he did for the men. The men were as much like him when they tried to carry out his instructions as brass is like gold; but he never grew weary of "coaching" them, down to the most minute detail. Once during the rehearsals of "Hamlet" I saw him growing more and more fatigued with his efforts to get the actors who opened the play to perceive his meaning. He wanted the first voice to ring out like a pistol shot. "_Who's there?_" "Do give it up," I said. "It's no better!" "Yes, it's a little better," he answered quietly, "and so it's worth doing." From the first the scenery or substitute scenery was put upon the stage for rehearsal, and the properties or substitute properties were to hand. After each act had been gone through twice each day, it came to half an act once in a whole day, because of the development of detail. There was no detail too small for Henry Irving's notice. He never missed anything that was cumulative--that would contribute something to the whole effect. The messenger who came in to announce something always needed a great deal of rehearsal. There were processions, and half processions, quiet bits when no word was spoken. There was _timing_. Nothing was left to chance. In the master carpenter, Arnott, we had a splendid man. He inspired confidence at once through his strong, able personality, and, as time went on, deserved it through all the knowledge he acquired and through his excellence in never making a difficulty. "You shall have it," was no bluff from Arnott. You _did_ "have it." We could not find precisely the right material for one of my dresses in "The Cup." At last, poking about myself in quest of it, I came across the very thing at Liberty's--a saffron silk with a design woven into it by hand with many-colored threads and little jewels. I brought a yard to rehearsal. It was declared perfect, but I declared the price prohibitive. "It's twelve guineas a yard, and I shall want yards and yards!" In these days I am afraid they would not only put such material on to the leading lady, but on to the supers too! At the Lyceum _wanton_ extravagance was unknown. "Where can I get anything at all like it?" "You leave it to me," said Arnott. "I'll get it for you. That'll be all right. "But, Arnott, it's a hand-woven Indian material. How _can_ you get it?" "You leave it to me," Arnott repeated in his slow, quiet, confident way. "Do you mind letting me have this yard as a pattern?" He went off with it, and before the dress rehearsal had produced about twenty yards of silk, which on the stage looked better than the twelve-guinea original. "There's plenty more if you want it," he said dryly. He had had some raw silk dyed the exact saffron. He had had two blocks made, one red and the other black, and the design had been printed, and a few cheap spangles had been added to replace the real jewels. My toga looked beautiful. This was but one of the many emergencies to which Arnott rose with talent and promptitude. With the staff of the theater he was a bit of a bully--one of those men not easily roused, but being vexed, "nasty in the extreme!" As a craftsman he had wonderful taste, and could copy antique furniture so that one could not tell the copy from the original. The great aim at the Lyceum was to get everything "rotten perfect," as the theatrical slang has it, before the dress rehearsal. Father's test of being rotten perfect was not a bad one. "If you can get out of bed in the middle of the night and do your part, you're perfect. If you can't, you don't really know it!" Henry Irving applied some such test to every one concerned in the production. I cannot remember any play at the Lyceum which did not begin punctually and end at the advertised time, except "Olivia," when some unwise changes in the last act led to delay. He never hesitated to discard scenery if it did not suit his purpose. There was enough scenery rejected in "Faust" to have furnished three productions, and what was finally used for the famous Brocken scene cost next to nothing. Even the best scene-painters sometimes think more of their pictures than of scenic effects. Henry would never accept anything that was not right _theatrically_ as well as pictorially beautiful. His instinct in this was unerring and incomparable. I remember that at one scene-rehearsal every one was fatuously pleased with the scenery. Henry sat in the stalls talking about everything _but_ the scenery. It was hard to tell what he thought. "Well, are you ready?" he asked at last. "Yes, sir." "My God! Is that what you think I am going to give the public?" Never shall I forget the astonishment of stage manager, scene-painter, and staff! It was never safe to indulge in too much self-satisfaction beforehand with Henry. He was always liable to drop such bombs! He believed very much in "front" scenes, seeing how necessary they were to the swift progress of Shakespeare's diverging plots. These cloths were sometimes so wonderfully painted and lighted that they constituted scenes of remarkable beauty. The best of all were the Apothecary scene in "Romeo and Juliet" and the exterior of Aufidius's house in "Coriolanus." We never had electricity installed at the Lyceum until Daly took the theater. When I saw the effect on the faces of the electric footlights, I entreated Henry to have the gas restored, and he did. We used gas footlights and gas limes there until we left the theater for good in 1902. To this I attribute much of the beauty of our lighting. I say "our" because this was a branch of Henry's work in which I was always his chief helper. Until electricity has been greatly improved and developed, it can never be to the stage what gas was. The thick softness of gaslight, with the lovely specks and motes in it, so like _natural_ light, gave illusion to many a scene which is now revealed in all its naked trashiness by electricity. The artificial is always noticed and recognized as art by the superficial critic. I think this is what made some people think Irving was at his best in such parts as Louis XI, Dubosc, and Richard III. He could have played Louis XI three times a day "on his head," as the saying is. In "The Lyons Mail," Dubosc the wicked man was easy enough--strange that the unprofessional looker-on always admires the actor's art when it is employed on easy things!--but Lesurques, the _good_ man in the same play ("The Lyons Mail"), was difficult. Any actor, skillful in the tricks of the business, can play the drunkard; but to play a good man sincerely, as he did here, to show that double thing, the look of guilt which an innocent man wears when accused of crime, requires great acting, for "_the look_" is the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual emotion--and this delicate emotion can only be perfectly expressed when the actor's heart and mind and soul and skill are in absolute accord. In dual parts Irving depended little on make-up. Make-up was, indeed, always his servant, not his master. He knew its uselessness when not informed by the _spirit_. "The letter" (and in characterization grease-paint is the letter) "killeth--the spirit giveth life." His Lesurques was different from his Dubosc because of the way he held his shoulders, because of his expression. He always took a deep interest in crime (an interest which his sons have inherited), and often went to the police-court to study the faces of the accused. He told me that the innocent man generally looked guilty and hesitated when asked a question, but that the round, wide-open eyes corrected the bad impression. The result of this careful watching was seen in his expression as Lesurques. He opened his eyes wide. As Dubosc he kept them half closed. Our plays from 1878 to 1887 were "Hamlet," "The Lady of Lyons," "Eugene Aram," "Charles I.," "The Merchant of Venice," "Iolanthe," "The Cup," "The Belle's Stratagem," "Othello," "Romeo and Juliet," "Much Ado About Nothing," "Twelfth Night," "Olivia," "Faust," "Raising the Wind," and "The Amber Heart." I give this list to keep myself straight. My mental division of the years at the Lyceum is _before_ "Macbeth," and _after_. I divide it up like this, perhaps, because "Macbeth" was the most important of all our productions, if I judge it by the amount of preparation and thought that it cost us and by the discussion which it provoked. Of the characters played by Henry Irving in the plays of the first division--before "Macbeth," that is to say--I think every one knows that I considered Hamlet to be his greatest triumph. Sometimes I think that was so because it was the only part that was big enough for him. It was more difficult, and he had more scope in it than in any other. If there had been a finer part than Hamlet, that particular part would have been his finest. When one praises an actor in this way, one is always open to accusations of prejudice, hyperbole, uncritical gush, unreasoned eulogy, and the rest. Must a careful and deliberate opinion _always_ deny a great man genius? If so, no careful and deliberate opinions from me! I have no doubt in the world of Irving's genius--no doubt that he is with David Garrick and Edmund Kean, rather than with other actors of great talents and great achievements--actors who rightly won high opinions from the multitude of their day, but who have not left behind them an impression of that inexplicable thing which we call genius. Since my great comrade died I have read many biographies of him, and nearly all of them denied what I assert. "Now, who shall arbitrate?" I find no contradiction of my testimony in the fact that he was not appreciated for a long time, that some found him like olives, an acquired taste, that others mocked and derided him. My father, who worshiped Macready, put Irving above him because of Irving's _originality_. The old school were not usually so generous. Fanny Kemble thought it necessary to write as follows of one who had had his share of misfortune and failure before he came into his kingdom and made her jealous, I suppose, for the dead kings among her kindred: "I have seen some of the accounts and critics of Mr. Irving's acting, and rather elaborate ones of his Hamlet, which, however, give me no very distinct idea of his performance, and a very hazy one indeed of the part itself as seen from the point of view of his critics. Edward Fitzgerald wrote me word that he looked like my people, and sent me a photograph to prove it, which I thought much more like Young than my father or uncle. _I have not seen a play of Shakespeare's acted I do not know when. I think I should find such an exhibition extremely curious as well as entertaining._" Now, shall I put on record what Henry Irving thought of Fanny Kemble! If there is a touch of malice in my doing so, surely the passage that I have quoted gives me leave. Having lived with Hamlet nearly all his life, studied the part when he was a clerk, dreamed of a day when he might play it, the young Henry Irving saw that Mrs. Butler, the famous Fanny Kemble, was going to give a reading of the play. His heart throbbed high with anticipation, for in those days TRADITION was everything--the name of Kemble a beacon and a star. The studious young clerk went to the reading. An attendant came on to the platform, first, and made trivial and apparently unnecessary alterations in the position of the reading desk. A glass of water and a book were placed on it. After a portentous wait, on swept a lady with an extraordinary flashing eye, a masculine and muscular outside. Pounding the book with terrific energy, as if she wished to knock the stuffing out of it, she announced in thrilling tones: "'HAM--A--LETTE.' By Will--y--am Shak--es--peare." "I suppose this is all right," thought the young clerk, a little dismayed at the fierce and sectional enunciation. Then the reader came to Act I, Sc. 2, which the old actor (to leave the Kemble reading for a minute), with but a hazy notion of the text, used to begin: "Although of Hamlet, our dear brother's death, The memory be--memory be--(What _is_ the color?) _green_".... When Fanny Kemble came to this scene the future Hamlet began to listen more intently. _Gertrude_: Let not thy mother lose _her_ prayers, _Ham--a--lette_. _Hamlet_: I shall in all respects obey _you_, madam (obviously with a fiery flashing eye of hate upon the King). When he heard this and more like it, Henry Irving exercised his independence of opinion and refused to accept Fanny Kemble's view of the gentle, melancholy, and well-bred Prince of Denmark. He was a stickler for tradition, and always studied it, followed it, sometimes to his own detriment, but he was not influenced by the Kemble Hamlet, except that for some time he wore the absurd John Philip feather, which he would have been much better without! Let me pray that I, representing the old school, may never look on the new school with the patronizing airs of "Old Fitz"[1] and Fanny Kemble. I wish that I could _see_ the new school of acting in Shakespeare. Shakespeare must be kept up, or we shall become a third-rate nation! [Footnote 1: Edward FitzGerald.] Henry told me this story of Fanny Kemble's reading without a spark of ill-nature, but with many a gleam of humor. He told me at the same time of the wonderful effect that Adelaide Kemble (Mrs. Sartoris) used to make when she recited Shelley's lines, beginning: "Good-night--Ah, no, the hour is ill Which severs those it should unite. Let us remain together still-- Then it will be _good-night_!" I have already said that I never could cope with Pauline Deschapelles, and why Henry wanted to play Melnotte was a mystery. Claude Melnotte after Hamlet! Oddly enough, Henry was always attracted by fustian. He simply reveled in the big speeches. The play was beautifully staged; the garden scene alone probably cost as much as the whole of "Hamlet." The march past the window of the apparently unending army--that good old trick which sends the supers flying round the back-cloth to cross the stage again and again--created a superb effect. The curtain used to go up and down as often as we liked and chose to keep the army marching! The play ran some time, I suppose because even at our worst the public found _something_ in our acting to like. As Ruth Meadowes I had very little to do, but what there was, was worth doing. The last act of "Eugene Aram," like the last act of "Ravenswood," gave me opportunity. It was staged with a great appreciation of grim and poetic effect. Henry always thought that the dark, overhanging branch of the cedar was like the cruel outstretched hand of Fate. He called it the Fate Tree, and used it in "Hamlet," in "Eugene Aram," and in "Romeo and Juliet." In "Eugene Aram," the Fate Tree drooped low over the graves in the churchyard. On one of them Henry used to be lying in a black cloak as the curtain went up on the last act. Not until a moonbeam struck the dark mass did you see that it was a man. He played all such parts well. Melancholy and the horrors had a peculiar fascination for him--especially in these early days. But his recitation of the poem "Eugene Aram" was finer than anything in the play--especially when he did it in a frock-coat. No one ever looked so well in a frock-coat! He was always ready to recite it--used to do it after supper, anywhere. We had a talk about it once, and I told him that it was _too much_ for a room. No man was ever more willing to listen to suggestion or less obstinate about taking advice. He immediately moderated his methods when reciting in _a room_, making it all the less theatrical. The play was a good répertoire play, and we did it later on in America with success. There the part of Houseman was played by Terriss, who was quite splendid in it, and at Chicago my little boy Teddy made his second appearance on any stage as Joey, a gardener's boy. He had, when still a mere baby, come on to the stage at the Court in "Olivia," and this must be counted his _first_ appearance, although the chroniclers, ignoring both that and Joey in "Eugene Aram," _say_ he never appeared at all until he played an important part in "The Dead Heart." It is because of Teddy that "Eugene Aram" is associated in my mind with one of the most beautiful sights upon the stage that I ever saw in my life. He was about ten or eleven at the time, and as he tied up the stage roses, his cheeks, untouched by rouge, put the reddest of them to shame! He was so graceful and natural; he spoke his lines with ease, and smiled all over his face! "A born actor!" I said, although Joey was my son. Whenever I think of him in that stage garden, I weep for pride, and for sorrow, too, because before he was thirty my son had left the stage--he who had it all in him. I have good reason to be proud of what he has done since, but I regret the lost actor _always_. Henry Irving could not at first keep away from melancholy pieces. Henrietta Maria was another sad part for me--but I used to play it well, except when I cried too much in the last act. The play had been one of the Bateman productions, and I had seen Miss Isabel Bateman as Henrietta Maria and liked her, although I could not find it possible to follow her example and play the part with a French accent! I constantly catch myself saying of Henry Irving, "That is by far the best thing that he ever did." I could say it of some things in "Charles I."--of the way he gave up his sword to Cromwell, of the way he came into the room in the last act and shut the door behind him. It was not a man coming on to a stage to meet some one. It was a king going to the scaffold, quietly, unobtrusively, and courageously. However often I played that scene with him, I knew that when he first came on he was not aware of my presence nor of any _earthly_ presence: he seemed to be already in heaven. Much has been said of his "make-up" as Charles I. Edwin Long painted him a triptych of Vandyck heads, which he always had in his dressing-room, and which is now in my possession. He used to come on to the stage looking precisely like the Vandyck portraits, but not because he had been busy building up his face with wig-paste and similar atrocities. His make-up in this, as in other parts, was the process of _assisting subtly and surely the expression from within_. It was elastic, and never hampered him. It changed with the expression. As Charles, he was assisted by Nature, who had given him the most beautiful Stuart hands, but his clothes most actors would have consigned to the dust-bin! Before we had done with Charles I.--we played it together for the last time in 1902--these clothes were really threadbare. Yet he looked in them every inch a king. His care of detail may be judged from the fact that in the last act his wig was not only grayer, but had far less hair in it. I should hardly think it necessary to mention this if I had not noticed how many actors seem to think that age may be procured by the simple expedient of dipping their heads, covered with mats of flourishing hair, into a flour-barrel! Unlike most stage kings, he never seemed to be _assuming_ dignity. He was very, very simple. Wills has been much blamed for making Cromwell out to be such a wretch--a mean blackguard, not even a great bad man. But in plays the villain must not compete for sympathy with the hero, or both fall to the ground! I think that Wills showed himself a true poet in his play, and in the last act a great playwright. He gave us both wonderful opportunities, yet very few words were spoken. Some people thought me best in the camp scene in the third act, where I had even fewer lines to speak. I was proud of it myself when I found that it had inspired Oscar Wilde to write me this lovely sonnet: In the lone tent, waiting for victory, She stands with eyes marred by the mists of pain, Like some wan lily overdrenched with rain; The clamorous clang of arms, the ensanguined sky, War's ruin, and the wreck of chivalry To her proud soul no common fear can bring; Bravely she tarrieth for her Lord, the King, Her soul aflame with passionate ecstasy. O, hair of gold! O, crimson lips! O, face Made for the luring and the love of man! With thee I do forget the toil and stress, The loveless road that knows no resting place, Time's straitened pulse, the soul's dread weariness, My freedom, and my life republican! That phrase "wan lily" represented perfectly what I had tried to convey, not only in this part but in Ophelia. I hope I thanked Oscar enough at the time. Now he is dead, and I cannot thank him any more.... I had so much _bad_ poetry written to me that these lovely sonnets from a real poet should have given me the greater pleasure. "He often has the poet's heart, who never felt the poet's fire." There is more good _heart_ and kind feeling in most of the verses written to me than real poetry. "One must discriminate," even if it sounds unkind. At the time that Whistler was having one of his most undignified "rows" with a sitter over a portrait and wrangling over the price, another artist was painting frescoes in a cathedral for nothing. "It is sad that it should be so," a friend said to me, "but _one must discriminate_. The man haggling over the sixpence is the great artist!" How splendid it is that _in time_ this is recognized. The immortal soul of the artist is in his work, the transient and mortal one is in his conduct. Another sonnet from Oscar Wilde--to Portia this time--is the first document that I find in connection with "The Merchant," as the play was always called by the theater staff. "I marvel not Bassanio was so bold To peril all he had upon the lead, Or that proud Aragon bent low his head, Or that Morocco's fiery heart grew cold; For in that gorgeous dress of beaten gold, Which is more golden than the golden sun, No woman Veronese looked upon Was half so fair as thou whom I behold. Yet fairer when with wisdom as your shield The sober-suited lawyer's gown you donned, And would not let the laws of Venice yield Antonio's heart to that accursed Jew-- O, Portia! take my heart; it is thy due: I think I will not quarrel with the Bond." Henry Irving's Shylock dress was designed by Sir John Gilbert. It was never replaced, and only once cleaned by Henry's dresser and valet, Walter Collinson. Walter, I think, replaced "Doody," Henry's first dresser at the Lyceum, during the run of "The Merchant of Venice." Walter was a wig-maker by trade--assistant to Clarkson the elder. It was Doody who, on being asked his opinion of a production, said that it was fine--"not a _join_[1] to be seen anywhere!" It was Walter who was asked by Henry to say which he thought his master's best part. Walter could not be "drawn" for a long time. At last he said Macbeth. [Footnote 1: A "join" in theatrical wig-makers' parlance is the point where the front-piece of the wig ends and the actor's forehead begins.] This pleased Henry immensely, for, as I hope to show later on, he fancied himself in Macbeth more than in any other part. "It is generally conceded to be Hamlet," said Henry. "Oh, no, sir," said Walter, "_Macbeth._ You sweat twice as much in that." In appearance Walter was very like Shakespeare's bust in Stratford Church. He was a most faithful and devoted servant, and was the only person with Henry Irving when he died. Quiet in his ways, discreet, gentle, and very quick, he was the ideal dresser. The Lyceum production of "The Merchant of Venice" was not so strictly archaeological as the Bancrofts' had been, but it was very gravely beautiful and effective. If less attention was paid to details of costumes and scenery, the play itself was arranged and acted very attractively and always went with a swing. To the end of my partnership with Henry Irving it was a safe "draw" both in England and America. By this time I must have played Portia over a thousand times. During the first run of it the severe attack made on my acting of the part in _Blackwood's Magazine_ is worth alluding to. The suggestion that I showed too much of a "coming-on" disposition in the Casket Scene affected me for years, and made me self-conscious and uncomfortable. At last I lived it down. Any suggestion of _indelicacy_ in my treatment of a part always blighted me. Mr. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll, of the immortal "Alice in Wonderland") once brought a little girl to see me in "Faust." He wrote and told me that she had said (where Margaret begins to undress): "Where is it going to stop?" and that perhaps in consideration of the fact that it could affect a mere child disagreeably, I ought to alter my business! I had known dear Mr. Dodgson for years and years. He was as fond of me as he could be of any one over the age of ten, but I was _furious_. "I thought you only knew _nice_ children," was all the answer that I gave him. "It would have seemed to me awful for a _child_ to see harm where harm is; how much more when she sees it where harm is not." But I felt ashamed and shy whenever I played that scene. It was the Casket Scene over again. The unkind _Blackwood_ article also blamed me for showing too plainly that Portia loves Bassanio before he has actually won her. This seemed to me unjust, if only because Shakespeare makes Portia say _before_ Bassanio chooses the right casket: "One half of me is yours--the other half yours--_All yours!_" Surely this suggests that she was not concealing her fondness like a Victorian maiden, and that Bassanio had most surely won her love, though not yet the right to be her husband. "There is a soul of goodness in things evil," and the criticism made me alter the setting of the scene, and so contrive it that Portia was behind and out of sight of the men who made hazard for her love. Dr. Furnivall, a great Shakespearean scholar, was so kind as to write me the following letter about Portia: "Being founder and director of the New Shakespeare Society, I venture to thank you most heartily for your most charming and admirable impersonation of our poet's Portia, which I witnessed to-night with a real delight. You have given me a new light on the character, and by your so pretty by-play in the Casket Scene have made bright in my memory for ever the spot which almost all critics have felt dull, and I hope to say this in a new edition of 'Shakespeare.'" (He did say it, in "The Leopold" edition.) "Again those touches of the wife's love in the advocate when Bassanio says he'd give up his wife for Antonio, and when you kissed your hand to him behind his back in the Ring bit--how pretty and natural they were! Your whole conception and acting of the character are so true to Shakespeare's lines that one longs he could be here to see you. A lady gracious and graceful, handsome, witty, loving and wise, you are his Portia to the life." That's the best of Shakespeare, _I_ say. His characters can be interpreted in at least eight different ways, and of each way some one will say: "That is Shakespeare!" The German actress plays Portia as a low comedy part. She wears an eighteenth-century law wig, horn spectacles, a cravat (this last anachronism is not confined to Germans), and often a mustache! There is something to be said for it all, though I should not like to play the part that way myself. Lady Pollock, who first brought me to Henry Irving's notice as a possible leading lady, thought my Portia better at the Lyceum than it had been at the Prince of Wales's. "Thanks, my dear Valentine and enchanting Portia," she writes to me in response to a photograph that I had sent her, "but the photographers don't see you as you are, and have not the poetry in them to do you justice.... You were especially admirable in the Casket Scene. You kept your by-play quieter, and it gained in effect from the addition of repose--and I rejoiced that you did not kneel to Bassanio at 'My Lord, my governor, my King.' I used to feel that too much like worship from any girl to her affianced, and Portia's position being one of command, I should doubt the possibility of such an action...." I think I received more letters about my Portia than about all my other parts put together. Many of them came from university men. One old playgoer wrote to tell me that he liked me better than my former instructress, Mrs. Charles Kean. "She mouthed it as she did most things.... She was not real--a staid, sentimental 'Anglaise,' and more than a little stiffly pokerish." Henry Irving's Shylock was generally conceded to be full of talent and reality, but some of his critics could not resist saying that this was _not_ the Jew that Shakespeare drew! Now, who is in a position to say what is the Jew that Shakespeare drew? I think Henry Irving knew as well as most! Nay, I am sure that in his age he was the only person able to decide. Some said his Shylock was intellectual, and appealed more to the intellect of his audiences than to their emotions. Surely this is talking for the sake of talking. I recall so many things that touched people to the heart! For absolute pathos, achieved by absolute simplicity of means, I never saw anything in the theater to compare with his Shylock's return home over the bridge to his deserted house after Jessica's flight. A younger actor, producing "The Merchant of Venice" in recent years, asked Irving if he might borrow this bit of business. "By all means," said Henry. "With great pleasure." "Then, why didn't you do it?" inquired my daughter bluntly when the actor was telling us how kind and courteous Henry had been in allowing him to use his stroke of invention. "What do you mean?" asked the astonished actor. My daughter told him that Henry had dropped the curtain on a stage full of noise, and light, and revelry. When it went up again the stage was empty, desolate, with no light but a pale moon, and all sounds of life at a great distance--and then over the bridge came the wearied figure of the Jew. This marked the passing of the time between Jessica's elopement and Shylock's return home. It created an atmosphere of silence, and the middle of the night. "_You_ came back without dropping the curtain," said my daughter, "and so it wasn't a bit the same." "I couldn't risk dropping the curtain for the business," answered the actor, "_because it needed applause to take it up again_!" Henry Irving never grew tired of a part, never ceased to work at it, just as he never gave up the fight against his limitations. His diction, as the years went on, grew far clearer when he was depicting rage and passion. His dragging leg dragged no more. To this heroic perseverance he added an almost childlike eagerness in hearing any suggestion for the improvement of his interpretations which commended itself to his imagination and his judgment. From a blind man came the most illuminating criticism of his Shylock. The sensitive ear of the sightless hearer detected a fault in Henry Irving's method of delivering the opening line of his part: "Three thousand ducats--well!" "I hear no sound of the usurer in that," the blind man said at the end of the performance. "It is said with the reflective air of a man to whom money means very little." The justice of the criticism appealed strongly to Henry. He revised his reading not only of the first line, but of many other lines in which he saw now that he had not been enough of the money-lender. In more recent years he made one change in his dress. He asked my daughter--whose cleverness in such things he fully recognized--to put some stage jewels on to the scarf that he wore round his head when he supped with the Christians. "I have an idea that, when he went to that supper, he'd like to flaunt his wealth in the Christian dogs' faces. It will look well, too--'like the toad, ugly and venomous,' wearing precious jewels on his head!" The scarf, witnessing to that untiring love of throwing new light on his impersonations which distinguished Henry to the last, is now in my daughter's possession. She values no relic of him more unless it be the wreath of oak-leaves that she made him for "Coriolanus." We had a beautiful scene for this play--a garden with a dark pine forest in the distance. Henry was _not_ good in it. He had a Romeo part which had not been written by Shakespeare. We played it instead of the last act of "The Merchant of Venice." I never liked it being left out, but people used to say, like parrots, that "the interest of the play ended with the Trial Scene," and Henry believed them--for a time. I never did. Shakespeare _never_ gives up in the last act like most dramatists. Twice in "Iolanthe" I forgot that I was blind! The first time was when I saw old Tom Mead and Henry Irving groping for the amulet, which they had to put on my breast to heal me of my infirmity. It had slipped on to the floor, and both of them were too short-sighted to see it! Here was a predicament! I had to stoop and pick it up for them. The second time I put out my hand and cried: "Look out for my lilies," when Henry nearly stepped on the bunch with which a little girl friend of mine supplied me every night I played the part. Iolanthe was one of Helen Faucit's great successes. I never saw this distinguished actress when she was in her prime. Her Rosalind, when she came out of her retirement to play a few performances, appeared to me more like a _lecture_ on Rosalind, than like Rosalind herself: a lecture all young actresses would have greatly benefited by hearing, for it was of great beauty. I remember being particularly struck by her treatment of the lines in the scene where Celia conducts the mock marriage between Orlando and Ganymede. Another actress, whom I saw as Rosalind, said the words, "And I do take thee, Orlando, to be my husband," with a comical grimace to the audience. Helen Faucit flushed up and said the line with deep and true emotion, suggesting that she was, indeed, giving herself to Orlando. There was a world of poetry in the way she drooped over his hand. Mead distinguished himself in "Iolanthe" by speaking of "that immortal land where God hath His--His--er--room?--no--lodging?--no--where God hath His apartments!" The word he could not hit was, I think, "dwelling." He used often to try five or six words before he got the right one _or_ the wrong one--it was generally the wrong one--in full hearing of the audience. IX LYCEUM PRODUCTIONS "THE MERCHANT OF VENICE" TO "ROMEO AND JULIET" "The Merchant of Venice" was acted two hundred and fifty consecutive nights on the occasion of the first production. On the hundredth night every member of the audience was presented with Henry Irving's acting edition of the play bound in white velum--a solid and permanent souvenir, paper, print and binding all being of the best. The famous Chiswick Press did all his work of this kind. On the title page was printed: "I count myself in nothing else so happy As in a soul remembering my good friends." At the close of the performance which took place on Saturday, February 14, 1880, Henry entertained a party of 350 to supper on the stage. This was the first of those enormous gatherings which afterwards became an institution at the Lyceum. It was at this supper that Lord Houghton surprised us all by making a very sarcastic speech about the stage and actors generally. It was no doubt more interesting than the "butter" which is usually applied to the profession at such functions, but every one felt that it was rather rude to abuse long runs when the company were met to celebrate a hundredth performance! Henry Irving's answer was delightful. He spoke with good sense, good humour and good breeding, and it was all spontaneous. I wish that a phonograph had been in existence that night, and that a record had been taken of the speech. It would be so good for the people who have asserted that Henry Irving always employed journalists (when he could not get Poets Laureate!) to write his speeches for him! The voice was always the voice of Irving, if the hands were sometimes the hands of the professional writer. When Henry was thrown on his debating resources he really spoke better than when he prepared a speech, and his letters prove, if proof were needed, how finely he could write! Those who represent him as dependent in such matters on the help of literary hacks are just ignorant of the facts. During the many years that I played Portia I seldom had a Bassanio to my mind. It seems to be a most difficult part, to judge by the colorless and disappointing renderings that are given of it. George Alexander was far the best of my Bassanio bunch! Mr. Barnes, "handsome Jack Barnes," as we called him, was a good actor, is a good actor still, as every one knows, but his gentility as Bassanio was overwhelming. It was said of him that he thought more of the rounding of his legs than the charms of his affianced wife, and that in the love-scenes he appeared to be taking orders for furniture! This was putting it unkindly, but there was some truth in it. He was so very dignified! My sister Floss (Floss was the first Lyceum Nerissa) and I once tried to make him laugh by substituting two "almond rings" for the real rings. "Handsome Jack" lost his temper, which made us laugh the more. He was quite right to be angry. Such fooling on the stage is very silly. I think it is one of the evils of long runs! When we had seen "handsome Jack Barnes" imperturbably pompous for two hundred nights in succession, it became too much for us, and the almond rings were the result. Mr. Tyars was the Prince of Morocco. Actors might come, and actors might go in the Lyceum company, but Tyars went on for ever. He never left Henry Irving's management, and was with him in that last performance of "Becket" at Bradford on October 13, 1905--the last performance ever given by Henry Irving who died the same night. Tyars was the most useful actor that we ever had in the company. I should think that the number of parts he has played in the same piece would constitute a theatrical record. I don't remember when Tom Mead first played the Duke, but I remember what happened! "Shylock, the world thinks, and I think so too." He began the speech in the Trial Scene very slowly. Between every word Henry was whispering: "Get on--get on!" Old Mead, whose memory was never good, became flustered, and at the end of the line came to a dead stop. "Get on, get on," said Henry. Mead looked round with dignity, opened his mouth and shut it, opened it again, and in his anxiety to oblige Henry, did get on indeed!--to the last line of the long speech. "We all expect a gentle answer, Jew." The first line and the last line were all that we heard of the Duke's speech that night. It must have been the shortest version of it on record. This was the play with which the Lyceum reopened in the autumn of 1880. I was on the last of my provincial tours with Charles Kelly at the time, but I must have come up to see the revival, for I remember Henry Irving in it very distinctly. He had not played the dual rôle of Louis and Fabien del Franchi before, and he had to compete with old playgoers' memories of Charles Kean and Fechter. Wisely enough he made of it a "period" play, emphasizing its old-fashioned atmosphere. In 1891, when the play was revived, the D'Orsay costumes were noticed and considered piquant and charming. In 1880 I am afraid they were regarded with indifference as merely antiquated. The grace and elegance of Henry as the civilized brother I shall never forget. There was something in _him_ to which the perfect style of the D'Orsay period appealed, and he spoke the stilted language with as much truth as he wore the cravat and the tight-waisted full-breasted coats. Such lines as-- "'Tis she! Her footstep beats upon my heart!" were not absurd from his lips. The sincerity of the period, he felt, lay in its elegance. A rough movement, a too undeliberate speech, and the absurdity of the thing might be given away. It was in fact given away by Terriss at Château-Renaud, who was not the smooth, graceful, courteous villain that Alfred Wigan had been and that Henry wanted. He told me that he paid Miss Fowler, an actress who in other respects was not very remarkable, an enormous salary because she could look the high-bred lady of elegant manners. It was in "The Corsican Brothers" that tableau curtains were first used at the Lyceum. They were made of red plush, which suited the old decoration of the theater. Those who only saw the Lyceum after its renovation in 1881 do not realize perhaps that before that date it was decorated in dull gold and dark crimson, and had funny boxes with high fronts like old-fashioned church pews. One of these boxes was rented annually by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. It was rather like the toy cardboard theater which children used to be able to buy for sixpence. The effect was somber, but I think I liked it better than the cold, light, shallow, bastard Pompeian decoration of later days. In Hallam Tennyson's life of his father, I find that I described "The Cup" as a "great little play." After thirty years (nearly) I stick to that. Its chief fault was that it was not long enough, for it involved a tremendous production, tremendous acting, had all the heroic size of tragedy, and yet was all over so quickly that we could play a long play like "The Corsican Brothers" with it in a single evening. Tennyson read the play to us at Eaton Place. There were present Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, William Terriss, Mr. Knowles, who had arranged the reading, my daughter Edy, who was then about nine, Hallam Tennyson, _and_ a dog--I think Charlie, for the days of Fussie were not yet. Tennyson, like most poets, read in a monotone, rumbling on a low note in much the same way that Shelley is said to have screamed in a high one. For the women's parts he changed his voice suddenly, climbed up into a key which he could not sustain. In spite of this I was beginning to think how impressive it all was, when I looked up and saw Edy, who was sitting on Henry's knee, looking over his shoulder at young Hallam and laughing, and Henry, instead of reproaching her, on the broad grin. There was much discussion as to what the play should be called, and as to whether the names "Synorix" and "Sinnatus" would be confused. "I don't think they will," I said, for I thought this was a very small matter for the poet to worry about. "I do!" said Edy in a loud clear voice, "I haven't known one from the other all the time!" "Edy, be good!" I whispered. Henry, mischievous as usual, was delighted at Edy's independence, but her mother was unutterably ashamed. "Leave her alone," said Henry, "she's all right." Tennyson at first wanted to call the play "The Senator's Wife," then thought of "Sinnatus and Synorix," and finally agreed with us that "The Cup" was the best as it was the simplest title. The production was one of the most beautiful things that Henry Irving ever accomplished. It has been described again and again, but none of the descriptions are very successful. There was a vastness, a spaciousness of proportion about the scene in the Temple of Artemis which I never saw again upon the stage until my own son attempted something like it in the Church Scene that he designed for my production of "Much Ado About Nothing" in 1903. A great deal of the effect was due to the lighting. The gigantic figure of the many-breasted Artemis, placed far back in the scene-dock, loomed through a blue mist, while the foreground of the picture was in yellow light. The thrilling effect always to be gained on the stage by the simple expedient of a great number of people doing the same thing in the same way at the same moment, was seen in "The Cup," when the stage was covered with a crowd of women who raised their arms above their heads with a large, rhythmic, sweeping movement and then bowed to the goddess with the regularity of a regiment saluting. At rehearsals there was one girl who did this movement with peculiar grace. She wore a black velveteen dress, although it was very hot weather, and I called her "Hamlet." I used to chaff her about wearing such a grand dress at rehearsals, but she was never to be seen in any other. The girls at the theater told me that she was very poor, and that underneath her black velveteen dress, which she wore summer and winter, she had nothing but a pair of stockings and a chemise. Not long after the first night of "The Cup" she disappeared. I made inquiries about her, and found that she was dying in hospital. I went several times to see her. She looked so beautiful in the little white bed. Her great eyes, black, with weary white lids, used to follow me as I left the hospital ward, and I could not always tear myself away from their dumb beseechingness, but would turn back and sit down again by the bed. Once she asked me if I would leave something belonging to me that she might look at until I came again. I took off the amber and coral beads that I was wearing at the time and gave them to her. Two days later I had a letter from the nurse telling me that poor Hamlet was dead--that just before she died, with closed eyes, and gasping for breath, she sent her love to her "dear Miss Terry," and wanted me to know that the tall lilies I had brought her on my last visit were to be buried with her, but that she had wiped the coral and amber beads and put them in cotton-wool, to be returned to me when she was dead. Poor "Hamlet"! Quite as wonderful as the Temple Scene was the setting of the first act, which represented the rocky side of a mountain with a glimpse of a fertile table-land and a pergola with vines growing over it at the top. The acting in this scene all took place on different levels. The hunt swept past on one level; the entrance to the temple was on another. A goatherd played upon a pipe. Scenically speaking, it was not Greece, but Greece in Sicily, Capri, or some such hilly region. Henry Irving was not able to look like the full-lipped, full-blooded Romans such as we see in long lines in marble at the British Museum, so he conceived his own type of the blend of Roman intellect and sensuality with barbarian cruelty and lust. Tennyson was not pleased with him as Synorix! _How_ he failed to delight in it as a picture I can't conceive. With a pale, pale face, bright red hair, gold armor and a tiger-skin, a diabolical expression and very thin crimson lips, Henry looked handsome and sickening at the same time. _Lechery_ was written across his forehead. The first act was well within my means; the second was beyond them, but it was very good for me to try and do it. I had a long apostrophe to the goddess with my back turned to the audience, and I never tackled anything more difficult. My dresses, designed by Mr. Godwin, one of them with the toga made of that wonderful material which Arnott had printed, were simple, fine and free. I wrote to Tennyson's son Hallam after the first night that I knew his father would be delighted with Henry's splendid performance, but was afraid he would be disappointed in me. "Dear Camma," he answered, "I have given your messages to my father, but believe me, who am not 'common report,' that he will thoroughly appreciate your noble, _most_ beautiful and imaginative rendering of 'Camma.' My father and myself hope to see you soon, but not while this detestable cold weather lasts. We trust that you are not now really the worse for that night of nights. "With all our best wishes, "Yours ever sincerely, "HALLAM TENNYSON." "I quite agree with you as to H.I.'s Synorix." The music of "The Cup" was not up to the level of the rest. Lady Winchilsea's setting of "Moon on the field and the foam," written within the compass of eight notes, for my poor singing voice, which will not go up high nor down low, was effective enough, but the music as a whole was too "chatty" for a severe tragedy. One night when I was singing my very best: "Moon, bring him home, bring him home, Safe from the dark and the cold," some one in the audience _sneezed_. Every one burst out laughing, and I had to laugh too. I did not even attempt the next line. "The Cup" was called a failure, but it ran 125 nights, and every night the house was crowded! On the hundredth night I sent Tennyson the Cup itself. I had it made in silver from Mr. Godwin's design--a three-handled cup, pipkin-shaped, standing on three legs. "The Cup" and "The Corsican Brothers" together made the bill too heavy and too long, even at a time when we still "rang up" at 7:30; and in the April following the production of Tennyson's beautiful tragedy--which I think in sheer poetic intensity surpasses "Becket," although it is not nearly so good a play--"The Belle's Stratagem" was substituted for "The Corsican Brothers." This was the first real rollicking comedy that a Lyceum audience had ever seen, and the way they laughed did my heart good. I had had enough of tragedy and the horrors by this time, and I could have cried with joy at that rare and welcome sight--an audience rocking with laughter. On the first night the play opened propitiously enough with a loud laugh due to the only accident of the kind that ever happened at the Lyceum. The curtain went up before the staff had "cleared," and Arnott, Jimmy and the rest were seen running for their lives out of the center entrance! People said that it was so clever of me to play Camma and Letitia Hardy (the comedy part in "The Belle's Stratagem") on the same evening. They used to say the same kind thing, "only more so," when Henry played Jingle and Matthias in "The Bells." But I never liked doing it. A _tour de force_ is always more interesting to the looker-on than to the person who is taking part in it. One feels no pride in such an achievement, which ought to be possible to any one calling himself an actor. Personally, I never play comedy and tragedy on the same night without a sense that one is spoiling the other. Harmonies are more beautiful than contrasts in acting as in other things--and more difficult, too. Henry Irving was immensely funny as Doricourt. We had sort of Beatrice and Benedick scenes together, and I began to notice what a lot his _face_ did for him. There have only been two faces on the stage in my time--his and Duse's. My face has never been of much use to me, but my _pace_ has filled the deficiency sometimes, in comedy at any rate. In "The Belle's Stratagem" the public had face and pace together, and they seemed to like it. There was one scene in which I sang "Where are you going to, my pretty maid?" I used to act it all the way through and give imitations of Doricourt--ending up by chucking him under the chin. The house rose at it! I was often asked at this time when I went out to a party if I would not sing that dear little song from "The Cup." When I said I didn't think it would sound very nice without the harp, as it was only a chant on two or three notes, some one would say: "Well, then, the song in 'The Belle's Stratagem'! _That_ has no accompaniment!" "No," I used to answer, "but it isn't a song. It's a look here, a gesture there, a laugh anywhere, _and_ Henry Irving's face everywhere!" Miss Winifred Emery came to us for "The Belle's Stratagem" and played the part that I had played years before at the Haymarket. She was bewitching, and in her white wig in the ball-room, beautiful as well. She knew how to bear herself on the stage instinctively, and could dance a minuet to perfection. The daughter of Sam Emery, a great comedian in a day of comedians, and the granddaughter of _the_ Emery, it was not surprising that she should show aptitude for the stage. Mr. Howe was another new arrival in the Lyceum company. He was at his funniest as Mr. Hardy in "The Belle's Stratagem." It was not the first time that he had played my father in a piece (we had acted father and daughter in "The Little Treasure"), and I always called him "Daddy." The dear old man was much liked by every one. He had a tremendous pair of legs, was bluff and bustling in manner, though courtly too, and cared more about gardening than acting. He had a little farm at Isleworth, and he was one of those actors who do not allow the longest theatrical season to interfere with domesticity and horticulture! Because of his stout gaitered legs and his Isleworth estate, Henry called him "the agricultural actor." He was a good old port and whisky drinker, but he could carry his liquor like a Regency man. He was a walking history of the stage. "Yes, my dear," he used to say to me, "I was in the original cast of the first performance of 'The Lady of Lyons,' which Lord Lytton gave Macready as a present, and I was the original François when 'Richelieu' was produced. Lord Lytton wrote this part for a lady, but at rehearsal it was found that there was a good deal of movement awkward for a lady to do, so I was put into it." "What year was it, Daddy?" "God bless me, I must think.... It must have been about a year after Her Majesty took the throne." For forty years and nine months old Mr. Howe had acted at the Haymarket Theater! When he was first there, the theater was lighted with oil lamps, and when a lamp smoked or went out, one of the servants of the theater came on and lighted it up again during the action of the play. It was the acting of Edmund Kean in "Richard III." which first filled Daddy Howe with the desire to go on the stage. He saw the great actor again when he was living in retirement at Richmond--in those last sad days when the Baroness Burdett-Coutts (then the rich young heiress, Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts), driving up the hill, saw him sitting huddled up on one of the public seats and asked if she could do anything for him. "Nothing, I think," he answered sadly. "Ah yes, there is one thing. You were kind enough the other day to send me some very excellent brandy. _Send me some more._"[1] [Footnote 1: This was a favorite story of Henry Irving's, and for that reason alone I think it worth telling, although Sir Squire Bancroft assures me that stubborn dates make it impossible that the tale should be true.] Of Henry Irving as an actor Mr. Howe once said to me that at first he was prejudiced against him because he was so different from the other great actors that he had known. "'This isn't a bit like Iago,' I said to myself when I first saw him in 'Othello.' That was at the end of the first act. But he had commanded my attention to his innovations. In the second act I found myself deeply interested in watching and studying the development of his conception. In the third act I was fascinated by his originality. By the end of the play I wondered that I could ever have thought that the part ought to be played differently." Daddy Howe was the first member of the Lyceum company who got a reception from the audience on his entrance as a public favorite. He remained with us until his death, which took place on our fourth American tour in 1893. Every one has commended Henry Irving's kindly courtesy in inviting Edwin Booth to come and play with him at the Lyceum Theater. Booth was having a wretched season at the Princess's, which was when he went there a theater on the down-grade, and under a thoroughly commercial management. The great American actor, through much domestic trouble and bereavement, had more or less "given up" things. At any rate he had not the spirit which can combat such treatment as he received at the Princess's, where the pieces in which he appeared were "thrown" on to the stage with every mark of assumption that he was not going to be a success. Yet, although he accepted with gratitude Henry Irving's suggestion that he should migrate from the Princess's to the Lyceum and appear there three times a week as Othello with the Lyceum company and its manager to support him, I cannot be sure that Booth's pride was not more hurt by this magnificent hospitality than it ever could have been by disaster. It is always more difficult to _receive_ than to _give_. Few people thought of this, I suppose. I did, because I could imagine Henry Irving in America in the same situation--accepting the hospitality of Booth. Would not he too have been melancholy, quiet, unassertive, _almost_ as uninteresting and uninterested as Booth was? I saw him first at a benefit performance at Drury Lane. I came to the door of the room where Henry was dressing, and Booth was sitting there with his back to me. "Here's Miss Terry," said Henry as I came round the door. Booth looked up at me swiftly. I have never in any face, in any country, seen such wonderful eyes. There was a mystery about his appearance and his manner--a sort of pride which seemed to say: "Don't try to know me, for I am not what I have been." He seemed broken, and devoid of ambition. At rehearsal he was very gentle and apathetic. Accustomed to playing Othello with stock companies, he had few suggestions to make about the stage-management. The part was to him more or less of a monologue. "I shall never make you black," he said one morning. "When I take your hand I shall have a corner of my drapery in my hand. That will protect you." I am bound to say that I thought of Mr. Booth's "protection" with some yearning the next week when I played Desdemona to _Henry's_ Othello. Before he had done with me I was nearly as black as he. Booth was a melancholy, dignified Othello, but not great as Salvini was great. Salvini's Hamlet made me scream with mirth, but his Othello was the grandest, biggest, most glorious thing. We often prate of "reserved force." Salvini had it, for the simple reason that his was the gigantic force which may be restrained because of its immensity. Men have no need to dam up a little purling brook. If they do it in acting, it is tame, absurd and pretentious. But Salvini held himself in, and still his groan was like a tempest, his passion huge. The fact is that, apart from Salvini's personal genius, the foreign temperament is better fitted to deal with Othello than the English. Shakespeare's French and Italians, Greeks and Latins, medievals and barbarians, fancifuls and reals, all have a dash of Elizabethan English men in them, but not Othello. Booth's Othello was very helpful to my Desdemona. It is difficult to preserve the simple, heroic blindness of Desdemona to the fact that her lord mistrusts her, if her lord is raving and stamping under her nose! Booth was gentle in the scenes with Desdemona until _the_ scene where Othello overwhelms her with the foul word and destroys her fool's paradise. Love _does_ make fools of us all, surely, but I wanted to make Desdemona out the fool who is the victim of love and faith; not the simpleton, whose want of tact in continually pleading Cassio's cause is sometimes irritating to the audience. My greatest triumph as Desdemona was not gained with the audience but with Henry Irving! He found my endeavors to accept comfort from Iago so pathetic that they brought the tears to his eyes. It was the oddest sensation when I said "Oh, good Iago, what shall I do to win my lord again?" to look up--my own eyes dry, for Desdemona is past crying then--and see Henry's eyes at their biggest, luminous, soft and full of tears! He was, in spite of Iago and in spite of his power of identifying himself with the part, very deeply moved by my acting. But he knew how to turn it to his purpose: he obtrusively took the tears with his fingers and blew his nose with much feeling, softly and long (so much expression there is, by the way, in blowing the nose on the stage), so that the audience might think his emotion a fresh stroke of hypocrisy. Every one liked Henry's Iago. For the first time in his life he knew what it was to win unanimous praise. Nothing could be better, I think, than Mr. Walkley's[1] description: "Daringly Italian, a true compatriot of the Borgias, or rather, better than Italians, that devil incarnate, an Englishman Italianate." [Footnote 1: Mr. A.B. Walkley, the gifted dramatic critic of _The Times_.] One adored him, devil though he was. He was so full of charm, so sincerely the "honest" Iago, peculiarly sympathetic with Othello, Desdemona, Roderigo, _all_ of them--except his wife. It was only in the soliloquies and in the scenes with his wife that he revealed his devil's nature. Could one ever forget those grapes which he plucked in the first act, and slowly ate, spitting out the seeds, as if each one represented a worthy virtue to be put out of his mouth, as God, according to the evangelist, puts out the lukewarm virtues. His Iago and his Romeo in different ways proved his power to portray _Italian_ passions--the passions of lovely, treacherous people, who will either sing you a love sonnet or stab you in the back--you are not sure which! We played "Othello" for six weeks, three performances a week, to guinea stalls, and could have played it longer. Each week Henry and Booth changed parts. For both of them it was a change _for the worse_. Booth's Iago seemed deadly commonplace after Henry's. He was always the snake in the grass; he showed the villain in all the scenes. He could not resist the temptation of making polished and ornate effects. Henry Irving's Othello was condemned almost as universally as his Iago was praised. For once I find myself with the majority. He screamed and ranted and raved--lost his voice, was slow where he should have been swift, incoherent where he should have been strong. I could not bear to see him in the part. It was painful to me. Yet night after night he achieved in the speech to the Senate one of the most superb and beautiful bits of acting of his life. It was _wonderful_. He spoke the speech, beaming on Desdemona all the time. The gallantry of the thing is indescribable. I think his failure as Othello was one of the unspoken bitternesses of Henry's life. When I say "failure" I am of course judging him by his own standard, and using the word to describe what he was to himself, not what he was to the public. On the last night, he rolled up the clothes that he had worn as the Moor one by one, carefully laying one garment on top of the other, and then, half-humorously and very deliberately said, "_Never again_!" Then he stretched himself with his arms above his head and gave a great sigh of relief. Mr. Pinero was excellent as Roderigo in this production. He was always good in the "silly ass" type of part, and no one could say of him that he was playing himself! Desdemona is not counted a big part by actresses, but I loved playing it. Some nights I played it beautifully. My appearance was right--I was such a poor wraith of a thing. But let there be no mistake--it took strength to act this weakness and passiveness of Desdemona's. I soon found that, like Cordelia, she has plenty of character. Reading the play the other day, I studied the opening scene. It is the finest opening to a play I know. How many times Shakespeare draws fathers and daughters, and how little stock he seems to take of _mothers_! Portia and Desdemona, Cordelia, Rosalind and Miranda, Lady Macbeth, Queen Katherine and Hermione, Ophelia, Jessica, Hero, and many more are daughters of _fathers_, but of their mothers we hear nothing. My own daughter called my attention to this fact quite recently, and it is really a singular fact. Of mothers of sons there are plenty of examples: Constance, Volumnia, the Countess Rousillon, Gertrude; but if there are mothers of daughters at all, they are poor examples, like Juliet's mother and Mrs. Page. I wonder if in all the many hundreds of books written on Shakespeare and his plays this point has been taken up? I once wrote a paper on the "Letters in Shakespeare's Plays," and congratulated myself that they had never been made a separate study. The very day after I first read my paper before the British Empire Shakespeare League, a lady wrote to me from Oxford and said I was mistaken in thinking that there was no other contribution to the subject. She enclosed an essay of her own which had either been published or read before some society. Probably some one else has dealt with Shakespeare's patronage of fathers and neglect of mothers! I often wonder what the mothers of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia were like! I think Lear must have married twice. This was the first of Henry Irving's great Shakespearean productions. "Hamlet" and "Othello" had been mounted with care, but, in spite of statements that I have seen to the contrary, they were not true reflections of Irving as a producer. In beauty I do not think that "Romeo and Juliet" surpassed "The Cup," but it was very sumptuous, impressive and Italian. It was the most _elaborate_ of all the Lyceum productions. In it Henry first displayed his mastery of crowds. The brawling of the rival houses in the streets, the procession of girls to wake Juliet on her wedding morning, the musicians, the magnificent reconciliation of the two houses which closed the play, every one on the stage holding a torch, were all treated with a marvelous sense of pictorial effect. Henry once said to me: "'Hamlet' could be played anywhere on its acting merits. It marches from situation to situation. But 'Romeo and Juliet' proceeds from picture to picture. Every line suggests a picture. It is a dramatic poem rather than a drama, and I mean to treat it from that point of view." While he was preparing the production he revived "The Two Roses," a company in which as Digby Grant he had made a great success years before. I rehearsed the part of Lottie two or three times, but Henry released me because I was studying Juliet; and as he said, "You've got to do all you know with it." Perhaps the sense of this responsibility weighed on me. Perhaps I was neither young enough nor old enough to play Juliet. I read everything that had ever been written about her before I had myself decided what she was. It was a dreadful mistake. That was the first thing wrong with my Juliet--lack of original impulse. As for the second and the third and the fourth--well, I am not more than common vain, I trust, but I see no occasion to write them _all_ down. It was perhaps the greatest opportunity that I had yet had at the Lyceum. I studied the part at my cottage at Hampton Court in a bedroom looking out over the park. There was nothing wrong with _that_. By the way, how important it is to be careful about environment and everything else when one is studying. One ought to be in the country, but not all the time.... It is good to go about and see pictures, hear music, and watch everything. One should be very much alone, and should study early and late--all night, if need be, even at the cost of sleep. Everything that one does or thinks or sees will have an effect upon the part, precisely as on an unborn child. I wish now that instead of reading how this and that actress had played Juliet, and cracking my brain over the different readings of her lines and making myself familiar with the different opinions of philosophers and critics, I had gone to Verona, and just _imagined_. Perhaps the most wonderful description of Juliet, as she should be acted, occurs in Gabriele d'Annunzio's "Il Fuoco." In the book an Italian actress tells her friend how she played the part when she was a girl of fourteen in an open-air theater near Verona. Could a girl of fourteen play such a part? Yes, if she were not youthful, only young with the youth of the poet, tragically old as some youth is. Now I understand Juliet better. Now I know how she should be played. But time is inexorable. At sixty, know what one may, one cannot play Juliet. I know that Henry Irving's production of "Romeo and Juliet" has been attributed to my ambition. What nonsense! Henry Irving now had in view the production of all Shakespeare's actable plays, and naturally "Romeo and Juliet" would come as early as possible in the programme. The music was composed by Sir Julius Benedict, and was exactly right. There was no _leit-motiv_, no attempt to reflect the passionate emotion of the drama, but a great deal of Southern joy, of flutes and wood and wind. At a rehearsal which had lasted far into the night I asked Sir Julius, who was very old, if he wasn't sleepy. "Sleepy! Good heavens, no! I never sleep more than two hours. It's the end of my life, and I don't want to waste it in sleep!" There is generally some "old 'un" in a company now who complains of insufficient rehearsals, and says, perhaps, "Think of Irving's rehearsals! They were the real thing." While we were rehearsing "Romeo and Juliet" I remember that Mrs. Stirling, a charming and ripe old actress whom Henry had engaged to play the nurse, was always groaning out that she had not rehearsed enough. "Oh, these modern ways!" she used to say. "We never have any rehearsals at all. How am I going to play the Nurse?" She played it splendidly--indeed, she as the Nurse and old Tom Mead as the Apothecary--the two "old 'uns" romped away with chief honors, had the play all to nothing. I had one battle with Mrs. Stirling over "tradition." It was in the scene beginning-- "The clock struck twelve when I did send the nurse, And yet she is not here...." Tradition said that Juliet must go on coquetting and clicking over the Nurse to get the news of Romeo out of her. Tradition said that Juliet must give imitations of the Nurse on the line "Where's your mother?" in order to get that cheap reward, "a safe laugh." I felt that it was wrong. I felt that Juliet was angry with the Nurse. Each time she delayed in answering I lost my temper, with genuine passion. At "Where's your mother?" I spoke with indignation, tears and rage. We were a long time coaxing Mrs. Stirling to let the scene be played on these lines, but this was how it _was_ played eventually. She was the only Nurse that I have ever seen who did not play the part like a female pantaloon. She did not assume any great decrepitude. In the "Cords" scene, where the Nurse tells Juliet of the death of Paris, she did not play for comedy at all, but was very emotional. Her parrot scream when she found me dead was horribly real and effective. Years before I had seen Mrs. Stirling act at the Adelphi with Benjamin Webster, and had cried out: "_That's_ my idea of an actress!" In those days she was playing Olivia (in a version of the "Vicar of Wakefield" by Tom Taylor), Peg Woffington, and other parts of the kind. She swept on to the stage and in that magical way, never, never to be learned, _filled_ it. She had such breadth of style, such a lovely voice, such a beautiful expressive eye! When she played the Nurse at the Lyceum her voice had become a little jangled and harsh, but her eye was still bright and her art had not abated--not one little bit! Nor had her charm. Her smile was the most fascinating, irresistible thing imaginable. The production was received with abuse by the critics. It was one of our failures, yet it ran a hundred and fifty nights! Henry Irving's Romeo had more bricks thrown at it even than my Juliet! I remember that not long after we opened, a well-known politician who had enough wit and knowledge of the theater to have taken a more original view, came up to me and said: "I say, E.T., why is Irving playing Romeo?" I looked at his distraught. "You should ask me why I am playing Juliet! Why are we any of us doing what we have to do?" "Oh, _you're_ all right. But Irving!" "I don't agree with you," I said. I was growing a little angry by this time. "Besides, who would you have play Romeo?" "Well, it's so obvious. You've got Terriss in the cast." "_Terriss!_" "Yes. I don't doubt Irving's intellectuality, you know. As Romeo he reminds me of a pig who has been taught to play the fiddle. He does it cleverly, but he would be better employed in squealing. He cannot shine in the part like the fiddler. Terriss in this case is the fiddler." I was furious. "I am sorry you don't realize," I said, "that the worst thing Henry Irving could do would be better than the best of any one else." When dear Terris did play Romeo at the Lyceum two or three years later to the Juliet of Mary Anderson, he attacked the part with a good deal of fire. He was young, truly, and stamped his foot a great deal, was vehement and passionate. But it was so obvious that there was no intelligence behind his reading. He did not know what the part was about, and all the finer shades of meaning in it he missed. Yet the majority, with my political friend, would always prefer a Terriss as Romeo to a Henry Irving. I am not going to say that Henry's Romeo was good. What I do say is that some bits of it were as good as anything he ever did. In the big emotional scene (in the Friar's cell), he came to grief precisely as he had done in Othello. He screamed, grew slower and slower, and looked older and older. When I begin to think it over I see that he often failed in such scenes through his very genius for impersonation. An actor of commoner mould takes such scenes rhetorically--recites them, and gets through them with some success. But the actor who impersonates, feels, and lives such anguish or passion or tempestuous grief, does for the moment in imagination nearly die. Imagination impeded Henry Irving in what are known as "strong" scenes. He was a perfect Hamlet, a perfect Richard III., a perfect Shylock, except in the scene with Tubal, where I think his voice failed him. He was an imperfect Romeo; yet, as I have said, he did things in the part which were equal to the best of his perfect Hamlet. His whole attitude before he met Juliet was beautiful. He came on from the very back of the stage and walked over a little bridge with a book in his hand, sighing and dying for Rosaline. In Iago he had been Italian. Then it was the Italy of Venice. As Romeo it was the Italy of Tuscany. His clothes were as Florentine as his bearing. He ignored the silly tradition that Romeo must wear a feather in his cap. In the course of his study of the part he had found that the youthful fops and gallants of the period put in their hats anything that they had been given--some souvenir "dallying with the innocence of love." And he wore in his hat a sprig of crimson oleander. It is not usual, I think, to make much of the Rosaline episode. Henry Irving chose with great care a tall dark girl to represent Rosaline at the ball. Can I ever forget his face when suddenly in pursuit of _her_ he saw _me_.... Once more I reflect that a _face_ is the chiefest equipment of the actor. I know they said he looked too old--was too old for Romeo. In some scenes he looked aged as only a very young man can look. He was not boyish; but ought Romeo to be boyish? I am not supporting the idea of an elderly Romeo. When it came to the scenes where Romeo "poses" and is poetical but insincere, Henry _did_ seem elderly. He couldn't catch the youthful pose of melancholy with its extravagant expression. It was in the repressed scenes, where the melancholy was sincere, the feeling deeper, and the expression slighter, that he was at his best. "He may be good, but he isn't Romeo," is a favorite type of criticism. But I have seen Duse and Bernhardt in "La Dame aux Camélias," and cannot say which is Marguerite Gauthier. Each has her own view of the character, and each _is_ it _according to her imagination_. According to his imagination, Henry Irving was Romeo. Again in this play he used his favorite "fate" tree. It gloomed over the street along which Romeo went to the ball. It was in the scene with the Apothecary. Henry thought that it symbolized the destiny hanging over the lovers. It is usual for Romeo to go in to the dead body of Juliet lying in Capulet's monument through a gate on the _level_, as if the Capulets were buried but a few feet from the road. At rehearsals Henry Irving kept on saying: "I must go _down_ to the vault." After a great deal of consideration he had an inspiration. He had the exterior of the vault in one scene, the entrance to it down a flight of steps. Then the scene changed to the interior of the vault, and the steps now led from a height above the stage. At the close of the scene, when the Friar and the crowd came rushing down into the tomb, these steps were thronged with people, each one holding a torch, and the effect was magnificent. At the opening of the Apothecary Scene, when Balthazar comes to tell Romeo of Juliet's supposed death, Henry was marvelous. His face grew whiter and whiter. "Then she is well and nothing can be ill; Her body sleeps in Capulet's monument." It was during the silence after those two lines that Henry Irving as Romeo had one of those sublime moments which an actor only achieves once or twice in his life. The only thing that I ever saw to compare with it was Duse's moment when she took Kellner's card in "Magda." There was absolutely no movement, but her face grew white, and the audience knew what was going on in her soul, as she read the name of the man who years before had seduced and deserted her. As Juliet I did not _look_ right. My little daughter Edy, a born archaeologist, said: "Mother, you oughtn't to have a fringe." Yet, strangely enough, Henry himself liked me as Juliet. After the first night, or was it the dress rehearsal--I am not quite clear which--he wrote to me that "beautiful as Portia was, Juliet leaves her far, far behind. Never anybody acted more exquisitely the part of the performance which I saw from the front. 'Hie to high fortune,' and 'Where spirits resort' were simply incomparable.... Your mother looked very radiant last night. I told her how proud she should be, and she was.... The play will be, I believe, a mighty 'go,' for the beauty of it is bewildering. I am sure of this, for it dumbfounded them all last night. Now you--we--must make our task a delightful one by doing everything possible to make our acting easy and comfortable. We are in for a long run." To this letter he added a very human postscript: "I have determined not to see a paper for a week--I know they'll cut me up, and I don't like it!" Yes, he _was_ cut up, and he didn't like it, but a few people knew. One of them was Mr. Frankfort Moore, the novelist, who wrote to me of this "revealing Romeo, full of originality and power." "Are you affected by adverse criticism?" I was asked once. I answered then and I answer now, that legitimate adverse criticism has always been of use to me if only because it "gave me to think" furiously. Seldom does the outsider, however talented, as a writer and observer, recognize the actor's art, and often we are told that we are acting best when we are showing the works most plainly, and denied any special virtue when we are concealing our method. Professional criticism is most helpful, chiefly because it induces one to criticize oneself. "Did I give that impression to anyone? Then there must have been something wrong somewhere." The "something" is often a perfectly different blemish from that to which the critic drew attention. Unprofessional criticism is often more helpful still, but alas! one's friends are to one's faults more than a little blind, and to one's virtues very kind! It is through letters from people quite unknown to me that I have sometimes learned valuable lessons. During the run of "Romeo and Juliet" some one wrote and told me that if the dialogue at the ball could be taken in a lighter and _quicker_ way, it would better express the manner of a girl of Juliet's age. The same unknown critic pointed out that I was too slow and studied in the Balcony Scene. She--I think it was a woman--was perfectly right. On the hundredth night, although no one liked my Juliet very much, I received many flowers, little tokens, and poems. To one bouquet was pinned a note which ran: "To JULIET, As a mark of respect and Esteem From the Gasmen of the Lyceum Theater." That alone would have made my recollections of "Romeo and Juliet" pleasant. But there was more. At the supper on the stage after the hundredth performance, Sarah Bernhardt was present. She said nice things to me, and I was enraptured that my "vraies larmes" should have pleased and astonished her! I noticed that she hardly ever moved, yet all the time she gave the impression of swift, butterfly movement. While talking to Henry she took some red stuff out of her bag and rubbed it on her lips! This frank "making-up" in public was a far more astonishing thing in the 'eighties than it would be now. But I liked Miss Sarah for it, as I liked her for everything. How wonderful she looked in those days! She was as transparent as an azalea, only more so; like a cloud, only not so thick. Smoke from a burning paper describes her more nearly! She was hollow-eyed, thin, almost consumptive-looking. Her body was not the prison of her soul, but its shadow. On the stage she has always seemed to me more a symbol, an ideal, an epitome than a _woman_. It is this quality which makes her so easy in such lofty parts as Phèdre. She is always a miracle. Let her play "L'Aiglon," and while matter-of-fact members of the audience are wondering if she looks _really_ like the unfortunate King of Rome, and deciding against her and in favor of Maude Adams who did look the boy to perfection, more imaginative watchers see in Sarah's performance a truth far bigger than a mere physical resemblance. Rostand says in the foreword to his play, that in it he does not espouse this cause or that, but only tells the story of "one poor little boy." In another of his plays, "Cyrano de Bergerac," there is one poor little tune played on a pipe of which the hero says: "�coutez, Gascons, c'est toute la Gascogne." Though I am not French, and know next to nothing of the language, I thought when I saw Sarah's "L'Aiglon," that of that one poor little boy too might be said: "�coutez, Français, c'est toute la France!" It is this extraordinary decorative and symbolic quality of Sarah's which makes her transcend all personal and individual feeling on the stage. No one plays a love scene better, but it is a _picture_ of love that she gives, a strange orchidaceous picture rather than a suggestion of the ordinary human passion as felt by ordinary human people. She is exotic--well, what else should she be? One does not, at any rate one should not, quarrel with an exquisite tropical flower and call it unnatural because it is not a buttercup or a cowslip. I have spoken of the face as the chief equipment of the actor. Sarah Bernhardt contradicts this at once. Her face does little for her. Her walk is not much. Nothing about her is more remarkable than the way she gets about the stage without one ever seeing her move. By what magic does she triumph without two of the richest possessions that an actress can have? Eleonora Duse has them. Her walk is the walk of the peasant, fine and free. She has the superb carriage of the head which goes with that fearless movement from the hips--and her face! There is nothing like it, nothing! But it is as the real woman, a particular woman, that Duse triumphs most. Her Cleopatra was insignificant compared with Sarah's--she is not so pictorial. How futile it is to make comparisons! Better far to thank heaven for both these women. EXTRACT FROM MY DIARY _Saturday, June 11, 1892._--"To see 'Miss Sarah' as 'Cléopâtre' (Sardou superb!). She was inspired! The essence of Shakespeare's 'Cleopatra.' I went round and implored her to do Juliet. She said she was too old. She can _never_ be old. 'Age cannot wither her.' _June 18._--"Again to see Sarah--this time 'La Dame aux Camélias.' Fine, marvelous. Her writing the letter, and the last act the best. _July 11._--"_Telegraph_ says 'Frou-frou' was 'never at any time a character in which she (Sarah) excelled.' Dear me! When I saw it I thought it wonderful. It made me ashamed of ever having played it." Sarah Bernhardt has shown herself the equal of any man as a manager. Her productions are always beautiful; she chooses her company with discretion, and sees to every detail of the stage-management. In this respect she differs from all other foreign artists that I have seen. I have always regretted that Duse should play as a rule with such a mediocre company and should be apparently so indifferent to her surroundings. In "Adrienne Lecouvreur" it struck me that the careless stage-management utterly ruined the play, and I could not bear to see Duse as Adrienne beautifully dressed while the Princess and the other Court ladies wore cheap red velveteen and white satin and brought the pictorial level of the performance down to that of a "fit-up" or booth. Who could mention "Miss Sarah" (my own particular name for her) as being present at a supper-party without saying something about her by the way! Still, I have been a long time by the way. Now for Romeo and Juliet! At that 100th-night celebration I saw Mrs. Langtry in evening dress for the first time, and for the first time realized how beautiful she was. Her neck and shoulders kept me so busy looking that I could neither talk nor listen. "Miss Sarah" and I have always been able to understand one another, although I hardly know a word of French and her English is scanty. She too, liked my Juliet--she and Henry Irving! Well, that was charming, although I could not like it myself, except for my "Cords" scene, of which I shall always be proud. My dresser, Sarah Holland, came to me, I think, during "Romeo and Juliet." I never had any other dresser at the Lyceum except Sally's sister Lizzie, who dressed me during the first few years. Sally stuck to me loyally until the Lyceum days ended. Then she perceived "a divided duty." On one side was "the Guv'nor" with "the Guv'nor's" valet Walter, to whom she was devoted; on the other was a precarious in and out job with me, for after the Lyceum I never knew what I was going to do next. She chose to go with Henry, and it was she and Walter who dressed him for the last time when he lay dead in the hotel bedroom at Bradford. Sally Holland's two little daughters "walked on" in "Romeo and Juliet." Henry always took an interest in the children in the theater, and was very kind to them. One night as we came down the stairs from our dressing-rooms to go home--the theater was quiet and deserted--we found a small child sitting forlornly and patiently on the lowest step. "Well, my dear, what are you doing here?" said Henry. "Waiting for mother, sir." "Are you acting in the theater?" "Yes, sir." "And what part do you take?" "Please, sir, first I'm a water-carrier, then I'm a little page, and then I'm a virgin." Henry and I sat down on the stairs and laughed until we cried! Little Flo Holland was one of the troop of "virgins" who came to wake Juliet on her bridal morn. As time went on she was promoted to more important parts, but she never made us laugh so much again. Her mother was a "character," a dear character. She had an extraordinarily open mind, and was ready to grasp each new play as it came along as a separate and entirely different field of operations! She was also extremely methodical, and only got flurried once in a blue moon. When we went to America and made the acquaintance of that dreadful thing, a "one-night stand," she was as precise and particular about having everything nice and in order for me as if we were going to stay in the town a month. Down went my neat square of white drugget; all the lights in my dressing-room were arranged as I wished. Everything was unpacked and ironed. One day when I came into some American theater to dress I found Sally nearly in tears. "What's the matter with you, Sally?" I asked. "I 'aven't 'ad a morsel to heat all day, dear, and I can't 'eat my iron." "Eat your iron, Sally! What _do_ you mean?" "'Ow am I to iron all this, dear?" wailed Sally, picking up my Nance Oldfield apron and a few other trifles. "It won't get 'ot." Until then I really thought that Sally was being sardonic about an iron as a substitute for victuals! When she first began to dress me, I was very thin, so thin that it was really a grief to me. Sally would comfort me in my thin days by the terse compliment: "Beautiful and fat to-night, dear." As the years went on and I grew fat, she made a change in the compliment: "Beautiful and thin to-night, dear." Mr. Fernandez played Friar Laurence in "Romeo and Juliet." He was a very nervous actor, and it used to paralyze him with fright when I knelt down in the friar's cell with my back to the audience and put safety pins in the drapery I wore over my head to keep it in position while I said the lines, "Are you at leisure, holy father, now Or shall I come to you at evening mass?" Not long after the production of "Romeo and Juliet" I saw the performance of a Greek play--the "Electra," I think--by some Oxford students. A young woman veiled in black with bowed head was brought in on a chariot. Suddenly she lifted her head and looked round, revealing a face of such pure classic beauty and a glance of such pathos that I called out: "What a supremely beautiful girl!" Then I remembered that there were no women in the cast! The face belonged to a young Oxford man, Frank Benson. We engaged him to play Paris in "Romeo and Juliet," when George Alexander, the original Paris, left the Lyceum for a time. Already Benson gave promise of turning out quite a different person from the others. He had not nearly so much of the actor's instinct as Terriss, but one felt that he had far more earnestness. He was easily distinguished as a man with a purpose, one of those workers who "scorn delights and live laborious days." Those laborious days led him at last to the control of two or three companies, all traveling through Great Britain playing a Shakespearean répertoire. A wonderful organizer, a good actor (oddly enough, the more difficult the part the better he is--I like his _Lear_), and a man who has always been associated with high endeavor, Frank Benson's name is honored all over England. He was only at the Lyceum for this one production, but he always regarded Henry Irving as the source of the good work that he did afterwards. "Thank you very much," he wrote to me after his first night as Paris, "for writing me a word of encouragement.... I was very much ashamed and disgusted with myself all Sunday for my poverty-stricken and thin performance.... I think I was a little better last night. Indeed I was much touched at the kindness and sympathy of all the company and their efforts to make the awkward new boy feel at home.... I feel doubly grateful to you and Mr. Irving for the light you shed from the lamp of art on life now that I begin to understand the labor and weariness the process of trimming the Lamp entails." X LYCEUM PRODUCTIONS (_continued_) "MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING" TO "FAUST" Our success with "The Belle's Stratagem" had pointed to comedy, to Beatrice and Benedick in particular, because in Mrs. Cowley's old comedy we had had some scenes of the same type. I have already told of my first appearance as Beatrice at Leeds, and said that I never played the part so well again; but the Lyceum production was a great success, and Beatrice a great personal success for me. It is only in high comedy that people seem to know what I am driving at! The stage-management of the play was very good; the scenery nothing out of the ordinary except for the Church Scene. There was no question that it _was_ a church, hardly a question that old Mead was a Friar. Henry had the art of making ceremonies seem very real. This was the first time that we engaged a singer from outside. Mr. Jack Robertson came into the cast to sing "Sigh no more, ladies," and made an enormous success. Johnston Forbes-Robertson made his first appearance at the Lyceum as Claudio. I had not acted with him since "The Wandering Heir," and his improvement as an actor in the ten years that had gone by since then was marvelous. I had once said to him that he had far better stick to his painting and become an artist instead of an actor. His Claudio made me "take it back." It was beautiful. I have seen many young actors play the part since then, but not one of them made it anywhere near as convincing. Forbes-Robertson put a touch of Leontes into it, a part which some years later he was to play magnificently, and through the subtle indication of consuming and insanely suspicious jealousy made Claudio's offensive conduct explicable at least. On the occasion of the performance at Drury Lane which the theatrical profession organized in 1906 in honor of my Stage Jubilee, one of the items in the programme was a scene from "Much Ado about Nothing." I then played Beatrice for the last time and Forbes-Robertson played his old part of Claudio. During the run Henry commissioned him to paint a picture of the Church Scene, which was hung in the Beefsteak Room. The engravings printed from it were at one time very popular. When Johnston was asked why he had chosen that particular moment in the Church Scene, he answered modestly that it was the only moment when he could put himself as Claudio at the "side"! Some of the other portraits in the picture are Henry Irving, Terriss, who played Don Pedro; Jessie Millward as Hero, Mr. Glenny as Don John, Miss Amy Coleridge, Miss Harwood, Mr. Mead, and his daughter "Charley" Mead, a pretty little thing who was one of the pages. The Lyceum company was not a permanent one. People used to come, learn something, go away, and come back at a larger salary! Miss Emery left for a time, and then returned to play Hero and other parts. I liked her Hero better than Miss Millward's. Miss Millward had a sure touch; strength, vitality, interest; but somehow she was commonplace in the part. Henry used to spend hours and hours teaching people. I used to think impatiently: "Acting can't be taught." Gradually I learned to modify this conviction and to recognize that there are two classes of actors: 1. Those who can only do what they are taught. 2. Those who cannot be taught, but can be helped by suggestion to work out things for themselves. Henry said to me once: "What makes a popular actor? Physique! What makes a great actor? Imagination and sensibility." I tried to believe it. Then I thought to myself: "Henry himself is not quite what is understood by 'an actor of physique,' and certainly he is popular. And that he is a great actor I know. He certainly has both imagination and 'sense and sensibility.'" After the lapse of years I begin to wonder if Henry was ever really _popular_. It was natural to most people to dislike his acting--they found it queer, as some find the painting of Whistler--but he forced them, almost against their will and nature, out of dislike into admiration. They had to come up to him, for never would he go down to them. This is not popularity. _Brain_ allied with the instinct of the actor tells, but stupidity allied with the instinct of the actor tells more than brain alone. I have sometimes seen a clever man who was not a born actor play a small part with his brains, and have felt that the cleverness was telling more with the actors on the stage than with the audience. Terriss, like Mrs. Pritchard, if we are to believe what Dr. Johnson said of her, often did not know what on earth he was talking about! One morning we went over and over one scene in "Much Ado"--at least a dozen times I should think--and each time when Terriss came to the speech beginning: "What needs the bridge much broader than the flood," he managed to give a different emphasis. First it would be: "What! _Needs_ the bridge much broader than the flood!" Then: "What needs the bridge _much_ broader than the flood." After he had been floundering about for some time, Henry said: "Terriss, what's the meaning of that?" "Oh, get along, Guv'nor, _you_ know!" Henry laughed. He never could be angry with Terriss, not even when he came to rehearsal full of absurd excuses. One day, however, he was so late that it was past a joke, and Henry spoke to him sharply. "I think you'll be sorry you've spoken to me like this, Guv'nor," said Terriss, casting down his eyes. "Now no hanky-panky tricks, Terriss." "Tricks, Guv'nor! I think you'll regret having said that when you hear that my poor mother passed away early this morning." And Terriss wept. Henry promptly gave him the day off. A few weeks later, when Terriss and I were looking through the curtain at the audience just before the play began, he said to me gaily: "See that dear old woman sitting in the fourth row of stalls--that's my dear old mother." The wretch had quite forgotten that he had killed her! He was the only person who ever ventured to "cheek" Henry, yet he never gave offense, not even when he wrote a letter of this kind: "My dear Guv.,-- "I hope you are enjoying yourself, and in the best of health. I very much want to play 'Othello' with you next year (don't laugh). Shall I study it up, and will you do it with me on tour if possible? Say _yes_, and lighten the drooping heart of yours sincerely, "WILL TERRISS." I have never seen any one at all like Terriss, and my father said the same. The only actor of my father's day, he used to tell me, who had a touch of the same insouciance and lawlessness was Leigh Murray, a famous _jeune premier_. One night he came into the theater soaked from head to foot. "Is it raining, Terriss?" said some one who noticed that he was wet. "Looks like it, doesn't it?" said Terriss carelessly. Later it came out that he had jumped off a penny steamboat into the Thames and saved a little girl's life. It was pretty brave, I think. Mr. Pinero, who was no longer a member of the Lyceum company when "Much Ado" was produced, wrote to Henry after the first night that it was "as perfect a representation of a Shakespearean play as I conceive to be possible. I think," he added, "that the work at your theater does so much to create new playgoers--which is what we want, far more I fancy than we want new theaters and perhaps new plays." A playgoer whose knowledge of the English stage extended over a period of fifty-five years, wrote another nice letter about "Much Ado" which was passed on to me because it had some ridiculously nice things about me in it. SAVILE CLUB, _January 13, 1883._ "My dear Henry,-- "I were an imbecile ingrate if I did not hasten to give you my warmest thanks for the splendid entertainment of last night. Such a performance is not a grand entertainment merely, or a glorious pastime, although it was all that. It was, too, an artistic display of the highest character, elevating in the vast audience their art instinct--as well as purifying any developed art in the possession of individuals. "I saw the Kean revivals of 1855-57, and I suppose 'The Winter's Tale' was the best of the lot. But it did not approach last night.... "I was impressed more strongly than ever with the fact that the plays of Shakespeare were meant to be _acted_. The man who thinks that he can know Shakespeare by reading him is a shallow ass. The best critic and scholar would have been carried out of himself last night into the poet's heart, his mind-spirit.... The Terry was glorious.... The scenes in which she appeared--and she was in eight out of the sixteen--reminded me of nothing but the blessed sun that not only beautifies but creates. But she never acts so well as when I am there to see! That is a real lover's sentiment, and all lovers are vain men. "Terriss has 'come on' wonderfully, and his Don Pedro is princely and manful. "I have thus set down, my dear Irving, one or two things merely to show that my gratitude to you is not that of a blind gratified idiot, but of one whose intimate personal knowledge of the English stage entitles him to say what he owes to you." "I am "Affectionately yours, "A.J. DUFFIELD." In 1891, when we revived "Much Ado," Henry's Benedick was far more brilliant than it was at first. In my diary, January 5, 1891, I wrote: "Revival of 'Much Ado about Nothing.' Went most brilliantly. Henry has vastly improved upon his _old_ rendering of Benedick. Acts larger now--not so 'finicking.' His model (of manner) is the Duke of Sutherland. VERY good. I did some parts better, I think--made Beatrice a nobler woman. Yet I failed to please myself in the Cathedral Scene." _Two days later._--"Played the Church Scene all right at last. More of a _blaze_. The little scene in the garden, too, I did better (in the last act). Beatrice has _confessed_ her love, and is now _softer_. Her voice should be beautiful now, breaking out into playful defiance now and again, as of old. The last scene, too, I made much more merry, happy, _soft_." _January 8._--"I must make Beatrice more _flashing_ at first, and _softer_ afterwards. This will be an improvement upon my old reading of the part. She must be always _merry_ and by turns scornful, tormenting, vexed, self-communing, absent, melting, teasing, brilliant, indignant, _sad-merry_, thoughtful, withering, gentle, humorous, and gay, Gay, _Gay_! Protecting (to Hero), motherly, very intellectual--a gallant creature and complete in mind and feature." After a run of two hundred and fifty nights, "Much Ado," although it was still drawing fine houses, was withdrawn as we were going to America in the autumn (of 1883) and Henry wanted to rehearse the plays that we were to do in the States by reviving them in London at the close of the summer season. It was during these revivals that I played Janette in "The Lyons Mail"--not a big part, and not well suited to me, but I played it well enough to support my theory that whatever I have _not_ been, I _have_ been a useful actress. I always associate "The Lyons Mail" with old Mead, whose performance of the father, Jerome Lesurques, was one of the most impressive things that this fine actor ever did with us. (Before Henry was ever heard of, Mead had played Hamlet at Drury Lane!) Indeed when he "broke up," Henry put aside "The Lyons Mail" for many years because he dreaded playing Lesurques' scene with his father without Mead. In the days just before the break-up, which came about because Mead was old, and--I hope there is no harm in saying of him what can be said of many men who have done finely in the world--too fond of "the wine when it is red," Henry use to suffer great anxiety in the scene, because he never knew what Mead was going to do or say next. When Jerome Lesurques is forced to suspect his son of crime, he has a line: "Am I mad, or dreaming? Would I were." Mead one night gave a less poetic reading: "Am I mad or _drunk_? Would I were!" It will be remembered by those who saw the play that Lesurques, an innocent man, will not commit the Roman suicide of honor at his father's bidding, and refuses to take up his pistol from the table. "What! you refuse to die by your own hands, do you?" says the elder Lesurques. "Then die like a dog by mine!" (producing a pistol from his pocket). One night, after having delivered the line with his usual force and impressiveness, Mead, after prolonged fumbling in his coat-tail pockets, added another: "D---, b----! God bless my soul! Where's the pistol? I haven't got the pistol!" The last scene in the eventful history of "Meadisms" in "'The Lyons Mail" was when Mead came on to the stage in his own top-hat, went over to the sofa, and lay down, apparently for a nap! Not a word could Henry get from him, and Henry had to play the scene by himself. He did it in this way: "You say, father, that I," etc. "I answer you that it is false!" Mead had a remarkable _foot_. Norman Forbes called it an _architectural_ foot. Bunions and gout combined to give it a gargoyled effect! One night, I forget whether it was in this play or another, Henry, pawing the ground with his foot before an "exit"--one of the mannerisms which his imitators delighted to burlesque--came down on poor old Mead's foot, bunion gargoyles and all! Hardly had Mead stopped cursing under his breath than on came Tyars, and brought down _his_ weight heavily on the same foot. Directly Tyars came off the stage he looked for Mead in the wings and offered an apology. "I beg your pardon--I'm really awfully sorry, Mead." "Sorry! sorry!" the old man snorted. "It's a d----d conspiracy!" It was the dignity and gravity of Mead which made everything he said so funny. I am afraid that those who never knew him will wonder where the joke comes in. I forget what year he left us for good, but in a letter of Henry's dated September, 1888, written during a provincial tour of "Faust," when I was ill and my sister Marion played Margaret instead of me, I find this allusion to him: "Wenman does the Kitchen Witch now (I altered it this morning) and Mead the old one--the climber. Poor old chap, he'll not climb much longer!" This was one of the least successful of Henry's Shakespearean productions. Terriss looked all wrong as Orsino; many other people were miscast. Henry said to me a few years later when he thought of doing "The Tempest," "I can't do it without three great comedians. I ought never to have attempted 'Twelfth Night' without them." I don't think that I played Viola nearly as well as my sister Kate. Her "I am the man" was very delicate and charming. I overdid that. My daughter says: "Well, you were far better than any Viola that I have seen since, but you were too simple to make a great hit in it. I think that if you had played Rosalind the public would have thought you too simple in that. Somehow people expect these parts to be acted in a 'principal boy' fashion, with sparkle and animation." We had the curious experience of being "booed" on the first night. It was not a comedy audience, and I think the rollickings of Toby Belch and his fellows were thought "low." Then people were put out by Henry's attempt to reserve the pit. He thought that the public wanted it. When he found that it was against their wishes he immediately gave in. His pride was the service of the public. His speech after the hostile reception of "Twelfth Night" was the only mistake that I ever knew him make. He was furious, and showed it. Instead of accepting the verdict, he trounced the first-night audience for giving it. He simply could not understand it! My old friend Rose Leclercq, who was in Charles Kean's company at the Princess's when I made my first appearance upon the stage, joined the Lyceum company to play Olivia. Strangely enough she had lost the touch for the kind of part. She, who had made one of her early successes as the spirit of Astarte in "Manfred," was known to a later generation of playgoers as the aristocratic dowager of stately presence and incisive repartee. Her son, Fuller Mellish, was also in the cast as Curio, and when we played "Twelfth Night" in America was promoted to the part of Sebastian, my double. In London my brother Fred played it. Directly he walked on to the stage, looking as like me as possible, yet a _man_ all over, he was a success. I don't think that I have ever seen anything so unmistakable and instantaneous. In America "Twelfth Night" was liked far better than in London, but I never liked it. I thought our production dull, lumpy and heavy. Henry's Malvolio was fine and dignified, but not good for the play, and I never could help associating my Viola with physical pain. On the first night I had a bad thumb--I thought it was a whitlow--and had to carry my arm in a sling. It grew worse every night, and I felt so sick and faint from pain that I played most of my scenes sitting in a chair. One night Dr. Stoker, Bram Stoker's brother, came round between the scenes, and, after looking at my thumb, said: "Oh, that'll be all right. I'll cut it for you." He lanced it then and there, and I went on with my part for _that_ night. George Stoker, who was just going off to Ireland, could not see the job through, but the next day I was in for the worst illness I ever had in my life. It was blood-poisoning, and the doctors were in doubt for a little as to whether they would not have to amputate my arm. They said that if George Stoker had not lanced the thumb that minute, I _should_ have lost my arm. A disagreeable incident in connection with my illness was that a member of my profession made it the occasion of an unkind allusion (in a speech at the Social Science Congress) to "actresses who feign illness and have straw laid down before their houses, while behind the drawn blinds they are having riotous supper-parties, dancing the can-can and drinking champagne." Upon being asked for "name," the speaker would neither assert nor deny that it was Ellen Terry (whose poor arm at the time was as big as her waist, and _that_ has never been very small!) that she meant. I think we first heard of the affair on our second voyage to America, during which I was still so ill that they thought I might never see Quebec, and Henry wrote a letter to the press--a "scorcher." He showed it to me on the boat. When I had read it, I tore it up and threw the bits into the sea. "It hasn't injured me in any way," I said. "Any answer would be undignified." Henry did what I wished in the matter, but, unlike me, whose heart I am afraid is of wax--no impression lasts long--he never forgot it, and never forgave. If the speech-maker chanced to come into a room where he was--he walked out. He showed the same spirit in the last days of his life, long after our partnership had come to an end. A literary club, not a hundred yards from Hyde Park Corner, "blackballed"' me (although I was qualified for election under the rules) for reasons with which I was never favored. The committee, a few months later, wished Henry Irving to be the guest of honor at one of the club dinners. The honor was declined. The first night of "Olivia" at the Lyceum was about the only _comfortable_ first night that I have ever had! I was familiar with the part, and two of the cast, Terriss and Norman Forbes, were the same as at the Court, which made me feel all the more at home. Henry left a great deal of the stage-management to us, for he knew that he could not improve on Mr. Hare's production. Only he insisted on altering the last act, and made a bad matter worse. The division into two scenes wasted time, and nothing was gained by it. _Never_ obstinate, Henry saw his mistake and restored the original end after a time. It was weak and unsatisfactory but not pretentious and bad like the last act he presented at the first performance. We took the play too slowly at the Lyceum. That was often a fault there. Because Henry was slow, the others took their time from him, and the result was bad. The lovely scene of the vicarage parlor, in which we used a harpsichord and were accused of pedantry for our pains, did not look so well at the Lyceum as at the Court. The stage was too big for it. The critics said that I played Olivia better at the Lyceum, but I did not feel this myself. At first Henry did not rehearse the Vicar at all well. One day when he was stamping his foot very much, as if he was Matthias in "The Bells," my little Edy, who was a terrible child _and_ a wonderful critic, said: "Don't go on like that, Henry. Why don't you talk as you do to me and Teddy? At home you _are_ the Vicar." The child's frankness did not offend Henry, because it was illuminating. A blind man had changed his Shylock; a little child changed his Vicar. When the first night came he gave a simple, lovable performance. Many people now understood and liked him as they had never done before. One of the things I most admired in it was his sense of the period. In this, as in other plays, he used to make his entrance in the _skin_ of the part. No need for him to rattle a ladder at the side to get up excitement and illusion as Macready is said to have done. He walked on, and was the simple-minded old clergyman, just as he had walked on a prince in "Hamlet," a king in "Charles I.," and a saint in "Becket." A very handsome woman, descended from Mrs. Siddons and looking exactly like her, played the gipsy in "Olivia." The likeness was of no use, because the possessor of it had no talent. What a pity! "Olivia" has always been a family play. Edy and Ted walked on the stage for the first time in the Court "Olivia." In later years Ted played Moses and Edy made her first appearance in a speaking part as Polly Flamborough, and has since played both Sophia and the Gipsy. My brother Charlie's little girl Beatrice made her first appearance as Bill, my sister Floss played Olivia on a provincial tour, and my sister Marion played it at the Lyceum when I was ill. I saw Floss play it, and took from her a lovely and sincere bit of "business." In the third act, where the Vicar has found his erring daughter and has come to take her away from the inn, I had always hesitated at my entrance as if I were not quite sure what reception my father would give me after what had happened. Floss in the same situation came running in and went straight to her father, quite sure of his love if not of his forgiveness. I did _not_ take some business which Marion did on Terriss's suggestion. Where Thornhill tells Olivia that she is not his wife, I used to thrust him away with both hands as I said--"Devil!" "It's very good, Nell, very fine," said Terriss to me, "but believe me, you miss a great effect there. You play it grandly, of course, but at that moment you miss it. As you say 'Devil!' you ought to strike me full in the face." "Oh, don't be silly, Terriss," I said, "she's not a pugilist." Of course I saw, apart from what was dramatically fit, what would happen. However Marion, very young, very earnest, very dutiful, anxious to please Terriss, listened eagerly to the suggestion during an understudy rehearsal. "No one could play this part better than your sister Nell," said Terriss to the attentive Marion, "but as I always tell her, she does miss one great effect. When Olivia says 'Devil!' she ought to hit me bang in the face." "Thank you for telling me," said Marion gratefully. "It will be much more effective," said Terriss. It was. When the night came for Marion to play the part, she struck out, and Terriss had to play the rest of the scene with a handkerchief held to his bleeding nose! I think it was as Olivia that Eleonora Duse first saw me act. She had thought of playing the part herself some time, but she said: "_Never_ now!" No letter about my acting ever gave me the same pleasure as this from her: "Madame,--Avec Olivia vous m'avez donné bonheur et peine. _Bonheur_ part votre art qui est noble et sincère ... _peine_ car je sens la tristesse au coeur quand je vois une belle et généreuse nature de femme, donner son âme à l'art--comme vous le faites--quand c'est la vie même, _votre_ coeur même qui parle tendrement, douleureusement, noblement _sous_ votre jeu. Je ne puis me débarrasser d'une certaine tristesse quand je vois des artistes si nobles et hauts tels que vous et Irving.... Si vous êtes si forts de soumettre (avec un travail continu) la vie à l'art, il faut done vous admirer comme des forces de la nature même qui auraient pourtant le droit de vivre pour elles-mêmes et non pour la foule. Je n'ose pas vous déranger, Madame, et d'ailleurs j'ai tant à faire aussi qu'il m'est impossible de vous dire de vive voix tout le grand plaisir que vous m'avez donné, mais puisque j'ai senti votre coeur, veuillez, chère Madame, croire au mien qui ne demande pas mieux dans cet instant que de vous admirer et de vous le dire tant bien que mal d'une manière quelconque. Bien à vous. "E. DUSE." When I wrote to Madame Duse the other day to ask her permission to publish this much-prized letter, she answered: BUENOS AYRES, _Septembre 11, 1907._ "Chère Ellen Terry,-- "Au milieu du travail en Amérique, je reçois votre lettre envoyée à Florence. "Vous me demandez de publier mon ancienne lettre amicale. Oui, chère Ellen Terry; ce que j'ai donné vous appartient; ce que j'ai dit, je le peux encore, et je vous aime et admire comme toujours.... "J'espère que vous accepterez cette ancienne lettre que j'ai rendue plus claire et un peu mieux écrite. Vous en serez contente avec moi car, ainsi faisant, j'ai eu le moyen de vous dire que je vous aime et de vous le dire deux fois. "A vous de coeur, "E. DUSE." Dear, noble Eleanora Duse, great woman, great artist--I can never appreciate you in words, but I store the delight that you have given me by your work, and the personal kindness that you have shown me, in the treasure-house of my heart! When I celebrated my stage jubilee you traveled all the way from Italy to support me on the stage at Drury Lane. When you stood near me, looking so beautiful with wings in your hair, the wings of glory they seemed to me, I could not thank you, but we kissed each other and you understood! "Clap-trap" was the verdict passed by many on the Lyceum "Faust," yet Margaret was the part I liked better than any other--outside Shakespeare. I played it beautifully sometimes. The language was often very commonplace--not nearly as poetic or dramatic as that of "Charles I."--but the character was all right--simple, touching, sublime. The Garden Scene I know was unsatisfactory. It was a bad, weak love-scene, but George Alexander as Faust played it admirably. Indeed he always acted like an angel with me; he was so malleable, ready to do anything. He was launched into the part at very short notice, after H.B. Conway's failure on the first night. Poor Conway! It was Coghlan as Shylock all over again. Henry called a rehearsal the next day--on Sunday, I think. The company stood about in groups on the stage while Henry walked up and down, speechless, but humming a tune occasionally, always a portentous sign with him. The scene set was the Brocken Scene, and Conway stood at the top of the slope as far away from Henry as he could get! He looked abject. His handsome face was very red, his eyes full of tears. He was terrified at the thought of what was going to happen. The actor was summoned to the office, and presently Loveday came out and said that Mr. George Alexander would play Faust the following night. Alec had been wonderful as Valentine the night before, and as Faust he more than justified Henry's belief in him. After that he never looked back. He had come to the Lyceum for the first time in 1882, an unknown quantity from a stock company in Glasgow, to play Caleb Decie in "The Two Roses." He then left us for a time, returned for "Faust," and remained in the Lyceum company for some years playing all Terriss's parts. Alexander had the romantic quality which was lacking in Terriss, but there was a kind of shy modesty about him which handicapped him when he played Squire Thornhill in "Olivia." "Be more dashing, Alec!" I used to say to him. "Well, I do my best," he said. "At the hotels I chuck all the barmaids under the chin, and pretend I'm a dog of a fellow for the sake of this part!" Conscientious, dear, delightful Alec! No one ever deserved success more than he did and used it better when it came, as the history of the St. James's Theater under his management proves. He had the good luck to marry a wife who was clever as well as charming, and could help him. The original cast of "Faust" was never improved upon. What Martha was ever so good as Mrs. Stirling? The dear old lady's sight had failed since "Romeo and Juliet," but she was very clever at concealing it. When she let Mephistopheles in at the door, she used to drop her work on the floor so that she could find her way back to her chair. I never knew why she dropped it--she used to do it so naturally with a start when Mephistopheles knocked at the door--until one night when it was in my way and I picked it up, to the confusion of poor Mrs. Stirling, who nearly walked into the orchestra. "Faust" was abused a good deal as a pantomime, a distorted caricature of Goethe, and a thoroughly inartistic production. But it proved the greatest of all Henry's financial successes. The Germans who came to see it, oddly enough, did not scorn it nearly as much as the English who were sensitive on behalf of the Germans, and the Goethe Society wrote a tribute to Henry Irving after his death, acknowledging his services to Goethe! It is a curious paradox in the theater that the play for which every one has a good word is often the play which no one is going to see, while the play which is apparently disliked and run down is crowded every night. Our preparations for the production of "Faust" included a delightful "grand tour" of Germany. Henry, with his accustomed royal way of doing things, took a party which included my daughter Edy, Mr. and Mrs. Comyns Carr, and Mr. Hawes Craven, who was to paint the scenery. We bought nearly all the properties used in "Faust" in Nuremberg, and many other things which we did not use, that took Henry's fancy. One beautifully carved escutcheon, the finest armorial device I ever saw, he bought at this time and presented it in after years to the famous American connoisseur, Mrs. Jack Gardiner. It hangs now in one of the rooms of her palace at Boston. It was when we were going in the train along one of the most beautiful stretches of the Rhine that Sally Holland, who accompanied us as my maid, said:-- "Uncommon pretty scenery, dear, I must say!" When we laughed uncontrollably, she added: "Well, dear, _I_ think so!" During the run of "Faust" Henry visited Oxford and gave his address on "Four Actors" (Burbage, Betterton, Garrick, Kean). He met there one of the many people who had recently been attacking him on the ground of too long runs and too much spectacle. He wrote me an amusing account of the duel between them: "I had supper last night at New College after the affair. A---- was there, and I had it out with him--to the delight of all. "'_Too much decoration_,' etc., etc. "I asked him what there was in 'Faust' in the matter of appointments, etc., that he would like left out?' "Answer: Nothing. "'Too long runs.' "'You, sir, are a poet,' I said. 'Perhaps it may be my privilege some day to produce a play of yours. Would you like it to have a long run or a short one?' (Roars of laughter.) "Answer: 'Well--er--well, of course, Mr. Irving, you--well--well, a short run, of course for _art_, but--' "'Now, sir, you're on oath,' said I. 'Suppose that the fees were rolling in £10 and more a night--would you rather the play were a failure or a success?' "'Well, well, as _you_ put it--I must say--er--I would rather my play had a _long_ run!' "A---- floored! "He has all his life been writing articles running down good work and crying up the impossible, and I was glad to show him up a bit! "The Vice-Chancellor made a most lovely speech after the address--an eloquent and splendid tribute to the stage. "Bourchier presented the address of the 'Undergrads.' I never saw a young man in a greater funk--because, I suppose, he had imitated me so often! "From the address: "'We have watched with keen and enthusiastic interest the fine intellectual quality of all these representations from Hamlet to Mephistopheles with which you have enriched the contemporary stage. To your influence we owe deeper knowledge and more reverent study of the master mind of Shakespeare.' "All very nice indeed!" I never cared much for Henry's Mephistopheles--a twopence colored part, anyway. Of course he had his moments--he had them in every part--but they were few. One of them was in the Prologue, when he wrote in the student's book, "Ye shall be as gods knowing good and evil." He never looked at the book, and the nature of the _spirit_ appeared suddenly in a most uncanny fashion. Another was in the Spinning-wheel Scene when Faust defies Mephistopheles, and he silences him with, "_I am a spirit_." Henry looked to grow a gigantic height--to hover over the ground instead of walking on it. It was terrifying. I made valiant efforts to learn to spin before I played Margaret. My instructor was Mr. Albert Fleming, who, at the suggestion of Ruskin, had recently revived hand-spinning and hand-weaving in the North of England. I had always hated that obviously "property" spinning-wheel in the opera, and Margaret's unmarketable thread. My thread always broke, and at last I had to "fake" my spinning to a certain extent; but at least I worked my wheel right, and gave an impression that I could spin my pound of thread a day with the best. Two operatic stars did me the honor to copy my Margaret dress--Madame Albani and Madame Melba. It was rather odd, by the way, that many mothers who took their daughters to see the opera of "Faust" would not bring them to see the Lyceum play. One of these mothers was Princess Mary of Teck, a constant patron of most of our plays. Other people "missed the music." The popularity of an opera will often kill a play, although the play may have existed before the music was ever thought of. The Lyceum "Faust" held its own against Gounod. I liked our incidental music to the action much better. It was taken from many different sources and welded into an effective and beautiful whole by our clever musical director, Mr. Meredith Ball. In many ways "Faust" was our heaviest production. About four hundred ropes were used, each rope with a name. The list of properties and instructions to the carpenters became a joke among the theater staff. When Henry first took "Faust" into the provinces, the head carpenter at Liverpool, Myers by name, being something of a humorist, copied out the list on a long thin sheet of paper, which rolled up like a royal proclamation. Instead of "God save the Queen!" he wrote at the foot, with many flourishes: "God help Bill Myers!" The crowded houses at "Faust" were largely composed of "repeaters," as Americans call those charming playgoers who come to see a play again and again. We found favor with the artists and musicians too, even in Faust! Here is a nice letter I got during the run (it _was_ a long one) from that gifted singer and good woman, Madame Antoinette Sterling:-- "My dear Miss Terry,-- "I was quite as disappointed as yourself that you were not at St. James's Hall last Monday for my concert.... Jean Ingelow said she enjoyed the afternoon very much.... "I wonder if you would like to come to luncheon some day and have a little chat with her? But perhaps you already know her. I love her dearly. She has one fault--she never goes to the theater. Oh my! What she misses, poor thing, poor thing! We have already seen 'Faust' twice, and are going again soon, and shall take the George Macdonalds this time. The Holman Hunts were delighted. He is one of the most interesting and clever men I have ever met, and she is very charming and clever too. How beautifully plain you write! Give me the recipe. "With many kind greetings, "Believe me sincerely yours, "ANTOINETTE STERLING MACKINLAY." My girl Edy was one of the angels in the vision in the last act of "Faust," an event which Henry commemorated in a little rhyme that he sent me on Valentine's Day with some beautiful flowers: "White and red roses, Sweet and fresh posies, One bunch for Edy, _Angel_ of mine-- One bunch for Nell, my dear Valentine." Mr. Toole ran a burlesque on the Lyceum "Faust," called "Faust-and-Loose." Henry did not care for burlesques as a rule. He thought Fred Leslie's exact imitation of him, face, spectacles, voice--everything was like Henry except the ballet-skirt--in the worst taste. But everything that Toole did was to him adorable. Marie Linden gave a really clever imitation of me as Marguerite. She and her sister Laura both had the trick of taking me off. I recognized the truth of Laura's caricature in the burlesque of "The Vicar of Wakefield" when as Olivia she made her entrance, leaping impulsively over a stile! There was an absurd chorus of girl "mashers" in "Faust-and-Loose," dressed in tight black satin coats, who besides dancing and singing had lines in unison, such as "No, no!" "We will!" As one of these girls Violet Vanbrugh made her first appearance on the stage. In her case "we will!" proved prophetic. It was her plucky "I will get on" which finally landed her in her present successful position. Violet Barnes was the daughter of Prebendary Barnes of Exeter, who, when he found his daughter stage-struck, behaved far more wisely than most parents. He gave her £100 and sent her to London with her old nurse to look after her, saying that if she really "meant business" she would find an engagement before the £100 was gone. Violet had inherited some talent from her mother, who was a very clever amateur actress, and the whole family were fond of getting up entertainments. But Violet didn't know quite how far £100 would go, or wouldn't go. I happened to call on her at her lodgings near Baker Street one afternoon, and found her having her head washed, and crying bitterly all the time! She had come to the end of the £100, she had not got an engagement, and thought she would have to go home defeated. There was something funny in the tragic situation. Vi was sitting on the floor, drying her hair, crying, and drinking port wine to cure a cold in her head! I told her not to be a goose, but to cheer up and come and stay with me until something turned up. We packed the old nurse back to Devonshire. Violet came and stayed with me, and in due course something did turn up. Mr. Toole came to dinner, and Violet, acting on my instructions to ask every one she saw for an engagement, asked Mr. Toole! He said, "That's all right, my dear. Of course. Come down and see me to-morrow." Dear old Toole! The kindliest of men! Violet was with him for some time, and played at his theater in Mr. Barrie's first piece "Walker London." Her sister Irene, Seymour Hicks, and Mary Ansell (now Mrs. Barrie) were all in the cast. This was all I did to "help" Violet Vanbrugh, now Mrs. Arthur Bourchier and one of our best actresses, in her stage career. She helped herself, as most people do who get on. I am afraid that I have discouraged more stage aspirants than I have encouraged. Perhaps I have snubbed really talented people, so great is my horror of girls taking to the stage as a profession when they don't realize what they are about. I once told an elderly aspirant that it was quite useless for any one to go on the stage who had not either great beauty or great talent. She wrote saying that my letter had been a great relief to her, as now she was not discouraged. "I have _both_." There is one actress on the English stage whom I did definitely encourage, of whose talent I was _certain_. When my daughter was a student at the Royal Academy of Music, Dr. (now Sir Alexander) Mackenzie asked me to distribute the medals to the Elocution Class at the end of the term. I was quite "new to the job," and didn't understand the procedure. No girl, I have learned since, can be given the gold medal until she has won both the bronze and the silver medals--that is, until she has been at the Academy three years. I was for giving the gold medalists, who only wanted certificates, _bronze_ medals; and of one young girl who was in her first year and only entitled to a bronze medal, I said: "Oh, she must have the gold medal, of course!" She was a queer-looking child, handsome, with a face suggesting all manner of possibilities. When she stood up to read the speech from "Richard II." she was nervous, but courageously stood her ground. She began slowly, and with a most "fetching" voice, to _think_ out the words. You saw her think them, heard her speak them. It was so different from the intelligent elocution, the good recitation, but bad impersonation of the others! "A pathetic face, a passionate voice, a _brain_," I thought to myself. It must have been at this point that the girl flung away the book and began to act, in an undisciplined way, of course, but with such true emotion, such intensity, that the tears came to my eyes. The tears came to her eyes too. We both wept, and then we embraced, and then we wept again. It was an easy victory for her. She was incomparably better than any one. "She has to work," I wrote in my diary that day. "Her life must be given to it, and then she will--well, she will achieve just as high as she works." Lena Pocock was the girl's name, but she changed it to Lena Ashwell when she went on the stage. In the days of the elocution class there was still some idea of her becoming a singer, but I strongly advised the stage, and wrote to my friend J. Comyns Carr, who was managing the Comedy Theater, that I knew a girl with "supreme talent" whom he ought to engage. Lena was engaged. After that she had her fight for success, but she went steadily forward. Henry Irving has often been attacked for not preferring Robert Louis Stevenson's "Macaire" to the version which he actually produced in 1883. It would have been hardly more unreasonable to complain of his producing "Hamlet" in preference to Mr. Gilbert's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern." Stevenson's "Macaire" may have all the literary quality that is claimed for it, although I personally think Stevenson was only making a delightful idiot of himself in it. Anyhow, it is frankly a burlesque, a skit, a _satire_ on the real Macaire. The Lyceum was _not_ a burlesque house! Why should Henry have done it? It was funny to see Toole and Henry rehearsing together for "Macaire." Henry was always _plotting_ to be funny. When Toole as Jacques Strop hid the dinner in his pocket, Henry, after much labor, thought of his hiding the plate inside his waistcoat. There was much laughter later on when Macaire, playfully tapping Strop with his stick, cracked the plate, and the pieces fell out! Toole hadn't to bother about such subtleties, and Henry's deep-laid plans for getting a laugh must have seemed funny to dear Toole, who had only to come on and say "Whoop!" and the audience roared! Henry's death as Macaire was one of a long list of splendid deaths. Macaire knows the game is up, and makes a rush for the French windows at the back of the stage. The soldiers on the stage shoot him before he gets away. Henry did not drop, but turned round, swaggered impudently down to the table, leaned on it, then suddenly rolled over, dead. Henry's production of "Werner" for one matinée was to do some one a good turn, and when Henry did a "good turn," he did it magnificently.[1] We rehearsed the play as carefully as if we were in for a long run. Beautiful dresses were made for me by my friend Alice Carr. But when we had given that one matinée, they were put away for ever. The play may be described as gloom, gloom, gloom. It was worse than "The Iron Chest." [Footnote 1: _From my Diary, June_ 1, 1887.--"Westland-Marston Benefit at the Lyceum. A triumphant success entirely due to the genius and admirable industry and devotion of H.I., for it is just the dullest play to read as ever was! He made it _intensely_ interesting."] While Henry was occupying himself with "Werner," I was pleasing myself with "The Amber Heart," a play by Alfred Calmour, a young man who was at this time Wills's secretary. I wanted to do it, not only to help Calmour, but because I believed in the play and liked the part of Ellaline. I had thought of giving a matinée of it at some other theater, but Henry, who at first didn't like my doing it at all, said: "You must do it at the Lyceum. I can't let you, or it, go out of the theater." So we had the matinée at the Lyceum. Mr. Willard and Mr. Beerbohm Tree were in the cast, and it was a great success. For the first time Henry saw me act--a whole part and from the "front" at least, for he had seen and liked scraps of my Juliet from the "side." Although he had known me such a long time, my Ellaline seemed to come quite as a surprise. "I wish I could tell you of the dream of beauty that you realized," he wrote after the performance. He bought the play for me, and I continued to do it "on and off" here and in America until 1902. Many people said that I was good but the play was bad. This was hard on Alfred Calmour. He had created the opportunity for me, and few plays with the beauty of "The Amber Heart" have come my way since. "He thinks it's all his doing!" said Henry. "If he only knew!" "Well, that's the way of authors," I answered. "They imagine so much more about their work than we put into it, that although we may seem to the outsider to be creating, to the author we are, at our best, only doing our duty by him." Our next production was "Macbeth." Meanwhile we had visited America three times. It is now my intention to give some account of my tours in America, of my friends there, and of some of the impressions that the vast, wonderful country made on me. XI AMERICA THE FIRST OF EIGHT TOURS The first time that there was any talk of my going to America was, I think, in 1874, when I was playing in "The Wandering Heir." Dion Boucicault wanted me to go, and dazzled me with figures, but I expect the cautious Charles Reade influenced me against accepting the engagement. When I did go in 1883, I was thirty-five and had an assured position in my profession. It was the first of eight tours, seven of which I went with Henry Irving. The last was in 1907 after his death. I also went to America one summer on a pleasure trip. The tours lasted three months at least, seven months at most. After a rough calculation, I find that I have spent not quite five years of my life in America. Five out of sixty is not a large proportion, yet I often feel that I am half American. This says a good deal for the hospitality of a people who can make a stranger feel so completely at home in their midst. Perhaps it also says something for my adaptableness! "When we do not speak of things with a partiality full of love, what we say is not worth being repeated." That was the answer of a courteous Frenchman who was asked for his impressions of a country. In any case it is imprudent to give one's impressions of America. The country is so vast and complex that even those who have amassed mountains of impressions soon find that there still are mountains more! I have lived in New York, Boston and Chicago for a month at a time, and have felt that to know any of these great cities even superficially would take a year. I have become acquainted with this and that class of American, but I realize that there are thousands of other classes that remain unknown to me. I set out in 1882 from Liverpool on board the _Britannic_ with the fixed conviction that I should never, never return. For six weeks before we started, the word America had only to be breathed to me, and I burst into floods of tears! I was leaving my children, my bullfinch, my parrot, my "aunt" Boo, whom I never expected to see alive again, just because she said I never would; and I was going to face the unknown dangers of the Atlantic and of a strange, barbarous land. Our farewell performances in London had cheered me up a little--though I wept copiously at every one--by showing us that we should be missed. Henry Irving's position seemed to be confirmed and ratified by all that took place before his departure. The dinners he had to eat, the speeches that he had to make and to listen to, were really terrific! One speech at the Rabelais Club had, it was said, the longest peroration on record. It was this kind of thing: Where is our friend Irving going? He is not going like Nares to face the perils of the far North. He is not going like A---- to face something else. He is not going to China, etc.,--and so on. After about the hundredth "he is not going," Lord Houghton, who was one of the guests, grew very impatient and interrupted the orator with: "Of course he isn't! He's going to New York by the Cunard Line. It'll take him about a week!" Many people came to see us off at Liverpool, but I only remember seeing Mrs. Langtry and Oscar Wilde. It was at this time that Oscar Wilde had begun to curl his hair in the manner of the Prince Regent. "Curly hair to match the curly teeth," said some one. Oscar Wilde _had_ ugly teeth, and he was not proud of his mouth. He used to put his hand to his mouth when he talked so that it should not be noticed. His brow and eyes were very beautiful. Well, I was not "disappointed in the Atlantic," as Oscar Wilde was the first to say, though many people have said it since without acknowledging its source. My first voyage was a voyage of enchantment to me. The ship was laden with pig-iron, and she rolled and rolled and rolled. She could never roll too much for me! I have always been a splendid sailor, and I feel jolly at sea. The sudden leap from home into the wilderness of waves does not give me any sensation of melancholy. What I thought I was going to see when I arrived in America I hardly remember. I had a vague idea that all American women wore red flannel shirts and carried bowie knives and that I might be sandbagged in the street! From somewhere or other I had derived an impression that New York was an ugly, noisy place. Ugly! When I first saw that marvelous harbor I nearly cried--it was so beautiful. Whenever I come now to the unequaled approach to New York I wonder what Americans must think of the approach from the sea to London! How different are the mean, flat, marshy banks of the Thames and the wooden toy lighthouse at Dungeness to the vast, spreading Hudson with its busy multitude of steamboats, and ferryboats, its wharf upon wharf, and its tall statue of Liberty dominating all the racket and bustle of the sea traffic of the world! That was one of the few times in America when I did not miss the poetry of the past. The poetry of the present, gigantic, colossal and enormous, made me forget it. The "sky-scrapers"--what a brutal name it is when one comes to think of it!--so splendid in the landscape now, did not exist in 1883, but I find it difficult to divide my early impressions from my later ones. There was Brooklyn Bridge though, hung up high in the air like a vast spider's web. Between 1883 and 1893 I noticed a great change in New York and other cities. In ten years they seemed to have grown with the energy of tropical plants. But between 1893 and 1907 I saw no evidence of such feverish increase. It is possible that the Americans are arriving at a stage when they can no longer beat the records! There is a vast difference between one of the old New York brownstone houses and one of the fourteen-storied buildings near the river, but between this and the Times Square Building or the still more amazing Flat Iron Building, which is said to oscillate at the top--it is so far from the ground--there is very little difference. I hear that they are now beginning to build downwards into the earth, but this will not change the appearance of New York for a long time. I had not to endure the wooden shed in which most people landing in America have to struggle with the Custom-house officials--a struggle as brutal as a "round in the ring," as Paul Bourget describes it. We were taken off the _Britannic_ in a tug, and Mr. Abbey, Laurence Barrett, and many other friends met us--including the much-dreaded reporters. They were not a bit dreadful, but very quick to see what kind of a man Henry was. In a minute he was on the best of terms with them. He had on what I used to call his best "Jingle" manner--a manner full of refinement, bonhomie, elegance and geniality. "Have a cigar--have a cigar." That was the first remark of Henry's, which put every one at ease. He also wanted to be at ease and have a good smoke. It was just the right merry greeting to the press representatives of a nation whose sense of humor is far more to be relied on than its sense of reverence. "Now come on, all of you!" he said to the interviewers. He talked to them all in a mass and showed no favoritism. It says much for his tact and diplomacy that he did not "put his foot in it." The Americans are suspicious of servile adulation from a stranger, yet are very sensitive to criticism. "These gentlemen want to have a few words with you," said Henry to me when the reporters had done with him. Then with a mischievous expression he whispered: "Say something pleasant! Merry and bright!" Merry and bright! I felt it! The sense of being a stranger entering a strange land, the rushing sense of loneliness and foreignness was overpowering my imagination. I blew my nose hard and tried to keep back my tears, but the first reporter said: "Can I send any message to your friends in England?" I answered: "Tell them I never loved 'em so much as now," and burst into tears! No wonder that he wrote in his paper that I was "a woman of extreme nervous sensibility." Another of them said that "my figure was spare almost to attenuation." America soon remedied that. I began to put on flesh before I had been in the country a week, and it was during my fifth American tour that I became really fat for the first time in my life. When we landed I drove to the Hotel Dam, Henry to the Brevoort House. There was no Diana on the top of the Madison Square Building then. The building did not exist, to cheer the heart of a new arrival as the first evidence of _beauty_ in the city. There were horse trams instead of cable cars, but a quarter of a century has not altered the peculiarly dilapidated carriages in which one drives from the dock, the muddy side-walks, and the cavernous holes in the cobble-paved streets. Had the elevated railway, the first sign of _power_ that one notices after leaving the boat, begun to thunder through the streets? I cannot remember New York without it. I missed then, as I miss now, the numberless _hansoms_ of London plying in the streets for hire. People in New York get about in the cars, unless they have their own carriages. The hired carriage has no reason for existing, and when it does, it celebrates its unique position by charging two dollars (8_s._) for a journey which in London would not cost fifty cents (2_s._)! I cried for two hours at the Hotel Dam! Then my companion, Miss Harries, came bustling in with: "Never mind! here's a piano!" and sat down and played "Annie Laurie" very badly until I screamed with laughter. Before the evening came my room was like a bower of roses, and my dear friends in America have been throwing bouquets at me in the same lavish way ever since. I had quite cheered up when Henry came to take me to see some minstrels who were performing at the Star Theater, the very theater where in a few days we were to open. I didn't understand many of the jokes which the American comedians made that night, but I liked their dry, cool way of making them. They did not "hand a lemon" or "skiddoo" in those days; American slang changes as quickly as thieves' slang, and only "Gee!" and "Gee-whiz!" seem to be permanent. There were very few theaters in New York when we first went there. All that part of the city which is now "up town" did not exist, and what was then "up" is now more than "down" town. The American stage has changed almost as much. In those days their most distinguished actors were playing Shakespeare or old comedy, and their new plays were chiefly "imported" goods. Even then there was a liking for local plays which showed the peculiarities of the different States, but they were more violent and crude than now. The original American genius and the true dramatic pleasure of the people is, I believe, in such plays, where very complete observation of certain phases of American life and very real pictures of manners are combined with comedy almost childlike in its naïveté. The sovereignty of the young girl which is such a marked feature in social life is reflected in American plays. This is by the way. What I want to make clear is that in 1883 there was no living American drama as there is now, that such productions of romantic plays and Shakespeare as Henry Irving brought over from England were unknown, and that the extraordinary success of our first tours would be impossible now. We were the first and we were pioneers, and we were _new_. To be new is everything in America. Such palaces as the Hudson Theater, New York, were not dreamed of when we were at the Star, which was, however, quite equal to any theater in London in front of the footlights. The stage itself, the lighting appliances, and the dressing-rooms were inferior. Henry made his first appearance in America in "The Bells." He was not at his best on the first night, but he could be pretty good even when he was not at his best. I watched him from a box. Nervousness made the company very slow. The audience was a splendid one--discriminating and appreciative. We felt that the Americans _wanted_ to like us. We felt in a few days so extraordinarily at home. The first sensation of entering a foreign city was quickly wiped out. The difference in atmosphere disappears directly one understands it. I kept on coming across duplicates of "my friends in England." "How this girl reminds me of Alice." "How like that one is to Gill!" We had transported the Lyceum three thousand miles--that was all. On the second night in New York it was my turn. "Command yourself--this is the time to show you can act!" I said to myself as I went on to the stage of the Star Theater, dressed as Henrietta Maria. But I could not command myself. I played badly and cried too much in the last act. But the people liked me, and they liked the play, perhaps because it was historical; and of history the Americans are passionately fond. The audience took many points which had been ignored in London. I had always thought Henry as Charles I. most moving when he made that involuntary effort to kneel to his subject, Moray, but the Lyceum audiences never seemed to notice it. In New York the audience burst out into the most sympathetic spontaneous applause that I have ever heard in a theater. I know that there are some advanced stage reformers who prefer to think applause "vulgar," and would suppress it in the theater if they could. If they ever succeed they will suppress a great deal of good acting. It is said that the American actor, Edwin Forrest, once walked down to the footlights and said to the audience very gravely and sincerely: "If you don't applaud, I can't act," and I do sympathize with him. Applause is an instinctive, unconscious act expressing the sympathy between actors and audience. Just as our art demands more instinct than intellect in its exercise, so we demand of those who watch us an appreciation of the simple unconscious kind which finds an outlet in clapping rather than the cold, intellectual approval which would self-consciously think applause derogatory. I have yet to meet the actor who was _sincere_ in saying that he disliked applause. My impression of the way the American women dressed in 1883 was not favorable. Some of them wore Indian shawls and diamond earrings. They dressed too grandly in the street and too dowdily in the theater. All this has changed. The stores in New York are now the most beautiful in the world, and the women are dressed to perfection. They are as clever at the _demi-toilette_ as the Parisian, and the extreme neatness and smartness of their walking-gowns are very refreshing after the floppy, blowsy, trailing dresses, accompanied by the inevitable feather boa of which English girls, who used to be so tidy and "tailor-made," now seem so fond. The universal white "waist" is very pretty and trim on the American girl. It is one of the distinguishing marks of a land of the free, a land where "class" hardly exists. The girl in the store wears the white waist; so does the rich girl on Fifth Avenue. It costs anything from seventy-five cents to fifty dollars! London when I come back from America always seems at first like an ill-lighted village, strangely tame, peaceful and backward. Above all, I miss the sunlight of America, and the clear blue skies of an evening. "Are you glad to get back?" said an English friend. "Very." "It's a land of vulgarity, isn't it?" "Oh yes, if you mean by that a wonderful land--a land of sunshine and light, of happiness, of faith in the future!" I answered. I saw no misery or poverty there. Every one looked happy. What hurts me on coming back to England is the _hopeless_ look on so many faces; the dejection and apathy of the people standing about in the streets. Of course there is poverty in New York, but not among the Americans. The Italians, the Russians, the Poles--all the host of immigrants washed in daily on the bosom of the Hudson--these are poor, but you don't see them unless you go Bowery-ways, and even then you can't help feeling that in their sufferings there is always hope. The barrow man of to-day is the millionaire of to-morrow! Vulgarity? I saw little of it. I thought that the people who had amassed large fortunes used their wealth beautifully. When a man is rich enough to build himself a big new house, he remembers some old house which he once admired, and he has it imitated with all the technical skill and care that can be had in America. This accounts for the odd jumble of styles in Fifth Avenue, along the lakeside in Chicago, in the new avenues in St. Louis and elsewhere. One millionaire's house is modeled on a French château, another on an old Colonial house in Virginia, another on a monastery in Mexico, another is like an Italian palazzo. And their imitations are never weak or pretentious. The architects in America seem to me to be far more able than ours, or else they have a freer hand and more money. It is sad to remember that Mr. Stanford White was one of the best of these splendid architects. It was Stanford White with Saint-Gaudens--that great sculptor, whose work dignifies nearly all the great cities in America--who had most to do with the Exhibition buildings of the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. It was odd to see that fair dream city rising out of the lake, so far more beautiful in its fleeting beauty than the Chicago of the stock-yards and the Pit which had provided the money for its beauty. The millionaires did not interfere with the artists at all. They gave their thousands--and stood aside. The result was one of the loveliest things conceivable. Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their work as well as though the buildings were to endure for centuries instead of being burned in a year to save the trouble of pulling down! The World's Fair always recalled to me the story of Michael Angelo, who carved a figure in snow which, says the chronicler who saw it, "was superb." Saint-Gaudens gave me a cast of his medallion of Bastien-Lepage, and wrote to a friend of mine that "Bastien had '_le coeur au métier_.' So has Miss Terry, and I will place that saying in the frame that is to replace the present unsatisfactory one." He was very fastidious about this frame, and took such a lot of trouble to get it right. It must have been very irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim to that extraordinary official puritanism which sometimes exercises a petty censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a beautiful little nude figure of a boy holding an olive branch, emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace wreath and some lettering were substituted. Saint-Gaudens did the fine bas-relief of Robert Louis Stevenson which was chosen for the monument in St. Gile's Cathedral, Edinburgh. He gave my daughter a medallion cast from this, because he knew that she was a great lover of Stevenson. The bas-relief was dedicated to his friend Joe Evans. I knew Saint-Gaudens first through Joe Evans, an artist who, while he lived, was to me and to my daughter the dearest of all in America. His character was so fine and noble--his nature so perfect. Many were the birthday cards he did for me, original in design, beautiful in execution. Whatever he did he put the best of himself into it. I wrote to my daughter soon after his death:-- "I heard on Saturday that our dear Joe Evans is dangerously ill. Yesterday came the worst news. Joe was not happy, but he was just heroic, and this world wasn't half good enough for him. I keep on getting letters about him. He seems to have been so glad to die. It was like a child's funeral, I am told, and all his American friends seem to have been there--Saint-Gaudens, Taber, etc. A poem about the dear fellow by Mr. Gilder has one very good line in which he says the grave 'might snatch a brightness from his presence there.' I thought that was very happy, the love of light and gladness being the most remarkable thing about him, the dear sad Joe." Robert Taber, dear, and rather sad too, was a great friend of Joe's. They both came to me first in the shape of a little book in which was inscribed, "Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it." "Upon this hint I spake," the book began. It was all the work of a few boys and girls who from the gallery of the Star Theater, New York, had watched Irving's productions and learned to love him and me. Joe Evans had done a lovely picture by way of frontispiece of a group of eager heads hanging over the gallery's edge, his own and Taber's among them. Eventually Taber came to England and acted with Henry Irving in "Peter the Great" and other plays. Like his friend Joe, he too was heroic. His health was bad and his life none too happy--but he struggled on. His career was cut short by consumption, and he died in the Adirondacks in 1904. I cannot speak of all my friends in America, or anywhere, for the matter of that, _individually_. My personal friends are so many, and they are all wonderful--wonderfully staunch to me! I have "tried" them so, and they have never given me up as a bad job. My first friends of all in America were Mr. Bayard, afterwards the American Ambassador in London, and his sister, Mrs. Benoni Lockwood, her husband and their children. Now after all these years they are still my friends, and I can hope for none better to the end. William Winter, poet, critic and exquisite man, was one of the first to write of Henry with whole-hearted appreciation. But all the criticism in America, favorable and unfavorable, surprised us by the scholarly knowledge it displayed. In Chicago the notices were worthy of the _Temps_ or the _Journal des Débats_. There was no attempt to force the personality of the writer into the foreground nor to write a style that should attract attention to the critic and leave the thing criticized to take care of itself. William Winter, and, of late years, Allan Dale, have had their personalities associated with their criticisms, but they are exceptions. Curiously enough the art of acting appears to bore most dramatic critics, the very people who might be expected to be interested in it. The American critics, however, at the time of our early visits, were keenly interested, and showed it by their observation of many points which our English critics had passed over. For instance, writing of "Much Ado about Nothing," one of the Americans said of Henry in the Church Scene that "something of him as a subtle interpreter of doubtful situations was exquisitely shown in the early part of this fine scene by his suspicion of Don John--felt by him alone, and expressed only by a quick covert look, but a look so full of intelligence as to proclaim him a sharer in the secret with his audience." "Wherein does the superiority lie?" wrote another critic in comparing our productions with those which had been seen in America up to 1884. "Not in the amount of money expended, but in the amount of brains;--in the artistic intelligence and careful and earnest pains with which every detail is studied and worked out. Nor is there any reason why Mr. Irving or any other foreigner should have a monopoly of either intelligence or pains. They are common property, and one man's money can buy them as well as another's. The defect in the American manager's policy heretofore has been that he has squandered his money upon high salaries for a few of his actors and costly, because unintelligent, expenditure for mere dazzle and show." William Winter soon became a great personal friend of ours, and visited us in England. He was one of the few _sad_ people I met in America. He could have sat upon the ground and told "sad stories of the deaths of kings" with the best. He was very familiar with the poetry of the _immediate_ past--Cowper, Coleridge, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and the rest. He _liked_ us, so everything we did was right to him. He could not help being guided entirely by his feelings. If he disliked a thing, he had no use for it. Some men can say, "I hate this play, but of its kind it is admirable." Willie Winter could never take that unemotional point of view. In England he loved going to see graveyards, and knew where every poet was buried. His children came to stay with me in London. When we were all coming home from the theater one night after "Faust" (the year must have been 1886) I said to little Willie: "Well, what do you think of the play?" "Oh my!" said he, "it takes the cake." "Takes the _cake_!" said his little sister scornfully, "it takes the ice-cream!" "Won't you give me a kiss?" said Henry to the same young miss one night. "No, I _won't_ with all that blue stuff on your face." (He was made up for Mephistopheles.) Then, after a pause, "But why--why don't you _take_ it!" She was only five years old at the time! I love the American papers, especially the Sunday ones, although they do weigh nearly half a ton! As for the interviewers, I never cease to marvel at their cleverness. I tell them nothing, and the next day I read their "story" and find that I have said the most brilliant things! The following delightful "skit" on one of these interviews suggested itself to my clever friend Miss Aimée Lowther:-- WHAT CONSTITUTES CHARM AN ILLUSTRATED INTERVIEW WITH MISS ELLEN TERRY "Yes, I know that I am very charming," said Miss Ellen Terry, "a perfectly delightful creature, a Queen of Hearts, a regular witch!" she added thoughtfully, at the same time projecting a pip of the orange she was chewing, with inimitable grace and accurate aim into THE REPORTER'S EYE. "You know, at all events, that you have charm?" I said. "What do you think, you idiot! I exercise absolute power over my audiences--I cast over them an irresistible spell--I do with them what I will.... I am omnipotent, enthralling--and no wonder!" I looked at her across the table, wondering at so much simple modesty. "But feeling your power, you must often be tempted to experiment with it," I ventured. "Yes, now and then I am," replied Miss Terry. "Once, I remember, when I was to appear as Ophelia, on making my entrance and seeing the audience waiting breathlessly--as they always do--for what I was going to do next, I said to myself, 'You silly fools, you shall have a treat to-night--I will give you something you will appreciate more than Shakespeare!' Hastily slipping on a FALSE NOSE which I always carry in my pocket, I struck an attitude, and then turned A SOMERSAULT. "Ah! the applause, the delirious, intoxicating applause! That night I felt my power, that night I knew that I had wished I could have held them indefinitely! But I am only one of several gifted beings on the stage who are blessed with this mysterious quality. Dan Leno, Herbert Campbell, and Little Tich all have it. Dan Leno, in particular, rivets the attention of his audience by his entrancing by-play, even when he doesn't speak. And yet it is NOT HIS BEAUTY precisely that does it." At that moment Miss Terry's little grandchild, who was playing about the room, BEGAN TO HOWL most dismally. "Here is a little maid who was a charmer from her cradle," said the delightful actress, picking up the child and PLAYFULLY TOSSING it out of the third-floor window. Seeing me look relieved, though somewhat surprised, she said merrily: "I have plenty more of them at home, and they are ALL CHARMING, every one of them! If you want to be charming you must be natural--I always am. Even in my cradle I was QUITE NATURAL. And now, please go. Your conversation bores me inexpressibly, and your countenance, which is at once vacuous and singularly plain, disagrees with me thoroughly. Go! or I shall BE SICK!" So saying the great actress gave me a VIGOROUS KICK which landed me outside her room, considerably shaken, and entirely under the spell of her matchless charm. * * * * * For "quite a while" during the first tour I stayed in Washington with my friend Miss Olive Seward, and all the servants of that delightful household were colored. This was my first introduction to the negroes, whose presence more than anything else in the country, makes America seem foreign to European eyes. They are more sharply divided into high and low types than white people, and are not in the least alike in their types. It is safe to call any colored man "George." They all love it, perhaps because of George Washington, and most of them are really named George. I never met such perfect service as they can give. _Some_ of them are delightful. The beautiful, full voice of the "darkey" is so attractive, so soothing, and they are so deft and gentle. Some of the women are beautiful, and all the young appeared to me to be well-formed. As for the babies! I washed two or three little piccaninnies when I was in the South, and the way they rolled their gorgeous eyes at me was "too cute," which means in British-English "fascinating." At the Washington house, the servants danced a cake-walk for me--the colored cook, a magnificent type, who "took the cake," saying, "that was because I chose a good handsome boy to dance with, Missie." They sang too. Their voices were beautiful--with such illimitable power, yet as sweet as treacle. The little page-boy had a pet of a wooly head. Henry once gave him a tip--"fee," as they call it in America--and said: "There, that's for a new wig when this one is worn out," gently pulling the astrakhan-like hair. The tip would have bought him many wigs, I think! "Why, Uncle Tom, how your face shines to-night!" said my hostess to one of the very old servants. "Yes, Missie, glycerine and rose-water, Missie!" He had taken some from her dressing-table to shine up his face in honor of me! A shiny complexion is considered to be a great beauty among the negroes! The dear old man! He was very bent and very old; and looked like one of the logs that he used to bring in for the fire--a log from some hoary, lichened tree whose life was long since past. He would produce a pin from his head when you wanted one; he had them stuck in his pad of white wooly hair: "Always handy then, Missie," he would say. "Ask them to sing 'Sweet Violets,' Uncle Tom." He was acting as a sort of master of the ceremonies at the entertainment the servants were giving me. "Don't think they know dat, Miss Olly." "Why, I heard them singing it the other night!" And she hummed the tune. "Oh, dat was 'Sweet Vio-_letts_,' Miss Olly!" Washington was the first city I had seen in America where the people did not hurry, and where the social life did not seem entirely the work of women. The men asserted themselves here as something more than machines in the background untiringly turning out the dollars, while their wives and daughters give luncheons and teas at which only women are present. Beautifully as the women dress, they talk very little about clothes. I was much struck by their culture--by the evidences that they had read far more and developed a more fastidious taste than most young Englishwomen. Yet it is all mixed up with extraordinary naïveté. The vivacity, the appearance, at least, of _reality_, the animation, the energy of American women delighted me. They are very sympathetic, too, in spite of a certain callousness which comes of regarding everything in life, even love, as "lots of fun." I did not think that they, or the men either, had much natural sense of beauty. They admire beauty in a curious way through their intellect. Nearly every American girl has a cast of the winged Victory of the Louvre in her room. She makes it a point of her _education_ to admire it. There! I am beginning to generalize--the very thing I was resolute to avoid. How silly to generalize about a country which embraces such extremes of climate as the sharp winters of Boston and New York and the warm winds of Florida which blow through palms and orange groves! XII SOME LIKES AND DISLIKES It is only human to make comparisons between American and English institutions, although they are likely to turn out as odious as the proverb says! The first institution in America that distressed me was the steam heat. It is far more manageable now than it was both in hotels and theaters, because there are more individual heaters. But how I suffered from it at first I cannot describe! I used to feel dreadfully ill, and when we could not turn the heat off at the theater, the plays always went badly. My voice was affected too. At Toledo once, it nearly went altogether. Then the next night, after a good fight for it, we got the theater cool, and the difference that it made to the play was extraordinary. I was in my best form, feeling well and jolly! No wonder the Americans drink ice-water and wear very thin clothes indoors. Their rooms are hotter than ours ever are, even in the height of the summer--when we have a summer! But no wonder, either, that Americans in England shiver at our cold, draughty rooms. They are brought up in hot-houses. If I did not like steam heat, I loved the ice which is such a feature at American meals. Everything is served on ice, and the ice-water, however pernicious the European may consider it as a drink, looks charming and cool in the hot rooms. I liked the traveling; but then we traveled in a very princely fashion. The Lyceum company and baggage occupied eight cars, and Henry's private parlor car was lovely. The only thing that we found was better understood in England, so far as railway traveling is concerned, was _privacy_. You may have a _private_ car in America, but all the conductors on the train, and there is one to each car, can walk through it. So can any official, baggage man or newsboy who has the mind! The "parlor car" in America is more luxurious than our first class, but you travel in it (if you have no "private" car) with thirty other people. "What do you want to be private for?" asked an American, and you don't know how to answer, for you find that with them that privacy means concealment. For this reason, I believe, they don't have hedges or walls round their estates and gardens. "Why should we? We have nothing to hide!" In the cars, as in the rooms at one's hotel, the "cuspidor" is always with you as a thing of beauty! When I first went to America the "Ladies' Entrance" to the hotel was really necessary, because the ordinary entrance was impassable! Since then very severe laws against spitting in public places have been passed, and there is a _great_ improvement. But the habit, I suppose due to the dryness of the climate, or to the very strong cigars smoked, or to chronic catarrh, or to a feeling of independence--"This is a free country and I can spit if I choose!"--remains sufficiently disgusting to a stranger visiting the country. The American voice is the one thing in the country that I find unbearable; yet the truly terrible variety only exists in one State, and is not widely distributed. I suppose it is its very assertiveness that makes one forget the very sweet voices that also exist in America. The Southern voice is very low in tone and soothing, like the "darkey" voice. It is as different from Yankee as the Yorkshire burr is from the Cockney accent. This question of accent is a very funny one. I had not been in America long when a friend said to me: "We like your voice. You have so little English accent!" This struck me as rather cool. Surely English should be spoken with an _English_ accent, not with a French, German, or double-dutch one! Then I found that what they meant by an English accent was an English affectation of speech--a drawl with a tendency to "aw" and "ah" everything. They thought that every one in England who did not miss out aspirates where they should be, and put them in where they should not be, talked of "the rivah," "ma brothar," and so on. Their conclusion was, after all, quite as well founded as ours about _their_ accent. The American intonation, with its freedom from violent emphasis, is, I think, rather pretty when the quality of the voice is sweet. Of course the Americans would have their jokes about Henry's method of speech. Ristori followed us once in New York, and a newspaper man said he was not sure whether she or Mr. Irving was the more difficult for an American to understand. "He pronounces the English tongue as it is pronounced by no other man, woman or child," wrote the critic, and proceeded to give a phonetically spelled version of Irving's delivery of Shylock's speech of Antonio. "Wa thane, ett no eperes Ah! um! yo ned m'clp Ough! ough! Gaw too thane! Ha! um! Yo com'n say Ah! Shilok, um! ouch! we wode hev moanies!" I wonder if the clever American reporter stopped to think how _his_ delivery of the same speech would look in print! As for the ejaculations, the interjections and grunts with which Henry interlarded the text, they often helped to reveal the meaning of Shakespeare to his audience--a meaning which many a perfect elocutionist has left perfectly obscure. The use of "m'" or "me" for "my" has often been hurled in my face as a reproach, but I never contracted "my" without good reason. I had a line in Olivia which I began by delivering as-- "My sorrows and my shame are my own." Then I saw that the "mys" sounded ridiculous, and abbreviated the two first ones into "me's." There were of course people ready to say that the Americans did not like Henry Irving as an actor, and that they only accepted him as a manager--that he triumphed in New York as he had done in London, through his lavish spectacular effects. This is all moonshine. Henry made his first appearance in "The Bells," his second in "Charles I.," his third in "Louis XI." By that time he had conquered, and without the aid of anything at all notable in the mounting of the plays. It was not until we did "The Merchant of Venice" that he gave the Americans anything of a "production." My first appearance in America in Shakespeare was as Portia, and I could not help feeling pleased by my success. A few weeks later I played Ophelia at Philadelphia. It is in Shakespeare that I have been best liked in America, and I consider that Beatrice was the part about which they were most enthusiastic. During our first tour we visited in succession New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Detroit, and Toronto. To most of these places we paid return visits. "To what do you attribute your success, Mr. Irving?" "To my acting," was the simple reply. We never had poor houses except in Baltimore and St. Louis. Our journey to Baltimore was made in a blizzard. They were clearing the snow before us all the way from New Jersey, and we took forty-two hours to reach Baltimore! The bells of trains before us and behind us sounded very alarming. We opened in Baltimore on Christmas day. The audience was wretchedly small, but the poor things who were there had left their warm firesides to drive or tramp through the slush of melting snow, and each one who managed to reach the theater was worth a hundred on an ordinary night. At the hotel I put up holly and mistletoe, and produced from my trunks a real Christmas pudding that my mother had made. We had it for supper, and it was very good. It never does to repeat an experiment. Next year at Pittsburg my little son Teddy brought me out another pudding from England. For once we were in an uncomfortable hotel, and the Christmas dinner was deplorable. It began with _burned hare soup_. "It seems to me," said Henry, "that we aren't going to get anything to eat, but we'll make up for it by drinking!" He had brought his own wine out with him from England, and the company took him at his word and _did_ make up for it! "Never mind!" I said, as the soup was followed by worse and worse. "There's my pudding!" It came on blazing, and looked superb. Henry tasted a mouthful. "Very odd," he said, "but I think this is a camphor pudding." He said it so politely, as if he might easily be mistaken! My maid in England had packed the pudding with my furs! It simply reeked of camphor. So we had to dine on Henry's wine and L.F. Austin's wit. This dear, brilliant man, now dead, acted for many years as Henry's secretary, and one of his gifts was the happy knack of hitting off people's peculiarities in rhyme. This dreadful Christmas dinner at Pittsburg was enlivened by a collection of such rhymes, which Mr. Austin called a "Lyceum Christmas Play." Every one roared with laughter until it came to the verse of which he was the victim, when suddenly he found the fun rather labored! The first verse was spoken by Loveday, who announces that the "Governor" has a new play which is "_Wonderful_!" a great word of Loveday's. _George Alexander_ replies: "But I say, Loveday, have I got a part in it, That I can wear a cloak in and look smart in it? Not that I care a fig for gaudy show, dear boy-- But juveniles must _look_ well, don't you know, dear boy. And shall I lordly hall and tuns of claret own? And may I murmur love in dulcet baritone? Tell me at least, this simple fact of it-- Can I beat Terriss hollow in one act of it?[1] Pooh for Wenman's bass![2] Why should he make a boast of it?" [Footnote 1: Alexander had just succeeded Terriss as our leading young man.] [Footnote 2: Wenman had a rolling bass voice of which he was very proud. He was a valuable actor, yet somehow never interesting. Young Norman Forbes-Robertson played Sir Andrew Ague Cheak with us on our second American tour.] _Norman Forbes_: "If he has a voice, I have got the ghost of it! When I pitch it low, you may say how weak it is, When I pitch it high, heavens! what a squeak it is! But I never mind; for what does it signify? See my graceful hands, they're the things that dignify; All the rest is froth, and egotism's dizziness-- Have I not played with Phelps? (_To Wenman_) I'll teach you all the business!" _T. Mead_: (Of whom much has already been written in these pages.) "What's this about a voice? Surely you forget it, or Wilfully conceal that _I_ have no competitor! I do not know the play, or even what the title is, But safe to make success a charnel-house recital is! So please to bear in mind, if I am not to fail in it, That Hamlet's father's ghost must rob the Lyons Mail in it! No! that's not correct! But you may spare your charity-- A good sepulchral groan's the thing for popularity!" _H. Howe_: (The "agricultural" actor, as Henry called him.) "Boys, take my advice, the stage is not the question, But whether at three score you'll all have my digestion. Why yearn for plays, to pose as Brutuses or Catos in, When you may get a garden to grow the best potatoes in? You see that at my age by Nature's shocks unharmed I am! Tho' if I sneeze but thrice, good heavens, how alarmed I am! But act your parts like men, and tho' you all great sinners are, You're sure to act like men wherever Irving's dinners are!" _J.H. Allen_ (our prompter): "Whatever be the play, _I_ must have a hand in it, For won't I teach the supers how to stalk and stand in it? Tho' that blessed Shakespeare never gives a ray to them, _I_ explain the text, and then it's clear as day to them![1] Plain as A B C is a plot historical, When _I_ overhaul allusions allegorical! Shakespeare's not so bad; he'd have more pounds and pence in him, If actors stood aside, and let me show the sense in him!" [Footnote 1: Once when Allen was rehearsing the supers in the Church Scene in "Much Ado about Nothing," we overheard him show the sense in Shakespeare like this: "This 'Ero let me tell you is a perfect lady, a nice, innercent young thing, and when the feller she's engaged to calls 'er an 'approved wanton,' you naturally claps yer 'ands to yer swords. A wanton is a kind of--well, you know she ain't what she ought to be!" Allen would then proceed to read the part of Claudio: "... not to knit my soul to an approved wanton." Seven or eight times the supers clapped their "'ands to their swords" without giving Allen satisfaction. "No, no, no, that's not a bit like it, not a bit! If any of your sisters was 'ere and you 'eard me call 'er a ----, would yer stand gapin' at me as if this was a bloomin' tea party!"] Louis Austin's little "Lyceum Play" was presented to me with a silver water-jug, a souvenir from the company, and ended up with the following pretty lines spoken by Katie Brown, a clever little girl who played all the small pages' parts at this time: "Although I'm but a little page, Who waits for Portia's kind behest, Mine is the part upon this stage To tell the plot you have not guessed. "Dear lady, oft in Belmont's hall, Whose mistress is so sweet and fair, Your humble slaves would gladly fall Upon their knees, and praise you there. "To offer you this little gift, Dear Portia, now we crave your leave, And let it have the grace to lift Our hearts to yours this Christmas eve. "And so we pray that you may live Thro' many, many, happy years, And feel what you so often give-- The joy that is akin to tears!" How nice of Louis Austin! It quite made up for my mortification over the camphor pudding! Pittsburg has been called "hell with the lid off," and other insulting names. I have always thought it beautiful, especially at night when its furnaces make it look like a city of flame. The lovely park that the city has made on the heights that surround it is a lesson to Birmingham, Sheffield, and our other black towns. George Alexander said that Pittsburg reminded him of his native town of Sheffield. "Had he said Birmingham, now instead of Sheffield," wrote a Pittsburg newspaper man, "he would have touched our tender spot exactly. As it is, we can be as cheerful as the Chicago man was who boasted that his sweetheart 'came pretty near calling him "honey,"' when in fact she had called him 'Old Beeswax'!" When I played Ophelia for the first time in Chicago, I played the part better than I had ever played it before, and I don't believe I ever played it so well again. _Why_, it is almost impossible to say. I had heard a good deal of the crime of Chicago, that the people were a rough, murderous, sand-bagging crew. I ran on to the stage in the mad scene, and never have I felt such sympathy! This frail wraith, this poor demented thing, could hold them in the hollow of her hand.... It was splendid! "How long can I hold them?" I thought: "For ever!" Then I laughed. That was the best Ophelia laugh of my life--my life that is such a perfect kaleidoscope with the people and the places turning round and round. At the risk of being accused of indiscriminate flattery I must say that I liked _all_ the American cities. Every one of them has a joke at the expense of the others. They talk in New York of a man who lost both his sons--"One died and the other went to live in Philadelphia." Pittsburg is the subject of endless criticism, and Chicago is "the limit." To me, indeed, it seemed "the limit"--of the industry, energy, and enterprise of man. In 1812 this vast city was only a frontier post--Fort Dearborn. In 1871 the town that first rose on these great plains was burned to the ground. The growth of the present Chicago began when I was a grown woman. I have celebrated my jubilee. Chicago will not do that for another fifteen years! I never visited the stock-yards. Somehow I had no curiosity to see a live pig turned in fifteen minutes into ham, sausages, hair-oil, and the binding for a Bible! I had some dread of being made sad by the spectacle of so much slaughter--of hating the Chicago of the "abattoir" as much as I had loved the Chicago of the Lake with the white buildings of the World's Fair shining on it, the Chicago built on piles in splendid isolation in the middle of the prairie, the Chicago of Marshall Field's beautiful palace of a store, the Chicago of my dear friends, the Chicago of my son's first appearance on the stage! Was it not a Chicago man who wrote of my boy, tending the roses in the stage garden in "Eugene Aram," that he was "a most beautiful lad"! "His eyes are full of sparkle, his smile is a ripple over his face, and his laugh is as cherry and natural as a bird's song.... This Joey is Miss Ellen Terry's son, and the apple of her eye. On this Wednesday night, January 14, 1885, he spoke his first lines upon the stage. His mother has high hopes of this child's dramatic future. He has the instinct and the soul of art in him. Already the theater is his home. His postures and his playfulness with the gardener, his natural and graceful movement, had been the subject of much drilling, of study and practice. He acquitted himself beautifully and received the wise congratulations of his mother, of Mr. Irving, and of the company." That is the nicest newspaper notice I have ever read! At Chicago I made my first speech. The Haverley Theater, at which we first appeared in 1884, was altered and rechristened the "Columbia" in 1885. I was called upon for a speech after the special performance in honor of the occasion, consisting of scenes from "Charles I.," "Louis XI," "The Merchant of Venice," and "The Bells," had come to an end. I think it must be the shortest speech on record: "Ladies and Gentlemen, I have been asked to christen your beautiful theater. 'Hail Columbia!'" When we acted in Brooklyn we used to stay in New York and drive over that wonderful bridge every night. There were no trolley cars on it then. I shall never forget how it looked in winter, with the snow and ice on it--a gigantic trellis of dazzling white, as incredible as a dream. The old stone bridges were works of _art_. This bridge, woven of iron and steel for a length of over 500 yards, and hung high in the air over the water so that great ships can pass beneath it, is the work of _science_. It looks as if it had been built by some power, not by men at all. It was during our week at Brooklyn in 1885 that Henry was ill, too ill to act for four nights. Alexander played Benedick, and got through it wonderfully well. Then old Mr. Mead did (_did_ is the word) Shylock. There was no intention behind his words or what he did. I had such a funny batch of letters on my birthday that year. "Dear, sweet Miss Terry, etc., etc. Will you give me a piano?"!! etc., etc. Another: "Dear Ellen. Come to Jesus. Mary." Another, a lovely letter of thanks from a poor woman in the most ghastly distress, and lastly an offer of a _two years'_ engagement in America. There was a simple coming in for one woman acting at Brooklyn on her birthday! Brooklyn is as sure a laugh in New York as the mother-in-law in a London music hall. "All cities begin by being lonesome," a comedian explained, "and Brooklyn has never gotten over it." My only complaint against Brooklyn was that they would not take Fussie in at the hotel there. Fussie, during these early American tours, was still _my_ dog. Later on he became Henry's. He had his affections alienated by a course of chops, tomatoes, strawberries, "ladies' fingers" soaked in champagne, and a beautiful fur rug of his very own presented by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts! How did I come by Fussie? I went to Newmarket with Rosa Corder, whom Whistler painted. She was one of those plain-beautiful women who are so far more attractive than some of the pretty ones. She had wonderful hair--like a fair, pale veil, a white, waxen face, and a very good figure; and she wore very odd clothes. She had a studio in Southampton Row, and another at Newmarket where she went to paint horses. I went to Cambridge once and drove back with her across the heath to her studio. "How wonderfully different are the expressions on terriers' faces," I said to her, looking at a painting of hers of a fox-terrier pup. "That's the only sort of dog I should like to have." "That one belonged to Fred Archer," Rosa Corder said. "I daresay he could get you one like it." We went out to find Archer. Curiously enough I had known the famous jockey at Harpenden when he was a little boy, and I believe used to come round with vegetables. "I'll send you a dog, Miss Terry, that won't be any trouble. He's got a very good head, a first-rate tail, stuck in splendidly, but his legs are too long. He'd follow you to America!" Prophetic words! On one of our departures for America, Fussie was left behind by mistake at Southampton. He could not get across the Atlantic, but he did the next best thing. He found his way back from there to his own theater in the Strand, London! Fred Archer sent him originally to the stage-door at the Lyceum. The man who brought him out from there to my house in Earl's Court said: "I'm afraid he gives tongue, Miss. He don't like music, anyway. There was a band at the bottom of your road, and he started hollering." We were at luncheon when Fussie made his début into the family circle, and I very quickly saw his _stomach_ was his fault. He had a great dislike to "Charles I."; we could never make out why. Perhaps it was because Henry wore armor in one act--and Fussie may have barked his shins against it. Perhaps it was the firing off of the guns; but more probably it was because the play once got him into trouble. As a rule Fussie had the most wonderful sense of the stage, and at rehearsal would skirt the edge of it, but never cross it. But at Brooklyn one night when we were playing "Charles I."--the last act, and that most pathetic part of it where Charles is taking a last farewell of his wife and children--Fussie, perhaps excited by his run over the bridge from New York, suddenly bounded on to the stage! The good children who were playing Princess Mary and Prince Henry didn't even smile; the audience remained solemn, but Henry and I nearly went into hysterics. Fussie knew directly that he had done wrong. He lay down on his stomach, then rolled over on his back, whimpering an apology--while carpenters kept on whistling and calling to him from the wings. The children took him up to the window at the back of the scene, and he stayed there cowering between them until the end of the play. America seems to have been always fatal to Fussie. Another time when Henry and I were playing in some charity performance in which John Drew and Maude Adams were also acting, he disgraced himself again. Henry having "done his bit" and put on hat and coat to leave the theater, Fussie thought the end of the performance must have come; the stage had no further sanctity for him, and he ran across it to the stage door barking! John Drew and Maude Adams were playing "A Pair of Lunatics." Maude Adams, sitting looking into the fire, did not see Fussie, but was amazed to hear John Drew departing madly from the text: "Is this a dog I see before me, His tail towards my hand? Come, let me clutch thee." She began to think that he had really gone mad! When Fussie first came, Charlie was still alive, and I have often gone into Henry's dressing-room and seen the two dogs curled up in both the available chairs, Henry _standing_ while he made up, rather than disturb them! When Charlie died, Fussie had Henry's idolatry all to himself. I have caught them often sitting quietly opposite each other at Grafton Street, just adoring each other! Occasionally Fussie would thump his tail on the ground to express his pleasure. Wherever we went in America the hotel people wanted to get rid of the dog. In the paper they had it that Miss Terry asserted that Fussie was a little terrier, while the hotel people regarded him as a pointer, and funny caricatures were drawn of a very big me with a very tiny dog, and a very tiny me with a dog the size of an elephant! Henry often walked straight out of an hotel where an objection was made to Fussie. If he wanted to stay, he had recourse to strategy. At Detroit the manager of the hotel said that dogs were against the rules. Being very tired Henry let Fussie go to the stables for the night, and sent Walter to look after him. The next morning he sent for the manager. "Yours is a very old-fashioned hotel, isn't it?" "Yes, sir, very old and ancient." "Got a good chef? I didn't think much of the supper last night; but still--the beds are comfortable enough--I am afraid you don't like animals?" "Yes, sir, in their proper place." "It's a pity," said Henry meditatively, "because you happen to be overrun by rats!" "Sir, you must have made a mistake. Such a thing couldn't--" "Well, I couldn't pass another night here without my dog," Henry interrupted. "But there are, I suppose, other hotels?" "If it will be any comfort to you to have your dog with you, sir, do by all means, but I assure you that he'll catch no rat here." "I'll be on the safe side," said Henry calmly. And so it was settled. That very night Fussie supped off, not rats, but terrapin and other delicacies in Henry's private sitting-room. It was the 1888 tour, the great blizzard year, that Fussie was left behind by mistake at Southampton. He jumped out at the station just before Southampton, where they stop to collect tickets. After this long separation, Henry naturally thought that the dog would go nearly mad with joy when he saw him again. He described to me the meeting in a letter. "My dear Fussie gave me a terrible shock on Sunday night. When we got in, J----, Hatton, and I dined at the Cafe Royal. I told Walter to bring Fussie there. He did, and Fussie burst into the room while the waiter was cutting some mutton, when, what d'ye think--one bound at me--another instantaneous bound at the mutton, and from the mutton nothing would get him until he'd got his plateful. "Oh, what a surprise it was indeed! He never now will leave my side, my legs, or my presence, but I cannot but think, alas, of that seductive piece of mutton!" Poor Fussie! He met his death through the same weakness. It was at Manchester, I think. A carpenter had thrown down his coat with a ham sandwich in the pocket, over an open trap on the stage. Fussie, nosing and nudging after the sandwich, fell through and was killed instantly. When they brought up the dog after the performance, every man took his hat off.... Henry was not told until the end of the play. He took it so very quietly that I was frightened, and said to his son Laurence who was on that tour: "Do let's go to his hotel and see how he is." We drove there and found him sitting eating his supper with the poor dead Fussie, who would never eat supper any more, curled up in his rug on the sofa. Henry was talking to the dog exactly as if it were alive. The next day he took Fussie back in the train with him to London, covered with a coat. He is buried in the dogs' cemetery, Hyde Park. His death made an enormous difference to Henry. Fussie was his constant companion. When he died, Henry was really alone. He never spoke of what he felt about it, but it was easy to know. We used to get hints how to get this and that from watching Fussie! His look, his way of walking! He _sang_, whispered eloquently and low--then barked suddenly and whispered again! Such a lesson in the law of contrasts! The first time that Henry went to the Lyceum after Fussie's death, every one was anxious and distressed, knowing how he would miss the dog in his dressing-room. Then an odd thing happened. The wardrobe cat, who had never been near the room in Fussie's lifetime, came down and sat on Fussie's cushion! No one knew how the "Governor" would take it. But when Walter was sent out to buy some meat for it, we saw that Henry was not going to resent it! From that night onwards the cat always sat night after night in the same place, and Henry liked its companionship. In 1902, when he left the theater for good, he wrote to me: "The place is now given up to the rats--all light cut off, and only Barry[1] and a foreman left. Everything of mine I've moved away, including the Cat!" [Footnote 1: The stage-door keeper.] I have never been to America yet without going to Niagara. The first time I saw the great falls I thought it all more wonderful than beautiful. I got away by myself from my party, and looked and looked at it, and I listened--and at last it became dreadful and I was _frightened_ at it. I wouldn't go alone again, for I felt queer and wanted to follow the great flow of it. But at twelve o'clock, with the "sun upon the topmost height of the day's journey," most of Nature's sights appear to me to be at their plainest. In the evening, when the shadows grow long and all hard lines are blurred, how soft, how different, everything is! It was noontide, that garish cruel time of day, when I first came in sight of the falls. I'm glad I went again in other lights--but one should live by the side of all this greatness to learn to love it. Only once did I catch Niagara in _beauty_, with pits of color in its waters, no one color definite--all was wonderment, allurement, fascination. The _last_ time I was there it was wonderful, but not beautiful any more. The merely stupendous, the merely marvelous, have always repelled me. I cannot _realize_, and become terribly weak and doddering. No terrific scene gives me pleasure. The great cañons give me unrest, just as the long low lines of my Sussex marshland near Winchelsea give me rest. At Niagara William Terriss slipped and nearly lost his life. At night when he appeared as Bassanio, he shrugged his shoulders, lowered his eyelids, and said to me-- "Nearly gone, dear,"--he would call everybody "dear"--"But Bill's luck! Tempus fugit!" What tempus had to do with it, I don't quite know! When we were first in Canada I tobogganed at Rosedale. I should say it was like flying! The start! Amazing! "Farewell to this world," I thought, as I felt my breath go. Then I shut my mouth, opened my eyes, and found myself at the bottom of the hill in a jiffy--"over hill, over dale, through bush, through briar!" I rolled right out of the toboggan when we stopped. A very nice Canadian man was my escort, and he helped me up the hill afterwards. I didn't like _that_ part of the affair quite so much. Henry Irving would not come, much to my disappointment. He said that quick motion through the air always gave him the ear-ache. He had to give up swimming (his old Cornish Aunt Penberthy told me he delighted in swimming as a boy) just because it gave him most violent pains in the ear. Philadelphia, as I first knew it, was the most old-world place I saw in America, except perhaps Salem. Its redbrick side-walks, the trees in the streets, the low houses with their white marble cuffs and collars, the pretty design of the place, all give it a character of its own. The people, too, have a character of their own. They dress, or at least _did_ dress, very quietly. This was the only sign of their Quaker origin, except a very fastidious taste--in plays as in other things. Mrs. Gillespie, the great-grandchild of Benjamin Franklin, was one of my earliest Philadelphia friends--a splendid type of the independent woman, a bit of the martinet, but immensely full of kindness and humor. She had a word to say in all Philadelphian matters. It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast to Mrs. Gillespie of Philadelphia than Mrs. Fields of Boston, that other great American lady whom to know is a liberal education. Mrs. Fields reminded me of Lady Tennyson, Mrs. Tom Taylor, and Miss Hogarth (Dickens's sister-in-law) all rolled into one. Her house is full of relics of the past. There is a portrait of Dickens as a young man with long hair. He had a feminine face in those days, for all its strength. Hard by is a sketch of Keats by Severn, with a lock of the poet's hair. Opposite is a head of Thackeray, with a note in his handwriting fastened below. "Good-bye, Mrs. Fields; good-bye, my dear Fields; good-bye to all. I go home." Thackeray left Boston abruptly because a sudden desire to see his children had assailed him at Christmas time! As you sit in Mrs. Field's spacious room overlooking the Bay, you realize suddenly that before you ever came into it, Dickens and Thackeray were both here, that this beautiful old lady who so kindly smiles on you has smiled on them and on many other great men of letters long since dead. It is here that they seem most alive. This is the house where the culture of Boston seems no fad to make a joke about, but a rare and delicate reality. This--and Fen Court, the home of that wonderful woman Mrs. Jack Gardiner, who represents the present worship of beauty in Boston as Mrs. Fields represents its former worship of literary men. Fen Court is a house of enchantment, a palace, and Mrs. Gardiner is like a great princess in it. She has "great possessions" indeed, but her best, to my mind, is her most beautiful voice, even though I remember her garden by moonlight with the fountain playing, her books and her pictures, the Sargent portrait of herself presiding over one of the most splendid of those splendid rooms, where everything great in old art and new art is represented. What a portrait it is! Some one once said of Sargent that "behind the individual he finds the real, and behind the real, a whole social order." He has painted "Mrs. Jack" in a tight-fitting black dress with no ornament but her world-famed pearl necklace round her waist, and on her shoes rubies like drops of blood. The daring, intellectual face seems to say: "I have possessed everything that is worth possession, through the energy and effort and labor of the country in which I was born." Mrs. Gardiner represents all the _poetry_ of the millionaire. Mrs. Gardiner's house filled me with admiration, but if I want rest and peace I just think of the houses of Mrs. James Fields and Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was another personage in Boston life when I first went there. Oh, the visits I inflicted on him--yet he always seemed pleased to see me, the cheery, kind man. It was generally winter when I called on him. At once it was "four feet upon a fender!" Four feet upon a fender was his idea of happiness, he told me, during one of these lengthy visits of mine to his house in Beacon Street. He came to see us in "Much Ado about Nothing" and, next day sent me some little volumes of his work with a lovely inscription on the front page. I miss him very much when I go to Boston now. In New York, how much I miss Mrs. Beecher I could never say. The Beechers were the most wonderful pair. What an actor he would have made! He read scenes from Shakespeare to Henry and me at luncheon one day. He sat next to his wife, and they held hands nearly all the while; I thought of that time when the great preacher was tried, and all through the trial his wife showed the world her faith in his innocence by sitting by his side and holding his hand. He was indeed a great preacher. I have a little faded card in my possession now: "Mrs. Henry W. Beecher." "Will ushers of Plymouth Church please seat the bearer in the Pastor's pew." And in the Pastor's pew I sat, listening to that magnificent bass-viol voice with its persuasive low accent, its torrential scorn! After the sermon I went to the Beechers' home. Mr. Beecher sat with a saucer of uncut gems by him on the table. He ran his hand through them from time to time, held them up to the light, admiring them and speaking of their beauty and color as eloquently as an hour before he had spoken of sin and death and redemption. He asked me to choose a stone, and I selected an aquamarine, and he had it splendidly mounted for me in Venetian style to wear in "The Merchant of Venice." Once when he was ill, he told me, his wife had some few score of his jewels set up in lead--a kind of small stained-glass window--and hung up opposite his bed. "It did me more good than the doctor's visits," he laughed out! Mrs. Beecher was very remarkable. She had a way of lowering her head and looking at you with a strange intentness--gravely--kindly and quietly. At her husband she looked a world of love, of faith, of undying devotion. She was fond of me, although I was told she disliked women generally and had been brought up to think all actresses children of Satan. Obedience to the iron rules which had always surrounded her had endowed her with extraordinary self-control. She would not allow herself ever to feel heat or cold, and could stand any pain or discomfort without a word of complaint. She told me once that when she and her sister were children, a friend had given them some lovely bright blue silk, and as the material was so fine they thought they would have it made up a little more smartly than was usual in their somber religious home. In spite of their father's hatred of gaudy clothes, they ventured on a little "V" at the neck, hardly showing more than the throat; but still, in a household where blue silk itself was a crime, it was a bold venture. They put on the dresses for the first time for five o'clock dinner, stole downstairs with trepidation, rather late, and took their seats as usual one on each side of their father. He was eating soup and never looked up. The little sisters were relieved. He was not going to say anything. No, he was not going to say anything, but suddenly he took a ladleful of the hot soup and dashed it over the neck of one sister; another ladleful followed quickly on the neck of the other. "Oh, father, you've burned my neck!" "Oh, father, you've spoiled my dress!" "Oh, father, why did you do that?" "I thought you might be cold," said the severe father significantly--malevolently. That a woman who had been brought up like this should form a friendship with me naturally caused a good deal of talk. But what did she care! She remained my true friend until her death, and wrote to me constantly when I was in England--such loving, wise letters, full of charity and simple faith. In 1889, after her husband's death, I wrote to her and sent my picture, and she replied: "My darling Nellie,-- "You cannot know how it soothes my extreme heart-loneliness to receive a token of remembrance, and word of cheer from those I have faithfully loved, and who knew and reverenced my husband.... Ellen Terry is very sweet as Ellaline, but dearer far as my Nellie." The Daly players were a revelation to me of the pitch of excellence which American acting had reached. My first night at Daly's was a night of enchantment. I wrote to Mr. Daly and said: "You've got a girl in your company who is the most lovely, humorous darling I have ever seen on the stage." It was Ada Rehan! Now of course I didn't "discover" her or any rubbish of that kind; the audience were already mad about her, but I did know her for what she was, even in that brilliant "all-star" company and before she had played in the classics and won enduring fame. The audacious, superb, quaint, Irish creature! Never have I seen such splendid high comedy! Then the charm of her voice--a little like Ethel Barrymore's when Miss Ethel is speaking very nicely--her smiles and dimples, and provocative, inviting _coquetterie_! Her Rosalind, her Country Wife, her Helena, her performance in "The Railroad of Love"! And above all, her Katherine in "The Taming of the Shrew"! I can only exclaim, not explain! Directly she came on I knew how she was going to do the part. She had such shy, demure fun. She understood, like all great comedians, that you must not pretend to be serious so sincerely that no one in the audience sees through it! As a woman off the stage Ada Rehan was even more wonderful than as a shrew on. She had a touch of dignity, of nobility, of beauty, rather like Eleonora Duse's. The mouth and the formation of the eye were lovely. Her guiltlessness of make-up off the stage was so attractive! She used to come in to a supper with a lovely shining face which scorned a powder puff. The only thing one missed was the red hair which seemed such a part of her on the stage. Here is a dear letter from the dear, written in 1890: "My dear Miss Terry,-- "Of course the first thing I was to do when I reached Paris was to write and thank you for your lovely red feathers. One week is gone. To-day it rains and I am compelled to stay at home, and at last I write. I thought you had forgotten me and my feathers long ago. So imagine my delight when they came at the very end. I liked it so. It seemed as if I lived all the time in your mind: and they came as a good-bye. "I saw but little of you, but in that little I found no change. That was gratifying to me, for I am over-sensitive, and would never trouble you if you had forgotten me. How I shall prize those feathers--Henry Irving's, presented by Ellen Terry to me for my Rosalind Cap. I shall wear them once and then put them by as treasures. Thank you so much for the pretty words you wrote me about 'As You Like It.' I was hardly fit on that matinée. The great excitement I went through during the London season almost killed me. I am going to try and rest, but I fear my nerves and heart won't let me. "You must try and read between the lines all I feel. I am sure you can if any one ever did, but I cannot put into words my admiration for you--and that comes from deep down in my heart. Good-bye, with all good wishes for your health and success. "I remain "Yours most affectionately, "ADA REHAN." I wish I could just once have played with Ada Rehan. When Mr. Tree could not persuade Mrs. Kendal to come and play in "The Merry Wives of Windsor" a second time, I hoped that Ada Rehan would come and rollick with me as Mrs. Ford--but it was not to be. Mr. Daly himself interested me greatly. He was an excellent manager, a man in a million. But he had no artistic sense. The productions of Shakespeare at Daly's were really bad from the pictorial point of view. But what pace and "ensemble" he got from his company! May Irwin was the low comedian who played the servants' parts in Daly's comedies from the German. I might describe her, except that she was far more genial, as a kind of female Rutland Barrington. On and off the stage her geniality distinguished her like a halo. It is a rare quality on the stage, yet without it the comedian has uphill work. I should say that May Irwin and J.B. Buckstone (the English actor and manager of the Haymarket Theater during the 'sixties) had it equally. Generous May Irwin! Lucky those who have her warm friendship and jolly, kind companionship! John Drew, the famous son of a famous mother, was another Daly player whom I loved. With what loyalty he supported Ada Rehan! He never played for his own hand but for the good of the piece. His mother, Mrs. John Drew, had the same quiet methods as Mrs. Alfred Wigan. Everything that she did told. I saw Mrs. Drew play Mrs. Malaprop, and it was a lesson to people who overact. Her daughter, Georgie Drew, Ethel Barrymore's mother, was also a charming actress. Maurice Barrymore was a brilliantly clever actor. Little Ethel, as I still call her, though she is a big "star," is carrying on the family traditions. She ought to play Lady Teazle. She may take it from me that she would make a success in it. Modjeska, who, though she is a Polish actress, lives in America and is associated with the American stage, made a great impression on me. She was exquisite in many parts, but in none finer than in "Adrienne Lecouvreur." Her last act electrified me. I have never seen it better acted, although I have seen all the great ones do it since. Her Marie Stuart, too, was a beautiful and distinguished performance. Her Juliet had lovely moments, but I did not so much care for that, and her broken English interfered with the verse of Shakespeare. Some years ago I met Modjeska and she greeted me so warmly and sweetly, although she was very ill. During my more recent tours in America Maude Adams is the actress of whom I have seen most, and "to see her is to love her!" In "The Little Minister" and in "Quality Street" I think she is at her best, but above all parts she herself is most adorable. She is just worshiped in America, and has an extraordinary effect--an _educational_ effect upon all American girlhood. I never saw Mary Anderson act. That seems a strange admission, but during her wonderful reign at the Lyceum Theater, which she rented from Henry Irving, I was in America, and another time when I might have seen her act I was very ill and ordered abroad. I have, however, had the great pleasure of meeting her, and she has done me many little kindnesses. Hearing her praises sung on all sides, and her beauties spoken of everywhere, I was particularly struck by her modest evasion of publicity _off_ the stage. I personally only knew her as a most beautiful woman--as kind as beautiful--constantly working for her religion--_always_ kind, a good daughter, a good wife, a good woman. She cheered me before I first sailed for America by saying that her people would like me. "Since seeing you in Portia and Letitia," she wrote, "I am convinced you will take America by storm." Certainly _she_ took _England_ by storm! But she abandoned her triumphs almost as soon as they were gained. They never made her happy, she once told me, and I could understand her better than most since I had had success too, and knew that it did not mean happiness. I have a letter from her, written from St. Raphael soon after her marriage. It is nice to think that she is just as happy now as she was then--that she made no mistake when she left the stage, where she had such a brief and brilliant career. "GRAND HOTEL DE VALESCURE, "ST. RAPHAEL, FRANCE. "Dear Miss Terry,-- "I am saying all kinds of fine things about your beautiful work in my book--which will appear shortly; but I cannot remember the name of the small part you made so attractive in the 'Lyons Mail.' It was the first one I had seen you in, and I wish to write my delightful impressions of it. "Will you be so very kind as to tell me the name of your character and the two Mr. Irving acted so wonderfully in that play? "There is a brilliant blue sea before my windows, with purple mountains as a background and silver-topped olives and rich green pines in the middle distance. I wish you could drop down upon us in this golden land for a few days' holiday from your weary work. "I would like to tell you what a big darling my husband is, and how perfectly happy he makes my life--but there's no use trying. "The last time we met I promised you a photo--here it is! One of my latest! And won't you send me one of yours in private dress? DO! "Forgive me for troubling you, and believe me your admirer "MARY ANDERSON DE NAVARRO." Henry and I were so fortunate as to gain the friendship and approval of Dr. Horace Howard Furness, perhaps the finest Shakespearean scholar in America, and editor of the "Variorum Shakespeare," which Henry considered the best of all editions--"the one which counts." It was in Boston, I think, that I disgraced myself at one of Dr. Furness's lectures. He was discussing "As You Like It" and Rosalind, and proving with much elaboration that English in Shakespeare's time was pronounced like a broad country dialect, and that Rosalind spoke Warwickshire! A little girl who was sitting in the row in front of me had lent me her copy of the play a moment before, and now, absorbed in Dr. Furness's argument, I forgot the book wasn't mine and began scrawling controversial notes in it with my very thick and blotty fountain pen. "Give me back my book! Give me my book!" screamed the little girl. "How dare you write in my book!" She began to cry with rage. Her mother tried to hush her up: "Don't, darling. Be quiet! It's Miss Ellen Terry." "I don't care! She's spoilt my nice book!" I am glad to say that when the little girl understood, she forgave me; and the spoilt book is treasured very much by a tall Boston young lady of eighteen who has replaced the child of seven years ago! Still, it was dreadful of me, and I did feel ashamed at the time. I saw "As You Like It" acted in New York once with every part (except the man who let down the curtain) played by a woman, and it was extraordinarily well done. The most remarkable bit of acting was by Janauschek, who played Jacques. I have never heard the speech beginning "All the world's a stage" delivered more finely, not even by Phelps, who was fine in the part. Mary Shaw's Rosalind was good, and the Silvius (who played it, now?) was charming. Unfortunately that one man, poor creature (no wonder he was nervous!), spoiled the end of the play by failing to ring down the curtain, at which the laughter was immoderate! Janauschek used to do a little sketch from the German called "Come Here!" which I afterwards did in England. In November, 1901, I wrote in my diary: "_Philadelphia._--Supper at Henry's. Jefferson there, sweeter and more interesting than ever--and younger." Dear Joe Jefferson--actor, painter, courteous gentleman, _profound_ student of Shakespeare! When the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy was raging in America (it really _did_ rage there!) Jefferson wrote the most delicious doggerel about it. He ridiculed, and his ridicule killed the Bacon enthusiasts all the more dead because it was barbed with erudition. He said that when I first came into the box to see him as "Rip" he thought I did not like him, because I fidgeted and rustled and moved my place, as is my wicked way. "But I'll get her, and I'll hold her," he said to himself. I was held indeed--enthralled. In manner Jefferson was a little like Norman Forbes-Robertson. Perhaps that was why the two took such a fancy to each other. When Norman was walking with Jefferson one day, some one who met them said: "Your son?" "No," said Jefferson, "but I wish he were! The young man has such good manners!" Our first American tours were in 1883 and 1884; the third in 1887-88, the year of the great blizzard. Henry fetched us at half-past ten in the morning! His hotel was near the theater where we were to play at night. He said the weather was stormy, and we had better make for his hotel while there was time! The German actor Ludwig Barnay was to open in New York that night, but the blizzard affected his nerves to such an extent that he did not appear at all, and returned to Germany directly the weather improved! Most of the theaters closed for three days, but we remained open, although there was a famine in the town and the streets were impassable. The cold was intense. Henry sent Walter out to buy some violets for Barnay, and when he brought them in to the dressing room--he had only carried them a few yards--they were frozen so hard that they could have been chipped with a hammer! We rang up on "Faust" three-quarters of an hour late! This was not bad considering all things. Although the house was sold out, there was hardly any audience, and only a harp and two violins in the orchestra. Discipline was so strong in the Lyceum company that every member of it reached the theater by eight o'clock, although some of them had had to walk from Brooklyn Bridge. The Mayor of New York and his daughter managed to reach their box somehow. Then we thought it was time to begin. Some members of Daly's company, including John Drew, came in, and a few friends. It was the oddest, scantiest audience! But the enthusiasm was terrific! Five years went by before we visited America again. Five years in a country of rapid changes is a long time, long enough for friends to forget! But they didn't forget. This time we made new friends, too, in the Far West. We went to San Francisco, among other places. We attended part of a performance at the Chinese theater. Oh, those rows of impenetrable faces gazing at the stage with their long, shining, inexpressive eyes! What a look of the everlasting the Chinese have! "We have been before you--we shall be after you," they seem to say. Just as we were getting interested in the play, the interpreter rose and hurried us out. Something that was not for the ears of women was being said, but we did not know it! The chief incident of the fifth American tour was our production at Chicago of Laurence Irving's one-act play "Godefroi and Yolande." I regard that little play as an inspiration. By instinct the young author did everything right. The Chicago folk, in spite of the unpleasant theme of the play, recognized the genius of it, and received it splendidly. In 1901 I was ill, and hated the parts I was playing in America. The Lyceum was not what it had been. Everything was changed. In 1907--only the other day--I toured in America for the first time on my own account--playing modern plays for the first time. I made new friends and found my old ones still faithful. But this tour was chiefly momentous to me because at Pittsburg I was married for the third time, and married to an American. My marriage was my own affair, but very few people seemed to think so, and I was overwhelmed with "inquiries," kind and otherwise. Kindness and loyalty won the day. "If any one deserves to be happy, you do," many a friend wrote. Well, I am happy, and while I am happy, I cannot feel old. XIII THE MACBETH PERIOD Perhaps Henry Irving and I might have gone on with Shakespeare to the end of the chapter if he had not been in such a hurry to produce "Macbeth." We ought to have done "As You Like It" in 1888, or "The Tempest." Henry thought of both these plays. He was much attracted by the part of Caliban in "The Tempest," but, he said, "the young lovers are everything, and where are we going to find them?" He would have played Touchstone in "As You Like It," not Jacques, because Touchstone is in the vital part of the play. He might have delayed both "Macbeth" and "Henry VIII." He ought to have added to his list of Shakespearean productions "Julius Caesar," "King John," "As You Like It," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Richard II.," and "Timon of Athens." There were reasons "against," of course. In "Julius Caesar" he wanted to play Brutus. "That's the part for the actor," he said, "because it needs acting. But the actor-manager's part is Antony--Antony scores all along the line. Now when the actor and actor-manager fight in a play, and when there is no part for you in it, I think it's wiser to leave it alone." Every one knows when the luck first began to turn against Henry Irving. It was in 1896 when he revived "Richard III." On the first night he went home, slipped on the stairs in Grafton Street, broke a bone in his knee, aggravated the hurt by walking on it, and had to close the theater. It was that year, too, that his general health began to fail. For the ten years preceding his death he carried on an indomitable struggle against ill-health. Lungs and heart alike were weak. Only the spirit in that frail body remained as strong as ever. Nothing could bend it, much less break it. But I have not come to that sad time yet. "We all know when we do our best," said Henry once. "We are the only people who know." Yet he thought he did better in "Macbeth" than in "Hamlet"! Was he right after all? His _view_ of "Macbeth," though attacked and derided and put to shame in many quarters, is as clear to me as the sunlight itself. To me it seems as stupid to quarrel with the conception as to deny the nose on one's face. But the carrying out of the conception was unequal. Henry's imagination was sometimes his worst enemy. When I think of his "Macbeth," I remember him most distinctly in the last act after the battle when he looked like a great famished wolf, weak with the weakness of a giant exhausted, spent as one whose exertions have been ten times as great as those of commoner men of rougher fiber and coarser strength. "Of all men else I have avoided thee." Once more he suggested, as he only could suggest, the power of Fate. Destiny seemed to hang over him, and he knew that there was no hope, no mercy. The rehearsals for "Macbeth" were very exhausting, but they were splendid to watch. In this play Henry brought his manipulation of crowds to perfection. My acting edition of the play is riddled with rough sketches by him of different groups. Artists to whom I have shown them have been astonished by the spirited impressionism of these sketches. For his "purpose" Henry seems to have been able to do anything, even to drawing, and composing music! Sir Arthur Sullivan's music at first did not quite please him. He walked up and down the stage humming, and showing the composer what he was going to do at certain situations. Sullivan, with wonderful quickness and open-mindedness, caught his meaning at once. "Much better than mine, Irving--much better--I'll rough it out at once!" When the orchestra played the new version, based on that humming of Henry's, it was exactly what he wanted! Knowing what a task I had before me, I began to get anxious and worried about "Lady Mac." Henry wrote me such a nice letter about this: "To-night, if possible, the last act. I want to get these great multitudinous scenes over and then we can attack _our_ scenes.... Your sensitiveness is so acute that you must suffer sometimes. You are not like anybody else--see things with such lightning quickness and unerring instinct that dull fools like myself grow irritable and impatient sometimes. I feel confused when I'm thinking of one thing, and disturbed by another. That's all. But I do feel very sorry afterwards when I don't seem to heed what I so much value.... "I think things are going well, considering the time we've been at it, but I see so much that is wanting that it seems almost impossible to get through properly. 'To-night commence, Matthias. If you sleep, you are lost!'"[1] [Footnote 1: A quotation from "The Bells."] At this time we were able to be of the right use to each other. Henry could never have worked with a very strong woman. I might have deteriorated, in partnership with a weaker man whose ends were less fine, whose motives were less pure. I had the taste and artistic knowledge that his upbringing had not developed in him. For years he did things to please me. Later on I gave up asking him. In "King Lear" Mrs. Nettleship made him a most beautiful cloak, but he insisted on wearing a brilliant purple velvet cloak with spangles all over it which swamped his beautiful make-up and his beautiful acting. Poor Mrs. Nettleship was almost in tears. "I'll never make you anything again--never!" One of Mrs. "Nettle's" greatest triumphs was my Lady Macbeth dress, which she carried out from Mrs. Comyns Carr's design. I am glad to think it is immortalized in Sargent's picture. From the first I knew that picture was going to be splendid. In my diary for 1888 I was always writing about it: "The picture of me is nearly finished, and I think it magnificent. The green and blue of the dress is splendid, and the expression as Lady Macbeth holds the crown over her head is quite wonderful. "Henschel is sitting to Sargent. His concerts, I hear, can't be carried on another year for want of funds. What a shame! "Mr. Sargent is painting a head of Henry--very good, but mean about the chin at present. "Sargent's picture is talked of everywhere and quarreled about as much as my way of playing the part. "Sargent's 'Lady Macbeth' in the New Gallery is a great success. The picture is the sensation of the year. Of course opinions differ about it, but there are dense crowds round it day after day. There is talk of putting it on exhibition by itself." Since then it has gone over nearly the whole of Europe, and now is resting for life at the Tate Gallery. Sargent suggested by this picture all that I should have liked to be able to convey in my acting as Lady Macbeth. _My Diary._--"Everybody hates Sargent's head of Henry. Henry also. I like it, but not altogether. I think it perfectly wonderfully painted and like him, only not at his best by any means. There sat Henry and there by his side the picture, and I could scarce tell one from t'other. Henry looked white, with tired eyes, and holes in his cheeks and bored to death! And there was the picture with white face, tired eyes, holes in the cheeks and boredom in every line. Sargent tried to paint his smile and gave it up." Sargent said to me, I remember, upon Henry Irving's first visit to the studio to see the Macbeth picture of me, "What a Saint!" This to my mind promised well--that Sargent should see _that_ side of Henry so swiftly. So then I never left off asking Henry to sit to Sargent, who wanted to paint him too, and said to me continually, "What a head!" _From my Diary._--"Sargent's picture is almost finished, and it is really splendid. Burne-Jones yesterday suggested two or three alterations about the color which Sargent immediately adopted, but Burne-Jones raves about the picture. "It ('Macbeth') is a most tremendous success, and the last three days' advance booking has been greater than ever was known, even at the Lyceum. Yes, it is a success, and I am a success, which amazes me, for never did I think I should be let down so easily. Some people hate me in it; some, Henry among them, think it my best part, and the critics differ, and discuss it hotly, which in itself is my best success of all! Those who don't like me in it are those who don't want, and don't like to read it fresh from Shakespeare, and who hold by the 'fiend' reading of the character.... One of the best things ever written on the subject, I think, is the essay of J. Comyns Carr. That is as hotly discussed as the new 'Lady Mac'--all the best people agreeing with it. Oh, dear! It is an exciting time!" From a letter I wrote to my daughter, who was in Germany at the time: "I wish you could see my dresses. They are superb, especially the first one: green beetles on it, and such a cloak! The photographs give no idea of it at all, for it is in color that it is so splendid. The dark red hair is fine. The whole thing is Rossetti--rich stained-glass effects, I play some of it well, but, of course, I don't do what I want to do yet. Meanwhile I shall not budge an inch in the reading of it, for that I know is right. Oh, it's fun, but it's precious hard work for I by no means make her a 'gentle, lovable woman' as some of 'em say. That's all pickles. She was nothing of the sort, although she was _not_ a fiend, and _did_ love her husband. I have to what is vulgarly called 'sweat at it,' each night." The few people who liked my Lady Macbeth, liked it very much. I hope I am not vain to quote this letter from Lady Pollock: "... Burne-Jones has been with me this afternoon: he was at 'Macbeth' last night, and you filled his whole soul with your beauty and your poetry.... He says you were a great Scandinavian queen; that your presence, your voice, your movement made a marvelously poetic harmony; that your dress was grandly imagined and grandly worn--and that he cannot criticize--he can only remember." But Burne-Jones by this time had become one of our most ardent admirers, and was prejudiced in my favor because my acting appealed to his _eye_. Still, the drama is for the eye as well as for the ear and the mind. Very early I learned that one had best be ambitious merely to please oneself in one's work a little--quietly. I coupled with this the reflection that one "gets nothing for nothing, and damned little for sixpence!" Here I was in the very noonday of life, fresh from Lady Macbeth and still young enough to play Rosalind, suddenly called upon to play a rather uninteresting mother in "The Dead Heart." However, my son Teddy made his first appearance in it, and had such a big success that I soon forgot that for me the play was rather "small beer." It had been done before, of course, by Benjamin Webster and George Vining. Henry engaged Bancroft for the Abbé, a part of quite as much importance as his own. It was only a melodrama, but Henry could always invest a melodrama with life, beauty, interest, mystery, by his methods of production. "I'm full of French Revolution," he wrote to me when he was preparing the play for rehearsal, "and could pass an examination. In our play, at the taking of the Bastile we must have a starving crowd--hungry, eager, cadaverous faces. If that can be well carried out, the effect will be very terrible, and the contrast to the other crowd (the red and fat crowd--the blood-gorged ones who look as if they'd been all drinking wine--_red_ wine, as Dickens says) would be striking.... It's tiresome stuff to read, because it depends so much on situations. I have been touching the book up though, and improved it here and there, I think. "A letter this morning from the illustrious Blank offering me his prompt book to look at.... I think I shall borrow the treasure. Why not? Of course he will say that he has produced the play and all that sort of thing; but what does that matter, if one can only get one hint out of it? "The longer we live, the more we see that if we only do our own work thoroughly well, we can be independent of everything else or anything that may be said.... "I see in Landry a great deal of Manette--that same vacant gaze into years gone by when he crouched in his dungeon nursing his wrongs.... "I shall send you another book soon to put any of your alterations and additions in. I've added a lot of little things with a few lines for you--very good, I think, though I say it as shouldn't--I know you'll laugh! They are perhaps not startling original, but better than the original, anyhow! Here they are--last act! "'Ah, Robert, pity me. By the recollections of our youth, I implore you to save my boy!' (_Now_ for 'em!) "'If my voice recalls a tone that ever fell sweetly upon your ear, have pity on me! If the past is not a blank, if you once loved, have pity on me!' (Bravo!) "Now I call that very good, and if the 'If and the 'pitys' don't bring down the house, well it's a pity! I pity the pittites! "... I've just been copying out my part in an account book--a little more handy to put in one's pocket. It's really very short, but difficult to act, though, and so is yours. I like this 'piling up' sort of acting, and I am sure you will, when you play the part. It's restful. 'The Bells' is that sort of thing." The crafty old Henry! All this was to put me in conceit with my part! Many people at this time put me in conceit with my son, including dear Burne-Jones with his splendid gift of impulsive enthusiasm. "THE GRANGE, "WEST KENSINGTON, W. "_Sunday._ "Most Dear Lady,-- "I thought all went wonderfully last night, and no sign could I see of hitch or difficulty; and as for your boy, he looked a lovely little gentleman--and in his cups was perfect, not overdoing by the least touch a part always perilously easy to overdo. I too had the impertinence to be a bit nervous for you about him, but not when he appeared--so altogether I was quite happy. "... Irving was very noble--I thought I had never seen his face so beautified before--no, that isn't the word, and to hunt for the right one would be so like judicious criticism that I won't. Exalted and splendid it was--and you were you--YOU--and so all was well. I rather wanted more shouting and distant roar in the Bastille Scene--since the walls fell, like Jericho, by noise. A good dreadful growl always going on would have helped, I thought--and that was the only point where I missed anything. "And I was very glad you got your boy back again and that Mr. Irving was ready to have his head cut off for you; so it had what I call a good ending, and I am in bright spirits to-day, and ever "Your real friend, "E.B.-J." "I would come and growl gladly." There were terrible strikes all over England when we were playing "The Dead Heart." I could not help sympathizing with the strikers ... yet reading all about the French Revolution as I did then, I can't understand how the French nation can be proud of it when one remembers how they butchered their own great men, the leaders of the movement--Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre and the others. My man is Camille Desmoulins. I just love him. Plays adapted from novels are generally unsatisfactory. A whole story cannot be conveyed in three hours, and every reader of the story looks for something not in the play. Wills took from "The Vicar of Wakefield" an episode and did it right well, but there was no _episode_ in "The Bride of Lammermoor" for Merivale to take. He tried to traverse the whole ground, and failed. But he gave me some lovely things to do in Lucy Ashton. I had to lose my poor wits, as in Ophelia, in the last act, and with hardly a word to say I was able to make an effect. The love scene at the well I did nicely too. Seymour Lucas designed splendid dresses for this play. My "Ravenswood" riding dress set a fashion in ladies' coats for quite a long time. Mine was copied by Mr. Lucas from a leather coat of Lord Mohun's. He is said to have had it on when he was killed. At any rate there was a large stab in the back of the coat, and a blood-stain. This was my first speculation in play-buying! I saw it acted, and thought I could do something with it. Henry would not buy it, so I did! He let me do it first in front of a revival of "The Corsican Brothers" in 1891. It was a great success, although my son and I did not know a word on the first night and had our parts written out and pinned all over the furniture on the stage! Dear old Mr. Howe wrote to me that Teddy's performance was "more than creditable; it was exceedingly good and full of character, and with your own charming performance the piece was a great success." Since 1891 I must have played "Nance Oldfield" hundreds of times, but I never had an Alexander Oldworthy so good as my own son, although such talented young actors as Martin Harvey, Laurence Irving and, more recently, Harcourt Williams have all played it with me. Henry's pride as Cardinal Wolsey seemed to eat him. How wonderful he looked (though not fat and self-indulgent like the pictures of the real Wolsey) in his flame-colored robes! He had the silk dyed specially by the dyers to the Cardinal's College in Rome. Seymour Lucas designed the clothes. It was a magnificent production, but not very interesting to me. I played Katherine much better ten years later at Stratford-on-Avon at the Shakespeare Memorial Festival. I was stronger then, and more reposeful. This letter from Burne-Jones about "Henry VIII." is a delightful tribute to Henry Irving's treatment of the play: "My Dear Lady,-- "We went last night to the play (at my theater) to see Henry VIII.--Margaret and Mackail and I. It was delicious to go out again and see mankind, after such evil days. How kind they were to me no words can say--I went in at a private door and then into a cosy box and back the same way, swiftly, and am marvelously the better for the adventure. No YOU, alas! "I have written to Mr. Irving just to thank him for his great kindness in making the path of pleasure so easy, for I go tremblingly at present. But I could not say to him what I thought of the Cardinal--a sort of shame keeps one from saying to an artist what one thinks of his work--but to you I can say how nobly he warmed up the story of the old religion to my exacting mind in that impersonation. I shall think always of dying monarchy in his Charles--and always of dying hierarchy in his Wolsey. How Protestant and dull all grew when that noble type had gone! "I can't go to church till red cardinals come back (and may they be of exactly that red) nor to Court till trumpets and banners come back--nor to evening parties till the dances are like that dance. What a lovely young Queen has been found. But there was no YOU.... Perhaps it was as well. I couldn't have you slighted even in a play, and put aside. When I go back to see you, as I soon will, it will be easier. Mr. Irving let me know you would not act, and proposed that I should go later on--wasn't that like him? So I sat with my children and was right happy; and, as usual, the streets looked dirty, and all the people muddy and black as we came away. Please not to answer this stuff. "Ever yours affectionately, "E.B.-J. "--I wish that Cardinal could have been made Pope, and sat with his foot on the Earl of Surrey's neck. Also I wish to be a Cardinal; but then I sometimes want to be a pirate. We can't have all we want. "Your boy was very kind--I thought the race of young men who are polite and attentive to old fading ones had passed away with antique pageants--but it isn't so." When the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire gave the famous fancy dress ball at Devonshire House, Henry attended it in the robes which had appealed so strongly to Burne-Jones's imaginative eye. I was told by one who was present at this ball that as the Cardinal swept up the staircase, his long train held magnificently over his arm, a sudden wave of reality seemed to sweep upstairs with him, and reduce to the prettiest make-believe all the aristocratic masquerade that surrounded him. I renewed my acquaintance with "Henry VIII." in 1902, when I played Queen Katherine for Mr. Benson during the Shakespeare Memorial performances in April. I was pretty miserable at the time--the Lyceum reign was dying, and taking an unconscionably long time about it, which made the position all the more difficult. Henry Irving was reviving "Faust"--a wise step, as it had been his biggest "money-maker"--and it was impossible that I could play Margaret. There are some young parts that the actress can still play when she is no longer young: Beatrice, Portia, and many others come to mind. But I think that when the character is that of a young girl the betrayal of whose innocence is the main theme of the play, no amount of skill on the part of the actress can make up for the loss of youth. Suggestions were thrown out to me (not by Henry Irving, but by others concerned) that although I was too old for Margaret, I might play _Martha_! Well! well! I didn't quite see _that_. So I redeemed a promise given in jest at the Lyceum to Frank Benson twenty years earlier, and went off to Stratford-upon-Avon to play in Henry VIII. Mr. Benson was wonderful to work with. "I am proud to think," he wrote me just before our few rehearsals began, "that I have trained my folk (as I was taught by my elders and betters at the Lyceum) to be pretty quick at adapting themselves to anything that may be required of them, so that you need not be uneasy as to their not fitting in with your business." "My folk," as Mr. Benson called them, were excellent, especially Surrey (Harcourt Williams), Norfolk (Matheson Lang), Caperius (Fitzgerald), and Griffith (Nicholson). "Harcourt Williams," I wrote in my diary on the day of the dress-rehearsal, "will be heard of very shortly. He played Edgar in 'Lear' much better than Terriss, although not so good an actor yet." I played Katherine on Shakespeare's Birthday--such a lovely day, bright and sunny and warm. The performance went finely--and I made a little speech afterwards which was quite a success. I was presented publicly on the stage with the Certificate of Governorship of the Memorial Theater. During these pleasant days at Stratford, I went about in between the performances of "Henry VIII."--which was, I think, given three times a week for three weeks--seeing the lovely country and lovely friends who live there. A visit to Broadway and to beautiful Madame de Navarro (Mary Anderson) was particularly delightful. To see her looking so handsome, robust and fresh--so happy in her beautiful home, gave me the keenest pleasure. I also went to Stanways--the Elchos' home--a fascinating place. Lady Elcho showed me all over it, and she was not the least lovely thing in it. In Stratford I was rebuked by the permanent inhabitants for being kind to a little boy in professionally ragged clothing who made me, as he has made hundreds of others, listen to a long, made-up history of Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare, the Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and other things--the most hopeless mix! The inhabitants assured me that the boy was a little rascal, who begged and extorted money from visitors by worrying them with his recitation until they paid him to leave them alone. Long before I knew that the child was such a reprobate I had given him a pass to the gallery and a Temple Shakespeare! I derived such pleasure from his version of the "Mercy" speech from "The Merchant of Venice" that I still think he was ill-paid! "The quality of mercy is not strange It droppeth as _the_ gentle rain from 'Eaven Upon _the_ place beneath; it is twicet bless. It blesseth in that gives and in that takes It is in the mightiest--in the mightiest It becomes the throned monuk better than its crownd. It's an appribute to God inself It is in the thorny 'earts of kings But not in the fit and dread of kings." I asked the boy what he meant to be when he was a man. He answered with decision: "A reciterer." I also asked him what he liked best in the play ("Henry VIII."). "When the blind went up and down and you smiled," he replied--surely a naïve compliment to my way of "taking a call"! Further pressed, he volunteered: "When you lay on the bed and died to please the angels." XIV LAST DAYS AT THE LYCEUM I had exactly ten years more with Henry Irving after "Henry VIII." During that time we did "King Lear," "Becket," "King Arthur," "Cymbeline," "Madame Sans-Gêne," "Peter the Great" and "The Medicine Man." I feel too near to these productions to write about them. The first night of "Cymbeline" I felt almost dead. Nothing seemed right. "Everything is so slow, so slow," I wrote in my diary. "I don't feel a bit inspired, only dull and hide-bound." Yet Imogen was, I think, the _only_ inspired performance of these later years. On the first night of "Sans-Gêne" I acted _courageously_ and fairly well. Every one seemed to be delighted. The old Duke of Cambridge patted, or rather _thumped_, me on the shoulder and said kindly: "Ah, my dear, _you_ can act!" Henry quite effaced me in his wonderful sketch of Napoleon. "It seems to me some nights," I wrote in my diary at the time, "as if I were watching Napoleon trying to imitate H.I., and I find myself immensely interested and amused in the watchings." "The Medicine Man" was, in my opinion, our only _quite_ unworthy production. _From my Diary._--"Poor Taber has such an awful part in the play, and mine is even worse. It is short enough, yet I feel I can't cut too much of it.... The gem of the whole play is my hair! Not waved at all, and very filmy and pale. Henry, I admit, is splendid; but oh, it is all such rubbish!... If 'Manfred' and a few such plays are to succeed this, I simply must do something else." But I did not! I stayed on, as every one knows, when the Lyceum as a personal enterprise of Henry's was no more--when the farcical Lyceum Syndicate took over the theater. I played a wretched part in "Robespierre," and refused £12,000 to go to America with Henry in "Dante." In these days Henry was a changed man. He became more republican and less despotic as a producer. He left things to other people. As an actor he worked as faithfully as ever. Henley's stoical lines might have been written of him as he was in these last days: "Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods there be For my unconquerable soul. "In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud: Beneath the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody but unbowed." Henry Irving did not treat me badly. I hope I did not treat him badly. He revived "Faust" and produced "Dante." I would have liked to stay with him to the end of the chapter, but there was nothing for me to act in either of these plays. But we never quarreled. Our long partnership dissolved naturally. It was all very sad, but it could not be helped. It has always been a reproach against Henry Irving in some mouths that he neglected the modern English playwright; and of course the reproach included me to a certain extent. I was glad, then, to show that I _could_ act in the new plays when Mr. Barrie wrote "Alice-sit-by-the-Fire" for me, and after some years' delay I was able to play in Mr. Bernard Shaw's "Captain Brassbound's Conversion." Of course I could not have played in "little" plays of this school at the Lyceum with Henry Irving, even if I had wanted to! They are essentially plays for small theaters. In Mr. Shaw's "A Man of Destiny" there were two good parts, and Henry, at my request, considered it, although it was always difficult to fit a one-act play into the Lyceum bill. For reasons of his own Henry never produced Mr. Shaw's play and there was a good deal of fuss made about it at the time (1897). But ten years ago Mr. Shaw was not so well known as he is now, and the so-called "rejection" was probably of use to him as an advertisement! "A Man of Destiny" has been produced since, but without any great success. I wonder if Henry and I could have done more with it? At this time Mr. Shaw and I frequently corresponded. It began by my writing to ask him, as musical critic of the _Saturday Review_, to tell me frankly what he thought of the chances of a composer-singer friend of mine. He answered "characteristically," and we developed a perfect fury for writing to each other! Sometimes the letters were on business, sometimes they were not, but always his were entertaining, and mine were, I suppose, "good copy," as he drew the character of Lady Cecily Waynflete in "Brassbound" entirely from my letters. He never met me until after the play was written. In 1902 he sent me this ultimatum: "_April 3, 1902._ "Mr. Bernard Shaw's compliments to Miss Ellen Terry. "Mr. Bernard Shaw has been approached by Mrs. Langtry with a view to the immediate and splendid production of 'Captain Brassbound's Conversion.' "Mr. Bernard Shaw, with the last flash of a trampled-out love, has repulsed Mrs. Langtry with a petulance bordering on brutality. "Mr. Bernard Shaw has been actuated in this ungentlemanly and unbusinesslike course by an angry desire to seize Miss Ellen Terry by the hair and make her play Lady Cicely. "Mr. Bernard Shaw would be glad to know whether Miss Ellen Terry wishes to play Martha at the Lyceum instead. "Mr. Bernard Shaw will go to the length of keeping a minor part open for Sir Henry Irving when 'Faust' fails, if Miss Ellen Terry desires it. "Mr. Bernard Shaw lives in daily fear of Mrs. Langtry's recovering sufficiently from her natural resentment of his ill manners to reopen the subject. "Mr. Bernard Shaw begs Miss Ellen Terry to answer this letter. "Mr. Bernard Shaw is looking for a new cottage or house in the country, and wants advice on the subject. "Mr. Bernard Shaw craves for the sight of Miss Ellen Terry's once familiar handwriting." The first time he came to my house I was not present, but a young American lady who had long adored him from the other side of the Atlantic took my place as hostess (I was at the theater as usual); and I took great pains to have everything looking nice! I spent a long time putting out my best blue china, and ordered a splendid dinner, quite forgetting the honored guest generally dined off a Plasmon biscuit and a bean! Mr. Shaw read "Arms and the Man" to my young American friend (Miss Satty Fairchild) without even going into the dining-room where the blue china was spread out to delight his eye. My daughter Edy was present at the reading, and appeared so much absorbed in some embroidery, and paid the reader so few compliments about his play, that he expressed the opinion that she behaved as if she had been married to him for twenty years! The first time I ever saw Mr. Shaw in the flesh--I hope he will pardon me such an anti-vegetarian expression--was when he took his call after the first production of "Captain Brassbound's Conversion" by the Stage Society. He was quite unlike what I had imagined from his letters. When at last I was able to play in "Captain Brassbound's Conversion," I found Bernard Shaw wonderfully patient at rehearsal. I look upon him as a good, kind, gentle creature whose "brain-storms" are just due to the Irishman's love of a fight; they never spring from malice or anger. It doesn't answer to take Bernard Shaw seriously. He is not a man of convictions. That is one of the charms of his plays--to me at least. One never knows how the cat is really jumping. But it _jumps_. Bernard Shaw is alive, with nine lives, like that cat! On Whit Monday, 1902, I received a telegram from Mr. Tree saying that he was coming down to Winchelsea to see me on "an important matter of business." I was at the time suffering from considerable depression about the future. The Stratford-on-Avon visit had inspired me with the feeling that there was life in the old 'un yet and had distracted my mind from the strangeness of no longer being at the Lyceum permanently with Henry Irving. But there seemed to be nothing ahead, except two matinées a week with him at the Lyceum, to be followed by a provincial tour in which I was only to play twice a week, as Henry's chief attraction was to be "Faust." This sort of "dowager" engagement did not tempt me. Besides, I hated the idea of drawing a large salary and doing next to no work. So when Mr. Tree proposed that I should play Mrs. Page (Mrs. Kendal being Mrs. Ford) in "The Merry Wives of Windsor" at His Majesty's, it was only natural that I should accept the offer joyfully. I telegraphed to Henry Irving, asking him if he had any objection to my playing at His Majesty's. He answered: "Quite willing if proposed arrangements about matinées are adhered to." I have thought it worth while to give the facts about this engagement, because so many people seemed at the time, and afterwards, to think that I had treated Henry Irving badly by going to play in another theater, and that theater one where a certain rivalry with the Lyceum as regards Shakespearean productions had grown up. There was absolutely no foundation for the rumors that my "desertion" caused further estrangement between Henry Irving and me. "Heaven give you many, many merry days and nights," he telegraphed to me on the first night; and after that first night (the jolliest that I ever saw), he wrote delighting in my success. It _was_ a success--there was no doubt about it! Some people accused the Merry Wives of rollicking and "mafficking" overmuch--but these were the people who forgot that we were acting in a farce, and that farce is farce, even when Shakespeare is the author. All the summer I enjoyed myself thoroughly. It was all such _good fun_--Mrs. Kendal was so clever and delightful to play with, Mr. Tree so indefatigable in discovering new funny "business." After the dress-rehearsal I wrote in my diary: "Edy has real genius for dresses for the stage." My dress for Mrs. Page was such a _real_ thing--it helped me enormously--and I was never more grateful for my daughter's gift than when I played Mrs. Page. It was an admirable all-round cast--almost a "star" cast: Oscar Asche as Ford, poor Henry Kemble (since dead) as Dr. Caius, Courtice Pounds as Sir Hugh Evans, and Mrs. Tree as sweet Anne Page all rowed in the boat with precisely the right swing. There were no "passengers" in the cast. The audience at first used to seem rather amazed! This thwacking rough-and-tumble, Rabelaisian horse-play--Shakespeare! Impossible! But as the evening went on we used to capture even the most civilized, and force them to return to a simple Elizabethan frame of mind. In my later career I think I have had no success like this! Letters rained on me--yes, even love-letters, as if, to quote Mrs. Page, I were still in "the holiday-time of my beauty." As I would always rather make an audience laugh than see them weep, it may be guessed how much I enjoyed the hearty laughter at His Majesty's during the run of the madcap absurdity of "The Merry Wives of Windsor." All the time I was at His Majesty's I continued to play in matinées of "Charles I." and "The Merchant of Venice" at the Lyceum with Henry Irving. We went on negotiating, too, about the possibility of my appearing in "Dante," which Sardou had written specially for Irving, and on which he was relying for his next tour in America. On the 19th of July, 1902, I acted at the Lyceum for the very last time, although I did not know it then. These last Lyceum days were very sad. The reception given by Henry to the Indian Princes, who were in England for the Coronation, was the last flash of the splendid hospitality which had for so many years been one of the glories of the theater. During my provincial tour with Henry Irving in the autumn of this year I thought long and anxiously over the proposition that I should play in "Dante." I heard the play read, and saw no possible part for me in it. I refused a large sum of money to go to America with Henry Irving because I could not consent to play a part even worse than the one that I had played in "Robespierre." As things turned out, although "Dante" did fairly well at Drury Lane, the Americans would have none of it and Henry had to fall back upon his répertoire. Having made the decision against "Dante," I began to wonder what I should do. My partnership with Henry Irving was definitely broken, most inevitably and naturally "dissolved." There were many roads open to me. I chose one which was, from a financial point of view, _madness_. Instead of going to America, and earning £12,000, I decided to take a theater with my son, and produce plays in conjunction with him. I had several plays in view--an English translation of a French play about the patient Griselda, and a comedy by Miss Clo Graves among them. Finally, I settled upon Ibsen's "Vikings." We read it aloud on Christmas Day, and it seemed _tremendous_. Not in my most wildly optimistic moments did I think Hiordis, the chief female character--a primitive, fighting, free, open-air person--suited to me, but I saw a way of playing her more _brilliantly_ and less _weightily_ than the text suggested, and anyhow I was not thinking so much of the play for me as for my son. He had just produced Mr. Laurence Houseman's Biblical play "Bethlehem" in the hall of the Imperial Institute, and every one had spoken highly of the beauty of his work. He had previously applied the same principles to the mounting of operas by Handel and Purcell. It had been a great grief to me when I lost my son as an actor. I have never known any one with so much natural gift for the stage. Unconsciously he did everything right--I mean all the technical things over which some of us have to labor for years. The first part that he played at the Lyceum, Arthur St. Valery in "The Dead Heart," was good, and he went on steadily improving. The last part that he played at the Lyceum--Edward IV. in "Richard III."--was, maternal prejudice quite apart, a most remarkable performance. His record for 1891, when he was still a mere boy, was: Claudio (in "Much Ado about Nothing"), Mercutio, Modus, Charles Surface, Alexander Oldworthy, Moses (in "Olivia"), Lorenzo, Malcolm, Beauchamp; Meynard, and the Second Grave-Digger! Later on he played Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo on a small provincial tour. His future as an actor seemed assured, but it wasn't! One day when he was with William Nicholson, the clever artist and one of the Beggarstaff Brothers of poster fame, he began chipping at a woodblock in imitation of Nicholson, and produced in a few hours an admirable wood-cut of Walt Whitman, then and always his particular hero. From that moment he had the "black and white" fever badly. Acting for a time seemed hardly to interest him at all. When his interest in the theater revived, it was not as an actor but as a stage director that he wanted to work. What more natural than that his mother should give him the chance of exploiting his ideas in London? Ideas he had in plenty--"unpractical" ideas people called them; but what else should _ideas_ be? At the Imperial Theater, where I spent my financially unfortunate season in April 1903, I gave my son a free hand. I hope it will be remembered, when I am spoken of by the youngest critics after my death as a "Victorian" actress, lacking in enterprise, an actress belonging to the "old school," that I produced a spectacular play of Ibsen's in a manner which possibly anticipated the scenic ideas of the future by a century, of which at any rate the orthodox theater managers of the present age would not have dreamed. Naturally I am not inclined to criticize my son's methods. I think there is a great deal to be said for the views that he has expressed in his pamphlet on "The Art of the Theater," and when I worked with him I found him far from unpractical. It was the modern theater which was unpractical when he was in it! It was wrongly designed, wrongly built. We had to disembowel the Imperial behind scenes before he could even start, and then the great height of the proscenium made his lighting lose all its value. He always considered the pictorial side of the scene before its dramatic significance, arguing that this significance lay in the picture and in movement--the drama having originated not with the poet but with the dancer. When his idea of dramatic significance clashed with Ibsen's, strange things would happen. Mr. Bernard Shaw, though impressed by my son's work and the beauty that he brought on to the stage of the Imperial, wrote to me that the symbolism of the first act according to Ibsen should be Dawn, youth rising with the morning sun, reconciliation, rich gifts, brightness, lightness, pleasant feelings, peace. On to this sunlit scene stalks Hiordis, a figure of gloom, revenge, of feud eternal, of relentless hatred and uncompromising unforgetfulness of wrong. At the Imperial, said Mr. Shaw, the curtain rose on profound gloom. When you _could_ see anything you saw eld and severity--old men with white hair impersonating the gallant young sons of Ornulf--everywhere murky cliffs and shadowy spears, melancholy--darkness! Into this symbolic night enter, in a blaze of limelight, a fair figure robed in complete fluffy white fur, a gay and bright Hiordis with a timid manner and hesitating utterance. The last items in the topsy-turviness of my son's practical significance were entirely my fault! Mr. Shaw was again moved to compliments when I revived "Much Ado about Nothing" under my son's direction at the Imperial. "The dance was delightful, but I would suggest the substitution of trained dancers for untrained athletes," he wrote. I singed my wings a good deal in the Imperial limelight, which, although our audience complained of the darkness on the stage, was the most serious drain on my purse. But a few provincial tours did something towards restoring some of the money that I had lost in management. On one of these tours I produced "The Good Hope," a play by the Dutch dramatist, Heijermans, dealing with life in a fishing village. Done into simple and vigorous English by Christopher St. John, the play proved a great success in the provinces. This was almost as new a departure for me as my season at the Imperial. The play was essentially modern in construction and development--full of action, but the action of incident rather than the action of stage situation. It had no "star" parts, but every part was good, and the gloom of the story was made bearable by the beauty of the atmosphere--of the _sea_, which played a bigger part in it than any of the visible characters. For the first time I played an old woman, a very homely old peasant woman too. It was not a big part, but it was interesting, and in the last act I had a little scene in which I was able to make the same kind of effect that I had made years before in the last act of "Ravenswood"--an effect of _quiet_ and stillness. I flattered myself that I was able to assume a certain roughness and solidity of the peasantry in "The Good Hope," but although I stumbled about heavily in large sabots, I was told by the critics that I walked like a fairy and was far too graceful for a Dutch fisherwoman! It is a case of "Give a dog a bad name and hang him"--the bad name in my case being "a womanly woman"! What this means I scarcely apprehend, but I fancy it is intended to signify (in an actress) something sweet, pretty, soft, appealing, gentle and _underdone_. Is it possible that I convey that impression when I try to assume the character of a washerwoman or a fisherwoman? If so I am a very bad actress! My last Shakespearean part was Hermione in "A Winter's Tale." By some strange coincidence it fell to me to play it exactly fifty years after I had played the little boy Mamilius in the same play. I sometimes think that Fate is the best of stage managers! Hermione is a gravely beautiful part--well-balanced, difficult to act, but certain in its appeal. If only it were possible to put on the play in a simple way and arrange the scenes to knit up the raveled interest, I should hope to play Hermione again. MY STAGE JUBILEE When I had celebrated my stage jubilee in 1906, I suddenly began to feel exuberantly young again. It was very inappropriate, but I could not help it. The recognition of my fifty years of stage life by the public and by my profession was quite unexpected. Henry Irving had said to me not long before his death in 1905 that he believed that they (the theatrical profession) "intended to celebrate our jubilee." (If he had lived he would have completed his fifty years on the stage in the autumn of 1906.) He said that there would be a monster performance at Drury Lane, and that already the profession were discussing what form it was to take. After his death, I thought no more of the matter. Indeed I did not want to think about it, for any recognition of my jubilee which did not include his, seemed to me very unnecessary. Of course I was pleased that others thought it necessary. I enjoyed all the celebrations. Even the speeches that I had to make did not spoil my enjoyment. But all the time I knew perfectly well that the great show of honor and "friending" was not for me alone. Never for one instant did I forget this, nor that the light of the great man by whose side I had worked for a quarter of a century was still shining on me from his grave. The difficulty was to thank people as they deserved. Stammering speeches could not do it, but I hope that they all understood. "I were but little happy, if I could say how much." Kindness on kindness's head accumulated! There was _The Tribune_ testimonial. I can never forget that London's youngest newspaper first conceived the idea of celebrating my Stage Jubilee.[1] [Footnote 1: I am sorry to say that since I wrote this _The Tribune_, after a gallant fight for life, has gone to join the company of the courageous enterprises which have failed.] The matinée given in my honor at Drury Lane by the theatrical profession was a wonderful sight. The two things about it which touched me most deeply were my reception by the crowd who were waiting to get into the gallery when I visited them at two in the morning, and the presence of Eleonora Duse, who came all the way from Florence just to honor me. She told me afterwards that she would have come from South Africa or from Heaven, had she been there! I appreciated very much too, the kindness of Signor Caruso in singing for me. I did not know him at all, and the gift of his service was essentially the impersonal desire of an artist to honor another artist. I was often asked during these jubilee days, "how I felt about it all," and I never could answer sensibly. The strange thing is that I don't know even now what was in my heart. Perhaps it was one of my chief joys that I had not to say good-bye at any of the celebrations. I could still speak to my profession as a fellow-comrade on the active list, and to the public as one still in their service. One of those little things almost too good to be true happened at the close of the Drury Lane matinée. A four-wheeler was hailed for me by the stage-door keeper, and my daughter and I drove off to Lady Bancroft's in Berkeley Square to leave some flowers. Outside the house, the cabman told my daughter that in old days he had often driven Charles Kean from the Princess's Theater, and that sometimes the little Miss Terrys were put inside the cab too and given a lift! My daughter thought it such an extraordinary coincidence that the old man should have come to the stage-door of Drury Lane by a mere chance on my jubilee day that she took his address, and I was to send him a photograph and remuneration. But I promptly lost the address, and was never able to trace the old man. APOLOGIA I have now nearly finished the history of my fifty years upon the stage. A good deal has been left out through want of skill in selection. Some things have been included which perhaps it would have been wiser to omit. I have tried my best to tell "all things faithfully," and it is possible that I have given offense where offense was not dreamed of; that some people will think that I should not have said this, while others, approving of "this," will be quite certain that I ought not to have said "that." "One said it thundered ... another that an angel spake." It's the point of view, for I have "set down naught in malice." During my struggles with my refractory, fragmentary, and unsatisfactory memories, I have realized that life itself is a point of view: is, to put it more clearly, imagination. So if any one said to me at this point in my story: "And is this, then, what you call your life?" I should not resent the question one little bit. "We have heard," continues my imaginary and disappointed interlocutor, "a great deal about your life in the theater. You have told us of plays and parts and rehearsals, of actors good and bad, of critics and of playwrights, of success and failure, but after all, your whole life has not been lived in the theater. Have you nothing to tell us about your different homes, your family life, your social diversions, your friends and acquaintances? During your life there have been great changes in manners and customs; political parties have altered; a great Queen has died; your country has been engaged in two or three serious wars. Did all these things make no impression on you? Can you tell us nothing of your life in the world?" And I have to answer that I have lived very little in the world. After all, the life of an actress belongs to the theater as the life of a soldier belongs to the army, the life of a politician to the State, and the life of a woman of fashion to society. Certainly I have had many friends outside the theater, but I have had very little time to see them. I have had many homes, but I have had very little time to live in them! When I am not acting, the best part of my time is taken up by the most humdrum occupations. Dealing with my correspondence, even with the help of a secretary, is no insignificant work. The letters, chiefly consisting of requests for my autograph, or appeals to my charity, have to be answered. I have often been advised to ignore them--surely a course that would be both bad policy and bad taste on the part of a servant of the public. It would be unkind, too, to those ignorant of my busy life and the calls upon my time. Still, I sometimes wish that the cost of a postage stamp were a sovereign at least! * * * * * In 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Jubilee, I find that I wrote in my diary:--"I am not yet forty, but am pretty well worn out." It is twenty years since then, and I am still not worn out. Wonderful! THE DEATH OF HENRY IRVING It is commonly known, I think, that Henry Irving's health first began to fail in 1896. He went home to Grafton Street after the first night of the revival of "Richard III." and slipped on the stairs, injuring his knee. With characteristic fortitude, he struggled to his feet unassisted and walked to his room. This made the consequences of the accident far more serious, and he was not able to act for weeks. It was a bad year at the Lyceum. In 1898 when we were on tour he caught a chill. Inflammation of the lungs, bronchitis, pneumonia followed. His heart was affected. He was never really well again. When I think of his work during the next seven years, I could weep! Never was there a more admirable, extraordinary worker; never was any one more splendid-couraged and patient. The seriousness of his illness in 1898 was never really known. He nearly died. "I am still fearfully anxious about H.," I wrote to my daughter at the time. "It will be a long time at the best before he gains strength.... But now I do hope for the best. I'm fairly well so far. All he wants is for me to keep my health, not my _head_. He knows I'm doing that! Last night I did three acts of 'Sans-Gêne' and 'Nance Oldfield' thrown in! That is a bit too much--awful work--and I can't risk it again." "A telegram just come: 'Steadily improving....' You should have seen Norman[1] as Shylock! It was not a bare 'get-through.' It was--the first night--an admirable performance, as well as a plucky one.... H. is more seriously ill than anyone dreams.... His look! Like the last act of Louis XI." [Footnote 1: Mr. Norman Forbes-Robertson.] In 1902, on the last provincial tour that we ever went together, he was ill again, but he did not give in. One night when his cough was rending him, and he could hardly stand up from weakness, he acted so brilliantly and strongly that it was easy to believe in the triumph of mind over matter--in Christian Science, in fact! Strange to say, a newspaper man noticed the splendid power of his performance that night and wrote of it with uncommon discernment--a _provincial_ critic, by the way. In London at the time they were always urging Henry Irving to produce new plays by new playwrights. But in the face of the failure of most of the new work, and of his departing strength, and of the extraordinary support given him in the old plays (during this 1902 tour we took £4,000 at Glasgow in one week!), Henry took the wiser course in doing nothing but the old plays to the end of the chapter. I realized how near, not only the end of the chapter but the end of the book was, when he was taken ill at Wolverhampton in the spring of 1905. We had not acted together for more than two years then, and times were changed indeed. I went down to Wolverhampton when the news of his illness reached London. I arrived late and went to an hotel. It was not a good hotel, nor could I find a very good florist when I got up early the next day and went out with the intention of buying Henry some flowers. I wanted some bright-colored ones for him--he had always liked bright flowers--and this florist dealt chiefly in white flowers--_funeral_ flowers. At last I found some daffodils--my favorite flower. I bought a bunch, and the kind florist, whose heart was in the right place if his flowers were not, found me a nice simple glass to put it in. I knew the sort of vase that I should find at Henry's hotel. I remembered, on my way to the doctor's--for I had decided to see the doctor first--that in 1892 when my dear mother died, and I did not act for a few nights, when I came back I found my room at the Lyceum filled with daffodils. "To make it look like sunshine," Henry said. The doctor talked to me quite frankly. "His heart is dangerously weak," he said. "Have you told him?" I asked. "I had to, because the heart being in that condition he must be careful." "Did he understand _really_?" "Oh, yes. He said he quite understood." Yet a few minutes later when I saw Henry, and begged him to remember what the doctor had said about his heart, he exclaimed: "Fiddle! It's not my heart at all! It's my _breath_!" (Oh the ignorance of great men about themselves!) "I also told him," the Wolverhampton doctor went on, "that he must not work so hard in future." I said: "He will, though,--and he's stronger than any one." Then I went round to the hotel. I found him sitting up in bed, drinking his coffee. He looked like some beautiful gray tree that I have seen in Savannah. His old dressing-gown hung about his frail yet majestic figure like some mysterious gray drapery. We were both very much moved, and said little. "I'm glad you've come. Two Queens have been kind to me this morning. Queen Alexandra telegraphed to say how sorry she was I was ill, and now you--" He showed me the Queen's gracious message. I told him he looked thin and ill, but _rested_. "Rested! I should think so. I have plenty of time to rest. They tell me I shall be here eight weeks. Of course I sha'n't, but still--It was that rug in front of the door. I tripped over it. A commercial traveler picked me up--a kind fellow, but d--n him, he wouldn't leave me afterwards--wanted to talk to me all night." I remembered his having said this, when I was told by his servant, Walter Collinson, that on the night of his death at Bradford, he stumbled over the rug when he walked into the hotel corridor. We fell to talking about work. He said he hoped that I had a good manager ... agreed very heartily with me about Frohman, saying he was always so fair--more than fair. "What a wonderful life you've had, haven't you?" I exclaimed, thinking of it all in a flash. "Oh, yes," he said quietly ... "a wonderful life--of work." "And there's nothing better, after all, is there?" "Nothing." "What have you got out of it all.... You and I are 'getting on,' as they say. Do you ever think, as I do sometimes, what you have got out of life?" "What have I got out of it?" said Henry, stroking his chin and smiling slightly. "Let me see.... Well, a good cigar, a good glass of wine--good friends." Here he kissed my hand with courtesy. Always he was so courteous; always his actions, like this little one of kissing my hand, were so beautifully timed. They came just before the spoken words, and gave them peculiar value. "That's not a bad summing-up of it all," I said. "And the end.... How would you like that to come?" "How would I like that to come?" He repeated my question lightly yet meditatively too. Then he was silent for some thirty seconds before he snapped his fingers--the action again before the words. "Like that!" I thought of the definition of inspiration--"A calculation rapidly made." Perhaps he had never thought of the manner of his death before. Now he had an inspiration as to how it would come. We were silent a long time, I thinking how like some splendid Doge of Venice he looked, sitting up in bed, his beautiful mobile hand stroking his chin. I agreed, when I could speak, that to be snuffed out like a candle would save a lot of trouble. After Henry Irving's sudden death in October of the same year, some of his friends protested against the statement that it was the kind of death that he desired--that they knew, on the contrary, that he thought sudden death inexpressibly sad. I can only say what he told me. I stayed with him about three hours at Wolverhampton. Before I left I went back to see the doctor again--a very nice man by the way, and clever. He told me that Henry ought never to play "The Bells" again, even if he acted again, which he said ought not to be. It was clever of the doctor to see what a terrible emotional strain "The Bells" put upon Henry--how he never could play the part of Matthias with ease as he could Louis XI., for example. Every time he heard the sound of the bells, the throbbing of his heart must have nearly killed him. He used always to turn quite white--there was no trick about it. It was imagination acting physically on the body. His death as Matthias--the death of a strong, robust man--was different from all his other stage deaths. He did really almost die--he imagined death with such horrible intensity. His eyes would disappear upwards, his face grow gray, his limbs cold. No wonder, then, that the first time that the Wolverhampton doctor's warning was disregarded, and Henry played "The Bells" at Bradford, his heart could not stand the strain. Within twenty-four hours of his last death as Matthias, he was dead. What a heroic thing was that last performance of Becket which came between! I am told by those who were in the company at the time that he was obviously suffering and dazed, this last night of life. But he went through it all as usual. The courteous little speech to the audience, the signing of a worrying boy's drawing at the stage-door--all that he had done for years, he did faithfully for the last time. Yes, I know it seems sad to the ordinary mind that he should have died in the entrance to an hotel in a country-town with no friend, no relation near him. Only his faithful and devoted servant Walter Collinson (whom, as was not his usual custom, he had asked to drive back to the hotel with him that night) was there. Do I not feel the tragedy of the beautiful body, for so many years the house of a thousand souls, being laid out in death by hands faithful and devoted enough, but not the hands of his kindred either in blood or in sympathy! I do feel it, yet I know it was more appropriate to such a man than the deathbed where friends and relations weep. Henry Irving belonged to England, not to a family. England showed that she knew it when she buried him in Westminster Abbey. Years before I had discussed, half in joke, the possibility of this honor. I remember his saying to me with great simplicity, when I asked him what he expected of the public after his death: "I should like them to do their duty by me. And they will--they will!" There was not a touch of arrogance in this, just as I hope there was no touch of heartlessness in me because my chief thought during the funeral in Westminster Abbey was: "How Henry would have liked it!" The right note was struck, as I think was not the case at Tennyson's funeral thirteen years earlier. "Tennyson is buried to-day in Westminster Abbey," I wrote in my diary, October 12, 1892. "His majestic life and death spoke of him better than the service.... The music was poor and dull and weak, while he was _strong_. The triumphant should have been the sentiment expressed.... Faces one knew everywhere. Lord Salisbury looked fine. His massive head and sad eyes were remarkable. No face there, however, looked anything by the side of Henry's.... He looked very pale and slim and wonderful!" How terribly I missed that face at Henry's own funeral! I kept on expecting to see it, for indeed it seemed to me that he was directing the whole most moving and impressive ceremony. I could almost hear him saying, "Get on! get on!" in the parts of the service that dragged. When the sun--such a splendid, tawny sun--burst across the solemn misty gray of the Abbey, at the very moment when the coffin, under its superb pall of laurel leaves,[1] was carried up the choir, I felt that it was an effect which he would have loved. [Footnote 1: Every lover of beauty and every lover of Henry Irving must have breathed a silent thanksgiving that day to the friends who had that inspiration and made the pall with their own hands.] I can understand any one who was present at Henry Irving's funeral thinking that this was his best memorial, and that any attempt to honor him afterwards would be superfluous and inadequate. Yet when some further memorial was discussed, it was not always easy to sympathize with those who said: "We got him buried in Westminster Abbey. What more do you want?" After all it was Henry Irving's commanding genius, and his devotion of it to high objects, his personal influence on the English people, which secured him burial among England's great dead. The petition for the burial presented to the Dean and Chapter, and signed, on the initiative of Henry Irving's leading fellow-actors, by representative personages of influence, succeeded only because of Henry's unique position. "We worked very hard to get it done," I heard said--more than once. And I often longed to answer: "Yes, and all honor to your efforts, but you worked for it between Henry's death and his funeral. _He_ worked for it all his life!" I have always desired some other memorial to Henry Irving than his honored grave, not so much for _his_ sake as for the sake of those who loved him and would gladly welcome the opportunity of some great test of their devotion. Henry Irving's profession decided last year, after much belated discussion, to put up a statue to him in the streets of London. I believe that it is to take the form of a portrait statue in academic robes. A statue can never at any time be a very happy memorial to an actor, who does not do his work in his own person, but through his imagination of many different persons. If statue it had to be, the work should have had a symbolic character. My dear friend Alfred Gilbert, one of the most gifted sculptors of this or any age, expressed a similar opinion to the committee of the memorial, and later on wrote to me as follows: "I should never have attempted the representation of Irving as a mummer, nor literally as Irving disguised as this one or that one, but as _Irving_--the artistic exponent of other great artists' conceptions--_Irving_, the greatest illustrator of the greatest men's creations--he himself being a creator. "I had no idea of making use of Irving's facial and physical peculiarities as a means to perpetuate his life's work. The spirit of this work was worship of an ideal, and it was no fault of his that his strong personality dominated the honest conviction of his critics. These judged Irving as the man masquerading, not as the Artist interpreting, for the single reason that they were themselves overcome by the magic personality of a man above their comprehension. "I am convinced that Irving, when playing the rôle of whatever character he undertook to represent, lived in that character, and not as the actor playing the part for the applause of those in front--Charles I. was a masterpiece of conception as to the representation of a great gentleman. His Cardinal Wolsey was the most perfect presentation of greatness, of self-abnegation, and of power to suffer I can realize.... Jingle and Matthias were in Comedy and Tragedy combined, masterpieces of histrionic art. I could write volumes upon Irving as an actor, but to write of him as a _man_, and as a very great Artist, I should require more time than is still allotted to me of man's brief span of life and far, far more power than that which was given to those who wrote of him in a hurry during his lifetime.... Do you wonder, then, that I should rather elect to regard Irving in the abstract, when called upon to suggest a fitting monument, than to promise a faithful portrait?... Let us be grateful, however, that a great artist is to be commemorated at all, side by side with the effigies of great Butchers of mankind, and ephemeral statesmen, the instigators of useless bloodshed...." ALFRED GILBERT AND OTHERS Alfred Gilbert was one of Henry's sincere admirers in the old Lyceum days, and now if you want to hear any one talk of those days brilliantly, delightfully, and whimsically, if you want to live first nights and Beefsteak Room suppers over again--if you want to have Henry Irving at the Garrick Club recreated before your eyes, it is only Alfred Gilbert who can do it for you! He lives now in Bruges, that beautiful dead city of canals and Hans Memlings, and when I was there a few years ago I saw him. I shall never forget his welcome! I let him know of my arrival, and within a few hours he sent a carriage to my hotel to bring me to his house. The seats of the _fiacre_ were hidden by flowers! He had not long been in his house, and there were packing-cases still lying about in the spacious, desolate rooms looking into an old walled garden. But on the wall of the room in which we dined was a sketch by Raffaele, and the dinner, chiefly cooked by Mr. Gilbert himself,--the Savoy at its best! Some people regret that he has "buried" himself in Bruges, and that England has practically lost her best sculptor. I think that he will do some of the finest work of his life there, and meanwhile England should be proud of Alfred Gilbert. In a city which can boast of some of the ugliest and weakest statues in the world, he has, in the fountain erected to the memory of the good Lord Shaftesbury in Piccadilly Circus, created a thing of beauty which will be a joy to future generations of Londoners. The other day Mr. Frampton, one of the leaders of the younger school of English sculptors, said of the Gilbert fountain that it could hold its own with the finest work of the same kind done by the masters of the past. "They tell me," he said, "that it is inappropriate to its surroundings. It is. That's the fault of the surroundings. In a more enlightened age than this, Piccadilly Circus will be destroyed and rebuilt merely as a setting for Gilbert's jewel." "The name of Gilbert is honored in this house," went on Mr. Frampton. We were at the time looking at Henry Irving's death-mask which Mr. Frampton had taken, and a replica of which he had just given me. I thought of Henry's living face, alive with raffish humor and mischief, presiding at a supper in the Beefsteak Room--and of Alfred Gilbert's Beethoven-like head with its splendid lion-like mane of tawny hair. Those days were dead indeed. Now it seems to me that I did not appreciate them half enough--that I did not observe enough. Yet players should observe, if only for their work's sake. The trouble is that only certain types of men and women--the expressive types which are useful to us--appeal to our observation. I remember one supper very well at which Bastien-Lepage was present, and "Miss Sarah" too. The artist was lost in admiration of Henry's face, and expressed a strong desire to paint him. The Bastien-Lepage portrait originated that evening, and is certainly a Beefsteak Room portrait, although Henry gave two sittings for it afterwards at Grafton Street. At the supper itself Bastien-Lepage drew on a half-sheet of paper for me two little sketches, one of Sarah Bernhardt and the other of Henry, which are among my most precious relics. My portrait as Lady Macbeth by Sargent used to hang in the alcove in the Beefsteak Room when it was not away at some exhibition, and the artist and I have often supped under it--to me no infliction, for I have always loved the picture, and think it is far more like me than any other. Mr. Sargent first of all thought that he would paint me at the moment when Lady Macbeth comes out of the castle to welcome Duncan. He liked the swirl of the dress, and the torches and the women bowing down on either side. He used to make me walk up and down his studio until I nearly dropped in my heavy dress, saying suddenly as I got the swirl:--"That's it, that's it!" and rushing off to his canvas to throw on some paint in his wonderful inimitable fashion! But he had to give up _that_ idea of the Lady Macbeth picture all the same. I was the gainer, for he gave me the unfinished sketch, and it is certainly very beautiful. By this sketch hangs a tale of Mr. Sargent's great-heartedness. When the details of my jubilee performance at Drury Lane were being arranged, the Committee decided to ask certain distinguished artists to contribute to the programme. They were all delighted about it, and such busy men as Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema, Mr. Abbey, Mr. Byam Shaw, Mr. Walter Crane, Mr. Bernard Partridge, Mr. James Pryde, Mr. Orpen, and Mr. William Nicholson all gave some of their work to me. Mr. Sargent was asked if he would allow the first Lady Macbeth study to be reproduced. He found that it would not reproduce well, so in the height of the season and of his work with fashionable sitters, he did an entirely new painting of the same subject, which _would_ reproduce! This act of kind friendship I could never forget even if the picture were not in front of me at this minute to remind me of it. "You must think of me as one of the people bowing down to you in the picture," he wrote to me when he sent the new version for the programme. Nothing during my jubilee celebrations touched me more than this wonderful kindness of Mr. Sargent's. Burne-Jones would have done something for my jubilee programme too, I think, had he lived. He was one of my kindest friends, and his letters--he was a heaven-born letter-writer--were like no one else's; full of charm and humor and feeling. Once when I was starting for a long tour in America he sent me a picture with this particularly charming letter: "THE GRANGE, "_July 14, 1897._ "My dear Miss Terry,-- "I never have the courage to throw you a huge bouquet as I should like to--so in default I send you a little sign of my homage and admiration. I made it purposely for you, which is its only excellence, and thought nothing but gold good enough to paint with for you--and now it's done, I am woefully disappointed. It looks such a poor wretch of a thing, and there is no time to make another before you go, so look mercifully upon it--it did mean so well--as you would upon a foolish friend, not holding it up to the light, but putting it in a corner and never showing it. "As to what it is about, I think it's a little scene in Heaven (I am always pretending to know so much about that place!), a sort of patrol going to look to the battlements, some such thought as in Marlowe's lovely line: 'Now walk the angels on the walls of Heaven.' But I wanted it to be so different, and my old eyes cannot help me to finish it as I want--so forgive it and accept it with all its accompanying crowd of good wishes to you. They were always in my mind as I did it. "And come back soon from that America and stay here, and never go away again. Indeed I do wish you boundless happiness, and for our sake, such a length of life that you might shudder if I were to say how long. "Ever your poor artist, "E.B.-J. "If it is so faint that you can scarcely see it, let that stand for modest humility and shyness--as I had only dared to whisper." Another time, when I had sent him a trifle for some charity, he wrote: "Dear Lady,-- "This morning came the delightful crinkly paper that always means you! If anybody else ever used it, I think I should assault them! I certainly wouldn't read their letter or answer it. "And I know the check will be very useful. If I thought much about those wretched homes, or saw them often, I should do no more work, I know. There is but one thing to do--to help with a little money if you can manage it, and then try hard to forget. Yes, I am certain that I should never paint again if I saw much of those hopeless lives that have no remedy. I know of such a dear lad about my Phil's age who has felt this so sharply that he has given his happy, lucky, petted life to give himself wholly to share their squalor and unlovely lives--doing all he can, of evenings when his work is over, to amuse such as have the heart to be amused, reading to them and telling them about histories and what not--anything he knows that can entertain them. And this he has daily done for about a year, and if he carries it on for his life time he shall have such a nimbus that he will look top-heavy with it. "No, you would always have been lovely and made some beauty about you if you had been born there--but I should have got drunk and beaten my family and been altogether horrible! When everything goes just as I like, and painting prospers a bit, and the air is warm and friends well and everything perfectly comfortable, I can just manage to behave decently, and a spoilt fool I am--that's the truth. But wherever you were, some garden would grow. "Yes, I know Winchelsea and Rye and Lynn and Hythe--all bonny places, and Hythe has a church it may be proud of. Under the sea is another Winchelsea, a poor drowned city--about a mile out at sea, I think, always marked in old maps as 'Winchelsea Dround.' If ever the sea goes back on that changing coast there may be great fun when the spires and towers come up again. It's a pretty land to drive in. "I am growing downright stupid--I can't work at all, nor think of anything. Will my wits ever come back to me? "And when are you coming back--when will the Lyceum be in its rightful hands again? I refuse to go there till you come back...." * * * * * "Dear Lady,-- "I have finished four pictures: come and tell me if they will do. I have worked so long at them that I know nothing about them, but I want you to see them--and like them if you can. "All Saturday and Sunday and Monday they are visible. Come any time you can that suits you best--only come. "I do hope you will like them. If you don't you must really pretend to, else I shall be heartbroken. And if I knew what time you would come and which day, I would get Margaret here. "I have had them about four years--long before I knew you, and now they are done and I can hardly believe it. But tell me pretty pacifying lies and say you like them, even if you find them rubbish. "Your devoted and affectionate "E.B.-J." I went the next day to see the pictures with Edy. It was the "Briar Rose" series. They were _beautiful_. The lovely Lady Granby (now Duchess of Rutland) was there--reminding me, as always, of the reflection of something in water on a misty day. When she was Miss Violet Lindsay she did a drawing of me as Portia in the doctor's robes, which is I think very like me, as well as having all the charming qualities of her well-known pencil portraits. The artists all loved the Lyceum, not only the old school, but the young ones, who could have been excused for thinking that Henry Irving and I were a couple of old fogeys! William Nicholson and James Pryde, who began by working together as "The Beggarstaff Brothers," and in this period did a poster of Henry for "Don Quixote" and another for "Becket," were as enthusiastic about the Lyceum as Burne-Jones had been. Mr. Pryde has done an admirable portrait of me as Nance Oldfield, and his "Irving as Dubosc" shows the most extraordinary insight. "I have really tried to draw his _personality_" he wrote to me thanking me for having said I liked the picture (it was done after Henry's death).... "Irving's eyes in Dubosc always made my hair stand on end, and I paid great attention to the fact that one couldn't exactly say whether they were _shut_ or _open_. Very terrifying...." Mr. Rothenstein, to whom I once sat for a lithograph, was another of the young artists who came a good deal to the Lyceum. I am afraid that I must be a very difficult "subject," yet I sit easily enough, and don't mind being looked at--an objection which makes some sitters constrained and awkward before the painter. Poor Mr. Rothenstein was much worried over his lithograph, yet "it was all right on the night," as actors say. "Dear Miss Terry,-- "My nights have been sleepless--my drawing sitting gibbering on my chest. I knew how fearfully I should stumble--that is why I wanted to do more drawings earlier. I have been working on the thing this morning, and I believe I improved it slightly. What I want now is a cloak--the simplest you have (perhaps the green one?), which I think would be better than the less simple and worrying lace fallalas in the drawing. I can put it on the lay figure and sketch it into the horror over the old lines. I think the darker stuff will make the face blonde--more delicate. Please understand how nervously excited I have been over the wretched drawing, how short it falls of any suggestion of that personality of which I cannot speak to you--which I should some day like to give a shadow of.... "You were altogether charming and delightful and sympathetic. Perhaps if you had looked like a bear and behaved like a harpy, who knows what I might not have done! "... You shall have a sight of a proof at the end of the week, if you have any address out of town. Meanwhile I will do my best to improve the stone. "Always yours, dear Miss Terry, "WILL ROTHENSTEIN." My dear friend Graham Robertson painted two portraits of me, and I was Mortimer Menpes' first subject in England. Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema did the designs for the scenery and dresses in "Cymbeline," and incidentally designed for Imogen one of the loveliest dresses that I ever wore. It was made by Mrs. Nettleship. So were the dresses that Burne-Jones designed for me to wear in "King Arthur." Many of my most effective dresses have been what I may call "freaks." The splendid dress that I wore in the Trial Scene in "Henry VIII." is one example of what I mean. Mr. Seymour Lucas designed it, and there was great difficulty in finding a material rich enough and somber enough at the same time. No one was so clever on such quests as Mrs. Comyns Carr. She was never to be misled by the appearance of the stuff in the hand, nor impressed by its price by the yard, if she did not think it would look right on the stage. As Katherine she wanted me to wear steely silver and bronzy gold, but all the brocades had such insignificant designs. If they had a silver design on them it looked under the lights like a scratch in white cotton! At last Mrs. Carr found a black satin which on the right side was timorously and feebly patterned with a meandering rose and thistle. On the wrong side of it was a sheet of silver--just the _right_ steely silver because it was the _wrong_ side! Mrs. Carr then started on another quest for gold that should be as right as that silver. She found it at last in some gold-lace antimacassars at Whiteley's! From these base materials she and Mrs. Nettleship constructed a magnificent queenly dress. Its only fault was that it was _heavy_. But the weight that I can carry on the stage has often amazed me. I remember that for "King Arthur" Mrs. Nettleship made me a splendid cloak embroidered all over with a pattern in jewels. At the dress-rehearsal when I made my entrance the cloak swept magnificently and I daresay looked fine, but I knew at once that I should never be able to act in it. I called out to Mrs. Nettleship and Alice Carr, who were in the stalls, and implored them to lighten it of some of the jewels. "Oh, do keep it as it is," they answered, "it looks splendid." "I can't breathe in it, much less act in it. Please send some one up to cut off a few stones." I went on with my part, and then, during a wait, two of Mrs. Nettleship's assistants came on to the stage and snipped off a jewel here and there. When they had filled a basket, I began to feel better! But when they tried to lift that basket, their united efforts could not move it! On one occasion I wore a dress made in eight hours! During the first week of the run of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" at His Majesty's, there was a fire in my dressing-room--an odd fire which was never accounted for. In the morning they found the dress that I had worn as Mrs. Page burnt to a cinder. A messenger from His Majesty's went to tell my daughter, who had made the ill-fated dress: "Miss Terry will, I suppose, have to wear one of our dresses to-night. Perhaps you could make her a new one by the end of the week." "Oh, that will be all right," said Edy, bluffing, "I'll make her a dress by to-night." She has since told me that she did not really think she _could_ make it in time! She had at this time a workshop in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. All hands were called into the service, and half an hour after the message came from the theater the new dress was started. That was at 10.30. Before 7 p.m. the new dress was in my dressing-room at His Majesty's Theater. And best of all, it was a great improvement on the dress that had been burned! It stood the wear and tear of the first run of "Merry Wives" and of all the revivals, and is still as fresh as paint! That very successful dress cost no time. Another very successful dress--the white one that I wore in the Court Scene in "A Winter's Tale," cost no money. My daughter made it out of material of which a sovereign must have covered the cost. My daughter says to know what _not_ to do is the secret of making stage dresses. It is not a question of time or of money, but of omission. One of the best "audiences" that actor or actress could wish for was Mr. Gladstone. He used often to come and see the play at the Lyceum from a little seat in the O.P. entrance, and he nearly always arrived five minutes before the curtain went up. One night I thought he would catch cold--it was a bitter night--and I lent him my white scarf! He could always give his whole great mind to the matter in hand. This made him one of the most comfortable people to talk to that I have ever met. In everything he was _thorough_, and I don't think he could have been late for anything. I contrasted his punctuality, when he came to see "King Lear," with the unpunctuality of Lord Randolph Churchill, who came to see the play the very next night with a party of men friends and arrived when the first act was over. Lord Randolph was, all the same, a great admirer of Henry Irving. He confessed to him once that he had never read a play of Shakespeare's in his life, but that after seeing Henry act he thought it was time to begin! A very few days later he pulverized us with his complete and masterly knowledge of at least half a dozen of the plays. He was a perfect person to meet at a dinner or supper--brilliantly entertaining, and queerly simple. He struck one as being able to master any subject that interested him, and once a Shakespeare performance at the Lyceum had fired his interest, there was nothing about that play, or about past performances of it, which he did not know! His beautiful wife (now Mrs. George Cornwallis West) wore a dress at supper one evening which gave me the idea for the Lady Macbeth dress, afterwards painted by Sargent. The bodice of Lady Randolph's gown was trimmed all over with green beetles' wings. I told Mrs. Comyns Carr about it, and she remembered it when she designed my Lady Macbeth dress and saw to its making by clever Mrs. Nettleship. Lady Randolph Churchill by sheer force of beauty of face and expressiveness would, I venture to prophesy, have been successful on the stage if fate had ever led her to it. "BEEFSTEAK" GUESTS AT THE LYCEUM The present Princess of Wales, when she was Princess May of Teck, used often to come to the Lyceum with her mother, Princess Mary, and to supper in the Beefsteak Room. In 1891 she chose to come as her birthday treat, which was very flattering to us. A record of those Beefsteak Room suppers would be a pleasant thing to possess. I have such a bad memory--I see faces round the table--the face of Liszt among them--and when I try to think when it was, or how it was, the faces vanish as people might out of a room when, after having watched them through a dim window-pane, one determines to open the door--and go in. Lady Dorothy Nevill, that distinguished lady of the old school--what a picture of a woman!--was always a fine theater-goer. Her face always cheered me if I saw it in the theater, and she was one of the most clever and amusing of the Beefsteak Room guests. As a hostess, sitting in her round chair, with her hair dressed to _become_ her, irrespective of any period, leading this, that and the other of her guests to speak upon their particular subjects, she was simply the _ideal_. Singers were often among Henry Irving's guests in the Beefsteak Room--Patti, Melba, Calvé, Albani, Sims Reeves, Tamagno, Victor Maurel, and many others. Calvé! The New York newspapers wrote "Salve Calvé!" and I would echo them. She is the best singer-actress that I know. They tell me that Grisi and Mario were fine dramatically. When I saw them, they were on the point of retiring, and I was a child. I remember that Madame Grisi was very stout, but Mario certainly acted well. Trebelli was a noble actress; Maria Gay is splendid, and oh! Miss Mary Garden! Never shall I forget her acting in "Griselidis." Yet for all the talent of these singers whom I have named, and among whom I should surely have placed the incomparable Maurel, whose Iago was superb, I think that the arts of singing and acting can seldom be happily married. They quarrel all the while! A few operas seem to have been written with a knowledge of the difficulty of the conventions which intervene to prevent the expression of dramatic emotion; and these operas are contrived with amazing cleverness so that the acting shall have free play. Verdi in "Othello," and Bizet in "Carmen" came nearest solving the problem. To go back to Calvé. She has always seemed to me a darling, as well as a great artist. She was entirely generous and charming to me when we were living for some weeks together in the same New York hotel. One wonderful Sunday evening I remember dining with her, and she sang and sang for me, as if she could never grow tired. One thing she said she had never sung so well before, and she laughed in her delicious rapturous way and sang it all over again. Her enthusiasm for acting, music, and her fellow-artists was magnificent. Oh, what a lovable creature! Such soft dark eyes and entreating ways, such a beautiful mixture of nobility and "câlinerie"! She would laugh and cry all in a moment like a child. That year in New York she was raved about, but all the excitement and enthusiasm that she created only seemed to please and amuse her. She was not in the least spoiled by the fuss. I once watched Patti sing from behind scenes at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. My impression from that point of view was that she was actually a _bird_! She could not help singing! Her head, flattened on top, her nose tilted downwards like a lovely little beak, her throat swelling and swelling as it poured out that extraordinary volume of sound, all made me think that she must have been a nightingale before she was transmigrated into a human being! Near, I was amazed by the loudness of her song. I imagine that Tetrazzini, whom I have not yet heard, must have this bird-like quality. The dear kind-hearted Melba has always been a good friend of mine. The first time I met her was in New York at a supper party, and she had a bad cold, and therefore a frightful _speaking_ voice for the moment! I shall never forget the shock that it gave me. Thank goodness I very soon afterwards heard her again when she hadn't a cold! "All's well that ends well." It ended very well. She spoke as exquisitely as she sang. She was one of the first to offer her services for my jubilee performance at Drury Lane, but unfortunately she was ill when the day came, and could not sing. She had her dresses in "Faust" copied from mine by Mrs. Nettleship, and I came across a note from her the other day thanking me for having introduced her to a dressmaker who was "an angel." Another note sent round to me during a performance of "King Arthur" in Boston I shall always prize. "You are sublime, adorable _ce soir_.... I wish I were a millionaire--I would throw _all_ my millions at your feet. If there is another procession, tell the stage manager to see those imps of Satan _don't chew gum_. It looks awful. "Love, "MELBA" I think that time it was the solemn procession of mourners following the dead body of Elaine who were chewing gum; but we always had to be prepared for it among our American "supers," whether they were angels or devils or courtiers! In "Faust" we "carried" about six leading witches for the Brocken Scene, and recruited the forty others from local talent in the different towns that we visited. Their general direction was to throw up their arms and look fierce at certain music cues. One night I noticed a girl going through the most terrible contortions with her jaw, and thought I must say something. "That's right, dear. Very good, but don't exaggerate." "How?" was all the answer that I got in the choicest nasal twang, and the girl continued to make faces as before. I was contemplating a second attempt, when Templeton, the limelight man, who had heard me speak to her, touched me gently on the shoulder. "Beg pardon, miss, she don't mean it. She's only _chewing gum_!" One of my earliest friends among literary folk was Mr. Charles Dodgson--or Lewis Carroll--or "Alice in Wonderland." Ah, _that_ conveys something to you! I can't remember when I didn't know him. I think he must have seen Kate act as a child, and having given _her_ "Alice"--he always gave his young friends "Alice" at once by way of establishing pleasant relations--he made a progress as the years went on through the whole family. Finally he gave "Alice" to my children. He was a splendid theater-goer, and took the keenest interest in all the Lyceum productions, frequently writing to me to point out slips in the dramatist's logic which only he would ever have noticed! He did not even spare Shakespeare. I think he wrote these letters for fun, as some people make puzzles, anagrams, or Limericks! "Now I'm going to put before you a 'Hero-ic' puzzle of mine, but please remember I do not ask for your solution of it, as you will persist in believing, if I ask your help in a Shakespeare difficulty, that I am only jesting! However, if you won't attack it yourself, perhaps you would ask Mr. Irving some day how _he_ explains it? "My difficulty is this:--Why in the world did not Hero (or at any rate Beatrice on her behalf) prove an 'alibi' in answer to the charge? It seems certain that she did _not_ sleep in her room that night; for how could Margaret venture to open the window and talk from it, with her mistress asleep in the room? It would be sure to wake her. Besides Borachio says, after promising that Margaret shall speak with him out of Hero's chamber window, 'I will so fashion the matter that Hero shall be absent.' (_How_ he could possibly manage any such thing is another difficulty, but I pass over that.) Well then, granting that Hero slept in some other room that night, why didn't she say so? When Claudio asks her: 'What man was he talked with yesternight out at your window betwixt twelve and one?' why doesn't she reply: 'I talked with no man at that hour, my lord. Nor was I in my chamber yesternight, but in another, far from it, remote.' And this she could, of course, prove by the evidence of the housemaids, who must have known that she had occupied another room that night. "But even if Hero might be supposed to be so distracted as not to remember where she had slept the night before, or even whether she had slept _anywhere_, surely _Beatrice_ has her wits about her! And when an arrangement was made, by which she was to lose, for one night, her twelve-months' bedfellow, is it conceivable that she didn't know _where_ Hero passed the night? Why didn't _she_ reply: "But good my lord sweet Hero slept not there: She had another chamber for the nonce. 'Twas sure some counterfeit that did present Her person at the window, aped her voice, Her mien, her manners, and hath thus deceived My good Lord Pedro and this company?' "With all these excellent materials for proving an 'alibi' it is incomprehensible that no one should think of it. If only there had been a barrister present, to cross-examine Beatrice! "'Now, ma'am, attend to me, please, and speak up so that the jury can hear you. Where did you sleep last night? Where did Hero sleep? Will you swear that she slept in her own room? Will you swear that you do not know where she slept?' I feel inclined to quote old Mr. Weller and to say to Beatrice at the end of the play (only I'm afraid it isn't etiquette to speak across the footlights): "'Oh, Samivel, Samivel, vy vornt there a halibi?'" Mr. Dodgson's kindness to children was wonderful. He _really_ loved them and put himself out for them. The children he knew who wanted to go on the stage were those who came under my observation, and nothing could have been more touching than his ceaseless industry on their behalf. "I want to thank you," he wrote to me in 1894 from Oxford, "as heartily as words can do it for your true kindness in letting me bring D. behind the scenes to you. You will know without my telling you what an intense pleasure you thereby gave to a warm-hearted girl, and what love (which I fancy you value more than mere admiration) you have won from her. Her wild longing to try the stage will not, I think, bear the cold light of day when once she has tried it, and has realized what a lot of hard work and weary waiting and 'hope deferred' it involves. She doesn't, so far as I know, absolutely need, as N. does, to earn money for her own support. But I fancy she will find life rather a _pinch_, unless she can manage to do something in the way of earning money. So I don't like to advise her strongly _against_ it, as I would with any one who had no such need. "Also thank you, thank you with all my heart, for all your great kindness to N. She does write so brightly and gratefully about all you do for her and say to her." "N." has since achieved great success on the music-halls and in pantomime. "D." is a leading lady! This letter to my sister Floss is characteristic of his "Wonderland" style when writing to children: "Ch. Ch., _January, 1874._ "My dear Florence,-- "Ever since that heartless piece of conduct of yours (I allude to the affair of the Moon and the blue silk gown) I have regarded you with a gloomy interest, rather than with any of the affection of former years--so that the above epithet 'dear' must be taken as conventional only, or perhaps may be more fitly taken in the sense in which we talk of a 'dear' bargain, meaning to imply how much it has cost us; and who shall say how many sleepless nights it has cost me to endeavor to unravel (a most appropriate verb) that 'blue silk gown'? "Will you please explain to Tom about that photograph of the family group which I promised him? Its history is an instructive one, as illustrating my habits of care and deliberation. In 1867 the picture was promised him, and an entry made in my book. In 1869, or thereabouts, I mounted the picture on a large card, and packed it in brown paper. In 1870, or 1871, or thereabouts, I took it with me to Guilford, that it might be handy to take with me when I went up to town. Since then I have taken it two or three times to London, and on each occasion (having forgotten to deliver it to him) I brought it back again. This was because I had no convenient place in London to leave it in. But _now_ I have found such a place. Mr. Dubourg has kindly taken charge of it--so that it is now much nearer to its future owner than it has been for seven years. I quite hope, in the course of another year or two, to be able to remember to bring it to your house: or perhaps Mr. Dubourg may be calling even sooner than that and take it with him. You will wonder why I ask you to tell him instead of writing myself. The obvious reason is that you will be able, from sympathy, to put my delay in the most favorable light--to make him see that, as hasty puddings are not the best of puddings so hasty judgments are not the best of judgments, and that he ought to be content to wait even another seven years for his picture, and to sit 'like patience on a monument, smiling at grief.' This quotation, by the way, is altogether a misprint. Let me explain it to you. The passage originally stood, '_They_ sit like patients on the Monument, smiling at Greenwich.' In the next edition 'Greenwich' was printed short, 'Green'h,' and so got gradually altered into 'grief.' The allusion of course is to the celebrated Dr. Jenner, who used to send all his patients to sit on the top of the Monument (near London Bridge) to inhale fresh air, promising them that, when they were well enough, they should go to 'Greenwich Fair.' So of course they always looked out towards Greenwich, and sat smiling to think of the treat in store for them. A play was written on the subject of their inhaling the fresh air, and was for some time attributed to him (Shakespeare), but it is certainly not in his style. It was called 'The Wandering Air,' and was lately revived at the Queen's Theater. The custom of sitting on the Monument was given up when Dr. Jenner went mad, and insisted on it that the air was worse up there and that the _lower_ you went the _more airy_ it became. Hence he always called those little yards, below the pavement, outside the kitchen windows, '_the kitchen airier_,' a name that is still in use. "All this information you are most welcome to use, the next time you are in want of something to talk about. You may say you learned it from 'a distinguished etymologist,' which is perfectly true, since any one who knows me by sight can easily distinguish me from all other etymologists. "What parts are you and Polly now playing? "Believe me to be (conventionally) "Yours affectionately, "L. DODGSON." No two men could be more unlike than Mr. Dodgson and Mr. J.M. Barrie, yet there are more points of resemblance than "because there's a 'b' in both!" If "Alice in Wonderland" is the children's classic of the library, and one perhaps even more loved by the grown up children than by the others, "Peter Pan" is the children's stage classic, and here again elderly children are the most devoted admirers. I am a very old child, nearly old enough to be a "beautiful great-grandmother" (a part that I have entreated Mr. Barrie to write for me), and I go and see "Peter" year after year and love him more each time. There is one advantage in being a grown-up child--you are not afraid of the pirates or the crocodile. I first became an ardent lover of Mr. Barrie through "Sentimental Tommy," and I simply had to write and tell him how hugely I had enjoyed it. In reply I had a letter from Tommy himself! "Dear Miss Ellen Terry,-- "I just wonder at you. I noticed that Mr. Barrie the author (so-called) and his masterful wife had a letter they wanted to conceal from me, so I got hold of it, and it turned out to be from you, and _not a line to me in it_! If you like the book, it is _me_ you like, not him, and it is to me you should send your love, not to him. Corp thinks, however, that you did not like to make the first overtures, and if that is the explanation, I beg herewith to send you my warm love (don't mention this to Elspeth) and to say that I wish you would come and have a game with us in the Den (don't let on to Grizel that I invited you). The first moment I saw you, I said to myself, 'This is the kind I like,' and while the people round about me were only thinking of your acting, I was wondering which would be the best way of making you my willing slave, and I beg to say that I believe I have 'found a way,' for most happily the very ones I want most to lord it over, are the ones who are least able to resist me. "We should have ripping fun. You would be Jean MacGregor, captive in the Queen's Bower, but I would climb up at the peril of my neck to rescue you, and you would faint in my strong arms, and wouldn't Grizel get a turn when she came upon you and me whispering sweet nothings in the Lovers' Walk? I think it advisible to say _in writing_ that I would only mean them as nothings (because Grizel is really my one), but so long as they were sweet, what does that matter (at the time); and besides, _you_ could _love me_ genuinely, and I would carelessly kiss your burning tears away. "Corp is a bit fidgety about it, because he says I have two to love me already, but I feel confident that I can manage more than two. "Trusting to see you at the Cuttle Well on Saturday when the eight o'clock bell is ringing, "I am "Your indulgent Commander, "T. SANDYS. "P.S.--Can you bring some of the Lyceum armor with you, and two hard-boiled eggs?" Henry Irving once thought of producing Mr. Barrie's play "The Professor's Love Story." He was delighted with the first act, but when he had read the rest he did not think the play would do for the Lyceum. It was the same with many plays which were proposed for us. The ideas sounded all right, but as a rule the treatment was too thin, and the play, even if good, on too small a scale for the theater. One of our playwrights of whom I always expected a great play was Mrs. Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes). A little one-act play of hers, "Journeys End in Lovers' Meeting"--in which I first acted with Johnston Forbes-Robertson and Terriss at a special matinée in 1894--brought about a friendship between us which lasted until her death. Of her it could indeed be said with poignant truth, "She should have died hereafter." Her powers had not nearly reached their limit. Pearl Craigie had a man's intellect--a woman's wit and apprehension. "Bright," as the Americans say, she always managed to be even in the dullest company, and she knew how to be silent at times, to give the "other fellow" a chance. Her _executive_ ability was extraordinary. Wonderfully tolerant, she could at the same time not easily forgive any meanness or injustice that seemed to her deliberate. Hers was a splendid spirit. I shall always bless that little play of hers which first brought me near to so fine a creature. I rather think that I never met any one who _gave out_ so much as she did. To me, at least, she _gave, gave_ all the time. I hope she was not exhausted after our long "confabs." _I_ was most certainly refreshed and replenished. The first performance of "Journeys End in Lovers' Meeting" she watched from a private box with the Princess of Wales (our present Queen) and Henry Irving. She came round afterwards just _burning_ with enthusiasm and praising me for work which was really not good. She spoiled one for other women. Her best play was, I think, "The Ambassador," in which Violet Vanbrugh (now Mrs. Bourchier) played a pathetic part very beautifully, and made a great advance in her profession. There was some idea of Pearl Craigie writing a play for Henry Irving and me, but it never came to anything. There was a play of hers on the same subject as "The School for Saints," and another about Guizot. "_February 11, 1898._ "My very dear Nell,-- "I have an idea for a real four-act comedy (in these matters nothing daunts me!) founded on a charming little episode in the private lives of Princess Lieven (the famous Russian ambassadress) and the celebrated Guizot, the French Prime Minister and historian. I should have to veil the identity _slightly_, and also make the story a husband and wife story--it would be more amusing this way. It is comedy from beginning to end. Sir Henry would make a splendid Guizot, and you the ideal Madame de Lieven. Do let me talk it over with you. 'The School for Saints' was, as it were, a born biography. But the Lieven-Guizot idea is a play. "Yours ever affectionately, "PEARL MARY THERESA CRAIGIE." In another letter she writes: "I am changing all my views about so-called 'literary' dialogue. It means pedantry. The great thing is to be lively." "A first night at the Lyceum" was an institution. I don't think that it has its parallel nowadays. It was not, however, to the verdict of all the brilliant friends who came to see us on the first night that Henry Irving attached importance. I remember some one saying to him after the first night of "Ravenswood": "I don't fancy that your hopes will be quite fulfilled about the play. I heard one or two on Saturday night--" "Ah yes," said Henry very carelessly and gently, "but you see there were so many _friends_ there that night who didn't pay--_friends_. One must not expect too much from friends! The paying public will, I think, decide favorably." Henry never cared much for society, as the saying is--but as host in the Beefsteak Room he thoroughly enjoyed himself, and every one who came to his suppers seemed happy! Every conceivable type of person used to be present--and there, if one had the _mind_[1] one could study the world in little. [Footnote 1: "Wordsworth says he could write like Shakespeare if he had the _mind_. Obviously it is only the mind that is lacking."--_Charles Lamb's Letters._] One of the liveliest guests was Sir Francis Burnand--who entirely contradicted the theory that professional comedians are always the most gloomy of men in company. A Sunday evening with the Burnand family at their home in The Bottoms was a treat Henry Irving and I often looked forward to--a particularly restful, lively evening. I think a big family--a "party" in itself--is the only "party" I like. Some of the younger Burnands have greatly distinguished themselves, and they are all perfect dears, so unaffected, kind, and genial. Sir Francis never jealously guarded his fun for _Punch_. He was always generous with it. Once when my son had an exhibition of his pictures, I asked Mr. Burnand, as he was then, to go and see it or send some one on Mr. Punch's staff. He answered characteristically! "WHITEFRIARS, "London, E.C. "My dear Ellen Terry,-- "Delighted to see your hand--'wish your face were with it' (Shakespeare). "Remember me (Shakespeare again--'Hamlet') to our Sir Henry. May you both live long and prosper! "GORDON CRAIG'S PICTURES He opens his show A day I can't go. Any Friday Is never my day. But I'll see his pictures (Praise and no strictures) 'Ere this day week; Yet I can't speak Of them in print (I might give a hint) Till each on its shelf I've seen for myself. I've no one to send. Now I must end. None I can trust, So go I must. Yours most trul_ee_ V'la F.C.B. All well here, All send love. Likewise misses Lots of kisses. From all in this 'ere shanty To _you_ who don't play in Dante! What a pity! Whuroo-oo Oo-oo-oo!" BITS FROM MY DIARY What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it, dull to the contemporary who reads it, invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it! Whatever interest the few diaries of mine that I have preserved may have for future psychologists and historians, they are for my present purpose almost worthless. Yet because things written at the time are considered by some people to be more reliable than those written years afterwards when memory calls in imagination to her help, I have hunted up a few passages from my diaries between 1887 and 1901; and now I give them in the raw for what they are worth--in my opinion nothing! _July 1887._--E.B.-J. (Sir Edward Burne-Jones) sent me a picture he has painted for me--a troop of little angels. _August 2._--(We were in Scotland.) Visited the "Blasted Heath." Behold a flourishing potato field! Smooth softness everywhere. We must blast our own heath when we do Macbeth! _November 29._---(We were in America.) Matinée "Faust"--Beecher Memorial. The whole affair was the strangest failure. H.I. himself took heaps of tickets, but the house was half empty. The following Saturday.--Matinée "Faust." House crammed. Why couldn't they have come when it was to honor Beecher? _January 1890._--In answer to some one who has said that Henry had all his plays written for him, he pointed out that of twenty-eight Lyceum productions only three were written "for" him--"Charles I.," "Eugene Aram," and "Vanderdecken." _February 27._--(My birthday.) Henry gave me a most exquisite wreath for the head. It is made of green stones and diamonds and is like a myrtle wreath. I never saw anything so simple and grand. It's lovely. (During this year our readings of "Macbeth" took place.) _April._--Visit to Trentham after the reading at Hanley. Next day to hotel at Bradford, where there were beetles in the beds! I see that Bulwer, speaking of Macready's Macbeth, says that Macbeth was a "trembler when opposed by his conscience, a warrior when defied by his foes." _August._--(At Winchelsea.) We drove to Cliffe End. Henry got the old pony along at a spanking rate, but I had to seize the reins now and again to save us from sudden death. _August 14._--Drove to Tenterden. Saw Clowe's Marionettes. (Henry saw one of their play-bills in a shop window, but found that the performances only took place in the evening. He found out the proprietor and asked him what were the takings on a good night. The man said £5, I think. Henry asked him if he would give him a special show for that sum. He was delighted. Henry and I and my daughter Edy and Fussie sat in solemn state in the empty tent and watched the show, which was most ingenious and clever. Clowe's Marionettes are still "on the road," but ever since that "command" performance of Henry's at Tenterden their bill has had two extra lines: "Patronized by SIR HENRY IRVING and MISS ELLEN TERRY.") _September._--"Method," (in last act of "Ravenswood"), "to keep very still, and feel it all quietly and deeply." George Meredith, speaking of Romance, says: "The young who avoid that region, escape the title of Fool at the cost of a Celestial Crown." Good! _December._--Mr. Gladstone behind the scenes. He likes the last act very much. _January 14, 1892._--Prince Eddie died. Cardinal Manning died. _January 18._--(Just after successful production of "Henry VIII.") H.I. is hard at work, studying "Lear." This is what only a great man would do at such a moment in the hottest blush of success. No "swelled head"--only fervent endeavor to do better work. The fools hardly conceive what he is. _February 8._--Morell Mackenzie died. _March 1._--Mother died. Amazing courage in my father and sisters. She looked so lovely when she was dead. _March 7._--Went back to work. _October 6._--Tennyson died. _October 26._--A fine day. To call on the young Duchess of S----. What a sweet and beautiful young girl she is! I said I would write and ask Mrs. Stirling to give her lessons, but feared she could not as she was ill. _November._--Heard from Mrs. Stirling: "I am too ill and weak to see any one in the way of lessons. I am just alive--in pain and distress always, but always anxious for news from the Lyceum. 'Lear' will be a great success, I am sure. I was Cordelia with Macready." _November 10._--First night of "Lear." Such a foggy day! H. was just marvelous, but indistinct from nervousness. T. spoke out, but who cared! Haviland was very good. My Ted splendid in the little bit he had to do as Oswald. I was rather good to-night. It _is_ a wee part, but fine. _December 7._--Poor Fred Leslie is dead. Typhoid. A thunderbolt to us all. Poor, bright, charming Fred Leslie! _December 31._--This has been a dark year. Mother died. Illness rife in the family. My son engaged--but that may turn out well if the young couple will not be too hasty. H.I. not well. Business by no means up to the proper point. A death in the Royal Family. Depression--depression! _March 9, 1897._--Eunice (Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher) is dead. Poor darling! She was a great friend to me. _April 10._--First night of "Sans-Gêne." A wonderful first-night audience. I acted courageously and fairly well. Extraordinary success. _April 14._--Princess Louise (Lorne) came to see the play and told me she was delighted. Little Elspeth Campbell was with her, looking lovely. I did not play well--was depressed and clumsy. _May 13._--It's all off about "The Man of Destiny" play with H.I. and G.B.S. _May 15._--To "Princess and Butterfly" with Audrey and Aimée. Miss Fay Davis better than ever. _May 17._---Nutcombe Gould has lost his voice, and Ted was called upon at a moment's notice to play Hamlet at the Olympic to-night. _June 20._--Thanksgiving Service at St. Paul's for the Queen's Jubilee. Went with Edy and Henry. Not at all adequate to the occasion was the ceremony. The Te Deum rather good, the sermon sensible, but the whole uninspired, unimpassioned and _dull_. The Prince and Princess looked splendid. _June 22._--To Lady Glenesk's, Piccadilly. Wonderfullest sight I ever saw. All was perfect, but the little Queen herself more dignified than the whole procession put together! Sarah B. was in her place at the Glenesks' at six in the morning. Bancroft made a Knight. Mrs. Alma-Tadema's "at home." Paderewski played. What a divinely beautiful face! _July 14._--The Women's Jubilee Dinner at the Grafton Galleries. Too ill to go. My guests were H.I., Burne-Jones, Max Beerbohm, W. Nicholson, Jimmy Pryde, Will Rothenstein, Graham Robertson, Richard Hardig Davis, Laurence Irving, Ted and Edy. _December 11._--(In Manchester.) Poor old Fussie dropped down a trap 30 feet and died in a second. _December 16._--Willie Terriss was murdered this evening. Newspapers sent me a wire for "expressions of sympathy"!! _January 22, 1901._--(Tenterden.) Nine o'clock evening and the bell is tolling for our dearest Queen--Victoria, who died this evening just before seven o'clock--a grand, wise, good woman. A week ago she was driving out regularly. The courage of it! _January 23._--To Rye (from Winchelsea). The King proclaimed in the Market Place. The ceremony only took about five minutes. Very dull and undignified until the National Anthem, which upset us all. _January 26._--London last night when I arrived might have been Winchelsea when the sun goes down on all our wrath and arguments. No one in the streets ... empty buses crawling along. Black boards up at every shop window. All the gas half-mast high as well as the flags. I never saw such a mournful city, but why should they turn the gas down? Thrift, thrift, Horatio! _February 2._--The Queen's Funeral. From a balcony in S. James's I saw the most wonderful sight I have ever seen. The silence was extraordinary.... The tiny coffin on the gun-carriage drawn by the cream-colored ponies was the most pathetic, impressive object in all that great procession. All the grandest carriages were out for the occasion. The King and the German Emperor rode side by side.... The young Duke of Coburg, the Duchess of Albany's son, like Sir Galahad. I slept at Bridgewater House, but on my way to St. James's from there my clothes were torn and I was half squeezed to death. One man called out to me: "Ah, now you know what it feels like at the pit door, Miss Terry." _April 15._--Lyceum. "Coriolanus" produced. Went home directly after the play was over. I didn't seem to know a word of my part yesterday at the dress-rehearsal, but to-night I was as firm as if I had played it a hundred times. _April 16._--The critics who wrote their notices at the dress-rehearsal, and complained of my playing pranks with the text, were a little previous. Oh, how bad it makes one feel to find that they all think my Volumnia "sweet," and _I_ thought I was fierce, contemptuous, overbearing. Worse, I felt as if I must be appearing like a cabman rating his Drury Lane wife! _April 20._--Beginning to play Volumnia a little better. _June 25._--Revival of "Charles I." The play went marvelously. I played first and last acts well. H. was magnificent. Ted saw play yesterday and says I don't "do Mrs. Siddons well." I know what he means. The last act too declamatory. _June 26._--Changed the "Mrs. Siddons" scene, and like it much better. Simpler--more nature--more feeling. _July 16._--Horrible suicide of Edith and Ida Yeoland. The poor girls were out of an engagement. Unequal to the fight for life. _July 20._--Last day of Lyceum season--"Coriolanus." (On that night, I remember, H.I. for the first time played Coriolanus _beautifully_. He discarded the disfiguring beard of the warrior that he had worn during the "run" earlier in the season--and now that one could see his face, all was well. When people speak of the evils of long runs, I should like to answer with a list of their advantages. An actor, even an actor of Henry Irving's caliber, hardly begins to play an immense part like Coriolanus for what it is worth until he has been doing it for fifty nights.) _November 16._--"New York. Saw delightful Maude Adams in 'Quality Street'--charming play. She is most clever and attractive. _Unusual_ above everything. Queer, sweet, entirely delightful." From these extracts, I hope it will be seen that by burning most of my diaries I did not inflict an unbearable loss upon present readers, or posterity! I am afraid that I think as little of the future as I do of the past. The present for me! If my impressions of my friends are scanty, let me say in my defense that actors and actresses necessarily _see_ many people, but _know_ very few. If there has been more in this book about my life in the theater than about my life outside it, the proportion is inevitable and natural. The maxim is well-worn that art is long and life is short, and there is no art, I think, which is longer than mine! At least, it always seems to me that no life can be long enough to meet its requirements. If I have not revealed myself to you, or succeeded in giving a faithful picture of an actor's life, perhaps I have shown what years of practice and labor are needed for the attainment of a permanent position on the stage. To quote Mrs. Nancy Oldfield:-- "Art needs all that we can bring to her, I assure you." THE END INDEX Abbey, E.A., 277, 372 Abingdon, Mrs., 54 Adams, Maude, 321, 399 Adelphi Theatre, The, 76 Albani, Madame, 264, 381 Albert, Prince, 18 Albina, Madame, 41 Alexander, George, 209, 260-61, 300, 302 Alexandra, Queen, 56, 391, 397 "Alice-sit-by-the-Fire," 345 Allen, J.H., 185, 301 Allingham, William, 122 --Mrs., 122 Alma-Tadema, Sir Laurence, 372, 377 "Ambassador, The," 391 "Amber Heart, The," 191, 271-2 Anderson, Mary, 231, 321 _et sqq._ Angell, Louisa, 56 Archer, Fred, 306 Argyll, Duchess of (Princess Louise), 397 "Arms and the Man," 346-7 Arnold, Sir Edwin, 117 Arnott, Mr., 187 _et sqq._, 217 Asche, Oscar, 349 Ashwell, Lena, 269 "Attar Gull," 41-2 Austin, L.F., 299 _et sqq._ Ball, Mr. Meredith, 265 Bancroft, Lady (Miss Marie Wilton), 47, 91-2, 109 _et sqq._, 125, 131 _et sqq._, 165, 357 --Sir Squire, 92, 108 _et sqq._, 125, 165, 334, 397 Barclay, Mr., 51 Barnay, Ludwig, 325 Barnes, J.H., 209-10 Barnes, Prebendary, 267 Barrett, Laurence, 277 Barrie, J.M., 268, 345, 388 _et sqq._ --Mrs. J.M. (Mary Ansell), 268 Barrymore, Ethel, 318, 320-1 Bastien-Lepage, 284, 371 Bateman, Colonel, 141, 145 --Mrs., 160 --Isabel, 196-7 Bath, 51 Bayard, Mr., 286 "Becket," 217, 343, 365 Beecher, Henry Ward, 315-16 _et sqq._ --Mrs. Henry Ward, 315-16, 397 Beefsteak Club, The, 369, 371, 381 _et sqq._, 392 Beerbohm, Mr. Max, 397 "Belle's Stratagem, The," 56, 191, 217, 218, 244 Bellew, Kyrle, 173 "Bells, The," 217, 280, 331, 365 Benedict, Sir Julius, 229 Benson, F., 166, 243, 339-40 Bernhardt, Sarah, 74, 162-3, 175, 233, 236 _et sqq._, 397 "Bethlehem," 351 Bizet, 382 Black, William, his "Madcap Violet," 124 Blake, W., 147 Booth, Edwin, 221 _et sqq._ Boucicault, Dion, 273 Bourchier, Arthur, 263, 268 --Mrs. Arthur. _See_ Irene Vanbrugh Bourget, Paul, 277 Bradshaw, Mr., 12, 18 Bristol, 39, 44, 49-50, 72-3, 76 Brookfleld, Charles, 176 "Brothers," 152 Brough, Lionel, 76 Brown, Katie, 302 Browning, Robert, 58-9, 61 _et sqq._ Buckstone, J.B., 49, 51, 53 _et sqq._ "Buckstone at Home," 56 Burdett-Coutts, Baroness, 160, 212, 220, 306 Burges, William, 51 Burnand, Sir F.C., 392-3 Burne-Jones, Sir E., 333 _et sqq._, 337 _et sqq._, 372 _et sqq._, 377, 394, 397 Byrn, Oscar, 23-4 Byron, H.J., 133 --Lord, 60, 153 Calmour, Alfred, 271-2 Calvé, 381 _et sqq._ Calvert, Charles, 129 Cambridge, Duke of, 34, 343 Cameron, Mrs. Julia Margaret, 58 "Captain Brassbound's Conversion," 52-3, 345 Carr, J. Comyns, 269, 333 --Mrs. Comyns, 175, 331, 377 "Carroll, Lewis" (C.L. Dodgson), 201, 384 _et sqq._ "Charles I.," 154, 180, 191, 257, 260, 281, 297, 350, 395, 398 Chippendale, Mr., 52, 53-4, 172 Churchill, Lady Randolph, 380 --Lord Randolph, 380 Chute, J.H., 46 _et sqq._, 51 Clarke, Hamilton, 168 Clarkson, Mr., 200 Coghlan, Charles, 116, 119 _et sqq._, 133, 145, 152, 260 Collinson, Walter, 200, 363 Compton, Edward, 166 --Mr. Henry, 53-4, 165 Conway, H.B., 153, 260 Cooper, Frank, 173 Corder, Rosa, 306 "Coriolanus," 189, 206, 398 "Corsican Brothers, The," 212, 217, 337 Court Theatre, The, 77, 148, 151 Courtney, Mr., 35 Coventry, 3-7 Craig, Edith, 86 _et sqq._, 146 _et sqq._, 158-9, 177, 204, 212-13, 235, 256-7, 266, 284, 347, 378-9, 395, 397 --Edward Gordon, 86 _et sqq._, 146 _et sqq._, 159, 177, 196, 257, 304, 334, 337, 350 _et sqq._, 396-7 Craigie, Mrs., 390-1 Crane, Walter, 372 Craven, Mr. Hawes, 76 Croisette, 74 Culverwell, Mr., 35 "Cup, The," 178-9, 187, 191, 212 _et sqq._ "Cymbeline," 343, 377 Dale, Allan, 286 Dalrymple, Mrs., 58 Daly, Mr., 318 _et sqq._ "Dame aux Camélias, La," 175 "Dante," 344, 350 Davis, Richard Harding, 397 "Dead Heart, The," 196, 334, 351 Delaunay, 74 Denvil, Clara, 18 Devonshire House, 339 Dickens, Charles, 74, 313-4 Disraeli, Benjamin (Lord Beaconsfield), 58-9, 60 "Distant Relations," 36 Doody, Mr., 200 "Dora," 151, 164 "Double Marriage, The," 78 Drew, John, 308, 320 --Mrs., 320 Drury Lane Theatre, 356-7 _et seq._ Duffield, A.J., 249 Duse, Eleonora, 163, 175, 233-4, 258 _et sqq._ Edinburgh, 9 Edward VII., 56, 398 Elcho, Lady, 340 Elliott, Maxine, 166 Emery, Winifred, 218-9, 245 "Endymion," 49 "Eugene Aram," 191, 195, 395 Eugénie, Empress, 73 Evans, Joe, 284-5 Fairchild, Miss Satty, 346 Farren, Mr., 53-4 --Nelly, 168 "Faust," 27, 76, 153, 191, 252, 260 _et sqq._, 288, 384, 394-5 "Faust-and-Loose," 266 "Faust and Marguerite," 24 Favart, Madame, 74 Fechter, C.A., 73, 136, 175, 211 Fields, Mrs. James T., 313 Fitzgerald, Edward, 192 Fleming, Albert, 264 Forbes-Robertson, Johnston, 92, 125-6, 136, 153, 244 _et sqq._, 390 --Norman, 159, 300, 324-5, 361 Forrest, Edwin, 175, 281 Forrester, Mr., 172 "Friends and Foes," 69 "Frou-Frou" ("Butterfly"), 175 Furness, Dr. Horace Howard, 323 Furnivall, Dr., 202 Fussie (Irving's dog), 180, 305 _et sqq._, 395, 397 Garden, Miss Mary, 382 Gardiner, Mrs. Jack, 314-5 Garrick, David, 192 Gay, Maria, 382 Gilbert, Alfred, 118, 368 _et sqq._ Gilbert, Sir John, 200 Gilbert, Sir W.S., 127, 270 Gilder, Mr. R.W., 285 Gillespie, Mrs., 313 Gladstone, Right Hon. W.E., 58-9, 379, 396 Glasgow, 4, 8 Glenesk, Lady, 397 Godwin, Mr., 49, 50-1, 111, 164, 216 Got, 74 "Governor's Wife, The," 43 Grieve, Mrs., 17 Grisi, Madame, 381-2 Haas, Frederick, 136 "Hamlet," 107, 136-7, 166 _et sqq._, 191 Harcourt, Sir William V., 63-4 --Right Hon. Lewis, 64 Hare, John, 148 _et sqq._, 165 Harley, Mr., 26-7 Harries, Miss, 279 Harvey, Martin, 337 Haymarket Theatre, 49, 53, 72 "Henry VIII.," 24, 337 _et sqq._, 377 Herbert, Miss, 69, 71 Hicks, Seymour, 268 Hine, Mr., 51 Hodson, Henrietta (Mrs. Labouchere), 47 _et sqq._, 49, 76 Holland, Sarah, 240 _et sqq._ Holmes, O.W., 315 "Home for the Holidays," 35-6 Houghton, Lord, 208, 274-5 "House of Darnley, The," 153 _Household Words_, 74 Housman, Mr. Laurence, 351 Howe, Mr., 52, 219-20, 301, 337 "Hunchback, The," 75 Hunt, Holman, 266 "If the Cap Fits," 26 Imperial Theatre, 352 _et sqq._ Ingelow, Miss Jean, 265 "Iolanthe," 191, 206 "Iris," 164 Irving, Sir Henry, 59; first appearance with Ellen Terry, 76; Miss Terry's first impressions of, 79 _et sqq._; in "The Taming of the Shrew," 80; in "Hunted Down," 81; his genius of will, 107; as King Philip, 134 _et sqq._, 145; as Hamlet in 1874, 136 _et sqq._; in "Louis XI." and "Richelieu," 136; what critics have said of him, 141; the infinite variety of his acting, 142; takes the Lyceum Theatre, 160; his Hamlet in 1878, 166 _et sqq._, 180 _et sqq._; his musical director, 168; his characteristics, 169 _et sqq._; in "Much Ado About Nothing," 178; in "The Merchant of Venice," 179, 350; his dog Fussie, 180, 305-6 _et sqq._; his childhood, 182 _et sqq._; as stage manager, 188 _et sqq._; his best parts, 190; as Claude Melnotte, 194; as Eugene Aram, 195; as Charles I., 197, 350; as Shylock, 203-4; in "The Corsican Brothers," 212; in "The Cup," 213 _et sqq._; in "The Bells," 217; and Edwin Booth, 221 _et sqq._; in "Othello," 221 _et sqq._; his Romeo, 224; in "The Two Roses," 227; and Terriss, 246 _et sqq._; his "Much Ado About Nothing," 244 _et sqq._; in "Twelfth Night," 254; in "Olivia," 256 _et sqq._; in "Faust," 260 _et sqq._, 344; his address on "Four Actors," 263; in "Macaire," 270; in "Werner," 270-1; touring in America, 273; American criticism of his accent, 296-7; his early appearances in America, 280, 298; his cat, 311; other tours in America, 325 _et seq_.; in "Godefroi and Yolande," 326; produces "Macbeth," 328 _et sqq._; painted by Sargent, 331; produces "The Dead Heart," 334; produces "Ravenswood," 337; in "Henry VIII.," 338 _et sqq._; at the Devonshire House fancy dress ball, 339; in "King Lear," "Becket," "King Arthur," "Cymbeline," "Madame Sans-Gêne," "The Medicine Man," "Peter the Great," 343; in "Robespierre," 344; "Dante," 344, 350; his last illness, 360 _et sqq._; plays in "The Bells," for the last time, 365; plays in "Becket"; his death, 365; buried in Westminster Abbey, 366 _et sqq._; his death-mask, taken by Mr. Frampton, 371; his portraits, 371 _et sqq._; his portrait as Dubosc by Mr. Pryde, 375; at Mrs. Craigie's play, 391; and the Marionettes, 395 Irving, Laurence, 326, 337, 397 Irwin, May, 320 Jackson, Mrs., 58 Jefferson, Joe, 324-5 "John, King," 10, 29, 31 Johnson, Dr., 156 "Journeys End in Lovers' Meeting," 391 Kean, Charles, 10 _et sqq._, 21 _et sqq._, 136, 171, 211, 357 --Mrs. Charles, 11 _et sqq._, 20 _et sqq._, 29 _et sqq._, 203 --Edmund, 11-2, 33, 46, 192 Keeley, Mr. and Mrs., 23 --Louise, 56 Kelly, Charles (Mr. Wardell), 96, 150, 153, 164, 173, 176, 177, 211 Kembles, The, 6, 46 --Adelaide, 194 --Henry, 152, 176, 349 --Fanny, 192 _et sqq._ Kendal, W.H., 44, 114 _et sqq._, 165 --Mrs. _See_ Madge Robertson. "King Arthur," 343, 377, 383 Knowles, Sir J., 212 Labouchere, Henry, 76 --Mrs. _See_ Henrietta Hodson Lacy, Walter, 32, 171, 180 "Lady of Lyons, The," 107, 119, 191 Lamb, Charles, 128 Langtry, Mrs., 153 _et sqq._, 275 Lavender Sweep--Tom Taylor's house, 53, 68 _et sqq._, 123, 127 _et sqq._ "Lear, King," 24, 343, 396 Leathes, Edmund, 92 Leclercq, Carlotta, 20, 32 --Rose, 32, 253-4 Leighton, Lord, 117 Lepage, Bastien, 135 Leslie, Fred, 266, 396 Lewis, Mr. Arthur, 72, 73 Linden, Marie, 266 Little Holland House, 53, 58 _et sqq._ "Little Treasure, The," 51-2 Liverpool, 10-11 Lockwood, Mrs. Benoni, 286 Long, Edwin, 197 "Louis XI.," 136, 190, 297 Loveday, H.J., 180 _et sqq._, 299 Lowther, Miss Aimée, 288 Lucas, Seymour, 336, 377 Lyceum Theatre, The, 138, 141, 152 _et sqq._, 159-60 _et sqq._, 188 _et sqq._; _et passim_, 343 _et sqq._ "Lyons Mail, The," 190, 250-1 Lytton, Lord, 119-20, 153, 219 "Macaire," 270 _et sqq._ "Macbeth," 31, 191, 328 _et sqq._ Macdonald, George, 266 Mackail, J.W., 338 Mackaye, Steele, 128 Mackenzie, Sir Alexander, 268 --Dr. Morell, 102, 396 Macready, W.C., 9, 10, 28, 46, 192 "Madame Sans-Gêne," 343 "Man of Destiny, A," 345, 397 Manning, Cardinal, 396 Mario, 381-2 Martin, Lady (Helen Faucit), 206-7 Maurel, Victor, 381 Mazzini, 128 Mead, Tom, 172, 207, 210, 229, 244, 250 _et sqq._, 300, 305 "Medicine Man, The," 343 Meissonier, 75 Melba, Madame, 264, 381, 383 "Merchant of Venice, The," 24, 26, 110, 179, 180, 191, 204, 206, 208, 298 Meredith, George, 59 Merivale, Herman C., 336 "Merry Wives of Windsor," 114, 348 "Midsummer Night's Dream, A," 19, 21 _et sqq._ Millais, Sir J.E., 135 Millward, Miss, 245-6 Modjeska, 321 "Money," 119, 120-1, 165-6 Montagu, Mr., 72 Montgomery, Walter, 72 Moore, Albert, 76 --Frankfort, 235 Morris, Mrs. William, 69 "Much Ado About Nothing," 56, 72, 150, 177-8, 179, 191, 248 _et sqq._ Murray, Leigh, 248 "Nance Oldfield," 337 Naylor, Sydney, 38 Neilson, Adelaide, 72, 166 Nettleship, Mrs., 331, 377-8, 383 Nevill, Lady Dorothy, 381 Neville, Henry, 165 "New Men and Old Acres," 124, 146, 150, 152 New Queen's Theatre, 76, 80 _et sqq._ "Nice Quiet Day, A," 44 Nicholson, William, 352, 372, 375, 397 "Olivia," 150, 153 _et sqq._, 179, 188, 191, 256 Orpen, William, 372 O'Shaughnessy, 118 "Othello," 72, 175, 191, 221 _et sqq._ "Our Seaman," 94 Paderewski, I., 397 Partridge, Bernard, 372 Patti, Adelina, 381, 383 "Peter Pan," 388-9 "Peter the Great," 285, 343 Pinches, Dr., 139 Pinero, A.W., 173, 225, 248-9 "Pizarro," 29 Planché, J.R., 12, 28 Pollock, Sir Frederick, 117 --Lady, 117, 160-1, 203 Pounds, Courtice, 349 Prince of Wales's Theatre, 92, 108 _et sqq._, 131 _et sqq._, 145, 148-9 Princess's Theatre, 10, 19, 28, 32, 72, 357 Prinsep, Mrs., 58 Pritchard, Mrs., 156 Pryde, James, 372, 375, 397 "Queen Mary," Tennyson's, 133, 134 "Raising the Wind," 191 "Ravenswood," 337, 354, 392, 396 Reade, Charles, 54, 65, 68, 90 _et sqq._, 99 _et sqq._, 109, 112 _et sqq._, 121, 149, 273 --Mrs. Charles, 54 Reeves, Sims, 381 Rehan, Ada, 318 _et sqq._ Rhona, Madame de, 39 _et sqq._ "Richard II.," 24 "Richard III.," 9, 190, 329, 351, 360 "Rivals, The," 52, 55 Robertson, Graham, 376, 397 --Madge (Mrs. Kendal), 47, 91, 114 _et sqq._, 152, 320, 348 _et sqq._ --T., 109 "Robespierre," 344 Robson, 23 "Romeo and Juliet," 37-8, 179, 189, 191, 206 Rorke, Kate, 159 Rossetti, D.G., 69 _et sqq._ Rossi, 136 Rothenstein, William, 376, 397 Rousseau, 127 Royal Colosseum, The, 35 Royalty Theatre (Royal Soho), 39 _et sqq._ Ruskin, John, 264 Rutland, Duchess of, 375 Ryde, 19, 23, 34 _et sqq._, 39 Ryder, Mr., 30, 31 Saint-Gaudens, 283 _et sqq._ St. James's Theatre, 69, 71 Salvini, 122, 163, 222-3 Sargent, J.S., 135, 331-2, 371-2 "School for Scandal, The," 165 Schumann, Madame, 68 Scott, Sir Walter, 4, 150 Seward, Miss Olive, 291 Seymour, Mrs., 112 _et sqq._ _Shakespeare_: "Coriolanus," 189, 206, 398; "Cymbeline," 343, 377; "Hamlet," 107, 136-7, 166 _et sqq._, 191; "Henry VIII.," 24-5, 338 _et sqq._, 377; "John, King," 10, 29, 31; "Lear, King," 24, 343, 396; "Macbeth," 31, 191, 328 _et sqq._; "Merchant of Venice," 24, 26, 110, 179-80, 191, 204, 206, 208, 298, 350; "Merry Wives of Windsor," 114-5, 348; "Midsummer Night's Dream," 19, 21 _et sqq._, 51; "Much Ado About Nothing," 56, 72, 150, 177-8, 179, 191, 248 _et sqq._; "Othello," 72, 175, 191, 221 _et sqq._; "Richard II.," 24-5; "Richard III.," 9, 190, 329, 351, 360; "Romeo and Juliet," 37-8,179, 189, 191, 206; "Taming of the Shrew," 80, 107; "Twelfth Night," 191, 253; "Winter's Tale, A," 10, 15, _et sqq._, 355 Shaw, Byam, 372 --G. Bernard, 345 _et sqq._, 353, 397 --Mary, 324 Sheridan, R.B., 54 Siddons, Mrs., 6, 46 Skey, Mr., 20 Smith, Milly (Mrs. Thorn), 22 Somers, Mrs., 58 Sothern, E.A., 51-2 Spedding, James, 117, 122 Sterling, Madame Antoinette, 265-6 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 270, 284 "Still Waters Run Deep," 79 Stirling, Mrs., 229 _et sqq._, 261, 396 Stoker, Bram, 180-1-2 Stoker, Dr., 254-5 Stratford-on-Avon, 7, 339 Sue, Eugene, 41 Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 127, 330 Swinburne, A.C., 118 Taber, Robert, 285 Tamagno, Sig., 381 "Taming of the Shrew," 80, 107 Taylor, Tom, 53, 67 _et sqq._, 76, 95, 106, 121 _et sqq._, 152 --Mrs. Tom, 68, 121-2, 125 Teck, Princess Mary of, 265, 381 Telbin, 76 Tennyson, Lord, 16, 59, 60 _et sqq._, 141, 151, 212-3, 367, 396 --Lady, 60 --Hallam, 62, 212-3, 216 --Lionel, 62 Terriss, William, 32, 151, 153, 156 _et sqq._, 196, 211, 212, 231 _et sqq._, 247, 258, 300, 312, 397 Terry, B., Ellen Terry's father, 3, 4, 5, 9 _et sqq._, 18, 122-3, 179, 192 --Ben, Ellen Terry's brother, 8 --Mrs. B., Ellen Terry's mother, 3, 4, 8, 10, 48, 67, 396 --Charles, 8 --Daniel, 4 --Ellen, early recollections her birth, 3-5; acts at Stratford-on-Avon, 7; impersonates a mustard-pot, 8-9; her first appearance as Mamilius in "A Winter's Tale," 10, 15 _et sqq._; and Mrs. Charles Kean, _13 et sqq._; training in Shakespeare, _19 et sqq._; hurts her foot, 20; plays Puck, 20 _et sqq._, 33; learns about vowels, 21; plays in the Christmas pantomime for 1857, 22; learns to walk, plays in "Faust and Marguerite," "Merchant of Venice," "Richard II.," and "Henry VIII.," 24; plays in "If the Cap Fits," 26; and Macready, 28; plays in "Pizarro" and "King John," 29; in "A Drawing-room Entertainment," 32, 35 _et sqq._; her salary, 33; in "To Parents and Guardians," 34; at the Royal Soho Theatre, 39 _et sqq._; in "Attar Gull," 41-2; in "The Governor's Wife," 43; in "A Nice Quiet Day," 44; life in a stock company, 46 _et sqq._; at Bristol in Mr. Chute's company, 46 _et sqq._; as Cupid in "Endymion," 49; as Dictys in "Perseus and Andromeda," 49; at the Haymarket Theatre, 49; plays Titania at Bath, 51; in "The Little Treasure" and "The Rivals," 51-2, 55; meets Mr. G.F. Watts, and painted by him with Kate Terry as "The Sisters," 53; as Hero in "Much Ado About Nothing," 56, 72; in "The Belle's Stratagem," 56; in "Buckstone at Home," playing to royalty, 56; in "The American Cousin," 57; married to Mr. Watts, 58-9 _et sqq._; returns to the stage, 67; and the Tom Taylors, 68 _et sqq._, plays Desdemona, 72-3; visits Paris, 73 _et sqq.; plays Helen in "The Hunchback," 75; plays in "The Antipodes," 76; first appearance with Henry Irving, 76; plays in "The House of Darnley," 77; and Mrs. Wigan, 76 _et sqq._; plays in "The Double Marriage," 78; plays in "Still Waters Run Deep," 79; first impressions of Henry Irving, 79 _et sqq._; plays in "The Taming of the Shrew," 80; plays in "The Household Fairy," 82; withdraws from the stage, 83 _et sqq._; adventures in cooking, 86; her children, 86 _et sqq., 146 _et sqq._; and Charles Reade, 90 _et sqq._; returns to the stage, 91 _et sqq._; plays in "The Wandering Heir," 91 _et sqq._; engagement with the Bancrofts, 92; lives at Hampton Court, 93, 146; plays in Charles Reade's "Our Seamen," 94; and Charles Reade, 99 _et sqq._; plays in "The Lady of Lyons," 107, 119; engagement with the Bancrofts, plays Portia, 110 _et sqq._; performs in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," 1902, 114, 348 _et sqq._; playing to aesthetic audiences, 117; plays in "Money," 119, 120-1; and Tom Taylor, 121 _et sqq._; in "New Men and Old Acres," 124, 146, 152; and the Bancrofts, 131; as Mabel Vane, 131; as Blanche Hayes in "Ours," 132; goes to see Irving act, 133, 134, 137; and Irving's Hamlet, 136 _et sqq._; as Ophelia, 137-41; engagement with John Hare, 148 _et sqq._; her marriage with Mr. Wardell (Charles Kelly), 150; acts with him, 150 _et sqq._; in "Olivia," 150, 153_ et sqq._, 159 _et sqq._; in "Dora," 151; in "Brothers," 152; in "The House of Darnley," 153; a visit from Henry Irving, 161; Ellen Terry's description of him, 161 _et sqq._; on tour with Charles Kelly in "Dora" and "Iris," 164; in "The School for Scandal," 165; plays in "Money," 165; in Irving's "Hamlet," 166 _et sqq._; touring in the provinces, 174 _et sqq._; in "Butterfly," 175; in "Much Ado About Nothing," 177-8; her dress for "The Cup," 187; in plays at the Lyceum, 191; in "Charles I.," 197; and "Lewis Carroll," 201; as Portia, 201 _et sqq._, 209; in "Othello," 222-3 _et sqq._; her "Letters in Shakespeare's Plays," 226; as Juliet, 227 _et sqq._; and Terriss, 231; her opinion of Sarah Bernhardt, 236-7 _et sqq._; her Jubilee, 245; in "Much Ado About Nothing," 250 _et sqq._; in "The Lyons Mail," 250-1; in "Twelfth Night," 253; as Olivia, 256; in "Faust," 260 _et sqq._, 344; in "The Amber Heart," 271; First Tour in America, 273 _et sqq._; first appearance in America, 280-1; an "American" interview, 288-9; on colored servants, 291; some opinions on America, 294 _et sqq._; her first speech, 304-5; at Niagara, 311-12; other tours in America, 325 _et sqq._; in "Godefroi and Yolande," 326; her third marriage, 327; in "Macbeth," 328 _et sqq._; painted as Lady Macbeth by Sargent, 331-2, 371-2; plays in the "Dead Heart," 334; plays in "Ravenswood," 337; plays in "Nance Oldfield," 337 _et sqq._; in "Henry VIII.," 338; at Stratford-on-Avon, 339 et sqq._; in "King Lear," "Becket," "King Arthur," "Cymbeline," "Madame Sans-Gêne," "The Medicine Man," "Peter the Great," 343; in Robespierre, 344; in "Alice Sit-by-the-Fire," 345; in "Captain Brassbound's Conversion," 345; in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," 114, 348 _et sqq._; in Ibsen's "Vikings," at the Imperial Theatre, 351; produces "The Good Hope," 354; in "Ravenswood," 354; her last Shakespearean part, Hermione, 355; her Stage Jubilee, 355 _et sqq._; her theatre dresses, 377 _et sqq._, 383; in "Journeys End in Lovers' Meeting," 391; "Bits from her Diary," 394 _et sqq._; and the Marionettes, 395 --Eliza, 4 --Florence, 8, 83, 122, 125, 209, 257-8, 387 --Fred, 8, 83 --George, 8, 174-5 --Kate (Mrs. Arthur James Lewis), 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 18, 20, 24 _et sqq._, 29 _et sqq._, 35, 47, 48 _et sqq._, 67 --Marion, 8, 83, 125, 257 --Tom, 8, 126 Tetrazzini, 383 Thackeray, W.M., 314 _Times, The_, 18 Toole, J.L., 266, 270 "To Parents and Guardians," 34 Trebelli, Madame, 382 Tree, H. Beerbohm, 114, 271, 320, 348 _et sqq._ --Mrs., 349 "Twelfth Night," 191, 253 "Two Roses, The," 227 Tyars, Mr., 210, 252 Vanbrugh, Irene, 268 Vanbrugh, Violet (Mrs. Arthur Bourchier), 267 _et sqq._, 391 "Vanderdecken," 395 Verdi, 382 Victoria, Queen, 18, 57, 110, 397, 398 Victoria (Princess Royal), 18 "Vikings," Ibsen's, 351 Vining, George, 334 Wales, Princess of, 381 Walkley, A.B., 224 "Wandering Heir, The," 91 _et sqq._, 100, 109, 244, 273 Wardell, Charles. _See_ Charles Kelly Warner, Charles, 113 Watts, George Frederick, R.A., 53, 58 _et sqq._, 164 Watts-Dunton, T., 118 Webster, Benjamin, 165, 230, 334 Wenman, 300 "Werner," 270-1 Whistler, J.M., 129, 134-5, 199, 306 White, Stanford, 283 Wigan, Alfred, 76, 79, 211-2 --Mrs., 76 _et sqq._, 176 Wilde, Oscar, 118, 134-5, 198-9, 275 Williams, Harcourt, 337, 340 Wills, W.G., 150, 152, 336 Wilton, Miss Marie. _See_ Lady Bancroft Winchilsea, Lady, 177, 216 Winter, William, 158, 286 _et sqq._ "Winter's Tale, A," 10, 15 _et sqq._, 355 Wood, Arthur, 48 --Mrs. John, 91 Woodhouse, Mr., 37 _World, The_, 26 Wyndham, Charles, Sir, 76 _et sqq._ Yates, Edmund, 26 [Illustration: _From a photograph by Lewis Carroll_ MR. AND MRS. BENJAMIN TERRY The father and mother of Ellen Terry] [Illustration: CHARLES KEAN AND ELLEN TERRY IN 1856 As they appeared in "The Winter's Tale." This was Miss Terry's début on the stage.] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY IN 1856] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AT SIXTEEN] [Illustration: _Photograph by the Autotype Company, London_ "THE SISTERS" (KATE AND ELLEN TERRY) From the painting by George Frederick Watts] [Illustration: _From a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron_ ELLEN TERRY AT SEVENTEEN After her marriage to George Frederick Watts] [Illustration: GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS, R.A. From a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, made about the time of his marriage to Ellen Terry] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS HELEN IN "THE HUNCHBACK"] [Illustration: _Photograph by the London Stereoscopic Co._ HENRY IRVING AS JINGLE IN "MR. PICKWICK"] [Illustration: _Photograph by Braun, Clement & Co._ HEAD OF A YOUNG GIRL (ELLEN TERRY) From the painting by George Frederick Watts, in the collection of Alexander Henderson, Esq., M.P.] [Illustration: HENRY IRVING From a photograph in the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS PORTIA From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley] [Illustration: HENRY IRVING AS MATTHIAS IN "THE BELLS" The part in which Irving made his first appearance in America From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley] [Illustration: HENRY IRVING AS PHILIP OF SPAIN From the painting by Whistler] [Illustration: HENRY IRVING AS HAMLET From the statue by E. Onslow Ford, R.A., in the Guildhall of the City of London] [Illustration: _Photograph by the Vander Weyde Light_ LILY LANGTRY] [Illustration: WILLIAM TERRISS AS SQUIRE THORNHILL IN "OLIVIA"] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS OPHELIA From a photograph taken in 1878, in the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS BEATRICE From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley] [Illustration: SIR HENRY IRVING From the painting by Sir John Millais, Bart., P.R.A.] [Illustration: IRVING AS LOUIS XI] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS HENRIETTA MARIA] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS CAMMA IN "THE CUP"] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS IOLANTHE] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS LETITIA HARDY IN "THE BELLE'S STRATAGEM"] [Illustration: _Photograph by Sarony, in the collection of Robert Coster_ EDWIN THOMAS BOOTH] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS JULIET] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS BEATRICE From the collection of Miss Frances Johnston] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS BEATRICE From the collection of Miss Frances Johnston] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY'S FAVOURITE PHOTOGRAPH AS OLIVIA From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley] [Illustration: ELEANORA DUSE WITH LENBACH'S CHILD From the painting by Franz von Lenbach] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS MARGARET IN "FAUST"] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS ELLALINE IN "THE AMBER HEART" From the collection of Miss Frances Johnston] [Illustration: _From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley_ MISS ELLEN TERRY IN 1883 From a photograph taken at the time of her first appearance in America] [Illustration: THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Modeled by Augustus Saint-Gaudens for the St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh. Saint-Gaudens gave a cast of this portrait to Miss Terry's daughter, Edith Craig] [Illustration: MISS ELLEN TERRY From a snap-shot taken in the United States] [Illustration: SIR HENRY IRVING From a snap-shot taken in the United States] [Illustration: _Photographed by Miss Alice Boughton_ SARAH HOLLAND, ELLEN TERRY'S DRESSER] [Illustration: MISS ROSA CORDER From the painting by James McNeill Whistler] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY With her fox-terriers, Dummy and Fussie; from a photograph taken in 1889] [Illustration: _Photographed by T.R. Annan_ MISS ELLEN TERRY IN 1898 From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley] [Illustration: SIR HENRY IRVING From a portrait given by him to Miss Evelyn Smalley in 1896] [Illustration: MISS ELLEN TERRY From a photograph taken on her last tour in America] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS LADY MACBETH From the painting by Sargent, in the Tate Gallery, London] [Illustration: _Photographed by Crook, Edinburgh_ SIR HENRY IRVING From a photograph in the possession of Miss Evelyn Smalley] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS LUCY ASHTON IN "RAVENSWOOD"] [Illustration: HENRY IRVING AS CARDINAL WOLSEY IN "HENRY VIII" From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS NANCE OLDFIELD From a hitherto unpublished portrait] [Illustration: _From the collection of H. McM. Painter_ ELLEN TERRY AS KNIERTJE IN "THE GOOD HOPE" Taken on the beach at Swansea, Wales, in 1906, by Edward Craig.] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS IMOGEN Drawn by Alma-Tadema for Miss Terry's jubilee in 1906] [Illustration: _Photographed by H.H. Hay Cameron_ HENRY IRVING AS BECKET From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley] [Illustration: SIR HENRY IRVING From the painting by Jules Bastien-Lepage] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS ROSAMUND IN "BECKET" From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS GUINEVERE IN "KING ARTHUR" From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley] [Illustration: _From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley_ "OLIVIA" Drawn by Sir Edwin Abbey for Miss Terry's Jubilee Programme] [Illustration: MISS TERRY'S GARDEN AT WINCHELSEA From a photograph given by her to Miss Evelyn Smalley] [Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS HERMIONE IN "THE WINTER'S TALE" From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley] 
46358	----	MAX FARGUS _By_ OWEN JOHNSON _Author of_ "Arrows of the Almighty" and "In the Name of Liberty." [Illustration: Decoration] New York THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY UNION SQUARE NORTH _Copyright, 1906, by_ THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY Published, September, 1906 _The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A._ [Illustration: "ANY ONE UP THERE?" _Frontispiece_] CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE HOUSE OF THE TIN SAILOR 9 II. IN THE EYES OF THE LAW 25 III. THE FIRM OF GROLL AND BOFINGER 36 IV. THE LITTLE MAN OF THE SHOVEL HAT 61 V. BOFINGER LOSES HOPE 71 VI. MISS MORISSEY IS MISS VAUGHN 82 VII. THE COMPACT 97 VIII. THE DISCOVERER OF THE OYSTER 109 IX. THE MISANTHROPE IN LOVE 122 X. BOFINGER REPORTS 134 XI. MARRIAGE AS A BATTLEFIELD 145 XII. BOFINGER IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING 160 XIII. SHEILA RETREATS 172 XIV. AS A FLASH IN THE DARK 189 XV. THE IRONICAL MOMENT 203 XVI. CASTLES IN THE AIR 220 XVII. THE SEVEN YEARS 231 XVIII. FARGUS IS DEAD 251 XIX. ROUT AT EVERY POINT 262 XX. BOFINGER IN DESPAIR 278 XXI. SAMMAMON ACTS 293 EPILOGUE 302 ILLUSTRATIONS "ANY ONE UP THERE?" _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE "NO, NO, I WON'T SIGN!" 104 "AND HOW'S YOUR MAN, NELL?" 136 FOR MILE AFTER MILE HE SCURRIED THUS 196 "KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF!" 298 MAX FARGUS CHAPTER I THE HOUSE OF THE TIN SAILOR In a street, uniform and dedicated it would seem to commonplace existences, there was taking place, on a certain evening in March, 187-, a chapter in one of the most perplexing and mysterious of dramas which the scramble for wealth has known; whose denouement, unsuspected by neighbors and hidden from the press, holds the secret of the rise of one of the most forceful and brutal individualities that have dominated the city. Near Stuyvesant Square, which then presented in the waste of New York, a charming oasis, serene and calm with the quiet of Colonial dignity; in one of the side streets east of Second Avenue there extended an unbroken march of red brick houses, uniform as though homes were fashioned wholesale. The block was clear of the skirts of fashion which gathered about the square, yet rescued from the squalor into which the street suddenly sank as it passed east under the brutal yoke of the Elevated. It belonged to mediocre life, to those who earned two thousand a year, who paid a third of their income in rent, went rarely to the theater and always to church, where occasionally the children fetched the family beer in pail and pitcher; a street of one servant or none at all; one of those indistinct half-way stations of the city where fortune and misfortune, ascending and descending, pass; where one finds the small shopkeeper, the clerk who is rising next to the doctor whose patients have left him, or the lawyer who has missed his leap. Towards the east a saloon made the corner, while a few doors nearer a brothel displayed its red ensign, before which, in the daytime, the children romped without distinction. Already several doorways invited board and lodging, signs of the invasion which sooner or later would claim the street. A third of the way down the block, on the north side, there projected above a doorway the figure of a tin sailor, balancing two paddles which the breeze caused to revolve. Some one in whom the instinct of home was strong had placed it there in protest against the tyranny of uniformity, while succeeding tenants, grateful for the indication, had left it undisturbed. By eleven o'clock of the night on which this story opens, beside the distant red lantern of the brothel and a few top-story lights there was only the parlor window, under the odd weather-vane, whose bright edge cut into the blackness of the street. The shade, contrary to custom, was lowered, but at each approaching step the silhouette of a woman crossed it hurriedly in the direction of the door. Shortly after the bells of a dozen churches had cried the hour, a man coming from the west passed under the lamp-post, carrying a satchel and striding with that nervous intensity which the tumult of New York injects into the legs. As he perceived the lighted window his advance suddenly relaxed, until opposite the door, in default of a number, he began to seek in the shadow the presence of the creaking boatman. Then, noticing the silhouette on the shade, as though assured of his destination he sprang up the steps. Before he could seize the bell the door was thrown open and he passed into the house. A woman in the thirties, pretty, dressed in white, closed the door after him and remained weakly leaning against the wall, awaiting in agitation his first word. He gave her a nod, took a step, turned and looked at her sharply, then busied himself with his coat. Suddenly the woman stretched out her hand and cried, with the hopelessness of one for whom the question can bring but one answer: "Bofinger, what is it? Tell me!" "Oh, it's good news," he said laconically, placing his bag on the floor, "good enough." "He's alive--my husband is alive!" she stammered, her eyes filling with nervous, incredulous tears. "Alive!" he exclaimed, rising his voice to a shout, while his head jerked about. But in a moment the amazement gave way to unbelief and he continued, with the irony of one impatient with feminine hypocrisy, "Max Fargus, my dear Sheila, is dead; done for by bandits, accommodating little greasers, bless their souls!" He turned his back on her scornfully, busying himself with finding a hook in the dark hallway. The woman had received the news like a blow in the face. She swayed back against the door, her hands went to her lips, then to her throat as though to stifle a cry, and for a moment she seemed about to fall. Then suddenly her eyes returned in fear to the contemptuous back of the lawyer and she controlled herself by a violent effort, passing before him into the parlor to hide the agitation on her face. "Shed a few tears for the public, my dear," he called out, following her with the impertinence of a man who has a right to dispense with civilities. "You can afford them; for eventually you'll come into as tidy a fortune as was ever won in six months' time. But before we get down to business, Sheila my dear, I am starving; could you get me a bite." Seizing further opportunity to prepare herself for the encounter she passed into the dining-room, after bidding him be seated with a conventionality as marked as his affectation of intimacy. As he was settling in a chair he suddenly remembered his bag and returned to the vestibule. The parlor breathed an air of imitation and a striving for luxury, which after the first impression of ridicule had a certain note of pathos. Everything was of the factory, with the odor of the bargain-counter. One saw the decoration before the body, overwhelmed by a confused sense of plush and gilt, of reds and greens, of false cherubs and artificial flowers, of airy, bejeweled furniture for which, in the department stores, one imagines in vain a purchaser. In the medallion carpet all the colors fought, in the portieres the Byzantine wrestled with the Gothic, the Roman with the Greek. Before selecting a comfortable chair, Bofinger peeled off a pair of yellow gloves, looked about in indecision and placed them gingerly on an étagère. Next, whisking out a lilac handkerchief, he slapped vigorously the dust from his shoes. Then bringing forth a number of documents from the bag he smoothed them nervously on his knee, replaced them, and suddenly raised his head to follow the movements of the woman with a perplexed intensity, in which there was both irritation and anxiety. On the body of a dandy was set the head of a comedian. One and the other produced a like impression of sham. He was too solicitous of his clothes, too conscious of his manner. His collar was worn with discomfort, his checked tweed cutaway was too tight, his shoes too new; while, on establishing himself in his chair, he had thrown open his coat on a buckskin vest, heavily sealed, and a purple tie, held in four-in-hand by a fat horseshoe, with the ill-at-ease of the man who never quite familiarizes himself with his own audacity. The head had the prominent bones of the Yankee with a suggestion of the Italian in the sallowness of the complexion and the limpidity of the eyes, which when most gracious had a warning of treachery. He smiled much, but the smile was as constrained as his dress. Though not far in the thirties, his face was sown with lines, while at each thought flurries showed on the forehead and the cheeks, which from constant conscription had come to never remaining still. His ears were so small that they seemed almost a deformity. The nose, which was impressive and slightly pointed, told more of cunning than of sagacity; the mouth, open and pliant, was the mouth of the demagogue and the orator, which lets escape the torrent of phrases. One divined the man who played at will the tyrant or the servitor, who browbeat the timid and flattered the strong, who bellowed in a police court, but who tiptoed for a favor and could on occasion listen obsequiously. Finally his jet hair, which he enforced into parting in the middle and plastered to his scalp, in the back rose like the comb of a cockatoo. This rebellious movement to the repression of the front was significant of the whole man. When Mrs. Fargus returned with a tray all traces of emotion had vanished. Watching her, the lawyer voiced the amazement that had been in his mind from the first. "Sheila, you are astonishingly pretty to-night." "Really!" she said, and despite her alarm she sent a glance to the mirror. Over the loose white muslin, free at the throat and at the elbows, she wore a filmy scarf of red chiffon, subtle as a mist, which, encircling her shoulders, came to a loose knot and fell to her feet in a sanguine line. It was a striking effect which perplexed the eye, and threw in bold relief the waves of her black hair and the rather high color of her complexion; but emphasized in the general voluptuousness the surprising contrast of the eyes which, gray with a slight blue tinge, were cold, without passion or enticement. Intrigued at the contrast of her indifference with her first agitation, Bofinger was careful not to open the conversation, knowing that it is easier to penetrate the hypocrisy of an enforced question than to discover truth in a guarded answer. Mrs. Fargus, seeing at last that the situation compelled her to speak, rested her chin on her palm and said as though to herself: "So Fargus is dead!" "Eh, eh!" the lawyer cried instantly, shooting a sharp look, "a moment ago that overwhelmed you. But you are reconciled already, I suppose." She showed some confusion, but returned immediately: "Sure I'm shocked; poor fellow, after all he did love me." Displeased to find her self-possessed, the lawyer, not to waken her mistrust, seemed to accept her attitude by launching into a diatribe. "Yes, yes, cling to your respectability. You women are all the same. Virtue always! Do you do it to fool us or yourselves? Come now, you know that old Fargus's death is a stroke of luck! Why the deuce, then, don't you admit it?" "You don't understand," she said coldly. He searched her face with aroused curiosity, saying to himself, "No, my lady, you bet I don't." Then continuing his plan of battle he occupied himself with his plate. "You brought him, the body, back," she asked presently. "No," he answered irritably, and pushed back his plate with impatience. "Why not?" she asked, noticing his annoyance. "That is a long story and goes with the rest," he said rising. "Now, my dear, we'll get down to it." In the parlor, as he was taking a chair, he recollected himself and demanded with a jerk of his head: "Any one up there?" "I sent the girl away," she answered, "as you said." "Nevertheless," he replied slowly, "I guess I'll satisfy myself of that." "Yes, I supposed you would," she said with a shrug, "I left the gas on." The unlooked-for reply halted him. He vacillated a moment suspiciously, wondering whether to accept the situation, but, the shyster prevailing, he turned on his heel and went up the stairs. The woman smiled with the consciousness of a first advantage. But no sooner did the steps creak than she abandoned herself to a paroxysm of despair, twisting and turning the scarf in her hands until it cut them, as though to fight with the physical sting the agony of the mind. Yet in this violent return to her first agitation there was nothing to suggest grief for another; rather she seemed a prey to the torments of the gambler who, by a sudden upset, sees a fortune elude his fingers, dissipating in the air. She was, at the first glance, of that gay and fragile class who comprehend nothing but pleasure and see pleasure bounded only by the narrow limits of youth, into which they wish to compress all emotions, all desires, and all sensations; who pursue their ideals, palpitating and with bandaged eyes, and are consumed alike by their gratification and their hunger. On them weigh perhaps the heaviest the inequalities of society. Mixtures of desires and scruples, peculiarly American, swayed by conflicting ideals and prejudices, they wish to taste of the glittering world at any price except at the price of outward respectability. A young man attracted to Sheila Fargus by her facile beauty would have mistaken her for an adventuress or a saint. A man of the world, knowing her weakness and her fetishes, would have recognized that she might become either. As soon as the step of Bofinger was heard returning, she drew herself hastily together, but the lawyer, to further satisfy himself, passed into the kitchen. She rose, inhaled a long breath, extended her arms as though to shake off the rigidity of her emotion, and finding herself pale, pinched her cheeks. The lawyer returned too conscious of his tactical disadvantage to notice the traces of her agitation. "So you feel at rest now," she said maliciously. "My dear, take it as a tribute to you," he answered. "You had the air of truth but you might have been--" "More clever?" "Exactly," he said. "You can't be sure with a woman." To shut off further reference he cast himself back in his chair, brought his fingers to a cage, and demanded, as though from impulse, "Sheila, answer this--and carefully, for it is vital. Before Fargus left for Mexico did he show any suspicion?" "Why, no," she answered, too visibly surprised not to be telling the truth; "sure he didn't." "What, not the slightest suspicion of our relations?" he persisted. "Think well,--Fargus who was suspicion itself! And he didn't at some time suspect either you or me!" She reflected a moment, started to answer, and then shook her head. "No, no, not once." The hesitation was not lost on the lawyer, who continued: "But did he seem much in love?" "Why, he adored me!" she cried. She examined him curiously, noting again his restrained irritation, and asked, "What funny questions! Why do you ask them?" "On account of a number of suspicious circumstances," he answered irritably. "Well, you know Fargus; he was not an ordinary man. However--" He took up his documents, sifting them to count them. Then, at the moment when Sheila, preparing to listen, was off her guard, he launched the question he had held in reserve. "Did he tell you why he went to Mexico?" "Why," she said, "I suppose, on business." "He told you what business." "No." The two looked in each other's eyes. "She lies," thought the lawyer. "He knows I lie," she said to herself, palpitating, but she did not dare avert her glance. CHAPTER II IN THE EYES OF THE LAW To Sheila's surprise, instead of the browbeating she had learned to expect, she saw that for some incomprehensible reason it suited him to accept the denial. "He went to investigate a silver mine," he said after a moment. "A mine!" she exclaimed; and the knowledge that he had not challenged the lie gave to the exclamation a vehemence so well simulated that it left him somewhat shaken in his first impression. "That at least is my conviction," he said. "Now for the story." He spoke rapidly, recounting in trivial detail the various steps by which he had traced Fargus to Mexico and into the dangerous mining region of Durango. From time to time Sheila, who suffered under these numerous details, interrupted, saying: "Leave that." "Be more brief." "But tell me, tell me first of his death!" "Here we are," Bofinger said finally, after completing without deviation his methodical recital. "On the twenty-fifth day of January, the last day of his life, he quarreled with his attendants and dismissed them. Despite all warnings he then pushed on in the sole company of an Indian breed and arrived at two o'clock at the ranch of a Mexican, Manuel Stroba. Here is his affidavit, the importance of which you'll see later." As he prepared to read it, she snatched it from his hand, crying: "Afterward! Go on; oh, do go on!" "At three o'clock, Fargus left the ranch, intending to make a mission five miles away. The next morning Stroba, in passing through a defile six miles on, the scene of a dozen hold-ups, found the bodies of the two horses. The packs were scattered on the ground alongside of the coat and hat of Fargus stained with blood, in fact everything to indicate a violent conflict, except--except not the slightest trace of Fargus or the half-breed." She sprang up. "But then," she cried all in one breath, "he could be alive!" He looked at her, astonished again at her emotion. "If it happened yesterday--perhaps," he admitted; adding quickly, with the emphasis a man gives to a statement of which he is determined to be convinced, "but this happened on the twenty-sixth of January and we are now the end of March. If he was taken by bandits, it was for ransom, and if he lived they would have served notice immediately. No, Fargus is dead--dead without a doubt. For me, I suspect the half-breed. He could have murdered him, buried the body, shot the horses, and arranged things to make it seem as though he had shared the same fate. Unfortunately," he added moodily, "unfortunately there is no conceivable way of proving that most necessary fact!" The ominous significance of his last remark was lost on her. The flash of hope which had so mystified the lawyer disappeared in the dejection caused by his logic. There passed through her an immense breath, which like a tumultuous burst of wind seemed to whirl away a multitude of longings and desires. She remained silent, overwhelmed and convinced. "But you said there were suspicious circumstances," she said at last. "What circumstances?" "First," he replied, watching her, "why should he have taken such a journey, at such a risk?" She shook her head. "And the next?" "This. No one in the mines, not a soul, knew of his coming;--in fact, no one had ever heard of the existence of Max Fargus." This time she could not repress an exclamation. "So, that does surprise you," he said quickly. "Why, yes--of course," she admitted grudgingly. She rose, took a step, and reseated herself. "Still, if he were thinking of buying a mine, wouldn't it be like him to look it over first without being known. That might be it." Bofinger understood that she wished thus to convey to him her knowledge, but without appearing to notice the contradiction, he suddenly broke out: "What luck, what damnable luck! And I did everything, scoured the country, offered a dozen rewards for the body! No use, not a trace, not a single clew!" Sheila, who had expected to find him triumphant, recognized again with growing anxiety the note of disaster in his voice. "Something is wrong?" she said, leaning forward suddenly. He rose, gave her a glance as though to estimate the probabilities of her attitude, then, oblivious to her presence, suddenly allowed all his anger and defeat to appear. "It is inconceivable, monstrous, absurd! It is enough to make me superstitious! But that's the way it goes in this world! I surmount everything. I put to sleep the suspicions of a crazy man, play him till he marries you. Good! Everything succeeds like magic. He goes to Mexico on some tantrum and is killed. So far magnificent! Fargus out of the way, the property ours. Nothing could be better. One would say heaven had ordained it. And then--there comes an impossible, an absurd turn,--a preposterous, idiotic bit of luck, and we are stranded high and dry!" He flung himself down and, jarring the table with his fists, cried: "It is enough to make me believe in Providence!" "But what, what has happened?" she cried, now thoroughly alarmed. "Is there a will?" "True, you don't see it. You're not a lawyer," he said, stopping short. "Ah, the law is a beautiful thing, a marvelously beautiful thing, my dear! You are satisfied he is dead, aren't you?" She hesitated, looking at him, wondering if there might be a doubt. "Of course you are!" he said savagely. "So am I, so would any one,--not the shadow of a doubt. Well, my dear, under the beautiful and equitable system of common-law from which we receive justice, nothing of the sort is allowed. Fargus cannot die for seven years!" "I don't understand," she said helplessly. "Because there is no eye-witness of his death nor discovery of the body, the law, my dear, will not admit he is dead for seven years." "Ah!" She followed him anxiously, perceiving there was more than she comprehended. "My dear girl, don't you see what that means?" "No, not quite." "It means Fargus being alive, in the eye of the law,--for seven years you can neither marry nor touch"--he paused to give the full blow to his next words--"nor touch one cent of the property." "But that is terrible! That is not just!" she protested mechanically, still incapable of estimating the sentence. The blow was too crushing, and, before they overwhelm, the great misfortunes demand time. "And that is what you call justice!" "I, I call it law!" he said with a laugh. "Well--what can we do?" she asked, turning to him in frightened appeal. "Nothing--wait." "But I am his wife--do you mean that I--" "Cannot touch one cent!" "But I am his wife!" "Wedded to a corpse," he said with a shrug of his shoulders. "And I can neither marry nor inherit the property?" "Just that." "For seven years?" "Correct." "Seven years," she repeated, drawing her hand across her eyes. "It is hard." "Seven years!" she burst out, rising with a cry of despair that thrilled the lawyer. "But that is a lifetime!" "Eh, its long enough." "A lifetime!" she repeated more quietly, staring at him with blank eyes. "It's hard on me too," he said roughly. "On you!" she cried with a laugh such as despair alone can render horrible. "Oh, on you!" All at once he understood that the cry had been torn from her by the vision of the youth she saw expiring. "There now--" he said desperately. "After all, seven years are soon over, and half a million is something to wait for." "What good will it do me then!" she said, sinking into a chair and covering her face with her hands. Then seized with a convulsive sobbing, she cried, "No, no, it is too cruel. I won't do it, I won't, I can't!" "Come, don't be a fool," he said angrily, taking her by the shoulder. "Seven years, seven years!" she cried hysterically. "What good will it do me then, what do I care for money then! Oh, my youth, my youth! And this is the end of it. I knew it, I knew it! Fargus, you were not human! Fargus, you did this to punish me!" All at once she rose, shaken and frantic as a prophetess, and seizing her hair in her hands cried: "Oh, those years, I see them, those seven terrible years!" She began to wander about the room avoiding the lawyer, invoking always the youth which she seemed to see expiring before her, in the inexorable limits of nature. Bofinger, after a vain attempt to check her, remained helpless in the presence of such hysteria. A moment later he stole from the room, took his satchel and went to the door. There he stopped, waited, saw her convulsed with sobbing, frowned, raised his shoulders and slipped out. On the sidewalk the gods of suspicion, which ruled him, made him cry suddenly: "Hell! I am a fool to be so tender-hearted. She's been lyin' to me to hide some mystery. That was the time to put the screws on!" He hesitated, scanning the shade. From time to time a silhouette passed, frantic and suffering. This shadow, without life or body, representing nothing but an agony, horrified him. He turned and hastened away. CHAPTER III THE FIRM OF GROLL AND BOFINGER Six months previous to the events of the last chapter, four men were awaiting the opening of the afternoon session of the police court, in an office whose glass front displayed to the travel of Tenth Street the legend, HYMAN GROLL & ALONZO BOFINGER _Counselors-at-Law._ Opposite, the Jefferson Market Court loomed from the triangular island which is formed by the junction of Sixth and Greenwich Avenues, whose muddy torrents descend, roaring, to shake it from its foundation. The court is one of seven similar mouths, down which one may look aghast, into the cauldron at the depths of society. Vice nowhere has a more horrid aspect, for nowhere is it more mean and repulsive with the inequalities of suffering. Journalism, to strip the novice of all his illusions, sends him to this rude school, where he shortly learns not only that evil as well as good is inevitable and eternal, but that justice, in common with eternity, must be accepted in faith, for to explore its depths is to recoil in horror. To him, who knows the misery which bears the weight of the social superstructure, justice has the aspect of a seal over a living tomb, and the present building is a mockery. Where there should stand a waste of gray is a meaningless mass of red brick. In place of a stern, ponderous block of granite, unsoftened by ledge or cornice, crude with the crudity of man's justice to man, there rises in architectural legerdemain a jumble of turret and tower, as though variety and gaiety could be sought in this saddest and dreariest of the manifestations of society. Confronting the barred windows of the prison annex, from Sixth to Seventh Avenues, runs a short row of clingy, undersized houses, given over to the lawyers of the army of "Shysters," who, much as a ragpicker rakes a garbage heap, scrape from the petty crimes of the court a miserable income. The lawyer who succeeds has his runners whipping up the gutters and the alleys, his alliances suspected or open with the criminal and the police, while the miserable fee which results from this elaborate system must often be divided into three parts. The city, which does nothing in character and wantonly mingles loveliness and evil, the ridiculous and the tragic, has not marked the spot for avoidance but has forced the lawyers to dispute their foothold with half a dozen small shops. The marketers, who come to the grocery, basket on arm, share the sidewalk with the prostitute and the dive-keeper. At four o'clock each afternoon the street is momentarily flushed by the influx of children from a neighboring school, who also witness the reluctant entrances into these mysterious offices, where despair dominates beyond what the court itself can inflict. In this row, the offices of Groll & Bofinger were the most pretentious and immaculate. The glass front sparkled. The gilt announcement arrested the eye afar, while a green shade, raised half-way from the bottom, effectually screened the occupants and suggested a little of the mystery of the pawn-shop, which offers obscurity to the despair of its clients. An office boy, prematurely gone into long trousers, lolled in the doorway, finishing by means of a hat pin the butt of a cigar and searching the passers-by with something of the restlessness of the pointer, alert to flush a new client. Within the office the dwarfed ceiling and the frown of the opposite prison left a dim area by the window and sunk the rest into shadow. In the rear two dull glass doors threw a foggy interruption which filled with foreboding the imagination of the client who entered these confidential cabinets. Otherwise, the office was matter-of-fact and characterless; where one expected dust, confusion, and slouch, everything was clean, ordered and new, seeking an atmosphere of respectable mediocrity. This decent surface, nevertheless, after the first introduction never failed to impress the initiated with the treachery of an ambuscade. By the window Bofinger, with a leg over the table, was chatting with a reporter, Joseph LeBeau, who from nervousness was perched on the back of a chair, feet on the seat, gulping down frankfurter sandwiches from a paper bag. On the bench near by his comrade Ganzler, from a news agency, was stretched on his fat back, a law book under his shaved head, hat over his eyes, pretending to snatch the sleep he had squandered during the night. In the rear the figure of Groll, withdrawn from the conversation, presented nothing but an indistinct bulk. Ganzler was one of those rats of journalism which are as necessary to the press as the criminal confederate to the police, a bohemian to whom reporting was a destiny rather than a profession. He touched all men on the worst side, knew blackmailer and sharper by name, enjoyed their company and fell into their ways, did them favors when they turned up in the Police Court, was their intermediary with the force and, in return, ran without fear streets where a detective would not venture alone. He knew each subtle channel of graft about the court and won the confidence of all by dipping into the same ugly mess. He was coarse, acute, with a memory which never let slip a fact, made of iron, tricky, but too immersed in the life he reported to lend to the bare facts that inspiration which needs a far perspective. He was rated sure and indispensable. In journalism that is at once a guarantee and an epitaph. Joseph LeBeau had not been in the service long enough to disguise either his curiosity or his horror. He was a blonde young man remarkable for that height of forehead which the image of Walter Scott has impressed upon the memory, and which, while invariably betokening great imagination and intellectuality, appears alike in poets and casuists. In the brown eyes were perception and wit fed by an untiring curiosity of life. At twenty-five, unless dissipation has scarred it, the face of a man is a record yet to be written and the first marks are significant. From the nostrils to the corners of the mouth two furrows had already set, which when he smiled recalled that statue of Voltaire which, above the fret of the Boulevard St. Germain, mocks those who cannot see life is but a jest. Though rich, he dressed carelessly. The felt hat askew on his head was weather-worn. The blue tie straggled from its knot. The trousers sustained by a belt bagged from the hips to the boots which showed the white seam of a crack. Nevertheless, beside him, Bofinger in his immaculate trousers, stiff white vest, and planked shirt had the air of a countryman who dresses once a year for a wedding or a funeral, while there was about LeBeau an atmosphere of aristocratic certainty which gave the impression that his bohemianism was a mood into which, as into all things, he had ventured to sample the sensation. He had been listening vacantly to Bofinger, intent more on pursuing some train of thought of his own. At length he crumpled up the bag and asked with that impertinence which reporters use to arrive more directly to their ends: "Alonzo, did you ever in the course of your distinguished services happen to defend an honest man?" Bofinger feigned an air of reflection, then with a superior smile answered: "How many do you know?" The paper bag hurled at the waste basket fell back, spilling its crumbs. LeBeau without attention to the accident drew out a cigar, crossed his legs and began gravely: "How many do I know? You don't believe in the animal then? That phrase, my poor Bo, condemns you to mediocrity. Man, honesty is not a fixed virtue! Any one may become honest, at times, and for a variety of reasons." "Joseph, you alarm me," said Ganzler, stirring under his hat. "Alarm me and disturb my slumbers." "Honesty as a variety is an absolute necessity to man," continued LeBeau, half in raillery, half in conviction. "It stimulates our imagination and resuscitates our powers for sinning. We reserve it as a sort of moral bath; when we feel ourselves getting too black, why, we seek out an honest action and cleanse ourselves. It is a moral bath and a very slight application removes the stains. Blessed be our human nature!" "Joe, your view of human nature is horrible," interjected Ganzler. "Say, can't we trust any man to remain dishonest?" "Not even you, you old grafter," LeBeau said with a complimentary oath. "I pass that. But Bo?" continued Ganzler. Then answering his own question he added: "Bo, though, isn't to be relied on, he's not a steady character. Say Groll then--now go slow, you ain't going to tell us Groll's in any danger? I'd hate to think that." The impudence of journalists is unbounded. All is permitted them if only they say it with an air of insincerity. On their side they abuse their prerogative, as women avail themselves of banter to leave the sting of truth. As LeBeau remained silent and thoughtful, Bofinger rose and examined the street, while Ganzler turning to the wall grunted: "That was a poser." "If I am right," LeBeau said with deliberation. "Of the four of us, Groll is the surest to end honest and respectable." He added: "He's a conservative--the present is but a ladder." Ganzler and Bofinger, who saw in his gravity an exquisite irony, went off into riotous laughter, but LeBeau had the satisfaction of seeing, in the shadow, Groll abruptly raise his head. "A man is neither good nor bad, honest or dishonest," he continued, "but a sensitive organism that under different conditions responds to different impulses." "Hello, here's Flora," said Ganzler. A woman entered, young and with a memory of good looks. Bofinger rose and the two disappeared through one of the glass doors. "The man who succeeds," said LeBeau, speaking to Groll, "is he who studies the conditions that may turn an honest man to dishonesty, and those that bring a rascal to repentance. The important thing is not to fix the price of each man. Not at all. The thing is to use rogues not as rogues, but as rogues in whom is the fatal impulse to honesty." "Hello, that's an idea," said Ganzler. The door of the cabinet creaked and Bofinger, sticking out his head, said with an oath: "Same story--she wants more time!" Groll without a word let fall his fist; Bofinger, interpreting the refusal, disappeared. A cry was heard. The door shut, LeBeau resumed. "That's what Bofinger doesn't see, and yet it is the obstacle he ought always to be dreading. Nothing more dangerous than honesty. Why, it is often nothing but an obstinate revulsion of pride in a man who for a whim or a moment resents being counted on as a rascal. That is temperamental honesty, liable at any moment to trip up a case. Then, a man can become honest by terror, or anger, or superstition, or sheer caprice. The truth is, in these days, you can count on no man's dishonesty. So confident am I of this beautiful truth that I prophesy Bo will end a shyster lawyer in a shyster court." The woman reappeared, trailed by Bofinger, who shrugged his shoulders at her sullen departure. "No use, Flora," broke in Ganzler, impudently, "you dress too well for that game. Pay and be protected. The system is better than another one we know." The girl stopped for a furious retort, in one of those passions which shake the existence of the outcast and bring a hundred times into their lives the lust of murder. Then compressing her lips she wheeled and bolted out. Ganzler laughed uneasily; LeBeau, forgetting his theme, watched her retreat. From behind, she showed a pleasing figure and the movements of a young girl. "Take the other side," Bofinger said, returning to his perch. "Every man is more or less dishonest. Admit that proposition." "It is debatable," said LeBeau, whose eyes still followed the woman. "We graft or allow grafting--and what's the difference?" Bofinger pursued contemptuously. "A man who touches society the way we do has got no illusions I can tell you. Do you know how I could live if I wanted to--without its costing me a cent? Talk to me of your honesty! For lodging I could put up at a dozen hotels who want protection. For meals there are restaurants by the hundred who don't want to be looked into too closely. Stand in with the force and anything is yours." "You said clothes?" inquired Ganzler with particular interest. "Well, it ain't so hard to find a sweat shop that's breaking the law, is it?" Bofinger replied with a smile. "Liquor and tobacco are too easy. Theaters that break the rule of the fire department will keep you amused. Pawnshops on the queer will give you a fine assortment of jewelry, and you can get a hack when you want it from any night hawk who expects to get into court." "Correct," said Ganzler, with an approving nod, "and convincing." "Fact is, there is pretty nearly nothing you couldn't get served up to you," Bofinger ended, with too much pride for either to misunderstand it. "Nothing--because you can always find some one who is grafting in a large or small way. Hell, how absurd justice is! Take this case just now. If adultery is a crime, why don't they prosecute a woman of the world in a divorce scandal instead of some miserable brute who lives by selling herself for a few little dollars!" Ganzler admired the fine flush of indignation and nodded wisely. LeBeau, remembering the scene with Flora, smiled ironically. "A poor man calls in a lawyer to defend him," continued Bofinger, whom the thought of injustice aroused. "A rich man's lawyer plans for him how to escape arrest. What's the difference? A million, that's all! With a million anything is respectable." "It is," took up LeBeau, in haste to air his opinions on that topic. "Why? With a million direct responsibility ceases. You no longer need to steal in person, you break laws by proxy. Justice does not yet recognize indirect responsibility. A million--there's our standard! Make it anyway. So long as the track is masked society will judge you only by the way you use it. At the bottom of all is this," he summed up, pulling out his watch: "The world abhors petty sinning. Take a ten-dollar bribe, you are despicable. Distribute on election day one hundred thousand dollars for bribery and you are a leader of men. Take one life--murder! Sacrifice a thousand lives for a commercial advantage, you are a captain of industry! Crime is in the motive and the scale. When a man steals from hunger or kills for revenge the motive is evident and the guilt apparent. But for ambition, for fame, for supremacy--the motive is human and grandiose. The grand scale precludes the crime! You are right, Bo, you are right there. The million's everything!" "Yes," Bofinger said pensively, whistling on his fingers, "but to get that first essential million you've got to run some risks." "Otherwise life would be too easy," LeBeau said with a smile. "The only difficulty to-day is, as you say, to get the first million." "It is all luck," Bofinger said moodily, and he remained silent, his gaze plunged into the street. LeBeau scrutinized him, smiling at the appetite he had awakened, seeing the man in the bare, and wondering if there were any crime before which such a nature would retreat, were it once a question of the opportunity he coveted. He woke his companion, who jumped up rubbing his eyes, asking: "Well, are you through with your honest man?" "True, we had forgotten him," LeBeau said, glancing at Bofinger. "Bo, good news!" Ganzler cried, looking through the window. "I see a client." Across the street a little man, clad in black from a shovel hat to a cloak which he carried slung over his shoulder, was examining undecidedly the row of lawyers' offices. The shoulders, which were unusually broad, so diminished his size that they gave him the look of a dwarf. It was an odd figure, incongruous in the street, with an air of belonging to the traditions of the stage. The two reporters, amusing themselves at his expense, decided successively that he was a bandit, a barber, an actor, a magician, a poet, and an engraver of tombstones. "There he goes," cried Ganzler. "He's frightened off. He's guilty!" "Maybe it was the honest man after all," said LeBeau, laughing. "Only honesty looks guilty nowadays. Too bad, that was your chance. Beware the honest man, though!" The two reporters departed for the court after helping themselves to cigars. Immediately from the back of the room a voice cried peremptorily: "Alonzo, you talk too damn much!" "What of it?" Bofinger said, wincing under his chief's reproof. "I only told them what they knew." "Say nothing and you risk nothing." Extricating himself from his seat Groll moved into the light, discovering the shoulders of a hunchback, a massive bust on legs which were weak, ill-matched, and pitiful. The heavy head fell from the high cheekbones and the yellowish eyes, which bulged like marbles, along the bold and fleshy nose to a lengthened jaw where the folded lips adhered to each other as though to repress all indiscreet speech. It was an unusual face, vacuous and immobile, that seemed to contain instead of blood some fishy fluid, which left it incapable of emotion. On settling into his seat his arms sprawled over the desk, bracing the weight of the head and shoulders on the elbows, while from the mass the eyes, vacant and magnetic, conveyed to Bofinger for the thousandth time the impression of an immense spider in the center of its web. Physical deformity has an extreme effect on human nature. Either it produces an heroic and resigned optimism, or it forms, by divesting them of the passions which shackle men, characters of implacable selfishness, who are strong because they were born weak and know no pity because nature has shown them none. Calculating and self-absorbed, Groll was yet not of those gamblers who, staking all at each leap, infrequently arrive through desire and infatuated confidence to heights seemingly beyond their force. He moved slowly to his end, with that unhuman oriental patience which, allied to the imagination of the American, forms in its rare conjunction characters that death alone can thwart. He knew how to bide his time without, as commonly occurs, the waiting consuming him. At thirty-eight, age when the American reckons his life a success or a failure, he had not lost a whit of his complacency. He had never known youth, he had not therefore been disturbed by its pangs for instant preeminence. With all that he was approaching forty a shyster lawyer, living on the blackmail he shared with the police. The future did not seem to hold anything further. Nevertheless, he had forced a career even out of this slough of petty misery. He had begun by examining carefully the problem of vice and the law, asking himself anxiously if the system of blackmail was transitory. He soon became convinced that so long as public sentiment would not admit that vice exists and legalize it, vice must exist through corruption. He then conceived an audacious plan, which was no less than to unite under one system, with himself as the head, all the traffic in blackmail which then filtered through a thousand intersecting channels. The man who could achieve such an organization, he saw would dominate the city so long as he was content to remain obscure. Towards this end he had moved irresistibly, picking his associates and his agents, biding only the moment when his fortune would permit him to launch the system on a grand scale. So well had he locked up in his own breast the secret of this gigantic plan that Bofinger himself did not suspect it. In character he was frugal, temperate, and peaceful, without vices or distractions, qualities which in another man would have been virtues, so strangely does the controlling motive determine betwixt virtue and vice. Born three centuries ago he might have been a bigot, pursuing religion with the same fanaticism which he brought to the conquest of his present design. Bofinger continuing to defend himself, Groll interrupted decisively: "One is never strong enough to be confident. Only a fool feels secure. Talk to Ganzler who is one of us--but not to LeBeau, who for a sensation might write us up and bring everything tumbling about our ears! Also don't show your hand! Play close to your chest." He stopped, considered his associate, and perceiving the reproof was felt, added: "Now for business. What did they say at that new joint in Eighteenth Street?" Bofinger, who had taken his scolding like a guilty schoolboy, hastened gratefully to the opening, saying: "They won't give up a cent." "Did you make clear our pull?" "Yes." "What, do they think they can operate in this district for nothing?" "That seems to be it." "We'll have it raided to-night," Groll said thoughtfully but without irritation. "We must make an example. It will have a good effect. Besides Flaherty tells me he's got to pull off something quick." He drummed on the desk, while Bofinger, seeing he had something in mind, waited. "Alonzo, we've been working on a wrong principle," he said suddenly. "This idea of being lenient with the women will bring us in trouble. We must be paid promptly and cut out the excuses. That's what gets them excited, and when they get worked up they are liable to do anything. When they understand they must pay up they'll take it as a matter of course. Putting it off gets them to brooding over their wrongs. After this, no more putting off. Otherwise run them in the next day and send them up to the Island. Two or three examples will straighten things out. Make it easier for us and easier for them." "Shall I warn them?" Bofinger asked. "No," he said after a moment. "The example will be better if you don't. Send a couple up." For a few minutes he gave directions in the same mild, unvarying voice, and then departed, each step paid by an effort. Bofinger with a remainder of his irritation threw himself into a chair. The discussion with LeBeau had touched him too closely to be soon dismissed. The reporter had not been mistaken in his estimate. Bofinger was a man constantly in revolt against his condition, ready to risk anything for the opportunity to rise. But he wanted fortune, as the gambler seeks it, in a day, on some marvelous cast. This conversation with LeBeau, who had all he coveted and seemed to disdain it, left him in a fury. He recapitulated in his mind a dozen schemes of blackmail and sharp practise, rejecting each as inadequate and petty. "It's all luck," he said almost aloud. "I'd like to be a woman. It's only a woman can jump from anywhere. If I only had their chance!" In the midst of this reverie, the door was suddenly thrown open without the ceremony of a knock, and a curt voice demanded: "Be this Mr. Groll?" The lawyer, shocked out of his dreaming, looked up and recognized the singular figure of the little man in the shovel hat. CHAPTER IV THE LITTLE MAN OF THE SHOVEL HAT The newcomer stood rigidly. In the dimness of the office he had the look of a musty portrait where the artist has allowed the body from the shoulders to sink into obscurity, the better to emphasize the chalkiness of the face. "I am Mr. Bofinger," the lawyer said. "What can I do for you?" The client, without answer, remained blinking at the lawyer. The clothes were shabby, of a style unfamiliar. The trousers bulged and wrinkled like sails in the wind. In the coat the elbows were polished and the cuffs eaten away. The narrow, ill-revealed eyes had all the cunning of the valet, spying the details that escape another, but with the insolence of the man who is accustomed to give command. The cast of countenance was Eastern, dominated about the thick lips by a set scowl of mistrust, which struck the lawyer at once, as well as the almost fanatic intensity of his gaze. The feet, the knuckles, and the nostrils, as in abnormal or extreme natures, were pronounced. He remained at the doorway with undisguised interest, examining the unfamiliar surroundings with the defiance of one prejudiced against the profession. Bofinger, who divided humanity into those who could pay and those who could not, satisfied on this score despite the poverty of the habiliment, rose and said: "Come in, take a seat." The visitor with a start removed his hat, discovering a fleeing forehead matted with coarse dark hair, and sliding forward ten feet fell into a chair. Standing his hands had obtruded, seated he sought to conceal his feet. Then suddenly, speaking from the corner of his mouth, he said: "You're rather young." "I have been fortunate," Bofinger said modestly, concealing his astonishment at this opening, by pretending to discover a tribute. "Close-mouthed?" "As an undertaker." "Honest?" "What, sir!" "And honest?" the little man repeated, seizing a knee in either hand and looking him stubbornly in countenance. With unfeigned astonishment, Bofinger shot to his feet, glared down a moment at the cynical, unrelenting scrutiny; then, with a bob of his head, wheeled, returned to his desk and said softly as he took up his paper: "Kindly close the door--after you!" There was a moment's interval, while each watched the other, the lawyer fearing the success of his manoeuver, the client weighing its sincerity as he balanced on his chair and blinked in indecision. All at once he jerked upright, flung aside his shock of hair and blurted: "Mr. Bofinger--" "No, sir, I beg you," the lawyer cut in, elevating two fingers. "Such questions cannot be addressed to reputable members of my profession--" "I want to say--" "No sir, it is useless. If I don't produce in you the necessary impression of confidence, then there ain't no use in prolonging--there ain't no use, I say--" "Say, I take that back," the other interrupted decisively. Convinced that the question had been designed to test him, Bofinger allowed a requisite interval to salve his dignity, before replying: "You are, I see, unfamiliar with the etiquette of attorney and client. For that reason and because I see your business is of a kind to alarm you I'll pass over what you have just said. But I insist that without further delay" (here he consulted his watch) "you come to the matter in point, Mr. ----" The little man shook his head nervously. "You don't wish to give your name?" "I don't." "That ain't unusual," Bofinger said graciously. "Well, how can I help you?" Thus faced, the client said carefully: "It is a delicate matter." At this trite introduction, Bofinger could not restrain a certain disappointed loosening of his body. He crossed his legs, caged his fingers and, meditating on the ceiling, volunteered: "A woman?" "Yes." The visitor shifted in his seat, pulling at the knees of his trousers. Bofinger repressed a smile and a yawn. "You couldn't have gotten into better hands," he said in sing-song. "Are there any letters? Does she hold documentary evidence?" "No--no!" "Good. Divorce or breach of promise?" "What are you talking about?" his client said angrily. "I want information." "I see," Bofinger said, resuming the scent, "and very stupid of me. Information preparatory to marriage, ain't it?" "Certainly not!" Bofinger, nettled at his insuccess, said grandly: "If you will elucidate." "It is an adoption." The manner and the answer revived all the lawyer's curiosity. "You said--" "Adoption!" snapped the little man with evident ill humor. "Very good. The case now is clear. With a view to adoption, I am to investigate the past life and present surroundings of the child." "Yes." "It is a girl?" "A woman--a young woman." At this answer the lawyer experienced an extraordinary quickening of interest that finally dispelled any fear of a commonplace case. This time he did not force a repetition of the essential statement, but adopting a matter-of-fact tone, poised a pencil and asked: "What is the name?" "Vaughn--Sheila Vaughn." "And the address?" "I don't know." Bofinger raised his head in astonishment. "But you know her--have met her." His client, with a nod, suddenly abandoned his reticence and as though now he had come head high into the matter, there was nothing for it but to strike out boldly, began imperiously: "I'm to meet her at four o'clock in Washington Square, northeast corner. You be there, follow her after I go, and get her address. Find out everything about her, where she comes from, where she lives, what she does." "One moment," Bofinger said suddenly. "How long have you known her?" The little man frowned, looked at him in disapproval of the question, and finally replied: "Four months." "Good." "Look here, Mr. Bofinger, I want to know everything, complete. You know what that means?" "Certainly." The chair grated, the little man snapped to his feet, clapping down his hat. "And see here. I forbid--that is, I want you to see that she don't suspect what's going on, not for a second. You hear--she's not to know I'm looking her up." "That goes without saying. Now can I have a few days? Say--three from now. Where do you want me to report, Mr. ----" "Mr. Bofinger," he cried angrily, "you ain't going to catch me with your lawyer's tricks. You thought you'd worm out of me where I lived, didn't you?" He stopped, glared at Bofinger and then cried: "Do you know what I think? I think you're nothing but a pettifogging lawyer--that there ain't no partner, and I'm no better'n a fool to talk to you. What do you say to that?" "That I'm dealing with a lunatic!" Bofinger said brusquely. "I've had enough of you. Take your case somewhere else!" "No, no," he answered chuckling. He remained shifting from foot to foot, swinging his big hands and blinking at the lawyer, who, from long contact with rascals, presented an offended innocence on the most honest countenance imaginable. At the end of a moment, reassured or not, the little man ground on his heel, squared his shoulders, and without so much as a word shuffled away. Bofinger, with a few rapid steps, flung out the back passage into a sort of blind alley, choked with a damp display of mounting wash, hailed Toby the office boy from a knot of young gamblers, and returning showed him through the window the retreating figure of his late client. "Name and address. Be quick and be damned careful." He spun a half dollar in the air, adding, "Waiting for you, Toby, if you're back within an hour." "I'm on," Toby answered. He drew in a whistle, blinked one eye affectionately at the silver and disappeared like a shadow, calling back, "Put it on the ice, boss!" Bofinger stood a moment, rubbing his chin. Then with a grin he dropped into his chair, saying contemptuously: "An adoption!" CHAPTER V BOFINGER LOSES HOPE Bofinger, with his instinct for blackmail, already saw clearly into the case. A misanthrope in love, who, to conceal his purpose, hid his identity and feigned to be considering an adoption; and a woman who, on her side, refused to reveal her address presented to him the familiar conjunction of senility and the adventuress. When he had asked his client how long he had known Sheila Vaughn he had had a motive. To him, the vital issue was to learn whether this shabby, odd client had means. Confident that the woman must have already secured that information, when he learned that the intimacy had already existed four months he felt certain that if she had played so carefully it was for no mean stake. To his keen sense of his own opportunities the eccentric character of his client, all suspicion and mistrustful cunning, provoked a professional eagerness to meet and dupe so unusual an antagonist. He did not formulate a plan yet, but he had that strange, excited premonition of success, which, though it deceive a hundred times, gains always with the temperament of the gambler an easy credence. He went to the court-room, where he transacted some business, and towards four o'clock hastened back to the office. To his great irritation Toby was nowhere to be seen, but on going to his desk he discovered a note on which was scrawled: MAX FARGUS _The Oyster House Man._ Bofinger pounced upon it with a cry of exultation. Max Fargus, proprietor of half a dozen oyster houses, was a character known to the city by a score of anecdotes of eccentricity and greed. He crushed the paper in his hand and swung out triumphantly. "Fargus is worth half a million, if a cent," he said joyfully. "What luck, eh! The woman is playing for marriage of course. Bo, I begin to see where you come in!" As he hastened towards the Square, dodging amid the filth of Sixth Avenue, he amused himself by sketching the portrait of the woman as he imagined her. "Yes, sure, its a question of marriage," he thought. "It must be if she has played as close as that for four months. She's a clever one, I bet, an old hand. I wonder if I know her." The Square suddenly discovered itself, that smiling barrier which interposes between the horrors of Third Street, a locality so foul that a conflagration alone could cleanse it, and the thoughtless royal avenue which digs its roots here and stretches upward to flower like a royal palm in the luxuriance of Central Park. At this period Washington Square had not fallen before the vandal march of business, though already the invaders showed their menacing front above the roofs. To-day nothing remains of that glory save the north side, which, in its red and white uniforms, makes face with solid front to the enemy from whom it expects nothing but obliteration. "Now for it," thought Bofinger as he entered the grateful shades which the foliage, nowhere more generous, lavished there. On a bench at the foot of a sycamore he had perceived the somber note of his odd client and the green flush of a dress. Slackening he came towards them, his eyes eagerly on the woman. He had expected a young girl, he found a woman in the thirties, but fresh and defying an exact estimate. A simple bonnet, with border of lace, which drooped like petals, effectually concealed her face. The dress of a peculiar shade of May-green silk showed a neck as modest as that of a young girl, and draped itself demurely and indefinitely. She was busy over some embroidery, but at the moment of his passing the needle was idle, and with her eyes on the ground she was pondering on some remark of her companion. Everything spoke of the natural--the innocence and prudery of her pose, the gradual motion of her body, the artless quiet of her attention; of the coquette or the actress--not a sign. Bofinger caught this rapid impression as one seizes the flight of a star. He passed, his hopes sank. His anger rose and he cried with an oath: "Hell, what luck--she's honest!" It was the one obstacle that never failed to upset his temper. To be defeated by rascality, by a clever turn of chicanery, never disturbed him--that was legitimate. But honesty, in his philosophy, was such a colossal absurdity that before it he never could control his impatience. So it was with a sense of having been defrauded that he repeated: "Damn the luck, she _seems_ honest." He sat down at some distance, yet near enough to wait anxiously a better look. In a moment the woman lifted her head and he saw her face as she nodded deferentially to her companion. The black hair was divided in the middle and fell over the temples in the fashion of a thousand madonnas. He thought that she had even a look of stupidity. She put the embroidery into a bag and the movements of her arm was stiff, lacking grace, the gestures of a woman without coquetry. "Sold again!" Bofinger murmured, overcome by such evidence. "Perhaps after all I jumped too soon. The old boy is crazy enough to adopt her." With an abrupt leave-taking, Fargus arose and departed eastward. The woman without lightness or geniality had accepted his bow, bobbing her head and, betraying her inexperience by a slight diffident start, reseated herself with embarrassment. Presently she stood up, smoothed her skirt, tucked her bag under her arm and moved off, clutching her parasol by the waist. "Oh, a woman who walks like that," Bofinger said to himself as he followed her up Fifth Avenue, "must be virtuous. She's the honest working girl supporting an invalid mother and all that. It's true, such things do happen. Ah, we turn east now." She had disappeared around the corner of Twelfth Street. Without distrust, Bofinger followed so negligently that on rounding the corner he ran full upon her waiting in ambush. The surprise made him lose his self-possession; he passed hurriedly, without daring to meet her glance. But to his immense relief he saw she had not even noticed him and divined that it was for Fargus alone that she took such precautions. "Eh, eh! What does that mean?" he said joyfully to himself. But this new hope gradually flickered out, as he considered logically: "After all, she has a right to hide where she lives. Besides, if she were an adventuress, she would have suspected me. That's true, that proves nothing." He continued eastward and turned north up Irving Place, perceiving to his satisfaction that she would do the same. At Fourteenth Street he covered himself in the crowd, while the woman taking the other side went west to Seventh Avenue, again starting north. Seeing that she no longer feared pursuit Bofinger approached nearer. At one crossing, to avoid a puddle she caught up her skirts in either hand, the parasol projecting awkwardly. "She walks like a country school ma'am, going to school in rubber boots!" he thought savagely, finding relief, as his irritation grew, in ridiculing the woman. "How long is she going to keep me trotting after her, I wonder?" As though in answer to his question she turned west and suddenly mounted the steps of a brown stone front close to the southern corner. "Respectable, of course!" Bofinger ejaculated, passing and marking the number. He went to Eighth Avenue, descended a block and returned eastward. The respectability of the house completed his dejection, which showed itself in the listless drag of his feet. All at once as he neared Seventh Avenue again his indifferent glance, wandering along the street, was stopped by the peculiar actions of a woman in a light duster, who was holding the door across her and spying the street with caution. The veil which fell from a saucy toque of light blue straw was thick enough to hide her features. With only a languid amusement Bofinger was watching her when, in stepping from the vestibule, the woman caught her duster on the door. The next moment she snatched it around her, but in the second's interval Bofinger beheld a flash of green, of that peculiar May-green silk which a half an hour before had first attracted his eye to the companion of Max Fargus. Her alarm, the dress so carefully concealed, the position of the house back to back with the one she had entered, revealed the whole stratagem. A great thankfulness welled up in him, and like all men whom a flip of fortune redeems, he received the turn exultingly, as an evidence that he might count on illimitable favors. He laughed with an easy heart at the simplicity of the trick which had deceived him, and as he followed her he laughed anew at the transformation of the woman. Everything was changed. The skirts hidden under the duster were yet gathered about her in a way to suggest the slender lines of the body. She walked daintily, placing her feet with care. Even to the alert poise of the head and the rapid grace of her movement, everything breathed an air of coquetry and art. Bofinger, lost in this analysis, continued to laugh, sharing emotion between railing at his stupidity and admiration for the actress who had not neglected a single detail. He thought of the awkward start she had made when Fargus had left, and of the way she had reminded him of the country woman stalking in rubber boots, and recalling such details he followed joyously, scenting success with such an ally. After a few blocks she went west and entered a house, letting herself in with a key. "Hello, I know that place," Bofinger said to himself, recognizing the boarding-house as a haven of improvident actors. "So Miss Vaughn is of the stage. I can believe it." Then he added with decision: "What a treasure, eh! She's clever enough to hoodwink a dozen Farguses!" The exact meaning of this sentiment was, no doubt, that a woman who could deceive him must be capable of great things. CHAPTER VI MISS MORISSEY IS MISS VAUGHN At the end of half an hour, which he gave to a careful consideration of his plans, Bofinger returned to the boarding-house. A plot of burned and scrawny grass served as a front lawn. A cast-iron nymph, relic of prosperity, stained and chipped, its head-dress holding the straws of an old nest, gave the note to the place and prophesied the interior. At his pull, the loose knob, as though unaccustomed to use, came forth so far that he feared he had wrenched it bodily out, before a faint twinkle from within persisted to his ears. Three times he repeated this operation, before a shadow on the glass announced a slow relief. A frail old woman, moving tediously, ushered him into the hall, shading her weak eyes while she awaited his errand. Bofinger, drawing forth his pocketbook, selected a business card, discarded that for one that bore his name alone, and finally, after a moment's consideration, replaced the pocketbook and said: "Just tell the lady who came in a half an hour ago that a gentleman wants to speak to her." "Ain't ye goin' to send no name?" the woman asked in dull astonishment. "It is not necessary." "And ye don't know her well?" "I don't." "I guess, then, I've got to climb up," she answered wearily. "I was hopin' you might go up. What did ye say her name was?" "The lady who came in a while ago; she wore a light duster." "Oh, Miss Morissey--ye want to see her, do ye?" "That's it, Miss Morissey--please." "She wouldn't hear if I called. She's on the third," she answered, with a sigh and a look of reproach. "Ye can sit down there--" She took a step but turned with a sudden solicitude. "Don't bear too hard." Mindful of the caution Bofinger balanced gingerly on the shaky chair, watching the landlady laboring up the stairs, a step at a time, childish fashion. An air of dinginess and neglect pervaded the hall and the distant dining-room. In the carpets were frayed shallows, on the banisters two spindles diverged from the line. The blistered plaster was dropping from the ceiling, while on the wall the grimy, green paper had regions of musky yellow. Curtains and shutters rigidly excluded the daylight, while everywhere the carpeted silence spread the feeling of a cemetery of abandoned hopes. From the second floor the thin complaint of the landlady came down. "Miss Morissey! oh, Miss Morissey!" So persuaded was Bofinger by the all prevailing famine that he rose and cautiously regained his hat from the loose rack. The landlady, climbing on, kept calling from time to time, fruitlessly, "Miss Morissey! Miss Morissey!" A door whined, and in the dusk of the landing above a vague head came to peer down at the lawyer. The landlady returned, descending with the same efforts, and announced: "Ye can go up, top floor back, feel to the right as far as ye can go, and knock." Seized with the general decadence he toiled upward with slow, lifeless steps. An odor of stale tobacco hung in the air. At the first floor a door left purposely open showed a man in shirt sleeves, shaving, while a woman in a wrapper arrived in time to study his passing. Through the darkness into which he now ascended came an atmosphere of musk and the scraping of a violin. Groping down the blind passage with outstretched fingers, his hands finally struck against the wall. He felt to the right, found a door, and knocked. A voice replied, uncertainly: "Yes--come in." He stepped out of the blackness, blinking a moment at the sudden light. The woman he saw was indeed Sheila Vaughn. "Miss Morissey?" he asked, shutting the door carefully. "Yes." He bowed and, indifferent to her questioning, remained sweeping the room with precise scrutiny. In the walls the same decrepitude was manifest, in the furniture the same infirmity. A patch of brown paper replaced a pane in the window, the globe on the gas-jet was bitten and smoked. On the rakish bed was laid out the green silk dress, a clothes brush on top. In its place she wore a soiled muslin, raveled at the cuffs and the neck, while the neat boots had given way to frayed red slippers. A wrapper, a musty dress or two, in impoverished contrast to the elegance on the bed, hung from a row of pegs. The eye of the lawyer, after noting each evidence of unusual poverty, rested on the table where a few photographs were displayed. He advanced and picking up each in turn said pleasantly: "Ah, Miss Morissey, you have had a career?" The woman, who had followed him with amazement and alarm, said stiffly: "What do you want with me?" "Miss Morissey," Bofinger said, replacing the photographs with a nod, "I want to see you on business--particular business. Can I sit down?" "Sit down." Reassured by the matter-of-fact method of his address, she motioned him to a chair, drawing one for herself. "If you please, I'll sit here," he said, placing himself so that the light would fall on her face. He drew his glasses, peered at her earnestly, and began: "My dear Miss Morissey, you are certainly a most interesting person--pardon me if I am too curious." "What's your name?" she said quickly. "Mr. Bofinger--Mr. Alonzo Bofinger." "You are a lawyer?" she asked slowly. "Yes, Miss _Vaughn_, I am." "Ah!" The interjection escaped her. Immediately she rallied, rose and shifted her chair, that the light might be equally shared. Her eyes showed anxiety but more interest, as she asked with false calm: "Then what do you want with--Miss Vaughn?" "Sheila Vaughn," Bofinger said loudly, thinking the time right to overwhelm her, "I represent Mr. Max Fargus." He paused for evidence of disconcertion, but whatever her emotions she replied evenly: "Yes, I know him." "Mr. Fargus has commissioned me to make the most exact inquiries about you." "Why?" she asked, studying his face intently. "My client is thinking of an adoption." "Indeed!" she said, really astonished; but the smile that succeeded showed him she was not the dupe of the subterfuge. "That was the reason he gave me. I suspect, though, that it is rather a question of marriage." "Very probably," she said, nodding. In measure, as she studied the sly countenance, her assurance had returned. "And what'll you do?" "Madam," Bofinger said impressively, "I must report what I have discovered." "And that's what?" "That I followed Miss Vaughn to a house where she disappeared and Miss Morissey emerged--by a back passage. That Miss Morissey is quite a different character from Miss Vaughn, especially in style," he added, smiling reminiscently. "That Miss Morissey is evidently of the stage, living in a boarding-house, which I happen to know is a resort of actors on their uppers. I shall be forced to describe the contrast in your dress and the destitution of your wardrobe; pardon me, if I am forced to use the word,--deception. This, I say it frankly, is but the beginning of my investigation." "It's already a good deal, isn't it?" she said thoughtfully. "You must judge of that, Miss Vaughn." "Are you sure" she asked with a smile, "quite sure that you'll tell all that?" He turned in astonishment and saw that she had taken his measure. Realizing that he could no longer count on the advantage of terrifying her, he acknowledged the turn by abandoning his magisterial attitude, and discarding his glasses. "Sheila," he said genially, "I don't intend to do anything of the kind." She frowned, laughed, rose, rearranged her skirts and, with a return of coquetry, asked maliciously: "Will you please tell me how my extraordinary friend came to employ you?" He did not like it that she should have read him so easily, but this pique yielding to the humor of the question, he said with a grin: "I guess Fargus thinks all lawyers a set of scoundrels. Anyhow he picked me at random, thinking he would stand as good a chance that way as any other. To which I'll add, since perfect confidence is necessary between us, he was wrong in his theory and unlucky in its application. However, his misfortune is our gain." At the word "our," calmly spoken, Sheila turned anxiously. "You have some plan then?" she said abruptly. "And what do you expect out of it?" "One moment," Bofinger said with a deprecating smile; "before we discuss such vulgar details there must be, I repeat, absolute confidence. Miss Vaughn, you have sized up quickly the fact that your future lies solely in my hands. I ain't going to deceive you--my interests depend on you. Let's begin at the start. What's your side of the affair?" He threw himself back into a listening attitude and looked at her encouragingly. The daylight had begun to weaken. Across the sordid back lots an occasional gas-jet flared upon a room too miserable to be hidden. Before the direct avowal Sheila hesitated, incapable of his brutal frankness, woman-like considering some justifying motive. The lawyer with a cynical smile comprehended the dumb play and waited until she broke out lamely: "My side--you know it already. He wants to marry me--and I--I am willing. That's all. How could it be anything else?" She put out her hand as though calling on her surroundings to explain. "What have you told him?" Bofinger asked, seeing that he must prompt the recital. "I am living with an aunt, whom I support by needlework," she admitted reluctantly. "Come, my dear," Bofinger said encouragingly. "If you don't want to tell me how you managed it--you're clever enough, you fooled me for a moment--tell me where you are." "I don't know," she said frankly. "He's half crazy, you know. I'm never sure of him." "Well, has he spoken?" "Of marriage? No--that is, not outright." "Well, where are you?" "Why, I am waiting," she said with a shrug. "He makes love to me all the time." "And I suppose, my clever dear," Bofinger said, taking the opportunity to promote familiarity. "You've made him think you're pining away?" "I'm no such fool," she answered with an indefinable smile. "Indeed I tell him that I don't care the least bit for him. That if he wants to win my affection he's going to have a hard time, but--" she added with a laugh, "I let him believe that's not entirely impossible." "You're right," Bofinger said appreciatively. "Of course you're right." A weak knock sounded on the door. Bofinger, who did not wish to be seen, rose, looking anxiously at Sheila. "It's only dinner," she explained, going to the door. "Nevertheless," he said hurriedly, showing his back and going to the window, "don't let any one in." Obedient to his request, she received the meal from the child who brought it, paying out the pennies and barring the door. "Let's see," he said, returning to the table, "what you call a dinner." On the table were arranged half a sausage, half a loaf of bread, and a pint of milk. He looked at them a moment and then with a contemptuous motion tossed the loaf and the sausage out of the window. Sheila, with a cry, sprang forward. "No more of that stuff," he said with a sneer. He drew his pocketbook and laid on the table a fifty-dollar note. "There's ready money, pay your debts and be ready for me at half-past seven." "Why, what do you mean?" she blurted out, fastening greedily on the money. "Is that for me? Why?" Bofinger, who watched anxiously the effect, was exultant at the hunger in her eyes. "I hold her there," he thought. Then aloud he said cheerily, "I'm going to take you to your aunt's, my dear, and respectable quarters where you need not be afraid of being found. And we'll do that right away, for old Fargus is suspicious enough to have me watched as well as you. We'll take no risks. Now if you'll light the gas." As she complied, he pulled his note-book and, tearing out a page, was proceeding to write, when he stopped and considered the woman as though to measure her cunning. Suddenly he asked: "Sheila, are you educated?" "Yes." "You can write--like a lady?" "Of course." "Let's see," he insisted, passing her the paper and pencil. She wrote her name and his in a free, regular hand. "Very good," he nodded, scanning her signature. "Now just a moment." He wrote with pains, while she waited in perplexity, until at length, with a glance of satisfaction, he returned the page to his pocket, stiffened in his chair and said drily: "Now, if you please, we'll talk business!" CHAPTER VII THE COMPACT Sheila looked at him in astonishment. A world intervened between the two attitudes. The man she had fathomed and did not fear had given place to something hard, impassive, and mechanical. She saw she had marched into a trap and the perspiration rose cold between her shoulders as she moved uneasily, seeking with a smile to regain the man from the lawyer. "Come, it isn't so bad as that!" she said with a moue. "You see how I am fixed. What do you ask?" "Half!" She looked at him open-mouthed. A moment intervened before she asked in perplexity: "What? Half of what?" "Half!" he answered, raising his voice. "Share and share alike!" "Do you think I'm a fool?" she cried angrily, springing up. "A fool?" "Half!" he insisted, pressing the point of his pencil obstinately into the table. "Of all he gives you--one half to me!" "Oh, that's too absurd!" she cried with a clap of laughter. "My dear Miss Morissey, sit down, sit down and listen," he said acridly. "We are to be partners, share alike or the game's off. Whatever you get, whatever money passes from his hands to yours, for whatever reason, for expenses or for pleasure, for carfare even, one half comes to me--to my account. Accept and I take all expenses. You leave here to-night and marry Fargus in two months. Otherwise I break you with a word, as easily as this." He took a glass from the table, placed it without anger under his foot, and crushed it. She came suddenly to him, tears of fear in her eyes, and placing her hand on his shoulder said: "You're not going to be as hard as that--I am starving, in rags--have a little pity on me. Or is it the way of you lawyers," she said, forcing an anxious smile, "to ask for more than you expect? If so, you are wrong. I will be generous. Help me to marry Fargus and I'll give you one thousand dollars." "One thousand dollars!" he cried uproariously. "You fool, do you know what the old miser is worth? A quarter of a million! Half, half I say!" She still sought the man in the lawyer and, throwing herself on her knees, cried: "But that would make me a slave! You can't mean that--you are too young to be so merciless. Make your own terms, say anything reasonable, and it's yours." "Miss Morissey," he said pompously, "you are mistaken in the person you're addressing. Mr. Bofinger has left the room. You're dealing now with the lawyer. Let me tell you right now, as a lawyer, I don't set one price to get another. I always get what I ask. When I have once made up my mind what's coming to me, I never relent. I am not twenty-one," he added with a smile. "I do not throw away thousands, either for caresses or tears. Get up!" She regained her feet, affrighted, perceiving that this obsession of the lawyer was the more implacable that it was set in vanity and pride. "Don't drive me to despair!" she said with an ugly flash of anger. He began to laugh. "You are wrong," she said sullenly, "to squeeze such a bargain. I will refuse." "Come," he said, rising, and with a brutal movement laying his hand over the bank-note. "Is it for you to make conditions? I know your kind, a fine dress outside, rags to your skin--rags, that's the story, rags and crumbs, beggary and starvation. And you bargain with me! Come, that's too good. Suppose I offer _you_ a thousand and take the rest? I could do it. I hold the whip hand. I make the terms. Enough of this. Come, choose." He held the bill loosely in his fingers, withdrawing it gradually. She followed its retreat with haggard looks, until, when he was on the point of replacing it in his pocket, she shot forth her hand, and said sullenly: "Give me it--I am starving!" "There, my dear, that's sensible," he said with a burst of good humor. "You can have the best dinner to-night New York can give! What! Are you hankering after cold bread and sausage? Is poverty so lovely that you regret it? And, Sheila, do you think that boiled ham is any more satisfying than a crust? Look at me. I swear I suffer as much on a pittance as you do on nothing. I also, my dear, am hungry for a little bit of the cream. No, you are not one bit more miserable, here in this room, than I; I, who if I had had ten thousand dollars to start with would be worth a million to-day. Do you think a man like me--with my talents, don't suffer too? Come, we're more than partners--comrades! We each want the same thing, don't we? So lets play the game together and square now! There's no limit to what we can do!" She felt the wolfish sincerity in his avowal and perceived that it was useless to struggle, but, disliking his new mood, she said coldly: "I'd rather talk to the lawyer." "Which reminds me," he said, driving into his pocket. "Kindly sign this paper. It is an acknowledgment of a common-law marriage between us." "Between _us_!" she exclaimed, utterly bewildered. "Purely technical, my dear," he said with a reassuring smile. "My affections ain't enlisted. The document is simply for my protection and is, as you will see, the only one that can guarantee me you'll live up to your agreement." "So that means I am to be absolutely in your power?" she said slowly. "Absolutely." "And if I don't do as I agree--" "I'd produce the contract and prove your marriage to Fargus void. You see how it protects me?" "And suppose Fargus dies?" she persisted. "You see I want to know all." "In that case," he said cheerily, "We should probably--after a decent period--get married ourselves." "That's what I wanted to know!" she cried, hurling the contract angrily away. "Very well. I will never, never sign such a paper, never!" She began to whip up and down the room like a panther, her lips moving, repeating incessantly, "Never, never!" Bofinger, without shifting, allowed her passion to run its limit. Then when, from its very violence, exhaustion compelled her at last to fall into a chair, he said softly: "So, so. Then, my dear, you had no idea of holding to the agreement, had you? Come now, why are you so furious? Because you find that I am not to be tricked? Take the pen and sign." She shook her head weakly and put it away with her hand, as a child refusing medicine. "I shan't give you time to repent," he said, pursuing his advantage. "If you refuse, I take a cab from here to Max Fargus. I don't propose that you shall see him first. It's hard luck, of course it is, that you can't get it all, but luck has given me a chance to divide the pie--and what are you going to do about it? Come, come," he said, again advancing the contract to the yielding woman. "Sign and get through with this wretchedness. What holds you? Do you love squalor? Do you prefer this to luxury and riding in your own carriage--for play your cards well and that's what you can get. There, sign this and learn what it is to live." The devil could not have persuaded her more eloquently. She allowed him to slip the paper under her unresisting fingers. "Sign, my dear," he repeated softly, moderating his impatience. "There now, we are sensible. Don't try to disguise your handwriting. I have your signature, you know." She dropped the paper and pen with a cry of fear and recoiling exclaimed: "No, no, I won't sign. I am afraid of you--afraid of what you may make me do. You would stop at nothing!" [Illustration: "NO, NO, I WON'T SIGN!"] "Yes, Sheila," he said, trying to give to his words an air of conviction, for he realized that he had been too clever. "I stop at a good many things and always on the windy side of the law. I am not a fool. As for the rest, I am not close. Play square and you will find me a good fellow." From his pocketbook he added two bills of fifty dollars to the first, and with a smile offered them to her. "In return for your signature, of course." He again placed the document before her, laid the three bills at its side and, giving her a little tap on the shoulder, said: "Come, Sheila, this place gives me the horrors. Let's get through and out of here." She gazed at the three bills, then took the pen, looking moodily up into his face. There, despite the smile with which he sought to reassure her, she saw such avidity in his eye that suddenly there rose to her mind the scene where Faust sells his immortal soul to the devil, and, turning from Bofinger to the covenant, she shuddered. Then half averting her face she pressed the pen to the paper and signed. He pounced upon it, without concealing his joy, compared the signatures and thrust both papers into his pocket. She had the three bank notes twisting in her fingers. "Pack up, pay up, and be ready in an hour," he said, no longer delaying for fair speeches. "I'll have the marriage witnessed to-night. In an hour, Sheila." "Yes." She opened the door, followed him to the stairs, and leaned over the banister to watch his descent. Below, a faint blurred light marked the drop of the stairs. His steps were hushed on the carpeted flight, only the white of his hand, slipping down the railing, showed the winding retreat. All at once she was shaken with a loathing and a dread of this unseen man, and leaning over, she whispered, "Stop. Come back!" On the banisters the white spot paused, then slid rapidly down, and a shadow, like the passage of a bat, obscured the glow in the hall. The door shivered noisily. She waited and then went slowly to her room. The three bank-notes were on the table, waiting. At the foot, the pen had rolled on the floor. She flung down into a chair and snatched up the bills as though to tear them into shreds. A moment later they slipped from her fingers into her lap. "No, I won't do it!" she said aloud, staring with horror at the green notes, stained and bruised by the clutch of battling hands. But though she had renounced them, she could not withdraw her eyes. When the hour was three quarters gone, with a cry she jumped up, crumpled the bills into her breast, and began feverishly to make ready. CHAPTER VIII THE DISCOVERER OF THE OYSTER Max Fargus, on leaving Sheila to be shadowed by the lawyer, departed in such a fever of amorous suspense that it became absolutely essential to his intense nature to inflict some cruelty on his fellow beings. The nearer he approached to the realization of his infatuation the more imperative became these sudden revulsions to savagery. With this temperamental debauch in mind, he hastened to Broadway, purposing to surprise his principal establishment and find food for his spleen. By a back entrance he glided into the kitchens, where he passed like a storm among the scullions, who feared him like the Evil One. But this time, to pour out the floods of his wrath on oyster openers and dish washers no longer satisfied him. The crisis in his affections was too vital for him to find relief in petty browbeating. Realizing that only a master stroke could satisfy him to-day, he climbed the stairs and passed moodily through the restaurant, where the waiters watched him from the corners of their eyes. Then passing into his office he shut himself up and waited angrily for an inspiration. All at once he struck the bell and shouted joyfully: "Send Bastien here!" At the end of a brief moment a portly, florid Frenchman slipped through the door and glided to attention, waiting blandly the moment it pleased his employer to speak. Fargus, enjoying the surprise his announcement would bring, feasted his eyes interminably on the victim a flash of genius had suggested to him. The head waiter, who by a miracle had for three years avoided the suspicions of his master, without troubling himself at this savage inspection, shifted his balance, coughed faintly, and fell to studying the clouded tops of his employer's shoes. "Bastien," Fargus began softly, "do you know why I want you?" "No, sir, I don't, sir." "Can't guess?" "Why, no, sir," Bastien said, beginning to show some perplexity. "I sent for you," Fargus said, hanging on each word, "to tell you, Bastien, that I don't need your services any more." "Me?" exclaimed the head waiter, who could not have been more astonished had a bomb exploded under his legs. "You, Bastien." "Beg pardon, sir, you said--" "Discharged!" "Me--me?" "You, Bastien." "What for, sir?" he cried all in a gulp. "Haven't I served you three years without your finding a word of fault?" "Exactly!" said Fargus, whose black eyes under the frowning eyebrows, like threatening muzzles, had been holding in their pent-up rage. "Exactly. For all that time I have never found fault--found--Bastien. There's the trouble. There's where you started my suspicions. You're clever, my man, but there you overreached yourself." Before the impossibility of such a charge, Bastien for the first time in his life lost his self-possession and remained, desperately fastening his hope on the chances of a joke. Fargus, shaking with malicious, dumb laughter ran on: "Too sharp, my man, too clever: You forget I know the business from A to Z. If you'd stolen a little I should have said nothing. Don't tell me you don't steal. You steal--all steal--and if I haven't caught you it's because you stole too well, or, OR," he cried, raising his finger theatrically, to confound him with the shrewdness of his guess, "OR, because you thought you'd wait until you were put where you could touch the keys of the safe! Aha, have I hit it--you scoundrel!" "Before God, Mr. Fargus--" the frightened waiter started to protest, but Fargus, with a contemptuous laugh, waved him off, crying: "Discharged, discharged!" "What, you turn me out," Bastien said sullenly, "because you haven't found fault with me?" "Yes! It is impossible, I say, to be so virtuous without some evil purpose." "But not for good, sir--I can come back?" "No!" Fargus shouted with a crash of his fist. "No you don't! You gave yourself away that time! If you were innocent you wouldn't take it so meekly. I only suspected before, now I KNOW!" Bastien, helpless before such madness, remained a moment staring stupidly at him. Then suddenly, convinced of the hopelessness of appeasing such an obsession, he forgot the waiter, and as a man, outraged and indignant, raised his fists and cursed him. At the uproar the clerks and the waiters ran in, while Fargus, rubbing his hands with delight, shouted above the din of oaths: "So, at last you rage! Now you show your true character! And for three years you have tried to put me to sleep with your meek face! You villain, I'll tell you what I'll do--I'll have your accounts investigated, before you get a cent!" Bastien, purple in the face, screamed that he would have a lawyer. "You will, will you!" Fargus cried, bounding up. "And I'll have a judge on you! Oscar, Peter, put him out! Throw him out! Joseph, call a policeman!" The waiters, who had suffered the usual indignities from the fallen chief, without waiting a second urging seized the struggling Bastien and propelled him from the office. Fargus, with lips still trembling from his excitation, listened with clenched fists to the dwindling tumult that announced the progress of the eviction. Then gradually his breathing grew quieter, the anger passed from his eyes, he reseated himself, held his head a moment in his hands, then, stretching back, threw out his arms and smiled a smile of vast contentment. Peace had returned to his soul. His history, from the age of nineteen, had been the record of a ledger, of the hour of rising, eating, working, and returning to sleep. He spent not one cent more one day than another. He woke invariably at half past four he was in bed by one o'clock. He spent five cents on carfare each morning, and saved five by walking home each night. He lunched and dined at his restaurants. His one extravagance was to breakfast at a coffee stall, kept by a woman who thirty years before had jilted him for a longshoreman, where for six cents he might remind her each day of the fortune she had flung aside. So much for the history of the man. Before nineteen his youth had been one of storm. Three great disillusionments had marked the period, the greatest which can befall a man, in the loyalty of a friend, in the virtue of his mother, and in the love of a woman. The friend was a newsboy, the mother a pedler, and the woman a waitress in a restaurant on the wharves. Society, which regards honor, virtue, and faith, and the capability of sorrow, peculiar to itself, can see nothing but the ridiculous in such tragedies. To the frail boy, however, with his misanthropic bent, these three trials changed the complexion of the sky and brought a rage against humanity, and with it an abiding, vindictive purpose to treat it always as an enemy. His worldly progress had been the journey of the mole. Burrowing through his youth, obscure and undivined, he had broken ground one day and emerged, to the surprise of his associates, rich and successful. Starting as a chore boy, rising to a waiter in a small oyster house near the docks, he had progressed to the proprietorship of one lunch counter, to the ownership of a restaurant, of an oyster house, of three; until the city knew him at last as the owner of half a dozen resorts, Fargus's West Side Oyster Rooms, Fargus's Bowery Oyster Parlors, Fargus's Broadway Oyster & Chop House, etc. He had but one vanity, a weakness pardonable in self-made men, he had come to regard himself as the discoverer of the oyster. On the night of the interview with Bofinger, to the upsetting of all routine he left his office an hour earlier. The hat boy, hastily summoned, arrived trembling, but to the amazement of every one Fargus departed without a word of reproof. The violence which had eased his craving for cruelty had departed and left him timid and infatuated, with the elusive figure of Sheila running before him and mocking his desires. Instead of following his invariable course down Broadway, he turned into the quieter side streets seeking an opportunity for reflection. He did not walk like the generality of men, who propel themselves from the back foot, but like the animals who draw themselves forward by their claws. This peculiarity, which was not so noticeable when he was in a hurry, sprang into notice the moment his gait relaxed, when he appeared, as to-night, to be prowling over the ground, alert as a panther to bound forward a dozen feet. So immersed was he in the perplexities of his passion that he failed to notice the sudden swooping down of three soldiers of the night, until a hand fell on his shoulder and an angry voice commanded: "Stop short, damn ye!" Fargus, thus threatened, answered without disconcertion: "Well, my friend, what can I do for you?" At this moment, the third of the party, coming up, broke in with a shout: "Bill--you fool, what'cher stopping him for? It's the old screw!" "It is, eh?" the other cried with an oath. "And what if it is?" "Go through him, then, if you're so green!" continued the first, "and if you pull more than a nickel I'll double what you get." "Quite right," Fargus said cheerfully. "I've been here forty-nine years and no one's ever found any more on me than the next day's car fare." He drew from his pocket five pennies which he displayed for confirmation. "And what's more, you can't find another cent in my room!" "Ah, come on. Don't waste time over that guy," said the third. "We've turned him inside out a dozen times." "The hell you have!" the other cried in disgust, and struck up his hand, causing the pennies to scatter into the street. The three footpads lurched into the darkness. Fargus, fondling his chin, stood a moment chuckling at their discomfiture before striking a match and betaking himself to the task of recovering his pennies. The fifth having been secured on his hands and knees he started rapidly home, penetrated a squalid, heated street, filled with children slumbering on the steps, and halting at a flight of tenements stumbled up a dark stairway and found his door. Lighting the butt of a candle, which he had drawn from his pocket, he entered a room with one window, murky and pinched, which he called his home, and whose horror can only be appreciated when it is realized that three families had shared the room before him. In the further corner stood a cot, without covering, and a pine washstand. By the window was a small leather trunk. In the whole room there was not another object. Placing the flickering stump on the washstand, Fargus secured the door. Then going to the trunk he unlocked it, drew out the bedding and made the bed. Once undressed he went in his nightgown to the window and, resting his chin in his palm, gazed up a moment at the black rim of the opposite tenement. Forty-nine years before, in the little room under the heated roof opposite, he had opened his eyes to the struggle of life. From there, as a child, he had a thousand times gazed down on the room he now occupied as a region of unattainable felicity. To possess such a paradise, all to himself, seemed then the zenith of earthly ambition. It was his earliest conception of the possibilities of wealth, it had never changed. He had remained in his present home twenty-one years, without a larger desire. To-night he stayed but a short time at the window, the contemplation of his progress did not bring him its accustomed satisfaction. He was conscious of a great unrest, of having suddenly laid his way along unfamiliar and perilous paths, where everything was problematical and uncertain. "If the lawyer finds everything all right," he said to himself, turning away, "I'll marry her. But if he don't--" He blew out the candle with the breath of his irritation and flung down on the bed, saying to himself querulously: "Am I going to sleep to-night, I wonder? Well, supposing he don't--what then?" CHAPTER IX THE MISANTHROPE IN LOVE It was now a little over four months since Sheila Vaughn had intruded upon the well-ordered and sufficient existence of the misanthrope. On that memorable day in June Fargus, for the first time, had broken his prison-like routine and taken in the middle of the afternoon an hour's relaxation. Three bits of good fortune, arriving together, had inclined him to such an unusual vacation: the monthly contract for clams, thanks to his shrewdness was ten per cent below the market; second, he had concluded a deal by which he took over the establishment of his chief competitor for the theater trade, at terms offered only by a bankrupt; third, he had discovered that his monthly personal expenses had fallen thirty-five cents below the average. For the first time in his life, then, he felt the imperative need of drawing breath for a moment's gratified contemplation. He sauntered over to Washington Square where, yielding to the pleasure of the spring and his own good humor, he installed himself on a shady bench, buying a newspaper in an automatic seeking for some reason to be idling there. The foliage was complete, yet with the zest of its youth still on it. The fountain in the center flung its spray against the rich green background. Gardeners were setting out the flower beds. The chirp of sparrows and the glee of children blended together in the stirring of the leaves. The air was fragrant and gentle, good to breathe. Fargus, contemplating the scene, forgot his paper, and remained contented and idle, with something that approached a smile. By one of the thousand and one chances which determine our mortal journey, call it fate or call it coincidence, it presently happened that his eye was arrested by the figure of a woman, advancing towards him. The green silk dress she wore, as though alive to the breeze, was in a continual flutter, the edges billowing as though served by the playful hand of cherubs. In the poise of her figure there was a slight, pleasant consciousness, but the face was given to abstraction and a dreamy, wistful contemplation of the park. A parasol swung languidly from her wrist, occasionally resting lightly on the ground. She seemed so a part of the gentle prospect that Fargus nodded approvingly, without realizing that it was not nature, but a woman, who had thus drawn his admiring glance. Arrived near him, she cast about for a vacant seat, and presently, with a glance, came and sat beside him. His first impulse was to recoil, all a-bristle and scowling, but as his companion continued oblivious to his displeasure he relaxed and from the tail of his eye stole a glance at the slender hands crossed on the top of her parasol. Suddenly he heard a soft voice say: "I beg your pardon, could you give me the time?" He withdrew gruffly, glaring at the woman, on whose face appeared first surprise and then a restrained amusement. "I beg your pardon, have you the time?" At this gentle reminder he became confused and, fumbling for his watch, with a jerk extended it to her on his palm, without vouchsafing a word. "Thank you," she said, nodding. "You don't speak English?" "What do you mean?" he said, startled into speech. "Oh, I see," she said with a malicious smile. "I was wrong. You do look foreign, though. It's pleasant here, isn't it?" Insensibly, resenting the ingenuity that drew him on, he was led into conversation and then all too soon abandoned by her rising and departing with an inclination of her head, sent to him over her shoulder as she swept up the shimmering green dress. Fargus jumped up and glanced guiltily at his watch. Then, with a scowl, brushing aside a bevy of children, he rushed back to his office. The following day, at the same hour, before he had quite understood what had guided his steps, he found himself straying again into the Square. She was already there, in the same green dress, on the bench where they had sat, her arms resting languidly, her head a little back, yielding to the charm of the sky. He faltered as he approached, went on, and then making a sudden turn came and sat beside her. Two months passed, and in the soul of the misanthrope an infatuation took root and grew, tumultuous and struggling with the stubborn forces of his hatred, without his being able, from word or look, to determine that the woman was leading him on. His first advances, awkward and innocent, to his surprise were abruptly rejected, nor was he able once to transgress the strict limits of acquaintanceship. Despite such austerity, he would not have been Fargus had he been without suspicions. He apprehended a deep purpose and set himself to preparing his retreat in the belief that some day she would attempt to discover his identity. The precaution was unproductive and, without his suspecting it, arrived too late. When in turn he sought to follow her he was surprised by the same ambush which had nearly entrapped Bofinger, and obtained his pardon only by a solemn promise to refrain from further attempts. The repulse and her steady indifference heaped fuel on the rising flame of his infatuation. He arrived at the stage where he no longer could see the ridicule of his own actions. He asked her to the theater, with the palpitations of a schoolboy blundering through his first escapade, and her constant refusals left him helpless and miserable. Finally, he sought by discreet questions to discover her existence. "Why do you always wear the same dress?" he began abruptly. "I am poor," she answered so naturally that Fargus was left abashed. "You work for a living then?" he persisted. "I do embroidery and fancy sewing." "You are alone?" "I live with my aunt." "You support her, I suppose?" he said with almost a sneer. "I help." He left her brusquely, enraged at her story, convinced of its insincerity. What infuriated him was that all he had to do was not to return. But that was an experiment he had no desire to try. Finally he obtained from her a promise to spend a Sunday afternoon with him in Central Park. The concession once laboriously won, he feigned to see the second stage of her campaign. He ran precipitately, full of joyous madness, to a jeweler's, whence, for the enormous price of ten dollars and a half he bore away a horseshoe of pearls, after lingering romantically over a lover's heart to offer her which he finally lacked the daring. The next afternoon the mischievous package in his vest pocket left him no peace. He blew hot and he blew cold. He said to himself that he would never have the audacity to offer it, and the next moment imagined impassioned speeches which never reached the tip of his tongue. Finally, when they had paused to rest, in one of the unfrequented bypaths which wind about the lakes, he plunged his hand into his pocket, and bringing forth the box said in a fit of desperation: "For you. For luck." He did not dare to look at her. He had a sinking feeling of having thrown away all by his folly--and he did not know that he was in love. Sheila turned, saw him trembling like a frightened bird under the hand, took the box and held up the pin. Fargus, scarce believing his fortune, dared to steal a look. She counterfeited admirably a flush of pleasure and regret. "Oh, how wonderful!" she exclaimed, holding it at arm's length and allowing her eyes to show the longing for its possession. "But it is too valuable, I could not take it--no." She looked at it again regretfully, then turning to him added: "You are very kind--but I mustn't, I can't take that!" Then, by quick movement, she averted her head, as though she wished to conceal from him her tears. The fire mounted into his temples. He caught her hand, drawing her to him and crying: "Sheila, Sheila, my darling!" "Oh! OH!" She sprang up, wrenching free her hand. Fargus, swept away by his infatuation, followed her, seizing her by her arm. With a rapid movement of anger she threw him off and, dashing a stinging hand across his face, cried: "All or nothing!" Then flinging the pin into the dust she stamped on it, covered her face with her hands and, bursting into sobs, ran away; leaving Fargus so thoroughly undone that he could neither speak or move. "Ah, she wants to marry me, does she?" he cried with a clap of rage, when he had recovered a little from his amazement. He picked up the twisted brooch, dusted it off and cried again, overcome by the enormity of her crime: "She wants to marry me! That's her game, then! Marry me! Huh!" With a roar he made off, swaying between incredulity and rage, contempt vying with derisive laughter. Full of fury and tempest he passed the night, eating out the slow hours until the next afternoon when he descended like a lion upon the Square, to force an understanding. She was not there. "What, she won't come!" he cried, thunderstruck at such a solution. He sunk on the bench, waiting desperately for some glimpse of the woman. His rage departed like a puff of wind, leaving him beaten, lonely, and blank. "She will come to-morrow," he said, as he trudged wearily home. She came neither that day nor the succeeding days. Then in Fargus the last seeds of resistance died and left nothing but a barren, disheartened surrender. He had no longer any doubts as to his true state, her absence taught him what he could suffer. A week passed before a chance meeting on the street brought them together again. He sought her forgiveness abjectly and without shame. For a while she refused to give ear to his protestations, his explanations and his promises. At last she inclined her head and replied seriously: "Very well. But I shall reserve my opinion, for the future." With this resumption of their daily meetings, his suspicion started up anew, without his still being able to find a hook whereon to hang them. She remained cold and uninterested, refusing always to believe in his vows of affection. It is true, he had not spoken of marriage. "Sheila, you don't care for me," he said once to her in unreasoning anger. "I don't," she said with a nod. "And it won't make any difference to you if you never see me again." "Yes, it would. You have been kind, and my life is lonely," she said reflectively. "I will miss you." "You say that as if you were going away," he said irritably. "True. I haven't told you. We go next week to Chicago." "And why should you go to Chicago?" he cried furiously. "My aunt must go--she's had a legacy left her, a small one but it'll mean a good deal. Of course, I have to go with her," she added, a little regretfully. The next morning, in a panic, Fargus had sought out Bofinger. CHAPTER X BOFINGER REPORTS Fargus, who slept as badly as a bridegroom on the wedding eve, was up before five o'clock. After replacing the bedding in the trunk he departed for his morning's breakfast. Three blocks to the west near the river front, in a frame building which occupied a corner, a flaring yellow sign, over a sunken basement, announced, NELLIE THE COFFEE-WOMAN _Ladies & Gents Parlors._ Three wooden steps, rotted by the weather, descended past the food bulletins into a sanded room. It was in this underground resort, with its rough clients, that Fargus had served his apprenticeship, faithfully his master and his master's daughter, pretty Nell O'Hara, who had jilted him for the privilege of maintaining the present Mr. Biggs in idleness among his bottles. Fargus descended the familiar steps and entered. Never once did he return to the presence of his first love without a pang of mortification that all the triumphs of his changed fortune could not obliterate. A ponderous woman on whose expanding trunk time had recorded each successive year was behind the counter. Of the charm that once was Nell's nothing remained but a certain reminiscent prettiness of the face. Fargus, who entered as a conqueror, took his seat at the counter, asking maliciously, as he never failed to do: "And how's your man, Nell?" [Illustration: "AND HOW'S YOUR MAN, NELL?"] "The same," she answered, as though the simple statement required no explanation. "And are you doin' well, Mr. Fargus?" "I bought another restaurant, Nell," he said. "Yes, I'm doin' well. It's a little larger than the old place." He saw she understood the malice of his last remark and enjoyed the new opening of the old wound. To-day his vindictiveness was tempered by a feeling of wonder. With Sheila in mind he looked at this woman, mottled and worn with toil, and asked himself how it was possible that she could still have the power to make him suffer. The thought recalled Sheila and abruptly he arose and departed. But, not wishing to lose an opportunity for vengeance, he returned and said wisely: "Nell, perhaps I'll have something to tell you before long, a bit of news that may interest you. My love to your man." He departed for the oyster markets for his purchases, but without the zest that gave to these excursions the exhilaration of the battle-field. "I'm a fool," he said to himself angrily, "to let a woman upset me so. How the devil, though, am I going to wait two days more to hear from that lawyer!" Bofinger had resolved to conceal his relations with Fargus from Groll, taking the risk of an inopportune visit of his client. He knew well the consequences of such treachery once discovered, but the avidity of great stakes gave him the daring to play with fire. He was in the office, chatting with Groll and LeBeau, when towards one o'clock he perceived from his sentry by the window the incongruous figure of Fargus, advancing from the direction of Sixth Avenue. He yielded to a moment's panic, then rapidly, with a hasty excuse, stepped out of the door and departed, not too quickly, towards the west. "They may notice him again," he thought, "but it's not so risky as going to meet him." He slackened his gait at the corner, bought a newspaper and, perusing it, went slowly northward. A moment later Fargus shuffled up, all out of breath. "Oh, it's you," Bofinger exclaimed in surprise. "That's lucky; you want to see me? Shall we go back to the office?" "There's some one there," Fargus said nervously. "Yes, there's my partner and a reporter," Bofinger replied with an air of reflection. "Perhaps you'd rather--" "Let's walk on," Fargus interrupted. Then, no longer holding back his anxiety, he blurted out, "Well, what? Have you found out anything?" "I think I've made a good beginning," the lawyer said in his professional manner. "Of course in one day--" "I was passing," Fargus said, avoiding his eye, "I thought--" "Well, sir," Bofinger broke in tactfully, "I have investigated enough, I guess, to satisfy you. To begin, Miss Sheila Vaughn is an orphan living with an aunt whom she supports by her needlework." At this confirmation of Sheila's story the misanthrope gave a sigh of relief, which showed the lawyer what pangs a contrary answer would have cost him. Immediately, seizing the arm of the lawyer, he stammered: "Are you sure? Can you be sure? How are you sure?" "My dear sir," Bofinger objected, "I ain't goin' to make a statement on insufficient evidence. I followed Miss Vaughn without any difficulty. She lives in a respectable boarding-house on the West side. Here is the address, for your information," he added, passing him a slip. "I marked the house and went back pretending to seek a room. Two circumstances, fortunately, helped me to gather a great deal of information. In the first place, the servant who showed me around asked nothing better than to talk." "Well, well?" Fargus broke in irritably. "A little patience," Bofinger said with a smile. "Things have got to be told in their order. I learned from the servant that Miss Vaughn and her aunt Miss Morissey have lived in the same rooms for over six years. The aunt is a retired school-teacher, having perhaps a very small income. Miss Vaughn, evidently, is the mainstay, doing fancy embroidery and needlework. The servant told me that she was very devout. Now for the second circumstance, but this won't be to your liking." "What do you mean?" Fargus demanded, instantly alarmed. "I learned that Miss Vaughn and her aunt are going to leave." "You are sure?" Fargus cried in despair. He had only half believed the announcement from the lips of the woman. "I am. With an inspiration, I instantly asked to see their room. What do you think of that? On this pretext I saw not only the room but Miss Vaughn and her aunt. Well, they impressed me very favorably, quiet and devoted--" "But when is she going, and where?" Fargus broke in impatiently. "They go to Chicago in a few days--a very few." "And did you find out why?" "I did," Bofinger said with a nod, and began again. "Of course I did not try to pump them, but when I left I said to the maid--" "Never mind that, tell me now why they are going." "Miss Morissey, the aunt," Bofinger said, stopping short, "has had a small legacy left her and is going to settle her affairs." "Then what she told me was true after all!" Fargus exclaimed, without perceiving how clearly he portrayed his real sentiments. "Now, of course," Bofinger said glibly, stealing a glance at his dejected client. "I shall at once take up the threads and push my investigation rapidly." "Mr. Bofinger," Fargus said, coming out of his abstraction, "that's enough. Don't do anything more. I've got now all I wanted to know." "Then you are satisfied?" Bofinger replied in feigned astonishment. "Yes." He walked a while, studying the sidewalk, and then asked slowly: "Mr. Bofinger, you see all kinds of people--you ought to be a judge. I'm going to put a question to you. Would you, if you were me, in my position, adopt Miss Vaughn?" "Really, my dear sir," Bofinger said carefully. "I can't take the responsibility of answering that." "Is she the right sort--steady and dependable?" "Oh, if you mean is she worthy of being adopted--certainly yes! But," he added with a show of frankness, "if you do want my opinion, I think the young lady is too independent a character to permit it." Fargus hesitated a moment, with an impulse to confidences, then, retreating awkwardly, he began to draw out his pocketbook, saying: "Thanks, you've done well." "Then you want nothing further?" Bofinger said, smiling at the way his hand fumbled in his coat. "No, no," Fargus said hastily. "You've done enough. That's what I wanted. You've done fine." He turned his back on the lawyer and examined the pocketbook, close to his nose, for he was short-sighted. After long weighing of reasons, he plucked forth two bills as one might draw out a thorn, and spinning about hastily he thrust them into the lawyer's hand, as though mistrusting his second thoughts. Bofinger saw that each was for twenty dollars. With a flash, he stiffened and said sternly: "My dear sir, I would like you to know that, in my profession, we fix the remuneration." Fargus, believing himself entrapped, looked with repressed rage at the money he had surrendered. Bofinger allowed him this moment of torture, before continuing on the same key: "My fee, sir, for these services is twenty dollars." And with a gesture that was sultanesque he returned the other bank-note. Fargus received one of the shocks of his life. The idea that any one could refuse money so confounded him that he did not have wit enough to extend his hand. But only for a moment; then, with a grunt of joy, he snatched up the bill, crying with genuine feeling: "Mr. Bofinger, you'll not regret this!" "Thank you, that is my invariable fee--good day," the lawyer said, holding his hat like a statue. Then, snapping back to life again, he returned exultantly to the office. In the short interview he had grown immeasurably in his own eyes. But one thing distressed him, the thought that so much talent must be locked in his own bosom. He drew a long breath and, walking on his toes, said with conviction: "Ah, Bofinger, you were made for bigger things!" CHAPTER XI MARRIAGE AS A BATTLEFIELD Two weeks later Sheila and Max Fargus left church as man and wife and, entering a cab, set out for their new home near Stuyvesant Square. The comedy which Bofinger had devised had thus come to a successful end. The lawyer was not mistaken. Fargus, in despair at the thought of Sheila's leaving, had offered himself that afternoon. She did not accept at once, she asked time for reflection; but promised, in response to his frantic appeals, to remain in New York. Miss Morissey, her aunt, departed for Chicago on the next afternoon. Fargus did not see her. Sheila, after several days, allowed herself to be persuaded. But in consenting to be his wife she promised nothing more. She frankly avowed herself happy to have the opportunity of a home, admitted a certain friendly esteem, which she did not pretend was irrevocable, but made him understand that to win her love lay in his hands alone. On these terms she asked him, with many misgivings, if it was right for a woman to marry. Fargus argued the question furiously and without rest, and succeeded, to his delight, in disposing of one objection after the other, without for a moment suspecting that it was he and not Sheila the arguments were designed to convince. The arrival of the wedding was to him a day of bewildering and complex emotions. So well did the woman keep him in suspense of her final acceptance, that it was only on the morning of the wedding-day itself that he awoke to the fact that the day would dispose of his own existence. His first act was characteristic. He rushed in a tempest to the coffee stall, where he announced his departure and his marriage to Nell, to whom for the final time he brought the agony of a destiny despised. Refreshed by this _coup de grace_ on the woman he had never forgiven, he hurried chastened and cheerful to Sheila. At first he had opposed a religious ceremony. He professed himself an atheist. When one ceases to believe in man, one does not believe in God. Sheila, who was really devout, would hear of nothing else. Fargus ceded, but his appearance in church had put him into a frightful humor. Now in the cab, alone at last with the woman he had so long desired, he discovered all at once that the law, which gave him everything, gave him nothing at all. In his squat hand were the four fingers which she had ceded to him, without resistance and without feeling. He clung to them awkwardly, gingerly, knowing not what to do. Sheila did not even feel his presence. Withdrawn as far as possible, without appearing to shun him, she nerved herself for the battle which, with sure instinct, she felt approaching. Of the two, she had all the self-possession, plus an excited mentality which stimulated all her forces at the approach of the crisis. She was in this mood when the cab stopped at the flight of red brick dwellings, before the stoop above which the tin sailor was whirling his paddles. She had a slight surprise. It was not elegance; but she had dreaded worse. "It's not so discouraging," she thought, as she jumped out full of anticipation. "It is not bad--to begin with." Astonished to find the shades down, she rang impatiently, then turning to Fargus, who was disputing furiously with the driver, she cried: "Is this right? Have I made a mistake?" "In a moment, I have the key," he cried, dismissing the driver and hurrying up. "Ah!" she thought, drawing breath like a gladiator entering the arena. "I'm to have no servant, then!" "There, my dear," cried the voice of her husband, proudly, "there you are!" Forgetting twenty pretty speeches, he threw open the door and stood aside with bashful pride to let her pass. The beam of light entered the vacant dusk like an intruder. Sheila seized all in one swift glance and her lips set dangerously. She remained without motion, while Fargus, mumbling nervously, stole to the parlor window and flung open the shutters. The hall was bare, the parlor had but a table and a cheap lamp in its emptiness. The walls were destitute of ornament, clothed with an invariable dust-green paper. She went quickly to the dining-room. The furniture was of the scantiest. She counted the chairs, there were just two. The sideboard and the table were of oak, thinly veneered and not fresh. The two gazed silently, Sheila with swelling throat and clouded eyes, Fargus, to whom each purchase had been a plunge into the abyss of ruin, trembling again with the memory of the pangs each had cost him. "Well," he asked at last, "it's pretty, don't you think?" "Oh, the house can be made very pretty," she said pensively and, turning to him with a smile, she added gratefully, "and you were real nice to leave me the furnishing of it." "The--the furnishing!" he stammered, opening his eyes. "Wait and see what I can do," she cried with a laugh. "Now I'm going up to see the rest." She left him stupefied and tripped up the stairs. In their bedroom, which alone was furnished, there was nothing but a bed, a chest of drawers, and two chairs. She felt a profound discouragement, a sudden desire to weep, but it was only the weakness that precedes great victories. "Now or never!" she thought, as she heard the soft step of her husband on the stairs. She threw herself into an attitude of inspection, gathering her skirts from the dusty floor, set her head critically on one side, and extended her hand as though to calculate the height of the walls. "What are you doing?" Fargus said, stopping short. "I was trying to decide," she answered meditatively, "whether to paper all the room in rose or to use a border." Fargus leaned against the door for support. Then forcing a horrible laugh, he cried with desperate good humor: "Say, now, you're a good one, and that's a good joke!" "As for the guest room--green and white," she continued, passing to the back; "green and white is fresh and clean." The absurdity of a guest room convinced Fargus. He laughed with a light heart and entered the spirit of the jest. "Green and white is good," he assented, wagging his head. "The question is whether to have a double bed or two single ones," she persisted. "Oh, two!" he said gravely, sticking his tongue in his cheek. "A double bed is cheaper," she said reflectively. "Bah!" "I know just the furniture," she said, embracing the room with a sweep of her hand. "Such a bargain! We ought to pick it up at once,--seven pieces, bird's-eye maple too, just the elegant thing." "Let's go now," he said with exaggerated levity. "Shall we--O Max!" she answered, clapping her hands. Then nodding seriously, she said in approbation: "You have begun well. You don't know what it means to a woman to have the making of her home. Just think what fun it'll be, picking out carpets and rugs and pictures. But we must decide on the papering right off--because I don't intend to be out of my home any longer than I can help it!" He eyed her suspiciously. There was that in her enthusiasm which made him doubt her levity. Nevertheless he could not yet bring himself to comprehend such a monstrosity. He answered facetiously: "How about the stable and horses, my dear?" Seeing that she must bring matters to an issue she returned to their room, nodded and said pensively: "This we ought to decide more carefully. I'm for ebony, though. It's nobby. Now," she added, wheeling about, "let's go to the hotel." "What hotel?" he said dumfounded. "Why, the hotel we're going to stay at, until the house is ready," she said impatiently. Then all at once he comprehended that he was caught. He felt for a chair and stumbled into it. "Then what you said about furnishing was true?" he said in a dying voice. "You meant it!" "Why, what is the matter with you?" she asked, stopping and looking at him in pretended amazement. Suddenly he bounded up and said brutally, pointing to the room: "This is where we stay!" "Here?" she cried scornfully. "This isn't fit for a servant!" She had dreamed of luxury so long that the manner came to her naturally. For a moment Fargus was overawed by her sudden stature, then the thought came to him that after all she belonged to him and that he had a right to do as he wished with her. "Well, that's where you stay!" he cried with that rage which is as closely allied to love as madness to genius. She saw him advance upon her to crush her in his arms. Without giving an inch, she put her hands behind her and looked him frigidly in the eyes. His hands touched her before they fell. She was at once anger and ice; to have continued would have been to embrace a monument. So overcome was he that he remained awkwardly before her, not knowing how to extricate himself. "Go and sit down," she said coldly, "and let's have an understanding at once!" He hesitated, with his eyes on the floor, brooding whether to carry it through by violence. She saw and was frightened. "And let me say at once, Mr. Fargus," she continued hurriedly. "Never attempt again what you tried then! For if you do--I shall know how to protect myself." The mystery of her threat appalled him. The man in love believes all absurdities. He retreated. "What furnishing does it need?" he asked sullenly. "Everything, carpets, curtains, linen, furniture," she said aggressively, now that her moment of danger had passed. "Even to the servant's room nothing is done!" "Servant!" he cried in terror. "Do you want to ruin me!" "What!" she exclaimed in turn. "Do you mean I'm to have no servant!" "What for?" "Then it's true," she cried vehemently. "You were bringing me to this garret to be your servant! This is the kindness you promised me--this is your generosity!" "Sheila!" he cried in fear, as she gathered her cape about her. "This, then, is what your love means!" she continued angrily. "So you expect me to come to this, do you? A kennel! A dining-room without a chair for a friend!" "I have no friends!" "So you thought, did you," she said scornfully, "that I would cook for you, wash for you, clean for you, make your bed for you? You call that getting a wife! You are wrong, you don't want a wife--you want a slave! Go and get one!" "Sheila, one moment,--Sheila!" he cried, seeing her about to depart. She paused, and then, with a toss of her head, returned and sat down. Presently she said sadly, her eyes filling with tears: "And this is all you care for me. If you were poor and I loved you, I'd share anything with you. But you are rich--you told me so twenty times. So, if you bring me to this, it can only mean, Max, that you despise me." "No, no!" he cried, won by the sweetness of the look she gave him. He flung himself at her knees, striving to gain her hand, but Sheila, withdrawing it with firmness, said gently: "What else am I to think? I haven't concealed from you that I don't love you. I liked you for your kindness, I respected you--yes, I trusted you, when you swore you would know how to earn my love. I consented to marry you telling you all this, for I longed for a home. Is this, then," she continued with a catch in her voice, "is this the way you're going to make me love you?" He had caught her hand, he felt himself going, slipping from the old moorings, and with a last resistance he cried desperately: "Sheila, what is it you want?" "To be treated as your wife!" she said quickly, avoiding the pitfall of the specific. "To be treated as though you were proud of me. Either that or"--she paused a moment and ran her fingers through his hair; "or if money means more to you than to love and be loved, poor man, then let us own our mistake and part--now." "No, Sheila, no! Don't leave me!" he cried, and sinking his head in her lap, vanquished, he caught her knees while the very rout of his soul made her indispensable to his infatuation. "Then I am--to stay?" A sob was her answer. "Poor fellow," she said compassionately. "What do you know of life? I will teach you how to live." These terrible words, which filled the flesh of the miser with mortification, aroused in the lover the frenzy of the gambler. He felt that he was throwing his all to the winds and the thought intoxicated him. "Sheila," he cried, lifting his face, "do what you want! I love you--only you!" She bent her head hurriedly. There were in her eyes two things she did not dare let him see, the pride of her triumph and that bewildered pity which comes only to the utter victors. CHAPTER XII BOFINGER IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING Fargus, as all those who are forced to surrender without conditions, retained a reservation,--he counted on the future. His nature was too simple and intense to fathom the complexities of marriage. He had the fierce, half-savage conception that the woman resigned her ascendancy when she gave herself into his power. He conceived of woman as a tyrant before marriage and a suppliant ever after. For him the physical submission carried all with it. So even in his surrender he believed that time would restore the balance in his favor. Sheila, on the contrary, had well understood that the first weeks of marriage must be a battle on which would hinge the fortunes of her whole life. She had this advantage, that Fargus was utterly unprepared and ignorant of the thousand agilities of her sex. She had subdued him by taking him by surprise, but she was not the dupe of her victory. She knew where the danger lay, divining the secret thoughts of her husband. The problem with her was to forever cheat his infatuation. She submitted but she did not give herself to him. The history of these unending skirmishes, open or ambushed, seldom rising to the dignity of a conflict, was an uninterrupted record of successes for the woman. Fargus, who had counted on the future, found himself each day more willingly subjugated. This infatuation that overturned all his ideas of conduct gave to his love the mad aspect of a forbidden passion. Each time that he ceded to Sheila he had a moment of horror, and then that delirious access of folly and passion which comes only to the man who loves and ruins himself. Sheila, then, had her way, but she did not abuse her power. She even began to practise economies,--she sewed the curtains with her own needle and marked the linen. Fargus avowed himself touched by such acts of moderation. Nevertheless, there were moments in the night when he awoke with a cry, starting in a cold perspiration from a nightmare where he had seen himself dragged down into bankruptcy by the follies of his pretty wife. He rose and crept over the house, trying the windows and the locks, listening suspiciously at the door of the servant, an innovation to which he could never accustom himself. Then returning softly to his room he regained his bed. But the night was rare when the creak of a plank did not start him again on his uncanny rounds. He was not happy. He had believed that in marriage all desires were gratified. Instead he found himself, to his mystification, even more miserable than in the days when he returned in despair to his one room in the slums, there to pursue all night, in his dreams, the elusive figure of the radiant woman. He came at length, slowly, to understand what she adroitly and cruelly intended he should, that the possession at last of Sheila, even under the wide domain of marriage, left him still defeated, and that it was her love alone that would satisfy. After that he was ready for all follies. When Sheila saw that the victory was complete, she had, naturally, a moment of intense virtue, in which she said to herself that she could well be content, with a man whom she so easily bent to her every desire. Besides, the joy of making a home was to her such a natural impulse, that during its ecstasy Fargus represented to her no more than the husband. This joy was so intense that she came near relenting and showing him some kindness,--a slip against which she was forced to be constantly on her guard. For she saw clearly that her domination lay in perpetual vigilance, and that with such a man nothing could be shared--she would have to be either a tyrant or a slave. There was on her fair horizon but the ugly shadow of the lawyer. She had almost forgotten him, then she almost doubted his existence, so fantastic seemed the idea of their extraordinary contract. Each month, she had agreed to give him an accounting, delivering him her note for the sum due. But to carry out such a program they must see each other, and she asked herself incredulously how the lawyer could manage. The month passed without a sign of Bofinger, when, one evening as she was in her bedroom, she heard, to her amazement, the familiar shuffle of Fargus on the stoop, accompanied by a thick, resolute fall of feet. The lock clicked and the voice of Bofinger said loudly: "See here, Mr. Fargus, your lady won't like being taken by surprise." She understood that he was sending her a warning. She had indeed need of it. A voice from the dead could not have struck more terror than this sudden apparition of the lawyer. She felt her knees wabble and with an effort seized a bottle of smelling salts. Her repulsion for Bofinger, intensified by fear, was suddenly a hundred times magnified by this uncanny introduction into her home, on the very arm of her husband, at the moment when she fatuously had put him out of her mind. "Ah, I was so happy!" she cried, sinking limply into a chair. Nevertheless she realized that the moment was fraught with peril and that she must regain her control. "Sheila, Sheila!" Fargus called from below. She shut her teeth savagely over her lip and went down to face her husband's glance. "Sheila," he said, as she halted in simulated surprise, "I brought an old friend with me,--Mr. Bofinger." She went hurriedly past her husband, murmuring something, and extended her hand to the lawyer, who, bland and smiling, bowed with stiff legs. Seeing his self-possession, she rallied, brought to calm by the quiet command of his eye. "Take Mr. Bofinger into the parlor, my dear," Fargus said. "Put him into a comfortable chair and make him at home. I'll be down in a minute." "Really, Mrs. Fargus," Bofinger said, halting on the threshold of the parlor, "I compliment you on your home. I heard my friend had to sail pretty close this winter, but I guess that must have been rumor. Really, this is elegant; say, this is luxury!" While pronouncing this glibly he managed to lay his fingers over his lips, sending her a glance of warning. Sheila, at this extraordinary introduction, delivered without a trace of expression to clarify its meaning, stood in stupid bewilderment. When she heard the sound of her husband's step above, she started forward with an impulsive question. With a rapid frown the lawyer again laid his finger along his lips and, drawing her to a corner, said quickly: "Not a word to-night. Complain at the table about the size of the house--remember!" Then aloud, quelling her astonishment with a peremptory gesture, he continued, raising his voice purposely, "Mrs. Fargus, I really ought to apologize. I shouldn't have dropped in on you like this, but your husband would have it; and when an old friend gets you buttonholed--you know!" This assumption of intimacy, avowed alike by the lawyer and her husband, completed her terror. Her wits had deserted her. All her artillery lay in the consciousness of her fascination. As soon as she knew herself loved, she became formidable and arrogant. The unimpressionable glance of the lawyer disarmed her and scattered all her artifices. Obeying an imperious sign from Bofinger, she gathered herself together and said hastily: "Why--I am sure my husband was quite right, and, indeed, it's no trouble." "So I said," Fargus put in, his nocturnal face appearing at the door when she believed him above. "Sheila, it's all right, I had something sent over from the restaurant." "Then I'll see to it," she said, escaping quickly, for she felt as yet unequal to retaining her composure before both of them. The supper, to her relief, passed easily. She dissociated herself from the conversation, resisting all the lawyer's attempts to drag her into it and evading obstinately a dozen openings which he gave her to criticise her home. Keeping a stubborn silence, then, she began anxiously to study his game. Seeing that she had no intention of obeying him, he shifted his tactics. He began a tirade against the extravagance of the modern woman, asserting that she put on her back one fourth of the family income. Sheila smiled, but guarded herself against a retort. Fargus applauded in his taciturn way. Receiving no answer, Bofinger developed his thesis, to the point of declaring that the nation was becoming effeminate, due to the fact that the wife instead of the husband was the dominating influence in the home. He even ascribed to this cause the increase of domestic infelicity. "Is he, by any chance, trying to force me to quarrel with him?" Sheila thought in amused perplexity. "Is that his game, I wonder?" Acting on this assumption, she avoided all expression so skilfully that the lawyer on his leaving immediately after supper shot her a glance full of anger and irritation. "Come again--come soon," Fargus said cordially. "Sheila, ask Mr. Bofinger to run in and see you some afternoon." "Why," she stammered, overcome by this new surprise, "I hope he will." When Fargus returned from ushering out the lawyer, he found Sheila in the parlor, an elbow on the mantelpiece, resting her chin pensively in her palm. "I thought you had no friends," she said immediately. "I? So I haven't--not many." "Mr. Bofinger is a friend then?" "He is--why, yes." "You have known him a long time then?" "Oh, quite a while." "Five years?" "Well--around that." "Why, you've never spoken to me of him." "Didn't I? So I didn't." "Tell me this," she said, her anxiety rising above her prudence, "do you rely upon him? Do you trust him?" "Why, in a way," he answered evasively, adding sharply, "why do you ask that?" She made a gesture of impatience. "You don't like him, eh?" Her shoulders twisted with an indefinable displeasure. "Why not?" "I could never trust--that man!" she said desperately. "It's a woman's instinct, that's all." "Nonsense," he answered with great good humor, "Bofinger's square as they make 'em. He is not a lady's man, I know. But he's got sense--horse sense, and Sheila, my dear, if you ever want advice, go to him." She opened her eyes very wide at this and said nothing more, turning it over and seeking some explanation in the tangle of the evening. "I've been a fool," she thought, glancing at the satisfied face of Fargus. "I've played into Bofinger's hands--whereas I ought to have made Fargus jealous." The truth is, she was too near the dreaded shadow of Bofinger to have regained the clearness of analysis which would have saved her from such a blunder. CHAPTER XIII SHEILA RETREATS The explanation of this extraordinary meeting, which had so mystified Sheila, lay in a last revolt of the miser. Once out of her presence, Max Fargus was constantly terrified at the gradual perversion of his own character. He could refuse his wife nothing, or resisted only long enough to learn anew the completeness of his surrender. From an agony of foreboding he vacillated to an ecstasy of defeat. His own impotence mystified him, for he believed that he resisted with all his being, not realizing that in an infatuation half of the man combats for the woman. Then he could never comprehend the use of money. Money spent was money lost. He would have denied angrily being a miser and would have argued that in allowing his wealth to accumulate he individualized it and turned it into a human agency which returned him the most satisfying of sensations,--power. For the first time in his life he felt the need of a friend to advise and to steady him. But what he had cried out to Sheila was literally true, he had not a friend in the world, not even an acquaintance to whom he could turn. In all his business dealings he had sought to make himself feared. He disdained conciliation, to prevail by sheer autocracy alone intoxicated him. In this perplexed mood he found himself one morning, in what seemed to him the most accidental manner, face to face with his former attorney, Alonzo Bofinger. The familiar face evoked the memory of an unexampled moderation. A quick thought was followed by a bow. He stopped, giving him a smiling, "Good morning, Sir." The lawyer shifted his glance a moment, then with a blank countenance passed on. "But I'm not mistaken, it must be him," Fargus said doubtfully, and he called again, "Mr. Bofinger, hello there!" The lawyer halted, wheeled, and said in a puzzled voice: "Yes? What? Who is it?" "Say now," Fargus protested, "you know me." "Not at all, sir." "Why, I was your client a month ago." "Indeed?" "You remember me now?" "Not in the street, sir," Bofinger said with a smile. "My memory stops at my office." "But if I let you," Fargus said, much impressed. "That is different. How do you do? You may remember I don't know your name." Such scrupulousness completed the favorable impression of the misanthrope. He nodded approvingly and said: "Mr. Bofinger, you please me, I like your ways. And if you'll come around to the restaurant, I'd like to consult you--I want some advice. My name's Fargus, Max Fargus--you know that name, I'll bet." "What, are you _the_ Fargus!" Bofinger exclaimed, taking a step backwards. "The same," Fargus said with a chuckle, flattered by the tribute. "You wonder why I came to you, don't you--on the quiet?" "I am a little puzzled, I admit it, Mr. Fargus," Bofinger replied, putting a new deference into his address. "I've been bitten too often," Fargus said with a grim nod. "There's a lot of your profession, Mr. Bofinger, who ain't no better than crooks!" "Far too many," Bofinger said solemnly. "But I hope a better day will come." They arrived in the private office. For the third time Fargus fidgeted and repeated: "I want some advice." "Well, sir, I hope I can help you," Bofinger said encouragingly. "Mr. Bofinger," Fargus blurted out, "you remember Miss Vaughn?" "Perfectly." "Mr. Bofinger, won't you have something?" Fargus said desperately. The lawyer named his drink. His host, turning from the waiter, faced him with the manner of one about to overwhelm him with his disclosure. "She is now Mrs. Fargus--my wife." "Indeed?" the lawyer said politely, shooting up his cuffs, but nodding without astonishment. "Well, doesn't that surprise you?" Fargus said, opening his eyes. Shrewd and tricky in his little specialty, in the minor experiences of life he was a little dull. "Yes and no," the lawyer answered, examining the ash of his cigar. "From the standpoint of your attorney, yes. From any other standpoint," he added with a smile, "no." "Then you suspected all the time?" "Pardon me," Bofinger said, raising his hand half-way. "It was not my business to suspect, my business was to believe what you said. So Miss Vaughn is your wife?" "Yes." "I hope you're happy." "That's just it," Fargus said, seizing the opening, "that's the point. You put your finger on it without knowing it. I can't say I am happy--altogether happy." "Well, let's hear about it," Bofinger said with bluff directness. "The trouble is this," Fargus said doubtfully. "A woman has no idea of money, except to spend it and--you know yourself--it ain't easy to refuse one anything--particularly--well--when you're fond of her." "Say, now, ain't this about it?" Bofinger said, abandoning his stilted accents for an air of rough and confidential understanding. "This is the trouble. You're in love with a pretty woman, a remarkably pretty and charming woman--a whole lot in love. Now she, like a woman, a pretty woman, thinks more of pleasure than you do, wants to be out and seeing and wants to be out and be seen." "Yes," Fargus assented, and with a sigh he echoed faintly, "yes." "And she probably thinks that you're much better off than you are," Bofinger said with a wise nod. "That's it; there, that is it!" In his eagerness, Fargus extended his hand until it touched the lawyer on the sleeve. "Doesn't understand that just because you run a few fine places, that don't mean money--but expenses." "Ah, Mr. Bofinger!" Fargus said, raising his hands. "Come, now, you're worried over expenses at home, or rather at what you may be getting into, and you find the trouble is here,--dealing with a woman you're in love with ain't like talking business to a man." "Mr. Bofinger," Fargus said solemnly, "You've struck the nail on the head. That's my case--you can't handle a woman like a man." "Of course not. You're not the man to do it either. You'd spend everything on her!" Fargus, with an effort, allowed the statement to pass without betraying his emotion. "I'll tell you the best way," Bofinger said, after drumming a moment with his fingers, while Fargus pricked up his ears. "Here, this is it! Get a friend to talk to her." "How so?" "Why, a friend--the right sort--could do this," Bofinger continued. "He could tell her confidentially--that he thought--that he rather suspected, well, that he'd heard things weren't going as well with you as people thought. In fact, he feared you were going to have a close squeeze. He needn't say anything direct now, that would make her suspicious, but he might advise _her_ to beg _you_ to cut expenses down all you could." "Mr. Bofinger," Fargus cried, slapping his hands together, as Bofinger with a satisfied chuckle turned to him for his approval, "that's an elegant idea! And you're the man to do it!" "Me?" Bofinger exclaimed, in real surprise at such quick success. "But I'm not exactly, do you think, in the position of a friend?" "She'd never know it!" Fargus insisted. "I say, you're the man." "Why, frankly, sir," the lawyer objected, "I can't see I'd do--I really don't--you can't say those things off-hand--I'd have to get acquainted more--" Bofinger resisted so well and protested so earnestly that, an hour later, Fargus carried him away, under his arm, to that meeting which had come so near to Sheila's undoing. The situation was a perilous one for the lawyer. There was, he knew, the insane jealousy of the misanthrope to be reckoned with, the danger that Fargus would fear more from his intimacy than from the prodigality of his wife. Fortunately for Bofinger, Sheila's attitude had completely reconciled Fargus, who wanted her to receive advice, but more that it should come from unwelcome lips. In a fever of trepidation, Sheila awaited the next meeting with the lawyer. The sense of peril had sent her panic-stricken, with almost affection, to the shelter of her husband. The instinct of safeguarding her home and the memory of her pinched and wandering career impelled her towards all the virtues, in an incentive to flight from the menace of the lawyer. Many times she debated the consequences which would follow confession and an appeal to her husband's generosity. Invariably she recoiled, as before an impossibility, convinced that he would never pardon the slightest deception. She had divined under the intoxication of love the implacable, dormant fierceness of the misanthrope, and with this perception she came to recognize by what slender bonds she held his savage nature imprisoned. To surrender a moment her supremacy meant at best servitude. Besides, in her ignorance of the law she saw no escape from the marriage contract which lay in the hands of Bofinger. To her annoyance, it was not until the third afternoon that the lawyer arrived. From her window she discovered him sauntering elegantly toward her, displaying to the street a brilliant tan vest, a pair of lavender trousers, and a smooth gray cutaway. A villain masked has thrice the terror of a villain seen, and to the despairing woman this outward semblance of the negligent dandy magnified immeasurably the lurking venom of the shyster beneath. She went hurriedly down the stairs, rehearsing the dozen and one evasions she had prepared in making up the account he had come to demand. "He cannot prove I am lying," she thought defiantly. "Let him make a scene if he wants to. As for the furniture and the expense of fitting up the house, that belongs to Fargus. On that point I won't yield." Then, as his step sounded, she opened the door and said pleasantly, "Well, you've come at last." "Ah, Mrs. Fargus, I am unlucky! You are going out?" he said, starting back with a frown and speaking punctiliously. "But I may come in, for a moment? Just for a moment, then." "Fargus is not in," she said, sneering at his sleek hypocrisy, "and no one is around." "Excuse me, every one is around!" he said savagely, pushing past her. "Neighbors have eyes as well as ears. Oblige me by not coming to the door until I ring!" "A pleasant introduction." He shrugged his shoulders and made a quick survey. Returning to the parlor he took his seat by the window, to command a view of the street. "Sit there," he said, placing a chair. "Now no one can steal in on us." He stretched out his legs, quizzing her with a smile, in which he took no pains to conceal his vanity. "You were a little surprised to see me the other night, just a leettle, eh?" "How long have you known Fargus?" she said instantly. "You heard what he said." "Then you deceived me." "If what he said is true." She saw that she would learn nothing from him, so, drawing back, she said angrily: "Very well. Is this why you came?" "No," he said sharply, and abandoning his coxcomb attitude he sat erect with a jerk, brought his brows together above his joined fingers, staring at her so fixedly that Sheila nerved herself for the dreaded demand. "Sheila," he said moodily, "why didn't you complain of this box of a house, as I told you?" "Because I did not intend to play blindly." He shifted his glance, gazing moodily out of the window until, with a pucker of his lips, he said condescendingly: "Blindly, Sheila? I thought you more clever than that. You missed a trick. We must quarrel before him. If you had obeyed me I should have pooh-poohed your extravagant ideas. We would have been at once on bad terms. Do what I tell you another time." "Why, what is the use?" "To work into his confidence and get rid of his infernal jealousy, my dear." "But why make him stingy? Certainly that's not our game." "That's but temporary," he said after a long pause. "Now be frank with me," she said anxiously. "What are you trying to do? You've got a new plan, haven't you?" "None whatever," he said with emphasis. "One may come. On my honor, I have nothing in mind now but to work into his confidence and become the friend of the family. The advantage to us is obvious." The reply did not convince her. Despite his glibness she felt that he was deceiving her. She pressed him for some time, but without success. Finally, as she persisted, demanding his confidence, he cut her short by rising and saying: "I mustn't stay too long. It's understood now you are to hate me?" "Very well." "Not difficult, eh?" he said with a laugh. "No." He turned upon her violently, catching her wrists. "Don't try any tricks on me, my dear!" "You hurt," she said in white anger, but without resistance. "You heard?" "I hear." "And remember this," he said without releasing her. "When Fargus asks what we talked about, say that I told you I thought he was hard up and worried over his business." "I hear." "And I told you to make him go slow." "I hear." "There," he said, smiling and releasing his hold. "Don't be a little fool. Act square and you won't regret it. Au revoir." It was not until he had gone that she remembered with a shudder of foreboding that he had not once referred to their contract or demanded his account. The thought left her frightened and dismayed. Without a doubt he had changed his plan of campaign. Yet what could be his new purpose and why should he want to cater to her husband's avarice? Did he plan, when he had gained his complete confidence, to carry off by some master stroke what he would have to wait for painfully, year by year? She asked herself twenty such uneasy questions and resolved that, until she had forced Bofinger's confidence she would do nothing to further his purposes. "Well, have you seen Mr. Bofinger yet?" Fargus asked on his return. "He called." "Indeed," he said with a start. "And what did you talk about?" "Mr. Bofinger preached to me about--economy," she said slowly. "Well, well," he said, at loss for a comment. "And how do you like him now?" "Max, I wish you'd tell me something?" she said earnestly, laying her hand on his shoulder. "Is he your lawyer? Does he have charge of anything for you?" "No, no!" he said, shaking his head. "I look after my own business, thank you! Still, Bofinger is a good fellow; though you're set against him, aren't you?" "I?" she said in surprise, "oh, I was--" "Well?" he said fretfully. "Why, this afternoon I liked him better. Why did you say he wasn't a lady's man? I should say just the opposite." "Nonsense!" he said angrily. "So you like him?" "Yes," she admitted thoughtfully. "Yes, I do. He's quite different when you talk to him, alone." She added pensively, "What funny eyes he has,--very handsome, don't you think?" "What do you mean? What makes you say that?" Fargus said in great disturbance. "Oh, you silly man!" she said, throwing back her head and laughing. "Don't look so fierce. The idea! A man doesn't make love to you the first time he calls!" CHAPTER XIV AS A FLASH IN THE DARK The card Sheila had played in her desperation succeeded so completely that she became alarmed. She had played on impulse, recking not the danger of crossing the lawyer. The effect on Fargus was so extreme that she suddenly found herself in all the dangers which now arose from her double relation. The very thought that any man might make love to his wife had sufficed to awaken all the demons of jealousy in Fargus and had caused the face of Bofinger to appear the most odious in the world. From that night the name of the lawyer never passed his lips. He avoided him studiously in the streets. He left orders at his restaurants to deny him access. It was no longer only Bofinger he held in fear but all younger men, and he resolved bitterly never again to commit the error of introducing into his home that particular danger. For six days Bofinger was unable to catch even a glimpse of his coat-tails or to penetrate to his office. Vaguely alarmed, he studied his time and succeeded in surprising Fargus one afternoon at the moment he was leaving for the rounds of his various establishments. Fargus, unaware of his proximity, was startled by a clasp on his arm and the glib voice of Bofinger crying in his ear: "Here's luck! Where in thunder have you been hiding all the while?" In dismay Fargus let fall the package under his arm. "Evil conscience," said the lawyer, laughing as he restored the bundle. "Well, are things going any better?" "What things?" Fargus stammered. He looked at him darkly, seeing nothing but the eyes that Sheila had found handsome. "Hello, didn't your lady tell you how I lectured her on expenses?" Bofinger said, examining him with uneasiness. "Guess I must have turned her against me with too much advice." "Oh yes," Fargus said finally, forced to say something. "I remember." "It goes better then?" "Better." "Well, well, glad to hear it," Bofinger said, withdrawing his arm and shooting a queer look. "Glad to have been of use. Call on me any time. By, by!" With a nod and a luxuriant wave of his arm he ground on his heel and strode away. Fargus, a little uneasy, plodded along saying to himself that he had shown his ill-humor too abruptly. Next, remembering the little deceit in which they had been fellows, he became genuinely alarmed lest Bofinger, offended, should revenge himself by blabbing to Sheila. At this horrible idea he at once set out for Jefferson Market determined to conciliate the lawyer. The poor man, after a few weeks of marriage, was ready to do anything to escape facing a scene. Entering hastily he found the office in the sole possession of Hyman Groll. He halted, startled by the unusual figure of the hunchback, and asked: "Isn't Mr. Bofinger back?" "Not yet." "When do you expect him?" "When I see him," Groll answered, shrugging his shoulders. "You're his partner?" Fargus said, surveying the hunchback with an interest which Groll returned, each recognizing in the other a common intensity of purpose. "I'm his partner. Can we do anything for you?" "No, no," Fargus said hastily; "just tell him I want to see him very much." "What name?" "Fargus. He will know." "You're a client of his, then?" Groll said with aroused curiosity. "Yes, of course." "I beg pardon--since when?" "Why, a couple of months--" "Indeed--what name?" "Fargus, Max Fargus." "Oh, Max Fargus. Thank you, I'll speak to him," Groll answered with just the slightest twitch to his eyebrows. Excusing himself Fargus hurried directly home, convinced that the lawyer would be beforehand. He arrived at the corner of Second Avenue just in time to perceive the figure of Bofinger passing into his home. "Oh, the villain," he cried, "he is going to betray me!" And clutching his cane in the middle, he began to run, provoking the gibes of a group of street urchins, who cheered him on. He reached the door, blown and trembling, and inserting the key entered. Immediately such an explosion of anger greeted him from above that, mystified, he checked the call on his lips and stole cautiously to the foot of the stairs. The voice of his wife was answering in terror: "I swear I haven't! I've played square!" "Look here, Sheila, my girl," cried the furious voice of Bofinger. "It won't go. It won't do. What I want to know is what you've been telling the old boy to set him against me!" The first words had revealed the truth to the misanthrope, as in the storm a flash suddenly reveals the monstrous iniquities of the night. The exclamation was stifled in his throat; crumbling he fell across the banister, clinging to them with desperate fingers, while above the sounds of the altercation continued their overwhelming revelation. "Are you going to tell me the truth?" cried the lawyer. "Sheila, either you've made a blunder or you're playing double with me." "I am not." "You've made him suspicious of me." "I haven't--I swear it--on my honor." "Honor!" he cried with a roar of laughter. "Cut that out between us! Now once for all you can't fool me. I know when you're lying, and you're lying now! Ah, my girl, I've placed you long ago. You think you'll play me close and get all for yourself." "Bofinger, you are mad!" "See here, cut this short. I'll give you just one chance." "What's that?" she said, but so faintly that Fargus did not hear it. "You get me to supper here within four days--or I'll put the screws on!" "But how can I?" "That's a good one," he cried, repeating contemptuously her words. "You do it. That's all. We're partners and don't you forget it. Share alike! That was the terms when I could have ruined you with a word--and those, my girl, are the terms now!" Fargus, crimped to the banisters, listening with parted mouth and terrible eyes, could hear no more. He was suffocated. He reeled to the door and with a last effort opened it without noise. Once in the street he slunk rapidly away, glancing backward fearfully over his shoulder, scarce restraining a mad impulse to break into a run. He scurried under the Elevated and on without stopping, until at last the river barred his way. There he collapsed on a pile of lumber and remained holding his numbed head in his hands, swaying, until a policeman startled him by touching him on the shoulder and questioning him. Then, stumbling to his feet, he fled again towards the south, but haphazard as the rush of a brute wounded to the death. For mile after mile he scurried thus, striking east and striking west, his mind vacant and stunned, incapable of other thought than to flee as far as he could from the abomination he had left in his home. A dozen times he came near being run over, without knowing his danger or hearing the screams of warning that followed his crazy progress. In the blank shifting of faces he saw nothing but the leer and the scorn of the mocking world. The blow had been too instant and too astounding. His numbed mind could only feel the acuteness of the anguish, without as yet being able to analyze or recognize the causes. He did not think of Sheila or Bofinger. It was the world which had crushed him, the perfidious, mocking world which in the end had thus taken its contemptuous revenge. [Illustration: FOR MILE AFTER MILE HE SCURRIED THUS.] He saw everywhere smiles of derision, heard triumphant laughter. Every one was gazing at him, enjoying the discomfiture of the ancient enemy. He saw nothing clearly, he began to stumble in his walk and to waver, clearing his way through the crowds with his cane, thrusting women and children violently out of his path. In one narrow street in the Jewish quarter a crowd of boys at play set up a cry of "Madman!" He turned furiously and shook his fist, cursing them. Then fleeing anew his course became embroiled, crossing and recrossing, until to his dismay, a second time, he encountered the group of urchins, who accompanied him a block, with derisive shouts. Fargus, clasping his temples in his hands, broke away in terror and, by some instinct avoiding his former direction, turned north, winding and twisting helplessly in the labyrinth of the ill-smelling slums. Still everything was confused, his hatred and his agony. It was always the world which pursued him with its jeers. This obsession possessed him so completely that even the noises of the city, the rumble of truck and carriage, the roar of the Elevated, the screams of the street hawkers, the hum and swish of the crowd, struck his ears as so many delirious taunts. Through this fog and rumble, all at once, he heard a wild shriek of acclaim: "Madman! Madman!" Looking up wildly he found himself, to his horror, a third time in the street of his persecutors. This time the hilarity descended on him like a storm, for humanity is pitiless once its sense of ridicule is touched. From the windows women saluted him with gibes and laughter, people crowded to the front of the shops showing him to one another, while the loungers cheered on the ragamuffins who, forming in a company behind him, chanted in unison: "Mad dog! Mad dog!" Some one from a window pelted him with an apple. At this moment he was in danger of losing his reason. He began frantically to run, his tormentors with shrieks of delight pursuing him. After two blocks of fruitless flight he turned suddenly on the pack about his heels and clubbed the foremost with such fury that the rest fled. Then forgetting everything but the new fear of the something within his mind which was beginning to snap, he rushed over to the west side, crossing Broadway by a miracle. All at once he heard his name pronounced. A familiar voice was saying conciliatingly: "Oh, Mr. Fargus, do come in! What has happened to you?" He came to a halt, stock still, and glared about him. Some strange instinct had led him back to the scenes of his boyhood. He was before the sunken rooms of Nell's Coffee House, and Mrs. Biggs herself was watching him with fear and wonder. "What, you too!" he cried, and whipped into fury by the sight of his first love he brandished his cane and rushed on her. The woman, with a cry, flung into the restaurant and barricaded the door. Then a chill began to shake him, his arm fell inertly, his rage, from utter exhaustion, passed like a fever from him. He turned away and instinctively took up the familiar journey to his old home in the tenements. "Ah, let me think," he said wearily, striking his damp forehead. The perfidy of Bofinger he had guessed from the first words of his wife. He gradually comprehended what had happened, that the lawyer had gone straight to Sheila and with her had formed a compact which had made her his wife. If the details were obscure the truth was blinding. When he had thought this carefully out he said again: "What am I going to do?" He returned to the street of his birth and hurried up the well-known stairs. The key of the room was still in his pocket--he had never surrendered the old quarters. It was a superstition and a sentiment unique in his life. He entered the room and looked about solicitously. Nothing had been disturbed. Mechanically, still confused, he went to the trunk and was taking out the bedding when in dismay he recollected himself and shoved it hurriedly back. Then seating himself on the bed, his head imprisoned in his hands, he repeated: "What am I going to do?" This time the question had the vigor of an explosion. He no longer could abandon himself to the torrents of his rage. That emotion had left him in weakness and fear. But gradually, in the cold succeeding calm, a germ of a new passion formed and gathered violence,--the germ of vengeance. At the end of an hour of anguish he leaped to his feet with a shout of victory and, refreshed and alert, again rushed down the stairs and set out resolutely for the upper city. CHAPTER XV THE IRONICAL MOMENT Three hours later Fargus dragged himself home, still limp with the violence of that first uncontrolled burst of vengeance, which, like all the passions, had been too intense in its inception not to necessitate an exhausted reaction. But during these three hours he had already put into motion that conception of a punishment which had come to him like a flash at the end of his maddened flight through the city. What was hardest was to return home. When he reached the street it was already dark and the light in the second story was showing cheerily, while from the hall the veiled glow spread a feeling of delicious warmth. At the sight of the home he had grown so passionately to love such a lust for murder welled up in him that, not daring to look upon Sheila's treacherous face, he fled again. It was almost half an hour later that he came again to his own door and forced his reluctant feet up the steps. With the key in his hand he remained a long moment, feeling all at once very old and exhausted. Then with a shudder he opened the door. "Is that you?" the voice of his wife cried instantly. In the greeting, strangely enough, there was a note of gladness. "What kept you? I have been waiting for ever so long." "Business," he mumbled. His delay had frightened her. In moments of danger and deception the slightest deviation from the routine fires the imagination with vague terrors. Reassured, she began to move about quickly, humming to herself. Below Fargus listened, one hand raised, his lips moving involuntarily to her singing, aghast at her composure. "I'm coming--coming right away," she called down. "Go in and order supper." Before he had moved, she had run down the stairs. "Heavens!" she cried, stopping short. "How tired you look!" "Do I?" he said, looking on the floor. "Yes, a headache or something." "You must take more rest," she said, laying her hand on his shoulder and looking a moment anxiously in his face, before she took her seat at the table. He had wondered if he could keep his hands from her fair throat,--she came and he could hardly restrain himself from falling at her feet. When he looked at her at last his heart rebelled. He had believed that her perfidy had ended his infatuation. He found in her loveliness the power yet to wound--he suffered, he loved. It was not only the woman he could not give up, but the half, the happier half, of his own self. Seeing him so weary Sheila felt a sudden movement of pity, a maternal tenderness she had not believed possible. Across the shining little table, which she contemplated from time to time with an affectionate eye, she saw always the intruding shadow of the lawyer, malignant and inexorable, bringing with it the damp and the chill of the outer night. It was a memory and a threat, the shadow of the cold, starved world of poverty which clung to her. Before this real menace her vanities and her whims vanished, and suddenly, on again looking at the man who had placed her amid this coziness and warmth, the tears dimmed her eyes. All at once she realized how desperately she clung to this home of hers, this one satisfying reality in a stretch of past darkness and future menace. Threatened in this joy of possession her heart was softened towards her husband, whose suffering she now comprehended with her own. She raised her head and said compassionately: "How tired you are, dear! You aren't ill, are you?" At this, her first caress, he twitched violently as from a shock of pain, and drawing his hand hastily across his forehead he stammered inaudibly: "No, no." He fastened his gaze desperately on his plate; to look at her would have meant surrender. He had an immense impulse to seize her in his arms, to overwhelm the fair, treacherous face with kisses, to forego and to forget and to sink into a shameless, passionate subjection. To himself he repeated again and again: "Yes, yes, I love her--I want to love her!" Sheila also was stirred by the responsive emotion one endearing word had brought. "If he loves me like that," she thought, trembling on the verge of a confession, "he might forgive me anything." And shaken with the daring of the thought she sought the courage to throw herself on her knees and cry his mercy. The pause lasted but a moment. Neither suspected what was in the soul of the other or that three destinies hung on a word. A glance of affection would have brought Fargus shamelessly to her knees, a flash of courage and she would have confessed and been forgiven. The ironical moment passed. She did not quite dare. But to distract him she said gently: "I'm going to tell Mr. Bofinger to give you as good advice as he gave me. And by the way, what has become of him all this time?" That speech decided two fates. In Fargus every human emotion froze. From the rage of subjection he passed violently to the rage of murder. Where a moment before he had been on the point of stretching forth his hands in supplication he was now shaken with a blinding passion to possess himself with something murderous, with which to rush on her and blot out forever both her treachery and his infatuation. "Fargus!" she cried in horror. "What is it? Why do you look so?" "Me?" he mumbled, thrusting away from him the knife by his plate with a gesture she could not understand. "What--what was it?" "I asked if Mr. Bofinger was away," she said, following him in alarm. "And why you haven't seen him." "Ah, Bofinger!" he cried, and his fist cracked on the table like the sound of a curse. "What jealousy!" she thought to herself, and reassured she began to laugh openly. "Why do you laugh?" he demanded fiercely. "Monster of jealousy!" she said, smiling. "What a lot of trouble that naughty remark of mine has made!" "Go on," he said, drawing his eyebrows together. Then to himself he added furiously: "Actress--vile actress, lie now to me if you can." "I'm penitent, my dear; I own up," she said with mock humility. "Your friend talked economy and poverty to me until I expected he was going to send you back to your old ways. So to be rid of him I made up my mind to make you jealous. You remember?" And looking at him with challenging eyes she burst out laughing. "Since then, you can't bear to hear his name. Isn't that true?" "No," he said gruffly, cursing her cleverness. "No, I am not jealous." "Fib!" she said, wagging a finger. "And it's all my fault." "No." "You're not made for telling lies," she said with a shake of her head. "Leave that for those who know. Shall we ask Mr. Bofinger to supper then--to-morrow night?" He did not answer, raging at the skill with which she enmeshed him. "And you're not jealous!" she cried, clapping her hands triumphantly. Then rising and coming to his side with the fawning movement of a cat she laid her hand on his arm, saying with a sudden shift to seriousness: "Forgive me my foolish teasing. I'll feel awfully hurt if you let that come between you and an old friend. As for Mr. Bofinger, you silly man, he oils his hair and his eyes have a squint!" "Then you want him?" he said, without raising his eyes from her jeweled, supple fingers. "Please--for to-morrow," she answered with the air of making an atonement. "And--I'll not be so wicked again." Strangely enough, in the presence of such perfected acting Fargus found new strength and a fierce delight in matching wits. "Well, well!" he said, forcing a fierce smile. "That was all, was it? And you are sure you want Mr. Bofinger?" "Please." "That decides it then!" he said grimly; and to him the words were as the casting of a die. The emotion of vengeance is supreme among human passions. Beyond love itself, of which it is often the ultimate phase, it is so exacting and absorbing that only the most intense natures can guard it long in their hearts without being thereby consumed. The generality of men prefer to excuse and forget. The man who can pursue a vengeance relentlessly, and at the sacrifice of his own desires, has in him either a little of the woman or of the savage, in whom the egotism of civilization is unknown; or a touch of that madness which distinguishes fanatics and misanthropes, those who are ready to sacrifice themselves for humanity or those who despise it. In measure as this supreme passion dominated Fargus it educated him and, from a first tempestuous upsetting, it calmed him and gave to him the strength of deception, the joy of matching his wits against the woman and a confidence in the ultimate day. His demeanor during the supper at which Bofinger was present surprised him. Forewarned he viewed their adroit maneuvering to develop a quarrel with scorn and amusement. He found in himself another man, the creature of his new purpose, who suffered no longer. But at times the other returned with the intensity of pain. Two days after the supper with Bofinger, Fargus returned one night with a vigor and a zest that impressed Sheila at once. "Ah, you're different to-night," she said, looking at him with interest. "Yes, Sheila, I am," he cried, taking her hand and squeezing it joyfully. "Luck, great luck!" Wondering much she followed him up-stairs, where without preliminaries he brought out a bundle of papers and said with a smile: "Sheila, we're going to have a business talk. Something unexpected has happened. First--there!" Picking out of the bundle a book he offered it to her with an expectant smile. She took it with a feeling of apprehension, watching him in almost dismay. It was a bank book inscribed with her name. "For me?" she cried, "but--what--why?" "You have said you don't have enough money," he answered drily. "You are now to run the house--all expenses except rent. Every three months four hundred dollars will be paid in to your account." She looked and saw that amount entered to her credit. This development in her husband so overwhelmed her that she could not for a time muster words to thank him. When she started he cut her short. "Now listen, Sheila, you've been wondering, haven't you, what has worried me these last days." He stopped with a questioning look, reveling in his new power of deception. "Three days ago I was afraid that the chance to make millions was going to escape me. To-day I have it in my hand. Yes, Sheila, millions--millions!" Across her mind there passed the terrible thought that Bofinger had found an opening, and she said anxiously: "Is it a secret?" "Absolutely," he answered. "A secret for every one!" "It's a plan, then, of Mr. Bofinger's!" she said with conviction. "Bofinger, heavens no!" he cried in real alarm. "He has no idea of it; and, Sheila, no one must know, no one!" "Never fear," she cried, relieved. "Not a word shall pass my lips, I promise you! But, Max, you say millions," she added incredulously; "in your enthusiasm don't you--what do you really mean?" "No, millions!" he cried, smiting his palms. Then leaning forward and grasping a knee in either squat hand he began nervously: "To-morrow I'm leaving for Mexico. When I come back, if all goes well, there is nothing you can wish for you can't have." At this extraordinary promise, all of a sudden, like a mist, there rolled up before the woman a glittering vision of luxury and splendor; carriages beautifully fashioned, rolling behind swift horses, boxes at the opera dimmed by apparitions of bewildering satins and silks, which in turn disappeared before the fascination of glistening jewelry. She shut her eyes and with a sigh relaxed in the gentle happiness. Fargus lost not a sign of her emotion. He smiled as a master smiles. He held her. He proceeded rapidly, finding in the thought of her deception a joy which she imagined came from his words. "Four years ago I staked out a miner who came to me with tales of the Mexican silver mines. I supplied him on condition to have two thirds of his findings. He is not the first I've done that for. He wrote me a week ago that he was returning successful. To-day I saw him and, Sheila, not only has he discovered a mine that promises everything, but he brings me the chance to buy up one which they think is worked out, but which really is filled with millions. There is in this business," he said, nodding wisely, "something queer, a bit of treachery; but let the owners look to themselves. The more fools they to be deceived! I shall go to-morrow and investigate both with an expert, on the quiet. Now, in order that I can close as soon as I am sure, I have brought these papers to you to sign." She received the papers without a glance, saying breathlessly: "And you really believe there is a chance?" "A chance? A certainty!" She leaned over and took his hands, saying with tears in her eyes: "O Max, if it is only true!" "There, there, read over the papers," he said nervously, withdrawing his hands. "If everything goes well I shall sell some of my restaurants and cinch the bargain. The papers are a formality--your consent to the sales in case they are made. Of course," he added with a shrug, "if nothing turns up I shan't sell." "Oh, don't speak of such a thing!" she said with a superstitious shiver. "Where shall I sign?" "There and there," he said, imposing his finger and hiding his eyes. "To-morrow we'll go before a notary and you can acknowledge your signature." "And why that?" she said, signing carelessly. "To show, my dear, that your signature is given willingly and not by compulsion." She lifted her head and met his glance. The two burst into laughter. The next morning the deeds were duly executed at the Union Bank, where Sheila was identified. After lunch she insisted on packing everything herself. She arranged his tie, smoothed his coat, studying him with an affection as sincere and deep as her hunger for the vision of wealth he had so marvelously held out to her. "Now remember," he said sternly, "if anyone asks, say I'm off on business." "I will." "But you don't know where." "Never fear." "You might say, if necessary, that it was to look up some oyster beds." "I will." "Good-by, then," he blurted out, reaching out his hand. "Not like that!" she cried in protest, and flinging herself into his arms she kissed him. Then holding herself from him, seizing his shoulders, she cried fervently: "Oh, Max, bring me only what you promised, and I'll give you all without reserve. All!" CHAPTER XVI CASTLES IN THE AIR It was fully a month before Sheila received word of Max Fargus. The weeks passed in skirmishes with Bofinger, who, dissatisfied with her explanations, continually harassed her. To his insistent demands she answered always that Fargus had left without further explanation than that he was going to investigate the oyster fields. "And that's all you know?" the lawyer demanded with one of his inquisitorial looks. "Absolutely." "He writes to you?" "Me? I haven't heard a word," she answered truthfully. "Well, it looks peculiar," he said suspiciously. "He has never done this before that I can find out." "Perhaps he has a plan to extend his business," she said, committing the mistake of trying to explain. He looked at her with an antagonistic eye. "Sheila, I bet something's gone wrong between you two." She protested in surprise. "You haven't been cutting up, have you?" he continued angrily. "Doing anything to make him jealous?" "Me? What could I do?" she answered. "I might as well live in a convent." "How long is he going to be away?" "I don't know." "And he hasn't written?" "No." "And that doesn't worry you?" "Me?" she said, slipping over the dangerous answer. "Why should it?" Twenty times Bofinger returned to the catechism without discovering in her manner a single flaw. She held the lawyer always in terror, but according to the nature of her sex, which is disconcerted only by the unknown, the daily contact educated her and brought a new confidence. Besides she was defending the millions Fargus had promised her with the instinct of a mother for her children. They had grown very real to her, these children of her hopes. She believed in them because she had always wanted to believe. So now without restraint she began to abandon herself to all the delights of the imagination. She began the morning by ransacking the society columns for details of the last night's functions, promising herself, with a delicious rage, that the time would soon come when she would read her own name there. She ran the shops, purchasing in her imagination enough to fill their little house three times over. She hung over the shining counters of the jewelers, setting aside for the future day bracelets and brooches unending, and decided, so natural did her new destiny seem to her, that she would wear nothing but rubies and pearls. She remained late abed, having her breakfast served in her room and tired out the morning with preparations for her afternoon parade on the Avenue. At times her happiness became so intense that she had a superstitious dread lest at the last moment Providence might thwart her. She went thrice a week to church, where she promised to be a faithful and exemplary wife if only Fargus might be permitted to return successful, hoping by this bargain to conciliate God and range him on her side, for she was a bit uneasy over her past. Also it must be admitted that her conception of Paradise had a flavor of upper Fifth Avenue. The culmination of these weeks of delirium arrived in a visit to the opera. It was an intoxication such as she had never known. Ensconced in the glittering orchestra, the display on the stage, the surge and the sweep of the immense music, awakened all her senses. Radiant and palpitating she leaned back languidly, her glance traveling among the boxes, back and forth over the bewildering horseshoe, dreaming of the day when she too would take her place among these princesses of fashion,--and it took her quite a while to decide which box she would occupy. During the second entre-acte she joined the parade in the foyer. Feeling that the excitement gave her a moment of unusual brilliancy, she placed herself in prominence, wondering anxiously if she would be noticed among all the gorgeous toilettes. To her delight she drew many glances and on leaving had the delicious satisfaction of hearing a voice say in a whisper half impertinent and half admiration: "Who is she?" "Oh, when I can dress as they do!" she thought with a sigh of delight, "they will know who I am!" The incense of this flattery caused her to imagine the conquests she should then number--little infidelities to Fargus, a number of which, despite all her vows, she committed in that moment of ecstasy. On leaving the opera she took a carriage for the mere vanity of being obsequiously handed through the door. Then, arrived home, she paid the driver double his fare in the embarrassment she felt that he should set her down in such an unfashionable quarter. The next morning, remembering with alarm the infidelities she had imagined to her poor husband, she hastened to church where she renounced them in trembling, hoping perhaps that the divine Providence had not noticed such a minuscule frailty. At the end of the month Bofinger, on repairing to Sheila's, stumbled on a messenger who was bringing a telegram to the door. Convinced for a long time that the absence of Fargus held some mystery of which the woman knew the secret he avidly seized on the occasion offered. Slipping a quarter into the palm of the surprised messenger he bade him return five minutes later. Then he went in hurriedly and going at once to the attack said: "Well, Sheila, what news?" "About Fargus? Nothing." "What! Not even a letter?" "No, indeed." "But he's telegraphed?" he persisted. "He'd never think of that," she said with conviction. "So," he said smiling. "And you're still satisfied there's nothing to fear?" "Why, I am a little worried," she said, deciding to answer thus. "But then I suppose it's only one of his funny ways." At this moment the bell rang and Sheila, answering the door, received the telegram. "Hello, what's that?" the lawyer cried from the parlor. "Only someone at the wrong number," she said, shutting the door. Bofinger rose and with two steps reached her side at the moment she was trying to conceal the telegram in her dress. "Indeed!" he said ironically, twisting the dispatch from her hand. "So this doesn't count?" Sheila, paralyzed with fear, felt the floor swim beneath her. Bofinger, tearing off the cover, found to his great disappointment only this: Begin journey tomorrow. "MAX FARGUS." Without attempting to conceal his vexation, he was tendering the dispatch to Sheila when all at once snatching it back he scanned it for the source. "Mexico!" he exclaimed, and, looking at her with the gleam of the lawyer who has entrapped his witness, he raised his voice to a shout, "MEXICO!" Sheila, who had feared that the contents might reveal the story of the mine, comprehended rapidly that she might yet extricate herself. "Mexico?" she cried with well acted incredulity, and seizing the telegram she read it. "But--but I don't understand! Why Mexico?" "You do it well," he said scornfully. "So Fargus has gone to Mexico. Why?" "My dear fellow," she said, sitting down and studying the telegram, "I am as astonished as you." "Sheila, you're lying to me." "You tell me that a dozen times a day," she said with a shrug. "It gets tiresome. Still, I would like to know why he is in Mexico and what he means by beginning his journey. Does he mean his return or what?" Deceived by her air of candid bewilderment Bofinger tried a new method. "Sheila," he said, looking at her earnestly, "I believe you. But, my dear girl, if you are deceiving me, you are running big risks. Fargus is too clever for you alone. You need me, whether you find it out now or later." "Perhaps," she said, glancing at the telegram to escape his scrutiny, "perhaps he has some idea of bringing up a Mexican establishment?" "You think he's coming back now?" "Oh, of course." "You are doubtless right," he added, smiling too graciously not to raise her doubts, "and we'll soon know." A week later, the mail brought her the following brief letter, with a Southern postmark. Dear Sheila: Fargus has been away a leettle too long. You may be satisfied, I am not. I'm off for Mexico. ALONZO BOFINGER. "Oh, if he finds him, then everything is lost!" she cried in consternation. "If only I knew how to warn Fargus!" At the end of three weeks she received a telegram from Bofinger which completed her despair, for he sent but the one word: "Progress." Six weeks of torture succeeded, during which she was torn between the fear that the lawyer should learn of the mines and the agony which gradually possessed her as she became convinced that some dreadful accident had happened to Fargus, forever sweeping away her brief vision of fortune. This was the secret of the overwhelming grief which had so mystified Bofinger on the night when he had returned to reveal to the distracted woman the fall of all her hopes and the extraordinary sentence which for seven years she must undergo by the provisions of the common law. CHAPTER XVII THE SEVEN YEARS The human imagination, which responds easily to the narration of an immediate sorrow, is unable to comprehend that suffering which has no end, for the imagination of man is powerless before the stretch of time, which always surprises and mystifies it. Hence the difficulty of making comprehensible the agony of the seven years' waiting in which Sheila suddenly found herself; as though she had suddenly awakened in the embrace of a dungeon, forgotten and without hope. For man can conceive of the future only in the terms of the past, and if time, when reviewed, has the ironical property of amazing contraction, it has, when anticipated, according to the intensity of the desire, the illimitable power of extension with something of the mysterious cruelty of death, incessantly multiplied and incessantly possible. What is seven years in the human life? In the past it is a breath, in the future it is eternal. In the memory it ceases to exist or stands only as a vague gap which one seeks bewildered and with a sense of loss. In the future, for the convict who awaits his liberty, for the genius who runs the streets unrecognized, for the lover and the heir, seven years stretches beyond the human vision and has something of the quality of eternal punishment. Seven years to eat out her soul in patience, seven years to mortify unquenchable desires, seven years to contemplate the autumn of her youth arriving, to have all just beyond reach, to gain all just too late, and to suffer each day the pangs of a queen in exile--this was the aspect to the distracted woman of these inexorable seven years on the morning after the revelation of the lawyer. She had not realized it at once. She began to comprehend it in the morning after a night of agony. When Bofinger returned the next afternoon he found her shattered and inert. She had passed from the horror of waiting to a recoil from the suffering she must begin, as a damned soul might shrink at the brink of the unending atonement. She did the natural thing. She refused to believe that Fargus could be dead. Then, as though to surrender the thought of the millions was as painful as to wait for the half of one, she found a wretched consolation in the hope that Fargus had found the mines and had pretended death, until by careful espionage he could satisfy himself that she was worthy. Bofinger had his reasons for keeping her in ignorance of her legal rights. He did not inform her that she could apply to the courts for an allowance, for he wished to keep everything in his hands, fearing specially the danger of her falling into honest guidance. Two things he wished to avoid, her learning the value of her inheritance and, in his selfishness, her spending what would undoubtedly be a liberal allowance. To make more secure his hold he loaned her the sum requisite for her needs, twelve hundred a year, taking notes of acknowledgment at twelve months for double the amount, which by constant exchange he calculated to swell to usorious figures. Also it suited his precautions that she should be forced to live frugally and separated from the world, for he knew the dangers of her nature which, were the opportunity presented, would sacrifice everything for instant luxury. Without his suspecting it, one thing abetted his end. Sheila's account at the bank terminated with her first credit. Seeing that she refused, for some unaccountable reason, to surrender the hope of Fargus's return, he encouraged her in that persuasion, pretending also to fear some ruse of his eccentric nature. For two years Sheila clung to this obstinate hope, and at times thereafter she returned to it desperately, but at the beginning of the fourth year she abandoned her dream utterly and resigned herself to despair, with the revolt of one who can accuse but fate and sees herself the sport of some divine cruelty. In brief, as the history of such daily grief can no more be told than comprehended, six years passed and, amazed, she beheld the beginning of the last period. She was entering then her forty-first year. With the six preceding years she had bidden a sullen farewell to the last of her youth and in this cruel martyrdom had watched day by day the imperceptible fading of her bloom, the dulling of her eyes until, doomed to impotently witness the fragrance and the warmth evaporate, she had come rebelling into middle age, having been beautiful, coquette, and pleasure-loving for nothing. What gave a mysterious horror to this period was the utter impossibility, when she sought back, to perceive even the traces of the journey. At the beginning of the seventh year she awoke and shaking off all restraint began desperately to anticipate the arrival of her fortune. Bofinger, after a first resistance, seeing her resolved, advanced her the sums she required, surprising her by his generosity and good humor. At thirty-four she had looked upon forty as irrevocable. Now she said to herself that she had yet two years into which to crowd all the defeated longings of her youth. She flung madly into the vanities of luxury. She dismissed her maid of all work and installed a cook and waitress. She made a bundle, so to speak, of all her furnishings; replacing the carpets with oriental rugs, introducing into the dining-room a magnificent sideboard spread with silver. As for the parlor and bedroom, within six months they retained not an object of those treasures which had once seemed to her so luxurious and whose purchase had cost Fargus such pangs. Each afternoon in a landau, which she rented by the month, prepared by her coiffeur, perceptibly rouged, a little puffy but always noticeable, she rolled away languidly to mingle in the parade of the avenue. In the evenings she lived from theater to theater. Paradise, to this woman, was to be admired, envied, and coveted. She loved but two ideas, herself and the world. Her feminine nature had never sought the tribute of the individual--the woman who does that returns her love--but the admiration of the mass; an emotion entirely selfish and egoistical. In her appetite for admiration she made no discriminations, the meanest glances had the power of rendering her supremely happy. So each day, as she whirled along up Fifth Avenue and through the Park, she watched anxiously from the corners of her eye, counting the looks that followed her; thoughtful and pained when an old beau, who recognized her artifices, showed her to a friend with a knowing laugh, delighted when a young man, attracted by the mystery of woman's maturity, ogled her with supreme daring. One consideration alone kept her in her modest neighborhood, a consideration human and quite feminine. Next to the joy of rubbing elbows with the fashionable world, she procured her greatest delight in the triumph over her neighbors, which she each day achieved as, perfumed and hidden in laces, she was handed into her carriage. In this unsatisfied, false joy she ran through the last twelve months, eating up the savings of the lawyer, who continued meanwhile all suavity and good nature, calling on her three times a week, serving her in little ways, always agreeable and amusing, acting as her companion whenever it pleased her. Still she was not the dupe of his mildness, understanding very well its end. Only as a disagreeable situation to be met in the future she found it easier to banish the problem from her mind. Thus arrived the end of January, and the day which brought to an end the seven years. At eight promptly Bofinger arrived bearing a bouquet. Time had not entirely overlooked him. He had turned slightly bald, the wrinkles had invaded every cranny, and his vest had generously rounded out. But despite such telltale evidence, he had not yielded a jot of the dress of a young dandy. He wore a fancy shirt, thin red lines on a lavender background, upright collar of the same decoration. A flowing crimson tie passed through the loop of a large ruby ring, this last the memento of a gentleman who procured such trifles at considerably below their market value. A blue silk vest with a firmament of yellow stars was designed to give the touch of gaiety needed to a suit of ruddy brown cheviot. Pending Sheila's arrival he waited in the parlor, heels clicked together, stiff legs, bouquet to his bosom, a speech on his tongue. Then, as this attitude began to cramp him, he relaxed, placed the bouquet on the table and stalked about the room, contemplating with his chin in his palm the display of Sheila's extravagance. Many thoughts doubtless passed through his mind, which he summed up by clicking to himself and saying with conviction: "Damn, she'll take a lot of driving!" Then instinctively the fingers of his left hand tightened as one who already grips the reins. Immersed in this reflection he did not notice Sheila's soft entrance. By a caprice, instead of making a toilette for the anniversary she had put on a plain dress of black, either to render herself less desirable or to appeal to his compassion. She stood a moment silently, her glance bent gravely upon him. Then, advancing with a smile, she said lightly: "Heavens, Alonzo, you _have_ something on your mind!" Bofinger, startled, turned about in haste, losing all his effect. "Do you know what night this is?" she asked, stealing his thunder. "I have come to congratulate you on your widowhood," he said hurriedly. "Is that why you have gone into mourning?" "And are those flowers for me?" she asked with a gesture. "Eh," he cried, and, turning clumsily, hastily presented them. To restore his equanimity he began to smoke, while Sheila, after touching the flowers of the bouquet one by one, finally laid them down on her lap and said: "Do you know that, until a few months ago, I expected him to turn up at any moment." "Well, at times I had the same idea," he said with a nod. "A sort of superstition. However, if the waiting was long it's over now. Sheila, own up, I haven't been a half bad fellow, have I? Have you any complaint coming?" "No," she replied with a smile. "You have been easy on me; but I never thought that it was against your interests." He frowned, and bringing out a package of notes said acridly: "Do you know just how much I've loaned you? For seven years I've made you an allowance of $1,200 yearly, total $8,400. It may be interesting to note that it has been at a slight personal embarrassment. Beside which, in the last twelve months I have advanced you $4,800; to do which I have been forced to borrow heavily. Total, $13,200." "Finish up the calculation, Alonzo," she said with a shrug, "and tell me just what you expect to make on your generous transactions. However, I don't object, virtue should be rewarded." "About $32,000," he said promptly, "which is nothing considering the risks. Yet," he continued, placing the notes on the table before him with a significant movement, "I'll have something more to say about this later, then perhaps you will give me more credit." An awkward moment succeeded, what each felt was the end of the skirmishing. It was the woman who finally resolutely went to the attack. "Alonzo," she said, sinking back in her chair, "we might as well come to the point. I know very well what that is,--you intend to marry me. Well, let us talk it over and as friends. For our feelings have changed and, as I have become a middle-aged woman, I look at things differently. You have had your interests but you have been a good friend to me. So let's talk the situation over, as friends." "Agreed," he said gravely; "but as we are going to be frank, Sheila, why, I may as well say now, we will be married day after to-morrow." "Then let us discuss it on that basis," she said with a smile, into which she put all the indifference and weariness of middle-age. "What is the situation? You wish your half of Fargus's fortune; I don't flatter myself there is any other reason for our marriage. Well, you shall have it--freely. I won't hide from you that I did at first rebel. Now you have fairly earned it. But on the other hand I want my liberty. So take your share and leave me free. On your side, at forty-three, you are young. You will want to enjoy life, you won't want to do it with an old woman at your side. You love life, my dear Alonzo, and a wife twenty-five years old is what you need. For me," she said with a tired smile, "I have come to what I never felt possible; I adore pleasure as much as ever, but I have no longer the strength. Yes, I must get used to being old. This last year has tired me dreadfully. It's over, money will no longer mean what it could have meant." "And what will you do with it?" he asked solemnly. "Me? I may make a splurge for another six months, for it is hard to give up. After which," she added with profound deliberation, "I think I'll devote myself to charity. Therefore, my dear Alonzo, don't tie up with a middle-aged woman when it isn't necessary." "My dear Sheila," Bofinger said, adopting the same attitude. "What I am going to say will surprise you; I too have changed. No, I have not the same desires, the same enthusiasms I had seven years ago. I am not young at forty-three and to play it would make me ridiculous. A time for all things. Now I have other ambitions. But first of all I have gotten to the point in life when a man gets lonely--wants to anchor somewhere." "Heavens, Alonzo," she cried in vexation, "you're not going to make love to me now!" "That would not be difficult, my dear Sheila," he said with an admiring glance, "though for some reason you have taken pains to-night to appear at your worst." And tilting his nose in the air, he enjoyed a smile at the expense of the woman, he had not studied in vain. "What's the use, Sheila? You know it's settled. And when we get as far along as this scenes ain't agreeable. When we're married," he added, sweeping up the bundle of notes, "Sheila, my dear, you may make a bonfire of these without it's costing you more than the price of a match." "But," she said suspiciously, "if that's been your intention why did you make me sign such agreements?" "And supposing you had died," he said with a shrug. "What would have been coming to me? Nothing but the papers I held. Now tell me I haven't been generous! And what's more, when we're married, you can choose. I'll take what's coming to me and leave you absolutely free--or--" "Or what," she asked, at some wonder to hear him speak so soft. "Or we can pull together. The property has improved, if we wanted higher stakes we could do much together. I'd go into politics; that's the way to invest your money to-day. Yes, Sheila, tastes change and new ambitions come. After forty only power satisfies a man. That is what I want. So, frankly, I should like a home. I feel I'd make a good husband and, Sheila, I shouldn't find it difficult to be proud of you!" In listening to these soft words and seeing him so settled and phlegmatic, knowing the charity that comes with fortune, she had perhaps a moment during which she was willing to believe that he had really experienced a change of heart. So easily are we persuaded of the best intentions, when we fear the worst. "But why," she asked after a thoughtful interval, "why is marriage necessary? There is no question of your half, that I promise you." "My dear," he said with deprecatory candor, "I am too old to change my skin. I know I can trust you, now. Yet, to save my life, I couldn't help doubting it. It's second nature, you know. Seeing is believing, and holding is better. I'm made to risk nothing, to act as though I suspected everything. It ain't personal, Sheila--I can't help it." She bit her lip and, driven to desperation, said angrily: "But I don't want to marry you!" "Why not?" "Because I'm not in love with you." "Were you with Fargus?" he said quietly. "It was a question of interest, wasn't it? Well, marry me and it'll be to your interest too. Such a man as I am, knowing the secret ways and who ain't squeamish, only needs capital. Knowledge without capital is what makes the shyster." "However, you leave me free to choose?" she said. "Perfectly." "Then," she said decisively, seeking to provoke from him his true feelings, "since you won't trust me to pay, we'll be married and, as soon as you get your half, you'll arrange for a divorce." "I regret," he said politely but with a ring of vexation, "that is not possible. In coming into possession of Fargus's estate you must give bonds for the principal until another seven years have elapsed. There also you will need my assistance." "Then in heaven's name what do I get!" she cried, rising. "Humph, you get the income," he said with a shrug, "which is tolerable--quite enough." "Well, what?" "Well," he drawled, looking askance at her, "somewhere around $50,000." "A year?" she said faintly. "Yes. The property must have bettered considerable--ought to fetch close on to a million now." "And that, all that is mine!" she said, palpitating. "All ours," he corrected, and his voice trembled a little, despite himself. "And half of that won't satisfy you!" she cried. "Two such halves are better than one," he said, then added hastily, "However, that lies with you. If you say it, it will be a marriage in form only." "Let me think it over," she said, still under the shock of her surprise. "Certainly," he answered, rising to depart. "You are perfectly free." "Thank you." "But," he added at the door, "be ready for the ceremony, day after to-morrow, at eleven in the morning. Good night. Think over the rest carefully." Then she comprehended, what at the bottom she had known from the beginning, that, despite all her resources, at the crucial moment he would always be her master, and in the matter of her fortune she would do exactly as he designed. CHAPTER XVIII FARGUS IS DEAD It is rare in the secret life of the city that they who live by preying on society are not themselves preyed upon. Alonzo Bofinger for a long while had been in the clutches of Sammamon, the money-lender. Without his aid he could never have maintained Sheila through her period of waiting. But, to obtain the necessary loans, he had been forced to take him into his entire confidence, paying, of course, the penalty in the usorious rates Sammamon greedily imposed. Bofinger, indeed, had never lived on his income, but had used it to capitalize his debts, gambling always on a lucky future turn of the wheel of fortune. He frequented what are called "sporting circles," where in the company of jockeys and pugilists he was entirely at home. He had the run of the second-class theaters and enjoyed specially the atmosphere of the wings and the little suppers after midnight where the gaiety was not conventional and the jests were unadulterated. He liked to splurge and, as a consequence, he was constantly floundering beyond his depth. Without losing either his heart or his head he had entered into an attachment with one of the actresses of these sham stages, a connection which flattered his vanity and gave him, he thought, the standing of a man of the world. When, therefore, after the death of Fargus, he saw the future open before him with all the gratification of his desires, he threw all moderation to the winds, and having in a short while exhausted all his property, he had recourse to Sammamon, with whom he had had one or two previous understandings. His yearly income, about this time, was nearly cut in two by the withdrawal of Hyman Groll from the firm. Bofinger, already in debt, was astounded to learn that his quiet partner had already accumulated a capital of $50,000 with which he purposed to emerge into larger opportunities. But his chagrin was tempered by the delicious thought that, in a few years, he would be able to turn the laugh. To his annoyance, the dissolving of the partnership showed him, what he had scoffed at before, that with all the glamour and the applause he was only the voice where Hyman Groll had been the power. In a month he saw his prestige impaired, his alliances shaken, and found himself on the same footing with the half dozen lawyers who scrambled for the pickings of the court. All of which had sent him frequently and deep into the lair of Sammamon. On the morning after his visit to Sheila, he started for the office of the money-lender to negotiate another loan, which he promised himself should be the last. A frightful run of luck at roulette had depleted him. Besides, he wished to make a handsome present to Sheila before their marriage, desiring above all things to keep her in good humor until the crucial morrow was over. Also he had to appease the actress, and having no doubt as to the scene which would follow his announcement of the marriage, he knew that no small offering would suffice. Not far from Hester Street, in the heart of the Ghetto, on the first floor of a tumble-down frame building, stooping with age, a dank office bore the sign, LEOPOLD SAMMAMON _Loans._ Bofinger, whose sensitive nose was offended by the smells of the quarter, lit a cigar, and entered. The office, on the apex of a triangle formed by the junction of two streets, had an entrance on either side, so that those within seemed to be constantly buffeted by the two streams of humanity. Sammamon came hurriedly forward, a frail man not yet forty whose shoulders stooped as though still bearing the weight of the pack with which he had landed here twenty years before. The body, without vitality, seemed held together by the one impulse of gain that burned in the eyes, which had the strange contradictory quality peculiar to his trade, all fierceness and intensity when examining a client, but wavering uneasily the moment they were subjected to the same scrutiny. The two entered a cell which served as a cabinet and began to talk, with their foreheads together, both to overcome the noise of the street and to protect themselves against the sharp ears of the three clerks. "Sammamon, I want two thousand dollars," Bofinger said directly, "two thousand dollars more and that's all, so help me God!" "Where I get two thousand dollars?" the money-lender protested. "I am bankrupt now with your loans! Ain't the time up to-day--eh? Why you want more money?" "I am going to marry the woman to-morrow," the lawyer said conciliatingly. "And I've got to hush another one up and do it handsome!" "Where I get two thousand dollars?" Sammamon repeated with a shrug. "See here," Bofinger said, tapping him on the knee. "Come to terms now and quit your mumbling. Darn you, you know very well you're making a good thing out of this. Give me the money and I'll sign for three thousand dollars at sixty days and I'll pay the rest then. It takes time to get the thing through the courts." "I couldn't do it,--so help me! I couldn't do it, I couldn't get the credit, I couldn't get one other cent!" "Three thousand dollars, Sammamon, at sixty days." "Think of the risk! If anythings happen, I'm ruined!" "Well, curse you, what will you do it for? Out with it!" "I can't do it, Mr. Bofinker, I can't do it!" "Three thousand five hundred dollars then." "Imbossible!" "Well, make your own terms--I'll sign anything." Sammamon took his chin in his hands, and, after much shrugging of his shoulders and pursing of his lips, finally said, with a gesture that seemed to apologize to his ancestors for his moderation: "Five thousand dollars at sixty days--not one cent less. And then I don't know where I gets the money." "Make out the papers," Bofinger said curtly--and did not curse him until the money was safe in hand. The next day having meanwhile procured the authorization of the courts, he was married to Sheila and went with her to live in her home; for Sheila, seeing there was no escape, and deciding to make the best of the situation, had feigned a willingness to accept his proposal. Three days later, on a stormy morning, in the company of his wife Bofinger appeared in court to begin the formalities necessary to place Sheila in possession of Fargus's property. Sammamon, who trusted only his own eyes, occupied a distant corner where he listened attentively, seeking unsuccessfully to conceal the agitation which the prospect of his future gains caused in him. The judge, who, despite the monotony of his profession, kept an interest in the romances of the law, instead of proceeding with the routine of the case, assumed an ex-officio air and said: "Ah, this is that extraordinary case of disappearance--a very extraordinary one, Mr.--Mr. Bofinger. In my whole experience I don't think I remember another case like this." "Your Honor," Bofinger said, "I represent my wife, the party in pleading." "You're a lawyer, then, Mr. Bofinger?" the judge said in some surprise. "I do not remember your name before." "In fact, I have never had the pleasure of appearing before your Honor." "And what was the last heard of this Mr. Fargus?" "Seven years ago, the twenty-sixth of this month," Bofinger said, "according to the depositions I have here." "Upon which date the lady was free to marry. You are not, therefore, an old married couple." "Naturally, your Honor." "I congratulate you," the judge said pleasantly, giving him a shrewd glance. "It has been a long attachment." "Quite so," the judge answered with a bow, "and now that your marriage is accomplished you are taking steps to gain possession of the property?" "Your Honor states the case exactly," Bofinger said drily. "We are come to take the first steps to acquire possession of the property, subject, of course, to the bond which the law requires for another seven years; although it is sufficiently established that Max Fargus is dead." "Who says that I am dead?" At this extraordinary interruption every one in the court-room turned in astonishment. In the back of the court-room a dark undersized figure had entered unperceived and supporting himself heavily on his cane, had advanced to the middle of the room, where a second time he cried: "Who says that Max Fargus is dead?" Then with an effort he removed his hat, revealing a face on which, despite a pallor of death, was the mocking sneer which one imagines on the face of Satan claiming the forfeit of a soul. For a moment there was a tense silence. Then through the court-room the shriek of Sheila reechoed in terror: "Fargus, Max Fargus!" The sound of a thud followed as she slipped to the bench and pitched loudly on the floor. "Your Honor," Fargus said, turning to the judge. "All I wanted to do was to establish my identity. That is done." Bofinger had a moment of vertigo during which he committed two vital mistakes. The first was to remain sillily muttering over and over, "Max Fargus! Max Fargus!"; the second was in allowing his enemy to escape. When a moment later he recovered himself and rushed forth there was not a trace of the misanthrope to be seen, neither in the halls nor on the sidewalk, nor in the white, storm-swept street. A policeman told him that a cab had been waiting into which Fargus had tottered and driven off with a companion who had remained inside, concealing his features. CHAPTER XIX ROUT AT EVERY POINT Great dangers, which in the physical world turn the coward at bay into the most dangerous of antagonists, often in the realm of the mind excite a similar phenomenon. Bofinger, before the shock of the revelation, remained but a moment confused and staring. The situation flashed over him,--he divined the conspiracy. Calling hurriedly to the policeman to have his wife sent home, he cleared the sidewalk with a bound and started on the trail of a car, hat in hand, his coat-tails lashing the frosty air. But half-way, meeting a hansom meandering towards him through the storm, he turned with a cry of joy and bounded into it, almost jolting the sleepy driver from his seat. "Fargus's Broadway Oyster House!" he shouted. "Ten dollars an hour--drive like the devil!" The hansom shaved the corner, hung a moment on one wheel and rocked up the street. In Bofinger there were two movements, a physical collapse, as he sank back inertly into the corner, and an acute nervous excitation of the mental faculties which, soaring above the surrender of the body, absorbed in a few minutes, with the compressed energy of so many hours, every detail of his perilous situation. His reflections, jumbled and rapid as a kaleidoscope, ran thus: "Two thirds gone at a blow, two thirds of a million lost forever by his turning up! How in the devil did he manage it? The third, the third, the dower right! What will become of that? Can it be saved? What is the law? Does the second marriage forfeit the dower of the first, if the husband turns up? If so we are ruined. There's not a doubt in the world that there was a plot. Fargus planned it all out. What am I going to do? I must get hold of him--yes--or he'll disappear again. If he goes anywhere he'll go to one of his Oyster Houses to be recognized again. He must have discovered everything seven years ago, but how--not from me. From Sheila? She talked perhaps in her sleep, or he found her accounts and guessed the rest. If he got a clew he could have put a detective on it and everything would have come out. But what gave him his clew? Not me. Sheila? But she had no reason to ruin herself." At this point he took his head in his hands and said desperately: "I'm wasting time. What does it matter how it happened. That's not the point. Two thirds gone and only the dower right left--if it is left; why should it be left? The law is probably the other way. What am I going to do?" All at once he sat up. "I have it. Bring an action of conspiracy against Fargus with intent to defraud his wife of her dower rights. Hell, am I losing my wits! Of course. Desertion and conspiracy to defraud. Plain as day! But the devil of it is I must get hold of him. Oh, what a fool I was to let him slip away again! Anyhow I can get an injunction on the property this afternoon, at once. But first for Fargus!" At the restaurant he found everything in bewilderment. An hour before, Fargus had entered, and after having been recognized by his old employees had departed. "Oh, the scoundrel!" he cried, rushing out, "he has established his identity and has gotten off." As he fled from the restaurant his shoulder was suddenly clutched and turning in alarm he beheld the greedy features of Sammamon, who, running out of the court-house at his heels, had caught the address flung to the cabman. The money-lender, panting and distracted, cried to him all out of breath: "Where you going, Mr. Bofinker? What you going to do? What about my money?" "Sammamon, you idiot," Bofinger cried with an oath, "don't stop me! I've got to have every moment. You fool, I'm not running away! If you don't believe it, get in there and go with me." And half lifting him he pounced into the hansom, crying: "To Fargus's Chop House, Broadway near Fortieth." "You pay?" Sammamon cried menacingly as the hansom swung into its reckless course. The rapacious fingers instinctively closed over Bofinger's sleeve as he added aggressively: "How you pay now?" "Sammamon, I've a mind to run you out of business!" Bofinger cried furiously. "Take your hand off me and let me alone! Can't you see I've got enough to think over." "You pay?" the money-lender persisted doggedly. "Damn you, of course I'll pay you!" Bofinger cried. "See here, we lose two thirds by that devil's turning up, but there's always the dower right which belongs to my wife,--a third, if you know enough law to know that. A third is a third of a million, and that's safe in real estate, where he can't convert it. You've got nothing to worry over." "What you doing now?" Sammamon said, but half convinced. "Trying to get hold of Fargus, of course," Bofinger said irritably, "before he can get away, to delay matters." The hansom jerked to a stop, Bofinger rushed into the restaurant while Sammamon mounted guard at the door, heedless of the rush of snow. The lawyer quickly returned, having received another setback. Fargus had appeared and departed. With a last hope Bofinger drove to the Westside establishment, relapsing moodily into silence. The grim, persistent figure of the money-lender began to affect him with a foreboding of disaster. At the Oyster Parlors, the same story. Then Bofinger, abandoning any hope of surprising Fargus, returned to the hansom and cried savagely: "To the Union Bank! Sammamon, where can I put you down?" "No, no," Sammamon replied with a wily shake of his head. "I go too." "Sammamon, I'll pitch you out!" the lawyer cried, exasperated. "You pay? Where you get the money?" the money-lender said defiantly. "Look here, will you get out!" "I go too," Sammamon repeated. Bofinger in a rage, stopped the cab, took the money-lender by the collar and deposited him roughly in the street, a move which later he was to regret. Then changing his mind he drove to the court where he had a warrant issued for Fargus's arrest as well as an injunction on the Union Bank on any sums standing in the name of Max Fargus. Returning to his office he hurriedly put himself in communication with his particular allies in the detective force, imploring them to ransack the city for a trace of Fargus. Armed with his injunction he went next to the Union Bank, where he had himself announced to Gilday, the president, whom he knew. Lawrence Gilday was a small, dapper, smiling man, fastidious in his dress, with a general air of bon viveur, which deceived at first. The gamblers and politicians esteemed him greatly for his probity and confided in him without reserve. Thanks to this peculiar personality the Union Bank had built itself up a number of blind accounts, personal and political. To a few who were initiated, Gilday was recognized as the safe intermediary between the upper world of finance and fashion and the leaders of the under regions in the numerous secret occasions where these extremes desire to meet with mutual profit. Gilday, who never surrendered his position of quiet superiority, received Bofinger with quick circumstantial affability and said without rising: "Well, Bofinger, what can I do for you to-day?" "Mr. Gilday," Bofinger said, sitting down awkwardly and secretly admiring, despite all his agitation, the neat red tie which he could not have worn without its crying out to the street, "I've got an injunction here that I've got to serve on you immediately." "Is it a personal matter?" Gilday said, frowning. "No, no," Bofinger said hastily, "it's simply an injunction on the account of one of your depositors, pending the result of an action at law." Gilday, divining that there was more in reserve, extended his hand, wondering under what scheme of blackmail the lawyer was now engaged. "Well, what account is it?" "The account of Max Fargus," Bofinger replied, "and you'll oblige me if you will notify your cashier at once." "Have we such an account?" Gilday asked with a doubtful look, which Bofinger thought the perfection of acting. "Max Fargus? The Max Fargus I knew has been dead some time." "Mr. Gilday," Bofinger said smiling, "I know everything. Besides there is no longer any need of concealment, as Max Fargus has chosen to show himself to-day." "Max Fargus--the restaurant proprietor?" cried Gilday. "The man who was murdered in Mexico?" Bofinger, with a shrug of his shoulders, said: "I wouldn't ask you to break professional secrecy, Mr. Gilday, but I tell you everything has come out and concealment is no longer possible." Gilday, who had rung, handed a slip of paper to the clerk, saying: "Is there any such account? Mr. Bofinger," he continued, "I can assure you there is some mistake. Mr. Fargus I knew very well. We have heard nothing from him for many years." "One question," said Bofinger: "Don't Fargus's restaurants bank with you?" "There is no reason why I should not answer that," the banker replied carefully. "Certainly they do." At this moment the messenger returned, saying: "The account of Max Fargus, sir, expired seven years and two months ago." "And will you give me your word of honor," Bofinger said with a smile, "that Max Fargus has no account here under any other name? But that, of course, Mr. Gilday, I realize I have no right to ask. However--" "One moment," Gilday interrupted, "it's true that I should not ordinarily answer such a question; but in the present case, I assure you that we have no dealings directly or indirectly with Mr. Max Fargus." Bofinger shrugged his shoulders good-humoredly, as a man who does not hold a falsehood against another, and replied: "And may I ask how you reconciled that with your statement that the restaurant account is still with you?" "But what has that to do with Max Fargus?" Gilday asked with a trace of impatience. "The Max Fargus Restaurant Company is an independent firm." "Since when?" Bofinger said, smiling at what seemed to him the successive blunders of the banker. "Since seven years ago. I remember the transaction perfectly," Gilday replied. "A month before his departure Mr. Fargus sold outright his various restaurants, stipulating only that the name should be retained for eight years. Mr. MacGruder, a client of mine, bought the property, being only too glad to retain the name which has always been a guarantee with the public. For that reason the deal was a secret one." "Mr. Gilday," Bofinger said sharply, thinking that the banker had abused his good nature long enough. "Do you forget the simple fact that no man can transfer his property without his wife's consent? To clear matters up, let me tell you now that I represent the widow of Max Fargus, and that she is my wife." "Thank you, I am aware of such elemental law. I now repeat to you that Max Fargus sold out seven years ago--with the consent of his wife." "Mr. Gilday, that is impossible!" Bofinger said, losing patience. "Mr. Bofinger, I assure you, you are laboring under a misunderstanding. Mrs. Fargus, in my presence, gave her written consent willingly and, I may add, eagerly." Bofinger looked at him, saw he spoke the truth and collapsed. Gilday sprang forward to ring, then, changing his mind, went quickly to the table and seizing a glass of water dashed it in his face. Bofinger, who had had a spell of vertigo, staggered to his feet with such an ashen face that Gilday even was moved to cry: "In God's name, what is the matter?" "I'm wiped out!" Bofinger exclaimed, and raising his fists he cried, "Oh, that devil!" Then controlling himself with an effort he asked, "Mr. Gilday, in the name of pity, tell me if you know to what bank Fargus transferred his money." "Mr. MacGruder paid him with a check," Gilday said after a moment's reflection. "And on the following day Mr. Fargus drew out his entire account." "Was he paid with a check?" "In cash." Bofinger, who thus lost his last hope of tracing the movements of Fargus, started to leave the room without quite realizing what he did or said, when Gilday retained him. "But how is it possible," he said with a glance replete with curiosity, "that you knew nothing about this? Surely you are a partner of Hyman Groll?" Bofinger shook his head. "No--no, not for a long while." "Ah," Gilday ejaculated, at once mystified and enlightened. Then he added, "Do you lose much?" "Everything!" Bofinger answered, and disappeared. Everything for him meant no longer the dreamed-of millions, nor the half, nor the dower right; but, so swiftly had the perspective narrowed, every cent he had in the world. He had entered the bank, thanks to his plan of suing for conspiracy, certain of retaining at least $300,000, sum substantial and not to be despised. He staggered out with everything swept away into certain bankruptcy, thinking only of one thing, to reach his bank and withdraw the two thousand and odd dollars he had deposited the day before. Still another shock was reserved for him. At the wicket the paying teller refused to honor his draft, saying: "Sorry, Mr. Bofinger, but I've been served with an order restraining me from paying anything over to you." "In whose name?" he cried aghast, and at a loss to divine the direction of the blow. "Leopold Sammamon." He withdrew the check saying nothing, accepting the reverse dully, too bewildered not to imagine the finger of retribution, and yielding all at once to that superstitious dread which attacks the scoffer amid the blasts of disaster. At this moment he feared and believed in God. CHAPTER XX BOFINGER IN DESPAIR Towards seven o'clock that evening Bofinger presented himself at the door of a large double-fronted mansion, in one of the side streets of Murray Hill. Since the morning he had eaten nothing. Hunger and fatigue had given him the appearances of an extreme dissipation. His feet burned with cold and from time to time, to resuscitate them, he plunged his hands in his breast. A fine bead of snow had risen on his clothes, fastened to his hair, and caked over the collar, which had rolled up on one side. The butler, who came to his ring, viewing with disfavor this desperate figure, exclaimed: "Be off now, we can't do anything for you." Too miserable to resent the insolence, he took an attitude of supplication. "This is Mr. Hyman Groll's, ain't it?" he said meekly. "And if it is?" "Tell him it's Mr. Bofinger, Alonzo Bofinger." "Mr. Groll is out," replied the butler aggressively, "and he won't be back to-night." At this moment, when Bofinger was in despair, a carriage drawn by a team rolled swiftly up and stopped before the house. The butler, leaving Bofinger, ran down to the step and helped out the short, overhung figure of Hyman Groll, to whom he gave his arm to assist up the steps. In the disordered figure on the stoop the hunchback failed to recognize the person of his former dapper partner. He stopped and, with a questioning glance, said: "Who is it? What do you want?" "It's me. It's Bofinger," the lawyer said humbly, removing his hat. "I'm in trouble, partner, I've got to see you." Groll twitched violently, and drawing back with a start shoved the butler forward until his body interposed. Then after a moment of evident hesitation he said: "Go in, I'll see you. Humphreys, take him into the library." Bofinger, ushered by the astonished butler, was shown into a large room at the back where he remained deferentially, surveying the evidences of his associate's sudden rise in the world, at a loss to account for the cause. In a moment Groll entered, stopped near the door, watched him, and in an almost defensive attitude said: "Well, my boy, in trouble, eh? What is it?" "Hyman, I'm done for!" said Bofinger, who at this moment reeled and fell into the chair. "What's the matter with you, man?" Groll said, hobbling forward. "I guess I'm weak," Bofinger said, passing his hands over his face. "I haven't had time to eat anything all day. Oh, what a day!" Seeing that the case was urgent Groll rang, ordered some sandwiches and whisky, and presently, as though reassured, came and sat near Bofinger, eyeing him doubtfully. "Here, now, eat something and drink this," he said, pouring him out a glass. "Talk afterward." "Hyman, I'm up against it," Bofinger said, shaking his head. "You are, eh? You look it. What's the matter?" "I'm cleaned out." "Bankrupt?" "Ten times over." "Well, let's hear it." "Hyman, I got over my depth," Bofinger said gravely. "And I don't know where I stand now. That's why I want your advice." He paused, drew a breath and continued with a jerk: "Ever hear of Max Fargus?" "The restaurant man? Didn't he disappear somehow in Mexico?" "Disappear--hell, yes!" Bofinger cried with an incongruous laugh. "Look here, I've got to make a clean breast to you. You won't hold a little thing in the past against me, will you? You've done too well." "Go ahead," Groll said with a nod. He settled in his chair and turned his glance on him; the same cold, emotionless scrutiny which Bofinger knew of old. "When we were partners down by the old Jefferson Market," he began, withering somewhat under the look, "I struck the trail of Max Fargus by accident. He came to me to look up some girl he was in love with. I went over and struck a bargain with her and turned in a report that made the old boy marry her. Now, I'm making a clean breast," he added, faltering a little and dropping his glance. "I'm knocked out. You're at the top, you won't hold it against me, will you?" "Go on--go ahead." "I kept it from you--expecting to make a tidy bit out of it. I was to get half of whatever came to her." "How much?" "Half." "You did well," Groll said with just a tinge of irony. "Well!" Bofinger repeated with an oath. "I've acted like a fool throughout! And I thought myself so clever. Then I managed to work into the old fellow's confidence and everything went smoothly and I thought I saw a chance of doing something big. He must have been worth close to a million then." "Go on--" said Groll as he stopped. "I'll ask you some questions later. Only what was the woman's name and who was she?" "Sheila Vaughn or Morissey, a sort of third-rate actress," he answered. The quick professional attitude of Groll recalled to Bofinger the traditions of their office. He forgot the personal note and lapsed into a technical voice, as he related the details of Fargus's departure, his suspicions, his discovery from Sheila of her husband's whereabouts, his tracing the miser to the scene of the hold-up, the fruitless efforts to discover the body and his return to Sheila with the news. "You'll admit," he concluded doggedly, "That the situation was elegant. I had only to marry the widow to scoop in a fat fortune." Groll raised a hand in objection. "I mean, of course," Bofinger added hurriedly, "at the end of the seven years, which the law fixes. I can't get things straight to-night." "Alonzo," Groll interposed with marked interest, "did you apply for a trust for the widow?" "No, of course I didn't! That's just what I didn't want to do--then. I wanted to keep her in my hands to make sure of her, until I could marry her! Instead," he added, "I put up for her myself and got into the hands of that robber, Sammamon, doing it!" Groll made a move as though to enter a question, and then relapsed, motioning him to proceed. "As soon as the seven years were over and I could get the papers through I married the widow. To-day we went into court to begin proceedings for the possession of the estate--and Fargus turned up from the grave!" "The devil you say!" "But that's not all, he got away again," he said shamefacedly, "after we had both lost our heads and recognized him! And I haven't had a sign of him since then, though I've put the whole force on his track." Groll emitted a whistle, which to him was an enormous concession. "It was a conspiracy of course," Bofinger said sullenly. "Damn him! He planned it out--must have got on to our game somehow. That meant two thirds swept away." "Why only two thirds?" interrupted Groll. "There was her dower right, wasn't there?" Bofinger replied, doubtfully. "Surely the law would give her that?" "I'm not sure of that," Groll objected. "There might be a question there." "Well, anyhow, if it didn't, I had a plan to save it all right." "Indeed," Groll said with interest. "How so?" "I had a warrant sworn for him on a charge of desertion, complicated by conspiracy to deprive his wife of her dower rights. That is clear enough." "Possibly--possibly yes," Groll said after a moment's drumming on his chair. "Ah, but the worst is to come!" Bofinger said bitterly. "When I went to attach the property, I found Fargus had sold out everything seven years before!" "But--" "With the consent of the woman, of course! Gilday of the Union Bank told me he saw her give her consent himself!" "The woman played crooked then--or they fooled her," Groll said softly, looking at Bofinger, who bent his head and bit his lips with repressed fury. "Then here's the situation," he began. "You can't get hold of Fargus, no property to attach, and you're in the clutches of Sammamon? How much do you owe him?" "Over twelve thousand and he has attached all I had in the bank. That's the worst of all!" "He was quick about it." "He was slinking around the court, damn him, when Fargus turned up." "Have you any other property?" Bofinger took out a few bills and small change, saying: "That's what I'm worth to-day. Not a cent more; I had banked all on that." "So you're cleaned out?" "Gutted!" "Alonzo," Groll said, "you're in a bad way. Now I want to put some questions to you." Bofinger nodded. "I wanted to get things clear in my head. The woman, of course, has been the weak point. What were your relations?" "Dog eat dog." "You tried keeping her under by scaring her, then?" "Yes." Groll shook his head. "A mistake, Alonzo. You ought to have made love to her. You can only bully a woman that way. Fear won't hold them! So she was sullen all the time?" "Yes." "Then she didn't want to go into the arrangement." "You bet she didn't." "It was a hold-up, then?" "Yes." "But how could you hold her after she married Fargus?" Bofinger, in his misery, related without a gleam of pride what had once seemed to him a master stroke. "I made her sign a common-law marriage with me, had it witnessed, and told her if she squealed I'd produce it and claim her." "Alonzo," Groll said with a nod of approval, "you've had hard luck." "Luck! I've been up against a fiend; that's what!" "That idea of a common-law marriage was clever," Groll said musing. Then he added carelessly, "You squeezed that paper tight!" "It ain't been out of my safe a moment." "Now tell me why you didn't investigate the property?" "I did--every bit of it, Hyman, right after the marriage." Bofinger said with a curse. "How was I to know that she'd given her name!" "You ought to have looked it up again," Groll said, shaking his head. "What was the use? I thought it was safe." "You were wrong, Bo." "Oh, of course! I know it." "So you never suspected that she'd signed a paper?" "Never!" There was a pause until Groll took up evenly: "Well, Alonzo, you want facts. Here they are. To begin, there's no doubt that this fellow Fargus got on to your game. He's planned the whole thing to revenge himself on you two, that's plain. He took his precautions in selling out, but fooled you by concealing the sale." "Yes, that's plain." "As to your case for conspiracy and desertion," Groll said reflectively, "all right, if you catch him. But by this time he's off and to run him down means money--a lot of it. When you find him he may be somewhere where you can't touch him. Of course he hasn't left a cent, here, for you to get at." "No, damn him!" "Now the point with you is where do you stand?" Bofinger looked at him, waiting, as a man who knows there can be no favorable answer. "Well, Alonzo, here's the truth. He's broken you! You owe twelve thousand to Sammamon, who'll get everything you have in the bank. What do you hold in notes on the woman?" "About thirteen thousand," replied Bofinger, who was too ashamed to mention the higher figure. "So much waste paper! Has she any debts?" "I don't know--a thousand or two, perhaps." "An interesting point might come up there," Groll said musing. "Whether you are liable for her debts. A husband is liable for the debts of the woman he marries. Though it don't make any difference; you'll go into bankruptcy." "Oh, I'm knocked out!" Bofinger said, biting his lips to keep back the weak tears. "Yes, Alonzo, you are," Groll said. "Haven't you got anything you can save?" "Not a thing." "Hasn't the woman any jewels? Get them if you can, but make sure first that they are free of debt, if you don't want to get in worse trouble." "You're right," Bofinger said, starting up. "I'll get hold of them before Sammamon can put his claws on them." "If I were you," Groll said softly as they went to the door, "I think I'd have an understanding with the woman. She's the one who's done you." "I'll attend to her!" "Nothing rash, Alonzo," Groll said with more curiosity than feeling. "You won't do anything rash?" "Rash!" Bofinger cried with a wild laugh. "Oh, no! Nothing rash!" And leaving Groll in profound meditation on the stoop he plunged down the steps, no longer caring for the cold or the storm. CHAPTER XXI SAMMAMON ACTS At nine o'clock that night Sheila, who had waited all the afternoon in agonized ignorance, beheld Bofinger burst in with the fury of the storm that was raging without. One glance at his wild figure and blood-ridden face told her all. She fell on her knees shrieking, "Alonzo, don't hurt me!" "Get up!" he said hoarsely. "Get up quick and sit over there! And answer everything I say or I swear I'll do for you!" She obeyed instantly, saying hurriedly: "Alonzo, I'll tell you the truth--every word of it!" "When did you sign those papers?" he asked, each word interrupted by a gasp. "What papers?" she cried, for in her ignorance of their import she had totally forgotten the transaction. "What papers, Alonzo--tell me!" "The papers--those papers--the papers Fargus got you to sign--your permission for the sale of the restaurants." "Yes, yes, I remember," she said eagerly, "the day he left for Mexico." "You signed--willingly!" "Yes." "Why, in God's name!" She hesitated. "Why!" "I'll tell, I'll tell you," she cried, throwing up her arm, and brokenly she told him of the mine. "Oh, that fiend! That devil!" he cried, forgetting her for a moment in his consternation at the malignant ingenuity with which he had been ruined. The next moment, turning to her furiously, he shouted: "And you thought by concealing it from me you could cheat me out of my share! Didn't you--didn't you!" "Yes." "You fool!" he cried in a paroxysm, "and what has it cost you? Fargus sold out the next day and you lost every cent of your dower. Ruined, that's what we are! Ruined, without a cent in the world to-day!" In her fear for her life she thought to moderate his fury by pretending to fall in a swoon. He ran to her angrily, shaking her without drawing from her a sound. Then, leaving her sprawling, he began to pace up and down the floor. Presently, in terror of what he might do, she half opened her eyes. Imperceptible as was the movement he perceived it and seizing her by the shoulder swept her up into a chair. "Get your wits back. Hurry up, I haven't any time to lose," he said. In his present manner was something venomous and cold that terrified her more than all the transports of his rage. From that moment she thought only how she might manage to reach the front door and escape from the house. She opened her eyes with a sigh and sat up weakly. "Do you owe any bills?" he began. "A few." "Where?" She enumerated half a dozen stores. "Do you owe anything on your jewelry?" "Not a cent." He breathed a little more freely. "Take off your rings," he commanded. She slipped off, hurriedly, seven glittering rings. "Put them on that table." She obeyed. "Take off them bracelets." She flung them on the table. "And the pins." In her haste, she pulled off the brooches, pricking her finger and, without waiting his command added the gold chain she wore about her neck. "Now go up-stairs." She ran up, trembling to feel him behind her. "Gather up your jewels, gather up every one of them," he commanded, following her into her room. She made a pile, putting into it everything, even to the silver on her bureau. "Take them down-stairs." Again they descended. "Put them with the rest." When all were on the table, he raised his eyes and said: "So you knew all the time about his going to Mexico?" "Yes," she said faintly. "And you played me false all the time?" She noticed that his hand began to tremble and edged away until with a spring she placed the table between them. "Come back," he said, glowering at her. She did not move. "Come back, I tell you!" "Don't kill me, Alonzo," she said faintly. "I'm not going to kill you. Come back you--!" he cried with a vile expression. Suddenly the door-bell rang, long and violently. Both halted in throbbing surprise, so incongruous did an intrusion seem at such a crisis. A second time the bell rang angrily, accompanied by a shower of knocks. Sheila started to the door. "Stay there!" Bofinger cried, and advancing with a guilty fear he went to the door and opened it. In the midst of a cloud of snow Sammamon rushed in, a warrant in his hand. "Hell!" Bofinger cried, appalled by the apparition, and rushing to the table he tried to screen the heap of jewelry from the money-lender, shouting desperately, "Sammamon, get out of here! Sammamon, do you hear me, get out! I'll do you harm!" The money-lender, whom losses had made frantic and courageous, did not flinch a minute. Rushing past him, he spied the jewels and divined the lawyer's purpose. "You run away with them, eh! You swindler!" he cried violently. "You touch one thing, you go in jail! Everythings here is mine!" "Keep your hands off," Bofinger cried. "Those belong to my wife, you can't touch them!" [Illustration: "KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF."] "Touch, eh?" he screamed, "don't she owes me five thousand dollars!" "Sheila, you owe him--that hound?" he cried, reeling back. "Is that true?" "He came himself! He offered it to me!" she cried, and turning in terror to the money-lender she pleaded, "Mr. Sammamon, don't leave me, he's going to kill me!" Sammamon gave no heed,--he was busy inscribing on his cuff the inventory of the jewelry. "Kill you? That's too good for the likes of you," Bofinger cried, starting forward, "I'll fix you. Out on the street you go where you belong! Get out of here, get out of this house at once!" "On the streets? To-night?" she cried in terror. "Without a cent?" "Go out and earn it, the way you're fit for!" he said brutally. Then with an oath he extended his hand and commanded: "Get out of those clothes." "Bofinger," she cried in terror, "have mercy!" "Take it off!" he said with an ugly look. "Not a rag belongs to you. Every stitch you have ought to go towards paying what you swindled me out of!" She dropped on her knees, stretching out her hands. "Not like that, Alonzo, not like that!" "Take it off!" he cried in a fury, and as she made no move he seized the collar in his hands and tore it open. Sheila fell forward. On the bare neck flashed a necklace of small diamonds, which she had bought with the money from Sammamon. "That was it, was it!" Bofinger cried, beside himself with rage at this new deception. He seized the necklace and tore it from her, flinging it on the floor. On the neck a spot of blood sprang up. She staggered to her feet and fled to the door. When she had got it open such a blast upset her, driving in the snow, that she shrank back piteously, begging, "Alonzo, dear, don't turn me out. Let me stay for pity's sake!" "Ah, you won't go, won't you!" he cried, and the sight of the blood on her bare neck unloosed the brute in him. He ran in a rage to the fireplace and snatched up the shovel. Sheila shrieked and disappeared into the storm and the night. EPILOGUE Two years later, of a sunny morning in April, the carriage of Hyman Groll transported him to the familiar street where the Jefferson Market Court casts the shadow of its crushing tyranny over the little meannesses of the opposite row of lawyers' offices. The carriage according to orders drew up near the entrance from which presently the court at the close of the morning session would issue, while Groll, with a glance at his watch, leaned from the window, as though expecting again to see the glass window with its gilt display: HYMAN GROLL AND ALONZO BOFINGER _Attorneys at Law._ On the threshold of putting into operation his vast scheme for controlling the tribute on vice throughout the city, he had arrived at last to that knowledge of human destinies which even in men of the most practical sense must awaken a power of imagination, if only it begins with self-contemplation. The sordid street filled him with horror. In the grubbing days he had never flinched in the confidence of his destiny. To-day he shuddered at the memory of his former faith, trembling for a quick moment at the possibilities which had never daunted his stubborn beginnings,--an emotion the more poignant now that he looked back over the yawning chasm. He frowned, stiffened and withdrew into the back of the carriage so as to be concealed from the sidewalk. At this moment the doors opened and the steps were covered with the outflow of the court. With pursed lips he followed the crowd. Some he knew of person--all by intuition;--the crooks, the flashy women, the sleek swindlers come to study the ways of the new magistrate and the pleas that avail. The shabby and the tawdry misery dwindled away. Several policemen hurried away to luncheon; a late clerk scurried off. Then after an interval Alonzo Bofinger, guffawing with two reporters, slouched down the steps and hung himself over the railing, giving and taking banter with that false laughter which is fanned only from the lungs. Of the once flashing dandy nought remained, not even the bloom of the amazing vests. He had grown quite puffy in the throat and the legs and under the bulbous waistcoat, quite lumpy and neglectful of his dress. The creases were no longer defined in the trousers, while over the shoulders the wrinkles ran with impunity. The reporters rolled away arm in arm. The laughter faded from Alonzo Bofinger's face and it seemed suddenly to age. He drew a cigar and eyed it in indecision before fumbling in the shabby pockets. Finding no match, he started to pocket the cigar, changed his mind, placed it languidly in his mouth, shoved back his hat and stared on the sidewalk in heavy lassitude. Hyman Groll, opening the door of the carriage, called energetically: "Alonzo--eh, Alonzo!" At the sight of his old partner Bofinger started up with a flush of embarrassment which disappeared in the precipitate obsequiousness with which he hastened to the carriage. "You were waiting for some one?" Groll said with a slight, amicable nod. "Never mind, jump in." Bofinger complied quickly, concealing the cheap cigar in his pocket with a sly movement Groll did not fail to perceive. The carriage rolled away. Without preliminaries Groll said: "Bo, Sheila's dead." Bofinger dropped the hand he was raising to his collar, shifted in his seat and said faintly: "When?" "Last night." "Where?" "Bellevue." "Here!" "Yes." "Were there--" "You're all right, there were no debts." "I wouldn't have paid them," he said, in his agitation drawing out the cigar from his pocket. "You lost track of her after the night you turned her out?" Groll said, offering him a light. Bofinger frowned, shrugged his shoulders and leaned towards the window. "And didn't care to--I understand. Well, she was picked up the next morning half frozen," Groll said, glancing at him, "out of her head,--two months at the Charities. After that she got a place in a traveling circus. She hung on as long as she could. She died of quick consumption." His companion, who had gradually turned towards him, frowned in perplexity and asked: "How do you know?" "I was interested in the case," Groll answered carefully. "And Fargus, do you know what became of him?" Bofinger took a sudden deep breath and turned again to the window with the involuntary distaste of one who wishes to avoid the resurrection of a disagreeable memory. The movement told all to his companion, the bitterness, the humiliation, and the never-ending sting. "What! Haven't you any curiosity," he persisted. "No," Bofinger said without looking at him, "I don't care to hear either. All that is over. I botched the job--I got what I deserved." "You did not understand him," Groll answered. "He was crazy--mad," Bofinger said bitterly. "We call mad what we can't understand," Groll objected slowly. "So you don't care what became of him?" "I do not." "He died three weeks after his appearance in the court." "Who told you that?" "I was interested in the case," Groll repeated softly. This time Bofinger remained blankly staring at him, struck by a dawning comprehension. All at once, forgetting the distance between them, he seized his partner by the collar crying: "What do you mean? What had you to do with all that?" "Everything," Groll said calmly. "Take your hand off and quiet down. I am going to tell you all." "You--great God, it was you!" "Right, me, your partner whom you deceived." An oath shrieked out and Bofinger, dropping his hold, sank back in the limpness of despair. "My time is valuable, let me get at this," Groll said coldly, abandoning the familiar tone. Then quickly he recounted the circumstances of Fargus's discovery of Bofinger's conspiracy. "Yes, it was to me he came for his vengeance," he said, gazing at his companion who remained as in a stupor. "The idea was like him--to strike you by the hand of your partner--whom you thought you were deceiving. Not a bad idea that." "You planned out that business in Mexico!" Bofinger cried hoarsely. "An ordinary vengeance," Groll said, nodding, "would have meant nothing to him. I had to find him something that would not only bankrupt you both but crush out of you all youth, ambition, and hope. More--Fargus wished not only all that made life blotted out, but that life itself should be the most unendurable thing to you both. He succeeded. He knew it--strange man! He died happy." "And he--where was he all that time," Bofinger said dully. "He--he lay hidden in the safest place in the world," Groll said, looking out at the city with a smile full of malice. "Max Fargus, from the time you began to hunt him high and low--during the whole seven years remained quietly and safely in the house opposite to Sheila." "Impossible!" Bofinger cried in horror. "The most possible thing in the world," Groll answered. "Do you know the face of one of your neighbors? I don't." "Ah, you were well paid for all that!" Bofinger murmured, clenching his fists. "Of course--of course, naturally. His whole fortune has passed to me." Bofinger, beside himself with rage, flung himself on the hunchback, crying: "And if I strangle you, you scoundrel!" "My dear Bo," Groll said calmly, "open murder fortunately is a transgression we lawyers avoid by instinct. Besides, it is not me you want to throttle but your own fate. What have I done that you wouldn't do if you had the opportunity? There, return to your side and don't make me call for help." Bofinger gradually released his hold, sunk back and covered his eyes with his hand. At the end of a moment he said pleadingly: "You're right. I have no kick comin'. You'll do something for me, Hyman?" Groll puffed away on the cigar he had not ceased to smoke before answering decisively: "No." "Why not?" "I promised him." "Well, what?" Bofinger said coaxingly. "You ain't going to talk to me of promises and honor--come now!" "Just that," Groll answered with a nod. "You won't understand. It's a superstition--so be it. But I owe what I am and what I'm going to be to Max Fargus. I shall do what I promised him." "He's dead." "It's not him I'm thinking of--it's myself--it's a superstition. I'd be afraid to do otherwise, I have that in me. Besides, I liked him." "You won't do anything, then?" "No." "Honest?" "Yes." "What was the use of telling me, then?" "I promised him to do so, as soon as Sheila was gone." "Why not before?" "There might have been complications." "And do you think me such a fool that I don't know what to do now?" Bofinger cried suddenly. "A third of the estate belongs to Sheila as her dower right." "And you would bring suit to recover that?" Groll said. The carriage had come to a stop before an office building on Union Square. "I get out here. One moment, are you quite sure that Sheila ever was the wife of Max Fargus?" "What do you mean," Bofinger cried, halting with one foot on the sidewalk,--aghast at the thought. "I think, my dear Bofinger," Groll said maliciously, "that a contract of marriage exists between you and Sheila--" "Trickery!" "But very difficult to explain away. You have the contract?" "It is destroyed." "You are sure?" "Yes." "My dear fellow," Groll said suavely, "that contract was in my possession three hours after you had told me of it." "You stole it, then,--you!" "I do not object to the word," Groll said. "You see I was careful to protect myself at every point before telling you these things. Moreover, I have the death-bed statement of Sheila herself. She at least believed it a marriage. A little reflection, I think, will show you the danger of your position." Bofinger looked at the ground as a child does in the sudden lust of murder. "Will you go back in the carriage," Groll said politely. "No!" "You are foolish to take it so hard," Groll said with a shrug. "I have stirred up a mess of nasty memories and you imagine you are the Bofinger of ten years ago. You are not. You will suffer an hour or so and then you will forget. Do you know what is the best thing to do? Get into my carriage and drive back. Make an impression on your clients. Call out, when you get back, 'Mr. Hyman Groll wants you at his office.' Then you'll get a reputation as a man of influence. Get into the carriage and for twenty minutes imagine yourself its master. Here, smoke these--they're good ones." He drew a couple of cigars and held them out gravely to Bofinger, who at the end of a moment took them, looking on the ground, and entered the carriage. "Hyman, you'll do something for me?" he said gently. "I won't give you a cent," Groll said, "but I may have need of you some day." He shut the door and called to the coachman, "Jefferson Market Court!" When the carriage turned, Bofinger was holding his head in his hands. "Ugh!" Groll said to himself, gazing after him with a somber glance, "and I might have been like that!" He remained still, shuddering at the thought which Bofinger's abjection had called up; as in another's death what we weep for is often the imminence of our own. Two or three persons found the situation unusual enough to turn and glance back. ADVERTISEMENTS KATRINA BY ROY ROLFE GILSON Author of "In the Morning Glow" With Illustrations in color by Alice Barber Stephens. Crown, 8vo. $1.50 The subtlety and charm of Mr. Gilson's stories reach their highest point in this book. Larry, the newspaper man, humorous, kindly, homely, lives over again the romance of his younger days in the little daughter of the woman he lost. Upon this slightly suggested theme Mr. Gilson builds one of his most charming stories, full of the humor and the tenderness which mark all of his work. The illustrations by Mrs. Stephens deserve an especial word, for the extraordinary sympathy with which they depict the charm of Mr. Gilson's characters. THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO. 33-37 East 17th Street, New York POWER LOT BY SARAH P. McLEAN GREENE _Author of "Cape Cod Folks," "Vesty of the Basins," "Deacon Lysander."_ 12mo Illustrated $1.50 In this volume Mrs. Greene returns to the quaint, strong characters of the sea coast, but this time it is in Nova Scotia that she has laid her story. The tale is of a dissolute city lad set down penniless in the sombre life of Power Lot--"Power Lot God Help Us" it is called in that section--a little fishing village set on the rough, wild coast, where the characters have the breadth of the magnificent view which surrounds them, and a quaint idea of life, which is altogether fascinating. The story of the development of this lad in the hard work and struggle for his very living, and of the pathetic and humorous incidents which befell him, is done in Mrs. Greene's best style, and is perhaps the strongest and most entertaining book she has written. THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO. 33-37 East 17th St., New York HAZEL OF HEATHERLAND By Mabel Barnes-Grundy $1.50 Truly a tale of most exceptional humour and charm--a most captivating and refreshing story. HOW ENGLAND RECEIVED HAZEL: PUNCH.--"The Baron has great pleasure in recommending Hazel to all and sundry. There is in this story an originality of idea and a freshness of treatment that will rivet the attention of the most jaded novel-reader." PALL MALL GAZETTE.--"In _Hazel of Heatherland_, Miss Mabel Barnes-Grundy presents the story of a very charming country girl. In the quiet humours of home life, in the antithesis of severe and buoyant character of familiar types, and in that ingenuous raillery for which an alert and good-tempered disposition can find so much opportunity, the novel is entirely agreeable. A very pretty love story, tinctured with humour, runs through the book, and any reader who fails to enjoy it may be dismissed as a hopeless frump." THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO., Publishers 33-37 East 17th St., Union Sq. North, New York FOLLY By EDITH RICKERT _Author of "The Reaper"_ Illustrated in Color by SIGISMOND DE IVANOWSKI $1.50 "Folly" is a two-edged title--at the same time both the nickname of the charming, high-spirited heroine and the keynote of her life's actions. The story of Folly's temptation and its disaster, of the man she married and the "other man" whom she loved, are told with a delicacy and subtle force which fulfill the extravagant prophecies made upon publication of "The Reaper." To competent observers of tides in modern popular fiction "Folly" embodies, in its artistic and thoroughly interesting handling of a great theme, the essence of present-day literary tendencies. It is a strong story, yet its problem is handled with great delicacy, so that it is, in fact, spiritual where many writers would have made it gross. THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO., Publishers 33-37 East 17th St., Union Sq. North, New York 
25760	----	None 
47561	----	provided by the Internet Archive TRELAWNY OF THE "WELLS" A Comedietta in Four Acts By Arthur W. Pinero 1899 This Play was produced at the Court Theatre, London, on Thursday, January 29th, 1898. [_The Original Cast at the Lyceum Theatre, New York_] [Ill 0000] THEATRICAL FOLK Tom Wrench Ferdinand Gadd James Telfer of the Augustus Colpoys Bagnigge-Wells Rose Trelawny Theatre Avonia Bunn Mrs. Telfer, ( Miss Violet) Imogen Parrott, of the Royal Olympic Theatre O' Dwyer, prompter at the Pantheon Theatre Edward J. Morgan Wm. Courtleigh Geo. C. Boniface Charles W. Butler Mary Mannering Elizabeth Tyree Mrs. Chas. Walcot Hilda Spong Grant Stewart Mr. Denzil Mr. Mortimer Mr. Hunston Miss Brewster of the Pantheon Theatre Thos. Whiffen Louis Albion Mace Greenleaf Adelaide Keim Hallkeeper at the Pantheon Edward H. Wilkinson NON-THEATRICAL FOLK Vice-Chancellor Sir William Gower, Kt. Arthur Gower 4 Clara de Foenix & Charles Walcot Henry Woodruff Helma Nelson Miss Trafalgar Gower, Sir William's sister Ethel Hornick Captain de Foenix, Clara's husband H. S. Taber Mrs. Mossop, a landlady Mrs. Thos. Whiffen Mr. Ablett, a grocer John Findlay Charles, a butler W. B. Royston Sarah, a maid Blanche Kelleher THE FIRST ACT at Mr. and Mrs. Telfer's Lodgings in No. 2 Brydon Crescent, Clerkenwell. May THE SECOND ACT at Sir William Gower's, in Cavendish Square. June. THE THIRD ACT again in Brydon Crescent. December. THE FOURTH ACT on the stage of the Pantheon Theatre. A few days later. PERIOD somewhere in the early Sixties. (1860s) NOTE:--Bagnlgge (locally pronounced Bagnidge) Wells, formerly a popular mineral spring in Islington, London, situated not far from the better remembered Sadler's-Wells. The gardens of Bagnlgge-Wells were at one time much resorted to; but, as a matter of fact, Bagnigge-Wells, unlike Sadler's-Wells, has never possessed a playhouse. Sadler's-Wells Theatre, however, always familiarly known as the "Wells," still exists. It was rebuilt in 1876-77. The costumes and scenic decoration of this little play-should follow, to the closest detail, the mode of the early Sixties, the period, in dress, of crinoline and the peg-top trouser; in furniture, of horsehair and mahogany, and the abominable "walnut -and -rep." No attempt should be made to modify such fashions in illustration, to render them less strange, even less grotesque, to the modern eye. On the contrary, there should be an endeavor to reproduce, perhaps to accentuate, any feature which may now seem particularly quaint and bizarre. Thus, lovely youth should be shown decked uncompromisingly as it was at the time indicated, at the risk (which the author believes to be a slight one) of pointing the chastening moral that, while beauty fades assuredly in its own time, it may appear to succeeding generations not to have been beauty at all. TRELAWNY OF THE "WELLS." THE FIRST ACT. The scene represents a sitting room on the first floor of a respectable lodging house. On the right are two sash-windows, having Venetian blinds and giving a view of houses on the other side of the street. The grate of the fireplace is hidden by an ornament composed of shavings and paper roses. Over the fireplace is a mirror: on each side there is a sideboard cupboard. On the left is a door, and a landing is seen outside. Between the windows stand a cottage piano and a piano stool. Above the sofa, on the left, stands a large black trunk, the lid bulging with its contents and displaying some soiled theatrical finery. On the front of the trunk, in faded lettering, appear the words "Miss Violet Sylvester, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane." Under the sofa there are two or three pairs of ladies' satin shoes, much the worse for wear, and on the sofa a white-satin bodice, yellow with age, a heap of dog-eared playbooks, and some other litter of a like character. On the top of the piano there is a wig-block, with a man's wig upon it, and in the corners of the room there stand some walking sticks and a few theatrical swords. In the center of the stage is a large circular table. There is a clean cover upon it, and on the top of the sideboard cupboards are knives and forks, plate, glass, cruet-stands, and some gaudy flowers in vases--all suggesting preparations for festivity. The woodwork of the room is grained, the ceiling plainly whitewashed, and the wall paper is of a neutral tint and much faded. The pictures are engravings in maple frames, and a portrait or two, in oil, framed in gilt. The furniture, curtains, and carpet are worn, but everything is clean and well-kept. The light is that of afternoon in early summer. Mrs. Mossop--a portly, middle-aged Jewish lady, elaborately attired--is laying the tablecloth. Ablett enters hastily, divesting himself of his coat as he does so. He is dressed in rusty black for "waiting." _Mrs. Mossop._ [_In a fluster._] Oh, here you are, Mr. Ablett----! _Ablett._ Good-day, Mrs. Mossop. _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Bringing the cruet-stands._] I declare I thought you'd forgotten me. _Ablett._ [_Hanging his coat upon a curtain-knob, and turning up his shirt sleeves._] I'd begun to fear I should never escape from the shop, ma'am. Jest as I was preparin' to clean myself, the 'ole universe seemed to cry aloud for pertaters. [_Relieving Mrs. Mossop of the cruet-stands, and satisfying himself as to the contents of the various bottles._] Now you take a seat, Mrs. Mossop. You 'ave but to say "Mr. Ablett, lay for so many," and the exact number shall be laid for. _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Sinking into the armchair._] I hope the affliction of short breath may be spared you, Ablett. Ten is the number. _Ablett._ [_Whipping up the mustard energetically._] Short-breathed you may be, ma'am, but not short-sighted. That gal of yours is no ordinary gal, but to 'ave set 'er to wait on ten persons would 'ave been to 'ave caught disaster. [_Bringing knives and forks, glass, etc., and glancing round the room as he does so._] I am in Mr. and Mrs. Telfer's setting-room, I believe, ma'am? _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Surveying the apartment complacently._] And what a handsomely proportioned room it is, to be sure! _Ablett._ May I h'ask if I am to 'ave the honor of includin' my triflin' fee for this job in their weekly book? _Mrs. Mossop._ No, Ablett--a separate bill, please. The Telfers kindly give the use of their apartment, to save the cost of holding the ceremony at the "Clown" Tavern; but share and share alike over the expenses is to be the order of the day. _Ablett._ I thank you, ma'am. [_Rubbing up the knives with a napkin._] You let fall the word "ceremony," ma'am----- _Mrs. Mossop._ Ah, Ablett, and a sad one--a farewell cold collation to Miss Trelawny. _Ablett._ Lor' bless me! I 'eard a rumor---- _Mrs. Mossop._ A true rumor. She's taking her leave of us, the dear. Ablett. This will be a blow to the "Wells," ma'am. _Mrs. Mossop._ The best juvenile lady the "Wells" has known since Mr. Phillips's management. _Ablett._ Report 'as it, a love affair, ma'am. _Mrs. Mossop._ A love affair, indeed. And a poem into the bargain, Ablett, if poet was at hand to write it. _Ablett._ Reelly, Mrs. Mossop! [_Polishing a tumbler._] Is the beer to be bottled or draught, ma'am, on this occasion? _Mrs. Mossop._ Draught for Miss Trelawny, invariably. _Ablett._ Then draught it must be all round, out of compliment. Jest fancy! nevermore to 'ear customers speak of Trelawny of the "Wells," except as a pleasin' memory! A non-professional gentleman they give out, ma'am. _Mrs. Mossop._ Yes. _Ablett._ Name of Glover. _Mrs. Mossop._ Gower. Grandson of Vice Chancellor Sir William Gower, Mr. Ablett. _Ablett._ You don't say, ma'am! _Mrs. Mossop._ No father nor mother, and lives in Cavendish Square with the old judge and a great aunt. _Ablett._ Then Miss Trelawny quits the Profession, ma'am, for good and all, I presoom? _Mrs. Mossop._ Yes, Ablett, she's at the theaytre at this moment, distributing some of her little ornaments and fallals among the ballet. She played last night for the last time--the last time on any stage. [_Rising and going to the sideboard-cupboard._] And without so much as a line in the bill to announce it. What a benefit she might have taken! _Ablett._ I know one who was good for two box tickets, Mrs. Mossop. _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Bringing the flowers to the table and arranging them, while Ablett sets out the knives and forks._] But no. "No fuss," said the Gower family, "no publicity. Withdraw quietly--" that was the Gower family's injunctions--"withdraw quietly, and have done with it." _Ablett._ And when is the weddin' to be, ma'am? _Mrs. Mossop._ It's not yet decided, Mr. Ablett. In point of fact, before the Gower family positively say Yes to the union, Miss Trelawny is to make her home in Cavendish Square for a short term--"short term" is the Gower family's own expression--in order to habituate herself to the West End. They're sending their carriage for her at two o'clock this afternoon, Mr. Ablett--their carriage and pair of bay horses. _Ablett._ Well, I dessay a West End life has sooperior advantages over the Profession in some respecks, Mrs. Mossop. _Mrs. Mossop._ When accompanied by wealth, Mr. Ablett. Here's Miss Trelawny but nineteen, and in a month-or-two's time she'll be ordering about her own powdered footman, and playing on her grand piano. How many actresses do that, I should like to know! [_Tom Wrench's voice is heard._] _Tom._ [_Outside the door._] Rebecca! Rebecca, my loved one! _Mrs. Mossop._ Oh, go along with you, Mr. Wrench! [_Tom enters, with a pair of scissors in his hand. He is a shabbily-dressed ungraceful man of about thirty, with a clean-shaven face, curly hair, and eyes full of good-humor._] _Tom._ My own, especial Rebecca! _Mrs. Mossop._ Don't be a fool, Mr. Wrench! Now, I've no time to waste. I know you want something-- _Tom._ Everything, adorable. But most desperately do I stand in need of a little skillful trimming at your fair hands. _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Taking the scissors from him and clipping the frayed edges of his shirt-cuffs and collar._] First it's patching a coat, and then it's binding an Inverness! Sometimes I wish that top room of mine was empty. _Tom._ And sometimes I wish my heart was empty, cruel Rebecca. _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Giving him a thump._] Now, I really will tell Mossop of you, when he comes home! I've often threatened it--- _Tom._ [_To Ablett._] Whom do I see! No--it can't be--but yes--I believe I have the privilege of addressing Mr. Ablett, the eminent greengrocer, of Rosoman Street? _Ablett._ [_Sulkily._] Well, Mr. Wrench, and wot of it? _Tom._ You possess a cart, good Ablett, which may be hired by persons of character and responsibility. "By the hour or job"--so runs the legend. I will charter it, one of these Sundays, for a drive to Epping. _Ablett._ I dunno so much about that, Mr. Wrench. _Tom._ Look to the springs, good Ablett, for this comely lady will be my companion. _Mrs. Mossop._ Dooce take your impudence! Give me your other hand. Haven't you been to rehearsal this morning with the rest of 'em? _Tom._ I have, and have left my companions still toiling. My share in the interpretation of Sheridan Knowles's immortal work did not necessitate my remaining after the first act. _Mrs. Mossop._ Another poor part, I suppose, Mr. Wrench? _Tom._ Another, and to-morrow yet another, and on Saturday two others--all equally, damnably rotten. _Mrs. Mossop._ Ah, well, well! somebody must play the bad parts in this world, on and off the stage. There [_returning the scissors_], there's no more edge left to fray; we've come to the soft. [_He points the scissors at his breast._] Ah! don't do that! [Illustration: 0025] _Tom._ You are right, sweet Mossop, I won't perish on an empty stomach. [_Taking her aside._] But tell me, shall I disgrace the feast, eh? Is my appearance too scandalously seedy? _Mrs. Mossop._ Not _it_, my dear. _Tom._ Miss Trelawny--do you think she'll regard me as a blot on the banquet? [_wistfully_] do you, Beccy? _Mrs. Mossop._ She! la! don't distress yourself. She'll be too excited to notice you. _Tom._ H'm, yes! now I recollect, she has always been that. Thanks, Beccy. [_A knock, at the front-door, is heard. Mrs. Mossop hurries to the window down the stage._] _Mrs. Mossop._ Who's that? [_Opening the window and looking out._] It's Miss Parrott! Miss Parrott's arrived! _Tom._ Jenny Parrott? Has Jenny condescended------? _Mrs. Mossop._ Jenny! Where are your manners, Mr. Wrench? Tom. [_Grandiloquently._] Miss Imogen Parrott, of the Olympic Theatre. _Mrs. Mossop._ [_At the door, to Ablett._] Put your coat on, Ablett. We are not selling cabbages. [_She disappears and is heard speaking in the distance._] Step up, Miss Parrott! Tell Miss Parrott to mind that mat, Sarah--! Be quick, Ablett, be quick! The élite is below! More dispatch, good Ablett! _Ablett._ [_To Tom, spitefully, while struggling into his coat._] Miss Trelawny's leavin' will make all the difference to the old "Wells." The season'll terminate abrupt, and then the comp'ny 'll be h'out, Mr. Wrench--h'out, sir! _Tom._ [_Adjusting his necktie, at the mirror over the piano._] Which will lighten the demand for the spongy turnip and the watery marrow, my poor Ablett. _Ablett._ [_Under his breath. _] Presumpshus! [_He produces a pair of white cotton gloves, and having put one on makes a horrifying discovery._] Two lefts! That's Mrs. Ablett all over! [_During the rest of the act, he is continually in difficulties, through his efforts to wear one of the gloves upon his right hand. Mrs. Mossop now re-enters, with Imogen Parrott. Imogen is a pretty, lighthearted young woman, of about seven-and-twenty, daintily dressed._] _Mrs. Mossop._ [_To Imogen._] There, it might be only yesterday you lodged in my house, to see you gliding up those stairs! And this the very room you shared with poor Miss Brooker! _Imogen._ [_Advancing to Tom. _] Well, Wrench, and how are you? _Tom._ [_Bringing her a chair, demonstratively dusting the seat of it with his pocket-handkerchief_]. Thank you, much the same as when you used to call me Tom. _Imogen._ Oh, but I have turned over a new leaf, you know, since I have been at the Olympic. _Mrs. Mossop._ I am sure my chairs don't require dusting, Mr. Wrench. _Tom._ [_Placing the chair below the table, and blowing his nose with his handkerchief, with a flourish._] My way of showing homage, Mossop. _Mrs. Mossop._ Miss Parrott has sat on them often enough, when she was an honored member of the "Wells"--haven't you, Miss Parrott. _Imogen._ [_Sitting, with playful dignity. _] I suppose I must have done so. Don't remind me of it. I sit on nothing nowadays but down pillows covered with cloth of gold. [_Mrs. Mossop and Ablett prepare to withdraw._] _Mrs. Mossop._ [_At the door, to Imogen._] Ha, ha! ha! I could fancy I'm looking at Undine again--Undine, the Spirit of the Waters. She's not the least changed since she appeared as Undine--is she, Mr. Ablett? _Ablett._ [_Joining Mrs. Mossop._] No--or as Prince Cammyralzyman in the pantomine. I never 'ope to see a pair o' prettier limbs---- _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Sharply._] Now then! [_She pushes him out; they disappear._] _Imogen._ [_After a shiver at Ablett's remark._] In my present exalted station I don't hear much of what goes on at the "Wells," Wrench. Are your abilities still--still---- _Tom._ Still unrecognized, still confined within the almost boundless and yet repressive limits of Utility--General Utility? [_Nodding._] H'm, still. _Imogen._ Dear me! a thousand pities! I positively mean it. Tom. Thanks. _Imogen._ What do you think! You were mixed up in a funny dream I dreamt one night lately. _Tom._ [_Bowing._] Highly complimented. _Imogen._ It was after a supper which rather--well, I'd had some strawberries sent me from Hertfordshire. _Tom._ Indigestion levels all ranks. _Imogen._ It was a nightmare. I found myself on the stage of the Olympic in that wig you--oh, gracious! You used to play your very serious little parts in it---- _Tom._ The wig with the ringlets? _Imogen._ Ugh I yes. _Tom._ I wear it to-night, for the second time this week, in a part which is very serious--and very little. _Imogen._ Heavens! it is in existence then! _Tom._ And long will be, I hope. I've only three wigs, and this one accommodates itself to so many periods. _Imogen._ Oh, how it used to amuse the gallery-boys! _Tom._ They still enjoy it. If you looked in this evening at half-past-seven--I'm done at a quarter-to-eight--if you looked in at half-past seven, you would hear the same glad, rapturous murmur in the gallery when the presence of that wig is discovered. Not that they fail to laugh at my other wigs, at every article of adornment I possess, in fact! Good God, Jennny--! _Imogen._ [_Wincing._] Ssssh! _Tom._ Miss Parrott--if they gave up laughing at me now, I believe I--I believe I should--_miss it_. I believe I couldn't spout my few lines now in silence; my unaccompanied voice would sound so strange to me. Besides, I often think those gallery-boys are really fond of me, at heart. You can't laugh as they do--rock with laughter sometimes!--at what you dislike. _Imogen._ Of course not. _Of course_ they like you, Wrench. You cheer them, make their lives happier---- _Tom._ And to-night, by the bye, I also assume that beast of a felt hat--the gray hat with the broad brim, and the imitation wool feathers. You remember it? _Imogen._ Y-y-yes. _Tom._ I see you do. Well, that hat still persists in falling off, when I most wish it to stick on. It will tilt and tumble to-night--during one of Telfer's pet speeches; I feel it will. _Imogen._ Ha, ha, ha! _Tom._ And those yellow boots; I wear _them_ to-night---- _Imogen._ No! _Tom._ Yes! _Imogen._ Ho, ho, ho, ho! _Tom._ [_With forced hilarity._] Ho, ho! ha, ha! And the spurs--the spurs that once tore your satin petticoat! You recollect------? _Imogen._ [_Her mirth suddenly checked._] Recollect! _Tom._ You would see those spurs to-night, too, if you patronized us--and the red worsted tights. The worsted tights are a little thinner, a little more faded and discolored, a little more darned--Oh, yes, thank you, I am still, as you put it, still--still--still---- [_He walks away, going to the mantelpiece and turning his back upon her._] _Imogen._ [_After a brief pause._] I'm sure I didn't intend to hurt your feelings, Wrench. _Tom._ [_Turning, with some violence._] You! you hurt my feelings! Nobody can hurt my feelings! I have no feelings---! [_Ablett re-enters, carrying three chairs of odd patterns. Tom seizes the chairs and places them about the table, noisily._] _Ablett._ Look here, Mr. Wrench! If I'm to be 'ampered in performin' my dooties--- _Tom._ More chairs, Ablett! In my apartment, the chamber nearest heaven, you will find one with a loose leg. We will seat Mrs. Telfer upon that. She dislikes me, and she is, in every sense, a heavy woman. _Ablett._ [_Moving toward the door--dropping his glove._] My opinion, you are meanin' to 'arrass me, Mr. Wrench----- _Tom._ [_Picking up the glove and throwing it to Ablett--singing._] "Take back thy glove, thou faithless fair!" Your glove, Ablett. _Ablett._ Thank you, sir; it _is_ my glove, and you are no gentleman. [_He withdraws._] _Tom._ True, Ablett--not even a Walking Gentleman. _Imogen._ Don't go on so, Wrench. What about your plays? Aren't you trying to write any plays just now? _Tom._ Trying! I am doing more than trying to write plays. I am writing plays. I have written plays. _Imogen._ Well? _Tom._ My cupboard upstairs is choked with 'em. _Imogen._ Won't anyone take a fancy----? _Tom._ Not a sufficiently violent fancy. _Imogen._ You know, the speeches were so short and had such ordinary words in them, in the plays you used to read to me--no big opportunity for the leading lady, Wrench. _Tom._ M' yes. I strive to make my people talk and behave like live people, don't I-? _Imogen._ I suppose you do. _Tom._ To fashion heroes out of actual, dull, every-day men--the sort of men you see smoking cheroots in the club windows in St. James's Street; and heroines from simple maidens in muslin frocks. Naturally, the managers won't stand that. _Imogen._ Why, of course not. _Tom._ If _they_ did, the public wouldn't. _Imogen._ Is it likely? Is it likely? _Tom._ I wonder! _Imogen._ Wonder--what? _Tom._ Whether they would. _Imogen._ The public! _Tom._ The public. Jenny, I wonder about it sometimes so hard that that little bedroom of mine becomes a banqueting hall, and this lodging house a castle. [_There is a loud and prolonged knocking at the front door._] _Imogen._ Here they are, I suppose. _Tom._ [_Pulling himself together._] Good Lord! Have I become disheveled? _Imogen._ Why, are you anxious to make an impression, even down to the last, Wrench? _Tom._ [_Angrily._] Stop that! _Imogen._ It's no good your being sweet on her any longer, surely? _Tom._ [_Glaring at her._] What cats you all are, you girls! _Imogen._ [_Holding up her hands._] Oh! oh, dear! How vulgar--after the Olympic! [_Ablett returns, carrying three more chairs._] _Ablett._ [_Arranging these chairs on the left of the table._] They're all 'ome! they're all 'ome! [_Tom places the four chairs belonging to the room at the table. To Imogen._] She looks 'eavenly, Miss Trelawny does. I was jest takin' in the ale when she floated down the Crescent on her lover's arm. [_ Wagging his head at Imogen admiringly._] There, I don't know which of you two is the---- _Imogen._ [_Haughtily._] Man, keep your place! _Ablett._ [_Hurt._] H'as you please, miss--but you apperently forget I used to serve you with vegetables. [_He takes up a position at the door as Telfer and Gadd enter. Telfer is a thick-set, elderly man, with a worn, clean-shaven face and iron-gray hair "clubbed" in the theatrical fashion of the time. Sonorous, if somewhat husky, in speech, and elaborately dignified in bearing, he is at the same time a little uncertain about his H's. Gadd is a flashily-dressed young man of seven-and-twenty, with brown hair arranged à la Byron and mustache of a deeper tone._] _Telfer._ [_Advancing to Imogen, and kissing her paternally._] Ha, my dear child! I heard you were 'ere. Kind of you to visit us. Welcome! I'll just put my 'at down---- [_He places his hat on the top of the piano, and proceeds to inspect the table._] _Gadd._ [_Coming to Imogen, in an elegant, languishing way._] Imogen, my darling. [_Kissing her._] Kiss Ferdy! _Imogen._ Well, Gadd, how goes it--I mean how are you? _Gadd._ [_Earnestly._] I'm hitting them hard this season, my darling. To-night, Sir Thomas Clifford. They're simply waiting for my Clifford. _Imogen._ But who on earth is your Julia? _Gadd._ Ha! Mrs. Telfer _goes on_ for it--a venerable stopgap. Absurd, of course; but we daren't keep my Clifford from them any longer. _Imogen._ You'll miss Rose Trelawny in business pretty badly, I expect, Gadd? _Gadd._ [_With a shrug of the shoulders._] She was to have done Rosalind for my benefit. Miss Fitzhugh joins on Monday; I must pull _her_ through it somehow. I would reconsider my bill, but they're waiting for my Orlando, waiting for it-- [_Colpoys enters--an insignificant, wizen little fellow who is unable to forget that he is a low-comedian. He stands L., squinting hideously at Imogen and indulging in extravagant gestures of endearment, while she continues her conversation with Gadd._] _Colpoys._ [_Failing to attract her attention._] My love! my life! _Imogen._ [_Nodding to him indifferently._] Good-afternoon, Augustus. _Colpoys._ [_Ridiculously._] She speaks! she hears me! _Ablett._ [_Holding his glove before his mouth, convulsed with laughter._] Ho, ho! oh, Mr. Colpoys! oh, reelly, sir! ho, dear! _Gadd._ [_To Imogen, darkly._] Colpoys is not nearly as funny as he was last year. Everybody's saying so. We want a low-comedian badly. [_He retires, deposits his hat on the wig-block, and joins Telfer and Tom._] _Colpoys._ [_Staggering to Imogen and throwing his arms about her neck._] Ah--h--h! after all these years! _Imogen._ [_Pushing him away._] Do be careful of my things, Colpoys! [Illustration: 0043] _Ablett._ [_Going out, blind with mirth._] Ha, ha, ha! ho, ho! [_He collides with Mrs. Telfer, who is entering at this moment. Mrs. Telfer is a tall, massive lady of middle age--a faded queen of tragedy._] _Ablett._ [_As he disappears._] I'm sure I beg your pardon, Mrs. Telfer, ma'am. _Mrs. Telfer._ Violent fellow! [_Advancing to Imogen and kissing her solemnly._] How is it with you, Jenny Parrott? _Imogen._ Thank you, Mrs. Telfer, as well as can be. And you? _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Waving away the inquiry._] I am obliged to you for this response to my invitation, It struck me as fitting that at such a time you should return for a brief hour or two to the company of your old associates---- [_Becoming conscious of Colpoys, behind her, making grimaces at Imogen._] Eh--h--h? [_Turning to Colpoys and surprising him._] Oh--h--h! Yes, Augustus Colpoys, you are extremely humorous off. _Colpoys._ [_Stung._] Miss Sylvester--Mrs. Telfer! _Mrs. Telfer._ On the stage, sir, you are enough to make a cat weep. _Colpoys._ Madam! from one artist to another! well, I--! 'pon my soul! [_Retreating and talking under his breath. _] Popular favorite! draw more money than all the--old guys---- _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Following him._] What do you say, sir! Do you mutter! [_They explain mutually. Avonia Bunn enters--an untidy, tawdrily-dressed young woman of about three-and-twenty, with the airs of a suburban soubrette._] _Avonia._ [_Embracing Imogen._] Dear old girl! _Imogen._ Well, Avonia? _Avonia._ This is jolly, seeing you again. My eye, what a rig-out! She'll be up directly. [_With a gulp._]She's taking a last look-round at our room. _Imogen._ You've been crying, 'Vonia. _Avonia._ No, I haven't. [_Breaking down._] If I have I can't help it. Rose and I have chummed together--all this season--and part of last--and--it's a hateful profession! The moment you make a friend----------! [_Looking toward the door._] There! isn't she a dream? I dressed her---- [_She moves away, as Rose Trelawny and Arthur Gower enter. Rose is nineteen, wears washed muslin, and looks divine. She has much of the extravagance of gesture, over-emphasis in speech, and freedom of manner engendered by the theatre, but is graceful and charming nevertheless. Arthur is a handsome, boyish young man--"all eyes" for Rose._] _Rose._ [_Meeting Imogen._] Dear Imogen! _Imogen._ [_Kissing her._] Rose, dear! _Rose._ To think of your journeying from the West to see me make my exit from Brydon Crescent! But you're a good sort; you always were. Do sit down and tell me--oh--! let me introduce Mr. Gower. Mr. Arthur Gower--Miss Imogen Parrott. _The_ Miss Parrott of the Olympic. _Arthur._ [_Reverentially._] I know. I've seen Miss Parrott as Jupiter, and as--I forget the name--in the new comedy-----[_Imogen and Rose sit below the table._] _Rose._ He forgets everything but the parts _I_ play, and the pieces _I_ play in--poor child! don't you, Arthur? _Arthur._ [_Standing by Rose, looking down upon her._] Yes--no. Well, of course I do! How can I help it, Miss Parrott? Miss Parrott won't think the worse of me for that--will you, Miss Parrott? _Mrs. Telfer._ I am going to remove my bonnet. Imogen Parrott--! _Imogen._ Thank you, I'll keep my hat on, Mrs. Telfer--take care! [_Mrs. Telfer, in turning to go, encounters Ablett, who is entering with two jugs of beer. Some of the beer is spilt._] _Ablett._ I beg your pardon, ma'am. _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Examining her skirts._] Ruffian! [_She departs._] _Rose._ [_To Arthur._] Go and talk to the boys. I haven't seen Miss Parrott for ages. [_In backing away from them, Arthur comes against Ablett._] _Ablett._ I beg your pardon, sir. _Arthur._ I beg yours. _Ablett._ [_Grasping Arthur's hand._] Excuse the freedom, sir, if freedom you regard it as---- _Arthur._ Eh-----? -, _Ablett._ You 'ave plucked the flower, sir; you 'ave stole our ch'icest blossom. _Arthur._ [_Trying to get away._] Yes, yes, I know---- _Ablett._ Cherish it, Mr. Glover----! [Illustration: 0049] _Arthur._ I will, I will. Thank you---- [_Mrs. Mossop's voice is heard calling "Ablett!" Ablett releases Arthur and goes out. Arthur joins Colpoys and Tom._] _Rose._ [_To Imogen._] The carriage will be here in half an hour. I've so much to say to you. Imogen, the brilliant hits you've made! how lucky you have been! _Imogen._ _My_ luck! what about _yours?_ _Rose._ Yes, isn't this a wonderful stroke of fortune for me! Fate, Jenny! that's what it is--Fate! Fate ordains that I shall be a well-to-do fashionable lady, instead of a popular but toiling actress. Mother often used to stare into my face, when I was little, and whisper, "Rosie, I wonder what is to be your--fate." Poor mother! I hope she sees. _Imogen._ Your Arthur seems nice. _Rose._ Oh, he's a dear. Very young, of course--not much more than a year older than me--than I. But he'll grow manly in time, and have mustaches, and whiskers out to here, he says. _Imogen._ How did you----? _Rose._ He saw me act Blanche in the _The Peddler of Marseilles,_ and fell in love. _Imogen._ Do you prefer Blanche----? _Rose._ To Celestine? Oh, yes. You see, I got leave to introduce a song--where Blanche is waiting for Raphael on the bridge. [_Singing, dramatically but in low tones._] "Ever of thee I'm fondly dreaming----" _Imogen._ I know-- [_They sing together._] _Rose. and Imogen._ "Thy gentle voice my spirit can cheer." _Rose._ It was singing that song that sealed my destiny, Arthur declares. At any rate, the next thing was he began sending bouquets and coming to the stage-door. Of course, I never spoke to him, never glanced at him. Poor mother brought me up in that way, not to speak to anybody, nor look. _Imogen._ Quite right. _Rose._ I do hope she sees. _Imogen._ And then? _Rose._ Then Arthur managed to get acquainted with the Telfers, and Mrs. Telfer presented him to me. Mrs. Telfer has kept an eye on me all through. Not that it was necessary, brought up as I was--but she's a kind old soul. _Imogen._ And now you're going to live with his people for a time, aren't you? _Rose._ Yes--on approval. _Imogen._ Ha, ha, ha I you don't mean that! _Rose._ Well, in a way--just to reassure them, as they put it. The Gowers have such odd ideas about theatres, and actors and actresses. _Imogen._ Do you think you'll like the arrangement? _Rose._ It 'll only be for a little while. I fancy they're prepared to take to me, especially Miss Trafalgar Gower---- _Imogen._ Trafalgar! _Rose._ Sir William's sister; she was born Trafalgar year, and christened after it-- [_Mrs. Mossop and Ablett enter, carrying trays on which are a pile of plates and various dishes of Cold food--a joint, a chicken and a tongue, a ham, a pigeon pie, etc. They proceed to set out the dishes upon the table._] _Imogen._ [_Cheerfully._] Well, God bless you, my dear. I'm afraid I couldn't give up the stage though, not for all the Arthurs---- _Rose._ Ah, your mother wasn't an actress. _Imogen._ No. _Rose._ Mine was, and I remember her saying to me once, "Rose, if ever you have the chance, get out of it." _Imogen._ The Profession? _Rose._ Yes. "Get out of it," mother said; "if ever a good man comes along, and offers to marry you and to take you off the stage, seize the chance--get out of it." _Imogen._ Your mother was never popular, was she? _Rose._ Yes, indeed she was, most popular--till she grew oldish and lost her looks. _Imogen._ Oh, _that's_ what she meant, then? _Rose._ Yes, that's what she meant. _Imogen._ [_Shivering._] Oh, lor', doesn't it make one feel depressed. Poor mother! _Rose._ Well, I hope she sees. _Mrs. Mossop._ Now, ladies and gentlemen, everything is prepared, and I do trust to your pleasure and satisfaction. _Telfer._ Ladies and gentlemen, I beg you to be seated, [_There is a general movement._] Miss Trelawny will sit 'ere, on my right. On my left, my friend Mr. Glower will sit. Next to Miss Trelawny--who will sit beside Miss Trelawny? _Gadd. and Colpoys._ I will. _Avonia._ No, do let me! [_Gadd, Colpoys, and Avonia gather round Rose and wrangle for the vacant place._] _Rose._ [_Standing by her chair._] It must be a gentleman, 'Vonia. Now, if you two boys quarrel---! _Gadd._ Please don't push me, Colpoys! _Colpoys._ 'Pon my soul, Gadd----! _Rose._ I know how to settle it. Tom Wrench------! _Tom._ [_Coming to her._] Yes? [_Colpoys and Gadd move away, arguing._] _Imogen._ [_Seating herself._] Mr. Gadd and Mr. Colpoys shall sit by me, one on each side. [_Colpoys sits on Imogen's right, Gadd on her left, Avonia sits between Tom and Gadd; Mrs. Mossop on the right of Colpoys. Amid much chatter, the viands are carved by Mrs. Mossop, Telfer, and Tom. Some plates of chicken, etc., are handed round by Ablett, while others are passed about by those at the table._] _Gadd._ [_Quietly to Imogen, during a pause in the hubbub._] Telfer takes the chair, you observe. Why _he_--more than myself, for instance? _Imogen._ [_To Gadd._] The Telfers have lent their room---- _Gadd._ Their stuffy room I that's no excuse. I repeat, Telfer has thrust himself into this position. _Imogen._ He's the oldest man present. _Gadd._ True. And he begins to age in his acting too. His H's! scarce as pearls! _Imogen._ Yes, that's shocking. Now, at the Olympic, slip an H and you're damned for ever. _Gadd._ And he's losing all his teeth. To act with him, it makes the house seem half empty. [_Ablett is now going about pouring out the ale. Occasionally he drops his glove, misses it, and recovers it._] _Telfer._ [_To Imogen._] Miss Parrott, my dear, follow the counsel of one who has sat at many a "good man's feast"--have a little 'am. _Imogen._ Thanks, Mr. Telfer. [_Mrs. Telfer returns._] _Mrs. Telfer._ Sitting down to table in my absence! [_To Telfer._] How is this, James? _Telfer._ We are pressed for time, Violet, my love. _Rose._ Very sorry, Mrs. Telfer. _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Taking her place, between Arthur and Mrs. Mossop--gloomily._] A strange proceeding. _Rose._ Rehearsal was over so late. [_To Telfer._] You didn't get to the last act till a quarter to one, did you? _Avonia._ [_Taking off her hat and flinging it across the table to Colpoys._] Gus! catch! Put it on the sofa, there's a dear boy. [_Colpoys perches the hat upon his head, and behaves in a ridiculous, mincing way. Ablett is again convulsed with laughter. Some of the others are amused also, but more moderately._] Take that off, Gus! Mr. Colpoys, you just take my hat off! [_Colpoys rises, imitating the manners of a woman, and deposits the hat on the sofa._] _Ablett._ Ho, ho, ho! oh, don't Mr. Colpoys! oh, don't, sir! [_Colpoys returns to the table._] _Gadd._ [_Quietly to Imogen._] It makes me sick to watch Colpoys in private life. He'd stand on his head in the street, if he could get a ragged infant to laugh at him. [_Picking the leg of a fowl furiously._] What I say is this. Why can't an actor, in private life, be simply a gentleman? [_Loudly and haughtily._] More tongue here! _Ablett._ [_Hurrying to him._] Yessir, certainly, sir. [_Again discomposed by some antic on the part of Colpoys._] Oh, don't, Mr. Colpoys! [_Going to Telfer with Gadd's plate--speaking while Telfer carves a slice of tongue._] I shan't easily forget this afternoon, Mr. Telfer. [_Exhausted._] This 'll be something to tell Mrs. Ablett. Ho, ho! oh, dear, oh, dear! [_Ablett, averting his face from Colpoys, brings back Gadd's plate. By an unfortunate chance, Ablett's glove has found its way to the plate and is handed to Gadd by Ablett._] _Gadd._ [_Picking up the glove in disgust._] Merciful powers! what's this! _Ablett._ [_Taking the glove._] I beg your pardon, sir--my error, entirely. [_A firm rat-tat-tat at the front door is heard. There is a general exclamation. At the same moment Sarah, a diminutive servant in a crinoline, appears in the doorway._] _Sarah._ [_Breathlessly._] The kerridge has just drove up! [_Imogen, Gadd, Colpoys, and Avonia go to the windows, open them, and look out. Mrs. Mossop hurries away, pushing Sarah before her._] _Telfer._ Dear me, dear me! before a single speech has been made. _Avonia._ [_At the window._] Rose, do look! _Imogen._ [_At the other window._] Come here, Rose! _Rose._ [_Shaking her head._] Ha, ha! I'm in no hurry; I shall see it often enough. [_Turning to Tom._] Well, the time has arrived. [_Laying down her knife and fork._] Oh, I'm so sorry, now. _Tom._ [_Brusquely._] Are you? I'm glad. _Rose._ Glad! that is hateful of you, Tom Wrench! _Arthur._ [_Looking at his watch._] The carriage is certainly two or three minutes before its time, Mr. Telfer. _Telfer._ Two or three-----! The speeches, my dear sir, the speeches! [_Mrs. Mossop returns, panting._] _Mrs. Mossop._ The footman, a nice-looking young man with hazel eyes, says the carriage and pair can wait for a little bit. They must be back by three, to take their lady into the Park---- _Telfer._ [_Rising._] Ahem! Resume your seats, I beg. Ladies and gentlemen----- _Avonia._ Wait, waitl we're not ready! [_Imogen, Gadd, Colpoys, and Avonia return to their places. Mrs. Mossop also sits again. Ablett stands by the door._] _Telfer._ [_Producing a paper from his breast-pocket._] Ladies and gentlemen, I devoted some time this morning to the preparation of a list of toasts. I now 'old that list in my hand. The first toast---- [_He pauses, to assume a pair of spectacles._] _Gadd._ [_To Imogen._] He arranges the toast-list! he! _Imogen._ [_To Gadd._] Hush! _Telfer._ The first toast that figures 'ere is, naturally, that of The Queen. [_Laying his hand on Arthur's shoulder._] With my young friend's chariot at the door, his horses pawing restlessly and fretfully upon the stones, I am prevented from enlarging, from expatiating, upon the merits of this toast. Suffice it, both Mrs. Telfer and I have had the honor of acting before Her Majesty upon no less than two occasions. _Gadd._ [_To Imogen._] Tsch, tsch, tsch! an old story! _Telfer._ Ladies and gentlemen, I give you--[_to Colpoys_]--the malt is with you, Mr. Colpoys. _Colpoys._ [_Handing the ale to Telfer._] Here you are, Telfer. _Telfer._ [_Filling his glass. _] I give you The Queen, coupling with that toast the name of Miss Violet Sylvester--Mrs. Telfer--formerly, as you are aware, of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Miss Sylvester has so frequently and, if I may say so, so nobly impersonated the various queens of tragedy that I cannot but feel she is a fitting person to acknowledge our expression of loyalty. [_Raising his glass._] The Queen I And Miss Violet Sylvester! [_All rise, except Mrs. Telfer, and drink the toast. After drinking Mrs. Mossop passes her tumbler to Ablett._] _Ablett._ The Queen! Miss Vi'lent Sylvester! [_He drinks and returns the glass to Mrs. Mossop. The company being reseated, Mrs. Telfer rises. Her reception is a polite one._] _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Heavily._] Ladies and gentlemen, I have played fourteen or fifteen queens in my time--- _Telfer._ Thirteen, my love, to be exact; I was calculating this morning. _Mrs. Telfer._ Very well, I have played thirteen of 'em. And, as parts, they are not worth a tinker's oath. I thank you for the favor with which you have received me. [_She sits; the applause is heartier. During the demonstration Sarah appears in the doorway, with a kitchen chair._] _Ablett._ [_To Sarah._] Wot's all this? _Sarah._ [_To Ablett._] Is the speeches on? _Ablett._ H'on! yes, and you be h'off! [_She places the chair against the open door and sits, full of determination. At intervals Ablett vainly represents to her the impropriety of her proceeding._] _Telfer._ [_Again rising._] Ladies and gentlemen. Bumpers, I charge ye! The toast I 'ad next intended to propose was Our Immortal Bard, Shakspere, and I had meant, myself, to 'ave offered a few remarks in response---- _Gadd._ [_To Imogen, bitterly._] Ha! _Telfer._ But with our friend's horses champing their bits, I am compelled--nay, forced--to postpone this toast to a later period of the day, and to give you now what we may justly designate the toast of the afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to lose, to part with, one of our companions, a young comrade who came amongst us many months ago, who in fact joined the company of the "Wells" last February twelvemonth, after a considerable experience in the provinces of this great country. _Colpoys._ Hear, hear! _Avonia._ [_Tearfully._] Hear, hear! [_With a sob._] I detested her at first. _Colpoys._ Order! _Imogen._ Be quiet, 'Vonia! _Telfer._ Her late mother an actress, herself made familiar with the stage from childhood if not from infancy, Miss Rose Trelawny--for I will no longer conceal from you that it is to Miss Trelawny I refer---- [_Loud applause._] Miss Trelawny is the stuff of which great actresses are made. _All._ Hear, hear! _Ablett._ [_Softly._] 'Ear, 'ear! _Telfer._ So much for the actress. Now for the young lady--nay, the woman, the gyirl. Rose is a good girl---- [_Loud applause, to which Ablett and Sarah contribute largely. Avonia rises and impulsively embraces Rose. She is recalled to her seat by a general remonstrance._] A good girl---- _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Clutching a knife._] Yes, and I should like to hear anybody, man or woman----! _Telfer._ She is a good girl, and will be long remembered by us as much for her private virtues as for the commanding authority of her genius. [_More applause, during which there is a sharp altercation between Ablett and Sarah._] And now, what has happened to "the expectancy and Rose of the fair state"? _Imogen._ Good, Telfer! good!' _Gadd._ [_To Imogen._] Tsch, tsch! forced! forced! _Telfer._ I will tell you--[_impressively_]--a man has crossed her path. _Ablett._ [_In a low voice._] Shame! _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Turning to him._] Mr. Ablett! _Telfer._ A man--ah, but also a gentle-man. [_Applause._] A gentleman of probity, a gentleman of honor, and a gentleman of wealth and station. That gentleman, with the modesty of youth,--for I may tell you at once that 'e is not an old man,--comes to us and asks us to give him this gyirl to wife. And, friends, we have done so. A few preliminaries 'ave, I believe, still to be concluded between Mr. Gower and his family, and then the bond will be signed, the compact entered upon, the mutual trust accepted. Riches this youthful pair will possess--but what is gold? May they be rich in each other's society, in each other's love! May they--I can wish them no greater joy--be as happy in their married life as my--my--as Miss Sylvester and I 'ave been in ours! [_Raising his glass._] Miss Rose Trelawny--Mr. Arthur Gower! [_The toast is drunk by the company, upstanding. Three cheers are called for by Colpoys, and given. Those who have risen then sit._] Miss Trelawny. _Rose._ [_Weeping._] No, no, Mr. Telfer. _Mrs. Telfer._ [_To Telfer, softly._] Let her be for a minute, James. _Telfer._ _Mr. Gower._ [_Arthur rises and is well received._] _Arthur._ Ladies and gentlemen, I--I would I were endowed with Mr. Telfer's flow of--of--of splendid eloquence. But I am no orator, no speaker, and therefore cannot tell you how highly--how deeply I appreciate the--the compliment---- _Ablett._ You deserve it, Mr. Glover! _Mrs. Mossop._ Hush! _Arthur._ All I can say is that I regard Miss Trelawny in the light of a--a solemn charge, and I--I trust that, if ever I have the pleasure of--of meeting--any of you again, I shall be able to render a good--a--a--satisfactory--satisfactory--- _Tom._ [_In an audible whisper._] Account. _Arthur._ Account of the way--of the way--in which I--in which----- [_Loud applause._] Before I bring these observations to a conclusion, let me assure you that it has been a great privilege to me to meet--to have been thrown with--a band of artists--whose talents--whose striking talents--whose talents---- _Tom._ [_Kindly, behind his hand._] Sit down. _Arthur._ [_Helplessly._] Whose talents not only interest and instruct the--the more refined residents of this district, but whose talents- _Imogen._ [_Quietly to Colpoys._] Get him to sit down. _Arthur._ The fame of whose talents, I should say---- _Colpoys._ [_Quietly to Mrs. Mossop._] He's to sit down. Tell Mother Telfer. _Arthur._ The fame of whose talents has spread to--to regions--- _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Quietly to Mrs. Telfer._] They say he's to sit down. _Arthur._ To--to quarters of the town--to quarters---- _Mrs. Telfer._ [_To Arthur._] Sit down! _Arthur._ Eh? _Mrs. Telfer._ You finished long ago. Sit down. _Arthur._ Thank you. I'm exceedingly sorry. Great Heavens, how wretchedly I've done it! [_He sits, burying his head in his hands. More applause._] _Telfer._ Rose. my child. [_Rose starts to her feet. The rest rise with her, and cheer again, and wave handkerchiefs. She goes from one to the other, round the table, embracing and kissing and crying over them all excitedly. Sarah is kissed, but upon Ablett is bestowed only a handshake, to his evident dissatisfaction. Imogen runs to the piano and strikes up the air of "Ever of Thee." When Rose gets back to the place she mounts her chair, with the aid of Tom and Telfer, and faces them with flashing eyes. They pull the flowers out of the vases and throw them at her._] _Rose._ Mr. Telfer, Mrs. Telfer! My friends! Boys! Ladies and gentlemen! No, don't stop, Jenny! go on! [_Singing, her arms stretched out to them._] "Ever of thee I'm fondly dreaming, Thy gentle voice." You remember! the song I sang in The Peddler of Marseilles--which made Arthur fall in love with me! Well, I know I shall dream of you, of all of you, very often, as the song says. Don't believe [_wiping away her tears_], oh, don't believe that, because I shall have married a swell, you and the old "Wells"--the dear old "Wells"!---- [_Cheers._] _Rose._ You and the old "Wells" will have become nothing to me! No, many and many a night you will see me in the house, looking down at you from the Circle--me and my husband---- _Arthur._ Yes, yes, certainly! _Rose._ And if you send for me I'll come behind the curtain to you, and sit with you and talk of bygone times, these times that end to-day. And shall I tell you the moments which will be the happiest to me in my life, however happy I may be with Arthur? Why, whenever I find that I am recognized by people, and pointed out--people in the pit of a theatre, in the street, no matter where; and when I can fancy they're saying to each other, "Look! that was Miss Trelawny! you remember--Trelawny! Trelawny of the 'Wells!'"---- [_They cry "Trelawny!" and "Trelawny of the 'Wells!'" and again "Trelawny!" wildly. Then there is the sound of a sharp rat-tat at the front door. Imogen leaves the piano and looks out of the window._] _Imogen._ [_To somebody below._] What is it? _A Voice._ Miss Trelawny, ma'am. We can't wait. _Rose._ [_Weakly._] Oh, help me down---- [_They assist her, and gather round her._] END OF THE FIRST ACT. THE SECOND ACT. _The scene represents a spacious drawing-room in a house in Cavendish Square. The walls are somber in tone, the ceiling dingy, the hangings, though rich, are faded, and altogether the appearance of the room is solemn, formal, and depressing. On the right are folding-doors admitting to a further drawing-room. Beyond these is a single door. The wall on the left is mainly occupied by three sash-windows. The wall facing the spectators is divided by two pilasters into three panels. On the center panel is a large mirror, reflecting the fireplace; on the right hangs a large oil painting--a portrait of Sir William Gower in his judicial wig and robes. On the left hangs a companion picture--a portrait of Miss Gower. In the corners of the room there are marble columns supporting classical busts, and between the doors stands another marble column, upon which is an oil lamp. Against the lower window there are two chairs and a card-table. Behind a further table supporting a lamp stands a threefold screen. The lamps are lighted, but the curtains are not drawn, and outside the windows it is twilight._ [_Sir William Gower is seated, near a table, asleep, with a newspaper over his head, concealing his face. Miss Trafalgar Gower is sitting at the further end of a couch, also asleep, and with a newspaper over her head. At the lower end of this couch sits Mrs. de Foenix--Clara--a young lady of nineteen, with a "married" air. She is engaged upon some crochet work. On the other side of the room, near a table, Rose is seated, wearing the look of a boredom which has reached the stony stage. On another couch Arthur sits, gazing at his boots, his hands in his pockets. On the right of this couch stands Captain de Foenix, leaning against the wall, his mouth open, his head thrown back, and his eyes closed. De Foenix is a young man of seven-and-twenty--an example of the heavily-whiskered "swell" of the period. Everybody is in dinner-dress. After a moment or two Arthur rises and tiptoes down to Rose. Clara raises a warning finger and says "Hush!" He nods to her, in assent._] _Arthur._ [_On Rose's left--in a whisper._] Quiet, isn't it? _Rose._ [_To him, in a whisper._] Quiet! Arthur---! [_Clutching his arm._] Oh, this dreadful half-hour after dinner, every, every evening! _Arthur._ [_Creeping across to the right of the table and sitting there._] Grandfather and Aunt Trafalgar must wake up soon. They're longer than usual to-night. _Rose._ [_To him, across the table._] Your sister Clara, over there, and Captain de Foenix--when they were courting, did they have to go through this? _Arthur._ Yes. _Rose._ And now that they are married, they still endure it! _Arthur._ Yes. _Rose._ And we, when we are married, Arthur, shall _we_---? _Arthur._ Yes. I suppose so. _Rose._ [_Passing her hand across her brow._] Phe--ew! [_De Foenix, fast asleep, is now swaying, and in danger of toppling over. Clara grasps the situation and rises._] _Clara._ [_In a guttural whisper._] Ah, Frederick! no, no, no! _Rose. and Arthur._ [_Turning in their chairs._] Eh--what-----? ah--h--h--h! [_As Clara, reaches her husband, he lurches forward into her arms._] _De Foenix._ [_His eyes bolting._] Oh! who------< _Clara._ Frederick dear, wake! _De Foenix._ [_Dazed._] How did this occur? _Clara._ You were tottering, and I caught you. _De Foenix._ [_Collecting his senses._] I wemember. I placed myself in an upwight position, dearwest, to prewent myself dozing. _Clara._ [_Sinking on to the couch._] How you alarmed me! [_Seeing that Rose is laughing, De Foenix comes down to her._] _De Foenix._ [_In a low voice._] Might have been a very serwious accident, Miss Trelawny. _Rose._ [_Seating herself on the footstool._] Never mind! [_Pointing to the chair she has vacated._] Sit down and talk. [_He glances at the old people and shakes his head._] Oh, do, do, do! do sit down, and let us all have a jolly whisper. [_He sits._] Thank your Captain Fred. Go on! tell me something--anything; something about the military---- _De Foenix._ [_Again looking at the old people, then wagging his finger at Rose._] I know; you want to get me into a wow. [_Settling himself into his chair._] Howwid girl! _Rose._ [_Despairingly._] Oh--h--h! [_There is a brief pause, and then the sound of a street-organ, playing in the distance, is heard. The air is "Ever of Thee."_] _Rose._ Hark! [_Excitedly._] Hark! _Clara._ Arthur, and De Foenix. Hush! _Rose._ [_Heedlessly._] The song I sang in The Peddler--The Peddler of Marseilles! the song that used to make you cry, Arthur! [_They attempt vainly to hush her down, but she continues dramatically, in hoarse whispers._] And then Raphael enters--comes on to the bridge. The music continues, softly. "Raphael, why have you kept me waiting? Man, do you wish to break my heart--[_thumping her breast_] a woman's hear--r--rt, Raphael?" [_Sir William and Miss Gower suddenly whip off their newspapers and sit erect. Sir William is a grim, bullet-headed old gentleman of about seventy; Miss Gower a spare, prim lady, of gentle manners, verging upon sixty. They stare at each other for a moment, silently._] _Sir William._ What a hideous riot, Trafalgar! _Miss Gower._ _Rose._ dear, I hope I have been mistaken--but through my sleep I fancied I could hear you shrieking at the top of your voice. [_Sir William gets on to his feet; all rise, except Rose, who remains seated sullenly._] [Illustration: 0081] _Sir William._ Trafalgar, it is becoming impossible for you and me to obtain repose. [_Turning his head sharply._] Ha! is not that a street-organ? [_To Miss Gower._] An organ? _Miss Gower._ Undoubtedly. An organ in the Square, at this hour of the evening--singularly out of place! _Sir William._ [_Looking round._] Well, well, well, does no one stir? _Rose._ [_Under her breath._] Oh, don't stop it! [_Clara goes out quickly. With a great show of activity Arthur and De Foenix hurry across the room and, when there, do nothing._] _Sir William._ [_Coming upon Rose and peering down at her._] What are ye upon the floor for, my dear? Have we no cheers? [_To Miss Gower--producing his snuff-box._] Do we lack cheers here, Trafalgar? _Miss Gower._ [_Going to Rose._] My dear Rose! [_Raising her._] Come, come, come, this is quite out of place! Young ladies do not crouch and huddle upon the ground--do they, William? _Sir William._ [_Taking snuff._] A moment ago I should have hazarded the opinion that they do not. [_Chuckling unpleasantly._] He, he, he! [_Clara returns. The organ music ceases abruptly._] _Clara._ [_Coming to Sir William._] Charles was just running out to stop the organ when I reached the hall, grandpa. _Sir William._ Ye'd surely no intention, Clara, of venturing, yourself, into the public street--the open Square----? _Clara._ [_Faintly._] I meant only to wave at the man from the door---- _Miss Gower._ Oh, Clara, that would hardly have been in place! _Sir William._ [_Raising his hands._] In mercy's name, Trafalgar, what is befalling my household? _Miss Gower._ [_Bursting into tears._] Oh, William----! [_Rose and Clara creep away and join the others. Miss Gower totters to Sir William and drops her head upon his breast._] _Sir William._ Tut, tut, tut, tut! _Miss Gower._ [_Between her sobs._] I--I--I--I know what is in your mind. _Sir William._ [_Drawing a long breath._] Ah--h--h--h! _Miss Gower._ Oh, my dear brother, be patient! _Sir William._ Patient! _Miss Gower._ Forgive me; I should have said hopeful. Be hopeful that I shall yet succeed in ameliorating the disturbing conditions which are affecting us so cruelly. Sm William. Ye never will, Trafalgar; _I've_ tried. _Miss Gower._ Oh, do not despond already! I feel sure there are good ingredients in Rose's character. [_Clinging to him._] In time, William, we shall shape her to be a fitting wife for our rash and unfortunate Arthur---- [_He shakes his head._] In time, William, in time! _Sir William._ [_Soothing her._] Well, well, well! there, there, there! At least, my dear sister, I am perfectly aweer that I possess in you the woman above all others whose example should compel such a transformation. _Miss Gower._ [_Throwing her arms about his neck._] Oh, brother, what a compliment----! _Sir William._ Tut, tut, tut! And now, before Charles sets the card-table, don't you think we had better--eh, Trafalgar? _Miss Gower._ Yes, yes--our disagreeable duty; let us discharge it. [_Sir William takes snuff._] Rose, dear, be seated. [_To everybody._] The Vice Chancellor has something to say to us. Let us all be seated. [_There is consternation among the young people. All sit._] _Sir William._ [_Peering about him._] Are ye seated? _Everybody._ Yes. _Sir William._ What I desire to say is this. When Miss Trelawny took up her residence here, it was thought proper, in the peculiar circumstances of the case, that you, Arthur--[_pointing a finger at Arthur_] you---- _Arthur._ Yes, sir. _Sir William._ That you should remove yourself to the establishment of your sister Clara and her husband in Holies Street, round the corner-- _Arthur._ Yes, sir. _Clara._ Yes, grandpa. _De Foenix._ Certainly, Sir William. _Sir William._ Taking your food in this house, and spending other certain hours here, under the surveillance of your great-aunt Trafalgar. Miss Gower. Yes, William. _Sir William._ This was considered to be a decorous, and, toward Miss Trelawny, a highly respectful, course to pursue. _Arthur._ Yes, sir. _Miss Gower._ Any other course would have been out of place. _Sir William._ And yet--[_again extending a finger at Arthur_] what is this that is reported to me? _Arthur._ I don't know, sir. _Sir William._ I hear that ye have on several occasions, at night, after having quitted this house with Captain and Mrs. De Foenix, been seen on the other side of the way, your back against the railings, gazing up at Miss Trelawny's window; and that you have remained in that position for a considerable space of time. Is this true, sir? _Rose._ [_Boldly._] Yes, Sir William. _Sir William._ I venture to put a question to my grandson, Miss Trelawny. _Arthur._ Yes, sir, it is quite true. _Sir William._ Then, sir, let me acqueent you that these are not the manners, nor the practices, of a gentleman. _Arthur._ No, sir? _Sir William._ No, sir, they are the manners, and the practices, of a Troubadour. _Miss Gower._ A troubadour in Cavendish Square! quite out of place! _Arthur._ I--I'm very sorry, sir; I--I never looked at it in that light. _Sir William._ [_Snuffing._] Ah--h--h--h! ho! pi--i--i--sh! _Arthur._ But at the same time, sir, I dare say--of course I don't speak from precise knowledge--but I dare say there were a good many--a good many----- _Sir William._ Good many--what sir? _Arthur._ A good many very respectable troubadours, sir---- _Rose._ [_Starting to her feet, heroically and defiantly. _] And what I wish to say, Sir William, is this. I wish to avow, to declare before the world, that Arthur and I have had many lengthy interviews while he has been stationed against those railings over there; I murmuring to him softly from my bedroom window, he responding in tremulous whispers---- _Sir William._ [_Struggling to his feet_]. You--you tell me such things---! [_All rise._] _Miss Gower._ The Square, in which we have resided for years----! Our neighbors----! _Sir William._ [_Shaking a trembling hand at Arthur. _] The--the character of my house---! _Arthur._ Again I am extremely sorry, sir--but these are the only confidential conversations Rose and I now enjoy. _Sir William._ [_Turning upon Clara and De Foenix._] And you, Captain de Foenix--an officer and a gentleman! and you, Clara! this could scarcely have been without your cognizance, without, perhaps, your approval----! [_Charles, in plush and powder and wearing luxuriant whiskers, enters, carrying two branch candlesticks with lighted candles._] _Charles._ The cawd-table, Sir William? _Miss Gower._ [_Agitatedly._] Yes, yes, by all means, Charles; the card-table, as usual. [_To Sir William._] A rubber will comfort you, soothe you---- [_Charles carries the candlesticks to the card-table, Sir William and Miss Gower seat themselves upon a couch, she with her arm through his affectionately. Clara and De Foenix get behind the screen; their scared faces are seen occasionally over the top of it. Charles brings the card-table, opens it and arranges it, placing four chairs, which he collects from different parts of the room, round the table. Rose and Arthur talk in rapid undertones._] _Rose._ Infamous! infamous! _Arthur._ Be calm, Rose, dear, be calm! _Rose._ Tyrannical! diabolical! I cannot endure it. [_She throws herself into a chair. He stands behind her, apprehensively, endeavoring to calm her._] _Arthur._ [_Over her shoulder._] They mean well, dearest---- _Rose._ [_Hysterically._] Well! ha, ha, ha! _Arthur._ But they are rather old-fashioned people--- _Rose._ Old-fashioned! they belong to the time when men and women were put to the torture. I am being tortured--mentally tortured---- _Arthur._ They have not many more years in this world----- _Rose._ Nor I, at this rate, many more months. They are killing me--like Agnes in _The Specter of St. Ives._ She expires, in the fourth act, as I shall die in Cavendish Square, painfully, of no recognized disorder-- _Arthur._ And anything we can do to make them happy---- _Rose._ To make the Vice Chancellor happy! I won't try! I will not! he's a fiend, a vampire-! _Arthur._ Oh, hush! _Rose._ [_Snatching up Sir William's snuff-box, which he has left upon the table._] His snuff-box! I wish I could poison his snuff, as Lucrezia Borgia would have done. She would have removed him within two hours of my arrival--I mean, her arrival. [_Opening the snuff-box and mimicing Sir William._] And here he sits and lectures me, and dictates to me! to Miss Trelawny! "I venture to put a question to my grandson, Miss Trelawny!" Ha, ha! [_Talcing a pinch of snuffy thoughtlessly but vigorously._] "Yah--h--h--h! pish! Have we no cheers? do we lack cheers here, Trafalgar?" [_Suddenly._] Oh! _Arthur._ What have you done? _Rose._ [_In suspense, replacing the snuff-box._] The snuff---! _Arthur._ _Rose._ dear! _Rose._ [_Putting her handkerchief to her nose, and rising._] Ah-----! [_Charles, having prepared the card-table, and arranged the candlesticks upon it, has withdrawn. Miss Gower and Sir William now rise._] _Miss Gower._ The table is prepared, William. Arthur, I assume you would prefer to sit and contemplate Rose----? _Arthur._ Thank you, aunt. [_Rose sneezes violently, and is led away, helplessly, by Arthur._] _Miss Gower._ [_To Rose._] Oh, my dear child! [_Looking round._] Where are Frederick and Clara? [_Appearing from behind the screen, shamefacedly._] Here. [_The intending players cut the pack and seat themselves. Sir William sits facing Captain de Foenix, Miss Gower on the right of the table, and Clara on the left._] _Arthur._ [_While this is going on, to Rose._] Are you in pain, dearest? Rose! _Rose._ Agony! _Arthur._ Pinch your upper lip--- [_She sneezes twice, loudly, and sinks back upon the couch._] _Sir William._ [_Testily._] Sssh! sssh! sssh! this is to be whist, I hope. _Miss Gower._ Rose! Rose! young ladies do not sneeze quite so continuously. [_De Foenix is dealing._] _Sir William._ [_With gusto._] I will thank you, Captain de Foenix, to exercise your intelligence this evening to its furthest limit. _De Foenix._ I'll twy, sir. _Sir William._ [_Laughing unpleasantly._] He, he, he! last night, sir---- _Clara._ Poor Frederick had toothache last night, grandpa. _Sir William._ [_Tartly._] Whist is whist, Clara, and toothache is toothache. We will endeavor to keep the two things distinct, if you please. He, he! _Miss Gower._ Your interruption was hardly in place, Clara, dear,--ah! _De Foenix._ Hey! what? _Miss Gower._ A misdeal. _Clara._ [_Faintly._] Oh, Frederick! _Sir William._ [_Partly rising._] Captain de Foenix! _De Foenix._ I--I'm fwightfully gwieved, sir---- [_The cards are re-dealt by Miss Gower. Rose now gives way to a violent paroxysm of sneezing. Sir William rises._] _Miss Gower._ William-----! [_The players rise._] _Sir William._ [_To the players._] Is this whist, may I ask? [_They sit._] _Sir William._ [_Standing._] Miss Trelawny-- [Illustration: 0097] _Rose._ [_Weakly._] I--I think I had better--what d'ye call it?--withdraw for a few moments. _Sir William._ [_Sitting again._] Do so. [_Rose disappears. Arthur is leaving the room with her._] _Miss Gower._ [_Sharply._] Arthur! where are you going? _Arthur._ [_Returning promptly._] I beg your pardon, aunt. _Miss Gower._ Really, Arthur---! _Sir William._ [_Rapping upon the table._] Tsch, tsch, tsch! _Miss Gower._ Forgive me, William. [_They play._] _Sir William._ [_Intent upon his cards._] My snuff-box, Arthur; be so obleeging as to search for it. _Arthur._ [_Brightly._] I'll bring it to you, sir. It is on the---- _Sir William._ Keep your voice down, sir. We are playing--[_emphatically throwing down a card, as fourth player_] whist. Mine. _Miss Gower._ [_Picking up the trick._] No, William. _Sir William._ [_Glaring._] No! _Miss Gower._ _Clara._played a trump. De Foenix. Yes, sir, Clara played a trump--the seven---- _Sir William._ I will not trouble you, Captain de Foenix, to echo Miss Gower's information. _De Foenix._ Vevy sowwy, sir. _Miss Gower._ [_Gently._] It was a little out of place, Frederick. _Sir William._ Sssh! whist. [_Arthur is now on Sir William's right, with the snuff-box._] Eh? what? [_Taking the snuff-box from Arthur._] Oh, thank ye. Much obleeged, much obleeged. [_Arthur walks away and picks up a book. Sir William turns in his chair, watching Arthur._] _Miss Gower._ You to play, William. [_A pause._] William, dear----? [_She also turns, following the direction of his gaze. Laying down his cards, Sir William leaves the card-table and goes over to Arthur slowly. Those at the card-table look on apprehensively._] _Sir William._ [_In a queer voice._] Arthur. _Arthur._ [_Shutting his book._] Excuse me, grandfather. _Sir William._ Ye--ye're a troublesome young man, Arthur. _Arthur._ I--I don't mean to be one, sir. _Sir William._ As your poor father was, before ye. And if you are fool enough to marry, and to beget children, doubtless your son will follow the same course. [_Taking snuff._] Y--y--yes, but I shall be dead 'n' gone by that time, it's likely. Ah--h--h--h! pi--i--i--sh! I shall be sitting in the Court Above by that time--- [_From the adjoining room comes the sound of Rose's voice singing "Ever of Thee" to the piano. There is great consternation at the card-table. Arthur is moving towards the folding-doors, Sir William detains him._] No, no, let her go on, I beg. Let her continue. [_Returning to the card-table, with deadly calmness._] We will suspend our game while this young lady performs her operas. _Miss Gower._ [_Rising and taking his arm._] William----! _Sir William._ [_In the same tone._] I fear this is no' longer a comfortable home for ye, Trafalgar; no longer the home for a gentlewoman. I apprehend that in these days my house approaches somewhat closely to a Pandemonium. [_Suddenly taking up the cards, in a fury, and flinging them across the room._] And this is whist--whist----! [_Clara and De Foenix rise and stand together. Arthur pushes open the upper part of the folding-doors._] _Arthur._ _Rose._ stop! Rose! [_The song ceases and Rose appears._] _Rose._ [_At the folding-doors._] Did anyone call? _Arthur._ You have upset my grandfather! _Miss Gower._ Miss Trelawny, how--how dare you do anything so--so out of place? _Rose._ There's a piano in there, Miss Gower. _Miss Gower._ You are acquainted with the rule of this household--no music when the Vice Chancellor is within doors. _Rose._ But there are so many rules. One of them is that you may not sneeze. _Miss Gower._ Ha! you must never answer--- _Rose._ No, that's another rule. _Miss Gower._ Oh, for shame! _Arthur._ You see, aunt, Rose is young, and--and--you make no allowance for her, give her no chance---- _Miss Gower._ Great Heaven! what is this you are charging me with? _Arthur._ I don't think the "rules" of this house are fair to Rose I oh, I must say it--they are horribly unfair! _Miss Gower._ [_Clinging to Sir William._] Brother! _Sir William._ Trafalgar! [_Putting her aside and advancing to Arthur._] Oh, indeed, sir! and so you deliberately accuse your great-aunt of acting toward ye and Miss Trelawny _mala fide_---- _Arthur._ Grandfather, what I intended to---- _Sir William._ I will afford ye the opportunity of explaining what ye intended to convey, downstairs, at once, in the library. [_A general shudder._] Obleege me by following me, sir. [_To Clara and De Foenix._] Captain de Foenix, I see no prospect of any further social relaxation this evening. You and Clara will do me the favor of attending in the hall, in readiness to take this young man back to Holies Street. [_Giving his arm to Miss Gower._] My dear sister---- [_To Arthur._] Now, sir. [_Sir William and Miss Gower go out Arthur comes to Rose and kisses her._] _Arthur._ Good-night, dearest: Oh, good-night! Oh, Rose! _Sir William._ [_Outside the door._] Mr. Arthur Gower! _Arthur._ I am coming, sir--- [_He goes out quickly._] _De Foenix._ [_Approaching Rose and taking her hand sympathetically._] Haw-----! I--weally--haw!---- _Rose._ Yes, I know what you would say. Thank you, Captain Fred. _Clara._ [_Embracing Rose._] Never mind! we will continue to let Arthur out at night as usual. I am a married woman! [_joining De Foenix_], and a married woman will turn, if you tread upon her often enough-----! [_De Foenix and Clara depart._] _Rose._ [_Pacing the room, shaking her hands in the air desperately._] Oh--h--h! ah--h--h! [_The upper part of the folding-doors opens, and Charles appears._] _Charles._ [_Mysteriously._] Miss Rose--- _Rose._ What-- _Charles._ [_Advancing._] I see Sir William h'and the rest descend the stairs. I 'ave been awaitin' the chawnce of 'andin' you this, Miss Rose. [_He produces a dirty scrap of paper, wet and limp, with writing upon it, and gives it to her._] _Rose._ [_Handling it daintly._] Oh, it's damp!-- _Charles._ Yes, miss; a little gentle shower 'ave been takin' place h'outside--'eat spots, cook says. _Rose._ [_Reading._] Ah! from some of my friends. Charles. [_Behind his hand._] Perfesshunnal, Miss Rose? _Rose._ [_Intent upon the note._] Yes--yes--- _Charles._ I was reprimandin' the organ, miss, when I observed them lollin' against the square railin's examinin' h'our premises, and they wentured for to beckon me. An egstremely h'affable party, miss. [_Hiding his face._] Ho! one of them caused me to laff! _Rose._ [_Excitedly._] They want to speak to me--[_referring to the note_] to impart something to me of an important nature. Oh, Charles, I know not what to do! _Charles._ [_Languishingly._] Whatever friends may loll against them railin's h'opposite, Miss Rose, you 'ave one true friend in this 'ouse--Chawles Gibbons---- _Rose._ Thank you, Charles. Mr. Briggs, the butler, is sleeping out to-night, isn't he? _Charles._ Yes, miss, he 'ave leave to sleep at his sister's. I 'appen to know he 'ave gone to Cremorne. _Rose._ Then, when Sir William and Miss Gower have retired, do you think you could let me go forth; and wait at the front door while I run across and grant my friends a hurried interview? _Charles._ Suttingly, miss. _Rose._ If it reached the ears of Sir William, or Miss Gower, you would lose your place, Charles! _Charles._ [_Haughtily._] I'm aweer, miss; but Sir William was egstremely rood to me dooring dinner, over that mis'ap to the ontray----- [_A bell rings violently._] S'william! [_He goes out. The rain is heard pattering against the window panes. Rose goes from one window to another, looking out. It is now almost black outside the windows._] _Rose._ [_Discovering her friends._] Ah! yes, yes! ah--h--h--h! [_She snatches an antimacassar from a chair and jumping onto the couch, waves it frantically to those outside._] The dears! the darlings! the faithful creatures----! [_Listening._] Oh------! [_She descends, in a hurry, and flings the antimacassar under the couch, as Miss Gower enters. At the same moment there is a vivid flash of lightning._] _Miss Gower._ [_Startled._] Oh, how dreadful! [_To Rose, frigidly._] The Vice Chancellor has felt the few words he has addressed to Arthur, and has retired for the night. [_There is a roll of thunder. Rose alarmed, Miss Gower clings to a chair._] Mercy on us! Go to bed, child, directly. We will all go to our beds, hoping to awake to-morrow in a meeker and more submissive spirit. [_Kissing Rose upon the brow._] Good-night. [_Another flash of lightning._] Oh----! Don't omit to say your prayers, Rose--and in a simple manner. I always fear that, from your peculiar training, you may declaim them. That is so out of place--oh! [_Another roll of thunder. Rose goes across the room, meeting Charles, who enters carrying a lantern. They exchange significant glances, and she disappears._] _Charles._ [_Coming to Miss Gower._] I am now at liberty to accompany you round the 'ouse, ma'am----[_A flash of lightning._] _Miss Gower._ Ah-----! [_Her hand to her heart._] Thank you, Charles--but to-night I must ask you to see that everything is secure, alone. This storm--so very seasonable; but, from girlhood, I could never--- [_A roll of thunder._] Oh, good-night! [_She flutters away. The rain beats still more violently upon the window panes._] _Charles._ [_Glancing at the window._] Ph--e--e--w! Great 'evans! [_He is dropping the curtains at the window when Rose appears at the folding-doors._] _Rose._ [_In a whisper._] Charles! _Charles._ Miss? _Rose._ [_Coming into the room, distractedly._] Miss Gower has gone to bed. _Charles._ Yes, miss--oh----! [_A flash of lightning._] _Rose._ Oh! my friends! my poor friends! _Charles._ H'and Mr. Briggs at Cremorne! Reelly, I should 'ardly advise you to wenture h'out, miss---- _Rose._ Out! no! Oh, but get them in! _Charles._ In, Miss Rose! indoors! _Rose._ Under cover---- [_A roll of thunder._] Oh! [_Wringing her hands._] They are my friends! is it a rule that I am never to see a friend, that I mayn't even give a friend shelter in a violent storm? [_To Charles._] Are you the only one up? _Charles._ I b'lieve so, miss. Any'ow the wimming-servants is quite h'under my control. _Rose._ Then tell my friends to be deathly quiet, and to creep--to tip-toe-- [_The rain strikes the window again. She picks up the lantern which Charles has deposited upon the floor, and gives it to him._] Make haste! I'll draw the curtains--[_He hurries out. She goes from window to window, dropping the curtains, talking to herself excitedly as she does so._] My friends! my own friends! ah! I'm not to sneeze in this house! nor to sing! or breathe, next! wretches! oh, my! wretches! [_Blowing out the candles and removing the candlesticks to the table, singing, under her breath, wildly._] "Ever of thee I'm fondly dreaming----" [_Mimicking Sir William again._] "What are ye upon the floor for, my dear? Have we no cheers? do we lack cheers here, Trafalgar----?" [_Charles returns._] _Charles._ [_To those who follow him._] Hush! [_To Rose._] I discovered 'em clustered in the doorway---- [_There is a final peal of thunder as Avonia, Gadd, Colpoys, and Tom Wrench enter, somewhat diffidently. They are apparently soaked to their skins, and are altogether in a deplorable condition. Avonia alone has an umbrella, which she allows to drip upon the carpet, but her dress and petticoats are bedraggled, her finery limp, her hair lank and loose._] _Rose._ 'Vonia! [Illustration: 0113] _Avonia._ [_Coming to her, and embracing her fervently._] Oh, ducky, ducky, ducky! oh, but what a storm! _Rose._ Hush! how wet you are! [_Shaking hands with Gadd_] Ferdinand--[_crossing to Colpoys and shaking hands with him_] Augustus--[_shaking hands with Tom_] Tom-Wrench-- _Avonia._ [_To Charles._] Be so kind as to put my umbrella on the landing, will you? Oh, thank you very much, I'm sure. [_Charles withdraws with the umbrella. Gadd and Colpoys shake the rain from their hats on to the carpet and furniture._] _Tom._ [_Quietly, to Rose._] It's a shame to come down on you in this way. But they would do it, and I thought I'd better stick to 'em. Gadd. [_Who is a little flushed and unsteady._] Ha! I shall remember this accursed evening. _Avonia._ Oh, Ferdy----! _Rose._ Hush! you must be quiet. Everybody has gone to bed, and I--I'm not sure I'm allowed to receive visitors---- _Avonia._ Oh! _Gadd._ Then we are intruders? _Rose._ I mean, such late visitors. [_Colpoys has taken off his coat, and is shaking it vigorously._] _Avonia._ Stop it, Augustus! ain't I wet enough? [_To Rose._] Yes, it is latish, but I so wanted to inform you--here--[_bringing Gadd forward_] allow me to introduce --my husband. _Rose._ Oh! no! _Avonia._ [_Laughing merrily._] Yes, ha, ha, ha! _Rose._ Sssh, sssh, sssh! _Avonia._ I forgot. [_To Gadd._] Oh, darling Ferdy, you're positively soaked! [_To Rose._] Do let him take his coat off, like Gussy---- _Gadd._ [_Jealously._] 'Vonia, not so much of the Gussy! _Avonia._ There you are, flying out again I as if Mr. Colpoys wasn't an old friend! _Gadd._ Old friend or no old friend---- _Rose._ [_Diplomatically._] Certainly, take your coat off, Ferdinand. [_Gadd joins Colpoys; they spread out their coats upon the couch._] _Rose._ [_Feeling Tom's coat sleeve._] And you? _Tom._ [_After glancing at the others--quietly._] No, thank you. _Avonia._. [_Sitting._] Yes, dearie, Ferdy and I were married yesterday. _Rose._ [_Sitting. _] Yesterday! _Avonia._. Yesterday morning. We're on our honeymoon now. You know, the "Wells" shut a fortnight after you left us, and neither Ferdy nor me could fix anything, just for the present, elsewhere; and as we hadn't put by during the season--you know it never struck us to put by during the season--we thought we'd get married. _Rose._ Oh, yes. _Avonia._. You see, a man and his wife can live almost on what keeps one, rent _and_ ceterer; and so, being deeply attached, as I tell you, we went off to church and did the deed. Oh, it will be such a save. [_Looking up at Gadd coyly._] Oh, Ferdy------! _Gadd._ [_Laying his hand upon her head, dreamily._] Yes, child, I confess I love you--. Colpoys [_Behind Rose, imitating Gadd._] Child, I confess I adore you. _Tom._ [_Taking Colpoys by the arm and swinging him away from Rose._] Enough of that, Colpoys! _Colpoys._ What! _Rose._ [_Rising._] Hush! _Tom._ [_Under his breath._] If you've never learnt how to behave---- _Colpoys._ Don't you teach behavior, sir, to a gentleman who plays a superior line of business to yourself! [_Muttering. _] 'Pon my soul! rum start! _Avonia._ [_Going to Rose._] Of course I ought to have written to you, dear, properly, but you remember the weeks it takes me to write a letter--- [_Gadd sits in the chair Avonia has just quitted; she returns and seats herself upon his knee._]And so I said to Ferdy, over tea, "Ferdy, let's spend a bit of our honeymoon' in doing the West End thoroughly, and going and seeing where Rose Trelawny lives." And we thought it only nice and polite to invite Tom Wrench and Gussy---- _Gadd._ 'Vonia, much less of the Gussy! _Avonia._ [_Kissing Gadd._] Jealous boy! [_Beaming._] Oh, and we have done the West End thoroughly. There, I've never done the West End so thoroughly in my life! And when we got outside your house I couldn't resist. [_Her hand on Gadd's shirt sleeve._] Oh, gracious! I'm sure you'll catch your death, my darling---! _Rose._ I think I can get him some wine. [_To Gadd._] Will you take some wine, Ferdinand? [_Gadd rises, nearly upsetting Avonia._] _Avonia._ Ferdy! _Gadd._ I thank you. [_ With a wave of the hand._] Anything, anything---- _Avonia._ [_To Rose._] Anything that goes with stout, dear. _Rose._ [_At the door, turning to them._] 'Vonia--boys--be very still. _Avonia._ Trust us! [_Rose tiptoes out. Colpoys is now at the card-table, cutting a pack of cards which remains there._] _Colpoys._ [_To Gadd._] Gadd, I'll see you for pennies. _Gadd._ [_Loftily._] Done, sir, with you! [_They seat themselves at the table, and cut for coppers. Tom is walking about, surveying the room._] _Avonia._ [_Taking off her hat and wiping it with her handkerchief._] Well, Thomas, what do you think of it? _Tom._ This is the kind of chamber I want for the first act of my comedy----- _Avonia._ Oh, lor', your head's continually running on your comedy. Half this blessed evening---- _Tom._ I tell you, I won't have doors stuck here, there, and everywhere; no, nor windows in all sorts of impossible places! _Avonia._ Oh, really! Well, when you do get your play accepted, mind you see that Mr. Manager gives you exactly what you ask for--won't you? _Tom._ You needn't be satirical, if you _are_ wet. Yes, I will I [_Pointing to the left._] Windows on the one side [_pointing to the right_], doors on the other--just where they should be, architecturally. And locks on the doors, _real locks_, to work; and handles--to turn! [_Rubbing his hands together gleefully._] Ha, ha! you wait! wait--! [_Rose re-enters, with a plate of biscuits in her hand, followed by Charles, who carries a decanter of sherry and some wine-glasses._] _Rose._ Here, Charles----- [_Charles places the decanter and the glasses on the table._] _Gadd._ [_Whose luck has been against him, throwing himself, sulkily, onto the couch._] Bah! I'll risk no further stake. _Colpoys._ Just because you lose sevenpence in coppers you go on like this! [_Charles, turning from the table, faces Colpoys._] ======== below this needs correction === _Colpoys._ [_Tearing his hair, and glaring at Charles wildly._] Ah--h--h, I am ruined! I have lost my all! my children are beggars----! _Charles._ Ho, ho, ho! he, he, he! _Rose._ Hush, hush! [_Charles goes out laughing. To everybody;_]Sherry? _Gadd._ [_Rising._] Sherry! [_Avonia, Colpoys; and Gadd gather round the table, and help themselves to sherry and biscuits._] _Rose._ [_To Tom._] Tom, won't you-----? _Tom._ [_Watching Gadd anxiously._] No, thank you. The fact is, we--we have already partaken of refreshments, once or twice during the evening---- [_Colpoys and Avonia, each carrying a glass of wine and munching a biscuit, go to the couch, where they sit._] _Gadd._ [_Pouring out sherry--singing._] "And let me the canakin clink, clink---" _Rose._ [_Coming to him._] Be quiet, Gadd! _Colpoys._ [_Raising his glass._] The Bride! _Rose._ [_Turning, kissing her hand to Avonia._] Yes, yes [_Gadd hands Rose his glass; she puts her lips to it._] The Bride! [_She returns the glass to Gadd._] _Gadd._ [_Sitting._] My bride! [_Tom, from behind the table, unperceived, takes the decanter and hides it under the table, then sits. Gadd, missing the decanter, contents himself with the biscuits._] _Avonia._ Well, Rose, my darling, we've been talking about nothing but ourselves. How are you getting along here? _Rose._ Getting along? oh, I--I don't fancy I'm getting along very well, thank you! _Colpoys. and Avonia._ Not----! _Gadd._ [_His mouth full of biscuit._] Not----! _Rose._ [_Sitting by the card-table._] No, boys; no 'Vonia. The truth is, it isn't as nice as you'd think it. I suppose the Profession had its drawbacks--mother used to say so--but [_raising her arms_] one could fly. Yes, in Brydon Crescent one was a dirty little London sparrow, perhaps; but here, in this grand square----! Oh, it's the story of the caged bird, over again. _Avonia._ A love-bird, though. _Rose._ Poor Arthur? yes, he's a dear. [_Rising._] But the Gowers--the old Gowers! the Gowers! the Gowers I [_She paces the room, beating her hands together. In her excitement, she ceases to whisper, and gradually becomes loud and voluble. The others, following her leady chatter noisily--excepting Tom, who sits thoughtfully, looking before him._] _Rose._ The ancient Gowers! the venerable Gowers! _Avonia._ You mean, the grandfather-----? _Rose._ And the aunt--the great-aunt--the great bore of a great-aunt! The very mention of 'em makes something go "tap, tap, tap, tap" at the top of my head. _Avonia._ Oh, I am sorry to hear this. Well, upon my word----! _Rose._ Would you believe it? 'Vonia--boys--you'll never believe it! I mayn't walk out with Arthur alone, nor see him here alone. I mayn't sing; no, nor sneeze even---- _Avonia._ [_Shrilly._]Not sing or sneeze! _Colpoys._ [_Indignantly. _] Not sneeze! _Rose._ No, nor sit on the floor--the floor! _Avonia._ Why, when we shared rooms together, you were always on the floor! _Gadd._ [_Producing a pipe, and knocking out the ashes on the heel of his boot._] In Heaven's name, what kind of house can this be! _Avonia._ I wouldn't stand it, would you, Ferdinand? _Gadd._ [_Loading his pipe._] Gad, no! _Avonia._ [_To Colpoys._] Would you, Gus, dear? _Gadd._ [_Under his breath._] Here! not so much of the Gus dear---- _Avonia._ [_To Colpoys._] Would you? _Colpoys._ No, I'm blessed if I would, my darling. _Gadd._ [_His pipe in his mouth._] Mr. Colpoys! less of the darling! _Avonia._ [_Rising._] Rose, don't you put up with it! [_Striking the top of the card-table vigorously._] I say, don't you stand it! [_Embracing Rose._] You're an independent girl, dear; they came to you, these people; not you to them, remember. _Rose._ [_Sitting on the couch._] Oh, what can I do? I can't do anything. _Avonia._ Can't you! [_Coming to Gadd._] Ferdinand, advise her. You tell her how to---- _Gadd._ [_Who has risen._] Miss Bunn--Mrs. Gadd, you have been all over Mr. Colpoys this evening, ever since we---- _Avonia._ [_Angrily, pushing him back into his chair._] Oh, don't be a silly! _Gadd._ Madam! _Avonia._ [_Returning to Colpoys._] Gus, Ferdinand's foolish. Come and talk to Rose, and advise her, there's a dear boy---- [_Colpoys rises; she takes his arm, to lead him to Rose. At that moment Gadd advances to Colpoys and slaps his face violently._] _Colpoys._ Hey----! _Gadd._ Miserable viper! [_The two men close. Tom runs to separate them. Rose rises with a cry of terror. There is a struggle and general uproar. The card-table is overturned, with a crash, and Avonia utters a long and piercing shriek. Then the house-bells are heard ringing violently._] _Rose._ Oh----! [_The combatants part; all look scared. At the door, listening._] They are moving--coming! Turn out the----! [_She turns out the light at the table. The room is in half-light as Sir William enters, cautiously, closely followed by Miss Gower. They are both in dressing-gowns and slippers; Sir William carries a thick stick and his bedroom candle. Rose is standing by a chair; Gadd, Avonia, Colpoys, and Tom are together._] _Sir William._ Miss Trelawny----! _Miss Gower._ _Rose._----! [_Running behind the screen._] Men! _Sir William._ Who are these people? _Rose._ [_Advancing a step or two._] Some friends of mine who used to be at the "Wells" have called upon me, to inquire how I am getting on. [_Arthur enters, quickly._] _Arthur._ [_Looking round._] Oh! Rose----! _Sir William._ [_Turning upon him._] Ah--h--h--h! How come you here? _Arthur._ I was outside the house. Charles let me in, knowing something was wrong. _Sir William._ [_Peering into his face._] Troubadouring-? _Arthur._ Troubadouring; yes, sir. [_To Rose._] Rose, what is this? _Sir William._ [_Fiercely._] No, sir, this is my affair. [_Placing his candlestick on the table._] Stand aside! [_Raising his stick furiously._] Stand aside! [_Arthur moves to the right._] _Miss Gower._ [_Over the screen._] William---- _Sir William._ Hey? _Miss Gower._ Your ankles--- _Sir William._ [_Adjusting his dressing-gown._] I beg your pardon. [_To Arthur._] Yes, I can answer your question. [_Painting his stick, first at Rose, then at the group._] Some friends of that young woman's connected with--the playhouse, have favored us with a visit, for the purpose of ascertaining how she is--getting on. [_Touching Gadd's pipe, which is lying at his feet, with the end of his stick._] A filthy tobacco-pipe. To whom does it belong? whose is it? [_Rose picks it up and passes it to Gadd, bravely._] _Rose._ It belongs to one of my friends. _Sir William._ [_Taking Gadd's empty wine-glass and holding it to his nose._] Phu, yes! In brief, a drunken debauch. [_To the group._] So ye see, gentlemen--[_to Avonia_] and you, madam; [_to Arthur_] and you, sir; you see, all of ye, [_sinking into a chair, and coughing from exhaustion_] exactly how Miss Trelawny is getting on. _Miss Gower._ [_Over the screen._] William---- _Sir William._ What is it? _Miss Gower._ Your ankles--- _Sir William._ [_Leaping to his feet, in a frenzy._] Bah! _Miss Gower._ Oh, they seem so out of place! _Sir William._ [_Flourishing his stick--to the group down L. _] Begone! a set of garish, dissolute gypsies! begone! [_Gadd, Avonia, Colpoys, and Wrench gather, the men hastily putting on their coats, etc._] _Avonia._ Where's my umbrella? _Gadd._ A hand with my coat here! _Colpoys._ 'Pon my soul! London artists----! _Avonia._ We don't want to remain where we're not heartily welcome, I can assure everybody. _Sir William._ Open windows! let in the air! _Avonia._ [_To Rose, who is standing above the wreck of the card-table._] Good-bye, my dear---- _Rose._ No, no, 'Vonia. Oh, don't leave me behind you! _Arthur._ Rose. _Rose._ Oh, I'm very sorry, Arthur. [_To Sir William._] Indeed, I am very sorry, Sir William. But you are right--gypsies--gypsies! [_To Arthur._] Yes, Arthur, if you were a gypsy, as I am, as these friends o' mine are, we might be happy together. But I've seen enough of your life, my dear boy, to know that I'm no wife for you. I should only be wretched, and would make you wretched; and the end, when it arrived, as it very soon would, would be much as it is to-night-! _Arthur._ [_Distractedly._] You'll let me see you, talk to you, to-morrow, Rose? _Rose._ No, never! _Sir William._ [_Sharply._] You mean that? _Rose._ [_Facing him._] Oh, don't be afraid. I give you my word. _Sir William._ [_Gripping her hand._] Thank ye. Thank ye. _Tom._ [_Quietly to Arthur._] Mr. Gower, come and see me to morrow----- [_He moves away to the door._] _Rose._ [_Turning to Avonia, Gadd, and Colpoys._] I'm ready---- _Miss Gower._ [_Coming from behind the screen to the back of the couch._] Not to-night, child! not to-night! where will you go? _Avonia._ [_Holding Rose._] To her old quarters in Brydon Crescent. Send her things after her, if you please. _Miss Gower._ And then----? _Rose._ Then back to the "Wells" again, Miss Gower! back to the "Wells"----! END OF THE SECOND ACT. THE THIRD ACT. _The scene represents an apartment on the second floor of Mrs. Mossop's house. The room is of a humbler character than that shown in the first act; but, though shabby, it is neat. On the right is a door, outside which is supposed to be the landing. In the wall at the back is another door, presumably admitting to a further chamber. Down L. there is a fireplace, with a fire burning, and over the mantelpiece a mirror. In the left-hand corner of the room is a small bedstead with a tidily-made bed, which can be hidden by a pair of curtains of some common and faded material, hanging from a cord slung from wall to wall. At the foot of the bedstead stands a large theatrical dress-basket. On the wall, by the head of the bed, are some pegs upon which hang a skirt or two and other articles of attire. On the right, against the back wall, there is a chest of drawers, the top of which is used as a washstand. In front of this is a small screen, and close by there are some more pegs with things hanging upon them. On the right wall, above the sofa, is a hanging bookcase with a few books. A small circular table, with a somewhat shabby cover upon it, stands on the left. The walls are papered, the doors painted stone-color. An old felt carpet is on the floor. The light is that of morning. A fire is burning in the grate._ [_Mrs. Mossop, now dressed in a workaday gown, has just finished making the bed. There is a knock at the center door._] _Avonia._ [_From the adjoining room._] Rose! _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Giving a final touch to the quilt._] Eh? _Avonia._ Is Miss Trelawny in her room? _Mrs. Mossop._ No, Mrs. Gadd; she's at rehearsal. _Avonia._ Oh---- [_Mrs. Mossop draws the curtains, hiding the bed from view. Avonia enters by the door on the right in a morning wrapper which has seen its best days. She carries a pair of curling-tongs, and her hair is evidently in process of being dressed in ringlets._] _Avonia._ Of course she is; I forgot. There's a call for _The Peddler of Marseilles_. Thank Gawd, _I'm_ not in it. [_Singing._] "I'm a great guerrilla chief, I'm a robber and a thief, I can either kill a foe or prig a pocket-handkerchief----" _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Dusting the ornaments on the mantelpiece._] Bless your heart, you're very gay this morning! _Avonia._ It's the pantomime. I'm always stark mad as the pantomime approaches. I don't grudge letting the rest of the company have their fling at other times--but with the panto comes _my_ turn. [_Throwing herself full length upon the sofa gleefully._]Ha, ha, ha! the turn of Avonia Bunn! [__With a change of tone.__] I hope Miss Trelawny won't take a walk up to Highbury, or anywhere, after rehearsal. I want to borrow her gilt belt. My dress has arrived. _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Much interested._] No! has it? _Avonia._ Yes, Mrs. Burroughs is coming down from the theatre at twelve-thirty to see me in it. [_Singing. "Any kind of villainy cometh natural to me. So it endeth with a combat and a one, two, three----!"_] * _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Surveying the room._] Well, that's as cheerful as I can make things look, poor dear! * These snatches of song are from "The Miller and His Men," a burlesque mealy-drama, by Francis Talfourd and Henry J. Byron, produced at the Strand Theatre, April 9, 1860. _Avonia._ [_Taking a look round, seriously._] It's pretty bright--if it wasn't for the idea of Rose Trelawny having to economize! _Mrs. Mossop._ Ah--h I _Avonia._ [_Rising._] That's what I can't swallow. [_Sticking her irons in the fire angrily._] One room! and on the second floor! [_Turning to Mrs. Mossop._] Of course, Gadd and me are one-room people too--and on the same floor; but then Gadd is so popular _out_ of the theatre, Mrs. Mossop--he's obliged to spend such a load of money at the "Clown"---- _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Who has been dusting the bookcase, coming to the table._] Mrs. Gadd, dearie, I'm sure I'm not in the least inquisitive; no one could accuse me of it--but I should like to know just one thing. _Avonia._ [_Testing her irons upon a sheet of paper which she takes from the table._] What's that? _Mrs. Mossop._ Why _have_ they been and cut down Miss Trelawny's salary at the "Wells"? _Avonia._ [_Hesitatingly._] H'm, everybody's chattering about it; you could get to hear easily enough---- _Mrs. Mossop._ Oh, I dare say. _Avonia._ So I don't mind--poor Rose! they tell her she can't act now, Mrs. Mossop. _Mrs. Mossop._ Can't act! _Avonia._ No, dear old girl, she's lost it; it's gone from her--the trick of it---- [_Tom enters by the door on the right, carrying a table-cover of a bright pattern._] _Tom._ [_Coming upon Mrs. Mossop, disconcerted._] Oh----! _Mrs. Mossop._ My first-floor table-cover! _Tom._ Y--y--yes. [_Exchanging the table-covers._] I thought, as the Telfers have departed, and as their late sitting room is at present vacant, that Miss Trelawny might enjoy the benefit--hey? _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Snatching up the old table-cover._] Well, I never---! [_She goes out._] _Avonia._ [_Curling her hair, at the mirror over the mantelpiece._] I say, Tom, I wonder if I've done wrong---- _Tom._ It all depends upon whether you've had the chance. _Avonia._ I've told Mrs. Mossop the reason they've reduced Rose's salary. _Tom._ You needn't. _Avonia._ She had only to ask any other member of the company----- _Tom._ To have found one who could have kept silent! _Avonia._ [_Remorsefully._] Oh, I could burn myself! _Tom._ Besides, it isn't true. _Avonia._ What? _Tom._ That Rose Trelawny is no longer up to her work. _Avonia._ [_Sadly._] Oh, Tom! _Tom._ It isn't the fact, I say! _Avonia._ Isn't it the fact that ever since Rose returned from Cavendish Square----? _Tom._ She has been reserved, subdued, ladylike---- _Avonia._ [_Shrilly._]She was always ladylike! _Tom._ I'm aware of that! _Avonia._ Well, then, what do you mean by--? _Tom._ [_In a rage, turning away._] Oh----! _Avonia._ [_Heating her irons again._] The idea! _Tom._ [_Cooling down._] She was always a ladylike actress, on the stage and off it, but now she has developed into a--[_at a loss_] into a---- _Avonia._ [_Scornfully._] Ha! _Tom._ Into a ladylike human being. These fools at the "Wells"! Can't act, can't she! No, she can no longer _spout_, she can no longer _ladle_, the vapid trash, the--the--the turgid rodomontade---- _Avonia._ [_Doubtfully._] You'd better be careful of your language, Wrench. _Tom._ [_With a twinkle in his eye--mopping his brow._] You're a married woman, 'Vonia---- _Avonia._ [_Holding her irons to her cheek, modestly._] I know, but still---- _Tom._ Yes, deep down in the well of that girl's nature there has been lying a little, bright, clear pool of genuine refinement, girlish simplicity. And now the bucket has been lowered by love; experience has turned the handle; and up comes the crystal to the top, pure and sparkling. Why, her broken engagement to poor young Gower has really been the making of her! It has transformed her! Can't act, can't she! [__Drawing a long breath.__] How she would play Dora in my comedy! _Avonia._ Ho, that comedy! _Tom._ How she would murmur those love-scenes! _Avonia._ Murder----! _Tom._ [_Testily._] Murmur. [_Partly to himself._] Do you know, 'Vonia, I had Rose in my mind when I imagined Dora----? _Avonia._ Ha, ha! you astonish me. _Tom._ [_Sitting._] And Arthur Gower when I wrote the character of Gerald, Dora's lover. [_In a low voice._] Gerald and Dora--Rose and Arthur--Gerald and Dora. [_Suddenly._] 'Vonia----! _Avonia._ [_Singeing her hair._] Ah--! oh, lor'! what now? _Tom._ I wish you could keep a secret. _Avonia._ Why, can't I?---- _Tom._ Haven't you just been gossiping with Mother Mossop? _Avonia._ [_Behind his chair, breathlessly, her eyes bolting._] A secret, Tom? _Tom._ [_Nodding._] I should like to share it with you, because--you are fond of her too---- _Avonia._ Ah----! _Tom._ And because the possession of it is worrying me. But there, I can't trust you. _Avonia._ Mr. Wrench! _Tom._ No, you're a warm-hearted woman, 'Vonia, but you're a sieve. _Avonia._ [_Going down upon her knees beside him._] I swear! By all my hopes, Tom Wrench, of hitting 'em as Prince Charming in the coming pantomime, I swear I will not divulge, leave alone tell a living soul, any secret you may intrust to me, or let me know of, concerning Rose Trelawny of the "Wells." Amen! _Tom._ [_In her ear._] 'Vonia, I know where Arthur Gower is. _Avonia._ Is! isn't he still in London? _Tom._ [_Producing a letter mysteriously._] No. When Rose stuck to her refusal to see him--listen--mind, not a word----! _Avonia._ By all my hopes-----! _Tom._ [_Checking her_]. All right, all right! [_Reading._] "Theatre Royal, Bristol. Friday---------" _Avonia._ Theatre Royal, Br----! _Tom._ Be quiet! [_Reading._] "My dear Mr. Wrench. A whole week, and not a line from you to tell me how Miss Trelawny is. When you are silent I am sleepless at night and a haggard wretch during the day. Young Mr. Kirby, our Walking Gentleman, has been unwell, and the management has given me temporarily some of his business to play------" _Avonia._ _Arthur._Gower------! _Tom._ Will you? [_Reading._] "Last night I was allowed to appear as Careless in _The School for Scandal_. Miss Mason, the Lady Teazle, complimented me, but the men said I lacked vigor,"--the old cry!--"and so this morning I am greatly depressed. But I will still persevere, as long as you can assure me that no presuming fellow is paying attention to Miss Trelawny. Oh, how badly she treated me----!" _Avonia._ [_Following the reading of the letter._] "How badly she treated me----!" _Tom._ "I will never forgive her--only love her----" _Avonia._ "Only love her----" _Tom._ "Only love her, and hope I may some day become a great actor, and, like herself, a gypsy. Yours very gratefully, Arthur Gordon." _Avonia._ In the Profession! _Tom._ Bolted from Cavendish Square--went down to Bristol---- _Avonia._ How did he manage it all? [_Tom taps his breast proudly._] But isn't Rose to be told? why shouldn't she be told? _Tom._ She has hurt the boy, stung him to the quick, and he's proud. _Avonia._ But she loves him now that she believes he has forgotten her. She only half loved him before. She loves him! _Tom._ Serve her right. _Avonia._ Oh, Tom, is she never to know? _Tom._ [_Folding the letter carefully._] Some day, when he begins to make strides. _Avonia._ Strides! he's nothing but General Utility at present? _Tom._ [_Putting the letter in his pocket._] No. _Avonia._ And how long have you been that? _Tom._ Ten years. _Avonia._ [_With a little screech._] Ah--h--h! she ought to be told! _Tom._ [_Seizing her wrist._] Woman, you won't----! _Avonia._ [_Raising her disengaged hand._] By all my hopes of hitting 'em----! _Tom._ All right, I believe you. [_Listening._] Sssh! [_They rise and separate, he moving to the fire, she to the right, as Rose enters. Rose is now a grave, dignified, somewhat dreamy young woman._] _Rose._ [_Looking from Tom to Avonia._] Ah----? _Tom. and Avonia._ Good-morning. _Rose._ [_Kissing Avonia._] Visitors! _Avonia._. My fire's so black [_showing her irons_]; I thought you wouldn't mind---- _Rose._ [_Removing her gloves._] Of course not. [_Seeing the table-cover._] Oh----! _Tom._ Mrs. Mossop. asked me to bring that upstairs. It was in the Telfers' room, you know, and she fancied----- _Rose._ How good of her! thanks, Tom. [_Taking off her hat and mantle._] Poor Mr. and Mrs. Telfer! they still wander mournfully about the "Wells"; they can get nothing to do. [_Carrying her hat and umbrella, she disappears through the curtains._] _Tom._ [_To Avonia, in a whisper, across the room._] The Telfers----! _Avonia._ Eh? _Tom._ She's been giving 'em money. _Avonia._ Yes. _Tom._ Damn! _Rose._ [_Reappearing._] What are yous saying about me. _Avonia._ I was wondering whether you'd lend me that belt you bought for Ophelia; to wear during the first two or three weeks of the pantomime--- _Rose._ Certainly, 'Vonia, to wear throughout---- _Avonia._ [_Embracing her._] No, it's too good; I'd rather fake one for the rest of the time. [_Looking into her face._] What's the matter? _Rose._ I will make you a present of the belt, 'Vonia, if you will accept it. I bought it when I came back to the "Wells," thinking everything would go on as before. But--it's of no use; they tell me I cannot act effectively any longer---- _Tom._ [_Indignantly. _] Effectively----! _Rose._ First, as you know, they reduce my salary----- _Tom. and Avonia._ [_With clenched hands._] Yes! _Rose._ And now, this morning--[_sitting_] you can guess---- _Avonia._ [_Hoarsely._] Got your notice? _Rose._ Yes. _Tom. and Avonia._ Oh--h--h! _Rose._ [_After a litle pause._] Poor mother! I hope she doesn't see. [_Overwhelmed, Avonia and Tom sit._] I was running through Blanche, my old part in _The Peddler of Marseilles_, when Mr. Burroughs spoke to me. It is true I was doing it tamely, but--it is such nonsense. _Tom._ Hear, hear! _Rose._ And then, that poor little song I used to sing on the bridge--- _Avonia._ [_Singing softly._] "Ever of thee I'm fondly-dreaming-----" _Tom. and Avonia._ [_Singing._] "Thy gentle voice my spirit can cheer." _Rose._ I told Mr. Burroughs I should cut it out. So ridiculously inappropriate! _Tom._ And that--did it? _Rose._ [_Smiling at him._] That did it. _Avonia._ [_Kneeling beside her, and embracing her tearfully._] My ducky! oh, but there are other theatres besides the "Wells"----- _Rose._ For me? only where the same trash is acted. _Avonia._ [_With a sob._] But a few months ago you l--l--liked your work. _Rose._ Yes [_dreamily_], and then I went to Cavendish Square, engaged to Arthur----[_Tom rises and leans upon the mantelpiece, looking into the fire._] How badly I behaved in Cavendish Square! how unlike a young lady! What if the old folks were overbearing and tyrannical, Arthur could be gentle with them. "They have not many more years in this world," he said--dear boy!--"and anything we can do to make them happy----" And what _did_ I do? _There_ was a chance for me--to be patient, and womanly; and I proved to them that I was nothing but--an actress. _Avonia._ [_Rising, hurt but still tearful._] It doesn't follow, because one is a--- _Rose._ [_Rising._] Yes, 'Vonia, it does! We are only dolls, partly human, with mechanical limbs that _will_ fall into stagey postures, and heads stuffed with sayings out of rubbishy plays. It isn't the world we live in, merely _a_ world--such a queer little one! I was less than a month in Cavendish Square, and very few people came there; but they were _real_ people--_real!_ For a month I lost the smell of gas and oranges, and the hurry and noise, and the dirt and the slang, and the clownish joking, at the "Wells." I didn't realize at the time the change that was going on in me; I didn't realize it till I came back. And then, by degrees, I discovered what had happened---- [_Tom is now near her. She takes his hand and drops her head upon Avonia's shoulder. Wearily._] Oh, Tom! oh, 'Vonia------[_From the next room comes the sound of the throwing about of heavy objects, and of Gadd's voice uttering loud imprecations. Alarmed._] Oh----! _Avonia._ [_Listening attentively._] Sounds like Ferdy. [_She goes to the center door. At the keyhole._] Ferdy! aint you well, darling? _Gadd._ [_On the other side of the door._]Avonia! _Avonia._ I'm in Miss Trelawny's room. _Gadd._ Ah! _Avonia._ [_To Rose and Tom._] Now, what's put Ferdy out? [_Gadd enters with a wild look._] Ferdinand! _Tom._ Anything wrong, Gadd? _Gadd._ Wrong! wrong! [_Sitting._] What d'ye think? _Avonia._ Tell us! _Gadd._ I have been asked to appear in the pantomime. _Avonia._ [_Shocked._] Oh, Ferdy! you! _Gadd._ I, a serious actor, if ever there was one; a poetic actor----! _Avonia._ What part, Ferdy? _Gadd._ The insult, the bitter insult! the gross indignity! _Avonia._ What part, Ferdy? _Gadd._ I have not been seen in pantomime for years, not since I shook the dust of the T. R. Stockton from my feet. _Avonia._ Ferdy, what part? _Gadd._ I simply looked at Burroughs, when he preferred his request, and swept from the theatre. _Avonia._ What part, Ferdy? _Gadd._ A part, too, which is seen for a moment at the opening of the pantomime, and not again till its close. _Avonia._ Ferdy. _Gadd._ Eh? _Avonia._. What part? _Gadd._ A character called the Demon of Discontent. [_Rose turns away to the fireplace; Tom curls himself up on the sofa and is seen to shake with laughter._] _Avonia._. [_Walking about indignantly._]Oh! [_Returning to Gadd._] Oh, it's a rotten part! Rose, dear, I assure you, as artist to artist, that part is absolutely rotten. [_To Gadd._] You won't play it, darling? _Gadd._ [_Rising._] Play it! I would see the "Wells" in ashes first. _Avonia._. We shall lose our engagements, Ferdy. I know Burroughs; we shall be out, both of us. _Gadd._ Of course we shall. D'ye think I have not counted the cost? _Avonia._ [_Putting her hand in his._] I don't mind, dear--for the sake of your position--[_struck by a sudden thought_] oh! _Gadd._ What-----? _Avonia._ There now--we haven't put by! [_There is a knock at the door._] _Rose._ Who is that? _Colpoys._ [_Outside the door._] Is Gadd here, Miss Trelawny? _Rose._ Yes. _Colpoys._ I want to see him. _Gadd._ Wrench, I'll trouble you. Ask Mr. Colpoys whether he approaches me as a friend, an acquaintance, or in his capacity of stage manager at the "Wells"--the tool of Burroughs. [_Tom opens the door slightly. Gadd and Avonia join Bose at the fireplace._] _Tom._ [_At the door, solemnly._]Colpoys, are you here as Gadd's bosom friend, or as a mere tool of Burroughs? [_An inaudible colloquy follows between Tom and Colpoys. Tom's head is outside the door; his legs are seen to move convulsively, and the sound of suppressed laughter is heard._] _Gadd._ [_Turning._] Well, well? _Tom._ [_Closing the door sharply, and facing Gadd with great seriousness._] He is here as the tool of Burroughs. _Gadd._ I will receive him. [_Tom admits Colpoys, who carries a mean-looking "part," and a letter._] [_After formally bowing to the ladies._] Oh, Gadd, Mr. Burroughs instructs me to offer you this part in the pantomime. [_Handing the part to Gadd._] Demon of Discontent. [_Gadd takes the part and flings it to the ground; Avonia picks it up and reads it._] _Colpoys._ You refuse it? _Gadd._ I do. [_With dignity._] Acquaint Mr. Burroughs with my decision, and add that I hope his pantomime will prove an utterly mirthless one. May Boxing-night, to those unfortunate enough to find themselves in the theatre, long remain a dismal memory; and may succeeding audiences, scanty and dissatisfied----! [_Colpoys presents Gadd with the letter. Gadd opens it and reads._] I leave. [_Sitting._] The Romeo, the Orlando, the Clifford--leaves! _Avonia._ [_Coming to Gadd, indicating some lines in the part._] Ferdy, this aint so bad. [_Reading._]= ```"I'm Discontent! from Orkney's isle to Dover ```To make men's bile bile-over I endover-"= _Gadd._ 'Vonia! [_Taking the part from Avonia, with mingled surprise and pleasure._] Ho, ho! no, that's not bad. [_Reading._]= ```Tempers, though sweet, I whip up to a lather, ```Make wives hate husbands, sons wish fathers farther."= 'Vonia, there's is something to lay hold of here! I'll think this over. [_Rising, addressing Colpoys._] Gus, I have thought this over. I play it. [_They all gather round him, and congratulate him. Avonia embraces and kisses him._] _Tom. and Colpoys._ That's right! _Rose._ I'm very pleased, Ferdinand. _Avonia._ [_Tearfully._] Oh, Ferdy! _Gadd._ [_In high spirits._] Egad, I play it! Gus, I'll stroll back with you to the "Wells." [_Shaking hands with Rose._] Miss Trelawny-------! [_Avonia accompanies Colpoys and Gadd to the door, clinging to Gadd, who is flourishing the part._] 'Vonia, I see myself in this! [_Kissing her._] Steak for dinner! [_Gadd and Colpoys go out. Tom shrieks with laughter._] _Avonia._ [_Turning upon him, angrily and volubly._]Yes, I heard you with Colpoys outside that door, if Gadd didn't. It's a pity, Mr. Wrench, you can't find something better to do----! _Rose._ [_Pacifically._] Hush, hush, 'Vonia! Tom, assist me with my basket; I'll give 'Vonia her belt---- [_Tom and Rose go behind the curtains and presently emerge, carrying the dress-basket, which they deposit._] _Avonia._ [_Flouncing across the room._] Making fun of Gadd! an artist to the roots of his hair! There's more talent in Gadd's little finger----! _Rose._ [_Rummaging among the contents of the basket_] 'Vonia, 'Vonia! _Avonia._ And if Gadd is to play a demon in the pantomime, what do _you_ figure as, Tom Wrench, among the half a dozen other things? Why, as part of a dragon! Yes, and _which end_---? _Rose._ [_Quietly to Tom._] Apologize to 'Vonia at once, Tom. _Tom._ [_Meekly._] Mrs. Gadd, I beg your pardon. _Avonia._ [_Coming to him and kissing him._] Granted, Tom; but you should be a little more considerate---- _Rose._ [_Holding up the belt._] Here----! _Avonia._ [_Taking the belt, ecstatically._] Oh, isn't it lovely! Rose, you dear! you sweet thing! [_Singing a few bars of the Jewel song from Faust, then rushing at Rose and embracing her._] I'm going to try my dress on, to show Mrs. Burroughs. Come and help me into it. I'll unlock my door on my side---- [_Tom politely opens the door for her to pass out._] Thank you, Tom--[_kissing him again_] only you should be more considerate toward Gadd---- [_She disappears._] _Tom._ [_Calling after her._] I will be; I will--[_Shutting the door._] Ha, ha, ha! _Rose._ [_Smiling._] Hush! poor 'Vonia! [_Mending the fire._] Excuse me, Tom--have you a fire upstairs, in your room, to-day? _Tom._ Er--n--not to-day--it's Saturday. I never have a fire on a Saturday. _Rose._ [_Coming to him._] Why not? _Tom._ [_Looking away from her._] Don't know--creatures of habit--- _Rose._ [_Gently touching his coat-sleeve._] Because if you would like to smoke your pipe by my fire while I'm with 'Vonia---- [_The key is heard to turn in the lock of the center door._] _Avonia._ [_From the next room._] It's unlocked. _Rose._ I'm coming. [_She unbolts the door on her side, and goes into Avonia's room, shutting the door behind her. The lid of the dress-basket is open, showing the contents; a pair of little satin shoes lie at the top. Tom takes up one of the shoes and presses it to his lips. There is a knock at the door. He returns the shoe to the basket, closes the lid, and walks away._] _Tom._ Yes? [_The door opens slightly and Imogen is heard._] _Imogen._ [_Outside._] Is that you, Wrench? _Tom._ Hullo! [_Imogen, in out-of-door costume, enters breathlessly._] _Imogen._ [_Closing the door--speaking rapidly and excitedly._] Mossop said you were in Rose's room---- _Tom._ [_Shaking hands with her._] She'll be here in a few minutes. _Imogen._ It's you I want. Let me sit down. _Tom._ [_Going to the armchair._] Here---- _Imogen._ [_Sitting on the right of the table, panting._] Not near the fire---- _Tom._ What's up? _Imogen._ Oh, Wrench! p'r'aps my fortune's made! _Tom._ [_Quite calmly._] Congratulate you, Jenny. _Imogen._ Do be quiet; don't make such a racket. You see, things haven't been going at all satisfactorily at the Olympic lately. There's Miss Puddifant---- _Tom._ I know--no lady. _Imogen._ _How_ do you know? _Tom._ Guessed. _Imogen._ Quite right; and a thousand other annoyances. And at last I took it into my head to consult Mr. Clandon, who married an aunt of mine and lives at Streatham, and he'll lend me five hundred pounds. _Tom._ What for? _Imogen._ Towards taking a theatre. _Tom._ [_Dubiously._] Five hundred---- _Imogen._ It's all he's good for, and he won't advance that unless I can get a further five, or eight, hundred from some other quarter. _Tom._ What theatre! _Imogen._ The Pantheon happens to be empty. _Tom._ Yes; it's been that for the last twenty years. _Imogen._ Don't throw wet blankets--I mean--[_referring to her tablets, which she carries in her muff_] I've got it all worked out in black and white. There's a deposit required on account of rent--two hundred pounds. Cleaning the theatre--[_looking at Tom_] what do you say? _Tom._ Cleaning that theatre? _Imogen._ I say, another two hundred. _Tom._ That would remove the top-layer----- _Imogen._ Cost of producing the opening play, five hundred pounds. Balance for emergencies, three hundred. You generally have a balance for emergencies. _Tom._ You generally have the emergencies, if not the balance? _Imogen._ Now, the question is, will five hundred produce the play? _Tom._ What play? _Imogen._ Your play. _Tom._ [_Quietly._] My----. _Imogen._ Your comedy. _Tom._ [_Turning to the fire--in a low voice._] Rubbish! _Imogen._ Well, Mr. Clandon thinks it _isn't._ [_He faces her sharply._] I gave it to him to read, and he--well, he's quite taken with it. _Tom._ [_Walking about, his hands in his pockets, his head down, agitatedly._]Clandon--Landon--what's his name-----? _Imogen._ Tony Clandon--Anthony Clandon---- _Tom._ [_Choking._] He's a--he's a--- _Imogen._ He's a hop-merchant. _Tom._ No, he's not--[_sitting on the sofa, leaning his head on his hands_] he's a stunner. _Imogen._ [_Rising_] So you grasp the position. Theatre--manageress--author--play, found; and eight hundred pounds _wanted!_ _Tom._ [_Rising._] Oh Lord! _Imogen._ Who's got it? _Tom._ [_Wildly._] The Queen's got it! Miss Burdett-Coutts has got it! _Imogen._ Don't be a fool, Wrench. Do you remember old Mr. Morfew, of Duncan Terrace? He used to take great interest in us all at the "Wells." He has money. _Tom._ He has gout; we don't see him now. _Imogen._ Gout! How lucky! That means he's at home. Will you run round to Duncan Terrace----? _Tom._ [_Looking down at his clothes._] I! _Imogen._ Nonsense, Wrench; we're not asking him to advance money on your clothes. _Tom._ The clothes are the man, Jenny. _Imogen._ And the woman------? _Tom._ The face is the woman; there's the real inequality of the sexes. _Imogen._ I'll go! Is my face good enough? _Tom._ [_Enthusiastically._] I should say so! _Imogen._ [_Taking his hands._] Ha, ha! It has been in my possession longer than you have had your oldest coat, Tom! _Tom._ Make haste, Jenny! _Imogen._ [_Running up to the door._] Oh, it will last till I get to Duncan Terrace. [_Turning._] Tom, you may have to read your play to Mr. Morfew. Have you another copy? Uncle Clandon has mine. _Tom._ [_Holding his head._] I think I have---I don't know----- _Imogen._ Look for it! Find it! If Morfew wants to hear it, we must strike while the iron's hot. _Tom._ While the gold's hot! _Imogen. and Tom._ Ha, ha, ha! [_Mrs. Mossop enters, showing some signs of excitement._] _Imogen._ [_Pushing her aside._] Oh, get out of the way, Mrs. Mossop--- [_Imogen departs._] _Mrs. Mossop._ Upon my----! [_To Tom._] A visitor for Miss Trelawny! Where's Miss Trelawny? _Tom._ With Mrs. Gadd. Mossop! _Mrs. Mossop._ Don't bother me now----- _Tom._ Mossop! The apartments vacated by the Tefferl's. Dare to let 'em without giving me the preference. _Mrs. Mossop._ You! _Tom._ [_Seizing her hands and swinging her round._] I may be wealthy, sweet Rebecca![_Embracing her._] I may be rich and honored! _Mrs. Mossop._ Oh, have done! [_Releasing herself._] My lodgers do take such liberties---- _Tom._ [_At the door, grandly._] Beccy, half a scuttle of coal, to start with. [_He goes out, leaving the door slightly open._] _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Knocking at the center door._] Miss Trelawny, my dear! Miss Trelawny! [_The door opens, a few inches._] _Rose._ [_Looking out._] Why, what a clatter you and Mr. Wrench have been making-------! _Mrs. Mossop._ [_Beckoning her mysteriously._] Come here, dear. _Rose._ [_Closing the center door, and entering the room wonderingly._] Eh? _Mrs. Mossop._ [_In awe._] Sir William Gower! _Rose._ Sir William. _Mrs. Mossop._ Don't be vexed with me. "I'll see if she's at home," I said. "Oh, yes, woman, Miss Trelawny's at home," said he, and hobbled straight in. I've shut him in the Telfers' room---- [_There are three distinct raps, with a stick, at the right-hand door._] _Rose. and Mrs. Mossop._ Oh-h! _Rose._ [_Faintly._] Open it. [_Mrs. Mossop opens the door, and Sir William enters. He is feebler, more decrepit, than when last seen. He wears a plaid about his shoulders and walks with the aid of a stick._] _Mrs. Mossop._ [_At the door._] Ah, and a sweet thing Miss Trelawny is----! _Sir William._ [_Turning to her._] Are you a relative? _Mrs. Mossop._ No, I am _not_ a relative----! _Sir William._ Go. [_She departs; he closes the door with the end of his stick. Facing Rose._] My mind is not commonly a wavering one, Miss Trelawny, but it has taken me some time--months--to decide upon calling on ye. _Rose._ Won't you sit down? _Sir William._ [_After a pause of hesitation, sitting upon the dress-basket._] Ugh! _Rose._ [_With quiet dignity._] Have we no chairs? Do we lack chairs here, Sir William? [_He gives her a quick, keen look, then rises and walks to the fire._] _Sir William._ [_Suddenly, bringing his stick down upon the table with violence._] My grandson! my grandson! where is he? _Rose._ Arthur! _Sir William._ I had but one. _Rose._ Isn't he--in Cavendish Square--? _Sir William._ Isn't he in Cavendish Square! no, he is not in Cavendish Square, as you know well. _Rose._ Oh, I don't know---- _Sir William._ Tsch! _Rose._ When did he leave you? _Sir William._ Tsch! _Rose._ When? _Sir William._ He made his escape during the night, 22d of August last--[_pointing his finger at her_] as you know well. _Rose._ Sir William. I assure you--- _Sir William._ Tsch! [_Talcing off his gloves._] How often does he write to ye? _Rose._ He does not write to me. He did write day after day, two or three times a day, for about a week. That was in June, when I came back here. [_With drooping head._] He never writes now. _Sir William._ Visits ye----? _Rose._ No. _Sir William._ Comes troubadouring-----? _Rose._ No, no, no. I have not seen him since that night. I refused to see him------[_With a catch in her breath._] Why, he may be----! _Sir William._ [_Fumbling in his pocket._] Ah, but he's not. He's alive [_producing a small packet of letters_]. Arthur's alive, [_advancing to her_] and full of his tricks still. His great-aunt Trafalgar receives a letter from him once a fortnight, posted in London---- _Rose._ [_Holding out her hand for the letters._] Oh! _Sir William._ [_Putting them behind his back._] Hey! _Rose._ [_Faintly._] I thought you wished me to read them. [_He yields them to her grudgingly, she taking his hand and bending over it._] Ah, thank you. _Sir William._ [_Withdrawing his hand with a look of disrelish._] What are ye doing, madam? what are ye doing? [_He sits, producing his snuff-box; she sits, upon the basket, facing him, and opens the packet of letters._] _Rose._ [_Reading a letter._] "To reassure you as to my well-being, I cause this to be posted in London by a friend----" _Sir William._ [_Pointing a finger at her again, accusingly._] A friend! _Rose._ [_Looking up, with simple pride._] He would never call me that. [_Reading._] "I am in good bodily health, and as contented as a man can be who has lost the woman he loves, and will love till his dying day--" Ah----! _Sir William._ Read no more! Return them to me! give them to me, ma'am! [_Rising, she restores the letters, meekly. He peers up into her face._] What's come to ye? You are not so much of a vixen as you were. _Rose._ [_Shaking her head._] No. _Sir William._ [_Suspiciously. _] Less of the devil--? _Rose._ _Sir William._ I am sorry for having been a vixen, and for all my unruly conduct, in Cavendish Square. I humbly beg your, and Miss Gower's, forgiveness. _Sir William._ [_Taking snuff, uncomfortably._]Pi--i--i--sh! extraordinary change. _Rose._ Aren't you changed, Sir William, now that you have lost him? _Sir William._ I! _Rose._ Don't you love him now, the more? [_His head droops a little, and his hands wander to the brooch which secures his plaid._] Let me take your shawl from you. You would catch cold when you go out---- [_He allows her to remove the plaid, protesting during the process._] _Sir William._ I'll not trouble ye, ma'am. Much obleeged to ye, but I'll not trouble ye. [_Rising._] I'll not trouble ye--- [_He walks away to the fireplace, and up the room. She folds the plaid and lays it upon the sofa. He looks round--speaking in an altered tone._] My dear, gypsying doesn't seem to be such a good trade with ye, as it used to be by all accounts---- [_The center door opens and Avonia enters boldly, in the dress of a burlesque prince--cotton-velvet shirt, edged with bullion trimming, a cap, white tights, ankle boots, etc._] _Avonia._ [_Unconsciously._] How's this, Rose------? [Illustration: 0183] _Sir William._ Ah--h-h--h! _Rose._ Oh, go away, 'Vonia! _Avonia._ Sir Gower! [_To Sir William._] Good-morning. [_She withdraws._] _Sir William._ [_Pacing the room--again very violent._] Yes! and these are the associates you would have tempted my boy--my grandson--to herd with! [_Flourishing his stick._] Ah--h--h--h! _Rose._ [_Sitting upon the basket--weakly._] That young lady doesn't live in that attire. She is preparing for the pantomime------ _Sir William._ [_Standing over her._] And now he's gone; lured away, I suspect, by one of ye--[_pointing to the center door_] by one of these harridans!---- [_Avonia reappears defiantly._] _Avonia._ Look here, Sir Gower------ _Rose._ [_Rising._] Go, 'Vonia! _Avonia._. [_To Sir William._] We've met before, if you remember, in Cavendish Square---- _Rose._ [_Sitting again, helplessly._] Oh, Mrs. Gadd----! _Sir William._ Mistress! a married lady! _Avonia._ Yes, I spent some of my honeymoon at your house---- _Sir William._ What! _Avonia._ Excuse my dress; it's all in the way of my business. Just one word about Rose. _Rose._ Please, 'Vonia----! _Avonia._ [_To Sir William, who is glaring at her in horror._] Now, there's nothing to stare at, Sir Gower. If you must look anywhere in particular, look at that poor thing. A nice predicament you've brought her to! _Sir William._ Sir----! [_Correcting himself._]. Madam! _Avonia._. You've brought her to beggary, amongst you. You've broken her heart; and, what's worse, you've made her genteel. She can't act, since she left your mansion; she can only mope about the stage with her eyes fixed like a person in a dream--dreaming of him, I suppose, and of what it is to be a lady. And first she's put upon half-salary; and then, to-day, she gets the sack--the entire sack, Sir Gower! So there's nothing left for her but to starve, or to make artificial flowers. Miss Trelawny I'm speaking of! [_Going to Rose, and embracing her._] Our Rose! our Trelawny! [_To Rose, breaking down._] Excuse me for interfering, ducky. [_Retiring, in tears._] Good-day, Sir Gower. [_She goes out._] _Sir William._ [_After a pause, to Rose._] Is this--the case? _Rose._ [_Standing, and speaking in a low voice._] Yes. As you have noticed, fortune has turned against me, rather. _Sir William._. [_Penitently._] I--I'm sorry, ma'am. I--I believe ye've kept your word to us concerning Arthur. I-I---- _Rose._ [_Not heeding him, looking before her, dreamily.'_] My mother knew how fickle fortune could be to us gypsies. One of the greatest actors that ever lived warned her of that--- _Sir William._ Miss Gower will also feel extremely--extremely---- _Rose._ Kean once warned mother of that. _Sir William._ [_In an altered tone._] Kean? which Kean? _Rose._ Edmund Kean. My mother acted with Edmund Kean when she was a girl. _Sir William._ [_Approaching her slowly, speaking in a queer voice._] With Kean? with Kean! _Rose._ Yes. _Sir William._ [_At her side, in a whisper._] My dear, I--I've seen Edmund Kean. _Rose._ Yes? _Sir William._ A young man then, I was; quite different, from the man I am now--impulsive, excitable. Kean! [_Drawing a deep breath._] Ah, he was a _splendid gypsy!_ _Rose._ [_Looking down at the dress-basket._] I've a little fillet in there that my mother wore as Cordelia to Kean's Lear---- _Sir William._ I may have seen your mother also. I was somewhat different in those days---- _Rose._ [_Kneeling at the basket and opening it._] And the Order and chain, and the sword, he wore in Richard. He gave them to my father; I've always prized them. [_She drags to the surface a chain with an Order attached to it, and a sword-belt and sword--all very theatrical and tawdry--and a little gold fillet. She hands him the chain._] That's the Order. _Sir William._ [_Handling it tenderly._] Kean! God bless me! _Rose._ [_Holding up the fillet._] My poor mother's fillet. _Sir William._ [_Looking at it_] I may have seen her. [_Thoughtfully._] I was a young man then. [_Looking at Rose steadily._]Put it on, my dear. [_She goes to the mirror and puts on the fillet._] _Sir William._ [_Examining the Order._] Lord bless us! how he stirred me! how he----! [_He puts the chain over his shoulders. Rose turns to him._] _Rose._ [_Advancing to him._] There! _Sir William._ [_Looking at her._] Cordelia! Cordelia--with Kean! _Rose._ [_Adjusting the chain upon him._] This should hang so. [_Returning to the basket and taking up the sword-belt and sword._] Look! _Sir William._ [_Handling them._] Kean! [_To her, in a whisper._] I'll tell ye! I'll tell ye! when I saw him as Richard--I was young and a fool--I'll tell ye--he almost fired me with an ambition to--to----[_Fumbling with the belt._] How did he carry this? _Rose._ [_Fastening the belt, with the sword, round him._] In this way-- _Sir William._ Ah! [_He paces the stage, growling and muttering, and walking with a limp and one shoulder hunched. She watches him, seriously._] Ah! he was a little man too! I remember him! as if it were last night! I remember----- [_Pausing and looking at her fixedly._] My dear, your prospects in life have been injured by your unhappy acquaintanceship with my grandson. _Rose._ [_Gazing into the fire._] Poor Arthur's prospects in life--what of them? _Sir William._ [_Testily._] Tsch, tsch, tsch! _Rose._ If I knew where he is----! _Sir William._ Miss Trelawny, if you cannot act, you cannot earn your living. _Rose._ How is he earning _his_ living? _Sir William._ And if you cannot earn your living, you must be provided for. _Rose._ [_Turning to him._] Provided for? _Sir William._ Miss Gower was kind enough to bring me here in a cab. She and I will discuss plans for making provision for ye while driving home. _Rose._ [_Advancing to him._] Oh, I beg you will do no such thing, Sir William. _Sir William._ Hey! _Rose._ I could not accept any help from you or Miss Gower. _Sir William._ You must! you shall! _Rose._ I will not. _Sir William._ [_Touching the Order and the sword._] Ah!--yes, I--I'll buy these of ye, my dear---- _Rose._ Oh, no, no! not for hundreds of pounds! please take them off! [_There is a hurried knocking at the door._] _Sir William._ [_Startled._] Who's that? [_Struggling with the chain and belt._] Remove these------! [_The handle is heard to rattle. Sir William disappears behind the curtains. Imogen opens the door and looks in._] _Imogen._ [_Seeing only Rose, and coming to her and embracing her._] Rose darling, where is Tom Wrench? _Rose._ He was here not long since---- _Imogen._ [_Going to the door and calling, desperately._] Tom! Tom Wrench! Mr. Wrench! _Rose._ Is anything amiss? _Imogen._ [_Shrilly._] Tom! _Rose._ Imogen! _Imogen._ [_Returning to Rose._] Oh, my dear, forgive my agitation---! [_Tom enters, buoyantly, flourishing the manuscript of his play._] _Tom._ I've found it! at the bottom of a box--"deeper than did ever plummet sound----"! [_To Imogen._] Eh? what's the matter? _Imogen._ Oh, Tom, old Mr. Morfew-----! _Tom._ [_Blankly._] Isn't he willing---? _Imogen._ [_With a gesture of despair._] I don't know. He's dead. _Tom._ No! _Imogen._ Three weeks ago. Oh, what a chance he has missed! [_Tom bangs his manuscript down upon the table savagely._] _Rose._ What is it, Tom? Imogen, what is it? _Imogen._ [_Pacing the room._] I can think of no one else---- _Tom._ Done again! _Imogen._ We shall lose it, of course-- _Rose._ Lose what? _Tom._ The opportunity--her opportunity, _my_ opportunity, _your_ opportunity, Rose. _Rose._ [_Coming to him._] _My_ opportunity, Tom? _Tom._ [_Pointing to the manuscript._] My play--my comedy--my youngest born! Jenny has a theatre--could have one--has five hundred towards it, put down by a man who believes in my comedy, God bless him!--the only fellow who has ever believed----? _Rose._ Oh, Tom! [_turning to Imogen_] oh, Imogen! _Imogen._ My dear, five hundred! we want another five, at least. _Rose._ Another five! _Imogen._ Or eight. _Tom._ And you are to play the part of Dora. Isn't she, Jenny--I mean, wasn't she? _Imogen._ Certainly. Just the sort of simple little Miss you _could_ play now, Rose. And we thought that old Mr. Morfew would help us in the speculation. Speculation! it's a dead certainty! _Tom._ _Dead_ certainty? poor Morfew! _Imogen._ And here we are, stuck fast----! _Tom._ [_Sitting upon the dress-basket dejectedly._] And they'll expect me to rehearse that dragon to-morrow with enthusiasm. _Rose._ [_Putting her arm around his shoulder._] Never mind, Tom. _Tom._ No, I won't----[_Taking her hand._] Oh, _Rose._ [_Looking up at her._]Oh, Dora----! [_Sir William, divested of his theatrical trappings, comes from behind the curtain._] _Imogen._ Oh! Tom. [_Rising._] Eh? _Rose._ [_Retreating_]. Sir William Gower, Tom---- _Sir William._ [_To Tom._] I had no wish to be disturbed, sir, and I withdrew [_bowing to Imogen_] when that lady entered the room. I have been a party, it appears, to a consultation upon a matter of business. [_To Tom._] Do I understand, sir, that you have been defeated in some project which would have served the interests of Miss Trelawny. _Tom._ Y--y--yes, sir. _Sir William._ Mr. Wicks _Tom._ Wrench---- _Sir William._ Tsch! Sir, it would give me pleasure--it would give my grandson, Mr. Arthur Gower, pleasure--to be able to aid Miss Trelawny at the present moment. _Tom._ S--s--sir William, w--w--would you like to hear my play----? _Sir William._ [_Sharply._] Hey! [_Looking round._] Ho, ho! _Tom._ My comedy? _Sir William._ [_Cunningly._] So ye think I might be induced to fill the office ye designed for the late Mr.-- Mr. -------- _Imogen._ Morfew. _Sir William._ Morfew, eh? _Tom._ N--n--no, sir. _Sir William._ No! no! _Imogen._ [_Shrilly._] Yes! _Sir William._ [_After a short pause, quietly._] Read your play, sir. [_Pointing to a chair at the table._] Sit down. [_To Rose and Imogen._] Sit down. [_Tom goes to the chair indicated. Miss Gower's voice is heard outside the door._] _Miss Gower._ [_Outside._] William! [_Rose opens the door; Miss Gower enters._] Oh, William, what has become of you? has anything dreadful happened? _Sir William._ Sit down, Trafalgar. This gentleman is about to read a comedy. A cheer! [_Testily._] Are there no cheers here! [_Rose brings a chair and places it for Miss Gower beside Sir William's chair._] Sit down. _Miss Gower._ [_Sitting, bewildered._] William, is all this--quite----? _Sir William._ [_Sitting._] Yes, Trafalgar, quite in place--quite in place---- [_Imogen sits. Rose pulls the dress-basket round, as Colpoys and Gadd swagger in at the door, Colpoys smoking a pipe, Gadd a large cigar._] _Sir William._ [_To Tom, referring to Gadd and Colpoys._] Friends of yours? _Tom._ Yes, Sir William. _Sir William._ [_To Gadd and Colpoys._] Sit down. [_Imperatively._] Sit down and be silent. [_Gadd and Colpoys seat themselves upon the sofa, like men in a dream. Rose sits on the dress-basket._] _Avonia._. [_Opening the center door slightly--in an anxious voice._] Rose----! _Sir William._ Come in, ma'am, come in! [_Avonia enters, coming to Rose. A cloak is now attached to the shoulders of Avonia's dress._] Sit down, ma'am, and be silent! [_Avonia sits beside Rose, next to Miss Gower._] _Miss Gower._ [_In horror._] Oh--h--h--h! _Sir William._ [_Restraining her._] Quite in place, Trafalgar; quite in place. [_To Tom._] Now, sir! _Tom._ [_Opening his manuscript and reading._] "Life, a comedy, by Thomas Wrench----" END OF THE THIRD ACT. THE FOURTH ACT. _The scene represents the stage of a theatre with the proscenium arch, and the dark and empty auditorium in the distance. The curtain is raised. The stage extends a few feet beyond the line of the proscenium, and is terminated by a row of old-fashioned footlights with metal reflectors. On the left, from the proscenium arch runs a wall, in which is an open doorway supposed to admit to the Green-room. Right and left of the stage are the "P." and "O. P." and the first and second entrances, with wings running in grooves, according to the old fashion. Against the wall are some "flats." Just below the footlights is a T-light, burning gas, and below this the prompt-table. On the right of the prompt-table is a chair, and on the left another. Against the edge of the proscenium arch is another chair; and nearer, on the right, stands a large throne-chair, with a gilt frame and red velvet seat, now much dilapidated. In the "second entrance" there are a "property" stool, a table, and a chair, all of a similar style to the throne-chair and in like condition, and on the center, as if placed therefor the purpose of rehearsal, are a small circular table and a chair. On this table is a work-basket containing a ball of wool and a pair of knitting-needles; and on the prompt-table there is a book. A faded and ragged green baize covers the floor of the stage. The wings, and the flats and borders, suggest by their appearance a theatre fallen somewhat into decay. The light is a dismal one, but it is relieved by a shaft of' sunlight entering through a window in the flies on the right._ [_Mrs. Telfer is seated upon the throne-chair, in an attitude of dejection. Telfer enters from the Green-room._] _Telfer._ [_Coming to her._] Is that you, Violet? _Mrs. Telfer._ Is the reading over? _Telfer._ Almost. My part is confined to the latter 'alf of the second act; so being close to the Green-room door [_with a sigh_], I stole away. _Mrs. Telfer._ It affords you no opportunity, James? _Telfer._ [_Shaking his head._] A mere fragment. _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Rising._]Well, but a few good speeches to a man of your stamp---- _Telfer._ Yes, but this is so line-y, Violet; so very line-y. And what d'ye think the character is described as? _Mrs. Telfer._ What? _Telfer._ "An old, stagey, out-of-date actor." [_They stand looking at each other for a moment, silently._] _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Falteringly._] Will you--be able--to get near it, James? _Telfer._ [_Looking away from her._] I dare say----- _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Laying a hand upon his shoulder._] That's all right, then. _Telfer._ And you--what have they called you for, if you're not in the play? They 'ave not dared to suggest understudy? _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Playing with her fingers._]They don't ask me to act at all, James. _Telfer._ Don't ask you---! _Mrs. Telfer._ Miss Parrott offers me the position of Wardrobe-mistress. _Telfer._ Violet! _Mrs. Telfer._ Hush! _Telfer._ Let us both go home. _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Restraining him._] No, let us remain. We've been idle six months, and I can't bear to see you without your watch and all your comforts about you. _Telfer._ [_Pointing toward the Green-room._] And so this new-fangled stuff, and these dandified people, are to push us, and such as us, from our stools! _Mrs. Telfer._ Yes, James, just as some other new fashion will, in course of time, push _them_ from their stools. [_From the Green-room comes the sound of a slight clapping of hands, followed by a murmur of voices. The Telfers move away. Imogen, elaborately dressed, enters from the Green-room and goes leisurely to the prompt-table. She is followed by Tom, manuscript in hand, smarter than usual in appearance; and he by O'Dwyer,--an excitable Irishman of about forty, with an extravagant head of hair,--who carries a small bundle of "parts" in brown-paper covers. Tom and O'Dwyer join Imogen._] _O'Dwyer._ [_To Tom._] Mr. Wrench, I congratulate ye; I have that honor, sir. Your piece will do, sir; it will take the town, mark me. _Tom._ Thank you, O'Dwyer. _Imogen._ Look at the sunshine! there's a good omen, at any rate. _O'Dwyer._ Oh, sunshine's nothing. [_To Tom._] But did ye observe the gloom on their faces whilst ye were read in'? _Imogen._ [_Anxiously._] Yes, they did look glum. _O'Dwyer._ Glum! it might have been a funeral! There's a healthy prognostication for ye, if ye loike! it's infallible. [_A keen-faced gentleman and a lady enter, from the Green-room, and stroll across the stage to the right, where they lean against the wings and talk. Then two young gentlemen enter, and Rose follows._] Note.--The actors and the actress appearing for the first time in this act, as members of the Pantheon Company, are outwardly greatly superior to the Gadds, the Telfers, and Colpoys. _Rose._ [_Shaking hands with Telfer._] Why didn't you sit near me, Mr. Telfer? [_Going to Mrs. Telfer._] Fancy our being together again, and at the West End! [_To Telfer._] Do you like the play? _Telfer._ Like it! there's not a speech in it, my dear--not a real speech; nothing to dig your teeth into--- _O'Dwyer._ [_Allotting the parts, under the direction of Tom and Imogen._] Mr. Mortimer! [_One of the young gentlemen advances and receives his part from O'Dwyer, and retires, reading it._] Mr. Denzil! [_The keen-faced gentleman takes his part, then joins Imogen on her left and talks to her. The lady now has something to say to the solitary young gentleman._] _Tom._ [_To O'Dwyer, quietly, handing him a part._] Miss Brewster. _O'Dwyer._ [_Beckoning to the lady, who does not observe him, her back being towards him._] Come here, my love. _Tom._ [_To O'Dwyer._] No, no, O'Dwyer--not your "love." _O'Dwyer._ [_Perplexed._] Not? _Tom._ No. _O'Dwyer._ No? _Tom._ Why, you are meeting her this morning for the first time. _O'Dwyer._ That's true enough. [_Approaching the lady and handing her the part._] Miss Brewster. _The Lady._ Much obliged. _O'Dwyer._ [_Quietly to her._] It 'll fit ye like a glove, darlin'. [_The lady sits, conning her part. O'Dwyer returns to the table._] _Telfer._ [_To Rose._] Your lover in the play? which of these young sparks plays your lover--Harold or Gerald----? _Rose._ Gerald. I don't know. There are some people not here to-day, I believe. _O'Dwyer._ Mr. Hunston! [_The second young gentleman advances, receives his part, and joins the other young gentleman in the wings._] _Rose._ Not that young man, I hope. Isn't he a little bandy? _Telfer._ One of the finest Macduffs I ever fought with was bow-legged. _O'Dwyer._ Mr. Teller. _Tom._ [_To O'Dwyer._] No, no--Telfer. _O'Dwyer._ Telfer! [_Telfer draws himself erect, puts his hand in his breast, but otherwise remains stationary._] _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Anxiously._] That's you, James. _O'Dwyer._ Come on, Mr. Telfer! look alive, sir! _Tom._ [_To O'Dwyer._] Sssh, sssh, sssh! don't, don't----! [_Telfer advances to the prompt-table, slowly. He receives his part from O'Dwyer. To Telfer, awkwardly._] I--I hope the little part of Poggs appeals to you, Mr. Telfer. Only a sketch, of course; but there was nothing else--quite--in your------- _Telfer._ Nothing? to whose share does the Earl fall? _Tom._ Oh; Mr. Denzil plays Lord Parracourt. _Telfer._ Denzil? I've never 'eard of 'im. Will you get to me to-day? _Tom._ We--we expect to do so. _Telfer._ Very well. [_Stiffly._] Let me be called in the street. [_He stalks away._] _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Relieved._] Thank Heaven! I was afraid James would break out. _Rose._ [_To Mrs. Telfer._] But you, dear Mrs. Telfer--you weren't at the reading--what are _you_ cast for? _Mrs. Telfer._ I? [_Wiping away a tear._] I am the Wardrobe-mistress of this theatre. _Rose._ You! [_Embracing her._] Oh! oh! _Mrs. Telfer._ [_Composing herself._] Miss Trelawny--Rose--my child, if we are set to scrub a floor--and we may come to that yet--let us make up our minds to scrub it legitimately--with dignity---- [_She disappears and is seen no more._] _O'Dwyer._ Miss Trelawny! come here, my de---- _Tom._ [_To O'Dwyer._] Hush! _O'Dwyer._ Miss Trelawny! [_Rose receives her part from O'Dwyer and, after a word or two with Tom and Imogen, joins the two young gentlemen who are in the "second entrance, L." The lady, who has been seated, now rises and crosses to the left, where she meets the keen-faced gentleman, who has finished his conversation with Imogen._] _The Lady._ [_To the keen-faced gentleman._] I say, Mr. Denzil! who plays Gerald? _The Gentlemen._ Gerald? _The Lady._ The man I have my scene with in the third act--the hero--- _The Gentleman._ Oh, yes. Oh, a young gentleman from the country, I understand. _The Lady._ From the country! _The Gentleman._ He is coming up by train this morning, Miss Parrott tells me; from Bath or somewhere--- _The Lady._ Well, whoever he is, if he can't play that scene with me decently, my part's not worth rags. _Tom._ [_To Imogen, who is sitting at the prompt-table._] Er--h'm--shall we begin, Miss Parrott? _Imogen._ Certainly, Mr. Wrench. _Tom._ We'll begin, O'Dwyer. [_The lady titters at some remark from the keen-faced gentleman._] _O'Dwyer._ [_Coming down the stage, violently._] Clear the stage there! I'll not have it! Upon my honor, this is the noisiest theatre I've ever set foot in! [_The icings are cleared, the characters disappearing into the Green-room._] _O'Dwyer._ I can't hear myself speak for all the riot and confusion! _Tom._ [_To O'Dwyer._] My dear O'Dwyer, there is no riot, there is no confusion-- _Imogen._ [_To O'Dwyer._] Except the riot and confusion you are making. _Tom._ You know, you're admirably earnest, O'Dwyer, but a little excitable. _O'Dwyer._ [_Calming himself._] Oh, I beg your pardon, I'm sure. [_Emphatically._] My system is, begin as you mean to go on. _Imogen._ But we _don't_ mean to go on like that. _Tom._ Of course not; of course not. Now, let me see--[_pointing to the right center_] we shall want another chair here. _O'Dwyer._ Another chair? _Tom._ A garden chair. _O'Dwyer._ [_Excitably._] Another chair! Now, then, another chair! Properties! where are ye? do ye hear me callin'? must I raise my voice to ye-? [_He rushes away._] _Imogen._ [_To Tom._] Phew! where did you get _him_ from? Tom. [_Wiping his brow._] Known Michael for years--most capable, invaluable fellow---- _Imogen._ [_Simply._] I wish he was dead. _Tom._ So do I. [_O'Dwyer returns, carrying a light chair._] _Tom._ Well, where's the property-man? _O'Dwyer._ [_Pleasantly._] It's all right now. He's gone to dinner. _Tom._ [_Placing the chair in position._] Ah, then he'll be back some time during the afternoon. [_Looking about him._] That will do. [_Taking up his manuscript._] Call--haven't you engaged a call-boy yet, O'Dwyer? _O'Dwyer._ I have, sir, and the best in London. _Imogen._ Where is he? _O'Dwyer._ He has sint an apology for his non-attindance. _Imogen._ Oh! _O'Dwyer._ A sad case, ma'am; he's buryin' his wife. _Tom._ Wife! _Imogen._ The call-boy? _Tom._ What's his age? _O'Dwyer._ Ye see, he happens to be an elder brother of my own---- _Imogen. and Tom._ O Lord! _Tom._ Nevermind! let's get on! Call Miss---- [_Looking toward the right._] Is that the Hall-Keeper? [_A man, suggesting by his appearance that he is the Hall-Keeper, presents himself, with a card in his hand._] _O'Dwyer._ [_Furiously._] Now then! are we to be continually interrupted in this fashion? Have I, or have I not, given strict orders that nobody whatever----? _Tom._ Hush, hush! see whose card it is; give me the card---- _O'Dwyer._ [_Handing the card to Tom._] Ah, I'll make rules here. In a week's time you'll not know this for the same theatre---- [_Tom has passed the card to Imogen without looking at it._] _Imogen._ [_Staring at it blankly._] Oh----! _Tom._ [_To her._] Eh? _Imogen._ Sir William. _Tom._ Sir William.! _Imogen._ What can he want? what shall we do? _Tom._ [_After referring to his watch--to the Hall-Keeper._] Bring this gentleman on to the stage. [_The Hall-Keeper withdraws. To O'Dwyer._] Make yourself scarce for a few moments, O'Dwyer. Some private business----- _O'Dwyer._ All right. I've plenty to occupy me. I'll begin to frame those rules---[_He disappears._] _Imogen._ [_To Tom._] Not here------ _Tom._ [_To Imogen._] The boy can't arrive for another twenty minutes. Besides, we must, sooner or later, accept responsibility for our act. _Imogen._ [_Leaning upon his arm._] Heavens! I foretold this! _Tom._ [_Grimly._] I know--"said so all along." _Imogen._ If he should withdraw his capital! _Tom._ [_With clenched hands._] At least, that would enable me to write a melodrama. _Imogen._ Why? _Tom._ I should then understand the motives and the springs of Crime! [_The Hall-Keeper reappears, showing the way to Sir William Gower. Sir William's hat is drawn down over his eyes, and the rest of his face is almost entirely concealed by his plaid. The Hall-Keeper withdraws._] _Tom._ [_Receiving Sir William._] How d'ye do, Sir William? _Sir William._ [_Giving him two fingers--with a grunt._] Ugh! _Tom._ These are odd surroundings for you to find yourself in--- [_Imogen comes forward._] Miss Parrott---- _Sir William._ [_Advancing to her, giving her two fingers._] Good-morning, ma'am. _Imogen._ This is perfectly delightful. _Sir William._ What is? _Imogen._ [_Faintly._] Your visit. _Sir William._ Ugh! [_Weakly._] Give me a cheer. [_Looking about him._] Have ye no cheers here? _Tom._ Yes. [_Tom places the throne-chair behind Sir William, who sinks into it._] _Sir William._ Thank ye; much obleeged. [_To Imogen._] Sit. [_Imogen hurriedly fetches the stool and seats herself beside the throne-chair. Sir William produces his snuff-box._] You are astonished at seeing me here, I dare say? _Tom._ Not at all. _Sir William._ [_Glancing at Tom._] Addressing the lady. [_To Imogen._] You are surprised to see me? _Imogen._ Very. _Sir William._ [_To Tom._] Ah! [_Tom retreats, getting behind Sir William's chair and looking down upon him._] The truth is, I am beginning to regret my association with ye. _Imogen._ [_Her hand to her heart._] Oh--h--h--h! _Tom._ [_Under his breath._] Oh! [_Holding his fist over Sir William's head._] Oh--h--h--h! _Imogen._ [_Piteously_]. You--you don't propose to withdraw your capital, Sir William? _Sir William._ That would be a breach of faith, ma'am---- _Imogen._ Ah! _Tom._ [_Walking about, jauntily._] Ha! _Imogen._ [_Seizing Sir William's hand._] Friend! _Sir William._ [_Withdrawing his hand sharply._] I'll thank ye not to repeat that action, ma'am. But I--I have been slightly indisposed since I made your acqueentance in Clerkenwell; I find myself unable to sleep at night. [_To Tom._] That comedy of yours--it buzzes continually in my head, sir. _Tom._ It was written with such an intention, Sir William--to buzz in people's heads. _Sir William._ Ah, I'll take care ye don't read me another, Mr. Wicks; at any rate, another which contains a character resembling a member of my family--a _late_ member of my family. I don't relish being reminded of late members of my family in this way, and being kept awake at night, thinking--turning over in my mind---- _Imogen._ [_Soothingly._] Of course not.. _Sir William._ [_Taking snuff._] Pa--a--a--h! pi--i--i--sh! When I saw Kean, as Richard, he reminded me of no member of my family. Shakespeare knew better than that, Mr. Wicks. [_To Imogen._] And therefore, ma'am, upon receiving your letter last night, acqueenting me with your intention to commence rehearsing your comedy--[_glancing at Tom_] his comedy---- _Imogen._ [_Softly._] _Our_ comedy---- _Sir William._ Ugh--to-day at noon, I determined to present myself here and request to be allowed to--to---- _Tom._ To watch the rehearsal? _Sir William._ The rehearsal of those episodes in your comedy which remind me of a member of my family--a late member. _Imogen._ [_Constrainedly_]. Oh, certainly---- _Tom._ [_Firmly._] By all means. _Sir William._ [_Rising, assisted by Tom._] I don't wish to be steered at by any of your--what d'ye call 'em?--your gypsy crew---- _Tom._ Ladies and Gentlemen of the Company, we call 'em. _Sir William._ [_Tartly._] I don't care what ye call 'em. [_Tom restores the throne-chair to its former position._] Put me into a curtained box, where I can hear, and see, and not be seen; and when I have heard and seen enough, I'll return home--and--and--obtain a little sleep; and to-morrow I shall be well enough to sit in Court again. _Tom._ [_Calling._] Mr. O'Dwyer---- [_O'Dwyer appears; Tom speaks a word or two to him, and hands him the manuscript of the play._] _Imogen._ [_To Sir William, falteringly._] And if you are pleased with what you see this morning, perhaps you will attend another----? _Sir William._ [_Angrily._] Not I. After to-day I wash my hands of ye. What do plays and players do, coming into my head, disturbing my repose! [_More composedly, to Tom, who has returned to his side._] Your comedy has merit, sir. You call it _Life_. There is a character in it--a young man--not unlike life, not unlike a late member of my family. Obleege me with your arm. [_To Imogen._] Madam, I have arrived at the conclusion that Miss Trelawny belongs to a set of curious people who in other paths might have been useful members of society. But after to-day I've done with ye--done with ye----[_To Tom._] My box, sir--my box---- [_Tom leads Sir William up the stage._] _Tom._ [_To O'Dwyer._] Begin rehearsal. Begin rehearsal! Call Miss Trelawny! [_Tom and Sir William disappear._] _O'Dwyer._ Miss Trelawny! Miss Trelawny! [_Rushing to the left._] Miss Trelawny! how long am I to stand here shoutin' myself hoarse--? [_Rose appears._] _Rose._ [_Gently._] Am I called? _O'Dwyer._ [_Instantly calm._] You are, darlin'. [_O'Dwyer takes his place at the prompt-table, book in hand. Imogen and Rose stand together in the center. The other members of the company come from the Greenroom and stand in the wings, watching the rehearsal._] Now then! [_Reading from the manuscript._] "At the opening of the play Peggy and Dora are discovered----" Who's Peggy? [_Excitedly._] Where's Peggy? Am I to----? _Imogen._ Here I am! here I am! I am Peggy. _O'Dwyer._ [_Calm._] Of course ye are, lovey--ma'am, I should say---- _Imogen._ Yes, you should. _O'Dwyer._ "Peggy is seated upon the Right, Dora on the Left---" [_Rose and Imogen seat themselves accordingly. In a difficulty._] No--Peggy on the Left, Dora on the Right. [_Violently._] This is the worst written scrip I've ever held in my hand[_Rose and Imogen change places._] So horribly scrawled over, and interlined, and--no--I was quite correct. Peggy is on the Right, and Dora is on the Left. [_Imogen and Rose again change seats. O'Dwyer reads from the manuscript._] "Peggy is engaged in--in" I can't decipher it. A scrip like this is a disgrace to any well-conducted theatre. [_ To Imogen._] I don't know what you're doin'. "Dora is--is----" [_To Rose._] You are also doin' something or another. Now then! When the curtain rises, you are discovered, both of ye, employed in the way described----[_Tom returns._] Ah, here ye are! [_Resigning the manuscript to Tom, and pointing out a passage._] I've got it smooth as far as there. _Tom._ Thank you. _O'Dwyer._ [_Seating himself._] You're welcome. _Tom._ [_To Rose and Imogen._] Ah, you're not in your right positions. Change places, please. [_Imogen and Rose change seats once more._] O'Dwyer rises and goes away. _O'Dwyer._ [_Out of sight, violently._] A scrip like that's a scandal! If there's a livin' soul that can read bad handwriting, I am that man! But of all the----! _Tom._ Hush, hush! Mr. O'Dwyer! _O'Dwyer._ [_Returning to his chair._] Here. _Tom._ [_Taking the hook from the prompt-table and handing it to Imogen._] You are reading. _O'Dwyer._ [_ Sotto voce._] I thought so. _Tom._ [_To Rose._] You are working. _O'Dwyer._ Working. _Tom._ [_Pointing to the basket on the table._] There are your needles and wool. [_Rose takes the wool and the needles out of the basket. Tom takes the ball of wool from her and places it in the center of the stage._] You have allowed the ball of wool to roll from your lap on to the grass. You will see the reason for that presently. _Rose._ I remember it, Mr. Wrench. _Tom._ The curtain rises. [_To Imogen._] Miss Parrott---- [Illustration: 0207] _Imogen._ [_Referring to her part._] What do I say? _Tom._ Nothing--you yawn. _Imogen._ [_Yawning, in a perfunctory way._] Oh--h! _Tom._ As if you meant it, of course. _Imogen._ Well, of course. _Tom._ Your yawn must tell the audience that you are a young lady who may be driven by boredom to almost any extreme. _O'Dwyer._ [_Jumping up._] This sort of thing. [_Yawning extravagantly._] He--oh! _Tom._ [_Irritably._] Thank you, O'Dwyer; thank you. _O'Dwyer._ [_Sitting again._] You're welcome. _Tom._ [_To Rose._] You speak. _Rose._ [_Reading from her part--retaining the needles and the end of the wool._] "What are you reading, Miss Chaffinch?" _Imogen._ [_Reading from her part. _] "A novel." _Rose._ "And what is the name of it?" _Imogen._ "The Seasons." _Rose._ "Why is it called that?" _Imogen._ "Because all the people in it do seasonable things." _Rose._ "For instance----?" _Imogen._ "In the Spring, fall in love." _Rose._ "In the Summer?" _Imogen._ "Become engaged. Delightful!" _Rose._ "Autumn?" _Imogen._ "Marry. Heavenly!" _Rose._ "Winter?" _Imogen._ "Quarrel. Ha, ha, ha!" _Tom._ [_To Imogen._] Close the book--with a bang---- _O'Dwyer._ [_Bringing his hands together sharply by way of suggestion. _] Bang! _Tom._ [_Irritably._] Yes, yes, O'Dwyer. [_To Imogen._] Now rise---- _O'Dwyer._ Up ye get! _Tom._ And cross to Dora. _Imogen._ [_Going to Rose._] "Miss Harrington, don't you wish occasionally that you were engaged to be married?" _Rose._ "No." _Imogen._ "Not on wet afternoons?" _Rose._ "I am perfectly satisfied with this busy little life of mine, as your aunt's Companion." _Tom._ [_To Imogen._] Walk about, discontentedly. _Imogen._ [_Walking about._] "I've nothing to do; let's tell each other our ages." _Rose._ "I am nineteen." _Tom._ [_To Imogen._] In a loud whisper---- _Imogen._ "I am twenty-two." _O'Dwyer._ [_Rising and going to Tom._] Now, hadn't ye better make that six-and-twenty? _Imogen._ [_Joining them, with asperity._] Why? why? _Tom._ No, no, certainly not. Go on. _Imogen._ [_Angrily._] Not till Mr. O'Dwyer retires into his corner. _Tom._ O'Dwyer.----[_O'Dwyer takes his chair, and retires to the "prompt-corner," out of sight, with the air of martyrdom. Tom addresses Rose._] You speak. _Rose._ "I shall think, and feel, the same when I am twenty-two, I am sure. I shall never wish to marry." _Tom._ [_To Imogen._] Sit on the stump of the tree. _Imogen._ Where's that? _Tom._ [_Pointing to the stool down the stage._] Where that stool is. _Imogen._ [_Sitting on the stool._] "Miss Harrington, who is the Mr. Gerald Leigh who is expected down to-day?" _Rose._ "Lord Parracourt's secretary." _Imogen._ "Old and poor!" _Rose._ "Neither, I believe. He is the son of a college chum of Lord Parracourt's--so I heard his lordship tell Lady McArchie--and is destined for public life." _Imogen._ "Then he's young!" _Rose._ "Extremely, I understand." _Imogen._ [_Jumping up, in obedience to a sign from Tom._] "Oh, how can you be so spiteful!" Rose. "I!" _Imogen._ "You mean he's too young!" _Rose._ "Too young for what?" _Imogen._ "Too young for--oh, bother!" _Tom._ [_Looking towards the keen-faced gentleman._] Mr. Denzil. _O'Dwyer._ [_Putting his head round the corner._] Mr. Denzil! [_The keen-faced gentleman comes forward, reading his part, and meets Imogen._] _The Gentleman._ [_Speaking in the tones of an old man._] "Ah, Miss Peggy!" _Tom._ [_To Rose._] Rise, Miss Trelawny. _O'Dwyer._ [_His head again appearing._] Rise, darlin'! [_Rose rises._] _The Gentleman._ [_To Imogen._] "Your bravura has just arrived from London. Lady McArchie wishes you to try it over; and if I may add my entreaties----" _Imogen._ [_Taking his arm._] "Delighted, Lord Parracourt. [_To Rose._] Miss Harrington, bring your work indoors and hear me squall. [_To the Gentleman._] Why, you must have telegraphed to town!" _The Gentleman._ [_As they cross the stage._] "Yes, but even telegraphy is too sluggish in executing your smallest command." [_Imogen and the keen-faced gentleman go off on the left. He remains in the wings, she returns to the prompt-table._] _Rose._ "Why do Miss Chaffinch and her girl-friends talk of nothing, think of nothing apparently, but marriage? Ought a woman to make marriage the great object of life? can there be no other? I wonder----" [_She goes off, the wool trailing after her, and disappears into the Green-room. The ball of wool remains in the center of the stage._] _Tom._ [_Reading from his manuscript._] "The piano is heard; and Peggy's voice singing. Gerald enters----" _Imogen._ [_Clutching Tom's arm._] There----! _Tom._ Ah, yes, here is Mr. Gordon. [_Arthur appears, in a traveling coat. Tom and Imogen hasten to him and shake hands with him vigorously._] _Tom._ [_On Arthur's right._]How are you? _Imogen._ [_On his left nervously._] How are you? _Arthur._ [_Breathlessly._] Miss Parrott! Mr. Wrench! forgive me if I am late; my cab-horse galloped from the station--- _Tom._ We have just reached your entrance. Have you read your part over? _Arthur._ Read it! [_Taking it from his pocket._] I know every word of it! it has made my journey from Bristol like a flight through the air! Why, Mr. Wrench [_turning over the leaves of his part_], some of this is almost me! _Tom. and Imogen._ [_Nervously._] Ha, ha, ha! _Tom._ Come! you enter! [_pointing to the right_] there! [_returning to the prompt-table with Imogen_] you stroll on, looking about you! Now, Mr. Gordon! _Arthur._ [_Advancing to the center of the stage, occasionally glancing at his part._] "A pretty place. I am glad I left the carriage at the lodge and walked through the grounds." [_There is an exclamation, proceeding from the auditorium, and the sound of the overturning of a chair._] _Imogen._ Oh! _O'Dwyer._ [_Appearing, looking into the auditorium._] What's that? This is the noisiest theatre I've ever set foot in----! _Tom._ Don't heed it! [_To Arthur._] Go on, Mr. Gordon. _Arthur._ "Somebody singing. A girl's voice. Lord Parracourt made no mention of anybody but his hostess--the dry, Scotch widow. [_Picking up the ball of wool._] This is Lady McArchie's, I'll be bound. The very color suggests spectacles and iron-gray curls----" _Tom._ Dora returns. [_Calling._] Dora! _O'Dwyer._ Dora! where are ye? _The Gentleman._ [_Going to the Green-room door._]Dora! Dora! [_Rose appears in the wings._] _Rose._ [_To Tom._] I'm sorry. _Tom._ Go on, please! [_There is another sound, nearer the stage, of the overturning of some object._] _O'Dwyer._ What---? _Tom._ Don't heed it! _Rose._ [_Coming face to face with Arthur._] Oh----! _Arthur._ Rose.! _Tom._ Go on, Mr. Gordon! _Arthur._ [_To Rose, holding out the ball of wool._] "I beg your pardon--are you looking for this?" _Rose._ "Yes, I--I--I----" [_Dropping her head upon his breast._] Oh, Arthur! [_Sir William enters, and comes forward on Arthur's right._] _Sir William._ Arthur. _Arthur._ [_Turning to him._] Grandfather! _O'Dwyer._ [_Indignantly._] Upon my soul-----! _Tom._ Leave the stage, O'Dwyer! [_O'Dwyer vanishes. Imogen goes to those who are in the wings and talks to them; gradually they withdraw into the Greenroom. Rose sinks on to the stool; Tom comes to her and stands beside her._] _Sir William._ What's this? what is it----? _Arthur._ [_Bewildered._] Sir, I--I--you--and--and Rose--are the last persons I expected to meet here---- _Sir William._ Ah-h-h--h! _Arthur._ Perhaps you have both already learned, from Mr. Wrench or Miss Parrott, that I have--become--a gypsy, sir? _Sir William._ Not I; [_pointing to Tom and Imogen_] these--these people have thought it decent to allow me to make the discovery for myself. [_He sinks into the throne-chair. Tom goes to Sir William. Arthur joins Imogen; they talk together rapidly and earnestly._] _Tom._ [_To Sir William._] Sir William, the secret of your grandson's choice of a profession---- _Sir William._ [_Scornfully._] Profession! _Tom._ Was one that I was pledged to keep as long as it was possible to do so. And pray remember that your attendance here this morning is entirely your own act. It was our intention---- _Sir William._ [_Struggling to his feet._] Where is the door? the way to the door? _Tom._ And let me beg you to understand this, Sir William--that Miss Trelawny was, till a moment ago, as ignorant as yourself of Mr. Arthur Gower's doings, of his movements, of his whereabouts. She would never have thrown herself in his way, in this manner. Whatever conspiracy---------- _Sir William._ Conspiracy! the right word--conspiracy! _Tom._ Whatever conspiracy there has been is my own--to bring these two young people together again, to make them happy---- [_Rose holds out her hand to Tom; he takes it._] They are joined by Imogen. _Sir William._ [_Looking about him._] The door! the door! _Arthur._ [_Coming to Sir William._] Grandfather, may I, when rehearsal is over, venture to call in Cavendish Square----? _Sir William._ Call----! _Arthur._ Just to see Aunt Trafalgar, sir? I hope Aunt Trafalgar is well, sir. _Sir William._ [_With a slight change of tone._] Your Great-aunt Trafalgar? Ugh, yes, I suppose she will consent to see ye---- _Arthur._ Ah, sir----! _Sir William._ But I shall be out; I shall not be within doors. _Arthur._ Then, if Aunt Trafalgar will receive me, sir, do you think I may be allowed to--to bring Miss Trelawny with me----? _Sir William._ What! ha, I perceive you have already acquired the impudence of your vagabond class, sir; the brazen effrontery of a set of----! _Rose._ [_Rising and facing him._] Forgive him! forgive him! oh, Sir William, why may not Arthur become, some day, a _splendid_ gypsy? _Sir William._ Eh? _Rose._ Like---- _Sir William._ [_Peering into her face. _] Like----? _Rose._ Like---- _Tom._ Yes, sir, a gypsy, though of a different order from the old order which is departing--a gypsy of the new school! _Sir William._ [_To Rose._] Well, Miss Gower is a weak, foolish lady; for aught I know she may allow this young man to--to--take ye---- _Imogen._ I would accompany Rose, of course, Sir William. _Sir William._ [_Tartly._] Thank ye, ma'am. [_Turning._] I'll go to my carriage. _Arthur._ Sir, if you have the carriage here, and if you would have the patience to sit out the rest of the rehearsal, we might return with you to Cavendish Square. _Sir William._ [_Choking._] Oh--h--h--hi _Arthur._ Grandfather, we are not rich people, and a cab to us---- _Sir William._ [_Exhausted._] Arthur---! _Tom._ Sir William will return to his box! [_Going up the stage._] O'Dwyer! _Sir William._ [_Protesting weakly._] No, sir! no! [_O'Dwyer appears._] _Tom._ Mr. O'Dwyer, escort Sir William Gower to his box. [_Arthur goes up the stage with Sir William, Sir William still uttering protests. Rose and Imogen embrace._] _O'Dwyer._ [_Giving an arm to Sir William._] Lean on me, sir! heavily, sir-! _Tom._ Shall we proceed with the rehearsal, Sir William, or wait till you are seated? _Sir William._ [_Violently._] Wait! Confound ye, d'ye think I want to remain here all day! [_Sir William and O'Dwyer disappear._] _Tom._ [_Coming forward, with Arthur on his right--wildly._] Go on with the rehearsal! Mr. Gordon and Miss Rose Trelawny! Miss Trelawny! [_Rose goes to him._] Trelawny--late of the "Wells"! Let us--let----[_Gripping Arthur's hand tightly, he bows his head upon Rose's shoulder._] Oh, my dears! let us--get on with the rehearsal! THE END. 
28512	----	[Illustration: Copyright, 1911, by Dodd, Mead & Company Nellie Duluth] What's-His-Name BY GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY HARRISON FISHER NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1910, 1911 BY GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON Published March, 1911 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Our Hero 1 II. Miss Nellie Duluth 31 III. Mr. Fairfax 71 IV. Luncheon 95 V. Christmas 124 VI. The Revolver 150 VII. The Lawyer 176 VIII. Blakeville 201 ILLUSTRATIONS Nellie Duluth Frontispiece Fairfax was sitting on a trunk, a satisfied smile on his lips 67 Phoebe 134 He stopped, aghast, petrified 238 WHAT'S-HIS-NAME CHAPTER I OUR HERO Two men were standing in front of the Empire Theatre on Broadway, at the outer edge of the sidewalk, amiably discussing themselves in the first person singular. It was late in September and somewhat early in the day for actors to be abroad, a circumstance which invites speculation. Attention to their conversation, which was marked by the habitual humility, would have convinced the listener (who is always welcome) that both had enjoyed a successful season on the road, although closing somewhat prematurely on account of miserable booking, and that both had received splendid "notices" in every town visited. These two loiterers serve a single purpose in this tale--they draw your attention to the principal character, to the person who plays the title rôle, so to speak, and then, having done so, sink back into an oblivion from which it is quite unnecessary to retrieve them. The younger of the two players was in the act of lighting a cigarette, considerately tendered by the older, when his gaze fell upon the figure of the approaching hero. He hesitated for a moment, squinting his eyes reflectively as if to make sure of both vision and memory before committing himself to the declaration that was to follow. "See that fellow there? The little chap with his hands in his pockets?" The other permitted a vague, indifferent glance to enter the throng of pedestrians, plainly showing that he did not see the person indicated. (Please note this proof of the person's qualifications as a hero.) "The fellow in front of Browne's," added the first speaker, so eagerly that his friend tried once more and succeeded. "What of him?" he demanded, unimpressed. "That is What's-His-Name, Nellie Duluth's husband." The friend's stare was prolonged and incredulous. "That?" "Yes. That's the fair Nellie's anchor. Isn't he a wonder?" The object of these remarks passed slowly in front of them and soon was lost in the crowd. Now that we know who he is we will say thank you to the obliging Thespian and be off up Broadway in his wake, not precisely in the capacity of spies and eavesdroppers, but as acquaintances who would know him better. He was not an imposing figure. You would not have looked twice at him. You could not have remembered looking once at him, for that matter. He was the type of man who ambles through life without being noticed, even by those amiably inclined persons who make it their business to see everything that is going on, no matter how trivial it is. Somewhere in this wide and unfeeling world the husband of Nellie Duluth had an identity of his own, but New York was not the place. Back in the little Western town from which he came he had a name and a personality all his own, but it was a far cry from Broadway and its environments. For a matter of four or five years he had been known simply as "Er--What's-His-Name? Nellie Duluth's husband!" You have known men of his stripe, I am sure; men who never get anywhere for the good and sufficient reason that it isn't necessary. Men who stand still. Men who do not even shine by reflected glory. Men whose names you cannot remember. It might be Smith or Brown or Jones, or any of the names you can't forget if you try, and yet it always escapes you. You know the sort I mean. Nellie Duluth's husband was a smallish young man, nice-looking, even kind-looking, with an habitual expression of inquiry in his face, just as if he never quite got used to seeing or being seen. The most expert tailor haberdasher could not have provided him with apparel that really belonged to him. Not that he was awkward or ill-favoured in the matter of figure, but that he lacked individuality. He always seemed to be a long way from home. Sometimes you were sure that he affected a slight, straw-coloured moustache; then, a moment afterward, if you turned your back, you were not quite sure about it. As a matter of fact, he did possess such an adornment. The trouble came in remembering it. Then, again, his eyes were babyish blue and unseasoned; he was always looking into shop windows, getting accustomed to the sights. Trolley cars and automobiles were never-decreasing novelties to him, if you were to judge by the startled way in which he gazed at them. His respect for the crossing policeman, his courtesy to the street-car conductor, his timidity in the presence of the corner newsboy, were only surpassed by his deference to the waiter in the cheap restaurants he affected. But, ah! You should have seen him in that little Western town! He was a "devil of a fellow" out there! He knew the policemen by their first names and had no respect for them; street-car conductors were hail-fellows well met, and the newsboys wore spectacles and said "Yes, sir," to him. As for the waiters, he knew them all by their Christian name, which usually was Annie or Mamie or Katie. On Broadway he was quite another person. He knew his Broadway from one end to the other--that is to say, he knew that side of the "Great White Way" which stares you in the face and rebukes you for staring back--the outside of Broadway. He had been on and off Broadway for a matter of five years and yet he had never recovered from the habit of turning out for every pedestrian he met, giving the other man the right of way instead of holding to his own half of it, sometimes stepping in puddles of water to do so and not infrequently being edged off the curbstone by an accumulation of the unexpected. Once in a while during his peregrinations some one recognised him and bowed in a hesitating manner, as if trying to place him, and at such times he responded with a beaming smile and a half-carried-out impulse to stop for a bit of a chat, but always with a subsequent acceleration of speed on discovering that the other fellow seemed to be in a hurry. They doubtless knew him for Miss Duluth's husband, but for the life of them they couldn't call him by name. Every one understood that Nellie possessed a real name, but no one thought to ask what it was. Moreover, Nellie had a small daughter whose name was Phoebe. She unquestionably was a collaboration, but every one who knew the child spoke of her as that "darling little girl of Nellie's." The only man in New York who appeared to know Nellie's husband by name was the postman, and he got it second-hand. At the stage door of the theatre he was known as Miss Duluth's husband, to the stage hands and the members of the chorus he was What's-His-Name, to the principals he was "old chap," to Nellie herself he was Harvey, to Phoebe he was "daddy," to the press agent he was nameless--he didn't exist. You could see Nellie in big red letters on all the billboards. She was inevitable. Her face smiled at you from every nook and corner--and it was a pretty face, too--and you had to get your tickets of the scalpers if you wanted to see her in person any night in the week, Sundays excepted. Hats, parasols, perfumes, and face powders were named after her. It was Nellie here and Nellie there and Nellie everywhere. The town was mad about her. It goes without saying that her husband was not the only man in love with her. As Harvey--let me see--oh, never mind--What's-His-Name--ambled up Broadway on the morning of his introduction into this homely narrative he was smiled at most bewitchingly by his wife--from a hundred windows--for Nellie's smile was never left out of the lithographs (he never missed seeing one of them, you may be sure)--but it never occurred to him to resent the fact that she was smiling in the same inviting way to every other man who looked. He ambled on. At Forty-second Street he turned to the right, peering at the curtained windows of the Knickerbocker with a sort of fearful longing in his mild blue eyes, and kept on his way toward the Grand Central Station. Although he had been riding in and out of the city on a certain suburban train for nearly two years and a half, he always heaved a sigh of relief when the gate-tender told him he was taking the right train for Tarrytown. Once in a great while, on matinée days, he came to town to luncheon with Nellie before the performance. On Sundays she journeyed to Tarrytown to see him and Phoebe. In that way they saw quite a bit of each other. This day, however, he was taking an earlier train out, and he was secretly agitated over the possibility of getting the wrong one. Nellie had sent word to the theatre that she had a headache and could not have luncheon with him. He was not to come up to her apartment. If he had known a human being in all New York with whom he could have had luncheon, he would have stayed in town and perhaps gone to a theatre. But, alas, there was no one! Once he had asked a low comedian, a former member of Nellie's company, but at the time out of a job and correspondingly meek, to luncheon with him at Rector's. At parting he had the satisfaction of lending the player eleven dollars. He hoped it would mean a long and pleasant acquaintance and a chance to let the world see something of him. But the low comedian fell unexpectedly into a "part" and did not remember Nellie's husband the next time he met him. He forgot something else as well. Harvey's memory was not so short. He never forgot it. It rankled. He bought a noon extra and found a seat in the train. Then he sat up very straight to let people see that they were riding in the same car with the great Nellie Duluth's husband. Lucky dog! Every one was saying that about him, he was sure. But every one else had a noon extra, worse luck! After a while he sagged down into the seat and allowed his baby-blue eyes to fall into a brown study. In his mind's eye he was seeing a thousand miles beyond the western bank of the Hudson, far off into the quiet streets of a town that scarcely had heard the name of Nellie Duluth and yet knew him by name and fame, even to the remotest nook of it. They were good old days, sweet old days, those days when he was courting her--when she was one among many and he the only one. Days when he could serve customers in his shirt-sleeves and address each one familiarly. Every one was kind. If he had a toothache, they sympathised with him and advised him to have it pulled and all that sort of thing. In New York (he ground his teeth, proving that he retained them) no one cared whether he lived or died. He hated New York. He would have been friendly to New York--cheerfully, gladly--if New York had been willing to meet him halfway. It was friendly to Nellie; why couldn't it be friendly to him? He was her husband. Why, confound it all, out in Blakeville, where they came from, he was somebody while she was merely "that girl of Ted Barkley's." He had drawn soda water for her a hundred times and she had paid him in pennies! Only five years ago. Sometimes she had the soda water charged; that is to say, she had it put on her mother's bill. Ted couldn't get credit anywhere in town. And now look at her! She was getting six hundred dollars a week and spurned soda water as if it were poison. His chin dropped lower. The dreamy look deepened. "Doggone it," he mused for the hundredth time, "I could have been a partner in the store by this time if I'd stuck to Mr. Davis." He was thinking of Davis' drug store, in Main Street, and the striped blazer he wore while tending the soda fount in the summer time. A red and yellow affair, that blazer was. Before the "pharmacy law" went into effect he was permitted to put up prescriptions while Mr. Davis was at meals. Afterward he was restricted to patent medicines, perfumes, soaps, toilet articles, cigars, razor strops, and all such, besides soda water in season. Moreover, when circuses came to town the reserved-seat sale was conducted in Davis' drug store. He always had passes without asking for them. Yes, he might have been a partner by this time. He drew a lot of trade to the store. Mr. Davis could not have afforded to let him go elsewhere. Five years ago! It seemed ages. He was twenty-three when he left Blakeville. Wasted ages! Somehow he liked the ready-made garments he used to buy at the Emporium much better than those he wore nowadays--fashionable duds from Fifth Avenue at six times the price. He used to be busy from seven A.M. till ten P.M., and he was happy. Nowadays he had nothing to do but get up and shave and take Phoebe for walks, eat, read the papers, tell stories to Phoebe, and go to bed. To be sure, the food was good and plentiful, the bed was soft, and the cottage more attractive than anything Blakeville could boast of; Phoebe was a joy and Nellie a jewel, but--heigh-ho! he might have been a partner in Davis' drug store if he'd stayed in the old town. The man in the seat behind was speaking to him. He came out of his reverie with a glad rush. It was so unusual for any one to take the initiative that he was more than ready to respond. "I see the Giants lost again yesterday," said the volunteer conversationalist. "Yes. Six to four," said our hero, brightly, turning in his seat. He always read the baseball news. He could tell you the batting average of every player in the big leagues for ten years back. "Lot of bone-heads," said the other sourly. At first glance our friend thought he looked like an actor and his heart sank. But perhaps he might be a travelling salesman. He liked them. In either event, the stranger's estimate of the New York ball team pleased him. He rejoiced in every defeat it sustained, particularly at the hands of the Chicagos. "Not in it with the Cubs," he announced, blitheness in his manner. Here was a man after his own heart. But the stranger glared at him. "The Cubs?" he said, his voice hardening, his manner turning aggressive. "They make the Giants look like two-spots," went on our friend, recklessly. The stranger looked him over pityingly and then ended the conversation by deliberately hiding himself behind his newspaper. Our hero opened his lips to add further comment, but something in the way the paper crackled caused him to close them and turn back to his bitter survey of the Hudson. And the confounded fellow had invited his confidence, too! He got down at Tarrytown and started up the hill. The station-master pointed him out to a friend. "That's--er--What's-His-Name--Nellie Duluth's husband." "That guy?" "She keeps him up here in a cottage to take care of the baby. Away from the temptations of the city," said the agent, with a broad wink. "I didn't know she was married," said his friend, who lived in Yonkers. "Well, she is." Mr.--(I declare, his name escapes me, so I will call him by his Christian name, Harvey)--Harvey, utterly oblivious to the pitying scrutiny of the two men, moved slowly up the road, homeward bound. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to light a "Sweet Cap," threw back his unimposing shoulders, and accelerated his gait a trifle in deference to his position as the master of a celebrity. It was his habit to take a rather roundabout way up to the little cottage on the hill. The route led him past a certain drug store and a grocer's where he was on speaking terms with the clerks. They knew him. He did the marketing, but the account was in Miss Duluth's name. A livery stable, too, was on the line of progress. He occasionally stopped in to engage a pony phaeton for a drive in the afternoon with Phoebe. To-day he passed these places by. Every one seemed to be busy. He could see that at a glance. So there wasn't any use stopping. That was what he got for coming home from town in the middle of the day. He nodded to several acquaintances--passing acquaintances in both senses of the word. They turned to look after him, half-smiles on their lips. One woman said to another, "I wonder if he's really married to her?" "If he wasn't, he'd be living in the city with her," was the complete rejoinder. "He seems such a quiet little man, so utterly unlike what a husband of hers ought to be. He's from the far West--near Chicago, I believe. I never can remember his name. Can you?" "I've never heard it." "It's not an uncommon name." "Why doesn't he call himself Mr. Duluth?" "My husband says actresses are not supposed to have husbands. If they have them, they keep them in the background." "That's true. I know I am always surprised when I see that they're trying to get divorces." Harvey was never so far in the background as when he appeared in the foreground. One seldom took notice of him unless he was out of sight, or at least out of hearing. He was not effeminate; he was not the puerile, shiftless creature the foregoing sentences may have led you to suspect. He was simply a weakling in the strong grasp of circumstance. He could not help himself; to save his life, he could not be anything but Nellie Duluth's husband. Not a bad-looking chap, as men of his stamp go. Not much of a spine, perhaps, and a little saggy about the shoulders; all in all, rather a common type. He kept his thin moustache twisted, but inconsistently neglected to shave for several days--that kind of a man. His trousers, no matter how well made, were always in need of pressing and his coat was wrinkled from too much sitting on the small of his back. His shirts, collars, and neckties were clean and always "dressy." Nellie saw to that. Besides he always had gone in for gay colours when it came to ties and socks. His watch-fob was a thing of weight and pre-eminence. It was of the bell-clapper type. In the summer time he wore suspenders with his belt, and in the winter time he wore a belt with his suspenders. Of late he affected patent-leather shoes with red or green tops; he walked as if he despised the size of them. Arriving at the snug little cottage, he was brought face to face with one of the common tragedies of a housekeeper's life. The cook and the nursemaid, who also acted as waitress and chambermaid, had indulged in one of their controversies during his absence, and the former had departed, vowing she would never return. Here it was luncheon time and no one to get it! He knew that Bridget would be back before dinner time--she always did come back--but in the meantime what were they to do? There wasn't a thing in the house. He found himself wishing he had stayed in the city for luncheon. Annie's story was a long one, but he gathered from it that Bridget was wholly to blame for the row. Annie was very positive as to that. "Have we any eggs?" asked the dismayed master. "Eggs? How should I know, sir?" demanded Annie. "It's Bridget's place to know what's in the pantry, not mine. The Lord knows I have enough to do without looking after her work." "Excuse me," said he, apologetically. He hesitated for a moment and then came to a decision. "I guess I'd better go and see what we've got. If we've got eggs, I can fry 'em. Bridget will be back this evening." "I'm not so sure of that," said Annie, belligerently. "I told her this was the last time, the very last." "I'll bet you a quarter she comes back," said he, brightly. "Gee! What a sport you are!" scoffed Annie. He flushed. "Will you please set the table?" "It's set." "Oh!" "I'll help you make the toast, if you'd like," said she, a sudden feeling of pity for him coming into her niggardly soul. "Thanks," he said, briskly. "And the tea, too?" "I think we'd better have coffee," said she, asserting a preference for the housemaid's joy. "Just as you say," he acquiesced, hastily. "Where is Phoebe?" "Next door with the Butler kids--children, I mean. Maybe they'll ask her to stay to lunch." He gave her a surprise. "Go over and tell her to come home. I don't want her staying to luncheon with those damned Butlers." She stared, open-mouthed. "I'm sure, sir, they're quite as good as--as we are. What have you got against 'em?" He could not tell her that Butler, who worked in a bank, never took the trouble to notice him except when Nellie was out to spend Sunday. "Never mind. Go and get Phoebe." He made a dash for the kitchen, and when the exasperated Annie returned a few minutes later with Phoebe--rebellious Phoebe, who at that particular moment hated her father--he was in his shirt-sleeves and aproned, breaking eggs over a skillet on the gas stove. His face was very red, as if considerable exertion had been required. Phoebe was pouting when she came in, but the sight of her father caused her to set up a shriek of glee. "What fun, daddy!" she cried. "Now we'll never need Bridget again. I don't like her. You will be our cook, won't you?" Annie's sarcastic laugh annoyed him. "I used to do all the cooking when the Owl Club went camping," he announced, entirely for Annie's benefit. "In Blakeville?" asked Annie, with a grin. "Yes, in Blakeville," he exploded, almost dropping the cigarette from his lips into the skillet. His blue eyes flashed ominously. Annie, unused to the turning of the worm, caught her breath. Suddenly obsessed by the idea that he was master in his own house, he began strutting about the kitchen, taking mental note of the things that needed attention, with a view to reproving Bridget when she came back to the fold. He burnt his fingers trying to straighten the stovepipe, smelt of the dish-cloths to see if they were greasy, rattled the pans and bethought himself of the eggs just in the nick of time. In some haste and embarrassment he removed the skillet from the fire just as Annie came out of the pantry with the bread and the coffee can. "Where's the platter?" he demanded, holding the skillet at arm's length. "They're fried." "They'll be stone cold," said she, "waiting for the coffee to boil. You ain't got any water boiling." "I thought, perhaps, we'd better have milk," he said, gathering his wits. To his surprise--and to her own, for that matter--she said, "Very good, sir," and repaired to the icebox for the dairy bottles. He was still holding the skillet when she returned. She was painfully red in the face. Phoebe eyed the subsequent preparations for the meal with an increasing look of sullenness in her quaint little face. She was rather a pretty child. You would say of her, if you saw her in the street, "What a sweet child!" just as you would say it about the next one you met. Her father, taking note of her manner, paused in the act of removing his apron. "What's the matter, darling?" "Can't I go over to Mrs. Butler's for luncheon?" she complained. "They're going to have chicken." "So are we," said he, pointing to the eggs. "I want to go," said Phoebe, stubbornly. He coloured. "Don't you want to stay home and eat what daddy has cooked?" he asked, rather plaintively. "I want to go." He could only resort to bribery. "And daddy'll take you down to see the nickel show as soon as we've finished," he offered. The child's face brightened. Here Annie interposed. "She can't go to see them nickel shows; Miss Duluth won't stand for it. She's give me strict orders." "I'll take good care of her----" began Phoebe's father. "Miss Duluth's afraid of diphtheria and scarlet fever," said Annie, resolutely, as she poured out a glass of milk for him. "Not likely to be any diphtheria this time of year," he began again, spurred by the kick Phoebe planted on his kneecap. "Well, orders is orders. What Miss Duluth says goes." "Ah, come now, Annie----" "Say, do you want her to ketch scarlet fever and die?" demanded the nurse, putting the bottle down and glaring at him with a look of mixed commiseration and scorn. "Good Heavens, no!" he ejaculated. The very thought of it brought a gush of cold water to his mouth. "Well, take her to see it if you must, but don't blame me. She's your kid," said Annie, meanly, with victory assured. "Make her say 'Yes,'" urged Phoebe, in a loud whisper. He hedged. "Do you want to have the scarlet fever?" he asked, dismally. "Yes," said Phoebe. "And measles, too." The sound of heavy footsteps on the back porch put an end to the matter for the time being. Even Phoebe was diverted. Bridget had come back. A little ahead of her usual schedule, too, which was food for apprehension. Usually she took the whole day off when she left "for good and all." Never before in the history of her connection with Miss Duluth's menage had she returned so promptly. Involuntarily the master of the house glanced out of the window to see if a rain had blown up. The sun was shining brightly. It wasn't the weather. The banging of the outer door to the kitchen caused him to jump ever so slightly and to cast a glance of inquiry at Annie, who altered her original course and moved toward the sitting-room door. In the kitchen a perfectly innocent skillet crashed into the sink with a vigour that was more than ominous. A moment later Bridget appeared in the door. She wore her best hat and gloves and the dress she always went to mass in. The light of battle was in her eye. "We--we thought we wouldn't wait, Bridget," said Mr.--er--What's-His-Name, quickly. "You never come back till six or seven, you know, so----" "Who's been monkeyin' wid my kitchen?" demanded Bridget. She started to unbutton one of her gloves and the movement was so abrupt and so suggestive that he got up from his chair in such a hurry that he overturned it. "Somebody had to get lunch," he began. "I wasn't sp'akin' to you," said Bridget, glaring past him at Annie. He gulped suddenly. For the second time that day his eyes blazed. Things seemed to be dancing before them. "Well, I'm speaking to you!" he shouted, banging the table with his clenched fist. "What!" squealed Bridget, staggering back in astonishment. He remembered Phoebe. "You'd better run over to the Butlers', Phoebe, and have lunch," he said, his voice trembling in spite of himself. "Run along lively now." Bridget was still staring at him like one bereft of her senses when Phoebe scrambled down from her chair and raced out of the room. He turned upon the cook. "What do you mean by coming in here and speaking to me in that manner?" he demanded, shrilly. "Great God above!" gasped Bridget weakly. She dropped her glove. Her eyes were blinking. "And why weren't you here to get lunch?" he continued, ruthlessly. "What do we pay you for?" Bridget forgot her animosity toward Annie. "What do yez think o' that?" she muttered, addressing the nursemaid. "Get back to the kitchen," ordered he. Cook had recovered herself by this time. Her broad face lost its stare and a deep scowl, with fiery red background, spread over her features. She imposed her huge figure a step or two farther into the room. "Phat's that?" she demanded. She weighed one hundred and ninety and was nearly six feet tall. He was barely five feet five and could not have tipped the beam at one hundred and twenty-five without his winter suit and overcoat. He moved back a corresponding step or two. "Don't argue," he said, hurriedly. "Argue?" she snorted. "Phy, ye little shrimp, who are you to be talkin' back to me? For two cents I'd----" "You are discharged!" he cried, hastily putting a chair in her path--but wisely retaining a grip on it. She threw back her head and laughed, loudly, insultingly. Her broad hands, now gloveless and as red as broiled lobsters, found resting-places on her hips. He allowed his gaze to take them in with one hurried, sweeping glance. They were as big and as menacing as a prizefighter's. "We'll discuss it when you're sober," he made haste to say, trying to wink amiably. "So help me Mike, I haven't touched a----" she began, but caught herself in time. "So yez discharge me, do yez?" she shouted. "I understood you had quit, anyway." "Well, me fine little man, I'll see yez further before I'll quit now. I came back this minute to give notice, but I wouldn't do it now for twenty-five dollars." "You don't have to give notice. You're discharged. Good-bye." He started for the sitting-room. She slapped the dining-table with one of her big hands. The dishes bounced into the air, and so did he. "I'll give this much notice to yez," she roared, "and ye'll bear it in mind as long as yez stay in the same house wid me. I don't take no orders from the likes of you. I was employed by Miss Duluth. I cook for her, I get me pay from her, and I'll not be fired by anybody but her. Do yez get that? I'd as soon take orders from the kid as from you, ye little pinhead. Who are yez anyhow? Ye're nobody. Begorry, I don't even know yer name. Discharge me! Phy, phy, ye couldn't discharge a firecracker. What's that?" "I--I didn't say anything," he gasped. "Ye'd better not." "I shall speak to--to Miss Duluth about this," he muttered, very red in the face. "Do!" she advised, sarcastically. "She'll tell yez to mind yer own business, the same as I do. The idee! Talkin' about firing me! Fer the love av Mike, Annie, what do yez think av the nerve? Phy Miss Duluth kapes him on the place I can't fer the life av me see. She's that tinder-hearted she----" But he had bolted through the door, slamming it after him. As he reached the bottom of the stairs leading to his bedroom the door opened again and Annie called out to him:-- "Are you through lunch, sir?" He was halfway up the steps before he could frame an answer. Tears of rage and humiliation were in his baby-blue eyes. "Tell her to go to the devil," he sputtered. As he disappeared at the bend in the stairs he distinctly heard Annie say:-- "I can see myself doing it--not." For an hour he paced the floor of his little bed-chamber, fuming and swearing to himself in a mild, impotent fashion--and in some dread of the door. Such words and sentences as these fell from his lips:--"Nobody!" "Keeps me on the place!" "Because she's tender-hearted!" "I will fire her!" "Can't talk back to me!" "Damned Irisher!" And so on and so forth until he quite wore himself out. Then he sat down at the window and let the far-away look slip back into his troubled blue eyes. They began to smart, but he did not blink them. Phoebe found him there at four when she came in for her nap. He promised to play croquet with her. Dinner was served promptly that evening, and it was the best dinner Bridget had cooked in a month. "That little talk of mine did some good," said he to himself, as he selected a toothpick and went in to read "Nicholas Nickleby" till bedtime. "They can't fool with me." He was reading Dickens. His wife had given him a complete set for Christmas. To keep him occupied, she said. CHAPTER II MISS NELLIE DULUTH Nellie Duluth had an apartment up near the Park, the upper end of the Park, in fact, and to the east of it. She went up there, she said, so that she could be as near as possible to her husband and daughter. Besides, she hated taking the train at the Grand Central on Sundays. She always went to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street in her electric brougham. It didn't seem so far to Tarrytown from One Hundred and Twenty-fifth. In making her calculations Nellie always went through the process of subtracting forty-two from one-twenty-five, seldom correctly. She had no difficulty in taking the two from the five, but it wasn't so simple when it came to taking four from two with one to carry over. It was the one that confused her. For the life of her she couldn't see what became of it. Figures of that sort were not in her line. Nellie's career had been meteoric. She literally had leaped from the chorus into the rôle of principal comédienne--one of those pranks of fortune that cannot be explained or denied. She was one of the "Jack-in-the-Box" girls in a big New York production. On the opening night, when the lid of her box flew open and she was projected into plain view, she lost her bearings and missed the tiny platform in coming down. To save herself from an ignominious tumble almost to the footlights she hopped off the edge of her box, where she had been "teetering" helplessly, and did a brief but exceedingly graceful little "toe spin," hopping back into the box an instant later with all the agility of a scared rabbit. She expected "notice" from the stage manager for her inexcusable slip. But the spectators liked it. They thought it was in the play. She was so pretty, so sprightly, so graceful, and so astoundingly modest that they wanted more of her. After the performance no fewer than a dozen men asked the producer why he didn't give that little girl with the black hair more of a chance. The next night she was commanded to repeat the trick. Then they permitted her to do it over in the "encore." Before the end of a fortnight she was doing a dance with the comedian, exchanging lines with him. Then a little individual song-and-dance specialty was introduced. At the close of the engagement on Broadway she announced that she would not sign for the next season unless given a "ripping" part and the promise to be featured. That was three years ago. Now she was the feature in the big, musical comedy success, "Up in the Air" and had New York at her feet. The critics admitted that she saved the "piece" in spite of composer and librettist. Some one is always doing that very thing for the poor wretches, Heaven pity them. Nellie was not only pretty and sprightly, but as clever as they make them. She never drew the short straw. She had a brain that was quite as active as her feet. It was not a very big brain; for that matter, her feet were tiny. She had the good sense to realise that her brain would last longer than her feet, so she got as much for them as she could while the applause lasted. She drove shrewd bargains with the managers and shrewder ones with Wall Street admirers, who experienced a slim sense of gratification in being able to give her tips on the market, with the assurance that they would see to it that she didn't lose. She put her money into diamonds as fast as she got it. Some one in the profession had told her that diamonds were safer than banks or railroad bonds. She could get her interest by looking at them and she could always sell them for what she paid for them. The card on the door of her cosey apartment bore the name, "Miss Nellie Duluth." There was absolutely nothing inside or outside the flat to lead one to suspect that there was a Mr. Duluth. A husband was the remotest figure in her household. When the management concluded to put her name in the play-bill, after the memorable Jack-in-the-Box leap, she was requested to drop her married name, because it would not look well in print. "Where were you born?" the manager had asked. "Duluth." "Take Duluth for luck," said he, and Duluth it was. She changed the baptismal name Ella to Nellie. At home in Blakeville she had been called Eller or Ell. Her apartment was an attractive one. Her housemaid was a treasure. She was English and her name was Rachel. Nellie's personal maid and dresser was French. Her name was Rebecca. When Miss Duluth and Rebecca left the apartment to go to the theatre in the former's electric brougham, Rachel put the place in order. So enormous was the task that she barely had it finished when her mistress returned, tired and sleepy, to litter it all up again with petticoats, stockings, roses, orchids, lobster shells, and cigarette stubs. More often than otherwise Nellie brought home girls from the theatre to spend the night with her. Poor things, they were chorus girls, just as she had been, and they had so far to go. Besides, they served as excuses for declining unwelcome invitations to supper. Be that as it may, Rachel had to clean up after them, finding their puffs, rats, and switches in the morning and the telephone number at their lodgings in the middle of the night. She had her instructions to say that such young ladies were spending the night with Miss Duluth. "If you don't believe it, call up Miss Duluth's number in the telephone book," she always concluded, as if the statement needed verification. Nellie had not been in Tarrytown for a matter of three weeks; what with rehearsals, revisions, consultations, and suppers, she just couldn't get around to it. The next day after Harvey's inglorious stand before Bridget she received a letter from him setting forth the whole affair in a peculiarly vivid light. He said that something would have to be done about Bridget and advised her to come out on the earliest day possible to talk it over with him. He confessed to a hesitancy about discharging the cook, recalling the trouble she had experienced in getting her away from a neighbour in the first place. But Bridget was drinking and quarrelling with Annie and using strong language in the presence of Phoebe. He would have discharged her long ago if it hadn't been for the fear of worrying her during rehearsals and all that. She wasn't to be bothered with trifling household squabbles at such an important time as this. No, sir! Not if he could help it. But, just the same, he thought she'd better come out and talk it over before Bridget took it into her head to poison some one. "I really, truly must go up to Tarrytown next Sunday," said Nellie to the select company supping in her apartment after the performance that night. "Harvey's going to discharge the cook." "Who is Harvey?" inquired the big blond man who sat beside her. "My teenty-weenty hubby," said she, airily. There were two other men besides the big blond in the party, and the wife of one of them--a balance wheel. The big blond man stared at his hostess. He expected her to laugh at her own joke, but she did not. The others were discussing the relative merits of the Packard and Peerless cars. He waited a moment and then leaned closer to Nellie's ear. "Are you in earnest?" he asked, in low tones. "About what, Mr. Fairfax?" "Hubby. Have you got one?" "Of course I have. Had him for six years. Why?" He swallowed hard. A wave of red crept up over his jowl and to the very roots of his hair. "I've known you for over a month, Nellie," he said, a hard light in his fishy grey eyes, "and you've never mentioned this husband of yours. What's the game?" "It's a guessing game," she said, coolly. "You might guess what I'm wearing this little plain gold ring on my left hand for. It's there where everybody can see it, isn't it? You just didn't take the trouble to look, Mr. Fairfax. Women don't wear wedding rings for a joke, let me tell you that." "I never noticed it," he said, huskily. "The truth is, it never entered my head to think you could be a married woman." "Thought I was divorced, eh?" "Well, divorces are not uncommon, you know. You girls seem to get rid of husbands quite as easily as you pick them up." "Lord bless you," said Nellie, in no way offended, "I have never done anything to give Harvey cause for divorce, and I'm sure he's never done the tiniest thing out of the way. He never treats me cruelly, he never beats me, he doesn't get tight and break things up, and he never looks at other women. He's the nicest little husband ever." She instructed Rachel to fill up Mr. Fairfax's glass and pass the ripe olives. He was watching her, an odd expression in his eyes. A big, smooth-faced man of fifty was he, fat from high living, self-indulgence, and indolence, immaculately dressed to the tips of his toes. "Speaking of divorce," she went on, without looking at him, "your wife didn't have much trouble getting hers, I've heard." It was a daring thing to say, but Nellie was from the West, where courage and freshness of vision are regarded as the antithesis of tact and diplomacy. Tact calls for tact. The diplomatist is powerless if you begin shooting at him. Nellie did not work this out for herself; she merely wanted to put him in a corner where he would have to stand and get it over with. Fairfax was disconcerted. He showed it. No one ever presumed to discuss the matter with him. It was a very tender subject. His eyes wavered. "I like your cheek," he growled. "Don't you like to talk about it?" she inquired, innocently. "No," he replied, curtly. "It's nobody's business, Miss Duluth." "My, how touchy!" She shivered prettily. "I feel as if some one had thrown a pail of ice water over me." "We were speaking of your--this husband of yours," he said, quietly. "Why have you never mentioned him to me? Is it quite fair?" "It just slipped my mind," she said, in the most casual way. "Besides, I thought you knew. My little girl is four--or is it five?" "Where do you keep them?" "I've got 'em in storage up at Tarrytown. That's the Sleepy Hollow neighbourhood, isn't it? I guess that's why Harvey likes it so well." "What is his business?" She looked up quickly. "What is that to you, Mr. Fairfax?" "Nothing. I am in no way interested in Mr. Duluth." "His name isn't Duluth," she flashed, hotly. "If you are not interested in him, let's drop the subject." "I retract what I said. I am always interested in curiosities. What's he like?" "Well, he's like a gentleman, if you are really interested in curiosities," she said. He laughed. "By Jove, you've got a ready wit, my dear." He looked at her reflectively, speculatively. "It's rather a facer to have you turn out to be a married woman." "Don't you like married women?" "Some of 'em," he answered, coolly. "But I don't like to think of you as married." "Pooh!" she said, and there was a world of meaning in the way she said it. "Don't you know that it means a great deal to me?" he demanded, leaning closer and speaking in a lowered voice, tense and eager. "Pooh!" she repeated. He flushed again. "I cannot bear the thought of you belonging----" She interrupted him quickly. "I wouldn't say it, if I were you." "But I must say it. I'm in love with you, Nellie, and you know it. Every drop of blood in my veins is crying out for you, and has been----" Her face had clouded. "I've asked you not to say such things to me." He stared in amazement. "You are dreaming! I've never uttered a word of this sort to you. What are you thinking of? This is the first time I've said----" Nellie was dismayed. It was the first time he had spoken to her in that way. She stammered something about "general principles," but he was regarding her so fixedly that her attempt at dissembling was most unconvincing. "Or perhaps," said he, almost savagely, but guardedly, "you are confusing me with some one else." This was broad enough to demand instant resentment. She took refuge in the opportunity. "Do you mean to insult me, Mr. Fairfax?" she demanded, coldly, drawing back in her chair. He laughed harshly. "Is there any one else?" he asked, gripping one of her small hands in his great fist. She jerked the hand away. "I don't like that, Mr. Fairfax. Please remember it. Don't ever do it again. You have no right to ask such questions of me, either." "I'm a fool to have asked," he said, gruffly. "You'd be a fool to answer. We'll let it go at that. So that's your wedding ring, eh? Odd that I shouldn't have noticed it before." She was angry with herself, so she vented the displeasure on him. "You never took much notice of your wife's wedding ring, if tales are true." "Please, Miss Duluth, I----" "Oh, I read all about the case," she ran on. "You must have hated the notoriety. I suppose most of the things she charged you with were lies." He pulled his collar away from his throat. "Is it too hot in the room?" she inquired, innocently. His grin was a sickly one. "Do you always make it so hot?" he asked. "This is my first visit to your little paradise, you must remember. Don't make it too hot for me." "It isn't paradise when it gets too hot," was her safe comment. Fairfax's wife had divorced him a year or two before. The referee was not long in deciding the case in her favour. As they were leaving Chambers, Fairfax's lawyer had said to his client:--"Well, we've saved everything but honour." And Fairfax had replied:--"You would have saved that, too, if I had given you a free rein." From which it may be inferred that Fairfax was something of a man despite his lawyer. He was one of those typical New Yorkers who were Pittsburgers or Kansas Citians in the last incarnation--which dated back eight or ten years, at the most, and which doesn't make any difference on Broadway--with more money than he was used to and a measureless capacity for spending. His wife had married him when money was an object to him. When he got all the money he wanted he went to New York and began a process of elevating the theatre by lending his presence to the stage door. The stage declined to be elevated without the aid of an automobile, so he also lent that, and went soaring. His wife further elevated the stage by getting a divorce from him. "This is my first time here," he went on, "but it isn't to be the last, I hope. What good taste you have, Nellie! It's a corking little nest." "I just can't go out to Tarrytown every night," she explained. "I must have a place in town." "By the way," he said, more at ease than he had been, "you spoke of going to Tarrytown on Sunday. Let me take you out in the motor. I'd like to see this husband chap of yours and the little girl, if----" "Nay, nay," she said, shaking her head. "I never mix my public affairs with my private ones. You are a public affair, if there ever was one. No, little Nellie will go out on the choo-choos." She laughed suddenly, as if struck by a funny thought. Then, very seriously, she said:--"I don't know what Harvey would do to you if he caught you with me." He stiffened. "Jealous, eh?" "Wildly!" "A fire-eater?" "He's a perfect devil," said Nellie, with the straightest face imaginable. Fairfax smiled in a superior sort of way, flecked the ashes from his cigarette, and leaned back in his chair the better to contemplate the charming creature at his side. He thoroughly approved of jealous husbands. The fellow who isn't jealous, he argued, is the hardest to trifle with. "I suppose you adore him," he said, with a thinly veiled sneer. "'He's the idol of me 'art,'" she sang, in gentle mimicry. "Lucky dog," he whispered, leering upon her. "And how trustful he is, leaving you here in town to face temptation alone while he hibernates in Tarrytown." "He trusts me," she flashed. "I am the original 'trust buster,'" he laughed. Nellie arose abruptly. She stretched her arms and yawned. The trio opposite gave over disputing about automobiles, and both men looked at their watches. "Go home," said Nellie. "I'm tired. We've got a rehearsal to-morrow." No one took offence. They understood her ways. Fairfax gave her his light topcoat to hold while he slipped into it. She was vaguely surprised that he did not seek to employ the old trick of slipping an arm about her during the act. Somehow she felt a little bit more of respect for him. "Don't forget to-morrow night," he said, softly, at the door. "Just the four of us, you know. I'll come back for you after the play." "Remember, it has to be in the main restaurant," she warned him. "I like to see the people." He smiled. "Just as you like." She laughed to herself while Rebecca was preparing her for bed, tickled by the thought of the "fire-eating" Harvey. In bed, however, with the lights out, she found that sleep would not come as readily as she had expected. Instead her mind was vividly awake and full of reflections. She was thinking of the two in Tarrytown asleep for hours and snugly complacent. Her thoughts suddenly leaped back to the old days in Blakeville when she was the Town Marshal's daughter and he the all-important dispenser of soft drinks at Davis'. How she had hung on his every word, quip, or jest! How she had looked forward to the nights when he was to call! How she hated the other girls who divided with her the attentions of this popular young beau! And how different everything was now in these days of affluence and adulation! She caught herself counting how many days it had been since she had seen her husband, the one-time hero of her dreams. What a home-body he was! What a change there was in him! In the old Blakeville days he was the liveliest chap in town. He was never passive for more than a minute at a stretch. Going, gadding, frivolling, flirting--that was the old Harvey. And now look at him! Those old days were far, far away, so far that she was amazed that she was able to recall them. She had sung in the church choir and at all of the local entertainments. The praise of the Blakeville _Patriot_ was as sweet incense to her, the placid applause of the mothers' meetings more riotous than anything she could imagine in these days when audiences stamped and clapped and whistled till people in the streets outside the theatre stopped and envied those who were inside. And then the days of actual courtship; she tried to recall how and when they began. She married Harvey in the little church on the hill. Everybody in town was there. She could close her eyes now and see Harvey in the new checked suit he had ordered from Chicago especially for the occasion, a splendid innovation that caused more than one Lotharial eye to gleam with envy. Then came the awakening. The popular drug clerk, for all his show of prosperity and progress, had not saved a cent in all his years of labour, nor was there any likelihood of his salary ever being large enough to supply the wants of two persons. They went to live with his mother, and it was not long before he was wearing the checked suit for "everyday use" as well as for Sunday. She was stagestruck. For that matter, so was he. They were members of the town dramatic club and always had important parts in the plays. An instructor came from Chicago to drill the "members of the cast," as they were designated by the committee in charge. It was this instructor who advised Nellie to go to Chicago for a course in the school he represented. He assured her she would have no difficulty in getting on the stage. Harvey procured a position in a confectioner's establishment in State Street and she went to work for a photographer, taking her lessons in dancing, singing, and elocution at odd hours. She was pretty, graceful, possessed of a lovely figure not above the medium height; dark-haired and vivacious after a fashion of her own. As her pleased husband used to say, she "got a job on the stage before you could say Jack Robinson." He tried to get into the chorus with her, but the management said, "No husbands need apply." That was the beginning of her stage career, such a few years ago that she was amazed when she counted back. It seemed like ten years, not five. She soared; he dropped, and, as there was no occasion for rousing himself, according to the point of view established by both of them, he settled back into his natural groove and never got beyond his soda-fountain days in retrospect. The next night after the little supper at Nellie's a most astonishing thing happened. A smallish man with baby-blue eyes appeared at the box-office window, gave his name, and asked for a couple of good seats in Miss Duluth's name. The ticket-seller had him repeat the name and then gruffly told him to see the company manager. "I'm Miss Duluth's husband," said the smallish man, shrinking. The tall, flashily good-looking man at his elbow straightened up and looked at him with a doubtful expression in his eyes. He was Mr. Butler, Harvey's next-door neighbour in Tarrytown. "You must be new here." "Been here two years," said the ticket-seller, glaring at him. "See the manager." "Where is he?" "At his hotel, I suppose. Please move up. You're holding the line back." At that moment the company's press representative sauntered by. Nellie's husband, very red in the face and humiliated, hailed him, and in three minutes was being conducted to a seat in the nineteenth row, three removed from the aisle, followed by his Tarrytown neighbour, on whose face there was a frozen look of disgust. "We'll go back after the second act," said Harvey, struggling with his hat, which wouldn't go in the rack sideways. "I'll arrange everything then." "Rotten seats," said Mr. Butler, who had expected the front row or a box. "The scenery is always better from the back of the house," explained his host, uncomfortably. "Damn the scenery!" said Mr. Butler. "I never look at it." "Wait till you see the setting in the second----" began Harvey, with forced enthusiasm, when the lights went down and the curtain was whisked upward, revealing a score of pretty girls representing merry peasants, in costumes that cost a hundred dollars apiece, and glittering with diamond rings. Mr. Butler glowered through the act. He couldn't see a thing, he swore. "I should think the husband of the star could get the best seats in the house," he said when the act was half-over, showing where his thoughts were. "That press agent hates me," said Harvey, showing where his had been. "Hates you? In God's name, why?" "I've had to call him down a couple of times," said Harvey, confidentially. "Good and hard, too." "I suppose that's why he makes you take a back seat," said Butler, sarcastically. "Well, what can a fellow do?" complained the other. "If I could have seen Mr.--" A man sitting behind tapped him on the shoulder. "Will you be good enough to stop talking while the curtain's up?" he requested, in a state of subdued belligerency. Harvey subsided without even so much as a glance to see what the fellow was like. After the act Butler suggested a drink, which was declined. "I don't drink," explained Harvey. His companion snorted. "I'd like to know what kind of a supper we're going to have if you don't drink. Be a sport!" "Oh, don't you worry about that," said Harvey. "Ginger ale livens me up as much as anything. I used to simply pour the liquor down me. I had to give it up. It was getting the best of me. You should have seen the way I was carrying on out there in Blakeville before----" "Well, come out and watch me take a drink," interrupted Butler, wearily. "It may brace you up." Harvey looked helplessly at the three ladies over whom they would have to climb in order to reach the aisle and shook his head. "We're going out after the next act. Let's wait till then." "Give me my seat check," said Butler, shortly. "I'm going out." Receiving the check, he trampled his way out, leaving Harvey to ruminate alone. The joint presence of these two gentlemen of Tarrytown in the city requires an explanation. You may remember that Nellie's husband resented Butler's habit of ignoring him. Well, there had come a time when Butler had thought it advisable to get down from his high horse. His wife had gone to Cleveland to visit her mother for a week or two. It was a capital time for him to get better acquainted with Miss Duluth, to whom he had been in the habit of merely doffing his hat in passing. The morning of his wife's departure, which was no more than eight hours prior to their appearance at the box office, he made it a point to hail Harvey in a most jovial manner as he stood on his side porch, suggesting that he come over and see the playroom he had fixed up for his children and Phoebe. "We ought to be more neighbourly," he said, as he shook hands with Harvey at the steps. Later on, as they smoked in the library, he mentioned the fact that he had not had the pleasure of seeing Miss Duluth in the new piece. Harvey was exalted. When any one was so friendly as all this to him he quite lost his head in the clouds. "We'll go in and see it together," said he, "and have a bit of supper afterward." "That's very good of you," said Butler, who was gaining his point. "When does Mrs. Butler return?" asked Harvey. Butler was startled. "Week or ten days." "Well, just as soon as she's back we'll have a little family party----" His neighbour shook his head. "My wife's in mourning," he said, nervously. "In mourning?" said Harvey, who remembered her best in rainbow colours. "Yes. Her father." "Dead?" "Certainly," said Butler, a trifle bewildered. He coughed and changed the current of conversation. It was not at all necessary to say that his wife's father had been dead eleven years. "I thought something of going in to the theatre to-night," he went on. "Just to kill time. It will be very lonely for me, now that my dear wife's away." Harvey fell into the trap. "By jinks!" he exclaimed, "what's the matter with me going in, too? I haven't been in town at night for six weeks or more." Butler's black eyes gleamed. "Excellent! We'll see a good play, have a bite to eat, and no one will know what gay dogs we are." He laughed and slapped Harvey on the back. "I'll get seats for Nellie's show if you'd like to see it," said Harvey, just as enthusiastically, except that he slapped the arm of the chair and peeled his knuckle on a knob he hadn't seen. "Great!" "And say, I'd like you to know my wife better, Mr. Butler. If you don't object I'll ask her to go out with us after the show for something to eat." "Permit me to remind you, Mr.--Mr.--er----" "Call me Harvey," said the owner of the name. "----to remind you that this is my party. I will play host and be honoured if your wife will condescend to join me--and you--at any hour and place she chooses." "You are most kind," said Harvey, who had been mentally calculating the three one-dollar bills in his pocket. And that is how they came to be in the theatre that night. The curtain was up when Butler returned. He had had a drink. "Did you send a note back to your wife?" he asked as he sat down. "What for?" "To tell her we are here," hissed the other. "No, I didn't," said Harvey, calmly. "I want to surprise her." Butler said something under his breath and was so mad during the remainder of the act that everybody on the stage seemed to be dressed in red. Miss Duluth did not have to make a change of costume between the second and third acts. It was then that she received visitors in her dressing-room. She had a sandwich and a glass of milk at that time, but was perfectly willing to send across the alley for bottled beer if her callers cared to take anything so commonplace as that. She was sitting in her room, quite alone, with her feet cocked upon a trunk, nibbling a sandwich and thinking of the supper Fairfax was to give later on in the evening, when the manager of the company came tapping at her door. People had got in the habit of walking in upon her so unexpectedly that she issued an order for every one to knock and then made the injunction secure by slipping the bolt. Rebecca went to the door. "Mr. Fairfax is here, mademoiselle," she announced a moment later. "Mr. Ripton has brought him back and he wants to come in." Except for the word "mademoiselle" Rebecca spoke perfect English. Nellie took one foot down and then, thinking quickly, put it up again. It wouldn't hurt Fairfax, she argued, to encounter a little opposition. "Tell Ripton I'm expecting some one else," she said, at random. "If Mr. Fairfax wants to wait in the wings, I'll see him there." But she had not the slightest inkling of what was in store for her in the shape of visitors. At that very moment Harvey and his friend were at the stage door, the former engaged in an attempt at familiarity with the smileless attendant. "Hello, Bob; how goes it?" said he, strutting up to the door. Bob's bulk blocked the passage. "Who d'you want to see?" he demanded, gruffly. "Who d'you suppose?" asked Harvey, gaily. "Don't get fresh," snapped the door man, making as if to slam the iron door in his face. Suddenly he recognised the applicant. "Oh, it's you, is it?" "You must be going blind, Bobby," said Harvey, in a fine effort at geniality. "I'm taking a friend in to show him how it's done. My friend, Mr. Butler, Bob." Mr. Butler stepped on Harvey's toes and said something under his breath. "Is Miss Duluth expecting you, Mr.--er--Mr.--Is she?" asked old Bob. "No. I'm going to surprise her." Bob looked over his shoulder hastily. "If I was you," he said, "I'd send my card in. She's--she's nervous and a shock might upset her." "She hasn't got a nerve in her body," said Harvey. "Come on, Butler. Mind you don't fall over the braces or get hit by the scenery." They climbed a couple of steps and were in the midst of a small, bustling army of scene shifters and property men. Old Bob scratched his head and muttered something about "surprises." Three times Harvey tried to lead the way across the stage. Each time they were turned back by perspiring, evil-minded stage hands who rushed at them with towering, toppling canvases. Once Harvey nearly sat down when an unobserving hand jerked a strip of carpet from under his feet. A grand staircase almost crushed Mr. Butler on its way into place, and some one who seemed to be in authority shouted to him as he dodged:-- "Don't knock that pe-des-tal over, you pie face!" At last they got safely over, and Harvey boldly walked up to the star's dressing-room. "We're all right now," he said to Butler, with a perceptible quaver in his voice. "Just you wait while I go in and tell her I am here." Butler squeezed himself into a narrow place, where he seemed safe from death, mopped his brow, and looked like a lost soul. Two men, sitting off to the left, saw Harvey try the locked door and then pound rather imperatively. "Good Lord!" exclaimed one of them, staring. "It's--it's--er--What's-His-Name, Nellie's husband! Well, of all the infernal----" "That?" gasped Fairfax. "What in thunder is he doing here this time o' night! Great Scott, he'll spoil everything," groaned Ripton, the manager. Harvey pounded again with no response. Nellie was sitting inside, mentally picturing the eagerness that caused Fairfax to come a-pounding like that. She had decided not to answer. Ripton called a stage hand. "Tell him that Nellie isn't seeing anybody to-night," he whispered. "Do it quick. Get him out of here." "Shall I throw him out, sir?" demanded the man, with a wry face. "Poor little chap!" "Just tell him that Nellie will see him for a few minutes after the play." Then, as the man moved away:--"They've got no business having husbands, Mr. Fairfax. Damned nuisances." Fairfax had his hand to his lips. He was thinking of Nellie's "perfect devil." "I fancy he doesn't cut much of a figure in her life," said he, in a tone of relief. In the meantime the stage hand had accosted Harvey, who had been joined by the anxious Mr. Butler. "Miss Duluth ain't seeing any one to-night, sir," he said. "She gave strict orders. No one, sir." Harvey's blue eyes were like delft saucers. "She'll see me," he said. "I'm her husband, you know." "I know that, sir. But the order goes, just the same." "Is she ill?" "Yes, sir. Very ill," said the man, quickly. Butler was gnawing his moustache. "Rubbish!" he said, sharply. "Come away, you. She's got a visitor in there. Can't you see the lay of the land?" The little husband turned cold, then hot. "A--a man visitor?" "Certainly," snapped the aggrieved Mr. Butler. "What else?" Without another word, Harvey brushed past the stage hand and began rattling the door violently. "Nellie!" he shouted, his lips close to the paint. In a second the door flew open and the astonished actress stood there staring at him as if he were a ghost. He pushed the door wide open and strode into the dressing-room, Nellie falling back before him. The room was empty save for the dismayed Rebecca. "There!" he exclaimed, turning to address Butler in the doorway, but Butler was not there. The stage hand had got in his way. "Wha--what, in the name of Heaven, are you doing here, Harvey?" gasped Nellie. "How are you, Nell? Nothing serious, I hope." "Serious?" she murmured, swallowing hard, her wits in the wind. "Ain't you ill?" "Never was better in my life," she cried, seeing what she thought was light. "Who brought you to town with such a tale as that? I'm fine. You've been fooled. If I were you, I'd take the first train out and try to find out who----" "It's all right, Butler," he called out. "Come right in. Hello! Where are you?" He stepped to the door and looked out. Mr. Butler was being conducted toward the stage door by the burly stage hand. He was trying to expostulate. "Hi! What you doing?" shouted Harvey, darting after them. "Let my friend alone!" Up came Ripton in haste. "O'Brien, what do you mean? Take your hand off that gentleman's shoulder at once. He is a friend of Mr.--Mr.--ahem! A terrible mistake, sir." Then followed a moment of explanation, apology, and introduction, after which Harvey fairly dragged his exasperated friend back to Nellie's room. She was still standing in the middle of the room trying to collect her wits. "You remember Mr. Butler, deary," panted Harvey, waving his hand. Nellie gasped in the affirmative. At that instant Fairfax's big frame appeared in the door. He was grinning amiably. She glared at him helplessly for a moment. "Won't you introduce me to your husband?" he said, suavely. Nellie found her tongue and the little man shook hands with the big one. "Glad to meet you," said Harvey. "I am glad to see you," said Fairfax, warmly. "My friend Butler," introduced Harvey. Mr. Butler was standing very stiff and pallid, with one knee propped against a chair. There was a glaze over his eyes. Fairfax grinned broadly. "Oh, Butler and I are old acquaintances," said he. "Wife out of town, Butler?" "Sure," said Harvey, before Butler could reply. "And we're in town to see the sights. Eh, Butler?" Butler muttered something that sounded uncommonly like "confounded ass," and began fanning himself with his derby hat and gloves and walking-stick, all of which happened to be in the same hand. "We're going to take Nellie--I mean Miss Duluth--out for supper after the play," went on Harvey, glibly. "We'll be waiting for you, dearie. Mr. Butler is doing the honours. By the way, Butler, I think it would be nicer if Nellie could suggest an odd lady for us. We ought to have four. Do you know of any one, Nell? By George, we've got to have a pretty one, though. We insist on that, eh, Butler?" He jabbed Butler in the ribs and winked. "Don't do that!" said the unhappy Mr. Butler, dropping his stick. It rolled under a table and he seized the opportunity thus providentially presented. He went down after it and was lost to view for a considerable length, of time, hiding himself as the ostrich does when it buries its head in the sand and imagines it is completely out of sight. Nellie's wits were returning. She was obliged to do some rapid and clever thinking. Fairfax was watching her with a sardonic smile on his lips. Ripton, the manager, peered over his shoulder and winked violently. "Oh, Harvey dear," she cried, plaintively, "how disappointed I am. I have had strict orders from the doctor to go straight home to bed after every performance. I really can't go with you and Mr. Butler to-night. I wish you had telephoned or something. I could have told you." Harvey looked distressed. "What does the doctor say it is?" [Illustration: Copyright, 1911, by Dodd, Mead & Company Fairfax was sitting on a trunk, a satisfied smile on his lips] "My heart," she said, solemnly. "Don't you think you could go out for a--just a sandwich and a bottle of beer?" he pleaded, feeling that he had wantonly betrayed his friendly neighbour. "Couldn't think of it," she said. "The nurse will be here at eleven. I'll just have to go home. He insists on absolute quiet for me and I'm on a dreadful diet." A bright thought struck her. "Do you know, I have to keep my door locked so as not to be startled by----" The sharp, insistent voice of the callboy broke in on her flow of excuses. "There! I'll have to go on in a second. The curtain's going up. Good-night, gentlemen. Good-night, Harvey dear. Give me a kiss." She pecked at his cheek with her carmine lips. "Just half an hour at some quiet little restaurant," he was saying when she fled past him toward the stage. "Sorry, dear," she called, then stopped to speak to Mr. Butler. "Thank you so much, Mr. Butler. Won't you repeat the invitation some time later on? So good of you to bring Harvey in. Bring Mrs. Butler in some night, and if I'm better we will have a jolly little spree, just the four of us. Will you do it?" She beamed on him. Butler bowed very low and said:-- "It will give me great pleasure, Miss Duluth." "Good-night, then." "Good-night." When she returned to her dressing-room later on, she found Fairfax there, sitting on a trunk, a satisfied smile on his lips. She left the door open. Mr. Ripton conducted the two men across to the stage door, leading them through the narrow space back of the big drop. Chorus girls threw kisses at Harvey; they all knew him. He winked blandly at Butler, who was staring straight before him. "A great life, eh?" said Harvey, meaning that which surrounded them. They were in the alley outside the stage door. "I'm going to catch the ten-twenty," said Butler, jamming his hat down firmly. "Ain't you going to see the last act?" demanded the other, dismayed. Butler lifted his right hand to heaven, and, shaking it the better to express the intensity of his declaration, remarked:-- "I hope somebody will kick me all over town if I'm ever caught being such a damned fool as this again. I honestly hope it! I've been made ridiculous--a blithering fool! Why, you--you----" He paused in his rage, a sudden wave of pity assailing him. "By George, I can't help feeling sorry for you! Good-night." Harvey hurried after him. "I guess I'll take it, too. That gets us out at eleven-thirty. We can get a bite to eat in the station, I guess." He had to almost trot to keep pace with Butler crossing to the Grand Central. Seated side by side in the train, and after he had recovered his breath a bit, he said:-- "Confound it, I forgot to ask Nellie if it will be wise for her to come out on Sunday. The heart's a mighty bad thing, Butler." "It certainly is," said Butler, with unction. At the station in Tarrytown he said "Good-night" very gruffly and hurried off to jump into the only cab at the platform. He had heard all about Blakeville and the wild life Harvey had led there, and he was mad enough to fight. "Good-night, Mr. Butler," said Harvey, as the hack drove off. He walked up the hill. CHAPTER III MR. FAIRFAX He found the nursemaid up and waiting for him. Phoebe had a "dreadful throat" and a high temperature. It had come on very suddenly, it seems, and if Annie's memory served her right it was just the way diphtheria began. The little girl had been thrashing about in the bed and whimpering for "daddy" since eight o'clock. His heart sank like lead, to a far deeper level than it had dropped with the base desertion of Butler. Filled with remorse, he ran upstairs without taking off his hat or overcoat. The feeling of resentment toward Butler was lost in this new, overpowering sense of dread; the discovery of his own lamentable unfitness for "high life" expeditions faded into nothingness in the face of this possible catastrophe. What if Phoebe were to die? He would be to blame. He remembered feeling that he should not have left her that evening. It had been a premonition, and this was to be the price of his folly. At three in the morning he went over to rouse the doctor, all the time thinking that, even if he were capable of forgiving himself for Phoebe's death, Nellie would always hold him responsible. The doctor refused to come before eight o'clock, and slammed the door in the disturber's face. "If she dies," he said to himself over and over again as he trudged homeward, "I'll kill that beast of a doctor. I'll tear his heart out." The doctor did not come till nine-thirty. They never do. He at once said it was a bad attack of tonsilitis, and began treatment on the stomach. He took a culture and said he would let Mr.--Mr. What's-His-Name know whether there was anything diphtheritic. In the meantime, "Take good care of her." Saturday morning a loving note came from Nellie, deploring the fact that she couldn't come out on Sunday after all. The doctor said she must save her strength. She instructed Harvey to dismiss Bridget and get another cook at once. But Harvey's heart had melted toward Bridget. The big Irishwoman was the soul of kindness now that her employer was in distress. About nine o'clock that morning a man came up and tacked a placard on the door and informed the household that it was in quarantine. Harvey went out and looked at the card. Then he slunk back into Phoebe's room and sat down, very white and scared. "Do you think she'll die?" he asked of the doctor when that gentleman called soon afterward. He was shivering like a leaf. "Not necessarily," said the man of medicine, calmly. "Diphtheria isn't what it used to be." "If she dies I'll jump in the river," said the little father, bleakly. "Nonsense!" said the doctor. "Can you swim?" he added, whimsically. "No," said Harvey, his face lighting up. The doctor patted him on the back. "Brace up, sir. Has the child a mother?" Harvey stared at him. "Of course," he said. "Don't you know whose child you are 'tending?" "I confess I--er--I----" "She is the daughter of Nellie Duluth." "Oh!" fell from the doctor's lips. "And you--you are Miss Duluth's husband? I didn't quite connect the names." "Well, I'm her husband, name or no name," explained the other. "I suppose I ought to send for her. She ought to know." "Are you--er--separated?" "Not at all," said Harvey. "I maintain two establishments, that's all. One here, one in the city." "Oh, I see," said the doctor, who didn't in the least see. "Of course, she would be subject to quarantine rules if she came here, Mr.--Mr.--ahem!" "They couldn't get along without her at the theatre," groaned the husband. "I'd suggest waiting a day or two. Believe me, my dear sir, the child will pull through. I will do all that can be done, sir. Rest easy." His manner was quite different, now that he knew the importance of his patient. He readjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. "I hope to have the pleasure of seeing Mrs.--er--your wife, sir." "She has a regular physician in town," said Harvey, politely. For two weeks he nursed Phoebe, day and night, announcing to the doctor in the beginning that his early training made him quite capable. There were moments when he thought she was dying, but they passed so quickly that his faith in the physician's assurances rose above his fears. Acting on the purely unselfish motive that Nellie would be upset by the news, he kept the truth from her, and she went on singing and dancing without so much as a word to distress her. Two Sundays passed; her own lamentable illness kept her away from the little house in Tarrytown. "If we tell her about Phoebe," said Harvey to Bridget and Annie, "she'll go all to pieces. Her heart may stop, like as not. Besides, she'd insist on coming out and taking care of her, and that would be fatal to the show. She's never had diphtheria. She'd be sure to catch it. It goes very hard with grown people." "Have you ever had it, sir?" asked Annie, anxiously. "Three times," said Harvey, who hadn't thought of it up to that moment. When the child was able to sit up he put in his time reading "David Copperfield" to her. Later on he played "jacks" with her and cut pictures out of the comic supplements. By the end of the month he was thinner and more "peaked," if anything, than she. Unshaven, unshorn, unpressed was he, but he was too full of joy to give heed to his own personal comforts or requirements. His mind was beginning to be sorely troubled over one thing. Now that Phoebe was well and getting strong he realised that Nellie would be furious when she found out how ill the child had been and how she had been deceived. He considered the advisability of keeping it from her altogether, swearing every one to secrecy, but there was the doctor's bill to be paid. When it came to paying that Nellie would demand an explanation. It was utterly impossible for him to pay it himself. Thinking over his unhappy position, he declared, with a great amount of zeal, but no vigour, that he was going to get a job and be independent once more. More than that, when he got fairly well established in his position (he rather leaned toward the drug or the restaurant business) he would insist on Nellie giving up her arduous stage work and settling down to enjoy a life of comfort and ease--even luxury, if things went as he meant them to go. One afternoon late in October, when the scarlet leaves were blowing across his little front yard and the screens had been taken from the windows, a big green automobile stopped at his gate and a tall man got out and came briskly up the walk. Harvey was sitting in the library helping Phoebe with her ABC's when he caught sight of the visitor crossing the porch. "Gentleman to see you," said Annie, a moment later. "Is it the butcher's man? I declare, I must get in and attend to that little account. Tell him I'll be in, Annie." "It ain't the butcher. It's a swell." Harvey got up, felt of the four days' growth of beard on his chin, and pondered. "Did he give his name?" "Mr. Fairfax, he said." He remembered Fairfax. His hand ran over his chin once more. "Tell him to come in. I'll be down in fifteen minutes." He went upstairs on the jump and got his razor out. He was nervous. Only that morning he had written to Nellie telling her of Phoebe's expensive illness and of her joyous recovery. The doctor's bill was ninety dollars. He cut himself in three places. Fairfax was sitting near the window talking with Phoebe when he clattered downstairs ten minutes later, deploring the cuts but pleased with himself for having broken all records at shaving. The big New Yorker had a way with him; he could interest children as well as their mothers and grown sisters. Phoebe was telling him about "Jack the Giant Killer" when her father popped into the room. "Phoebe!" he cried, stopping short in horror. Fairfax arose languidly. "How do you do, Mr.--ah--ahem! The little girl has been playing hostess. The fifteen minutes have flown." "Ten minutes by my watch," said Harvey, promptly. "Phoebe, dear, where did you get that awful dress--and, oh, my! those dirty hands? Where's Annie? Annie's the nurse, Mr. Fairfax. Run right away and tell her to change that dress and wash your hands. How do you do, Mr. Fairfax? Glad to see you. How are you?" He advanced to shake the big man's hand. Fairfax towered over him. "I was afraid you would not remember me," said Fairfax. "Run along, Phoebe. She's been very ill, you see. We don't make life any harder for her than we have to. Washing gets on a child's nerves, don't you think? It used to on mine, I know. Of course I remember you. Won't you sit down? Annie! Oh, Annie!" He called into the stair hallway and Annie appeared from the dining-room. "Ann--Oh, here you are! How many times must I tell you to put a clean dress on Phoebe every day? What are her dresses for, I'd like to know?" He winked violently at Annie from the security of the portière, which he held at arm's length as a shield. Annie arose to the occasion and winked back. "May I put on my Sunday dress?" cried Phoebe, gleefully. "Only one of 'em," said he, in haste. "Annie will pick out one for you." Considerably bewildered, Phoebe was led away by the nurse. "She's a pretty child," said Fairfax. If his manner was a trifle strained Harvey failed to make note of it. "Looks like her mother." "I'm glad you think so," said the father, radiantly. "I'd hate to have her look like me." Fairfax looked him over and suppressed a smile. "She is quite happy here with you, I suppose," he said, taking a chair. "Yes, sir-ree." "Does she never long to be with her mother?" "Well, you see," said Harvey, apologising for Nellie, "she doesn't see much of Miss--of her mother these days. I guess she's got kind of used to being with me. Kids are funny things, you know." "She seems to have all the comforts and necessities of life," said the big man, looking about him with an affectation of approval. "Everything that I can afford, sir," said Harvey, blandly. "Have you ever thought of putting her in a nice school for----" "She enters kindergarten before the holidays," interrupted the father. "I mean a--er--sort of boarding school," put in the big man, uneasily. "Where she could be brought up under proper influences, polished up, so to speak. You know what I mean. Miss Duluth has often spoken of such an arrangement. In fact, her heart seems to be set on it." "You mean she--she wants to send her away to school?" asked Harvey, blankly. "It is a very common and excellent practice nowadays," said the other, lamely. The little man was staring at him, his blue eyes full of dismay. "Why--why, I don't believe I'd like that," he said, grasping the arms of his chair with tense fingers. "She's doing all right here. It's healthy here, and I am sure the schools are good enough. Nellie has never said anything to me about boarding school. Why--why, Mr. Fairfax, Phoebe's only five--not quite that, and I--I think it would be cruel to put her off among strangers. When she's fifteen or sixteen, maybe, but not now. Nellie don't mean that, I'm sure." "There is a splendid school for little girls up in Montreal--a sort of convent, you know. They get the best of training, moral, spiritual, and physical. It is an ideal life for a child. Nellie has been thinking a great deal of sending her there. In fact, she has practically decided to----" Harvey came to his feet slowly, dizzily. "I can't believe it. She wouldn't send the poor little thing up there all alone; no, sir! I--I wouldn't let her do it." He was pacing the floor. His forehead was moist. "Miss Duluth appreciates one condition that you don't seem able to grasp," said Fairfax, bluntly. "She wants to keep the child as far removed from stage life and its environments as possible. She wants her to have every advantage, every opportunity to grow up entirely out of reach of the--er--influences which now threaten to surround her." Harvey stopped in front of him. "Is this what you came out here for, Mr. Fairfax? Did Nellie tell you to do this?" "I will be perfectly frank with you. She asked me to come out and talk it over with you." "Why didn't she come herself?" "She evidently was afraid that you would overrule her in the matter." "I never overruled her in my life," cried Harvey. "She isn't afraid of me. There's something else." "I can only say, sir, that she intends to put the child in the convent before Christmas. She goes on the road after the holidays," said Fairfax, setting his huge jaw. Harvey sat down suddenly, limp as a rag. His mouth filled with water--a cold, sickening moisture that rendered him speechless for a moment. He swallowed painfully. His eyes swept the little room as if in search of something to prove that this was the place for Phoebe--this quiet, happy little cottage of theirs. "Before Christmas?" he murmured. "See here, Mr.--ah--Mr., here is the situation in a nutshell:--Nellie doesn't see why she should be keeping up two establishments. It's expensive. The child will be comfortable and happy in the convent and this house will be off her hands. She----" "Why don't she give up her flat in town?" demanded Harvey, miserably. "That's where the money goes." "She expects to give it up the first of the year," said Fairfax. "The road tour lasts till May. She is going to Europe for the summer." "To Europe?" gasped Harvey, feeling the floor sink under his feet. He did not think to inquire what was to become of him in the new arrangement. "She needs a sea voyage, travel--a long vacation, in fact. It is fully decided. So, you see, the convent is the place for Phoebe." "But where do I come in?" cried the unhappy father. "Does she think for a minute that I will put my child in a convent so that we may be free to go to Europe and do things like that? No, sir! Dammit, I won't go to Europe and leave Phoebe in a----" Fairfax was getting tired of the argument. Moreover, he was uncomfortable and decidedly impatient to have it over with. He cut in rather harshly on the other's lamentations. "If you think she's going to take you to Europe, you're very much mistaken. Why, man, have you no pride? Can't you understand what a damned useless bit of dead weight you are, hanging to her neck?" It was out at last. Harvey sat there staring at him, very still; such a pathetic figure that it seemed like rank cowardice to strike again. And yet Fairfax, now that he had begun, was eager to go on striking this helpless, inoffensive creature with all the frenzy of the brutal victor who stamps out the life of his vanquished foe. "She supports you. You haven't earned a dollar in four years. I have it from her, and from others. It is commonly understood that you won't work, you won't do a stroke toward supporting the child. You are a leech, a barnacle, a--a--well, a loafer. If you had a drop of real man's blood in you, you'd get out and earn enough to buy clothes for yourself, at least, and the money for a hair cut or a shoe shine. She has been too good to you, my little man. You can't blame her for getting tired of it. The great wonder is that she has stood for it so long." Words struggled from Harvey's pallid lips. "But she loves me," he said. "It's all understood between us. I gave her the start in life. She will tell you so. I----" "You never did a thing for her in your life," broke in the big man, harshly. He was consumed by an ungovernable hatred for this little man who was the husband of the woman he coveted. "I've always wanted to get a job. She wouldn't let me," protested Harvey, a red spot coming into each of his cheeks. "I don't want to take the money she earns. I never have wanted to. But she says my place is here at home, with Phoebe. Somebody's got to look after the child. We've talked it over a----" "I don't want to hear about it," snapped Fairfax, hitting the arm of his chair with his fist. "You're no good, that's all there is to it. You are a joke, a laughing stock. Do you suppose that she can possibly love a man like you? A woman wants a man about her, not the caricature of one." "I intend to get a job as soon as----" began Harvey, as if he had not heard a word his visitor was saying. "Now, see here," exclaimed Fairfax, coming to his feet. "I'm a man of few words. I came out here to make you a proposition. It is between you and me, and no one need be the wiser. I'm not such a fool as to intrust a thing of this kind to an outsider. Is there any likelihood of any one hearing us?" Nellie's husband shrank lower into his chair and shook his head. He seemed to have lost the power of speech. Fairfax drew a chair up closer, however, and lowered his voice. "You've got a price. Men of your type always have. I told Nellie I would see you to-day. I'll be plain with you. She's tired of you, of this miserable attachment. You are impossible. That's settled. We won't go into that. Now I'm here, man to man, to find out how much you will take and agree to a separation." Harvey stiffened. He thought for a moment that his heart had stopped beating. "I don't believe I understand," he muttered. "Don't you understand the word 'separation'?" "Agree to a separation from what? Great God, you don't mean a separation from Phoebe?" "Don't be a fool! Use your brain, if you've got one." "Do--you--mean--Nellie?" fell slowly, painfully from the dry lips of the little man in the Morris chair. "Certainly." "Does she want to--to leave me?" The tears started in his big blue eyes. He blinked violently. "It has come to that. She can't go on as she has been going. It's ridiculous. You are anxious to go back to Blakeville, she says. Well, that's where you belong. Somebody's drug store out there you'd like to own, I believe. Now, I am prepared to see that you get that drug store and a matter of ten or twenty thousand dollars besides. Money means nothing to me. All you have to do is to make no answer to the charges she will bring----" Harvey leaped to his feet with a cry of abject pain. "Did she send you here to say this to me?" he cried, shrilly, his figure shaking with suppressed fury. "No," said Fairfax, involuntarily drawing back. "This is between you and me. She doesn't know----" "Then, damn you!" shrieked Harvey, shaking his fist in the big man's face, "what do you mean by coming here like this? What do you think I am? Get out of here! I'm a joke, am I? Well, I'll show you and her and everybody else that I'm a hell of a joke, let me tell you that! I was good enough for her once. I won her away from every fellow in Blakeville. I can do it again. I'll show you, you big bluffer! Now, get out! Don't you ever come here again, and--don't you ever go near my wife again!" Fairfax had arisen. He was smiling, despite his astonishment. "I fancy you will find you can't go so far as that," he sneered. "Get out, or I'll throw you out!" "Better think it over. Twenty-five thousand and no questions asked. Take a day or two to think----" With a shriek of rage Harvey threw himself at the big man, striking out with all his might. Taken by surprise, Fairfax fell away before the attack, which, though seemingly impotent, was as fierce as that of a wildcat. The New Yorker was in no danger. He warded off the blows with ease, all the time imploring the infuriated Harvey to be sensible, to be calm. But with a heroism born of shame and despair the little man swung his arms like windmills, clawing, scratching, until the air seemed full of them. Fairfax's huge head was out of reach. In his blind fury Harvey did not take that into account. He struck at it with all the power in his thin little arms, always falling so far short that the efforts were ludicrous. Fairfax began to look about in alarm. The noise of the conflict was sure to attract the attention of the servants. He began backing toward the doorway. Suddenly Harvey changed his fruitless tactics. He drove the toe of his shoe squarely against the shinbone of the big man. With a roar of rage Fairfax hurled himself upon the panting foe. "I'll smash your head, you little devil," he roared, and struck out viciously with one of his huge fists. The blow landed squarely on Harvey's eye. He fell in a heap several feet away. Half-dazed, he tried to get to his feet. The big man, all the brute in him aroused, sprang forward and drove another savage blow into the bleak, white face of the little one. Again he struck. Then he lifted Harvey bodily from the floor and held him up against the wall, his big hand on his throat. "How do you like it?" he snarled, slapping the helpless, half-conscious man in the face with his open hand--loud, stinging blows that almost knocked the head off the shoulders. "Will you agree to my proposition now?" From Harvey's broken lips oozed a strangled-- "No!" Fairfax struck again and then let him slide to the floor. "You damned little coward!" he grated. "To kick a man like that!" He rushed from the room, grabbed his hat and coat in the hall, and was out of the house like a whirlwind. The whir of a motor came vaguely, indistinctly to Harvey's ears. He was lying close to the window. As if in a dream he lifted himself feebly to his knees and looked out of the window, not knowing exactly what he did nor why he did it. A big green car was leaving his front gate. He was a long time in recalling who came up in it. His breath was coming slowly. He tried to speak, but a strange, unnatural wheeze came from his lips. A fit of coughing followed. At last he got upon his feet, steadying himself against the window casing. For a long time he stood there, working it all out in his dizzy, thumping brain. He put his hand to his lips and then stared dully at the stains that covered it when he took it away. Then it all came back to him with a rush. Like a guilty, hunted thing he slunk upstairs to his room, carefully avoiding the room in which Phoebe was being bedecked in her Sunday frock. Her high, shrill voice came to his ears. He was weeping bitterly, sobbing like a whipped child. He almost fainted when he first peered into the mirror on his bureau. His eyes were beginning to puff out like great knobs, his face and shirt front were saturated with his own plucky blood. Plucky! The word occurred to him as he looked. Yes, he had been plucky. He didn't know it was in him to be so plucky. A sort of pride in himself arose to offset the pain and mortification. Yes, he had defended his honour and Nellie's. She should hear of it! He would tell her what he had done and how Fairfax had struck him down with a chair. She would then deny to him that she had said those awful things about him. She would be proud of him! Carefully he washed his hands and face. With trembling fingers he applied court-plaster to his lips, acting with speed because his eyes were closing. Some one had told him that raw beefsteak was good for black eyes. He wondered if bacon would do as well. There was no beefsteak in the house. His legs faltered as he made his way to the back stairs. Bridget was coming up. She started back with a howl. "Come here, Bridget," he whispered. "Into my room. Be quick!" He retreated. He would employ her aid and swear her to secrecy. The Irish know a great deal about fighting, he reflected. "In the name av Hivvin, sor, what has happened to yez?" whispered Bridget, aghast in the doorway. "Come in and I'll tell you," said he, with a groan. Presently a childish voice came clamouring at the locked door. He heard it as from afar. Bridget paused in her ministrations. He had just said:-- "I will take boxing lessons and physical culture of your brother, Bridget. You think he can build me up? I know I'm a bit run down. No exercise, you know. Still, I believe I would have thrashed him to a frazzle if I hadn't stumbled. That was when he kicked me here. I got this falling against the table." "Yis, sor," said Bridget, dutifully. In response to the pounding on the door, he called out, bravely:-- "You can't come in now, Phoebe. Papa has hurt himself a little bit. I'll come out soon." "I got my Sunday dress on, daddy," cried the childish voice. "And I'm all spruced up. Has the nice gentleman gone away?" His head sank into his hands. "Yes, dearie, he's gone," he replied, in muffled tones. CHAPTER IV LUNCHEON For several days, he moped about the house, not even venturing upon the porch, his face a sight to behold. His spirits were lower than they had been in all his life. The unmerciful beating he had sustained at the hands of Fairfax was not the sole cause of his depression. As the consequences of that pummelling subsided, the conditions which led up to it forced themselves upon him with such horrifying immensity that he fairly staggered under them. It slowly dawned on him that there was something very sinister in Fairfax's visit, something terrible. Nellie's protracted stay in town, her strange neglect of Phoebe, to say nothing of himself, the presence of Fairfax in her dressing-room that night, and a great many circumstances which came plainly to mind, now that he considered them worth while noticing, all went a long way toward justifying Fairfax in coming to him with the base proposition that had resulted so seriously to his countenance. Nellie was tired of him! He did not belong to her world. That was the sum and substance of it. As he dropped out of her world, some one else quite naturally rose to fill the void. That person was Fairfax. The big man had said that she wanted a separation, she wanted to provide a safe haven for Phoebe. The inference was plain. She wanted to get rid of him in order to marry Fairfax. Fairfax had been honest enough to confess that he was acting on his own initiative in proposing the bribe, but there must have been something behind it all. He had spoken of "charges." What charge could Nellie bring against him? He was two days in arriving at the only one--failure to provide. Yes, that was it. "Failure to provide." How he hated the words. How he despised men who did not provide for their wives. He had never thought of himself in that light before. But it was true, all true. And Nellie was slipping away from him as the result. Not only Nellie but Phoebe. She would be taken from him. "I don't drink," he argued with himself, "and I've never treated her cruelly. Other women don't interest me. I never swear at her. I've never beaten her. I've always loved her. So it must be that I'm 'no good,' just as that scoundrel says. 'No good!' Why, she knows better than that. There never was a fellow who worked harder than I did for Mr. Davis. I drew trade to his store. Anybody in Blakeville will swear to that. Haven't I tried my best to get a job in the same shows with her? Wasn't I the best comedian they had in the dramatic club? I've never had the chance to show what I could do, and Nellie knows it. But I'll show them all! I'll make that big brute wish he'd never been born. I'll--I'll assert myself. He shan't take her away from me." His resolutions soared to great heights, only to succumb to chilly blasts that sent them shrivelled back to the lowest depths. What could he do against a man who had all the money that Fairfax possessed? What could he offer for Nellie, now that some one else had put a stupendous price on her? He remembered reading about an oil painting that originally sold for five hundred francs and afterward brought forty thousand dollars. Somehow he likened Nellie to a picture, with the reservation that he didn't believe any painting on earth was worth forty thousand dollars. If there was such a thing, he had never seen it. Then he began to think of poor Nellie cast helpless among the tempters. She was like a child among voracious beasts of prey. No wonder she felt hard toward him! He was to blame, terribly to blame. In the highest, most exalted state of remorse he wept, not once but often. His poor little Nellie! In one of these strange ever-growing flights of combined self-reproach and self-exaltation he so vividly imagined himself as a rescuer, as an able-bodied defender against all the ills and evils that beset her, that the fancy took the shape of positive determination. He made up his mind to take her off the stage, back to Blakeville, and to an environment so sweet and pure that her life would be one long season of joy and happiness. With the growth of this resolution he began to plan his own personal rehabilitation. First of all, he would let his face recover its natural shape; then he would cultivate muscle and brawn at the emporium of Professor Flaherty; moreover, he would devote considerable attention to his own personal appearance and to the habits of the "men about town." He would fight the tempters with their own weapons--the corkscrew, the lobster pick, the knife and fork, and the nut-splitter! He did not emerge from the house for five days. By that time he was fairly presentable. It was Annie's day out, so he took Phoebe for a little walk. As for Phoebe, she never passed a certain door upstairs without kicking at it with first one, then the other of her tiny feet, in revenge for the way it had hurt her father by remaining open so that he could bump into it on that bloody, terrifying day. She sent little darts of exquisite pain through him by constantly alluding to the real devastator as "that nice Mr. Fairy-fax." It was her pleasure to regard him as a great big fairy who had promised her in secret that she would some day be like Cinderella and have all the riches the slipper showered upon that poor little lady. As they were returning home after a stroll through a rather remote street, they came upon Mr. Butler, who was down on his knees fixing something or other about his automobile. Harvey thought it a good opportunity to start his crusade against New York City. "Hello," he said, halting. Butler looked up. He was mad as a wet hen to begin with. "Hello," he snarled, resuming his work. "I've been thinking about that little----" "Get out of the light, will you?" Harvey moved over, dragging Phoebe after him. "That little scheme of ours to dine together in town some night. You remember we talked about it----" "No, I don't," snapped Butler. "We might lunch together early next week. I know a nice little place on Seventh Avenue where you get fine spaghetti. We----" "I'm booked for a whole month of luncheons," said Butler, sitting back on his heels to stare at this impossible person. "Can't join you." "Some other time, then," said Harvey, waving his hand genially. "Your wife home yet?" Butler got upon his feet. "Say," said he, aggressively, "do you know she's heard about that idiotic trip of mine to town that night? Fairfax told everybody, and somebody's wife told Mrs. Butler. It got me in a devil of a mess." "You don't say so!" "Yes, I do say so. Next time you catch me--But, what's the use?" He turned to his work with an expressive shrug of his shoulders. "I'll have my wife explain everything to Mrs. Butler the first time she comes out," said Harvey, more bravely than he felt. He could not help wondering when Nellie would come out. "It isn't necessary," Butler made haste to assure him. Harvey was silent for a moment. "Fixing your automobile?" he asked, unwilling to give it up without another effort. "What do you suppose I'm doing?" "It's wonderful how fast one of these little one-seated cars can go," mused Harvey. "Cheap, too; ain't they?" Butler faced him again, malice in his glance. "It's not in it with that big green car your wife uses," he said, distinctly. "Big green----" began Harvey, blankly. Then he understood. He swallowed hard, straightened Phoebe's hat with infinite care and gentleness, and looking over Butler's head, managed to say, quite calmly:--"It used to be blue. We've had it painted. Come along, Phoebe, Mr. Butler's busy. We mustn't bother him. So long, Butler." "So long," said Mr. Butler, suddenly intent upon finding something in the tool-box. The pair moved on. Out of the corner of his eye Butler watched them turn the corner below. "Poor little guy!" he said to the monkey wrench. The big green car! All the way home that juggernaut green car ran through, over, and around him. He could see nothing else, think of nothing else. A big green car! That evening he got from Bridget the address of her brother, Professor Flaherty, the physical trainer and body builder. In the morning he examined himself in the mirror, a fever of restlessness and impatience afflicting him with the desire to be once more presentable to the world. He had been encouraged by the fact that Butler had offered no comment on the black rims around his eyes. They must be disappearing. With his chin in his hands he sat across the room staring at his reflection in the glass, a gloomy, desolate figure. "It wouldn't be wise to apply for a job until these eyes are all right again," he was saying to himself, bitterly. "Nobody would hire a man with a pair of black eyes and a busted lip--especially a druggist. I'll simply have to wait a few days longer. Heigh-ho! To-morrow's Sunday again. I--I wonder if Nellie will be out to see us." But Nellie did not come out. She journeyed far and fast in a big green car, but it was in another direction. Thursday of the next week witnessed the sallying forth of Harvey What's-His-Name, moved to energy by a long dormant and mournfully acquired ambition. The delay had been irksome. Nellie's check for the month's expenses had arrived in the mail that morning. He folded it carefully and put it away in his pocketbook, firmly resolved not to present it at the bank. He intended to return it to her with the announcement that he had secured a position and hereafter would do the providing. Spick and span in his best checked suit, his hat tilted airily over one ear, he stepped briskly down the street. You wouldn't have known him, I am sure, with his walking-stick in one hand, his light spring overcoat over the other arm. A freshly cleaned pair of grey gloves, smelling of gasoline, covered his hands. On the lapel of his coat loomed a splendid yellow chrysanthemum. Regular football weather, he had said. The first drug store he came to he entered with an air of confidence. No, the proprietor said, he didn't need an assistant. He went on to the next. The same polite answer, with the additional information, in response to a suggestion by the applicant, that the soda-water season was over. Undaunted, he stopped in at the restaurant in the block below. The proprietor of the place looked so sullen and forbidding that Harvey lost his courage and instead of asking outright for a position as manager he asked for a cup of coffee and a couple of fried eggs. As the result of this extra and quite superfluous breakfast he applied for the job. The man looked him over scornfully. "I'm the manager and the whole works combined," he said. "I need a dish-washer, come to think of it. Four a week and board. You can go to work to-day if----" But Harvey stalked out, swinging his cane manfully. "Well, God knows I've tried hard enough," he said to himself, resignedly, as he headed for the railway station. It was still six minutes of train time. "I'll write to Mr. Davis out in Blakeville this evening. He told me that my place would always be open to me." It was nearly one o'clock when he appeared at Nellie's apartment. Rachel admitted him. He hung his hat and coat on the rack, deposited his cane in the corner, and sauntered coolly into the little sitting-room, the maid looking on in no little wonder and uneasiness. "Where's my wife?" he asked, taking up the morning paper from the centre table and preparing to make himself at home in the big armchair. "She's out to lunch, sir." He laid the paper down. "Where?" Rachel mentioned a prominent downtown café affected by the profession. "Will you have lunch here, sir?" she inquired. "No," said he, determinedly. "Thank you just the same. I'm lunching downtown. I--I thought perhaps she'd like to join me." Rachel rang for the elevator and he departed, amiably doffing his hat to her as he dropped to the floor below. At one of the popular corner tables in the big café a party of men and women were seated, seven or eight in all. Nellie Duluth had her back toward the other tables in the room. It was a bit of modesty that she always affected. She did not like being stared at. Besides, she could hold her audience to the very end, so to speak, for all in the place knew she was there and were willing to wait until she condescended to face them in the process of departure. It was a very gay party, comprising a grand-opera soprano and a tenor of world-wide reputation, as well as three or four very well-known New Yorkers. Manifestly, it was Fairfax's luncheon. The crowd at this table was observed by all the neck-craners in the place. Every one was telling every one else what every one knew:--"That's Nellie Duluth over there." As the place began to clear out and tables were being abandoned here and there, a small man in a checked suit appeared in the doorway. An attendant took his hat and coat away from him while he was gazing with kaleidoscopic instability of vision upon the gay scene before him. He had left his walking-stick in a street car, a circumstance which delayed him a long time, for, on missing it, he waited at a corner in the hope of recognising the motorman on his return trip up Madison Avenue. The head-waiter was bowing before him and murmuring, "How many, sir?" "How many what?" mumbled Harvey, with a start. "In your party?" asked the man, not half so politely and with a degree of distance in his attitude. It did not look profitable. "Oh! Only one, sir. Just a sandwich and a cup of coffee, I think." There was a little table away over in the corner sandwiched between the doors of entrance and egress for laden waiters and 'bus boys. Toward this a hastily summoned second or third assistant conducted the newcomer. Twice during the process of traversing this illimitable space Harvey bumped against chairs occupied by merry persons who suddenly became crabbed and asked him who the devil he was stumbling over. A blonde, flushed woman who sat opposite Nellie at the table in the corner caught sight of him as he passed. She stared hard for a moment and then allowed a queer expression to come into her eyes. "For Heaven's sake!" she exclaimed, with considerable force. "What's the matter? Your husband?" demanded Nellie Duluth, with a laugh. "No," she said, staring harder. "Why, I can't be mistaken. Yes, as I live, it's Mr.--Mr. What's-His-Name, your husband, Nellie." "Don't turn 'round, Nellie," whispered Fairfax, who sat beside her. "I don't believe it!" cried Nellie, readily. "It isn't possible for Harvey to be here. Where is he?" she demanded in the same breath, looking over her shoulder. Harvey was getting out of the way of a 'bus boy and a stack of chinaware and in the way of a waiter with a tray of peach Melbas when she espied him. "For the land's sake!" she gasped, going clear back to Blakeville for the expression. "I don't dare look, Carrie. Tell me, has he got a--a fairy with him? Break it gently." "Fairy?" sneered Fairfax, suddenly uncomfortable. "Why, he's lost in the wood. He's alone on a desert isle. What the deuce is he doing here?" Harvey gave his order to the disdainful waiter and then settled back in his chair for the first deliberate look around the room in quest of his wife. Their eyes met. She had turned halfway round in her chair and was looking at him with wide-open, unbelieving eyes. He felt himself suddenly tied hand and foot to the chair. Now that he had found her he could do no more than stare at her in utter bewilderment. He had come tilting at windmills. The flush deepened in her cheek as she turned her attention to the dessert that had just been set down before her. She was very quiet, in marked contrast to her mood of the moment before. Fairfax made a remark which set the others to laughing. She did not smile, but toyed nervously with the dessert fork. Under cover of the laughter he leaned over and whispered, an anxious, troubled note in his voice:-- "I'll call the head waiter and have him put out before he does anything crazy." "Put out?" she repeated. "Why, what do you think he'd try to do?" "He's got an ugly look in his eye. I tell you, he'll create a scene. That's what he's here for. You remember what happened----" She laughed shrilly. "He won't shoot any one," she said in his ear. "Harvey create a scene! Oh, that's rich!" "He hasn't forgotten the thrashing I gave him. He has been brooding over it, Nellie." Fairfax was livid about the eyes. "Well, I respect him for trying to thrash you, even though he got the worst of it." She looked again in Harvey's direction. He was still staring steadily at her. "He's all alone over there and he's miserable. I can't stand it. I'm going over to sit with him." As she arose Fairfax reached out and grasped her arm. "Don't be a fool," he said, in dismay. "I won't," she replied, sweetly. "Trust me. So long, people. I'm going over to have coffee with my husband." If the occupants of the big café were surprised to see Nellie Duluth make her way over to the table and sit down with the queer little person in checks, not so Harvey. He arose to greet her and would have kissed her if she had not restrained him. He was gratified, overjoyed, but not surprised. "Hello!" she said, sharply, to cover the inward disquiet that possessed her. She was looking intently into his eyes as if searching for something she dreaded. "Hello!" was his response. He was still a trifle dazed. She sat down opposite him. Before she could think of anything further to say the head waiter rushed up to inquire if Miss Duluth and her friend wouldn't prefer a table at one of the windows. "No, this will do," she said, thankful for the interruption. "We are doing very nicely," said Harvey, rather pompously, adding in a loud voice of authority:--"Tell that fellow to hustle my luncheon along, will you?" Then, turning to Nellie, he said:--"You don't look as though you'd ever been sick a day in your life, Nellie." She laughed uncomfortably. "How are you, Harvey? And Phoebe?" "Fine. Never better. Why don't you come out and see us occasionally?" "May I order a cup of black coffee?" she asked, ignoring the question. She was sorely puzzled. "Have a big one," he urged, signalling a waiter. Her curiosity conquered. "What in Heaven's name brought you here, Harvey?" He told her of the word Rachel had given him. Nellie made a mental note of the intention to speak plainly to Rachel. "Who are your friends?" he asked. Just then he caught a glimpse of Fairfax's face. He turned very cold. "Mr. Fairfax is giving a luncheon for two of the grand-opera people," she explained. He forced his courage. "I don't want you to have anything more to do with that man," he said. "He's a scoundrel." "Now, don't be silly," she cried. "What train are you going out on?" "I don't know. Maybe I'll stay in. I'll go up to your flat, I guess, for a couple of days. Phoebe's all right. She's over the diphtheria now----" "Diphtheria?" gasped Nellie, wide-eyed, overlooking his other declaration, which, by the way, was of small moment. "Almost died, poor kiddie." She flared up in an instant. "Why wasn't I told? What were you thinking of, you little fool?" "If you had taken the trouble to come out to Tarrytown, you could have found out for yourself," he retorted, coolly. "Now, see here, Nellie, I've come in to see you and to have a very plain talk with you. So just hold your horses. Don't fly off the handle. I am the head of this family and I'm going to boss it from this time on." "You----" she began, in a furious little shriek, her eyes blazing. She caught herself up in time. Two or three people nearby looked up at the sound of her raised voice. She lowered it to a shrill, intense half-whisper. "What do you mean by coming here in this way? Everybody is laughing at me. You make me ridiculous. I won't stand for it; do you hear?" He was colder if possible than before, but he was resolute. "We've got to have an understanding, the sooner the better," he said, quietly. "Yes, you're right," she repeated; "the sooner the better." "We can't talk here," he said, suddenly conscious that the eyes of many were upon them. "Go over and ask that infernal sneak to excuse you, and we'll go up to the flat." "I'm going motoring this aft----" "You do as I tell you!" said he, in a strange voice. "Why, Harvey----" she stammered, catching her breath. "When you've had your coffee," he added. She sipped her coffee in silence, in wonder, in bitter resentment. He munched the club sandwich and sucked the coffee through his thin moustache with a vehemence that grated on her nerves terribly. "I've had all I want," she said, suddenly putting the little cup down with a crash. "Then go over and tell 'em you've got to go home." She crossed the room, red-faced and angry. He watched her as she made an announcement to the party, saw them laugh uproariously, and smiled in triumph over the evidence of annoyance on the part of Fairfax. Nellie was whispering something close to the big man's ear, and he was shaking his head vigorously. Then she waved her hand to the party and started away. Fairfax arose to follow her. As he did so, Harvey came to his feet and advanced. The big man stopped short, with a look of actual alarm in his eyes, and went back to his seat, hastily motioning to the head waiter. Five minutes later Miss Duluth emerged from the café, followed by the little man in the checked suit. An attendant blew his whistle and called out down the line of waiting motors:-- "Mr. Fairfax's car up!" "Get me a taxi," ordered Nellie, hastily. The man betrayed his surprise. She was obliged to repeat the order. "What does a taxi to--to our place cost?" demanded Harvey, feeling in his pocket. "Never mind," she snapped. "I'll pay for it." "No, you won't," he asserted. "I raised seventeen dollars yesterday on the watch mother gave me. It's my own money, Nellie, remember that." Rachel was plainly amazed when the couple walked into the apartment. The two at once resumed the conversation they had carried on so vigorously in the taxicab on the way up from downtown. Nellie did not remove her hat, sharply commanding Rachel to leave the room. "No," she said, "she simply has to go to the convent. She'll be safe there, no matter how things turn out for you and me, Harve, I insist on that." "Things are going to turn out all right for us, Nellie," he protested, a plaintive note in his voice. It was easily to be seen which had been the dominating force in the ride home. "Now, you've got to be reasonable, Harve," she said, firmly. "We can't go on as we have been going. Something's just got to happen." "Well, doggone it, haven't I said that I'll agree to your trip to Europe? I won't put a stop to that. I see your point clearly. The managers think it wise for you to do a bit of studying abroad. I can see that. I'm not going to be mean. Three months' hard work over there will get you into grand-opera sure. But that has nothing to do with Phoebe. She can go to Blakeville with me, and then when you come back next fall I'll have a job here in New York and we'll----" "Don't talk foolishness," she blurted out. "You've said that three or four times. First you wanted me to go back to Blakeville to live. You insisted on it. What do you think I am? Why, I wouldn't go back to Blakeville if Heaven was suddenly discovered to be located there instead of up in the sky. That's settled. No Blakeville for me. Or Phoebe either. Do you suppose I'm going to have that child grow up like--like"--she changed the word and continued--"like a yap?" "All I ask is that you will give me a chance to show what I can do," he said, earnestly. "You can do that just as well with Phoebe in the convent, as I've said before." "She's as much my child as she is yours," he proclaimed, stoutly. "Then you ought to be willing to do the sensible thing by her." "Why, good Lord, Nell, she's only five," he groaned. "She'll die of homesickness." "Nonsense! She'll forget both of us in a month and be happy." "She won't forget me!" he exclaimed. "Well, I've said my say," she announced, pacing the floor. "Suppose we agree to disagree. Well, isn't it better to have her out of the mess?" "I won't give her up, derned if I do!" "Say, don't you know if it comes to a question of law, the Court will give her to me?" "I'm not trying to take her away from you." "You're trying to ruin my career." "Fairfax has put all this into your head, Nellie, dear. He's a low-down rascal." "He's my friend, and a good one, too. I don't believe he offered you that money to agree to a separation." "Darn it all, you can still see the scar on my lip. That ought to prove something. If I hadn't stumbled, I'd have knocked him silly. As it was, he kicked me in the face when I was down." "He told me you assaulted him without cause." "He lied." "Well, that's neither here nor there. I'm sorry you were beaten up so badly. It wasn't right, I'll admit. He said you were plucky, Harve. I couldn't believe him at first." His face brightened. "You give me a chance and I'll show you how plucky I am!" he cried. "Come on now, Nellie, let's make a fresh start." She was silent for a long time. At heart she was fair and honest. She had lost her love and respect for the little man, but, after all, was that altogether his fault? She was sorry for him. "Well, I'll think it over," she said, at last. "I'll write to Mr. Davis to-night!" he cried, encouraged. "All right. I hope he'll give you a job," said she, also brightening, but for an entirely different reason. "You'll give up this awful thing of--of separating; won't you?" "I'll promise one thing, Harvey," said she, suddenly sincere. "I won't do anything until I come back from the road. That's fair, isn't it? And I'll tell you what else I'll do. I will let Phoebe stay with you in Tarrytown until the end of the tour--in May." "But I'm going to Blakeville," he protested. "No," said she, firmly, "I won't agree to that. Either you stay in Tarrytown or she goes to the convent." "I can't get work in Tarrytown." "You can tell Mr. Davis you will come out to Blakeville in time for the opening of the soda-water season. I'll do the work for the family till then. That's all I'll consent to. I'll ask for a legal separation if you don't agree to that." "I--I'll think it over," he said, feebly; "I'll stay here with you for a couple of days, and----" "You will do nothing of the sort!" she cried. "Do you suppose I'm going to spoil my chances for a separation, if I want to apply, by letting you live in the same house with me? Why, that would be wasting the two months already gone." He did not comprehend, and he was afraid to ask for an explanation. The term "failure to provide" was the only one he could get through his head; "desertion" was out of the question. His brow was wet with the sweat of a losing conflict. He saw that he would have to accept her ultimatum and trust to luck to provide a way out of the difficulty. Time would justify him, he was confident. In the meantime, he would ease his conscience by returning the check, knowing full well that it would not be accepted. He would then take it, of course, with reservations. Every dollar was to be paid back when he obtained a satisfactory position. He determined, however, to extract a promise from her before giving in. "I will consent, Nellie, on the condition that you stop seeing this fellow Fairfax and riding around in his big green car. I won't stand for that." Nellie smiled, more to herself than to him. She had Fairfax in the meshes. He was safe. The man was madly in love with her. The instant she was freed from Harvey he stood ready to become her husband--Fairfax, with all his money and all his power. And that is precisely what she was aiming at. She could afford to smile, but somehow she was coming to feel that this little man who was now her husband had it in him, after all, to put up a fierce and desperate fight for his own. If he were pushed to the wall he would fight back like a wildcat, and well she knew that there would be disagreeable features in the fray. "If you are going to talk like that I'll never speak to you again," she said, banishing the smile. "Don't you trust me?" "Sure," he said, and he meant it. "That's not the point." "See here, Harve," she said, abruptly putting her hands on his shoulders and looking squarely into his eyes, "I want you to believe me when I say that I am a--a--well, a good woman." "I believe it," he said, solemnly. Then, as an after-thought, "and I want to say the same thing for myself." "I've never doubted you," said she, fervently. "Now, go home and let things stand as they are. Write to Mr. Davis to-night." "I will. I say, won't you give me a kiss?" She hesitated, still calculating. "Yes, if you promise not to tell anybody," she said, with mock solemnity. As she expected, he took it seriously. "Do you suppose I go 'round telling people I've kissed my wife?" Then she gave him a peck on the cheek and let it go as a kiss. "When will you be out to see us?" "Soon, I hope," she said, quickly. "Now go, Harve, I'm going to lie down and rest. Kiss Phoebe for me." He got to the door. She was fairly pushing him. "I feel better," he said, taking a long breath. "So do I," said she. He paused for a moment to frown in some perplexity. "Say, Nell, I left my cane in a street car coming down. Do you think it would be worth while to advertise for it?" CHAPTER V CHRISTMAS The weeks went slowly by and Christmas came to the little house in Tarrytown. He had become resigned but not reconciled to Nellie's continued and rather persistent absence, regarding it as the sinister proclamation of her intention to carry out the plan for separation in spite of all that he could do to avert the catastrophe. His devotion to Phoebe was more intense than ever; it had reached the stage of being pathetic. True to his word, he wrote to Mr. Davis, who in time responded, saying that he could give him a place at the soda fountain in May, but that the wages would of necessity be quite small, owing to the fact that the Greeks had invaded Blakeville with the corner fruit stands and soft-drink fountains. He could promise him eight dollars a week, or ten dollars if he would undertake to come to the store at six A.M. and sweep up, a task now performed by the proprietor himself, who found himself approaching an age and a state of health that craved a feast of luxury and ease hitherto untasted. Harvey was in considerable doubt as to his ability to live on ten dollars a week and support Phoebe, as well as to begin the task of reimbursing Nellie for her years of sacrifice. Still, it was better than nothing at all, so he accepted Mr. Davis' ten-dollar-a-week offer and sat back to wait for the coming of the first of May. In the meantime he would give Nellie some return for her money by doing the work now performed by Annie--or, more advisedly speaking, a portion of it. He would conduct Phoebe to the kindergarten and call for her at the close of sessions, besides dressing her in the morning, sewing on buttons for her, undressing her at night, and all such jobs as that, with the result that Annie came down a dollar a week in her wages and took an extra afternoon out. In this way he figured he could save Nellie at least thirty dollars. He also did the janitor's work about the place and looked after the furnace, creating a salvage of three dollars and a half a month. Moreover, instead of buying a new winter suit and replacing his shabby ulster with one more comely and presentable, he decided to wear his fall suit until January and then change off to his old blue serge spring suit, which still seemed far from shiny, so far as he could see. And so it was that Nellie's monthly check for $150 did very nicely. Any morning at half-past eight, except Sunday, you could have seen him going down the street with Phoebe at his side, her hand in his, bound for the kindergarten. He carried her little lunch basket and whistled merrily when not engaged in telling her about Santa Claus. She startled him one day by asking:-- "Are you going to be Santy this year, daddy, or is mamma?" He looked down at the rich little fur coat and muff Nellie had outfitted her with, at the expensive hat and the silk muffler, and sighed. "If you ask questions, Santy won't come at all," he said, darkly. "He's a mighty cranky old chap, Santy is." He did not take up physical culture with Professor Flaherty, partly on account of the expense, partly because he found that belabouring cannel coal and shaking down the furnace was more developing than he had expected. Raking the autumn leaves out of the front yard also was harder than he had any idea it would be. He was rather glad it was not the season for the lawn mower. Down in his heart he hoped that Nellie would come out for Christmas, but he knew there was no chance of it. She would have two performances on that day. He refrained from telling Phoebe until the very last minute that her mother would not be out for the holiday. He hadn't the heart to do it. He broke the news then by telling the child that her mother was snowbound and couldn't get there. An opportune fall of snow the day before Christmas gave him the inspiration. He set up the little Christmas tree in the back parlour, assisted by Bridget and Annie, after Phoebe had gone to bed on Christmas Eve. She had urged him to read to her about Tiny Tim, but he put her off with the announcement that Santa was likely to be around early on account of the fine sleighing, and if he saw that she wasn't asleep in bed he might skip the house entirely. The expressman, in delivering several boxes from town that afternoon, had said to his helper:-- "That little fellow that came to the door was Nellie Duluth's husband, Mr.--Mr.----Say, look on the last page there and see what his name is. He's a cheap skate. A dime! Wot do you think of that?" He held up the dime Harvey had given him and squinted at it as if it were almost too small to be seen with the naked eye. Nellie sent "loads" of presents to Phoebe--toys, books, candies, fruits, pretty dresses, a velvet coat, a tiny pair of opera glasses, strings of beads, bracelets, rings--dozens of things calculated to set a child mad with delight. There were pocketbooks, handkerchiefs, squirrel stoles and muffs for each of the servants, a box of cigars for the postman, another for the milkman, and a five-dollar bill for the janitor. There was nothing for Harvey. He looked for a long time at the envelope containing the five-dollar bill, an odd little smile creeping into his eyes. He was the janitor, he remembered. After a moment of indecision he slipped the bill into another envelope, which he marked "Charity" and laid aside until morning brought the mendicant who, with bare fingers and frosted lips, always came to play his mournful clarionet in front of the house. Surreptitiously he searched the two big boxes carefully, inwardly hoping that she had not forgotten--nay, ignored--him. But there was nothing there, not even a Christmas card! It was the first Christmas she had.... The postman brought a small box addressed to Phoebe. The handwriting was strange, but he thought nothing of it. He thought it was nice of Butler to remember his little one and lamented the fact that he had not bought something for the little Butlers, of whom there were seven. He tied a red ribbon around the sealed package and hung it on the tree. After it was all over he went upstairs and tried to read "Dombey & Son." But a mist came over his blue eyes and his vision carried him far beyond the printed page. He was not thinking of Nellie, but of his old mother, who had never forgotten to send him a Christmas present. Ah, if she were alive he would not be wondering to-night why Santa Claus had passed him by. He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, closed "Dombey & Son" for the night, and went to bed, turning his thoughts to the row of tiny stockings that hung from the mantelpiece downstairs--for Phoebe had put to use all that she could find--and then let them drift on through space to an apartment near Central Park, where Kris Kringle had delivered during the day a little packet containing the brooch he had purchased for his wife out of the money he had preserved from the sale of his watch some weeks before. He was glad he had sent Nellie a present. Bright and early the next morning he was up to have a final look at the tree before Phoebe came down. A blizzard was blowing furiously; the windows were frosted; the house was cheerless. He built the fires in the grates and sat about with his shoulders hunched up till the merry crackle of the coals put warmth into his veins. The furnace! He thought of it in time, and hurried to the basement to replenish the fires. They were out. He had forgotten them the night before. Bridget found him there later on, trying to start the kindling in the two furnaces. "I clean forgot 'em last night," he said, sheepishly. "I don't wonder, sor," said Bridget, quite genially for a cold morning. "Do you be after going upstairs this minute, sor. I'll have them roaring in two shakes av a lamb's tail. Mebby there's good news for yez up there. Annie's at the front door this minute, taking a telegram from the messenger bye, sor. Merry Christmas to ye, sor." "Merry Christmas, Bridget!" cried he, gaily. His heart had leaped at the news she brought. A telegram from Nellie! Hurrah! He rushed upstairs without brushing the coal dust from his hands. The boy was waiting for his tip. Harvey gave him a quarter and wished him a merry Christmas. "A miserable day to be out," said he, undecided whether to ask the half-frozen lad to stay and have a bite of breakfast or to let him go out into the weather. "It's nothin' when you gets used to it," said the blue-capped philosopher, and took his departure. "But it's the getting used to it," said Harvey to Annie as she handed him the message. He tore open the envelope. She saw the light die out of his eyes. The message was from Ripton, the manager, and read:-- "Please send Phoebe in with the nurse to see the matinée to-day." The invitation was explicit enough. He was not wanted. If he had a secret inclination to ignore the command altogether, it was frustrated by his own short-sightedness. He gulped, and then read the despatch aloud for the benefit of the maid. When it was too late he wished he had not done so. Annie beamed. "Oh, sir, I've always wanted to see Miss Duluth act. I will take good care of Phoebe." He considered it beneath his dignity to invite her into a conspiracy against the child, so he gloomily announced that he would go in with them on the one-o'clock train and stay to bring them out. The Christmas tree was a great success. Phoebe was in raptures. He quite forgot his own disappointment in watching her joyous antics. As the distributor of the presents that hung on the gaily trimmed and dazzling cedar, he came at last to the little package from Butler. It contained a beautiful gold chain, at the end of which hung suspended a small diamond-studded slipper--blue enamel, fairly covered with rose diamonds. Phoebe screamed with delight. Her father's face was a study. "Why, they are diamonds!" he murmured. "Surely Butler wouldn't be giving presents like this." A card fluttered to the floor. He picked it up and read:--"A slipper for my little Cinderella. Keep it and it will bring good luck." There was no name, but he knew who had sent it. With a cry of rage he snatched the dainty trinket from her hand and threw it on the floor, raising his foot to stamp it out of shape with his heel. His first vicious attempt missed the slipper altogether, and before he could repeat it the child was on the floor clutching it in her fingers, whimpering strangely. The servants looked on in astonishment. He drew back, mumbling something under his breath. In a moment he regained control of himself. "It--it isn't meant for you, darling," he said, hoarsely. "Santy left it here by mistake. We will send it back to him. It belongs to some other poor little girl." "But I am Cinderella!" she cried. "Mr. Fairy-fax said so. He told Santy to bring it to me. Please, daddy--please!" He removed it gently from her fingers and dropped it into his pocket. His face was very white. "Santy isn't that kind of a man," he said, without rhyme or reason. "Now, don't cry, dearie. Here's another present from mamma. See!" Later in the morning, after she had quite forgotten the slipper, he put it back in the box, wrapped it carefully, and addressed the package to L. Z. Fairfax, in New York City, without explanation or comment. [Illustration: Copyright, 1911, by Dodd, Mead & Company Phoebe] Before the morning was half over he was playing with Phoebe and her toys quite as childishly and gleefully as she, his heart in the fun she was having, his mind almost wholly cleared of the bitterness and rancour that so recently had filled it to overflowing. The three of them floundered through the snowdrifts to the station, laughing and shouting with a merriment that proved infectious. The long-obscured sun came out and caught the disease, for he smiled broadly, and the wind gave over snarling and smirked with an amiability that must have surprised the shivering horses standing desolate in front of certain places wherein their owners partook of Christmas cheer that was warm. Harvey took Phoebe and the nurse to the theatre in a cab. He went up to the box-office window and asked for the two tickets. The seller was most agreeable. He handed out the little envelope with the words:-- "A packed house to-day, Mr.--Mr.--er--ah, and--sold out for to-night. Here you are, with Miss Duluth's compliments--the best seats in the house. And here is a note for--er--yes, for the nurse." Annie read the note. It was from Nellie, instructing her to bring Phoebe to her dressing-room after the performance, where they would have supper later on. Harvey saw them pass in to the warm theatre and then slowly wandered out to the bleak, wind-swept street. There was nothing for him to do; nowhere that he could go to seek cheerful companions. For an hour or more he wandered up and down Broadway, his shoulders hunched up, his mittened hands to his ears, water running from his nose and eyes, his face the colour of the setting sun. Half-frozen, he at last ventured into a certain café, a place where he had lunched no fewer than half-a-dozen times, and where he thought his identity might have remained with the clerk at the cigar stand. There were men at the tables, smoking and chatting hilariously. At one of them sat three men, two of whom were actors he had met. Summoning his courage, he approached them with a well-assumed air of nonchalance. "Merry Christmas," was his greeting. The trio looked at him with no sign of recognition. "How are you. Mr. Brackley? How are you, Joe?" The two actors shook hands with him without much enthusiasm, certainly without interest. Light dawned on one of them. "Oh," said he, cheerlessly, "how are you? I couldn't place you at first." He did not offer to introduce him to the stranger, but proceeded to enlighten the other players. "It's--oh, you know--Nellie Duluth's husband." The other fellow nodded and resumed his conversation with the third man. At the same time the speaker leaned forward to devote his attention to the tale in hand, utterly ignoring the little man, who stood with his hand on the back of the vacant chair. Harvey waited for a few moments. "What will you have to drink?" he asked, shyly dropping into the chair. They stared at him and shook their heads. "That seat's engaged," said the one called "Joe," gruffly. Harvey got up instantly. "Oh," he said, in a hesitating manner. They went on with their conversation as if he were not there. After a moment he moved away, his ears burning, his soul filled with mortification and shame. In a sort of daze he approached the cigar stand and asked for a box of cigarettes. "What kind?" demanded the clerk, laying down his newspaper. Harvey smiled engagingly. "Oh, the kind I usually get!" he said, feeling sure that the fellow remembered him and the quality he smoked. "What's that?" snapped the clerk, scowling. The purchaser hastily mentioned a certain kind of cigarette, paid for it after the box had been tossed at him, and walked away. Fixed in his determination to stay in the place until he was well thawed out, he took a seat at a little table near the stairway and ordered a hot lemonade. He was conscious of a certain amount of attention from the tables adjacent to the trio he had accosted. Several loud guffaws came to his ears as he sipped the boiling drink. Taking an unusually copious swallow, he coughed and spluttered as the liquid scalded his tongue and palate. The tears rushed to his eyes. From past experience he knew that his tongue would be sore for at least a week. He had such a tender tongue, Nellie said. For half an hour he sat there dreaming and brooding. It was much better than tramping the streets. A clock on the opposite wall pointed to four o'clock. The matinée would be over at a quarter to five. Presently he looked again. It was five minutes past four. Really it wasn't so bad waiting after all; not half so bad as he had thought it would be. Some one tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up with a start. The manager of the place stood at his elbow. "This isn't a railway station, young feller," he said, harshly. "You'll have to move on. These tables are for customers." "But I've bought----" "Now, don't argue about it. You heard what I said. Move along." The man's tone was peremptory. Poor Harvey looked around as if in search of a single benevolent face, and then, without a word of protest, arose and moved quickly toward the door. His eyes were fixed in a glassy stare on the dancing, elusive doorway. He wondered if he could reach it before he sank through the floor. Somehow he had the horrible feeling that just as he opened it to go out some one would kick him from behind. He could almost feel the impact of the boot and involuntarily accelerated his speed as he opened the door to pass into the biting air of the now darkening street. "I hate this damned town," said he to himself over and over again as he flung himself against the gale that almost blew him off his feet. When he stopped to take his bearings, he was far above Longacre Square and still going in the wrong direction. He was befuddled. A policeman told him in hoarse, muffled tones to go back ten blocks or so if he wanted to find the theatre where Nellie Duluth was playing. A clock in an apothecary's shop urged him to hurry. When he came to the theatre, the newsboys were waiting for the audience to appear. He was surrounded by a mob of boys and men shouting the extras. "Is the show out?" he asked one of them. "No, sir!" shouted the boy, eagerly. "Shall I call up your automobile, mister!" "No, thank you," said Harvey through his chattering teeth. For a moment he felt distinctly proud and important. So shrewd a judge of humanity as a New York "newsy" had taken him to be a man of parts. For awhile he had been distressed by the fear, almost the conviction, that he was regarded by all New York as a "jay." Belying his suddenly acquired air of importance, he hunched himself up against the side of the building, partly sheltered from the wind, and waited for the crowd to pour forth. With the appearance of the first of those home-goers he would repair to the stage door, and, once behind the scenes, was quite certain that he would receive an invitation from Nellie to join the gay little family supper party in her dressing-room. When the time came, however, he approached the doorman with considerable trepidation. He had a presentiment that there would be "no admittance." Sure enough, the grizzled doorman, poking his head out, gruffly informed him that no one was allowed "back" without an order from the manager. Harvey explained who he was, taking it for granted that the man did not know him with his coat-collar turned up. "I know you, all right," said the man, not unkindly. "I'd like to let you in, but--you see----" He coughed and looked about rather helplessly, avoiding the pleading look in the visitor's eyes. "It's all right," Nellie's husband assured him, but an arm barred the way. "I've got strict orders not to admit you," blurted out the doorman, hating himself. "Not to admit me!" said Harvey, slowly. "I'm sorry, sir. Orders is orders." "But my little girl is there." "Yes, sir, I understand. The orders are for you, sir, not for the kid." Struck by the look in the little man's eyes he hastened to say, "Maybe if you saw Mr. Ripton out front and sent a note in to Miss Duluth, she'd change her mind and----" "Good Lord!" fell from Harvey's lips as he abruptly turned away to look for a spot where he could hide himself from every one. Two hours later, from his position at the mouth of the alley, he saw a man come out of the stage door and blow a whistle thrice. He was almost perishing with cold; he was sure that his ears were frozen. A sharp snap at the top of each of them and a subsequent warmth urged him to press quantities of snow against them, obeying the old rule that like cures like. From the kitchens of a big restaurant came the odours of cooking foodstuffs. He was hungry on this Merry Christmas night, but he would not leave his post. He had promised to wait for Phoebe and take her out home with him in the train. With the three blasts of the whistle he stirred his numb feet and edged nearer to the stage door. A big limousine came rumbling up the alley from behind, almost running him down. The fur-coated chauffeur called him unspeakable names as he passed him with the emergency brakes released. Before he could reach the entrance, the door flew open and a small figure in fur coat and a well known white hat was bundled into the machine by a burly stage hand. A moment later Annie clambered in, the door was slammed and the machine started ahead. He shouted as he ran, but his cry was not heard. As the car careened down the narrow lane, throwing snow in all directions, he dropped into a dejected, beaten walk. Slowly he made his way in the trail of the big car--it was too dark for him to detect the colour, but he felt it was green--and came at last to the mouth of the alley, desolate, bewildered, hurt beyond all understanding. For an instant he steadied himself against the icy wall of a building, trying to make up his mind what to do next. Suddenly it occurred to him that if he ran hard and fast he could catch the train--the seven-thirty--and secure a bit of triumph in spite of circumstances. He went racing up the street toward Sixth Avenue, dodging head-lowered pedestrians with the skill of an Indian, and managed to reach Forty-second Street without mishap or delay. Above the library he was stopped by a policeman, into whose arms he went full tilt, almost bowling him over. The impact dazed him. He saw many stars on the officer's breast. As he looked they dwindled into one bright and shining planet and a savage voice was bellowing:-- "Hold still or I'll bat you over the head!" "I'm--I'm trying to make the seven-thirty," he panted, wincing under the grip on his arm. "We'll see about that," growled the policeman. "For Heaven's sake, Mr. Policeman, I haven't done anything. Honest, I'm in a hurry. My little girl's on that train. We live in Tarrytown. She'll cry her eyes out if I----" "What was you running for?" "For it," said Harvey, at the end of a deep breath. "It's only seven-five now," said the officer, suspiciously. "Well, it's the seven-ten I want, then," said Harvey, hastily. "I guess I'll hold you here and see if anybody comes chasin' up after you. Not a word, now. Close your trap." As no one came up to accuse the prisoner of murder, theft, or intoxication, the intelligent policeman released him at the expiration of fifteen minutes. A crowd had collected despite the cold. Harvey was always to remember that crowd of curious people; he never ceased wondering where they came from and why they were content to stand there shivering in the zero weather when there were stoves and steam radiators everywhere to be found. To add to his humiliation at least a dozen men and boys, not satisfied with the free show as far as it had gone, pursued him to the very gates in the concourse. "Darned loafers!" said Harvey, hotly, but under his breath, as he showed his ticket and his teeth at the same time. Then he rushed for the last coach and swung on as it moved out. Now, if I were inclined to be facetious or untruthful I might easily add to his troubles by saying that he got the wrong train, or something of the sort, but it is not my purpose to be harder on him than I have to be. It was the right train, and, better still, Annie and Phoebe were in the very last seat of the very last coach. With a vast sigh he dropped into a vacant seat ahead of them and began fanning himself with his hat, to the utter amazement of onlookers, who had been disturbed by his turbulent entrance. The newspaper Annie was reading fell from her hands. "My goodness, sir! Where did you come from?" she managed to inquire. "I've been--dining--at--Sherry's," he wheezed. "Annie, will you look and see if my ears are frozen?" "They are, sir. Good gracious!" He realised that he had been indiscreet. "I--I sat in a draught," he hastened to explain. "Did you have a nice time, Phoebe?" The child was sleepy. "No," she said, almost sullenly. His heart gave a bound. "Mamma wouldn't let me eat anything. She said I'd get fat." "You had quite enough to eat, Phoebe," said Annie. "I didn't," said Phoebe. "Never mind," said her father, "I'll take you to Sherry's some day." "When, daddy?" she cried, wide awake at once. "I like to go to places with you." He faltered. "Some day after mamma has gone off on the road. We'll be terribly gay, while she's away, see if we ain't." Annie picked up the paper and handed it to him. "Miss Duluth ain't going on the road, sir," she said. "It's in the paper." He read the amazing news. Annie, suddenly voluble, gave it to him by word of mouth while he read. It was all there, she said, to prove what she was telling him. "Just as if I couldn't read!" said Harvey, as he began the article all over again after perusing the first few lines in a perfectly blank state of mind. "Yes, sir, the doctor says she can't stand it on the road. She's got nervous prosperity and she's got to have a long rest. That Miss Brown is going to take her place in the play after this week and Miss Duluth is going away out West to live for awhile to get strong again. She----What is the name of the town, Phoebe?" "Reno," said Phoebe, promptly. "But the name of the town isn't in the paper, sir," Annie informed him. "It's a place where people with complications go to get rid of them, Miss Nellie says. The show won't be any good without her, sir. I wouldn't give two cents to see it." He sagged down in the seat, a cold perspiration starting out all over his body. "When does she go--out there!" he asked, as in a dream. "First of next week. She goes to Chicago with the company and then right on out to--to--er--to----" "Reno," said he, lifelessly. "Yes, sir." He did not know how long afterward it was that he heard Phoebe saying to him, her tired voice barely audible above the clacking of the wheels:-- "I want a drink of water, daddy." His voice seemed to come back to him from some far-away place. He blinked his eyes several times and said, very wanly:-- "You mustn't drink water, dearie. It will make you fat." CHAPTER VI THE REVOLVER He waited until the middle of the week for some sign from her; none coming, he decided to go once more to her apartment before it was too late. The many letters he wrote to her during the first days after learning of her change of plans were never sent. He destroyed them. A sense of shame, a certain element of pride, held them back. Still, he argued with no little degree of justice, there were many things to be decided before she took the long journey--and the short step she was so plainly contemplating. It was no more than right that he should make one last and determined effort to save her from the fate she was so blindly courting. It was due her. She was his wife. He had promised to cherish and protect her. If she would not listen to the appeal, at least he would have done his bounden duty. There was an ever present, ugly fear, too, that she meant, by some hook or crook, to rob him of Phoebe. "And she's as much mine as hers," he declared to himself a thousand times or more. Behind everything, yet in plain view, lay his own estimate of himself--the naked truth--he was "no good!" He had come to the point of believing it of himself. He was not a success; he was quite the other thing. But, granting that, he was young and entitled to another chance. He could work into a partnership with Mr. Davis if given the time. Letting the midweek matinée slip by, he made the plunge on a Thursday. She was to leave New York on Sunday morning; that much he knew from the daily newspapers, which teemed with Nellie's breakdown and its lamentable consequences. It would be at least a year, the papers said, before she could resume her career on the stage. He searched the columns daily for his own name, always expecting to see himself in type little less conspicuous than that accorded to her, and stigmatised as a brute, an inebriate, a loafer. It was all the same to him--brute, soak, or loafer. But even under these extraordinary conditions he was as completely blanketed by obscurity as if he never had been in existence. Sometimes he wondered whether she could get a divorce without according him a name. He had read of fellow creatures meeting death "at the hand of a person (or of persons) unknown." Could a divorce complaint be worded in such non-committal terms? Then there was that time-honoured shroud of private identity, the multitudinous John Doe. Could she have the heart to bring proceedings against him as John Doe? He wondered. If he were to shoot himself, so that she might have her freedom without going to all the trouble of a divorce or the annoyance of a term of residence in Reno, would she put his name on a tombstone? He wondered. A strange, a most unusual thing happened to him just before he left the house to go to the depot. He was never quite able to account for the impulse which sent him upstairs rather obliquely to search through a trunk for a revolver, purchased a couple of years before, following the report that housebreakers were abroad in Tarrytown, and which he had promptly locked away in his trunk for fear that Phoebe might get hold of it. He rummaged about in the trunk, finally unearthing the weapon. He slipped it into his overcoat pocket with a furtive glance over his shoulder. He chuckled as he went down the stairs. It was a funny thing for him to do, locking the revolver in the trunk that way. What burglar so obliging as to tarry while he went through all the preliminaries incident to destruction under the circumstances? Yes, it was stupid of him. He did not consider the prospect of being arrested for carrying concealed weapons until he was halfway to the city, and then he broke into a mild perspiration. From that moment he eyed every man with suspicion. He had heard of "plain clothes men." They were the very worst kind. "They take you unawares so," said he to himself, with which he moved closer to the wall of the car, the more effectually to conceal the weapon. It wouldn't do to be caught going about with a revolver in one's pocket. That would be the very worst thing that could happen. It would mean "the Island" or some other such place, for he could not have paid a fine. It occurred to him, therefore, that it would be wiser to get down at One Hundred and Tenth street and walk over to Nellie's. The policemen were not so thick nor so bothersome up there, he figured, and it was a rather expensive article he was carrying; one never got them back from the police, even if the fine were paid. Footsore, weary, and chilled to the bone, he at length came to the apartment building wherein dwelt Nellie Duluth. In these last few weeks he had developed a habit of thinking of her as Nellie Duluth, a person quite separate and detached from himself. He had come to regard himself as so far removed from Nellie Duluth that it was quite impossible for him to think of her as Mrs.--Mrs.--he had to rack his brain for the name, the connection was so remote. He had walked miles--many devious and lengthening miles--before finally coming to the end of his journey. Once he came near asking a policeman to direct him to Eighty-ninth Street, but the sudden recollection of the thing he carried stopped him in time. That and the discovery of a sign on a post which frostily informed him that he was then in the very street he sought. It should go without the saying that he hesitated a long time before entering the building. Perhaps it would be better after all to write to her. Somewhat sensibly he argued that a letter would reach her, while it was more than likely he would fall short of a similar achievement. She couldn't deny Uncle Sam, but she could slam the door in her husband's face. Yes, he concluded, a letter was the thing. Having come to this half-hearted decision, he proceeded to argue himself out of it. Suppose that she received the letter, did it follow that she would reply to it? He might enclose a stamp and all that sort of thing, but he knew Nellie; she wouldn't answer a letter--at least, not that kind of letter. She would laugh at it, and perhaps show it to her friends, who also would be vastly amused. He remembered some of them as he saw them in the café that day; they were given to uproarious laughter. No, he concluded, a letter was not the thing. He must see her. He must have it out with her, face to face. So he went up in the elevator to the eleventh floor, which was the top one, got out and walked down to the sixth, where she lived. Her name was on the door plate. He read it three or four times before resolutely pressing the electric button. Then he looked over his shoulder quickly, impelled by the queer feeling that some one was behind him, towering like a dark, threatening shadow. A rough hand seemed ready to close upon his shoulder to drag him back and down. But no one was there. He was alone in the little hall. And yet something was there. He could feel it, though he could not see it; something sinister that caused him to shiver. His tense fingers relaxed their grip on the revolver. Strangely the vague thing that disturbed him departed in a flash and he felt himself alone once more. It was very odd, thought he. Rachel came to the door. She started back in surprise, aye, alarm, when she saw the little man in the big ulster. A look of consternation sprang into her black eyes. He opened his lips to put the natural question, but paused with the words unuttered. The sound of voices in revelry came to his ears from the interior of the apartment, remote but very insistent. Men's voices and women's voices raised in merriment. His gaze swept the exposed portion of the hall. Packing boxes stood against the wall, piled high. The odour of camphor came out and smote his sense of smell. Rachel was speaking. Her voice was peculiarly hushed and the words came quickly, jerkily from her lips. "Miss Duluth is engaged, sir. I'm sorry she will not be able to see you." He stared uncertainly at her and beyond her. "So she's packing her things," he murmured, more to himself than to the servant. Rachel was silent. He saw the door closing in his face. A curious sense of power, of authority, came over him. "Hold on," he said sharply, putting his foot against the door. "You go and tell her I want to see her. It's important--very important!" "She has given orders, sir, not to let you----" "Well, I'm giving a few orders myself, and I won't stand for any back talk, do you hear? Who is the master of this place, tell me that?" He thumped his breast with his knuckles. "Step lively, now. Tell her I'm here." He pushed his way past her and walked into what he called the "parlour," but what was to Nellie the "living-room." Here he found numerous boxes, crates, and parcels, all prepared for shipment or storage. Quite coolly he examined the tag on a large crate. The word "Reno" smote him. As he cringed he smiled a sickly smile without being conscious of the act. "Wait a minute," he called to Rachel, who was edging in an affrighted manner toward the lower end of the hall and the dining-room. "What is she doing?" Rachel's face brightened. He was going to be amenable to reason. "It's a farewell luncheon, sir. She simply can't be disturbed. I'll tell her you were here." "You don't need to tell her anything," said he, briskly. The sight of those crates and boxes had made another man of him. "I'll announce myself. She won't----" "You'd better not!" cried Rachel, distractedly. "There are some men here. They will throw you out of the apartment. They're big enough, Mr.--Mr.----" He grinned. His fingers took a new grip on the revolver. "Napoleon wasn't as big as I am," he said, much to Rachel's distress. It sounded very mad to her. "Size isn't everything." "For Heaven's sake, sir, please don't----" "They seem to be having a gay old time," said he, as a particularly wild burst of laughter came from the dining-room. He hesitated. "Who is out there?" Rachel was cunning. "I don't know the names, sir. They're--they're strangers to me." At that instant the voice of Fairfax came to his ears, loudly proclaiming a health to the invalid who was going to Reno. Harvey stood there in the hall, listening to the toast. He heard it to the end, and the applause that followed. If he were to accept the diagnosis of the speaker, Nellie was repairing to Reno to be cured of an affliction that had its inception seven years before, a common malady, but not fatal if taken in time. The germ, or, more properly speaking, the parasite, unlike most bacteria, possessed but two legs, and so on and so forth. The laughter was just dying away when Harvey--who recognised himself as the pestiferous germ alluded to--strode into the room, followed by the white-faced Rachel. "Who was it, Rachel?" called out Nellie, from behind the enormous centrepiece of roses which obstructed her view of the unwelcome visitor. The little man in the ulster piped up, shrilly:-- "She don't know my name, but I guess you do, if you'll think real hard." There were ten at the table, flushed with wine and the exertion of hilarity. Twenty eyes were focussed on the queer, insignificant little man in the doorway. If they had not been capable of focussing them on anything a moment before, they acquired the power to do so now. Nellie, staring blankly, arose. She wet her lips twice before speaking. "Who let you in here?" she cried, shrilly. One of the men pushed back his chair and came to his feet a bit unsteadily. "What the deuce is it, Nellie?" he hiccoughed. Nellie had her wits about her. She was very pale, but she was calm. Instinctively she felt that trouble--even tragedy--was confronting her; the thing she had feared all along without admitting it even to herself. "Sit down, Dick," she commanded. "Don't get excited, any of you. It's all right. My husband, that's all." The man at her right was Fairfax. He was gaping at Harvey with horror in his face. He, too, had been expecting something like this. Involuntarily he shifted his body so that the woman on the other side, a huge creature, was partially between him and the little man in the door. "Get him out of here!" he exclaimed. "He's just damned fool enough to do something desperate if we----" "You shut up!" barked Harvey, in a sudden access of fury. "Not a word out of you, you big bully." "Get him out!" gasped Fairfax, holding his arm over his face. "What did I tell you? He's crazy! Grab him, Smith! Hurry up!" "Grab him yourself!" retorted Smith, in some haste. "He's not gunning for me." What there was to be afraid of in the appearance of the little ulstered man who stood there with his hands in his pockets I cannot for the life of me tell, but there was no doubt as to the consternation he produced in the midst of this erstwhile jovial crowd. An abrupt demand of courtesy urged him to raise his hand to doff his hat in the presence of ladies. Twenty terrified eyes watched the movement as if ten lives hung on the result thereof. Half of the guests were standing, the other half too petrified to move. A husband is a thing to strike terror to the heart, believe me, no matter how trivial he may be, especially an unexpected husband. "Go away, Harvey!" cried Nellie, placing Fairfax between herself and the intruder. "Don't do that!" growled the big man, sharply. "Do you suppose I want him shooting holes through me in order to get at you?" "Is he going to shoot?" wailed one of the women, dropping the wineglass she had been holding poised near her lips all this time. The tinkle of broken glass and the douche of champagne passed unnoticed. "For God's sake, let me get out of here!" "Keep your seats, ladies and gents," said Harvey, hastily, beginning to show signs of confusion. "I just dropped in to see Nellie for a few minutes. Don't let me disturb you. She can step into the parlour, I guess. They'll excuse you, Nellie." "I'll do nothing of the sort," snapped Nellie, noting the change in him. "Go away or I'll have a policeman called." He grinned. "Well, if you do, he'll catch me with the goods," he said, mysteriously. "The goods?" repeated Nellie. "Do you want to see it?" he asked, fixing her with his eyes. As he started to withdraw his hand from his overcoat pocket, a general cry of alarm went up and there was a sudden shifting of positions. "Don't do that!" roared two or three of the men in a breath. "Keep that thing in your pocket!" commanded Fairfax, huskily, without removing his gaze from the arm that controlled the hidden hand. Harvey gloated. He waved the hand that held his hat. "Don't be alarmed, ladies," he said. "You are quite safe. I can hit a silver dollar at twenty paces, so there's no chance of anything going wild." "For God's sake!" gasped Fairfax. Suddenly he disappeared beneath the edge of the table. His knees struck the floor with a resounding thump. "Get away from me!" shrieked the corpulent lady, kicking at him as she fled the danger spot. Harvey stooped and peered under the table at his enemy, a broad grin on his face. Fairfax took it for a grin of malevolence. "Peek-a-boo!" called Harvey. "Don't shoot! For the love of Heaven, don't shoot!" yelled Fairfax. Then to the men who were edging away in quest of safety behind the sideboard, china closet, and serving table:--"Why don't you grab him, you idiots?" Harvey suddenly realised the danger of his position. He straightened up and jerked the revolver from his pocket, brandishing it in full view of them all. "Keep back!" he shouted--a most unnecessary command. Those who could not crowd behind the sideboard made a rush for the butler's pantry. Feminine shrieks and masculine howls filled the air. Chairs were overturned in the wild rush for safety. No less than three well-dressed women were crawling on their hands and knees toward the only means of exit from the room. "Telephone for the police!" yelled Fairfax, backing away on all-fours, suggesting a crawfish. "Stay where you are!" cried Harvey, now thoroughly alarmed by the turn of affairs. They stopped as if petrified. The three men who were wedged in the pantry door gave over struggling for the right of precedence and turned to face the peril. Once more he brandished the weapon, and once more there were shrieks and groans, this time in a higher key. Nellie alone stood her ground. She was desperate. Death was staring her in the face, and she was staring back as if fascinated. "Harvey! Harvey!" she cried, through bloodless lips. "Don't do it! Think of Phoebe! Think of your child!" Rachel was stealing down the hall. The little Napoleon suddenly realised her purpose and thwarted it. "Come back here!" he shouted. The trembling maid could not obey for a very excellent reason. She dropped to the floor as if shot, and, failing in the effort to crawl under a low hall-seat, remained there, prostrate and motionless. He then addressed himself to Nellie, first cocking the pistol in a most cold-blooded manner. Paying no heed to the commands and exhortations of the men, or the whines of the women, he announced:-- "That's just what I've come here to ask you to do, Nellie; think of Phoebe. Will you promise me to----" "I'll promise nothing!" cried Nellie, exasperated. She was beginning to feel ridiculous, which was much worse than feeling terrified. "You can't bluff me, Harvey, not for a minute." "I'm not trying to bluff you," he protested. "I'm simply asking you to think. You can think, can't you? If you can't think here with all this noise going on, come into the parlour. We can talk it all over quietly and--why, great Scott, I don't want to kill anybody!" Noting an abrupt change in the attitude of the men, who found some encouragement in his manner, he added hastily, "Unless I have to, of course. Here, you! Don't get up!" The command was addressed to Fairfax. "I'd kind of like to take a shot at you, just for fun." "Harvey," said his wife, quite calmly, "if you don't put that thing in your pocket and go away I will have you locked up as sure as I'm standing here." "I ask you once more to come into the parlour and talk it over with me," said he, wavering. "And I refuse," she cried, furiously. "Go and have it out with him, Nellie," groaned Fairfax, lifting his head above the edge of the table, only to lower it instantly as Harvey's hand wabbled unsteadily in a sort of attempt to draw a bead on him. "Well, why don't you shoot?" demanded Nellie, curtly. "No! No!" roared Fairfax. "No! No!" shrieked the women. "For two cents I would," stammered Harvey, quite carried away by the renewed turmoil. "You would do anything for two cents," said Nellie, sarcastically. "I'd shoot myself for two cents," he wailed, dismally. "I'm no use, anyway. I'd be better off dead." "For God's sake let him do it, Nellie," hissed Fairfax. "That's the thing; the very thing." Poor Harvey suddenly came to a full realisation of the position he was in. He had not counted on all this. Now he was in for it, and there was no way out of it. A vast sense of shame and humiliation mastered him. Everything before him turned gray and bleak, and then a hideous red. He had not meant to do a single thing he had already done. Events had shaped themselves for him. He was surprised, dumfounded, overwhelmed. The only thought that now ran through his addled brain was that he simply had to do something. He couldn't stand there forever, like a fool, waving a pistol. In a minute or two they would all be laughing at him. It was ghastly. The wave of self-pity, of self-commiseration submerged him completely. Why, oh why, had he got himself into this dreadful pickle? He had merely come to talk it over with Nellie, that and nothing more. And now, see what he was in for! "By jingo," he gasped, in the depth of despair, "I'll do it! I'll make you sorry, Nellie; you'll be sorry when you see me lying here all shot to pieces. I've been a good husband to you. I don't deserve to die like this, but----" His watery blue eyes took in the horrified expressions on the faces of his hearers. An innate sense of delicacy arose within him. "I'll do it in the hall." "Be careful of the rug," cried Nellie, gayly, not for an instant believing that he would carry out the threat. "Shall I do it here?" he asked, feebly. "No!" shrieked the women, putting their fingers in their ears. "By all means!" cried Fairfax, with a loud laugh of positive relief. To his own as well as to their amazement, Harvey turned the muzzle of the pistol toward his face. It wabbled aimlessly. Even at such short range he had the feeling that he would miss altogether and looked over his shoulder to see if there was a picture or anything else on the wall that might be damaged by the stray bullet. Then he inserted the muzzle in his mouth. Stupefaction held his audience. Not a hand was lifted, not a breath was drawn. For half a second his finger clung to the trigger without pressing it. Then he lowered the weapon. "I guess I better go out in the hall, where the elevator is," he said. "Don't follow me. Stay where you are. You needn't worry." "I'll bet you ten dollars you don't do it," said Fairfax, loudly, as he came to his feet. "I don't want your dirty money, blast you," exclaimed Harvey, without thinking. "Good-by, Nellie. Be good to Phoebe. Tell 'em out in Blakeville that I--oh, tell 'em anything you like. I don't give a rap!" He turned and went shambling down the hall, his back very stiff, his ears very red. It was necessary to step over Rachel's prostrate form. He got one foot across, when she, crazed with fear, emitted a piercing shriek and arose so abruptly that he was caught unawares. What with the start the shriek gave him and the uprising of a supposedly inanimate mass, his personal equilibrium was put to the severest test. Indeed, he quite lost it, going first into the air with all the sprawl of a bronco buster, and then landing solidly on his left ear where there wasn't a shred of rug to ease the impact. In a twinkling, however, he was on his feet, apologising to Rachel. But she was crawling away as fast as her hands and knees would carry her. From the dining-room came violent shouts, the hated word "police" dominating the clamour. He slid through the door and closed it after him. A moment later he was plunging down the steps, disdaining the elevator, which, however fast it may have been, could not have been swift enough for him in his present mood. The police! They would be clanging up to the building in a jiffy, and then what? To the station house! Half-way down he paused to reflect. Voices above came howling down the shaft, urging the elevator man to stop him, to hold him, to do all manner of things to him. He felt himself trapped. So he sat down on an upper step, leaned back against the marble wall, closed his eyes tightly, and jammed the muzzle of the revolver against the pit of his stomach. "I hate to do it," he groaned, and then pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a sharp click. He opened his eyes. If it didn't hurt any more than that he could do it with them open. Why not? In a frenzy to have it over with he pulled again and was gratified to find that the second bullet was not a whit more painful than the first. Then he thought of the ugly spectacle he would present if he confined the mutilation to the abdominal region. People would shudder and say, "how horrible he looks!" So he considerately aimed the third one at his right eye. Even as he pulled the trigger, and the hammer fell with the usual click, his vision centred on the black little hole in the end of the barrel. Breathlessly he waited for the bullet to emerge. Then, all of a sudden, he recalled that there had been no explosion. The fact had escaped him during the throes of a far from disagreeable death. He put his hand to his stomach. In a dumb sort of wonder he first examined his fingers, and, finding no gore, proceeded to a rather careful inspection of the weapon. Then he leaned back and dizzily tried to remember when he had taken the cartridges out of the thing. "Thank the Lord," he said, quite devoutly. "I thought I was a goner, sure. Now, when did I take 'em out?" The elevator shot past him, going upward. He paid no attention to it. It all came back to him in a flash. He remembered that he had never loaded it at all. A loaded pistol is a very dangerous thing to have about the house. The little box of cartridges that came with the weapon was safely locked away at the bottom of the trunk, wrapped in a thick suit of underwear for protection against concussion. Even as he congratulated himself on his remarkable foresight the elevator, filled with excited men, rushed past him on the way down. He heard them saying that a dangerous lunatic was at large and that he ought to be----But he couldn't hear the rest of it, the car being so far below him. "By jingo!" he exclaimed, leaping to his feet in consternation. "They'll get me now. What a blamed fool I was!" Scared out of his wits, he dashed up the steps, three at a jump, and, before he knew it, ran plump into the midst of the women who were huddled at Nellie's landing, waiting for the shots and the death yells from below. They scattered like sheep, too frightened to scream, and he plunged through the open door into the apartment. "Where are you, Nellie?" he bawled. "Hide me! Don't let 'em get me. Nellie! Oh, Nellie!" The shout would have raised the dead. Nellie was at the telephone. She dropped the receiver and came toward him. "Aren't you ashamed of yourself!" she squealed, clutching his arm. "What an awful spectacle you've made of yourself--and me! You blithering little idiot. I----" "Where can I hide?" he whispered, hopping up and down in his eagerness. "Hurry up! Under a bed or--anywhere. Good gracious, Nellie, they'll get me sure!" She slammed the door. "I ought to let them take you and lock you up," she said, facing him. The abject terror in his eyes went straight to her heart. "Oh, you poor thing!" she cried, in swift compassion. "You--you wouldn't hurt a fly. You couldn't. Come along! Quick! I'll do this much for you, just this once. Never again! You can get down the back steps into the alley if you hurry. Then beat it for home. And never let me see your face again." Three minutes later he was scuttling down the alley as fast as his eager legs could carry him. Nellie was holding the front door against the thunderous assault of a half dozen men, giving him time to escape. All the while she was thinking of the depositions she could take from the witnesses to his deliberate attempt to kill her. He had made it very easy for her. CHAPTER VII THE LAWYER He was dismally confident that he would be arrested and thrown into jail on Friday. It was always an unlucky day for him. The fact that Nellie had aided and abetted in his undignified flight down the slippery back steps did not in the least minimise the peril that still hung like a cloud over his wretched head. Of course, he understood: she was sorry for him. It was the impulse of the moment. When she had had time to think it all over and to listen to the advice of Fairfax and the others, she would certainly swear out a warrant. As a measure of precaution he had slyly tossed the revolver from a car window somewhere north of Spuyten Duyvil, and, later on at home, stealthily disposed of the box of cartridges. All evening long he sat huddled up by the fireplace, listening with all ears for the ominous sound of constabulary thumpings at the front door. The fierce wind shrieked around the corners of the house, rattling the shutters and banging the kitchen gate, but he heard nothing, for his own heart made such a din in response to the successive bursts of noise that all else seemed still by comparison. His efforts to amuse the perplexed Phoebe were pitiful. The child took him to task for countless lapses of memory in his recital of oft-told and familiar fairy tales. But no one came that night. And Friday, too, dragged itself out of existence without a sign from Nellie or the dreaded officers of the law. You may be sure he did not poke his nose outside the door all that day. Somehow he was beginning to relish the thought that she would be gone on Sunday, gone forever, perhaps. He loved her, of course, but distance at this particular time was not likely to affect the enchantment. In fact, he was quite sure he would worship her a great deal more comfortably if she were beyond the border of the State. The thought of punishment quite overshadowed a previous dread as to how he was going to provide for Phoebe and himself up to the time of assuming the job in Davis' drug store. He had long since come to the conclusion that if Nellie persisted in carrying out her plan to divorce him he could not conscientiously accept help from her, nor could he expect to retain custody of the child unless by his own efforts he made suitable provision for her. His one great hope in the face of this particular difficulty had rested on the outcome of the visit to her apartment, the miserable result of which we know. Not only had he upset all of his fondest calculations, but he had heaped unthinkable ruin in the place he had set aside for them. There was nothing consoling in the situation, no matter how he looked at it. More than once he regretted the emptiness of that confounded cylinder. If there had been a single bullet in the thing his troubles would now be over. Pleasing retrospect! But not for all the money in the world would he again subject himself to a similar risk. It made him shudder to even think of it. It was hard enough for him to realise that he had had the monumental courage to try it on that never to be forgotten occasion. As a matter of fact, he was rather proud of it, which wouldn't have been at all possible if he had succeeded in the cowardly attempt. Suppose, thought he with a qualm--suppose there had been a bullet! It was now Saturday. His funeral would be held on Saturday. By Saturday night he would be in a grave--a lonesome, desolate grave. Nellie would have seen to that, so that she could get away on Sunday. Ugh! It was most unpleasant! The day advanced. His spirits were rising. If nothing happened between then and midnight he was reasonably secure from arrest. But in the middle of the day the blow fell. Not the expected blow, but one that stunned him and left him more miserable than anything else in the world could have done. There came a polite knock at the door. Annie admitted a pleasant-faced, rather ceremonious young man, who said he had business of the utmost importance to transact with Mr.--Mr.--He glanced at a paper which he drew from his pocket, and supplying the name asked if the gentleman was in. Harvey was tiptoeing toward the dining-room, with Phoebe at his heels, when the stranger entered the library. "Pardon me," called the young man, with what seemed to Harvey unnecessary haste and emphasis. "Just a moment, please!" Harvey stopped, chilled to the marrow. "It was all a joke," he said, quickly. "Just a little joke of mine. Ha! Ha!" It was a sepulchral laugh. "I am John Buckley, from the offices of Barnes & Canby, representing Miss Duluth, your wife, I believe? It isn't a pleasant duty I have to perform Mr.--Mr--er--but, of course, you understand we are acting in the interests of our client and if we can get together on this----" "Can't you come some other day?" stammered Harvey, holding Phoebe's hand very tightly in his. "I'm--I'm not well to-day. We--we are waiting now for the health officer to--to see whether it's smallpox or just a rash of----" The pleasant young gentleman laughed. "All the more necessary why we should settle the question at once. If it is smallpox the child would be quarantined with you--that would be unfortunate. You don't appear to have a rash, however." "It hasn't got up to my face yet," explained Harvey, feebly. "You ought to see my body. It's----" "I've had it," announced the young man, glibly; "so I'm immune." He winked. "What do you want?" demanded Harvey, bracing himself for the worst. "Out with it. Let's see your star." "Oh, I'm not a cop. I'm a lawyer." The other swallowed noisily. "A lawyer?" "We represent Miss Duluth. I'll get down to tacks right away, if you'll permit me to sit down." He took a chair. "Tacks?" queried Harvey, a retrospective grin appearing on his lips. "Gee! I wish I'd thought to put a couple----But, excuse me, I can't talk without my lawyer being present." The visitor stared. "You--do you mean to say you have retained counsel?" "The best in New York," lied Harvey. Buckley gave a sigh of relief. He knew a lie when he heard one. "I'd suggest that you send the little girl out of the room. We can talk better if we are alone." After Phoebe's reluctant departure, the visitor bluntly asked Harvey which he preferred, State's prison or an amicable adjustment without dishonour. "Neither," said Harvey, moistening his lips. Thereupon Mr. Buckley calmly announced that his client, Miss Duluth, was willing to forego the pleasure of putting him behind the bars on condition that he surrendered at once the person of their child--their joint child, he put it, so that Harvey might not be unnecessarily confused--to be reared, educated, and sustained by her, without let or hindrance, from that time forward, so on and so forth; a bewildering rigmarole that meant nothing to the stupefied father, who only knew that they wanted to take his child away from him. "Moreover," said Mr. Buckley, "our client has succeeded in cancelling the lease on this cottage and has authorised the owner to take possession on the first of the month--next Wednesday, that is. Monday morning, bright and early, the packers and movers will be here to take all of her effects away. Tuesday night, we hope, the house will be quite empty and ready to be boarded up. Of course, Mr.--Mr.--er--, you will see to it that whatever trifling effects you may have about the place are removed by that time. After that, naturally, little Miss Phoebe will be homeless unless provision is made for her by--er--by the court. We hope to convince you that it will be better for her if the question is not referred to a court of justice. Your own good sense will point the alternative. Do I make myself quite clear to you?" "No," said Harvey, helplessly. "Well, I'll be a little more explicit," said the lawyer, grimly. "A warrant will be issued for your arrest before two o'clock to-day if you do not grasp my meaning before that hour. It is twelve-ten now. Do you think you can catch the idea in an hour and fifty minutes?" Harvey was thoughtful. "What is the smallest sentence they can give me if I--if I stand trial?" "That depends," said Mr. Buckley, slightly taken aback, but without submitting an explanation. "You don't want to bring disgrace on the child by being branded as a jailbird, do you?" "Nellie won't have the heart to put me in jail," groaned the unhappy little man. "She--she just can't do it. She knows I'd die for her. She----" "But she isn't the State of New York," explained her counsel, briskly. "The State hasn't anything in the shape of a heart. Now, I'm here to settle the matter without a contest, if that's possible. If you want to fight, all right. You know just what you'll get. Besides, isn't it perfectly clear to you that Miss Duluth doesn't want to put you in jail? That's her idea, pure and simple. I don't mind confessing that our firm insisted for a long time on giving you up to the authorities, but she wouldn't have it that way. She wants her little girl, that's all. Isn't that perfectly fair?" "She's--she's going to give up the house?" murmured Harvey, passing his hand over his eyes. "Certainly." "It's a mighty inconvenient time for us to--to look for another place----" "That's just what I've been saying to you," urged Buckley. "The Weather Bureau says we'll have zero weather for a month or two. I shudder to think of that poor child out in----" "Oh, Lord!" came almost in a wail from the lips of Phoebe's father. He covered his face with his hands. Mr. Buckley, unseen, smiled triumphantly. At four o'clock Phoebe, with all her childish penates, was driven to the station by Mr. Buckley, who, it would appear, had come prepared for the emergency. Before leaving he gave the two servants a month's wages and a two weeks' notice dating from the 18th of December and left with Harvey sufficient money to pay up all the outstanding bills of the last month--with a little left over. We draw a curtain on the parting that took place in the little library just before the cab drove away. Phoebe was going to Reno. Long, long after the departure her father lifted his half-closed blue eyes from the coals in the grate and discovered that the room was ice-cold. * * * * * He understood the habits of astute theatrical managers so well by this time that he did not have to be told that the company would journey to Chicago by one of the slow trains. The comfort and convenience of the player is seldom considered by the manager, who, as a rule, when there is time to spare, transports his production by the least expensive way. Harvey knew that Nellie and the "Up in the Air" company would pass through Tarrytown on the pokiest day train leaving New York over the Central. There was, of course, the possibility that the affluent Nellie might take the eighteen-hour train, but it was somewhat remote. Sunday morning found him at the Tarrytown station, awaiting the arrival or the passing of the train bearing the loved ones who were casting him off. He was there early, bundled in his ulster, an old Blakeville cap pulled down over his ears, a limp cigarette between his lips. A few of the station employés knew him and passed the time of day. "Going in rather early, ain't you, Mr.--Mr.--" remarked the station master, clapping his hands to generate warmth. "No," said Harvey, leaving the inquirer in the dark as to whether he referred to a condition or a purpose. A couple of hours and a dozen trains went by. Harvey, having exhausted his supply of cigarettes, effected the loan of one from the ticket agent. "Waiting for some one, sir?" asked that worthy. "Or are you just down to see the cars go by?" "What time does the Chicago train go through?" asked Harvey. "Any particular one?" "No; I'm not particular." "There's one at eleven-forty." "I'm much obliged." He was panic-stricken when the train at last appeared and gave unmistakable signs of stopping at Tarrytown. Moved by an inexplicable impulse, he darted behind a pile of trunks. His dearest hope had been that Phoebe might be on the lookout for him as the cars whizzed through, and that she would waft a final kiss to him. But it was going to stop! He hadn't counted on that. It was most embarrassing. From his hiding place he watched the long line of sleepers roll by, slower and slower, until with a wheeze they came to a full stop. His eager eyes took in every window that passed. There was no sign of Phoebe. Somewhat emboldened, he ventured forth from shelter and strolled along the platform for a more deliberate scrutiny of the windows. The feeling of disappointment was intense. He had never known loneliness so great as this which came to him now. The droop to his shoulders became a little more pronounced as he turned dejectedly to re-enter the waiting-room. The train began to move out as he neared the corner of the building. The last coach crept by. He watched it dully. A shrill cry caught his ear. His eyes, suddenly alert, focussed themselves on the observation platform of the private car as it picked up speed and began the diminishing process. Braced against the garish brass bars that enclosed the little platform was Phoebe, in her white fur coat and hood, her mittened fingers clutching the rail, above which her rosy face appeared as the result of eager tiptoeing. The excellent Rachel stood behind the child, cold and unsmiling. "Hello, daddy!" screamed Phoebe, managing to toss him a kiss, just as he had hoped and expected. The response cracked in his throat. It was a miserable croak that he sent back, but he blew her a dozen kisses. "Good-bye, daddy!" came the shrill adieu, barely audible above the clatter of the receding train. He stood quite still until the last coach vanished up the track. The tears on his cheeks were frozen. Some one was speaking to him. "Ain't you going West with 'em, Mr.--, Mr.--?" queried the baggage master. Harvey gazed at him dumbly for a moment or two. Then he lifted his chin. "I--I've got to wait over a few days to see to the packing and storing of my household effects," he said, briskly. Then he trudged up the hill. Sure enough, the packers appeared "bright and early" Monday morning, just as Buckley had said they would. By nine o'clock the house was upside down and by noon it was full of excelsior, tar paper, and crating materials. The rasp of the saw and the bang of the hammer resounded throughout the little cottage. Burly men dragged helpless and unresisting articles of furniture about as if they had a personal grudge against each separate piece, and pounded them, and drove nails into them, and mutilated them, and scratched them, and splintered them, and after they were completely conquered marked their pine board coffins with the name "Nellie Duluth," after which they were ready for the fireproof graveyard in Harlem. Dazed and unsteady, Harvey watched the proceedings with the air of one who superintends. He gave a few instructions, offered one or two suggestions--principally as to the state of the weather--and was on the jump all day long to keep out of the way of the energetic workmen. He had seen Marceline at the Hippodrome on one memorable occasion. Somehow he reminded himself of the futile but nimble clown, who was always in the way and whose good intentions invariably were attended by disaster. The foreman of the gang, doubtless with a shrewd purpose in mind, opened half the windows in the house, thus forcing his men to work fast and furiously or freeze. Harvey almost perished in the icy draughts. He shut the front door fifty times or more, and was beginning to sniffle and sneeze when Bridget took pity on him and invited him into the kitchen. He hugged the cook stove for several hours, mutely watching the two servants through the open door of their joint bedroom off the kitchen while they stuffed their meagre belongings into a couple of trunks. At last it occurred to him that it would be well to go upstairs and pack his own trunk before the workmen got to asking questions. He carried his set of Dickens upstairs, not without interrogation, and stored the volumes away at the bottom of his trunk. So few were his individual belongings that he was hard put to fill the trays compactly enough to prevent the shifting of the contents. When the job was done he locked the trunk, tied a rope around it and then sat down upon it to think. Had he left anything out? He remembered something. He untied the knots, unlocked the trunk, shifted half of the contents and put in his fishing tackle and an onyx clock Nellie had given him for Christmas two years before. Later on he repeated the operation and made room for a hand saw, an auger, a plane, and a hatchet; also a smoking-jacket she had given him, and a lot of paper dolls Phoebe had left behind. (Late that night, after the lights were out, he remembered the framed motto, "God Bless Our Home," which his dear old mother had worked for him in yarns of variegated hues while they were honeymooning in Blakeville. The home was very cold and still, and the floor was strewn with nails, but he got out of bed and put the treasure in the top tray of the trunk.) Along about four in the afternoon he experienced a sensation of uneasiness--even alarm. It began to look as if the workmen would have the entire job completed by nightfall. In considerable trepidation he accosted the foreman. "If it's just the same to you I'd rather you wouldn't pack the beds until to-morrow--that is, of course, if you are coming back to-morrow." "Maybe we'll get around to 'em and maybe we won't," said the foreman, carelessly. "We've got to pack the kitchen things to-morrow and the china." "You see, it's this way," said Harvey. "I've got to sleep somewhere!" "I see," said the foreman, and went on with his work, leaving Harvey in doubt. "Have a cigar?" he asked, after a doleful pause. The man took it and looked at it keenly. "I'll smoke it after a while," he said. "Do the best you can about the bed in the back room upstairs," said Harvey, engagingly. An express wagon came at five o'clock and removed the servants' trunks. A few minutes later the two domestics, be-hatted and cloaked, came up to say good-bye to him. "You're not leaving to-day?" he cried, aghast. "If it's just the same to you, sor," said Bridget. "We've both got places beginnin' to-morry." "But who'll cook my----" "Niver you worry about that, sor; I've left a dozen av eggs, some bacon, rolls, and----" "All right. Good-bye," broke in the master, turning away. "Good luck, sor," said Bridget, amiably. Then they went away. His dismal reflections were broken by the foreman, who found him in the kitchen. "We'll be back early in the morning and clean up everything. The van will be here at ten. Is everything here to go to the warehouse? I notice some things that look as though they might belong to you personally." There were a few pieces of furniture and bric-à-brac that Harvey could claim as his own. He stared gloomily at the floor for a long time, thinking. Of what use were they to him now? And where was he to put them in case he claimed them? "I guess you'd better store everything," he said, dejectedly. "They--they all go together." "The--your trunk, sir; how about that?" "If you think you've got room for it, I----" "Sure we have." "Take it, too. I'm going to pack what clothes I need in a suitcase. So much easier to carry than a trunk." He was unconsciously funny, and did not understand the well-meant guffaw of the foreman. It was a dreary, desolate night that he spent in the topsy-turvy cottage. He was quite alone except for the queer shapes and shadows that haunted him. When he was downstairs he could hear strange whisperings above; when he was upstairs the mutterings were below. Things stirred and creaked that had never shown signs of animation before. The coals in the fireplace spat with a malignant fury, as if blown upon by evil spirits lurking in the chimney until he went to bed so that they might come forth to revel in the gloom. The howl of the wind had a different note, a wail that seemed to come from a child in pain; forbidding sounds came up from the empty cellar; always there was something that stood directly behind him, ready to lay on a ghostly hand. He crouched in the chair, feeling never so small, never so impotent as now. The chair was partially wrapped for crating. Every time he moved there was a crackle of paper that sounded like the rattle of thunder before the final ear-splitting crash. As still as a mouse he sat and listened for new sounds, more sinister than those that had gone before; and, like the mouse, he jumped with each recurring sound. Towering crates seemed on the verge of toppling over upon him, boxes and barrels appeared to draw closer together to present a barrier against any means of escape; cords and ropes wriggled with life as he stared at them, serpentine things that kept on creeping toward him, never away. Oh, for the sound of Phoebe's voice! "Quoth the raven, nevermore!" That sombre sentence haunted him. He tried to close his ears against it, but to no purpose. It crept up from some inward lurking place in his being, crooning a hundred cadences in spite of all that he could do to change the order of his thoughts. Far in the night he dashed fearfully up to his dismantled bedroom, a flickering candle in his hand. He had gone about the place to see that all of the doors and windows were fastened. Removing his shoes and his coat, he hurriedly crawled in between the blankets and blew out the light. Sleep would not come. He was sobbing. He got up twice and lighted the candle, once to put away the motto, again to take out of the trunk the cabinet size photograph of himself and Nellie and the baby, taken when the latter was three years old. Hugging this to his breast, he started back to bed. A sudden thought staggered him. For a long time he stood in the middle of the room, shivering as he debated the great question this thought presented. At last, with a shudder, he urged his reluctant feet to carry him across the room to the single gas jet. Closing his eyes he turned on the gas full force and then leaped into the bed, holding the portrait to his heart. Then he waited for the end of everything. When he opened his eyes broad daylight was streaming in upon him. Some one was pounding on the door downstairs. He leaped out of bed and began to pull on his shoes. Suddenly it occurred to him that by all rights he should be lying there stiff and cold, suffocated by the escaping gas. He sniffed the air. There was no odour of gas. With a gasp of alarm he rushed over and turned off the stopcock, a cold perspiration coming out all over him. "Gee, I hope I'm in time!" he groaned aloud. "I don't want to die. I--I--it's different in the daytime. The darkness did it. I hope I'm----" Then, considerably puzzled, he interrupted himself to turn the thing on again. He stood on his toes to smell the tip. "By jingo, I remember now, that fellow turned it off in the meter yesterday. Oh, Lord; what a close call I've had!" He was so full of glee when he opened the door to admit the packers that they neglected, in their astonishment, to growl at him for keeping them standing in the cold for fifteen or twenty minutes. "Thought maybe you'd gone and done it," said the foreman. "Took poison or turned on the gas, or something. You was mighty blue yesterday, Mr.--Mr. Duluth." With the arrival of the van he set off to pay the bills due the tradespeople in town, returning before noon with all the receipts, and something like $20 left over. The world did not look so dark and dreary to him now. In his mind's eye he saw himself rehabilitated in the sight of the scoffers, prospering ere long to such an extent that not only would he be able to reclaim Phoebe, but even Nellie might be persuaded to throw herself on his neck and beg for reinstatement in his good graces. With men like Harvey the ill wind never blows long or steadily; it blows the hardest under cover of night. The sunshine takes the keen, bitter edge off it, and it becomes a balmy zephyr. Already he was planning the readjustment of his fortunes. At length the van was loaded. His suitcase sat on the front porch, puny and pathetic. The owner of the house was there, superintending the boarding up of the windows and doors. Harvey stood in the middle of the walk, looking on with a strange yearning in his heart. All of his worldly possessions reposed in that humble bag, save the cotton umbrella that he carried in his hand. A cotton umbrella, with the mercury down to zero! "Well, I'm sorry you're leaving," said the owner, pocketing the keys as he came up to the little man. "Can I give you a lift in my cutter down to the station?" "If it isn't too much bother," said Harvey, blinking his eyes very rapidly. "You're going to the city, I suppose." "The city?" "New York." "Oh," said Harvey, wide-eyed and thoughtful, "I--I thought you meant Blakeville. I'm going out there for a visit with my Uncle Peter. He's the leading photographer in Blakeville. My mother's brother. No, I'm not going to New York. Not on your life!" All the way to the station he was figuring on how far the twenty dollars would go toward paying his fare to Blakeville. How far could he ride on the cars, and how far would he have to walk? And what would his crabbed old uncle say to an extended visit in case he got to Blakeville without accident? He bought some cigarettes at the newsstand and sat down to wait for the first train to turn up, westward bound. CHAPTER VIII BLAKEVILLE If by any chance you should happen to stop off in the sleepy town of Blakeville, somewhere west of Chicago, you would be directed at once to the St. Nicholas Hotel, not only the leading hostelry of the city, but--to quote the advertisement in the local newspaper--the principal hotel in that Congressional district. After you had been conducted to the room with a bath--for I am sure you would insist on having it if it were not already occupied, which wouldn't be likely--you would cross over to the window and look out upon Main Street. Directly across the way you would observe a show window in which huge bottles filled with red, yellow, and blue fluids predominated. The sign above the door would tell you that it was a drug store, if you needed anything more illuminating than the three big bottles. "Davis' drug store," you would say to your wife, if she happened to be with you, and if you have been at all interested in the history of Mr.--Mr.--Now, what is his name?--you would doubtless add, "It seems to me I have heard of the place before." And then you would stare hard to see if you could catch a glimpse of the soda-water dispenser, whose base of operations was just inside the door to the left, a marble structure that glistened with white and silver, and created within you at once a longing for sarsaparilla or vanilla and the delicious after effect of stinging gases coming up through the nostrils, not infrequently accompanied by tears of exquisite pain--a pungent pain, if you please. At the rush periods of the day you could not possibly have seen him for the crowd of thirsty people who obstructed the view. Everybody in town flocked to Davis' for their chocolate sundaes and cherry phosphates. Was not Harvey behind the counter once more? With all the new-fangled concoctions from gay New York, besides a few novelties from Paris, and a wonderful assortment of what might well have been called prestidigitatorial achievements! He had a new way of juggling an egg phosphate that was worth going miles to see, and as for the manner in which he sprinkled nutmeg over the surface--well! no Delsartian movement ever was so full of grace. Yes, he was back at the old place in Davis'. For a year and a half he had been there. So prosperous was his first summer behind the "soda counter" that the owner of the place agreed with him that the fountain could be kept running all winter, producing hot chocolate, beef tea, and all that sort of thing. Just to keep the customers from getting out of the habit, argued Harvey in support of his plan--and his job. You may be interested to learn how he came back to Blakeville. He was a fortnight getting there from Tarrytown. His railroad ticket carried him to Cleveland. From that city he walked to Chicago, his purpose being to save a few dollars so that he might ride into Blakeville. His feet were so sore and swollen when he finally hobbled into his Uncle Peter's art studio, on Main Street, that he couldn't get his shoes on for forty-eight hours after once taking them off. He confessed to a bit of high living in his time, lugubriously admitting to his uncle that he feared he had a touch of the gout. He was subject to it, confound it. Beastly thing, gout. But you can't live on lobster and terrapin and champagne without paying the price. His uncle, a crusty and unimpressionable bachelor, was not long in getting the truth out of him. To Harvey's unbounded surprise the old photographer sympathised with him. Instead of kicking him out he took him to his bosom, so to speak, and commiserated with him. "I feel just as sorry for a married man, Harvey," said he, "as I do for a half-starved dog. I'm always going out of my way to feed some of these cast-off dogs around town, so why shouldn't I do the same for a poor devil of a husband? I'll make you comfortable until you get into Davis', but don't you ever let on to these damned women that you're a failure, or that you're strapped, or that that measly little wife of yours gave you the sack. No, sir! Remember who you are. You are my nephew. I won't say as I'm proud of you, but, by thunder! I don't want anybody in Blakeville to know that I'm ashamed of you. If I feel that way about you, it's my own secret and it's nobody's business. So you just put on a bold front and nobody need know. You can be quite sure I won't tell on you, to have people saying that my poor dead sister's boy wasn't good enough for Ell Barkley or any other woman that ever lived. "But it's a lesson to you. Don't--for God's sake, don't--ever let another one of 'em get her claws on you! Here's ten dollars. Go out and buy some ten-cent cigars at Rumley's, and smoke 'em where everybody can see you. Ten-centers, mind you; not two-fers, the kind I smoke. And get a new pair of shoes at Higgs'. And invite me to eat a--an expensive meal at the St. Nicholas. It can't cost more'n a dollar, no matter how much we order, but you can ask for lobster and terrapin, and raise thunder because they haven't got 'em, whatever they are. Then in a couple of days you can say you're going to help me out during the busy season, soliciting orders for crayon portraits. I'll board and lodge you here and give you four dollars a week to splurge on. The only thing I ask in return is that you'll tell people I'm a smart man for never having married. That's all!" You may be quite sure that Harvey took to the place as a duck takes to water. Inside of a week after his arrival--or, properly speaking, his appearance in Blakeville, for you couldn't connect the two on account of the gout--he was the most talked-of, most envied man in the place. In the cigar stores, poolrooms, and at the St. Nicholas he was wont to regale masculine Blakeville with tales of high life in the Tenderloin that caused them to fairly shiver from attacks of the imagination, and subsequently to go home and tell their women folk what a gay Lothario he was, with the result that the interest in the erstwhile drug clerk spread to the other sex with such remarkable unanimity that no bit of gossip was complete without him. Every one affected his society, because every one wanted to hear what he had to say of the gay world on Manhattan Island; the life behind the scenes of the great theatres, the life in the million dollar cafés and hotels, the life in the homes of fashionable New Yorkers,--with whom he was on perfectly amiable terms,--the life in Wall Street. Some of them wanted to know all about Old Trinity, others were interested in the literary atmosphere of Gotham, while others preferred to hear about the fashions. But the great majority hungered for the details of convivial escapades--and he saw to it that they were amply satisfied. Especially were they interested in stories concerning the genus "broiler." Oh, he was really a devil of a fellow. When the time came for him to begin his work as a solicitor for crayon portraits his reputation was such that not only was he able to gain admittance to every home visited, but he was allowed to remain and chat as long as he pleased, sometimes obtaining an order, but always being invited to call again after the lady of the house had had time to talk it over with her husband. Sometimes he would lie awake in his bed trying in vain to remember the tales he had told and wondering if the people really believed him. Then he was prone to contrast his fiction with the truth as he knew it, and to blame himself for not having lived the brightly painted life when he had the opportunity. He almost wept when he thought of what he had missed. His imagination carried him so far that he cursed his mistaken rectitude and longed for one lone and indelible reminiscence which he could cherish as a real tribute to that beautiful thing called vice! In answer to all questions he announced that poor Nellie had been advised to go West for her health. Of the real situation he said nothing. No day passed that did not bring with it the longing for a letter from Nellie or a word from Phoebe. Down in his heart he was grieving. He wanted them, both of them. The hope that Nellie would appeal to him for forgiveness grew smaller as the days went by, and yet he did not let it die. His loyal imagination kept it alive, fed it with daily prayers and endless vistas of a reconstructed happiness for all of them. Toward the end of his first summer at Davis' he was served with the notice that Nellie had instituted proceedings against him in Reno. It was in the days of Reno's early popularity as a rest cure for those suffering from marital maladies; impediments and complications were not so annoying as they appear to be in these latter times of ours. There was also a legal notice printed in the Blakeville _Patriot_. The shock laid him up for a couple of days. If his uncle meant to encourage him by maintaining an almost incessant flow of invectives, he made a dismal failure of it. He couldn't convince the heartsick Harvey that Nellie was "bad rubbish" and that he was lucky to be rid of her. No amount of cajolery could make him believe that he was a good deal happier than he had ever been before in all his life; he wasn't happy and he couldn't be fooled into believing he was. He was miserable--desperately miserable. Looking back on his futile attempts to take his own life, he realised now that he had missed two golden chances to be supremely happy. How happy he could be if he were only dead! He was rather glad, of course, that he failed with the pistol, because it would have been such a gory way out of it, but it was very stupid of him not to have gone out pleasantly--even immaculately--by the other route. But it was too late to think of doing it now. He was under contract with Mrs. Davis, Mr. Davis having passed on late in the spring, and he could not desert the widow in the midst of the busy season. His last commission as a crayon solicitor had come through Mrs. Davis, two months after the demise of Blakeville's leading apothecary. She ordered a life-size portrait of her husband, to be hung in the store, and they wept together over the prescription--that is to say, over the colour of the cravat and the shade of the sparse thatch that covered the head of the departed. Mrs. Davis never was to forget his sympathetic attitude. She never quite got over explaining the oversight that had deprived him of the distinction of being one of the pall-bearers, but she made up for it in a measure by insisting on opening the soda fountain at least a month earlier than was customary the next spring, and in other ways, as you will see later on. Just as he was beginning to rise, phoenixlike, from the ashes of his despond, the _Patriot_ reprinted the full details of Nellie's complaint as they appeared in a New York daily. For a brief spell he shrivelled up with shame and horror; he could not look any one in the face. Nellie's lawyers had made the astounding, outrageous charge of infidelity against him! Infidelity! He was stunned. But just as he was on the point of resigning his position in the store, after six months of glorious triumph, the business began to pick up so tremendously that he wondered what had got into people. His uncle chucked him in the ribs and called him a gay dog! Men came in and ordered sundaes who had never tasted one before, and they all looked at him in a strangely respectful way. Women smirked and giggled and called him a naughty fellow, and said they really ought not to let him wait on them. All of a sudden it dawned on him that he was "somebody." He was a rake! The New York paper devoted two full columns to his perfidious behaviour in the Tenderloin. For the first time in his life he stood in the limelight. Nellie charged him with other trifling things, such as failure to provide, desertion, cruelty; but none of these was sufficiently blighting to take the edge off the delicious clause which lifted him into the seventh heaven of a new found self-esteem! His first impulse had been to cry out against the diabolical falsehood, to deny the allegation, to fight the case to the bitter end. But on second thought he concluded to maintain a dignified silence, especially as he came to realise that he now possessed a definite entity not only in Blakeville, but in the world at large. He was a recognised human being! People who had never heard of him before were now saying, "What a jolly scamp he is! What a scalawag!" Oh, it was good to come into his own, even though he reached it by a crooked and heretofore undesirable thoroughfare. Path was not the word--it was a thoroughfare, lined by countless staring, admiring fellow creatures, all of whom pointed him out and called him by his own name. Mothers cautioned their daughters, commanding them to have nothing to do with him, and then went with them to Davis' to see that the commands were obeyed. Fathers held him up to their sons as a dreadful warning, and then made it a point to drop in and tell him what they thought of him with a sly wink that pleased and never offended him. He mildly protested against the sensational charge when questioned about it, saying that Nellie was mistaken, that her jealousy led her to believe a lot of things that were not true, and that he felt dreadfully cut up about the whole business, as it was likely to create a wrong impression in New York. Of course, he went on, no one in Blakeville believed the foolish thing! But in New York--well, they were likely to believe anything of a fellow there! He moved in the very centre of a great white light. Reporters came in every day and asked him if there was anything new, hoping, of course, for fresh developments in the great divorce case. Lawyers dropped in to hint that they would like to take care of his interests. But there never was anything new, and his New York lawyers were perfectly capable of handling his affairs, particularly as he had decided to enter no general denial to the charges. He would let her get her divorce if she wanted it so badly as all that! "I'd fight it," said the editor of the _Patriot_, counselling him one afternoon. "You wouldn't if you had a child to consider," said Harvey, resignedly, quite overlooking the fact that there were nine growing children in the editor's household. "She's too young to know anything about it," argued the other, earnestly. Harvey shook his head. "You don't know what it is to be a father, Mr. Brinkley. It's a terrible responsibility." Mr. Brinkley snorted. "I should say it is!" "You'd think of your children if your wife sued you for divorce and charged you with----" "I'd want my children to know I was innocent," broke in the editor, warmly. "They wouldn't believe it if the lawyers got to cross-examining you," said Harvey, meaning well, but making a secret enemy of Mr. Brinkley, who thought he knew more of a regrettable visit to Chicago than he pretended. Late in the fall several important epoch-making things happened to Harvey. Nellie was granted a divorce and the custody of the child. His uncle fell ill and died of pneumonia, and he found himself the sole heir to a thriving business and nearly three thousand dollars in bank. Mrs. Davis blandly proposed matrimony to him, now that he was free and she nearing the halfway stage of mourning. He was somewhat dazed by these swift turns of the wheel of fate. His first thought on coming into the fortune was of Phoebe, and the opportunities it laid open to him where she was concerned. His uncle had been dilatory in the matter of dying, but his nephew did not have it in his kindly heart to hold it up against the old gentleman. Still, if he had passed on a fortnight earlier, the decree might have been anticipated by a few days and Phoebe at least saved for him. Seeing that the poor old gentleman had to die anyway, it seemed rather inconsiderate of fate to put it off so long as it did. As it was, he would have to make the best of it and institute some sort of proceedings to get possession of the child for half of the year at the shortest. He went so far as to slyly consult an impecunious lawyer about the matter, with the result that a long letter was sent to Nellie setting out the facts and proposing an amicable arrangement in lieu of more sinister proceedings. Harvey added a postscript to the lawyer's diplomatic rigmarole, conveying a plain hint to Nellie that, inasmuch as he was now quite well-to-do, she might fare worse than to come back to him and begin all over again. The letter was hardly on its way to Reno, with instructions to forward, when he began to experience a deep and growing sense of shame; it was a pusillanimous trick he was playing on his poor old woman-hating uncle. Contemplating a resumption of the conjugal state almost before the old gentleman was cold in his grave! It was contemptible. In no little dread he wondered if his uncle would come back to haunt him. There was, at any rate, no getting away from the gruesome conviction, ludicrous as it may seem, that he would be responsible for the brisk turning over of Uncle Peter, if nothing more. On top of this spell of uneasiness came the surprising proposition of Mrs. Davis. Between the suspense of not hearing from Nellie and the dread of offending the dead he was already in a sharp state of nerves. But when Mrs. Davis gently confided to him that she needed a live man to conduct her affairs without being actuated by a desire to earn a weekly salary he was completely stupefied. "I'm afraid I don't understand, Mrs. Davis," he said, beginning to perspire very freely. They were seated in the parlour of her house in Brown Street. She had sent for him. "Of course, Harvey, it is most unseemly of me to suggest it at the present time, seeing as I have only been in mourning for three months, but I thought perhaps you'd feel more settled like if you knew just what to expect of me." "Just what to expect?" "Yes; so's you could rest easy in your mind. It would have to be quite a ways off yet, naturally, so's people wouldn't say mean things about us. They might, you know, considering the way you carried on with women in New York. Not for the world would I have 'em say or even think that anything had been going on between you and me prior to the time of Mr. Davis' death, but--but you know how people will talk if they get a chance. For that reason I think we'd better wait until the full period of mourning is over. That's only about a year longer, and it would stop----" "Are--are you asking me to--to marry you, Mrs. Davis?" gasped Harvey, clutching the arms of the chair. "Well, Harvey," said she, kindly, "I am making it easy for you to do it yourself." "Holy----" began he, but strangled back the word "Mike," remembering that Mrs. Davis, a devout church member, abhorred anything that bordered on the profane. "Holy what?" asked she, rather coyly for a lady who was not likely to see sixty again unless reincarnated. "Matrimony," he completed, as if inspired. "I know I am a few years older than you, Harvey, but you are so very much older than I in point of experience that I must seem a mere girl to you. We could----" "Mrs. Davis, I--I can't do it," he blurted out, mopping his brow. "I suppose it means I'll lose my job in the store, but, honestly, I can't do it. I'm much obliged. It's awfully nice of you to----" "Don't be too hasty," said she, composedly. "As I said in the beginning, I want some one to conduct the store in Mr. Davis' place. But I want that person to be part owner of it. No hired man, you understand? Now, how would a new sign over the door look, with your name right after Davis? Davis &--er--er----Oh, dear me!" "I'll--I'll buy half of the store," floundered he. "I want to buy a half interest." "I won't sell," said she, flatly. "I'm determined that the store shall never go out of the family while I am alive. There's only one way for you to get around that, and that's by becoming a part of the family." "Why--why, Mrs. Davis, I'm only thirty years old. You surely don't mean to say you'd--you'd marry a kid like me? Let's see. My mother, if she was alive, wouldn't be as old as----" "Never mind!" interrupted she, with considerable asperity. "We won't discuss your mother, if you please. Now, Harvey, don't be cruel. I am very fond of you. I will overlook all those scandalous things you did in New York. I can and will close my eyes to the wicked life you led there. I won't even ask their names--and that's more than most women would promise! I won't----" "I can't do it," he repeated two or three times in rapid succession. "Think it over, Harvey dear," said she, impressively. "I'll buy a half interest if you'll let me, but I'll be doggoned if I'll marry a stepmother for Phoebe, not for the whole shebang!" "Stepmother!" she repeated, shrilly. "I don't intend to be a stepmother!" "Maybe I meant grandmother," he stammered in confusion. "I'm so rattled." "Nellie has got Phoebe. She's not yours any longer. How can I be her stepmother? Answer that." "You can't," said he, much too promptly. "Well, promise me one thing, Harvey dear," she pleaded; "promise me you'll take a month or two to think it over. We couldn't be married for a year, in any event, so what's the sense of being in such a hurry to settle the matter definitely?" Harvey reflected. He found himself in a very peculiar predicament. He had gone to her house with the avowed intention of offering her three thousand dollars and the studio in exchange for a half interest in the drug store. Now his long cherished dream seemed to be turning into a nightmare. "I will think it over," he said, at last, in secret desperation. "But can't you give me a year's option?" "On me?" "On the store." "Well, am I not the store?" "No ma'am," said he, hastily. "I can't look at you in that light. I can't think of you as a drug store." "I am sure I would make you a good and loving wife, Harvey. If Davis were alive he could tell you how devoted I was to him in all the----" "But that's just the trouble, he isn't alive!" cried poor Harvey, at his wits' end. "Give me eight months." "In the meantime you will up and marry some one else. Half the girls in town are crazy--no, I won't say that," she made haste to interrupt herself, suddenly realising the tactlessness of the remark. "Come up to dinner next Sunday and we will talk it over again. It is the best drug store in Blakeville, Harvey; remember that." "I will remember it," he said, blankly, and took his departure. As he passed Simpson's book store he dashed in and bought a New York dramatic paper. Hurriedly looking through the route list of companies, he found that the "Up in the Air" company was playing that week in Philadelphia. Without consulting his attorney he telegraphed to Nellie:--"Am in trouble. Uncle Peter is dead. Left me everything. Will you come back? Harvey." The next day he had a wire from Nellie, charges collect:--"If he left you everything, why don't you pay for telegrams when you send them? Nellie." He replied:--"I was not sure you were with the company, that's why. Shall I come to Philadelphia? Harvey." Her answer:--"Not unless you are looking for more trouble. Nellie." His next:--"There's a woman here who wants me to marry her. Won't you help me? Harvey." Her last:--"There's a man here who is going to marry me. Why don't you marry her? Naughty! Naughty! Nellie." He gave up in despair at this. On Sunday he allowed Mrs. Davis to bullyrag him into a tentative engagement. Then he began to droop. He had done a bit of investigating on his own account before going up to dine with her. She had been married to Davis forty-two years and then he died. If their only daughter had lived she would be forty-one years of age, and, if married, would doubtless be the mother of a daughter who might also in turn be the mother of a child. Figuring back, he made out that under these circumstances Mrs. Davis might very easily have been a great-grandmother. With this appalling thought in mind, he was quite firm in his determination to reject the old lady's proposal. Mrs. Davis taking Nellie's place! Pretty, gay, vivacious Nellie! It was too absurd for words. But he went home an engaged man, just the same. They were to be married in September of the following year, many months off. That afternoon he saw a few gray hairs just above his ears and pulled them out. After that he looked for them every day. It was amazing how rapidly they increased despite his efforts to exterminate them. He began to grow careless in the matter of dress. His much talked of checked suits and lavender waistcoats took on spots and creases; his gaudy neckties became soiled and frayed; his fancy Newmarket overcoat, the like of which was only to be seen in Blakeville when some travelling theatrical troupe came to town, looked seedy, unbrushed, and sadly wrinkled. He forgot to shave for days at a time. His only excuse to himself was, What's the use? During the holidays, in the midst of a cheerful season of buying presents for Phoebe--and a bracelet for Nellie--he saw in the _Patriot_, under big headlines, the thing that served as the last straw for his already sagging back. The announcement was being made in all the metropolitan newspapers that "Nellie Duluth, the most popular and the most beautiful of all the comic opera stars," was to quit the stage forever on the first of the year to become the wife of "the great financier, L. Z. Fairfax, long a devoted admirer." The happy couple were to spend the honeymoon on the groom's yacht, sailing in February for an extended cruise of the Mediterranean and other "sunny waters of the globe," primarily for pleasure but actually in the hope of restoring Miss Duluth to her normal state of health. A breakdown, brought on no doubt by the publicity attending her divorce a few months earlier, made it absolutely imperative, said the newspapers, for her to give up the arduous work of her chosen profession. Harvey did not send the bracelet to her. * * * * * The long winter passed. Spring came and in its turn gave way to summer. September drew on apace. He went about with an ever increasing tendency to look at the wall calendar with a fixed stare when he should have been paying attention to the congratulations that came to him from the opposite side of the counter or showcase. His baby-blue eyes wore the mournful, distressed look of an offending dog; his once trim little moustache drooped over the corners of his mouth; his shoulders sagged and his feet shuffled as he walked. "Harvey," said Mrs. Davis, not more than a fortnight before the wedding day, "You look terribly peaked. You must perk up for the wedding." "I'm going into a decline," he said, affecting a slight cough. "You are going to decline!" she shrilled, in her high, querulous voice. "I said 'into,' Minerva," he explained, dully. "I do believe I'm getting a bit deaf," she said, pronouncing it "deef." "It will be mighty tough on you if I should suddenly go into quick consumption," said he, somewhat hopefully. "You mustn't think of such a thing, dearie," she protested. "No," said he, letting his shoulders sag again. "I suppose it's no use." Just a week to the day before the 6th of September--the one numeral on the calendar he could see with his eyes closed--he shuffled over to the tailor's to try on the new Prince Albert coat and striped trousers that Mrs. Davis was giving him for a wedding present. He puffed weakly at the cigarette that hung from his lips and stared at the window without the slightest interest in what was going on outside. A new train of thought was taking shape in his brain, as yet rather indefinite and undeveloped, but quite engaging as a matter for contemplation. "Do you know how far it is to Reno?" he asked of the tailor, who paused in the process of ripping off the collar of the new coat. "Couple of thousand miles, I guess. Why?" "Oh, nothing," said Harvey, blinking his eyes curiously. "I just asked." "You're not thinking of going out there, are you?" "My health isn't what it ought to be," said Harvey, staring westward over the roof of the church down the street. "If I don't get better I may have to go West." "Gee, is it as bad as all that?" Harvey's lips parted to give utterance to a vigorous response, but he caught himself up in time. "Maybe it won't amount to anything," he said, noncommittally. "I've got a little cough, that's all." He coughed obligingly, in the way of illustration. "Don't wait too long," advised the kindly tailor. "If you get after it in time it can be checked, they say, although I don't believe it. In the family?" "Not yet," said his customer, absently. "A week from to-day." A reflection which puzzled the tailor vastly. Whatever may have been in Harvey's mind at the moment was swept away forever by the sudden appearance in the shop door of Bobby Nixon, the "boy" at Davis'. "Say, Harvey," bawled the lad, "come on, quick! Mrs. Davis is over at the store and she's red-headed because you've been away for more'n an hour. She's got a telegram from some'eres and----" "A telegram!" gasped Harvey, turning pale. "Who from?" "How should I know?" shouted Bobby. "But she's got blood in her eye, you can bet on that." Harvey did not wait for the tailor to strip the skeleton of the Prince Albert from his back, but dashed out of the shop in wild haste. Mrs. Davis was behind the prescription counter. She had been weeping. At the sight of him she burst into fresh lamentations. "Oh, Harvey, I've got terrible news for you--just terrible! But I won't put up with it! I won't have it! It's abominable! She ought to be tarred and feathered and----" Harvey began to tremble. "Somebody's doing it for a joke, Mrs. Davis," he gulped. "I swear to goodness I never had a thing to do with a woman in all my life. Nobody's got a claim on me, honest to----" "What are you talking about, Harvey?" demanded Mrs. Davis, wide-eyed. "What does it say?" cried he, pulling himself up with a jerk. "I'm innocent, whatever it is." "It's from your wife," said Mrs. Davis, shaking the envelope in his face. "Read it! Read the awful thing!" "From--from Nellie?" he gasped. "Yes, Eller! Read it!" "Hold it still! I can't read it if you jiggle it around----" She held the envelope under his nose. "Do you see who it's addressed to?" she grated out. "To me, as your wife. She thinks I'm already married to you. Read that name there, Harvey." He read the name on the envelope in a sort of stupefaction. Then she whisked the message out and handed it to him, plumping herself down in a chair to fan herself vigorously while the prescription clerk hastened to renew his ministrations with the ammonia bottle, a task that had been set to him some time prior to the advent of Harvey. Suddenly Harvey gave a squeal of joy and instituted a series of hops and bounds that threatened to create havoc in the narrow, bottle-encircled space behind the prescription wall. He danced up and down, waving the telegram on high, the tails of his half-finished wedding garment doing a mad obbligato to the tune of his nimble legs. "Harvey!" shrieked Mrs. Davis, aghast. "Yi-i-i!" rang out his ear-splitting yell. Pedestrians half a block away heard it and felt sorry for Mrs. Wiggs, the unhappy wife of the town sot, who, it went without saying, must be on another "toot." "Harvey!" cried the poor lady once more. "She's going to faint!" shouted the prescription clerk in consternation. "Let her! Let her!" whooped Harvey. "It's all right, Joe! Let her faint if she wants to." "I'm not going to faint!" exclaimed Mrs. Davis, struggling to her feet and pushing Joe away. "Keep quiet, Harvey! Do you want customers to think you're crazy? Give me that telegram. I'll attend to that. I'll answer it mighty quick, let me tell you. Give it to me." Harvey sobered almost instantly. His jaw fell. The look in her face took all the joy out of his. "Isn't--isn't it great, Minerva?" he murmured, as he allowed her to snatch the message from his unresisting fingers. She glared at him. "Great? Why, you don't think for a moment that I'll have the brat in my house, do you? Great? I don't see what you can be thinking of, Harvey. You must be clean out of your head. I should say it ain't great. It's perfectly outrageous. Where's the telegraph office, Joe? I'll show the dreadful little wretch that she can't shunt her child off on me for support. Not much. Where is it, Joe? Didn't you hear what I asked?" "Yes, ma'am," acknowledged Joe, blankly. "You can't be mean enough--I should say you don't mean to tell her we won't take Phoebe?" gasped Harvey, blinking rapidly. "Surely you can't be so hard-hearted as all----" "That will do, Harvey," said she, sternly. "Don't let me hear another word out of you. The idea! Just as soon as she thinks you're safely married to some one who can give that child a home she up and tries to get rid of her. The shameless thing! No, sir-ree! She can't shuffle her brat off on me. Not if I know what I'm----" She fell back in alarm. The telegram fluttered to the floor. Harvey was standing in front of her, shaking his fist under her nose, his face contorted by a spasm of fury. "Don't you call my little girl a brat," he sputtered. "And don't you dare to call my wife a shameless thing!" "Your wife!" she gasped. He waved his arms like a windmill. "My widow, if you are going to be so darned particular about it," he shouted, inanely. "Don't you dare send a telegram saying Phoebe can't come and live with her father. I won't have it. She's coming just as fast as I can get her here. Hurray!" Mrs. Davis lost all of her sternness. She dissolved into tears. "Oh, Harvey dear, do you really and truly want that child back again?" she sniffled. "Do I?" he barked. "My God, I should say I do! And say, I'd give my soul if I could get Nellie back, too. How do you like that?" The poor woman was ready to fall on her knees to him. "For Heaven's sake--for my sake--don't speak of such a thing. Don't try to get her back. Promise me! I'll let the child come, but--oh! don't take Nellie back. It would break my heart. I just couldn't have her around, not if I tried my----" Harvey stared, open-mouthed. "I didn't mean that I'd like to have you take her back, Minerva. You haven't anything to do with it." She stiffened. "Well, if I haven't, I'd like to know who has. It's my house, isn't it?" "Don't make a scene, Minerva," he begged, suddenly aware of the presence of a curious crowd in the front part of the store. "Go home and I'll send the telegram. And say, if I were you, I'd go out the back way." "And just to think, it's only a week till the wedding day," she choked out. "We can put it off," he made haste to say. "I know I shall positively hate that child," said she, overlooking his generous offer. "I will be a real stepmother to her, you mark my words. You can let her come if you want to, Harvey, but you mustn't expect me to treat her as anything but a--a--an orphan." She was a bit mixed in her nouns. A brilliant idea struck him. "You'd better be nice to her, Mrs. Davis, if you know what's good for you. Now, don't flare up! You mustn't forget you've broken the law by opening a telegram not intended for you." "What?" "It isn't addressed to you," he said, examining the envelope. "Your name is still Mrs. Davis, isn't it?" "Of course it is." "Well, then, what in thunder did you open a telegram addressed to my wife for? That's my wife's name, not yours." "But," she began, vastly perplexed, "but it was meant for me." "How do you know?" he demanded. Her eyes bulged. "You--you don't mean that there is another one, Harvey?" He winked with grave deliberateness. "That's for you to find out." He darted through the back door into the alley, just as she collapsed in the prescriptionist's arms. In the telegraph office he read and re-read the message, his eyes aglow. It was from Nellie and came from New York, dated Friday, the first. "Am sending Phoebe to Blakeville next Monday to make her home with you and Harvey. Letter to-day explains all. Have Harvey meet her in Chicago Tuesday, four P.M., Lake Shore." He scratched his chin reflectively. "I guess it don't call for an answer, after all," he said as much to himself as to the operator. Nellie's letter came the next afternoon, addressed to Harvey. In a state of great excitement he broke the seal and read the poignant missive with eyes that were glazed with wonder and--something even more potent. She began by saying that she supposed he was happily married, and wished him all the luck in the world. Then she came abruptly to the point, as she always did:--"I am in such poor health that the doctors say I shall have to go to Arizona at once. I am good for about six months longer at the outside, they say. Not half that long if I stay in this climate. Maybe I'll get well if I go out there. I'm not very keen about dying. I hate dead things; don't you? Now about Phoebe. She's been pining for you all these months. She doesn't like Mr. Fairfax, and he's not very strong for her. To be perfectly honest, he doesn't want her about. She's not his, and he hasn't much use for anything or anybody that doesn't belong to him. I've got so that I can't stand it, Harvey. The poor little kiddie is so miserably unhappy, and I'm not strong enough to get out and work for her as I used to. I would if I could. I think Fairfax is sick of the whole thing. He didn't count on me going under as I have. He hasn't been near me for a month, but he says it's because he hates the sight of Phoebe. I wonder. It wasn't that way a couple of years ago. But I'm different now. You wouldn't know me, I'm that thin and skinny. I hate the word, but that's what I am. The doctors have ordered me to a little place out in Arizona. I've got to do what they say, and what Fairfax says. It's the jumping-off place. So I'm leaving in a day or two with Rachel. My husband says he can't leave his business, but I'm not such a fool as he thinks. I won't say anything more about him, except that he hasn't the courage to watch me go down by inches. "I can't leave Phoebe with him and I don't think it best to have her with me. She ought to be spared all that. She's so young, Harvey. She'd never forget. You love her, and she adores you. I'm giving her back to you. Don't--oh, please don't, ever let her leave Blakeville! I wish I had never left it, much as I hate it. I remember your new wife as being a kind, simple-hearted woman. She will be good to my little girl, I know, because she is yours as well. If I could get my health back, I'd work my heart out trying to support her, but it's out of the question. I have nothing to give her, Harvey, and I simply will not let Fairfax provide for her. Do you understand? Or are you as stupid and simple as you always were? And as tender-hearted?" There was more, but Harvey's eyes were so full of tears he could not read. * * * * * He was waiting in the Lake Shore station when the train pulled in on Tuesday. His legs were trembling like two reeds in the wind and his teeth chattered with the chill of a great excitement. Out of the blur that obscured his vision bounded a small figure, almost toppling him over as it clutched his not too stable legs and shrieked something that must have pleased him vastly, for he giggled and chortled like one gone daft with joy. A soulless guard tapped him on the shoulder and gruffly ordered him to "get off to one side with the kid," he was blocking the exit--and flooding it, he added after a peep at Harvey's streaming eyes. Rachel, tall and sardonic, stood patiently by until the little man recovered from his ecstasies. "I thought you were staying with my--with Mrs. Fairfax," he said, gazing at her in amazement. He was holding Phoebe in his arms, and she was so heavy that his face was purple from the exertion. "You'd better put her down," said Rachel, mildly. "She's not a baby any longer." With that she proceeded to pull the child's skirts down over the unnecessarily exposed pink legs. Harvey was not loath to set her down, a bit abruptly if the truth must be told. "Mrs. Fairfax is still in the drawing-room, sir. She doesn't want to get off until the crowd has moved out." Harvey stared. "She's--on--the--train?" "We change for the Santa Fe, which leaves this evening for the West. I'll go back to her now. The way is quite clear, I think. Good-bye, Phoebe. Be a good----" [Illustration: Copyright, 1911, by Dodd, Mead & Company He stopped, aghast, petrified] "I'm going with you!" cried Harvey, breathlessly. "Take me to the car." Rachel hesitated. "You will be surprised, sir, when you see her. She's very frail, and----" "Come on! Take me to my wife at once!" "You forget, sir. She is not your wife any----" "Oh, Lordy, Lordy!" fell dismally from his lips. "And you have a new wife, I hear. So, if I were you, I'd avoid a scene if----" But he was through the gate, dragging Phoebe after him. Rachel could not keep up with them. The eager little girl led him to the right car and he scurried up the steps, bursting into drawing-room B an instant later. Nellie, wrapped in a thick garment, was lying back in the corner of the seat, her small, white face with its great dark eyes standing out with ghastly clearness against the collar of the ulster that almost enveloped her head. He stopped, aghast, petrified. "Oh, Nellie!" he wailed. She betrayed no surprise. A wan smile transfigured her thin face. With an effort she extended a small gloved hand. He grasped it and found there was so little of it that it seemed lost in his palm. The sweat broke out on his forehead. He could not speak. This was Nellie! Her voice was low and husky. "Good-bye, Harvey. Be good to Phoebe, old fellow." He choked up and could only nod his head. "We can get out now, Mrs. Fairfax," said Rachel, appearing at the door. "Do you think you can walk, or shall I call for a----" "Oh, I can walk," said Nellie, with a touch of her old raillery. "I'm not that far gone. Good-bye, Harvey. Didn't you hear me? Don't stand there watching me like that. It's bad enough without----" He turned on Rachel furiously. "Where is that damned Fairfax? Why isn't he here with her? The dog!" "Hush, Harvey!" "He's mean to mamma," broke in Phoebe, in her high treble. "I hate him. And so does mamma. Don't you, mamma?" "Phoebe! Be quiet!" "Where is he?" repeated Harvey, shaking his finger in Rachel's face. "What are you blaming me for?" demanded the maid, indignantly. "Everybody blames me for everything. He's in New York, that's where he is. Now, you get out of here!" She actually shoved him out into the aisle, where he stood trembling and uncertain, while she assisted her mistress to her feet and led her haltingly toward the exit. Nellie looked back over her shoulder at him, quite coquettishly. She shook her head at him in mild derision. "My, what a fire-eater my little Harvey has become," she said. He barely heard the words. "Your new wife must be scared half out of her wits all the time." He sprang to her side, gently taking her arm in his hand. She lurched toward him ever so slightly. He felt the weight of her on his arm and marvelled that she was so much lighter than Phoebe. "I'm not married, Nellie dear!" he cried. "It's not to be till Friday. You got the date wrong. And it won't be Friday, either. No, sir! I'm not going to let you go all the way out there alone. I said I'd look out for you when we were married, and I'm going to. You've got a husband, but what good is he to you? He's a brute. Yes, sir; I'm going with you and I don't give a cuss who knows it. See here! See this wad of bills? Well, by jingo, there's more than three thousand dollars there. I drew it out this morning to give to you if you were hard up. I----" "Oh, Harvey, what a perfect fool you are!" she cried, tears in her eyes. "You always were a fool. Now you are a bigger one than ever. Go away, please! I can get along all right. Fairfax is paying for everything. Put that roll away! Do you want to be held up right here in the station?" "And I've still got the photograph gallery," he went on. "It's rented and I get $40 a month out of it. I'll take care of you, Nellie. I'll see you safely out there. Then maybe I'll have to come back and marry old Mrs. Davis, God help me! I hate to think of it, but she's got her mind set on it. I don't believe I can get out of it. But she'll have to postpone it, I can tell you that, whether she likes it or not. Maybe she'll call it off when she hears I've eloped with another man's wife. She thinks I'm a perfect scamp with women, anyway, and this may turn her dead against me. Gee, I hope it does! Say, let me go along with you, Nellie; please do. You and I won't call it an elopement, but maybe she will and that would save me. And that beast of a Fairfax won't care, so what's the harm?" "No," said Nellie, looking at him queerly. "Fairfax won't care. You can be sure of that." "Then I'm with you, Nellie!" he shouted. "You are a perfectly dreadful fool, Harvey," she said, huskily. "I know it!" he exclaimed. GROSSET & DUNLAP'S DRAMATIZED NOVELS Original, sincere and courageous--often amusing--the kind that are making theatrical history. MADAME X. By Alexandra Bisson and J. W. McConaughy. Illustrated with scenes from the play. A beautiful Parisienne became an outcast because her husband would not forgive an error of her youth. Her love for her son is the great final influence in her career. 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A series of clever swindles conducted by a cheerful young man, each of which is just on the safe side of a State's prison offence. As "Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford," it is probably the most amusing expose of money manipulation ever seen on the stage. THE INTRUSION OF JIMMY. By P. G. Wodehouse. Illustrations by Will Grefe. Social and club life in London and New York, an amateur burglary adventure and a love story. Dramatized under the title of "A Gentleman of Leisure," it furnishes hours of laughter to the play-goers. Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York CHARMING BOOKS FOR GIRLS May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list WHEN PATTY WENT TO COLLEGE, By Jean Webster. Illustrated by C. D. Williams. One of the best stories of life in a girl's college that has ever been written. It is bright, whimsical and entertaining, lifelike, laughable and thoroughly human. JUST PATTY, By Jean Webster. Illustrated by C. M. Relyea. Patty is full of the joy of living, fun-loving, given to ingenious mischief for its own sake, with a disregard for pretty convention which is an unfailing source of joy to her fellows. THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL, By Eleanor Gates. With four full page illustrations. This story relates the experience of one of those unfortunate children whose early days are passed in the companionship of a governess, seldom seeing either parent, and famishing for natural love and tenderness. A charming play as dramatized by the author. REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM, By Kate Douglas Wiggin. One of the most beautiful studies of childhood--Rebecca's artistic, unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand out midst a circle of austere New Englanders. The stage version is making a phenomenal dramatic record. NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA, By Kate Douglas Wiggin. Illustrated by F. C. Yohn. Additional episodes in the girlhood of this delightful heroine that carry Rebecca through various stages to her eighteenth birthday. REBECCA MARY, By Annie Hamilton Donnell Illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green. This author possesses the rare gift of portraying all the grotesque little joys and sorrows and scruples of this very small girl with a pathos that is peculiarly genuine and appealing. EMMY LOU: Her Book and Heart, By George Madden Martin. Illustrated by Charles Louis Hinton. Emmy Lou is irresistibly lovable, because she is so absolutely real. She is just a bewitchingly innocent, huggable little maid. The book is wonderfully human. Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St. New York 
36502	----	http://www.archive.org/details/joanthursday00vanciala JOAN THURSDAY A Novel by LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE With Illustrations by Oscar Cesare Boston Little, Brown, and Company 1913 Copyright, 1913, By Louis Joseph Vance. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian. Published, September, 1913. Reprinted, September, 1913. Reprinted, December, 1913. The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A. TO GRANT RICHARDS [Illustration: "Oh," she said, "I guess I'll do, all right, all right!"] LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS "Oh," she said, "I guess I'll do, all right, all right!" "What's the matter with you, anyway?" he demanded, hotly "Miss Thursday--my fiancée. Joan, this is Mrs. Marbridge" The door slammed. He was gone JOAN THURSDAY I She stood on the southeast corner of Broadway at Twenty-second Street, waiting for a northbound car with a vacant seat. She had been on her feet all day and was very tired, so tired that the prospect of being obliged to stand all the way uptown seemed quite intolerable. And so, though quick with impatience to get home and "have it over with," she chose to wait. Up out of the south, from lower Broadway and the sweatshop purlieus of Union Square, defiled an unending procession of surface cars, without exception dark with massed humanity. Pausing momentarily before the corner where the girl was waiting (as if mockingly submitting themselves to the appraisal of her alert eyes) one after another received the signal of the switchman beyond the northern crossing and ground sluggishly on. Not one but was crowded to the guards, affording the girl no excuse for leaving her position. She waited on, her growing impatience as imperceptible as her fatigue: neither of them discernible to those many transient stares which she received with a semblance of blank indifference that was, in reality, not devoid of consciousness. Youth will not be overlooked; reinforced by an abounding vitality, such as hers, it becomes imperious. This girl was as pretty as she was poor, and as young. Judged by her appearance, she might have been anywhere between sixteen and twenty years of age. She was, in fact, something over eighteen, and at heart more nearly a child than this age might be taken to imply--more a child than any who knew her suspected. She herself suspected it least of all. She looked what she liked to believe herself, a young woman of considerable experience with life. Simple, and even cheap, her garments still owned a certain distinction which she would without hesitation have termed "stylish": a quality of smartness which somehow contrived not incongruously to associate with inferior materials. Her shirtwaist was of opaque linen, pleated, and while not laundry-fresh was still presentable; her skirt fitted her hips snugly, and fell in graceful lines to a point something short of her low tan shoes, showing stockings of a texture at once coarse and sheer; to her hat, an ordinary straw simply trimmed with a band and _chou_ of ribbon, she had lent some little factitious character by deftly twisting it a trifle out of the prevailing shape. Over one arm she carried a coat of the same material as her skirt, and in her hand a well-worn handbag of imitation leather, rather too large, and decorated with a monogram of two initials in German silver. The initials were J-T: her name was Joan Thursby. Uniform with a thousand sisters of the shop-counters, she was yet mysteriously different. Men looked twice in passing; after passing some turned to look again. Her face, tinted by the glow of the western sky, was by no means poor in native colour: a shade thin, its regular features held a promise, vague, fugitive, and provoking. Her hair was a brown which hardly escaped being ruddy, and her skin matched it, lacking alike the dusky warmth of the brune and the purity of the blonde. She was neither tall nor short, but seemed misleadingly smaller than she was in fact, thanks to the slightness of a body more stupidly nourished than under-nourished or immature. Her eyes were brown and large, and they were very beautiful indeed when divorced from the vacancy of weary thinking. It was only in this look of the unthinking toiler that unconsciously she confessed her immense fatigue. Her features were relaxed into lines and contours of apathy. She seemed neither to think nor even to be capable of much sustained thought. Yet she was thinking, and that very intensely if unconsciously. Her mind was not only active but was one of considerable latent capacity: something which she did not in the least suspect; indeed, it had never occurred to Joan to debate her mental limitations. Her thoughts were as a rule more emotional than psychical: as now, when she was intensely preoccupied with pondering how she was to explain at home the loss of her position, and what would be said to her, and how she would feel when all had been said ... and what she would then do.... Daylight was slowly fading. Though it was only half-after six of an evening in June, the sun was already invisible, smudged out by a portentous bank of purplish cloud whose profile was edged with fire-of-gold against a sky of tarnished blue--a sky that seemed dimmed with the sweat of day-long heat and toil. The city air was close and moveless, and the cloud-bank was lifting very slowly from behind the Jersey hills; it might be several hours before the promised storm would break and bring relief to a parched and weary people. At length despairing of her desire, the girl moved out to the middle of the street and boarded the next open car of the Lexington Avenue line. She was able to find standing-room only between two seats toward the rear, where smoking was permitted. She stood just inside the running-board, grasping the back of the forward seat. Her hand rested between the shoulders of two men. She was the only woman in that section. Behind her were ten masculine knees in a row, before her five masculine heads: ten men crowding the two transverse benches, some smoking, all stolidly absorbed in newspapers and indifferent to the intrusion of a woman. None dreamed of offering the girl a seat; nor did she find this anything remarkable, in whom use had bred the habit of accepting without question such everyday phenomena. If she was weary, so were the men; if she desired the consideration due her sex, then must she enfranchise herself from the sexless struggle for a living wage.... The car, swerving into Twenty-third Street, plunged on to and turned north on Lexington Avenue. Thereafter its progress consisted of a series of frantic leaps from street-corner to street-corner. When it was in motion, there was a grateful rush of air; when at pause, the heat was stifling and the fumes of cigarettes, pipes, and cheap cigars blended to manufacture a mephitic reek. A slight sweat dewed the face of the girl, and her colour faded to pallor. Her feet and legs were aching, her back ached with much lifting of boxes to and from shelves, her head ached--chiefly because of the inevitable malnutrition of a shop-girl's lunch. From time to time more passengers were taken on; a lesser number alighted: Joan found herself obliged to edge farther in between the rank of knees and the rigid back of the forward seat. By the time the car crossed Forty-second Street, she was at the inside guard-rail: ten persons, half of them standing, were occupying a space meant for five. It was then, or only a trifle later, that she became conscious of the knee which the man behind her was purposely pressing against her. Then for a minute or two she was let alone. But she was sick with apprehension.... She stood it as long as she could. Then abruptly she twisted round and faced her persecutor. Before her eyes, half blinded by rage and disgust, his face swam like the mask of an incubus--a blur of red flesh fixed in an insolent smirk. She was dimly aware of curious glances lifting to the sound of her tremulous voice: "Must I leave this car? Or will you let me alone?" There was the pause of an instant; then she had her answer in a tone of truculent contempt: "Ah, wha's the matter with you, anyhow?" She choked, stammering, and looked round in despair. But the man at her elbow was grinning with open amusement, and another, seated beside her tormentor, was pretending to notice nothing, his nose buried in a newspaper. "If y'u don't like the goin', sister, why doncha get off 'n' walk?" This from him who had compelled that frantic protest. With a lurch, the car stopped; and as it did so the girl turned impulsively, grasped the guard-rail, swung her lithe body between it and the floor of the car, and dropped to the cobbles between the tracks. She staggered a foot or two away, followed by an indistinguishable taunt amid derisive laughter. Fortunately there was no car bearing down on the southbound track to endanger her; while that which she had left flung away as, recovering, she ran to the sidewalk. She began to trudge northward. The first street lamp she encountered told her she had alighted at Forty-seventh Street, and had another mile and a half to walk. But with all her weariness, she no longer thought of riding; it was impossible ... she could never escape annoyance ... men just wouldn't let her alone.... _Men!..._ Shuddering imperceptibly, her eyes hot with tears of shame and indignation, she walked rapidly, anxious to gain the refuge of her home, to be secure, for a time at least, from Man.... They called themselves _Men_! She despised them all--_all_! Beasts!... What had she ever done?... It wasn't as if this was the first time: they were always plaguing her: hardly a day passed.... Well, anyway, never a week.... It wasn't her fault if she was pretty: she never even so much as looked at them: but they kept on staring ... nudging.... She didn't believe there was a decent fellow living ... except, of course, That One.... He was different; at least, he had been, somehow: like a perfect gentleman. He had come between her and a gang of tormentors, had knocked one down and thrown the rest into confusion with a lively play of fists, and then, whisking Joan into a convenient taxicab, had taken her to the corner nearest her home--never so much as asking her name, or if he might call.... She had expected him to--like in a book; but he didn't, nor had he (likewise contrary to her expectations) at any time thereafter been known to haunt her neighbourhood. To her the affair was like a dream of chivalry: she remembered him as very handsome (probably far more handsome than he really was) and _different_, with grand clothes and manners (the man had helped her out of the cab and lifted his hat in parting): all in all, vastly unlike any of the fellows whose rude attentions she somewhat loftily permitted in the streets after supper or at the home of some other girl. That One remained her dream-lord of romance. And in her heart of hearts she was sure that some day their paths would cross again. But it had all happened so long ago that she had grown a little faint with waiting. So, smothering her indignation with roseate fancies, she plodded her weary way to Seventy-sixth Street; where, turning eastward, she presently ascended a squat brown-stone stoop, entered the dingy vestibule of a dingier tenement, pressed the button below a mail-box labelled "Thursby," waited till the latch clicked its spasmodic welcome, and then began her weary climb to the topmost floor. II The five flights of steps were long and steep and covered with a compound of fabric, grease, and dirt which, today resembling a thin layer of decayed rubber, had once been bright linoleum. There was no light other than a dejected dusk filtering down the wall from a grimy sky-light in the roof, a twilight lacking little of the gloom of night. On each landing five doors opened--three toward the back, two toward the front of the building: most of them ajar, for purposes of ventilation and publicity. It was a question which was the louder, the clatter of tongues or the conflict of odours from things cooking and things that would doubtless have been the better for purification by fire. At the top conditions were a little more endurable: and when Joan had shut behind her the door giving access to her home, the clatter and squalling came from below, a familiar and not unpleasant blend of dissonances. And within the smells were individual: chiefly of boiled cabbage and fried pork, with a feebly contending flavour of cheap tobacco-smoke. She was in the dining-room of the Thursby flat. Behind it lay the kitchen; forward, three small cubicles successively denominated on the architect's plans as "bedchamber," "alcove," and "parlour." They were all, however, sleeping-rooms. The nearest was occupied by Joan's brother; the next, the alcove, contained a double-bed dedicated to Joan and her young sister; while the parlour held a curiosity called a folding-bed, which had long since ceased to fold, and on which slept Anthony Thursby and his wife. Mrs. Thursby was now in the kitchen, preparing dinner with the assistance of her fifteen-year-old daughter, Edna. "Butch," the son of the house, was not at home. Anthony Thursby sat at the dining-table, head bent over a ragged note-book and a well-thumbed collection of white and pink newspaper clippings. It was the sight of him that checked Joan in her explicit intention. She had meant to enter dramatically to her mother, blurt out the news, with the cause, of her misfortune, and abandon herself to the luxury of self-pity soothed by sympathy. But she had also meant to have it understood that nobody was to tell "the Old Man"--at least not until she should have established herself in a new job. In short, she had not thought to find Thursby at home. Hesitating beside the table, she removed the long pins from her hat while she stared with narrowed eyes at her father. She was wondering whether she hadn't better confess and have it out with him first as last. The only thing, indeed, that made her pause was the knowledge that there would be no living with him until she was once more "earning good money" behind a counter. And she was firmly determined not again to seek employment in a department store. Regarding fixedly the round but unpolished bald head with its neglected fringe of grey hair, she asked herself if the bitterness in her heart for her father were in truth hatred or mere premonitory resentment of the opposition he would unquestionably set against her plans for the future.... He was a man of nearly fifty, who looked more, in spite of a tendency to genial corpulence. At thirty he had been a fair and handsome man; today his round red face was mottled, disfigured by a ragged grey moustache, discoloured by several days' growth of scrubby beard, and lined and seamed with the imprint of that consuming passion whose sign was also set in his grey, passionate, haunted eyes. Shabbily dressed in a soiled madras shirt and shoddy trousers, he wore neither tie nor collar: his unkempt chin hung in folds upon his chest. Fat and grimy forearms protruded from his rolled-up sleeves; fat and mottled hands trembled slightly but perceptibly as they rustled the pink and white clippings and with a stubby pencil scrawled mysterious hieroglyphics in the battered note-book. Thursby was intent upon what he, and indeed all his family, knew as his "dope": checking and re-checking selections for tomorrow's races. This pursuit, with its concomitants, its attendant tides of hope and disappointment, was his infatuation, at once the solace and the terror of his declining years. Now and again he muttered unintelligibly. There rose a sound of voices in the kitchen. Annoyed by the interruption, he started, looked up, and discovered Joan. She offered to his irritated gaze a face of calm, with unsmiling features. "Hello!" he growled. "How the h--how long've you been in?" "Only a few minutes, pa," the girl returned quietly. "Well--what're you standing there--staring!--for, anyhow?" "I didn't mean anything: I was just taking off my hat." "Well"--his face was now purple with senseless anger--"cut along! Don't bother me. I'm busy." "I see." There was a damnable superciliousness in the tone of the girl as she turned away. Thursby meditated an explosion, but refrained at discretion: Joan had taught him that, unlike her browbeaten mother and timid sister and her sleek, loaferish brother, she could give as good as he could send. He bent again, grumbling, over his dope. Instantly it gripped him, obliterating all else in his cosmos. He frowned, moistened the pencil at his mouth, and scrawled another note in the greasy little book. Joan slipped quietly away to her bedroom. She found it stifling; ventilated solely from the parlour and the open door to Butch's kennel, it reeked with the smell of human flesh and cheap perfume. She noted resentfully the fact that her sister had neglected to make up the bed: its rumpled sheets and pillows, still retaining the impression of over-night, lent the cubicle the final effect of sordid poverty. Hanging up her hat and coat, she sat for a time on the edge of the bed, thinking profoundly. Such an existence, she felt, passed human endurance. And a gate of escape stood ajar to her, with a mundane paradise beyond, if only she had the courage to adventure.... In any event, conditions as they were now with the Thursbys could not obtain much longer. If the Old Man continued to follow the races through the poolrooms, he would soon be forced out of his small business and his family dispossessed of their mean lodgings; and there was no longer any excuse for hope that he would ever shake off the bondage of his infatuation. As it was, he gave little enough toward the support of his family, and grudged that little; almost all his meagre profits went to the poolrooms; it was only when he won (or seldom otherwise) that he would spare his wife a few dollars. Furthermore, his business was heavily involved in an intricate meshing of debt. Thursby, at least, persisted in calling it a business; though Joan's lips shaped scornfully at mention of that mean and insignificant newspaper shop, crowded in between a saloon and a delicatessen shop, in the shadow of the Third Avenue Elevated Railway. In her understanding it was chiefly remarkable as the one place where one could be certain of not finding Thursby during the afternoon or Butch at night. They were seldom there together: it was as if father and son could not breathe the same atmosphere for long at a time. Nominally, Butch was his father's assistant; actually, he alone kept the business alive; had it not been for his supervision of the morning and evening paper deliveries, it would long since have wasted inconspicuously away. By way of compensation, Butch, shrewdly alive to signs of a winning day, would now and again wheedle a dollar or two out of the Old Man. Wages he neither received nor expected, being well content with a nominal employment which served to cover many an hour of unlicensed liberty; and he seemed to have access to some mysterious if occasionally scanty fund, for he was never without some little money in pocket. After dinner, if Butch elected to eat the evening meal at home, he invariably disappeared; and his return was a matter of his personal convenience. He had been known not to sleep at home at all; his favourite bedtime was between one and two in the morning--after the saloons had closed. Yet no one had ever seen him drunk. He was younger than Joan by a year. Born to the name of Edgar, he had been dubbed Butch in the public schools, and the name had stuck; even his mother and father employed it. And yet it could not be said to suit him; rather, the boy suggested a jocky. He was short, slender, and wiry; with a strong, emaciated nose flanked by small eyes sunk deep in sallow cheeks--his mouth set in a perpetually sardonic curve. He dressed neatly, whatever the straits and necessities of the family (to the mitigation of which he contributed nothing whatever) and had a failing for narrow red neckties and flashy waistcoats. His hard, thin lips were generally tight upon a cigarette; they were forever tight upon his personal affairs: if he opened them at home it was to "kid" the girls, which he did with a slangy, mordant wit, or to drop some casually affectionate word to his mother. His conversation with his father, whom he seemed always to be watching with a narrow, grim suspicion, was ordinarily confined to monosyllables of affirmation or negation. He went his secret ways, self-sufficient, wary, reserved; a perpetual subject of covert speculation to the women of his family. Joan had heard it whispered that he was a member of the "Car-barn Gang." But she never dared question Butch, though she trembled every time she came upon newspaper headlines advertising some fresh hooliganism on the part of the gang--a policeman "beaten up," a sober citizen "held up and frisked" in the small hours, or a member of some rival organization found stabbed and weltering on the sawdust floor of a grisly dive. Between this girl and her brother there existed a strange harmony of understanding, quite tacit and almost unrecognized by either. Joan's nearest approach to acknowledgment of it resided in infrequent admissions to friends that she could "get on with Butch," whereas "the rest of the bunch made her weary." Almost all the vigour and vitality of the mother seemed to have been surrendered to Butch and Joan; there had been little left for Edna. The girl was frail, anæmic, flat-chested, pretty in an appealing way: fit only for one of two things, tuberculosis or reconstruction in the country. As it was, in the busy seasons she found underpaid employment in the workrooms of Sixth Avenue dressmaking establishments; between whiles she drudged at housework to the limits of her small strength. As for Mrs. Thursby.... It was singularly difficult for Joan to realize her mother. There was about the woman something formless and intangible. She seemed to fail to make a definite impression even upon the retina of the physical eye. She had the faculty of effacing herself, seemed more a woman that had been than a woman who was. The four boundary walls of the flat comprehended her existence; she seldom left the house; she never changed her dress save for bed. It might have been thought that she would thus dominate her world: to the contrary, she haunted it, more a wraith than a body, a creature of functions rather than of faculties. She had a way of being in a room without attracting a glance, of passing through and from it without leaving an impression of her transit. When Joan made herself look directly at her mother, she was able to detect traces of ravaged beauty. A living shell in which its tenant lay dormant, her subjective will to live alone kept this woman going her sempiternal rounds of monotony. Capacity for affection she apparently had none; she regarded her children with as little interest as her husband. Nor had she the power to excite or sustain affection. Joan believed she loved her mother. She did not: she accepted her as a convention in which affection inhered through tradition alone.... Seated on the edge of the bed, her face flushed with the heat of the smouldering evening, sombre eyes staring steadfastly at the threadbare carpet, the girl shook her head silently, in dreary wonder. She stood at crossroads. She could, of course, go on as she had gone--bartering youth and strength for a few dollars a week. But every fibre of her being, every instinct of her forlorn soul, was in vital mutiny against such servitude. In fact, doubt no longer existed in Joan's mind as to which way she would turn: dread of the inevitable rupture alone deterred her from the first steps. From the rear of the flat Edna called her fretfully: "Joan! Jo-an! Ain't you coming to eat?" Joan rose. She answered affirmatively in a strong voice. Her mind was now made up: she would tell them after supper--after the Old Man had gone back to the shop. She posed before a mirror, touching her hair with deft fingers while she stared curiously at the face falsified in the depths of the uneven sheet of glass. Then placing her hands on her hips, at the belt-line, thumbs to the back, she lifted her shoulders, at one and the same time smoothing out the wrinkles in her waist and settling her belt into place. "Oh," she said, as casually as if there had been any one to hear, "I guess I'll _do_, all right, all right!" III With a careless nod to her mother and sister, Joan slipped into her chair and helped herself mechanically but liberally to the remains of pork and cabbage. Her mother tilted a granite-ware pot over a cup and filled the latter with the decoction which, in the Thursby menu, masqueraded as coffee. Joan acknowledged the service with an outspoken "Thanks." At this Edna plucked up courage to say, with some animation: "Joan--" The mother interrupted with a sibilant warning, "_Hush!_" Thursby lifted his head and raked the three faces with an angry glance. "In God's name!" he cried--"can't you women hold your tongues?" The girls made their resentment variously visible: Joan with a scowl and a toss of her head, Edna with a timid pout. The mother's face betrayed no emotion whatsoever. Thereafter, as far as they were concerned, the meal progressed in silence. Thursby bent low over his plate, in the intervals devoted to mastication intently studying the file of dope at his elbow. Now and again he would drop knife and fork to take up his pencil and check the name of a horse or jot additional memoranda in his note-book. Infrequently he spoke or, rather, grunted, to indicate a desire for some dish beyond his reach. Curiously enough (Joan remarked for the thousandth time) he was punctilious to say "please" and "thank you." The idiosyncrasy was all a piece (she thought) with the ease with which he employed knife, fork, and spoon: a careless grace which the girl considered "elegant" and did him the honour to imitate. Furtively throughout the meal she studied her father. These little peculiarities of his, these refinements which sat so strangely on his gross, neglected person and were so exotic to his circumstances, exerted a compelling fascination upon the nimble curiosity of the girl. She both feared and despised him, but none the less cherished a sneaking admiration for the man. Beyond the fact that their estate had not always been so sorry, she knew nothing of the history of her parents; but she liked to think of her father, that he had once been, in some unknown way, superior: that he was a man ruined by a marriage beneath his station. To think this flattered her own secret dreams of rising out of her environment: girls, she had heard, took after their fathers--and _vice-versa_: perhaps she had inherited some of Anthony Thursby's keener intelligence, adaptability, and sensitiveness--those qualities with which she chose to endow the man who had been Thursby before he became her father. Other circumstances lent colour to this theory: Butch, for instance, had unquestionably inherited his mother's physique and her reticence, while Joan had her father's vigorous constitution and a body like his for sturdiness and good proportion.... Suddenly thrusting back his chair, Thursby rose, buttoned a soiled collar round his neck, shrugged a shabby coat upon his shoulders and, pocketing his dope, departed with neither word nor glance for his womenfolk. His heavy footsteps were pounding the second flight of steps before a voice broke the hush in the stuffy little room, a voice faint and toneless, dim and passionless. It was Mrs. Thursby's. "He's had a bad day, I guess...." Edna placed a tender hand over the scalded, listless one that rested on the oilcloth. Joan, abandoning her determination to air her personal grievances at the first available instant, said suddenly: "Never mind, ma. It ain't like he was a drinking man." The vacant eyes in the faded face of the mother were fathoming distances remote from the four walls of the slatternly room. Her thin and colourless lips trembled slightly; little more than a whisper escaped them: "Sometimes I wish he was--wish he had been. It'd 've been easier to stand--all this." A faltering gesture indicated vaguely the misery of their environment. Edna continued to pet the unresponsive hand. "Don't, mother!" she pleaded. The woman stirred, withdrew her hand, and slowly got up. "Come on, Edna. Le's get done with them dishes." With eyes hard and calculating, Joan watched the two drift into the kitchen. Their wretched state touched her less than the fact that she must continue forever to share it, or else try to better it in open defiance of her father's prejudices. "Something's got to be done for this family," she grumbled--"and I don't see anybody even thinking of doing anything but me!" She rose and strode angrily back to the cubicle she shared with Edna. In a fit of unreasoning rage, snatching her hat from its hook, she impaled it upon her hair with hatpins that stabbed viciously. It had grown too dark to see more than a vague white shape moving on the surface of the mirror. But she did not stop to light the gas to make sure she was armoured against the public eye. In another moment, bag in hand, coat over her arm, she was letting herself out into the hallway. Time enough tomorrow morning to fret her mother and sister with news of her misfortune: tonight she was in the humour to make a bold move toward freedom.... But on the door-stoop she checked, a trifle dashed by apprehension of the impending storm, which she had quite forgotten. She drew back into the vestibule: she could hardly afford to subject her only decent waist and skirt to danger of a drenching. An atmosphere if anything more dense than that of the day blanketed heavily the city. Even the gutter-children seemed to feel its influence, and instead of making the evening hideous with screams and rioting, moved with an uncommon lethargy, or stood or squatted apart in little groups, their voices hushed and querulous. The roar of the trains on the nearby Elevated seemed muted, the clangour of the Third Avenue surface cars blunted, and Joan fancied that the street lamps burned with an added lustre. Wayfarers moved slowly if near home, otherwise briskly, with a spirit as unwilling as unwonted: one and all with frequent glances skyward. Overhead, a low-hung bosom of dusky vapour borrowed a dull blush from the fires of life that blazed beneath. In the west, beyond the silhouetted structure of the Elevated and the less distinct profile of buildings on the far side of Central Park, the clouds blazed luridly with their own dread fires--a fitful, sheeted play athwart gigantic curtains, to an accompaniment of dull and intermittent grumbles. A soft, warm breath sighed down the breathless street, and sighing, died. Another, more cool and brusque, swept sharp upon the heels of the first, played with the littered rubbish of the pavements, caressed with a grateful touch flesh still stinging with the heat of day, and drove on, preceded by a cloud of acrid dust. A few drops of lukewarm water maculated the sidewalks with spots as big as dollars. There followed a sharper play of fire, and one more near. Children ran shrieking to shelter, and men and women dodged into convenient doorways or scudded off clumsily. The wind freshened, grew more chill.... Then, so suddenly that there might as well have been no warning, on the wings of the howling blast, laced continually with empyrean fire, timed by the rolling detonations of heavy artillery now near, now far, a shining deluge sluiced the streets and made its gutters brawling rivulets. A lonely, huddled figure, standing back in the entry, well out of the spray from the spattering drops, Joan waited the passing of the storm with neither fascination nor fear. Self-absorbed, her mood almost altogether introspective, she weighed her reckless plans. The crisis bellowed overhead in a series of tremendous, shattering explosions, bathing the empty street in wave after wave of blinding violet light, without seriously disturbing the slow, steady processes of the girl's mentality. Then she became aware of a young man who had emerged from the darksome backwards of the tenement, so quietly that Joan had no notion how long he might have been standing there, regarding her with interest and amusement in his grey eyes and on his broad, good-humoured countenance. He had a long, strong body poised solidly on sturdy legs, short arms with large and efficient hands; and bore himself with a careless confidence that did much to dissemble the negligence of his mode of dress--the ill-fitting coat and trousers, the common striped "outing shirt," the rusty derby set aslant on his round, close-cropped head. Joan knew him as Ben Austin, one of the few admirers whose attentions she was wont to suffer: by occupation a stage-hand at the Hippodrome; a steady young man, who lived with his mother in one of the rear flats. He greeted her with a broadening grin and a "Hello, Joan!" She said with indifference: "Hello, Ben." "Waitin' for the rain to let up?" "No, foolish; I'm posing for a statue of Patience by a sculptor who's going to be born tomorrow." This answer was brilliantly in accord with the humour of the day. Austin chuckled appreciatively. "I thought maybe you was waitin' for Jeems to bring around your limousine, Miss Thursby." "I was, but he won't be here till day before yesterday." The strain of such repartee proved too much for Austin; he felt himself outclassed and, shuffling to cover his discomfiture, sought another subject. "Whacha doing tonight, Joan? Anythin' special?" "I've got an engagement to pass remarks on the weather with the Dook de Bonehead," the girl returned with asperity. "He ain't late, either." "I guess that was one off the griddle, all right," said Austin pensively. "Excuse me for livin'." There fell a pause, Joan contemptuously staring away through the glimmering rain-drops, Austin desperately casting about for a conversational opening less calculated than its predecessors to educe rebuffs. "Say, Joan, lis'en--" "Move on," the girl interrupted: "you're blocking the traffic." "Nah--serious': howja like to go to a show tonight?" She turned incredulous eyes to him. "What show?" she drawled. "I gotta pass for Ziegfield's Follies--N'Yawk Roof. Wanta go?" "Quit your kidding," she replied after a brief pause devoted to analysis of his sincerity. "Y' know you've got to work." "Nothin' like that!" he insisted. "The Hip closed last Sat'dy and I got a coupla weeks lay-off while they're gettin' ready to rehearse the new show. On the level, now: will you go with me?" "_Will_ I!" The girl drew a long, ecstatic breath. Then her face darkened as she glanced again at the street: "But we'll get all wet!" "No, we won't: I'll get an umbrella. Besides, it's lettin' up." With this Austin vanished, to return in a few minutes with a fairly presentable umbrella. The shower was, in fact, fast passing on over Long Island, leaving in its wake a slackening drizzle amid deep-throated growls at constantly lengthening intervals. Half-clothed children were seeping in swelling streams from the tenements as the two--Austin holding the umbrella, Joan with a hand on her escort's arm, her skirts gathered high about her trim ankles--splashed through lukewarm puddles toward Third Avenue. A faint and odorous vapour steamed up from wet and darkly lustrous asphalt. They hurried on in silence: Austin dumbly content with his conquest of the aloof tolerance which the girl had theretofore shown him, and planning bolder and more masterful steps; Joan all ecstatic with the prospect of seeing for the first time a "Broadway show".... A few minutes before nine they left the cross-town car at Broadway and Forty-second Street. Though she had lived all her young years within the boundaries of New York, never before had Joan experienced the sensation of being a unit of that roaring flood of life which nightly scours Longacre Square, with scarce a perceptible change in volume, winter or summer. Yet she accepted it with apparently implacable calm. She felt as if she had been born to this, as if she were coming tardily into her birthright--something of which each least detail would in time become most intimate to her. They were already late, and Austin hurried her. A brief, hasty walk brought them to the theatre, where Austin left her in a corner of the lobby with the promise that he would return in a very few minutes: he had to see a friend "round back," he explained in an undertone. But Joan remained a target for boldly enquiring glances for full ten minutes before he reappeared. Even then, with a nod to her to wait, Austin went to the box-office window. She was not deceived as to the general tenor of his fortunes there--saw him place a card on the ledge and confer inaudibly with the ticket-seller, and then reluctantly remove the card and substitute for it two one-dollar bills, for which he received two slips of pasteboard. "House 'most sold out," he muttered uncomfortably in her ear as an elevator carried them to the roof. "Best I could get was table seats." "They're just as good as any," she whispered, with a look of gratitude that temporarily turned his head. The elevator discharged them into a vast hall with walls and a roof of glass. Artificial wistaria festooned its beams and pillars of steel, palms and potted plants lined the walls. A myriad electric bulbs glimmered dimly throughout the auditorium, brilliantly upon the small stage. Deep banks of chairs radiated back from the footlights, to each its tenant staring greedily in one common direction. An usher waved the newcomers to the left. Ultimately they found seats at a small table in a far corner of the enclosure. Austin was disappointed, and made his disappointment known in a public grumble: the table was too far away; they couldn't see nothin'--might's well not've come. Joan smiled his ill-humour away, insisting that the seats were fine. Mollified, he summoned a waiter and ordered beer for himself, for Joan a glass of lemonade--a weirdly decorated and insipid concoction which, nevertheless, Joan absorbed with the keenest relish. In point of fact, the distance from their seats to the stage offered little obstacle to her complete enjoyment: her senses were all youthful and unimpaired; she saw and heard what many another missed of those in their neighbourhood. Furthermore, Joan brought to an entertainment of this character a point of view fresh, virginal, and innocent of the very meaning of ennui. She sat forward on the extreme edge of her chair, imperceptibly a-quiver with excitement, avid of every sight and sound. All that was tawdry, vulgar, and contemptible escaped her: she was sensitive only to the illusion of splendour and magnificence, and lived enraptured by dream-like music, exquisite wit, and the poetic beauty of femininity but half-clothed, or less, and viewed through a kaleidoscopic play of coloured light. During the intermission she bent an elbow on the sloppy table-top and chattered at Austin with a vivacity new in his knowledge of her, and for which he had no match.... At one time during the second part of the performance, the auditorium was suddenly darkened, while attention was held to the stage by the antics of a pair of German comedians. But in the shadows that now surrounded them (quite unconscious that Austin had seized this opportunity to capture her warm young hand) Joan became aware of a number of figures issuing from a side-door to the stage. She saw them marshalled in ranks of two--a long double file, vaguely glimmering through the obscurity. And then the comedians darted into the wings, the lights blazed out at full strength all over the enclosure, and a roll of drums crescendo roused the audience to a tremendous and exhilarating novelty: a procession of chorus girls in hip-tights and hussar tunics who, each with a snare-drum at waist, had stolen down the aisle, into the heart of the auditorium. For a long moment they marked time, drumming skilfully, their leader with her polished baton standing beside Joan. Then the orchestra blared out an accompaniment, and they strode away, turning left and marching up the centre aisle to the stage.... Joan marked, with pulses that seemed to beat in tune to the drumming, the wistful beauty of many of the painted faces with their aloof eyes and fixed smiles of conscious self-possession, the richness of their uniforms, their bare powdered arms, the pretty legs in their silken casings. Oblivious to the libidinous glances of the goggling men they passed, she envied them one and all--the meanest and homeliest of them even as the most proud and beautiful--this chance of theirs _to act_, to be admired, to win the homage of the herd.... She awoke as from idyllic dreams to find herself again in a Third Avenue car, homeward bound. But still her brain was drowsy with memories of the splendour and the glory; fragments of haunting melody ran through her thoughts; and visions haunted her, of herself commanding a similar meed of adoration.... Austin's arm lay along the top of the seat behind her; his fingers rested lightly against the sleeve of her shirtwaist. She did not notice them. To his clumsily playful advances she returned indefinite, monosyllabic answers, accompanied by her charming smile of a grateful child.... On the third landing of their tenement they paused to say good night, visible to one another only in a faint light reflected up from the gas-jet burning low in the hall below. The smell of humanity and its food hung in the clammy air they breathed. A hum of voices from the many cells of the hive buzzed in their ears. But Joan forgot them all. She hesitated, embarrassed with the difficulty of finding words adequate to express her thanks. Austin tried awkwardly to help her out: "Well, I guess it's good night, kid." She said, exclamatory: "O Ben! I've had _such_ a good time!" "Dja? Glad to hear it. Will you go again--next week? I guess I can work som'other show, all right." Compunction smote as memory reminded her. "But--Ben--didn't you have to pay for those tickets?" "Oh, that's all right. I couldn't find the fella I was lookin' for, round back." "I'm so sorry--" "Gwan! It wasn't nothin'. Cheap at the price, if you liked it, little girl." "I liked it _awfully_! But I won't go again, unless you show me the pass first." "Wel-l, we'll see about that." He edged a pace nearer. Suddenly self-conscious, Joan drew back and offered her hand. "Good night and--thank you so much, Ben." He took the hand, but retained it. "Ah, say! is this all I get? I thought you kinda liked me...." "I do, Ben, but--" "Well, a kiss won't cost you nothin'. It's your turn now." "But, Ben--but, Ben--" "Oh, well, if that's the way you feel about it--" He made as if to relinquish her hand. But to be thought lacking in generosity had stung her beyond endurance. Without stopping to think--blindly and quickly, so that she might not think--she gave herself to his arms. "Well," she breathed in a soft voice, "just one...." "Just one, eh?" He pressed his lips to hers. "Oh, I don't know about that!" He tightened his embrace. Her heart was hammering madly. His mouth hurt her lips, his beard rasped her tender skin. She wanted frantically to get away, to regain possession of herself; and wanted it the more because, dimly through the tumult of thought and emotion, she was conscious of the fact that she rather liked it. "Joan...." Austin murmured in a tone that, soft with the note of wooing, was yet vibrant with the elation of the conqueror, "Joan...." One arm shifted up from her waist and his big hand rested heavily over her heart. For a breath she seemed numb and helpless, suffocating with the tempest of her senses. Then like lightning there pierced her confusion the memory of the knee that had driven her from the car, only that afternoon: symbolic of the bedrock beastliness of man. With a quick twist and wrench she freed herself and reeled a pace or two away. "Ben!" she cried, in a voice hoarse with anger. "You--you brute--!" "Why, what's the matter?" "What right had you to--to touch me like that?" she panted, retreating as he advanced. He paused, realizing that he had made a false move which bade fair to lose him his prey entirely. Only by elaborate diplomacy would he ever be able to reëstablish a footing of friendship; weeks must elapse now before he would gain the advantage of another kiss from her lips. He swore beneath his breath. "I didn't mean nothin'," he said in a surly voice. "I don't see as you got any call to make such a fuss." "Oh, don't you?... _Don't_ you!" She felt as if she must choke if she continued to parley with him. "Well, I do!" she flashed; and turning, ran up the fourth flight of steps. He swung on his heel, muttering; and she heard him slam the door to his flat. She continued more slowly, panting and struggling to subdue the signs of her emotion. But she was poisoned to the deeps of her being with her reawakened loathing of Man. On the top landing she paused, blinking back her tears, digging her nails into her palms while she fought down a tendency to sob, then drew herself up, took a deep breath, and advancing to the dining-room, turned the knob with stealth, to avoid disturbing her family. To her surprise and dismay, as the first crack widened between the door and jamb, she saw that the room was lighted. Wondering, she walked boldly in. Her father was seated at the dining-table, a cheap pipe gripped between his teeth. Contrary to his custom, when he sat up late, he was not thumbing his dope. His fat, hairy arms were folded upon the oilcloth, his face turned squarely to the door. Instinctively Joan understood that he had waited up for her, that inexplicably a crisis was about to occur in her relations with her family. In a chair tilted back against the wall, near the window opening upon the air-shaft, Butch sat, his feet drawn up on the lower rung, purple lisle-thread socks luridly displayed, hands in his trouser-pockets, a cigarette drooping from his cynical mouth, a straw hat with brilliant ribbon tilted forward over his eyes. Closing the door, Joan put her back to it, eyes questioning her parent. Butch did not move. Thursby sagged his chin lower on his chest. "Where have you been?" he demanded in deep accents, with the incisive and precise enunciation which she had learned to associate only with his phases of bad temper. "Where've I been?" she repeated, stammering. "Where.... Why--out walking--" "Street-walking?" he suggested with an ugly snarl. She sank, a limp, frightened figure, into a chair near the door. "Why, pa--what do you mean?" "I mean I'm going to find out the why and wherefore of the way you're behaving yourself. You're my daughter, and not of age yet, and I have a right to know what you do and where you go. Keep still!" he snapped, as she started to interrupt. "Speak when you're spoken to.... I'm going to have a serious talk with you, young woman.... What's all this I hear about your losing your job and going on the stage?" IV For a brief moment Joan sat agape, meeting incredulously the keen, contemptuous gaze of her father. Then she pulled herself together with determination to be neither browbeaten nor overborne. "Where'd you hear that about me?" she demanded ominously. Thursby shook his ponderous head: "It makes no difference--" "It makes a lot of difference to me!" she cut in, sharply contentious. "You might's well tell me, because I won't talk to you if you don't." Butch brushed the brim of his hat an inch above his eyes and threw her a glance of approbation. Thursby hesitated, his large, mottled face sullen and dark in the bluish illumination provided by the single gas-jet wheezing above the table. Then reluctantly he gave in. "Old Inness was in the store this evening. He said--" "Never mind what _he_ said! I guess I know. Gussie's been shooting off her face about me at home. And of course old Inness hadn't nothing better to do than to run off and tell you everything he knew!" "Then you don't deny it?" Thursby insisted. "I don't have to. It's true. No, I don't deny it," she returned, aping his manner to exasperation. "How'd you come to lose your job?" "Mr. Winter insulted me--one of the floor-walkers--if you've got to know." Thursby's head wagged heavily while he weighed this information, and he regarded his daughter with a baleful, morose glare, his fat hands trembling. "What did you say to this man, Winter?" he asked presently. "Told him I'd slap his face if he tried anything like that on me again. So he reported me up to the management--lied about me--and I got fired." There was a long silence, through which Thursby pondered the matter, his thick lips moving inaudibly, while Joan sat upright, maintaining her attitude of independence and defiance, and Butch, grinning lazily, as if at some private jest, manufactured ring after ring of smoke in the still, close air. Before her father spoke again, Joan became cognizant of Edna and her mother, like twin ghosts in their night-dresses, stealing silently, barefooted, to listen just within the door of the adjoining bedroom. "And what do you propose to do now?" asked Thursby at length, lifting his weary, haunted gaze to his daughter's face. "What's this about your going on the stage?" Joan set her jaw firmly. "That's what I'm going to do." Thursby shook his head with decision. "I won't have it," he said. "Oh, you won't? Well, I'd like to know how you're going to stop me. I'm tired slaving behind a counter for a dog's wages--and that eaten up by fines because I won't go out with the floor-walkers. I'm going to do the best I can for myself. I'm going to be an actress, so's I can make a decent living for Edna and ma and myself." "A decent living!" Thursby mocked without mirth. "You're old enough to know better than that." "I'm old enough to know which side my bread's buttered on," the girl flashed back angrily. "I'm through living in this dirty flat and giving up every dollar I make to keep us all from starving. God knows what we'd do if it wasn't for me with a steady job, and Edna working during the season. You don't do anything to help us out: all _you_ get goes on the ponies. I don't see any reason why I got to consult you if I choose to better myself." She rose the better to end her tirade with a stamp of her foot. Thursby likewise got up, if more sluggishly, and moved round the table to confront her. "You don't go on the stage--no!" he said. "That's settled. Understand?" "Oh, I get you," she replied, with a flirt of her head, "but I don't agree with you. I'm going down town first thing tomorrow to try for a job with--with," she hesitated, "Ziegfield's Follies!" "You will do nothing of the sort," he insisted fiercely, congested veins starting out upon his forehead. "You're my daughter, and those are my orders to you, and you'll obey 'em or I'll know the reason why. You...." He faltered as if choking. Then he flung out an arm, with a violent gesture indicating the shrinking woman in the doorway. "You--your mother was an actress when I married her and took her off the stage. She--she--" "Don't you dare say a word against my mother!" Joan screamed passionately into his louring face. "Don't you dare! You hear me: don't you dare!" Her infuriated accents were echoed by a smothered gasp and a spasm of sobbing from the other room. Momentarily abashed by the sheer force of this defiance, the father fell back a pace. An expression of almost ludicrous disconcertion shadowed his discoloured features. Then slowly, as if thoughtfully, he lifted one hand and deliberately tore his collar from its fastening and cast it from him. At this, hastily jerking his cigarette into the air-shaft, Butch got up, removed his hat and carefully placed it on the mantel, out of harm's way. "You," said Thursby with apparent difficulty, breathing heavily between his words--"you shan't use that tone to me, young woman, and live in this house. More than that, you'll leave it this very night--now!--unless you promise to give up this fool's notion of the stage." "Tonight!" Joan paled; her lips tightened; but the glint in her eyes wasn't one of fright. "Tonight!" her father reiterated with malicious pleasure in what he thought to be evidences of consternation. "And what's more, you're going to apologize to me now." "Apologize to you!" Joan caught her breath sharply, and her next words came without premeditation; she was barely conscious, in her rage, that she employed them: "I'll be damned if I do!" With an inarticulate cry, maddened beyond reason, Thursby lifted a heavy hand and stepped toward her. Simultaneously Butch sprang forward, seized the menacing fist and dragged it down and back, with a movement so swift and deft that its purpose was accomplished and the hand pinned to the small of Thursby's back actually before he appreciated what was happening. Even Joan was slow to comprehend the fact of this amazing intervention.... Nodding emphatically, "Beat it, kid," Butch counselled in a pleasant, unstrained tone--"beat it while the going's good.... Easy, now, guvner!" Speechless, Joan slipped out into the hall and slammed the door. Stumbling blindly in the murk, she was none the less quick to find the head of the stairway. On the ground floor, panting and sobbing, she paused to listen. There came from above no sound of pursuit to speed her on; yet on she went, out of the house, to scurry away through the midnight hush of the squalid street like a hunted thing. There was no sort of coherence in her thoughts, nothing but shreds and tatters of rage, fear, and despair, all clouded with a faint and vain regret. She gave no heed to the way she went: impulse controlled and blind instinct guided her. But at the corner of Park Avenue she was obliged to pause for breath, and took advantage of that pause to review her plight and plan her future. Her first concern must be to find a lodging for the night. Tomorrow could take care of itself.... Uttering a low cry of dismay, the girl clutched at the handbag swinging by its strap from her wrist: its latch was broken, its wide jaws yawned. In a breath she had grasped the empty substance of her most dire apprehensions: the slender fold of bills, handed her when she left the store for the last time that evening, was gone. Whether some sneak-thief had robbed her on a surface-car or in the Broadway rabble, or whether the lock had been broken, releasing its poor treasure, during her struggle with Austin on the stairs--or afterwards or before--she could not guess. But she was swift to recognize in its bitter fulness the heart-rending futility of retracing her steps to search for the vanished money--even though it was all that had stood between her and the world, between a common room with food for a week or two and starvation and--the streets. It was a fact, established and irrefutable in her understanding, that she could never go back.... Diligently exploring the bag, she brought to light a scanty store of small change: three quarters, a nickel, seven coppers--eighty-seven cents wherewith to face the world! Further rummaging educed a handful of odds and ends, from which, by the light of a corner lamp, she presently succeeded in sorting out a folded scrap of paper bearing a pencilled memorandum, faint almost to illegibility, so that only with some difficulty could Joan decipher its legend: "_Maizie Dean_ (_Lizzie Fogarty_) 289 W. 45 St." Slowly conning the address with mute, moving lips, until she had it by heart, the girl trudged on to Madison Avenue and there signalled and boarded a southbound surface-car. It carried few passengers. She had a long seat all to herself, and about fifteen minutes wherein to debate ways and means.... She reckoned it several years since Lizzie Fogarty (predecessor of faithless Gussie Inness, both at the stocking counter and in Joan's confidence) suddenly, and with no warning or explanation, had left the department store and for fully eight months thereafter had kept her where-abouts a mystery to her erstwhile associates--though rumours were not lacking in support of a shrewd suspicion that she had "gone on the stage." The truth only transpired when, one day, she drifted languidly up to the counter behind which she had once served, haughtily inspected and selected from goods offered her by a stupefied and indignant Gussie, and promptly broke down, confessing the truth amid giggles not guiltless of a suspicion of tears. Lizzie was in "vodeveal," partner in a "sister-act"--witness her card--"_The Dancing Deans, Maizie & May_." Beyond shadow of doubt she had prospered. Not only was she amazingly and awfully arrayed, but there was in evidence an accomplishment believed to be singular to people of great wealth, an "English accent"--or what Joan and Gussie ingenuously accepted as such. As practised by Miss Maizie Dean this embellishment consisted merely in broadening every A in the language (when she didn't forget) and speaking rapidly in a high, strained voice. Its effect upon her former associates was to render the wake she ploughed through their ranks phosphorescent with envy. Departing in good time to spare the girls the censure of the floor-walker, she had left with Joan the pencilled address and this counsel: "If ever you _dream_ of goin' into the business, my deah, don't do anythin' before you see _me_. That ad-dress will always make me, no mattah wheah 'm woikin': and I'd do _anythin'_ in the woild for you. I know you'd make good _anywheres_--with that _shape_ and them _eyes_!..." Of such stuff as this had Joan fashioned her dreams. Confident in the generosity of Lizzie Fogarty, she relied implicitly upon the willingness of Miss Maizie Dean to help her into the magic circle of "the profession." She had no more doubt that Maizie would make it her business, even at cost of personal inconvenience, to secure her an engagement, than she had that tomorrow's sun would rise upon a world tenanted by one Joan Thursby. Or if such doubt entered her mind by stealth, she fought it down and cast it forth with all the power of her will. For in Miss Dean, née Fogarty, now resided her sole immediate hope of friendly aid and advice.... Alighting at Forty-fifth Street, Joan hastened westward, past Fifth Avenue and Sixth to Longacre Square. Here on the corner, she paused to don her coat; for the low-swinging draperies of the painted skies had begun to distil upon the city a gentle drizzle, soft and warm. Only two hours ago a vortex of vivid animation, the Square now presented a singular aspect of sleepy emptiness. With its high glittering walls of steel and glass, its polished black paving like moiré silk, its blushing canopy of cloud, its air filled with an infinity of globular atoms of moisture, swirling and weltering in a shimmer of incandescence: it was like a pool of limpid light, deep and still. Few moving things were visible: now and again a taxicab, infrequently a surface-car, here and there, singly, a few prowling women, a scattering of predacious men. Of these latter, one who had been skulking beneath the shelter of the New York Theatre fire-escapes strolled idly out toward Joan and addressed her in a whisper of loathly intimacy. Fortunately she did not hear what he said. Even as he spoke she slipped away from the curb and like a haunted shadow darted across the open space and into the kindly obscurity of the side-street. Number 289 reared its five-storey brown-stone front on the northern side of the street, hard upon Eighth Avenue. Joan inspected it doubtfully. Its three lower tiers of windows were all dark and lightless, but on the fourth floor a single oblong shone with gas-light, while on the fifth as many as three were dully aglow. The outer doors, at the top of the high, old-style stoop, were closed, and even the most hopeful vision could detect no definite illumination through the fan-light. Into the heart of Joan a wretched apprehension stole and there abode, cold and crawling. From something in the sedate aspect of the house she garnered grim and terrible forebodings. Nevertheless she dared not lose grasp on hope. Mounting the stoop, she sought the bell-pull, and found it just below a small strip of paper glued to the stone; frayed and weatherbeaten, it published in letters in faded ink scrawled by an infirm hand the information: "_Rooms to let furnished_." For some reason which she did not stop to analyze, this announcement spelled encouragement to Joan. She wrought lustily at the bell. It evoked no sound that she could hear. Trembling with expectancy, she waited several minutes, then pulled again, and once more waited while the cold of dread spread from her heart to chill and benumb her hands and feet. She heard never a sound. It was no use--she knew it--yet she rang again and again, frantically, with determination, in despair. And once she vainly tried the door. The drizzle had developed into a fine, driving rain that swept aslant upon the wings of a new-sprung breeze. A great weight seemed to be crushing her: a vast, invisible hand relentlessly bearing her down to the earth. Only vaguely did she recognize in this the symptoms of immense physical fatigue added to those of intense emotional strain: she only knew that she was all a-weary for her bed. Of a sudden, hope and courage both deserted her. Tears filled her eyes: she was so lonely and forlorn, so helpless and so friendless. Huddled in the shallow recess of the doorway, she fought her emotions silently for a time, then broke down altogether and sobbed without restraint into her handkerchief. Moments passed uncounted, despair possessing her utterly. The street was all but empty. For some time none remarked the disconsolate girl. Then a man, with a handbag but without an umbrella, appeared from the direction of Longacre Square, walking with a deliberation which suggested that he was either indifferent to or unconscious of the rain. Turning up the steps of Number 289, he jingled absently a bunch of keys. Not until he had reached the platform of the stoop did he notice the woman in the doorway. Promptly he halted, lifting his brows and pursing his lips in a noiseless whistle--his head cocked critically to one side. Then through the waning tempest of her grief, Joan heard his voice: "I say! What's the matter?" Gulping down a sob and dabbing hastily at her eyes with a sodden wad of handkerchief, she caught through a veil of tears a blurred impression of her interrogator. A man.... She ceased instantly to cry and shrank hastily out of his way, into the full swing of wind and rain. She said nothing, but eyed him with furtive distrust. He made no offer to move. "See here!" he expostulated. "You're in trouble. Anything I can do?" Joan felt that she was regaining control of herself. She dared to linger and hope rather than to yield to her primitive instinct toward flight. "Nothing," she said with a catch in her voice--"only I--I wanted to see Miss Dean; but nobody answered the bell." "Oh!" he said thoughtfully--"you wanted to see Miss Dean--yes!"--as though he considered this a thoroughly satisfactory explanation. "But Madame Duprat never does answer the door after twelve o'clock, you know. She says people have no right to call on us after midnight. There's a lot in that, too, you know." He wagged his head earnestly. "Really!" he concluded with animation. His voice was pleasant, his manner sympathetic if something original. Joan found courage to enquire: "Do you think--perhaps--she might be in?" "Oh, she never leaves the house. At least, I've never seen her leave it. I fancy she thinks one of us might move it away if she got out of sight for a minute or so." Puzzled, Joan persisted: "You really think Miss Dean is in?" "Miss Dean? Oh, beg pardon! I was thinking of Madame Duprat. Ah ... Miss Dean ... now ... I infer you have urgent business with her--what?" "Yes, very!" the girl insisted eagerly. "If I could only see her ... I must see her!" "I'm sure she's in, then!" the man declared in accents of profound conviction. "Possibly asleep. But at home. O positively!" He inserted a key in the lock and pushed the door open. "If you don't mind coming in--out of the weather--I'll see." Joan eyed him doubtfully. The light was indifferent, a mere glimmer from the corner lamp at Eighth Avenue; but it enabled her to see that he was passably tall and quite slender. He wore a Panama hat with dark clothing. His attitude was more explicitly impersonal than that of any man with whom she had as yet come into contact: she could detect in it no least trace either of condescension or of an ingratiating spirit. He seemed at once quite self-possessed and indefinitely preoccupied, disinterested, and quite agreeable to be made use of. In short, he engaged her tremendously. But what more specifically prepossessed her in his favour, and what in the end influenced her to repose some slight confidence in the man, was a quality with which the girl herself endowed him: she chose to be reminded in some intangible, elusive fashion, of that flower of latter-day chivalry who had once whisked her out of persecution into his taxicab and to her home. In point of fact, the two were vastly different, and Joan knew it; but, at least, she argued, they were alike in this: both were _gentlemen_--rare visitants in her cosmos. It was mostly through fatigue and helpless bewilderment, however, that she at length yielded and consented to precede him into the vestibule. Here he opened the inner doors, ushering Joan into a hallway typical of an old order of dwelling, now happily obsolescent. The floor was of tiles, alternately black and white: a hideous checker-board arrangement. A huge hat-rack, black walnut framing a morbid mirror, towered on the one hand; on the other rose a high arched doorway, closed. And there was a vast and gloomy stairway with an upper landing lost in shadows impenetrable to the feeble illumination of the single small tongue of gas flickering in an old-fashioned bronze chandelier. Listening, Joan failed to detect in all the house any sounds other than those made by the young man and herself. "If you'll be good enough to follow me--" He led the way to the rear of the hall, where, in the shadow of the staircase, he unlocked a door and disappeared. The girl waited on the threshold of a cool and airy chamber, apparently occupying the entire rear half of the ground floor. At the back, long windows stood open to the night. The smell of rain was in the room. "Half a minute: I'll make a light." He moved through the darkness with the assurance of one on old, familiar ground. In the middle of the room a match spluttered and blazed: with a slight _plup!_ a gas drop-light with a green shade leapt magically out of the obscurity, discovering the silhouette of a tall, spare figure bending low to adjust the flame; which presently grew strong and even, diffusing a warm and steady glow below the green penumbra of its shade. The man turned back with his quaint air of deference. "Now, if you don't mind sitting down and waiting a minute, I'll ask Madame Duprat about Miss--ah--your friend--" "Miss Dean--Maizie Dean." "Thank you." With this he left the girl, and presently she heard his footsteps on the staircase. She found a deeply cushioned arm-chair, and subsided into it with a sigh. The intensity of her weariness was indeed a very serious matter with her. Her very wits shirked the labour of grappling with the problem of what she should do if Maizie Dean were not at home.... Wondering incoherently, she stared about her. The rich, subdued glow of the shaded lamp suggested more than it revealed, but she was impressed by the generous proportions of the room. The drop-light itself stood on a long, broad table littered with a few books and a great many papers, inkstands, pens, blotters, ash-trays, pipes: all in agreeable disorder. Beyond this table was one smaller, which supported a type-writing-machine. Against the nearer wall stood a luxurious, if worn, leather-covered couch. There were two immense black walnut bookcases. The windows at the back disclosed a section of iron-railed balcony. Joan grew sensitive to an anodynous atmosphere of quiet and comfort.... Drowsily she heard a quiet knocking at some door upstairs; then a subdued murmur of voices, the closing of a door, footsteps returning down the long staircase. When these last sounded on the tiled flooring, the girl spurred her flagging senses and got up in a sudden flutter of doubt, anxiety, and embarrassment. The man entering the room found her so--poised in indecision. "Please do sit down," he said quietly, with a smile that carried reassurance; and, taking her compliance for something granted, passed on to another arm-chair near the long table. With a docility and total absence of distrust that later surprised her to remember, Joan sank back, eyes eloquent with the question unuttered by her parted lips. Her host, lounging, turned to her a face of which one half was in dense shadow: a keen, strongly modelled face with deep-set eyes at once whimsical and thoughtful, and a mouth thin-lipped but generously wide. He rested an elbow on the table and his head on a spare, sinewy hand, thrusting slender fingers up into hair straight, not long, and rather light in colour. "I'm sorry to have to report," he said gently, "that 'The Dancing Deans, Maizie and May,' are on the road. So I'm informed by Madame Duprat, at least. They're not expected back for several weeks.... I hope you aren't greatly disappointed." Her eyes, wide and dark with dismay, told him too plainly that she was. She made no effort to speak, but after an instant of dumb consternation, moved as if to rise. He detained her with a gesture. "Please don't hurry: you needn't, you know. Of course, if you must, I won't detain you: the door is open, your way clear to the street. But what are you going to do about a place to sleep tonight?" She stared in surprise and puzzled resentment. A warm wave of colour temporarily displaced her pallor. "What makes you so sure I've got no place to sleep?" she asked ungraciously. He lifted his shoulders slightly and dropped his hand to the table. "Perhaps I was impertinent," he admitted. "I'm sorry.... But you haven't--have you?" "No, I haven't," she said sharply. "But what's that--" "As you quite reasonably imply, it's nothing to me," he interrupted suavely. "But I'd be sorry to think of you out there--alone--in the rain--when there's no reason why you need be." "No reason!" she echoed, wondering if she had misjudged him after all. Without warning the man tilted the green lamp-shade until a broad, strong glow flooded her face. A spark of indignation kindled in the girl while she endured his brief, impersonal, silent examination. Sheer fatigue alone prevented her from rising and walking out of the room--that, and curiosity. He replaced the shade, and got out of the chair with a swift movement that seemed not at all one of haste. "I see no reason," he announced coolly. "I've got to run along now--I merely dropped in to get a manuscript. I think you'll be quite comfortable here--and there's a good bolt on the door. Of course, it's very unconventional, but I hope you'll be kind enough to overlook that, considering the circumstances. And tomorrow, after a good rest, you can make up your mind whether it would be wiser to stick to your first plan or--go home." He smiled with a vague, disinterested geniality, and added a pleading "Now don't say no!" when he saw that the girl had likewise risen. "How do you know I've left home?" she demanded hotly. "Well"--his smile broadened--"deductive faculty--Sherlock Holmes--Dupin--that sort of tommyrot, you know. But it wasn't such a bad guess--now was it?" "I don't see how you knew," she muttered sulkily. He ran his long fingers once or twice through his hair in a manner of great perplexity. "I can't quite tell, myself." "It wasn't my fault," she protested with a flash of passion. "I lost my job today, and because I said I wanted to go on the stage, my father put me out of the house." "Yes," he agreed amiably; "they always do--don't they? I fancied it was something like that. But there isn't really any reason why you shouldn't go home tomorrow and patch it up--or is there?" She gulped convulsively: "You don't understand--" "Probably I don't," he conceded. "Still, things may look very much otherwise in the morning. They generally do, I notice. One goes to bed with reluctance and wakes up with a headache. All that sort of thing.... But if you'll listen to me a moment--why, then if you want to go, I shan't detain you.... My name is John Matthias. My trade is writing things--plays, mostly: I know it sounds foolish, but then I hate exercise. I live--sleep, that is--ah--elsewhere--down the street. This is merely my work-room. So your stopping here won't inconvenience me in the least...." He snatched up a mass of papers from the table, folded them hastily and thrust them into a coat pocket. "That manuscript I was after. Good night. I do hope you'll be comfortable." Before the amazed girl could collect herself, he had his hat and handbag and was already in the hallway. She ran after him. "But, Mr. Matthias--" He glanced hastily over his shoulder while fumbling with the night-latch. "I can't let you--" "Oh, but you must--really, you know." He had the door open. "But why do you--how can you trust me with all your things?" "Tut!" he said reprovingly from the vestibule--"nothing there but play 'scripts, and they're not worth anything. You can't get anybody to produce 'em. I know, because I've tried." He closed the inner door and banged the outer behind him. Joan, on the point of pursuing to the street, paused in the vestibule, and for a moment stood doubting. Then, with a bewildered look, she returned slowly to the back room, shut herself in, and shot the bolt.... * * * * * On the platform of the stoop, Mr. Matthias delayed long enough to turn up his coat-collar for the better protection of his linen, and surveyed with a wry grin the slashing rush of rain through which he now must needs paddle unprotected. "Queer thing for a fellow to do," he mused dispassionately.... "Daresay I am a bit of an ass.... I might at least have borrowed my own umbrella.... But that would hardly have been consistent with the egregious insanity of the performance.... "I wonder why I do these awful things?... If I only knew, perhaps I could reform...." Running down the steps, he set out at a rapid pace for the Hotel Astor; which in due time received and harboured him for the night. V Awakening at a late hour in a small bedroom bright with sunlight, Mr. Matthias treated himself to a moment of incredulity. Such surroundings were strange to his drowsy perceptions, and his transitory emotions on finding himself so curiously embedded might be most aptly and tersely summed up in the exclamation of the old lady in the nursery rhyme: "Lack-a-mercy, can this be I?" Being, however, susceptible to a conviction of singular strength that he was himself and none other; and by dint of sheer will-power overcoming a tremendous disinclination to do anything but lie still and feel perfectly healthy, sound, and at peace with the world: he induced himself to roll over and fish for his watch in the pocket of the coat hanging on a nearby chair. The hour proved to be half-past ten. He fancied that he must have been uncommonly tired to have slept so late. Then he remembered. "One doesn't need to get drunk to be daft," was the conclusion he enunciated to his loneliness. "I hope to goodness she doesn't go poking through my papers!" The perturbation to which this thought gave rise got him out of bed more promptly than would otherwise have been the case. None the less he forgot it entirely in another moment, and had bathed and dressed and was knotting his tie before a mirror when the memory of the girl again flitted darkly athwart the glass of his consciousness. "Wonder what it was that made me turn myself out of house and home for the sake of that girl, anyway? Something about her...." But try as he might he could recall no definite details of her personality. She remained a shadow--a hunted, tearful, desperate wraith of girlhood: more than that, nothing. He wagged his head seriously. "Something about her!... _Must_'ve been good-looking ... or something...." With which he drifted off into an inconsequent and irrelevant reverie which entertained him exclusively throughout breakfast and his brief homeward walk: in his magnificent, pantoscopic, protean imagination he was busily engaged in writing the first act of a splendid new play--something exquisitely odd, original, witty, and dramatic. A vague smile touched the corners of his mouth; his eyes were hazily lustrous; his nose was in the air. He had forgotten his guest entirely. He ran up the steps of Number 289, let himself in, trotted down the hall and burst unceremoniously into his room--not in the least disconcerted to find it empty, not, indeed, mindful that it might have been otherwise. His hat went one way, his handbag into a corner with a resounding bang. He sat himself down at his typewriter, quickly and deftly inserted a sheet of paper into the carriage and ... sat back at leisure, his gaze wandering dreamily out of the long, open windows, into the world of sunshine that shimmered over the back-yards. A subconscious impulse moved him to stretch forth a long arm and drop his hand on the centre-table; after a few seconds his groping fingers closed round the bowl of an aged and well-beloved pipe. He filled it, lighted it, smoked serenely. Half an hour elapsed before he was disturbed. Then someone knocked imperatively on the door. He recognized the knock; it was Madame Duprat's. Swinging round in his chair he said pleasantly: "Come in." Madame Duprat entered, filling the doorway. She shut the door and stood in front of it, subjecting it to an almost total eclipse. She was tall and portly, a grenadier of a woman, with a countenance the austerity of whose severely classic mould was somewhat moderated by a delicate, dark little moustache on her upper lip. Her mien was regal and portentous, sitting well upon the person of the widow of a great if unrecognized French tragedian; but her eyes were kindly; and Matthias had long since decided that it needed a body as big as Madame Duprat's to contain her heart. "Bon jour, monsieur." "Bon jour, madame." This form of salutation was invariable between them; but the French of Matthias rarely withstood much additional strain. He lapsed now into English, cocking an eye alight with whimsical intelligence at the face of the landlady. Madame possessed the gift (as it were an inheritance from the estate of her late husband) of creating an atmosphere at will, when and where she would. That which her demeanour now created within the four walls of the chamber of Monsieur Matthias was rather electrical. "Something's happened to disturb madame?" he hazarded. "What's the row? Have we discharged our chef? Is it that the third-floor front is behindhand with his rent? Or has Achilles--that dachshund of Heaven!--turned suffragette--and proved it with pups?" "The row, monsieur," madame checked him coldly, "has to do only with the conduct of monsieur himself?" "Eh?" Matthias queried blankly. "You ask me what?" The hands of madame were vivid with exasperation. "Is it that monsieur is not aware he entertained a young woman in this room last night?" "Oh--that!" The cloud passed from monsieur's eyes. He smiled cheerfully. "But it was quite proper, indeed, madame. Believe me, I--" "Proper! And what is propriety to me, if you please--at my age?" madame demanded indignantly. "Am I not aware that monsieur left my house almost immediately after entering it and spent the night elsewhere? Did I not from my window see him running up the street with his handbag through the rain? But am I to figure as the custodian of my lodgers' morals?" The thought perished, annihilated by an ample gesture. "My quarrel with monsieur is that he left the young woman here _alone_!" Matthias found the vernacular the only adequate vehicle of expression: "I've got to hand it to you, Madame Duprat; your point of view is essentially Gallic." "But what is the explanation of this conduct, monsieur? Am I to look forward to future escapades of the same nature? Do you intend to make of my house a refuge for all the stray unfortunates of New York? Am I, and my guests, to be left to the mercies of God-knows-who, simply because monsieur has a heart of pity?" "Oh, here!" Matthias broke in with some impatience. "It wasn't as bad as that. It's not likely to happen again ... and besides, the girl was a perfectly good, nice, respectable girl. Madame should know that I wouldn't take any chances with people I didn't know all about." "Monsieur knew the young woman, then?" "Oh, yes; assuredly yes," Matthias lied nonchalantly. By the happiest of accidents, his glance, searching the table for a box of matches wherewith to relight his pipe, encountered a sheet of typewriter paper on which a brief message had been scrawled in a formless, untrained hand: "_Dear Sir_," he read with relief, "_thank you--Your friend, Joan Thursby_." He found the matches and used one before looking up. "Miss Thursby," he said coolly, "is the daughter of an eminently respectable family in reduced circumstances. Thinking to better her condition, she proposed to become an actress, but met with such violent opposition on the part of her father--a bigot of a man!--that she was obliged to leave her home in order to retain her self-respect. Quite naturally she thought first of her only friend in the profession, Miss Maizie Dean, and came here to find her. The rest you may imagine. Was I to turn her out to wander through the rain--at two o'clock in the morning? Madame discredits her heart by suggesting anything of the sort!" Madame's expression of contrition seemed to endorse this reproof. She hesitated with a hand on the doorknob. "Monsieur is prepared to vouch for the young woman?" "Certainly," he assented, with an imperturbable countenance masking a creepy, crawly feeling that perhaps he might be letting himself in for more than he bargained. "Very good. I go, with apologies." Madame opened the door. "Thursday, you said?" He repeated without bothering to correct her: "Joan Thursday." "Barbarous names of these mad Americans!" The door, closing, totally eclipsed the grenadier. With thoughtful deliberation Matthias (smiling guiltily) tore Joan's note into minute bits and, dropping them in a waste-basket, dismissed her message and herself entirely from his mind. Five minutes later the typewriter was rattling cheerily. But its staccato chattering continued without serious interruption only for the time required to cover two pages and part of a third. Then came a long interval of smoke-soothed meditation, which ended with the young man cheerfully placing fresh paper in the machine and starting all over again. This time he worked more slowly, weighing carefully the value of lines already written before recasting and committing them to paper; but the third sheet was covered without evident error, and a fourth, and then a fifth. Indeed the type-bars were drumming heartily on the last quarter of page 6, when suddenly the young man paused, scowled, thrust back his chair and groaned from his heart. He sat for a space, teetering on the rear legs of his chair, his lips pursed, forehead deeply creased from temple to temple. Then in a sepulchral tone uttering the single word "_Snagged!_" he rose and began to pace slowly to and fro between the door and the windows. At the end of an hour he was still patrolling this well-worn beat--his way of torment by day and by night, if the threadbare length of carpet were to be taken as a reliable witness. And there's no telling how long he might have continued the exercise had not Madame Duprat knocked once again at his door. Roused by that sound, he came suddenly out of profound speculations. Stopping short and bidding Madame enter, he waited with hands thrust deep in his trouser-pockets and shoulders hunched high toward his ears, a cloud of annoyance darkening his countenance. Madame Duprat came in with a "Pardon, monsieur," and a yellow envelope. Placing this last upon the table, she announced with simple dignity, "A telegram, if you please," and retired. Matthias strode to the table and with an air of some surprise and excitement tore open the message. He found its import unusual in more than one respect: it was not a "day-letter," and it had been written with a fine, careless extravagance of emotion that recked naught whatever of the ten-word limit. He conned its opening aloud: "'_Beast animal coward ingrate poltroon traitor beast_'--" At this point he broke off to glance at the signature and observe thoughtfully: "If Helena's going in for this sort of thing, I really must buy her a thesaurus: she's used '_beast_' twice in two lines...." He continued: "'_How dared you run away last night? You promised. I was counting on you. I am disgusted with you and never want to see your face again. Return at once. Perhaps you won't be too late after all. Imperative. I insist that you return._'" The signature was simply: "_Helena_." He said with considerable animation: "But--damn it!--I don't _want_ to get married yet! I don't see what I've done...." Throwing back his shoulders and lifting a defiant chin, he announced with invincible determination: "I won't go. That's all there is about it. I will--not--go!... "Besides," he argued plaintively, "I couldn't travel like this--clothes all out of shape from that drenching last night--no time to change--!" Consultation of his watch gave flat contradiction to this assertion. "And besides, I'm just getting this thing started nicely!" This with reference to the play. With another groan even more soulful than the first he sat down at the table, seized the telephone in a savage grasp, and in prematurely embittered accents detailed a suburban number to the inoffensive central operator. In the inevitable three minutes' wait for the connection to be put through he found ample opportunity to lash himself to a frenzy of exasperation. "Hello!" he roared suddenly. "Hel-lo, I say!... Who is this?... Oh, you, eh, Swinton? This is Mr. Matthias.... No--I say, no! Don't call Mrs. Tankerville. Haven't time.... Just tell her I'm coming down on the six-thirty.... Yes.... And send something to meet me at the station.... Yes. Good-bye." VI Joan's was an awakening of another order; like the thoroughly healthy animal she was, the moment her eyes opened she was vividly and keenly alive, completely acquainted with her situation, in full command of every faculty. With no means of determining the time save by instinct, she was none the less sure that the hour wasn't late: not late, at all events, for people who didn't have to be behind counters by half-past eight. So she lay still for many minutes, on the worn leather couch, listening intently. There was a great hush in the lodging-house: not a foot-fall, not a sound. Yet it was broad daylight--a clear and sunny morning. Her quick eyes, reviewing the room in this new light, realized the substance of a dream come true. She liked it all: the high and dusty ceiling, the immense and gloomy bookcases, the disorderly writing-table, the three sombre and yellowing steel engravings on the walls, the bare, beaten path that crossed the carpet diagonally from door to window, the roomy and dilapidated chairs, even the faint, intangible, ineradicable smell of tobacco that haunted the air, even the generous cushion beneath her head. Against this last she cuddled her cheek luxuriously, a shadowy smile softening her lips, her lashes low. She was enchanted by the novel atmosphere of this roomy chamber, an atmosphere of studiousness and clear thinking. And her thoughts focussed sharply upon her memories of the early morning hours, especially those involving the man who had put himself out to shelter her. She was consumed with curiosity about him and all that concerned him. In her inexperience she found it rather more than difficult to associate his courtesy, his solicitude and generosity with his aloofness, abstraction and detachment: the type was new and difficult to classify. Was it true, then, that Man--flesh-and-blood Man as differentiated from the romantic abstractions that swaggered through the chapters of the ten-cent weekly libraries--could be disinterested with Woman, content to serve rather than be served, to give rather than take? On the one side stood That One of the taxicab adventure, together with John Matthias: arrayed against these, a host composed of Ben Austins and Mr. Winters and men with knees--beasts of prey who stalked or lay in ambush along all the trails that webbed her social wilderness. Were they truly different, Matthias and that other one? Or were they merely old enemies in new masks? How was one to know?... A noise in the basement, the rattle of a kitchen range being shaken clear of ashes, startled the girl to her feet in a twinkling. However sharp her inquisitiveness and her desire to see and to know more of this man, she entertained no idea of lingering to be found there by him.... After bolting the door and before surrendering her tired body to the invitation of the couch, she had yielded to the temptation to make a brief tour of enquiry. The result had satisfied her that Matthias had lied in one particular, at least: unquestionably this was his work-room, but no less surely the man lived as well as worked in it, much if not all of the time. In its eastern wall Joan found a door opening into a small bedroom furnished with almost soldierly simplicity. And there were two large closets in the southern wall of the chamber; in one she found his wardrobe, a staggering array of garments, neatly arranged in sharp contrast to the confusion of his desk; the other was a bathroom completely equipped, a dazzling luxury in her eyes, with its white enamel, nickel-plate, glass and porcelain fittings. She refreshed herself there after rising--not without a guilty sensation of trespass--returning to the larger room to complete her dressing; no great matter, since she had merely laid aside skirt, coat, and shirtwaist, and loosened her corsets before lying down. In a very little time then, she was ready for the street; but with her hands on the doorknob and bolt, she hesitated, looking back, reluctant to go a thankless guest. Slowly she moved back to the centre-table, touching with diffident fingers its jumble of manuscripts, typewriter-paper, memoranda, and correspondence. There were letters in plenty, a rack stuffed with them, others scattered like leaves hither and yon, one and all superscribed with the name of _John Matthias, Esq._, many in the handwriting of women, a few scented, but very faintly. Joan wondered about these women and his relations with them. Was he greatly loved and by many? It would not be strange, she thought, if he were.... Her temper curiously unsettled by these reflections, she stood for a long time, staring and thinking. Then a renewed disturbance in the lower regions of the house sent her packing--but not until she had left an inadequate scrawl of thanks, whose poverty and crudity she felt keenly. Why had she never learned to write a hand of delicately angular distinction to bear comparison with the hands that had addressed those impeccably "correct" notes?... The hallway was deserted. She let herself hastily out, believing she had escaped detection. Sunlight swept the street from side to side, a pitiless and withering blast. Already every trace of last night's shower had vanished, blotted up by an atmosphere all a-quiver with the impetuous passion of those early, slanting rays. As if every living thing had been driven to shelter, or dared not venture forth, the street was quiet and empty. In violent contrast, the tides of life ran brawling through Longacre Square on one hand and Eighth Avenue on the other. Joan turned toward the latter, moving listlessly enough once she had gained the grateful shadow of its easterly sidewalks. A clock in the window of a delicatessen shop told her the hour was half-past seven, while the sight of the food unattractively displayed proved a sharper reminder of breakfast-time. She had no other concern in the world just then. It would be hours before she could accomplish anything toward establishing her independence; and what steps she was to take toward that consummation remained altogether nebulous in her understanding. She had not gone far before a dairy lunch settled the question as to where she was to breakfast. It was a small, shabby, dingy place, its walls plastered with white tiling and mirrors. Joan's order comprised a cup of brownish-yellow liquid, which was not coffee, and three weighty cakes known as "sinkers." These last might have been crude, childish models in putty of the popular American "hot biscuit," but were larger and slightly scorched on top and bottom, and when pried open revealed a composition resembling aerated clay. Joan anointed them generously with butter and consumed them with evident relish. Her powers of digestion were magnificent. The price of the meal was ten cents. She went away with a sense of repletion and seventy-two cents. She turned northward again. An empty day of arid hours confronted her perturbed and questioning imagination. She was still without definite plans or notion which way to turn for shelter. She knew only that everything must be settled before nightfall: she dared not trust to find another John Matthias, she could not sleep in the streets or parks, and return to East Seventy-sixth Street she would not. She had her own exertions to rely upon--and seventy-two cents: the one as woefully inadequate as the other. Near Columbus Circle she bought a copy of the _New York World_ for the sake of its "Help Wanted" advertisements, and strolled on into Central Park. Here she found some suggestion of nature rising refreshed from its over-night bath to bask in sunlight. The grass was nowhere scorched, and in shadowed spots still sparkled with rain-drops. The air was still, steamy, and heady with fragrance of vegetation. Upon this artificial, rectangular oasis a sky of robin's-egg blue smiled benignly. A sense of peace and friendly fortunes impregnated the girl's being. Somehow she felt serenely sure that nothing untoward could happen to her. The world was all too beautiful and kindly.... She discovered a remote bench and there unfolded her newspaper and ran hastily through its advertising columns, finding one reason or another for rejecting every opening that seemed to promise anything in the nature of such employment as she had theretofore known. There were no cards from theatrical firms in need of chorus-girls, and nothing else interested her. She was now obsessed by two fixed ideas, as they might have been the poles of her world: she was going on the stage; she was not going back behind a counter. Yet she must find a way to live until the stage should open its jealous doors to her.... The morning hours ebbed slowly, with increasing heat. From time to time Joan, for one reason or another, would drift idly on to another bench. Once, as she sat dreaming with vacant eyes, she was roused by the quick beating of muffled hoofs, and looked up in time to see a woman on horseback pass swiftly along a bridle-path, closely pursued by a man, likewise mounted. The face of the horsewoman burned bright with pleasure and excitement and her eyes shone like stars as she glanced over-shoulder at her distanced escort. She rode well and looked very trim and well turned out in her habit of light-coloured linen. Joan thought her charming--and unspeakably blessed. Later they returned; but now their horses walked sedately side by side; and the woman was smiling softly, with her eyes downcast, as she listened to her companion, who bent eagerly close to her and spoke in a low and intimate voice. For hours afterwards Joan was haunted by the memory, and rent with envious longing. A hundred times she pictured herself in the place of the horsewoman; and the man at her side wore always the manner and the aspect of John Matthias.... About two o'clock in the afternoon she lunched meagrely on crackers-and-milk at another dairy establishment on Columbus Avenue--reducing her capital to sixty-one cents. Then, recrossing the park, she made her way back through the sweltering side-streets toward her late home. She arrived in time to see her father's burly figure lumbering heavily up the street. His gaze was to the sidewalk, his mind upon the poolrooms, his thick, pendulous lower lip quivered with incessant, inaudible repetition of race-track names and records. He would not have recognized Joan had he looked directly at her. And he didn't look. She was safe, now, to make her final visit to the flat. Thursby could be counted on not to return before six o'clock. She hastened across the street and up the narrow, dark and noisome stairway.... Seated at the dining-table, over an array of dishes discoloured with the residue of the mid-day stew, her mother, seemingly more immaterial than ever, merely lifted shadowed and apathetic eyes to Joan's face as she entered. Edna, on the contrary, jumped up with a hushed cry of surprise not untouched by alarm. "Joan!" The girl assumed a confident swagger. It was borne in upon her, very suddenly, that she must prove a ready liar in answer to the storm of questions that was about to break. "Hello, people!" she cried cheerfully. "How's everything?" "Didn't the Old Man meet you on the stairs?" demanded Edna in a frightened breath. "Nope: I waited till he'd turned the corner," Joan returned defiantly. "Anyway I ain't afraid of him. What'd he say, last night, after I was gone?" Edna started to speak, stammered and fell still, turning a timid gaze to her mother. "No more'n he said before you went out," said the latter listlessly. "He won't hear of your coming back--" "A lot I care!" Joan retorted with a fling of her head. "All I'm after's my things. I've done enough for this family.... Now I'm going to look out for Number One." The mother made no response. She seemed no longer to see Joan, whose bosom swelled and palpitated with a suddenly-acquired sense of personal grievance. "I've done enough!" she repeated mutinously. Edna said in a tremulous voice: "I don't know what we'll do without you--" "Do as I done!" Joan broke in hotly. "Go out and get a job and slave all day long so's your father won't have to support his family. Go on and try it: _I_'m sick and tired of it!" She turned and strode angrily into the front rooms. Edna followed, awed but inquisitive. Pulling their bed out from the wall, Joan disentangled from the accumulation of odds and ends beneath it a small suit-case of matting, in which she began to pack her scanty store of belongings: all in embittered silence, ignoring her sister. "Where'd you stay last night?" Edna ventured, at length. "With a friend of mine," Joan answered brusquely. "Who?" the other persisted. Joan hesitated not one instant; the lie was required to save her face. "Maizie Dean, if you _got_ to know." "Who's Maizie Dean? I never heard you speak of her--" "Lizzie Fogarty, then," said Joan roughly. "She used to work with me at the stocking counter. Then she went on the stage. Now she's making big money." "Is she going to get you a job?" "Of course--foolish!" "Where's she live?" "Down in Forty-fifth Street, near Eighth Avenue." "What's the number of the house?" "What do you want to know for?" "Ain't you going back there?" Joan shut down the lid of the suit-case and began to strap it. "Yes," she said with a trace of reluctance. "I might wanta write to you," insisted Edna. "Anything might happen and you not know--" "Oh, well, then," Joan admitted, with an air of extreme ennui, "the number's Two-eighty-nine. Catch that? Don't forget." "I won't." "Besides," Joan added, lifting her voice for the benefit of the listener in the dining-room, "you don't need to be so much in a rush to think I ain't ever coming back to see you. You got no right to think that of me, after the way I've turned in my pay week in and week out, right straight along. I don't know what makes you think I've turned mean. I'm going to come and see you and ma every week, and as soon's I begin to make money you'll get your share, all right, all right!" "Joan--" the younger girl whispered, drawing nearer. "What?" "They had a nawful row last night--ma and pa--after you went." "I bet he done all the rowing!" "He"--Edna's thin, pale cheeks coloured faintly with indignation--"he said rotten things to her--said it was because you took after her made you want to go on the stage." "That's like him, the brute!" Joan commented between her teeth. "What'd she say?" "Nothing. Then he lit into Butch, but Butch stood up to him and told him to shut his face or he'd knock his block off." "And he did shut his face, didn't he?" Edna nodded vigorously. "Yeh--but he rowed with ma for hours after they'd went to bed. I could hear him fussing and swearing. She never answered one word." Reminiscences of like experiences of her own, long white nights through which she had lain sleepless, listening to the endless, indistinguishable monologue of recrimination and abuse in the adjoining bedroom, softened Joan's mood. She returned to the dining-room. Her mother's head had fallen forward on arms folded amidst the odious disorder of unclean dishes. Through a long minute Joan regarded with sombre eyes that unlovely and pitiful head, with its scant covering of greyish hair stretched taut from nape to temple and brow and twisted into a ragged knot at the back, with its hollowed temples and sunken cheeks, its thin and stringy neck emerging from the collar of a cheap and soiled Mother Hubbard. With new intentness, as if seeing them for the first time, she studied the dejected curve of those toil-bent shoulders, and the lean red forearms with their gnarled and scalded hands. Dull emotions troubled the girl, pity and apprehension entering into her mood to war with selfishness and obstinacy. This drudge that was her mother had once been a woman like herself, straight and strong and fashioned in clean, firm contours of wholesome flesh. To what was due this dreadful metamorphosis? To the stage? Or to Man? Or to both?... Must she in the end become as her mother was, a battered derelict of womanhood, hopeless of salvage? Slipping to her knees, she passed an arm across the thin, sharp shoulders of the woman. "Ma ..." she said gently. The response was a whisper barely audible, her name breathed in a sigh: "Joan...." Beneath her warm, strong arm there was the faintest perceptible movement of the shoulders. "Listen to me, ma: I ain't going to forget you and Edna. I am going to work hard and take care of you." The mother moved her head slightly, turning her face away from her daughter. Otherwise she was wholly unresponsive. Joan might have been talking to the deaf. She divined suddenly something of the tragedy and despair of this inarticulate creature whose body had borne her, who had once been as her daughter was now. Before her mental vision unfolded a vast and sordid tapestry--a patchwork-thing made up of hints, innuendoes and snatches of half-remembered conversations, heretofore meaningless, of a thousand-and-one insignificant circumstances, individually valueless, assembling into an almost intelligible whole: picturing in dim, distorted perspective the history of her mother, drab, pitiful, appalling.... Abruptly, bending forward, Joan touched her lips to the sallow cheek. "Good-bye," she said stiffly; "I got to go." She rose. Her mother did not move. Edna stared wonderingly, as though a bystander at a scene of whose meaning she was ignorant. Joan took up her suit-case and went to the door. "S'long, kid," she saluted her sister lightly. "Take good care of ma while I'm away. See you before long." She hesitated again in the open doorway, with her hand on the knob. "And tell Butch I said thanks." She was half-way down to the next landing before she became aware of Edna bending over the banisters. "Joan--" "What?" The girl paused. "I 'most forgot: Butch said if you was to come in to tell you to drop around to the store th'safternoon. Said he had something to tell you." "What?" demanded Joan, incredulous. "I dunno. He just said that this morning." "All right. Good-bye." "Good-bye, Joan." To eyes dazzled by ambition, the news-stand, shouldered on either side by a prosperous delicatessen shop and a more prosperous and ornate corner saloon, wore a look unusually hopeless and pitiful: it was so small, so narrow-chested, so shabby! Its plate-glass show-window, dim with the accumulated grime of years, bore in block letters of white enamel--with several letters missing--the legend: A THUR BY Newsd ler & Stationer igars & Con tionery Before the door stood a wooden newspaper stand, painted red and black, advertising the one-cent evening sheet which furnished it gratis. A few dusty stacks of papers ornamented it. The door was wide open, disclosing an interior furnished with dirt-smeared show-cases which housed a stock of cheap cigars and tobacco, boxes of villainous candy to be retailed by the cent's-worth, writing-paper in gaudy, fly-specked packages, magazines, and a handful of brittle toys, perennially unsold. The floor was seldom swept and had never been scrubbed in all the nine years that Thursby had been a tenant of the place. The establishment was, as Joan had anticipated, in sole charge of Butch, who occupied a tilted chair, his lean nose exploring the sporting pages of _The Evening Journal_. Inevitably, a half-consumed Sweet Caporal cigarette ornamented his cynic mouth. He greeted Joan with a flicker of amusement. "'Lo, kid!" he said: and threw aside the paper. "What's doing?" "Edna said you wanted to see me." "Yeh: that's right." Butch yawned liberally and thrust his hat to the back of his head. "Well?" said the girl sharply. "What do you want?" Butch delayed his answer until he had inserted a fresh cigarette between his lips, lighted it from the old, and inhaled deeply. Interim he looked her over openly, with the eyes of one from whom humanity has no secrets. "Dja land that job?" he enquired at length, smoke trickling from his mouth and nostrils, a grim smile lurking about his lips. "Haven't tried yet." "But you're goin' to?" "Of course." "What line? Chorus girl or supe in the legit?" "I'm going to try to do anything that turns up," Joan affirmed courageously. "Try anythin' once, eh?" murmured the boy with profound irony. "Well, where you goin' to hang out till you land?" The lie ran glibly off her tongue this time: "With Maizie Dean--Two-eighty-nine West Forty-fifth." "That where you stayed last night?" "Yes ..." she faltered, already beginning to repent and foresee unhappy complications in event Butch should try to find her at the address she had given. The boy got up suddenly and stood close to her, searching her face with his prematurely knowing eyes. "Look here, kid!" he said roughly. "Hand it to me straight now: on the level, there ain't no man mixed up in this?" She was able to meet his gaze without a tremor: "On the dead level, Butch." "That's all right then. Only...." "Only what?" "There'll be regular trouble for the guy, if I ever find out you've lied to me." "What business--" "Ah, cut that!" snarled Butch. "You're my sister--see? And you're a damn' little fool, and somebody's got to look out for you. And that means me. You go ahead and try this stage thing all you like--but duck the men, duck 'em every time!" He eyed her momentarily from a vast and aloof coign of vantage. She was dumb with resentment, oppressed by amazement and a little in awe of the boy, her junior though he was. "Now, lis'en: got any money?" "No--yes--fifty cents," she stammered. "That ain't goin' to carry you far over the bumps. Who's goin' to put up for you while you're lookin' for this job-thing? Your frien' Maizie?" "I don't know--I guess so--yes: I'm going to stay with her." "Well, you won't last long if you don't come through with some coin every little while." Without warning Butch produced a small packet of bills from his trouser-pocket. "Djever see them before?" he enquired, with his mocking smile. Joan gasped: "My money--!" "Uh-huh," Butch nodded. "Fell outa your bag when you side-stepped the Old Man and beat it, last night. He didn't see it, and I sneaked the bunch while he wasn't lookin'. G'wan--take it." He thrust the money into her fingers that closed convulsively upon it. For a moment she choked and gulped, on the verge of tears, so overpowering was the sense of relief. "O Butch--!" "Ah, cut that out. It's your money, all right--ain't it?" She began with trembling fingers to count the bills. Butch tilted his head to one side and regarded her with undisguised disgust. "Say, you must have a swell opinion of me, kid, to think I'd hold out on you!" She stared bewildered. "There's twenty-two dollars here, Butch!" Her hand moved out as if offering to return the money. With an angry movement he slapped it back and turned away. "That's right," he muttered sourly. "I slipped an extra ten in. I guess I gotta right to, ain't I? You're my sister, and you'll need it before you get through, all right." She lingered, stunned. "But, Butch ... I oughtn't to...." "Ah, can that guff--and beat it. The Old Man's liable to be back any minute." Seizing her suit-case, he urged her none too gently toward the door. "It's awful' good of you, Butch--awful' good--" "All right--all right. But can the gush-thing till next time." Overwhelmed, Joan permitted herself to be thrust out of the door; and then, recovering to some extent, masked her excitement as best she could and trudged away across-town, back toward Central Park. Blind instinct urged her to that refuge where she would have quiet and peace while she thought things out: a necessity which had not existed until within the last fifteen minutes. Before her interview with Butch she had been penniless and planless. But now she found herself in circumstances of comparative affluence and independence. Twenty-two dollars strictly economized surely ought to keep her fed and sheltered in decent lodgings for at least three weeks; within which time she would quite as surely find employment of some sort. It remained to decide how best to conserve her resources. On the face of the situation, she had nothing to do but seek the cheapest and meanest rooming-house in the city. But in her heart of hearts she had already determined to return to the establishment of Madame Duprat, beyond her means though it might be, ostensibly to await the return of the Dancing Deans, secretly that she might be under the same roof with John Matthias. And in the end it was to Number 289 that she turned. At half-past four she stood again on the brown-stone stoop, waiting an answer to her ring. And at the same moment, John Matthias, handsomely garbed in the best of his wardrobe but otherwise invested in a temper both indignant and rebellious, instituted a dash from room to train, handicapped by a time-limit ridiculously brief. As the front door slammed at his back, he pulled up smartly to escape collision with the girl on the stoop. He looked at and through her, barely conscious of her pretty, pallid face and the light of recognition in her eyes. Then, with a murmured apology, he dodged neatly round her, swung down the steps, and frantically hailed a passing taxicab. Joan, dashed and disappointed, saw the vehicle swing in to the curb and heard Matthias, as he clambered in, direct the driver to the Pennsylvania Station with all possible haste. She stared after the dwindling cab disconsolately. He hadn't even known her! In another minute she would have turned her back on the house and sought lodgings elsewhere, but the door abruptly opened a second time, revealing Madame Duprat, a forbidding but imperative figure, upon the threshold. Timidly in her confusion the girl made some semi-articulate enquiry as to the address of Miss Maizie Dean. To her astonishment and consternation, the landlady unbent and smiled. "Ah!" she exclaimed with unction. "Mademoiselle is the friend of Monsieur Matthias, is it not? Very good. Will you not be pleased to enter? It is but this afternoon that the Sisters Dean have returned so altogether unexpectedly." VII Alone in the body of a touring-car, Helena Tankerville, a slender and fair woman in white, as cool and fresh to look upon as the day was hot and weary to endure, consulted her bracelet-watch, shrugged recklessly, and lifted her parasol an inch or so to enable her to level an imperious stare at the point where the straight, shining lines of railroad track debouched from the western woodland; as if expecting the very strength of her impatience to conjure into sight the overdue train. She was very pretty and prettily dressed and sure of herself; there were evidences of temper and determination mixed with disquietude in her manner; and there was no one in her present neighbourhood (except possibly her chauffeur) of whose existence she considered it worth her while to be aware. None the less, she was conscious that she was visible. . . . A faint puff of vapour bellied above the distant screen of pines. Immediately a far, mellow, prolonged hoot turned all faces toward the west. A rakish, low-lying locomotive with a long tail of coaches emerged from the woodland and, breathing forth vast volumes of smoke, fled a pursuing cloud of dust, straight as an arrow to the station; where, panting with triumph and relief, as one having won a race, it drew in beside the platform. Incontinently, upwards of two hundred people, the majority of them men in apparently comfortable circumstances, well dressed to the standards of summer negligence, swarmed out of the cars and ran hither and yon, heedlessly elbowing one another and gabbling vociferously as they sought accommodation in the long rank of station-wagons, 'buses, surreys, smartly appointed traps, and motor-cars. Helena, bending forward, overlooked them all with imperceptible disdain. The face she sought was not among those that swam in review beneath her. And presently encountering an overbold glance, she drew back with a little frown of annoyance. Already the throng was thinning; conveyances laden to the guards were drawing out of the rank and rattling and rumbling off through stifling drifts of dust; no more passengers were issuing from the coaches; and already the parlour-car porters were picking up their stools and preparing to swing back aboard the train. The conductor waved his final signal. The bell tolled its warning. The locomotive belched black smoke and cinders and amid stentorian puffings began to move, the coaches following to their tune of clanking couplings. No sign of her refractory nephew. And still Helena hesitated to give the order to drive home; John had telephoned; it wasn't like him to be delinquent in his promises. The end of the last car was passing her when she saw him. He appeared suddenly on the rearmost platform, with the startled expression and air of a Jack-in-the-box; dropped his suit-case over the rear rail; ran down the steps; delayed an instant to gauge distance and speed: and with nice calculation dropped lightly to the ground. Pausing only to recover his luggage, he approached the motor-car with a sheepish smile for his handsome young aunt, who regarded him with an air of mingled bewilderment and despair. "Wel-l!" she exclaimed, as soon as he was near enough to hear--"of _all_ things--!" "Right you are!" he affirmed gravely, tossing his handbag into the car and following it. "Kick along, Davy," he added, with a nod to the chauffeur; and gracefully sank back upon the seat beside Helena. Purring, the car began to grope its way through the dust-fog. Matthias turned twinkling eyes to his aunt. She compressed her lips and shook her head helplessly. "Words inadequate, aunty?" "Quite!" she said. "_What_ were you doing on that train, to come so near forgetting the station?" "Thinking," he explained: "wrapped in profound and exhaustive meditation. I say, how stunning you look!" She gave him up; or one inferred as much from her gesture. "You're impossible," she said in a tragic voice. "Thinking!... While _I_ had to wait there and be ogled by all those odious men!" "You must've been ready to sink through the ground." She eyed him stonily. "You didn't care--!" "Even if I hadn't been preoccupied, it would never have entered my head that you seriously objected to being admired." She received this in injured silence. Matthias chuckled to himself and settled more comfortably into his seat. The motor-car turned off the main road from the station to the village of Port Madison, down which the greater number of its predecessors had clattered, and found unclouded air on a well-metalled lane bordered with aged oaks and maples. Through a funnel-like dip between hills, Matthias, looking past his aunt, caught a fleeting glimpse of the cluttered roofs of Port Madison, its shallow, land-locked harbour set with a little fleet of pleasure boats, and the ineffable, burning blue of the distant Sound.... "I presume," Helena returned to the charge, disarmingly aggrieved, "you think I ought to be grateful for your condescending to return at all!" "Forgive me," he pleaded, not altogether insincerely; "I know it wasn't right of me to run away like that, but I couldn't help it." "You couldn't help it!" she murmured despairingly. "That's just the way of it. I got to thinking about a play I wanted to write, yesterday afternoon, and--well, along about ten o'clock it got too strong for me. I just had to get back to my typewriter. You know how that is." "I? What do I know about your silly playwriting?" Laughing, he bent nearer and patted the gloved hand on the cushions beside him. "You know perfectly well, Helena dear, what it is to want to do something so bad you simply can't help yourself. It's the Matthias blood in both of us. That's why you ran off and married Tankerville against everybody's advice. Of course, it did turn out beautifully; but you didn't stop to wonder whether it would or not when you took it into your head to marry him. The same with me: you decide that it's high time for your delightful sister-in-law to get married, and you look round and fix on your dutiful nephew for the bridegroom-elect--wholly because you want it to be that way." "Don't you?" she demanded sharply. He took a moment to think this over. "I suppose I do," he admitted almost reluctantly. "But--" "You're in love with her!" Helena declared with spirit. "Quite true, but--" "Then why," she begged in tones of moderate exasperation--"why do you object--hang fire--run away like a silly, frightened schoolboy as soon as I get everything arranged for you?" "But, you see, I'm not in a position to get married yet," he argued. "I haven't--" "How's that--'not in a position'?" she interrupted testily. "You keep forgetting I'm the family pauper, the poor relation, whereas Venetia has all the money there is, more or less." "There you are!" Helena turned her palms out expressively; folded them in resignation. "What more can you ask?" "Something more nearly approaching an equal footing, at least." "Jack!"--she turned to him with a fine air of innocence--"how much money _have_ you got, anyway?" "Thirty-six hundred per annum, as you know very well," he replied. "But, my dear, dear aunty (you're one of the most beautiful creatures alive and I'm awfully proud and fond of you) surely you must understand that no decent fellow wants to go to the girl he's in love with and make a proposition like this: 'I've got thirty-six hundred and you've got three hundred and sixty thousand; let's marry and divide.'" "How long have you been writing plays?" "Oh ... several years." "And how many have you written?" "Quite a few." "And how much have you made at it?" "Next to nothing, but--" "Then why do you persist?" "Because it's the thing I want to do." "But you can't make any money at it--" "I may make a lot before long. Meanwhile, I like it." "But if you'd only listen to reason and let Tankerville--" "With all the best intentions in the world, dear Helena, Tankerville couldn't make me a successful business man. It isn't in me. Permit me to muddle along in my own, 'special, wrong-headed way, and the chances are I'll make good in the end. But, once and for all, I refuse positively to give up my trade and try to make sense of Wall Street methods." Helena moved her shoulders impatiently. For an instant she was silenced. Then: "But marriage needn't necessarily put an end to your playwriting. A good marriage--as with Venetia--ought even to help, I should think." "But you persist in forgetting I'm not a fortune hunter." "But," she countered smartly, "Marbridge is." He said: "Oh--Marbridge!" as if dumbfounded. She smiled quietly, a very wise and superior smile. To this point the car had been steadily ascending; the noise of the motor, together with the frequent stutterings of the exhaust with the muffler cut-out, had been sufficient to disguise the substance of their communication from the ears of the operator. Now, however, they surmounted the highest point and began the more gradual descent to the Tankerville estate. And with less noise there was consequently very little talking on the part of the two on the rear seat. For which Matthias wasn't altogether sorry. He wanted time to think--to think about Venetia Tankerville in the new light cast upon her by his aunt's concluding remark: as affected by her friendship with Vincent Marbridge. In the natural swing of events, it would never have occurred to him to consider Marbridge's attentions seriously. Nobody ever took Marbridge seriously, he believed, aside from a few exceptionally foolish women.... Noiselessly the car slipped down a mile-long avenue to the brow of a promontory. On either hand Tanglewood's long parked terraces fell away to the water: on the left the harbour of Port Madison, on the right, Long Island Sound. Matthias was barely conscious of these things; his mood was haunted by an extraordinarily clear vision of Vincent Marbridge: not tall, but by no means short; a trifle stout, but none the less a well-knit figure of a man, and tremendously alive; dark, with a broad, blunt, good-humoured face and seal-brown eyes that were exceedingly handsome and expressive; keen-witted and accomplished, knowing almost everybody and every place and thing worth knowing; hedonist and egoist, selfish, unscrupulous, magnetic, fascinating. Impressed, Matthias frowned. His aunt eyed him covertly, with a sly, semi-affectionate, semi-malicious smile shadowing her mouth. Slackening its pace, the car took the wide semicircle of the drive and slid sedately to a dead stop by the carriage-block. Matthias pulled himself together, jumped out, and gave his hand to his aunt. They turned toward the house. Tankerville's pretentious marble palace crowned the brow of the headland with an effect as exquisite as a dream of an ancient French château realized in snow. For this its owner had his wife to thank. Helena, unable to curb her husband's desire for the most expensive and ostentatious place obtainable, had at least guided his choice of design. It was too magnificent, it was overpowering, but it was beautiful; and it was more than ever beautiful at this hour, with its walls in part bathed in a rose-pink light of sunset, in part shadowed as with a wash of violet, and with all its admirable proportions stark against the dusky sapphire of the Sound. An unwonted stillness clung about the place. Matthias wondered. "It might be the palace of the Sleeping Beauty," he said. "Why this deadly and benumbing silence? What--" "Oh, simply that Tankerville decided this morning to take everybody down to Huntington for lunch. They got away quite early, in the Enchantress. Come out on the terrace; we'll look for them." They passed through a wide, cool, panelled hallway. "Why didn't you go?" "You know I hate the water. Besides, I had a headache--at least, I had one until the Enchantress got under way; and furthermore I meant to stay at home and meet you and talk it out." "Venetia went, of course?" "Of course--_and_ Marbridge--and everybody!" He grunted thoughtfully. They descended to a terrace which jutted airily out over the edge of a cliff, with a sheer drop of a hundred and fifty feet to the beach. Helena, dropping languidly into a wicker chair, motioned Matthias to the broad marble balustrade. "Any sign of the Enchantress, O perturbed nephew?" He lingered there for an instant, marvelling with an inexhaustible wonder at the magnificent sweep of the view, then remembering, raked the waters until he discovered Tankerville's power-cruiser standing in toward the dock from the bottle-neck mouth of Port Madison harbour. Returning, he reported, seated himself near his aunt, lighted a cigarette. "Why did you ask him here anyway?" he demanded abruptly. "Who?" she parried mischievously. "Marbridge, of course," he admitted, sulking in the face of her manifest amusement. "Jealous, Jackie?" "Oh--if you insist." She laughed. "The most encouraging symptom you've yet betrayed!... I didn't ask him. Tankerville did. He likes him. The man's amusing, after all." "But you like him?" "He amuses me." "He's not precisely a tame cat...." "Dear boy!" she laughed again, "I didn't fetch you out here to worry about me. I'm fire-proof. Venetia's quite another pair of shoes. Fret about her as much as you like." "When does he go--Marbridge, I mean?" "Monday, I think. At least, I believe Tankerville asked him for a week only." "And that's why you asked me, this particular week?" "I thought you'd be a good counter-irritant; and hoped you'd come to your senses and secure Venetia against all Marbridges for all time to come. You gave me to understand you would." "Pardon," he corrected a trifle stiffly: "I admitted to you in strict confidence that I was in love with Venetia. I never promised to ask her to marry me." "Well, that's what I understood you to mean. And anyway, you'd better. Neither Tankerville nor I can control the girl; she's her own mistress and headstrong enough to be a good match for any Matthias that ever lived. If Marbridge ever convinces her that she likes him...." She concluded with an eloquent ellipsis. "Probably," mused Matthias after prolonged deliberation, "I'd have lost my head before this if it hadn't been so full of that play." Helena smiled indulgently. "It's not too late ... I hope." Troubled, he rose, walked to the balustrade, jerked his cigarette into space, and returned. "As between one fortune-hunter and another," he said gloomily, "I'm conceited enough to think myself the safer bet." His aunt smiled more openly: "See what Venetia thinks." "I will!" said Matthias with a fine air of inalterable determination. VIII Since it was her whim and the winds indulged, Helena had ordered that the rite of the late dinner be celebrated by candlelight alone. Ten shaded candles graced the places. In the centre of the table an ancient candelabrum of gold added the mellow illumination of its seven alabaster arms, whose small flames yearned upward ardently, with scarce a perceptible flicker, though every window was wide to the whispering night. One of these that faced Matthias framed a shimmering sky of stars and the still black shield of the Sound, on which the fixed and undeviating glare of a remote light-house was reflected darkly, a long unwavering way of light; he thought of a tall wax candle burning amid the sanctified shadows of some vast and dark and still cathedral.... They were ten at table: from Helena's right, Pat Atherton (Tankerville's partner), a Mrs. Majendie, Marbridge, a Mrs. Cardrow, Tankerville at the head; on his right, Mrs. Pat Atherton, Matthias, Venetia Tankerville, Majendie. The latter and his wife were almost strangers to Matthias, having arrived only the previous afternoon: but he thought them as pleasant and handsome people as any of those with whom the Tankervilles liked to fill their house. The Athertons were old friends; he had known them well, long before Helena dreamed of marrying Tankerville. Marbridge was an indifferently familiar figure in the ways of his life; they frequented the same clubs, and of late he had begun to encounter the older man more and more frequently in his theatrical divagations. Remained Mrs. Cardrow, a widow, the acquaintance of a week's standing. Cardrow had been in some way connected with the enterprises of Messrs. Tankerville & Atherton; how, Matthias didn't remember; a man of whom rumour said little that was good until it began to say _De mortuis_.... He had killed himself for no accountable reason. His widow seemed to have survived bereavement with amazing grace. Matthias admired her greatly. Women, he knew--Helena in their number--mistrusted her for no cause perceptible to him. He liked her, thought her little less than absolutely charming. So, evidently, did Marbridge, whose attitude toward her this evening was a little more noticeably attentive than ever before. He seemed to exert himself to interest and divert. His black eyes snapped. As he talked his heavy body swayed slightly from the hips, lending an accent to his animation. His laugh was frequent and infectious. She was a woman who smiled more than she laughed. She smiled now, inscrutably, her beautiful, insolent eyes half veiled with demure lashes, her face turned to Marbridge, her chin a trifle high, bringing out the clear strong lines of her throat and shoulders, which had the texture, the pallor, and the firmness of fine ivory. Her eyes, when she chose to discover them, were brown, her eyebrows almost black, her hair dull gold, the gold of the candelabrum--the gold of artifice, on the word of Helena. Perhaps it was to this odd colouring--ivory and brown, black and gold--that Mrs. Cardrow owed most of her strange and provoking quality. But there was something else, something one could not define: at once stimulating and elusive; less charm than allure; nameless; that attracted and repelled.... These were thoughts set stirring by a dozen semi-curious glances at the woman, in pauses in his conversation with Venetia. Matthias was in fact indifferent to Mrs. Cardrow. But he was tremendously interested in Venetia. It could hardly be otherwise--since his talk with Helena. He was to marry Venetia. Amazing thought! She was adorable. Of the other women, none compared with Mrs. Cardrow: even Helena's beauty paled in contrast. But Venetia was to Mrs. Cardrow as dawn to noon. One looked at Venetia and thought of a still sea at daybreak, mobile to the young and fitful airs, radiant with sunlight, breathless with apprehension of the long, golden hours to come. One looked at Mrs. Cardrow and thought--of Woman. Venetia was dark, and the other fair; Venetia was by no means a child, Mrs. Cardrow not yet thirty. The gulf that set them apart was not so much of years as of caste: they lived and thought on different levels, mental if not social. Matthias liked to think Venetia of the higher order. He was to marry her. Incredible! And tonight her eyes were warm and kind for him, and all for him. He could not see that there was anything of self-interest in the infrequent glances she cast at those who sat opposite, playing their time-old game with such engaging candour. If she had thought much of Marbridge, surely she must have betrayed some little pique or chagrin. She was not blind; neither was she patient and prone to self-effacement. Matthias had known her long enough to have garnered vivid memories of her resentment of slights, whether real or fancied. She was unique and wonderful in many ways, but (he told himself in a catch-phrase of the hour) she was essentially human. He could not have cared for a woman without temper: he cared intensely for this girl-woman whose rare loveliness seemed almost exotic in its singular scheme, whose skin, fine of texture and colourless as milk-white satin, was splashed with lips of burning scarlet, whose eyes of deepest violet were luminous in the shadow of hair of the richness and lustre of burnished bronze ... luminous and kind to him: he dared to hope greatly of their sympathy. Through dinner she had entertained him with a mirthful, inconsecutive narrative of the adventures of the day. Now, as ices were served, her interest swerved suddenly and found a new object in himself. "Why did you run away last night?" "You really noticed it?" Light malice trembled on her lips: "Not till this morning." "You were so busy"--an imperceptible nod indicated Marbridge--"I felt myself becoming ornamental. Whereas, utility's my proudest attribute. So I left you dancing, and skipped by the light of the moon." "Not really?" "I assure you--" "Put out with me, I mean?" He sought her eyes again and found them veiled and downcast. "Not the least in the world." "Then, again, why--?" "I wanted to get back to work. Besides, I had a little business with a manager." And so he had; but until this moment he had forgotten it. "Play business?" "I'm afraid I know no other." "Is something new to be produced?" Matthias nodded: "Goes into rehearsal in August. A melodrama I wrote some time ago--'The Jade God.'" "Who produces it?" "Rideout." "Who's he?" "A foolish actor: played a sketch of mine in vaudeville for a couple of years and, because that got over, thinks this piece must." "But it will, won't it?" "I hope so; but I'm glad it's not my money." "And where will you open?" "Heaven and the Shuberts only know. Rideout books through the Shuberts, you understand." "I'm afraid I don't." "The Shuberts are the Independents--the opposition to the Syndicate headed by Klaw and Erlanger. You see, the theatres of this country are practically all controlled by one or the other combination. If you want booking for your show, you've got to take sides--serve God or Mammon." "And which is which?" "The difference is imperceptible to the innocent bystander." "But you'll let us know--?" "If we open within motoring distance of Town--rather!" Tankerville, edging his plump little body forward on his chair, manoeuvred his round and sun-scorched face in vain attempts to catch his wife's eye past the intervening candelabrum. Helena, however, divined his desire. "Coffee in the card-room, George?" "Please!" Tankerville bleated plaintively. There was a concerted movement from the table. Venetia lingered with Matthias. "It's auction, tonight. Shall you play?" "'Fraid I'll have to. So will you. Helena--you know--" "Of course. We must. Only"--she sighed, petulant--"I'd rather not. I'd rather talk to you." "Heroic measures!" he laughed. "But--consolation note!--we're two over two full tables. Therefore we'll have to cut in and out. That'll give us some time to ourselves." "Yes," she agreed: "but it'll be just our luck to be disengaged at different times." He paused in amused incredulity. "Do you really want to talk to me as badly as all that?" She nodded, curtaining her eyes. "Very much," she said softly. They entered the card-room and were summoned to different tables. Matthias cut and edged Mrs. Cardrow out by a single pip. How Venetia fared he did not learn, more than that she was to play while Marbridge was to stay out the first rubber. He played even less intelligently than usual, with a mind distracted. Venetia's new attitude, pleasant as had been all their association, was a development of disconcerting suddenness; or else he had been witless and blind beyond relief. And yet--how could he say? He was so frequently misled by faculties befogged with dreaming, that overlooked when they did not flatly deny the obvious: it was possible that Helena had been more wise than he. A sense of strain handicapped his judgment; whether atmospheric or bred of his own emotion, he could not tell. And yet, plumbing the deeps of his humour, he discovered nothing there more exacting than bewilderment, more exciting than hope. On the other hand, he could fix upon nothing in the bearing of these amiable people to lead him to believe that the feeling of tensity to which he was susceptible was not the creation of his own fancy. They played with a certain abandon of enjoyment, absorbed in their diversion.... Looking past Venetia, at the other table--Venetia slim and tall and worshipful in a wonderful black gown that rendered dazzling the whiteness of her flesh--he could see Mrs. Cardrow and Marbridge at the piano in the drawing-room. The woman sat all but motionless, white arms alone moving graciously in the half-light as her deft hands wandered over the key-board. Marbridge, his arms folded, lounged over the piano, his back to the card-room. The eloquent movements of his round, dark head, its emphatic nods and argumentative waggings, seemed to indicate that he was bearing the burden of their talk; but the music, hushed though it was, covered his accents. The woman was looking up into his face with an expression of quick, pleased interest, her lips, half-parted, smiling. It did not occur to Matthias to wonder about the substance of their conversation. But for a sure clue to the intrigue of Venetia's heart--and his own--he would have given worlds. Throwing down his cards, Tankerville announced with satisfaction: "Game--rubber. Jack, you go out--praise the Saints! You've cost Mrs. Pat close onto fifteen dollars, more shame to you!" "Sorry!" Matthias smiled cheerfully, rising. "You would have me play." "Hearkening and repentance!" retorted Tankerville. "Next time I marry, you can bet your sweet life I'm going to pick out a family of sure-'nough bridgers.... Call Mrs. Cardrow, will you now, like a good fellow." But Mrs. Cardrow had already left the piano. Matthias held a chair for her, and then, since the rubber at the other table was not yet decided, strolled to a window. The night tempted him. Almost unconsciously he stepped out upon the terrace and wandered to the parapet. Abstractedly he lighted a cigarette. When the tobacco was aglow he held the match from him at arm's-length over the abyss. Its flame burned as steadily as though protected, flickering out only when, released, it fell. No night ever more still than this: land and water alike spellbound in breathless calm; even on the brow of that high foreland where Tankerville had builded him his lordly pleasure home, no hint of movement in the air! And yet Matthias was conscious of nothing resembling oppression--exhilaration, rather. He smiled vaguely into the darkness. From far below, echoing up from the placid waters of Port Madison as from a sounding-board, came the tinkle-tinkle of a banjo and the complaint of a harmonica. When these were silent the wailing of violins was clearly audible, bridging a distance of over a mile across the harbour, from the ball-room of the country club. Far out upon the Sound the night boat for Boston trudged along like a slow-winging firefly; and presently its wash swept inshore to rouse the beach below to sibilant and murmurous protest. In the east the vault of night was pallid, azure and silver, with the promise of the reluctant moon. A hand fell gently upon his arm: Venetia's. He had not been aware of her approach, yet he was not startled. He turned his head slowly, smiling. She said softly: "Don't say anything--wait till it rises." They waited in silence. Her hand lingered upon his arm; and that last, he knew, was trembling. The nearness of her person, the intimacy of her touch, weighed heavily upon his senses. An edge of golden light appeared where the skies came down to the sea; hesitated; increased. That wan and spectral light, waxing, lent emphasis to the rare and delicious wonder of her loveliness, to the impregnable mystery of her womanhood. He regarded her with something near awe, with keen perception of his unworthiness: as a spirit from Heaven had stooped to commune with him. She lived; breathed; the hand upon his arm was warm and strong.... Incredible! The gibbous disk swung clear of the horizon and like some strange misshapen acrobat climbed a low-lying lattice-work of clouds. The girl turned away to a huge willow basket-chair. Matthias found its fellow and drew near to her. He struggled to speak; he fancied that she waited for him to speak; but his mind refused to frame, his tongue to utter, aught but the stalest of banalities. "No dew tonight," he hazarded at length, shame-faced. After an instant of silence she laughed clearly and gently. "O romantic man!" she said. "Now that you have, shattered the spell--if you please, a cigarette." He supplied this need; held a match; delayed holding it when it had served its purpose, enraptured with the refulgent wonder of that cameo of sweet flesh and blood set against the melting shadows, silver and purple and blue. With a second low, light laugh, she bent forward and daintily extinguished the flame with a single puff. "I don't wish to be stared at...." "Pardon," he said mechanically, startled. "But ... why?" "Perhaps I'm afraid you may see too much...." "Impossible!" he declared with conviction. "Odd as it may sound," she said in a mocking voice, "I have my secrets." Her back was to the moon, her face a pallid oval framed in ebony, illegible; but the moonlight was full upon his face, and she who would might read. His disadvantage was obvious. It wasn't fair.... Lounging, she crossed her knees, puffed thrice and cast the cigarette into the gulf. Abruptly she sat forward, studying him intently. He was disturbed with a singular uneasiness. "Jack," said Venetia very quietly, "is it true that you love me?" "Good lord!" he cried, sitting up. "Is it true?" He blinked. His head was whirling. He said nothing; sank back; quite automatically puffed with such fury that in a trice he had reduced the cigarette to an inch of glowing coal; scorched his fingers and threw it from him. Then he gasped stupidly: "Venetia!" "Is it true?" She had not moved. The question had the force of stubborn purpose through its very monotony, a monotony of inflexion no less than of repetition. Her accents were both serious and sincere. She was in earnest; she meant to know. "But, Venetia--" "Or have you been just making believe, all this long time?" "It--I--why--of course it's true!" he stammered lamely. "Then why haven't you ever told me so?" There sounded reproach, not unkindly, but real. He shook his wits together. "How could I guess you'd care to know?" "Do you know me so little as to think I'd resent it, if I happened not to care?" "I--don't know--didn't think of it that way. In fact--you've knocked me silly!" "But why? Because I've been straightforward? Dear boy!"--she lifted a hand to him: he took it in trembling--"you're twenty-seven, I'm twenty-three. We know one another pretty well: we know ourselves--at least slightly. Why can't we face things--facts--as man and woman, not as children? What's the good of make-believe? If this thing lies between us, let's be frank about it!" He hesitated, doubting, searching her face. Her look was very sweet and kind. Of a sudden he cried "Venetia!" came to his knees beside her chair, snatched her hand and crushed it between his own, to his lips. "I love you--I've always loved you!..." He felt the velvet of her lips, her breath, upon his forehead; and made as if to clasp her to him. But she slipped back, straightening an arm to fend him off. "No," she whispered--"not now--not here. Dear boy, get up! Think--this moonlight--anybody might see--" "I love you!" "I know and, dear, I'm glad--so glad! But--you made me ask you!" "I couldn't help that, Venetia: I was--afraid; I hardly dared to dream--of this. You were--you are--above, beyond--" Gently her hand sealed his mouth. "Dear, silly boy! Get up. If you won't, I must." Releasing her hand, he rose. His emotion shook him violently. At discretion, he dropped back into his chair. He looked about him a little wildly, his glance embracing all the weird fantasy of the night: the cold, inaccessible, glittering vault of stars, the malformed and sardonic moon, the silken bosom of the Sound, the lace and purple velvet draperies of the land. Down on the harbour the banjo and harmonica were ragging to tatters a sentimental ballad of the day. From the house came a burst of laughter--Tankerville exultant in some successful stratagem at cards. His gaze returned to Venetia. She sat without moving, wrapped in the exquisite mystery of her enigmatic heart, bewitching, bewildering, steadfastly reading him with eyes veiled and inscrutable in liquid shadow. Muttering--"Preposterous!"--he dropped his head between his hands. "I'm mad--mad!" he groaned. Without stirring, she demanded: "Why?" He shook his head free. "To have--owned up--let this come to pass. I love you: but that's all I dare say to you." "Isn't it, maybe, enough for me?" "I mean--I'm mad to marry you. But how can I ask you to have me? What have I to offer you? The position of wife to a poverty-stricken, half-grown playwright! It's out of reason...." "But possibly--am I not the one to judge of that?" "No: I won't have you marry a man unable to provide for you in the way to which you've been educated. It's a point of honour--" "But I have--" "You must understand: I've got to be able--able!--to humour your every whim. With things that way--what of your own you choose to spend on yourself won't count. The issue is my ability to give you everything." "But that will come--" "When? I can't promise--I hardly dare hope--" "This new play isn't your only hope?" "No--" "Success or failure, you'll keep on?" "Certainly...." "Then it's only a question of time." "But you--how can I ask you to wait?" "There's no necessity--" "But it must be." He rose, unable to remain still. "Give me six months: I've got another piece of work under way--and others only waiting their turn. In six months I can--" "No!" The monosyllable brought him up sharply. He stared. Her white arms, radiant in that clear, unearthly light, lifted toward him. "If you want me, dear," she said in a voice tense with emotion--"it must be now--soon! To wait--six months--I--that's im--" The beautiful modulations of Helena Tankerville's voice interrupted. Standing in one of the windows to the card-room, she said simply: "An exquisite night." Then, coming out upon the terrace and seeing Venetia and Matthias, she moved toward them. "Oh, there you are, Jack. You're wanted indoors." Matthias, unable quickly to regain his poise, said nothing. Venetia answered for him, calmly: "He can't come." "What, dear?" "I say, he can't come, Helena. He's engaged." "Engaged!" Recovering, Helena bore down upon them with a little call of delight. "Not really!... O my dears! I'm so glad!" She gathered Venetia into her arms. IX Unremarked by any of these, Marbridge stepped out upon the terrace. He was light of foot like most men of his type; his voice, unctuous with the Southern drawl which he affected together with quaint Southern twists of speech, was the first warning they had of his approach. "This is surely one powerful' fine night. I don't wonder you-all like it better out here than--" He checked suddenly in both words and action: the women had started apart. "Why!" he added slowly, as though perplexed--"I hope I don't intrude...." His quick dark eyes shifted rapidly from Helena to Venetia, to Matthias, and again back to the women, during a momentary lull of embarrassment. Then Helena said quietly: "Not in the least. But this makes you the first to learn the news, Mr. Marbridge. Venetia and my nephew are engaged to be married." "Engaged--!" The man's chin slacked: his eyes widened; a cigarette fell unheeded from his fingers. He smiled a trace stupidly. "Why!"--he recollected himself almost instantaneously--"this certainly is some surprise, but I do congratulate you--both!" With a stride he seized the hand Venetia could not refuse him, and pressed it warmly. "You're the luckiest man I ever knew!" he declared, turning to clasp hands with Matthias. Instinctively the latter met his powerful grasp with one as forceful. "Thank you," he said, smiling gravely into the other's eyes. Under his firm but pleasant regard they wavered and fell, then steadied with a glint of temper. Their hands fell apart. Marbridge stepped back. "Perhaps I don't know you well enough, Mr. Matthias, to congratulate Miss Tankerville as heartily as I do you; but I'm persuaded she's not liable to make any serious mistake." Matthias nodded thoughtfully. "I understand: your intentions are excellent. I'm sure we both thank you. Venetia--?" "Mr. Marbridge is very amiable," said the girl, a hint of mirth modifying her composure. "But I'm afraid, Helena," she added quickly--"if you don't mind--I think I'll go to my room." To Marbridge she gave a quaint little bow that was half an old-fashioned courtesy, robbed of formality by her spirited smile: to Matthias her hand and a gentle "Good night!" Taking the arm of her sister-in-law, she drew her toward the house. Watching them until they disappeared, Marbridge chuckled quietly. "Took my breath away!" he declared. "Why, I never suspected for an instant!..." He dropped heavily but with characteristic grace into a chair. "It takes you quiet boys to get away with the girls like Venetia--all fire and dash!" "Yes," said Matthias reflectively: "it does--doesn't it? Have another cigarette?" He offered his case. "You dropped yours...." "Thanks.... She's a thoroughbred, all right. I reckon if I wasn't a mite too middle-aged, maybe I might've set you a pace that you'd've found lively going." "Well, let's be thankful nothing of that sort happened, at all events." Marbridge looked up over his match and lifted his brows; but if in reality a retort trembled on his lips, he thought better of it; and before either spoke again, Tankerville was on the terrace, brandishing pudgy arms. "Hey, you!" he called fretfully. "Don't you know you're holding us all up? Come on in...." But the game held less attraction for Matthias than ever, and after another and final failure to establish himself in Tankerville's good graces, he pocketed his losses, relinquished his place to Marbridge and--with even less inclination for bed than for cards--took himself again out into the open night. But now the terrace was all too small to contain his spirits. The need of action--movement, freedom, space--was strong upon him. Striding away down the drive that wound like a broad band of whitewash through its dark bordering lawns and darker coppices, he found even the grounds of Tanglewood too constricted for the extravagant energy that animated him; and took to the broad highways, with all Long Island free to his tireless spirit. For several hours or more he trudged valiantly hither and yon, with little or no notion of whither he went--with his head in the stars and his feet in the dust and kicking up a famous smother of it--and in that time was wittingly as near to happiness as he had ever been in all his days. The faculty of coherent thought had passed from him utterly, but it passed unmourned: Venetia was his! This thought alone sufficed him. He had neither time nor inclination to entertain those doubts, those questionings and apprehensions which had beset him in saner humour theretofore. It mattered nothing now that he was poor and she wealthy, nothing that all his efforts to make something of himself had thus far proved vain and fruitless. She loved him: it was enough.... He came to his senses, eventually, long enough to recognize anew the grounds of Tanglewood. Of a sudden his impetuosity had run out; remained the pleasant languor of a healthy body thoroughly exercised, the peace of a mind vexed by no insatiable desire. And still he was not sleepy. Purposefully he retarded his footsteps, approaching the house with stealth, eager to escape observation and gain his room, unhindered. Tomorrow would be soon enough to submit to the ordeal of congratulations.... It was with a shock of amazement that he saw the house all quiet and dark. He pulled out his watch and studied its face by moonlight, finding its evidence difficult to credit: twenty minutes past one in the morning! Gingerly, keeping to the grass in order that the gravel of the drive might not, by its crunching underfoot, betray him or alarm some wakeful member of the house-hold, he approached the front door, wondering if he were locked out, and--not without amusement at his self-contrived predicament--what to do if he were. To his relief one-half of the double door stood a foot or two ajar--thanks, he had no doubt, to the thoughtfulness of Helena or Tankerville. Blessing both on general principles, he entered, shut the door and softly shot the bolt; turned in deep obscurity to grope his way to the foot of the stairs; but paused with a hand on the newel-post and his breath catching in his throat. In the hallway above a night-light was burning dim and low but sufficiently diffused to show him the figure of a woman silently descending the stairway. When he first became aware of her she was indeed almost within arm's length: a shape of shadow scarce three shades lighter than the encompassing gloom.... Venetia, possibly, having waited and watched for him from her windows overlooking the drive, stealing down to bid him that good night they had perforce foregone in the presence of Helena and Marbridge.... That wild and extravagant surmise had no more than entered his mind when he found the woman in his arms. She gave herself into them with a gesture of abandonment, with a little sigh that escaped in broken measure, murmurous and fond. An arm that, lifting, flashed naked to the shoulder as the sleeve of her negligee fell back, encircled his neck and drew down his head to hers. And her mouth fastened to his with clinging lips.... Half stunned by receipt of that mad caress, one thought shot like light through the turmoil of his senses: this was never Venetia! With an effort he straightened his neck against the pressure of the woman's arm. She strove to overcome his resistance, wooing him in accents hushed, shaking with passion: "_Vincent ... sweetheart!..._" He interrupted hastily: "I beg pardon!" The inadequacy of that stilted form, disgusting him, he added: "I am John Matthias." Immediately the woman released him and, with a gasp, sank back against the newel-post. Her breath came gustily, with a sound like smothered sobbing. Pitifully he divined her shame and terror; and though he knew her very well, beyond mistake, he said evenly: "Don't worry--there isn't any light." In a stupefied voice she iterated: "No light--?" "It's so confounded' dark," he complained: "I couldn't tell you from Eve. So perhaps you'd better run back to your room now...." He turned away deliberately. Behind him, after a pause of an instant, there rose a sound of soft rustling draperies, a swift and hushed patter of footsteps on the stairs. A moment or two later a latch clicked very gently in the corridor above. Quietly Matthias switched on a single light, returned to the door, unbolted and quickly opened it. He was not disappointed that this manoeuvre surprised a shadow skulking in the penumbra of rose bushes that bordered the steps, the shadow of a man who drew back swiftly when he recognized Matthias. This last stepped out, turned in the direction of the fugitive shadow, and pursuing at leisure, hailed in a quiet and natural tone: "I say--Marbridge!--that you?" Immediately he came upon Marbridge at a standstill round the corner of the house, awaiting him in a curious posture of antagonism: his feet well apart, heavy body inclined a trifle forward, round dark head low between his shoulders, hands clenched, upon his face a cloud of anger. Matthias greeted him suavely: "I was afraid I'd locked you out." Ignoring his attitude even as he seemed to ignore the fact that Marbridge had changed from evening dress to a suit of dark flannels, he added: "Coming in now? It's a bit late." Marbridge pulled himself together. "Perhaps you're right," he assented surlily. But it was with patent effort that he mastered his resentment and accompanied Matthias back to the doors. "A fine night, what?" Matthias filled in the awkward silence. "Yes," agreed Marbridge brusquely. "Too fine," he amended--"too fine to waste in bed." "Sleepless, eh?" "Yes." Following him in, Matthias refastened the door. "Several of us seem troubled with the same indisposition," he observed coolly, swinging to face Marbridge. "That's why I bothered to call you in, you know." Marbridge scowled: "Perhaps I don't get you...." "She has gone back to bed," Matthias explained pleasantly. "I didn't like to think of you waiting out there, all alone." Marbridge choked on a retort, turned and began slowly to mount the stairs. "Oh--going? Half a minute." The man paused, and in silence looked down. "I just happened to think perhaps you haven't a time-table in your room," said Matthias amiably. "There are several early trains tomorrow, you know. I fancy the eight-seven would suit you as well as any." He got no answer other than a grunt. Marbridge resumed his deliberate ascent, gained the upper floor, and disappeared. "Good night!" Matthias called after him, softly; and turned out the light. X Monday afternoon found Mr. Matthias back at his desk and in a tolerably unhappy temper, tormented not only by that conscience-stricken sensation of secret guilt inseparable from a return to neglected work, but also by a less reasonable, in fact inexplicable (to him) feeling of discomfort; as though he were a trespasser upon the premises rather than their lawful tenant. Never before had he felt less at home, never more ill at ease in the homely solitude of his workshop and lodgings. As for his work.... He found page 6 of that promising young first act in the typewriter carriage, precisely as it had been left on his receipt of Helena's peremptory telegram. Removing the sheet, he turned back to the first page, and read what had been written with such high and eager hope; and looked his dashed bewilderment. Knitting portentous brows, sedulously he reconsidered the manuscript at length; then with a groan put it aside, ran fingers through his hair till it rose rampant, and sat scowling darkly at the wall, groping blindly and vainly for the lost ends of that snapped thread of enthusiasm. The first flush of confidence vanished, what he had written owned heart-rending incoherence in his understanding. However (he assured himself) it would come back to him in time. Indeed, it was bound to. It wasn't the first time this sort of thing had happened to him, nor yet the second: he was no raw novice to cry despair over such an everyday set-back. But what the devil _was_ the matter with him? All the way to Town he had been full of his theme, as keen-set for work as a schoolboy for a holiday, and hardly less for the well-worn comforts of his abode. And, lo! here sat he with his head as empty as his hands, and that misfit feeling badgering him to exasperation. Instinctively he consulted a pipe and, through its atmosphere, the view from his windows: the never-failing, tried and true, enheartening monotony of that sun-scorched area of back-yards, grim and unlovely in the happiest weather, cat-haunted and melancholy in all its phases.... But today he essayed vainly to distil from contemplation of it any of the rare glamour of yesterday's zeal and faith. It was all gone, all! and the erratic mind of him would persist in trailing off after errant thoughts of Venetia Tankerville. Surpassing inconsistency of the human heart! Three hours ago, in her company, he had been able to control and to behave himself, to anticipate with pleasure the prospect of returning to his desk after escorting her from the Pennsylvania to the Grand Central Station and putting her aboard the train for Greenwich, whither she was bound for a fortnight's visit. But now--he could think of nothing but Venetia: Venetia's eyes, her scarlet lips, her exquisite hands, her hair of bronze; her moods and whims, her laughter and her pensiveness, alike adorable; Venetia in evening dress on the moon-drenched terrace of Tanglewood; Venetia on the tennis-courts, all in white, glorified by sunlight, an amazingly spirited, victorious figure; Venetia with her hair blown across her eyes, at the wheel of one of Tankerville's racing motor-craft; Venetia in the gloom of the Grand Central Station, lingering to say good-bye to her betrothed.... It required several days for this stupid gentleman to awaken to the fact that the name of his trouble was merely love; that an acknowledged lover is a person vastly different from a diffident and distant worshipper; that, in short, the muse of the creative fancy is a jealous mistress, prone to sulk and deny the light of her countenance to a suitor who thinks to share his addresses with another. But this illuminating discovery did little to allay his discontent: progress with his work alone could accomplish that; and the work dragged dolefully; he scored only dismal failures in his efforts to produce something to satisfy himself. And he had only six months to prove his worth. The date of their marriage had been fixed for February; every detail of their plans had been worked out under the masterful guidance of Helena; even the steamer upon which they were to sail for Egypt had been selected and their suite reserved. In short he positively _had_ to win out within the allotted period of grace, who seemed able only to sit there, day in and out, beside his typewriter, with idle hands, or, with a vacant mind, to pace his trail of torment from door to window: getting nowhere, stripped of every vestige of his arduously acquired craftsmanship.... It was maddening. None the less, doggedly, savagely determined to overcome this sentimental handicap, he worked long hours: only to review the outcome of his labours with a sinking heart. For all his knowledge of the stage, for all that a long career of failures and half-hearted successes had taught him, the play that slowly took shape under his modelling lacked vitality--the living fire of drama. Technically he could find no disastrous fault with it; but in his soul he knew it to be as passionless as a proposition in Euclid. He was a dreamer, but not even the stuff of dreams could dull the clear perceptions of his critical intelligence.... Meantime, the superficial routine of work-a-day life went on much as it had ever since he had set up shop in the establishment of Madame Duprat. His breakfasts were served him in his rooms; for his other meals he foraged in neighbouring restaurants. A definite amount of exercise was required to keep him in working trim. In short, he was in and out of the house several times each day. Inevitably, then, he encountered fellow lodgers, either on the stoop or in the hallway; among them, and perhaps more often and less adventitiously than in other instances, one wistful young woman, shabbily dressed, in whose brown eyes lurked a hesitant appeal for recognition. He grew acquainted with the sight of her, but he was generally in haste and preoccupied, looked over her head if not through her, stepped civilly out of her way and went absently his own, and never once dreamed of identifying her with that dreary and damp creature of the rain-swept night whose necessity had turned him out of his lodgings for a single night. One day--the second Thursday following his return to Town--he found himself waiting in the lobby of the Knickerbocker, a trifle early for a luncheon engagement with Rideout and his producing manager, Wilbrow: a meeting arranged for the purpose of discussing the forthcoming production of "The Jade God." The day was seasonably insufferable with heat, but there was here a grateful drift of air through open doors and windows. Lounging in an arm-chair, he lazily consumed a cigarette and reviewed the listless ebb and flow of guests with a desultory interest which was presently, suddenly, and rudely quickened. Marbridge, accompanied by a woman, was leaving the eastern dining-room. They passed so near to Matthias that by stretching forth his foot he could have touched the woman's skirt. But she did not see him; her face was averted as she looked up, faintly smiling, to the face of her companion. Marbridge, on his part, was attending her with that slightly exaggerated attitude of solicitude and devotion which was peculiarly his with all women. If he saw Matthias he made no sign. His dark and boyish eyes ogled his companion; his tone was pitched low to a key of intimacy; he rolled a trifle in his walk, with the insuppressible swagger of the amateur of gallantry. They passed on and out of the hotel; and Matthias saw the carriage-porter, at a sign from Marbridge, whistle in a taxicab. He turned away in disgust. A moment or so later he looked up to find Marbridge standing over him and grinning impudently as he offered a hand. "Why, _how_ do you do, Matthias, my boy?" His voice, by no means subdued, echoed through the lobby and attracted curious glances. Matthias, ignoring the hand, lifted one of his own in a gesture deprecatory. "Softly!" he begged. "Somebody might hear you." Unabashed, Marbridge dropped into the chair beside him. "How's that? Why shouldn't they?" "They might make the mistake of inferring that I liked you," returned Matthias. Marbridge, on the point of settling back, sat up with a start. A dull colour flushed his plump, dark cheeks. For an instant his hands twitched nervously and his full lips tightened on a retort which he presumably deemed inadvisable; for mastering his impulse, he sank back again, and put a period to the display with a brief but not uneasy chuckle. "You're all there with the acidulated repartee," he observed appreciatively. "Some class to your work, my boy!" To which, Matthias making no comment, he added with at least some effort toward an appearance of sincerity: "Sorry you feel that way about me." "Unfortunately, I do." "Because I wouldn't act on your suggestion about that time-table, eh?" "Because of the circumstances which moved me to drop that hint." A brief silence prefaced Marbridge's next remark: "But damn it! I couldn't. It would've made talk if I'd pulled out when you wanted me to." "There would have been no occasion for any talk whatever if you'd known how to comport yourself as the guest of decent people." And still Marbridge husbanded his resentment. "Oh well!" he said, aggrieved--"women!" Matthias threw away his cigarette and prepared to rise. "Hold on a bit," Marbridge checked him. "I want to ask a favour of you.... Of course, you're right; I am a bad actor, and all that. I'm sorry I forgot myself at Tanglewood--word of honour, I am!" "Well?" Matthias suggested with an unmoved face. "Look here...." Marbridge sat up eagerly. "I think you're a mighty good sort--" "Thanks!" "You didn't blow about that business down there--" "I couldn't very well--could I?--with a woman involved!" "Oh, you did the white thing: I'm not disputing that. But what I'm worried about now is whether you're as good a sport as you seem." "Meaning--?" Marbridge nodded significantly toward the sidewalk, where he had put his late companion into the cab. "About today: you won't find it necessary to--?" "By God!" Matthias's indignation brimmed over. "If you're so solicitous of the woman's good name, why the devil do you allow her to be seen in your company?" "It isn't that," Marbridge persisted, keeping himself well in hand. "After all, what's a lunch at the Knick?" "Well--?" "The trouble is, she's supposed to be at Newport. Majendie doesn't know--" "You just can't help being a blackguard, can you, Marbridge?" Matthias enquired curiously. "You ought to have bitten off your tongue before you named a name in a public place like this." He rose, meeting with steady eyes the vicious glare of the other. "One word more: if I hear of your accepting another invitation to Tanglewood, I'll forget to be what you call 'a good sport'." Marbridge jumped up hotly. "Look here!" he said in accents that, though guarded, trembled, "I've been mighty patient with your insolence, and I'm certainly not going to forget myself here. But if you want to make a book on it, I'll lay you any odds you like that I'll be received at Tanglewood within the year, and you won't say one single damn' word. Do you make me?" Matthias looked him up and down, smiled quietly, swung on his heel, and moved across the lobby to greet Rideout and Wilbrow. His instinctive inclination to dismiss altogether from his mind a subject so distasteful was helped out by a conference which outlasted luncheon, involved dinner with the two men of the theatre, and was only concluded in Matthias's rooms shortly after midnight. Wilbrow, considering the play from the point of view of him upon whom devolved all responsibility for the manner of its presentation (the scene painting alone excepted) and gifted with that intuitive sense _du théâtre_ singular to men of his vocation, who very nearly monopolize the intelligence concerned with the American stage today--Wilbrow had uncovered a slight, by no means damning, flaw in the construction of the third act, and had a remedy to suggest. This, adopted without opposition from the playwright, suggested further alterations which Matthias could not deny were calculated to strengthen the piece. In consequence, when at length they left him, he found himself committed to a virtual rewriting of the last two acts entire. Groaning in resignation, he resolved to accomplish the revision in one week of solid, uninterrupted labour, and went to bed, rising the next morning to deny himself his correspondence and the newspapers and to make arrangements with Madame Duprat to furnish all his meals until his task was finished. These matters settled, and his telephone temporarily silenced, he began work and, forgetful of the world, plodded faithfully on by day and night until late Thursday afternoon, when he drew the final page from his typewriter, thrust it with its forerunners into an envelope addressed to Rideout, entrusted this last to a messenger, and threw himself upon the couch to drop off instantly into profound slumbers of exhaustion. At ten o'clock that night he was awakened and sat up, dazed and blinking in a sudden glare of gas-light. Stupidly, bemused with the slowly settling dust of dreams, he stared, incredulous of the company in which he found himself. Madame Duprat, having shown his callers in and made a light for them, was discreetly departing. George Tankerville, whose vigorous methods had roused Matthias, stood over him, with a look of deep and sympathetic anxiety clouding his round, commonplace, friendly countenance. Wearing a dinner jacket together with linen motor-cap and duster, oil-stained gauntlets on his hands, with an implacable impatience betrayed in his very pose, he cut a figure sufficiently striking instantly to engage attention--the unexpectedness of his call aside. Furthermore, he was accompanied by his wife: Helena, in a costume as unconventional as her husband's, stood at a little distance, regarding Matthias with much the same look of consternation and care. "Great Scott!" Matthias exclaimed, pulling his wits together. "You are a sudden pair of people!" With a shrug and a sour smile he deprecated his clothing, which consisted solely of a shirt, linen trousers, and a pair of antiquated slippers. "If you'd only given me some warning, I'd've tried to dress up to your elegance," he went on. "Damn your clothes!" Tankerville exploded. He dropped a hand on Matthias's shoulder and swung him round to the light. "Tell us you're all right--that's all we want to know!" "All right?" Matthias looked from one to the other, deeply perplexed. "Why, of course I'm all right. Why not?" With a little gasp of relief, Helena dropped into a chair. Tankerville removed his hand and leaned against the table, smiling foolishly. "That's all right, then," he said. "We tried to get you on the telephone all afternoon, failed, were afraid you'd done something foolish, and took a run in to town to make sure." "What the dickens are you driving at?" Matthias demanded. "I had my telephone cut off the other day because I was working and didn't want to be interrupted. I do that frequently. Why not? What's got into you two, anyway? Have you gone dotty?" "No," Helena replied with a grim, pale smile; "We're sane enough--and thank Heaven you are! But Venetia--" "Venetia!" Matthias cried. "What about Venetia?" Tankerville avoiding his eye, it devolved upon Helena to respond to Matthias's frantic and imperative look. "Venetia," she said reluctantly--"Venetia eloped with Marbridge day before yesterday--Tuesday. She came in town in the morning to do some shopping, met him and was married to him at the City Hall. They sailed on the Mauretania yesterday. The papers didn't get hold of it--_we_ knew nothing!--till this afternoon. I was afraid she might have written you and you--in despair--" Her voice broke. After a little, Matthias turned to a heap of unopened correspondence on a side table and ran rapidly through it, examining only the addresses. "No," he said presently, in a level tone: "no--she didn't trouble to write me." XI For several days the girl had haunted the stairs, the hall, and door-step, alert to waylay Matthias, before suddenly she became aware that it was long since she had either caught a glimpse of him or heard the syncopated murmuring of the typewriter behind the closed door to his back-parlour. It required the lapse of another day or two before she found courage to question (with laboured indifference) the dilapidated chambermaid who sedulously neglected her room for lack of a tip. From this far from garrulous source she learned that Matthias had packed up and gone out of town very suddenly, without mentioning where he might be addressed during his absence. Alone at the window of her tiny cell, Joan stared down at the uninspiring vista of back-yards and disconsolately recapitulated her sorry fortunes. She was now close upon the end of the fortnight's residence in the hall bedroom; before long she would have to surrender another four dollars--a week's rent in advance. Of the twenty-two dollars she had received from Butch, eight remained in her purse. By dint of adhering to a diet largely vegetarian, she had managed without serious discomfort to keep within an expenditure of four dollars per week for food. And twice Maizie Dean had saved her the cost of an evening meal by inviting her to dine out--at the expense of friends in "the profession." But a continuance of such favours was not to be counted upon; and the problem of living a fourth week away from home was one serious and importunate--always assuming she should fail to secure work before her money ran out. She had no resources in any degree dependable: Butch, even if willing, would probably not be able to extend her another loan; she possessed nothing worth pawning; and Maizie Dean had taken prompt occasion to make it clear that, while she was willing to do anything inexpensive for a budding sister _artiste_, her tolerance would stop short of financial aid. "Take it from me, dear," she announced soon after their first meeting: "there ain't no people in the world quicker to slip you a live tip than folks in the business; but you gotta make up your mind to pay your own keep. They work too hard for their coin to give up any without a howl you could hear from here to Hollum; and anyway, everybody's always broke in the summer. If you don't land somewhere before your cash runs low, you might just's well make up your mind to slip back into the chain-gang behind the counter." She had developed--or changed--amazingly in the brief period of her public career. Joan experienced difficulty in recognizing in her the warm-hearted Irish girl who had initiated her into the duties of saleswoman in the stocking department. She had hardened more than superficially; she was now as artificial as her make-up, as the hue of her ashen hair. The world to her was a desert threaded by "circuits," life an arid waste of "open time" punctuated with oases of "booking"; and the fountainhead of temporal power was located in the innermost sanctum of the United Booking Offices. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she crossed her knees frankly, sucked thoughtfully at a cigarette, and waved an explanatory hand: "Here's me and Mame, thinking we was all fixed for the nex' six weeks, and then somethin' puts a crimp into our bookin' and we're out for Gawd knows how long--till next Fall, sure. That's unless we want to take a trip over the meal-ticket circuit--fillin' in between filums, yunno. And if we do that it's goin' to crab us with the Orpheum people, sure; we'd never get back into the real money class. So we gotta hold onto what little we got until we kin see more time headed our way...." On the other hand, she had been liberal with sage and trustworthy counsel as to the best way to go about "breaking into the game." It was thanks to her that Joan was now able to enter a theatrical employment agency without fear and trembling, and to back her application for chorus work with a glib and unblushing statement that she had had experience "in summer stock out on the Coast." And to the Sisters Dean, likewise, Joan owed her growing acquaintance with the intricate geography of the theatrical districts of New York, her ability to discriminate between players "resting" and the average run of Broadway loungers who cluttered the shady side of that thoroughfare, from Twenty-fifth Street north to Forty-seventh, those shimmering summer afternoons, and her slowly widening circle of nodding acquaintances among the lesser peoples of the vaudeville world. As a rule she was awake before anybody else in the establishment of Madame Duprat; not yet could she slough the habit of early rising. Her breakfast she was accustomed to get at the same dairy restaurant which had supplied her first meal away from home, and at the same moderate expense--ten cents. By ten o'clock she would be on Broadway, beginning her round of the agencies: a courageous, shabby figure in the withering sun-blast, patient and indomitable through long hours of waiting in crowded anterooms, undiscouraged by the brevity and fruitlessness of the interviews with which her persistence was sometimes rewarded, ignoring disappointment with the same studied calm with which she had long since learned to ignore the advances of loafers of the streets. Her lunches she would purchase wherever she might happen to be at the noon hour--or go without. By five o'clock at the latest--frequently much earlier--she would turn back to West Forty-fifth Street. For dinner she sought again the establishment that provided her breakfast. Her idle hours, both day and evening, she grew accustomed to waste in the double bedroom ("second floor front") occupied by the Dancing Deans. At such times the _soi-disant_ sisters were rarely without company. They were lively and agreeable creatures, by no means unattractive, and so thoroughly theatric in every effect of manner, speech, gesture, person, and thought, that the most case-hardened member of the profession could not but feel at home in their company. Consequently, they were popular with both sexes of their associates. Seldom did a day pass but they entertained several callers, with all of whom they seemed to be on terms of the most candid intimacy. So Joan grew accustomed to being hailed, whenever she opened the door of the sisters' room, with a formula that varied little with repetition: "Why, if it _ain't_ the kid! Hello, dearie--come right in and stop awhile. Say, lis'n: I want you to shake hands with my friend, Charlie Quard. I guess you know who Charlie is, all right; you must of seen him of'n--played leading juveniles with the Spangler Stock, I dunno how long. Charlie, this is my little friend, Miss Thursday." "In the business, I trust?" "Goin' to be before long. Just lookin' round." "Well, I wish you luck, Miss Thursday. This is the rottenest season _I_ ever struck. There's eighty people for every job that blooms. Why, yunno, Maizie, I was talking only yesterday to Percy Williams, and Percy said--" At about this point Joan would ordinarily be forgotten, and the gossip would rattle on through a stifling cloud of cigarette smoke, while she sat and listened with grave, if not always comprehending, attention. And in this manner she met and grew familiar with the personalities of an astonishing crew of minor vaudeville folk, jugglers, dancers, patter comedians, balladists, coon shouters, performers on weird musical instruments, monologists, and an unclassified host of others, including a liberal sprinkling of plain actors and actresses, the pendulums of whose life alternated between small parts in popular-price stock companies and smaller parts in so-called dramatic sketches presented in vaudeville houses. To them all (if they remembered her at all) she was Joan Thursday. The translation from Thursby had been almost inevitable. Thursday was by far the easier word to remember; Joan soon grew tired of correcting the friends of the Dancing Deans; and accepted the change the more readily since it provided her with a real "stage name", and so, in some measure, identified her with the business to which her every aspiration was devoted. Of all the population of this new world, perhaps the most prominent in her eyes, aside from the saltatory sisters, was Mr. Quard; or, to give him the fullest benefit of the printed cards which (detaching them dexterously from the perforated edges by which they were held in an imitation-leather cover) he distributed regardless of expense: _Mr. Chas. Harborough Quard_ Spangler Stock Co. Variety Artists Club Brooklyn New York He was a long, rangy animal, robustious, romantical; with a taste in the question of personal decoration that created compelling effects. His face was large, open, boldly featured, his smile genial, his laugh constant and unctuous. Something less than thirty, he had been on the stage since childhood; with the training of an actor of the old school, he combined immense vitality, an ample, dashing air, enviable self-sufficiency, the temperament of a tom-cat. Any competent stage-director could have made much of him; but in an age when managers cast their productions with types who "look" their parts in preference to players who can act them, he found few chances to demonstrate his ability outside the cheaper stock organizations; for the only character he was physically fitted to portray was that of an actor. An ill-starred impulse had led him to resign his latest stock connection in order to adventure in vaudeville with a one-act sketch written to his order by a hack manufacturer of such trash. Its "try-out week" in a provincial town had elicited no offers from other managers, and in the meantime his place in the stock company had been filled. At present he had a little money saved up, no immediate prospects of an engagement, good-humour, no illusions whatever. "It's no good," he informed Miss May Dean on the occasion of their first meeting: "I know where I get off, all right. I can play anything they slip me, but these Broadway guys can't see my kind of actor. Give me a part I can sink my teeth into, and I'll shake it until the house climbs on the seats and howls. But that ain't what they're after, these days." "The movies'll get you, if you don't watch out," May suggested cheerfully. "That's right; and I'd be a knock-out in a film gang, too; I'm just their kind. That's what's become of all the old boys who still think Fourteenth Street's the Rialto, yunno. But me, I'm too strong for the noise an audience makes when they like you, or don't: I'd just as lief be hissed as get every hand in the house. Don't believe I could stand acting for a one-eyed box that didn't say anything but '_clickety-click_.' I'd rather travel with the Uncle Tommers--honest'." He was publicly morose for a moment or two. Then he roused: "Cheer up! The worst is yet to come. Maybe I can stick out till next spring, when Grady makes his next all-star revival. Wonder what he'll exhume this time? If it's only something like 'The Silver King,' or 'East Lynne,' I may yet cop out a chance to play to a two-dollar house.... Now, lis'n: I'm going down on the stoop and smoke a cigarette while you girls colour your maps for artificial light. The eats are on me tonight." "Does that take in my little friend?" demanded Maizie, with a nod toward Joan. Quard threw Joan a kindly glance: "Sure. Now, get a hustle on." "But I can't," Joan protested. "I'm sorry--I'd love to--but I've got nothing fit to wear." "You look pretty good to me as you stand," returned Quard. "Forget it, kid, and kick in." "That's right," Maizie insisted. "Besides, I'll lend you a hat and a fresh fichu; you don't need any coat tonight, it's too rotten warm." "Anyway," Quard said over his shoulder as he left the room, "we ain't booked for Sherry's." In witness whereof, he introduced the girls to an obscure Italian boarding-house in Twenty-seventh Street, the proprietress of which admitted them only after examination through a grille in the front door. Quard explained to Joan that this precaution was necessary because the house served "red ink" with the meals and without benefit of a liquor license; hence, only friends could be admitted. They dined by gas-light in the back-yard, under an awning which served the double purpose of excluding observation from the neighbouring dwellings and compressing the heated air. Perhaps two dozen tables crowded the enclosure. The male guests by common consent removed their coats and hung them on nails in the fence. The ladies emulated by discarding hats and all conventionalities of a nature to impede free expression of their temperaments. Maizie Dean even did without her English accent. The meal was of a sort only to be consumed with impunity by optimists and Italians: a heavy soup, and all one could eat of it, spaghetti without end, a minute section of lukewarm blotting paper with a remote flavour of chicken, a salad, cheese and coffee, a half-bottle of atrocious red wine. Joan enjoyed it immensely; it has been said that her powers of digestion were exceptional. Everybody seemed to know everybody else. Conversation was free between tables. Personalities were bandied back and forth amid intense glee. Quard, consuming enormous quantities of wine, proved himself a general favourite, a leading spirit. After dinner he called for a virulent green cordial (which Joan tasted but could not drink) and later returned to the wine. Before the end of the evening he became semi-maudlin, and on leaving exploited a highly humorous inability to walk a straight line. On the corner of Broadway he halted suddenly, bade the three women a slurred good night, and without other ceremony swung himself aboard a Broadway car. His rudeness excited no comment from the Dancing Deans. They walked all the way home with Joan, unescorted. Joan was surprised to see by the clock in the _Herald_ building that it was almost eleven. She thought she had never known an evening to pass so quickly and so pleasantly. What little wine she had consumed seemed to have affected her not at all, beyond rendering her keenly appreciative of this novel experience. But she suffered the next morning from a slight and, to her, inexplicable headache. It was four or five days later before she saw Quard again. He called early in the evening--but after dinner--and sat chatting amiably with the women for upwards of an hour before the real purpose of his visit transpired. "I was talking to Reinhardt about an idea I got for a sketch, day before yesterday," he announced suddenly. "But he wanted fifty cash before he'd touch it, and seeing as it was him slipped me that other lemon, I told him merrily where he could go and went home and wrote it myself." "You didn't!" Maizie exclaimed admiringly. "You bet your life I did," the actor asseverated with conscious modesty. "Why not? It's no great stunt, writing; and besides it's all old junk I've done before, only hashed up a new way. All I had to do was to cop lines out of shows I've played in--sure-fire stuff, yunno--and write in names of characters. That's nothing." "Oh, no, nothin' at all!" commented May Dean from her perch on the window-sill. "What's an author, anyway? Eight to five, girls, he's got the 'script on him. Get ready to duck." "Wel-l!" Quard laughed--"you beat me to it, all right." He produced a sheaf of folded papers, smoothing them out upon his knee. "I just thought I'd see what you thought of it. If it's any good I'm going to read it to Schneider tomorrow and see what he'll offer me." "Who's Schneider?" Maizie asked blankly. "Agent for the film circuits," Quard replied. "You don't mean you're thinkin' of fallin' for the four-a-day!" "I'll try anything once; I'm not too proud to earn my bed and board in the dull season, anyhow. Besides, this thing would break into the Orpheum Circuit only over the dead body of Martin Beck. I'm no Georgie Cohan. But it oughta sandwich in between the pictures without anybody asking his ten cents back." "You've got your nerve with you," Maizie commented darkly. "Let him rave," May advised, exhaling cigarette smoke voluminously. "Shoot!" Taking this for consent, Quard rattled the sheets of paper, tilted back his chair, and began to read. His voice was flexible and sonorous; instinctively he declaimed the lines, extracting from each its full value. Now and again he lent emphasis to a phrase with an eloquent hand. But to Joan the composition was quite incoherent. She attended with wonder and a feeling of impatience because of her inability to understand what Quard seemed to relish with so much enthusiasm. It was, in fact, a worthless farrago of nonsense. None the less the two dancers laughed at encouraging intervals. Flattered, Quard rose, removed his coat and began to act the lines, striding up and down the narrow space between the foot of the double-bed and the marble mantelpiece. The night was hot; a single gas-jet illumined the centre of the room; Quard perspired freely. For all that, his stenographic acting gave the thing some slight accent of humanity. It became a trifle, a mere trifle, more intelligible. Seated on the window-sill, _en profile_ to the room, her slight, wiry body attired sketchily in a kimono and short skirt, May Dean swung her legs and stared out into the darkness, an ironic smile hovering round her thin lips. Maizie lounged on the bed, tracing a meaningless pattern on the counterpane with a thin and rouge-stained forefinger. Joan occupied the only chair other than that at the disposal of the actor. She was very tired, and her attention wandered, even though Quard managed to draw it back now and then by some vivid trick of elocution or gesture. Vaguely sensitive to the magnetism of the man, her thoughts were occupied more with indefinite speculations about his personality than with the semi-plagiaristic and wholly commonplace concoction of cheap sentiment and tried-and-true "gags" which he professed to have written. Physically he attracted her. Divested of his coat, his chest swelled impressively beneath a pink-striped silk shirt. When he lifted an arm, the clinging sleeve moulded itself to an admirable biceps. As he strode to and fro the stuff of his thin summer trousers shaped itself to legs that might have proved enviable to Sir Willoughby Patterne himself. His wide-lipped mouth disclosed an excellent outfit of large, white, strong teeth. His jet-black hair curled engagingly at his temples and over his generous pink ears. She liked his big, muscular, mobile hands.... She started suddenly, to discover that he had concluded and was facing her with an expectant expression, and sat up and smiled faintly, with embarrassment, trying to remember what it had all been about. From the window, May Dean drawled languidly: "Is that the finish?" Quard waved an arm. "Curtain!" he said; and sat down. "My Gawd!" observed May thoughtfully. He laughed uncomfortably: "As bad as all that?" "It'd make a wonderful chaser," Maizie commented without lifting her eyes from the counterpane. Quard turned desperately back to Joan. "What do you think of it, Miss Thursday?" "I think so too," she said with all the animation she could muster. The other women laughed aloud. She flushed and added: "I mean, I think it's wonderful. I don't know what a chaser is." "A chaser, dearie," Maizie explained in tones of acute commiseration, "is an act put on in the continuous houses to chase out the chair-warmers and make room for more." "Well," said Quard, shuffling the manuscript, "I don't care if it is a chaser, so long as it stakes me to the eats till something else turns up." XII On that day when she discovered the disappearance of John Matthias, Joan left the house later than had been her wont, and returned earlier, after a faint-hearted and abortive attempt to interview the stage-manager of a new musical production then being assembled to rehearse against an early opening in the Autumn. The Deans were out. She had no place to go other than to her bare and lonely room, and she felt uncommonly hopeless and friendless. Subconsciously she had been holding in reserve, as a last hope, an appeal to the generosity of Matthias. He was a playwright, an intimate of managers: surely he would be able to suggest something, no matter how poorly paid or inconspicuous. Now, with the date of his return indefinite, she felt unjustly bereft of that last resource. She spent two weary, wretched hours on her bed, harassed by a singularly fresh and clear perception of her unfitness, for the first time made conscious that she had actually possessed no reasonable excuse for her determination to go on the stage. Her qualifications, which hitherto might have been expressed, according to her own estimate, by the algebraic X, now assumed a value only to be indicated by a cipher. She had a good strong voice, it's true, but no ear whatever for music; she didn't "know steps" (Maizie's term, denoting ability for eccentric dancing) and of the art of acting she was completely ignorant. In fact, her theatrical ambitions had been founded more upon need of money than upon any real or fancied passion for the stage. Other girls had done likewise and bettered themselves: Joan knew no reason why she should fall short of their enviable achievements; but she was innocent of dramatic feeling and even of any real yearning for applause. Only her looks, of which she was confident, were to be counted upon to carry her beyond the stage doors. She thought of her home, of her mother, her father, Edna and Butch, with a dull and temperate regret. Since that first afternoon she had never attempted to revisit them, and she felt now no inclination toward returning. Still, her thoughts yearned back to the miserable flat as to an assured shelter: there, at least, she had been safe from rude weather and positive hunger. As things were with her, another week would find her destitute, but there was still the chance that something would turn up within that week. She felt almost sure that something would turn up. In this incurable optimism resided almost her sole endowment for the career of an actress: this, and a certain dogged temper which wouldn't permit her to acknowledge defeat until every possible expedient had been explored.... Toward evening she heard footsteps on the stairs. To her surprise they paused by her door, upon which fell a confident knock. Jumping up from her bed in a flurry, she answered to find Quard on the threshold. No one had been farther from her thoughts. She stared, agape and speechless. "Hello, Miss Thursday!" said the actor genially. "Can I come in?" He entered, cast a comprehensive glance round the poor little room, deposited his hat upon the bed and himself beside it. Leaving the door open, and murmuring some inarticulate response, Joan turned back to her one chair. "Hope I don't intrude," Quard rattled on cheerfully. "The girl told me the Deans was out and you in, so I took a chance and said I'd come right up." "I--I'm sorry Maizie isn't home," stammered the girl. "I ain't." Quard's eyes looked her over with open admiration. "I didn't want to see either of 'em, really. What I wanted was a little confab with you." "With _me_!" "Surest thing you know. I wanta talk business. I don't guess you've landed anything yet?" Joan shook her head blankly. "Well, I got a little proposition to make you. Yunno that sketch I wrote and you liked so much the other night?" "Yes...." "Well, I got hold of Schneider yesterday, and read it to him, and he says he can get me four or five weeks' booking at least, if I can put it over at the try-out. How does that strike you?" "Why--I'm glad," Joan faltered, still mystified. "It must be fine to get something to do." "Well, I haven't got it yet; and of course, maybe I won't get it. One of the first things you gotta learn in this business is, never spend your pay envelope till you got it in your mitt. And in this case, a lot depends on you." "I don't get you," Joan returned frankly. "What've I got to do with it?" Quard smiled indulgently, offered her a cigarette, which she refused, and lighted one for himself. "If I can't get you to play the woman's part," he said, spurting twin jets of smoke through his nostrils, "it's all up--unless I can hitch up with summonelse just like you." "You mean--you want _me_ to--to act--?" "Right, the very first time outa the box! Yunno, it's this way with these cheap houses: they can't afford to pay much for a turn, even a good one--and this one of ours is going to be about as bum as any act that ever broke through: take that from me. So it's up to me to find somebody who'll work with me for little enough money to leave something for myself, after I've squared up with the agent and stage-hands, and all that. You make me now?" "Yes; but I haven't any experience--" "That's just it: if you had, I couldn't afford you. But you gotta start sometime, and it won't do you no harm to get wise to what little I can teach you. Now the most I can count on dragging down for this act is sixty a week. I want twenty-five of that for myself. Fifteen, more will fix the agent and the rest. That leaves twenty for you. It ain't much, but it's a long sight better than nothing." "But--how do you know I can do it?" "That'll be all right. I know all about acting--anyway, I know enough to show you how to put across anything you'll have to do in this piece. Now how about it?" "Why, I'll be glad--" "Good enough. Now here: I've had this dope type-written, and here's your copy. Let's run through it now, and tonight you can start in learning. Tomorrow we'll have a rehearsal, and just as soon's we got our lines pat, we'll let Schneider have a pipe at it. Don't worry. It ain't going to be hard." Thus reassured, but still a trifle dubious, Joan accepted a duplicate of the manuscript, and composed herself to follow to the best of her ability Quard's second reading. This time he took less pains with his enunciation, scanned the lines more rapidly, and frequently interrupted himself in order to explain a trick of stage-craft or to detail with genuine gusto some bit of business which he counted upon to prove especially telling. In consequence of this exposition, Joan acquired a much clearer understanding of the nature of the sketch. It concerned two persons only: a remarkably successful stage dancer, to be played by Joan; her convict husband, fresh from the penitentiary, by Quard. _Scene_: the dressing-room of the dancer. _Time_: just after the dancer's "turn." Joan, discovered "on", informs the audience of her fortunate circumstances through the medium of a brief soliloquy. _Enter_ Quard (shambling gait, convict pallor, etc.) to inform her that she has been living in the lap of luxury during the eight years that he has been serving time: "I'm goin' to have my share now!" Comedy business: humorously brutal attitude toward wife; slangy description of prison life. ("They'll simply eat that up!"--_Quard._) More comedy business involving a gratuitous box of property cigars and a cuspidor. Suddenly and without shadow of excuse, husband accuses wife of infidelity. Indignant denials; wife exhibits portrait of child born after commitment of husband, and of whose existence he has heretofore been ignorant: "It was for him I fought my way to the top of the ladder: he has _your_ eyes!" Incontinently husband experiences change of heart; kisses photograph; snuffles into cap crushed between hands; slavers over wife's hand; refuses her offer of assistance; announces he will go West to "make a _man_ of myself!" before returning to claim his wife and child. And the _Curtain_ falls upon him in the act of going out, all broken up. "Of course," Quard admitted, "it's bunk stuff, but we can put it across all right. I'm going to call it _The Convict's Return_ and bill it as by _Charles D'Arcy and Company_. You'll be the company. I don't want to use my name, because it ain't going to do me any good to have it known I've taken to this graft, and if I'm lucky no one's going to spot me through my make-up." Suddenly apprised by the failing light that the hour was growing late, he pocketed the manuscript and rose. "Come on out and eat--business dinner. We'll talk things over, and I'll fetch you home early, so's you can start getting up on your lines." They dined again at the Italian boarding-house. Quard drank but sparingly, considerably to the relief of Joan.... She was home by half-past eight, her head buzzing with her efforts to remember all he had told her, and sat up till three in the morning, conning the inhuman speeches of her part until she had them by rote; no very wonderful accomplishment, considering that the sketch was to play less than fifteen minutes, and that two-thirds of its lines were to be delivered by Quard. But once with head on pillow, it was not her rôle that she remembered, but the man: his coarsely musical tones, his eloquent white hands, the overt admiration that shone in his eyes whenever he forgot his sketch and remembered momentarily Joan the woman. She felt sure he liked her. And she liked him well. Of the merits of his enterprise she knew nothing, but he had succeeded in inspiring her with confidence that he knew what he was about. She drifted off into sleep, comforted by the conviction that she had found a friend. By the time of her return from breakfast, the next morning, Quard was waiting for her at the lodging-house. He had already arranged with Madame Duprat for the use of the front parlour for rehearsals, pending its lease to some fortuitous tenant; and here he proceeded to work out the physical action of the sketch. His gratitude to Joan for knowing her part was almost affecting; he himself was by no means familiar with his own and her prompt response to cues he read from manuscript facilitated his task considerably. When they adjourned for luncheon he announced himself persuaded that they would be ready to "open" within a week. Within that period Joan learned many things. She was a tractable and docile student, keen-set to profit by the scraps of dramatic chicanery which formed the major part of Quard's stage intelligence. He himself had a very fair memory and had been drilled by more than one competent stage-director whose instructions had stuck in his mind, forming a valuable addition to his professional equipment. Joan soon learned to speak out clearly; to infuse some little semblance of human feeling into several of her turgid lines; to suffer herself to be dragged by one wrist round the room on her knees, by the romantical convict; to time her actions by mental counting; to "feed lines" to her partner in a rapid patter through the passages of putative comedy. She learned also to answer to "dearie" as to her given name, and to submit to being handled in a way she did not like but which, from all that she could observe, was considered neither familiar nor objectionable as between people of the stage. And she learned, furthermore, that May Dean's opinion of the venture was never to be drawn beyond a mildly derisive "My Gawd!" while Maizie's ran to the sense that it was all a chance and Joan a little fool if she didn't grab it--and anyway Joan was old enough to take care of herself with Charlie Quard or any man living! And it was Maizie who was responsible for insisting that Joan wheedle an advance of ten dollars from Quard, ostensibly toward the purchase of costume and make-up. But when this had been successfully negotiated, the dancers advised Joan to save it against an emergency, and between them provided her with an outfit composed of cast-offs: a black satin décolleté bodice, an accordion-pleated short skirt of the period of 1890, wear-proof silk stockings, a pair of broken-down satin slippers with red heels, a japanned tin make-up box with a broken lock, and a generous supply of cheap grease-paint and cold cream. Joan's début occurred within the time-limit set by Quard and before an audience of two, not counting a few grinning stage-hands. The two were the agent Schneider, and the manager of a small moving-picture house in the Twenty-third Street shopping district; on the half-lighted stage of which their "try-out" took place at half-past ten of a rainy and disheartening morning. The judges sat in the darkened auditorium, staring apathetically and chewing large cigars. Joan, though a little self-conscious, was not at all nervous, and remembered her lines perfectly; better than this, she looked very fetching indeed in her makeshift costume. Quard forgot several of his speeches, floundered all over the stage, and in a frantic effort to redeem himself clowned his part outrageously. Nevertheless they were engaged. Convinced of their failure, Joan had only succeeded in removing her make-up and struggling into her shabby street clothing, when Quard knocked at the door of her dressing-room. He had played without make-up, and consequently had been able to catch the manager and agent before they could escape. Lounging in the doorway, he breathed a spirit of congratulation strongly tainted with fumes of whiskey. "We're on!" he declared exultantly. "What'd I _tell_ you? You needn't have changed, because we're going to stick here, and open today. One of the turns on this week's bill fell down at the last minute, and so we cop this chance to fill in. We go on after the first films--about a quarter of one; and then at four-thirty, seven-thirty, ten-forty-five. Now whadda yunno about that?" Joan gulped and shook her head, her eyes a little misty. For the first time she began to perceive that she had counted desperately on success. "I think--we're awful' lucky!" she said faintly. "Lucky nothing! I knew I could get away with it--always providing I had you to play up to." "Me!" "That's right. After we'd fixed things up I took Schneider down to the corner and bought him a drink. He said--I dunno as I ought to tell you this, but anyway--he said the sketch was punk (God knows it is) and never would've gone if it hadn't been for you. He said all the women would go crazy about you--you'd got the prettiest shape he'd seen in a month of Sundays. Yunno they get most of their afternoon houses from the women shoppers down here." He paused and after a moment added meditatively: "Of course, you can't _act_ for shucks." Joan, looking down, said nothing. Quard dropped a hand intimately across her shoulder and infused a caressing note into his voice. "I guess I'm a bad little guesser--eh, dearie?" Joan stood motionless for an instant. His hand seemed as if afire, as if burning through her shirtwaist the flesh of her shoulder. And she resented passionately the intimacy of his tone. Of a sudden she shook his hand off and moved a pace or two away. "Let me alone," she said sullenly. Quard started and jerked out a "What?" "I said, let me alone," she repeated in the same manner, looking him steadily in the face. He coloured darkly, mumbled something indistinguishable, and flashed into a short-lived fit of temper. "What's the matter with you, anyway?" he demanded hotly. [Illustration: "What's the matter with you, anyway?" he demanded, hotly.] "Nothing," she replied quietly; "only I don't want to be pawed." "No?" he exclaimed with sarcasm. "Is that straight?" "Yes, that's straight--and so'm I!" Recollecting himself, Quard attempted to carry off his discomfiture with a shrug and a laugh: "Oh, all right. Don't get huffy. I didn't mean anything." "I know you didn't, but don't do it again." He turned out into the corridor; hesitated. "Well--let it go at that, can't you?" "All right," she said sulkily: "_you_ let it go at that." Quard tramped off without saying anything more, and, whatever his resentment and disappointment, schooled himself to control them, and met her half-way to a reconciliation when the approaching hour of their first public appearance brought them together in the wings. And by this time Joan had been sufficiently diverted by other experiences to have regained her normal poise. The dingy, stuffy, and evil-smelling dressing-room to which she had been assigned had suffered an invasion of three other women: two worn and haggard clog-dancers and a matronly ballad-singer who, having donned an excessively soiled but showy evening gown, had settled down calmly to her knitting: an occupation which had interfered not in the least with her flow of animated and not unkindly gossip. Joan gathered that her voice was the main support of a small family, consisting of a shiftless husband and three children, for the younger of whom the mother was knitting a pair of small, pink bootees. These last had immediately enlisted the sympathetic interest of the clog-dancers, one of whom boasted of the precocity of her only child, a boy of eight living with his grandmother in Omaha, while the other told simply of the death of two children, due to neglect on the part of those to whom she had been obliged to entrust them while on the road.... Joan was the first to reach the entrance to the dingy "kitchen-set" which was to figure as a star dressing-room for the purposes of their sketch (and, for the purposes of subsequent offerings, as the drawing-room of a mansion on Fifth Avenue and the palm room of a fashionable hotel). About ten times the size of any dressing-room ever constructed, it was still atmospherically cheerless and depressing. She looked it over momentarily to make sure that the various simple properties were in place, and turned to find Quard approaching. Beneath the jaunty assurance which even his hang-dog make-up couldn't wholly disguise, she was able to detect traces of some uneasiness and anxiety. It was a fact that he had grown a trifle afraid of her. The discovery impressed her as so absurd that she smiled; and instantly the man was himself again. He thrust out a hand, to which with covert reluctance she entrusted her own. "All right now?" he asked cheerfully. She nodded: "All right." "Good enough. Let's see what kind of a house we've got." He found a peep-hole near the proscenium arch and peered intently through it for a moment or two; then beckoned Joan to take his place. But she could make but little of what seemed a dark well filled with flickering shadows. She turned away. "Only a handful out there," Quard assured her. "It's too early for much of a crowd. No good getting nervous about this bunch." "I'm not," she asserted quietly. And she wasn't; no less to her own surprise than to Quard's, she was conscious of no trace of the stage-fright she had heard so much about. Indeed a singular feeling of indifference and disappointment oppressed her; it was all so unlike what she had looked forward to as the setting for her first appearance in public. The dreary and tawdry atmosphere behind the scenes of the dilapidated little theatre; the weary and subdued accents in which her dressing-room associates had discussed their offspring; the _tinkle-tankle-tinkle-whang_ of a painfully automatic piano in the orchestra-pit; her own shabby second-hand costume; the brutal grotesqueness of Quard's painted countenance at close range--these owned little in common with those anticipations roused by the glitter and glamour of that fleshy show on the New York Theatre roof garden. She felt cheated; in perspective, even the stocking-counter seemed less uninviting.... A muffled outbreak of laughter and brief murmur of applause filtered through the curtain. The piano stopped with a crash. Quard nodded and, touching her elbow, urged her toward the entrance. "Film's finished. Ready and steady, old girl." "I'm all right," she said sullenly. "Don't you worry about me." She heard the curtain rise with a rustling as of mighty wings penetrated by the shrill squeal of an ungreased block; held back a moment; and walked on, into a dazzling glare of footlights, conscious of no emotion whatever beyond desire to get finished with her part and return to the dressing-room. At the designated spot, near the centre of the stage, she paused, faced the audience with her trained smile and mouthed the opening lines with precisely the proper intonation.... The curtain fell at length amid a few, scattering hand-claps that sounded much like faint-hearted firecrackers exploding at a distance. Joan rose from the chair in which she had been seated in a posture simulating abandonment to tears of joy, and walked soberly off the stage--barely anticipating a few stage-hands, who rushed on to make the changes necessary for the next act. Quard was waiting for her. "Well," he said, "it didn't go so bad, did it?" "No," she agreed listlessly. "Anyhow, they didn't throw things at us." "No." She endeavoured to smile, with indifferent success. "I got a lot more laughs with that spittoon business than I thought I would," he continued thoughtfully as they turned back toward the dressing-rooms. Joan made no reply, but when she stopped at the door of her dressing-room, Quard added tentatively: "Anyway, it beats clerking in a department store, doesn't it?" With some hesitation she replied: "I don't know...." XIII Immediately after her second public appearance in "The Convict's Return," Joan removed her make-up, changed to street dress and scurried through the rain to a Child's restaurant, not far from the theatre. In her excitement she had forgotten lunch and she was now thoroughly hungry. But she lingered purposely over the meal and even for some time after she had finished, preoccupied with self-dissection. She was--at last!--an actress; but she was none the less singularly discontented. In a very brief time she had travelled a great way from the Joan Thursby of East Seventy-sixth Street; a world of emotion and experience already dissociated them; but she seemed to have profited little by the journey. She felt sure that she had started the wrong way to prove her ability to act. And foreseeing nothing better than her present circumstances, she questioned gravely an inscrutable future. Instinctively she felt uneasy about this intimate, daily relationship with Quard. She wasn't afraid of him, but she was a little afraid of herself--because she liked him. Though still she dwelt in secret longing upon the image, half real, half fanciful, of a lover gentle and strong and fine--such an one as John Matthias might prove--for all that, Charlie Quard had the power to stir her pulses with a casual look of admiration, or with some careless note of tenderness in his accents. The shower slashed viciously at the restaurant windows. At that hour there were few other patrons in the establishment, no lights to relieve the dismal greyness of the afternoon, and no sounds other than an infrequent clash of crockery, the muffled shuffling of waitresses' feet, and their subdued voices, the melancholy and incessant crepitation of the downpour. Joan was sensible to the approach of an exquisite despondency; and in alarm, fearing to think too deeply, she arose, ran back to the theatre and on impulse paid her way in through the front, to watch the flickering phantasmagoria of the flying films and to sit in judgment on the antics of her fellows on the variety bill. She was in no hurry to return to the dressing-room, with its smells of grease-paint, scented powder, ordinary perfumes, sweat, stale cigarette-smoke, gin, and broken food. One of the clog-dancers claimed a tubercular tendency, for which she asserted gin to be a sovereign specific; but as the day ran on was even forgetting, at times, to cough by way of an overture to recourse to the bottle. The other, viewing this proceeding with public disfavour, had opened up an apparently inexhaustible and hopelessly monotonous store of reminiscence of the privations she had endured in consequence of "Fanny's weakness." Joan gathered that the two were forever being dropped from one bill after another because of Fanny's weakness. And of this she had five more days to anticipate and to endure.... She crawled back to Forty-fifth Street at half-past eleven, that night, so dog-tired that she had neither the heart nor the strength to call on the Deans with her good news; this though there were sounds of discreet revelry audible through the door of the second-floor front.... Somehow the week wore out without misadventure. Joan walked through her part with increasing confidence. Quard left her very much to herself when they were off the stage; indeed, he spent no more time in the theatre than was absolutely necessary. What he did out of it she did not know, but from the frequency with which he played his part with an alcoholic breath, she surmised that he was solacing himself in conventional manner for his degradation to "the four-a-day." On the third day the clog-dancers were dispensed with for the reason forecast, their place being taken by two female acrobats of a family troupe, who lolled about for eleven hours at a stretch in their grimy pink tights and had little to say either to Joan or to the matronly lady with the robust voice and the knitting. But the change was a wholesome one for the dressing-room. The following week _Charles D'Arcy & Company_ played at another house of equal unpretentiousness, on the East Side, and the week after that was divided between two other theatres. And on Wednesday of the fourth week--they were then in Harlem--what Joan had vaguely foreseen and hoped against, happened. Quard turned up in the morning with red-rimmed eyes, a flushed face and a thick tongue blatantly advertising a night of sleepless drunkenness. By sheer force of an admirable physique and the instinct of a trained actor, he contrived to play the first turn without mishap, snatched a little sleep in his dressing-room, and seemed almost his everyday self at the next repetition. But after that he left the theatre to drug his jangling nerves with more whiskey; and appeared at the final repetition so stupefied that he would not have been permitted to go on the stage but for remissness on the part of the stage-manager. Before he had been five minutes on view he was hooted off and the curtain was rung down amid an uproar. Once back in her dressing-room (where she was alone, since their act was the last on the bill and the rest of the performers had already left the theatre) Joan gave way to a semi-hysterical tempest of tears. It was her first experience at close quarters with a man in hopeless intoxication, and while Quard's surrender was too abject to terrify, she was faint with disgust of him and incensed beyond measure with him for having subjected her to those terrible five minutes before a howling audience. With this, she was poignantly aware that henceforth their offering was "cold": by morning Quard's name would be upon the black-list and further booking impossible to secure. She might as well count herself once more out of work, and now in even less hopeful circumstances than when first she had struck out for herself; for then she had been buoyed up by the fatuous confidence of complete inexperience, and then she had been comparatively affluent in the possession of twenty-two dollars. Now she knew how desperately hard was the way she must climb, and she had less than five dollars. What little she had been able to set aside out of her weekly wage had gone to purchase some sorely needed supplements to her meagre wardrobe. It was some time before she could collect herself enough to dabble her swollen eyes with cold water, scrub off her make-up, and change for the street. She stole away presently across an empty and desolate stage and through the blind, black alley leading from the stage-door to One-hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street. She felt somewhat relieved and comforted by the clean night air and the multitude of lights--the sense of normal life fluent in its accustomed, orderly channels. It seemed, in her excited fancy, like escaping from the foul, choking atmosphere of a madhouse.... The theatre was near Third Avenue, toward which Joan hurried, meaning to board a southbound car and transfer to Forty-second Street. But as she neared the corner she checked sharply, and (simple curiosity proving stronger than her impulse to fly across the street) went more slowly--only a few yards behind a figure that she knew too well--a swaying figure with weaving feet. Vastly different from the carefully overdressed, dandified person he had been at their first meeting, Quard stumbled on, his hands deep in pockets, head low between his shoulders, a straw hat jammed down over his eyes. Obviously he was without definite notion of either his where-abouts or his destination. Passers-by gave him a wide berth. He seemed so broken and helpless that pity replaced horror and indignation in the heart of the girl. After all, he hadn't been unkind to her; but for him she would long since have gone to the wall; and ever since their clash on the day of the try-out, he had treated her with a studied respect which had pleased her, apprehensive though she had remained of a renewal of his advances. Suddenly, and quite without premeditation, she darted forward and plucked Quard by the sleeve just as he was on the point of staggering through the swinging doors of a corner saloon. If her impulse had been at all articulate, she would have said that this was, in such extremity, the least she could do--to try to save him from himself. "Charlie!" she cried. "No, Charlie--don't be a fool!" The man halted and, turning, reeled against the door-post. "Wasmasr?" he asked thickly. Then recognition stirred in his bemused brain. "Why, it's lil Joan Thursh'y...." "Come away," she insisted nervously. "Don't be a fool. Don't go in there. Go home." He moved his head waggishly. "Thash where 'm goin'--home--soon's I brace up a bit." "Come away!" Joan repeated sharply, dragging at his cuff. "Do you hear? Come away. A walk'll straighten you out better'n anything else." "Walk, eh?" Quard lifted his chin and lurched away from the door-post. "Y' wanna take walk with me? All right"--indulgently--"_I_'ll walk with you, lil one, 's far's y' like." "Come, then!" she persisted. "Hurry--it's late." He yielded peaceably, with a sodden chuckle; but as he turned the lights of the saloon illumined his face vividly for an instant, and provided Joan with a fresh and appalling problem. The man had forgotten to remove his make-up; his mouth and jaws were plastered with a coat of bluish-grey paint, to suggest a week's growth of beard when viewed across footlights; there were wide blue rings round his eyes, and splashes of some silvery mixture on his dark hair. His face was a burlesque mask, so extravagant that it could not well escape observation in any steady light. It was impossible for Joan to be seen publicly with him--in a street-car, for instance. But now that she had taken charge of him, she couldn't gain her own consent to abandon the man to the potentially fatal whims of his condition. For a moment aghast and hesitant, in another she recognized how unavoidable was the necessity of adopting the suggestion his stupefied wits had twisted out of her pleadings: she would have to walk with him a little way, at least until he could recover to some slight extent. Indeed, even had she desired to, she would probably have found it difficult to get rid of him just then; for in an attempt to steady himself, Quard grasped her arm just above the elbow; and this grip he maintained firmly without Joan's daring to resent it openly. She was to that extent afraid of his drunkenness, afraid of his uncertain temper. Submissively, then, she piloted him to the south side of the street, where with fewer lighted shop-windows there was consequently less publicity, and to Lexington Avenue, turning south and then west through the comparative obscurity of One-hundred-and-twenty-fourth Street. Neither spoke until they had traversed a considerable distance and turned south again on Lenox Avenue. The streets were quiet, peopled with few wayfarers; and these few hurried past them with brief, incurious glances if not with that blind indifference which is largely characteristic of the people of New York. Quard suffered himself to be led with a docility as grateful as it had been unexpected. It was apparent to the girl that he was making, subconsciously at least, a strong effort to control his erratic feet. He retained her arm, however, until they were near One-hundred-and-sixteenth Street: when, noticing the lights of a corner drug-store, the girl held back. A swift glance roundabout discovered nobody near. "Where's your handkerchief, Charlie?" she demanded. "Where's whash? Whashmasser?" "I say," she repeated impatiently, "where's your handkerchief? Get it out and scrub some of that paint off your face. Do you hear? You look like a fool." "'M a fool," Quard admitted gravely, fumbling through his pockets. "Well, I won't be seen with you looking like that. Hurry up!" Her peremptory accents roused him a little. He found his handkerchief and began laboriously and ineffectually to smear his face with it, with the sole result of spreading the colour instead of removing it. In this occupation, he released her arm. With a testy exclamation, Joan snatched the handkerchief from him and began to scour his cheeks and jaws, heedless whether he liked it or not. To this treatment he resigned himself without protest--with, in fact, almost ludicrous complaisance, lowering his head and thrusting it forward as if eager for the scrubbing. For all her willingness she could accomplish little without cold cream. When at length she gave it up, his jowls were only a few shades lighter. She shrugged with despair, and threw away the greasy handkerchief. "It's no use," she said. "It just _won't_ come off! You'll have to go as you are." "Whash that? Go where?" "Now listen, Charlie," she said imperatively: "see that drug-store on the corner? You go in there and ask the man to give you something to straighten you out." Quard nodded solemnly, fixed the lighted show-window with a steadfast glare, and repeated: "So'thin' to straighten m' out." "That's it. Go on, now. I'll wait here." He wagged a playful forefinger at her. "Min' y' do," he mumbled, and wandered off. "And--Charlie!--get him to let you wash your face," she called after the man. Waiting in the friendly shadow of a tree, she watched him anxiously through the window; saw him turn to the soda-fountain and make his wants known to the clerk, who with a nod of comprehension and a smile of contempt began at once to juggle bottles and a glass. Singularly enough, it never occurred to the girl to seize this chance to escape. She was now accepting the situation without question or resentment. Quard seemed to her little better than an overgrown, irresponsible child, requiring no less care. Somebody had to serve him instead of his aberrant wits. To leave him to himself would be sheer inhumanity.... But she reasoned about his case far less than she felt, and for the most part acted in obedience to simple instinct. She saw him drain a long draught of some whitish, foaming mixture, pay and reel out of the store. He had, of course, forgotten (if he had heard) her plea to remove the remainder of his make-up. She was angry with him on that account, as angry as she might have been with a heedless youngster. But she did not let this appear. She moved quickly to his side. "Come on," she said quietly, turning southward; "you've got to walk a lot more." He checked, mumbled inarticulately, staring at her with glazed eyes, but in the end yielded passively. In silence they continued to One-hundred-and-tenth Street, Joan watching him furtively but narrowly. The drug worked more slowly than she had hoped. Primarily, in fact, it seemed only to thicken the cloud that befogged his wits. But by the time they had gained the last-named street, she noticed that he was beginning to walk with some little more confidence. He now seemed quite ignorant of her company--strode on without a word or glance aside. They crossed to Central Park and, entering, began to thread a winding path up the wooded rises of its northwestern face. Momentarily, now, there was an increasing assurance apparent in the movements of the man. He trudged along steadily, but with evident effort, like one embarrassed by a heavy weariness. His breathing was quick and stertorous. The park seemed very quiet. Joan wondered at this, until she remembered that it must have been nearly midnight when they stopped at the drug-store. She had noticed idly that the clerk had interrupted preparations to close in order to wait on Quard. They met nobody afoot, not even a policeman; but here and there, upon benches protected by umbrageous foliage, figures were vaguely discernible; men and women, a pair to a bench, sitting very near to one another when not locked in bold embraces. Joan heard their voices, gentle, murmurous, fond. These sights and sounds, the intimations they distilled, would at a previous time have moved the girl either to derision or to envy; now she felt only a profoundly sympathetic compassion, new and strange to her, quite inexplicable. Near the top of the hill they found a bench set in the stark glare of an arc-light, and therefore unoccupied. Upon this Quard threw himself as if exhausted. He said nothing, seemed wholly oblivious of his companion. Immediately he was seated his chin dropped forward on his chest, his hat fell off, his arms and legs dangled inertly. He appeared to sink at once into impregnable slumber; yet Joan was somehow intuitively aware that he wasn't asleep. She herself was very weary, but she couldn't leave him now, at the mercy of any prowling vagabond of the park. Picking up his hat, she sat down beside him with it in her lap, glad of the chance to rest. She was at once and incongruously not sleepy and thoughtless. Convinced that Quard was coming to himself, she was no longer troubled by solicitude; her wits wandered in a vast vacuity, sensitive only to dull impressions. She felt the immense hush that brooded over the park, a hush that was rendered emphatic by the muffled but audible and fast drumming of the man's over-stimulated heart, straining its utmost to pump and cleanse away the toxic stuff in his blood; the infrequent rumble and grinding of a surface-car on Central Park West seemed a little noise in comparison. Now and again a long thin line of glimmering car-windows would wind snakily round the lofty curve of the Elevated structure at One-hundred-and-tenth Street. Beyond, the great bulk of the unfinished cathedral on Morningside Heights loomed black against a broken sky of clouds. At one time a policeman passed them, strolling lazily, helmet in hand while he mopped his brow. His stare was curious for the two silent and ill-assorted figures on the bench. Joan returned it with insolent and aggressive interest, as if to demand what business it was of his. He grinned indulgently, and passed on. She had lost track of time entirely when Quard stirred, sighed, lifted his head and sat up with a gesture of deep despondency. The movement roused her from a dull, lethargic, waking dream. "Feeling better, Charlie?" she asked with assumed lightness. He nodded and groaned, without looking at her. "Able to go home yet?" "In a minute," he said drearily. "Where do you live?" she persisted. He waved a hand indifferently westward. "Over there--Ninety-sixth Street." "Think you'll be able to walk it?" "Oh, I'm all right now." He groaned again, and leaned forward, elbow on knee, forehead in his hand. "I feel like hell," he muttered. "The best thing for you is to get to bed and get some sleep," said the girl, stirring restlessly. He snapped crossly: "Wait a minute, can't you?" She subsided. "I guess you know I've gummed this thing all up, don't you?" he asked at length. "Yes, I guess you have," she replied, listless. "And, of course"--bitterly--"it's all _my_ fault...." To this she answered nothing. "Well, I'm sorry," he pursued in a sullen voice. "I guess I can't say any more'n that." She sighed: "I guess it can't be helped." He leaned back again, explored a pocket, brought to light a roll of money, with shaking hands stripped off four bills. "Well, anyway, there's your bit." Taking the bills, she examined them carefully. "That's a whole week," she said, surprised. "All right; it's coming to you." With neither thanks nor further protest, she put the money away in her pocket-book. "You've acted like a brick to me," he continued. "Don't let's talk about that now--" "I don't want you should think I don't appreciate it. If it hadn't been for you, I don't know when I'd've got home--chances are, not till tomorrow night, anyway. The old woman'd've been half crazy." Joan kept silence. "My mother," he amended, with a sidelong glance. "There's only the two of us." "Well," said the girl rising, "if that's so, you'd better get home to her; she won't be any too happy until she sees you--and not then." Reluctantly he got to his feet. "She thinks I'm a great actor," he observed bitterly; "and I'm nothing but a damn' drunken--" Joan interrupted roughly: "Ah, can that bunk: it'll keep till tomorrow--and maybe you'll mean it then." He subsided into silence, whether offended or penitent she neither knew nor cared. She gave him his hat, avoiding his look, and without further speech they found their way out to the gate at One-hundred-and-third Street. Here Joan paused to await an Eighth Avenue car. "You'd better walk all the way home, even if you don't feel like it," she advised Quard brusquely. "It won't do you any harm, and that mop of yours is a sight." "All right," he assented. He moved tentatively a foot or so away, checked, turned back. "I suppose this is good-bye--?" he said, offering his hand. "I guess it is," she agreed without emotion. Barely touching his clammy and tremulous fingers, she hastily withdrew her own. A southbound car was swinging down to them, not a block distant. Quard eyed it with morose disfavour. "At that," he said suddenly, "maybe this wouldn't've happened if you hadn't been so stand-offish. I only wanted to be friends--" In her exasperation Joan gave an excellent imitation of Miss May Dean's favourite ejaculation. "My Gawd!" she said scornfully--"if you can't think of any better excuse for being a souse than to blame it on me.... Good _night_!" The car pulled up for her. She climbed aboard--left him staring. XIV Though it was after three in the morning when Joan got home, she wasn't, as she had thought to be, the only waking person in the house. She had no sooner entered than, fagged though she was, she grasped this knowledge with a thrilling heart. Beneath the door of the back-parlour a thin yellow line of light shone, as brilliant in the obscurity as the rim of a newly minted coin. She paused; and there came to her ears the swift staccato chattering of a typewriter. Of a sudden she remembered how long it was since John Matthias had been anything but an abstraction in the background of her consciousness. He might have been at home for days: she had neither known nor thought of him, so wrapped up had she been with the routine of her work and the formless intrigue of emotions stimulated by the personality of Charlie Quard. But now Charlie had eliminated himself from her life (she was quite sure that she would never see him again) while to the man labouring late, behind that closed door, she must be even more a dim reminiscence than ever before. It stung her pride to think that Matthias had been able to forget her so easily. And she regretted bitterly that she herself had been so ready to let the image of her absent-minded benefactor fade upon the tablets of her memory. By way of mute apology and recompense she hastened to enshrine anew in her heart her ideal of a gentleman; and it was fashioned in the likeness of John Matthias. And she resolved not to let another day pass without approaching him. She was sure he would help her if he could; and she was very anxious to make him realize her again. But morning found her in quite another humour, one as diffident as different. And promptly she made a discovery so infinitely dismaying that it put the man altogether out of her mind for the time being. The Deans, she learned, had on the previous day received an offer for an engagement at a summer park in the Middle West, and had accepted, packed up and departed, all in an afternoon. So she was more lonely than ever she had been since leaving home. The bedroom of the Dancing Deans, that salon where those stars of remote and lowly constellations had assembled to afford Joan her only glimpses of social life, was empty, swept and garnished. Those whom she had met there, and who had been nice to her, those scatter-brained, kind-hearted, shiftless denizens of the vaudeville half-world, were once again removed from her reach. She spent that day and the next on the streets, trudging purposefully through the withering heat of August, once more a figure of the pageant which marches that most dolorous way, theatrical Broadway in the dog-days; one with the groups of idling actors with their bluish jowls and shabby jauntiness, one with and yet aloof from that drift of inexplicable creatures of stunted bodies and shoddy finery, less women than children, wistful of mien, with their strange, foreign faces and predatory eyes, bold and appealing to men, defiant to women.... Nothing came of it: the agencies took no more interest in her fortunes than they had before she could truthfully lay claim to stage experience. Each night she crawled home, faint with fatigue and the burden of the broiling day, to relish the bitter flavour of the truth that she would never go far without influence. The third day she spent at home, resting and furbishing up her wardrobe to make a good appearance in the evening. Toward nightfall she bathed, did up her hair in a new and attractive way, shrewdly refrained from dressing her face with rouge and powder after the fashion the Deans had taught her, and clothed herself simply and sweetly in her best skirt and a fresh shirtwaist--both recent purchases. In the deepening gloom of evening she mounted guard alone upon the stoop. Circumstances could not have proved more favourable; and since her eyes were quick to distinguish the tall and slender figure of Matthias the moment he turned out of Longacre Square, the length of the block away, she had ample time to prepare herself. And yet it was with growing consternation that she watched his approach, and when at last he ran lightly up the steps, she was so hampered by embarrassment that the words she had framed to address him went unuttered, and her tentative movement to rise was barely perceptible--a start, a sinking back. So that Matthias, in his preoccupation, received only a faint impression that he had somehow disturbed the girl (whoever _she_ might be) and lifting his hat, murmured an inarticulate word of apology and brushed past her into the vestibule. As the door of the back-parlour was noisily closed, tears of anger and mortification started to Joan's eyes. Then promptly temper overcame that which had daunted her calmer mood. Before she knew it she was knocking at Matthias's door. He answered immediately and in person, with his coat off and his collar unfastened by way of preparation for a long night's work. Staring blankly, he said "Oh?" in a mechanical and not at all encouraging manner. "Mr. Matthias--" Joan began with a slight, determined nod. "Oh--good evening," he stammered. Seeing him more at loss than herself, her self-confidence returned in some measure. "You don't remember me, Mr. Matthias," she asserted with a cool smile. He shook his head slowly: "So sorry--I've got a shocking memory. It'll come back to me in a minute. Won't you--ah--come in?" Joan said "Thanks," in a low voice, and entered. "I am Joan Thursday," she added with a hint of challenge in voice and glance. "Oh, yes, Miss Thursday--of course! Won't you sit down?" Matthias offered her an easy chair, but the girl was quite aware, as she accepted it, that he was still vainly racking his memory for some clue to the identity of Joan Thursday. "You were very kind to me one night about six weeks ago," she said, choosing her words carefully in order not to offend his fastidious taste. "Don't you remember? It was a rainy night, and I had nowhere to go, and you let me stay here--" "Oh!" he exclaimed, his face lighting up. "Of course, I remember now. Joan Thursday--to be sure! You left me a little note of thanks. I've often wondered what became of you." "I've been living here, right in this house, ever since." "You don't mean it. How very odd! I should think we'd have met before this, if that's the case." "You've had plenty of chances," she laughed, feeling a little more at ease. She rested her head against the back of the chair and regarded him through half-lowered lashes, conscious that the lamplight was doing full justice to her prettiness. "I've seen you dozens of times." "That's funny!" he observed, genuinely perplexed. "I don't see how that could have happened--!" "You were always too busy thinking about something else to look at poor me," she returned; and then, intuitively sensitive to the affectation of the adjective "poor" (a trick picked up from one of Maizie's women friends) she amended it hastily: "at me, I mean." "Well, I don't understand it, but I apologize for my rudeness, just the same," he laughed; and sat down, understanding that the girl wanted something and meant to stay until she got it, wondering what it could be, and a little annoyed to have his working time thus gratuitously interrupted. "So," he ventured, "you fixed things up to stop here, did you? At least, I seem to remember you--ah--weren't in very good form, financially, that night we met." "Yes," she said, "I fixed it up all right. I'd lost my money, but the next day I found it again, and I came back here because I didn't know where else to go, and besides there was my friends upstairs--the Deans, you know." "Oh, yes, to be sure. And did they help you find work on the stage? You did want to go on the stage, if I'm not mistaken." "Yes; that's why I left home, you know. But they didn't help me any--the Deans didn't--at least, not exactly; though it was through them I met a fellow who took me on for a vaudeville turn." "Why, that's splendid!" said Matthias, affecting an enthusiasm which he hardly felt. "And--you made good--eh?" "Well"--she laughed a little consciously--"I guess I did make good. But he didn't. He was a boozer, and they threw us out of the bill last Wednesday." "That's too bad," said Matthias sympathetically. "I see." And truly he did begin to see: she was out of a job and wanted assistance to another. It wasn't the first time--nor yet merely the hundredth--that he had been approached on a similar errand. People seemed to think that--simply because he wrote plays which, if produced at all, scored nothing more than indifferent successes at best!--he could wheedle managers into providing berths for every sorry incompetent who caught the footlight fever. It was very annoying. Not that he wouldn't be glad to place them all, given time and influence; but he had neither. Joan, watching him closely, saw his face darken, guessed cunningly the cause. And suddenly the buoyant assurance which had been hers up to this stage in their interview deserted her utterly. No longer enheartened by faith in the potency of her good looks and the appeal of her necessity, she became again the constrained and timid girl of unreasonable and inarticulate demands. After a brief silence, Matthias looked up with a smile. "I don't suppose you have anything else in sight?" Joan shook her head. "And you need a job pretty hard--eh?" "Oh, I do!" she cried. "I haven't hardly any money, and the Deans have gone away, and the agencies won't pay any attention to me--" "I understand," he interrupted. "Half a minute: I'll try to think of something." Unconsciously he began to pace the way his feet had worn from door to window. "How old are you?" he asked abruptly. She started and instinctively lied: "Twenty...." His surprise was unconcealed: "Really?" She faltered unconvincing amendment: "Nearly." "No matter," he said briskly. "It comes to the same thing: you're under twenty. The stage is no place for girls of your age. Don't you think you'd better chuck it--go home?" Not trusting herself to speak, she shook her head, her eyes misty with disappointment. "Besides, you're too good looking...." Struck by her unresponsiveness, he paused to glance at her, and noted with consternation the glimmer of tears in her lashes. "Oh, I say! Don't cry--we'll find something for you, never fear!" "I'm sorry," she gulped. "I--I didn't mean to.... Only, I can't go home, and I must find something to do, and you'd been so kind to me, once, I thought--" "And I will!" he asserted heartily. "I'm only trying to advise you.... I don't want to preach about the immorality of the theatre. A sensible girl is as safe on the legitimate stage as she would be in a business office--safer! But theatrical work has other effects on one's moral fibre, just as disastrous, in a way. It's lazy work; barring rehearsals, you won't find yourself driven very hard--unless ambition drives you, and you've got uncommon ability and mean to get to the top. Otherwise, you won't have much to do, even if constantly engaged. You'll get average small parts; you may be on in one act out of three or four. But even if you appear in every act, you'll only be in the theatre three hours or so a day. The rest of it you'll waste, nine chances out of ten. You'll lie abed late, and once up it won't seem worth while starting anything before it's time to show up at the theatre. That's the real evil of stage life: to every hard-working actor it turns out a hundred--five hundred--too lazy even to act their best, of no real use either to themselves or to the world." He checked and laughed in a deprecatory manner. "I didn't mean to speechify like this, but I do know what I'm talking about." Joan had listened, admiring Matthias intensely, but thoroughly sceptical of his counsel, to the tenor of which she paid just sufficient heed to perceive that doubts admitted would condemn her cause. "I mean to succeed," she said in an earnest voice: "I mean to work hard, and I do believe I'll make good, if I ever get a chance." "Then that's settled!" assented Matthias promptly. "The thing to do now is to find out what you can do with a chance." He pawed the litter of papers on the table, and presently brought to light a typed manuscript in blue paper covers. "This," he said, rustling the leaves, "is the first act of a play we're going to put on early in September. It goes into rehearsal in a week or ten days. There's a small part in the first act--a stenographer in a law office--a slangy, self-sufficient girl--you might be able to play. As I say, it's small; but it's quite important. It's the fashion nowadays, you know, to write pieces with small casts and no parts that aren't vital to the action. If you should bungle, it would ruin the first act and might kill the play. But I'm willing to try you out at rehearsals--with the distinct understanding that if you don't fit precisely you'll be released and somebody else engaged who we're sure can play it." "That's all I ask," said the girl. "You--you're awful' kind--" "Nonsense: I'd rather have you than anyone else I can think of just now, because you're pretty, and pretty women help a play a lot; and the man who's putting this piece on would rather have you because he'll get you for less money than he'd have to pay an actress of experience. So, if you make good, all hands will be pleased." "Shall I begin to study now?" Joan asked, offering to take the manuscript. "Not necessary. Your part will be given you when the first rehearsal is called. I merely want to refresh my memory, to see how much you'll have to do." He ran hastily through the pages. "As I thought: you are on at the opening for about ten minutes, and near the end of the act for a two-minute scene. Twelve minutes' work a day for, say, twenty-five dollars a week: that isn't bad. You'll be out of the theatre by half-past nine every night.... You see the point I've been trying to make?" "Yes," Joan assented. "It seems very easy. I hope I can do it." "I'm sure you can," said Matthias. "But--how are you going to live between now and the opening?" Joan's eyes were blank. "Have you any money?" he insisted. "A very little," she faltered--"eighteen dollars--" "You won't get pay for rehearsals; and they'll last three weeks; after we open it will be another week before the ghost walks. That's--say--six weeks you've got to scrape through somehow. Eighteen dollars won't cover that. Perhaps you'd better go back to your old job until we start." "I was fired from the last, and it would take more than two weeks for me to find anything like it, I know." "And there you are!" Matthias tossed the manuscript back to the table, waved his hands eloquently and threw himself into a chair, regarding her with his whimsical, semi-apologetic smile. "I'm afraid," he added after a minute, "I've reached the end of my string. Further suggestions will have to come from you." "I don't know," said the girl doubtfully. "Maybe I can think of something--maybe something will turn up." "I hope so. Perhaps even I may invent something. If I do, I'll let you know, Miss Thursday." He arose, his manner an invitation to go, to which she couldn't be blind. She got up, moved slowly toward the door. "I hope I haven't bothered you much--put you out of your writing--" "Oh, that's all right," he interrupted insincerely. "And you have been awful' good to me." "Please don't think of it that way." He was holding the door for her, but on the threshold she hesitated. "Unless," she ventured half-heartedly--"unless I could help you some way with your work." "Help me?" he exclaimed, at once amazed and amused. "I mean, copying--if you ever have any." "Type-writing?" She nodded, with a flush of hope. "When I was a kid--I mean, before I left school--I studied a while at a business college--nights, you know. They taught me type-writing by the touch system, but I couldn't seem to get the hang of shorthand, and so had to give it up and go to work in a store." "Now that _is_ a helpful thought!" he cried, turning back into the room. "Wait a minute. There may be something in this. Let me think." But his deliberation was very brief. "It can be done!" he announced in another moment. "I have got a lot of stuff to be copied. You see, about a month ago I...." He checked, his eyes clouding without cause apparent to the girl. "Well!" he went on with a nervous laugh--"I didn't feel much like work. Guess I must've done too much of it, for a while. Anyway, I found I had to quit, and went out of town for a while. Of course I couldn't stop work really--a man can't, if he likes his job--and so I took some manuscripts along and revised them in long-hand. Now they ought to be copied--I'd been thinking of sending them out to some public stenographer--but if you want the work, it's yours." XV Never had any of her difficulties been adjusted in a manner more satisfactory to Joan. She rose at once from an abyss of discouragement to sunlit peaks of happiness. Installing a rented type-writing machine in the room adjoining her own (temporarily without a tenant and willingly loaned by Madame Duprat) she tapped away industriously from early morning till late at night, sedulously transcribing into clean type-script the mangled manuscripts given her by Matthias. By no means a rapid worker, after renewing acquaintance with the machine she made up for slowness by diligence and long hours. And the work interested her: she thought the plays magnificent; and a novel which Matthias gave her when his stock of old plays ran low she considered superb. It was his first and only book, and had not as yet been submitted to the mercies of a publisher. But to Joan it was something more than a book; it was a revelation, her primal introduction to the world of the intellect. From poring over its pages, she grew hungry for more, thrilled by the discovery that she could find interest and pleasure in reading. She began to borrow extensively from the circulation branch of the Public Library in Forty-second Street, and to read late into the night, defying the prejudices of Madame Duprat on the question of gas consumption.... Refusing an offer of public stenographer rates, she had asked for ten dollars a week. This Matthias paid her, under protest that the work was worth more to him. The arrangement was, however, a fortunate one; for though at first Joan earned more than she received, after rehearsals of "The Jade God" had started she was seldom able to give more than two or three hours a day to the copying. These rehearsals furnished her with impressions vastly different from those garnered through her experience with "The Convict's Return." The company assembled for the first time on a mid-August morning, in the author's study. There were present eight men, aside from Matthias and the manager, his producing director and his press agent, and four women, including Joan. After brief introductions, the gathering disposed itself to attention, and Matthias, rocking nervously in his revolving desk-chair, read the play aloud. To most of those present the work was new and unfamiliar; they listened with intense interest, keenly alive to the possibilities of the various parts for which they had been cast. But Joan was not of these; she had typed all the parts and knew not only the story but her own slight though significant rôle (as she would have said) "backwards." Sitting in a shadowed corner, she devoted herself to studying those with whom her lines were to be cast. The leading lady was an actress who, after several attempts to star at the head of her own company, was reduced to playing second to the young and handsome matinée hero of several seasons ago, planning to return in triumph to the stage after an unsuccessful effort to retire from it into the contented estate of well-financed matrimony. Through their widely published photographs Joan was familiar with the features of both. She thought the star charming; good-humoured, good-looking, well-mannered, slight and graceful, he had all the assurance of a Charlie Quard and none of his vain swagger. But Joan decided on sight to detest the leading woman. She was a pale, ashen blonde, with a skin as colourless as snow, level dark brows, sharp blue eyes set close to the bridge of her pointed nose, and a thin-lipped, violent mouth. The first impression she conveyed was one of dangerous temper; the second, that she had been happy in her choice of photographers. Throughout the reading, she sat negligently on the arm of a chair, swinging a foot and staring out of the window with an air of immitigable disdain. Of the other women, one was a grey-haired, sweet-faced lady of perhaps fifty years, whose eyes softened winningly whenever they encountered Joan's, the other an unlovely creature of middle-age and long stage experience, who seemed to have no interest in life aside from her unfolding part. The remainder of the company, of a caste hall-marked by the theatre, offered nothing novel to Joan's eyes--aside from a fat, red-faced lump of a youth who was to act a thick-witted, sentimental office-boy, in love with the stenographer (Joan). This one she decided to tolerate on suspicion; he resembled a type which she had found difficult, apt to impertinence and annoying attentions. Rideout, the man financially responsible for the production, was an English actor of reputation and considerable ability. Carrying his stoutish body with an ease that almost suggested slenderness: with his plump, blowsy face, twinkling eyes and fat nose of a comedian: the insuppressible staginess of his gesture would have betrayed his calling anywhere. Now and again Joan surprised an anxious expression lurking beneath his humorous smile; she had inferred from some casual remark made by Matthias that Rideout was staking all he possessed on the success of this play. The producing manager, Wilbrow, was a short, lean-bodied American, with lantern jaws, large intent eyes, and a nervous frown. Joan was impressed with the aloof pleasantness of his manner: she was to know him better. The reading over, the company was dismissed with instructions to report at ten the next morning at an obscure dance-hall masquerading under the name of an opera house, situate in the immediate neighbourhood, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Several lingered to affix signatures to contracts--Joan of their number; and when these were gone, there remained in conference the star, the leading woman, Matthias, Rideout, and Wilbrow. Going out to dinner that night, Joan passed Matthias bidding good-bye to the leading woman in the hallway. He seemed tired and wore a harassed look; and later, when the girl delivered the outcome of her day's copying, he had a manner new to her, of weary brusqueness. The first rehearsal proper was held in a stuffy and ill-ventilated room, so dark that it was necessary to use the electric lights even at high noon. The day was fortunately cool, otherwise the place had been insufferable. There was little attempt at acting; the company devoted itself, under Wilbrow's patient direction, to blocking in the action. They had no stage--simply that bare, four-square room. Half a dozen chairs and a few long benches were dragged about to indicate entrances and properties. Nobody pretended to know his part--not even Joan, who knew hers perfectly. The example of the others, who merely mumbled from the manuscripts in their hands, made the girl fear to betray amateurishness by discovering too great an initial familiarity with her lines. So she, too, carried her "'script," and read from it. When not thus engaged, she sat watching and noting down what was going on with eager attention. But she took away with her a depressing sense of having engaged in something formless and incoherent. But succeeding rehearsals--beginning with the second--corrected this misapprehension. That afternoon developed Wilbrow suddenly into a mild-mannered, semi-apologetic, and humorous tyrant. He discovered an individual comprehension of what was required for the right development of the play, and an invincible determination to get it. He never lost either temper or patience, neither swore nor lifted his voice; but having indicated his desire, wrought patiently with its subject, sometimes for as long as an hour, until he had succeeded in satisfying it. He worked coatless, with his long black hair straggling down over his forehead and across his glasses: an incredibly thin, energetic, and efficient figure, dominated by a penetrating and masterful intelligence. Not infrequently, taking the typed part from the hands of one of his puppets, he would himself give a vivid sketch of its requirements through the medium of intonation, gesture, and action. And to Joan, at least, the effects he created by these means were as striking in the feminine rôles as in the masculine. Utterly devoid of self-consciousness, he had the faculty of seeming for the moment actually to be what he sought to suggest: one forgot the man, saw only what he had in mind. Another thing that surprised the girl more than a little was the docility with which her associates submitted to his dictation and even invited it. She had heard of actors "creating" rôles; but in this company no one but the producer seemed to be creating anything. The others came to rehearsals with minds so open that they seemed vacuous; not one, whether the star, his leading woman, or any of their supporting players, indicated the least comprehension of what they were required to portray or the slightest symptom of original conception. What Wilbrow told them and then showed them how to do, they performed with varying degrees of success. So that Joan at last came to believe the best actors those most susceptible to domination, least capable of independent thought. As he gradually became acquainted with his lines and the business Wilbrow mapped out for him, the star began to give more compelling impersonations at each rehearsal; but to the girl he never seemed more than a carbon filament of a man, burning bright with incandescence only when impregnated with the fluid genius of a superior mentality. So, likewise, with the leading woman.... As for herself, Joan was hardly happy in her endeavour to please. Having unwisely formed her own premature conception of her part, and lacking totally the technical ability to express it, she ran constantly afoul of Wilbrow's notions. She was called upon first to erase her own personality, next to forget the personality which she had meant to delineate, and finally to substitute for both these one which Wilbrow alone seemed able to see and understand. She strove patiently and without complaint, but in a stupefying welter of confusion. While on the pretended stage she was constantly terrified by Wilbrow's mild but predominant regard, which rendered her only awkward, witless, and ill-at-ease. Then, too, her attempts to imitate his brilliant and colourful acting were received with amusement, not always wholly silent, by the rest of the company. She seemed quite unable to follow his lead; and toward the end of the first week, throughout the whole of which (she was aware from the calm resignation of Wilbrow's attitude) she had improved not one whit, she began to despair. Inasmuch as she appeared only in the first act, she was customarily excused from attendance at the rest of each rehearsal, and spent this extra time at home, over her typewriter; thus maintaining the fiction of earning her weekly stipend. On Saturday afternoon, however, as soon as her "bit" had been rehearsed, there occurred one of those quiet, aloof conferences between Wilbrow, Rideout, and Matthias, which she had learned to recognize as presaging a change in the cast. Twice before, such consultations had resulted in the release of subordinate actors who had proved unequal to their parts. Now from the author's uneasy and distressed eye, which alternately sought and avoided her, Joan divined that her own fate was being weighed in the balance. And her heart grew heavy with misgivings. None the less, she was permitted to leave with no other advice than that the rehearsals would resume on the following Monday, at nine in the morning, on the stage of a Broadway theatre. She hurried home in a mood of wretched anxiety and creeping despair. Wilbrow had indisputable excuse for dissatisfaction with her; Rideout was quite humanly bent on getting the best material his money could purchase--and she was far from that; while Matthias couldn't reasonably protest against her dismissal for manifest incompetency. And dismissal now meant more to Joan than the loss of her coveted chance to appear in a first-class production; it meant not only the loss of the living she earned as typist--and she had been engaged with the understanding, implicit if not explicit, that Matthias had only enough extra work to occupy her until the opening of his play; dismissal from the cast of "The Jade God," in short, meant the loss to her of Matthias. There was no longer in her heart any doubt that she loved him. The admiration conceived in her that first night, when he had turned himself out to afford her shelter, had needed only this brief period of propinquity to ripen into something infinitely more deep and strong. And from the first she had been ready and willing to adore his very shadow upon an excuse far less encouraging than his kindly though detached interest in her welfare. In her cosmos Matthias was a being as exotic as a Martian, his intelligence of an order that passed understanding. His thoughts and ways of speech, his interests and amusements (as far as she could divine them) the delicacy of his perceptions, and the very refinements of his mode of life, all new and strange to her, invested him with a mystery as compelling to her imagination as the reticences of a strange and beautiful woman have for the mind of a young man. She worshipped him with a hopeless and inarticulate longing, and was content with this for the present; but hourly she dreamed of a day when through his aid she should have lifted herself to a position in which she would seem something more to him than a mere, forlorn shop-girl out of work and scratching for a living. If only she might hope to become an actress of recognized ability!... It was a truism in her conception of life that the estate of actress was a loadstone for the hearts of men. If success were to be denied her!... In her bedroom, behind a locked door, she hurried to her pillow and to tears. She had known many an hour darkened by the fugitive despairs of youth; but never until this day had she been so despondently sorry for herself. Later, the banal ticking of her tin alarm-clock penetrated her consciousness, and she remembered that she had work to do--to be finished before evening, if her promise to Matthias were to be kept. She rose, splashed face and eyes with cold water, and went to her typewriter in the adjoining room. She had really very little to do in order to complete her task--only a few pages of scored and interlined manuscript to reduce to clean copy; but her mind was not with her work. Time and again she found herself sitting with idle hands, thoughts far errant; and now and then she had to dry her eyes before she could proceed: so stubbornly did she cling to the sorry indulgence of self-pity! Once, even, she was so overcome by contemplation of her sufferings that she bowed her head upon the table where the manuscript lay, and wept without restraint for several minutes--without restraint and, toward the last, with kindling interest in the discovery that her tears were bedewing a freshly typed page. If Matthias were to notice, would he understand? And, understanding, what would he think?... With shame-faced reluctance she destroyed the blotched page and typed it anew. It was dark before she finished; and she was glad of this when she gathered up the manuscript to take to her employer. With no light in his room other than that of the reading-lamp with the green shade, her stained and flushed cheeks and swollen eyes would escape detection. It was not that she wouldn't have welcomed sympathetic interest, but a glance in the mirror showed her she had wept too unrestrainedly not to have depreciated the chiefest asset of her charm--her prettiness. However, she could not well avoid the meeting: the work must be delivered; but if she were lucky she would find him in one of his frequent moods of abstraction, and their interview need only be of the briefest. Nevertheless, she would have sent the work to him by the chambermaid if her week's wage had not been due that night. She waited a moment, listening at the door to the back-parlour; but there was no sound of voices within; and reassured, she knocked. His response--"Come in!"--followed with unexpected promptness. She obeyed, though with misgivings amply justified as soon as she found herself in the room, which was for once well-lighted, two gas-jets on the chandelier supplementing the green-shaded lamp. Matthias was bending over a kit-bag on the couch, hastily packing enough clothing to tide him over Sunday. He threw her an indifferent glance and greeting over his shoulder. "Hello, Miss Thursday! I was beginning to wonder whether you'd forgotten me. I'm going to run down to Port Madison until Monday morning--last chance I'll have for a day in the country for some time, probably. Chances are, Wilbrow will keep us at work next Sunday. Got that 'script all ready?" Joan, depositing it on the table, murmured an affirmative in a voice uncontrollably unsteady. Before entering she had been quite sure of her ability to carry off the short interview without betraying her harrowed emotions. But to find the man about whom they centred packing to leave town--to leave her!--added the final touch of misery to her mood. And the inflection of her response could not have failed to strike oddly on his hearing. Uttering a wondering "_Hello!_" he straightened up and swung round to look at her. And a glance sufficed: his smile faded, was replaced by a pucker of sympathy between his brows. "Why, what's the trouble?" Joan averted her face. "N-nothing," she faltered. Her lip trembled, her eyes filled anew. She dabbed at them with a wadded handkerchief. Matthias hesitated. He drew down the corners of his mouth, elevated his brows, and scratched a temple slowly with a meditative forefinger. Then he nodded sharply and, crossing to the door, closed it. "Tell me about it," he said, coming back to the girl. "Things not going to suit you, eh?" She shook her head, looking away. "I--I--!" she stammered--"_I_ can't act!" "O nonsense!" he interrupted with kindly impatience. "You mustn't get discouraged so easily. Naturally it comes hard at first, but you'll catch on. Everything of this sort takes time. I was saying the same thing to Wilbrow today." "Yes," she mumbled, gulping--"I--I know. I was watching you. H-he and Mr. Rideout wanted to fire me, didn't they?" "What? Oh, no, no!" Matthias lied unconvincingly. "They--they were just wondering.... I assured them--" "But you hadn't any right to!" the girl broke in passionately. "I can't act and--and I know it, and you know it, as well as they do. I can't--I just can't! It's no use.... I'm no good...." Of a sudden she flopped into a chair, rested her head on arms folded on the table, and sobbed aloud. Matthias shook his head and (since she could not see him) permitted himself a gesture of impotent exasperation. This was really the devil of a note! Women were incomprehensible: you couldn't bank on 'em, ever. Here was he preparing to catch a train, and not too much time at that.... But a glance at the clock reassured him slightly; he had still a little leeway. All the same, he didn't much relish the prospect of being compelled to invest his spare minutes in attempting to comfort a silly, emotional girl. And, besides, somebody in the hallway might hear her sobbing.... This last consideration took him somewhat reluctantly to her side. "There, there!" he pleaded, intensely irritated by that feeling of helplessness which always afflicts man in the presence of a weeping woman, whether or not he has the right to comfort her. "There--don't cry, please, Miss--ah--Thursday. You're all right--really, you are. You--you're--ah--doing all this quite needlessly, I give you my word." He might as well have attempted to stem a mountain torrent. "I wish I could make you understand this is all quite unnecessary," he groaned. "I--I'm so mis'able!" came a wail from the huddled figure. "I'm sorry," he said uncomfortably--"awfully sorry, truly. But you--I'm not afraid you won't make good, and I don't intend to let you go until you've had every chance in the world. That's a promise." He ventured to give her quaking shoulder a light, encouraging pat or two, and rested his hand upon the corner of the table. "Come, now--brace up--please. I--" With a strangled sob Joan sat up, caught his hand and carried it to her lips. Before he could recover from his astonishment it was damp with her tears and kisses. Instantly he snatched it away. "You--you're so good to me!" she cried. Matthias, horrified, stepped back a pace or two, as if to insure himself against a repetition of her offence, and quite mechanically dried his hand with a handkerchief. And then, in a flash, he lost his temper. "What the devil do you mean by doing that to me?" he demanded harshly. "Look here--you stop this nonsense. I won't have it. I--why--it's outrageous! What right have you got to--to do anything like that?" The shock of his anger brought the girl to her senses. Her tears ceased in an instant, as if automatically. She rose, mopping her face with her handkerchief, swallowed one last sob, and moved sullenly toward the door. "I'm sorry," she mumbled. "I--you've been very kind to me--I forgot myself. I'm sorry." "Well ..." he said grudgingly, in his irritation. "But don't let it happen again." "There's no chance of that," the girl retorted with a brief-lived flash of spirit. "Good night." "Good night," he returned. She was gone before he recovered; and then compunction smote him, and he followed her as far as the hallway. In the half-light of the flickering gas-jet, he saw her only as a shadow slowly mounting the staircase. And a glance toward the front door discovered indistinct shapes of lodgers on the stoop. "Miss Thursday!" he called in a guarded voice. She heard, hesitated a single instant, then with quickened steps resumed the ascent. He called once again, but she refused to listen, and he returned to his study in a state of insensate rage; which, however, had this time himself for its sole object--Joan's transgression quite lost sight of in remorse for his brutality. He could not remember ever having spoken to any woman in such wise: no man had any right to speak to any woman in such a manner, for any cause, however exasperating. Tremendously disgusted with himself, and ashamed, he tramped the floor so long, trying to quiet his conscience, and made so many futile attempts to apologize to the girl by word of hand--one and all either too abject or too constrained--that he had lost his train before he produced the lame and halting effort with which he was at length fain to be content. A later train was bearing him under the East River to Long Island when Joan read his message. A servant had taken it to the girl's room and, knocking without receiving an answer, concluded that Joan was out and slipped it under the door. When the descending footsteps were no longer audible, Joan rose from the bed, lighted the gas, and with blurred vision deciphered the lines: "DEAR MISS THURSDAY:--Please forgive me for my unmannerly exhibition of temper. I regret exceedingly my inability to make you understand how sorry I am to have hurt your feelings. "And do please understand that there is no grave dissatisfaction with your work at rehearsals. Remember that you have two weeks more in which to show what you can do. "I shall hope that you are not too deeply offended to overlook my loss of temper and to continue typing my book; if possible I'd like to have another chapter by Monday night. "Sincerely yours, "JOHN MATTHIAS." "P. S.--I enclose--what I'd completely forgotten--the regular weekly amount--$10." She fell asleep, at length, with this note crushed between her pillow and her cheek. XVI Her work proved invaluable distraction for the greater part of that long and lonely Sunday. When not at her typewriter she was tormented by alternate fits of burning chagrin and of equally ardent gratitude toward Matthias. Had this last been in town and chanced to meet her, she must either have quitted him definitely or have betrayed her passion unmistakably even to the purblind eyes of a dreaming dramatist. As it was, the girl had time to calm down, to recognize at once his disinterestedness and her own folly. If her infatuation did but deepen in contemplation of his generosity, she none the less regained poise before bedtime and with it her determination to succeed in spite of her stupidity, if only to justify his kindness. But the morning that took her back to rehearsals found her in a mood of dire misgivings. She would have forfeited much--anything other than their further association--to have been spared the impending encounter with Matthias. And although the author was not present when she reached the theatre, her embarrassment hampered her to a degree that rendered her attempts to act more than ever farcical. Wilbrow, seated in a chair on the "apron" of the stage, his back to the lifeless footlights, did not interrupt her once; but despair was patent in his attitude, and despair informed his eyes, and not long after her scene was finished the producer for the first time betrayed indications of temper. "Blaine!" he said abruptly in a chilling voice to one of the minor actors--"don't you _know_ there's a window over there--up left centre?" The player thus addressed, who had been idling purposelessly near the centre of the stage, looked up with a face of blank surprise. "Sure," he said--"sure I know it." "That's something, at least!" Wilbrow commented acidly. "I'm glad you remember it. If I'm not mistaken, I've reminded you of that window twice every day since Monday." "Yes," agreed the other with a look of painful concentration; "I guess that's right, too." "And yet you can't remember what I've told you just as often--that I want you to be up there, looking out of the window, when _Sylvia_ enters!" The actor turned out expostulatory palms. "But, Mr. Wilbrow, what for? I don't see--" "Because," the producer interrupted incisively, "the stage directions indicate it; because the significance of this scene requires you to be there, looking out, unaware of _Sylvia's_ entrance; because you look better there; because it dresses the stage; because you're in the way anywhere else; because I--God help me!--because _I--want--you--to--be--there_!" A smothered giggle broke from a group of players technically off-stage. Wilbrow glared icily toward that quarter. "Yes, I know," Blaine agreed intelligently. "But how do I _get_ there?" The front legs of Wilbrow's chair rapped the boards smartly as he jumped up. In silence, he grasped Blaine's arm and with a slightly exaggerated melodramatic stride propelled him to the indicated spot, released him, and stood back. "Walk!" he announced with an inimitable gesture of tolerant contempt; and went back to his chair. Not a line of his face had changed. He sat down, nodded to the leading woman. "All right, Mary," he said; and to another actor: "Now, the cue for _Sylvia_, please!" Joan shivered a little. Matthias did not come in until after the girl had finished her part in the afternoon rehearsal. She caught sight of him in the darkened auditorium just as she went off; and hurried from the house in tremulous dread. But a meeting was inevitable; and that evening, just before the dinner hour, found her reluctantly knuckling the door of the back-parlour. The voice of Matthias bade her enter, and she drew upon all her scant store of courage as she turned the knob. To her immense relief he was not alone. Rideout and Moran, the scene painter, were in consultation with Matthias over two small model stages set with painted pasteboard scenery. Matthias greeted her with a preoccupied smile and nod. "Oh, good evening, Miss Thursday. More 'script, eh? Thank you." Silently Joan gave him the manuscript and left the room. But the door had no sooner closed than it was re-opened and again closed. She turned to face this dreaded crisis. His smile was friendly and pleasant if a trace uncertain. He made as if to offer his hand, and thought better of it. "Oh, Miss Thursday.... I sent you a note...." She nodded, timid eyes avoiding his. "Am I forgiven?" "I--I--if you'll forgive me--" she faltered. "Then that's all right!" he cried heartily. "I'm glad," he added with unquestionable sincerity--"and sorry I was such a brute. I ought to have understood what a strain you'd been under. Shall we say no more about it?" She nodded again: "Please...." "Good!" He offered his hand frankly, subjected hers to a firm, cool pressure, and moved back to his study door. "Good night." She whispered her response, and ran upstairs to her room, almost beside herself with delight. It was all right! Best of all, the advances had come from him; he it was who had sued for pardon where the fault was hers--clear proof that he thought enough of her to wish to retain her friendship! With a glad and comforted heart she settled down to attack anew the vexatious problem of her rôle in "The Jade God." But for all her worry and good will, the next morning's rehearsal of her scenes passed off in the same terrible silence as had marked Monday's. And in the same afternoon the storm broke. After plodding through her first scene, Joan was about to go off when Wilbrow called her. "Miss Thursday," he said quietly, "one of three things has got to happen--_now_: either you'll follow my instructions, or you'll quit, or I will. I've told you what I want so many times that I'm tired repeating myself. Now we're going to go over that scene again and again, if it takes all afternoon to get what I'm after. _But_, before we start, I will ask you to bear one thing in mind: this isn't an ingénue part; there's no excuse for acting it like a petulant school-girl. Even pretty stenographers are business-like in real life--sometimes--and we're trying to secure some semblance of real life in this production. In other words, I want you to forget Billie Burke and try to act like a human being who's a little sore on her job and her employer, but not sore enough to chuck it just yet. Now, if you please--begin right at the beginning." For an instant Joan stood hesitant, on the verge of refusing. There seemed to be no satisfying this man: he either didn't or wouldn't understand; she tried desperately to please him--and her sole reward was to be held up to the derision of the entire company! It was intolerable! And of a sudden she hated Wilbrow with every atom of her being. But ... if she were to talk back or refuse to go on, Matthias would be forfeited from her life. She choked down her chagrin, resisted the temptation to wither Wilbrow with a glare, and sulkily resumed her place in the chair beside another chair that was politely presumed to be her typewriter desk. At once the fat boy whom she detested crossed the indefinite line dividing the scene from "off-stage," and leering insolently, spoke the opening line of the play. Seething with indignation, the girl looked up and in cutting accents shot her reply at him. She was pleased to surprise a look of dumb amazement in his eyes. At all events, she had succeeded in letting _him_ know just how she felt toward him! And this success inspired her to further efforts. She rattled through the remainder of the scene with the manner of a youthful termagant. When she had finished, Wilbrow said nothing beyond: "Again, please." The demand served only to deepen her resentment, and the second repetition differed not materially from the first. Ceasing to speak, she flounced away, but Wilbrow's voice brought her back. "Very good, Miss Thursday," he said mildly--"very good indeed. But why--in the name of Mike!--if you _could_ do it--why wouldn't you until now?" "Because," Joan stammered--"because--!" But she didn't dare say what she wished to, and checked her tongue in a fit of sulks more eloquent than any words she could have found. Wilbrow waited an instant, then laughed quite cheerfully. "The usual reason, eh? I might have guessed you had a sure-'nough one concealed about you.... That's all for today. Tomorrow morning at nine." Privately pondering this experience, Joan surprised its secret, and drew from it a conclusion that was to have an important influence upon her professional future: in order to act convincingly, she must herself feel the emotions accredited to her part. As applied to her individual temperament, at that stage of its development, this rule had all the inflexibility of an axiom. Others might--as others do--act in obedience to the admonitions of their intelligence: Joan could at that stage act only according to the promptings of her emotional self. So she encouraged herself to hate Wilbrow with all her heart, to despise him without ceasing night or day; no charitable thought of the manager was suffered to gain access to her humour at any hour. And so admirably did she succeed in impregnating her mind with virulent dislike of the man, that she afforded him no end of amusement. She made a point of coming to the rehearsals early enough to infuriate herself with contemplation of him in the flesh; and of walking up and down, before and between her scenes, thinking evil of him. The twinkle with which his eyes followed her, in place of their erstwhile calm indifference or resignation, worked only to intensify her rancour. Curiously enough, a clear comprehension of the illogical absurdity of it all made her temper even more bitter. One day just before the final rehearsals, Wilbrow, meeting her at the stage-door, planted his slender body squarely in her way. "Good morning!" he said cheerfully, with a semi-malicious smile. "My congratulations, Miss Thursday! You're doing nobly." "Thanks," Joan said curtly, pausing perforce. "You ought to be very grateful to me. Are you?" "No." "I wonder what you'd do under the direction of a man you happened to like?" "I don't know." Joan gave him a sullen look. "Will you please let me pass." "Delighted." He moved aside with mocking courtesy. "I ask only one thing of you: don't fall in love with me before our first night. I haven't got time to sour another sweet young thing's amiable disposition.... Keep on hating me as hard as you like--and we'll make at least a half-portion actress of you yet...." Toward the end of the second week, Joan began to notice that Rideout was growing less assiduous in attendance. At first inclined to lay this to his satisfaction with the progress--to her the production seemed to be taking on form and colour in a way to wonder at--she later overheard a chance remark of one of her associates, to the effect that Rideout was himself rehearsing with another company. "Well," someone commented, "if it was my coin back of this show, I'd stick by it if I had to play the office-boy." "I guess," was the reply, "Rideout ain't got any too much outside what he's sunk in this production. Shouldn't wonder if he needs what he's to get with Minnie Aspen." "Mebbe. He's a good trouper. What does he drag down, anyway?" "Four hundred a week." "Nix with those Lambs' Club figures. I mean regular money." "Oh, two hundred and fifty, sure." "Now you've said something...." During the third week it was announced that "The Jade God" would open in Altoona on the following Monday. And at the same time Joan discovered that she was expected to provide her own costume, a simple affair but unhappily beyond the resources of either her wardrobe or her pocket-book. In despair she took the advice of Mrs. Arnold (the sweet-faced lady of fifty, whom Joan counted her only friend on the company) and approached Rideout's personal representative, Druggett, with a demand for an advance. With considerable reluctance Druggett surrendered fifteen dollars, and promised her as much more on Monday, toward expenses on the road. And again on the advice and introduction of Mrs. Arnold, the girl succeeded in satisfying her needs at an instalment-plan clothing-house: paying eight dollars down on a bill of about forty and agreeing to remit the balance at the rate of four dollars each week. The final dress-rehearsal was called for Saturday morning. They were to leave New York Sunday night. But on Friday afternoon a sense of uneasiness and uncertainty invaded the temper of the organization. Wilbrow neglected the players to engage in protracted conferences with Matthias, Rideout, Moran, and Druggett, out of earshot, at the back of the auditorium. One or two weather-wise "troupers" hazarded gloomy surmises as to the nature of the "snag": that most favoured involved a "shake-up with the Shuberts" over some change in their route. With a singular unanimity the prophets of disaster either avoided or overlooked the actual cause of the trouble. At ten o'clock the next morning--a little late--Joan, with her costume in the dilapidated wicker suit-case, hurried into the theatre to find the company scattered about the stage in poses variously suggestive of restless dejection. Neither the star nor the leading woman was present, and there was no scenery in sight, other than that belonging to the production which occupied the same stage nightly. Rideout was nowhere to be seen, but the author, the producer, and Druggett were engaged in earnest but inaudible argument "out front." From their manner Joan inferred that Druggett was advocating some course actively opposed by Wilbrow and passively by Matthias. The group broke up before she found opportunity to question her associates. Druggett, in manifest dudgeon, turned sharply and marched out of the house, while Wilbrow strode purposefully back to the stage by way of the passage behind the boxes, Matthias following with an air of profound disgust and despondency. From the centre of the stage the producer addressed the little gathering. "Ladies and gentlemen!" he said sharply; and waited until he had all their attention. "There'll be no rehearsal today, and--and unless something quite unexpected happens, we won't open Monday. The truth is, there isn't money enough behind this show to finance it beyond Altoona. Moran can't collect on his scenery, and won't deliver. Mr. Matthias has offered to fix Moran up if we agree to go out, but I can't see it that way. Mr. Rideout's proposition is that we go on the road and run our chances of making expenses--but I don't have to tell you people what a swell show we'd have of breaking even on a tank route at this season of the year--hot weather still with us, and all that. We _might_--but that's about all you can say. And I don't think any of us want to count ties from Altoona.... "Mr. Druggett thinks that Mr. Rideout will be able to make a deal with the Shuberts, but I doubt it. Just now they're all tied up with their own productions and have no time to waste on a gambling risk like this. Of course, if I'm wrong, you'll all be notified. But I wouldn't, if I were you, pass up another engagement on the off-chance of this thing panning out after all. "I'm sorry about this--we're all sorry, naturally. We all lose. Mr. Matthias here loses as much as any of us--the rights in a valuable property for several months, at the inside. I'm out fifteen hundred dollars I was to get for putting the show on. And Rideout's out the two thousand real coin he's invested in expectation of backing which failed to materialize. Personally I refused to shoulder the responsibility of letting you go out in ignorance of the real state of affairs. That's all." He hesitated an instant, as if not satisfied that he had dealt fully with the situation, and glanced a little ruefully from face to face of the company. But for the moment none made any comment. And with an uncertain nod to the author, Wilbrow turned and disappeared through the stage-door. Matthias waited a trifle longer, as though anticipating trouble with the disappointed players; but there was no feeling manifest in their attitude toward him other than sympathy for a fellow-sufferer. And presently he consulted his watch and followed the stage-director. Those left in the theatre discussed the contretemps in subdued and regretful accents, betraying surprisingly little rancour toward anyone connected with it. Even Rideout escaped with slight censure. He was, in the final analysis, one of them--an incurable optimist who had erred only in banking too heavily on hope and promises. By twos and threes they gathered up their belongings and straggled off upon their various ways, a sorry, philosophic crew. Within ten minutes their dissociation was final and absolute. XVII Late in the evening, Matthias gave it up, and shaking off Rideout (whose only hope had resided in the author's anxiety to save his play) betook himself to an out-of-the-way restaurant to idle with a tasteless meal. He was at once dog-weary and heart-sick. The net outcome of some ten hours of runnings to and from, of meetings and schemings, of conferences by telephone and of communications by telegraph with those who had promised financial support to Rideout's project, was an empty assurance, indifferently given by the Shuberts, to the effect that, if nothing happened to make them think otherwise, they might possibly be prepared to consider the advisability of producing "The Jade God" about the first of January. The truth of the situation was that neither the Shuberts nor any other managerial concern was likely (as Wilbrow put it) "to look cross-eyed at the piece" until they could get full control of it; which would be in some three months, when Rideout's contract to produce would expire by limitation. And since Rideout might be counted upon to hold on to his contract rights till the last minute and leave nothing else undone in the effort to recoup his already substantial losses, it was useless to consider the play as anything but a property of potential value relegated indefinitely to abeyance. Matthias believed in the play with all his heart. During the last three weeks he had watched it come to life and assume the form he had dreamed for it, coloured with the rich hues of his imagination and quick with the breath of living drama. And because he possessed in some measure that rare faculty of being able to weigh justly the work of his own hand, and had looked upon this and seen that it was good, he had counted on it to win him that recognition which, more than money, his pride craved--partly by way of some compensation for what it had suffered at the hands of Venetia Tankerville. He was still sore with the hurt of that experience. Privately he doubted whether he would ever wholly recover from it; but the doubt was a very private one, never discovered even to his most sympathetic friends, not even to Helena, whose scorn of her sister-in-law remained immeasurable. Fortunate in having been able to afford those several weeks in the wooded hills of Maine, in their fragrant and passionless silences Matthias had found peace and regained confidence in his old, well-tried, wholesome code of philosophy; which held that though here and there a man ill-used by chance or woman might be found, the world was none the less sound and kind at heart, and good to live in. For all that, he could not easily endure the thought of Venetia's lowering herself to use him to further her love affair with Marbridge; of Venetia going from his arms and lips to the lips and arms of that insolent animal, Marbridge: the one amused by her successful cunning, the other contemptuous in his conquest. And he often wondered with what justice he judged the woman. It comforted him a little, at times, to believe that she had not acted so cruelly altogether as a free agent, to think her meeting with Marbridge in New York a freak of chance and fate, her elopement an unpremeditated and spontaneous surrender to the indisputable magnetism of the man. Marbridge commanded the reluctant admiration of men who did not like him--who knew him too well to like him. How much more easily, then, might he not have overcome the scruples of a girl untutored in the knowledge of her own heart.... Or had it all been due merely to the fact that John Matthias was not a man to hold the love of women? Such men exist, antipathetic to the Marbridges of the world. Was he of their unhappy order, incapable of inspiring enduring love? He could review a modest cycle of flirtations with women variously charming and willing to be amused, light-hearted attachments and short-lived, one and all, those that might have proved more lasting broken off without ill-will on either side--though always by the woman. Venetia alone had named Love to him as if it stood to her for something higher and more significant than the diversion of an empty hour--Venetia who was now in Italy, the bride of Marbridge! And yet, oddly enough, it wasn't his memories of Venetia and his regrets and wounded self-esteem that rendered insipid his belated dinner and made him presently abandon it in favour of the distracting throngs of Broadway. They were thoughts of another woman altogether that urged him forth and homeward--a poignant sympathy for Joan Thursday, the friendless and forlorn, whose high anticipations had with his own that day gone crashing to disaster. He couldn't remember what had made him think of her, but now that he did, it was with disturbing interest. He found himself suddenly very sorry for the girl--much more sorry for her than for himself. What to him was at worst a staggering reverse, to her must seem calamitous beyond repair. It wasn't hard to conjure up a picture of the child, pitifully huddled upon her bed, in tears, heart-broken, desolate, perhaps (since he had not been home to pay her) supperless and hungry! Matthias quickened his stride. His suddenly awakened and deep solicitude tormented him. He had received evidence that Joan's was a nature tempestuous and prone to extremes: he didn't like to contemplate the lengths to which despair might drive her. Through the texture of this new-found care ran a thread of irritation that it should have proved a care to him. He realized that he must of late have been giving a deal of thought to the girl. Formerly he had been aware of her much as he was of Madame Duprat; such kindness as he had shown her had been no greater than, and of much the same order as, he would have shown a stray puppy. Tonight he found himself unable to contemplate her as other than a vital figure in his life--a creature of fire and blood, of spirit and flesh, at once enigmatic and absolute, owning claims upon his consideration no less actual because passive. He who had pledged his ability and willingness to find her a foothold on the stage, was responsible for her present distress and disappointment. And if his good offices had been sought rather than voluntary, still was he responsible; for she wouldn't have dreamed of seeking them if he hadn't in the first place insisted on putting her under obligation to him. He had in a measure bidden her to look to him; now it was his part to look out for her. Hardly a pleasant predicament: Matthias resented it bitterly, with impatience conceding the weight of that doctrine which teaches the fatal responsibility of man for his hand's each and every idle turn. He had paused to pity a stray child of the town; and because of that, he now found himself saddled with her welfare. A situation exasperating to a degree! And, he argued, it was merely this subconscious sense of duty which had of late held the girl so prominently in his mind--ever since, in fact, that night when she had broken down and impulsively kissed his hand. Just that one hot-headed, frantic, foolish act had primarily brought home to Matthias his obligations as the object of her unsought, unwelcome gratitude.... He found Joan waiting on the stoop: a silent and vigilant figure, aloof from the other lodgers--a woman and two or three men lounging on the steps. And as these moved aside to give Matthias way, Joan rose and slipped quietly indoors, where in the hall she turned back with a gesture that too clearly betrayed the strain and tensity of her emotions; but, to his gratification, she was dry of eye and outwardly composed. "You were waiting for me?" he asked; and taking assent for granted rattled on with a show of cheerful contrition: "Sorry I'm late. There were ten dozen stones we had to turn, you know." Her eyes questioned. He smiled, apologetic: "No use; Rideout simply can't swing it." "I've finished type-writing that book," she announced obliquely. "Have you? That's splendid! Will you bring it to me? And then we can have a little talk." She nodded--"I'll go fetch it right away"--and scurried hastily up the stairs as he went on to his room. Leaving the door ajar and lighting his reading-lamp, Matthias closed the shutters at the long windows, adjusting their slats for ventilation. Then for some minutes he was left to himself. Resting against the edge of his work-table, he studied ruefully a cigarette which he was too indifferent or too distracted to continue smoking. Smouldering between his fingers, its slender stalk of pearly vapour ascended with hardly a waver in the still air, to mushroom widely above his head. It held his eyes and his thoughts in dreaming. He was thinking, simply and unconsciously, of the Joan he had just realized in the half-light of the hallway: a straight, slim creature with eyes like troubled stars, her round little chin held high as if in mute defiance of outrageous circumstance; vividly alive; giving a strange impression, as of some half-wild thing, at once timid and spirited, odd and--beautiful. To the sound of a light tap on the open door, the girl herself entered, a mute incarnation of that disturbing memory. She put down the manuscript before acknowledging his silent and intent regard. But becoming aware of this, her eyes wavered and fell, then again steadied to his. He was vastly concerned with the surprising length of her dark silken lashes and the delicate shadows on her warm, rich flesh. And he was sensitive to the virginal sweetness and fluent grace of her round and slender body. Vaguely he divined that the calm courage of her bearing was merely a naïve mask for a nature racked by intense feeling.... "That's the last," she said quietly, indicating the manuscript. "I finished up this evening," she added, superfluously yet without any evidence of consciousness. "Thank you. I'm glad to get it." Ransacking his pockets, Matthias found money, and paid her for the week. "I suppose that'll be all?" she asked steadily. "I mean, you won't want any more type-writing done for a while?" "I don't know," he said slowly. "We'll have to ... talk things over. Today has changed everything.... If you don't mind, I'll shut the door: people all the time passing through the hall...." She shook her head slightly to indicate a mild degree of impatience with his punctiliousness about that blessed door. Unconscious of this, having closed it, he returned to her, frowning a little as he reviewed her circumstances with a mind that seemed suddenly to have lost its customary efficiency of grasp. He found her eyes and lost them again, glancing aside in inexplicable embarrassment. "I'm sorry," he said slowly, looking down at the manuscript she had just delivered, and abstractedly disarranging it with thin, long fingers--"awfully sorry about the way things have turned out. I--" She interrupted him sharply: "O no, you're not!" He looked up quickly, amazed and disconcerted by the hint of anger in her tone. A little tremor ran through her body and she lifted her chin a trace higher while she met his stare with eyes hot and shining. Red spots like signals blazed in her either cheek. Confused, he stammered: "I beg your pardon--!" "I say you're not sorry. You're glad. You're glad, just like anybody else might be. _I_ don't blame you." She shot these words at him like bullets, with a disturbing display of passionate resentment. He opened his lips to speak, and thinking better of it, or else not thinking at all in his astonishment, gaped witlessly, wholly incapable of conceiving what had got into the girl. With a flush of scornful satisfaction her eyes remarked these evidences, so easily to be misinterpreted; then quickly she lowered her head and turned away, leaning against the table, her back to the light and face in shadow. "_I_ don't blame you," she repeated in a sullen murmur. He demanded blankly: "My dear girl, what _do_ you mean?" "I mean.... Why, just that you're glad to get rid of me!" she returned, looking away. He noticed the nervous strength with which her hands closed over the edge of the table, the whitening of their small knuckles.... "It's perfectly natural, I guess. I've been a nuisance so long, you've got every right to be tired of having me hang around--" "But, my dear young woman--!" She interrupted impatiently: "Oh, don't call me that. It don't mean anything. I guess I know when I'm not wanted. I'll go now and never bother you any more." Moving a pace or two away, she resumed before Matthias could muster faculties to cope with this emergency: "All the same, I don't want you to think I don't appreciate how good you've been to me--and patient, and all that. I am grateful--honest'--but I'm not as dumb as you think: I know when I'm in the way, all right!" "But you entirely misunderstand me--" "O no, I don't! You've made yourself plain enough, if you didn't think I had sense enough to see. It don't take _brains_ to see through a man who's only trying to be polite and kind--all the time bored--" "But, Miss Thursday--" She turned toward the door. He made a gesture of open exasperation. This was all so unfair! He had only meant to be kind and considerate and--and everything like that! And now she had drawn against him one of those unique and damnable indictments which seem to be peculiarly the product of a certain type of feminine mentality, and against which man is constitutionally incapable of setting up any effective defence, reason and logic alike being arbitrarily ruled out of court by the essential injustice of the charge. She chose to accuse him of having adopted toward her a mental attitude of which he was wholly guiltless; and there was no way by which he might persuade her of his innocence! And it was so confoundedly clear that she considered herself, temporarily at least, abused and altogether justified of her complaint! "Please," he begged, "don't go yet. Give _me_ a chance!" Her hand was on the knob. She hesitated, with an air of expectant and generous concession. "You're really quite unfair," he began; but paused to regain control of himself and to wonder a little, blindly, why it was that he tolerated her impudence--for it couldn't be called anything less. It would be much more sensible and quite just to bow to her construction of their indefinite relations and let her go her ways without more argument. In spite of everything, he could not refrain from one last attempt to set himself right. "I don't quite know what to say to you," he resumed patiently, "when you insist on putting thoughts into my head that never were there. I've really wanted to help you--" "Why?" The monosyllable brought him up startled and staring. "Why? I hardly know...." "Didn't you know better?" "I don't understand you--" Her eyes were wide and dark to his; all trace of petulance had faded from her manner. "You ought to. You ought to know," she insisted quietly, "that a man like you can't be just _kind_ to a girl like me without.... Oh!" she cried, "I suppose it would've been different if the show had gone out--and everything--but now, with that hope gone--and nothing more to do for you--with no prospects but to lose you--the only friend I've got in the world--!" Her voice broke at a high pitch, and she fell silent, turning away to stare with swimming eyes down at the table. He saw her trembling violently, her lips quivering. His amazement was extraordinary and bewildering. He heard his voice, as it might have been another's, saying: "Does it really mean so much to you?" "Oh, can't you see!" With a little, helpless motion of her hands, she lifted quickly to him a face of flushed and tear-dimmed loveliness. Another man might have been numb to its appeal: to Matthias it proved irresistible, coming sharp upon the shock of comprehending that she offered him her love, herself. In a stride, hardly knowing what he did, he folded the girl in his arms. She lay therein for an instant as though bewitched by the exquisite wonder of this consummation of her fondest, maddest dreams; then in a breath became a woman reanimate and wild with love, clinging to him with all her strength, in an ecstasy of impassioned tenderness. Bending his head, Matthias found her lips. "My dear, dear girl!" he murmured. "Oh," she breathed, "I have loved you always--always!" "If I had only known, if I had only guessed--!" "How could you? _I_ didn't know ... not till a little while ago.... And even then, I couldn't have told you ... only the thought of losing you ... my dear, my dear!" "I never guessed...." "You're not sorry? You're not angry with me--?" "Angry? I adore you!" "You will love me always?" "Always and forever." "And never send me away from you?" "You shall never leave me but of your own will." "I think I was going mad with the thought of losing you!" "My beloved girl!..." The dusky stillness of the room was murmurous with whispers, sighs, terms of endearment half smothered and all but inaudible. To these a foreign and alarming sound: a rapping at the door. Matthias lifted his head, wincing from the interruption. The girl in his arms moved feebly, as if to disengage. He held her for a moment still more close. Her heart sounded sonorously against his bosom. "Hush!" he said in a low and warning voice. And then the rapping was repeated. At once he released her. She moved away, blushing and dishevelled, the fragrant freshness of her starched linen waist a crumpled disorder, her hair in disarray; her crimson face one of many evidences of the tumult of her senses. In the hallway a man's voice said: "He must be in. There's a light--" A woman answered impatiently: "Of course he's in; but the chances are he's asleep." She called in a louder tone: "Jack--Jack Matthias!" Recognizing the voice of his aunt, that person groaned aloud--"O Lord!"--stole a glance at Joan, hesitated, shrugged, as if to say: There's no help for it! Then he answered the door. Helena swept in with a swirl of impatient skirts. "Good heavens!" she cried. "What ails you, Jackie? We knocked half a dozen times. Were you--?" Her glance encountering Joan, the words dried on her lips. Tankerville, at her heels, jerked a motor gauntlet from his fat hand in order to grasp that of Matthias. "Surprised you--eh?" he chuckled--"getting in so late. Well, it's all accidental. We were bound home--been visiting the Hastings for a week, you know--but the car broke down just this side of Poughkeepsie and delayed us and...." He became distressfully aware of his wife's silence, simultaneously ascertained the cause of it, and cut his speech short in full stride. Matthias laughed a little, quietly: no good trying to carry off this situation; by many a clue aside from Joan's confusion, they were betrayed. "You've caught us," he said cheerfully. "We may as well own up. Helena, this is Joan--Miss Thursday--my fiancée. And Joan, this is my aunt, Mrs. Tankerville--and her husband." And immediately he was conscious of the necessity of bridging the pause that would inevitably hold these three confounded, pending adjustment to his amazing announcement. "We had intended to keep it quiet for a while," he pursued evenly, shutting the door.... "Helena, let me help you with that cloak.... But since you've declared yourselves in, we can only ask you to hold your peace until we're ready. I'm sure we can count on you both." Tankerville puffed an explosive: "Oh--certainly!" Helena glanced shrewdly from Joan to Matthias. He smiled his confidence in her, knowing that he might count upon her doing the right thing to put the girl at ease--just shoulders of the girl as positively as he might count upon her violent opposition to the match as soon as she discovered that he had engaged himself to her pet abomination, a woman of the stage. With a bright nod to him, she turned back to Joan; drew slowly near to her; dropped kindly hands upon the shoulders of the girl. "But, my dear!" she exclaimed in a tone of expostulation--"you are beautiful!" XVIII Escorting his aunt to the car, Matthias helped her in, closed the door, and then, with a grin of amused resignation masking that trepidation to which he was actually a prey, folded his arms on the top of the door and invited the storm with one word of whimsical accent: "Well?" "Is it true?" she demanded, as if downright incredulous. "Most true," he insisted with convincing simplicity. The tip of one gloved finger to her chin, Helena considered remotely. "She's very beautiful," she conceded, "and sweet and fetching and hopelessly plebeian. She'd be wonderful to have around, to look at; but to listen to.... Oh my dear! what _are_ you thinking of?" "Cut it," Tankerville advised from his corner. "None of your funeral, old lady." "That consideration never yet hindered a Matthias," his wife retorted--"or a Tankerville, either, as far as I've been gifted to observe. However"--she turned again to her nephew--"you are presumably in love, and I hope you'll be happy, if ever you marry her. I shan't interfere--don't be afraid--but ... I could murder Venetia for this!" "Good night," said Matthias, offering his hand. But instead of taking it, his aunt leaned forward, caught his cheeks between both hands, and kissed him publicly. "Good night," she murmured in a tragical voice. "And Heaven help you!... When is it going to be?" "We haven't settled that yet," he laughed; "but you may be sure I shan't marry until I'm able to support my wife in a manner to which she's unaccustomed." He returned to Joan with--until he recrossed the threshold of his study--a thought ironic concerning the inconsistency of Helena's veneration of caste with her union to fat, good-natured, pretentiously commonplace George Tankerville. For that matter, the Matthias dynasty itself was descended from a needy, out-at-elbows English adventurer who had one day founded the family fortunes by taking title to Manhattan real estate in settlement of a gambling debt and on the next had died in a duel--the only act of thoughtful provision against improvidence registered in his biography. So Matthias wasn't much disposed to reverence his pedigree: social position, at least as a claim upon his consideration, meant little to him: the only class distinctions he was inclined to acknowledge were those created by the intellect and of the heart. In his private world people were either intelligent or stupid, either kindly or (stupidly) egoistic. To the first order, with humility of soul he aspired; for the other he was, without condescension, heartily sorry.... But there was nothing half so analytical as this in his temper when he rejoined Joan: only wonder and rejoicing and delight in her. He found her near the door, tense and hesitant, as though poised on the point of imminent flight. There was in her wide eyes a look almost of consternation; they seemed to glow, shot with the fire of her lambent thoughts. A doubting thumb and forefinger clipped her chin; a thin line of exquisite whiteness shone between her scarlet lips. Closing the door, he opened his arms. She came to them swiftly and confidently. Doubts and fears vanished in the joy of his embrace; she was no longer lonely in a world unfriendly. From the eloquent deeps of their submerged and blended senses, words now and again floated up like bubbles to the surface of consciousness: "You still love me?" "I love you." "It wasn't pity--impulse--Jack--?" "It was--love. It is love. It shall be love, dear heart, forever and always...." "You _told_ her--your aunt--we were engaged!" "Aren't we?" A convulsive tightening of her arms.... A whisper barely articulate: "You really ... want me ... enough to marry me?" "I love you." "But...." "Isn't that enough?" "But I am--only me: nothing: a girl who dares to love you." "Could any man ask more?" "You.... What will your friends say?... You'll be ashamed of me." "Hush! That's treason." "But you will--you won't be able to help it--" A faint, half-hearted cry of protest: words indistinguishable, silenced by lips on lips; a space of quiet.... "How shall I make myself worthy of you?" "Love me always." "How shall I dare to meet your family, your friends--?" "You will be my wife." "But that won't be for a long time...." "Yes, we must wait--be patient, Joan." She lifted her head, wondering. "But don't fear; love will sustain us." "I will be patient. You'll have to give me time to learn how not to disgrace you--" "What nonsense!" "I mean it. I must be somebody. I'm nobody now." "You are my dearest love." "I must be more, to be your wife. Give me time to learn to act. When I am a success--" "No more of that!" There was definite resolution in the interruption. "You must give up all thought of the stage." "But I want to--" "It's not the place for you--for my wife that is to be." "But we're not to be married for a long time, you say." "I'm a poor man, dear--I have enough for one, not enough for two. It may be only weeks, it may be months or years before my work begins to pay." "But meantime I must live--support myself, somehow." "You will leave that to me?" "I must do something--be independent--" "Won't you leave it all to me? I will arrange everything--" "I'll do whatever you wish me to." "And forget the stage--?" "I don't know--I'll try, Jack." "You must, dear one." It was not a time for disagreements. Joan clung more closely to him. The issue languished in default, was forgotten for the time.... Transports ebbed: the faintest premonitory symptoms of a return to something resembling sanity made their appearance; of a sudden Matthias remembered the hour. "Do you know," he said with tender gravity, having consulted his watch, "it's after eleven?" "It doesn't seem possible," she laughed happily. "And I'm hungry," he announced. "Aren't you?" She dared to be as frank as he: "Famished!" "Come along, then! Run, get your hat. It gives us an excuse for at least two hours more...." By the time she had repaired the damage this miracle had wrought with her appearance, Matthias had walked to the Astor and brought back a taxicab. The attention affected Joan with a poignant and exquisite sense of happiness. It was only her second ride in a motor vehicle. The top being down, they sat very circumspectly apart; but Matthias captured her hand and eye spoke to eye with secret laughter of delight, each reading the other's longing thought. The speed of the cab and its sudden slackening as it picked its path down Broadway, the flow of cool air against her face, the swimming maze of lights through which they sped, the sense of luxury and protection, added the last touch of delirious pleasure to Joan's mood. Matthias had chosen the café of "Old Martin's," at Twenty-sixth Street, the first place that suggested itself as one where they could sup without the girl being made to feel out of place in her modest work-a-day attire; but his thoughtfulness was misapplied: Joan was exalted beyond such annoyances; and those feminine glances which she detected, of pity, disdain, and jealousy, she took complacently as envious tributes to her prettiness and her conquest. From a seat against the wall, in a corner, she reviewed the other patrons of the smoke-wreathed room with a hauteur of spirit that would have seemed laughable had it been suspected. She thought of herself as the handsomest woman there, and the youngest, of Matthias as the most distinguished man and--the luckiest. The circumstances of the place and her partner enchanted her to distraction. The food Matthias ordered she devoured heedlessly; but there was a delicious novelty in the experience of sipping her first glass of champagne. It was, for that matter, the first time she had ever tasted good wine, or any kind of alcoholic drink other than an occasional glass of lukewarm beer, cheap and nasty to begin with and half-stale at best, and that poisonous red wine of the Italian boarding-house to which Charlie Quard had introduced her. She had never dreamed of anything so delicious as this dry and exhilarating draught with its exotic bouquet and aromatic bubbles. With a glowing face and dancing eyes she nodded to Matthias over the rim of her goblet. "When we are rich," she laughed softly, "I'm never going to drink anything else!" He smiled quietly, enjoying her enjoyment; but, when emptied, the half-bottle he had ordered was not renewed. There was without that enough intoxication in his fondness, in the simulacrum of gaiety manufactured by the lights, the life, the laughter, and in the muted, interweaving strains of music. Joan felt that she was living wonderfully and intensely, a creature of an existence transcendent and radiant. It was after one when another taxicab whisked them homeward through the quieting streets. She sat as close as could be to her lover and would not have objected on the grounds of "people looking" had he put an arm round her. Though he didn't, she was not disappointed, sharing something of his mood of sublimely sufficient contentment. But when he bade her good night at the foot of the stairs in the deserted and poorly lighted hallway, she gave herself to his caresses with a passion and abandon that startled and sobered Matthias, and sent him off to his room and bed in a thoughtful frame of mind. Lying awake in darkness until darkness was dimly tempered by the formless dusk that long foreruns the dawn, he communed gravely with his troubled heart. "Things can't go on this way--as they've started. There's _got_ to be sanity.... It's myself I've got to watch, of course," he said with stubborn loyalty to his ideal. "I mustn't forget I'm a man--nine years older--nearly ten.... Why, she's hardly more than a kiddie.... She doesn't _know_.... I've got to watch myself...." And in her room, four floors above, Joan sat as long before her bureau, chin cradled on her slim, laced fingers, eyeing intently the face shown her by gas-light in the one true patch of the common, tarnished mirror. When at length she rose, suddenly conscious of a heavy weariness, she lingered yet another long moment for one last fond look. "It's true," she told herself with a little nod of conviction; "I am beautiful. _She_ said I was ... he thinks I am ... I must be...." XIX For a long time Joan lay snug between the sheets, staring wide-eyed into the patch of lustrous blue morning sky framed by the window, reviewing this new and wonderful adventure of her heart from a point of view remote, detached, and critical. Thoughts recurred that in the excitement and ardour of the night had been passed over and neglected; and from them she derived a new, strange, and intoxicating sense of power. Her first waking thought was as her last before sleeping: _I am beautiful_. Her second, not _I love him_, but _He loves me_. And her third grew out of the second: _I can make him do what pleases me_. Yesterday a lowly supplicant at the shrine of love: today Love's very self, adored and desired by an erstwhile divinity now humbled to the level of humanity! A fit of petulance, beauty in tears, a whispered word of passion: strange and strangely simple incantation to have turned a world upside down! How easily was man suppled to the spell! The sense of power ran like wine through her being: she felt herself invincible, an adept of love's alchemy; she had surprised its secret, and now the world of man's heart lay open to the practices of her disastrous art. For a moment she experienced an almost terrifying intimation of empires ripe for conquest that lay beyond Matthias; but from this she withdrew her troubled gaze; nor would she look again; not yet.... She considered his mad extravagance of last night--taxicabs, champagne, tips! Was he, then, able to afford such expenditures? In her understanding they went oddly with his pretensions to decent poverty. Or had he merely lost his head under the influence of her charms? This last theory pleased her; she adopted it with reservations: the question remained one to be cleared up. He disapproved of a career upon the stage for her?... Joan smiled indulgently: that matter would be arranged in good time. She meant to have her way.... At a tap on her door she changed suddenly from the aloof egoist to a woman athrill before the veil of portentous mysteries. She sat up in bed, called out to know who was knocking, gave permission to the chambermaid to enter, and received a note in the hand of Matthias. "_Past twelve o'clock_," she read, "_and still no sign of you, sweetheart. I give you thirty minutes to dress and come to me. If you don't, I'll come for you. After breakfast, we'll run out of town for the day--our first day together!_ MATTHIAS." Half wild with delight, she hurried through her toilet and ran down-stairs to find her lover waiting in the hallway, watch in hand. He closed it with a snap, and made her a quaintly ceremonious bow. "In two minutes more--!" he observed in a tone of grave menace. "But before we go out, have the kindness to step into my humble study. I have somewhat to say to you." She appeared to hesitate, to be reluctant and preoccupied occupied. "What about?" she demanded distantly. But her dancing eyes betrayed her. "Business," he said, sententious. His gesture indicated a vigilant universe of eavesdroppers. "Nobody's but our own!" Nevertheless, there was none to spy upon them as he drew her gently by the waist, down the hall and into the back-parlour. She yielded with a charming diffidence. In his embrace the sense of power slipped unheeded from her ken; returned the deep, obliterating rapture of over-night. Lips that first submitted, soon gave in return, then demanded.... She clung heavily to him, a little faint and breathless with a vague and sweet and nameless longing.... At breakfast in a neighbouring restaurant, Matthias disclosed his plans for the day, involving a motor trip down along the north shore of Long Island, dinner at Huntington, a return by moonlight. Joan, enchanted by the prospect--the sum of whose experience outside Manhattan Island was comprised in a few trips to Coney Island--consented with a strange mingling of eagerness and misgivings; the thought of the cost troubled a conscience still haunted by memories of last night's prodigality. "I didn't know you had an automobile." "I haven't; I'm chartering one for the day." "But ... but ... won't it be awf'ly expensive?" "Don't worry, dear." "But, you know, you aren't--rich." "I'm a magnate of happiness, at all events: and today is _our_ day, the first of our love, sweetheart. For twelve long hours we're going to forget everything but our two selfish selves. Why fret about tomorrow? It always does manage to take care of itself, somehow. And frankly, I don't care to be reminded of its existence today; for tomorrow I work...." A day of quicksilver hours slipping ever from their jealous grasp; of hours volatile and glamorous: in Joan's half-dazed consciousness, a delectable pageant of scenes, sensations and emotions no sooner comprehended than displaced by others no less wonderful.... Abed long after midnight, visions besieged her bewilderingly: a length of dusty golden highway walled by green forest, with a white bridge glaring in sunlight at the bottom of a hill; the affrighting onrush of great motor-cars meeting their own, and the din and dust of their passage; the bright harbour of Huntington, blue and gold in a frame of gold and green, viewed from the marble balustrade of the Château des Beaux Arts; the wrinkled, kindly, comprehending face of a waiter who served them at dinner; the look in her lover's eyes as she repeated, on demand, guarded avowals under cover of the motor's rumble; the ardent face of a boy who had seemed unable to cease staring at her in the restaurant; silver and purple of the road by night; wheeling ranks of lights dotting the desolation of suburban Brooklyn; the high-flung span of Queensboro' Bridge, a web of steel and concrete strung with opalescent globes; the glare of the city's painted sky; the endless pulsing of the motor; their last caress on parting at the foot of the stairs.... On the morrow she went back to her typewriter like Cinderella to her kitchen. But what work Matthias was able to invent for her was neither arduous nor urgent; she was able to take her time on it, and wasted many an hour in dreaming. Her mind was, indeed, more engaged with thoughts of new frocks than with the circumstances of her love or her services to her lover. She was to receive thenceforward twenty-five instead of ten dollars a week. Matthias had experienced little difficulty in over-ruling her faint protestations: they were to be together a great deal, he argued, and she must be able to dress at least neatly; moreover, by requiring her promise to marry him at some future time when his fortunes would permit, he had in a measure made her dependent upon him; she couldn't reasonably be asked to wait for long on a bare pittance. His arguments were reinforced by one he knew nothing of, a maxim culled from the wisdom of Miss Maizie Dean: _It was up to a girl to look out for herself first, last, and all the time_. The platitude had made an ineffaceable impression upon Joan's sense of self-preservation. And if Matthias were able to afford nightly dinners for two at good restaurants, in addition to theater tickets several times a week, he ought to be able to afford a decent compensation to his stenographer; especially when it was his wish that she refrain from attempting to earn more money on the stage. It was, however, true that no offer had come to Joan of other theatrical work, and that the issue of her ambition remained in abeyance, a subject which she didn't care to raise and which Matthias, since that first night, had considered settled. Customarily they met each evening about half-past six at some distance from their lodgings: a precaution against gossip on the part of the other inmates of the Maison Duprat. Thence they would go to dine at some favourite restaurant, where food was good and evening dress not obligatory--the café of their first supper by preference, or else the Lafayette, in University Place, the Brevoort House, or one of a few minor French establishments upon which Matthias had conferred the approval of a discriminating taste. Thereafter, if he meant to work, they would take a taxicab for a brief whirl through Central Park or up Riverside Drive to Grant's Tomb and back. Or if he considered attendance upon some first representation important enough to interfere with his work, as forming part of the education of a student of contemporaneous drama, they would go to a theatre, where he always contrived to have good but inconspicuous seats. In all, Joan must have attended with him eight or nine first-nights; and since Matthias refused to waste his time on musical comedy, they witnessed for the most part plays dealing with one phase or another of social life in either London or New York. From these Joan derived an amount of benefit which would have surprised anyone ignorant of the quickness of perception and intelligent adaptability characteristic of the American girl, however humble her origin. The poorest plays furnished her with material for self-criticism and improvement. As plays, indeed, she was but vaguely interested in them, but as schools of deportment, they held her breathlessly attentive. She never took her gaze from the stage so long as there remained upon it an actress portraying, however indifferently, a woman of any degree of cultivation whatever. Gestures, postures, vocal inflections, the character of their gowns and the manner in which they contrived to impart to them something of their wearer's personality, the management of a tea-cup or a fashion of shaking hands: all these were registered and stored away in the girl's memory, to be recalled when alone, reviewed, dissected, modified to fit her individually, practised, and eventually to be adopted with varying discretion and success. She who was to be the wife of a man of position, was determined that his friends and associates should find little to censure in her manners. For long Helena Tankerville figured to Joan as an impeccable model of tact, distinction, taste, and gentlewomanliness. To become as Helena was, summed up the dearest aspirations of the girl. She began to be very guarded in her use of English, eschewed as far as her means permitted the uniform style of costume to which New York women are largely prone, dressed her hair differently and upon no superstructure other than its own, and spent long hours manicuring and observing the minor niceties of the feminine toilet. Paradoxically, with the obtuseness characteristic of a certain type of imaginative man, Matthias appreciated and was grateful for the improvement in his fiancée without realizing it objectively; what pleased his sensitive tastes, he accepted as normal expressions of innate good-breeding; what jarred, he glossed with charity. It was inconceivable that he should love any woman but one instinctively fine: he endowed Joan with many a grace and many a virtue that she did not possess; and this implicit assertion of his, that she was all that the mistress of his heart ought to be, incited her to more determined efforts to resemble all that by birth and training she was not. It was some time before the novelty palled and she grew restive under the strain of it all.... "I had a talk with Rideout today," he observed during dinner, on an evening about a fortnight subsequent to the disbanding of "The Jade God" company. "He's dickering with Algerson--thinks the thing may possibly come to a deal before long." "How do you mean?" Joan enquired with quick interest. "Algerson wants to buy Rideout's interest in the play--at a bargain to himself, of course. Rideout is holding out for a better offer, but he's hard pressed, and I rather think he'll close with Algerson within a few days." "Who's Algerson?" Joan asked, after an interval devoted to ransacking her memory for some echo of that name; resulting in the conviction that she had never heard it before. "He runs a chain of stock companies out on the Pacific Coast, and now he's anxious to branch out into the producing business." "And if he gets 'The Jade God'--when will he put it on?" "Can't say--haven't seen him. I'm not supposed to know he's interested as yet; though of course they'll have to come to me before the deal can be ratified." "But you'll consent?" "Rather! Especially if Algerson will take over Rideout's contract as it stands. It provides for pretty good royalties, and as a prospective bridegroom I'm very much interested in such sordid matters." Joan traced a meaningless pattern on the cloth with a tine of her fork; glanced surreptitiously at Matthias; remembered that toying with the tableware wasn't good form, and quietly abandoned the occupation. "I wonder ..." she murmured abstractedly. "You wonder what--?" Matthias prompted when she failed to round out her thought. She laughed uneasily. "I was just wondering if--if he gets the piece--Algerson would give me a chance at my old part?" "Not with my consent," said Matthias promptly. "You know I don't want you to stick at that game." "But I'm tired doing nothing," she pouted prettily. Matthias shook his stubborn head. "Besides," he added quickly, "Algerson will probably try the show out in one of his stock houses before he goes to the expense of organizing a new and separate production. I mean, he'll use people already on his pay roll, and not engage outsiders until he knows pretty well whether he's got a success or a failure on his hands." "You think he will produce out West?" "Probably." "And will you have to go?" "I don't know. I shan't unless I get some guarantee of expenses. Although ... I don't know ... perhaps I ought to. Wilbrow and I are the only people who know how the thing ought to be done, and Algerson most certainly won't pay what Wilbrow asks for making a production--and his expenses to the Coast and back, besides.... It would be a shame to let a valuable property go smash for want of intelligent supervision." "Then you may go, after all?" "I can't say until something definite is arranged. I'll have to think it over." Joan sighed. A week elapsed before the subject came up again. Matthias had been out all day; Joan, with no typing to engage her, had sought surcease of ennui with a book and an easy chair in the back-parlour. But the story was badly chosen for her purpose. Its heroine, like herself, had in the beginning been merely a girl of the people, little if any better equipped for the struggle to the top: Joan could see no reason why she should not rise with a rapidity as wonderful, given but the chance denied her through the unreasonable prejudice of her lover. And presently the book lay open and neglected in her lap, while her thoughts engaged mutinously with this obstruction to her desires, seeking a way to circumvent it without imperilling her conquest. Joan was proud and sure of her power over Matthias, but she realized that in spite of it she didn't as yet fill his life; there existed in his nature reticences her imagination might not plumb; and until chance, or the confidence only to be engendered through long, slow processes of intimate association, should make these known to her, she hesitated to join issue with his will. And yet ... she was continually restless and discontented. Sometimes she felt that the old order of uncertainty and stifled longings had been better for her soul; that she couldn't much longer endure the tension of living up to the rigorous standards of Matthias and his kind; that she might even be happier as the object of a passion less honourable and honest than that which he offered her. But never before this day had she admitted so much to herself, even in her most secret hours of egoistic self-communion.... Matthias came in briskly, in a glow of high spirits, shortly before sunset; and immediately, as always, her every doubt and misgiving vanished like mists in the morning-glow of his love. Throwing hat and stick upon the couch, he went directly to her chair, knelt beside it, gathered her to him. She yielded with a sedate yet warm tenderness perhaps the more sincere today because of a conscience stricken by the memory of her late disloyalty of thought. And something of her fond gravity and gentleness penetrated and sobered his own mood. He held her very close for many minutes. But when he drew back at arm's-length to worship her with his eyes, she turned her head aside quickly, if not quickly enough to deceive him. He was instant to detect the glimmer of tears in her long lashes, the childish tremor of her sweet lips, and again drew her to him. "My dearest one!" he whispered with infinite gentleness and solicitude. "What is it? Tell me." "Nothing," she breathed brokenly in return. "Nothing--only--I guess--I'm a little blue--lonely without you, dear. I'm afraid I need either to be at work or--with you always." "Then be comforted, sweetest girl; the time won't be long, now--I believe in my very soul." "Till when--?" She leaned back in her chair, examining his face with eyes that shone with infectious fire of his confident excitement. "Till when? What do you mean? Something has happened!" "You're right," he laughed exultantly: "two big things have happened to me today. Wylie has accepted 'Tomorrow's People': we signed the contract this afternoon; he's to put it on about the first of the year." "Oh, I'm so glad!" "But that isn't all: Algerson has bought Rideout's contract and is to produce 'The Jade God' in Los Angeles as soon as it can be got ready." "Dearest!" There was an interval.... "Only," he said presently, "it's going to mean a little real loneliness for you, dear--not more than a few weeks--" "Why?" she demanded sharply. "Because I've promised Algerson to superintend the rehearsals. I couldn't well refuse. You know how much it means to us, dear heart." "When do you leave?" "Monday--the Twentieth Century Limited for Chicago then on to Los Angeles." "And you'll be gone, altogether, how long?" Joan persisted tensely. "With good luck, about a month. If we strike a snag, of course, I may have to stop over a week or so longer. It's hard to say." "Then I'm to be left--here--alone--with nothing to do but wait--perhaps more than a month!" "I'm afraid so, dear. It's for both of our sakes. So much depends--" "Jack!" Placing her hands on his shoulders, Joan held him off. "Take me with you," she pleaded earnestly. "Think a moment, sweetheart. You must see how impossible it is. For one thing, it wouldn't--O it's all very well to say 'Conventions be hanged!' but--it wouldn't look right. We're not married." "Take me with you, Jack," she repeated stubbornly. He shook his head. "And, fairly and squarely, dear, I can't afford it. I haven't got enough money. Even if we were married, I'd have to leave you here." For a moment longer the girl kept her hands upon his shoulders, exploring his face with eyes that seemed suddenly to have been robbed of much of their girlishness. Then: "Very well," she said coldly, and releasing him, she sat back and averted her countenance. Matthias got up, distressed and perplexed. "You can't mean your love won't stand the strain of a few weeks' separation, Joan!" She made no answer. He shrugged, moved to the work-table, found a cigarette and lighted it. "Surely you can wait that long--" "I'll do my best," she interrupted almost impatiently. "If it can't be, it can't. So don't let's talk any more about it." "I'd give a good deal to be able to arrange things the way you wish," he grumbled. "But I don't see...." She was silent. He paced the worn path on the carpet for a few moments, then turned aside to his desk and stood idly examining a little collection of correspondence which had been delivered in his absence. One or two letters he opened, skimmed through without paying much attention to their contents, and tossed aside. A third brought from him an exclamation: "Hello!" "What is it?" Joan enquired indifferently. "What do you say to running down to Tanglewood over Sunday?" "Tanglewood?" "My Aunt Helena's home--down at Port Madison, Long Island, you know. She has just written, asking us. It would be rather fun. Would you like to go?" A blunt negative was barely suppressed. Curiosity made Joan hesitate, and temporarily to forego further petulance. "I've got nothing to wear," she doubted uncertainly. "Rot: you don't need anything but shirtwaists and skirts. There won't be anybody but you, Helena, George Tankerville and myself." Matthias leaned over the back of her chair and caught her face between his hands. "It'll be a splendid holiday for us, before I start. Say yes--sweetheart!" Joan turned up her face to his, lifting her arms to encircle his neck. She nodded consent as he bent his lips to hers. XX At times Joan was more than half inclined to doubt the reality of some of those unique phases of existence to which her love affair introduced her. Some experiences seemed beyond belief, even to an imagination stimulated by inordinate ambition and further excited by incessant novel-reading and theater-going. On the Friday morning following the receipt of Helena's invitation she went shopping, squandering upwards of three weeks' savings with that delicious abandonment to extravagance which is possible only to a woman of supremely confident tomorrows. The hundreds she was in subsequent days to disburse as thoughtlessly never afforded her one-half the pleasure that accompanied the expenditure of those seventy hoarded dollars. (For aside from the rent of her room, her association with Matthias had spared her nearly every other expense of daily life.) Among other things, she purchased for twenty-five dollars a simple evening frock eminently adapted to her requirements. A tolerably faithful copy of a foreign model, it had been designed to fetch a much higher price than that at which Joan was able to acquire it at an end-of-the-season bargain sale. She tried it on before deciding, and had the testimony of the department store mirrors that it was wonderfully becoming to her years and type of beauty. And it was the only garment of its kind that she had ever owned. As she hurried, tardily, to keep an appointment with Matthias for lunch at Martin's, she told herself that she would never know greater happiness. She could not rid her mind of that wonderful frock and the figure she had cut in it, posing in the dressing-room. But after luncheon--over which they lingered until they were quite alone in the eastern dining-room--with some hesitation, and having assured himself that there was not even a waiter near at hand, Matthias fumbled in one of his waistcoat pockets, produced a small leather-covered case, and passed it across the table. "I'd meant to keep this till we got home," he said with an awkward smile. "But I don't think I can wait...." Joan opened the box--and drew the longest breath of her life. Her heart seemed to leap and then stand stock-still for a full minute before she grasped the magnificence of his present: her engagement ring! Then and there the girl lost all touch with the tough verities of life; and throughout the day and until she lost consciousness in bed that night, a sensual enchantment held dominion over all her being.... Nor was the great adventure of the visit to Tanglewood of a nature calculated to dissipate that glamour--save, perhaps, in one untoward circumstance which, wholly unforeseen, could not have been provided against. A woman less shrewd and intelligent than Helena Tankerville, and one as violently opposed to the match, might have planned that short week-end visit to influence and discourage the girl rather than Matthias. But Helena knew that contrast would have the desired effect only upon the man; to whom its significance would be in inverse ratio to the emphasis lent it. So with infinite tact and thoughtfulness Joan's way was made smooth for her from the moment she alighted from the train until the moment of her leave-taking; and this without the least tangible suggestion that any especial consideration was being shewn her. The smallness of the party sanctioned informality; and George Tankerville's obtuse kindness of heart (which permitted him to see nothing in the stratagems of his wife other than a desire to put the girl completely at her ease) facilitated matters immensely. Joan was spared the embarrassment of a maid--was, indeed, given no reason to believe there were any such servants attached to the establishment. Suffered to unpack her modest effects and dispose of them herself, she received at Helena's hands the indispensable service of "hooking-up." And her unpretentious, pretty frock was by no means overshadowed by Helena's or by the unceremonious dinner jackets of the men; while the simplicity of the evening meal put her thoroughly at her ease, whose recently acquired but rather extensive acquaintance with New York restaurant ways and waiters robbed the attentions of a butler of their terrors. Nor was it, possibly, altogether a matter of chance that neighbouring friends telephoned an after-dinner invitation to Helena and Tankerville to run over and make up a table at auction: so that Joan was left alone with her lover to become acquainted with and at home among the charms of Tanglewood.... But it wasn't until the first hours of a still and splendid September Sunday that her sense of wonder was quite ravished by the place: its foreign and luxurious atmosphere, the half-wild loveliness of its grounds, the perfection of its appointments and the uniquity of its location. Then the sense of unreality resumed full sway over her perceptions: she seemed to move and have her being in a strange, new world of rare and iridescent witchery. And Helena was at pains to leave her no time for doubts or analysis. They motored in the morning to the South Shore and back, and after luncheon took the Enchantress for a short spin up the Sound, returning for tea upon the terrace.... Tankerville and Matthias were wrangling amiably about the least comfortless routes overland to the Pacific; Helena, with binoculars at the balustrade, was simulating an extravagant interest in the manoeuvers of two small yachts far in the distance (and, in the breathing-space thus cunningly contrived, wildly ransacking a rather extensive fund of resource for some subject which might prove a common ground of interest between herself and her guest) and Joan, in the depths of a basket-chair, while seeming smilingly to attend to the light banter of the men, was deeply preoccupied in consideration of her extraordinary sensation of comfort and security in this exotic environment. She was deliciously flattered by appreciation of her own ease and adaptability. The conclusion seemed inevitable that, somehow, strangely, Nature had meant her for just such an existence as this. The terrace was aflood with the golden glow of the westering sun--the season so far advanced that there was no discomfort in its warmth. The Sound shone like a sapphire, still and vast, and the cup of the skies bending over it was flawless sapphire banded at its rim with an exquisite shade of amethyst. Ashore, the wooded slopes were all aflame in the mortal passion of Indian summer. In the stirless, suave, and aromatic air hung an impalpable yet ineluctable hint of melancholy.... From landward, with unusual resonance in the deep quiet of that hour, sounded the long, dull, whining purr of a motor-car. Helena lowered the glasses, turned an ear to the sound, and came slowly back to the tea-table and Joan. Her faint smile, together with a slight elevation of her delicately darkened brows, indicated surprise. Engrossed in their argument, Matthias and Tankerville gave no heed to the threatened visitation. Resentfully, Joan detached her attention from the diamond Matthias had given her, and at discretion tossed aside a cigarette which she had been pretending to like because Helena smoked quite openly, and it was consequently the smart thing to do. Undoubtedly the car was stopping on the drive. Helena moved a few paces toward the house, paused, waited. A woman's laugh with an accent of cheerful excitement came to them. Joan saw Helena start and noticed Matthias break off a sentence in the middle and swing round in his chair. Immediately a woman ran through the doorway to the terrace, a light dust-wrap streaming from her shoulders. A man followed, but at the time Joan hardly noticed him. The woman absorbed all her interest, even though it was an interest compounded of jealousy and hostility. She was unquestionably the loveliest creature Joan had ever seen. Without moving, but staring, the girl sat transfixed with distrust and poignant envy. With a cry of wonder--"Venetia!"--Helena ran to greet these unpresaged guests. Meeting, the two women indulged in an embrace almost theatrically perfunctory. The commonplaces of such situations were breathlessly exchanged. Then Helena, disengaging turned to the man and extended a hand. "Well, Mr. Marbridge!..." she cried with a light note of semi-reproof in her laughter. At this, with a brightening smile, Marbridge bent over her hand, saying something indistinguishable to Joan. She was watching the meeting between Matthias and Venetia Marbridge. He held both her hands, and she permitted him to retain them, for a longer moment of silent greeting than Joan thought necessary. But this circumstance alone betrayed whatever constraint was felt by either. A smile, vague and perhaps not lacking a thought of tender sadness, touched the lips and eyes of Venetia. Matthias returned his twisted and indefinitely apologetic grin. "More than ever charming, Venetia!" "Thank you, Jack." If there were any hint of challenge in her tone or her straightforward eyes, Joan didn't detect it. George Tankerville submitted with open resignation to the embrace of his sister. "I suppose I've got to stand for this," he observed with philosophy. "Do you mean me to infer that you're humble and contrite?" "Not in the least," Venetia retorted defiantly. "Oh, very well," said he. "That being the case, I extend to you my belated blessing. How did you leave things on the other side?" "Much as usual--and by steamer." "When'd you get back?" "Last Monday...." Venetia became openly aware of Joan. Matthias interposed. "Miss Thursday--my fiancée. Joan, this is Mrs. Marbridge." [Illustration: "Miss Thursday--my fiancée. Joan, this is Mrs. Marbridge."] "Truly?" The shock told; she had been playing off very deftly a painful contretemps, but this announcement dashed Venetia. Momentarily she hesitated, scarlet lips apart but inarticulate, widening eyes of violet a shade darker, with--if possible--a pallor deeper even than that most striking attribute of her beauty. But the check could have been apparent only to the initiate or to a strongly intuitive intelligence. "I _am_ so glad!" she cried with sincerity--"so glad for both of you!" Impulsively she caught Joan's hands, drew the girl to her--"May I, my dear? We're to be great friends, you know!"--kissed her; then swinging round--"Vincent!" she called gaily. "Such news! Do come here immediately!" Marbridge showed a face strongly marked with the enquiry of his heavy, lifting eyebrows. His glance comprehended Joan with kindling interest. With Helena he approached, his heavy body rolling a little in spite of the elasticity of his stride. "My husband, Vincent Marbridge. Vincent, this is Joan Thursday. She's engaged to Jack Matthias. Isn't it wonderful? And aren't they both fortunate? And _isn't_ she pretty?" Marbridge's unctuous and intimate smile accompanied his reply: "Yes to all--twice yes to your last question." His warm strong hand closed over Joan's diffident fingers. "My heartiest congratulations to you both.... Ah, Mr. Matthias, how are you? So we meet again--at Tanglewood!" The hands of the two men touched and fell apart. But this clue was wasted upon Joan, who stood silently abashed and sullen with consciousness of her own inept awkwardness as contrasted with the amiable aplomb of these people with whom good breeding was a cult, the practice of the art of self-possession its primary rite. To Marbridge she stammered: "Pleased to meet you." And immediately felt her face burning and as if she could faint for sheer mortification. It was Helena who, pitiful for the gaucherie of the girl, saved the situation by raising the issue of tea. Venetia demurred: they were, it seemed, visiting friends in Southampton; had driven over only for a call of a moment; would be late for dinner if they tarried. But Marbridge settled the question by dropping solidly into a chair and announcing that there he was and there would stay pending either tea or a highball. Venetia, unable to disguise a flush of resentment, showed her back to her husband and devoted herself to George Tankerville. As Helena summoned a servant, Marbridge hitched his chair closer and inaugurated a rather one-sided conversation with Joan. Again in her basket-chair, knees daintily crossed in imitation of a pose mentally photographed from the stage, Joan experienced renewed consciousness of her attractions, and with it regained a little ease. It could scarcely be otherwise under the wondering regard that Marbridge bent upon the girl. His admiration was unconcealed, and to Joan at first the sweeter since it was diverted from his wife. But insensibly the situation began to affect her less pleasantly. She grew sensitive to an effect of strain in the atmosphere, made up in equal parts of Venetia's indignation, Matthias's annoyance, Helena's suave but quite fruitless efforts to interpose and distract the interest of Marbridge to herself. And there was a confusing and disturbing element of familiar and personal significance in the man's undeviating and brazen stare. Truly, in the older sense of the word, impudent, it hinted an understanding so complete as to be almost shameful--worse, it educed a real if unspoken response from the girl; unwillingly she admitted the existence of a bond of sympathy between herself and this man whom she had never seen before, a feeling more true and intimate than that which her association with Matthias had inspired, than any she had ever known. For a time she fought against this impression, in a bewilderment that evoked from her only witless and hesitant responses. Then suddenly encountering his eyes--actually against her will--she was stricken dumb and breathless by comprehension of their intent; in effect, they stripped her: bodily and mentally they made her naked to this man. Nor was this the sum: for the merest fraction of a moment Joan felt herself answering: in her bosom a strange oppression, strangely troubling and sweet; in her own eyes a kindling light, sympathetic, shameless.... Instantly quenched: distress and affronted modesty incarnadined her face, veiled her eyes. Almost unconsciously she turned away. Indistinctly she saw the white face of Venetia, set and hard, with a scornful lip for her husband. Shifting to view the object of his admiration, it showed no change of expression. Her voice cut incisively through his lazy, drawling accents. "This is quite impossible," she said coolly, consulting a jewelled watch on her slender, gloved wrist. "If we stay another instant we shall be unforgivably late. But"--to Helena--"thank you so much, dear, for wanting us to stop.... Vincent, I am going." She moved slowly toward the house. Marbridge kept his seat. "Nonsense!" he expostulated. "Plenty of time. Tea's just coming. And I'm dying the death of a dog with thirst." "I am going," Venetia repeated in an uninflected voice. His dark face darkening, Marbridge glanced to Helena, to Tankerville, ignored Matthias, looked back to Joan: gaining as little encouragement from her, as from his host and hostess, since she dared not again meet his gaze. With a movement of his heavy shoulders and a chuckle he heaved himself out of the chair. "Oh, _all_ right," he called indulgently to his wife: "coming!... All women are crazy, anyhow," he confided to the others. "You've got to let 'em have their own way. So--good night. Hope I'll have the pleasure of seeing you-all soon again." He extended a hand to Helena--who gave him cool fingertips--and paused before Joan. "Au revoir, Miss Thursday...." The girl was unconscious of the proffered hand. Her eyes averted, she murmured a good night. His smile broadening, Marbridge turned to Matthias; received from him a look that was as good as a kick, gave back a grin of graceless effrontery; and swinging, linked arms with Tankerville. "Come along, George--take a look at our new car. She's a wonder!" Civilly playing his part, Tankerville submitted. They disappeared--Marbridge gabbling cheerfully--into the house. Joan uncurtained her eyes. Her lover, with a face of thunder, was looking toward his aunt; who made a slight negative motion of her head, with an admonitory flutter of one hand: a servant with a tray was drawing near. Matthias answered her with a gesture of controlled wrath; turned to the balustrade; stood there staring straight into the angry sunset glow. On the drive a motor snorted, snored, drew away with a whine diminuendo.... Throughout the remainder of Joan's visit the incident was not once referred to. But it had had its curious and disturbing effect upon the girl. She remembered it all very vividly, reviewed it with insatiable inquisitiveness. From this she derived a feeling, which she resented, of having witnessed a scene fraught with significance indecipherable to her. XXI A little after the hour of four on Monday afternoon, Joan emerged from that riotous meander of hideous wooden galleries, ramps, passages, sheds, and vast echoing caves of gloom, which in those days encumbered the site of the new Grand Central Station; and with a long breath of relief turned westward on Forty-second Street. She walked slowly and without definite aim; yet she had never felt so keenly the quickness and joy of being alive. Her idle fancy invested with a true if formless symbolism her escape from that amazing labyrinth of shadows to the clear, sweet sunlight of the clamorous, busy street: as if she had eluded and cast off convention and formality, the constraint of a settled future and the strain of aspirations to be other than as Nature had fashioned her; and was free again of the enchanting ease of being simply herself. She had within five minutes said good-bye to her betrothed; her lips were yet warm with their parting kiss, her eyes still moist--and so, the more bewitching--with the facile tears through which she had watched his train draw out of the station. He was not to be back within a month; more probably his return would not occur within five or six weeks.... She was contrarily possessed by two opposed humours: one approximately saturated with an exquisite melancholy and a sense of heroic emotions adequately experienced; and the other, of freedom untrammelled by restrictions of any sort. Overruling her faint-hearted protests, Matthias had left her the sum of six weeks' wages (or allowance) in advance, by way of provision against emergencies and delays. Joan had this magnificent sum of one hundred and fifty dollars intact in her pocket-book: more money than she had ever--at least, seriously--dreamed of possessing at one time. Temporarily it represented to her imagination, level-headed as she ordinarily was in consideration of money matters, wealth almost incalculable. It thrilled her tremendously to contemplate this tangible proof of her lover's unquestioning trust and generosity--and at the same time it irked her with gnawing doubts of her worthiness. For continually the knowledge skulked in the dark backwards of her consciousness that only lack of opportunity restrained her from active disloyalty to his prejudices. Though she had disguised it from him, and even in some measure from herself, she knew that love had not quenched but had quickened her ambition for the stage. To be desired by one man only stimulated her longing to be desired inaccessibly--beyond the impregnable barrier of footlights--by all men. She wondered how far her strength and constancy would serve her to resist, were opportunity to come her way during the absence of Matthias, when distance should have sapped the strength of his influence and loneliness had lent an accent to her need for occupation and companionship. Furtively she closed her left hand, until she could feel the diamond in his ring, turned in toward the palm beneath her glove: as if it were a talisman.... Turning north on Broadway, she breasted the full current of the late afternoon promenade. Where the subway kiosks encroach upon the sidewalk, in front of what had been Shanley's restaurant, there was a distinct congestion of footfarers: Joan was obliged to move more slowly, crowded from behind, close on the heels of those in front, elbowed by pedestrians bound the opposite way. Abruptly she caught sight of Wilbrow, approaching. Almost at the same instant he saw her. Momentarily his eyes clouded with an effort of memory; then he placed her, his lantern cheeks widened with an ironic grin, and he lifted his hat with elaborate ceremony. Joan flushed slightly, smiled brightly in response, and tossed her head with a spirited suggestion of good-humoured tolerance. In another moment, wondering why she had done this, she realized that it had been due simply to a subconscious valuation of the man's interest, in the event she should ever again decide to try her luck on the stage.... Crossing at Forty-third Street, she turned again north on the sidewalk in front of a building given over almost entirely to the offices of theatrical businesses: a sidewalk darkened the year round with groups of actors sociably "resting." One of these groups, as Joan drew near, broke up on the urgent suggestion of a special policeman detailed for the purpose; and a member of it, swinging with a laugh to "move on," stopped short to escape collision with the girl. Then he laughed again in the friendliest fashion, and offered his hand. She looked up into the face of Charlie Quard. "Well!" he cried heartily, "I always was a lucky guy! I've been thinking about you all day--wondering what'd become of you." Joan smiled and shook hands. "I guess it wasn't worrying you much," she retorted. "If you'd wanted to, you knew where to find me." Quard needed no more encouragement. Promptly ranging alongside and falling into step: "That's just it," he argued; "I knew where to _start_ looking for you, all right, but I was kinda afraid you might be in when I called, and didn't know whether you'd snap my head off or not." "That's likely," the girl countered amiably. There was a distinctly agreeable sensation to be derived from this association with one upon whom she could impose her private estimate of herself. "What made you want to see me all of a sudden?" "Then you ain't sore on me?" "What for?" she evaded transparently. "Oh, you know what for, all right. I'm sore enough on myself not to want to talk about it." "Well," said Joan indifferently, "I guess it's none of my business if you're such a rummy you can't hold onto a job. Only, of course, I don't have to stand for that sort of foolishness more than once." "You said something then, all right," Quard approved humbly. "I can't blame you for feeling that way about it. But le' me tell you an honest fact: I ain't touched a drop of anything stronger'n buttermilk since that night--so help me Klaw and Erlanger!" "Why?" "Well, I guess I must've took a tumble to myself. Anyhow, when I got over the katzenjammer thing, I thought it all out and made up my mind it was up to me to behave for the balance of my sentence." "Is that so?" Joan asked, pausing definitely on the corner at Forty-fifth Street. "I know I can," Quard asserted convincingly. "Believe me, Joan, I hate the stuff! I'd as lief stake myself to a slug of sulphuric. No, on the level: I'm booked for the water-tank route for the rest of my natural." "I'm awful glad," observed the girl maliciously. "It's so nice for your mother. Well ... g'dafternoon!" "Hold on!" Quard protested. "I'll walk down to the house with you." "No, you won't," she returned promptly. "Why not?" "I don't want you to." "Oh, you don't!" he murmured blankly, pulling down the corners of his wide, expressive mouth. "_So_ sorry," she parroted. "G'dafternoon." She was several steps away before the man recovered from this rebuff. Then, with a face of set intent, he gave chase. "I say--Miss Thursday!" Joan accepted with a secret smile this sudden change from the off-hand manner of his first addresses. "Miss Thursday, eh?" she said to herself; but halted none the less. "Well?"--with self-evident surprise. "Look here--_lis'n_!" insisted Quard: "I got to have a talk with you." "What about?" "Oh, this is no good place. When can I see you?" "Is it quite necessary, Mister Quard?" He wagged an earnest head at her: "That's right. What are you doing tonight?" "Oh, I got an engagement with some friends of mine," she said with spontaneous mendacity. "Well, then, when?" "Oh, I don't know; you might as well take your chances--call round sometime--in two or three days." "And I got to be satisfied with that?" "Why not?" Quard shook his head helplessly: "I'd like to know what's come over you...." "Why, what's the matter?" The temptation to lead him on was irresistible. "You've changed a lot since I seen you last. What you been doing to yourself?" She bridled.... "Maybe it's you that is changed. Maybe you're seeing things different, now you're sober." Quard hesitated an instant, his features drawn with anger. Then abruptly: "_Plenty!_" he ejaculated, and as if afraid to trust himself further, turned and marched back to Broadway. Smiling quietly, Joan made her way home. On the whole, the encounter had not been unenjoyable. She had not only held her own, she had condescended with striking success. Later, she repented a little of her harshness; she had been hardly kind, if Quard were sincere in his protestations of reform; and a little tolerance might have earned her an evening less lonely. It was spent, after a dinner which proved unexpectedly desolate, lacking the companionship to which of late she had grown accustomed, in the back-parlour (to which Matthias had left her the key) and in discontented efforts to fix her interest on a novel. Before ten o'clock she gave it up, and climbed to her room, to lie awake for hours in mute rebellion against her friendless estate. She might, it was true, have kept a promise made to her lover just before his departure, to look up and renew relations with her family. But the more she contemplated this step, the less it attracted her inclination. There'd be another row with the Old Man, most likely and ... anyway, there was plenty of time. Besides, they'd want money, if they found out she had any; and while a hundred and fifty was a lot, there was no telling when she'd get more. Eventually she fell asleep while reviewing her meeting with Quard and turning over her hazy impression that it wouldn't hurt her to be less stand-offish with him, next time. In the morning she settled herself at her typewriter in a fine spirit of determination to keep her mind occupied with the work in hand--and incidentally to rid her conscience of it--until the feeling of loneliness wore off or at least till its reality became a trifle less unpalatable through familiarity. But not two pages had been typed before the call of the sunlit September day proved seductive beyond her will to resist; a much-advertised "_Promenade des Toilettes_" at a department store claimed the rest of the morning; and after lunch she "took in" a moving-picture show. But again her evening was forlorn. Theatres allured, but she hardly liked to go alone. In desperation she cast back mentally to the friends of the old days, and after rejecting her erstwhile confidant and co-labourer at the stocking counter, Gussie Innes (who lived too near home, and would tell her father, who would pass it along to the Old Man) Joan settled upon one or two girls, resident in distant Harlem, to be hunted up, treated to a musical comedy, and regaled with a narrative of the rise and adventures of Joan Thursday until their lives were poisoned with corrosive envy. But the first mail of Wednesday furnished distractions so potent that this project was postponed indefinitely and passed out of Joan's mind, never to be revived. It brought her two letters: manufacturing an event of magnitude in the life of a young woman who had yet to write her first letter and who had thus far received only a few scrappy and incoherent notes from boyish admirers. There was one from Matthias, posted in Chicago the preceding morning. Her first love letter, it was scanned hurriedly, even impatiently, and put aside in favour of a fat manila envelope whose contents consisted of a type-written manuscript and a note in scrawling long-hand: "Friend Joan-- "I hope you are not still mad with me and sorry I got hot under the collar Monday only I thought you might of been a little easy on me because, I am strictly on the Water Wagon and this time mean it-- "What I wanted to talk to you about was a Sketch I got hold of a while ago you know you picked the other one only that was punk stuff compared with this I think--Please read this and tell me what you think about it if you like it, I think I will try it out soon, if it's any good it's a cinch to cop out Orpheum time for a Classy Act like this-- "Your true friend-- "Chas. H. Quard. "P.S. of course I mean I want you to act the Womans part if you like the Sketch, what do you think!" It was afternoon before she realized the flight of time. She turned back to Quard's note, a trifle disappointed that he hadn't suggested an hour when he would call for her answer. Adjusting her hat before the mirror, preparatory to going out to lunch, she realized without a qualm that there was no longer any question of her intention as between Quard's offer and the wishes of Matthias. Whatever the consequences she meant to play that part--but on terms and conditions to be dictated by herself. But in the act of drawing on her gloves, she checked, and for a long time stood fascinated by the beauty and lustre of the diamond on her left hand. A stone of no impressive proportions, but one of the purest and most excellent water, of an exceptional brilliance, it meant a great deal to one whose ingrained passion for such adornments had, prior to her love affair, perforce been satisfied with the cheap, trashy, and perishable stuff designated in those days by the term "French novelty jewellery." Subconsciously she was sensitive to a feeling of kinship with the beautiful, unimpressionable, enigmatic stone: as though their natures were somehow complementary. Actively she knew that she would forfeit much rather than part with that perfect and entrancing jewel. With nothing else in nature, animate or inert, would it have been possible for her to spend long hours of silent, worshipful, sympathetic communion. If she were to persist in the pursuit of her romantic ambition, it might bring about a pass of cleavage between herself and her lover; it was more than likely, indeed; she knew the prejudices of Matthias to be as strong as his love, and this last no stronger than his sense of honour. Tacitly if not explicitly, she had given him to understand that she would respect his objections to a stage career. He would not forgive unfaith--least of all, such clandestine and stealthy disloyalty as she then contemplated. The breaking of their engagement would involve the return of the diamond. Intolerable thought! And yet.... Staring wide-eyed into her mirror, she saw herself irresolute at crossroads: on the one hand Matthias, marriage, the diamond, a secure and honourable future; on the other, Quard, "The Lie," disloyalty, the loss of the diamond, uncertainty--a vista of grim, appalling hazards.... And yet--she had four weeks, probably six, perhaps eight, in which to weigh the possibilities of this tremendous and seductive adventure. "The Lie" _might_ fail.... In that case, Matthias need never know. XXII As she drew near to Longacre Square, Joan saw Quard detach himself from an area-railing against which he had been lounging across the street, and move over to intercept her. Since she had anticipated that he might waylay her in some such manner, if he didn't call at the house, she was not surprised by this manoeuvre; but she was a little surprised and not a little amused (if quite privately) to see him throw away his cigar as they drew together, and lift his hat. Such attentions from him were distinctly novel--and gratifying. Complacent, and at the same time excited beneath a placid demeanour, she greeted him with a cool little nod. He grinned broadly but nervously. "I was wondering if you wouldn't happen along soon...." "Is that so?" Joan returned blandly. "Mind my walking with you?" "No-o," the girl drawled. "Of course, if I'm in the way--" "Oh, no--I'm just looking for some place to lunch." "Well, I'm hungry myself. Why not let me set up the eats?" "All right," she assented indifferently. "Fine! Where'll we go?" "Oh, I don't know...." "Anywheres you say." "Well, Rector's is right handy." "That suits me," Quard affirmed promptly. But Joan's sidelong glance discovered a look of some discomfiture. "I guess you got my letter, all right?" he pursued as they crossed to the sidewalk of the New York Theatre Building. "Oh, yes," Joan replied evenly, after a brief pause. "Wha'd you think of the piece?" "Oh ... the sketch! Why, it seems very interesting. Of course," Joan added in a tone of depreciation, "I didn't have much time--just glanced through it, you know--" "I felt pretty sure you'd like it!" "Oh, yes; I thought it _quite_ interesting," said the girl patronizingly. She seemed unconscious of his quick, questioning glance, and Quard withdrew temporarily into suspicious, baffled silence. In the pause they crossed Forty-fourth Street and entered the restaurant. It was rather crowded at that hour, but by good chance they found a table for two by one of the windows; where a heavily-mannered captain of waiters, probably thinking he recognized her, held a chair for Joan and bowed her into it with an empressement that secretly delighted the girl and lent the last effect to Quard's discomfiture. "Please," she said gravely as the actor, with the captain suave but vigilant at his elbow, knitted expressive eyebrows over the menu--"please order something very simple. I hardly _ever_ have much appetite so soon after breakfast." "I--ah--how about a cocktail?" Quard ventured, relief manifest in his smoothened brow. "I thought you--" "Oh, for you, I mean. Mine's ice'-tea." "I think," said Joan easily, "I would like a Bronx." And then, while Quard was distracted by the importance of his order, she removed her gloves and, with her hands in her lap hidden beneath the table, slipped off the ring and put it away in her wrist-bag: looking about the room the while with a boldness which she could by no means have mustered a month earlier, in such surroundings. Distrustful of her cocktail, when served, for all her impudence in naming it, she merely sipped a little and let it stand. The mystery of the change in her worked a trace of exasperation into Quard's humour. He eyed her narrowly, with misgivings. "I guess you ain't lost much sleep since we blew up," he hazarded abruptly. "What_ever_ do you mean?" drawled Joan. "You look and act's if you'd come into money since I saw you last." "Perhaps I have," she said with provoking reserve. "Meaning--mind my own business," he inferred morosely. "Well, now, what do you think?" "I--well, I'd be sorry to think what some folks might," he blundered. Joan's eyes flashed ominously. "Suppose you quit worrying about me; I guess I can take care of myself." "I guess you can," he admitted heavily. "Excuse _me_." "That's all right--and so'm I." Joan relented a little; lied: "I have come into some money--not much." Her gaze was as clear and straightforward as though her mouth had been the only authentic well-spring of veracity. "Let it go at that." "That's right, too." His face cleared, lightened. "Le's get down to brass tacks: how about that sketch?" "Didn't I say it seemed very interesting?" He nodded with impatience. "But you ain't said how my proposition strikes you. That's what I want to know." "You haven't made me any proposition." "Go on! Didn't you read my note?" "Sure I did; but you only said you wanted me for the woman's part." "Ain't that enough?" She shook her head with a pitying smile. "You got to talk regular business to me. I ain't as easy as I was once; I know the game better, and I don't need a job so bad. How much will you pay?" He hesitated: named reluctantly a figure higher than that which he had had in mind: "Thirty-five dollars...." "Nothing doing," said Joan promptly. "But look here: you're only a beginner--" "It's lovely weather we're having, for September, isn't it?" "I'd offer you more if I could afford it, but--" "Have you heard anything from Maizie since she left town?" "Damn Maizie! How much do you want, anyhow?" "Fifty--and transportation on the road." He checked; whistled guardedly and incredulously; changed his manner, bending confidentially across the table: "Listen, girlie, yunno I'd do anything in the world for you--" "Fifty and transportation!" "But I had to pay the guy what wrote this piece fifty for a month's option. If I take it up I gotta slip him a hundred more and twenty-five a week royalty as long's we play it: and there's three others in the cast, outsida you and me. _David_'ll want fifty at least, and the _Thief_ thirty-five and the servant twenty-five: there's a hundred and thirty-five already, including royalty. Add fifteen for tips and all that: a hundred and fifty; fifty to you, two-hundred. The best I can hope to drag down is three, and Boskerk'll want ten per cent commission for booking us, leaving only seventy for _my_ bit--and I'm risking all I got salted away to try it out." He paused with an air of appeal to which Joan was utterly cold. "It's a woman's piece," she said tersely; "if you get a sure-'nough actress to play it, she'll want a hundred at least, if she's any good at all. You're saving fifty if you get me at my price." This was so indisputably true that Quard was staggered and temporarily silenced. "And," Joan drove her argument shrewdly home with unblushing mendacity--"Tom Wilbrow says it's only a question of time before I can get any figure I want to ask, in reason." Quard's eyes started. "Tom Wilbrow!" he gasped. "He rehearsed me in 'The Jade God' before Rideout went broke. I guess you heard about that." The actor nodded moodily. "But I didn't know you was in the cast.... Look here: make it--" "Fifty or nothing." After another moment of hesitation, Quard gave in with a surly "All right." At once, to hide his resentment, he attacked with more force than elegance the food before him. Joan permitted herself a furtive and superior smile. The success of her tactics proved wonderfully exhilarating, even more so than the prospect of receiving fifty dollars a week; she would have accepted fifteen rather than lose the opportunity. She had demonstrated clearly and to her own complete satisfaction her ability to manage men, to bend them to her will.... There was ironic fatality in the accident which checked this tide of gratulate reflection. From some point in the restaurant behind Joan's back, three men who had finished their lunch rose and filed toward the Broadway entrance. Passing the girl, one of these looked back curiously, paused, turned, and retraced his steps as far as her table. His voice of spirited suavity startled her from a waking dream of power tempered by policy, ambitions achieved through adulation of men.... "Why, Miss Thursday, how _do_ you do?" Flashing to his face eyes of astonishment, Joan half started from her chair, automatically thrust out a hand of welcome, gasped: "Mr. Marbridge!" Quard looked up with a scowl. Marbridge ignored him, having in a glance measured the man and relegated him to a negligible status. He had Joan's hand and the knowledge, easily to be inferred from her alarm and hesitation, that she remembered and understood the scene of last Sunday, and was at once flattered and frightened by that memory. His handsome eyes ogled her effectively. "Please don't rise. I just caught sight of you and couldn't resist stopping to speak. How are you?" "I"--Joan stammered--"I'm very well, thanks." "As if one look at you wouldn't have told me you were as healthy as happy--more charming than both! You are--eh--not lonesome?" His intimate smile, the meaning flicker of his eyes toward Quard, exposed the innuendo. "Oh, no, I--" "Venetia was saying only yesterday we ought to look you up. She wants to call on you. Where do you put up in town?" Almost unwillingly the girl gave her address--knowing in her heart that the truth was not in this man. "And, I presume, you're ordinarily at home round four in the afternoon?" She nodded instinctively. "I'll not forget to tell Venetia. Two-eighty-nine west Forty-fifth, eh? Right-O! I must trot along. So glad to have run across you. Good afternoon...." Regaining control of her flustered thoughts, Joan found Quard eyeing her with odd intentness. "Friend of yours?" he demanded with a sneer and a backward jerk of his head. "Yes--the husband of a friend of mine," she replied quickly. The actor digested this information grimly. "Swell friends you've got, all right!" he commented, not without a touch of envy. "Now I begin to understand.... What's Marbridge going to do for you?" "Do for me? Mr. Marbridge? Why, nothing," she answered blankly, in a breath. "I don't know what you mean." "That's all right then. But take a friendly tip, and give him the office the minute he begins to talk about influencing managers to star you. I've heard about that guy, and he's a rotten proposition--grab it from me. He's Arlington's silent partner--and you know what kind of a rep. Arlington's got." "No, I don't," Joan challenged him sharply. "What's more, I don't care. Anyway, I don't see what Arlington's reputation's got to do with my being a friend of Marbridge's wife." "No more do I," grumbled Quard--"not if Marbridge believes you are." XXIII Before leaving the restaurant Quard outlined in detail his plans for producing "The Lie" for vaudeville presentation. He named the other two actors, spoke of hiring a negro dresser who would double as the servant, and indicated his intention of engaging a producing director of the first calibre who, he said, thought highly of the play. Joan was a little overcome. Peter Gloucester was a producer quite worthy to be named in the same breath with Wilbrow. "Well, he believes in the piece," Quard explained--"the same as me--and he says he'll give us ten afternoon rehearsals for a hundred and fifty. It'll be worth it." "You must think so," said Joan, a little awed. "You bet I do. This means a lot to me, anyway; I gotta do something to keep my head above out-of-town stock--or the movies again." Mentioning his recent experience, he shuddered realistically. "But if this piece ain't actor-proof, I'm no judge. Gloucester says so, too. And to have him tune it up into a reg'lar classy act will be worth ... something, I tell you!" His hesitation was due to the fact that Quard was secretly counting on the representations of his agent, Boskerk, who insisted that, properly presented, the sketch would earn at least four hundred and fifty dollars a week, instead of the sum he had named to Joan. But Joan overlooked this lamely retrieved slip; she was all preoccupied with a glowing sense of gratification growing out of this endorsement of her first surmise, that Quard had only waited on her consent to go ahead. The thought was unctuous flattery to her conceit, inflating it tremendously even in the face of a shrewd suspicion that it was sentiment more than an exaggerated conception of her ability that made Quard reckon her coöperation indispensable. That the man was infatuated with her she was quite convinced; on the other hand, she didn't believe him sufficiently blinded by passion to imperil the success of his venture by giving her the chief part unless he believed she could play it--"actor-proof" or no. "Lis'n, girlie," Quard pursued after one meditative moment: "could you begin rehearsing tomorrow?" "Of course I could." "Because if we don't, we lose three days...." "How?" "Well," Quard explained with a sheepish grin, "I guess I ain't any more nutty than the next actor you'll meet on Broadway; but I'd as lief slip my bank-roll to the waiter for a tip as start anything on a Friday. And Sat'day and Sunday's busy days for the Jinx, too. I got too much up to wish anything mean onto this piece!..." At his suggestion they left the dining-room by the hotel entrance on Forty-fourth Street, and Joan waited in the lobby while Quard telephoned Gloucester. "It's all right," he announced, beaming as he emerged from the booth--"Pete's ready to commence tomorrow aft'noon. Now I got to hustle and round up the rest of the bunch." "Where will it be?" asked Joan. "Don't know yet--I'll 'phone you where in the morning, at the latest...." Hastening home, Joan plunged at once into the study of her part, with the greater readiness since the occupation was anodynous to an uneasy conscience. Though she was always what is known as a "quick study," this new rôle was a difficult one; by far the longest, and unquestionably the most important, it comprised fully half the total number of "sides" in the manuscript--nearly half as many again as were contained in Quard's part, the next in order of significance. And her application, that first day, was hindered by a perplexing interruption in the early evening, when a box was delivered to her containing a dozen magnificent red roses and nothing else--neither a card nor a line of identification. At first inclining to credit Quard with this extravagance, on second thought she remembered Marbridge, whom she felt instinctively to be quite capable of such overtures. And her mind was largely distracted for the rest of the night by empty guesswork and futile attempts to decide whether or not she ought to run the risk of thanking Quard when next they met. Eventually she made up her mind to let the sender furnish the clue; and inasmuch as Quard never said anything which the most ready imagination could interpret as a reference to the offering, she came in time to feel tolerably satisfied that the anonymous donor must have been Marbridge. It was to be long, however, before this surmise could be confirmed; although, on getting home Saturday night, after a hard day's work and a late dinner with Quard, she was informed that a gentleman had called and asked for her during the afternoon, but had left neither word nor card. The same thing happened on Monday, under like circumstances; after which the attempts to see her were discontinued. And then, Joan noticed that Venetia didn't call.... Interim, the task of whipping "The Lie" into shape went on so steadily that she had little leisure to waste wondering about Marbridge or feeling flattered by his interest; and she even ceased, except at odd moments, to regard Quard as a man and therefore a possible conquest: Gloucester drilled the actors without mercy and spared himself as little. A pursy body, with the childish, moon-like face of a born comedian, he applied himself to the work with the extravagant solemnity of a minor poet mouthing his own perfumed verses at a literary dinner. During rehearsals his manner was immitigably austere, aloof, inspired; but however precious his methods, he achieved brilliant effects in the despised medium of clap-trap melodrama; and under his tutelage even Joan achieved surprising feats of emotional portrayal--and this, singularly enough, without learning to despise him as she had despised Wilbrow. She learned what either Wilbrow had lacked the time to teach her or she had then been unable to learn: how to assume the requisite mood the moment she left the wings and drop it like a mask as soon as she came off-stage again. She was soon able to hate and fear Quard with every fibre of her being throughout their long scenes of dialogue, and to chat with him in unfeigned amiability both before and after. And her liking and admiration for the man deepened daily, as Gloucester deftly moulded Quard's plastic talents into a rude but powerful impersonation. Partly because of the brevity of the little play, which enabled them to run through it several times of an afternoon as soon as they were familiar with its lines, and partly because Gloucester was hard up and in a hurry to collect his fee, the company was prepared well within the designated ten days. And through the agent Boskerk's influence, they were favoured with an early opportunity to present it at a "professional try-out" matinée, a weekly feature of one of the better-class moving-picture and vaudeville houses. The audiences attracted by such trial performances are the most singular imaginable in composition, and of a temper the most difficult--with the possible exceptions of a London first-night house bent on booing whatever the merits of the offering, and a body of jaded New York dramatic critics and apathetic theatre loungers assembled for the fourth consecutive first-night of a week toward the end of a long, hard winter. On Tuesday afternoons and nights (as a rule) they foregather in the "combination houses" of New York, animated (save for a sprinkling of agents and bored managers) by a single motive, the desire to laugh--preferably at, but at a pinch with, those attempting to win their approbation. Their sense of humour has been nourished on the sidewalk banana-peel, the slap-stick and the patch on the southern exposure of the tramp's trousers; and while they will accept with the silence of curiosity, if not of respect, and at times even applaud, straight "legitimate" acting, the slightest slip or evidence of hesitation on the part of an actor, the faintest suggestion of bathos in a line, or even the tardy adjustment of one of the wings after the rise of the curtain, will be hailed with shrieks of delight and derision. Before an assemblage of this character, "The Distinguished Romantic Actor, Chas. H. Quard & Company," presented "The Lie" as the fifth number of a matinée bill. Waiting in the wings and watching the stage-hands shift and manoeuvre flats and ceiling, and arrange furniture and properties at the direction of the _David_ (who doubled that rôle with the duties of stage manager) Joan listened to the dreadful wails of a voiceless vocalist who, on the other side of the scene-drop, was rendering with sublime disregard for key and tempo a ballad of sickening sentimentality; heard the feet of the audience, stamping in time, drown out both song and accompaniment, the subsequent roar of laughter and hand-clapping that signalized the retirement of the singer, and experienced, for the first and only time, premonitory symptoms of stage-fright. Through what seemed a wait of several minutes after the disappearance of the despised singer--who, half-reeling, half-running, with tears furrowing her enameled cheeks, brushed past Joan on her way to her dressing-room--the applause continued, rising, falling, dying out and reviving in vain attempts to lure the object of its ridicule back to the footlights. At a word from _David_, the stage-hands vanished, and at his nod Joan moved on. _David_ seated himself and opened a newspaper while the girl, trembling, took up a position near a property fireplace, with an after-dinner coffee-cup and saucer in her hands. She was looking her best in the evening frock purchased for the week-end at Tanglewood, and was in full command of her lines and business; but there was a lump in her throat and a sickly sensation in the pit of her stomach as the cheap orchestra took up the refrain of a time-worn melody which had been pressed into service as curtain music. Peering over the edge of his newspaper, _David_ spoke final words of kindly counsel: "Don't you mind, whatever happens. Make believe they ain't no audience." The house was quiet, now, and the music very clear. Kneeling within the recess of the fireplace, almost near enough to touch her hand, Quard begged plaintively: "For the love of Gawd, don't let their kidding queer you, girlie. Remember, Boskerk promised he'd have Martin Beck out front!" Joan nodded--gulped. The curtain rose. Through the glare of footlights the auditorium was vaguely revealed, a vast and gloomy amphitheatre dotted with an infinite, orderly multitude of round pink spots, and still with the hush of expectancy. Joan thought of a dotted lavender foulard she had recently coveted in a department-store; and the ridiculous incongruity of this comparison in some measure restored her assurance. Turning her head slowly, she looked at _David_, who was properly intent on his newspaper, smiled, and parted her lips to speak the opening line. From the gallery floated a shrill, boyish squeal: "_Gee! pipe the pippin!_" The audience rocked and roared. Joan's heart sank; then, suddenly, resentment kindled her temper; she grew coldly, furiously angry, and forgot entirely to be afraid of that stupid, bawling beast, the public. But her faint, charming smile never varied a fraction. Turning, she spoke the first line, heedless of the uproar; and as if magically it was stilled. A feeling of contempt and superiority further encouraged her. She repeated the words, which were of no special value to the plot--merely a trick of construction to postpone the ringing of a telephone-bell long enough to let the audience grasp the relationship of those upon the stage. In a respectful silence, _David_ looked up from the newspaper and replied. The telephone-bell rang. Turning to the instrument on the table beside him, he lifted the receiver to his ear and--the plot began to unfold. _David_, the husband, in his suburban home, was being called to New York on unexpected business with a client booked to sail for Europe in the morning. It was night; reluctant to go, he none the less yielded to pressure, rang for the coachman and ordered a carriage, in the face of the protests of Joan, his wife. She was to be left alone in the house with their little son; for the maids were out and the coachman slept beyond call in the stable. Reassuring her with his promise to return at the earliest possible moment, _David_ departed.... A brief and affectionate passage between the two was rendered inaudible by derisive laughter; but this was almost instantly silenced when Quard showed himself at a window in the back of the set, peering furtively in at the lonely woman in the unguarded house. An excellent actor when properly guided, and fresh from the hands of one of the most astute producers connected with the American stage, without uttering a word Quard contrived to infuse into this first brief appearance at the window a sense of criminal and sinister mystery which instantly enchained the imagination of the audience. In the tense silence of the house, the nervous gasp of a high-strung woman was distinctly audible. But it passed without eliciting a single hoot. Darting round to the door, Quard entered and addressed Joan. She cried out strongly in mingled terror and horror. A few crisp and rapid lines uncovered the argument: Quard was the woman's first husband, who had married and deserted her all in a week and whom she had been given every reason to believe dead. Ashamed of that mad union with a dissolute blackguard, she had concealed it from the husband of her second marriage. Now she was confronted with the knowledge that her innocently bigamous position would be made public unless she submitted to blackmail. Promising in her torment to give the man all he demanded, she induced him to leave before the return of the servant.... Alone she realized suddenly the illegitimacy of the child of her second marriage. At this, a scene-curtain fell, and a notice was flashed upon it informing the audience that the short moment it remained down indicated a lapse of five hours in the action. Already the interest of the audience had become so fixed that it applauded with sincerity. Hurrying to her dressing-room, Joan stepped out of her pretty frock and into a negligee. The removal of a few pins permitted her hair to fall down her back, a long, thick, plaited rope of bronze. Then grasping a revolver loaded with blanks, she ran back to the second left entrance. The scene-curtain was already up; on the stage, in semi-darkness, the _Thief_, having broken into the house by way of the back window, was attempting to force the combination of a small safe behind a screen.... Quard, kneeling to peer through the fireplace, lifted a signalling hand to Joan. _David_ stamped loudly, off-stage. In alarm, the _Thief_ hid himself behind the screen; and Joan came on, with a line of soliloquy to indicate that she had been awakened by the noise of the burglar's entrance. As she turned up the lights by means of a wall-switch, Quard re-entered by way of the window, in a well-simulated state of semi-drunkenness which had ostensibly roused his distrust and brought him back to watch and threaten his wife anew.... Here happened one of those terrible blunders which seem almost inseparable from first performances. As Joan wheeled round to recognize Quard, her hand nervously contracted on the revolver, and it exploded point-blank at Quard's chest. Had it been loaded he must inevitably have been killed then and there; and when, pulling himself together, Quard managed to go on with the business--springing upon Joan and wresting the weapon from her--the audience betrayed exquisite appreciation of the impossibility, and shrieked and whooped with joy unrestrained. It was some minutes before they were able audibly to take up the dialogue. And this was fortunate, in a way; for the shock of that unexpected explosion had caused Quard to "dry up"--as the slang of the stage terms nervous dryness of the throat whether or not accompanied by forgetfulness. He required that pandemoniac pause in which to recover; and even when able to make himself heard, he repeated hoarsely and with extreme difficulty the line called to him by _David_--who was holding the prompt-book, in the fireplace. But the instinct of one bred to the stage from childhood saved him. And with comparative quiet restored, he braced up and played out the scene with admirable verve and technique. Joan was well aware that, stronger though her rôle might be, the man was giving a performance that overshadowed it heavily. He was drunk and he was brutal: _David_ had telephoned that he was at the railroad station and would be home in a few minutes; Quard, not content with promises, insisted on money, of which the woman had none to give him, or her jewels, which were locked away in the safe. When she refused to disclose the combination or to open the safe, Quard in besotted rage attempted to force her to open it. Struggling, they overturned the screen, exposing the _Thief_. Through a breathless and silent instant the two men faced one another, Quard bewildered, the _Thief_ seeing his way of escape barred. Then simultaneously they fired--Quard using the woman's revolver. One shot only took effect--the _Thief's_--and that fatally. Quard fell. Joan seized the arm of the _Thief_ and urged him from the house; as he vanished through the window, she picked up the revolver which Quard had dropped, and turned to the door. Frantic with alarm, _David_ entered. Joan reeled into his arms, screaming: "I have killed a burglar!" On this tableau the curtain fell--and rose and fell again and again at the direction of the house-manager deferring to an enthusiastic audience. Crude and raw as was this composition, the surprise of its last line and the strength with which it was acted, had won the unstinted approval of a public ever hungry for melodrama. Quard, revivified, bowing and smiling with suave and deprecatory grace, Joan in tears of excitement and delight, and the subordinate members of the company in varying stages of gratification over the prospect of prompt booking and a long engagement, were obliged to hold the stage through nine curtain-calls.... On her way back to her dressing-room Joan was halted by a touch on her shoulder. She paused, to recognize Gloucester, of whose presence in the house she had been ignorant. "Very well done, my dear," he said loftily; "very well done. You've got the makings of an actress in you, if you don't lose your head. Now run along and dry your eyes, like a good girl, and don't bother me with your silly gratitude." With this he brusquely turned his back to her. But Quard, overtaking her in the gangway, without hesitation or apology folded her in his arms and kissed her on the lips. And Joan submitted without remonstrance, athrill and elate. "Girlie!" he cried exultantly--"you're a wonder! "I _knew_ you could do it!... But, O my Gawd! you nearly finished me when you let that gun off right in my face!..." Somehow she found her way home alone, and shut herself up in the hall-bedroom to calm down and try to review the triumph sensibly. Unquestionably she had done well. Quard had done much better--but no wonder! She wasn't jealous: she was glad for his sake as well as for her own. Of course, this meant a great change. There was to come the day of reckoning with Matthias.... She had four letters of his, not one of which she had answered.... If "The Lie" got booking, and she went on the road with it--as she knew in her soul she would: nothing now could keep her off the stage--she would almost certainly lose Matthias. Quard, however, would remain to her; and of Quard she was very sure. That he loved her with genuine and generous devotion was now the one clear and indisputable fact in her unstable existence. If only he would refrain from drinking.... He was to telephone as soon as he received any encouraging news; and he had expected definite word from Boskerk before the afternoon was over. In anticipation of being called down-stairs at any minute, Joan remained in her street dress, aching for her bed though she was with reaction and simple fatigue. But it was nearly eight o'clock before she was summoned. "That you, girlie?" the answer came to her breathless "Hello?" "Yes--yes, Charlie. What is it?" "I've seen Boskerk--in fact, I'm eating with him now. It's all settled. We're to open next Monday somewhere in New England--Springfield, probably; and we get forty weeks solid on top of that." "I'm so glad!" "Sure you are. We're all glad, I guess." "And--Charlie--" she stammered. "Hello?" "Are you--are you all right?" "Sure I'm all right. Good night, girlie. Take care of yourself. See you tomorrow." "Good night," said Joan. Hooking up the receiver, she leaned momentarily against the wall, feeling a little faint and ill. Was it simply overtaxed imagination that had made her believe she detected a slight constraint in Quard's voice--a hesitation assumed to mask blurred enunciation? XXIV But when Joan met Quard in the morning her anxious eyes detected in his assured bearing none of the nervous unrest, in his clear eyes and the even tone of his coarse, pasty-pale skin none of the feverish stains, that are symptomatic of alcoholic excesses. Surprised and grateful, she treated the man with a tenderness and sweetness she had otherwise been too wary to betray.... By Thursday it was settled that they were to open on Monday at Poli's Theatre in Springfield, for an engagement of a week. If the audiences there endorsed the verdict of the first, Boskerk promised Quard a full season's booking. From the Springfield house he was to receive three hundred and fifty dollars. He permitted Joan to understand, however, that his fee would be no more than the sum he had first mentioned--three hundred dollars. It was decided to leave New York by a Sunday train which would put them down in Springfield in the middle of the afternoon, enabling the company to find suitable lodgings before meeting to run through their lines in the evening. They would have an opportunity for a sketchy, scrambly rehearsal on the stage Monday morning, but dared not depend on that; for the greater part of their allotted period would necessarily be consumed in the selection of a practicable "set" from the stock of the theatre, in making arrangements for suitable furniture properties, and in drilling the house electrician in the uncommonly heavy schedule of light cues--any one of which, if bungled, was calculated seriously to impair the illusion of the sketch. Joan thoughtfully stipulated for twenty-five dollars advance, against expenses. Quard protested, alleging financial straits due to his already heavy outlay, but the girl was firm. True, she still had (unknown to him) one hundred and twenty-five dollars; but not until near the end of their week at Springfield would they know whether or not they were to get further booking. In the end the actor ungraciously surrendered. She made her preparations for leaving her hall-bedroom with a craft and stealth worthy of a burglar preparing to break prison. If her break with Matthias was to become absolute, she was determined not to leave any clue whereby she might be traced. An enquiry as to the best place to take a dress to be dry-cleaned furnished sufficient excuse for lugging away one well-filled suit-case, which Joan left at a cheap theatrical hotel a few blocks farther uptown and east of Broadway, where she simultaneously engaged a room for Saturday night. And on Saturday afternoon she carried away a second suit-case containing the remainder of her wardrobe, informing Madame Duprat that she was going to visit her folks for a day or two. But first she had to undergo a bad quarter-hour in the back-parlour. The sense of her treachery would not lift from her mood. Perhaps she felt its oppression the more heavily because of her uncertainty: she couldn't yet be sure she wasn't committing herself to a step of irrevocable error; she was only sure that she was doing what she wanted to do with all her heart, whatever evil might come of it. And there would be more ease in companionship with Quard; with him she could have her own way in everything, could always be her natural self and still retain his respect--and her own. On the other hand, she could not look up to him, and was by no means as fond of him as of Matthias. Her fiancée was without reproach: he loved her; but his respect she could never own. Dimly she recognized this fact; though he thought he respected her, and did truly honour her as his promised wife, he was his own dupe, passion-blinded. Actually, they were people of different races, their emotional natures differently organized, their mental processes working from widely divergent views of life. Even in this instance, Joan's perception of the gulf between them was more emotional than thoughtful.... She moved slowly about the room, resentfully distressed, touching with reluctant fingers objects indelibly associated in her memory with the man of her first love. Sitting at his desk, she enclosed in a large envelope his letters. Two had arrived since Thursday; but these she had not opened. She hardly understood why she desired not to open them; she still took a real and deep interest in his fortunes; but she was desperately loath to read the mute reproach legible, if to her eyes alone, between his lines. She meant to leave him a note of her own, tenderly contrite and at the same time firmly final; but in spite of a mood saturate with an appropriately gentle and generous melancholy, she could not, apparently, fix it down with ink on paper. Eventually she gave it up: destroyed what she had attempted, and sealed the packet, leaving Matthias no written word of hers save his name on the face of the envelope. There remained the most difficult duty of all. With painful reluctance, Joan removed the ring from her finger (where it had been ever since she had last parted with Quard) and replacing it in its leather-covered case, sat for a long time looking her farewell upon that brilliant and more than intrinsically precious jewel. At length, closing the case, she placed it on top of the envelope, rose and moved to the door. There she hesitated, looking back in pain and longing. There was no telling what might happen to it before Matthias returned. A prying chambermaid.... And then it was quite possible that "The Lie" would not last out the week in Springfield. Quard had more than once pointed out: "There's nothing sure in this game but the fact that you're bound to close sooner 'n you looked for." "Maybe I'll be back inside a week," Joan doubted. There was always that chance; and she had already left one door open against her return. "Anyway, it isn't safe, there. And I can mail it to him, registered, when I'm sure he's home." Turning back, she snatched up the leather case and darted guiltily from the study and out of the house. XXV The stage-wise have long since learned to discount a "slump" in the next performance to follow a brilliantly successful première: the phenomenon is as inevitable as poor food on a route of one-night stands. At Springfield, on Monday afternoon, "The Lie" was presented in a manner of unpardonable crudity. Quard forgot his lines and extemporized and "gagged" desperately to cover the consequent breaks in the dialogue; leaving poor Joan hopelessly at sea, floundering for cues that were never uttered. At the last moment it was discovered that nothing had been provided to simulate, at the beginning of the second scene, the sound of a clock striking twelve, off-stage. The property man could offer nothing better than an iron crowbar and a hammer; the twelve strokes, consequently, resembled nothing in the world other than a wholly untemperamental crowbar banged by a dispassionate hammer. Fortunately, the effect was so thin and dead that it convulsed only the first few rows of the orchestra. The light cues went wrong when they were not altogether ignored; and once, when Joan having indicated in a brief soliloquy her depression on being left alone in the gloomy house, gave the cue "_I must have more light_," at the same time touching a property switch on the wall, every light in the house other than the red "exit" lamps was "blacked out." And at all other times the required changes either anticipated or dragged far behind their cues. The _Thief_ forgot to load his revolver, with the result that Quard fired the only shot in their duel--and then fell dead. This so rattled _David_ that he anticipated his first entrance and rushed on the stage only to back off precipitately while Joan was urging the _Thief_ to go and leave her to shoulder his crime. The only misadventure that failed to attend upon the performance was a traditional one of the stage: the theatre cat by some accident did _not_ walk upon the scene at a climax and seat itself before the footlights to wash its face. Nevertheless the sketch "got over" at the matinée, receiving three curtain calls; and at night--when the little company, conscious of its crimes, pulled itself together and acted with an intensity of effort only equalled by that of its first performance in New York--the house gave the piece a rousing reception. Thereafter they played it well and consistently, with increasing assurance as days passed and use bred the habit in them all. On Thursday Quard heard from Boskerk, and announced that the company would return to New York the following Monday to play a six weeks' engagement in the Percy Williams houses, beginning with a fortnight in Manhattan and winding up in Greenpoint, Long Island. He added that Boskerk was busy arranging a subsequent tour which would take them to the Pacific Coast and back. He did not add that the agent had successfully demanded as much as four hundred and fifty dollars a week for the offering from many of the more prosperous houses on their list; from which figure the price ranged down to as little as three hundred in some of the smaller inland towns. But even at this minimum, Quard had so scaled his salary list, contrary to his representations to Joan, that his gross weekly profit (excluding personal living expenses) would seldom be less than one hundred dollars a week. Back in New York, Joan established herself temporarily at a small and very poor hotel on the west side of Harlem. Since their engagement took her no farther south than Sixty-third Street and Broadway during its first week, and the second week was played at One-hundred-and-twenty-sixth Street and Seventh Avenue, she felt tolerably insured against meeting either Matthias or any member of her own family. She really meant to go home some time and see how her mother and Edna were doing, but from day to day put it off, if with no better excuse on the ground that she was too tired and too busy. As a matter of fact she was in the habit of waking up at about ten, but never rose until noon; spent the hours between three and four and nine and ten in the theatre; and was ordinarily abed by half-past twelve or one o'clock. Up to the matinée hour, and between that and the night, she managed without great difficulty to kill time, spending a deal of it, and a fair proportion of her earnings, in the uptown department stores. She dined with Quard quite frequently, and almost invariably after the last performance they supped together, often in company with friends of his--for the most part vaudeville people whom he had previously known or with whom he struck up fervent, facile friendships of a week's duration. They were a quaint, scandalous crew, feather-brained, irresponsible and, most of them, destitute of any sort of originality; but their spirits were high as long as they had a pay-day ahead, their tongues were quick with the patter of the circuits, and their humour was of an order new and vastly diverting to Joan. She had with them what she called a good time, and soon learned to look leniently upon the irregular lives of some who entertained her. Once or twice she was invited to "parties", sociable gatherings in flats rented furnished, at which she learned to regard the consumption of large quantities of bottled beer as a polite and even humorous accomplishment, and to permit a degree of freedom in song and joke and innuendo that would have seemed impossible in another environment. Probably she would have felt less tolerant of these matters had Quard betrayed the least tendency to "fall off the wagon." But in her company, at least, he refrained sedulously from drink; and since his was one of those constitutions whose normal vitality is so high and constant that alcohol benumbs rather than stimulates its functions, he shone the more by contrast with their occasionally befuddled companions. Joan admired him intensely for the steadfastness of his stand, and still more when she saw how established was the habit of regular if not always heavy drinking in the world of their peers. No one but herself pretended for a moment to regard the reformation of Quard as anything but a fugitive whim; and now and again she was made aware that his abstinence was resented. She once heard him contemptuously advised to "chuck the halo and kick in and get human again." At another time he explained a false excuse given in her presence for refusing an invitation: "It's no use trying to travel with that gang unless you're boozing. They got no use for me unless I'm willing to get an edge on. What's the use?" There was a surliness, a resentment underlying his tone. Intuitively Joan bristled. "No use," she said sharply. "You know what you're up against better than they do. You've got to stick to the soft stuff if you want to keep going." "Oh, I know," he grumbled. "But it ain't as easy as you'd think." "All right," she retorted calmly; "but I give you fair warning, I'll quit you the very first time you come around with so much as a whiff of the stuff on you." "You don't have to worry," he responded. "I'm on all right.... But," he added abruptly, "you needn't run away with any notion this piece would head for the storehouse if you _was_ to quit it. The woods are full of girls who'd jump at your chance." Joan answered only with an enigmatic smile. It is doubtful if Quard himself realized, just then, as keenly as the girl did, the depth and strength of his infatuation. But Joan did not doubt her power. Neither did she overestimate it. It was toward the end of their "time" in New York that she learned of the failure of "The Jade God," the information coming to her through the medium of one of those coincidences which would be singular anywhere but on the stage. An actress in a farcical sketch, which followed the intermission preceded by "The Lie," was assigned to use Joan's dressing-room when the latter was through with it. Naturally, the two struck up a chatting acquaintance. Joan one time replied to a question with the information that "The Lie" was booked for the Pacific Coast, and (Matthias in mind) confessed to some curiosity regarding Los Angeles. The other actress admitted ignorance of the West, but had only that morning received a letter from a sister who was playing with the Algerson stock company in Los Angeles. The letter contained a clipping describing the immediate and disastrous collapse of "The Jade God," which had been withdrawn after its third repetition. Reading the review, Joan was puzzled to recognize some of its references; she was fairly familiar with the play, but here and there she encountered strictures which seemed to involve scenes she couldn't remember. But of the fact of the failure there could be no doubt. She was genuinely sorry. Her first impulse was to seek Matthias, if he were in town, and tell him of her sympathy; her second (discarded with even less ceremony than the first) to write to him. Two things held her back: sheer moral cowardice, that would not let her face the man whom she had failed even as had his play; and the impossibility of explaining that she loved the stage more than him or anything else in the world--except his ring. And while she never faltered from meaning to return this last "before long," she could not yet bring herself to part with it. Always it was with her, on her finger when at home and alone, in her pocket-book when abroad or with Quard; still in her imagination retaining something of its vaguely talismanic virtue; standing to her for something fanciful and magic, which she could not name, a visible token of the mystical powers that worked for her good fortune.... It was mid-October: sweetest of all seasons in New York; a time of early evenings and long, clear gloamings beneath skies of exquisite suavity and depth; of crisp and heady days whose air is wine in a crystal chalice; when thoughts are long and sweet, gentle with the beauty and the sadness of aging autumn. At the first hint of winter Joan's heart turned in longing to the thought of furs. She wasted hours studying advertisements, and many more going from place to place, examining, rejecting, coveting. Her fancy was not modest: a year ago she would have been delighted with the meanest strip of squirrel for a neckpiece; today she felt a little ashamed even to price the less expensive furs, and would make no attempt to purchase until she had saved up enough money to meet her desires. And then, one morning--they were playing at the Orpheum Theatre in Brooklyn--a messenger brought her a package from one of the Fulton Street stores and required a signed receipt. It contained a handsome coat of imitation seal with a collar of rich black fur and lined with golden brocade. Fitting her perfectly, it enclosed her in generous warmth from throat to ankle. Accompanying it was the card of "_Mr. Charles Harborough Quard, Presenting 'The Lie,' the Sketch Sensation of the Year, Address c/o Jas. K. Boskerk, St. James Building, N.Y._" Not since that day when she had received his ring from Matthias had she been so happy. Meeting Quard in the gangway outside her dressing-room, before the matinée performance, she showed her gratitude by lifting her face for his kiss. In the world in which they existed, kisses were commonplaces, quite perfunctory, of little more significance than a slap on the shoulder between acquaintances. Not so Joan's: she had set a value upon her caresses, a standard peculiarly inflexible with respect to Quard. None the less, this was not the second time he had known her lips. But the occasion was one rare enough to render him appreciative. He wound an arm round her, and held her tight. "Like it, eh, girlie?" "I love it!" "Then I'm satisfied." "But how did you guess what I wanted most?" "Maybe I did a little head-work to find out." "It's dear of you!" "So long's you think so, I've got no kick coming." She disengaged, drew a pace or two away. "But what made you do it, Charlie?" "Well, I can't afford to have my leading lady out of the cast with a cold." Joan shook her head at him in gay reproof. "Or do you want me to tell you what you know already--that I'm crazy about you?" "Foolish! It's time we were dressing!" But her laugh was fond, and so was the look she threw over her shoulder as she evaded his arms and vanished into her dressing-room. Quard lingered a moment, with a fatuous smile for the panels of the closed door, and wagged his head doggishly. He felt that he was winning ground at a famous rate--the difficulties, the coolness and craft of his antagonist, considered. And in a way he was right, though perhaps not precisely the way he had in mind. Even before his princely gift, Joan had been thinking a great deal about him, and very seriously. Instinctively she foresaw that their relationship could not long continue on its present basis of simple good-fellowship. Quard wasn't the sort to be content at arm's-length: he must either come closer or go farther away, and might be depended upon not to adopt the latter course until the former had proved impracticable. And Joan didn't want him to go farther away. She was positive about this. But she was also very sure that the arm's-length relationship must be abridged only under certain indispensable conditions--decorously--and soon, if at all: else she must be the one to withdraw, lest a worse thing befall her. It was a problem of two factors: Quard's nature and her own; she had herself to reckon with no less than with him; and herself she distrusted, who was no stronger than her greatest weakness. He attracted her. She often caught herself thinking of him as she had thought of no other man--not Matthias, not the Quard of "The Convict's Return," not even Marbridge except, perhaps, for one shameful instant. Something in the lawless, ranging, wanton grain of this man called to her with a call of infinite allure: something latent in her thrilled to the call and answered.... That way lurked danger, disguised, but deadly. They moved on to Greenpoint, thence to Trenton for a week. Daily Quard's attentions became more constant, intimate and tender. They were much together, and now far more exclusively together than had been possible in New York, where acquaintances commandeered so much of their time. In Trenton they lodged at the same hotel, the other members of the company finding cheaper accommodations at greater distance from the theatre. This increased their close and confidential association. They fell into the habit of breakfasting together. Quard, always first to rise, would telephone to Joan's room, ascertain how soon she would be dressed, and order for both of them accordingly. In return for this privilege he had that of paying for both meals. A negro waiter spoke of Joan one morning, in her presence, as "the Missus." When he had retired out of earshot, their eyes sought one another's; constraint was swept away in laughter. "We might's well be married, the way we're together all the time," Quard presently ventured. "Oh, I don't know about that," Joan retorted pertly. "I mean, the way other people see us. I shouldn't be surprised if everybody in the hotel thought we was married, girlie." Joan coloured faintly.... "Well, the room-clerk knows better," she said definitely. "I'd like another cup of coffee, please." Quard snapped his fingers loudly to attract the attention of the waiter. He grew aware of an awkward silence: that the thoughts of both were converging to a common point. "Folks are fools that get married in the profession," he observed consciously. "It's all right if you've got a husband or I've got a wife at home--" "I don't see it," Joan interrupted smartly. "Anyway, _I_ haven't. Have you?" The actor stared, confused. "Have I--what?" "Got a wife at home?" Joan repeated, laughing. "No--nothing like _that_!" he asserted with intense earnestness. "I mean, it's all right if you've got somebody keeping a flat warm for you, some place not too far off Broadway; but if you marry into the business--good _night_! You got all the trouble of being tied up for life, and that's all." "Why?" "Managers don't want husband and wife in the same company. They're always fighting each other's battles when they ain't fighting between themselves. So you're always playing different routes, and the chances are they never cross except it's inconvenient and you get caught and nominated for the Alimony Club." "Do you belong?" "Didn't I just tell you nothing like that?" Quard protested with unnecessary heat. "Well," Joan murmured mischievously, "you seem to know so much about it. I only wondered...." Their place on the bill was near the end, that week: a trick bicyclist followed them, and moving-pictures wound up the performance. Consequently, by the time they were able to leave the theatre in the afternoon the sun was already below the horizon. They emerged the same evening from the stage-door to view a cloudless sky of pulsing amber, shading into purple at the zenith, melting into rose along the western rim of the world. A wash of old rose flooded the streets, lifting the meanest structures out of their ugliness, lending an added dignity to rows of square-set, old-fashioned residences of red-brick with white marble trimmings. "Which way are you going?" Quard enquired as they approached the corner of a main thoroughfare. "Back to the hotel?" "No; I'm sick of that hole," Joan replied with a vivid shudder. "I'm going to take a walk. Want to come?" "I was just going to ask you." They turned off toward the Delaware. It was the twenty-first of November--winter still a month away; yet the breath of winter was in the air. It came up cool and brisk from the river, enriching the colour in Joan's cheeks that were bright and glowing from the scrubbing she always gave them after removing grease-paint with cold cream. The blood coursed tingling through her veins. Her eyes shone with deepened lustre. They walked with spirit, in step, in a pensive silence infrequently disturbed. "Of course," Quard presently offered without preface, "it's different in vodeveal, if you stick to it." "What's different?" "Being married." Joan's eyes widened momentarily. Then she laughed outright. "Gee! You don't mean to say you've been chewing _that_ rag ever since breakfast?" "Ah, I just happened to think of it again," said Quard with the air of one whose motives are wantonly misconstrued. Nevertheless, he wouldn't let the subject languish. "There's plenty of family acts been playing the circuits Gawd knows how long," he pursued, with a vast display of interest in the sunset glow. "Look't the Cohans, before George planted the American flag in Longacre Square and annexed it to the United States. And they ain't the only ones by a long shot. I could name a plenty that'll stick in the big time until their toes curl. It's all right to trot in double-harness so long's you manage your own company." "Well?" Joan asked with a sober mouth and mischievous eyes. "Well--what?" "If you're getting ready to slip me my two-weeks' notice, why not be a man and say so?" "What would I do that for?" Quard demanded indignantly. "Because you're thinking about getting married; and there's only room for one leading lady in any company I play in." "Quit your kidding," the man advised sulkily; "you know I couldn't get along without you." "Yes," Joan admitted calmly, "_I_ know it, but I didn't know you did." Quard shot a suspicious glance askance, but her face was immobile in its flawless loveliness. He started to say something, choked up and reconsidered with a painful frown. A mature man's perfect freedom is not lightly to be thrown away. And yet ... he doubted darkly the perfection of his freedom.... They held on in silence until they came to Riverside Park. Over the dark profile of the Pennsylvania hills the sky was jade and amethyst, a pool of light that dwindled swiftly in the thickening shades of violet. Below them, as they paused on a lonely walk, the river stole swiftly, like a great black serpent writhing through the shadows. A frosty wind swept steadily into their faces, making cool and firm the flesh flushed with exercise. There was no one near them. A train of jewelled lights swept over the railroad bridge and vanished into the night with a purring rumble that lent an accent to their isolation. Joan hugged about her voluptuously her wonderful coat, stole a glance warm with gratitude at the face of Quard. He intercepted it, and edged nearer. Aglow and eager, she murmured something vapid about the prettiness of the sky. He answered only with the arm he passed about her. She suffered him, lashes veiling her eyes, her head at rest in the hollow of his shoulder. The man stared down at her exquisite, suffused face, luminous in the last light of gloaming. "Joan," he said throatily--"girlie, don't you love me--a little?" Her mouth grew tremulous. "I ... don't ... know," she whispered. "I love you!" he cried suddenly in an exultant voice--"I love you!" He folded her, unresisting, in both his arms, covering her face with kisses, ardent, violent kisses that bruised and hurt her tender flesh but which she still sought and hungered for, insatiable. She sobbed a little in her happiness, feeling her body yield and yearn to his, transported by that sweet, exquisite, nameless longing.... Then suddenly she was like a steel spring in his embrace, writhing to free herself. Wondering, he tried to hold her closer, but she twisted and fended him off with all the power of her strong young arms. And still wondering, he humoured her. She drew away, but yet not wholly out of his clasp. "Charlie!" she panted. "Darling!" "How do you get married in New Jersey?" He pulled up, dashed and a little disappointed, and laughed nervously. "Why, you get a license and then--well, almost anybody'll do to tie the knot." She nodded tensely: "I guess a regular minister will be good enough for us." "I guess so," he demurred; and with another laugh: "I wasn't thinking serious' about it, but I guess I might's well be married as the way I am." "Well," she said quietly, "we've _got_ to. It's the only way...." XXVI And then, suddenly, the face of life was indescribably changed: Joan Thursday seemed but a memory, a slight and somehow wistful shadow in the shadowed depths of that darkling mirror, yesterday; in her place another creature altogether reigned, the Joan Quard of today, woman, actress, wife; with a gold band round her finger; mature, initiate of mysteries, ripe in wisdom; strong, poised serenely, clear of eye; with added graciousness in her beauty, conscious of added powers over Man, but discreet in their employment. She thought a great deal about herself in those days: not, perhaps, more than had been common with her in that so-dead yesterday, but much, and more profoundly; reading a new meaning into the riddle of existence, so changed had all things become since her marriage. Before her pensive vision Life unfolded rare, golden-vista'd promises. With another man, or in another stratum of society, she might have fulfilled herself wonderfully, even unto her salvation.... To begin with, she was very happy. Fond to distraction of her husband, she never doubted that he worshipped her; he gave her quick wits no cause to entertain a doubt. They were together always, inseparable. She felt that nature must truly have fashioned them solely for one another, and could not forget her wonder that their passion should be so mutual, so complete. She loved him to distraction: all his traits, his robust swagger, his sonorous and flexible tones, the flowery eloquence of his gesture, his broad, easy-going, tolerant good-humour, the way he wore his clothes and the very cut and texture of them. And she ruled him like a despot. Quard submitted without complaint. She was all his fancy had painted her, and something more; recognizing dimly that she excelled him variously (although he was quite incapable of analyzing these distinctions) he served her humbly, with unconscious deference to her many excellences. She was by way of making him a better wife than he deserved. If at times conscious of some little irk from her amiable but inflexible autocracy, he reminded himself that she was a finer woman than any he had ever known, well worth humouring: it wasn't on every corner a fellow'd pick up one like Joan. He liked to follow her into hotel lobbies and restaurants and watch people turn to eye her, the men with sudden interest, the women with instinctive hostility. It even amused him to quell a too-ambitious stare with a fixed, grim, and truculent regard backed by the menace of his powerful physique. It gave a man standing, license to swagger, to own a woman like Joan. He came to pander oddly to this vanity--would leave Joan to go to their room alone, while he strolled off to a bar to meet some crony or acquaintance of the day, tell his best story, and then suddenly excuse himself: "Well, s'long. The wife's waiting for me." The response rarely failed: "Ah, let her wait; have another drink. Did _I_ ever tell you--" A lifted, deprecatory palm, a knowing look: "No--guess I'll kick along; y'see, _she_'s some wife...." Conscious only of his adoration, Joan was enchanted by their mode of life, with its constant shifts of scene, its spice of vagabondage. She believed she could never tire of travelling. Railroad journeys, with their inevitable concomitants of dirt, noise, and discomfort, never discouraged her: she really liked them; they were taking her somewhere--it didn't much matter where. She even derived a sort of pleasure from such nauseating experiences as rising to catch a train at four-thirty in the morning, against their "long jumps." And there was keen delight in napping in a parlour-car chair or with a head upon her husband's shoulder in a day-coach, to wake all drowsy, breathe air foul with coal-smoke, and peer through a black window-pane (shadowed by her hand) to catch a glimpse of some darkly fulgent breadth of strange water, or the marching defile of great alien hills, or a sweep of semi-wooded countryside bleached with moonlight--remembering that, only a few short months ago, the world of her travels had been bounded by Fort George on the north, Coney Island on the south, knowing neither east nor west. She was discovering America: even as she was discovering Life.... Their route from Trenton took them south through Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, and Norfolk; whence they doubled back by steamer to New York, took a Sound boat to Fall River, played Boston, and drifted through New England in bitter cold weather, eventually striking westward again, via Albany, Buffalo, and the middle country. Quard drew her attention to the fact that it was "a liberal education...." Sometimes she thought pityingly of Matthias, and wondered if he knew she was married and what she was doing; and whether he were angry, or heart-broken, or eaten up with morbid jealousy; and how he would act should chance ever throw them together again. She was sorry for him: he had lost her. If only he had been a little more enterprising.... She wondered what would have happened if Matthias _had_ been more enterprising; he could have possessed her at any time during the brief period of their infatuation. If he had married her then, would she be as contented as she was now, with Charlie? She doubted it; Quard was so completely his opposite.... She ceased to worry about the ring. She meant to return it some day, perhaps. Though she did not wear it and had never so much as mentioned Matthias to Quard, it remained a possession whose charms tugged at her heart-strings. At times she amused herself formulating idle little intrigues, with the object (if ever set in motion) of excusing the appearance of the jewel upon her hand. But all her schemes seemed to possess some fatal flaw, and she was desperately afraid of the truth. Meanwhile, the ring lay perdue at the bottom of a work-basket of woven sweet-grass which she had purchased shortly after her marriage; twisted in an old, empty needle-paper and mixed in with a worthless confusion of trash, such as women accumulate in such receptacles, its hiding place was well calculated to escape detection by even an informed purloiner. Quard's tardy engagement ring was set with an inferior diamond flanked by artificial pearls. Joan despised it secretly. For a long time it was the sole blemish on the bright shield of her happiness.... And then, the night of their opening day in Cincinnati, Quard escorted her from the theatre to the hotel, left her at the door, and turned back to "see a friend" who happened to be playing on the same bill. This was quite the usual thing, and Joan went contentedly off to her room and in due course to bed, confident that Quard would return within an hour. Five hours later she awoke to startled apprehension of the facts, first that she must have dropped off to sleep without meaning to, next that Quard had not returned, finally that it was past four o'clock in the morning. With a little shiver of sickening premonition she rose, slipped into a dressing-gown, called a bell-boy, and instructed him to look for her husband. Some time later the boy reported that the bar was closed and the gentleman not to be found. It was broad daylight when Quard staggered in with the assistance of the same bell-boy and his negro dresser. His eyes were glazed, his face ghastly, his mind wandered: he was as helpless as a child. With the aid of the boys, Joan managed to undress the man and put him to bed. At once he fell asleep, with the cold stump of a half-burned cigar obstinately clenched between his teeth. It was an hour before the muscles of his jaw relaxed enough to release it. Dressing, Joan left the hotel, swallowed some coffee and rolls, tasteless to her, in a nearby restaurant, and wandered about until eight o'clock, when she found a drug-store open, and consulted the clerk. He advised bromo seltzer and aromatic spirits of ammonia. Armed with these, she returned to her husband, and shortly after noon, daring to delay no longer, roused him by sprinkling cold water in his face--all other methods having failed even to interrupt his stertorous breathing. Even then it was some time before she could induce him to swallow the medicine, and it required no less than three powerful doses, together with much black coffee and followed by a cold bath, to restore him to presentable condition. In the end, however, she succeeded in getting him to the theatre in time for the matinée. Through it all she uttered no single word of reproach, but waited on the man with at least every outward sign of sympathy and devotion. His remorse (when another nap at the hotel after the matinée had brought him to more complete realization of what had happened) was touching and, as long as it lasted, unquestionably sincere. Joan accepted without comment his lame explanation as to the manner of his temptation and fall during an all-night session at poker "with the boys," and gave genuine credulity to his protestations that it would never, never happen again. But three weeks later in Chicago he repeated the performance, though under somewhat less distressing circumstances. As before, he left her in the lobby, "to finish his cigar and chin with Soandso." Within an hour he was half-led, half-carried to their room, in a hopelessly sodden condition. The actor with whom he had been drinking accompanied him, apparently quite sober, but puzzled; and after Quard had been helped to bed, explained to the girl that her husband's collapse had been incomprehensibly due to no more than three drinks. "I never seen nothin' like it!" the man expostulated, with an air of grievance. "There he was, standin' up against the bar, with his foot on the rail, laughin' and kiddin', same's the rest of us; and he'd only had three whiskeys--though I will say they was man-size drinks; and then, all of a sudden, he turns white as a sheet and starts mumblin' to himself, and we all thinks he's joshin' until he keels over, limp's a rag. If the stuff gets to him like that, he's got no business touchin' it, ever!" These experiences continued at varying intervals; and presently Joan began to understand that Quard had not only primarily a weakness to tempt him, but a constitutional inability to assert his will-power after he had surrendered to the extent of a single drink. One modest dose of alcohol seemed to exercise upon him a sort of hypnotic power, driving him on whether he would or not to the next, the next, and the next--until the nadir of unconsciousness was reached. It was not that he invariably succumbed to moderate indulgence, but that once started he rarely stopped until his identity was completely submerged. Indeed, the way of alcohol with him seemed never twice to follow the same route; but its end was invariably the same. Hoping against hope, fighting with him, pleading, reasoning, threatening with him, even praying, Joan endured for a long time--much longer than, in retrospective days, seemed possible even to her; for she was honestly fond of her husband, far more so than she was ever of any other living being save herself. They reached San Francisco the third week in April. For some time Quard had been drinking rather methodically but stealthily. A threat made by Joan, while he was sobering up from his last debauch, to the effect that on repetition of the offence she would leave him without an hour's notice, had frightened the man to the extent of making him hesitate to add one drink to another except at intervals long enough to retard the cumulative effect; but never a day passed on which, in spite of her watchfulness, he did not contrive to throw several sops to the devil in possession, if without ever quite losing his wits. Detected with reeking breath, he would adopt one of three attitudes: he was a man, subject to the domination of no woman and of no appetite, had learned his lesson and now knew when to stop; or he was sorry--hadn't stopped to think--and wouldn't let it go any further; or nothing of the sort had happened, he had drunk nothing except a glass of soda-fountain nerve-tonic, or possibly it was his cigar that she smelled. With the first, Joan had no patience; and since she had a temper, it was the last resort in Quard's more sober stages, seldom employed save when potations had made him either indifferent or vicious. In his contrition, whether real or assumed, she tried hard to believe. But his lies never deceived her: to these she listened in the silence of contempt and despair. On the Wednesday afternoon of their week in San Francisco, the girl did a bit of shopping after the matinée; it was half after five before she returned to the hotel, and walked into their room to find Quard, with his coat off, seated in a chair that faced the door. His back was to the windows, through which the declining sun threw a flood of blinding golden light, so that Joan's dazzled vision comprehended only the dark silhouette of his body. She said "Hello, dearie!" lightly enough in the abstraction of reviewing some especially pleasing purchases, closed the door, walked over to the bureau, put down her handbag and a small parcel, and removed her hat. Then the fact that Quard had not answered penetrated her reverie. Disposing of her hat, she looked half casually over her shoulder, to discover that he hadn't moved. Two surmises struck through her wonder: that he had fallen asleep waiting for her; with poignant apprehension, that he had been drinking again. But this seemed hardly likely: he had been entirely rational and unintoxicated during the matinée. She said sharply: "What's the matter?" Quard made no answer. With a troubled sigh she moved to his chair and bent over him. His eyes, wide and blazing, met hers with a look of inflexible hostility and rage; his mouth was set like a trap, his lips, like his face, were almost colourless. The air was pungent with his breath, but intuitively she divined that it was not drunkenness alone which had aroused this temper, the more dismaying since it was for the time being under control. From the look in his eyes she started back as from a blow. "Charlie! What's the matter?" Quard opened his lips, gulped spasmodically, closed them without speaking. The muscles on the left side of his face twitched nervously. Abruptly he shot up out of his chair, strode to the door, locked it and pocketed the key. His face as he turned was terrible to see. She shrank away, but his eyes held hers in the fascination of fright. "Why--Charlie!--what--" He interrupted with an imperative gesture, took a step toward her, and shook his hand in her face. Between his thumb and forefinger glittered something exquisitely coruscant in the sunlight. "What's that?" he demanded in a quivering voice. She moved her head in assumed bewilderment, staggered to recognize the symbol of her broken troth with Matthias. "I don't know. What is it? You keep moving it around so, I can't see...." "There, then!" he cried, steadying the hand under her nose. Instinctively her gaze veered to her trunk. Its lid was up. On the floor lay her work-basket in the litter of its former contents. Her indignation mounted. "What were you doing in my trunk?" she demanded hotly. Quard's eyes clouded under the impact of this counter attack. Momentarily his dazed expression made it very plain that he had taken advantage of her absence to drink heavily. And this was even more plain in the blurred accents, robbed of the sharpness rage had lent them, in which he endeavoured to justify himself. "I wanted--shew on s'pender button--wanted work-basket...." Anger returned; his voice mounted: "And I found this! What is it?" Joan snatched at the ring, but he drew back his hand too quickly for her. "It's mine. Give it to me!" "Where'd you get it? Tha'sh what I wanna know!" "None of your business. Give it--" "T' hell it ain't my business. I'm your husband--gotta right to know where you get diamonds"--he sneered--"diamonds like this! I never bought it." "No," she flamed back; "you're too stingy!" "Stingy, am I?" He faltered swaying. "Tha'snough. I'm tightwad, so s'nother guy gets chansh to buy you diamonds. Tha's way of it, hey?" "You give me that ring, Charlie," Joan demanded ominously. "You got anotha good guess coming. What I'll give you is jush two minutes to tell me name of the fellow't give it to you." "Don't be a fool, Charlie!" "I don't intend to be fool--any longer. You tell me or--" He checked, searching his befuddled mind for a compelling threat. With a shift of manner, Joan extended her hand in pleading. "Give me the ring, Charlie, and be sensible. I haven't done anything wrong. I can explain." "Well...." Grudgingly he dropped the ring into her palm. But immediately her fingers had closed upon it, mistrust again possessed him. "Now, you tell me--" "Very well," she interrupted patiently. "You needn't shout. I don't mind telling you now. It's my engagement ring." "Your _what_?" sharply. "My engagement ring. I was engaged last summer to Mr. Matthias, before we began to rehearse the sketch." "Engaged?" he iterated stupidly. "Engaged for what?" "Engaged to be married. He was in love with me. I meant to marry him until you and I met the second time--" "Meant to marry who?" "Mr. Matthias. We--" "Matthias? What Matthias?" "John Matthias, the author--the playwright. He wrote 'The Jade God.'" Quard wagged his head cunningly. "Y'mean to tell me you was engaged to that guy, and--didn't marry him?" "Certainly. I married you, didn't I, dear?" "And if that's true, how't happen you didn't give'm back his ring? _Eh?_" "I meant to, Charlie, but he was out of town and I didn't know his address." "That's likely!" The actor laughed harshly. "Tha'sh _good_ one, that is! You going to marry him, and didn't know his address. Expect me to believe that?" "It's true, Charlie--it's God's truth." "You're a liar!" "Charlie--!" "I say, you're a liar! Wha'sh more, I mean it." Quard waved his hand, palm down, to indicate his scornful disposition of her yarn. Then he staggered, steadied himself by clutching the back of a chair, and conscious how this betrayed his condition, worked himself into a towering rage to cover it. "I know better. 'F you'd ever got a chance to marry that feller, you'd 've jumped at it. He'd never've got away. You wouldn't 've given him no more chance'n you did me--you'd 've pulled wool over his eyes same way. _I_ know what'm talking about. You're a _liar_, a dam' dirty little liar, tha's what you are." Joan's colour deserted her face entirely. "Charlie! don't you say that to me again." "And what'll you do? Think I care? I know what you'll do, all right, because I'm going make you do it." "What do you mean?" "Wha's more, I know now who gave you that ring. I was fool not to guess it before. I didn't give it to you--no! Mist' Matthias didn't give it to you--no! But somebody _did_ give it to you--_eh?_ Tha's right, isn't it? And his name--'s name was _Vincent Marbridge_! Wasn't it?" He thrust his inflamed face close to hers, leering wickedly. "Marbridge!" Joan echoed blankly. "Vincent Marbridge--tha's the feller't give you the ring. He's the feller't could do it, too--got all the money in the world--enough to buy dozens'r rings--enough to buy you all them good clothes you got hold of after you threw me down and before I was ass enough to take up with you again! A' that, you were a fool not to get more outa him." The insult ate like an acid into the pride of the girl. She flushed crimson, then in an instant paled again. Her eyes grew cold and hard. "That will do," she said bitterly. "You've said enough--too much. After all I've endured from you--your drunkenness, your--" There was a maniac glare in the eyes of the man as he thrust his face still closer. "And what'll you do, eh?" he shouted violently. "What'll _you_ do?" She turned her face aside, in disgust of his reeking breath. "And what'll _you_ do? Tell me that!" "I'll leave you--" "You betcha life you'll leave me. I knew _that_ before you come into this room!" "And I'm sorry I didn't go long ago--" "The hell you are!" In a gust of uncontrollable frenzy, Quard struck her sharply over the mouth. "You go--d'you hear?--you damn'----" In blind fury Joan flung herself upon him, sobbing, biting, scratching, kicking. He reeled back before that unexpected assault, then, sobered a trifle by its viciousness, caught her wrists, held her helpless for an instant, and threw her violently from him. She fell to her knees, lurched over on her side.... The door slammed: he was gone. [Illustration: The door slammed. He was gone.] She knew the man too well not to know he would make instantly for the nearest bar; the only question was what guise intoxication would assume in him, this time. It was possible that he would drink himself raving mad and return fit for murder. She must make her escape with all possible expedition.... Instantly Joan sat up, dried her eyes, convulsively swallowed her sobs, and felt of her bruised mouth. Before her on the carpet the diamond ring winked sardonically in the sunset light. She pondered savagely the wide and deep damnation it had wrought in her life. It seemed impossible that only a few minutes had elapsed since she had entered this room, an affectionate, patient, and not unhappy wife. Now she sifted her heart and found in it not one grain of the love it had once held for Quard. This alone would have rendered irrevocable her decision to leave him. The thing was over--settled--finished. She gave a gesture of finality. With all her heart she hoped that the sketch would go to the devil without her.... Rising, she went to the mirror, to stare incredulously at the face it presented for her inspection, a cruel caricature, lined, distorted, blowsy, stained with tears. At this vision, hysteria threatened again. With a great effort she fought it down, and controlled and smoothed out the muscles of her face. Now she was more recognizable. Even her mouth was not seriously disfigured; he had struck with the flat of his hand only; her lips were sore and slightly but not markedly swollen. A veil would disguise them completely. At the wash-stand she devoted some very valuable moments to sopping her face with cold water, and particularly her mouth and eyes. The treatment toned down the inflammation of weeping, rendered her flesh firm and cool once more, and left her with a feeling of spiritual refreshment, with nerves again under control and her will even more inalterably fixed than before. Rouge and powder completed her rejuvenescence. Turning to her trunk, she took out the tray--and paused with a low cry of consternation. From the tumbled and disordered state of its contents, it was plain that, having discovered the ring, Quard had searched diligently for further confirmation of his suspicions. With quickening breath, the girl dropped to her knees and hastily but thoroughly ransacked and turned out upon the floor all her belongings. Within a brief period she satisfied herself of one appalling fact: Quard had not only insulted and struck her and cast her off--he had stooped to rob her. Her hands were tied: she had not money enough to leave him. Probably, with the low cunning and fallacious reasoning of dipsomania, he had pouched her savings with that very thought in mind. Meaning to break with her, to have his scene and satisfy his lust for brutality, he had also planned to prevent Joan's leaving the cast of "The Lie" until a successor could be found and broken in. Penniless (he had argued) she would be obliged to play on, at least until Saturday, to earn her fare back East. It was Quard's practice to carry his money in large bills folded in a belt of oiled silk which he wore buckled round his waist, beneath his underclothing--with a smaller fund for running expenses in a leather bill-fold more accessibly disposed. But Joan (finding a money-belt uncomfortable because of her corsets) had adopted the shiftless plan of secreting her savings in a pocket contrived for that purpose in an old underskirt. And since she had always held her husband rigidly to account for her individual fifty dollars per week, she had managed thus to set aside about three hundred dollars. Unfortunately, it had been their habit to carry duplicate keys to one another's luggage by way of provision against loss. So that now she was left with less than twenty dollars in her pocket-book. She paced the floor in wrathful meditation, pondering means and expedients. Once or twice she noticed the ring, but passed it several times before she paused, picked it up, and abstractedly placed it on her finger. It did not once occur to her that she could raise money by hypothecating the jewel at a pawn-shop: by hook or crook she was determined to regain her own money. She was wondering what good it would do her to threaten Quard with arrest. Had a wife any right to her earnings, under the law? After a time, she opened her handbag, found her personal bunch of keys, and unlocked her husband's trunk. Her pains, however, went for nothing; she investigated diligently every pocket of his clothing without discovering a piece of money of any description. But one thing she did find to make her thoughtful--Quard's revolver.... Removing this last, she relocked the trunk and rang for a bell-boy. Then she put the weapon on the bureau and covered it with her hat. The youth who answered had an intelligent look. Joan appraised him narrowly before trusting him. She opened negotiations with a dollar tip. "I want you to find my husband for me," she said. "If he's anywhere around the hotel, he'll probably be in the bar. But look everywhere, and then come and tell me. You needn't say anything to him. I just want to know where he is. Do you understand?" "Yes, ma'm." "You'd know him if you saw him--Mr. Quard, the actor?" "Yes, ma'm." "That's all. Hurry." As soon as the boy was gone she turned again to her luggage, selecting indispensable garments and toilet articles and packing them in a suit-case. By the time a knock sounded again upon the door, she had the case strapped and locked. "He ain't nowhere about the house, ma'm," the bell-boy reported. "He was in the bar a while, but he's went out." Joan nodded, was dumb in thought. "Do you want as I should go look for him, ma'am?" "Can you leave the hotel?" Joan asked quickly. "I'm just going off-duty now, ma'm; the night shift came on about ten minutes ago, at six o'clock." "And you think you could possibly find him?" "He took a cab, ma'm. The driver's stand is in front of the hotel. If I can find him, I can find where your husband went. Anyhow, it ain't hard to follow up a gentleman as--" "As drunk!" Joan put in when the boy hesitated. "Yes, ma'm." Joan weighed the chance distrustfully; but it was at least a chance, and this was no time to be careful. Taking a five-dollar gold-piece from her scanty store, she gave it to the boy. "Go find him," she said. "And if he seems to know what he's doing--just hang around until he doesn't: he won't keep you waiting long. Then bring him to me. But first take this suit-case down to the Union Ferry house, check it in the baggage-room, and give me the check when you bring him back. And--don't say anything to anybody." "Yes, ma'm--no, ma'm." Supperless, she sat down to wait, Quard's revolver ready to her hand. Twilight waned; night fell; hours passed. Motionless and imperturbable, Joan waited on, the tensity of her mood betrayed only by the burning of her baleful, dangerous eyes. At half-past nine a noise of scuffling feet, gruff voices and heavy breathing in the hallway, following the clash of an elevator gate, brought her to her feet. Going to the bureau, she opened a drawer and put the revolver away. There would be no need of that, now. Answering a knock, she threw the door wide. Two porters staggered in, one with the shoulders, one with the feet of Quard. The bell-boy followed. When they had lugged to the bed that inert and insensate thing she had once loved, Joan tipped the men and they departed. The boy lingered. "Is there anything more I can do, ma'm?" "Where did you find him?" "Down on the Coast. I don't know what wouldn't've happened to him if you hadn't sent me after him. He was up an alley--had been stuck up by a couple of strong-arms. I seen 'em making their get-away just as I come in sight." She uttered a cry of despair: "Robbed--you mean?" "Yes, ma'm. He ain't got as much's a nickel on him." Overwhelmed, Joan sank into a chair. The boy avoided her desolate eyes; he was a little afraid she might want part of the five dollars back. "Hadn't I better send the hotel doctor up, ma'm?" "Perhaps," she muttered dully. "Yes, ma'm. And here's the check for your suit-case. Nothing else? Good night, ma'm." The door closed. Of a sudden, Joan jumped up and ran to the bed in the alcove. Quard's condition was pitiable, but in her excited no compassion. His face was pallid as a death-mask save on one cheek-bone, where there was an angry and livid contusion. His hands were scratched, bleeding, and filthy, his clothing begrimed and torn, his pockets turned inside out. He seemed scarcely to breathe, and a thin froth flecked his slack and swollen lips. With feverish haste she unbuttoned his shirt and trousers and tugged at his undershirt. Then she sobbed aloud, a short, dry sob of relief. She had discovered the money-belt. In another minute she had unbuckled and withdrawn it from his body. She took it to the other room, to the light, and hastily undid its fastenings. There were perhaps two dozen fresh, new bills, for the most part of large denominations, folded once lengthwise to fit into the narrow silken tube; but someone knocked before she found time to reckon up their sum. Hastily cramming the money, together with the tell-tale belt, into her handbag, Joan took a deep breath and said "Come in!" There entered a grave man of middle-age, carrying a physician's satchel. He said, with a slight inclination of his head: "Mrs. Quard, I believe?" "Yes," Joan gasped. She nodded toward the alcove: "Your patient's in there." He murmured some acknowledgment, turning away to the bedside. For several minutes he worked steadily over the drunkard. While she waited, her wits awhirl, Joan mechanically pinned on her hat. Presently the physician stepped back into the room, removed his coat, turned back his cuffs, and produced a pocket hypodermic. With narrowing eyes he recognized Joan's preparations for the street. "Is he all right, doctor?" she said with a feint of doubt and fear. "He's in pretty bad shape, but I guess we can pull him round, all right. But I need your help. You were going out?" She met his eyes steadily. "I was only waiting to hear how he was. I've got to hurry off to the theatre. I'm late now. If we miss the performance tonight, we may lose our booking. And he's just been held up--all we've got's what's coming to us next Saturday." "I see. And you can do without him?" "His understudy'll take his part--we'll manage somehow." "Then I am afraid I shall have to call in assistance--a trained nurse." "Do, please, doctor." "Very well." He moved toward the telephone. "I'll be back in about an hour." "Very well, Mrs. Quard." He stared, perplexed, at the door, when she had shut it.... Avoiding the elevator and lobby, she slipped down the stairs and through a side door to the street. In ten minutes she was at the Union Ferry. Within an hour she was in Oakland, purchasing through tickets for her transcontinental flight. XXVII When he had finished breakfast, Matthias lighted a pipe, and setting his feet anew in the groove they had worn diagonally from door to window, began his matutinal tramp toward inspiration. But this morning found his brain singularly sluggish: thoughts would not come; or if they showed themselves at all, it was only to peer mischievously at him round some distant corner which, when turned, discovered only an empty impasse. Distressed, he tamped down his pipe, ran long fingers through his hair, and wrapped himself in clouds of smoke. Then a breath of cool, sweet air fanned his cheek, and he looked round in sharp annoyance. It was like that fool maid to leave the windows open and freeze him to death! And truly enough, they were both wide open from top to bottom; though, for all that, he wasn't freezing. And outside there was a bright crimson border of potted geraniums on the iron-railed balcony. He hadn't noticed them before; Madame Duprat must have set them out before he was up. Curious whim of hers! Curious weather! Disliking inconsistencies, he stopped in one of the windows to investigate these unseasonable phenomena. In one corner of the back-yard a dilapidated bundle of fur and bones, conforming in general with a sardonic Post-Impressionist's candid opinion of a tom-cat, lay blinking lazily in a patch of warm yellow sunlight. In the next back-yard a ridiculous young person in bare-legs, blue denim overalls and a small red sweater, was industriously turning up the earth with a six-inch trowel, and chanting cheerfully to himself an improvisation in honour of his garden that was to be. At an open window across the way a public-spirited and extremely pretty young woman appeared with a towel pinned round her shoulders and let down her hair, a shimmering cascade of gold for the sun's rays to wanton with and, incidentally, to dry. Somewhere at a distance a cracked old piano-organ was romping and giggling rapturously through the syncopated measures of Tin Pan Alley's latest "rag." A vision drifted before Matthias' eyes, of the green slopes of Tanglewood, the white château on its windy headland, the ineffable blue of the Sound beyond.... Incredulous, he turned to consult his calendar: the day was Wednesday, the seventeenth of April. It was true, then: almost without his knowledge the bleak and barren Winter had worn away and Spring had stolen upon Town, flaunting, extravagant, shy and seductive, irresistible Spring.... For a little Matthias held back in doubt, with reluctant thoughts of his work. Then--all in a breath--he caught up hat and stick, slammed the door behind him, and blundered forth to fulfill his destiny.... She was seated on a bench, in a retired spot sheltered from the breeze, open to the sun, when Matthias, having swung round the upper reservoir, came at full stride down the West Drive, his blood romping, his eyes aglow, warm colour in his face: for the first time in half a year feeling himself again, Matthias the lover of the open skies divorced from Matthias of the midnight lamp and the scored and intricate manuscripts--that Matthias whom the world rejected. At a word, her companion rose and moved to intercept him; and at the sound of his name, Matthias paused, wondering who she could be, this strange, sweet-faced woman, plainly dressed. "Yes?" he said, lifting his hat. "I am Mr. Matthias--yes--" "Mrs. Marbridge would like to speak to you." His gaze veered quickly in the direction indicated by her brief nod. He saw Venetia waiting, and immediately went to her, in his surprise forgetful of the woman who had accosted him. This last moved slowly in the other direction and sat down out of earshot. "This is awfully good of you, Venetia," he said, bending over her hand. "I didn't see you, of course--was thinking of something else--" "But I was thinking of you," she said. "I've been wanting to see you for a long time, Jack." "Surely Helena could have told you where to find me...." "I knew we'd run across one another, somehow, somewhere, sometime--today or tomorrow, without fail. So I was content to do without the offices of Helena. Do sit down. I want so much to talk to you." "Most completely yours to command," he said lightly, and took the place beside her. But his heart was on his lips and in his eyes, and Venetia was far from blind. "Then tell me about yourself," she asked. "It's been so long since I've had any news!" "Is it possible? I should have imagined my doting aunt--" She interrupted with a slight, negative smile and shake of her head: "Helena doesn't approve of me, you know, and of late there has been a decided coolness between the families. I'm afraid George fell out with Vincent for some reason--not too hard to guess, perhaps." He looked away, colouring with embarrassment. "So," she pursued evenly--"about yourself: are you married yet?" Matthias started, laughed frankly. "You didn't know about that, either?... Well, it's true even Helena couldn't have told you much, for I told her nothing.... No, I'm neither married, nor like to be." "She was so very sweet and pretty--" "Joan was wholly charming," he agreed gravely, "but--well, I fancy it was inevitable. We were lucky enough to be obliged to endure a separation of some weeks before, instead of after, marriage; and so we had time to think. At least, she must have foreseen the mistake we were on the point of making, for the break was her own doing--not mine." "You think it would have been a mistake?" "Oh, unquestionably. I confess I'd not have known it, probably, until too late, if she hadn't made me think when she threw me over. I hope it doesn't sound caddish--but I was conscious of a distinct sense of relief when I got back from California and found she'd cleared out without leaving me a line." "I think I understand. And did you never hear from her?" "Not from--by accident, _of_ her. She was predestined for the stage--I can see that clearly now, though I objected then. She was offered a chance during my absence, jumped at it, and made a sort of a half-way hit in a very successful sketch which, oddly enough, I happened to have written--under a pseudonym. It had been kicking round my agent's office for a year; he didn't believe in it any more than I did; and I disbelieved in it hard enough to be ashamed to put my own name to it. That's often the way with a fellow's work; one always believes in the cripples, you know.... Well, some actor chanced to get hold of the 'script one day, fell in love with it and put it on with Joan as his leading woman. If it had been anybody else's sketch, I'd never have known what became of her, probably. As it was, I knew nothing until I got back from the Coast.... I believe they got married very shortly after it was produced; and now they're playing it all over the country. Odd, isn't it?" "Very," Venetia smiled. "And so your heart wasn't broken?" He shook his head and laughed: "No!" But a spasm of pain shot through his eyes and deceived the woman a little longer. "And what have you been doing?" she pursued, meaning to distract him. "I mean, your work?" He shrugged. "Oh, I've had an average luckless year. To begin with, Rideout fell down on his production of 'The Jade God'--the only time it ever had a chance to get over--and a man named Algerson bought his contract and put it on at his stock theatre in Los Angeles. That's why I went out there--to see it butchered." "It failed?" "Extravagantly!" "But didn't you once have a great deal of confidence in it?" "Every play is a valuable property until it's produced," he answered, smiling. "This one was killed by its production. Nothing was right: it needed scenery, and what they gave it had served a decade in stock; it needed actors, and what actors were accidentally permitted to get into the cast got the wrong rôles; finally, it needed intelligent stage direction, and that was supplied by the star, whose idea of a good play is one in which he speaks everybody's lines _and_ his own. Then they rewrote most of the best scenes and botched them horribly." "You couldn't stop them?" "When I attempted to interfere, I was told civilly to go to the devil. Under my contract, I could have stopped them: but that meant suing out an injunction, which in turn meant putting up a bond, and--I didn't have the money." "I'm so sorry, Jack!" "Oh, it's all in the game. I learned something, at least. But the greatest harm it did me was to sap the faith of managers here. One man--Wylie--who was under contract to produce my 'Tomorrow's People,' paid me on January first a forfeit of five hundred dollars rather than run the risk after 'The Jade God.'" "And so you lost both plays?" "Oh, no; I still have 'Tomorrow's People,' and only a short time ago signed up with a manager who isn't afraid of his shadow. We'll put it on next Autumn." "And you believe in that, too?" "I know it will go," Matthias asserted with level confidence. "It's only a question of intelligence at the producing end--and I've arranged to get that." "And meanwhile--you've been working?" "Oh"--he spread out his hands--"one doesn't stop, you know. It's too interesting!" And then he laughed again. "But, you see, you flatter a fellow into talking his head off about himself! Forgive me, and let me do a little cross-examining. How are you? And what have you been doing? You--you know, Venetia--you're looking more exquisitely pretty than ever!" And so she was--more strangely lovely than ever in all the long span of their friendship: with a deeper radiance in her face, a clearer, more translucent pallor, in her eyes a splendour that lent new dignity to their violet-shadowed mystery. "I'm glad of that," she said quietly. She folded listless hands in her lap, her eyes seeking distances. "I'm going to be very happy ... I think...." He looked up sharply. That she wasn't happy now, he could well understand: that Marbridge was behaving badly was something rather too broadly published by the very publicity of his methods. Marriage had not been permitted to interfere--at least, not after his return from Europe--with the ordinary tenor of his bachelor ways. Matthias himself had seen him not infrequently in theatres and restaurants, but only once in company with Venetia--most often he had been dancing attendance upon a Mrs. Cardrow: she who had given her lips to Matthias, thinking him Marbridge, that long-ago night at Tanglewood. She was said to be stage-struck; and Marbridge was rumoured to be deeply, though quietly, involved in the financing of certain theatrical enterprises. Surely, then, Venetia must know what everybody knew, and be unhappy in that knowledge. But now she was so calmly confident that she was "going to be happy"! He wondered if she were contemplating divorce.... And then in a flash he understood. That woman who had stopped him was not of Venetia's caste; if he guessed not wildly, she was a nurse. And Venetia afoot instead of in her limousine.... She turned her eyes to his, smiling with a certain diffident, sweet sedateness. "You didn't know, Jack?" He shook his head, looking quickly away. "But you've guessed?" "Yes," he replied in a low voice. Her hand fell lightly over his for a single instant. "Then be glad for me, Jack," she begged gently. "It's--it's compensation." "I understand," he said, "and I'm truly very glad. It's kind of you to--to tell me, Venetia." "It changes everything," she said pensively: "all my world is changed, and I am a new strange woman, seeing it with new eyes. I have learned so much--and in so short a time--I can hardly believe it. To think, it's not a year since that time at Tanglewood--!" "Please!" he begged. "Oh, I didn't mean to hurt you, Jack. But it's that I wanted to talk to you about. You won't mind, when you understand, as I have learned to understand.... I tell you, I'm altogether another woman. Marriage is like learning to live in a foreign land, but motherhood is another world. I find it difficult to realize Venetia of a year ago: she's like some strange creature I once knew but never quite understood. And yet, little as I understood her, I can make excuses for her: I know her impulses were not bad. I know, better than she knew ... she loved you, Jack." "You must not say that, Venetia!" "But it's true, my dear, most true," she insisted in her voice of gentle magic. "The rest ... was just madness, the sort of madness that some men have the power to--to kindle in women. It's a deadly power, very terrible, and they--who have it--use it as carelessly as children playing with matches and gunpowder--" "Oh, I understand, Venetia, I understand! Don't--" "No--let me tell you. I've got to, Jack. I've had this so long in my heart to tell you!... You must be patient with me, this once, and listen.... You must know that I loved you then when I--ran to you--threw myself into your arms--made you ask me to marry you and promised I would and--and thought that I was safe from _him_ because of my promise. But I didn't know myself--nor him. He seemed able to make his will my law so easily--so strangely!... Even when I ran away with him, I knew that happiness could never come of it.... It was just the madness ... I couldn't help myself ... I just could not _help_ myself.... And then--ah, but I have paid for my madness--many times over!..." For the moment he couldn't trust himself to speak. The woman bent forward to gain a glimpse of his half-averted face, and searched it anxiously with her haunted eyes. "You do understand, Jack?... You forgive?..." "There isn't any question of forgiveness," he said. "And I always understood--half-way. You know that--you must have known it, or you couldn't have said--what you have--to me." The woman laughed a little, tender, broken laugh. "I am so glad!" she said softly. "Perhaps it's wrong.... But you've made me a little happier. I have needed so desperately someone to confess to--someone on whose sympathy I could count. And--Jack--the only one in the world was you.... You--you've helped." She rose, holding out both hands to him, and as he took them and held them tight he saw that her lovely eyes were wide and dim with tears. "You've proved my faith in you," she said--"my gentle man--my knight sans peur et sans reproche!" He bent his head to her hands, but before his lips could touch them, very gently she drew them away, and turned and left him. Bareheaded and wondering, for a long time he stood staring at the spot where, in company with the nurse, she had disappeared. XXVIII As soon as the porter had made up the lower berth in the section Joan had reserved for her sole accommodation--in spite of the strain of thrift ingrained in her nature--she retired to it, buttoned securely the heavy plush portieres, and prepared for rest by reducing herself to that state of semi-undress in which she had learned to travel by night. Then, by the light of the small electric lamp above her pillow, she turned out the contents of her handbag and counted the money she had stolen from Quard. The sum of it, more than twenty-one hundred dollars, staggered her. She hadn't dreamed that Quard possessed so much ready cash. Carefully folding the bills of larger denomination into a neat, flat packet, she wrapped them in a handkerchief and hid them in the hollow of her bosom, secured by a safety-pin to her ribbed silk undervest. The remainder, more than enough to cover all ordinary expenses en route to New York, she disposed of more accessibly, half in her handbag, half in one of her stockings. Then extinguishing the light, she lay back, but not to sleep. The pressure of her emotions was too strong to let her lose touch with consciousness. As a general rule, sleeping-cars had no terrors for Joan; never a nervous woman, her thoroughly sound and healthy organization permitted her to sleep almost at will, even under such discouraging circumstances as those provided by modern railway accommodations. But that night she lay awake till dawn flushed the windows with its wash of grey, awake and staring wide of eye into the gloom of her section, listening to the snores of conscienceless neighbours, and thinking, thinking--thinking endlessly and acutely. But they were thoughts singularly uncoloured by remorse for what she had done or fear of its consequences. She was not in the least sorry she had taken Quard's money; she was glad. The mere amount of it was proof enough for Joan that her husband had lied to her about the earnings of the sketch, had lied from the very beginning; otherwise he could by no means have laid by so much in the term of their booking to date. And for that, he deserved to suffer. She was only sorry he might not be made to understand how heavily he was paying for those months of deception. But that was something Quard would never know: with the story of the bell-boy he must be content; he must go through life placing the blame of his misfortune upon the heads of those nameless "stick-up men" of the Barbary Coast. Nor was he likely to suffer otherwise. Joan was confident the man would manage somehow to find his feet financially, almost as soon as physically. A telegram to his agent, Boskerk, would bring him aid if all else failed; the play was too constant an earner of heavy commissions for Boskerk to let it fall by the wayside for lack of a few hundred dollars. So was it too strong a "draw" on the vaudeville circuits to be blacklisted and barred by managers because of the temporary break-down: something which Quard would readily explain and excuse (and Joan could imagine how persuasively) with his moving yarn of foot-pads and knock-out drops. Nor would it be more than a temporary break-down; with Quard restored to his senses, the absence of the leading woman would prove merely a negligible check. Joan entertained no illusions as to her indispensability: once, in Denver, when she had been out of the cast for two consecutive performances, suffering with an ulcerated tooth, another actress had gone on and actually read the part from manuscript without materially lessening the dramatic effect of the playlet as a whole. Other women by the score could be found to fill her place acceptably enough, if few as handsomely (Joan soothed her pride with this reservation). "The Lie" would go on its conquering way without her--never fear! And Quard? Joan curled a lip: _he_ wouldn't pine away for her. She had come to know too well his shallow bag of tricks; and life to him was not life if he lacked one before whose dazzled vision he could air his graces and accomplishments--strut and crow and trail a handsome wing in the dust. Looking back she could see very clearly, now, how love had waned as soon as lust was sated in the man. That night in Cincinnati had been the turning point: he had refrained from drink only as long as his wife continued to intoxicate his senses. And Joan?... In the stifling gloom of her curtained section the girl stretched luxuriously, breathed deep, and smiled a secret, enigmatic smile. No more than he, would she waste herself away with grief and longing. She was no longer another's but now her own mistress: a free adventurer, by the gold band upon her finger licensed to cruise with letters of marque. Shortly before sunrise she fell asleep, still smiling, and slept on sweetly well into mid-morning. Then, rising, she refreshed herself in the wash-room, and went to a late breakfast with countenance as clear and firm and bright as if she had never known a wakeful hour. The eyes of men followed her wherever she moved, and when she was seated alone in her section, dreaming over a magazine or gazing pensively out of the window, men discovered errands that took them to and fro in her vicinity more often than was warranted by any encouragement she gave them. For she gave them none, she ignored them every one. She was through with Man for good and all! It was a brand new rôle, and to play it diverted her immensely for the time being.... She spent the greater part of her waking hours, during the next few days, planning what she would do with all that money. Clothes, of course, figured ever first in these projections, and then a suite of rooms at some ostentatious hotel, and taxicabs when she went out to call on managers. How many times hadn't she heard Maizie Dean solemnly affirm that "a swell front does more to put you in _right_ than anything else, with them lowlifers"? And again she was pleasurably diverted by a vision of herself, extravagantly gowned, returning to recount her Odyssey to an admiring audience composed of Ma, Edna, and, perhaps, Butch; at the close of which she would distribute largesse, not forgetting to return Butch's loan with open-handed interest, and go on her way rejoicing, pursued by envious benedictions.... New York received her like a bridegroom, clothed in April sunshine as in a suit of golden mail, amazingly splendid and joyous. After that weary grind of inland towns and cities, differing one from another only in degrees of griminess, greyness, and dullness, New York seemed Paradise Regained to Joan. She had not believed it could seem so beautiful, so magnificent, so sensuously seductive. In the exaltation of that delirious hour she plunged madly into a department store near the Pennsylvania Station, even before securing lodgings, and bought herself a pair of cheap white kid gloves, simply for the sheer voluptuousness of possessing once again something newly purchased in New York. It was the beginning of an orgy. Joan hadn't thought how shabby and travel-worn she must seem until she donned those fresh and staring gloves and saw them in relief against the wrinkled and dusty garments she had worn across the continent. Thoughtful, she sought a nearby mirror and looked herself over, then shook her head and turned away to check her suit-case at the parcels desk and surrender herself body and mind to the sweet dissipation of clothing herself afresh from top to toe.... But first of all she visited the hairdressing and manicuring department: she meant to be altogether spick-and-span before venturing forth to woo and win anew this old and misprized lover, her New York. It was the head saleswoman of the suit department whose remote disdain led Joan deeper into extravagance. The girl had selected a taffeta costume which, while by no means the most expensive or the handsomest in stock, possessed the advantage of fitting well her average figure, requiring no alterations. On paying for it she announced her desire to put it on at once and have her old suit sent home. "Reully?" drawled the saleswoman, disappointed in her efforts to induce the girl to buy a higher-priced suit which did require alterations. Conjuring a pencil from the fastnesses of her back-hair, she produced an order pad. "Miss--what did you say? Ah, Thursday! Thanks. What numba, please? _Is_ it in the city?" Joan flushed, but controlled her impulse to wither and blast this insolent animal. "The Waldorf-Astoria," she said quietly--though never once had she ventured within the doors of that establishment--and withdrew in triumph to make her change of clothing. And having committed herself to this extent, she enjoyed ordering everything sent to that hotel, which in her as yet somewhat naïve understanding was synonymous with the last word in the sybaritism of metropolitan life. Her long experience on the road had served thoroughly to break her in to the ways of hotels, however, and she betrayed no diffidence in the matter of approaching the room-clerk for accommodations. Nor did she, apparently, find anything dismaying in the price she was asked to pay for a bedroom with private bath. It was only when, at length relieved of the attentions of the bell-boy whose unconcealed admiration alone was worth the quarter Joan gave him as a tip, she had inspected first her new quarters and then herself in a pier-glass, that the girl gave herself over to alternate tremors of self-approval and trepidation. These last were only increased when she reckoned up the money she had left, and appreciated how much she had spent in that one wild afternoon of shopping. On the other hand, she reminded herself, a complete new wardrobe was a necessity to one whose former outfit was lost beyond recall. Quard would never have forwarded the clothing she had left behind in San Francisco, even if she could have found the effrontery to write and demand it. And if she had expended upwards of five hundred dollars since reaching New York, there was less extravagance in that than might have been suspected; she had purchased cannily in almost every instance and, at worst, but few things that she could well have done without in that sphere of life to which she felt herself called. The excitement of unwrapping those parcels which began presently to arrive in shoals, and of reviewing such purchases as she had not worn to the hotel on her back, in time completely reassured her. It was with the composure of restored self-confidence and esteem that she presently went down to dinner. Conscious that she was looking her handsome best in a modish afternoon gown, she was able to receive the attentions of the head-waiter with just the proper degree of indifference, to order a simple meal and consume it appreciatively without seeming aware that she dined in strange surroundings. But all the while she was consumed with admiration of herself for her audacity, as well as with not a little awe-stricken wonder at the child of fortune, who in the space of one brief year--of less, indeed, than that full period--had risen from the stocking-counter of a department store and the squalor and poverty of East Seventy-sixth Street to the dignity of a leading woman and the affluence of lodging at the Waldorf! True, she now lacked an engagement; but she had to support her demands for new employment the prestige of a successful season with "The Lie"--"the vaudeville sensation of the year," as Quard had truthfully described it. Need she fret herself with vain questionings of an inscrutable future, who had made such amazing progress in so short a time? Surely she was justified in assuming that the end for her was not yet, that she was dedicated to some far richer and more gorgeous destiny than any she had ever conceived in her most wild imaginings. She had only to watch herself: she was her own sole enemy, with her fondness for the admiration of men and their society. Let them realize that weakness, and she was lost, doomed to the way too many capable girls had gone, to the end of infamy and despair. But if only she had the wit and art to make men think her weakness theirs.... And that much Joan was sure she possessed: she believed she had learned to know Man better than herself. She meant to go far, now, a great deal farther than she had ever thought to go in those quaint, far-off days when the crown of her ambition had been to paint her pretty face, wear silken tights upon her pretty legs, and beat a drum in the chorus of Ziegfield's Follies. XXIX After dinner Joan treated herself to the experience of lounging in one of the corridors of the hotel, the one (she fancied: she wasn't sure) known through the Town as "Peacock Alley." She pretended to be waiting for somebody, made her gaze seem more abstracted than demure. Inwardly she quivered with the excitement, the exaltation of forming a part of that rich and sensuous scene. There were women all about her, many women of all ages and from every grade of society, alike in one respect alone, that they were radiantly dressed and, like Joan, found pleasure in sunning themselves in the soft, diffused glow of the many shaded electric lamps as well as in the regard, as a rule less shaded, of that endless parade of men who moved, sometimes alone, again with other men, more commonly with women, continually from one part to another of the hotel. Muted strains from an excellent orchestra, not too near, added the final touch of enchantment to this ensemble. Entranced though, indeed, seeming little more conscious of her surroundings than one in a day-dream, Joan was acutely sensitive to all that passed in her vicinity. Not a woman came within the range of her vision without being critically inspected, dissected, analyzed, catalogued, both as to her apparel and as to the foundations for her pretensions to social position or beauty. Not a man strolled by, were he splendid in evening dress or merely "smart" in the ubiquitous "sack suit" of the period, without being scrutinized and appraised with a minute attention to detail that would have flattered him had it been less covert. Joan felt the lust for this life burning like a fire through all her being: there was nothing she could imagine more desirable than to live always as lived, apparently, these hundreds of well-groomed, high-spirited, carefree people.... She had been steeping her soul in the blandishments of this atmosphere for fully half an hour, and was beginning to think it time to return to her room, when she was momentarily startled out of her assumed preoccupation by sight of one who hadn't been far from her thoughts at any time since her break with Quard. He came walking her way from the general direction of the bar, with another man--both attired as richly as masculine conventions permit in America, and not altogether unconscious of the fact, each in his way guilty of a mild degree of swagger. Of the two, the one betraying the most ease and freedom from ostentation was one known to Joan, chiefly through the medium of his portraits published in _The Morning Telegraph_ and other theatrical organs, as "Arlie" Arlington, a producing manager locally famous both for his wit and the shrewdness and success with which he contrived to gauge, year in, year out, public taste in musical comedies. Broadway had tagged him "the only trustworthy friend of the Tired Business Man." Infrequently Arlington adventured in plays without music or dancing, but as a rule with far less success. His companion, the man whom, Joan felt, she had been subconsciously waiting for ever since entering the hotel, was Vincent Marbridge. She was impressed with the appositeness of his appearance there to her unexpressed desire, this man who had been so plainly struck by her charms at first sight and who was credited with silent partnership in many of Arlington's enterprises. And comprehending for the first time fully how much she had been subjectively counting on meeting him again and enlisting his sympathies--his sympathies at least--she steeled herself against the shock of recognition, lest she betray her fast mounting anxiety. He must not for a moment be permitted to suspect she considered him anything but the most distant of acquaintances or believed him to have been the anonymous author of that magnificent gift of roses.... But Marbridge passed without seeing her, at all events without knowing that he saw her. Rolling a little as he walked, with that individual sway of his body from the hips, he leaned slightly toward Arlington and gesticulated with immense animation while recounting some inaudible anecdote which seemed to amuse both men mightily. And in the swing of his narrative his glance, wandering, flickered across Joan's face and on without in the least comprehending her as anything more than a lay figure in a familiar setting. But Arlington, less distracted, looked once keenly, and after he had passed turned to look again. In spite of this balm to her vanity, Joan flushed with chagrin. She knew in her heart that Marbridge had not other than inadvertently slighted her; yet she felt the cut as keenly as though it had been grossly intentional. Nevertheless she waited there for many minutes more, in the hope that he would return and this time know her. At length, however, she saw the two men again, at some distance, standing by the revolving doors at the Thirty-third Street entrance. Both now wore top-coats and hats. Marbridge was still talking, and Arlington listening with the same expression of faintly constrained but on the whole genuine amusement. And almost as soon as Joan discovered them, they were joined by two women in brilliant evening gowns and wraps. An instant later the party was feeding itself into the inappeasable hopper of the revolving door, and so disappeared. A prey to a sudden sensation of intense loneliness and disappointment--and with this a trace of jealousy; for in spite of the distance she had been able to see that both women were very lovely--Joan got up and returned to her room.... An hour later she rose from a restless attempt to go to sleep, went to the telephone and asked the switchboard operator to find out whether or not Mr. Vincent Marbridge was a guest of the hotel. The answer was in the affirmative, if modified by the information that the party wasn't in just then. Intensely gratified, the girl went back to bed and promptly fell asleep formulating ingenious schemes to meet Marbridge by ostensible accident. On the following day she lunched at the hotel, spent two fruitless hours in its public corridors between tea time and time to dress for dinner, and another in Peacock Alley after dinner, seeing nothing whatever of Marbridge. And the day after provided her with a fatiguing repetition of this experience. She began to be tremendously bored by this mode of existence, to sense the emptiness, the vapidity of hotel life for a friendless woman. Once or twice she revived and let her fancy play about her project to revisit her family in the guise of Lady Bountiful, but only to defer its execution against the time when she could go to them with another engagement to drive home the stupendous proportions of her success. Besides (she told herself) they seemed to be worrying along without her, all right. If they cared anything about her, they could have written, at least; Edna had the West Forty-sixth Street address.... Not once or twice but many a time and oft she found herself yearning back to the homely society of the Sisters Dean's salon in the establishment of Madame Duprat. And though she held back from revisiting the house through fear of meeting Matthias, she wasted many an hour promenading Broadway from Thirty-eighth Street north to Forty-eighth, in the hope of encountering Maizie or May or one of their friends. But it was singularly her fate to espy not one familiar face among the multitude her wistful eyes reviewed during those dreary mid-afternoon patrols. Everybody she knew, it would seem, was either busy or resting out of town. On her fourth morning at the Waldorf, reading _The Morning Telegraph_ over the breakfast tray in her room, Joan ran across an illuminating news item that carried a Buffalo date line. It chronicled the first performance of Arlington's most recent venture, "Mrs. Mixer," announced as a satirical comedy of manners by an author unknown either to Joan or to fame, and projected by Arlington as a vehicle to exploit the putative talents of Nella Cardrow, "the stage's latest recruit from the Four Hundred." The Buffalo performance was, it appeared, the first of a fortnight's trial on the road, following which the production was to be withdrawn pending a metropolitan début in the Autumn. The story of the first night was infused with a thinly sarcastic humour. "After the final curtain," it pursued, "the audience filed reverently from the house, omitting flowers, and Arlie Arlington broke a track record reaching the nearest Western Union office to summon several well-known ante-mortem specialists of New York to the bedside of the patient. Meanwhile, Vincent Marbridge was hastily organized into a posse of one to prevent Undertaker Cain from laying hands upon the sufferer and carting it off to what might prove premature interment in the mausoleum of his celebrated storage warehouses...." Dropping the paper, Joan went directly to the telephone and asked the office to have her bill ready within an hour's time. From this she turned to pack her new possessions in a trunk as new. It had never occurred to her that Marbridge might have left the hotel. Now she said that it was "just her luck!..." By one o'clock that afternoon she had shifted bag and baggage to a stuffy and poorly furnished bedchamber in a crowded, noisy, and not overclean theatrical hotel situated on a corner of Longacre Square. This establishment consisted of an old and rambling structure of four storeys, of which the street floor was given over to tradesmen. An all-night drug-store held the corner shop, while other subdivisions were occupied by a "tonsorial parlor," a dairy-lunch room in the favour of many taxicab chauffeurs, a boot-blacking business, and a theatrical hair-dresser's. Next door, off Broadway, stood one of those reticent brown-stone residences with perennially shuttered windows and a front-door to all appearances hermetically sealed, but negotiable, none the less, to those whom fortune had favoured with the password and sufficient money and witlessness to make them welcome with proprietors of crooked gambling layouts. Across the street rose the side wall of a theatre, decorated with an angular iron fire-escape. The day was almost unseasonably warm, but the hour appointed when the city should blossom out in awnings had not arrived. Joan's room was hot with sunlight that mercilessly enhanced the shabbiness of all its appointments, from the stained and threadbare carpet to the cheap bureau with its mottled, dark mirror, and the scorched and blistered edges of its top where cigarettes had been suffered to burn out, forgotten. But when Joan had unpacked and disposed of her belongings, she went to the window as she was, in a loose kimono generously open at the throat, and stood there for a long time, contentedly looking out. Taxicabs darted or stood with motors sonorously rumbling in the street below. Round the corner, Longacre Square roared with the traffic of its several lines of surface-cars and its unending procession of motor-driven vehicles. The windows of the theatre across the way were open, and through them drifted the clatter of a piano with the surge of half a hundred feminine voices repeating over and over the burden of a chorus--betraying the fact that a rehearsal was in progress. At one of the open fire-escape exits lounged a youth in his shirt-sleeves, smoking a cigarette, and conversing amiably with a young woman in a stiffly-starched white shirtwaist, ankle-length skirt, and brazen hair: principals, Joan surmised, waiting for their turn, when the chorus had learned its business acceptably. Nearer at hand, in the room to the right of Joan's, a woman with a good voice was humming absently an aria from "La Tosca," while to the left another woman was audible, her strained and nervous accents stuttering on in an endless monologue of abuse, evidently aimed at the head of a husband who, if he had been "drinking again," retained at least wit enough to attempt no sort of interruption or rejoinder. Joan smiled in comprehension. Breathing long and deep of tepid air flavoured strongly with dust and the effluvia of dead cigars and cigarettes, she turned away from the window, lifted her arms and spread them wide, luxuriously. "Thank God!" she murmured with profound sincerity--"for a place you can stretch in!" XXX With scant delay Joan began to pick up acquaintances: nothing is easier in that milieu to which the girl dedicated herself. The process of widening her circle began with meeting the girl whom Joan had heard singing in the adjoining bedchamber. They passed twice in the corridors of the Astoria Inn before Joan had been resident there twenty-four hours, and on the second occasion the girl with the voice nodded in a friendly way and enquired if Joan didn't think the weather was simply awf'ly lovely today. Joan replied in the affirmative, and their acquaintanceship languished for as long as twelve hours. Then, toward six in the evening, the girl presented herself at Joan's door in a condition of candid deshabille, wishing to borrow a pair of curling-irons. Being accommodated, she came on into the room, perched herself on the edge of the bed, and made herself known. Her name was Minnie Hession and she had been singing in the chorus for seven years. Originally a prettyish, plump-bodied brunette, she was at present what she herself termed "black-and-tan": in the middle of the process of "letting her hair go back." Her father was Chief of Police of some Western city (name purposely withheld: Joan was, however, assured that she would be surprised if she knew _what_ city) and her folks had heaps of money and had been wild with her when she insisted on going on the stage. "But, goodness, dearie, when you've got tempryment, whatcha goin' to do? Nobody outsida the business ever understands." All the same, much as the folks disapproved of her carving out a career for herself, whenever she got hard up all she had to do was telegraph straight back home.... She was, of course, at present without employment; but Joan was advised to wait until Arlie Arlington got back into Town; Arlie never forgot a girl who had not only a good voice but _some_ figure, if Miss Hession did say it herself. They went shopping together the following afternoon, and in the evening dined together at a cheap Italian restaurant, counterpart of that to which Quard had first introduced Joan and the Sisters Dean. Joan paid the bill, by no means a heavy one, and before they went home stood treat for "the movies." After that their friendship ripened at a famous rate, if exclusively at Joan's expense. Before it had endured a week Joan had loaned Minnie ten dollars. Toward the end of its first fortnight she mortally offended the girl by refusing her an additional twenty, and the next day Minnie moved from the Astoria Inn without the formality of paying her bill or even of giving notice. The management philosophically confiscated an empty suit-case which she had been too timorous to attempt to smuggle out of the house--everything else in her room had mysteriously vanished--and considered the incident closed. In this the management demonstrated its wisdom in its day and generation: it never saw Miss Hession again. Nor did Joan. But through the chorus girl, as well as independently, Joan had contracted many other fugitive friendships. She never lacked society, after that, whether masculine or feminine. Men liked her for her good looks and unaffected high spirits; women tolerated her for two reasons, because she was always willing to pay not only her own way but another's, and because she was what they considered a "swell dresser": her presence was an asset to whatever party she lent her countenance. Frankly revelling in freedom regained, and intoxicated by possession of a considerable amount of money, she let herself go for a time, quite heedless of expense or consequence. Within a month she had become a familiar figure in such restaurants as Burns', Churchill's, and Shanley's; and her laughter was not infrequently heard in Jack's when all other places of its class boasted closed doors and drawn blinds. Inevitably she acquired a somewhat extensive knowledge of drink. Most of all she learned to love that champagne which Matthias had been too judicious to supply her and from which she had abstained out of consideration for Quard's weakness. But now there was no reason why she should not enjoy it in such moderation as was practised by her chosen associates. She preferred certain sweetish and heady brands whose correspondingly low cost rendered them more easy to obtain.... But with all this she never failed to practise a certain amount of circumspection. In one respect, she refrained from growing too confidential about herself. That she had been the leading woman with "The Lie" was something to brag about: the very cards which she had been quick to have printed proclaimed the fact loudly in imitation Old English engraving. But that she had been wife to its star was something which she was not long in discovering wasn't generally known. The success of the sketch was a by-word of envy among actors facing the prospect of an idle summer; and the route columns of _Variety_ told her that, in line with her prediction, Quard had somehow surmounted his San Francisco predicament and was continuing to guide the little play upon its triumphal course. But Quard himself had always been too closely identified with stock companies of the second class to have many friends among those with whom his wife was now thrown: actors for the most part of the so-called legitimate stage, with scant knowledge or experience (little, at least, that they would own to) of theatrical conditions away from Broadway and the leading theatres of a few principal cities. So Joan kept her own counsel about her matrimonial adventure: its publication could do her no good, if possibly no harm; and she preferred the freedom of ostensible spinsterhood. Her wedding-ring had long since disappeared from her hand, giving place to the handsome diamond with which Matthias had pledged her his faith. Furthermore, such dissipation as she indulged in was never permitted to carry her beyond the border-line which, in her understanding, limited discretion in her relations with men. She enjoyed leading them on, but marriage had made her too completely cognizant of herself to permit of any affair going beyond a certain clearly defined point: she couldn't afford to throw herself away. And more than once she checked sharply and left an undrained glass, warned by her throbbing pulses that she was responding a trace too ardently to the admiration in the eyes of some male companion of the evening. But there were only two whom she held dangerous to her peace of mind, one because she was afraid of him, the other because she admired him against her will. The first was an eccentric dancer and comedian calling himself Billy Salute. A man of middle-age and old beyond his years in viciousness, the gymnastic violence of his calling in great measure counteracted the effects of his excesses and kept him young in body. He was a constant and heavy but what was known to Joan's circle as a safe drinker; drunkenness never obliterated his consciousness or disturbed his physical equilibrium; in spite of its web of wrinkles, his skin remained fair and clear as a boy's, and retained much of the fresh colouring of youth. But his eyes were cold and hard and profoundly informed with knowledge of womankind. His regard affected Joan as had Marbridge's, that day at Tanglewood; under its analysis she felt herself denuded; pretence were futile to combat it: the man _knew_ her. He made no advances; but he watched her closely whenever they were together; and she knew that he was only waiting, patient in the conviction that he had only to wait. And thus he affected her with such fear and fascination that she avoided him as much as possible; but he was never far out of her thoughts; he lingered always on the horizon of her consciousness like the seemingly immobile yet portentous bank of cloud that masks the fury of a summer storm.... The other man pursued her without ceasing. He was young, not over twenty-five or six--an age to which Joan felt herself immeasurably superior in the knowledge and practice of life--and happened to be the one man of her acquaintance who was neither an actor nor connected with the business side of the stage. By some accident he had blundered from newspaper reporting to writing for cheaply sensational magazines, and from this to writing for the stage. It is true that his achievements in this last quarter had thus far been confined to collaboration with a successful playwright on the dramatization of one of his stories; but that didn't lessen his self-esteem and assertiveness. He claimed extraordinary ability for himself in a quite matter-of-fact tone, and on his own word was on terms of intimacy with every leading manager and star in the country. Nobody Joan knew troubled to contradict his pretensions, and despite that wide and seasoned view of life she believed herself to possess she was still inexperienced enough to credit more than half that he told her, never appreciating that, had the man been what he claimed, he would have had no time to waste toadying to actors. He might, if not discouraged, prove very useful to her. In fact, he promised to--repeatedly. More than this, his attentions flattered her more than she would have cared to confess even to herself. He didn't lack wit, wasn't without intelligence, and the power of his imagination couldn't be denied; thus he figured to her as the only man of mental attainments she had known since Matthias. It was something to be desired by such as this one, even though his abnormally developed egotism sometimes seemed appalling. It manifested itself in more ways than one: in his strut, in the foppishness of his dress, in his elaborate affectation of an English accent. He was a small person by the average standard, and slender, but well-formed, and wore clothing admirably tailored if always of an extreme cut. His cheeks were too fleshy, almost plump: something which had the effect of making his rather delicate features seem pinched. Near-sighted, he wore customarily a horn-rimmed pince-nez from which a wide black ribbon dangled like a mourning-band. His name was Hubert Fowey. So Joan tolerated him, encouraged him moderately through motives of self-interest, checked him with laughter when he tried to make love to her, secretly admired him even when his conceit was most fatiguing, and wondered what manner of women he had known to make him think that she would ever yield to his insistence.... She had been nearly six weeks in New York when she awoke one morning to rest in languorous regret of a late supper the preceding night, and to wonder whither she was tending, spurred to self-examination by that singularly clear introspective vision which not infrequently follows intemperance--at least, when one is young. She was reminded sharply that, since returning to Town, she had made hardly a single attempt to find work, beyond having her professional cards printed. And this was the edge of Summer.... Where would the Autumn find her? Slipping quickly out of bed, she collected her store of money, and counted it for the first time in several weeks. The sum total showed a shocking discrepancy between cold fact and the small fortune she had all along been permitting herself to believe she possessed. Even allowing for these heavy initial purchases on returning to New York, her capital had shrunk alarmingly. She began anew, that day, the rounds of managers' offices. Also, she laid down for her guidance a rigid schedule of economies. Only by strict observance thereof would she be able to scrape through the Summer without work or financial assistance from some quarter. Characteristically, she mourned now, but transiently, that she had so long deferred going to see her mother and Edna--something now obviously out of the question; they would want money, to a certainty, and Joan had none to spare them. A few days later she moved to share, half-and-half, the expenses of a three-room apartment on Fiftieth Street, near Eighth Avenue, with a minor actress whom she had recently met and taken a fancy to. Life was rather less expensive under this régime; the young women got their own breakfasts and, as a rule, lunches that were quite as meagre: repasts chiefly composed of crackers, cold meats from a convenient delicatessen shop, with sometimes a bottle of beer shared between two. If no one offered a dinner in exchange for their society, they would dine frugally at the cheaper restaurants of the neighbourhood. But their admirers they shared loyally: if one were invited to dine, the other accompanied her as a matter of course. An arrangement apparently conducive to the most complete intimacy; neither party thereto doubted that she was in the full confidence of the other. There were, none the less, reservations on both sides. Harriet Morrison, Joan's latest companion, was a girl whose very considerable personal attractions and innate love of pleasure were balanced by greenish eyes, a firm jaw, and the sincere conviction that straight-going and hard work would lead her to success upon the legitimate stage. She knew Joan for an incurable opportunist with few convictions of any sort other than that she could act if given a chance, and that men, if properly managed, would give her that chance. For one so temperamentally her opposite, Hattie couldn't help entertaining some unspoken contempt. On the other hand, she believed Joan to be decent, as yet; and halving the cost of living permitted her to indulge in the luxury of a week-end at the seaside once or twice a month. One day near the first of July the two, happening to meet on Broadway after a morning of fruitless search for engagements, turned for luncheon into Shanley's new restaurant--by way of an unusual treat. They had barely given their order when Matthias came in accompanied by a manager who had offices in the Bryant Building, and sat down at a table not altogether out of speaking-distance. To cover her discomfiture, which betrayed itself in flushed cheeks, Joan complained of the heat: an explanation accepted by Hattie without question, since Matthias had not yet looked their way. Joan prayed that he might not; but the thing was inevitable, and it was no less inevitable that he should look at the precise instant when Joan, unable longer to curb her curiosity, raised her eyes to his. For a moment she fancied that he didn't recognize her. But then his face brightened, and he nodded and smiled, coolly, perhaps, but civilly, without the least evidence of confusion. They might have been the most casual acquaintances. And, indeed, the incident would probably have passed unremarked but for the promptings of Joan's conscience. She was sure the glance of Matthias had shifted from her face to the hand on which his diamond shone, and had rested there for a significant moment. As a matter of fact, nothing of the sort had happened. Matthias was absorbed in negotiations concerning an old play which had caught the fancy of the manager. Joan, though he knew her at sight, was now too inconsiderable a figure in his world for him to recall, off-hand, that he had ever made her a present. Nevertheless the girl coloured furiously, and blushed again under the inquisitive stare of her companion. "Who's that?" "Who?" Joan muttered sullenly. "The fellow who bowed to you just now." "Oh, that?" Joan made an unconvincing effort at speaking casually: "A man named Matthias--a playwright, I believe." "Oh," said the other girl quietly. "Never done anything much, has he?" "I don't know." "You don't know him very well?" There was a touch of irony in the question that struck sparks from Joan's temper. "That's my business!" "I'm sure I _beg_ your pardon," Hattie drawled exasperatingly. And the incident was considered closed, though it didn't pass without leaving its indelible effect upon their association. With Joan it had another result: it made her think. Retrospectively examining the contretemps, after she had gone to bed that night, she arrived at the comforting conclusion that she had been a little fool to think that Matthias "held that old ring against her." He hadn't been her lover for several weeks without furnishing the girl with a fairly clear revelation of his character. He was simple-hearted and sincere; she could not remember his uttering one ungenerous word or being guilty of one ungenerous action, and she didn't believe he could make room in his mind for an ungenerous thought. Now if she were to return it, he would think that fine of her.... Of course, she must take it back in person. If she returned it by registered mail, he would have reason to believe her afraid to meet him--that she had been frightened by his mere glance into sending it back. Not that she hadn't every right in the world to keep it, if she liked: there was no law compelling a girl to return her engagement ring when she broke with a man. But Matthias would admire her for it. Moreover, it was just possible that he hadn't as yet arrived at the stage of complete indifference toward her. And he had "the ear of the managers." Nerving herself to the ordeal, two days later, she dressed with elaborate care in the suit she had worn on her flight from Quard. Newly sponged and pressed, it was quite presentable, if a little heavy for the season; moreover, it lacked the lustre and style of her later acquisitions. It wouldn't do to seem too prosperous.... It was a Saturday afternoon, and Hattie had taken herself off to a nearby ocean beach for the week-end; something for which Joan was grateful, inasmuch as it enabled her to dress her part without exciting comment. To her relief, a servant new to the house since her time, answered her ring at the bell of Number 289, and with an indifferent nod indicated the door to the back-parlour. Behind that portal Matthias was working furiously against time, carpentering against the grain that play to discuss which he had lunched at Shanley's; the managerial personage having offered to consider it seriously if certain changes were made. And the playwright was in haste to be quit of the job, not only because he disapproved heartily of the stipulated alterations, but further because he was booked for some weeks in Maine as soon as the revision was finished. Humanly, then, he was little pleased to be warned, through the medium of a knock, that his work was to suffer interruption. He swore mildly beneath his breath, glanced suspiciously at the non-committal door, growled brusque permission to enter, and bent again over the manuscript, refusing to look up until he had pursued a thread of thought to its conclusion, and knotted that same all ship-shape. And when at length he consented to be aware of the young woman on his threshold, waiting in a pose of patience, her eyes wide with doubt and apprehensions, his mind was so completely detached from any thought of Joan that he failed, at first, to recognize her. But the alien presence brought him to his feet quickly enough. "I beg your pardon," he said with an uncertain nod. "You wished to see me about something?" Closing the door, Joan came slowly forward into stronger light. "You don't remember me?" she asked, half perplexed, half wistful of aspect. "But I thought--the other day--at Shanley's--" "But of course I remember you," Matthias interrupted with a constrained smile. "But I wasn't--ah--expecting you--not exactly--you understand." "Oh, yes," Joan replied in subdued and dubious accents--"I understand." She waited a moment, watching narrowly under cover of assumed embarrassment, the signs of genuine astonishment which Matthias felt too keenly to think of concealing. Then she added an uneasy: "Of course...." "Of course!" Matthias echoed witlessly. "You wanted to see me about something," he iterated, wandering. With an effort he pulled himself together. "Won't you sit down--ah--Joan?" "Thank you," said the girl. "But I'm afraid I'm in the way," she amended, dropping back into the old, worn, easy-chair. "Oh, no--I--" The insincerity of his disclaimer was manifest in an apologetic glance toward the manuscript and a hasty thrust of fingers up through his hair. Joan caught him up quickly. "Oh, but I know I am, so I shan't stay," she said, settling herself comfortably. "I only ask a minute or two of your time. You don't mind?" "Mind? Why, I--certainly not." She looked down as if disconcerted by his honest, perplexed, questioning eyes. "I was afraid you might, after--after what's happened--" He fumbled for a cigarette, beginning to feel more calm, less nervous than annoyed. The fact of her unruffled self-possession had at length penetrated his understanding. "No," he said slowly, rolling the cigarette between his palms, "I don't mind in the least, if I can be of service to you." "But I was very foolish," Joan persisted, "and--and unkind. I've been sorry ever since...." "Don't be," Matthias begged, his tone so odd that she looked up swiftly and coloured. Thus far everything had gone famously, quite as rehearsed in the theatre of her optimistic fancy; but the new accent in his voice made her suddenly fear lest, after all, the little scene might not play itself out as smoothly as it had promised to. "Don't be," Matthias repeated coolly. "It's quite all right. Take my word for it: as far as I'm concerned you've nothing at all to reproach yourself with." Her flush deepened. "You mean you didn't care--!" Matthias smiled, but not unkindly. "I mean," he said slowly--"neither of us really cared." "Speak for yourself--" Joan cut in with a flash of temper; but he obtained her silence with a gentle gesture. "Please ... I mean, we both lost our heads for a time. That was all there was to it, I think. Naturally it couldn't last. You were wise enough to see that first and--ah--did the only thing you decently could, when you threw me over. I understood that, at once." "But I," she began in a desperate effort to regain lost ground--"I was afraid you'd hate and despise me--" "Not a bit, Joan--believe me, not for an instant. When I had had time to think it all out, I was simply grateful. I could never have learned to hate or despise you--as you put it--whatever happened; but if you hadn't been so sensible and far-sighted, the affair might have run on too far to be remedied. In which case we'd both have been horribly unhappy." This was so far from the attitude she had believed he would adopt, that Joan understood her cause to be worse than forlorn: it was lost; lost, that is, unless it could be saved by her premeditated heroic measure. Fumbling in her bag, she found his ring. "Perhaps you're right," she said with a little sigh. "Anyhow, it's like you to put it that way.... But what I really came for, was to return this." She offered the ring. He looked, startled, from it to her face, hesitated, and took it. "O--thanks!" he said, adding quite truthfully: "I'd forgotten about that"; and tossed it carelessly to his work-table where, rolling across the face of a manuscript, it oscillated momentarily and settling to rest, seemed to wink cynically at its late possessor. Joan blinked hastily in response: there was a transient little mist before her eyes; and momentarily her lips trembled with true emotion. The scene was working out more painfully than she had ever in her direst misgivings dreamed it might. Deep in her heart she had all along nursed the hope that he would insist on her retaining the ring. That would have been like the Matthias of her memories! But now he seemed to think that she ought to be glad thus to disburden her conscience and by just so much to modify her indebtedness to him! Struck by this thought, Joan gasped inwardly, and examined with startled eyes the face of Matthias. It was her first reminder of the fact that he had left her one hundred and fifty unearned dollars. She had forgotten all about that till this instant. Otherwise, she would have hesitated longer about calling. She wondered if he were thinking of the same thing; but his face afforded no index to his thoughts. He wasn't looking at her at all, in fact, but down, in abstraction, studying the faded pattern of the carpet at his feet. She wondered if perhaps it would advance her interests to offer to return the money, to pay it back bit by bit--when she found work. But wisely she refrained from acting on this suggestion. "I'm sorry I was so long about bringing it back," she resumed with an artificial manner. "I was always meaning to, you know, and always kept putting it off. You know how it is when you're on the road: one never seems to have any time to one's self." "I quite understand," Matthias assured her gravely. She grew sensitive to the fact that he was being patient with her. "But I really mustn't keep you from your work," she said, rising. "You--you knew I was working, didn't you?" "I heard," Matthias evaded--"in a roundabout way--that you were playing in vaudeville." The girl nodded vigorously. "Oh, yes; I was all over, playing the lead in a sketch called 'The Lie.' It was a regular knock-out. You ought to have seen how it got over. It's still playing, somewhere out West, I guess." "You left it, then?" Matthias asked, bored, heartily wishing her out of the house. She was aching to know if he had learned of her marriage. But then she felt sure he couldn't possibly have heard about it. Still, she wondered, if he did know, would it modify his attitude toward her in any way? "Yes," she resumed briskly, to cover her momentary hesitation, "I left it the week we played 'Frisco. I had to. The star and I couldn't seem to hit it off, somehow. You know how that is." "And yet you must have managed to agree with him pretty well, from all I hear." "What did you hear?" (Did he really know, then?) "Why," Matthias explained ingeniously, "you must have been with the sketch for several months, by your own account. You couldn't have been bickering all that time." Confidence returned.... "Oh, that! Yes, of course. But I could see it coming a long ways ahead. So I quit, and came back to look for another engagement. You--" She broke off, stammering. "Beg pardon?" Matthias queried curiously. Joan flushed again. "You don't know of anything I could do, just now, I suppose?" He shook his head. "Not at present, I'm afraid." "If you should hear of anything, it would be awful' good of you to let me know." "Depend upon me, I shall." "Care of The Dramatic Mirror will always get me." "I shan't forget." "Well...." She offered him her hand with a splendidly timid smile. "I suppose it's good-bye for good this time." Matthias accepted her hand, shook it without a tremor, and released it easily. "I've a notion it is, Joan," he admitted. She turned toward the door, advanced a pace or two, and paused. "They say Arlington's going to make a lot of new productions next Fall...." "Yes?" "Well, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind putting in a good word for me." "I would be glad to, but unfortunately I don't know Mr. Arlington." "But you know Mr. Marbridge, and everybody says he's Arlington's silent partner." Matthias looked as uncomfortable as he felt. "I am not sure that is true," he said slowly, "and--well, to tell the truth, Marbridge and I aren't on the best of terms. I'm afraid I couldn't influence him in any way--except, perhaps, to prejudice him." "Oh!" Joan said blankly.... It came to her, in a flash, that the two men might have quarrelled about her, thanks to the obvious fascination she had exerted over Marbridge, that age-old day at Tanglewood. "I suppose," she ventured pensively, "I might go to see him--Mr. Marbridge--myself--?" "I'm afraid I can't advise you." This time the accent of finality was unmistakable. Joan bridled with resentment. After all, he'd no real call to be so uppish, simply because she hadn't let him stand between her and her career.... "You don't really think I ought to go and see him, do you?" "I wish you wouldn't ask me, Joan." "But I've got no one to advise me.... If you don't think it wise, I wish you'd say so. I thought perhaps it was a chance...." Matthias shrugged, excessively irritated by her persistence. "I can only say that I wouldn't advise any woman to look to Marbridge for anything honourable," he said reluctantly. "Oh!" the girl said in a startled tone. "But--I'm sorry you made me say that. It's none of my affair. Please forget I said it." "But you make it so hard for me." "I?" he cried indignantly--"_I_ make it hard for you!" "Well, I come to you for advice--friendly advice--and you close in my very face the only door I can see to any sort of work. It's--it's pretty hard. I can act, I know I can act! I guess I proved that when I was with Charlie--Mr. Quard--the star of 'The Lie,' you know. I couldn't've stuck as long as I did if I hadn't had talent.... But back here in New York, all that doesn't seem to count. Here I've been going around for two months, and all they offer me is a chorus job with some road company. But Arlington ... he employs more girls than anybody in the business. I know he'd give me a chance to show what I can do, if I could only get to him. And then you tell me not to try to get to him the only way I know." Abruptly Joan ceased, breathing heavily after that long and, even to her, unexpected speech. But it had been well delivered: she could feel that. She clenched her hands at her sides in a gesture plagiarized from a soubrette star in one of her infrequent scenes of stage excitement; and stood regarding Matthias with wide, accusing eyes. His own were blank.... He was trying to account to himself for the fact that this girl seemed to have the knack of making him feel a heartless scoundrel, even when his stand was morally impregnable, even though it were unassailable. Here was this girl, evidently convinced that he had not dealt squarely with her, believing that he deliberately withheld--out of pique, perhaps--aid in his power to offer her.... He passed a hand wearily across his eyes, and turned back toward his work-chair. "You'd better sit down," he said quietly, "while I think this out." Without a word the girl returned to the arm-chair and perched herself gingerly upon the edge of it, ready to rise and flee (she seemed) whenever it should pardonably suggest itself to Matthias that the only right and reasonable thing for him to do was to rise up and murder her.... On his part, sitting, he rested elbows upon the litter of manuscript, and held his head in his hands. He was sorry now that he had yielded to the temptation to be plain-spoken about Arlington and Marbridge. But she had driven him to it; and she was an empty-headed little thing and ought really to be kept out of _that_ galley. On the other hand, he was afraid that if he allowed himself to be persuaded to help her find a new engagement, she would misunderstand his motives one way or another--most probably the one. He couldn't afford to have her run away with the notion that his affection for her had been merely hibernating. He had not only himself, he had Venetia to think of, now. To her he had dedicated his life, to a dumb, quixotic passion. Some day she might need him; some day, it seemed certain, she would need him. She was presently to have a child; and Marbridge was going on from bad to worse; things could not forever endure as they were between those two. And then she would be friendless, a woman with a child fighting for the right to live in solitary decency.... But Joan!... If she were headed that way, toward the Arlington wheel within the wheel of the stage, even at risk of blame and misunderstanding Matthias felt that he ought to do what could be done to set her back upon the right road. It was too bad, really. And it was none of his business. The girl had given herself to the theatre of her own volition, after all. Or had she? Had the right of choice been accorded her? Or was it simply that she had been designed by Nature especially for that business, to which women of her calibre seemed so essential? Was she, after all, simply life-stuff manufactured hastily and carelessly in an old, worn mould, because destined solely to be fed wholesale into the insatiable maw of the stage? He shook his head in weary doubt, and sighed. "Probably," he said, fumbling with a pen and avoiding her eyes--"I presume--you'd better come back in a day or two--say Tuesday. That will give me time to look round and see what I can scare up for you. Or perhaps Wednesday would be even better...." He dropped the pen and rose, his manner inviting her to leave. "Wednesday?" she repeated, reluctantly getting up again. "At four, if that's convenient." "Yes, indeed, it is. And ... thank you so much ... Jack." "No, no," Matthias expostulated wearily. "No, I mean it," she insisted. "You're awf'ly sweet not to be--unkind to me." "Believe me, I could never be that." "Then--g'dafternoon." "Good afternoon, Joan." But as he moved to open the door, his eyes were caught by the flash from a facet of the diamond; and the thought came to him that its presence there assorted ill with his latest assurance to the girl. Catching it up, he offered it to Joan as she was about to go. "And this," he said, smiling--"don't forget it, please." Automatically her hand moved out to take it, but was stayed. Her eyes widened with true consternation, and she gasped faintly. "You--you don't mean it?" "Oh, yes, I do. Please take it. I've really no use for it, Joan, and--well, you and I know what professional life means." He grinned awry. "It might be of service to you some day." With a cry of gratitude that was half a sob, but with no other acknowledgment, the girl accepted the gift, stumbled through the door in a daze, and so from the house. XXXI So it seemed that all men were much alike. Joan knew but two types, the man who lived by his brains and the man who lived by his wits, but had no more hesitation in generalizing from these upon masculine society as a whole than a scientist has in constructing a thesis upon the habits of prehistoric mammalia from the skull of a pterodactyl and the thigh-bone of an ichthyosaurus.... They were all much alike: if you knew how to get round one kind, you knew how to win over the other; there was a merely negligible difference in the mode of attack. You appealed to their sympathies, or to their sentiments, or their appetites, and if these failed you appealed to their pride in their self-assumed rôle of the protectors. It was no great trick, once you had made yourself mistress of it. By this route Joan achieved the feat of looking down on Matthias; and that was not wholesome for the girl, leaving her world destitute of a single human soul that commanded her respect. She had needed only to stir up his jealousy of Marbridge and his innate chivalry.... As if she didn't know what Arlington's companies were like! The facts were notorious; nobody troubled to blink them; Arlington's employees least of all. It wasn't their business to blink the facts; a girl without following had as little chance of securing a place in one of his choruses as a girl without a pretty figure. But, of course, a handsome girl with a good figure.... Joan glanced in a shop window, en passant; but she saw nothing of the display of wares. The plate glass made a darkling mirror for the passers-by: Joan could see that her refurbished travelling suit fitted her becomingly, even though it was a trifle passé. She hurried home and changed it, and hurried forth again to keep an appointment with Hubert Fowey. They dined at a pretentious hotel, in an "Orange Garden" whose false moonlight and tinkling, artificial fountain manufactured an alluring simulacrum of romantic night, despite the incessant activities of a ragtime-bitten orchestra and the inability of the ventilating system to infuse a hint of coolness into the heavy, superheated air. Joan had little appetite--the day had been too over-poweringly hot--but she was very thirsty; and Fowey provided a brand of champagne less sweet and heady than she would have chosen, and consequently more insinuative. During the meal Billy Salute appeared at a table across the room and invisible to Fowey, whose back was toward it, but still not far enough removed to prevent Joan from recognizing that look in the dancer's eyes which she resented so angrily. She didn't once look at the man; but she never quite lost sight of him, and was well aware that he was ridiculing Fowey to his companion--an actor, by many an indication, but a stranger to Joan. Provoked, she demonstrated her contempt of Salute by flirting outrageously with Fowey. Unconscious of her motive, that aspiring little dramatic author lost his head to some extent. Now and again his voice trembled when he spoke to her, and once he mumbled something about marriage, but checked at discretion, and let his words trail off inarticulately. Joan was not to be denied. "What did you say?" she demanded, with her most distracting smile. "Oh, nothing of any importance," muttered Fowey, his face reddening. "But you did say something. I only caught part of it. Hubert, I want to know!" It was the first time she had used his given name. "I--I only wondered if you were married," he stammered. "You talk so cursed little about yourself!" "Does it matter?" she parried, surrender in her eyes. He choked and gulped on his champagne. "But you're not, are you?" he persisted. "What's that to you?" He hesitated and changed the subject, fearful lest his tongue compromise him. "What shall we do now? Don't say a roof garden. Let's get out of this infernal smother. I vote for a taxi ride to Manhattan Beach." Joan assented. Leaving, they passed Salute's table. Joan gave the dancer a distant and chilling greeting, and swept haughtily past, ignoring his offer to rise. The insolent irony of his eyes was incredibly offensive to her. They said: "I am waiting, I am patient, I make no effort, I am inevitable." She swore in her soul that she would prove them wrong. In the taxicab Fowey made some slighting reference to the dancer. "He's the devil!" Joan declared with profound conviction. But she wouldn't explain her reasons for so naming him. When occasion offered, in the more shadowed stretches of their course to the sea, Fowey attempted to kiss her. But she would have none of him then, fending him off by main strength and raillery; and she was pleased with the discovery that she was stronger than he. Yet another evidence of the inferiority of man! At the beach, Fowey ordered a claret cup. Joan demanded an ice and drank sparingly; but when again in the motor-car, homeward-bound, she was abruptly smitten with amazement to find herself in Fowey's arms, submitting to his kisses if not returning them. For a time she remained so and let him talk love to her. It was pleasant, to be--wanted.... Arrived at the little flat, she had to prevent Fowey's following her in, again by main strength, slamming the door in his face. Bolting the door, she turned to a mirror "to see what a fright she must have looked." But it seemed a radiant vision that smiled back at her. She thought hazily of Hubert Fowey. "That kid!" she murmured, not altogether in contempt, but almost compassionately. It was a shame to tease him so.... Not until the next day, that dawned upon her consciousness amid the thunders of a splitting headache, did she appreciate how far the affair had gone. Penitent, she vowed reformation. She wasn't going to let any man think he could make a fool of her, much less that conceited little whippersnapper. As it happened, she didn't see the amateur dramatist again for some days. He, too, had vowed reformation, and on much the same moral grounds. Her appointment with Matthias, for Wednesday at four, Joan failed to keep. And since that was her own affair, and since she had not left him her address, Matthias kept to himself the word that he had for her and, in accordance with his original intention, boarded the Bar Harbor Express that same evening, and forgot New York for upwards of ten weeks. It had rained all day Tuesday, and Wednesday was overcast but dry and, by contrast with what had been, cool. Dressing for her interview with Matthias, Joan donned a summery gown of lawn, liberally inset with lacework over her shoulders and bosom: a frock for the country-house or the seashore, never for the Broadway pavements. None the less it was quite too pretty to be wasted on Matthias alone. She set out to keep her appointment with an hour to spare, purposing to employ the interval by running, at leisure, the gauntlet of masculine admiration on Broadway as far south as Thirty-eighth Street. For this expedition she would have preferred company; but Hattie, having looked her over, announced that she couldn't dress up to Joan's style, didn't mean to try, and didn't care to be used as a foil; furthermore, it was much more sensible to loaf round the flat in little or no clothing at all, and read up on Pinero. From the Astor Theatre corner Joan struck across Broadway to the eastern sidewalk, chiefly to avoid the throng of loungers in front of the Bryant Building: it is good to be admired, but Joan had little taste for the form of admiration that becomes vocal at once intimately and publicly. Half-way down the New York Theatre Building block, she turned abruptly and scuttled like a frightened quail into the lobby, from the back of which, turning, she was able to see, without being seen by, Quard. Brief as the term of their dissociation was, in mere point of elapsed time, Joan had so completely divorced herself from her husband that she was actually beginning to forget him; physically no less than mentally she was beginning to forget him. An outcast from her life, he no longer had any real existence in her world. By some curious freak of sophistry she had even managed to persuade herself she was never to see him again. Thus it seemed the most staggering shock she had ever experienced, to recognize the man's head and shoulders looming above the throng before the entrance to the moving-picture show, just south of the lobby to the New York Theatre proper. But Quard hadn't seen her. He was with companions, a brace of vaudeville actors whom Joan knew through him. But while she waited for them to pass, two other friends accosted the three, directly before the lobby entrance, and they paused to exchange greetings. Quard slapped both newcomers on their shoulders, and kept his hand on the last he slapped, bending forward and engaging their interest with some intimate bit of ribaldry. He had been drinking--Joan saw that much at a glance--not heavily, but enough to render his good-fellowship boisterous. Otherwise he looked well. He was hardly to be identified with that sodden wreck which had been brought from the Barbary Coast back to the woman he had insulted and abused. His colour was good, his poise assured. He was wearing new clothing--a loud shepherd's-plaid effect which Joan couldn't possibly have forgotten. No one could possibly have forgotten it. And he had acquired a dashing Panama hat which at least looked genuine at that slight distance. Useless to have wasted pity on the man: he had fallen, but not far, and he had fallen on his feet. Joan eyed him with fear, despair, and loathing. Had he come to render New York too small to contain them both? She skulked in the farthest corner of the lobby, in shadows, not quite round the corner of the elevator shaft--where she could just see and ran least risk of being seen--and waited. But the group on the sidewalk seemed to have settled down to a protracted session. When Quard had finished talking, and the laughter had quieted down, another fixed the attention of the group with a second anecdote, of what nature Joan could well surmise. Of course, it was only a question of time before Quard would propose a drink. Then she would be free to proceed to her appointment. But through some oversight the suggestion remained temporarily in abeyance; and Joan was unlucky in that none of the policemen appeared, who are assigned to the business of keeping actors moving in that neighbourhood. After a minute or two Quard shifted his position so that he could, by simply lifting his eyes, have looked directly into the lobby. At this Joan turned in desperation and entered the cage of an elevator, which happened just then to be waiting with an open gate. There were several theatrical enterprises with offices on one of the upper floors: no reason why Joan shouldn't wait in one of these until it would be safe to venture forth again. There was Arlington's, for instance. Joan's was no strange figure there. She had long since made several attempts to see Arlington or one of his lieutenants; but her professional cards, borne in to them by a disillusioned office-boy, had educed no other response than "Mist' Arlington says they's nothin' doin' just' present." But it was as good a place as any for Joan's purpose, and there could be no harm trying again. The same world-weary boy received her card when she entered the suite of offices. He considered it, and Joan as well, dispassionately. "Whoja wanna see?" he mumbled with patent effort. Joan's prettiest smile was apparently wasted upon the temperament of an anchorite. "Mr. Arlington, please." The boy offered to return the card: "He ain't in." "That's what you always tell me." "He ain't never in." "Very well," said Joan sweetly: "I'll wait." The boy started to say something pointed, hesitated, regarded her with dull suspicion, and suddenly enquired: "Whaja wanna see 'm 'bout?" "A matter of private business." "Ah," drawled the boy with infinite disgust, "tha's what they all say!" An embittered grimace shaped upon his soiled face. "Lis'n!" he said, almost affably--"if yuh'll think up a good one, I'll fetch this inta his sec't'ry. Now cud anythin' be fairer 'n that?" "I'll go you," Joan retorted, falling in with his spirit. "Tell him a friend of Mr. Marbridge's wants to see him." She esteemed this a rather brilliant bit of diplomacy, and at the same time considered herself stupid not to have thought of it before. But it failed to move the office-boy. His head signalled a negative. "Havta do better'n that," he announced. "If I fell for ev'ry wren what claims she's a nintimate frien' of Mista Marbridge--" "But I am a friend of his--truly I am!" Joan insisted warmly. The boy rammed a hand into a trouser's-pocket. "Betcha--" he began; but reconsidered. "Yuh never can tell 'bout a skirt," he reminded himself audibly. "But, jus' to prove I'm a sport, I'll go yuh." Motioning Joan through the door of the reception room, he shambled off with an air of questioning his own sanity. The reception room was perhaps thirty feet long by fifteen wide: an interior room, lighted, and none too well, by electricity, ventilated, when at all, through the doorways of adjoining offices. A row of cane-seated chairs was aligned against the inner wall. In the middle of the floor stood a broad and substantial table of oak; it was absolutely bare. Here and there a few unhappy lithographs, yellowing "life-size" photographs of dead or otherwise extinguished stars, and a framed play-bill or two of Arlington's earlier ventures, decorated the dingy drab wall. There was no floor-covering of any description. In this room herded some two-score people of the stage, waiting hopefully for interviews that were, as a rule, granted to not more than one applicant in ten: a heterogeneous assemblage, owning a single characteristic in common: whenever, at the far end of the room, the door opened leading to the offices of the management, every head turned that way, and every voice was hushed in reverence. Yet it was seldom that the door disclosed anything more unique than a second office-boy, even more dejected than the first, who, peering through, would, after examining the card in his hand for the name of the applicant, painfully recite some stereotyped phrase worn smooth--"Mista Brown? Y'ur party says t' come back next week!" "Miss Holman? Y'ur party's went out 'n' won't be back th'safternoon!" "Miss Em'rson? Mista Arlington says ever'thin's full up just'present. Call 'n ag'in!" or more infrequently: "Mista Grayson's t' step in, please...." Joan found a vacant chair. She had no hope whatever of being admitted to the Presence, despite the unexpected condescension of the office-boy. Marbridge's name might prove the Open Sesame; but she doubted that vaguely: "it wouldn't be her if _that_ happened!" The atmosphere was stifling with heat complicated by stale human breath and the reek of perfumery, all stratified with layers of tobacco smoke which entered over the transoms of the communicating offices. Above the muted murmurings of the unemployed's apprehensive voices could be heard the brisk chattering of two or three type-writing machines; and telephone bells rang incessantly, near and far, one taking up the tune as soon as another ended. The throng of applicants shuffled their feet uneasily, expectantly, morosely. Joan was so uncomfortable and oppressed that she was tempted to rise and go without waiting for the discounted answer. Only dread of encountering Quard restrained her. The longer she delayed, the slighter the chance of finding him still in front of the theatre.... Her thoughts drifted into reverie dully coloured with misgivings. She thought of Charlie Quard as a bird of ill-omen whose appearance could presage nothing but suffering and disaster; ignoring altogether the truth, that through his good offices alone, however tainted with self-interest, she had been suffered to enter into the profession whose ranks she had elected to adorn; with that other truth, that she owed him for the clothing she wore, the food she ate, the very roof that sheltered her--and meant never to repay.... The voice of the second office-boy chanted her name twice before she heard it. "Miss Thursd'y?... Miss Joan Thursd'y?" Joan started to her feet. "Yes--?" "Th' party you ast for says please t' step this way!" XXXII Between gratification and misgivings, Joan followed her guide in a flutter of emotion. When intending nothing more than to provide an excuse for using the anteroom as a temporary refuge, she hadn't for an instant questioned her right to use Marbridge's name. But now that it appeared she was to gain thereby the boon of an audience with Arlington, she was torn by doubts. After all, her acquaintance with Marbridge had been one of the most tenuous description. True, the man had seemed attracted by her at the time; but that was many months ago; and only recently he had looked her fair in the face without knowing her. She had really gained her advantage through false pretences. And when Marbridge learned of this, would he not resent it? Had she not, through her presumption, put herself in the way of defeating her own ends? She brought up before a closed door in a state of nervousness not natural with her. "You're to wait a minute," her guide advised. She was thankful he wasn't the guardian of the outer defences: just at present she was in no fit mood to bandy persiflage successfully. But she was uncomfortably conscious that this present boy eyed her curiously as he threw open the office door. She entered, and he closed it after her. The room was untenanted, but a haze of cigar smoke in the air indicated that it had been only recently vacated. It was handsomely furnished, carpeted and decorated. The broad, flat-topped desk in one corner boasted an elaborate display of ornate desk hardware. In the middle of the blotting-pad a sheaf of letters lay beneath a bronze paperweight of unique design. All in all, an office owning little in common with the generality of those to which Joan had theretofore penetrated.... She sat herself down uneasily. A door communicating with the adjoining office, though a solid door of oak, was an inch or so ajar. Through it penetrated sounds of masculine voices in conversation--but nothing distinguishable. Five minutes passed. Then the conference in the next room broke up amid laughter; the doorknob rattled; and Joan rose automatically. Marbridge entered. For a moment, in her surprise and consternation, Joan could only stare and stammer. But obvious though her agitation was, Marbridge ignored it gracefully. Shutting the door tight, he advanced with an outstretched hand and a smile there was no resisting--with, in short, every normal evidence of friendly pleasure in their meeting. "Well, Miss Thursday!" he said, gratification in his carefully modulated voice. "This is public-spirited of you!" Joan shook hands limply, her face crimson beneath his pardonably admiring stare. "I--thank you--but--" "Really," he went on smoothly, "I consider it mighty nice of you to look me up. Fancy your remembering me! Do sit down. We must have a chat. Fortunately, you've caught me in an off-hour." Retaining her hand coolly enough, he introduced the girl to a capacious lounge-chair beside the desk, then settled himself behind it. Joan shook her wits together. "You're awf'ly kind--" "I--kind?" Marbridge denied the implication with an indulgent smile. "My dear Miss Thursday, if you get to know me well--and I sincerely hope you will some day--you'll find there's not a spark of human generosity in my system. I think only of my own pleasure. How can there be kindness to you in my seizing this chance to improve our acquaintance? I declare, I thought you'd forgotten me!" "Oh, no!" Joan protested. "Really? That's charming of you. But tell me about yourself. How long have you been back?" "Not long," Joan replied instinctively to the first stock question that marks every other similar meeting in the theatrical district of New York. "That is--I mean--a couple of months." "Oh, then you didn't stay with 'The Lie'?" "You knew about that?" Marbridge nodded briskly. "Indeed, I did! Pete Gloucester told me all about you--how splendidly you were doing at rehearsals--and then, one afternoon in Chicago, I saw the sketch billed and dropped in at the theatre for the sole purpose of seeing you. And if I hadn't had a train to catch, I'd have come right round back to congratulate you. Fact! You were wonderful. You were more than wonderful: you were downright adorable, and no mistake!" Under the tonic stimulus of his flattery, Joan recovered her self-possession with surprising readiness--so swiftly that she almost forgot to cover the phenomenon with prolonged evidences of pretty confusion. She looked down, her colour high, and smiling traced with a gloved forefinger an invisible seam in her skirt; and then, looking up shyly, she appraised Marbridge with one quick, shrewd, masked glance. Her instinct had not misled her: this man esteemed her at a high value. "It's awf'ly kind of you to say so," she murmured demurely. Marbridge bent forward, leaning on the desk, his gaze ardent. "I only say what I think, Miss Thursday. I watched you act that afternoon--and so far as I was concerned, you were the whole sketch!--and made up my mind then and there you were a girl with a great big future." "Oh, but really, Mr. Marbridge--" "Give you my word! I said to myself then and there: 'Here's a little woman worth watching, and if ever I get a chance to lend her a helping hand and don't do it, I'd better quit fussing with this theatrical game.' And that was the effect of seeing you play just once, mind you!" "I'm afraid you're a dreadful kidder, Mr. Marbridge." His injured look was eloquent of the injustice that she did him. "You don't believe me? Very well, Miss Thursday--wait! Some day I'll surprise you." He swung back in his chair, smiling genially. "Some one of these days you'll set your heart on something I have the say in--and then you'll be able to judge of my sincerity." "If I dared believe you," Joan told him boldly, "I might put you to the test sooner than you think." "Well, and why not? I'm ready." But as Joan would have gone on, the desk-telephone rang sharply, and Marbridge, excusing himself with a mumbled apology, turned to the instrument and lifted the receiver to his ear. "Hello.... Who?... Oh, send her in to see Mr. Arlington.... Oh, he did, eh?... Well, say I'm not in either.... Yes, gone for the day." Replacing the instrument, he swung round again. "There's proof already," he informed her cheerfully. "That was Nella Cardrow--one of the biggest propositions on our list--star of 'Mrs. Mixer.' And I'm putting her off solely to show you how sincerely I'm interested in what you have to say to me." He bent forward again, confidentially. "Now tell me: what can I do for you?" "Give me a job," Joan informed him honestly. "That's all I want just now--work--a part in anything you have influence with." "Then you _have_ left 'The Lie'?" Marbridge persisted incredulously. Joan nodded. "I had to. I couldn't stand it any longer." "But--without you--why, I don't know what they were thinking of, to let you go!" "I just couldn't get along with the star, and that's all there was to it," Joan declared. "He was a boozer and--well, I had to quit." "And the sketch--" "Oh, it went on, all right, I guess." "Without you! Well, that's hard to credit. However...." Marbridge leaned back and for a moment stared thoughtfully out of the window. "I really can't think of anything we've got open just now that's good enough to offer you." "Please don't think of me that way, Mr. Marbridge," Joan pleaded earnestly, more than half deceived. "I'm ready for anything, to get a chance to show these people what I can do. Anything--however small--just so it gives me a show--I don't care what!" Marbridge preserved admirably his look of intent gravity. "Let me think a moment," he requested, pursing his full lips. Joan watched him closely through that brief silence, her mood one of curious texture, compounded in almost equal parts of hope and doubt, of wonder and misgivings, of appreciation of her own courage and shrewdness, and of admiration for Marbridge. He was by no means what she would have termed handsome, but he was uncommonly individual, a personality that left an ineffaceable impression of strength and masculinity; and with this he had an air of being finished and complete, as though he not only knew better than most how to take care of himself in all ways, but slighted himself in none. She thought his mode of dress striking, combining distinction and taste to an extraordinary degree.... And when in his abstraction he pinched his chin gently between thumb and forefinger, she was impressed with the discovery that a man's hand could be at once well-manicured and muscular.... He turned back abruptly with a sparkle of enthusiasm in his bold and prominent eyes. "By George, I think I have it!..." "Yes--?" she breathed excitedly. He considered an instant longer, shook his head, and jumped up. "I must consult Arlington first," he declared. "I wouldn't care to commit him without his consent. No--don't get up. Just excuse me one minute. I'll be right back." And before she could protest--had she entertained the faintest idea of doing anything of the sort--he left the room by the same door which had admitted him. Immediately she was again aware of a rumble of voices in the next office, but now it was even more indefinite. And again she waited a full five minutes alone.... When Marbridge rejoined her, it was with an air apologetic and disappointed. "It's too bad," he announced, aggrieved, "but it seems Arlington has really gone for the day. I shan't see him before evening, likely, possibly not until tomorrow. So I must ask you to trouble yourself to come back, if you don't mind." "Mind!" Joan laughed, rising. "Oh, I guess not." "Well," Marbridge assured her, "I don't think you'll have any wasted time to regret. But I can't promise anything until I'm sure Arlington hasn't made other arrangements, or until I've managed to put a crimp into 'em if he has." "But you mustn't do that--" "Hush!" Marbridge paused to chuckle infectuously. "There's one trouble," he amended, more gravely, "and that is, I haven't got any too much time. I'm booked to sail for Europe Saturday, and have got so many little things to attend to, I'm running round in circles. But don't you fret: I've got this matter right next to my heart, Miss Thursday, and I'm going to put it through if it humanly can be done. Now let me think when I can ask you to call again." "Any time that suits your convenience, Mr. Marbridge." "Well, it's a question. I'd like mighty well to have you lunch with me before I go, but.... The truth is, I haven't got hardly a minute unengaged. You just happened to catch me right, today.... I wonder if you could call in Friday, say, about half-past three?" "Of course I can, but I don't want you to--" "Didn't I tell you, _hush_!" Marbridge interrupted, mock-impatient. "Not another word. Remember what I told you about how I felt that day I saw you act, out in Chicago. The time's coming when I'm going to be powerful' glad you gave me this chance to give you a lift, Miss Thursday. And then"--he paused in the act of opening the door, and took Joan's hand, subjecting it to a firm, friendly pressure before continuing--"and then, perhaps, I'll be coming round and begging favours of you." For an instant Joan's eyes endured, without a tremor, the quick searching probe of the man's. She nodded quietly, saying in a grave voice: "I guess you won't have to beg very hard--not for anything I could ever do for you, Mr. Marbridge." His smile was as spontaneous and bright as a child's. "It's a bargain!" he declared spiritedly. "And you can bet your life I won't forget my end of it!... Good afternoon, Miss Thursday. Remember--Friday at three-thirty...." XXXIII As one result of her interview with Marbridge, Joan returned to her quarters in a state of thoughtfulness which was responsible not only for her forgetting the appointment with Matthias and the risk she ran of encountering Quard at every corner, but also for her unquestioning acceptance of Hattie's absence from the flat in the face of her expressed determination not to go out that afternoon. Hattie, however, was nothing loath to explain her change of mind when she blew in cheerfully shortly before dinner-time. "Hello!" she exclaimed, tossing her hat one way and her parasol another. "Did you miss me?" Joan looked up blankly from the depths of her musing. "No," she said dully. "Why?" "Well, you went off half-peeved because I wouldn't go trapesing with you--and then I went out after all." "Oh--I'd forgotten," Joan admitted without much interest. "Well, I didn't mean to go out, but Billy Emerson sent me a tip and ... I bet you can't guess who I've seen." Joan shook her head. "Arlington!" "Arlington!" Joan exclaimed. "Well, and why not?" "Nothing--only I thought you weren't looking for anything in musical shows." "No more am I, and it wasn't a musical show I went to see him about. Billy sent me a card of introduction with the tip, and Arlington saw me and--well, I guess it's just about settled. I'm to understudy Nella Cardrow in 'Mrs. Mixer.' Arlington wouldn't promise, but told me to come in Saturday morning, and the understanding is he'll have contracts ready to sign then. I do believe my luck's turned at last!" "But," Joan argued, perplexed, "I don't understand.... Of course, it's fine to get the job, and all that--and I'm awf'ly glad for you, Hattie--but you act as excited as if it was the title rôle you expected to play." "Maybe I do," Hattie retorted. "That's what an understudy's for, isn't it--to play the star part in case of an emergency?" "Yes, but--" "Anyhow, I don't mind telling you that's what I'm looking forward to." "You mean you think Mrs. Cardrow--?" "Now don't you ask me any questions; I can't tell you what I think; it's a secret." Having made this statement, Hattie sat down on the edge of the bed, lighted a cigarette, vacillated one second, and proceeded to divulge the secret: "You see, I called around to thank Billy Emerson, after my talk with Arlington, and he told me the whole story in confidence. Nobody's to know it yet, so you mustn't breathe a word to anybody; but the thing's all fixed, and Nella Cardrow's never going to play 'Mrs. Mixer' before a Broadway audience. She couldn't play it anyhow--'s just a plain-boiled dub--never did anything before she persuaded Marbridge to put her on in this show. It's _his_ money that's behind it, mostly--Arlington's too wise to risk much on an uncertain proposition like the Cardrow. Marbridge just hides behind Arlington." "What for?" "Well, I guess he figures home would be none the happier if Friend Wife knew he was footing the bills for Nella Cardrow's show. He and Cardrow, Billy Emerson says, are just about as friendly as the law allows--and that isn't all." "But," Joan persisted stupidly, "if that's the case, I don't see what makes you think he'll throw her down to give you the part--" "If they ever caught anybody on Broadway as innocent as you pretend to be," Hattie commented with a scorn for grammar as deep as for Joan's obtuseness--"they'd arrest 'em, that's all! Who ever told you Marbridge was the kind of a guy to stick to a woman forever--not to say when she's losing money for him? Billy Emerson saw the show when they put it on up in Buffalo, a while ago, and he says the play's a wonder but Cardrow can't even look the part, much less act it. He says if they ever let her loose on the stage of a Broadway theatre--well, Marbridge and Arlington can just kiss their investment a fond farewell. For reasons of his own, Marbridge isn't ready to break with Cardrow yet, but he knows he's got a big success on his hands in this 'Mrs. Mixer' with her out of it. So they're going right ahead, just as if she was to be the star, but when the show opens it'll be little Miss Understudy who'll do all the acting." The actress tossed aside her cigarette and bent forward, regarding Joan with mock solicitude. "Does it begin to penetrate, dearie?" "It sounds to me like a pretty mean trick to play on Mrs. Cardrow," Joan suggested. "Don't you worry about her. She'll survive, all right. And anyhow, when you've been as long in this game as I have, you'll realize that the motto of the profession is 'Everybody for himself and the devil take the hindermost'! I've waited seven years for this chance, and I'm not going to let it get past me through any sentimental considerations, not if I know myself. And you'd do just the same thing in my place, too." "I don't see what right you've got to say that--" "Then you don't know yourself as well as I know you," Hattie laughed. "But listen: I oughtn't to have told you all this. You won't say anything, will you, dear?" "No, I won't say anything...." Nor did Joan consider it necessary to repay confidence with confidence by confessing the fact of her coincidental interview with Marbridge. The reflection that they must have been in adjoining offices at much the same time, in spite of Marbridge's assertion that Arlington was out, counselled reticence, even if envy hadn't served to impose silence upon Joan. And she was profoundly envious of Hattie's good fortune. Why could it not have been her own, instead? If Marbridge honestly esteemed her abilities one-half as highly as he had pretended to, why could he not have seen to it that Joan Thursday rather than Hattie Morrison was selected for Mrs. Cardrow's understudy? Still, the matter was not yet definitely settled. Hattie's contract remained a thing of the future, and she might be congratulating herself prematurely. Struck by this reflection, Joan withdrew even more jealously into her reserve.... But she anticipated her appointment for Friday afternoon with an impatience that lent each hour the length of three, and when the time drew near prepared herself for it with such exacting attention to the minutiæ of her toilet that a final survey in a cheval-glass sent her forth radiant with consciousness that she had never looked more charming. To her surprise and somewhat to her disappointment, Marbridge didn't receive her alone. She was shown into Arlington's office, finding there Marbridge in company with the great man himself. Entrenched behind his desk, Arlington didn't move when she entered, and only when Marbridge formally presented Joan deigned to rise half out of his chair and extend to her, across the mahogany barrier, a hand almost effeminately white, soft, and bedizened with rings. "Pleasure to meet you, Miss Thursday, I'm sure," he drawled, his clasp as languid as the glance with which he looked Joan over; and sank wearily back into his chair. "I've been hearing wonderful things about you--ah--from Mr. Marbridge." "He's very kind," said Joan in her best manner. "Not at all," Marbridge protested. "I've only been describing how splendid your work was in 'The Lie.' But Mr. Arlington is the original of the gentleman from Missouri: you've got to show him. However, I know you can--so that's all right." "Oh, I hope so," Joan replied with becoming diffidence--"if I ever get a chance." "You'll get that, never fear," Arlington observed dispassionately. "Marbridge has fixed it all up for you. It's a risk, a pretty big risk to take with an actress of your--ah--comparative inexperience, but as a rule I find it advisable to give Marbridge his head when he sets his heart on anything." "You're awf'ly good," Joan murmured. "Don't think it," Arlington returned in a tone of remote amiability, teetering in his chair. "I've nothing whatever to do with it, beyond engaging you and being responsible for your salary. It's all Marbridge's doing." He examined with a perplexed air his highly polished fingernails.... "You're to have a small part in a new comedy we're putting on next September," he announced, "and at the same time you will understudy the star--Nella Cardrow in 'Mrs. Mixer.' Your salary will be sixty a week unless through some accident you're called upon to play the title rôle regularly--and accidents will happen in the best regulated theatrical enterprises. In which case you'll draw one-hundred a week for the first season. There are some details which Marbridge will explain to you--and if you'll drop in any time Monday and ask for Mr. Grissom he will have your contracts ready. And now if you'll excuse me, I've an appointment." Consulting his watch, he rose and moved round from behind his desk. "Good day, Miss Thursday," he said with a shadow of a formal smile. "I shall see much of you, no doubt, when the rehearsals begin." "Oh, thank you--thank you!" Joan cried. Arlington disclaimed title to her gratitude with a weary gesture. "Don't thank me, please--thank Marbridge.... You won't be long, Vin?" he added, at the door. "I'll be with you in ten minutes." "Right you are. Good afternoon, Miss--ah--Thursday...." Alone with Marbridge, Joan began impulsively to protest her thanks, but on glancing up, fell silent, abashed by an expression that glowed in the man's eyes like a reflection of firelight. She lowered demure lashes to cloak her confusion, a smile about her lips at once sophisticated and timid: a distractingly pretty woman fully conscious of her allure and of his attraction for her: a vision of provoking promise. Marbridge drew a deep breath. "If you persist in looking like that," he said in a voice that trembled between laughter and a sigh--"don't blame me if I forget myself and take you in my arms and kiss you. There are limits to my endurance...." Joan looked up, smiling. "Well--" she said with a little nervous laugh--"Well, what of it?" XXXIV Before Joan left Marbridge, they had arrived at an understanding which was not less complete and satisfactory in that it was largely implicit. Without receiving any definite explanation of the circumstances complicating the production of "Mrs. Mixer," Joan carried away with her a tolerably clear notion thereof, both confirming and supplementing the second-hand information of Hattie Morrison. Mrs. Cardrow owned a heavy interest in the play, Joan had gathered; and there existed, as well, a contract between her and Arlington which would have to be eliminated before it would be possible to go ahead and make the production with another actress in place of the erstwhile star. Some very delicate diplomatic manoeuvring was indicated.... Interim, Joan was to be privately drilled by Peter Gloucester for some weeks prior to calling together the full company to rehearse for the September production. Gloucester was just then out of Town, but she would be advised when and where to meet him on his return. Marbridge was to be absent from New York until the middle of September or longer; but he promised to be back a week or two before the opening performance. There were other promises exchanged.... With her future thus schemed, the girl was very well content, who had attained by easy stages to one of mental development in which those primary moral distinctions upon which she had been reared were no longer perceptible--or, if perceptible, had diminished to purely negligible stature. It was not in nature for her to disdain or reject her bargain on moral grounds: she knew, or recognized, none that applied. For over a year during the most impressionable period of her life, Joan Thursday had breathed the atmosphere of the stage. She had become thoroughly accustomed to recognize without criticism those irregular unions and regular disunions that characterized the lives of her associates. She had observed many an instance where the most steadfast and loyal love existed without bonds of any sort, and as many where it existed in matrimony, and as many again where neither party to a marriage made aught but the barest pretence of fidelity. She had remarked that material and artistic success seemed to depend upon neither the observance nor the disregard of sexual morality. She knew of husbands and wives against whom scandal uttered no whisper and whose talents were considerable, but who had struggled for years and would struggle until the end without winning substantial recognition. And she knew of the reverse. The one unpardonable sin in her world was the sin of drunkenness, and even it was venial except when it "held the curtain" or prevented its rising altogether. As far as concerned her attitude toward herself, she considered Joan Thursday above reproach, seeing that she had withdrawn from her marriage long before even as much as contemplating any man other than her husband. She held that she was now free, at liberty to do as she liked, untrammelled by opinion whether public or private: that she had outgrown criticism. True, Quard might divorce her. But what of that? If he did, Joan Thursday wouldn't suffer. If he didn't, he himself would be the last to pretend he was leading a life of celibacy because of her defection. Marbridge she really liked; his appeal to her nature was stronger than that of any man she had as yet encountered. He attracted her in every way, and he excited her curiosity as well. He was a new type--but in what respect different from other men? He was famously successful with women: why? He had wealth, cultivation of a certain sort (real or spurious, Joan couldn't discriminate) and social position; and this flattered, that such an one should reject the women of his own sphere for Joan Thursday--late of the stocking counter. And if she could turn this infatuation of his to material profit, while at the same time satisfying the several appetites Marbridge excited in her: why not? Other women by the score did as much without censure or obvious cause for regret. Why not she? How many women of her acquaintance--women whose interests, running in grooves parallel to hers, were intelligible to Joan--would have refused the chance that was now hers through Marbridge? Not one; none, at least, who was free as Joan was free; not even Hattie Morrison, whose views upon the subject of such arrangements were strong, whom Joan considered straitlaced to the verge of absurdity. Hattie, Joan believed, would have jumped at the opportunity. But of course, denied, Hattie would be sure to decry it, and with the more bitterness since Joan had won it in the wreck of Hattie's hopes. And here was the only shadow upon the fair prospect of Joan's contentment. She who had questioned Hattie's right to become a party to the conspiracy against Mrs. Cardrow--how could she ever go home and face the girl, with this treachery on her conscience? True: Hattie didn't know, wouldn't know before morning, might never learn the truth during the term of their association. None the less, to be with Hattie that night would be to sit with a skeleton at the feast of her felicity.... On impulse Joan turned to the left on leaving the New York Theatre building, and moved slowly, purposelessly, down Broadway. It was an afternoon of withering heat: the pavements burning palpably through the paper-thin soles of her pretty slippers, and the air close with the smell of hot asphaltum. The rays of the westering sun made nothing of the fabric of Joan's white parasol, their heat penetrating its sheer shield as though it were glass. Mankind in general sought the shadowed side of the street and moved only reluctantly, with its coat over its arm, a handkerchief tucked in between neck and collar--effectually choking off ventilation and threatening "sun-stroke." Waiting upon the northeast corner of Forty-second Street for the traffic police to check the cross-town tide, Joan felt half-suffocated and thought longingly of the seashore.... Once across the street, she turned directly in beneath the permanent awning of the Knickerbocker Hotel, and entered the lobby, making her way round, past the entrance to the bar, to the recess dedicated to the public telephone booths. A semi-exhausted and apathetic operator looked up reluctantly as Joan approached, with one glance appraising her from head to heels. At any other time the dainty perfection of Joan's toilet would have roused antagonism in the woman; today she found energy only sufficient for a perfunctory mumble. "What numba, please?" Joan hesitated, feeling herself suddenly upon the verge of dangerous indiscretion, but stung by the operator's look of jaded disdain, took her courage in hand and pursued her original intention. "One Bryant," she said. The operator jammed a plug into one of the rows of sockets before her and iterated the number mechanically. In another moment she nodded, indicating the rank of booths. "Numba five--One Bryant," she said. Joan shut herself in with the sliding door and took up the receiver. "Hello--Lambs' Club?" she enquired.... "Is Mr. Fowey in the club?... Will you page him, please.... Miss Thursday.... Yes, I'll hold the wire." The booth was hermetically sealed. Perspiration was starting out all over her body. And somewhere in that airless box, probably at her feet, lurked a long unburied cigar. She thrust the door ajar, but only to close it immediately as Fowey's voice saluted her. "Hello?" "Hello, Hubert," Joan drawled, with a little touch of laughing mockery in her accents. "Is that you, Joan--really?" the voice demanded excitedly. "Real-ly!" she affirmed. "What're you doing there, shut up all alone by yourself in that stupid club, Hubert?" Prefaced by a brief but intelligible pause, the man's response came briskly: "Where are you now, anyway?" "That doesn't matter," she retorted. She had meant to ask him to meet her at the hotel, but reconsidered, fearing lest Marbridge might chance to see them. "What really matters is that this is my birthday and I'm going to give a party. Have you got anything better to do?" "No--" "Then meet me in half an hour on the southbound platform of the Sixth Avenue L at Battery Place." "Battery Place! What in thunder--" "Never mind--tell you all about it when we meet. Will you come?" "Will I! Well, rawther!" "Half an hour, then--" "I'll be there, with bells on!" "Then good-bye for a little--Hubert." "Good-bye." Fowey reached the point of assignation only one train later than Joan. As he hurried down the platform, almost stumbling in his impatience to join her, the girl surveyed with sudden dislike and regret his slight, dandified figure fitted with finical precision into clothing so ultra-English in fashion that it might have belonged to his younger brother. And the confident smile that lighted up his pinched, eager countenance seemed little short of offensive. She was sorry now that she had yielded to the temptation to make use of him: he was so insignificant in every way, so violently the opposite in all things of the man who now filled all her thoughts--Marbridge; and so transparent that even she could read his mind: he entertained not the least tangible doubt that now, after the manner in which they had last parted, she had at length wakened to appreciation of his irresistible charms, that her requesting him to meet her was but the preface to surrender. But she permitted nothing of her thoughts to become legible in her manner. After all, she had only wanted an escort for the evening, an excuse to postpone that unavoidable return to the company of the girl she had betrayed; and Fowey had seemed the most convenient and the least dangerous man she could think of. If in the inflation of his insufferable conceit he dreamed for an instant another thing.... Well, Joan promised herself, he'd soon find out his mistake!... Keeping up the fiction of her imaginary birthday, she outlined her plans: they would take one of the Iron Steamboat Company's boats from Pier 1, North River--a short walk from the station--to Coney Island. When that resort palled, they would drive to Manhattan Beach and dine, perhaps "take in" Pain's Fireworks; and return to New York by the same route. Fowey's objections were instant and sincere and well-grounded: the boats would be crowded beyond endurance with an unwashed rabble liberally sown with drunks and screaming children. If she would only let him, he'd get a taxicab--or even a touring-car. Quietly but firmly Joan overruled him. It must be her party or no party, as she proposed or not at all. He yielded in the end, but the event proved him right in all he had foretold. Joan was very soon made sorry she hadn't suffered herself to be gainsaid. They had half an hour to wait for the boat, and the waiting-room upon the second-storey of the pier was like an oven, packed with a milling, sweating mob exactly fulfilling Fowey's prediction. They were elbowed, shouldered, walked upon, and at one time openly ridiculed by a gang of hooligans, any one of whom would have made short work of Fowey had he dared show any resentment. Upon the boat, when at length it turned up tardily to receive them, conditions were little better, save that the open air was an indescribable relief after the reeking atmosphere of the pier. Fowey managed to secure two uncomfortable folding stools, upon which they perched, crowded against the rail of the upper deck; a wretched "orchestra" wrung infamous parodies of popular songs from several tortured instruments; children scuffled and howled; burly ruffians in unclean aprons thrust themselves bodily through the throng, balancing dripping trays laden with glasses of lukewarm beer and "soft drinks" and bawling in every ear their seductive refrain--"Here's the waiter! Want the waiter? _Who_ wants the waiter?"--and an alcoholic, planting his chair next to Joan's, promptly went to sleep, snoring atrociously, and threatened every instant to topple over and rest his head in her lap. A single circumstance modified in a way Joan's regret that she hadn't heeded Fowey's protests. As the boat swung away from the pier, a larger steamship of one of the coastwise lines, outward bound from its dock farther up the North River, passed with leeway so scant that the dress and features of those upon its decks were clearly to be discerned. And at the moment when the two vessels were nearest, Joan discovered one who stood just outside an open cabin door, leaning upon the rail with an impressively nonchalant pose, and smoking a heavy cigar. He wore clothing of a conspicuous shepherd's-plaid, and his pose was an arrested dramatic gesture. In a moment a woman emerged from the open door behind him and joined him at the rail, placing an intimate hand on his forearm and saying something which won from him a laugh and a look of tender admiration: a handsome, able-bodied woman, expensively but loudly dressed, her connection with the stage as unquestionable as was his. Joan dissembled the odd emotion with which she recognized the man, and turned to Fowey. "What boat is that, do you know, Hubert?" Fowey raked her with an indifferent glance, fore and aft. "Belongs to the New Bedford Line," he announced--"can't make out her name--connects at New Bedford for the boats to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Ever been up that way?" "No. What's it like?" "Pretty islands. Don't know Martha's Vineyard very well, but Nantucket's my old stamping-ground. Go up there in the middle of the summer--about now--and you'll find every actor and actress you ever heard of, and then some. Great place. Wish we were going there." "Don't be silly...." The boats were drawing apart. Joan looked back for the last sight she was ever to have of her husband. Though she couldn't have known this, she sighed a little, in strange depression. Perplexed, she tried vainly to analyze her emotion: was it regret--or jealousy? Of a sudden, in the heart of that immense crowd, with Fowey attentive at her elbow, she was conscious of a feeling of intense loneliness. XXXV When, after a long and tedious voyage over a sea as flat as a plate and unflawed by a single cooling drift of air, the steamboat was made fast to the end of that long iron pier which juts out from the flat, low coast of Coney Island, its passengers rose en masse and crowded toward the gangways. Joan and Fowey, attempting to hang back until the crowd had thinned out sufficiently to enable them to go ashore in comfort, were caught in the swirl of it and swept along willy-nilly. Once on the pier-head the multitude had more elbow room and spread out, the main body streaming headlong shorewards, keen-set for the delights promised by the two great amusement parks which had grown up in the heart of that frontier settlement of gin-mills, dance-halls, side-shows, eating-houses, and dives unspeakable. Joan and Fowey followed more at their leisure, constraint and silence between them like a wall. The girl was deeply disappointed with the expedition, as far as it had gone, doubting whether anything better would follow, and still labouring under that unaccountable depression which had settled down upon her spirits at sight of Quard on the New Bedford boat. Fowey, no less disgusted, was puzzled by his companion's attitude, at once tolerant and aloof, keenly watchful for an opening through which to pursue his conquest, and wondering how it would end. If she were simply bent on tantalizing him again, for her own amusement.... He swore angrily but inaudibly. Near the shore end of the pier they delayed to watch the antics of the hundreds of bathers churning the shallows in front of huge and hideous bathing establishments. In countless numbers, they dotted the sea like flies and darkened the sun-baked, unclean sands, into which their feet had trodden the wreckage of ten thousand lunches. Fowey said something inexpressively cynical about the resemblance of the scene below to a congregation of bacilli crawling upon a slide beneath a microscope. Joan heard without response, either vocal or mental. She resented bitterly the superior attitude adopted by her companion. For her part, she would have asked nothing better than to mingle with the throng and taste those crude pleasures so dear to its simple heart and, had she but dared admit it, to her own. But she had Fowey to live up to. Very heartily she regretted the impulse which had dictated her invitation. She had been far happier alone--though it would have been strange had she been suffered to remain long alone. By the time they left the pier, the evening was so far advanced that the myriad lights of the tawdry town were flashing into being. They debouched into a roaring mob which filled the wide avenue from curb to curb, packed so densely, though in constant motion, that trolley cars and automobiles forced a way through it only at a snail's pace and with great difficulty. Encouraged by the excessive heat which rendered Town intolerable to all who had the means to escape it, the week-end swarming had begun in all sincerity. In spite of the terrific congestion which already obtained in all the streets and avenues and beaches, piers, amusement parks, catch-penny shows, saloons, and restaurants, scarcely a minute passed without the arrival at some one of the trolley terminals of a car packed to the guards with more visitors. A good-natured if rowdy mob, for the most part, with only a minimum element of the downright vicious in its composition, it was none the less bent on amusement in its cheapest form, that is to say, at somebody else's expense. It gathered thickest round the places of free entertainment, where acrobats performed on open-air stages or crawled upon high, invisible wires, or where slides were supplied gratis for public diversion: grinning always, but howling with delight when treated to real misadventure, as when some girl, negotiating a bamboo slide upon a grass mat, her skirts wrapped tight about her, would lose balance and shoot headlong, sprawling, to the level; the greater the exposure, the greater the diversion.... Nor was Fowey permitted to escape unteased: his conspicuous clothing, and the broad black ribbons dangling from his horn-rimmed glasses were too tempting to be resisted. Once his Panama was smashed down over his eyes; and his glasses were so frequently jerked by their moorings from his nose that he was fain at length to pocket them and poke owlishly along at Joan's guidance. Dazzled to blindness by those ten million glaring bulbs which lifted up tier upon tier against the blank purple skies; deafened by an indescribable cacophony of bands, organs, bells, horns, human tongues incessantly clattering; suffering acutely from the collective heat of the multitude added to that of the still and muggy night; buffeted and borne hither and yon at the will of the mass: they contrived in the end to engage an open, horse-drawn vehicle, of the type colloquially known in those days as "low-neck hack," and ordered themselves driven to the Manhattan Beach Hotel. When presently they had gained the darkling peace of a long road between marsh-lands, Fowey resumed with his glasses his hateful cynicism. "That was considerable treat, all right," he said pensively. "Glad you liked it," Joan replied with the curtness of chagrin. "We'll go back and have some more after dinner," he suggested. "Thanks--I've had plenty." "No, but really!" he insisted. "We haven't seen half of it--" "Oh, shut up!" Her anger was real; and when he would have mollified the girl with soft words and an arm that sought to steal round her waist, she repeated her injunction with added coarseness and struck his hand away with a force that he felt. In spite of this, he schooled himself to patience. Dinner, served perfunctorily by a weary waiter and consumed upon the verandah of the hotel at a table, the best they could command, far removed from the comparative coolness and ease of those beside the railing, did little if anything to modify Joan's temper. She, who had set out, believing herself the happiest of mortals, to spend an evening of real enjoyment, felt utterly wretched and forlorn. Moment by moment her distaste for Fowey was gaining strength. She was put to it to listen to his bragging and to make response civilly. She did not relish her food, her company, or her surroundings; and in utter ennui tried to stimulate herself with her favourite brand of sweet champagne, insisting on another bottle when they had emptied one between them. It served only to stimulate a fictitious gaiety in her, one swift to wane. For all this, she was reluctant to contemplate going home. Anything were preferable to that--at least until she could feel reasonably sure of finding Hattie abed and asleep. They finished their meal at an hour too late to make it worth while to patronize one of the open-air entertainments with which she had promised herself diversion; and since she would neither go home nor, at Fowey's mischievous suggestion, return to Coney Island, they moved to another table, nearer the railing, and whiled away one more hour listening to the band music over their cigarettes and liqueurs. Toward eleven o'clock, Joan suddenly announced that she was sick of it all and ready to go. Fowey revived his preference for a motor-car, and got his way against scanty opposition. In a saner humour, Joan would have stuck to her original plan. As it was, she accepted the motor ride with neither gratitude nor graciousness. Curiously enough, once established in the car, her hat off, the swift rush of night air cooling her moist brows, her head resting back against the cushions, she permitted Fowey to repeat his ardent love-making which had made their previous ride together memorable. Her dislike of him was no less thorough-paced, but had passed from an active to a passive stage; she was at once too indifferent to resist him and so bored that she welcomed anything that promised excitement. She suffered his kisses, confident in her power to control him, and drew a certain satisfaction from reminding him, now and again forcibly, that there were limits to her toleration. But for the most part she lay in his arms in passive languor, her eyes half closed, and tried to forget him, or rather to believe him someone else, one whose embraces she could have welcomed.... When they came to lighted streets, she bade Fowey "behave," and would not permit him even so slight a lapse from decorum as that of "holding hands." She sat up, rearranging the disorder of her hair, adjusted her hat, surreptitiously restored the brilliance of her lips with a stick of rouge. The man drew back sullenly into his corner, fuming.... At her door, dismissing the car, he followed her up to the stoop. "Joan--" he began angrily. She turned back from using her latch-key, with a wondering, child-like stare. "Yes, Hubert?" she enquired with hidden malice. "You're not--you're not going to send me off like this?" "Why not?" she demanded with fine assumption of simplicity. "It's awful' late." Fowey seized her wrist. "Now, listen to me!" Joan broke his grasp with little or no effort. "Silly boy!" she said. "Do you really want to come in and visit a while before you say good night?" Her look was false with a winning softness. Fowey stammered. "You--you know--" "Then come along!" she said, with a laugh; and turning fled lightly before him up the darkened stairway. She had opened the door to the tiny private hallway of the flat when he overtook her, panting. She paused, with a warning finger to her lips. "S-sh!" she warned. "Don't wake Hattie!" He swore viciously, discountenanced; and she laughed and, leaving the door wide, went on into the small sitting-dining-room, meanly exulting in the discomfiture she had planned, knowing quite well that he had either forgotten Hattie or believed her to be spending this week-end out of Town, as before. In the act of lighting the gas, she heard the door close and saw Fowey come, white and shaken, into the room. "Hush!" she said gaily. "I'll make sure she isn't awake--" Removing her hat, she passed on into the adjoining bedroom, and stopped short with a sensation of sinking dismay. The room was empty, the bed she shared with Hattie untouched. So much was visible in the faint light entering through windows that opened on a well. Wondering, Joan struck a light. Its first glimmer revealed to her the fact that Hattie's trunk was gone. The flare of the gas-jet disclosed greater changes in the aspect of the room, due to the disappearance of Hattie's toilet articles and knick-knacks. Hattie had left, bag and baggage--had gone for good! But why? Had she discovered Joan's treachery? Or what had happened? And in her surprise and perplexity, the girl was conscious anew of that sense of loneliness. She had been afraid to return to the one whom she had betrayed so lightly; but now she was afraid to be without her. Going back to the adjoining room, she found Fowey standing beside the table and with a slight smile examining a sheet of paper. "I found this lying here," he announced, handing it over--"didn't realize it was anything until I'd read half of it." His smile was again confident, bright with premature pride of conquest. But Joan didn't heed it. She was reading rapidly what had been written, swiftly and in a sprawling hand, upon the half sheet of note-paper. "By rights I ought to stay until you come back, whenever you have the cheek to, and tell you what I think of you--I saw B. E. this evening and he told me all about it--but I want never to see you again--the rent's paid up till next Wednesday--then you can stick or get out--I don't care which--and I wish you joy of your bargain!--H. M." "You've been scrapping with Hattie, eh?" Joan heard Fowey say in an amused voice. Without answering, she let the sheet of paper fall to the table, and stood with head bowed in thought, suffering acutely the humiliation inspired by Hattie's contemptuous dismissal. "What was the trouble?" Fowey pursued. "Not that I'm sorry--" "Oh, nothing much," Joan interrupted. "We just had a difference of opinion, and she had to fly off the handle like this. It doesn't matter." "It matters to me," Fowey announced significantly. Now Joan looked up, for the first time appreciating her position. "Oh ..." she said blankly. Fowey was advancing, with extended arms. She raised a hand to fend him off. "Don't!" she begged. "Please don't. I can't.... You must go, now--of course. I'm sorry. Good night." He paused, and she saw his face pale and working with passion; his small eyes blazing behind their thick lenses; his hands clenched by his sides, but not tightly, the fingers twitching nervously; his whole body trembling and shaken beyond control. She was conscious of an incongruous, unnatural, inexplicable feeling of pity for him. "Please be a good boy," she pleaded, "and go away." "No, I'm damned if I do. You asked me up here--I know now--just to tease me. But that's no good. I won't go!" He advanced another pace, his tone and manner changing. "O Joan, Joan!" he begged--"don't treat me so cruelly! You know I'm mad about you. Doesn't that mean anything to you, more than a chance to torment me? My God! what kind of a woman are you? I can't stand this. Flesh and blood couldn't. I'm only human. All this week I've kept away from you simply because I realized what you were--" "What am I?" Joan cut in quickly. Fowey choked again, with a gesture of impotent exasperation. "You," he almost shouted--"you're the woman I love and who's driving me mad--mad I tell you!" "Hubert! You mean that? You really love me?" "You know I do. You know I'm crazy about you. Haven't you seen it from the first?" Hesitating, Joan experienced a sense of one in deep waters. There was a sound as that of distant surf in her ears. All through her body pulses were throbbing madly. She struggled still a little, instinctively; but Fowey advantaged himself of that instant of indecision. He held her in his arms, now; her face was stinging beneath his kisses. Almost unconsciously, she lifted her arms and clasped them round his neck, drawing his face to hers. "You poor kid!" she murmured fondly, her eyes closed.... "You poor kid...." XXXVI Without knowing how she had come there, Joan found herself standing beside the outer doorway, in the narrow hall; one hand hugging about her the kimono she must have snatched up by instinct, while yet not fully wakened, the other hand fumbling with the lock; sleep clouding her brain like a fog, fatigue weighting her eyelids and chaining her limbs, panic hammering in her bosom. Overhead the doorbell was ringing imperatively, without interruption, even as it must have been ringing for many minutes before she was consciously awake. Dimly she felt that this alarm by night must portend something strange and terrible. And still she held her hand, wondering. Who could it be? Not Quard: for she had seen him leave New York. Never Marbridge: that were unthinkable! Hattie Morrison, perhaps.... And that meant.... The bell ground on implacably. At length she found courage to adjust the chain-bolt and open the door to the limit permitted by that guard. In the outer hallway a gas-jet burned, turned low, diffusing just enough illumination to show her the figure, somehow indefinitely familiar in spite of its style, of a man in a chauffeur's uniform: a young and wiry man clothed in khaki coat and breeches and leather leggins, and wearing a cap with visor shadowing heavily his narrow, sharp-featured countenance. As the door opened he removed his finger from the bell-push, and drove home recognition with his voice. "Miss Thursby live here? I got a message for her." Joan gasped: "Butch!" "It's me, all right," her brother admitted crisply in his well-remembered tone of irony. "You certainly are one sincere little sleeper. I been ringing here--" "How did you get in?" "Rang up the janitor--if _that_ matters. Lis'n: you betta hustle into your clothes quick 's you can if you wanta get home in time to say good-bye to the old woman." "Mother!" Joan shrilled. "What--what's the matter--?" "Dyin'," Butch told her briefly and without emotion. "She said she wanted to see you. So get a move on. My car's waitin', and I dassent leave it alone. Hustle--y' understand?" "Yes, yes!" Joan promised with a sob. "I'll hurry, Butch--" "See you do, then!" The boy swung about smartly and disappeared down the well of the stairway. Joan closed the door, and leaned against it, panting. Suppose he had wanted to come in!... For the moment, this was her sole coherent thought. Then, rousing, she crept stealthily back to the darkened bedroom, gathered up her clothing with infinite precautions against noise, and returned to the sitting-room to dress in feverish haste.... There was an open taxicab waiting in front of the door. As she came out, Butch bent over and cranked the motor. Straightening up, he waved her curtly into the body of the car. "Jump in and shut the door," he ordered briefly, climbing into the driver's seat. "But--Butch--" "Doncha hear me? Get in and shut that door. We got no time to waste chinnin' here." Abashed and frightened, the girl obeyed. Immediately Butch had the cab in motion, tearing eastward at lawless speed through streets whose long ranks of yawning windows, seen fugitively in the formless dusk of early morning, seemed to look down leering, as if informed with terrible intelligence. She shut out the sight of them with hands that covered her face until the swift rush of cool air steadied and sobered her, so that she grew calmer in the knowledge that, in veritable fact (and this was all that really mattered) "nobody knew".... Then, sitting up, she composed herself, and with deft fingers completed the adjustment of her garments. By the time she had finished her toilet, aided by a small mirror inset between the forward windows, Butch was stopping the cab before the East Seventy-sixth Street tenement. Bending back, he unlatched the door and swung it open. "You go on up," he ordered. "I'll be around before long--gotta run this machine back to the garage." Joan stepped quickly to the sidewalk, and shut the door. "All right," she responded, and added, almost timidly, avoiding her brother's eyes: "Thank you, Butch." He grunted unintelligibly and, as Joan moved up the stoop, threw in the power again and drew swiftly away down the street. For an instant Joan held back in the vestibule, sickened to recognize anew the home of dirt and squalor she had fled, a long lifetime since, it seemed, and struggling with almost invincible repugnance for the ordeal awaiting her at the head of those five weary flights. Then, more through instinct than of her will, her finger pressed the call-button beneath the Thursby letter box. The latch clicked. She pushed the door open, moved reluctantly into the shadows and addressed herself wearily to the stairs, inhaling with a keen physical disgust the heavy and malodorous atmosphere in which her youth had been shaped toward womanhood. As the dining-room door admitted her, she checked again, almost tempted to question the soundness of those faculties which insisted that more than a year had passed, rather than an hour or two, since she had left that mean and sordid place. Above the dining-table blazed and wheezed a single gas-jet, whose ragged bluish flame was yet sufficiently strong to turn to the colour of night the dull dawnlight outside the air-shaft windows. It revealed to her not a single article of furniture other than as memory placed it, and showed her, seated on the far side of the table, her father lifting a heavy and sullen face from the note-book between his soiled fat fingers, that inevitable sheaf of dope lying at his elbow. There was no sort of greeting, in proper sense, between these two. For a little neither spoke. Joan hesitated, with shoulders against the panels of the door, in an attitude instinctively defiant and defensive. Thursby looked her up and down, a louring sneer marking his recognition of his daughter's finery. Suddenly, explosively, she found her tongue: "How's ma?" Thursby jerked a thumb in the direction of the bedrooms. "She died an hour ago," he said slowly, "just after Ed went to find you. Edna's in there." Joan made a gesture of horror. "My God!" she said throatily, and turned away. A moment later, loud cries of lamentation ringing through the flat testified that she had found her sister. XXXVII With peculiar irony, the passing of that pallid, vague, and ineffectual character, Mrs. Thursby, proved the signal for the dissolution of the family which, denying her both respect and affection during her life, had none the less lost, in losing her, its sole motive or excuse for unity. The return from the cemetery was accomplished toward noon of a July day whose heavily overcast sky seemed only to act as a blanket over the city, compressing its heated and humid atmosphere until the least exertion was to be indulged in only at the cost of saturated clothing. The four were crowded in common misery within a shabby, stuffy, undertaker's growler. Thursby occupied the back seat with his eldest daughter, notwithstanding the fact that, since apprising her of her mother's death, the morning of her return, he had addressed no word to her directly. He sat now with fat and mottled hands resting on his knees, his waistcoat unbuttoned, exposing soiled linen, his dull and heavy gaze steadfastly directed through the window. Opposite him, on the forward seat, Edna wept silently and incessantly into a black-bordered handkerchief. Butch, beside her, looked serious and depressed in a suit of black clothing borrowed for the occasion. Nobody spoke from the time they re-entered the carriage, after the burial, until they left it. Joan huddled herself into her corner, putting all possible space between herself and her father. A sense of lassitude was heavy upon her. She meditated vaguely on the strangeness of life, its inscrutable riddle, the enigma of its brief and feverish transit from black oblivion through light to black oblivion. But the problem only wearied her. She dropped it from time to time and tried to think of other things; as a rule this resulted in her speculations centering about Butch. The boy mystified her, awed her a little with a suggestion of spirit and strength, character and intelligence, conveyed by a forceful yet unassuming manner. It was a new manner, strangely developed in the year that spaced her knowledge of him, only to be explained by his sudden determination to go seriously to work and make something of himself; and the motive for that remained inexplicable, and would ever as far as concerned Joan. For the personal reticence that had always sealed his cynical mouth was more than ever characteristic of the boy today; and the sympathy which once had existed between himself and Joan was become a thing of yesterday and as if it had never been. His attitude toward her was touched with just a colour of contempt, almost too faint to be resented; she shrank from it, feeling that he saw through her shallowness, that he knew her, not as Marbridge knew her, perhaps, or as Billy Salute, but thoroughly and intimately, and far better than she would ever know herself. She knew now--through Edna--that within the last twelve-month Butch had learned his trade of chauffeur and pursued it with such diligence that, aside from being the main support of the family which she had deserted, he was half-owner of his taxicab and in a way to acquire an interest in a small garage.... When the carriage stopped, the father was the first to alight. With no word or look for either of his daughters, and only a semi-articulate growl for Butch, to the effect that they'd see one another again at dinner, he pulled his rusty derby well forward over his haggard, haunted eyes, thrust his hands deep into trouser-pockets, and slouched ponderously away in the direction of his news-stand. Before he turned the avenue corner, Joan, looking after him while she waited for Butch to settle with the driver, saw Thursby produce his packet of dope and, moistening a thumb, begin to con it as he plodded on. So, pursuing his passion to the end, he passed forever from her life, yet never altogether from her memory; in which, as time matured the girl, his inscrutable personality assumed the character of a symbol of aborted destiny. What he had been, whence he had sprung, what he might have become, she never learned.... Then, preceded by Edna, followed by Butch, she climbed for the last time those weary stairs. Arrived in the flat, Butch shut himself into his room to change to working clothes. He could not afford to waste an afternoon, he said. Joan and Edna sat down in the dark and dismal dining-room, conferring in hushed voices until he rejoined them. He came forth presently, the inevitable cigarette drooping from his thin, hard lips, and sat down, his spare, wiry body looking uncommonly well set-up and capable in the chauffeur's livery. After a little hesitation, Joan mustered up courage to say her say, if with something nearly approaching appeal in the way that she addressed this taciturn and self-sufficient man who had replaced her loaferish brother. "I've been telling Edna," she said, "that I'm going to take care of her from now on." "That so?" Butch exhaled twin jets of smoke from his nostrils. "How?" he enquired without prejudice. "Well ... she's coming to live with me--" "Where?" "I don't know. I'm leaving where you found me. By the way, how did you know where to look for me, Butch?" "Seen you one day when you was livin' in the Astoria Inn. There's a dairy lunch on the ground floor where I gen'ly eat. After that I kept an eye on you." "Oh!" said Joan thoughtfully, wondering how much that eye had seen of the brief but lurid existence she had led before coming partially to her senses and moving to share Hattie Morrison's lodgings. "Well, I'll find a good place, and Edna can stay with me and act as my maid until she's old enough to find something to do for herself." "On the stage, eh?" "I guess so. I'm getting on, you know. Chances are I could give her a boost." Butch shook his head: "Nothin' doin'." "Why?" He was unmoved by the flash of hostility in Joan's manner. "I guess," he said after a deliberate pause, "we don't have to go into that. Anyway, I got other plans for Edna. She's goin' to the country, up-State, to spend the summer on a farm--family of a fellow I know. After that, if she's strong enough, she can come back and keep house for me, if she wants to, or go to work any way she chooses--that's not my business. Only--understand me--she isn't going to go into the chorus until she's old enough to know what she's doin', and strong enough to stand the racket. That's settled." Rising, he jerked the stub of his cigarette through the air-shaft window, and slowly drew on his gauntlets. "You do what packin' you wanta, kid," he advised Edna, "before three o'clock thisaft'noon. I'll be back for you then. Your train leaves at four. You'll travel along with the mother of this friend of mine--Mrs. Simmons, her name is." As he had said, the matter was settled. Joan conceded the point without bickering, with indeed a feeling of mean relief. Moreover, she was afraid of Butch.... The flat in Fiftieth Street had gained associations insufferably hateful. She returned to it only long enough to pack up and move out. Incidentally she found, read, and destroyed without answering, a note from Fowey suggesting an assignation. Her paradoxical dislike for the man had deepened into detestation. She both hoped and intended never to see him again. She moved before nightfall, leaving no address, and established herself in an inexpensive but reputable boarding establishment, little frequented by the class of theatrical people with which she was acquainted, and where a repetition of her escapade was impossible. On the third day following she began rehearsing privately with Gloucester, and threw into the work all she could muster of strength, patience, and intelligence, leaving herself, at the end of each day's work, too exhausted in mind and body to indulge in any of the pleasures to which her tastes inclined. Fowey, unable to trace her and seeing nothing of the girl in those restaurants and places of amusement she had been wont to frequent, in time gave up the chase; and before the first presentation of "Mrs. Mixer" the newspapers supplied Joan with the news of his clandestine marriage and subsequent flight to Europe with a widow whose fortune doubtless promised compensation for the fact that she had a son nearly as old as her latest husband. XXXVIII The rehearsals of "Tomorrow's People" were arranged to begin on the twenty-third day of September; and since all the important rôles had been filled before he left Town, and Wilbrow, whom he could trust, had charge of all other details, Matthias delayed his home-coming until the twenty-second. Not until the twentieth did he emerge from the wilderness up back of the Allagash country into the comparative civilization of Moosehead Lake. In eight weeks he had not written a line, received a letter, or read a newspaper. But, as he telegraphed Helena from the Mt. Kineo House, he was so healthy that he was ashamed of it. The day-letter telegram she sent in reply was delivered on the train. Its news, though condensed, was reassuring: Venetia was well and her boy developing into a famous ruffian; the two were making a visit at Tanglewood, and on the return of Marbridge from his summer in Europe would move back to New York, where Venetia was to reassume charge of his town-house. Thus satisfied as to the welfare of the woman he loved, Matthias gave himself up completely to the production of his play; and through the following four weeks lived in the theatre by day, dreamed of it by night, thought, talked, and wrote only in its singular terminology. Few facts unconnected with his own play penetrated his understanding, in all that period. But, dining with Wilbrow one night at the general table in the Players, he overheard Gloucester railing bitterly at the ill-fortune which had induced him to pledge himself to stage a modern satirical comedy for Arlington and to train for the leading part a raw and almost inexperienced stage-struck girl. He detailed his trials in vivid phrases: "As far as I know, she's never played in anything except a bum vaudeville sketch, and I had hell's own time making her fit to play _that_. And yet she's got the ineffable nerve to keep picking at my way of doing things on the general ground that it ain't Tom Wilbrow's. Seems he had the privilege of rehearsing her for a five-side part in that punk show of Jack Matthias', that went to pieces out on the Coast last Summer. If Wilbrow wasn't listening with all his ears, over there, I'd tell you what I said to the young woman the last time she threw him in my face.... What?... Oh, nobody you ever heard of. Calls herself Thursday--Joan Thursday.... Of course I rowed with Arlington about her, but he only shrugged and grinned and said she had to play it and I'd got to make her play it--offered to bet me a thousand over and above my fees I couldn't do it.... Sure, I took him up. Why not? I'll make her act it yet. I could make a Casino chorus boy act human if I wasn't so squeamish.... Oh, Marbridge--one of his discoveries. I saw him handing her gently into that big, brazen touring-car of his, in front of Rector's, night before last. Fragile's the word--'handle with care!'" Wilbrow, interrogated, supplied the context. Arlington had bought up, through a third party, Mrs. Cardrow's interest in "Mrs. Mixer," advising her to sell out because the play had already scored one failure and promising her another play in which she would stand better chance to win New York audiences. This was an old comedy from the French, revamped, and was even then being rehearsed with a scrub company and a scratch outfit of scenery, the production to be made on the same night that "Mrs. Mixer" was to tempt fate with Joan Thursday; the designated date being the twenty-fifth of October, a Wednesday. Matthias promptly dismissed the matter from his mind: he speculated a little, hazily about Marbridge, in his constitutional inability to understand that gentleman, felt more than ever sorry for Venetia and wondered how much longer she would stand it all--and plunged again into his preoccupation. "Tomorrow's People" was announced for production on Monday, October the twenty-third. But after the dress-rehearsal on Sunday certain changes recommended themselves as advisable to the judgment of the author, who persuaded the management to postpone the opening night until Wednesday. At ten minutes to twelve on that night the final curtain fell upon a successful representation; an audience in its wraps blocked the aisles until after midnight, applauding and demanding the author; who, however, was not in the theatre. He had, in fact, not been near it since the curtain, falling on the first act, had persuaded him of the general friendliness of an audience and the competency of the company. This culmination of a nerve-racking strain which had endured without respite for over a month found him without courage to await the verdict. He took to the streets and walked himself weary in vain effort to refrain from circling back toward the building whose walls housed his fate. At length, in desperation hoping to distract his thoughts from the supreme issue, he purchased a ticket of admission to another theatre, above whose entrance blazed the announcement "Mrs. Mixer," and stationed himself at the back of the orchestra to witness the last part of the performance. He saw the self-confidence of Gloucester supremely justified: the satiric farce marched steadily, scene by scene, to a success that was to keep it on Broadway through the winter and make the name of Joan Thursday a house-hold word throughout the Union. Her personal success was as unquestionable as her beauty; she played with grace, vivacity, charm, and distinction; and only to the initiate of the theatre was it apparent that Gloucester had found in her the perfect medium for the transmission of his art. Matthias could see, in company with a few of the more discriminating and stage-wise, that she employed not a gesture, intonation or bit of business which had not originated with Gloucester; she brought to her rôle on her part nothing but beauty and an unshakable self-confidence so thoroughly ingrained that it escaped suggesting self-consciousness. The triumph was, rightly, first Gloucester's, then the play's; but the public acclaimed the actress, and the one acidulated critic who hailed her, the following morning, as "at last!--the perfect human kinetophone record!" was listened to by none, least of all by the subject of his sarcasm. Marbridge, in a stage box, led the applause at the conclusion of each act; and at the end of the play Arlington came in person before the curtain, leading by the hand the gracefully reluctant Joan, and in a few suave sentences thanked the audience for its appreciation and a beneficent Providence for granting him this opportunity of fixing a new star in the theatrical firmament: the name of "this little girl," he promised (bowing to Joan) would appear in letters of fire over the theatre, the next night.... Pausing in the lobby to light a cigarette before leaving, Matthias overheard one of Arlington's lieutenants confiding to another the news of the ruinous failure of the third initial production of that night. Half an hour later he met Wilbrow by appointment in a quiet, non-theatrical club, and received from him confirmation of rumours which had already reached him of his own triumph with "Tomorrow's People." "You're a made man now," Wilbrow told him with sincere good will and some little honest envy; "by tomorrow morning the pack will be at your heels, yapping for a chance to put on every old 'script in your trunk." "I suppose so," Matthias nodded soberly. "But there's one comfort about that," Wilbrow pursued cheerfully: "whatever the temptation, you won't give 'em anything but sound, sane, workmanlike stuff. You've proved yourself one of the two or three, at most, playwrights in this country who are able to think and to make an audience think without losing sight of the fact that, in the last analysis, 'the play's the thing.' We've got plenty of authors nowadays who can turn out first-chop melodrama, and we've got a respectable percentage of 'em who write plays so full of honest and intelligent thought that it gives the average manager a headache to look at the 'script; but the men who can give us the sort of drama that not only makes you think but holds you on the front edge of your seat waiting to see what's coming next.... Well, they're few and far between, and you're one of 'em, and I'm proud to have had a hand in putting you before the public!" "You've got nothing on me, there," Matthias grinned: "I'm proud you had. And if I can get my own way after this--" "You don't need to join the I-Should-Worries on account of that!" "You'll be the only man who will ever produce one of my plays." Between one o'clock and two they parted. Matthias trudged home, completely fagged in body, but with a buoyant heart to sustain him. Venetia would be glad for him.... He was ascending the steps of Number 289 when a heavy touring-car, coming from the direction of Longacre Square, swung in to the curb and stopped. Latch-key in hand, Matthias paused and looked back in some little surprise: the lodgers of Madame Duprat were a motley lot, but as far as he knew none of them were of the class that maintains expensive automobiles. But this car, upon inspection, proved to be tenanted by the chauffeur alone; who, leaving the motor purring, jumped smartly from his seat and ran up the steps. "I beg your pardon, sir," he said, touching his cap, "but I'm looking for a gentleman named Matthias--" "I am Mr. Matthias." "Thank you, sir. I've been sent to fetch you. It's--er--important, I fancy," the man added, eyeing Matthias curiously. "You've been sent to fetch me? But who sent you?" "My employer, sir--Mr. Marbridge." "Marbridge!" Matthias echoed, startled. Without definite decision, he turned and ran down the steps in company with the chauffeur: Venetia in need of him, perhaps.... "What's happened?" he demanded. "Is Mrs. Marbridge--?" "If you'll just get in, sir," the man replied, "I'll tell you--as much as I know--on the way. It'll save time." He opened the door of the tonneau, but Matthias turned from it, walked round the car, and climbed into the seat beside the driver's. With a nod of satisfaction, the chauffeur joined him, threw in the power, and deftly swung the ponderous vehicle about. "Well?" Matthias asked as the machine shot across-town. "Beg pardon, sir," the man replied after a moment--"but I'd rather not say anything, if it's all the same to you." "It isn't," Matthias insisted curtly. "I'm not on sufficiently friendly terms with Mr. Marbridge for him to send for me without explanation." "Yes, sir; but you see, part of my job is to keep my mouth shut." "I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to forget that duty to some extent, or else stop the car and let me out." "Very good, sir. I don't suppose I can do any harm telling what little I know. After supper tonight, Mr. Marbridge told me to take the car to the garage and not to expect a call for it until sometime tomorrow morning; but when I got there, he was already wanting me on the telephone. He said there'd been an accident, and told me to find Mr. Arlington first and then you, and ask you to come immediately." "But why me?" Matthias asked, more of himself than of the driver. "He didn't say, sir." "Did he state what sort of an accident?" "No, sir." "You found Mr. Arlington?" "No, sir; he wasn't in when I asked at his hotel. But I left a message before coming on for you." Matthias sat up with a start. Instead of turning up Broadway the man was steering his car straight across Longacre Square. Before he had time to comment on this fact they were speeding on toward Sixth Avenue. "Look here," he cried, "you're not taking me to Mr. Marbridge's home!" "No, sir." "But--" "Mr. Marbridge hadn't gone home when he telephoned me, sir." "Where is he, then?" "We'll be there in a minute, sir--an apartment house on Madison Avenue." "Oh!" said Matthias thoughtfully. "Was Mr. Marbridge--ah--alone when you left him tonight?" "I'd rather not say, sir, if you don't mind." Troubled by an inkling of the disaster, Matthias composed himself to patience. Turning south on Fifth Avenue, the car passed Thirty-fourth Street before swinging eastward again. It stopped, eventually, in the side street, just short of the corner of Madison Avenue, before a private entrance to a ground-floor apartment, such as physicians prefer. But Matthias could discern no physician's name-plate upon the door at which his guide knocked, or in either of the flanking windows. Opening, the door disclosed a panelled entry tenanted by a white-lipped woman in the black and white uniform of a lady's-maid. Her frightened eyes examined Matthias apprehensively as he entered, followed by the chauffeur. This last demanded briefly: "Doctor been?" The maid assented with a nervous nod: "Ten minutes ago, about. He's with the lady now--" "Lady!" the chauffeur echoed. "But I thought it was Mr. Marbridge--" "I mean the other lady," the maid explained--"the one what done the shooting. When Mr. Marbridge got the gun away from her, he locked her up in the bathroom, and then she had hysterics. The doctor's trying to make her hush, so's she won't disturb the other tenants, but.... You can hear yourself how she's carrying on." In a pause that followed, Matthias was conscious of the sound of high-pitched and incessant laughter, slightly muffled, emanating from some distant part of the flat. He asked abruptly: "Where is Mr. Marbridge?" The maid started and hesitated, looking to the chauffeur. "This is Mr. Matthias," that one explained. "Mr. Marbridge sent for him." "Oh, yes--excuse me, sir. This way, if you please." Opening a door on the right, the woman permitted Matthias to pass through, then closed it. He found himself in a dining-room of moderate proportions and handsomely furnished. Little of it was visible, however, outside the radius of illumination cast by an electric dome which, depending from the middle of the ceiling, focussed its rays upon a small round dining-table of mahogany. This table was quite bare save for a massive decanter of cut-glass standing at the edge of a puddle of spilt liquor: as if an uncertain hand had attempted to pour a drink. Near it lay a broken goblet. On the farther side of the table a woman with young and slender figure stood in a pose of arrested action, holding a goblet half-full of brandy and water. Her features were but indistinctly suggested in the penumbra of the dome, but beneath this her bare arms and shoulders, rising out of an elaborate evening gown, shone with a soft warm lustre. Matthias remembered that gown: Joan Thursday had worn it in the last act of "Mrs. Mixer." But she neither moved nor spoke, and for the time being he paid her no further heed, giving his attention entirely to Marbridge. Sitting low in a deeply upholstered wing-chair--out of place in the dining-room and evidently dragged in for the emergency--Marbridge breathed heavily, chin on his chest, his coarse mouth ajar, his face ghastly with a stricken pallor. His feet sprawled uncouthly. The dress coat and waistcoat he had worn lay in a heap on the floor, near the chair, and both shirt and undershirt had been ripped and cut away from his right shoulder, exposing his swarthy and hairy bosom and a sort of temporary bandage which, like his linen, was darkly stained. Closed when Matthias entered, his eyes opened almost instantly and fixed upon the man a heavy and lacklustre stare which at first failed to indicate recognition. Matthias heard himself crying out in a voice of horror: "Good God, Marbridge! How did this happen?" The man stirred, granted with pain, and made a deprecatory gesture with his left hand. "Needn't yell," he said thickly: "I've been shot ... done for...." His gaze shifted heavily to the woman. With effort he enunciated one word more: "Drink...." As though by that monosyllable freed from an enchaining spell, Joan started, moved quickly to his side and held the goblet to his lips. He drank noisily, gulping and slobbering; overflowing at either corner of his mouth, the liquor dripped twin streams upon his naked bosom. Mechanically Matthias put his hat down on the table. He experienced an incredulous sensation, as though he were struggling to cast off the terror and oppression of some particularly vivid and coherent nightmare. From the farther room that noise persisted of monotonous and awful laughter. Marbridge ceased to swallow and grunted. Joan removed the glass and drew away without looking at Matthias. At a cost of considerable will-power, apparently, the wounded man collected himself and levelled at Matthias his louring, but now less dull, regard. "Oh, it's you, is it?" he said ungraciously. "Well, you'll do at a pinch.... I wanted Arlington ... but you if he couldn't be found." "Well," said Matthias stupidly, "I'm here.... The doctor's seen you, I suppose?" "Yes--did what he could for me--no use wasting effort--it's my cue to exit." "Oh, come! It's not as bad as that!" "The hell it ain't. The doctor knows--I know. Not that it matters. It was coming to me and I got it." "Where's the doctor?" Matthias insisted. "Why isn't he attending you now?" "He's in the other room ... trying to silence that crazy woman.... She plugged me and ... went into hysterics...." "Who?" "Nella Cardrow.... Had the devil of a time with her before doctor came ... trying to keep her from rushing out and giving herself up ... all this in the papers.... But all right now: we'll hush it up." "Then that's what you want of me?" "Wait," Marbridge grunted. "Where's that girl?" Joan moved back to his side. "What can I do?" she said; and these were all the words Matthias heard her utter from first to last of that business. Marbridge nodded at her with a curling lip: "You can get out!" She turned sharply and left the room, banging the door. "That's the kind _she_ is," Marbridge commented. "You were lucky to get rid of her as easy as you did.... Give me more brandy, will you, like a good fellow--and be stingy with the water. I've got to ... hold out a couple of hours more." Matthias served him. "I presume Venetia knows nothing about this, yet?" Having drunk, Marbridge shook his head. "Not yet. Now, listen.... You guessed it: I want you to help hush this up, for Venetia's sake.... Rotten mess--do no good if it gets in the papers--only humiliation for her. Will you--?" "What is it you want me to do?" "Help me home and keep your mouth shut.... You see, this is my place; I've had it years; very handy--private entrance--all that.... Nella used to meet me here. That's how she came to have a key. I'd forgotten.... Well, I got tired of her, and she couldn't act, and Arlington was sore about that. So we planned to get rid of her. I guess you must've heard. It was a dirty business, all round.... And tonight, when her play went to pieces, just as we'd planned it should, she saw how she'd been bilked and lost her head.... Came here, let herself in quietly, without the maid's hearing her, and shot me when I came in with Joan. I managed to get the gun away before she could turn it on herself, and locked her up. Then--hysterics.... Well, I'm finished. I asked for it, and got it.... No: no remorse bunk, no deathbed repentance, nothing like that! But I realize I've been a pretty rotten proposition, first and last. Never mind.... What I'm getting at's this: nobody need suffer but me. That's where _you_ come in. For Venetia's sake. You and Arlington and the doctor can cover it all up between you. Arlie can quiet that girl--Joan--and the doctor's all right; he'll want a pretty stiff cheque to fix the undertaker--and that's all right, too. Then you've got to scare Nella Cardrow so's she won't give herself away, and buy my chauffeur and that maid out there, Sara.... But first off, you'll have to help doctor get me home and in bed. I'm the sort that's got to die in the house." His chin dropped again. "Well ... I guess it's a good job ... at that...." He shivered. The hall-door opened and Arlington entered, followed by a lean man with worried eyes who proved to be the doctor. XXXIX Shortly before seven o'clock, that same morning, a limousine car pulled up quietly just short of the corner of Madison Avenue, and its occupant, with a word on alighting to his driver, addressed himself briskly to the door of the ground-floor flat. He was a handsome, well dressed, well-set-up and well-nourished animal of something more than middle-age: a fact which the pitilessly clear light of early morning betrayed, discovering lines and hollows in his clean-shaven countenance which would ordinarily have escaped notice. But he had passed that time of life when he could suffer a sleepless night of anxiety without visibly paying for it. His intention to announce himself by ringing the bell was promptly anticipated, the door opening before his finger could touch the button. He checked momentarily in obvious surprise, then jauntily lifted his hat as he stepped hurriedly inside. "Why, my dear!" he addressed the woman who held the door--"up so early!" "I haven't been to bed, of course, Mr. Arlington," Joan informed him. "Well," he observed, not without envy, "you don't look it." "I've been packing all night," she returned. "Of course--I can't stay here, after what's happened." "Of course not," he agreed sympathetically. Having closed the outside door, she moved before him into a small drawing-room which adjoined the entry-hall on the left, and when he had followed shut its door with particular care. "Sara's still packing," she explained, turning to Arlington. "Well?" He hesitated, looking her over with a doubtful eye. But she was, at least outwardly, quite cool and collected, her manner exhibiting no undue amount of anxiety. Still, a certain amount of make-believe would seem no more than decent.... "Look here," he said almost sharply--"you're feeling all right, eh?" "Quite--only tired as a dog; and naturally--" "I understand," he interrupted. "But you'll be fit to go on tonight, you think?" "Don't worry about that," Joan advised him decidedly. "I'm hoping to get a nap before evening, but even if I don't, I know the first duty of an actress is always to her public." "Yes," Arlington agreed briefly, avoiding her eyes.... "Still, I must ask you to be prepared." Joan's figure stiffened slightly, and her dark eyes widened. "Dead?" she questioned in a low voice. Arlington nodded. "I'm sorry.... About half an hour after we got him home." The girl sat down suddenly and buried her face in her hands. "Oh!" she cried in a stifled voice--"how awful!" "There!" Arlington moved over and rested a hand familiarly on her shoulder. "Brace up. You'll forget all about this before long." "O no--never!" she moaned through her fingers. "But you will," he insisted, looking down at her with an odd expression. "To begin with, I'm going to make it my business to see that you forget. You must. You can't do justice to your--genius, if you keep harping on this accident. It wasn't your fault, you know. Just as soon as I've arranged a few details.... By the way, how's the Cardrow woman?" "Asleep," Joan answered. "She hasn't made a bit of trouble since the doctor gave her that dope--whatever it was." "Good. He'll be along presently with a nurse he can trust. And by that time I'll have you out of the way. I know just the place for you, a little flat uptown, on Fifty-ninth Street, overlooking the Park. You'll be very quiet and comfortable there, and near the theatre besides." "I'm glad of that. I was thinking, of course, I'd have to go to some hotel ... and I didn't want to." "And quite natural. You want to be alone until you feel yourself again.... I'll find you a good maid, and make everything smooth for you. You're not to fret about anything, and if you're troubled you must come right to me." "You're awf'ly kind." "Don't look at it that way, please." "How can I ever thank you?" "Oh, we'll talk that over some other time." Arlington removed his hand from her shoulder and went back to the table, upon which he had deposited a bundle of newspapers. "There's no doubt of your success," he pursued soothingly. "Your notices are the finest I've seen in years. I brought you the lot of them in case you care--" Joan uncovered her face and looked up quickly. "Oh, do let me see them!" Arlington placed the papers in her eager hands. "They're all folded with your reviews uppermost." "Oh, thank you ever so much!" But in the act of opening the bundle, Joan hesitated and let it fall into her lap. "There's nothing about--?" she questioned fearfully. "No, and won't be," he promised. "Besides, these were already on the presses by the time it happened.... You needn't worry," he resumed, moving to a window and looking abstractedly out, hands clasped behind him; "the affair will be kept perfectly quiet. Everybody's been seen and fixed, except the Cardrow, and the doctor has already given us a certificate of death under the knife--operation for appendicitis, imperatively required at an hour's notice.... By the way, I don't suppose you know, but--Marbridge didn't leave any papers or anything of that sort lying round here, did he?" There was no answer. He heard a paper rustle, and looking round saw the girl with her attention all absorbed by one of her notices. "Well," he said after a moment, "I'll go and have a talk with that maid, Sara." "All right," she returned abstractedly. "You're all ready to leave when I've fixed things up with her?" "Yes," she returned, without looking up. He hesitated a moment by the door, remarking the flush of colour that was deepening in her cheeks; then with a mystified shake of his head, he left the room very quietly. She remained alone for upwards of half an hour, in the course of which time she read all the reviews once and some of the more enthusiastic twice. Then carefully folding the papers, she put them aside and sat thinking. She thought for a long time without moving, her eyes shining as they looked ahead, out of the stupid and sordid turmoil of yesterday into the golden promise of tomorrow. She thought by no means clearly, with a brain confused by praise and sodden with fatigue; but above the welter of her thoughts, a single tremendous fact stood out, solid and unshakable, like a mountain towering about cloud-wrack: She was a Success. 
48642	----	https://archive.org/details/servantofpublic00hope A SERVANT OF THE PUBLIC * * * * * * BY THE SAME AUTHOR A MAN OF MARK MR. WITT'S WIDOW FATHER STAFFORD A CHANGE OF AIR HALF A HERO THE PRISONER OF ZENDA THE GOD IN THE CAR THE DOLLY DIALOGUES COMEDIES OF COURTSHIP THE CHRONICLES OF COUNT ANTONIO THE HEART OF PRINCESS OSRA PHROSO SIMON DALE RUPERT OF HENTZAU THE KING'S MIRROR QUISANTÉ * * * * * * [Illustration: "I SHOULD BE RATHER AFRAID NEVER TO CHANGE TO A PERSON. IT WOULD MAKE HIM MEAN SO TERRIBLY MUCH TO ONE, WOULDN'T IT?" PAGE 62] A SERVANT OF THE PUBLIC by ANTHONY HOPE With Four Illustrations by Harold Percival, A.R.E. Methuen & Co. 36 Essex Street W.C. London First Published in 1905 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. MUDDOCK AND MEAD 1 II. FIRST IMPRESSIONS 15 III. AN ARRANGEMENT FOR SUNDAY 29 IV. BY WAY OF PRECAUTION 43 V. A DAY IN THE COUNTRY 55 VI. AWAY WITH THE RIBBONS! 70 VII. UNDER THE NOSEGAY 86 VIII. THE LEGITIMATE CLAIMANT 102 IX. RENUNCIATION: A DRAMA 118 X. THE LICENCE OF VIRTUE 133 XI. WHAT IS TRUTH? 149 XII. AT CLOSE QUARTERS 164 XIII. THE HEROINE FAILS 179 XIV. AS MR. FLINT SAID 194 XV. THE MAN UPSTAIRS 210 XVI. MORALITY SMILES 227 XVII. AT SEA AND IN PORT 243 XVIII. THE PLAY AND THE PART 257 XIX. COLLATERAL EFFECTS 270 XX. THE WAYS DIVIDE 286 XXI. WHAT DOES IT MEAN? 301 XXII. OTHER WORLDS 316 XXIII. THE MOST NATURAL THING 332 XXIV. "A GOOD SIGHT" 348 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE "I SHOULD BE RATHER AFRAID NEVER TO CHANGE TO A PERSON. IT WOULD MAKE HIM MEAN SO TERRIBLY MUCH TO ME, WOULDN'T IT?" _Frontispiece_ "SOMEBODY'LL BE GLAD TO SEE ME, ANYHOW," HE ENDED, WITH A LAUGH 224 THE CONTRACT PUNCTILIOUSLY SIGNED BY ALL THE PARTIES AND WITNESSED BY JANET THE MAID ... THEY HAD OPENED A BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE 301 WALKED IN SILENCE SIDE BY SIDE 360 A Servant of the Public CHAPTER I MUDDOCK AND MEAD The social birth of a family, united by a chain of parallel events with the commercial development of a business, is a spectacle strange to no country but most common among the nation of shopkeepers; it presents, however, interesting points and is likely to produce a group of persons rather diverse in character. Some of the family breathe the new air readily enough; with some the straw of the omnibus (there was straw in omnibuses during the formative period) follows on silken skirts into the landau. It takes, they say, three generations to make a gentleman; the schools ticket them--National or Board, Commercial or Grammar, Eton or Harrow. Three generations, not perhaps of human flesh, but of mercantile growth, it takes to make a great Concern. The humble parent-tree in the Commercial Road puts forth branches in Brixton, Camberwell, Stoke Newington, wherever buyers are many and "turnover" quick: here is the second period, when the business is already large and lucrative, but not yet imposing. Then a new ambition stirs and works in the creator's mind; there is still a world to conquer. Appearance is added to reality, show to substance. A splendid block rises somewhere within the ken of fashion; it is red, with white facings, a tower or two, perhaps a clock. First and last, a good deal is said about it in talk and in print. Possibly a luncheon is given. Now there are points of policy to be practised, not directly productive of hard money, but powerful in the long run. For example, the young ladies and gentlemen who serve the counters should be well treated, and carefully looked after in regard to their morals. And if this be done, there is no reason against having the fact stated with the utmost available publicity. For this service, sections of an all-embracing Press are ready and willing. In the eye of the polite world this big block is now the business: the branches are still profitable, but the ledgers alone sing their virtues; men cease to judge the position or the purse of the family by their humble fronts. For the family too has been on the move; it has passed, in orderly progression, in an ascent of gentility, from Putney to Maida Vale, from Maida Vale to Paddington, from Paddington to Kensington Palace Gardens. At each stopping-place it may acquire members, at some it will lose them; the graves where those lie who have dropped from the ranks are themselves milestones on the march. The survivors have each some scent, some trace, of their place of origin. To the architect of fortune the Commercial Road is native and familiar; he lost his first love there and buried her down East. His second wife dates from the latter end of the Maida Vale time and is in all essentials of the Middle, or Paddington, Period. The children recollect Paddington as childhood's home, have extorted information about Maida Vale, talk of Putney with a laugh, and seem almost of true Kensington Palace Gardens' blood. Yet even in them there is an element which they are hardly conscious of, an element not to be refined away till the third generation of human flesh has run. Then comes the perfect product; a baronetcy is often supposed to mark, but sometimes may be considered to precede, its appearance. Indeed--for it is time to descend to the particular--Sir James Muddock was hardly the perfect product; nay, he still strove valiantly to plume himself on not being such. But with a wife and children it is hard to go on exulting in a lowly origin. It is also rather selfish, and was certainly so in Sir James' case, since Lady Muddock was very sensitive on the subject. It would seem that being of the Middle Period is apt to produce a sensitiveness of this sort; the pride of achievement is not there, the pride of position is still new and uneasy. Somewhat in this vein, but with a more malicious and humorous turn of speech, Ashley Mead ran through the history of the firm of Muddock and Mead for Lady Kilnorton's pleasure and information. She was interested in them as phenomena and as neighbours; they were hardly more than across the road from her house in Queen's Gate. Ashley spoke with full knowledge; both business and family were familiar to him; he himself represented an episode in the career of the concern which survived only in its name. He used to say that he had just missed being a fit figure for romance; his father had not been a scatter-brained genius bought out of a splendid certainty of wealth for fifty pounds, but a lazy man who very contentedly and with open eyes accepted fifteen thousand pounds and leisure in preference to hard work and an off-chance of riches. This elder Mead had come into the business with three thousand pounds when capital was wanted for the Stoke Newington branch, and had gone out when ambition began to whisper the name of Buckingham Palace Road. He had not felt aggrieved at losing opulence, but had lived on his spoil--after all, a good return for his investment--and died with it in cheerfulness. But then he had not been born a trader. He came of the professions; money-making was not in his blood nor bone of his bone, as it must be in the frame of one who is to grow gradually by his own labour to the status of a millionaire. The instinct of gain was not in his son either; Ashley laughed with unreserved good-nature as he said: "If my father hadn't gone out, I should have had half the business, I suppose, instead of starving along on four hundred a year." "You've your profession," observed Lady Kilnorton, hardly seriously. "The Bar, you know." "My profession?" he laughed, as he leant against the mantel-piece and looked down at her. "I'm one of five thousand names on five hundred doors, if that's a profession!" "You might make it one," she suggested, but not as though the subject interested her or were likely to interest him. The little rebuke had all the perfunctoriness of duty and convention. "The funny thing is," he went on, "that old Sir James would like to get me back now; he's always hinting about it. Shall I go and sell the ribbons?" "Why can't Mr. Robert sell the ribbons?" "Well, in the family we don't think Bob very bright, you see." "Oh! Alice is bright, though; at least she's very clear-headed." "More brains than any of them. And what did you think of My lady?" "Of My lady?" Irene Kilnorton laughed a little, raised her brows a little, and paused before she said: "Well, her hair's too fluffy, isn't it? They don't beat her, do they? She looks rather like it." "No, they don't beat her; but she's not quite sure that she's got the grand manner." "Isn't she?" said Lady Kilnorton, laughing again. "And then Sir James insists on referring to Putney, especially by way of acknowledging the goodness of God in family prayers. The servants are there, of course, and--you understand?" "Perfectly, Mr. Mead. In such a case I shouldn't like it myself." "Lady Muddock has no objection to being thankful privately, but she doesn't like it talked about." "You go there a great deal?" she asked, with a glance at him. "Yes, a good deal." "And the girl--Alice--is very fond of you?" "Not the least, I believe." "Oh, you're bound to say that! Would she go with--with selling the ribbons?" But she went on without waiting for an answer, perhaps because she had risked a snub. "I was received with immense _empressement_." "You're a bit of a swell, aren't you?" "A poverty-stricken Irish widow! No, but I took some swells with me." "Lord Bowdon, for instance?" "Yes, Lord Bowdon. And a greater swell still--Miss Ora Pinsent." A pause followed. Ashley looked over his hostess' head out of the window. Then Lady Kilnorton added, "Lord Bowdon drove Miss Pinsent to her house afterwards." Another pause followed; each was wondering what the other's point of view might be. "Fancy Ora Pinsent at the Muddocks'!" reflected Ashley presently. "She went to please you?" "How do I know why she went? I don't suppose she knew herself." "You're great friends, though?" "I admire and despise, love and most bitterly hate, Ora Pinsent," said Lady Kilnorton. "All at once?" asked Ashley with a smile, and brows raised in protest. "Yes, all at once, and successively, and alternately, and in all sorts of various combinations." "And Lord Bowdon drove her home?" His tone begged for a comment from his companion. "I told you so," she answered with a touch of irritation, which was as significant as any comment. The servant came in, bringing tea; they were silent while the preparations were made. Ashley, however, covertly regarded his friend's trim figure and pretty, small features. He often felt rather surprised that he had no inclination to fall in love with, or even to make love to, Irene Kilnorton. Many men had such an inclination, he knew; among them he ranked this same Lord Bowdon who had driven Miss Pinsent to her house. Lady Kilnorton was young, she was pretty, she had, if not wit, at least the readiness of reply which is the common substitute provided by the habit of conversing with wideawake people. It was, though, very pleasant to have so charming a friend and to be in no danger of transforming her into the doubtful and dangerous character of a woman he loved; so he told himself, having no disposition to love her. "She's got a husband, hasn't she?" he asked, as the door closed behind the footman. "Ora? Oh, yes, somewhere. He's a scamp, I think. He's called--oh, I forget! But his name doesn't matter." "They've always got a husband, he's always a scamp, and his name never matters," remarked Ashley between mouthfuls of toast. "Fenning! That's it! Fenning." "Just as you like, Lady Kilnorton. It's the fact, not what you call it, that's the thing, you know." As he spoke the door was opened again and Lord Bowdon was announced. He came in almost eagerly, like a man who has something to say, shook hands hastily, and, the instant that he dropped into a chair, exclaimed, "What a glorious creature!" "I knew exactly what you were going to say before you opened your lips," remarked Lady Kilnorton. "You haven't been long, though." There was a touch of malice in her tone. "It wasn't left to me to fix the length of the interview. And she said she liked driving fast. Well, Ashley, my boy, how are you?" "I'm all right, Lord Bowdon." "I've got a job for you. I'll write to you about it presently. It's a Commission they've put me on, and I thought you might like to be secretary." "Anything with a stipend," agreed Ashley cheerfully. "What a lot men think of money!" said Lady Kilnorton. "I don't think I ever met a more fascinating creature," Lord Bowdon mused. "It's awfully good of you," continued Ashley. "I'm uncommonly hard-up just now." "Do you know her?" asked Bowdon. "Met her once or twice," Ashley answered very carelessly. Bowdon seemed to fall into a reverie, as he gently stirred his tea round and round. Lady Kilnorton leant back and looked at the mantel-piece. But presently he glanced at her, smiled pleasantly, and began to discuss the Muddocks. Ashley left them thus engaged when he took his leave ten minutes later. Lord Bowdon had lived a full and active life which now stretched over forty-three years. In spite of much sport and amusement he had found time for some soldiering, for the duties of his station, and for proving himself an unexpectedly useful and sensible Member of Parliament. But he had not found time to be married; that event he used to think of in his earlier days as somehow connected with his father's death; when he became Earl of Daresbury, he would marry. However, about a year back, he had made Lady Kilnorton's acquaintance, had liked her, and had begun to draw lazy and leisurely plans about her. He had not fallen in love with her, any more than Ashley Mead had, but he had drifted into a considerable affection for her. His father had lived to be old; he himself had already grown more middle-aged than was desirable in a bridegroom. During the last few weeks he had considered the project seriously; and that he had assumed this attitude of mind could hardly have escaped the lady's notice. He had detected, with some pleasure, her hidden consciousness of his purpose and commended her for a gracefully easy treatment of the position. She did not make at him, nor yet run away from him, she neither hurried nor repulsed him. Thus by degrees the thing had become very pleasant and satisfactory in imagination. It was not quite what in by-gone years he had meant by being in love--he thanked heaven for that, after reflection--but it was pleasant and satisfactory. "Let it go on to the end," he would have said, with a contentment hardly conscious of an element of resignation. To-day there was a check, a set-back in his thoughts, and he was uncomfortable lest it might shew in his manner. He talked too long about the Muddocks, then too long about Ashley Mead, then about something quite uninteresting. There was an unexplained check; it vexed and puzzled him. Lady Kilnorton, with her usual directness, told him what it was before they parted. "You've been thinking about Ora Pinsent all the time," she said. "It would have been better to have the courage of your ingratitude and go on talking about her." The gay, good-humoured words were accompanied by a rather nervous little smile. "Who is she?" asked Bowdon bluntly and with undisguised curiosity. "She's Mrs. Jack Fenning. I don't know and I don't care who Jack Fenning is, only--" "Only what?" "Only he's not dead. I know you think that's the one thing he ought to be." "I'm not sure about that," he answered, looking in her face. The face had suddenly become charming to him in its now apparent mixture of annoyance and merriment. "Well, I must be going," he added with a sigh. Then he laughed; Lady Kilnorton, after an instant's hesitation, joined in his laugh. "She liked me to drive as fast as I could, and straight home!" said he. "Good-bye, Lady Kilnorton." "Good-bye. I wonder you aren't a little more sensible at your age." "She carries you off your feet, somehow," he murmured apologetically, as he made for the door. He was feeling both rude and foolish, confessing thereby the special relation towards his hostess which he had come to occupy. Left alone, Irene Kilnorton sat down and attempted a dispassionate appraisement of herself. She was twenty-nine, a widow of four years' standing. The world, which had seemed ended when her young husband died, had revived for her; such is the world's persistent way. She was pretty, not beautiful, bright, not brilliant, pleasant, but hardly fascinating. She was pleased with the impartiality which conducted her so far. But at this point the judgment of herself began to drift into a judgment of Ora Pinsent, who seemed to be all that she herself had just missed being; in assessing Ora the negatives fell out and the limitations had to be discarded. Yet her mood was not one of envy for Ora Pinsent. She would not be Ora Pinsent. Among those various feelings which she had for Ora, there was one which she had described by saying "I despise her." The mood, in truth, hung doubtful between pity and contempt; but it was enough to save her from wishing to be Ora Pinsent. She would sooner put up with the negatives and the limitations. But she might wish, and did wish, that other people could take her own discerning view of her friend. She did not call herself a jealous woman; but after all Lord Bowdon had become in a rather special sense her property; now he was, as he put it graphically enough, carried off his feet. That condition would not last; he would find his feet and his feet would find the ground again soon. Meanwhile, however, she could hardly be expected exactly to like it. Men did such strange things--or so she had been told--just in those brief spaces of time when the feet were off the ground; perhaps women too did things rather strange in a similar case. "And poor Ora's feet," she said to herself, "are never really on the ground." She was vaguely conscious that her mingled admiration and contempt reflected in a rather commonplace fashion the habitual attitude of good-sense towards genius. Not being in love with commonplace good-sense as an intellectual ideal, she grew impatient with her thoughts, flung the window open, and sought distraction in the sight of the people who passed up and down the hill through the cool kindliness of the June evening. The wayfarers caught her idle interest, and she had almost lost herself in wondering whether the boy and girl at the corner would kiss before they parted when she was recalled to her own sphere by seeing two people whom she knew breasting the slope on bicycles. A dark young man inclining to stoutness, very elaborately arrayed for the exercise on which he was engaged, rode side by side with a dark young woman inclining to leanness, plainly clad, with a face that a man might learn to think attractive by much looking, but would not give a second thought to in a London drawing-room. "The young Muddocks," said Irene, drawing back and peering at them from behind her curtains. "Recovering themselves after the party, I suppose." She watched them till they were out of sight; why, she did not ask herself. Of course there was the interest of wealth, perhaps a vulgar, but seemingly an unavoidable, sensation which pounds much multiplied enable their possessors to create. There was more; the Muddocks had come somehow into her orbit. They were in the orbit of her friend Ashley Mead; the girl might become the most important satellite there. Irene's own act had perhaps brought them into Ora Pinsent's orbit--where storms were apt to rage. Curiosity mingled with an absurd sense of responsibility in her. "It's such a risk introducing Ora to anybody," she murmured, and with this her thoughts flew back to Bowdon and the condition of men who are carried off their feet. "It's simply that I'm jealous," she declared petulantly, as she shut the window. But she was not yet to escape from Ora Pinsent. There on the mantel-piece was a full-length photograph, representing Ora in her latest part and signed with her autograph, a big O followed by a short sprawl of letters, and a big P followed by a longer sprawl. Though not a professed believer in the revelation of character by handwriting, Irene found something significant in this signature, in the impulse which seemed to die away to a fatigued perfunctory ending, in the bold beginning that lagged on to a conclusion already wearisome. Her eyes rose to the face of the portrait. It shewed a woman in a mood of audacity, still merry and triumphant, but distantly apprehensive of some new and yet unrealised danger. Exultation, barely yet most surely touched with fear, filled the eyes and shaped the smile. It seemed to Irene Kilnorton that, if Ora knew herself and her own temper, such reasonably might be her disposition towards the world and her own life as well as her pose in the play to which she now drew all the town; for her power of enjoying greatly in all likelihood carried with it its old companion, the power greatly to suffer. Yet to Irene a sort of triviality affected both capacities, as though neither could be exactly taken seriously, as though the enjoyment would always be childish, the suffering none too genuine. Good-sense judged genius again; and again the possessor of good-sense turned impatiently away, not knowing whether her contempt should be for herself or for her friend. Then she began to laugh, suddenly but heartily, at the recollection of Lady Muddock. When Ora had passed on after the introduction, and Irene was lingering in talk with her hostess, Lady Muddock had raised her timid pale-blue eyes, nervously fingered that growth of hair which was too fluffy for her years, and asked whether Miss Pinsent were "nice." This adjective, maid-of-all-work on women's lips, had come with such ludicrous inadequacy and pitiful inappropriateness that even at the moment Irene had smiled. Now she laughed. Yet she was aware that Lady Muddock had no more than this one epithet with which to achieve a classification of humanity. You were nice or you were not nice; it was simple dichotomy; there was the beginning, there the end of the matter. So viewed, the question lost its artlessness and became a singularly difficult and searching interrogation. For if the little adjective were given its rich fulness of meaning, its widely representative character (it had to sum up half a world!), if it were asked whether, on the whole, Ora Pinsent were likely to be a good element in the world, or (if it might be so put) a profitable speculation on the part of Nature, Irene Kilnorton would have been quite at a loss to answer. In fact--she asked, with a laugh still but now a puzzled laugh--was she nice or wasn't she? The mixture of feelings which she had described to Ashley Mead forbade any clear and definite response on her own behalf. On Lady Muddock's, however, she owned that the verdict must be in the negative. By the Muddock standards, nice Ora was not. And what was this absent Jack Fenning like? There seemed no materials for a judgment, except that he had married Ora Pinsent and was no longer with Ora Pinsent. Here was a combination of facts about him remarkable enough to invest him with a certain interest. The rest was blank ignorance. "And," said Irene with another slight laugh, "I suppose I'm the only person who ever took the trouble to think about him. I'm sure Ora never does!" CHAPTER II FIRST IMPRESSIONS It was an indication of the changed character of the business that the big block in Buckingham Palace Road closed early on Saturdays, surrendering the hours in which the branches continued to do their most roaring trade. The day after the party was a Saturday; Sir James and his son were making their way back through the Park, timed to arrive at home for a two o'clock luncheon. The custom was that Lady Muddock and Alice should meet them at or about the entrance of Kensington Gardens, and the four walk together to the house. There existed in the family close union, modified by special adorations. Sir James walked with his daughter, Bob with his stepmother; this order never varied, being the natural outcome of the old man's clinging to Alice, and of Lady Muddock's pathetic fidelity to Bob. She had no child of her own; she looked up to Alice, but was conscious of an almost cruel clear-sightedness in her which made demonstrations of affection seem like the proffer of excuses. There are people so sensible that one caresses them with an apology. Bob, on the other hand, was easy to please; you had to look after his tastes, admire his wardrobe, and not bother about the business out of hours; he asked no more, his stepmother did no less. Thus while they crossed the Gardens Lady Muddock talked of yesterday's party, while Sir James consulted his daughter as to the affairs of the firm. Alice detected here and there in what he said an undercurrent of discontent with Bob, on the score of a lack not of diligence but of power, not of the willingness to buckle to, but of that instinct for the true game--the right move, the best purchase, the moment to stand for your price, the moment to throw all on the market--whence spring riches. Sir James expressed his meaning clumsily, but he ended clearly enough by wishing that there were another head in the business; for he grew old, and, although he was now relieved from Parliament, found the work heavy on him. Nothing of all this was new to the listener; the tale was an old one and led always to the same climax, the desire to get Ashley Mead back into the business. If Alice objected that he was ignorant and untrained in commercial pursuits, Sir James pushed the difficulty aside. "He's got the stuff in him," he would persist, and then look at his daughter in a questioning way. With this look also she was familiar; the question which the glance put was whether she would be willing to do what Lady Kilnorton called "going with selling the ribbons." Such was the suggestion; Alice's mood (she treated herself with the candour which she bestowed on others) towards it was that she would be willing to go--to go to Ashley Mead, but not to go with selling the ribbons. The point was not one of pride; it was partly that she seemed to herself to be weary of the ribbons, not ashamed (she was free from that little weakness, which beset Bob and made him sensitive to jokes about his waistcoats being acquired at cost price), but secretly and rather urgently desirous of a new setting and background for her life, and of an escape from surroundings grown too habitual. But it was more perhaps that she did not wish Ashley to sell ribbons or to make money. She was touched with a culture of which Sir James did not dream; the culture was in danger of producing fastidiousness. Ashley was precious in her life because he did not sell ribbons, because he thought nothing or too little of money, because he was poor. The children of the amassers are often squanderers. Alice was no squanderer, but she felt that enough money had been made, enough ribbons sold. With a new aim and a new outlook life would turn sweet again. And she hated the thought that to Ashley she meant ribbons. She did not fear that he would make love to her merely for her money's sake; but the money would chink in her pocket and the ribbons festoon about her gown; if she went to him, she would like to leave all that behind and start a new existence. Yet the instinct in her made the business sacred; a reverence of habit hung about it, causing these dreams to seem unholy rebels which must not shew their heads, and certainly could not be mentioned in answer to her father's look. Moreover she wished Ashley to shew himself a man who, if he took to ribbon-selling, would sell ribbons well; the qualities remained great in her eyes though the pursuit had lost its charms. At lunch they talked of their guests. Lady Kilnorton had pleased them all; Lord Bowdon's presence was flattering to Lady Muddock and seemed very friendly to her husband. Minna Soames, who had come to sing to the party, was declared charming: hard if she had not been, since she spent her life trying after that verdict! Lady Muddock added that she was very nice, and sang only at concerts because of the atmosphere of the stage. Ora Pinsent excited more discussion and difference of opinion, but here also there was a solid foundation of agreement. They had all felt the gulf between them and her; she might not be bad--Bob pretended that he would have heard all about any scandal had there been one--but she was hopelessly alien from them. They were not sorry that Lady Kilnorton had brought her, for she had added to the _éclat_, but they could not feel sure (nor perhaps eager to be sure) that they had secured a permanent acquaintance, much less a possible friend. And then she had told her hostess, quite casually, that Lord Bowdon (whom she had never met before) was going to drive her home. Lord Bowdon was not an old man, Miss Pinsent was quite a young woman; he was a lord and she was an actress; of suspected classes, both of them. Every tenet and preconception of the Middle Period combined to raise grave apprehension in Lady Muddock's mind. Sir James nodded assent over his rice pudding. The son and daughter shared the feeling, but with self-questioning; was it not narrow, asked Alice, was it not unbecoming to a man of the world, asked Bob. But there it was--in brother and sister both. "Ashley knows her, I think," Alice remarked. "That doesn't prove anything," said Bob with a laugh. Lady Muddock looked a little frightened. "I mean, Ashley knows everybody," he added rather enviously. "Ashley can take care of himself," the old man decided, as he pushed his plate away. "Anyhow I don't suppose we shall see much of her," said Alice. Her tone had some regret in it; Ora Pinsent was at least far removed from the making of money and the selling of ribbons; she was of another world. With this the subject passed; nobody made mention of Mr. Jack Fenning because nobody (not even well-informed Bob) had heard of him, and gloves had hidden the unobtrusive wedding ring on Miss Pinsent's finger. Indeed at all times it lay in the shadow of a very fine sapphire; the fanciful might be pardoned for finding an allegory here. The still recent fatigues of entertaining made Lady Muddock disinclined to drive, and Alice went alone to the Park in the afternoon. The place was very full, and motion slow and interrupted. Getting fast-set in a block, she leant back resignedly, wondering why in the world she had chosen this mode of spending a summer afternoon. Suddenly she heard her name called and, turning round, found a small and unpretentious victoria wedged close to the carriage. A lady sat in the victoria; Alice was conscious of little more than a large hat, eyes, and a smile; when she thought of the meeting later on, she was surprised to find herself ignorant of what Ora Pinsent was wearing. But the smile she remembered; it was so cordial and radiant, a smile quite without reserve, seeming to express what was, for the instant at least, the whole and unclouded happiness of a human being. Thus to smile is in itself a talent. "Miss Pinsent!" she exclaimed in a flutter for which she had not time to rebuke herself. "I wasn't quite sure it was you," Ora explained. "But I thought I'd risk it. Isn't it dull?" Her eloquent hands accused the whole surroundings. "This block's so tiresome," observed Alice; she felt the obviousness of the remark. "Oh, I don't mind whether we move or not. I mean driving alone. But perhaps you do it from choice. I don't. But he didn't come." Alice looked at her and laughed. "I should have thought he would," she said. She began to be amused. "Yes, wouldn't you?" asked Ora. "But he didn't." "I'm very sorry." "Oh, I've stopped wanting him now. It's quite unsafe not to keep appointments with me. You miss the time when you're wanted! Have you seen Irene Kilnorton anywhere?" "Not since yesterday." There was a pause. Some way ahead a carriage crawled a few paces on; the pack was going to break up. Ora's victoria got a start first; as it moved she turned her head over her shoulder, saying: "I suppose you wouldn't like to come and see me some day?" Alice said that she would be delighted, but she felt that her expression of pleasure in the prospect sounded purely conventional. In reality she was amazed, inclined to be apprehensively gratified, and certainly interested. "Then do," smiled Miss Pinsent as she was borne away. "I wonder who didn't come!" said Alice to herself, smiling; but the next moment criticism revived. "How curious she should tell me about it!" she reflected. "She doesn't know me a bit." Frown and smile stood on her face together. The way was cleared. Alice accomplished another round at a fairly quick trot. Then she saw Miss Pinsent's victoria again. This time Miss Pinsent was not alone; the victoria stood by the path and Lord Bowdon's foot was on the step. He was talking to Ora; Ora leant back, looking past him with an expression of utter inattention. Was he the man who didn't come? Or was she inattentive because he was not? Alice gave up the riddle; she had a sudden consciousness that generalisations which had hitherto seemed tolerably trustworthy might prove most fallacious if applied to Ora Pinsent. But there was a distinct regret in her mind when she lost sight of the little victoria with the big man by its step. She had her invitation; but in retrospect her invitation seemed woefully vague. Ashley dropped in to dinner that evening, pleasant and talkative as usual, but rather less alert and a trifle absent in manner. However he had good news; he was to be secretary to Lord Bowdon's Commission; it would last a long while, was probably meant to last as long as the Government did (the grounds for this impression would be tedious to relate, and open to controversy), and would enable him to pay bills. "I suppose," he said to Alice, "you don't know what it is not to be able to pay a bill?" "I hardly ever have one," she said; "they're just sent in to father." "It must be rather slow never to be hard-up," he remarked; he hardly meant what he said, and was quite unaware how true his remark seemed to Alice Muddock. "Then you never write cheques?" he went on. "For charity I do." "Good heavens, what a base use of a cheque book!" Lady Muddock happened to hear this observation. She had failed to accustom herself to remarks not meant for literal acceptance; the Middle Period treats language seriously. "We all ought to give a certain proportion," she remarked. "Oughtn't we, James?" But Sir James had gone to sleep. As Ashley sat and talked lightly about the secretaryship, his shifts to live comfortably beyond his means, and the welcome help Lord Bowdon had afforded, Alice felt a surprise at him growing in her. Had she been placed as he was, she might not have married for money, but she would inevitably have thought of such a step, probably have had a severe struggle about it, and certainly have enjoyed a sense of victory in putting it on one side. The money-taint had bitten so far into her; she could disregard wealth but could not forget it. She hardly understood Ashley; she felt curious to know what he would say if she stood before him and offered herself and her thousands freely, unconditionally, the money without the ribbons. Did he know that she was ready to do it? Did he want her? There was an only half-occupied look in his eyes. She never expected to see admiration gleam in the eyes of men, but she often, indeed generally, excited interest and chained attention. To-night there was hardly attention, certainly not whole-hearted engrossed interest. All at once, for the first time in her simple sincere life, there came over her a bitter regret that she was not pretty. It was a small thing to be; small in itself, very small in the little changes of shape and colour that made it. But how rich in consequences! Yes, she meditated, how unfairly rich! Pressed by thought, she found herself lapsing into long silences. She started another line of talk, but the new topic sprang from the previous meditation. "I met Miss Pinsent in the Park to-day," she said. "She was looking so beautiful. And what do you think, she asked me to go and see her! I was very flattered." Ashley smiled as he observed: "She's asked me to go and see her too." "Shall you go?" asked Alice, with a grave interest. She was puzzled at the heartiness of his laugh over her question. "Great heavens, of course I shall go," he said, laughing still. "What are you laughing at?" "Why, my dear Alice, there isn't a man in London who wouldn't go." "Oh, I see," she said in a disappointed, almost irritable tone. She had somehow expected a better explanation than lay in that, something that might apply to herself, to a girl. She was even sure that there ought to be something more about Miss Pinsent, that it was a man's fault if he saw only what all men must see. Her tone did not escape the quick wit of her companion. "You must see that she's tremendously interesting?" he said. "Lady Kilnorton says that Ora Pinsent's the most interesting person in the world--except one." "Except who?" "Her husband," he answered, laughing again. "You look surprised. Oh, yes, he exists. His name's Fenning." "She--she's married?" Alice was leaning forward now; here was another problem. "Incredible, but true. You may let Bob meet her without the least danger of spoiling that great match he's going to make." "I'd no idea she was married." Ashley was obviously amused at her wonder, perhaps at the importance she attached to the circumstance which he had brought to her knowledge. "Lady Kilnorton will have it that he must be a remarkable man," he went on. "But it doesn't follow in the least, you know, rather the contrary. Some women have unimpeachable taste in everything except marriage; or perhaps we must all have our share of the ordinary, and they take theirs out in their husbands. Anyhow, he's at the other end of the world somewhere." They talked a little while longer about Ora, Alice incidentally mentioning Bowdon's appearance by the step of the victoria. Then Ashley said good-night, and started to walk home to his rooms in one of the streets which run down from the Strand to the Thames Embankment. Here he dwelt humbly, commanding modest comforts and, if he craned his neck, a sidelong view of a bit of the river by Charing Cross bridge. As he walked, he was pleasantly and discursively thoughtful. His evening had disposed him to reflexion on the very various types of people who inhabited the world and flocked, one and all, to London. He knew many sorts; yet within the limits of his acquaintance the Muddocks were peculiar. And now, right at the other end of the scale, came this Miss Pinsent. He thought about Miss Pinsent for a little while, and then drifted idly into a trivial classification of women according to their external advantages. Perhaps he had dimly discerned and caught something of Alice Muddock's train of ideas. There were those beautiful to all, those pretty to some, those plain to most. Miss Pinsent, Lady Kilnorton, Alice Muddock, were the instances on which his generalities depended. Superficial as the dividing principle was, he gained a hint of what had come home to Alice while he talked to her, of the immense difference it made to the persons divided. (That it made an immense difference to him was in no way such a discovery as needed midnight meditation.) To them the difference would surely become more than a source of greater or less homage, attention, pleasure, or excitement. These immediate results must so influence and affect life as to make the woman in the end really a different being, a different inner as well as a different outer creature, from what she would have been had she occupied a place in another class than her own. It would be curious to take twin souls (he allowed himself the hypothesis of souls), put them into diverse kinds of bodies, leave them there ten years, from eighteen to twenty-eight, say, then take them out and record the observed variations. But that was hopeless; the experimental method, admirable for all sorts of dull subjects, broke down just where it would become of absorbing interest. In Pall Mall he met Lord Bowdon coming out of the Reform Club. Bowdon's family had always been Whigs; people might argue that historical parties had changed their policies and their principles; Bowdon was not to be caught by any such specious reasoning. The Liberals were heirs to the Whigs; he was heir to his fathers; his conservative temperament preserved his Liberal principles. But he did not seem to be occupied by such matters to-night. He caught Ashley by the arm, turned him round the Athenæum corner, and began to stroll gently along towards the steps. Ashley thanked him again for procuring him the Secretaryship; Bowdon's only answer was to nod absently. What Alice Muddock had told him recurred to Ashley's mind. "I hear you had an audience in the Park to-day," he said, laughing. "Her Majesty distinguished you?" "I did a most curious thing," said Bowdon slowly. "I had an appointment to drive with her. I didn't go. Half-an-hour later I walked up to the Park and looked for her till I found her. Doesn't that strike you as a very silly proceeding?" "Very," said Ashley with a laugh. "In a man of forty-three?" pursued Bowdon with a whimsical gravity. "Worse and worse. But where do you put the folly, in missing the appointment or--?" "Oh, in the combination! The combination makes it hopeless. You said you knew her, didn't you?" "Yes. I shouldn't miss the appointment." Ashley had long been aware of his companion's kindness for him, one of those partialities that arise without much apparent reason but are of unquestionable genuineness. But Bowdon was considered reserved, and this little outbreak of self-exposure was a surprise. It shewed that the man was at least playing with a new emotion; if the emotion grew strong the play might turn to earnest. Moreover Bowdon must know that his confidant was a frequent visitor at Lady Kilnorton's. Bowdon stopped suddenly, standing still on the pavement, and looking full in Ashley's face. "Don't think I'm going to make a fool of myself, my boy," he said with remarkable emphasis and energy. "Good-night;" and, hailing a cab, he was off in an instant. Ashley properly considered his friend's last remark an indication that he was feeling rather inclined to, and just possibly might, make or try to make (for often failure is salvation) a fool of himself. The man of unshaken sobriety of purpose needs no such protests. Ashley strolled on to his rooms, decidedly amused, somehow also a little vexed. Nothing had happened except a further and needless proof that he had been right in putting Ora in the first division of his classification. The vexation, then, remained unaccounted for, and it was not until he had reached home, lit his pipe, mixed his whiskey and water, and settled in his arm-chair, that he discovered that he was a little annoyed just because Lord Bowdon was apparently afraid of making a fool of himself. It was a thing that Bowdon or any other man had a perfect right to do, so far as the rest of the world was concerned. This sounded like a platitude; Ashley was surprised to find in his own soul an indefinite but not weak opposition to it. The instinct of exclusive possession was stirring in him, that resentment of intrusion which is the forerunner of a claim to property. Well, he was not forty-three but just thirty. His theory of life did not forbid a certain amount of making a fool of himself; his practice had included a rather larger quantity. Perturbation had been the ruling factor in Bowdon, in Ashley a pleasurable anticipation was predominant. In his case there were no very obvious reasons why he should not make a fool of himself again, if he were so disposed; for, dealing dispassionately with the situation and with his own standards, he could not treat this Jack Fenning as a very obvious reason. He went to bed with a vague sense of satisfaction; the last few days had brought to birth a new element in life, or at least a new feature of this season. It was altogether too soon to set about measuring the dimensions of the fresh arrival or settling to what it might or might not grow. His anticipation would have been much heightened and the development of his interest quickened had he been able to see what was at this time happening to the lady who had made so abrupt and resolute an entry into his thoughts as well as into Lord Bowdon's. Her distress would have been sun and water to the growth of his feelings. For Mr. Sidney Hazlewood, an accomplished comedian and Ora Pinsent's Manager, had urged that she should try, and indeed must force herself, to regard a certain business arrangement from a purely business point of view. To Ora, still charged with the emotions of her performance in addition to her own natural and large stock of emotions, this suggestion seemed mere brutality, oblivious of humanity, and dictated solely by a ruthless and unhallowed pursuit of gain. So she burst into tears, and a weary wrinkle knitted itself on Mr. Hazlewood's brow. Lady Kilnorton had been blaming herself for judging genius from the stand of common-sense; Mr. Hazlewood did not theorise about the matter; that eloquent wrinkle was his sole protest against the existence and the ways of genius. The wrinkle having failed of effect, he observed that an agreement was an agreement and spoke, as a man who contemplates regrettable necessities, of his solicitor. Ora defied Mr. Hazlewood, the law, and the world, and went home still in tears. She was not really happy again until she had got into her dressing-gown, when quite suddenly she chanced on the idea that Mr. Hazlewood had a good deal to say for himself. Then she began to laugh merrily at the scene which had passed between them. "He's very stupid, but he likes me and he's a good old creature," she ended in a charitable way. CHAPTER III AN ARRANGEMENT FOR SUNDAY "Elizabeth Aurora Pinsent; that's it. But Elizabeth was too solemn, and Betty was too familiar, and Aurora too absurd. So I'm just Ora." Lord Bowdon nodded gravely. "And I think," she went on, lying back on the sofa, "that the world's rather dull, and that you're rather like the world this afternoon." He did not dispute the point. A man who wants to make love, but is withheld by the sense that he ought not, is at his dullest. Bowdon's state was this or even worse. Ora was a friend of Irene Kilnorton's; how much had she guessed, observed, or been told? Would she think loyalty a duty in herself and disloyalty in him a reproach? That would almost certainly be her mood unless she liked him very much; and she gave no sign of such a liking. On all grounds he was clear that he had better go away at once and not come back again. He thought first of Irene Kilnorton, then of his own peace and interest, lastly of Mr. Jack Fenning; but it must be stated to his credit that he did think quite perceptibly of Jack Fenning. Yet he did not go away immediately. "You live all alone here?" he asked, looking round the bright little room. "Yes, I can, you see. That's the advantage of being married." "I never looked at marriage in that light before." "No," she laughed. "You've not looked at it in any light, you know; only from the outer darkness." As his eyes rested on her lying there in graceful repose, he felt a grudge against the way fate was treating him. He wished he were ten or fifteen years younger; he wished he had nothing to lose; he wished he had no conscience. Given these desirable things, he believed that he could break down this indifference and banish this repose. Ora had done nothing to create such a belief; it grew out of his own sturdy and usually justifiable self-confidence. "Have you a conscience?" he asked her suddenly. "Oh, yes," she answered, "afterwards." "That's a harmless variety," he said wistfully. "Tiresome, though," she murmured with her eyes upturned to the ceiling as though she had forgotten his presence. "Only, you see, something else happens soon and then you don't think any more about it." Ora seemed glad that the cold wind of morality was thus tempered. Such a remedy was not for the solid-minded man: he did think more about it, notwithstanding that many things happened; and his was not merely the harmless variety of conscience. Ora nestled lower on her cushions, sighed and closed her eyes; she did not treat him with ceremony, if any comfort lay in that. He rose, walked to the window, and looked out. He felt intolerably absurd, but the perception of his absurdity did not help him much. Again he complained of fate. This thing had come just when such things should cease to come, just also when another thing had begun to seem so pleasant, so satisfactory, so almost settled. He was ashamed of himself; as he stood there he regretted his midnight confidence to Ashley Mead a fortnight before. Since then he had made no confidences to Ashley; he had not told him how often he came to this house, nor how often he wished to come. Ora Pinsent's name had not been mentioned between them, although they had met several times over the initial business of launching their Commission. He turned round and found her eyes on him. She began to laugh, sprang up, ran across the room, laid a hand lightly on his sleeve, and looked in his face, shaking her head with an air of determination. "You must either go, or be a little more amusing," she said. "What's the matter? Oh, I know! You're in love!" "I suppose so," he admitted with a grim smile. "Not with me, though!" "You're sure of that? Nothing would make you doubt it?" "Well, I thought it was Irene Kilnorton," she answered; her eyes expressed interest and a little surprise. "So it was; at least I thought so too," said Bowdon. "Well, if you think so enough, it's all right," said Ora with a laugh. "But I'm inclined to think differently now." "Oh, I shouldn't think differently, if I were you," she murmured. "Irene's so charming and clever. She'd just suit you." "You're absolutely right," said Bowdon. "Then why don't you?" She looked at him for a moment and he met her gaze; a slight tint of colour came on her cheeks, and her lips curved in amusement. "Oh, what nonsense!" she cried a moment later and drew back from him till she leant against the opposite shutter and stood there, smiling at him. The next moment she went on: "It is quite nonsense, you know." Lord Bowdon thought for a moment before he answered her. "Nonsense is not the same as nothing," he said at last. "You're not serious about it?" she asked with a passing appearance of alarm. "But of course you aren't." She began to laugh again. He was relieved to find that he had betrayed nothing more decisive than an inclination to flirt. It would be an excellent thing to sail off under cover of that; she would not be offended, he would be safe. "Tragically serious," he answered, smiling. "Oh, yes, I know!" she said. Then she grew grave, frowned a little and looked down into the street. "You talk rather like Jack used to. You reminded me of him for an instant," she remarked. "Though you're not like him really, of course." "Your husband?" His tone had surprise in it; she had never mentioned Jack before; both the moment and the manner of her present reference to him seemed strange. "Yes. You never met him, did you? He used to be about London five or six years ago." "No, I never saw him. Where is he now?" A shrug of her shoulders and a slight smile gave her answer. "Why did he go away?" "Oh, a thousand reasons! It doesn't matter. I liked him, though, once." "Do you like him now?" A moment more of gravity was followed by a sudden smile; her eyes sparkled again and she laughed, as she answered, "No, not just now, thank you, Lord Bowdon. What queer questions you ask, don't you?" "The answers interest me." "I don't see why they should." "Don't you?" "I mean I don't see how they ought." "Quite so." "You're really getting a little bit more amusing," said Ora with a grateful look. He felt an impulse to be brutal with her, to do, in another sphere of action, very much what Mr. Hazlewood had done when he insisted that a business arrangement must be regarded in a business-like way. Suppose he told her that questions of morals, with their cognate problems, ought to be regarded in a moral way? He would perhaps be a strange preacher, but surely she would forget that in amazement at the novelty of his doctrine! "How old are you?" he asked her, aghast this time at his question but quite unable to resist it. She glanced at him for a moment, smiled, and answered simply, "Twenty-seven last December." He was remorseful at having extracted an answer, but he bowed to her as he said, "You've paid me a high compliment. You're right, though; it wasn't impertinence." "Oh, no, you're all right in that way," she murmured with a careless cordiality. "But why did you want to know?" "I want to know all about you," he said in a low voice. Again she looked at him for a moment, growing grave as she looked. Then she laid her hand on his arm again and looked up in his face with a pleading coaxing smile. "Don't," she said. There was silence for a moment. Then Lord Bowdon took her hand, kissed it, smiled at her, and asked a prosaic question. "Where's my hat?" said he. But that prosaic question made it impossible to sail off under cover of an inclination to flirt; it was not at all in that manner; it lacked the colour, the flourish and the show. As he walked away, Bowdon was conscious that whatever happened to the affair, good or evil, whether it went on or stopped, it must be stamped with a certain genuineness. It could not pass at once from his thoughts; he could not suppose that it would be dismissed immediately from hers. That he occupied her attention for a little while after he went away happened to be the case, although it was by no means the certain result he imagined. A mind for the moment vacant of new impressions allowed her to wonder, rather idly, why she had said "Don't" so soon; he had done nothing to elicit so direct a prohibition; it had put a stop to a conversation only just becoming interesting, still far from threatening inconvenience. Perhaps she was surprised to find her injunction so effective. She had said the word, she supposed, because she was not much taken with him; or rather because she liked him very definitely in one way, and very definitely not in another, and so had been impelled to deal fairly with him. Besides he had for a moment reminded her of Jack Fenning; that also might have something to do with it. The remembrance of her husband's love-making was not pleasant to her. It recalled the greatest of all the blunders into which her trick of sudden likings had led her, the one apparently irrevocable blunder. It brought back also the memory of old delusions which had made the blunder seem something so very different at the time it was committed. She walked about the room for a few minutes with a doleful look, her lips dragged down and her eyes woeful. It was only five; she did not dine till six. She was supposed to rest this hour; if resting meant thinking of Jack Fenning and Lord Bowdon and of the general harshness of the world, she would have none of it. It occurred to her, almost as an insult, that here was an hour in which she was at leisure and yet nobody seemed to desire her society; such treatment was strange and uncomplimentary. A ring at the bell scattered her gloom. "That must be somebody amusing!" she cried, clasping her hands in the joyful confidence that fate had taken a turn. "I wonder who it is!" The visitor thus favoured by a prejudice of approbation proved to be Ashley Mead. He had come once before, a week ago; three days back Ora had in her own mind accused him of neglect and then charitably congratulated him on indifference. Now she ran to him as though he were the one person in the world she wished to see. "How charming of you!" she cried. "I was bored to death. I do like people who come at the right time!" Ashley held her hand for a moment in sheer pleasure at the feel of it; they sat down, she again on her sofa, he in a low chair close by. "Tea?" she said. "Goodness, no. Don't move from where you are, Miss Pinsent. I met Lord Bowdon walking away." "I sent him away." "What delightful presentiments you have!" "Indeed I'd no idea that you'd come. I don't think he wanted to stay, though." She smiled meditatively. Lord Bowdon's prompt acceptance of her "Don't" seemed now to take on a humorous air; his hesitation contrasted so sharply with the confident readiness of her new visitor. "I've come on business," said Ashley. "Business?" she echoed, with an unpleasant reminiscence of Mr. Sidney Hazlewood and his views as to the nature of an agreement. "I want you to help me to organise something." "Oh, I couldn't. I hate all that sort of thing. It's not a bazaar, is it?" "No. Perhaps we might call it a _fête_. It's a day in the country, Miss Pinsent." "Oh, I know! Children! You mean those children?" He leant back in his chair and looked at her before he replied. She seemed a little hurt and regretful, as though his visit were not proving so pleasant as she had expected; a visit should be paid, as virtue should be practised, for its own sake. "No," he said. "Not those children. These children." She took an instant to grasp the proposal; then her eyes signified her understanding of it; but she did not answer it. "Why not?" he urged, leaning forward. She broke into a light laugh. "There's no reason why not--" "Ah, that's right!" "Except that I'm not sure I want to," continued Ora. She put her head a little on one side, with a critical air. "I wonder if you'd amuse me for a whole day," she said. "You quite mistake my point of view," he replied, smiling. "I never expected to amuse you. I want you to amuse me. I'm quite selfish about it." "That's just making use of me," she objected. "I don't think I was created only to amuse you, you know." "Perhaps not; but let me have the amusement first. The trouble'll come soon enough." "Will it? Then why--" "Oh, you understand that well enough really, Miss Pinsent." "What would that nice serious girl you're going to marry say if she heard of our outing?" "I haven't received the news of my engagement yet." "Irene says you're certain to marry her." "Well, at any rate she doesn't say I've done it yet, does she?" "No," admitted Ora, smiling. "And that's the point, isn't it? Will you come on Sunday?" Sunday had looked rather grey; there was nothing but a lunch party, to meet a Dean who thought that the stage might be made an engine for good, and therefore wished to be introduced to Miss Pinsent. Oh, and there was a dinner to celebrate somebody's birthday--she had forgotten whose. Yes, Sunday was quite a free day. The sun shone here; it would shine merrily in the country. In short she wanted to go. "Oh, well, I don't mind trying to prevent you being bored for just one day," she said, with her eyes merry and mocking. "That's very kind of you," observed Ashley in a composed tone. "I'll call for you at eleven and carry you off." "Where to?" "I shall settle that. It's entirely for my sake we're going, you know, so I shall have my choice." "It sounds as if you might enjoy yourself, Mr. Mead." "Yes, quite, doesn't it?" he answered, laughing. Ora joined in his laugh; the world was no longer harsh; Lord Bowdon was nothing; there were no more reminiscences of the way Jack Fenning used to talk. There was frolic, there was a touch of adventure, a savour of mischief. "It'll be rather fun," she mused softly, clasping her hands on her knee. Behind the man's restrained bearing lay a sense of triumph. He had carried out his little campaign well. He did not look ahead, the success of the hour served. No doubt after that Sunday other things would happen again, and might even be of importance; meanwhile except that Sunday there was nothing. Merely that she came was not all--with her was not even very much. But he knew that her heart was eager to come, and that the Sunday was a joy to her also. "It's dinner-time," she said, springing up. "Go away, Mr. Mead." He was as obedient as Bowdon had been; enough had been done for to-day. But a farewell may be said in many ways. "Sunday, then," he said, taking both her hands which she had held out to him in her cordial fashion. Lady Kilnorton said that Ora always seemed to expect to be kissed. "Just manner, of course," she would add, since Ora was her friend. "Yes, Sunday--unless I change my mind. I often do." "You won't this time." The assertion had not a shred of question about it; it was positive and confident. She looked up in his face, laughing. "Good-bye," she said. Bowdon had kissed her hand, but Ashley did not follow that example. They enjoyed another laugh together, and he was laughing still as he left her and took his way downstairs. "Oh, dear!" she said, passing her hand over her eyes, as she went to get ready for dinner. She felt a reaction from some kind of excitement; yet what reason for excitement had there been? With regard to the theatre the Muddock family displayed a variety of practice. Sir James never went; Bob frequented with assiduity those houses where the lighter forms of the drama were presented; Lady Muddock and Alice were occasional visitors at the highest class of entertainment. Neither cared much about evenings so spent as a rule; but Lady Muddock, having entertained Miss Pinsent, was eager to see her act. Ora was the only member of her profession whom Lady Muddock had met; to be acquainted with one of the performers added a new flavour. Lady Muddock felt an increased importance in herself as she looked round the house; there must be a great many people there who knew nobody on the stage; she knew Miss Pinsent; she would have liked the fact mentioned, or at any rate to have it get about in some unobtrusive way. Before the first act was over she had fully persuaded herself that Ora had noticed her presence; she had looked twice quite directly at the box! The little woman, flattered by this wholly fictitious recognition, decided audaciously that Sir James' attitude towards the stage was old-fashioned and rather uncharitable; everybody was not bad on the stage; she felt sure that there were exceptions. Anyhow it was nice to know somebody; it gave one a feeling of what Bob called--she smiled shyly to herself--"being in it." She was very careful never to talk slang herself, but sometimes it expressed just what she wanted to say. She pulled out her pink silk sleeves to their fullest volume (sleeves were large then) and leant forward in the box. Between the acts Babba Flint came in. He was a club acquaintance of Bob's, and had met the ladies of the family at a charity bazaar. It was a slender basis for friendship, but Babba was not ceremonious. Nobody knew why he was called Babba (which was not his name), but he always was. He was a small fair man, very smartly dressed; he seldom stopped talking and was generally considered agreeable. He talked now, and, seeing the bent of Lady Muddock's interest, he made Ora his theme. Lady Muddock was a little vexed to find that Babba also knew Ora, and most of her colleagues besides; but there was recompense in his string of anecdotes. Alice was silent, looking and wondering at Babba--strange to be such a person!--and yet listening to what he was saying. Babba lisped a little; at least when he said "Miss Pinsent," the S's were blurred and indistinct. He had met her husband once a long while ago; "a fellow named Denning, no, Fenning; a good-looking fellow." "A gentleman?" Babba supposed so, but deuced hard-up and not very fond of work. She led him no end of a life, Babba had heard; so at last he bolted to America or somewhere. Babba expressed some surprise that Mr. Fenning did not now return--he knew the amount of Ora's salary and mentioned it by way of enforcing this point--and declared that he himself would put up with a good deal at the hands of a lady so prepossessing as Miss Pinsent. Then Lady Muddock asked whether Miss Pinsent were really nice, and Babba said that she wasn't a bad sort to meet about the place but (Here he broke into a quotation from a song popular in its day), "You never know what happens downstairs." Lady Muddock tried to look as though she had received information, and Babba withdrew, in order to refresh himself before the rise of the curtain. Ora played well that night, indeed played Mr. Hazlewood off the stage, according to his own confession and phraseology. There was a ring in her laugh, a rush in her passion, a triumph in her very walk. Alice found herself wondering whether what happened to the woman herself had much effect on her acting, how complete or incomplete the duality of person was, how much was put on and put off with the stage dresses and the stage paint. But, after all, the woman herself must be there before them, the real creature, full of life and yet straining her great gift of it to the full. Alice had heard men described as "living hard." That phrase generally meant something foolish or disreputable; but you could live hard without dissipation or folly, at least in the ordinary sense of those words. You could take all there was in every hour out of it, put all there was of you into every hour, taste everything, try everything, feel everything, always be doing or suffering, blot out the uneventful stretches of flat country so wide in most lives, for ever be going up or down, breasting hills or rattling over the slopes. It must be strange to be like that and to live like that. Was it also sweet? Or very sweet when not too bitter? And when it was very bitter, what came of it? Surely the mightiest temptation to lay it all aside and go to sleep? Alice drew back with a sudden sense of repulsion, as though there were no health or sanity in such lives and such people. Then she looked again at the beautiful face, now strained in sorrow, with hands stretched out in such marvellous appeal, the whole body a prayer. Her heart went out in pity, and, with a sudden impulse, cried to go out in love. But she could come to no final conclusion about Ora Pinsent, and, vexed at her failure, was thinking when the curtain fell, "What does it matter to me?" The arrangement for a Sunday in the country, had she known of it, might have made the question seem less simple to answer. CHAPTER IV BY WAY OF PRECAUTION For some days back Irene Kilnorton had been finding it difficult to have amiable thoughts about Ora. That they are attractive, that they make a change where they come, that they are apt to upset what seemed to be settling itself very comfortably before their arrival, are not things which can reasonably be imputed as faults to the persons to whom they are attached as incidents; but neither do they at all times commend them. It could not be denied--at this moment Irene at least could not deny--that there was a wantonness about Ora's intrusions; she went where she might have known it was better that she should stay away, and pursued acquaintances which were clearly safer left in an undeveloped state. She was irresponsible, Lady Kilnorton complained; the grievance was not unnatural in her since she felt that she was paying part of the bill; it was Ora's debt really, but Ora was morally insolvent, and made her friends unwilling guarantors. The pleasant confidence with which she had awaited Bowdon's approaches and received his attentions was shaken; she found that she had wanted him more than she had thought, that she was less sure of getting him than she had supposed. He had been to see her two or three times; there was no falling off in his courtesies, no abrupt break in his assiduity. But a cloud hung about him. Being there, he seemed half somewhere else; she suspected where the absent half of his thoughts might be found. He wore an air almost remorseful and certainly rather apologetic; Lady Kilnorton did not wish to be courted by way of apology. She knew it was all Ora Pinsent, and, although she was quite aware that there was a good deal to be pleaded on Ora's side of the question, she itched to say something--no matter what, provided it were pointed and unpleasant--about Jack Fenning. Babba Flint, with whom she was acquainted, had once described some young lady to her as his "second-best girl." Babba was deplorable, most deplorable; yet her anger borrowed from his strange vocabulary. She did not want to be anybody's "second-best girl." "Not," she added, "that I'm a girl at all. No more is Ora, for that matter." The pleasure of the hit at Ora outweighed the regret in her admission about herself. With regard to Ashley Mead her mood was much lighter, and, as a consequence, much less repressed. Since she did not care greatly whether he came or not, she reproached him bitterly for not coming; being tolerably indifferent as to how he managed his life, she exhorted him not to be silly; having no concern in the disposal of his affections, she gave him the best possible advice as to where he should bestow them. This conversation happened at Mrs. Pocklington's, where everybody was, and it seemed to amuse Ashley Mead very much. But it was Friday night and Sunday was near, so that everything seemed to amuse and please him. She told him that Alice Muddock was somewhere in the rooms; he said that he had already paid his respects to Alice. Irene's glance charged him with the blindest folly. "How women are always trying to give one another away!" he exclaimed. "Oh, if you won't see, you won't," she answered huffishly and leant back in her chair. The baffled mentor harboured a grievance! He looked at her for a moment, smiled, and passed on. Presently Minna Soames came and sat down by her. Minna was one of those girls to whom it is impossible to deny prettiness and impossible to ascribe beauty; she sang very well and lived very comfortably by her concerts; she might, of course (or so she said), have made more on the stage, but then there was the atmosphere. Irene did not like her much and was inclined to think her silly. What matter? She began to exercise a circumscribed power of sarcasm on Ora Pinsent; in spite of a secret sense of shame, Irene became more and more gracious. Praise be to those who abuse whom we would abuse but cannot with propriety! "I was quite surprised to see her at Lady Muddock's," observed Miss Soames with prim maliciousness. Irene cast a glance at her companion; the remark was evidently innocent, so far as she was concerned; the malice was purely for Ora, not for her. Miss Soames was not aware how Ora had come to be at the Muddocks'! Irene reached the depths of self-contempt when, after ten minutes, Minna Soames went away still in ignorance of this simple fact. "I'm a mean wretch," Irene Kilnorton thought; and so at the moment she was--as the best of us at certain moments are. These same moments, in which we see ourselves as we are most careful that others shall not see us, are not so pleasant that we seek to prolong them. Irene plunged into the moving throng with the idea of finding somebody to talk to her and take her to supper. With some surprise, some pleasure, and more excitement than she was willing to admit, she chanced to meet Bowdon almost immediately. Her temper rose to the encounter as though to a challenge. She suggested supper. She began to find herself in high spirits. The idea was in her that she would not surrender, would not give up the game, would not make Ora irresistible by shirking a fight with her. When they had secured a little table and sat down she began to talk her best; in this she was helped by the consciousness of looking her best; she did not fear to pin his eyes to her with keenest attention. But the expression of the watching eyes puzzled and annoyed her; they were eager and yet doubtful, appreciative but wistful. Was he trying to think her all he had been on the point of thinking her, still to see in her all that he wanted? Was he unhappy because he could not so think and so see? He almost gave her that impression. She was very gay and felt herself now almost brilliant; her contest was with that most gay and brilliant shape which came between his eyes and what she offered for their allurement. People passing by, in the usual ignorance and the usual confidence of passers-by, summed up the situation in a moment; Bowdon was only waiting for her leave to speak, she was absolutely confident of him. They envied her and said that she should not parade her captive quite so openly. She guessed what they thought; she was glad and was fired to new efforts. She alone would know how incomplete was the victory; for all the world she would be triumphant. Even Ora might think herself defeated! But why was he changed, why was she less charming to him, why must she strive and toil and force? In the midst of her raillery and gaiety she could have put her hands before her face, and hidden tears. He was almost persuaded, he was eager to be persuaded. At this moment she seemed all he wanted; he told himself angrily and persistently that she was all that any man could or ought to want, that she stood for the best and most reasonable thing, for sure happiness and stable content. If he left her, for what would he leave her? For utter folly and worse. She would be a wife to be proud of; there would be no need to apologise for her. Even had there been no Jack Fenning, he knew that a marriage with Ora Pinsent would seem even to himself to need some apology, that he would fear to see smiles mingled with the congratulations, and to hear a sunken murmur of sneers and laughter among the polite applause. He cursed himself for a fool because he did not on that very instant claim her for his. Why, the other woman would not even let him make love to her! He smiled bitterly as he recollected that it was not open to him to make a fool of himself, even if he would. He wanted the bad and could not have it, but because he wanted it vainly, now he was refusing the good. No raw boy could have sailed further in folly. Coming to that conclusion he declared he would take a firm hold on himself. Failing that, his danger was imminent. They went up together from the supper-room. Now she was set to win or for ever to lose; she could not play such a game twice. "Don't leave me," she said, boldly and directly. "Everybody here is so tiresome. Let's go to the little room at the end, it's generally empty." He appeared to obey her readily, even eagerly, indeed to be grateful for her invitation; it shewed that he had not betrayed himself. The little room was empty and they sat down together. Now he was inclined to silence and seemed thoughtful. Irene, in inward tumult, was outwardly no more than excited to an unusual brightness. After one swift searching glance at him, she faced the guns and hazarded her assault against the full force of the enemy. She began to speak of Ora, dragging her name into the conversation and keeping it there, in spite of his evident desire to avoid the topic. Of Ora her friend she said nothing untrue, nothing scandalous, nothing malicious; she watched her tongue with a jealous care; conscience was awake in her; she would have no backbiting to charge herself with. But she did not see why she should not speak the truth; so she told herself; both the general truths that everybody knew and the special truths which intimacy with Ora Pinsent had revealed to her. Ora spoke plainly, even recklessly, of others; why should she not be spoken about plainly, not recklessly, in her turn? And, no, she said nothing untrue, nothing that she would not have said to Ora's face, in the very, or almost the very, same words. "Yes, she's a strange creature," assented Bowdon. "Now Ashley Mead's mad about her! But of course he's only one of a dozen." Here was dangerous ground; she might have stirred a jealousy which would have undone all that was begun; with many men this result would have been almost certain. But with Bowdon there was wisdom in her line of attack; she roused pride in him, the haughtiness which was in his heart though never in his bearing, the instinct of exclusiveness, the quiet feeling of born superiority to the crowd, the innate dislike of being one of a dozen, of scrambling for a prize instead of reaching out to accept a proffered gift. Ashley Mead, the secretary of his Commission, his _protégé_--and a dozen more! The memory of his confidence to Ashley became very bitter; if Ashley were favoured, he would laugh over the recollection of that talk! He felt eager to shew Ashley that it was all no more than a whim, hardly more than a joke. Well, there was a ready way to shew Ashley that--and, he told himself, to shew it to himself too, to convince himself of it, at least to put it out of his own power henceforth to question it by word or deed. The great and the little, the conviction of his mind and the prick of his vanity, worked together in him. He was persuaded now that to go forward on this path would be wise, would make for the worthiness and dignity of his life, save him from unbecoming follies, and intrench him from dangers. If only he could again come to feel the thing sweet as well as wise! There was much to help him--his old impulses which now revived, her unusual brilliancy, the way in which she seemed to draw to him, to delight in talking to him, to make of him a friend more intimate than she had allowed him to consider himself before. He had meant the thing so definitely a few weeks ago; it seemed absurd not to mean it now, not to suppose it would be as pleasant and satisfactory now as it had seemed then. He had been in a delusion of feeling; here was sanity coming back again. He caught at it with an eager, detaining hand. Suddenly Irene felt that the battle was won; she knew it clearly in an instant. There was a change in his manner, his tones, his eyes, his smile. Now he was making love to her and no longer thinking whether he should make love to her; and to her he could make love thus plainly with one purpose only, and only to one end. She had what she had striven for, in a very little while now it would be offered to her explicitly. For an instant she shrank back from plucking the fruit, now that she had bent the bough down within her reach. There was a revulsion to shame because she had tried, had fought, had set her teeth and struggled till she won. What she had said of Ora Pinsent rose up against her, declaring that its truth was no honest truth since it was not spoken honestly. Babba Flint and his horrible phrase wormed their way back into her mind. But she rose above these falterings; she would not go back now that she had won--had won that triumph which all the world would suppose to be so complete, and had avoided that defeat the thought of whose bitterness had armed her for battle and sustained her in the conflict. In view of Bowdon's former readiness it would be grossly unfair, surely, to speak of hers as the common case of a woman leading a man on; his implied offer had never been withdrawn; she chose now to accept it; that was the whole truth about the matter. He asked her to be his wife with the fire and spirit of a passion seemingly sincere; she turned to him in a temporary fit of joy, which made her forget the road by which she had travelled to her end. Her low-voiced confession of love made him very glad that he had spoken, very glad for her sake as well as for his own; it was a great thing to make her so happy. If he had refrained, and then found out the anticipations he had raised in her and how he had taught her to build on him, he must have acknowledged a grave infraction of his code. She was, after the first outburst of fearful delight, very gentle and seemed to plead with him; he answered the pleading, half unconsciously, by telling her that he had been so long in finding words because she had encouraged him so little and kept him in such uncertainty. When she heard this she turned her face up to his again with a curiously timid deprecatory affection. He was for announcing the engagement then and there, as publicly as possible. His avowed motive was his pride; a desire to commit himself beyond recall, to establish the fact and make it impregnable, was the secret spring. Irene would not face the whole assembly, but agreed that the news should be whispered to chosen friends. "It'll come to the same thing in a very little while," he said with a relieved laugh. Before the evening ended, the tidings thus disseminated reached Ashley Mead, and he hastened to Irene. Bowdon had left her for the moment, and he detached her easily from the grasp of a casual bore. His felicitations lacked nothing in heartiness. "But it's no surprise," he laughed. "I was only wondering how long you'd put it off. I mean 'you' in the singular number." That was pleasant to hear, just what she wanted to hear, just what she wished all the world to say. But she burned to ask him whether he had continued in the same state of anticipation during the last week or two. Suddenly he smiled in a meditative way. "What's amusing you?" she demanded rather sharply. "Nothing," he answered. He had been thinking of Bowdon's midnight confidence. He reflected how very different men were. Some day, no doubt, he himself would make a proper and reasonable choice; but he could not have gone so straight from the idea (however foolish the idea) of Ora Pinsent to the fact of Irene Kilnorton. It was to lay aside a rapturous lyric and take up a pleasantly written tale. He found several other such similes for it, the shadow of Sunday being over his mind. He was in great spirits and began to talk merrily and volubly, making fun of his companion, of love, of engaged folk, and so on. She listened very contentedly for awhile, but then began to wonder why Bowdon did not come back to her; she would have risked absurdity to be sure that he could not keep away. She knew men hated that risk above all; but surely he could come back now and talk to her again? She looked round and saw him standing alone; then he wanted to come. With her eyes she gave him a glad invitation; but as he approached there was a sort of embarrassment in his manner, a shamefacedness; he was too much a man of the world to wear that look simply because he had become a declared lover. And although Ashley was both cordial and sufficiently respectful there was a distant twinkle in his eye, as if he were enjoying some joke. Her apprehensions and her knowledge of the nature of her triumph made her almost unnaturally acute to detect the slightest shade of manner in either of the men. Men knew things about one another which were kept from women; had Ashley a knowledge which she lacked? Did it make her triumph seem to him not incomplete perhaps, but very strange? The glow of victory even so soon began to give place to discomfort and restlessness. Ashley looked at his watch. "I shall go," he announced. "I've been betrayed." He spoke with a burlesque despair. "A certain lady--you can't monopolise the tender affections, Lady Kilnorton--told me she would be here--late. It's late, in fact very late, and she's not here." "Who was she?" asked Irene. "Can you doubt? But I suppose she felt lazy after the theatre." "Oh, Ora?" "Of course," said Ashley. "How silly you are! Isn't he?" She turned to Bowdon. "He's very young," said Bowdon, with a smile. "When he comes to my age--" "You can't say much to-night anyhow, can you?" laughed Ashley. "Ora never comes when she says she will." "Oh, yes, she does sometimes," Ashley insisted, thinking of his Sunday. "You have to go and drag her!" "That's just what I should do." No doubt Bowdon took as small a part in the conversation as he decently could. Still it seemed possible to talk about Ora; that to Irene's present mood was something gained. Nobody turned round on her and said, "He'd rather have had Ora, really," a fantastic occurrence which had become conceivable to her. "Your Muddocks have gone, haven't they?" she asked Ashley. "Yes, my Muddocks have gone," said Ashley, laughing. "But why 'my' Muddocks? Am I responsible for them?" "They ought to be your Muddocks. I try to get him to be sensible." The last sentence she addressed to Bowdon with a smile. "But men won't be." "None of them?" asked Bowdon, returning her smile. "Oh, don't say you're being sensible," she cried, half-laughing, half-petulantly. "I don't want you to be; but I think Mr. Mead might." "Marriage as a precautionary method doesn't recommend itself to me," said Ashley lightly, as he held out his hand in farewell. They both laughed and watched him as he went. "Silly young man!" she said. "You'll take me to my carriage, won't you?" Ashley might be silly; they were wise. But Wisdom often goes home troubled, Folly with a light heart. The hand of the future is needed to vindicate the one and to confound the other. No doubt it does. The future, however, is a vague and indefinite period of time. CHAPTER V A DAY IN THE COUNTRY When Ashley Mead called for her at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning Miss Pinsent was not dressed. When she made her appearance at a quarter to twelve she was rather peevish; her repertory embraced some moods quite unamiable in a light way. She did not want to go, she said, and she would not go; she wondered how she had come to say she would go; was he sure she had said so? "Oh, you must go now," said Ashley cheerfully and decisively. "Why must I, if I don't want to?" "Honour, justice, kindness, pity; take your choice of motives. Besides--" he paused, smiling at her. "Well, what besides?" "You mean to go." The stroke was bold, bold as that of Lady Kilnorton's about Ashley being one of a dozen. "Are you a thought-reader, Mr. Mead?" "A gown-reader on this occasion. If that frock means anything it means the country." Ora smiled reluctantly, with a glance down the front of her gown. "It's quite true I didn't mean to go," she said. "Besides I didn't think you'd come." "A very doubtful truth, and a quite unnecessary fiction," said he. "Come along." She came, obedient but still not gay; he did not force the talk. They went to Waterloo and took tickets for a quiet village. He gave her all the Sunday papers and for a time she read them, while he leant back, steadily and curiously regarding the white smooth brow which shewed itself over the top of the sheet. He was wondering how she kept the traces of her various emotions (she was credited with so many) off her face. For lines she might have been a child; for eyes too, it seemed to him sometimes, while at other moments all possibilities of feeling, if not of knowledge, spoke in her glance. After this, it seemed a poor conclusion to repeat that she was interesting. Presently she threw away her paper and looked out of the window with a grave, almost bored, expression. Still Ashley bided his time; he took up the discarded journal and read; its pleasant, discursive, unimportant talk was content with half his mind. "I suppose," she said absently, "that Irene and Lord Bowdon are spending the day together somewhere." "I suppose so; they ought to be, anyhow." A long pause followed, Ashley still reading his column of gossip with an appearance of sufficient attention. Ora glanced at him, her brows raised a little in protest. At last she seemed to understand the position. "I'm ready to be agreeable as soon as you are," she announced. "Why, then, it's most delightful of you to come," was his answer, as he leant forward to her; the paper fell on the floor and he pushed it away with his foot. "Will they enjoy themselves, that couple?" "She wrote to me about it yesterday, quite a long letter." "Giving reasons?" "Yes; reasons of a sort, you know." "I thought so," he nodded. "Somehow both of them seemed anxious to have reasons, good sound reasons." "Oh, well, but she's in love with him," said Ora. "I suppose that's a reason." "And he with her?" "Of course." It had been Ora's firm intention not to refer in the most distant manner to what had passed between Bowdon and herself. But our lips and eyes are traitors to our careful tongues; and there are people who draw out a joke from any hiding-place. "He's done a very wise thing," said Ashley, looking straight into her eyes. She blushed and laughed. "I admire wise things," he added, laughing in his turn. "But don't do them?" "Oh, sometimes. To-day for example! What can be wiser than to refresh myself with a day in the country, to spend a few hours in fresh air and--and pleasant surroundings?" She looked at him for a moment, then settled herself more luxuriously on the seat as she murmured, "I like being wise too." The one porter at the little station eyed Ora with grave appreciation; the landlady of the little inn where they procured a plain lunch seemed divided between distrust of the lady and admiration of her garments. Ashley ordered an early dinner and then invited his friend to come out of doors. He had brought her to no show view, no famous prospect. There was only a low slow stream dawdling along through the meadows, a belt of trees a quarter of a mile away behind them, in front a stretch of flat land beyond the river, and on the water's edge, here and there, a few willows. She found a convenient slope in the bank and sat down, he lying beside her, smoking a cigar. The sun shone, but the breeze was fresh. Ora had been merry at lunch but now she became silent again. When Ashley Mead threw the stump of his cigar into the stream, she seemed to rouse herself from a reverie and watched it bob lazily away. "Sleepy after lunch?" he asked. "No, I'm not sleepy," she answered. "I was letting things pass through my head." She turned to him rather abruptly. "Why did you bring me here to-day?" she asked, with a touch of protest in her voice. "Purely a desire for pleasure; I wanted to enjoy myself." "Are you like that too? Because I am." She seemed to search his face. "But there's something else in you." "Yes, at other times," he admitted. "But just then there wasn't, so I brought you. And just now there isn't." She laughed, rather nervously as it seemed to him. "And what do the other things, when they're there, say to it?" she asked. "Oh, they're sure of their innings in the end!" His tone was careless, but his eyes did not leave her face. He had meant not to make love to her; he would not have admitted that he was making love to her. But to have her face there and not look at it had become impossible; it chained him with its power of exciting that curiosity mingled with attraction which is roughly dubbed fascination. He felt that he must not only see more of her but know more of her; there was a demand of the brain as well as a craving of the emotions. She seemed moved to tell him nothing; she made no disclosures of her past life, where she had been born or bred, how she had fared, how come where she was, how become Mrs. Jack Fenning, or how now again turned to Ora Pinsent. She left him to find out anything he wanted to know. Her assumption that there was nothing to tell, or no reason to tell anything, spurred him to further study of her. That he studied at his peril he knew well and had known from the first; it was but another prick of the spur to him. She had been gazing across the stream, at the meadows and the cattle. Now her eyes returned to him and, meeting his glance, she laughed again in that half-amused, half-embarrassed way. "Shall I make up a life for you?" he asked. "Listen now. You weren't pretty as a young girl; you were considered very naughty, rather good-for-nothing; I think they were a bit down on you, tried to drill you into being like other people, to--what's the word?--eradicate your faults, to give you the virtues. All that made you rather unhappy; you'd a good deal rather have been petted. But you weren't drilled, your faults weren't eradicated, you never got the virtues." She was listening with a smile and amused eyes. "The training broke down because you began to grow beautiful and coaxing; they couldn't drill you any more; it wasn't in their hearts. They began to see that they'd got something uncommon; or perhaps they just despaired. They said it was Ora's way.--" "Lizzie's way," she corrected with a merry nod. "Oh, no. Hang Lizzie! They said it was Ora's way, and that it was no use bullying the girl. Your father said it first and had some trouble in convincing your mother. But he did at last. Then you grew up, and everybody made love to you. And I expect somebody died and home wasn't so comfortable. So some time or other you took a flight away, and the stage became a reality. I suppose it had been a dream. And at some time or other you took a certain step. Then I don't know anything more except what's written in the Chronicles of Queen Ora Pinsent." He ended the story, which had been punctuated by pauses in which he gathered fresh information from her face. "You've done well to find out so much. It wasn't very unlike that. Now tell me the future. What's going to happen to me?" "You're going to be young and beautiful for ever and ever." She laughed joyfully. "Oh, yes!" she cried. "Let me see. I shall be young--young enough--for ten years more, and with the proper appliances beautiful for twenty." His laugh was reluctant; the mention of the proper appliances jarred on him a little. She saw it in an instant and answered with a defiance: "I rouge now when I want it." "Are you rouged to-day?" "You can look and see." "I can look, but perhaps I can't see." She rubbed her cheek hard with her hand and then showed him the palm. "I hope that's proof," he said, "but these contrivances are so cunning now-a-days." "Men think them even more cunning than they are," laughed Ora. "And what have you done?" she went on. "What's your life been?" "The deplorably usual--preparatory school, public school, Oxford, Bar. I'm a full-blown specimen of the ordinary Englishman of the professional classes." "And what are you going to do?" "Oh, I'm sure I don't know. As little work as I must and as little harm as I can, I suppose." She laughed as she said: "At any rate you aren't doing much work to-day, are you? And no harm at all! But you've left out what you put in for me--a certain step." "Well, you've taken it, and I haven't." "You will. Oh, Irene Kilnorton has told me all about it. It seems you can't help it, Mr. Mead. I liked her; I asked her to come and see me, but she's never been." He made a little grimace, wrinkling brow and nose. Ora laughed again. "You won't be able to help it," she declared, nodding her head. "And then no more Sundays out with actresses!" "Even as matters stand, it's not a habit of mine," he protested. She smoked a cigarette of his, investing the act of luxury with a grace which made it meritorious; as she blew out the last of the smoke, she sighed, saying, "I wish to-day would last for ever." "Do you?" he asked in a low voice. The tone startled her to a sudden quick glance at his face. Her words had given expression to his longing that this simple perfection of existence should never pass. "Just the meadows, and the river, and the sunshine." "You leave me out?" "No," she said, "you may be somewhere in it, if you like. Because if nothing was going to change, I shouldn't change either; and I like you being here now, so I should like you being here always." "Do you always expect to change to people?" "It's not altogether me. They change to me, I think." "If I don't change to you, will you promise not to change to me?" He laughed as he spoke, but he looked at her intently. She turned away, saying, "I should be rather afraid never to change to a person. It would make him mean so terribly much to one, wouldn't it?" "But you married?" he whispered, whether in seriousness or in mockery he himself could hardly tell. "Yes," she said. She seemed to agree that there was a puzzle, but to be unable to give any explanation of it. The fact was there, not to be mended by theorising about it. In long intimate talk the hours were wearing away. His impulse was delicately to press her to reveal herself, to shew her mind, her way of thought, her disposition towards him. But side by side with his interest came the growing charm of her; he hardly knew whether to talk to her or to be silent with her, to elicit and trace the changes animation made, or to admire the dainty beauty of her features in repose. Movement and rest alike became her so well that to drive out either for the other seemed a gain burdened with an equal loss; her quick transitions from expression to expression were ruthless as well as bountiful. She appeared very happy, forgetful now of the puzzle that he had called to her mind, of the distrust that had afflicted her, entirely given over to the pleasure of living and of being there. Then she liked him; he was no jar, no unwelcome element. But there was still a distance between them, marked by her occasional nervousness, her ignoring of a remark that pressed her too closely, her skirting round topics which threatened to prove too serious. She seemed to ask him not to compel her to any issue, not to make her face any questions or attempt any determination, to let her go on being happy as long as might be possible without driving her to ask why she was happy or how long she would be. Happy she was; as they rose reluctantly to go back to the inn she turned to him, saying: "I shall never forget the day you've given me." But, arrived at the inn, she forgot her love of the meadows. Now she was glad to be in the snug parlour, glad dinner was near, glad to sit in a chair again. She went upstairs under the escort of the questioning admiring landlady, and came down fresh and radiant. In passing she gave him her hand, still cool and moist from water. "Isn't that nice?" she asked, and laughed merrily when he answered, "Oh, well, nice enough." The window opened on a little garden; she flung it wide. "There's nobody to spy on how much we eat," she said, "and the evening smells sweet. Oh, do let's begin!" And she clapped her hands when the meal came. Ashley found a sort of pity mingling with his other feelings for her, compassion for the simplicity and readiness of emotion which expose their possessor to so many chances of sorrow as well as to a certainty of recurrent joys. But he fell in with her mood and they joined in a childish pretence that they were at a great banquet, dignifying the simple chicken with titles they recollected from _menu_ or constructed from imagination, while the claret, which could make no great claims on intrinsic merit, became a succession of costly vintages, and the fictitious bill, by which she declared she would measure his devotion to her, grew by leaps and bounds. It was strange to realise that in twenty-four hours she would be back in her theatre, a great, at least a notorious, personage, talked of, stared at, canvassed, blamed, admired, the life she herself made so simple a thing given over to a thousand others for their pleasure and curiosity. A touch of jealousy made itself felt in his reflexions. "I'm beginning rather to hate your audiences," he said. A shrug and a smile sent the audiences to a limbo of inexpressible unimportance. "You'll think differently about that to-morrow," he warned her. "Be content with what I feel to-night; I am." They had finished dinner; both again had smoked cigarettes. "How long before the train?" she asked. "An hour and a half," he answered with a hint of triumph in his voice; the end was not yet; even after the time for the train there was the journey. Evening fell slowly, as it seemed with a sympathetic unwillingness to end their day. She moved to an arm-chair by the side of the window and he sat near her. Talk died away unmissed and silence came unnoticed. She looked a little tired and leant back in her seat; her face shewed pale in the frame of dark hair that clustered round it; her eyes were larger and more eloquent. The fate that he had braved, or in truth invited, was come; he loved her, he so loved her that he must needs touch her. Yet there was that about her which made his touch timid and light; a delicacy, an innocence which he was inclined to call paradoxical, the appeal of helplessness, a sort of unsubstantiality that made her seem the love for a man's soul only. One of her hands lay on the arm of her chair; he laid his lightly on it and when she turned smiled at her. She smiled back at him with deprecation but with perfect understanding. She knew why he did that; she did not resent it. She turned her hand over and very lightly grasped his fingers in a friendly tender pressure; she gazed again into the little garden while their hands were thus distantly clasped. She seemed to yield what she must and to beg him to ask no more. He longed to be able to do her will as it was and not to seek to change it, to offer her no violence of entreaty and to bring her into no distress. But the sweetness of love's gradual venturing allured him; it might be still that she only tolerated, that she gave a return for her day's happiness, and allowed this much lest she should wound a man she liked. With that he was not content, he was hotly and keenly discontent. She had become everything to him; he must be everything to her; if it must be, everything in sorrow and renunciation, but everything; if not for always, at least for now, for the end of this golden day, everything. He could not go home without the memory of her lips. He leant forward towards her; she turned to him. For a moment she smiled, then grew grave again; she let him draw her nearer to him, and with averted face and averted eyes suffered his kiss on her cheek. In the very midst of his emotion he smiled; she preserved so wonderfully the air of not being responsible for the thing, of neither accepting nor rejecting, of being quite passive, of just having it happen to her. He kissed her again; after much entreaty, once she kissed him lightly, shyly, under protest as it were, yet with a sincerity and gladness which called out a new tenderness in him; they seemed to say that she had wanted to do it very much long before she did it, and would want to do it again, and yet would not do it again. The kiss, which from many women would have levelled all barriers, seemed to raise new ones round her. He was ashamed of himself when his love drove him to besiege her more. Even now she was not resentful, she did not upbraid or repel him; she broke into that little nervous laugh of hers, as she lay back passive in the chair, and murmured so low that he hardly caught the words, "Don't. Don't make love to me any more now." Her prohibition or request had availed with Bowdon's hesitating conscience-ridden impulse; perhaps there was small cause to wonder at that. It availed now no less with Ashley Mead's impetuous passion. Her low whisper protected her absolutely; the confession it hinted disarmed him; he caught both her hands and held them in a long clasp, looking the while into her appealing eyes. But he entreated her no more and he kissed her no more. A moment later he rose, went and sat on the window-sill, and lit a cigarette; the glow seemed a tiny beacon of fire to shew the harbour, that danger was past, that her orders were understood and accepted. She lay very quiet, looking at him with steady, grateful, loving eyes, acknowledging a kindness that she had not doubted and yet found fine in him. His transgression--perhaps she hardly counted it one--was forgiven because he stayed his steps at her bidding. He knew that she trusted him; and in spite of her prohibition he believed that she loved him. Now one of the riddles about her seemed to find an explanation. He understood how she had passed through the dangers and the ordeal, and had come out still with her freshness and her innocence; how her taste had saved her from those who would have been deaf to the appeal that had arrested him, how powerful and sufficing a shield that appeal was to any man whom her taste would allow to come close to her in comradeship. You could not be false to a confidence like that; if you were a man who could, you would never have the chance. Thus Ashley summed up a case which a little while ago had seemed to him very strange. It seemed strange and unusual still, with a peculiar charm of its own. It was weakness breeding strength, surrender made security. It put a man on his honour; it took away the resistance which might make honour forget itself in the passion of victory. It was like being made guardian of another's treasure; you were careful of it, however heedless you were of your own. As they journeyed home, she was mirthful and joyous. This day was done, but she did not despair of the world; there should be other days, and the work of this day should endure. She made plans by which they were to meet, to be much together, to unite their lives by many ties. She let him see how much he had entered into her schemes; she told him plainly again and again that he had become to her quite different from all other men. She revealed to him her little habits, her tempers, her ways, her manoeuvres, her tricks; she had plenty of all of them. She shewed an open delight in the love which she had won from him and made no pretence of concealing anything of what he was to her. Of Jack Fenning she said not a word; of caution in the externals of her own behaviour, of what people might think or say, of any possible difficulties in their relation to one another, not a word. She was happy and she was grateful. He took her to the door of her own house; she was not hurt but seemed a little surprised that he would not go in. He did not offer to kiss her again, but could not avoid thinking that she would have been neither angry nor grieved if he had. His last memory was of her looking round her door, smiling delightedly and nodding to him, her eyes full of a thousand confidences. "Come soon," she called at last before she hid herself from his sight. When he reached his own rooms, he found awaiting him a note from Sir James Muddock, begging him to come to the office at Buckingham Palace Road at eleven the next morning. "I have had an interview with my doctor," the old man wrote, "which makes it necessary for me to consider very seriously certain immediate steps. I hope that I shall be able to rely on your assistance." The note was sent by hand and marked "Immediate." Its meaning was plain enough. The long-expected verdict had come; Sir James must be relieved; another head was wanted in the firm of Muddock and Mead. With his brain still full of Ora Pinsent the matter of the message seemed remote to Ashley, but he forced himself to descend to it. He was to have the offer of a partnership, the offer of great wealth, the opportunity of a career limited only by his own talents and no longer clogged by poverty. Would the offer be free, or hampered by a tacit unacknowledged understanding? He knew well enough Sir James' mind about his future. How strange that future looked in the after-glow of this day! Yet what future had this day? Here was a question that he could not bring himself to discuss patiently. Future or no future, this day had altered his life, seemed at this moment to have altered it so completely that on it and on what had happened in it would turn his answer to the offer of great wealth and the prospect of a career. Even in his own thoughts he observed that reticence about Alice Muddock which would have governed his tongue in speaking of her to another; but, affect as he would, or thought himself obliged to, he knew that she formed a factor in the situation, that she was in her father's mind when he wrote, no less than that other object of the old man's love, the great firm in Buckingham Palace Road. "It's strange," he thought, "that the thing, after dragging on so long, should come to a head now, to-night, just when--." He broke off his reflexions and, going to the window, looked out on the lights of the bridge and listened to the lessening noise of the town. He was dimly conscious that in this day of long idleness, by the slow low river and in the little inn, he had done more to draw the lines and map the course of his life than in any hour of labour, however successful and however strenuous. Fate had surprised him with a point-blank question, the Stand-and-deliver of a direct choice. Saying he would think it all over, he sat late that night. But thoughts will not always be compelled and disciplined; his vigil was but a pictured repetition of the day that he had lived. The day had been Ora's day. Hers also was the night. CHAPTER VI AWAY WITH THE RIBBONS! Few things make the natural man, a being who still occupies a large apartment in the soul of each of us, more impatient than to find people refusing to conform to his idea of the way in which they ought to seek and find happiness. So far as sane and sensible folk are concerned--there is no need to bring the Asylums into the argument--his way is the way; deviations from it, whether perversely deliberate or instinctive and unreasoned, are so many wanderings from the only right track. He likes money--then only fools omit to strive for it. Stability of mind is his ideal--what more wretched than to be tossed from mood to mood? A regular life is the sole means of preserving health in stomach and brain--it is melancholy to see persons preferring haphazard and ill-regulated existences. Nay, it makes this natural man rather vexed if we do not like his furniture, his favourite vegetable, his dentist, and so forth; his murmured "_De gustibus_" has a touch of scorn in it. He conceives a grudge against us for upsetting established standards of excellence in matters of life, conduct, upholstery, and the table. Our likings for people in whom he sees nothing puzzle and annoy him equally; the shrug with which he says, of a newly married couple for instance, "They seem very happy," adds quite clearly, "But on no reasonable grounds have they a right to be, and in my heart I can't quite believe they are." Sir James Muddock--once again the occasion of generalisations--had never been able to understand why Ashley Mead did not jump at the chance of Alice Muddock's hand and a share in Buckingham Palace Road. The lad was poor, his prospects were uncertain, at the best they could not yield wealth as Sir James had learnt to count it; the prejudice against trade is only against trade on a small scale; any ambitions, social or political, would be promoted, not thwarted, by his entry into the firm. As for Alice, she was the best girl in the world, clever, kind, trustworthy; she was very fond of him; he was fond of her and appreciated her company. Ashley was turned thirty; he was not asked to surrender the liberty of early youth. He had had his fling, and to sensible men this fling was a temporary episode, to be enjoyed and done with. It was time for him to get into harness; the harness offered was very handsome, the manger well filled, the treatment all that could be desired. When Sir James summed up the case thus, he had no suspicion of what had passed during one Sunday in the country; it is fair to add that it would have made no difference in his ideas, if he had known of it. The day in the country with Ora Pinsent would have been ticketed as part of the fling and thus relegated to after-dinner memories. Sir James did not understand people to whom the fling was more than an episode, to whom all life went on being a series of flings of ever-changing dice, till at last and only in old age the box fell from paralysed fingers. Therefore he did not understand all that was in the nature of Ashley Mead; he would have understood nothing at all of what was in Ora Pinsent's. Ashley's decision had taken itself, as it seemed, without any help or effort on his part. Here was the warrant of its inevitability. He thought, when he first read the old man's summons, that he was in for a great struggle and faced with a hard problem, with an anxious weighing of facts and a curious forecast of possibilities, that he must sit down to the scrutiny in idleness and solemnity. But somehow, as he slept or dressed or breakfasted, between glances at his paper and whiffs of his pipe, he decided to refuse many thousands a year and to ignore the implied offer of Alice Muddock's hand. In themselves thousands were good, there was nothing to be said against them; and of Alice he had been so fond and to her so accustomed that for several years back he had considered her as his most likely wife. She and the thousands were now dismissed from his life--both good things, but not good for him. He sighed once with a passing wish that he could be different; but being what he was he felt himself hopelessly at war with Sir James' scheme as a whole, and with every part of it. Contrast it with the moods, the thoughts, the atmosphere of life which had filled his yesterday! And yesterday's was his native air; thus it seemed to him, and he was so infected with this air that he did not ask whether but for yesterday his decision would have been as easy and unfaltering. The old man was hurt, grieved, and, in spite of previous less direct rebuffs, bitterly disappointed; he had not thought that his offer would be refused when expressly made; he had not looked to see his hints about his daughter more openly ignored the more open they themselves became. His anger expressed itself in an ultimatum; he flung himself back in his elbow chair, saying, "Well, my lad, for the last time, take it or leave it. If you take it, we'll soon put you through your facings, and then you'll be the best head in the business. But if you won't have it, I must take in somebody else." "I know, Sir James. Don't think I expect you to go on giving me chances." "If it's not you, it's got to be Bertie Jewett." Bertie Jewett was Herbert, son of Peter Jewett who had served through all the changes and lately died as Manager in Buckingham Palace Road. "He won't refuse, anyhow." The tone added, "He's not such a fool." "No, he's not such an ass as I am," said Ashley, answering the tone and smiling at poor Sir James with an appealing friendliness. "That's your word, not mine; but I'm not going to quarrel with it," said Sir James without a sign of softening. "What you're after I can't see. What do you want?" Ashley found himself unable to tell the Head of the Firm what he wanted. "I can get along," he said lamely. "I make a bit writing for the papers, and there's a brief once in a blue moon; and of course I've got a little; and this secretaryship helps for the time." This beggarly catalogue of inadequate means increased Sir James' scorn and bewilderment. "Are you above it?" he asked with sudden heat. "Good God, sir, don't think me a snob as well as an ass," prayed Ashley. "Then I don't know what you do want." Matters seemed to have reached a standstill. But Sir James had a last shot in his locker. "Go up and lunch in Kensington Palace Gardens," he said. "Talk it over with the ladies, talk it over with Alice." Ashley wanted to refuse; on this day he had no desire to see Alice. But refusal seemed impossible. "All right, Sir James, I will," he said. "Take a week, take a week more. If you say no then, it's Bertie Jewett--and your chance is gone for ever. For Heaven's sake don't make a fool of yourself." Affection mingling with wrath in the entreaty made it harder to resist. Ashley walked off with the last words ringing in his ears; they recalled Lord Bowdon and the Athenæum corner. After reflexion and against inclination Bowdon had determined not to make a fool of himself, and had intrenched his resolution with apparent security against the possibility of a relapse into a less sensible course. Here was Ashley's example; but he shied at it. "And how the devil am I to talk to Alice about it?" he exclaimed petulantly, as he struck across the front of Buckingham Palace and headed up Constitution Hill. There had been a general impression that he would marry Alice Muddock, and a general impression about us assumes to ourselves a vaguely obligatory force. We may not justify it, but we feel the need for some apology if we refuse. Besides Ashley had, up to a certain point, shared the impression, although in a faint far-off way, regarding the suggested alliance not as the aim of his life but as a possible and not unacceptable bourn of his youth. His entrance into the firm was a topic so closely connected that he felt much awkwardness in discussing it with Alice Muddock. Of her feelings he thought less than of his own; he was not by nature a selfish man, but he had now fallen into the selfishness of a great pre-occupation. The smallest joy or the lightest sorrow for Ora Pinsent would have filled his mind. It is difficult to feel in anything like this way towards more than one person at a time. His sympathy for Alice Muddock was blunted and he excused its want of acuteness by an affected modesty which questioned her concern in him. It chanced that Lady Kilnorton was at lunch. She seemed in high spirits and talked vigorously. Her theme was the artistic temperament; she blamed its slavishness to the moment. Lady Muddock showed an anxiety to be furnished with details for purposes of increased disapproval; Alice was judicial. One man among three women, Ashley would have been content to listen, but, when appealed to, he defended the aspersed disposition. He felt the conversation approaching Ora Pinsent, step by step; she was in all their minds; the only case in point known to Lady Muddock, the instance most interesting to Alice, an unwelcome persistent presence to Irene, to him a subject to be neither encouraged nor avoided without risk of self-betrayal. It was curious how she had come into the circle of their lives, and having entered seemed to dominate it. But presently he grew sure of his face and, for the rest, preferred that they should abuse her rather than not speak of her; he grudged every abstraction of his thoughts which banished her image. The discussion brought its trials. Irene's well-restrained jealousy and Lady Muddock's inquisitive disapproval were merely amusing; it was Alice's judicial attitude which stirred him to resentment. To assess and assay with this cold-blooded scientific accuracy seemed inhuman, almost from its excess of science unscientific, since it was a method so unsuited to the subject. "Now take Ora," said Irene, at last grasping the nettle. "There's nothing she wouldn't do for you at one moment, the next she wouldn't do anything at all for you." "For her acquaintances, you mean?" Alice asked. "Oh, no, my dear. For anybody, for her best friend. You can't call her either good or bad. She's just fluke, pure fluke." "Well, I know it's the thing to pretend not to like flukes--" Ashley began. The thin jocularity served for a shield. "Oh, what's the use of asking a man? He just sees her face, that's all. Nobody's denying her looks." Lady Kilnorton seemed petulant. "Of course a life like hers," observed Lady Muddock, "is very demoralising." "My dear Lady Muddock, why?" asked Ashley, growing exasperated. "Well, I only know what Minna Soames says, and--" "Mother dear, Minna Soames is a goose," Alice remarked. Ashley was grateful, but still with reservations as to the judicial tone. Irene Kilnorton, engaged in her secret task of justifying herself and taking a rosy view of Bowdon's feelings, talked more for her own ends than for those of the company. "That sort of people suit one another very well," she went on. "They know what to expect of each other. Harm comes only when people of a different sort get entangled with them." "You're vague," said Ashley. "What different sort?" He had partly fathomed her mood now, and his eyes were mischievous as he looked at her. "Sensible people, Mr. Mead." There was a touch of asperity in the brief retort, which made a thrust from him seem excusable. "Suppose Lord Bowdon had never seen you," he said with plausible gravity, "and, being in that state of darkness, had fallen in love with Miss Pinsent; would it have been so very surprising?" "Very," said Irene Kilnorton. "And dreadful?" "Well, bad for him. He'd never have got on with her and--" "There's Mr. Fenning," interposed Alice with a quiet laugh. A moment's pause ensued. Ashley had been startled at the introduction of the name, but he recovered himself directly. "Oh, well," he said, "of course there's Mr. Fenning. I'd forgotten him. But he's quite accidental. Leave him out. He's not part of the case." "But there's so often a Mr. Fenning," Alice persisted. "Can he be considered quite accidental?" Ashley had made much the same remark in different words to Irene Kilnorton a few weeks before; but remarks do not bear transplanting. "Isn't that rather a traditional view?" he asked. "You mean a prejudiced one?" "Well, yes." "I suppose so. But prejudices start somehow, don't they?" Her smile was very gentle, but still, to his mind, horribly aloof and judicial. Could she not understand how a woman might be carried away, and blunder into a Mr. Fenning, _per incuriam_ and all in a minute (so to speak)? In such a case was it to be expected that the Mr. Fenning in question should be all in all to her? In some ways perhaps she must acknowledge his existence; but at any rate she needn't Darby-and-Joan it with him! "Poor dear Ora!" said Irene Kilnorton after a pause. Yet she was not naturally malicious any more than Ashley Mead was naturally selfish. If we are responsible for the moods we raise in others Miss Pinsent's account was mounting up. Ashley allowed himself the retort of a laugh as Lady Muddock rose from the table. "I came to talk to you," he said to Alice, as she passed him. "Then drink your coffee quick, and come into the garden," she answered with her usual frank kindness. When she looked at him her aspect and air became less judicial. In the garden he opened the subject of Sir James' proposal; his eyes were set straight in front of him, hers on the ground. Her answer would have dismayed Sir James, and it surprised Ashley. She was energetically, almost passionately, opposed to his entering the business. "It's not your line, or your taste, or your proper work," she said. "What's the good of being rich if you're doing what you hate all the time?" "I felt just like that," he said gratefully, "but I was afraid that I felt like it because I was a fool." "You can make your own way. Don't sell yourself to the business." He glanced at her stealthily; her colour had risen and her lip trembled. Did she think of anything besides the business when she bade him not sell himself? A moment later she laughed uneasily, as, with a reference to the conversation at lunch, she said, "You've too much of the artistic temperament for Buckingham Palace Road." "I? I the artistic temperament?" He accepted the trite phrase as a useful enough symbol of what they both meant. "Yes," she answered steadily. "A good deal of it." "Then I come under Irene Kilnorton's censures?" "Under a good many of them, yes." Something in her manner again annoyed and piqued him. She was judging again, and judging him. But she was interesting him also. She spoke of him; she knew him well: and just now he was in some doubt about himself. "I don't know what you mean," he said, seeking to draw her out. "Oh, things carry you away; and you like it. You don't want to get to a comfortable place and stay there. I'm not saying anything you mind?" "No. I don't think so, at least." She glanced at him full for a moment as she said, "I never think anything you'd mind, Ashley." Then she went on hastily. "But you must be prepared to see Bertie Jewett in great prosperity--a big house and so on--and to know it might all have been yours." "I'm prepared for that," he said absently. He did not at all realise the things he was abandoning. "But of course you'll get on. You'll be something better than rich." "Perhaps, if I don't--don't play the fool." "You keep calling yourself a fool to-day. Why do you? You're not a fool." "It's only a way of speaking and not quite my own way, really," he laughed. "It means if I don't enjoy life a little instead of spoiling it all by trying to get something that isn't particularly well worth having; it means, in fact, if I don't allow scope to my artistic temperament." It meant also if he did not spend more days in the country with Ora Pinsent; for though he did not (as he had hinted) call that folly to himself, he was now on his defence against a world which would call it folly with no doubtful voice, and would exhort him earnestly to imitate Lord Bowdon's decisive measures of self-protection. It was in the power of this clear-sighted girl thus to put him on his defence, even in the full swing of his attraction towards Ora Pinsent; better than anyone, she could shew him the other side of the picture. He fell into a silence occupied with puzzled thoughts. She grew grave, except for a sober little smile; she was thinking that it was easy to be wise for others, for all the world except herself; while she was playing the judicial prudent friend to him, the idea of another part was in her head. There may be hope without expectation; it would not have been human in her to hope nothing from this talk in the garden, to build no fancies on it. But she rebuked her imagination; whatever it was that filled his mind--and his occasional air of distraction had caught her notice--she had little share in it, she knew that well. "The talk at lunch was _à propos_," she said presently. "I'm going to call on Miss Pinsent this afternoon." "You're going to call--?" The surprise was plain in his voice. This sudden throwing of the two together seemed an odd trick of circumstances! His tone brought her eyes quickly round to him and she looked at him steadily. "Why not? She asked me. I told you so," she said. Ashley could not deny it; he shrugged his shoulders. "Shan't I like her?" "Everybody must like her, I think," he answered, awkward, almost abashed. But then there came on him a desire to talk about Ora, not so much to justify himself as to tell another what she was, to exhibit her charm, to infect a hearer with his own fever. He contrived to preserve a cool tone, aiming at what might seem a dispassionate analysis of a fascination which everybody admitted to exist; but he was at once too copious and too happy in his description and his images. The girl beside him listened with that little smile; it could not be merry, she would not let it grow bitter, but schooled it to the neutrality of polite attention. She soon saw the state of his mind and the discovery was hard for her to bear. Yet it was not so hard as if he had come to tell her of an ordinary attachment, of a decorous engagement to some young lady of their common acquaintance, and of a decorous marriage to follow in due course. Then she would have asked, "Why her and not me?" With Ora Pinsent no such question was possible. Neither for good nor for evil could any comparison be drawn. And another thought crept in, although she did not give it willing admittance. Ora was not only exceptional; she was impossible. Impossibility might be nothing to him now, but it could not remain nothing forever. The pain was there, but the disaster not irrevocable. Among the somewhat strange chances which had marked the life of Mr. Fenning there was now to be reckoned a certain shamefaced comfort which he all unwittingly afforded to Alice Muddock. But Alice was not proud of the alliance. Ashley broke off in a mixture of remorse and embarrassment. His description could not be very grateful to its hearer; it must have come very near to betraying its utterer. Alice did not pretend that it left her quite in the dark; she laughed a little and said jokingly: "One would think you were in love with her. I suppose it's that artistic temperament again. Well, this afternoon I'll look and see whether she's really all you say. The male judgment needs correction." As their talk went on he perceived in her a brightening of spirits, a partial revival of serenity, a sort of relief; they came as a surprise to him. The lightness with which she now spoke of Ora appeared, to a large degree at least, genuine. He did not understand that she attributed to him, in more sincerity than her manner had suggested, the temper which had formed the subject of their half-serious half-jesting talk. Her impression of him did not make him less attractive to her; he was not all of the temper she blamed and feared; he had, she persuaded herself, just enough of it to save him from the purely ribbon-selling nature and (here came the point to which she fondly conducted herself) to give her both hope and patience in regard to her own relations with him. She could not help picturing herself as the fixed point to which he would, after his veerings, return in the end; meanwhile his share of the temperament excused the veerings. Lady Kilnorton had forced the game with entire apparent success, but Alice's quick eyes questioned the real completeness of that victory. She would play a waiting game. There was no question of an orthodox marriage with the young lady from over the way or round the corner, an arrangement which would have been odious in its commonplace humiliation and heart-breaking in its orderly finality. But Ora Pinsent was not a finality, any more than she was the embodiment of an orderly arrangement. That fortunate impossibility which attached to her, by virtue of Jack Fenning's existence, forbade despair, just as her fascination and her irresistibility seemed to prevent humiliation and lessen jealousy. The thing was a transient craze, such as men fell into; it would pass. If she joined her life to Ashley Mead's she was prepared (so she assured herself) for such brief wanderings of allegiance, now and then; as time went on, they would grow fewer and fewer, until at last she conquered altogether the tendency towards them. "And she must be ten years older than I am," her reflections ended; that the real interval was but seven did not destroy the importance of the point. Having offered Ashley a lift to Piccadilly, she went off to get ready, and presently Bowdon, who had called to pick up Irene, strolled into the garden for a cigarette. "Hullo, what are you doing here? You ought to be making your living," he cried good-humouredly. "I've been throwing it away instead," said Ashley. "Should you like to be a partner in Muddock and Mead?" "A sleeping one," said Bowdon with a meditative pull at his moustache. Ashley explained that he would have been expected to take an active part. Bowdon evidently thought that he ought to have been glad to take any part, and rebuked him for his refusal. "Take the offer and marry the girl," he counselled. "She'd have you all right, and she seems a very good sort." "I don't feel like settling down all of a sudden," said Ashley with a smile. They walked side by side for a few paces; then Bowdon remarked, "Depend upon it, it's a good thing to do, though." "It's a question of the best date," said Ashley, much amused at his companion. "Now at your age, Lord Bowdon--" "Confound you, Ashley, I'm not a hundred! I say it's a good thing to do. And, by Jove, when it means a lump of money too!" A pause followed; they walked and smoked in silence. "Good creatures, women," remarked Bowdon. Ashley did not find the remark abrupt; he traced its birth. Alice had left much the same impression behind her in his mind. "Awfully," he answered; there was in his voice also a note of remorse, of the feeling that comes when we cannot respond to a kindness so liberally as it deserves. "Of course they aren't all alike, though," pursued Bowdon, as though he were reasoning out an intricate subject and coming on unexpected conclusions. "In fact they differ curiously, wonderfully." His thoughts had passed, or were passing, from Irene Kilnorton to Ora Pinsent; obedient to this guidance Ashley's followed in a parallel track from Alice Muddock to Ora Pinsent. "They're charming in different ways," said he with a slight laugh. Bowdon shewed no signs of mirth; he was frowning a little and smoked rather fast. "And men are often great asses," he observed a few moments later. Again Ashley had kept pace, but his face was more doubtful than his companion's and there was hesitation in his voice as he replied, "Yes, I suppose they are." This subterranean conversation, shewing above ground only faint indications of what it really meant to each of the talkers, had carried them to the end of the garden. Turning round at the fence, they saw Irene and Alice walking towards them, side by side. Both ladies were well dressed, Irene rather brilliantly, Alice with quiet, subdued good taste; both seemed attractive, Irene for her bright vivacity and merry kindness, Alice for her strength of regard and a fine steady friendliness. A man who was fortunate enough to gain either of them would win a wife of whom he might justly be proud when he talked with the enemy in the gate, and moreover would enjoy an unusually good prospect of being happy in his own house. The man who had won one, and the man who could, if he would, win the other, approached them in a slow leisurely stroll. "Yes, great asses," repeated Bowdon in a reflective tone. "I didn't say we weren't," protested Ashley Mead with an irritated laugh. They would have found a most heartfelt endorsement of the view which they reluctantly adopted, had Sir James Muddock known how small a share of Ashley's visit had been honestly devoted to a consideration of the advantages of a partnership in Muddock and Mead, and how much larger a part had been given to a subject concerning which Sir James could have only one opinion. CHAPTER VII UNDER THE NOSEGAY When Alice Muddock reached Ora's little house in Chelsea and was shewn into the drawing-room, she found herself enjoying an introduction to Mr. Sidney Hazlewood and forced to shake hands with Babba Flint. Hazlewood struck her favourably; there was a repressed resolution about him, a suggestion of being able to get most of what he might happen to want; no doubt, though, his desires would be limited and mainly professional. Babba was, as usual, quite inexplicable to her and almost intolerable. The pair had, it seemed, come on business, and, after an apology, Ora went on talking business to them for fully a quarter of an hour. She was in a businesslike, even a commercial money-grubbing mood; so were the men; amid a number of technical terms which fell on Alice's ignorant ears the question of what they would make was always coming uppermost. There was indeed a touch of insincerity in Ora's graspingness; it did not seem exactly affectation, but rather like a part for which she was cast on this occasion and into which she threw herself with artistic zeal. She had to play up to her companions. There was in her neither the quiet absorption in the pecuniary aspect which marked Mr. Hazlewood, nor the tremulous eagerness with which Babba counted imaginary thousands, the fruit of presupposed successes. Hazlewood, a clean-shaven hard-lined man of close on fifty, and Babba with his long moustache, his smooth cheeks, his dandiness, and his youth, treated Ora exactly in the same way--first as a possible partner, then as a possible property. They told her what she would make if she became a partner and how much they could afford to pay her as a property if she would hire herself out to them. Ora had her alternative capacities clearly grasped and weighed their relative advantages with a knowing hand. Alice thought it a strange scene by which to make her first more intimate study of the irresistible impossible Miss Pinsent, the Miss Pinsent of uncontrollable emotions and unknowable whims. What images the world made of people! Yet somehow, in the end, had not the world a way of being just right enough to save its credit? At last the conference appeared to be about to break up. Alice was almost sorry; she could have gone on learning from it. "Only remember," said Mr. Hazlewood, "that if we do make a deal, why, it is a deal!" Ora began to laugh; an agreement was an agreement, she remembered, and a deal, by parity of reasoning, a deal. Hazlewood's wrinkle clamoured for seriousness; hard money was at stake, and over that surely even genius could look grave. "Oh, she won't want to cry off this," said Babba with a sagacious nod. Alice had never known how Babba lived (any more than she knew why). It appeared now that he supported himself by speculations of this description; she fancied that he asserted himself so much because the other two seemed to consider him, in the end, rather superfluous; more than once he had to remind them that he was indispensable; they yielded the point good-naturedly. She was interrupted in her thoughts by Hazlewood, who made a suave remark to her and held out his hand with a low bow. Ora was chaffing Babba about a very large flower in his buttonhole. "Is Miss Pinsent a good woman of business?" Alice asked in an impulse of curiosity. Hazlewood glanced at Ora; she was entirely occupied with Babba. "Miss Pinsent," said he, with his overworked but still expressive smile, "is just exactly what you happen to find her. But if you call often enough, there'll come a time when you'll find her with a good head on her shoulders." Alice felt vaguely sorry for Mr. Hazlewood; it must be wearing to deal with such unstable quantities. She could imagine herself exchanging sympathy with him on the vagaries of the artistic temperament; would she grow a wrinkle, of brow or of heart, over Ashley Mead? Or had she grown one? "Well, you've had a lot of experience of her, haven't you?" she asked, laughing, and wondering what he thought of Ora. His answer expressed no great affection. "Good Lord, yes," he sighed, furrowing his brow again. Ora darted up to him, put an arm through his, and clasped her hands over his sleeve. "Abusing me?" she said, turning her face round to his. For a moment Alice thought that she was going to kiss him and hoped vaguely she would not; but she felt that she did not know the etiquette; it might be usual. "Telling the truth," said Mr. Hazlewood with stout courage; then with pronounced gallantry he raised his arm with Ora's hands on it and kissed one of the hands; his manner now was quite different from his business manner of a few moments ago; his eyes were different too, hardly affectionate, but very indulgent. "He likes me really, you know, though I worry him dreadfully," said Ora to Alice. Babba came up; he had been arranging the big flower before a mirror. "Seen Lady Kilnorton lately? She's brought it off with Bowdon, I hear," he said to Alice. "She's engaged to Lord Bowdon," said Alice stiffly. "Deuced lucky woman," observed Babba, blind to the rebuke which lay in Alice's formality of phrase. "Take him away," Ora commanded Mr. Hazlewood. "We've done with him and we don't want him any more. We aren't sure we like him." "Oh, come now, I ain't a bad chap, Miss Pinsent," pleaded Babba piteously. "We're not at all sure we like him," said Ora inexorably. "Take him away at once, please, Mr. Hazlewood." And Hazlewood led him out, protesting bitterly. For a moment or two Ora moved about, touching the furniture into the places in which she wanted it, and fingering the flowers in the vases. Then she came quickly to Alice, sat down by her side, and cried expansively, "It's really charming of you to come. And you're like--you're like something--Oh, I don't know! I mean you're a lovely change from those men and their business and their money." "I like Mr. Hazlewood." "Oh, so do I. But my life's so much Mr. Hazlewood. Why did you come?" "You asked me," said Alice. "Yes, I know, but I hardly thought you'd come." She darted back to the previous conversation. "I'm going to make a lot of money, though, and then I'm going to have a long holiday, and a villa somewhere in Italy." "Oh, they won't let you rest long." "It won't be very long really, because I shall spend all the money," Ora explained with a smile. "Let's have some tea." She rang, and tea was brought by a very respectable middle-aged woman. Ora addressed her maid as Janet and gave her a series of orders; Janet listened to them with a non-committal air, as though she would consider whether they were reasonable or not, and act according to her conclusion. Alice noticed that she called her mistress "Ma'am;" the reference to Mr. Fenning was very indirect, but it was the first that Alice had ever heard made in Ora's presence. It seemed to her also that Janet laid some slight emphasis on the designation, as though it served, or might be made to serve, some purpose besides that of indicating the proper respect of a servant. She found herself wondering whether Janet dated from the time when Mr. Fenning was still a present fact and formed a member of the united Fenning household (which, by the way, was an odd entity to contemplate). If that were the case, a conversation with Janet might be very interesting; knowledge might be gained about the bulwark; Alice had begun to look on Mr. Fenning as a bulwark--and to tell herself that she did no such thing. A large number of photographs stood on the mantel-piece and about the room, most of them signed by their originals. Many were of men; one might be of Mr. Fenning. A silver frame stood on a little table just by the sofa. Alice's intuitive perception told her that here was Ora's favourite place; her traditions caused her to conclude that the frame (its back was towards her) held Mr. Fenning's portrait. She was not undiplomatic, only less diplomatic than many other women; she took a tour of inspection, saying how pretty the room was and declaring that she must look closer at the photograph of an eminent tragedian on the opposite wall. Her return movement shewed her the face of the portrait which she had guessed to be Mr. Fenning's; it was that of her friend Ashley Mead. "Yes," said Ora, "he sent me that yesterday. I was so glad to have it." "You gave him a return?" asked Alice with a careless laugh, the laugh appropriate to the moment. "He chose one and I wrote on it. Sugar, Miss Muddock?" Alice took sugar. "You've known him ever so long, haven't you?" asked Ora, handing the cup. "Ages, ever since we were children. He's very nice and very clever." "I've only known him quite a little while." Ora paused and laughed. "Some people would say that's why his picture's in the place of honour." "You like change?" asked Alice. Ashley liked change also. But Ora made her old defence. "People change, so of course I change to them." The explanation did not quite satisfy herself. "Oh, I don't know," she said impatiently. "Anyhow I haven't left off liking Ashley yet. I may, you know." Alice, conscious that she herself in her hostess' position would have said "Mr. Mead," tried to make the obvious allowances; it was just like that clasping of the hands round Hazlewood's arm, just like the air of expecting to be kissed. Fully aware of insurgent prejudices, she beat them down with a despotic judgment; she would not follow in the wake of her stepmother nor adopt the formulas of Minna Soames. Curiously enough Ora was in somewhat the same or a parallel state of mind, although she did not realise it so clearly. She too was struggling to understand and to appreciate. She was sure she would be friends with Miss Muddock, if she could get within her guard; but why did people have guards, or why not drop them when other people shewed themselves friendly? You might have to keep the Babba Flints at their distance, no doubt, but even that was better done by ridicule than by stiffness. "We still see a good deal of him," said Alice, "although he has an immense lot of engagements. He generally comes to lunch on Sunday." Ora reflected that he had not followed his usual practice on one Sunday. Alice went on to give a brief description of Ashley's general relation to the Muddock family, and referred to her father's wish that he should enter the business. "He came to talk to me about it to-day," she said, "but it wouldn't suit him in the least, and I told him so." "Oh, no, it wouldn't," cried Ora. "I'm so glad you told him right." Their eyes met in a sudden glance. Did they both know so much of Ashley Mead, of his tastes, his temper, and what would suit him? An embarrassment arrested their talk. Alice was conscious that her hostess' eyes rested on her with an inquisitive glance; it had just occurred to Ora that in meeting this girl she had encountered a part of the life of Ashley Mead hitherto unknown to her. "What part? How much?" her eyes seemed to ask. She was not jealous of Alice Muddock, but she was inclined to be jealous of all that life of Ashley's of which she knew nothing, which her visitor had shared. With a sudden longing she yearned for the inn parlour where he had no other life than a life with her; the sudden force of the feeling took her unawares and set her heart beating. She came again to Alice and sat down by her; silence had somehow become significant and impossible. "I like your frock," she said, gently fingering the stuff. "At least I like it for you. I shouldn't like it for me." The relativity of frocks, being, like that of morals, an extensive and curious subject, detained them for a few moments and left them with a rather better opinion of one another. Incidentally it revealed a common scorn of Minna Soames, who dressed as though she were stately when she was only pretty; this also knit them together. But they progressed nearer to liking than to understanding one another. Small points of agreement, such as the unsuitability of the business to Ashley and the inappropriateness of her gowns to Minna Soames, made intercourse pleasant but could not bridge the gulf between them; they were no more than hands stretched out from distant banks. Alice began to talk of Irene Kilnorton and Bowdon. While attributing to them all proper happiness and the finality of attachment incidental to their present position, she told Ora, with a laugh, that they had all seen how much Bowdon had been struck with her. "I think he did like me," said Ora with a ruminative smile. "He's safe now, isn't he?" she added a moment later. The thought had been Alice's own, but it needed an effort for her to look at it from Ora's point of view. To be a danger and to know yourself to be a danger, to be aware of your perilousness in a matter-of-fact way, without either exultation or remorse, was a thing quite outside Alice's experience. On the whole to expect men to fall in love with you and to be justified in this anticipation by events would create a life so alien from hers that she could not realise its incidents or the state of mind it would create. "I like Lord Bowdon," said Ora. "But--" she paused and went on, laughing, "He's rather too sensible for me. He'll just suit Irene Kilnorton. But really I must write and tell him to come and see me. I haven't seen him since the engagement." "You'd much better not," was on the tip of Alice's tongue, but she suspected that the impulse to say it was born of her still struggling prejudices. "Ask them together," she suggested instead. "Oh, no," said Ora pathetically. "He'd hate it." Alice did not see exactly why he should hate it. Engaged people always went about together; surely always? "Were you ever engaged?" Ora went on. "Never," said Alice with a laugh. "I've been--well, of course I have--and I hated it." With curiosity and pleasure Alice found herself on the threshold of the subject of Mr. Fenning. But Ora turned aside without entering the hidden precincts. "And I'm sure I should hate it worse now. You wouldn't like it, would you?" "I should like it very much, if I cared for the man." "Well," Ora conceded, "he might make it endurable, if he treated it properly. Most men look so solemn over it. As soon as they've got you, they set to work to make you think what a tremendous thing you've done. As if that was the way to enjoy yourself!" She paused, seemed to think, smiled out of the window, and then, turning to Alice, said with an innocence evidently genuine, "Ashley Mead would make it rather pleasant, I think." The trial was sudden; Alice had no time to put on her armour; she felt that her face flushed. Again their eyes met, as they had when it was agreed that the business would not suit Ashley. The glance was longer this time, and after Alice turned away Ora went on looking at her for several moments. That was it, then; Irene Kilnorton had not spoken idly or in ignorant gossip. What she had said fell short of truth, for she had spoken of an alliance only, not of love. Now Ora knew why the girl talked so much of Ashley; now she knew also why the girl shewed such interest in herself. Yes, the rich Miss Muddock would be Ashley's wife if she were wooed; besides being rich she was pleasant and clever, and knew how to dress herself. (This last moral quality ranked high in Ora's list.) Such an arrangement would be in all ways very beneficial to Ashley. She wondered whether Ashley knew how entirely the game was in his own hands. She felt a sudden and sore pity for Alice, who had been so cordial and so pleasant and whose secret she had heedlessly surprised. The cordiality seemed very generous; there was in it a challenge to counter-generosity. In an instant the heroic idea of giving him up to Alice flashed through her brain. This fine conception was hardly born before she found herself asking wrathfully whether he would consent to leave her. Alice was herself again; she said that she thought Mr. Mead might make an engagement very pleasant, but that such a relation to him would perhaps not be very exciting to her, since she had known him all her life. This suppression of emotion was not to Ora's taste; it burked a scene to which her instinct had begun to look forward. But as generosity would be at this point premature (even if it should ever become tolerable) she was forced to acquiesce. A little later Alice took her leave with increased friendliness and a pressing invitation to Ora to come and see her at Kensington Palace Gardens when there was no party and they could have another quiet talk together. Surrender--or the inn parlour? Generosity or joy? As an incidental accompaniment, correctness or incorrectness of conduct? These alternatives presented themselves to Ora when she was left alone. The _rôle_ of renunciation had not only obvious recommendations but also secret attractions. How well she could play it! She did not exactly tell herself that she could play it well--the temperament has its decent reticences--but she pictured herself playing it well and wished for an opportunity to play it. She would have played it beautifully for Irene Kilnorton's benefit, had that lady asked her assistance instead of taking the matter into her own resolute hands. She would have sent Bowdon away with an exhortation to see his own good and to forget her, with a fully adequate, nay, a more than ample, confession of the pain the step was causing her, but yet with a determination which made the parting final and Irene's happiness secure. All this vaguely rehearsed itself in her brain as she lay on the sofa beside Ashley Mead's portrait in its silver frame. And her subsequent relations both with Irene and with Bowdon would have been touched with an underlying tenderness and sweetened by the common recollection of her conduct; even when he had become quite happy with Irene, even when he had learnt to thank herself, he would not quite forget what might have been. Having arrived at this point, Ora burst into a laugh at her own folly. All that went very well, so very smoothly and effectively, grouped itself so admirably, and made such a pretty picture. But she took up the photograph in the silver frame and looked at it. It was not Bowdon's likeness but Ashley Mead's; the question, the real question, was not whether she should give up Bowdon; fate was not complaisant enough to present her with a part at once so telling and so easy. It was not Bowdon with whom she had spent a day in the country, not Bowdon who had been with her in the inn parlour, not Bowdon who, Alice Muddock thought, might make an engagement very pleasant. The grace of self-knowledge came to her and told her the plain truth about her pretty picture. "What a humbug I am!" she cried, as she set down the photograph. For the actual opportunity was very different from the imagined, as rich in effect perhaps, but by no means so attractive. She still liked her part, but the rest of the cast was not to her taste; she could still think of the final interview with a melancholy pleasure, but, with this distribution of characters, how dull and sad and empty and intolerable life would be when the final interview was done! The subsequent relations lost all their subdued charm; underlying tenderness and common recollections became flat and unprofitable. "An awful humbug!" sighed Ora with a plaintive smile. Why were good things so difficult? Because this thing would be very good--for him, for poor Alice, for herself. A reaction from the joy of Sunday came over her, bringing a sense of fear, almost of guilt. She recollected with a flash of memory what she had said to Jack Fenning when they parted in hot anger. "You needn't be afraid to leave me alone," she had cried defiantly, and up to now she had justified the boast. She had been weary and lonely, she had been courted and tempted, but she had held fast to what she had said. Her anger and her determination that Jack should not be in a position to triumph over her had helped to keep her steps straight. Now these motives seemed less strong, now the loneliness was greater. If she sent Ashley away the loneliness would be terrible; but this meant that the danger in not sending him away was terrible too, both for him and for her. As she sank deeper and deeper in depression she told herself that she was born to unhappiness, but that she might at least try not to make other people as unhappy as she herself was doomed to be. While she still lay on the sofa, in turns pitying, reproaching, and exhorting herself, Janet came in. "A letter, ma'am," said Janet. "Your dinner will be ready in ten minutes, ma'am." "Thanks, Janet," said Ora, and took the letter. The handwriting was not known to her; the stamp and postmark were American; Bridgeport, Conn., the legend ran. "I don't know anybody in Bridgeport, or in Conn.--Conn.?--Oh, yes, Connecticut," said Ora. The silver frame stood crooked on the table. Ora set it straight, looked at the face in it, smiled at some thought, sighed at the same or some other thought, and lazily opened the letter from Bridgeport, Conn.; she supposed it was a communication of a business kind, or perhaps a request for a photograph or autograph. "My dear Ora, I have had an accident to my hand, so get a friend to write this for me. I am here in a merchant's office, but have had a bit of luck on Wall Street and am in funds to a modest extent. So I am going to take a holiday. I shall not come to England unless you give me leave; but I should like to come and see you again and pay you a visit. How long I stayed would depend on circumstances and on what we decided after we had met. A letter will find me here for the next month. I hope you will send one inviting me to come. I would write more if I could write myself; as it is I will only add that I am very anxious to see you and am sure I can set right any mistakes that there have been in the past. Write as soon as you can. Yours affectionately, Jack." She turned back to the envelope:--"Miss Ora Pinsent." The friend who wrote Jack's letter probably did not know that he was writing to Jack's wife. Janet knew Jack's writing, but not the writing of Jack's friend. In secrecy and privacy Jack's letter had come. She laid it down beside the portrait in the silver frame, and lay back again quietly with wide-opened eyes. The clock ticked away ten minutes; dinner was ready; she lay still. Had people a right to rise from the dead like this? Were they justified, having gone out of life, in coming back into it under cover of a friend's handwriting and a postage stamp? They had parted for ever, Jack and she, most irrevocably, most eagerly, most angrily. A few lines on a sheet of note paper could not change all that. He had been dead and gone; at least he had existed only as a memory and as--she hardly liked to say an encumbrance--as a check, as a limiting fact, as a difficulty which of necessity barred her from ordering her doings just as she might have liked to order them. Now he proposed suddenly to become a fact, a presence, a part of her again, and stole a hearing for this proposal in the insidious disguise of a friend's handwriting. How he chose his time too! In wild fancy she imputed to him a knowledge of the curious appositeness of his letter's arrival. It came just when she was unhappy, torn with doubts, feeling low, yes, and feeling guilty; just after the revelation of Alice Muddock's feelings, just after the day in the country, just while she was saying that, for weal or woe, she could not send Ashley Mead away. At such a moment she would not have opened the letter had she known it for his; but he had had an accident to his hand and the unknown writing had gained him access. Janet came in again. "Your dinner is ready, ma'am," she said, and went on, "These have come for you, ma'am," laying a nosegay of roses on the little table beside the portrait in the silver frame, and the letter from Bridgeport, Conn. Ora nodded; there was no need to ask whence the roses came; they were of the colour she had declared her favourite by the river bank on Sunday. "I'll come to dinner directly," she said, and seeing Janet's eye on the letter, she forgot that it was in a friend's handwriting and pushed it under the nosegay till the roses hid it. There was nothing to be seen on the table now but the roses of the colour she loved, and the picture in its silver frame. To toy with material symbols of immaterial realities is pretty enough work for the fancy or the pen. The symbols are docile and amenable; the letter can be pushed under the roses till their blooms utterly conceal it, and neither you nor anybody else can see that it is there. The picture you do not care about can be locked away in the drawer, the one you love placed on the little table by your elbow as you sit in your favourite seat. Unhappily this artistic arrangement of the symbols makes no difference at all to the obstinate realities. They go on existing; they insist on remaining visible or even obtrusive; audible and even clamorous. The whole thing is a profitless trick of the fancy or the pen. Although the letter was pushed under the roses, Jack Fenning was alive in Bridgeport, Conn., with a desire to see his wife in his heart, and his passage money across the Atlantic in his pocket. As Ora drove down to the theatre that night, she moaned, "How am I to play with all this worrying me?" But she played very well indeed. And she was sorry when the acting was over and she had to go back to her little house in Chelsea, to the society of the letter and the roses. But now there was another letter: "I am coming to-morrow at 3. Be at home. A. M." "What in the world am I to do?" she asked with woeful eyes and quivering lip. It seemed to her that much was being laid on the shoulders of a poor young woman who asked nothing but to be allowed to perfect her art and to enjoy her life. It did not occur to her that the first of these aims is accomplished by few people, that at any rate a considerable minority fail in the second, and that the fingers of two hands may count those who in any generation succeed in both. The apparent modesty of what she asked of fortune entirely deceived her. She sat in her dressing-gown and cried a little before she got into bed. CHAPTER VIII THE LEGITIMATE CLAIMANT Ashley Mead did not take the week's consideration which Sir James had pressed on him. The same evening he wrote a letter decisively declining to assume a place at the helm in Buckingham Palace Road. Sir James, receiving the letter and handing it to Alice, was disappointed to meet with no sympathy in his expressed views of its folly. He was nearly angry with his daughter and frankly furious against Ashley. He was proud of his daughter and proud of his business; the refusal left him very sore for both. As soon as he reached his office he gave vent to his feelings by summoning Bertie Jewett to his presence and offering him the position to whose attractions Ashley had been so culpably blind. Here there was no refusal. A slim, close-built, dapper little fellow, with a small fair moustache and small keen blue eyes, full of self-confidence, perfectly self-controlled, almost sublimely industrious, patiently ambitious, Bertie turned away from no responsibilities and let slip no opportunities. He knew himself Bob Muddock's superior in brains; he had known of, and secretly chafed against, the proposed intrusion of Ashley Mead. Now he was safe, and fortune in his hands. But to Bertie the beauty of firm ground was not that you can stand still on it and be comfortable, but that it affords a good "take-off" when you want to clear an obstacle which lies between you and a place even more desirable in your eyes. Sir James explained the arrangements he proposed to make, his big share, Bob's moderate share, Bertie's small share; the work, as is not unusual, was to be in an inverse ratio to the share. Then the old man approached the future. When he was gone there was a sum of money and a big annuity for Lady Muddock; subject to that, Bob was to have two-fifths of his father's share to add to his own; the rest was to be Alice's. In that future time Alice's share would be nearly as big as Bob's; the addition of another small share would give it preponderance. Bertie's blue eye was very keen as he examined the nature of the ground he had reached and its capacities in the way of "take-off." But on going forth from Sir James' office, he could at first do little but marvel at the madness of Ashley Mead; for he knew that Ashley might have taken what he had just received, and he suspected that the great jump he had begun to meditate would have been easy to Ashley. For incontestably Alice had shown favour to Ashley--and had not shown favour to Bertie Jewett. Bob and Bertie lunched together at Bob's club that day, the occasion allowing a little feasting and relaxation from toil. The new project touching Alice was not even distantly approached, but Bertie detected in Bob a profound dissatisfaction with Ashley Mead. Ashley's refusal seemed to Bob a slur on the business, and concerning the business he was very sensitive. He remarked with mingled asperity and satisfaction that Ashley had "dished himself all round." The "all round" indicated something besides the big block in Buckingham Palace Road, and so was significant and precious to Bertie Jewett. "Naturally we aren't pleased," Bob said, assuming to express the collective views of the family. "Fact is, Ashley's got a bit too much side on, you know." Bertie Jewett laughed cautiously. "He doesn't like the shop, I suppose!" Bob pursued sarcastically. "I'm sorry Sir James is so much annoyed about it," remarked Bertie with apparent concern. "He'll see what a fool he's made of himself some day," said Bob. Alice was in his mind, but went unmentioned. Bob's opinion was shared in its entirety by Irene Kilnorton, who came over to express it to Alice as soon as the news reached her through Bowdon. Bowdon had heard it from Ashley himself, they being together on the business of the Commission. Irene was amazed to find Alice on Ashley's side and would allow no merit to her point of view. "Oh, no, it's all wrong," she declared. "It would have been good for him in every way; it would have settled him." "I don't want him settled," said Alice. "Oh, if you knew how tired I get of the business sometimes! Besides it will make Mr. Jewett so happy. He takes Ashley's place, you know, though father won't give him as big a share as he'd have given Ashley." "Well, I shall tell Mr. Mead what I think of him." She paused, hesitating a moment as to whether she should say a disagreeable thing or not. But she was annoyed by Alice's attitude and decided to say it. "Not that he'll care what I say or what anybody says, except Ora Pinsent," she ended. "Won't he?" asked Alice. She felt bound to interject something. "What a creature she is!" cried Irene. "When I went to see her this morning, I found her in tears. What about? Oh, I don't know. But I spoke to her sensibly." "Poor Miss Pinsent!" "I said, 'My dear Ora, I suppose you've done something silly and now you're sorry for yourself. For goodness' sake, though, don't ask me to be sorry for you.'" "Had she asked you?" said Alice with a smile. Lady Kilnorton took no notice of the question. "I suppose," she went on scornfully, "that she wanted to be petted. I wasn't going to pet her." "I think I should have petted her. She'd be nice to pet," Alice remarked thoughtfully. Irene seemed to lose patience. "You don't mean to say that you and she are going to make friends?" she exclaimed. "It would be too absurd." "Why shouldn't we? I liked her rather; at least I think so." "I wish to goodness that husband of hers would come back and look after her. What's more, I said so to her; but she only went on crying more and more." "You don't seem to have been very pleasant," Alice observed. "I suppose I wasn't," Irene admitted, half in remorse. "But that sort of person does annoy me so. As I was saying to Frank, you never know where to have them. Oh, but Ora doesn't mind it from me." "Then why did she cry more and more?" "I don't know--unless it was because I reminded her of Mr. Fenning's existence. I think it's a good thing to do sometimes." "Perhaps. I'm not sure, though, that I shouldn't leave it to Mr. Fenning himself." "My dear, respectability goes for something. The man's alive, after all." Alice knew that he was alive and in her heart knew that she was glad he was alive; but she was sorry that Ora should be made to cry by being invited to remember that he was alive. Irene was, presumably, happy with the man she had chosen; it was a good work leaning towards supererogation (if such were possible) when she took Ora's domestic relations under her wing. She hinted something of this sort. "Oh, that's what Ashley Mead says; we all know why he says it," was Irene's mode of receiving the good advice. A pause followed; Irene put her arm through Alice's and they began to walk about the garden. Lady Muddock was working at her embroidery at the open window; she was pronouncedly anti-Ashleyan, taking the colour of her opinions from her husband and even more from Bob. "Where's Lord Bowdon?" "Oh, at his tiresome Commission. He's coming to tea afterwards. I asked Mr. Mead, but he won't come." "You'll be happier alone together." Irene Kilnorton made no answer. She looked faintly doubtful and a trifle distressed. Presently she made a general remark. "It's an awful thing," she said, "to undertake--to back yourself, you know--to live all your life with a man and never bore him." "I'm sure you couldn't bore anybody." "Frank's rather easily bored, I'm afraid." "What nonsense! Why, you're making yourself unhappy just in the same way that Miss Pinsent--" "Oh, do stop talking about Ora Pinsent!" cried Irene fervently. Then she gave a sudden apprehensive glance at her companion and blushed a little. "I simply meant that men wanted such a lot of amusing," she ended. In recording her interview with Ora, Irene had somewhat exaggerated her brutality, just as in her reflexions about her friend she exaggerated her own common-sense. Ora drove her into protective measures; she found them in declaring herself as unlike to Ora as possible. In reality common-sense held no disproportionate or disagreeable sway in her soul; if it had, she would have been entirely content with the position which now existed, and with her relations towards Bowdon. There was nothing lacking which this vaunted common-sense could demand; it was stark sentimentality, and by consequence such folly as Ora herself might harbour and drop tears about, which whispered in her heart, saying that all was nothing so long as she was not for her lover the first and only woman in the world, so long as she still felt that she had seized him, not won him, so long as the mention of Ora's name still brought a look to his face and a check to his talk. It was against herself more than against Ora that she had railed in the garden; Ora had exasperated her because she knew in herself a temper as unreasonable as Ora's; she harped on Ora's husband ill-naturedly--as she went home, she confessed she had been ill-natured--because he who was to be her husband had dreamt of being Ora's lover. Even now he dared not speak her name, he dared not see her, he could not trust himself. The pledge his promised bride had wrung from him was safe so long as he did not see or let himself think of Ora. It was thus that Irene read his mind. She read it rightly--to his own sorrow and remorse--rightly. He was surprised too. About taking the decisive step he had hesitated; except for circumstances rather accidentally provocative, perhaps he would not have taken it. But its virtue and power, if and when taken, he had not doubted. He had thought that by binding his actions with the chain of honour he would bind his feelings with the chain of love, that when his steps could not wander his fancy also would be tethered, that he could escape longing by abstinence, and smother a craving for one by committing himself to seem to crave for another. The maxims of that common-sense alternately lauded and reviled by Irene had told him that he would be successful in all this; he found himself successful in none of it. Ora would not go; her lure still drew him; as he sat at his Commission opposite to his secretary at the bottom of the table, he was jealous of his secretary. Thus he was restless, uncomfortable, contemptuous of himself. But he was resolute too. He was not a man who broke faith or took back his plighted word. Irene was to be his wife, was as good as his wife since his pledge was hers; he set himself to an obstinate fulfilment of his bargain, resolved that she should see in him nothing but a devoted lover, ignorant that she saw in him the thing which above all he wished to hide. Such of Ora's tears as might be apportioned to the unhappiness she caused to others were just now tolerably well justified, whatever must be thought of those which she shed on her own account. Here was Bowdon restless and contemptuous of himself, Irene bitter and ashamed, Alice with no surer, no more honest, comfort than the precarious existence of Mr. Fenning, Sir James Muddock (Ora was no doubt partly responsible here also) grievously disappointed and hurt; while the one person who might be considered to owe her something, Mr. Bertie Jewett, was as unconscious of his debt as she of his existence; both would have been surprised to learn that they had anything in the world to do with one another. But after all most of Ora's tears were for herself. Small wonder in face of that letter from Bridgeport, Connecticut! Bowdon wished to be married very soon; why wait, he asked; he was not as young as he had been; it would be pleasant to go to the country in August man and wife. In fine the chain of honour gave signs of being strained, and he proposed to tie up the other leg with the fetters of law; he wanted to make it more and more impossible that he should give another thought to anybody except his affianced wife. In marriage attachment becomes a habit, daily companionship strengthens it; surely that was so? And in the country, or, better still, on a yacht in mid-ocean, how could anything remind him of anybody else? But Irene would not hasten the day; she gave many reasons to countervail his; the one she did not give was a wild desire that he should be her lover before he became her husband. So on their feigned issues they discussed the matter. "The end of July?" he suggested. It was now mid-June. "Impossible, Frank!" she cried. "Perhaps November." In September and October Ora would be away. Two months with Ora away, absolutely away, perhaps forgotten! Irene built hopes high on these two months. "Not till November!" he groaned. The groan sounded well; but it meant "Don't leave me free all that time. Tie me up before then!" "Ashley Mead seems obstinate in his silly refusal of Sir James Muddock's offer," she said, anxious to get rid of the conflict. "Why should he take it?" asked Bowdon. "He can get along very well without it; I don't fancy him at the counter." "Oh, it's so evidently the sensible thing." "I've heard you tell him yourself not to go and sell ribbons." How exasperating are these reminders! "I've grown wiser in ever so many ways lately," she retorted with a smile. There was an opening for a lover here. She gave it him with a forlorn hope of its acceptance. "Yes; but I'm not sure it's a good thing to grow so very wise," he said. Then he came and sat by her. "You mustn't be sentimental," she warned him. "Remember we're elderly people." He insisted on being rather sentimental; with a keen jealousy she assessed his sincerity. Sometimes he almost persuaded her; she prayed so hard to be convinced; but the wish begot no true conviction. Then she was within an ace of throwing his pledge back in his face; but still she clung to her triumph with all its alloy and all its incompleteness. She had brought him to say he loved her; could she not bring him in very truth to love? Why had Ora but to lift a finger while she put out all her strength in vain? It would not have consoled her a whit had she been reminded of Ora's tears. Like most of us, she would have chosen to win and weep. As Bowdon strolled slowly back through the Park, repeating how charming Irene was and how wise and fortunate he himself was, he met Ashley Mead. Ashley was swinging along at a good pace, his coat-tails flying in the wind behind him. When Bowdon first saw him he was smiling and his lips were moving, as though he were talking to himself in a pleasant vein. In response to his friend's hail, he stopped, looked at his watch, and announced that he had ten minutes to spare. "Where are you off to in such a hurry?" asked Bowdon. Ashley looked openly happy; he had an air of being content with life, of being sure that he could make something satisfactory out of it, and of having forgotten, for the time being at all events, any incidental drawbacks which might attend on it. Bowdon was smitten with an affectionate envy, and regarded the young man with a grim smile. "Going to see a lady," said Ashley. "You seem to be making a day of it," observed Bowdon. "In the morning you refuse a fortune, in the afternoon--" "Oh, you've heard about the fortune, have you? I've just been down to Buckingham Palace Road, to congratulate young Jewett on being in--and myself on being out. Now, as I mentioned, Lord Bowdon--" "Now you're on your way to see Miss Pinsent?" "Right; you've guessed it, my lord," laughed Ashley. "You don't seem to be ashamed of yourself." "No, I'm not." "You know all about Mr. Fenning?" "Well, as much as most of us know about him. But I don't see why I shouldn't take tea with Miss Ora Pinsent." Bowdon turned and began to walk slowly along beside Ashley; Ashley looked at his watch again and resigned himself to another five minutes. He owed something to Bowdon; he could spare him five of Ora's minutes; to confess the truth, moreover, he was a little early, although he had made up his mind not to be. "Jewett's the ablest little cad, I know," said Ashley. "At least I think he's a cad, though I can't exactly tell you why." "Of course he's a cad," said Bowdon, who had dined with Bob Muddock to meet him. "There's no salient point you can lay hold of," mused Ashley; "it's pervasive; you can tell it when you see him with women, you know; that brings it out. But he's got a head on his shoulders." "That's more than can be said for you at this moment, my friend." "I'm enjoying myself very much, thank you," said Ashley with a radiant smile. "You won't be for long," retorted Bowdon, half in sorrow, half in the involuntary malice so often aroused by the sight of gay happiness. "Look here, you ought to be idiotic yourself just now," Ashley remonstrated. Then out came his watch again. The sight of it relieved Bowdon from the fear that he had betrayed himself; evidently he occupied no place at all in his companion's thoughts. "Be off," he said with rueful good-nature. "Only don't say I didn't tell you." Ashley laughed, nodded carelessly, and set off again at his round pace. But presently the round pace became intolerably slow, and he hailed a hansom. He was by way of being economical about hansoms, often pointing out how fares mounted up; but he took a good many. He was soon landed at the little house in Chelsea. Ora was not in the room when Janet ushered him in. "I'll tell my mistress, sir," said Janet gravely, taking up a smelling-bottle which stood on Ora's little table and carrying it off with her. Blind to this subtle indication that all was not well in the house, Ashley roamed about the room. He noticed with much satisfaction his portrait in the silver frame and his roses in a vase; then he looked at the photographs on the mantel-piece; falling from these, his eyes rested for a moment in idleness on a letter which bore the postmark "Bridgeport, Conn." "Ah, here she is!" he cried, as a step sounded and the door-handle was turned. Ora entered and closed the door; but she did not advance towards him; the smelling-bottle was in her hand. "I wrote you a note telling you not to come," she said. "Thank heaven I didn't get it," he answered cheerfully. "I haven't been home since the morning. You can't send me away now, can you?" Ora walked slowly towards the sofa; he met her half-way and held out both his hands; she gave him one of hers in a listless despairing fashion. "Oh, I know!" said he. "You've been making yourself unhappy?" She waved him away gently, and sat down. "What was in the note you wrote me?" he asked, standing opposite to her. "That I could never see you again," she said. "Oh, come!" Ashley expostulated with a laugh. "That's rather summary, isn't it? What have I done?" "Irene Kilnorton has been here." "Ah! And was she disagreeable? She is sometimes--from a sense of duty or what she takes for it." "Yes, she was disagreeable." "If that's all--" he began, taking a step forward. "That's not all," Ora interrupted. "Are my eyes red?" "You've not been crying?" "Yes, I have," she retorted, almost angrily. "Oh, why did I go with you on Sunday? Why did you make me go?" She seemed to be conscience-stricken; he drew up a chair and sat down by her. She did not send him away now but looked at him appealingly. She had something of the air that she had worn in the inn parlour, but there joy had been mingled with her appeal; there was no joy in her eyes now. "We didn't do much harm on Sunday," he said. "I believe I'm preventing you doing what you ought to do, what all your friends wish for you, what would be best for you. It's just like me. I can't help it." "What are you preventing me from doing?" "Oh, you know. Irene says you are quite getting to like her. And she's so nice." "But Lady Kilnorton's engaged already." "You know I don't mean Lady Kilnorton. Don't make fun now, Ashley, don't." Ashley leant forward suddenly and kissed her cheek. "Oh, that's not the least use," she moaned disconsolately. "If that was all that's wanted, I know you'd do it." A mournful smile appeared on her lips. "But it only makes it worse. I've made up my mind to something." "So have I. I've made up my mind that you're the most charming woman in the world, and that I don't care a hang about anything else." "But you must, you know. We must be reasonable." "Oh, I see Irene Kilnorton's been very disagreeable!" "It's not Irene Kilnorton." "Is it my true happiness, then?" "No," said Ora, with another fugitive smile. "It's not exactly your true happiness." "Well, then, I don't know what it is." Ora was silent for a moment, her dark eyes filled with woe. "There's a letter on the mantel-piece," she said. "Will you give it to me?" He rose and took the letter. "This one from America?" he asked. "I say, you're not going off there, starring, are you? Because I shall have to come too, you know." "No, I'm not going there." She took the letter out of its envelope. "Read it," she said, and handed it to him. Somehow, before he read a word of it, the truth flashed into his mind. He looked at her and said one word: "Fenning?" She nodded and then let her head fall back on the sofa. He read the letter carefully and jealously; that it was written by a friend's hand no doubt prevented Jack Fenning from saying more, as he himself hinted; yet the colourlessness and restraint of what he wrote were a comfort to Ashley. He laid the letter down on the table and looked for a moment at his own picture. Ora's eyes were on him; he leant forward, took her hand, and raised it to his lips. "Poor dear!" said he. Then he folded the letter, put it in its envelope, laid the envelope on the mantel-piece, read Bridgeport, Conn., again on the postmark, and, turning, stood looking down on her. He had not got quite home to the heart of the situation. All that day long, as it seemed to him, there had been ineffectual efforts to stop him, to turn him from his path, and to rescue him from the impulses which were carrying him along. The Buckingham Palace Road proposal, Irene Kilnorton's hints, Alice Muddock's presence, had all been as it were suggestions to him; he had not heeded the suggestions. Now came something more categorical, something which must receive attention and insisted on being heeded. Mr. Fenning had suddenly stepped out of vagueness into definiteness, out of a sort of hypothetical into a very real and pressing form of existence. He was now located in space at Bridgeport, Connecticut; he was palpable in his written message; he became urgent for consideration by virtue of his proposal. Ashley had, in his heart, not taken Mr. Fenning very seriously; now Mr. Fenning chose to upset his attitude in that respect in a most decisive fashion. For whatever Ora decided to do, there must from now be a difference; Ashley could not doubt that. She might accept her husband's proposal; in that case her whole life was changed and his with it. She might refuse to have anything to do with it; but then would not the discarded but legitimate claimant on her affections and her society force her and him out of the compromise under which they now sheltered themselves? Either way, Jack Fenning must now be reckoned with; but which was to be the way? With a curious sense of surviving ignorance, with an uncomfortable recognition that he was only at the beginning of the study and on the outskirts of a knowledge of the woman whom he already loved and held nearest to him of anybody in the world, Ashley discovered that he had no idea in which way Ora would face the situation, what would be her temper, or what her decision. For the first time in their acquaintance a flash of discomfort, almost of apprehension, shot across his mind. Was she as alien, as foreign, as diverse from him as that? But he would not admit the feeling, would not have it or recognise it; it was absurd, he told himself, to expect to foresee her choice, when he knew so little of the factors which must decide it. Did he know Fenning, had he been privy to their married life? Not in her but in the nature of the case lay the puzzle. He dismissed his doubt and leant down towards the sad beautiful face beside him. "Well, dear?" he asked, very gently. "I'm going to tell him to come," said she. CHAPTER IX RENUNCIATION: A DRAMA The words in which Ora declared her intention of recalling Jack Fenning to her side and of taking up again the burden of married life sounded like the statement of a firm, unalterable, and independent resolution; after them it seemed as though Ashley had only to bow his head and go his ways; his task would be, if not easy, yet plain and simple. But with the brave sound came the appealing glance; the words were uttered more like a prayer than a decree. She had thrown herself on his mercy in the inn parlour on the Sunday; she appeared to throw herself on his mercy again now, and in reality to await his determination rather than announce her own. But she was eager to win from him the verdict that she suggested; she was not hoping for a refusal while she satisfied appearances by asking. The appeal was full of fear and doubt, but it was genuine and sincere. Her eyes followed him as he walked to the window and as he came back and stood again before her; she watched the struggle in him with anxiety. Once she smiled faintly as though to show her understanding and her sympathy with what was passing in his mind. "I feel all that too," she seemed to say. "Have you quite made up your mind?" he asked her at last. "You've realised what it means? I don't know him, of course, and you do. Well, can you do it?" "I must do it. I ought to do it," she said pathetically. "You know I ought to do it." He shrugged his shoulders; probably she was right there, unless Jack Fenning were a much worse calamity than he had any good reason for supposing; certainly everybody would hold her right, everybody who had not queer theories, at least. "You must help me," she said. He was silent. She rose and came to stand by him, speaking to him in a low whisper. "Yes, you must help me, you must make me able to do it. I can do it if you help me, Ashley. It is right, you know." A hint of amusement shewed itself in his face. "Perhaps, but I shouldn't have thought I could help you much," he said. "Unless you mean by going away and staying away?" "Oh, no, no," she cried in terror. "You mustn't go away, you mustn't leave me alone, I should die if you did that now. It's a thing for both of us to do; we must help one another. We shall make one another stronger. Don't you see what I mean? You won't go?" He had not fathomed her mood yet, but only one answer to her prayer was possible. "I won't go as long as you want me," he said. "You promise? You promise me that?" she insisted. "Yes, I promise," he assured her with another smile. "And you'll make it easy for me?" She, in her turn, smiled a moment. "I mean you won't make it too difficult? I must be good, you must let me be good. Some people say you're happy when you're good. I wonder! I shall be very miserable, I know." The tears were standing in her eyes; she looked indeed very miserable; he kissed her. "Yes," she murmured, as though he had told her in words that he pitied her very much; she preserved that childlike sort of attitude towards caresses; to Ashley it seemed to make kissing her almost meritorious. She saw no inconsistency between accepting his kisses and holding to her heroic resolution; it seemed almost as though she must be kissed to enable her to hold to her resolution; it was the sympathy, or even the commendation, without which her virtue could not stand. "I can do it," she said plaintively. Then she drew herself up a little. "Yes, I can," she repeated proudly, "I'm sure I can. We can do what we ought, if we try. Oh, but how I shall hate it! If only it had come a little sooner--before--before our Sunday! It wouldn't have been so bad, then." "No, it wouldn't," he said. "Poor Ashley!" she said, pressing his hand. "Will it be very hard for you?" He answered with the shamefaced brevity and reserve with which men, trained as he had been, confess to emotion. "I shan't like it, naturally." "But you must be strong too," she urged. "We must make each other strong." She returned with evident comfort to this idea of their helping one another; they were to fight as allies, in a joint battle, not each to support a solitary unaided struggle. To most people it would have seemed that they would make one another weak. Ora was sure of the contrary; they would make one another strong, support one another against temptation, and applaud one another's successes. She could be good, could be even heroic, could perform miracles of duty and resignation, if she had the help of Ashley's sympathy and the comfort of his presence. And he would feel the same, she thought; she could soften the trial to which she was obliged to subject him; she could console him; her tender grief and her love, ardent while renouncing, would inspire him to the task of duty. She grew eager as this idea took shape in her mind; she pressed it on him, anxious to make him see it in the aspect in which she saw it, to understand the truth and to appreciate the beauty that lay in it. She was sure it was true. It surprised her to find this beauty also in it. But if they separated now, cut themselves adrift from one another, and went off their different ways, all that drew her in the picture would be destroyed, and she would be left without the balm of its melancholy sweetness. She tried by every means in her power to enlist him on her side and make him look at the question as she looked at it. Always obedient to her pleading orders, never able openly to reject what she prayed him to accept, Ashley feigned to fall in with an idea which his clearsightedness shewed very much in its real colours and traced to its true origin. It had begun in the instinctive desire not to lose him yet, to put off the day of sacrifice, to reconcile, so far as might be possible, two inconsistent courses, to pay duty its lawful tribute and yet keep a secret dole for the rebel emotion which she loved. Up to this point she was on ground common enough, and did only what many men and women seek and strive to do. Her individual nature shewed itself in the next step, when the idea that she had made began to attract her, to grow beautiful, to shape itself into a picture of renunciatory passion, moving and appealing in her eyes. But there must be other eyes; he too must see; by interchange of glances they must share and heighten their appreciation of what they were engaged on. Her morality, her effort to be, as she put it, good, must not only be liberally touched by emotion; it must be supported and stimulated by sympathetic applause. Reluctantly and almost with a sense of ungenerousness, as though he were criticising her ill-naturedly, he found himself applying to her the terms of her own art, beginning to see her in effective scenes, to detect an element of the theatrical in her mood. This notion came to him without bringing with it any repugnance and without making him impute to her any insincerity. She was sincere enough, indeed absolutely engrossed in her emotion and in the picture her emotion made. But the sincerity was more of emotion than of purpose, and the emotion demanded applause for the splendid feat of self-abnegation which it was to enable her and him to achieve. He was quite incapable of casting this glamour round his own share in the matter, but he strove to feel and perceive it in hers as she pleaded softly with him that he should not leave her to struggle in grim solitude. And he was glad of any excuse for not leaving her. "I can't think yet of what it will be like when he's come," she said. "I mustn't think of that, or--or I couldn't go on. I must just do it now; that's what we've got to do, isn't it? We must get it done, Ashley, and leave all the rest. We must just do what's right without looking beyond it." "There's no particular good in looking forward," he admitted ruefully. "You're quite clear about it?" "Oh, yes, aren't you? I'm sure you are." She looked at him apprehensively. "You mustn't turn against me. I can be strong with you to help me; I couldn't be strong against you." Her voice fell even lower. "Not for an hour," she ended in a whisper. Again she threw herself on his mercy; again he could not fail her or be deaf to her prayer. "If you think it right, I can say nothing against it," he said. "No. You wouldn't be happy if you did; I mean if you did persuade me to anything else. I know there aren't many men like you, capable of doing what you're going to do for me. But you can do it." He perceived the glamour encircling him now as well as her; quarrelling with his own words, still he said to himself that his part also was to be an effective one; she was liberal to him and shewed no desire to occupy all the stage; her eyes would be as much for him as for herself. "And because you're strong, I can be strong," she went on. "We shall both be glad afterwards, shan't we?" "Let's rest in the consciousness of virtue, and never mind the gladness," he suggested. Ora discarded the gladness almost eagerly. "Yes," she said. "Because we shall both be terribly unhappy. We've got to face that. We aren't doing it blindly. We know what it means." He doubted greatly whether she knew what it meant; she could not realise its meaning so long as she refused to look forward or to consider the actual state of things when Jack Fenning had arrived, so long as she preferred to concentrate all her gaze on the drama of renunciation which was to precede and bring about his coming. But in all this there was only an added pathos to him, a stronger appeal to his compassion, and an insuperable difficulty in the way of even trying to make her understand; such an attempt seemed brutal in his eyes. He could comfort her now; he could not tell her that when the moving scene ended with the entrance of Jack Fenning he would be able to comfort her no more. The same mood which prevented her from looking forward made her reluctant to talk of her husband as he actually was. Under pressure of Ashley's questions she told him that she had begun by loving Jack and had gone on liking him for some little while; but that he bore poverty badly and yet was indolent; that he often neglected her and sometimes had been unkind; that he was very extravagant, got into terrible money difficulties, and had been known to turn to the bottle for relief from his self-created troubles. But she became very distressed with the subject and obviously preferred to leave Jack Fenning vague, to keep him to the part of a husband in the abstract. This was all the drama needed--a husband accepted in duty but no longer loved or desired; the personal characteristics or peculiarities of the particular husband were unessential and unimportant. Ashley was surprised to find how little he had learnt about Mr. Fenning. But he was learning more about Mr. Fenning's wife. "It's not what he is," urged Ora, "it's what we've got to do." By now Ashley felt irrevocably coupled with her in a common task; and to him at least the precise character of the husband was not important. They were to act on the high plane of duty; Jack's past misdeeds or present defects were to be of no moment except in so far as they might intensify the struggle and enhance the beauty of renunciation. Ashley was so far infected with her spirit that he was glad to be left with a number of impressions of Jack Fenning all vaguely unfavourable. "Nothing will ever alter or spoil the memory of our Sunday," she said. "It'll be there always, the one sweet and perfect thing in life. I think we shall find it even more perfect because of what we're going to do. I shall think about it every day as long as I live. I think it helps to have been happy just once, don't you? It'll never be as if we hadn't known we loved one another." With the dismissal of the topic of Jack Fenning's character and the acceptance of the position that they were not to look forward beyond the act of renunciation, Ora had grown composed, cheerful, and at moments almost gay. Already she seemed to have triumphed in her struggle, or their struggle as she always called it; already she was minded to exchange congratulations with her ally. Her mere presence was such a charm to him as to win him to happiness, even while they were agreeing that happiness was impossible; the sense of loss, of deprivation, and of emptiness was postponed and could not assert itself while she moved before his eyes in the variety of her beauty and grace. Though he could accord but a very half-hearted adhesion to the scheme she had planned, again he welcomed it, because for the time at least it left her to him; nor could he be altogether sorrowful when she made her great and confessed love for him the basis on which the whole plan rested, the postulate that gave to the drama all its point and to the sacrifice all its merit. If she were triumphing in renunciation, he triumphed in a victory no less great, and hardly less sweet because the fruits of it were denied to him, because it was to rank as a memory, and not to become a perpetual joy. At least she loved him, trusted him, depended on him; he was to her more than any man; he was her choice. He would not have changed parts with Jack Fenning although he had to go out of her life and Jack was coming into it again. Surely to be desired is more than to possess? "I suppose people suspect about us," she said. "I'm sure Irene does, and I think Miss Muddock does. But we've nothing to be ashamed of; we can't help loving one another and we're going to do right." She paused a moment, and then, looking at him with a timid smile, added, "How awfully surprised everybody will be when they hear that Jack's coming back! I think a lot of them hardly believed in him." No doubt she divined accurately the nature of a considerable body of opinion. "I daresay not," said Ashley. "You'll tell people what's going to happen?" "Just my friends. It would look so odd if he came without any warning." It could not be denied that she was interested in thinking of the effect which her news would create. She saw herself telling it to people. "Of course I shall announce it as if it was the most ordinary thing," she went on. "You must do the same; say I told you about it. They'll be rather puzzled, won't they?" "Oh, my dear!" said he, half laughing, half groaning, as he took her hand for a moment and pressed it lightly. "Yes, I daresay they'll be puzzled," he added with a rueful smile. "We mustn't shew we notice anything of that sort," pursued Ora. "Nobody must see what it is we're really doing. They won't know anything about it." Her eyes fixed themselves on his. "I daresay they'll suspect," she ended. "We can't help that, can we?" "We must keep our own counsel." "Yes. If they like to talk, they must, that's all." She had more to say of this secret of theirs, talked about, guessed at, canvassed, but not fully understood and never betrayed; it was to be something exclusively their own, hidden and sacred, a memory for ever between them, a puzzle to all the rest of the world. "I daresay they'll guess that we care for one another," she said, "but they'll never know the whole truth. I expect they wouldn't believe in it if they did. They wouldn't think we could do what we're going to." Not till he prepared to go did her sorrow and desolation again become acutely felt. She held his arms and prayed him not to leave her. "You must rest a little while and eat something before you go to the theatre," he reminded her. "No, no, don't leave me. Stay with me, do stay with me. Why can't I always have you with me? Why shouldn't I? How cruel it is!" She was almost sobbing. "Ashley, don't go," she whispered. "Well, I won't go," he said. "I'll stay and dine with you and take you to the theatre." "And fetch me home afterwards?" "No, I don't think I'll do that as well." "Why not?" she asked resentfully. Ashley shook his head. After a long look at him Ora sighed deeply. "I suppose you'd better not," she admitted. "But you'll stay now, won't you?" She ran across to the bell and rang it; her tone was gay as she told Janet that Mr. Mead would dine with her; between being left now and being left two hours hence a gulf of difference yawned. "I'm afraid there's not much dinner, ma'am," said Janet in a discouraging, perhaps a disapproving, way. "Oh, you won't mind that, will you?" she cried to Ashley, and when Janet went out she sighed, "It's so nice to have you." His smile had mockery in it as well as love. "It's for such a little while too," she went on. "Presently I shan't have you at all." The little meal that they took together--Ashley ignoring an engagement to dine with friends, Ora seeming unmindful of things much harder to forget--was not a sorrowful feast. The shadow of the great renunciation did not eclipse Ora's gaiety, but tempered it with a soft tenderness. None of her many phases had charmed her friend more; never had she seemed stronger in her claim on his service, more irresistible in the weakness with which she rested her life on his. His taste, his theoretical taste, had not been for women of this type, but rather, as he used to put it, for a woman with a backbone, a woman like Alice Muddock; theoretical preferences exist to be overthrown. The unpretentious "jobbed" victoria was waiting at the door, and at last Ora made up her mind to start. It was but a little after seven, the streets were still light and full. The beginning of the renunciation might have seemed a strange one to the passer-by who recognised the occupants of the victoria. Many looked at Ora, thinking they had seen her before; some certainly knew her, some also knew Ashley. In reply to a not very serious expostulation from her companion Ora declared that it did not matter if people gossipped a little, because her announcement would put an end to it all directly; meanwhile shouldn't they enjoy themselves while they could? "If you hadn't taken me to the theatre to-night, I could never have got there," she declared with conviction. Ashley knew quite well that this was not literal truth and that she would have gone anyhow; whatever had happened to her, her instinct would have taken her; but the untruth had a truth in it and she thought it all true. It was an instance of the way in which she had put herself in his hands, had told him what she wanted him to do with her, and was now leaving him to do it. He had, in a slang phrase which came into his mind, "to see her through;" he had to ensure that the great renunciation should be properly carried out. It was consoling, although no doubt somewhat whimsical, that the renunciation should seem to excuse what but for it would have been condemned as an imprudence, and, while dooming them to ultimate separation, should excuse or justify them in being as much together as they could in the present. It was "only for a little while;" the coming of Jack Fenning would end their pleasant hours and silence those who cavilled at them. The consciousness of their approaching virtue bred in Ora, and even in Ashley to some degree, both a sense of security and a tendency to recklessness; it seemed as though they had had no reason to fear either themselves or other people. "You might come and fetch me afterwards," she said coaxingly. But here he stood firm and repeated his refusal. She seemed surprised and a little hurt. But at the moment Babba Flint lifted his hat and bowed from the pavement with much _empressement_. "The story of our drive will be half over London by midnight," said Ashley. "It doesn't matter now," she assured him, lightly touching his hand. "Shall you write soon?" he asked. "Yes, to-morrow," she said. An idea seemed to strike her. "Hadn't I better telegraph?" she asked. "Wouldn't that look unnecessarily eager?" he suggested. The notion of a telegram stirred a jealousy, not of any real fact, but of the impression that it might convey to Mr. Fenning. He did not wish Jack Fenning to suppose that his home-coming was joyously awaited. Ora had been caught with the attraction of a telegram; it would emphasise the renunciation; but she understood the objection. "No," she said, "I'd better write. Because I shall have to explain the reasons for what I'm doing and tell him how--how we're to be to one another." She glanced at Ashley. He was looking straight in front of him. "I'll shew you the letter," she said in a low voice. "I don't want to see the letter; I won't see it," he returned. "Oh, it is hard for both of us!" she sighed. "But you know, dear, you know so well what you are to me; nobody ever has been or ever will be what you are. Won't you see the letter?" "No, I won't see the letter." Ora was disappointed; she would have liked sympathy and appreciation for the letter. Since these were not to be had, she determined to send quite a short business-like letter. "No," she said. "I won't enter on any sort of discussion. I shall just tell him that I don't feel justified in refusing him leave to come. That'll be best; afterwards we must be guided by circumstances." The "we" amused Ashley, for undoubtedly it served to couple Ora and himself, not Ora and her husband; from time to time he awoke for a moment to the queer humour of the situation. "We must see how he behaves himself," he said,--smiling. "Yes," she assented gravely, but a moment later, seeing his amusement, she broke into a responsive laugh, "I know why you're smiling," she said with a little nod, "but it is like that, isn't it?" Perhaps for the time it was, but it was very clear to him that it could not go on being. Professing to think of nothing but the renunciation, she had begun to construct an entirely impossible fabric of life on the basis of it. In this fabric Ashley played a large part; but no fabric could stand in which both he and Jack Fenning played large parts; and Jack's part was necessarily large in any fabric built with the renunciation for its cornerstone. Else where was the renunciation, where its virtue and its beauty? To see the impossibility of a situation and its necessary tendency to run into an _impasse_ is logically the forerunner to taking some step to end it. Since, however, logic is but one of several equal combatants in human hearts, men often do not act in accordance with its rules. They wait to have the situation ended for them from without; a sort of fatalism gains sway over them and is intensified by every growth of the difficulty in which they find themselves. Unconvinced by Ora's scheme and not thoroughly in harmony with her mood, Ashley acted as though the one satisfied and the other entirely dominated him. When they parted at the theatre door there were two understandings arrived at between them, both suggested by her, both accepted obediently by him. One was that he should not fail to come and see her next day, and the day after, and the day following on that; to this he pledged himself under sanction of his promise to be her ally in the struggle and not to forsake her. The other arrangement was that the letter of recall should be written and despatched to Jack Fenning within twenty-four hours. Ora reluctantly agreed that Ashley should not have any hand in its composition or even see it before it was sent, but she was sure that she not only must but also ought to render to him a very clear and full account of all that it did and did not contain. "Because," she said, as she gave him her hand in unwilling farewell, "we're going to fight this battle together, aren't we?" He nodded. "I couldn't fight it without you, indeed I couldn't," were the last words she spoke to him; they came with all the added force of the last imploring look from her eyes and the last pleading smile on her lips. Then the theatre swallowed her up, and he was left to walk home, to remember his neglected engagement, to telegraph excuses in regard to it, then speedily again to forget it, and to spend an evening in which despair, wonder, tenderness, and amusement each had their turn with him. He had not lost her yet, but he must lose her; this idea of hers was absurd, ludicrous, impossible, yet it was also sweet, persuasive, above all expressive of her in her mingled power and weakness. It was herself; and from it, therefore, he could no more escape than he could from her. CHAPTER X THE LICENCE OF VIRTUE Irene Kilnorton was in a state of pardonable irritation; just now she often inclined to irritation, but the immediate cause of this fit and its sufficient excuse lay in Babba Flint's behaviour. If only he could have believed it, he always annoyed her; but it was outrageous beyond the common to come on her "At Home" day, and openly scout her most interesting, most exciting, most comforting piece of news. He stuck his glass in his eye, stared through it an instant, and dropped it with an air of contemptuous incredulity. "She told me herself," said Irene angrily. "I suppose that's pretty good authority." "The very worst," retorted Babba calmly. "She's just the person who has an interest in spreading the idea. Mind you, I don't say he doesn't exist; I reserve judgment as to that because I'm aware that he used to. But I do say he won't turn up, and I'm willing to take any reasonable bet on the subject. In fact the whole thing is as plain as a pikestaff." "What whole thing?" She spoke low, she did not want the rest to hear. Babba spread his hands in a deprecating toleration for his hostess' density. "She's everywhere with Mead," he said. "Drives to the theatre with him, you know, walks with him, talks about him." "That doesn't explain anything, even if it's true." "Doesn't it? When you're being indiscreet, lay emphasis on your husband. That's the standing rule, Lady Kilnorton. You'll see; when she gets tired of Mead, we shall hear no more of Jack Fenning." Irene looked at him resentfully; he was abominably confident. And after all Ora was a strange being; in spite of their friendship, still outside her comprehension and not reducible to her formulas. "But she's full of his coming," she expostulated. "She's--well, not exactly glad, I suppose--" "I should suppose not," smiled Babba. "But quite excited about it. And Mr. Mead knows he's coming too." "No doubt Mead says he knows he's coming." Babba had once served his articles to a solicitor, and reminiscences of the rules of evidence and the value of testimony hung about him. "Well, I believe he'll come," Irene declared with external firmness and an internal faintness. "He won't, you'll see," returned Babba placidly. Desiring an end to this vexatious conversation, Irene cast her eyes round her guests who were engaged in drinking tea and making talk to one another. Her glance detached Bowdon from his attendance on Minna Soames and brought him to her side; Babba, however, did not move away. "The whole thing is very likely a despairing effort of Miss Pinsent's conscience," he said. "How are you, Lord Bowdon?" "Ah, Babba, you here? Gossipping as usual, I see." "He says Ora's husband won't come." "Well, he doesn't know anything about it." "I'll take six to four," said Babba eagerly. "I don't think I care to bet about it," said Bowdon. "Ah, I expect not!" For Babba the only possible reason against making any bet in the world was the fear of losing it. "Do go and talk to Minna Soames," Irene implored him. "She'll be ready enough to disbelieve anything creditable about poor Ora." Babba smiled knowingly and began to edge away. Bowdon sat down by his _fiancée_. "I do believe it, you know," she said, turning to him. Babba looked back with a derisive smile. "Why should she say it, if it's not true?" asked Irene, addressing Bowdon and pointedly ignoring Babba. "Oh, no doubt it's true," said Bowdon. "Why shouldn't it be true?" Babba had put forward the constant companionship of Ora and Ashley Mead at once as evidence that the report was not true and as the explanation of its being circulated; Irene was inclined to attribute to it only the first of these functions. "She goes on very oddly, if it is," she murmured. "But then she is odd." "It's true, depend upon it," said Bowdon. His solid persistence both comforted and exasperated her. She desired to think the report true, but she did not wish him to accept it merely in the unquestioning loyalty to Ora Pinsent which his tone implied. A thing was not true simply because Ora chose to say it; men lose all their common-sense where a woman is concerned; so say women themselves; so said Irene Kilnorton. "What impresses me," she went on, "is that Ashley Mead told me." "I suppose he got his information from her." "Of course; but he can judge." She paused and added, "It's a very good thing, if it is true." "Is it?" asked Bowdon. The question was an almost naked dissent. Irene looked at him severely. "It seems to me," she observed, "that men ought to pretend to approve of respectability. One doesn't ask them to be respectable." "The man's a scamp, according to all accounts." "He's her husband." "He'll make her miserable, and take her money, and so on." "No doubt his arrival will be inconvenient in a good many ways," Irene allowed herself to remark with significant emphasis. She had, she declared, no patience with the way men looked at such things; the man was the woman's husband after all. She found growing in her a strong disposition to champion Mr. Fenning's cause through thick and thin. "We don't know his version of the case," she reminded Bowdon after a pause. "Oh, that's true, of course," he conceded with what she felt was an empty show of fairness. In reality he had prejudged the case and condemned the absent and unheard defendant. That was because he was a man and Ora Pinsent good-looking; a habit regrettable in men generally becomes exasperating, almost insulting, in one's own lover, especially with circumstances of a peculiar nature existing in the past and still very vivid in memory. One way in which the news affected Bowdon he had allowed Irene to perceive; he was not at his ease as to how Ora would fare, and there was a touch of jealousy in his picture of Mr. Fenning's probable conduct. But he was conscious also of thankfulness that he had escaped from the sort of position in which he might have been placed had he yielded to his impulse, and in which, so far as he saw, Ashley Mead was now involved. His dignity would not have suffered him to enter into any rivalry with Fenning, while to leave the field clear to Fenning would have been a sacrifice hard to make. From this evil fortune the woman by him had rescued him, or enabled him to rescue himself, and he was full of gratitude to her; while she was still resenting the jealousy which he had betrayed with regard to Ora Pinsent, he surprised her by some whispered words of more tenderness than he commonly used and by a look which sent new hope through her. Suddenly she grasped that this event might do what she had not been able to do, might reconcile him to what was, gradually wean him wholly from the thought of what might have been, and in the end render him to her entirely her own in heart and soul. She would be very grateful to Jack Fenning if he accomplished that for her; he would have remade her life. "You're quite gallant to-day," she whispered with a blush and a glad sparkle in her eyes. "We were very nearly quarrelling just now, weren't we?" she asked with a bright smile. "We'll never be nearer, my dear," he answered; he had the most intense desire to please her. "And about this Fenning man! Imagine!" she whispered in scornful amusement. Bowdon went off to the House and the other guests took their leave. When all had gone Alice Muddock arrived; the two ladies had arranged to dine and spend a quiet hour together before they went to the parties for which they were engaged. When they were left alone Alice, with a sigh, told her friend that Queen's Gate seemed like a refuge. "We've been so uncomfortable at home the last few days," she explained. "At least I've found it very uncomfortable. You know about Ashley and the business? Well, father's furious with him about it, so's Bob, so's my stepmother, of course. And then--" She paused as though in hesitation. "Well, and then?" asked Irene Kilnorton. "Bob's brought home a lot of gossip about him from the club. Has Mr. Flint been here?" Lady Kilnorton nodded tragically. "He told Bob something, and father's furious about that too. So he won't hear Ashley's name mentioned, and takes his revenge by having Bertie Jewett always in the house. And I don't think I much like Bertie Jewett, not every day anyhow." "I've only just made his acquaintance--through your brother." "Oh, he's just what he would be; it's not his fault, you know." She began to laugh. "He pays me marked attentions." "The Industrious Apprentice!" said Irene with a nod. "Ashley's the idle one." "It's all very absurd and very tiresome." She had risen and walked across the room. From the other end of it she asked abruptly, "What do they say about him and Miss Pinsent?" "Oh, my dear, what don't they say about everybody?" "I don't believe it. I like her; and of course I like him." "And I expect they like one another, so it's all harmonious," said Irene; but she repented the next moment. "I don't believe anything bad. But he's very silly about her. It'll all pass." After a moment, thanks to the new hope in her, she added a courageous generalisation. "Such nonsense never lasts long," she said. Then she looked at Alice, and it struck her suddenly that Alice would have referred to the news about Jack Fenning, had she known it; it seemed odd that everybody should not have heard of a subject so rich in interest. "You know about Mr. Fenning?" she asked. "Mr--? Oh, yes! You mean Miss Pinsent's husband? I know she has a husband, of course." Then she did not know the new development. "I've got a bit of news for you," said Irene luxuriously. "Guess." "I won't guess even to please you. I hate guessing." "Well, Mr. Fenning's coming home. I'll tell you all about it." Beyond the bare fact there was in reality very little to tell, but the fact was capable of being clothed with so much meaning, of being invested with so many attendant possibilities, of taking on such various colours, that it seemed in itself a budget of news. Alice did justice to its claims; she was undeniably interested; the two found themselves talking it over in a vein which prevented them from pretending to one another that they were not both excited about it. They felt like allies who rejoiced together at the coming of a reinforcement. Irene's satisfaction was open and declared; Alice was more reticent and inclined to thoughtfulness. But even as an abstract existence on the other side of the world Mr. Fenning had comforted her; his virtue as a balm was endlessly multiplied by the prospect of his arrival in concrete form and flesh. "The men amuse me," said Irene loftily. "They're all pitying Ora; they don't seem to give a thought to poor Mr. Fenning." "Have you seen Ashley since--since the news came?" "Yes, but only for a minute. He mentioned it as certain, but quite indifferently. Of course he'd pretend to be indifferent." "I suppose so," said Alice. "Perhaps he is really." "How can he be?" "Perhaps he means to take no notice of Mr. Fenning." "My dearest Alice!" cried Irene. "You absolutely shock me. Besides it isn't like that at all. Ora's most excited about his coming. I can't make them out, though." They fell to debating the constant companionship; the drive to the theatre, improved by Babba Flint's tongue into an invariable habit, was a puzzle, fitting very badly with an excited interest in Mr. Fenning's return. From these unprofitable enquiries they agreed to retreat to the solid basis of hope which the reappearance of the husband gave; on that they congratulated one another. Common danger breeds candour; common good fortune breeds candour; finally, a _tête-à-tête_ dinner breeds candour. By the time they reached the sweets Irene Kilnorton, in the course of a demonstration that Ashley must and would get over his infatuation, that such nonsense never lasted, and that Mr. Fenning's return would put a summary end to anything of the sort, had confided to her friend that just for a little while Lord Bowdon had shewn signs of an inclination to hover round the same perilous flame. She was able to reveal the secret now, because she was so full of hope that it was all a thing of the past; she found her confidence itself strengthened by a bold assertion of it. "Frank's got over it pretty quickly, anyhow," she ended with a secure laugh. Alice was not so expansive, she had not victory to justify her; she said nothing in words, but when Irene accompanied her "It'll all come right, dear, you'll see," with a squeeze of the hand, she blushed and smiled, returned the squeeze, and kissed her friend on the first convenient opportunity. For all practical purposes the confession was complete, and the alliance sealed anew,--with the addition of a third, involuntary, and unconscious member in the person of Mr. Jack Fenning of Bridgeport, Connecticut. At Alice's party Ashley Mead appeared. Lady Muddock made timid efforts to avoid him and ludicrously timid attempts to snub him. He laughed at both, and insisted on talking to her with great cordiality for ten minutes before he carried Alice off to supper. Her he treated with even more than his usual friendly intimacy; he surprised her by displaying very high spirits. All went well with him, it seemed; he had been paid fine compliments on his work as secretary to the Commission; his acceptance of the post promised to help rather than hinder him at the Bar; he had received a suggestion that he should try his hand at a couple of articles a week for an important journal. "It's all quite wrong, of course," he said, laughing. "After refusing Buckingham Palace Road, I ought to be reduced to starvation and have to crawl back like the Prodigal Son. But the course of events is terribly unregenerate; it's always missing the moral. The world isn't very moral, left to itself." Alice loved him in this mood of gaiety; her own serious and sober disposition found relief in it. But she liked it more as a flower of talk than as a living rule of action. "I'm so glad," she said, with full sincerity. "Of course I knew that your getting on was only a matter of time." "I really believe," he said, "that I've at last just got the knife between the outside edges of the oyster shell. I hope it's a good oyster inside, though!" "It's sure to be a good one for you," was her answer. She could not help giving him that sort of answer; if it betrayed her, she must bear the betrayal. She gave him the answer even now, when he was under the ban of heavy disapproval on account of Ora Pinsent. But she wondered to find him so gay, in a state of such contentment with the world, and of such interest in it. Bearing in mind what she now knew, she would not have marvelled to find him in deepest depression or even in a hardly controlled despair. He looked down in her face with a merry laugh and some trifling joke which was only an excuse for it; his eyes dwelt on her face, apparently in a frank enjoyment of what he found there. But what could he, who looked daily on the face of Ora Pinsent, find there? His pleasure was absurd, she told herself, but it won upon her; at least she was not boring him; for the moment anyhow he was not wishing himself somewhere else. Here was a transient triumph over the lady with whom the gossips linked his name; to Alice's modesty it was much to make forgotten in absence one in whose presence she herself must have been at once forgotten. He began to flirt with her; he had done the same thing before, now and then, by way of a change she supposed, perhaps lest their friendship should sink too far into the brotherly-sisterly state. She desired this state less than he, but his deviations from it brought her pleasure alloyed with pain. Indeed she could not, as she admitted, quite understand flirtation; had it been all pretence she could have judged and would have condemned, but a thing so largely made up of pretence, and yet redeemed from mere pretence by a genuineness of the moment's mood, puzzled her. Fretfully aware of a serious bent in herself, of a temper perilously near to a dull literalness, she always tried to answer in kind when he, or indeed anybody else, offered to engage in the game with her. When it was Ashley she used to abandon herself, so far as her nature allowed her, to the present pleasure, but never got rid of the twofold feeling that he did not mean what he said and that he ought to mean more than he said. That he should flirt with her now was especially strange. She did not do him the injustice of supposing that he was employing her merely in order to throw the critics of his relations with Ora off the scent. She came nearer to the truth in concluding that the flirtation, like the rest of his bearing, was merely an outcome of general good-humour. The puzzle was postponed only one stage; how could he be in good-humour, how did he contrive to rejoice in his life and exult in it? He was in love with Ora Pinsent; such a love was hopeless if not disastrous, disastrous if not hopeless; in any aspect that she could perceive it was irremediably tragic. But Ashley Mead was radiant. The idea which Irene Kilnorton said absolutely shocked her recurred as a possible explanation; did he mean to take no notice of Mr. Fenning? An alarmed horror filled her; her love and her moral code joined in an urgent protest. Such a thing would mean degradation for him, it might mean ruin or something like it for his career; besides that, it must mean an end of him so far as she was concerned; it would set an impenetrable insurmountable barrier between them. But how did men approach a determination like that? Surely through sorrow, gloom, and despair? Ah, but there was sometimes a mad desperate gaiety that went with and covered such a resolve. She looked at him with a sudden distress that showed itself in her eyes and parted lips. The change in her caught his notice, but she was too engrossed with her fear to feel embarrassment or false shame. He broke off what he was saying to ask, "Why, what's the matter, Alice? Have you seen a ghost drinking champagne?" "They say you're being very foolish," she answered in a low steady voice, not moving her eyes from his face. "Oh, Ashley, you're not going to--to do anything mad?" A pause followed; presently he looked at her and said, with seeming surprise, "Have you been thinking of that all the time?" "No, only just now." "Why? I mean, what made you think of it?" "I've heard things. And you were so--I can't say what I mean! When people are very gay and in great spirits, and so on, don't the Scotch say they're fey, and that something will happen to them?" "Most nations have said so," he answered lightly; but a slight frown came on his brow, as he added, "So I'm fey, am I?" His laugh was a little bitter. "I've no right to speak to you." "Every right." Whatever was in his face, there was neither offence nor resentment. "Only it's not worth your while to bother," he went on. "You know I think it is," she answered with simple directness. He looked at her wistfully; for a moment there came to him such a mood as had arrested Bowdon's steps and availed to turn his feet into a new path. But Ashley's temper was not the same. He did not say that because this path was the best it should be his, be the other ever so attractive; he admitted with a sigh that the other was more attractive, nay, was irresistible, and held on his way straight to it. "You're one of the best people in the world, Alice," he said. And he added, smiling, "Don't believe all you hear. Everybody is behaving very properly." "That's not the Kensington Palace Gardens' opinion." "I'm afraid I'm damned for ever in Sir James' eyes. Bertie Jewett reigns in my stead." "Yes, that's it exactly," she agreed. He shrugged his shoulders petulantly. "So be it," said he, with contemptuous resignation. "Oh, I don't mean that I think you look at it like that," he added an instant later. She wanted to speak to him about what Irene Kilnorton had told her; her desire was to hear from his own lips that he did not mean to take no notice of Mr. Fenning. The subject was difficult of approach, embarrassed by conventionalities and forbidden by her consciousness of a personal interest. Before she could find any way of attacking it indirectly, Ashley began to talk again fluently and merrily, and this mood lasted until she parted from him; she had no further chance of getting inside his guard, and went home, wondering still at his high spirits. On the whole she had drawn comfort from the evening. She decided to reject that far-fetched idea which called him fey because he was merry, and to repose on two solid facts: the first being that Ashley did not seem heart-broken, the second that Mr. Fenning was coming back to his wife. Among any people whom she could measure or understand, these two facts would have been of high importance, enough in themselves to determine the issue. But she felt about Ashley something of the same ignorance which paralysed all her efforts to understand Ora Pinsent or to forecast the actions of that gifted but bewildering lady. Certainly she would have been no more in her intellectual depth had she understood that the doings which were setting Babba Flint's tongue and all the other tongues a-wagging were simply a natural outcome and almost an integral part of a great scheme of renunciation. She could not be blamed. Ashley Mead himself was hardly less at a loss on the occasions when he allowed himself to take thought concerning the matter. But they were few; he could despair of the situation, and this he did often when he was alone; he could accept it, as he came to do when with Ora; he could abandon himself to the gaiety of the moment, as in the mood in which Alice had found him. But he could not think out the course of events. He had now only one clear purpose, to make things as easy as he could to Ora, to obey her commands, to fall in with her idea, to say nothing which would disturb the artificial tranquillity which she seemed to have achieved. The letter had started on its way to Jack Fenning, the renunciation was set on foot. The few days, the week or two, that still remained to them seemed to make little difference. To scandal he had become indifferent, the arrival was to confute it; of pain he had become reckless since it was everywhere and in every course; the opinions of his friends he gathered merely as a source of bitter amusement; the good fortune on which he had allowed himself to descant to Alice Muddock had a very ironical flavour about it, since it chose to come at the time when it could afford him no real gratification, when he was engrossed with another interest, when he had room only for one sorrow and only for one triumph. At supper at one of his clubs that night he chanced to find Mr. Sidney Hazlewood, who was a member. Ashley sat down beside him at the table, exchanging a careless nod. Mr. Hazlewood ate his supper with steady silent persistence; Ashley made rather poor work of a kidney; he had not really wanted supper, but preferred it to going home to bed. "You're not conversational," he observed at last to Hazlewood. "Afraid of interrupting your reverie," Hazlewood explained with a grim smile. "I shouldn't have sat down by you unless I'd wanted to talk. How's the piece going?" "First-rate. Thought you'd have known; you're about pretty often." "Yes, but I generally omit to enquire at the box office," said Ashley with an air of apology. Mr. Hazlewood pushed back his chair and threw down his napkin. Then he lit a cigar with great care and took several whiffs. At last he spoke. "Mind you, Mead," said he with a cautious air, "I don't say it's wrong of a man at your time of life to be a fool, and I don't say I haven't been just as great a fool myself, and I don't say that you haven't a better excuse for it than I ever had, and I don't say that half the men in town wouldn't be just as great fools as you if they had the chance." "I'm glad you're not going to say any of those absurd things," remarked Ashley with gravity. "But all I say is that you are a fool." "Is that quite all?" asked Ashley. Hazlewood's smile broadened a little. "Not quite," said he. "I left out one word. An epithet." Ashley surveyed him with a kindly and good-tempered smile. "Well, old chap, I don't see how you could say anything else," he observed. It was merely one, no doubt a typical one, of the opinions that had for the present to be disregarded. In due time the renunciation would confound them all. Of this Mr. Hazlewood and his like foresaw nothing; had it been shewn to them in a vision they would not have believed; if, _per impossibile_, they believed--Ashley's lips set tight and stern as imagination's ears listened to their cackling laughter. From of old virtue in man is by men praised with a sneer. CHAPTER XI WHAT IS TRUTH? There was one aspect of the renunciation on which Ora had the tact not to dwell in conversation with her faithful ally; it was, however, an added source of comfort to herself, and proved very useful at moments when her resolve needed reinforcement. As an incidental result of its main object, as a kind of byproduct of beneficence, the renunciation was to make Alice Muddock happy. Ora had always given a corner to this idea. To use the metaphor which insisted on occurring to Ashley, Alice had a part--not a big part, but a pretty part; in the last act her faithful love was to be rewarded. She would not (and could not consistently with the plan of the whole piece) look to receive a passionate attachment, but a reasonable and sober affection, such as her modest wisdom must incline her to accept, would in the end be hers; from it was to spring, not rapturous joy, but a temperate happiness, and a permanent union with Ashley Mead. Ashley was to be led to regard this as the best solution, to fall in with it at first in a kind of resignation, and later on to come to see that it had been the best thing under the circumstances of the case. Ora could bring him to perceive this (though perhaps nobody else could); to her Alice would owe the temperate happiness, and Ashley a settlement in life from all points of view most advantageous. Ora herself continued to have a good deal to do with this hypothetical wedded life; she pictured herself making appearances in it from time to time, assuaging difficulties, removing misunderstandings, perhaps renewing to Ashley her proof of its desirability, and shewing him once again that, sweet as her life with him and his with her must have proved, yet the renunciation had been and remained true wisdom, as well as the only right course. These postnuptial scenes with Ashley were very attractive to Ora in her moods of gentle melancholy. The picture of the married life in the considerable intervals during which she made no appearance in it, but was somewhere with Mr. Fenning, was left vague and undefined. Ora caught at a visit from Lord Bowdon as the first fruit of the renunciation and a promise of all that was to follow after. He had not come near her since the day when she dismissed him with her "Don't;" within a week from the announcement of Mr. Fenning's approaching return he paid a call on her. The inference was easy, and to a large extent it was correct. Ora could not resist drawing her visitor and Irene Kilnorton into the play; quite small parts were theirs, but they furnished the stage and heightened the general impression. Their married life also was to be tinged and coloured by the past; they also were to owe something to the renunciation; it had restored to them complete tranquillity, removed from him a wayward impulse, from her a jealous pang, and set them both on the straight path of unclouded happiness. She could not say any of this to Bowdon, but she hinted it to Ashley, who laughed, and when Bowdon came she hinted to him her hopes concerning Alice Muddock. He laughed like Ashley, but with a very doubtful expression in his eyes. By now the world was talking rather loudly about Miss Pinsent and Mr. Ashley Mead. Bowdon was inclined to think that his hostess was "humbugging" him in a somewhat transparent fashion. He did not resent it; he found, with an appreciable recrudescence of alarm, that he minded very little what she talked about so that she sat there and talked to him. His inward "Thank God, the fellow's coming!" was a triumphant vindication of part, at least, of Ora's faith in the renunciation. He pulled his moustache thoughtfully as he observed, "I suppose a match between Miss Muddock and Ashley was always an idea. Irene says old Sir James has been set on it for years." Sir James made a quiet and unobtrusive entry on the stage, bringing (by a legitimate stretch of fancy) his sympathetic wife with him; even Ora could not make anything of Bob for scenic purposes. "But Ashley's not a fellow to be forced into what he doesn't care about." "Not forced, no," murmured Ora. The method was not so crude as that. "And we've no right to take the lady's feelings for granted." "Oh, no," said Ora earnestly. "There are certainly no signs of anything of the sort at present." "At present! No!" she cried almost indignantly. Then she detected a hint of amusement in Bowdon's eye and began to laugh. In spite of all the sorrow and pain involved in the renunciation, its spice of secrecy and mystification sometimes extorted a smile from her; people were so hopelessly puzzled about it, so very far from guessing the truth, and so wide of the mark in their conjectures. Bowdon evidently shared the general bewilderment and felt a difficulty in talking to her about Ashley Mead. She presented him with another topic. "The news about you and Irene made me so happy," she said. "Irene's such a dear." "You're very kind," he muttered. This topic was not much less awkward than the other, and Ora's enthusiasm had imparted to her manner the intense cordiality and sympathy which made Irene say that she conveyed the idea of expecting to be kissed; he preferred that she should not suggest that idea to him. "It's such a lovely arrangement in every way," she pursued. "Isn't it?" Her eyes were raised to his; she had meant to be quite serious, but her look betrayed the sense of fun with which she offered her congratulations. She could not behave quite as though nothing had ever passed between them; she was willing to minimise but declined to annihilate a certain memory common to them. "I'm going to come and see you very often when you're married," she went on. Bowdon was willing enough to meet her subtly hinted mockery. "I hope you'll be very discreet," he said with a smile. "Oh, I'll be discreet. There isn't much to be discreet about, is there?" "That's not my fault," he allowed himself to remark as he rose to take leave. "Oh, you're not going yet?" she cried. "If you do I shall think it was simply a duty call. And it's so long since I've seen you." Her innate desire--it was almost an instinct--to have every man leave her with as much difficulty as possible imparted a pathetic earnestness to her tone. "Perhaps I shan't have many more chances of seeing you." "Many--after I'm married," he reminded her, smiling. "No, I'm serious now," she declared. "You--you know what's going to happen, Lord Bowdon?" "Yes, I know." "Of course when Jack comes home I shan't be so free. Besides--!" She did not end the sentence; the suppressed words would obviously have raised the question of Jack Fenning's acceptability to her friends. For his part Bowdon immediately became certain that Jack was a ruffian. He held out his hand, ostensibly in farewell; Ora took it and pressed it hard, her eyes the while demanding much sympathy. Bowdon found himself giving her intense sympathy; he had not before realised what this thing meant to her, he had been too much occupied with what it meant to him. He could not openly condole with her on her husband's return, but he came very near that point in his good-bye. "Your friends will always want to see you, and--and be eager to do anything in the world they can for you," he said. The pressure of her hand thanked him, and then he departed. As he walked out of the hall-door, he put his hat very firmly on his head and drew a long breath. He was conscious of having escaped a danger; and he could not deny, in spite of poor Ora's hard fortune, that the return of Mr. Fenning was a good thing. Good or bad, the coming was near now. The brief and business-like letter had reached Bridgeport, Connecticut, and had elicited a reply by cable. In eight days Mr. Fenning might be expected at Southampton. As the event approached, it seemed to become less and less real to Ashley; he found himself wondering whether a man who is to be hanged on Monday has more than the barest intellectual belief in the fact, whether it really sinks into his consciousness until the rope is absolutely round his neck. Accidents by sea and land suggested themselves to an irresponsible and non-indictable fancy; or Jack had merely meant to extort a gift of money; or his unstable purpose would change. The world that held himself and Ora seemed incapable of opening to receive Jack Fenning; something would happen. Nothing did happen except that the last days went on accomplishing themselves in their unmoved way, and when Ashley went to bed each night Jack Fenning was twenty-four hours nearer. Ora's conduct increased the sense of unreality. She wanted him always with her; she dissipated his scruples with radiant raillery or drowned them in threatened tears. On the other hand, she was full of Jack Fenning now; often talking about him, oftener still about how she would receive him. She sketched his career for Ashley's information; the son of a poor clergyman, he had obtained a berth in a shipowner's office at Hamburg; he had lost it and come home; he had made the acquaintance of a Jewish gentleman and been his clerk on the Stock Exchange; he had written a play and induced the Jewish gentleman to furnish money for its production; disaster followed; Jack became an auctioneer's clerk; the Jewish gentleman, with commendable forgivingness, had put him in the way of a successful gold mine (that is, a successfully floated gold mine); he had made two thousand pounds. "Then he married me," Ora interpolated into her summary narrative. The money was soon spent. Then came darker times, debts, queer expedients for avoiding, and queerer for contriving, payment, and at last a conviction that the air of America would suit him better for a time. The picture of a worthless, weak, idle, plausible rascal emerged tolerably complete from these scattered touches. One thing she added, new to her hearer and in a way unwelcome: Jack was--had been, she put it, still treating him as belonging to the past--extremely handsome. "Handsomer than you, much," she said, laughing, with her face very near his over his shoulder as he sat moodily by the window. He did not look round at her, until, by accident as it seemed and just possibly was, a curl of her dark hair touched his cheek; then he forgave her the handsomeness of Jack Fenning. Irene Kilnorton had been with her that day and had told her that, since she chose to have the man back, she must treat him properly and look as though she were glad to see him; that she must, in fact, give a fair trial to the experiment which she had decided to allow. Being thoroughly in harmony with the theory of renunciation, this advice made a great impression on Ora. She professed her joy that Jack was to arrive on a Sunday, because she would thus be free from the theatre and able to meet him at Southampton. To meet him at Southampton was an admirable way of treating him properly and of giving a fair trial to the experiment. Ashley's raised brows hinted that this excess of welcome was hardly due to the Prodigal. Ora insisted on it. He was past surprise by now, or he would have wondered when she went on: "But of course I can't go alone; I hate travelling alone; and I don't know anything about how the boats come in or anything. You must come with me, you know." "Oh, I'm to go with you, am I?" "Yes; and you'll go and find him and bring him to me. Somebody'll tell you which is him." "And then I'm to leave you with him and come back to town alone?" Ora's smile suddenly vanished. "Don't, dear," she said, laying her hand on his arm. That was her way always when he touched on the black side of the situation. Her plans and pictures still stopped short with the arrival of the boat. "It'll be our last time quite alone and uninterrupted together," she reminded him, as though he could forget the object of the expedition and be happy in the thought that it meant two hours with her. "I don't see why you shouldn't travel back with us," she added a moment later. "Oh, of course you will!" He chafed at her use of the word "us," for now it meant herself and Jack, and had the true matrimonial ring, asserting for Mr. Fenning a position which the law only, and not Ashley's habit of thought, accorded him. But he would have to accustom himself to this "us" and all that it conveyed. He forced himself to smile as he observed, "Perhaps Fenning'll want to smoke!" Ora laughed merrily and said that she hoped he would. Even to Ashley it seemed odd that the notion appeared to her rather as a happy possibility than as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of her attitude; she really thought it conceivable that Jack might go and smoke, while she and Ashley had another "last time quite alone together." But she had such an extraordinary power of commending absurdities to serious consideration that he caught himself rehearsing the best terms in which to make the suggestion to Mr. Fenning. In those days he had it always in mind to tell her a thing on which he was resolutely determined, which even she could not make him falter about. With the entry of Jack Fenning must come his own exit. He did not deceive himself as to his grounds for this resolve, or deck in any gorgeous colours of high principle what was at best no more than a dictate of self-respect and more probably in the main an instinct of pride. But from the hour of the arrival of the boat he meant to be no more an intimate friend of hers. Had his business engagements allowed he would have arranged to leave London. Absence from town was impossible to him without a loss which he could not encounter, but London is a large place, where people need not be met unless they are sought. He would deliver her over to her husband and go his way. But he did not tell her; she would either be very woeful, and that calamity he could not face, or she would give a thoughtless assent and go on making her pictures just the same. The resolution abode in his own heart as the one fixed point, as the one definite end to all this strange period of provisional indiscretion and unreal imaginings. When he thought of it, he rose to the wish that Jack might be still handsome and might prove more reputable and kinder than he had been in the old days. Ora herself was beginning to have hopes of Jack, or hopes of what she might make of him by her zealous care and dutiful fidelity; Ashley encouraged these hopes and they throve under his watering. In the course of the last week there was added to the great idea of a renunciation of Ashley the hardly less seductive and fascinating project of a reformation of Jack Fenning. This conception broadened and enriched the plot of the fanciful drama, added a fine scene or two, and supplied a new motive for the heroine. In the end Ora had great hopes of Jack in the future and a very much more charitable opinion of him in the past. She paid her promised visit to Alice Muddock on the Wednesday, Jack Fenning being due on the following Sunday. In these last days Ora devoted herself entirely to people who were, in some way or other, within the four corners of the scheme of renunciation. Alice was amazed to find in her a feeling about her husband's arrival hardly distinguishable from pleasure; at least she was sure that a cable message that he was not coming would have inflicted a serious disappointment on her visitor. But at the same time this strange creature was obviously, openly--a few weeks ago Alice would not have hesitated to say shamelessly--in love with Ashley Mead. The two men's names alternated on her lips; it seemed moral polyandry or little better. Alice's formulas were indeed at fault. And through it all ran the implied assertion that Alice was interested in the affair for a stronger reason than the friendship which she was so good as to offer to Ora. Here again, according to Ora's method, Irene Kilnorton's share in the scheme was hinted at, while Alice was left to infer her own. She did so readily enough, having drawn the inference on her own account beforehand, but her wonder at finding it in Ora's mind was not diminished. To be passionately in love with a man and to give him up was conceivable; any heights of self-sacrifice were within the purview of Alice's mind. To find a luxury in giving him up was beyond her. To return to a husband from a sense of duty would have been to Alice almost a matter of course, however bad the man might be; to set to work to make out that the man was not bad clashed directly with the honest perspicacity of her intellect. And, to crown all, in the interval, as a preparation for resuming the path of duty, to set all the town talking scandal and greet the scandal with a defiance terribly near to enjoyment! Alice, utterly at fault, grew impatient; her hard-won toleration was hard tried. "I'm sure you understand all I feel," said Ora, taking her friend's hand between hers. "Indeed I don't," replied Alice bluntly. "Anyhow you're sorry for me?" Ora pleaded. Here Alice could give the desired assurance. Ora was content; sympathy was what she wanted; whether it came from brain or heart was of small moment. By a coincidence, which at first sight looked perverse, Bob brought Babba Flint into Alice's room at tea-time. Alice did not like Babba, and feared that his coming would interrupt the revelation of herself which Ora in innocent unconsciousness was employed in giving. The result proved quite different. Babba had declared to Irene Kilnorton that the coming of Mr. Fenning was a figment concocted from caprice or perhaps with an indirect motive; he advanced the same view to Ora herself with unabashed impudence, yet with a seriousness which forbade the opinion that he merely jested. "Of course I can't tell whether you expect him, Miss Pinsent. All I know is he won't come." Babba's eye-glass fell from his eye in its most conclusive manner. "Oh, yes, he will," cried Ora triumphantly. "I know all about it; the boat, and the time, and everything else." "You'll see, he won't be there," Babba persisted. "I wonder if you'll be awfully surprised!" "Why should I say he's coming if he isn't?" asked Ora, but rather with amusement than indignation. "Oh, for an advertisement, or just because it came into your head, or as the homage liberty pays to matrimony; any reason you like, you know." Their debate filled Alice with wonder. It was strange that Ora should lend an ear to Babba's suggestions, that she should not at once silence him; yet she listened with apparent interest, although, of course, she repudiated the motives imputed to her and declared that in all sincerity she expected her husband. Babba fell back on blank assertion. "He won't come, you'll see," he repeated. The extreme impertinence of the little man moved Alice to resentment; in whatever sense his remarks were taken, they must bear an offensive meaning. But Ora did not seem resentful; strangely enough she began to shew signs of disturbance, she brought forward serious arguments to prove that Jack Fenning would come, and appealed to Babba to alter his opinion with pathetic eyes. Babba was inexorable. "Really you must allow Miss Pinsent to know," Alice expostulated. "It's a matter of experience," Babba observed. "They're always going to turn up, but they never do." "Why do you say he won't come?" asked Ora anxiously. "I've told you the reason. They never do," repeated Babba obstinately. Bob Muddock burst into a laugh, Alice frowned severely, Ora's brows were knit in puzzled wrinkles. This suggestion of an impediment in the way of the renunciation and reformation was quite new to her; but she did not appear to be struck at all by what seemed to Alice the indecency of discussing it. "Suppose he didn't!" Ora murmured audibly; a smile came slowly to her lips and her eyes seemed to grow full of half-imaged possibilities. Babba made no comment; his smile was enough for all who knew the facts of the present situation; for example, for all who knew in what company Miss Pinsent drove to the theatre. "If he didn't--" Ora began. Babba's mocking eye was on her. She began to laugh. "I know what you're thinking!" she cried with a menacing wave of her hand. The scene had become distasteful, almost unendurable, to Alice Muddock. Here was the side of Ora that she detested; it raised all the old prejudices in her and argued that they were well justified. She also knew what Babba Flint's look meant, and wanted to turn him out of the room for it. Such punishment would be only proper; it would also have propitiated in some degree the jealousy which made her unwilling to admit that possibly Mr. Fenning might not come. The young men went; she and Ora were alone together; Alice's feeling of hostility persisted and became manifest to Ora's quick perception. In an instant she implored pity and forgiveness by abandoning herself to condemnation. "Now you see what I am! And you might have been my friend!" she murmured. "But you don't know how unhappy I am." "I don't believe you're unhappy at all," said Alice with blunt barbarity. "Not unhappy!" exclaimed Ora in dismay. If she were not unhappy, the whole structure tumbled. "You will be, though," Alice pursued relentlessly. "You'll be very unhappy when Mr. Fenning comes, and I think you'd be unhappy if by any chance he didn't come." She paused and looked at her visitor. "I shouldn't like to be like you," she said thoughtfully. Ora sat quiet; there was a scared look on her face; she turned her eyes up to Alice who sat on a higher chair. "Why do you say that sort of thing to me?" she asked in a low voice. "It's quite true. I shouldn't. And all the rest is true too." Her voice grew harder and harder in opposition to an inner pleading for mercy. This woman should not wheedle her into lies; she would tell the truth for once, although Ora did sit there--looking like a child condemned to rigorous punishment. "It's not decent the way you talk about it, and let people talk about it," she broke out in a burst of indignation. "Have you no self-respect? Don't you know how people talk about you? Oh, I wouldn't be famous at the price of that!" Ora did not cry; the hurt was beyond tears; she grew white, her eyes were wide and her lips parted; she watched Alice as a dog seems to watch for the next fall of the whip. "You say you're unhappy. Lots of us are unhappy, but we don't tell all the world about it. And we don't hug our unhappiness either and make a play out of it." What Ashley had reluctantly and secretly thought came in stern and cutting plainness from Alice's lips; but Ashley would have died sooner than breathe a word of it to Ora. "I suppose," said Alice, "you think I'm angry because--because of something that concerns myself. I'm not, I'm just telling you the truth." She was sure that it was the truth, however it might be inspired, however it was that she had come to utter it. "What does that man say about you when you aren't there? He says almost everything to your face! And you laugh! What does he say after dinner, what does he say at his club?" "Please let me go home," said Ora. "Please let me go home." She seemed almost to stagger as she rose. "I must go home," she said, "Or--or I shan't have time for dinner." "I suppose you like--" Alice began, but she stopped herself. She had said enough; the face before her seemed older, thinner, drawn into lines that impaired its beauty, as it were scarred with a new knowledge; the eyes that met hers were terrified. "It's all true," she said to herself again. "Quite true. Only nobody has ever told her the truth." She rang the bell, but did not go with Ora to the door; neither of them thought of shaking hands; a quarter of an hour before Ora would have offered one of her ready kisses. Now she went quietly and silently to the door and opened it with timid noiselessness. As she went out, she looked back over her shoulder; a movement from Alice, the holding out of a hand, would have brought her back in a flood of tears and a burst of pitiful protests at once against herself and against the accusations laid to her charge. No sign came; Alice stood stern and immovable. "I'm late as it is. Good-bye," whispered Ora. She went out. Alice stood still where she was for a moment before she flung herself into a chair, exclaiming again, and this time aloud, "It's true, it's true; every word of it's the truth!" She was very anxious to convince herself that every word of it was true. CHAPTER XII AT CLOSE QUARTERS The next few days were critical for the renunciation, and consequently for the reformation which was to accompany it. In the first place, Jack Fenning was now very near; secondly, Ashley Mead's behaviour was so perfect as to suggest almost irresistibly an alternative course; finally, thanks to Alice Muddock's outspokenness, Ora was inclined to call virtue thankless and to decide that one whom all the world held wicked might just as well for all the world be wicked. She had appealed from Alice to Irene Kilnorton, hinting at the cruelty to which she had been subjected. She found no comfort; there was an ominous tightening of Irene's lips. Ora flew home and threw herself--the metaphorical just avoids passing into the literal--on Ashley's bosom. There were tears and protests against universal injustice; she cried to him, "Take me away from all of them!" What answer did she expect or desire? He could not tell. Mr. Fenning was due on Sunday, and Ora's piece was running still. Yet at the moment it seemed as though she would fly into space with him and a hand-bag, leaving renunciations, reformations, virtues, careers, and livelihoods to look after themselves, surrendering herself to the rare sweetness of unhindered impulse. For himself, he was ready; he had come to that state of mind in regard to her. His ordinary outlook on life was blocked by her image, his plan of existence, with all its lines of reason, of hope, of ambition, blurred by the touch of her finger. Only very far behind, somewhere remote in the background, lay the haunting conviction that these last, and not his present madness, would prove in the end the abiding reality. What made him refuse, or rather evade, the embracing of her request was that same helplessness in her which had restrained his kisses in the inn parlour. If she turned on him later, crying, "You could do what you liked with me, why did you do this with me?" what would he have to answer? "We'll settle it to-morrow; you must start for the theatre now," he said. "So I must. Am I awfully late?" cried Ora. That evening he dined with Bob Muddock. Bertie Jewett and Babba Flint were his fellow-guests. All three seemed to regard him with interest--Bob's, admiring; Bertie's, scornful; Babba's, amused. Bob envied the achievement of such a conquest; Bertie despised the man who wasted time on it; Babba was sympathetic and hinted confidential surprise that anybody made any bones about it. But they none of them doubted it; and of the renunciation none knew or took account. A course of action which fails to suggest itself to anybody incurs the suspicion of being mad, or at least wrong-headed and quixotic. Ashley told himself that his conduct was all these things, and had no countervailing grace of virtue. It was no virtue to fear a reproach in Ora's eyes; it was the merest cowardice; yet that fear was all that held him back. After dinner Bob drew him to a sofa apart from their companions and began to discuss the dramatic profession. Ashley suffered patiently, but his endurance changed to amusement when Bob passed to the neighbouring art of music, found in it a marked superiority, and observed that he had been talking over the subject with Minna Soames. "I don't see how anybody can object to singing at concerts," said Bob, with a shake of the head for inconceivable narrow-mindedness, "not even the governor." "Sits the wind in that quarter?" asked Ashley, laughing. "I've got my eye on her, if that's what you mean," answered Bob. "She's ripping, isn't she?" The vague and violent charms which the epithet seemed to imply were not Minna's. Ashley replied that she was undoubtedly pretty and charming. Bob eyed him with a questioning air; it was as though a man who had been on a merry-go-round were consulted by one who thought of venturing on the trip. "People talk a great deal of rot," Bob reflected. "A girl isn't degraded, or unsexed, or anything of that sort, just because she sings for her living." "Surely not," smiled Ashley. The prejudices were crying out in pain as Bob's newborn idea crushed and mangled them. "But the governor's so against all that sort of thing," Bob complained. Then he looked up at his friend. "That's mostly your fault," he added, with an awkward laugh. "My dear Bob, the cases are not parallel." "Well, Miss Soames hasn't got a husband, of course." There was no use in being angry, or even in representing that the remark which had seemed so obvious to Bob was a considerable liberty. "Imagine her with a thousand husbands, and still the cases couldn't be parallel." "She's not on the stage." "And if she were, the distinctions run by people, not by professions," said Ashley. "Well, I'm thinking of it," Bob announced. And he added, with a ludicrous air of desiring the suspicion, while he repudiated the fact, of dishonourable intentions, "All on the square, of course." "Good heavens, I should think so!" said Ashley. The imagination of man could attribute no crooked dealings or irregular positions to Miss Soames. "Still, I don't know about the governor," Bob ended, with a relapse into gloom. "She'd retire from her work, of course?" Ashley suggested, smiling. "If she married me? Oh, of course," said Bob decisively. "She wouldn't want the money, would she?" Any other end of a profession had not occurred to him, and his opinion that active and public avocations were not "unsexing" to women was limited by the proviso that such employments must be necessary for bread-and-butter. An eye for the variety of the human mind may make almost any society endurable. Here was Bob struggling with conscious daring against convention, as a prelude to paying his court to a lady who worshipped the god whom he persuaded himself to brave; here was Babba Flint drifting vulgarly, cheerfully, irresponsibly, through all his life and what money he happened from time to time to possess; here was Bertie Jewett, his feet set resolutely on the upward track, scorning diversion, crying "Excelsior" with exalted fervour as he pictured the gold he would gather and pocket on the summit of the hill; here, finally, was Ashley himself, who had once set out to climb another hill, and now eagerly turned his head to listen to a sweet voice that cried to him from the valley. Such differences may lie behind four precisely similar and equally spotless white shirt-fronts on the next sofa any evening that we drop into the club. Therefore it needs discrimination, and perhaps also some prepossessions, to assign degrees of merit to the different ideas of how time in this world had best be passed. "The fact is," Babba was saying to Bertie Jewett, as he nodded a knowing head towards Ashley, "he was getting restive, so she made up this yarn about her husband." He yawned, as if the matter were plain to dulness. "What an ass he is!" mused Bertie. "Don't you know the chance he had? He might have been where I am!" Babba turned a rather supercilious look on his companion. "The shop? Must be a damned grind, isn't it?" Bertie was nettled; he revealed a little of what he had begun to learn that he ought to conceal. "I bet you I earn a sovereign quicker than you earn a shilling," he remarked. "Daresay you do," murmured Babba, regarding the end of his cigar. Babba was vulgar, but not with this sort of vulgarity. "And more of 'em," pursued Bertie. "But you have an infernally slow life of it," Babba assured him. Babba was ignorant of the engrossing charms that sparkle in the eyes of wealth, forbidding weariness in its courtship, making all else dull and void of allurement to its votaries. To each man his own hunger. Back to his hunger went Ashley Mead, no less ravenous, yet seeing his craving in the new light of desires revealed to him, but still alien from him. All his world seemed now united in crying out to him to mind his steps, in pointing imploringly or mockingly to the abyss before his feet, in weeping, wondering, or laughing at him. That some of the protests were conscious, some unwitting, made no difference; the feeling of standing aloof from all the rest gave him a sense of doom, as though he were set apart for his work, and amidst condemnation, pity, and ridicule must go through with it. For to-morrow he thought that she would come with him, leaving Mr. Fenning desolate, Sidney Hazlewood groaning over agreements misunderstood as to their nature, friends heart-broken, and the world agape. But the next day she would not come, or, rather, prayed not to be taken. "You mustn't, you mustn't," she sobbed. "Alice Muddock had made me angry, oh, and hurt me so. I was ready to do anything. But don't, Ashley dear, don't! Do let me be good. That'll be the best way of answering her, won't it? I couldn't answer her then." "Alice? What's Alice been saying?" he asked, for he had not been told the details of that particular case of cruelty. "I can't tell you. Oh, it was horrible! Was it true? Say it wasn't true!" "You haven't told me what it was," he objected. "Oh dear me, neither I have!" cried Ora, drawing back from him; her eyes swam in tears, but her lips bent in smiles. "How awfully absurd of me!" she exclaimed, and broke into the low luxurious laughter that he loved. "Well, it was something bad of me; so it couldn't be true, could it?" He pressed her to tell him what it was and she told him, becoming again sorrowful and wounded as she rehearsed the story; the point of view surprised her so. To Ashley it was no surprise, nothing more than a sharp unsparing utterance of the doubts of his own mind. His quarrel with Alice was that she said it, not that she thought it; she was bound to think it when he in all his infatuation could not stifle the thought. Was he in love then with a bundle of emotions and ready to give away his life in exchange for a handful of poses? In self-defence he embraced the conclusion and twisted it to serve his purpose. What more is anybody, he asked--what more than the sheet on which slide after slide is momentarily shewn? "But still she was wrong," said Ora. "Oh, I can forgive her. Of course I forgive her. It's only because she's fond of you. I know I'm not really like that. It's not the true me, Ashley." The idea of the "true me" delighted Ora, and the "true me" required that Mr. Fenning should be met punctually on Sunday next. The renunciation raised its head again. "The 'true me,' then, is really a very sober and correct person?" asked Ashley. "Yes," she answered, enjoying the paradox she asserted. Her interest in herself was frank and almost might be called artistic. "Do you think me strange?" she asked. "I believe you're laughing at me half the time." "And the other half?" "We weep together, don't we? Poor Ashley!" On the Saturday he came to see her again in order to make final arrangements for their expedition of the next day. There was also a point on which they had never touched, to which, as he believed, Ora had given no consideration. Was Mr. Fenning to settle down in the little house at Chelsea? At present the establishment was in all its appearance and fittings so exclusively feminine that it seemed an impossible residence for a man. Ora was not in the room when Janet ushered him in; that respectable servant lingered near the door and, after a moment's apparent hesitation, spoke to him. "I beg pardon, sir," she said, "but could you tell me where I can get some good whiskey?" "Whiskey?" Ashley exclaimed in surprise. "Mr. Fenning, sir, used to be particular about his whiskey, and as he's--" "Oh, yes, of course, Janet." He thought for a moment and mentioned the wine merchant with whom Lord Bowdon dealt. "I think you'll be safe there," he ended with a nod. Janet thanked him and went out. "This really brings it home," said Ashley, dropping into a chair and laughing weakly to himself. "Tomorrow night Jack Fenning'll sit here and drink that whiskey, while I--" He rose abruptly and walked about the room. His portrait in the silver frame was still on the little table by Ora's favourite seat; not even a letter from Bridgeport, Connecticut, was there to hint of Mr. Fenning. The demand for a good whiskey seemed the sole forerunner of the wanderer's return. "She doesn't know in the least what she's doing," Ashley muttered as he flung himself into his seat again. That afternoon she was in the mood hardest for him to bear. She was sanguine about her husband; she recalled the short time they had contrived to be happy together, dwelt on the amiable points in his character, ascribed his weaknesses more to circumstances than to nature, and took on her own shoulders a generous share of blame for the household's shipwreck. All this is to say that the reformation for the instant took precedence of the renunciation, and a belief in the possibility, not perhaps of being happy with Jack, but at least of making Jack happy, was bedecked in the robes of a virtuous aspiration. "It would be no use having him back if I couldn't make him happy, would it?" she asked. She shewed sometimes this strange forgetfulness of her friend's feelings. "I know I've got a photograph of him somewhere," she said with a troubled little frown. "I wonder where it is!" Then a lucky thought brought a smile. "I expect he'd like to see it on the mantel-piece, wouldn't he?" she cried, turning to Ashley. "I should think he'd be very touched. He might even believe it had been there all the time." "Don't be sarcastic," said Ora good-humouredly. "I'll ask Janet where I've put it." Janet, being summoned and questioned, knew where Miss Pinsent had put the photograph, or anyhow where it was to be found. In a few minutes she produced it. "It is handsome, you see," said Ora, handing it across to Ashley. She appeared anxious for a favourable opinion from him. The face was certainly handsome. The features were straight, the eyes large, the brow well formed; there was no great appearance of intellect or resolution, but the smile was amiable. Ashley handed it back with a nod of assent, and Ora set it on the mantel-piece. Ashley's bitterness overflowed. "Put it in the frame instead of mine," he said, stretching out his hand to take his own portrait. In an instant Ora was across to the table and snatched up the picture. She held it close to her with both hands and stood fronting him defiantly. "No," she said, "no. You shan't touch it. Nobody shall touch it." He leant back with a smile of despairing amusement. She put down the portrait and came close to him, looking at him intently; then she dropped on her knees beside him and took his hand between hers. "Fancy you daring to think that!" she said. A look of terror came into her eyes. "You're not going to be like that?" she moaned. "I can't go on if you're going to be like that." He meant far more than he had hinted in his bitter speech; this afternoon he had intended to tell her his resolution; this was his last visit to the little house; from to-morrow afternoon he would be an acquaintance to whom she bowed in the streets, whom she met now and then by chance. He might tell her that now--now while she held his hands between hers. And if he told her that and convinced her of it, she would not go to meet Jack Fenning. He sat silent as she looked up in his eyes. His struggle was short; it lacked the dramatic presentment of Ora's mental conflicts, it had no heroic poses; but there emerged again clearly from the fight the old feeling that to use her love and his power in this fashion would not be playing fair; he must let her have her chance with her husband. "I was a brute, Ora," he said. "I'll do just what you like, dear." With a bound she was back to merriment and her sanguine view of favourable possibilities in Mr. Fenning. She built more and more on these last, growing excited as she pictured how recent years might, nay must, have improved him, how the faults of youth might, indeed would, have fallen away, and how the true man should be revealed. "And if he wants a friend, you'll always be one to him," she ended. Ashley, surrendering at discretion, promised to be a friend to Jack Fenning. The next day found her in the same temper. She was eager and high-strung, merry and full of laughs, thoughtfully kind, and again thoughtlessly most cruel. When he called for her in the morning she was ready, waiting for him; from her air they might have been starting again for a day in the country by themselves, going to sit again in the meadow by the river, going to dine again in the inn parlour whose window opened on the sweet old garden. No such reminiscences, so sharp in pain for him, seemed to rise in her or to mar her triumph. For triumphant she was; her great purpose was being carried out; renunciation accomplished, reformation on the point of beginning. Prosperously the play had run up to its last great scene; soon must the wondering applause of friends fall on her ear; soon would Alice Muddock own that her virtue had been too cruel, and Babba Flint confess his worldly sagacity at fault. To herself now she was a heroine, and she rejoiced in her achievements with the innocent vanity of a child who displays her accomplishments to friendly eyes. How much she had suffered, how much forgone, how much resisted! Now she was to reap her reward. Their train was late; if the boat had made a good passage it would be in before them; the passengers who had friends to meet them would be in waiting. They might find Jack Fenning on the platform as their engine steamed into the station. They had talked over this half way through the journey, and Ora seemed rather pleased at the prospect; Ashley took advantage of her happy mood to point out that it would be better for him to leave her alone with Jack; he would get a plate of cold meat somewhere, and go back to town by himself later on. She acquiesced reluctantly but without much resistance. "We can tell you about our journey afterwards," she said. Then had come more rosy pictures of the future. At last they were finished. There was a few minutes' silence. Ashley looked out of the window and then at his watch. "We ought to be there in ten minutes," he said. Her eyes grew wide; her hands dropped in her lap; she looked at him. "In ten minutes, Ashley?" she said in a low voice. It had come at last, the thing, not pictures, not imaginings of the thing. "Ten minutes?" she whispered. He could hardly speak to her. As her unnatural excitement, so his unnatural calm fell away; he lost composure and was not master of his voice. He took her hands and said, "Good-bye, my dear, good-bye. I'm going to lose you now, Ora." "Ashley, Ashley!" she cried. "I'm not going to be unkind, but there must be a difference." "Yes," she said in a wondering tone. "There must, I suppose. But you'll come often?" He meant never to come. "Now and then, dear," he said. Then he kissed her; that he had not meant to do; and she kissed him. "Ashley," she whispered, "perhaps he won't be kind to me; perhaps--oh, I never thought of that! Perhaps he'll be cruel, or--or not what I've fancied him. Ashley, my love, my love, don't leave me altogether! I can't bear it, indeed I can't. I shall die if you leave me." She was terrified now at the thought of the unknown man waiting for her and the loss of the man whom she knew so well. Her dramatic scenes helped her no more; her tears and terror now were unrehearsed; she clung to his hand as though it held life for her. "Oh, how did I ever think I could do it?" she moaned. "Are we going slower? Is the train stopping? Oh, are we there, are we there?" "We've not begun to go slower yet," he said. In five minutes they must arrive. "Stay with me till I see him; you must stay; you must stay till I've seen what--what he's going to be to me. I shall kill myself if you leave me." "I'll stay till you've found him," Ashley answered in a hard restrained voice. "Then I must go away." The train rumbled on; they were among the houses now; the ships in the harbour could be seen; the people in the next carriage were moving about, chattering loudly and merrily. The woman he loved sat with despairing eyes, clinging to his hand. "It's slower," she whispered, with lips just parted. "It's slower now, isn't it?" The train went slower; he nodded assent. The girl next door laughed gaily; perhaps she went to meet her lover. Suddenly the brake creaked, they stopped, there was something in the way. "How tiresome!" came loudly and impatiently from next door. Ora's grasp fixed itself tighter on his hand; she welcomed the brief reprieve. Her eyes drew him to her; the last embrace seemed to leave her half animate; she sank back in her seat with closed eyes. With a groan and a grumble the wheels began to move again. Ora gave a little shiver but made no other sign. Ashley let down the window with a jerk, and turned his face to the cool air that rushed in. He could not look more at Ora; he had a thing to do now, the last thing, and it was not good for the doing of it that he should look at her. She might cry again to him, "Take me away!" and now he might forget that to obey was not fair play. Besides, here came the platform, and on the platform he would find Jack Fenning. There may be passions but there must not be scenes; he could not tell Jack that he had decided to take Ora back to town on his own account. He and she between them had spun a web of the irrevocable; they had followed virtue, here was the reward. But where were the trappings which had so gorgeously ornamented it? Ora's eyes were closed and she saw them no more. Slowly they crept into the station; the platform was full of people and of luggage; it seemed as though the boat were already in. At last the train came to a stand; he laid his hand lightly on Ora's. "Here we are," he said. "Will you wait by the carriage till I find out where he is?" She opened her eyes and slowly rose to her feet. "Yes; I'll do what you tell me," she said. He opened the door and helped her to get out. She shivered and drew her cloak closer round her. There was a bench near. He led her to it and told her to sit there. "I shall know him and I'll bring him to you. Promise not to move," he said. Just as he turned to leave her she put out her hand and laid it on his arm. "Ashley!" he heard her whisper. He bent down to catch what she said, but it was a moment before she went on. It seemed as though words came hard to her and she would like to tell him all with her eyes. She raised her other hand and pointed to the arm that rested on his. "What is it, dear?" he asked. "Did I ever tell you? I forget what I've told you and what I haven't." "What is it? What do you want to tell me?" "He struck me once; on the arm, just there, with his fist." She touched her arm above the elbow, near the shoulder. She had never told him that; nothing less than this moment's agony, wherein sympathy must be had at every cost, could have brought it to her lips. Ashley pressed her hand and turned away to look for Jack Fenning. CHAPTER XIII THE HEROINE FAILS The fast train, by which they ought to travel, left for London in a quarter of an hour; a slow train would follow twenty minutes later. Ashley procured this information before undertaking his search; since the platform was still crowded it seemed possible that Mr. Fenning would not be found in time for the fast train. He proved hard to find; yet he might have been expected to be on the look-out. Ashley sought him conscientiously and diligently, but before long a vague hope began to rise in him that the man had not come after all. What then? He did not answer the question. It was enough to picture Ora freed from her fears, restored to the thoughtless joyousness of their early days together. If by wild chance he had found the man dead or heard that he was dead, he would have been glad with a natural heathen exultation. People die on voyages across the Atlantic sometimes; there is an average of deaths in mid-ocean; averages must be maintained; how maintain one with more beneficial incidental results than by killing Mr. Fenning? Ashley smiled grimly; his temper did not allow the humour of any situation to escape him; he felt it even in the midst of the strongest feelings. His search for Jack Fenning, while Jack Fenning's wife sat in terror, while he loved Jack Fenning's wife, had its comic side; he wondered how matters would strike Jack, supposing him to be alive, and to have come; or, again, if he were dead and fluttering invisible but open-eyed over the platform. He saw the girl who had been in the next carriage, hanging on a young man's arm, radiant and half in tears; but the young man was not like Jack's photograph. There were many young men, but none of them Jack Fenning. He scoured the platform in vain. A whistle sounded loud, and there were cries of "Take your seats!" Ashley looked at his watch; that was the express starting; they would be doomed to crawl to town. Where the plague was Jack Fenning? This suspense would be terrible for Ora. How soon could he be safe in going back and telling her that Jack had not come? What a light would leap to her face! How she would murmur, "Ashley!" in her low rich voice! She seemed able to say anything and everything in the world to him with that one word, "Ashley!" to help the eloquence of her eyes. A rush of people scurrying out of the refreshment-room and running to catch the express encountered and buffeted him. Here was a place he had not ransacked; perhaps Jack Fenning was in the refreshment-room; a remembrance of Janet's anxiety about a good whiskey gave colour to the idea. Ashley waited till the exodus was done and then strolled in; the place was almost empty; the barmaids were reaching their arms over the counter to gather up the used glasses or wipe the marble surface with cloths. But at the far end of the room there was a man standing at the bar, with a tumbler before him; he was smoking and in conversation with the girl who served him. Ashley stood still on the threshold for a moment or two, watching this man. "This is my man," he said to himself; he seemed to have an intuitive knowledge of the fact and not to rely on any pose or air which he had noticed in the photograph; he knew that he was looking at Ora's husband, and stood and looked at him. The man had come; he was not dead; he was here, drinking at the bar. "How much would he take to go away again?" That was Ashley's thought. Then he shook his head and walked towards the man, who had just set his glass down empty. "You'll have missed the express," said the girl behind the counter. "I was bound to have a drink," protested the customer in a rather injured tone. He turned away, stooped, lifted a hand-bag, and came down the room. Ashley noticed that his right hand was bandaged; he thought he noticed also a slight uncertainty in his walk; he did not lurch or stagger, but he swayed a little. "Just sixpenn'orth too much," was Ashley's summary. Then he walked up to the stranger and asked if he had the honour of addressing Mr. Fenning. There remained always in Ashley Mead's mind a memory of Jack Fenning as he was that day, of his soft blurred voice, his abashed eyes, his slight swayings, and the exaggerated apologetic firmness (or even aggression) of gait that followed them, of his uneasy deference towards the man who met him, of his obvious and unfeigned nervousness on being told that Miss Pinsent was waiting for him. Had child married child? The question leapt to Ashley's thoughts. Here was no burly ruffian, full of drink and violence. He had been drinking, but surely as a boy who takes his second glass of birthday port, not knowing the snake which lurks among that pleasant, green grass? He had struck Ora; the ugly fact was there; yet now Ashley found himself asking whether children had not their tempers, whether they are to be judged as men are judged, as gentlemen claim to be judged. Jack Fenning came neither in a truculent resentment against his wife, nor in a masterful assertion of his rights, nor (which would have been worst of all) in a passion for her. He did not question Ashley's position, he did not ask how he came to be there; nor did he demand to be taken to his wife, nor did he fly to seek her. "She's here, is she?" he said with an unmistakable accent of alarm. "Yes, she's here. Come along. I'll take you to her," said Ashley curtly. He was angry to find his resentment oozing away. "Didn't you know she was coming to meet you?" "She said she might," murmured Jack. "But I didn't think she would." "I thought there'd be a crowd and so on, so I ran down with her," Ashley explained, despising himself for explaining at all. "Awfully kind of you," said Mr. Fenning. "Where--where did you leave her?" "Oh, on a seat on the platform. Where's your luggage?" "Here." He held up the hand-bag. "That all?" "Yes, that's all," said Jack with a propitiatory smile. "I didn't see the good of bringing much." He paused and then added, "I haven't got much, you know." Another pause followed. "I hope that--that Miss Pinsent's all right?" he ended. "Yes, she's all right. Come along." Then he asked abruptly, "Hurt your hand?" Jack raised his hand and looked at it. "I got it burnt," he said. "We were making a night of it, and some fool made the poker hot--we had an open fire--and I didn't see it was hot and laid hold of it." He looked at his companion's face, which wore a grim smile. "Of course I shouldn't have done it if I hadn't had a drop too much," he added, smiling. "Good God!" groaned Ashley to himself as he led the way. Wouldn't anything, the burly ruffian, the crafty schemer, or even the coarse lover, have been better than this? Any of them might have ranked as a man, any of them might have laid a grasp on Ora and ruled her life to some pattern. But what could or should this poor creature do? Why, he had come at her bidding, and now was afraid to meet her! "Has she talked about me?" Jack asked timidly. "Yes, a lot," said Ashley. He looked over his shoulder and sent a very direct glance into his companion's eyes. "She's told me all about it, or nearly all," he added. Jack looked ashamed and acutely distressed. Ashley felt sorry for him and cursed himself for the feeling. "You'll get along better now, I hope," he said, looking away. Then he smiled; it had occurred to him to wonder what all the folk who were so interested in the coming of Mr. Fenning would make of this Mr. Fenning who had come. For an embodiment of respectability, of regularity of life, and of the stability of the conjugal relation, this creature was so--there seemed but one word--so flabby. "Is Janet still with Miss Pinsent?" asked Jack. It was evident that he hesitated as to what he ought to call his wife. There was a little pause before he pronounced her name. "Yes," said Ashley. "Janet's there. She's ordered some whiskey you'll like." Jack, unobservant of sarcasm, smiled gratefully; he reminded Ashley of a child rather afraid of its parents and finding comfort in the presence of a kind familiar nurse. "It was about here I left Miss Pinsent," Ashley went on, glancing round. There was the seat on which Ora had sat; but Ora was not on the seat. Ashley looked about, scanning the platform, seeking the graceful figure and gait that he knew so well. Jack put his bag down on the seat and stared at the roof of the station. "I don't see her," said Ashley. "She must have moved." He glanced at Jack and added with a sudden burst of laughter, "Now you must stay here while I look for her!" "You're very kind," said Jack Fenning, sinking down on the seat. "I might be the father of twins," said Ashley, as he walked off. Jack, left alone, furtively unclasped the bag, sought a small bottle, and took a small mouthful from it; he wanted all his nerve to meet his wife. Again Ashley Mead searched the station and ransacked the waiting-rooms; again in whimsical despair he explored the refreshment saloon; all were empty. What had become of Ora? He returned to the seat where Jack Fenning was. A tall burly guard stood by Jack, regarding him with a rather contemptuous smile. When Ashley approached he turned round. "Perhaps you're the gentleman, sir?" he said. "Mr. Mead, sir?" "I'm Mr. Mead," said Ashley. "The lady who went by the express left this note for you, sir. I thought it was for this gentleman but he says it isn't." "Thanks, I expect it's for me," said Ashley, exchanging a shilling for a scrap of twisted paper addressed to him in Ora's familiar scrawl. The guard looked at the pair with a faint curiosity, spun his shilling in the air, and turned away. They were, after all, a very unimportant episode in the life of the guard. "I have gone. As you love me, don't let him follow me. I am heart-broken:--Ora." Thus ran the note which Ashley read. At the last moment, then, the great drama had broken down, renunciation and reformation had refused to run in couples, the fine scenes would not be played and--the heroine had fled from the theatre! An agreement was an agreement, as Mr. Hazlewood insisted; but Ora had broken hers. Here was Ashley Mead with a stray husband on his hands! He laughed again as he re-read the note. Where had she gone, poor dear, she and her broken heart? She was crying somewhere with the picturesqueness that she could impart even to the violent forms of grief. His laugh made friends with a groan as he looked down on the flabby figure of Jack Fenning. That such a creature should make such a coil! The world is oddly ordered. "What the devil are we to do now?" he exclaimed aloud, glancing from the note to Jack, and back from Jack to the note. The note gave no help; Jack's bewildered questioning eyes were equally useless. "She's gone," Ashley explained with a short laugh. "Gone? Where to?" Helplessness still, not indignation, not even surprise, marked the tone. "I don't know. You're not to follow her, she says." Jack seemed to sink into a smaller size as he muttered forlornly, "She told me to come, you know." His uninjured hand moved longingly but indecisively towards his bag. "Will you have a dram?" he asked. "No, I won't," said Ashley. "Well, we can't stay here all night. What are you going to do?" "I don't understand what you mean by saying she's gone," moaned Jack. "It's all she says--and that you're not to follow. What are you going to do?" His look now was severe and almost cruel; Jack seemed to cringe under it. "I don't know," he muttered. "You see I--I've got no money." "No money?" "No. I had a little, but I had infernally bad luck at poker, coming over. You wouldn't believe how the luck ran against me." Ashley put his hands in his pockets and regarded his companion. "So you've no money?" "About five shillings." "And now you've no wife!" Jack twisted in his seat. "I wish I hadn't come," he said fretfully. "So do I," said Ashley. "But here you are!" He took a turn along the platform. The burly guard saw him and touched his hat. "Train for London in five minutes, sir. The last to-night, sir. Going on?" "Damn it, yes, we'll go on," said Ashley Mead. At least there was nothing to be gained by staying there. "Your ticket takes you through to London, I suppose?" he asked Jack. "Yes, it does; but what am I to do there?" asked Jack forlornly. Something restrained Ashley from the obvious retort, "What the devil do I care?" If he abandoned Jack, Jack must seek out Ora; he must track her by public and miscellaneous inquiries; he must storm the small house at Chelsea, braving Ora for the sake of Janet and the whiskey. Or if he did not do that, he would spend his five shillings as he had best not, and--visions of police-court proceedings and consequential newspaper broad-sheets rose before Ashley's eyes. He took Jack to London with him. The return journey alone with Mr. Fenning was an unconsidered case, an unrehearsed effect. Mr. and Mrs. Fenning were to have gone together; in one mad pleasant dream he and Ora were to have gone together, with Jack smoking elsewhere. Reality may fail in everything except surprises. Ora was heaven knew where, heart-broken in Chelsea or elsewhere, and Ashley was in charge of Mr. Fenning. "Good God, how everybody would laugh!" thought Ashley, himself hovering between mirth and ruefulness. The pencil of Babba Flint would draw a fine caricature of this journey; the circumstances might wring wonder even from Mr. Hazlewood's intimate and fatigued acquaintance with the ways of genius; as for Kensington Palace Gardens--Ashley suddenly laughed aloud. "What's the matter?" asked Jack. "It's all so damned absurd," said Ashley, laughing still. An absurd tragedy--and after all that Jack should come as he did, be what he was, and go on existing, was in essentials pure tragedy--seemed set on foot. "What am I to do with the fellow?" asked Ashley of himself. "I can't let him go to Chelsea." Nor, on reflection, could he let him go either to the workhouse or to the police-court. In fact, by an impulsive extension of the very habit which had appealed so strongly to his chivalry, Ora had thrown not herself only but her husband also on his hands! London drew near, even for the slow train, and with London came the problem. Ashley solved it in a flash, with a resolve that preserved the mixture of despair and humour which had become his attitude towards the situation of affairs. Above him in his house by Charing Cross there lived a clerk; the clerk had gone for a month's holiday, and had given liberty to the housekeeper to let his bed-sitting-room (so the compound was termed) to any solvent applicant. Jack Fenning should occupy the room for this night at least; he would be safe from danger, from observation, from causing trouble at Chelsea or wherever his wife might be. Thus to provide for him seemed mere humanity; he had but five shillings and a weakness for strong drink; and although he had struck Ora (the violence grew more and more inconceivable), yet in a sense he belonged to her. "And something must happen to clear it all up soon," Ashley reflected in an obstinate conviction that things in the end went reasonably. A short interview with the housekeeper was enough to arrange for Jack Fenning's immediate comfort; then Ashley took him into his own room and gave him an improvised supper, and some whiskey and water mixed very weak; Jack regarded it disconsolately but made no protest; he lugged out a pipe and began to smoke, staring the while into the empty grate. "I wonder where she's gone!" he said once, but Ashley was putting on his slippers and took no notice of the question. There lay on the table a note and a telegram; Jack's eyes wandered to them. "Perhaps the wire's from her," he suggested timidly. "Perhaps," said Ashley, taking it up. But the message was from Alice Muddock and ran, "Father had a paralytic stroke to-day. Afraid serious. Will you come to-morrow?" "It's not from Miss Pinsent," said Ashley, as he turned to the note. This was from Bowdon, sent by hand: "I'm glad to say that I've persuaded Irene to be married in a month from now. As you're such a friend of hers as well as of mine, I hope you'll be my best man on the occasion." "And the note's not from her either," said Ashley, walking up to the mantel-piece and filling his pipe. Jack leant back in his chair and gulped down his weak mixture; he looked up in Ashley's face and smiled feebly. Ashley's brows were knit, but his lips curved in a smile. The mixed colours held the field; here was poor old Sir James come to the end of his work, to the end of new blocks and the making of sovereigns; here was Bowdon triumphantly setting the last brick on the high wall behind which he had entrenched himself against the assault of wayward inclinations. Was Irene then at peace? Would Bob hold his own or would Bertie Jewett grasp the reins? Was Bowdon resigned or only fearful? What a break-up in Kensington Palace Gardens! What the deuce should he do with this man? And where in heaven's name was Ora Pinsent? Ashley's eyes fell on a couple of briefs which had been sent after him from the Temple; it seemed as though the ordinary work of life were in danger of neglect. "We can't do anything to-night, you know," he said to Jack in an irritated tone. "You don't want to knock her up to-night, I suppose, even if she's at her house?" "No," said Jack meekly. "Are you ready for bed then?" Jack cast one longing glance at the whiskey bottle, and said that he was. Ashley led him upstairs, turned on the gas, and shewed him the room he was to occupy. Desiring to appear friendly, he lingered a few moments in desultory and forced conversation, and, seeing that Jack's wounded hand crippled him a little, began to help him to take his things out of the bag and lay them in handy places. Jack accepted his services with regard to the bag, and set about emptying his own pockets on the mantel-piece. Presently Ashley, his task done, turned round to see his companion standing with back turned, under the gas jet; he seemed to be regarding something which he held in his hand. "I think you'll be all right now," said Ashley, preparing to make his escape. Jack faced round with a slight start and an embarrassed air. He still held in his hand the object which he had been regarding; Ashley now perceived it to be a photograph. Was it Ora's--Ora's, treasured through years of separation, of quarrel, of desertion and apparent neglect? Had the man then grace in him so to love Ora Pinsent? A flash of kindliness lit up Ashley's feelings towards him; a pang of sympathy went near to making him sorry that Ora had fled from welcoming the home-comer. His eyes rested on Jack with a friendly look; Jack responded with a doubtful wavering smile; he seemed to ask whether he could in truth rely on the new benevolence which he saw in his host's eyes. Ashley smiled, half at his own queer thoughts, half to encourage the poor man. The smile nourished Jack's growing confidence; with a roguish air which had not been visible before he held out the picture to Ashley, saying, "Pretty girl, isn't she?" With a stare Ashley took the portrait. It could not be Ora's, if he spoke of it like that; so it seemed to the lover who translated another's feelings into his own. In an instant he retracted; that was how Jack Fenning would speak of Ora; short-lived kindliness died away; the man was frankly intolerable. But the sight of the picture sent his mind off in another direction. The picture was not Ora's, unless in previous days Ora had been of large figure, of bold feature, of self-assertive aspect, given to hats outrageous, and to signing herself, "Yours ever, Daisy." For such were the salient characteristics of the picture which Mr. Jack Fenning had brought home with him. A perverse freak of malicious memory carried Ashley back to the room in the little house at Chelsea, where his own portrait stood in its silver frame on the small table by Ora's favourite seat. _Mutato nomine, de te!_ But, lord, what a difference the name makes! "Very pretty," he remarked, handing back the image which had occasioned his thought. "Some one you know on the other side?" "Yes," said Jack, standing the picture up against the wall. Ashley was absurdly desirous of questioning him, of learning more about Daisy, of discovering whether Mr. Fenning had his romance or merely meditated in tranquillity on a pleasant friendship. But he held himself back; he would not be more mixed up with the man than fate and Ora Pinsent had commanded. There was something squalid about the man, so that he seemed to infect what he touched with his own flabby meanness. How in the world had Ora come to make him her husband? No doubt five years of whiskey, in society of which Daisy was probably too favourable a specimen to be typical, would account for much. He need not have been repulsive always; he might even have had a fawning attractiveness; it hung oddly about him still. But how could he ever have commanded love? Love asks more, some material out of which to fashion an ideal, some nobility actual or potential. At this point his reflections were very much in harmony with the views of Alice Muddock. He hated to think what Ora had been to this man; now he thanked God that she had run away. He would have liked himself to run away somewhere, never to see Jack Fenning, to forget that he had ever seen him, to rid Ora of every association with him. It was odious that the thought of her must bring the thought of Fenning; how soon would he be able to think of her again without this man shouldering his way into recollection by her side? Until he could achieve that, she herself, suffering an indignity, almost seemed to suffer a taint. "Good-night," said he. "We'll have a talk in the morning about what's to be done." "Good-night, Mr. Mead. I'm--I'm awfully obliged to you for everything." "Not at all," said Ashley. He moved towards the door. As he passed the table his eye fell on Jack's flask, which lay there. For an instant he thought of cautioning Jack against an excessive use of it; but where was the good and why was it his business? Without more he left his unwelcome guest to himself. And Jack, being thus left alone, had some more whiskey, another look at his picture, and another smoke of his pipe. After that he began to consider how very hardly his wife had used him. Or, rather, he tried to take up and maintain this position, but he failed. He was so genuinely relieved that Ora had not been there; he did not want to meet Ora; he knew that he would be terribly uncomfortable. Why had he come? He wandered up to the mantel-piece again and looked with pathetic reproach at the picture and the signature below it. "I wish she hadn't made me!" he groaned as he turned away and began to undress himself. Ora had allowed him to come, but it could hardly be said that she had made him. Moreover his protest seemed to be addressed to the picture on the mantel-piece. CHAPTER XIV AS MR. FLINT SAID Irene Kilnorton looked, as she had been bidden, out of the window in Queen's Gate and perceived a four-wheeled cab laden with three large boxes; from that sight she turned her eyes again to Ora Pinsent, who sat in a straight-backed chair with an expression of unusual resolution on her face. It was eleven o'clock on Monday morning. "I lay awake all night, trembling," said Ora. "Imagine if he'd come to the house!" "But, good gracious, you told him to come, Ora! You must see him now." "I won't. I thought you'd be kind and come with me; but I'm going anyhow." "Where is he?" "I don't know. I suppose Ashley has done something with him; only I wonder I haven't had a letter." "Ashley!" Lady Kilnorton's tone fully explained her brief remark, but Ora only nodded her head and repeated, "Yes, Ashley." "And where do you propose to go?" "Devonshire." "And what about your theatre?" "Oh, I've sent a wire. The understudy must do it. I couldn't possibly." "And are you going alone to Devonshire?" "Yes. At least I suppose Ashley couldn't go with me, could he?" "He would if you asked him, I should think," said Irene most impatiently. "He can run down and see me, though," observed Ora in a slightly more cheerful tone. "I shall wire my address and ask him to let me know what--what happened. Only--only I'm rather afraid to know. I should like just to leave it all to Ashley." "I think you're quite mad." "I was nearly, at the thought of meeting him. I wonder what Ashley did with him." A faint and timid smile appeared on her lips as she looked at her friend. "Their meeting must have been rather funny," she added, with obvious fear, but yet unable to resist confiding her amusement. "Did anybody ever beat you, Ora?" demanded Lady Kilnorton. "Yes, dear," confessed Ora plaintively. "Then they didn't do it enough, that's all." Ora sat silent for a moment still, smiling a little. "It's no good being unkind to me," she remarked then. "I don't see how I could have done anything else. I did my very best to--to let him come; but I couldn't." "It's not very likely you could, when you'd been spending every hour of the day with Ashley Mead! Actually took him to meet your husband!" "I suppose it was that, partly; but I couldn't have got even as far as I did without Ashley. Why won't you come to Devonshire?" "Among other things, I'm going to be married." "Oh! Soon?" "In a month." "Really? How splendid! I should think Lord Bowdon's a lovely lover. I'm sure he would be." Ora was now smiling very happily. Irene seemed to consider something seriously for a moment or two; then she gave it utterance. "I'm afraid you're disreputable, after all," she said. "No, I'm not," protested Ora. "Oh, but, my dear, how I should like to be! It would simplify everything so. But then Ashley--" She broke off and frowned pensively. "Oh, I don't mean exactly what you've done, but what you are." She came suddenly across the room, bent down, and kissed Ora's cheek. Then, as she straightened herself again, she said, "I don't think we can be friends." At first Ora laughed, but, seeing Irene very grave, she looked at her with scared eyes. Irene met her gaze fully and directly. "You didn't tell me all Alice Muddock said to you," said Irene. "No, not quite," Ora murmured; "it was horrid." "She's told me since. Well, she only said what you've made us all think of you." "You?" asked Ora, her eyes still set on her friend. "Yes," said Irene Kilnorton, and, turning away, she sat down by the window. A silence followed, broken only by a stamp of the hoof from the cab-horse at the door. Then Irene spoke again. "Don't you see that you can't go on as you've been going on, that it's impossible, that it ruins everybody's life who has anything to do with you? Don't you see how you're treating your husband? Don't you see what you're doing to Ashley Mead?" Ora had turned rather white, as she had when Alice Muddock told her that not for the sake of fame would she pay Ora's price. They were both against her. "How hard people are!" she cried, rising and walking about the room. "Women, I mean," she added a moment later. "Oh, I know you make men think what you like," said Irene scornfully. "We women see what's true. I'm sure I don't want to distress you, Ora." Ora was looking at her in despair tempered by curiosity. Bitterly as she had felt Alice's onslaught, she had ended in explaining it to herself by saying that Alice was an exceptionally cold and severe person, and also rather jealous concerning Ashley Mead. Irene Kilnorton was neither cold nor severe, and Ora had no reason to think her jealous. The agreement of the two seemed a token and an expression of a hostile world in arms against her, finding all sins in her, hopelessly blind to her excuses and deaf to the cries of her heart which to her own ears were so convincing. Irene thought that she ought to have been beaten more; if she told of Mr. Fenning's isolated act of violence, Irene would probably disapprove of nothing in it except its isolation. "I thought you'd sympathise with me," she said at last. "Then you must have thought me a goose," retorted Irene crossly. Her real feelings would have led her to substitute "very wicked" for "a goose," but she had an idea that an ultra-moral attitude was _bourgeois_. "Goose" gave her all she wanted and preserved the intellectual point of view. But to Ora the moral and the intellectual were the Scylla and Charybdis between which her frail bark of emotions steered a perilous, bumping, grazing way, lucky if it escaped entire destruction on one or the other, or (_pace_ the metaphor) on both at once. She felt that the world was harsh and most ill-adapted to any reasonable being; for Ora also seemed to herself very reasonable; reason follows the habit of the chameleon and takes colour from the tree of emotions on which it lies. From her meditations there emerged a sudden terrible dread that swallowed up every other feeling, every other anxiety. All the world (must not the world be judged by these two ladies?) was against her. Her action was to it beyond understanding, her temperament beyond excuse. Would Ashley feel the same? "Have I tired him out?" she cried to herself. All else she could surrender, though the surrender were with tears; but not his love, his sympathy, her hold over him. He must see, he must understand, he must approve. She could not have him also rebelling against her in weariness or puzzled disgust. Then indeed there would be nothing to live for; even the refuge in Devonshire must become an arid tormenting desert. For the times when he could run down and see her had gone near to obliterating all the other times in her imaginary picture of the refuge in Devonshire: just as her occasional appearances had filled the whole of that picture of Ashley's married life drawn in the days of the renunciation. She rose and bade Irene good-bye with marked abruptness; it passed as the sign of natural offence, and kindness mingled with reproach in Irene's parting kiss. But Irene asked no more questions and invited no more confidences. Ora ran downstairs and jumped into her cab. A new fear and a new excitement possessed her; she thought no more of Irene's censure; she asked no more what had become of Jack Fenning. "What station, miss?" asked the driver, taking a look at her. He had seen her from the gallery and was haunted by a recollection. "Oh, I'm not going to the station!" exclaimed Ora impatiently; why did people draw unwarranted inferences from the mere presence of three boxes on the roof of a cab? She gave him Ashley's address with the coolest and most matter-of-fact air she could muster. But for the terror she was in, it would have been pleasant to her to be going for the first time to those rooms of his to which she had sent so many letters, so many telegrams, so many boy-messengers, so many commissionaires, but which in actual palpable reality she had never seen yet. Reflecting that she had never seen them yet, she declared that the reproaches levelled at her were absurdly wide of the mark and horribly uncharitable. They didn't give her credit for her real self-control. But what was Ashley feeling? Again she cried, "Have I tired him out?" Now she pictured no longer from her own but from his standpoint the scene at the station, and saw how she had left him to do the thing which it had been hers to do. For the first time that day a dim half-recollected vision of the renunciation and reformation took shape in her brain; she dubbed it at once an impossible and grotesque fantasy. Ashley must have known it for that all the time; who but Ashley would have been so generous and so tactful as never to let her see his opinion of it? Who but Ashley would have respected the shelter that she made for herself out of its tattered folds? And now had she lost Ashley, even Ashley? By this time Jack Fenning, his doings, and his whereabouts, had vanished from her mind. Ashley was everything. The laden cab reached the door; Ora was out in a moment. "Wait," she cried, as she darted in; the driver shifted the three boxes, so as to make room for additional luggage; he understood the situation now; his fare had come to pick up somebody; they would go to the station next. Mr. A. Mead dwelt on the first floor; on the second floor lived Mr. J. Metcalfe Brown. Having gleaned this knowledge from names in white letters on a black board, Ora mounted the stairs. The servant-girl caught a glimpse of her and admired without criticising; charity reigned here; a lady's gown was scrutinised, not her motives. Ora reached the first floor; here again the door was labelled with Ashley's name. The sight of it brought a rebound to hopefulness; the spirit of the adventure caught on her, her self-confidence revived, her fears seemed exaggerated. At any rate she would atone now by facing the problem of her husband in a business-like way; she would talk the matter over reasonably and come to some practical conclusion. She pulled her hat straight, laughed timidly, and knocked at the door. How surprised he'd be! And if he were disposed to be unkind--well, would he be unkind long? He had never been unkind long. Why, he didn't answer! Again she knocked, and again. He must be out. This check in the plan of campaign almost brought tears to Ora's eyes. She must enquire. She was about to go downstairs again and ring the bell when she heard a door opened on the landing above, and a man's step. She paused; this man might give her news of Ashley; that he might be surprised to see her did not occur to her. A moment later a voice she knew well exclaimed in soliloquy, "Good heavens, what a creature!" and round the bend of the stairs came Ashley himself, in a flannel jacket, smoking a pipe, with his hair much disordered. Ora wore a plain travelling frock suitable for a dusty journey to Devonshire; her jacket was fawn colour, her hat was black; yet even by these sober hues the landing seemed illuminated to Ashley Mead. "Well!" he cried, taking his pipe from his mouth and standing still. "Open this door," Ora commanded, in a little tumult of gladness; in an instant his eyes told her that she had not tired him out. "And who's a creature?" "A creature?" he asked, coming down. "Yes. You said somebody was. Oh, I know! The man above? Mr. J. Metcalfe Brown?" "Exactly," said Ashley. "Metcalfe Brown." He took a key out of his pocket, unlocked the door, and held it open for her. He was laughing. "So this is your den!" she cried. "What are those papers?" The desk was strewn with white sheets. "Our Commission. I've been having a morning at it." "Between it and Metcalfe Brown?" "Well, yes, he does need some of my attention." "What a noise he makes!" said Ora, for a dragging tread sounded on the ceiling of the room. "He must be rather a bore?" "Yes, he is," said Ashley, with a short laugh and a quick amused glance at her. "Where's my picture?" Ora demanded, looking round. "Strictly concealed," Ashley assured her. "I wonder I've never come here before," she reflected, sitting down in his arm-chair. "Well, on the whole, so do I," said Ashley, laughing still. She was taking a careful and interested view of the room. The steps overhead went on. "I think it would be very nice," she said at last, "except for Metcalfe Brown." "There's always something one could do without," observed Ashley Mead. "I like you in that coat. Oh, well, I like you in any coat. But I never saw you ready for work before. Ashley, who is Metcalfe Brown? And how I wish he'd sit still!" "He's a clerk," said Ashley; his smile persisted, but his brows were knit in a humorous puzzle. A pause followed. Ora looked at him, smiled, looked away, looked at him again. Ashley said nothing. "You might ask me something," she murmured reproachfully. He shook his head. She rose and came behind him; laying a hand on his shoulder she looked round in his face; mirth and appeal mingled as of old in the depths of her eyes. "Am I very dreadful?" she whispered. "Are you quite tired of me, Ashley?" There was a sound from above as though a man had thrown himself heavily on a sofa or a bed. "Bother Metcalfe Brown," whispered Ora. "Ashley, I couldn't help it. I was afraid." "You needn't have been afraid with me," he said in a low voice. "But--but you wouldn't have stayed. I was so frightened. You know what I told you; I remembered it all. He'd had too much to drink; he wasn't generally cruel, but that made him. Ashley dear, say you forgive me?" The dim sound of a quavering voice reached them through the ceiling. For an instant Ora raised her head, then she bent down again to Ashley. "Because I'm going away, to Devonshire," she went on. "And I mayn't see you for ever so long, unless you'll come and see me; and Irene Kilnorton says you oughtn't to. But you must. But still it will be days! Oh, how shall I pass days without you? So do forgive me before I go." "Forgive you!" said he with a little laugh. "Ah, you do," she sighed. "How good you are, Ashley." She pressed his shoulder with her hand. "I couldn't go on living if it wasn't for you," she said. "Everybody else is so hard to me. I ran away last night because I couldn't bear to lose you!" She paused and moved her face nearer his, as she whispered, "Could you bear to lose me?" Mr. Metcalfe Brown tumbled off the bed and seemed to stagger across the room towards the mantel-piece. "No," said Ashley Mead. "But I'm going away; my boxes are on the cab outside. I daren't stop now he's come; I might meet him; he might--no, I daren't stay." Her voice fell yet lower as she asked, "What did he say? Where is he? What have you done with him?" Ashley gently raised her hand from his arm, rose, and walked to the fireplace. He looked at her as she bent forward towards him in the tremulous eagerness of her questioning, with fear and love fighting in her eyes, as though she looked to him alone both for safety and for joy. And, as it chanced, Mr. Metcalfe Brown made no sound in the room above; it was possible altogether to forget him. Ora took the chair that Ashley had left and sat looking at him. For a moment or two he said nothing; it was the pause before the plunge, the last hasty reckoning of possibilities and resources before a great stake. Then he set all on the hazard. "You needn't have run away," he said in a cool, almost bantering tone. "Fenning didn't turn up at all." Mr. Metcalfe Brown walked across the room and threw himself into a chair; at least the sounds from above indicated some such actions on his part. "I don't know why, but he didn't," said Ashley with a momentary glance at the ceiling--rather as though he feared it would fall on him. "Not come?" she whispered. "Oh, Ashley!" She seemed for a moment to hold herself in the chair by the grasp of her hands on its arms. Then she rose and moved slowly towards him. "He didn't come?" "Not a sign of him." "And--and he won't, will he?" "I don't expect so," said Ashley, smiling. Ora seemed to accept his answer as final. She stood still, for a moment grave, then breaking into a gurgle of amused delighted laughter. Ashley glanced again at the ceiling; surely a man who had ever heard that laugh must remember it! But had the man upstairs? Was not that laugh made and kept for him himself from the beginning of the world? So his madness persuaded him. "Rather funny, wasn't it? So I came back alone by the slow train--a very slow train it was, without you." Ora's mood was plain enough. She was delighted, and she was hardly surprised. No instability of purpose and no change of intention were out of harmony with her idea of her husband. There was no telling why he had not come, but there was nothing wonderful in his not coming. She spread her arms out with a gesture of candid self-approval. "Well, I've done my duty," said she. "Yes," said Ashley, smiling. He was relieved to find his word taken so readily. "But do you think you're doing it by staying here?" "How rude you are! Why shouldn't I?" "It's irregular. And somebody might come." He paused and added, "Suppose Metcalfe Brown dropped in?" "What would he think?" cried Ora with sparkling eyes. "Is he a very steady young man?" "I don't know; he's got a picture signed 'Yours ever, Daisy,' on his mantel-piece." Ora's eyes shewed no recognition of "Daisy." "The girl he's engaged to, I suppose," she said rather scornfully; high and unhappy passion is a little contemptuous of a humdrum engagement. "Perhaps," said Ashley cautiously. "Oh, he's moving about again; and he's singing! I wish we could hear better!" For the sound of the voice was very muffled. "I know that tune though. Where have I heard it before?" "Everybody used to torture one with it a few years ago; somebody sang it at the Alhambra." "Oh, yes, I went with--I went once and heard it." The voice died down in a gentle grumble. The little puzzled frown with which Ora had listened also passed away. "Going to Devonshire?" asked Ashley Mead. "To Devonshire? No," said Ora decisively. "Why should I go away now?" "You must go away from here." "Must I, Ashley?" "Yes, you must. Consider if Metcalfe Brown--" "Oh, bother your Metcalfe Brown! There's always somebody like that!" "Yes, generally. Come, I'll take you to your cab--" "But you'll come and see me to-morrow?" "Yes, I'll come to-morrow." "Oh, isn't everything perfect? What's that? He must be throwing the fire irons about!" "Never mind him. Come along." "I don't mind him. I don't mind anybody now. How could I ever have thought of bringing--of doing what I did? Why did you let me, Ashley? But it's all right now, isn't it?" "Come down quietly; Metcalfe Brown'll hear us." "I don't care." "Oh, but you must. Consider my reputation!" "Very well, I'll be quiet," said Ora with another low and joyous laugh. They stole downstairs together. Metcalfe Brown was quiet; he did not open his door, look out, glance down the well of the stairs and see who was Ashley Mead's companion; he sat with his pipe in his mouth and his glass by his side, while Ora escaped in safety from the house. The cabman had employed his leisure first in recollecting how his fare's face came to be familiar to him, secondly (since he had thus become interested in her), in examining the luggage labels on the three large boxes. There was a friendliness, and also a confidence, in his manner as he leant down from his box and said, "Paddington, Miss Pinsent?" "Paddington! No," said Ora. Ashley began to laugh. Ora laughed too, as she gave her address in Chelsea. "Where I took you up, miss?" asked the cabman. "Yes," said Ora, bright with amusement. "It really must seem rather funny to him," she said in an aside to Ashley, as she got in. The cabman himself was calling the affair "a rum start," as he whipped up his horse. To Ashley Mead it seemed very much the same. There were, however, two people who were not very seriously surprised, Janet the respectable servant and Mr. Sidney Hazlewood the accomplished comedian. They received Ora, at the house in Chelsea and at the theatre respectively, with a very similar wrinkling of the forehead and a very similar sarcastic curving of the lips; to both of them the ways of genius were well known. "Mr. Fenning hasn't come after all," said Ora to Janet, while to Mr. Hazlewood she observed "I felt so much better that I've come after all." Janet said, "Indeed, ma'am." Mr. Hazlewood said, "All right," and sent word to the understudy that she was not wanted. On the whole her sudden change of plan seemed to Ora to cause less than its appropriate sensation--except to the cabman, whose demeanour had been quite satisfactory. As Mr. Hazlewood was dressing for his part, it chanced that Babba Flint came in, intent on carrying through an arrangement rich, as were all Babba's, in prospective thousands. When the scheme had been discussed, Hazlewood mentioned Ora's wire of the morning and Ora's appearance in the evening. Babba nodded comprehendingly. "Something to do with the husband perhaps," Hazlewood hazarded. "Not that it needs any particular explanation," he added, hiding his wrinkle with some paint. "Husband, husband?" said Babba in a puzzle. "Oh, yes! By Jove, he was to come yesterday! Hasn't turned up, of course?" "Haven't seen or heard anything of him." "Of course not," said Babba placidly. "I knew he wouldn't. I told Bowdon he wouldn't, but Bowdon wouldn't bet. Give me a wire, though." Hazlewood's dresser was ready with a telegraph-form and Babba, in the wantonness of exuberant triumph, sent a message to Bowdon's house asserting positively that Mr. Fenning had not come. That evening Bowdon dined with Irene, and the telegram, forwarded by messenger, reached him there. After dinner Alice ran in to give news of a rather better character concerning her father. She also heard the contents of Babba Flint's message. Ora's underlying desire for a sensation would have been satisfied. They were all amazed. "This morning she thought he had come," Irene persisted. "I wonder if Ashley Mead knows anything about it. Have you seen him, Alice?" "No; he telegraphed that he couldn't possibly come to Kensington Palace Gardens to-day, but would early to-morrow." Alice's tone was cold; Ashley ought to have gone to Kensington Palace Gardens that day, she thought. "It's very odd, isn't it, Frank?" asked Irene. "It's not our affair," said Bowdon; he was rather uncomfortable. "Except," said Irene with a glance at Alice and an air of reserved determination, "that we have to consider a little what sort of person she really is. I don't know what to make of it, do you, Alice?" No less puzzled was Ashley Mead as he kept guard on the man to whom he had transferred the name of Metcalfe Brown, and wondered how he was to persevere in his assertion that the man had not come. For here the man was, and, alas, by now the man was peevishly anxious to see his wife; from no affection, Ashley was ready to swear, but, as it seemed, in a sort of fretful excitement. No doubt even to such a creature the present position was uncomfortable; possibly it appeared even degrading. "We'll settle about that to-morrow," said Ashley Mead; and in spite of a pang of self-reproach he added, "Have a little drop more whiskey?" For to-night must be tided over; and whiskey was the only tide that served. CHAPTER XV THE MAN UPSTAIRS Kensington Palace Gardens, whither Ashley Mead hastened early on Tuesday morning, was not the same place to him as it had been. The change went deeper than any mere shadow of illness or atmosphere of affliction. There was alienation, a sense of difference, the feeling of a suppressed quarrel. The old man knew him, but greeted him with a feeble fretfulness, Lady Muddock was distantly and elaborately polite, even in Bob a constraint appeared. Alice received him kindly, but there was no such gladness at his coming as had seemed to be foreshadowed by her summons of him. Was she resentful that he had not come the day before? That was likely enough, for his excuses of pressing business did not sound very convincing even to himself. But here again he sought a further explanation and found it in a state of things curiously unwelcome to him. It may be easy to abdicate; it is probably harder to stand by patiently while the new monarch asserts his sway and receives homage. Bertie Jewett was in command at Kensington Palace Gardens; when Sir James could talk he called Bertie and conferred with him; on him now Lady Muddock leaned, to him Bob abandoned the position by birth his own; it was his advice which Alice repeated, his opinions which she quoted to Ashley Mead as they took a turn together in the garden. Both business and family, the big house and the big block, owned a new master; Bertie's star rose steadily. Ashley was prepared with infinite scorn. He watched the upstart with an eye acute to mark his lapses of breeding, of taste, and of tact, to discern the vulgarity through affected ease, the coarseness of mind beneath the superficial helpfulness. Something of all these he contrived to see or to persuade himself that he saw, but a whole-hearted confident contempt denied itself to him. There is a sort of man intolerable while he is making his way, while he pushes and disputes and shoulders for place; the change which comes over him when his position is won, and what he deems his rights acknowledged, is often little less than marvellous. It is as though the objectionable qualities, which had seemed so ingrained in him and so part of him that they must be his from cradle to grave and perhaps beyond, were after all only armour he has put on or weapons he has taken into his hand of his own motion, to do his work; the work done they are laid aside, or at least so hidden as merely to suggest what before they displayed offensively. So concealed, they are no longer arrogant or domineering, but only imply a power in reserve; they do no more than remind the rash of what has been and may be again. In part this great transformation had passed over Bertie Jewett; the neat compact figure, the resolute eye, the determined mouth, the brief confident directions, wrung even from Ashley admiration and an admission that, if (as poor old Sir James used to say) the "stuff" was in himself, it was in Bertie also, and probably in fuller measure. Neither business nor family would lack a good counsellor and a bold leader; neither family nor business would suffer by the substitution of Bertie for himself. Watching his successor, he seemed to himself to have become superfluous, suddenly to have lost his place in the inmost hearts of these people, and to have fallen back to the status of a mere ordinary friendship. Was that in truth Alice's mood towards him? It was not, but his jealous acuteness warned him that it soon might be. She did not tell him now that she disliked Bertie Jewett; she praised Bertie with repentant generosity, seeking opportunities to retract without too much obtrusiveness the hard things she had said, and fastening with eager hand on all that could be commended. Ashley walked by her, listening. "Where we should be without him now I don't know," she said. "I can't do much, and Bob--well, Bob wants somebody to guide him." "I hope you'll let me be of any use I can," he said; in spite of himself the words sounded idle and empty. "You're most kind, Ashley, always, but I don't think there's anything we need trouble you about for the present. We don't expect any immediate change in father." "When I said I wouldn't have anything to do with the business, I didn't include Kensington Palace Gardens in the word." "Oh, I know you didn't. Indeed I'll ask you for help when I want it." He was silent for a moment or two. Then he said, "You agreed with me about the business. Do you still think I was right?" "I'm more than ever sure of it," she answered with a direct gaze at him. "I grow surer of it every day. It wasn't the least suited to you; nor you to it, you know." She smiled as she spoke the last words. "And Jewett's in his element?" "I hear he's wonderfully able, and he's very nice and considerate about everything too. Oh, no, you'd never have done for it." What she said was what she had always said; she had always been against his selling the ribbons, had thought that he was too good to sell ribbons and loved him for this very thing. But the same words may carry most different implications; was not the idea in her head now that, if it would not have been good for him to sell the ribbons, neither would it have been good for the ribbons nor for the family whose prosperity depended on them? Her smile had been indulgent rather than admiring; he accused her of reverting to the commercial view of life and of suffering a revival of the family prejudices and of the instinct for getting and reverencing wealth. He felt further from her and detected a corresponding feeling in her. He studied her in the light of that unreasonable resentment with which Bertie Jewett inspired him; he saw that she read him in the light of her judgment of Ora Pinsent; and he knew tolerably well what she thought and said of Ora Pinsent. They were further apart. Yet at the end old kindliness revived and he clasped her hand very heartily. "I'm always at your orders," he said. "Always." She smiled; did she intend to remind him that the day before he had neglected her summons? His conscience gave her smile that meaning, and he could not tell her that he had been obliged to play jailer to Mr. Fenning--for Mr. Fenning had not come! But her smile was not reproachful; it was still indulgent. She seemed to expect him to say such things, to know he would, to accept them as his sincere meaning at the time, but not to expect too much from them, not to take them quite literally, not to rely on them with the simple ample faith that the words of a solid trustworthy man receive. The love that has lived on admiration may live with indulgence; she seemed still to love him although now with opened eyes. And when he was gone, she turned back to the business of life with a sigh, to business and Bertie Jewett. Back she went to work, and in her work Ashley Mead had no longer a place. At this time, among his conquests--and they were over himself as well as others--Bertie Jewett achieved a complete victory over Irene Kilnorton's old dislike of him. He was so helpful, so unobtrusive, so strong, so different from feather-headed people who were here one moment and elsewhere the next, whom you never knew where to have. She had what was nearly a quarrel with Bowdon because he observed that, when all was said and done, Bertie was not a gentleman. "Nonsense, Frank," she said tartly. "He only wants to go into society a little more. In all essentials he's a perfect gentleman." Bowdon shook his head in impenetrable, silent, male obstinacy. He was not apt at reasons or definitions, but he knew when he did and when he did not see a gentleman before him; he and his ancestors had spent generations in acquiring this luxury of knowledge. His shake of the head exasperated Irene. "I like him very much," she said. "He has just the qualities that made me like you. One can depend on him; he's not harum-scarum and full of whims. You can trust yourself with men like that." "I hope I'm not as dull as I sound, my dear," said Bowdon patiently. "Dull! Who said you were dull? I said I could trust you, and I said I could trust Bertie Jewett. Oh, I don't mean to say he's fascinating like Ashley Mead. At least I suppose Ashley is fascinating to most people." "Most women anyhow," murmured Bowdon. "I consider," said Irene solemnly, "that Ora Pinsent has done him infinite harm." "Poor Miss Pinsent!" "Oh, yes, of course it's 'Poor Miss Pinsent'! If you'd been in the Garden of Eden you'd have said nothing but 'Poor Eve'! But, Frank--" "Yes, dear." "I believe Alice is getting tired of him at last." Here was a useful conquest--and a valuable ally--for Bertie Jewett. Bowdon perceived the bent of Irene's thoughts. "Good God!" he muttered gently, between half-opened lips. Then he smiled to himself a little ruefully. Was Alice also to seek a refuge? Remorse came hard on the heels of this ungracious thought, and he kissed Irene gallantly. "Suppose," he suggested, "that you were to be content with looking after your own wedding for the present and leave Miss Muddock to look after hers." Irene, well pleased, returned his kiss, but she also nodded sagaciously, and said that if he waited he would see. Bowdon was now so near his marriage, so near inviolable safety, that he allowed himself the liberty of thinking about Ora Pinsent and consequently of Ashley Mead. That the husband had not come--Babba's triumphant telegram was still in his pocket--surprised as much as it annoyed him. In absence from Ora he was able to condemn her with a heartiness which his _fiancée_ herself need not have despised; that his condemnation could not be warranted to outlast a single interview with its object was now no matter to him, but merely served to explain the doings of Ashley. Ashley was hopelessly in the toils, this was clear enough. Strangely hovering between self-congratulation on his own escape and envy of the man who had not run away, Bowdon asked what was to be the end, and, as a man of the world, saw but one end. Ashley would pay dear and would feel every penny of the payment. His was a nature midway between Ora's and Irene's, perhaps it had something even of Alice Muddock's; he had a foot in either camp. Reason struggled with impulse in him, and when he yielded he was still conscious of what he lost. He could not then be happy, and he would hardly find contentment in not being very unhappy. He must be tossed about and torn in two. Whither would he go in the end? "Anyhow I'm safe," was Bowdon's unexpressed thought, given new life and energy by the news that Ora Pinsent's husband had not come. For now the tongues would be altogether unchained, and defence of her hopeless. Had she ever meant him to come, ever believed that he was coming, ever done more than fling a little unavailing dust in the world's keen eyes? The memory of her, strong even in its decay, rose before him, and forbade him to embrace heartily what was Irene's and would be everybody's theory. But what other theory was there? Bowdon was living in his father's house in Park Lane, and these meditations brought him to the door. A servant awaited him with the news that Ashley was in the library and wanted to see him. The business of their Commission brought Ashley often, and it was with only a faint sense of coincidence that Bowdon went in to meet him. Ashley was sitting on a sofa, staring at the ceiling. He sprang up as Bowdon entered; there was a curious nervousness in his air. "Here you are, Bowdon!" he cried. Bowdon noticed, without resenting, the omission of his title; hitherto, in deference to seniority and Bowdon's public position, Ashley had insisted on saying "Lord Bowdon." He inferred that Ashley's mind was busy. "Here I am, Ashley. What do you want? More witnesses, more reports, what is it?" "It's not the Commission at all." "Take a cigar and tell me what it is." Ashley obeyed and began to smoke quickly; he stood now, while Bowdon dropped into a chair. "In about a month I shall have seven hundred pounds coming in," said Ashley. "Just now I've only a hundred at the bank." "Present economy and the prospect of future recompense," said Bowdon, smiling. "I want five hundred now, to-day. They'll give it me at the bank if I get another name. Will you--?" "I won't give you my name, but I'll lend you five hundred." Ashley looked down at him. "Thank you," he said. "Do you trust your servant?" "More than you, Ashley, and I'm lending you five hundred." "Then send him round to the bank." "My good fellow, I can write a cheque." "No, I want five hundred-pound notes--new ones," said Ashley, with his first glimmer of a smile. "Very well," said Bowdon. He went to the table, wrote a cheque, rang the bell, and, when his personal servant had been summoned, repeated Ashley's request. "Very good, my lord," said the man, and vanished. Bowdon lit a cigarette and resumed his seat. "It's for--," Ashley began. "As you like about that," said Bowdon. "Only why were they to be new hundred-pound notes?" "In order to appeal to the imagination. I'm going to tell you about it." "As long as it's because you want and not because I want, all right." "I believe I'm going to do a damned rascally thing." "Can't you keep it to yourself then?" asked Bowdon, with a plaintive intonation and a friendly look. "At present I've lent you five hundred. That's all! They can't hit me." "I want somebody to know besides me, and I've chosen you." "Oh, all right," muttered Bowdon resignedly. Ashley walked twice across the room and came to a stand again opposite his friend. "The notes are for Miss Pinsent's husband," said he. Bowdon looked up quickly. "Hullo!" said he, with lifted brows. "I mean what I say; for Fenning." "As the price of not coming?" "Who told you he hadn't come?" "Babba Flint; but it's all over the place by now." "Babba's wrong," said Ashley. "He came on Sunday night. The notes are to bribe him to go away again." There was a pause; then Bowdon said slowly: "I should like to hear a bit more about this, if you don't mind, Ashley. The money's yours. I promised it. But still--since you've begun, you know!" "Yes, I know," said Ashley quickly. "Look here, I'll tell you all about it." The hands ticked the best part of the way round the clock while Ashley talked without pause and uninterrupted, save once when the notes were brought in and laid on the table. He told how the man had come, what the man was, how Ora had fled from him, and how, while the man moved about in the room above, he himself had told her that the man had not come. He broke off here for an instant to say, "You can understand how I came to tell her that?" On receiving Bowdon's assenting nod he went on to describe how for two days he had kept his prisoner quiet; but now he must take some step. "I must take him to her, or I must murder him, or I must bribe him," he ended, with the laugh that accompanies what is an exaggeration in sound but in reality not beyond truth. "I don't like it," said Bowdon at the end. "You haven't seen him as I have," was Ashley's quick retort. To him it seemed all sufficient. "Used to beat her, did he?" Bowdon was instinctively bolstering up the case. Ashley hesitated a little in his answer. "She said he struck her once. I'm bound to say he doesn't seem violent. Drink, I suppose. And she--well, it might seem worse than it was. Why the devil are we to consider him? He's impossible anyhow." "I wasn't considering him. I was considering ourselves." "I'm considering her." "Oh, I know your state of mind. Well, and if he takes the money and goes?" "She'll be quit of him. It'll be as it was before." "Will it?" asked Bowdon quietly. The two men regarded one another with a long and steady gaze. Ashley's eyes did not shirk the encounter. "I mean that," he said at last. "But--." He shrugged his shoulders slightly. He would do his best, but he could answer for nothing. He invited Bowdon to take his stand by him, to fix his attention only on saving her the ordeal which had proved beyond her strength, just to spare her pain, to ask nothing of what lay beyond, not to look too anxiously at the tools they were using or the dirt that the tools might leave on their hands. Bowdon gained a sudden understanding of what Irene Kilnorton had meant by saying that Ora did Ashley infinite harm; but above this recognition and in spite of it rose his old cry so scorned by Irene, "Poor Ora Pinsent!" To him as to Ashley Mead the thought of carrying this man to Ora Pinsent and saying, "You sent for him, here he is," was well nigh intolerable. They were both men who had lived, as men like them mostly live, without active religious feelings, without any sense of obligation to do good, but bound in the strictest code of honour, Pharisees in the doctrine and canons of that law, fierce to resent the most shamefaced prompting of any passion which violated it. A rebel rose against it--was it not rebellion?--drawing strength from nowhere save from the pictured woe in Ora Pinsent's eyes. They sat smoking in silence, and now looked no more at one another. "It's got nothing to do with me," Bowdon broke out once. "Then take back your money," said Ashley with a wave of his hand towards the notes on the table. "You're on the square with me, anyhow," said Bowdon with a reluctant passing smile. He wished that Ashley had been less scrupulous and had taken his money without telling him what use he meant to put it to. "I tell you what, you'd better come and see the fellow," said Ashley. "That'll persuade you I'm right, if anything will." Bowdon had become anxious to be persuaded that the thing was right, or at least so excusable as to be near enough to the right, as to involve no indefensible breach of his code, no crying protest from his honour; if the sight of the man would convince him, he was ready and eager to see the man. Besides, he had a curiosity. Ora had married the man; this adventitious interest hung about Jack Fenning still. "Pocket the notes, and come along," he said, rising. They were very silent as they drove down to Ashley's rooms. The affair did not need, and perhaps would not bear, much talking about; if one of them happened to put it in the wrong way they would both feel very uncomfortable; it could be put in a right way, they said to themselves, but so much care was needed for this that silence seemed safer. Bowdon was left in Ashley's rooms while Ashley went upstairs to fetch Mr. Fenning, whom he found smoking his pipe and staring out of the window. Ashley had made up his mind to carry matters with a high hand. "I want you downstairs a minute or two," he said curtly. "All right; I shall be jolly glad of a change," said Jack, with his feeble smile. "It's pretty slow here, I can tell you." "Hope you won't have much more of it," Ashley remarked, as he led the way downstairs. To suggest to a man that he is of such a disposition as to be ready to surrender his claim to his wife's society, take himself off for good, and leave her fate in the hands of gentlemen who are not related to her in consideration of five hundred pounds, is to intimate that you hold a very peculiar opinion of him. Even with Jack Fenning Ashley felt the difficulties of the position. Bowdon gave him no help, but sat by, watching attentively. The high-handed way was the only way; but it seemed rather brutal to bully the creature. Ashley began. In a pitiless fashion he hinted to Jack what he was, and hazarded the surmise that he set out to rejoin his wife for much the same reason which Babba Flint had thought would appeal to him. Bowdon waited for the outbreak of anger and the flame of resentment. Jack smiled apologetically and rubbed his hands against one another. The other two exchanged a glance; their work grew easier; it seemed also to grow more disgusting. The man was passive in their hands; they had it all to do; the responsibility was all theirs. "We propose, Mr. Fenning, that you should return to America at once, without seeing Miss Pinsent or informing her of your arrival. You have lost time and incurred expense--and--er--no doubt you're disappointed. We shall consider all this in a liberal spirit." Ashley's speech ended here; he was inclined to add, "I'll deal with you as one scoundrel with another." "Go back now, without seeing her?" Was there actually a sparkle of pleasure, or relief, or thankfulness in his eye? Ashley nodded, took out the notes, and laid them on the table. Bowdon shifted his feet, lit a cigarette, and looked away from his companions out of the window. "I have here five hundred pounds. If you'll take the first boat and slip away without letting your--er--visit be known to anybody, I'll hand them over to you, when you step on board." Jack shook his head thoughtfully. "You see I'm out of a place," he said. "I threw up my position to come." He was haggling about the price, nothing else; Bowdon got up and opened the window. "I made a sacrifice for the sake of returning to Miss Pinsent; my expenses have been--" "For God's sake, how much do you want?" said Bowdon, turning round on him. "There's a little spec I know of--" began Jack, with a confidential smile. "How much?" said Ashley. "I think you ought to run to a thousand, Mr. Mead. A thousand's not much for--" "Doing what you're doing? No, it's damned little," said Ashley Mead. "Give him the money, Ashley," said Bowdon from the window. "All right, I'll give it you when I see you on board. Mind you hold your tongue while you're here!" Jack was smiling happily; he seemed like a man who has brought off a great _coup_ which was almost beyond his hopes, in which, at least, he had never expected to succeed so readily and easily. Looking at him, Ashley could not doubt that if he and Bowdon had not furnished means for the "little spec" Ora Pinsent would have been asked to supply them. "I shall be very glad to go back. I never wanted to come. I didn't want to bother Miss Pinsent. I've my own friends." There was a sort of bravado about him now. "Somebody'll be glad to see me, anyhow," he ended with a laugh. "No doubt," said Ashley Mead; his tone was civil; he loathed Mr. Fenning more and more, but it was not the moment for him to get on moral stilts. Bowdon was as though he had become unconscious of Jack's proximity. "There's a boat to-morrow; I'll try for a passage on that." "The sooner the better," Ashley said. "Yes, the sooner the better," said Fenning. He looked doubtfully at the two men and glanced across to a decanter of whiskey which stood on a side table. "Then we needn't say any more," Ashley remarked, hastily gathering the crisp notes in his hand; Jack eyed them longingly. "I'll see you again to-night. Good-bye." He nodded slightly. Bowdon sat motionless. Again Jack looked at both, and his face fell a little. Then he brightened up; there was whiskey upstairs also. "Good afternoon," he said, and moved towards the door; he did not offer to shake hands with Bowdon; he knew that Bowdon would not wish to shake hands with him; and the knowledge did not trouble him. "Oh, Ashley, my boy, Ashley!" groaned Bowdon when the door closed behind Mr. Fenning. "He came to blackmail her." "Evidently. But--I say, Ashley, was he always like that?" "Of course not," said Ashley Mead almost fiercely. "He must have been going down hill for years. Good God, Bowdon, you know the change liquor and a life like his make in a man." "Yes, yes, of course," muttered Bowdon. [Illustration: "SOMEBODY'LL BE GLAD TO SEE ME ANYHOW," HE ENDED WITH A LAUGH] "Thank heaven we've saved her from seeing him as he is now!" "I'm glad of that too." Bowdon rose and flung the window open more widely. "Tell you what, Ashley," he said, "it seems to me the room stinks." Ashley made no answer; he smiled, but not in mirth. There was a knock at the door. Ashley went to open it. Jack Fenning was there. "I beg pardon, Mr. Mead," he said, "but if you'll give me a sheet of paper, I'll write for the passage; and I may have to pay something extra for going back by this boat." "I'll look after that. Here's paper." And he hustled Mr. Fenning out. At the moment a tread became audible on the stairs. Ashley stood where he was. "Somebody coming," he said to Bowdon. "Hope he won't catch Fenning!" Then came voices. The two men listened; the door was good thick oak, and the voices were dim. "I know that voice," said Ashley. "Who the deuce is it?" "It's a man, anyhow," said Bowdon. He had entertained a wild fear that the visitor might be Ora herself; the scheme of things had a way of playing tricks such as that. "Well, good-bye," said the voice, not Jack Fenning's. They heard Jack going upstairs; at the same moment came the shutting of his door and a knock at Ashley's. With a glance at Bowdon, warning him to be discreet, Ashley opened it. Mr. Sidney Hazlewood stood on the threshold. "Glad to find you in," he said, entering. "How are you, Bowdon? I want your advice, Mead. Somebody's stealing a piece of mine and I thought you'd be able to tell me what to do. You're a lawyer, you see." "Yes, in my spare time," said Ashley. "Sit down." Hazlewood sat and began to take off his gloves. "You've got a queer neighbour upstairs, that fellow Foster," he said. "He told me he'd made your acquaintance too." "He's only here for a day or two, and I had to be civil." "Funny my meeting him. I used to come across him in the States. Don't you be too civil." "I know he's no great catch," said Ashley. "He lived by his wits out there, and very badly at that. In fact he'd have gone under altogether if he'd been left to himself." Ashley felt that Bowdon's eyes were on him, but Bowdon took no share in the talk. "Who looked after him then?" he asked. "His wife," said Hazlewood. "She used to walk on, or get a small part, or sing at the low-class halls, or anything you like. Handsome girl in a coarse style. Daisy Macpherson, that's what they called her. She kept him more or less going; he always did what she told him." He paused, and added with a reflective smile, "I mean she said she was his wife, and liked to be called Mrs. Foster in private life." This time neither Bowdon nor Ashley spoke. Hazlewood glanced at them and seemed to be struck with the idea that they were not much interested in Foster and the lady who was, or said she was, his wife. "But I didn't come to talk about that," he went on rather apologetically. "Only it was odd my meeting the fellow." "Oh, I don't know," said Ashley carelessly. "What's the play, Hazlewood, and who's the thief?" CHAPTER XVI MORALITY SMILES For Ora Pinsent the clouds were scattered, the heavens were bright again, the sun shone. The dread which had grown so acute was removed, the necessity for losing what had come to be so much to her had passed away. And all this had fallen to her without blame, without calling for abasement or self-reproach. Nay, in the end, on a view of the whole case, she was meritorious. She had summoned her husband back; true, at the last moment she had run away from him and shirked her great scenes; but if he had really come (she told herself now) she would have conquered that momentarily uncontrollable impulse and done her duty. After a few days' quiet in the country she would have gained strength and resolution to carry out her programme of renunciation and reformation. But he had not come and now he would not come; not even a message came. He refused to be reformed; there was no need for anybody to be renounced. She had done the right thing and by marvellous good fortune had escaped all the disagreeable incidents which usually attend on correct conduct. None could blame her; and she herself could rejoice. She had offered her husband his due; yet there was nothing to separate her from Ashley or to break the sweet companionship. At last fate had shewn her a little kindness; the world unbent towards her with a smile, and she, swiftly responsive, held out both her hands to it in welcome for its new benevolence. Trouble was over, the account was closed; she was even as she had been before the hateful letter came from Bridgeport, Connecticut. In very truth now she could hide the letter among the roses and let it lie there forgotten; the realities had fallen into line with the symbols. As for the people who were to have been edified by the reformation and comforted by the renunciation, why, Irene and Alice Muddock had both been so inexplicably harsh and unkind and unsympathetic that Ora did not feel bound to make herself miserable on their account. Irene had got her husband, Alice did not deserve the man whom Ora understood her to want. It happened that she herself was made for Ashley and Ashley for her; you could not alter these things; there they were. She lay back on the sofa with her eyes on the portrait in the silver frame, and declared that she was happier than she had been for years. If only Ashley would come! For she was rather hurt at Ashley's conduct. Here was Thursday morning and he had not been to see her. He had written very pretty notes, pleading pressing engagements, but he had not come. She was a little vexed, but not uneasy; no doubt he had been busy. She would, of course, have excused him altogether had she known that it was only on Wednesday evening that he was free from his burden and back in town, after seeing his passenger safely embarked on the boat which was to carry him and his thousand pounds back to Bridgeport, Connecticut, or somewhere equally far from the town where she was. Although Ashley did not come, she had a visitor, and although the visitor was Babba Flint, he came not merely in curiosity. His primary business was connected with a play. He had the handling (such was his expression) of a masterpiece; the heroine's part was made for Ora, the piece would do great things here, but, Babba asserted, even greater in America. The author wanted Ora to play in it--authors have these whims--and, if she consented, would offer his work to Mr. Hazlewood; but Hazlewood without Ora would not serve the turn. "So I ran round to nobble you," said Babba. "You know Sidney wants to go to the States, if he can get plays. Well, mine (he had not actually written it) is a scorcher." "Should I have to go to America?" asked Ora apprehensively. "It's absurd you haven't been before." He proceeded to describe Ora's American triumph and the stream of gold which would flow in. "You take a share," he said. "I can offer you a share. Sidney would rather have you on a salary, but take my advice and have a share." The conversation became financial and Ora grew apparently greedy. As Alice Muddock had noticed, she had the art of seeming quite grasping and calculating. But about going to America she gave no answer. The matter was not urgent; the thing would not become pressing for months. On being cross-questioned Babba admitted that the masterpiece was not yet written; the idea was there and had been confided to Babba; he was thunderstruck with it and advised an immediate payment of two hundred pounds. Then the masterpiece would get itself written; all wheels must be oiled if they are to run. "And if you take half, you'll make a fortune," said Babba. Making a fortune for a hundred pounds was the kind of operation which attracted Ora. "I'll write you a cheque now," she said. Babba smiled in a superior manner. "There isn't all that hurry, as long as you're on," he observed. "Won't you give me a kiss for putting you on?" "If it goes as you say, I'll give you a kiss--a kiss for every thousand I make," said Ora, laughing. "There won't be any of me left," groaned Babba, with a humorous assumption of apprehension. He paused for a moment, glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, and added, "But what would Mr. Fenning say?" Ora sat on her sofa and regarded him. She said nothing; she was trying to look grave, resentful, dignified--just as Alice Muddock would look; she knew so well how vulgar Babba was and how impertinent. Alas that he amused her! Alas that just now anybody could amuse and delight her! Her lips narrowly preserved their severity, but her eyes were smiling. Babba, having taken a survey of her, fell into an appearance of sympathetic dejection. "Awfully sorry he didn't come!" he murmured; "I say, don't mind me if you want to cry." "You're really atrocious," said Ora, and began to laugh. "Nobody but you would dare," she went on. "Oh, I believe in him all right, you know," said Babba, "because I've seen him. But most people don't, you know. I say, Miss Pinsent, it'd have a good effect if you advertised; look _bonâ fide_, you know." "You mustn't talk about it, really you mustn't," said Ora, with twitching lips. It was all wrong (Oh, what would Alice Muddock say?), but she was very much amused. If her tragedy of renunciation would turn to a comedy, she must laugh at the comedy. "Keep it up," said Babba, with a grave and sincere air of encouragement. "Postpone him, don't give him up. Let him be coming in three months. It keeps us all interested, you know. And if you positively can't do anything else with him, divorce him." Ora's eyes turned suddenly away. "Anyhow don't waste him," Babba exhorted her. "I tell you there's money in him." "Now you must stop," she said with a new note of earnestness. It caught Babba's attention. "Kick me, if you like," said he. "I didn't know you minded, though." "I don't think I did, much," said Ora. Then she sat up straight and looked past Babba with an absent air. She had an idea of asking him what he thought of her in his heart. He was shrewd under his absurdities, kind under his vulgarity; he had never made love to her; in passing she wondered why. But after all nobody thought Babba's opinion worth anything. "Do you remember meeting Miss Muddock here?" she enquired. "Rather," said Babba. "I know her very well. Now she's a good sort--reminds you of your mother grown young." "Well, she thought you detestable," said Ora. The praise of Alice was not grateful to her, although she acknowledged the aptness of Babba's phrase. "Yes, she would," said he cheerfully. "I've got to shoulder that, you know. So have we all, if it comes to that." "We all! What do you mean?" Ora did not seem amused now. "Oh, our sort," said Babba. "I'll leave you out, if you particularly wish it." "Just tell me what you mean." "Can't, for the life of me," said Babba. "Have a cigarette?" He held out his case; Ora took a cigarette. They both began to smoke. "But we give her fits," he went on in a meditative tone, as of a man who recognised facts, although he disclaimed all power of explaining them. "I tell you what, though--" he resumed; but again he paused. "Well?" said Ora irritably. "That's the sort to marry," said Babba, and put his cigarette in his mouth with a final air. "Ask her, then," said Ora, with an uncomfortable laugh. "I think I see myself!" smiled Babba. "How should we mix?" Ora rose from the sofa and walked restlessly to the window. Her satisfaction with the world was shadowed. She decided to tell Babba nothing of what Alice Muddock, nothing of what Irene Kilnorton, had said to her. For, strange as it seemed, Babba would understand, not ridicule, appreciate, not deride, be nearer endorsing than resenting. He would not see narrow, ignorant, uncharitable prejudice; it appeared that he would recognise some natural inevitable difference, having its outcome in disapproval and aloofness. Was there this gulf? Was Babba right in sitting down resignedly on the other side of it? Her thoughts flew off to Ashley Mead. On which side of the gulf was he? And if on the other than that occupied by "our sort," would he cross the gulf? How would he cross it? "Well, you'll bear the matter of the play in mind," said Babba, rising and flinging away his cigarette. "Oh, don't bother me about plays now," cried Ora impatiently. Babba stood hat in hand, regarding her critically. He saw that she was disturbed; he did not perceive why she should be. The change of mood was a vagary to be put up with, not accounted for; there was need of Mr. Hazlewood's philosophy. He fell back on raillery. "Cheer up," he said. "He'll turn up some day." "Stop!" said Ora, with a stamp of her foot. "Go away." "Not unpardoned?" implored Babba tragically. Ora could not help laughing, as she stretched out her hand in burlesque grandeur, and allowed him to kiss it. "Anyhow, we'll see you through," he assured her as he went out, casting a glance back at the slim still figure in the middle of the room. Partly because he had not come sooner, more from the shadow left by this conversation, she received Ashley Mead when he arrived in the afternoon with a distance of manner and a petulance which she was not wont to show towards him. She had now neither thanks for his labours in going to meet Mr. Fenning nor apologies for her desertion of him; she gave no voice to the joy for freedom which possessed her. Babba Flint had roused an uneasiness which demanded new and ample evidence of her power, a fresh assurance that she was everything to Ashley, a proof that though she might be all those women said she was, yet she was irresistible, conquering and to conquer. And her triumph should not be won by borrowing weapons or tactics from the enemy. She would win with her own sword, in her own way, as herself; she had rather exaggerate than soften what they blamed in her; still she would achieve her proof and win her battle. There seemed indeed no battle to fight, for Ashley was very tender and friendly to her; he appeared, however, a little depressed. Pushing her experiment, she began to talk about Irene and Alice, and, as she put it, "that sort of woman." "But they aren't at all the same sort of woman," he objected, smiling. "Oh, yes, they are, if you compare them with me," she insisted, pursuing the path which Babba's reflections had shewn her. "Well, they've certain common points as compared with you, perhaps," he admitted. "They're good and I'm not." "You aren't alarmingly bad," said Ashley, looking at her. He was wondering how she had come to marry Fenning. "Look at my life and theirs!" "Very different, of course." They had never been joined in bonds of union with Fenning. She leant forward and began to finger the flowers in her vase. "It would have been better," she said, "if Jack had come. Then you could have gone back. I know you think you're bound not to go back now." He took no notice of her last words, and asked no explanation of what "going back" meant. "I'd sooner see you dead than with your husband," he said quietly. Forgetting the flowers, she bent forward with clasped hands. "Would you, Ashley?" she whispered. The calm gravity of his speech was sweet incense to her. Speaking like that, he surely meant what he said! "How could you help me to bring him back, then?" "I hadn't quite realised the sort of man he must be." "Oh!" This was not just what she wanted to hear. "There's nothing particular the matter with him," she said. "The things you told me--" "I daresay I was unjust. I expect I exasperated him terribly. I used rather to like him--really, you know." "You wouldn't now," said Ashley with a frown. The remark seemed to shew too much knowledge. He added, "I mean, would you?" "Now? Oh, now--things are different. I should hate it now." She rose and stood opposite to him. "What's the matter?" she asked. "You're not happy to-day. Is anything wrong?" He could not tell her what was wrong, how this man whom she had so unaccountably brought into her life seemed first to have degraded her and now to degrade him. To tell her that was to disclose all the story. He could throw off neither his disgust with himself nor his discontent with her. She had not asked him to borrow money and bribe Jack Fenning to go away; it was by no will of hers that he had become a party to the sordid little drama which Hazlewood's information enabled him to piece together. All she saw was that he was gloomy and that he did not make love to her. He should have come in a triumph of exultation that their companionship need not be broken. Her fears were ready with an explanation. Was Babba Flint right? Was the companionship unnatural, incapable of lasting, bound to be broken? She looked down on him, anger and entreaty fighting in her eyes. "I believe you're sorry he didn't come," she said, in a low voice. "Do you want to get rid of me? You've only to say so, if that's what you want." "I'm not sorry he didn't come," said Ashley, with a smile. "Now you're amused. What at?" "Oh, the way things happen! Among all the things I thought you might say to me, I never thought of your telling me that I was sorry he hadn't come." He raised his eyes to hers suddenly. "Do you know anything about what he does out there?" he asked. "No; he never wrote, except that once. I don't want to know; it doesn't matter to me." "One letter in five years--isn't it five?--isn't much." "Oh, why should he write? We separated for ever." "But then he proposed to come." "Dear me, don't be logical, Ashley. You see he didn't come. I suppose he had a fit of something and wrote then." She paused, and added with a smile, "Perhaps it occurred to him that I used to be attractive." "And then he forgot again?" "I suppose so. Why do you talk about him? He's gone!" She waved her hand as though to scatter the last mist of remembrance of Jack Fenning. "Perhaps he wanted to get some money out of you," said Ashley. "You aren't flattering, Ashley." "Ah, my dear, a man who does what I do may say what I say." Something in his words or tone appealed to her. She knelt down by his chair and looked up in his face. "You do all sorts of things for me, don't you?" "All sorts." "And you hate a good many of them?" "Some." "And your friends hate all of them for your sake! I mean Irene, and Miss Muddock, and so on. Ashley, would you do anything really bad for me?" "I expect so." "I don't care; I should like it. And when you'd done it I should like to go and tell Alice Muddock all about it." "She wouldn't care." His voice sounded sincere, not merely as though it gave utterance to the proper formal disclaimer of an unloved lady's interest in him. Ora did not miss the ring of truth. "Has she begun not to care?" she asked. "If you choose to put it in that way, yes," he answered, with a shrug of his shoulders. "You see, we go different ways." The talk seemed all of different ways and different sorts to-day. "Yes, I know," she answered, drawing a little back from him, but not rising from her knees. Ashley was not looking at her, but, resting his head on his hands, gazed straight in front of him; he was frowning again. "What are they saying about Jack not coming?" she asked suddenly. "What they would," said Ashley, without turning his head. "You know; I needn't tell you." "Oh, yes, I know. Well, what does it matter?" "Not a ha'penny," said Ashley Mead. It was not what they said that troubled him; what they said had nothing to do with what he had done. "Ashley," she said, with an imperative note in her voice, "I know exactly what I ought to do; I've read it in a lot of books." Her smile broke out for a moment. "Most books are stupid--at least the women in them are. I was stupid before--before Jack didn't come, and I thought I'd do it. Well, I won't. I don't believe you'd be happier. I won't give you up, I won't let you go." Ashley turned on her with a smile. "Nothing equals the conceit of women," he said. "They always think they can settle the thing. Whatever you say, I've not the least intention of being given up." It crossed his mind that to allow himself to be given up now would be a remarkable piece of ineptitude, when he had sacrificed a thousand pounds, and one or two other things, in order to free himself and her from the necessity of their renunciation. "Wouldn't you go if I told you?" "Not I!" "Well then, I've half a mind to tell you!" Her tone was gay; Babba Flint's inexplicable convictions and voiceless philosophy were forgotten. The man she loved loved her; what more was there to ask? She began to wonder how she had strayed from this simple and satisfactory point of view; didn't it exhaust the world? It was not hers to take thought for him, but to render herself into his hands. Not ashamed of this weakness, still she failed to discern that in it lay her overwhelming strength. She stretched out her hands and put them in his with her old air of ample self-surrender, of a capitulation that was without condition because the conqueror's generosity was known of all. "What are we worrying about?" she cried with a low merry laugh. "Here are you, Ashley, and here am I!" And now she recollected no more that this kind of conduct was exactly what seemed horrible to Alice Muddock and wantonly wicked to Irene Kilnorton. In this mood her fascination was strongest; she had the power of making others forget what she forgot. Ashley Mead sat silent, looking at her, well content if he might have rested thus for an indefinite time, with no need of calculating, of deciding, or of acting. As for her, so for him now, it was enough. With a light laugh she drew her hands away and sprang to her feet. "I wish I hadn't got to go to the theatre," she exclaimed. "We'd dine somewhere together. Oh, of course you're engaged, but of course you'd break it. You'd just wire, 'Going to dine with Ora Pinsent,' and they'd all understand. They couldn't expect you to refuse that for any engagement; you see, they know you're rather fond of me. Besides they'd all do just the same themselves, if they had the chance." So she gave rein to her vanity and her triumph; they could not but please him since they were her pæan over his love for her. Till the last possible moment he stayed with her, driving with her to the theatre again as in the days when the near prospect of the renunciation made indiscretion provisional and unimportant. He would not see her act; it was being alone with her, having her to himself, which was so sweet that he could hardly bring himself to surrender it. To see her as one of a crowd had not the virtue that being alone with her had; it brought back, instead of banishing, what she had made him forget--the view of the world, what she was to others, and what she was to himself so soon as the charm of her presence was removed. He left her at the door of the theatre and went off to keep his dinner engagement. With her went the shield that protected him from reflexion and saved him from summing up the facts of the situation. Morality has curious and unexpected ways of justifying itself, even that somewhat specialised form of morality which may be called the code of worldly honour. This was Ashley Mead's first reflexion. A very stern character is generally imputed to morality; people hardly do justice nowadays to its sense of humour; they understood that better in the old days. "The Lord shall have them in derision." Morality is fond of its laugh. Here was his second thought, which came while a vivacious young lady gave him her opinion of the last popular philosophical treatise. To take advantage of Mr. Hazlewood's carelessly dropped information, to follow up the clue of the good-for-nothing Foster and the masterful Daisy Macpherson, to set spies afoot, to trace the local habitation of the "little spec," and to find out who formed the establishment that carried it on--all this would be no doubt possible, and seemed in itself sordid enough, with its sequel of a divorce suit, and the notoriety of the proceedings which Miss Pinsent's fame would ensure. Yet all this might possibly have been endured with set teeth and ultimately lived down, if only it had chanced that Mr. Hazlewood had been to hand with his very significant reminiscences before Lord Bowdon and Ashley Mead had made up their minds that Jack Fenning must be got out of the way, and that a thousand pounds should buy his departure and bribe him not to obtrude his society upon the lady who was his wife. That Mr. Hazlewood came after the arrangement was made and after the bargain struck was the satiric touch by which morality lightened its grave task of business-like retribution. What, if any, might be the legal effect of such a transaction in the eyes of the tribunal to which Miss Pinsent must be persuaded to appeal, Ashley did not pretend to know and could not bring himself seriously to care. The impression which it would create on the world when fully set forth (and he knew Jack Fenning too well to suppose that it would not be declared if it suited that gentleman's interest) was only too plain. The world perhaps might not understand Bowdon's part in the affair; probably it would content itself with surmises about something lying in the past and with accompanying sympathetic references to poor Irene Kilnorton; but its judgment of himself, of Jack Fenning, and of Ora Pinsent was not doubtful. Would the world believe that Ora knew nothing about the manner of Jack's coming and the manner of Jack's going? The world was not born yesterday! And about Ashley Mead the world would, after a perfunctory pretence of seeking a charitable explanation, confess itself really unable to come to any other than one conclusion. The world would say that the whole thing was very deplorable but would not attempt to discriminate between the parties. "Six of one and half-a-dozen of the other." That would be the world's verdict, and, having arrived at it, it would await the infinitely less important judgment of the Court with a quiet determination not to be shaken in its view of the case. To pursue a path that ended thus was to incur penalties more degrading and necessities more repugnant than could lie in an open defiance of this same world with its sounding censures and malicious smiles. To defy was in a way respectable; this would be to grovel, and to grovel with no better chance than that of receiving at last a most contemptuous pardon. "Six of one and half-a-dozen of the other." He would be paired off with Jack Fenning, Ora coupled with the masterful Daisy Macpherson. Let them fight it out among themselves--while decent people stood aloof with their noses in the air, their ears open, and their lips as grave as might be. Such was the offer of peace which morality, certainly not serious beyond suspicion, made to Ashley Mead; if he would submit to this, his offence touching that matter of the thousand pounds and the burking of Mr. Fenning's visit should be forgotten. Better war to the death, thought Ashley Mead. But what would Bowdon say? And what would be the cry that echoed in the depths of Ora's eyes? He asked the question as he looked at her picture. Suddenly with an oath he turned away; there had come into his mind the recollection of Jack Fenning's ardent study of Miss Macpherson's face. _Mutato nomine de te_:--and does the name make such a difference? CHAPTER XVII AT SEA AND IN PORT To Irene Kilnorton, occupied with the matter against her will and in face of self-contempt, the non-appearance of Jack Fenning was a source of renewed irritation and uneasiness. She could not smile with the world nor agree to dispose of the subject with the cynical and contented observation that she had never supposed the man would come and had her doubts about there being such a man at all. Her consideration of it was bound to be more elaborate, her view more individual. Hence came the self-contempt and anger which afflicted her without affecting facts. For the present indeed Ora was infatuated with Ashley Mead, a position of affairs deplorable on general grounds but reassuring on personal; but then where was her safety, what security had she? She let injustice trick her into panic--with such as Ora the infatuation of Monday afternoon might be followed by a new passion on Tuesday morning. The mixture of jealousy with her moral condemnation caused Irene to suffer an unhealthy attraction to the subject; she could not help talking about it; she talked about it with Bowdon to his great discomfort. He was not a good dissembler; he could respect a secret, but his manner was apt to betray that there was a secret; he was restless, impatient, now and then almost rude, when Irene harped on the string of Jack Fenning's strange behaviour. Or was it not Ora's? Had Ora at the last moment, for reasons unquestionably sufficient, countermanded her husband? Bowdon was pathetic in his plea of ignorance, but the plea did not ring true. Thus she was sore with her _fiancé_, vexed with Ashley Mead, and furious against Ora Pinsent. Yet, being a woman of the world, she was polite to Ora when they met, friendly if severe to Ashley, and, as has been said, interested in both of them with a reluctant intensity. Any strangeness there might be in her own attitude was suggested to her for the first time by the very different behaviour of her friend Alice Muddock. Here she found a definiteness of mind, a resolution, and a relentlessness which she hardly knew whether to laugh at, to shudder at, or to admire. She knew what Ashley had been to Alice; she remembered how in the beginning Alice had taken a liking to Ora Pinsent. Yet now her own anger could hardly seem deep or serious beside Alice's silent condemnation; her moral disapproval, with its copious discussion and its lively interest, was mere frippery compared with her friend's eloquent ignoring of the very existence of the culprits. Having dropped in to talk the whole thing over, Irene was amazed to find that she was ashamed to introduce the subject. "I suppose I'm not really moral at all," thought Irene with a moment's insight into the radical differences between her friend and herself, between the talkative shockedness of society and the genuine grieved concern which finds in silence its only possible expression. "And I brought Ora here!" Irene reflected in mingled awe and amusement; her deed seemed now like throwing a lighted squib into a chapelfull of worshippers. "It's a little bit absurd," was suggested by her usual way of looking at things. "Quite proper, though," added her jealousy of Ora Pinsent. But the habitual had the last word with her. "I suppose the Muddocks were brought up in that way," she ended. Alice had been brought up in that way; from that way she had struggled to escape with the help of some uncertain intellectual lights; but the lights had drawn their flickering radiance from the flame of her love for Ashley Mead. So long as she could she had believed the best, or had at least refused to believe the worst. But the lights did not now burn brightly, their oil gave out, and the prejudices (if they were prejudices) began to gather round, thick and darkening. A lax judgment on a matter of morals seldom survives defeat suffered at the hands of the sinner. This fortuitous buttressing of righteousness is all to the good. Yet because she did not see how her own feelings joined forces with her idea of right, how the fact of the argosy being laden with her own hopes intensified in her eyes the crime of the pirate, Alice Muddock became hard to the sinners as well as justly severe on their censurable doings; and, from having once tried to understand and excuse them, grew more certain that they could put forward no mitigating plea. Weeks passed and Ashley Mead was not asked to Kensington Palace Gardens. "It's a little inhuman; she was fond of him," thought Irene. Then came a flash of light. "Bertie Jewett!" she cried inwardly, and her lips set in the stoniness of a new disapproval. Much as Bertie had conciliated her, the reaction went too far for Lady Kilnorton's taste. It is very well to be estimable, but it is very ill to be estimable and nothing else; and she thought that Bertie was nothing else, unless it were that he was also a little vulgar; to Bowdon she had denied this; to herself she admitted it. Yet she was very wrong. He might be vulgar; he was estimable; but he was much besides; hence it happened that the thing which seemed to her so impossible was in a fair way to come about. Old Sir James was dying, and stayed his last tottering steps on Bertie Jewett's arm; Bob came home day by day to tell how all the business hung on Bertie Jewett; Bob's echo, Lady Muddock, was of course in the same cry; the potent influence of the household, which so encircles the individual, ringed Alice round with the praises of Bertie Jewett. She had no passion for him, but now it seemed to her that passions were of doubtful advantage and that she at least was not meant for them; the idea of having one had been part of her great mistake. Bertie lay right on the true lines of her life, as training and fate--as God, she said to herself--had planned them for her; if she followed them, would she not come to Bertie? All this was much, yet not enough had he been only estimable. He was strong also, strong to advance and strong to wait; the keenness of his pale blue eyes saved him here as it saved him in the bargains that he made. It shewed him his hour and the plan of his attack. With cautious audacity he laid his siege, letting his deeds not his words speak for him, trusting not to his words but to his deeds to disparage his rival. The man had the instinct for success--or seemed to have it, because his desires and capabilities were so nicely adjusted and of such equal range. He could not have written a poem, but he never wanted to. Ora Pinsent would have suffered under him as under a long church service; but then he would never have tried to please that lady. "Do you really like him?" Irene asked Alice as they walked in the garden. "Yes," said Alice thoughtfully. "I really like him now." "Oh, because he's helpful and handy, and looks after you all!" "No, there's something more than that." She frowned a little. "You can rely on him; I don't mean to do things so much as to be things--the things you expect, you know. I think the one terrible thing would be to have to do with a person who was all fits and starts; it would seem as though there was no real person there at all." "That's what I always feel about Ora Pinsent." Irene took courage and introduced the name deliberately. "Yes," Alice assented briefly. Irene had no doubt that she was thinking of Miss Pinsent's friend also, and when she came to report the conversation to Bowdon this aspect of it took the foremost place. "If she marries Mr. Jewett," said Irene, "it'll be just in a recoil from Ashley Mead." Bowdon did not look at her but at the end of the cigarette which he was smoking by the window in Queen's Gate. He had no difficulty in understanding how a recoil might land one in a marriage; this was to him trodden ground. "She'll be happier with him," Irene continued. "Ora has quite spoilt Ashley for any other woman." Bowdon agreed that Miss Pinsent might very likely have some such effect, but he expressed the view quite carelessly. "Besides, really, how could any self-respecting woman think of him now, any more than any man could of her?" Bowdon made no answer to this question, which was, after all, purely rhetorical. "But, hang it, Jewett!" he remarked after a pause. "I know," said Irene, forgetting her former dialectical championship of Bertie. The matter was serious now. "She needn't have taken quite such an extreme remedy; but he was on the spot, you see; and--and it's the business. She's falling right back into the business, over head and ears and all. It's rather sad, but--" It seemed as though she meant that it was better than linking fortunes with a being all fits and starts. She rose and came near him. "I think we're just about right, you and I, Frank," she said. "We aren't Jewetts and we aren't Oras. I think we're the happy compromise." "You are, no doubt, my dear. I'm a dull dog," said Bowdon. She looked at him for a moment and turned away with a little sigh. The marriage was very near; was the work yet fully done, or had fits and starts still their power over him and their attraction for him? He made a remark the next moment which vexed her intensely. "Well, you know," he said with a thoughtful smile, "I expect we seem to Miss Pinsent just what Jewett seems to us." Irene walked away and sat down in a chair on the other side of the room. "I'm sure I don't care what I seem to Ora Pinsent," she said very coldly; but Bowdon smoked on in pensive silence. At this time both the triumph and the activity of Babba Flint were great. He was divided between the masterpiece of dramatic writing at whose birth he was assisting, and the masterpiece of prescience which he had himself displayed touching the matter of Mr. Fenning's return. When he contemplated these two achievements (and he took almost as much personal credit for the first as for the second) he said openly that he ought to find excuse for being "a bit above himself." It was no use to tell him that he was not writing the play, and neither of the men who knew chose to tell him that he had been wrong in regard to Jack Fenning. Thus left to a blessed self-conceit, he obtruded on Ashley Mead certain advice which was received with a curious bitter amusement. "If I were you, I'd find out something about the fellow," he said. "I mean--why didn't he come?" He looked very sly. "_Cherchez la femme_," he added. "And if I found her?" asked Ashley. "Oh, well, you know best about that," said Babba. He conceded that it was entirely for Ashley to say whether he would greet a chance of establishing his relations with Ora on a regular and respectable basis. "But, depend on it, she's there," he added, waving his hand in the supposed direction of the United States. "I shouldn't wonder at all," Ashley remarked, his recollection fixed on Miss Macpherson's portrait. "Now if we all go over in the winter--" began Babba. "You all? Who do you mean?" "Why, if we take the play. Have I told you about--?" "Oh, Lord, yes, Babba, twenty times. But I'd forgotten." "Well, if Hazlewood and Miss Pinsent and I go--we can't ask you, I'm afraid, you know--we can nose about a bit." Ashley looked at him with a helpless smile; the picture conjured up by his expression lacked no repulsive feature. Here was a hideously apt summary of the prospect which had been in his own thoughts; if he followed the clue, he must nose about or get somebody to nose about for him. "Shut up, Babba," he commanded, rudely enough; but Babba smiled and told him to think it over. Babba did not recognise any defect in the manner of offering his services or anything objectionable in the substance of them. He had flung open a door; he could not be expected to guarantee the cleanliness of the threshold, since he had not a very fine eye with which to guide the broom. Whatever Ashley might think about the opportunities supposed to be afforded by the suggested excursion to America, he could not avoid giving consideration to the tour itself. The London season drew to a close; Mr. Hazlewood wanted to make his plans; Babba and his associates were urgent for a Yes or a No. If Ora said Yes, after a brief rest she would set to work at rehearsals and in a few weeks cross the seas; if she said No, she had the prospect of a long holiday, to be spent how she would, where she would, with whom she would. This position of affairs raised the great question in a concrete and urgent form; it pressed itself on Ashley Mead; he began to wonder when it would make an impression on Ora. For up to the present time she did not seem to have looked ahead; she had fallen back into the state of irresponsible happiness from which her husband's letter had roused her. She considered the tour with interest and even eagerness, but without bringing it into relation with Ashley Mead; in other moments she talked rapturously about the delights of a holiday, but either ignored or tacitly presupposed the manner and the company in which she was to spend it. She never referred to her husband; she had, and apparently expected to have, no letter from him. He was gone; Ora seemed as unconscious of the problem to which his disappearance gave rise as she was ignorant of the means by which the disappearance had been brought about. She had left to Ashley the decision as to whether she should or should not undertake the renunciation and reformation; so she appeared to leave it to him now to make up his mind what must be done since the reformation had become impossible and the renunciation of no effect. Meanwhile she was delightfully happy. It was this unmeditated joy in her which made it at once impossible for Ashley to leave her and impossible to shape plans by which he should be enabled to stay with her. To do either was to spoil what he had, was to soil a simple perfection, was to run up against the world, against the world's severe cold Alice Muddocks with their scorn of emotions, and its Babba Flints with their intolerable manoeuvres and hints of profitable nosings. That a choice of courses should be forced on him became irksome. Things were very well as they were; she was happy, he was happy, Jack Fenning was gone, and--well, some day he would pay Lord Bowdon a thousand pounds. He was in this mood when the American tour faced him with its peremptory summons, with its business-like calculations of profit, its romantic involving of despair, its abominable possibilities of nosing. Babba spoke of it to him, so did Mr. Hazlewood, both with an air of curiosity; Ora herself speculated about it more and more, sometimes in her artistic, sometimes in her financial, sometimes in her fatalistic mood. She was strange about it; now she would talk as though he were to be with her, again as if he were to be at work here at home and his letters her only comfort. She never faced facts; she did not even look at them from the corner of an eye, over the shoulder. "Shall I go or not?" she would ask him, as though it were a question between keeping some trivial engagement and breaking it for a pleasanter. "Now, shall I go, Ashley dear?" Had she no notion of what things meant? Away from her he often asked this question; when he was with her, it died away on his lips. Then he declared that, if he could so cheat necessity and beguile the inevitable from its path, she should never know what things meant, never take a hard reckoning with the world, never be forced to assess herself. She had forgotten what Irene and what Alice had said to her, or had persuaded herself that they spoke for form's sake, or in jealousy, or in ignorance, or because their clergyman had such influence over them, or for some such cause. She was now as simply unreasoning as she was simply happy; she was altogether at his disposal, ready to go or stay, to do what he ordered, even (as he knew) to leave him in tears and sorrow, if that were his will. She left it all to him; and, having it all left to him, he left it to Mr. Hazlewood, to Babba Flint, or to any other superficially inadequate embodiment in which the Necessary chose to clothe itself. But Bowdon's thousand pounds? Such a man as Ashley--or as his creditor--will be careless of all things in earth or heaven save a woman's secret, his given word, the etiquette of his profession, and a debt of honour. The thousand pounds was in the fullest sense a debt of honour. He had not a thousand pounds. To save was impossible while Ora went everywhere with him. Money to her was like manna and seemed to entail the same obligation that none of the day's bounty should be left to the next morning. Ashley was hard-up; the prosaic fact shot across his mental embarrassments in a humorous streak. He laughed at it, at himself when he bought Ora bouquets or the last fancy in blotting-pads, at her when she asked him for a sovereign, because she had no place convenient for the carrying of a purse. At a word she would have repaid, and besides flung all she had into his hands. But that word he would not speak. The Commission drew near to its close; brief bred brief but slowly; and as long as he owed Bowdon a thousand pounds he seemed to himself more than criminal. But did he owe it? Yes, a thousand times. For if he did not, then Bowdon was something more to Ora Pinsent than a chance acquaintance or a friend's _fiancé_. He acknowledged the hearty good comradeship which had shewn itself in the loan; but it had been a loan; only by repaying it could he appropriate the service to himself and remove another's offering from the shrine at which he worshipped. Matters standing in this position, time, with its usual disregard of the state of our private affairs, brought on the wedding of Irene Kilnorton and Lord Bowdon. Irene had found no sufficient reason for objecting to Ashley's presence. Logic then demanded that an invitation should be sent to Miss Pinsent. As it chanced, it pleased Ora to come in conspicuous fashion, in a gown which the papers were bound to notice, in a hat of mark, rather late, full of exuberant sympathy with the performance. She arrived only a minute before the bride, while Bowdon and Ashley Mead stood side by side close to the altar-rails. Both saw her the moment she came in, both looked at her, neither made any comment on her appearance. As soon as the procession entered she made an effort to relapse into decorous obscurity, but, willy-nilly, she halved attention with the proper heroine of the day. A wedding affected Ora; the ready tears stood in her eyes as the solemn confident vows were spoken. Ashley almost laughed as he listened to Bowdon's; he had a sudden sense that it would be rather absurd if Ora and he took such vows; he had a distinct knowledge that the woman of whom he himself thought was in the minds of bride and bridegroom also. He glanced at her, she smiled at him with her innocent disregard of appearances. He looked the other way and found Alice Muddock with eyes firm set on her prayer-book. The officiating minister delivered a little discourse, one of his own writing, in lieu of the homily. Looking again, Ashley found Alice's eyes on the minister with a grave meditative gaze, as though she weighed his words and assessed the duties and the difficulties they set forth; but Ora was glancing round the church, finding acquaintances. When the ceremony ended and they had come out of the vestry, he walked past Ora in the wake of the procession. Ora smiled in a comprehending, rather compassionate way; her emotion was quite gone. Now she seemed to bid him take the ceremony for what it was worth. He had watched to see whether Bowdon looked at her; Bowdon had not looked. That was because the ceremony had seemed of importance to him. Ashley broke into a smile; it would have been more encouraging, if also more commonplace, had Ora's tears not been so obviously merely a tribute to the literary gifts of the composers of the service. At the reception afterwards--it was quiet and small--one thing happened which seemed to have a queer significance. He found Ora, and took her round the rooms. As they made their circuit they came on Alice Muddock; she was talking to Bertie Jewett. She looked up, bowed to Ashley, and smiled; she took no notice at all of Ora Pinsent. Ashley felt himself turn red, and his lips shaped themselves into angry words; he turned to Ora. Ora was looking the other way. She had been cut; but she had not seen it; she had not noticed Alice Muddock. But Ashley understood that the two women had parted asunder, that to be the friend of one was in future not to be a friend to the other. It was a queer moment also when Ora, full again of overflowing emotions, flung herself on Irene's breast, kissed her, blessed her, praised her, prayed for her, laughed at her, lauded her gown, and told her that she had never looked better in her life. Irene laughed and returned the kiss; then she looked at her husband, next at Ashley, lastly at Ora Pinsent. There was a moment of silent embarrassment in all the three; Ora glanced round at them and broke into her low laugh. "Why, what have I done to you all?" she cried. "Have I hypnotised you all?" Bowdon raised his eyes, let them rest on her a moment, then turned to Ashley Mead. The two women began to talk again. For a moment the two men stood looking at one another. They had their secret. Each telegraphed to the other, "Not a word about the thousand!" Then they shook hands heartily. Ora and Ashley passed on. For a moment Bowdon looked after them. Then he turned to his bride and found her eyes on him. He took her hand and pressed it. Her eyes were bright as she looked at him for an instant before a new friend claimed her notice. As she greeted the friend, Bowdon gave a little sigh. He was in port! But the laughing, dancing, buffeting, dangerous waves are also sweet. "I'm glad I went," said Ora, as Ashley handed her into her victoria. She laughed as she lay back on the cushions. "It was so funny at my wedding," she said. "Jack lost the ring." She waved her hand merrily as she was driven away. "Come soon," she cried over her shoulder. He waved his hand in response and turned to go back into the house. In his path stood Bertie Jewett. For an instant Ashley stood still. "I suppose it's about over," he said carelessly. "Just about. I must get back to the shop," said Bertie, looking at his watch. But he did not move. Ashley, glancing beyond him, saw Alice Muddock coming towards the door. "So must I," he said, clapping on his hat and hailing a hansom. He jumped in and was carried away. One of Bowdon's servants brought his walking-stick to his rooms the next day. He had forgotten it in a passing recollection of old days, when Alice and he used to laugh together over the manoeuvres by which they got rid of Bertie Jewett. CHAPTER XVIII THE PLAY AND THE PART Babba Flint's dramatic masterpiece progressed and took shape rapidly. "The beggar's got at it at last," Babba said, in one of his infrequent references to the author. Mr. Hazlewood did not talk much, but was plainly of opinion that there might be a great deal of money made. Ora was enthusiastic. She had seen the scenario and had read the first draft of the great scene in the third act. The author had declared his conviction that no woman save Ora could play this scene; Ora was certain that it would be intolerable to her that any other woman should. She did not then and there make up her mind to play it, but it began to be certain that she would play it and would accept such arrangements of her life and her time as made her playing of it possible. In this way things, when suggested or proposed, slid into actual facts with her; they grew insensibly, as acquaintances grow; she found herself committed to them without any conscious act of decision. "Let her alone, she'll do it," said Hazlewood to Babba, and Babba did no more than throw out, on the one side, conjectures as to the talent which certain ladies whom he named might display in the _rôle_, and, on the other, forecasts of the sure triumph which would await Ora herself. Finally he added that Ora had better see the whole piece before she arrived at a conclusion. Hazlewood approved and seconded these indirect but skilful tactics. With every such discussion the play and the part made their footing more and more secure in Ora's mind. She began to talk as though, in the absence of unforeseen circumstances, she would be "opening" in New York with the play and the part in October; when she spoke thus to Ashley Mead, the old look of vague questioning was in her eyes; it seemed to him as though the old look of apprehension or appeal were there also, as though she were a little afraid that he would forbid her to go and prevent her from playing the part. But in this look lay the only reference that she made to her present position, and her only admission that it held any difficulties. His answer to it was to talk to her about the play and the part; this he could not do without the implied assumption that she would act the part in the play, would act it with Sidney Hazlewood, and would act it in America in October. What these things that were gradually insinuating themselves into the status of established facts meant to him he began to see. For the play was nothing to him, he had no share in the venture, and certainly he could not tour about the United States of America as a superfluous appendage to Mr. Hazlewood's theatrical company. The result was that she would go away from him, and that the interval before she went grew short. Up to the present time there was no change in their relations; as they had been before the coming and going of Jack Fenning, they were still. But such relations must in the end go forward or backward; had he chosen, he knew that they would have gone forward; more plainly than in words she had left that to him; but he had left the decision to the course of events, and that arbiter was deciding that the relations should go backward. She loved him still, tenderly always, sometimes passionately; but the phase of feeling in which her love had been the only thing in the world for her was passing away, as the counter-attraction of the play and the part increased in strength. The rest of her life, which love's lullaby had put to sleep, was awaking again. In him a resignation mingled with the misery brought by his recognition of this; unless he could resort to the "nosings" which Babba Flint suggested, he would lose her, she would drift away from him; he felt deadened at the prospect but was not nerved to resist it. He was paralysed by an underlying consciousness that this process was inevitable; the look in her eyes confirmed the feeling in him; now she seemed to look at him, even while she caressed him, from across a distance which lay between them. His encounter with Bertie Jewett after the wedding had been the incident which made him understand how he had passed out of Alice Muddock's life, and she out of his, his place in hers being filled by another, hers in his left empty. The fatalism of his resignation accepted a like ending for himself and Ora Pinsent. Presently she would be gone; there was no use in trying to weld into one lives irrevocably disassociated by the tendency of things. This was the conclusion which forced itself upon him, when he perceived that she would certainly act in the play and certainly go to America in the autumn. The mists of love conceal life's landscape, wrapping all its features in a glowing haze. Presently the soft clouds lift, and little by little the scene comes back again; once more the old long roads stretch out, the quiet valleys spread, the peaks raise their heads; the traveller shoulders his knapsack and starts again on his path. He has lingered; here now are the roads to traverse and the peaks to climb; here is reality; where is that which was the sole reality? But at first the way seems very long, the sack is very heavy, and the peaks--are they worth the climbing? "What's the matter, Ashley? You're glum," she said one day, after she had been describing to him the finest situation in the finest part in the finest play that had ever been written. It was a week before her theatre was to close and before a decision as to plans for the future must be wrung from her by the pressure of necessity. The thought of how he stood had been so much with him that suddenly, almost without intention, he gave voice to it. She charmed him that day and he felt as though the inevitable must not and somehow could not happen, as though some paradox in the realm of fact would rescue him, as a witty saying redeems a conversation which has become to all appearance dull beyond hope of revival. "I'm losing you, Ora," he said slowly and deliberately, fixing his eyes on her. "You'll take this play; you'll go to America; you're thinking more about that than anything else now." A great change came on her face; he rose quickly and went to her. "My dear, my dear, I didn't mean to say anything of that sort to you," he whispered as he bent over her. "It's quite natural, it's all as it should be. Good God, you don't think I'm reproaching you?" He bent lower still, meaning to kiss her. She caught him by the arms and held him there, so that he could come no nearer and yet could not draw back; she searched his face, then dropped her hands and lay back, looking up at him with quivering lips and eyes already full of tears. Blind to his feelings as she had been, yet her quickness shewed them all to her at his first hint, and she magnified his accusation till it grew into the bitterest condemnation of her. "You've given simply everything for me," she said, speaking slowly as he had. "I don't know all you've done for me, but I know it's a great deal. I told you what Alice Muddock said I was; you remember?" She sprang to her feet suddenly and threw her arms round his neck; "I love you," she whispered to him; it was apology, protest, consolation, all in one. "Ashley, what do I care about the wretched play? Only I--I thought you were interested in it too. How lovely it would be if we could act it together!" Her smile dawned on her lips. "Only you'd be rather funny acting, wouldn't you?" she ended with a joyous little laugh. Ashley laughed too; he thought that he would certainly be funny acting; yet he was sure that if he could have acted with her he need not have lost her. "But I think I liked you first because you were so different from all of them at the theatre," she went on, knitting her brows in a puzzled frown. He might have recollected that Alice Muddock had liked him because he was so different from all of them in Buckingham Palace Road. Well, Alice had turned again to Buckingham Palace Road, and Bertie Jewett's star was in the ascendant. "I should hate to have you act," she said, darting her hand out and clasping his. They sat silent for some moments; Ora's fingers pressed his in a friendly understanding fashion. "There's nobody in the world like you," she said. He smiled at the praise, since his reward was to be to lose her. Things would have their way, and he would lose her. As Alice back to the business, as Bowdon back to a suitable alliance, so she back to her theatre. As for himself, he happened to have nothing to go back to; somewhat absurdly, he was glad of it. "All sorts of stupid people are quite happy," Ora reflected dolefully. "Everything seems to be arranged so comfortably for them. It's not only that I married Jack, you know." She was right there, although she rather underrated the importance of the action she mentioned. Even without Jack there would have been difficulties. But her remark brought Jack, his associations and his associates, back into Ashley Mead's mind. "Perhaps I shall run across Jack in America," she added a moment later. It was indeed not only Jack, but it was largely Jack. Jack, although he was not all, seemed to embody and personify all. Ashley's love for her was again faced and confronted with his distaste for everything about her. Herself he could see only with his own eyes, but her surroundings he saw clearly enough through the eyes of a world which did not truly know her--the world of Irene Bowdon, almost the world of Alice Muddock. Could he then take her from her surroundings? That could be done at a price to him definite though high; but what would be the price to her? The answer came in unhesitating tones; he would be taking from her the only life that was hers to live. Then he must tell her that? He almost laughed at the idea; he knew that he would not be able to endure for a second the pain there would be in her eyes. To wrench himself away from her would torture her too sorely; let her grow away from him and awake some day to find herself content without him. "And what a fool all my friends would think me!" he reflected. But the reflexion did not weigh with him; he had protected her life from the incursion of Jack Fenning, he would protect it from his own tyranny. He leant forward towards her and spoke to her softly. "Take the play, Ora," he said; "take the part, go to America, and become still more famous. That's what you can do and what you ought to do." "And you? Will you come with me?" "Why no," he said, smiling. "I must stay and roll my little stone here. Yours is a big stone and mine only a little one, but still I must roll my own." "But I shall be away months." "Yes, I know, long months. But I won't forget you." "You won't really? I should die if you forgot me, Ashley. If I go I shall think of you every hour. Oh, but I'm afraid to go! I know you'll forget me." He had but little doubt that the forgetfulness would come, and that it would not come first from him. She had no inkling of the idea that she could herself cease to feel for him all that she felt now. She extracted from him vows of constancy and revelled in the amplitude of his promises. Presently her mind overleapt the months of absence, saw in them nothing but a series of triumphs which would make him more proud of her, and a prospect of meeting him again growing ever nearer and nearer and sweetening her success with the approaching joy of sharing it all with him and telling him all about it. Anything became sweet, shared with him; witness the renunciation! "If I hadn't you, I shouldn't care a bit about the rest of it," she said. "But somehow having you makes me want all the rest more. I wonder if all women are like that when they're as much in love as I am." Ashley knew that all women were by no means like that, but he said that he suspected they were, and assured Ora that the state of feeling she described was entirely consistent with a great and permanent love. As, before, his one object had been to support her through the renunciation, to make it easy and possible for her, so now he found himself bending his energies and exerting his ingenuity to persuading her that there was no incompatibility between her love and her life, between her ambition and her passion, between him and the masterpiece for whose sake she was to leave him. He had seen her once in despair about herself and dared not encounter a second time the pain which that sight of her had given him; he himself might know the truth of what she was and the outcome of what she did; he determined that, so far as he could contrive and control the matter, she should not know it. She should go and win her triumph, she should go in the sure hope that he would not change, in the confidence that she would not, that their friendship would not, that nothing would. Then she would dry her tears, or weep only in natural sorrow and with no bitterness of self-accusation. It seemed worth while to him to embark again on oceans of pretence for her sake, just as it had seemed worth while to pretend to believe in the renunciation, and worth while to break his code by bribing Jack Fenning with a borrowed thousand pounds. At this time a second stroke fell on old Sir James Muddock; worn out with work and money-making, he had no power to resist. The end came swiftly. It was announced to Ashley in a letter from Bertie Jewett. Lady Muddock was prostrate, Bob and Alice overwhelmed with duties. Bertie begged that his letter might be regarded as coming from the family; he shewed consideration in the way he put this request and assumed his position with delicacy. Ashley read with a wry smile, not blaming the writer but wondering scornfully at the turn of affairs. The old man had once been almost a father to him, the children near as brother and sister; now Bertie announced the old man's death and the children pleaded that they were too occupied to find time to write to him. He went to the funeral; through it all his sense of being outside, of having been put outside, persisted, sharing his mind with genuine grief. From whatever cause it comes that a man has been put outside, even although he may have much to say for himself and the expulsion be of very questionable justice, it is hard for him to avoid a sense of ignominy. Ashley felt humiliation even while he protested that all was done of his own choice. He spoke to the Muddocks no more than a few kind but ordinary words; he did not go to the house. Bertie invited him there and pressed the invitation with the subdued cordiality which was all that the occasion allowed; but he would not go on Bertie's invitation. The resentment which he could not altogether stifle settled on Bob. Bob was the true head of family and business now. Why did Bob abdicate? But he had himself been next in succession; Bob's abdication would have left the place open for him; he had refused and renounced; he could not, after all, be very hard on poor Bob. Again a few days later came a letter from Bertie Jewett. This time he made no apology for writing; he wrote in his official capacity as one of Sir James's executors. By a will executed a month before death Sir James left to Ashley Mead, son of his late partner, the sum of one thousand pounds to be paid free of legacy duty. Ashley had no anger against the old man and accepted this acknowledgment of his father's position without contempt; it was not left to him but to his father's son; before the will was made he had been put outside. "He might have left you more than that," said Ora. "You see, I wouldn't go into the business," Ashley explained. "No, and you wouldn't do anything he wanted," she added with a smile. "It's really very good of him to leave me anything." "I don't call a thousand pounds anything." "That's all very well for you, with your wonderful play up your sleeve," said Ashley, smiling. "But, as it happens, a thousand pounds is particularly convenient to me, and I'm very much obliged to poor old Sir James." For armed with Bertie Jewett's letter he had no difficulty in obtaining an overdraft at his bank and that same evening he wrote a cheque for a thousand pounds to the order of Lord Bowdon. In allotting old Sir James's money to this particular purpose he found a curious pleasure. The Muddock family had been hard on Ora and hard on him because of Ora; it seemed turning the tables on them a little to take a small fraction of their great hoard and by its means to make them benefactors to Ora, to make them _ex post facto_ responsible for Jack Fenning's departure, and to connect them in this way with Ora's life. His action seemed to forge another link in the chain which bound together the destinies of the group among which he had moved. Sir James would have given the thousand for no such purpose; he had not laboured with any idea of benefiting Ora Pinsent. Bowdon would not like taking the thousand pounds; he had desired to lay his own gift at Ora's feet. But Sir James being dead should give, and Lord Bowdon being his lady's husband should take. So Ashley determined and wrote his cheque with a smile on his lips. Things turned out so very oddly. "What have you done with your legacy?" asked Ora. When money came in to her, she always "did something" with at least a large proportion of it; in other words she got rid of it in some remarkable, salient, imagination-striking manner, obtaining by this means a sense of wealth and good fortune which a mere balance at the bank, whether large or small, could never give. Ashley looked up at her as she stood before him. "I've paid an old debt with it," he said. "I was very glad to be able to. I'm quite free now." "Were you in debt? Oh, why didn't you tell me? I've got a lot of money. How unkind of you, Ashley!" "I couldn't take your money," said Ashley. "And I wasn't pressed. My creditor wouldn't have minded waiting for ever." "What an angel!" said Ora. She was a little surprised that under the circumstances Ashley had felt called upon to pay. "Exactly," he laughed. "It was Bowdon." "He's got lots of money. I wonder he takes it." "I shall make him take it. I borrowed it to get something I wanted, and I don't feel the thing's mine till I've paid him off." "Oh, I understand that," said Ora. "Don't tell him I told you." "All right, I won't. I don't suppose I shall get a chance of telling Lord Bowdon anything. Irene was like ice to me at the wedding." In reality Irene had not failed to meet with a decent cordiality the outpouring of Ora's enthusiasm. "Confound you, I didn't want it," was Lord Bowdon's form of receipt for the cheque; he scribbled it on half a sheet of note paper and signed it "B." This was just what Ashley had expected, and he found new pleasure in the constraint which he had placed on his friend's inclination. He shewed the document to Ora when he next went to see her. "You were quite right," he said. "Bowdon didn't want the money. Look here." Ora read the scrawl and sat turning it over and over in her fingers. "But he had to take it," said Ashley with a laugh of triumph, almost of defiance. "I should think he'd be a very good friend," said Ora. "If Irene would let him, I mean," she added with a smile. "Do you think he'd lend me a thousand pounds and not want it paid back?" she asked. "From my knowledge of him," said Ashley, "I'm quite sure he would." "People do an awful lot of things for me," said Ora with a reflective smile. She paused, and added, "But then other people are often very horrid to me. I suppose it works out, doesn't it?" Ashley was engaged in a strenuous attempt to make it work out, but he had little idea in what way the balance of profit and loss, good and evil, pleasure and pain, was to be arrived at. "You'd do simply anything for me, wouldn't you?" she went on. Although he had certainly done much for her, yet he felt himself an impostor when she looked in his face and asked him that question. There seemed to him nothing that he would not suffer for her, no advantages, no prospects, and no friendships that he would not forgo and sacrifice for her. But he would not "do simply anything for her." There was much that he would not, as it appeared to him could not, do for her. Else what easier than to say, "We know so-and-so about your husband, and we can find out so-and-so by using the appropriate methods"? What easier than to say, "I'll go in your train to America, and while you win the triumphs I'll do the nosing"? For if he said that to her, if he opened to her the prospect of being rid, once and for all, of Jack Fenning, of levelling the only fence between him and her of which she was conscious, of enabling her to keep her masterpiece and her triumphs and yet not lose her lover, her joy would know no bounds and the world be transfigured for her into a vision of delight. But yet he could not. All was hers short of negativing himself, of ceasing to be what he was, of gulfing his life, his standards, his mind in hers. She judged by what she saw, and set no bounds to a devotion that seemed boundless. But to him her praise was accusation, and he charged himself with giving nothing because he could not give all. Ora understood very little why he suddenly caught her in his arms and kissed her. But she thought it a charming way of answering her question. "Poor Ashley!" she sighed, as she escaped from his embrace. She had occasional glimpses of the imperfection of his happiness, just as she had occasional pathetic intuitions of what her own nature was. CHAPTER XIX COLLATERAL EFFECTS On the whole Irene Bowdon felt that she ought to thank heaven, not perhaps in any rapturous outpouring of tremulous joy, but in a sober give-and-take spirit which set possible evil against actual good, struck the balance, and made an entry of a reasonably large figure on the credit side of the sheet. Surely it was in this spirit that sensible people dealt with heaven? If once or twice in her life she had not been sensible, to repeat such aberrations would little become an experienced and twice-married woman. You could not have everything; and Lord Bowdon's conduct had been extremely satisfactory. Only for two days of one week had he relapsed into that apparent moodiness, that alternation of absent-mindedness with uncomfortable apologies, which had immediately succeeded the offer of his hand. On this occasion something in a letter from Ashley Mead seemed to upset him. The letter had a cheque in it, and Irene believed that the letter and cheque vexed her husband. She had too much tact to ask questions, and contented herself, so far as outward behaviour went, with Bowdon's remark that Ashley was a young fool. But her instinct, sharpened by the old jealousy, had loudly cried, "Ora Pinsent!" She was glad to read in the papers that Ora was to go to America. Yes, on the whole she would thank heaven, and assure herself that Lord Bowdon would have made her his wife anyhow; that is, in any case, and without--She never finished the phrase which began with this "without." So Ora Pinsent was going to America. Surely madness stopped somewhere? Surely Ashley Mead would not go with her? Irene had never given up hopes of Ashley, and at this first glimmer of a chance she was prepared to do battle for him. She had never quite reconciled herself to Bertie Jewett; her old dislike of the ribbon-selling man and the ribbon-selling atmosphere so far persisted that she had accepted, rather than welcomed, the prospect of Bertie. She wrote and begged Alice Muddock to come across to tea. She and Bowdon were in her house in Queen's Gate, his not being yet prepared to receive her. She fancied that she saw her way to putting everything right, to restoring the _status quo ante_, and to obliterating altogether the effect of Ora Pinsent's incursion; she still felt a responsibility for the incursion. Of course she was aware that just now matrimonial projects must be in the background at Kensington Palace Gardens; but the way might be felt and the country explored. "Mr. Jewett, Mr. Jewett, Mr. Jewett;" this seemed the burden of Alice's conversation. The name was not mentioned in a romantic way, nor in connexion with romantic subjects; it cropped up when they talked of the death, of the funeral, of the business, of money matters, future arrangements, everything that goes to make up the ordinary round of life. Alice was quite free from embarrassment and shewed no self-consciousness about the name; but its ubiquity was in the highest degree significant in Irene's eyes. She knew well that the man who has made himself indispensable has gone more than half-way towards making any other man superfluous, and she seemed to be faced with the established fact of Bertie Jewett's indispensability. The time would come when he would ask his reward; either he must receive it or he must vanish, carrying off with him all the comfort his presence had given and breaking the habit of looking to him and leaning on him which had become so strong and constant. If Irene meant to enter the lists against Bertie, she would be challenging an opponent who knew how to fight. "Have you seen anything of Ashley Mead?" she asked, as she lifted the teapot and poured out the tea. "He came to the funeral, but of course we had no talk, and he's not been since." "You haven't been asking people, I suppose?" "We haven't asked him," said Alice calmly. She took her tea and looked at her hostess with perfect composure. "He couldn't come just now without being invited, you know," Irene suggested. "Perhaps not," said Alice, rather doubtfully. "I don't think he wants to come." She paused, and then added deliberately, "And I don't want him to come." Now she flushed a very little, although her face remained steady and calm. She did not seem to shrink from the discussion to which her friend opened the way. "It would be nonsense to pretend that he's what he used to be to us," she went on. "You know that as well as I do, Irene." "I don't know anything about it," declared Irene pettishly. "I think you're hard on him; all men are foolish sometimes; it doesn't last long." Had not Lord Bowdon soon returned to grace, soon and entirely? "Oh, it's just that you see what they are," said Alice. She set down her cup and gazed absently out of the window. Irene was irritated; her view had been that momentary weaknesses in a man were to be combated, and were not to be accepted as final indications of what the man was; she had acted on that view in regard to her husband, and, as has been stated, on the whole she thanked heaven. She thought that Alice also might, if she chose, bring herself to a position in which she could thank heaven moderately; but it was not to be done by slamming the door in the face of a prodigal possibly repentant. She cast about for a delicate method of remarking that Ora Pinsent was going to America. "It was quite inevitable that he should drift away from us," Alice continued. "I see that now. I don't think we're any of us bitter about it." "He needn't go on drifting away unless you like." "It isn't very likely that I should make any efforts to call him back," said Alice, with a faint smile. "Why not?" asked Irene crossly. "Well, do women do that sort of thing?" "Why, of course they do, my dear." Alice's smile expressed a very clear opinion of such conduct, supposing it to exist. Irene grew red for an instant and pushed her chair back from the table. Anger makes delicate methods of remarking on important facts seem unnecessary. "You know Ora Pinsent's off to America?" she asked. "No, I know nothing of Miss Pinsent's movements," said Alice haughtily. "I don't read theatrical gossip." Irene looked at her, rose, and came near. She stood looking down at Alice. Alice looked up with a smile; the irritation in both seemed to vanish. "Oh, my dear girl, why must you be so proud?" asked Irene, with a nervous little laugh. "You cared for him, Alice." "Yes; all the world knew that. I didn't realise, though, quite how well they knew it." "And now you don't?" Alice's eyes did not leave her friend's face as she paused in consideration. "I don't suppose I shall ever be so happy as I used to think I should be with Ashley Mead," she said at last. "But I couldn't now. I should always be thinking of--of what's been happening lately. Irene, I loathe that sort of thing, don't you?" "Oh, with men it's just--" Irene began. "With some sort of men, I suppose so," Alice interrupted. "I tried to think it didn't matter, but--Could you care for a man if you knew he had done what Ashley has?" In ninety hours out of a hundred, in ninety moods out of a hundred, Irene would have been ready with the "No" that Alice expected so confidently from her; with that denial she would instinctively have shielded herself from a breath of suspicion. But now, looking into the grave eyes upturned to hers, she answered with a break in her voice, "Yes, dear; we must take what we can get, you know." Then she turned away and walked back to her tea-table; her own face was in shadow there, and thence she watched Alice's, which seemed to rise very firm and very white out of the high black collar of her mourning gown. She loved Alice, but, as she watched, she knew why Ashley Mead had left her and given himself over to Ora Pinsent; she had not often seen so nearly in the way men saw. Then she thought of what Bertie Jewett was; he could not love as this girl deserved to be loved. "And we don't always get what we deserve," she added, forcing another nervous laugh. "Most women have to put up with something like what you mean, only they're sensible and don't think about it." "I'm considered sensible," said Alice, smiling. "Sensible people are only silly in different ways from silly people," Irene declared, with a touch of fresh irritation in her voice. "Well then, it's no use?" she asked. "It's no use trying to undo what's done." Alice got up and came and kissed her friend. "It was like you to try, though," she said. "And I suppose it's to be--?" "It's not to be anybody," Alice interrupted. "Fancy talking about it now!" "Oh, that's conventional. You needn't mind that with me." "Really I'm not thinking about it." But even as she spoke her face grew thoughtful. "Our life's arranged for us, really," she said. "We haven't much to do with it. Look how I was born to the business!" "And you'll go on in the business?" "Yes. I used to think I should like to get away from it. Perhaps I should like still; but I never shall. There are terribly few things one gets a choice about." "Marriage is one," Irene persisted, almost imploringly. "Do you think it is, as a rule?" asked Alice doubtfully. Their talk had drawn them closer together and renewed the bonds of sympathy, but herein lay its only comfort for Irene Bowdon. The disposition that Alice shewed seemed clearly to presage Bertie Jewett's success and to prove how far he had already progressed. She wondered to find so much done and to see how Ashley had lost his place in the girl's conception of what her life must be. "I should have fought more," Irene reflected, and went on to ask whether that were not because she also felt more than her friend, or at least differently; did not the temperament which occasioned defeat also soften it? Yet the girl was not happy; she was rather making the best of an apparently necessary lack of happiness; life was a niggard of joy, but by good management the small supply might be so disposed as to make a good show and so spread out as to cover a handsome space. Against the acceptance of such a view Irene's soul protested. It was dressing the shop-window finely when there was no stock inside. "I shouldn't mind what a man had thought," she said, "if I could make him think as I wanted him to now." "No, but you'd know him too well to imagine that you ever could," said Alice. A little inhuman, wasn't it? The old question rose again in Irene's mind, even while she was feeling full of sympathy and of love. It was all too cold, too clear-sighted, too ruthless; if you were very fond of people, you did not let yourself know too well what you did not wish to think about them; you ought to be able to forget, to select, to idealise; else how could two people ever love one another? There must be a partiality of view; love must pretend. She could fancy Ashley's humorously alarmed look at the idea of living in company with perfect clear-sightedness. As for Ora--but surely the objection here would come even sooner and more clamorously from clear-sightedness itself? "I daresay you're right, dear, but it doesn't sound very encouraging," she said. "I declare it's a good thing I'm married already, or I should never have dared after this!" "If it is like that, we may just as well admit it," said Alice, with a smile and a sigh. "I must go back," she added. "Mr. Jewett's coming to dinner to talk over some business with me." Business and Mr. Jewett! That indeed seemed now the way of it. Irene kissed her friend with rueful emphasis. At this time Lady Muddock, while conceiving herself prostrate and crushed under the blow which had fallen on her, was in reality very placid and rather happy. As a dog loves his master she had loved her husband; the dog whines at the master's loss, but after a time will perceive that there is nobody to prevent him from having a hunt in the coverts. A repressive force was removed, and Lady Muddock enjoyed the novel feeling of being a free agent. And everything went very well according to her ideas. Minna Soames, whose father had been a clergyman, and who had sung only at concerts, would become her daughter-in-law, and Bertie Jewett her son-in-law; Minna would cease to sing, and Bertie would carry on the business; Bob would be perfectly happy, and Alice would act with true wisdom and presently find her reward. She had a sense of being at home in all things, of there being nothing that puzzled or shocked or upset her. She disliked the unfamiliar; she had therefore disliked Ora Pinsent, even while she was flattered by knowing her; but it was just as flattering and at the same time more comfortable to have known and voluntarily to have ceased to know her. As for Ashley Mead, he had never let her feel quite at ease with him; and the society which he had been the means of bringing to the house was not the sort which suited her. She made preparations for taking a handsome villa at Wimbledon; to that she would retire when Bob brought his bride to Kensington Palace Gardens. In a word, the world seemed to be fitting itself to her size most admirably. Bowdon had been paying a visit of condolence to her while Alice was with his wife--so Irene had contrived to distribute the quartette--and discovered her state of mind with an amusement largely infected with envy. His own life was of course laid on broader lines than hers; there was a wider social side to it and a public side; but he also had come to a time of life and a state of things when he must fit himself to his world and his world to him, much in Lady Muddock's fashion--when things became definite, vistas shortened, and the actual became the only possible. The return of his thousand pounds typified this change to him; it closed an incident which had once seemed likely to prevent or retard the process of settling down to which he was now adapting and resigning himself; he admitted with a sigh that he had put it off as long as most men, and that, now it was come, it had more alleviations for him than for most. Well, the ground had to be cleared for the next generation; theirs would be the open playing-fields; it was time for him to go into the house and sit down by the fire. What was there to quarrel with in that? Did not _placens uxor_ sit on the other side of the hearth? And though tempests were well enough in youth, in advanced years they were neither pleasant nor becoming. But he wished that it was all as grateful to him as it was to Lady Muddock. Alice came in before he left and took him to walk with her in the garden. The burden of her talk chimed in with his mood; again she dwelt on the view that one's place was somewhere in the world, that by most people at all events it had only to be found, not made, but that sorrow and a fiasco waited on any mistake about it. She spoke only for herself, but she seemed to speak for him also, expressing by her subdued acquiescence in giving up what was not hers, and her resolute facing of what was, the temper which he must breed in himself if he were to travel the rest of the way contentedly. "But it's a bit of a bore, isn't it?" he asked, suddenly standing still and looking at her with a smile. "Yes, I suppose it's a bit of a bore," said she. Then she went on rather abruptly, "Have you seen Ashley since you came back?" "Only once, for a moment at the club." "Is he getting on well? Will he do well?" "If he likes," said Bowdon, shrugging his shoulders. "But he's a queer fellow." "I don't think he quite agrees with us in what we've been saying." "I don't know about that. At any rate I fancy he won't act on it." "There's no use talking about it," she said with an impatience only half suppressed. "He's so different from what he used to be." "Not so very, a little perhaps. Then you're a little different from what you used to be, aren't you?" She looked at him with interest. "Yes?" she said questioningly. "Add the two little differences together and they make a big one." "A big difference between us?" "That's what I mean. I feel the same thing about him myself. He's not for settling down, Miss Muddock." "Oh, I suppose we both know why that is," she said. "We needn't mention names, but--" "Well, we know how it is even if we don't know why it is; but it isn't all Miss Pinsent, or--" He paused an instant and ended with a question. "Or why doesn't he settle down there?" She seemed to consider his question, but shook her head as though she found no answer. To adduce the obvious objection, the Fenning objection, seemed inconsistent with the sincerity into which their talk had drifted. "I tell you what," said Bowdon, "I'm beginning to think that it doesn't much matter what sort a man is, but he ought to be one sort or the other. Don't you know what I mean?" She walked by his side in silence again for a few minutes, then she turned to him. "Are we contemptuous, or are we envious, or what are we, we people of one sort?" she asked. "On my honour I don't know," answered Bowdon, shaking his head and laughing a little. "I think I'm contemptuous," she said, and looked in his face to find an equal candour. But he did not give his decision; he would not admit that he inclined still a little towards the mood of envy. "Anyhow it must be strange to be like that," she said; she had thought the same thing before when she sat in the theatre, watching Ora Pinsent act. Then she had watched with an outside disinterested curiosity in the study of a being from another world who could not, as it had seemed, make any difference to her world or to her; but Ora had made differences for her, or at least had brought differences to light. So the various lines of life run in and out, now meeting and now parting, each following its own curve, lead where it may. "I must run away," said Bowdon, "or I shall keep my wife waiting for dinner." "And I must go and dress, or I shall keep Mr. Jewett waiting for dinner." They parted with no more exchange of confidence than lay in the hint of a half-bitter smile. Lord Bowdon walked home to Queen's Gate, meditating on the Developments and Manifestations of the Modern Spirit. He yielded to fashion so far as to shape his phrase in this way and to affix mental capital letters to the dignified words. But in truth he was conscious that the affair was a very old one, that there had been always a Modern Spirit. In the state of innocency Adam fell, and in the days of villainy poor Jack Falstaff; the case would seem to be much the same with the Modern Spirit. Still there is good in a label, to comfort the consciences of sinners and to ornament the eloquence of saints. The eloquence of saints was on the lips of his wife that evening when they dined together, and Bowdon listened to it with complete intellectual assent. He could not deny the force of her strictures on Ashley Mead nor the justness of her analysis of Ora Pinsent. But he did not love her in this mood; we do not always love people best when they convince us most. Ashley was terribly foolish, Ora seemed utterly devoid of the instinct of morality, intimated Irene. "No," said Bowdon, with a sudden undeliberated decisiveness, "that's just what she's got. She hasn't anything else, but she has that." The flow of Irene's talk was stemmed; she looked across at him with a vexed enquiring air. "You've not seen anything like so much of her as I have," she objected. "Really I don't see what you can know about it, Frank. Besides men never understand women as women do." "Sometimes better, and I'm quite right here," he persisted. "Why did she send for her husband?" "I don't think there was ever any real question of his coming." This remark was not quite sincere. "Oh, yes, there was," said Bowdon with a smile. The smile hinted knowledge and thereby caused annoyance to his wife. How did he come to know, or to think he knew, so much of Ora? But it was no great thing that had inspired his protest; it was only the memory of how she once said, "Don't." "I'm going to see her," Irene announced in resolute tones. "I used to have some influence over her, and I'm going to try and use it. I may do some good." "In what direction, dear?" There was a touch of scepticism in Bowdon's voice. "About Ashley Mead. I do believe everything could be made happy again. Frank, I'm not reconciled to Bertie Jewett yet." Bowdon shook his head; he was reconciled to Bertie Jewett and to the tendency of events which involved the success of Bertie Jewett. "And she ought to go back to her husband," Irene pursued. The Modern Spirit had not, it must be presumed, left Lord Bowdon entirely untouched, else he could not have dissented from this dictum; or was it only that a very vivid remembrance of Mr. Fenning rose in his mind? "I'm hanged if she ought," he said emphatically. "And if you only knew what the fellow's like--" He came to a sharp stop; his wife's surprised eyes were set on his face. "You don't know what he's like, you've never seen him; you told me so, long ago, when I first got to know her." Lord Bowdon appeared embarrassed. "Wasn't it true?" asked Irene severely. "Yes, it was true," he answered, and truly, for, at the time he said it, it had been true. "Then how do you know what he's like?" she persisted. The servants had left them to their coffee. Irene came round and sat down close to her husband. "You know something, something you didn't mean me to know. What is it, Frank?" Bowdon looked at her steadily. He had meant to tell nothing; but he had already told too much. A sudden gleam of understanding came into her eyes; her quick intuition discerned a connection between this thing and the other incident which had puzzled her. "I believe it's something to do with that cheque Ashley Mead sent you," she said. She would not move her eyes from his face. "I'm not at liberty to tell you anything about it. Of course I'm not going to deny that there's a secret. But I can't tell you about it, Irene." "You would be quite safe in telling me." She rose and stood looking down on him. "You ought to tell me," she said. "You ought to tell me anything that concerns both you and Ora Pinsent." She was amazed to say this, and he to hear it. The one point of silence, of careful silence, the one thing which neither had dared to speak of to the other, the one hidden spring which had moved the conduct of both, suddenly became a matter of speech on her lips to him. Suddenly she faced the question and demanded that he also should face it. She admitted and she claimed that what touched him and Ora Pinsent must touch her also. And he did not contest the claim. "I must know, if--if we're to go on, Frank," she said. "There's much less than you think," said he. "But I'll tell you. I tell you in confidence, you know. Fenning came. That's all." Irene made no comment. That was not all; the cheque from Ashley Mead was not explained. Bowdon proceeded with his story. He told what he had to tell in short sharp sentences. "The fellow was impossible." "It was impossible to let her see him." "He was a rascal." "He drank." Pauses of silence were interspersed. "It would have killed her." "He only wanted money of her." "The idea of his going near her was intolerable." "She had forgotten what he was, or he had gone down-hill terribly." "And the money?" asked Irene, in a low whisper. She had seated herself again, and was looking before her into the fireplace. "He came for money; he had to have it if he was to go. Ashley asked me for it. I gave it him." "As a loan? He sent it back." "I didn't mean it as a loan. But, as you say, he's sent it back." "Why?" "Because he didn't want her to be indebted to me for it." His bitterness cropped out in his tone; he had desired a share in the work which Ashley would not give him. He must have forgotten his wife for the moment, or he would have kept that bitterness out of his voice; indeed for the moment he seemed to have forgotten her, as he leant his head on his hand and stared gloomily at the floor. "So we gave him the money, and he went away again." She was silent. "You wouldn't wonder so much if you'd seen him." "I don't wonder," she said. "I haven't seen him, but I don't wonder. And you never told her?" "No, I never told her." "Nor Ashley Mead?" "No, he's never told her, either. And you mustn't." For an instant his tone was rigidly imperative. In spite of the tone she seemed to pay no heed to the last words. "You kept it all from her?" she asked again. "Yes," he said. "Does that seem very wrong to you?" "Oh, I don't know," she groaned. "Or very strange?" he asked, turning his head and looking towards her. She rose to her feet suddenly, walked to the mantel-piece, and stood there with her back towards him. "No," she said, "not very strange. It's only what I knew before. It's not strange." She turned round and faced him; she was rather pale, but she smiled a little. "I knew all the time that you were in love with her too," she said. "Of course you wouldn't let the man go near her!" Bowdon raised his eyes to his wife's face. She turned away again. "I knew it when I made you propose to me," she said. CHAPTER XX THE WAYS DIVIDE It may safely be said that, had Bowdon's wife been such as Ora Pinsent, or Bowdon himself of the clay of which Ora was made, the foregoing conversation would not have stopped where it did, nor with the finality which in fact marked its close. It would have been lengthened, resumed, and elaborated; its dramatic possibilities in the way of tragedy and comedy (it was deficient in neither line) would have been developed; properly and artistically handled, it must have led to something. But ordinary folk, especially perhaps ordinary English folk, make of their lives one grand waste of dramatic possibilities, and as things fell out the talk seemed to lead to nothing. When Irene had made her remark about knowing that her husband was in love with Ora even when she induced him to propose to herself, she stood a moment longer by the mantel-piece and then went upstairs, as her custom was; he held the door open for her, as his custom was; sat down again, drank a small glass of cognac, and smoked a cigar, all as his custom was; in about half an hour he joined her in the drawing-room and they talked about the house they were going to take in Scotland for the autumn. Neither then nor in the days that followed was any reference made to this after-dinner conversation, nor to the startling way in which the hidden had become open, the veil been for a moment lifted, and the thing which was between them declared and recognised. The dramatic possibilities were, in fact, absolutely neglected and thrown away; to all appearance the conversation might never have taken place, so little effect did it seem to have, so absolutely devoid of result it seemed to be. It was merely that for ever there it was, never to be forgotten, always to form part of their consciousness, to define permanently the origin of their relations to one another, to make it quite plain how it was that they came to be passing their lives together. That it did all these not unimportant things and yet never led to another acute situation or striking scene shews how completely the dramatic possibilities were thrown away. It did not even alter Irene's resolve of going to see Ora Pinsent. To acquiesce in existing facts appeared the only thing left to do so far as she herself was concerned: but the facts might still be modified for others; this was what she told herself. Besides this feeling, she was impelled by an increased curiosity, a new desire to see again and to study the woman who had been the occasion of this conversation, who had united her husband and her friend in a plot and made them both sacrifice more than money because they would not have Jack Fenning come near her. We are curious when we are jealous; where lies the power, what is the secret of the strength which conquers us? The scene in the little house at Chelsea was very much the same as Alice Muddock had once chanced on there. Sidney Hazlewood and Babba Flint were with Ora; after a swift embrace Ora resumed her talk with them. The talk was of tours, triumphs, and thousands; the masterpiece was finished; it bulged nobly in Babba's pocket, type-written, in brown covers, with pink ribbons to set off its virgin beauty. On the table lay a large foolscap sheet, fairly written; this was an agreement, ready for Ora's signature; when it had received that, it would be, as Hazlewood was reminding Ora, an agreement. Ora was struck anew with the unexpectedness of this result of merely writing one's name, and shewed a disinclination to take the decisive step. She preferred to consider tour, triumphs, and thousands as hypothetical delights; she got nearly as much enjoyment out of them and was bound to nothing. Babba smoked cigarettes with restless frequency and nervous haste; a horse and cart could almost have been driven along the wrinkle on Mr. Hazlewood's brow. He looked sixty, if he looked a day, that afternoon. Irene sat unnoticed, undisturbed, with the expression in her eyes which a woman wears when she is saying, "Yes, I suppose it would be so; I suppose men would. I don't feel it myself, but I understand how it would be." The expression is neither of liking nor of dislike; it is of unwilling acquiescence in a fact recognised but imperfectly comprehended. The presence of the power is admitted, the source but half discovered; the analysis of a drug need not be complete before we are able to discern its action. "I won't sign to-day," said Ora. "I might change my mind." "Good Lord, don't!" cried Babba, seizing another cigarette. "That's just why we want you to sign to-day," said Hazlewood, passing his hand over his forehead in a vain effort to obliterate the wrinkle. "Then you'd bring an action against me!" exclaimed Ora indignantly. "Without a doubt--and win it," said Hazlewood. "I hate agreements. I hate being committed to things. Oh, do give me a cigarette!" After all, was it not strange that both the men should have done what they had for her? Was there not a touch of vulgarity in her? To the jealous eyes of a woman, perhaps. "But men don't see that," thought Irene Bowdon as she sat on the sofa; she was in that favourite seat of her hostess', by the little table, the portrait in its silver frame, and the flower-vase that once had hidden the letter from Bridgeport, Connecticut. There was more in Ora's mood than her natural indecision, or her congenital dislike of being bound, or her ingrained dread of agreements which were agreements. The men did not see this; what do men see? But the observant woman on the sofa saw it. The power of the tour, the triumphs, and the thousands was fought by another power; the battle raged in the heart of the woman who would not sign, who chaffed and laughed and protested petulantly, who put off her persuaders by any art or device her beauty excused or her waywardness furnished, who would say neither yes nor no. The conflict declared itself in her nervous laughs, in her ridiculous puffings at an ill-used cigarette, in the air of attention which seemed to expect or hope for a new arrival, perhaps somebody to rescue her, to decide for her, to take the burden of choice from the shoulders that she shrugged so deprecatingly. "It's awful to go wandering about over there for months," she said. "I hate you both, oh, how I hate you both!" "The part--" began Babba. "Do be quiet. I know it's a lovely part," cried Ora. Then she turned suddenly to Irene and began to laugh. "Don't tell anybody how silly I am, Irene," she said, and she looked at the clock again with that expectant hopeful air. "It's now or never," declared Mr. Hazlewood, with much solemnity. "Oh, nonsense!" said Ora peevishly. "It's now or to-morrow; and to-morrow will do just as well." Hazlewood and Babba exchanged glances. After all, to-morrow would be just in time; they had wrestled long with her to-day. "If you'll take your Bible oath to settle one way or the other to-morrow--" Babba began. "I will, I will, oh, of course I will," Ora interrupted, infinite joy and relief lighting up her face. "I shall know quite well by to-morrow. Do go now, there's good men. I'll settle it all in five minutes to-morrow." "Mind you do," said Babba, looking round for his hat. Hazlewood had his and was staring at the crown of it; a coach and four might have hazarded passage along the wrinkle now. "You'll be just the same to-morrow," he observed, hardly reproachfully, but with an air of sad knowledge. "I shan't," said Ora indignantly. "If you think that of me, I wonder you have anything to do with me. Oh, but I suppose I'm useful! Nobody cares for me--only just for the use I am to them!" Both men smiled broadly; greatly to her surprise and disgust Irene found herself exchanging what she was obliged to call a grin with Babba Flint; she had not expected to live to do that. "That's just it, Miss Pinsent," said Babba. "You ain't clever, and you ain't pleasant, and you ain't pretty; but the fool of a public happens to like you, so we've all got to pretend you are; and we mean to work you to the last tanner, don't you know?" Mr. Hazlewood smiled sardonically; he did not admire Babba's wit. "This time to-morrow then," said Ora, ringing the bell. "Oh, and take your agreement with you; I won't have the odious thing here." She flung it at Babba, who caught it cleverly. "I couldn't live in the room with it," she said. Ora waited till she heard the house door shut upon her visitors. "Thank goodness!" she cried then, as she sank into a chair opposite Irene. "How good of you to come and see me," she went on. Irene was hard on her search; she did not allow herself to be turned aside by mere civilities, however charming might be the cordiality with which they were uttered. "Are you really going to America?" she asked. Ora's face grew plaintive again; she thought that she had got rid of that question till the next day. "Oh, I suppose so. Yes. I don't know, I'm sure." She leant forward towards her friend. "I suppose you're awfully happy, aren't you, Irene?" Irene smiled; she had no intention of casting doubts on her bliss in her present company. "Then do be kind to me, because I'm awfully miserable. Now you're looking as if you were going to tell me it was my own fault. Please don't, dear. That doesn't do any good at all." "Not the least I'm sure, to you," said Irene Bowdon. Ora scanned her friend's face anxiously and timidly. She was speculating on the amount of sympathy to be expected; she knew that on occasion Irene could be almost as unjust as Alice Muddock. She was afraid that Irene would break out on her. Irene was in no such mood; coldly, critically, jealously observant, she waited for this woman to throw new lights on herself, to exhibit the kind of creature she was, to betray her weakness and to explain her power. "Can't you make up your mind whether to go or not?" she asked with a smile. "If you only knew what going means to me!" cried Ora. Suddenly she rose and flung herself on her knees beside her friend. Irene had an impulse to push her away; but she sat quite still and suffered Ora to take her hand. "You see, he can't come with me," Ora went on, with a pathetic air which seemed to bemoan the wanton impossibility of what might, had it been so disposed, have been quite possible. "Who can't go with you? Mr. Mead?" "Yes, Ashley; who else could I mean?" "Well, I don't suppose he can." Irene gave a short laugh. "No," said Ora resentfully. "He can't, you see." She looked up in Irene's face. "At least I suppose he can't?" she said in a coaxing voice; then dreariness conquered and reigned in her whole air as she added mournfully, "Anyhow, I'm sure he won't." "I hope to goodness he won't," said Irene Bowdon. Ora drew a little away, as though surprised; then she nodded and smiled faintly. "I knew you'd say that," she remarked. "What in the world else should I say?" Irene demanded. "Nothing, I suppose," sighed Ora. "It would be quite out of the question, wouldn't it?" "Quite," said Irene, and shut her lips close as the one word left them. Her patience was failing. There were two possible things, to be respectable, and not to be respectable; but there was no such third course as Ora seemed to expect to have found for her. "Of course if I give up the tour," said Ora, in a meditative tone, "things could go on as they are." "Could they?" cried Irene. "Oh, I don't know how they are, and I don't want to ask. Well, then, I suppose I don't believe the worst or I shouldn't be here; but almost everybody does, and if you go on much longer quite everybody will." "I don't mind a bit about that," remarked Ora. Her tone was simple and matter-of-fact; she was neither making a confession nor claiming a merit. "How can I be expected to? I lost all feeling of that sort when Jack didn't come. He was the person who ought to have cared, and he didn't care enough to come when I said he might." The reference to Mr. Fenning touched Irene's wound, and it smarted again. But she was loyal to her husband's injunction and gave no hint which might disturb Ora's certainty that Jack Fenning had not come. "I think you'd better go away before you've quite ruined Ashley Mead's life," she said in cold and deliberate tones; "and before you've ruined yourself too, if you care about that." She expected to be met by one of Ora's old pitiful protests against harsh and unsympathetic judgments; the look in Ora's eyes a little while ago had foreshadowed such an appeal. But it did not come now. Ora regarded her with a faint smile and brows slightly raised. "I don't see," she said, "how all sorts of different people can be expected all to behave in exactly the same way." "What's that got to do with it?" asked Irene irritably. "Well, that's what it comes to, if you listen to what people say." "Do you mean if you listen to what I say?" "Yes," said Ora, with a smile, "you and Miss Muddock and all the rest of them. And I suppose you've made Lord Bowdon as bad by now? I'm not going to think about it any more." She shook her head as though to clear away these mists of conventional propriety. "If people can be happy anyhow, why shouldn't they?" she added. "I believe," said Irene, "that you really think you're coming to a new resolution. As if you'd ever thought of anything except what you liked!" Ora shook her head again, this time in gentle denial; memories of infinite sacrifices to the Ideal rose before her; for example, there was the recalling of her husband. But she would not argue as to her own merits; she had ceased to expect justice or to hope for approbation. "It's all no use," she said despondently. "I may say what I like, but he won't come." Again she spoke as though she would not give up the tour and would sign the agreement on the morrow, and would do this although she knew that Ashley would not come. Then they would separate! To her own sheer amazement and downright shame Irene Bowdon felt a sharp pang of sorrow; for Ora looked puzzled and forlorn, as though she did what she could not help and suffered keenly at the price she had to pay. Their eyes met, and Ora divined the newly born sympathy. "You are sorry for me, aren't you?" she murmured, stretching her hands out towards her friend. "Yes," said Irene, with a laugh. "I actually am." She was beginning to understand the transaction which had sent Jack Fenning away richer by a thousand pounds. "I know you'd help me if you could," Ora went on, "but nobody can; that's the worst of it." She paused for a moment, and then remarked with a mournful smile, "And suppose Babba's wrong and the play does no good after all!" Irene's warmth of feeling was chilled; she did not understand the glamour of the play so well as she appreciated the pathos of the parting. The strength of the tie came home to her, the power which fought against it was beyond her experience or imagination. "I wonder you can think about the play at all," she said. "Oh, you've no idea what a part it is for me!" cried Ora. But her plea sounded weak, even flippant, to Irene; she condemned it as the fruit of vanity and the sign of shallowness. Ora caused in others changes of mood almost as quick as those she herself suffered. "Well, if you go because you like the part, you can't expect me to be very sorry for you. It's a very good thing you should go; and your part will console you for--for what you leave behind." Ora made no answer; her look of indecision and puzzle had returned; it was useless to try to make another understand what she herself failed to analyse. But as the business drew Alice Muddock, so the play drew her; and the business had helped to turn Alice's heart from Ashley Mead. He had not been able there to conquer what was in the blood and mingled its roots with the roots of life. No thought of a parallel came to Irene Bowdon; any point of likeness between the two women or their circumstances would have seemed to her impossible and the idea of it absurd; they were wide asunder as the poles. What she did dimly feel was the fashion in which Ashley seemed to stand midway between them, within hearing of both and yet divided from each; she approached the conclusion that he was not really made for either, because he had points which likened him to both. But this was little more than a passing gleam of insight; she fell back on the simpler notion that after all Ashley and Ora could not be so very much in love with one another. If they were victims of the desperate passion she had supposed, one or other or both would give up everything else in the world. They were both shallow then; and probably they would do nothing very outrageous. Relief, disappointment, almost scorn, mingled together in her as she arrived at this conclusion. "I'm sure you and Mr. Mead will end by being sensible," she said to Ora, with a smile which was less friendly than she wished it to appear. "You've been very foolish, but you both seem to see that it can't go on." She leant forward and looked keenly at Ora. "Well?" said Ora, put on her defence by this scrutiny. "Do you really care much about him? I wonder if you could really care much about anybody!" She was rather surprised to find herself speaking so openly about an attachment which her traditions taught her should be sternly ignored; but she was there to learn what the woman was like. "I don't love people often, but I love Ashley," was Ora's answer; it was given with her own blend of intensity and innocence. To Irene Bowdon, even armoured as she was in prejudice, it carried conviction. "It'll almost kill me to go away from him." "You'll forget all about him." "Should I be any happier if I believed that? Should you be happier for thinking that you'd stop loving your husband?" "If I had to lose him--" Irene began. "No, no, no," insisted Ora; her eyes were full of tears. "Oh, you don't understand, how can you understand? I suppose you think it's Jack? I tell you it would be the same if Jack had never existed. No, I don't know. But anyhow it would be the same if he didn't exist now." She began to walk about the room, her hands clasped tight on one another. As she spoke the door opened and Ashley came in. Irene started, but did not move: she had not wished to see them together; the sight of their meeting revived her disapprobation; the thing, being made palpable, became again offensive to her. But escape was impossible. Ora seemed entirely forgetful of the presence of any onlooker; she ran straight to Ashley, crying his name, and caught him by both his hands. He looked across at Irene, then raised Ora's hands in his and kissed each of them. He seemed tired. "I'm late," he said. "I've had a busy day." He released Ora and came towards Irene. "They've actually taken to sending me briefs! How are you, Lady Bowdon?" "And the briefs keep him from me," said Ora; she was standing now in the middle of the room. "Yes," he said with a smile at her. "The world's a very selfish thing; it wants a big share." He paused a moment, and went on, "I smell much tobacco; who's been here?" "Sidney Hazlewood and Babba," Ora answered. "They came about the play. They want me to sign the agreement to-morrow." "Ah, yes," he said wearily. "They're very persistent gentlemen. Your husband all right, Lady Bowdon?" "Quite, thanks." Irene rose. She had a desire to get away. She did not follow the lines of the play nor understand the point of the tragedy; but the sight of them together made her sure that there was a tragedy, and she did not wish to see it played. In the first place, that there should be a tragedy was all wrong, and her presence must not sanction it; in the second place, the tragedy looked as if it might be intolerably distressing and must be utterly hopeless. They would find no way out; his weariness declared that as plainly as the helplessness of Ora's puzzled distress. Irene decided to go home; she would be better there; for although she had her own little tragedy, she could keep it safely under lock and key. The secret purpose of her visit stood accomplished; if she had realised Ora in distress, she would have sorrowed to send Jack Fenning back to her. The difference between doing it with sorrow and refusing to do it altogether was no greater than might be expected between a woman and men in such a case. To have got thus far without having seen Mr. Fenning must stand for an achievement to Lady Bowdon's credit. Ora let her go without resistance. At the last Irene was full of friendly feeling, but of feeling that here was the end of a friendship. By one way or another Ora was drifting from her; they would not see much more of one another. Perhaps it had never been natural that they should see much of one another; atoms from different worlds, they had met fortuitously; the chance union yielded now before the dissolving force of their permanent connexions. But even such meetings leave results, and Ora, passing out of her friend's life as a presence, would not be forgotten; she left behind her the effect that she had had, the difference that she had made. She could never be forgotten; she would only be unmentioned and ignored; there must be many minutes in which Irene would think of her and know that she was in Bowdon's thoughts also. The way of things seemed to be that people should come into one's life, do something to it, and then go away again; the coming was not their fault, what they did seemed hardly their own doing. She was no longer angry with Ora; she was sorry for Ora, and she was sorry for herself. Was there not some wantonness somewhere? Else why had Ora's raid on her little treasure-house come about? It had done harm to her, and no good to Ora. But she kissed Ora with fondness as she left her. "I'm glad to find you here," said Ashley, as he escorted her downstairs. "It shews you don't believe the gossip about her--about her and me." Irene turned to him, but made no comment. "Oh, I don't know that there's any particular credit to anybody in the gossip not being true; still as a fact it isn't true. She hasn't got you here on false pretences." Irene seemed now not to care whether the gossip were true or not. She did not get into her carriage, but detained Ashley on the doorstep. "What are you going to do?" she asked. "Haven't you talked about it to Ora?" he enquired. "Yes, but Ora doesn't know what to do." She was possessed with a longing to tell him that she knew about Jack Fenning, but her loyalty to Bowdon still restrained her. Ashley looked at her; his face struck her again as being very tired and fretted, but it wore his old friendly smile; he seemed to take her into his confidence and to appeal to a common knowledge as he answered her. "Oh, you know, she'll go to America," he said. "It'll end in that." "Does she want to go?" asked Irene. His eyes dwelt steadily on hers and he nodded his head. "Yes, she wants to go," he said, smiling still. "She doesn't know it, poor dear, but she wants to go." "She'd stop if you told her!" exclaimed Irene impulsively. How came she to make such a suggestion? She spent half the evening trying to discover. "Yes, that's so too," he said. "And--and of course you can't go with her?" "I shan't go with her," said Ashley. "I can't, if you like to put it that way." She pressed him; her curiosity would not be satisfied. "You don't want to go?" she asked. His answer was very slow in coming this time, but he faced the question at last. "No," he said, "I don't want to go." He paused, glanced at her again, and again smiled. "So, you see, we shall both have what we really like, and there's no reason to pity us, is there, Lady Bowdon?" Then she got into her carriage, and, as she shook hands with him, she said, "Well, I don't know that you're worse off than a good many other people." "I don't know that we are," said Ashley. And, as she went home, she added that they had themselves to thank for their troubles, whereas the greater part of hers could not fairly be laid at her own door. "If that makes it any better, you know," she murmured, half aloud. But perhaps one minded to deal with her as faithfully as she thought that Ora should be dealt with, might have observed that not to become Lady Bowdon had once been a thing in her power. CHAPTER XXI WHAT DOES IT MEAN? [Illustration: THE CONTRACT PUNCTILIOUSLY SIGNED BY ALL THE PARTIES, AND WITNESSED BY JANET THE MAID ... THEY HAD OPENED A BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE] The bargain was struck, the agreement made, the contract punctiliously signed by all the parties, and witnessed by Janet the maid. There were two copies; Mr. Hazlewood had one, Ora the other; Babba possessed himself of a memorandum. They had opened a bottle of champagne and drunk success to the enterprise; prospective triumphs, thousands, fame, bubbled out into the glasses. Babba was wildly hilarious, and vulgar with a profusion of debased phrases beyond even his wont. Mr. Hazlewood smoothed his brow provisionally; he knew that it must wrinkle again many times ere the tour was done and the thousands pocketed. Ora talked very fast, smoked two cigarettes, and darted to and fro about the room, restless as quicksilver, utterly refusing to take her seat on the sofa. The arrangements suspended during her days of indecision could now swiftly be put in working order; men waited for the word at the end of cables and telephones across the Atlantic. The announcements needed only the final touches of Babba's practised pen; the berths on the boat would be booked before to-morrow's sun rose. The thing was settled; beyond all other agreements, this agreement was an agreement; beyond all other undertakings, this undertaking bound them all. For they were launched on a great venture and none could now draw back. It had ended in Ora's consenting to go, as Ashley Mead had said it would. Babba Flint and Sidney Hazlewood were gone; Janet, who also had drunk a glass of champagne, had withdrawn below again; it was very quiet in the drawing-room of the little house in Chelsea. Ora was in her seat now, by the small table, the portrait, and the vase of fresh roses which from day to day were never wanting. She lay back there, looking at the ceiling with wide-opened eyes; she did not move except when her fingers plucked fretfully at a trimming of lace on her gown; she was thinking what she had done, what it came to, what it would end in. She remembered her uncomfortable talk with Ashley the day before, after Irene had gone, when he would not say "Sign," nor yet, "For God's sake, darling, don't sign, don't go, don't leave me;" but would only smile and say, "You want to go, don't you, Ora?" She had been able to say neither, "Yes, I want to go," nor yet, "For all the world I wouldn't leave you;" but had been perverse and peevish, and at last had sent him away with a petulant dismissal. But all the time they both had known that she would sign and that she would go, because things were setting irresistibly in that direction and it was impossible to say No to fate. Fate does not take denials; its invitations are courteously but persistently renewed. So now she had signed and she was going. Of course it meant much more than appeared on the surface; she had felt that even at the moment, in spite of Babba's jokes and Hazlewood's business-like attitude. When she was left alone, the feeling came on her in tenfold strength; the drama of her action started to light, its suppressed meaning became manifest, all its effects unrolled themselves before her. Yet how shortly all could be put; she was going away from Ashley Mead; the sweet companionship was to be broken. Did such things come twice, could threads so dropped ever be picked up again? But all this happened by her own act. She faced the charge with a denial that there was more than the most superficial of truths in it. She had not been able to help her action; it was hers in a sense, no doubt, but it was the action of a self over which not she as she knew herself, but this mysterious irresistible bent of things, held control. And the control was very tyrannous. Ashley was bound too; for in all the uncomfortable talk there had been never a suggestion that he should come with her; for both of them that had become an impossibility not to be taken into account. As things would have it, he could not go and she could not stay. There assailed her such a storm of fear and horror as had beset her once before, when her fine scheme of renunciation and reformation was shattered by the little hard fact that the train drew near to the station and in ten minutes Ashley would be gone and Jack Fenning come. She caught Ashley's picture and kissed it passionately; then she laid her head down on the cushions and began to sob. She knew now what she had done; she had driven Ashley out of her life, and life without him was not worth having. How had she been so mad as to sign, to deliver herself bound hand and foot to these men who only wanted to make money out of her, to think that any triumph could console her for the loss of her love? Was it too late, would not a telegram undo all that had been done? She sat up with a sudden abrupt movement; should she write one? They might send her to prison, she supposed, or anyhow make her pay a lot of money. They would think she used them very badly. Oh, what was all that? They could get somebody else to play her part-- Why, so they could! Anybody would be glad to play that part; it might bring new treasure of glory to the great--sweet strange fame to one yet unknown. Ora's sobs were for a moment stayed; she sat looking straight in front of her. Ah, how hard things were! How they harassed, how they tortured, how they tore one asunder! She lay back and sobbed again, now not so passionately, but more gently, yet despairingly. So tragic a guise may sometimes be assumed by such homely truths as that you cannot blow both hot and cold, that you can't eat your cake and have it, and that you must in the end decide whether you will go out by the door or by the window. She had told Ashley to come to her again that day to hear her decision. It was the appointed hour, and she began to listen for his tread with fear. For he would think that she did not love him, and she did love him; he would say that she wanted to go, and she loathed going; he would tell her all her going meant, and she knew all it meant. It would be between them as it had been yesterday, and worse. Alas, that she should have to fear the sound of Ashley's foot! Ah, that she could throw herself into his arms, saying, "Ashley, I won't go!" Then the sweet companionship and days in the country could come again, all could be forgotten in joy, and the existence of to-morrow be blotted out. And Mr. Hazlewood and Babba would get somebody else to play the part--the great, great part. There was the tread. She heard and knew it, and sat up to listen to it, her lips parted and her eyes wide; marked it till it reached the very door, but did not rise to meet it. She would sit there and listen to all that he said to her. He came in smiling; that seemed strange; he walked up to her and greeted her cheerily; she glanced at him in frightened questioning. "So you've arranged it?" he said, sitting down opposite to her. "How do you know, Ashley?" "Oh, I should know, anyhow," he answered, laughing; "but I met Babba singing a song in Piccadilly--rather loud it sounded--and he stopped to tell me." "Oh," she murmured nervously. That he had come to know in this way seemed an anti-climax, a note which jarred the tragic harmony; she would have told him in a tempest of tears and self-reproach. "You've done quite right," he went on. "It wasn't a chance to miss. I should have been a selfish brute if I'd wanted you to give it up. Besides--" He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. "Come, Ora," he went on, "don't look so sorrowful about it." He was not as he had been the day before; the touch of mockery which she had seemed to see then was quite gone. He took her hand and caressed it gently. "Poor dear," he said, "making up your mind always upsets you so terribly, doesn't it?" "It's going away from you," she whispered, and her grasp fixed tightly on his hand. "For a few months," he said. "Don't you think that long?" she cried, her eyes growing reproachful; she had made up her mind that it was eternity. "I don't mean to think it long, and you mustn't think it long," he said. "The time'll go like lightning. Get an almanac and ink out the days, as homesick boys do at school; it's quite consoling. And you'll have so much to do, so much to fill your thoughts." "And you?" "Oh, I shall jog along till you come back. I shall be there to meet you then. We'll come up to town together." Was this really all? Was there no great, no final tragedy, after all? So it might seem from his quiet cheerful manner. Ora was bewildered, in a way disappointed, almost inclined to be resentful. "It looks as if you didn't care so very much," she murmured; she tried to draw her hand away from his, but he held it fast. He shut his lips close for a moment, and then said, still very quietly, "You mustn't think it means that, dear." On the last word his voice quivered, but he went on again. "It means a very long night; the sun won't rise again for ever so many months. But some day it will." She had turned her head away, and, as he made this confident declaration, a smile bent his lips for a moment, a smile not of amusement. "Will it?" she asked, leaning towards him again, praying him to repeat his comforting words. "Of course it will." "And you won't forget me? Ashley, don't forget me!" "Not likely, my dear," said he. "I think Miss Pinsent makes herself remembered." "Because I shan't forget you, not for a moment," she said, fixing her eyes on his. "Oh, it's hard to leave you!" She took up her handkerchief from the small table and dried her eyes. "Your picture will go with me everywhere," she said, lightly touching it. "But I shan't be able to have your roses, shall I? Would you like some tea, Ashley?" "Very much indeed," said he. After all, why not tea? There is nothing in tea necessarily inconsistent with tragedy; still her vague forecasts of this conversation had not included the taking of tea. "Now show me your agreement," he said. "I must see that they've not done you." As they had tea, they looked through the contract, clause by clause. On the whole Ashley was very well satisfied, although he suggested that one or two points might be modified in Ora's favour; she quite grasped what he put forward and thought that she would be able to obtain the concessions from her partners. "I ought to make all I can, oughtn't I?" she asked. "I'm giving up so much to go." "You ought to be as greedy as you possibly can," he assured her with a laugh. He wanted to prevent her from beginning to talk again of what she was giving up; what she would gain was a better topic; just as she must not think how long she would be away, but on the other hand how soon she would be back. We cannot control facts, but there is a limited choice of aspects in which we may regard them and present them for the consideration of our friends. In this little free field optimism and pessimism are allowed to play. "You can always make me happy!" she sighed, leaning back. "I know the way to do it, you see," he answered. He had decided that in this case the best way to do it was to let her go and play her part. "Even when you're gone, I shan't be as miserable as I was before. You've made it all seem less--less big and less awful, you know. Every day will really be bringing me nearer to you again; even the first day! It'll begin directly, won't it? Oh, I shall cry, but now I shall be able to think of that too." He was not deceiving her in anything like the grave manner in which he had deceived her concerning Jack Fenning, but he felt something of the same qualms. He did not yield an inch to them externally; he had made up his mind to cheat her into going happily; when once that was done, he thought she would soon grow happy; and if it were to be done, it should be done thoroughly. A few tears were inevitable, but they must be alleviated with smiles of hope. "Directly you go away, you'll begin coming back, won't you? Really I almost wish you were gone already, Ora!" She laughed at this whimsical idea, but agreed that the actual going would be the one irremediably black spot. Then she grew grave suddenly, as though an unwelcome thought had flashed into her mind. "Ashley," she said, "suppose I--I meet Jack! He's over there, you know. What shall I do?" "Oh, he won't bother you, I expect," Ashley assured her. "But if he does? I shan't have you to take care of me, you know." "If he does, you go straight to Hazlewood. He's a good fellow and knows his way about the world. He'll see you come to no harm and aren't victimised." "Will he keep Jack away from me?" "Yes, I think so. Take him into your confidence." Ashley smiled for a moment. "He'll know the sort of man Fenning is." Ora seemed a good deal comforted. "Yes, I like Sidney Hazlewood," she said. "He's awfully tiresome sometimes, but you feel that you can rely on him. He gives you an idea of strength, as if you could put yourself in his hands. Oh, but not so much as you do, of course! But then you won't be there." "He'll look after you just as well as I should." "Perhaps he will, as far as the actual thing goes," she admitted. Then she began to smile. "But--but I shan't like it so much from him." "You never know that till you try," said Ashley, answering her smile with a cheerful smile. "Oh, that's absurd," said Ora. "But I do think he'll stand by me." She leant forward and put her hand on his knee. "If I were in very, very great trouble and sent for you, would you come?" "Yes," said Ashley, "I'd come then." "Whatever you had to do? Whatever time it took? However far off I was?" "Yes," he answered. "Anyhow I'd come. But you won't--" He hesitated for a moment. "You won't have any cause to send for me," he ended. "Oh, but I should rather like one," she whispered, almost merrily. He shook his head. "I shall come only if you're in very, very great trouble; otherwise you must depend on Hazlewood. But you won't be in trouble, and I don't think you'll have any bother about Fenning." For would not Mr. Fenning have the best of reasons for avoiding observation while Hazlewood was about? To Hazlewood he was Foster, and Miss Macpherson, by the dictates of politeness, Mrs. Foster. It was in entire accord with the line of conduct which Ashley had laid down for himself that even now he said no more of Jack Fenning, and nothing of what he had done about him or heard about him. He stood aside; he had determined not to take her life into his hands; he could not put his into hers; he would not, then, seek to shape events either for her or for himself; he would give her no information and urge on her no course. If she came across her husband, something would very likely happen; or again it was quite probable that nothing would occur except an unpleasant interview and the transference of some of Ora's earnings to Jack's pocket. Miss Macpherson might appear or she might not. Ashley had gone as far as he meant to go when he told Ora to look to Mr. Hazlewood if she were in any trouble. And if she should chance to want, or assent to, "nosings" being carried on, why, was not Babba Flint to be of the party? He dismissed all this from his mind, so far as he could. It was not part of Ora, but yet it hung about Ora; he hated it all because it hung about her, and would intrude sometimes into his thoughts of her. Why had such sordid things ever come near her? But they had, and they, as well as the play and the part, were a fence between her and him. The bitterness of this conclusion was nothing new; he had endured it before; he endured it again as he talked to her and coaxed her into going happily. But amid all the complexities of reasons, of feelings, and of choices in which men live, there are moments when simplicity reasserts itself, and one thing swallows all others; joy or sorrow brings them. Then the meeting is everything; or again, there is nothing save the parting, and it matters nothing why we must part, or should part, or are parting. Not to be together overwhelms all the causes which forbid us to be together; the pain seems almost physical; people cannot sit still when it is on them any more than when they have a toothache. Such a moment was not to be altogether evaded by any clever cheating of Ora into going happily. There were the inevitable tears from her; in him there was the fierce impulse after all to hold her, not to let her go, to do all that he was set not to do, by any and every means to keep her in hearing and sight and touch. For when she was gone what were touch and hearing and sight to do? They would all be useless and he, their owner, useless too. But of this in him she must see only so much as would assure her of his love and yet leave her to go happy. That she should go happy and still not doubt his love was the object at which he had to aim; the cost was present emptiness of his own life. But things have to be paid for, whether we are furnishing our own needs or making presents to our friends; the ultimate destination of the goods does not change a farthing in the bill. His last hour with her seemed to set itself, whether in indulgence or in irony he could not decide, to focus and sum up all that she had been to him, to shew all the moods he knew, the ways he loved, the changes that he had traced with so many smiles. She wept, she laughed, she hummed a tune; she took offence and offered it; she flirted and she prayed for love; she held him at arm's length, only to fall an instant later into his arms; she said she should never see him again, and then decided at what restaurant they would dine together on the evening of reunion; she waxed enthusiastic about the part, and then cried that all parts were the same to her since he would not be in the theatre. To be never the same was to be most herself. Yet out of all this variety, in spite of her relapses into tragedy, the clear conclusion formed itself in his mind that she was going happy, at least excited, interested, eager, and not frightened nor utterly desolate. Yet at the last she hung about him as though she could not go; and at the last--he had prayed that this might be avoided--there came back into her eyes the puzzled, alarmed, doubtful look, and with it the reproach which seemed to ask him what he was doing with her, to say that after all it was his act, that he was master, and that when she gave herself into his hands no profession of abdication could free him from his responsibility. If it were so, the burden must be borne; the delusion under which she went must not be impaired. The last scene came on a misty morning at Waterloo Station; it had been decided that he should part from her there, should hand her over to the men who wanted to make money out of her, and so go his ways. The place was full of people; Babba chattered volubly in the intervals of rushing hither and thither after luggage, porters, friends, provisions, playing-cards, remembering all the things he had forgotten, finding that he had forgotten all that he meant to remember. Hazlewood, a seasoned traveller, smoked a cigar and read the morning paper, waiting patiently till his man should put him in the reserved corner of his reserved carriage; certainly he looked a calm man to whom one might trust in a crisis. Ora and Ashley got a few minutes together in the booking-office, while her maid looked to her trunks and Babba flew to buy her flowers. Nobody came near them. Then it was that it seemed as though the success of his pretence failed in some degree, as though she also felt something of the sense which pressed so remorselessly on him, the sense of an end, that thus they were now together, alone, all in all to one another, and that thus they would never be again. The tears ran down Ora's cheeks; she held both his wrists in her hands with the old grip that said, "You mustn't go." She could not speak to him, he found nothing to say to her; but her tears cried to him, "Are you right?" Their reproach was bitter indeed, their appeal might seem irresistible. What now beside them were parts and plays, lives and their lines, Hazlewoods, Babba Flints, aye, or Jack Fennings either? They pleaded for the parlour in the little inn, reminding him how there first she had thrown herself on his mercy, asking him whether now for the first time he meant in very truth to turn cruel and abuse the trust. But days had passed, and months, since then; with love had come knowledge, and the knowledge had to be reckoned with, although it had not destroyed the love. Was that ungentle? The knowledge was of himself as well as of her; he dealt no blow that he did not suffer. The knowledge was, above all, of the way things were and must be. Therefore in all the stress of parting he could not, desire it as he might, doubt that he was right. Hazlewood raised his voice and called from the platform, "Off in five minutes, Mead! Hadn't you better take Miss Pinsent to her carriage?" "Come, Ora," he said, "you must get in now." For a moment longer she held his arms. "I don't believe I shall ever see you again," she said. Then she dried her eyes and walked with him on to the platform. Here stood Babba, here Hazlewood, here all the retinue. Ashley led her up to Hazlewood. "Here she is," he said; he seemed to be handing her over, resigning charge of her. The three turned and walked together to the train. "You'd rather go down just with your maid, I daresay," said Hazlewood. "It's time to get in, you know." He held out his hand to Ashley and then walked away. "Now, dear," said Ashley Mead. She gave him her hand. For long he remembered that last grasp and the clinging reluctance with which it left him. "Good-bye, Ashley," she said. "You're beginning to come back from this minute," he reminded her, forcing a smile. "As soon as ever the train moves you're on your way home!" "Yes," she smiled. "Yes, Ashley." But the charm of that conceit was gone; the tone was doubtful, sad, with only a forced recognition of how he meant to cheer her. Her eyes were more eloquent and more sincere, more outspoken too in their reproach. "You're sending me away," they said. So she went away, looking back out of the window so long as she could see him; not crying now, but with a curious, wistful, regretful, bewildered face, as though she did not yet know what he had done to her, what had happened, what change had befallen her. This was the last impression that he had of her as she went to encounter the world again without the aid to which he had let her grow so used, without the arm on which he had let her learn to lean. But he seemed to know the meaning she sought for, to grasp the answer to the riddle that puzzled her. As he walked back through the empty town, back to the work that must be done and the day that must be lived through, it was all very clear to him, and seemed as inevitable as it was clear. It was an end, that was what it was--an utter end. For if it were anything but an end, he had done wrong. And he had no hope that he had done wrong. The chilling sense that he knew only too well the truth and the right of it was on him; and because he had known them, he was now alone. Would not blindness then have been better? "No, no; it's best to see," said he. CHAPTER XXII OTHER WORLDS Elisha wore worthily the mantle of Elijah; nay, there were fresh vigour and a new genius in the management of Muddock and Mead. The turn-over grew, the percentage of working expenses decreased, the profits swelled; the branches were reorganised and made thoroughly up to the needs of the times; the big block in Buckingham Palace Road advanced steadily in prestige. For all this the small, compact, trim man with the keen pale-blue eyes had to be thanked. He had found a big place vacant; he did not hesitate to jump up to it, and behold, he filled it! Moreover he knew that he filled it; the time of promotion was over, the time of command was come. His quieter bearing and a self-possession which no longer betrayed incompleteness by self-assertion marked the change. He did not now tell people that he made sovereigns while they were making shillings. He could not give himself grace or charm, he could not help being still a little hard, rather too brusque and decisive in his ways; he could not help people guessing pretty accurately what he was and whence he came; but the rough edges were filed and the sharpest points rounded. Even Bowdon, who was for a number of reasons most prejudiced, admitted that it was no longer out of the question to ask him to dinner. The business was to be turned into a company; this step was desirable on many grounds, among them because it pleased Miss Minna Soames. She was to marry Bob Muddock, now Sir Robert, and although she liked Bob and Bob's money she did not care much about Bob's shop. Neither did Bob himself; he did not want to work very hard, now that his father's hand was over him no more, and he thought that a directorship would both give him less to do and mitigate a relationship to the shop hitherto too close for his taste. So the thing was settled, and Bertie Jewett, as Managing Director, found himself in the position of a despot under forms of constitutional government. For Bob did as he was told; and given that a certain event took place, Bertie would control the larger part of the ordinary shares in virtue of his own holding, his brother-in-law's, and his wife's. Preference shares only had been offered to the public. The event would take place. Nobody in the circle of the Muddocks' acquaintance doubted that now, although perhaps it might not occur very soon. For it was not the sort of thing which came with a rush; it depended on no sudden tempest of feeling, it grew gradually into inevitability. Union of interest, the necessity of constant meetings, the tendency to lean one on the other, work slowly, but when they have reached a certain point of advance their power is great. Bertie Jewett had not spoken of marriage yet and not for some time would he; but he had already entered the transaction on the credit side of his life's ledger. Alice knew that he had; she did not run away. Here was proof enough. "It's not the least use your saying you hope it won't happen. It will," Lady Bowdon remarked to her husband; and he found it impossible to argue that she was wrong. For there was no force to oppose the force of habit, of familiarity, of what her family wanted, of what the quiet keen little man wanted and meant to have. Alice was not likely to fall into a sudden, new, romantic passion; her temper was not of the kind that produces such things. She had no other wooers; men felt themselves warned off. Was she then to live unmarried? This was a very possible end of the matter, but under the circumstances not the more likely. Then she would marry Bertie Jewett, unless the past could be undone and Ashley Mead come again into her heart. But neither was her temper of the sort that lets the past be undone; the registers of her mind were written in an ink which did not fade. Besides he had no thought of coming back to her. But there was now, after Ora had gone off with her play and her part, a revival of friendship between them, started by a chance encounter at the Bowdons' and confirmed by a talk they had together when Ashley called in Kensington Palace Gardens. He was not insensible, and thought that she was not, to an element of rather wry comedy which had crept into their relations. He was sorry for himself, as he had very good grounds for being; he perceived that she was sorry for herself and, in view of the dominance and imminence of Bertie Jewett, fully acknowledged the soundness of her reasons. The comic side of the matter appeared when he recognised that, side by side with this self-commiseration, there existed in each of them an even stronger pity for the other, a pity that could not claim to be altogether free from contempt, since it was directed towards what each of them had chosen, as well as towards what had chanced to befall them from outside. They had both been unfortunate, but there was no need to dwell on that; the more notable point was that whereas he had chosen to be of Ora Pinsent's party with all which that implied, she was choosing to be of Bertie Jewett's party with all which that implied. It was no slur on their own misfortunes that each would now refuse to take the others place or to come over to the others faction. The pity then which each had for the other was not merely for a state of circumstances accidental and susceptible of change, but for a habit of mind; they pitied one another as types even while they came again to like one another as individuals. For naturally they over-ran the mark of truth, he concluding that because she was drifting towards Bertie she was in all things like Bertie, she that because he had been carried off his feet by Ora Pinsent he was entirely such as Ora was. There was certainly something of the comic in this reciprocity of compassion; it made Ashley smile as he walked beside Alice in the garden. "So Bob's going to cut Buckingham Palace Road?" he asked. "Hardly that. Oh, well, it'll come to something like that. Minna has aristocratic instincts." "I remember she had them about the theatre." "She doesn't like the shop." Alice had been laughing, but grew grave now as she added, "Do you know, I get to like the shop more and more. I often go there and look on while they take stock or something of that kind. One's in touch with a real life there, there's something being done." "I suppose there is," he admitted rather reluctantly. "I don't in the least object to other people doing it. However you said from the beginning that it wouldn't suit me." "Yes, I know I did. I think so still." But whether her reasons were quite the same was more doubtful than ever. "But I'm quite sure it suits me admirably. I should like really to work at it." "Sir James always relied on your opinion about it." "I suppose he wasn't so wrong as he looked," she said with a little laugh. "It's in our blood, and I seem to have a larger share of it than Bob. Why should we try to get away from it? It's made us what we are." "You didn't use to think that quite." "No, and you didn't use to--" "Be quite such a fool as I am? No, I don't think I did," said Ashley. "Still--" "Still you can't conceive how I can interest myself so much in the business?" "Something like that," he admitted. Her phrase went as near to candour as it was possible for them to go together. They walked on in silence for a little way, then Ashley smiled and remarked, "I believe we get a lot of our opinions simply by disliking what we see of other people's; we select their opposites." "Reaction?" "Yes; and then we feed what we've picked up till it grows quite strong." They fell into silence again. Friendliness could not banish the sense of distance between them; they could agree, more or less, as to how they had come to be so far apart, but the understanding brought them no nearer. Even agreeing to differ is still differing. Both were rather sad, yet both were smiling faintly, as they walked side by side; it was very absurd that they had ever thought of being so much to one another. Yet it was a rather sorrowful thing that in future they were to be so very little to one another. Beneath their differences they had just enough of kinship to make them regret that the differences were so great, and so imperative in the conditions they imposed. A sudden impulse made Alice turn to him and say, "I know you think I'm narrow; I hope you don't think I've been unkind or unfriendly. I did try to put myself in your place as well as I could; I never thought unkindly about you." "How were you to put yourself in my place?" he asked, smiling at her. "I know you tried. But you'd have had to put yourself in somebody else's place as well." "I suppose so," said Alice with a shake of her head; she certainly could not put herself in Ora Pinsent's place. "After all, people are best in their own places," he went on. He paused for a moment, and added, "Supposing they can find out where their places are. You've found yours?" "Yes," she answered. "Mine is the shop." He sighed and smiled, lifting his hands. "I wonder where mine is," he said a moment later. For if his were not the shop, it had not seemed to be by Ora Pinsent either. "Perhaps I haven't got one," he went on. "And after all I don't know that I want one. Isn't it possible to keep moving about, trying one after another, you know?" He spoke lightly, making a jest of his question; but she had fallen into seriousness. "What are you going to do?" she asked. "Work and labour truly to get mine own living. As for the rest, really I haven't thought about it." She wanted to ask him whether he still loved Ora Pinsent, whether he were waiting for her to come back to him, and still made that the great thing in his life. But she could find no words for these questions and no right in herself to ask them. The unuttered thoughts served only to check her sympathy for him; even if he did not look to Ora as the great thing in his future life, yet she had been so great in his past as to leave him not caring about the rest. "I'm hard at work, though," he said an instant after; it sounded as if he were seeking to defend himself. Alice said something rather commonplace about the advantages of hard work; Ashley gave it the perfunctory assent it seemed to demand. Then came silence, and to both of them a sense that there was no more to be said between them. In spite of this, perhaps because she would not acknowledge it, Alice asked him to dinner the next night, to meet the Bowdons and Bertie Jewett; he accepted with an odd sort of desire to make one of the family circle once again. His interest was mainly in Bertie; they sat on either side of Alice. Ashley's contempt for Bertie was now entirely for the type, and even there not very severe, for power of any kind extorts respect; it was in the main supplanted by the curiosity with which we look on people who are doing what we might have done had we so chosen, or been allowed by nature so to choose. There was a moment's pang when he perceived that Alice was more at ease and more comfortable in talking to Bertie; he was resigned to the change, but it was not very pleasant to look on at it in full operation. Irene, on his other side, allowed none of its significance to escape him; her glances pointed the moral; why she did this he could not understand, not tracing how part of her grudge against Ora attached to the man who had been so near and so much to Ora, and now recalled her so vividly to memory. Bowdon was polite to Lady Muddock, but far from gay. Merriment, animation, sallies of wit or chaff, a certain amount of what a hostile critic might call noisiness, had become habitual to Ashley in the society which he had recently frequented; he found himself declaring this little party very dull, overdone with good sense and sobriety, wanting in irresponsibility of spirit. He hinted something of this feeling to Irene Bowdon. "Oh, we don't go in for being brilliant," she said with a double touch of malice; she meant to hit at Ora and Ora's friends, and also perversely to include herself in his hinted depreciation of the company; this she liked to do because the depreciation came, as she knew, from a recollection of Ora and Ora's sort of society. "Being brilliant isn't in itself a crime," pleaded Ashley; "even if it were, it's so rare that there's no need for an exemplary sentence." "Why don't you talk to Alice?" she whispered. "She prefers to talk to Mr. Jewett." "I'm glad it annoys you." "Are you? I'm rather surprised it does. I don't know why it should, you see." Irene turned her shoulder on him with emphasised impatience. What right had he to find it dull? Did Bowdon also find it dull? Then came the worst irritation--the admission that it was dull. She turned back to Ashley with a sudden twist. "What right have you to expect to be always amused?" she demanded. "None; but I suppose I may mention it when I'm not," said he. "Do you know what you remind me of? You'll be angry if I tell you." "Then I couldn't deprive you of the pleasure of telling me, Lady Bowdon." "You're like a drunkard put on lemonade," she said with a vicious little laugh. Ashley made no immediate answer; he looked at her with lifted brows; then he also laughed. "The metaphor's rather strong," said he, "but--if you like!" "Well, you're very good-tempered," she conceded with a remorseful glance. "I should feel better if you'd hit me back." "I've no weapon." "Yes, you have." Her tone was marked and significant; he looked straight and attentively in her face; her eyes were not on his watching face but on her husband whose head was bent in courteous attention to Lady Muddock's doubtfully expounded platitudes. "Look here, do you know anything?" he asked. "Yes," said she without turning towards him. He grew surer of his ground and hazarded his shot with confidence. "About a thousand pounds?" "Yes." "Ah, married men, married men! It wasn't his secret. And why in heaven's name did he tell you?" "He was right to tell me. I like the truth." "Oh, don't talk about truth! I'm fresh from a surfeit of it. I shouldn't have thought it made you any more--" He paused, in difficulty how to say enough and not too much. "Any happier to know?" "Well--if you like," said Ashley, again accepting her phrase. "No, it doesn't," she said briefly. Then she added, "I promised not to tell you; don't let him know I have." "I'll try to prove a better confidant than he is," said Ashley. "And why did you tell me?" "You half guessed. I didn't tell. But--don't you think we might sympathise a little?" "We'll sympathise all we can," said Ashley with a laugh. "We might almost all sympathise; she's made a difference to almost all of us." "Who has?" "She--she--she," said Irene Bowdon, as she rose in answer to her hostess' signal. "Well, yes, she has," Ashley admitted, as he drew back the chairs. And while she was still in earshot he added, "But it's all over now." "Indeed it isn't, it never will be," said Irene over her shoulder, as she swept away. "How ready people are with these eternal negatives," he thought as he sat down to his glass of wine. Then he fell to speculating why Bowdon had told her about Jack Fenning and the thousand pounds, and why she had revealed that Bowdon had told her. To him the second question seemed the more difficult to answer, but he found an explanation, partly in her desire to defend or apologise for a certain bitterness towards Ora which she had betrayed, more perhaps in the simple fact that she was brimming over with the thing and could not restrain herself in the presence of one to whom her disclosure would be so interesting and significant. She had been tempted to show him that she knew more of the situation than he supposed, and must not be treated as an outsider when Ora and her affairs came up for discussion. Anyhow there the disclosure was, with its proof that, even although the eternal negative might be rashly asserted, for the time at all events Ora had very materially affected other lives than his own. "Of course I never expected to be where I am; at any rate not till much later." Bertie Jewett was talking to Bowdon about his success and his new position; he talked unaffectedly enough, although perhaps it could hardly be said that he talked modestly. Perceiving that his remark had roused Ashley to attention, he went on, "Among other things, I've got to thank your dislike of a commercial life, Mead. That let me in, you see." "Come, Ashley," laughed Bowdon, "here's something to your credit!" "Really the exact train of circumstances that has resulted in putting me practically at the head of the concern is rather curious to consider," pursued Bertie. Bowdon listened with a tolerant, Ashley with a malicious smile. "It all seemed to be made so easy for me. I had only to wait, and all the difficulties cleared out of the way. I can talk of it because I had nothing to do with it, except taking what I was offered, I mean." "Well, everybody's not equal to that, by any means," said Bowdon. "But certainly fortune's treated you well." It was on Ashley's lips to say "You owe it all to Ora Pinsent." But the thing would have been absurd and quite inadmissible to say. Perhaps it was also rather absurd to think; he knew the trick he had of magnifying and extending his own whimsical view of events until it seemed to cover the whole field. None the less, an intimate knowledge of the circumstances, of the exact train of circumstances as Bertie put it, forbade him to rob Miss Pinsent of all credit for the result on which he and Bowdon were congratulating Mr. Jewett. Why should not poor Ora, towards whom so many people were bearing a grudge, have gratitude when she deserved it? "The fact is," said Bowdon, tugging his moustache, "things happen very queerly in this world." "After that startling observation, let's go into the garden and smoke," said Ashley, rising with a laugh. In the garden Ashley talked to Lady Muddock, and had the opportunity of observing how a seventh heaven of satisfaction might be constructed without a single scrap of material which seemed to him heavenly. Such a spectacle should serve as a useful corrective for a judgment of the way of the world too personal and relative in character; it had on Ashley the perverse effect of increasing his discontent. If happiness were so easy a thing and placidity so simply come by, if nothing extraordinary were needed for them and nothing dazzling essential, why, what fools were people who went after the extraordinary and the dazzling, and yet in the end failed completely in their quest! And that you were a fool by your very nature was no comfort, but rather increased the hopelessness of the position. "I can't help thinking how wonderfully everything has happened for the best," said Lady Muddock, her eyes resting on Alice and Bertie who were walking side by side, a few paces behind Bowdon and his wife. "You're rather too optimistic for me," said Ashley with a laugh. "I think we do the world rough justice if we admit that most things happen for the second-best." "We are taught--" Lady Muddock began. "Yes, but, my dear Lady Muddock, we're most of us shocking bad pupils." Lady Muddock made a few efforts to convert him to the creed of the best, in distinction from that of the second-best; but Ashley would not be persuaded. The idea of the second-best gained on him. What had happened to the little circle about him was certainly not ideal, yet it was not calamity; it could hardly claim to be tragedy, yet you were in danger of being brought up short by some sudden pang if you tried to laugh at it. It wanted then a formula to express its peculiar variety, its halting midway between prosperity and misfortune, between what one would have wished and what one might have had to take. The formula of the second-best seemed to suit it very well. Even his own individual position, of which he had not taken a sanguine view, fitted itself into the formula with just a little pressing and clipping and management. His life was not ruined; he found himself left with too many interests and ambitions, with too keen an appreciation of all that was going on about him, to yield to the hysteria of such a sentimental conclusion; but it was not, and now would not be, quite what he had once dreamed and even lately hoped. He took courage and decided that he need not fall below the formula of the second-best. And what of Ora? Would she also and her life fit into the formula? She had never fitted into any formula yet; here lay her charm, the difficulty and the hopelessness of her. But then the new formula was very elastic. She might find a second-best for herself, or accept one if it were offered to her. In the notion that he has learnt or begun to learn the ways of the world and how to take it there lies a subtle and powerful appeal to a man's vanity. There is a delicate flavour in the feeling, surpassing the more obvious delights which may be gained from the proof of intellectual superiority or the consciousness of personal charm. It is not only that the idea makes him seem wiser than his fellows, for the conviction of greater wisdom would not appear to carry much pleasure; it makes him feel better-tempered, better-mannered, better-bred--if it may so be put, more of a gentleman. He is no longer one of the pushing jostling throng, eager to force a way into the front places, to have the best view of the show or the largest share of the presents which are to be distributed; he stands on the outskirts in cool leisureliness, smiling rather superciliously, not exactly happy, but convinced that any effort would turn his negative condition into a positive discomfort. Or the old metaphor of the banquet comes back into his mind; when the dish goes round he does not snatch at it; if it is long in coming, he feels and betrays no impatience; if it is finished before it reaches him, he waits for the next course, and meanwhile engages in polite conversation; he does not call out, nor make gestures, nor abuse the waiters (they are great folk in disguise). The rest of the company, who do all these things, commit gross breaches of taste; and although he may go home hungry he will be fed and warmed by the satisfaction of his graceful attitude and the glow of his suavity. Of course graceful attitudes are a little tiring and suavity is always more or less of a mask, but here it is that good-breeding finds its field and rewards him who displays it with its peculiar guerdon. Perhaps he would have liked the presents or the dishes, and he has not got them; but then his coat is not torn, his shirt is not crumpled, his collar is not limp. The successful betray all these unbecoming signs of a triumph in reality disgraceful; how have they the audacity to exhibit themselves red-faced, puffing, perspiring, hugging their prizes to their breasts and casting round furtive suspicious glances, fearful that they may still be robbed? Surely the vulgarity of the means sticks to the end and soils that also? Here were very ingenious arguments to prove that the second-best was in a true view the best; so treated and managed, the formula should surely assume new attractions? But if a man be very hungry? The argument is not fairly put. He gets fed, though not on his favourite delicacy. But if he cannot eat rough fare? Well, in that case, so much the worse for him; he should not have a dainty stomach. It is a long way from Kensington Palace Gardens to Charing Cross; there is time for many philosophical reflexions as a man walks from one to the other on a fine night. But at the end, when he has arrived, should his heart beat and his hand dart out eagerly at the sight of an envelope bearing an American postage stamp? Does such a paradox impugn his conclusions or merely accuse his weakness? Human nature will crop out, and hunger is hunger, however it may be caused. Perhaps these backslidings must be allowed; they come only now and then; they will not last, will at least come more seldom. The emptiness will not always vent angry abuse on the good manners which are the cause of it. The letter was a long one, or looked long because it covered many pages--it was understamped, a circumstance prettily characteristic--but Ora wrote large, and there was not really a great deal in it. What there was was mostly about the play and the part, the flattering reception, the killing work, the unreasonableness of everybody else. All this was just Ora, Ora who was neither to be approved of, nor admired, nor imitated, but who was on no account to be changed. Ashley read with the same smile which had shewn itself on his face when he commended the formula of the second-best to Lady Muddock's candid consideration. He came near the end. Would there be no touch of the other Ora, of his own special secret Ora, the one he knew and other people did not? There was hardly a touch; but just on the last page, just before the "yours, Ora," there came, "Oh, my dear, if only you were with me! But I seem to have got into another world. And I'm lonely, Ashley dear." The great clock down at Westminster struck one, the hum of the town ran low, the little room was quiet. Perhaps moments like these are not the fittest for the formula of the second-best. Does it not, after all, need an audience to smile pleased and appreciative applause of it? Is it as independent, as grandly independent, as it sounds? Does it comfort a man when he is quite alone? Is it equal to fighting the contrasts between what is and what might have been? "I seem to have got into another world. And I'm lonely, Ashley dear." Heavens, how many worlds were there, that all his friends should be getting into others and leaving him alone in his? CHAPTER XXIII THE MOST NATURAL THING By reason of the Government's blunders or of the Opposition's factiousness--the point awaits the decision of a candid historian in case he should deem it worth his attention--Parliament had to assemble in the autumn of this year; the Bowdons were back in town in November, the Commission met to wind up its work, and Ashley Mead was in dutiful attendance. Before this Irene had made up her mind that things were going tolerably, would go better, and in the end would turn out as well as could reasonably be expected. The recuperative effect of a vagrant autumn had produced a healthier state of feeling in her. She had begun to be less fretful about herself, less nervous and inquisitive about her husband; she had resigned herself to the course of events in a hopeful temper. Bowdon's bearing towards her was all that she could desire; it was losing that touch of exaggerated chivalry which had smacked of apology and remorse; it was assuming the air of a genuine and contented comradeship. She was inclined to think that their troubles were over. If one or two other things were over with the troubles, the principle of compensation must be accepted manfully. After all, love's alternate joy and woe is not the stuff to make a permanently happy home or the best setting for a useful public career; on the other hand, these can co-exist with a few memories of which one does not speak and a cupboard or two kept carefully locked. Having brought herself to this point, and feeling both praiseworthy and sensible in attaining so much, she allowed herself some astonishment at Ashley Mead, who seemed to have started in an even worse condition and yet to have achieved so much more. He appeared to have passed a complete Act of Oblivion for himself, and to have passed it with a rapidity which (from one or other of the reasons above referred to) would have been quite impossible to the Legislature. Surely in him, if in anybody, the period of convalescence should have been long? Resolution is good, so is resignation, so are common-sense and strength of will; but there is a decency in things, and to recover too quickly from a folly confirms the charge of levity and instability incurred by its original commission. Ashley should not be behaving just for all the world as though nothing had happened; such conduct was exasperating to persons who had reason to know and to feel how much really had happened. To be cheerful, to be gay, to be prospering greatly, to be dining out frequently, to have suppressed entirely all hint of emotions lately so acute and even overpowering, was not creditable to him, and cheated his friends of a singularly interesting subject for observation and comment, as well as of a sympathetic melancholy to which they had perhaps allowed themselves to look forward. It was no defence that Irene herself aimed at what he appeared to have achieved, as at a far-off ideal; she had not been, to the knowledge of all London, desperately in love with Ora Pinsent; she had not thrown up brilliant business prospects, lost an admirable match, and seriously impaired her reputation in the eyes of all respectable people. Neither had she bribed Jack Fenning to go away at the cost of a thousand pounds. "Surely all men aren't like that?" she cried with marked indignation. She broke out on Ashley once when he came to tea and they chanced to be alone; he met her in a way which increased her annoyance. "Well, what has happened after all?" he asked, leaning back in his chair and smiling at her. "I don't see that anything has. Ora has gone on a visit to America; from what I hear, a very successful visit. Presently, I suppose, she'll come back. A visit to America doesn't in these days mean a final separation from all one holds dear in the old country. I believe one almost always finds the man who lives next door in London dining at the same table in New York; then one makes his acquaintance." "Do you ever hear from her? I never do." "I hear from her every now and then. Oh, I admit at once what your look means; yes, not so often as at first." He laughed at the flush of vexation on Lady Bowdon's face. "I write seldomer too; I can do anything for a friend except carry on a correspondence." "I expect every day to hear of Alice Muddock's engagement." "Do you really think about it every day?" he asked, raising his brows. "What an eye you keep on your acquaintances!" Was he genuine? Or was he only perfectly, coolly, securely on his guard? Irene felt baffled and puzzled; but it was bad enough that he should be able even to pretend so well to her; pretending that nothing had happened was not always easy. "Do you think Ora will come back?" she asked. "If she's successful she may stay." "Oh, she'll come," he nodded. "We shall have her back in Chelsea before six months are out." "And when she does?" Irene's curiosity had overcome her, but Ashley laughed again as he answered, "Ascribe what emotions you like to me, Lady Bowdon; but I haven't heard that Jack Fenning's health's failing." There was some pretence about the attitude so puzzling and exasperating to Irene Bowdon, but more of reality. The passing of the months had brought a sense of remoteness; it was intensified by a gradual cessation of the interchange of letters. Ora had told him that she seemed to have got into another world and was lonely; she was, without doubt, still in another world; whether still lonely he could not tell. She was in all senses a long way off; what he had chosen, or at least accepted as the lesser evil, was happening; she and her life were diverging from him and his life. He recognised all this very clearly as he ate his chop at the club that evening. She had found him living one life; she had given him another while she was with him; she left him a third different from either of the other two. That evening, whether from some mood of his own or because of what Irene had said, she seemed irrevocably departed and separated from him. But even in that hour she was to come back to him so as to be very near in feeling though still across the seas in fact. As he turned into his street about ten o'clock and approached the door of his house, he perceived a man walking slowly up and down, to and fro. There was something familiar in the figure and the gait; an indecision, a looseness, a plaintive weakness. Unconsciously Ashley quickened his step; he had a conviction which seemed absurd and was against all probability; a moment would prove or disprove its truth. The man came under the gas lamp, stopped, and looked up at Ashley's windows. His face was plain to see now. "By God, it is!" whispered Ashley Mead, with a frown and a smile. A little more slinking, a little more slouching, a little more altogether destitute of the air which should mark a self-respecting man, but unchanged save for these intensifications of his old characteristics, Jack Fenning stood and looked up at the house whence he had once come out richer by a thousand pounds than when he went in. He seemed to regard the dingy old walls with a maudlin affection. It was a pretty bit of irony that she should come back in this way; that this aspect of her, this side of her life, should be thrust before Ashley's eyes when all that he loved of her and longed for was so far away. Ashley walked up to Jack Fenning with lips set firm in a stiff smile. "Well, Mr. Fenning, what brings you here?" he asked. "I've no more thousands about me, you know." "I--I thought you might give me a drink for old friendship," said Jack. "They said you were out, and wouldn't let me sit in your room. So I said I'd come back; but I've been waiting all the time." "If you don't mind what the drink's for, I'll give it you. Come along." He loathed the man, but because the man in a sense belonged to Ora he would not turn him away; curiosity, too, urged him to find out the meaning of an appearance so unexpected. With Ora in America, how could it profit Jack to make a nuisance of himself in England? There was nothing to be got by that. When they were upstairs and Jack had been provided with the evidence of friendship which he desired, Ashley lit his pipe, sat down by the fire, and studied his companion in silence for a few moments. Jack grew a little uncomfortable under the scrutiny; he was quite aware that he did not and could not stand investigation. But Ashley was thinking less of him than of what he represented. He had been just one of those stupid wanton obstacles, in themselves so unimportant, which serve to wreck fair schemes; he seemed to embody the perversity of things, and to make mean and sordid the fate that he typified. "What do you want?" Ashley asked suddenly and abruptly. "I've got no more money for you, you know." No doubt Jack was accustomed to this style of reception. It did not prevent him from telling his story. He lugged out a cheap broken-backed cigar from his breast-pocket and lit it; it increased the feeble disreputableness of his appearance. "I'll tell you all about it, Mr. Mead," he said. "It may be worth your while to listen." But the sudden confidence of these last words died away quickly. "I hope to God you'll do something for me!" he ended in a whining voice. This man was Ora Pinsent's husband. "Go on," muttered Ashley, his teeth set hard on the stem of his pipe. The story began, but proceeded very haltingly; Ashley had to draw it out by questions. The chief point of obscurity was as regards Jack's own intentions and motives. Why he had come to England remained in vagueness; Ashley concluded that the memory of the thousand pounds had drawn him with a subtle retrospective attraction, although reason must have told him that no second thousand would come. But on the matter of his grievances and the sad treatment he had suffered from others Jack was more eloquent and more lucid. Everybody was against him, even his wife Ora Pinsent, even his own familiar friend Miss Daisy Macpherson. For Miss Macpherson had deserted him, had gone over to the enemy, had turned him out, and for lucre's sake had given information to hostile emissaries. And his wife ("My own wife, Mr. Mead," said Jack mournfully) was trying to get rid of him for good and all. Ashley suddenly sat up straight in his seat as the narrative reached this point. "To get rid of you? What do you mean?" he asked. "There's a fellow named Flint--" said Jack between gulps at his liquor. Of course there was! A fellow who did not despise nosings! That bygone talk with Babba leapt lifelike to Ashley's mind. The fellow named Flint, aided by the basest treachery on the part of Miss Macpherson--why had she not denied all compromising facts?--had landed Mr. Fenning in his present predicament. "What in the world is it you mean?" groaned Ashley. "They've begun divorce proceedings," said Jack, with a desperate pull at the broken-backed leaky cigar. "My own wife, Mr. Mead." "Upon my soul, you're a much-wronged man," said Ashley. In the next few moments he came near to repenting his sarcastic words. Repentance would indeed have been absurd; but if every one were kicking the creature it was hard and needless to add another kick. He found some sorrow and disapprobation for the conduct of Miss Daisy Macpherson; it was ungrateful in her who had liked to be known as Mrs. Foster in private life. "Babba Flint got round your friend, did he?" he asked. "Well, I suppose you've no defence?" "I've got no money, Mr. Mead." "That's the same thing, you know," said Ashley. "Well, what's the matter? How does it hurt you to be divorced?" "I never tried to divorce her," moaned Jack. "Never mind your conduct to your wife; we can leave that out." "I was very fond of Miss Pinsent; but she was hard to me." "I've nothing to do with all that. What do you want to resist the divorce for?" His tone was savage; how dare this creature tell him that he had been very fond of Ora Pinsent? Must her memory be still more defiled? Should he always have to think of this man when he thought of her? Jack shrank lower and lower in his chair under the flash of severity; his words died away into confused mutterings; he stretched out his hand towards the whiskey bottle. "You're half drunk already," said Ashley. Jack looked at him for an instant with hazy eyes, and then poured out some liquor; Ashley shrugged his shoulders; his suggested reason had, he perceived, no validity. Jack drank his draught and leant forward towards his entertainer with a fresh flicker of boldness. "I know what their game is, Mr. Mead," he said. "Daisy let it all out when we had our row." "Whose game?" "Why, Ora's, and that damned Flint's, and Hazlewood's." "Will you oblige me in one point? If you will, you may have some more whiskey. Tell the story without mentioning Miss Pinsent." Jack smiled in wavering bewilderment. Why shouldn't he mention Ora? He took refuge in an indeterminate "They," which might or might not include his wife. "They mean to get rid of me, then their way's clear," he said with a nod. "Their way to what?" "To marrying her to Hazlewood," said Jack with a cunning smile. He waited an instant; his smile grew a little broader; he took another gulp. "What do you say to that, Mr. Mead?" he asked. Several moments passed, Jack still wearing his cunning foolish smile, Ashley smoking steadily. What did he say to that? Babba had offered him the service of nosings; would he not, in an equally liberal spirit, put them at the disposal of Mr. Hazlewood? Hazlewood was a good fellow, but he would not be squeamish about the nosings. So far there was no improbability. But Ora? Was she party to the scheme? Well, she would gladly--great heavens, how gladly!--be rid of this creature; and the other thing would be held in reserve; it would not be pressed on her too soon. The same mixture of truth and pretence which had marked his talk with Irene Bowdon displayed itself in his answer to Jack Fenning. "The most natural thing in the world," he said, with a shrug of his shoulders. Jack's face fell, disappointment and dismay were painted on it. His next remark threw some light on the hopes which had brought him to England. "I thought you'd be obliged to me for the tip," he said mournfully. Tips and nosings--nosings and tips! "Good God, have you any notion at all of the sort of creature you are?" asked Ashley. Jack giggled uncomfortably. "We're none of us perfect," he said. "I don't see that I'm worse than other people." He paused, and added again, "I thought you'd be obliged to me, Mr. Mead." Ashley had fallen to thinking; now he asked one question. "Does Miss Pinsent know you came here before?" "Daisy gave away the whole thing," murmured Jack forlornly. "All about my being here and what you did; and Hazlewood saw me here, you know." He paused again, and resumed, "It's all pretty rough on me; I don't want to be troublesome, but they ought to do something for me." "And they wouldn't, so you came to me?" Jack wriggled about and finished his glass. "Well, I won't, either," said Ashley. "I've only got thirty shillings. There's a cousin of mine in Newcastle who might do something for me if I had a bit of money, but--" "What have you done with the thousand?" "Daisy clawed the lot," moaned Mr. Fenning. It was surely a delusion which made Ashley feel any responsibility for the man; he had no doubt prevented Jack from rejoining his wife, but no good could have come of the reunion. Nevertheless, on the off-chance of there being a moral debt due, he went to the drawer of his writing-table and took out two bank-notes. It occurred to him that the proceeding was unfair to the cousin in Newcastle, but in this world somebody must suffer. He held out the notes to Jack. "Go," he said. Jack's eyes glistened as he darted out his hand. "Never come back. By heaven, I'll throw you downstairs if you ever come back." Jack laughed weakly as he looked at the notes and thrust them into his pocket. He rose; he could still stand pretty steadily. "You understand? Never come back or--the stairs!" said Ashley, standing opposite to him and smiling at him. "I won't trouble you again, Mr. Mead," Jack assured him. "It's a case where the trouble would be a pleasure, but don't come all the same. You'd be a poor sort of man to be hanged for, you know." Jack laughed more comfortably; he thought that he was establishing pleasant relations; but he was suddenly relegated to fright and dismay, for Ashley caught him by the shoulder and marched him quickly to the door, saying, "Now, get out." Jack glanced round in his face. "All right, I'm going, I'm going, Mr. Mead," he muttered. "Don't be angry, I'm going." He darted hastily through the door and stood for one instant at the top of the stairs, looking back over his shoulder with a scared expression. Ashley burst into a laugh and slammed the door; the next moment he heard Jack's shuffling steps going down. "I must have looked quite melodramatic," he said as he flung himself down on his sofa. His heart was beating quick and the sweat stood on his brow. "Good God, what an ass I am!" he thought. "But I only just kept my hands off the fellow. How infernally absurd!" He got up again, relit his pipe, and mixed himself some whiskey-and-water. His self-respect demanded an immediate and resolute return to the plane of civilised life; an instinct to throw Jack Fenning downstairs, combined with a lively hope that his neck would be broken, was not civilised. And was it grateful? His stiff smile came again as he declared that he ought to consider himself obliged to Jack and that the bank-notes were no more than a proper acknowledgment of services rendered. Jack's reappearance and Jack's news gave the fitting and necessary cap to the situation; they supplied its demands and filled up its deficiencies, they forbade any foolish attempt to idealise it, or to shut eyes to it, or to kick against the pricks. He had elected to have nothing to do with nosings; then he could not look to enjoy the fruits of nosing. The truth went deeper than that; he had been right in his calm bitter declaration that the thing of which Jack came to warn him was the most natural thing in the world. Ora, being in another world and being lonely, turned to the companionship her new world gave; like sought like. The thing, while remaining a little difficult to imagine--because alien memories crossed the mirror and blurred the image--became more and more easy to explain on the lines of logic, and to justify out of his knowledge of the world, of women and of men. It was natural, indeed he caught the word "inevitable" on the tip of his tongue. The whole affair, the entire course of events since Ora Pinsent had come on the scene, was of a piece; the same laws ruled, the same tendencies asserted themselves; against their sway and their force mere inclinations, fancies, emotions, passions--call them what you would--seemed very weak and transient, stealing their moment of noisy play, but soon shrinking away beaten before the steady permanent strength of these opponents. The problem worked out to its answer, the pieces fitted into the puzzle, until the whole scheme became plain. As Bowdon to his suitable wife, as Alice Muddock to her obvious husband, so now Ora Pinsent to the man who was so much in her life, so much with her, whose lines ran beside her lines, converging steadily to a certain point of meeting. Yes, so Ora Pinsent to Sidney Hazlewood. It would be so; memories of days in the country, of inn parlours, of sweet companionship, could not hinder the end; the laws and tendencies would have their way. The sheep had tried to make a rush, to escape to pleasant new browsing-grounds, the dog was on them in an instant and barked them back to their proper pens again. "Only I don't seem to have a pen," said Ashley Mead. When a thing certainly is, it is perhaps waste of time to think whether it is for the best, and what there may be to be said for and against it. But the human mind is obstinately plagued with a desire to understand and appreciate things; it likes to feel justified in taking up an amiable and acquiescent attitude towards the world in which it finds itself, it does not love to live in rebellion nor even in a sullen obedience. Therefore Ashley tried to vindicate the ways of fate and to declare that the scheme which was working itself out was very good. Even for himself probably a pen would be indicated presently, and he would walk into it. On a broader view the pen-system seemed to answer very well and to produce the sort of moderate happiness for which moderately sensible beings might reasonably look. That was the proper point of view from which to regard the matter; anything else led to an uncivilised desire to throw Jack Fenning downstairs. Thus Jack Fenning vanished, but in the next day or two there came the letter from Ora, the letter which was bound to come in view of the new things she had learnt. Ora was not exactly angry, but she was evidently puzzled. She gave him thanks for keeping Jack away from her, out of her sight and her knowledge. "But," she wrote, "I don't understand about afterwards; because you found out from Mr. Hazlewood things that might have made, oh, all the difference, if you'd told them to me and if you'd wanted them to. I don't understand why you didn't tell me; we could have done what's being done now and I should have got free. Didn't you want me free? I can't and won't think that you didn't really love me, that you wouldn't really have liked to have me for your own. But I don't know what else I can think. It does look like it. I wish I could see you, Ashley, because I think I might perhaps understand then why you acted as you did; I'm sure you had a reason, but I can't see what it was. When we were together, I used to know how you thought and felt about things, and so perhaps, if we were together now, you could make me understand why you treated me like this. But we're such a long way off from one another. Do you remember saying that I should begin to come back as soon as ever I went away, and that every day would bring me nearer to you again? It isn't like that; you get farther away. It's not only that I'm not with you now, but somehow it comes to seem as if I'd never been with you--not as we really were, so much together. And so I don't know any more how you feel, and I can't understand how you did nothing after what you found out from Mr. Hazlewood. Because it really would have made all the difference. I don't want to reproach you, but I just don't understand. I shall be travelling about a lot in the next few weeks and shan't have time to write many letters. Good-bye." It was what she must think, less by far than she might seem to have excuse for saying. He had no answer to it, no answer that he could send to her, no answer that he could carry to her, without adding a sense of hurt to the bewilderment that she felt. Of course too she forgot how large a share the play and the part, with all they stood for, had had in the separation and distance between them which she deplored as so sore a barrier to understanding. She saw only that there had been means by which Jack Fenning might have been cleared out of the way, means by which he was in fact now being cleared out of the way, and that Ashley had chosen to conceal them from her and not to use them himself. Hence her puzzled pain, and her feeling that she had lost her hold on him and her knowledge of his mind. Reading the letter, he could not stifle some wonder that her failure to understand was so complete. He would not be disloyal to her; anything that was against her was wrung from him reluctantly. But had she no shrinking from what was being done, no repugnance at it, no sense that she was soiled and a sordid tinge given to her life? No, she had none of these things; she wanted to be free; he could have freed her and would not; now Sidney Hazlewood and Babba Flint were setting her at liberty. He was far off, they were near; he was puzzling, their conduct was intelligible. She felt herself growing more and more separated from him; was she not growing nearer and nearer to them? The law ruled and the tendency worked through such incidents as these; in them they sprang to light and were fully revealed, their underlying strength became momentarily open and manifest. They would go on ruling and working, using the puzzle, the wound, the resentment, the separation, the ever-growing distance, the impossibility of understanding. These things blotted out memories, so that his very face would grow blurred for her, the tones of his voice dim and strange, the touch of his lips alien and forgotten. She would be travelling a lot in the next few weeks and would not have time to write many letters. He knew, as he read, that she would write no more letters at all, that this was the last to come from her to him, the last that would recall the intimate and sweet companionship whose ending it deplored with poor pathetic bewilderment. She did not see how they came to be so far apart and to be drifting farther and farther apart; she saw only the fact. Was it any easier for him to bear because he seemed to see the reason and the necessity? So, "Good-bye," she ended; and it was the end. He put the letter away in the drawer whence he had taken the bank-notes for Jack Fenning, drew a chair up to the table and, sitting down, untied the red tape round a brief which lay there. He began to read but broke off when he had read a few lines and sat for a moment or two, looking straight in front of him. "Yes," he said, "there's an end of that." And he went on with the brief. It was indeed the most natural thing in the world. CHAPTER XXIV "A GOOD SIGHT" "One unbroken round of triumph from the hour we landed to the hour we left," said Babba Flint. He was off duty, had dined well, and come on to Mrs. Pocklington's rather late; although perfectly master of himself, he was not inclined at this moment to think less well of the world than it deserved. "Including the legal proceedings?" asked Irene Bowdon, studying the figure on her French fan. "Well, we put them through all right; pretty sharp too." Babba looked at his companion with a droll air. "Fact is," he continued, "some of us thought it as well to fix the thing while we were on the other side; complications might have arisen here, you know." "Oh, I know what you mean. It's her own look-out; I daresay Mr. Hazlewood will make a very good husband." "He won't make much difference except in business matters," observed Babba composedly. "We all know that well enough." Babba did not seem to deplore the state of affairs he indicated. "Does he--the man himself?" Her curiosity was natural enough. "Lord love you, yes, Lady Bowdon. It's not like the other affair, you see. That wasn't business; this is." He eyed Irene's face, which was rather troubled. "Best thing, after all," he added. "I suppose so," said Irene, looking up with a faint smile. "Oh, mind you, I'm sorry in a way. But if you won't pay the price, you don't acquire the article, that's all. I did it for Hazlewood, I'd have done it for Mead. But if you don't like being in large letters in the bills and the headlines, and being cross-examined yourself, and having her cross-examined, and having everybody--" "In short, if you don't like going through the mud--" "You've got to stay on the near side of the ditch. Precisely." Irene sighed. Babba fixed his eye-glass and took a view of the room. "I'm not Mead's sort," he continued, his eye roving round the while, "but I know how it struck him. Well, it didn't strike Sidney that way and I suppose it didn't strike her. Therefore--" He broke off, conceiving that his meaning was clear enough. "She's coming here to-night," he went on a moment later. "And he's here." "Situation!" murmured Babba, spreading his hands out. "Oh dear no," said Irene scornfully. "We don't go in for situations in society, Mr. Flint. Isn't that Alice Muddock over there?" "It is; and Jewett with her. Still no situation?" He smiled and twisted the glass more firmly in his eye. As he spoke Ashley Mead came up to Alice and Bertie, shook hands with both, talked to them for a moment and then passed on, leaving them alone together. Alice looked after him for an instant with a faint smile and then turned her face towards her companion again. "Your husband here?" asked Babba of Lady Bowdon. "Yes, my husband's here," answered Irene. She nearly said, "My husband's here too," but such emphatic strokes were not needed to define a situation to Babba's professional eye. "He's somewhere in the crowd," she added. "That's all right," said Babba, whether mirthfully or merely cheerfully Irene could not determine. Her next question seemed to rise to her lips inevitably: "And what's become of Mr. Fenning?" "Nobody knows and nobody cares," said Babba. "He doesn't count any longer, you see, Lady Bowdon. We've marked Jack Fenning off. Bless you, I believe Miss Pinsent's forgotten he ever existed!" "She seems good at forgetting." "What? Oh, yes, uncommon," agreed Babba rather absently; a pretty girl had chanced to pass by at the minute. Irene was inclined to laugh. With all his eye for the situation Babba reduced it to absolutely nothing but a situation, a group, a _tableau_, a pose of figures at which you stopped to look for a moment and passed on, saying that it was very effective, that it carried such and such an impression, and would hold the house for this or that number of seconds. It was no use for life to ask Babba to take it with the tragic seriousness which Irene had at her disposal. "I wonder if she'll have forgotten me," she said. "She always remembers when she sees you again," Babba assured her. "Ought that to be a comfort to me?" "Well, it would be good enough for me," said Babba, and he began to hum a tune softly. "After a year, you know, it's something," he broke off to add. "Have you really been away a year?" "Every hour of it, without including the time I was seasick," said Babba with a retrospective shudder. "Ah, here she comes!" he went on, and explained the satisfaction which rang in his tones by saying, "I see her most days, but she's always a good sight, you know." As Irene watched Ora Pinsent pass up the room responding gaily to a hundred greetings, it occurred to her that Babba's was perhaps the truest point of view from which to regard her old acquaintance, her friend and enemy. In personal intercourse Ora might be unsatisfactory; perhaps it was not well to let her become too much to you; it was no doubt imprudent to rely on becoming or remaining very much to her. But considered as a "good sight," as an embellishment of the room she was in, of the society that knew and the world that held her, as an increase of beauty on the earth, as a fountain of gaiety, both as a mirror to picture and as a magnet to draw forth fine emotions and great passions, she seemed to justify herself. This was not to call her "nice" in Lady Muddock's sense; but it was really the way to take her, the only way in which she would fit into Irene's conception of an ordered universe. Ashley Mead had not, it seemed, been content to take her like that. Was the man who walked a few yards behind her, with his tired smile and his deep wrinkle, his carefully arranged effective hair, and his fifty years under decent control--was her new husband content to take her like that and to accept for himself the accidental character which she had the knack of imparting to her domestic relations? He was more respectable and more presentable than Jack Fenning. Jack Fenning counted for nothing now; in truth did Mr. Hazlewood count for much more? Except, of course, as Babba had observed, in business matters. Irene looked up with a little start; there had been a movement by her; she found Babba Flint gone and Ashley Mead in his place. His eyes left Ora and turned to her. "Splendid, isn't she?" he said in a spontaneous unintended outburst. "Yes; but--" Irene's fan moved almost imperceptibly, but its point was now towards Sidney Hazlewood. "Would you like it?" she asked in a half-whisper. Ashley made no answer; his regard was fixed on Ora Pinsent. Ora was in conversation and did not perceive the pair who watched her so attentively. They heard her laugh; her face was upturned to the man she talked to in the old way, with its old suggestion of expecting to be kissed. Sidney Hazlewood had disappeared into the throng; yes, he seemed decidedly accidental, as accidental as Jack Fenning himself. "There's my husband," said Irene, as Bowdon appeared from among the crowd and went up to Ora. After a moment he pointed to where they were, and he and Ora came towards them together. "Prepare to receive cavalry," said Irene with a nervous little laugh; the next instant her hands were caught in Ora's outstretched grasp. "What an age since I've seen you!" Ora cried, and kissed her very affectionately. She remembered Irene when she saw her again, as Babba had foretold. The two women talked, the two men stood by and listened. Ora's greeting to Ashley had been friendly but quite ordinary; she did not say that it was an age since she had seen him, but met him as though they had parted yesterday. The situation seemed to fade away; the sense that after all nothing had happened recurred to Irene's mind. Sidney Hazlewood instead of Jack Fenning--that was all! But a passing glance at Ashley's face changed her mood; the smile with which he regarded Ora was not the smile he used to have for her. He was admiring still (how should he not?), but now he was analysing also; he was looking at her from the outside; he was no longer absorbed in her. "Oh, my trip all seems like a dream," said Ora. "A lovely dream! You must come and see the piece when we play it here." They all declared that they would come and see the play; it and it alone seemed to represent her trip to Ora's mind; the legal proceedings and Mr. Hazlewood were not thought of. "I had lots of fun and no trouble," said Ora. Ashley Mead gave a sudden short laugh. It made Irene start and she fell to fingering her fan in some embarrassment; Bowdon's smile also was uncomfortable. Ora looked at Ashley with an air of surprise. "He's laughing at me for something," she said to Irene. "I don't know what. Will you tell me if I come down to supper with you, Ashley?" She still called him Ashley; Irene was definitely displeased; she thought the use of his first name decidedly unseemly under the circumstances. "I'll try," said Ashley. Ora took his arm and waved a gay adieu. "Come and see me very soon," she called, and, as she turned away, she shot a glance at Bowdon. "You come too; you haven't been for--" She paused and ended with a laugh. "Well, for almost longer than I can remember." The supper-room was not very full; they got a little table to themselves and sat down. It was away in a corner: they were in effect alone. "What were you laughing at? Me?" "Yes, of course," answered Ashley. She looked at him with a rather distrustful and inquisitive glance. "How funnily everything has turned out," she began rather timidly. It was just as he had expected her to begin. "Funnily? Oh, I don't see that. I call it all very natural," he said. "Natural!" Ora repeated, lifting her brows. Ashley nodded, and drank some champagne. Ora seemed disappointed to find him taking that view. The expression of her face set him smiling again. "I don't think I like you to laugh," she said. "It seems rather unkind, I think." He raised his eyes to hers suddenly. "Then I won't laugh," he said, in a lower tone. "But I wasn't laughing in that way at all, really." He had, at all events, grown grave now; he pushed his chair a little back and leant his elbow on the table, resting his head on his hand. "If I told you all about how it happened--" she began. "Your letter told me," he interrupted. "I don't want you to tell me again." Her eyes grew affectionate. She laid a hand on his arm. "Was it hard, dear Ashley?" she whispered. "I knew how it would be from the moment you went away," was his answer. "Then why did you let me go?" she asked quickly, and, as he fancied, rather reproachfully. She seemed to snatch at a chance of excusing herself. "You wanted to go." Ora looked a little troubled; she knit her brows and clasped her hands; she seemed to be turning what he said over in her mind. She did not deny its truth, but its truth distressed her vaguely. "It's no use bothering ourselves trying to explain things," Ashley went on more lightly. "It's all over now, anyhow." He was conscious of the old weakness--he could not cause her pain. His impulse even now was to make her think that she had been in all things right. "Yes." Her dark eyes rested on his face a moment. "You liked it while it lasted?" "Very much," he admitted, smiling again for a moment. "But it's over. I'm sorry it's over, you know." "Are you, Ashley? Really sorry?" He nodded. "So am I," she said with a sigh. He rose to his feet and she followed his example; but she would not let him take her back to where the people were, but made him sit down in a recess in the passage outside the drawing-room. She seemed to have fallen into a pensive mood; he was content to sit by her in silence until she spoke again. "Sidney was very kind, and very helpful to me," she said at last. "I got to like him very much." She was pleading with Ashley in her praise of Hazlewood. "Oh, yes, I know," he murmured. "Good heavens, you don't think I'm blaming you?" He had said that to her before; she did not accept it so readily now. "Yes, you are," she said, with a little temper. "You've set me down for something--as some sort of person. I know you have. You may say that's not blaming, but it's just as bad." He was surprised at her penetration. "I suppose you always felt like that really, down in your heart," she added thoughtfully. "But you used to like me." "I should rather think I did," said Ashley. "You don't now?" "Yes, I do." "Not so much? Not in the same way?" A touch of urgency had come into her tone. "Should you expect that? And I'm sure you wouldn't wish it." "Some people go on caring always--whatever happens." He leant forward towards her and spoke in a low serious voice. "I shall never be able to think of my life without thinking of you," he told her. After a pause he added, "That's the truth of it, but I don't know exactly how much it comes to. A good deal, I expect; more than generally happens in such cases." "You'll marry somebody!" The prospect did not seem to please her. "Very likely," he answered. "What difference does that make? Whatever happens, you're there. You put yourself there, and you can't take yourself away again." "I don't want to," said Ora, with all her old sincerity in the avowal of her feelings. "Of course you don't," he said, with a faint smile. She had spoken seriously, almost pathetically, as though she were asking to be allowed to stay with him in some such way as he had hinted at; for the first time he recognised the look of appeal once so familiar. It brought to him mingled pain and pleasure; it roused a tenderness which made him anxious above all to say nothing that would hurt her, and to leave her happy and content with herself when they parted; this also was quite in the old fashion. "Why, you'll stand for the best time and the best thing in my life," he said. "You'll be my holiday, Ora. But we can't have holidays all the time." "We had some lovely days together, hadn't we? I'm not sure the first wasn't best of all. You remember?" "Oh, yes, I remember." "You're laughing again." But now Ora laughed a little herself. The cloud was passing away; she was regaining the serenity of which too much self-examination had threatened to rob her, and the view of herself as the passive subject of occurrences at which she, in common with the rest of the world, was at liberty to sigh or smile in a detached irresponsibility. A man passed by and bowed, saying, "How do you do, Mrs. Hazlewood?" "Isn't that funny?" asked Ora. "Nobody thinks of calling me Mrs. Hazlewood." "I certainly shan't think of calling you anything of the kind," said Ashley. She laughed, seemed to hesitate a little, but then risked her shot. "You wouldn't have expected me to be called Mrs. Mead, would you?" she asked. "No, I shouldn't," he answered with a smile. The whole case seemed to be stated in her question. She not only would not have been called, but she would not really have been, Mrs. Mead--not in any sense which was of true importance. Neither had she been Mrs. Fenning; neither was she Mrs. Hazlewood; she was and would remain Ora Pinsent. "Of course I don't mind it," Ora went on, with a smile whose graciousness was for both her actual husband in the drawing-room and her hypothetical husband in the recess. "But somehow it always sounds odd." She laughed, adding, "I suppose some people would call that odd--your friend Alice Muddock, for instance." "I haven't the least doubt that Alice Muddock would call it very odd." "She never liked me really, you know." "Well, perhaps she didn't." "But she did like you, Ashley." "She certainly doesn't," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "Oh, you'd never have got on with her," said Ora scornfully. Then she jumped up suddenly, crying, "There's Babba, I want to speak to him." But before she went, she said one word more. "You were the truest finest friend, Ashley. And I wasn't worthy." She looked at him in appeal. "No, not worthy," she repeated. "I think Alice Muddock's right about me." She threw out her hands in the saddest little protest, dumbly accusing the Power that had made her what she was. "I think you could still break my heart by being unhappy," said Ashley Mead. She gave him a little wistful smile, shook her head, and walked quickly away. Her voice rose gaily the next moment, crying, "Babba, Babba!" And that was all Babba's situation came to. There was in fact no situation; there was only a state of things; so Ashley decided as he sat on alone. Perhaps rather a strange state of things, but certainly no more than that. Her being here in town, liable to be met, having to be spoken to, being again a presence as well as a memory--all this made his position different from what it had been while she was over seas. But stranger still was the knowledge that, however often she were met and spoken to, the presence would be and would rest different from the memory. He had recognised the possibility that all which had come to him in the months of separation would vanish again at her living touch and that the old feelings would revive in their imperious exclusive sway. He had known that this might happen; he had not known whether he hoped or feared its happening; because, if it happened, there was no telling what else might happen. Now he became aware that it would not happen, and (perhaps this was strangest of all) that the insuperable obstacle came from himself and not from her. She had not ceased, and could not cease, to attract, amuse, and charm, or even to be the woman with whom out of all women he would best like to be. But here the power of her presence stopped; it owned limits; it had not a boundless empire; that belonged now only to the memory of her. It was then the memory, not the presence, which he would always think of when he thought of his life, which would be the great thing to him, which would abide always with him, unchanged, unweakened, unspoilt either by what she was now or in the future might be. She was beyond her own power; herself, as she had been to him, she could neither efface nor mar. He had idealised her; he was rich in the possession of the image his idealising had made; but the woman before his eyes was different or seen with different eyes. As this came home to his mind, a sense of relief rose for a moment in him; he hailed its appearance with eagerness; but its appearance was brief; it was drowned in a sense of loss. He was free; that was the undoubted meaning of what he felt; but he was free at a great cost. It was as though a man got rid of his fetters by cutting off the limb that carried them. He strolled back into the drawing-room. The throng had grown thin. Alice Muddock and Bertie Jewett were gone; Alice had kept out of Ora's way. Babba Flint was just saying good-bye; the Bowdons, Ora, and Hazlewood were standing in a group together in the middle of the room. He noticed that Hazlewood shifted his position a little so as to present a fullback view. Really Hazlewood need not feel uncomfortable. Hazlewood as an individual was of such very small importance. However Ashley did not thrust his presence on him, but went off and talked for a few moments with his hostess. Meanwhile the group separated; Ora came towards Mrs. Pocklington, Hazlewood following. Ashley hastily said his own farewell and sauntered off; Ora waved her hand to him with her lavish freedom and airy grace of gesture, calling, "Good-night, Ashley!" Hazlewood exchanged a nod with him; then the pair passed out. In the hall Bowdon suggested that they should walk a little way together, the night being fine. Irene knew well why they wanted to walk together, but got into her carriage without objection; she had no more to fear from Ora. As for Ashley, so for her Ora's work lay in the past, not in the present or the future. The difference in her life, as in his, had been made once and for all; nothing that came now could either increase it or take it away. Her fears, her jealousy, her grudge, were for the memory, not for the presence. The two men who had wanted to talk to one another walked in silence, side by side. But presently the silence seemed absurd, and they spoke of trivial matters. Then came silence again. [Illustration: WALKED IN SILENCE SIDE BY SIDE] "I mustn't come much further," said Bowdon at last, "or I shan't get home to-night." "Oh, come on a little way; it'll do you good," said Ashley. So they went on a little way. And at last Bowdon spoke. "She doesn't look a day older," he said. "Oh, no. She won't look a day older for ever so long." "And old Hazlewood's just the same, wrinkle and all." "She won't smooth that away," said Ashley with a laugh. Bowdon took his arm and they walked on together for a little way further. Then Bowdon stopped. "I'm going home," he said, dropping Ashley's arm. "Good-night." "Good-night," Ashley answered. But for a moment Bowdon did not go. With a smile at once confidential and apologetic he put the question which was in his mind: "It's infernally impertinent of me, but, I say, Ashley, are you still in love with her?" Ashley looked him full in the face for a moment, and then gave his answer. "No, I'm not, but I wish to God I was!" he said. For in that love his life had done its uttermost; it would do no such good thing again. He had called Ora's time his holiday time. It was over. The rare quality of its pleasure he would taste no more. Bowdon nodded in understanding. "A wonderful creature!" he said, as he turned away. A wonderful creature! Or, as Babba Flint had preferred to put it, "A good sight." Yes, that must be the way to look at her, the right way to look at her existence, the truth about it. Only when Ashley remembered that little gesture of dumb protest, the truth seemed rather hard--and hard not for himself alone. If she sacrificed others, if her nature were shaped to that, was she not a sacrifice herself--sacrificed that beautiful things might be set before the eyes and in the hearts of men? Let judgment then be gentle, and love unashamed. PLYMOUTH WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LIMITED PRINTERS * * * * * * Transcriber's note: Minor punctuation errors have been corrected. oe-ligatures have been replaced with oe. This text is otherwise as originally published. 
42069	----	JANET HARDY IN HOLLYWOOD by RUTHE S. WHEELER The Goldsmith Publishing Company Chicago Copyright 1935 by The Goldsmith Publishing Company Made in U. S. A. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. "The Chinese Image" 13 II. Leading Rôles 20 III. The Wind Roars 33 IV. Little Deer Valley 47 V. The White Menace 58 VI. Desperate Hours 64 VII. Sanctuary at Home 72 VIII. Postponed Tryouts 78 IX. Big News 85 X. Victory for Helen 92 XI. A Famous Director Arrives 101 XII. On the Stage 112 XIII. Janet Steps In 124 XIV. Just Fishing 134 XV. Hollywood Bound 145 XVI. Thrilling Hours 155 XVII. On the Westbound Plane 161 XVIII. Hello, Hollywood! 173 XIX. Gorgeous Gowns 182 XX. At the Premiere 188 XXI. Screen Tests 196 XXII. Western Action 202 XXIII. On the Screen 210 XXIV. "Kings of the Air" 220 XXV. The Stars Vanish 227 XXVI. Bombs from the Sky 233 XXVII. The Showdown 244 Janet Hardy in Hollywood _Chapter I_ "THE CHINESE IMAGE" Winter hung on grimly in the Middle West that year. Late March found the streets piled high with snow and on that particular morning there was a threat of additional snow in the air as Janet Hardy, a blond curl sticking belligerently out from under her scarlet beret, hurried toward school. It was an important day for members of the senior class of the Clarion High School, for Miss Williams, the dramatics instructor, was going to hand out parts to read for the class play. For that reason, Janet walked more briskly than usual and she failed to hear footsteps behind her until another girl, running lightly, called. "Slow up a minute, Janet. I'm nearly breathless. I've been chasing you for more than a block." Janet turned to greet Helen Thorne, who lived half a block beyond her own home and on the same broad, comfortable thoroughfare. The girls fell into step, Janet slowing her pace until Helen could recover her breath. "What chance do you think we'll have of getting parts in the play?" asked Helen, her face reflecting her hopefulness. "Just as good as any of the rest," replied Janet. "I don't think there are any Ethel Barrymores in school and I wouldn't worry if there were. I won't be heart-broken if I don't get a part." "That's easy to say, but I'm afraid I'll be pretty much disappointed if I don't get one. You have the _Weekly Clarion_ to keep you busy." "It does that all right," conceded Janet, who was editor of the page of high school news which appeared once a week in the local daily paper, the _Times_, under the title of "The Weekly Clarion." The girls turned into the street which led up the hill to the high school, a sprawling brick structure which covered nearly a block. The original building had been started in 1898 and as the city had grown additions had been made, seemingly at random, until hardly any one knew how many rooms there were and it was not unusual for a new student to get lost. Janet was slightly taller than Helen. Her hair was a golden blond with just enough of a natural curl to make her the envy of most of the girls in school. Her blue eyes had a friendly, cheery look and her mouth had an upward twist that made it easy for her to smile. Helen was a complement to Janet, with dark brown hair, brown eyes and a dusky skin. Because of her brunette coloring, she inclined to gayer colors than her blond companion. It was half an hour before school when they reached the building, but a goodly number of seniors were already on hand and competition for rôles in the play would be intense. With 132 in the senior class, not many more than a score could hope to win parts. "There's so many it's going to be a discouraging business," said Helen as they went upstairs to the chemistry auditorium where the class was to meet. "If a lot of the others think that, it will be easy for us," smiled Janet. "Come on, tell yourself you're going to win a part and you will." "I want to for Dad's sake. He wrote that he would be home for my graduation and would attend all of the senior activities. So I've just got to make the play cast." "Keep up that kind of a spirit and you're as good as in," encouraged Janet, who secretly confessed that it was going to be quite a job to win a place in the play. The chemistry auditorium was well filled when they arrived. Almost every senior girl was there and at least half of the boys. Janet looked around the large room, gauging the mettle of the girls they would have to compete against. Well up toward the rostrum was Margie Blake, petite and blond and exceedingly vivacious. Margie was popular, confessed Janet, and probably stood a good chance of winning a part in the play for she had innate dramatic ability, while Janet, who had taken a leading rôle in the junior play, had been compelled to study each bit of action carefully. Near Margie was Cora Dean, a pronounced brunette, who had already announced that she intended to have a leading rôle, and Cora had a reputation of getting whatever she went after, whether it was a place on the honor roll or a part in one of the drama club's one act plays. "I'm afraid Cora will be after the part I try out for," whispered Helen. "She's good, too." "She's not a bit better than you are, and not half as pretty," retorted Janet. "But you don't always win play parts on your looks," said Helen. Just then Miss Williams, the dramatics instructor, hurried in. In one hand she carried a large sheaf of mimeographed sheets while in the other was the complete book for the play. Several plays had been tentatively considered, but final approval had been up to Miss Williams and she was to announce the title that morning as well as give out reading parts. The room quieted down as a few stragglers, coming in at the last minute, found seats at the rear. Miss Williams sorted the mimeographed sheets into piles and at exactly 8:45 o'clock she rapped briskly on the desk with a ruler. The dramatics teacher was pleasant and almost universally liked. She smiled as she looked over the seniors who had gathered. "It looks like we're going to have real competition for the play parts this year," she said. "I suppose, though, that first you'd like to know the name of the play." She paused a moment, then went on. "I've read all the plays the committee recommended carefully and my final choice is 'The Chinese Image.'" There was a ripple of applause, for a number of seniors, including Janet and Helen, had read portions of "The Chinese Image." Helen leaned toward her companion. "That's the play I've been hoping would be selected. There's a part I think I can win." "The leading rôle?" asked Janet. "Well, hardly, but it isn't a bad part." Miss Williams held up her hand and the buzz of conversation which had started after her announcement ceased. "I have had parts for every character mimeographed and each sheet gives sufficient reading material for tryouts. There are 23 rôles in 'The Chinese Image.' I'm familiar with the ability of almost all of you and if you'll come up as I call your names, I'll give you tryout sheets. The first sheet contains a brief synopsis of the play with the complete cast of characters and the second sheet has the part I want you to try for. You will also find the hours on the second sheet when I want you to go down to the gym for the tryouts." Janet had to confess that she was more than a little nervous as she waited for Miss Williams to call her name. Senior after senior was called up to the desk and handed his sheets. To some of them Miss Williams added another word or two, but she talked too low to be heard by the main body of pupils. As the tryout sheets were handed out, the seniors left the room for it was nearly assembly time. Helen looked anxiously at Janet. "I wonder if we're going to be called? There are less than a dozen left." "We'll know in a couple of minutes," replied Janet. "There goes Margie Blake. Wonder what part she'll get a chance at?" "One of the leads, you can be sure of that. And there's Cora Dean. I suppose Cora will get the part I try for. That happened in several of the one acts last year." "This isn't last year and Cora's a bit too temperamental. Well, we are going to be the last." All of the others had been called before Miss Williams spoke to Janet and Helen, and with a feeling of misgiving they advanced toward her desk. _Chapter II_ LEADING RÔLES Miss Williams smiled pleasantly as she looked up from the now slender pile of sheets with the tryout parts. "Afraid I was going to forget you?" she asked. "We were commencing to worry," admitted Janet, "for after all there's only one senior play." "Right. And I'm determined that 'The Chinese Image' be the best ever produced by Clarion High." The electric gong that heralded the opening of school banged its lusty tone through the hall. "Never mind about opening assembly," said Miss Williams. "I'll explain to the principal that I detained you." The dramatics instructor looked quizzically at Janet and Helen. "You make a good team, don't you?" "Well, we don't exactly fight," smiled Helen, "but there are times when we don't agree." "Of course. That's only human. What I mean is that when you get together with a goal in mind, you work hard to attain that goal. When Janet went out for editor of the _Weekly Clarion_ last fall, you were working hard for her to win." "I did my best," admitted Helen. "And it had a lot to do with my winning out over Margie Blake," said Janet whole-heartedly. "Which is just the kind of spirit I'm looking for to put across the senior play. I'll have to make a little confession or you'll wonder why I'm so intensely interested in the success of this special play. A dramatic producing company has made me a tentative offer, but their final decision will be made after one of their representatives has seen the senior play." "But that would mean leaving Clarion," protested Helen. "I'm afraid it would, and while I wouldn't like that, the opportunity offered by this company, if it finally develops, would be such that I just couldn't afford to reject it." "I suppose there isn't a whole lot of money in teaching dramatics in a high school," said Janet. "Not enough so I want to make it a life career," replied Miss Williams. "But this isn't getting along with my plan. Helen, I'm assigning you for a tryout for the leading rôle. Here's your part. Read it over carefully and be ready tomorrow afternoon at 4:15 o'clock." Miss Williams handed the mimeographed sheets to the astounded Helen. "They won't bite," she smiled. "But the lead? I never dreamed you would want me to try out for that." "Why not? It calls for a brunette with ability and brains and I think you answer that description." Miss Williams turned to Janet. "Here's your rôle, Janet. It's the second lead. You play a jittery little blond who hasn't a brain in her head and probably never will have." "Does that rôle fit me?" asked Janet, her eyes twinkling. "Well, hardly, but I think you'll have a lot of fun working on such a part. Margie Blake is going to try for it, also." "Who will be trying for the part you've assigned me?" asked Helen. "Cora Dean. I expect that with such competition both of you will be forced to do your best to win the part. Maybe it's a little mean of me to match you against each other this way, but I've got to have a superlative cast for the play." "You'll get it," promised Janet, "for Helen and I are going to do our best to win these rôles. Why Helen's father is planning on coming back for graduation week and Helen's got to make the play." "Is he really coming?" asked Miss Williams, almost incredulously, for the name of Henry Thorne was a magic word in Clarion. "He's promised, and both mother and I are counting on it. We haven't seen him since last fall." "Then I know one dramatics teacher who is going to be doubly nervous the night of the play. Just think of it--Henry Thorne, star director of the great Ace Motion Picture Company, watching a high school play. I'm afraid the cast may go all to pieces, they'll be so nervous." "But Dad's so entirely human," said Helen. "That's just the trouble. Because he's made a success in films, people think he must be some kind of a queer individual who goes around with his head in the air thinking he is better than anyone else. He's just like Janet's father and when he gets home he likes nothing better than getting his old fishpole out, digging a can of worms, and going out along the creek to fish and doze." "I suppose you're right, but his pictures have been so outstanding it seems that directing them must be some sort of a genius. I've never quite understood why you and your mother stayed on here, though." Miss Williams had often wanted to ask that question just to satisfy her own curiosity, but the opportunity had never opened before. "Dad's working under pressure on the coast, long hours and a terrific strain, and he says some of the things that are said about Hollywood are true. Most of the people are fine and hard working, but a small, wild crowd gives the rest a bad name and he doesn't want to take any chance on my getting mixed up with that bunch." "But you wouldn't," said Miss Williams. "I don't think so, but Dad thinks it best for us to stay here in Clarion and mother and I are happy here with all of our friends. Of course we don't see a whole lot of Dad, but when he does get home or we go out there, we have an awfully good time." Miss Williams glanced at her watch. "It's 9:10. You'd better go down to assembly. I'll explain why you were late. Don't forget, tryouts for both of you tomorrow afternoon and I'm counting on you to do your best." "We'll try," promised Janet, as they picked up the sheets with the tryout parts and left the chemistry auditorium. In the hall Helen, her dark eyes aglow with excitement, turned to Janet. "Just think; I've got a chance at the leading rôle. Of course Cora will probably get it, but at least Miss Williams is considering me." "Now let's stop right here," said Janet firmly, "and get one thing straight. You have a chance at the leading rôle." Helen nodded. "Cora has a chance at the lead." Again Helen nodded. "But," went on Janet, "you are going to win the lead." "Oh, do you really think so?" There was a tinge of desperation in Helen's voice. "I know you are." Janet spoke with a definiteness that she didn't quite feel, for Cora was a splendid little actress. But Helen needed some real encouragement and Janet knew that if Helen felt confident from the start half of the battle was won. The morning passed in a whirl of routine classes, but Janet found time to study her tryout sheets for several minutes. "The Chinese Image" was ideally suited for a senior play, with an excellent mystery story to carry the action. A whole lot of dramatic ability was unnecessary for the rapid tempo of the story would carry along the interest of the audience. The synopsis Miss Williams had prepared was brief and Janet read it twice. "The Chinese Image" centered about a strange little figure which had been brought back from China in 1851 by Ebenezer Naughton, then captain of one of the clipper ships which had sailed out of Salem for far-away ports in the Orient. The strange, squat little figure had remained in the Naughton family ever since for Captain Ebenezer, in his will, had stipulated that it must never be given away or sold. "When grave troubles befall my family, turn to 'The Chinese Image,'" he had written, "and therein you will find an answer." But the Naughtons had prospered and the will had been almost forgotten until the family came upon hard times and its fortune dwindled. Two grandsons of Captain Ebenezer, now heads of their own families, quarreled bitterly and in the ensuing family feud the image became involved. It finally fell to the lot of Abbie Naughton, the rôle played by Janet, to solve the mystery of the image, which she did in as thorough a manner as might have been expected of the light-headed Abbie. Janet chuckled over the lines she was to read in the tryout. The part of Abbie should be great fun, for Abbie did about every nonsensical thing possible and the giddier the part could be made, the better, decided Janet. Helen's rôle was more serious, for she was supposed to be in love with one of the boys of the other branch of the family and many were the trials and tribulations of their love affair. It was a delicate rôle, with much sweetness and tenderness, and it should prove ideal for Helen. Janet couldn't conceive of Cora Dean, who had a certain harshness about her, getting the part. But then, Cora was capable and she might be able to play the rôle to perfection. Just before noon the sky, grey since morning, turned a more desolate shade and the clouds disgorged their burden of snow. It was dry and fine and tons of it seemed to be coming down. Janet met Helen in the hall. "What about lunch?" "I'm going to stay at school and have mine in the cafeteria," replied Helen. "How about you?" "I don't relish the long walk home, but I didn't bring any money with me." Helen smiled. "You wouldn't accept a loan, would you?" "I might," conceded Janet, "because I'm more than a little hungry." "I've got fifty cents. That ought to buy enough food to last until we get home tonight." "But we're not going home," Janet reminded her companion. "Have you forgotten about the roller skating party at Youde's?" Helen flushed. "To tell the truth, I had. I've been thinking so much about the play I completely forgot the party." "Better not. It will be lots of fun." "I don't know whether I ought to go. If I do, I won't have much time to study over my tryout part." "There'll be an hour after school and you haven't more than two paragraphs to memorize." "I know them now," said Helen. "Then come on and go to the party. The bus is leaving school at five o'clock. We'll be at Youde's in an hour and there'll be a hot supper and the skating party afterward." "It's snowing hard," observed Helen, gazing out into the swirling grey. "You think of everything," expostulated Janet. "Of course, it's snowing, but the road to Youde's is paved part of the way. If it gets too thick we can turn around and come back." Both Janet and Helen had one open period in the afternoon which came at the same hour and they went into the library to study their tryout parts. Janet read her lines, stopping several times to chuckle over the nonsensical words which Abbie Naughton was required to say in the play. "This is going to be great fun," she told Janet. "How is your part going?" "It's a grand rôle, and lots of fun. I know the lines, but I'm supposed to be in love." "That shouldn't be a hard part then. You rather like Jim Barron, don't you?" "Yes, but what's that got to do with my part?" "I heard this noon that Jim was trying out opposite you." "Honestly?" "Honest true. Of course he may not get it." "Jim's a grand fellow." "Seems to me I've heard you say that before," chuckled Janet. "I have a hunch you'll get that part all right." Helen went through her rôle while Janet looked on with critical eyes, suggesting several minor changes which she thought would improve her companion's chances. The bell for the final class period sounded and they folded up their parts and hastened back to the assembly. Their last class for the day was honors English, a group of advanced English students who also served as the editors and reporters for the _Weekly Clarion_, writing and editing all of the high school news which appeared each Friday in the _Times_, the afternoon daily paper published in Clarion. It was the honors English class which was sponsoring the roller skating party at Youde's and Jim Barron, the sports editor, was in charge of the plans. There were seventeen in the class, including Cora Dean and Margie Blake, who wrote the girls' athletic news. Miss Bruder, the instructor, was small and dark, but somehow she managed to keep her high-tempered class under control. This was a mid-week period and the entire time was devoted to writing stories, which were turned over to Janet for final editing. It was Janet's task to write the headlines, a job at which she had become exceedingly proficient. Promptly at 3:30 o'clock the final bell sounded and writing materials were shoved hastily aside. Jim Barron stood up. "I'm counting on everyone being at the party. The bus will be here at five o'clock. We'll stop at Whet's drug store on the way out of town to pick up any of you who aren't here when we start. Remember, we're taking the money for the party out of the profit we've made from the _Weekly Clarion_ and it won't cost you a cent. Wear old clothes and plenty of warm ones. See you here at five." The class scattered, some of them remaining at school to finish up odd tasks, others hurrying home to change clothes and prepare for the party. "Going home?" asked Helen. "Right now. I'm certainly not going to fall down in these clothes while I'm skating. I've got an old tweed suit and boots I'm going to wear. Why don't you change to your corduroys?" "I thought I'd stay on and work on my part." "You know that almost to perfection now. Better get into some older clothes." Helen acquiesced and they donned their winter school coats and started down the hill toward home. The snow was still coming down steadily, as fine and dry as ever. "I'm glad there's no wind. This would drift terribly if there was," said Janet, kicking her way through the fine spume. _Chapter III_ THE WIND ROARS Janet was home in plenty of time to dress in leisure for the skating party. Her mother looked in once to make sure that she had plenty of warm clothes on. "I'm glad you're wearing that old tweed outfit. It's warm and at the same time nice looking." "Even though it's old, mother?" "Even though it's old. Tweed always looks nice and that's an especially pretty shade of brown. It goes so well with your hair. Wear your scarlet beret and don't forget the boots." "I won't," promised Janet as her mother started downstairs again. The Hardy home was pleasant, even though decidedly old-fashioned. There was a broad porch completely across the front of the house. The house itself was L-shaped, the base of the L having been added after the original structure was built. The exterior was shingled and creeping vines softened the sharper angles. Janet's room had a south exposure with two dormer windows that added to the many angles of the low-ceilinged rambling room. The wall paper was pink and white with gay farm scenes interspersed. Crisp chintz curtains were at the windows and a gay curtain hid the large, old-fashioned wardrobe at one end of the room in which she kept her clothes. Her dressing table was between the dormers with a rose-colored shade on the electric light. The bed, a walnut four poster, was against the wall nearest the hall. A gay, pink-tufted spread covered it. At one side was a small walnut stand with a shaded reading lamp. Hooked rugs, reflecting the cheery tone of the room in their varied colors, covered the dark, polished floor. Over in the far corner, where the roof sloped sharply, Janet had built a book case and stained it brown. It was filled with books, arranged in none too perfect order, showing the interest she had in them. But Janet had little time now to relax in the charm of her room. Parting the curtain of the wardrobe she found her tweed suit far to the back. Her boots were back there too, but they had been well oiled and were pliable. From a walnut chest of drawers which stood beside the wardrobe Janet drew woolen socks for it was an 18-mile ride to Youde's and they probably wouldn't be home until late. Janet dressed sensibly, woolen hose, heavy tweed skirt, a blue, shaggy wool sweater and her tweed coat. The crimson beret would be warm enough. She glanced at the clock. She had spent more time than she had anticipated, it was after 4:30 and Whet's drug store where they were to meet the bus was a good six blocks away. Janet hurried downstairs. "I've a cup of tea and some cookies all ready," her mother called. It would be after six o'clock before they ate and Janet drank the tea with relish. The cookies, crisp and filled with raisins, were delicious and she put several in the pockets of her coat. "I put your old fur coat in the hall," said Mrs. Hardy. "Your scarf's there, too." "Thanks mother. I'm certainly going to be too warm." Her mother went to the window. It was nearly dark and the snow still swirled down in dry, feathery clouds. "I almost wish you weren't going," she said, "but there doesn't seem to be any wind." "Oh, we'll be all right, mother. The bus is large and if the weather should get bad we could stay at Youde's until it clears. Remember Miss Bruder is chaperon and she's extremely sensible." "She needs to be with your crowd on her hands," smiled her mother, following Janet into the hall. Janet slipped into her old coat. It wasn't much to look at but it was warm and serviceable, one of those bunglesome coonskins that were so popular with college students at one time. She twisted her scarf around her neck, gave her mother a quick hug and kiss, and strode out of the house. Janet kicked along through the dry snow, walking rapidly until she reached Helen Thorne's home. There were no lights in the southeast room and Janet knew that Helen must be dressed for that was Helen's room. She whistled sharply, a long and a short, that penetrated the quick of the twilight. The porch light flashed on and Helen, sticking her head out, yelled, "I'm coming." Helen hurried down the walk, wriggling into a suede jacket. "Think that will be warm enough?" asked Janet, who felt very much bundled up in her coonskin. "I've got my corduroy jacket underneath and a sweater under that. I'm practically sealed up against the cold, but I'll run back and get my old coonskin." They swung along rapidly toward Whet's scuffing through the dry snow. "I like this," said Helen, breathing deeply. "The snow's grand and it isn't too cold. Wonder if they'll have any heat at Youde's?" "Oh, the dining room will be warm, but there's only a fireplace out in the room where we skate. Wraps will probably feel good there until we get well warmed up from skating." Out of the haze ahead emerged the blob of light that marked the neighborhood drug store. As they approached they could see two or three standing near the front door of the store. Ed Rickey, captain of the football team, jerked open the door. "Greetings, wanderers of the storm. Enter and be of good cheer." They stamped the snow off their boots and stepped inside. Cora Dean and Margie Blake were there. Boon companions, they were seldom apart. "Hello," said Margie, but there was no warmth in the greeting. "Hello," replied Janet. "You must think you're going to the north pole," put in Cora, as she looked Janet and Helen over coolly. "Well, not quite that far, but we believe in being sensible and warm," replied Helen, and Cora's face flamed, for both she and Margie, always trying to make an impression, were dressed in fashionable riding breeches of serge. They were pleasing to look at, but hardly the thing for comfort on a night when the temperature might drop almost to zero. Instead of coats they wore zipper sweaters of angora wool. Their boots were fashionable, but light, and would be of little use in withstanding any severe cold. "Here comes the bus," said Ed Rickey, who was bundled up in nondescript clothes. "All out that's going to Youde's," he bellowed, imitating a train caller. The bus ground to a stop in front of the store and the girls followed Ed across the curb. Jim Barron opened the door. The windows of the bus were heavily frosted for a heater was going full blast but the driver, a middle aged man, had a windshield wiper cutting a swath through the frost that formed on the glass in front of him. Miss Bruder spoke as they came in. "Everyone's here," announced Jim. "Find your seats. Next stop at Youde's." There was plenty of room in the bus for the vehicle had a capacity of thirty and there were only eighteen in addition to the driver. Most of them found seats well to the fore where they could feel the blast of warm air from the heater. Clarion was a sprawling city of 19,000, but in less than ten minutes they had left the street lights behind and were rolling along a smoothly paved highway. It was impossible to see out for the windows were frosted solid, but it was a merry crowd nevertheless. Ed Rickey, who had a fine bass voice, started in with a school song and the others soon joined him. Six miles outside Clarion they turned off the main road and swung over toward the hills which flanked the Wapsie river for it was along the banks of the Wapsie that Youde's Inn was located. Their progress was slowed here for the road had not been cleared by a snowplow. But the snow was less than five inches deep and the powerful bus forged ahead steadily. Almost before they knew it they were over the last hill and dropping down into the river valley. As the bus turned into the inn, floodlights in the yard were snapped on. A dog, barking eagerly, leaped forward to greet them. Ed and Jim were out of the bus first, assisting the others down. With Miss Bruder in the lead, they trooped toward the rambling, one story inn. Eli Youde, a coonskin cap on his head, was at the door. Behind him stood his wife, a buxom, motherly soul of forty-five. "Supper's on the table now," said Mrs. Youde as she greeted them. "The girls can take off their things in the room at the right; the boys go to the left." There were nine boys and eight girls in the honors English class, but with Miss Bruder it made an even number and she was so young and full of fun that she always seemed like one of them. Cora and Margie stopped before an old fashioned dresser to powder their noses and pat their hair into shape, but at a skating party these things were irrelevant to Janet and Helen and they hastened out to join the group in the dining room. One long table had been set. There were no place cards and the first to arrive took the choice seats, which were near a glowing soft-coal burner. Mrs. Youde, assisted by her husband, brought in steaming bowls of oyster stew. Three large bowls of crisp, white crackers were on the table, but huge inroads in them were soon made. Conversation died away as the stew was ladled down hungry throats. Before the bowls of stew had vanished, Mrs. Youde brought in two heaping platters of thick sandwiches. Janet found at least three varieties and was afraid to ask Helen how many she discovered. "This is ruining my weight, but I'm having a fine time," said Janet between bites and Helen nodded. After the sandwiches came pumpkin pie, great thick wedges of it with a mound of whipped cream on top and a slab of yellow cheese at one side. Ed Rickey yelled for help and when no one volunteered to jounce him up and down to make room for the pie, he managed to get to his feet and trot around the table several times. "I'm never going to be able to bend down and put on a skate," groaned Jim Barron, who had begged a second piece of pie and was now looking ruefully at the last crisp crust. He wanted it, but he didn't quite dare and with a sheepish look he pushed the plate away from him. "Perhaps we'd better sit around a few minutes before we start skating," suggested Miss Bruder. The suggestion was welcomed and while Mr. Youde carried armfuls of woods into the skating rink to fill the fireplace they told stories around the roaring fire in the heater. "I feel better," announced Jim a few minutes later. "In fact, I'll be courteous enough to help any of you weak damsels get your skates on. Let's go." With Jim in the lead, they trooped into the skating rink. The fireplace, along one wall and halfway down the rink, was roaring lustily as Mr. Youde piled it with fresh fuel. The skates were in boxes, numbered for size, and ranged in rows along the walls. Jim, Ed and one of the other boys did the fitting while the girls sat on a long bench. "Here's a pair that ought to be long enough for you," grinned Jim as he placed a skate under Janet's right foot. "Oh, I don't know that I'm such a clodhopper," smiled Janet. "Anyway, I'll bet I can beat you around the rink the first time." "It's a go," replied Jim, fastening the other skate. "Wait until I get the wheels under my hoofs." Janet stood up and tried the skates. Jim had found an excellent pair for her. They felt true and speedy. She tried a preliminary whirl. Her balance was good. Jim shot out onto the floor, tried to make a sharp turn, lost his balance, and sat down with a thud that shook the room. "First down," yelled Ed Rickey, who hastened to Jim's aid and entangled himself over Jim's outstretched legs. Ed also went down and shouts of merriment echoed through the room. "Ready Jim?" asked Janet when the husky senior was back on his feet. "Just as ready now as later," he replied and they shot away, Janet's feet moving swiftly as she got up speed. Jim had the longer legs, the more powerful strokes, but Janet was fast and light. That might overcome the advantage of her heavier rival. "Go on, Janet, go on!" she heard Helen shouting as they took the first turn. Jim was still ahead, but he was going too fast for a safe turn and he skidded sharply and lost speed at the next turn while Janet, her feet a twinkle of motion, shot ahead. Jim yelled in protest, but Janet only went the faster and flashed by the finish at least two yards ahead of the puffing Jim. From then on the rink buzzed with the roll of the skates as in couples and singly they sped around the room. Ed Rickey was a wizard on skates and after the first rush of skating, when some of them were content to sit on the benches near the fireplace, he gave a demonstration of fancy skating. Janet had never imagined Ed had that grace and sense of rhythm but the big fellow was remarkably light on his feet. Then they were back on the floor again, this time in a series of races Jim Barron had planned, some of them rolling peanuts the length of the rink and back and others skating around backwards in tandem races. In spite of the roaring fire, the room was cold and Janet felt the chill creep through her bones. She stopped skating and edged over close to the fireplace just as the bus driver came in and spoke to Eli Youde. The innkeeper departed at once with the driver and Janet heard the bang of an outer door as though it had been caught by the wind and closed violently. But there had been no wind when they came down into the valley to the inn. If the wind had come up, the snow might drift badly. She put that thought out of her mind, and rejoined the skaters. It was less than five minutes later when the innkeeper and the bus driver returned, striding down the center of the rink. Mr. Youde held up one hand and the skaters gathered around him. "Wind's coming up and the snow's starting to drift. May be bad in another hour or two. If you want to get home before midnight you'd better start now for it will be slow going up in the hills." "We'll start at once," decided Miss Bruder. "Get your wraps, everybody." Janet, some unknown fear tugging at her heart, hung back and spoke to Mr. Youde. "Is it perfectly safe to start the trip back?" she asked. "I guess so. That's a powerful bus. But you'd better start now before the wind gets bad. This snow is going to drift like fury before morning. I expect we'll be blockaded for a couple of days." Janet rejoined the girls in the room where they had left their coats. A horn sounded outside and they hastened to don their wraps. The floodlights in the yard flashed on and the group, bidding the Youdes cheery goodnights, hastened out to the bus. _Chapter IV_ LITTLE DEER VALLEY In spite of her warm clothing, Janet could feel the sting of the night air. It was much colder than when they had arrived. The snow seemed to be less, but the wind was shipping it in little eddies across the yard. With the heater running full blast, the bus was comfortable and they found seats well up toward the front. Miss Bruder counted them to make sure that everyone was on hand. Reassured, she told the driver to start the return trip. The windows were heavily frosted and it was like being in a sealed room, the only peephole being the small frame of glass which the windshield wiper kept clear. "What time is it?" Janet asked Helen, who had a wrist watch. "Nine forty-five. We're starting home early." Janet nodded, but she was glad they had made the start. It wouldn't have been pleasant staying at Youde's if they had been snowed in for the lonely inn had few comforts. The powerful engine of the bus labored as the big machine topped a grade out of the valley and they swung down into another. For five or six miles it would be one hill after another and Janet wondered if the snow was drifting down in the valleys. The road was little used and if the wind increased, it might make travel exceedingly difficult. But she dismissed that thought from her mind for the bus had heavy chains on the double wheels at the rear. The spontaneity which had marked their trip out was missing and conversation soon died away. Everyone was tired and willing to snuggle down into their coats. Janet must have been dozing for the heavy roar of the bus motor awoke her with a start. They were backing up. Then they stopped and the driver shifted gears. The bus leaped ahead, the throttle on full and the exhaust barking in the crisp air. Gradually their forward motion ceased and the wheels ground into the snow. Without a word the bus driver shifted instantly into reverse and they lurched backward. The driver stopped the bus, set the emergency brake, and dodged out into the night. "What's the matter?" asked Helen, who was almost hidden in her fur coat and deliciously sleepy. "I think we've hit a drift," replied Janet. "We ought to be almost home, though. It seems like we've been traveling for ages." "I expect we are," but Janet didn't feel the optimism that she meant her words to convey. If the wind had increased they might find themselves in a serious situation. The bus driver opened the door and stuck his head in. "One of you fellows come out and give me a hand with the shovels." Jim Barron, nearest the door, responded with Ed Rickey at his heels. After several minutes the bus driver came back inside and slowed the motor down to idling speed and the wave of heat from the heater diminished noticeably. With the motor barely turning over, outside noises were audible and Janet could hear the rush of the wind. Particles of the fine, dry snow were being driven against the window beside her. It was at least fifteen minutes later when Jim, Ed and the driver returned, red-faced and breathless from their exertions. The boys dropped into the front seats while the driver opened the throttle and sent the big machine lumbering ahead. The bus plunged into the drift, the chains on the rear wheels biting deep into the snow. Once they swung sharply and Janet gasped, but they swung back and with the engine taxed to the limit finally pulled through the drift. Janet saw Jim look around and she thought she detected grave concern in his eyes. Then he turned away and she was too far away to speak to him without alarming the others. The bus labored up a long grade, breasted the top of the hill, and then started down. It would be in the valley that trouble would come, for the snow would be heavily drifted. The big machine rocked down the slope, jolting its occupants around and bruising one or two of them. Janet heard Miss Bruder cry out sharply and turned around, but the teacher motioned that she was all right. Then the speed of the bus slackened, the wheels spun futilely, and their forward motion ceased. Almost instantly they were in reverse, but the bus slipped to one side and in spite of the full power of the motor, the wheels churned through the dry snow. The driver eased up on the throttle, looked significantly at Jim and Ed, and with them at his heels plunged into the storm again. Fortunately, he had tied several shovels to the bus before leaving Youde's and they were not without implements to dig themselves out. Janet could hear them working, first at the front and then at the rear and Helen, now thoroughly wide awake, looked at her in alarm. "It's getting colder in here," she said. "The engine's barely turning over; there isn't much heat coming out." "I know, but I mean the temperature outside must be dropping rapidly, and listen to the wind." But Janet preferred not to listen to the wind; it was too mournful, too nerve-wracking. What it whispered alarmed her for they were still some miles from the main road and there were few if any farms near. The bus driver returned and motioned to the other boys. "Give us a hand. We don't want to stay here a minute longer than necessary." The rest of the boys piled out of the bus, leaving the girls and Miss Bruder alone. "I'm nearly frozen," complained Margie Blake. "At least we might have obtained a good bus driver." "I don't think it's the driver's fault," interposed Janet. "We stayed too long at Youde's." "Then he should have told us the storm was getting worse. My folks will be worried half to death if we are hung up here all night." Janet admitted to herself that they would all have cause to worry if they had to stay in the bus all night, for she doubted if the supply of fuel would be sufficient to keep the engine going to operate the heater for that length of time and she dreaded to think of how cold it might get if the heater was off. Between the gusts of wind that swept around the bus they could hear the steady swing of the shovels biting into the snow. It was eleven o'clock when the driver came inside. His face was almost white from the cold and he beat his hands together as he took the wheel and eased in the clutch. With the motor roaring heavily Janet felt the power being applied to the wheels ever so gradually to keep them from slipping. The bus seemed cemented into the snow, but motion finally became evident. The wheels churned and they moved backward. Someone outside was shouting, but the words were unintelligible to all except the driver. He stopped while one of the boys scraped the frost off the window outside for the windshield wiper had frozen. Then, barely creeping ahead and with the bus in low gear, they moved through the snow, shouted commands keeping the driver in the right path. At last they were through the drift and the boys piled back into the bus, pounding each other on the back and clapping their hands to bring back the circulation. Miss Bruder called Jim Barron back. "Just how serious is this, Jim?" she asked. "Pretty bad. We're three miles from the main road and there isn't a farm within two miles. Only thing we can do is to keep going ahead and try to shovel through." "How about Little Deer valley?" "That's what we're worrying about. The wind gets a clean sweep there and I'm afraid we may not get through." "Can we turn back and stay at Youde's?" "Some of the road behind us would be as badly drifted as Little Deer valley," replied Jim. "I guess the only thing is to grind ahead and trust that the gas holds out." For a time they made steady progress, the bus rumbling along smoothly and the heater throwing out a steady blast of warm, dank air. Then they rolled down a gentle slope and onto the flat of Little Deer valley, which was more than half a mile wide. The driver stopped and went out to wade through the drifts. He came back to report that they might make it although in places the drifts were nearly up to the tops of the fence posts. "It's going to mean plenty of shoveling," he warned them. "We've got to go on," said Miss Bruder. "If we get stuck at least we're that much closer to the road. Perhaps we could walk to the main highway." Janet saw Jim glance sharply at Miss Bruder. Perhaps she didn't realize the seriousness of their situation, or perhaps she was masking her thoughts with those words. The gears ground again, the motor took up its burden, and they lurched ahead, churning through the deepening snow. The air was colder now. There was no warmth from the heater. Something had gone wrong with the motor or a pipe had frozen. No matter then. Getting through the drifts was uppermost in their minds. Gradually the straining progress of the bus slowed, finally stopped, the gears clashed, and they lurched backward several hundred feet. Then they plunged ahead again, burrowing deeper into the snow. "Everybody out to shovel," said the driver, snapping off the engine to save fuel. The boys hurried out into the cold and the girls huddled closer to each other. Margie and Cora, thinly clad for such a night, beat their arms almost steadily and stamped their feet in rhythmic cadence. Janet and Helen, heavily clothed, were still warm although the cold crept through their gloves to some extent. "I wonder how cold it is?" asked Helen. "I haven't any idea, but it feels like it was almost zero. Let's not think about it." "Try not to think about it," retorted Helen, and Janet admitted that her companion was right. There was nothing to think about except the cold and the snow. Of course there was the class play, but marooned in the middle of Little Deer valley with a howling blizzard raging was no time to think of class plays. The driver came back and stepped on the starter. The motor was slow in turning over. It must be bitterly cold, thought Janet. Finally the engine started and they plowed ahead a few feet, then finally churned to a stop. Outside the shovels clanged against the steel sides of the bus as the boys dug into the snow again. It was chilling, numbing work out there and Jim Barron tumbled through the door to stand up in front and beat his arms steadily. When he went out, Ed Rickey came in and the boys alternated. Margie whimpered in the cold and Janet felt sorry for her. "My coat's large. I'll come up and sit with you and Cora can come back here with Helen," said Janet. The other girls, thoroughly chilled, welcomed the change and Janet unbuttoned the voluminous coonskin and shared it with Margie, Helen doing likewise for Cora. Janet could feel Margie trembling as she pressed close to her. After a time the driver returned and started the motor again. They moved forward slowly, creeping along the trail the boys had opened with the shovels. Finally they rocked to a stop and the driver turned toward Miss Bruder. "It's no use. The drifts are three feet high and getting worse every minute." _Chapter V_ THE WHITE MENACE Miss Bruder looked at the girls, huddled together on the seats, desperately trying to keep warm. Outside the boys were bravely attempting to clear a path, but it was hopeless. "Perhaps we'd better get out and try to reach the main road on foot," she said. "I wouldn't advise that," replied the driver. "Some of the girls couldn't make it through the drifts. It must be well below zero now and the snow's still coming down bad." Just then Jim and Ed led the boys back into the bus, closing the door carefully after them. They were covered with fine snow and frost from their own breath. "I'm going to try and break through to the road," said Jim. "The rest of you stay here and try to keep warm. Whatever you do, don't leave the bus." "If anyone is going to try to make it to the paved highway, I'm going," spoke up the driver. "I've been over this road a number of times. I'll follow the fence line and get to a farm somehow." In spite of the protests of the boys, the driver remained firm, insisting that he, and he alone, could make the trip. "Keep the door shut and don't run the motor. The heater's out of order now and if you run the motor, carbon monoxide fumes may creep in. They're deadly." But that was an unnecessary warning for all of the boys knew the danger of the motor fumes in a closed compartment. Bundling himself up well, the driver plunged into the storm and Miss Bruder and her honors English class were left alone in the middle of Little Deer valley with the worst storm of the winter raging around their marooned bus. Jim turned off the headlights, leaving only the red and green warning lights atop the bus on. He snapped the switches for the interior lights until only one was left aglow for there was no use to waste the precious supply of electricity in the storage battery. If anything the whine of the wind was louder and it was exceedingly lonely out there despite the presence of the others. There was something about it that made Janet feel as though she were a hundred miles from civilization. She had not dreamed it would be possible to have such a sense of loneliness and yet be in a group of schoolmates. Jim Barron and Ed Rickey kept on the move, talking with some of the boys or attempting to cheer up the girls. "Better get up every few minutes and swing your arms and stamp your feet," advised Ed. "That'll keep the circulation going; otherwise you may suffer frostbite." Helen squinted her eyes and looked at her watch in the dim light shed by the single bulb. It was just after midnight. "Wonder if we'll be home by morning," she asked, turning back to Janet. "Let's hope so, though I'm not in the least bit hungry after the big meal we had at Youde's." "That seems ages away," replied Helen. "I'd almost forgotten the skating party." Margie, who had taken shelter under Janet's coat, spoke up. "It's all the bus driver's fault. We never should have left Youde's." "But none of us wanted to spend the night there," said Janet. "Of course we didn't dream the snow would have drifted this much." "The driver should have known," insisted Margie, and Janet thought her more than a little unreasonable, but then Margie was probably thoroughly chilled and likely to disagree with everything and everyone. The minutes passed slowly, dragging as Janet had never known they could. The cold increased in intensity and some of the other girls, not as warmly dressed as Janet and Helen, began to complain. "My feet are getting numb," said Bernice Grogan, a slip of a little black-haired Irish girl. "Better keep them moving," said Ed Rickey. "Here, I'll move them for you until the circulation starts back." Ed knelt down on the floor and took Bernice's boots in his hands, massaging her feet vigorously. Soon Bernice began to cry. "It's the pain. They hurt terribly." "Just the circulation coming back," said Ed, but Janet knew from the lines on his forehead that Ed was worried. "If any of the rest of you feel numb, just call out. We've got to keep moving or some of us may suffer some frozen parts before morning," he warned. Bernice, in spite of her efforts, couldn't keep the tears back, but they froze on her cheeks, so bitter was the cold. Jim Barron opened the door, and a rush of cutting air swept in. Then he was gone into the night and Janet could hear him wielding the shovel outside. It was five or six minutes before Jim returned and he looked utterly exhausted. "I've never seen such a night," he mumbled. "I'm afraid the bus driver didn't get very far." "Then we'd better start out after him," said Ed, getting to his feet. But Jim's broad shoulders barred the door. "We're going to stay right here. You can't even find the fences now. It would be suicide to start in the dark. The only thing we can do is keep as warm as possible inside the bus. I started throwing snow up around the windows. Some of you fellows give me a hand. We'll bank the bus in snow clear to the top and that will keep out some of this bitter wind." "But if you cover the bus with snow, they'll never find us when they come hunting us," protested Cora. "Just never mind about that," retorted Jim. "The only thing I'm worrying about now is keeping us from freezing to death." Jim's words shocked the girls into silence. _Chapter VI_ DESPERATE HOURS Freezing to death! The phrase was terrible in its import, yet the danger was very near and very deadly, for there was slight chance that the bus driver had gotten through to give a warning of their predicament. Even if he had Janet wondered if any searching party could brave the rigors of the night. Outside the boys worked steadily, coming inside in shifts, and then going back. They could hear the snow thud against the side of the bus as it was piled higher and higher and the sound of the wind gradually faded as the wall of snow protecting them from it thickened. The light from the single bulb was ghostly now. The battery seemed to be weakening. Helen looked at her watch. It was just one o'clock when the boys came in, beating their hands and knocking the frost from their breath off their coats. Jim was the last one in and he closed the door carefully after him. Bernice was crying again and Ed, though half frozen himself, bent down and massaged her feet. Miss Bruder was white and shaken for it was more than she could cope with and she turned to Ed and Jim to pull them through the emergency. While Ed worked with Bernice's feet, Jim spoke to the group. "We might as well face this thing frankly," he said. "We're in an awful jam. It must be fifteen or twenty below right now. The snow has stopped, but the wind is increasing in strength and the snow is drifting badly. It may be hours, perhaps a day, before we're discovered." He paused and watched the conflicting emotions on their faces, then plunged on. "We've banked the bus with snow to keep out the worst of the wind, but it's going to be terribly cold just the same. We've got to keep moving, keep up our spirits. If we don't----" But Jim didn't finish his sentence. There was no need for they all knew what would happen once they became groggy and sleepy. "I'm going to start with a count and I want all of you to beat your feet in time with me. That'll jar your whole body and warm you up a little." Jim started counting and soon the whole group was stamping their feet methodically. Even Janet had not realized how cold she was. Her feet had felt a little numb, but under the steady pounding against the floor they started to tingle, then burn with an intensity that brought tears to her eyes where they froze on her lashes. "I'm nearly frozen," chattered Margie, huddling closer to Janet. "If it wasn't for your coat I'd be like an icicle by this time." They kept up the motion with their feet for at least five minutes, and Jim called a halt then. "Everyone feel a little warmer?" he asked. "My hands are still cold," said one of the girls, but Janet was too stiff to turn around and see who was speaking. "Then here's an arm drill for everyone," said Jim, starting to swing his arms in cadence. When that exercise was completed, most of them could feel their bodies aglow as the blood raced through their veins. Ed started to tell funny stories and though he did his best, their own situation was so tragic that nothing appeared humorous. But he kept them interested, which was the main thing. Helen was the first to break the now monotonous flow of Ed's words. "Stop, Ed," she said, her voice low and tense. "Shake Miss Bruder, quick!" Ed turned suddenly to the teacher, who had been sitting back of him. Her head had fallen forward on her chest and her arms hung limp. The husky senior picked her up and brought her back under the light, the rest crowding around him. Then Janet took charge. Miss Bruder's eyes were closed, but she was breathing slowly. "I believe she's half frozen. She was sitting where a constant knife of air was coming in around the door," whispered Jim. "Get busy and massage her." Janet, with Helen helping her, stripped off Miss Bruder's thin gloves. Her hands were pitifully white. Ed scooped up a handful of snow where it had sifted in around the door and used it to rub Miss Bruder's hands while Janet and Helen massaged the upper part of her body and her face. It was five minutes before the teacher responded to their frantic efforts. Then her eyes opened and she tried to smile. "I must have dozed for a moment," she whispered. "Don't talk," said Helen. "Rest now." "Is everyone all right?" insisted the teacher. "Everybody's here," replied Jim, who was keeping a close eye on Bernice, who seemed the most susceptible to the cold. Ed pulled Janet to the rear of the bus. "This thing is getting serious," he whispered. "Some of the girls won't be able to stand it until morning unless we're able to keep them warmer. Jim and I have sheepskins. We'll put them down on the floor and you girls get down and lie on them. Huddle together and cover up with your own coats. Your body heat should keep you warm and we'll be moving around and talking to you so none of you will get too drowsy from the cold." "But you can't do that. You and Jim will freeze," protested Janet. "Freeze? I guess not. We're too tough for that. Besides, I've got all kinds of clothes on under this sheepskin." Janet finally agreed to the plan and Ed explained it briefly. Miss Bruder hesitated, but the others overruled her. Jim and Ed placed their heavy canvas, sheep-lined coats on the floor and the girls laid down on them like ten pins, huddling together and putting their own coats over them. "Get just as close as you can so you'll keep each other warm," counseled Jim, who, minus his heavy coat, was busy swinging his arms and legs. In less than five minutes the girls were ready to admit that the plan was an excellent one, for they were quite comfortable under the mound of coats and Janet made them keep up a constant flow of conversation, calling to each girl every few minutes. Up in the front of the bus they could hear the boys moving steadily and stamping their feet. How long they had been under the pile of coats Janet couldn't guess, but suddenly there was a wild pounding on the door of the bus. She managed to get her head out from under the coats in time to see Jim open the door. "Everyone safe?" cried someone outside. "We're all right," replied Jim and then Janet saw her father looking down at the huddled group of girls on the floor of the bus. His face was covered with frost, but he brushed past the boys and knelt beside her. "All right, honey?" he asked. "A little cold," Janet managed to smile. "How did you get here?" "Never mind that. The first thing is to get out of here and where you'll be safe and warm." Other men poured into the bus. Janet recognized some of them. Ed's father was there. So was Jim's, Cora's and Margie's. Someone had a big bottle of hot coffee and cardboard cups. The steaming hot liquid, bitter without sugar or cream, was passed around. Janet drank her cup eagerly and the hot beverage warmed her chilled body. Extra coats and mufflers had been brought by the rescue party. "Get as warm as you can. It's going to be a cold ride to the paved road," advised her father. They were soon ready and once more the door of the bus was opened. Outside a powerful searchlight glowed and as they neared it Janet saw a large caterpillar tractor. Behind this was a hayrack, mounted on runners and well filled with hay. "Everybody into the rack. Burrow down deep so you'll keep warm." Janet's father counted them as they got into the rack, yelled to the operator of the tractor to start, and then piled into the rack himself. With a series of sharp reports from its exhaust, the lumbering tractor got into motion, jerking the rack and its precious load behind it. _Chapter VII_ SANCTUARY AT HOME It was nearly an hour later when the tractor breasted the last grade and rolled down to the paved road where a dozen cars, all of them warmly heated and well lighted, were strung along the road. Anxious fathers and mothers were on hand, including Janet's mother and Mrs. Thorne and they welcomed their thoroughly chilled daughters to their bosoms. Janet's father shepherded them into their own sedan where despite the sub-zero cold the heater had kept the car comfortable. Then they started the final lap of their eventful trip from Youde's home. Helen and Janet sank back on the cushions of the capacious rear seat, thoroughly worn out by their trying experience. Janet's father, one of the most prominent attorneys in Clarion, slipped in behind the wheel, slamming the car door and shutting out the biting blast of air. There were other cars ahead of them and they made no attempt at high speed as they rolled back into the city. "How did you ever find us, Dad?" asked Janet. "You can thank the bus driver for that. Somehow he got through to a farmhouse. He was almost frozen, but he managed to tell them the story and they phoned word in to us." "Who thought of the tractor and hayrack?" asked Helen, warm once more. "It was Hugh Grogan, Bernice's father. He sells the caterpillars. Good thing he did or we'd never have gotten through." "It was a good thing for Bernice, too. She was about all in," said Janet. When they reached the Hardy home, Janet's mother insisted that Helen and Mrs. Thorne come in and have a hot lunch before going to their own home. While the girls took off their coats and Mr. Hardy put the car into the garage, Mrs. Hardy bustled out into the kitchen where she had left a kettle of water simmering on the stove. Lunch was ready in short order, tea, peanut butter sandwiches, cookies and a large bowl of fruit. Janet and Helen had ravenous appetites and the sandwiches disappeared as though by magic. "How cold is it, Dad?" asked Janet. "Twenty-two below." "The wind was awful," said Helen, between bites at a sandwich. "I know. It was pretty fierce going across country in the hayrack. The boys must have used their heads for someone banked the bus with snow." "That was Jim Barron's idea. He and Ed Rickey kept us moving and talking most of the time, but we forgot Miss Bruder. She was in a draft and almost froze to death without saying a word to anyone." "That scared us half to death," put in Helen, "but the boys massaged her hands with snow and Janet and I massaged the upper part of her body until we could get the circulation going again. I think she'll be all right, but probably pretty sensitive to cold for the rest of the winter." "But the winter's almost over. Here it's late March. Who'd ever have thought we'd have a storm like this," said Janet. "If I had, I can assure you that you'd never have made the trip to Youde's tonight," promised her father. "It was one of those freak storms that sometimes sweep down from the Arctic circle and fool even the weather men. By tomorrow the temperature will shoot up and the snow will melt so fast we'll probably have a flood." The girls finished every sandwich on the plate and drank two cups of tea apiece. It was five o'clock when they left the table. Mrs. Thorne and Helen started to put on their coats, but Janet's mother objected. "Your house will be cold and our guest room upstairs is all made up. Janet and I will lend you whatever you need. We'll all get to bed now." Janet got warm pajamas for Helen and then went to her own room. Warm and inviting in the soft rays of the rose-shaded lamp over her dressing table, it was a sanctuary after the exciting events of the night. A wave of drowsiness assailed Janet, and it was with difficulty that she unlaced and pulled off her boots. Somehow she managed to crawl into her pajamas and roll into bed, but she was asleep before she could remember to turn off the light. Her mother, looking in a few minutes later, pulled the blankets up around Janet's shoulders, opened the window just a crack to let in a whiff of fresh air, and turned off the light. Janet slept a heavy and dreamless sleep. When she awakened the sun was streaming in the windows and from the angle she could tell that it was late. But in spite of the knowledge that she would probably be extremely late in getting to school, Janet was too deliciously comfortable to move rapidly. After stretching leisurely, she got out of bed and closed the window. The radiator in her room was bubbling gently and she slipped into bed to wait until the room warmed up. Vivid thoughts of what had happened during the night rotated in her mind, the cold, the wind, the snow--the terror of waiting in Little Deer valley for the rescue, hoping but not knowing for sure that they would be reached in time to save them from the relentless cold. Someone opened Janet's door and peered in. It was Helen, who, on seeing that her friend was awake, bounced into the room. "You look pretty live and wide awake after last night," smiled Janet. "I'm not only that, I'm ravenously hungry," said Helen, "and if you had been out in the hall and caught a whiff of the breakfast your mother is preparing you would be too." "What time is it?" "Well, you can call it breakfast or lunch, depending on whether you've had breakfast. For me it's breakfast even though the clock says it's just a little after eleven." "You're seeing things," retorted Janet, throwing off the covers and hurrying toward her wardrobe. "I wouldn't be surprised if I am, but your mother says it is after eleven and I'll take her word for it. I'll run down and tell her you'll be along within the hour." "That isn't fair. You know it won't be more than five minutes. I always dress faster than you do." _Chapter VIII_ POSTPONED TRYOUTS Helen went down stairs and Janet hastened to the bathroom where she made a hasty toilet. Back in her room she fairly jumped into her clothes, gave her hair one final and hurried caress with the brush, and then went down stairs. Mrs. Thorne, who had breakfasted earlier with Janet's father and mother, had gone home, so Helen and Janet sat down to the breakfast Mrs. Hardy had prepared. There was grapefruit to start with, then oatmeal with dates in it, hot, well-buttered toast, strips of crisp bacon and large glasses of milk. "Feel all right this morning, Janet?" her mother asked, looking a little anxiously at her vibrant and energetic daughter. "Fine, mother. I slept very soundly. Last night seems almost like a nightmare." "It was a nightmare," said her mother, sitting down and picking up a piece of toast to munch while the girls ate their breakfast. "I've never seen your father so worried. He was almost frantic until Hugh Grogan suggested they try to get through with one of his big tractors. They held a council of war right here in the front room and I've never seen as many nervous and excited men in my life. Talk about women getting upset, why they were worse than we ever think of being." She smiled a little. She could now, but last night it had all been a very grim and very near tragedy. "You'll have to write an excuse for me," said Janet between munches on a crisp slice of bacon. "Not this time. I phoned the superintendent and he said that everyone in honors English was excused from school today." "Wonder if we'll have the tryouts for the class play this afternoon?" said Helen, who until that moment had been devoting her full energies to the large bowl of oatmeal. "There's one way of finding out," replied Janet. "I'll phone the principal's office and see if it has been taken off the bulletin board." Janet went to the phone in the hall and called the schoolhouse. When she returned her face was aglow. "No school, no tryouts--what a day and what to do?" "You're sure about the tryouts?" Helen was insistent, for winning the leading part meant so much to her. "Sure as sure can be. They've been postponed until Saturday morning at 9:30 o'clock when they will be held in the assembly." "Then that will give me plenty of time to study my part thoroughly," said Helen. "But you know it now. Why you had it memorized, every word and phrase, yesterday afternoon," protested Janet. "I know I did yesterday, but last night scared it completely out of me. I can't even remember the opening lines." "Maybe it's a good thing. We'll both start over and this afternoon we can rehearse upstairs in my room." "Grand. I've got to go home and help mother for a while, but I'll be back by 2:30 o'clock and we'll start in." Breakfast over, Janet went to the door with Helen. The day was bright and almost unbelievably clear. The temperature was rising rapidly, the wind had gone down, and their experience of the night before seemed very far away. Rivulets of water were starting to run down the streets and before nightfall the gutters would be full of the melting snow and slush. Janet found a multitude of little things to do around home to help her mother and the first interruption came with the ringing of the telephone. Her mother answered, but then summoned Janet. "It's the Times," said Mrs. Hardy. Janet took the instrument and recognized the voice of the city editor of the local paper. "I need a good first person story of what took place inside the bus, Janet," said Pete Benda. "Can you come down to the office and write a yarn? You've had enough experience with your high school page to do the trick and do it well." "But it all seems so far away and kind of vague now," protested Janet. "Listen, Janet, I've got to have that story." Pete was cajoling now. "Haven't we done a lot of favors for your high school page?" "Yes, but--." "Then come down and write the story. I'll save a good spot on page one for it." Janet hung up the telephone, feeling a little weak and limp. Pete Benda was insistent and she would have to go through with it. "The Times wants me to come down and write a first person story of what happened last night," she explained to her mother. "I didn't want to, but Pete Benda, the city editor, just insisted. He's been so good about helping us out on the school page when we've been in jams that I couldn't say no." "Of course not, and you'll do a good piece of writing. No don't worry about it. Run along. I'll have a little lunch ready when you get back." Janet put on her coat, but paused at the door and called to her mother. "If Helen comes before I get back, tell her I'll be along soon." Janet enjoyed the walk to the Times office for the air was invigorating. The Times was housed in a narrow two-story building with its press in the basement. The news department was on the second floor with the city editor's desk in front of a large window where he could look the full length of the main business street of Clarion. Pete Benda, thin and too white-faced for his own good health, saw Janet come in. "Here's a desk and typewriter you can use," he said. "I'm counting on having that story in less than an hour. You'll have to come through, young lady." Janet flushed at Pete's appellation, for the city editor of the Times was only a little older than she. Oh well, perhaps Pete was twenty-two, but she could remember when he had been in high school, playing football, and one of the best ends in the state. Janet rolled some copy paper into the typewriter and looked rather blankly at the sheet. It was hard now to concentrate on the events which had been so tragically real the night before. If she could only get the first sentence to click the rest would come easily. She tried one phrase. That wouldn't do; not enough action in it. Ripping the sheet of paper from the typewriter, she inserted another and tried again. This was better. Perhaps it would do; at least she had started, and the words came now in a smooth flow for Janet could type rapidly, thanks to a commercial course in her junior year. Pete Benda, on his way to the composing room, looked over her shoulder and read the first paragraph but Janet, now engrossed in the story, hardly noticed him. Pursing his lips in a low whistle, a trick that he did when pleased, Pete went on about his work. Janet finished one page and then another. Even a third materialized under the steady tapping of her fingers on the keyboard. Then she was through. Three pages of copy, three pages of short, sharp sentences, of adjectives that caught and held the imagination, that gave a picture of the cold and the apprehension of those in the bus, of the relief, almost hysterical, when rescue came. Janet didn't read it over. It was the best she could do. If Pete wanted to change it that was all right with her. She put the three sheets of copy paper together and placed them on his desk. Then she slipped into her coat and went down stairs. She had finished the story well within the limit set by the city editor and she turned toward home and the rehearsal she and Helen had planned for the afternoon. _Chapter IX_ BIG NEWS Janet had gone less than half a block when she heard someone calling to her. Looking back she saw Pete Benda leaning from an upper window of the Times office. He was waving Janet's story in his hand. "Great story, Janet," he shouted. "I'll send you a box of candy. Thanks a lot." Janet smiled and waved at Pete. It was just like the impetuous city editor to lean out his window and shout his thoughts at the top of his voice to someone down the street. But she was glad to know that the story met Pete's approval. But as for the candy. Well Pete was always making promises like that. If he had kept them all he would have needed a private candy factory. Helen was waiting when Janet reached home and she waved a letter at her friend. "It's from Dad," she cried. "He says he's about through on the picture he's making at present and will be home without fail for my graduation. Wants me to send him the dates of the play, of the banquet and of everything. Also wants your Dad to make sure the fishing will be good and to line up a good plot where he can find plenty of worms." "That's splendid news. I'm so happy," said Janet, who knew how much Helen missed her father's companionship at times, for when he was in Clarion they were almost inseparable. But Janet realized that Mr. Thorne was exceedingly smart in keeping Helen in Clarion rather than taking her west with him to the movie city where she would be subject to all of the tensions and nervous activity there. Here in Clarion she was growing up in entirely normal surroundings where she would have a sane and sensible outlook on life and its values. "I phoned your Dad, and he says he'll have to start hunting good creeks just as soon as the snow's off." "That kind of puts Dad on the spot, for he's got to deliver on the worms and the fishing," smiled Janet. "Oh, well, Dad doesn't care so much about getting any fish. He just likes to get out and loaf on a sunny creek bank and either talk with your Dad or doze. He calls that a real holiday." Janet went upstairs and got the mimeographed sheets with the synopsis of the play and the part she was to try out for. After the drama of last night, that of "The Chinese Image" seemed shallow and forced. The rôle of Abbie Naughton, who was more than a little light-headed and fun loving until a crisis came along, was comparatively easy for it called for little actual acting ability and Janet was frank enough to admit that she was no actress. Helen, trying for the straight lead, carried by Gale Naughton, had always liked to think that she had real dramatic talent and Janet was willing to admit that her companion had more than average ability. At least Helen was pretty enough to carry the rôle off whether she had any dramatic ability or not. Coaching each other, they gave their own interpretations of the parts which they were trying for. An hour and then another slipped away. The brightness faded from the afternoon and Janet turned on a reading light. "I think we've done all we can for one day. If we keep on we'll go stale. Let's forget the tryouts for a while." "You can," retorted Helen, "but I've simply got to win that part. What would Dad think of me if I didn't?" "I don't believe he'd think any the less of you," smiled Janet, "but I'll admit it would be nice for you to win the leading rôle and I'll do everything I can to help you." "Of course, I know you will. It was awfully small of me to say that." The doorbell rang and Janet answered it. A boy handed her a package. "It's for Miss Hardy. She live here?" "I'm Janet Hardy." "Okay. I just wanted to be sure this was the right place." "This looks interesting," said Janet, returning to the living room with the large box. Her mother, who had heard the doorbell, joined them. Janet tore off the wrapping, opened the cardboard outer box, and pulled out a two pound box of assorted chocolates. On top of the box was a clipping torn from the front page of the Times. Janet stared hard at the clipping, hardly believing her eyes. There was her story with her name signed to it. "Why Janet, your name is on this front page story!" exclaimed her mother. "What's all the mystery?" demanded Helen, and Janet explained, rather quickly, about her summons to the Times office. "Pete Benda said he liked the story and was going to send me a box of candy, but I thought he was joking. You know he's always telling people he's going to send them candy." "This is no joke," said Helen as Janet opened the box and offered candy to her mother and to Helen. "In fact, I'd like a joke like this about once a week." "Yes, but I wouldn't like an experience like we had once a week," retorted Janet. Helen's mother phoned that they were having an early supper and Helen picked up the tryout sheets, put her coat over her shoulders, and started for home. "If I disappear, it's just that I've been swept away in the flood," she called as she hurried out. Janet looked after her. Helen wasn't far from wrong. With the rapidly rising temperature, the afternoon sun had covered the sidewalks and filled the street with rushing torrents of water. Another day and there would be no sign of the storm of the night before. Mrs. Hardy called and Janet went into the kitchen to help her mother with the preparations for the evening meal. "I heard you rehearsing this afternoon," said her mother, "and I wouldn't set my heart too much on winning one of those parts." "I won't," promised Janet. "Of course I'd like to be in the senior play, but I won't be heart-broken if I don't win a part." "Perhaps I was thinking more about Helen than you," confessed Mrs. Hardy. "She's so much in earnest that failure would upset her greatly." "I know it, but I can understand why Helen wants a part and I'm afraid I'd be just as intent if my father were the ace director for a great motion picture company. I suppose I'd think that I should have dramatic ability to be a success in his eyes." "That's just it," said Mrs. Hardy. "Helen doesn't need to get a part in the play. When he comes home, he likes nothing better than being with his wife and Helen. You know he never goes any place." "Except fishing with Dad." "Oh, pshaw. They don't fish. They dig a few worms and take their old fishpoles along some creek that never did have any fish. It just gets them outdoors and away from people who might want to bother Henry Thorne." "Well, no matter, Helen has set her heart on winning the leading rôle and I'm going to do everything in my power to help her along." _Chapter X_ VICTORY FOR HELEN The rest of the week slipped away quickly. The harrowing experience in Little Deer valley became a memory and the seniors concentrated upon winning rôles in the class play. By Saturday morning the snow had vanished, the temperature was above freezing and the grass was starting to turn green--such are the miracles of the early spring. Janet and Helen rehearsed their tryout parts so many times that Janet found herself mumbling her lines in her sleep. Most of the seniors assembled promptly at 9:30 o'clock that morning for the tryouts. A few of them, feeling that they had no chance, did not come, but Janet noticed that Margie and Cora were well to the front of the room where Miss Williams would be sure to see them. "I want you to do your best this morning for on your work now depends whether you will have a place in the play," she warned them, and Janet felt a little twinge. School was near an end and the senior play was her last chance. Of course it wasn't as important to her as it was to Helen, but it would be nice to have the part of Abbie, for Abbie was such a delightfully irresponsible character. Miss Williams called for tryouts for minor rôles first and Helen sent an anxious glance toward Janet and nodded toward the hall. They slipped out of the assembly quietly and Helen voiced her fears. "Perhaps I'd better try for one of these minor parts as well as for the lead. Then if I don't get to play Gale Naughton, I may win another rôle." "I wouldn't," counseled Janet. "Concentrate on the main part. I think you'll make it all right." "I wish I had your confidence." "I'm not confident about winning a part myself, but I'm sure you will," replied Janet. "Let's go back and watch the tryouts." "Perhaps I ought to go over my lines again?" "Nonsense. You can even speak them backwards. If you work on them any more you may do that, which would be fatal. Let's see the mistakes of the others and then we'll know we aren't the world's worst actresses." Miss Williams was conscientious. She wanted every boy and girl who felt he had a chance to have the utmost opportunity and she worked with them carefully. At noon she was fairly well down the cast, but the four major rôles remained, two for the boys and two for the girls, including the parts of Gale and Abbie Naughton which Helen and Janet sought. "We've been at this long enough," announced Miss Williams as the noon whistles sounded down town. "Everyone take a rest, have lunch, and be back here at one o'clock. Then we'll go on until we finish. For those who have been assigned parts, the first rehearsal will be Monday night at 7:15 o'clock. I'll expect you to have your first act lines memorized." The group broke up, some of them going home to have lunch and others stopping at the luncheonette of a nearby drug store. Janet and Helen were among this group, which included Cora and Margie. The latter, seated with two companions, appeared confident that they would win the leading rôles, but Janet overheard a spiteful remark by Cora. "Of course, I haven't the pull Helen has, for her father's a famous director," she said, and Janet saw Helen's face flush. "That's isn't fair," said Helen. "You know Dad wouldn't use any influence to get a part for me." "So does Cora. She's saying that just to be mean." When they reassembled it was a small group, Jim Barron, Ed Rickey and two other boys who were trying for the male leads, Cora, Margie, Helen, Janet and Miss Williams. The instructor worked with the boys first and it was evident that Jim and Ed were to have the major parts. In less than half an hour they were assigned, Ed getting the lead and Jim the second rôle. If Janet won the part of Abbie, Jim would be playing opposite her. That would be fun, for Jim was wholesome and pleasant. After the boys had departed, Miss Williams turned to the girls. "Now we're down to the two major parts, for the play hinges on the characters of Gale and Abbie." She looked at the four hopeful, anxious faces. "I want Cora and Margie first. Take your places and give me an interpretation of the action you think should go with the lines you have memorized." Cora, dark-eyed and confident, stepped to the platform. Margie, a wispy, blonde girl, followed. Both girls used excellent diction, spoke clearly and with feeling, but somehow Cora's work lacked a convincing touch. Perhaps she was trying too hard and Janet felt her spirits rising. Helen should walk away with the rôle unless she got scared when she stepped on the platform. But Janet was more than a little concerned about Margie. The blonde senior was doing an excellent job, putting just the right amount of enthusiasm into the rôle. There was nothing forced. Every word and gesture seemed spontaneous and lines that had sounded silly in their own rehearsals were very logical and convincing when they came tumbling from Margie's lips. Janet smiled grimly. Of course she wanted the part, but even more, she wanted Helen to win the rôle of Gale. Cora and Margie finished the part Miss Williams had assigned, and looked anxiously toward the dramatics teacher. "That was very nicely done," said Miss Williams. "Janet and Helen next and put plenty of feeling into your interpretations." From the platform Janet could look down on Cora and Margie. There was a thin sneer on Cora's lips and Janet felt Helen, standing close beside her, tremble. "Ready?" she asked. Helen nodded. Janet's lines opened their brief tryout rôles. She spoke them clearly, but somehow the spark needed to add vigor and brilliance was lacking. She was thinking too much about Helen. The lines and action snapped to Helen and she picked them up instantly. Janet thrilled. Helen had forgotten Cora and Margie. She had forgotten even Miss Williams. She was living her part. She was Gale Naughton, the dark, lovely heroine of "The Chinese Image." The lines came smoothly and without effort. Then they were through, a little breathless, their hearts beating rapidly. Janet was the first to turn toward Miss Williams and before the instructor spoke, she knew Helen had made a deep impression with her interpretation of Gale. "Splendid. I liked that very much," said Miss Williams, who was not given to compliments. "If you'll be good enough to wait a few minutes, I'll be back." "Will you announce the winners then?" asked Cora, her dark cheeks flushed with excitement and her brown eyes glowing. "Yes," promised Miss Williams, hurrying from the room. "Why do you suppose she left to make her tabulations?" asked Helen, her voice low. "Probably didn't want us to know just how she rated us. She's got a percentage system all her own she uses in casting parts. It won't be long now," said Janet. "The sooner the better. I'm all fluttery inside." "Maybe you think Cora and Margie aren't. They can't even sit still." Which was true. Cora and Margie were walking restlessly up and down the far side of the assembly, looking anxiously toward the double doorway through which Miss Williams would return. Five minutes slipped away. Then another five and it stretched out into fifteen minutes before the quick footsteps of the dramatics instructor could be heard in the hallway. Involuntarily Cora and Margie joined Janet and Helen at the front of the large assembly room. Miss Williams came in briskly, a slip of paper in her right hand, and Janet, who was nearest, saw two names written on the slip. "Sorry I kept you so long, but I'm trying to be very fair in making the final selections," explained Miss Williams. "Go on, go on," burst out Cora. "Who won?" Miss Williams frowned. "Well, I'm sorry, Cora." The dark-haired senior interrupted her sharply. "You mean I didn't win?" "I mean that Helen gave a more convincing interpretation of the part. She gets the leading rôle." Cora's eyes flashed. "I might have known that. Too bad I don't have a father with some influence." Cora picked up her coat. "Come on, Margie. We've just wasted our time." "I'd stay if I were you, Margie," said Miss Williams. "What I have to say should interest you." And in those words Janet knew the decision. Helen had the lead and Margie was to get the second rôle. She was out, but at least she could take it without creating a scene like Cora. _Chapter XI_ A FAMOUS DIRECTOR ARRIVES Miss Williams looked at the three girls remaining and she spoke slowly, choosing her words with care. "I regret that Cora took that attitude," she said, "for there was no influence used in my selection of Helen for the lead. She was much better in the tryout than Cora." Then the instructor turned to Margie. "You did a nice bit as Abbie," she went on, "and I want you to take that rôle. Janet was practically as good as you were on the lines, but you seem a little more like the character. You're thinner and you flutter around more than Janet, and Abbie is a very fluttery sort of a person." Margie grinned. "In other words, Abbie is a dizzy sort of a gal and I'm that type." "Call it that if you want to," smiled Miss Williams. "Do you want the part?" "And how!" "Very well. I will expect you and Helen to have your lines for the first act well in hand by Monday night." Miss Williams, followed by Margie, left the room and Helen turned to face Janet. "I'm sorry it turned out this way. I'd rather you had won a part." "I'm not," said Janet, and she said it honestly, for a part in the senior play had meant so much more to Helen. She knew she had done her best, but she had to admit that after all Margie was better suited to the rôle than she. The air softened. April came and went, and the senior play neared its final rehearsals. Miss Williams drove the cast without mercy for on the success of the play would depend her own opportunity for advancement. Helen, working every spare moment, became tired and irritable. "I'll be glad when it's all over," she said. "I never dreamed it would be so hard." "You'll be well repaid when the play is given," said Janet, who had been assigned to the stage crew. In this capacity she attended almost every rehearsal and she couldn't help watching Margie go through the lines of Abbie. It was a delightful part, easy to handle, and so breezy and irresponsible. Costuming took several nights, for Miss Williams was meticulous. Then came the dress rehearsals, the first on Monday night. The play would be given Friday. On the following week came the junior-senior banquet and then graduation and the end of school days. Janet, watching the play in rehearsal each night, came to know the lines of almost everyone in the cast for the lighting of the show was in her charge. It was up to her to get just the right amount of amber in the afternoon scene and just the right amount of blue to simulate moonlight for the evening scene from the rather antiquated banks of lights on each side of the stage. Brief letters and a telegram or two had come from Helen's father, assuring her that he would arrive in ample time for the presentation of "The Chinese Image." Janet's father had found a small plot at the rear of their own large lot which yielded an ample supply of worms at almost every spadeful and Indian creek, two miles north of Clarion, was said to abound with bullheads that spring. On Wednesday night, after a long and tiring rehearsal, Janet and Helen walked home through the soft moonlight of the late May evening. "I haven't heard from Dad today. He was going to wire what train he would arrive on. It looks like he won't be in until the morning of the play." "That will be plenty of time. He can stay on longer after the play's over," said Janet. "It won't be plenty of time if he has to do any more retakes on his last picture. His letters have sounded awfully tired." "Let's walk on down to Whet's for an ice cream soda. The walk will do both of us good and the soda will be refreshing," said Janet. Helen agreed and they walked leisurely, breathing deeply of the flower-scented air; for it was a perfect evening. From far away came the rumble of heavy trucks on a through street, but on their own there was an air of peace and contentment. "Dad will like this when he finally gets here. He always seems to throw off his cares when he's back home." "Which is why he anticipates coming home so much," added Janet. "But it can't go on this way forever. He needs mother and I'll be going away to school next fall." "I wouldn't worry about that until after graduation. There'll be plenty of time to discuss those matters then." Janet felt somewhat like a very fatherly old man giving advice to a very young girl and she smiled to herself. At the neighborhood drug store they dawdled over their sodas, thoroughly relaxing after the strenuous hours of rehearsal. On the way home they again walked leisurely, discussing little things about the play that appealed to them. Helen's mother, waiting on the porch, called to them the moment they came in sight. "Hurry up, Helen. I've a telegram from your father." Helen ran across the lawn with Janet close behind. "He's coming, isn't he, mother?" And to Janet there was something pitiful in Helen's extreme anxiety for she was so desperately intent upon having her father see her in the leading rôle in the class play. "He's coming tonight, dear. He wired saying that he would be on the transcontinental plane which stops at Rubio at midnight. Janet's father and mother are going to drive us over. You girls had better clean up a bit. We're leaving right away." "I'm so happy," said Helen. "I was afraid it was a message saying he wouldn't be able to come." Janet hurried on home. Her father had the large sedan out in the driveway and her mother was bustling about the kitchen, making stacks of thin sandwiches. "Why the sandwiches?" asked Janet. "I've never known the time when Henry Thorne wasn't hungry. He's been that way ever since he was a little boy and his wife is too excited to think about that. We'll have them all over for lunch after we get home." "But it will be late. Way after one o'clock and Helen ought to be in bed. She has been keeping terrific hours with the rehearsals." "It won't do her a bit of harm this time. Being with her father will do her more good than anything else. Wrap these sandwiches up and put them in the breadbox so they'll keep good and moist. Then slice some lemon for the ice tea and put the slices back in the ice box. We'll stop and get some ice cream on our way in to town." They hurried around the kitchen until Janet's mother noticed the disarray of her daughter. "For land's sake, Janet, you're a sight. Working with the scenery and lights again at school? Well, hurry upstairs and clean up. Then slip into that pale green print that makes your hair look golden. We'll be ready in five minutes." Janet forgot her fatigue and raced upstairs, splashed water on her flushed cheeks, followed that with a few hasty dabs of a powder puff to take the shine off her skin, and then went to her own room where she put on fresh, sheer hose and the green print that was so becoming. Her hair, with its natural curl, needed only a quick brushing to bring out the highlights. Down in the driveway her father pushed the horn button and her mother called. "We're ready, Janet." But so was Janet and she hastened downstairs and joined them. The sedan was one of those extra-broad stream-lined cars with room for three in the front seat. "You and Helen can sit up front with me while your mother and Mrs. Thorne are in the back seat," said her father. "Coming back we'll put the Thornes in the back where they can visit to their heart's content." The car rolled down the drive and her father turned and stopped the large, low machine in front of the Thorne home. Half a dozen lights were turned on downstairs and the house fairly glowed with light. Helen and her mother came down the walk, Helen in a pink, fluffy creation that set off her dark coloring to its best effect. "You're pretty enough to look like a would-be movie star trying to make an impression upon a famous director," whispered Janet. "Maybe I am," smiled Helen as she slipped into the front seat. "Everybody ready?" inquired Janet's father. "I don't want to get half way to Rubio and have one of you women remember that you've left something important at home." "You do the driving and we'll worry about what's been left at home," replied Mrs. Hardy with a chuckle. The big machine rolled away smoothly and when they turned onto the main state road to Rubio, John Hardy stepped on the accelerator and they fairly flew down the straight, white ribbon which unrolled before their blazing lights. The speedometer climbed steadily, fifty, sixty and then seventy miles an hour, and the needle hung there except when they swung around one of the broad, well-banked curves. Then it dropped to fifty. The rush of cool air was refreshing and Janet and Helen sank back in the broad, comfortable seat. When the lights of Rubio glowed ahead Helen spoke. "It hardly seems possible that Dad will be here in a few minutes. It's been months since I've seen him." "Then you'll enjoy seeing him all the more. What fun you're going to have the next few days." "I hope it will be several weeks for I think Dad needs a good rest. He's done three big pictures in the last year." They rolled through Rubio to the airport, which was just beyond the city limits. The clock over the hangar pointed to 11:50 and Janet's father guided the sedan to a stop in the parking area behind the steel fence. "I'll find out if the plane's on time," he said, and went over to the office. Janet thought she could hear the faint, faraway beat of an airplane, but the noise of another car turning into the parking space drowned it out. "Come on folks. The plane will be here in a minute," called Mr. Hardy. They hurried out of the car and followed John Hardy through the gate and onto the ramp. In the west were the red and green lights of an incoming plane. Suddenly the field burst into a flood of blue-white brilliance as a great searchlight came on. Like a ghost, the huge, twin-motored plane glided down its invisible path and settled easily onto a runway, little clouds of dust coming up from the crushed rock as the machine touched the ground. With its motors roaring a lusty song of power, the monoplane waddled toward the concrete ramp. The pilot swung it smartly about and the ground crew blocked the wheels and rushed the landing stage up to the cabin door as the pilot cut the motors. The propellers ceased whirling just as the stewardess opened the door. "There's Dad!" cried Helen and she ran toward the plane with Janet at her heels. _Chapter XII_ ON THE STAGE Henry Thorne was the first passenger to alight from the east-bound plane. Tall, well-built, with a close-clipped mustache and iron gray hair that curled a bit around his temples, he was a man's man. Helen threw her arms around her father and he gave her a tremendous hug. "Golly, I'm glad to see you, hon," he said. "Where's mother?" "She's coming. She couldn't run as fast as I," explained Helen, breathless with excitement. Mrs. Thorne, her face flushed with happiness over her husband's coming arrived and they embraced affectionately. Then Mr. Thorne saw John Hardy and Janet and her mother. "Say, this is great of you to come over. I feel like a visiting celebrity, or something." "You're very much a celebrity," smiled Janet. "Not to you," he replied. "Well, let's start home. I've only this light traveling bag." "Does that mean you won't be able to stay long?" asked Helen anxiously. "I should say it doesn't. I can live for six months out of a traveling bag. Oh, of course, I wouldn't look like Beau Brummell, but I'd be acceptable in average circles." The Thornes occupied the back seat and Janet and her mother sat in front. The big car purred smoothly and Janet's father sent it humming away on the trip back to Clarion. Janet got only snatches of the conversation that was going on in the rear seat. She was anxious to listen, but it wouldn't have been very polite to have done so obviously. Anyway, Helen would tell her most of the news the next day. From the few remarks she overheard, she realized that Henry Thorne was exceedingly happy to be home, and that the last year had been a strain even though all of his pictures had been money makers. The lights of Clarion were in sight when he leaned forward and spoke to Janet's father. "Get any worms located, John?" "Plenty of them and right in my own back yard. You can dig to your heart's content." "How about the fishing?" "I haven't tried it myself, but the boys say there are lots of bullheads in Indian creek. Remember it?" "I'll never forget the time we were hunting rabbits and walked across the ice of the creek. It wasn't frozen thick enough and we dropped through into water waist deep. Going home was the longest, coldest walk I've ever taken." "It wasn't very pleasant," nodded Janet's father. "Did you hear about the experience of the girls?" "Haven't read a paper for weeks. I've been going day and night on retakes for the last picture. What happened?" They slowed down for the edge of Clarion and Janet's father, briefly and vividly, recounted the events of that harrowing night in the storm and bitter cold of Little Deer valley. "I should have known about this," said Henry Thorne quietly. "Why didn't someone wire me?" "I thought of it," said Helen's mother, "but it all happened so quickly. Then, after the girls were safe at home I thought wiring you would only prove disturbing and I knew you were going to the limit of your strength and endurance anyway." "Perhaps you're right," he conceded, sinking back in the rear seat. "My, but it's great to be home." John Hardy swung the car into the drive and they rolled up the grade to the porch. "Pity you couldn't take a man to his own door," chided his friend. "All right, I will if you want to miss the lunch that's waiting." They bantered good naturedly, for John Hardy and Henry Thorne had been companions since boyhood. Now their correspondence was haphazard and infrequent, but each anticipated their visits together. Janet hastened to the kitchen to help her mother with the lunch, placing the delicious, thinly cut sandwiches on a large silver platter. There was a heap of them, but it was late and they were all hungry. Her mother stopped halfway to the dining room, a stricken look appearing on her face. "I completely forgot to stop on the way home and get ice cream." Janet looked at the clock. It was 1:15 a. m. "I'm afraid it's too late to find any place near here open. We'll make out anyway with sandwiches, cheese wafers and tea." "There's some chocolate cake left over from yesterday," said her mother. "Then I'll put that on. We'll have plenty." They bustled about and almost before they knew it Janet was out on the porch announcing that lunch was ready. The Hardys sat on one side of the table and the Thornes on the other, the conversation shifting back and forth. The pile of sandwiches dwindled rapidly, tea cups were refilled two and three times and Henry Thorne was noticed taking at least two slices of the thick, delicious chocolate cake. John Hardy accused him of taking three slices, but this he denied strenuously. "If I'm to be accused of eating three slices of cake, I'm going home," he announced. "And I won't be back until there's more cake." "I'll get up early and bake a fresh one. It will be ready by noon," said Janet's mother. "That'll be just about the time I'm getting up. Come on folks. We've got to get some sleep tonight." Goodnights were said quickly and with Henry Thorne in the lead, the visitors departed for their home. Janet helped her mother clear away the dishes. It was too late to wash them and they were hastily stacked in the sink. "How do you think Henry looks?" asked John Hardy coming into the kitchen. "He's too tired and looks like he's been going on nervous energy for simply days," replied Janet's mother. "I got the same impression. If we can manage to make him forget that strenuous business of his, of making successful motion pictures he'll be able to build himself up." "He'll find plenty to interest himself in the graduation program," said Mrs. Hardy, "and if you take him on some fishing and loafing expeditions along the creek he'll get a fine chance to relax." "Unless they send a rush call from the coast for him to return at once like they did a year ago just after he had settled down to a fine vacation. Well, staying up and talking doesn't help the situation. Scoot for bed, Janet. It's a good thing you aren't in the class play, what with keeping such late hours as this." Up until the afternoon of the play Janet saw very little of Helen's father. He was over to the house once, but Helen informed her that he had been sleeping and taking long drives around the countryside with her mother. "They have so very much to visit about," explained Helen, who was worn thin by the strain of the last rehearsals. The night before it had been midnight before they rang down the curtain. Janet had been up equally as late for her work on the meager lighting equipment kept her on the job as long as the cast rehearsed. On Friday afternoon they made a final check of sets and lights and costumes and Miss Williams rehearsed one or two of the minor characters who had been causing more trouble than the leads in getting their lines in just the way she wanted them. The gymnasium was filled with row upon row of chairs. The old curtain which shielded the stage had been refurbished and looked quite presentable in spite of the landscape scene which it depicted. Someday Janet hoped the school would be able to buy adequate stage equipment. The stage was large enough, but the sets were pitifully few in number and all of them several years old. They had been changed a little here and there by the stagecraft class, but underneath you could detect the same flats and doors and windows of other years. It was five o'clock before they finally straggled away from the gym and the call for the entire cast and stage crew was 6:30 o'clock for Miss Williams wanted everyone on hand early. Janet had seen the instructor conferring with a rather distinguished looking man that afternoon and guessed that he was the representative of the producing company, there to see the production and make the final decision on offering a job to Miss Williams. Janet, in spite of the fact that she was only a member of the stage crew, found it hard to eat even though supper that night was especially delicious and her mother, although silent, looked at her reprovingly. Helen arrived before supper was over and Janet was surprised to see her so calm. Perhaps her father had been coaching her on composure. Janet folded up a clean smock, tucked it under one arm, and joined Helen. "Good luck, girls," said her father. "We'll wait for you after the show and all have a lunch down town to celebrate the event." "Do you know where your folks are going to sit?" asked Janet. Helen shook her head. "Dad wouldn't tell me; thought if I knew I would be looking for them and it might make me nervous." "This is the first time a high school class has ever performed before a famous Hollywood director," said Janet. "Oh, don't think of Dad in that way. Now that he's back home he's just a neighbor and he wants to be thought of in that way." "All right, but you can't keep the cast from remembering that an ace director is in the audience tonight." "I suppose not. I only hope it won't make them too excited and upset." "How about yourself?" "I had been wondering up until tonight. But now I've made myself realize that he's just Dad and that makes all of the difference in the world. Sort of gives me the confidence that I need for I know that if I make mistakes he'll understand. I wish you were going to be Abbie." "Well I'm not, and you'll get along all right with Margie. I think she's really been working hard." "Oh, she's worked hard enough, but somehow she doesn't seem real in the character." "You mean I'm just crazy and silly enough to make a very real Abbie?" chided Janet. Helen's face flushed quickly. "You know better than that. Margie is light-headed enough for the rôle of Abbie, but she lacks some spark of sincerity that's needed, for after all, you know, Abbie finally solves the riddle of the Chinese image and pulls out the string of priceless pearls which saves the fortunes of the Naughtons." The cast and stage crew reported on time and Miss Williams checked each of them in. She devoted her own energies to making up the principals while several other teachers, fairly adept in dramatics, helped with the makeup of the minor characters. Janet put on her smock and checked the lighting instructions which had been mimeographed and placed it beside the small switchboard. Actually she knew them all by heart, but she wanted to be sure there would be no mistake; no dimming of the lights when they should be brightened nor a sudden blackout in the middle of a love scene. Margie Blake came up from one of the dressing rooms. She was glorious in salmon-hued taffeta and golden slippers. Margie, fully aware of the striking picture she made, walked slowly across the stage, which had been set for the opening scene, the garden of the Naughton home. Ed Rickey was standing nearby and Janet saw his eyes widen as they took in the beauty of Margie and her costume. And Janet felt her own heart tighten. Here she was in a smock, with her hands none too clean, no wonder that Ed had eyes only for Margie. One of the sky drops was hanging unevenly and Miss Williams sent one of the boys in the stage crew up into the loft to adjust the lines and even the drop. The dramatic instructor stood in the middle of the stage motioning for first one end of the drop and then the other to be lifted or lowered. Suddenly there was a cry from the loft and Janet, looking up, saw one end of the heavy drop sagging. It hung there for a moment. Then there was the sound of rending wood and the drop hurtled down toward the stage. Miss Williams leaped backward instinctively, but Margie, seated on a garden bench, didn't have a chance. Janet tried to shout a warning, but the cry jammed in her throat. Margie looked up and Janet caught one terror-stricken look on her face. Then the drop thudded to the floor, a tangle of painted canvas enveloping Margie. _Chapter XIII_ JANET STEPS IN Ed Rickey was the first to reach Margie. With desperate hands he tore away the pile of canvas, splintered wood and snarl of rope. Jim Barron, who had rushed from the dressing room with his makeup only half on, helped Ed lift Margie to a nearby bench. Then Miss Williams took charge. Margie was breathing regularly, but her eyes were closed. There was a nasty bump over her forehead and her dress looked like it might have been run over by a ten-ton truck, for a mass of dust and grime had come down with the drop. The boy who had been in the scene loft scrambled down. "The pulleys let go!" he cried. "Honestly, Miss Williams, I couldn't help it." "Of course not, and I don't think Margie is badly hurt. She'll come around in a minute or two." Someone brought a glass of water and Miss Williams raised Margie's head and forced some water between her lips. After a time Margie opened her eyes. "Where was the storm?" she mumbled. Then, recognizing the anxious faces of the members of the cast about her, struggled to sit up. "What hit me?" she demanded thickly. "The pulleys gave way and a drop came down," explained Ed. Margie tried to stand up, but sat down abruptly. "My head," she moaned. "It feels ten sizes too large." "Carry her downstairs," Miss Williams said to Ed and Jim. While the boys were obeying instructions, Miss Williams went to a telephone and summoned a doctor. It was 7:15 o'clock then and the curtain was set for eight. In just forty-five minutes the show must go on and Margie had a splitting headache and her costume was ruined at least for the night. When Doctor Bates, the school physician arrived, it was 7:30 o'clock and Margie, stretched out on a couch in the girls' dressing room, was holding cold cloths on her head. Doctor Bates' examination was quick but thorough. "Mild concussion, I'd say. She must go to bed at once and remain there, perfectly quiet, for at least twenty-four hours." Margie struggled to her feet and was as promptly returned to the couch by the doctor, who forced her to choke back her words. "Sure, I understand," he said. "You've got a part in the play and you've got to go on. That's the tradition of the theater. But this isn't a theater. This is a high school play and young lady you're not going to risk serious injury to yourself by doing any such thing as attempting to appear in this play. I'm going to take you home right now." Doctor Bates, who usually had his way, helped Margie out to his car. It was a tearful and protesting Margie, but Miss Williams joined in insisting that she go home and there was nothing else for her to do. By the time Margie was on her way home the first rows of the gym were filling with spectators and Miss Williams, a look of desperate intent upon her face, called the cast together on the stage. "We've got to go on for this means so much to me and to you. Try and forget, if you can, what has happened to Margie. Do everything you can to help the girl I'm going to push into Margie's rôle. If she stumbles on her lines or forgets them, fake until you can pick it up again." Then she swung toward Janet. "Can you get anything from home you can wear for the first act--something very light and pretty. You'll be able to wear the costumes intended for Margie in the other two acts." "You mean you want me to step in and take Margie's rôle?" asked Janet. "That's exactly what I mean. You've got to do it. You're the only one who knows the lines." "But I'm afraid I'll make a terrible mess of things; I'll spoil the whole show." "You can't, Janet, you can't." There was desperate entreaty in Miss Williams' words. "I've heard you repeating Margie's lines to yourself at rehearsal. You know them all and you know the action. Just imagine that you were originally picked for the rôle. You can handle it, I know." "Come on, Janet. This is our chance. We'll be playing together tonight. I need you to steady me." It was Helen speaking, saying she needed Janet to steady her. Janet smiled to herself. She would be the one who would need bolstering. Miss Williams came up. "I've found one of the boys with a car. He'll take you home and bring you back with a costume for the first act. I don't want to hold the curtain unless absolutely necessary." "I'll make it," promised Janet. There was no one at home and she rushed upstairs and dove into the large wardrobe in her room. She had been wondering all the way home what to select. Probably that pale green silk print. She'd only worn it once or twice, and never to anything at school. Janet seized the dress, slipped out of the smock and everyday dress she had worn under that, and wiggled into the cool, crisp silk. Stockings and shoes were changed in a flash. Pausing just a moment before her mirror, she brushed her hair vigorously until the light caught all of its natural golden glints. Then she ran down stairs, breathless from the rush. It was two minutes to eight, just two minutes before the curtain was scheduled to go up, when Janet reached the stage. Miss Williams was pacing nervously when she hurried on, but she stopped instantly and eyed Janet approvingly. "Splendid, dear, splendid. We'll start on time. If you forget some of the lines, just make up a few sentences until you can recall them. The rest of the cast will help you carry along." Helen, dark and radiant, came out of the wings. "You need a little more color on your cheeks. You look as pale as a ghost." "I feel pretty much like a ghost," confessed Janet as they slipped into a dressing room where Helen adeptly applied a touch of rouge, used an eyebrow pencil sparingly, and then finished the makeup with just enough lipstick to accentuate the charm of Janet's lips. "Everybody ready?" It was Miss Williams, calling the cast together for a final checkup. Fortunately Janet would not go on until the middle of the first act. It would give her an opportunity to regain her full composure, to get into the swing of the play, and to brush up on any lines she was afraid she might forget. The music of the high school orchestra, which was playing in the pit out front, reached a crescendo and died away. Janet faintly heard a wave of applause for the efforts of the orchestra. Then the girl who had taken her place at the switchboard dimmed the house lights, shoved the switch that sent the electricity surging into the footlights, and the curtain started up. There was that little breathless pause before the action of the play began. Then Helen, the first character on the stage, started her lines. Clearly, confidently, she spoke, and Janet's fears for the play, fears for any mistakes of her own, melted away. Helen was going magnificently, perfectly at ease and seemingly living the very rôle of Gale Naughton. Janet slipped into the mood of the play. It wasn't hard for she had attended every rehearsal and knew the lines of almost every character. On the other side of the stage Miss Williams, the prompt book in her hands, was obviously pleased. Then came a cue that awoke Janet from the pleasant glow. She was on next. With hands that fluttered just a little she picked up a mirror on the tiny dressing table in the wings and made sure that her hair was right. It was time for her to go on, a rollicking, bouncing sort of entrance that one would expect from gay, light-hearted Abbie Naughton, and Janet did it perfectly. The blaze of light from the footlights shielded her from the audience. She didn't need to care what they were thinking. All she needed to do was to go through her part, playing it to the utmost. Later she would know what the audience thought, but then it would be too late to matter. Janet and Helen had a fast exchange of lines, Helen reproving Janet for her gayety when the family funds were so low. They carried that hard bit of repartee off successfully and when the conversation swung to another character, Helen whispered under her breath. "You're grand, simply grand. Keep it up." "Double the compliment for yourself," replied Janet, her lips barely moving yet the words were audible to Helen. The first act was over suddenly. The curtain came down, smoothly, silently, and as it bumped the floor a gathering wave of applause echoed throughout the gym. Miss Williams nodded and the curtain went up again, the members of the cast smiling and bowing. Then came the rush for the second act. The stage must be reset and the girls, especially, had to put on new costumes. Miss Williams stopped Janet in the wings. "Margie's costumes for the last two acts are laid out in the dressing room. I'm sure they'll fit." Then she laughed. "They'll have to, Janet. We can't stop for a costume, can we?" "Not after the first act," replied Janet. But Margie's costumes did fit. It was as though they had been made for Janet. The action of the play moved more rapidly, swirling closer and closer around the Chinese image on its pedestal in the garden. Finally came the third act with Janet, clumsy, jubilant Janet, accidentally knocking over the image, which burst open when it struck the stage floor and there, inside the figure of clay, was the secret of the image and the continued comfort of the Naughtons--a ruby, so perfect, so beautiful, that it was worth an exceedingly large fortune. Before Janet knew it the curtain came down for the final time and on its echo came a sustained wave of applause. First the cast, then Miss Williams, and then the cast, answered the steady calls for their appearance. When Janet and Helen, coming out hand in hand, took a bow, the applause reached a new peak and then died away as the audience, satisfied as having paid tribute to the two stars of the show, prepared to leave the spacious gymnasium. There was the usual crowd on the stage, parents and friends rushing up to congratulate members of the cast and over in one corner Janet saw Miss Williams signing her name to a paper that looked very much like a contract. Without doubt the dramatics instructor had earned her contract with the producing company. "I'm tired," announced Helen, in a very matter-of-fact manner. "I suppose I am, too, but I'm still far too excited to realize it," replied Janet. "Here come the folks." Her father and mother, closely followed by Helen's parents, were pushing their way through the crowd. "I'm mighty proud of you two," said John Hardy as he gave each of them a hug. "I'm more than that," chuckled Helen's father. "I'm tempted to sign them to contracts and take them back to Hollywood with me." _Chapter XIV_ JUST FISHING Henry Thorne's words echoed in Janet's ears as the girls changed their costumes in the dressing room. Of course he must have been saying it lightly, paying them a pleasant compliment for their work. She forced herself to dismiss it from serious consideration. They changed quickly, hung up their costumes, and hurried out to join their parents for Henry Thorne was entertaining at dinner down town. "What was the idea of telling us you were in charge of lighting when you actually played the second lead?" Janet's mother asked after they had left the gym and were rolling down town in the car. "But mother, I told the truth. I was in charge of lighting until about twenty minutes before the curtain went up. Then one of the drops broke away and fell on Margie. She suffered a minor concussion and it was up to someone to step in and take the part or the show would have flopped right then and there before the curtain went up." "You mean you stepped in cold and handled the second lead?" asked Henry Thorne, turning around in the front seat to gaze incredulously at Janet. "But it wasn't hard. You see I tried out for that rôle and then I attended every rehearsal. Of course I sort of lived the character I tried out for. I missed some of the lines tonight, but the others knew I might and they covered up for me." "Well, I'll be darned. I thought you had been rehearsing it from the first and had told us you were on lights just to surprise us," said the famous director. "Anyway, you did a swell job. Maybe I will take you back to the coast with me." "Now Henry," protested his wife, "don't start saying things you don't mean. You'll get the girls all excited and then you'll have to rush away to start work on another picture and you'll forget all about your promises to them." "Probably you're right mother, but they're smart, good looking girls, even if one of them is my daughter, and heavens knows we could use some really smart, level-headed girls in one of my companies." Janet's father wheeled the car in to the curb in front of the restaurant where they were to have dinner and in the bustle of getting out of the car conversation switched to another topic, but Henry Thorne's words persisted in sticking in Janet's mind. Henry Thorne had planned and ordered the supper himself. It was a man's meal and Janet and Helen, now tremendously hungry after the strain of the play, enjoyed it to the utmost. First there was chilled tomato juice and in the center of the table a heaping platter of celery, olives and pickled onions that they ate with relish through all of the courses of the dinner. Then came great sizzling steaks, thick and almost swimming in their own juice, french fried potatoes, a liberal head lettuce salad, small buttered peas, hot rolls and jam. And after that there was open-face cherry pie and coffee for those who cared for it. "So this is your idea of a meal, Henry?" asked his wife, surveying the welter of dishes on the table. "Well, perhaps not every day and every meal, but once in a while I'd say yes. This is my idea of a meal." "I think it's been grand," spoke up Janet's mother, "especially since I didn't have to do any work toward it." "That does make a difference," conceded Mrs. Thorne, "but I'd hate to think of Henry's waistline if he had a meal like this every day." Conversation turned to neighborhood issues and talk of the town, for Henry Thorne maintained a tremendously active interest in the affairs of his home city. When they finally started home, it was well after one o'clock, but routine school days for Janet and Helen were at an end. Exams were over and there was only the junior-senior banquet and then commencement. Janet slept late the next morning and it was after ten o'clock when her mother finally awakened her. "Helen and her father just phoned they are coming over. I thought you might like to go with them. After they get some worms out of the back yard they're going fishing. I'll put up a lunch." Janet hurried into her clothes and met Helen and her father as they arrived. Henry Thorne was armed with an ancient cane fishpole, had on a venerable straw hat, cracked but comfortable shoes, old overalls and a blue shirt. "I think he's thoroughly disreputable looking," said Helen, laughing at her father. "Granted, my dear, but I'm most thoroughly comfortable, which is the main thing. I wouldn't trade this old fishing outfit for the best suit of clothes in the world." Janet showed them a corner of the back lot that promised to be productive of worms, and then went in the house for her own breakfast. She ate on the kitchen table while her mother packed a basket of lunch to be taken by the anglers. It was a grand morning for a fishing expedition and especially if those going fishing really didn't care whether they caught any fish or not. Just before they left Janet's father arrived and hastily changed into old clothes. "Want to go to the creek in the car?" asked John Hardy. "Not on your life. We're walking, both ways," grinned Henry Thorne, and the men, the cane poles over their shoulders, started for the creek. Helen carried the can of worms and Janet took the lunch basket. Indian creek was a pleasant stream, meandering through the rolling hills north of Clarion. Its waters were clear, alternating in quiet pools and swift little riffles over its gravel bed. The air was mild and there was scarcely a cloud in the sky. They went up the creek for more than a mile before Henry Thorne found a pool that looked like it might have a few bullheads. The foliage overhead was thick and the water here looked almost turgid, far different from the clear stream which danced along its bed farther down. The men baited their hooks and Janet and Helen sat down to watch the fishermen. Helen's father got the first bite, but he failed to land his fish. After that there was a long interval when the fishermen failed to talk and the fish failed to bite. Then the bullheads all seemed hungry and Janet's father was the first to land one, but Henry Thorne was right behind him with a larger catch. "Cut a willow stick for a stringer," said Helen's father, tossing a knife to her, and Helen, knowing exactly what was needed, found a forked willow and trimmed it down. In less than an hour they had eleven bullheads on the willow stick. "That's plenty," decided Janet's father. "There's no use spoiling the fun by taking more than we need. Shall we have them for supper tonight at my place?" "Nothing doing. We'll have them right here. Remember when we were kids and used to clean them along the creek, put them on a stick, and try and cook them over a fire?" Janet's father nodded. "That's what we're going to do right now. We'll clean the fish while the girls get some dry sticks and build a fire." Thus they had their noon meal, bullheads off the spit, crisp and hot, with just a sprinkle of salt on them, sandwiches and fruit from the basket, and cool, sweet water from a nearby spring. Henry Thorne, his appetite appeased, his mind and body relaxed, stretched out on the grass and looked meditatively into the creek. "What a life this would be--no strain, no thoughts of tomorrow, no temperamental stars to worry about, no stories to doctor, no budget to watch." "But after what you've had this would tire in a few weeks. Why, you're thinking about getting back into the harness right now," said Janet's father. Henry Thorne flushed guiltily. "Caught that time," he admitted. "Sure I was thinking about getting back on the job. I'm too much of a work horse, I guess." "But you'll stay until after graduation, won't you?" asked Helen anxiously. "That's one thing you needn't worry about," promised her father. "I'm thinking now of what's going to be best for you after high school days are over; whether you and mother will prefer to stay here in Clarion or would like to come west with me. You're pretty much of a young woman now, Helen, and from the play last night, quite a capable little actress." "Not much of an actress, I'm afraid, Dad, but I did want to be in the class play because you were coming home and I wanted you to be proud of me." "I was very proud of you, dear. Just how proud you'll never know, and I've been trying to think of something I could do that would show you just how pleased I was over the work you and Janet did in the class play." They were silent for a time, all of them enjoying the quiet charm of the afternoon. Henry Thorne puffed slowly on a venerable pipe while Janet's father dozed, his hat pulled down to shield his eyes from the sun. The embers of their fire turned black and then grey as they cooled. Janet thoroughly enjoyed relaxing on the creek bank. School days were almost over and she couldn't help wondering what the summer and the coming year would hold in store for her. Of course there would be college in the fall, but just where had not been determined. It was generally understood at home, though, that she would be allowed to make her own choice providing it was anywhere near within reason. Janet knew that Helen's plans were very uncertain. Her friend wasn't even sure that they would continue to make their home in Clarion. Just then Henry Thorne knocked the ashes out of his pipe and squinted at the sun. "Better be starting home," he said. He picked up a small stick and tossed it at Janet's father, who awoke with a start. "Come on sleepy-head. Time to go." Janet finished packing the few utensils that went back into the lunch basket while the men wound up the lines on their fishpoles. They started home, walking leisurely in the warm afternoon, the men leading the way. Half a mile down the creek they came upon a farm boy, riding bareback. The horse was a beautiful, spirited animal, and the lad rode with amazing grace. They paused for several minutes to watch the horse and rider until they finally disappeared over a nearby hill. "Can either of you girls ride?" Henry Thorne asked the question almost sharply. "A little, but not much nor very well," confessed Janet. "I belong in the same class," added Helen. "Is there any place in town where we can find good horses and a good instructor?" Helen's father shot the question at John Hardy. "Hill and Dale farm keeps a fine string of horses. I'm sure I could arrange for instruction there." "I'll go with you this evening and we'll see what can be done. I want the girls to become proficient at riding as soon as possible." "But what's the idea?" asked Helen. "Just another quirk of mine," smiled her father. As soon as they reached home Henry Thorne urged Janet's father to accompany him to see about riding lessons for the girls and just before dinner returned. "Your first lesson will be at eight o'clock to-morrow morning," he announced. "Look up some old duds that won't be hurt if you fall off." "But how about the girls?" demanded his wife. "They'll have to take a chance on that," he smiled. _Chapter XV_ HOLLYWOOD BOUND Janet remained awake for some time that night, wondering what the significance of Henry Thorne's decision to have her and Helen learn to ride, and ride well, could be. Finally she gave it up as a bad job, realizing that he would tell them in his own good time. Graduation week passed in a mixed whirl of events, with the junior-senior banquet and actual graduation exercises interspersed between the long hours passed at Hill and Dale farm where Janet and Helen underwent an intensive series of lessons on horsemanship. Both girls were agile and anxious to learn, and both soon came to enjoy the riding thoroughly. Their instructor, an older man, found them eager pupils and Helen's father encouraged them at each lesson, for he went with them on every trip to the farm. Like the senior class play, the graduation exercises were held in the gymnasium and Helen stopped for Janet. They were going on ahead of their parents for they had to be at school half an hour before the start of the program. "I hope I don't smell like a stable," smiled Helen, radiant in her crisp, white organdie dress. "We've been at the farm so much I almost say 'Giddap' every time I start to do anything." "I feel almost the same way. One good thing, though, I can sit down comfortably now and I couldn't after the first two days." When they came down from Janet's room, Helen's father and mother were there. "We're early, but I want to talk to your folks," Henry Thorne told Janet. "You youngsters run along and we'll be there in plenty of time." When they were on their way to school, Helen spoke. "Dad's been acting so mysteriously the last two days and mother seems to be unusually happy about something. This morning Dad put in a call for Hollywood, but he wouldn't talk from home; went down to a pay station. I asked mother what was up, but she said not for me to worry as long as she wasn't." "Perhaps he isn't going back west," suggested Janet. "You don't know Dad. I heard him mumbling just this afternoon about some kind of a story idea. You know he usually sits in on the final drafting of all of the stories he produces. I expect that as soon as graduation is over he'll start back." "Has he said anything more about taking you with him?" "Not a word lately and that's what I'm puzzled about. Neither Dad nor mother have talked about what I'm to do next fall. You know I'd like to go to school with you." "And I'd like to have you, Helen. I'll be lost if we aren't able to hit it off together. We've had such good times through high school and especially this last year." The final meeting of the seniors, as a class, was held in the assembly, the girls in their snow-white dresses and the boys all in their dark suits made a pleasing contrast. Some of them were visibly nervous while others remained unusually calm. To some it was a momentous event while others took it as the last step in a tiresome school career. Margie Blake, still white and feeling none too strong, was near the door when Janet and Helen entered. Janet started to speak, but Margie deliberately turned her back, and Janet, shocked and hurt, looked at her sharply. "Now why do you suppose she did that?" she asked Helen. "I wasn't going to tell you, but you might as well know," said Helen. "Margie is hinting around that she suspects you had something to do with the injury she suffered." "You mean that I contrived to have that piece of scenery fall on her just so I could get her part in the play?" "That's exactly what Margie's hinting. Of course she isn't saying that openly, but she doesn't give you much room to guess what she means." "Then I'm going to have a word with Margie right now. That's one thing I won't stand for." Janet's face was flushed and she was furiously angry when she confronted Margie. Margie's eyes widened and Helen thought she saw her hands tremble just a little. Perhaps she surmised that Janet was on the warpath and that she was the cause of it. "Margie, I've been told that you are insinuating I was responsible for the accident which forced you out of the play and gave me your place. Is that so?" Janet's words were low enough so that only Margie and Helen could hear, but there was a compelling force in them that would not be denied. "Why, no, that's not so. I never said you caused the accident." Margie stammered and flushed hotly. "You've no right to accuse me of this thing," she added defiantly. "I've a very good right if you are dropping hints about me and the accident the night of the play. If you've been doing that all I've got to say is that you're smaller than I ever dreamed you could be. You're simply below contempt." Janet whirled and left Margie with tears in her eyes. Helen paused a moment for Margie seemed about to speak. "I'm sorry about what I've said," Margie managed to say. "I guess I was a little indiscreet, but you tell Janet I won't say anything else." "I'll tell her and I think you'll be a very wise girl if you decide to let the whole thing drop," advised Helen, turning to rejoin Janet, who had gone to the other side of the room. The principal was giving his final words of instruction. "As your names are called for the presentation of diplomas, each of you will come from your places to the platform, receive a tube of paper, and return. After the exercises are over come to me in this room and I will present your real diplomas. If you can not come here after the close of the exercises, call at my office tomorrow." He paused a moment, then added, "and I should like to say that I am extremely proud of this class. I think it is the finest to graduate from Clarion High in the eight years I have been principal." "Which," whispered Helen, "is quite a compliment, if you ask me. It's the first he ever paid this class." "He sort of made up for the lack before by these last words," smiled Janet. Again they went onto the stage of the gymnasium, but this time not as actors and actresses in a play of make believe, but in the very serious business of graduating from high school. The gymnasium was filled with parents and friends of the seniors. The air was close, portending the storm that was to break later. Fortunately the program was simple, the address by the superintendent of schools lasting only fifteen minutes. Then the names were called and one by one they went forward and when they came back their high school days were over. It had been grand, being in school, decided Janet, and now she felt just a little scared. Life was ahead and life was so vast and uncomprehending and she knew it could be cold and cruel and merciless. They bowed their heads at the benediction, there was a final swell of music from the orchestra and the lights in the gymnasium glared. It was over and Janet, in that moment, felt years older. She was a high school girl no longer.... Parents and friends of the graduates crowded around them and Janet saw her father beckoning. "Get your diplomas," he called. "We'll meet you outside." Janet and Helen went up to the assembly where they turned in the paper scrolls which had been presented to them at the program. In return they received their real diplomas. Outside they found their parents. "We were tremendously proud of both of you," said Janet's mother. "You were by far the prettiest girls on the stage." "I'll cast my vote in support of that statement," put in Helen's father, "and that's from someone who should know a pretty girl when he sees one." They had planned a light supper at Thorne's and all of them enjoyed the walk home for the air was close. Dark banks of clouds, illuminated once in a while by flashes of lightning, were mounting higher and higher in the west. "Looks like we'll get a real one tonight," said Janet's father, and the others agreed. "Do you realize that the folks haven't given us anything for graduation?" whispered Helen. "Well, not exactly any concrete gift just now, but they've given me a lot of character and a sense of realization of the finer and honest things of life." "Oh, silly, of course I realize that, but Dad has been so mysterious today I know something is in the wind." When they reached Helen's home they sat down to an informal supper in the dining room. On two plates were envelopes, one marked "Janet" and the other "Helen." Helen's father was puffing rather furiously at his pipe as he watched the girls, their fingers clumsy from their haste, rip open the envelopes. Long green slips of paper, looking very much like railroad tickets, came out of the envelopes. Helen was the first to read hers. "Why, Dad," she cried. "It's a round trip ticket by airplane to Los Angeles." "So is mine," gasped Janet. "What does this mean?" Her father chuckling, nodded toward Henry Thorne. "I'd say that it meant a round trip to Los Angeles. Also, if you'll dig a little further into your envelopes, you'll find reservations for the westbound plane out of Rubio just one week from tonight." "But Dad, we didn't know anything about this," gasped Helen. "Of course not. It wouldn't have been a surprise," chuckled her father. "Seriously though," he added, "I liked your performances in the high school play and I've talked it all over with Janet's folks and with mother here. You're going back to Hollywood to spend the summer with me and this morning I contracted the production unit of our company which makes cowboy films and both of you are to have a chance in the cast of that picture. You're Hollywood bound, girls." _Chapter XVI_ THRILLING HOURS Janet was speechless and Helen was the first to give vent to her thoughts in words. "Oh, Dad, it's grand of you, but it doesn't seem possible." She looked at the ticket again, feeling it to see if it actually was real. Tears brimmed into Janet's eyes. "I'm so happy I could cry," she confessed. Then added quickly, "But I don't know how I can thank you." "Don't try now," smiled Henry Thorne. "I'll be more than repaid if you two make good in the western pictures I'm going to try to put you in." "But Dad, we've never had any experience like that," protested Helen. "We'll probably be awful flops." "Nonsense. It doesn't take much acting ability to get by in the 'horse operas' as we call them. You just act natural, look pretty, and you'll have all of the cowboys in the cast asking you for dates." Janet looked at her mother, wondering just how she had been won over to letting them go to Hollywood, even though Helen's father would be there to oversee things in general. Just then Mrs. Thorne spoke, pulling an envelope from a pocketbook. "You're not the only lucky ones," she reminded Janet and Helen. "I'm going along and see that you are properly chaperoned when these dashing cowboys ask you to go places with them." That explained to Janet why her mother had consented for with Mrs. Thorne along she would have little to worry about. "Does that mean we're going to leave Clarion for good?" asked Helen. "Well, hardly," boomed her father. "I'd be lost if I didn't have Clarion to come back to for a rest when I get fagged out and I don't know what the bullheads out in Indian creek would do without me. We're going to keep the place here for you never know when even a famous Hollywood director will start turning out poor pictures and once you hit the toboggan out there, it's hard to come back. I've been at it so long now, that another year will just about see me through. Then I'll want to retire to some quiet city and Clarion suits me." "I'm glad of that, Dad, for I've grown up here and it would be so hard to think of cutting all of the ties of friendship at just one sweep." "You won't have to do that, Helen, and maybe, if you two youngsters can't make the grade with our western company, you'll be back here before you know it." "But we're leaving in just a week. It doesn't seem possible," said Janet, half to herself and half to the rest. "The time will go before you know it," said her mother, "what with the packing we'll have to do and the new clothes to buy." "Now let's stop right there," put in Helen's father. "Packing is all well and good, but let's cut out the new clothes. Instead of loading the girls up with things here, we'll give Mother the money and she can let them have it in Hollywood when they see a dress in the shops out there that they want. I think they'll feel a little more in style in Hollywood clothes than in Clarion clothes in Hollywood." "I suppose they would," confessed Janet's mother, "but I'm afraid the money for Janet's summer clothes allowance won't go very far." "She'll be getting a regular salary each week and the company will furnish whatever costumes are needed for each picture." "Each picture," smiled Helen. "I like that Dad. How long does it take to make a picture?" "When I'm directing anywhere from six weeks to three or four months, but the western company moves pretty rapidly. They'll grind the average one out in two weeks or three at the most. They're after action and plenty of scenery." "Which explains why we were carted off to Hill and Dale farm and hoisted up on horses and jogged up and down for hours until I thought every bone in my body would be broken," said Janet. "Good guess. I've had this idea in mind ever since the night of the class play," confessed Helen's father. "If you think you're going to get out of the riding class the rest of the time you're in Clarion you'll be sadly mistaken. I'm certainly not going to show up on the lot and ask Billy Fenstow to take on a couple of girls who can't ride." "Who's Billy Fenstow?" asked Helen. "He runs our western unit. Billy writes most of the stories, does the supervising and directing and just about everything else about the picture. You'll like him. He's fat, forty, bald and lots of fun and if he likes you, he'll invite you to the Brown Derby for dinner." "What fun that would be," exclaimed Janet. "Why that's where all of the stars go." "You usually find a few of them eating there," admitted Helen's father. They talked for another hour, the girls, in their excitement, planning things that could never come true, but their fathers and mothers, indulging them the sheer joy of their mood, let them ramble on. It was nearly midnight when they finally pushed their chairs away from the table and the Hardys started for home. "I'll see you first thing in the morning," said Helen, "but I don't believe I'll sleep a wink." "I'm afraid I won't either," replied Janet, "but I'm so excited I don't care." On the way home she linked her arm with her father and mother and they walked slowly. "Happy?" her father asked gently. "Gloriously happy," replied Janet softly, squeezing her mother's arm. "Of course I want to go to Hollywood, but I'm going to miss both of you terribly." "We'll miss you, too. You know that," replied her father, "but it's an opportunity that comes to few girls. Don't be too disappointed if you fail to remain in the cast of that western picture. You're going out there for a lark and not with the serious intent of becoming a motion picture actress." Janet bit her lips. Of course her dad was right. She couldn't seriously hope to be a motion picture actress, but for just a moment she had found herself dreaming of real fame and fortune in Hollywood. Why it WAS just a lark, a sort of super vacation that only Helen's father could make possible for them. In the fall, after the summer on the film lots, they would probably come back to the middle west for Janet knew her father favored her entering the state university, Janet resolutely set her mind right. She must realize that it was to be only a vacation lark. Then she could come back happy and without regret when the summer was at an end. _Chapter XVII_ ON THE WESTBOUND PLANE The week following graduation was a hectic one for Janet and Helen. There were the riding lessons each day, their wardrobes to be gone over, new shoes and hose to be purchased and they finally decided that each of them needed at least two new dresses to last until they could get into the shops in Hollywood and select things they desired there. It was fortunate that Janet's father was a successful lawyer and Helen's a famous director or their personal pocketbooks would have been much thinner at the end of the shopping expeditions. Neither Janet nor Helen told their friends of their plans, but somehow the story got around that they were going to Hollywood and had already signed for rôles in a new picture. Some said they were to have parts in Henry Thorne's next production while others claimed the girls were going to be bathing beauties in a series of comedies. "Now wouldn't that make you boil," said Helen, as she related a conversation between Cora Dean and Margie Blake which she had overheard. "I was half way minded to step in and tell them the truth, but then I realized that was just what they wanted." They were sitting on the Hardy's front porch and the telephone summoned Janet inside. She called Helen to her a few seconds later. "It's Pete Benda of the _Times_. He says he's heard the story and if we won't confirm it he will print all of the rumors going the rounds, including the one that we're going to be bathing beauties. What shall I tell him?" "Tell him we're going to Hollywood with Dad for a vacation and if we get in any pictures we'll send him an autographed picture," suggested Helen, which Janet promptly did. "Pete isn't satisfied, but I guess he won't print all of the rumors," reported Janet as she hung up the telephone. "You can just bet that Cora and Margie ran up to the _Times_ office and filled Pete full of hot air," said Helen. "I thought maybe after we were out of high school things would be different. I'd like to be friendly with them for they can be delightful when they want to be, but both of them are still carrying a chip on their shoulders." There was only one more afternoon of fishing and loafing along the banks of the creek and John Hardy went with Janet, Helen and Henry Thorne on the outing. Their luck was with them again and they hooked a fine mess of catfish and fried them over an open fire. Through the late afternoon Janet and Helen talked incessantly of their hopes and plans while at a distance their fathers dozed along the creek bank. It was dusk before they started home, walking slowly through the twilight. "This is the last night at home," Janet's father reminded her. "Tomorrow night we go to Rubio and you take the west-bound plane for Hollywood." "It hardly seems possible, but it must be so," said Janet. "Everything is like a dream." "It will be until you actually arrive and start work in the studio." Janet's father was silent for several minutes. When he spoke again his voice was so low that it could not be overheard by Helen and her father, who were walking a short distance ahead. "I'm not expecting you to turn into a motion picture actress, but I want you to do your best out there. The change will be a fine vacation and when you're actually on the lot working before the cameras, give it everything you've got. That will add to the pleasure you'll have in later years when you look back on this summer." "I'll do it, Dad. I'll do the best possible job." "Sure, I know you will. It's going to be lonesome here," he added, "but the break had to come sooner or later." "But I'm not going away for good, Dad. Only for the summer." "Of course. You'll be home in the fall and we'll make plans for school then. Have you thought anything more about the university?" "Too bad I wasn't a boy, Dad, then I could have tried for football there." There was just a note of seriousness in Janet's voice for her father was an All-American halfback at Corn Belt U. and she knew he had always secretly been a little disappointed when she proved to be a girl, for there was no chance of a girl becoming an All-American halfback. "Football isn't everything," replied her father. "I'm satisfied," and he said it with a conviction that brought joy to Janet's heart. Through the evening hours Janet and her mother checked over the last minute packing. Trunks had been sent ahead by express and only the essentials were going to be carried in the bags they would take on the plane. Janet's luggage was attractive, but not expensive, for her father had never believed in undue waste of money. That night Janet found it difficult to get to sleep. Tomorrow night they would be winging westward at three miles or more a minute and by the noon of the second day would be landing at the Grand Central airport at Glendale, from where they could motor over to Hollywood. Finally sleep came and Janet dropped into the dreamless slumber of youth. It was mid-morning when she finally awakened as her mother shook her shoulders. "Time to get up," said Mrs. Hardy, "for there's much to be done today before you start for Hollywood." Janet leaped out of bed for in spite of all of the preparations they had been making through the last week there were a hundred and one small things that remained to be done. The hours fairly melted away. She made three or four trips down town on hurried errands and as many over to Helen's, where the same hurry and bustle prevailed. At dinner time her mother made her slow down. "Everything's done," she announced. "Of course you may have forgotten one or two things, but they aren't important, and they can be sent on later. Now you take it easy and enjoy dinner for this is the last one you'll have with your father and me for some weeks. My Janet, but we're proud of you," she added, with a happy smile. "I'm just afraid I won't make good; that's the only thing that scares me," confessed the usually self-reliant Janet. "Everything out there is going to be so strange and as actresses, I'm fearful that Helen and I will be about the worst that ever struck Hollywood." "Impossible," smiled her mother encouragingly, and after Janet mentally reviewed some of the pictures she had seen, she decided that quite likely her mother was right. Her father arrived home promptly and they passed more than an hour at a leisurely dinner, visiting about a score of different incidents, none of them important in themselves, but all of them important in that they kept them around the dinner table, prolonging their last dinner hour. Janet's father finally looked at his watch. "You'd better dress, dear. The westbound plane leaves Rubio at eleven o'clock and there's no reason to rush the trip over there." He reached into his coat pocket and drew out a small case which he handed to Janet. "Here's a little present mother and I want you to have." Janet opened the case with hands that shook visibly. Inside was a tiny wrist watch with a thin, silver chain to go around her wrist. It was a beautiful creation of watchmaker's skill and Janet looked up with just a trace of a tear in her eyes. "It's wonderful, but you shouldn't have done this after giving me the trip to Hollywood." "You'll have to have something to keep time by so you can get to the studio on time. Maybe I should have gotten you an alarm clock," grinned her father. "I packed one in her trunk," smiled Mrs. Hardy. "Now hike and get into your things." Janet, tremendously happy and so thrilled she felt she was walking on air, hurried up to her room. After a quick bath, tapered off with a cool shower, she started dressing. Her outfit was new from the silken underthings to the sensible but attractive summer linen suit. The skirt, snug and well tailored, fitted beautifully and a small but bright blue tie added a note of color to her heavy, white silk shirtwaist. The night air was warm and Janet decided to carry her coat. There was no use in putting it on and getting it mussed until necessary. Standing in front of her dressing table, Janet looked around her room and a queer little lump caught in her throat. It was such a pleasant room; she would miss it, she knew, in the months to come. Then her father called and she caught up the small traveling bag she was to carry on the plane, snapped out the light, and hurried down stairs. "Step right along," her father warned, and they hastened into the car and rolled around in front of the Thorne home down the block. Henry Thorne, pacing up and down the porch, called to his wife and Helen, who appeared almost immediately. Both carried small overnight cases. As they came down the walk to the street, Henry Thorne turned off the lights in the house, locked the door, and followed them. Now that the time of departure was near there seemed little to say. They had talked of it for so many hours it hardly seemed possible that they were on their way. John Hardy sent his big car over the road at a smooth, effortless pace. The lights of Clarion dropped behind and they sped through the open country where there were only the occasional lights from farmhouses to mark the blackness of the night. Later there would be a moon. Tonight they were in the heart of the mid-west and to Janet it was almost incredible that by noon tomorrow they would be in the city made famous by the movies. When they reached the airport at Rubio several hundred cars were parked near the entrance for the coming and going of the night planes always brought out a crowd if they arrived before midnight. Henry Thorne, who had their tickets, took them into the office to have them validated. When he returned he announced that the plane would arrive in 25 minutes. "There's a good tail wind up high tonight and they're stepping right along," he explained. A field attendant took their bags and stowed them on a small luggage cart. They talked almost aimlessly and Janet suddenly felt very empty and more than a little afraid of what her reaction would be when she got into the plane and the ground started dropping away from her. Then a ripple of excitement ran through the crowd and she heard someone call. "Here comes the plane!" Out of the east twin stars suddenly appeared, coming rapidly and very low, and then she heard the steady beat of two powerful motors. Like some great bird of prey, a-wing in the night, the silvery monoplane swung over the field, circled sharply, and dropped down far out on the runway and rolled smoothly toward them, its propellers flashing in the bright rays of a floodlight which bathed the entire field in a mantle of brilliant blue. Janet watched the scene with fascination. The ground crew rolled a small platform up to the door of the passenger cabin and a girl, not much older than herself and dressed in a smoke grey suit with a jaunty overseas cap perched on a mass of brown curls, stepped out. After her came several passengers, alighting for a bit of air and to stretch their legs before settling down for the long flight over the plains and into the higher altitudes that would take them over the Rockies. Janet's mother hugged her hard. "We'll miss you, dear. Write often and remember to do your best if you get a chance in any pictures." "I will, mother," she promised. "Goodbye, Dad." "Goodbye, Janet. Hit the line hard." "I'll tackle it with all I've got." "I know you will," he said with a confidence that Janet wished she could have felt. Then Helen's father touched her arm. "Time to go," he said, and Janet and Helen walked toward the plane while the Thornes said a final word of goodbye to their old neighbors. "You have seats four and five on this side," said the stewardess as the girls reached the plane. Helen went in first with Janet close at her heels. The interior was much like a bus, thought Janet, and she found her seat unusually comfortable. Helen's father and mother took seats across the aisle from the girls and the stewardess came along and snapped on the safety belts. "You can take them off as soon as we're away from the field," she explained. The landing stage was pulled away, the starters hummed deeply as though struggling with stubborn motors, and finally the mighty engines burst into a deafening roar, but were soon throttled down. Lights in the cabin were turned low and Janet, pressing her face close to the small, round window, could see her father and mother standing on the ramp. She waved, and they waved back. Then the plane started forward, rolling smoothly along the concrete. When it came to the crushed rock runway it bumped slightly, but before Janet knew it they were in the air and when she looked down again, the field was several hundred feet below. She was actually on her way to Hollywood. _Chapter XVIII_ HELLO, HOLLYWOOD! Janet and Helen found that by leaning close together they could converse but with the steady beat of the engines in their ears, a sense of drowsiness soon overtook the girls and they relaxed in their chairs. Janet dropped into a deep sleep that was not broken until their plane dropped down at Cheyenne well after midnight to change pilots and refuel. Here the stewardess offered them a selection of fruit and Janet ate several oranges with relish. Then they were off again, meeting the sunrise east of Salt Lake City with the most glorious panorama Janet had ever seen unfolding beneath her eyes. After that they swung southwest in an almost direct line for Los Angeles, climbing dizzily over the Sierras and then dropping down into lower California. Helen glanced at her watch and Janet, still unused to her own, followed suit. They would be at the Grand Central airport in less than half an hour. Helen, leaning back, cried, "We're almost there," and Janet nodded happily. It seemed almost on the echo of Helen's words, although it was actually minutes later, when the plane wheeled and settled gently down on the runway of a huge airport. Janet, looking eagerly from the window, saw a group of cameramen standing at the gate which led to the field. There must be some celebrity on their own plane or on a ship due in soon. She scanned the passengers in their own cabin. None of them appeared unusually famous and she decided the cameramen were there to meet some other plane. A landing stage was rolled up the moment the plane stopped and the stewardess opened the door. "Take your time," said Helen's father. "We'll all be a bit stiff after this long ride. You girls want to look your best." Janet stood up and smoothed out her skirt. It had remained remarkably fresh and the heavy silk shirtwaist showed only a few wrinkles. Her jacket would cover that up and she got that garment down from the rack over her head. Helen, who had worn a brown silk suit, had fared almost as well, and after a hurried glance into the mirrors in their handbags, both girls pronounced themselves ready to see what Hollywood looked like. Helen's father and mother were out of the plane first with the girls close behind them. A uniformed airport employee nodded to Mr. Thorne. "I've had your bags put in your car," he said, and Janet saw the famous director hand over a bill. The cameramen were still clustered at the gate and instead of looking for the arrival of another plane, seemed to be watching them as they advanced. "Hi, Mr. Thorne," greeted one of them, a chunky little fellow half hidden behind a huge camera. "Have a nice trip?" "Fine, Joey. Couldn't have been better." "Get any fish?" another one called. "You guess," smiled Helen's father. "That's far enough," said the photographer called Joey. "Just line up with the girls in the middle. What's the idea trying to sneak in on us like this?" "What do you mean?" parried Mr. Thorne. "The Ace publicity office just tipped us off that you were coming in this noon with a couple of girls from the midwest and that you think they're a couple of great film possibilities. I don't call that playing very fair with us." "So the office phoned and said I was bringing in a couple of new stars?" "That's right. Now girls, smile a little. We won't bite even if the cameras do look big." Janet and Helen, more than a little perplexed by the sudden turn of events, couldn't help smiling while the photographers clicked their machines. Then several reporters, who had remained in the background until the photographers were through, pushed ahead. "Give us the dope, Mr. Thorne--who they are, where you found them, what you have in mind for them? Do you really think they're good?" "Good?" asked Henry Thorne slowly. "Good? They're two of the finest possibilities that ever struck Hollywood. Boys, you don't know how enthusiastic I am." "Think they'll be big box office?" one reporter asked. "As far as I'm concerned, they're box office attractions right now and they are going to be under my personal management and supervision." Janet chuckled quietly for she could see the trend of Henry Thorne's conversation. "Sure, sure, we'll admit they're good," said another reporter, "but who are they and where did you find them?" Henry Thorne paused a moment as though deciding a question of tremendous importance. "Well, gentlemen, of course I hadn't expected the office would tip you off on my arrival. I'd rather planned on slipping in quietly and giving these girls a chance to get used to Hollywood, but I suppose I might as well tell you now. I want you to meet my daughter, Helen, and her friend, Janet Hardy." Reporters and photographers stared. "You're kidding us!" one of them protested. "I'm very serious," replied Henry Thorne. "You boys let yourselves in for this. I've always played fair with you and you thought I was pulling a fast one on you so I let your imaginations run along for a while." "Then they're not new stars?" asked one photographer, who had taken unusual care to get some excellent shots. "I didn't say they weren't. Now here's actually the story. The girls graduated from high school last week and this trip west is a present to them. Both of them have brains, better than average looks, and both of them can ride. Billy Fenstow is going to put them into his next western, but whether they'll be any good is another question. I'm willing to bet that they will." The photographer called Joey looked at Janet and Helen critically. "I'll string along with you," he decided. "Those girls look like winners to me." "Thanks Joey. I'll remember that." "Any time you have a picture scoop," Joey retorted. The Thornes and Janet went on to a waiting sedan where a driver was ready to whirl them to the home Henry Thorne maintained in Hollywood. "That was quite an experience," grinned Helen. "We almost became celebrities." "Just another fool stunt of the publicity office, but I guess it didn't do any harm," admitted Helen's father. Half an hour's ride took them to a comfortable, sprawling bungalow set well back on a side street. "I've been living in an apartment, but when I got the idea of bringing you back with me I leased this place," Henry Thorne told his wife and daughter. "I've installed George, my negro cook, and there ought to be something in the way of lunch ready for us." The bungalow was delightful with a tremendous living room clear across the front and two long wings to the rear, one housing the dining room, kitchen and servants' quarters while the other contained a series of bedrooms with baths between. At the rear, flanked by a high hedge, was a medium sized swimming pool with a diving tower. "Dad, this is wonderful," exclaimed Helen. "I don't care now whether I ever get before a camera. I'll be happy right here, spending my days in that pool." Mrs. Thorne took charge, made instant friends of George, the smiling cook, and assigned the bedrooms, Janet and Helen sharing one large room with twin beds. It was at the very rear of the house with a door that almost opened onto the pool, which pleased the girls. "Clean up and we'll have lunch. George informs me that it will be ready in fifteen minutes," said Helen's mother. "How about a swim?" asked Helen. "What in?" asked Janet. "The pool, silly." "But I hear it's even against California laws to go in a pool in your birthday suit." "I forgot. Of course we'd put our suits in the trunk and I suppose it will be a couple of days before they arrive." After a more prosaic shower, they felt tremendously refreshed and the luncheon which George had prepared was delicious. "See about a maid at once to do the housework, mother," said Henry Thorne, "and with George to do the cooking you can have a little fun, too." "But I want something to do," protested Mrs. Thorne. "There'll be plenty just keeping track of Janet and Helen." "How would you like to attend a premiere of a new picture at the Queen's Court tonight?" he asked. "Fine," replied Helen, "but what's the Queen Court?" "It's the newest of the deluxe motion picture theaters here. You'll see a lot of stars. What do you say now?" "Count us in," declared Janet. "What'll we wear? Our trunks aren't here?" "Mother'll take you shopping this afternoon," promised Henry Thorne. "Or better, I'll take you around to Roddy at the studio." "I'm not a mind reader. Who's Roddy?" Helen asked. Her father looked at her in astonishment. Then grinned. "Sure, you wouldn't know Roddy. Well, he's a thin little fellow, almost bald, but he creates the most sensational clothes worn by the stars at our studio. His credit line on the screen is always signed Adoree, but that's just for publicity. Roddy wouldn't be a good name for a creator of ultra fashions." "You mean you'll have Adoree do dresses for us for tonight?" asked Helen. "You'd better not call him Adoree or he'll stick you full of pins. He's just plain Roddy around the studio." Janet's throat suddenly felt dry. Here, on her first day in Hollywood, she was to have a gown created by a famous designer and attend a premiere at the Queen's Court. _Chapter XIX_ GORGEOUS GOWNS Henry Thorne telephoned for an appointment with Roddy and then drove the girls to the studio. The Ace plant, one of the largest in Hollywood, was built in a rambling Spanish style. Where most automobiles were stopped at the main gate, Henry Thorne sent his car rolling right on through and the gatekeeper waved and smiled. He stopped at a small office and a boy hurried out. "Mr. Rexler wants to see you at once. It's about your next picture." Henry Thorne scowled a little as he said, "Tell him I'll be along in a few minutes." Turning to the girls, he explained, "Rexler is the general manager and I'll have to see him, but I'll take you to Roddy first." The creator of famous styles had his office and workshop in a rambling, one story white stucco building. Roddy looked just as Henry Thorne had promised he would and Janet thought a good, strong wind might blow the little man away. But she liked him instantly, for his eyes twinkled when Henry Thorne explained his mission. "And you'd like to have them look like real stars tonight?" he smiled. "That's the idea," grinned Henry Thorne. "Maybe the publicity office wasn't wrong in sending out the photographers and reporters this morning." Roddy stepped back and surveyed Janet and Helen with cold, analytical eyes. "Nice hair, even features, not too heavy and not too thin, trim ankles," he said, half to himself and half out loud. "I'll leave them with you, Roddy. I've got to see Rexler." "Another picture?" Henry Thorne nodded. "I hear they need another of your smash hits," said the designer. "You mean smash up or smash down?" "Up. You never do flops." "But I have." "That was years ago when I was only a tailor. Go along now," added Roddy. "I've work to do with these girls." He took them back into his private fitting room and called for silks and satins by the bolt. "Something vivid for you," he told Helen, taking a great bolt of crimson velvet and fashioning it around her with dexterous hands, pinning it here and there. Before Janet's eyes he created a gown, stepped back, shook his head, changed a pin or two, and surveyed his handiwork again. "Not perfect, but it will do for a hurry up job," conceded Roddy. Then, with a bolt of silver cloth, he quickly fashioned a waist length cape. "Not too much makeup tonight," he told Helen. "Just a touch of color to take off the pallor." Then he turned to Janet. "This will be a little harder," he told her. "Brunettes are always easier to design for than blondes, but I am glad you are not an artificial blonde." Janet smiled, but said nothing and Roddy called for various fabrics, finally deciding on a sheer, vivid blue and a cape of gold cloth. "For you," he told Janet, "more color in your cheeks. It will be needed with this blue. Use a blue band to tie your hair, but do not curl it any more than the natural wave it now has. Both of you carry white gloves and it will be better without bags. I shall be proud of you." Janet and Helen felt very much like fairy princesses as they left the designer's office. In less than an hour they had seen stunning gowns created. True, they had to be put together, but they did not doubt that this would be done in time, for Roddy had a certain magic in his hands and his energy seemed to flow out to the others who worked with him. They waited for a time for Helen's father to return and when he finally arrived there was new enthusiasm in his eyes. "I'll bet you're assigned to a new picture," said Helen. "Right, dear. I start work on the script tomorrow. The first draft is ready, but I always like to sit in on the finishing touches." "What's it going to be?" asked Janet. "The kind of picture I've always wanted to do, an epic of the air, a story of the air mail, but on broader, more sweeping lines than anything else ever attempted. We need one more big picture to bolster up the production schedule for next year and I've drawn the assignment." Helen's father was as happy as a boy with a new bicycle, and he hummed to himself half the way home. Suddenly he burst out. "I forgot all about your dresses. How did you get along with Roddy?" "He's grand, and we're all fixed up. Mine is crimson velvet and Janet's is some divine shade of blue. I have a silver cape and she has a cloth of gold cape. Oh, he planned everything for us, even telling us just how much makeup to use." "That's Roddy. He's a fine friend." They drove on in silence for a time before Helen's father spoke again. "I must be getting absent minded," he said as they turned into the drive at the bungalow. "I ran into Billy Fenstow at the administration building at the studio. He said to send you to see him tomorrow morning. He's going to start shooting on a new western next week." "Things," said Janet, "are happening too fast. We only arrived this noon and have already been fitted for gowns. Tonight we go to a premiere and tomorrow we meet a director who may give us places in his next pictures." "That's Hollywood for you," grinned Helen's father. _Chapter XX_ AT THE PREMIERE After a leisurely dinner that evening they enjoyed a quiet half hour beside the pool. "There's plenty of time; let's take a swim. The trunks arrived this afternoon and mother's found our suits," said Helen, and Janet seconded the idea at once. It had been a hectic day and the water would relax them. They had trim one-piece suits, Janet's of cool green and Helen's a sharp blue. For twenty minutes they splashed in the water or relaxed and floated just as the mood struck them. Finally Mrs. Thorne called. "It's less than an hour before we must start for the premiere," she said. Janet and Helen climbed out of the pool, rubbed themselves briskly with heavy towels, and hastened into their bedroom. Large boxes were at the foot of each bed and from them they drew the gowns which Roddy had created. Dressing that night was one of the thrills Janet would never forget. The costume was complete for just the right undergarments had been sent by the designer. The hose were the sheerest gold, with gold slippers to match, while Helen's accessories were silver. "How do you feel?" asked Helen. "Something like a fairy princess and it's hard to make myself believe that this is all real." "Then let's enjoy every minute of it. We may wake up and find that it is all just a dream." Janet looked at herself in the mirror. She was sheathed in blue silk, ankle length, with just enough of a slit in one side to show her dainty, silken ankles. Helen helped her tie a blue ribbon around her hair and watched while Janet applied rouge judiciously. "I imagine the lights will be bright as we go into the theater," said Helen, "so remember what Roddy said about the color." In turn Janet helped Helen, fastening the crimson velvet dress. Like her own, it was a sheath of material with Helen encased inside. "I'm not sure I'll be able to sit down. Dad may have to hire a truck and drive us to the theater in it. I'd hate to have this gown all mussed." "Mine looks awfully tight, but it feels very comfortable," confessed Janet. "Oh, I feel grand--simply grand." "About ready?" called Helen's father. They caught up their capes and threw them around their shoulders with just the right touch of abandon. Even the gloves had been provided in the boxes sent by Roddy. Mr. and Mrs. Thorne were waiting for them in the living room, Helen's mother looking very beautiful in a brown velvet gown while her father was distinguished in his dinner jacket. Henry Thorne caught his breath as he looked at the girls in Roddy's gowns. "I knew Roddy was a wonder worker, but I didn't know he could perform miracles. I'd hardly know you if I saw you any place else." "That's a real compliment, Dad," smiled Helen. "Here's something I thought you'd like to see." He handed a copy of one of the evening papers to them. On the front page was one of the pictures taken at the airport with Janet and Helen between Mr. and Mrs. Thorne. "Famous Director Brings Daughter and Friend West to start Their Careers in Movies," was the caption over the picture. Underneath the story said: "Moviedom will get its first chance to see Henry Thorne's daughter, Helen, and her companion, Janet Hardy, tonight at the premiere at the Queen's Court. Both girls are slated for movie careers if their screen tests turn out all right. Their initial rôles will probably be in a new western which Bill Fenstow is casting now and plans to put into production next week." "We look pretty much 'midwesternish' in that picture," observed Helen. "What if you do? There are too many Hollywood types. What we need in pictures is fresh faces on girls who have ability. Come on now, we've got to hurry or we'll be late." The big sedan was in the drive and Helen's father had summoned a driver he employed when he needed a chauffeur to drive them that evening. They turned out of the side street on which they lived into a main boulevard and whirled rapidly toward the Queen's Court. Janet, attending a movie premiere for the first time, felt her heart quicken as she saw the blaze of light which marked the front of the theater. The whistle of a traffic officer slowed them down and the driver was forced to produce a card before they were allowed to go past the police lines. The sidewalks were lined with people, anxious for a glimpse at some Hollywood notable. The car fell into line behind several others and Janet caught her first glimpse of the theater. It was magnificent white marble, with the entrance an open court and down this court the honored guests had to walk, running the gamut of the stares of hundreds who backed the police lines. Their car pulled up under a canopy. "Here we are, girls. Take your time and enjoy it. Don't be stiff. It's just like going to the Idle Hour back in Clarion," said Helen's father. He stepped out first, assisted Mrs. Thorne and then turned to the girls. Janet heard the master of ceremonies, standing at the microphone nearby, announce, "Henry Thorne, most famous of the directors for Ace productions, Mrs. Thorne, their daughter, Helen, and Janet Hardy." Janet stepped out into the glare of the floodlights. For just a moment a terrific wave of stage fright gripped her. Then she saw smiling, friendly faces, and she smiled back. Flashlights boomed as the photographers worked. The announcer beckoned to Henry Thorne. "Just a word, Mr. Thorne." But the director shook his head. "This is the girls' night," he smiled, shoving Helen toward the microphone. "All I can say," gasped Helen, "is that I'm tremendously happy to be here." "Thank you," said the announcer. "And now, Miss Hardy, please." "I like all of the smiles," said Janet simply, and a burst of applause came back from the crowd. "Well done," whispered Henry Thorne and they started down the long walk past the sea of faces. Janet felt supremely confident, perhaps it was just knowing that her gown and accessories were perfection, and more than one compliment on her costume came from the packed masses. In the grand foyer there were film stars on every hand, some of them stopping for a moment to talk, and as Helen's father introduced the girls to all of these, Janet thought she detected several frankly unfriendly stares from some of the actresses, who seemed to be little if any older than they were. Then the picture started. Actually Janet saw very little of it. She was too busy drinking in the beauty of the theater and straining to catch glimpses of stars who had arrived late. When they left the theater, various groups congregated in the foyer for brief visits and Janet saw a tubby little man, looking ill at ease in his dinner suit and mopping his bald head, struggling to reach them. He kept his eyes quite frankly on Janet and Helen as he neared them, but there was nothing offensive in his stare. He grabbed Henry Thorne's arm. "Say, Henry, are these the girls?" he demanded. "Hello, Billy. Sure. I want you to meet my daughter, Helen, and Janet Hardy." "Girls," he explained, "you want to be nice to this scamp. He's in charge of the western unit and it will be his decision on whether you get into the cast. In other words, meet Billy Fenstow." "None other and none such," grinned the affable little director. "Why didn't you tell me you had a couple of stars in tow?" he chided Helen's father. "Are you willing to take a chance on them and promise them parts right now?" The creator of western pictures looked a little surprised. "Well maybe not for sure. Tell you what. I'm going home and make some changes in my script. I'll build up some stronger parts for the girls. Can they act?" "Billy, I don't know. I saw them one night when I thought they could, but you'll have to find out for yourself. Now I'm going to take them home and see that they get some sleep or they won't be able to act." "I'm glad I met you tonight," said Billy earnestly. "See you in the morning," as Helen and Janet moved toward the car. He watched them through shrewd eyes, and if Janet could have turned around she would have noticed that Billy Fenstow was looking at her in particular. "I think she'll do," whispered the little director. "I think she's got just what I want for the new pix. Gosh, I wish this was morning." He jammed on his soft, black hat and went out in search of a taxi. _Chapter XXI_ SCREEN TESTS Despite the excitement of the premiere, Janet and Helen were up early. Mrs. Thorne, tired from the trip, decided to remain in bed until later and Helen's father had already gone to the studio, but not before leaving a note directing them on where to find Billy Fenstow. Helen scanned a morning paper for an account of the premiere. "Here's a paragraph about us," she exclaimed. "Listen." "I am," said Janet. "Two of the most stunningly gowned girls seen at the Queen's Court last night were Helen Thorne, daughter of Director Henry Thorne, and Janet Hardy, a friend from the midwest. It is rumored their gowns were special creations of Adoree. Both girls are to get film tests." "I must clip the picture in last night's paper and the story this morning and send them to dad and mother," said Janet. While Janet clipped out the items she wanted, Helen telephoned for a taxi and they were soon speeding toward the studio. The driver looked at them a little suspiciously as he slowed down at the main gate of the studio. Evidently he had seen too many girls like Janet and Helen get turned away, but Helen produced a note from her father which gained them instant admission. They paid the cab driver and a boy was assigned to direct them to Billy Fenstow's office. They found the director of the westerns at an office well to the back of the lot and he greeted them warmly. "We might just as well make a test the first thing," he said. "I've got a camera crew over on stage nine where there's an old interior that hasn't been struck. You girls any lines you can go through?" "Only from our senior play," confessed Helen. Billy Fenstow looked aghast. "That sounds pretty bad, but we'll try it." Stage nine was one of the smaller sound units on the Ace lot, but the director had a camera crew, the sound men and an electrician awaiting their arrival. He tested the lights quickly. "Just walk onto the set, do your lines and action, and forget about the rest of us," he said. "We'll take part of it, maybe." Janet's knees felt very weak and when she touched Helen's hand it was damp with a chill perspiration. "This is awful," whispered Janet. "I wish your Dad could be here." "I'm glad he isn't," said Helen fervently. "Go ahead, girls," urged the director, and Janet and Helen, who had already agreed on the scene, started their lines. The action and words were simple, but both of them were scared stiff and they acted like wooden people. "Wait a minute," said Billy Fenstow. "I'm human. I won't bite and I don't expect you to be world beaters. Now try that over and loosen up." Janet laughed a little and Helen found a handkerchief and wiped the palms of her hands. Both of them felt better. The lights brightened until it was impossible to see the camera crew; it was more like being on the stage of the gym with Miss Williams over in the wings with her prompt book in her hands. Both girls entered into the spirit of their bit the second time, talking and acting as they had the night of the class play. For the moment they forgot the camera crew and failed to hear the soft whirring of the camera as Billy Fenstow signaled the cameraman to pick up the sequence. They ran through the scene and the lights dimmed. Billy Fenstow stepped forward. "That was better. We shot it and I'll have it put through at once. There's a couple of others have a final word on the casting and they'll want to see the test." "When will it be ready?" asked Helen. "Tonight. Suppose you bring your father over at eight and we'll send it through with rushes of other stuff that's been taken today." "We'll be here," promised Janet. On their way out they overheard several electricians talking. "One of the kids was Henry Thorne's girl," said one. "What did you think of her?" "She's not bad looking, but their skit was lousy." "Yeh, I thought so too." Helen looked at Janet and for some reason or other, felt like laughing. Why hadn't her Dad warned them about the test? He should have given them something to rehearse that would have been impressive. It was nearly noon when they reached home and after lunch Janet sat down and wrote in detail of the things that had transpired since they left Clarion. In the letter she enclosed the picture and the newspaper paragraph. In the late afternoon Henry Thorne came home, tired but elated. "I'm delighted with the first draft of the script for the new picture." "Haven't you seen Mr. Fenstow?" asked Helen. "No, why?" "I'm afraid it wasn't so good." "Nonsense. You made out well enough. What did he put you through?" "That's just it," explained Janet. "He had us do a scene from the high school play and we felt like awful nit-wits." "I suppose so," conceded Helen's father. "When will the test be ready?" "Mr. Fenstow said to come over at eight. He said several others had to have a word about the casting." "Sure. The supervisors always want the last word." After dinner they drove to the studio, Mrs. Thorne accompanying them. Helen's father took them directly to the projection room. Billy Fenstow was waiting and half a dozen others were in the room. Most of them spoke to Henry Thorne and he introduced several to Janet and Helen, but Janet couldn't remember their names. Then the lights went out and they settled back into comfortable leather-upholstered chairs. Scenes from a number of pictures in production flashed before their eyes. Suddenly Janet and Helen saw themselves on the screen, moving and talking, and Janet dropped her eyes for a minute. To her it looked pretty terrible, but her voice was well modulated and pleasing. After that the lights came on and Henry Thorne went over to speak to Billy Fenstow. When he returned a few minutes later Janet couldn't even guess what the decision had been. "The action was punk," Helen's father said frankly, "but the supervisors liked your voices. You've got good faces and figures. In other words you report Monday morning and both of you go into 'Broad Valley,' Billy's next picture." _Chapter XXII_ WESTERN ACTION In the days intervening Janet and Helen found plenty to do. Billy Fenstow sent over scripts of his new western and they had a chance to familiarize themselves with the general theme of the play. The story, briefly, was the efforts of a band of ruthless men to gain control of "Broad Valley," a great cattle ranch which had been left to young Fred Danvers by his father. There was plenty of action, some gunplay, and a love theme in which Fred fell in love with the leader of the band of men who sought his property. The theme was as old as western pictures, but Billy Fenstow had a knack of dressing them up and making them look new. Janet and Helen reported at stage nine at eight o'clock Monday morning, Henry Thorne driving them over himself. He left as soon as they reached the lot. Nearly a score of people were clustered around the chubby little director and he nodded as Janet and Helen joined the crowd. Janet nudged Helen. "There's Curt Newsom, the western star. I'll bet he's got the lead." "He looks nice," replied Helen, "but older than he appears on the screen." A rather artificial blonde was seated at Billy Fenstow's right, idly thumbing through the sheaf of script from which the picture would be shot. Mr. Fenstow spoke sharply. "Attention everybody. All of you have had a chance to study the script; all of you should be familiar with the parts. We'll make plenty of changes as we go along, but in general you know what we're aiming at. We've got two weeks assigned for the shooting and that means we'll be done in two weeks, and not three." He looked around at each of them, then went on. "Curt Newsom goes into the lead as Fred Danvers and Miss Jackson will play the rôle of Ruth Blair, the girl he falls in love with." He ran on down the list. "The green cousins from the east who come to visit Bill will be played by Janet Hardy and Helen Thorne." Janet felt her heart bound. She actually had a part and it mattered little that it was an insignificant rôle. Bertie Jackson, the blonde in the chair, turned and looked sharply at the girls, then sniffed. "I should say they would be well qualified to play such rôles." Billy Fenstow caught the sneer in her voice and turned quickly. "You know, Miss Jackson, you don't have to work in this picture if you don't want to. There are plenty of blondes would jump at the chance to play this lead." "Oh, calm down, Billy. Just because one of the girls is Henry Thorne's daughter, you don't need to get on your high horse when I make a harmless wisecrack." But Helen had her own ideas about Bertie Jackson's wisecrack and she resolved to watch the pallid blonde. Bertie, if it served her own purpose, was quite capable of doing any number of mean tricks. The morning passed rapidly with costume assignments being made. There were a number of interior shots of the ranch house which would be necessary and these scenes had already been erected on stage nine. Janet and Helen would have their first scenes tomorrow, but they remained on hand to watch the first shots of the picture and to attempt to get acquainted with other members of the company. Most of them were friendly enough, but they seemed to feel that the girls had deliberately been put into the cast through Henry Thorne's influence and Helen voiced her belief quietly. "We've got to expect that," admitted Janet, "but we don't need to let it spoil all of our fun." Whatever she might have thought of Bertie Jackson from a standpoint of personality, Janet had to admit that the actress was a thorough workman and she went through her rôle in an easy and screen-appealing manner. In makeup Curt Newsom appeared much younger than the forty years he was willing to admit. The next morning Janet and Helen reached the lot early. Although not their first scene in the picture, the first one in which they were to be shot showed them arriving at the ranchhouse. Simple travelling costumes had been assigned by the wardrobe department, but Roddy stepped in and quietly added a touch or two that made them distinctive. Janet could almost hear Bertie Jackson hissing. It was an unheard of thing for Roddy to pay any attention to the costume worn by a minor character in a western or any other character in a picture of that type. "Your lines are simple, girls. You've just gotten out of a buckboard after a long ride from the nearest railroad station. You're tired and stiff and a little mad because Curt didn't come to meet you. Janet, remember that you're a little giddy and anything crazy you do will fit in all right." "She'll do plenty of that," said Bertie Jackson, under her breath. Billy Fenstow didn't believe in rehearsals. He told his people what he wanted, then asked them to do it, and started the cameras grinding. If it was too bad, he had to shoot it over, but if it was fair, he let it go, with the result that once in a while he got some exceptional shots. "All set, girls?" asked the director. Janet, her mouth dry, nodded. "Let's go. Camera!" They stepped into the range of the cameras, Helen in the lead and Janet, a rather vacant stare on her face, following. There was a bear-skin rug in front of the door and some way her feet became tangled up in it and she pitched forward, only the strong arm of Curt Newsom preventing her from falling. Curt, a veteran trooper, faked a line and Janet had enough presence of mind to come back with a cue. Then they went on with the scene, which was extremely brief, ending with a cowboy, laden with baggage, trying to get through the door. "Cut it," waved Billy. "What are you trying to do, clown this?" he demanded of the red-faced Janet. "No, Mr. Fenstow. You see, I slipped. I didn't mean to do it," she explained. "Well, whatever it was, it was a nice bit of action and I think we'll keep it. It ought to be worth a laugh or two." The next morning they left early by bus for a location back in the mountains. Billy Fenstow had every ranch possibility listed in a small black book and this was one of his favorites. He had used it several times, but a studio carpenter crew, by going out several days in advance, had changed the barns and corrals enough to disguise them. They arrived shortly before noon and a delicious meal was waiting for them. Janet and Helen had little to do for the next two days, most of the shots being confined to action on the range, with the camera, mounted on a special truck, racing ahead of the pounding horses while the broad valley resounded to volleys of blank shots as the cowboys, led by Curt Newsom, chased and were chased by the marauders. Then Janet and Helen got their chance in a comedy sequence called for their first riding. Neither of them felt any qualms until they were mounted. Then their horses seemed to explode and both girls hung on for their lives, their faces registering surprise in no uncertain terms. Helen lost her grip and flew through the air to land in an undignified position in a cloud of dust. Janet, either more fortunate or a better rider, clung on for another minute, then found herself dumped into the open water trough. Splashing furiously and sputtering at a great rate, Janet got her head above water. Her hair was plastered to her head and she was soaking wet. The camera crew, in spite of their roars of laughter, had kept grinding away. "Great stuff, Janet. You've got a natural born sense of comedy," chuckled Billy Fenstow as he wiped the tears out of his eyes. "It looks like I'm all wet as an actress," admitted Janet. "Oh, I don't know. Getting all wet may make you one," countered the director. "Get into some dry clothes. We're through with this sequence, anyhow." The days on location passed swiftly and in the main pleasantly. Curt Newsom took an interest in the girls, which only heightened Bertie Jackson's jealousy. He taught them several tricks about riding and they spent every extra hour in the saddle. One of the last sequences to be filmed at the ranch was one calling for a wild ride by Janet to take news of a raid on the ranch to the sheriff's office in a near-by town. With the camera crew in the truck ahead, the action started. Janet rode hard, but was careful to keep in camera range. Suddenly she felt her saddle slipping and she grabbed desperately at the mane of the galloping horse. Alarmed by the looseness of the saddle, the beast increased its stride and Janet, a stifled scream on her lips, plunged headlong. She felt the shock of the ground as she struck and then a mantle of merciful darkness descended upon her. _Chapter XXIII_ ON THE SCREEN Curt Newsom was the first to reach the unconscious Janet. He picked her up, almost without effort, and ran to the car in which Billy Fenstow had been following the action. "Step on it, Billy. This girl's had a bad fall," he said, and the director swung the car quickly and sped back toward the ranchhouse. Helen, mounted, galloped after them and the rest of the company, including the camera crew, trailed along. When Janet regained her senses she was lying on a bed in the ranchhouse with Helen, her face expressing her anxiety, bending over her. "What happened?" asked Janet faintly. "Your saddle came loose and you took a header," explained Curt. "How do you feel?" "Let me get up and take a few steps and then I'll tell you," replied Janet. "Better stay quiet for a few more minutes. We've got a doctor coming out to look you over," advised Billy Fenstow. "But I'm sure there's nothing really wrong with me, except perhaps I'm clumsy," replied Janet. Just then one of the cowboys tiptoed in and whispered something to Curt Newsom. Janet caught a flash of anger in his face as he turned and followed the cowboy outside. The doctor arrived within a few minutes and made a thorough examination for possible injuries. "Just a liberal supply of bumps and bruises," he decided. "Better take it easy for a day or two." "Well, that's that," Janet managed to smile when the doctor had departed. "I'm afraid I spoiled another sequence and you'll have to shoot it over." "I should say not," replied Billy Fenstow. "The camera got every bit of action and I'll work it in somehow. Any time I let a swell shot like that go unused you can write 'finished' after my name. Stay in bed the rest of the day. The schedule of scenes you were in is practically completed anyway." Helen was in and out the rest of the day for there were several shots in which she appeared and it was late afternoon when she came in to stay. "Curt Newsom is on the warpath," she said slowly as she sat down beside Janet. "Sore about my mussing up that scene?" asked Janet. "No. He's been looking at the saddle and says someone tried to kill you." Helen's voice was flat. Janet sat up in bed. "Someone tried to kill me?" she demanded. Tears welled into Helen's tired eyes. "Oh, this is all a mess," she cried. "We never should have come out here. There are too many intrigues and jealousies among those established." "Tell me just what you mean?" insisted Janet. Helen waved her hands helplessly. "Curt's found out that the saddle girth was almost cut through. That's the reason your saddle came loose and you were pitched out." "Does he have any idea who did it?" "If he does, he isn't saying anything, but I heard him tell Billy Fenstow that this is the last picture he'll work in with Bertie Jackson." "I wonder if that means he suspects Bertie?" Janet pondered. "You could take it that way if you wanted to, and personally I think Bertie is fully capable of some despicable stunt like that. I'm glad shooting on this picture is practically over. I've seen all of Bertie I ever want to." "It doesn't seem as though she would do anything like that, though," said Janet. "But, after all, Bertie's determined to get ahead and I expect she's wholly unscrupulous when she thinks anything or anyone may be blocking her way. But why should she pick on us?" "Because we came in as absolute greenhorns and got fairly good bits. She's afraid we may be pushed ahead too fast because of Dad's position with the company. I think it's all plain enough." "Perhaps you're right," conceded Janet. "I'll certainly watch myself when I'm around Bertie from now on." Janet felt much better the next morning. She was still stiff and sore, but was able to walk with only a moderate amount of discomfort. It was the final day of shooting for "Broad Valley" and a certain tenseness gripped the whole company. Billy Fenstow was determined to finish on time and they worked like mad through the long, hot hours. Janet had to do another riding sequence, and she went about it gamely, although every bone in her body ached as her horse galloped at a mad pace across the broad valley and into the rolling hills behind it. Then it was done. The picture was "in the can." Supper was served at the ranchhouse and after the meal, in the soft twilight of the summer evening, they piled into the bus that was to take them back to Hollywood. There was little conversation on the way back to the city. Some of them were completely worn out by the strain of working against time for the last few days and a number dozed as the bus, striking a concrete road, rolled smoothly and swiftly toward Hollywood. The days had been exciting and even thrilling for Janet and Helen--an experience they might never know again and both girls knew they would come to treasure the recent days highly. Janet wondered what would be in store for them in Hollywood. Would they win other rôles or were they through? It would depend on the verdict after "Broad Valley" had its screening before the studio executives. The lights of Hollywood glowed and they pulled up in front of the studio. Some of the actors and actresses had their own cars; others took busses and only a few signalled for waiting taxis. Janet and Helen were among these. Henry Thorne was waiting for them when they reached home. "All done?" he asked. Helen nodded wearily. "The picture is and we may be too." "Why?" "Won't it depend on how our work shows up whether we get any more rôles?" "Yes, I suppose so," said her father, "but I could push you into some minor parts in other films." "Now you're wrong, Dad. We don't want that any more than you would want to do it." "I guess you're right, dear. I did give you a boost with Billy and if you didn't make good on 'Broad Valley' there's little more that I can do." They were silent for a time. Helen's mother, who had been to a neighborhood picture house, came home and they went into the dining room where a cold lunch was ready for them. "I hear you had some unusual experiences," said Helen's father. "Oh, we had a few falls," admitted Janet. There was no use in voicing their suspicions about Bertie Jackson. The next four days were spent in sight-seeing around Los Angeles, in a trip to Catalina Island and several swimming expeditions at Malibu. Then came a call from Billy Fenstow. "We're screening 'Broad Valley' at the studio tonight," he informed them. "Better come on out. It's at eight." This was the news they had been waiting for, but now that the actual screening was to take place, both girls felt nervous and upset. Helen's father and mother insisted on coming with them, "to enjoy the triumph or share the sorrows." Henry Thorne smiled and Janet later wondered whether he had advance information on the outcome of the picture. The small auditorium in which the picture was screened was well filled that night with most of the members of the cast on hand, including Curt Newsom and Bertie Jackson. The lights were out and the picture started. Janet read the title: "'Broad Valley' with Curt Newsom and Bertie Jackson, directed by William Fenstow; produced by the Ace Motion Picture Corporation." Then came the cast of characters and well toward the bottom of the list she found her name. Her heart leaped and she held Helen's arm close. What a thrill it was to actually read her own name in the cast of characters of a film. Then the action started, the story of Curt Newsom's fight to hold title to his ranch. Almost before Janet and Helen knew it they were in the picture, the midwestern cousins arriving for a visit and in spite of herself Janet chuckled as she stumbled over the rug. It DID look wholly accidental. Then for a time they were out of the action, coming back again in the riding sequence in which Janet was dumped into the watering trough. This entire bit of action had been kept in the film and she heard several hearty chuckles as she went headlong into the trough. After that came the wild ride in which Janet was pitched from her horse and the final victory of Curt over his enemies. "Broad Valley" came to a close with Curt winning the affections of Bertie Jackson and Janet felt her distaste for the actress growing as she watched the final fadeout. The lights in the projection room flashed up and Henry Thorne turned to the girls. "Nice work," he said. "Do you really mean it, Dad?" asked Helen. "Of course I do, honey. I think both of you handled your parts very well and Janet added a couple of top notch comedy incidents." "They weren't intentional," Janet assured him. "Then that explains why they look so natural. Billy will be a sap if he cuts them out in the final version." "And I'm not a sap," said Billy Fenstow, who had quietly joined them. "How about my next western? Think you could stand a few more weeks in my company?" "Are you serious?" demanded Janet. "Enough so that I'm promising you parts right now. In fact, we'll pay you $75 a week instead of the $50 a week you got for this first picture. How does that sound?" "Not enough," put in Henry Thorne, "especially if the girls can give you some more comedy as good as the stuff they put into this one." "Now wait a minute," protested the little director. "I don't work on budgets that run up to half a million. I've got to watch my pay-roll." "I was only kidding, Billy. But honestly, the girls ought to be worth a hundred a week. You'll only use them a couple of weeks and that's pretty cheap." "I won't make any promises about a hundred a week," said Billy, "but you can count on another job if you want to join the company for my next western." "Then we're in right now," decided Helen, and Janet nodded her approval. _Chapter XXIV_ "KINGS OF THE AIR" The next morning Janet found an interesting paragraph in one of the morning papers, which had been written by a reporter who had attended the screening of "Broad Valley." "One of the pleasant surprises about this latest Billy Fenstow western was the work of Helen Thorne and Janet Hardy, two newcomers. Miss Thorne is the daughter of the famous director and Miss Hardy is a friend of hers from the middle west. Although playing minor rôles, both girls handled their parts well with Miss Hardy providing several of the best comedy touches seen in a western by this reviewer in some months. It is reported that both will be in the next western which the prolific Fenstow will produce." Janet read the brief comment three times, then clipped it out of the paper, wrote a brief note home, and sent the clipping to her folks. Later in the day they received their final vouchers from the studio for work on "Broad Valley." Altogether the two weeks work on the picture had netted them $100 apiece, more money than either of them had ever earned in a similar length of time. "No wonder girls come to Hollywood," said Helen as she looked at the check. "Yes, but remember that we're lucky. We didn't have to break down any barriers; we didn't have to make introductions. The way was all smoothed out for us. Look at those poor kids over at the casting office." Helen turned in the direction Janet pointed. Half a hundred young men and women were waiting patiently in a line before the window of the casting office. Most of them were rejected; only one or two were allowed inside. "That's what happens to the average seeker of fame in the films," said Janet. "So many, with some beauty and high hopes, come out here expecting to make a success, and then almost starve. Of course they get a bit once in a while, but it's hardly enough to buy their food much less their clothes and all of the other necessary things." "You're right, of course," admitted Helen. "If it hadn't been for Dad we'd never have had a look-in." They were having lunch that noon at the studio restaurant with Helen's father. They were waiting when he arrived. Accompanying him was a stranger. "Girls, I want you to meet Mr. Rexler, general manager of the company." The general manager, tall, thin and exceedingly nervous, greeted them cordially, then seemed to forget that they even existed for he talked business from the moment they reached their table until lunch was over. But in spite of that Janet and Helen enjoyed the hour. Some of the most famous stars on the Ace lot were lunching there that noon and Janet and Helen enjoyed watching them come in. The general manager, a man of quick thought and action, suddenly turned toward them. "I saw 'Broad Valley' the other night. Congratulations on a nice bit of work." The hour passed quickly, with Helen's father and the general manager continuing their conference in the executive's private office in the administration building. "Dad and Rexler are having trouble over the story for the new air picture," said Helen. "I heard him talking with mother just last night. They can't agree on the final version. Dad was going over it last night." "I'd like to read it," said Janet. "I'll get it for you if he brings it home tonight." That night Janet had her chance to scan the script of Henry Thorne's next picture. The tentative title was "Kings of the Air." The action was fast and stirring, the panorama of the story covering the entire transcontinental route of one air mail system and Janet could understand that there was material here for a really great picture. But there was something lacking--a crashing climax that would make the spectators grip their seats. Henry Thorne, watching Janet as she laid the script aside, spoke quietly. "If you can suggest a suitable climax you can just about name your own ticket on our lot," he said. "How about a race for a contract?" suggested Helen. "Too old; it's worn out." "Then why not have the plane going through with valuable papers which are needed for say," Janet paused, "a naval conference at Washington, on the outcome of which may hinge the fate of the world." Henry Thorne started to reject the idea, but halted. "Where did you get that idea?" "Something I read in a paper several months ago suggested it," admitted Janet. "Navy planes were racing across country with a naval envoy and they got held up somewhere in Wyoming on account of bad weather. You could have your mail plane take over there after the navy ship was grounded." "That would give the navy a black eye." "Some other solution could be worked out then," said Janet. "You know, that's not a bad idea. It would require some rewriting of the script, but we've got to have a terrific air race against time and the elements in this thing for a conclusion. I'll talk it over with Rexler in the morning." Then Helen's father changed his mind. "No, I'll talk it over with him tonight if he's home." He phoned the general manager's home, found Rexler there, and informed him he was coming over. "We'll see what he thinks of your suggestion," he flung at Janet as he hurried out the door. "Shall we wait up and learn the outcome of the conference?" asked Helen. "Just think if they should decide to work out a climax along the line you suggested." "I'm all for waiting up, but I'm afraid my suggestion is pretty weak," said Janet. At eleven o'clock Mrs. Thorne decided to retire and urged the girls to do likewise, but they insisted upon awaiting the return of Helen's father. Midnight passed and finally the clock struck one A. M. "I'm too sleepy to stay up any longer," admitted Helen. "Oh, wait half an hour more," urged Janet, and Helen agreed. It was 1:20 when Director Thorne reached home. There were hollows under his eyes and he looked unusually tired, but in his eyes burned a spirit of elation that fatigue could not beat down. Mrs. Thorne, in a dressing gown, joined them. "What's the decision?" asked Helen. "We're going to work out the climax along the line suggested by Janet," replied her father. "Rexler called two of the writers down and they're working right on through the night on a new treatment for the whole script. It must be done tomorrow noon. We're to start shooting next week. It means another bouquet for you, Janet." Janet blushed. "It was just luck." "No, it wasn't luck. It was good, clear thinking and the ability to recall a worthwhile incident. Incidentally, both of you are going into the cast of 'Kings of the Air'." "But, Dad, you can't mean that!" exclaimed Helen. "I mean just that," retorted her father, "and I wasn't the one who suggested it. Rexler insists that you be included. It's his way of trying to repay Janet for her suggestion." "Then that means we'll get another chance in a picture," said Janet, and she felt her heart beating like mad. "Indeed it does and you'll be in the biggest feature the Ace company is producing this year," Helen's father assured them. _Chapter XXV_ THE STARS VANISH Janet and Helen did get rôles in "Kings of the Air" and even though they were very minor parts, both girls were elated. They were cast as waitresses in the restaurant which served the pilots at the main western terminal of the air mail line. Almost every contract player on the Ace lot was in it, with a good, substantial rôle going to Curt Newsom, who was taken out of Billy Fenstow's western unit long enough to play the part of a bitter field manager. Even Bertie Jackson got a part as a gold-digger who was out to get all the information she could from the pilots and was suspected of selling secrets to a rival air line. Janet and Helen saw little of Helen's father for the next few days. He was immensely busy on the details of the production and a complete airport was set up out in the California desert for one of the major sequences would revolve around this lonely outpost on the air mail route. The sequences in which Janet and Helen were to appear were shot at Grand Central at Glendale, actually in the field restaurant and were among the first to be taken. Janet had only four lines and Helen had three. All of them were in a brief scene with Curt Newsom and his encouragement helped them through for it was hard work under the glare of a brilliant battery of electrics. What made it all the harder was that Mr. Rexler was with the company the day this particular sequence was shot, but somehow they managed to get through with it. After that they were free to stay with the company and watch the rest of the shooting schedule until Billy Fenstow called them back for his next western. It was during the second week of shooting that things started to go wrong. There were innumerable little delays that were maddening in themselves and when a dozen of them came, almost at the same time, even level-headed Henry Thorne showed signs of extreme exasperation. The cast was large and expensive and a dozen planes had been leased. The daily overhead was terrific and each day's delay sent the cost of the picture rocketing. When they went on location out in the desert Curt Newsom, lunching with Janet and Helen, gave voice to his fears. "This outfit is getting jitters," he said. "I heard this morning that one of the pilots found several of his control wires half way eaten through by acid. That's bad business." Janet, looking up from a dish of ice cream, spoke slowly. "Then that means someone is deliberately trying to cripple the company?" "It means someone is doing it. That flyer pulled out; refused to take his plane off the ground again and some good shots are already 'in the can' with his plane in it. Means they'll have to get another plane and fix it up like his or shoot over a lot of footage. Either one will be expensive." That night Henry Thorne called the company together. Their location was at the edge of the ghost town of Sagebrush, and members of the company were sheltered in the three or four habitable houses which remained. All of them had grumbled a bit, but there was nothing that could be done about it for the nearest town of any size was too far away to make the drive back and forth daily. Helen's father spoke plainly. "There have been a series of accidents," he said. "These have slowed up production and put us almost a week behind schedule. All of you know what that means on a picture of this size. I am convinced that someone in the company is aiding in this sabotage and I am giving fair warning now that this town will be patrolled at night and that all equipment will be watched. The guards are armed and have orders to shoot first and ask questions afterward." That was all, but it started a buzz of conversation that lasted nearly an hour. When the company finally broke up to go to quarters, Janet happened to be watching Bertie Jackson and she saw the blond actress, slip between two buildings and vanish into the night. Helen was some distance away and Janet, playing a hunch, followed Bertie at a safe distance. There was no moon, but the sky was studded with stars. The walking through the sand was hard going, but noiseless, and Janet, keeping low, could discern Bertie's silhouette. Suddenly the older actress stopped and whistled softly, a long, a short and a long whistle. The sound could not have carried back to Sagebrush and Janet, vaguely alarmed, waited. Almost before she knew it another figure joined Bertie and she could hear the two conversing, but she didn't dare move closer. The newcomer struck a match to light a cigarette and carefully shielded though it was, Janet was close enough to glimpse his face. It was that of a stranger. The match went out and the night seemed darker. Janet wanted to get closer, but as she moved forward she stumbled over something in the dark and plunged headlong into the sand. Before she could regain her feet she heard a muttered exclamation and knew she had been discovered. Then the thin beam from a shielded flashlight struck her face. Janet knew her only chance was to run for it and she tried to rise, but her feet were entangled in a tough creeper. "Look out! She may scream!" warned Bertie. Janet opened her lips to cry out, but before she could do it, the man with Bertie leaped forward and thrust a heavy hand against Janet's mouth. Suddenly the world went black, the stars vanished, and she dropped into the sand. _Chapter XXVI_ BOMBS FROM THE SKY It was later in the evening when Janet was missed. Helen thought her companion had gone to visit some other member of the company and it was well after ten o'clock when she became alarmed and started making inquiries. "Looking for someone?" asked Bertie Jackson, who seemed to be everywhere. "I haven't seen Janet for several hours." "Maybe she's got a date with a boy friend in the desert." "Janet hasn't any boy friend and she wouldn't be dating in the desert," snapped Helen. "Have it your own way," retorted Bertie, but as she turned away a sneer distorted her vapid face. Helen finally communicated her fears to her father. "I've gone over the entire camp and no one has seen Janet for at least an hour and none of them are sure it was that recent. I'm worried." Henry Thorne, busy working with one of the writers on a difficult bit of script that needed smoothing up half way dismissed Helen's fears with a wave of his hand. Then he stopped. "You're sure she's not in camp?" he asked. "I'm positive, Dad. Do you think anything terrible has happened?" "Of course not. She's probably walked out into the desert and has gone too far. I'll rout out some of the men and we'll start a searching party." Curt Newsom was one of the first to answer the call and he muttered to himself when he heard the news. "There's trouble brewing," he told Helen. "You stick close to me." "What do you mean, Curt?" asked Helen, her voice filled with anxiety. "I mean this picture promises to be too big and someone is trying to throw a wrench in the proceedings." "Some rival company?" "It could be that. I'm not saying, but I'm certainly going to keep my eyes open." Under the brisk commands of Helen's father, the ghost town awoke. Men who had been asleep were routed out, cars commandeered, and parties swept away over the desert in search of the missing girl. Curt Newsom, who had brought several horses with him, preferred to ride and Helen went with him. Curt saddled the horses and they swung away into the desert together. Across the almost level floor of the desert they could see the cars swinging in great circles. "They won't find anything," said Curt, and after that they rode on in a silence broken only by the steady shuffling of the horses through the sand. At intervals they stopped and Curt's great voice boomed through the night. "We'd better turn back to camp," the cowboy star finally advised. "Maybe some of the others have news." But when they gathered in the ghost town, Helen knew that the search had been fruitless. Each searching party brought back the same report--no trace of the missing Janet had been found. "Everyone try to get some sleep now," said Helen's father. "We'll resume the search at dawn." Helen went to the room assigned to her and lay down, fully dressed, to try and rest in the short interval before dawn. But sleep would not come and thoughts raced through her head. Something was decidedly amiss and, like Curt Newsom, she could now sense impending disaster to the company. Just what it was or how it would strike she could not determine, but a terrible uneasiness gripped her. Breakfast was served at dawn. Most of the women in the company were on hand to aid in the search, but Henry Thorne called only upon the men. Half a dozen cars were manned and they swung out again to comb the desert floor. "Let them go," said Curt Newsom to Helen. "We'll ride. If there are any tracks, we'll be able to follow them easier." The tall, well-built cowboy star swung into his saddle and they trotted away between two tumbledown houses of the ghost town. Shadows of the morning were long and heavy, for the sun was just topping the mountains, but Helen, riding close behind the cowboy, glimpsed a footprint in the sand. She reined in her horse and called to Curt, who whirled quickly. "Someone's been through here," she said, pointing to where the sand was fairly hard packed. "Anyone could have left a print like that," replied the cowboy star. "Your nerves are getting the best of you, Helen. Steady up." She smiled and they turned again toward the desert, riding at a steady pace and scanning the sand intently for anything unusual. They were less than a quarter of a mile from the old town when Curt pulled his horse up sharp and leaped from the saddle to bend down and scrutinize a tough creeper which had been pulled out of the sand. "Get down here, Helen. Here's something the others have missed." Helen dismounted and ran to Curt's side. In his hands he held a tough section of the creeper and his eyes were fastened on a brown stain. "What is it?" demanded Helen. "Looks like someone got caught in this and scratched," said Curt, trying to pass the remark off lightly. "You mean it might have been Janet?" "It might have been," agreed the cowboy star. "Look back toward the village. This is in a direct line and although you may not have noticed it, we've been following footprints all of the way. Two came out and only one returned." Helen looked at him, her eyes showing her fear. "Then someone in the company was responsible for Janet's disappearance!" she gasped. "Right," snapped Curt. "The first thing is to find Janet; then we'll catch up with whoever was responsible." "Hadn't we better tell the others?" asked Helen. "They're not used to tracking; I am." He grinned. "Even if I am a movie cowboy most of the time, I know a few tricks about the range and the desert. Come on!" They remounted and Curt led the way, scanning the ground closely. Even Helen, as inexperienced as she was, could see the signs now. Someone had left deep prints in the sand. "He was either an awful big man or he was carrying someone," said Curt. "One thing, he won't be able to go far." The trail led toward the hills back of the ghost town and it was evident that the man they were trailing had rested frequently. Curt saw another of those brown stains, but he made sure that Helen did not see it for there was no use in increasing her fears. The trail led on, perhaps half a mile altogether, and ended suddenly in a tiny depression where the sand was smooth and hard. Curt dismounted and made a minute survey of the bowl. The trail came in all right, but there were no tracks going out. In the center were two marks, about four inches wide and 12 or 14 feet long, but that was all. Beside one of these was a tiny smudge of black and Curt got down on his hands and knees and sniffed keenly. "What is it?" asked Helen. Curt shook his head. "Can't tell yet and there's no use in guessing." He mopped his forehead with a large bandana and scanned the heavens. The sun was blazing down and shortly the temperature in the little bowl they were in would be stifling. "We'd better get out of here," he said. "But Janet? Where can she be? We've followed the trail but it's simply vanished." The questions tumbled from Helen's lips. "I wish I could answer them all," said Curt. "Maybe I can later." They rode back to the ghost town at a brisk trot and Curt cornered Henry Thorne and told him of their discovery. Then he led a searching party of half a dozen into the hills back of the town while the other members of the company assembled for the day's work under the boiling sun. Helen attempted to join the searching party, but was told it was no place for a girl so she went with the company out into the desert where the airport had been laid out and a dummy hangar erected. Shooting went ahead on schedule until just before noon when someone shouted an alarm and they turned toward the ghost town. The remaining houses were rapidly being consumed by flames and before they could reach them there was no hope of saving anything, including a number of valuable cameras, sound equipment and hundreds of dollars worth of costumes. Henry Thorne fairly blazed for he knew now that a deliberate effort was being made to stop the production of "Kings of the Air." But before they had recovered from that disaster, another befell with startling swiftness. There was a dull boom from the valley and they turned to see a fast, black plane swinging over the set on the desert. A cloud of dust was rising near the hangar and as they watched, another explosion echoed in their ears. "That guy's bombing the set!" yelled a cameraman, leaping into a car. The third bomb was a direct hit and the hangar collapsed. Over to the right were half a dozen planes which were being used in the picture and the unknown flyer turned his attention toward these. "If he blows them up, we can figure a hundred thousand dollar loss right there," groaned Helen's father. But the unknown flyer had reckoned without the resourcefulness of Curt Newsom. The lanky cowboy, riding hard by in the hills, had heard the first explosion and the roar of an airplane motor. They saw him flash out into the desert at a mad gallop. "He's crazy; someone stop him!" cried Henry Thorne, but there was no one near enough to reach Curt. Helen saw him drag a rifle from the scabbard on his saddle. The flyer was apparently disdainful of the lone rider for he dropped another bomb. It missed the planes by only the narrowest of margins and the pilot of the black ship swung around for another try. He swooped toward Curt and waved jeeringly as Curt leaped from the saddle. They were too far away to hear the report of the rifle but they could see the little puffs of smoke from the muzzle. Suddenly the black plane heeled sharply, its motor sputtering. The pilot shot over the side, his chute billowing out and Curt, jumping back into the saddle, rode like mad toward the hills. The plane gyrated uncertainly, then dove toward the ground. It struck with a tremendous explosion as the bombs still aboard let go. Helen saw Curt whirl back into the valley and sweep down on the flyer, who had landed in a tangle of cord and silk from the parachute. All thought of resistance was gone from the flyer's mind and the cowboy captured him easily. By the time the others arrived, Curt had the situation well in hand. "I think a confession out of this guy will solve our troubles," said the cowboy star as Henry Thorne stared at the flyer. "What have you got to say for yourself. Who employed you?" demanded the director. The flyer was sullen. "I'm not talking. I want an attorney." Curt rocked back and forth on his heels. "So you won't talk?" He grinned, but it was a mirthless grin that struck terror to those who watched. Curt was living in real life the rôle he had played so many times on the screen. With a quick jerk his lariat was free from the saddle and before the flyer knew it, he was in the coils of the rope and his feet had been jerked out from under him. Curt swung into the saddle, twisted the rope around the saddle horn and looked down on the helpless man. "Going to talk?" The captive shook his head. Curt spoke to his horse and the magnificent sorrel moved ahead slowly, dragging the captive after him. After bouncing over the desert floor for a rod, the flyer cried for mercy. "I'll talk; I'll talk. Get this rope off quick." "And you'll tell us what you did with that girl last night and where we can find her?" The captive nodded emphatically and Curt shook the rope loose. _Chapter XXVII_ THE SHOWDOWN When Janet regained consciousness she was aware of a roaring that filled her ears. It was as though a great storm was sweeping down upon her. Then, from the motion, she realized that she was in an airplane. Her head ached terrifically and she made no attempt to move for several minutes. As her eyes became accustomed to a dim glow of light ahead she could distinguish the figure of a man at the controls in the small cabin they were in. Janet shifted her weight and the man turned instantly, focusing a flashlight on her. "Keep still or I'll crack you again," he warned and from the fierceness of his voice Janet knew that he would not hesitate to carry out his threat. The pulse of the motor lessened and she felt the craft sinking, to settle smoothly into a little circle of light. It was then that she learned they were in an autogiro. Her captor opened the door and ordered her out. Still with her head throbbing wildly, Janet managed to get out. There was a bad scratch on her left leg that had bled rather freely. To her anxious questions, the flyer gave only the same answer, "You'll find out later, maybe." Janet was forced to allow her hands to be tied behind her and then was led to a small shelter tent. There was a blanket on the ground and the flyer tossed another over her. "Don't make any attempt to escape," he warned. The portable electric light which had guided the autogiro down into the basin was snapped off and Janet passed the remainder of the night in desperate anxiety, wondering what was happening back at camp and the meaning of her abduction. With the coming of dawn she hoped to learn more about the camp, but she was doomed to disappointment for her captor appeared and dropped the canvas fly which covered the front of the tiny tent. It was well after daylight when she heard another plane approaching. It landed nearby and a few minutes later she heard men's voices, one of whom she recognized as that of the flyer who had brought her there. Then the plane which had just landed roared away and it was shortly after that when Janet heard a series of booming explosions. Suddenly her tent flap was jerked roughly aside and her captor, a stocky, heavy-set man with a mass of black hair, ordered her to her feet. Janet struggled to get up, but she was numb from being in one position so long. The man half cuffed her upright and then hurried her toward the autogiro. The motor of the queer looking plane responded instantly and they rose almost straight out of the valley, which Janet judged must be some distance from Sagebrush. As they gained altitude she looked across the desert. Although it was several miles away, it seemed almost a stone's throw to Sagebrush, hardly recognizable now with the flames still consuming the few structures left in the village. Janet saw that the set for the desert airport had been destroyed. But what was more important was the swarm of planes which were climbing off the desert floor. Like angry hornets they were buzzing around. Suddenly one of them shot toward the autogiro and the rest followed. Janet heard her own pilot shouting in anger, but the autogiro was slow and the movie planes were around it almost instantly. In the foremost was Curt Newsom and Janet felt her blood chill as she saw the rifle in Curt's hard hands. Under the warning muzzle of the gun, the autogiro settled toward the floor of the valley and in less than three minutes the other planes were down around it while cars raced toward them, clouds of desert dust rising in their wake. Bertie Jackson was in the first car and when she saw Janet her face blanched. Helen and her father were in the same machine. "Are you all right?" asked Helen anxiously, for Janet was white-faced and deep hollows of fatigue were under her eyes. "A little tired," confessed Janet. "What happened? Was this something in the plot I wasn't supposed to know about?" "Tell us where you've been and why?" said Henry Thorne, and Janet briefly related the events. She didn't like to do it, but there was nothing else she could do under the circumstances and her story implicated Bertie Jackson. "She's jealous, that's all," snapped Bertie. "The whole story is trumped up." Then Curt Newsom took a hand. "Let's look at this thing squarely. How much were you and these two flyers paid to slow up production on 'Kings of the Air'?" He shot the question at Bertie. "You're impertinent," she blazed. "Sure, but you're likely to go to prison. Setting fire to buildings is arson, you know." There was no humor in his words and Bertie looked from one to another in the group around her. Each stared at her with scornful eyes. Defiant to the end, she flung her head back, "Well, what of it?" she demanded. "Only this. You'll never work in another picture for anybody." It was Henry Thorne speaking, quietly and firmly, and Bertie turned away. The two flyers, the one who had abducted Janet and the one who had bombed the set, talked. Janet didn't hear the whole story, but she and Helen learned enough to know that another rival company was implicated. It was Bertie who had set fire to the dry old houses in Sagebrush and who had supplied the flyers with information on the plans of the company. When they finally returned to what little was left of the village, Henry Thorne spoke quietly to the girls. "Don't worry now," he assured Helen. "There'll be no more delays. We can erect another set on the desert without too much loss of time and we'll have to live in tents, but that is endurable." Turning to Janet, he surprised her. "Janet, I'm going to put you in Bertie's rôle. We'll shoot the scene in the field restaurant over again when we get back to Hollywood, but I need someone right now to step into Bertie's place and you can handle the part. What do you say?" "I'll do my best," promised Janet. "I know you will." Then Henry Thorne hurried away to attend to one of the hundred details that are the worry of a successful director and Janet and Helen faced each other. "It looks like 'Kings of the Air' is going on to a successful conclusion now," said Janet. "I'm so happy." "And I'm happy that you are getting Bertie's part. Do you suppose we're going to be able to keep on in the movies?" "That," smiled Janet, "is something I couldn't even guess. If we don't we'll go home this fall with the memories of the most thrilling summer any two girls could have had." They turned to rejoin the rest of the company, unaware of the further adventures in Hollywood and in New York which were to befall them before winter came. * * * * * * Transcriber's note: --Obvious typographical errors were corrected except for a few amusing ones. 
40734	----	_By GUY THORNE_ When It Was Dark The Story of a Great Conspiracy 12^o. (By mail, $1.35) _Net_, $1.20 A Lost Cause 12^o $1.50 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS _New York and London_ THE SOCIALIST BY GUY THORNE AUTHOR OF "WHEN IT WAS DARK," ETC [Illustration: Decoration] G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press 1909 COPYRIGHT, 1909 BY WARD, LOCK AND COMPANY The Knickerbocker Press, New York TO JOHN GILBERT BOHUN LYNCH SOUVENIR OF FEBRUARY 8TH, 1909 CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I CONCERNING HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF PADDINGTON 1 CHAPTER II "HAIR LIKE RIPE CORN" 18 CHAPTER III A MOST SURPRISING DAY 28 CHAPTER IV THE MAN WITH THE MUSTARD-COLOURED BEARD 43 CHAPTER V "TO INAUGURATE A REVOLUTION!" 56 CHAPTER VI THE GREAT NEW PLAN 68 CHAPTER VII KIDNAPPING UPON SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLES 80 CHAPTER VIII "IN CELLAR COOL!" 92 CHAPTER IX MARY MARRIOTT'S INITIATION 103 CHAPTER X NEWS ARRIVES AT OXFORD 115 CHAPTER XI THE DISCOVERY 126 CHAPTER XII AT THE BISHOP'S TOWN HOUSE 139 CHAPTER XIII NEW FRIENDS: NEW IDEAS 149 CHAPTER XIV AT THE PARK LANE THEATRE 169 CHAPTER XV THE MANUSCRIPT IN THE LIBRARY 190 CHAPTER XVI ARTHUR BURNSIDE'S VIEWS 201 CHAPTER XVII THE COMING OF LOVE 212 CHAPTER XVIII A LOVER, AND NEWS OF LOVERS 234 CHAPTER XIX TROUBLED WATERS 256 CHAPTER XX THE DUKE KNOWS AT LAST 269 CHAPTER XXI IN THE STAGE BOX AT THE PARK LANE THEATRE 279 CHAPTER XXII THE SUPPER ON THE STAGE 291 CHAPTER XXIII POINTS OF VIEW FROM A DUKE, A BISHOP, A VISCOUNT, AND THE DAUGHTER OF AN EARL 304 CHAPTER XXIV "LOVE CROWNS THE DEED" 315 CHAPTER XXV EPILOGUE 326 THE SOCIALIST CHAPTER I CONCERNING HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF PADDINGTON There are as many social degrees in the peerage as there are in the middle and lower classes. There are barons who are greater noblemen than earls, viscounts who are welcomed in a society that some marquises can never hope to enter--it is a question not of wealth or celebrity, but of family relationships and date of creation. When, however, a man is a duke in England, his state is so lofty, he is so inevitably apart from every one else that these remarks hardly apply at all. Yet even in dukedoms one recognises there are degrees. There are royal dukes, stately figureheads moving in the brilliant light which pours from the throne, and generally a little obscured by its refulgence. These have their own serene place and being. There are the political dukes, Cabinet-made, who are solemnly caricatured through two generations of _Punch_, massive, Olympian, and generally asleep on the front benches of the House of Lords. And every now and then it happens that there are the young dukes. The fathers of the young dukes have lived to a great age and married late in life. They have died when their sons were little children. For years it seems to the outside public as if certain historic houses are in abeyance. Nothing much is heard of these names, and only Londoners who pay enormous ground rents to this or that Ducal estate office realise what a long minority means. From time to time paragraphs find their way into the society papers telling of the progress of this or that young dukeling at Eton. The paragraphs become more in evidence when the lad goes to Oxford, and then, like a suddenly-lit lamp, the prince attains his majority. Paragraphs in weekly papers expand into columns in all the dailies. The public suddenly realises that the Duke of ----, a young man of twenty-one, owns a great slice of London, has an income of from one to two hundred thousand pounds a year, and by the fact of his position is a force in public affairs. For a week every one talks about the darling of fortune. His pictures are in all the journals. His castle in Kent, his palace in Park Lane, his castle in Scotland, his villa at Monte Carlo, are, as it were, thrown open to the inspection of the world. The hereditary jewels are disinterred by popular rumour from the vaults at Coutts' Bank. The Mysore Nagar emerald that the third duke brought from India glitters once more in the fierce light of day. The famous diamond tiara that the second duke bought for his duchess (in the year when his horse "Strawberry Leaf" won the Derby and His Grace eighty thousand pounds) sparkles as never before. Photographers seek, and obtain, permission to visit the famous picture galleries at Duke Dale, and American millionaires gasp with envy as they read of the Velasquez, the three Murillos, the priceless series of Rembrandt genre pictures, and the "Prince in Sable" of Vandyck, owned by a youth who has in all probability never seen any one of them. The man in the street has his passing throb of envy, and then, being a generous-minded fellow in the main, and deeply imbued with loyalty to all existing and splendid institutions, wishes his lordship luck and promptly forgets all about him. What the man _on_ the street--a very different sort of person--says, is merely a matter which polite people do not hear, for who heeds a few growls in cellars or curses in a cul-de-sac? Women are even more generous, as is their dear mission to the world. If your dukeling is a pretty lad, presentable and straight as caught by the obsequious camera, they give him kind thoughts and wonder who the fortunate girl will be. Who shall share the throne of Prince Fortunatus? On whose white and slender neck shall that great Indian emerald give out its sinful Asiatic fire? On whose shining coronet of hair shall rise that crown of diamonds that the brave horse won for the "bad old duke" on Epsom Downs? And then all the stir and bother is over. Some newer thing engages the public mind. Another stone is thrown into another pool; the ripples upon the first die away, and the waters are tranquil once more. Prince Fortunatus has ascended his throne, and the echoes of the ceremonial trumpets are over and gone. * * * * * John Augustus Basil FitzTracy was the fifth Duke of Paddington, Earl of Fakenham in Norfolk, and a baronet of the United Kingdom. His seats were Fakenham Hall, at Fakenham, Castle Trink, N. B., and the old Welsh stronghold, near Conway, known as Carleon, which had come to him from his mother's aunt, old Lady Carleon of Lys. In regard to his houses, there was, first and foremost, the great square pile in Piccadilly, which was almost as big as the Duke of Devonshire's palace, and was known as Paddington House. There was an old Saxon house near Chipping Norton, in Gloucestershire, which was used as a hunting-box--the late duke always having ridden with the Heythrop. There was also a big blue, pink-and-white villa upon the Promenade des Anglais at Nice--the late duke liked to spend February among the palms and roses of the Riviera, though it was said that the duchess never accompanied him upon these expeditions to the sun-lit shores of the Mediterranean. The Duke of Paddington was not a great country nobleman. Fakenham was some three thousand acres, and though the shooting was excellent, as is the shooting of all the big houses which surround Sandringham Hall, the place in itself was not particularly noteworthy. Nor did the duke own coal mines, while no railways had enriched him by passing through any of his properties. The duke's enormous revenues were drawn from London. He and their graces of Westminster and Bedford might well have contended for a new title--Duke of London. If extent of possessions and magnitude of fortune could alone decide such an issue the Duke of Paddington would have won. A huge slice of the outer West End--anywhere north of Oxford Street--belonged to him. His income was variously stated, but the only truth about it, upon which every one was agreed, was that it was incredibly large. There was a certain modest, massive stone building in the Edgware Road where the duke's affairs were conducted. It was known as the FitzTracy Estate Office, forty clerks were regularly employed there, and only old Colonel Simpson, late of the Army Service Corps, and now chief agent to the duke, knew what the actual income was. Possessor of all this,--and it is but the barest epitome,--the duke was twenty-three years of age, had no near relations, and was just finishing his university career at Oxford. Everything that the human mind can wish for was his; there was hardly anything in the world, worthy or unworthy, that he could not have by asking for it. The duke was an undergraduate of St. Paul's College, Oxford. Much smaller than Christ Church, Magdalen, or New College, St. Paul's is, nevertheless, the richest and most aristocratic foundation in the university. It was a preserve of the peerage; no poor men could afford to enter at Paul's, and it was even more difficult for the sons of rich vulgarians to do so. On one dull, cold morning at the end of the October term the duke came out of his bedroom into the smaller of his two sitting rooms. It was about ten o'clock. He had cut both early chapel or its alternative roll-call--necessities from which even dukes are not exempt if they wish to keep their terms. The duke wore an old Norfolk jacket and a pair of grey flannel trousers. His feet were thrust into a pair of red leather bath slippers. He was about five feet ten in height, somewhat sturdily built, and deliberate in his movements. His head was thickly covered with very dark red hair. The eyes were grey, and with a certain calm and impassivity about them--the calm of one so highly placed that nothing can easily affect him; one sees it in the eyes of kings and queens. The nose was aquiline, and thin at the nostrils, the nose of an aristocrat; the mouth was large, and pleasant in expression, though by no means always genial. There was, in short, something Olympian about this young man, an air, a manner, an aroma of slight aloofness, a consciousness of his position. It was not aggressive or pronounced, but it was indubitably there. In the majority of colleges at Oxford undergraduates have only two rooms. In Paul's, more particularly in what were known as the new buildings, men had three, a bedroom, a dining-room or small sitting-room, in which breakfast and lunch were taken, and a larger sitting-room. The duke came out of his bedroom into the smaller room. It was panelled in white throughout. Let into the panels here and there were first impressions of famous coloured mezzotints by Raphael Smith, Valentine Green, and other masters. They had been brought from the portfolios at Paddington House, and each one was worth three hundred pounds. The chairs of this room were upholstered in red leather--a true vermilion, and not the ordinary crimson--which went admirably with the white walls and the Persian carpet, brick-dust and peacock blue colour, from Teheran. A glowing fire of cedar logs sent a cheerful warmth into the room, and the flames were reflected in the china and silver of a small round table prepared for breakfast. Although it was November, there was a great silver dish of fruit, nectarines, and strawberries, grapes and peaches, all produced in the new electric forcing houses which had been installed at the duke's place at Fakenham. There was no apparatus for tea or coffee. In some things the duke was a little unusual. He never drank tea or coffee, but took a glass of thin white wine from Valperga. The tall yellow bottle stood on the table now, and by its side was a fragile glass of gold and purple, blown in Venice three hundred years ago. The duke crossed the room and the larger one that opened out of it. He pushed open the swing door--the heavy outer "oak" lay flat against the wall--and shouted down the staircase for his "scout." Despite the ineradicable belief of some popular novelists, there are no bells at Oxford, and duke or commoner must summon his servant in the good old mediæval way. In a minute the man appeared with breakfast. He had previously brought his master a printed list from the kitchens when he called him. Gardener was an elderly, grey-haired man, clean-shaven, and confidential of manner. He had served many young noblemen on staircase number one, and each and all had found him invaluable. He had feathered his nest well during the years, and was worth every penny of ten thousand pounds. A type produced nowhere in such completeness and perfection as at Oxford or Cambridge, he represented a certain definite social class, a class more hated by the working man than perhaps any other--the polite parasite! "Beastly weather, Gardener," said the duke in a voice which every one found musical and pleasant, a contented, full-blooded voice. "It is indeed, sir," said Gardener, as he arranged two silver dishes upon the table--"very dull and cold. I was told that there would be skating on Port Meadow as I came into college this morning." "Well, I don't think it will tempt me," said the duke. "You understand thoroughly about lunch?" "Thoroughly, sir, thank you. Do you wish anything else now, sir?" "Nothing more, Gardener. You can go." "I thank your grace," said the scout, and left the room. Gardener had brought the art of politeness to a high point. Indeed, he had elevated it to a science. He always made a distinction, thoroughly understood and appreciated by his masters, between himself and the ordinary flunkey or house servant. He called a duke or a marquis "sir" in general address, reserving the title for the moment of leaving the room, thus showing that he did not forget the claims of rank, while he was too well-bred to weary his hearer by undue repetition. The duke began his breakfast--a chop and a poached egg. The young man was by no means of a luxurious turn of mind as far as his personal tastes were concerned. Simplicity was the keynote of many of his actions. But he was very punctilious that everything about him should be "just so," and had he dined on a dish of lentils he would have liked them cooked by Escoffier. There was a pile of letters by his plate. He opened them one by one, throwing most of them on to an adjacent chair for his secretary--who called every day at eleven--to answer. One of the letters bore the cardinal's hat, which is the crest of Christ Church College, and was from the duke's greatest friend in the university, Viscount Hayle. This was the letter: "MY DEAR JOHN,--My father and sister arrived to-night, and, as I supposed, they will be delighted to lunch to-morrow. You said at one, didn't you? I have been dining with them at the _Randolph_, but I have come back to college, as I must read for a couple of hours before I go to bed. "Yours, "GERALD." Gerald, Viscount Hayle, was the only son of the Earl of Camborne, who was a spiritual as well as a temporal peer inasmuch as he was the Bishop of Carlton, the great northern manufacturing centre. Lord Hayle and the Duke of Paddington had gone up to Oxford in the same term. They were of equal ages, and many of their tastes and opinions were identical, while the remaining differences of temperament and thought only served to accentuate their strong friendship and to give it a wholesome tonic quality. The duke had met Lord Camborne once only. He had never stayed at the palace, though often pressed to do so by Lord Hayle. Something or other had always intervened to prevent it. The two young men had not known each other during their school days--the duke had been at Eton, his friend at Winchester--and their association had been simply at the university. Now the bishop, who was a widower, was coming to Oxford for a few days, to be present at a reception to be given to Herr Schmölder, the famous German Biblical scholar, and was bringing his daughter, Lady Constance Camborne, with him. As he ate his nectarine the duke wondered what sort of a girl Lady Constance was. That she was very lovely he knew from general report, and Gerald also was extremely good-looking. But he wondered if she was like all the other girls he knew, accomplished, charming, sometimes beautiful and always smart, but--stereotyped. That was just what all society girls were; they always struck him as having been made in exactly the same mould. They said the same sort of things in the same sort of voice. Their thoughts ran in grooves, not necessarily narrow or limited grooves, but identical ones. Before he had finished breakfast the duke's valet entered. The man was his own private servant, and of course lived out of college, while there was a perpetual feud between him and old Gardener, the scout. The man carried two large boxes of thin wood in his hands. "The orchids have come, your grace," he said. "They were sent down from the shop in Piccadilly by an early train in answer to my telegram. I went to the station this morning to get them." "Oh, very well, Proctor," said the duke. "Thank you. Just open the boxes and I will look at them. Then you can arrange them in the other room. I sha'n't have any flowers on the table at lunch." In a minute Proctor had opened the boxes and displayed the wealth of strange, spotted blooms within--monstrous exotic flowers, beautiful with a morbid and almost unhealthy beauty. The duke was a connoisseur of orchids. "Yes, these will do very well," he said. "Now you can take them out." The man, a slim, clean-shaven young fellow, with dark eyes and a resolute jaw, hesitated a moment as if about to speak. The duke, who had found a certain pleasure in thinking of his friend's sister and wondering if she would be like her brother, had been lost in a vague but pleasing reverie in fact, looked up sharply. He wanted to be alone again. He wanted to catch up the thread of his thoughts. "Well?" he said. "I think I told you to go, Proctor?" The valet flushed at his master's tone. Then he seemed to make an effort. "I beg your grace's pardon," he said. "I wish to give you my notice." The duke stared at his valet. "Why, what on earth do you mean?" he said. "You've only been with me for nine months, and I have found you satisfactory in every way. You have just learnt all my habits and exactly how I like things done. And now you want to leave me! Are you aware, Proctor, that you enjoy a situation that many men would give their ears for?" "Indeed, your grace, I know that I am fortunate, and that there are many that would envy me." "Then don't talk any more nonsense. What do I pay you? A hundred and twenty pounds a year, isn't it? Well, then, take another twenty pounds. Now go and arrange the orchids." "I am very sorry, your grace," Proctor said. "But I do not seek any increase of wages. I respectfully ask you to accept my month's notice." A certain firmness and determination had come into the valet's voice. It irritated the duke. It was a note to which he was not accustomed. But he tried to keep his temper. "What are your reasons for wishing to leave me?" he said, asking the direct question for the first time. "I have been successful with a small invention, your grace. I occupy my spare time with mechanics. It is an improved lock and key, and a firm have taken it up." "Have they paid you?" said the duke. "A certain sum down, your grace, and a royalty is to follow on future sales." "I congratulate you, I'm sure," the duke said, with an unconsciously contemptuous smile, for he shared the not uncommon opinion among certain people that there is something ludicrous in the originality of a servant. "No idea you were such a clever fellow. But I don't see why you should want to leave me. Because you are my servant it won't interfere with you collecting your royalties or whatever they are." The duke was a kind-hearted young man enough. He did not mean to wound his valet, but he had never been accustomed to think of such people as quite human--human in the sense that he himself was human--and his tone was far more unpleasant than he had any idea of. The valet flushed up. Then he did an extraordinary thing. He took two five-pound notes from his pocket and placed them upon the table. "That is a month's wages, your grace," he said, "instead of a month's notice. I am no longer your servant, nor any man's." As he spoke the whole aspect of the valet changed. He seemed to stand more upright, his eyes had a curious light in them, his lips were parted as one who inhales pure air after being long in a close room. The duke's face grew pale with anger. "What do you mean by this?" he said in a voice which was a strange mixture of passion and astonishment. "Exactly what I say, sir," Proctor answered. "That I am no longer in your service. I have done all that is legally necessary to discharge myself. And I have a word to say to you. You are not likely to hear such words addressed to you again, until your class and all it means is swept away for ever. You sneer at me because I have dared to invent something, to produce something, to add something to the world's wealth and the world's comfort. What have you ever done? What have you ever contributed to society? I am a better man than you are, and worth more to society, because I've worked for my living and earned my daily bread, even though fortune made me your body servant. But I'm free now, and, mark what I say, read the signs of the times, if one in your position can have any insight into truth at all! Read the signs of the times, and be sure that before you and I are old men we shall be equal in the eyes of the world as we are unequal now! There aren't going to be any more drones in the hive. Men aren't going to have huge stores of private property any more. You won't be allowed to own land which is the property of every one." He stopped suddenly in the flood of high-pitched, agitated speech, quivering with excitement, a man transformed and carried away. Was this the suave, quiet fellow who had brushed the clothes and put studs into the shirts? With an involuntary gesture the duke passed his hand before his eyes. He was astounded at this sudden volcanic outburst. Nothing, as Balzac said, is more alarming than the rebellion of a sheep. But as Proctor's voice died away his excitement seemed to go with it, or at any rate long habit and training checked and mastered it. The man bowed, not without dignity, and when he spoke again his voice was once more the old respectful one. "I beg your grace's pardon," he said, "if I have been disrespectful. There are times when a man loses control of himself, and what is beneath the surface will out. Your grace will find everything in perfect order." He withdrew without another word and passed out of his master's life. The duke was left staring at the masses of orchids which lay before him on the table. When Gardener, the scout, entered he found the duke still in the same position--lost in a sort of day-dream. CHAPTER II "HAIR LIKE RIPE CORN" The duke was reciting his adventure with the valet to his three guests, but he glanced most often at Lady Constance Camborne. No, the society journals and society talk hadn't exaggerated her beauty a bit--she was far and away the loveliest girl he had ever seen. He knew it directly she came into the room with Lord Hayle and the bishop, the influence of such extraordinary beauty was felt like a physical blow. The girl was of a Saxon type, but with all the colouring accentuated. The hair which crowned the small, patrician head in shining masses was golden. But it was not pale gold, metallic gold, or flaxen. It was a deep, rich gold, an "old gold," and the duke, with a somewhat unaccustomed flight of fancy, compared it in his mind to ripe corn. Her eyebrows were very dark brown, almost black, and the great eyes, with their long black lashes, were dark as a southern night. Under their great coronet of yellow hair, and set in a face whose contour was a pure and perfect oval, with a skin like the inside of a seashell, the contrast was extraordinarily effective. Her beautiful lips had the rare lines of the unbroken Greek bow, and their colour was like wine. She was tall in figure, even as though some marble goddess had stepped down from her pedestal in the Louvre and assumed the garments of the daughters of men. Some people said that, beautiful as she was in every way, her crowning beauty was her hands. She had sat to Pozzi, at Milan, at the great sculptor's earnest request, so that he might perpetuate the glory of her hands for ever. Mr. Swinburne had written a sonnet, shown only to a favoured few and never published, about her hands. The duke talked on. Outwardly he was calm enough, within his brain was in a turmoil entirely fresh to it, entirely new and unexpected. He heard his own voice mechanically relating the incident of Proctor's rebellion, but he gave hardly a thought to what he said. For all he knew he might have been talking the most absolute nonsense. He was lost in wonder that one living, moving human being could be so fair! He felt a sort of unreasoning anger with his friend, Lord Hayle. Why hadn't Gerald introduced him to his sister before? Why had all this time been wasted?--quite forgetting the repeated invitations he had received to stay with the Cambornes. "Well, what did you do in the end, John?" said Lord Hayle. "Did you kick the fellow out? I should have pitched him down the staircase, by Jove!" "As a matter of fact, I did nothing at all," said the duke. "I was too surprised. I just sat still and let him talk; I was quite tongue-tied." "More's the pity," said the young viscount, a lean, sinewy lad, who rowed three in the 'Varsity boat. "I should have made very short work of him." "Don't be such a savage, Gerald," Lady Constance answered. "It was very rude, of course; but from what the duke says, the man was not exactly what you would call impudent, and he apologised at the end. And nowadays every one has a right to his own opinions. We don't live in the middle ages any longer." Her voice was like a silver bell, the duke thought, as the girl voiced these somewhat republican sentiments. A silver bell, was it? No, it was like water falling into water, like a flute playing in a wood at a great distance. "My daughter is quite a Radical, Paddington," said Lord Camborne, with a smile. "She'll grow out of it when she gets a little older. But I found her reading the _Fabian Essays_ the other day; actually the _Fabian Essays_!"--the bishop said it with a shudder. "And she met John Burns at a ministerial reception, and said he was charming!" "It's all very well for Constance," said Lord Hayle; "a girl plays at that sort of thing, and if it amuses her it hurts nobody else. However much Connie talks about equality, and all that, she'd never sit down to dinner with the butler. But it's quite another thing when all these chaps are getting elected to Parliament and making all these new laws. If it isn't stopped, no one will be safe. It's getting quite alarming. For my part, I wish a chap like Lord Kitchener could be made Dictator of England for a month. He'd have all the Socialists up against a wall and shoot them in no time. Then things would be right again." Lord Hayle concluded in his best college debating society manner, and drank a glass of hock and seltzer in a bloodthirsty and determined manner. The bishop, a tall, portly man, with a singularly fine face and extreme graciousness of manner--he was most popular at Court, and it was said would certainly go to Canterbury when Dr. ---- died,--laughed a little at his son's vehemence. "That would hardly solve the problem," he said. "But it will solve itself. I am quite sure that there is no real reason for alarm. The country is beginning to wake up to the real character of the Socialist leaders. It will no longer listen to them. Men of sense are beginning to perceive that the great fact of inequality as between man and man is everywhere stamped in ineffaceable characters. Men are not equal, and they never will be while talent, and talent alone, produces wealth. Democracy is nothing but a piece of humbug from beginning to end--a transparent attempt to flatter a mass of stupid mediocrity which is too dull to appreciate the language of its hypocritical and time-serving admirers. These contemptible courtiers of the mob no more believe in equality than the ruin-bringing demagogues of ancient Athens did. One only has to watch them to see how eager they are to feather their nests at the expense of all the geese that will stand plucking. Observe how they scheme and contrive to secure official positions so that they may lord it over the general herd of common workers. They have their own little game to play, and beyond their own self-interest they do not care a straw. Knowing that they are unfit to succeed either in commercial or industrial pursuits, they try to extend the sphere of governmental regulation. What for? To supply themselves with congenial jobs where they won't be subject to the keen test of industrial and commercial competition, and will be less likely to be found out for the worthless wind-bags that they are!" The bishop paused. He had spoken as one having authority; quite in the grand manner, bland, serene, and a little pompous. He half-opened his mouth to continue, looked round to recognise that his audience was a young one, and thought better of it. He drank half a glass of port instead. The conversation changed to less serious matters, and in another minute or so Gardener entered to say that coffee was ready in the other room. The "sitter," to use the Oxford slang word, was very large. It was, indeed, one of the finest rooms in the whole of Paul's. Three tall oriel windows lighted it, it was panelled in dark oak, and there was a large open fire-place. It was a man's room. Luxurious as it was in all its furniture appointments and colouring, all was nevertheless strongly masculine. The rows of briar pipes, in their racks, a pile of hunting crops and riding switches in one corner, a tandem horn, the pictures of dogs and horses upon the walls, and three or four gun-cases behind the little black Bord piano, spoke eloquently of male tastes. Though it is often said, it is generally quite untrue to say, that a man's rooms are an index to his personality. Few people can express themselves in their furniture. The conscious attempt to do so results in over-emphasis and strain. The ideal is either canonised or vulgarised, and the vision within is distorted and lost. At Oxford, especially, very few men succeed in doing more than attaining a convention. But the duke's rooms really did reflect himself to some extent. They showed a certain freshness of idea and a liking for what was considered and choice. But there was no effeminacy, no over-refinement. They showed simplicity of temperament, and were not complex. Nor was the duke complex. Lady Constance was peculiarly susceptible to the influences of material and external things. She was extremely quick to gather and weigh impressions--the room interested her, her brother's friend interested her already. She found something in his personality which was attractive. The whole atmosphere of these ancient Oxford rooms pleased and stimulated her, and she talked brightly and well, revealing a mind with real originality and a gentle and sympathetic wit most rare in girls of her age. "And what are you going to do in the vacation?" the bishop asked the duke. "For the first three or four weeks I shall be in town; then I'm going down to Norfolk. I sha'n't stay at Fakenham, Lord Leicester is putting me up; but we are going to shoot over Fakenham. I can't stay all alone in that great place, you know, though I did think of having some men down. However, that was before the Leicesters asked me. Then I am to be at Sandringham for three days for the theatricals. It is the first time I have been there, you know." "You'll find it delightful," said the bishop. "The King is the best host in England. On the three occasions when I have had the honour of an invitation I have thoroughly enjoyed myself. Where are you staying when you are in town--at Paddington House?" "Oh, no! That would be worse than Fakenham! Paddington House was let, always, during my minority, but for two years now there have just been a few servants there, but no one living in the house. My agent looks after all that. No, I am engaging some rooms at the _Carlton_. It's near everywhere. I have a lot of parties to go to, and Claridge's is always so full of German grand dukes!" "But why not come to us in Grosvenor Street?" said the bishop. "You've never been able to accept any of Gerald's invitations yet. Here is an opportunity. I have to be in town for three or four weeks, at the House of Lords and the Westminster conference of the bishops. You'd much better come to us. We'll do our best to make you comfortable." "Oh, do come, John!" said Lord Hayle. "Yes, please come, duke," said Lady Constance. "It's awfully good of you, Lord Camborne," said the duke; "I shall be delighted to come." It was a dark and gloomy afternoon--indeed, the electric bulbs in their silver candelabra were all turned on. But suddenly it seemed to the duke that the sun was shining and there was bird music in the air. He looked at Lady Constance. "I shall be delighted to come," he said again. They chatted on, and presently the duke found himself standing by one of the tall windows talking to his friend's sister. Lord Hayle, himself an enthusiastic amateur of art, was showing his father some of the treasures upon the walls. "How dreary it is to-day--the weather, I mean,"--said the girl. "There has been a dense fog in town for the last three days, I see by the papers. And through it all the poor unemployed men have been tramping and holding demonstrations without anything to eat. I can't help thinking of the poor things." The duke had not thought about the unemployed before, but now he made a mental vow to send a big cheque to the Lord Mayor's fund. "It must be very hard for them," he said vaguely. "I remember meeting one of their processions once when I was walking down Piccadilly." "The street of your palace!" she answered more brightly. "Devonshire House, Paddington House, and Apsley House, and all the clubs in between! It must be interesting to have a palace in London. I suppose Paddington House is very splendid inside, isn't it? I have never seen more of it than the upper windows and the huge wall in front." "Well, it is rather gorgeous," he said; "though I never go there, or, at least, hardly ever. But I have a book of photographs here. I will show them to you, Lady Constance, if I may. So far we've succeeded in keeping them out of the illustrated magazines." "Oh, please do!" she said. "Father, the duke is going to show me some pictures of the rooms of his mysterious great place in Piccadilly." As she spoke there was a knock upon the door, and the scout came in with a telegram upon a tray. "I thought I had better bring it at once, sir," he said; "it's marked 'urgent' upon the envelope." With an apology, the duke opened the flimsy orange-coloured wrapping. Then he started, his face grew rather paler, and he gave a sudden exclamation. "Good heavens!" he said, "listen to this: "'Large portion front west wing Paddington House destroyed by explosion an hour ago. Bomb filled with picric acid discovered intact near gateway. The smaller Gainsborough and the Florence vase destroyed. Please come up town immediately. "'SIMPSON.'" There was a dead silence in the room. CHAPTER III A MOST SURPRISING DAY Lord Camborne, Lord Hayle, and Lady Constance stared at the duke in amazement as he read the extraordinary telegram from Colonel Simpson. Lady Constance was the first to speak. "And you were just getting the book of photographs!" she said in a bewildered voice, "the photographs of Paddington House, and now----" "Read the wire again, John," said Lord Hayle. The duke did so; it was quite clear: "'Large portion front west wing Paddington House destroyed by explosion an hour ago. Bomb filled with picric acid discovered intact near gateway. The smaller Gainsborough and the Florence vase destroyed. Please come up town immediately. "'SIMPSON.'" "The smaller Gainsborough--that's the famous portrait of Lady Honoria FitzTracy," said Lord Hayle suddenly. "Why, it's the finest example of Gainsborough in existence!" He grew pale with sympathy as he looked at his friend. "It isn't in existence any more, apparently," said the duke. "I wish the Florence vase had been saved. My father gave ten thousand pounds for it--not that the money matters--but, you see, it was the only one in the world, except the smaller example in the Vatican." The bishop broke in with a slight trace of impatience in his voice. "My dear young men," he said, "surely the great question is: Who has perpetrated this abominable outrage? What does it all mean? What steps are being----" He stopped short. Gardener had entered with another telegram. "Man arrested on suspicion, known to belong to advanced socialist or anarchist group. Can you catch the fast train up? There is one at six. I will meet you with car. "SIMPSON." "Well, here is a sort of answer," said the duke, handing the telegram to the bishop. "It appears that the thing is another of those kindly and amiable protests which the lower classes make against their betters from time to time." "Just what I was saying," young Lord Hayle broke in eagerly, "just what I was saying a few minutes ago. It's all the result of educating the lower classes sufficiently to make them discontented and to put these scoundrelly socialists and blackguards into Parliament. They'll be trying Buckingham Palace or Marlborough House next! Probably this is the work of those unemployed gentry whom I heard Constance defending just now." "It's a bad business," said Lord Camborne gravely; "a very black, bad business indeed. Paddington, you have my sincerest sympathy. I am afraid that in the shock of the news we may have been a little remiss in expressing our grief, but you know, my dear boy, how we all feel for you." He went up to the duke as he spoke, a grand and stately old man, and shook him warmly by the hand. "Yes, John," said Lord Hayle, "we really are awfully sorry, old chap." Lady Constance said nothing, but she looked at her host, and it was enough. He forgot the news, he forgot everything save only the friendship and kindliness in her eyes. "I suppose you will go up to town by the six o'clock train?" Lord Hayle said. "I suppose I must, Gerald," the duke replied. "I must go and get leave from the dean later on. I expect I shall have to stay the night. It's not an inviting day for London, is it?" "Do you know, duke, that I think you are taking it remarkably well," Lady Constance said with a sudden dazzling smile. "I should have been terribly frightened, and then cried my eyes out about the vase and the picture. And as for Hayle--well, I think I can imagine the way Hayle would have behaved." "Well, of course, I'm horribly angry," the duke said, "and such a thing means a great deal more to society in general than its mere personal aspect to me. But I can't somehow feel it very nearly; it seems remote. I should realize it far more if any one were to steal or break anything in these rooms here--things I constantly touch and see, things I live with. I have so many houses and pictures and things that I never see; they don't seem part of one." "I can quite understand that," said the bishop; "but that will all be changed some day, please God, before very long. You are only on the threshold of life as yet, you know." He smiled paternally at the young man, and there was a good deal of meaning in his smile. The duke, not ordinarily sensitive about such things, blushed a little now. He was quite aware to what Lord Camborne referred. The bishop, astute courtier and diplomatist that he was, marked the blush, pretended not to notice it, and was secretly well pleased. He himself was earl as well as bishop, he was wealthy, he was certain of the Primacy. His daughter, whom he loved and admired more than any other living thing, was a match for any one with her rank and wealth and loveliness. He longed to see her happily married also. At the same time, good man as he was, he was by his very nature and training a worldly man. If, therefore, the two young people fell in love with each other--well, it would be a very charming arrangement, to say the least of it, Lord Camborne thought. For, far and away above all other fortunate young noblemen, the duke was the greatest _parti_ of the day; he stood alone. "I've got three hours or more before the train goes," said the duke, "and I can dine on board; there's a car, I know. Now, do let's forget this troublesome business. I'm so sorry, Lady Constance, that it should have happened while you were here. Let's shut out this horrid afternoon." He spoke with light-hearted emphasis, with gaiety even. Despite what had happened he felt thoroughly happy, his blood ran swiftly in his veins, his pulses throbbed to exhilarating measures. Oh, how beautiful she was! How gracious and lovely! He went to the windows and pulled the heavy crimson curtains over them, shutting out the wan, grey light of the November afternoon. He made Gardener bring candles--innumerable candles--to supplement the glow of the electric lights. More logs were cast upon the fire--logs of sawn cedar wood which gave flames of rose-pink and amethyst. The noble room was illuminated as if for a feast. Lord Hayle entered into the spirit of the thing, _con amore_. His spirits rose with those of his friend, and his sister also caught the note, while Lord Camborne, smoking a cigar by the fire, watched the three young people with a benevolent smile. Lady Constance had been sitting by the piano. "Do you play, Lady Constance?" the duke asked. "She's one of the best amateur pianists I've ever heard," said Lord Hayle. "Do play something, Lady Constance. What will you give us?" "It depends on the sort of music you like. Do you like Chopin?" "I am very fond of Chopin indeed." "I'll tell you what to play, Connie," said Lord Hayle eagerly. "Play that wonderful nocturne, I forget the number, where the bell comes in. The one with the story about it." "A story?" said the duke. "Yes; don't you know it, John? Chopin had just come back from his villa at Majorca--come back to Paris at a time when Georges Sand would have nothing more to do with him. He was living close to Notre Dame. He had a supper by appointment, but began to write his nocturne and forgot all about the time. He was nearing the end when the big bell of the cathedral began to toll midnight. He realised how late it was, and forced himself to finish the thing in a hurry. He wove the twelve great 'clangs' into the theme. It's marvellously romantic and Gothic. One seems to see Victor Hugo's dwarf, Quasimodo, upon the tower, drinking in the midnight air." Lady Constance sat down at the piano and began the nocturne. The beautiful hands flashed over the keys, whiter than the ivory on which they pressed, her face was grave with the joy of what she was doing. And as the duke listened the time and place faded utterly away. The passionate and yet fantastic music pealed out into the room and destroyed its material appeal to the senses. His brain seemed suddenly aware of a larger and more fully-coloured life than he had ever known before, ever thought possible before. He stood upon the threshold of it; it held strange secrets, wonderful chances; there were passionate moments for young blood awaiting! Here was the agony that lurked in pleasure, the immedicable pain which allured--lights gleamed behind swaying veils. Clang! The deep resonance of the iron bell tolled into the dream. Clang! The twin towers of Notre Dame were stark and black up in the sky. Clang! The dark sky grew rosy, he saw her hands, he saw the light upon her face. It was dark no longer--the bell had tolled away the old day, dawn was at hand, the new day was coming; the dawn of love was rosy in the sky. * * * * * It was four o'clock when the duke's guests went away. He went with them through the two quadrangles of Paul's to the massive gateway, and saw the three tall figures disappear in the mist with a sense of desolation and loss. But as he was returning to his rooms to get cap and gown in which to visit the dean of his college, he comforted himself with the reflection that term was almost over. In a week or so he would be in London, staying in the same house with her! The very thought set his heart beating like a drum! He was nearly at the door of his staircase when he saw a man coming towards him, evidently about to speak to him. It was a man he recognised, though he had never spoken to him, a man called Burnside. St. Paul's, as it has been said, was a college in which nearly all the undergraduates were rich men. A man of moderate means could not afford to join it. At the same time, as in the case of all colleges, there were half-a-dozen scholarships open to any one. As these scholarships were large in amount they naturally attracted very poor men. At the present moment there were some six or seven scholars of Paul's, who lived almost entirely upon their scholarships and such tutorial work as they could secure in the vacations. But these men lived a life absolutely apart from the other men of the college. They could afford to subscribe to none of the college clubs, they could not dress like other men, they could not entertain. That they were all certain to get first-classes and develop into distinguished men mattered nothing to the young aristocrats of the college. For them the scholars simply did not exist. Burnside, the duke had heard somewhere or other, was one of the most promising scholars of his year, but he wore rather shabby black clothes, very thick boots, and a made-up tie; he was quite an unimportant person! He came up to the duke now, his pale intelligent face flushing a little and a very obvious nervousness animating him. "Might I speak to you a moment?" he said. The duke looked at him with that peculiar Oxford stare, which is possibly the most insolent expression known to the physiognomist, a cultivated rudeness which the Oxford "blood" learns to discard very quickly indeed when he "goes down" and enters upon the realities of life. The duke did not mean anything by his stare, however; it was habit, that was all, and seeing the nervousness of his vis-à-vis was growing painful, his face relaxed. "Oh, all right," he said. "What is it--anything I can do? At any rate, come up to my rooms, it's so confoundedly dismal out here this afternoon." The two men went up the stairs together and entered the huge luxurious sitting-room, with its brilliant lights, its glowing fire, its pictures and flowers. Burnside looked swiftly around him; he had never dreamed of such luxury, and then he began-- "I hope you won't think me impertinent," he said, "but I have just received a telegram from the _Daily Wire_. I occasionally do some work for them. They tell me that part of your town house has been destroyed by an explosion, and that some famous art treasures have been destroyed." "That's quite true, unfortunately," said the duke. "And they ask me to obtain an interview with you for to-morrow's paper in order that you may make some statement about your loss." He spoke with an eagerness that almost outweighed, at any rate, alleviated his nervousness. "Most certainly not!" said the duke sharply. "I wonder that you should permit yourself to make me such a request. I will wish you good-afternoon!" The other muttered something that sounded like an apology and then turned to go. His face was quite changed. The eagerness passed out of it as though the whole expression had suddenly been wiped off by a sponge. An extraordinary dejection, piteous in the completeness of its disappointment, took its place. The duke had never seen anything so sudden and so profound before; it startled him. The man was already half-way to the door when the duke spoke again. "Excuse me," he said, and from mere habit his voice was still cold, "would you mind telling me why you seem so strangely disappointed because I have not granted your request?" A surprise awaited him. Burnside swung round on his feet, and his voice was tense as he answered. "Oh, yes, I'll tell you," he said, "though, indeed, how should you understand? The editor of the _Daily Wire_ offered me fifteen pounds in his telegram if I could get a column interview with you. I am reading history for my degree, and there are certain German monographs which I can't get a sight of in Oxford or London. The only way is to buy them. Of course, I could not afford to do that, and then suddenly this opportunity came. But you can't understand. Good-afternoon!" For the second time that day the duke was mildly surprised, but he understood. "My dear sir," he said in a very different tone, "how was I to guess? I am very sorry, but I really am so--so ignorant of all these things. Come and sit down and interview me to your heart's content. What does it matter, after all? Will you have a whisky and soda, or, perhaps, some tea? I'll call my scout." In five minutes Burnside was making notes and asking questions with a swift and practical ability that compelled his host's interest and admiration. The duke had never met any one of his own age so business-like and alert. His own friends and contemporaries were so utterly different. He became quite confidential, and found that he was really enjoying the conversation. After the interview was over the two young men remained talking frankly to each other for a few minutes, and, wide as the poles asunder in rank, birth, and fortune, they were mutually pleased. For both of them it was a new and stimulating experience, and the peer realised how narrow his views of Oxford must necessarily be. Suddenly a thought struck him. "Wait a minute," he said. "I think I have something here that will interest you." He went to his writing-table, and, after some search, found a letter. It was a long business document from his chief agent, Colonel Simpson. "I want to read you this paragraph from my agent's last letter," he said. "' ... There is another matter to which I wish to draw your grace's attention. As you are aware, the libraries, both at Fakenham and Paddington House, are of extreme value and interest, but since the death of the late librarian, Mr. Fox, no steps have been taken to fill his position. When he died Mr. Fox was half-way through the work of compiling a comprehensive and scholarly catalogue of your grace's literary treasures. Would it not be as well to have this catalogue completed by a competent person in view of the fact that sooner or later your grace will be probably throwing open the two houses again?' "Now, wouldn't that suit you, Mr. Burnside, as work in the vacation, don't you know? It would last a couple of years or so probably, and you need not give all your time to it, even if you take your degree meanwhile and read for the Bar, as you tell me you mean to. I would pay you, say, four hundred a year, if you think that is enough," he added hastily, wondering if he ought to have offered more. The young man's stammering gratitude soon undeceived him, and as Burnside left him his last words sent a glow of satisfaction through him--"I won't say any more than just this, your splendid offer has removed all obstacles from my path. The career I have mapped out for myself is now absolutely assured." For half an hour longer the duke remained alone, thinking of the events of the day, thinking especially of Lady Constance Camborne. He did not give a thought to the smaller Gainsborough or the Florentine vase, and he was entirely ignorant that he had just done something which was to have a marked and definite influence upon his future life. By six o'clock he had wired to Colonel Simpson, had obtained the necessary exeat from the dean, and was entering a first-class carriage in the fast train from Oxford to London. The fog was thick all along the line, and more than once the express was stopped for some minutes when the muffled report of fog signals, like guns fired under a blanket, could be heard in the dark. One such stop occurred when, judging by the time and such blurred indications of gaunt housebacks as he could discern, the duke felt that they must be just outside Paddington Station. He had the carriage to himself, brightly lit, warm, and comfortable. He sat there, wrapped in his heavy, sable-lined coat, a little drowsy and tired, though with a pleasant sense of well-being, despite the errand which was bringing him to London. The noise of the train died away and the engine stopped. Voices could be heard talking in the silence, voices which seemed very far away. Then there was the roar of an advancing train somewhere in the distance, a roar which grew louder and louder, one or two sudden shouts, and then a frightful crash as if a thunderbolt had burst, a shrill multiple cry of fear, and finally the long, rending noise of timber and iron breaking into splinters. The duke heard all this, and even as his brain realised what it meant, he was thrown violently up into the air--so it seemed to him--he caught sight of the light in the roof of the carriage for the thousandth part of a second, and then everything flashed away into darkness and silence. CHAPTER IV THE MAN WITH THE MUSTARD-COLOURED BEARD It was the morning of the day on which part of the façade of Paddington House, Piccadilly, was destroyed by the explosion of a bomb. London was a city of darkness and gloom, a veritable "city of dreadful night." The fog was everywhere, it was bitter cold, and all the lights in the shops and the lamps in the streets were lit. As yet the fog was some few yards above the house-tops. It had not descended, as it did later on in the day, into the actual streets themselves. It lay, a terrible leaden pall, a little above them. In no part of London did the fog seem more dreary than in Bloomsbury. The gaunt squares, the wide, old-fashioned streets, were like gashes cut into a face of despair. At half-past nine o'clock Mary Marriott came out of her tiny bedroom into her tiny sitting-room and lit the gas. She lived on the topmost floor of a great Georgian house in a narrow street just off Bedford Square. In the old days, before there were fogs, and when trees were still green in the heart of London, a great man had lived in this house. The neighbourhood was fashionable then, and all the world had not moved westwards. The staircase at No. 102 was guarded by carved balusters, the ceilings of the lower rooms were worked in the ornate plaster of Adams, the doors were high, and the lintels delicately fluted. Now 102 was let out in lodgings, some furnished, some unfurnished. Mary Marriott had two tiny rooms under the roof. On the little landing outside was a small gas-stove and some shelves, upon which were a few pots and pans. A curtain screened this off from the stairhead. This was the kitchen. The furniture, what there was of it, was Mary's own, and, in short, she might, had she been so disposed, have called her dwelling almost a flat. Moreover, she paid her rent quarterly--five pounds every three months--and was quite an independent householder. Mary was an actress, a hard-working member of the rank and file. She had never yet secured even the smallest engagement in London, and most of her life was spent on tour in the provinces. When she was away she locked up her rooms. She was without any relations, except a sister, who was married to a curate in Birmingham. Her private income was exactly thirty pounds a year, the interest upon a thousand pounds safely invested. This paid the rent of the rooms which were all she had to call "home," and left her ten pounds over. Every penny in addition to this she must earn by the exercise of her art. She had been lucky during her four years of stage life in rarely being out of an engagement. She had never played a leading part, even in the provinces, but her second parts had generally been good. If she had come nowhere near success she had been able to keep herself and save a little, a very little, money for a rainy day. It is astonishing on how little two careful girls, chumming together, can live on tour. Managing in this way it was an extravagant week when Mary spent thirty shillings upon her share of the week's bill, and as she never earned less than three pounds she felt herself fortunate. She knew piteous things of girls who were less fortunate than she. She came into the room and lit the gas. It was not a beautiful room, some people would have called it a two-penny-halfpenny room, but it was comfortable, there was a gracious feminine touch about all its simple appointments, and to Mary Marriott it represented home. The chairs were of wicker-work, with cretonne cushions--sixteen-and-six each in the Tottenham Court Road. The pictures were chiefly photographs of theatrical friends, the curtains were a cheap art-green rep, the carpet plain Indian matting--so easy to clean! But the colours were all harmonious, and a shelf holding nearly two hundred books gave a finishing note of pleasant habitableness. The girl moved with that grace which is not languid but alert. There was a spring and balance in her walk that made one think of a handsome boy; for though the lithe and beautiful figure was girlish enough, few girls learn to move from the hips, erect and unswayed, as she moved, or often suggest the temper and resilience of a foil. The simple grey tweed coat and the slim skirts that hung so superbly gave every movement its full value. She had not yet put on her hat, but her coat would keep her warm while she ate her frugal breakfast and save the necessity of lighting the fire, as she was shortly going out. Her hair was dead-black with the blackness of bog-oak root or of basalt. She did not wear it in any of the modes of the moment, but gathered up in a great coiled knot at the back of her head. In shape, Mary Marriott's face was one of those semi-ovals which one has forgotten in the Greek rooms of the Louvre and remembered in some early Victorian miniatures. It was grave, and the corners of the almost perfect mouth were slightly depressed, like the Greek bow reversed. The violet eyes were not hard, but they did not seem quite happy. It was almost a petulance with environment which seemed written there, and, in the words of a great master of English prose, "the eyelids were a little weary." All her face, indeed,--in the general impression it gave,--seemed to have that constant preoccupation that hints at the pursuit of something not yet won. She might have been four or five-and-twenty. Her face was not the face of a young, unknowing girl--no early morning fruit in a basket with its bloom untouched. Yet it was still possible to imagine that her indifferent loveliness could wake suddenly to all the caresses and surrenders of spring. But the ordained day must dawn for that. Like a sundial, one might have said of her that her message was told only under the serenest skies, and that even then it must come with shadow. She lit the stove on the landing to boil some water for her cocoa and egg. Then she took the necessary crockery from a cupboard, together with the loaf and butter she had bought last night. While the simple meal was in progress her low forehead was wrinkled with thought. A long tour was just over in the fairly prosperous repertoire company with which she had been associated for eighteen months. Usually at this season of the year the company played right through till the spring at those provincial theatres where no pantomimes were produced. This year, however, it had been disbanded until March, when Mary was at liberty to rejoin if she had not meanwhile found another engagement. This was what she was trying to do, at present with no success at all. She was tired to death of the monotonous touring business. She felt that she had better work within her had she only a chance to show it. But it was horribly difficult to get that chance. She had no influence with London managers whatever. Her name was not known in any way, and as the days went by the hopelessness of her ambition seemed to become more and more apparent. This morning the heavy pall which lay over London seemed to crush her spirits. She was so alone, life was drab and cheerless. With a sigh she strove to banish black thoughts. "I won't give up!" she said aloud, stamping a little foot upon the floor. "I know I've got something in me, and I won't give up!" When breakfast was over, she swept up the crumbs from the tablecloth, opened the window, and scattered them upon the leads for the birds--her invariable custom. Then she went into her bedroom, made the bed, and tidied everything, for she did all her own housework when she was "at home," though a charwoman came once a week to "turn out" the rooms. When she had put on her hat and gloves and returned to the sitting-room she found two or three cheeky little London sparrows were chirping over their meal on the parapet, and she stood motionless to watch them. As she did so she saw a new arrival. A robin, with bright, hungry eyes, in his warm scarlet waistcoat, had joined the feathered group. Nearly all the crumbs were disposed of by this time, and, greatly daring, the little creature hopped on to the window-sill, looked timidly round him for a moment, and then flew right over to the table where the bread-latter still stood. With an odd little chirp of satisfaction the bird seized a morsel of bread as big as a nut in his tiny beak and flashed out through the window again, this time flying right away into the fog. "Oh, you dear!--you perfect dear!" Mary said, clapping her hands. "Why didn't you stay longer?" And as she went down the several staircases to the hall the little incident remained with her and cheered her. "I shall have some luck to-day," she thought. "I feel quite certain I shall have some luck. One of the agents will have heard of something that will suit me; I am confident of it." And all the time that she walked briskly towards the theatrical quarter of London the sense of impending good fortune remained with her, despite the increasing gloom of the day. It was with almost a certainty of it that she turned into the district around Covent Garden and crossed the frontier as it were of the world of mimes. It is a well-defined country, this patch of stage-land in the middle of London. The man who knows could take a map of the metropolis and pencil off an area that would contain it with the precision of a gazetteer. Wellington Street on the east, St. Martin's Lane on the west, Long Acre on the north, and the Strand on the south--these are its boundaries. Yet to the ordinary passer-by it is a _terra incognita_, its very existence is unsuspected, and he might hurry through the very centre of it without knowing that he was there at all. Mary made straight for Virgin Lane, a long, narrow street leading from Bedford Street to Covent Garden Market--the street where all the theatrical agents have their offices. The noise of traffic sank to a distant hum as she entered it. Instead, the broken sound of innumerable conversations met her ear, for the pavements, and the road itself, were crowded with men and women who were standing about just as the jobbers and brokers do after closing time outside the Stock Exchange. The men were nearly all clean-shaven, and they were alike in a marked fashion. Dress varied and features differed, but every face bore a definite stamp and impress. Perhaps colour had something to do with it. Nearly every face had the look of a somewhat faded chalk drawing. They shared a certain opaqueness of skin in common. What colour there was seemed streaky--the pastel drawing seemed at close quarters. There was an odd sketchiness about these faces, no one of them quite expressed what it hinted at. The men were a rather seedy-looking lot, but the women were mostly well dressed--some of them over-dressed. But they seemed to wear their frocks as costumes, not as clothes, and to have that peculiar consciousness people have when they wear what we call "fancy dress." Mary entered an open door with a brass-plate at the side, on which "Seaton's Dramatic and Musical Agency" was inscribed. She walked up some uncarpeted stairs and entered two large rooms opening into each other. The walls were covered with theatrical portraits, and both rooms were already half-full of people, men and women. A clerk sat at a writing-table in the outer room taking the names of each person as he or she came, writing them down on slips of paper, and sending them into a third inner room, which was the private sanctum of Mr. Seaton, the agent himself. Mary sent in her name and sat down. Now and again some girl or man whom she knew would come in and do the same, generally coming up to her for a few words of conversation--for she was a popular girl. But most people's eyes were resolutely fixed upon the door of the agent's room, in the hope that he would appear and that a word might be obtained with him. Now and then this actually happened. Seaton, a tall man, with a cavalry moustache, would pop his head out, instead of sending his secretary, and call for this or that person. As often as not there was a hurried rush of all the others and a chorus of agitated appeals: "Just one moment, Mr. Seaton," "I sha'n't keep you a moment, dear boy," "I've something of the utmost importance to tell you." And all the time the page-boy kept returning with the slips of paper upon which the actors and actresses had written their names upon entering, and finding out particular individuals. Some few were fortunate. "Mr. Seaton would like to see you at twelve, miss. He has something he thinks might suit you"; but by far the more usual formula was, "Mr. Seaton is very sorry, there is nothing suitable to-day; but would you mind calling again to-morrow." At last it was Mary's turn. She was talking to a Miss Dorothy French, a girl who had been with her on the recent tour, when the boy came up to her. "Mr. Seaton is very sorry that there is nothing suitable to-day, miss; but would you mind calling again to-morrow." Mary sighed. "I've been here for two hours," she said, "and now there is nothing after all. And, somehow or other, I felt sure I should get something to-day." She was continuing to bewail her lot when a very singular-looking man indeed entered the room and went up to the clerk. He was tall and dressed in loose, light tweeds, a flopping terra-cotta tie, a hat of soft felt, and a turn-down collar. His hair, beard, and moustache were a curious and unusual yellow--mustard colour, in fact. His eyes were coal black and very bright, while his face was as pale as linen. Directly the clerk saw him he rose at once with a most deferential manner and almost ran to the agent's private room. In a second more he was back and obsequiously conducting the man with the mustard-coloured beard into the sanctum. Mary and her friend left the office together and went out into the choking fog, which was now much lower and thicker. Both were members of the Actors Association, the club of ordinary members of their profession, and they planned to take their simple lunch there, read the _Stage_ and the _Era_, and see if they could hear of anything going. As they went down the stairs Mary said, "You saw that odd-looking man with the yellow beard--evidently some one of importance? Well, do you know, Dolly, I can't help thinking that I've seen him before somewhere. I can't remember where, but I'm almost sure of it." The other girl started. "What a strange thing, dear," she said. "I had exactly the same sort of feeling, but I thought it must be a mistake. I wonder who he can be?" "He is a most unusual-looking person, though certainly distinguished---- Now I remember, Dolly!" "Where?" "Why, at Swindon, of course, on the last week of the tour, and, if I don't forget, on the last night, too--the Saturday night. He was in evening things, in a box, with another man, a clergyman. He stayed for the first two acts, but when I came on in the third act he was gone!" "So it was! You're quite right. Now I remember perfectly. What a curious coincidence!" They discussed the incident for the remainder of their short walk to St. Martin's Lane, and then, lunch being imminent, and both of them very hungry, they forgot all about it. Miss French had an appointment after lunch and went away early, leaving Mary alone. There was nobody in the clubrooms that she knew, and she sat down by a glowing fire to read the afternoon papers, fresh editions of which had just been brought in. She read of the growing distress of the unemployed all over London. She saw that another Socialist had been elected to Parliament at a by-election--neither of which items of news interested her very much. Then she read with rather more interest, and a little shudder, that there had been a bomb explosion in Piccadilly only an hour or two ago, and that part of a great mansion belonging to the Duke of Paddington had been destroyed. At five o'clock she went out again. The fog was worse than ever, but she knew her London well and was not afraid. She did some modest shopping, and then let herself into the house with her latch-key and went up-stairs. Another day was over! Another fruitless day was over, and the robin had not brought her luck after all! As she opened her own door and felt for the little enamelled matchbox which always stood on a shelf beside it, her foot trod on something which crackled faintly. Directly the gas was lit she saw that it was a telegram. She opened it. It had been despatched from the Bedford Street office at two o'clock that afternoon--while she had been at the Actors' Association. It was from Seaton, the agent, and contained these words: "Gentleman calling personally on you six to-night with important offer." In wild excitement Mary looked at the clock. It was ten minutes to six. She lit the fire hurriedly, and urged it into flame with the bellows. Then she lit two candles on the mantlepiece to supplement the single gas jet, and drew the curtain over the window. At six o'clock precisely she heard rapid steps, light, springy steps, coming up the stairs. There was a momentary hesitation, and then came two loud, firm knocks at her door. She opened it almost immediately, and then started in uncontrollable surprise. The man who stood before her was the tall man with the mustard-coloured beard and the face pale as linen. CHAPTER V "TO INAUGURATE A REVOLUTION!" The strange-looking man bowed. "Miss Mary Marriott, I think!" he said. "Yes," Mary answered. "Please come in. I have had a telegram from Mr. Seaton, the agent." "Yes, he sent me here," said the tall man in a singularly fluid and musical voice. "I had better tell you my name." He entered the room, closed the door, opened a silver cigarette case, and took a card from it which he handed to Mary. "There I am," he said with a smile that showed a set of gleaming white teeth and lit up the pallid face into an extraordinary vivacity. Mary looked at the card. Then she knew who she was entertaining. On the card were these words: JAMES FABIAN ROSE. The customary "Mr." was omitted, and there was no address in the corner. Mary was a self-possessed girl enough, but she was unused to meeting famous people. She looked at the card, gave a little gasp, half of wonder and half of dismay, and then recollected herself. "Please do sit down, Mr. Rose," she said, "and take off your overcoat--oh, and smoke, please, if you want to--I had no idea." The tall man smiled. He seemed singularly pleased with the effect he had produced, almost childishly pleased. With a series of agile movements that had no break in them and seemed to be part of the continuous and automatic movement of a machine, he put his soft felt hat on the table, shed, rather than took off his overcoat, produced a box of wooden matches from somewhere, lit a cigarette, and sat down by the fire. He rubbed his hands together and said, "Yes, it is I, what a nice fire you've got"--all in one breath and in his rich, musical voice. Mary sat down on the other side of the hearth, feeling rather as if she were in some fantastic dream. She said nothing, but looked at the man opposite, remembering all that she had heard of him. About five-and-forty years of age, James Fabian Rose was one of the most noteworthy personalities of the day. He filled an immense place in the public eye, and it was almost impossible to open a newspaper without finding a paragraph or two about him on any given day. He was so well known that his whole name was seldom or never given in headlines. He was simply referred to as "J. F. R." and every one knew at once who was referred to. His activities were enormous, and the three chief ones were Socialist leader, dramatist, and novelist. His socialistic lectures were always thronged by all classes of society. His problem plays--in which he always endeavoured to inculcate one or another of his odd but fervent beliefs--were huge successes with cultured people. His novels were only read by literary people, and then merely for their cleverness. He was a man whom very few understood. He was, for one reason, far too clever to be credible with the popular mind; for, another, far too aware of his cleverness and far too fond of displaying it at inopportune moments. Fantastic paradox was his chief weapon, and many people did not realise his own point of view, which defined paradox as simply truth standing on its head to attract attention. When he referred to his own novels, which he often did, he always rated them high above Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and Sir Walter Scott. When he spoke in public of his plays--no infrequent occurrence--it was generally with a word of pity for Shakespeare. He was the head of a large and enthusiastic following of intellectual people, and the anathema of all slow thinkers. Apropos of this last, he would quote Swift's saying that the appearance of a man of genius in the world may always be known by the virulence of dunces. Beneath all his extravagances and pose--and their name was legion--his whole life and earnestness were devoted to the cause in which he believed. One of the most unconventional, and, at the same time, one of the most prominent men of his day, he had two real passions. One was to shock the obese-brained of this world, the other to do all he could to leave the world better than he found it. This was the extraordinary person, genius and buffoon, reformer and wit, who sat laughing on one side of Mary Marriott's little fire. "I've surprised you, Miss Marriott!" said Mr. James Fabian Rose. "I saw you at the agent's this morning," she answered, and then--"I think I am not mistaken--I saw you at the theatre at Swindon a few weeks ago." "Yes, I was there with Peter Conrad, the parson," said Mr. Rose. "I'd been addressing a meeting of the Great Western Railway Company's men in the afternoon--the younger men--trying to teach them that the youth of a nation are the trustees of posterity, and in the evening I came to the theatre. That's why I'm here." Mary said nothing. She waited for him to speak again, but her heart began to beat violently. "I took away the programme," Rose went on, "and I put a mark against your name. I was quite delighted with your work, really delighted. I was in a fury at the crass stupidity of the play, and as for the rest of the company they bore about the same relation to real artists as the pawnbroker does to the banker. But you, my dear child, were very good indeed. I kept you in mind for a certain project of mine which was then maturing. It is now settled, and this morning I called at one or two agents to find out where you were. You were not on Blackdale's books, but I found you, or, rather, heard of you, at Seaton's, and so here I am." "You want me to----" "To act, of course. To become a leading lady in a West End theatre, in a new play. That's all!" For a moment or two Mary could not speak. "But such a thing never happened before," she answered at length in a faltering voice. "It is----" He cut her short. "My experience of the stage is at least twenty times more profound than yours," he said, "and I have known the thing happen six times within my own experience. Who found Dolores Rainforth? I did. Who found Beatrice Whittingham?--little wretch, she's deserted art and is making a squalid fortune in drawing-room comedy--I did! I could give you many more names. However, that's neither here nor there. I want you for a certain purpose. I know that if I searched the provinces all over I should not find any one who so exactly fits the leading part--my own conception of it!--in my new play as you do. Therefore you are coming to me. And the amusing part of it is that I have actually stormed the citadel of rank and fashion itself. I have gained a stronghold in the hostile country of the capitalists--in short, I and my friends have secured a lease of the Park Lane Theatre!" Mary leant back in her chair. Her face had suddenly grown white. She was overwhelmed by all this. And, though she forgot this, her lunch had consisted of a cheap and not very succulent luxury known as a "Vienna steak," a not very nutritious mass of compressed mince-meat, but cheap, very cheap. It was now seven o'clock. There were those who said that James Fabian Rose was a dreamer. People who knew him intimately were aware that if he was an idealist, he was also practical in the ordinary affairs of life. "Now, I sha'n't tell you a word more," he said. "They're all waiting for you, and I promised to bring you for dinner. My wife was most insistent about it, and, besides, there are half a dozen people anxious to meet you. In absolute contradiction to all true socialistic principles I've been paying rent for a cab which has been standing outside your front door for ever so long. Put on your hat and come at once." Mary sat up. "But I can't come like this," she said helplessly, "to dinner!" Mr. Rose made a gesture of impatience. "The old stupid heresy of Carlyle," he said, "complicated by the fact that if a woman looks nice in one sort of costume she can't realise that she looks nice on whatever occasion she wears it. You must grow superior to such nonsense if we are to enlist you among us! But, come, you'll soon understand, and, besides, I know you are not really the ordinary fluffy little duffer one meets in the stage world." She fell in with his humour and quickly pinned on her hat. She knew that she was on the threshold of stimulating experiences, that her chance had come, no matter how strange and fantastic the herald of its advent. As Rose had said, a hansom was waiting. They got into it and trotted slowly away into the fog towards the great man's house at Westminster. They arrived at last, though it was a somewhat perilous journey. More than once the driver descended from his seat, took one of the lamps from its bracket, and led his horse through this or that misty welter of traffic. Parliament Street was a broad hurry of confusion, but when they had passed the Abbey on the right and turned into the small network of quiet streets behind the Norman tomb of ancient kings, the house of the Socialist in Great College Street--that quiet and memorable backwater of London--was easily found. Rose opened a big green door with his latch-key, and at once a genial yellow glow poured out and painted itself upon the curtain of the fog. Mary stood on the steps as a young woman of middle height, pretty and vivacious, came hurrying to the door. "My dear girl!" she cried, "so here you are! Fabian swore that he would find you and bring you. Come in quick out of the cold." Then she stopped, still holding the door open--something was going on outside, the not infrequent altercation with the London cabman, Mary thought. This is what she heard. "Don't be so foolish, my friend"--it was Rose's voice. "Foolish!" said the cabman. "Bit of oil right ter call me foolish, I don't fink! Nah, I don't tyke no money from you, J. F. R., stryke me Turnham Green, if I do! I've 'eard you speak, I read your harticles, hi do, and it's a fair exchynge. In the dyes ter come no one won't pye anyfink for anyfink. The Styte'll do it all. I've your word for it. I'm a practical Socialist, I am. So long, and keep 'ammering awye at them as keeps the land from the rightful howners, wich is heverybody." He cracked his whip and disappeared into the fog. Mr. Rose came into the hall, shut the door, and looked at the half sovereign in his hand with a sigh. His manner seemed a little subdued. "A little in advance of the future," he said in a meditative voice; "dear, good fellow! And now, Lucia, take Miss Marriott upstairs." When her hostess took her into the drawing-room Mary found several people there. All of them seemed to expect her, she had the sense of that at once. Her welcome was singularly cordial, she was in some subtle way made to feel that she was somebody. She did not quite realise this at the moment because the whole thing was too sudden and exciting. She perceived it afterwards when she thought everything over. The drawing-room on the first floor was large, low-ceilinged, and singularly beautiful. Mary had never seen such a room before. She had a sort of idea that Socialists liked to live in places like the hall of a workhouse, or the class-room of a board school--drab and whitewash places. She did not know till some time afterwards that the room she was in had been arranged and designed for the Roses by William Morris and Walter Crane themselves. It was, in truth, a lovely room. The walls were covered with brown paper for two-thirds of their height. A wooden beading painted white divided the warm and sober brown from a plain white frieze. All along one side of the room were shelves covered with gleaming pewter--an unusually fine collection. Here was a seventeenth-century bénitier from Flanders, there a set of "Tappit hens," found in a Scotch ale-house. There was a gleaming row of massive English plates of the Caroline period stamped with the crowned rose. The dull gleam, set thus against the brown background, was curiously effective, and the old Davenport and Mason china upon the white frieze above--deep blues, golds, and old cardinal reds,--the drawings by Walter Crane upon the walls, the tawny orange and reds of the Teheran carpets, and the open brick fire-place, all blended and refined themselves into a delightful harmony. Besides the host and hostess three other people were present. One of them was the Reverend Peter Conrad, the clergyman who had been with Rose in the box at the Swindon Theatre. Mary recognised him at once. He was tall and thin with a clear-cut and somewhat ascetic face and a singularly humorous mouth. She had heard vaguely of him as a leader among that branch of the party which called itself, "Christian Socialistic," a large and growing group of earnest people, of all sects and shades of Christian opinion, representing every school of thought, but which, nevertheless, united in the endeavour to adapt the literal Socialistic teachings of the Sermon on the Mount to modern life. Christ, they said, was the Master Socialist, and all their aspirations and teachings were founded upon this axiom. Sitting next to Mr. Conrad was a small, pale-faced man with a rather heavy light moustache and wearing gold-rimmed spectacles. He would have been almost insignificant in appearance had it not been for the high-domed forehead and fine cranial development. This was Charles Goodrick, the editor-in-chief of the great Radical daily paper--the most "advanced" of all the London journals,--and a man with great political influence. The third man, Aubrey Flood, Mary recognised at once. He was a young and enthusiastic actor-manager, possessed of large private means, who was in the forefront of the modern movement for the reformation of the stage. He was at the head of the band of enthusiasts who were sworn foes of musical comedy and futile melodrama, and he enjoyed a definite place and _cachet_ in society. When they all went in to dinner, which they did almost at once, Mary found that he was seated at her left. On her right was Mr. Rose himself. The meal was quite simple, but exquisitely served and cooked. The consommé would not have disgraced Vatel or Carème, the omelette was light as a feather, and, above all, hot! The wild ducks had been properly basted with port wine and stuffed with minced chestnuts and ham. To poor Mary it was a banquet for the gods! "You see, Miss Marriott," said Rose, with a queer little twinkle in his eye, "we don't eat out of a common trough, though we are Socialists, nor are we vegetarians, as poor, dear Bernard Shaw would like us all to be." Mary laughed. "I don't think I ever imagined Socialists were like that," she said. "In fact, though it may seem very terrible, I must confess that my mind has hitherto been quite a blank upon the subject." "Then it will be all the easier to write the truth upon it," Rose answered. "Then Miss Marriott doesn't quite know what we want her for yet?" Aubrey Flood asked. "She only knows that she is going to play lead at the Park Lane Theatre in a new play of mine." "And that is overwhelming, simply," Mary said with a blush. "It's impossible to believe. But, all the same, I am longing to hear all there is for me to know." "So you shall after dinner," said Rose, "you shall have full details. Meanwhile, to sum the whole thing up, you are not only going to take a part in a play, but you are going to inaugurate a Revolution!" CHAPTER VI THE GREAT NEW PLAN "J. F. R." had spoken with unusual seriousness, and his manner was reflected in the faces of the other guests as they looked towards Mary Marriott. The girl's brain reeled at the words. A Revolution! What could they mean--what did it all mean? Was she not in truth asleep in her dingy little attic sitting-room? Wouldn't she wake up soon to find the old familiar things around her--all these new surroundings but a dream, a phantom of the imagination? Mrs. Rose was watching her, and guessed something of what was passing in the girl's mind. "My dear," she said, with a bright and friendly smile, "it's all right; you really are wide awake, and you shall hear all about it from Fabian in a few minutes. And you haven't come into a den of anarchists, so don't be afraid. Only your chance has come at last, and you are to have the opportunity of doing a great, artistic thing--as great, perhaps, as any actress has ever done--and also of helping England. You may make history! Who knows?" "Who knows, indeed?" said Charles Goodrick, the editor of the _Daily Wire_. "I hope it will be my privilege to record it in the columns of my paper." The dinner was nearly over, but the remainder of it seemed interminably long to the waiting girl. In a swift moment, as it were, her whole life was changed. That morning she was a poor and almost friendless actress of the rank and file. Now she sat at dinner with a group of influential people whose names were known far and wide, whose influence was a real force in public affairs. And, somehow or other, they wanted her. She was an honoured guest. She was made to feel, and in a half-frightened way she did feel, that much depended upon her. What it was she did not know and could not guess; but the fact remained, and the consciousness of it was a strange mingling of exaltation, wonder, and fear. At last Mrs. Rose smiled and nodded at Mary and rose from her seat. "Don't be more than five minutes, Fabian," the hostess said, as she and Mary left the room. When they were alone together she drew the girl to a big couch, covered with blue linen, and kissed her. "We are to be friends," she said, "I am quite certain of it." And the lonely girl's heart went out to this winning and gracious young matron. The four men came into the room, a maid brought coffee, cigarettes were lighted--Mrs. Rose smoked, but Mary did not--and the playwright took up a commanding position upon the hearth-rug. Then he began. The mockery which was so frequent a feature of his talk was gone. He permitted himself neither pose nor paradox--he was in deadly earnest. "For more than a year," he said, "I have searched in vain for an actress who could fill the chief woman's part in my new play. None of the ladies who have acted in my other plays would do. They were admirable in those plays, but this is quite different. I have never written anything like it before. I sincerely believe, and so do those who are associated with me in its production"--he looked over at Aubrey Flood--"that the play is a great work of art. But it is designed to be more, far more than that. It is designed to be a lever, a huge force in helping on the cause in which I believe and to which I have devoted my life--the cause of Socialism. I could not find any one capable of playing Helena Hardy, the heroine of the play. The play stands alone; yet is like no other play; no actress trained in the usual way, and however clever an artist, had the right personality. Then I saw you play. I knew at once, Miss Marriott, that I had found the lady for whom I was searching. Chance or Fate had thrown you in my way. In every detail you visualized my Helena Hardy for me. I am never mistaken. I was, and am, quite certain of it. "You tell me you know nothing of Socialism. Before you have been associated with us very long you will know a great deal about it. I am sure, if I read you rightly, that when the time comes for you to play Helena you will be convinced of the truth of the words you utter, of the Cause for the service of which we enlist your art. It is the cause of humanity, of brotherhood, of freedom. "We cannot go on as we are. These things have not touched your young life as yet, they are about to do so. Realise, to begin with, that England cannot continue as she is at present. Nemesis is one of the grim realities not sufficiently taken into account in the great game of life. Leaden-footed she may be, and often is, but that is only her merciful way of giving the sinner time to repent. There is nothing more certain in the universe than that an injustice done to an individual or to a class, to a nation or to a sex, will sooner or later bring destruction upon the doer. At the present moment England is reproducing every cause which led to the downfall of the great nations of the past--Imperialism, taking tribute from conquered races, the accumulation of great fortunes, the development of a huge population which owns no property and is always in poverty. Land has gone out of cultivation, and physical deterioration is an alarming fact. And so we Socialists say that the system which is producing these results must not be allowed to continue. A system which has robbed Religion of its message, destroyed handicraft, which awards the prizes and successes of life to the unscrupulous, corrupts the press, turns pure women into the streets and upright men into mean-spirited time-servers, must not continue. "I'm not going to give you a lecture on Socialism now. But it is absolutely necessary that I should explain to you, at the very beginning of your work, how we look at these things. "At the present moment three quarters at least of the whole population are called 'workers.' How do these people live? By the wear of hands and bodies, by the sweat of their faces. A 'worker' eats food which is rough, cheap, and harmful in many instances. His clothes are of shoddy, with a tendency to raggedness. He lodges in tiny, ill-ventilated rooms. He works from eight to sixteen hours each day, just so long as his strength is effective. And not only the worker himself--that is the man who is head and support of his family--but his wife and sisters and daughters share the burden of toil. He works among perils and dangers unceasing, accidents with machinery, explosions in mills and mines, dreadful diseases come to him from dangerous trades--unwholesome conditions, vitiated air, poisonous processes, and improper housing. Hardly any of those fortunate ones who impose these tasks upon him take any care to shield him from these evils. He is not so valuable as a horse. He is cheap, there are millions of him to be had, why go to the expense of protecting him? A horse has to be bought, he costs an initial sum down, the worker costs nothing but his wretched keep. "You, Miss Marriott, are cultured. You are an artist, you live for your art, and you care for it. You can understand the peculiar horror, I should say one peculiar horror, of the life of the worker which he is himself generally too blind and ignorant to understand. For he has no leisure to look about him, no heart to speculate as to what things might be. Over all his misery and misfortune towers one supreme misery and misfortune--the want of all that makes the pleasure and interest of life to the free man. No genius tells stories, makes music, paints pictures, writes or acts, plays, builds palaces for the worker. Genius itself would starve at such work, as things are at present constituted. The workers' chief concern is to buy bread. He must let art, that sweetens life, go by. The Graces and the Muses are never shown to him in such a way that he may know and love them for their own sakes." He stopped suddenly. Colour had come into the pallid face, the rich, musical voice had a vibrant organ note in it, every one in the room was leaning forward, strained to attention, Mary among the rest. "So much for that," he went on. "I have been saying necessary but obvious things. Now let me point out what we are doing, we Socialists. Our party is growing enormously day by day. Innumerable adherents, great power, fill our ranks and give us weapons. "We have an influential press. Monthly reviews and weekly papers preach our message. And one great daily journal, controlled by our brother, Charles Goodrick, reaches every class of society, and hammers in the truth day by day. "Our political organization is an engine of great power. We have a large pledged party in the House of Commons. Our lecturers are everywhere, our books and pamphlets are being sown broadcast over the kingdom. "We have a great Religious movement. Mr. Conrad here, together with some half a dozen others, controls the increasing band of Christian Socialists. Men and women of all the churches flock to his banner, differences of opinion are forgotten and lost under the one comprehensive watchword--that Christianity, the faith in Jesus Christ, is a socialistic religion. "We have two great needs, however. Able as our writers are, they are nearly all essayists or journalists. As yet no great popular novelist has joined us--one of those supreme preachers who wield the magic wand of fiction and reach where no others can reach. "And lastly, we have never had as yet a socialistic stage! That tremendous weapon, the theatre, has laid ready to our hand, but we have not availed ourselves of it. We are about to do so now. You know, I know, we are both experts, and it is our business to know, that there are hundreds of thousands of people who never read a book or pamphlet, and who are yet profoundly influenced and impressed by the mimic representations of life which they see upon the stage. "You are a provincial actress. You have toured in ordinary melodrama. When, after some important act or scene, the characters are called before the curtain, what do you find? You find that some stick of a girl who has walked through the part of the heroine in a simper and a yellow wig is rapturously applauded--not for herself, the public thinks nothing of her acting one way or the other, but for the virtues of which she is the silly and inartistic symbol. The bad woman of the piece, always and invariably the finer player and more experienced artist, is hissed with genuine virulence. "What is this but the very strongest proof--and there are dozens of other proofs if such were wanting--of the influence, the real and deep influence of the theatre upon the ordinary man and woman? "It is to inaugurate the new use to which the theatre is going to be put by us that I have invited you to join us. But do not mistake me. We have taken the Park Lane Theatre by design. We are going to begin by showing the idle classes themselves the truth about themselves and their poorer brethren. They will come out of curiosity in the first instance, and afterwards because what we are going to give them is so unique, so extraordinary, and so artistically fine that they will be absolutely unable to neglect it. Then the movement will spread. We shall rouse the workers by this play, and others like it, in theatres which they can afford to attend. We shall have companies on tour--I may tell you that already a vast and detailed scheme is prepared, though I need not go into any of the details of that on this first night. "And now, finally, let me tell you, quite briefly and without going into the scope of the plot, something about the first play of all at the Park Lane Theatre--your play, the play in which you are to create Helena Hardy. It is called, at present, _The Socialist_, and it is destined to be the first of a series. Its primary effort, in the carefully-thought-out scheme of theatre propaganda, is to draw a lurid picture of the extreme and awful contrast between the lives of the poor and the rich. "We are going to do what has never been really done before--we are going to be extraordinarily and mercilessly realistic. It will be called brutal. And our studies are going to be made at first hand. In attacking one class, we are also going to allow it to be known that all our actual scenes have been taken from life. The slums to the north of Oxford Street, all round Paddington, are hideous and dreadful. They all belong to one man, the young Duke of Paddington, a boy at Oxford; incredibly rich. The theatre itself is on his land. Well, we are going to go for this young man tooth and nail, hammer and tongs, because he is typical of the class we wish to destroy. We are going to let it be generally known that this is our object. It will be published abroad that the slum scenes in the play are literal reproductions of actual scenes on the duke's property. Our scene painters are even now at work taking notes. One by one all the members of the cast are going to be taken to see these actual slums, to converse with their inhabitants, to imbibe the frightful atmosphere of these modern infernos. We want every one to play with absolute conviction. I have arranged that a party shall leave this house in two days' time, a county council inspector and a couple of police inspectors are coming with us, in order to do this. You, I beg, Miss Marriott, will come, too." He had been speaking for a considerable time with enormous earnestness and vivacity. Now he stopped suddenly and sank into a chair. His face became pale again, he was manifestly tired. Some one passed him a box of cigarettes. He lit one, inhaled the smoke in a few deep breaths, and then turned to Mary. "Well?" he said. She answered him as simply, and many words would not have made her answer more satisfying or sincere. "Yes," she said. "Very well, then, that's settled," Rose replied in his ordinary voice. "Salary and that sort of thing we will arrange to-morrow through Mr. Seaton. I will merely assure you that we regard the labourer as worthy of his hire, and that we shall not disagree upon that sort of thing." As he spoke a maid entered the room. "Mr. Goodrick is being rung up from the offices of the _Daily Wire_," she said. "Then there is something important," said the journalist, as he hurried to the telephone in an adjacent room. "When I left at five I said that I should not return to-night unless it was anything big. I left Bennett in sole charge." He was away some minutes, and the conversation in the drawing-room became general, the high note being dropped by mutual consent. "By the way," Mr. Conrad said suddenly, "what an odd thing it is that part of Paddington House was blown down this morning!" "The poor boy will have to take arms against a sea of troubles," said Mrs. Rose sympathetically. "At any rate, we are law-abiding conspirators. It seems dreadful to think that there are people who will go these lengths. I'm sorry for the poor young duke. It isn't his fault that he's who and what he is." "Of course," Rose replied. "I hate and deprecate this violence. It is, of course, a menace from the unemployed. But my heart bleeds for them. Think of them crouching in doorways, with no shirts below their ragged coats, with no food in their stomachs, on a night like this!" He shuddered, and Mary saw, with surprise, another and almost neurotic facet of this extraordinary character. Charles Goodrick hurried into the room. "I must say good-night," he said, in a voice which trembled with excitement. "A very big piece of news has come in. One of our men has all the details. It will be our particular scoop. No other paper to-morrow morning will have all that we shall." "But what is it?" Rose asked. "A big railway accident, but with an extraordinary complication, and--by Jove, what a coincidence!--it concerns the young Duke of Paddington!" "Is he killed?" "No. He was stunned for a time. The accident happened in the fog just outside Paddington Station. He was stunned, but soon recovered. "Then what?" said the journalist. "Why, the extraordinary thing is that he has totally disappeared!" CHAPTER VII KIDNAPPING UPON SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLES The Duke of Paddington lay stunned and unconscious beneath the wreck of the first-class carriage. There had been the period of waiting outside Paddington Station--his own great-grandfather had sold the ground on which it stood to the company--in the black fog of the winter's night. Then there had come the lengthening roar of the approaching train, the shouts, the horrid crash of impact, the long tearing, ripping, grinding noise--and oblivion. How long he had been unconscious the duke did not in the least know. He came back to life with that curious growing, widening sensation that a diver has when he is once more springing up through the water towards the surface, air, and light. Then quite suddenly full consciousness returned--rather, he arrived at full consciousness. Everything was dark, pitch dark. His ears were full of a horrid clamour. A heavy, suffocating weight was pressing upon him. He lay perfectly still for some moments endeavouring to recollect where he was and what had happened. Finally he remembered and realised that he was actually--he himself--a victim of one of those terrible railway accidents of which he had read so often in the newspapers with a careless word of pity, or perhaps, no emotion at all. Another train had crashed into the Oxford express in the fog. The duke moved his right arm, and found he could do so freely, except above his body, where the heavy something which was lying upon him prevented its passage. He strove to dislodge the weight, but was utterly unable to do so. He was, in fact, pinned beneath a mass of woodwork, which, while not pressing on him with more than a little of its weight, nevertheless kept him rigid upon his back without possibility of movement. His left arm he could not move at all. Curiously enough, the sensation of fear was entirely absent. "I am in a deuce of a tight place," he thought of himself, and thought about himself in a strangely detached fashion as if he was thinking of another person. "I am in a deuce of a tight place. What is to be done?" He tried once more to move the crushing roof. He might as well have tried to push down the Bank of England with an umbrella. Next there came to him a sudden thought, a realisation that at least one thing was in his favour. As far as he knew he was perfectly unhurt. He felt fairly certain that no limbs were broken, and that he had no severe internal injury. He was cut and bruised, doubtless, and still giddy from the blow of the impact, but, save for this, there could be no doubt that he had been most mercifully preserved. The air was full of confused noises, shouts, the roaring of escaped steam, cries of agony. The duke added his clamour to the rest. His voice was full and strong, and echoed and re-echoed in his ears. Nothing happened, and now for the first time a sickening feeling of fear came to him and his cries sank into silence. Almost immediately afterwards he heard a noise much nearer than before, much more distinct and individual. It was a crashing, regular noise, some one was working at the débris. Once more he shouted, and this time an answering hail came to him. "Is anyone there?" "Yes," the duke called out. "I am pinned down here by a heavy mass of timber." "Are you badly injured?" "I don't think I'm much hurt, only it is impossible for me to move." "Cheer up!" came back the voice. "We will soon have you out." And then the crashing, tearing noise went on with renewed vigour. In a few minutes the duke found the pressure on his chest was much relieved and the noise grew infinitely louder. It was as though he was lying shut up in a box, at the sides of which half a dozen stalwart navvies were kicking. He thought that the drums of his ears were bursting. Then there was a chorus of shouts, a last tremble and heaving of the confining mass, a breath of cold reviving air, and strong hands withdrew him from his prison. He was carried swiftly to the side of the line and laid down upon a pile of sacking. Immediately he became aware that soft, dexterous hands were feeling him all over, hands which seemed to be definite and separate organisms, so light and purposeful were they. He realised that a doctor was examining him, and the light of a lantern which some one else was holding showed him that the surmise was correct. A tall young man with a pointed beard, in a long mackintosh, was bending over him. "You are all right, thank goodness!" said the doctor. "You are not hurt a bit, only you have been stunned, and of course you are suffering from the shock. Now, you just lie here until I come to you again. You must stay still for half an hour. Drink this." He held a little cup of brandy to the duke's mouth. The fiery liquid sent new life into the young man's veins. Everything became more real and actual to him. Before everything had been a little blurred, as the first image upon the lenses of field-glasses is blurred. Now, the duke seemed to have got the right focus. "Now, mind, you are not to move at all till I come back," the doctor said. "You have got a warm coat, and I will put some of these sacks over you. You are not hurt, but if you move now until you are rested a little you may get a shock to the nerves, which will remain with you for a long time. Now I must go to attend to some of the poor chaps who want me far more than you do." "Is it a bad smash?" the duke asked. They were the first words he had spoken. "One of the worst smashes for many years," answered the doctor over his shoulder as he was hurrying away. "You may thank your Maker that you have been so mercifully preserved." The duke lay where he was. The brandy had revived him, and, to his surprise, he realised that, except for a more or less violent headache, he really felt as well as he had been when he first got into the train. He was not even aware of any bruises or contusions, save only that his left hand had been rather badly cut, and was covered with congealed blood. He wondered exactly where he was, and he looked around him. The fog was still impenetrably dense, though it was illuminated here and there by glowing fires and moving torches--a strange Dantesque vision of moving forms and red light, dim and distorted, like some mysterious tragedy of the underworld. Now and then some sharp and almost animal like cry of agony came to his ears, cutting through the gloom like a knife, horribly distressing to hear. Nobody was immediately near him. He was outside the radius of the chief activities of the breakdown gang and the doctors. There was nothing for him to do but to wait where he was. The doctor would be certain not to forget him, and, besides, he had not the faintest notion in what direction to move in order to get away from all this horror. So he lay still. Presently the brandy, to which he was unaccustomed, began to work within him, and induced a languor and drowsiness. His heavy sable coat, all torn and soiled now, though it had cost him six hundred guineas less than a month before, kept his body warm, and, in addition to it, he was covered by sacking. His mind wandered a little, and he was almost on the point of dropping to sleep when there was a sound as of approaching footsteps upon gravel or cinders. He heard a muttered and strangely husky conversation, apparently between two people, a quick, furtive ripple of talk, and then something descended upon his mouth, something warm and firm--a man's hand. In the dark he could see two figures about him. A man had stooped down and brought his hand silently down upon his mouth, so that he could not cry out. Another was bending towards him on the other side, and soon he felt that deft hands were going through his pockets. When the doctor had touched him he had felt nothing but surprise and wonder at the prehensile intelligence of the touch. Now he shuddered. He began to struggle, but found himself by no means so strong as he had imagined that he was a quarter of an hour ago. A harsh voice hissed in his ear: "Now, stow that, or I'll make you!" In all his life the Duke of Paddington had never been spoken to in such a way, and, ill as he was, the imperious blood leapt to his brain, and he redoubled his exertions. Suddenly he stopped with a low gurgle of anguish. His ear had been seized between two bony knuckles and twisted round with a sharp jerk until the pain was frightful. Then he lay still once more. He realised what was happening. The accident to the train had occurred on that part of the line some little way out of the station, upon which all sorts of more or less slum houses debouch. Two of those modern brigands who infest London had come, attracted to this scene of suffering and tragedy by the hope of plunder--even as in the old days, after a battlefield, obscene and terrible creatures appeared in the night and nameless deeds were done. They had his watch. Sir John Bennett had made it specially for him. It was one of those repeating watches with all sorts of costly additional improvements, which can do almost anything but talk. He heard the man about him say: "This 'ere's a rich bloke, Sidney; but the ticker's no blooming use except for the case. The--fence wouldn't look at it. Too easy to identify. Ah, this 'ere's better!" He had found the duke's sovereign purse. Swiftly, and with the skill born of long practice, the man went through every pocket. When he found the little case of green crocodile skin, in which the duke carried paper money, his cards, and a letter or two, he gave a low whistle of delight. The duke could hear the little crackle close to his ear as the man counted the five-pound notes. Almost immediately after this there was a gasp of astonishment. "Look 'ere!" the other man said, "it's the bloomin' Duke of Paddington himself!" The duke started, and obviously his captors imagined that he was about to recommence his struggles, for there was a sharp tweak of his ear once more. After that he heard nothing. The two men had joined heads over his body and were whispering eagerly to each other. It seemed an eternity while he was lying there with the heavy hand upon his mouth, breathing with difficulty through his nostrils, though, in actual point of fact, from first to last, the whole thing was of less than two minutes' duration. The men seemed to have come to some sort of agreement. They acted with neatness and precision. A filthy and evil-smelling handkerchief was suddenly rammed into the duke's mouth. Another bandaged his eyes before he realised what was happening, and two pair of stalwart arms had him up upon his feet, locked in the London policeman's grip, and half carried, half hustled right away from where he had been lying almost before he realised what was happening. He heard the click of a gate or door. His feet had left the gravel or cinder upon which they had been walking and were now apparently shuffling over flagstones. Then, by an added chill to the cold air, and a certain echo in the footsteps, he knew that he was being pushed down some sort of alley or cul de sac. He was twisted from left to right and from right to left with the greatest rapidity, and half the extraordinary journey was not completed before he had utterly lost all idea of his whereabouts. The noise of the distant rescuers at the scene of the accident sank into a low hum and then died completely away. He seemed to be rushing along some maze or city of the dead, for no human sound save the noise of his and his captors' movements reached his ears. In four or five minutes he was rudely stopped. He heard a knock upon a door, a peculiar and obviously signal knock. There was a sound of a window opening, a low whistle, and he was pushed forward up a few steps and into a house, the door of which was immediately closed behind him. He was hustled along an evil-smelling passage, down a flight of uneven stone stairs and into a room, a room much warmer than the cold passages which he had traversed, a room in which there were several people, and where a fire was burning. The cruel grip which had held him like a vice in its strength and ingenuity was a little relaxed. He was pushed down upon a chair. The air of the room was stifling, his body was wet with perspiration, owing to the sudden transition from cold to heat, the restricted breathing, and the extreme rapidity of his progress. A hand rested on his cheek for a moment and then plucked the filthy handkerchief from his mouth. The duke took a deep breath. Foul as the air was in this place it seemed at this moment balmy as those breezes laden with cassia and nard which blow through the Gardens of the Hesperides. Then a voice spoke: "You will be all right, guv'nor. Sorry to 'ave 'ad to treat you a bit rough like, but, 'pon my sivvey, we wasn't goin' to lose a bit-of-orl-right like this. Just for precaution's sake, as you might sye, we'll----" The sentence was not concluded, but the duke felt his legs were being tied to the legs of the chair. His arms were suddenly caught up and pressed behind him. He was perfectly helpless. Then the bandage was removed from his eyes. He found himself in a place which, in his experience, was utterly unlike anything that he had seen before, or even imagined. As a matter of fact, he was sitting trussed upon a windsor chair in an underground thieves' cellar-kitchen. A large fire of coal and coke glowed in the white-washed fire-place. There were shelves with crockery and other utensils on each side of the fire. An ancient armchair, covered with torn and dirty chintz, was drawn to the fire, and in it sat a very large fat woman of middle age. She wore heavy gold earrings, bracelets were upon her wrists, and a glinting flash from her fat and dirty fingers showed that the diamonds in her rings were real. No one could have mistaken her for an instant for anything else than a Jewess. There were five or six men in the room. As the duke became accustomed to the light of the big paraffin lamp which hung from the ceiling he saw that all these men were singularly alike. They were all clean shaven, for one thing, and they all seemed to have the same expression. Their mouths were one and all intelligent and slightly deferential. Their eyes flickered a good deal hither and thither and were curiously and quietly watchful. There was a precision about their movements. "Could they all be brothers?" he wondered idly, for his brain was still weakened by shock, "and could that fat woman with the filthy clothes and the rings be their mother?" "Now, then, guv'nor," said one of the men with perfect politeness, but with a curious under-note of menace in his voice, "we know who your lordship is. It is a fair cop. We've got you 'ere, and of course you are not going away from 'ere unless you makes it nice and heasy for all parties." The man spoke in a hoarse voice, but, again, a singularly quiet voice. Menace was there, it is true, but there was something cringing also. Who could these men be? the duke thought idly and as if in a dream. They looked like actors. Yes, they were very much like actors. Was it that he had---- The true explanation burst in upon him. He remembered a certain magazine article he had once read with a curious mixture of disgust and pity, a magazine article which was illustrated by many photographs. These men were alike for a very sufficient reason. A terrible discipline had pressed them into its irremediable mould. They were all old convicts. They were men who had "done time." CHAPTER VIII "IN CELLAR COOL!" The duke knew perfectly well that he had fallen into the hands of as rascally and evil a gang of ruffians as London could produce. He made no answer to the words of the man who had addressed him. "You will be better off if you listen to Sidney reasonable, dearie," said the horrible old woman. The words dropped from her lips like gouts of oil. "You will be all the better for listening to Sidney! I'm sure nobody wants to do anything unpleasant to you, but folks must live, and you've reely walked in most convenient, as you might sye." "What do you want?" the duke said at last. "Well, sir," the man addressed as "Sidney" replied, "we have got you fair. Nobody saw us take you away. You've disappeared from the accident without leaving a trace like." As he spoke, the man's servile, wolfish face was a sheer wedge of greed and cunning. His tongue moistened his lips as if in anticipation of something. "You see, nobody can't possibly know where you've come. They will think you were smashed up, or got up and went away, out of your mind, after the shock. People'll hunt all over London for you, no doubt, but they won't never think of us. Now, we've got your very 'ansom ticker and a few quids, and the gold purse that 'eld them, and there was a matter of forty or fifty pound in notes in the pocket-book when we opened it. It was that, by the wye, as told us who you was. Now, our contention is that them as 'as as much money as you must contribute to them as 'asn't." He grinned as if pleased with his own wit, and a horrid little uncertain chuckle went round the room, a chuckle with something not quite human in it. "Now, wot I says," the man continued, "is this. We will return you the ticker because it won't be of much use to us, except the gold case. We'll keep the chain and the quid box and the quids, and we'll also keep the fi-pun notes. Then, my lord, you'll sit down and write a little note to your bankers and enclose a cheque. I see you have got the cheque-book with you, or I've got it at least. Now, the question is what the amount of this 'ere cheque shall be. You, being a rich man, we cannot put it low, and we hold all the cards. Let's say three thousand pounds. In addition to that you'll give us your word of honour as a gentleman to take no proceedings about this 'ere little matter and say nothing about it to nobody. When that's done, by to-morrow morning, mid-day, say, you can go, and I am sure," he concluded, "with an 'earty hand-shake from yours truly, being a gentleman, as I am sure you will prove, and a lord, too." The duke considered. Three thousand pounds is a large sum of money, though to him it meant little or nothing. At the same time his whole manhood rose up within him--the stubbornness of his race steeled him against granting these miscreants their demand. A flood of anger mounted to his brain. His upper lip stiffened and his eyes glinted ominously. At last he answered the man. "I'll see you d----d," he said, "before I give you a single halfpenny! And let me tell you this, that, as sure as you stand here now, you are bringing upon yourselves a sure and speedy punishment. You think, because I am wealthy and you know who I am, you have got a big haul. If you were just a little cleverer than you are you would understand that the Duke of Paddington cannot disappear, even for a few hours, without urgent inquiry being made for him. You will infallibly be discovered, and you know what the result of that will be." "Not quite so fast," said the man called Sidney, in a smooth, quiet voice. "It is all very well to talk like this 'ere, but you don't know what you are a-saying of. You don't know in whose hands you are. People like us don't stick at nothing. As sure as eggs is eggs, unless you do as we are asking, you will never be seen or heard of any more. You think we run a risk? Well, I'll tell you this--I've had a good deal of professional experience--this is one of the easiest jobs to keep out of sight that I've ever 'ad. Now, supposing there 'ad been a little high-class job in the West End--matter of a jeweller's shop, say--or a house in Park Lyne. In that case we should be pretty certain to have some 'tecs nosing round this quarter, finding out where I or some other of my pals had been the night before. We should be watched, and the fences would be watched, until they could prove something against us. But in this case the police won't have a single idea wot will connect us with your disappearance." "I am not going to argue with you, my man," the duke answered calmly. "I am not accustomed to bandy words with anybody, much less a filthy criminal ruffian like you! You can go to blazes, the whole lot of you! I won't give any of you a farthing!" Even now the man who was the spokesman of that furtive, evil crew did not lose his temper. He smiled and nodded to himself, as if marking what the duke had said and weighing it over in his mind. "All right," he answered at length. "That is what you say now. You will say different soon. I am not going to make any bones about it, but I'll tell you the programme, and that is this: To-night we are going to tie you up and take you down into a cellar. There's another one below this, and it ain't got no light nor fire, neither. It is simply a hole in the foundations of the house, that is wot it is. And the rats are all-alive-oh down there, I can tell you! Nice, warm, little furry rats with pink 'ands. You will stay down there to-night, and to-morrow morning I'll come and ask you this question again. I should like to get the business settled and over by mid-day. No use wasting time when there's work to be done. I am a business man, I am. Then, if your blooming lordship is fool enough not to agree to our little proposals by that time--well, then, I can only say that--much as I should regret 'aving to do it--we should 'ave to try what a little physical persuasion means--some 'ot sealing-wax upon the bare stomach, or a splinter or two of wood 'ammered between the nail and the finger, or even a good deal worse than that. Well, it'll all depend on you." There was something so repulsively insolent in the man's voice that the duke's sense of outrage and anger was even greater than his fear. He could not, did not, believe that these men would do anything of what they had threatened. His whole upbringing and training had made it almost impossible for him to believe that such a thing could happen to him. It was incredible--perfectly astounding and incredible--that he had even met with this misfortune, that he was where he was. But that the results of his capture would be pushed so far as the man said he was absolutely sceptical. His fierce and lambent sense of anger mastered everything. "Don't try and frighten me, you scoundrel!" he said. "I won't give you a penny!" Still in the same even voice the ruffian concluded his address. The circle of the others had come closer and surrounded the duke on every side, while the old woman in the background peered over the shoulders of two men, looking at the bound victim with a curious, detached interest, as a naturalist might watch a cat playing with a mouse. "Lastly," said the man, "if you go on being silly, after you've enjoyed a day or two with the pleasant little gymes I've told you of, why, I shall just come down into that 'ere cellar one morning, hold up your chin, and cut your throat like a pig! We sha'n't want to have you about if you stick to what you say, and a little cement down in that 'ere forgotten cellar--which, in fact, nobody knows of at all, except me and my pals here--will soon hide you away, my lord! There won't be any stately funeral and ancestral vault for the Duke of Paddington!" For the first time a chill came into the duke's blood. He felt also a tremendous weariness, and his head throbbed unbearably. Yet there was a toughness within him, a strength of purpose and will which was not easily to be vanquished or weakened. In a flash he reviewed the chances of the situation. They were going to put him in a cellar till the morning. Well, he could bear that, no doubt. He might have time to think the whole matter over--to decide whether he should weaken or not, whether he should yield to these menacing demands. At the present his whole soul rose up in revolt against budging an inch from what he had said. His intense pride of birth and station, so deeply ingrained within him, turned with an almost physical nausea against allowing himself to be intimidated by such carrion as these. Should the dirty sweepings of the gaols of England frighten a man in whose veins ran the blood of centuries of rulers? He ground his teeth together and looked the spokesman full in the face. He even smiled a little. "I don't believe," he said in a quiet voice, "that you are fool enough to do any of these things with which you have threatened me, but I tell you that if you do you will find me exactly the same as you find me now. You might threaten some people and frighten them successfully. You might torture some people into doing what you say, but you will neither frighten me in the first instance, nor torture me into acquiescence in the second. You have got hold of the wrong person this time, my man, and what you think is going to be such a nice thing for you and your crew of scoundrels will in the end, if you carry out your threats, mean nothing else for all of you but the gallows. You may kill me if you like. I quite realise that at present I am in your power, though I do not think it at all likely I shall be so for very long. But even if you kill me you will get nothing out of me beyond the things you have stolen already. You have a very limited knowledge of life if you imagine that anybody of my rank and breed is going to let himself be altered from his purpose by such filth as you!" There was a low and ominous murmur from the men as the duke concluded. The evil, snake-like faces grew more evil still. They clustered together under the lamp, talking and whispering rapidly to each other, and the whimsical thought, even in that moment of extreme peril, came to the duke that there was a chamber of horrors resembling in an extraordinary degree that grisly underground room at the waxwork show in Baker Street, which, out of curiosity, he had once visited. There were the same cold, watchful eyes, the mobile and not unintelligent lips, the abnormally low foreheads, of the waxen monsters in the museum. There was nothing human about any of them; they were ape-like and foul. The man called "Sidney" turned round. From a bulging side-pocket of his coat he took out the duke's valuable repeater. "Ah," he said, "I see that this 'ere little transaction 'as only occupied 'arf an hour from the time when we found you to the present. We came out, thinking we might pick up a ticker or two or a portmanteau among the wreck. We got something a good deal better. Never mind what you say, we will find means to convince you right enough, but there is no time now. We're going to put you down in that there cellar I spoke of among the rats, and you will wait there till to-morrow morning. Meanwhile me and my pals will all be seen in different parts of London, in a bar or talking innocent-like to each other, and we will take jolly good care we will be seen by some of the 'tecs as knows us. There won't be no connecting us with your lordship's disappearance. Now then, come on!" His voice, which had been by no means so certain and confident as it was before, suddenly changed into a snarl of fury. The duke heard it without fear and with a sense of exultation. He knew that his serenity had gone home, that his contempt had stung even this wolf-pig man. As if catching the infection of the note, the unseen ruffian behind the chair, who held his arms, gave them a sharp, painful wrench. The men crowded round him. His legs were untied from the chair legs and then retied together. His arms were strongly secured behind him, and he was half pushed, half carried to a door at the back of the kitchen. The leader of the gang went before, carrying a tallow candle in a battered tin holder. Passing through the door, they came into a small back cellar-kitchen, in which there was a sink and a tap. A large tub, apparently used for washing, stood in one corner. Deft hands pulled this, half-full of greasy water as it was, away from where it originally stood. A stone flag with an iron ring let into it was revealed. A man pulled this up with an effort, revealing a square of yawning darkness, into which a short ladder descended. The leader went down first, and with some difficulty the helpless body of the duke was lowered down after him, though the depth could not have been more than eight feet or so. When he had been pushed into this noisome hole the duke saw by the light of the candle which "Sidney" carried that he was in an underground chamber, perhaps some ten feet by ten. The walls were damp and oozing with saltpetre. The floor was of clay. Looking up in the flickering light of the dip he could see where the ancient brick foundations of the house had been built into the ground. He was now, in fact, below the lowest cellar, in an unsuspected and forgotten chamber, left by the builders two hundred years ago. "Now, this 'ere comfortable little detached residence, dook," said the man, "is where we generally puts our swag when it's convenient to keep it for a bit. Nobody knows of it. Nobody has ever learned of it. We discovered it quite by chance like. That man wot comes round and collects the rents ain't an idea of its existence. This 'ere is Rat Villa, this is. Now, good-night! 'Ope to see your lordship 'appy and 'ealthy in the morning! You will observe we have left you your right arm free to brush the vermin off." The duke lay down upon his back, looking up at the sinister ruffian with the candle and the dark stone ceiling of his prison. Then, with an impudent, derisive chuckle Sidney climbed the ladder, and immediately afterwards the stone slab fell into its place with a soft thud. The duke was alone in the dark! CHAPTER IX MARY MARRIOTT'S INITIATION The morning was not so foggy as the last three terrible days had been. Dull it was even yet--the skies were dark and lowering--but the acrid, choking fog had mercifully disappeared. But Mary Marriott thought nothing of this change in the weather as she drove down in a hansom cab to the house of James Fabian Rose in the little quiet street behind Westminster Abbey. It was half-past twelve. The great expedition to the slums of the West End was now to start. Since that extraordinary day upon which her prospects had seemed so hopeless and so forlorn Mary had been in a state of suspended expectation. Suddenly, without any indication of what was to happen, she had been caught out of her drab monotony and taken into the very centre of a great, new pulsating movement. The conclusion of the day upon which she had again failed to achieve a theatrical engagement was incredibly splendid, incredibly wonderful! She had had twenty-four hours to think it over, and during the whole of that quiet time in her little Bloomsbury flat, she had lived as if in a dream. Was it possible, she asked herself over and over again--could it be true that the man with the mustard-coloured beard--the great James Fabian Rose--had indeed called upon her, had found her preparing her simple evening meal, and had taken her away through the fog to the brilliant little house in Westminster? And was it true that she was really destined to be a leader upon the stage of the great propaganda of the Socialist party? Was it true that she out of all the actresses--the thousands of actresses unknown to fame--had been picked and chosen for this role--to be the star of a huge and organised social movement. As the cab rolled down the grey streets of London towards Westminster, Mary found that she was asking herself these questions again and again. When she arrived at Rose's house she knew that that was no delusion. The maid who opened the door ushered her in at once, and Mrs. Rose was waiting in the hall. "Oh, my dear," Mrs. Rose said; "here you are at last! Do you know, when Fabian captured you the other night in the fog and brought you here we all knew that you were just the very person we wanted. We were so afraid--at least I was, nobody else was--that you would vanish away and we should not see you any more. Now, here you are! You have come to fulfil your destiny, and make your first great study in the environment, and among the scenes, of what you will afterwards present to the world with all your tragic power. My dear, they are all upstairs; they are all waiting. Two or three motor-cars will be round in about half an hour to take you right away into Dante's Inferno! Come along! Come along!" As she concluded Mrs. Rose led Mary up the stairs to the drawing-room and shouted out in her sweet, high-pitched voice: "Fabian! Mr. Goodrick! Peter! She has come! Here she is! Now we're all complete." Mary followed her hostess into the drawing-room. There she found her friends of the first wonderful night, augmented by various people whom she did not know. James Fabian Rose, pallid of face, and with his strange eyes burning with a curious intensity, came forward to greet her. He took her little hand in his and shook it heartily. Aubrey Flood was there also, wearing a grey overcoat, and he also had the intent expression of one who waits. Peter Conrad, the clergyman, was not in clerical clothes. He wore a lounge suit of pepper-and-salt colour, and held a very heavy blackthorn stick in his right hand. The famous editor of the _Daily Wire_, Charles Goodrick, was almost incognito beneath the thick tweed overcoat with a high collar, from which his insignificant face and straw-coloured moustache looked out with a certain pathetic appeal. Mary's welcome was extraordinarily cordial. She felt again as she had felt upon that astonishing night when she had first met all these people. She felt as if they all thought that an enormous deal depended upon her, that they were awaiting her with real anxiety. On that chill mid-day the beautiful drawing-room, with its decorations by William Morris and Walter Crane, had little of its appeal. It seemed bare and colourless to Mary at least. It was a mere ante-room of some imminent experience. She said as much to Fabian Rose. "Mr. Rose," she said, "I have come, and here I am. Now, what are you going to do with me? Where are you going to take me? What am I going to see? I am all excitement! I am all anxiousness!" "My dear girl," Rose answered, "it is so charming of you to say that. That is just the attitude in which I want you to be--all excitement and anxiousness!" They crowded round her, regarding her, as she could not but feel, as the centre of the picture, and her trepidation and excitement grew with the occasion. She was becoming, indeed, rather overstrained, when Mrs. Rose took her by the arm. "My dear," she said, "don't get excited until it is absolutely necessary. Remember that you are here to-day simply to receive certain impressions, which are to germinate in your brain; seeds to be sown in your temperament, which shall blossom out in your heart. Therefore do not waste nervous force before the occasion arises. I am not going, you will be the only woman upon this expedition." Mary looked round in a rather helpless way. "Oh!" she said, "am I to be all alone?" There came a sudden, sharp cackle of laughter from the famous editor. "My dear Miss Marriott," he said, "all alone?" Looking round upon the group of people who were indicated by the sweep of the little man's hand, Mary realised that she would be by no means alone. Then she noticed, as she had not done before, that in the back recesses of the drawing-room were three or four other men, who, somehow or other, did not seem to belong to the world of her companions. Rose caught the glance. "Oh," he said, "I must introduce you to the bodyguard!" He took her by the arm, and led her to the other end of the drawing-room. There were four people standing there. One was clean-shaven, and wore a uniform of dark blue, braided with black braid, and held a peaked hat in his hand. Two of the others were bearded, very tall, strong and alert. They were dressed in ordinary dark clothes, and Mary felt--your experienced actress has always an eye for costume, and the necessity of it--that these two also suggested uniform. The fourth person, who stood a little in the background of the other three, was a man with a heavy black moustache, hair cut short, except for a curious, shining wave over the forehead, and was obviously a strong and lusty constable in plain clothes. "This is Miss Marriott, gentlemen," Rose said. The three men in the foreground bowed. The man at the back automatically raised his right arm in military salute. "These gentlemen, Miss Marriott," Rose said, "are going to take us into the places where we have to go. They are going to protect us. Inspector Brown and Inspector Smith, of Scotland Yard, and Inspector Green, of the County Council." Mary bowed and smiled. Then the tallest of the bearded men said: "Excuse me, miss, where we are going it would be quite inadvisable for you to wear the clothes you are wearing now." He spoke quite politely, but with a certain decision and sharpness, at which Mary wondered. "I don't quite understand," she said. "Well, Miss Marriott," the inspector answered, "you see we are going into some very queer places indeed, and as you will be the only lady with us, you had better wear----" "Oh, I quite forgot," Fabian Rose said. "Of course, you told me that before, Mr. Brown. We have got a nurse's costume for you, Miss Marriott. You see, a nurse can go anywhere in these places where no other woman can go. By the way," he added, as a sort of after-thought, "this must seem rather terrible to you. I hope you are not frightened?" Mary smiled. She looked round at the group of big men in the drawing-room, and made a pretty little gesture with her hands. "Frightened!" she said, and smiled. "Come along," Rose said, "my wife will fit you up." In half an hour a curious party had left Westminster in two closed motor-cars, and were rolling up Park Lane. When Oxford Street was reached the car in which the party sat went two or three hundred yards eastward. The car in which the other half were bestowed moved as far to the west. Every one alighted, and the cars disappeared. In half an hour after that the whole party, by devious routes carefully planned beforehand, met in a centre of the strange network of slums which are in the vicinity of the Great Western Station of Paddington. These slums the ordinary wayfarer knows nothing of. A man may ride down some main thoroughfare to reach the great railway gate of the West and realise nothing of the fact that, between some gin palace and large lodging-house, a little alley-entry may conduct the curious or the unwary into an inferno as sordid, as terrible, and even more dangerous than any lost quarter of Stepney or Whitechapel. London, indeed, West End London, is quite unaware that among its stateliest houses, in the very middle of its thoroughfares, there are modern caves in which the troglodytes still dwell which are sinister and dark as anything can be in modern life. Inspector Brown took the lead. "Gentlemen," he said, "I am going to take you now through some streets which none of you have probably ever seen before, to a certain district about a quarter of a mile beyond Paddington Station, and where I shall show you exactly what I am instructed to show you. I am sorry to have to make you walk so far, and especially as we have a lady with us, but there is no alternative. We cannot take a cab, or several cabs, to where we are going. A cab has never been seen in the quarter which you are entering with me. Even as we go we shall be known and marked. We shall not be interfered with in any dangerous way because you are with me and my colleagues, but, at the same time, the noise of our arrival will spread through the whole quarter, and I shall only be able to show you the place somewhat dulled of its activities, and, as it were, frightened by our arrival." "I see," Aubrey Flood answered. "I see, inspector. What you mean is that the rabbits will all be terrorised by the arrival of the ferret!" "Well, sir," the inspector answered, "I am sure that is not a bad way of putting it." "Is that a policeman? Do you mean to say he is a detective?" Mary asked James Fabian Rose. "I thought those people were so illiterate and stupid." The great Socialist laughed. "My dear," he answered, "you have so much, so very much to learn. Inspector Brown is one of the most intelligent men you could meet with anywhere. He speaks three languages perfectly. He reads Shakespeare. He understands social economics almost as well as I do myself. If he had had better chances he would have been a leader at the bar or an archdeacon. As it is he protects society without _réclame_, or without acknowledgment, and his emolument for exercising his extreme talents in this direction is, I believe, something under £250 a year." Mary said nothing. It seemed, indeed, the only thing to do, but very many new thoughts were born within her as she listened to the pleasant, cultured voice of the bearded man, who looked as if he ought to be in uniform, and who led the party with so confident and so blithe a certainty. They walked through streets of squalor. They progressed through by-ways, ill-smelling and garbage-laden. The very spawn of London squealed and rolled in the gutters, while grey, evil-faced men and women peered at them from doorways and spat a curse as they went by. They wound in and out of the horrid labyrinth of the West End slums until the great roar of London's traffic died away and became an indistinct hum, until they were all conscious of the fact that they were in another and different sphere. They had arrived at the underworld. They were come at last to grip with facts that stank and bit and gripped. Mary turned a white face to Fabian Rose. "Mr. Rose," she said, "I had no idea that anything could be quite so sordid and horrible as this. Why! the very air is different!" "My child," the great Socialist answered, his hand upon her shoulder, the pale face and mustard-coloured beard curiously merged into something very eager, and yet full of pity. "My child, you are as yet only upon the threshold of what we are bringing you to see. We have brought you to-day to these terrible places so that you may drink in all their horrors, all their hideousness, and all their misery, and transform them--through the alchemy of your art--into a great and splendid appeal, which shall convulse the indifferent, the cruel, and the rich." "Let us go on!" Mary said in a very quiet voice. They went on. And now the houses seemed to grow closer together, the foetid atmosphere became more difficult for unaccustomed lungs to breathe, the roads became more difficult to walk upon, the faces which watched and gibbered round their progress were menacing, more awful, more hopeless. They walked in a compact body, and then suddenly Inspector Brown turned round to his little battalion. He addressed Fabian Rose. "Sir," he said, "I think we have arrived at the starting point. Shall we begin now?" Mary heard the words, and turned to Fabian Rose. "Oh, Mr. Rose!" she said, "what terrible places, what dreadful places these are! I had no idea, though I have lived in London all my life, that such places existed. Why, I--oh, I don't know what I mean exactly--but why should such places be?" "Because, my dear Miss Marriott," Rose answered--and she saw that his face was lit up with excitement and interest--"because of the curse of capitalism, because of the curse of modern life which we are endeavouring to remove." Mary stamped her little foot upon the ground. "I see," she said. "Why, I would hang the man who was responsible for all this! Who is he? Tell me!" Rose looked gravely at her. "My dear," he answered, "the man who is responsible for all this that immediately surrounds us is the man whom we hope to hold up to the whole of England as a type of menace and danger to the Commonwealth. It is the Duke of Paddington!" CHAPTER X NEWS ARRIVES AT OXFORD On the afternoon when the Bishop of Carlton, Lord Hayle and Lady Constance Camborne had left the Duke of Paddington's rooms in St. Paul's College, Oxford, they went back to the _Randolph Hotel_, where the bishop and his daughter were staying. Lord Hayle accompanied them, and the father, his son and daughter, went up to the private sitting-room which the bishop occupied. The fog--the nasty, damp river mist, rather, which takes the place of fog in Oxford--was now thicker than ever, but a bright fire burnt upon the hearth of the comfortable sitting-room in the hotel, and one of the servants had drawn down the blinds and made the place cheery and home-like. The Cambornes had only been three days in Oxford, but Lady Constance had already transformed the somewhat bare sitting-room into something of wont and use; the place was full of flowers, all the little personalia that a cultured and wealthy girl carries about with her, showed it. A piano had been brought in, photographs of friends stood about, and the huge writing-table, specially put there for the use of the bishop, stood near the fireplace covered with papers. The three sat down and some tea was brought. "Well, Connie dear," Lord Hayle said, "and what do you think of John? You have often heard me talk about him. He is the best friend I have got in the world, and he is one of the finest chaps I know. What do you think of him, Connie?" "I thought he was charming, Gerald," Lady Constance answered, "far more charming than I had expected. Of course, I have known that you and he have been friends all the time you have been up, but I confess I did not expect to see anybody quite so pleasant and sympathetic." "My dear girl," Lord Hayle answered, "you don't suppose I should be intimate friends with anybody who was not pleasant and sympathetic?" "Oh, no, I don't mean that, Gerald," the girl replied; "but, after all, the duke is in quite a special position, isn't he?" "How do you mean?" said Lord Hayle. "Well, Gerald, he is not quite like all the other young men one meets of our own class. Of course he is, in a way, but what I mean is that one expected a boy who was so stupendously rich and important to be a little more conscious of it than the duke was. He seemed quite nice and natural." The bishop, who was sipping his tea and stretching out his shapely, gaitered feet to the fire, gave a little chuckle of satisfaction. "My dear Constance," he said, "the duke is all you say, of course, in the way of importance and so on, but at the same time, he is just the simple gentleman that one would expect to meet. I also thought him a charming fellow, and I congratulate Gerald upon his friendship." The bishop sipped his tea and said nothing more. He was gazing dreamily into the fire, while his son and daughter talked together. All was going very well. There was no doubt that the two young people had been mutually pleased with each other. Rich as the Earl of Camborne and Bishop of Carlton was, celebrated as he was, sure as he was of the Archbishopric when dear old Doctor Arbuthnot--now very shaky--should be translated to heaven, Lord Camborne was, nevertheless, not insensible of the fact that a marriage between his daughter and the Duke of Paddington would crown a long and distinguished career with a befitting _finis_. His own earldom was as old as the duke's title. There would be nothing incongruous in the match. Yet at the same time it would be a very fine thing indeed. All was well with the world, with the bishop, and the world was still a very pleasant place. It was now about half-past five. The bishop, Lady Constance, and Lord Hayle were to dine with Sir Andrew Anderson, a Scotch baronet, who had a seat some eight miles away from Oxford. The bishop's motor-car was to be ready at half-past six, and they would reach Packington Grange by seven. "What a blessing it is," the bishop said, breaking in upon the conversation of his son and daughter, "that the automobile has been invented. Here we are, sitting comfortably by the fire at half-past five. There is time to change without hurry or disturbance, and by dinner time we shall be at Packington. In my days, my dear Gerald, if one wanted to dine so far away from Oxford one had to get permission from the dean to stay all night. It would have been impossible for me, as an undergraduate, to go back before college gates were finally shut. You are far more fortunate." "I don't know about that, father," Lord Hayle replied. "As a matter of fact, I should much prefer to stay the night at Packington, as you and Connie may possibly do so. In fact, I know the dean would give me permission at once, especially as I am with you. However, I quite agree with you about the joys of motoring, as I propose to drive the car back to Oxford myself whether you two return or not." The bishop smiled. He was proud of his bright, handsome son, who had done him so much credit in his University career, and was already becoming a pronounced favourite of society. "Well, Gerald," he said, "we look at things from a different point of view. Has the duke any motors, by the way?" "He has lots of motors," Lord Hayle answered, "but only one up here, which he does not often use. In fact, I use it as much as he does. He is a riding man, you know. He sticks to the horses. Now then, father, I must run back to college and change. I will be back in time to start." "We had all better change, I think," said the bishop, and smiling at his son he took his daughter by the arm, pinching it playfully, and they left the sitting-room for their respective bedrooms. As his valet assisted him the bishop thought with a pleasant glow that his daughter had never looked more beautiful. There was something changed about her. Of that he felt quite certain, and once more he thanked God for all the blessings of his life. It is a blessed thing, indeed, to be an earl of old lineage, and the bishop of a famous cathedral city, a handsome and portly man, with a beautiful son and daughter, the friend of princes, and designate to the archiepiscopal chair. Constance, as the maid brushed out that hair like ripe corn, that wonderful hair that so many men had eulogised, so many poets sung of, that hair which was often referred to by the society papers as if it was a national possession, sat thinking over the events of the afternoon. How charming Gerald's friend was! He seemed so strong and self-contained, yet so simple and so natural. Despite his great position and the enormous figure he made and was to make in the public eye, he was yet the pleasantest of boys. He was unspoiled yet, she reflected, by the whirl and artificial _va et vient_ of society. He had not yet taken up his sceptre, as it were, and had none of the manners of princedom. The whole scene had etched itself upon her memory. The rich and the sober old college-rooms, the quiet, happy meal, the talk, the music, and then the dramatic telegram announcing the anarchistic outrage to Paddington House in Piccadilly. How well the duke had taken it all. He had heard that the famous Florentine vase had been destroyed beyond hope of repair, that a picture which the nation would gladly have purchased for a fabulous sum had shown its painted glories to the eyes of the world for the last time. Yet he had not seemed unduly worried. He had taken the whole thing calmly, and Lady Constance thought it imperative that well-bred people should take everything calmly. And then, and then--well! he had certainly seemed very pleased to see her. He had been extremely attentive and nice. There had been something in his eyes. She smiled a little to herself, and a faint blush crept into her cheeks. She saw the colour as she looked into the glass and heard the soft swish of the ivory brush as it passed over her tresses. "I am sure," she thought, "that he is good. He is so unlike the men one meets in society. They all seem to have something behind their words, some thought which is not quite simple and spontaneous, which informs all that they say. Nearly all of them are artificial, but the duke was quite natural and ordinary. I am so glad Gerald has such a nice friend, and he seemed quite pleased to come and stay with us when the term ends. What a good idea it was that we proposed it. It seems odd, indeed, that the poor boy, with his great house in London and all the country seats, should stay at the _Carlton_ or the _Ritz_ when he comes to town. Really, highly placed as he is, he is quite lonely. Well, we'll do all we can to make him happy." Once more she said to herself: "It must be very nice for Gerald to have such a friend!" though even as she thought it she half realised that this was not precisely the sole spring and fountain of her satisfaction with the events of the afternoon. At half-past six Lady Constance and her father met in the hall. In her long sable robe, and with a fleecy cloud of spun silk from China covering her head, she stood by the side of the earl, splendid in his coat of astrakhan and corded hat. All round them, in the hall of the _Randolph_, were people who were dressed for dinner standing and talking in groups. Many heads nodded, and there were many whispers as the two stood there. Every one knew that here was the famous young society beauty, Lady Constance Camborne, and that the majestic old man by her side was her father, the earl, and the Bishop of Carlton. Then, as the swing doors burst open, and Lord Hayle, in a fur coat and a tweed cap, came bustling in, the onlookers whispered that this was the young viscount who would succeed to everything. The hall porter, cap in hand, came up to the trio. The car was waiting for his lordship. The servants grouped around rushed to the doors. The muttering of the great red motor waiting outside became suddenly redoubled as the earl and his children left the hall. There was a little sigh, and then a buzz of talk, as the three distinguished people disappeared into the night opposite the Museum. The dinner party at Sir Andrew Anderson's was a somewhat ceremonious function, and was also rather dull. The Scotch baronet was a "dour laird," who had been a member of the last Government, and the visit was one of those necessary and stately occasions to which people in the bishop's position are subject. Sir Andrew had no son, and his two daughters were learned girls, who had taken their degree at St. Andrew's University, and looked upon Lady Constance as a mere society butterfly, although they thawed a little when talking to Lord Hayle. It was all over about a quarter-past ten, much earlier than the bishop and Lady Constance had anticipated. The bishop's suit-case had been put into the car, and Lady Constance also had her luggage. Nothing had been decided as to whether the Cambornes should stay the night or not, though the party had assumed that they would do so. As, however, at a little after ten the conversation languished, and everybody was obviously rather bored with everybody else, the bishop decided to return to Oxford with his son, and before the half-hour struck the great Mercedes car was once more rushing through the wintry Oxfordshire lanes towards the ancient City of Spires. "Well," Lord Hayle said, "I have never in all my life, father, been to such a dull house, or been so bored. Didn't you feel like that, too, Connie?" "Indeed, I did, Gerald," the girl answered. "It was perfectly terrible!" Slowly the bishop replied-- "I know, my dears, that it was not an enlivening entertainment, but Sir Andrew, you must remember, is a very solid man, and is well liked by the country. He will be in the Cabinet when this wretched Radical and Socialistic ministry meets the fate it deserves, and, you know, Hayle, that in our position, it is necessary to endure a good deal sometimes. One must keep in with one's own class. We must be back to back, we must be solid. I have nothing to say against Sir Andrew, except that, of course, he is not a very intellectual man. At the same time, he is liked at court, and is, I believe," the bishop concluded with a chuckle, "one of the most successful breeders of short-horns in the three kingdoms." The motor-car brought the party back into civilisation. It rolled up the High, past the age-worn fronts of the colleges, brilliantly illuminated now by the tall electric light standards. They flitted by St. Mary's, where Cranmer made his great renunciation, past the new front of Brazenose, up to the now dismantled Carfax. As they turned The Corn was almost deserted, in a flash they were abreast of the Martyrs' Memorial, and the car was at rest before the doors of Oxford's great hotel. The three entered the warm, comfortable hall. "Good-night, father!" Lady Constance said "Good-night, Gerald, I shall go straight up-stairs!" She kissed her father and brother, and turned to the right towards the lift. "I think I will have a final smoke, father," Lord Hayle said, "before I go back to college. There's lots of time yet. Shall we go upstairs, or shall we go into the smoking-room?" "Oh, well, let us go into the smoking-room," said the bishop. "It's a comfortable place." They gave their coats to an attendant, and went through the door under the stairs into the smoking-room. No one else was there, though a great fire burned upon the hearth, and drawing two padded armchairs up before it they sat down and lit their cigarettes. "I think," said the bishop, "that I shall have a glass of Vichy. Will you have anything more, dear boy?" "No, thanks, father," Lord Hayle answered, "but I will ring the bell for you." He pressed the button, and the waiter came into the room, shortly afterwards returning with the bishop's aerated water. Lord Hayle was well known at the _Randolph_. He sometimes gave dinners there, in preference to using the _Mitre_ or the _Clarendon_. He and the duke sometimes dined there together. As he was sitting with his father, quietly talking over the events of the day, one of the managers of the hotel came hurriedly into the smoking-room and up to the earl and the viscount. "My lord," he said, and his face was very white and agitated. "I fear I have very sad news for you." There was something in the man's voice that made both the bishop and his son turn round in alarm. "What is it?" said Lord Hayle. "My lord," the manager continued, "a telegram has just reached us that there has been a terrible railway accident to the six o'clock train from here to Paddington. We are informed that the Duke of Paddington, your friend, my lord, was in the train, and it is feared that his grace has been killed." CHAPTER XI THE DISCOVERY It really was appalling! All the others had seen this sort of thing many times, and it did not appeal to them with the same first flush of horror and dismay as it did to Mary Marriott. She turned to Fabian Rose. "Oh, Mr. Rose," she said, "it is dreadful, more dreadful than I could ever have thought!" "There is much worse than this, my dear," he answered in a grave tone, from which all the accustomed mockery had gone. "A painful experience is before you, but you must endure it. At the end of that time----" Mary looked into the great Socialist's face, and she knew what his unspoken words would have conveyed. She knew well that she was on a trial, a test; that this strange expedition had been devised, not only that her art as an actress might be stimulated to its highest power, but that the very strings of her pity and womanhood should be touched also. Her new friends knew well that when at last she was on the boards of the Park Lane Theatre, acting there for all the rich and fashionable world to see, her work could only accomplish its great mission with success if it came poignantly from her heart. "Yes," she said in answer to his look, "I am beginning to see, I am beginning to hear the cry of the down-trodden and the oppressed, the wailing of the poor." Rose nodded gravely. "Now, Miss Marriott and gentlemen," said Inspector Brown, "we will turn down here, if you please. I should like to show you one or two tenements." As he spoke he turned to the right, down a narrow alley. Tall, grimy old houses rose up on either side of them, and there was hardly room for two members of the party to walk abreast. The flags upon which they trod were soft with grease and filth. The air was foetid and chill. It was, indeed, as though they were treading a passage-way to horror! The whole party came out into a court, a sort of quadrangle some thirty yards by twenty. The space between the houses and the floor of the quadrangle was of beaten earth, though here and there some half-uprooted flagstone showed that it had once been paved. The whole of it was covered with garbage and refuse. Decayed cabbage leaves lay in little pools of greasy water. Old boots and indescribable rags of filthy clothes were piled on heaps of cinders. As they came into the square Mary shrank back with a little cry; her foot had almost trodden upon a litter of one-day old kittens which had been drowned and flung there. The houses all round this sinister spot had apparently at one time, though many years ago, been buildings of some substance and importance. Now they wore an indescribable aspect of blindness and misery. There was hardly a whole window in any of the houses. The broken panes were stopped with dirty rags or plastered with newspaper. The doors of the houses stood open, and upon the steps swarms of children--dirty, pale, pallid, and hopeless--squirmed like larvæ. A drunken old woman, her small and ape-like face caked and encrusted with dirt, was reeling from one side of the square to another, singing a hideous song in a cracked gin-ridden voice, which shivered up into the cold, dank air in a forlorn and bestial mockery of music. "What is this?" Mary said, turning round to the police inspector by her side. "This, miss," said the bearded man grimly, "is called Taverner's Rents. Every room in these houses is occupied by a family; some rooms are occupied by two families. The people that live here are the poorest of the poor. The boys that sell newspapers, the little shoeless boys and girls who hawk the cheaper kinds of flowers about the streets, the cab-runners, the people who come out at night and pick over the dust-bins for food, those are the people that live here, miss. And there's a fairly active criminal population as well." Mary shuddered. The inspector noticed her involuntary shrinking. "Miss," he said, "you have only seen a little of it yet. Wait until I take you inside some of these places, then you will see what life in London can be like." The clergyman, Mr. Conrad, broke in. "You have come, Miss Marriott," he said, "now to the home of the utterly degraded and the utterly lost. Nothing I or anybody else can say or do is possible to redeem this generation. Their brains have almost gone, through filth and starvation. They live more terribly than any animal lives. Their lives are too feeble and too awful, either for description or for betterment. It is, indeed, difficult for one who, as myself, believes most thoroughly in the fact that each one of us has an immortal soul, that each one of us in the next world will start again, according to what we have done in this, to realise that the poor creatures whom you have seen now are human. Come!" It was almost with the slowness and solemnity of a funeral procession that the party passed up the broken steps of one of the houses and entered what had once, in happier bygone days, been the hall of a mansion of some substance and fair-seeming. The broken stairs stretched up above. The banisters which guarded them had long since been broken and pulled away. The doors all round were almost falling from their hinges. "Come in here, gentlemen," said the sanitary inspector of the London County Council, pushing a door open with his foot as he did so. They all followed into a large front room. A slight fire was burning in a broken grate, and by it, upon a stool, sat an immensely fat woman of middle-age. Her hair was extremely scanty and caught up at the back of her head in a knot hardly bigger than a Tangerine orange. Through the thin dust-coloured threads the dirty pink scalp showed in patches. The face was inordinately large, bloated, and of a waxen yellow. The eyes were little gimlet holes. The mouth, with its thick lips of pale purple, smiled a horrid toothless smile as they came in. All round the walls of the room were things which had once been mattresses, but from which damp straw was bursting in every direction. These mattresses were black, sodden, and filthy, and upon them--covered, or hardly covered as the case might be, with scraps of old quilt or discarded clothing--lay young children of from one year to eighteen months old. These little mites were almost motionless. Their heads seemed to be extraordinarily large, their unknowing, unseeing eyes blazed in their faces. The fat woman, suffering from dropsy, rose from her seat and curtsied as she saw the sanitary inspector and his colleagues. "It is all right, gentlemen," she said in a wee, fawning voice. "There's food on the fire for the little dearies, and they're going to have their meal, bless 'em, as soon as it's boiled up." She pointed to an iron pot full of something that looked like oatmeal which was simmering upon the few coals. "That's all right, Mary," the County Council inspector said in a rough but genial voice. "We haven't come to make any trouble to-day. We know you do your best. It is not your fault." "Thank you, sir," the woman answered, subsiding heavily once more upon her stool. "I have never done away with any children yet, and I am glad you know it. I've never been up before any beak yet, and I does my best. They comes to me when they've got the insurances on the kids, and I ses, 'No,' I ses, 'you take 'em where you know wot you wants will be done. You won't have far to go,' I ses, and so they takes 'em away. 'My bizness,' I ses, 'is open and aboveboard.' I looks arter the kids for a penny a day, and I gives 'm back to their mothers when they comes 'ome, feeding them meanwhile as well as I can." Mary was standing horror-struck in the middle of the room. She turned to Inspector Brown. "Oh," she said, "how awful! How terrible! How utterly awful!" The inspector looked down at her with grave face. "You may well say so, miss," he answered. "I am a married man myself, and it goes to my heart. But you must know that all this woman says is absolutely true. She is dying of dropsy, and she looks after these children for their mothers while they are at the match factories in Bethnal Green or making shirts in some Jew sweater's den. She is not what you may call a 'baby-farmer.' She is not one of those women who make a profession of killing children by starvation and cold in order that their parents may get the insurance money. As she goes, this woman is honest." "But look, look!" Mary answered, pointing with quivering finger to the swarming things upon the mattresses. "I know," the inspector answered, "but, miss, there are worse things than this that you could see in the neighbourhood." Suddenly Mary's blood, which had been cooled and chilled by the awful spectacle, rose to boiling point in a single second. She felt sick, she said, wheeling round and turning to Fabian Rose--she felt sick that all these terrible things should be. "Why should such things be allowed?" "My dear," Rose answered very gravely, "it is the fault of our modern system. It is the fault of capitalism. This is one of the reasons why we are Socialists." "Then," Mary said, her eyes flashing, her breast heaving, "then, Mr. Rose, I am a Socialist, too--from this day, from this hour." As she spoke she did not see that Aubrey Flood, the actor-manager, was regarding her with a keen, intense scrutiny. He watched her every movement. He listened to every inflection of her voice, and then--even in that den of horror--he turned aside and smiled quietly to himself. "Yes," he thought, "Fabian was right. Here, indeed, is the one woman who shall make our play a thing which shall beat at the doors of London like a gong." Inspector Brown spoke to Mary in his calm official voice. "Now, what should you think, miss," he said, "this woman--Mrs. Church--pays weekly for this room?" "Pays?" Mary answered. "Pays? Does she pay for such a room as this?" The fat woman upon the stool answered in a heavy, thick, watery voice: "Pye, miss? I pye eight shillings a week for this ere room." Mary started; she could not understand it. "What?" she said with a little stamp of her foot upon the ground. "It is perfectly true, miss," the County Council inspector interposed. "The rents of these places--these single rooms--are extremely high." "Then why do they pay them?" Mary asked. "Because, miss," the inspector answered, "if they didn't they would have nowhere to go at all, except to the workhouse. You see, people of this sort cannot move from where they are. They are as much tied to places of this sort as a prisoner in gaol is confined in his cell. It is either this or the streets." "But for all that money," Mary said, "surely they could give them a decent place to live in?" "We are doing all we can, miss, on the County Council, of course," the man replied, "and the workmen's dwellings which are springing up all over London are, indeed, a great improvement, but they are taken up at once by the hard-working artisan class, in more or less regular employment. It would be impossible to let any of the County Council tenements to a woman like this. Her income is so precarious, and there are others far more thrifty and deserving who must have first choice." "Who is the landlord?" Mary asked. She was standing next to the dropsical woman by the fireside as she spoke. "Oh, missie"--the woman answered her question--"the 'ead-landlord is Colonel Simpson at the big estyte orffice in Oxford Street, but, of course, we don't never see 'im. The collectors comes raund week by week and we pyes them. If we wants anythink then we arsts them, and they ses they'll mention it at 'eadquarters, but, of course, nuthink does get done. I don't suppose Colonel Simpson ever 'ears of nuthink." "It is perfectly true, miss," said the inspector. "It is only when we absolutely prosecute the estate agency for some flagrant breach of sanitary regulations that anything can be done in houses like this, and even then the lawyers in their employ are so conversant with all the recent enactments, and so shrewd in the science of evading them, that practically we can do nothing at all." When Mary turned to Fabian Rose he was standing side by side with the Reverend Peter Conrad. Both men were looking at her gravely and a little curiously. "Who is this Colonel Simpson?" she asked. "Could not he be exposed in the Press? Could not he be held up to execration? Could not you, Mr. Goodrick," she said, flashing upon the editor, who had hitherto remained in the background and said no word, "could not you tell the world of the wickedness of this Colonel Simpson?" The little man with the straw-coloured moustache and the keen eyes smiled. "Miss Marriott," he said, "you realise very little as yet. You do not know what the forces of capitalism and monopoly mean. Day by day we are driving our chisels into the basis of the structure, and some day it will begin to totter; some day, again, it will fall, but not yet, not yet. Mr. Simpson is a mere nobody. He is a machine. His object in life is to get as much money as he can out of the vast properties which he controls for another. He is an agent, nothing more." "Then who does this really belong to? Who is really responsible?" Mary asked. Fabian Rose looked at her very meaningly. "Once more," he said, "I will pronounce that ill-omened name--the Duke of Paddington." "Let us go away," Mr. Conrad said suddenly. He noticed that Mary's face was very pale, and that she was swaying a little. They went out into the hall and stood there for a moment undecided as to what to do. Mary seemed about to faint. Suddenly from the back of the hall, steps were heard coming towards them, and in a moment more the face of a clean-shaven man appeared. He was mounting from the stairs that led down into what had once been the kitchens or cellars of the old house. Just half of his body was visible, when he stopped suddenly, as if turned to stone. As he did so the bearded Inspector Brown stepped quickly forward and caught him by the shoulder. "Ah, it is you, is it?" he said. "Come up and let us have a look at you." The man's face grew absolutely white, then, with a sudden eel-like movement, he twisted away from under the inspector's hand and vanished down the stairs. In a flash the inspector and his companion were after him. "Come on!" they shouted to the others, "come on, we shall want you!" Rose and Conrad dashed after them. Mary could hear them stumbling down the stairs, and then a confused noise of shouting as if from the bowels of the earth. She was left alone, standing there with Mr. Goodrick, when she suddenly became aware that the staircase leading to the upper part of the house had become crowded with noiseless figures, looking down upon what was toward with motionless, eager faces. "What shall we do?" Mary said. "What does it all mean?" "I am sure I don't know," Goodrick answered, "but if you are not afraid, don't you think we had better follow our friends? I suppose the inspector is after some thief or criminal whom he has just recognised." "I am not afraid," Mary said. "Come along, then," he answered, and together they went to the end of the hall and stumbled down some greasy steps. A light was at the bottom, red light through an open door, and they turned into a sort of kitchen. There was nobody there, but one man who crouched in a corner and a fat, elderly Jewish woman, whose mouth dropped in fear, and whose eyes were set and fixed in terror, like the eyes of a doll. Through an open door in a corner of the kitchen beyond there came strange sounds--oaths, curses--sounds which seemed even farther away than the door suggested that they were. The sounds seemed to rise up from the very bowels of the earth, from some deeper inferno even than this. Then Mary, for the first time, began to be in real terror. She clung to the imperturbable little editor. "Oh, what is it?" she cried. "What does it all mean?" The Jewess turned round with an almost crouching attitude and peered fearfully into the dimly lit gloom through the doorway. Then, quite suddenly, without any warning, she fell back against the wall of the kitchen and began to shriek and wail like a lost soul. As she did so, and through her piercing shrieks, Mary heard the distant noises were becoming louder and louder. She reeled in the hot and filthy air of this dreadful place and pressed her hand against the wall for support. Even as she did so she saw the two police inspectors stagger into the room, bearing a burden between them, the burden, as it seemed, of a dead man. Then everything began to sway, the place was filled with a louder and louder noise, the whole room grew fuller and fuller of people, and Mary Marriott fainted dead away. CHAPTER XII AT THE BISHOP'S TOWN HOUSE The library was a noble one for a London house. The late sun of the summer afternoon in town poured into the place and touched all the golden and crimson-laden shelves in glory. From floor to roof the great tomes winked and glittered in the light. Here the sun fell upon the glazed-fronted cabinets, which held the priceless first editions of modern authors. There it illuminated those cabinets which confined and guarded the old black-letter editions of the bishop's famous collection of medieval missals. It was a dignified home of lettered culture and ease. Lord Camborne was sitting in a great armchair of green leather. In his own house he smoked a pipe, and a well-seasoned briar was gripped in his left hand as he leaned forward and looked at his son. On the opposite side of the glowing fireplace, on each side of which stood pots of great Osmunda ferns, which glistened in the firelight as if they had been cunningly japanned, Lord Hayle was sitting. His face was quite white, his attitude one of strained attention, as he listened to the wordy and didactic utterances of the earl. "I don't know what to make of it, my dear Gerald," the bishop said. "Upon my soul, I don't know what to make of it! Such a thing has never happened before in all my experience. Indeed, I don't suppose that such an occurrence has ever been known." "You are quite right, father," Lord Hayle replied; "but that is not the question. The question is: Where is my poor friend? Where is John?" The bishop threw out two shapely hands with a curious gesture of indecision and bewilderment. "Gerald," he said, "if I could answer that question I should satisfy the press of Europe and put society at rest." "But it is the most extraordinary thing, father," Lord Hayle said. "Here is John involved in this terrible railway accident. As far as we know--as far as we can know, indeed--he was rescued from the débris of the broken carriage perfectly unhurt. That young Doctor Jenkins was perfectly certain that the man whom he rescued and told to lie down for half an hour, to avoid the nervous effects of the shock, must have been the Duke of Paddington. He has assured me, he has assured Colonel Simpson, he has assured everybody in short that it was certainly the duke! In three-quarters of an hour he goes back to find his patient, and, meanwhile meeting Colonel Simpson, who had come down the line in frightful anxiety about the duke, there--where John had been--was nobody at all! Do you suppose that, as the _Pall Mall Gazette_ has hinted, that John was temporarily deranged by the shock and walked away and lost himself? There seems to be no other explanation." "But that is impossible," the bishop replied. "If he had done so would he not have been found in an hour or two?" "I suppose he would," Lord Hayle answered. "I suppose he would, father." "Then, all I can say," the bishop said, with an air of finality, "all I can say is that the thing is as black and mysterious as anything I have ever known in the whole course of my experience. There we were, you and myself and your sister, lunching at Paul's with the duke, when the news came of the outrage in Piccadilly. The duke went up to town by the six o'clock train. The accident occurred, and now the whole of society is trembling in suspense to know what has happened to your friend. I cannot tell you, Gerald, how it has distressed me; and," the bishop continued, with a slight hesitation in his voice, "your sister also is very much upset." "Well, naturally, Connie would be," Lord Hayle returned. "But think what it must be to me, father! It is worse for me than for anybody. You have met the duke, Connie has met him; but I have been his intimate friend for the whole of the time we have been up at Oxford together, and I am at a loose end, I am simply heart-broken." "My dear Gerald," said the splendid old gentleman from the armchair, with some unctiousness, "God ordains these things, these trials, for all of us; but be sure that, in His own good time, all will come right. We must be patient and trust in the Divine Will." The young man looked at his father with a curious expression upon his face. He was very fond of his distinguished parent, and had a reverence for his abilities, but somehow or other at that moment the bishop's adjuration did not seem to ring quite true. Youth is often intolerant of the pious complacency of late middle-age! It was about seven o'clock. At nine o'clock there was a small dinner party. The Home Secretary was to be there. "I wonder," Lord Hayle said, at length, "if Sir Anthony will have any news?" "I am sure I hope so," the bishop answered. "I saw him this morning in Whitehall, and he told me that everything that could possibly be done was being done. The whole of Scotland Yard, in fact, is bending its attention to the discovery of the whereabouts of your friend." "I wish," Lord Hayle returned grimly, "I wish we could have a Johnnie like Sherlock Holmes on John's trek. There don't seem to be any of that sort of people outside the magazines." At that moment the door of the library opened, and the butler came in. He carried a pile of evening papers upon a tray. "These are the latest editions, my lord," he said, bringing them up to the bishop. The father and son took the papers and opened them hurriedly. Huge head-lines greeted their eyes. "Where is the duke?" "Has the duke disappeared with intention?" "Last news of the missing duke." "Rumours that the Duke of Paddington has taken a berth on the _Lucania_ under the name of John Smith." "If the duke does not return, what will this mean to the ground-rents of London?" and so forth, and so forth, and so forth. The bishop put down the papers with a weary sigh. "The same thing," he said, "my dear Gerald, the same sort of thing." Lord Hayle looked up at his father. "Yes," he answered, "what fools these journalists are!" "No, my dear boy, they are not fools. When they have anything to write about, they write about it rather well. When they haven't, of course they must manufacture." "A confounded swindle, I call it!" said Lord Hayle. The bishop did not answer. He remembered how much he owed to the press of London and the provinces for his advancement in the Church. "Well," Lord Hayle said, "I shall go up-stairs, father, to my own room and have a tub and a pipe, and think the whole thing over. I suppose we may hear something from Sir Anthony at dinner to-night." "My dear boy," the bishop replied, "I'm sure I hope so." Lord Hayle had already risen from his seat, and was walking towards the door of the library when the butler entered once more. He bore a silver salver, upon which was a card, and went straight up to Lord Camborne. "My lord," he said, "there is a gentleman waiting in the morning-room. He desires to see you upon a most important matter. I told the gentleman that your lordship was probably engaged, but he would not be denied." "I cannot see anybody," the bishop replied, rather irritably. "Take the card to the chaplain." "I beg your lordship's pardon," said the butler, "but I think this is a gentleman whom your lordship would wish to see." The bishop pulled out his single eye-glass--he was the only prelate upon the bench who wore one--and looked at the card upon the tray. "Good gracious!" he said, with a sudden sharpness in his voice. "This fellow! How dare----" "Who has come to see you?" Lord Hayle asked. The bishop's face was flushed. There was indignation in his voice, contempt in his eyes, and angry irritation in his pose. "Look here, Gerald!" he said, taking the card and holding it out to his son in answer. "Who do you suppose has come to see me? Look!" Lord Hayle took up the card. "By Jove!" he said. "James Fabian Rose! Why, that's the great Socialist Johnny, isn't it, father? The man who writes plays and lectures, and is on the County Council and all that. I think we had him down at Oxford once, and I am not sure that we did not drive him out of the town." "That is the man," the bishop answered; "one of the most brilliant intellects and unscrupulous characters in London to-day. It is not too much to say, Gerald, that this man is a perfect danger and menace to society, and to our--our order." "Then what has he come to see you for, father?" "Goodness only knows!" said the bishop. "I certainly shall not see him." The butler was an old and privileged family servant. He had said nothing while this dialogue was in progress. Now he turned to his master. "If you will allow me to say so, my lord," he said, "I think the gentleman should be seen. I don't think that it is an ordinary visit at all. It bears no indication of being an ordinary visit at all." The bishop snapped his fingers once or twice. "Oh, well, Parker," he said, "show him in, show him in; but explain that I have only three minutes, and that I am very busy. Gerald, you might as well wait. It might be interesting for you to see this creature." In half a minute the butler opened the door and showed in the man with the face as white as linen, the mustard-coloured beard and moustache, and the keen lamp-like eyes. Rose was dressed in his usual lounge suit, cut with about as much regard to convention as a ham sandwich. His tall figure bent forwards in eagerness, and he was certainly a disreputable note in this stronghold of aristocracy. Yet, nevertheless, his personality blazed out in the room as if some one had lit a Roman candle in the library. The bishop rose, stately, portly, splendid. "Mr. Rose," he said, "to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit? I am rather pressed for time." "Something very important, indeed, my lord," the Socialist answered, in quick, incisive accents. "I should not have intruded upon you unless I had something most special to say." "I understand that, Mr. Rose," the bishop replied, though the courteous smile with which he said it robbed his remark of something of its sting. "You and I, Mr. Rose, represent two quite different points of view, do we not?" "I suppose we do," said the great Socialist, with a sudden vigour and amusement in his eyes; "but that is not what I have come here for to-night. May I ask, my lord," he said, looking towards Lord Camborne's son, "may I ask if this is Lord Hayle?" "That is my name, Mr. Rose," the young man replied, rather startled at the sudden question. "Oh, thank you," Rose said. "I have come here specially to see you to-night." There was a moment's pause. "Your business, Mr. Rose?" said the bishop once more. "Is this," Rose rejoined. "The Duke of Paddington has sent me with a very special message to his friend, Lord Hayle. If Lord Hayle was not in London, his grace asked me to see Lord Camborne." The bishop started violently. "My dear Mr. Rose," he said, in a deep voice, "what is all this? What is all this? The Duke of Paddington! Do you mean to say----" "The Duke of Paddington, my lord," Rose answered, a subtle mockery becoming somewhat apparent in his voice, "the Duke of Paddington has been discovered!" "Good Lord!" Lord Hayle shouted out suddenly, in the high-pitched voice of almost uncontrollable excitement. "You have found dear old John! Where is John, Mr. Rose?" There was something so spontaneous and sincere in the young man's voice that the Socialist turned with a certain brightness and pleasure to the young man. "Oh, sir!" he said, "the duke is lying at my house in Westminster. He has been kidnapped by criminal ruffians, and, I am sorry to say, has been tortured in order that large sums of money might be extorted from him. The doctors are with him now, and no serious injury has been done, but he is especially anxious to see you. I have a cab waiting, if you care to come at once." "I'll have my coat on in a moment," Lord Hayle replied, and left the room. The bishop went up to James Fabian Rose. "Sir," he said, "our difference of opinion in social economics and political affairs shall not prevent me from gripping you very heartily by the hand." CHAPTER XIII NEW FRIENDS: NEW IDEAS It was three days after the strange and dramatic rescue of the Duke of Paddington, and he lay in a bright, cheerful bedroom in James Fabian Rose's house in Westminster. Providence had guided Rose and his companions to the underground cellar in the nick of time. The relentless ruffians who had captured the duke had been as good as their word. They had treated him with indescribable ferocity, though into the details of the horrors in the foundation of the old house it is not necessary to go. When the police inspectors had brought him up from the deepest hole of all, he was unconscious, and had immediately been taken away to Rose's own house in a horse ambulance which had been summoned from the police headquarters of the district. The actual discovery had been very simple. Directly the Inspector of Police recognised the man known as "Sidney," he had rushed after him, followed by the others. As it happened, for some time the police had been very anxious to discover the exact whereabouts of this particular ex-convict, to track him to his lair. It was obvious that when the man turned and bolted down the stairs there was something he wished to conceal, and, though there was no actual charge against him at the moment, the policeman had experience enough to know that something illegal was afoot. They had dashed into the kitchen to find it tenanted only by the old Jewish woman, but the door leading into the smaller kitchen was open, and Sidney was leaning over the trap-door in the floor pulling up another member of the gang who had been down in the pit with the victim. The man's design had obviously been to get his comrade up, close the trap-door, and push the tub over it before the policemen could enter the kitchen. In all probability there would then have been no discovery at all, though the ruffian himself was by no means sure that the party were not in some way or other upon the track of the actual offence he had committed in kidnapping the duke. His guilty conscience had betrayed him. When the scoundrel had been caught and handcuffed, and the duke had been discovered and carried up into the kitchen the man relapsed into a sullen silence. He had gathered at once from the remarks made by his captors that they were quite unaware of the identity of the prisoner. It did not, in fact, occur to any of the party, even to the police, to connect this insensible figure, half-clothed--the face covered with grime and dirt--with the missing peer. "We will get the poor fellow off to the hospital at once, sir," Inspector Green had said to Rose. "These devils have been working some horrible thing upon him. I expect he is one of their pals who has given them away. I have seen some black things, but this is about as bad as any of them. I should not wonder"--he turned round with his face like a flint, and a voice that cut like a whip--"I should not wonder if this was a swinging job for you, Sidney O'Connor!" "He certainly shall not go to the hospital," said Rose. "Not that they won't look after him thoroughly there; but I could not allow anybody whom I discovered myself in such a plight as this to do so. He must go to my house, and my wife and Miss Marriott will nurse him." "Well, sir," said the officer, "it is only a very little distance farther to your house from here than to Charing Cross Hospital, and I will send the ambulance there if you really wish it. It's very kind of you, Mr. Rose." "Certainly I do," Rose answered. "It is a duty, of course." "And I," said Mary Marriott, "will drive back at once if a cab can be found for me, to tell Mrs. Rose that they are bringing this poor man." "That will be very kind of you, Miss Marriott," Rose answered. "I am sorry that our expedition has come to so unpleasant and dramatic an end, for I do not suppose any of us would care to go on now?" "No, indeed," said both the clergyman and the journalist in answer, and in a few minutes Mary's first experience of the dark under-currents of London life was at an end. When the duke was comfortably installed in Rose's house the doctor pronounced him suffering from shocks and extreme weakness. "He will be all right in a few days," he said. "He must now have absolute rest and nourishment. The actual harm inflicted upon him by the scoundrels with whom he was found is very slight. There are the merest superficial burns, and the cuts are trivial. It is the weakness and shock that are the most serious. The young man has a splendid constitution. He's as strong as an ox." The doctor went away, leaving minute directions for the treatment of the patient. The duke was in a semi-conscious condition. He realised dimly that he was out of the horrible place where he had lain for, so it seemed to him, an eternity. He knew that, somehow or other, he had been rescued, that he was now lying in a comfortable bed. A new life seemed slowly coming back into his veins as the meat jelly dissolved in his mouth. The horror was ended at last! He had fallen at length into a deep slumber. The party assembled in the drawing-room, discussing the extraordinary events of the morning, and Mrs. Rose was told every detail. The police and the County Council inspector were not there, but the chief inspector had promised to report later as to anything that should be learned of the truth of the mystery. "Well," said Mr. Goodrick, with a little chuckle, "I went out this morning because I wanted to watch Miss Marriott, and because I am interested in the great experiment we are making with her. I had seen all that sort of thing before I knew Miss Marriott; in fact, I began my journalistic career by writing of such places as we have been among; but I never expected that I was going to get a journalistic scoop. This will make a fine column in to-morrow's paper. The junior members of my staff will be jealous of their editor-in-chief going out and bringing in copy! They will regard it as an infringement of their rights!" He chuckled once more, and rubbed his hands together, all the true pressman's delight at exclusive news glowing in his eyes. "Yes," he went on, "it will be quite a big thing, especially as you were present, Rose--a real sensation! The _Wire_ will solve the mystery that is agitating the mind of the public in a most startling fashion!" A maid came into the room. "If you please, sir," she said to Rose, "Inspector Green is here, and wishes to see you immediately on a matter of great importance." "Show him up, Annie," said the Socialist, and in a second or two more the inspector burst into the room, his usual calm and imperturbable manner strangely altered. He seemed to be labouring under some deep emotion. "What is it, inspector?" Rose said, and instinctively all the people in the room rose up. "The man," the inspector gasped, "the man we found in the cellar, ladies and gentlemen--it is--it is his Grace the Duke of Paddington himself!" There was a dead silence. The faces of every one went pale with excitement. "The Duke of Paddington?" Rose said in a startled and incredulous voice. "His Grace himself, sir. As you know, his Grace's disappearance has been agitating the whole of Europe for the last day or two. It seems what happened was this. The duke was lying down on the side of the line after the railway accident. He was almost uninjured, but the doctor who rescued him ordered him to rest for half an hour. The gang of men in the slum hard by, attracted by the accident in the fog and the possibility of plunder, had come through a doorway in the wall which leads upon the line. They rifled the duke's pockets, and from their contents found out who he was. "The leader of the gang, Sidney O'Connor, is one of the most dangerous and desperate criminals in the country, and, moreover, a man of great daring and resource. He it was who thought it would be an infinitely better stroke of business if he could kidnap the duke and hold him to ransom. Owing to the fog and the proximity of their den--it is one of the duke's own houses, by the way, you will remember--the kidnapping was easily affected, the duke being too weak and stunned by the accident to offer any resistance. It is by the mercy of Providence that we found him when we did. The old Jewish woman who keeps the den has confessed everything. How is his Grace, Mr. Rose?" "Much better," said Mrs. Rose, "much better, inspector. The doctor has been here, and says he will be all right in a few days. He is suffering from extreme weakness and shock. He is now sleeping peacefully, and a nurse from the Westminster Hospital is with him." Mr. Goodrick went up to the inspector. "Now look here, inspector," he said, "promise me one thing, that neither you nor your companions will give any of the details of this affair to the press. I shall see that it is well worth your while, all of you, to be silent until to-morrow morning. Can you answer for your colleague and the plain-clothes man who was with us?" "Certainly I can, Mr. Goodrick," the inspector answered. "Well, it will be worth five pounds each to them. And what about the County Council inspector?" "He has gone back to Spring Gardens now, sir," Green replied, "but I can easily send a message up to him from Scotland Yard to that effect." "I shall be most obliged if you will do so," said Mr. Goodrick, and then once more he gave a loud chuckle of triumph and rubbed his hands together. "Sensation!" he said in an ecstasy, "why, the _Wire_ will have one of the biggest scoops of recent years to-morrow. Oh, what luck! Oh, what splendid luck! No other paper will have anything except the mere statement of the fact that the duke has been discovered under mysterious circumstances. Mrs. Rose, I must say good-bye; I must hurry off. Don't forget, inspector! Absolute secrecy!" He made a comprehensive bow, which included all of them, patted Fabian genially upon the back, and rushed away. "What do you suppose we had better do, inspector?" Rose asked. "Well, sir, I don't quite know what there is to be done, except, perhaps, to telegraph to the head of the young gentleman's college at Oxford, and to Colonel Simpson, his agent. You see, the duke has no very near relatives, though he is connected with half the peerage. I shall take care, also, that the news is at once conveyed to Buckingham Palace. His Majesty has been most anxious during the last day or two, and inquiries are constantly reaching us. For the rest, I think it will be better that you should wait until his Grace regains consciousness and can say what he would like to be done." The inspector had disappeared, and Rose, his wife, Mary, and Mr. Conrad, were left alone, looking at each other in amazement. Then suddenly Rose sat down and burst into laughter. The old elfin, mocking expression had returned to his face. The keen eyes twinkled with sardonic humour, the mustard-coloured beard and moustache wagged up and down, as the great man leant back in an ecstasy of mirth. "All's well that ends well," he said at length, spluttering out his words. "Good heavens! what a marvellous day it has been! We go to the Duke of Paddington's property, so that Miss Marriott can get ideas for the part of the heroine in the play which is to draw all England to the iniquity of great landlords like the duke, who do nothing, and allow their agents to draw rents for rat-holes. Then we find the duke himself trussed up like a chicken in a gloomy cellar of one of his own filthy properties! What extraordinary tricks Fate does play sometimes! Who would have thought that such a thing could possibly happen? And, what is better still--what is more quaintly humorous than ever--here is the young gentleman with his hundred and fifty thousand a year and his great name and title, here! sleeping in my best bedroom--in the very headquarters of the party which is labouring to destroy monopolies such as his. I wonder what he will say when he wakes up and finds out where he is, poor fellow!" "If he is a gentleman, as I suppose he is," said Mrs. Rose, "he will say 'Thank you'--not once, but several times, because, you know, Fabian dear, not only did you save his life, in the first instance by chance, but you brought him here instead of sending him to a hospital when you had no idea who he was." "And that," Mary broke in, "is what I call practical socialism. Don't you allow, Mr. Rose, that the duke is a brother?" "Oh, yes," the Socialist replied, "but no more and no less a brother because of his dukedom." There was a tap at the door. The nurse had sent down a message that the gentleman upstairs was awake, had learned where he was, and would like to see Mr. Rose. * * * * * This was what had occurred. For three days the duke had lain in bed, gradually growing stronger. Lord Hayle had visited him constantly, and when he was well enough to be moved he was to go straight to the Camborne's house in Grosvenor Street. The sun poured into the bedroom--a cold, wintry sun, but still grateful enough after the fog and gloom of the last week. A fire crackled upon the hearth, and the duke lay propped up with pillows, smoking a cigarette. On a chair at the side of the bed sat Fabian Rose, and on a chair on the other side was Mr. Conrad, the clergyman. An animated conversation was in progress. For the first time in his life the duke had met types to which he was utterly unaccustomed. He had known of Fabian Rose, of course; there was no one in England who did not know the great Socialist's name, and few people of the upper classes who had not, at some time or other, witnessed one of his immensely clever plays. But now the duke was finding that all his ideas were being rudely upset. They were in a process of transition. The man with the white face and the mustard-coloured beard, with the lambent humour, had captivated him. He felt drawn to Rose, though his predominant sensation when talking to his host was one of wild amazement, and as for the clergyman, the duke liked him also, though he was a type that he had never met before. It was an odd situation indeed. Here was the great capitalist captured and cornered by two of the most militant Socialists of the day--and here--he was rather enjoying it! "Well," he said, "I seem fated nowadays to be carried off into the camp of the enemy; but I like this captivity better than the first. All the same, I cannot in the least agree with you, Mr. Conrad, in what you say, that the law of England, as it stands at present, is simply in the interests of the classes with property. Poor people have just as much justice, I have always understood, as any others." "It is not so," replied Mr. Conrad, shaking his head. "I wish it were. As I see it, as Rose sees it, as we Socialists see it, the law works wholly to protect property and the propertied, and to do whatever injustices the propertied people who control the State require of it. "When a hungry man helps himself to the food he cannot pay for, a man in blue introduces him to a man on a bench, and the result of the interview is that the hungry one is put away and locked up for a lengthened time. When the people meet to discuss their miseries and to demand relief men in scarlet as well as in blue beat and cut them to death. The law of England, as it stands at present, is entirely built up upon what John Kenworthy has so aptly described as 'that Devil's Bible, the Codex Romanorum.' Rome built up a property system which asserted and maintained the rights of the selfish and cunning over those whom they cheated and robbed, and we have done precisely the same with similar results. It is just the same in England to-day as it is in Russia, though the English people are not able to assert themselves as their brethren in Russia are doing. Count Tolstoi has said that in both countries--in almost all countries, in fact, authority is in the hands of men who, like all the rest, are ever ready to sacrifice the commonweal if their own personal interests are at stake. These men encounter no resistance from the oppressed, and are wholly subject to the corrupting influence of authority itself. And yet we call ourselves a Christian nation!" "And so we are, Mr. Conrad," the duke replied. "England is ruled and guided entirely by the Christian faith. If it were not so society would fall to pieces in a day." "It is not so, believe me, duke," the clergyman answered; "and if society could but fall to pieces in a day, then indeed there would be a glorious opportunity to reconstruct it on really Christian lines! Jesus left no doubt as to the nature of His mission. He pictured Dives, the rich man, plunged into torment for nothing else than for being rich when another was poor--not, you will observe, only for being rich. He pictures Lazarus, who had not anything, poor and afflicted, as comforted and consoled. For that those evangelical nonconformists the Pharisees, derided the Great Teacher of mankind. Again, by the force of His personality, for it was not the scourge that He held in His hands alone, Jesus drove the usurers out of their business quarters in the Temple and named them thieves. 'Woe,' He said, 'to those who lay up treasures upon earth. Blessed,' He said, 'are the poor!' It is," he concluded, "to reconstruct real Christianity that the Socialists are labouring to-day." The duke did not answer. He lay back upon his pillows, thinking deeply. "These are very new thoughts to me," he said, "and you must forgive me if I cannot immediately assimilate them." "Quite so," Fabian Rose broke in, "but perhaps some day your Grace will get more light upon these subjects. It is impossible for you and us to think alike in any particular. Our whole lives and environment have been entirely different. Some men upon a mountain survey a landscape; others see nothing but a map. I agree with Mr. Conrad to a certain extent, but he would be the very last person to call me an orthodox Christian all the same. As one looks round it really does often seem that when Christ died the religion of Christ died too. Instead of that we have only the 'Christian religion' nowadays. But we must not tire you, you must get up all your strength to-day, for your removal to Lord Camborne's house to-morrow--for your removal out of our lives," he concluded, with an unusual sadness in his voice, "for our ways lie very far apart." "If you will allow me, Mr. Rose," the duke answered, "our ways will not lie very far apart. Thinking differently as we do, looking upon these problems through different pairs of spectacles, nevertheless it would be a grief to me if I thought that we were not to meet sometimes and to remain friends. What you have done for me is more than I can say, and I should be indeed ungrateful if the fact that we were in opposite camps prevented a hand-grasp now and then." "Well, well," Rose answered, "I am sure it is very kind of you to say so, and we shall see what the future brings forth. At the same time it is only fair to tell you what I have not told you before--that I am organising an active campaign against you in the first instance, as a type of the class we desire to destroy, and for which we wish to substitute another." "Dear me!" said the duke, smiling. "That sounds very dreadful, Mr. Rose. Do tell me what is going to happen. Are you going to blow up some more of my house in Piccadilly?" "Oh, no," Rose replied, laughing. "Those are not our methods, and although they have not found out, I understand, who threw the bomb and destroyed the Florentine Vase, I am sure it was no member of the Socialistic party, to which I belong. We accomplish our ends by more peaceful methods, though infinitely stronger. No, duke, I will tell you frankly what is on the cards." Mr. Rose paused for a moment, and then in a few sentences told his guest exactly, and in detail, all his plan for educating society to socialistic ideals by means of the theatre. "And here," he concluded with a smile, as Mrs. Rose knocked at the door and entered with Mary Marriott, who was carrying a bunch of chrysanthemums in her hand, "and here is the girl who is to be the arch offender against your rights! Here is the heroine of the play! The artist whose influence shall be more powerful and far-reaching than a thousand lectures!" The duke smiled. He was glad to see the beautiful girl whom he had got to know and like during the two or three times he had met her. "Well," he said, "if privilege is to be destroyed it could be at no more kindly hands I am sure!" "I brought you some chrysanthemums, your Grace," Mary said, flushing a little, "a sort of peace offering, because Mr. Rose told me yesterday that he was going to tell you all that we propose to do. I hope your Grace will accept them?" They left the duke alone after a few minutes further chat, and for the rest of the day he saw no one but the doctor and a new valet who had been engaged for him. The flowers which Mary Marriott had given him stood upon a table by the bed, and, as he regarded their delicate, fantastic beauty, so instinct with the decorative spirit of the Land of the Rising Sun, he thought a good deal of the giver. To the duke an actress had hitherto always meant some dull wench in a burlesque. On one occasion only had he been to a supper party given to some of these ornaments of the illustrated papers, and he had been so insufferably bored that he resolved the experience should be his last. He had known vaguely, of course, that ladies went on the stage nowadays, but the fact had never been brought home to him before he met Mary Marriott. How graceful she was! As graceful in every movement as any famous society beauty. Her face was very lovely in its way, he thought, and though of quite a different type, it was almost as lovely as that of Lady Constance Camborne. What a pair they would make! What a bouquet of girls! It would be splendid to see them together, the dark girl and the fair. He had much to occupy his mind as he lay alone. The novel which they had brought him lay unheeded upon the counterpane. He had stepped into a new world, of that there was no doubt at all, and had begun to realise how his great possessions and high rank had hitherto set him apart and barred him from much that was vivid and interesting, pulsating with life. He had always been exclusive; it was in his blood to be so, and his training had fostered the instinct. But he saw now that he would never be quite the same again. His curiosity was aroused, and his interest in classes of society of which he had never thought before. He determined to investigate. He would keep friends with Fabian Rose and his circle. If they were going to write a socialistic play, well, let them. It would be amusing to watch it, and, besides, it could not hurt him. He would get to know this Miss Marriott better, and he would ask her about her art, which seemed to be so dominant a purpose in her life. There were many things that he resolved he would do in the future. Then again, there was that young Arthur Burnside. The duke remembered how, during the afternoon before the accident, he had talked with Burnside in St. Paul's College, and had been able to give him the vacant librarianship at Paddington House, which had meant a total change in the young man's prospects. Yes! he would go to Paddington House one day, when he was staying with the Cambornes, and he would see how Burnside was getting on, and have a talk with him. Oh, yes, there were many things that he would do! On the morning of the next day, a bright winter's morning, the duke left the hospitable house in Westminster. It was with real regret and with a sense of parting from old friends that he said "Good-bye." Mary Marriott was there. She was now in constant confabulation with Rose every morning, and she formed one of the little group who assembled on the steps of the house in the quiet street behind the Abbey. A huge motor brougham, with Lord Camborne's coronet upon the panels, was waiting there. A groom in motoring livery stood by the door. The chauffeur took off his hat as the duke came out. It was not often that such splendour was seen in that quarter. Then the brougham rolled swiftly away, and another page in the young man's life was turned over. He did not drive straight to Lord Camborne's house, but told the chauffeur to stop at Gerrard's in Regent Street, the florist's, and went into the shop, where the great masses of hothouse flowers made the air all Arabia for him and all comers. His purchase of lilies and roses was so stupendous that even the imperturbable young ladies in that floral temple showed more than their usual interest. Indeed, the house of the Socialist would be gay that afternoon, and Mrs. Rose would be surrounded by a perfect garden of the flowers whose name she bore--a delicate thankoffering. In a few minutes more the duke arrived at Lord Camborne's house in Grosvenor Street. Both his host and Lord Hayle were out, but Lady Constance received him. "Now, you are going to be very quiet, and not talk much," she said. "We are going to be most careful of you, after what you have gone through. I cannot tell you, duke, how agitated we have all been about you. Poor Gerald has been nearly mad with anxiety. He is so fond of you, you know. What terrible things you have been through--first the accident, and then that awful horror!" She shuddered. She was very fair as she stood there, in her simple morning gown, with all the beauty of sympathy added to her supreme loveliness. As the duke was shown to his own rooms he felt once more that throbbing pulsation, that sudden exhilaration, which he had known when Lady Constance had come to lunch at Paul's and he had seen her for the first time. She did not know, nor could he tell her, how star-like she had been in his thoughts during the long, dark hours of his captivity, and how it was the radiant vision of her, etched into his memory, which had given strength to his obstinacy and power to resist the demands of his tormentors. CHAPTER XIV AT THE PARK LANE THEATRE The Park Lane Theatre in Oxford Street, about two hundred yards east of the Marble Arch, was one of the most successful houses of those many theatres which have sprung up in London during the last few years. Its reputation was thoroughly high-class, and more particularly that of a theatre patronised by Society. It was in fact, the St. James's of that quarter of London. Here was no pit, and the gallery seats were half-a-crown for example. The long and successful run of a play at the Park Lane had just concluded, and the theatrical journalists were hazarding this or that surmise as to what would be next produced. For some reason or other there seemed to be a sort of mystery. The syndicate which owned the theatre would make no announcements through their manager, save only that the theatre had been let. Inquiries elicited nothing. This or that well-known _entrepreneur_, when asked the question had denied that he was interested in any forthcoming production at the theatre. There was a good deal of speculation on the point, and the play-going public itself was beginning to be interested. Then, one morning, there appeared in the _Daily Wire_ a paragraph, displayed in a prominent position, which stated that the theatre had been leased to Mr. Aubrey Flood, the well-known actor-manager, and the paragraph--obviously inspired--went on to hint at a most sensational development, of which the public might shortly expect news in the columns of the great Radical daily. A few days after the public had been informed of the Duke of Paddington's extraordinary and terrible experiences, Mr. Aubrey Flood sat in his private room at the theatre. It was twelve o'clock noon, and he was dictating some letters to his secretary. The room was large and comfortable, and was reached by a short passage at the back of the dress circle. The walls were hung with framed photographs, many of them of great size, and signed by names which were famous in the dramatic world. There was a curious likeness to each other in all these photographs, when one regarded them closely. Men and women of entirely different faces and figures had all, nevertheless, the same curiously _conscious_ look lurking in the eyes and pose. They seemed well aware, in their beauty of face and figure or splendour of costume, that they were there for one purpose--to be looked at. Here and there the photographs were diversified by valuable old play-bills in gold frames, and close to the door was a page torn out of a ledger, the writing now faded and brown with years. It was a salary list of some forgotten provincial theatre, and the names of famous actors--at the time it was written utterly unknown to fame--were set down there in a thin, old-fashioned script. Heading the list one saw "Henry Irving, £1 10s. 0d.," the weekly salary at that date of, perhaps, the greatest actor England has ever known. A huge writing-table was covered with papers, and there were two telephones, one hanging upon the wall, the other resting on its plated stand upon the table. Upon another table, much higher than the ordinary, and standing at one side of the room was a complete model theatre. Carefully executed studies of scenery half a yard square lay by the side of the model, and a complete miniature tableau had been built up upon the tiny stage, while the characters of the toy drama were represented by the little oblong cubes of wood, variously coloured. To complete the picture, it should be stated that, by the side of Mr. Aubrey Flood, nearer, indeed, to him than the telephone, stood a square bottle of cut-glass, a tumbler, and a syphon of soda-water. There was a knock at the door, and the stage door-keeper entered with a card. "Mr. Lionel C. Westwood, to see you, sir," he said. "Ask him to come in at once," Flood answered. Mr. Lionel C. Westwood had, more or less, created his own profession, which was that of a very special sort of theatrical journalist. He had been tried for dramatic criticism on more than one paper, but had abandoned this form of writing for what he speedily found to be the more lucrative one of collecting early dramatic intelligence. He wrote, too, the column of Green Room Gossip in more than one important paper, and was, indeed, of extreme use to managers who wished to contradict a rumour or to start one. He came hurriedly into the room--a short, easy, alert young man, wearing a voluminous frock-coat, and with a mixed aspect of extreme hurry and cordiality. "Oh, my dear Aubrey," he said, shaking the manager's hand with effusive geniality, "so here you are! Directly I saw the paragraph in the _Wire_ I wrote to you, asking for fuller information. Now, you won't mind telling me all there is to know, will you?" "Sit down, Lionel," said the actor. "Will you have a drink?" "No, thank you," replied the little man, "I never take anything in the morning. Now, what is all this? What are you going to do? What are you going to produce? That's what I want to know. All London is wondering!" He rapped with his fingers upon the table, and his face suddenly assumed a curiously ferret-like look "What is it, Aubrey, dear boy?" he concluded. Flood leant back in his chair and lit a cigarette. "It is a very big thing indeed, Lionel," he said, "and I don't know, dear boy, that I should be justified in letting you into it just yet. Why, we only read the play to the company this afternoon!" Mr. Lionel C. Westwood's ears seemed positively to twitch as he elicited this first piece of information. "Oh!" he said, with a sudden gleam of satisfaction. "Well, that is something, at any rate. That is an item, Aubrey." "I am afraid that is as far as I shall be able to go," the shrewd manager replied. This little comedy progressed for some twenty minutes, until at last Mr. Lionel C. Westwood was worked up into the right state of frantic curiosity and excitement. Then Aubrey Flood explained dimly the purpose and scope of the new play, hinted reluctantly at the achievement of a new star, a young actress of wonderful power and extreme beauty, who had hitherto been quite unknown in the provinces, and finally, with a gush of friendship, "Well, as it is you, Lionel, dear boy, though I would not do it for anybody else," promised the journalist that he might come to the theatre again that afternoon and form one of the privileged few, in addition to the company itself, who would be present at the reading of the play by its author, Mr. James Fabian Rose. Mr. Lionel C. Westwood went away more than contented, and Aubrey Flood resumed his correspondence. The train was laid and the match was applied to it. The _Daily Wire_, of course, was at the disposal of the syndicate, and would further its objects in every way through Mr. Goodrick. At the same time, the editor was quite shrewd enough to know that his paper was more particularly read by the middle-classes, and content to sacrifice items of excessive interest concerning the play in order that it might be widely advertised. For they were all very greatly in earnest, these people. Even Aubrey Flood himself, while he was business man enough to regard this speculation as an excellent one, and believe that he would make a great deal of money over it, was nevertheless about to produce this epoch-making play from a real and earnest adherence to the doctrines it was to inculcate. There is a general opinion that your actor-manager and your actor are persons consumed by two inherent thirsts--applause and money. In a sense--perhaps in a very general sense--this is true, but there are still those actors and actresses whose life is not entirely occupied with their own personality and chances of success. In the most egotistical of all occupations there are yet men and women who are animated by the spirit of altruism, and the hope of helping a great movement. Aubrey Flood was one of these men. He was as convinced a Socialist as Fabian Rose himself. He was enlisted under that banner, and he was prepared to go to any length to uphold it in the forefront of the great battle which was imminent. At the same time, Mr. Aubrey Flood saw no reason why propaganda should not pay! He was dictating his letters, when once more the stage door-keeper came into the room with another card. It was that of Miss Mary Marriott. Flood started. "Show Miss Marriott in at once," he said, and his face changed a little, while a new light of interest came into his eyes. Your theatrical manager is not, as a rule, a person very susceptible to the charms of the ladies with whom he is constantly associated, though perhaps that is not quite the best way to put it. He is susceptible, but in a somewhat cynical and contemptuous way. The conquests in the world of the limelight are not always too difficult, and a man who pursues them out of habit and inclination very often learns to put a low figure upon achievement. But in the case of Mary Marriott, Aubrey Flood, who was no better or no worse than his colleagues, had felt differently. It does not necessarily mean that when a manager makes love to his leading lady, or to any lady in his company, he necessarily has the slightest real emotion in doing so. It is, indeed, part of the day's work, and half of the day's necessity. That is all. But Flood had never met any one like Mary Marriott before. He was impressed by her beauty; he recognised her talent; he believed absolutely in her artistic capacities. At the same time he found himself feeling for this girl something to which he had long been a stranger--a feeling of reverence, or perhaps chivalry, would more easily describe it. Yes, when he was with her he remembered his younger days when, as a boyish undergraduate from Oxford, he had played tennis with the daughters of the squire on the lawns of his father's rectory. Then all women passably fair and passably young had been mysterious goddesses. Mary Marriott sometimes brought the hardened and cynical man of the world, whose only real passion was for the cause of Socialism, back to the ideals of his youth, and he counted himself fortunate that fate had thrown her in his way. Mary came into the room. He rose and shook her heartily by the hand. "My dear Miss Marriott," he said--an intimate of his would have noticed a slight change in his way of addressing her, for to most lady members of his company he would have said "my dear," "to what do I owe this call? I thought we were all going to meet at half-past two to hear the play read! Do sit down." Mary smiled at him. She liked Mr. Flood. She knew the sickening familiarities of the men who had controlled some of the companies in which she had been. At first it had been horrible, then she had become a little accustomed and blunted to it. She had endured without any signs of outrage the familiar touch upon the arm, the bold intimacy of voice and manner. It was refreshing now to meet a man who behaved to her as a gentleman behaves to a lady in a society where the footlights are not. In fact, everything was refreshing, new, and exhilarating to Mary now, since that day, that terrible day of fog and gloom, when, after her long and perilous search for an engagement she had sat in her little attic flat in Bloomsbury and the mustard-bearded man had knocked at the door with all the suddenness of wonder of the fairy godmother herself to Cinderella. She sat down, and there was a moment's pause. "Well, do you know, Mr. Flood," she said at length, hesitating a little, and feeling embarrassed, "I have come to ask you a most extraordinary favour." All sorts of ideas crossed the swift, cinematographic mind of the manager. It could not be that she wanted an advance of salary, because all the company were to be paid for rehearsals, and directly the contract had been signed with him and Fabian Rose, Mary Marriott's half-salary had begun. It could not be that she wanted more "fat" in the part, because she realised the rigidity of Rose's censorship in such a matter; and, besides, she was too much an artist to want the centre of the stage all the time. What could it be? His face showed nothing of his thoughts. All he said was, "Miss Marriott, I am sure you will not ask me anything that I shall not be able to grant." "But I think on this occasion you might have some difficulty, Mr. Flood," Mary answered, with half a smile--the man thought he had never seen such charm and such self-possession. Her voice was like a silver bell, heard far away on a mountain side. No, it wasn't, it was like water falling into water--like a tiny waterfall, falling into a deep, translucent pool in a wood! "Go on, Miss Marriott," he replied, with a smile. "I want to bring some one to the reading of the play this afternoon," she said. "That is all right," he answered; "but provided, of course, that your friend will not divulge anything about the play more than we allow him to do. Why, I have just given little Lionel C. Westwood permission to come and hear the play read. Of course, Mr. Rose must have a say in the matter. But who do you want to bring?" "I have asked Mr. Rose," Mary replied. "I saw him this morning, and he raised no objections, provided only that you gave your consent." "Well, then, it is a foregone conclusion," Flood returned; "but who is it?" "Well," Mary answered, "it is the Duke of Paddington." Aubrey Flood looked at her for a moment, his eyes wide with amazement. "The man himself! By Jove!" he said, "the very man! Do you think this is wise?" "He has given me his promise," Mary answered, "that he comes merely as an interested spectator." "Oh, well, then," Flood answered, "if that is the case, by all means let him come, Miss Marriott. Of course, if Rose does not mind, I am sure I don't; but when you first mentioned his name I had a flitting vision that he was coming for--not at all in a friendly way--in fact, to gather material for a libel action in case his personality is indicated too plainly in the play." "But it is not, Mr. Flood, is it?" Mary asked. "Oh, no," the actor answered; "his personality is not indicated at all. We don't caricature people, we indicate types. He is---- Well, perhaps I should hardly even have used the word indicate at all--he is merely used as a peg upon which to hang our theories. I have read the play and you have not, and I am sure that what I say is quite correct. At the same time, you know, Miss Marriott, all London will guess at whom we are hitting in the first instance--not so much because he happens to be an individual enemy of the Cause as that he is representative of the army of monopolists we are endeavouring to destroy." "I am sure he won't mind at all," Mary Marriott said, and Flood noticed with an odd uneasiness that she flushed a little. "I have had the privilege of seeing something of the duke lately, and he really seems to be taking an interest in the socialistic movement, though of course from quite a different point of view to ours." "I see," Flood replied slowly. "Miss Marriott, you are trying----" And then he stopped, he thought it better to leave his thought unspoken. "Very well, then," he replied, "so be it. Bring him, by all means." "May I telephone?" Mary said, "or, rather would you have a message telephoned to Grosvenor Street, Mr. Flood? The duke is staying with Lord Camborne, and I promised that if it was possible for him to hear the reading of the play I would let him know. If you telephone to him that there is no objection he will arrive here at half-past two o'clock." "By all means," Flood answered, "I will do it myself. I have had a good many interesting experiences in my lifetime, but this will be the first time that I have talked to a duke over the telephone." He laughed a little sardonically as Mary rose. "By the way, what are you going to do now?" he said. "It is nearly one o'clock. I am going home to my flat for lunch," Mary answered. "No, you are not, Miss Marriott," he answered. "You are coming out to lunch with me, if you please." Mary hesitated for a moment, then smiled radiantly, and thanked him. "It is very kind of you," she said. "Of course I will, since you ask me." Together, a few minutes afterwards, they left the theatre and drove down to Frascati's. The lunch was bright and merry. Upon the stage the usual convenances are not observed, because, indeed, it would be impossible that they should be. Apart from them any abuses of stage life, and the danger which belongs to the meeting of youngish men and women without the usual restraints of society, without the usual restraints which society imposes, there is, nevertheless, in many instances a real and true _camaraderie_ of the sexes which is as charming as it is without offence. The girl lunched with the actor-manager, gaily and happily. The simple _omelette_, _fines herbes_, the red mullet and the grilled kidneys were perfectly cooked, and the bottle of Beaune--well, it was Moulin à Vent, and what more can be said? They talked over the play from various points of view. First of all it was from the aspect of its probable success. They agreed that this seemed assured. Then they talked eagerly, keenly of the artistic possibilities of it. Mary had read a scene or two--Fabian Rose had given her the typewritten manuscript--but of the play as a whole she had no more than a vague idea. This, to both of them, was the most interesting part of their talk. Aubrey was an artist in every way. He was a successful artist and had combined commercial success with his real work, otherwise he would not have been a "successful artist." But he cared very much, nevertheless, for the splendour of what he believed to be the greatest art in the world. He was sincere, as Mary was also, in his belief in the high mission of the stage. Finally, over their coffee, they talked of what the play--already assumed successful and important--would mean to Socialism. Mary was but a new convert. Her ideas about the cause to which, in her young enthusiasm, she had pledged herself were nebulous. She had much to learn. She was learning much. Yet her heart warmed up as Aubrey Flood let his words go, and told her of his ambitions that this play should indeed be a great thing for the Cause. He was a clever and well-known actor, a successful manager, under a new aspect altogether. She had met people like Aubrey Flood before, but no single one of them had ever shown her that beneath his life of the theatre lay any deep and underlying motive, and it uplifted her, she felt that strange sense of brotherhood which those who are united against the world always know. She recognised that Aubrey Flood, beneath his exterior, was as keen and convinced a Socialist as Fabian Rose, or Mr. Conrad. The fact substantiated her own new theories and induced in her the throbbing sense of being an officer in a great army. "I wish I had known before," she said to him as they were preparing to leave the restaurant. "I wish I had known before, then, indeed, I might have had an ethical motive in my life, which I now see and feel has been lacking for a long time." "You are now," he answered, "catching something of our own enthusiasm, and it is by the most extraordinary chain of events that Rose and you, Conrad and myself have come into touch with the Duke of Paddington himself. Conrad, of course, would tell you that Providence had designed it. I cannot go so far as that. I simply say that it is chance. All the same, it is a most marvellous thing. We are going to startle England." Mary looked at him for a moment. They had just got into the hansom which was to drive them back to the theatre. "I don't see, Mr. Flood," she said in a quiet voice, "why it is any more easy to believe that something you call 'chance' brings things about than it is difficult to believe that something Mr. Conrad calls 'Providence' should effect the same results." Flood looked at her in his turn. Here was a most strange young lady of the stage, indeed. He tried to think of something to say, but could not. The simple logic of her answer forbade retort. Indeed, why should any one want to gather up "coincidences," call the controlling power of them "chance," and not admit that Providence itself had ordered them? He could not think beyond that, and he was silent. He remembered his old father at the country rectory. He remembered the simple faith of his father and mother and his sisters, and he realised with a sudden shock of pain that the reason why he strove to call the strange Directorship of the affairs of life by a name which had no especial meaning was because he was not prepared to submit to the teachings and the order of the Faith. Mary also seemed to realise that her words had struck home to a heart which was not yet entirely atrophied by the rush of life in the world of the stage. She turned to him and smiled slightly, rather sadly, indeed. "Mr. Flood," she said, "you and I were both born in the same country but perhaps you have been over the frontier for a long time." "And perhaps," he answered, and while he did so his voice sounded in his own ears strange and unfamiliar, "and perhaps even a theatrical manager may some day ask for his passport to return." They drew up at the stage door of the Park Lane Theatre. Mary did not go back to Mr. Flood's room. She went straight on to the stage. The curtain was up. The house was swathed in brown holland, and only a faint light came down from the glass dome in the roof, showing the whole place melancholy and bizarre. The stage itself was a great expanse of dirty boards, stretching right away to a brick wall at the back, in which was a huge slit, with two dingily-painted doors covering it, by which scenery was brought into the scene-dock a little behind. Two or three chairs were set down by the unlighted footlights, and there was a tiny table by one of them. The limits of the scene which would be set one day were marked off by chalk lines upon the boards. Two or three nondescript men in soft felt hats wandered about in the wings, and on the prompt side, up a ladder and standing on the platform above where is the switchboard which controls the stage lights, the electrician--in a dirty white linen coat--was twisting wires from one plug to another, and noisily whistling the last popular song. It was a scene of drab materialism, and the two or three little groups of people who stood here and there neither added to it nor gave it any animation. As Mary went "on" the actors and actresses who were waiting there looked at her with curious eyes. One or two she knew--they were often at the Actors' Association. Who her colleagues as principals were she had not been told, and as yet had no idea, save only of course that she was to act with Aubrey Flood himself. She saw, however, with a little thrill of pleasure that Dorothy French was there. She herself had obtained a small part for her little friend from Fabian Rose. Dolly came hurrying up to her, the girl's high-heeled shoes echoing strangely upon the boards and sending out a muffled drum-like note into the dim, shrouded auditorium beyond. "Oh, Mary dear," Dolly whispered, "I am so glad to see you! I have not seen you for such a long time, and it's been so awfully good of you to find a shop for me. But what an extraordinary business it all is! None of us seem to know anything about it. The whole thing is a perfect mystery, and is it really true?" she continued, with a touch of envy, "is it really true, Mary dear, that you are going to play lead?" Mary sighed a little. "Well," she said, "I suppose it is." "Then you know all about it?" Dolly answered quickly. "Now, do tell me, Mary, what it is all about. The papers are full of rumours." Mary realised what she had often realised before in her stage career, that friendships last for a tour, and are spoiled by the first hintings of success. She had always been fond of little Dolly French, pretty little Dolly French; but here at the very first intimation of her own promotion, was Dolly, with a changed voice and a different look in her eyes, wearing an eager, questioning envious look. "I know very little, Dolly," she answered rather shortly, "and what I do know I must not tell. Everybody will know soon, of course." Dorothy looked at her for a moment in silence. Then she said: "Oh, Mary! I see that you are already feeling the responsibilities of being Lead." She tittered rather bitterly, turned away, and rejoined the group from which she had come. Every one seemed to watch Mary for a few moments--she was standing quite by herself--when there was a noise of footsteps and a group of people came through the pass-door and down the three or four steps which led to the stage itself. Aubrey Flood was the first, without a hat and in an ordinary lounge suit. James Fabian Rose, carrying a roll of brown paper in his hand, and wearing a tweed overcoat and soft felt hat, followed him. Behind the two was another man, who walked close to the pioneers, and looked round him with an air of unfamiliarity. He was a tallish, clean-shaven young man who wore a heavy fur coat. Mary turned round and went up to the group. "Yes," Aubrey Flood said; "yes, Miss Marriott, here indeed is his Grace, who has come to hear how we are going to attack him." The duke looked at Flood with a half smile, there seemed to be something condescending in it, then he turned eagerly to Mary. "Oh, Miss Marriott," he said, "you cannot think how interesting all this is to me, and how grateful I am to you for enabling me to see it all." He looked up and round, and there was something in his voice that showed he was alert and aware--aware and curious. "We shall be about half an hour before we begin to read the play, your Grace," Aubrey Flood said. "Would you like to be shown over the theatre--that is, have you ever been over a theatre from the 'behind-the-scenes' point of view, as it were?" "No, I have not," the duke answered, "and I should like to very much." At the same moment the stage manager came hurrying up to Aubrey Flood. The actor turned to the duke and to Mary Marriott. "Miss Marriott," he said, "would you show the duke something of the theatre? I must talk to Mr. Howard." Mary and the duke moved away together. "I don't quite know what to show you," she said, "and will you really be interested in the way we present our illusions?" "Miss Marriott," the duke answered, "I want to know all sorts of things which I have never known before. I've always been boxed up, so to say. Life has been rather a monotonous procession for me up to the present. Now I am simply greedy and eager for new sensations." "Then, come along," the girl answered; "come along, and I will show you the mechanism by which we produce our effects." "Oh, no," the duke answered, "you cannot show me that, Miss Marriott, at all. You can show me a mere mechanism which surrounds and assists art. That is all you can show me. It will be in the future that you will show me art itself." She looked at him with a quiet, considering eye, forgetting for a moment who he was: "Do you know," she said, "I think you must be an artist." The duke looked at her rather strangely. CHAPTER XV THE MANUSCRIPT IN THE LIBRARY The high wall which shields the great palace of the Dukes of Paddington from the gaze of the ordinary passer-by is broken in its centre by the treble ornamental gates of ironwork. They are gates with a history, but they are gates which very few Londoners of the present generation have ever seen opened. But about fifty feet to the right of the central entrance there is a little green door set in the thickness of the high brick wall, with a shining bell-push in the lintel. It is through this door that people who have business with the ducal house, now so void and empty of living interest, enter and make acquaintance with the great courtyard in front of the façade. The big gates during the last few days had been open for several hours each morning and afternoon, while a policeman had been stationed by them. Carts full of building materials had been driven in, while the gap in the wall, which had been made by the bomb, was built up and repaired. Therefore, Arthur Burnside, in his black bowler hat and unfashionable overcoat, did not trouble to ring the electric bell, which brought the ducal porter to the little door in the wall, but turned in at the main entrance. The policeman knew him, and, vaguely recognising him as a henchman of the _entourage_, saluted as the young scholar of Paul's went by. The great front door of the house was closed. Six people lived in the empty palace and kept its solitariness warm, but there was a side entrance which they used, and which Burnside, since Colonel Simpson had confirmed the dukes' appointment, used also. He went in, walking briskly through the keen air, rang the bell, was admitted by an under-steward, and hung up his coat and hat in a small lobby. Then he traversed a longish corridor, pushed open a green baize door at the end of it, and came into the great central hall of the house. As he did so he looked round him, stopped, and sighed. There was a great marble staircase before him, a staircase of white marble from Carrara, which mounted to a wonderful marble balcony, which ran round the central square of the famous house. Statues, each one of which was known and priced minutely in the catalogues of the connoisseurs, were standing in their cold beauty on the stairway. The celebrated purple carpet from Teheran ran up to the gallery above. All round in the hall were huge doors of mahogany, leading to this or that marvellous _salon_. Another and older carpet of purple, extraordinarily large and woven in Persia for the late duke many years ago, covered the tesselated pavement. There were chairs set about, examples of priceless Chippendale, and little glass-topped tables held collections of miniatures, which were as well known as they were priceless. The three pictures which hung in the lower part of the great hall beneath the gallery, and surrounding the door which led to the library, were three Gainsboroughs of riant beauty and incomparable value. But it was all a dead house, a house where nobody lived, a museum of priceless treasures which nobody ever saw. As the young man stepped across the heavy carpet, walking upon it as one walks upon a well-trimmed tennis lawn, he shuddered a little to think that all this collection of beauty was crammed together in a dead profusion which appealed to nobody. He said to himself: "How terrible it all is! How terrible it is to think of this huge palace of art, set in the very centre of London, closed and shuttered with no appeal to the world. No one can come and see these lovely and famous things, and I myself, who appreciate each and every one of them, am oppressed, not only by the silence and seclusion of it all, but also by the fact that in this one house there are stored treasures of art so thickly that one has no time to think about _this_ before the adjacent _other one_ comes and obscures one's comprehension." He pushed open the vast panelled door which led to the library and entered. The library was a huge place, as big as the central room in the town hall of any flourishing provincial town. The ceiling was designed by Adams, and the supreme genius of that master of plaster-work seemed to burgeon out and down into the place, reminding one always that the great artist had been here. The books, in their glass-fronted cabinets, reached only to a half-height of the walls. On the top of the shelves stood the late duke's well-known collection of Chinese porcelain of the Ming dynasty. There were three great fires in the place, and each one of them was glowing now, as the solitary young scholar of Paul's entered and closed the heavy twelve-foot door behind him. He went up to the largest fireplace of all, where logs were hissing in the hot enveloping flame. He turned his back upon it and surveyed the vast expanse before him. The books in the room were probably worth three hundred thousand pounds. There were the first four folios of Shakespeare, there was a great case which held the Vinegar Bible, the Breeches Bible, and the very earliest black-letter copy of the Scriptures, printed by Schwartz and Pannheim upon the heights of the Apennines in fear of their death should it become known.... It was simply beyond statement, thirty or forty great collections were comprised in this one room. The young scholar's love of books and appreciation of their history thrilled at the sight of all this wealth, thrilled to know that fortune had given him the temporary control of it all. Upon a great red leather-covered writing-table, set by the principal fireside, lay his papers and the calf-bound volumes in which, with scrupulous care and accurate knowledge, he was completing the work of cataloguing which the death of his predecessor had left unfinished. He went towards the table, looked at the records of his first fortnight's work for a moment or two, sighed a little, and then sat down and concentrated his mind upon what he had to do. For several hours he worked steadily--it had been through his great capacity for steady, uninterrupted and concentrated work that this young man had risen from the ordinary Board school to the higher-grade school, and had won the most difficult and brilliant scholarship that the aristocratic college of St. Paul's at Oxford had in its gift. Here was a young man determined to get on; nothing could stop him, nothing could stand in his way. In temperament he was like a steel drill that, driven by tireless energy, goes lower and lower through the granite rock, and through the quartz, until at last the desired strata is reached and won. He worked the whole morning with hardly a pause. At one o'clock he took a paper of sandwiches from his pocket and made his simple meal. Then he worked onwards till three. At that time, feeling that he had done his duty, or rather more, by his employer the duke, whom, by the way, he had never seen since his appointment as librarian nor subsequently during the extraordinary ferment that his Grace's disappearance, reappearance, and return to health had occasioned in the Press, he put away the catalogue upon which he was engaged. Then he opened a drawer in the great writing-table, a locked drawer, and pulled out a pile of manuscript. He turned it over until the last few pages were displayed. Then, with a puckered forehead and a mouth which was undecided only because it was critical, the shabby young man in the black clothes, surrounded by evidence of incalculable wealth read steadily at what he designed to be a key which should open modern political life to him. He read on and on, now and again making an annotation with his fountain pen, sometimes waiting for two or three minutes before he scored through a passage or added a few words. Then at last a clock, a great clock which had been brought from Versailles, beat out the hour of four with deep sonorous notes like the voice of an old man. Burnside pulled his nickel watch from his pocket, saw that it synchronised with the stately time given by the guardian of the library, and hurried away. He crossed the hall, went down the passage which led to the side door, put on his hat and coat, and disappeared into Piccadilly, quite forgetting that he had left the last pages of his manuscript upon the writing-table. * * * * * It was a fortnight since the duke had been allowed to listen to the reading of the play at the Park Lane Theatre. When he had heard James Fabian Rose read the work to the company who sat and stood around upon the grey and empty stage the duke had not been very much impressed. He had not been impressed--that is to say--with the actual achievement of Rose's work. He had listened with some bewilderment to the tags, stage directions, and so forth, and now and then he had been caught up into a mental reverie by some biting, stinging paradox or epigram. As he sat there the duke had been frankly watching Mary Marriott's face as she listened to the author's words. He saw her eyes light up and become intent, or flicker down into a strange gloom. He marked the sudden rigidity of her pose, the relaxation of it when something was afoot in which she was not particularly concerned, the whole careful attention and sympathetic watching of the girl. What all this play meant, he, sitting on a chair on the O.P. side of the stage, could hardly gather. He realised, nevertheless, by watching Mary, and by surveying the other members of the company, that the play was obviously something rather important and out of the usual run of such things. To him it conveyed little or nothing, but he had become sufficiently mobile in mind to realise that probably this happening in the grey light of the afternoon and the shabby surroundings of the stage were yet instinct with potentiality, and would become--in their full fruition--something charged with purpose and an appeal to the general world. After it was all over he had thanked Rose, Aubrey Flood, and Mary Marriott, had got into a cab and been driven back to Grosvenor Street. He was conscious himself at the moment that he had been a little unresponsive and chilly in his manner, but for the life of him he hadn't been able to express himself more pleasantly. "Thank you so much, Miss Marriott," he had said, "for letting me come here this afternoon. Indeed, Mr. Rose, I think it is most sporting of you to ask me. For my part, I frankly confess I don't realise what it's all about! It's all so new to me, you know, to hear something read in this way, and I cannot grasp it as a whole. At the same time," he concluded with a weary smile, "at the same time, if this is your attack upon me, or, rather, upon people like me, then, my dear Mr. Rose, I think you ought to sharpen your sword." As he had said this both Aubrey Flood and the great Socialist had chuckled, while the former remarked, "Wait and see, your Grace. Wait and see what we can eventually spin out of such dull ritual on such a grey afternoon as this." "I will, Mr. Rose," the duke had answered rather shortly, and gone back to the cheery house in Grosvenor Street. He had told Lord Hayle and Lady Constance all about his experience of the afternoon. Neither of them had been very interested, and Lady Constance remarked that all "excursions into _les coulisses_ must surely be rather disappointing." In fact, the Camborne family regarded the whole thing as a rather too amiable weakness on the part of their guest. The bishop, who was always running backwards and forwards at this time from his palace at Carlton to his house in Grosvenor Street, often made a genial jest upon the subject to the young man. "My dear Paddington," he would say, "how is the attack going? Ha, ha! Every day, when I open my newspapers, I find that the general public is being worked up to a perfect froth of excitement about this forthcoming theatrical enterprise. A peer in the pillory! The duke in the dock! How amusing it all is!" Thus the bishop scoffed on more than one occasion, and his witticisms had no very exhilarating effect upon the duke. His life in Grosvenor Street was happier with the younger members of the family. His dear friend Gerald was still as sympathetic and vivid as ever. Lord Hayle had passed the test of intimate human association, and come out of it very well. Lady Constance was as ever--beautiful, sweet, and sympathetic--but the duke was finding that in the very splendour of the girl's nature and appearance there was something a trifle cloying. He was deeply in love with her; he knew also that she cared for him, but for the first time in his guarded, shielded life he saw before him times of indecision and of trouble. Life, which had seemed so smooth and stately, so well ordered a thing, was not quite what it had been. The serene repose of his mind was disturbed by all he had gone through. Sometimes he went and took tea with Mrs. Rose, and often her husband, Mr. Conrad, and Mary Marriott were there. He never attempted to argue with any of them. He took their shafts of wit with a quiet complaisance, but if they thought that their epigrams had not gone home they were very deeply mistaken. One afternoon, tired and troubled, the duke bethought himself of his great house in Piccadilly. He walked there from Grosvenor Street, astonished the servants by ringing the bell, and, entering, he moodily surveyed some of his famous possessions. Then he turned into the library. The three great fires were burning down. It was about six o'clock. He switched on the electric light himself and wandered through the maze of his treasures. He came up to a table--a huge writing-table, covered with red leather--and saw upon it five or six sheets of manuscript in careful handwriting. Forgetting exactly what he was doing, thinking nothing of the man he had appointed to be librarian, the duke sat down and began to read. CHAPTER XVI ARTHUR BURNSIDE'S VIEWS This was the document that the duke read with amazement and growing interest in the great empty library of his palace. It was obviously the peroration of an important work-- "Are we already in the position of ancient Rome? Are we moribund? No barbarians, indeed, stand with menace of conquering at our gates, but it was not the barbarians who overthrew the greatness of the Roman Empire. The greatness had already departed long before the Huns and Goths swept down upon its walls. In her early strength Rome, the capital of the world, would have rolled back her invaders, as a rock resists the onslaught of an angry wave; but Rome, when she fell, was no longer as she had been in her earlier days. "And we must ask ourselves now whether our own civilisation, with all its wonders, is not tending to a like end? Are we not reproducing in faithful detail every cause which led to the downfall of the civilisations of other days? We are Imperialists, that is to say, we take tribute from conquered races. Great fortunes are constantly accumulated, to the defeat of individuals in our midst. An enormous population is with us, which owns no property, and lives always in grinding poverty. A great portion of the land of the country has gone out of cultivation. The physical deterioration of Englishmen is a well known and most alarming fact, which can be proved over and over again by the statistics of the medical schools. I am not concerned here to prove any statements I make in the last few lines of this book. They have been proved in the earlier portions. This is a summing up. "And it is for these reasons that we who are socialists say that the system which is producing such appalling results shall not be allowed to continue. It is a system which has taken from religion much of its natural appeal and consoling power over the hearts and souls of the majority. It is a system which has destroyed, handicapped, and turned the protection of the useful and necessary things of life into a soulless progress of mechanism controlled by slaves. It is a system which awards the palm of success to the unscrupulous, corrupts the press, turns pure women on to the streets, and transforms upright men into mean-spirited time-servers. "It cannot continue. "In the end it is bound to work its own overthrow. "Socialism, with its promise of freedom, its larger hope for humanity, its triumph of peace over war, its binding of the races of the earth into one all-embracing brotherhood, must in the end prevail. Capitalism is the creed of the dying present; Socialism throbs with the life of the days that are to be. Socialism has claimed its martyrs in the past, and to-day, also, it has claimed them. But before long the martyrs in the cause of humanity all will see--let us hope and believe from another and better ordered life--that their efforts have not been in vain. "I write, perhaps, in these last words, from a somewhat academic standpoint. I do not think, however, that my readers who have followed me so far will accuse me of pure theorising in the earlier portions of this work. At the same time, experience is merely the lesson learnt by event, and I do not think I shall be unduly ponderous if I again, and finally, draw attention to those stupendous teachings which the student of history draws from the past and applies to the amelioration of the present. "It cannot be too loudly proclaimed! Academic evolution necessarily goes hand-in-hand with a moral development strictly related to it. Nowadays, broken into the individualistic system, we regard with astonishment the fierce patriotism which inflamed the little cities and republics of antiquity, the States of Greece, the Kingdoms of Italy, and even the larger and less civilised hordes of the North. Yet, if we regard it for a moment, we shall see that this sentiment was merely inspired by the eradicable instinct of self-preservation. In the bosom of the clans, in the heart of the families, interests were consolidated and the fact was realised. And in those days, also, defeat might not only bring ruin and a total loss of comfort and worldly possession, but it would also mean slavery. "In those days, indeed, the conqueror, whether barbarian or not, could not fail to appear. He intervened always wherever great wealth was amassed in the hands of a population incapable of defending it. And, taking these lessons of history to ourselves, we can see that, though the whole conditions of society have changed, a conqueror must still appear and throw down the existing system with all its horrors and anachronisms. "Once more let me point out that England at present is dominated by certain economic facts. "Although there is plenty of food, clothing, and shelter available in the country, an enormous population of these islands do not obtain enough of any of them to support life properly, or even in the simplest way possible, to secure ordinary health and ordinary enjoyment of existence. "Again, then, the statistics quoted in the earlier part of this work inevitably show, with all the rigour of hard facts and unassailable statistics, that each year many people die from overwork or want. "The producers of wealth are poor, miserable, and enslaved, while those who enjoy the wealth thus produced in misery are idle, corrupt, and enervated by their riches. There are more than a million men needing work and wages in England at the present moment, while, at the same time, we keep the land of the country less than one-quarter tilled. "As Mr. John Kenworthy has written, in words which re-echo and reverberate in the ears of modern men: 'These accusations are facts as palpable and clear as heaven and earth above us and beneath us; not to be disputed by any person of ordinary sense. Surely we have enough of stupidity and wrong here to certify ourselves a nation not only "mostly fools" but largely knaves also.' "In truth nobody disputes this state of affairs. You may prove the extremest horrors straight from Government Blue Books. Recently some very full particulars concerning mining industries were put into one of those Government coffins for burying disagreeable truths. One might expect that, after having such particulars of overwork underpaid and murderous housing thrust into their notice, a Parliament which served humanity and not the brood of Mammon would sit night and day until the law had done what law can do to right these wrongs. But no, the six hundred gentlemen of Parliament who play with the mouse-like people in a gentle, cat-like fashion, did--just nothing, as usual! No doubt members of Parliament are filled with good resolutions to do something for the people; but the intentions always go down before the hard fact that doing anything for the people is found to mean, in practice, giving up some right of property. "Upon this one issue, the right of property, the whole social question centres. The man who has discovered what the right of property means now, and what it ought to mean, and would mean among good and honest people, may claim to have solved the problem of misery which baffles the nations of the world." The duke put the manuscript down upon the huge, leather-covered table and looked at it thoughtfully. He saw the neat, careful writing--the writing of a man who had been accustomed to write Greek. He smiled to himself with a dreamy appreciation of the well-known fact that no scholar writes like an ordinary man, and that always the hand which, in youth at a public school, has been inured to the careful tracing of Greek script, betrays itself when writing English by a meticulous care in the forming of each individual word. Then, quite suddenly, the duke sat down and leaned back in a high-cushioned chair. He had not been in his famous library for a very long time. He felt forlorn and alone in it, and he looked round upon its glories with a sort of wonder. "Does all this belong to me?" he thought. "Of course it does, and yet how little I see of it; how little I know of it! I pay a man merely to catalogue the treasures here." The electric lights glowed softly all over the vast place and the young man looked round him with a sigh of perplexity. It did not interest him very much to know that on all sides were books and manuscripts that were absolutely priceless. He felt, as he sat there, that the world was a most perplexing place. The great mahogany door at the end of the library opened, and the trusted servant in charge of the staff still maintained in the ducal house hurried in. "Your Grace," he said, as he came up to the duke, "can I bring you anything? Can I do anything?" The duke had not an idea of the man's name--all these details were arranged by Colonel Simpson for the young man. "No, no," he said; "I thank you very much but I don't want anything. I shall be leaving the house very soon." "But, your Grace," the man went on, "you will please allow me to make up the fires?" "Oh, yes," the duke answered; "you may as well do that, and then you can leave me alone. I will let myself out." "I thank your Grace," said the man. And, with noiseless footsteps he went away. In two minutes three men were in the library and the dying fires were revived, until, as the dark came over London, a great red blaze threw odd contrasts of red light and shadow into the rich place. The men went away, and when they had gone the duke walked up and down the room for a minute or two, and then discovered, near the door which led into the hall, the switches which controlled the electric lights. He switched off the whole illumination, save only the one standard lamp upon the writing-table. Then he went back to his seat. He sat down and looked about him. The ruddy, cheerful light was all around. Below his eyes upon the table the shaded electric-light lamp threw a brilliant circle of light upon the manuscripts which he had been reading. Beyond everything was mysterious. The duke sighed, and once more took up the manuscript. "Yes," he said to himself, "if every one was good. That is the whole point. Now I must finish this. But how extraordinary! I meet a man in my own college and make him librarian here, and he, too, turns out to be a Socialist, and to be writing a book upon Socialism. A book which, if I am not very much mistaken, will simply become the bible of all of them. Fabian Rose never told me that he knew Burnside! Of course, that is not very extraordinary, because it would not be in his way to tell me. It would not have occurred to him. But how strange it is! On all sides, on all occasions, Fate or Providence seems to have brought me among the ranks of the Socialists. Well, I'll just finish this." The duke took up the manuscript once more. There was no rancour in his heart against the young man who, surrounded by the pomp and luxury of his employer's property, was nevertheless, and at the same moment, writing against people such as the duke was. The duke did not take the attacks very seriously. The forthcoming play had seemed to him rather futile. All that Rose, Mr. Conrad, and the group of their friends who met at the house in Westminster, had said certainly had opened the young man's mind; but nevertheless he had not felt any of the real force of the attack as yet. He took up the manuscript and read the remaining pages. There was a cross-heading upon one, and it was this-- "THE REAL SOLUTION" "The real solution, let me finally say, is indubitably this: I have hinted at it throughout the pages of this work. I have tried to lead the mind of the reader up towards the discovery of my own conviction. Now I state it. "If human nature was naturally good, as Jean Jacques Rousseau believed it to be, then there would be no social problem. Human nature is not temperamentally good. It is temperamentally bad. Therefore, before we can reorganise Society we must reorganise character. "And in what way is it possible to do this? Can it be done by Act of Parliament? Can it be done by articles in newspapers and reviews? Can it be done by the teaching of altruism at the hands of university settlements and propagandists? It cannot be done by any of these means. "There is only one way in which the individual mind can be reached, touched, and influenced so strangely and so completely that the influence will be permanent, and the life of the individual will be changed. "And that way is the Christian way. "We must do again, if we are to realise the ideals which burn in our hearts, what the Christian Church did in the old days of the Roman Empire, and was meant to do in all ages, by means of the Old Faith 'once and for all delivered to the saints.' In those dim, far-off days the historian knows that Christianity succeeded actually in creating a new middle-class--just what was needed--of poor men made richer, and rich men made poorer in one common brotherhood. Its motto was: For all who want work, work! For those who won't work, hunger! But for the old and infirm, provision. And this the Church of Christ actually achieved, neither by denouncing nor inculcating dogma, but by insisting on and carrying out in practice its own remarkable dogmas. It is not the denial of the Real Presence at the altar, it is not its affirmation, it is not the question of the validity of the apostolic succession nor the denial of it, which will make it possible for an English world to save itself from the horrors of the present. "It will be simply this: That those who believe in Christ as the most inspired Teacher the world has ever seen, as God-made-Man, come into this world on a great mission of regeneration, that we shall see our opportunity. "Christianity and Socialism are inextricably entwined. Separate one from the other, as so many Socialists of nowadays are endeavouring to do, and one or the other--perhaps both--will fail of their high ideal, their splendid mission. "Combine them, and success is real and assured. We shall all, in that happy day, begin to realise the kingdom of heaven; to re-echo in this world the dim echo of the heavenly harmonies which may then reach us from the new Jerusalem." The duke put down the manuscript, and with slow, grave steps left his great library, crossed the famous marble hall, and went up through the enclosure of his gardens into the roar and surge of Piccadilly. His face was curiously set and intent, as he walked to Lord Camborne's, in Grosvenor Street. CHAPTER XVII THE COMING OF LOVE They were dining quite alone at the Cambornes'--the duke, the bishop, Lord Hayle, and Lady Constance. When he had changed and came down-stairs the duke went into the drawing-room. There were still a few minutes before dinner would be served. He found himself alone, and walked up and down the beautiful room with a curious physical, as well as mental, restlessness. He felt out of tune, as it were. The tremendous upheaval in his life which he had lately experienced was not likely to be forgotten easily. He realised that, and he realised also--more poignantly perhaps at this moment than ever before--how rude a shock his life had experienced. All his ideas must be reconstructed, and the process was not a pleasant one. From the bottom of his heart he caught himself wishing that nothing had happened, that he was still without experience of the new sides of life, to which he had been introduced by such an extraordinary series of accidents. "I was happier before," he said to himself aloud. And then, even as he did so, in a sudden flash he realised that, after all, these new experiences, disquieting as they were, were exceedingly stimulating. Was it not better that a man should wake and live, even though it was disturbing, than remain always in a sleep and a dream, uninfluenced by actualities? Some men, he knew, held Nirvana to be the highest good. And there were many who would drink of the Waters of Lethe, could they but find them. But these were old or world-weary men. They were men who had sinned and suffered, and so desired peace. Or they were men whose bodies tormented them. He was young, strong, rich, and fortunate. He knew that, however much his newly-awakened brain might fret and perturb him, it was better to live than to stagnate even in the most gorgeous palace in the Sleeping Wood. The simile pleased him as it came to him. As a little boy _Grimm's Fairy Tales_ had been a wondrous treasure-house, as they have been to nearly all the upper-class children of England. He saw the whole series of pictures in the eye of memory. The happiness was not won until the last scene, when everybody woke up! In his reverie his thoughts changed unconsciously, and dwelt with an unaccustomed effort of memory and appreciation upon the old Fairy Palace, which he had loved so in his youth. He remembered also that, one day, when of mature age, he had run over to Nice; he had gone with the Grand Duke Alexis and a few other young men to a cinematograph, for fun, after a dinner at the _Hotel des Anglais_. "Le Bois Dormant!" How it had all come back! And also, what a wonderful thing a cinematograph was! He remembered the flickering beauty of the girl in the strange mimic representation of the Enchanted Castle! Certainly, then, he had watched the movement of the pictures with the interest and amusement of childhood. It was odd, also, that the whole thing should recur to him now. Was not he also awakening from a sleep, long enchanted for him by the circumstances of his great wealth and rank? And then--the Beauty! He stopped in his walk up and down the great room, and his eyes fell upon a photograph in a heavy silver frame studded with uncut turquoises, which stood upon a little table. It was one of Madame Lallie Charles's pictures, in soft grey platinotype, and it represented Lady Constance Camborne. The lovely profile, in its supreme and unflawed beauty, came into his mood as the conception of the fantasy. Here, here indeed, was the Beauty! and no dream story, etched deep into the imagination, was ever fairer than this. He looked long and earnestly at the portrait, thinking deeply, now, of something which would mean more to his life than anything else. Since he had been staying at the Bishop's house he had seen much of the beautiful and radiant society girl. And all he had seen only confirmed him in his admiration for her beauty and her charm. Curiously enough, though, he remembered that he had found, as he stood there reviewing his experiences, that on some occasions his feelings towards his friend's sister were singularly more passionate than at others. There were times when his blood pulsed through his veins, and his whole being rose up in desire to call this lovely girl his own. There were others when, on the contrary, he admired her from a standpoint which might even be called detached. Why was this? The alterations of feeling were quite plainly marked in his memory. Was it--and a sudden light seemed to flash in his mind--was it that when he had been with Mary Marriott his passion for Lady Constance had cooled for a time? He dismissed the thought impatiently, not liking it, angry that it should have come to him. Mary was as beautiful in her way as Lady Constance. Her charm was not so explicit, but perhaps it was as great. But, then, Mary Marriott was just an actress, and nobody. He crushed down the unwelcome thought, for, despite all his new knowledge and experience, the old traditions of his breed and training were strong within him. He was the Duke of Paddington, and his mind must not stray into strange paths! He was standing in the middle of the room, looking down, and frowning to himself. The subtle scent of the hot-house flowers which were massed in great silver bowls here and there mingled strangely with the sense of warmth from the great fires which had a strangely drowsy influence upon him. Once more he was within the precincts of the Château dans le Bois Dormant. "A penny for your thoughts, duke!" cut into his reverie. He started and looked up. Lady Constance stood before him, with her radiant smile and wonderful appeal. She swung a little fan of white feathers from one wrist. She wore a long, flowing black crêpe de chine Empire gown, scintillating here and there with rich passementerie embroideries and jet ornamentations. The dress was rich in its simplicity, graceful and flowing, it possessed the art that concealed art, and showed off to wonderful advantage the wearer's youthful beauty and glorious hair, the whiteness of her neck and arms against the shimmer of the black. It had been made by Worth, and only made more explicit the wonderful coronet of corn-ripe hair, surmounting a face as lovely as ever Raphael or Michael Angelo dreamt of and set down upon their canvases. She made an _ensemble_ so sudden in its appearance, so absolutely overwhelming in its appeal, that for one of the first times in his life the duke was taken aback and blushed and stammered like a boy. "I really do not know," he said at length. "I was in a sort of brown study, Lady Constance!" "Well," she replied, "the offer of a penny, or should it be twopence? is still open; but if you are not going to deal, as the Americans say, explain to me the meaning of the words 'brown study.'" "I am afraid that is beyond me, Lady Constance," he returned, smiling, and feeling at ease again. Just as he spoke Lord Hayle and the bishop entered, and they all went down to dinner. They sat at a small oval table, and every one was in excellent spirits. The duke's troubles seemed to have left him. He felt exhilarated and stimulated, and a half-formed purpose in his mind grew clearer and clearer as the meal went on. He would ask the radiant girl opposite him to be his wife. He would ask her that very night if an opportunity presented itself. She was utterly, overwhelmingly charming. There was nobody like her in society. She was as unique among the high-born girls of the day as Ellen Terry was in the height of her charm and beauty upon the stage, when Charles Reade wrote the famous passage about her. Yes, nothing could be better. She was like champagne to him--she was the most beautiful thing in the world--at the moment she was the most desirable. The ready influence of her talk and laughter stole into his brain. He was captured and enthralled. He thought that this at last was Love. For he did not know, being a young man with great possessions, but few experiences, that Love does not come upon the wings of light and laughter, but wears a sable mantle, shot through with fires from heaven. He had never loved, and so he did not know that, when the divine blessing of love is vouchsafed, there is a catch in the throat and the tears start into the eyes. He talked well and brilliantly, relating his experiences of that afternoon. "So you see," he said, "I went into my great lonely house by a side door--the butler's door, I believe it is called as a matter of fact, and I found the library very warm and comfortable, and with the man I had appointed to be librarian gone. He apparently had just finished his day's work of cataloguing. He is a scholar of my own college and a very decent chap I have found him. He wanted some paid work during the vacations to help him on towards his career at the bar--he is going to be called as soon as he possibly can. I understand that he is certain for a double first. Already he has got his first in mods. and he will get a first in history, too." "I know the man," Lord Hayle said. "Poor chap! He does not look too well provided with this world's goods." "But I thought every one at Paul's," Lady Constance said, "was well-to-do. Is it not quite the nicest college in Oxford?" "Oh, yes, Connie," Lord Hayle replied, "but don't you see, there are some scholarships upon the Foundation which make it possible for quite poor men to live at Paul's. They are very much out of it, naturally. They cannot live with the other men, and so they form a little society of themselves. Still, it is a jolly good thing for them, I suppose," he concluded rather vaguely, and with the young patrician's slight contempt for, and lack of interest in people, of the class to which Arthur Burnside belonged. "Well, I like the man well enough--what I have seen of him," the duke continued. "But I made an extraordinary discovery to-day. Upon the writing-table where he had been working was some manuscript. It was obviously the last chapter of a book, and, by Jove! it was a book of the rankest Socialism!" "Socialism?" said the bishop. "My dear Paddington get rid of the young man at once. Such people ought not to be encouraged!" "Such people are very charming sometimes, bishop," the duke replied. "You know that I probably owe my life to the chief Socialist of them all--Fabian Rose." "Well, well," the bishop replied, "I suppose it would be unfair to deprive this young Mr. Burnside of his opportunity. At the same time, I must say it is extraordinary how these pernicious socialistic doctrines are getting abroad. Fabian Rose, and his friends, however personally charming and intellectual they may be--and, of course, I do not deny that some of them are very clever fellows--are doing an amount of harm to the country that is incalculable." "They are clever," the duke returned, in a somewhat meditative voice; "they are, indeed, clever. This manuscript that I read was certainly a brilliant piece of special pleading, and, as a matter of fact, I don't quite understand what the answer to it can be." "It does seem hard," Lady Constance said with a little sigh, "that we should have everything, and so many other people have nothing. After all, father, in the sight of God we are all equal, are we not?" The bishop smiled. "In the sight of God, my dear," he answered, "we are certainly all equal. The soul of one man is as precious as the soul of another. But in this world God has ordained that certain classes should exist, and we must not presume to question His ordinance. Our Lord said: 'Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's.'" "But what I cannot see," the duke broke in, "is why, when wealth is produced by labour, the people who produce it should have no share in it. Don't think, Lord Camborne, that I am a Socialist, or infected in any way with socialistic doctrines." He spoke more rashly than he knew. "But I should like to know the economic answer to the things which Mr. Rose, and Mr. Conrad, and their friends told me when I was ill." "The answer," replied the bishop, "is perfectly simple. It is intellect, and not labour, that is the creator of wealth. Let me give you a little example." As he spoke he placed his elbows upon the table, joined the tips of his fingers together, and looked at his young audience with a suave smile. "Let me instance the case of a saw!" "A saw, father?" Lady Constance said. "What on earth has a saw to do with Socialism?" "Listen," the bishop replied, "and I will tell you. If a saw had not been invented, planks, which are absolutely necessary for the construction of building, and, indeed, for almost all the conveniences of modern life, must be split up out of the trunks of trees by means of wedges, a most clumsy and wasteful method. "Your labourer says that he produces wealth which the planks make. This, of course, is an absolute fallacy. Labour alone might rend the trunk of a tree into separate pieces, though, to be sure, it would be a difficult business enough. But only labour, working with tools, could split up the trunk of a tree with wedges, saw it with a saw, or cut it with a knife. Don't you see, my dear Connie, labour makes the noise, but it is intellect which is responsible for the tune. Men move by labour, but they only move effectually and profitably by intellect. Labour is the wind, intellect the mill. Though there is as much wind blowing about now as there was three thousand years ago, some of it now grinds corn, saves time, and increases wealth. This difference is due, not to the wind, but to the wiser utilisation of the wind through intellect. "And the same is true of labour. Without the inventions and the improvements of the few, labour would produce a bare subsistence for naked savages. It could not, however, produce wealth, because wealth is essentially something over and above a bare subsistence. A bare subsistence means consuming as fast as producing; and thus, all that labour does when not enabled to be efficient and profitable by the superior intelligence of the few. "So that the real truth is that wealth, as such, is something over and above a mere subsistence, and, so far from being due to labour, is rather due to that diminution of toil which enables things to be produced more quickly than they are consumed. But such diminution is due to the time-shortening processes, methods, and inventions of the few. The fact is that the general mass of men are of far too dull and clownish a character to do much for real advancement. "Any forward step which produces wealth is taken by somebody in particular, and not by everybody in general. "Of course it is easy enough to copy and profit by inventions and improvements after somebody else has made them." The bishop stopped, and sipped his glass of Contrexeville, looking with a pleased smile at the young people before him. No one could talk with a more accurate and sustained flow of English than Lord Camborne. He knew it. The public knew it, and he knew that the public knew it. From some men such a sustained monologue would have been excessively tedious, even though the people to whom it was addressed were, like Miss Rose Dartle, "anxious for information." In the bishop, however, there was such a blandness and suavity--he was such a handsome old man, and had cultivated the grand manner to such perfection--that he really was able, on all occasions, to indulge in his favourite amusement without boring anybody at all. He was, in short, one of the few men in Europe who could enjoy the pleasure of hearing himself talk at considerable length without an uneasy feeling that, in giving way to his ruling passion, he was not alienating friends. "I see, father!" Lady Constance said as the stately old gentleman concluded his rounded periods. But there was a slight note of indifference in her voice. The bishop did not hear it, Lord Hayle did not hear it, but the duke detected it with a slight sensation of surprise. His senses were sharpened to apprehend every inflection in the voice of the girl he loved. And he wondered that she, apparently, was a little bored by the bishop's explanation. He did not realise, being a young man, and one who had enjoyed a long minority, and had known but little of his parents, that, even though a prophet may sometimes have honour in his own country, his children do not always pay him his due meed of recognition when he is, so to speak, "unbuttoned and at home." The duke had never heard the story of the angry old gentleman who was threatening two little boys, who had thrown some orange peel at him, with the imminent arrival of a policeman upon the other side of the road. "Garn!" said the little boys in chorus. "Why, that's farver!" The duke himself was intensely interested in the bishop's logical and singularly powerful exposition of socialistic fallacies. He had been uneasy for a long time now. He had had an alarming suspicion that the arguments of Fabian Rose and his companions were unanswerable, and, on that very afternoon, he had been specially struck by the vigour and force of the concluding chapter of Arthur Burnside's book. Now he was reinstated in all his old ideas. His mental trouble seemed to pass away like a dream. The world was as it had been before! The remainder of the dinner passed off as brightly and merrily as it had begun. Lord Camborne was a charming host. He could tell stories of the great people of the Victorian Era, for he had been upon intimate terms with all of them. As a young man he had sat with Lord Tennyson in a Fleet Street chop-house in the first days of the _Saturday Review_. He had been in Venice when Browning wrote that beautiful poem beginning-- "Oh, to be in England, now that April's there!" and had been cynically amused at the poet's steadfast determination to remain in the City of Palaces until the cold weather of his native land was definitely over. He had been an honoured guest at the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and many years afterwards he had sat at the hospitable table of Sandringham, and had reminded the King and Queen of the scene of their marriage. It was very fascinating to the duke to hear these stories told with a delicate point and wit, and with the air which reminded the young man pleasantly of the fact that he, too, all his life, had been of these people, and was, indeed, a leader in England. Since his association with Fabian Rose--an association which pleased and interested him, he had, nevertheless, found a great diminution of his own importance. That sense had been so carefully cultivated from his very earliest years that the loss of it had occasioned him much uneasiness. Now it all seemed restored to him. He was in his own proper _milieu_, and as he looked constantly at Lady Constance Camborne, more and more he felt that here, indeed, was his destined bride. Lord Camborne, himself one of the astutest and shrewdest readers of character in England, gathered something of what was passing in the young man's mind. He wanted the duke for a son-in-law. It was all so eminently suitable. The two young people were both exactly the two young people who ought to marry each other. The news of their engagement would, the bishop knew, be very welcome at Court, and society would acclaim it as the most fitting arrangement that could be made. "If I am not very much mistaken," the old gentleman thought to himself, "the dear boy will ask Connie to marry him to-night. I must see if an opportunity cannot be arranged." Lord Hayle, as it happened, was going to a bridge-party of young men, which was to be held in one of the card-rooms at the Cocoa Tree Club. He had asked the duke to accompany him, but the duke had already refused. "I hate cards, my dear Gerald, as you know; and, really, I am not feeling too fit to-night." "Very well, then," the bishop said, "we will smoke a cigar and have a chat, Paddington, and perhaps Connie will make some music for us? Sir William expressly asked me to see that you did not do too much, and went early to bed, after your terrible experiences, and I am not going to let you spoil your recovery." "What a pompous old bore Sir William is," the duke said, laughing. "But I suppose he really does know about what he says." "The greatest doctor alive at present," said the bishop. Lady Constance did not leave the table after dessert, as they were all so intimate and at home. The young men were allowed to light their cigarettes, the bishop preferring to go to the library before he smoked. Suddenly Lady Constance, who had cracked an almond, held out the kernel to the duke. "Look," she said with almost childish glee, "this nut has two kernels. Now, let us have a phillipine. Will you, duke?" "Of course I will, Lady Constance," he answered. "We must arrange all about it. I forget the rules. Is it not the first person who says 'phillipine' to-morrow morning who wins?" "That's it," she answered. "Now, what are you going to give me, or what am I going to give you?" "Whatever you like," said the duke. "Well, you choose first," said Lady Constance. "I don't quite know what I want," said the duke. The bishop laughed softly. Things were going excellently well. "Surely, my dear boy," he said, "even you--fortunate as you are--cannot say that there is nothing in the world that you don't want?" "I know!" the duke answered suddenly, with a quick flush. "There is one thing which I want very much!" "Well, then, if it is not too expensive," Lady Constance said, "and if you win, of course, I will give it to you. But what is it?" "I don't think I will tell you now," the duke replied. "We will wait and see the issues. But what do you want, Lady Constance?" "Well, I don't know, either," she said. "Oh, yes, I do. I saw Barrett's the other day--the place in Piccadilly, you know--there were some delightful little ivory pigs. I should like a pig to add to my collection of charms. I meant to have bought one then, only I was rather in a hurry, and besides, your chain charms ought always to be given to you if they are to bring you good luck." "Very well, then, that is settled," said the duke. "I don't think it is at all fair, all the same," she said, "not to tell me what your prize is to be if you win." "My resolution upon that point is inflexible, Lady Constance," he answered. Then there was a curious momentary silence. Nobody looked at the other. Lord Hayle was thinking of the bridge-party to which he was going. The bishop had realised what the duke meant, and was wondering if his daughter had realised it also. The duke wondered if, carried away by the moment, he had been a little too explicit. Lady Constance? What did Lady Constance wonder? The bishop saved the situation, if, indeed, it needed salvage. "Well," he said, "shall we go into the drawing-room? Gerald, I know, wants to get away, and I and Paddington will be allowed to smoke, as there's nobody else there. Connie won't mind, I know." "Oh, I sha'n't mind a bit," Lady Constance answered. "Father's disgraceful when we're alone. He smokes everywhere. But the butler has invented a wonderful way of removing all traces of smoke in the air by the next morning. He makes one of the maids put down a couple of great copper bowls full of water, and they seem to absorb it all. Then, we will go." Laughing and chatting together, they passed out of the dining-room and mounted to the drawing-rooms on the first floor. Lord Camborne and his guest sat by one of the fire-places and played a game of chess. Lady Constance was at the Erard, some distance away. Her touch of the piano was perfect, and she played brilliant little trifles, snatches from Grieg or Chopin, and once she played a Tarantelle of Miguel Arteaga--a flashing, scarlet thing, instinct with the heat and spirit of the South. The bishop won the game of chess. He was, as a matter of fact, though the duke did not know it, one of the finest amateurs of the game then living. The duke was at his best an indifferent performer. A minute or two after the game was over Mr. Westinghouse, the chaplain, came into the drawing-room. He had been dining in his own rooms that night, as he was very busy upon some special correspondence for the bishop. It was then that Lord Camborne saw his chance. "Westinghouse," he said, "I think we had better go through those letters now, because some of them are most important. I am sure, Paddington, you will excuse me for a few minutes? Come along, Westinghouse, and we will get the whole thing done, and then we will come back, and my daughter will sing to us." Together the two clergymen left the drawing-room. Lady Constance was still at the piano, playing soft and dreamy music to herself. The duke was standing in front of the fire looking out upon the great room lit with its softly-shaded electric lights. The harmonies of colour at that discreet and comfortable hour blended charmingly. It was a room designed by some one who knew what a beautiful room should be. The flowers standing about everywhere blended into the colour scheme. It was as lovely a place as could be found in London on that winter's night. The duke stood there, tall, young-looking, and with that unmistakable aura which "personality" gives--motionless, and saying nothing. His head was a little bowed; he was thinking deeply. Suddenly he left the hearth-rug, took three quick steps out into the middle of the room, and then walked up to the piano. He leant over it and looked at the beautiful girl, who went on playing, smiling up at him. "What are you playing?" he asked. "It is the incidental music of a little play called _Villon_ by Alfred Calmour," she said. "I don't know who wrote the music in the first instance, but it was afterwards collected and welded into a sort of musical pictorial account of the play. You know about Villon, I suppose?" "He was a French medieval poet, wasn't he? And rather a rascal, too?" the duke said. "Yes," she replied. "The story is this: Villon lived with robbers and cut-throats, despite all his beautiful poetry. One night he and two friends, called Beaugerac and Réné de Montigny, decided to rob an old man, who was said to have a lot of money stowed away. His name was Gervais. "It was a bitter night in old Paris, and people said that wolves would be coming into the streets. The rich man's house was on the outskirts of the town. Villon is to go to the house, knock at the door, and ask for shelter. Then, when he is once inside, he is to make a signal to Beaugerac and Montigny, who are to rush in and kill the old man, tie up his daughter, who lives with him, and take away the money. "Villon goes through the snow, and is admitted by the daughter, Marie. "The old man is there, and asks him to sit down and share their simple supper. Villon does so, and during the meal the old man says: 'What is your name, stranger, who have come to us to share our meal this cold winter's night?" "Taken unawares, Villon told the truth. 'I, sir,' he said, 'am one François Villon, a poor master of arts of the University of Paris.' "'Villon!' says the girl suddenly. 'Villon, the poet!' "'None other! At your service, mademoiselle,' he answers, rising. "'Villon!' said the old man, 'Villon, the poet! who associates with cut-throats and robbers? Begone from my house!' "'Sir,' the poet answers, 'I wish you a very good night. Mademoiselle, you have then read my poems?' "'Ay, and loved them truly,' Mary answers in a whisper. "'Begone!' Gervais says once more. "Villon casts a last look at the girl and goes to the door and opens it. Flakes of snow are driven in by the wind as he does so. There is a sudden snarl of anger, a shriek of pain, and then a low gurgle. "Beaugerac and Montigny have watched their confederate through the window, sitting at supper, and have come to the conclusion that he has betrayed them. So Villon lies dying on the threshold as they rush away, frightened at what they have done, and the girl bends over him and places a crucifix upon his lips." She stopped. "Now then," she said, "I will play you the piece. It is marvellously descriptive of the little story of the play." Her face, as she looked up at him, was so sweet and lovely, so throbbing with the pity of the little tale, that he could hesitate no longer. "No," he said, "you shall not play me the music now. Listen, oh, my dear, listen instead to my story, because I love you!" CHAPTER XVIII A LOVER, AND NEWS OF LOVERS Mary Marriott sat alone in her little flat at the top of the old house in Bloomsbury. The new year had begun, bright and cold from its very first day until the present--eight days after its birth. The terrible fogs and depression of the old year had vanished as if they had never been. On such a morning as this was they seemed but a dim memory. And yet how much had happened during those weeks when London lay under a leaden pall. For Mary at least they had been the most eventful weeks of her life. Everything had been changed for her. From obscurity she had been given an unparalleled opportunity of gaining fame--swift and complete--a fame which some of the best judges in London told her was already assured. Nor was this all, stupendous though it was. A few weeks ago she had been as friendless and lonely a girl as any in London; now she had troops of friends, distinguished, brilliant, and fascinating, and among all these kind people she was, as it were, upon a pedestal. They regarded her as a great artist, took her on trust as that; they regarded her also as a tremendous force to aid the victory of the Cause they had at heart. And there was more even than this. In the old days her art had always been her one ideal in life. The art of the theatre was everything to her. It was so still, but it was welded and fused with another ideal. Art for art's sake, just that and nothing more, was welded and fused with something new and uplifting. She saw how her art might become a means of definitely helping forward a movement which had for its object the relief of the down-trodden and oppressed, the doing away with poverty and misery, the ushering in--at last--of the Golden Age! She was to fulfil her artistic destiny, to do the work she came into the world to do, and at the same time to consecrate that work to the service of her sisters and brethren of England. In all the socialistic ranks there was no more enthusiastic convert than this lovely and brilliant girl. She was singing now as she sat in her little room, and the crisp, bright winter sunshine poured into it; crooning an old Jacobite song, though her eyes were fixed upon the typewritten manuscript of her part in the new play at the Park Lane Theatre. Her ivory brow was wrinkled a little, for she was deep in thought over a detail of her work--should the voice drop at the end of that impressive line, or would not the excitement in which it was to be uttered give it a sharper and more staccato character?--it required thinking out. The little sitting-room was not quite the same as it had been. Another bookshelf had been added, and it was filled with the literature of Socialism. On the top shelf was a long row of neat volumes bound in grey-green, the complete works of James Fabian Rose, presented to Mary by the author himself. All over the place masses of flowers were blooming, pale mauve violets from the Riviera, roses of sulphur and blood-colour from Grasse, striped carnations from Nice. Mary had many friends now who sent her flowers. They came constantly, and her tiny room was redolent of sweet odours. The walls of the room now bore legends painted upon them in quaint lettering. Mr. Conrad, the socialistic clergyman, Fabian Rose's friend, was clever with his brush, and had indeed decorated his church with fresco work. He had painted sentences and socialistic texts upon the walls of Mary's sitting-room. "The rich and the poor meet together; the Lord is the maker of them all," was taken from the Book of Proverbs and painted over the door. Upon the board over the fire, painted in black letter, was this quotation from Sir Thomas More: "I am persuaded that till property is taken away there can be no equitable or just distribution of things, nor can the world be happily governed, for so long as that is maintained the greatest and the far best of mankind will be still oppressed with a load of cares and anxieties." There were many other pregnant and pithy sayings upon the walls, and Mary, who used to speak of her cosy little attic as her "sanctum" or "nest," now laughingly called it her "Profession of faith." Mary also was not quite as she had been. A larger experience of life, new interests, new friends, and, above all, a new ideal had added to her grace and charm of manner, given fulness and maturity even to her beauty. More than ever she was marvellously and wonderfully alive, charged with a kind of radiant energy and force, a joyous power of true correspondence with environment which had made Conrad whisper to James Fabian Rose--one night in the house at Westminster: "For she on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise." Indeed, her experiences had been strangely varied and diversified during the last few weeks. Rose and his friends had spared nothing in the effort to make her a very perfect instrument which should interpret their ideas to the world at large. They had found their task not only easy, but full of intense pleasure. The girl was so responsive, so quick to mark and learn, of such an enthusiastic and original temper of mind that her education on new lines was a specific joy, and their first hopes seemed already assured of fruition. It was now only a few days before the play upon which so many hopes depended was to be produced at the Park Lane Theatre. Already the whole of London was in a fever of curiosity about it. Mr. Goodrick had begun the stimulation of public curiosity in the _Daily Wire_, Lionel Westwood had continued the work until the whole Press had interested itself and daily teemed with report, rumour, and conjecture. Almost everyone in the metropolis knew that something quite out of the ordinary, unprecedented, indeed, in the history of the theatre was afoot. Absolutely correct information there was none. Goodrick was reserving full and accurate details for the day before the production, when the _Daily Wire_ promised a complete and authoritative statement of an absolutely exclusive kind. The three facts which had leaked out in more or less correct fashion, and which were responsible for much of the eager curiosity of London, were the three essential ones. _The Socialist_, which was announced as the title of the play, was known to be the first step in an organised attempt to use the theatre as a method of socialistic propaganda. It was also said that the play was indubitably the masterpiece of James Fabian Rose. This in itself was sufficient to attract marked interest. Secondly, every one seemed to be aware that a young actress of extraordinary beauty and talent had been discovered in the provinces and was about to burst into the theatrical firmament as a full-fledged star, a new Duse or Bernhardt, a star of the first magnitude. Again, there were the most curious rumours afloat in regard to the actual plot of the play. It was said that the whole scheme was nothing more or less than a virulent attack upon a certain great nobleman who owned a large portion of the West End of London and whose name had been much in the public mouth of late. No newspaper had as yet ventured to print the actual name, but it was a more or less open secret that the Duke of Paddington was meant. Mary had seen but little of the duke, and then she had thought his manner altered. She had met him once or twice at the Roses' house, and he seemed to her to have lost his usual serenity. He was as a man on whose mind something weighs heavily. Restless, and with a certain appeal in his eyes. He looked, Mary reflected upon one of these occasions, like a man who had made some great mistake and was beginning to find it out. She had had little or no private talk with him except on one occasion, and then only for a moment. One afternoon the duke had taken her and Mrs. Rose to Paddington House in Piccadilly, and showed the two ladies the treasures of the historic place. It was an old-standing promise, dating from the time of his illness at Westminster, that he should do so. He had called for them in his motor-brougham, and they had noticed his restlessness and depression, both of which seemed accentuated. After a little while the young man's spirits began to improve, and he had not been with them for half an hour when he became bright and animated. In some subtle way he managed to convey to Mary--and she knew that she was not mistaken--a sense that he was glad to see her, glad to be with her, that he liked her. When they were in the picture gallery Mrs. Rose had walked on a few yards to examine a Goya, and the two younger people were left alone for a minute. "I have secured my box for the first performance of _The Socialist_, Miss Marriott," the duke said. Mary flushed a little, she could not help it. "I am sure----" she began, and then hesitated as to what she should say. "You mean that I had better not come," the duke answered with a smile. "Oh, I don't think I shall mind Rose's satire, judging from what I heard when the play was read, at any rate, and, besides, I quite understand that it is not I personally who am shot at so much as that I am unfortunately a sort of typical target. The papers I see are full of it and all my friends are chaffing me." Mary looked at him, her great eyes full of doubt and musing. There was something in his voice which touched her--a weariness, a sadness. "I don't know," she said, "but I think it very likely that when you see the play as it is now you will find it hits harder than you expect. We are all very much in earnest. I think it is very good of you to come at all. I hope at any rate that you will forgive me my part in it. You and I live in very different ways of life, but since we have met once or twice I should not like you to think hardly of me." She spoke perfectly sincerely, absolutely naturally, as few people ever spoke to him. The duke's answer had been singular, and Mary did not forget it. "Miss Marriott," he said in a voice which suddenly became intensely earnest and vibrated strangely, "let me say this, once and for all, Never, under any circumstances whatever, could I think hardly or unkindly of you. To be allowed to call myself your friend, if, indeed, I may be so allowed, is one of the greatest privileges I possess or ever can possess." He had been about to say more, and his eyes seemed eloquent with further words, when Mrs. Rose rejoined them. Mary heard him give a little weary sigh, saw the light die out of his eyes, and something strangely like resignation fall over his face. She had wondered very much at the time what were the causes of the recent changes in the duke's manner, what trouble assailed him. When he had spoken to her in the picture gallery there had been almost a note of pleading in his voice. It hurt her at the time, and she had often recalled it since, more especially as she had seen nothing of him for some time. He had not been to see the Roses, and had, it seemed, quite dropped out of the life of Mary and her friends. The girl was sorry, perhaps more sorry than she cared to admit to herself. Quite apart from the romance of their first meeting, without being in any way influenced by the unique circumstances of his rank and wealth, Mary liked the duke very much indeed. She liked him better, perhaps, than any other man she had ever met. It was always a pleasure to her to be in his society, and she made no disguise about it to herself. Mary put down the manuscript of the play and glanced at the little carriage clock, covered in red leather, which stood on the mantelshelf. It was eleven o'clock, and she had to be at the theatre at the half hour to meet Aubrey Flood and discuss some details of stage business with him. Then she was to lunch with the Roses at Westminster, after which she would return to the theatre and begin a rehearsal, which, with a brief interval for dinner, might last till any hour of the night. She put on her hat and jacket, descended the various flights of stairs which led to her nest in the old Georgian mansion, and walked briskly towards Park Lane. Mr. Flood had not yet arrived, she was told by the stage-door keeper, and thanking him she passed down a short stone passage and pushed open the swing door which led directly on to the stage itself. She was in a meditative mood that morning, and as her feet tapped upon the boards of the huge empty space she wondered if indeed she was destined to triumph there. Was this really to be the scene in which she would realise her life-long dreams or---- She put the ugly alternative away from her with a shudder and fell to considering her part, walking the boards and taking up this or that position upon them in solitary rehearsal. The curtain was up and the enormous cavern of the auditorium in gloom, save only where a single pale shaft of sunlight filtered through a circular window in the roof. The brown holland which covered all the seats and gilding seemed like some ghostly audience. To Mary's right, on the prompt side of the proscenium, a man stood upon a little railed-in platform some eight feet above the stage-floor level. He was an electrician, and was busy with the frame of black vulcanite, full four feet square and covered with taps and switches of brass. From here the operator would control all the lights of the stage as the play went on. A click, and the moon would rise over the garden and flood it with soft, silver light; a handle turned this way or that, and the lights of the mimic scene would rise or die and flood the stage with colour--colour fitted to the emotion of the moment, as the music of the orchestra would be fitted to it also--science invoked once more to aid the great illusion. Mary looked up at the man and the thought came to her swiftly. Yes, it was illusion, a strange and dream-like phantasma of the truth! She herself was a shadow in a dream, moving through unrealities, animated by art, so that the dream should take shape and colour, and the others--the real people--on the other side of the footlights should learn their lesson and take a forceful memory home. It was a strange and confusing thought, remote from actuality, as her mood was at that moment. She looked upwards into a haze of light, far away among the network of beams and ropes and hanging scenery of the "grid." A narrow-railed bridge crossed the open space nearly forty feet above her. Two men in their shirt-sleeves were standing there talking, small and far away. They seemed like sailors on the yard of a ship, seen from the deck below. The girl had seen it all a thousand times before, under every aspect of shifting light and colour, but to-day it had a certain unfamiliarity and strangeness. She realised that she was not quite herself, her usual self, this morning, though for what reason she could not divine. Perhaps the strain of hard work, of opening her mind to new impressions and ideals, was beginning to tell a little upon her. Life had changed too suddenly for her, perhaps, and, above all, there was the abiding sense of waiting and expectation. Her triumph or her failure were imminent. One thing or the other would assuredly happen. But, meanwhile, the waiting was trying, and she longed for the moment of fruition--this way or that. Her reverie was broken in upon. With quick footsteps, quick footsteps which echoed on the empty stage, Aubrey Flood came up to her. He was wearing a heavy fur coat, the collar and cuffs of Persian lamb. His hat was of grey felt--a hard hat--for he had a little farm down at Pinner, where he went for week-ends, and affected something of the country gentleman in his dress. Mary was glad to see him at last, not only because she had been waiting for him to discuss business matters, but because a friendly face at this moment cut into her rather weary and dreamy mood, and brought her back to the life of the moment and the movement of the day. "Oh, here you are!" she said gladly. "I've been waiting quite a long time, and I've been in the blues, rather. The empty theatre, when one is the only person in it, suggests horrible possibilities for the future, don't you think?" He answered her quickly. "No, I don't think anything of the sort. Mary, you are getting into that silly nervous state which comes to so many girls before the first night, the first important night, I mean. You must not do it, I won't allow it, I won't let you. You're overstrained, of course. We're all very much over-strained. So much depends upon the play. But, all the same, we all know that everything is sure and certain. So cheer up, Mary." Flood had called her by her Christian name for two weeks now. The two had become friends. The celebrated young actor-manager and the unknown provincial actress had realised each other in the kindliest fashion. The girl had never met a cleverer, more artistic, nor more chivalrous man in the ranks of her profession, and Flood himself, a decent, clean-living citizen of London, had not grasped hands with a girl like Mary for many months. Mary Marriott sighed. "Oh," she said, "it's all very well for you to talk in that way. But you know, Mr. Flood, how all of you have poured the whole thing on to me, as it were. You have insisted that I am the pivot of it all, and there are moments when it is too overwhelming and one gets tired and dispirited." "Don't talk nonsense," he answered quickly. "All right, then, I won't," she replied. "Now let's go into the question of that business in the second act. My idea is, that Lord Winchester should----" He cut her short with a single exclamation. "That's a thing we can talk over later," he said. "At the moment I have something more important to say." Mary stopped. Flood's voice was very earnest and urgent. She felt that he had discovered some flaw in the conduct of the rehearsals, that some very serious hitch had occurred. Her voice was anxious as she said that they had better discuss the thing immediately. "I hope that it's nothing very serious," she said, alarmed by the disturbance in his voice. "I am going to lunch with the Roses, and as you're late I ought to be off in a few minutes. But what's gone wrong?" "As yet," he replied, "nothing has gone wrong at all." "I hope nothing will," she said, by now quite alarmed by his tone. "Please tell me at once." "I can't tell you here," he replied. "Would you mind coming into my room?" She followed him, wondering. They went into Flood's private room. It faced west, and the winter sun being now high in the heavens did not penetrate there at this hour. The fire was nearly out, only a few cinders glowed with their dull black and crimson on the hearth. "How cheerless!" Mary said as she came into the room. With a quick movement Aubrey Flood turned to the wall. There was a succession of little clicking noises, and then the electric light leaped up and the place was full of a dusky yellow radiance. "That's better," he said in a curiously muffled voice, "though it's not right. Somehow I know it's not right. No, I am sure that it's not right!" His voice rang with pain. His voice was full of melancholy and pain as he looked at her. Never, in all his stage triumphs in the mimic life he could portray so skilfully and well, had his mobile, sensitive voice achieved such a note of pain as now. Suddenly Mary knew. "What do you mean, Mr. Flood?" she said faintly. He turned swiftly to her, his voice had a note of passion also now. His eyes shone, his mobile lips trembled a little--they seemed parched and dry. "Mary," he said, "I love you as I have never loved any one in the world before, and I am frightened because I see no answering light in your eyes, they do not change when you see me." He paused for a moment, and then with a swift movement he caught her by the hands, drew her a little closer to him, and gazed steadily into her face. His own was quite changed. She had never seen him like this before. It was as if for the first time a mask had been suddenly peeled away and the real man beneath revealed. He had made love to Mary during rehearsals, he was her lover in the play of James Fabian Rose--but this was quite different. He spoke simply without rhetoric or bombast. He was a man now, no longer an actor. "Oh, my dear!" he said, "I have no words to tell you how I love and reverence you. I am not playing a part now, I'm not a puppet mouthing the words of another man any longer, and I can't find expression. I can only say that my whole heart and soul are consumed by one wish, one hope. It is you! Ever since I first met you at Rose's house I have watched you with growing wonder and growing love. Now I can keep silence no longer. Dear, do you care for me a little? Can you ever care for me? I am not worthy of one kind look from your beautiful eyes, I know that well. But I am telling you the truth when I say that I have not been a beast as so many men in the profession are. You know how things sometimes are with actors, every one knows. Well, I've not been like that, Mary; I've kept straight, I can offer you a clean and honest love, and though such things would never weigh with you, I am well-to-do. My position on the stage, you know. I am justified in calling it a fairly leading one, am I not? We should have all the community of tastes and interests that two people could possibly have. We love the same art. My dear, dear girl, my beautiful and radiant lady, will you marry me? Will you make me happiest of living men?" His urgent, pleading voice dropped and died away. He held her hands still. His face shone with an earnestness and anxiety that were almost tragic. Mary was deeply moved and stirred. No man had ever spoken to her like this before. Her life had been apart from anything of the kind. All her adult years had been spent upon the stage and touring about from one place to another in the provinces. She had always lived with another girl in the company, and had always enjoyed the pleasant, easy bohemian _camaraderie_ with men that the touring life engenders. Men had flirted with her, of course. There had been sighs and longings, equally, of course, and now and then, though rarely, she had endured the vile persecution of some human beast in authority, a manager, or what not. But never had she heard words like these before, had seen an honourable and distinguished gentleman consumed with love of her and offering her himself and all he had, asking her to be his wife. He was saying it once more: "Mary, will you be my wife?" She trembled as she heard the words, trembled all over as a leaf in the wind. It was as though she had never heard it before, it came like a chord of sweet music. In that moment dormant forces within her awoke, things long hidden from herself began to move and stir in her heart. A curtain seemed to roll up within her consciousness, and she knew the truth. She knew that it was for this that she had come into the world, that the holy sacrament of marriage was her destined lot. Yet, though it was the passionate pleading of the man before her which had worked this change and revealed things long hidden, it was not to him that her heart went out. She thought of no one, no vision rose in her mind. She only knew that this was not the man who should strike upon the deep chords of her being and wake from them the supreme harmonies of love. She was immensely touched, immensely flattered, full of a sisterly tenderness towards him. Affection welled up in her. She wanted to kiss him, to stroke his hair, to say how sorry she was for him. She had never had a brother, she would like a brother just like this. He was simple and good, true, and in touch with the verities of life--down under the veneer imposed upon him by his vocation and position upon the stage. She answered him as frankly and simply as he had spoken to her; she was voicing her thoughts, no more, no less. Almost instinctively she called him by his Christian name. She hardly knew that she did it. He had bared his soul to her and she felt that she had known him for years and had always known him. "It's not possible in that way, Aubrey," she said. "I know it isn't, I can't give you any explanation. There is no one else, but, somehow, I know it within me. But, believe me, I do care for you, I honour and respect you. I like you more than almost any one I have ever met. I will be your friend for ever and ever. But what you ask is not mine to give. I can only say that." The pain on his face deepened. "I knew," he answered sadly, "I knew that is what you would say, and, indeed, who am I that you should love me? But you said"--he hesitated--"you said that there was no one else." She nodded, hardly trusting herself to speak, for his face was a wedge of sheer despair. "Then," he said suddenly, more to himself than to her, "then perhaps some day I may have another chance." He dropped her hands and half turned from her. "God bless you, dear," he said simply, "and now let us forget what has passed for the present and resume ordinary relations again. Remember that both for the sake of our art, our own reputations, and the cause we believe in, _The Socialist_ has got to be a success." In a minute more they were both eagerly discussing the technical theatre business which was the occasion of their meeting. Both found it a great relief. Almost before they had concluded Flood was called away, and Mary, looking at her watch, found that she might as well go down to Westminster at once, for though the Roses did not lunch until a quarter before two there was no object in going back to her flat. She went out into the surging roar of Oxford Street at high noon, momentarily confusing and bewildering after the gloom and semi-silence of the empty theatre. Her idea had been to walk through the park, but when she began she found that the scene through which she had passed had left her somewhat shaken. She trembled a little, her limbs were heavy, she could not walk. She got into a hansom and was driving down Park Lane, thinking deeply as she rolled easily along that avenue of palaces. She knew well enough that in a sense a great honour had been done her. There was no one on the stage with a better reputation than Aubrey Flood. He was a leading actor; he was a gentleman against whom nothing was said; he was rich, influential, and charming. Sincerity was the keynote of his life. Hundreds of girls, as beautiful and cleverer than she was--so she thought to herself--would have gladly accepted all he had to offer. She was a humble-minded girl, entirely bereft of egotism or conceit, and she felt certain that Aubrey Flood might marry almost any one for choice. She had always liked him, now she did far more than that. A real affection for him had blossomed in her heart, and yet it was no more than that. Why had she not accepted him? She put the answer away from her mind; she would not, dare not, face it. There are few people with sensitive minds who take life seriously, who value their own inward and spiritual balance, that have not experienced--at some time or another--this most serious of all sensations recurring within the hidden citadel of the soul. A thought is born, a thought we are afraid of. It rises in the subconscious brain, and our active and conscious intelligence tells us that one thing is there. We are aware of its presence, but we shun it, push it away, try to forget it. We exercise our will and refuse to allow it to become real to us. It was thus with Mary now. Mrs. Rose met her in the hall of the beautiful and artistic little house in Westminster. She kissed the girl affectionately. "I shall be busy for half an hour, dear," she said; "household affairs, you know. Fabian is out; he went to breakfast with Mr. Goodrick this morning to discuss the Press campaign in connection with the play. But he'll be back to lunch, and he'll go with you to the rehearsal this afternoon. Take your things off in my room and go into the drawing-room. The weekly papers have just come, and there are all these. I will send the morning papers up, too." Mary did as she was bid. The beautiful drawing-room was bright and cheery, as the sunlight poured into it and a wood fire crackled merrily upon the hearth. She sat down with a sigh of relief. Unwilling to think, yet afraid of the restful silence which was so conducive to thought, she took up one of the morning papers and opened it. Her eyes fell idly upon the news column for a moment, and then she grew very pale while the crisp sheet rustled in her hands. She saw two oval portraits. One was of the Duke of Paddington, an excellent likeness of the young man as she knew him and had seen him look a thousand times. The second portrait, which was joined and looped to the first by a decoration of true lover's knots, was that of a girl of extraordinary and patrician beauty. Underneath this was the name, "The Lady Constance Camborne." She read: "We are able to announce the happy intelligence that a marriage has been arranged----" when the paper fell from her fingers upon the carpet. Mary knew now. The hidden thought had awakened into full and furious life. Her pale face suddenly grew hot with shame and she covered it with her hands. When she eventually picked up the paper and finished the paragraph she found that the duke's engagement had been a fact for a month past, but was only now formally announced. CHAPTER XIX TROUBLED WATERS The Duke of Paddington was walking up the broad avenue of St. Giles's at Oxford, going towards "The Corn." The trees of the historic street were all bare and leafless in the late winter sun. To his right was the Pusey House, headquarters of the High Church Party in the Church of England. To his left was the façade of St. John's College, while beyond it was the side of Balliol and the slender spire of the Martyrs' Memorial. Farther still, as a background and completion of the view, was the square Saxon tower of St. Michael's. It was a grey and sober loveliness that met his eye, a vista of the ancient university which came sharply and vividly to the senses in all the appeal of its gracious antiquity, unmixed with those sensuous impressions that obtain when all the trees are in leaf and the hot sun of summer bathes everything in a golden haze. The Duke had been to see Lord Hayle, who was lying in the Acland Home with a broken leg. Lord Camborne's son had been thrown from his horse on Magdalen Bridge--a restive young cob which had been sent up from the episcopal stables at Carlton, and been startled by the noisy passage of an automobile. Term was in full swing again, and the viscount lay in the private hospital, unable to take any part in it, while the visits of the duke and others of his friends were his only relaxation. The duke was dressed in the ordinary Norfolk jacket and tweed cap affected by the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge. He was smoking a cigarette and walking at a good pace. Once or twice a man he knew passed and nodded to him, but he hardly noticed them. His forehead was wrinkled in thought and his upper lip drawn in, giving the whole face an aspect of perplexity and worry. Probably in the whole university there was not, at that moment, a young man more thoroughly out of tune with life and with himself than he was. He was probably the most envied of all the undergraduates resident in Oxford. He was certainly placed more highly than any other young man, either in Oxford, or, indeed, in England. Save only members of the Blood Royal, no one was above him. He was, to use a hackneyed phrase, rich beyond the dreams of avarice. His health was perfect, and he was engaged to the most beautiful girl in the United Kingdom. He presented to his friends and to the world at large the picture of a youth to whom the gods had given everything within their power, given with a lavish hand, full measure, pressed down and running over. And he was thoroughly unhappy and disturbed. His friends, the young aristocrats of Paul's, had long noticed the change in him. It had become an occasion of common talk among them, and no one was able to explain it. The general theory--believed by some and scouted by others--was that the duke was still suffering from the shocks of the terrible railway accident outside Paddington Station and his torture and imprisonment at the hands of the vile gang in the West End slum. It was thought that his mind had not recovered tone, that his hours of melancholy and brooding were the result of that. Men tried to cheer him up, to take him out of himself, but with poor success. His manner and his habits seemed utterly changed. The members of the gang who had kidnapped and imprisoned the duke had been tried at the sessions of the Central Criminal Court and were sentenced to various lengthy terms of imprisonment. The duke had gone up from Oxford to be present at the trial. When he returned he refused to speak of it, but his friends learnt from the daily papers that the ringleader of the criminals had been sent into penal servitude for no less than twenty years, and that, by special permission of the judge, the duke had spent several hours with the prisoner directly sentence had been pronounced. Such a proceeding was so utterly unlike the duke, and his reticence about it was so complete, that every one was lost in wonder and conjecture. And there was more than this: during term the duke hardly entertained at all. His horses were exercised by grooms, and he took no part in social life. And worse than all, from the point of view of his Oxford friends, he began to frequent sets of whose existence he had hardly been aware before. This shocked the "bloods" of the 'Varsity more than anything else. It was incredible and alarming. Had the duke been a lesser man he himself would have been dropped. Few outsiders are aware of, or can possibly realise, the extent to which exclusiveness and a sort of glorified snobbery prevails in certain circles at Oxford. Social dimensions are marked with a rigidity utterly unknown elsewhere. Even the greater Society of the outside world is not so exclusive. It was known that the duke was in the habit of taking long walks alone with a poor scholar of his own college. The man was of no birth at all, a "rank outsider," called Burnside. The duke was constantly being seen with this man and with others of his friends--fellows who wore black clothes and thick boots and never played any games. It was nothing less than a scandal! Now and then men who went to the duke's rooms would find strange visitors from London there, people who might have come from another world, so remote were they in appearance, speech, and mode of thought. And the worst of it all was that the duke kept his own counsel, and nobody dared to comment upon the change in his hearing. There was a reserve and dignity about him, a sense of power and restrained force which chilled the curiosity of even intimate friends. They all felt that something ought to be done; nobody knew how to set about it. Then, unexpectedly, an opportunity presented itself. Lord Hayle was thrown from his horse and was taken to the private hospital with a broken leg. As soon as it was allowed all the men of his set--the exclusive set to which he and the duke belonged--paid him frequent visits. Lord Hayle himself had noted with growing dissatisfaction and perplexity the marked change in his future brother-in-law. He saw that John was moody and preoccupied, seemed to have some secret trouble, and was changing all his habits. This distressed and grieved him, but he had said nothing of it to his sister or any one else, hoping that it was but a passing phase. Moreover, he had only seen the commencement of the change. Away from everything in the hospital he had not been able to witness the full development. His friends enlightened him; they told him everything in detail, and urged him to remonstrate. "It will come better from you than from any one else, Hayle," they said. "You are Paddington's closest friend, and he's going to marry your sister. It really is your duty to try and bring him back to his old self and to find out what really is the matter with him." Lord Hayle had taken this advice to heart, and on this very afternoon he had opened the whole question. His remarks had been received quietly enough--the two men were friends who could not easily become estranged--but the interview had been by no means a satisfactory one. "It's perfectly true, Gerald," the duke had said. "I am going through a period of great mental strain and disturbance. But I can't tell you anything about it. It is a mental battle which I must fight out for myself. No one can possibly help me, not even you or Constance. All I can tell you is that there is absolutely nothing in it that is in any way wrong. I am in no material trouble at all. Let me go my own way. Some day you shall know what there is to know, but not yet." The duke walked down the busy "Corn" towards Carfax and the entrance to the "High"--the most beautiful street in Europe. He was on his way to his rooms in Paul's. The interview with Lord Hayle had disturbed him. It had brought him face to face with hard fact, insistent, recurring fact, which was always present and would not be denied. His mind was busy as a mill. The thoughts churned and tossed there like running water under the fans of a wheel. There was no peace anywhere, that was the worst of all. And to-day, of all days, was important. It was the early afternoon of the evening on which the play called _The Socialist_ was to be presented at the Park Lane Theatre. He had obtained special permission to go to town by the evening train--there would be no accident this time--and he knew that to-morrow, whether the play was a success or a failure, his name would be in every one's mouth. All Oxford, all London, all Society was talking about the play that would see light in a few hours. The public interest in it was extraordinary; his own interest in it was keen and fierce, with a fierceness and keenness a thousand times more strenuous than any one knew. He did not fear that he, as a typical representative of his class and order, would be caricatured or held up to economic execration. Even if it were so--and he was aware of Rose's intention--he did not care twopence. He feared nothing of that sort. He feared that he might become convinced. For it had come to that. A complete change and _bouleversement_ of opinion and outlook is not nearly so long a process as many people are apt to suppose. To some natures it is true that conviction, or change of conviction, comes slowly. In the case of the majority this is not so. With many people a settled order of mind, a definite attitude towards life, a fixed set of principles, are the results of heredity or environment. A man thinks in such-and-such a way, and is content with thinking in such-and-such a way simply because the other side of the question has not been presented to him with sufficient force. A Conservative, for example, hears Radical arguments, as a rule, through the medium of a Conservative paper, with all the answers and regulations in the next column. It had been thus with the Duke of Paddington. He had lived a life absolutely walled-in from outside influences, Eton and Oxford, an intensely exclusive circle of that society which surrounds the Court. He had been shut away from everything which might have turned his thoughts to the larger issues of life. Enlightenment, knowledge, had come suddenly and had come with irresistible force. Reviewing the past weeks, as the duke sometimes did with a sort of bitter wonder, he dated the change in his life from the actual moment when he was crushed down into the swift unconsciousness when the railway accident occurred outside Paddington Station. Since then his mental progress had been steady and relentless. James Fabian Rose, Mr. Goodrick, Peter Conrad, the parson, were all men of extreme intellectual power. Arthur Burnside also was unique in his force and grip, his vast and ever-increasing knowledge. And Mary Marriott--Mary, the actress!--the duke thought as little of Mary Marriott as he possibly could--she came into his thoughts too often for the peace of a loyal gentleman pledged irrevocably to another girl. All these forces, the cumulative effect of them, had been at work. The duke found himself at the parting of the ways. Day by day he deserted all the friends of his own station and all the amusements and pleasures which had always employed his time before. For these he substituted the society of Burnside. He went for long walks with the scholar. He drove him out in his great Mercedes automobile; they talked over coffee during late midnights. An extraordinary attachment had sprung up between the two young men. They were utterly different. One was plebeian and absolutely poor, the other was a hereditary peer of England and wealthier than many a monarch. Yet they were fast friends, nevertheless. Nothing showed more completely the entire change of the duke's attitude than this simple fact. All his prejudices had disappeared and were overcome. Regardless of the opinions of his friends, forgetful of his rank and state, he was a close friend of Burnside. Their relations were peculiar. The duke had offered his companion anything and everything. He proposed to make the scholar independent of struggle for the rest of his life. He pressed him to accept a sum of money which would for ever free him from sordid cares and enable his genius to have full play. Burnside had absolutely refused anything of the sort. He was delighted to accept the sum which the duke was paying him for his work as librarian of Paddington House. It meant everything to him. But he worked for it; he knew that his work was valuable, and he accepted its due wages. Apart from that, apart from a mutual attraction and liking which was astonishing enough to both of them, and which was, nevertheless, very real and deep, the relations of the two were simply this: the poor young man of the middle classes, the man of brilliant intellect, was the tutor. The duke was a simple pupil, and day by day he was learning a lesson which would not be denied. The duke arrived at St. Paul's College and crossed the quadrangle into the second quad., where the "new buildings" were. He went up the oak stairs to his rooms. His scout, Gardener--the discreet and faithful Gardener!--was making up the fire in the larger of the two sitting-rooms as the duke came in. "The kit-bag and the suit cases are already packed, sir," he said. "The valet asked me to say so. You will remember that you have given him the afternoon off. Wilkins will be at the station ten minutes before the train starts. Will you kindly tell me where you will be staying, sir, so that the porter can send the late post letters up to reach you at breakfast?" "Oh, I shall be at the _Ritz_," the duke answered, "but you'd better send the letters on to me yourself, Gardener." "At the _Ritz_? Very good, your Grace," the privileged old servant replied. "I saw in the _Telegraph_ that Lord Camborne and her ladyship were down at Carlton, so I thought as you'd be staying at a hotel, sir. But I'm sorry to say that I must leave the matter of the letters to the porter, because, your Grace, I have leave of absence from the bursar to-night, and I am going to London myself." "Oh, well, I hope you'll enjoy yourself, Gardener," the duke answered. "If you go to the writing-table you will find a pocket-book with five five-pound notes in it. You can take one, and it will pay your expenses. You're going on pleasure, I suppose?" Gardener went to the writing-table, expressing well-bred thanks. "Certainly your Grace is most kind," he said. "I hardly know how to thank you, sir. You've been a very kind master to me ever since you've been up. I don't know if you'd call it pleasure exactly, but I'm going up to London to see this abominable play, begging your pardon. I'm going to do the same as your grace is going to do. I'm going to see this here _Socialist_. In a sense I felt it a kind of duty, sir, to go up and make my bit of a protest--if hissing will do any good--especially so, sir, since all the papers are saying that it's an attack upon your Grace." The duke was about to reply, somewhat touched and pleased by the old fellow's interest, when Burnside came into the room, walking very quickly and with his face flushed. "I beg your pardon," he said, "for bursting in like this, but I think you arranged to walk to Iffley with me, didn't you? and I have some specially extraordinary news to tell you!" The old scout, who did not in the least approve of poor scholars of Paul's becoming the intimate friends of dukes, withdrew with a somewhat grim smile. "What is it, Burnside?" the duke said. "You seem excited. Good news, I hope?" "Tremendously good!" said the young man in the black clothes, his keen, intellectual face lit up like a lamp. "An uncle of mine, who emigrated to Canada many years ago as quite a poor labourer, has died and left a fortune of over three hundred thousand pounds. I never knew him, and so I can't pretend to feel sorry for his death. To cut a long story short, however, I must tell you that I am the only surviving heir, and that I have heard this morning from solicitors in London that all this money is absolutely mine!" The duke's face became animated, he was tremendously pleased. "I'm so glad," he said. "I can't tell you how glad I am, Burnside. Now you will be quite safe. You will be able to complete your destiny unhampered by squalid worries. And you won't owe your good fortune to any one." "I'm so glad that you see it in that way," Burnside replied. "Three hundred thousand pounds! Think of it, if money means anything to a man of millions, like you. Why, it will mean everything to the cause of Socialism. Fabian Rose will go mad with excitement when I put the whole lot into his hands to be spent for the cause!" CHAPTER XX THE DUKE KNOWS AT LAST The duke went to the theatre early. The play was announced for nine o'clock, but he was in his box, the stage box on a level with the stalls, by half-past eight. A whole carriage had been reserved for him from Oxford to London, and a dinner basket had been put in for him. He wished to be entirely alone, to think, to adjust his ideas at a time of crisis unparalleled in his life before. A motor-brougham had met him at Paddington and taken him swiftly down to the _Ritz_ in Piccadilly. There he had bathed and changed into evening clothes, and now, as the clock was striking eight, he sat down in his box. The curtains were partially drawn and he could not be seen from the auditorium, though he knew that when the theatre filled all Society would know where he was, even though he was not actually visible. At present the beautiful little theatre was but half lit. There was no pit, and the vista of red-leather armchairs which made the stalls was almost bare of people. There was a sprinkling of folk in the dress-circle, but the upper circle, which took the place of gallery and stretched up to the roof, was packed with people. It was the only part of the aristocratic Park Lane Theatre that was unreserved. The fire-proof curtain was down, hiding the act-drop, the orchestra was a wilderness of empty chairs, and none of the electric footlights were turned on. Now and again some muffled noises came from the stage, where, probably, the carpenters were putting the finishing touches to the first scene, and a continuous hum of talk fell from the upper circle, sounding like bees swarming in a garden to one who sits in his library with an open window upon a summer day. The duke sat alone. He was in a curious mood. The perplexity and irritation with life and circumstance which had been so poignant during the afternoon at Oxford had quite left him. He was quite placid now. His nerves were stilled, he remained quietly expectant. Yet he was sad also, and he had many reasons for sadness. The old life was over, the old ideas had gone, the future, which had seemed so irrevocably ordered, so settled and secure for him, was now a mist, an unknown country full of perils and alarms. The duke was a young man who was always completely honest with himself. As he sat alone in the box waiting for what was to ensue he knew three things. He knew that something of tremendous importance was going to happen to him on that night. He knew that he could no longer regard his enormous wealth and high rank from the individualistic point of view. And he knew that he had made a horrible, ghastly, and irremediable mistake in asking Lady Constance Camborne to be his wife. It was the most hideous of all possible mistakes. It was a mistake for which there was no remedy. Carried away by a sudden gust of passion, he had done what was irrevocable. He had found almost at once that he did not love her, that he had been possessed by the power of her beauty and charm for a moment; but never, under any circumstances could he feel a real and abiding love for her. A knock came at the door of the box, and a second afterwards James Fabian Rose entered. The gleaming expanse of shirt-front only accentuated the extreme pallor of his face, and beneath the thatch of mustard-coloured hair his eyes shone like lamps. Rose was nervous and somewhat unlike his usual self. He was always nervous on the first nights of his plays, and lost his cool assurance and readiness of manner. To-night he was particularly so. "I thought I would just come in and say 'how-do-you-do,'" he said, shaking the duke heartily by the hand. "They told me that you were in the house." The duke was genuinely glad to see his celebrated friend, and his face reflected the pleasure that he felt. The visit broke in upon sad thoughts and the ever-growing sensation of loneliness. "Oh! do sit down for a minute or two," he said. "It's most kind of you to look me up. I suppose you're frightfully busy, though?" "On the contrary," Rose replied, "I have nothing on earth to do. Everything is finished and out of my hands now. If you had said that you supposed I was frightfully nervous, you would have been far more correct." The duke nodded sympathetically. "I know," he said. "I'm sure it must be awful." "It is; and, of course, it's worse to-night than ever before. I am flying right in the face of Society and all convention. I'm putting on a play which will rouse the fierce antagonism of all the society people, who will be here in a few minutes. I'm going tooth-and-nail for your order. And, finally, I am introducing an unknown actress to the London stage. It's enough to make any one nervous. I'm trying to preach a sermon and produce a work of art at one and the same moment, and I'm afraid the result will be absolute failure." The duke, for his part, had never expected anything else but failure for the venture until this very evening. But to-night, for some reason or other, he had a curious certainty that the play, would not fail. It was an intuition without reason, but he would have staked anything upon the event. His strange certainty and confidence was in his voice as he answered the Socialist. "No," he said, "it is going to be a gigantic success. I am quite definitely sure of it. It is going to be the success of your life. And more than that, it is not only going to be an artistic triumph, but it will be the strongest blow you have ever struck for Socialism!" Rose looked at the young man with keen scrutiny. Then a little colour came into the linen-white cheeks, and he held out his hand with a sudden and impulsive gesture. "You put new confidence into me," he said, "and the generosity of your words makes me ashamed. Here I am attacking all that you hold dear, attacking you, indeed, in a public way! And you can say that. I know, moreover, from your tone, that it isn't mere Olympian indifference to anything I and my socialistic brethren can do against any one so fortified and entrenched, so highly placed as you are. It is fine of you to say what you have said. It is fine of you to be present here to-night. And it is finer still of you to remain friends with me and to shake me by the hand." The duke smiled rather sadly and shook his head. "No," he said; "there is nothing fine in it at all, Rose. You say that I am fortified and entrenched. So I was, fortified with ignorance and indifference, entrenched by selfishness and convention. But the castle has been undermined though it has not fallen yet. Already I can hear the muffled sound of the engineers in the cellars! I am not what I used to be. I do not think as I used to think. You are responsible, in the first instance, for far more than you know or suspect." Rose had listened with strange attention. The colour had gone again from his face, his eyes blazed with excitement. The lips beneath the mustard-coloured moustache were slightly parted. When he replied it was in a voice which he vainly tried to steady. "This is absolutely new to me," he said. "It moves me very deeply. It is startling but it is splendid! What you have said fills me with hope. Do you care to tell me more--not now, because I see the theatre is filling up--but afterwards? We are having a supper on the stage when the show is over--success or not--and we might have a talk later. I didn't like to ask you before." "I shall be delighted to come," the duke answered. "I have spoken of these things to a few people only. Arthur Burnside has been my chief confidant." "Splendid fellow, Burnside!" Rose said, with enthusiasm. "A brilliant intellect! He will be a power in England some day." "He is already," said the duke, with a smile. "He has inherited three hundred thousand pounds from a distant relative, who made a fortune in Canada, and has died intestate. He tells me he is going to devote the whole of it to the socialistic cause." Rose gasped. "Three hundred thousand pounds!" he said. "Why it will convert half England! You spring surprise after surprise upon me. My brain is beginning to reel. Upon my word, I do believe that this night will prove to be the crowning night of my career!" "I'm sure I hope so," the duke answered warmly. "But isn't it fine of Burnside! To give up everything like that." "It is fine," Rose answered; "but there are many Socialists who would do it--just as there are, of course, plenty of Socialists who would become individualists within five minutes of inheriting a quarter of a million! But Burnside will not give it all up; I shall see to that." "But I thought----" "Many people fail to understand that we don't want, at any rate, in the present state of things and probably not for hundreds of years, to abolish private property. We want to regulate it. We want to abolish poverty entirely, but we don't say yet that a man shall not have a fair income, and one in excess of others. I shall advise Burnside, for he will come to me, to retain a sufficient capital to bring him in an income of a thousand pounds a year. If the possession of capital was limited to, say, thirty thousand pounds in each individual case, the economic problem would be solved. But I must go. The world arrives, the individualists and aristocrats muster in force!" "What are you going to do? Why not sit here with me?" Rose smiled. "I never watch one of my plays on the first night," he said. "It would be torture to the nerves. I am going to forget all about the play and go to a concert at the Queen's Hall. I shall come back before the curtain is rung down--in case the audience want to throw things at me! Au revoir, until supper--you've given me a great deal to think about." With a wave of his hand, Rose hurried away, and the duke was once more alone. The theatre was filling up rapidly as the duke moved a little to the front of the box and peeped round the curtains. Party after party of well-dressed people were pouring into the stalls. Diamonds shimmered upon necks and arms which were like columns of ivory, there was a sudden infusion of colour, pinks and blues, greens and greys, wonderfully accentuated and set off by the sombre black and white of the men's clothes. A subtle perfume began to fill the air, the blending of many essences ravished from the flowers of the Côte d'Azur. The lights in the roof suddenly jumped up, and the electric candelabra round the circle became brilliant. There was a hum of talk, a cadence of cultured and modulated voices. The whole theatre had become alive, vivid, full of colour and movement. And, in some electric fashion, the duke was aware that every one was expecting--even as he was expecting--the coming of great things. There was a subtle sense of stifled excitement--apprehension was it?--that was perfectly patent and real. Everybody felt that something was going to happen. It was not an ordinary first night. Even the critics, who sat more or less together, were talking eagerly among themselves and had lost their somewhat exaggerated air of nonchalance and boredom. The duke saw many people that he knew. Every one who was not upon the Riviera was there. Great ladies nodded and whispered, celebrated men whispered and nodded. A curious blend of amusement and anxiety was the keynote of the expression upon many faces. To-night, indeed, was a night of nights! The duke had not written to Lady Constance Camborne to say that he was going to be present at the first night of _The Socialist_. She had made some joking reference to the coming production in one of her letters but he had not replied to it. He had kept all his new mental development from her--locked up in his heart. From the very first he had never known real intimacy with her. As Society took its seats he was certain that every one was talking about him. Sooner or later some one or other would see him, and there would be a sensation. He was sure of it. It would create a sensation. For many reasons the duke was glad that neither Lord Hayle, the bishop, nor Constance were in the theatre. Gerald, of course, was in hospital at Oxford, the earl and Constance were down at Carlton. Even as the thought came to his mind, and he watched the stalls cautiously from the back of the darkened box, he started and became rigid. Something seemed to rattle in his head, there was a sensation as if cold water had been poured down his spine. The Earl of Camborne and his daughter had entered the opposite box upon the grand circle tier. The duke shrank back into the box, asking himself with fierce insistence why he felt thus--guilty, found out, ashamed? At that moment the overture ended and the curtain rose upon the play. Then the duke knew. CHAPTER XXI IN THE STAGE BOX AT THE PARK LANE THEATRE The curtain rose upon a drawing-room scene, perfectly conceived and carried out, an illusion of solid reality, immense and satisfying to eye and intelligence alike. Here was a silver table, covered with those charming toys, modern and antique, which fashionable women collect and display. There was a revolving book-shelf of ebony and lapis lazuli which held--so those members of the audience who were near could see--the actual novels and volumes of _belles lettres_ of the moment; the things they had in their own drawing-rooms. The whole scheme was wonderfully done. It was a room such as Waring and Liberty, assisted by the individual taste of its owner, carry out. Up to a certain height the walls--and how real and solid they appeared!--were of pale grey, then came a black picture rail, and above it a frieze of deep orange colour. Black, orange, and grey, these were the colour notes of all the scene, and upon the expanses of grey were rows of old Japanese prints, or, rather, the skilful imitation of them, framed in gold. The carpet was of orange, carrying a serpentine design of dead black, two heavy curtains of black velvet hung on either side of a door leading into a conservatory, softly lit by electric lights concealed amid the massed blossoms, for it was a night scene that opened the play. There was a low murmur of applause and pleasure from the crowded theatre, for here was a picture as complete and beautiful as any hardened playgoers had seen for many years. Then the sound died away. The new actress was upon the stage, the unknown Mary Marriott; there was a great hush of curiosity and interest. As the curtain rose the girl had been sitting upon a Chesterfield sofa of blue linen at the "O. P." side of the stage. For a moment or two she had remained quite motionless, a part of the picture, and, with a handkerchief held to her face, her shoulders shaking convulsively. She was dressed in an evening gown of flame-colour and black. In front of her, and in the centre of the stage, two odd and incongruous figures were standing. One was a shabby, middle-aged woman, pale, shrinking, and a little furtive among all the splendours in which she found herself. She wore a rusty bonnet and a black cape scantily trimmed with jet. By the woman's side stood a tall girl in a hat and a cheap, fawn-coloured jacket. The girl held a soiled boa of white imitation fur in one restless hand. She was beautiful, but sullen and hard of face. Not a word was spoken. It might have been a minute and a half before a word was said. The only sound was that of the sobbing from the richly-dressed woman upon the couch and the timid, shuffling feet of the two humble people--mother and daughter evidently--who stood before her. Yet, curiously enough--and, indeed, it was unprecedented--not a sigh nor sound of impatience escaped the audience. One and all were as still as death. Some extraordinary influence was already flowing over the footlights to capture their imaginations and their nerves. As yet they hadn't seen the face of the new actress, of whom they had heard so much in general talk and read so much in the newspapers. A minute and a half had gone by and not a word had been spoken. They all sat silent and motionless. Suddenly Mary jumped up from the sofa and threw her handkerchief away. They saw her for the first time; her marvellous beauty sent a flutter through the boxes and the stalls, her voice struck upon their ears almost like a blow. Never was a play started thus before. Mary--upon the programme she was Lady Augusta Decies, a young widow--leapt up and faced the two motionless figures before her. Tears were splashing down her cheeks, her lovely mouth quivered with pain, her arms were outstretched, and her perfect hands were spread in sympathy and entreaty. "Oh, but it shan't be, Mrs. Dobson! It can't be! I will stop it! I will alter it for you and Helen and all of you!" These were the first words of the play. They poured out with a music that was terribly compelling. There was a cry of agony, a hymn of sympathy, and a stern resolve. An audible sigh and shudder went round the theatre as that perfect voice swept round it. "What was this play to be? Who was this girl? What did it all mean?" Some such thought was in the mind of every one. Such a voice had not been heard in a London theatre for long. Sarah Bernhardt had a voice like that, Duse had a voice like that--a voice like liquid silver, a voice like a fairy waterfall falling into a lake of dreamland. Most of the people there had heard the loveliest speaking voices of the modern world. But this was as lovely and compelling as any of them, and yet it had something more. It had one supreme quality--the quality of absolute conviction. The new player--this unknown Mary Marriott--was hardly acting. It was a real cry of anguish straight from the heart itself. Every one there felt it, though in different ways and according to the measure of their understanding. To one man it came as a double revelation; it came with the force and power of a mighty avalanche that rushes down the sides of a high Alp, sweeping forests and villages away in its tremendous course. The duke knew that here was one of the very greatest artists who had ever come upon the boards, and he knew also--oh, sweet misery and sudden shame!--that this was the woman he had loved from their first meeting--had loved, loved now, hopelessly, for ever and a day! In that moment he lowered his head and prayed. He sent up an inarticulate prayer to God, a wild, despairing ejaculation, that he might be given power to bear the burden, that he might be a man, a gentleman, and keep these things hid. From where he sat in the shadow of the box he could see Lady Constance Camborne opposite. Both she and the bishop were leaning forward with polite attention stamped upon their faces. There was the girl who was to be his wife. He was bound to her for always, but she didn't know--she never should know! Above all, he must be a gentleman! Never did play have such an extraordinary beginning, one only possible to an artist of consummate ability and knowledge, to a playwright of absolute unconventionality and daring in art. In ten minutes the whole attention of the house was engrossed, after the first quarter of an hour the audience was perfectly still. But this was curious. Throughout the whole of the first act there was hardly any applause--until the fall of the curtain. What little clapping of hands there was came from the huge upper circle, which combined in itself the functions of pit, upper circle, and gallery in the Park Lane Theatre. But it was not a chilling silence; it was by no means the silence of indifference, of boredom. It was a silence of astonishment at the daring of the play. It was also a silence of wonder at, and appreciation of, the supreme talent of the writer, and the players who interpreted him. There were many Socialists in the house, more especially in the upper tiers, but these were in a large minority. Rose and Flood had allowed but few tickets to be sold to the libraries and theatre agents for the first three nights. They had laid their plans well; they wanted Society to see the play before other classes of the community did so. The "boom" which had been worked up in the general Press of London, more especially owing to the skilful direction of it by that astute editor, Mr. Goodrick, of the _Daily Wire_, had been quite sufficient to ensure an enormous demand for seats. The manager of the box office had his instructions, and as a result the theatre was crammed with people to whom socialistic doctrines were anathema, and who sat angry at the doctrine which was being pumped into their brains from the other side of the footlights, but spellbound by the genius that was doing it. Yet the plot of the play was quite simple. It seemed fresh and new because of the subtlety of its treatment, yet, nevertheless, it was but a peg on which to hang an object lesson. Mary, the heroine, represented a woman of the wealthy class which controls the "high finance." Her late husband had left her millions. As a girl she was brought up in the usual life of her class, shielded from all true knowledge of human want, the younger daughter of an earl, married at twenty to a gentlemanly high priest of the god Mammon, who had died five years after the marriage, leaving her with one child, a boy, and mistress of his vast fortune. At the period when the play opened she was engaged to the young Marquis of Wigan, a peer, also immensely wealthy. She was deeply in love with him--real love had come to her for the first time in her life--and he adored her. They were soon to be married. They lived in a rosy dream. They knew nothing of the outside world. It was at her first real contact with the outside world, at terrible, stinging, and bitter truths, which were told her by an ex-kitchenmaid whom she had employed in the past but never seen, which struck the keynote of the play. It was a play of black and white, of yellow and violet--of incredible contrasts. No such brutal and poignant thing had been seen upon the stage of a West End theatre before. In all its shifting scenes and changes there was a hideous alternation. The perfection of cultured luxury, of environment and thought, was shown with the most lavish detail and fidelity. No scenes in the lives of wealthy and celebrated people had ever been presented with such entire disregard of cost before. The pictures were perfect. They were recognized by every one there--they lived in just such a way themselves. But the other scenes?--the hideously sombre pictures--these struck into the heart with chilling horror and dismay. Every one knew in a vague sort of way that such things went on. They had always known it, but they had put the facts away from themselves and refused to recognize them. They were trapped now. They had to sit and watch a supremely skilful imitation of real life in the malign slums of London. They had to sit and listen to dialogue which burnt and blistered, which seared even the most callous heart, truths from the hell of London forced into their ears, phrases which lashed their soft complacency like burning whips. The act-drop came down in absolute silence after the last scene of the first act, a scene in an East-End sweater's den, so cruel and relentless in its realism that dainty women held handkerchiefs of filmy lace to their nostrils as if the very foul odour and miasma of the place might reach them. There was a long sigh of relief as the horror was shut out. The dead, funereal silence was continued for a moment, and then everybody suddenly realized something. The whole audience realized that they had been witnessing an artistic triumph that would always be historic in the annals of the stage. Mary Marriott had done this thing. The fire of her incarnate pity and sorrow had played upon their heart-strings till all of them--wishful, greedy, worldly, sensual--were caught up into an extraordinary emotion of gratitude and sympathy. A burst of cheering, a thunder of applause absolutely without precedent, rang and echoed in the theatre. The evening pedestrians upon the pavements of Oxford Street heard it and halted in wonder before the façade of the theatre. High up in the "grid" the distant stage carpenters heard it and looked at each other in amazement. Up stone flights of stairs in far-away dressing-rooms members of the company heard it and gasped. Mary Marriott and Aubrey Flood came before the curtain and bowed. The full-handed thunder rose to a terrifying volume of sound, and the Duke of Paddington, forgetful of all else, leaned forward in his box and shouted with the rest. The tears were falling down his cheeks, his voice was choked and hoarse. As she retired Mary Marriott looked at him and smiled a welcome! * * * * * There were only three acts. In the course of the plot, simply but ingeniously construed, the Marquis of Wigan and Lady Augusta Decies were taken into the most awful and hopeless places of London. There was a third principal character, a cynical cicerone with a ruthless and bitter tongue, who explained everything to them and was the chorus of their progression. In Doctor Davidson, a prominent socialistic leader, every one recognized a caricature of James Fabian Rose by himself, put before them to ram the message home! The struggle in the woman's mind and heart was manifested with supreme art. Piece by piece the audience saw the old barriers of caste and prejudice crumbling away, until the culminating moment arrived when the young marquis must choose between the loss of her and the abandonment of all his life theories and the prejudices of race. The end came swiftly and inevitably. There was a great culminating scene, in which the girl appealed to her lover to give up almost everything--as she herself was about to do--for the cause of the people, for the cause of brotherhood and humanity. He hesitates and wavers. He is kindly and good-hearted, he wants her more than anything else, but in him caste and long training triumphs. There is a final moment in which he confesses that he cannot do this thing. With pain and anguish he renounces his love for her in favour of his order, the order to which she also belongs. Even for her he cannot do it. He must remain as he has always been; he must say good-bye. The last scene is the same as the first--it is Lady Augusta's drawing-room. Everything is over; they say farewell at the parting of the ways. But she holds the little son by her first husband up to him. "Good-bye, dear Charles!" she says. "You and I go different ways for ever and a day. God bless you! But this little fellow, with the blood of our own class in his veins, shall do what you cannot do. Good-bye!" As the last curtain fell a tall and portly figure came into the Duke of Paddington's box. "John," said the Earl of Camborne and Bishop of Carlton, "I have known that you were here for the last hour. Constance has gone back to Grosvenor Street, but I want to speak to you very seriously indeed." The duke looked up quickly, his voice was decisive. "I didn't know that either you or Connie were in London," he said. "I understood from Gerald that you were both down at the palace. I'm very sorry, but I'm afraid we shall have to postpone our talk until to-morrow morning. I'll turn up at Grosvenor Street at whatever time you wish. To-night, however, now, as a matter of fact, I am very particularly engaged indeed." CHAPTER XXII THE SUPPER ON THE STAGE The success of the play was beyond all question. It was stupendous, overwhelming and complete. For ten minutes the house shouted itself hoarse and Mary Marriott was recalled over and over again. Great baskets of flowers had made their appearance as she stood bowing for the tenth time, and were handed up to her till she stood surrounded by a mass of blossom. Hundreds of opera glasses were levelled at her, eager, critical and admiring faces watched this lovely and graceful girl who stood before them, quietly and modestly, and with a great joy shining in her eyes. For she had stirred them, stirred them by the depths of her art and the passion of her playing. They knew that in one night a great artist had suddenly appeared. However much they might disagree and dislike the doctrines preached in _The Socialist_ they knew that the play was a work of genius, and had been interpreted with supreme talent. Aubrey Flood they were fond of. He was a popular favourite, he had acquitted himself well upon this eventful night. He had received his meed of praise. But for Mary Marriott there was a reception so whole-hearted and magnificent that the tears might well come into the young girl's eyes and the slim, flower-laden hands tremble with emotion as she bowed her gratitude. James Fabian Rose had to make a little speech. He did it with extraordinary assurance and aplomb, and he was received with shouts of applause and good-natured laughter. He had amused and pleased society, and that was enough. The few mocking and brilliant epigrams he flung at them were taken in good part. The deep undercurrent of seriousness seemed but to harmonise with the electric, emotional influences of the moment. For a minute or two--until they should be seated at supper in the smart restaurants, clubs, and houses--they were all Socialists! And the fact that their convictions of the truth would vanish with the first plover's egg and glass at Pol Roger, by no means affected their butterfly enthusiasm as the famous author talked to and at them. The Duke of Paddington watched it all with a strange sense of exhilaration and joy. Lord Camborne had given him an appointment in Grosvenor Street for the morrow, and had hurried away in the most marked perplexity and annoyance. Lord Hayle had been writing to his father, the duke saw that at once, but he was not perturbed. He had made his resolve. He was master of his own fate, captain of his own soul--what did anything else matter? What was to be done was to be done, come what might. One must be true to oneself! As the weary, excited audience began at last to press out of the stalls and boxes, there was a tap upon the door of the duke's, and Mr. Goodrick, the editor of the _Daily Wire_, entered. The little man's face was flushed with excitement, and he was smiling with pleasure. Yet even under these conditions of animation he still seemed a quiet, insignificant little person, and did not in any way suggest the keen, sword-like intellect, the controller of a vast mass of public opinion that he was. "Rose has sent me to say that supper will be ready in ten minutes," he began, "and Mary Marriott especially charged me to tell you how grateful she is that you have come here to-night. What a success! There has never been anything like it! All London will go mad about the thing to-morrow! I had three members of the staff here to-night--Masterman, who does the dramatic criticism, purely from the standpoint of dramatic art, don't you know; William Conrad, the parson's younger brother, who is one of our political people; and old Miss Saurin, who does the society and dress. They're all three gone down to the office in cabs in a state of lambent enthusiasm and excitement. We shall have a fine paper to-morrow morning!" "I'm sure you will, Mr. Goodrick," the duke answered. "Perhaps finer than you know." The little man laughed as he lit a cigarette and offered the case to his companion. "Yes," he said, "but this time it won't be a 'scoop' as it was when I first had the pleasure of meeting you. Good heavens! what a boom that was for the _Wire_. I shall never forget it as long as I live! We were absolutely the only paper in the kingdom to publish the full details of your disappearance and recovery. You don't know how much we owe you, your Grace, from the journalistic point of view. Such things don't come twice, more's the pity!" "I'm not so sure of that, Mr. Goodrick," the duke replied slowly. "Perhaps to-night, within an hour or so, I am going to provide you with a 'scoop' as you call it, to which the first was a mere nothing!" The editor stiffened as a setter stiffens in the stubble when the birds are near. "Your voice has no joking in it," he said. "There is meaning in your Grace's words--what is it?" As he spoke a waiter came into the box. "Supper is prepared upon the stage, your Grace," he said. "Miss Marriott, Mr. Rose, and Mr. Aubrey Flood request the honour of your Grace's presence." "Come along, Mr. Goodrick," the duke said, laughing a little. "You see you will have to wait an event like any one else in this world! But I promise you the 'scoop' all the same!" They went out of the box, the waiter leading the way to the sliding iron "pass door," which led directly on to the stage. For the first few steps they were in semi-darkness, for a boxed-in screen had been hurriedly set by the carpenters to make a supper-room. Then, pushing open a canvas door, they came out into the improvised supper-room. Some forty people were standing upon the stage in groups, talking animatedly to each other. In the background were flower-covered tables gleaming with glass and silver and covered with flowers, among which many tiny electric lights were hidden. Mary Marriott stood in the centre of a laughing happy group of men and women. She wore a long tea-gown of dark red, made of some Indian fabric, and edged with a narrow band of green embroidery upon a biscuit-coloured ground. She wore dark-red roses in the coiled masses of her marvellous black hair, the paint of the theatre had been washed from her face, and her eyes were brighter, her cheeks more lovely, than any art could make them. She was a queen come into her own on that night! An empress of her art, throned, acknowledged, and wonderful. To her came the duke. It was a strange and almost symbolic meeting to some of the quick-wits and artists' brains there. Here was a real prince of this world, a prince who had suffered the hours of a keen and bitter attack with fine dignity and chivalry--James Fabian Rose had not spared words--and there was a princess of art, who from nothing had made a more enduring kingdom, a more splendid realm, than even the long line of peers, statesmen, and warriors had bestowed upon the young man before her. Yet they were both royal, they looked royal, there was an emanation of royalty as the duke bowed over the hand of the actress and touched it with his lips. "_Hommage au vrai Art_," he murmured, quoting the words which a king had once used as he kissed the hand of the greatest French actress of his time. "It was so good of you to come," she said, and he thought that her voice sounded like a flute. "It is kinder still of you to be here now. But they are sitting down to supper. I believe we are placed together; shall we go?" She took his arm, and his whole being thrilled as the little white hand touched his sleeve and her gracious presence was so near. They sat down together in the centre of one of the long tables. The duke sat on one side of Mary, James Fabian Rose upon the other. The waiters began to serve the clear amber consommé in little porcelain bowls; the champagne, cream and amber, flowed into the glasses. Every one was in the highest spirits--actors, authors, journalists, socialistic leaders--every one. It was an odd gathering enough to the casual eye. The ladies of the stage were radiant in their evening gowns and flowers, some of the ladies in the ranks--or rather upon the staff--of the Socialist army were in evening frocks also, others, hard-featured, earnest-eyed women, with short hair and serviceable coats and skirts, were scattered among them, grubs among the butterflies, scorning gay attire. The men were the same, though the majority of them were in conventional evening clothes. Yet, sitting by Mrs. Rose, charming in pale blue, and with sapphires upon her neck, sat a man in a brown suit with a turn-down collar of blue linen, a grey flannel shirt, and a red tie. It was Mr. William Butterworth, the great Socialist M.P. for one of the Lancashire manufacturing towns, who had never worn a dress suit in his life, and never meant to, on principle. Such contrasts were everywhere apparent, but to-night they were mere superficial accidents. Every one was rejoicing at the immense success of _The Socialist_, every one realised that to-night a new and hitherto undreamed of weapon had been forged. An artery was beating in the duke's head--or was it his heart?--beating with the sound of distant drums. He was speaking to Mary in a low voice, and she was bending a little towards him. "Oh, it was far more wonderful and moving than you yourself can ever know!" he said. "I have seen all the great players of our day. But you are queen of them all! There has never been any one like you. There never will be any one like you." He stopped, unable to say more. The drumming within gathered power and sound, became imminent, near, a mighty crescendo, a tide! a flood! "It is sweet of you to say such things," she answered in her low, flute-like voice, "but of course they are not true. I am only a very humble artist indeed. And no one could have helped playing fairly well in such a play as this, especially when the cause it advocates has become very dear to me. I am a Socialist heart and soul now, you know." She sighed, hesitated for a moment, and then went on: "I hope you were not hurt to-night by anything upon the stage. I could not help thinking of you. I knew you were in the box, and it was, by the very nature of it, aimed so directly at you, or rather the class to which you belong and lead. Since I have been converted to Socialism I have tried to put myself into the place of other people--to imagine how they see things. And I know how subversive and outrageous all our ideas must seem to you." "Then you were really sorry for me?" "Really and truly sorry." Perhaps the lovely girl's voice betrayed her a little, its note was so strangely intimate and tender. He started violently, and a joyful, wonderful, and yet despairing thought flashed into his mind. He was silent for some seconds before he replied. "No, I wasn't hurt a bit," he said at length. "Not in the very least. I have something to tell you, Mary"--he was quite unconscious that he had called her by her Christian name. She saw it instantly, and now it was her turn to feel the sudden, overwhelming stab of joy and wonder--and despair! "Tell me," she said softly. "I was not hurt," he answered, "because all my ideas are changed also. I, too, have seen the light. The mists of selfishness and individualism have vanished from around me. The process has been gradual. It has been terribly hard. But it has been inevitable and sure, and it dates from the day on which I first saw you by my bedside in the house of James Fabian Rose. To-night you and he together have completed my conversion. With a full knowledge of all that this means to me, I still say to you that from to-night onwards I am a Socialist heart and soul!" She looked at him, and the colour faded out of her flower-like face, and her great eyes grew wide with wonder. Then the colour came stealing back, pink, like the delicate inside of a shell, crimson with realisation and gladness. "Then----" she began. "You will hear to-night," he answered, and even as he did so Aubrey Flood, flushed with excitement, and his voice trembling with emotion, rose, and in a few broken, heart-felt words proposed the health of Mary Marriott and James Fabian Rose. The toast was drunk with indescribable enthusiasm and _verve_. The high grid of the stage above echoed with the cheers. The very waiters, forgetting their duties, were caught up in the swing and excitement of it and shouted with the rest. It was some minutes before the pale man with the yellow beard could obtain a hearing. He stood there smiling and bowing and patting Mary upon the shoulder. Then he began. He acknowledged the honour they had done Mary and himself in a few brief words of deep feeling. Then, taking a wider course, he told them what he believed this would mean for Socialism, how that the theatre, a huge educational machine with far more power and appeal than a thousand books, a hundred lectures, was now their own. A new era was opening for them, and it dated from this night. Everything had been leading up to it for years, now the hour of fulfilment had come. He took a letter from his pocket. It was from Arthur Burnside, and had arrived from Oxford, during the course of the play. He had found it waiting for him when he returned to the theatre as the curtain fell on the last act. He told them the great news in short, sharp sentences of triumph, how that on this very night of huge success a great fortune was placed in their hands for the furtherance of the great work of humanity. When the second prolonged burst of applause and cheering was over Rose concluded his speech with a sympathetic reference to the duke's presence among them. As he concluded the duke leaned behind Mary's chair and whispered a word to him. Immediately afterwards the leader rose and said that the Duke of Paddington asked permission to speak to them for a moment. There was a second's silence of surprise, a burst of generous cheers, and the duke was speaking in grave, quiet tones the few sentences which were to agitate all England on the morrow and alter the whole course of his life for ever and a day. Mr. Goodrick had a notebook before him and a pencil poised in his right hand. "Ladies and gentlemen," said the duke, "what I have to say shall be said in the very fewest words possible. My friend Mr. Rose has said in his kind remarks about my presence here that to-night I must have felt like a Daniel in a den of lions, or a lion in a den of Daniels--he was not sure which. I felt like neither one nor the other. Miss Marriott said to me just now that she hoped I was not hurt by the attack upon that class of the community which I may be thought to represent. Miss Marriott was wrong also. I have gone through experiences and learnt lessons which I need not trouble you with now. There stands my master in chief"--he pointed to Mr. Rose--"and there have been many others. I came to the theatre to-night as nearly a Socialist in heart and mental conviction as any man could be without an actual declaration. At this moment I announce and avow myself a true and convinced Socialist. I am with you all heart and soul! Allow me a personal reference. I am extremely wealthy. I have great estates in London and other parts of England. Some of these are entailed upon my heirs, and I only enjoy the emoluments during my own lifetime. The rest--and owing to past circumstances and my long minority the more considerable part--are mine to do with as I will. They are mine no longer. I give them freely to the Cause and to England. I join with my friend, Arthur Burnside, in renouncing a vast property in favour of the people. I shall retain only a sufficient sum to provide for me in reasonable comfort. All the details will be settled by the Central Committee of our party--it will take many months to arrange them, but that is by the way. And I offer myself and my work, for what they are worth, to the Cause also. I have no more to say, ladies and gentlemen." He sat down in his chair, swayed a little, and as Mary bent over him and every one present rose to their feet, he swooned away. Mr. Goodrick stole out from his seat, rushed down the passage to the stage door, clasping his note-book, and leaped into a waiting cab. "A sovereign if you get me to the offices of the _Daily Wire_, in Fleet Street, in half an hour!" said Mr. Goodrick. CHAPTER XXIII POINTS OF VIEW FROM A DUKE, A BISHOP, A VISCOUNT, AND THE DAUGHTER OF AN EARL The rain was pouring down and it was a horribly gloomy, depressing morning. The rain fell through the drab, smoke-laden air of London like leaden spears, thrown upon the metropolis in anger by the gods who control the weather. The duke woke up and through the window opposite the foot of his bed saw the rain falling. He was in the same guest-room in the house of James Fabian Rose to which he had been carried when the exploring party had found him in the hands of the criminals of the West End slum. How long ago that seemed now, he thought, as he lay there in the grey, dreary light of the London morning. When he had fainted on the night before he had been carried into Aubrey Flood's dressing-room, and speedily recovered consciousness. His swoon was nothing more than a natural protest of the nerves against an overwhelming strain. It could hardly have been otherwise. One does not undergo weeks of mental strain and dismay without overtaxing the strength. One does not go through a night in which conviction of truth comes to one, the knowledge of love, the certainty that, in honour, that love could never be declared, the solemn and public renunciation of almost everything is realised and declared, without collapse. He had found Mrs. Rose and Mary Marriott--ministering angels--by his side when he came back to the world. Rose had entered, and would not hear of the duke's return to the _Ritz_. A messenger had been sent home for his things, and now he woke in the old familiar room upon this grey, depressing morning. He was feeling the inevitable reaction. He could not help but feel it. It was eight o'clock he saw from his watch, the same watch which had been taken from him by force on the night of the railway accident. The morning papers were out. One of these papers he knew would be even now having a record sale. The _Daily Wire_ was having a huge boom. The general public were already learning of his renunciation. Before mid-day all society would know of it also. His hundreds of relations and connections would be reading the story. It would be known at Buckingham Palace and at Marlborough House. Lord Camborne would know of it, the news would reach Lord Hayle on his sick-bed at Oxford. Lady Constance would know it. Before lunch he had to go to Grosvenor Street He must keep his appointment with his future father-in-law. And he was fearing this interview as he had never feared anything in this world before. What was going to happen he didn't know. But he was certain that the meeting would be terrible. He felt frightfully alone, and there was only one little gleam of satisfaction in the outlook. Constance would stand by him. The beautiful girl who was to be his wife had often expressed her sympathy with the down-trodden and the poor. He could rely on her at least. He did not love her. He could never love her. He loved some one else with all his heart and soul, and believed--dared to believe--that she loved him also. That was a secret for her and for him for ever and ever. The thing might not be. He had to keep his word inviolable, his honour unstained. They both had duties to do--he and Mary! They must live for the Cause, apart, lonely, but strong. He was pledged to Constance Camborne, and hand in hand, good comrades, they would work together for the common weal. The joy of life must be found in just that--in the "stern lawgiver" Duty. The other and divinest joy was not for him, and he must face the fact like a man of a great race. "So be it," he muttered to himself with a bitter smile. "Amen!" Then he rose and plunged into the cold bath prepared for him in an alcove of the bedroom. He breakfasted alone with James Fabian Rose. Mary Marriott was staying in the house but both she and Mrs. Rose were utterly exhausted and would not be visible for many hours. The duke was quite frank with his host. He unburdened himself of the "perilous stuff" of weeks to him; he laid everything bare, all the mental processes which had led to his absolute change of view. He spoke of the future and reiterated his determination to become a leader in the new Israel. He even told Rose of his fear and terror at the approaching interview with Lord Camborne, but of the most real and deep pain and distress he said never a word. He did not mention Mary Marriott, he said nothing of Lady Constance Camborne. Rose appeared to him then in a new light. The apostle of Socialism, the caustic wit, the celebrated man of literature was as gentle and tender as a child. He seemed to know everything, to enter into the psychology of the situation with an intuition and understanding which were as delicate and sure as those of a woman. He said no single word to indicate it, but the duke felt more and more certain as the meal went on that this wonderful man had penetrated, more deeply than he could have thought possible, to the depths of his soul. Rose knew that he loved Mary Marriott and must marry Constance Camborne. Twice during breakfast a swift gleam of sardonic but utterly kindly and sympathetic amusement flashed into the dark eyes of the pallid man. It was a gleam full of promise and understanding. But the duke never saw it, he did not see into the immediate future with the unerring certainty that the writer of plays and student of human life saw it. The duke had no hint of his own deliverance, but the elder man saw it clear and plain, and he would say nothing. A martyr must undergo his martyrdom before he wins his proper peace, it is the supreme condition of self-sacrifice, and James Fabian Rose knew that very well. * * * * * The duke stood waiting in the bishop's library at Grosvenor Street. "His lordship will be with you in a moment, your Grace," the butler said, quietly closing the door of that noble room. It might have been imagination, but the young man thought that he saw a curious expression flit over the man's face, the half-compassionate, half-contemptuous look with which callous intelligence regards a madman. "Ah!" he thought to himself, "I suppose that sort of look is one to which I must become familiar in the future, it is part of the price that I must pay for living up to the truth that is in me. Very well, let it be so, I can keep a stiff upper lip, I believe. I must always remember the sort of people from whom I am descended. Many of them were robbers and scoundrels, but at least they were strong men." It was in this temper of mind that he waited in the splendid library, among all the hushed silence that a great collection of books seems to give a room, until the bishop should arrive. The duke had not long to wait. The distinguished and commanding old man entered, closed the door behind him, and walked straight up to him. The bishop's face was very stern and the lines of old age seemed more deeply cut into it than usual. But there was a real pain in the steadfast and proud red eyes which added a pathos to his aspect and troubled the duke. "John," Lord Camborne began, "when I saw you last night at that wicked and blasphemous play I trembled to think that most disquieting news which had reached me was true." "And what was that, my lord?" "Suffer me to proceed in my own way, please, and bear with me if I am prolix. I am in no happy mind. I went to that play as a public duty, and I took my daughter that she might see for herself the truth about the Socialists and the godless anarchy they preach. You had made no mention of your intention to be present, and I was glad to think that you would be quietly at Oxford. I had heard from Gerald--than whom you have no greater friend--that you were associating with disreputable and doubtful people, forsaking men of your own class and living an extraordinary life." "It was a lie," the duke answered shortly. "Gerald has been ill in bed, he has been misinformed." "It was not only Gerald," the old man went on, "but letters reached me from other sources, letters full of the most disturbing details." "Do you set spies upon my actions, Lord Camborne?" "That is unworthy of you, John," the bishop answered gently, "unworthy both of you and of me. You are well aware that I could not stoop to such a thing. Do you forget that in your high position, with all its manifold responsibilities to God, to your country, and to yourself, your movements and dispositions are the object of the most wise and watchful scrutiny on the part of your tutors?" "I am sorry I spoke wrongly." "I make allowances for you. The word was nothing, but it is a far harder task to make allowances for you in another way. You seem to have committed yourself irrevocably." The old man's voice had become very stern. The duke saw at once that he had read the _Daily Wire_. He said nothing. "You have been a traitor to your order," the pitiless voice went on. "You have publicly blasphemed against the wise ordinances of God. A great peer of England, pledged to support the Throne, you have cast in your lot with those who would destroy it. I say this in the full persuasion that the report of what occurred last night is correctly set forth in that pestilent news-sheet, the _Daily Wire_." "It is perfectly true," said the duke. "You intend to abide by it?" "Unswervingly. My reason is convinced and my honour is pledged." The bishop turned and strode twice up and down the library, a noble and reverend figure as he struggled with his anger. "I have seen Constance," he said at length, speaking with marked difficulty. "Of course any idea of your marriage is now out of the question." The suddenness of the words hit the duke like a blow. "And Constance?" he said in a faint voice; "she----" "She is of one mind with me," Lord Camborne answered. "The blow has been terrible for her, but she is true to her blood. An announcement that the marriage will not take place will be sent to the papers to-day." "May I see her?" "You may see her, John," the bishop said brokenly. "Oh, why have you brought this shame and public disgrace upon us? I did not intend to make an appeal to you, but I knew your father, I have loved you, and there is my dear daughter. Is it too late? Cannot you withdraw? Can it not be explained as a momentary aberration, a freak, a joke, call it what you will? There would be talk and scandal, of course, but it would soon blow over and be forgotten. It could be arranged. I have great influence. Is it too late? Remember all that you are losing, think well before you answer." There were tears in the bishop's voice. There were tears in the duke's eyes as he answered. "Alas!" he said, "it is too late, I would not change even if I could, I must be true to myself." "God help you, preserve you, and forgive you," Lord Camborne replied with lifted hand. "And now good-bye, in this world we shall not meet again. I will send Constance to you. Do not keep her long. Remember that you have an old man's blessing." With his hand over his eyes the bishop went from the room. More than once he stumbled in his walk. He was weeping. It was awful to see that high and stately old man stricken, to see that white and honourable head bowed in sorrow and farewell. Lady Constance came into the room. She was very pale, her eyes were swollen as if she also had been weeping. She went straight up to the duke, tall and erect as a dart, and held out her hand to him. "John," she said. "I've come to say good-bye. Father has allowed me five minutes and no more. Father is terribly shaken." He held her hand in his for a moment. She was very beautiful, very patrician, a true daughter of the race from which she had sprung. "Then it is really all over, Constance?" he said with great sadness. "It must be all over for you and me," she answered. "Tell me this, dear. Is what you say said of your own free will, or is it said because of your father's authority and pressure? He has been very kind to me, kinder than from his natural point of view I can ever deserve. But I must know. I am ready and anxious. I am putting it horribly, but the situation is horrible. Constance, won't you marry me still?" "You are not putting it horribly," she said with a faint smile. "You are putting it chivalrously and like a gentleman. Let us be absolutely frank one with another. We come of ancient races, you and I. We have blood in us that common people have not. We are both of us quietly and intensely proud of that. 'Noblesse oblige' is our creed. Very well, I will not marry you for three reasons. First of them all is that you do not love me. No, don't start, don't protest. This is our last real meeting, and so in God's name let's be done with shame. You admire me, you have a true affection for me. But that is all. We were both dazzled and overcome by circumstances and the moment. You wanted me because I am beautiful, of your rank, because we should get on together. I was ready to marry you because I am very fond of you and because I know and feel that it is my destined lot in life to make a great marriage, to lead Society, always to be near the throne. The second reason that I won't marry you is that by your own act you have deprived yourself of those material things that are my right and my destiny, and the third reason is that my father forbids it. John, I think I honour and like you more than I have ever done before for what you are doing. You have chosen your path, find peace and joy in it. I pray that you will ever do so, and I know that you are going to be very happy." "Very happy, Constance?" "Very happy, indeed. Oh, you foolish boy, did I not see your face at the theatre last night! Oh, foolish boy!" She wore a little bunch of violets at her breast. She took them and held them out to him. "Give them to her with my love," she said. She bent forward, kissed him upon the forehead, and left the room without even looking back. A noblewoman always. CHAPTER XXIV "LOVE CROWNS THE DEED" The duke stood on the pavement outside Lord Camborne's house in Grosvenor Street. It was still pouring heavy drops of rain, which beat a tattoo upon his umbrella. He glanced back at the massive green-painted door which the butler had just closed behind him. Never again would that hospitable door open for him! He would see none of his kind friends any more. Gerald, who had been as a brother to him for so long, would never shake him by the hand again--he knew Lord Hayle's temperament too well to expect it. Constance, beautiful, frank, and stately, had vanished from his life. The earl, a prince of the Church and a princely old man, would never again tell him his genial and courtly stories of the past. The duke stood there alone. Alone!--the word tolled in his ears like a bell, making a melancholy accompaniment to the rain. He began to walk towards Bond Street in a shaken and melancholy mood. How swift and strange it all was! How a few months had altered all his life, utterly and irrevocably! An infinitesimal time back he had not a care in the world. He was Prince Fortunatus, enjoying every moment of his life and position in a dignified and becoming fashion. And what was he now? He laughed a small, bitter laugh as he asked himself the question. He was still the Duke of Paddington, the owner of millions, the proprietor of huge estates, perhaps the most highly-placed young man in England. Even now it was not too late to undo much of what he had done. Everything would be condoned and forgiven to such a man as he. He could buy a great yacht, go round the world for a year with a choice society of friends of his own standing, and when he returned Court and Society would welcome him with open arms once more--all this he understood very well. He had but to say a few words and all that was now slipping away from him would be his own once more. Struggles against conscience and convictions are either protracted or very short. The protracted struggle was over in his case. He had fought out the battle long before. His public action on the night before had been the outcome. But there was still the last after-temptation to be faced, the final and conclusive victory to be won. It was not far from Lord Camborne's town house to Bond Street, but during the distance the battle within the young man's mind raged fiercely. He must not be blamed. The whole of his past life must be taken into consideration. It must be remembered that he had just been enduring a succession of shocks, and it must also be taken into account that no one feels the same enthusiasm on a grey, wet morning, when he is alone, as he does in a brilliant, lighted place at midnight, surrounded by troops of friends and sympathisers. A tiny urchin, wet and ragged, with bare feet, came pattering round the corner. Under his arm he held a bundle of pink papers in an oil-skin wrapper. In front of him, as a sort of soiled apron, was the limp contents-bill of an evening paper. The duke saw his own name upon it. He realised that by now, of course, the early editions of all the evening papers were on the streets, and that they had copied the news from the _Daily Wire_. "Pyper, m'lord!" said the urchin, turning up a shrewd and dirty face to the duke, who shook his head and would have passed on. "Yer wouldn't sye no, m'lord, if yer noo the noos!" said the child. "'Ere's a bloomin' noo hactress wot's goin' to beat the bloomin' 'ead orf of all the other gels, just a cert she is! And there's a mad dook wot's gone and give all is oof to the pore! P'raps I shell get a bit of it--I don't fink!--'ave a pyper, sir?" The impish readiness of the boy amused the duke, though his words stung. Yes! all the world was ringing with his name. The knowledge, or rather the realisation of what he had known before, acted as a sudden tonic. In a swift moment he set his teeth and braced himself up. A mad duke, was he?--_au contraire_, he felt particularly sane! The past was over and done--let it be so. The future was before him--let him welcome it and be strong. If he was indeed mad, then it should be a fine madness--a madness of living for humanity! He looked at the pinched and anxious face of the boy. A sudden thought struck him. He would begin with the boy. "Hungry?" he said. "Not 'arf!" said the boy. "Father and mother?" "Old man's doin' five years, old woman's dead--Lock Orspital." "Home?" "Occasional, as you might sye," said the imp reflectively; "but Hadelphi Harches as hoften as not--blarst 'em!" "Very well," said the duke. "Now you're going to have as much as you like to eat, good clothes, and a happy life if you come with me. I'll see you through." "Straight?--no bloomin' reformatory?" "Come along with me, you little devil," said the duke genially. "Do you think I'm going to let you in? If you do--scoot!" "I'm on," said the child, much reassured at being called a little devil. "Carn't be much worse off than nah, wotever 'appens." Two cabs were found at the corner. "Jump in that one," the duke said, pointing to the last. "Follow me," he said to the driver, getting into the first cab as he did so, and giving the address of Rose's house in Westminster. The two cabs started without comment or question. There was something very authoritative about his Grace of Paddington sometimes. The two cabs drove up to the little house in Westminster just as the rain cleared off, and a gleam of sunlight bursting through the clouds shone on the budding trees which topped the high wall of the Westminster sanctuary and jewelled them with prismatic fires. High above, the towers of the Abbey seemed washed and clean, rising into an air purged for a moment of grime and smoke, while the wet leaden roof of the nave shone like silver. James Fabian Rose was on the doorstep of his house, and in the act of unlocking the door with his latchkey. "Hallo!" he said. "So you're back, duke--home again! The ordeal is over, then!" "Yes, it's quite over," the duke answered. "Who's this ruffian?" said Rose, smiling at the little newsboy. "A recruit!" the duke said. "I'm responsible for him for the future. And meanwhile he's confoundedly hungry." "So I bloomin' well am," said the imp--though "blooming" was not the precise word he used. Rose took the urchin by the ear. "Come along, embryo Socialist," he said; "there's lots to eat inside--I'll take him to the kitchen, duke, and meet you in a moment in my study. My wife's in the kitchen helping the cook. She'll see to this youngster." The duke paid the cabmen. As he gave half-a-crown to the second man, the fellow leaned down from his box and said, "God bless you, my lord. I knew you as soon as you got into my cab. It'll be many years before you know the good you done last night. People like us know wot you done and are goin' to do. I arst you to remember that." He gave a salute with his whip and clattered away. The duke went into the house. As the door closed behind him and he stood alone in the narrow hall, the final revelation, the complete realisation came to him. Mechanically he took off his wet overcoat and bowler hat, hanging them upon the rack. He put his dripping umbrella in the stand and went upstairs to the first floor. Rose's study was on the first floor, facing the drawing-room. He opened the door and went in. The room, lined with books, a working-room, was rather dark. It did not face the newly-arrived sun. But a dancing fire burned upon the hearth, and in a chair by the side of it Mary Marriott sat alone. Her face was pale, she wore a long, flowing tea-gown, round her feet were scattered the innumerable daily papers in which she had been reading the extraordinary chorus of praise for her triumph of the night before. She was leaning back in a high-backed armchair covered in green Spanish leather, looking like one of Sargeant's wonderful portraits that catch up eye and heart into a sort of awe at such cunning and splendour of presentation. The duke stopped upon the threshold for a second--only for a second. He had known what he had come to do directly he was in the house--immediately he had entered the house and felt the influence which pervaded it. He went quickly up to her and sank on his knees beside her chair. He took her white hands in his--things of carved ivory, with a soul informing them. An hour ago he had held another pair of hands as beautiful as these. Her face flushed deeply, her eyes grew wide, her lips parted. She tried to draw her hands away. The words burst from her lips as if she had no power to control them. Her soul spoke, her heart spoke; it was an absolute avowal. But conscience, her sense of right and duty, her high thought for him and for herself spoke also. "No, no! It is dishonourable, you are vowed!" He held her fast, the strong male impulse dominated her, she was sick to death with surrender. "But you love me, Mary?" "Yes!--oh, what am I saying? God help me!--go, for you are a gentleman, and must preserve our hearts unstained!" "Darling!" he cried, "God is with us. I break no troth! All that is over and done--I am free, I am yours." He had her little hands in his, tight, close--ah, close! Swift, passionate words come from his lips, fierce loving words caught up in sobs, broken with the hot tears of happiness in that he is so blessed and she so dear! Her face, in its supreme loveliness, its tenderness, its joy, is turned full to his now. The river of his speech rushes down upon her heart, surging over her. His words catch her up upon their flood, her will seems to her merged in his, she swoons with love. For her! For her--this wonder is for her! It is an echo from the love of the august parents in the sweet garden of Eden. Gone is the world, the world in which she has always moved. Gone are ideals and causes, gone are art and triumph, homage and success! Gone--vanished utterly away--while her own lover holds her hands in his. She bent her lovely head. No longer did she look up into her lover's face with happy eyes. A deep flush suffused her face and the white column of her neck. "So you see, dearest--best, I had to tell you. This is the moment when the love that throngs and swells over a man's heart bursts all bonds of repression and surges out in a great flood. Oh! darling! there has never been any one like you--there will never be any one like you again! My love and my lady, dare I ask you to be mine? Oh, I don't know--I can't say! I kneel before you as a man kneels before a shrine. I wonder that I have even words to speak to you, so peerless, so gracious, and so beautiful!" His voice dropped and broke for a moment. He could say no more. Mary said no word. The firelight made flickering gleams in the great masses of dead-black hair. The wonderful face was hidden by the white hands which she had withdrawn from his. His own strong hands were clasped upon her knees. They shook and trembled violently. What was she thinking? How did she receive his words?--his winged and fiery words. He knelt there in an agony of doubt. Then, in one swift access of passion, his mood changed to one of greater power. She was a woman, and therefore to be won! The clear, strong thought came down upon him like fire from heaven. He knew then that he was her conqueror, the man she must have to be her mate, her strength, her lover! His strong arms were round her. They held her close. "Darling!" he whispered, "my arms are the home for you. That is what the old Roman poet said. Horace said it in the vineyards and the sun. I say it now. See, you are mine, mine!--only mine! You shall never break away, my own, incomparable lady and love!" The whole world went away from her and was no more. She only knew, in a super-sensual ecstasy, that his kisses fell upon her cheek like a hot summer wind. She found a little voice, a little, crushed, happy voice. "But you are a duke, you are so much that is great! I am only Mary Marriott, the actress!" "You are only the supreme genius of the stage. I am the greatest man in the world because you love me. Mary, it is just like that--and that is all." She kissed him. He knew the supreme moment. All life, all love, all nature were revealed to him in one flash of joy for which there is no name. Both of them heard an echo of the harps that the saints were playing in another world. The whole heavenly orchestra was sounding an accompaniment to their story. "Love!" "Love!" "Husband!" "Wife!" There was a knock at the door. "Please, miss," said the housemaid, "lunch is ready. Mr. Goodrick has come, your Grace. And the downstairs rooms are full of gentlemen of the press. And there's men with photographic cameras, too. I've asked the master what I am to do, but he only laughs, miss! I can't get anything out of him. But lunch is ready!" "Sweetheart," the duke said, "lunch is ready! There's a _fact_! Let's cling to it! And if Rose is laughing, let's laugh, too, and dodge the journalists!" "It will be a very happy laughter, John," she said. As the couple came into the luncheon-room--which was full of the leaders of the socialistic movement--Mr. Goodrick cast a swift glance at the duke and Mary, and then left the place with an unobtrusive air. The _Daily Wire_ had no evening edition. But it had an extraordinary reputation for being "first there" with intimate news at breakfast time. EPILOGUE Upon the Chelsea Embankment there is a house which, for some months after its new occupants had taken possession of it, was an object of considerable interest to those who passed by. People used to point there, at that time, and tell each other that "That's where the Socialist duke and his actress wife have gone to live. The Duke of Paddington--_you_ know!--gave up all his possessions, or nearly all, to be held in trust for the Socialists. They say that he's half mad, never recovered from being captured by those burglars on the night of the big railway smash on the G.E.R." "Silly Juggins!" would be the reply. "Wish _I'd_ have had it. You wouldn't see _me_ giving it all up--not half!" But for several years the house has been just like any ordinary house and few people point to it or talk about it any more. There have been hundreds of sensations since the duke and his wife settled down in Chelsea. * * * * * It was about one o'clock in the afternoon. The duke sat in his library in Cheyne Walk. It was a large and comfortable room, surrounded by books, with a picture here and there which the discerning eye would have immediately seen to be of unusual excellence, and, indeed, surprising in such a house as this. A barrister earning his two thousand a year, a successful doctor not quite in the first rank, a county court Judge or a Clerk in the Houses of Parliament would have had just such a room--save only for the three pictures. The duke had changed considerably in appearance during the past five years. The boyishness had departed. The serenity and impassivity of a great prince who had never known anything but a smooth seat high upon Olympus had gone also. The face, now strong with a new kind of strength, showed the marks and gashes of Experience. It was the mask of a man who had done, suffered, and learned, but it was, nevertheless, not a very happy face. There was, certainly, nothing of discontent in it. But there was a persistent shadow of thought--a brooding. Much water had flowed under the bridge since the night at the theatre when he had made a public renunciation of almost everything that was his. Life had not been placid, and for many reasons. There had been the long and terribly difficult breaking away from his own class and order, for he had not been allowed to go into "outer darkness" without a protracted struggle. All the forces of the world had arrayed themselves against him. The wisest, the most celebrated, the highest placed, had combined together in that they might prevent this dreadful thing. He was not as other men. Hardly a great and stately house in England but was connected with him by ties of kindred. His falling away was a menace to all of them in its opening of possibilities, a real grief to many of them. There had been terrible hours of expostulation, dreadful scenes of sorrow and recrimination. Compromise had assailed him on every side. His wife would have been received everywhere--it was astonishing how Court and Society had discovered that Mary Marriott was one of themselves after all--a "Mem-Sahib." He could do what he liked within reason, and still keep his place. A prime minister had pointed out to him that no one at all would object to his countenance of the Socialistic party. He might announce his academic adherence to Socialism as often and as loudly as he pleased. It would, indeed, be a good thing for Socialism, in which--so his lordship was pleased to say--there was indubitably a germ of economic good. All great movements had begun slowly. These things must ripen into good and prove themselves by their own weight. But it was economically wrong, and subversive of all theories of progress, that a sudden and overpowering weight should be put into one side of the scale by a single individual. "It will disturb everything" said the Prime Minister. "And any one who, from an individual opinion, disturbs the balance of affairs is doing grave, and perhaps irreparable, harm." In short, they would have allowed him to do anything, but give up his PROPERTY. They would have let him marry any one if he did not give up his PROPERTY. For all of them had won their property and sovereignty by predatory strength throughout the centuries, or the years. Landowners of ancient descent, millionaires of yesterday, all knew the power of what they held and had. All loved that power and were determined to keep it for themselves and their descendants.... And, all had sons, young and generous of mind as yet, to whom the duke's example might prove an incentive to a repetition of such an abnegation. They were very shrewd and far-seeing, all these people. Collectively, they were the most cultured, beautiful, and charming folk in England. They were the rulers of England, and by birth, temper, and inheritance he was one of them. The pressure put upon him had been enormous, the strain terrible. A resolution made in a moment of great emotion, and an enthusiasm fostered by every incident of time and circumstance, seems a very different thing regarded dispassionately when the blood is cool, and, so to speak, the footlights are lowered, the curtain down, the house empty. Once, indeed, he had nearly given in. He had been sent for privately to the Palace, and some wise and kindly words had been spoken to him there by A Personage to whom he could not but listen with the gravest and most loyal attention. Compromise was once more suggested, he was bidden to remember his order and his duty to it. He was again told that his opinions were his own, that short of taking the irrevocable step he might do almost anything. Nor does a young man whose inherited instincts are all in fierce war with his new convictions listen unmoved to gracious counsel such as this from the Titular Head of all nobility, for whose ancestors his own had bled on many a historic field. He had stood quite alone. Mary Marriott, his wife that was to be, had given him no help. Tender, loving, ready to marry him at any cost, she nevertheless stood aloof from influencing his decision in the hour of trial. He tried hard to get help and support from her, to make her love confirm his resolution, but he tried in vain. With the clear sanity of a noble mind, the girl refused to throw so much as a feather-weight into the scale of the balance, though in this she also suffered (secretly) as much as he. Then he went to the others, sick and sore from the buffetings he was receiving at all hands--from his own order and from the great public press they influenced, from the great solid middle-class of the country which, more than anything else perhaps, preserves the level of wise-dealing and order in England. The others were as dumb as the girl he loved. It was true that a section of the Socialist party, the noisy, blatant--and possibly insincere--big drum party, hailed him as prophet, seer, martyr, and Galahad in one. But there was a furious vulgarity about this sort of thing which was more unnerving, and made him more wretched than anything else at all. Such people spoke a different language from his own, a different language from that of Fabian Rose and his friends. They said the same thing perhaps--he was inclined to doubt even that sometimes--but the dialect offended fastidious ears, the attitude offended one accustomed to a certain comeliness and reticence even in the new life and surroundings into which he had been thrown. Both the Pope and General Booth, for example, serve One Master, and live for Our Lord. But it is conceivable that if the Bishop of Rome could be present at a mass meeting of the Salvation Army in the Albert Hall, he would leave it a very puzzled and disgusted prelate indeed. Rose and his friends avoided influencing the duke, of set purpose. They were high-minded men and women, but they were also psychologists, and trained deeply in the one science which can dominate the human mind and human opinion. They wanted the Duke of Paddington badly. They wanted the enormous impetus to the movement that his accession would bring; they wanted the great revenues which would provide sinews of war for a vast campaign. But they knew that nothing would be more disastrous than an illustrious convert who would fall away. The duke had been left alone. For a month after the few words he had addressed to the people at the theatre supper, the struggle had continued. His name was in every one's mouth. It would not be too much to say that all Europe set itself to wonder what would be the outcome. The journals of England and the Continent teemed with denunciation, praise, sneers. Tolstoi sent a long message--the thing fermented furiously, and, instructed by the journalists, even the man in the street recognised that here was something more than even the renunciation of one man of great possessions for an idea--that it would create--one way or the other--a disintegrating or binding force, that a precedent would establish itself, that vast issues were involved. After a week of it, the duke disappeared. Only a few of his friends knew where he was, and they were pledged not to say. He was fighting it out alone in a little mountain village of the Riviera--Roquebume, which hangs like a bird's nest on the Alps between Monte Carlo and Mentone, and where the patient friendly olive growers of the mountain steppes never knew who the quiet young Englishman was who sat in the little _auberge_ under the walls of the Saracen stronghold and watched the goats and the children rolling in the warm dusk, or stared steadfastly out over the Mediterranean far below, to where the distant cliffs of Corsica gleamed like pearls in the sun. He came back to England, his decision made, his first resolve strengthened into absolute, assured purpose. The ruffians who had kidnapped him on the night of the railway accident had been unable to torture him into buying his freedom. For what to him would have been nothing--a penny to a beggar--he might have gone free. And yet he had nearly died rather than give in. Save for the chance or Providence which brought his rescuers to him in the very last moment, he would have died--there is no doubt about it. Now again, he was firm as granite. His mind was made up, nothing could alter it nor move it. His hand had been placed upon the plough. It was going to remain there, and he left the palms and orange groves of the South a man doubly vowed. He had married at once. Mary Marriott became a duchess. Several problems arose. Should he drop his title--that was one of them. He refused to do so, and in his refusal was strongly backed up by the real leaders of the movement. "You were born Duke of Paddington," said Rose, "and there is no earthly reason why you should become Mr. John something or other. It would only be a pretence, and if you do, I shall change my own name to James Fabian Turnip! and as I have always told you Socialism never says that all men are equal--true Socialism that is. It only says that all men have equal rights! At the same time some of our noisy friends will go for you--though you won't mind that!" They did "go for" him. Despite the fact that he had given up everything--his friends and relatives, his order, his tastes, there was not wanting a certain section of the baser socialistic press which spoke of "The young man with great possessions" who would give up much but not all; like all professional sectarians, rushing to the Gospels in an extremity to pick and choose a few comfortable texts from the history of One whom they alternately held up as the First Great Socialist, and then denied His definite claims to be the Veritable Son of God. The duke minded their veiled sarcasms not at all; an open attack was never dared. But the attitude gave him pain, and much material forethought. They were always quoting "The Christ," "The Man Jesus." They continually pointed out--as it suited them upon occasion--that private property, privilege, and monopoly were attacked by Jesus, who left no doubt as to the nature of His mission. They said, and said truly enough, that "He pictured Dives, a rich man, plunged into torment, for nothing else than for being rich when another was poor; while Lazarus, who had been nothing but poor and afflicted, is comforted and consoled. For that, those Evangelical-Nonconformists, the Pharisees, who were covetous, derided him. By the force of His personality (it was not the scourge that did it!), He drove the banking fraternity (who practised usury then as they do to-day) out of their business quarters in the Temple, and named them thieves. 'Woe to you rich, who lay up treasures, property, on earth,' He cried. And 'Blessed are ye poor, who relinquish property and minister to each other's needs,' He cried." And yet, in the same breath with which they spoke of this Supreme Man they denied His Divinity, trying to prove Him, at the same moment, an inspired Socialist, and what is more a very _practical_ One, and also a Dreamer who spoke in simile of His claims to Godhead, or, and this was the more logical conclusion of their premisses, a conscious Pretender and Liar. "He was," they said, "a Seer, as the ancient prophets were, as John, Paul, Francis of Assisi, Luther, Swedenborg, Fox, and Wesley, were. Such men, modern Spiritualists and Theosophists would call 'mediums.' So great was He in wisdom and power of the spirit, that in His own day He was called 'the Son of God,' as well as 'the Son of Man,'--that is, the pre-eminent, the God-like, Man." Who need dispute over the stories of the "miracles" wrought by Him and His disciples? To-day, no scientific person would say they were impossible; we have learned too much of the power of "mind" over "matter," for that, by now. There were well-attested marvels in all ages, and in our own living day, which were not less "miraculous" than the Gospel miracles. Therefore, they would not reject the story of Jesus because He was affirmed to have worked many signs and wonders. The Sermon on the Mount, therefore, was a piece of practical politics which was epitomised in the saying "Love one another." The clear and definite statements which Jesus made then ought to obtain to-day in their literal letter. The equally clear and definite statements which Jesus made as to His own Divine Origin were the misty utterances of a "medium"! The Incarnation was not a fact. "Love one another" was the supreme rule of conduct--which made it odd and bewildering that the young man who had given up everything should be covertly assailed for holding fast to the name in which he had been born. But the duke steeled himself. He honestly realised that class hatred must still exist for generations and generations. It was not the fault of one class, or the other, it was the inevitable inheritance of blood. Yet he found himself less harsh in spirit than most of those who forgot his sacrifices, and grudged him his habits of speaking in decent English, of courteous manner, of taste, of careful attention to his finger nails. To his sorrow he found that many of them still hated him for these things--despite everything they hated him. For his part he merely disliked, not them, but the absence in them of these things. But from the first he found his way was hard and that his renunciation was a renunciation indeed. He threw himself into the whole Socialistic movement with enormous energy, but his personal consolations were found in the sympathy and society of people like the Roses, and their set--cultured and brilliant men and women who were, after all was said and done, "Gentlefolk born!" After his marriage, months had been taken up with the legal business, protracted and beset with every sort of difficulty, by which he had devised his vast properties to the movement. He was much criticised for retaining a modest sum of two thousand pounds a year for himself and his wife--until James Fabian Rose with a pen dipped in vitriol and a tongue like a whip of steel neatly flayed the objectors and finished them off with a few characteristic touches of his impish Irish wit. Then--would he go to court?--a down-trodden working-man couldn't go to court. If he was going to be a Socialist, let him be a Socialist--and so on. For this sort of thing, again, the duke did not care. The only critic and judge of his actions was himself, his conscience. He went to court, Mary was presented also. They were kindly received. High minds can appreciate highmindedness, however much the point of view may differ. Mary was two things. First of all she was the Duchess of Paddington. It was made quite plain to her that, though perhaps she was not the duchess for whom many people had hoped, she was indubitably of the rank. Gracious words were said to her as duchess. Even kinder words were said to her upon another and more private occasion, as one of those great artists whom Royalty has always been delighted to honour--recognising a sovereignty quite alien to its own but still real! As for the duke, he had a certain privilege at the levées. It belonged to his house. It was his right to stand a few paces behind the Lord Chamberlain, and when any representatives of the noble family of ---- appeared before the Sovereign, to draw his court sword and step near to the King--an old historic custom the reasons for which were nearly forgotten, but which was still part of the pomp and pageantry of the Royal palace. Upon one occasion after his renunciation, he appeared at St. James's and exercised his ancient right. There was no opposition, nothing unkind, upon the faces of any of the great persons there. The ceremony was gone through with all its traditional dignity, but every one there felt that it was an assertion--and a farewell! The duke himself knew it at the time, and as he left St. James's he may be pardoned if, for a moment, old memories arose in him, and that his eyes were dimmed with a mist of unshed tears as the modest brougham drove him back to his house in Cheyne Walk. How kind they had all been! How sympathetic in their way, _how highly bred_! Yes! it was worth while to be one of them! It was worth while to live up to the traditions which so many of them often forgot. But one could still do that, one could still keep the old hereditary chivalry of race secret and inviolable in the soul, and yet live for the people, love the poor, the outcast, the noisy, the vulgar, those whom Our Lord, who counselled tribute to reason, loved best of all!... These things are an indication, not a history of the events of the first eighteen months after the Duke of Paddington's marriage. The story provides a glimpse into some of his difficulties, that is to say, difficulties which were semi-public and patent to his intimate circle of friends, if not, perhaps, to all the rest of the world. Nevertheless, giving all that he had given, he found himself confronted with yet another problem, which was certainly the worst of all. He had married Mary, he loved her and reverenced her as he thought no man had ever reverenced and loved a girl before. She loved and appreciated him also. Theirs was a perfect welding and fusion of identity and hopes. But she was an actress. Her love for her Art had been direct and overwhelming from the very first. She had given all her life and talent to it. For her it had all the sacredness of a real vocation. She was, and always would be, a woman vowed to her Art as truly and strongly as an innocent maiden puts on the black veil and vows herself to Christ. Nor is this a wrong comparison, because there are very many ways of doing things to the glory of God, and God gives divers gifts to divers of his children. And so this also had to be faced by the duke. Since the night upon which her great opportunity had come to her, Mary had never looked back. Her success, then, had been supreme and overwhelming, and, apart from all the romantic circumstances which had attended it, her position upon the stage had grown into one which was entirely apart from anything outside her Art. The world now--after five years--still knew that she was a duchess--if she chose, that was how the world put it--but the fact had little or no significance for the public. She was just Mary Marriott--their own Mary--and if she so often spent her genius in interpreting the brilliant socialistic plays of James Fabian Rose--well, what of that? They went to see her play in the plays, not, in the first instance, to see the play itself. And even after that, Rose was always charming--there was always a surprise and a delightfully subversive point of view. One went home to Bayswater and West Kensington "full of new ideas," and certainly full of enthusiasm for beautiful Mary Marriott. "What a darling she is, mother!" ... "Charming indeed, Gertie. And do not forget that she is, after all, the Duchess of Paddington. Of course the duke gave up his fortune to the Socialists some years ago, but they are still quite wealthy. Maud knows them. Your Aunt Maud was there to an afternoon reception only last week. Every one was there. All the leading lights! They have renounced society, of course, but quite a lot of the best people pop in all the same--so your Aunt Maud tells me--and, of course, all the leading painters and actors and writers, and so on. And, of course, they can go anywhere they like directly they give up this amusing socialistic pose. They're even asked down to Windsor. The King tolerates the young duke with his mad notions, and of course Miss Marriott is received on other grounds too--like Melba and Patti and Irving, don't you know. Nothing like real Art, Gertie! It takes you anywhere." Such statements as these were only half true. Every one came to the duke's house who was any one in the world of Art. But they came to see his wife, not to see him. And despite the rumours of Bayswater his own class left him severely alone by now. The years had passed, his property was no longer his, he had very definitely "dropped out." The duke did not care for "artistic" people, and he knew that they didn't care for him. He could not understand them, and on their part they thought him dull and uninteresting. There was no common ground upon which they could meet. Many of the people who came were actors and actresses, and when it had been agreed between Mary and her husband that she was to continue her artistic career, he had not contemplated the continual invasion and interruption of his home life which this was to mean. He had a prodigious admiration for Mary's talent; it had seemed, and still seemed, to him the most wonderful thing in the world. His ideal had been from the first a life of noble endeavour for the good of the world. He had given up everything he held dear, and would spend the rest of his life in active service for the cause of Socialism. Mary would devote her supreme art to the same cause. But there would also be a hidden, happy life of love and identity of aim which would be perfect. They had done exactly as he had proposed. His enthusiasm for the abstract idea of Socialism had never grown less--was stronger than ever now. Mary's earnestness and devotion was no less than his. In both of them the flame burned pure and brightly still. But the duke knew by this time that nothing had turned out as he expected and hoped. His home life was non-existent. His work was incessant, but the Cause seemed to be making no progress whatever. It remained where it had stood when he had just made his great renunciation. The vested interests of Property were too strong. A Liberal and semi-socialistic government had tried hard, but had somehow made a mess of things. The House of Lords had refused its assent to half a dozen bills, and its members had only smiled tolerantly at the Duke of Paddington's fervid speeches in favour of the measures which were sent up from the Lower House. And worse than this, the duke saw, the Socialists saw, every one saw, that the country was in thorough sympathy with the other party, that at the next general election the Conservatives would be returned by an overwhelming majority. And there was one other thing, a personal, but very real thing, which contributed to the young man's general sense of weariness and futility of endeavour. He loved his wife with the same dogged and passionate devotion with which he had won her. He knew well that her own love for him was as strong as ever. But, as far as she was concerned, there was so little time or opportunity for an expression of it. She was a public woman, a star of the first rank in Art and in affairs. Her day was occupied in rehearsals at the theatre or in public appearances upon the socialistic platform. Her nights were exercised in the practice of her Art upon the stage. Sometimes he went to see his wife act, but his pride and joy in her achievement was always tempered and partly spoiled by a curious--but very natural--_physical_ jealousy which he was quite unable to subdue. It offended and wounded all his instincts to see some painted posing actor holding _his_ own wife--the Duchess of Paddington!--in his arms and making a pretended love to her. It was all pretence, of course; it was simply part of the inevitable mechanism of "Art" ("Oh, _damn_ Art," he would sometimes say to himself very heartily), but it was beastly all the same. He had to meet the actor-men in private life. First with surprise, and then with a disgust for which he had no name, he watched their self-consciousness of pose, their invincible absorption in a petty self, their straining efforts to appear as gentlemen, their failure to convince any one but their own class that they were real human beings at all--that they were any more than empty shells into which the personality of this or that creative genius nightly poured the stuff that made the puppets work. No doubt his ideas were all wrong and distorted. But they were very real, and ever present with him. Nor was it nice to know that any horrid-minded rascal with a few shillings in his fob could buy the nightly right to sit and gloat over Mary's charm, Mary's beauty. It was a violation of his inherited beliefs and impulses, though, if it had been another man's wife, and not his own, he would probably not have cared in the least! * * * * * So the Duke of Paddington sat in the library of his house in Chelsea. It was a Saturday afternoon. There was a matinée, and Mary had rushed off after an early lunch. The duke felt very much alone. He had no particular engagement that afternoon. His correspondence he had finished during the morning, and he was now a little at a loss how to occupy his time. At the moment life seemed rather hollow and empty, the very aspect of his comfortable room was somehow distasteful, and, though he did not feel ill, he had a definite sensation of physical mis-ease. "I must have some exercise," he thought to himself. "I suppose it's a touch of liver." He debated whether he should go to the German gymnasium for an hour, to swim at the Bath Club, or merely to walk through the town. He decided for the walk. Thought and pedestrianism went well together, and the other two alternatives were not conducive to thought. He wanted to think. He wanted to examine his own sensations, to analyse the state of his mind, to find out from himself and for himself if he really _were_ unhappy and dissatisfied with his life, if he had made a frightful mistake or no. It was late autumn. The weather was neither warm nor cold. There was no fog nor rain, but everything was grey and cheerless of aspect. The sky was leaden, and there was a peculiar and almost sinister lividity in the wan light of the afternoon. He walked along the Embankment dreamily enough. The movement was pleasant--he had certainly not taken enough exercise lately!--and he tried to postpone the hour of thought, the facing of the question. When he had crossed the head of the Vauxhall Bridge road, and traversed the rather dingy purlieus of Horseferry, he came out by the Lords' entrance to the Houses of Parliament. The Victoria Tower in all its marvellous modern beauty rose up into the sky, white and incredibly massive against the background of grey. The house was sitting, so he saw from the distant, drooping flag above; but it was many months now since he had ventured into the Upper Chamber. As he came along his heart suddenly began to beat more rapidly than usual, and his face flushed a little. A small brougham just set down the Archbishop of Canterbury as the duke arrived at the door--the man whom in the past he had known so well and liked so much, Lord Camborne, to whose daughter the duke had been engaged--Lord Camborne, older now, stooping a little, but no less dignified and serene. Time had not robbed the bishop and earl of any of his stateliness of port, and the Primate of All England was still one of the most striking figures of the day. He turned and saw the duke. The two men had never met nor spoken since the day upon which the younger had told of his new convictions. The archbishop hesitated for a moment. His fine old face grew red, and then paled again; there was a momentary flicker of indecision about the firm, proud mouth. Then he held out his hand, with a smile, but a smile in which there was a great deal of sadness. "Ah, John!" he said, shaking his venerable head. "Ah, John! so we meet again after all these years. How are you? Happy, I hope?--God bless you, my dear fellow." A pang, like a spear-thrust, traversed the young man's heart as he took that revered and trembling hand. "I am well, your Grace," he said slowly, "and I'm happy." "Thank God for it," returned the archbishop, "Who has preserved your Grace"--he put a special and sorrowful accent upon the form of address the younger man shared with him--"for His own purposes, and has given you _His_ grace! as I believe and hope." And then, something kindly and human coming into his face and voice, the ceremonial gone from both, he said: "Dear boy, years ago I never thought that we should meet like this--as duke and as archbishop. I hoped that you would have called me father! And since dear Hayle's death ... Well, I am a lonely old man now, John. My daughter has other interests. I am not long for this world. I spend the last of my years in doing what I can for England, according to the light within me. As you do also, John, I don't doubt it. Good-bye, good-bye--I am a little late as it is. Pray, as I pray, that we may all meet in Heaven." And with these last kindly words the old man went away, and the Duke of Paddington never saw him again, for in five months he was dead and the Church mourned a wise and courtly prelate. The duke went on. Melancholy filled his mind. He never heard a voice now like that of the man he had just left. It brought back many memories of the past. He wasn't among the great of the world any more. The people who filled his house in Chelsea were clever and charming no doubt. But they weren't _his_ people. He had departed from the land of his inheritance. He was no longer a prince and a ruler among rulers and princes. The waters of Babylon were not as those of Israel, and in his heart he wept. ... It was to be an afternoon of strain and stress. As he went up Parliament Street towards Trafalgar Square he met a long line of miserable sandwich men. Upon their wooden tabards he saw his wife's name "KING'S THEATRE--MISS MARY MARRIOTT'S HUNDREDTH NIGHT," and so forth. And as he turned into Pall Mall--for half unconsciously his feet were leading him to a club in St. James's Street to which he still belonged--he received another shock. A victoria drove rapidly down the street of clubs, and in it, lovely and incomparable in her young matronhood, sat the Marchioness of Dover, Constance Camborne that had been, now the supreme leader and arbitrix of Vanity Fair. She saw him, she recognised him, and he knew it. But she made no sign, not a muscle of her face relaxed as the carriage whirled by. Once more the duke felt very much alone. * * * * * He went into the club--it was the famous old Cocoa Tree--sat down and began to read the evening papers. He lay back upon the circular seat of padded crimson leather that surrounds the central column of the Tree itself. Few people were in the club this afternoon, and as he glanced upwards to where the chocolate-coloured column disappears through the high Georgian ceiling, a sense came to him that he was surrounded by the shades of those august personalities who had thronged this exclusive place of memories in the past--Lord Byron, Gibbon; farther back, Lord Alvanley, Beau Brummell, and the royal dukes of the Regency. Their pictures hung upon the walls--peers, statesmen, royalties, they all seemed crowding out of the frames, and to be pressing upon him now. Stately figures all and each, ghostly figures of men who had lived and died in many ways, well or ill, but all people who had _ruled_--men of his own caste and clan. He was overwrought and tired. His imagination, never a very insistent quality with him, was roused by the physical dejection of his nerves to an unusual activity. And in the back of his brain was the remembrances of recent meetings--the meeting with the Primate who might have been his father-in-law; the meeting with the radiant and high-bred young woman whose husband he himself might have been. ... A grave servant in the club's livery came up to him, with a pencilled memorandum upon a silver tray. "This has just come through by telephone, your Grace," he said. "The telephone boy did not know that your Grace was in the house, or he would have called you. As it was the boy took down the message." This was the message: "Hoping to see you Bradlaugh Hall, Bermondsey, to-night. Slap-up meeting arranged, and a few words from you will be much appreciated. To-night we shall bump if not much mistaken. Wot O for the glorious cause. "SAM JONES, M.P." The duke folded up the message and placed it in his pocket. Yes! he was now little more than the figurehead, the complacent doll, whose jerky movements were animated and controlled by Labour Members of Parliament, captains of "hunger marchers" brigades and such-like "riff-raff"--no! of course "salt of the earth!" Struggling with many conflicting thoughts--old hopes and desires now suddenly and startlingly reawakened, strong convictions up and arming themselves in array against inherited predisposition, a tired and not happy brain, at war with itself and all its environment--he rose from his seat and passed out of the room through the huge mahogany doors. He walked by the tiny room where the hall porter sits, and mounted the few stairs which lead to the lobby in front of the doors of the dining-rooms. The electric "column printer" machines were clicking and ticking, while the long white rolls of paper, imprinted in faint purple with the news of the last hour, came pouring slowly out of the glass case, while a much-buttoned page boy was waiting to cut up the slips, and paste them upon the green baize board under their respective headings. The duke went up to one of the machines, and held up the running cascade of printed paper. As he did so, this was what he saw and read: 3.30. MR. ARTHUR BURNSIDE, THE BRILLIANT YOUNG BARRISTER, SOCIALIST M.P., AND A TRUSTEE OF THE DUKE OF PADDINGTON'S PROPERTY SHARING SCHEME, HAS BEEN RUN OVER BY A MOTOR OMNIBUS. THE INJURED GENTLEMAN WAS AT ONCE TAKEN TO THE HOUSE OF MR. JAMES FABIAN ROSE BEHIND THE ABBEY. _LATER._ MR. BURNSIDE IS SINKING FAST. SIR FREDERICK DAVIDSON GIVES NO HOPE. MR. ROSE AND ALL OTHER LEADERS OF SOCIALIST PARTY ARE AWAY IN MANCHESTER EXCEPT DUKE PADDINGTON, WHOSE WHEREABOUTS ARE UNCERTAIN. The duke dropped the paper. The machine went on ticking and clicking, but he did not wish to read any more. So Burnside was dying!--Burnside who had been the impulse, the ultimate force which had finally directed his own change of attitude towards life and its problems, his great renunciation. Quite as in a dream, still without any vivid sense of the reality of things, the duke turned to the left, entered the lavatory, and began to wash his hands. He hardly knew what he was doing, but, suddenly, he heard his conscious brain asking him--"Is this symbolic and according to a terrible precedent? Of _what_ are you washing your hands?" Then, putting the thought away from him, as a man fends off some black horror of the sleepless hours of night by a huge effort of will he went out of the place, found his hat and stick and got into a cab, telling the driver to go to Westminster as if upon a matter of life and death! * * * * * Burnside lay quite pale and quiet in that very bedroom where the duke had once lain in pain and exhaustion--how many years ago it seemed now! how much further away than any mere measure of time as we know it by the calendar it really was! A discreet nurse in hospital uniform was there, sitting quietly by the bedside. A table was covered with bandages and bottles, there was a faint chemical fragrance in the air--iodoform perhaps--and a young doctor, left behind by the great ones who had departed, moved silently about the place. Burnside was conscious. He turned eyes in which the light and colour were fading towards the new arrival. "Ah!" he said, in a voice which seemed to come from a great distance. "So there is some one after all! You opened the door to me in the past, duke. And it is strange that you have come here now, after all this time, to close it gently behind me again." "My poor old fellow," the duke said. "It's heartbreaking to find you like this--you from whom we all hoped so much! But what ... I mean, I wish Rose and all the rest of them could be here." "Never mind, duke, you're here. And Some One Else is coming soon." The duke did not understand the words of the dying man. But he sat down beside the bed and held a hand that was ice-cold and the fingers of which twitched now and then. The duke felt, dimly, that there ought to be a clergyman here. In his own way he was a religious man. He went to church on Sundays and said "Our Father," and such variations of the prayer as suggested themselves to him, quite frequently. Of the constant Presence of the Supernatural or Supernormal in the life of the Catholic Church, the duke knew nothing at all. His spiritual life had never been more than an embryo; he was surrounded by people, in the present, many of whom were frankly contemptuous of Christianity, some of whom avowedly hated it, others who called Jesus the Great Socialist, but denied His Divinity. He had never discussed religious matters with his wife, except in the most casual and superficial way. Much as he loved her, certain as he was of her love for him, their lives were lived, to a certain extent, apart. Her Art, his work for Socialism, kept them busy in their own spheres--and her Art, also, had become a most powerful weapon of the socialistic crusade--and left them tired at the close of each crowded day. There was never time or opportunity for talk about religion--for confidences. The duke had known--had always had a sort of vague idea--that Burnside was what some people call "A High Churchman." He knew that his friend belonged to the Christian Social Union, was a friend of the Bishop of Birmingham, lived by a certain rule. But Burnside had never obtruded the Christian Social Union upon that larger and more militant, that _political_ socialism with which the duke was chiefly connected. Burnside had always known that the time was not yet ripe for that. The duke had never realised at all the quietly growing force within the English Catholic Church. ... He held the hand of the dying man, and a singular sense of companionship, identity of feeling came to him, as he did so. It seemed to be stronger even than his grief and sorrow, and much as he had always liked and appreciated Burnside, he now experienced the sensation of being _nearer_ to him than ever before. Burnside moved his head a little. "You can talk," he said. "Thank God, my head is quite clear, and I am in hardly any pain. I have several hours yet to live, the doctors tell me. Something will happen to me in four or five hours, and I shall then pass away quite simply. Sir William, God bless him, didn't tell me any of the soothing lies that doctors have to tell people. He saw the case was hopeless, and he was good enough to be explicit!" There was something so calm and certain in the barrister's voice, that the other man's nerves were calmed too. He saw the whole situation with that momentary certainty of intuition which comes to every one now and then, and which is a habit with a great soldier or doctor--a Lord Roberts or Sir William Gull. "Yes, let's talk, then," he answered in a calm, even voice. "I need hardly tell you, old fellow, what this means to me, and what it means to the movement." "You're getting very tired of the movement, duke!" the thin voice went on. The duke started; the nurse held a cup of some stimulant to the lips of the dying man. There was a silence for a minute. "I don't quite understand you, Burnside." "But I understand _you_, though I have never said so before. After all your splendid and wonderful renunciations, you are beginning to have doubts and qualms now. Tell the truth to a man who's dying!" The duke bowed his head. At that moment of mute confession, he knew the deep remorse that cowards and traitors know--traitors and cowards for whom circumstances have been too strong, who are convinced of the cause they support, but have been, in action or in thought, disloyal to it. Burnside spoke again. "But don't be faint-hearted or discouraged," he said. "The truths of what we call Socialism are as true as they ever were. But only a few Socialists, as yet, have realised the only lines upon which we can attack the great problem. All of us have a wonderful ideal. Only a small minority of us have found out the way in which that ideal can be realised. And there is only one way...." Suddenly Burnside stopped speaking. He raised himself a little upon his pillow, some colour came into his face, some light into his eyes. The front door bell of the house could be heard ringing down below. The young doctor withdrew to a side of the room, and sat down upon a chair, with a watchful, interested expression on his face. The nurse suddenly knelt down. Then the door of the bedroom opened, and a tall, clean-shaven man in a cassock and surplice came in, bearing two silver vessels in his hand. Instinctively the duke knelt also. Some One Else had indeed come into the room. And in the light of that Real Presence many things were made clear, the solution of all difficulties flowed like balm into the awe-struck heart of the young man who had surrendered great possessions. God and Man, the Great Socialist, was _there_, among them, and a radiance not of this visible world, was seen by the spiritual vision of four souls. * * * * * It was evening as the duke walked home to Chelsea. The clergyman who had brought the Blessed Sacrament to Burnside walked with him. Father Carr had remained by the bedside till the quiet end--a peaceful, painless passing away. The duke had remained also, and his grief had become tempered by a strange sense of peace and rest, utterly unlike anything he had ever known before. It was his first experience of death. He had never seen a corpse before, and the strange waxen thing that lay upon the bed spoke to him--as the dead body must to all Christians--most eloquently of immortality. This shell was not Burnside at all. Burnside had gone, but he was more alive than ever before, alive in the happy place of waiting which we call Paradise. The duke had asked the priest--who, as it happened, had no other engagement--to come home and dine with him, and as they walked together by the river, Father Carr told him many things about the dead man--of a secret life of holiness and renunciation that few knew of, the simple story of a true Socialist and a very valiant soldier of Christ. "He saw very far indeed," said Father Carr. "I wish that all Socialists could see as far. For, as Plato pointed out long ago, we shall never have perfect conditions in this life until character is perfected. Burnside knew that as well as an imaginary and revolutionary Socialism, there is also a _moral_, that is, a _Christian_ Socialism. Christianity paints no Utopias, describes to us no _perfect_ conditions to be introduced into this world. It teaches us, on the contrary, to seek perfection in another world; but it desires at the same time to help us to struggle against earthly care and want, so that the kingdom of God, and therewith the true kingdom of man, embracing as it does not only his spiritual but also his material life, may come upon earth and prosper." "These aspects are new to me," said the duke. "I must hear more of this." "I can send you books," replied Mr. Carr, "and you might come to some of the meetings of the Christian Social Union also. You will find all your present doubts and difficulties solved if you examine our contentions. As you have just told me, you are as convinced as ever as to the truth of a moderate and well-ordered Socialism. But you see, little progress being made and you are uneasy in your environment. I am a convinced Socialist also, but I see the truth--which is simply this. The nearer we all get to our Lord Jesus Christ, the nearer we get to Socialism. There is no other way." It was late when Mr. Carr left the house in Chelsea, and the two men had talked long together. The duke sat in his study alone, waiting for his wife's return from the theatre--on matinée days she did not return home for dinner. He was filled with a strange excitement, new and high thoughts possessed him, and he wanted to share them with her. At last he heard the sound of her key in the lock and the jingle of her hansom as it drove away. He went out into the hall to meet her. A small round table with her soup and chicken had been placed by the library fire, and as she ate he told her of Burnside's death, and with eager words poured out the ferment of thought within him. "I don't know if you quite see all I mean yet, dear," he said, "and, of course, it's all crude and undigested with me as yet. But we must make more knowledge of it together." An unconscious note of pleading had come into his voice as he looked at her. She sat before him tired by the long day's work, but radiant in beauty and charm, and he saw so little of her now!--this, and the most priceless boon of all, it seemed that he must surrender for the good of the Cause. Then, suddenly, she left her seat and came to where he was, putting her arms round his neck and kissing him. "Darling!" she said. "_Together_, that is the word. We have not been enough together of late years. But I had to do my work for the Cause just as you had. But now we shall be more together and happier than ever before. In a few weeks I shall leave the stage for ever. I shall have another work to do." "You mean, darling----" "I also have something to tell you"; and pressing her warm cheek to his, with sweet faltering accents, she told him. He held her very close. The tears were in his eyes. "Oh, my love!" he whispered. "At last!" THE END ADVERTISEMENTS _A Selection from the Catalogue of_ G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS [Illustration: Decoration] Complete Catalogues sent on application "The most enthralling and interest-compelling work of fiction this reviewer has ever encountered."--_The American, Nashville._ When It Was Dark The Story of a Great Conspiracy By GUY THORNE Author of "A Lost Cause" _Crown octavo. (By mail, $1.35.) Net, $1.20_ "It is in its wonderful tonic effect upon Christianity in England that the book is showing its most remarkable effects. It has become the theme of hundreds of sermons, and long extracts are being printed in the secular press as well as in the religious publications. It is known to have been the cause of a number of revivals throughout England, and its strange effect is increasing daily."--_N. Y. American._ The Bishop of London preaching at Westminster Abbey said: "I wonder if any of my hearers have read that remarkable work of fiction 'When It Was Dark.' The author paints in wonderful colors what would be the condition of the world if (as in the story is supposed to be the case) a conviction had come upon the people that the resurrection had never occurred." "A critical handling of current journalism, ecclesiasticalism, and liberalism. A novel written from the inside as well as from observation; and from the heart as well as from the head."--_Congregationalist._ _Send for a complete descriptive circular._ New York--G. P. Putnam's Sons--London _Bound to excite a great deal of favorable comment_ A Lost Cause By Guy Thorne Author of "When It Was Dark." Crown Octavo $1.50 Mr. Thorne, the author of that much-discussed religious novel, _When It Was Dark_, which has become the theme of hundreds of sermons, and has received the highest commendation in the secular press as well as in the religious publications, has written another powerful book which also deals with present-day aspects of the Christian religion. The new story is marked by the same dramatic and emotional strength which characterized his earlier work. The special theme deals with certain practices which have caused dissension in the Church, and the influence of ardent religious convictions on character and conduct. Written in all sincerity, the book can hardly fail to arouse wide and varied attention and is destined to take its place as one of the most interest-compelling works of fiction in recent years. New York--G. P. Putnam's Sons--London _By the Author of "Marotz"_ DROMINA BY JOHN AYSCOUGH "Over the whole book broods a rich sunset light of lost causes, forgotten and hopeless loyalties, a passing order.... There is the passionate life of the older order and its ideals in the breasts of those who cling to them; the high ardour, the faith, and the exalted sense of _noblesse oblige_.... As a creation of a strange and glowing atmosphere it is remarkable."--_London Times._ "Spacious in scope, splendid in vigour and colouring, and rich in human feeling and sentiment, ... the whole romance thrills and glows with a real and splendid effect of life, and I commend it heartily to all who would wish to become immersed in a long, vivid, emotional, and wonderfully convincing story, deriving its interests from a great past."--_Dundee Advertiser._ "Mr. Ayscough is impressive. He draws living people, and makes them interesting."--_Morning Leader._ "True Romance--vivid, many-coloured, passionate."--_Daily Graphic._ _Crown 8vo. $1.50_ G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK LONDON "_A work of rare and exceptional quality_" TOIL OF MEN (MENSCHENWEE) By ISRAEL QUERIDO In praise of Querido's _Menschenwee_, a novel that recalls both the work of Balzac and of Zola, the authoritative critical journals of Europe have spoken with one voice. To refrain from superlatives in speaking of _Menschenwee_ would be an impertinent recalcitrancy to the critical judgment of Europe. Let us hasten then to assert that this great and impassioned novel, bringing together a wide range of characters--mostly toilers who live close to the soil--and making us live by sympathy the hard life of the fields, combines a convincing and relentless realistic observation with the true sympathetic method of the idealist. In imaginative and creative power, in the masterly descriptive faculty everywhere evinced, in its compelling dramatic interest, in its surprising blend of conflicting passions and sentiments, alike by its hate, raillery, irony, and indignation, by its tenderness, pity, and melancholy, _Menschenwee_ has been hailed as a work of rare and exceptional quality, that is entitled to hold the attention of thinkers and lovers of literature the world over. Querido, the author of the novel, is a native of Amsterdam, and comes of a titled Portuguese family long settled in that city. The ardor of his temperament, his culture, his learning, the strength of his intellect, and the range of his sympathies entitle him to the place he now holds in the world of letters. _Authorized Translation. Crown 8vo. $1.50_ G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK LONDON 
20085	----	THE TRAGIC MUSE by HENRY JAMES MacMillan and Co., Limited St. Martin's Street, London 1921 PREFACE I profess a certain vagueness of remembrance in respect to the origin and growth of _The Tragic Muse_, which appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ again, beginning January 1889 and running on, inordinately, several months beyond its proper twelve. If it be ever of interest and profit to put one's finger on the productive germ of a work of art, and if in fact a lucid account of any such work involves that prime identification, I can but look on the present fiction as a poor fatherless and motherless, a sort of unregistered and unacknowledged birth. I fail to recover my precious first moment of consciousness of the idea to which it was to give form; to recognise in it--as I like to do in general--the effect of some particular sharp impression or concussion. I call such remembered glimmers always precious, because without them comes no clear vision of what one may have intended, and without that vision no straight measure of what one may have succeeded in doing. What I make out from furthest back is that I must have had from still further back, must in fact practically have always had, the happy thought of some dramatic picture of the "artist-life" and of the difficult terms on which it is at the best secured and enjoyed, the general question of its having to be not altogether easily paid for. To "do something about art"--art, that is, as a human complication and a social stumbling-block--must have been for me early a good deal of a nursed intention, the conflict between art and "the world" striking me thus betimes as one of the half-dozen great primary motives. I remember even having taken for granted with this fond inveteracy that no one of these pregnant themes was likely to prove under the test more full of matter. This being the case, meanwhile, what would all experience have done but enrich one's conviction?--since if, on the one hand, I had gained a more and more intimate view of the nature of art and the conditions therewith imposed, so the world was a conception that clearly required, and that would for ever continue to take, any amount of filling-in. The happy and fruitful truth, at all events, was that there was opposition--why there _should_ be was another matter--and that the opposition would beget an infinity of situations. What had doubtless occurred in fact, moreover, was that just this question of the essence and the reasons of the opposition had shown itself to demand the light of experience; so that to the growth of experience, truly, the treatment of the subject had yielded. It had waited for that advantage. Yet I continue to see experience giving me its jog mainly in the form of an invitation from the gentle editor of the _Atlantic_, the late Thomas Bailey Aldrich, to contribute to his pages a serial that should run through the year. That friendly appeal becomes thus the most definite statement I can make of the "genesis" of the book; though from the moment of its reaching me everything else in the matter seems to live again. What lives not least, to be quite candid, is the fact that I was to see this production make a virtual end, for the time, as by its sinister effect--though for reasons still obscure to me--of the pleasant old custom of the "running" of the novel. Not for many years was I to feel the practice, for my benefit, confidingly revive. The influence of _The Tragic Muse_ was thus exactly other than what I had all earnestly (if of course privately enough) invoked for it, and I remember well the particular chill, at last, of the sense of my having launched it in a great grey void from which no echo or message whatever would come back. None, in the event, ever came, and as I now read the book over I find the circumstance make, in its name, for a special tenderness of charity; even for that finer consideration hanging in the parental breast about the maimed or slighted, the disfigured or defeated, the unlucky or unlikely child--with this hapless small mortal thought of further as somehow "compromising." I am thus able to take the thing as having quite wittingly and undisturbedly existed for itself alone, and to liken it to some aromatic bag of gathered herbs of which the string has never been loosed; or, better still, to some jar of potpourri, shaped and overfigured and polished, but of which the lid, never lifted, has provided for the intense accumulation of the fragrance within. The consistent, the sustained, preserved _tone_ of _The Tragic Muse_, its constant and doubtless rather fine-drawn truth to its particular sought pitch and accent, are, critically speaking, its principal merit--the inner harmony that I perhaps presumptuously permit myself to compare to an unevaporated scent. After which indeed I may well be summoned to say what I mean, in such a business, by an appreciable "tone" and how I can justify my claim to it--a demonstration that will await us later. Suffice it just here that I find the latent historic clue in my hand again with the easy recall of my prompt grasp of such a chance to make a story about art. _There_ was my subject this time--all mature with having long waited, and with the blest dignity that my original perception of its value was quite lost in the mists of youth. I must long have carried in my head the notion of a young man who should amid difficulty--the difficulties being the story--have abandoned "public life" for the zealous pursuit of some supposedly minor craft; just as, evidently, there had hovered before me some possible picture (but all comic and ironic) of one of the most salient London "social" passions, the unappeasable curiosity for the things of the theatre; for every one of them, that is, except the drama itself, and for the "personality" of the performer (almost any performer quite sufficiently serving) in particular. This latter, verily, had struck me as an aspect appealing mainly to satiric treatment; the only adequate or effective treatment, I had again and again felt, for most of the distinctively social aspects of London: the general artlessly histrionised air of things caused so many examples to spring from behind any hedge. What came up, however, at once, for my own stretched canvas, was that it would have to be ample, give me really space to turn round, and that a single illustrative case might easily be meagre fare. The young man who should "chuck" admired politics, and of course some other admired object with them, would be all very well; but he wouldn't be enough--therefore what should one say to some other young man who would chuck something and somebody else, admired in their way too? There need never, at the worst, be any difficulty about the things advantageously chuckable for art; the question is all but of choosing them in the heap. Yet were I to represent a struggle--an interesting one, indispensably--with the passions of the theatre (as a profession, or at least as an absorption) I should have to place the theatre in another light than the satiric. This, however, would by good luck be perfectly possible too--without a sacrifice of truth; and I should doubtless even be able to make my theatric case as important as I might desire it. It seemed clear that I needed big cases--small ones would practically give my central idea away; and I make out now my still labouring under the illusion that the case of the sacrifice for art _can_ ever be, with truth, with taste, with discretion involved, apparently and showily "big." I daresay it glimmered upon me even then that the very sharpest difficulty of the victim of the conflict I should seek to represent, and the very highest interest of his predicament, dwell deep in the fact that his repudiation of the great obvious, great moral or functional or useful character, shall just have to consent to resemble a surrender for absolutely nothing. Those characters are all large and expansive, seated and established and endowed; whereas the most charming truth about the preference for art is that to parade abroad so thoroughly inward and so naturally embarrassed a matter is to falsify and vulgarise it; that as a preference attended with the honours of publicity it is indeed nowhere; that in fact, under the rule of its sincerity, its only honours are those of contradiction, concentration and a seemingly deplorable indifference to everything but itself. Nothing can well figure as less "big," in an honest thesis, than a marked instance of somebody's willingness to pass mainly for an ass. Of these things I must, I say, have been in strictness aware; what I perhaps failed of was to note that if a certain romantic glamour (even that of mere eccentricity or of a fine perversity) may be flung over the act of exchange of a "career" for the esthetic life in general, the prose and the modesty of the matter yet come in with any exhibition of the particular branch of esthetics selected. Then it is that the attitude of hero or heroine may look too much--for the romantic effect--like a low crouching over proved trifles. Art indeed has in our day taken on so many honours and emoluments that the recognition of its importance is more than a custom, has become on occasion almost a fury: the line is drawn--especially in the English world--only at the importance of heeding what it may mean. The more I turn my pieces over, at any rate, the more I now see I must have found in them, and I remember how, once well in presence of my three typical examples, my fear of too ample a canvas quite dropped. The only question was that if I had marked my political case, from so far back, for "a story by itself," and then marked my theatrical case for another, the joining together of these interests, originally seen as separate, might, all disgracefully, betray the seam, show for mechanical and superficial. A story was a story, a picture a picture, and I had a mortal horror of two stories, two pictures, in one. The reason of this was the clearest--my subject was immediately, under that disadvantage, so cheated of its indispensable centre as to become of no more use for expressing a main intention than a wheel without a hub is of use for moving a cart. It was a fact, apparently, that one _had_ on occasion seen two pictures in one; were there not for instance certain sublime Tintorettos at Venice, a measureless Crucifixion in especial, which showed without loss of authority half-a-dozen actions separately taking place? Yes, that might be, but there had surely been nevertheless a mighty pictorial fusion, so that the virtue of composition had somehow thereby come all mysteriously to its own. Of course the affair would be simple enough if composition could be kept out of the question; yet by what art or process, what bars and bolts, what unmuzzled dogs and pointed guns, perform that feat? I had to know myself utterly inapt for any such valour and recognise that, to make it possible, sundry things should have begun for me much further back than I had felt them even in their dawn. A picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty, and is, moreover, not composed at all unless the painter knows _how_ that principle of health and safety, working as an absolutely premeditated art, has prevailed. There may in its absence be life, incontestably, as _The Newcomes_ has life, as _Les Trois Mousquetaires_, as Tolstoi's _Peace and War_, have it; but what do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically _mean_? We have heard it maintained, we well remember, that such things are "superior to art"; but we understand least of all what _that_ may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us. There is life and life, and as waste is only life sacrificed and thereby prevented from "counting," I delight in a deep-breathing economy and an organic form. My business was accordingly to "go in" for complete pictorial fusion, some such common interest between my two first notions as would, in spite of their birth under quite different stars, do them no violence at all. I recall with this confirmed infatuation of retrospect that through the mild perceptions I here glance at there struck for _The Tragic Muse_ the first hour of a season of no small subjective felicity; lighted mainly, I seem to see, by a wide west window that, high aloft, looked over near and far London sunsets, a half-grey, half-flushed expanse of London life. The production of the thing, which yet took a good many months, lives for me again all contemporaneously in that full projection, upon my very table, of the good fog-filtered Kensington mornings; which had a way indeed of seeing the sunset in and which at the very last are merged to memory in a different and a sharper pressure, that of an hotel bedroom in Paris during the autumn of 1889, with the Exposition du Centenaire about to end--and my long story, through the usual difficulties, as well. The usual difficulties--and I fairly cherish the record as some adventurer in another line may hug the sense of his inveterate habit of just saving in time the neck he ever undiscourageably risks--were those bequeathed as a particular vice of the artistic spirit, against which vigilance had been destined from the first to exert itself in vain, and the effect of which was that again and again, perversely, incurably, the centre of my structure would insist on placing itself _not_, so to speak, in the middle. It mattered little that the reader with the idea or the suspicion of a structural centre is the rarest of friends and of critics--a bird, it would seem, as merely fabled as the phoenix: the terminational terror was none the less certain to break in and my work threaten to masquerade for me as an active figure condemned to the disgrace of legs too short, ever so much too short, for its body. I urge myself to the candid confession that in very few of my productions, to my eye, _has_ the organic centre succeeded in getting into proper position. Time after time, then, has the precious waistband or girdle, studded and buckled and placed for brave outward show, practically worked itself, and in spite of desperate remonstrance, or in other words essential counterplotting, to a point perilously near the knees--perilously I mean for the freedom of these parts. In several of my compositions this displacement has so succeeded, at the crisis, in defying and resisting me, has appeared so fraught with probable dishonour, that I still turn upon them, in spite of the greater or less success of final dissimulation, a rueful and wondering eye. These productions have in fact, if I may be so bold about it, specious and spurious centres altogether, to make up for the failure of the true. As to which in my list they are, however, that is another business, not on any terms to be made known. Such at least would seem my resolution so far as I have thus proceeded. Of any attention ever arrested by the pages forming the object of this reference that rigour of discrimination has wholly and consistently failed, I gather, to constitute a part. In which fact there is perhaps after all a rough justice--since the infirmity I speak of, for example, has been always but the direct and immediate fruit of a positive excess of foresight, the overdone desire to provide for future need and lay up heavenly treasure against the demands of my climax. If the art of the drama, as a great French master of it has said, is above all the art of preparations, that is true only to a less extent of the art of the novel, and true exactly in the degree in which the art of the particular novel comes near that of the drama. The first half of a fiction insists ever on figuring to me as the stage or theatre for the second half, and I have in general given so much space to making the theatre propitious that my halves have too often proved strangely unequal. Thereby has arisen with grim regularity the question of artfully, of consummately masking the fault and conferring on the false quantity the brave appearance of the true. But I am far from pretending that these desperations of ingenuity have not--as through seeming _most_ of the very essence of the problem--their exasperated charm; so far from it that my particular supreme predicament in the Paris hotel, after an undue primary leakage of time, no doubt, over at the great river-spanning museum of the Champ de Mars and the Trocadero, fairly takes on to me now the tender grace of a day that is dead. Re-reading the last chapters of _The Tragic Muse_ I catch again the very odour of Paris, which comes up in the rich rumble of the Rue de la Paix--with which my room itself, for that matter, seems impregnated--and which hangs for reminiscence about the embarrassed effort to "finish," not ignobly, within my already exceeded limits; an effort prolonged each day to those late afternoon hours during which the tone of the terrible city seemed to deepen about one to an effect strangely composed at once of the auspicious and the fatal. The "plot" of Paris thickened at such hours beyond any other plot in the world, I think; but there one sat meanwhile with another, on one's hands, absolutely requiring precedence. Not the least imperative of one's conditions was thus that one should have really, should have finely and (given one's scale) concisely treated one's subject, in spite of there being so much of the confounded irreducible quantity still to treat. If I spoke just now, however, of the "exasperated" charm of supreme difficulty, that is because the challenge of economic representation so easily becomes, in any of the arts, intensely interesting to meet. To put all that is possible of one's idea into a form and compass that will contain and express it only by delicate adjustments and an exquisite chemistry, so that there will at the end be neither a drop of one's liquor left nor a hair's breadth of the rim of one's glass to spare--every artist will remember how often that sort of necessity has carried with it its particular inspiration. Therein lies the secret of the appeal, to his mind, of the successfully _foreshortened_ thing, where representation is arrived at, as I have already elsewhere had occasion to urge, not by the addition of items (a light that has for its attendant shadow a possible dryness) but by the art of figuring synthetically, a compactness into which the imagination may cut thick, as into the rich density of wedding-cake. The moral of all which indeed, I fear, is, perhaps too trivially, but that the "thick," the false, the dissembling second half of the work before me, associated throughout with the effort to weight my dramatic values as heavily as might be, since they had to be so few, presents that effort as at the very last a quite convulsive, yet in its way highly agreeable, spasm. Of such mild prodigies is the "history" of any specific creative effort composed! But I have got too much out of the "old" Kensington light of twenty years ago--a lingering oblique ray of which, to-day surely quite extinct, played for a benediction over my canvas. From the moment I made out, at my high-perched west window, my lucky title, that is from the moment Miriam Rooth herself had given it me, so this young woman had given me with it her own position in the book, and so that in turn had given me my precious unity, to which no more than Miriam was either Nick Dormer or Peter Sherringham to be sacrificed. Much of the interest of the matter was immediately, therefore, in working out the detail of that unity and--always entrancing range of questions--the order, the reason, the relation, of presented aspects. With three _general_ aspects, that of Miriam's case, that of Nick's and that of Sherringham's, there was work in plenty cut out; since happy as it might be to say, "My several actions beautifully become one," the point of the affair would be in _showing_ them beautifully become so--without which showing foul failure hovered and pounced. Well, the pleasure of handling an action (or, otherwise expressed, of a "story") is at the worst, for a storyteller, immense, and the interest of such a question as for example keeping Nick Dormer's story his and yet making it also and all effectively in a large part Peter Sherringham's, of keeping Sherringham's his and yet making it in its high degree his kinsman's too, and Miriam Rooth's into the bargain; just as Miriam Rooth's is by the same token quite operatively his and Nick's, and just as that of each of the young men, by an equal logic, is very contributively hers--the interest of such a question, I say, is ever so considerably the interest of the system on which the whole thing is done. I see to-day that it was but half a system to say, "Oh Miriam, a case herself, is the _link_ between the two other cases"; that device was to ask for as much help as it gave and to require a good deal more application than it announced on the surface. The sense of a system saves the painter from the baseness of the _arbitrary_ stroke, the touch without its reason, but as payment for that service the process insists on being kept impeccably the right one. These are intimate truths indeed, of which the charm mainly comes out but on experiment and in practice; yet I like to have it well before me here that, after all, _The Tragic Muse_ makes it not easy to say which of the situations concerned in it predominates and rules. What has become in that imperfect order, accordingly, of the famous centre of one's subject? It is surely not in Nick's consciousness--since why, if it be, are we treated to such an intolerable dose of Sherringham's? It can't be in Sherringham's--we have for that altogether an excess of Nick's. How, on the other hand, can it be in Miriam's, given that we have no direct exhibition of hers whatever, that we get at it all inferentially and inductively, seeing it only through a more or less bewildered interpretation of it by others. The emphasis is all on an absolutely objective Miriam, and, this affirmed, how--with such an amount of exposed subjectivity all round her--can so dense a medium be a centre? Such questions as those go straight--thanks to which they are, I profess, delightful; going straight they are of the sort that makes answers possible. Miriam _is_ central then to analysis, in spite of being objective; central in virtue of the fact that the whole thing has visibly, from the first, to get itself done in dramatic, or at least in scenic conditions--though scenic conditions which are as near an approach to the dramatic as the novel may permit itself and which have this in common with the latter, that they move in the light of _alternation_. This imposes a consistency other than that of the novel at its loosest, and, for one's subject, a different view and a different placing of the centre. The charm of the scenic consistency, the consistency of the multiplication of _aspects_, that of making them amusingly various, had haunted the author of _The Tragic Muse_ from far back, and he was in due course to yield to it all luxuriously, too luxuriously perhaps, in _The Awkward Age_, as will doubtless with the extension of these remarks be complacently shown. To put himself at any rate as much as possible under the protection of it had been ever his practice (he had notably done so in _The Princess Casamassima_, so frankly panoramic and processional); and in what case could this protection have had more price than in the one before us? No character in a play (any play not a mere monologue) has, for the right expression of the thing, a _usurping_ consciousness; the consciousness of others is exhibited exactly in the same way as that of the "hero"; the prodigious consciousness of Hamlet, the most capacious and most crowded, the moral presence the most asserted, in the whole range of fiction, only takes its turn with that of the other agents of the story, no matter how occasional these may be. It is left, in other words, to answer for itself equally with theirs: wherefore (by a parity of reasoning if not of example) Miriam's might without inconsequence be placed on the same footing; and all in spite of the fact that the "moral presence" of each of the men most importantly concerned with her--or with the second of whom she at least is importantly concerned--_is_ independently answered for. The idea of the book being, as I have said, a picture of some of the personal consequences of the art-appetite raised to intensity, swollen to voracity, the heavy emphasis falls where the symbol of some of the complications so begotten might be made (as I judged, heaven forgive me!) most "amusing": amusing I mean in the best very modern sense. I never "go behind" Miriam; only poor Sherringham goes, a great deal, and Nick Dormer goes a little, and the author, while they so waste wonderment, goes behind _them_: but none the less she is as thoroughly symbolic, as functional, for illustration of the idea, as either of them, while her image had seemed susceptible of a livelier and "prettier" concretion. I had desired for her, I remember, all manageable vividness--so ineluctable had it long appeared to "do the actress," to touch the theatre, to meet that connexion somehow or other, in any free plunge of the speculative fork into the contemporary social salad. The late R. L. Stevenson was to write to me, I recall--and precisely on the occasion of _The Tragic Muse_--that he was at a loss to conceive how one could find an interest in anything so vulgar or pretend to gather fruit in so scrubby an orchard; but the view of a creature of the stage, the view of the "histrionic temperament," as suggestive much less, verily, in respect to the poor stage _per se_ than in respect to "art" at large, affected me in spite of that as justly tenable. An objection of a more pointed order was forced upon me by an acute friend later on and in another connexion: the challenge of one's right, in any pretended show of social realities, to attach to the image of a "public character," a supposed particular celebrity, a range of interest, of intrinsic distinction, greater than any such display of importance on the part of eminent members of the class as we see them about us. There _was_ a nice point if one would--yet only nice enough, after all, to be easily amusing. We shall deal with it later on, however, in a more urgent connexion. What would have worried me much more had it dawned earlier is the light lately thrown by that admirable writer M. Anatole France on the question of any animated view of the histrionic temperament--a light that may well dazzle to distress any ingenuous worker in the same field. In those parts of his brief but inimitable _Histoire Comique_ on which he is most to be congratulated--for there are some that prompt to reserves--he has "done the actress," as well as the actor, done above all the mountebank, the mummer and the _cabotin_, and mixed them up with the queer theatric air, in a manner that practically warns all other hands off the material for ever. At the same time I think I saw Miriam, and without a sacrifice of truth, that is of the particular glow of verisimilitude I wished her most to benefit by, in a complexity of relations finer than any that appear possible for the gentry of M. Anatole France. Her relation to Nick Dormer, for instance, was intended as a superior interest--that of being (while perfectly sincere, sincere for _her_, and therefore perfectly consonant with her impulse perpetually to perform and with her success in performing) the result of a touched imagination, a touched pride for "art," as well as of the charm cast on other sensibilities still. Dormer's relation to herself is a different matter, of which more presently; but the sympathy she, poor young woman, very generously and intelligently offers him where most people have so stinted it, is disclosed largely at the cost of her egotism and her personal pretensions, even though in fact determined by her sense of their together, Nick and she, postponing the "world" to their conception of other and finer decencies. Nick can't on the whole see--for I have represented him as in his day quite sufficiently troubled and anxious--why he should condemn to ugly feebleness his most prized faculty (most prized, at least, by himself) even in order to keep his seat in Parliament, to inherit Mr. Carteret's blessing and money, to gratify his mother and carry out the mission of his father, to marry Julia Dallow in fine, a beautiful imperative woman with a great many thousands a year. It all comes back in the last analysis to the individual vision of decency, the critical as well as the passionate judgement of it under sharp stress; and Nick's vision and judgement, all on the esthetic ground, have beautifully coincided, to Miriam's imagination, with a now fully marked, an inspired and impenitent, choice of her own: so that, other considerations powerfully aiding indeed, she is ready to see their interest all splendidly as one. She is in the uplifted state to which sacrifices and submissions loom large, but loom so just because they must write sympathy, write passion, large. Her measure of what she would be capable of for him--capable, that is, of _not_ asking of him--will depend on what he shall ask of _her_, but she has no fear of not being able to satisfy him, even to the point of "chucking" for him, if need be, that artistic identity of her own which she has begun to build up. It will all be to the glory, therefore, of their common infatuation with "art": she will doubtless be no less willing to serve his than she was eager to serve her own, purged now of the too great shrillness. This puts her quite on a different level from that of the vivid monsters of M. France, whose artistic identity is the last thing _they_ wish to chuck--their only dismissal is of all material and social over-draping. Nick Dormer in point of fact asks of Miriam nothing but that she shall remain "awfully interesting to paint"; but that is _his_ relation, which, as I say, is quite a matter by itself. He at any rate, luckily for both of them it may be, doesn't put her to the test: he is so busy with his own case, busy with testing himself and feeling his reality. He has seen himself as giving up precious things for an object, and that object has somehow not been the young woman in question, nor anything very nearly like her. She, on the other hand, has asked everything of Peter Sherringham, who has asked everything of _her_; and it is in so doing that she has really most testified for art and invited him to testify. With his professed interest in the theatre--one of those deep subjections that, in men of "taste," the Comédie Française used in old days to conspire for and some such odd and affecting examples of which were to be noted--he yet offers her his hand and an introduction to the very best society if she will leave the stage. The power--and her having the sense of the power--to "shine" in the world is his highest measure of her, the test applied by him to her beautiful human value; just as the manner in which she turns on him is the application of her own standard and touchstone. She is perfectly sure of her own; for--if there were nothing else, and there is much--she has tasted blood, so to speak, in the form of her so prompt and auspicious success with the public, leaving all probations behind (the whole of which, as the book gives it, is too rapid and sudden, though inevitably so: processes, periods, intervals, stages, degrees, connexions, may be easily enough and barely enough named, may be unconvincingly stated, in fiction, to the deep discredit of the writer, but it remains the very deuce to _represent_ them, especially represent them under strong compression and in brief and subordinate terms; and this even though the novelist who doesn't represent, and represent "all the time," is lost, exactly as much lost as the painter who, at his work and given his intention, doesn't paint "all the time"). Turn upon her friend at any rate Miriam does; and one of my main points is missed if it fails to appear that she does so with absolute sincerity and with the cold passion of the high critic who knows, on sight of them together, the more or less dazzling false from the comparatively grey-coloured true. Sherringham's whole profession has been that he rejoices in her as she is, and that the theatre, the organised theatre, will be, as Matthew Arnold was in those very days pronouncing it, irresistible; and it is the promptness with which he sheds his pretended faith as soon as it feels in the air the breath of reality, as soon as it asks of him a proof or a sacrifice, it is this that excites her doubtless sufficiently arrogant scorn. Where is the virtue of his high interest if it has verily never _been_ an interest to speak of and if all it has suddenly to suggest is that, in face of a serious call, it shall be unblushingly relinquished? If he and she together, and her great field and future, and the whole cause they had armed and declared for, have not been serious things they have been base make-believes and trivialities--which is what in fact the homage of society to art always turns out so soon as art presumes not to be vulgar and futile. It is immensely the fashion and immensely edifying to listen to, this homage, while it confines its attention to vanities and frauds; but it knows only terror, feels only horror, the moment that, instead of making all the concessions, art proceeds to ask for a few. Miriam is nothing if not strenuous, and evidently nothing if not "cheeky," where Sherringham is concerned at least: these, in the all-egotistical exhibition to which she is condemned, are the very elements of her figure and the very colours of her portrait. But she is mild and inconsequent for Nick Dormer (who demands of her so little); as if gravely and pityingly embracing the truth that _his_ sacrifice, on the right side, is probably to have very little of her sort of recompense. I must have had it well before me that she was all aware of the small strain a great sacrifice to Nick would cost her--by reason of the strong effect on her of his own superior logic, in which the very intensity of concentration was so to find its account. If the man, however, who holds her personally dear yet holds her extremely personal message to the world cheap, so the man capable of a consistency and, as she regards the matter, of an honesty so much higher than Sherringham's, virtually cares, "really" cares, no straw for his fellow-struggler. If Nick Dormer attracts and all-indifferently holds her it is because, like herself and unlike Peter, he puts "art" first; but the most he thus does for her in the event is to let her see how she may enjoy, in intimacy, the rigour it has taught him and which he cultivates at her expense. This is the situation in which we leave her, though there would be more still to be said about the difference for her of the two relations--that to each of the men--could I fondly suppose as much of the interest of the book "left over" for the reader as for myself. Sherringham, for instance, offers Miriam marriage, ever so "handsomely"; but if nothing might lead me on further than the question of what it would have been open to us--us novelists, especially in the old days--to show, "serially," a young man in Nick Dormer's quite different position as offering or a young woman in Miriam's as taking, so for that very reason such an excursion is forbidden me. The trade of the stage-player, and above all of the actress, must have so many detestable sides for the person exercising it that we scarce imagine a full surrender to it without a full surrender, not less, to every immediate compensation, to every freedom and the largest ease within reach: which presentment of the possible case for Miriam would yet have been condemned--and on grounds both various and interesting to trace--to remain very imperfect. I feel, moreover, that I might still, with space, abound in remarks about Nick's character and Nick's crisis suggested to my present more reflective vision. It strikes me, alas, that he is not quite so interesting as he was fondly intended to be, and this in spite of the multiplication, within the picture, of his pains and penalties; so that while I turn this slight anomaly over I come upon a reason that affects me as singularly charming and touching and at which indeed I have already glanced. Any presentation of the artist _in triumph_ must be flat in proportion as it really sticks to its subject--it can only smuggle in relief and variety. For, to put the matter in an image, all we then--in his triumph--see of the charm-compeller is the back he turns to us as he bends over his work. "His" triumph, decently, is but the triumph of what he produces, and that is another affair. His romance is the romance he himself projects; he eats the cake of the very rarest privilege, the most luscious baked in the oven of the gods--therefore he mayn't "have" it, in the form of the privilege of the hero, at the same time. The privilege of the hero--that is, of the martyr or of the interesting and appealing and comparatively floundering _person_--places him in quite a different category, belongs to him only as to the artist deluded, diverted, frustrated or vanquished; when the "amateur" in him gains, for our admiration or compassion or whatever, all that the expert has to do without. Therefore I strove in vain, I feel, to embroil and adorn this young man on whom a hundred ingenious touches are thus lavished: he has insisted in the event on looking as simple and flat as some mere brass check or engraved number, the symbol and guarantee of a stored treasure. The better part of him is locked too much away from us, and the part we see has to pass for--well, what it passes for, so lamentedly, among his friends and relatives. No, accordingly, Nick Dormer isn't "the best thing in the book," as I judge I imagined he would be, and it contains nothing better, I make out, than that preserved and achieved unity and quality of tone, a value in itself, which I referred to at the beginning of these remarks. What I mean by this is that the interest created, and the expression of that interest, are things kept, as to kind, genuine and true to themselves. The appeal, the fidelity to the prime motive, is, with no little art, strained clear (even as silver is polished) in a degree answering--at least by intention--to the air of beauty. There is an awkwardness again in having thus belatedly to point such features out; but in that wrought appearance of animation and harmony, that effect of free movement and yet of recurrent and insistent reference, _The Tragic Muse_ has struck me again as conscious of a bright advantage. HENRY JAMES. BOOK FIRST I The people of France have made it no secret that those of England, as a general thing, are to their perception an inexpressive and speechless race, perpendicular and unsociable, unaddicted to enriching any bareness of contact with verbal or other embroidery. This view might have derived encouragement, a few years ago, in Paris, from the manner in which four persons sat together in silence, one fine day about noon, in the garden, as it is called, of the Palais de l'Industrie--the central court of the great glazed bazaar where, among plants and parterres, gravelled walks and thin fountains, are ranged the figures and groups, the monuments and busts, which form in the annual exhibition of the Salon the department of statuary. The spirit of observation is naturally high at the Salon, quickened by a thousand artful or artless appeals, but it need have put forth no great intensity to take in the characters I mention. As a solicitation of the eye on definite grounds these visitors too constituted a successful plastic fact; and even the most superficial observer would have marked them as products of an insular neighbourhood, representatives of that tweed-and-waterproof class with which, on the recurrent occasions when the English turn out for a holiday--Christmas and Easter, Whitsuntide and the autumn--Paris besprinkles itself at a night's notice. They had about them the indefinable professional look of the British traveller abroad; the air of preparation for exposure, material and moral, which is so oddly combined with the serene revelation of security and of persistence, and which excites, according to individual susceptibility, the ire or the admiration of foreign communities. They were the more unmistakable as they presented mainly the happier aspects of the energetic race to which they had the honour to belong. The fresh diffused light of the Salon made them clear and important; they were finished creations, in their way, and, ranged there motionless on their green bench, were almost as much on exhibition as if they had been hung on the line. Three ladies and a young man, they were obviously a family--a mother, two daughters and a son; a circumstance which had the effect at once of making each member of the group doubly typical and of helping to account for their fine taciturnity. They were not, with each other, on terms of ceremony, and also were probably fatigued with their course among the pictures, the rooms on the upper floor. Their attitude, on the part of visitors who had superior features even if they might appear to some passers-by to have neglected a fine opportunity for completing these features with an expression, was after all a kind of tribute to the state of exhaustion, of bewilderment, to which the genius of France is still capable of reducing the proud. "En v'là des abrutis!" more than one of their fellow-gazers might have been heard to exclaim; and certain it is that there was something depressed and discouraged in this interesting group, who sat looking vaguely before them, not noticing the life of the place, somewhat as if each had a private anxiety. It might have been finely guessed, however, that though on many questions they were closely united this present anxiety was not the same for each. If they looked grave, moreover, this was doubtless partly the result of their all being dressed in such mourning as told of a recent bereavement. The eldest of the three ladies had indeed a face of a fine austere mould which would have been moved to gaiety only by some force more insidious than any she was likely to recognise in Paris. Cold, still, and considerably worn, it was neither stupid nor hard--it was firm, narrow and sharp. This competent matron, acquainted evidently with grief but not weakened by it, had a high forehead to which the quality of the skin gave a singular polish--it glittered even when seen at a distance; a nose which achieved a high free curve; and a tendency to throw back her head and carry it well above her, as if to disengage it from the possible entanglements of the rest of her person. If you had seen her walk you would have felt her to tread the earth after a fashion suggesting that in a world where she had long since discovered that one couldn't have one's own way one could never tell what annoying aggression might take place, so that it was well, from hour to hour, to save what one could. Lady Agnes saved her head, her white triangular forehead, over which her close-crinkled flaxen hair, reproduced in different shades in her children, made a looped silken canopy like the marquee at a garden-party. Her daughters were as tall as herself--that was visible even as they sat there--and one of them, the younger evidently, altogether pretty; a straight, slender, grey-eyed English girl of the sort who show "good" figures and fresh complexions. The sister, who was not pretty, was also straight and slender and grey-eyed. But the grey in this case was not so pure, nor were the straightness and the slenderness so maidenly. The brother of these young ladies had taken off his hat as if he felt the air of the summer day heavy in the great pavilion. He was a lean, strong, clear-faced youth, with a formed nose and thick light-brown hair which lay continuously and profusely back from his forehead, so that to smooth it from the brow to the neck but a single movement of the hand was required. I cannot describe him better than by saying that he was the sort of young Englishman who looks particularly well in strange lands and whose general aspect--his inches, his limbs, his friendly eyes, the modulation of his voice, the cleanness of his flesh-tints and the fashion of his garments--excites on the part of those who encounter him in far countries on the ground of a common speech a delightful sympathy of race. This sympathy may sometimes be qualified by the seen limits of his apprehension, but it almost revels as such horizons recede. We shall see quickly enough how accurate a measure it might have taken of Nicholas Dormer. There was food for suspicion perhaps in the wandering blankness that sat at moments in his eyes, as if he had no attention at all, not the least in the world, at his command; but it is no more than just to add without delay that this discouraging symptom was known among those who liked him by the indulgent name of dreaminess. By his mother and sisters, for instance, his dreaminess was constantly noted. He is the more welcome to the benefit of such an interpretation as there is always held to be something engaging in the combination of the muscular and the musing, the mildness of strength. After some time, an interval during which these good people might have appeared to have come, individually, to the Palais de l'Industrie much less to see the works of art than to think over their domestic affairs, the young man, rousing himself from his reverie, addressed one of the girls. "I say, Biddy, why should we sit moping here all day? Come and take a turn about with me." His younger sister, while he got up, leaned forward a little, looking round her, but she gave for the moment no further sign of complying with his invitation. "Where shall we find you, then, if Peter comes?" asked the other Miss Dormer, making no movement at all. "I daresay Peter won't come. He'll leave us here to cool our heels." "Oh Nick dear!" Biddy exclaimed in a small sweet voice of protest. It was plainly her theory that Peter would come, and even a little her fond fear that she might miss him should she quit that spot. "We shall come back in a quarter of an hour. Really I must look at these things," Nick declared, turning his face to a marble group which stood near them on the right--a man with the skin of a beast round his loins, tussling with a naked woman in some primitive effort of courtship or capture. Lady Agnes followed the direction of her son's eyes and then observed: "Everything seems very dreadful. I should think Biddy had better sit still. Hasn't she seen enough horrors up above?" "I daresay that if Peter comes Julia'll be with him," the elder girl remarked irrelevantly. "Well then he can take Julia about. That will be more proper," said Lady Agnes. "Mother dear, she doesn't care a rap about art. It's a fearful bore looking at fine things with Julia," Nick returned. "Won't you go with him, Grace?"--and Biddy appealed to her sister. "I think she has awfully good taste!" Grace exclaimed, not answering this inquiry. "_Don't_ say nasty things about her!" Lady Agnes broke out solemnly to her son after resting her eyes on him a moment with an air of reluctant reprobation. "I say nothing but what she'd say herself," the young man urged. "About some things she has very good taste, but about this kind of thing she has no taste at all." "That's better, I think," said Lady Agnes, turning her eyes again to the "kind of thing" her son appeared to designate. "She's awfully clever--awfully!" Grace went on with decision. "Awfully, awfully!" her brother repeated, standing in front of her and smiling down at her. "You are nasty, Nick. You know you are," said the young lady, but more in sorrow than in anger. Biddy got up at this, as if the accusatory tone prompted her to place herself generously at his side. "Mightn't you go and order lunch--in that place, you know?" she asked of her mother. "Then we'd come back when it was ready." "My dear child, I can't order lunch," Lady Agnes replied with a cold impatience which seemed to intimate that she had problems far more important than those of victualling to contend with. "Then perhaps Peter will if he comes. I'm sure he's up in everything of that sort." "Oh hang Peter!" Nick exclaimed. "Leave him out of account, and _do_ order lunch, mother; but not cold beef and pickles." "I must say--about _him_--you're not nice," Biddy ventured to remark to her brother, hesitating and even blushing a little. "You make up for it, my dear," the young man answered, giving her chin--a very charming, rotund, little chin--a friendly whisk with his forefinger. "I can't imagine what you've got against him," her ladyship said gravely. "Dear mother, it's disappointed fondness," Nick argued. "They won't answer one's notes; they won't let one know where they are nor what to expect. 'Hell has no fury like a woman scorned'; nor like a man either." "Peter has such a tremendous lot to do--it's a very busy time at the embassy; there are sure to be reasons," Biddy explained with her pretty eyes. "Reasons enough, no doubt!" said Lady Agnes--who accompanied these words with an ambiguous sigh, however, as if in Paris even the best reasons would naturally be bad ones. "Doesn't Julia write to you, doesn't she answer you the very day?" Grace asked, looking at Nick as if she were the bold one. He waited, returning her glance with a certain severity. "What do you know about my correspondence? No doubt I ask too much," he went on; "I'm so attached to them. Dear old Peter, dear old Julia!" "She's younger than you, my dear!" cried the elder girl, still resolute. "Yes, nineteen days." "I'm glad you know her birthday." "She knows yours; she always gives you something," Lady Agnes reminded her son. "Her taste is good _then_, isn't it, Nick?" Grace Dormer continued. "She makes charming presents; but, dear mother, it isn't _her_ taste. It's her husband's." "How her husband's?" "The beautiful objects of which she disposes so freely are the things he collected for years laboriously, devotedly, poor man!" "She disposes of them to you, but not to others," said Lady Agnes. "But that's all right," she added, as if this might have been taken for a complaint of the limitations of Julia's bounty. "She has to select among so many, and that's a proof of taste," her ladyship pursued. "You can't say she doesn't choose lovely ones," Grace remarked to her brother in a tone of some triumph. "My dear, they're all lovely. George Dallow's judgement was so sure, he was incapable of making a mistake," Nicholas Dormer returned. "I don't see how you can talk of him, he was dreadful," said Lady Agnes. "My dear, if he was good enough for Julia to marry he's good enough for us to talk of." "She did him a very great honour." "I daresay, but he was not unworthy of it. No such enlightened collection of beautiful objects has been made in England in our time." "You think too much of beautiful objects!" Lady Agnes sighed. "I thought you were just now lamenting that I think too little." "It's very nice--his having left Julia so well off," Biddy interposed soothingly, as if she foresaw a tangle. "He treated her _en grand seigneur_, absolutely," Nick went on. "He used to look greasy, all the same"--Grace bore on it with a dull weight. "His name ought to have been Tallow." "You're not saying what Julia would like, if that's what you are trying to say," her brother observed. "Don't be vulgar, Grace," said Lady Agnes. "I know Peter Sherringham's birthday!" Biddy broke out innocently, as a pacific diversion. She had passed her hand into Nick's arm, to signify her readiness to go with him, while she scanned the remoter reaches of the garden as if it had occurred to her that to direct their steps in some such sense might after all be the shorter way to get at Peter. "He's too much older than you, my dear," Grace answered without encouragement. "That's why I've noticed it--he's thirty-four. Do you call that too old? I don't care for slobbering infants!" Biddy cried. "Don't be vulgar," Lady Agnes enjoined again. "Come, Bid, we'll go and be vulgar together; for that's what we are, I'm afraid," her brother said to her. "We'll go and look at all these low works of art." "Do you really think it's necessary to the child's development?" Lady Agnes demanded as the pair turned away. And then while her son, struck as by a challenge, paused, lingering a moment with his little sister on his arm: "What we've been through this morning in this place, and what you've paraded before our eyes--the murders, the tortures, all kinds of disease and indecency!" Nick looked at his mother as if this sudden protest surprised him, but as if also there were lurking explanations of it which he quickly guessed. Her resentment had the effect not so much of animating her cold face as of making it colder, less expressive, though visibly prouder. "Ah dear mother, don't do the British matron!" he replied good-humouredly. "British matron's soon said! I don't know what they're coming to." "How odd that you should have been struck only with the disagreeable things when, for myself, I've felt it to be most interesting, the most suggestive morning I've passed for ever so many months!" "Oh Nick, Nick!" Lady Agnes cried with a strange depth of feeling. "I like them better in London--they're much less unpleasant," said Grace Dormer. "They're things you can look at," her ladyship went on. "We certainly make the better show." "The subject doesn't matter, it's the treatment, the treatment!" Biddy protested in a voice like the tinkle of a silver bell. "Poor little Bid!"--her brother broke into a laugh. "How can I learn to model, mamma dear, if I don't look at things and if I don't study them?" the girl continued. This question passed unheeded, and Nicholas Dormer said to his mother, more seriously, but with a certain kind explicitness, as if he could make a particular allowance: "This place is an immense stimulus to me; it refreshes me, excites me--it's such an exhibition of artistic life. It's full of ideas, full of refinements; it gives one such an impression of artistic experience. They try everything, they feel everything. While you were looking at the murders, apparently, I observed an immense deal of curious and interesting work. There are too many of them, poor devils; so many who must make their way, who must attract attention. Some of them can only _taper fort_, stand on their heads, turn somersaults or commit deeds of violence, to make people notice them. After that, no doubt, a good many will be quieter. But I don't know; to-day I'm in an appreciative mood--I feel indulgent even to them: they give me an impression of intelligence, of eager observation. All art is one--remember that, Biddy dear," the young man continued, smiling down from his height. "It's the same great many-headed effort, and any ground that's gained by an individual, any spark that's struck in any province, is of use and of suggestion to all the others. We're all in the same boat." "'We,' do you say, my dear? Are you really setting up for an artist?" Lady Agnes asked. Nick just hesitated. "I was speaking for Biddy." "But you _are_ one, Nick--you are!" the girl cried. Lady Agnes looked for an instant as if she were going to say once more "Don't be vulgar!" But she suppressed these words, had she intended them, and uttered sounds, few in number and not completely articulate, to the effect that she hated talking about art. While her son spoke she had watched him as if failing to follow; yet something in the tone of her exclamation hinted that she had understood him but too well. "We're all in the same boat," Biddy repeated with cheerful zeal. "Not me, if you please!" Lady Agnes replied. "It's horrid messy work, your modelling." "Ah but look at the results!" said the girl eagerly--glancing about at the monuments in the garden as if in regard even to them she were, through that unity of art her brother had just proclaimed, in some degree an effective cause. "There's a great deal being done here--a real vitality," Nicholas Dormer went on to his mother in the same reasonable informing way. "Some of these fellows go very far." "They do indeed!" said Lady Agnes. "I'm fond of young schools--like this movement in sculpture," Nick insisted with his slightly provoking serenity. "They're old enough to know better!" "Mayn't I look, mamma? It _is_ necessary to my development," Biddy declared. "You may do as you like," said Lady Agnes with dignity. "She ought to see good work, you know," the young man went on. "I leave it to your sense of responsibility." This statement was somewhat majestic, and for a moment evidently it tempted Nick, almost provoked him, or at any rate suggested to him an occasion for some pronouncement he had had on his mind. Apparently, however, he judged the time on the whole not quite right, and his sister Grace interposed with the inquiry-- "Please, mamma, are we never going to lunch?" "Ah mother, mother!" the young man murmured in a troubled way, looking down at her with a deep fold in his forehead. For Lady Agnes also, as she returned his look, it seemed an occasion; but with this difference that she had no hesitation in taking advantage of it. She was encouraged by his slight embarrassment, for ordinarily Nick was not embarrassed. "You used to have so _much_ sense of responsibility," she pursued; "but sometimes I don't know what has become of it--it seems all, _all_ gone!" "Ah mother, mother!" he exclaimed again--as if there were so many things to say that it was impossible to choose. But now he stepped closer, bent over her and in spite of the publicity of their situation gave her a quick expressive kiss. The foreign observer whom I took for granted in beginning to sketch this scene would have had to admit that the rigid English family had after all a capacity for emotion. Grace Dormer indeed looked round her to see if at this moment they were noticed. She judged with satisfaction that they had escaped. II Nick Dormer walked away with Biddy, but he had not gone far before he stopped in front of a clever bust, where his mother, in the distance, saw him playing in the air with his hand, carrying out by this gesture, which presumably was applausive, some critical remark he had made to his sister. Lady Agnes raised her glass to her eyes by the long handle to which rather a clanking chain was attached, perceiving that the bust represented an ugly old man with a bald head; at which her ladyship indefinitely sighed, though it was not apparent in what way such an object could be detrimental to her daughter. Nick passed on and quickly paused again; this time, his mother discerned, before the marble image of a strange grimacing woman. Presently she lost sight of him; he wandered behind things, looking at them all round. "I ought to get plenty of ideas for my modelling, oughtn't I, Nick?" his sister put to him after a moment. "Ah my poor child, what shall I say?" "Don't you think I've any capacity for ideas?" the girl continued ruefully. "Lots of them, no doubt. But the capacity for applying them, for putting them into practice--how much of that have you?" "How can I tell till I try?" "What do you mean by trying, Biddy dear?" "Why you know--you've seen me." "Do you call that trying?" her brother amusedly demanded. "Ah Nick!" she said with sensibility. But then with more spirit: "And please what do you call it?" "Well, this for instance is a good case." And her companion pointed to another bust--a head of a young man in terra-cotta, at which they had just arrived; a modern young man to whom, with his thick neck, his little cap and his wide ring of dense curls, the artist had given the air of some sturdy Florentine of the time of Lorenzo. Biddy looked at the image a moment. "Ah that's not trying; that's succeeding." "Not altogether; it's only trying seriously." "Well, why shouldn't I be serious?" "Mother wouldn't like it. She has inherited the fine old superstition that art's pardonable only so long as it's bad--so long as it's done at odd hours, for a little distraction, like a game of tennis or of whist. The only thing that can justify it, the effort to carry it as far as one can (which you can't do without time and singleness of purpose), she regards as just the dangerous, the criminal element. It's the oddest hind-part-before view, the drollest immorality." "She doesn't want one to be professional," Biddy returned as if she could do justice to every system. "Better leave it alone then. There are always duffers enough." "I don't want to be a duffer," Biddy said. "But I thought you encouraged me." "So I did, my poor child. It was only to encourage myself." "With your own work--your painting?" "With my futile, my ill-starred endeavours. Union is strength--so that we might present a wider front, a larger surface of resistance." Biddy for a while said nothing and they continued their tour of observation. She noticed how he passed over some things quickly, his first glance sufficing to show him if they were worth another, and then recognised in a moment the figures that made some appeal. His tone puzzled but his certainty of eye impressed her, and she felt what a difference there was yet between them--how much longer in every case she would have taken to discriminate. She was aware of how little she could judge of the value of a thing till she had looked at it ten minutes; indeed modest little Biddy was compelled privately to add "And often not even then." She was mystified, as I say--Nick was often mystifying, it was his only fault--but one thing was definite: her brother had high ability. It was the consciousness of this that made her bring out at last: "I don't so much care whether or no I please mamma, if I please you." "Oh don't lean on me. I'm a wretched broken reed--I'm no use _really_!" he promptly admonished her. "Do you mean you're a duffer?" Biddy asked in alarm. "Frightful, frightful!" "So that you intend to give up your work--to let it alone, as you advise _me_?" "It has never been my work, all that business, Biddy. If it had it would be different. I should stick to it." "And you _won't_ stick to it?" the girl said, standing before him open-eyed. Her brother looked into her eyes a moment, and she had a compunction; she feared she was indiscreet and was worrying him. "Your questions are much simpler than the elements out of which my answer should come." "A great talent--what's simpler than that?" "One excellent thing, dear Biddy: no talent at all!" "Well, yours is so real you can't help it." "We shall see, we shall see," said Nick Dormer. "Let us go look at that big group." "We shall see if your talent's real?" Biddy went on as she accompanied him. "No; we shall see if, as you say, I can't help it. What nonsense Paris makes one talk!" the young man added as they stopped in front of the composition. This was true perhaps, but not in a sense he could find himself tempted to deplore. The present was far from his first visit to the French capital: he had often quitted England and usually made a point of "putting in," as he called it, a few days there on the outward journey to the Continent or on the return; but at present the feelings, for the most part agreeable, attendant upon a change of air and of scene had been more punctual and more acute than for a long time before, and stronger the sense of novelty, refreshment, amusement, of the hundred appeals from that quarter of thought to which on the whole his attention was apt most frequently, though not most confessedly, to stray. He was fonder of Paris than most of his countrymen, though not so fond perhaps as some other captivated aliens: the place had always had the virtue of quickening in him sensibly the life of reflexion and observation. It was a good while since his impressions had been so favourable to the city by the Seine; a good while at all events since they had ministered so to excitement, to exhilaration, to ambition, even to a restlessness that was not prevented from being agreeable by the excess of agitation in it. Nick could have given the reason of this unwonted glow, but his preference was very much to keep it to himself. Certainly to persons not deeply knowing, or at any rate not deeply curious, in relation to the young man's history the explanation might have seemed to beg the question, consisting as it did of the simple formula that he had at last come to a crisis. Why a crisis--what was it and why had he not come to it before? The reader shall learn these things in time if he cares enough for them. Our young man had not in any recent year failed to see the Salon, which the general voice this season pronounced not particularly good. None the less it was the present exhibition that, for some cause connected with his "crisis," made him think fast, produced that effect he had spoken of to his mother as a sense of artistic life. The precinct of the marbles and bronzes spoke to him especially to-day; the glazed garden, not florally rich, with its new productions alternating with perfunctory plants and its queer, damp smell, partly the odour of plastic clay, of the studios of sculptors, put forth the voice of old associations, of other visits, of companionships now ended--an insinuating eloquence which was at the same time somehow identical with the general sharp contagion of Paris. There was youth in the air, and a multitudinous newness, for ever reviving, and the diffusion of a hundred talents, ingenuities, experiments. The summer clouds made shadows on the roof of the great building; the white images, hard in their crudity, spotted the place with provocations; the rattle of plates at the restaurant sounded sociable in the distance, and our young man congratulated himself more than ever that he had not missed his chance. He felt how it would help him to settle something. At the moment he made this reflexion his eye fell upon a person who appeared--just in the first glimpse--to carry out the idea of help. He uttered a lively ejaculation, which, however, in its want of finish, Biddy failed to understand; so pertinent, so relevant and congruous, was the other party to this encounter. The girl's attention followed her brother's, resting with it on a young man who faced them without seeing them, engaged as he was in imparting to two companions his ideas about one of the works exposed to view. What Biddy remarked was that this young man was fair and fat and of the middle stature; he had a round face and a short beard and on his crown a mere reminiscence of hair, as the fact that he carried his hat in his hand permitted to be observed. Bridget Dormer, who was quick, placed him immediately as a gentleman, but as a gentleman unlike any other gentleman she had ever seen. She would have taken him for very foreign but that the words proceeding from his mouth reached her ear and imposed themselves as a rare variety of English. It was not that a foreigner might not have spoken smoothly enough, nor yet that the speech of this young man was not smooth. It had in truth a conspicuous and aggressive perfection, and Biddy was sure no mere learner would have ventured to play such tricks with the tongue. He seemed to draw rich effects and wandering airs from it--to modulate and manipulate it as he would have done a musical instrument. Her view of the gentleman's companions was less operative, save for her soon making the reflexion that they were people whom in any country, from China to Peru, you would immediately have taken for natives. One of them was an old lady with a shawl; that was the most salient way in which she presented herself. The shawl was an ancient much-used fabric of embroidered cashmere, such as many ladies wore forty years ago in their walks abroad and such as no lady wears to-day. It had fallen half off the back of the wearer, but at the moment Biddy permitted herself to consider her she gave it a violent jerk and brought it up to her shoulders again, where she continued to arrange and settle it, with a good deal of jauntiness and elegance, while she listened to the talk of the gentleman. Biddy guessed that this little transaction took place very frequently, and was not unaware of its giving the old lady a droll, factitious, faded appearance, as if she were singularly out of step with the age. The other person was very much younger--she might have been a daughter--and had a pale face, a low forehead, and thick dark hair. What she chiefly had, however, Biddy rapidly discovered, was a pair of largely-gazing eyes. Our young friend was helped to the discovery by the accident of their resting at this moment for a time--it struck Biddy as very long--on her own. Both these ladies were clad in light, thin, scant gowns, giving an impression of flowered figures and odd transparencies, and in low shoes which showed a great deal of stocking and were ornamented with large rosettes. Biddy's slightly agitated perception travelled directly to their shoes: they suggested to her vaguely that the wearers were dancers--connected possibly with the old-fashioned exhibition of the shawl-dance. By the time she had taken in so much as this the mellifluous young man had perceived and addressed himself to her brother. He came on with an offered hand. Nick greeted him and said it was a happy chance--he was uncommonly glad to see him. "I never come across you--I don't know why," Nick added while the two, smiling, looked each other up and down like men reunited after a long interval. "Oh it seems to me there's reason enough: our paths in life are so different." Nick's friend had a great deal of manner, as was evinced by his fashion of saluting Biddy without knowing her. "Different, yes, but not so different as that. Don't we both live in London, after all, and in the nineteenth century?" "Ah my dear Dormer, excuse me: I don't live in the nineteenth century. _Jamais de la vie_!" the gentleman declared. "Nor in London either?" "Yes--when I'm not at Samarcand! But surely we've diverged since the old days. I adore what you burn, you burn what I adore." While the stranger spoke he looked cheerfully, hospitably, at Biddy; not because it was she, she easily guessed, but because it was in his nature to desire a second auditor--a kind of sympathetic gallery. Her life was somehow filled with shy people, and she immediately knew she had never encountered any one who seemed so to know his part and recognise his cues. "How do you know what I adore?" Nicholas Dormer asked. "I know well enough what you used to." "That's more than I do myself. There were so many things." "Yes, there are many things--many, many: that's what makes life so amusing." "Do you find it amusing?" "My dear fellow, _c'est à se tordre_. Don't you think so? Ah it was high time I should meet you--I see. I've an idea you need me." "Upon my word I think I do!" Nick said in a tone which struck his sister and made her wonder still more why, if the gentleman was so important as that, he didn't introduce him. "There are many gods and this is one of their temples," the mysterious personage went on. "It's a house of strange idols--isn't it?--and of some strange and unnatural sacrifices." To Biddy as much as to her brother this remark might have been offered; but the girl's eyes turned back to the ladies who for the moment had lost their companion. She felt irresponsive and feared she should pass with this easy cosmopolite for a stiff, scared, English girl, which was not the type she aimed at; but wasn't even ocular commerce overbold so long as she hadn't a sign from Nick? The elder of the strange women had turned her back and was looking at some bronze figure, losing her shawl again as she did so; but the other stood where their escort had quitted her, giving all her attention to his sudden sociability with others. Her arms hung at her sides, her head was bent, her face lowered, so that she had an odd appearance of raising her eyes from under her brows; and in this attitude she was striking, though her air was so unconciliatory as almost to seem dangerous. Did it express resentment at having been abandoned for another girl? Biddy, who began to be frightened--there was a moment when the neglected creature resembled a tigress about to spring--was tempted to cry out that she had no wish whatever to appropriate the gentleman. Then she made the discovery that the young lady too had a manner, almost as much as her clever guide, and the rapid induction that it perhaps meant no more than his. She only looked at Biddy from beneath her eyebrows, which were wonderfully arched, but there was ever so much of a manner in the way she did it. Biddy had a momentary sense of being a figure in a ballet, a dramatic ballet--a subordinate motionless figure, to be dashed at to music or strangely capered up to. It would be a very dramatic ballet indeed if this young person were the heroine. She had magnificent hair, the girl reflected; and at the same moment heard Nick say to his interlocutor: "You're not in London--one can't meet you there?" "I rove, drift, float," was the answer; "my feelings direct me--if such a life as mine may be said to have a direction. Where there's anything to feel I try to be there!" the young man continued with his confiding laugh. "I should like to get hold of you," Nick returned. "Well, in that case there would be no doubt the intellectual adventure. Those are the currents--any sort of personal relation--that govern my career." "I don't want to lose you this time," Nick continued in a tone that excited Biddy's surprise. A moment before, when his friend had said that he tried to be where there was anything to feel, she had wondered how he could endure him. "Don't lose me, don't lose me!" cried the stranger after a fashion which affected the girl as the highest expression of irresponsibility she had ever seen. "After all why should you? Let us remain together unless I interfere"--and he looked, smiling and interrogative, at Biddy, who still remained blank, only noting again that Nick forbore to make them acquainted. This was an anomaly, since he prized the gentleman so. Still, there could be no anomaly of Nick's that wouldn't impose itself on his younger sister. "Certainly, I keep you," he said, "unless on my side I deprive those ladies--!" "Charming women, but it's not an indissoluble union. We meet, we communicate, we part! They're going--I'm seeing them to the door. I shall come back." With this Nick's friend rejoined his companions, who moved away with him, the strange fine eyes of the girl lingering on Biddy's brother as well as on Biddy herself as they receded. "Who _is_ he--who _are_ they?" Biddy instantly asked. "He's a gentleman," Nick made answer--insufficiently, she thought, and even with a shade of hesitation. He spoke as if she might have supposed he was not one, and if he was really one why didn't he introduce him? But Biddy wouldn't for the world have put this question, and he now moved to the nearest bench and dropped upon it as to await the other's return. No sooner, however, had his sister seated herself than he said: "See here, my dear, do you think you had better stay?" "Do you want me to go back to mother?" the girl asked with a lengthening visage. "Well, what do you think?" He asked it indeed gaily enough. "Is your conversation to be about--about private affairs?" "No, I can't say that. But I doubt if mother would think it the sort of thing that's 'necessary to your development.'" This assertion appeared to inspire her with the eagerness with which she again broke out: "But who are they--who are they?" "I know nothing of the ladies. I never saw them before. The man's a fellow I knew very well at Oxford. He was thought immense fun there. We've diverged, as he says, and I had almost lost sight of him, but not so much as he thinks, because I've read him--read him with interest. He has written a very clever book." "What kind of a book?" "A sort of novel." "What sort of novel?" "Well, I don't know--with a lot of good writing." Biddy listened to this so receptively that she thought it perverse her brother should add: "I daresay Peter will have come if you return to mother." "I don't care if he has. Peter's nothing to me. But I'll go if you wish it." Nick smiled upon her again and then said: "It doesn't signify. We'll all go." "All?" she echoed. "He won't hurt us. On the contrary he'll do us good." This was possible, the girl reflected in silence, but none the less the idea struck her as courageous, of their taking the odd young man back to breakfast with them and with the others, especially if Peter should be there. If Peter was nothing to her it was singular she should have attached such importance to this contingency. The odd young man reappeared, and now that she saw him without his queer female appendages he seemed personally less weird. He struck her moreover, as generally a good deal accounted for by the literary character, especially if it were responsible for a lot of good writing. As he took his place on the bench Nick said to him, indicating her, "My sister Bridget," and then mentioned his name, "Mr. Gabriel Nash." "You enjoy Paris--you're happy here?" Mr. Nash inquired, leaning over his friend to speak to the girl. Though his words belonged to the situation it struck her that his tone didn't, and this made her answer him more dryly than she usually spoke. "Oh yes, it's very nice." "And French art interests you? You find things here that please?" "Oh yes, I like some of them." Mr. Nash considered her kindly. "I hoped you'd say you like the Academy better." "She would if she didn't think you expected it," said Nicholas Dormer. "Oh Nick!" Biddy protested. "Miss Dormer's herself an English picture," their visitor pronounced in the tone of a man whose urbanity was a general solvent. "That's a compliment if you don't like them!" Biddy exclaimed. "Ah some of them, some of them; there's a certain sort of thing!" Mr. Nash continued. "We must feel everything, everything that we can. We're here for that." "You do like English art then?" Nick demanded with a slight accent of surprise. Mr. Nash indulged his wonder. "My dear Dormer, do you remember the old complaint I used to make of you? You had formulas that were like walking in one's hat. One may see something in a case and one may not." "Upon my word," said Nick, "I don't know any one who was fonder of a generalisation than you. You turned them off as the man at the street-corner distributes hand-bills." "They were my wild oats. I've sown them all." "We shall see that!" "Oh there's nothing of them now: a tame, scanty, homely growth. My only good generalisations are my actions." "We shall see _them_ then." "Ah pardon me. You can't see them with the naked eye. Moreover, mine are principally negative. People's actions, I know, are for the most part the things they do--but mine are all the things I _don't_ do. There are so many of those, so many, but they don't produce any effect. And then all the rest are shades--extremely fine shades." "Shades of behaviour?" Nick inquired with an interest which surprised his sister, Mr. Nash's discourse striking her mainly as the twaddle of the under-world. "Shades of impression, of appreciation," said the young man with his explanatory smile. "All my behaviour consists of my feelings." "Well, don't you show your feelings? You used to!" "Wasn't it mainly those of disgust?" Nash asked. "Those operate no longer. I've closed that window." "Do you mean you like everything?" "Dear me, no! But I look only at what I do like." "Do you mean that you've lost the noble faculty of disgust?" "I haven't the least idea. I never try it. My dear fellow," said Gabriel Nash, "we've only one life that we know anything about: fancy taking it up with disagreeable impressions! When then shall we go in for the agreeable?" "What do you mean by the agreeable?" Nick demanded. "Oh the happy moments of our consciousness--the multiplication of those moments. We must save as many as possible from the dark gulf." Nick had excited surprise on the part of his sister, but it was now Biddy's turn to make him open his eyes a little. She raised her sweet voice in appeal to the stranger. "Don't you think there are any wrongs in the world--any abuses and sufferings?" "Oh so many, so many! That's why one must choose." "Choose to stop them, to reform them--isn't that the choice?" Biddy asked. "That's Nick's," she added, blushing and looking at this personage. "Ah our divergence--yes!" Mr. Nash sighed. "There are all kinds of machinery for that--very complicated and ingenious. Your formulas, my dear Dormer, your formulas!" "Hang 'em, I haven't got any!" Nick now bravely declared. "To me personally the simplest ways are those that appeal most," Mr. Nash went on. "We pay too much attention to the ugly; we notice it, we magnify it. The great thing is to leave it alone and encourage the beautiful." "You must be very sure you get hold of the beautiful," said Nick. "Ah precisely, and that's just the importance of the faculty of appreciation. We must train our special sense. It's capable of extraordinary extension. Life's none too long for that." "But what's the good of the extraordinary extension if there is no affirmation of it, if it all goes to the negative, as you say? Where are the fine consequences?" Dormer asked. "In one's own spirit. One is one's self a fine consequence. That's the most important one we have to do with. _I_ am a fine consequence," said Gabriel Nash. Biddy rose from the bench at this and stepped away a little as to look at a piece of statuary. But she had not gone far before, pausing and turning, she bent her eyes on the speaker with a heightened colour, an air of desperation and the question, after a moment: "Are you then an æsthete?" "Ah there's one of the formulas! That's walking in one's hat! I've _no_ profession, my dear young lady. I've no _état civil_. These things are a part of the complicated ingenious machinery. As I say, I keep to the simplest way. I find that gives one enough to do. Merely to be is such a _métier_; to live such an art; to feel such a career!" Bridget Dormer turned her back and examined her statue, and her brother said to his old friend: "And to write?" "To write? Oh I shall never do it again!" "You've done it almost well enough to be inconsistent. That book of yours is anything but negative; it's complicated and ingenious." "My dear fellow, I'm extremely ashamed of that book," said Gabriel Nash. "Ah call yourself a bloated Buddhist and have done with it!" his companion exclaimed. "Have done with it? I haven't the least desire to have done with it. And why should one call one's self anything? One only deprives other people of their dearest occupation. Let me add that you don't _begin_ to have an insight into the art of life till it ceases to be of the smallest consequence to you what you may be called. That's rudimentary." "But if you go in for shades you must also go in for names. You must distinguish," Nick objected. "The observer's nothing without his categories, his types and varieties." "Ah trust him to distinguish!" said Gabriel Nash sweetly. "That's for his own convenience; he has, privately, a terminology to meet it. That's one's style. But from the moment it's for the convenience of others the signs have to be grosser, the shades begin to go. That's a deplorable hour! Literature, you see, is for the convenience of others. It requires the most abject concessions. It plays such mischief with one's style that really I've had to give it up." "And politics?" Nick asked. "Well, what about them?" was Mr. Nash's reply with a special cadence as he watched his friend's sister, who was still examining her statue. Biddy was divided between irritation and curiosity. She had interposed space, but she had not gone beyond ear-shot. Nick's question made her curiosity throb as a rejoinder to his friend's words. "That, no doubt you'll say, is still far more for the convenience of others--is still worse for one's style." Biddy turned round in time to hear Mr. Nash answer: "It has simply nothing in life to do with shades! I can't say worse for it than that." Biddy stepped nearer at this and drew still further on her courage. "Won't mamma be waiting? Oughtn't we to go to luncheon?" Both the young men looked up at her and Mr. Nash broke out: "You ought to protest! You ought to save him!" "To save him?" Biddy echoed. "He had a style, upon my word he had! But I've seen it go. I've read his speeches." "You were capable of that?" Nick laughed. "For you, yes. But it was like listening to a nightingale in a brass band." "I think they were beautiful," Biddy declared. Her brother got up at this tribute, and Mr. Nash, rising too, said with his bright colloquial air: "But, Miss Dormer, he had eyes. He was made to see--to see all over, to see everything. There are so few like that." "I think he still sees," Biddy returned, wondering a little why Nick didn't defend himself. "He sees his 'side,' his dreadful 'side,' dear young lady. Poor man, fancy your having a 'side'--you, you--and spending your days and your nights looking at it! I'd as soon pass my life looking at an advertisement on a hoarding." "You don't see me some day a great statesman?" said Nick. "My dear fellow, it's exactly what I've a terror of." "Mercy! don't you admire them?" Biddy cried. "It's a trade like another and a method of making one's way which society certainly condones. But when one can be something better--!" "Why what in the world is better?" Biddy asked. The young man gasped and Nick, replying for him, said: "Gabriel Nash is better! You must come and lunch with us. I must keep you--I must!" he added. "We shall save him yet," Mr. Nash kept on easily to Biddy while they went and the girl wondered still more what her mother would make of him. III After her companions left her Lady Agnes rested for five minutes in silence with her elder daughter, at the end of which time she observed: "I suppose one must have food at any rate," and, getting up, quitted the place where they had been sitting. "And where are we to go? I hate eating out of doors," she went on. "Dear me, when one comes to Paris--!" Grace returned in a tone apparently implying that in so rash an adventure one must be prepared for compromises and concessions. The two ladies wandered to where they saw a large sign of "Buffet" suspended in the air, entering a precinct reserved for little white-clothed tables, straw-covered chairs and long-aproned waiters. One of these functionaries approached them with eagerness and with a _"Mesdames sont seules?"_ receiving in return from her ladyship the slightly snappish announcement _"Non; nous sommes beaucoup!"_ He introduced them to a table larger than most of the others, and under his protection they took their places at it and began rather languidly and vaguely to consider the question of the repast. The waiter had placed a _carte_ in Lady Agnes's hands and she studied it, through her eye-glass, with a failure of interest, while he enumerated with professional fluency the resources of the establishment and Grace watched the people at the other tables. She was hungry and had already broken a morsel from a long glazed roll. "Not cold beef and pickles, you know," she observed to her mother. Lady Agnes gave no heed to this profane remark, but dropped her eye-glass and laid down the greasy document. "What does it signify? I daresay it's all nasty," Grace continued; and she added inconsequently: "If Peter comes he's sure to be particular." "Let him first be particular to come!" her ladyship exclaimed, turning a cold eye upon the waiter. _"Poulet chasseur, filets mignons sauce bearnaise,"_ the man suggested. "You'll give us what I tell you," said Lady Agnes; and she mentioned with distinctness and authority the dishes of which she desired that the meal should be composed. He interjected three or four more suggestions, but as they produced absolutely no impression on her he became silent and submissive, doing justice apparently to her ideas. For Lady Agnes had ideas, and, though it had suited her humour ten minutes before to profess herself helpless in such a case, the manner in which she imposed them on the waiter as original, practical, and economical, showed the high executive woman, the mother of children, the daughter of earls, the consort of an official, the dispenser of hospitality, looking back upon a lifetime of luncheons. She carried many cares, and the feeding of multitudes--she was honourably conscious of having fed them decently, as she had always done everything--had ever been one of them. "Everything's absurdly dear," she remarked to her daughter as the waiter went away. To this remark Grace made no answer. She had been used for a long time back to hearing that everything was very dear; it was what one always expected. So she found the case herself, but she was silent and inventive about it, and nothing further passed, in the way of conversation with her mother, while they waited for the latter's orders to be executed, till Lady Agnes reflected audibly: "He makes me unhappy, the way he talks about Julia." "Sometimes I think he does it to torment one. One can't mention her!" Grace responded. "It's better not to mention her, but to leave it alone." "Yet he never mentions her of himself." "In some cases that's supposed to show that people like people--though of course something more's required to prove it," Lady Agnes continued to meditate. "Sometimes I think he's thinking of her, then at others I can't fancy _what_ he's thinking of." "It would be awfully suitable," said Grace, biting her roll. Her companion had a pause, as if looking for some higher ground to put it upon. Then she appeared to find this loftier level in the observation: "Of course he must like her--he has known her always." "Nothing can be plainer than that she likes him," Grace opined. "Poor Julia!" Lady Agnes almost wailed; and her tone suggested that she knew more about that than she was ready to state. "It isn't as if she wasn't clever and well read," her daughter went on. "If there were nothing else there would be a reason in her being so interested in politics, in everything that he is." "Ah what Nick is--that's what I sometimes wonder!" Grace eyed her parent in some despair: "Why, mother, isn't he going to be like papa?" She waited for an answer that didn't come; after which she pursued: "I thought you thought him so like him already." "Well, I don't," said Lady Agnes quietly. "Who is then? Certainly Percy isn't." Lady Agnes was silent a space. "There's no one like your father." "Dear papa!" Grace handsomely concurred. Then with a rapid transition: "It would be so jolly for all of us--she'd be so nice to us." "She's that already--in her way," said Lady Agnes conscientiously, having followed the return, quick as it was. "Much good does it do her!" And she reproduced the note of her bitterness of a moment before. "It does her some good that one should look out for her. I do, and I think she knows it," Grace declared. "One can at any rate keep other women off." "Don't meddle--you're very clumsy," was her mother's not particularly sympathetic rejoinder. "There are other women who are beautiful, and there are others who are clever and rich." "Yes, but not all in one: that's what's so nice in Julia. Her fortune would be thrown in; he wouldn't appear to have married her for it." "If he does he won't," said Lady Agnes a trifle obscurely. "Yes, that's what's so charming. And he could do anything then, couldn't he?" "Well, your father had no fortune to speak of." "Yes, but didn't Uncle Percy help him?" "His wife helped him," said Lady Agnes. "Dear mamma!"--the girl was prompt. "There's one thing," she added: "that Mr. Carteret will always help Nick." "What do you mean by 'always'?" "Why whether he marries Julia or not." "Things aren't so easy," Lady Agnes judged. "It will all depend on Nick's behaviour. He can stop it to-morrow." Grace Dormer stared; she evidently thought Mr. Carteret's beneficence a part of the scheme of nature. "How could he stop it?" "By not being serious. It isn't so hard to prevent people giving you money." "Serious?" Grace repeated. "Does he want him to be a prig like Lord Egbert?" "Yes--that's exactly what he wants. And what he'll do for him he'll do for him only if he marries Julia." "Has he told you?" Grace inquired. And then, before her mother could answer, "I'm delighted at that!" she cried. "He hasn't told me, but that's the way things happen." Lady Agnes was less optimistic than her daughter, and such optimism as she cultivated was a thin tissue with the sense of things as they are showing through. "If Nick becomes rich Charles Carteret will make him more so. If he doesn't he won't give him a shilling." "Oh mamma!" Grace demurred. "It's all very well to say that in public life money isn't as necessary as it used to be," her ladyship went on broodingly. "Those who say so don't know anything about it. It's always intensely necessary." Her daughter, visibly affected by the gloom of her manner, felt impelled to evoke as a corrective a more cheerful idea. "I daresay; but there's the fact--isn't there?--that poor papa had so little." "Yes, and there's the fact that it killed him!" These words came out with a strange, quick, little flare of passion. They startled Grace Dormer, who jumped in her place and gasped, "Oh mother!" The next instant, however, she added in a different voice, "Oh Peter!" for, with an air of eagerness, a gentleman was walking up to them. "How d'ye do, Cousin Agnes? How d'ye do, little Grace?" Peter Sherringham laughed and shook hands with them, and three minutes later was settled in his chair at their table, on which the first elements of the meal had been placed. Explanations, on one side and the other, were demanded and produced; from which it appeared that the two parties had been in some degree at cross-purposes. The day before Lady Agnes and her companions travelled to Paris Sherringham had gone to London for forty-eight hours on private business of the ambassador's, arriving, on his return by the night-train, only early that morning. There had accordingly been a delay in his receiving Nick Dormer's two notes. If Nick had come to the embassy in person--he might have done him the honour to call--he would have learned that the second secretary was absent. Lady Agnes was not altogether successful in assigning a motive to her son's neglect of this courteous form; she could but say: "I expected him, I wanted him to go; and indeed, not hearing from you, he would have gone immediately--an hour or two hence, on leaving this place. But we're here so quietly--not to go out, not to seem to appeal to the ambassador. Nick put it so--'Oh mother, we'll keep out of it; a friendly note will do.' I don't know definitely what he wanted to keep out of, unless anything like gaiety. The embassy isn't gay, I know. But I'm sure his note was friendly, wasn't it? I daresay you'll see for yourself. He's different directly he gets abroad; he doesn't seem to care." Lady Agnes paused a moment, not carrying out this particular elucidation; then she resumed: "He said you'd have seen Julia and that you'd understand everything from her. And when I asked how she'd know he said, 'Oh she knows everything!'" "He never said a word to me about Julia," Peter Sherringham returned. Lady Agnes and her daughter exchanged a glance at this: the latter had already asked three times where Julia was, and her ladyship dropped that they had been hoping she would be able to come with Peter. The young man set forth that she was at the moment at an hotel in the Rue de la Paix, but had only been there since that morning; he had seen her before proceeding to the Champs Elysées. She had come up to Paris by an early train--- she had been staying at Versailles, of all places in the world. She had been a week in Paris on her return from Cannes--her stay there had been of nearly a month: fancy!--and then had gone out to Versailles to see Mrs. Billinghurst. Perhaps they'd remember her, poor Dallow's sister. She was staying there to teach her daughters French--she had a dozen or two!--and Julia had spent three days with her. She was to return to England about the twenty-fifth. It would make seven weeks she must have been away from town--a rare thing for her; she usually stuck to it so in summer. "Three days with Mrs. Billinghurst--how very good-natured of her!" Lady Agnes commented. "Oh they're very nice to her," Sherringham said. "Well, I hope so!" Grace Dormer exhaled. "Why didn't you make her come here?" "I proposed it, but she wouldn't." Another eye-beam, at this, passed between the two ladies and Peter went on: "She said you must come and see her at the Hôtel de Hollande." "Of course we'll do that," Lady Agnes declared. "Nick went to ask about her at the Westminster." "She gave that up; they wouldn't give her the rooms she wanted, her usual set." "She's delightfully particular!" Grace said complacently. Then she added: "She _does_ like pictures, doesn't she?" Peter Sherringham stared. "Oh I daresay. But that's not what she has in her head this morning. She has some news from London--she's immensely excited." "What has she in her head?" Lady Agnes asked. "What's her news from London?" Grace added. "She wants Nick to stand." "Nick to stand?" both ladies cried. "She undertakes to bring him in for Harsh. Mr. Pinks is dead--the fellow, you know, who got the seat at the general election. He dropped down in London--disease of the heart or something of that sort. Julia has her telegram, but I see it was in last night's papers." "Imagine--Nick never mentioned it!" said Lady Agnes. "Don't you know, mother?--abroad he only reads foreign papers." "Oh I know. I've no patience with him," her ladyship continued. "Dear Julia!" "It's a nasty little place, and Pinks had a tight squeeze--107 or something of that sort; but if it returned a Liberal a year ago very likely it will do so again. Julia at any rate believes it can be made to--if the man's Nick--and is ready to take the order to put him in." "I'm sure if she can do it she will," Grace pronounced. "Dear, dear Julia! And Nick can do something for himself," said the mother of this candidate. "I've no doubt he can do anything," Peter Sherringham returned good-naturedly. Then, "Do you mean in expenses?" he inquired. "Ah I'm afraid he can't do much in expenses, poor dear boy! And it's dreadful how little we can look to Percy." "Well, I daresay you may look to Julia. I think that's her idea." "Delightful Julia!" Lady Agnes broke out. "If poor Sir Nicholas could have known! Of course he must go straight home," she added. "He won't like that," said Grace. "Then he'll have to go without liking it." "It will rather spoil _your_ little excursion, if you've only just come," Peter suggested; "to say nothing of the great Biddy's, if she's enjoying Paris." "We may stay perhaps--with Julia to protect us," said Lady Agnes. "Ah she won't stay; she'll go over for her man." "Her man----?" "The fellow who stands, whoever he is--especially if he's Nick." These last words caused the eyes of Peter Sherringham's companions to meet again, and he went on: "She'll go straight down to Harsh." "Wonderful Julia!" Lady Agnes panted. "Of course Nick must go straight there too." "Well, I suppose he must see first if they'll have him." "If they'll have him? Why how can he tell till he tries?" "I mean the people at headquarters, the fellows who arrange it." Lady Agnes coloured a little. "My dear Peter, do you suppose there will be the least doubt of their 'having' the son of his father?" "Of course it's a great name, Cousin Agnes--a very great name." "One of the greatest, simply," Lady Agnes smiled. "It's the best name in the world!" said Grace more emphatically. "All the same it didn't prevent his losing his seat." "By half-a-dozen votes: it was too odious!" her ladyship cried. "I remember--I remember. And in such a case as that why didn't they immediately put him in somewhere else?" "How one sees you live abroad, dear Peter! There happens to have been the most extraordinary lack of openings--I never saw anything like it--for a year. They've had their hand on him, keeping him all ready. I daresay they've telegraphed him." "And he hasn't told you?" Lady Agnes faltered. "He's so very odd when he's abroad!" "At home too he lets things go," Grace interposed. "He does so little--takes no trouble." Her mother suffered this statement to pass unchallenged, and she pursued philosophically: "I suppose it's because he knows he's so clever." "So he is, dear old man. But what does he do, what has he been doing, in a positive way?" "He has been painting." "Ah not seriously!" Lady Agnes protested. "That's the worst way," said Peter Sherringham. "Good things?" Neither of the ladies made a direct response to this, but Lady Agnes said: "He has spoken repeatedly. They're always calling on him." "He speaks magnificently," Grace attested. "That's another of the things I lose, living in far countries. And he's doing the Salon now with the great Biddy?" "Just the things in this part. I can't think what keeps them so long," Lady Agnes groaned. "Did you ever see such a dreadful place?" Sherringham stared. "Aren't the things good? I had an idea----!" "Good?" cried Lady Agnes. "They're too odious, too wicked." "Ah," laughed Peter, "that's what people fall into if they live abroad. The French oughtn't to live abroad!" "Here they come," Grace announced at this point; "but they've got a strange man with them." "That's a bore when we want to talk!" Lady Agnes sighed. Peter got up in the spirit of welcome and stood a moment watching the others approach. "There will be no difficulty in talking, to judge by the gentleman," he dropped; and while he remains so conspicuous our eyes may briefly rest on him. He was middling high and was visibly a representative of the nervous rather than of the phlegmatic branch of his race. He had an oval face, fine firm features, and a complexion that tended to the brown. Brown were his eyes, and women thought them soft; dark brown his hair, in which the same critics sometimes regretted the absence of a little undulation. It was perhaps to conceal this plainness that he wore it very short. His teeth were white, his moustache was pointed, and so was the small beard that adorned the extremity of his chin. His face expressed intelligence and was very much alive; it had the further distinction that it often struck superficial observers with a certain foreignness of cast. The deeper sort, however, usually felt it latently English enough. There was an idea that, having taken up the diplomatic career and gone to live in strange lands, he cultivated the mask of an alien, an Italian or a Spaniard; of an alien in time even--one of the wonderful ubiquitous diplomatic agents of the sixteenth century. In fact, none the less, it would have been impossible to be more modern than Peter Sherringham--more of one's class and one's country. But this didn't prevent several stray persons--Bridget Dormer for instance--from admiring the hue of his cheek for its olive richness and his moustache and beard for their resemblance to those of Charles I. At the same time--she rather jumbled her comparisons--she thought he recalled a Titian. IV Peter's meeting with Nick was of the friendliest on both sides, involving a great many "dear fellows" and "old boys," and his salutation to the younger of the Miss Dormers consisted of the frankest "Delighted to see you, my dear Bid!" There was no kissing, but there was cousinship in the air, of a conscious, living kind, as Gabriel Nash doubtless quickly noted, hovering for a moment outside the group. Biddy said nothing to Peter Sherringham, but there was no flatness in a silence which heaved, as it were, with the fairest physiognomic portents. Nick introduced Gabriel Nash to his mother and to the other two as "a delightful old friend" whom he had just come across, and Sherringham acknowledged the act by saying to Mr. Nash, but as if rather less for his sake than for that of the presenter: "I've seen you very often before." "Ah repetition--recurrence: we haven't yet, in the study of how to live, abolished that clumsiness, have we?" Mr. Nash genially inquired. "It's a poverty in the supernumeraries of our stage that we don't pass once for all, but come round and cross again like a procession or an army at the theatre. It's a sordid economy that ought to have been managed better. The right thing would be just _one_ appearance, and the procession, regardless of expense, for ever and for ever different." The company was occupied in placing itself at table, so that the only disengaged attention for the moment was Grace's, to whom, as her eyes rested on him, the young man addressed these last words with a smile. "Alas, it's a very shabby idea, isn't it? The world isn't got up regardless of expense!" Grace looked quickly away from him and said to her brother: "Nick, Mr. Pinks is dead." "Mr. Pinks?" asked Gabriel Nash, appearing to wonder where he should sit. "The member for Harsh; and Julia wants you to stand," the girl went on. "Mr. Pinks, the member for Harsh? What names to be sure!" Gabriel mused cheerfully, still unseated. "Julia wants me? I'm much obliged to her!" Nick absently said. "Nash, please sit by my mother, with Peter on her other side." "My dear, it isn't Julia"--Lady Agnes spoke earnestly. "Every one wants you. Haven't you heard from your people? Didn't you know the seat was vacant?" Nick was looking round the table to see what was on it. "Upon my word I don't remember. What else have you ordered, mother?" "There's some _boeuf braisé_, my dear, and afterwards some galantine. Here's a dish of eggs with asparagus-tips." "I advise you to go in for it, Nick," said Peter Sherringham, to whom the preparation in question was presented. "Into the eggs with asparagus-tips? _Donnez m'en s'il vous plaît_. My dear fellow, how can I stand? how can I sit? Where's the money to come from?" "The money? Why from Jul----!" Grace began, but immediately caught her mother's eye. "Poor Julia, how you do work her!" Nick exclaimed. "Nash, I recommend you the asparagus-tips. Mother, he's my best friend--do look after him." "I've an impression I've breakfasted--I'm not sure," Nash smiled. "With those beautiful ladies? Try again--you'll find out." "The money can be managed; the expenses are very small and the seat's certain," Lady Agnes pursued, not apparently heeding her son's injunction in respect to Nash. "Rather--if Julia goes down!" her elder daughter exclaimed. "Perhaps Julia won't go down!" Nick answered humorously. Biddy was seated next to Mr. Nash, so that she could take occasion to ask, "Who are the beautiful ladies?" as if she failed to recognise her brother's allusion. In reality this was an innocent trick: she was more curious than she could have given a suitable reason for about the odd women from whom her neighbour had lately separated. "Deluded, misguided, infatuated persons!" Mr. Nash replied, understanding that she had asked for a description. "Strange eccentric, almost romantic, types. Predestined victims, simple-minded sacrificial lambs!" This was copious, yet it was vague, so that Biddy could only respond: "Oh all that?" But meanwhile Peter Sherringham said to Nick: "Julia's here, you know. You must go and see her." Nick looked at him an instant rather hard, as if to say: "You too?" But Peter's eyes appeared to answer, "No, no, not I"; upon which his cousin rejoined: "Of course I'll go and see her. I'll go immediately. Please to thank her for thinking of me." "Thinking of you? There are plenty to think of you!" Lady Agnes said. "There are sure to be telegrams at home. We must go back--we must go back!" "We must go back to England?" Nick Dormer asked; and as his mother made no answer he continued: "Do you mean I must go to Harsh?" Her ladyship evaded this question, inquiring of Mr. Nash if he would have a morsel of fish; but her gain was small, for this gentleman, struck again by the unhappy name of the bereaved constituency, only broke out: "Ah what a place to represent! How can you--how can you?" "It's an excellent place," said Lady Agnes coldly. "I imagine you've never been there. It's a very good place indeed. It belongs very largely to my cousin, Mrs. Dallow." Gabriel partook of the fish, listening with interest. "But I thought we had no more pocket-boroughs." "It's pockets we rather lack, so many of us. There are plenty of Harshes," Nick Dormer observed. "I don't know what you mean," Lady Agnes said to Nash with considerable majesty. Peter Sherringham also addressed him with an "Oh it's all right; they come down on you like a shot!" and the young man continued ingenuously: "Do you mean to say you've to pay money to get into that awful place--that it's not _you_ who are paid?" "Into that awful place?" Lady Agnes repeated blankly. "Into the House of Commons. That you don't get a high salary?" "My dear Nash, you're delightful: don't leave me--don't leave me!" Nick cried; while his mother looked at him with an eye that demanded: "Who in the world's this extraordinary person?" "What then did you think pocket-boroughs were?" Peter Sherringham asked. Mr. Nash's facial radiance rested on him. "Why, boroughs that filled your pocket. To do that sort of thing without a bribe--_c'est trop fort!_" "He lives at Samarcand," Nick Dormer explained to his mother, who flushed perceptibly. "What do you advise me? I'll do whatever you say," he went on to his old acquaintance. "My dear, my dear----!" Lady Agnes pleaded. "See Julia first, with all respect to Mr. Nash. She's of excellent counsel," said Peter Sherringham. Mr. Nash smiled across the table at his host. "The lady first--the lady first! I've not a word to suggest as against any idea of hers." "We mustn't sit here too long, there'll be so much to do," said Lady Agnes anxiously, perceiving a certain slowness in the service of the _boeuf braisé_. Biddy had been up to this moment mainly occupied in looking, covertly and in snatches, at Peter Sherringham; as was perfectly lawful in a young lady with a handsome cousin whom she had not seen for more than a year. But her sweet voice now took license to throw in the words: "We know what Mr. Nash thinks of politics: he told us just now he thinks them dreadful." "No, not dreadful--only inferior," the personage impugned protested. "Everything's relative." "Inferior to what?" Lady Agnes demanded. Mr. Nash appeared to consider a moment. "To anything else that may be in question." "Nothing else is in question!" said her ladyship in a tone that would have been triumphant if it had not been so dry. "Ah then!" And her neighbour shook his head sadly. He turned after this to Biddy. "The ladies whom I was with just now and in whom you were so good as to express an interest?" Biddy gave a sign of assent and he went on: "They're persons theatrical. The younger one's trying to go upon the stage." "And are you assisting her?" Biddy inquired, pleased she had guessed so nearly right. "Not in the least--I'm rather choking her off. I consider it the lowest of the arts." "Lower than politics?" asked Peter Sherringham, who was listening to this. "Dear no, I won't say that. I think the Théâtre Français a greater institution than the House of Commons." "I agree with you there!" laughed Sherringham; "all the more that I don't consider the dramatic art a low one. It seems to me on the contrary to include all the others." "Yes--that's a view. I think it's the view of my friends." "Of your friends?" "Two ladies--old acquaintances--whom I met in Paris a week ago and whom I've just been spending an hour with in this place." "You should have seen them; they struck me very much," Biddy said to her cousin. "I should like to see them if they really have anything to say to the theatre." "It can easily be managed. Do you believe in the theatre?" asked Gabriel Nash. "Passionately," Sherringham confessed. "Don't you?" Before Nash had had time to answer Biddy had interposed with a sigh. "How I wish I could go--but in Paris I can't!" "I'll take you, Biddy--I vow I'll take you." "But the plays, Peter," the girl objected. "Mamma says they're worse than the pictures." "Oh, we'll arrange that: they shall do one at the Français on purpose for a delightful little yearning English girl." "Can you make them?" "I can make them do anything I choose." "Ah then it's the theatre that believes in _you_," said Mr. Nash. "It would be ungrateful if it didn't after all I've done for it!" Sherringham gaily opined. Lady Agnes had withdrawn herself from between him and her other guest and, to signify that she at least had finished eating, had gone to sit by her son, whom she held, with some importunity, in conversation. But hearing the theatre talked of she threw across an impersonal challenge to the paradoxical young man. "Pray should you think it better for a gentleman to be an actor?" "Better than being a politician? Ah, comedian for comedian, isn't the actor more honest?" Lady Agnes turned to her son and brought forth with spirit: "Think of your great father, Nicholas!" "He was an honest man," said Nicholas. "That's perhaps why he couldn't stand it." Peter Sherringham judged the colloquy to have taken an uncomfortable twist, though not wholly, as it seemed to him, by the act of Nick's queer comrade. To draw it back to safer ground he said to this personage: "May I ask if the ladies you just spoke of are English--Mrs. and Miss Rooth: isn't that the rather odd name?" "The very same. Only the daughter, according to her kind, desires to be known by some _nom de guerre_ before she has even been able to enlist." "And what does she call herself?" Bridget Dormer asked. "Maud Vavasour, or Edith Temple, or Gladys Vane--some rubbish of that sort." "What then is her own name?" "Miriam--Miriam Rooth. It would do very well and would give her the benefit of the prepossessing fact that--to the best of my belief at least--she's more than half a Jewess." "It is as good as Rachel Felix," Sherringham said. "The name's as good, but not the talent. The girl's splendidly stupid." "And more than half a Jewess? Don't you believe it!" Sherringham laughed. "Don't believe she's a Jewess?" Biddy asked, still more interested in Miriam Rooth. "No, no--that she's stupid, really. If she is she'll be the first." "Ah you may judge for yourself," Nash rejoined, "if you'll come to-morrow afternoon to Madame Carré, Rue de Constantinople, _à l'entresol_." "Madame Carré? Why, I've already a note from her--I found it this morning on my return to Paris--asking me to look in at five o'clock and listen to a _jeune Anglaise_." "That's my arrangement--I obtained the favour. The ladies want an opinion, and dear old Carré has consented to see them and to give one. Maud Vavasour will recite, and the venerable artist will pass judgement." Sherringham remembered he had his note in his pocket and took it out to look it over. "She wishes to make her a little audience--she says she'll do better with that--and she asks me because I'm English. I shall make a point of going." "And bring Dormer if you can: the audience will be better. Will you come, Dormer?" Mr. Nash continued, appealing to his friend--"will you come with me to hear an English amateur recite and an old French actress pitch into her?" Nick looked round from his talk with his mother and Grace. "I'll go anywhere with you so that, as I've told you, I mayn't lose sight of you--may keep hold of you." "Poor Mr. Nash, why is he so useful?" Lady Agnes took a cold freedom to inquire. "He steadies me, mother." "Oh I wish you'd take _me_, Peter," Biddy broke out wistfully to her cousin. "To spend an hour with an old French actress? Do _you_ want to go upon the stage?" the young man asked. "No, but I want to see something--to know something." "Madame Carré's wonderful in her way, but she's hardly company for a little English girl." "I'm not little, I'm only too big; and _she_ goes, the person you speak of." "For a professional purpose and with her good mother," smiled Mr. Nash. "I think Lady Agnes would hardly venture----!" "Oh I've seen her good mother!" said Biddy as if she had her impression of what the worth of that protection might be. "Yes, but you haven't heard her. It's then that you measure her." Biddy was wistful still. "Is it the famous Honorine Carré, the great celebrity?" "Honorine in person: the incomparable, the perfect!" said Peter Sherringham. "The first artist of our time, taking her altogether. She and I are old pals; she has been so good as to come and 'say' things--which she does sometimes still _dans le monde_ as no one else _can_--- in my rooms." "Make her come then. We can go _there_!" "One of these days!" "And the young lady--Miriam, Maud, Gladys--make her come too." Sherringham looked at Nash and the latter was bland. "Oh you'll have no difficulty. She'll jump at it!" "Very good. I'll give a little artistic tea--with Julia too of course. And you must come, Mr. Nash." This gentleman promised with an inclination, and Peter continued: "But if, as you say, you're not for helping the young lady, how came you to arrange this interview with the great model?" "Precisely to stop her short. The great model will find her very bad. Her judgements, as you probably know, are Rhadamanthine." "Unfortunate creature!" said Biddy. "I think you're cruel." "Never mind--I'll look after them," Sherringham laughed. "And how can Madame Carré judge if the girl recites English?" "She's so intelligent that she could judge if she recited Chinese," Peter declared. "That's true, but the _jeune Anglaise_ recites also in French," said Gabriel Nash. "Then she isn't stupid." "And in Italian, and in several more tongues, for aught I know." Sherringham was visibly interested. "Very good--we'll put her through them all." "She must be _most_ clever," Biddy went on yearningly. "She has spent her life on the Continent; she has wandered about with her mother; she has picked up things." "And is she a lady?" Biddy asked. "Oh tremendous! The great ones of the earth on the mother's side. On the father's, on the other hand, I imagine, only a Jew stockbroker in the City." "Then they're rich--or ought to be," Sherringham suggested. "Ought to be--ah there's the bitterness! The stockbroker had too short a go--he was carried off in his flower. However, he left his wife a certain property, which she appears to have muddled away, not having the safeguard of being herself a Hebrew. This is what she has lived on till to-day--this and another resource. Her husband, as she has often told me, had the artistic temperament: that's common, as you know, among _ces messieurs_. He made the most of his little opportunities and collected various pictures, tapestries, enamels, porcelains, and similar gewgaws. He parted with them also, I gather, at a profit; in short he carried on a neat little business as a _brocanteur_. It was nipped in the bud, but Mrs. Rooth was left with a certain number of these articles in her hands; indeed they must have formed her only capital. She was not a woman of business; she turned them, no doubt, to indifferent account; but she sold them piece by piece, and they kept her going while her daughter grew up. It was to this precarious traffic, conducted with extraordinary mystery and delicacy, that, five years ago, in Florence, I was indebted for my acquaintance with her. In those days I used to collect--heaven help me!--I used to pick up rubbish which I could ill afford. It was a little phase--we have our little phases, haven't we?" Mr. Nash asked with childlike trust--"and I've come out on the other side. Mrs. Rooth had an old green pot and I heard of her old green pot. To hear of it was to long for it, so that I went to see it under cover of night. I bought it and a couple of years ago I overturned and smashed it. It was the last of the little phase. It was not, however, as you've seen, the last of Mrs. Rooth. I met her afterwards in London, and I found her a year or two ago in Venice. She appears to be a great wanderer. She had other old pots, of other colours, red, yellow, black, or blue--she could produce them of any complexion you liked. I don't know whether she carried them about with her or whether she had little secret stores in the principal cities of Europe. To-day at any rate they seem all gone. On the other hand she has her daughter, who has grown up and who's a precious vase of another kind--less fragile I hope than the rest. May she not be overturned and smashed!" Peter Sherringham and Biddy Dormer listened with attention to this history, and the girl testified to the interest with which she had followed it by saying when Mr. Nash had ceased speaking: "A Jewish stockbroker, a dealer in curiosities: what an odd person to marry--for a person who was well born! I daresay he was a German." "His name must have been simply Roth, and the poor lady, to smarten it up, has put in another _o_," Sherringham ingeniously suggested. "You're both very clever," said Gabriel, "and Rudolf Roth, as I happen to know, was indeed the designation of Maud Vavasour's papa. But so far as the question of derogation goes one might as well drown as starve--for what connexion is _not_ a misalliance when one happens to have the unaccommodating, the crushing honour of being a Neville-Nugent of Castle Nugent? That's the high lineage of Maud's mamma. I seem to have heard it mentioned that Rudolf Roth was very versatile and, like most of his species, not unacquainted with the practice of music. He had been employed to teach the harmonium to Miss Neville-Nugent and she had profited by his lessons. If his daughter's like him--and she's not like her mother--he was darkly and dangerously handsome. So I venture rapidly to reconstruct the situation." A silence, for the moment, had fallen on Lady Agnes and her other two children, so that Mr. Nash, with his universal urbanity, practically addressed these last remarks to them as well as to his other auditors. Lady Agnes looked as if she wondered whom he was talking about, and having caught the name of a noble residence she inquired: "Castle Nugent--where in the world's that?" "It's a domain of immeasurable extent and almost inconceivable splendour, but I fear not to be found in any prosaic earthly geography!" Lady Agnes rested her eyes on the tablecloth as if she weren't sure a liberty had not been taken with her, or at least with her "order," and while Mr. Nash continued to abound in descriptive suppositions--"It must be on the banks of the Manzanares or the Guadalquivir"--Peter Sherringham, whose imagination had seemingly been kindled by the sketch of Miriam Rooth, took up the argument and reminded him that he had a short time before assigned a low place to the dramatic art and had not yet answered the question as to whether he believed in the theatre. Which gave the speaker a further chance. "I don't know that I understand your question; there are different ways of taking it. Do I think it's important? Is that what you mean? Important certainly to managers and stage-carpenters who want to make money, to ladies and gentlemen who want to produce themselves in public by limelight, and to other ladies and gentlemen who are bored and stupid and don't know what to do with their evening. It's a commercial and social convenience which may be infinitely worked. But important artistically, intellectually? How _can_ it be--so poor, so limited a form?" "Upon my honour it strikes me as rich and various! Do _you_ think it's a poor and limited form, Nick?" Sherringham added, appealing to his kinsman. "I think whatever Nash thinks. I've no opinion to-day but his." This answer of the hope of the Dormers drew the eyes of his mother and sisters to him and caused his friend to exclaim that he wasn't used to such responsibilities--so few people had ever tested his presence of mind by agreeing with him. "Oh I used to be of your way of feeling," Nash went on to Sherringham. "I understand you perfectly. It's a phase like another. I've been through it--_j'ai été comme ça._" "And you went then very often to the Théâtre Français, and it was there I saw you. I place you now." "I'm afraid I noticed none of the other spectators," Nash explained. "I had no attention but for the great Carré--she was still on the stage. Judge of my infatuation, and how I can allow for yours, when I tell you that I sought her acquaintance, that I couldn't rest till I had told her how I hung upon her lips." "That's just what _I_ told her," Sherringham returned. "She was very kind to me. She said: '_Vous me rendez des forces_.'" "That's just what she said to me!" "And we've remained very good friends." "So have we!" laughed Sherringham. "And such perfect art as hers--do you mean to say you don't consider _that_ important, such a rare dramatic intelligence?" "I'm afraid you read the _feuilletons_. You catch their phrases"--Nash spoke with pity. "Dramatic intelligence is never rare; nothing's more common." "Then why have we so many shocking actors?" "Have we? I thought they were mostly good; succeeding more easily and more completely in that business than in anything else. What could they do--those people generally--if they didn't do that poor thing? And reflect that the poor thing enables them to succeed! Of course, always, there are numbers of people on the stage who are no actors at all, for it's even easier to our poor humanity to be ineffectively stupid and vulgar than to bring down the house." "It's not easy, by what I can see, to produce, completely, any artistic effect," Sherringham declared; "and those the actor produces are among the most momentous we know. You'll not persuade me that to watch such an actress as Madame Carré wasn't an education of the taste, an enlargement of one's knowledge." "She did what she could, poor woman, but in what belittling, coarsening conditions! She had to interpret a character in a play, and a character in a play--not to say the whole piece: I speak more particularly of modern pieces--is such a wretchedly small peg to hang anything on! The dramatist shows us so little, is so hampered by his audience, is restricted to so poor an analysis." "I know the complaint. It's all the fashion now. The _raffinés_ despise the theatre," said Peter Sherringham in the manner of a man abreast with the culture of his age and not to be captured by a surprise. "_Connu, connu_!" "It will be known better yet, won't it? when the essentially brutal nature of the modern audience is still more perceived, when it has been properly analysed: the _omnium gatherum_ of the population of a big commercial city at the hour of the day when their taste is at its lowest, flocking out of hideous hotels and restaurants, gorged with food, stultified with buying and selling and with all the other sordid preoccupations of the age, squeezed together in a sweltering mass, disappointed in their seats, timing the author, timing the actor, wishing to get their money back on the spot--all before eleven o'clock. Fancy putting the exquisite before such a tribunal as that! There's not even a question of it. The dramatist wouldn't if he could, and in nine cases out of ten he couldn't if he would. He has to make the basest concessions. One of his principal canons is that he must enable his spectators to catch the suburban trains, which stop at 11.30. What would you think of any other artist--the painter or the novelist--whose governing forces should be the dinner and the suburban trains? The old dramatists didn't defer to them--not so much at least--and that's why they're less and less actable. If they're touched--the large loose men--it's only to be mutilated and trivialised. Besides, they had a simpler civilisation to represent--societies in which the life of man was in action, in passion, in immediate and violent expression. Those things could be put upon the playhouse boards with comparatively little sacrifice of their completeness and their truth. To-day we're so infinitely more reflective and complicated and diffuse that it makes all the difference. What can you do with a character, with an idea, with a feeling, between dinner and the suburban trains? You can give a gross, rough sketch of them, but how little you touch them, how bald you leave them! What crudity compared with what the novelist does!" "Do you write novels, Mr. Nash?" Peter candidly asked. "No, but I read them when they're extraordinarily good, and I don't go to plays. I read Balzac for instance--I encounter the admirable portrait of Valérie Marneffe in _La Cousine Bette_." "And you contrast it with the poverty of Emile Augier's Séraphine in _Les Lionnes Pauvres_? I was awaiting you there. That's the _cheval de bataille_ of you fellows." "What an extraordinary discussion! What dreadful authors!" Lady Agnes murmured to her son. But he was listening so attentively to the other young men that he made no response, and Peter Sherringham went on: "I've seen Madame Carré in things of the modern repertory, which she has made as vivid to me, caused to abide as ineffaceably in my memory, as Valérie Marneffe. She's the Balzac, as one may say, of actresses." "The miniaturist, as it were, of whitewashers!" Nash offered as a substitute. It might have been guessed that Sherringham resented his damned freedom, yet could but emulate his easy form. "You'd be magnanimous if you thought the young lady you've introduced to our old friend would be important." Mr. Nash lightly weighed it. "She might be much more so than she ever will be." Lady Agnes, however, got up to terminate the scene and even to signify that enough had been said about people and questions she had never so much as heard of. Every one else rose, the waiter brought Nicholas the receipt of the bill, and Sherringham went on, to his interlocutor: "Perhaps she'll be more so than you think." "Perhaps--if you take an interest in her!" "A mystic voice seems to exhort me to do so, to whisper that though I've never seen her I shall find something in her." On which Peter appealed. "What do you say, Biddy--shall I take an interest in her?" The girl faltered, coloured a little, felt a certain embarrassment in being publicly treated as an oracle. "If she's not nice I don't advise it." "And if she _is_ nice?" "You advise it still less!" her brother exclaimed, laughing and putting his arm round her. Lady Agnes looked sombre--she might have been saying to herself: "Heaven help us, what chance has a girl of mine with a man who's so agog about actresses?" She was disconcerted and distressed; a multitude of incongruous things, all the morning, had been forced upon her attention--displeasing pictures and still more displeasing theories about them, vague portents of perversity on Nick's part and a strange eagerness on Peter's, learned apparently in Paris, to discuss, with a person who had a tone she never had been exposed to, topics irrelevant and uninteresting, almost disgusting, the practical effect of which was to make light of her presence. "Let us leave this--let us leave this!" she grimly said. The party moved together toward the door of departure, and her ruffled spirit was not soothed by hearing her son remark to his terrible friend: "You know you don't escape me; I stick to you!" At this Lady Agnes broke out and interposed. "Pardon my reminding you that you're going to call on Julia." "Well, can't Nash also come to call on Julia? That's just what I want--that she should see him." Peter Sherringham came humanely to his kinswoman's assistance. "A better way perhaps will be for them to meet under my auspices at my 'dramatic tea.' This will enable me to return one favour for another. If Mr. Nash is so good as to introduce me to this aspirant for honours we estimate so differently, I'll introduce him to my sister, a much more positive quantity." "It's easy to see who'll have the best of it!" Grace Dormer declared; while Nash stood there serenely, impartially, in a graceful detached way which seemed characteristic of him, assenting to any decision that relieved him of the grossness of choice and generally confident that things would turn out well for him. He was cheerfully helpless and sociably indifferent; ready to preside with a smile even at a discussion of his own admissibility. "Nick will bring you. I've a little corner at the embassy," Sherringham continued. "You're very kind. You must bring _him_ then to-morrow--Rue de Constantinople." "At five o'clock--don't be afraid." "Oh dear!" Biddy wailed as they went on again and Lady Agnes, seizing his arm, marched off more quickly with her son. When they came out into the Champs Elysées Nick Dormer, looking round, saw his friend had disappeared. Biddy had attached herself to Peter, and Grace couldn't have encouraged Mr. Nash. V Lady Agnes's idea had been that her son should go straight from the Palais de l'Industrie to the Hôtel de Hollande, with or without his mother and his sisters as his humour should seem to recommend. Much as she desired to see their valued Julia, and as she knew her daughters desired it, she was quite ready to put off their visit if this sacrifice should contribute to a speedy confrontation for Nick. She was anxious he should talk with Mrs. Dallow, and anxious he should be anxious himself; but it presently appeared that he was conscious of no pressure of eagerness. His view was that she and the girls should go to their cousin without delay and should, if they liked, spend the rest of the day in her society. He would go later; he would go in the evening. There were lots of things he wanted to do meanwhile. This question was discussed with some intensity, though not at length, while the little party stood on the edge of the Place de la Concorde, to which they had proceeded on foot; and Lady Agnes noticed that the "lots of things" to which he proposed to give precedence over an urgent duty, a conference with a person who held out full hands to him, were implied somehow in the friendly glance with which he covered the great square, the opposite bank of the Seine, the steep blue roofs of the quay, the bright immensity of Paris. What in the world could be more important than making sure of his seat?--so quickly did the good lady's imagination travel. And now that idea appealed to him less than a ramble in search of old books and prints--since she was sure this was what he had in his head. Julia would be flattered should she know it, but of course she mustn't know it. Lady Agnes was already thinking of the least injurious account she could give of the young man's want of precipitation. She would have liked to represent him as tremendously occupied, in his room at their own hotel, in getting off political letters to every one it should concern, and particularly in drawing up his address to the electors of Harsh. Fortunately she was a woman of innumerable discretions, and a part of the worn look that sat in her face came from her having schooled herself for years, in commerce with her husband and her sons, not to insist unduly. She would have liked to insist, nature had formed her to insist, and the self-control had told in more ways than one. Even now it was powerless to prevent her suggesting that before doing anything else Nick should at least repair to the inn and see if there weren't some telegrams. He freely consented to do as much as this, and, having called a cab that she might go her way with the girls, kissed her again as he had done at the exhibition. This was an attention that could never displease her, but somehow when he kissed her she was really the more worried: she had come to recognise it as a sign that he was slipping away from her, and she wished she might frankly take it as his clutch at her to save him. She drove off with a vague sense that at any rate she and the girls might do something toward keeping the place warm for him. She had been a little vexed that Peter had not administered more of a push toward the Hôtel de Hollande, clear as it had become to her now that there was a foreignness in Peter which was not to be counted on and which made him speak of English affairs and even of English domestic politics as local and even "funny." They were very grandly local, and if one recalled, in public life, an occasional droll incident wasn't that, liberally viewed, just the warm human comfort of them? As she left the two young men standing together in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, the grand composition of which Nick, as she looked back, appeared to have paused to admire--as if he hadn't seen it a thousand times!--she wished she might have thought of Peter's influence with her son as exerted a little more in favour of localism. She had a fear he wouldn't abbreviate the boy's ill-timed _flânerie_. However, he had been very nice: he had invited them all to dine with him that evening at a convenient café, promising to bring Julia and one of his colleagues. So much as this he had been willing to do to make sure Nick and his sister should meet. His want of localism, moreover, was not so great as that if it should turn out that there _was_ anything beneath his manner toward Biddy--! The upshot of this reflexion might have been represented by the circumstance of her ladyship's remarking after a minute to her younger daughter, who sat opposite her in the _voiture de place_, that it would do no harm if she should get a new hat and that the search might be instituted that afternoon. "A French hat, mamma?" said Grace. "Oh do wait till she gets home!" "I think they're really prettier here, you know," Biddy opined; and Lady Agnes said simply: "I daresay they're cheaper." What was in her mind in fact was: "I daresay Peter thinks them becoming." It will be seen she had plenty of inward occupation, the sum of which was not lessened by her learning when she reached the top of the Rue de la Paix that Mrs. Dallow had gone out half an hour before and had left no message. She was more disconcerted by this incident than she could have explained or than she thought was right, as she had taken for granted Julia would be in a manner waiting for them. How could she be sure Nick wasn't coming? When people were in Paris a few days they didn't mope in the house, but she might have waited a little longer or have left an explanation. Was she then not so much in earnest about Nick's standing? Didn't she recognise the importance of being there to see him about it? Lady Agnes wondered if her behaviour were a sign of her being already tired of the way this young gentleman treated her. Perhaps she had gone out because an instinct told her that the great propriety of their meeting early would make no difference with him--told her he wouldn't after all come. His mother's heart sank as she glanced at this possibility that their precious friend was already tired, she having on her side an intuition that there were still harder things in store. She had disliked having to tell Mrs. Dallow that Nick wouldn't see her till the evening, but now she disliked still more her not being there to hear it. She even resented a little her kinswoman's not having reasoned that she and the girls would come in any event, and not thought them worth staying in for. It came up indeed that she would perhaps have gone to their hotel, which was a good way up the Rue de Rivoli, near the Palais Royal--on which the cabman was directed to drive to that establishment. As he jogged along she took in some degree the measure of what that might mean, Julia's seeking a little to avoid them. Was she growing to dislike them? Did she think they kept too sharp an eye on her, so that the idea of their standing in a still closer relation wouldn't be enticing? Her conduct up to this time had not worn such an appearance, unless perhaps a little, just a very little, in the matter of her ways with poor Grace. Lady Agnes knew she wasn't particularly fond of poor Grace, and could even sufficiently guess the reason--the manner in which Grace betrayed most how they wanted to make sure of her. She remembered how long the girl had stayed the last time she had been at Harsh--going for an acceptable week and dragging out her visit to a month. She took a private heroic vow that Grace shouldn't go near the place again for a year; not, that is, unless Nick and Julia were married within the time. If that were to happen she shouldn't care. She recognised that it wasn't absolutely everything Julia should be in love with Nick; it was also better she should dislike his mother and sisters after a probable pursuit of him than before. Lady Agnes did justice to the natural rule in virtue of which it usually comes to pass that a woman doesn't get on with her husband's female belongings, and was even willing to be sacrificed to it in her disciplined degree. But she desired not to be sacrificed for nothing: if she was to be objected to as a mother-in-law she wished to be the mother-in-law first. At the hotel in the Rue de Rivoli she had the disappointment of finding that Mrs. Dallow had not called, and also that no telegrams had come. She went in with the girls for half an hour and then straggled out with them again. She was undetermined and dissatisfied and the afternoon was rather a problem; of the kind, moreover, that she disliked most and was least accustomed to: not a choice between different things to do--her life had been full of that--but a want of anything to do at all. Nick had said to her before they separated: "You can knock about with the girls, you know; everything's amusing here." That was easily said while he sauntered and gossiped with Peter Sherringham and perhaps went to see more pictures like those in the Salon. He was usually, on such occasions, very good-natured about spending his time with them; but this episode had taken altogether a perverse, profane form. She had no desire whatever to knock about and was far from finding everything in Paris amusing. She had no aptitude for aimlessness, and moreover thought it vulgar. If she had found Julia's card at the hotel--the sign of a hope of catching them just as they came back from the Salon--she would have made a second attempt to see her before the evening; but now certainly they would leave her alone. Lady Agnes wandered joylessly with the girls in the Palais Royal and the Rue de Richelieu, and emerged upon the Boulevard, where they continued their frugal prowl, as Biddy rather irritatingly called it. They went into five shops to buy a hat for Biddy, and her ladyship's presumptions of cheapness were woefully belied. "Who in the world's your comic friend?" Peter Sherringham was meanwhile asking of his kinsman as they walked together. "Ah there's something else you lost by going to Cambridge--you lost Gabriel Nash!" "He sounds like an Elizabethan dramatist," Sherringham said. "But I haven't lost him, since it appears now I shan't be able to have you without him." "Oh, as for that, wait a little. I'm going to try him again, but I don't know how he wears. What I mean is that you've probably lost his freshness, which was the great thing. I rather fear he's becoming conventional, or at any rate serious." "Bless me, do you call that serious?" "He used to be so gay. He had a real genius for playing with ideas. He was a wonderful talker." "It seems to me he does very well now," said Peter Sherringham. "Oh this is nothing. He had great flights of old, very great flights; one saw him rise and rise and turn somersaults in the blue--one wondered how far he could go. He's very intelligent, and I should think it might be interesting to find out what it is that prevents the whole man from being as good as his parts. I mean in case he isn't so good." "I see you more than suspect that. Mayn't it be simply that he's too great an ass?" "That would be the whole--I shall see in time--but it certainly isn't one of the parts. It may be the effect, but it isn't the cause, and it's for the cause I claim an interest. Do you think him an ass for what he said about the theatre--his pronouncing it a coarse art?" "To differ from you about him that reason would do," said Sherringham. "The only bad one would be one that shouldn't preserve our difference. You needn't tell me you agree with him, for frankly I don't care." "Then your passion still burns?" Nick Dormer asked. "My passion--?" "I don't mean for any individual exponent of the equivocal art: mark the guilty conscience, mark the rising blush, mark the confusion of mind! I mean the old sign one knew you best by; your permanent stall at the Français, your inveterate attendance at _premières_, the way you 'follow' the young talents and the old." "Yes, it's still my little hobby, my little folly if you like," Sherringham said. "I don't find I get tired of it. What will you have? Strong predilections are rather a blessing; they're simplifying. I'm fond of representation--the representation of life: I like it better, I think, than the real thing. You like it too, you'd be ready in other conditions to go in for it, in your way--so you've no right to cast the stone. You like it best done by one vehicle and I by another; and our preference on either side has a deep root in us. There's a fascination to me in the way the actor does it, when his talent--ah he must have that!--has been highly trained. Ah it must _be_ that! The things he can do in this effort at representation, with the dramatist to back him, seem to me innumerable--he can carry it to a point!--and I take great pleasure in observing them, in recognising and comparing them. It's an amusement like another--I don't pretend to call it by any exalted name, but in this vale of friction it will serve. One can lose one's self in it, and it has the recommendation--in common, I suppose, with the study of the other arts--that the further you go in it the more you find. So I go rather far, if you will. But is it the principal sign one knows me by?" Peter abruptly asked. "Don't be ashamed of it," Nick returned--"else it will be ashamed of you. I ought to discriminate. You're distinguished among my friends and relations by your character of rising young diplomatist; but you know I always want the final touch to the picture, the last fruit of analysis. Therefore I make out that you're conspicuous among rising young diplomatists for the infatuation you describe in such pretty terms." "You evidently believe it will prevent my ever rising very high. But pastime for pastime is it any idler than yours?" "Than mine?" "Why you've half-a-dozen while I only allow myself the luxury of one. For the theatre's my sole vice, really. Is this more wanton, say, than to devote weeks to the consideration of the particular way in which your friend Mr. Nash may be most intensely a twaddler and a bore? That's not my ideal of choice recreation, but I'd undertake to satisfy you about him sooner. You're a young statesman--who happens to be an _en disponibilité_ for the moment--but you spend not a little of your time in besmearing canvas with bright-coloured pigments. The idea of representation fascinates you, but in your case it's representation in oils--or do you practise water-colours and pastel too? You even go much further than I, for I study my art of predilection only in the works of others. I don't aspire to leave works of my own. You're a painter, possibly a great one; but I'm not an actor." Nick Dormer declared he would certainly become one--he was so well on the way to it; and Sherringham, without heeding this charge, went on: "Let me add that, considering you _are_ a painter, your portrait of the complicated Nash is lamentably dim." "He's not at all complicated; he's only too simple to give an account of. Most people have a lot of attributes and appendages that dress them up and superscribe them, and what I like Gabriel for is that he hasn't any at all. It makes him, it keeps him, so refreshingly cool." "By Jove, you match him there! Isn't it an appendage and an attribute to escape kicking? How does he manage that?" Sherringham asked. "I haven't the least idea--I don't know that he doesn't rouse the kicking impulse. Besides, he can kick back and I don't think any one has ever seen him duck or dodge. His means, his profession, his belongings have never anything to do with the question. He doesn't shade off into other people; he's as neat as an outline cut out of paper with scissors. I like him, therefore, because in dealing with him you know what you've got hold of. With most men you don't: to pick the flower you must break off the whole dusty, thorny, worldly branch; you find you're taking up in your grasp all sorts of other people and things, dangling accidents and conditions. Poor Nash has none of those encumbrances: he's the solitary-fragrant blossom." "My dear fellow, you'd be better for a little of the same pruning!" Sherringham retorted; and the young men continued their walk and their gossip, jerking each other this way and that, punching each other here and there, with an amicable roughness consequent on their having, been boys together. Intimacy had reigned of old between the little Sherringhams and the little Dormers, united in the country by ease of neighbouring and by the fact that there was first cousinship, not neglected, among the parents, Lady Agnes standing in this plastic relation to Lady Windrush, the mother of Peter and Julia as well as of other daughters and of a maturer youth who was to inherit, and who since then had inherited, the ancient barony. Many things had altered later on, but not the good reasons for not explaining. One of our young men had gone to Eton and the other to Harrow--the scattered school on the hill was the tradition of the Dormers--and the divergence had rather taken its course in university years. Bricket, however, had remained accessible to Windrush, and Windrush to Bricket, to which estate Percival Dormer had now succeeded, terminating the interchange a trifle rudely by letting out that pleasant white house in the midlands--its expropriated inhabitants, Lady Agnes and her daughters, adored it--to an American reputed rich, who in the first flush of his sense of contrasts considered that for twelve hundred a year he got it at a bargain. Bricket had come to the late Sir Nicholas from his elder brother, dying wifeless and childless. The new baronet, so different from his father--though recalling at some points the uncle after whom he had been named--that Nick had to make it up by cultivating conformity, roamed about the world, taking shots which excited the enthusiasm of society, when society heard of them, at the few legitimate creatures of the chase the British rifle had up to that time spared. Lady Agnes meanwhile settled with her girls in a gabled, latticed house in a mentionable quarter, though it still required a little explaining, of the temperate zone of London. It was not into her lap, poor woman, that the revenues of Bricket were poured. There was no dower-house attached to that moderate property, and the allowance with which the estate was charged on her ladyship's behalf was not an incitement to grandeur. Nick had a room under his mother's roof, which he mainly used to dress for dinner when dining in Calcutta Gardens, and he had "kept on" his chambers in the Temple; for to a young man in public life an independent address was indispensable. Moreover, he was suspected of having a studio in an out-of-the-way district, the indistinguishable parts of South Kensington, incongruous as such a retreat might seem in the case of a member of Parliament. It was an absurd place to see his constituents unless he wanted to paint their portraits, a kind of "representation" with which they would scarce have been satisfied; and in fact the only question of portraiture had been when the wives and daughters of several of them expressed a wish for the picture of their handsome young member. Nick had not offered to paint it himself, and the studio was taken for granted rather than much looked into by the ladies in Calcutta Gardens. Too express a disposition to regard whims of this sort as extravagance pure and simple was known by them to be open to correction; for they were not oblivious that Mr. Carteret had humours which weighed against them in the shape of convenient cheques nestling between the inside pages of legible letters of advice. Mr. Carteret was Nick's providence, just as Nick was looked to, in a general way, to be that of his mother and sisters, especially since it had become so plain that Percy, who was not subtly selfish, would operate, mainly with a "six-bore," quite out of that sphere. It was not for studios certainly that Mr. Carteret sent cheques; but they were an expression of general confidence in Nick, and a little expansion was natural to a young man enjoying such a luxury as that. It was sufficiently felt in Calcutta Gardens that he could be looked to not to betray such confidence; for Mr. Carteret's behaviour could have no name at all unless one were prepared to call it encouraging. He had never promised anything, but he was one of the delightful persons with whom the redemption precedes or dispenses with the vow. He had been an early and lifelong friend of the late right honourable gentleman, a political follower, a devoted admirer, a stanch supporter in difficult hours. He had never married, espousing nothing more reproductive than Sir Nicholas's views--he used to write letters to the _Times_ in favour of them--and had, so far as was known, neither chick nor child; nothing but an amiable little family of eccentricities, the flower of which was his odd taste for living in a small, steep, clean country town, all green gardens and red walls with a girdle of hedge-rows, all clustered about an immense brown old abbey. When Lady Agnes's imagination rested upon the future of her second son she liked to remember that Mr. Carteret had nothing to "keep up": the inference seemed so direct that he would keep up Nick. The most important event in the life of this young man had been incomparably his success, under his father's eyes, more than two years before, in the sharp contest for Crockhurst--a victory which his consecrated name, his extreme youth, his ardour in the fray, the marked personal sympathy of the party, and the attention excited by the fresh cleverness of his speeches, tinted with young idealism and yet sticking sufficiently to the question--the burning question which has since burned out--had made quite splendid. There had been leaders in the newspapers about it, half in compliment to her husband, who was known to be failing so prematurely--he was almost as young to die, and to die famous, for Lady Agnes regarded it as famous, as his son had been to stand--tributes the boy's mother religiously preserved, cut out and tied together with a ribbon, in the innermost drawer of a favourite cabinet. But it had been a barren, or almost a barren triumph, for in the order of importance in Nick's history another incident had run it, as the phrase is, very close: nothing less than the quick dissolution of the Parliament in which he was so manifestly destined to give symptoms of a future. He had not recovered his seat at the general election, for the second contest was even sharper than the first and the Tories had put forward a loud, vulgar, rattling, bullying, money-spending man. It was to a certain extent a comfort that poor Sir Nicholas, who had been witness of the bright hour, should have passed away before the darkness. He died with all his hopes on his second son's head, unconscious of near disappointment, handing on the torch and the tradition, after a long, supreme interview with Nick at which Lady Agnes had not been present, but which she knew to have been a thorough paternal dedication, an august communication of ideas on the highest national questions (she had reason to believe he had touched on those of external as well as of domestic and of colonial policy) leaving on the boy's nature and manner from that moment the most unmistakable traces. If his tendency to reverie increased it was because he had so much to think over in what his pale father had said to him in the hushed dim chamber, laying on him the great mission that death had cut short, breathing into him with unforgettable solemnity the very accents--Sir Nicholas's voice had been wonderful for richness--that he was to sound again. It was work cut out for a lifetime, and that "co-ordinating power in relation to detail" which was one of the great characteristics of the lamented statesman's high distinction--the most analytic of the weekly papers was always talking about it--had enabled him to rescue the prospect from any shade of vagueness or of ambiguity. Five years before Nick Dormer went up to be questioned by the electors of Crockhurst Peter Sherringham had appeared before a board of examiners who let him off much less easily, though there were also some flattering prejudices in his favour; such influences being a part of the copious, light, unembarrassing baggage with which each of the young men began life. Peter passed, however, passed high, and had his reward in prompt assignment to small, subordinate, diplomatic duties in Germany. Since then he had had his professional adventures, which need not arrest us, inasmuch as they had all paled in the light of his appointment, nearly three years previous to the moment of our making his acquaintance, to a secretaryship of embassy in Paris. He had done well and had gone fast and for the present could draw his breath at ease. It pleased him better to remain in Paris as a subordinate than to go to Honduras as a principal, and Nick Dormer had not put a false colour on the matter in speaking of his stall at the Théâtre Français as a sedative to his ambition. Nick's inferiority in age to his cousin sat on him more lightly than when they had been in their teens; and indeed no one can very well be much older than a young man who has figured for a year, however imperceptibly, in the House of Commons. Separation and diversity had made them reciprocally strange enough to give a price to what they shared; they were friends without being particular friends; that further degree could always hang before them as a suitable but not oppressive contingency, and they were both conscious that it was in their interest to keep certain differences to "chaff" each other about--so possible was it that they might have quarrelled if they had had everything in common. Peter, as being wide-minded, was a little irritated to find his cousin always so intensely British, while Nick Dormer made him the object of the same compassionate criticism, recognised in him a rare knack with foreign tongues, but reflected, and even with extravagance declared, that it was a pity to have gone so far from home only to remain so homely. Moreover, Nick had his ideas about the diplomatic mind, finding in it, for his own sympathy, always the wrong turn. Dry, narrow, barren, poor he pronounced it in familiar conversation with the clever secretary; wanting in imagination, in generosity, in the finest perceptions and the highest courage. This served as well as anything else to keep the peace between them; it was a necessity of their friendly intercourse that they should scuffle a little, and it scarcely mattered what they scuffled about. Nick Dormer's express enjoyment of Paris, the shop-windows on the quays, the old books on the parapet, the gaiety of the river, the grandeur of the Louvre, every fine feature of that prodigious face, struck his companion as a sign of insularity; the appreciation of such things having become with Sherringham an unconscious habit, a contented assimilation. If poor Nick, for the hour, was demonstrative and lyrical, it was because he had no other way of sounding the note of farewell to the independent life of which the term seemed now definitely in sight--the sense so pressed upon him that these were the last moments of his freedom. He would waste time till half-past seven, because half-past seven meant dinner, and dinner meant his mother solemnly attended by the strenuous shade of his father and re-enforced by Julia. VI When he arrived with the three members of his family at the restaurant of their choice Peter Sherringham was already seated there by one of the immaculate tables, but Mrs. Dallow was not yet on the scene, and they had time for a sociable settlement--time to take their places and unfold their napkins, crunch their rolls, breathe the savoury air, and watch the door, before the usual raising of heads and suspension of forks, the sort of stir that accompanied most of this lady's movements, announced her entrance. The _dame de comptoir_ ducked and re-ducked, the people looked round, Peter and Nick got up, there was a shuffling of chairs--Julia had come. Peter was relating how he had stopped at her hotel to bring her with him and had found her, according to her custom, by no means ready; on which, fearing his guests would arrive first at the rendezvous and find no proper welcome, he had come off without her, leaving her to follow. He had not brought a friend, as he intended, having divined that Julia would prefer a pure family party if she wanted to talk about her candidate. Now she stood looking down at the table and her expectant kinsfolk, drawing off her gloves, letting her brother draw off her jacket, lifting her hands for some rearrangement of her hat. She looked at Nick last, smiling, but only for a moment. She said to Peter: "Are we going to dine here? Oh dear, why didn't you have a private room?" Nick had not seen her at all for several weeks and had seen her but little for a year, but her off-hand cursory manner had not altered in the interval. She spoke remarkably fast, as if speech were not in itself a pleasure--to have it over as soon as possible; and her _brusquerie_ was of the dark shade friendly critics account for by pleading shyness. Shyness had never appeared to him an ultimate quality or a real explanation of anything; it only explained an effect by another effect, neither with a cause to boast of. What he suspected in Julia was that her mind was less pleasing than her person; an ugly, a really blighting idea, which as yet he had but half accepted. It was a case in which she was entitled to the benefit of every doubt and oughtn't to be judged without a complete trial. Nick meanwhile was afraid of the trial--this was partly why he had been of late to see her so little--because he was afraid of the sentence, afraid of anything that might work to lessen the charm it was actually in the power of her beauty to shed. There were people who thought her rude, and he hated rude women. If he should fasten on that view, or rather if that view should fasten on him, what could still please and what he admired in her would lose too much of its sweetness. If it be thought odd that he had not yet been able to read the character of a woman he had known since childhood the answer is that this character had grown faster than Nick's observation. The growth was constant, whereas the observation was but occasional, though it had begun early. If he had attempted inwardly to phrase the matter, as he probably had not, he might have pronounced the effect she produced upon him too much a compulsion; not the coercion of design, of importunity, nor the vulgar pressure of family expectation, a betrayed desire he should like her enough to marry her, but a mixture of divers urgent things; of the sense that she was imperious and generous--probably more the former than the latter--and of a certain prevision of doom, the influence of the idea that he should come to it, that he was predestined. This had made him shrink from knowing the worst about her; not the wish to get used to it in time, but what was more characteristic of him, the wish to interpose a temporary illusion. Illusions and realities and hopes and fears, however, fell into confusion whenever he met her after a separation. The separation, so far as seeing her alone or as continuous talk was concerned, had now been tolerably long; had lasted really ever since his failure to regain his seat. An impression had come to him that she judged that failure rather stiffly, had thought, and had somewhat sharply said, that he ought to have done better. This was a part of her imperious way, and a part not _all_ to be overlooked on a mere present basis. If he were to marry her he should come to an understanding with her: he should give her his own measure as well as take hers. But the understanding might in the actual case suggest too much that he _was_ to marry her. You could quarrel with your wife because there were compensations--for her; but you mightn't be prepared to offer these compensations as prepayment for the luxury of quarrelling. It was not that such a luxury wouldn't be considerable, our young man none the less thought as Julia Dallow's fine head poised itself before him again; a high spirit was of course better than a mawkish to be mismated with, any day in the year. She had much the same colour as her brother, but as nothing else in her face was the same the resemblance was not striking. Her hair was of so dark a brown that it was commonly regarded as black, and so abundant that a plain arrangement was required to keep it in natural relation to the rest of her person. Her eyes were of a grey sometimes pronounced too light, and were not sunken in her face, but placed well on the surface. Her nose was perfect, but her mouth was too small; and Nick Dormer, and doubtless other persons as well, had sometimes wondered how with such a mouth her face could have expressed decision. Her figure helped it, for she appeared tall--being extremely slender--yet was not; and her head took turns and positions which, though a matter of but half an inch out of the common this way or that, somehow contributed to the air of resolution and temper. If it had not been for her extreme delicacy of line and surface she might have been called bold; but as it was she looked refined and quiet--refined by tradition and quiet for a purpose. And altogether she was beautiful, with the gravity of her elegant head, her hair like the depths of darkness, her eyes like its earlier clearing, her mouth like a rare pink flower. Peter said he had not taken a private room because he knew Biddy's tastes; she liked to see the world--she had told him so--the curious people, the coming and going of Paris. "Oh anything for Biddy!" Julia replied, smiling at the girl and taking her place. Lady Agnes and her elder daughter exchanged one of their looks, and Nick exclaimed jocosely that he didn't see why the whole party should be sacrificed to a presumptuous child. The presumptuous child blushingly protested she had never expressed any such wish to Peter, upon which Nick, with broader humour, revealed that Peter had served them so out of stinginess: he had pitchforked them together in the public room because he wouldn't go to the expense of a _cabinet_. He had brought no guest, no foreigner of distinction nor diplomatic swell, to honour them, and now they would see what a paltry dinner he would give them. Peter stabbed him indignantly with a long roll, and Lady Agnes, who seemed to be waiting for some manifestation on Mrs. Dallow's part which didn't come, concluded, with a certain coldness, that they quite sufficed to themselves for privacy as well as for society. Nick called attention to this fine phrase of his mother's and said it was awfully neat, while Grace and Biddy looked harmoniously at Julia's clothes. Nick felt nervous and joked a good deal to carry it off--a levity that didn't prevent Julia's saying to him after a moment: "You might have come to see me to-day, you know. Didn't you get my message from Peter?" "Scold him, Julia--scold him well. I begged him to go," said Lady Agnes; and to this Grace added her voice with an "Oh Julia, do give it to him!" These words, however, had not the effect they suggested, since Mrs. Dallow only threw off for answer, in her quick curt way, that that would be making far too much of him. It was one of the things in her that Nick mentally pronounced ungraceful, the perversity of pride or of shyness that always made her disappoint you a little if she saw you expected a thing. She snubbed effusiveness in a way that yet gave no interesting hint of any wish to keep it herself in reserve. Effusiveness, however, certainly, was the last thing of which Lady Agnes would have consented to be accused; and Nick, while he replied to Julia that he was sure he shouldn't have found her, was not unable to perceive the operation on his mother of that shade of manner. "He ought to have gone; he owed you that," she went on; "but it's very true he would have had the same luck as we. I went with the girls directly after luncheon. I suppose you got our card." "He might have come after I came in," said Mrs. Dallow. "Dear Julia, I'm going to see you to-night. I've been waiting for that," Nick returned. "Of course _we_ had no idea when you'd come in," said Lady Agnes. "I'm so sorry. You must come to-morrow. I hate calls at night," Julia serenely added. "Well then, will you roam with me? Will you wander through Paris on my arm?" Nick asked, smiling. "Will you take a drive with me?" "Oh that would be perfection!" cried Grace. "I thought we were all going somewhere--to the Hippodrome, Peter," Biddy said. "Oh not all; just you and me!" laughed Peter. "I'm going home to my bed. I've earned my rest," Lady Agnes sighed. "Can't Peter take _us_?" demanded Grace. "Nick can take you home, mamma, if Julia won't receive him, and I can look perfectly after Peter and Biddy." "Take them to something amusing; please take them," Mrs. Dallow said to her brother. Her voice was kind, but had the expectation of assent in it, and Nick observed both the good nature and the pressure. "You're tired, poor dear," she continued to Lady Agnes. "Fancy your being dragged about so! What did you come over for?" "My mother came because I brought her," Nick said. "It's I who have dragged her about. I brought her for a little change. I thought it would do her good. I wanted to see the Salon." "It isn't a bad time. I've a carriage and you must use it; you must use nothing else. It shall take you everywhere. I'll drive you about to-morrow." Julia dropped these words with all her air of being able rather than of wanting; but Nick had already noted, and he noted now afresh and with pleasure, that her lack of unction interfered not a bit with her always acting. It was quite sufficiently manifest to him that for the rest of the time she might be near his mother she would do for her numberless good turns. She would give things to the girls--he had a private adumbration of that; expensive Parisian, perhaps not perfectly useful, things. Lady Agnes was a woman who measured outlays and returns, but she was both too acute and too just not to recognise the scantest offer from which an advantage could proceed. "Dear Julia!" she exclaimed responsively; and her tone made this brevity of acknowledgment adequate. Julia's own few words were all she wanted. "It's so interesting about Harsh," she added. "We're immensely excited." "Yes, Nick looks it. _Merci, pas de vin_. It's just the thing for you, you know," Julia said to him. "To be sure he knows it. He's immensely grateful. It's really very kind of you." "You do me a very great honour, Julia," Nick hastened to add. "Don't be tiresome, please," that lady returned. "We'll talk about it later. Of course there are lots of points," Nick pursued. "At present let's be purely convivial. Somehow Harsh is such a false note here. _Nous causerons de ça_." "My dear fellow, you've caught exactly the tone of Mr. Gabriel Nash," Peter Sherringham declared on this. "Who's Mr. Gabriel Nash?" Mrs. Dallow asked. "Nick, is he a gentleman? Biddy says so," Grace Dormer interposed before this inquiry was answered. "It's to be supposed that any one Nick brings to lunch with us--!" Lady Agnes rather coldly sighed. "Ah Grace, with your tremendous standard!" her son said; while Peter Sherringham explained to his sister that Mr. Nash was Nick's new Mentor or oracle--whom, moreover, she should see if she would come and have tea with him. "I haven't the least desire to see him," Julia made answer, "any more than I have to talk about Harsh and bore poor Peter." "Oh certainly, dear, you'd bore me," her brother rang out. "One thing at a time then. Let us by all means be convivial. Only you must show me how," Mrs. Dallow went on to Nick. "What does he mean, Cousin Agnes? Does he want us to drain the wine-cup, to flash with repartee?" "You'll do very well," said Nick. "You're thoroughly charming to-night." "Do go to Peter's, Julia, if you want something exciting. You'll see a wonderful girl," Biddy broke in with her smile on Peter. "Wonderful for what?" "For thinking she can act when she can't," said the roguish Biddy. "Dear me, what people you all know! I hate Peter's theatrical people." "And aren't you going home, Julia?" Lady Agnes inquired. "Home to the hotel?" "Dear, no, to Harsh--to see about everything." "I'm in the midst of telegrams. I don't know yet." "I suppose there's no doubt they'll have him," Lady Agnes decided to pursue. "Who'll have whom?" "Why, the local people and the party managers. I'm speaking of the question of my son's standing." "They'll have the person I want them to have, I daresay. There are so many people in it, in one way or another--it's dreadful. I like the way you sit there," Julia went on to Nick. "So do I," he smiled back at her; and he thought she _was_ charming now, because she was gay and easy and willing really, though she might plead incompetence, to understand how jocose a dinner in a pothouse in a foreign town might be. She was in good humour or was going to be, and not grand nor stiff nor indifferent nor haughty nor any of the things people who disliked her usually found her and sometimes even a little made him believe her. The spirit of mirth in some cold natures manifests itself not altogether happily, their effort of recreation resembles too much the bath of the hippopotamus; but when Mrs. Dallow put her elbows on the table one felt she could be trusted to get them safely off again. For a family in mourning the dinner was lively; the more so that before it was half over Julia had arranged that her brother, eschewing the inferior spectacle, should take the girls to the Théâtre Français. It was her idea, and Nick had a chance to observe how an idea was apt to be not successfully controverted when it was Julia's. Even the programme appeared to have been prearranged to suit it, just the thing for the cheek of the young person--_Il ne Faut Jurer de Rien_ and _Mademoiselle de la Seiglière_. Peter was all willingness, but it was Julia who settled it, even to sending for the newspaper--he was by a rare accident unconscious of the evening's bill--and to reassuring Biddy, who was happy but anxious, on the article of their being too late for good places. Peter could always get good places: a word from him and the best box was at his disposal. She made him write the word on a card and saw a messenger despatched with it to the Rue de Richelieu; and all this without loudness or insistence, parenthetically and authoritatively. The box was bespoken and the carriage, as soon as they had had their coffee, found to be in attendance. Peter drove off in it with the girls, understanding that he was to send it back, and Nick waited for it over the finished repast with the two ladies. After this his mother was escorted to it and conveyed to her apartments, and all the while it had been Julia who governed the succession of events. "Do be nice to her," Lady Agnes breathed to him as he placed her in the vehicle at the door of the café; and he guessed it gave her a comfort to have left him sitting there with Mrs. Dallow. He had every disposition to be nice to his charming cousin; if things went as she liked them it was the proof of a certain fine force in her--the force of assuming they would. Julia had her differences--some of them were much for the better; and when she was in a mood like this evening's, liberally dominant, he was ready to encourage most of what she took for granted. While they waited for the return of the carriage, which had rolled away with his mother, she sat opposite him with her elbows on the table, playing first with one and then with another of the objects that encumbered it; after five minutes of which she exclaimed, "Oh I say, well go!" and got up abruptly, asking for her jacket. He said something about the carriage and its order to come back for them, and she replied, "Well, it can go away again. I don't want a carriage," she added: "I want to walk"--and in a moment she was out of the place, with the people at the tables turning round again and the _caissière_ swaying in her high seat. On the pavement of the boulevard she looked up and down; there were people at little tables by the door; there were people all over the broad expanse of the asphalt; there was a profusion of light and a pervasion of sound; and everywhere, though the establishment at which they had been dining was not in the thick of the fray, the tokens of a great traffic of pleasure, that night-aspect of Paris which represents it as a huge market for sensations. Beyond the Boulevard des Capucines it flared through the warm evening like a vast bazaar, and opposite the Café Durand the Madeleine rose theatrical, a high artful _décor_ before the footlights of the Rue Royale. "Where shall we go, what shall we do?" Mrs. Dallow asked, looking at her companion and somewhat to his surprise, as he had supposed she wanted but to go home. "Anywhere you like. It's so warm we might drive instead of going indoors. We might go to the Bois. That would be agreeable." "Yes, but it wouldn't be walking. However, that doesn't matter. It's mild enough for anything--for sitting out like all these people. And I've never walked in Paris at night. It would amuse me." Nick hesitated. "So it might, but it isn't particularly recommended to ladies." "I don't care for that if it happens to suit me." "Very well then, we'll walk to the Bastille if you like." Julia hesitated, on her side, still looking about. "It's too far; I'm tired; we'll sit here." And she dropped beside an empty table on the "terrace" of M. Durand. "This will do; it's amusing enough and we can look at the Madeleine--that's respectable. If we must have something we'll have a _madère_--is that respectable? Not particularly? So much the better. What are those people having? _Bocks_? Couldn't we have _bocks_? Are they very low? Then I shall have one. I've been so wonderfully good--I've been staying at Versailles: _je me dois bien cela_." She insisted, but pronounced the thin liquid in the tall glass very disgusting when it was brought. Nick was amazed, reflecting that it was not for such a discussion as this that his mother had left him with hands in his pockets. He had been looking out, but as his eloquence flowed faster he turned to his friend, who had dropped upon a sofa with her face to the window. She had given her jacket and gloves to her maid, but had kept on her hat; and she leaned forward a little as she sat, clasping her hands together in her lap and keeping her eyes on him. The lamp, in a corner, was so thickly veiled that the room was in tempered obscurity, lighted almost equally from the street and the brilliant shop-fronts opposite. "Therefore why be sapient and solemn about it, like an editorial in a newspaper?" Nick added with a smile. She continued to look at him after he had spoken, then she said: "If you don't want to stand you've only to say so. You needn't give your reasons." "It's too kind of you to let me off that! And then I'm a tremendous fellow for reasons; that's my strong point, don't you know? I've a lot more besides those I've mentioned, done up and ready for delivery. The odd thing is that they don't always govern my behaviour. I rather think I do want to stand." "Then what you said just now was a speech," Julia declared. "A speech?" "The 'rot,' the humbug of the hustings." "No, those great truths remain, and a good many others. But an inner voice tells me I'm in for it. And it will be much more graceful to embrace this opportunity, accepting your co-operation, than to wait for some other and forfeit that advantage." "I shall be very glad to help you anywhere," she went on. "Thanks awfully," he returned, still standing there with his hands in his pockets. "You'd do it best in your own place, and I've no right to deny myself such a help." Julia calmly considered. "I don't do it badly." "Ah you're so political!" "Of course I am; it's the only decent thing to be. But I can only help you if you'll help yourself. I can do a good deal, but I can't do everything. If you'll work I'll work with you; but if you're going into it with your hands in your pockets I'll have nothing to do with you." Nick instantly changed the position of these members and sank into a seat with his elbows on his knees. "You're very clever, but you must really take a little trouble. Things don't drop into people's mouths." "I'll try--I'll try. I've a great incentive," he admitted. "Of course you have." "My mother, my poor mother." Julia breathed some vague sound and he went on: "And of course always my father, dear good man. My mother's even more political than you." "I daresay she is, and quite right!" said Mrs. Dallow. "And she can't tell me a bit more than you can what she thinks, what she believes, what she wants." "Pardon me, I can tell you perfectly. There's one thing I always immensely want--to keep out a Tory." "I see. That's a great philosophy." "It will do very well. And I desire the good of the country. I'm not ashamed of that." "And can you give me an idea of what it is--the good of the country?" "I know perfectly what it isn't. It isn't what the Tories want to do." "What do they want to do?" "Oh it would take me long to tell you. All sorts of trash." "It would take you long, and it would take them longer! All they want to do is to prevent _us_ from doing. On our side we want to prevent them from preventing us. That's about as clearly as we all see it. So on both sides it's a beautiful, lucid, inspiring programme." "I don't believe in you," Mrs. Dallow replied to this, leaning back on her sofa. "I hope not, Julia, indeed!" He paused a moment, still with his face toward her and his elbows on his knees; then he pursued: "You're a very accomplished woman and a very zealous one; but you haven't an idea, you know--not to call an idea. What you mainly want is to be at the head of a political salon; to start one, to keep it up, to make it a success." "Much you know me!" Julia protested; but he could see, through the dimness, that her face spoke differently. "You'll have it in time, but I won't come to it," Nick went on. "You can't come less than you do." "When I say you'll have it I mean you've already got it. That's why I don't come." "I don't think you know what you mean," said Mrs. Dallow. "I've an idea that's as good as any of yours, any of those you've treated me to this evening, it seems to me--the simple idea that one ought to do something or other for one's country." "'Something or other' certainly covers all the ground. There's one thing one can always do for one's country, which is not to be afraid." "Afraid of what?" Nick Dormer waited a little, as if his idea amused him, but he presently said, "I'll tell you another time. It's very well to talk so glibly of standing," he added; "but it isn't absolutely foreign to the question that I haven't got the cash." "What did you do before?" she asked. "The first time my father paid." "And the other time?" "Oh Mr. Carteret." "Your expenses won't be at all large; on the contrary," said Julia. "They shan't be; I shall look out sharp for that. I shall have the great Hutchby." "Of course; but you know I want you to do it well." She paused an instant and then: "Of course you can send the bill to me." "Thanks awfully; you're tremendously kind. I shouldn't think of that." Nick Dormer got up as he spoke, and walked to the window again, his companion's eyes resting on him while he stood with his back to her. "I shall manage it somehow," he wound up. "Mr. Carteret will be delighted," said Julia. "I daresay, but I hate taking people's money." "That's nonsense--when it's for the country. Isn't it for _them_?" "When they get it back!" Nick replied, turning round and looking for his hat. "It's startlingly late; you must be tired." Mrs. Dallow made no response to this, and he pursued his quest, successful only when he reached a duskier corner of the room, to which the hat had been relegated by his cousin's maid. "Mr. Carteret will expect so much if he pays. And so would you." "Yes, I'm bound to say I should! I should expect a great deal--everything." And Mrs. Dallow emphasised this assertion by the way she rose erect. "If you're riding for a fall, if you're only going in to miss it, you had better stay out." "How can I miss it with _you_?" the young man smiled. She uttered a word, impatiently but indistinguishably, and he continued: "And even if I do it will have been immense fun." "It is immense fun," said Julia. "But the best fun is to win. If you don't----!" "If I don't?" he repeated as she dropped. "I'll never speak to you again." "How much you expect even when you don't pay!" Mrs. Dallow's rejoinder was a justification of this remark, expressing as it did the fact that should they receive on the morrow information on which she believed herself entitled to count, information tending to show how hard the Conservatives meant to fight, she should look to him to be in the field as early as herself. Sunday was a lost day; she should leave Paris on Monday. "Oh they'll fight it hard; they'll put up Kingsbury," said Nick, smoothing his hat. "They'll all come down--all that can get away. And Kingsbury has a very handsome wife." "She's not so handsome as your cousin," Julia smiled. "Oh dear, no--a cousin sooner than a wife any day!" Nick laughed as soon as he had said this, as if the speech had an awkward side; but the reparation perhaps scarcely mended it, the exaggerated mock-meekness with which he added: "I'll do any blessed thing you tell me." "Come here to-morrow then--as early as ten." She turned round, moving to the door with him; but before they reached it she brought out: "Pray isn't a gentleman to do anything, to be anything?" "To be anything----?" "If he doesn't aspire to serve the State." "Aspire to make his political fortune, do you mean? Oh bless me, yes, there are other things." "What other things that can compare with that?" "Well, I for instance, I'm very fond of the arts." "Of the arts?" she echoed. "Did you never hear of them? I'm awfully fond of painting." At this Julia stopped short, and her fine grey eyes had for a moment the air of being set further forward in her head. "Don't be odious! Good-night," she said, turning away and leaving him to go. BOOK SECOND VII Peter Sherringham reminded Nick the next day that he had promised to be present at Madame Carré's interview with the ladies introduced to her by Gabriel Nash; and in the afternoon, conformably to this arrangement, the two men took their way to the Rue de Constantinople. They found Mr. Nash and his friends in the small beflounced drawing-room of the old actress, who, as they learned, had sent in a request for ten minutes' grace, having been detained at a lesson--a rehearsal of the _comédie de salon_ about to be given for a charity by a fine lady, at which she had consented to be present as an adviser. Mrs. Rooth sat on a black satin sofa with her daughter beside her while Gabriel Nash, wandering about the room, looked at the votive offerings which converted the little panelled box, decorated in sallow white and gold, into a theatrical museum: the presents, the portraits, the wreaths, the diadems, the letters, framed and glazed, the trophies and tributes and relics collected by Madame Carré during half a century of renown. The profusion of this testimony was hardly more striking than the confession of something missed, something hushed, which seemed to rise from it all and make it melancholy, like a reference to clappings which, in the nature of things, could now only be present as a silence: so that if the place was full of history it was the form without the fact, or at the most a redundancy of the one to a pinch of the other--the history of a mask, of a squeak, of a series of vain gestures. Some of the objects exhibited by the distinguished artist, her early portraits, in lithograph or miniature, represented the costume and embodied the manner of a period so remote that Nick Dormer, as he glanced at them, felt a quickened curiosity to look at the woman who reconciled being alive to-day with having been alive so long ago. Peter Sherringham already knew how she managed this miracle, but every visit he paid her added to his amused, charmed sense that it _was_ a miracle and that his extraordinary old friend had seen things he should never, never see. Those were just the things he wanted to see most, and her duration, her survival, cheated him agreeably and helped him a little to guess them. His appreciation of the actor's art was so systematic that it had an antiquarian side, and at the risk of representing him as attached to an absurd futility it must be said that he had as yet hardly known a keener regret for anything than for the loss of that antecedent world, and in particular for his having belatedly missed the great _comédienne_, the light of the French stage in the early years of the century, of whose example and instruction Madame Carré had had the inestimable benefit. She had often described to him her rare predecessor, straight from whose hands she had received her most celebrated parts and of whom her own manner was often a religious imitation; but her descriptions troubled him more than they consoled, only confirming his theory, to which so much of his observation had already ministered, that the actor's art in general was going down and down, descending a slope with abysses of vulgarity at its foot, after having reached its perfection, more than fifty years ago, in the talent of the lady in question. He would have liked to dwell for an hour beneath the meridian. Gabriel Nash introduced the new-comers to his companions; but the younger of the two ladies gave no sign of lending herself to this transaction. The girl was very white; she huddled there, silent and rigid, frightened to death, staring, expressionless. If Bridget Dormer had seen her at this moment she might have felt avenged for the discomfiture of her own spirit suffered at the Salon, the day before, under the challenging eyes of Maud Vavasour. It was plain at the present hour that Miss Vavasour would have run away had she not regarded the persons present as so many guards and keepers. Her appearance made Nick feel as if the little temple of art in which they were collected had been the waiting-room of a dentist. Sherringham had seen a great many nervous girls tremble before the same ordeal, and he liked to be kind to them, to say things that would help them to do themselves justice. The probability in a given case was almost overwhelmingly in favour of their having any other talent one could think of in a higher degree than the dramatic; but he could rarely refrain from some care that the occasion shouldn't be, even as against his conscience, too cruel. There were occasions indeed that could scarce be too cruel to punish properly certain examples of presumptuous ineptitude. He remembered what Mr. Nash had said about this blighted maiden, and perceived that though she might be inept she was now anything but presumptuous. Gabriel fell to talking with Nick Dormer while Peter addressed himself to Mrs. Rooth. There was no use as yet for any direct word to the girl, who was too scared even to hear. Mrs. Rooth, with her shawl fluttering about her, nestled against her daughter, putting out her hand to take one of Miriam's soothingly. She had pretty, silly, near-sighted eyes, a long thin nose, and an upper lip which projected over the under as an ornamental cornice rests on its support. "So much depends--really everything!" she said in answer to some sociable observation of Sherringham's. "It's either this," and she rolled her eyes expressively about the room, "or it's--I don't know what!" "Perhaps we're too many," Peter hazarded to her daughter. "But really you'll find, after you fairly begin, that you'll do better with four or five." Before she answered she turned her head and lifted her fine eyes. The next instant he saw they were full of tears. The words she spoke, however, though uttered as if she had tapped a silver gong, had not the note of sensibility: "Oh, I don't care for _you_!" He laughed at this, declared it was very well said and that if she could give Madame Carré such a specimen as that----! The actress came in before he had finished his phrase, and he observed the way the girl ruefully rose to the encounter, hanging her head a little and looking out from under her brows. There was no sentiment in her face--only a vacancy of awe and anguish which had not even the merit of being fine of its kind, for it spoke of no spring of reaction. Yet the head was good, he noted at the same moment; it was strong and salient and made to tell at a distance. Madame Carré scarcely heeded her at first, greeting her only in her order among the others and pointing to seats, composing the circle with smiles and gestures, as if they were all before the prompter's box. The old actress presented herself to a casual glance as a red-faced, raddled woman in a wig, with beady eyes, a hooked nose, and pretty hands; but Nick Dormer, who had a sense for the over-scored human surface, soon observed that these comparatively gross marks included a great deal of delicate detail--an eyebrow, a nostril, a flitting of expressions, as if a multitude of little facial wires were pulled from within. This accomplished artist had in particular a mouth which was visibly a rare instrument, a pair of lips whose curves and fine corners spoke of a lifetime of "points" unerringly made and verses exquisitely spoken, helping to explain the purity of the sound that issued from them. Her whole countenance had the look of long service--of a thing infinitely worn and used, drawn and stretched to excess, with its elasticity overdone and its springs relaxed, yet religiously preserved and kept in repair, even as some valuable old timepiece which might have quivered and rumbled but could be trusted to strike the hour. At the first words she spoke Gabriel Nash exclaimed endearingly: _"Ah la voix de Célimène!"_ Célimène, who wore a big red flower on the summit of her dense wig, had a very grand air, a toss of the head, and sundry little majesties of manner; in addition to which she was strange, almost grotesque, and to some people would have been even terrifying, capable of reappearing, with her hard eyes, as a queer vision of the darkness. She excused herself for having made the company wait, and mouthed and mimicked in the drollest way, with intonations as fine as a flute, the performance and the pretensions of the _belles dames_ to whom she had just been endeavouring to communicate a few of the rudiments. _"Mais celles-là, c'est une plaisanterie,"_ she went on to Mrs. Rooth; "whereas you and your daughter, _chère madame_--I'm sure you are quite another matter." The girl had got rid of her tears, and was gazing at her, and Mrs. Rooth leaned forward and said portentously: "She knows four languages." Madame Carré gave one of her histrionic stares, throwing back her head. "That's three too many. The thing's to do something proper with one." "We're very much in earnest," continued Mrs. Rooth, who spoke excellent French. "I'm glad to hear it--_il n'y a que ça. La tête est bien_--the head's very good," she said as she looked at the girl. "But let us see, my dear child, what you've got in it!" The young lady was still powerless to speak; she opened her lips, but nothing came. With the failure of this effort she turned her deep sombre eyes to the three men. "_Un beau regard_--it carries well." Madame Carré further commented. But even as she spoke Miss Rooth's fine gaze was suffused again and the next moment she had definitely begun to weep. Nick Dormer sprung up; he felt embarrassed and intrusive--there was such an indelicacy in sitting there to watch a poor working-girl's struggle with timidity. There was a momentary confusion; Mrs. Rooth's tears were seen also to flow; Mr. Nash took it gaily, addressing, however, at the same time, the friendliest, most familiar encouragement to his companions, and Peter Sherringham offered to retire with Nick on the spot, should their presence incommode the young lady. But the agitation was over in a minute; Madame Carré motioned Mrs. Rooth out of her seat and took her place beside the girl, and Nash explained judiciously to the other men that she'd be worse should they leave her. Her mother begged them to remain, "so that there should be at least some English"; she spoke as if the old actress were an army of Frenchwomen. The young heroine of the occasion quickly came round, and Madame Carré, on the sofa beside her, held her hand and emitted a perfect music of reassurance. "The nerves, the nerves--they're half our affair. Have as many as you like, if you've got something else too. _Voyons_--do you know anything?" "I know some pieces." "Some pieces of the _répertoire_?" Miriam Rooth stared as if she didn't understand. "I know some poetry." "English, French, Italian, German," said her mother. Madame Carré gave Mrs. Rooth a look which expressed irritation at the recurrence of this announcement. "Does she wish to act in all those tongues? The phrase-book isn't the comedy!" "It's only to show you how she has been educated." "Ah, _chère madame_, there's no education that matters! I mean save the right one. Your daughter must have a particular form of speech, like me, like _ces messieurs_." "You see if I can speak French," said the girl, smiling dimly at her hostess. She appeared now almost to have collected herself. "You speak it in perfection." "And English just as well," said Miss Rooth. "You oughtn't to be an actress--you ought to be a governess." "Oh don't tell us that: it's to escape from that!" pleaded Mrs. Rooth. "I'm very sure your daughter will escape from that," Peter Sherringham was moved to interpose. "Oh if _you_ could help her!" said the lady with a world of longing. "She has certainly all the qualities that strike the eye," Peter returned. "You're _most_ kind, sir!" Mrs. Rooth declared, elegantly draping herself. "She knows Célimène; I've heard her do Célimène," Gabriel Nash said to Madame Carré". "And she knows Juliet, she knows Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra," added Mrs. Rooth. "_Voyons_, my dear child, do you wish to work for the French stage or for the English?" the old actress demanded. "Ours would have sore need of you, Miss Rooth," Sherringham gallantly threw off. "Could you speak to any one in London--could you introduce her?" her mother eagerly asked. "Dear madam, I must hear her first, and hear what Madame Carré says." "She has a voice of rare beauty, and I understand voices," said Mrs. Rooth. "Ah then if she has intelligence she has every gift." "She has a most poetic mind," the old lady went on. "I should like to paint her portrait; she's made for that," Nick Dormer ventured to observe to Mrs. Rooth; partly because struck with the girl's suitability for sitting, partly to mitigate the crudity of inexpressive spectatorship. "So all the artists say. I've had three or four heads of her, if you would like to see them: she has been done in several styles. If you were to do her I'm sure it would make her celebrated." "And me too," Nick easily laughed. "It would indeed--a member of Parliament!" Nash declared. "Ah, I have the honour----?" murmured Mrs. Rooth, looking gratified and mystified. Nick explained that she had no honour at all, and meanwhile Madame Carré had been questioning the girl "_Chère madame_, I can do nothing with your daughter: she knows too much!" she broke out. "It's a pity, because I like to catch them wild." "Oh she's wild enough, if that's all! And that's the very point, the question of where to try," Mrs. Rooth went on. "Into what do I launch her--upon what dangerous stormy sea? I've thought of it so anxiously." "Try here--try the French public: they're so much the most serious," said Gabriel Nash. "Ah no, try the English: there's such a rare opening!" Sherringham urged in quick opposition. "Oh it isn't the public, dear gentlemen. It's the private side, the other people--it's the life, it's the moral atmosphere." "_Je ne connais qu'une scène,--la nôtre_," Madame Carré declared. "I'm assured by every one who knows that there's no other." "Very correctly assured," said Mr. Nash. "The theatre in our countries is puerile and barbarous." "There's something to be done for it, and perhaps mademoiselle's the person to do it," Sherringham contentiously suggested. "Ah but, _en attendant_, what can it do for her?" Madame Carré asked. "Well, anything I can help to bring about," said Peter Sherringham, more and more struck with the girl's rich type. Miriam Rooth sat in silence while this discussion went on, looking from one speaker to the other with a strange dependent candour. "Ah, if your part's marked out I congratulate you, mademoiselle!"--and the old actress underlined the words as she had often underlined others on the stage. She smiled with large permissiveness on the young aspirant, who appeared not to understand her. Her tone penetrated, however, to certain depths in the mother's nature, adding another stir to agitated waters. "I feel the responsibility of what she shall find in the life, the standards, of the theatre," Mrs. Rooth explained. "Where is the purest tone--where are the highest standards? That's what I ask," the good lady continued with a misguided intensity which elicited a peal of unceremonious but sociable laughter from Gabriel Nash. "The purest tone--_qu'est-ce que c'est que ça_?" Madame Carré demanded in the finest manner of modern comedy. "We're very, _very_ respectable," Mrs. Rooth went on, but now smiling and achieving lightness too. "What I want is to place my daughter where the conduct--and the picture of conduct in which she should take part--wouldn't be quite absolutely dreadful. Now, _chère madame_, how about all that; how about _conduct_ in the French theatre--all the things she should see, the things she should hear, the things she should learn?" Her hostess took it, as Sherringham felt, _de très-haut_. "I don't think I know what you're talking about. They're the things she may see and hear and learn everywhere; only they're better done, they're better said, above all they're better taught. The only conduct that concerns an, actress, it seems to me, is her own, and the only way for her to behave herself is not to be a helpless stick. I know no other conduct." "But there are characters, there are situations, which I don't think I should like to see _her_ undertake." "There are many, no doubt, which she would do well to leave alone!" laughed the Frenchwoman. "I shouldn't like to see her represent a very bad woman--a _really_ bad one," Mrs. Rooth serenely pursued. "Ah in England then, and in your theatre, every one's immaculately good? Your plays must be even more ingenious than I supposed!" "We haven't any plays," said Gabriel Nash. "People will write them for Miss Rooth--it will be a new era," Sherringham threw in with wanton, or at least with combative, optimism. "Will _you_, sir--will you do something? A sketch of one of our grand English ideals?" the old lady asked engagingly. "Oh I know what you do with our pieces--to show your superior virtue!" Madame Carré cried before he had time to reply that he wrote nothing but diplomatic memoranda. "Bad women? _Je n'ai joué que ça, madame_. 'Really' bad? I tried to make them real!" "I can say 'L'Aventurière,'" Miriam interrupted in a cold voice which seemed to hint at a want of participation in the maternal solicitudes. "Allow us the pleasure of hearing you then. Madame Carré will give you the _réplique_," said Peter Sherringham. "Certainly, my child; I can say it without the book," Madame Carré responded. "Put yourself there--move that chair a little away." She patted her young visitor, encouraging her to rise, settling with her the scene they should take, while the three men sprang up to arrange a place for the performance. Miriam left her seat and looked vaguely about her; then having taken off her hat and given it to her mother she stood on the designated spot with her eyes to the ground. Abruptly, however, instead of beginning the scene, Madame Carré turned to the elder lady with an air which showed that a rejoinder to this visitor's remarks of a moment before had been gathering force in her breast. "You mix things up, _chère madame_, and I have it on my heart to tell you so. I believe it's rather the case with you other English, and I've never been able to learn that either your morality or your talent is the gainer by it. To be too respectable to go where things are done best is in my opinion to be very vicious indeed; and to do them badly in order to preserve your virtue is to fall into a grossness more shocking than any other. To do them well is virtue enough, and not to make a mess of it the only respectability. That's hard enough to merit Paradise. Everything else is base humbug! _Voilà, chère madame_, the answer I have for your scruples!" "It's admirable--admirable; and I am glad my friend Dormer here has had the great advantage of hearing you utter it!" Nash exclaimed with a free designation of Nick. That young man thought it in effect a speech denoting an intelligence of the question, yet he rather resented the idea that Gabriel should assume it would strike him as a revelation; and to show his familiarity with the line of thought it indicated, as well as to play his part appreciatively in the little circle, he observed to Mrs. Rooth, as if they might take many things for granted: "In other words, your daughter must find her safeguard in the artistic conscience." But he had no sooner spoken than he was struck with the oddity of their discussing so publicly, and under the poor girl's handsome nose, the conditions which Miss Rooth might find the best for the preservation of her personal integrity. However, the anomaly was light and unoppressive--the echoes of a public discussion of delicate questions seemed to linger so familiarly in the egotistical little room. Moreover, the heroine of the occasion evidently was losing her embarrassment; she was the priestess on the tripod, awaiting the afflatus and thinking only of that. Her bared head, of which she had changed the position, holding it erect, while her arms hung at her sides, was admirable; her eyes gazed straight out of the window and at the houses on the opposite side of the Rue de Constantinople. Mrs. Rooth had listened to Madame Carré with startled, respectful attention, but Nick, considering her, was very sure she hadn't at all taken in the great artist's little lesson. Yet this didn't prevent her from exclaiming in answer to himself: "Oh a fine artistic life--what indeed is more beautiful?" Peter Sherringham had said nothing; he was watching Miriam and her attitude. She wore a black dress which fell in straight folds; her face, under her level brows, was pale and regular--it had a strange, strong, tragic beauty. "I don't know what's in her," he said to himself; "nothing, it would seem, from her persistent vacancy. But such a face as that, such a head, is a fortune!" Madame Carré brought her to book, giving her the first line of the speech of Clorinde: "_Vous ne me fuyez pas, mon enfant, aujourd'hui_." But still the girl hesitated, and for an instant appeared to make a vain, convulsive effort. In this convulsion she frowned portentously; her low forehead overhung her eyes; the eyes themselves, in shadow, stared, splendid and cold, and her hands clinched themselves at her sides. She looked austere and terrible and was during this moment an incarnation the vividness of which drew from Sherringham a stifled cry. "_Elle est bien belle--ah ça_," murmured the old actress; and in the pause which still preceded the issue of sound from the girl's lips Peter turned to his kinsman and said in a low tone: "You must paint her just like that." "Like that?" "As the Tragic Muse." She began to speak; a long, strong, colourless voice quavered in her young throat. She delivered the lines of Clorinde in the admired interview with Célie, the gem of the third act, with a rude monotony, and then, gaining confidence, with an effort at modulation which was not altogether successful and which evidently she felt not to be so. Madame Carré sent back the ball without raising her hand, repeating the speeches of Célie, which her memory possessed from their having so often been addressed to her, and uttering the verses with soft, communicative art. So they went on through the scene, which, when it was over, had not precisely been a triumph for Miriam Rooth. Sherringham forbore to look at Gabriel Nash, and Madame Carré said: "I think you've a voice, _ma fille_, somewhere or other. We must try and put our hand on it." Then she asked her what instruction she had had, and the girl, lifting her eyebrows, looked at her mother while her mother prompted her. "Mrs. Delamere in London; she was once an ornament of the English stage. She gives lessons just to a very few; it's a great favour. Such a very nice person! But above all, Signor Ruggieri--I think he taught us most." Mrs. Rooth explained that this gentleman was an Italian tragedian, in Rome, who instructed Miriam in the proper manner of pronouncing his language and also in the art of declaiming and gesticulating. "Gesticulating I'll warrant!" declared their hostess. "They mimic as for the deaf, they emphasise as for the blind. Mrs. Delamere is doubtless an epitome of all the virtues, but I never heard of her. You travel too much," Madame Carré went on; "that's very amusing, but the way to study is to stay at home, to shut yourself up and hammer at your scales." Mrs. Rooth complained that they had no home to stay at; in reply to which the old actress exclaimed: "Oh you English, you're _d'une légèreté à faire frémir._ If you haven't a home you must make, or at least for decency pretend to, one. In our profession it's the first requisite." "But where? That's what I ask!" said Mrs. Rooth. "Why not here?" Sherringham threw out. "Oh here!" And the good lady shook her head with a world of sad significance. "Come and live in London and then I shall be able to paint your daughter," Nick Dormer interposed. "Is that all it will take, my dear fellow?" asked Gabriel Nash. "Ah, London's full of memories," Mrs. Rooth went on. "My father had a great house there--we always came up. But all that's over." "Study here and then go to London to appear," said Peter, feeling frivolous even as he spoke. "To appear in French?" "No, in the language of Shakespeare." "But we can't study that here." "Mr. Sherringham means that he will give you lessons," Madame Carré explained. "Let me not fail to say it--he's an excellent critic." "How do you know that--you who're beyond criticism and perfect?" asked Sherringham: an inquiry to which the answer was forestalled by the girl's rousing herself to make it public that she could recite the "Nights" of Alfred de Musset. "Diable!" said the actress: "that's more than I can! By all means give us a specimen." The girl again placed herself in position and rolled out a fragment of one of the splendid conversations of Musset's poet with his muse--rolled it loudly and proudly, tossed it and tumbled it about the room. Madame Carré watched her at first, but after a few moments she shut her eyes, though the best part of the business was to take in her young candidate's beauty. Sherringham had supposed Miriam rather abashed by the flatness of her first performance, but he now saw how little she could have been aware of this: she was rather uplifted and emboldened. She made a mush of the divine verses, which in spite of certain sonorities and cadences, an evident effort to imitate a celebrated actress, a comrade of Madame Carré, whom she had heard declaim them, she produced as if she had been dashing blindfold at some playfellow she was to "catch." When she had finished Madame Carré passed no judgement, only dropping: "Perhaps you had better say something English." She suggested some little piece of verse--some fable if there were fables in English. She appeared but scantily surprised to hear that there were not--it was a language of which one expected so little. Mrs. Rooth said: "She knows her Tennyson by heart. I think he's much deeper than La Fontaine"; and after some deliberation and delay Miriam broke into "The Lotus-Eaters," from which she passed directly, almost breathlessly, to "Edward Gray." Sherringham had by this time heard her make four different attempts, and the only generalisation very present to him was that she uttered these dissimilar compositions in exactly the same tone--a solemn, droning, dragging measure suggestive of an exhortation from the pulpit and adopted evidently with the "affecting" intention and from a crude idea of "style." It was all funereal, yet was artlessly rough. Sherringham thought her English performance less futile than her French, but he could see that Madame Carré listened to it even with less pleasure. In the way the girl wailed forth some of her Tennysonian lines he detected a faint gleam as of something pearly in deep water. But the further she went the more violently she acted on the nerves of Mr. Gabriel Nash: that also he could discover from the way this gentleman ended by slipping discreetly to the window and leaning there with his head out and his back to the exhibition. He had the art of mute expression; his attitude said as clearly as possible: "No, no, you can't call me either ill-mannered or ill-natured. I'm the showman of the occasion, moreover, and I avert myself, leaving you to judge. If there's a thing in life I hate it's this idiotic new fashion of the drawing-room recitation and of the insufferable creatures who practise it, who prevent conversation, and whom, as they're beneath it, you can't punish by criticism. Therefore what I'm doing's only too magnanimous--bringing these benighted women here, paying with my person, stifling my just repugnance." While Sherringham judged privately that the manner in which Miss Rooth had acquitted herself offered no element of interest, he yet remained aware that something surmounted and survived her failure, something that would perhaps be worth his curiosity. It was the element of outline and attitude, the way she stood, the way she turned her eyes, her head, and moved her limbs. These things held the attention; they had a natural authority and, in spite of their suggesting too much the school-girl in the _tableau-vivant_, a "plastic" grandeur. Her face, moreover, grew as he watched it; something delicate dawned in it, a dim promise of variety and a touching plea for patience, as if it were conscious of being able to show in time more shades than the simple and striking gloom which had as yet mainly graced it. These rather rude physical felicities formed in short her only mark of a vocation. He almost hated to have to recognise them; he had seen them so often when they meant nothing at all that he had come at last to regard them as almost a guarantee of incompetence. He knew Madame Carré valued them singly so little that she counted them out in measuring an histrionic nature; when deprived of the escort of other properties which helped and completed them she almost held them a positive hindrance to success--success of the only kind she esteemed. Far oftener than himself she had sat in judgement on young women for whom hair and eyebrows and a disposition for the statuesque would have worked the miracle of sanctifying their stupidity if the miracle were workable. But that particular miracle never was. The qualities she rated highest were not the gifts but the conquests, the effects the actor had worked hard for, had dug out of the mine by unwearied study. Sherringham remembered to have had in the early part of their acquaintance a friendly dispute with her on this subject, he having been moved at that time to defend doubtless to excess the cause of the gifts. She had gone so far as to say that a serious comedian ought to be ashamed of them--ashamed of resting his case on them; and when Sherringham had cited the great Rachel as a player whose natural endowment was rich and who had owed her highest triumphs to it, she had declared that Rachel was the very instance that proved her point;--a talent assisted by one or two primary aids, a voice and a portentous brow, but essentially formed by work, unremitting and ferocious work. "I don't care a straw for your handsome girls," she said; "but bring me one who's ready to drudge the tenth part of the way Rachel drudged, and I'll forgive her her beauty. Of course, _notez bien_, Rachel wasn't a _grosse bête_: that's a gift if you like!" Mrs. Rooth, who was evidently very proud of the figure her daughter had made--her daughter who for all one could tell affected their hostess precisely as a _grosse bête_--appealed to Madame Carré rashly and serenely for a verdict; but fortunately this lady's voluble _bonne_ came rattling in at the same moment with the tea-tray. The old actress busied herself in dispensing this refreshment, an hospitable attention to her English visitors, and under cover of the diversion thus obtained, while the others talked together, Sherringham put her the question: "Well, is there anything in my young friend?" "Nothing I can see. She's loud and coarse." "She's very much afraid. You must allow for that." "Afraid of me, immensely, but not a bit afraid of her authors--nor of you!" Madame Carré smiled. "Aren't you prejudiced by what that fellow Nash has told you?" "Why prejudiced? He only told me she was very handsome." "And don't you think her so?" "Admirable. But I'm not a photographer nor a dressmaker nor a coiffeur. I can't do anything with 'back hair' nor with a mere big stare." "The head's very noble," said Peter Sherringham. "And the voice, when she spoke English, had some sweet tones." "Ah your English--possibly! All I can say is that I listened to her conscientiously, and I didn't perceive in what she did a single _nuance_, a single inflexion or intention. But not one, _mon cher_. I don't think she's intelligent." "But don't they often seem stupid at first?" "Say always!" "Then don't some succeed--even when they're handsome?" "When they're handsome they always succeed--in one way or another." "You don't understand us English," said Peter Sherringham. Madame Carré drank her tea; then she replied: "Marry her, my son, and give her diamonds. Make her an ambassadress; she'll look very well." "She interests you so little that you don't care to do anything for her?" "To do anything?" "To give her a few lessons." The old actress looked at him a moment; after which, rising from her place near the table on which the tea had been served, she said to Miriam Rooth: "My dear child, I give my voice for the _scène anglaise_. You did the English things best." "Did I do them well?" asked the girl. "You've a great deal to learn; but you've rude force. The main things _sont encore a dégager_, but they'll come. You must work." "I think she has ideas," said Mrs. Rooth. "She gets them from you," Madame Carré replied. "I must say that if it's to be _our_ theatre I'm relieved. I do think ours safer," the good lady continued. "Ours is dangerous, no doubt." "You mean you're more severe," said the girl. "Your mother's right," the actress smiled; "you have ideas." "But what shall we do then--how shall we proceed?" Mrs. Rooth made this appeal, plaintively and vaguely, to the three gentlemen; but they had collected a few steps off and were so occupied in talk that it failed to reach them. "Work--work--work!" exclaimed the actress. "In English I can play Shakespeare. I want to play Shakespeare," Miriam made known. "That's fortunate, as in English you haven't any one else to play." "But he's so great--and he's so pure!" said Mrs. Rooth. "That indeed seems the saving of you," Madame Carré returned. "You think me actually pretty bad, don't you?" the girl demanded with her serious face. "_Mon Dieu, que vous dirai-je?_ Of course you're rough; but so was I at your age. And if you find your voice it may carry you far. Besides, what does it matter what I think? How can I judge for your English public?" "How shall I find my voice?" asked Miriam Rooth. "By trying. _Il n'y a que ça_. Work like a horse, night and day. Besides, Mr. Sherringham, as he says, will help you." That gentleman, hearing his name, turned round and the girl appealed to him. "Will you help me really?" "To find her voice," said Madame Carré. "The voice, when it's worth anything, comes from the heart; so I suppose that's where to look for it," Gabriel Nash suggested. "Much you know; you haven't got any!" Miriam retorted with the first scintillation of gaiety she had shown on this occasion. "Any voice, my child?" Mr. Nash inquired. "Any heart--or any manners!" Peter Sherringham made the secret reflexion that he liked her better lugubrious, as the note of pertness was not totally absent from her mode of emitting these few words. He was irritated, moreover, for in the brief conference he had just had with the young lady's introducer he had had to meet the rather difficult call of speaking of her hopefully. Mr. Nash had said with his bland smile, "And what impression does my young friend make?"--in respect to which Peter's optimism felt engaged by an awkward logic. He answered that he recognised promise, though he did nothing of the sort;--at the same time that the poor girl, both with the exaggerated "points" of her person and the vanity of her attempt at expression, constituted a kind of challenge, struck him as a subject for inquiry, a problem, an explorable tract. She was too bad to jump at and yet too "taking"--perhaps after all only vulgarly--to overlook, especially when resting her tragic eyes on him with the trust of her deep "Really?" This note affected him as addressed directly to his honour, giving him a chance to brave verisimilitude, to brave ridicule even a little, in order to show in a special case what he had always maintained in general, that the direction of a young person's studies for the stage may be an interest of as high an order as any other artistic appeal. "Mr. Nash has rendered us the great service of introducing us to Madame Carré, and I'm sure we're immensely indebted to him," Mrs. Rooth said to her daughter with an air affectionately corrective. "But what good does that do us?" the girl asked, smiling at the actress and gently laying her finger-tips upon her hand. "Madame Carré listens to me with adorable patience, and then sends me about my business--ah in the prettiest way in the world." "Mademoiselle, you're not so rough; the tone of that's very _juste. A la bonne heure_; work--work!" the actress cried. "There was an inflexion there--or very nearly. Practise it till you've got it." "Come and practise it to _me_, if your mother will be so kind as to bring you," said Peter Sherringham. "Do you give lessons--do you understand?" Miriam asked. "I'm an old play-goer and I've an unbounded belief in my own judgement." "'Old,' sir, is too much to say," Mrs. Rooth remonstrated. "My daughter knows your high position, but she's very direct. You'll always find her so. Perhaps you'll say there are less honourable faults. We'll come to see you with pleasure. Oh I've been at the embassy when I was her age. Therefore why shouldn't she go to-day? That was in Lord Davenant's time." "A few people are coming to tea with me to-morrow. Perhaps you'll come then at five o'clock." "It will remind me of the dear old times," said Mrs. Rooth. "Thank you; I'll try and do better to-morrow," Miriam professed very sweetly. "You do better every minute!" Sherringham returned--and he looked at their hostess in support of this declaration. "She's finding her voice," Madame Carré acknowledged. "She's finding a friend!" Mrs. Rooth threw in. "And don't forget, when you come to London, my hope that you'll come and see _me_," Nick Dormer said to the girl. "To try and paint you--that would do me good!" "She's finding even two," said Madame Carré. "It's to make up for one I've lost!" And Miriam looked with very good stage-scorn at Gabriel Nash. "It's he who thinks I'm bad." "You say that to make me drive you home; you know it will," Nash returned. "We'll all take you home; why not?" Sherringham asked. Madame Carré looked at the handsome girl, handsomer than ever at this moment, and at the three young men who had taken their hats and stood ready to accompany her. A deeper expression came for an instant into her hard, bright eyes. "_Ah la jeunesse_!" she sighed. "You'd always have that, my child, if you were the greatest goose on earth!" VIII At Peter Sherringham's the next day Miriam had so evidently come with the expectation of "saying" something that it was impossible such a patron of the drama should forbear to invite her, little as the exhibition at Madame Carré's could have contributed to render the invitation prompt. His curiosity had been more appeased than stimulated, but he felt none the less that he had "taken up" the dark-browed girl and her reminiscential mother and must face the immediate consequences of the act. This responsibility weighed upon him during the twenty-four hours that followed the ultimate dispersal of the little party at the door of the Hôtel de la Garonne. On quitting Madame Carré the two ladies had definitely declined Mr. Nash's offered cab and had taken their way homeward on foot and with the gentlemen in attendance. The streets of Paris at that hour were bright and episodical, and Sherringham trod them good-humouredly enough and not too fast, leaning a little to talk with Miriam as he went. Their pace was regulated by her mother's, who advanced on the arm of Gabriel Nash (Nick Dormer was on her other side) in refined deprecation. Her sloping back was before them, exempt from retentive stillness in spite of her rigid principles, with the little drama of her lost and recovered shawl perpetually going on. Sherringham said nothing to the girl about her performance or her powers; their talk was only of her manner of life with her mother--their travels, their _pensions_, their economies, their want of a home, the many cities she knew well, the foreign tongues and the wide view of the world she had acquired. He guessed easily enough the dolorous type of exile of the two ladies, wanderers in search of Continental cheapness, inured to queer contacts and compromises, "remarkably well connected" in England, but going out for their meals. The girl was but indirectly communicative; though seemingly less from any plan of secrecy than from the habit of associating with people whom she didn't honour with her confidence. She was fragmentary and abrupt, as well as not in the least shy, subdued to dread of Madame Carré as she had been for the time. She gave Sherringham a reason for this fear, and he thought her reason innocently pretentious. "She admired a great artist more than anything in the world; and in the presence of art, of _great_ art, her heart beat so fast." Her manners were not perfect, and the friction of a varied experience had rather roughened than smoothed her. She said nothing that proved her intelligent, even though he guessed this to be the design of two or three of her remarks; but he parted from her with the suspicion that she was, according to the contemporary French phrase, a "nature." The Hôtel de la Garonne was in a small unrenovated street in which the cobble-stones of old Paris still flourished, lying between the Avenue de l'Opéra and the Place de la Bourse. Sherringham had occasionally traversed the high dimness, but had never noticed the tall, stale _maison meublée_, the aspect of which, that of a third-rate provincial inn, was an illustration of Mrs. Rooth's shrunken standard. "We would ask you to come up, but it's quite at the top and we haven't a sitting-room," the poor lady bravely explained. "We had to receive Mr. Nash at a café." Nick Dormer declared that he liked cafés, and Miriam, looking at his cousin, dropped with a flash of passion the demand: "Do you wonder I should want to do something--so that we can stop living like pigs?" Peter recognised the next day that though it might be boring to listen to her it was better to make her recite than to let her do nothing, so effectually did the presence of his sister and that of Lady Agnes, and even of Grace and Biddy, appear, by a strange tacit opposition, to deprive hers, ornamental as it was, of a reason. He had only to see them all together to perceive that she couldn't pass for having come to "meet" them--even her mother's insinuating gentility failed to put the occasion on that footing--and that she must therefore be assumed to have been brought to show them something. She was not subdued, not colourless enough to sit there for nothing, or even for conversation--the sort of conversation that was likely to come off--so that it was inevitable to treat her position as connected with the principal place on the carpet, with silence and attention and the pulling together of chairs. Even when so established it struck him at first as precarious, in the light, or the darkness, of the inexpressive faces of the other ladies, seated in couples and rows on sofas--there were several in addition to Julia and the Dormers; mainly the wives, with their husbands, of Sherringham's fellow-secretaries--scarcely one of whom he felt he might count upon for a modicum of gush when the girl should have finished. Miss Rooth gave a representation of Juliet drinking the potion, according to the system, as her mother explained, of the famous Signor Ruggieri--a scene of high fierce sound, of many cries and contortions: she shook her hair (which proved magnificent) half-down before the performance was over. Then she declaimed several short poems by Victor Hugo, selected among many hundred by Mrs. Rooth, as the good lady was careful to make known. After this she jumped to the American lyre, regaling the company with specimens, both familiar and fresh, of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, and of two or three poetesses now revealed to Sherringham for the first time. She flowed so copiously, keeping the floor and rejoicing visibly in her luck, that her host was mainly occupied with wondering how he could make her leave off. He was surprised at the extent of her repertory, which, in view of the circumstance that she could never have received much encouragement--it must have come mainly from her mother, and he didn't believe in Signor Ruggieri--denoted a very stiff ambition and a blundering energy. It was her mother who checked her at last, and he found himself suspecting that Gabriel Nash had intimated to the old woman that interference was necessary. For himself he was chiefly glad Madame Carré hadn't come. It was present to him that she would have judged the exhibition, with its badness, its impudence, the absence of criticism, wholly indecent. His only new impression of the heroine of the scene was that of this same high assurance--her coolness, her complacency, her eagerness to go on. She had been deadly afraid of the old actress but was not a bit afraid of a cluster of _femmes du monde_, of Julia, of Lady Agnes, of the smart women of the embassy. It was positively these personages who were rather in fear; there was certainly a moment when even Julia was scared for the first time he had ever remarked it. The space was too small, the cries, the convulsions and rushes of the dishevelled girl were too near. Lady Agnes wore much of the time the countenance she might have shown at the theatre during a play in which pistols were fired; and indeed the manner of the young reciter had become more spasmodic and more explosive. It appeared, however, that the company in general thought her very clever and successful; which showed, to Sherringham's sense, how little they understood the matter. Poor Biddy was immensely struck; she grew flushed and absorbed in proportion as Miriam, at her best moments, became pale and fatal. It was she who spoke to her first, after it was agreed that they had better not fatigue her any more; she advanced a few steps, happening to be nearest--she murmured: "Oh thank you so much. I never saw anything so beautiful, so grand." She looked very red and very pretty as she said this, and Peter Sherringham liked her enough to notice her more and like her better when she looked prettier than usual. As he turned away he heard Miriam make answer with no great air of appreciation of her tribute: "I've seen you before--two days ago at the Salon with Mr. Dormer. Yes, I know he's your brother. I've made his acquaintance since. He wants to paint my portrait. Do you think he'll do it well?" He was afraid the girl was something of a brute--also somewhat grossly vain. This impression would perhaps have been confirmed if a part of the rest of the short conversation of the two young women had reached his ear. Biddy ventured to observe that she herself had studied modelling a little and that she could understand how any artist would think Miss Rooth a splendid subject. If indeed _she_ could attempt her head, that would be a chance indeed. "Thank you," said Miriam with a laugh as of high comedy. "I think I had rather not _passer par toute la famille_!" Then she added: "If your brother's an artist I don't understand how he's in Parliament." "Oh he isn't in Parliament now--we only hope he will be." "Ah I see." "And he isn't an artist either," Biddy felt herself conscientiously bound to state. "Then he isn't anything," said Miss Rooth. "Well--he's immensely clever." "Ah I see," Miss Rooth again replied. "Mr. Nash has puffed him up so." "I don't know Mr. Nash," said Biddy, guilty of a little dryness as well as of a little misrepresentation, and feeling rather snubbed. "Well, you needn't wish to." Biddy stood with her a moment longer, still looking at her and not knowing what to say next, but not finding her any less handsome because she had such odd manners. Biddy had an ingenious little mind, which always tried as much as possible to keep different things separate. It was pervaded now by the reflexion, attended with some relief, that if the girl spoke to her with such unexpected familiarity of Nick she said nothing at all about Peter. Two gentlemen came up, two of Peter's friends, and made speeches to Miss Rooth of the kind Biddy supposed people learned to make in Paris. It was also doubtless in Paris, the girl privately reasoned, that they learned to listen to them as this striking performer listened. She received their advances very differently from the way she had received Biddy's. Sherringham noticed his young kinswoman turn away, still very red, to go and sit near her mother again, leaving Miriam engaged with the two men. It appeared to have come over her that for a moment she had been strangely spontaneous and bold, and that she had paid a little of the penalty. The seat next her mother was occupied by Mrs. Rooth, toward whom Lady Agnes's head had inclined itself with a preoccupied tolerance. He had the conviction Mrs. Rooth was telling her about the Neville-Nugents of Castle Nugent and that Lady Agnes was thinking it odd she never had heard of them. He said to himself that Biddy was generous. She had urged Julia to come in order that they might see how bad the strange young woman would be, but now that the event had proved dazzling she forgot this calculation and rejoiced in what she innocently supposed to be the performer's triumph. She kept away from Julia, however; she didn't even look at her to invite her also to confess that, in vulgar parlance, they had been sold. He himself spoke to his sister, who was leaning back with a detached air in the corner of a sofa, saying something which led her to remark in reply: "Ah I daresay it's extremely fine, but I don't care for tragedy when it treads on one's toes. She's like a cow who has kicked over the milking-pail. She ought to be tied up." "My poor Julia, it isn't extremely fine; it isn't fine at all," Sherringham returned with some irritation. "Pardon me then. I thought that was why you invited us." "I imagined she was different," Peter said a little foolishly. "Ah if you don't care for her so much the better. It has always seemed to me you make too awfully much of those people." "Oh I do care for her too--rather. She's interesting." His sister gave him a momentary, mystified glance and he added: "And she's dreadful." He felt stupidly annoyed and was ashamed of his annoyance, as he could have assigned no reason for it. It didn't grow less for the moment from his seeing Gabriel Nash approach Julia, introduced by Nick Dormer. He gave place to the two young men with some alacrity, for he had a sense of being put in the wrong in respect to their specimen by Nash's very presence. He remembered how it had been a part of their bargain, as it were, that he should present that gentleman to his sister. He was not sorry to be relieved of the office by Nick, and he even tacitly and ironically wished his kinsman's friend joy of a colloquy with Mrs. Dallow. Sherringham's life was spent with people, he was used to people, and both as host and as guest he carried the social burden in general lightly. He could observe, especially in the former capacity, without uneasiness and take the temperature without anxiety. But at present his company oppressed him; he felt worried and that he showed it--which was the thing in the world he had ever held least an honour to a gentleman dedicated to diplomacy. He was vexed with the levity that had made him call his roomful together on so poor a pretext, and yet was vexed with the stupidity that made the witnesses so evidently find the pretext sufficient. He inwardly groaned at the delusion under which he had saddled himself with the Tragic Muse--a tragic muse who was strident and pert--and yet wished his visitors would go away and leave him alone with her. Nick Dormer said to Mrs. Dallow that he wanted her to know an old friend of his, one of the cleverest men he knew; and he added the hope that she would be gentle and encouraging with him; he was so timid and so easily disconcerted. Mr. Nash hereupon dropped into a chair by the arm of her sofa, their companion went away, and Mrs. Dallow turned her glance upon her new acquaintance without a perceptible change of position. Then she emitted with rapidity the remark: "It's very awkward when people are told one's clever." "It's only awkward if one isn't," Gabriel smiled. "Yes, but so few people are--enough to be talked about." "Isn't that just the reason why such a matter, such an exception, ought to be mentioned to them?" he asked. "They mightn't find it out for themselves. Of course, however, as you say, there ought to be a certainty; then they're surer to know it. Dormer's a dear fellow, but he's rash and superficial." Mrs. Dallow, at this incitement, turned her glance a second time on her visitor; but during the rest of the conversation she rarely repeated the movement. If she liked Nick Dormer extremely--and it may without more delay be communicated to the reader that she did--her liking was of a kind that opposed no difficulty whatever to her not liking, in case of such a complication, a person attached or otherwise belonging to him. It was not in her nature to "put up" with others for the sake of an individual she loved: the putting up was usually consumed in the loving, and with nothing left over. If the affection that isolates and simplifies its object may be distinguished from the affection that seeks communications and contracts for it, Julia Dallow's was quite of the encircling, not to say the narrowing sort. She was not so much jealous as essentially exclusive. She desired no experience for the familiar and yet partly unsounded kinsman in whom she took an interest that she wouldn't have desired for herself; and indeed the cause of her interest in him was partly the vision of his helping her to the particular extensions she did desire--the taste and thrill of great affairs and of public action. To have such ambitions for him appeared to her the highest honour she could do him; her conscience was in it as well as her inclination, and her scheme, to her sense, was noble enough to varnish over any disdain she might feel for forces drawing him another way. She had a prejudice, in general, against his existing connexions, a suspicion of them, and a supply of off-hand contempt in waiting. It was a singular circumstance that she was sceptical even when, knowing her as well as he did, he thought them worth recommending to her: the recommendation indeed mostly confirmed the suspicion. This was a law from which Gabriel Nash was condemned to suffer, if suffering could on any occasion be predicated of Gabriel Nash. His pretension was in truth that he had purged his life of such possibilities of waste, though probably he would have admitted that if that fair vessel should spring a leak the wound in its side would have been dealt by a woman's hand. In dining two evenings before with her brother and with the Dormers Mrs. Dallow had been moved to exclaim that Peter and Nick knew the most extraordinary people. As regards Peter the attitudinising girl and her mother now pointed that moral with sufficient vividness; so that there was little arrogance in taking a similar quality for granted of the conceited man at her elbow, who sat there as if he might be capable from one moment to another of leaning over the arm of her sofa. She had not the slightest wish to talk with him about himself, and was afraid for an instant that he was on the point of passing from the chapter of his cleverness to that of his timidity. It was a false alarm, however, for he only animadverted on the pleasures of the elegant extract hurled--literally _hurlé_ in general--from the centre of the room at one's defenceless head. He intimated that in his opinion these pleasures were all for the performers. The auditors had at any rate given Miss Rooth a charming afternoon; that of course was what Mrs. Dallow's kind brother had mainly intended in arranging the little party. (Julia hated to hear him call her brother "kind": the term seemed offensively patronising.) But he himself, he related, was now constantly employed in the same beneficence, listening two-thirds of his time to "intonations" and shrieks. She had doubtless observed it herself, how the great current of the age, the adoration of the mime, was almost too strong for any individual; how it swept one along and dashed one against the rocks. As she made no response to this proposition Gabriel Nash asked her if she hadn't been struck with the main sign of the time, the preponderance of the mountebank, the glory and renown, the personal favour, he enjoyed. Hadn't she noticed what an immense part of the public attention he held in London at least? For in Paris society was not so pervaded with him, and the women of the profession, in particular, were not in every drawing-room. "I don't know what you mean," Mrs. Dallow said. "I know nothing of any such people." "Aren't they under your feet wherever you turn--their performances, their portraits, their speeches, their autobiographies, their names, their manners, their ugly mugs, as the people say, and their idiotic pretensions?" "I daresay it depends on the places one goes to. If they're everywhere"--and she paused a moment--"I don't go everywhere." "I don't go anywhere, but they mount on my back at home like the Old Man of the Sea. Just observe a little when you return to London," Mr. Nash went on with friendly instructiveness. Julia got up at this--she didn't like receiving directions; but no other corner of the room appeared to offer her any particular reason for crossing to it: she never did such a thing without a great inducement. So she remained standing there as if she were quitting the place in a moment, which indeed she now determined to do; and her interlocutor, rising also, lingered beside her unencouraged but unperturbed. He proceeded to remark that Mr. Sherringham was quite right to offer Miss Rooth an afternoon's sport; she deserved it as a fine, brave, amiable girl. She was highly educated, knew a dozen languages, was of illustrious lineage, and was immensely particular. "Immensely particular?" Mrs. Dallow repeated. "Perhaps I should say rather that her mother's so on her behalf. Particular about the sort of people they meet--the tone, the standard. I'm bound to say they're like _you_: they don't go everywhere. That spirit's not so common in the mob calling itself good society as not to deserve mention." She said nothing for a moment; she looked vaguely round the room, but not at Miriam Rooth. Nevertheless she presently dropped as in forced reference to her an impatient shake. "She's dreadfully vulgar." "Ah don't say that to my friend Dormer!" Mr. Nash laughed. "Are you and he such great friends?" Mrs. Dallow asked, meeting his eyes. "Great enough to make me hope we shall be greater." Again for a little she said nothing, but then went on: "Why shouldn't I say to him that she's vulgar?" "Because he admires her so much. He wants to paint her." "To paint her?" "To paint her portrait." "Oh I see. I daresay she'd do for that." Mr. Nash showed further amusement. "If that's your opinion of her you're not very complimentary to the art he aspires to practise." "He aspires to practise?" she echoed afresh. "Haven't you talked with him about it? Ah you must keep him up to it!" Julia Dallow was conscious for a moment of looking uncomfortable; but it relieved her to be able to demand of her neighbour with a certain manner: "Are you an artist?" "I try to be," Nash smiled, "but I work in such difficult material." He spoke this with such a clever suggestion of mysterious things that she was to hear herself once more pay him the attention of taking him up. "Difficult material?" "I work in life!" At this she turned away, leaving him the impression that she probably misunderstood his speech, thinking he meant that he drew from the living model or some such platitude: as if there could have been any likelihood he would have dealings with the dead. This indeed would not fully have explained the abruptness with which she dropped their conversation. Gabriel, however, was used to sudden collapses and even to sudden ruptures on the part of those addressed by him, and no man had more the secret of remaining gracefully with his conversational wares on his hands. He saw Mrs. Dallow approach Nick Dormer, who was talking with one of the ladies of the embassy, and apparently signify that she wished to speak to him. He got up and they had a minute's talk, after which he turned and took leave of his fellow-visitors. She said a word to her brother, Nick joined her, and they then came together to the door. In this movement they had to pass near Nash, and it gave her an opportunity to nod good-bye to him, which he was by no means sure she would have done if Nick hadn't been with her. The young man just stopped; he said to Nash: "I should like to see you this evening late. You must meet me somewhere." "Well take a walk--I should like that," Nash replied. "I shall smoke a cigar at the café on the corner of the Place de l'Opéra--you'll find me there." He prepared to compass his own departure, but before doing so he addressed himself to the duty of a few civil words to Lady Agnes. This effort proved vain, for on one side she was defended by the wall of the room and on the other rendered inaccessible by Miriam's mother, who clung to her with a quickly-rooted fidelity, showing no symptom of desistance. Nash declined perforce upon her daughter Grace, who said to him: "You were talking with my cousin Mrs. Dallow." "To her rather than with her," he smiled. "Ah she's very charming," Grace said. "She's very beautiful." "And very clever," the girl continued. "Very, very intelligent." His conversation with Miss Dormer went little beyond this, and he presently took leave of Peter Sherringham, remarking to him as they shook hands that he was very sorry for him. But he had courted his fate. "What do you mean by my fate?" Sherringham asked. "You've got them for life." "Why for life, when I now clearly and courageously recognise that she isn't good?" "Ah but she'll become so," said Gabriel Nash. "Do you think that?" Sherringham brought out with a candour that made his visitor laugh. "_You_ will--that's more to the purpose!" the latter declared as he went away. Ten minutes later Lady Agnes substituted a general, vague assent for all further particular ones, drawing off from Mrs. Rooth and from the rest of the company with her daughters. Peter had had very little talk with Biddy, but the girl kept her disappointment out of her pretty eyes and said to him: "You told us she didn't know how--but she does!" There was no suggestion of disappointment in this. Sherringham held her hand a moment. "Ah it's you who know how, dear Biddy!" he answered; and he was conscious that if the occasion had been more private he would have all lawfully kissed her. Presently three more of his guests took leave, and Mr. Nash's assurance that he had them for life recurred to him as he observed that Mrs. Rooth and her damsel quite failed to profit by so many examples. The Lovicks remained--a colleague and his sociable wife--and Peter gave them a hint that they were not to plant him there only with the two ladies. Miriam quitted Mrs. Lovick, who had attempted, with no great subtlety, to engage her, and came up to her host as if she suspected him of a design of stealing from the room and had the idea of preventing it. "I want some more tea: will you give me some more? I feel quite faint. You don't seem to suspect how this sort of thing takes it out of one." Peter apologised extravagantly for not having seen to it that she had proper refreshment, and took her to the round table, in a corner, on which the little collation had been served. He poured out tea for her and pressed bread and butter on her and _petits fours_, of all which she profusely and methodically partook. It was late; the afternoon had faded and a lamp been brought in, the wide shade of which shed a fair glow on the tea-service and the plates of pretty food. The Lovicks sat with Mrs. Rooth at the other end of the room, and the girl stood at the table, drinking her tea and eating her bread and butter. She consumed these articles so freely that he wondered if she had been truly in want of a meal--if they were so poor as to have to count with that sort of privation. This supposition was softening, but still not so much so as to make him ask her to sit down. She appeared indeed to prefer to stand: she looked better so, as if the freedom, the conspicuity of being on her feet and treading a stage were agreeable to her. While Sherringham lingered near her all vaguely, his hands in his pockets and his mind now void of everything but a planned evasion of the theatrical question--there were moments when he was so plentifully tired of it--she broke out abruptly: "Confess you think me intolerably bad!" "Intolerably--no." "Only tolerably! I find that worse." "Every now and then you do something very right," Sherringham said. "How many such things did I do to-day?" "Oh three or four. I don't know that I counted very carefully." She raised her cup to her lips, looking at him over the rim of it--a proceeding that gave her eyes a strange expression. "It bores you and you think it disagreeable," she then said--"I mean a girl always talking about herself." He protested she could never bore him and she added: "Oh I don't want compliments--I want the hard, the precious truth. An actress has to talk about herself. What else can she talk about, poor vain thing?" "She can talk sometimes about other actresses." "That comes to the same thing. You won't be serious. I'm awfully serious." There was something that caught his attention in the note of this--a longing half hopeless, half argumentative to be believed in. "If one really wants to do anything one must worry it out; of course everything doesn't come the first day," she kept on. "I can't see everything at once; but I can see a little more--step by step--as I go; can't I?" "That's the way--that's the way," he gently enough returned. "When you see the things to do the art of doing them will come--if you hammer away. The great point's to see them." "Yes; and you don't think me clever enough for that." "Why do you say so when I've asked you to come here on purpose?" "You've asked me to come, but I've had no success." "On the contrary; every one thought you wonderful." "Oh but they don't know!" said Miriam Rooth. "You've not said a word to me. I don't mind your not having praised me; that would be too banal. But if I'm bad--and I know I'm dreadful--I wish you'd talk to me about it." "It's delightful to talk to you," Peter found himself saying. "No, it isn't, but it's kind"; and she looked away from him. Her voice had with this a quality which made him exclaim: "Every now and then you 'say' something--!" She turned her eyes back to him and her face had a light. "I don't want it to come by accident." Then she added: "If there's any good to be got from trying, from showing one's self, how can it come unless one hears the simple truth, the truth that turns one inside out? It's all for that--to know what one is, if one's a stick!" "You've great courage, you've rare qualities," Sherringham risked. She had begun to touch him, to seem different: he was glad she had not gone. But for a little she made no answer, putting down her empty cup and yearning over the table as for something more to eat. Suddenly she raised her head and broke out with vehemence: "I will, I will, I will!" "You'll do what you want, evidently." "I _will_ succeed--I _will_ be great. Of course I know too little, I've seen too little. But I've always liked it; I've never liked anything else. I used to learn things and do scenes and rant about the room when I was but five years old." She went on, communicative, persuasive, familiar, egotistical (as was necessary), and slightly common, or perhaps only natural; with reminiscences, reasons, and anecdotes, an unexpected profusion, and with an air of comradeship, of freedom in any relation, which seemed to plead that she was capable at least of embracing that side of the profession she desired to adopt. He noted that if she had seen very little, as she said, she had also seen a great deal; but both her experience and her innocence had been accidental and irregular. She had seen very little acting--the theatre was always too expensive. If she could only go often--in Paris for instance every night for six months--to see the best, the worst, everything, she would make things out, would observe and learn what to do, what not to do: it would be a school of schools. But she couldn't without selling the clothes off her back. It was vile and disgusting to be poor, and if ever she were to know the bliss of having a few francs in her pocket she would make up for it--that she could promise! She had never been acquainted with any one who could tell her anything--if it was good or bad or right or wrong--except Mrs. Delamere and poor Ruggieri. She supposed they had told her a great deal, but perhaps they hadn't, and she was perfectly willing to give it up if it was bad. Evidently Madame Carré thought so; she thought it was horrid. Wasn't it perfectly divine, the way the old woman had said those verses, those speeches of Célie? If she would only let her come and listen to her once in a while like that it was all she would ask. She had got lots of ideas just from that half-hour; she had practised them over, over, and over again, the moment she got home. He might ask her mother--he might ask the people next door. If Madame Carré didn't think she could work, she might have heard, could she have listened at the door, something that would show her. But she didn't think her even good enough to criticise--since that wasn't criticism, telling her her head was good. Of course her head was good--she needn't travel up to the _quartiers excentriques_ to find that out. It was her mother, the way she talked, who gave the idea that she wanted to be elegant and moral and a _femme du monde_ and all that sort of trash. Of course that put people off, when they were only thinking of the real right way. Didn't she know, Miriam herself, that this was the one thing to think of? But any one would be kind to her mother who knew what a dear she was. "She doesn't know when any thing's right or wrong, but she's a perfect saint," said the girl, obscuring considerably her vindication. "She doesn't mind when I say things over by the hour, dinning them into her ears while she sits there and reads. She's a tremendous reader; she's awfully up in literature. She taught me everything herself. I mean all that sort of thing. Of course I'm not so fond of reading; I go in for the book of life." Sherringham wondered if her mother had not at any rate taught her that phrase--he thought it highly probable. "It would give on _my_ nerves, the life I lead her," Miriam continued; "but she's really a delicious woman." The oddity of this epithet made Peter laugh, and altogether, in a few minutes, which is perhaps a sign that he abused his right to be a man of moods, the young lady had produced in him a revolution of curiosity, set his sympathy in motion. Her mixture, as it spread itself before him, was an appeal and a challenge: she was sensitive and dense, she was underbred and fine. Certainly she was very various, and that was rare; quite not at this moment the heavy-eyed, frightened creature who had pulled herself together with such an effort at Madame Carré's, nor the elated "phenomenon" who had just been declaiming, nor the rather affected and contradictious young person with whom he had walked home from the Rue de Constantinople. Was this succession of phases a sign she was really a case of the celebrated artistic temperament, the nature that made people provoking and interesting? That Sherringham himself was of this shifting complexion is perhaps proved by his odd capacity for being of two different minds very nearly at the same time. Miriam was pretty now, with felicities and graces, with charming, unusual eyes. Yes, there were things he could do for her; he had already forgotten the chill of Mr. Nash's irony, of his prophecy. He was even scarce conscious how little in general he liked hints, insinuations, favours asked obliquely and plaintively: that was doubtless also because the girl was suddenly so taking and so fraternising. Perhaps indeed it was unjust to qualify as roundabout the manner in which Miss Rooth conveyed that it was open to him not only to pay for her lessons, but to meet the expense of her nightly attendance with her mother at instructive exhibitions of theatrical art. It was a large order, sending the pair to all the plays; but what Peter now found himself thinking of was not so much its largeness as the possible interest of going with them sometimes and pointing the moral--the technical one--of showing her the things he liked, the things he disapproved. She repeated her declaration that she recognised the fallacy of her mother's view of heroines impossibly virtuous and of the importance of her looking out for such tremendously proper people. "One must let her talk, but of course it creates a prejudice," she said with her eyes on Mr. and Mrs. Lovick, who had got up, terminating their communion with Mrs. Rooth. "It's a great muddle, I know, but she can't bear anything coarse or nasty--and quite right too. I shouldn't either if I didn't have to. But I don't care a sou where I go if I can get to act, or who they are if they'll help me. I want to act--that's what I want to do; I don't want to meddle in people's affairs. I can look out for myself--I'm all right!" the girl exclaimed roundly, frankly, with a ring of honesty which made her crude and pure. "As for doing the bad ones I'm not afraid of that." "The bad ones?" "The bad women in the plays--like Madame Carré. I'll do any vile creature." "I think you'll do best what you are"--and Sherringham laughed for the interest of it. "You're a strange girl." "_Je crois bien_! Doesn't one have to be, to want to go and exhibit one's self to a loathsome crowd, on a platform, with trumpets and a big drum, for money--to parade one's body and one's soul?" He looked at her a moment: her face changed constantly; now it had a fine flush and a noble delicacy. "Give it up. You're too good for it," he found himself pleading. "I doubt if you've an idea of what girls have to go through." "Never, never--never till I'm pelted!" she cried. "Then stay on here a bit. I'll take you to the theatres." "Oh you dear!" Miriam delightedly exclaimed. Mr. and Mrs. Lovick, accompanied by Mrs. Rooth, now crossed the room to them, and the girl went on in the same tone: "Mamma dear, he's the best friend we've ever had--he's a great deal nicer than I thought." "So are you, mademoiselle," said Peter Sherringham. "Oh, I trust Mr. Sherringham--I trust him infinitely," Mrs. Rooth returned, covering him with her mild, respectable, wheedling eyes. "The kindness of every one has been beyond everything. Mr. and Mrs. Lovick can't say enough. They make the most obliging offers. They want you to know their brother." "Oh I say, he's no brother of mine," Mr. Lovick protested good-naturedly. "They think he'll be so suggestive, he'll put us up to the right things," Mrs. Rooth went on. "It's just a little brother of mine--such a dear, amusing, clever boy," Mrs. Lovick explained. "Do you know she has got nine? Upon my honour she has!" said her husband. "This one is the sixth. Fancy if I had to take them all over!" "Yes, it makes it rather awkward," Mrs. Lovick amiably conceded. "He has gone on the stage, poor darling--but he acts rather well." "He tried for the diplomatic service, but he didn't precisely dazzle his examiners," Mr. Lovick further mentioned. "Edmund's very nasty about him. There are lots of gentlemen on the stage--he's not the first." "It's such a comfort to hear that," said Mrs. Rooth. "I'm much obliged to you. Has he got a theatre?" Miriam asked. "My dear young lady, he hasn't even got an engagement," replied the young man's terrible brother-in-law. "He hasn't been at it very long, but I'm sure he'll get on. He's immensely in earnest and very good-looking. I just said that if he should come over to see us you might rather like to meet him. He might give you some tips, as my husband says." "I don't care for his looks, but I should like his tips," Miriam liberally smiled. "And is he coming over to see you?" asked Sherringham, to whom, while this exchange of remarks, which he had not lost, was going on, Mrs. Rooth had in lowered accents addressed herself. "Not if I can help it I think!" But Mr. Lovick was so gaily rude that it wasn't embarrassing. "Oh sir, I'm sure you're fond of him," Mrs. Rooth remonstrated as the party passed together into the antechamber. "No, really, I like some of the others--four or five of them; but I don't like Arty." "We'll make it up to him, then; _we_'ll like him," Miriam answered with spirit; and her voice rang in the staircase--Sherringham attended them a little way--with a charm which her host had rather missed in her loudness of the day before. IX Nick Dormer found his friend Nash that evening at the place of their tryst--smoking a cigar, in the warm bright night, on the terrace of the café forming one of the angles of the Place de l'Opéra. He sat down with him, but at the end of five minutes uttered a protest against the crush and confusion, the publicity and vulgarity of the place, the shuffling procession of the crowd, the jostle of fellow-customers, the perpetual brush of waiters. "Come away; I want to talk to you and I can't talk here. I don't care where we go. It will be pleasant to walk; well stroll away to the _quartiers sérieux_. Each time I come to Paris I at the end of three days take the Boulevard, with its conventional grimace, into greater aversion. I hate even to cross it--I go half a mile round to avoid it." The young men took their course together down the Rue de la Paix to the Rue de Rivoli, which they crossed, passing beside the gilded rails of the Tuileries. The beauty of the night--the only defect of which was that the immense illumination of Paris kept it from being quite night enough, made it a sort of bedizened, rejuvenated day--gave a charm to the quieter streets, drew our friends away to the right, to the river and the bridges, the older, duskier city. The pale ghost of the palace that had perished by fire hung over them a while, and, by the passage now open at all times across the garden of the Tuileries, they came out upon the Seine. They kept on and on, moving slowly, smoking, talking, pausing, stopping to look, to emphasise, to compare. They fell into discussion, into confidence, into inquiry, sympathetic or satiric, and into explanations which needed in turn to be explained. The balmy night, the time for talk, the amusement of Paris, the memory of younger passages, gave a lift to the occasion. Nick had already forgotten his little brush with Julia on his leaving Peter's tea-party at her side, and that he had been almost disconcerted by the asperity with which she denounced the odious man he had taken it into his head to force upon her. Impertinent and fatuous she had called him; and when Nick began to plead that he was really neither of these things, though he could imagine his manner might sometimes suggest them, she had declared that she didn't wish to argue about him or ever to hear of him again. Nick hadn't counted on her liking Gabriel Nash, but had thought her not liking him wouldn't perceptibly matter. He had given himself the diversion, not cruel surely to any one concerned, of seeing what she would make of a type she had never before met. She had made even less than he expected, and her intimation that he had played her a trick had been irritating enough to prevent his reflecting that the offence might have been in some degree with Nash. But he had recovered from his resentment sufficiently to ask this personage, with every possible circumstance of implied consideration for the lady, what had been the impression made by his charming cousin. "Upon my word, my dear fellow, I don't regard that as a fair question," Gabriel said. "Besides, if you think Mrs. Dallow charming what on earth need it matter to you what I think? The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion's about a woman." "It was to help me to find out what I think of yourself," Nick returned. "Oh, that you'll never do. I shall bewilder you to the end. The lady with whom you were so good as to make me acquainted is a beautiful specimen of the English garden-flower, the product of high cultivation and much tending; a tall, delicate stem with the head set upon it in a manner which, as a thing seen and remembered, should doubtless count for us as a gift of the gods. She's the perfect type of the object _raised_ or bred, and everything about her hangs together and conduces to the effect, from the angle of her elbow to the way she drops that vague, conventional, dry little 'Oh!' which dispenses with all further performance. That degree of completeness is always satisfying. But I didn't satisfy her, and she didn't understand me. I don't think they usually understand." "She's no worse than I then." "Ah she didn't try." "No, she doesn't try. But she probably thought you a monster of conceit, and she would think so still more if she were to hear you talk about her trying." "Very likely--very likely," said Gabriel Nash. "I've an idea a good many people think that. It strikes me as comic. I suppose it's a result of my little system." "What little system?" "Oh nothing more wonderful than the idea of being just the same to every one. People have so bemuddled themselves that the last thing they can conceive is that one should be simple." "Lord, do you call yourself simple?" Nick ejaculated. "Absolutely; in the sense of having no interest of my own to push, no nostrum to advertise, no power to conciliate, no axe to grind. I'm not a savage--ah far from it!--but I really think I'm perfectly independent." "Well, that's always provoking!" Nick knowingly returned. "So it would appear, to the great majority of one's fellow-mortals; and I well remember the pang with which I originally made that discovery. It darkened my spirit at a time when I had no thought of evil. What we like, when we're unregenerate, is that a new-comer should give us a password, come over to our side, join our little camp or religion, get into our little boat, in short, whatever it is, and help us to row it. It's natural enough; we're mostly in different tubs and cockles, paddling for life. Our opinions, our convictions and doctrines and standards, are simply the particular thing that will make the boat go--_our boat_, naturally, for they may very often be just the thing that will sink another. If you won't get in people generally hate you." "Your metaphor's very lame," said Nick. "It's the overcrowded boat that goes to the bottom." "Oh I'll give it another leg or two! Boats can be big, in the infinite of space, and a doctrine's a raft that floats the better the more passengers it carries. A passenger jumps over from time to time, not so much from fear of sinking as from a want of interest in the course or the company. He swims, he plunges, he dives, he dips down and visits the fishes and the mermaids and the submarine caves; he goes from craft to craft and splashes about, on his own account, in the blue, cool water. The regenerate, as I call them, are the passengers who jump over in search of better fun. I jumped over long ago." "And now of course you're at the head of the regenerate; for, in your turn"--Nick found the figure delightful--"you all form a select school of porpoises." "Not a bit, and I know nothing about heads--in the sense you mean. I've grown a tail if you will; I'm the merman wandering free. It's the jolliest of trades!" Before they had gone many steps further Nick Dormer stopped short with a question. "I say, my dear fellow, do you mind mentioning to me whether you're the greatest humbug and charlatan on earth, or a genuine intelligence, one that has sifted things for itself?" "I do lead your poor British wit a dance--I'm so sorry," Nash replied benignly. "But I'm very sincere. And I _have_ tried to straighten out things a bit for myself." "Then why do you give people such a handle?" "Such a handle?" "For thinking you're an--for thinking you're a mere _farceur_." "I daresay it's my manner: they're so unused to any sort of candour." "Well then why don't you try another?" Nick asked. "One has the manner that one can, and mine moreover's a part of my little system." "Ah if you make so much of your little system you're no better than any one else," Nick returned as they went on. "I don't pretend to be better, for we're all miserable sinners; I only pretend to be bad in a pleasanter, brighter way--by what I can see. It's the simplest thing in the world; just take for granted our right to be happy and brave. What's essentially kinder and more helpful than that, what's more beneficent? But the tradition of dreariness, of stodginess, of dull, dense, literal prose, has so sealed people's eyes that they've ended by thinking the most natural of all things the most perverse. Why so keep up the dreariness, in our poor little day? No one can tell me why, and almost every one calls me names for simply asking the question. But I go on, for I believe one can do a little good by it. I want so much to do a little good," Gabriel Nash continued, taking his companion's arm. "My persistence is systematic: don't you see what I mean? I won't be dreary--no, no, no; and I won't recognise the necessity, or even, if there be any way out of it, the accident, of dreariness in the life that surrounds me. That's enough to make people stare: they're so damned stupid!" "They think you so damned impudent," Nick freely explained. At this Nash stopped him short with a small cry, and, turning his eyes, Nick saw under the lamps of the quay that he had brought a flush of pain into his friend's face. "I don't strike you that way?" "Oh 'me!' Wasn't it just admitted that I don't in the least make you out?" "That's the last thing!" Nash declared, as if he were thinking the idea over, with an air of genuine distress. "But with a little patience we'll clear it up together--if you care enough about it," he added more cheerfully. Letting his companion proceed again he continued: "Heaven help us all, what do people mean by impudence? There are many, I think, who don't understand its nature or its limits; and upon my word I've literally seen mere quickness of intelligence or of perception, the jump of a step or two, a little whirr of the wings of talk, mistaken for it. Yes, I've encountered men and women who thought you impudent if you weren't simply so stupid as they. The only impudence is unprovoked, or even mere dull, aggression, and I indignantly protest that I'm never guilty of _that_ clumsiness. Ah for what do they take one, with _their_ beastly presumption? Even to defend myself sometimes I've to make believe to myself that I care. I always feel as if I didn't successfully make others think so. Perhaps they see impudence in that. But I daresay the offence is in the things that I take, as I say, for granted; for if one tries to be pleased one passes perhaps inevitably for being pleased above all with one's self. That's really not my case--I find my capacity for pleasure deplorably below the mark I've set. This is why, as I've told you, I cultivate it, I try to bring it up. And I'm actuated by positive benevolence; I've that impudent pretension. That's what I mean by being the same to every one, by having only one manner. If one's conscious and ingenious to that end what's the harm--when one's motives are so pure? By never, _never_ making the concession, one may end by becoming a perceptible force for good." "What concession are you talking about, in God's name?" Nick demanded. "Why, that we're here all for dreariness. It's impossible to grant it sometimes if you wish to deny it ever." "And what do you mean then by dreariness? That's modern slang and terribly vague. Many good things are dreary--virtue and decency and charity, and perseverance and courage and honour." "Say at once that life's dreary, my dear fellow!" Gabriel Nash exclaimed. "That's on the whole my besetting impression." "_Cest là que je vous attends!_ I'm precisely engaged in trying what can be done in taking it the other way. It's my little personal experiment. Life consists of the personal experiments of each of us, and the point of an experiment is that it shall succeed. What we contribute is our treatment of the material, our rendering of the text, our style. A sense of the qualities of a style is so rare that many persons should doubtless be forgiven for not being able to read, or at all events to enjoy, us; but is that a reason for giving it up--for not being, in this other sphere, if one possibly can, an Addison, a Ruskin, a Renan? Ah we must write our best; it's the great thing we can do in the world, on the right side. One has one's form, _que diable_, and a mighty good thing that one has. I'm not afraid of putting all life into mine, and without unduly squeezing it. I'm not afraid of putting in honour and courage and charity--without spoiling them: on the contrary I shall only do them good. People may not read you at sight, may not like you, but there's a chance they'll come round; and the only way to court the chance is to keep it up--always to keep it up. That's what I do, my dear man--if you don't think I've perseverance. If some one's touched here and there, if you give a little impression of truth and charm, that's your reward; besides of course the pleasure for yourself." "Don't you think your style's a trifle affected?" Nick asked for further amusement. "That's always the charge against a personal manner: if you've any at all people think you've too much. Perhaps, perhaps--who can say? The lurking unexpressed is infinite, and affectation must have begun, long ago, with the first act of reflective expression--the substitution of the few placed articulate words for the cry or the thump or the hug. Of course one isn't perfect; but that's the delightful thing about art, that there's always more to learn and more to do; it grows bigger the more one uses it and meets more questions the more they come up. No doubt I'm rough still, but I'm in the right direction: I make it my business to testify for the fine." "Ah the fine--there it stands, over there!" said Nick Dormer. "I'm not so sure about yours--I don't know what I've got hold of. But Notre Dame _is_ truth; Notre Dame _is_ charm; on Notre Dame the distracted mind can rest. Come over with me and look at her!" They had come abreast of the low island from which the great cathedral, disengaged to-day from her old contacts and adhesions, rises high and fair, with her front of beauty and her majestic mass, darkened at that hour, or at least simplified, under the stars, but only more serene and sublime for her happy union far aloft with the cool distance and the night. Our young men, fantasticating as freely as I leave the reader to estimate, crossed the wide, short bridge which made them face toward the monuments of old Paris--the Palais de Justice, the Conciergerie, the holy chapel of Saint Louis. They came out before the church, which looks down on a square where the past, once so thick in the very heart of Paris, has been made rather a blank, pervaded however by the everlasting freshness of the vast cathedral-face. It greeted Nick Dormer and Gabriel Nash with a kindness the long centuries had done nothing to dim. The lamplight of the old city washed its foundations, but the towers and buttresses, the arches, the galleries, the statues, the vast rose-window, the large full composition, seemed to grow clearer while they climbed higher, as if they had a conscious benevolent answer for the upward gaze of men. "How it straightens things out and blows away one's vapours--anything that's _done_!" said Nick; while his companion exclaimed blandly and affectionately: "The dear old thing!" "The great point's to do something, instead of muddling and questioning; and, by Jove, it makes me want to!" "Want to build a cathedral?" Nash inquired. "Yes, just that." "It's you who puzzle _me_ then, my dear fellow. You can't build them out of words." "What is it the great poets do?" asked Nick. "_Their_ words are ideas--their words are images, enchanting collocations and unforgettable signs. But the verbiage of parliamentary speeches--!" "Well," said Nick with a candid, reflective sigh, "you can rear a great structure of many things--not only of stones and timbers and painted glass." They walked round this example of one, pausing, criticising, admiring, and discussing; mingling the grave with the gay and paradox with contemplation. Behind and at the sides the huge, dusky vessel of the church seemed to dip into the Seine or rise out of it, floating expansively--a ship of stone with its flying buttresses thrown forth like an array of mighty oars. Nick Dormer lingered near it in joy, in soothing content, as if it had been the temple of a faith so dear to him that there was peace and security in its precinct. And there was comfort too and consolation of the same sort in the company at this moment of Nash's equal appreciation, of his response, by his own signs, to the great effect. He took it all in so and then so gave it all out that Nick was reminded of the radiance his boyish admiration had found in him of old, the easy grasp of everything of that kind. "Everything of that kind" was to Nick's sense the description of a wide and bright domain. They crossed to the farther side of the river, where the influence of the Gothic monument threw a distinction even over the Parisian smartnesses--the municipal rule and measure, the importunate symmetries, the "handsomeness" of everything, the extravagance of gaslight, the perpetual click on the neat bridges. In front of a quiet little café on the left bank Gabriel Nash said, "Let's sit down"--he was always ready to sit down. It was a friendly establishment and an unfashionable quarter, far away from the caravan-series; there were the usual little tables and chairs on the quay, the muslin curtains behind the glazed front, the general sense of sawdust and of drippings of watery beer. The place was subdued to stillness, but not extinguished, by the lateness of the hour; no vehicles passed, only now and then a light Parisian foot. Beyond the parapet they could hear the flow of the Seine. Nick Dormer said it made him think of the old Paris, of the great Revolution, of Madame Roland, _quoi_! Gabriel said they could have watery beer but were not obliged to drink it. They sat a long time; they talked a great deal, and the more they said the more the unsaid came up. Presently Nash found occasion to throw out: "I go about my business like any good citizen--that's all." "And what is your business?" "The spectacle of the world." Nick laughed out. "And what do you do with that?" "What does any one do with spectacles? I look at it. I see." "You're full of contradictions and inconsistencies," Nick however objected. "You described yourself to me half an hour ago as an apostle of beauty." "Where's the inconsistency? I do it in the broad light of day, whatever I do: that's virtually what I meant. If I look at the spectacle of the world I look in preference at what's charming in it. Sometimes I've to go far to find it--very likely; but that's just what I do. I go far--as far as my means permit me. Last year I heard of such a delightful little spot; a place where a wild fig-tree grows in the south wall, the outer side, of an old Spanish city. I was told it was a deliciously brown corner--the sun making it warm in winter. As soon as I could I went there." "And what did you do?" "I lay on the first green grass--I liked it." "If that sort of thing's all you accomplish you're not encouraging." "I accomplish my happiness--it seems to me that's something. I have feelings, I have sensations: let me tell you that's not so common. It's rare to have them, and if you chance to have them it's rare not to be ashamed of them. I go after them--when I judge they won't hurt any one." "You're lucky to have money for your travelling expenses," said Nick. "No doubt, no doubt; but I do it very cheap. I take my stand on my nature, on my fortunate character. I'm not ashamed of it, I don't think it's so horrible, my character. But we've so befogged and befouled the whole question of liberty, of spontaneity, of good humour and inclination and enjoyment, that there's nothing that makes people stare so as to see one natural." "You're always thinking too much of 'people.'" "They say I think too little," Gabriel smiled. "Well, I've agreed to stand for Harsh," said Nick with a roundabout transition. "It's you then who are lucky to have money." "I haven't," Nick explained. "My expenses are to be paid." "Then you too must think of 'people.'" Nick made no answer to this, but after a moment said: "I wish very much you had more to show for it." "To show for what?" "Your little system--the æsthetic life." Nash hesitated, tolerantly, gaily, as he often did, with an air of being embarrassed to choose between several answers, any one of which would be so right. "Oh having something to show's such a poor business. It's a kind of confession of failure." "Yes, you're more affected than anything else," said Nick impatiently. "No, my dear boy, I'm more good-natured: don't I prove it? I'm rather disappointed to find you not more accessible to esoteric doctrine. But there is, I confess, another plane of intelligence, honourable, and very honourable, in its way, from which it may legitimately appear important to have something to show. If you must confine yourself to that plane I won't refuse you my sympathy. After all that's what I have to show! But the degree of my sympathy must of course depend on the nature of the demonstration you wish to make." "You know it very well--you've guessed it," Nick returned, looking before him in a conscious, modest way which would have been called sheepish had he been a few years younger. "Ah you've broken the scent with telling me you're going back to the House of Commons," said Nash. "No wonder you don't make it out! My situation's certainly absurd enough. What I really hanker for is to be a painter; and of portraits, on the whole, I think. That's the abject, crude, ridiculous fact. In this out-of-the-way corner, at the dead of night, in lowered tones, I venture to disclose it to you. Isn't that the æsthetic life?" "Do you know how to paint?" asked Nash. "Not in the least. No element of burlesque is therefore wanting to my position." "That makes no difference. I'm so glad." "So glad I don't know how?" "So glad of it all. Yes, that only makes it better. You're a delightful case, and I like delightful cases. We must see it through. I rejoice I met you again." "Do you think I can do anything?" Nick inquired. "Paint good pictures? How can I tell without seeing some of your work? Doesn't it come back to me that at Oxford you used to sketch very prettily? But that's the last thing that matters." "What does matter then?" Nick asked with his eyes on his companion. "To be on the right side--on the side of the 'fine.'" "There'll be precious little of the 'fine' if I produce nothing but daubs." "Ah you cling to the old false measure of success! I must cure you of that. There'll be the beauty of having been disinterested and independent; of having taken the world in the free, brave, personal way." "I shall nevertheless paint decently if I can," Nick presently said. "I'm almost sorry! It will make your case less clear, your example less grand." "My example will be grand enough, with the fight I shall have to make." "The fight? With whom?" "With myself first of all. I'm awfully against it." "Ah but you'll have me on the other side," Nash smiled. "Well, you'll have more than a handful to meet--everything, every one that belongs to me, that touches me near or far; my family, my blood, my heredity, my traditions, my promises, my circumstances, my prejudices; my little past--such as it is; my great future--such as it has been supposed it may be." "I see, I see. It's splendid!" Nash exclaimed. "And Mrs. Dallow into the bargain," he added. "Yes, Mrs. Dallow if you like." "Are you in love with her?" "Not in the least." "Well, she is with you--so I understood." "Don't say that," said Nick Dormer with sudden sternness. "Ah you are, you are!" his companion pronounced, judging apparently from this accent. "I don't know _what_ I am--heaven help me!" Nick broke out, tossing his hat down on his little tin table with vehemence. "I'm a freak of nature and a sport of the mocking gods. Why should they go out of their way to worry me? Why should they do everything so inconsequent, so improbable, so preposterous? It's the vulgarest practical joke. There has never been anything of the sort among us; we're all Philistines to the core, with about as much esthetic sense as that hat. It's excellent soil--I don't complain of it--but not a soil to grow that flower. From where the devil then has the seed been dropped? I look back from generation to generation; I scour our annals without finding the least little sketching grandmother, any sign of a building or versifying or collecting or even tulip-raising ancestor. They were all as blind as bats, and none the less happy for that. I'm a wanton variation, an unaccountable monster. My dear father, rest his soul, went through life without a suspicion that there's anything in it that can't be boiled into blue-books, and became in that conviction a very distinguished person. He brought me up in the same simplicity and in the hope of the same eminence. It would have been better if I had remained so. I think it's partly your fault that I haven't," Nick went on. "At Oxford you were very bad company for me--my evil genius: you opened my eyes, you communicated the poison. Since then, little by little, it has been working within me; vaguely, covertly, insensibly at first, but during the last year or two with violence, pertinacity, cruelty. I've resorted to every antidote in life; but it's no use--I'm stricken. _C'est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée_--putting Venus for 'art.' It tears me to pieces as I may say." "I see, I follow you," said Nash, who had listened to this recital with radiant interest and curiosity. "And that's why you are going to stand." "Precisely--it's an antidote. And at present you're another." "Another?" "That's why I jumped at you. A bigger dose of you may disagree with me to that extent that I shall either die or get better." "I shall control the dilution," said Nash. "Poor fellow--if you're elected!" he added. "Poor fellow either way. You don't know the atmosphere in which I live, the horror, the scandal my apostasy would provoke, the injury and suffering it would inflict. I believe it would really kill my mother. She thinks my father's watching me from the skies." "Jolly to make him jump!" Nash suggested. "He'd jump indeed--come straight down on top of me. And then the grotesqueness of it--to _begin_ all of a sudden at my age." "It's perfect indeed, it's too lovely a case," Nash raved. "Think how it sounds--a paragraph in the London papers: 'Mr. Nicholas Dormer, M. P. for Harsh and son of the late Right Honourable and so forth and so forth, is about to give up his seat and withdraw from public life in order to devote himself to the practice of portrait-painting--and with the more commendable perseverance by reason of all the dreadful time he has lost. Orders, in view of this, respectfully solicited.'" "The nineteenth century's a sweeter time than I thought," said Nash. "It's the portrait then that haunts your dreams?" "I wish you could see. You must of course come immediately to my place in London." "Perfidious wretch, you're capable of having talent--which of course will spoil everything!" Gabriel wailed. "No, I'm too old and was too early perverted. It's too late to go through the mill." "You make _me_ young! Don't miss your election at your peril. Think of the edification." "The edification--?" "Of your throwing it all up the next moment." "That would be pleasant for Mr. Carteret," Nick brooded. "Mr. Carteret--?" "A dear old family friend who'll wish to pay my agent's bill." "Serve him right for such depraved tastes." "You do me good," said Nick as he rose and turned away. "Don't call me useless then." "Ah but not in the way you mean. It's only if I don't get in that I shall perhaps console myself with the brush," Nick returned with humorous, edifying elegance while they retraced their steps. "For the sake of all the muses then don't stand. For you _will_ get in." "Very likely. At any rate I've promised." "You've promised Mrs. Dallow?" "It's her place--she'll _put_ me in," Nick said. "Baleful woman! But I'll pull you out!" cried Gabriel Nash. X For several days Peter Sherringham had business in hand which left him neither time nor freedom of mind to occupy himself actively with the ladies of the Hôtel de la Garonne. There were moments when they brushed across his memory, but their passage was rapid and not lighted with complacent attention; for he shrank from bringing to the proof the question of whether Miriam would be an interest or only a bore. She had left him after their second meeting with a quickened sympathy, but in the course of a few hours that flame had burned dim. Like most other men he was a mixture of impulse and reflexion, but was peculiar in this, that thinking things over almost always made him think less conveniently. He found illusions necessary, so that in order to keep an adequate number going he often forbade himself any excess of that exercise. Mrs. Rooth and her daughter were there and could certainly be trusted to make themselves felt. He was conscious of their anxiety and their calculations as of a frequent oppression, and knew that whatever results might ensue he should have to do the costly thing for them. An idea of tenacity, of worrying feminine duration, associated itself with their presence; he would have assented with a silent nod to the proposition--enunciated by Gabriel Nash--that he was saddled with them. Remedies hovered before him, but these figured also at the same time as complications; ranging vaguely from the expenditure of money to the discovery that he was in love. This latter accident would be particularly tedious; he had a full perception of the arts by which the girl's mother might succeed in making it so. It wouldn't be a compensation for trouble, but a trouble which in itself would require compensations. Would that balm spring from the spectacle of the young lady's genius? The genius would have to be very great to justify a rising young diplomatist in making a fool of himself. With the excuse of pressing work he put off Miss Rooth from day to day, and from day to day he expected to hear her knock at his door. It would be time enough when they ran him to earth again; and he was unable to see how after all he could serve them even then. He had proposed impetuously a course of the theatres; but that would be a considerable personal effort now that the summer was about to begin--a free bid for bad air, stale pieces, and tired actors. When, however, more than a week had elapsed without a reminder of his neglected promise it came over him that he must himself in honour give a sign. There was a delicacy in such unexpected and such difficult discretion--he was touched by being let alone. The flurry of work at the embassy was over and he had time to ask himself what in especial he should do. He wanted something definite to suggest before communicating with the Hôtel de la Garonne. As a consequence of this speculation he went back to Madame Carré to ask her to reconsider her stern judgement and give the young English lady--to oblige him--a dozen lessons of the sort she knew so well how to give. He was aware that this request scarcely stood on its feet; for in the first place Madame Carré never reconsidered when once she had got her impression, and in the second never wasted herself on subjects whom nature had not formed to do her honour. He knew his asking her to strain a point to please him would give her a false idea--save that for that matter she had it already--of his relations, actual or prospective, with the girl; but he decided he needn't care for this, since Miriam herself probably wouldn't care. What he had mainly in mind was to say to the old actress that she had been mistaken--the _jeune Anglaise_ wasn't such a _grue_. This would take some courage, but it would also add to the amusement of his visit. He found her at home, but as soon as he had expressed his conviction she began: "Oh, your _jeune Anglaise_, I know a great deal more about her than you! She has been back to see me twice; she doesn't go the longest way round. She charges me like a grenadier and asks me to give her--guess a little what!--private recitations all to herself. If she doesn't succeed it won't be for want of knowing how to thump at doors. The other day when I came in she was waiting for me; she had been there two hours. My private recitations--have you an idea what people pay for them?" "Between artists, you know, there are easier conditions," Sherringham laughed. "How do I know if she's an artist? She won't open her mouth to me; what she wants is to make me say things to _her_. She does make me--I don't know how--and she sits there gaping at me with her big eyes. They look like open pockets!" "I daresay she'll profit by it," said Sherringham. "I daresay _you_ will! Her face is stupid while she watches me, and when she has tired me out she simply walks away. However, as she comes back--!" Madame Carré paused a moment, listened and then cried: "Didn't I tell you?" Sherringham heard a parley of voices in the little antechamber, and the next moment the door was pushed open and Miriam Rooth bounded into the room. She was flushed and breathless, without a smile, very direct. "Will you hear me to-day? I know four things," she immediately broke out. Then seeing Sherringham she added in the same brisk, earnest tone, as if the matter were of the highest importance: "Oh how d'ye do? I'm very glad you're here." She said nothing else to him than this, appealed to him in no way, made no allusion to his having neglected her, but addressed herself to Madame Carré as if he had not been there; making no excuses and using no flattery; taking rather a tone of equal authority--all as if the famous artist had an obvious duty toward her. This was another variation Peter thought; it differed from each of the attitudes in which he had previously seen her. It came over him suddenly that so far from there being any question of her having the histrionic nature she simply had it in such perfection that she was always acting; that her existence was a series of parts assumed for the moment, each changed for the next, before the perpetual mirror of some curiosity or admiration or wonder--some spectatorship that she perceived or imagined in the people about her. Interested as he had ever been in the profession of which she was potentially an ornament, this idea startled him by its novelty and even lent, on the spot, a formidable, a really appalling character to Miriam Rooth. It struck him abruptly that a woman whose only being was to "make believe," to make believe she had any and every being you might like and that would serve a purpose and produce a certain effect, and whose identity resided in the continuity of her personations, so that she had no moral privacy, as he phrased it to himself, but lived in a high wind of exhibition, of figuration--such a woman was a kind of monster in whom of necessity there would be nothing to "be fond" of, because there would be nothing to take hold of. He felt for a moment how simple he had been not to have achieved before this analysis of the actress. The girl's very face made it vivid to him now--the discovery that she positively had no countenance of her own, but only the countenance of the occasion, a sequence, a variety--capable possibly of becoming immense--of representative movements. She was always trying them, practising them, for her amusement or profit, jumping from one to the other and extending her range; and this would doubtless be her occupation more and more as she acquired ease and confidence. The expression that came nearest belonging to her, as it were, was the one that came nearest being a blank--an air of inanity when she forgot herself in some act of sincere attention. Then her eye was heavy and her mouth betrayed a commonness; though it was perhaps just at such a moment that the fine line of her head told most. She had looked slightly _bête_ even when Sherringham, on their first meeting at Madame Carré's, said to Nick Dormer that she was the image of the Tragic Muse. Now, at any rate, he seemed to see that she might do what she liked with her face. It was an elastic substance, an element of gutta-percha, like the flexibility of the gymnast, the lady at the music-hall who is shot from the mouth of a cannon. He winced a little at this coarser view of the actress; he had somehow always looked more poetically at that priestess of art. Yet what was she, the priestess, when one came to think of it, but a female gymnast, a mountebank at higher wages? She didn't literally hang by her heels from a trapeze and hold a fat man in her teeth, but she made the same use of her tongue, of her eyes, of the imitative trick, that her muscular sister made of leg and jaw. It was an odd circumstance that Miss Rooth's face seemed to him to-day a finer instrument than old Madame Carré's. It was doubtless that the girl's was fresh and strong and had a future in it, while poor Madame Carré's was worn and weary and had only a past. The old woman said something, half in jest, half in real resentment, about the brutality of youth while Miriam went to a mirror and quickly took off her hat, patting and arranging her hair as a preliminary to making herself heard. Sherringham saw with surprise and amusement that the keen Frenchwoman, who had in her long life exhausted every adroitness, was in a manner helpless and coerced, obliging all in spite of herself. Her young friend had taken but a few days and a couple of visits to become a successful force; she had imposed herself, and Madame Carré, while she laughed--yet looked terrible too, with such high artifices of eye and gesture--was reduced to the last line of defence; that of pronouncing her coarse and clumsy, saying she might knock her down, but that this proved nothing. She spoke jestingly enough not to offend, but her manner betrayed the irritation of an intelligent woman who at an advanced age found herself for the first time failing to understand. What she didn't understand was the kind of social product thus presented to her by Gabriel Nash; and this suggested to Sherringham that the _jeune Anglaise_ was perhaps indeed rare, a new type, as Madame Carré must have seen innumerable varieties. He saw the girl was perfectly prepared to be abused and that her indifference to what might be thought of her discretion was a proof of life, health, and spirit, the insolence of conscious resources. When she had given herself a touch at the glass she turned round, with a rapid "_Ecoutez maintenant_!" and stood leaning a moment--slightly lowered and inclined backward, her hands behind her and supporting her--on the _console_ before the mirror. She waited an instant, turning her eyes from one of her companions to the other as to take possession of them--an eminently conscious, intentional proceeding, which made Sherringham ask himself what had become of her former terror and if that and her tears had all been a comedy: after which, abruptly straightening herself, she began to repeat a short French poem, an ingenious thing of the day, that she had induced Madame Carré to say over to her. She had learned it, practised it, rehearsed it to her mother, and had now been childishly eager to show what she could do with it. What she mainly did was to reproduce with a crude fidelity, but in extraordinary detail, the intonations, the personal quavers and cadences of her model. "How bad you make me seem to myself and if I were you how much better I should say it!" was Madame Carré's first criticism. Miriam allowed her, however, little time to develop it, for she broke out, at the shortest intervals, with the several other specimens of verse to which the old actress had handed her the key. They were all fine lyrics, of tender or ironic intention, by contemporary poets, but depending for effect on taste and art, a mastery of the rare shade and the right touch, in the interpreter. Miriam had gobbled them up, and she gave them forth in the same way as the first, with close, rude, audacious mimicry. There was a moment for Sherringham when it might have been feared their hostess would see in the performance a designed burlesque of her manner, her airs and graces, her celebrated simpers and grimaces, so extravagant did it all cause these refinements to appear. When it was over the old woman said, "Should you like now to hear how _you_ do?" and, without waiting for an answer, phrased and trilled the last of the pieces, from beginning to end, exactly as her visitor had done, making this imitation of an imitation the drollest thing conceivable. If she had suffered from the sound of the girl's echo it was a perfect revenge. Miriam had dropped on a sofa, exhausted, and she stared at first, flushed and wild; then she frankly gave way to pleasure, to interest and large laughter. She said afterwards, to defend herself, that the verses in question, and indeed all those she had recited, were of the most difficult sort: you had to do them; they didn't do themselves--they were things in which the _gros moyens_ were of no avail. "Ah my poor child, your means are all _gros moyens_; you appear to have no others," Madame Carré replied. "You do what you can, but there are people like that; it's the way they're made. They can never come nearer to fine truth, to the just indication; shades don't exist for them, they don't see certain differences. It was to show you a difference that I repeated that thing as you repeat it, as you represent my doing it. If you're struck with the little the two ways have in common so much the better. But you seem to me terribly to _alourdir_ everything you touch." Peter read into this judgement a deep irritation--Miriam clearly set the teeth of her instructress on edge. She acted on her nerves, was made up of roughnesses and thicknesses unknown hitherto to her fine, free-playing finger-tips. This exasperation, however, was a degree of flattery; it was neither indifference nor simple contempt; it acknowledged a mystifying reality in the _jeune Anglaise_ and even a shade of importance. The latter remarked, serenely enough, that the things she wanted most to do were just those that were not for the _gros moyens_, the vulgar obvious dodges, the starts and shouts that any one could think of and that the _gros public_ liked. She wanted to do what was most difficult, and to plunge into it from the first; and she explained as if it were a discovery of her own that there were two kinds of scenes and speeches: those which acted themselves, of which the treatment was plain, the only way, so that you had just to take it; and those open to interpretation, with which you had to fight every step, rendering, arranging, doing the thing according to your idea. Some of the most effective passages and the most celebrated and admired, like the frenzy of Juliet with her potion, were of the former sort; but it was the others she liked best. Madame Carré received this revelation good-naturedly enough, considering its want of freshness, and only laughed at the young lady for looking so nobly patronising while she gave it. Her laughter appeared partly addressed to the good faith with which Miriam described herself as preponderantly interested in the subtler problems of her art. Sherringham was charmed with the girl's pluck--if it was pluck and not mere density; the stout patience with which she submitted, for a purpose, to the old woman's rough usage. He wanted to take her away, to give her a friendly caution, to advise her not to become a bore, not to expose herself. But she held up her beautiful head as to show how little she cared at present for any exposure, and that (it was half coarseness--Madame Carré was so far right--and half fortitude) she had no intention of coming away so long as; there was anything to be picked up. She sat and still she sat, challenging her hostess with every sort of question--some reasonable, some ingenious, some strangely futile and some highly indiscreet; but all with the effect that, contrary to Peter's expectation, their distinguished friend warmed to the work of answering and explaining, became interested, was content to keep her and to talk. Yes, she took her ease; she relieved herself, with the rare cynicism of the artist--all the crudity, the irony and intensity of a discussion of esoteric things--of personal mysteries, of methods and secrets. It was the oddest hour our young man had ever spent, even in the course of investigations which had often led him into the _cuisine_, the distillery or back shop, of the admired profession. He got up several times to come away; then he remained, partly in order not to leave Miriam alone with her terrible initiatress, partly because he was both amused and edified, and partly because Madame Carré held him by the appeal of her sharp, confidential, old eyes, addressing her talk to himself, with Miriam but a pretext and subject, a vile illustration. She undressed this young lady, as it were, from head to foot, turned her inside out, weighed and measured and sounded her: it was all, for Sherringham, a new revelation of the point to which, in her profession and nation, an intelligence of the business, a ferocious analysis, had been carried and a special vocabulary developed. What struck him above all was the way she knew her grounds and reasons, so that everything was sharp and clear in her mind and lay under her hand. If she had rare perceptions she had traced them to their source; she could give an account of what she did; she knew perfectly why, could explain it, defend it, amplify it, fight for it: all of which was an intellectual joy to her, allowing her a chance to abound and insist and discriminate. There was a kind of cruelty or at least of hardness in it all, to poor Peter's shy English sense, that sense which can never really reconcile itself to any question of method and form, and has extraneous sentiments to "square," to pacify with compromises and superficialities, the general plea for innocence in everything and often the flagrant proof of it. In theory there was nothing he valued more than just such a logical passion as Madame Carré's, but it was apt in fact, when he found himself at close quarters with it, to appear an ado about nothing. If the old woman was hard it was not that many of her present conclusions about the _jeune Anglaise_ were not indulgent, but that she had a vision of the great manner, of right and wrong, of the just and the false, so high and religious that the individual was nothing before it--a prompt and easy sacrifice. It made our friend uncomfortable, as he had been made uncomfortable by certain _feuilletons_, reviews of the theatres in the Paris newspapers, which he was committed to thinking important but of which, when they were very good, he was rather ashamed. When they were very good, that is when they were very thorough, they were very personal, as was inevitable in dealing with the most personal of the arts: they went into details; they put the dots on the _i_'s; they discussed impartially the qualities of appearance, the physical gifts of the poor aspirant, finding them in some cases reprehensibly inadequate Peter could never rid himself of a dislike to these pronouncements; in the case of the actresses especially they struck him as brutal and offensive--unmanly as launched by an ensconced, moustachioed critic over a cigar. At the same time he was aware of the dilemma (he hated it; it made him blush still more) in which his objection lodged him. If one was right in caring for the actor's art one ought to have been interested in every honest judgement of it, which, given the peculiar conditions, would be useful in proportion as it should be free. If the criticism that recognised frankly these conditions seemed an inferior or an unholy thing, then what was to be said for the art itself? What an implication, if the criticism was tolerable only so long as it was worthless--so long as it remained vague and timid! This was a knot Peter had never straightened out: he contented himself with feeling that there was no reason a theatrical critic shouldn't be a gentleman, at the same time that he often dubbed it an odious trade, which no gentleman could possibly follow. The best of the fraternity, so conspicuous in Paris, were those who didn't follow it--those who, while pretending to write about the stage, wrote about everything else. It was as if Madame Carré, in pursuance of her inflamed sense that the art was everything and the individual nothing save as he happened to serve it, had said: "Well, if she _will_ have it she shall; she shall know what she's in for, what I went through, battered and broken in as we all have been--all who are worthy, who have had the honour. She shall know the real point of view." It was as if she were still beset with Mrs. Rooth's twaddle and muddle, her hypocrisy, her idiotic scruples--something she felt all need to belabour, to trample on. Miriam took it all as a bath, a baptism, with shuddering joy and gleeful splashes; staring, wondering, sometimes blushing and failing to follow, but not shrinking nor wounded; laughing, when convicted, at her own expense and feeling evidently that this at last was the high cold air of art, an initiation, a discipline that nothing could undo. Sherringham said he would see her home--he wanted to talk to her and she must walk away with him. "And it's understood then she may come back," he added to Madame Carré. "It's _my_ affair of course. You'll take an interest in her for a month or two; she'll sit at your feet." The old actress had an admirable shrug. "Oh I'll knock her about--she seems stout enough!" XI When they had descended to the street Miriam mentioned to Peter that she was thirsty, dying to drink something: upon which he asked her if she should have an objection to going with him to a café. "Objection? I've spent my life in cafés! They're warm in winter and you get your lamplight for nothing," she explained. "Mamma and I have sat in them for hours, many a time, with a _consommation_ of three sous, to save fire and candles at home. We've lived in places we couldn't sit in, if you want to know--where there was only really room if we were in bed. Mamma's money's sent out from England and sometimes it usedn't to come. Once it didn't come for months--for months and months. I don't know how we lived. There wasn't any to come; there wasn't any to get home. That isn't amusing when you're away in a foreign town without any friends. Mamma used to borrow, but people wouldn't always lend. You needn't be afraid--she won't borrow of _you_. We're rather better now--something has been done in England; I don't understand what. It's only fivepence a year, but it has been settled; it comes regularly; it used to come only when we had written and begged and waited. But it made no difference--mamma was always up to her ears in books. They served her for food and drink. When she had nothing to eat she began a novel in ten volumes--the old-fashioned ones; they lasted longest. She knows every _cabinet de lecture_ in every town; the little, cheap, shabby ones, I mean, in the back streets, where they have odd volumes and only ask a sou and the books are so old that they smell like close rooms. She takes them to the cafés--the little, cheap, shabby cafés too--and she reads there all the evening. That's very well for her, but it doesn't feed me. I don't like a diet of dirty old novels. I sit there beside her with nothing to do, not even a stocking to mend; she doesn't think that _comme il faut_. I don't know what the people take me for. However, we've never been spoken to: any one can see mamma's a great lady. As for me I daresay I might be anything dreadful. If you're going to be an actress you must get used to being looked at. There were people in England who used to ask us to stay; some of them were our cousins--or mamma says they were. I've never been very clear about our cousins and I don't think they were at all clear about us. Some of them are dead; the others don't ask us any more. You should hear mamma on the subject of our visits in England. It's very convenient when your cousins are dead--that explains everything. Mamma has delightful phrases: 'My family is almost extinct.' Then your family may have been anything you like. Ours of course was magnificent. We did stay in a place once where there was a deer-park, and also private theatricals. I played in them; I was only fifteen years old, but I was very big and I thought I was in heaven. I'll go anywhere you like; you needn't be afraid; we've been in places! I've learned a great deal that way--sitting beside mamma and watching people, their faces, their types, their movements. There's a great deal goes on in cafés: people come to them to talk things over, their private affairs, their complications; they have important meetings. Oh I've observed scenes between men and women--very quiet, terribly quiet, but awful, pathetic, tragic! Once I saw a woman do something that I'm going to do some day when I'm great--if I can get the situation. I'll tell you what it is sometime--I'll do it for you. Oh it is the book of life!" So Miriam discoursed, familiarly, disconnectedly, as the pair went their way down the Rue de Constantinople; and she continued to abound in anecdote and remark after they were seated face to face at a little marble table in an establishment Peter had selected carefully and where he had caused her, at her request, to be accommodated with _sirop d'orgeat_. "I know what it will come to: Madame Carré will want to keep me." This was one of the felicities she presently threw off. "To keep you?" "For the French stage. She won't want to let you have me." She said things of that kind, astounding in self-complacency, the assumption of quick success. She was in earnest, evidently prepared to work, but her imagination flew over preliminaries and probations, took no account of the steps in the process, especially the first tiresome ones, the hard test of honesty. He had done nothing for her as yet, given no substantial pledge of interest; yet she was already talking as if his protection were assured and jealous. Certainly, however, she seemed to belong to him very much indeed as she sat facing him at the Paris café in her youth, her beauty, and her talkative confidence. This degree of possession was highly agreeable to him and he asked nothing more than to make it last and go further. The impulse to draw her out was irresistible, to encourage her to show herself all the way; for if he was really destined to take her career in hand he counted on some good equivalent--such for instance as that she should at least amuse him. "It's very singular; I know nothing like it," he said--"your equal mastery of two languages." "Say of half-a-dozen," Miriam smiled. "Oh I don't believe in the others to the same degree. I don't imagine that, with all deference to your undeniable facility, you'd be judged fit to address a German or an Italian audience in their own tongue. But you might a French, perfectly, and they're the most particular of all; for their idiom's supersensitive and they're incapable of enduring the _baragouinage_ of foreigners, to which we listen with such complacency. In fact your French is better than your English--it's more conventional; there are little queernesses and impurities in your English, as if you had lived abroad too much. Ah you must work that." "I'll work it with _you_. I like the way you speak." "You must speak beautifully; you must do something for the standard." "For the standard?" "Well, there isn't any after all." Peter had a drop. "It has gone to the dogs." "Oh I'll bring it back. I know what you mean." "No one knows, no one cares; the sense is gone--it isn't in the public," he continued, ventilating a grievance he was rarely able to forget, the vision of which now suddenly made a mission full of possible sanctity for his companion. "Purity of speech, on our stage, doesn't exist. Every one speaks as he likes and audiences never notice; it's the last thing they think of. The place is given up to abominable dialects and individual tricks, any vulgarity flourishes, and on top of it all the Americans, with every conceivable crudity, come in to make confusion worse confounded. And when one laments it people stare; they don't know what one means." "Do you mean the grand manner, certain pompous pronunciations, the style of the Kembles?" "I mean any style that _is_ a style, that's a system, a consistency, an art, that contributes a positive beauty to utterance. When I pay ten shillings to hear you speak I want you to know how, _que diable_! Say that to people and they're mostly lost in stupor; only a few, the very intelligent, exclaim: 'Then you want actors to be affected?'" "And do you?" asked Miriam full of interest. "My poor child, what else under the sun should they be? Isn't their whole art the affectation _par excellence_? The public won't stand that to-day, so one hears it said. If that be true it simply means that the theatre, as I care for it, that is as a personal art, is at an end." "Never, never, never!" the girl cried in a voice that made a dozen people look round. "I sometimes think it--that the personal art is at an end and that henceforth we shall have only the arts, capable no doubt of immense development in their way--indeed they've already reached it--of the stage-carpenter and the costumer. In London the drama is already smothered in scenery; the interpretation scrambles off as it can. To get the old personal impression, which used to be everything, you must go to the poor countries, and most of all to Italy." "Oh I've had it; it's very personal!" said Miriam knowingly. "You've seen the nudity of the stage, the poor, painted, tattered screen behind, and before that void the histrionic figure, doing everything it knows how, in complete possession. The personality isn't our English personality and it may not always carry us with it; but the direction's right, and it has the superiority that it's a human exhibition, not a mechanical one." "I can act just like an Italian," Miriam eagerly proclaimed. "I'd rather you acted like an Englishwoman if an Englishwoman would only act." "Oh, I'll show you!" "But you're not English," said Peter sociably, his arms on the table. "I beg your pardon. You should hear mamma about our 'race.'" "You're a Jewess--I'm sure of that," he went on. She jumped at this, as he was destined to see later she would ever jump at anything that might make her more interesting or striking; even at things that grotesquely contradicted or excluded each other. "That's always possible if one's clever. I'm very willing, because I want to be the English Rachel." "Then you must leave Madame Carré as soon as you've got from her what she can give." "Oh, you needn't fear; you shan't lose me," the girl replied with charming gross fatuity. "My name's Jewish," she went on, "but it was that of my grandmother, my father's mother. She was a baroness in Germany. That is, she was the daughter of a baron." Peter accepted this statement with reservations, but he replied: "Put all that together and it makes you very sufficiently of Rachel's tribe." "I don't care if I'm of her tribe artistically. I'm of the family of the artists--_je me fiche_ of any other! I'm in the same style as that woman--I know it." "You speak as if you had seen her," he said, amused at the way she talked of "that woman." "Oh I know all about her--I know all about all the great actors. But that won't prevent me from speaking divine English." "You must learn lots of verse; you must repeat it to me," Sherringham went on. "You must break yourself in till you can say anything. You must learn passages of Milton, passages of Wordsworth." "Did _they_ write plays?" "Oh it isn't only a matter of plays! You can't speak a part properly till you can speak everything else, anything that comes up, especially in proportion as it's difficult. That gives you authority." "Oh yes, I'm going in for authority. There's more chance in English," the girl added in the next breath. "There are not so many others--the terrible competition. There are so many here--not that I'm afraid," she chattered on. "But we've got America and they haven't. America's a great place." "You talk like a theatrical agent. They're lucky not to have it as we have it. Some of them do go, and it ruins them." "Why, it fills their pockets!" Miriam cried. "Yes, but see what they pay. It's the death of an actor to play to big populations that don't understand his language. It's nothing then but the _gros moyens_; all his delicacy perishes. However, they'll understand _you_." "Perhaps I shall be too affected," she said. "You won't be more so than Garrick or Mrs. Siddons or John Kemble or Edmund Kean. They understood Edmund Kean. All reflexion is affectation, and all acting's reflexion." "I don't know--mine's instinct," Miriam contended. "My dear young lady, you talk of 'yours'; but don't be offended if I tell you that yours doesn't exist. Some day it will--if the thing comes off. Madame Carré's does, because she has reflected. The talent, the desire, the energy are an instinct; but by the time these things become a performance they're an instinct put in its place." "Madame Carré's very philosophic. I shall never be like her." "Of course you won't--you'll be original. But you'll have your own ideas." "I daresay I shall have a good many of yours"--and she smiled at him across the table. They sat a moment looking at each other. "Don't go in for coquetry," Peter then said. "It's a waste of time." "Well, that's civil!" the girl cried. "Oh I don't mean for me, I mean for yourself I want you to be such good faith. I'm bound to give you stiff advice. You don't strike me as flirtatious and that sort of thing, and it's much in your favour." "In my favour?" "It does save time." "Perhaps it saves too much. Don't you think the artist ought to have passions?" Peter had a pause; he thought an examination of this issue premature. "Flirtations are not passions," he replied. "No, you're simple--at least I suspect you are; for of course with a woman one would be clever to know." She asked why he pronounced her simple, but he judged it best and more consonant with fair play to defer even a treatment of this branch of the question; so that to change the subject he said: "Be sure you don't betray me to your friend Mr. Nash." "Betray you? Do you mean about your recommending affectation?" "Dear me, no; he recommends it himself. That is, he practises it, and on a scale!" "But he makes one hate it." "He proves what I mean," said Sherringham: "that the great comedian's the one who raises it to a science. If we paid ten shillings to listen to Mr. Nash we should think him very fine. But we want to know what it's supposed to be." "It's too odious, the way he talks about us!" Miriam cried assentingly. "About 'us'?" "Us poor actors." "It's the competition he dislikes," Peter laughed. "However, he's very good-natured; he lent mamma thirty pounds," the girl added honestly. Our young man, at this information, was not able to repress a certain small twinge noted by his companion and of which she appeared to mistake the meaning. "Of course he'll get it back," she went on while he looked at her in silence a little. Fortune had not supplied him profusely with money, but his emotion was caused by no foresight of his probably having also to put his hand in his pocket for Mrs. Rooth. It was simply the instinctive recoil of a fastidious nature from the idea of familiar intimacy with people who lived from hand to mouth, together with a sense that this intimacy would have to be defined if it was to go much further. He would wish to know what it was supposed to be, like Nash's histrionics. Miriam after a moment mistook his thought still more completely, and in doing so flashed a portent of the way it was in her to strike from time to time a note exasperatingly, almost consciously vulgar, which one would hate for the reason, along with others, that by that time one would be in love with her. "Well then, he won't--if you don't believe it!" she easily laughed. He was saying to himself that the only possible form was that they should borrow only from him. "You're a funny man. I make you blush," she persisted. "I must reply with the _tu quoque_, though I've not that effect on you." "I don't understand," said the girl. "You're an extraordinary young lady." "You mean I'm horrid. Well, I daresay I am. But I'm better when you know me." He made no direct rejoinder to this, but after a moment went on: "Your mother must repay that money. I'll give it her." "You had better give it _him_!" cried Miriam. "If once mamma has it--!" She interrupted herself and with another and a softer tone, one of her professional transitions, remarked: "I suppose you've never known any one that was poor." "I'm poor myself. That is, I'm very far from rich. But why receive favours--?" And here he in turn checked himself with the sense that he was indeed taking a great deal on his back if he pretended already--he had not seen the pair three times--to regulate their intercourse with the rest of the world. But the girl instantly carried out his thought and more than his thought. "Favours from Mr. Nash? Oh he doesn't count!" The way she dropped these words--they would have been admirable on the stage--made him reply with prompt ease: "What I meant just now was that you're not to tell him, after all my swagger, that I consider that you and I are really required to save our theatre." "Oh if we can save it he shall know it!" She added that she must positively get home; her mother would be in a state: she had really scarce ever been out alone. He mightn't think it, but so it was. Her mother's ideas, those awfully proper ones, were not all talk. She _did_ keep her! Sherringham accepted this--he had an adequate and indeed an analytic vision of Mrs. Rooth's conservatism; but he observed at the same time that his companion made no motion to rise. He made none either; he only said: "We're very frivolous, the way we chatter. What you want to do to get your foot in the stirrup is supremely difficult. There's everything to overcome. You've neither an engagement nor the prospect of an engagement." "Oh you'll get me one!" Her manner presented this as so certain that it wasn't worth dilating on; so instead of dilating she inquired abruptly a second time: "Why do you think I'm so simple?" "I don't then. Didn't I tell you just now that you were extraordinary? That's the term, moreover, that you applied to yourself when you came to see me--when you said a girl had to be a kind of monster to wish to go on the stage. It remains the right term and your simplicity doesn't mitigate it. What's rare in you is that you have--as I suspect at least--no nature of your own." Miriam listened to this as if preparing to argue with it or not, only as it should strike her as a sufficiently brave picture; but as yet, naturally, she failed to understand. "You're always at concert pitch or on your horse; there are no intervals. It's the absence of intervals, of a _fond_ or background, that I don't comprehend. You're an embroidery without a canvas." "Yes--perhaps," the girl replied, her head on one side as if she were looking at the pattern of this rarity. "But I'm very honest." "You can't be everything, both a consummate actress and a flower of the field. You've got to choose." She looked at him a moment. "I'm glad you think I'm so wonderful." "Your feigning may be honest in the sense that your only feeling is your feigned one," Peter pursued. "That's what I mean by the absence of a ground or of intervals. It's a kind of thing that's a labyrinth!" "I know what I am," she said sententiously. But her companion continued, following his own train. "Were you really so frightened the first day you went to Madame Carré's?" She stared, then with a flush threw back her head. "Do you think I was pretending?" "I think you always are. However, your vanity--if you had any!--would be natural." "I've plenty of that. I'm not a bit ashamed to own it." "You'd be capable of trying to 'do' the human peacock. But excuse the audacity and the crudity of my speculations--it only proves my interest. What is it that you know you are?" "Why, an artist. Isn't that a canvas?" "Yes, an intellectual, but not a moral." "Ah it's everything! And I'm a good girl too--won't that do?" "It remains to be seen," Sherringham laughed. "A creature who's absolutely _all_ an artist--I'm curious to see that." "Surely it has been seen--in lots of painters, lots of musicians." "Yes, but those arts are not personal like yours. I mean not so much so. There's something left for--what shall I call it?--for character." She stared again with her tragic light. "And do you think I haven't a character?" As he hesitated she pushed back her chair, rising rapidly. He looked up at her an instant--she seemed so "plastic"; and then rising too answered: "Delightful being, you've a hundred!" XII The summer arrived and the dense air of the Paris theatres became in fact a still more complicated mixture; yet the occasions were not few on which Sherringham, having placed a box near the stage (most often a stuffy, dusky _baignoire_) at the disposal of Mrs. Rooth and her daughter, found time just to look in, as he said, to spend a part of the evening with them and point the moral of the performance. The pieces, the successes of the winter, had entered the automatic phase: they went on by the force of the impetus acquired, deriving little fresh life from the interpretation, and in ordinary conditions their strong points, as rendered by the actors, would have been as wearisome to this student as an importunate repetition of a good story. But it was not long before he became aware that the conditions couldn't be taken for ordinary. There was a new infusion in his consciousness--an element in his life which altered the relations of things. He was not easy till he had found the right name for it--a name the more satisfactory that it was simple, comprehensive, and plausible. A new "distraction," in the French sense, was what he flattered himself he had discovered; he could recognise that as freely as possible without being obliged to classify the agreeable resource as a new entanglement. He was neither too much nor too little diverted; he had all his usual attention to give to his work: he had only an employment for his odd hours which, without being imperative, had over various others the advantage of a certain continuity. And yet, I hasten to add, he was not so well pleased with it but that among his friends he maintained for the present a rich reserve about it. He had no irresistible impulse to describe generally how he had disinterred a strange, handsome girl whom he was bringing up for the theatre. She had been seen by several of his associates at his rooms, but was not soon to be seen there again. His reserve might by the ill-natured have been termed dissimulation, inasmuch as when asked by the ladies of the embassy what had become of the young person who had amused them that day so cleverly he gave it out that her whereabouts was uncertain and her destiny probably obscure; he let it be supposed in a word that his benevolence had scarcely survived an accidental, a charitable occasion. As he went about his customary business, and perhaps even put a little more conscience into the transaction of it, there was nothing to suggest to others that he was engaged in a private speculation of an absorbing kind. It was perhaps his weakness that he carried the apprehension of ridicule too far; but his excuse may have dwelt in his holding it unpardonable for a man publicly enrolled in the service of his country to be markedly ridiculous. It was of course not out of all order that such functionaries, their private situation permitting, should enjoy a personal acquaintance with stars of the dramatic, the lyric, or even the choregraphic stage: high diplomatists had indeed not rarely, and not invisibly, cultivated this privilege without its proving the sepulchre of their reputation. That a gentleman who was not a fool should consent a little to become one for the sake of a celebrated actress or singer--_cela s'était vu_, though it was not perhaps to be recommended. It was not a tendency that was encouraged at headquarters, where even the most rising young men were not incited to believe they could never fall. Still, it might pass if kept in its place; and there were ancient worthies yet in the profession--though not those whom the tradition had helped to go furthest--who held that something of the sort was a graceful ornament of the diplomatic character. Sherringham was aware he was very "rising"; but Miriam Rooth was not yet a celebrated actress. She was only a young artist in conscientious process of formation and encumbered with a mother still more conscientious than herself. She was a _jeune Anglaise_--a "lady" withal--very earnest about artistic, about remunerative problems. He had accepted the office of a formative influence; and that was precisely what might provoke derision. He was a ministering angel--his patience and good nature really entitled him to the epithet and his rewards would doubtless some day define themselves; but meanwhile other promotions were in precarious prospect, for the failure of which these would not even in their abundance, be a compensation. He kept an unembarrassed eye on Downing Street, and while it may frankly be said for him that he was neither a pedant nor a prig he remembered that the last impression he ought to wish to produce there was that of a futile estheticism. He felt the case sufficiently important, however, when he sat behind Miriam at the play and looked over her shoulder at the stage; her observation being so keen and her comments so unexpected in their vivacity that his curiosity was refreshed and his attention stretched beyond its wont. If the exhibition before the footlights had now lost much of its annual brilliancy the fashion in which she followed it was perhaps exhibition enough. The attendance of the little party was, moreover, in most cases at the Théâtre Français; and it has been sufficiently indicated that our friend, though the child of a sceptical age and the votary of a cynical science, was still candid enough to take the serious, the religious view of that establishment the view of M. Sarcey and of the unregenerate provincial mind. "In the trade I follow we see things too much in the hard light of reason, of calculation," he once remarked to his young charge; "but it's good for the mind to keep up a superstition or two; it leaves a margin--like having a second horse to your brougham for night-work. The arts, the amusements, the esthetic part of life, are night-work, if I may say so without suggesting that they're illicit. At any rate you want your second horse--your superstition that stays at home when the sun's high--to go your rounds with. The Français is my second horse." Miriam's appetite for this interest showed him vividly enough how rarely in the past it had been within her reach; and she pleased him at first by liking everything, seeing almost no differences and taking her deep draught undiluted. She leaned on the edge of the box with bright voracity; tasting to the core, yet relishing the surface, watching each movement of each actor, attending to the way each thing was said or done as if it were the most important thing, and emitting from time to time applausive or restrictive sounds. It was a charming show of the critical spirit in ecstasy. Sherringham had his wonder about it, as a part of the attraction exerted by this young lady was that she caused him to have his wonder about everything she did. Was it in fact a conscious show, a line taken for effect, so that at the Comédie her own display should be the most successful of all? That question danced attendance on the liberal intercourse of these young people and fortunately as yet did little to embitter Sherringham's share of it. His general sense that she was personating had its especial moments of suspense and perplexity, and added variety and even occasionally a degree of excitement to their commerce. At the theatre, for the most part, she was really flushed with eagerness; and with the spectators who turned an admiring eye into the dim compartment of which she pervaded the front she might have passed for a romantic or at least an insatiable young woman from the country. Mrs. Rooth took a more general view, but attended immensely to the story, in respect to which she manifested a patient good faith which had its surprises and its comicalities for her daughter's patron. She found no play too tedious, no _entr'acte_ too long, no _baignoire_ too hot, no tissue of incidents too complicated, no situation too unnatural and no sentiments too sublime. She gave him the measure of her power to sit and sit--an accomplishment to which she owed in the struggle for existence such superiority as she might be said to have achieved. She could out-sit everybody and everything; looking as if she had acquired the practice in repeated years of small frugality combined with large leisure--periods when she had nothing but hours and days and years to spend and had learned to calculate in any situation how long she could stay. "Staying" was so often a saving--a saving of candles, of fire and even (as it sometimes implied a scheme for stray refection) of food. Peter saw soon enough how bravely her shreds and patches of gentility and equanimity hung together, with the aid of whatever casual pins and other makeshifts, and if he had been addicted to studying the human mixture in its different combinations would have found in her an interesting compendium of some of the infatuations that survive a hard discipline. He made indeed without difficulty the reflexion that her life might have taught her something of the real, at the same time that he could scarce help thinking it clever of her to have so persistently declined the lesson. She appeared to have put it by with a deprecating, ladylike smile--a plea of being too soft and bland for experience. She took the refined, sentimental, tender view of the universe, beginning with her own history and feelings. She believed in everything high and pure, disinterested and orthodox, and even at the Hôtel de la Garonne was unconscious of the shabby or the ugly side of the world. She never despaired: otherwise what would have been the use of being a Neville-Nugent? Only not to have been one--that would have been discouraging. She delighted in novels, poems, perversions, misrepresentations, and evasions, and had a capacity for smooth, superfluous falsification which made our young man think her sometimes an amusing and sometimes a tedious inventor. But she wasn't dangerous even if you believed her; she wasn't even a warning if you didn't. It was harsh to call her a hypocrite, since you never could have resolved her back into her character, there being no reverse at all to her blazonry. She built in the air and was not less amiable than she pretended, only that was a pretension too. She moved altogether in a world of elegant fable and fancy, and Sherringham had to live there with her for Miriam's sake, live there in sociable, vulgar assent and despite his feeling it rather a low neighbourhood. He was at a loss how to take what she said--she talked sweetly and discursively of so many things--till he simply noted that he could only take it always for untrue. When Miriam laughed at her he was rather disagreeably affected: "dear mamma's fine stories" was a sufficiently cynical reference to the immemorial infirmity of a parent. But when the girl backed her up, as he phrased it to himself, he liked that even less. Mrs. Rooth was very fond of a moral and had never lost her taste for edification. She delighted in a beautiful character and was gratified to find so many more than she had supposed represented in the contemporary French drama. She never failed to direct Miriam's attention to them and to remind her that there is nothing in life so grand as a sublime act, above all when sublimely explained. Peter made much of the difference between the mother and the daughter, thinking it singularly marked--the way one took everything for the sense, or behaved as if she did, caring only for the plot and the romance, the triumph or defeat of virtue and the moral comfort of it all, and the way the other was alive but to the manner and the art of it, the intensity of truth to appearances. Mrs. Rooth abounded in impressive evocations, and yet he saw no link between her facile genius and that of which Miriam gave symptoms. The poor lady never could have been accused of successful deceit, whereas the triumph of fraud was exactly what her clever child achieved. She made even the true seem fictive, while Miriam's effort was to make the fictive true. Sherringham thought it an odd unpromising stock (that of the Neville-Nugents) for a dramatic talent to have sprung from, till he reflected that the evolution was after all natural: the figurative impulse in the mother had become conscious, and therefore higher, through finding an aim, which was beauty, in the daughter. Likely enough the Hebraic Mr. Rooth, with his love of old pots and Christian altar-cloths, had supplied in the girl's composition the esthetic element, the sense of colour and form. In their visits to the theatre there was nothing Mrs. Rooth more insisted on than the unprofitableness of deceit, as shown by the most distinguished authors--the folly and degradation, the corrosive effect on the spirit, of tortuous ways. Their companion soon gave up the futile task of piecing together her incongruous references to her early life and her family in England. He renounced even the doctrine that there was a residuum of truth in her claim of great relationships, since, existent or not, he cared equally little for her ramifications. The principle of this indifference was at bottom a certain desire to disconnect and isolate Miriam; for it was disagreeable not to be independent in dealing with her, and he could be fully so only if she herself were. The early weeks of that summer--they went on indeed into August--were destined to establish themselves in his memory as a season of pleasant things. The ambassador went away and Peter had to wait for his own holiday, which he did during the hot days contentedly enough--waited in spacious halls and a vast, dim, bird-haunted garden. The official world and most other worlds withdrew from Paris, and the Place de la Concorde, a larger, whiter desert than ever, became by a reversal of custom explorable with safety. The Champs Elysées were dusty and rural, with little creaking booths and exhibitions that made a noise like grasshoppers; the Arc de Triomphe threw its cool, thick shadow for a mile; the Palais de l'Industrie glittered in the light of the long days; the cabmen, in their red waistcoats, dozed inside their boxes, while Sherringham permitted himself a "pot" hat and rarely met a friend. Thus was Miriam as islanded as the chained Andromeda, and thus was it possible to deal with her, even Perseus-like, in deep detachment. The theatres on the boulevard closed for the most part, but the great temple of the Rue de Richelieu, with an esthetic responsibility, continued imperturbably to dispense examples of style. Madame Carré was going to Vichy, but had not yet taken flight, which was a great advantage for Miriam, who could now solicit her attention with the consciousness that she had no engagements _en ville_. "I make her listen to me--I make her tell me," said the ardent girl, who was always climbing the slope of the Rue de Constantinople on the shady side, where of July mornings a smell of violets came from the moist flower-stands of fat, white-capped _bouquetières_ in the angles of doorways. Miriam liked the Paris of the summer mornings, the clever freshness of all the little trades and the open-air life, the cries, the talk from door to door, which reminded her of the south, where, in the multiplicity of her habitations, she had lived; and most of all, the great amusement, or nearly, of her walk, the enviable baskets of the laundress piled up with frilled and fluted whiteness--the certain luxury, she felt while she passed with quick prevision, of her own dawn of glory. The greatest amusement perhaps was to recognise the pretty sentiment of earliness, the particular congruity with the hour, in the studied, selected dress of the little tripping women who were taking the day, for important advantages, while it was tender. At any rate she mostly brought with her from her passage through the town good humour enough--with the penny bunch of violets she always stuck in the front of her dress--for whatever awaited her at Madame Carré's. She declared to her friend that her dear mistress was terribly severe, giving her the most difficult, the most exhausting exercises, showing a kind of rage for breaking her in. "So much the better," Sherringham duly answered; but he asked no questions and was glad to let the preceptress and the pupil fight it out together. He wanted for the moment to know as little as possible about their ways together: he had been over-dosed with that knowledge while attending at their second interview. He would send Madame Carré her money--she was really most obliging--and in the meantime was certain Miriam could take care of herself. Sometimes he remarked to her that she needn't always talk "shop" to him: there were times when he was mortally tired of shop--of hers. Moreover, he frankly admitted that he was tired of his own, so that the restriction was not brutal. When she replied, staring, "Why, I thought you considered it as such a beautiful, interesting art!" he had no rejoinder more philosophic than "Well, I do; but there are moments when I'm quite sick of it all the same," At other times he put it: "Oh yes, the results, the finished thing, the dish perfectly seasoned and served: not the mess of preparation--at least not always--not the experiments that spoil the material." "I supposed you to feel just these questions of study, of the artistic education, as you've called it to me, so fascinating," the girl persisted. She was sometimes so flatly lucid. "Well, after all, I'm not an actor myself," he could but impatiently sigh. "You might be one if you were serious," she would imperturbably say. To this her friend replied that Mr. Gabriel Nash ought to hear this; which made her promise with a certain grimness that she would settle _him_ and his theories some day. Not to seem too inconsistent--for it was cruel to bewilder her when he had taken her up to enlighten--Peter repeated over that for a man like himself the interest of the whole thing depended on its being considered in a large, liberal way and with an intelligence that lifted it out of the question of the little tricks of the trade, gave it beauty and elevation. But she hereupon let him know that Madame Carré held there were no _little_ tricks, that everything had its importance as a means to a great end, and that if you were not willing to try to _approfondir_ the reason why, in a given situation, you should scratch your nose with your left hand rather than with your right, you were not worthy to tread any stage that respected itself. "That's very well, but if I must go into details read me a little Shelley," groaned the young man in the spirit of a high _raffiné_. "You're worse than Madame Carré; you don't know what to invent; between you you'll kill me!" the girl declared. "I think there's a secret league between you to spoil my voice, or at least to weaken my _souffle_, before I get it. But _à la guerre comme à la guerre_! How can I read Shelley, however, when I don't understand him?" "That's just what I want to make you do. It's a part of your general training. You may do without that of course--without culture and taste and perception; but in that case you'll be nothing but a vulgar _cabotine_, and nothing will be of any consequence." He had a theory that the great lyric poets--he induced her to read, and recite as well, long passages of Wordsworth and Swinburne--would teach her many of the secrets of the large utterance, the mysteries of rhythm, the communicableness of style, the latent music of the language and the art of "composing" copious speeches and of retaining her stores of free breath. He held in perfect sincerity that there was a general sense of things, things of the mind, which would be of the highest importance to her and to which it was by good fortune just in his power to contribute. She would do better in proportion as she had more knowledge--even knowledge that might superficially show but a remote connexion with her business. The actor's talent was essentially a gift, a thing by itself, implanted, instinctive, accidental, equally unconnected with intellect and with virtue--Sherringham was completely of that opinion; but it struck him as no _bêtise_ to believe at the same time that intellect--leaving virtue for the moment out of the question--might be brought into fruitful relation with it. It would be a bigger thing if a better mind were projected upon it--projected without sacrificing the mind. So he lent his young friend books she never read--she was on almost irreconcilable terms with the printed page save for spouting it--and in the long summer days, when he had leisure, took her to the Louvre to admire the great works of painting and sculpture. Here, as on all occasions, he was struck with the queer jumble of her taste, her mixture of intelligence and puerility. He saw she never read what he gave her, though she sometimes would shamelessly have liked him to suppose so; but in the presence of famous pictures and statues she had remarkable flashes of perception. She felt these things, she liked them, though it was always because she had an idea she could use them. The belief was often presumptuous, but it showed what an eye she had to her business. "I could look just like that if I tried." "That's the dress I mean to wear when I do Portia." Such were the observations apt to drop from her under the suggestion of antique marbles or when she stood before a Titian or a Bronzino. When she uttered them, and many others besides, the effect was sometimes irritating to her adviser, who had to bethink himself a little that she was no more egotistical than the histrionic conscience required. He wondered if there were necessarily something vulgar in the histrionic conscience--something condemned only to feel the tricky, personal question. Wasn't it better to be perfectly stupid than to have only one eye open and wear for ever in the great face of the world the expression of a knowing wink? At the theatre, on the numerous July evenings when the Comédie Française exhibited the repertory by the aid of exponents determined the more sparse and provincial audience should have a taste of the tradition, her appreciation was tremendously technical and showed it was not for nothing she was now in and out of Madame Carré's innermost counsels. But there were moments when even her very acuteness seemed to him to drag the matter down, to see it in a small and superficial sense. What he flattered himself he was trying to do for her--and through her for the stage of his time, since she was the instrument, and incontestably a fine one, that had come to his hand--was precisely to lift it up, make it rare, keep it in the region of distinction and breadth. However, she was doubtless right and he was wrong, he eventually reasoned: you could afford to be vague only if you hadn't a responsibility. He had fine ideas, but she was to act them out, that is to apply them, and not he; and application was of necessity a vulgarisation, a smaller thing than theory. If she should some day put forth the great art it wasn't purely fanciful to forecast for her, the matter would doubtless be by that fact sufficiently transfigured and it wouldn't signify that some of the onward steps should have been lame. This was clear to him on several occasions when she recited or motioned or even merely looked something for him better than usual; then she quite carried him away, making him wish to ask no more questions, but only let her disembroil herself in her own strong fashion. In these hours she gave him forcibly if fitfully that impression of beauty which was to be her justification. It was too soon for any general estimate of her progress; Madame Carré had at last given her a fine understanding as well as a sore, personal, an almost physical, sense of how bad she was. She had therefore begun on a new basis, had returned to the alphabet and the drill. It was a phase of awkwardness, the splashing of a young swimmer, but buoyancy would certainly come out of it. For the present there was mainly no great alteration of the fact that when she did things according to her own idea they were not, as yet and seriously judged, worth the devil, as Madame Carré said, and when she did them according to that of her instructress were too apt to be a gross parody of that lady's intention. None the less she gave glimpses, and her glimpses made him feel not only that she was not a fool--this was small relief--but that he himself was not. He made her stick to her English and read Shakespeare aloud to him. Mrs. Rooth had recognised the importance of apartments in which they should be able to receive so beneficent a visitor, and was now mistress of a small salon with a balcony and a rickety flower-stand--to say nothing of a view of many roofs and chimneys--a very uneven waxed floor, an empire clock, an _armoire à glace_, highly convenient for Miriam's posturings, and several cupboard doors covered over, allowing for treacherous gaps, with the faded magenta paper of the wall. The thing had been easily done, for Sherringham had said: "Oh we must have a sitting-room for our studies, you know, and I'll settle it with the landlady," Mrs. Rooth had liked his "we"--indeed she liked everything about him--and he saw in this way that she heaved with no violence under pecuniary obligations so long as they were distinctly understood to be temporary. That he should have his money back with interest as soon as Miriam was launched was a comfort so deeply implied that it only added to intimacy. The window stood open on the little balcony, and when the sun had left it Peter and Miriam could linger there, leaning on the rail and talking above the great hum of Paris, with nothing but the neighbouring tiles and tall tubes to take account of. Mrs. Rooth, in limp garments much ungirdled, was on the sofa with a novel, making good her frequent assertion that she could put up with any life that would yield her these two conveniences. There were romantic works Peter had never read and as to which he had vaguely wondered to what class they were addressed--the earlier productions of M. Eugène Sue, the once-fashionable compositions of Madame Sophie Gay--with which Mrs. Rooth was familiar and which she was ready to enjoy once more if she could get nothing fresher. She had always a greasy volume tucked under her while her nose was bent upon the pages in hand. She scarcely looked up even when Miriam lifted her voice to show their benefactor what she could do. These tragic or pathetic notes all went out of the window and mingled with the undecipherable concert of Paris, so that no neighbour was disturbed by them. The girl shrieked and wailed when the occasion required it, and Mrs. Rooth only turned her page, showing in this way a great esthetic as well as a great personal trust. She rather annoyed their visitor by the serenity of her confidence--for a reason he fully understood only later--save when Miriam caught an effect or a tone so well that she made him in the pleasure of it forget her parent's contiguity. He continued to object to the girl's English, with its foreign patches that might pass in prose but were offensive in the recitation of verse, and he wanted to know why she couldn't speak like her mother. He had justly to acknowledge the charm of Mrs. Rooth's voice and tone, which gave a richness even to the foolish things she said. They were of an excellent insular tradition, full both of natural and of cultivated sweetness, and they puzzled him when other indications seemed to betray her--to refer her to more common air. They were like the reverberation of some far-off tutored circle. The connexion between the development of Miriam's genius and the necessity of an occasional excursion to the country--the charming country that lies in so many directions beyond the Parisian _banlieue_--would not have been immediately apparent to a superficial observer; but a day, and then another, at Versailles, a day at Fontainebleau and a trip, particularly harmonious and happy, to Rambouillet, took their places in our young man's plan as a part of the indirect but contributive culture, an agency in the formation of taste. Intimations of the grand manner for instance would proceed in abundance from the symmetrical palace and gardens of Louis XIV. Peter "adored" Versailles and wandered there more than once with the ladies of the Hôtel de la Garonne. They chose quiet hours, when the fountains were dry; and Mrs. Rooth took an armful of novels and sat on a bench in the park, flanked by clipped hedges and old statues, while her young companions strolled away, walked to the Trianon, explored the long, straight vistas of the woods. Rambouillet was vague and vivid and sweet; they felt that they found a hundred wise voices there; and indeed there was an old white chateau which contained nothing but ghostly sounds. They found at any rate a long luncheon, and in the landscape the very spirit of silvery summer and of the French pictorial brush. I have said that in these days Sherringham wondered about many things, and by the time his leave of absence came this practice had produced a particular speculation. He was surprised that he shouldn't be in love with Miriam Rooth and considered at moments of leisure the causes of his exemption. He had felt from the first that she was a "nature," and each time she met his eyes it seemed to come to him straighter that her beauty was rare. You had to get the good view of her face, but when you did so it was a splendid mobile mask. And the wearer of this high ornament had frankness and courage and variety--no end of the unusual and the unexpected. She had qualities that seldom went together--impulses and shynesses, audacities and lapses, something coarse, popular, and strong all intermingled with disdains and languors and nerves. And then above all she was _there_, was accessible, almost belonged to him. He reflected ingeniously that he owed his escape to a peculiar cause--to the fact that they had together a positive outside object. Objective, as it were, was all their communion; not personal and selfish, but a matter of art and business and discussion. Discussion had saved him and would save him further, for they would always have something to quarrel about. Sherringham, who was not a diplomatist for nothing, who had his reasons for steering straight and wished neither to deprive the British public of a rising star nor to exchange his actual situation for that of a yoked _impresario_, blessed the beneficence, the salubrity, the pure exorcism of art. At the same time, rather inconsistently and feeling that he had a completer vision than before of that oddest of animals the artist who happens to have been born a woman, he felt warned against a serious connexion--he made a great point of the "serious"--with so slippery and ticklish a creature. The two ladies had only to stay in Paris, save their candle-ends and, as Madame Carré had enjoined, practise their scales: there were apparently no autumn visits to English country-houses in prospect for Mrs. Rooth. Peter parted with them on the understanding that in London he would look as thoroughly as possible into the question of an engagement. The day before he began his holiday he went to see Madame Carré, who said to him, "_Vous devriez bien nous la laisser_." "She _has_ something then----?" "She has most things. She'll go far. It's the first time in my life of my beginning with a mistake. But don't tell her so. I don't flatter her. She'll be too puffed up." "Is she very conceited?" Sherringham asked. "_Mauvais sujet!_" said Madame Carré. It was on the journey to London that he indulged in some of those questionings of his state that I have mentioned; but I must add that by the time he reached Charing Cross--he smoked a cigar deferred till after the Channel in a compartment by himself--it had suddenly come over him that they were futile. Now that he had left the girl a subversive, unpremeditated heart-beat told him--it made him hold his breath a minute in the carriage--that he had after all not escaped. He _was_ in love with her: he had been in love with her from the first hour. BOOK THIRD XIII The drive from Harsh to the Place, as it was called thereabouts, could be achieved by swift horses in less than ten minutes; and if Mrs. Dallow's ponies were capital trotters the general high pitch of the occasion made it all congruous they should show their speed. The occasion was the polling-day an hour after the battle. The ponies had kept pace with other driven forces for the week before, passing and repassing the neat windows of the flat little town--Mrs. Dallow had the complacent belief that there was none in the kingdom in which the flower-stands looked more respectable between the stiff muslin curtains--with their mistress behind them on her all but silver wheels. Very often she was accompanied by the Liberal candidate, but even when she was not the equipage seemed scarce less to represent his easy, friendly confidence. It moved in a radiance of ribbons and hand-bills and hand-shakes and smiles; of quickened commerce and sudden intimacy; of sympathy which assumed without presuming and gratitude which promised without soliciting. But under Julia's guidance the ponies pattered now, with no indication of a loss of freshness, along the firm, wide avenue which wound and curved, to make up in large effect for not undulating, from the gates opening straight on the town to the Palladian mansion, high, square, grey, and clean, which stood among terraces and fountains in the centre of the park. A generous steed had been sacrificed to bring the good news from Ghent to Aix, but no such extravagance was after all necessary for communicating with Lady Agnes. She had remained at the house, not going to the Wheatsheaf, the Liberal inn, with the others; preferring to await in privacy and indeed in solitude the momentous result of the poll. She had come down to Harsh with the two girls in the course of the proceedings. Julia hadn't thought they would do much good, but she was expansive and indulgent now and had generously asked them. Lady Agnes had not a nice canvassing manner, effective as she might have been in the character of the high, benignant, affable mother--looking sweet participation but not interfering--of the young and handsome, the shining, convincing, wonderfully clever and certainly irresistible aspirant. Grace Dormer had zeal without art, and Lady Agnes, who during her husband's lifetime had seen their affairs follow the satisfactory principle of a tendency to defer to supreme merit, had never really learned the lesson that voting goes by favour. However, she could pray God if, she couldn't make love to the cheesemonger, and Nick felt she had stayed at home to pray for him. I must add that Julia Dallow was too happy now, flicking her whip in the bright summer air, to say anything so ungracious even to herself as that her companion had been returned in spite of his nearest female relatives. Besides, Biddy _had_ been a rosy help: she had looked persuasively pretty, in white and blue, on platforms and in recurrent carriages, out of which she had tossed, blushing and making people feel they would remember her eyes, several words that were telling for their very simplicity. Mrs. Dallow was really too glad for any definite reflexion, even for personal exultation, the vanity of recognising her own large share of the work. Nick was in and was now beside her, tired, silent, vague, beflowered and beribboned, and he had been splendid from beginning to end, beautifully good-humoured and at the same time beautifully clever--still cleverer than she had supposed he could be. The sense of her having quickened his cleverness and been repaid by it or by his gratitude--it came to the same thing--in a way she appreciated was not assertive and jealous: it was lost for the present in the general happy break of the long tension. So nothing passed between them in their progress to the house; there was no sound in the park but the pleasant rustle of summer--it seemed an applausive murmur--and the swift roll of the vehicle. Lady Agnes already knew, for as soon as the result was declared Nick had despatched a mounted man to her, carrying the figures on a scrawled card. He himself had been far from getting away at once, having to respond to the hubbub of acclamation, to speak yet again, to thank his electors individually and collectively, to chaff the Tories without cheap elation, to be carried hither and yon, and above all to pretend that the interest of the business was now greater for him than ever. If he had said never a word after putting himself in Julia's hands to go home it was partly perhaps because the consciousness had begun to glimmer within him, on the contrary, of some sudden shrinkage of that interest. He wanted to see his mother because he knew she wanted to fold him close in her arms. They had been open there for this purpose the last half-hour, and her expectancy, now no longer an ache of suspense, was the reason of Julia's round pace. Yet this very impatience in her somehow made Nick wince a little. Meeting his mother was like being elected over again. The others had not yet come back, and Lady Agnes was alone in the large, bright drawing-room. When Nick went in with Julia he saw her at the further end; she had evidently been walking up and down the whole length of it, and her tall, upright, black figure seemed in possession of the fair vastness after the manner of an exclamation-point at the bottom of a blank page. The room, rich and simple, was a place of perfection as well as of splendour in delicate tints, with precious specimens of French furniture of the last century ranged against walls of pale brocade, and here and there a small, almost priceless picture. George Dallow had made it, caring for these things and liking to talk about them--scarce ever about anything else; so that it appeared to represent him still, what was best in his kindly, limited nature, his friendly, competent, tiresome insistence on harmony--on identity of "period." Nick could hear him yet, and could see him, too fat and with a congenital thickness in his speech, lounging there in loose clothes with his eternal cigarette. "Now my dear fellow, _that_'s what I call form: I don't know what you call it"--that was the way he used to begin. All round were flowers in rare vases, but it looked a place of which the beauty would have smelt sweet even without them. Lady Agnes had taken a white rose from one of the clusters and was holding it to her face, which was turned to the door as Nick crossed the threshold. The expression of her figure instantly told him--he saw the creased card he had sent her lying on one of the beautiful bare tables--how she had been sailing up and down in a majesty of satisfaction. The inflation of her long plain dress and the brightened dimness of her proud face were still in the air. In a moment he had kissed her and was being kissed, not in quick repetition, but in tender prolongation, with which the perfume of the white rose was mixed. But there was something else too--her sweet smothered words in his ear: "Oh my boy, my boy--oh your father, your father!" Neither the sense of pleasure nor that of pain, with Lady Agnes--as indeed with most of the persons with whom this history is concerned--was a liberation of chatter; so that for a minute all she said again was, "I think of Sir Nicholas and wish he were here"; addressing the words to Julia, who had wandered forward without looking at the mother and son. "Poor Sir Nicholas!" said Mrs. Dallow vaguely. "Did you make another speech?" Lady Agnes asked. "I don't know. Did I?" Nick appealed. "I don't know!"--and Julia spoke with her back turned, doing something to her hat before the glass. "Oh of course the confusion, the bewilderment!" said Lady Agnes in a tone rich in political reminiscence. "It was really immense fun," Mrs. Dallow went so far as to drop. "Dearest Julia!" Lady Agnes deeply breathed. Then she added: "It was you who made it sure." "There are a lot of people coming to dinner," said Julia. "Perhaps you'll have to speak again," Lady Agnes smiled at her son. "Thank you; I like the way you talk about it!" cried Nick. "I'm like Iago: 'from this time forth I never will speak word!'" "Don't say that, Nick," said his mother gravely. "Don't be afraid--he'll jabber like a magpie!" And Julia went out of the room. Nick had flung himself on a sofa with an air of weariness, though not of completely extinct cheer; and Lady Agnes stood fingering her rose and looking down at him. His eyes kept away from her; they seemed fixed on something she couldn't see. "I hope you've thanked Julia handsomely," she presently remarked. "Why of course, mother." "She has done as much as if you hadn't been sure." "I wasn't in the least sure--and she has done everything." "She has been too good--but _we_'ve done something. I hope you don't leave out your father," Lady Agnes amplified as Nick's glance appeared for a moment to question her "we." "Never, never!" Nick uttered these words perhaps a little mechanically, but the next minute he added as if suddenly moved to think what he could say that would give his mother most pleasure: "Of course his name has worked for me. Gone as he is he's still a living force." He felt a good deal of a hypocrite, but one didn't win such a seat every day in the year. Probably indeed he should never win another. "He hears you, he watches you, he rejoices in you," Lady Agnes opined. This idea was oppressive to Nick--that of the rejoicing almost as much as of the watching. He had made his concession, but, with a certain impulse to divert his mother from following up her advantage, he broke out: "Julia's a tremendously effective woman." "Of course she is!" said Lady Agnes knowingly. "Her charming appearance is half the battle"--Nick explained a little coldly what he meant. But he felt his coldness an inadequate protection to him when he heard his companion observe with something of the same sapience: "A woman's always effective when she likes a person so much." It discomposed him to be described as a person liked, and so much, and by a woman; and he simply said abruptly: "When are you going away?" "The first moment that's civil--to-morrow morning. _You_'ll stay on I hope." "Stay on? What shall I stay on for?" "Why you might stay to express your appreciation." Nick considered. "I've everything to do." "I thought everything was done," said Lady Agnes. "Well, that's just why," her son replied, not very lucidly. "I want to do other things--quite other things. I should like to take the next train," And he looked at his watch. "When there are people coming to dinner to meet you?" "They'll meet _you_--that's better." "I'm sorry any one's coming," Lady Agnes said in a tone unencouraging to a deviation from the reality of things. "I wish we were alone--just as a family. It would please Julia to-day to feel that we _are_ one. Do stay with her to-morrow." "How will that do--when she's alone?" "She won't be alone, with Mrs. Gresham." "Mrs. Gresham doesn't count." "That's precisely why I want you to stop. And her cousin, almost her brother: what an idea that it won't do! Haven't you stayed here before when there has been no one?" "I've never stayed much, and there have always been people. At any rate it's now different." "It's just because it's different. Besides, it isn't different and it never was," said Lady Agnes, more incoherent in her earnestness than it often happened to her to be. "She always liked you and she likes you now more than ever--if you call _that_ different!" Nick got up at this and, without meeting her eyes, walked to one of the windows, where he stood with his back turned and looked out on the great greenness. She watched him a moment and she might well have been wishing, while he appeared to gaze with intentness, that it would come to him with the same force as it had come to herself--very often before, but during these last days more than ever--that the level lands of Harsh, stretching away before the window, the French garden with its symmetry, its screens and its statues, and a great many more things of which these were the superficial token, were Julia's very own to do with exactly as she liked. No word of appreciation or envy, however, dropped from the young man's lips, and his mother presently went on: "What could be more natural than that after your triumphant contest you and she should have lots to settle and to talk about--no end of practical questions, no end of urgent business? Aren't you her member, and can't her member pass a day with her, and she a great proprietor?" Nick turned round at this with an odd expression. "_Her_ member--am I hers?" Lady Agnes had a pause--she had need of all her tact. "Well, if the place is hers and you represent the place--!" she began. But she went no further, for Nick had interrupted her with a laugh. "What a droll thing to 'represent,' when one thinks of it! And what does _it_ represent, poor stupid little borough with its strong, though I admit clean, smell of meal and its curiously fat-faced inhabitants? Did you ever see such a collection of fat faces turned up at the hustings? They looked like an enormous sofa, with the cheeks for the gathers and the eyes for the buttons." "Oh well, the next time you shall have a great town," Lady Agnes returned, smiling and feeling that she _was_ tactful. "It will only be a bigger sofa! I'm joking, of course?" Nick pursued, "and I ought to be ashamed of myself. They've done me the honour to elect me and I shall never say a word that's not civil about them, poor dears. But even a new member may blaspheme to his mother." "I wish you'd be serious to your mother"--and she went nearer him. "The difficulty is that I'm two men; it's the strangest thing that ever was," Nick professed with his bright face on her. "I'm two quite distinct human beings, who have scarcely a point in common; not even the memory, on the part of one, of the achievements or the adventures of the other. One man wins the seat but it's the other fellow who sits in it." "Oh Nick, don't spoil your victory by your perversity!" she cried as she clasped her hands to him. "I went through it with great glee--I won't deny that: it excited me, interested me, amused me. When once I was in it I liked it. But now that I'm out of it again----!" "Out of it?" His mother stared. "Isn't the whole point that you're in?" "Ah _now_ I'm only in the House of Commons." For an instant she seemed not to understand and to be on the point of laying her finger quickly to her lips with a "Hush!"--as if the late Sir Nicholas might have heard the "only." Then while a comprehension of the young man's words promptly superseded that impulse she replied with force: "You'll be in the Lords the day you determine to get there." This futile remark made Nick laugh afresh, and not only laugh, but kiss her, which was always an intenser form of mystification for poor Lady Agnes and apparently the one he liked best to inflict; after which he said: "The odd thing is, you know, that Harsh has no wants. At least it's not sharply, not articulately conscious of them. We all pretended to talk them over together, and I promised to carry them in my heart of hearts. But upon my honour I can't remember one of them. Julia says the wants of Harsh are simply the national wants--rather a pretty phrase for Julia. She means _she_ does everything for the place; _she_'s really their member and this house in which we stand their legislative chamber. Therefore the _lacunae_ I've undertaken to fill out are the national wants. It will be rather a job to rectify some of them, won't it? I don't represent the appetites of Harsh--Harsh is gorged. I represent the ideas of my party. That's what Julia says." "Oh never mind what Julia says!" Lady Agnes broke out impatiently. This impatience made it singular that the very next word she uttered should be: "My dearest son, I wish to heaven you'd marry her. It would be so fitting now!" she added. "Why now?" Nick frowned. "She has shown you such sympathy, such devotion." "Is it for that she has shown it?" "Ah you might _feel_--I can't tell you!" said Lady Agnes reproachfully. He blushed at this, as if what he did feel was the reproach. "Must I marry her because you like her?" "I? Why we're _all_ as fond of her as we can be." "Dear mother, I hope that any woman I ever may marry will be a person agreeable not only to you, but also, since you make a point of it, to Grace and Biddy. But I must tell you this--that I shall marry no woman I'm not unmistakably in love with." "And why are you not in love with Julia--charming, clever, generous as she is?" Lady Agnes laid her hands on him--she held him tight. "Dearest Nick, if you care anything in the world to make me happy you'll stay over here to-morrow and be nice to her." He waited an instant. "Do you mean propose to her?" "With a single word, with the glance of an eye, the movement of your little finger"--and she paused, looking intensely, imploringly up into his face--"in less time than it takes me to say what I say now, you may have it all." As he made no answer, only meeting her eyes, she added insistently: "You know she's a fine creature--you know she is!" "Dearest mother, what I seem to know better than anything else in the world is that I love my freedom. I set it far above everything." "Your freedom? What freedom is there in being poor?" Lady Agnes fiercely demanded. "Talk of that when Julia puts everything she possesses at your feet!" "I can't talk of it, mother--it's too terrible an idea. And I can't talk of _her_, nor of what I think of her. You must leave that to me. I do her perfect justice." "You don't or you'd marry her to-morrow," she passionately argued. "You'd feel the opportunity so beautifully rare, with everything in the world to make it perfect. Your father would have valued it for you beyond everything. Think a little what would have given _him_ pleasure. That's what I meant when I spoke just now of us all. It wasn't of Grace and Biddy I was thinking--fancy!--it was of him. He's with you always; he takes with you, at your side, every step you take yourself. He'd bless devoutly your marriage to Julia; he'd feel what it would be for you and for us all. I ask for no sacrifice and he'd ask for none. We only ask that you don't commit the crime----!" Nick Dormer stopped her with another kiss; he murmured "Mother, mother, mother!" as he bent over her. He wished her not to go on, to let him off; but the deep deprecation in his voice didn't prevent her saying: "You know it--you know it perfectly. All and more than all that I can tell you you know." He drew her closer, kissed her again, held her as he would have held a child in a paroxysm, soothing her silently till it could abate. Her vehemence had brought with it tears; she dried them as she disengaged herself. The next moment, however, she resumed, attacking him again: "For a public man she'd be the perfect companion. She's made for public life--she's made to shine, to be concerned in great things, to occupy a high position and to help him on. She'd back you up in everything as she has backed you in this. Together there's nothing you couldn't do. You can have the first house in England--yes, the very first! What freedom _is_ there in being poor? How can you do anything without money, and what money can you make for yourself--what money will ever come to you? That's the crime--to throw away such an instrument of power, such a blessed instrument of good." "It isn't everything to be rich, mother," said Nick, looking at the floor with a particular patience--that is with a provisional docility and his hands in his pockets. "And it isn't so fearful to be poor." "It's vile--it's abject. Don't I know?" "Are you in such acute want?" he smiled. "Ah don't make me explain what you've only to look at to see!" his mother returned as if with a richness of allusion to dark elements in her fate. "Besides," he easily went on, "there's other money in the world than Julia's. I might come by some of that." "Do you mean Mr. Carteret's?" The question made him laugh as her feeble reference five minutes before to the House of Lords had done. But she pursued, too full of her idea to take account of such a poor substitute for an answer: "Let me tell you one thing, for I've known Charles Carteret much longer than you and I understand him better. There's nothing you could do that would do you more good with him than to marry Julia. I know the way he looks at things and I know exactly how that would strike him. It would please him, it would charm him; it would be the thing that would most prove to him that you're in earnest. You need, you know, to do something of that sort," she said as for plain speaking. "Haven't I come in for Harsh?" asked Nick. "Oh he's very canny. He likes to see people rich. _Then_ he believes in them--then he's likely to believe more. He's kind to you because you're your father's son; but I'm sure your being poor takes just so much off." "He can remedy that so easily," said Nick, smiling still. "Is my being kept by Julia what you call my making an effort for myself?" Lady Agnes hesitated; then "You needn't insult Julia!" she replied. "Moreover, if I've _her_ money I shan't want his," Nick unheedingly remarked. Again his mother waited before answering; after which she produced: "And pray wouldn't you wish to be independent?" "You're delightful, dear mother--you're very delightful! I particularly like your conception of independence. Doesn't it occur to you that at a pinch I might improve my fortune by some other means than by making a mercenary marriage or by currying favour with a rich old gentleman? Doesn't it occur to you that I might work?" "Work at politics? How does that make money, honourably?" "I don't mean at politics." "What do you mean then?"--and she seemed to challenge him to phrase it if he dared. This demonstration of her face and voice might have affected him, for he remained silent and she continued: "Are you elected or not?" "It seems a dream," he rather flatly returned. "If you are, act accordingly and don't mix up things that are as wide asunder as the poles!" She spoke with sternness and his silence appeared again to represent an admission that her sternness counted for him. Possibly she was touched by it; after a few moments, at any rate, during which nothing more passed between them, she appealed to him in a gentler and more anxious key, which had this virtue to touch him that he knew it was absolutely the first time in her life she had really begged for anything. She had never been obliged to beg; she had got on without it and most things had come to her. He might judge therefore in what a light she regarded this boon for which in her bereft old age she humbled herself to be a suitor. There was such a pride in her that he could feel what it cost her to go on her knees even to her son. He did judge how it was in his power to gratify her; and as he was generous and imaginative he was stirred and shaken as it came over him in a wave of figurative suggestion that he might make up to her for many things. He scarcely needed to hear her ask with a pleading wail that was almost tragic: "Don't you see how things have turned out for us? Don't you know how unhappy I am, don't you know what a bitterness----?" She stopped with a sob in her voice and he recognised vividly this last tribulation, the unhealed wound of her change of life and her lapse from eminence to flatness. "You know what Percival is and the comfort I have of him. You know the property and what he's doing with it and what comfort I get from _that_! Everything's dreary but what you can do for us. Everything's odious, down to living in a hole with one's girls who don't marry. Grace is impossible--I don't know what's the matter with her; no one will look at her, and she's so conceited with it--sometimes I feel as if I could beat her! And Biddy will never marry, and we're three dismal women in a filthy house, and what are three dismal women, more or less, in London?" So with an unexpected rage of self-exposure she poured out her disappointments and troubles, tore away the veil from her sadness and soreness. It almost scared him to see how she hated her life, though at another time it might have been amusing to note how she despised her gardenless house. Of course it wasn't a country-house, and she couldn't get used to that. Better than he could do--for it was the sort of thing into which in any case a woman enters more than a man--she felt what a lift into brighter air, what a regilding of his sisters' possibilities, his marriage to Julia would effect for them. He couldn't trace the difference, but his mother saw it all as a shining picture. She hung the bright vision before him now--she stood there like a poor woman crying for a kindness. What was filial in him, all the piety he owed, especially to the revived spirit of his father, more than ever present on a day of such public pledges, became from one moment to the other as the very handle to the door of the chamber of concessions. He had the impulse, so embarrassing when it is a question of consistent action, to see in a touching, an interesting light any forcibly presented side of the life of another: such things effected a union with something in _his_ life, and in the recognition of them was no soreness of sacrifice and no consciousness of merit. Rapidly, at present, this change of scene took place before his spiritual eye. He found himself believing, because his mother communicated the belief, that it depended but on his own conduct richly to alter the social outlook of the three women who clung to him and who declared themselves forlorn. This was not the highest kind of motive, but it contained a spring, it touched into life again old injunctions and appeals. Julia's wide kingdom opened out round him and seemed somehow to wear the face of his own possible future. His mother and sisters floated in the rosy element as if he had breathed it about them. "The first house in England" she had called it; but it might be the first house in Europe, the first in the world, by the fine air and the high humanities that should fill it. Everything beautiful in his actual, his material view seemed to proclaim its value as never before; the house rose over his head as a museum of exquisite rewards, and the image of poor George Dallow hovered there obsequious, expressing that he had only been the modest, tasteful organiser, or even upholsterer, appointed to set it all in order and punctually retire. Lady Agnes's tone in fine penetrated further than it had done yet when she brought out with intensity: "Don't desert us--don't desert us." "Don't desert you----?" "Be great--be great. I'm old, I've lived, I've seen. Go in for a great material position. That will simplify everything else." "I'll do what I can for you--anything, everything I can. Trust me--leave me alone," Nick went on. "And you'll stay over--you'll spend the day with her?" "I'll stay till she turns me out!" His mother had hold of his hand again now: she raised it to her lips and kissed it. "My dearest son, my only joy!" Then: "I don't see how you can resist her," she added. "No more do I!" She looked about--there was so much to look at--with a deep exhalation. "If you're so fond of art, what art is equal to all this? The joy of living in the midst of it--of seeing the finest works every day! You'll have everything the world can give." "That's exactly what was just passing in my own mind. It's too much," Nick reasoned. "Don't be selfish!" "Selfish?" he echoed. "Unselfish then. You'll share it with us." "And with Julia a little, I hope," he said. "God bless you!" cried his mother, looking up at him. Her eyes were detained by the sudden sense of something in his own that was not clear to her; but before she could challenge it he asked abruptly: "Why do you talk so of poor Biddy? Why won't she marry?" "You had better ask Peter Sherringham," said Lady Agnes. "What has he to do with it?" "How odd of you not to know--when it's so plain how she thinks of him that it's a matter of common gossip." "Yes, if you will--we've made it so, and she takes it as an angel. But Peter likes her." "Does he? Then it's the more shame to him to behave as he does. He had better leave his wretched actresses alone. That's the love of art too!" mocked Lady Agnes. But Nick glossed it all over. "Biddy's so charming she'll easily marry some one else." "Never, if she loves him. However, Julia will bring it about--Julia will help her," his mother pursued more cheerfully. "That's what you'll do for us--that _she'll_ do everything!" "Why then more than now?" he asked. "Because we shall be yours." "You're mine already." "Yes, but she isn't. However, she's as good!" Lady Agnes exulted. "She'll turn me out of the house," said Nick. "Come and tell me when she does! But there she is--go to her!" And she gave him a push toward one of the windows that stood open to the terrace. Their hostess had become visible outside; she passed slowly along the terrace with her long shadow. "Go to her," his mother repeated--"she's waiting for you." Nick went out with the air of a man as ready to pass that way as another, and at the same moment his two sisters, still flushed with participation, appeared in a different quarter. "We go home to-morrow, but Nick will stay a day or two," Lady Agnes said to them. "Dear old Nick!" Grace ejaculated looking at her with intensity. "He's going to speak," she went on. "But don't mention it." "Don't mention it?" Biddy asked with a milder stare. "Hasn't he spoken enough, poor fellow?" "I mean to Julia," Lady Agnes replied. "Don't you understand, you goose?"--and Grace turned on her sister. XIV The next morning brought the young man many letters and telegrams, and his coffee was placed beside him in his room, where he remained until noon answering these communications. When he came out he learned that his mother and sisters had left the house. This information was given him by Mrs. Gresham, whom he found dealing with her own voluminous budget at one of the tables in the library. She was a lady who received thirty letters a day, the subject-matter of which, as well as of her punctual answers in a hand that would have been "ladylike" in a manageress, was a puzzle to those who observed her. She told Nick that Lady Agnes had not been willing to disturb him at his work to say good-bye, knowing she should see him in a day or two in town. He was amused at the way his mother had stolen off--as if she feared further conversation might weaken the spell she believed herself to have wrought. The place was cleared, moreover, of its other visitors, so that, as Mrs. Gresham said, the fun was at an end. This lady expressed the idea that the fun was after all rather a bore. At any rate now they could rest, Mrs. Dallow and Nick and she, and she was glad Nick was going to stay for a little quiet. She liked Harsh best when it was not _en fête_: then one could see what a sympathetic old place it was. She hoped Nick was not dreadfully fagged--she feared Julia was completely done up. Julia, however, had transported her exhaustion to the grounds--she was wandering about somewhere. She thought more people would be coming to the house, people from the town, people from the country, and had gone out so as not to have to see them. She had not gone far--Nick could easily find her. Nick intimated that he himself was not eager for more people, whereupon Mrs. Gresham rather archly smiled. "And of course you hate _me_ for being here." He made some protest and she added: "But I'm almost part of the house, you know--I'm one of the chairs or tables." Nick declared that he had never seen a house so well furnished, and Mrs. Gresham said: "I believe there _are_ to be some people to dinner; rather an interference, isn't it? Julia lives so in public. But it's all for you." And after a moment she added: "It's a wonderful constitution." Nick at first failed to seize her allusion--he thought it a retarded political reference, a sudden tribute to the great unwritten instrument by which they were all governed and under the happy operation of which his fight had been so successful. He was on the point of saying, "The British? Wonderful!" when he gathered that the intention of his companion had been simply to praise Mrs. Dallow's fine robustness. "The surface so delicate, the action so easy, yet the frame of steel." He left Mrs. Gresham to her correspondence and went out of the house; wondering as he walked if she wanted him to do the same thing his mother wanted, so that her words had been intended for a prick--whether even the two ladies had talked over their desire together. Mrs. Gresham was a married woman who was usually taken for a widow, mainly because she was perpetually "sent for" by her friends, who in no event sent for Mr. Gresham. She came in every case, with her air of being _répandue_ at the expense of dingier belongings. Her figure was admired--that is it was sometimes mentioned--and she dressed as if it was expected of her to be smart, like a young woman in a shop or a servant much in view. She slipped in and out, accompanied at the piano, talked to the neglected visitors, walked in the rain, and after the arrival of the post usually had conferences with her hostess, during which she stroked her chin and looked familiarly responsible. It was her peculiarity that people were always saying things to her in a lowered voice. She had all sorts of acquaintances and in small establishments sometimes wrote the _menus_. Great ones, on the other hand, had no terrors for her--she had seen too many. No one had ever discovered whether any one else paid her. People only knew what _they_ did. If Lady Agnes had in the minor key discussed with her the propriety of a union between the mistress of Harsh and the hope of the Dormers this last personage could take the circumstance for granted without irritation and even with cursory indulgence; for he was got unhappy now and his spirit was light and clear. The summer day was splendid and the world, as he looked at it from the terrace, offered no more worrying ambiguity than a vault of airy blue arching over a lap of solid green. The wide, still trees in the park appeared to be waiting for some daily inspection, and the rich fields, with their official frill of hedges, to rejoice in the light that smiled upon them as named and numbered acres. Nick felt himself catch the smile and all the reasons of it: they made up a charm to which he had perhaps not hitherto done justice--something of the impression he had received when younger from showy "views" of fine country-seats that had pressed and patted nature, as by the fat hands of "benches" of magistrates and landlords, into supreme respectability and comfort. There were a couple of peacocks on the terrace, and his eye was caught by the gleam of the swans on a distant lake, where was also a little temple on an island; and these objects fell in with his humour, which at another time might have been ruffled by them as aggressive triumphs of the conventional. It was certainly a proof of youth and health on his part that his spirits had risen as the plot thickened and that after he had taken his jump into the turbid waters of a contested election he had been able to tumble and splash not only without a sense of awkwardness but with a considerable capacity for the frolic. Tepid as we saw him in Paris he had found his relation to his opportunity surprisingly altered by his little journey across the Channel, had seen things in a new perspective and breathed an air that set him and kept him in motion. There had been something in it that went to his head--an element that his mother and his sisters, his father from beyond the grave, Julia Dallow, the Liberal party and a hundred friends, were both secretly and overtly occupied in pumping into it. If he but half-believed in victory he at least liked the wind of the onset in his ears, and he had a general sense that when one was "stuck" there was always the nearest thing at which one must pull. The embarrassment, that is the revival of scepticism, which might produce an inconsistency shameful to exhibit and yet difficult to conceal, was safe enough to come later. Indeed at the risk of presenting our young man as too whimsical a personage I may hint that some such sickly glow had even now begun to tinge one quarter of his inward horizon. I am afraid, moreover, that I have no better excuse for him than the one he had touched on in that momentous conversation with his mother which I have thought it useful to reproduce in full. He was conscious of a double nature; there were two men in him, quite separate, whose leading features had little in common and each of whom insisted on having an independent turn at life. Meanwhile then, if he was adequately aware that the bed of his moral existence would need a good deal of making over if he was to lie upon it without unseemly tossing, he was also alive to the propriety of not parading his inconsistencies, not letting his unregulated passions become a spectacle to the vulgar. He had none of that wish to appear deep which is at the bottom of most forms of fatuity; he was perfectly willing to pass for decently superficial; he only aspired to be decently continuous. When you were not suitably shallow this presented difficulties; but he would have assented to the proposition that you must be as subtle as you can and that a high use of subtlety is in consuming the smoke of your inner fire. The fire was the great thing, not the chimney. He had no view of life that counted out the need of learning; it was teaching rather as to which he was conscious of no particular mission. He enjoyed life, enjoyed it immensely, and was ready to pursue it with patience through as many channels as possible. He was on his guard, however, against making an ass of himself, that is against not thinking out his experiments before trying them in public. It was because, as yet, he liked life in general better than it was clear to him he liked particular possibilities that, on the occasion of a constituency's holding out a cordial hand to him while it extended another in a different direction, a certain bloom of boyhood that was on him had not paled at the idea of a match. He had risen to the fray as he had risen to matches at school, for his boyishness could still take a pleasure in an inconsiderate show of agility. He could meet electors and conciliate bores and compliment women and answer questions and roll off speeches and chaff adversaries--he could do these things because it was amusing and slightly dangerous, like playing football or ascending an Alp, pastimes for which nature had conferred on him an aptitude not so very different in kind from a due volubility on platforms. There were two voices to admonish him that all this was not really action at all, but only a pusillanimous imitation of it: one of them fitfully audible in the depths of his own spirit and the other speaking, in the equivocal accents of a very crabbed hand, from a letter of four pages by Gabriel Nash. However, Nick carried the imitation as far as possible, and the flood of sound floated him. What more could a working faith have done? He had not broken with the axiom that in a case of doubt one should hold off, for this applied to choice, and he had not at present the slightest pretension to choosing. He knew he was lifted along, that what he was doing was not first-rate, that nothing was settled by it and that if there was a hard knot in his life it would only grow harder with keeping. Doing one's sum to-morrow instead of to-day doesn't make the sum easier, but at least makes to-day so. Sometimes in the course of the following fortnight it seemed to him he had gone in for Harsh because he was sure he should lose; sometimes he foresaw that he should win precisely to punish him for having tried and for his want of candour; and when presently he did win he was almost scared at his success. Then it appeared to him he had done something even worse than not choose--he had let others choose for him. The beauty of it was that they had chosen with only their own object in their eye, for what did they know about his strange alternative? He was rattled about so for a fortnight--Julia taking care of this--that he had no time to think save when he tried to remember a quotation or an American story, and all his life became an overflow of verbiage. Thought couldn't hear itself for the noise, which had to be pleasant and persuasive, had to hang more or less together, without its aid. Nick was surprised at the airs he could play, and often when, the last thing at night, he shut the door of his room, found himself privately exclaiming that he had had no idea he was such a mountebank. I must add that if this reflexion didn't occupy him long, and if no meditation, after his return from Paris, held him for many moments, there was a reason better even than that he was tired, that he was busy, that he appreciated the coincidence of the hit and the hurrah, the hurrah and the hit. That reason was simply Mrs. Dallow, who had suddenly become a still larger fact in his consciousness than his having turned actively political. She _was_ indeed his being so--in the sense that if the politics were his, how little soever, the activity was hers. She had better ways of showing she was clever than merely saying clever things--which in general only prove at the most that one would be clever if one could. The accomplished fact itself was almost always the demonstration that Mrs. Dallow could; and when Nick came to his senses after the proclamation of the victor and the drop of the uproar her figure was, of the whole violent dance of shadows, the only thing that came back, that stayed. She had been there at each of the moments, passing, repassing, returning, before him, beside him, behind him. She had made the business infinitely prettier than it would have been without her, added music and flowers and ices, a finer charm, converting it into a kind of heroic "function," the form of sport most dangerous. It had been a garden-party, say, with one's life at stake from pressure of the crowd. The concluded affair had bequeathed him thus not only a seat in the House of Commons, but a perception of what may come of women in high embodiments and an abyss of intimacy with one woman in particular. She had wrapped him up in something, he didn't know what--a sense of facility, an overpowering fragrance--and they had moved together in an immense fraternity. There had been no love-making, no contact that was only personal, no vulgarity of flirtation: the hurry of the days and the sharpness with which they both tended to an outside object had made all that irrelevant. It was as if she had been too near for him to see her separate from himself; but none the less, when he now drew breath and looked back, what had happened met his eyes as a composed picture--a picture of which the subject was inveterately Julia and her ponies: Julia wonderfully fair and fine, waving her whip, cleaving the crowd, holding her head as if it had been a banner, smiling up into second-storey windows, carrying him beside her, carrying him to his doom. He had not reckoned at the time, in the few days, how much he had driven about with her; but the image of it was there, in his consulted conscience, as well as in a personal glow not yet chilled: it looked large as it rose before him. The things his mother had said to him made a rich enough frame for it all, and the whole impression had that night kept him much awake. XV While, after leaving Mrs. Gresham, he was hesitating which way to go and was on the point of hailing a gardener to ask if Mrs. Dallow had been seen, he noticed, as a spot of colour in an expanse of shrubbery, a far-away parasol moving in the direction of the lake. He took his course toward it across the park, and as the bearer of the parasol strolled slowly it was not five minutes before he had joined her. He went to her soundlessly, on the grass--he had been whistling at first, but as he got nearer stopped--and it was not till he was at hand that she looked round. He had watched her go as if she were turning things over in her mind, while she brushed the smooth walks and the clean turf with her dress, slowly made her parasol revolve on her shoulder and carried in the other hand a book which he perceived to be a monthly review. "I came out to get away," she said when he had begun to walk with her. "Away from me?" "Ah that's impossible." Then she added: "The day's so very nice." "Lovely weather," Nick dropped. "You want to get away from Mrs. Gresham, I suppose." She had a pause. "From everything!" "Well, I want to get away too." "It has been such a racket. Listen to the dear birds." "Yes, our noise isn't so good as theirs," said Nick. "I feel as if I had been married and had shoes and rice thrown after me," he went on. "But not to you, Julia--nothing so good as that." Julia made no reply; she only turned her eyes on the ornamental water stretching away at their right. In a moment she exclaimed, "How nasty the lake looks!" and Nick recognised in her tone a sign of that odd shyness--a perverse stiffness at a moment when she probably but wanted to be soft--which, taken in combination with her other qualities, was so far from being displeasing to him that it represented her nearest approach to extreme charm. _He_ was not shy now, for he considered this morning that he saw things very straight and in a sense altogether superior and delightful. This enabled him to be generously sorry for his companion--if he were the reason of her being in any degree uncomfortable, and yet left him to enjoy some of the motions, not in themselves without grace, by which her discomfort was revealed. He wouldn't insist on anything yet: so he observed that her standard in lakes was too high, and then talked a little about his mother and the girls, their having gone home, his not having seen them that morning, Lady Agnes's deep satisfaction in his victory, and the fact that she would be obliged to "do something" for the autumn--take a house or something or other. "I'll lend her a house," said Mrs. Dallow. "Oh Julia, Julia!" Nick half groaned. But she paid no attention to his sound; she only held up her review and said: "See what I've brought with me to read--Mr. Hoppus's article." "That's right; then _I_ shan't have to. You'll tell me about it." He uttered this without believing she had meant or wished to read the article, which was entitled "The Revision of the British Constitution," in spite of her having encumbered herself with the stiff, fresh magazine. He was deeply aware she was not in want of such inward occupation as periodical literature could supply. They walked along and he added: "But is that what we're in for, reading Mr. Hoppus? Is it the sort of thing constituents expect? Or, even worse, pretending to have read him when one hasn't? Oh what a tangled web we weave!" "People are talking about it. One has to know. It's the article of the month." Nick looked at her askance. "You say things every now and then for which I could really kill you. 'The article of the month,' for instance: I could kill you for that." "Well, kill me!" Mrs. Dallow returned. "Let me carry your book," he went on irrelevantly. The hand in which she held it was on the side of her on which he was walking, and he put out his own hand to take it. But for a couple of minutes she forbore to give it up, so that they held it together, swinging it a little. Before she surrendered it he asked where she was going. "To the island," she answered. "Well, I'll go with you--and I'll kill you there." "The things I say are the right things," Julia declared. "It's just the right things that are wrong. It's because you're so political," Nick too lightly explained. "It's your horrible ambition. The woman who has a salon should have read the article of the month. See how one dreadful thing leads to another." "There are some things that lead to nothing," said Mrs. Dallow. "No doubt--no doubt. And how are you going to get over to your island?" "I don't know." "Isn't there a boat?" "I don't know." Nick had paused to look round for the boat, but his hostess walked on without turning her head. "Can you row?" he then asked. "Don't you know I can do everything?" "Yes, to be sure. That's why I want to kill you. There's the boat." "Shall you drown me?" she asked. "Oh let me perish with you!" Nick answered with a sigh. The boat had been hidden from them by the bole of a great tree which rose from the grass at the water's edge. It was moored to a small place of embarkation and was large enough to hold as many persons as were likely to wish to visit at once the little temple in the middle of the lake, which Nick liked because it was absurd and which Mrs. Dallow had never had a particular esteem for. The lake, fed by a natural spring, was a liberal sheet of water, measured by the scale of park scenery; and though its principal merit was that, taken at a distance, it gave a gleam of abstraction to the concrete verdure, doing the office of an open eye in a dull face, it could also be approached without derision on a sweet summer morning when it made a lapping sound and reflected candidly various things that were probably finer than itself--the sky, the great trees, the flight of birds. A man of taste, coming back from Rome a hundred years before, had caused a small ornamental structure to be raised, from artificial foundations, on its bosom, and had endeavoured to make this architectural pleasantry as nearly as possible a reminiscence of the small ruined rotunda which stands on the bank of the Tiber and is pronounced by _ciceroni_ once sacred to Vesta. It was circular, roofed with old tiles, surrounded by white columns and considerably dilapidated. George Dallow had taken an interest in it--it reminded him not in the least of Rome, but of other things he liked--and had amused himself with restoring it. "Give me your hand--sit there and I'll ferry you," Nick said. Julia complied, placing herself opposite him in the boat; but as he took up the paddles she declared that she preferred to remain on the water--there was too much malice prepense in the temple. He asked her what she meant by that, and she said it was ridiculous to withdraw to an island a few feet square on purpose to meditate. She had nothing to meditate about that required so much scenery and attitude. "On the contrary, it would be just to change the scene and the _pose_. It's what we have been doing for a week that's attitude; and to be for half an hour where nobody's looking and one hasn't to keep it up is just what I wanted to put in an idle irresponsible day for. I'm not keeping it up now--I suppose you've noticed," Nick went on as they floated and he scarcely dipped the oars. "I don't understand you"--and Julia leaned back in the boat. He gave no further explanation than to ask in a minute: "Have you people to dinner to-night?" "I believe there are three or four, but I'll put them off if you like." "Must you _always_ live in public, Julia?" he continued. She looked at him a moment and he could see how she coloured. "We'll go home--I'll put them off." "Ah no, don't go home; it's too jolly here. Let them come, let them come, poor wretches!" "How little you know me," Julia presently broke out, "when, ever so many times, I've lived here for months without a creature!" "Except Mrs. Gresham, I suppose." "I have had to have the house going, I admit." "You're perfect, you're admirable, and I don't criticise you." "I don't understand you!" she tossed back. "That only adds to the generosity of what you've done for me," Nick returned, beginning to pull faster. He bent over the oars and sent the boat forward, keeping this up for a succession of minutes during which they both remained silent. His companion, in her place, motionless, reclining--the seat in the stern was most comfortable--looked only at the water, the sky, the trees. At last he headed for the little temple, saying first, however, "Shan't we visit the ruin?" "If you like. I don't mind seeing how they keep it." They reached the white steps leading up to it. He held the boat and his companion got out; then, when he had made it fast, they mounted together to the open door. "They keep the place very well," Nick said, looking round. "It's a capital place to give up everything in." "It might do at least for you to explain what you mean." And Julia sat down. "I mean to pretend for half an hour that I don't represent the burgesses of Harsh. It's charming--it's very delicate work. Surely it has been retouched." The interior of the pavilion, lighted by windows which the circle of columns was supposed outside and at a distance to conceal, had a vaulted ceiling and was occupied by a few pieces of last-century furniture, spare and faded, of which the colours matched with the decoration of the walls. These and the ceiling, tinted and not exempt from indications of damp, were covered with fine mouldings and medallions. It all made a very elegant little tea-house, the mistress of which sat on the edge of a sofa rolling her parasol and remarking, "You ought to read Mr. Hoppus's article to me." "Why, is _this_ your salon?" Nick smiled. "What makes you always talk of that? My salon's an invention of your own." "But isn't it the idea you're most working for?" Suddenly, nervously, she put up her parasol and sat under it as if not quite sensible of what she was doing. "How much you know me! I'm not 'working' for anything--that you'll ever guess." Nick wandered about the room and looked at various things it contained--the odd volumes on the tables, the bits of quaint china on the shelves. "They do keep it very well. You've got charming things." "They're supposed to come over every day and look after them." "They must come over in force." "Oh no one knows." "It's spick and span. How well you have everything done!" "I think you've some reason to say so," said Mrs. Dallow. Her parasol was now down and she was again rolling it tight. "But you're right about my not knowing you. Why were you so ready to do so much for me?" He stopped in front of her and she looked up at him. Her eyes rested long on his own; then she broke out: "Why do you hate me so?" "Was it because you like me personally?" Nick pursued as if he hadn't heard her. "You may think that an odd or positively an odious question; but isn't it natural, my wanting to know?" "Oh if you don't know!" Julia quite desperately sighed. "It's a question of being sure." "Well then if you're not sure----!" "Was it done for me as a friend, as a man?" "You're not a man--you're a child," his hostess declared with a face that was cold, though she had been smiling the moment before. "After all I was a good candidate," Nick went on. "What do I care for candidates?" "You're the most delightful woman, Julia," he said as he sat down beside her, "and I can't imagine what you mean by my hating you." "If you haven't discovered that I like you, you might as well." "Might as well discover it?" She was grave--he had never seen her so pale and never so beautiful. She had stopped rolling her parasol; her hands were folded in her lap and her eyes bent on them. Nick sat looking at them as well--a trifle awkwardly. "Might as well have hated me," she said. "We've got on so beautifully together all these days: why shouldn't we get on as well for ever and ever?" he brought out. She made no answer, and suddenly he said: "Ah Julia, I don't know what you've done to me, but you've done it. You've done it by strange ways, but it will serve. Yes, I hate you," he added in a different tone and with his face all nearer. "Dear Nick, dear Nick----!" she began. But she stopped, feeling his nearness and its intensity, a nearness now so great that his arm was round her, that he was really in possession of her. She closed her eyes but heard him ask again, "Why shouldn't it be for ever, for ever?" in a voice that had for her ear a vibration none had ever had. "You've done it, you've done it," Nick repeated. "What do you want of me?" she appealed. "To stay with me--this way--always." "Ah not this way," she answered softly, but as if in pain and making an effort, with a certain force, to detach herself. "This way then--or this!" He took such pressing advantage of her that he had kissed her with repetition. She rose while he insisted, but he held her yet, and as he did so his tenderness turned to beautiful words. "If you'll marry me, why shouldn't it be so simple, so right and good?" He drew her closer again, too close for her to answer. But her struggle ceased and she rested on him a minute; she buried her face in his breast. "You're hard, and it's cruel!" she then exclaimed, shaking herself free. "Hard--cruel?" "You do it with so little!" And with this, unexpectedly to Nick, Julia burst straight into tears. Before he could stop her she was at the door of the pavilion as if she wished to get immediately away. There, however, he stayed her, bending over her while she sobbed, unspeakably gentle with her. "So little? It's with everything--with everything I have." "I've done it, you say? What do you accuse me of doing?" Her tears were already over. "Of making me yours; of being so precious, Julia, so exactly what a man wants, as it seems to me. I didn't know you could," he went on, smiling down at her. "I didn't--no, I didn't." "It's what I say--that you've always hated me." "I'll make it up to you!" he laughed. She leaned on the doorway with her forehead against the lintel. "You don't even deny it." "Contradict you _now_? I'll admit it, though it's rubbish, on purpose to live it down." "It doesn't matter," she said slowly; "for however much you might have liked me you'd never have done so half as much as I've cared for you." "Oh I'm so poor!" Nick murmured cheerfully. With her eyes looking at him as in a new light she slowly shook her head. Then she declared: "You never can live it down." "I like that! Haven't I asked you to marry me? When did you ever ask me?" "Every day of my life! As I say, it's hard--for a proud woman." "Yes, you're too proud even to answer me." "We must think of it, we must talk of it." "Think of it? I've thought of it ever so much." "I mean together. There are many things in such a question." "The principal thing is beautifully to give me your word." She looked at him afresh all strangely; then she threw off: "I wish I didn't adore you!" She went straight down the steps. "You don't adore me at all, you know, if you leave me now. Why do you go? It's so charming here and we're so delightfully alone." "Untie the boat; we'll go on the water," Julia said. Nick was at the top of the steps, looking down at her. "Ah stay a little--_do_ stay!" he pleaded. "I'll get in myself, I'll pull off," she simply answered. At this he came down and bent a little to undo the rope. He was close to her and as he raised his head he felt it caught; she had seized it in her hands and she pressed her lips, as he had never felt lips pressed, to the first place they encountered. The next instant she was in the boat. This time he dipped the oars very slowly indeed; and, while for a period that was longer than it seemed to them they floated vaguely, they mainly sat and glowed at each other as if everything had been settled. There were reasons enough why Nick should be happy; but it is a singular fact that the leading one was the sense of his having escaped a great and ugly mistake. The final result of his mother's appeal to him the day before had been the idea that he must act with unimpeachable honour. He was capable of taking it as an assurance that Julia had placed him under an obligation a gentleman could regard but in one way. If she herself had understood it so, putting the vision, or at any rate the appreciation, of a closer tie into everything she had done for him, the case was conspicuously simple and his course unmistakably plain. That is why he had been gay when he came out of the house to look for her: he could be gay when his course was plain. He could be all the gayer, naturally, I must add, that, in turning things over as he had done half the night, what he had turned up oftenest was the recognition that Julia now had a new personal power with him. It was not for nothing that she had thrown herself personally into his life. She had by her act made him live twice as intensely, and such an office, such a service, if a man had accepted and deeply tasted it, was certainly a thing to put him on his honour. He took it as distinct that there was nothing he could do in preference that wouldn't be spoiled for him by any deflexion from that point. His mother had made him uncomfortable by bringing it so heavily up that Julia was in love with him--he didn't like in general to be told such things; but the responsibility seemed easier to carry and he was less shy about it when once he was away from other eyes, with only Julia's own to express that truth and with indifferent nature all about. Besides, what discovery had he made this morning but that he also was in love? "You've got to be a very great man, you know," she said to him in the middle of the lake. "I don't know what you mean about my salon, but I _am_ ambitious." "We must look at life in a large, bold way," he concurred while he rested his oars. "That's what I mean. If I didn't think you could I wouldn't look at you." "I could what?" "Do everything you ought--everything I imagine, I dream of. You _are_ clever: you can never make me believe the contrary after your speech on Tuesday, Don't speak to me! I've seen, I've heard, and I know what's in you. I shall hold you to it. You're everything you pretend not to be." Nick looked at the water while she talked. "Will it always be so amusing?" he asked. "Will what always be?" "Why my career." "Shan't I make it so?" "Then it will be yours--it won't be mine," said Nick. "Ah don't say that--don't make me out that sort of woman! If they should say it's me I'd drown myself." "If they should say what's you?" "Why your getting on. If they should say I push you and do things for you. Things I mean that you can't do yourself." "Well, won't you do them? It's just what I count on." "Don't be dreadful," Julia said. "It would be loathsome if I were thought the cleverest. That's not the sort of man I want to marry." "Oh I shall make you work, my dear!" "Ah _that_----!" she sounded in a tone that might come back to a man after years. "You'll do the great thing, you'll make my life the best life," Nick brought out as if he had been touched to deep conviction. "I daresay that will keep me in heart." "In heart? Why shouldn't you be in heart?" And her eyes, lingering on him, searching him, seemed to question him still more than her lips. "Oh it will be all right!" he made answer. "You'll like success as well as any one else. Don't tell me--you're not so ethereal!" "Yes, I shall like success." "So shall I! And of course I'm glad you'll now be able to do things," Julia went on. "I'm glad you'll have things. I'm glad I'm not poor." "Ah don't speak of that," Nick murmured. "Only be nice to my mother. We shall make her supremely happy." "It wouldn't be for your mother I'd do it--yet I'm glad I like your people," Mrs. Dallow rectified. "Leave them to me!" "You're generous--you're noble," he stammered. "Your mother must live at Broadwood; she must have it for life. It's not at all bad." "Ah Julia," her companion replied, "it's well I love you!" "Why shouldn't you?" she laughed; and after this no more was said between them till the boat touched shore. When she had got out she recalled that it was time for luncheon; but they took no action in consequence, strolling in a direction which was not that of the house. There was a vista that drew them on, a grassy path skirting the foundations of scattered beeches and leading to a stile from which the charmed wanderer might drop into another division of Mrs. Dallow's property. She said something about their going as far as the stile, then the next instant exclaimed: "How stupid of you--you've forgotten Mr. Hoppus!" Nick wondered. "We left him in the temple of Vesta. Darling, I had other things to think of there." "I'll send for him," said Julia. "Lord, can you think of him now?" he asked. "Of course I can--more than ever." "Shall we go back for him?"--and he pulled up. She made no direct answer, but continued to walk, saying they would go as far as the stile. "Of course I know you're fearfully vague," she presently resumed. "I wasn't vague at all. But you were in such a hurry to get away." "It doesn't signify. I've another at home." "Another summer-house?" he more lightly suggested. "A copy of Mr. Hoppus." "Mercy, how you go in for him! Fancy having two!" "He sent me the number of the magazine, and the other's the one that comes every month." "Every month; I see"--but his manner justified considerably her charge of vagueness. They had reached the stile and he leaned over it, looking at a great mild meadow and at the browsing beasts in the distance. "Did you suppose they come every day?" Julia went on. "Dear no, thank God!" They remained there a little; he continued to look at the animals and before long added: "Delightful English pastoral scene. Why do they say it won't paint?" "Who says it won't?" "I don't know--some of them. It will in France; but somehow it won't here." "What are you talking about?" Mrs. Dallow demanded. He appeared unable to satisfy her on this point; instead of answering her directly he at any rate said: "Is Broadwood very charming?" "Have you never been there? It shows how you've treated me. We used to go there in August. George had ideas about it," she added. She had never affected not to speak of her late husband, especially with Nick, whose kinsman he had in a manner been and who had liked him better than some others did. "George had ideas about a great many things." Yet she appeared conscious it would be rather odd on such an occasion to take this up. It was even odd in Nick to have said it. "Broadwood's just right," she returned at last. "It's neither too small nor too big, and it takes care of itself. There's nothing to be done: you can't spend a penny." "And don't you want to use it?" "We can go and stay with _them_," said Julia. "They'll think I bring them an angel." And Nick covered her white hand, which was resting on the stile, with his own large one. "As they regard you yourself as an angel they'll take it as natural of you to associate with your kind." "Oh _my_ kind!" he quite wailed, looking at the cows. But his very extravagance perhaps saved it, and she turned away from him as if starting homeward, while he began to retrace his steps with her. Suddenly she said: "What did you mean that night in Paris?" "That night----?" "When you came to the hotel with me after we had all dined at that place with Peter." "What did I mean----?" "About your caring so much for the fine arts. You seemed to want to frighten me." "Why should you have been frightened? I can't imagine what I had in my head: not now." "You _are_ vague," said Julia with a little flush. "Not about the great thing." "The great thing?" "That I owe you everything an honest man has to offer. How can I care about the fine arts now?" She stopped with lighted eyes on him. "Is it because you think you _owe_ it--" and she paused, still with the heightened colour in her cheek, then went on--"that you've spoken to me as you did there?" She tossed her head toward the lake. "I think I spoke to you because I couldn't help it." "You _are_ vague!" And she walked on again. "You affect me differently from any other woman." "Oh other women----! Why shouldn't you care about the fine arts now?" she added. "There'll be no time. All my days and my years will be none too much for what you expect of me." "I don't expect you to give up anything. I only expect you to do more." "To do more I must do less. I've no talent." "No talent?" "I mean for painting." Julia pulled up again. "That's odious! You _have_--you must." He burst out laughing. "You're altogether delightful. But how little you know about it--about the honourable practice of any art!" "What do you call practice? You'll have all our things--you'll live in the midst of them." "Certainly I shall enjoy looking at them, being so near them." "Don't say I've taken you away then." "Taken me away----?" "From the love of art. I like them myself now, poor George's treasures. I didn't of old so much, because it seemed to me he made too much of them--he was always talking." "Well, I won't always talk," said Nick. "You may do as you like--they're yours." "Give them to the nation," Nick went on. "I like that! When we've done with them." "We shall have done with them when your Vandykes and Moronis have cured me of the delusion that I may be of _their_ family. Surely that won't take long." "You shall paint _me_," said Julia. "Never, never, never!" He spoke in a tone that made his companion stare--then seemed slightly embarrassed at this result of his emphasis. To relieve himself he said, as they had come back to the place beside the lake where the boat was moored, "Shan't we really go and fetch Mr. Hoppus?" She hesitated. "You may go; I won't, please." "That's not what I want." "Oblige me by going. I'll wait here." With which she sat down on the bench attached to the little landing. Nick, at this, got into the boat and put off; he smiled at her as she sat there watching him. He made his short journey, disembarked and went into the pavilion; but when he came out with the object of his errand he saw she had quitted her station, had returned to the house without him. He rowed back quickly, sprang ashore and followed her with long steps. Apparently she had gone fast; she had almost reached the door when he overtook her. "Why did you basely desert me?" he asked, tenderly stopping her there. "I don't know. Because I'm so happy." "May I tell mother then?" "You may tell her she shall have Broadwood." XVI He lost no time in going down to see Mr. Carteret, to whom he had written immediately after the election and who had answered him in twelve revised pages of historical parallel. He used often to envy Mr. Carteret's leisure, a sense of which came to him now afresh, in the summer evening, as he walked up the hill toward the quiet house where enjoyment had ever been mingled for him with a vague oppression. He was a little boy again, under Mr. Carteret's roof--a little boy on whom it had been duly impressed that in the wide, plain, peaceful rooms he was not to "touch." When he paid a visit to his father's old friend there were in fact many things--many topics--from which he instinctively kept his hands. Even Mr. Chayter, the immemorial blank butler, who was so like his master that he might have been a twin brother, helped to remind him that he must be good. Mr. Carteret seemed to Nick a very grave person, but he had the sense that Chayter thought him rather frivolous. Our young man always came on foot from the station, leaving his portmanteau to be carried: the direct way was steep and he liked the slow approach, which gave him a chance to look about the place and smell the new-mown hay. At this season the air was full of it--the fields were so near that it was in the clean, still streets. Nick would never have thought of rattling up to Mr. Carteret's door, which had on an old brass plate the proprietor's name, as if he had been the principal surgeon. The house was in the high part, and the neat roofs of other houses, lower down the hill, made an immediate prospect for it, scarcely counting, however, since the green country was just below these, familiar and interpenetrating, in the shape of small but thick-tufted gardens. Free garden-growths flourished in all the intervals, but the only disorder of the place was that there were sometimes oats on the pavements. A crooked lane, with postern doors and cobble-stones, opened near Mr. Carteret's house and wandered toward the old abbey; for the abbey was the secondary fact of Beauclere--it came after Mr. Carteret. Mr. Carteret sometimes went away and the abbey never did; yet somehow what was most of the essence of the place was that it could boast of the resident in the squarest of the square red houses, the one with the finest of the arched hall-windows, in three divisions, over the widest of the last-century doorways. You saw the great church from the doorstep, beyond gardens of course, and in the stillness you could hear the flutter of the birds that circled round its huge short towers. The towers had been finished only as time finishes things, by lending assurances to their lapses. There is something right in old monuments that have been wrong for centuries: some such moral as that was usually in Nick's mind as an emanation of Beauclere when he saw the grand line of the roof ride the sky and draw out its length. When the door with the brass plate was opened and Mr. Chayter appeared in the middle distance--he always advanced just to the same spot, as a prime minister receives an ambassador--Nick felt anew that he would be wonderfully like Mr. Carteret if he had had an expression. He denied himself this freedom, never giving a sign of recognition, often as the young man had been at the house. He was most attentive to the visitor's wants, but apparently feared that if he allowed a familiarity it might go too far. There was always the same question to be asked--had Mr. Carteret finished his nap? He usually had not finished it, and this left Nick what he liked--time to smoke a cigarette in the garden or even to take before dinner a turn about the place. He observed now, every time he came, that Mr. Carteret's nap lasted a little longer. There was each year a little more strength to be gathered for the ceremony of dinner: this was the principal symptom--almost the only one--that the clear-cheeked old gentleman gave of not being so fresh as of yore. He was still wonderful for his age. To-day he was particularly careful: Chayter went so far as to mention to Nick that four gentlemen were expected to dinner--an exuberance perhaps partly explained by the circumstance that Lord Bottomley was one of them. The prospect of Lord Bottomley was somehow not stirring; it only made the young man say to himself with a quick, thin sigh, "This time I _am_ in for it!" And he immediately had the unpolitical sense again that there was nothing so pleasant as the way the quiet bachelor house had its best rooms on the big garden, which seemed to advance into them through their wide windows and ruralise their dulness. "I expect it will be a lateish eight, sir," said Mr. Chayter, superintending in the library the production of tea on a large scale. Everything at Mr. Carteret's seemed to Nick on a larger scale than anywhere else--the tea-cups, the knives and forks, the door-handles, the chair-backs, the legs of mutton, the candles, and the lumps of coal: they represented and apparently exhausted the master's sense of pleasing effect, for the house was not otherwise decorated. Nick thought it really hideous, but he was capable at any time of extracting a degree of amusement from anything strongly characteristic, and Mr. Carteret's interior expressed a whole view of life. Our young man was generous enough to find in it a hundred instructive intimations even while it came over him--as it always did at Beauclere--that this was the view he himself was expected to take. Nowhere were the boiled eggs at breakfast so big or in such big receptacles; his own shoes, arranged in his room, looked to him vaster there than at home. He went out into the garden and remembered what enormous strawberries they should have for dinner. In the house was a great deal of Landseer, of oilcloth, of woodwork painted and "grained." Finding there would be time before the evening meal or before Mr. Carteret was likely to see him he quitted the house and took a stroll toward the abbey. It covered acres of ground on the summit of the hill, and there were aspects in which its vast bulk reminded him of the ark left high and dry upon Ararat. It was the image at least of a great wreck, of the indestructible vessel of a faith, washed up there by a storm centuries before. The injury of time added to this appearance--the infirmities round which, as he knew, the battle of restoration had begun to be fought. The cry had been raised to save the splendid pile, and the counter-cry by the purists, the sentimentalists, whatever they were, to save it from being saved. They were all exchanging compliments in the morning papers. Nick sauntered about the church--it took a good while; he leaned against low things and looked up at it while he smoked another cigarette. It struck him as a great pity such a pile should be touched: so much of the past was buried there that it was like desecrating, like digging up a grave. Since the years were letting it down so gently why jostle the elbow of slow-fingering time? The fading afternoon was exquisitely pure; the place was empty; he heard nothing but the cries of several children, which sounded sweet, who were playing on the flatness of the very old tombs. He knew this would inevitably be one of the topics at dinner, the restoration of the abbey; it would give rise to a considerable deal of orderly debate. Lord Bottomley, oddly enough, would probably oppose the expensive project, but on grounds that would be characteristic of him even if the attitude were not. Nick's nerves always knew on this spot what it was to be soothed; but he shifted his position with a slight impatience as the vision came over him of Lord Bottomley's treating a question of esthetics. It was enough to make one want to take the other side, the idea of having the same taste as his lordship: one would have it for such different reasons. Dear Mr. Carteret would be deliberate and fair all round and would, like his noble friend, exhibit much more architectural knowledge than he, Nick, possessed: which would not make it a whit less droll to our young man that an artistic idea, so little really assimilated, should be broached at that table and in that air. It would remain so outside of their minds and their minds would remain so outside of it. It would be dropped at last, however, after half an hour's gentle worrying, and the conversation would incline itself to public affairs. Mr. Carteret would find his natural level--the production of anecdote in regard to the formation of early ministries. He knew more than any one else about the personages of whom certain cabinets would have consisted if they had not consisted of others. His favourite exercise was to illustrate how different everything might have been from what it was, and how the reason of the difference had always been somebody's inability to "see his way" to accept the view of somebody else--a view usually at the time discussed in strict confidence with Mr. Carteret, who surrounded his actual violation of that confidence thirty years later with many precautions against scandal. In this retrospective vein, at the head of his table, the old gentleman enjoyed a hearing, or at any rate commanded a silence, often intense. Every one left it to some one else to ask another question; and when by chance some one else did so every one was struck with admiration at any one's being able to say anything. Nick knew the moment when he himself would take a glass of a particular port and, surreptitiously looking at his watch, perceive it was ten o'clock. That timepiece might as well mark 1830. All this would be a part of the suggestion of leisure that invariably descended upon him at Beauclere--the image of a sloping shore where the tide of time broke with a ripple too faint to be a warning. But there was another admonition almost equally sure to descend upon his spirit during a stroll in a summer hour about the grand abbey; to sink into it as the light lingered on the rough red walls and the local accent of the children sounded soft in the churchyard. It was simply the sense of England--a sort of apprehended revelation of his country. The dim annals of the place were sensibly, heavily in the air--foundations bafflingly early, a great monastic life, wars of the Roses, with battles and blood in the streets, and then the long quietude of the respectable centuries, all corn-fields and magistrates and vicars--and these things were connected with an emotion that arose from the green country, the rich land so infinitely lived in, and laid on him a hand that was too ghostly to press and yet somehow too urgent to be light. It produced a throb he couldn't have spoken of, it was so deep, and that was half imagination and half responsibility. These impressions melted together and made a general appeal, of which, with his new honours as a legislator, he was the sentient subject. If he had a love for that particular scene of life mightn't it have a love for him and expect something of him? What fate could be so high as to grow old in a national affection? What a fine sort of reciprocity, making mere soreness of all the balms of indifference! The great church was still open and he turned into it and wandered a little in the twilight that had gathered earlier there. The whole structure, with its immensity of height and distance, seemed to rest on tremendous facts--facts of achievement and endurance--and the huge Norman pillars to loom through the dimness like the ghosts of heroes. Nick was more struck with its thick earthly than with its fine spiritual reference, and he felt the oppression of his conscience as he walked slowly about. It was in his mind that nothing in life was really clear, all things were mingled and charged, and that patriotism might be an uplifting passion even if it had to allow for Lord Bottomley and for Mr. Carteret's blindness on certain sides. He presently noticed that half-past seven was about to strike, and as he went back to his old friend's he couldn't have said if he walked in gladness or in gloom. "Mr. Carteret will be in the drawing-room at a quarter to eight, sir," Chayter mentioned, and Nick as he went to dress asked himself what was the use of being a member of Parliament if one was still sensitive to an intimation on the part of such a functionary that one ought already to have begun that business. Chayter's words but meant that Mr. Carteret would expect to have a little comfortable conversation with him before dinner. Nick's usual rapidity in dressing was, however, quite adequate to the occasion, so that his host had not appeared when he went down. There were flowers in the unfeminine saloon, which contained several paintings in addition to the engravings of pictures of animals; but nothing could prevent its reminding Nick of a comfortable committee-room. Mr. Carteret presently came in with his gold-headed stick, a laugh like a series of little warning coughs and the air of embarrassment that our young man always perceived in him at first. He was almost eighty but was still shy--he laughed a great deal, faintly and vaguely, at nothing, as if to make up for the seriousness with which he took some jokes. He always began by looking away from his interlocutor, and it was only little by little that his eyes came round; after which their limpid and benevolent blue made you wonder why they should ever be circumspect. He was clean-shaven and had a long upper lip. When he had seated himself he talked of "majorities" and showed a disposition to converse on the general subject of the fluctuation of Liberal gains. He had an extraordinary memory for facts of this sort, and could mention the figures relating to the returns from innumerable places in particular years. To many of these facts he attached great importance, in his simple, kindly, presupposing way; correcting himself five minutes later if he had said that in 1857 some one had had 6014 instead of 6004. Nick always felt a great hypocrite as he listened to him, in spite of the old man's courtesy--a thing so charming in itself that it would have been grossness to speak of him as a bore. The difficulty was that he took for granted all kinds of positive assent, and Nick, in such company, found himself steeped in an element of tacit pledges which constituted the very medium of intercourse and yet made him draw his breath a little in pain when for a moment he measured them. There would have been no hypocrisy at all if he could have regarded Mr. Carteret as a mere sweet spectacle, the last or almost the last illustration of a departing tradition of manners. But he represented something more than manners; he represented what he believed to be morals and ideas, ideas as regards which he took your personal deference--not discovering how natural that was--for participation. Nick liked to think that his father, though ten years younger, had found it congruous to make his best friend of the owner of so nice a nature: it gave a softness to his feeling for that memory to be reminded that Sir Nicholas had been of the same general type--a type so pure, so disinterested, so concerned for the public good. Just so it endeared Mr. Carteret to him to perceive that he considered his father had done a definite work, prematurely interrupted, which had been an absolute benefit to the people of England. The oddity was, however, that though both Mr. Carteret's aspect and his appreciation were still so fresh this relation of his to his late distinguished friend made the latter appear to Nick even more irrecoverably dead. The good old man had almost a vocabulary of his own, made up of old-fashioned political phrases and quite untainted with the new terms, mostly borrowed from America; indeed his language and his tone made those of almost any one who might be talking with him sound by contrast rather American. He was, at least nowadays, never severe nor denunciatory; but sometimes in telling an anecdote he dropped such an expression as "the rascal said to me" or such an epithet as "the vulgar dog." Nick was always struck with the rare simplicity--it came out in his countenance--of one who had lived so long and seen so much of affairs that draw forth the passions and perversities of men. It often made him say to himself that Mr. Carteret must have had many odd parts to have been able to achieve with his means so many things requiring cleverness. It was as if experience, though coming to him in abundance, had dealt with him so clean-handedly as to leave no stain, and had moreover never provoked him to any general reflexion. He had never proceeded in any ironic way from the particular to the general; certainly he had never made a reflexion upon anything so unparliamentary as Life. He would have questioned the taste of such an extravagance and if he had encountered it on the part of another have regarded it as an imported foreign toy with the uses of which he was unacquainted. Life, for him, was a purely practical function, not a question of more or less showy phrasing. It must be added that he had to Nick's perception his variations--his back windows opening into grounds more private. That was visible from the way his eye grew cold and his whole polite face rather austere when he listened to something he didn't agree with or perhaps even understand; as if his modesty didn't in strictness forbid the suspicion that a thing he didn't understand would have a probability against it. At such times there was something rather deadly in the silence in which he simply waited with a lapse in his face, not helping his interlocutor out. Nick would have been very sorry to attempt to communicate to him a matter he wouldn't be likely to understand. This cut off of course a multitude of subjects. The evening passed exactly as he had foreseen, even to the markedly prompt dispersal of the guests, two of whom were "local" men, earnest and distinct, though not particularly distinguished. The third was a young, slim, uninitiated gentleman whom Lord Bottomley brought with him and concerning whom Nick was informed beforehand that he was engaged to be married to the Honourable Jane, his lordship's second daughter. There were recurrent allusions to Nick's victory, as to which he had the fear that he might appear to exhibit less interest in it than the company did. He took energetic precautions against this and felt repeatedly a little spent with them, for the subject always came up once more. Yet it was not as his but as theirs that they liked the triumph. Mr. Carteret took leave of him for the night directly after the other guests had gone, using at this moment the words he had often used before: "You may sit up to any hour you like. I only ask that you don't read in bed." XVII Nick's little visit was to terminate immediately after luncheon the following day: much as the old man enjoyed his being there he wouldn't have dreamed of asking for more of his time now that it had such great public uses. He liked infinitely better that his young friend should be occupied with parliamentary work than only occupied in talking it over with him. Talking it over, however, was the next best thing, as on the morrow, after breakfast, Mr. Carteret showed Nick he considered. They sat in the garden, the morning being warm, and the old man had a table beside him covered with the letters and newspapers the post had poured forth. He was proud of his correspondence, which was altogether on public affairs, and proud in a manner of the fact that he now dictated almost everything. That had more in it of the statesman in retirement, a character indeed not consciously assumed by Mr. Carteret, but always tacitly attributed to him by Nick, who took it rather from the pictorial point of view--remembering on each occasion only afterwards that though he was in retirement he had not exactly been a statesman. A young man, a very sharp, handy young man, came every morning at ten o'clock and wrote for him till luncheon. The young man had a holiday to-day in honour of Nick's visit--a fact the mention of which led Nick to make some not particularly sincere speech about _his_ being ready to write anything if Mr. Carteret were at all pressed. "Ah but your own budget--what will become of that?" the old gentleman objected, glancing at Nick's pockets as if rather surprised not to see them stuffed out with documents in split envelopes. His visitor had to confess that he had not directed his letters to meet him at Beauclere: he should find them in town that afternoon. This led to a little homily from Mr. Carteret which made him feel quite guilty; there was such an implication of neglected duty in the way the old man said, "You won't do them justice--you won't do them justice." He talked for ten minutes, in his rich, simple, urbane way, about the fatal consequences of getting behind. It was his favourite doctrine that one should always be a little before, and his own eminently regular respiration seemed to illustrate the idea. A man was certainly before who had so much in his rear. This led to the bestowal of a good deal of general advice on the mistakes to avoid at the beginning of a parliamentary career--as to which Mr. Carteret spoke with the experience of one who had sat for fifty years in the House of Commons. Nick was amused, but also mystified and even a little irritated, by his talk: it was founded on the idea of observation and yet our young man couldn't at all regard him as an observer. "He doesn't observe _me_," he said to himself; "if he did he would see, he wouldn't think----!" The end of this private cogitation was a vague impatience of all the things his venerable host took for granted. He didn't see any of the things Nick saw. Some of these latter were the light touches the summer morning scattered through the sweet old garden. The time passed there a good deal as if it were sitting still with a plaid under its feet while Mr. Carteret distilled a little more of the wisdom he had laid up in his fifty years. This immense term had something fabulous and monstrous for Nick, who wondered whether it were the sort of thing his companion supposed _he_ had gone in for. It was not strange Mr. Carteret should be different; he might originally have been more--well, to himself Nick was not obliged to phrase it: what our young man meant was more of what it was perceptible to him that his old friend was not. Should even he, Nick, be like that at the end of fifty years? What Mr. Carteret was so good as to expect for him was that he should be much more distinguished; and wouldn't this exactly mean much more like that? Of course Nick heard some things he had heard before; as for instance the circumstances that had originally led the old man to settle at Beauclere. He had been returned for that borough--it was his second seat--in years far remote, and had come to live there because he then had a conscientious conviction, modified indeed by later experience, that a member should be constantly resident. He spoke of this now, smiling rosily, as he might have spoken of some wild aberration of his youth; yet he called Nick's attention to the fact that he still so far clung to his conviction as to hold--though of what might be urged on the other side he was perfectly aware--that a representative should at least be as resident as possible. This gave Nick an opening for something that had been on and off his lips all the morning. "According to that I ought to take up my abode at Harsh." "In the measure of the convenient I shouldn't be sorry to see you do it." "It ought to be rather convenient," Nick largely smiled. "I've got a piece of news for you which I've kept, as one keeps that sort of thing--for it's very good--till the last." He waited a little to see if Mr. Carteret would guess, and at first thought nothing would come of this. But after resting his young-looking eyes on him for a moment the old man said: "I should indeed be very happy to hear that you've arranged to take a wife." "Mrs. Dallow has been so good as to say she'll marry me," Nick returned. "That's very suitable. I should think it would answer." "It's very jolly," said Nick. It was well Mr. Carteret was not what his guest called observant, or he might have found a lower pitch in the sound of this sentence than in the sense. "Your dear father would have liked it." "So my mother says." "And _she_ must be delighted." "Mrs. Dallow, do you mean?" Nick asked. "I was thinking of your mother. But I don't exclude the charming lady. I remember her as a little girl. I must have seen her at Windrush. Now I understand the fine spirit with which she threw herself into your canvass." "It was her they elected," said Nick. "I don't know," his host went on, "that I've ever been an enthusiast for political women, but there's no doubt that in approaching the mass of electors a graceful, affable manner, the manner of the real English lady, is a force not to be despised." "Julia's a real English lady and at the same time a very political woman," Nick remarked. "Isn't it rather in the family? I remember once going to see her mother in town and finding the leaders of both parties sitting with her." "My principal friend, of the others, is her brother Peter. I don't think he troubles himself much about that sort of thing," said Nick. "What does he trouble himself about?" Mr. Carteret asked with a certain gravity. "He's in the diplomatic service; he's a secretary in Paris." "That may be serious," said the old man. "He takes a great interest in the theatre. I suppose you'll say that may be serious too," Nick laughed. "Oh!"--and Mr. Carteret looked as if he scarcely understood. Then he continued; "Well, it can't hurt you." "It can't hurt me?" "If Mrs. Dallow takes an interest in your interests." "When a man's in my situation he feels as if nothing could hurt him." "I'm very glad you're happy," said Mr. Carteret. He rested his mild eyes on our young man, who had a sense of seeing in them for a moment the faint ghost of an old story, the last strange flicker, as from cold ashes, of a flame that had become the memory of a memory. This glimmer of wonder and envy, the revelation of a life intensely celibate, was for an instant infinitely touching. Nick had harboured a theory, suggested by a vague allusion from his father, who had been discreet, that their benevolent friend had had in his youth an unhappy love-affair which had led him to forswear for ever the commerce of woman. What remained in him of conscious renunciation gave a throb as he looked at his bright companion, who proposed to take the matter so much the other way. "It's good to marry and I think it's right. I've not done right, I know that. If she's a good woman it's the best thing," Mr. Carteret went on. "It's what I've been hoping for you. Sometimes I've thought of speaking to you." "She's a very good woman," said Nick. "And I hope she's not poor." Mr. Carteret spoke exactly with the same blandness. "No indeed, she's rich. Her husband, whom I knew and liked, left her a large fortune." "And on what terms does she enjoy it?" "I haven't the least idea," said Nick. Mr. Carteret considered. "I see. It doesn't concern you. It needn't concern you," he added in a moment. Nick thought of his mother at this, but he returned: "I daresay she can do what she likes with her money." "So can I, my dear young friend," said Mr. Carteret. Nick tried not to look conscious, for he felt a significance in the old man's face. He turned his own everywhere but toward it, thinking again of his mother. "That must be very pleasant, if one has any." "I wish you had a little more." "I don't particularly care," said Nick. "Your marriage will assist you; you can't help that," Mr. Carteret declared. "But I should like you to be under obligations not quite so heavy." "Oh I'm so obliged to her for caring for me----!" "That the rest doesn't count? Certainly it's nice of her to like you. But why shouldn't she? Other people do." "Some of them make me feel as if I abused it," said Nick, looking at his host. "That is, they don't make me, but I feel it," he corrected. "I've no son "--and Mr. Carteret spoke as if his companion mightn't have been sure. "Shan't you be very kind to her?" he pursued. "You'll gratify her ambition." "Oh she thinks me cleverer than I am." "That's because she's in love," the old gentleman hinted as if this were very subtle. "However, you must be as clever as we think you. If you don't prove so----!" And he paused with his folded hands. "Well, if I don't?" asked Nick. "Oh it won't do--it won't do," said Mr. Carteret in a tone his companion was destined to remember afterwards. "I say I've no son," he continued; "but if I had had one he should have risen high." "It's well for me such a person doesn't exist. I shouldn't easily have found a wife." "He would have gone to the altar with a little money in his pocket." "That would have been the least of his advantages, sir," Nick declared. "When are you to be married?" Mr. Carteret asked. "Ah that's the question. Julia won't yet say." "Well," said the old man without the least flourish, "you may consider that when it comes off I'll make you a settlement." "I feel your kindness more than I can express," Nick replied; "but that will probably be the moment when I shall be least conscious of wanting anything." "You'll appreciate it later--you'll appreciate it very soon. I shall like you to appreciate it," Mr. Carteret went on as if he had a just vision of the way a young man of a proper spirit should feel. Then he added; "Your father would have liked you to appreciate it." "Poor father!" Nick exclaimed vaguely, rather embarrassed, reflecting on the oddity of a position in which the ground for holding up his head as the husband of a rich woman would be that he had accepted a present of money from another source. It was plain he was not fated to go in for independence; the most that he could treat himself to would be dependence that was duly grateful "How much do you expect of me?" he inquired with a grave face. "Well, Nicholas, only what your father did. He so often spoke of you, I remember, at the last, just after you had been with him alone--you know I saw him then. He was greatly moved by his interview with you, and so was I by what he told me of it. He said he should live on in you--he should work in you. It has always given me a special feeling, if I may use the expression, about you." "The feelings are indeed not usual, dear Mr. Carteret, which take so munificent a form. But you do--oh you do--expect too much," Nick brought himself to say. "I expect you to repay me!" the old man returned gaily. "As for the form, I have it in my mind." "The form of repayment?" "The form of repayment!" "Ah don't talk of that now," said Nick, "for, you see, nothing else is settled. No one has been told except my mother. She has only consented to my telling you." "Lady Agnes, do you mean?" "Ah no; dear mother would like to publish it on the house-tops. She's so glad--she wants us to have it over to-morrow. But Julia herself," Nick explained, "wishes to wait. Therefore kindly mention it for the present to no one." "My dear boy, there's at this rate nothing to mention! What does Julia want to wait for?" "Till I like her better--that's what she says." "It's the way to make you like her worse," Mr. Carteret knowingly declared. "Hasn't she your affection?" "So much so that her delay makes me exceedingly unhappy." Mr. Carteret looked at his young friend as if he didn't strike him as quite wretched; but he put the question: "Then what more does she want?" Nick laughed out at this, though perceiving his host hadn't meant it as an epigram; while the latter resumed: "I don't understand. You're engaged or you're not engaged." "She is, but I'm not. That's what she says about it. The trouble is she doesn't believe in me." Mr. Carteret shone with his candour. "Doesn't she love you then?" "That's what I ask her. Her answer is that she loves me only too well. She's so afraid of being a burden to me that she gives me my freedom till I've taken another year to think." "I like the way you talk about other years!" Mr. Carteret cried. "You had better do it while I'm here to bless you." "She thinks I proposed to her because she got me in for Harsh," said Nick. "Well, I'm sure it would be a very pretty return." "Ah she doesn't believe in me," the young man repeated. "Then I don't believe in _her_." "Don't say that--don't say that. She's a very rare creature. But she's proud, shy, suspicious." "Suspicious of what?" "Of everything. She thinks I'm not persistent." "Oh, oh!"--Nick's host deprecated such freedom. "She can't believe I shall arrive at true eminence." "A good wife should believe what her husband believes," said Mr. Carteret. "Ah unfortunately"--and Nick took the words at a run--"I don't believe it either." Mr. Carteret, who might have been watching an odd physical rush, spoke with a certain dryness. "Your dear father did." "I think of that--I think of that," Nick replied. "Certainly it will help me. If I say we're engaged," he went on, "it's because I consider it so. She gives me my liberty, but I don't take it." "Does she expect you to take back your word?" "That's what I ask her. _She_ never will. Therefore we're as good as tied." "I don't like it," said Mr. Carteret after a moment. "I don't like ambiguous, uncertain situations. They please me much better when they're definite and clear." The retreat of expression had been sounded in his face--the aspect it wore when he wished not to be encouraging. But after an instant he added in a tone more personal: "Don't disappoint me, dear boy." "Ah not willingly!" his visitor protested. "I've told you what I should like to do for you. See that the conditions come about promptly in which I _may_, do it. Are you sure you do everything to satisfy Mrs. Dallow?" Mr. Carteret continued. "I think I'm very nice to her," Nick declared. "But she's so ambitious. Frankly speaking, it's a pity for her that she likes me." "She can't help that!" the old man charmingly said. "Possibly. But isn't it a reason for taking me as I am? What she wants to do is to take me as I may be a year hence." "I don't understand--since you tell me that even then she won't take back her word," said Mr. Carteret. "If she doesn't marry me I think she'll never marry again at all." "What then does she gain by delay?" "Simply this, as I make it out," said Nick--"that she'll feel she has been very magnanimous. She won't have to reproach herself with not having given me a chance to change." "To change? What does she think you liable to do?" Nick had a pause. "I don't know!" he then said--not at all candidly. "Everything has altered: young people in my day looked at these questions more naturally," Mr. Carteret observed. "A woman in love has no need to be magnanimous. If she plays too fair she isn't in love," he added shrewdly. "Oh, Julia's safe--she's safe," Nick smiled. "If it were a question between you and another gentleman one might comprehend. But what does it mean, between you and nothing?" "I'm much obliged to you, sir," Nick returned. "The trouble is that she doesn't know what she has got hold of." "Ah, if you can't make it clear to her!"--and his friend showed the note of impatience. "I'm such a humbug," said the young man. And while his companion stared he continued: "I deceive people without in the least intending it." "What on earth do you mean? Are you deceiving me?" "I don't know--it depends on what you think." "I think you're flighty," said Mr. Carteret, with the nearest approach to sternness Nick had ever observed in him. "I never thought so before." "Forgive me; it's all right. I'm not frivolous; that I promise you I'm not." "You _have_ deceived me if you are." "It's all right," Nick stammered with a blush. "Remember your name--carry it high." "I will--as high as possible." "You've no excuse. Don't tell me, after your speeches at Harsh!" Nick was on the point of declaring again that he was a humbug, so vivid was his inner sense of what he thought of his factitious public utterances, which had the cursed property of creating dreadful responsibilities and importunate credulities for him. If _he_ was "clever" (ah the idiotic "clever"!) what fools many other people were! He repressed his impulse and Mr. Carteret pursued. "If, as you express it, Mrs. Dallow doesn't know what she has got hold of, won't it clear the matter up a little by informing her that the day before your marriage is definitely settled to take place you'll come into something comfortable?" A quick vision of what Mr. Carteret would be likely to regard as something comfortable flitted before Nick, but it didn't prevent his replying: "Oh I'm afraid that won't do any good. It would make her like you better, but it wouldn't make her like me. I'm afraid she won't care for any benefit that comes to me from another hand than hers. Her affection's a very jealous sentiment." "It's a very peculiar one!" sighed Mr. Carteret. "Mine's a jealous sentiment too. However, if she takes it that way don't tell her." "I'll let you know as soon as she comes round," said Nick. "And you'll tell your mother," Mr. Carteret returned. "I shall like _her_ to know." "It will be delightful news to her. But she's keen enough already." "I know that. I may mention now that she has written to me," the old man added. "So I suspected." "We've--a--corresponded on the subject," Mr. Carteret continued to confess. "My view of the advantageous character of such an alliance has entirely coincided with hers." "It was very good-natured of you then to leave me to speak first," said Nick. "I should have been disappointed if you hadn't. I don't like all you've told me. But don't disappoint me now." "Dear Mr. Carteret!" Nick vaguely and richly sounded. "I won't disappoint _you_," that gentleman went on with a finer point while he looked at his big old-fashioned watch. BOOK FOURTH XVIII At first Peter Sherringham thought of asking to be transferred to another post and went so far, in London, as to take what he believed good advice on the subject. The advice, perhaps struck him as the better for consisting of a strong recommendation to do nothing so foolish. Two or three reasons were mentioned to him why such a request would not, in the particular circumstances, raise him in the esteem of his superiors, and he promptly recognised their force. He next became aware that it might help him--not with his superiors but with himself--to apply for an extension of leave, and then on further reflexion made out that, though there are some dangers before which it is perfectly consistent with honour to flee, it was better for every one concerned that he should fight this especial battle on the spot. During his holiday his plan of campaign gave him plenty of occupation. He refurbished his arms, rubbed up his strategy, laid down his lines of defence. There was only one thing in life his mind had been much made up to, but on this question he had never wavered: he would get on, to the utmost, in his profession. That was a point on which it was perfectly lawful to be unamiable to others--to be vigilant, eager, suspicious, selfish. He had not in fact been unamiable to others, for his affairs had not required it: he had got on well enough without hardening his heart. Fortune had been kind to him and he had passed so many competitors on the way that he could forswear jealousy and be generous. But he had always flattered himself his hand wouldn't falter on the day he should find it necessary to drop bitterness into his cup. This day would be sure to dawn, since no career could be all clear water to the end; and then the sacrifice would find him ready. His mind was familiar with the thought of a sacrifice: it is true that no great plainness invested beforehand the occasion, the object or the victim. All that particularly stood out was that the propitiatory offering would have to be some cherished enjoyment. Very likely indeed this enjoyment would be associated with the charms of another person--a probability pregnant with the idea that such charms would have to be dashed out of sight. At any rate it never had occurred to Sherringham that he himself might be the sacrifice. You had to pay to get on, but at least you borrowed from others to do it. When you couldn't borrow you didn't get on, for what was the situation in life in which you met the whole requisition yourself? Least of all had it occurred to our friend that the wrench might come through his interest in that branch of art on which Nick Dormer had rallied him. The beauty of a love of the theatre was precisely in its being a passion exercised on the easiest terms. This was not the region of responsibility. It was sniffed at, to its discredit, by the austere; but if it was not, as such people said, a serious field, was not the compensation just that you couldn't be seriously entangled in it? Sherringham's great advantage, as he regarded the matter, was that he had always kept his taste for the drama quite in its place. His facetious cousin was free to pretend that it sprawled through his life; but this was nonsense, as any unprejudiced observer of that life would unhesitatingly attest. There had not been the least sprawling, and his interest in the art of Garrick had never, he was sure, made him in any degree ridiculous. It had never drawn down from above anything approaching a reprimand, a remonstrance, a remark. Sherringham was positively proud of his discretion, for he was not a little proud of what he did know about the stage. Trifling for trifling, there were plenty of his fellows who had in their lives infatuations less edifying and less confessable. Hadn't he known men who collected old invitation-cards and were ready to commit _bassesses_ for those of the eighteenth century? hadn't he known others who had a secret passion for shuffleboard? His little weaknesses were intellectual--they were a part of the life of the mind. All the same, on the day they showed a symptom of interfering they should be plucked off with a turn of the wrist. Sherringham scented interference now, and interference in rather an invidious form. It might be a bore, from the point of view of the profession, to find one's self, as a critic of the stage, in love with a _coquine_; but it was a much greater bore to find one's self in love with a young woman whose character remained to be estimated. Miriam Rooth was neither fish nor flesh: one had with her neither the guarantees of one's own class nor the immunities of hers. What _was_ hers if one came to that? A rare ambiguity on this point was part of the fascination she had ended by throwing over him. Poor Peter's scheme for getting on had contained no proviso against his falling in love, but it had embodied an important clause on the subject of surprises. It was always a surprise to fall in love, especially if one was looking out for it; so this contingency had not been worth official paper. But it became a man who respected the service he had undertaken for the State to be on his guard against predicaments from which the only issue was the rigour of matrimony. Ambition, in the career, was probably consistent with marrying--but only with opening one's eyes very wide to do it. That was the fatal surprise--to be led to the altar in a dream. Sherringham's view of the proprieties attached to such a step was high and strict; and if he held that a man in his position was, above all as the position improved, essentially a representative of the greatness of his country, he considered that the wife of such a personage would exercise in her degree--for instance at a foreign court--a function no less symbolic. She would in short always be a very important quantity, and the scene was strewn with illustrations of this general truth. She might be such a help and might be such a blight that common prudence required some test of her in advance. Sherringham had seen women in the career, who were stupid or vulgar, make such a mess of things as would wring your heart. Then he had his positive idea of the perfect ambassadress, the full-blown lily of the future; and with this idea Miriam Rooth presented no analogy whatever. The girl had described herself with characteristic directness as "all right"; and so she might be, so she assuredly was: only all right for what? He had made out she was not sentimental--that whatever capacity she might have for responding to a devotion or for desiring it was at any rate not in the direction of vague philandering. With him certainly she had no disposition to philander. Sherringham almost feared to dwell on this, lest it should beget in him a rage convertible mainly into caring for her more. Rage or no rage it would be charming to be in love with her if there were no complications; but the complications were just what was clearest in the prospect. He was perhaps cold-blooded to think of them, but it must be remembered that they were the particular thing his training had equipped him for dealing with. He was at all events not too cold-blooded to have, for the two months of his holiday, very little inner vision of anything more abstract than Miriam's face. The desire to see it again was as pressing as thirst, but he tried to practise the endurance of the traveller in the desert. He kept the Channel between them, but his spirit consumed every day an inch of the interval, until--and it was not long--there were no more inches left. The last thing he expected the future ambassadress to have been was _fille de théâtre_. The answer to this objection was of course that Miriam was not yet so much of one but that he could easily, by a handsome "worldly" offer, arrest her development. Then came worrying retorts to that, chief among which was the sense that to his artistic conscience arresting her development would be a plan combining on his part fatuity, not to say imbecility, with baseness. It was exactly to her development the poor girl had the greatest right, and he shouldn't really alter anything by depriving her of it. Wasn't she the artist to the tips of her tresses--the ambassadress never in the world--and wouldn't she take it out in something else if one were to make her deviate? So certain was that demonic gift to insist ever on its own. Besides, _could_ one make her deviate? If she had no disposition to philander what was his warrant for supposing she could be corrupted into respectability? How could the career--his career--speak to a nature that had glimpses as vivid as they were crude of such a different range and for which success meant quite another sauce to the dish? Would the brilliancy of marrying Peter Sherringham be such a bribe to relinquishment? How could he think so without pretensions of the sort he pretended exactly not to flaunt?--how could he put himself forward as so high a prize? Relinquishment of the opportunity to exercise a rare talent was not, in the nature of things, an easy effort to a young lady who was herself presumptuous as well as ambitious. Besides, she might eat her cake and have it--might make her fortune both on the stage and in the world. Successful actresses had ended by marrying dukes, and was not that better than remaining obscure and marrying a commoner? There were moments when he tried to pronounce the girl's "gift" not a force to reckon with; there was so little to show for it as yet that the caprice of believing in it would perhaps suddenly leave him. But his conviction that it was real was too uneasy to make such an experiment peaceful, and he came back, moreover, to his deepest impression--that of her being of the inward mould for which the only consistency is the play of genius. Hadn't Madame Carré declared at the last that she could "do anything"? It was true that if Madame Carré had been mistaken in the first place she might also be mistaken in the second. But in this latter case she would be mistaken with him--and such an error would be too like a truth. How, further, shall we exactly measure for him--Sherringham felt the discomfort of the advantage Miriam had of him--the advantage of her presenting herself in a light that rendered any passion he might entertain an implication of duty as well as of pleasure? Why there should have been this implication was more than he could say; sometimes he held himself rather abject, or at least absurdly superstitious, for seeing it. He didn't know, he could scarcely conceive, of another case of the same general type in which he would have recognised it. In foreign countries there were very few ladies of Miss Rooth's intended profession who would not have regarded it as too strong an order that, to console them for not being admitted into drawing-rooms, they should have no offset but the exercise of a virtue in which no one would believe. This was because in foreign countries actresses were not admitted into drawing-rooms: that was a pure English drollery, ministering equally little to real histrionics and to the higher tone of these resorts. Did the oppressive sanctity which made it a burden to have to reckon with his young friend come then from her being English? Peter could recall cases in which that privilege operated as little as possible as a restriction. It came a great deal from Mrs. Rooth, in whom he apprehended depths of calculation as to what she might achieve for her daughter by "working" the idea of a life blameless amid dire obsessions. Her romantic turn of mind wouldn't in the least prevent her regarding that idea as a substantial capital, to be laid out to the best worldly advantage. Miriam's essential irreverence was capable, on a pretext, of making mince-meat of it--that he was sure of; for the only capital she recognised was the talent which some day managers and agents would outbid each other in paying for. Yet as a creature easy at so many points she was fond of her mother, would do anything to oblige--that might work in all sorts of ways--and would probably like the loose slippers of blamelessness quite as well as having to meet some of the queer high standards of the opposite camp. Sherringham, I may add, had no desire that she should indulge a different preference: it was distasteful to him to compute the probabilities of a young lady's misbehaving for his advantage--that seemed to him definitely base--and he would have thought himself a blackguard if, even when a prey to his desire, he had not wished the thing that was best for the object of it. The thing best for Miriam might be to become the wife of the man to whose suit she should incline her ear. That this would be the best thing for the gentleman in question by no means, however, equally followed, and Sherringham's final conviction was that it would never do for him to act the part of that hypothetic personage. He asked for no removal and no extension of leave, and he proved to himself how well he knew what he was about by never addressing a line, during his absence, to the Hôtel de la Garonne. He would simply go straight, inflicting as little injury on Peter Sherringham as on any one else. He remained away to the last hour of his privilege and continued to act lucidly in having nothing to do with the mother and daughter for several days after his return to Paris. It was when this discipline came to an end one afternoon after a week had passed that he felt most the force of the reference we have just made to Mrs. Rooth's private calculations. He found her at home, alone, writing a letter under the lamp, and as soon as he came in she cried out that he was the very person to whom the letter was addressed. She could bear it no longer; she had permitted herself to reproach him with his terrible silence--to ask why he had quite forsaken them. It was an illustration of the way in which her visitor had come to regard her that he put rather less than more faith into this description of the crumpled papers lying on the table. He was not even sure he quite believed Miriam to have just gone out. He told her mother how busy he had been all the while he was away and how much time above all he had had to give in London to seeing on her daughter's behalf the people connected with the theatres. "Ah if you pity me tell me you've got her an engagement!" Mrs. Rooth cried while she clasped her hands. "I took a great deal of trouble; I wrote ever so many notes, sought introductions, talked with people--such impossible people some of them. In short I knocked at every door, I went into the question exhaustively." And he enumerated the things he had done, reported on some of the knowledge he had gathered. The difficulties were immense, and even with the influence he could command, such as it was, there was very little to be achieved in face of them. Still he had gained ground: two or three approachable fellows, men with inferior theatres, had listened to him better than the others, and there was one in particular whom he had a hope he really might have interested. From him he had extracted benevolent assurances: this person would see Miriam, would listen to her, would do for her what he could. The trouble was that no one would lift a finger for a girl unless she were known, and yet that she never could become known till innumerable fingers had been lifted. You couldn't go into the water unless you could swim, and you couldn't swim until you had been in the water. "But new performers appear; they get theatres, they get audiences, they get notices in the newspapers," Mrs. Rooth objected. "I know of these things only what Miriam tells me. It's no knowledge that I was born to." "It's perfectly true. It's all done with money." "And how do they come by money?" Mrs. Rooth candidly asked. "When they're women people give it to them." "Well, what people now?" "People who believe in them." "As you believe in Miriam?" Peter had a pause. "No, rather differently. A poor man doesn't believe in anything the same way that a rich man does." "Ah don't call yourself poor!" groaned Mrs. Rooth. "What good would it do me to be rich?" "Why you could take a theatre. You could do it all yourself." "And what good would that do me?" "Ah don't you delight in her genius?" demanded Mrs. Rooth. "I delight in her mother. You think me more disinterested than I am," Sherringham added with a certain soreness of irritation. "I know why you didn't write!" Mrs. Rooth declared archly. "You must go to London," Peter said without heeding this remark. "Ah if we could only get there it would be a relief. I should draw a long breath. There at least I know where I am and what people are. But here one lives on hollow ground!" "The sooner you get away the better," our young man went on. "I know why you say that." "It's just what I'm explaining." "I couldn't have held out if I hadn't been so sure of Miriam," said Mrs. Rooth. "Well, you needn't hold out any longer." "Don't _you_ trust her?" asked Sherringham's hostess. "Trust her?" "You don't trust yourself. That's why you were silent, why we might have thought you were dead, why we might have perished ourselves." "I don't think I understand you; I don't know what you're talking about," Peter returned. "But it doesn't matter." "Doesn't it? Let yourself go. Why should you struggle?" the old woman agreeably inquired. Her unexpected insistence annoyed her visitor, and he was silent again, meeting her eyes with reserve and on the point of telling her that he didn't like her tone. But he had his tongue under such control that he was able presently to say instead of this--and it was a relief to him to give audible voice to the reflexion--"It's a great mistake, either way, for a man to be in love with an actress. Either it means nothing serious, and what's the use of that? or it means everything, and that's still more delusive." "Delusive?" "Idle, unprofitable." "Surely a pure affection is its own beautiful reward," Mrs. Rooth pleaded with soft reasonableness. "In such a case how can it be pure?" "I thought you were talking of an English gentleman," she replied. "Call the poor fellow whatever you like: a man with his life to lead, his way to make, his work, his duties, his career to attend to. If it means nothing, as I say, the thing it means least of all is marriage." "Oh my own Miriam!" Mrs. Rooth wailed. "Fancy, on the other hand, the complication when such a man marries a woman who's on the stage." Mrs. Rooth looked as if she were trying to follow. "Miriam isn't on the stage yet." "Go to London and she soon will be." "Yes, and then you'll have your excuse." "My excuse?" "For deserting us altogether." He broke into laughter at this, the logic was so droll. Then he went on: "Show me some good acting and I won't desert you." "Good acting? Ah what's the best acting compared with the position of a true English lady? If you'll take her as she is you may have her," Mrs. Rooth suddenly added. "As she is, with all her ambitions unassuaged?" "To marry _you_--might not that be an ambition?" "A very paltry one. Don't answer for her, don't attempt that," said Peter. "You can do much better." "Do you think _you_ can?" smiled Mrs. Rooth. "I don't want to; I only want to let it alone. She's an artist; you must give her her head," the young man pursued. "You must always give an artist his head." "But I've known great ladies who were artists. In English society there's always a field." "Don't talk to me of English society! Thank goodness, in the first place, I don't live in it. Do you want her to give up her genius?" he demanded. "I thought you didn't care for it." "She'd say, 'No I thank you, dear mamma.'" "My wonderful child!" Mrs. Rooth almost comprehendingly murmured. "Have you ever proposed it to her?" "Proposed it?" "That she should give up trying." Mrs. Rooth hesitated, looking down. "Not for the reason you mean. We don't talk about love," she simpered. "Then it's so much less time wasted. Don't stretch out your hand to the worse when it may some day grasp the better," Peter continued. Mrs. Rooth raised her eyes at him as if recognising the force there might be in that, and he added: "Let her blaze out, let her look about her. Then you may talk to me if you like." "It's very puzzling!" the old woman artlessly sighed. He laughed again and then said: "Now don't tell me I'm not a good friend." "You are indeed--you're a very noble gentleman. That's just why a quiet life with you----" "It wouldn't be quiet for _me_!" he broke in. "And that's not what Miriam was made for." "_Don't say that_ for my precious one!" Mrs. Rooth quavered. "Go to London--go to London," her visitor repeated. Thoughtfully, after an instant, she extended her hand and took from the table the letter on the composition of which he had found her engaged. Then with a quick movement she tore it up. "That's what Mr. Dashwood says." "Mr. Dashwood?" "I forgot you don't know him. He's the brother of that lady we met the day you were so good as to receive us; the one who was so kind to us--Mrs. Lovick." "I never heard of him." "Don't you remember how she spoke of him and that Mr. Lovick didn't seem very nice about him? She told us that if he were to meet us--and she was so good as to intimate that it would be a pleasure to him to do so--he might give us, as she said, a tip." Peter achieved the effort to recollect. "Yes he comes back to me. He's an actor." "He's a gentleman too," said Mrs. Rooth. "And you've met him, and he _has_ given you a tip?" "As I say, he wants us to go to London." "I see, but even I can tell you that." "Oh yes," said Mrs. Rooth; "but _he_ says he can help us." "Keep hold of him then, if he's in the business," Peter was all for that. "He's a perfect gentleman," said Mrs. Rooth. "He's immensely struck with Miriam." "Better and better. Keep hold of him." "Well, I'm glad you don't object," she grimaced. "Why should I object?" "You don't regard us as _all_ your own?" "My own? Why, I regard you as the public's--the world's." She gave a little shudder. "There's a sort of chill in that. It's grand, but it's cold. However, I needn't hesitate then to tell you that it's with Mr. Dashwood Miriam has gone out." "Why hesitate, gracious heaven?" But in the next breath Sherringham asked: "Where have they gone?" "You don't like it!" his hostess laughed. "Why should it be a thing to be enthusiastic about?" "Well, he's charming and _I_ trust him." "So do I," said Sherringham. "They've gone to see Madame Carré." "She has come back then?" "She was expected back last week. Miriam wants to show her how she has improved." "And _has_ she improved?" "How can I tell--with my mother's heart?" asked Mrs. Rooth. "I don't judge; I only wait and pray. But Mr. Dashwood thinks she's wonderful." "That's a blessing. And when did he turn up?" "About a fortnight ago. We met Mrs. Lovick at the English church, and she was so good as to recognise us and speak to us. She said she had been away with her children--otherwise she'd have come to see us. She had just returned to Paris." "Yes, I've not yet seen her. I see Lovick," Peter added, "but he doesn't talk of his brother-in-law." "I didn't, that day, like his tone about him," Mrs. Rooth observed. "We walked a little way with Mrs. Lovick after church and she asked Miriam about her prospects and if she were working. Miriam said she had no prospects." "That wasn't very nice to me," Sherringham commented. "But when you had left us in black darkness what _were_ our prospects?" "I see. It's all right. Go on." "Then Mrs. Lovick said her brother was to be in Paris a few days and she would tell him to come and see us. He arrived, she told him and he came. _Voilà_!" said Mrs. Rooth. "So that now--so far as _he_ is concerned--Miss Rooth has prospects?" "He isn't a manager unfortunately," she qualified. "Where does he act?" "He isn't acting just now; he has been abroad. He has been to Italy, I believe, and is just stopping here on his way to London." "I see; he _is_ a perfect gentleman," said Sherringham. "Ah you're jealous of him!" "No, but you're trying to make me so. The more competitors there are for the glory of bringing her out the better for her." "Mr. Dashwood wants to take a theatre," said Mrs. Rooth. "Then perhaps he's our man." "Oh if you'd help him!" she richly cried. "Help him?" "Help him to help us." "We'll all work together; it will be very jolly," said Sherringham gaily. "It's a sacred cause, the love of art, and we shall be a happy band. Dashwood's his name?" he added in a moment. "Mrs. Lovick wasn't a Dashwood." "It's his _nom de théâtre_--Basil Dashwood. Do you like it?" Mrs. Rooth wonderfully inquired. "You say that as Miriam might. Her talent's catching!" "She's always practising--always saying things over and over to seize the tone. I've her voice in my ears. He wants _her_ not to have any." "Not to have any what?" "Any _nom de théâtre_. He wants her to use her own; he likes it so much. He says it will do so well--you can't better it." "He's a capital adviser," said Sherringham, getting up. "I'll come back to-morrow." "I won't ask you to wait for them--they may be so long," his hostess returned. "Will he come back with her?" Peter asked while he smoothed his hat. "I hope so, at this hour. With my child in the streets I tremble. We don't live in cabs, as you may easily suppose." "Did they go on foot?" Sherringham continued. "Oh yes; they started in high spirits." "And is Mr. Basil Dashwood acquainted with Madame Carré?" "Ah no, but he longed to be introduced to her; he persuaded Miriam to take him. Naturally she wishes to oblige him. She's very nice to him--if he can do anything." "Quite right; that's the way!" Peter cheerfully rang out. "And she also wanted him to see what she can do for the great critic," Mrs. Rooth added--"that terrible old woman in the red wig." "That's what I should like to see too," Peter permitted himself to acknowledge. "Oh she has gone ahead; she's pleased with herself. 'Work, work, work,' said Madame Carré. Well, she has worked, worked, worked. That's what Mr. Dashwood is pleased with even more than with other things." "What do you mean by other things?" "Oh her genius and her fine appearance." "He approves of her fine appearance? I ask because you think he knows what will take." "I know why you ask!" Mrs. Rooth bravely mocked. "He says it will be worth hundreds of thousands to her." "That's the sort of thing I like to hear," Peter returned. "I'll come in to-morrow," he repeated. "And shall you mind if Mr. Dash wood's here?" "Does he come every day?" "Oh they're always at it." "At it----?" He was vague. "Why she acts to him--every sort of thing--and he says if it will do." "How many days has he been here then?" Mrs. Rooth reflected. "Oh I don't know! Since he turned up they've passed so quickly." "So far from 'minding' it I'm eager to see him," Sherringham declared; "and I can imagine nothing better than what you describe--if he isn't an awful ass." "Dear me, if he isn't clever you must tell us: we can't afford to be deceived!" Mrs. Rooth innocently wailed. "What do we know--how can we judge?" she appealed. He had a pause, his hand on the latch. "Oh, I'll tell you frankly what I think of him!" XIX When he got into the street he looked about him for a cab, but was obliged to walk some distance before encountering one. In this little interval he saw no reason to modify the determination he had formed in descending the steep staircase of the Hôtel de la Garonne; indeed the desire prompting it only quickened his pace. He had an hour to spare and would also go to see Madame Carré. If Miriam and her companion had proceeded to the Rue de Constantinople on foot he would probably reach the house as soon as they. It was all quite logical: he was eager to see Miriam--that was natural enough; and he had admitted to Mrs. Rooth that he was keen on the subject of Mrs. Lovick's theatrical brother, in whom such effective aid might perhaps reside. To catch Miriam really revealing herself to the old actress after the jump she believed herself to have taken--since that was her errand--would be a very happy stroke, the thought of which made her benefactor impatient. He presently found his cab and, as he bounded in, bade the coachman drive fast. He learned from Madame Carré's portress that her illustrious _locataire_ was at home and that a lady and a gentleman had gone up some time before. In the little antechamber, after his admission, he heard a high voice come from the salon and, stopping a moment to listen, noted that Miriam was already launched in a recitation. He was able to make out the words, all the more that before he could prevent the movement the maid-servant who had led him in had already opened the door of the room--one of the leaves of it, there being, as in most French doors, two of these--before which, within, a heavy curtain was suspended. Miriam was in the act of rolling out some speech from the English poetic drama-- "For I am sick and capable of fears, Oppressed with wrongs and therefore full of fears." He recognised one of the great tirades of Shakespeare's Constance and saw she had just begun the magnificent scene at the beginning of the third act of _King John_, in which the passionate, injured mother and widow sweeps in wild organ-tones the entire scale of her irony and wrath. The curtain concealed him and he lurked three minutes after he had motioned to the _femme de chambre_ to retire on tiptoe. The trio in the salon, absorbed in the performance, had apparently not heard his entrance or the opening of the door, which was covered by the girl's splendid declamation. Peter listened intently, arrested by the spirit with which she attacked her formidable verses. He had needed to hear her set afloat but a dozen of them to measure the long stride she had taken in his absence; they assured him she had leaped into possession of her means. He remained where he was till she arrived at "Then speak again; not all thy former tale, But this one word, whether thy tale be true." This apostrophe, briefly responded to in another voice, gave him time quickly to raise the curtain and show himself, passing into the room with a "Go on, go on!" and a gesture earnestly deprecating a stop. Miriam, in the full swing of her part, paused but for an instant and let herself ring out again, while Peter sank into the nearest chair and she fixed him with her illumined eyes, that is, with those of the raving Constance. Madame Carré, buried in a chair, kissed her hand to him, and a young man who, near the girl, stood giving the cue, stared at him over the top of a little book. "Admirable, magnificent, go on," Sherringham repeated--"go on to the end of the scene, do it all!" Miriam's colour rose, yet he as quickly felt that she had no personal emotion in seeing him again; the cold passion of art had perched on her banner and she listened to herself with an ear as vigilant as if she had been a Paganini drawing a fiddle-bow. This effect deepened as she went on, rising and rising to the great occasion, moving with extraordinary ease and in the largest, clearest style at the dizzy height of her idea. That she had an idea was visible enough, and that the whole thing was very different from all Sherringham had hitherto heard her attempt. It belonged quite to another class of effort; she was now the finished statue lifted from the ground to its pedestal. It was as if the sun of her talent had risen above the hills and she knew she was moving and would always move in its guiding light. This conviction was the one artless thing that glimmered like a young joy through the tragic mask of Constance, and Sherringham's heart beat faster as he caught it in her face. It only showed her as more intelligent, and yet there had been a time when he thought her stupid! Masterful the whole spirit in which she carried the scene, making him cry to himself from point to point, "How she feels it, sees it and really 'renders' it!" He looked now and again at Madame Carré and saw she had in her lap an open book, apparently a French prose version, brought by her visitors, of the play; but she never either glanced at him or at the volume: she only sat screwing into the girl her hard, bright eyes, polished by experience like fine old brasses. The young man uttering the lines of the other speakers was attentive in another degree; he followed Miriam, in his own copy, to keep sure of the cue; but he was elated and expressive, was evidently even surprised; he coloured and smiled, and when he extended his hand to assist Constance to rise, after the performer, acting out her text, had seated herself grandly on "the huge firm earth," he bowed over her as obsequiously as if she had been his veritable sovereign. He was a good-looking young man, tall, well-proportioned, straight-featured and fair, of whom manifestly the first thing to be said on any occasion was that he had remarkably the stamp of a gentleman. He earned this appearance, which proved inveterate and importunate, to a point that was almost a denial of its spirit: so prompt the question of whether it could be in good taste to wear any character, even that particular one, so much on one's sleeve. It was literally on his sleeve that this young man partly wore his own; for it resided considerably in his garments, and in especial in a certain close-fitting dark blue frock-coat, a miracle of a fit, which moulded his juvenility just enough and not too much, and constituted, as Sherringham was destined to perceive later, his perpetual uniform or badge. It was not till afterwards that Peter began to feel exasperated by Basil Dashwood's "type"--the young stranger was of course Basil Dashwood--and even by his blue frock-coat, the recurrent, unvarying, imperturbable good form of his aspect. This unprofessional air ended by striking the observer as the very profession he had adopted, and was indeed, so far as had as yet been indicated, his mimetic capital, his main qualification for the stage. The ample and powerful manner in which Miriam handled her scene produced its full impression, the art with which she surmounted its difficulties, the liberality with which she met its great demand upon the voice, and the variety of expression that she threw into a torrent of objurgation. It was a real composition, studded with passages that called a suppressed tribute to the lips and seeming to show that a talent capable of such an exhibition was capable of anything. "But thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy, Nature and Fortune join'd to make thee great: Of Nature's gifts thou mayst with lilies boast, And with the half-blown rose." As the girl turned to her imagined child with this exquisite apostrophe--she addressed Mr. Dashwood as if he were playing Arthur, and he lowered his book, dropped his head and his eyes and looked handsome and ingenuous--she opened at a stroke to Sherringham's vision a prospect that they would yet see her express tenderness better even than anything else. Her voice was enchanting in these lines, and the beauty of her performance was that though she uttered the full fury of the part she missed none of its poetry. "Where did she get hold of that--where did she get hold of that?" Peter wondered while his whole sense vibrated. "She hadn't got hold of it when I went away." And the assurance flowed over him again that she had found the key to her box of treasures. In the summer, during their weeks of frequent meeting, she had only fumbled with the lock. One October day, while he was away, the key had slipped in, had fitted, or her finger at last had touched the right spring and the capricious casket had flown open. It was during the present solemnity that, excited by the way she came out and with a hundred stirred ideas about her wheeling through his mind, he was for the first time and most vividly visited by a perception that ended by becoming frequent with him--that of the perfect presence of mind, unconfused, unhurried by emotion, that any artistic performance requires and that all, whatever the instrument, require in exactly the same degree: the application, in other words, clear and calculated, crystal-firm as it were, of the idea conceived in the glow of experience, of suffering, of joy. He was afterwards often to talk of this with Miriam, who, however, was never to be able to present him with a neat theory of the subject. She had no knowledge that it was publicly discussed; she only ranged herself in practice on the side of those who hold that at the moment of production the artist can't too much have his wits about him. When Peter named to her the opinion of those maintaining that at such a crisis the office of attention ceases to be filled she stared with surprise and then broke out: "Ah the poor idiots!" She eventually became, in her judgements, in impatience and the expression of contempt, very free and absolutely irreverent. "What a splendid scolding!" the new visitor exclaimed when, on the entrance of the Pope's legate, her companion closed the book on the scene. Peter pressed his lips to Madame Carré's finger-tips; the old actress got up and held out her arms to Miriam. The girl never took her eyes off Sherringham while she passed into that lady's embrace and remained there. They were full of their usual sombre fire, and it was always the case that they expressed too much anything they could express at all; but they were not defiant nor even triumphant now--they were only deeply explicative. They seemed to say, "That's the sort of thing I meant; that's what I had in mind when I asked you to try to do something for me." Madame Carré folded her pupil to her bosom, holding her there as the old marquise in a _comédie de moeurs_ might in the last scene have held her god-daughter the _ingénue_. "Have you got me an engagement?"--the young woman then appealed eagerly to her friend. "Yes, he has done something splendid for me," she went on to Madame Carré, resting her hand caressingly on one of the actress's while the old woman discoursed with Mr. Dashwood, who was telling her in very pretty French that he was tremendously excited about Miss Rooth. Madame Carré looked at him as if she wondered how he appeared when he was calm and how, as a dramatic artist, he expressed that condition. "Yes, yes, something splendid, for a beginning," Peter answered radiantly, recklessly; feeling now only that he would say anything and do anything to please her. He spent on the spot, in imagination, his last penny. "It's such a pity you couldn't follow it; you'd have liked it so much better," Mr. Dashwood observed to their hostess. "Couldn't follow it? Do you take me for _une sotte_?" the celebrated artist cried. "I suspect I followed it _de plus près que vous, monsieur_!" "Ah you see the language is so awfully fine," Basil Dashwood replied, looking at his shoes. "The language? Why she rails like a fish-wife. Is that what you call language? Ours is another business." "If you understood, if you understood, you'd see all the greatness of it," Miriam declared. And then in another tone: "Such delicious expressions!" "_On dit que c'est très-fort_. But who can tell if you really say it?" Madame Carré demanded. "Ah, _par exemple_, I can!" Sherringham answered. "Oh you--you're a Frenchman." "Couldn't he make it out if he weren't?" asked Basil Dashwood. The old woman shrugged her shoulders. "He wouldn't know." "That's flattering to me." "Oh you--don't you pretend to complain," Madame Carré said. "I prefer _our_ imprecations--those of Camille," she went on. "They have the beauty _des plus belles choses_." "I can say them too," Miriam broke in. "_Insolente_!" smiled Madame Carré. "Camille doesn't squat down on the floor in the middle of them. "For grief is proud and makes his owner stoop. To me and to the state of my great grief Let kings assemble," Miriam quickly declaimed. "Ah if you don't feel the way she makes a throne of it!" "It's really tremendously fine, _chère madame_," Sherringham said. "There's nothing like it." "_Vous êtes insupportables_," the old woman answered. "Stay with us. I'll teach you Phèdre." "Ah Phædra, Phædra!" Basil Dashwood vaguely ejaculated, looking more gentlemanly than ever. "You've learned all I've taught you, but where the devil have you learned what I haven't?" Madame Carré went on. "I've worked--I have; you'd call it work--all through the bright, late summer, all through the hot, dull, empty days. I've battered down the door--I did hear it crash one day. But I'm not so very good yet. I'm only in the right direction." "_Malicieuse_!" growled Madame Carré. "Oh I can beat that," the girl went on. "Did you wake up one morning and find you had grown a pair of wings?" Peter asked. "Because that's what the difference amounts to--you really soar. Moreover, you're an angel," he added, charmed with her unexpectedness, the good nature of her forbearance to reproach him for not having written to her. And it seemed to him privately that she _was_ angelic when in answer to this she said ever so blandly: "You know you read _King John_ with me before you went away. I thought over immensely what you said. I didn't understand it much at the time--I was so stupid. But it all came to me later." "I wish you could see yourself," Peter returned. "My dear fellow, I do. What sort of a dunce do you take me for? I didn't miss a vibration of my voice, a fold of my robe." "Well, I didn't see you troubling about it," Peter handsomely insisted. "No one ever will. Do you think I'd ever show it?" "_Ars celare artem_," Basil Dashwood jocosely dropped. "You must first have the art to hide," said Sherringham, wondering a little why Miriam didn't introduce her young friend to him. She was, however, both then and later perfectly neglectful of such cares, never thinking, never minding how other people got on together. When she found they didn't get on she jeered at them: that was the nearest she came to arranging for them. Our young man noted in her from the moment she felt her strength an immense increase of this good-humoured inattention to detail--all detail save that of her work, to which she was ready to sacrifice holocausts of feelings when the feelings were other people's. This conferred on her a large profanity, an absence of ceremony as to her social relations, which was both amusing because it suggested that she would take what she gave, and formidable because it was inconvenient and you mightn't care to give what she would take. "If you haven't any art it's not quite the same as if you didn't hide it, is it?" Basil Dashwood ingeniously threw out. "That's right--say one of your clever things!" Miriam sweetly responded. "You're always acting," he declared in English and with a simple-minded laugh, while Sherringham remained struck with his expressing just what he himself had felt weeks before. "And when you've shown them your fish-wife, to your public _de là-bas_, what will you do next?" asked Madame Carré. "I'll do Juliet--I'll do Cleopatra." "Rather a big bill, isn't it?" Mr. Dashwood volunteered to Sherringham in a friendly but discriminating manner. "Constance and Juliet--take care you don't mix them," said Sherringham. "I want to be various. You once told me I had a hundred characters," Miriam returned. "Ah, _vous en êtes là_?" cried the old actress. "You may have a hundred characters, but you've only three plays. I'm told that's all there are in English." Miriam, admirably indifferent to this charge, appealed to Peter. "What arrangements have you made? What do the people want?" "The people at the theatre?" "I'm afraid they don't want _King John_, and I don't believe they hunger for _Antony and Cleopatra_," Basil Dashwood suggested. "Ships and sieges and armies and pyramids, you know: we mustn't be too heavy." "Oh I hate scenery!" the girl sighed. "_Elle est superbe_," said Madame Carré. "You must put those pieces on the stage: how will you do it?" "Oh we know how to get up a play in London, Madame Carré"--Mr. Dashwood was all geniality. "They put money on it, you know." "On it? But what do they put _in_ it? Who'll interpret them? Who'll manage a style like that--the style of which the rhapsodies she has just repeated are a specimen? Whom have you got that one has ever heard of?" "Oh you'll hear of a good deal when once she gets started," Dashwood cheerfully contended. Madame Carré looked at him a moment; then, "I feel that you'll become very bad," she said to Miriam. "I'm glad I shan't see it." "People will do things for me--I'll make them," the girl declared. "I'll stir them up so that they'll have ideas." "What people, pray?" "Ah terrible woman!" Peter theatrically groaned. "We translate your pieces--there will be plenty of parts," Basil Dashwood said. "Why then go out of the door to come in at the window?--especially if you smash it! An English arrangement of a French piece is a pretty woman with her back turned." "Do you really want to keep her?" Sherringham asked of Madame Carré--quite as if thinking for a moment that this after all might be possible. She bent her strange eyes on him. "No, you're all too queer together. We couldn't be bothered with you and you're not worth it." "I'm glad it's 'together' that we're queer then--we can console each other." "If you only would; but you don't seem to! In short I don't understand you--I give you up. But it doesn't matter," said the old woman wearily, "for the theatre's dead and even you, _ma toute-belle_, won't bring it to life. Everything's going from bad to worse, and I don't care what becomes of you. You wouldn't understand us here and they won't understand you there, and everything's impossible, and no one's a whit the wiser, and it's not of the least consequence. Only when you raise your arms lift them just a little higher," Madame Carré added. "My mother will be happier _chez nous_" said Miriam, throwing her arms straight up and giving them a noble tragic movement. "You won't be in the least in the right path till your mother's in despair." "Well, perhaps we can bring that about even in London," Sherringham patiently laughed. "Dear Mrs. Rooth--she's great fun," Mr. Dashwood as imperturbably dropped. Miriam transferred the dark weight of her gaze to him as if she were practising. "_You_ won't upset her, at any rate." Then she stood with her beautiful and fatal mask before her hostess. "I want to do the modern too. I want to do _le drame_, with intense realistic effects." "And do you want to look like the portico of the Madeleine when it's draped for a funeral?" her instructress mocked. "Never, never. I don't believe you're various: that's not the way I see you. You're pure tragedy, with _de grands éclats de voix_ in the great style, or you're nothing." "Be beautiful--be only that," Peter urged with high interest. "Be only what you can be so well--something that one may turn to for a glimpse of perfection, to lift one out of all the vulgarities of the day." Thus apostrophised the girl broke out with one of the speeches of Racine's Phædra, hushing her companions on the instant. "You'll be the English Rachel," said Basil Dashwood when she stopped. "Acting in French!" Madame Carré amended. "I don't believe in an English Rachel." "I shall have to work it out, what I shall be," Miriam concluded with a rich pensive effect. "You're in wonderfully good form to-day," Sherringham said to her; his appreciation revealing a personal subjection he was unable to conceal from his companions, much as he wished it. "I really mean to do everything." "Very well; after all Garrick did." "Then I shall be the Garrick of my sex." "There's a very clever author doing something for me; I should like you to see it," said Basil Dashwood, addressing himself equally to Miriam and to her diplomatic friend. "Ah if you've very clever authors----!" And Madame Carré spun the sound to the finest satiric thread. "I shall be very happy to see it," Peter returned. This response was so benevolent that Basil Dashwood presently began: "May I ask you at what theatre you've made arrangements?" Sherringham looked at him a moment. "Come and see me at the embassy and I'll tell you." Then he added: "I know your sister, Mrs. Lovick." "So I supposed: that's why I took the liberty of asking such a question." "It's no liberty, but Mr. Sherringham doesn't appear to be able to tell you," said Miriam. "Well, you know, it's a very curious world, all those theatrical people over there," Peter conceded. "Ah don't say anything against them when I'm one of them," Basil Dashwood laughed. "I might plead the absence of information," Peter returned, "as Miss Rooth has neglected to make us acquainted." Miriam vaguely smiled. "I know you both so little." But she presented them with a great stately air to each other, and the two men shook hands while Madame Carré observed them. "_Tiens_! you gentlemen meet here for the first time? You do right to become friends--that's the best thing. Live together in peace and mutual confidence. _C'est de beaucoup le plus sage_." "Certainly, for yoke-fellows," said Sherringham. He began the next moment to repeat to his new acquaintance some of the things he had been told in London; but their hostess stopped him off, waving the talk away with charming overdone stage horror and the young hands of the heroines of Marivaux. "Ah wait till you go--for that! Do you suppose I care for news of your mountebanks' booths?" XX As many people know, there are not, in the famous Théâtre Français, more than a dozen good seats accessible to ladies.[*] The stalls are forbidden them, the boxes are a quarter of a mile from the stage and the balcony is a delusion save for a few chairs at either end of its vast horseshoe. But there are two excellent _baignoires d'avant-scène_, which indeed are by no means always to be had. It was, however, into one of them that, immediately after his return to Paris, Sherringham ushered Mrs. Rooth and her daughter, with the further escort of Basil Dashwood. He had chosen the evening of the reappearance of the celebrated Mademoiselle Voisin--she had been enjoying a _congé_ of three months--an actress whom Miriam had seen several times before and for whose method she professed a high though somewhat critical esteem. It was only for the return of this charming performer that Peter had been waiting to respond to Miriam's most ardent wish--that of spending an hour in the _foyer des artistes_ of the great theatre. She was the person whom he knew best in the house of Molière; he could count on her to do them the honours some night when she was in the "bill," and to make the occasion sociable. Miriam had been impatient for it--she was so convinced that her eyes would be opened in the holy of holies; but wishing as particularly as he did to participate in her impression he had made her promise she wouldn't taste of this experience without him--not let Madame Carré, for instance, take her in his absence. There were questions the girl wished to put to Mademoiselle Voisin--questions which, having admired her from the balcony, she felt she was exactly the person to answer. She was more "in it" now, after all, than Madame Carré, in spite of her slenderer talent: she was younger, fresher, more modern and--Miriam found the word--less academic. She was in fine less "_vieux jeu_." Peter perfectly foresaw the day when his young friend would make indulgent allowances for poor Madame Carré, patronising her as an old woman of good intentions. [*: 1890] The play to-night was six months old, a large, serious, successful comedy by the most distinguished of authors, with a thesis, a chorus embodied in one character, a _scène à faire_ and a part full of opportunities for Mademoiselle Voisin. There were things to be said about this artist, strictures to be dropped as to the general quality of her art, and Miriam leaned back now, making her comments as if they cost her less, but the actress had knowledge and distinction and pathos, and our young lady repeated several times: "How quiet she is, how wonderfully quiet! Scarcely anything moves but her face and her voice. _Le geste rare_, but really expressive when it comes. I like that economy; it's the only way to make the gesture significant." "I don't admire the way she holds her arms," Basil Dash wood said: "like a _demoiselle de magasin_ trying on a jacket." "Well, she holds them at any rate. I daresay it's more than you do with yours." "Oh yes, she holds them; there's no mistake about that. 'I hold them, I hope, _hein_?' she seems to say to all the house." The young English professional laughed good-humouredly, and Sherringham was struck with the pleasant familiarity he had established with their brave companion. He was knowing and ready and he said in the first _entr'acte_--they were waiting for the second to go behind--amusing perceptive things. "They teach them to be ladylike and Voisin's always trying to show that. 'See how I walk, see how I sit, see how quiet I am and how I have _le geste rare_. Now can you say I ain't a lady?' She does it all as if she had a class." "Well, to-night I'm her class," said Miriam. "Oh I don't mean of actresses, but of _femmes du monde_. She shows them how to act in society." "You had better take a few lessons," Miriam retorted. "Ah you should see Voisin in society," Peter interposed. "Does she go into it?" Mrs. Rooth demanded with interest. Her friend hesitated. "She receives a great many people." "Why shouldn't they when they're nice?" Mrs. Rooth frankly wanted to know. "When the people are nice?" Miriam asked. "Now don't tell me she's not what one would wish," said Mrs. Rooth to Sherringham. "It depends on what that is," he darkly smiled. "What I should wish if she were my daughter," the old woman rejoined blandly. "Ah wish your daughter to act as well as that and you'll do the handsome thing for her!" "Well, she _seems_ to feel what she says," Mrs. Rooth piously risked. "She has some stiff things to say. I mean about her past," Basil Dashwood remarked. "The past--the dreadful past--on the stage!" "Wait till the end, to see how she comes out. We must all be merciful!" sighed Mrs. Rooth. "We've seen it before; you know what happens," Miriam observed to her mother. "I've seen so many I get them mixed." "Yes, they're all in queer predicaments. Poor old mother--what we show you!" laughed the girl. "Ah it will be what _you_ show me--something noble and wise!" "I want to do this; it's a magnificent part," said Miriam. "You couldn't put it on in London--they wouldn't swallow it," Basil Dashwood declared. "Aren't there things they do there to get over the difficulties?" the girl inquired. "You can't get over what _she did_!"--her companion had a rueful grimace. "Yes, we must pay, we must expiate!" Mrs. Rooth moaned as the curtain rose again. When the second act was over our friends passed out of their _baignoire_ into those corridors of tribulation where the bristling _ouvreuse_, like a pawnbroker driving a roaring trade, mounts guard upon piles of heterogeneous clothing, and, gaining the top of the fine staircase which forms the state entrance and connects the statued vestibule of the basement with the grand tier of boxes, opened an ambiguous door composed of little mirrors and found themselves in the society of the initiated. The janitors were courteous folk who greeted Sherringham as an acquaintance, and he had no difficulty in marshalling his little troop toward the foyer. They traversed a low, curving lobby, hung with pictures and furnished with velvet-covered benches where several unrecognised persons of both sexes looked at them without hostility, and arrived at an opening, on the right, from which, by a short flight of steps, there was a descent to one of the wings of the stage. Here Miriam paused, in silent excitement, like a young warrior arrested by a glimpse of the battle-field. Her vision was carried off through a lane of light to the point of vantage from which the actor held the house; but there was a hushed guard over the place and curiosity could only glance and pass. Then she came with her companions to a sort of parlour with a polished floor, not large and rather vacant, where her attention flew delightedly to a coat-tree, in a corner, from which three or four dresses were suspended--dresses she immediately perceived to be costumes in that night's play--accompanied by a saucer of something and a much-worn powder-puff casually left on a sofa. This was a familiar note in the general impression of high decorum which had begun at the threshold--a sense of majesty in the place. Miriam rushed at the powder-puff--there was no one in the room--snatched it up and gazed at it with droll veneration, then stood rapt a moment before the charming petticoats ("That's Dunoyer's first underskirt," she said to her mother) while Sherringham explained that in this apartment an actress traditionally changed her gown when the transaction was simple enough to save the long ascent to her _loge_. He felt himself a cicerone showing a church to a party of provincials; and indeed there was a grave hospitality in the air, mingled with something academic and important, the tone of an institution, a temple, which made them all, out of respect and delicacy, hold their breath a little and tread the shining floors with discretion. These precautions increased--Mrs. Rooth crept about like a friendly but undomesticated cat--after they entered the foyer itself, a square, spacious saloon covered with pictures and relics and draped in official green velvet, where the _genius loci_ holds a reception every night in the year. The effect was freshly charming to Peter; he was fond of the place, always saw it again with pleasure, enjoyed its honourable look and the way, among the portraits and scrolls, the records of a splendid history, the green velvet and the waxed floors, the _genius loci_ seemed to be "at home" in the quiet lamplight. At the end of the room, in an ample chimney, blazed a fire of logs. Miriam said nothing; they looked about, noting that most of the portraits and pictures were "old-fashioned," and Basil Dashwood expressed disappointment at the absence of all the people they wanted most to see. Three or four gentlemen in evening dress circulated slowly, looking, like themselves, at the pictures, and another gentleman stood before a lady, with whom he was in conversation, seated against the wall. The foyer resembled in these conditions a ball-room, cleared for the dance, before the guests or the music had arrived. "Oh it's enough to see _this_; it makes my heart beat," said Miriam. "It's full of the vanished past, it makes me cry. I feel them here, all, the great artists I shall never see. Think of Rachel--look at her grand portrait there!--and how she stood on these very boards and trailed over them the robes of Hermione and Phèdre." The girl broke out theatrically, as on the spot was right, not a bit afraid of her voice as soon as it rolled through the room; appealing to her companions as they stood under the chandelier and making the other persons present, who had already given her some attention, turn round to stare at so unusual a specimen of the English miss. She laughed, musically, when she noticed this, and her mother, scandalised, begged her to lower her tone. "It's all right. I produce an effect," said Miriam: "it shan't be said that I too haven't had my little success in the maison de Molière." And Sherringham repeated that it was all right--the place was familiar with mirth and passion, there was often wonderful talk there, and it was only the setting that was still and solemn. It happened that this evening--there was no knowing in advance--the scene was not characteristically brilliant; but to confirm his assertion, at the moment he spoke, Mademoiselle Dunoyer, who was also in the play, came into the room attended by a pair of gentlemen. She was the celebrated, the perpetual, the necessary _ingénue_, who with all her talent couldn't have represented a woman of her actual age. She had the gliding, hopping movement of a small bird, the same air of having nothing to do with time, and the clear, sure, piercing note, a miracle of exact vocalisation. She chaffed her companions, she chaffed the room; she might have been a very clever little girl trying to personate a more innocent big one. She scattered her amiability about--showing Miriam how the children of Molière took their ease--and it quickly placed her in the friendliest communication with Peter Sherringham, who already enjoyed her acquaintance and who now extended it to his companions, and in particular to the young lady _sur le point d'entrer au théâtre._ "You deserve a happier lot," said the actress, looking up at Miriam brightly, as if to a great height, and taking her in; upon which Sherringham left them together a little and led Mrs. Rooth and young Dashwood to consider further some of the pictures. "Most delightful, most curious," the old woman murmured about everything; while Basil Dashwood exclaimed in the presence of most of the portraits: "But their ugliness--their ugliness: did you ever see such a collection of hideous people? And those who were supposed to be good-looking--the beauties of the past--they're worse than the others. Ah you may say what you will, _nous sommes mieux que ça_!" Sherringham suspected him of irritation, of not liking the theatre of the great rival nation to be thrust down his throat. They returned to Miriam and Mademoiselle Dunoyer, and Peter asked the actress a question about one of the portraits to which there was no name attached. She replied, like a child who had only played about the room, that she was _toute honteuse_ not to be able to tell him the original: she had forgotten, she had never asked--"_Vous allez me trouver bien légère_!" She appealed to the other persons present, who formed a gallery for her, and laughed in delightful ripples at their suggestions, which she covered with ridicule. She bestirred herself; she declared she would ascertain, she shouldn't be happy till she did, and swam out of the room, with the prettiest paddles, to obtain the information, leaving behind her a perfume of delicate kindness and gaiety. She seemed above all things obliging, and Peter pronounced her almost as natural off the stage as on. She didn't come back. XXI Whether he had prearranged it is more than I can say, but Mademoiselle Voisin delayed so long to show herself that Mrs. Rooth, who wished to see the rest of the play, though she had sat it out on another occasion, expressed a returning relish for her corner of the _baignoire_ and gave her conductor the best pretext he could have desired for asking Basil Dashwood to be so good as to escort her back. When the young actor, of whose personal preference Peter was quite aware, had led Mrs. Rooth away with an absence of moroseness which showed that his striking resemblance to a gentleman was not kept for the footlights, the two others sat on a divan in the part of the room furthest from the entrance, so that it gave them a degree of privacy, and Miriam watched the coming and going of their fellow-visitors and the indefinite people, attached to the theatre, hanging about, while her companion gave a name to some of the figures, Parisian celebrities. "Fancy poor Dashwood cooped up there with mamma!" the girl exclaimed whimsically. "You're awfully cruel to him; but that's of course," said Sherringham. "It seems to me I'm as kind as you; you sent him off." "That was for your mother; she was tired." "Oh gammon! And why, if I _were_ cruel, should it be of course?" "Because you must destroy and torment and wear out--that's your nature. But you can't help your type, can you?" "My type?" she echoed. "It's bad, perverse, dangerous. It's essentially insolent." "And pray what's yours when you talk like that? Would you say such things if you didn't know the depths of my good nature?" "Your good nature all comes back to that," said Sherringham. "It's an abyss of ruin--for others. You've no respect. I'm speaking of the artistic character--in the direction and in the plentitude in which you have it. It's unscrupulous, nervous, capricious, wanton." "I don't know about respect. One can be good," Miriam mused and reasoned. "It doesn't matter so long as one's powerful," he returned. "We can't have everything, and surely we ought to understand that we must pay for things. A splendid organisation for a special end, like yours, is so rare and rich and fine that we oughtn't to grudge it its conditions." "What do you call its conditions?" Miriam asked as she turned and looked at him. "Oh the need to take its ease, to take up space, to make itself at home in the world, to square its elbows and knock, others about. That's large and free; it's the good nature you speak of. You must forage and ravage and leave a track behind you; you must live upon the country you traverse. And you give such delight that, after all, you're welcome--you're infinitely welcome!" "I don't know what you mean. I only care for the idea," the girl said. "That's exactly what I pretend--and we must all help you to it. You use us, you push us about, you break us up. We're your tables and chair, the simple furniture of your life." "Whom do you mean by 'we'?" Peter gave an ironic laugh. "Oh don't be afraid--there will be plenty of others!" She made no return to this, but after a moment broke out again. "Poor Dashwood immured with mamma--he's like a lame chair that one has put into the corner." "Don't break him up before he has served. I really believe something will come out of him," her companion went on. "However, you'll break me up first," he added, "and him probably never at all." "And why shall I honour you so much more?" "Because I'm a better article and you'll feel that." "You've the superiority of modesty--I see." "I'm better than a young mountebank--I've vanity enough to say that." She turned on him with a flush in her cheek and a splendid dramatic face. "How you hate us! Yes, at bottom, below your little cold taste, you _hate_ us!" she repeated. He coloured too, met her eyes, looked into them a minute, seemed to accept the imputation and then said quickly: "Give it up: come away with me." "Come away with you?" "Leave this place. Give it up." "You brought me here, you insisted it should be only you, and now you must stay," she declared with a head-shake and a high manner. "You should know what you want, dear Mr. Sherringham." "I do--I know now. Come away before you see her." "Before----?" she seemed to wonder. "She's success, this wonderful Voisin, she's triumph, she's full accomplishment: the hard, brilliant realisation of what I want to avert for you." Miriam looked at him in silence, the cold light still in her face, and he repeated: "Give it up--give it up." Her eyes softened after a little; she smiled and then said: "Yes, you're better than poor Dashwood." "Give it up and we'll live for ourselves, in ourselves, in something that can have a sanctity." "All the same you do hate us," the girl went on. "I don't want to be conceited, but I mean that I'm sufficiently fine and complicated to tempt you. I'm an expensive modern watch with a wonderful escapement--therefore you'll smash me if you can." "Never--never!" she said as she got up. "You tell me the hour too well." She quitted her companion and stood looking at Gérôme's fine portrait of the pale Rachel invested with the antique attributes of tragedy. The rise of the curtain had drawn away most of the company. Peter, from his bench, watched his friend a little, turning his eyes from her to the vivid image of the dead actress and thinking how little she suffered by the juxtaposition. Presently he came over and joined her again and she resumed: "I wonder if that's what your cousin had in his mind." "My cousin----?" "What was his name? Mr. Dormer; that first day at Madame Carré's. He offered to paint my portrait." "I remember. I put him up to it." "Was he thinking of this?" "I doubt if he has ever seen it. I daresay I was." "Well, when we go to London he must do it," said Miriam. "Oh there's no hurry," Peter was moved to reply. "Don't you want my picture?" asked the girl with one of her successful touches. "I'm not sure I want it from _him_. I don't know quite what he'd make of you." "He looked so clever--I liked him. I saw him again at your party." "He's a jolly good fellow; but what's one to say," Peter put to her, "of a painter who goes for his inspiration to the House of Commons?" "To the House of Commons?" she echoed. "He has lately got himself elected." "Dear me, what a pity! I wanted to sit for him. But perhaps he won't have me--as I'm not a member of Parliament." "It's my sister, rather, who has got him in." "Your sister who was at your house that day? What has she to do with it?" Miriam asked. "Why she's his cousin just as I am. And in addition," Sherringham went on, "she's to be married to him." "Married--really?" She had a pause, but she continued. "So he paints _her_, I suppose?" "Not much, probably. His talent in that line isn't what she esteems in him most." "It isn't great, then?" "I haven't the least idea." "And in the political line?" the girl persisted. "I scarcely can tell. He's very clever." "He does paint decently, then?" "I daresay." Miriam looked once more at Gérôme's picture. "Fancy his going into the House of Commons! And your sister put him there?" "She worked, she canvassed." "Ah you're a queer family!" she sighed, turning round at the sound of a step. "We're lost--here's Mademoiselle Voisin," said Sherringham. This celebrity presented herself smiling and addressing Miriam. "I acted for _you_ to-night--I did my best." "What a pleasure to speak to you, to thank you!" the girl murmured admiringly. She was startled and dazzled. "I couldn't come to you before, but now I've got a rest--for half an hour," the actress went on. Gracious and passive, as if a little spent, she let Sherringham, without looking at him, take her hand and raise it to his lips. "I'm sorry I make you lose the others--they're so good in this act," she added. "We've seen them before and there's nothing so good as you," Miriam promptly returned. "I like my part," said Mademoiselle Voisin gently, smiling still at our young lady with clear, charming eyes. "One's always better in that case." "She's so bad sometimes, you know!" Peter jested to Miriam; leading the actress thus to glance at him, kindly and vaguely, in a short silence which you couldn't call on her part embarrassment, but which was still less affectation. "And it's so interesting to be here--so interesting!" Miriam protested. "Ah you like our old house? Yes, we're very proud of it." And Mademoiselle Voisin smiled again at Sherringham all good-humouredly, but as if to say: "Well, here I am, and what do you want of me? Don't ask me to invent it myself, but if you'll tell me I'll do it." Miriam admired the note of discreet interrogation in her voice--the slight suggestion of surprise at their "old house" being liked. This performer was an astonishment from her seeming still more perfect on a nearer view--which was not, the girl had an idea, what performers usually did. This was very encouraging to her--it widened the programme of a young lady about to embrace the scenic career. To have so much to show before the footlights and yet to have so much left when you came off--that was really wonderful. Mademoiselle Voisin's eyes, as one looked into them, were still more agreeable than the distant spectator would have supposed; and there was in her appearance an extreme finish which instantly suggested to Miriam that she herself, in comparison, was big and rough and coarse. "You're lovely to-night--you're particularly lovely," Sherringham said very frankly, translating Miriam's own impression and at the same time giving her an illustration of the way that, in Paris at least, gentlemen expressed themselves to the stars of the drama. She thought she knew her companion very well and had been witness of the degree to which, in such general conditions, his familiarity could increase; but his address to the slim, distinguished, harmonious woman before them had a different quality, the note of a special usage. If Miriam had had an apprehension that such directness might be taken as excessive it was removed by the manner in which Mademoiselle Voisin returned: "Oh one's always well enough when one's made up; one's always exactly the same." That served as an example of the good taste with which a star of the drama could receive homage that was wanting in originality. Miriam determined on the spot that this should be the way _she_ would ever receive it. The grace of her new acquaintance was the greater as the becoming bloom to which she alluded as artificial was the result of a science so consummate that it had none of the grossness of a mask. The perception of all this was exciting to our young aspirant, and her excitement relieved itself in the inquiry, which struck her as rude as soon as she had uttered it: "You acted for 'me'? How did you know? What am I to you?" "Monsieur Sherringham has told me about you. He says we're nothing beside you--that you're to be the great star of the future. I'm proud that you've seen me." "That of course is what I tell every one," Peter acknowledged a trifle awkwardly to Miriam. "I can believe it when I see you. _Je vous ai bien observée_," the actress continued in her sweet conciliatory tone. Miriam looked from one of her interlocutors to the other as if there were joy for her in this report of Sherringham's remarks--joy accompanied and partly mitigated, however, by a quicker vision of what might have passed between a secretary of embassy and a creature so exquisite as Mademoiselle Voisin. "Ah you're wonderful people--a most interesting impression!" she yearningly sighed. "I was looking for you; he had prepared me. We're such old friends!" said the actress in a tone courteously exempt from intention: upon which Sherringham, again taking her hand, raised it to his lips with a tenderness which her whole appearance seemed to bespeak for her, a sort of practical consideration and carefulness of touch, as if she were an object precious and frail, an instrument for producing rare sounds, to be handled, like a legendary violin, with a recognition of its value. "Your dressing-room is so pretty--show her your dressing-room," he went on. "Willingly, if she'll come up. _Vous savez que c'est une montée."_ "It's a shame to inflict it on _you_," Miriam objected. "_Comment donc?_ If it will interest you in the least!" They exchanged civilities, almost caresses, trying which could have the nicest manner to the other. It was the actress's manner that struck Miriam most; it denoted such a training, so much taste, expressed such a ripe conception of urbanity. "No wonder she acts well when she has that tact--feels, perceives, is so remarkable, _mon Dieu, mon Dieu!"_ the girl said to herself as they followed their conductress into another corridor and up a wide, plain staircase. The staircase was spacious and long and this part of the establishment sombre and still, with the gravity of a college or a convent. They reached another passage lined with little doors, on each of which the name of a comedian was painted, and here the aspect became still more monastic, like that of a row of solitary cells. Mademoiselle Voisin led the way to her own door all obligingly and as if wishing to be hospitable; she dropped little subdued, friendly attempts at explanation on the way. At her threshold the monasticism stopped--Miriam found herself in a wonderfully upholstered nook, a nest of lamplight and delicate cretonne. Save for its pair of long glasses it might have been a tiny boudoir, with a water-colour drawing of value in each of its panels of stretched stuff, with its crackling fire and its charming order. It was intensely bright and extremely hot, singularly pretty and exempt from litter. Nothing lay about, but a small draped doorway led into an inner sanctuary. To Miriam it seemed royal; it immediately made the art of the comedian the most distinguished thing in the world. It was just such a place as they _should_ have for their intervals if they were expected to be great artists. It was a result of the same evolution as Mademoiselle Voisin herself--not that our young lady found this particular term at hand to express her idea. But her mind was flooded with an impression of style, of refinement, of the long continuity of a tradition. The actress said, _"Voilà, c'est tout!"_ as if it were little enough and there were even something clumsy in her having brought them so far for nothing, and in their all sitting there waiting and looking at each other till it was time for her to change her dress. But to Miriam it was occupation enough to note what she did and said: these things and her whole person and carriage struck our young woman as exquisite in their adaptation to the particular occasion. She had had an idea that foreign actresses were rather of the _cabotin_ order, but her hostess suggested to her much more a princess than a _cabotine_. She would do things as she liked and do them straight off: Miriam couldn't fancy her in the gropings and humiliations of rehearsal. Everything in her had been sifted and formed, her tone was perfect, her amiability complete, and she might have been the charming young wife of a secretary of state receiving a pair of strangers of distinction. The girl observed all her movements. And then, as Sherringham had said, she was particularly lovely. But she suddenly told this gentleman that she must put him _à la porte_--she wanted to change her dress. He retired and returned to the foyer, where Miriam was to rejoin him after remaining the few minutes more with Mademoiselle Voisin and coming down with her. He waited for his companion, walking up and down and making up his mind; and when she presently came in he said to her: "Please don't go back for the rest of the play. Stay here." They now had the foyer virtually to themselves. "I want to stay here. I like it better," She moved back to the chimney-piece, from above which the cold portrait of Rachel looked down, and as he accompanied her he went on: "I meant what I said just now." "What you said to Voisin?" "No, no; to you. Give it up and live with _me."_ "Give it up?" She turned her stage face on him. "Give it up and I'll marry you to-morrow." "This is a happy time to ask it!" she said with superior amusement. "And this is a good place!" "Very good indeed, and that's why I speak: it's a place to make one choose--it puts it all before one." "To make _you_ choose, you mean. I'm much obliged, but that's not my choice," laughed Miriam. "You shall be anything you like except this." "Except what I most want to be? I _am_ much obliged." "Don't you care for me? Haven't you any gratitude?" Sherringham insisted. "Gratitude for kindly removing the blest cup from my lips? I want to be what _she_ is--I want it more than ever." "Ah what she is--!" He took it impatiently. "Do you mean I can't? Well see if I can't. Tell me more about her--tell me everything." "Haven't you seen for yourself and, knowing things as you do, can't you judge?" "She's strange, she's mysterious," Miriam allowed, looking at the fire. "She showed us nothing--nothing of her real self." "So much the better, all things considered." "Are there all sorts of other things in her life? That's what I believe," the girl went on, raising her eyes to him. "I can't tell you what there is in the life of such a woman." "Imagine--when she's so perfect!" she exclaimed thoughtfully. "Ah she kept me off--she kept me off! Her charming manner is in itself a kind of contempt. It's an abyss--it's the wall of China. She has a hard polish, an inimitable surface, like some wonderful porcelain that costs more than you'd think." "Do you want to become like that?" Sherringham asked. "If I could I should be enchanted. One can always try." "You must act better than she," he went on. "Better? I thought you wanted me to give it up." "Ah I don't know what I want," he cried, "and you torment me and turn me inside out! What I want is you yourself." "Oh don't worry," said Miriam--now all kindly. Then she added that Mademoiselle Voisin had invited her to "call"; to which Sherringham replied with a certain dryness that she would probably not find that necessary. This made the girl stare and she asked: "Do you mean it won't do on account of mamma's prejudices?" "Say this time on account of mine." "Do you mean because she has lovers?" "Her lovers are none of our business." "None of mine, I see. So you've been one of them?" "No such luck!" "What a pity!" she richly wailed. "I should have liked to see that. One must see everything--to be able to do everything." And as he pressed for what in particular she had wished to see she replied: "The way a woman like that receives one of the old ones." Peter gave a groan at this, which was at the same time partly a laugh, and, turning away to drop on a bench, ejaculated: "You'll do--you'll do!" He sat there some minutes with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. His friend remained looking at the portrait of Rachel, after which she put to him: "Doesn't such a woman as that receive--receive every one?" "Every one who goes to see her, no doubt." "And who goes?" "Lots of men--clever men, eminent men." "Ah what a charming life! Then doesn't she go out?" "Not what we Philistines mean by that--not into society, never. She never enters a lady's drawing-room." "How strange, when one's as distinguished as that; except that she must escape a lot of stupidities and _corvées_. Then where does she learn such manners?" "She teaches manners, _à ses heures_: she doesn't need to learn them." "Oh she has given me ideas! But in London actresses go into society," Miriam continued. "Oh into ours, such as it is. In London _nous mêlons les genres_." "And shan't I go--I mean if I want?" "You'll have every facility to bore yourself. Don't doubt it." "And doesn't she feel excluded?" Miriam asked. "Excluded from what? She has the fullest life." "The fullest?" "An intense artistic life. The cleverest men in Paris talk over her work with her; the principal authors of plays discuss with her subjects and characters and questions of treatment. She lives in the world of art." "Ah the world of art--how I envy her! And you offer me Dashwood!" Sherringham rose in his emotion. "I 'offer' you--?" Miriam burst out laughing. "You look so droll! You offer me yourself, then, instead of all these things." "My dear child, I also am a very clever man," he said, trying to sink his consciousness of having for a moment stood gaping. "You are--you are; I delight in you. No ladies at all--no _femmes comme il faut?"_ she began again. "Ah what do _they_ matter? Your business is the artistic life!" he broke out with inconsequence, irritated, moreover, at hearing her sound that trivial note again. "You're a dear--your charming good sense comes back to you! What do you want of me, then?" "I want you for myself--not for others; and now, in time, before anything's done." "Why, then, did you bring me here? Everything's done--I feel it to-night." "I know the way you should look at it--if you do look at it at all," Sherringham conceded. "That's so easy! I thought you liked the stage so," Miriam artfully added. "Don't you want me to be a great swell?" "And don't you want _me_ to be?" "You _will_ be--you'll share my glory." "So will you share mine." "The husband of an actress? Yes, I see myself that!" Peter cried with a frank ring of disgust. "It's a silly position, no doubt. But if you're too good for it why talk about it? Don't you think I'm important?" she demanded. Her companion met her eyes and she suddenly said in a different tone: "Ah why should we quarrel when you've been so kind, so generous? Can't we always be friends--the truest friends?" Her voice sank to the sweetest cadence and her eyes were grateful and good as they rested on him. She sometimes said things with such perfection that they seemed dishonest, but in this case he was stirred to an expressive response. Just as he was making it, however, he was moved to utter other words: "Take care, here's Dashwood!" Mrs. Rooth's tried attendant was in the doorway. He had come back to say that they really must relieve him. BOOK FIFTH XXII Mrs. Dallow came up to London soon after the meeting of Parliament; she made no secret of the fact that she was fond of "town" and that in present conditions it would of course not have become less attractive to her. But she prepared to retreat again for the Easter vacation, not to go back to Harsh, but to pay a couple of country visits. She did not, however, depart with the crowd--she never did anything with the crowd--but waited till the Monday after Parliament rose; facing with composure, in Great Stanhope Street, the horrors, as she had been taught to consider them, of a Sunday out of the session. She had done what she could to mitigate them by asking a handful of "stray men" to dine with her that evening. Several members of this disconsolate class sought comfort in Great Stanhope Street in the afternoon, and them for the most part she also invited to return at eight o'clock. There were accordingly almost too many people at dinner; there were even a couple of wives. Nick Dormer was then present, though he had not been in the afternoon. Each of the other persons had said on coming in, "So you've not gone--I'm awfully glad." Mrs. Dallow had replied, "No, I've not gone," but she had in no case added that she was glad, nor had she offered an explanation. She never offered explanations; she always assumed that no one could invent them so well as those who had the florid taste to desire them. And in this case she was right, since it is probable that few of her visitors failed to say to themselves that her not having gone would have had something to do with Dormer. That could pass for an explanation with many of Mrs. Dallow's friends, who as a general thing were not morbidly analytic; especially with those who met Nick as a matter of course at dinner. His figuring at this lady's entertainments, being in her house whenever a candle was lighted, was taken as a sign that there was something rather particular between them. Nick had said to her more than once that people would wonder why they didn't marry; but he was wrong in this, inasmuch as there were many of their friends to whom it wouldn't have occurred that his position could be improved. That they were cousins was a fact not so evident to others as to themselves, in consequence of which they appeared remarkably intimate. The person seeing clearest in the matter was Mrs. Gresham, who lived so much in the world that being left now and then to one's own company had become her idea of true sociability. She knew very well that if she had been privately engaged to a young man as amiable as Nick Dormer she would have managed that publicity shouldn't play such a part in their intercourse; and she had her secret scorn for the stupidity of people whose conception of Nick's relation to Julia rested on the fact that he was always included in her parties. "If he never was there they might talk," she said to herself. But Mrs. Gresham was supersubtle. To her it would have appeared natural that her friend should celebrate the parliamentary recess by going down to Harsh and securing the young man's presence there for a fortnight; she recognised Mrs. Dallow's actual plan as a comparatively poor substitute--the project of spending the holidays in other people's houses, to which Nick had also promised to come. Mrs. Gresham was romantic; she wondered what was the good of mere snippets and snatches, the chances that any one might have, when large, still days _à deux_ were open to you--chances of which half the sanctity was in what they excluded. However, there were more unsettled matters between Mrs. Dallow and her queer kinsman than even Mrs. Gresham's fine insight could embrace. She was not on the Sunday evening before Easter among the guests in Great Stanhope Street; but if she had been Julia's singular indifference to observation would have stopped short of encouraging her to remain in the drawing-room, along with Nick, after the others had gone. I may add that Mrs. Gresham's extreme curiosity would have emboldened her as little to do so. She would have taken for granted that the pair wished to be alone together, though she would have regarded this only as a snippet. The company had at all events stayed late, and it was nearly twelve o'clock when the last of them, standing before the fire in the room they had quitted, broke out to his companion: "See here, Julia, how long do you really expect me to endure this kind of thing?" Julia made him no answer; she only leaned back in her chair with her eyes upon his. He met her gaze a moment; then he turned round to the fire and for another moment looked into it. After this he faced his hostess again with the exclamation: "It's so foolish--it's so damnably foolish!" She still said nothing, but at the end of a minute she spoke without answering him. "I shall expect you on Tuesday, and I hope you'll come by a decent train." "What do you mean by a decent train?" "I mean I hope you'll not leave it till the last thing before dinner, so that we can have a little walk or something." "What's a little walk or something? Why, if you make such a point of my coming to Griffin, do you want me to come at all?" She hesitated an instant; then she returned; "I knew you hated it!" "You provoke me so," said Nick. "You try to, I think." "And Severals is still worse. You'll get out of that if you can," Mrs. Dallow went on. "If I can? What's to prevent me?" "You promised Lady Whiteroy. But of course that's nothing." "I don't care a straw for Lady Whiteroy." "And you promised me. But that's less still." "It _is_ foolish--it's quite idiotic," said Nick with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ceiling. There was another silence, at the end of which Julia remarked: "You might have answered Mr. Macgeorge when he spoke to you." "Mr. Macgeorge--what has he to do with it?" "He has to do with your getting on a little. If you think that's the way--!" Nick broke into a laugh. "I like lessons in getting on--in other words I suppose you mean in urbanity--from you, Julia!" "Why not from me?" "Because you can do nothing base. You're incapable of putting on a flattering manner to get something by it: therefore why should you expect me to? You're unflattering--that is, you're austere--in proportion as there may be something to be got." She sprang from her chair, coming toward him. "There's only one thing I want in the world--you know very well." "Yes, you want it so much that you won't even take it when it's pressed on you. How long do you seriously expect me to bear it?" Nick repeated. "I never asked you to do anything base," she said as she stood in front of him. "If I'm not clever about throwing myself into things it's all the more reason you should be." "If you're not clever, my dear Julia--?" Nick, close to her, placed his hands on her shoulders and shook her with a mixture of tenderness and passion. "You're clever enough to make me furious, sometimes!" She opened and closed her fan looking down at it while she submitted to his mild violence. "All I want is that when a man like Mr. Macgeorge talks to you you shouldn't appear bored to death. You used to be so charming under those inflictions. Now you appear to take no interest in anything. At dinner to-night you scarcely opened your lips; you treated them all as if you only wished they'd go." "I did wish they'd go. Haven't I told you a hundred times what I think of your salon?" "How then do you want me to live?" she asked. "Am I not to have a creature in the house?" "As many creatures as you like. Your freedom's complete and, as far as I'm concerned, always will be. Only when you challenge me and overhaul me--not justly, I think--I must confess the simple truth, that there are many of your friends I don't delight in." "Oh _your_ idea of pleasant people!" Julia lamented. "I should like once for all to know what it really is." "I can tell you what it really isn't: it isn't Mr. Macgeorge. He's a being almost grotesquely limited." "He'll be where you'll never be--unless you change." "To be where Mr. Macgeorge is not would be very much my desire. Therefore why should I change?" Nick demanded. "However, I hadn't the least intention of being rude to him, and I don't think I was," he went on. "To the best of my ability I assume a virtue if I haven't it; but apparently I'm not enough of a comedian." "If you haven't it?" she echoed. "It's when you say things like that that you're so dreadfully tiresome. As if there were anything that you haven't or mightn't have!" Nick turned away from her; he took a few impatient steps in the room, looking at the carpet, his hands always in his pockets. Then he came back to the fire with the observation: "It's rather hard to be found so wanting when one has tried to play one's part so beautifully." He paused with his eyes on her own and then went on with a vibration in his voice: "I've imperilled my immortal soul, or at least bemuddled my intelligence, by all the things I don't care for that I've tried to do, and all the things I detest that I've tried to be, and all the things I never can be that I've tried to look as if I were--all the appearances and imitations, the pretences and hypocrisies in which I've steeped myself to the eyes; and at the end of it (it serves me right!) my reward is simply to learn that I'm still not half humbug enough!" Julia looked away from him as soon as he had spoken these words; she attached her eyes to the clock behind him and observed irrelevantly: "I'm very sorry, but I think you had better go. I don't like you to stay after midnight." "Ah what you like and what you don't like, and where one begins and the other ends--all that's an impenetrable mystery!" the young man declared. But he took no further notice of her allusion to his departure, adding in a different tone: "'A man like Mr. Macgeorge'! When you say a thing of that sort in a certain, particular way I should rather like to suffer you to perish." Mrs. Dallow stared; it might have seemed for an instant that she was trying to look stupid. "How can I help it if a few years hence he's certain to be at the head of any Liberal Government?" "We can't help it of course, but we can help talking about it," Nick smiled. "If we don't mention it it mayn't be noticed." "You're trying to make me angry. You're in one of your vicious moods," she returned, blowing out on the chimney-piece a guttering candle. "That I'm exasperated I've already had the honour very positively to inform you. All the same I maintain that I was irreproachable at dinner. I don't want you to think I shall always be as good as that." "You looked so out of it; you were as gloomy as if every earthly hope had left you, and you didn't make a single contribution to any discussion that took place. Don't you think I observe you?" she asked with an irony tempered by a tenderness unsuccessfully concealed. "Ah my darling, what you observe--!" Nick cried with a certain bitterness of amusement. But he added the next moment more seriously, as if his tone had been disrespectful: "You probe me to the bottom, no doubt." "You needn't come either to Griffin or to Severals if you don't want to." "Give them up yourself; stay here with me!" She coloured quickly as he said this, and broke out: "Lord, how you hate political houses!" "How can you say that when from February to August I spend every blessed night in one?" "Yes, and hate that worst of all." "So do half the people who are in it. You, my dear, must have so many things, so many people, so much _mise-en-scène_ and such a perpetual spectacle to live," Nick went on. "Perpetual motion, perpetual visits, perpetual crowds! If you go into the country you'll see forty people every day and be mixed up with them all day. The idea of a quiet fortnight in town, when by a happy if idiotic superstition everybody goes out of it, disconcerts and frightens you. It's the very time, it's the very place, to do a little work and possess one's soul." This vehement allocution found her evidently somewhat unprepared; but she was sagacious enough, instead of attempting for the moment a general rejoinder, to seize on a single phrase and say: "Work? What work can you do in London at such a moment as this?" Nick considered. "I might tell you I want to get up a lot of subjects, to sit at home and read blue-books; but that wouldn't be quite what I mean." "Do you mean you want to paint?" "Yes, that's it, since you gouge it out of me." "Why do you make such a mystery about it? You're at perfect liberty," Julia said. She put out her hand to rest it on the mantel-shelf, but her companion took it on the way and held it in both his own. "You're delightful, Julia, when you speak in that tone--then I know why it is I love you. But I can't do anything if I go to Griffin, if I go to Severals." "I see--I see," she answered thoughtfully and kindly. "I've scarcely been inside of my studio for months, and I feel quite homesick for it. The idea of putting in a few quiet days there has taken hold of me: I rather cling to it." "It seems so odd your having a studio!" Julia dropped, speaking so quickly that the words were almost incomprehensible. "Doesn't it sound absurd, for all the good it does me, or I do _in_ it? Of course one can produce nothing but rubbish on such terms--without continuity or persistence, with just a few days here and there. I ought to be ashamed of myself, no doubt; but even my rubbish interests me. '_Guenille si l'on veut, ma guenille m'est chère_.' But I'll go down to Harsh with you in a moment, Julia," Nick pursued: "that would do as well if we could be quiet there, without people, without a creature; and I should really be perfectly content. You'd beautifully sit for me; it would be the occasion we've so often wanted and never found." She shook her head slowly and with a smile that had a meaning for him. "Thank you, my dear; nothing would induce me to go to Harsh with you." He looked at her hard. "What's the matter whenever it's a question of anything of that sort? Are you afraid of me?" She pulled her hand from him quickly, turning away; but he went on: "Stay with me here then, when everything's so right for it. We shall do beautifully--have the whole place, have the whole day, to ourselves. Hang your engagements! Telegraph you won't come. We'll live at the studio--you'll sit to me every day. Now or never's our chance--when shall we have so good a one? Think how charming it will be! I'll make you wish awfully that I may do something." "I can't get out of Griffin--it's impossible," Julia said, moving further away and with her back presented to him. "Then you _are_ afraid of me--simply!" She turned straight round, very pale. "Of course I am. You're welcome to know it." He went toward her, and for a moment she seemed to make another slight movement of retreat. This, however, was scarcely perceptible, and there was nothing to alarm in the tone of reasonable entreaty in which he spoke as he stood there. "Put an end, Julia, to our absurd situation--it really can't go on. You've no right to expect a man to be happy or comfortable in so false a position. We're spoken of odiously--of that we may be sure; and yet what good have we of it?" "Spoken of? Do I care for that?" "Do you mean you're indifferent because there are no grounds? That's just why I hate it." "I don't know what you're talking about!" she returned with sharp disdain. "Be my wife to-morrow--be my wife next week. Let us have done with this fantastic probation and be happy." "Leave me now--come back to-morrow. I'll write to you." She had the air of pleading with him at present, pleading as he pleaded. "You can't resign yourself to the idea of one's looking 'out of it'!" Nick laughed. "Come to-morrow, before lunch," she went on. "To be told I must wait six months more and then be sent about my business? Ah, Julia, Julia!" the young man groaned. Something in this simple lament--it sounded natural and perfectly unstudied--seemed straightway to make a great impression on her. "You shall wait no longer," she said after a short silence. "What do you mean by no longer?" "Give me about five weeks--say till the Whitsuntide recess." "Five weeks are a great deal," smiled Nick. "There are things to be done--you ought to understand." "I only understand how I love you." She let herself go--"Dearest Nick!"--and he caught her and kept her in his arms. "I've your promise then for five weeks hence to a day?" he demanded as she at last released herself. "We'll settle that--the exact day; there are things to consider and to arrange. Come to luncheon to-morrow." "I'll come early--I'll come at one," he said; and for a moment they stood all deeply and intimately taking each other in. "Do you think I _want_ to wait, any more than you?" she asked in congruity with this. "I don't feel so much out of it now!" he declared by way of answer. "You'll stay of course now--you'll give up your visits?" She had hold of the lappet of his coat; she had kept it in her hand even while she detached herself from his embrace. There was a white flower in his buttonhole that she looked at and played with a moment before she said; "I've a better idea--you needn't come to Griffin. Stay in your studio--do as you like--paint dozens of pictures." "Dozens? Barbarian!" Nick wailed. The epithet apparently had an endearing suggestion for her; it at any rate led her to let him possess himself of her head and, so holding it, kiss her--led her to say: "What on earth do I want but that you should do absolutely as you please and be as happy as you can?" He kissed her in another place at this; but he put it to her; "What dreadful proposition is coming now?" "I'll go off and do up my visits and come back." "And leave me alone?" "Don't be affected! You know you'll work much better without me. You'll live in your studio--I shall be well out of the way." "That's not what one wants of a sitter. How can I paint you?" "You can paint me all the rest of your life. I shall be a perpetual sitter." "I believe I could paint you without looking at you"--and his lighted face shone down on her. "You do excuse me then from those dreary places?" "How can I insist after what you said about the pleasure of keeping these days?" she admirably--it was so all sincerely--asked. "You're the best woman on earth--though it does seem odd you should rush away as soon as our little business is settled." "We shall make it up. I know what I'm about. And now go!" She ended by almost pushing him out of the room. XXIII It was certainly singular, in the light of other matters, that on sitting down in his studio after she had left town Nick should not, as regards the effort to project plastically some beautiful form, have felt more chilled by the absence of a friend who was such an embodiment of beauty. She was away and he missed her and longed for her, and yet without her the place was more filled with what he wanted to find in it. He turned into it with confused feelings, the strongest of which was a sense of release and recreation. It looked blighted and lonely and dusty, and his old studies, as he rummaged them out, struck him even as less inspired than the last time he had ventured to face them. But amid this neglected litter, in the colourless and obstructed light of a high north window which needed washing, he came nearer tasting the possibility of positive happiness: it appeared to him that, as he had said to Julia, he was more in possession of his soul. It was frivolity and folly, it was puerility, to spend valuable hours pottering over the vain implements of an art he had relinquished; and a certain shame that he had felt in presenting his plea to Julia that Sunday night arose from the sense not of what he clung to, but of what he had given up. He had turned his back on serious work, so that pottering was now all he could aspire to. It couldn't be fruitful, it couldn't be anything but ridiculous, almost ignoble; but it soothed his nerves, it was in the nature of a secret dissipation. He had never suspected he should some day have nerves on his own part to count with; but this possibility had been revealed to him on the day it became clear that he was letting something precious go. He was glad he had not to justify himself to the critical, for this might have been a delicate business. The critical were mostly absent; and besides, shut up all day in his studio, how should he ever meet them? It was the place in the world where he felt furthest away from his constituents. That was a part of the pleasure--the consciousness that for the hour the coast was clear and his mind independent. His mother and his sister had gone to Broadwood: Lady Agnes--the phrase sounds brutal but represents his state of mind--was well out of the way. He had written to her as soon as Julia left town--he had apprised her of the fact that his wedding-day was fixed: a relief for poor Lady Agnes to a period of intolerable mystification, of dark, dumb wondering and watching. She had said her say the day of the poll at Harsh; she was too proud to ask and too discreet to "nag"; so she could only wait for something that didn't come. The unconditioned loan of Broadwood had of course been something of a bribe to patience: she had at first felt that on the day she should take possession of that capital house Julia would indeed seem to have entered the family. But the gift had confirmed expectations just enough to make disappointment more bitter; and the discomfort was greater in proportion as she failed to discover what was the matter. Her daughter Grace was much occupied with this question, and brought it up for discussion in a manner irritating to her ladyship, who had a high theory of being silent about it, but who, however, in the long run, was more unhappy when, in consequence of a reprimand, the girl suggested no reasons at all than when she suggested stupid ones. It eased Lady Agnes a little to advert to the mystery when she could have the air of not having begun. The letter Nick received from her the first day of Passion Week in reply to his important communication was the only one he read at that moment; not counting of course the several notes Mrs. Dallow addressed to him from Griffin. There were letters piled up, as he knew, in Calcutta Gardens, which his servant had strict orders not to bring to the studio. Nick slept now in the bedroom attached to this retreat; got things, as he wanted them, from Calcutta Gardens; and dined at his club, where a stray surviving friend or two, seeing him prowl about the library in the evening, was free to impute to such eccentricity some subtly political basis. When he thought of his neglected letters he remembered Mr. Carteret's convictions on the subject of not "getting behind"; they made him laugh, in the slightly sonorous painting-room, as he bent over one of the old canvases that he had ventured to turn to the light. He was fully determined, however, to master his correspondence before going down, the last thing before Parliament should reassemble, to spend another day at Beauclere. Mastering his correspondence meant, in Nick's mind, breaking open envelopes; writing answers was scarcely involved in the idea. But Mr. Carteret would never guess that. Nick was not moved even to write to him that the affair with Julia was on the point of taking the form he had been so good as to desire: he reserved the pleasure of this announcement for a personal interview. The day before Good Friday, in the morning, his stillness was broken by a rat-tat-tat on the outer door of his studio, administered apparently by the knob of a walking-stick. His servant was out and he went to the door, wondering who his visitor could be at such a time, especially of the rather presuming class. The class was indicated by the visitor's failure to look for the bell--since there _was_ a bell, though it required a little research. In a moment the mystery was solved: the gentleman who stood smiling at him from the threshold could only be Gabriel Nash. Nick had not seen this whimsical personage for several months, and had had no news of him beyond a general intimation that he was following his fancy in foreign parts. His old friend had sufficiently prepared him, at the time of their reunion in Paris, for the idea of the fitful in intercourse; and he had not been ignorant, on his return from Paris, that he should have had an opportunity to miss him if he had not been too busy to take advantage of it. In London, after the episode at Harsh, Gabriel had not reappeared: he had redeemed none of the pledges given the night they walked together to Notre Dame and conversed on important matters. He was to have interposed in Nick's destiny, but he had not interposed; he was to have pulled him hard and in the opposite sense from Julia, but there had been no pulling; he was to have saved him, as he called it, and yet Nick was lost. This circumstance indeed formed his excuse: the member for Harsh had rushed so wantonly to perdition. Nick had for the hour seriously wished to keep hold of him: he valued him as a salutary influence. Yet on coming to his senses after his election our young man had recognised that Nash might very well have reflected on the thanklessness of such a slippery subject--might have held himself released from his vows. Of course it had been particularly in the event of a Liberal triumph that he had threatened to make himself felt; the effect of a brand plucked from the burning would be so much greater if the flames were already high. Yet Nick had not kept him to the letter of this pledge, and had so fully admitted the right of a thorough connoisseur, let alone a faithful friend, to lose patience with him that he was now far from greeting his visitor with a reproach. He felt much more thrown on his defence. Gabriel, however, forbore at first to attack him. He brought in only blandness and benevolence and a great content at having obeyed the mystic voice--it was really a remarkable case of second sight--which had whispered him that the recreant comrade of his prime was in town. He had just come back from Sicily after a southern winter, according to a custom frequent with him, and had been moved by a miraculous prescience, unfavourable as the moment might seem, to go and ask for Nick in Calcutta Gardens, where he had extracted from his friend's servant an address not known to all the world. He showed Nick what a mistake it had been to fear a dull arraignment, and how he habitually ignored all lapses and kept up the standard only by taking a hundred fine things for granted. He also abounded more than ever in his own sense, reminding his relieved listener how no recollection of him, no evocation of him in absence, could ever do him justice. You couldn't recall him without seeming to exaggerate him, and then acknowledged, when you saw him, that your exaggeration had fallen short. He emerged out of vagueness--his Sicily might have been the Sicily of _A Winter's Tale_--and would evidently be reabsorbed in it; but his presence was positive and pervasive enough. He was duly "intense" while he lasted. His connexions were with beauty, urbanity and conversation, as usual, but they made up a circle you couldn't find in the Court Guide. Nick had a sense that he knew "a lot of esthetic people," but he dealt in ideas much more than in names and addresses. He was genial and jocose, sunburnt and romantically allusive. It was to be gathered that he had been living for many days in a Saracenic tower where his principal occupation was to watch for the flushing of the west. He had retained all the serenity of his opinions and made light, with a candour of which the only defect was apparently that it was not quite enough a conscious virtue, of many of the objects of common esteem. When Nick asked him what he had been doing he replied, "Oh living, you know"; and the tone of the words offered them as the story of a great deed. He made a long visit, staying to luncheon and after luncheon, so that the little studio heard all at once a greater quantity of brave talk than in the several previous years of its history. With much of our tale left to tell it is a pity that so little of this colloquy may be reported here; since, as affairs took their course, it marked really--if the question be of noting the exact point--a turn of the tide in Nick Dormer's personal situation. He was destined to remember the accent with which Nash exclaimed, on his drawing forth sundry specimens of amateurish earnestness: "I say--I say--I say!" He glanced round with a heightened colour. "They're pretty bad, eh?" "Oh you're a deep one," Nash went on. "What's the matter?" "Do you call your conduct that of a man of honour?" "Scarcely perhaps. But when no one has seen them--!" "That's your villainy. _C'est de l'exquis, du pur exquis_. Come, my dear fellow, this is very serious--it's a bad business," said Gabriel Nash. Then he added almost with austerity: "You'll be so good as to place before me every patch of paint, every sketch and scrap, that this room contains." Nick complied in great good humour. He turned out his boxes and drawers, shovelled forth the contents of bulging portfolios, mounted on chairs to unhook old canvases that had been severely "skied." He was modest and docile and patient and amused, above all he was quite thrilled--thrilled with the idea of eliciting a note of appreciation so late in the day. It was the oddest thing how he at present in fact found himself imputing value to his visitor--attributing to him, among attributions more confused, the dignity of judgement, the authority of knowledge. Nash was an ambiguous character but an excellent touchstone. The two said very little for a while, and they had almost half an hour's silence, during which, after our young man had hastily improvised an exhibition, there was only a puffing of cigarettes. Gabriel walked about, looking at this and that, taking up rough studies and laying them down, asking a question of fact, fishing with his umbrella, on the floor, amid a pile of unarranged sketches. Nick accepted jocosely the attitude of suspense, but there was even more of it in his heart than in his face. So few people had seen his young work--almost no one who really counted. He had been ashamed of it, never showing it to bring on a conclusion, since a conclusion was precisely what he feared. He whistled now while he let his companion take time. He rubbed old panels with his sleeve and dabbed wet sponges on surfaces that had sunk. It was a long time since he had felt so gay, strange as such an assertion sounds in regard to a young man whose bridal-day had at his urgent solicitation lately been fixed. He had stayed in town to be alone with his imagination, and suddenly, paradoxically, the sense of that result had arrived with poor Nash. "Nicholas Dormer," this personage remarked at last, "for grossness of immorality I think I've never seen your equal." "That sounds so well," Nick returned, "that I hesitate to risk spoiling it by wishing it explained." "Don't you recognise in _any_ degree the grand idea of duty?" "If I don't grasp it with a certain firmness I'm a deadly failure, for I was quite brought up on it," Nick said. "Then you're indeed the wretchedest failure I know. Life is ugly, after all." "Do I gather that you yourself recognise obligations of the order you allude to?" "Do you 'gather'?" Nash stared. "Why, aren't they the very flame of my faith, the burden of my song?" "My dear fellow, duty is doing, and I've inferred that you think rather poorly of doing--that it spoils one's style." "Doing wrong, assuredly." "But what do you call right? What's your canon of certainty there?" Nick asked. "The conscience that's in us--that charming, conversible, infinite thing, the intensest thing we know. But you must treat the oracle civilly if you wish to make it speak. You mustn't stride into the temple in muddy jack-boots and with your hat on your head, as the Puritan troopers tramped into the dear old abbeys. One must do one's best to find out the right, and your criminality appears to be that you've not taken the commonest trouble." "I hadn't you to ask," smiled Nick. "But duty strikes me as doing something in particular. If you're too afraid it may be the wrong thing you may let everything go." "Being is doing, and if doing is duty being is duty. Do you follow?" "At a very great distance." "To be what one _may_ be, really and efficaciously," Nash went on, "to feel it and understand it, to accept it, adopt it, embrace it--that's conduct, that's life." "And suppose one's a brute or an ass, where's the efficacy?" "In one's very want of intelligence. In such cases one's out of it--the question doesn't exist; one simply becomes a part of the duty of others. The brute, the ass," Nick's visitor developed, "neither feels nor understands, nor accepts nor adopts. Those fine processes in themselves classify us. They educate, they exalt, they preserve; so that to profit by them we must be as perceptive as we can. We must recognise our particular form, the instrument that each of us--each of us who carries anything--carries in his being. Mastering this instrument, learning to play it in perfection--that's what I call duty, what I call conduct, what I call success." Nick listened with friendly attention and the air of general assent was in his face as he said: "Every one has it then, this individual pipe?" "'Every one,' my dear fellow, is too much to say, for the world's full of the crudest _remplissage_. The book of life's padded, ah but padded--a deplorable want of editing! I speak of every one who's any one. Of course there are pipes and pipes--little quavering flutes for the concerted movements and big _cornets-à-piston_ for the great solos." "I see, I see. And what might your instrument be?" Nash hesitated not a moment; his answer was radiantly there. "To speak to people just as I'm speaking to you. To prevent for instance a great wrong being done." "A great wrong--?" "Yes--to the human race. I talk--I talk; I say the things other people don't, the things they can't the things they won't," Gabriel went on with his inimitable candour. "If it's a question of mastery and perfection you certainly have them," his companion replied. "And you haven't, alas; that's the pity of it, that's the scandal. That's the wrong I want to set right before it becomes too public a shame. If I called you just now grossly immoral it's on account of the spectacle you present--a spectacle to be hidden from the eye of ingenuous youth: that of a man neglecting his own fiddle to blunder away on that of one of his fellows. We can't afford such mistakes, we can't tolerate such licence." "You think then I _have_ a fiddle?"--and our young man, in spite of himself, attached to the question a quaver of suspense finer, doubtless, than any that had ever passed his lips. "A regular Stradivarius! All these things you've shown me are remarkably interesting. You've a talent of a wonderfully pure strain." "I say--I say--I say!" Nick exclaimed, hovering there with his hands in his pockets and a blush on his lighted face, while he repeated with a change of accent Nash's exclamation of half an hour before. "I like it, your talent; I measure it, I appreciate it, I insist upon it," that critic went on between the whiffs of his cigarette. "I have to be awfully wise and good to do so, but fortunately I am. In such a case that's my duty. I shall make you my business for a while. Therefore," he added piously; "don't say I'm unconscious of the moral law." "A Stradivarius?" said Nick interrogatively and with his eyes wide open. The thought in his mind was of how different this seemed from his having gone to Griffin. XXIV His counsellor had plenty of further opportunity to develop this and other figurative remarks, for he not only spent several of the middle hours of the day at the studio, but came back in the evening--the pair had dined together at a little foreign pothouse in Soho, revealed to Nick on this occasion--and discussed the great question far into the night. The great question was whether, on the showing of those examples of his ability with which the scene of their discourse was now densely bestrewn, Nick Dormer would be justified in "really going in" for the practice of pictorial art. This may strike many readers of his history as a limited and even trivial inquiry, with little of the heroic or the romantic in it; but it was none the less carried to the finest point by our impassioned young men. Nick suspected Nash of exaggerating his encouragement in order to play a malign trick on the political world at whose expense it was his fond fancy to divert himself--without indeed making that organisation perceptibly totter--and reminded him that his present accusation of immorality was strangely inconsistent with the wanton hope expressed by him in Paris, the hope that the Liberal candidate at Harsh would be returned. Nash replied, first, "Oh I hadn't been in this place then!" but he defended himself later and more effectually by saying that it was not of Nick's having got elected he complained: it was of his visible hesitancy to throw up his seat. Nick begged that he wouldn't mention this, and his gallantry failed to render him incapable of saying: "The fact is I haven't the nerve for it." They talked then for a while of what he _could_ do, not of what he couldn't; of the mysteries and miracles of reproduction and representation; of the strong, sane joys of the artistic life. Nick made afresh, with more fulness, his great confession, that his private ideal of happiness was the life of a great painter of portraits. He uttered his thought on that head so copiously and lucidly that Nash's own abundance was stilled and he listened almost as if he had been listening to something new--difficult as it was to conceive a point of view for such a matter with which he was unacquainted. "There it is," said Nick at last--"there's the naked, preposterous truth: that if I were to do exactly as I liked I should spend my years reproducing the more or less vacuous countenances of my fellow-mortals. I should find peace and pleasure and wisdom and worth, I should find fascination and a measure of success in it--out of the din and the dust and the scramble, the world of party labels, party cries, party bargains and party treacheries: of humbuggery, hypocrisy and cant. The cleanness and quietness of it, the independent effort to do something, to leave something which shall give joy to man long after the howling has died away to the last ghost of an echo--such a vision solicits me in the watches of night with an almost irresistible force." As he dropped these remarks he lolled on a big divan with one of his long legs folded up, while his visitor stopped in front of him after moving about the room vaguely and softly, almost on tiptoe, so as not to interrupt him. "You speak," Nash said, "with the special and dreadful eloquence that rises to a man's lips when he has practically, whatever his theory may be, renounced the right and dropped hideously into the wrong. Then his regret for the right, a certain exquisite appreciation of it, puts on an accent I know well how to recognise." Nick looked up at him a moment. "You've hit it if you mean by that that I haven't resigned my seat and that I don't intend to." "I thought you took it only to give it up. Don't you remember our talk in Paris?" "I like to be a part of the spectacle that amuses you," Nick returned, "but I could scarcely have taken so much trouble as that for it." "Isn't it then an absurd comedy, the life you lead?" "Comedy or tragedy--I don't know which; whatever it is I appear to be capable of it to please two or three people." "Then you _can_ take trouble?" said Nash. "Yes, for the woman I'm to marry." "Oh you're to marry?" "That's what has come on since we met in Paris," Nick explained, "and it makes just the difference." "Ah my poor friend," smiled Gabriel, much arrested, "no wonder you've an eloquence, an accent!" "It's a pity I have them in the wrong place. I'm expected to have them in the House of Commons." "You will when you make your farewell speech there--to announce that you chuck it up. And may I venture to ask who's to be your wife?" the visitor pursued. "Mrs. Dallow has kindly consented to accept that yoke. I think you saw her in Paris." "Ah yes: you spoke of her to me, and I remember asking you even then if you were in love with her." "I wasn't then," said Nick. Nash had a grave pause. "And are you now?" "Oh dear, yes." "That would be better--if it wasn't worse." "Nothing could be better," Nick declared. "It's the best thing that can happen to me." "Well," his friend continued, "you must let me very respectfully approach this lady. You must let me bring her round." "Bring her round to what?" "To everything. Talk her over." "Talk her under!" Nick laughed--but making his joke a little as to gain time. He remembered the effect this adviser had produced on Julia--an effect that scantly ministered to the idea of another meeting. Julia had had no occasion to allude again to Nick's imperturbable friend; he had passed out of her life at once and for ever; but there flickered up a quick memory of the contempt he had led her to express, together with a sense of how odd she would think it her intended should have thrown over two pleasant visits to cultivate such company. "Over to a proper pride in what you may do," Nash returned--"what you may do above all if she'll help you." "I scarcely see how she can help me," said Nick with an air of thinking. "She's extremely handsome as I remember her. You could do great things with _her_." "Ah, there's the rub," Nick went on. "I wanted her to sit for me this week, but she wouldn't hear of it." "_Elle a bien tort_. You should attack some fine strong type. Is Mrs. Dallow in London?" Nash inquired. "For what do you take her? She's paying visits." "Then I've a model for you." "Then _you_ have--?" Nick stared. "What has that to do with Mrs. Dallow's being away?" "Doesn't it give you more time?" "Oh the time flies!" sighed Nick with a spontaneity that made his companion again laugh out--a demonstration in which for a moment he himself rather ruefully joined. "Does she like you to paint?" that personage asked with one of his candid intonations. "So she says." "Well, do something fine to show her." "I'd rather show it to you," Nick confessed. "My dear fellow, I see it from here--if you do your duty. Do you remember the Tragic Muse?" Nash added for explanation. "The Tragic Muse?" "That girl in Paris, whom we heard at the old actress's and afterwards met at the charming entertainment given by your cousin--isn't he?--the secretary of embassy." "Oh Peter's girl! Of course I remember her." "Don't call her Peter's; call her rather mine," Nash said with easy rectification. "I invented her. I introduced her. I revealed her." "I thought you on the contrary ridiculed and repudiated her." "As a fine, handsome young woman surely not--I seem to myself to have been all the while rendering her services. I said I disliked tea-party ranters, and so I do; but if my estimate of her powers was below the mark she has more than punished me." "What has she done?" Nick asked. "She has become interesting, as I suppose you know." "How should I know?" "Well, you must see her, you must paint her," Nash returned. "She tells me something was said about it that day at Madame Carré's." "Oh I remember--said by Peter." "Then it will please Mr. Sherringham--you'll be glad to do that. I suppose you know all he has done for Miriam?" Gabriel pursued. "Not a bit, I know nothing about Peter's affairs," Nick said, "unless it be in general that he goes in for mountebanks and mimes and that it occurs to me I've heard one of my sisters mention--the rumour had come to her--that he has been backing Miss Rooth." "Miss Rooth delights to talk of his kindness; she's charming when she speaks of it. It's to his good offices that she owes her appearance here." "Here?" Nick's interest rose. "Is she in London?" "_D'où tombez-vous_? I thought you people read the papers." "What should I read, when I sit--sometimes--through the stuff they put into them?" "Of course I see that--that your engagement at your own variety-show, with its interminable 'turns,' keeps you from going to the others. Learn then," said Gabriel Nash, "that you've a great competitor and that you're distinctly not, much as you may suppose it, _the_ rising comedian. The Tragic Muse is the great modern personage. Haven't you heard people speak of her, haven't you been taken to see her?" Nick bethought himself. "I daresay I've heard of her, but with a good many other things on my mind I had forgotten it." "Certainly I can imagine what has been on your mind. She remembers you at any rate; she repays neglect with sympathy. She wants," said Nash, "to come and see you." "'See' me?" It was all for Nick now a wonder. "To be seen by you--it comes to the same thing. She's really worth seeing; you must let me bring her; you'll find her very suggestive. That idea that you should paint her--she appears to consider it a sort of bargain." "A bargain?" Our young man entered, as he believed, into the humour of the thing. "What will she give me?" "A splendid model. She _is_ splendid." "Oh then bring her," said Nick. XXV Nash brought her, the great modern personage, as he had described her, the very next day, and it took his friend no long time to test his assurance that Miriam Rooth was now splendid. She had made an impression on him ten months before, but it had haunted him only a day, soon overlaid as it had been with other images. Yet after Nash had talked of her a while he recalled her better; some of her attitudes, some of her looks and tones began to hover before him. He was charmed in advance with the notion of painting her. When she stood there in fact, however, it seemed to him he had remembered her wrong; the brave, free, rather grand creature who instantly filled his studio with such an unexampled presence had so shaken off her clumsiness, the rudeness and crudeness that had made him pity her, a whole provincial and "second-rate" side. Miss Rooth was light and bright and direct to-day--direct without being stiff and bright without being garish. To Nick's perhaps inadequately sophisticated mind the model, the actress were figures of a vulgar setting; but it would have been impossible to show that taint less than this extremely natural yet extremely distinguished aspirant to distinction. She was more natural even than Gabriel Nash--"nature" was still Nick's formula for his amusing old friend--and beside her he appeared almost commonplace. Nash recognised her superiority with a frankness honourable to both of them--testifying in this manner to his sense that they were all three serious beings, worthy to deal with fine realities. She attracted crowds to her theatre, but to his appreciation of such a fact as that, important doubtless in its way, there were the limits he had already expressed. What he now felt bound in all integrity to register was his perception that she had, in general and quite apart from the question of the box-office, a remarkable, a very remarkable, artistic nature. He allowed that she had surprised him here; knowing of her in other days mainly that she was hungry to adopt an overrated profession he had not imputed to her the normal measure of intelligence. Now he saw--he had had some talks with her--that she was capable almost of a violent play of mind; so much so that he was sorry for the embarrassment it would be to her. Nick could imagine the discomfort of having anything in the nature of a mind to arrange for in such conditions. "She's a woman of the best intentions, really of the best," Nash explained kindly and lucidly, almost paternally, "and the quite rare head you can see for yourself." Miriam, smiling as she sat on an old Venetian chair, held aloft, with the noblest effect, that quarter of her person to which this patronage was extended, remarking to her host that, strange as it might appear, she had got quite to like poor Mr. Nash: she could make him go about with her--it was a relief to her mother. "When I take him she has perfect peace," the girl said; "then she can stay at home and see the interviewers. She delights in that and I hate it, so our friend here is a great comfort. Of course a _femme de théâtre_ is supposed to be able to go out alone, but there's a kind of 'smartness,' an added _chic_, in having some one. People think he's my 'companion '; I'm sure they fancy I pay him. I'd pay him, if he'd take it--and perhaps he will yet!--rather than give him up, for it doesn't matter that he's not a lady. He _is_ one in tact and sympathy, as you see. And base as he thinks the sort of thing I do he can't keep away from the theatre. When you're celebrated people will look at you who could never before find out for themselves why they should." "When you're celebrated you grow handsomer; at least that's what has happened to you, though you were pretty too of old," Gabriel placidly argued. "I go to the theatre to look at your head; it gives me the greatest pleasure. I take up anything of that sort as soon as I find it. One never knows how long it may last." "Are you attributing that uncertainty to my appearance?" Miriam beautifully asked. "Dear no, to my own pleasure, the first precious bloom of it," Nash went on. "Dormer at least, let me tell you in justice to him, hasn't waited till you were celebrated to want to see you again--he stands there open-eyed--for the simple reason that he hadn't the least idea of your renown. I had to announce it to him." "Haven't you seen me act?" Miriam put, without reproach, to her host. "I'll go to-night," he handsomely declared. "You have your terrible House, haven't you? What do they call it--the demands of public life?" Miriam continued: in answer to which Gabriel explained that he had the demands of private life as well, inasmuch as he was in love--he was on the point of being married. She listened to this with participation; then she said: "Ah then do bring your--what do they call her in English? I'm always afraid of saying something improper--your _future_. I'll send you a box, under the circumstances; you'll like that better." She added that if he were to paint her he would have to see her often on the stage, wouldn't he? to profit by the _optique de la scène_--what did they call _that_ in English?--studying her and fixing his impression. But before he had time to meet this proposition she asked him if it disgusted him to hear her speak like that, as if she were always posing and thinking about herself, living only to be looked at, thrusting forward her person. She already often got sick of doing so, but _à la guerre comme à la guerre_. "That's the fine artistic nature, you see--a sort of divine disgust breaking out in her," Nash expounded. "If you want to paint me 'at all at all' of course. I'm struck with the way I'm taking that for granted," the girl decently continued. "When Mr. Nash spoke of it to me I jumped at the idea. I remembered our meeting in Paris and the kind things you said to me. But no doubt one oughtn't to jump at ideas when they represent serious sacrifices on the part of others." "Doesn't she speak well?" Nash demanded of Nick. "Oh she'll go far!" "It's a great privilege to me to paint you: what title in the world have I to pretend to such a model?" Nick replied to Miriam. "The sacrifice is yours--a sacrifice of time and good nature and credulity. You come, in your bright beauty and your genius, to this shabby place where I've nothing worth speaking of to show, not a guarantee to offer you; and I wonder what I've done to deserve such a gift of the gods." "Doesn't _he_ speak well?"--and Nash appealed with radiance to their companion. She took no notice of him, only repeating to Nick that she hadn't forgotten his friendly attitude in Paris; and when he answered that he surely had done very little she broke out, first resting her eyes on him with a deep, reasonable smile and then springing up quickly; "Ah well, if I must justify myself I liked you!" "Fancy my appearing to challenge you!" laughed Nick in deprecation. "To see you again is to want tremendously to try something. But you must have an infinite patience, because I'm an awful duffer." She looked round the walls. "I see what you've done--_bien des choses_." "She understands--she understands," Gabriel dropped. And he added to their visitor: "Imagine, when he might do something, his choosing a life of shams! At bottom he's like you--a wonderful artistic nature." "I'll have patience," said the girl, smiling at Nick. "Then, my children, I leave you--the peace of the Lord be with you." With which words Nash took his departure. The others chose a position for the young woman's sitting after she had placed herself in many different attitudes and different lights; but an hour had elapsed before Nick got to work--began, on a large canvas, to "knock her in," as he called it. He was hindered even by the fine element of agitation, the emotion of finding himself, out of a clear sky, confronted with such a subject and launched in such a task. What could the situation be but incongruous just after he had formally renounced all manner of "art"?--the renunciation taking effect not a bit the less from the whim he had all consciously treated himself to _as_ a whim (the last he should ever descend to!) the freak of a fortnight's relapse into a fingering of old sketches for the purpose, as he might have said, of burning them up, of clearing out his studio and terminating his lease. There were both embarrassment and inspiration in the strange chance of snatching back for an hour a relinquished joy: the jump with which he found he could still rise to such an occasion took away his breath a little, at the same time that the idea--the idea of what one might make of such material--touched him with an irresistible wand. On the spot, to his inner vision, Miriam became a rich result, drawing a hundred formative forces out of their troubled sleep, defying him where he privately felt strongest and imposing herself triumphantly in her own strength. He had the good fortune, without striking matches, to see her, as a subject, in a vivid light, and his quick attempt was as exciting as a sudden gallop--he might have been astride, in a boundless field, of a runaway horse. She was in her way so fine that he could only think how to "do" her: that hard calculation soon flattened out the consciousness, lively in him at first, that she was a beautiful woman who had sought him out of his retirement. At the end of their first sitting her having done so appeared the most natural thing in the world: he had a perfect right to entertain her there--explanations and complications were engulfed in the productive mood. The business of "knocking her in" held up a lamp to her beauty, showed him how much there was of it and that she was infinitely interesting. He didn't want to fall in love with her--that _would_ be a sell, he said to himself--and she promptly became much too interesting for it. Nick might have reflected, for simplification's sake, as his cousin Peter had done, but with more validity, that he was engaged with Miss Rooth in an undertaking which didn't in the least refer to themselves, that they were working together seriously and that decent work quite gainsaid sensibility--the humbugging sorts alone had to help themselves out with it. But after her first sitting--she came, poor girl, but twice--the need of such exorcisms passed from his spirit: he had so thoroughly, so practically taken her up. As to whether his visitor had the same bright and still sense of co-operation to a definite end, the sense of the distinctively technical nature of the answer to every question to which the occasion might give birth, that mystery would be lighted only were it open to us to regard this young lady through some other medium than the mind of her friends. We have chosen, as it happens, for some of the great advantages it carries with it, the indirect vision; and it fails as yet to tell us--what Nick of course wondered about before he ceased to care, as indeed he intimated to her--why a budding celebrity should have dreamed of there being something for her in so blighted a spot. She should have gone to one of the regular people, the great people: they would have welcomed her with open arms. When Nick asked her if some of the R.A.'s hadn't expressed a wish for a crack at her she replied: "Oh dear no, only the tiresome photographers; and fancy _them_ in the future. If mamma could only do _that_ for me!" And she added with the charming fellowship for which she was conspicuous at these hours: "You know I don't think any one yet has been quite so much struck with me as you." "Not even Peter Sherringham?" her host jested while he stepped back to judge of the effect of a line. "Oh Mr. Sherringham's different. You're an artist." "For pity's sake don't say that!" he cried. "And as regards _your_ art I thought Peter knew more than any one." "Ah you're severe," said Miriam. "Severe--?" "Because that's what the poor dear thinks. But he does know a lot--he has been a providence to me." "Then why hasn't he come over to see you act?" She had a pause. "How do you know he hasn't come?" "Because I take for granted he'd have called on me if he had." "Does he like you very much?" the girl asked. "I don't know. I like _him_." "He's a gentleman--_pour cela_," she said. "Oh yes, for that!" Nick went on absently, labouring hard. "But he's afraid of me--afraid to see me." "Doesn't he think you good enough?" "On the contrary--he believes I shall carry him away and he's in a terror of my doing it." "He ought to like that," said Nick with conscious folly. "That's what I mean when I say he's not an artist. However, he declares he does like it, only it appears to be not the right thing for him. Oh the right thing--he's ravenous for that. But it's not for me to blame him, since I am too. He's coming some night, however. Then," she added almost grimly, "he shall have a dose." "Poor Peter!" Nick returned with a compassion none the less real because it was mirthful: the girl's tone was so expressive of easy unscrupulous power. "He's such a curious mixture," she luxuriously went on; "sometimes I quite lose patience with him. It isn't exactly trying to serve both God and Mammon, but it's muddling up the stage and the world. The world be hanged! The stage, or anything of that sort--I mean one's artistic conscience, one's true faith--comes first." "Brava, brava! you do me good," Nick murmured, still amused, beguiled, and at work. "But it's very kind of you, when I was in this absurd state of ignorance, to impute to me the honour of having been more struck with you than any one else," he continued after a moment. "Yes, I confess I don't quite see--when the shops were full of my photographs." "Oh I'm so poor--I don't go into shops," he explained. "Are you very poor?" "I live on alms." "And don't they pay you--the government, the ministry?" "Dear young lady, for what?--for shutting myself up with beautiful women?" "Ah you've others then?" she extravagantly groaned. "They're not so kind as you, I confess." "I'll buy it from you--what you're doing: I'll pay you well when it's done," said the girl. "I've got money now. I make it, you know--a good lot of it. It's too delightful after scraping and starving. Try it and you'll see. Give up the base, bad world." "But isn't it supposed to be the base, bad world that pays?" "Precisely; make it pay without mercy--knock it silly, squeeze it dry. That's what it's meant for--to pay for art. Ah if it wasn't for that! I'll bring you a quantity of photographs to-morrow--you must let me come back to-morrow: it's so amusing to have them, by the hundred, all for nothing, to give away. That's what takes mamma most: she can't get over it. That's luxury and glory; even at Castle Nugent they didn't do that. People used to sketch me, but not so much as mamma _veut bien le dire_; and in all my life I never had but one poor little carte-de-visite, when I was sixteen, in a plaid frock, with the banks of a river, at three francs the dozen." XXVI It was success, the member for Harsh felt, that had made her finer--the full possession of her talent and the sense of the recognition of it. There was an intimation in her presence (if he had given his mind to it) that for him too the same cause would produce the same effect--that is would show him how being launched in the practice of an art makes strange and prompt revelations. Nick felt clumsy beside a person who manifestly, now, had such an extraordinary familiarity with the esthetic point of view. He remembered too the clumsiness that had been in his visitor--something silly and shabby, pert rather than proper, and of quite another value than her actual smartness, as London people would call it, her well-appointedness and her evident command of more than one manner. Handsome as she had been the year before, she had suggested sordid lodgings, bread and butter, heavy tragedy and tears; and if then she was an ill-dressed girl with thick hair who wanted to be an actress, she was already in these few weeks a performer who could even produce an impression of not performing. She showed what a light hand she could have, forbore to startle and looked as well, for unprofessional life, as Julia: which was only the perfection of her professional character. This function came out much in her talk, for there were many little bursts of confidence as well as many familiar pauses as she sat there; and she was ready to tell Nick the whole history of her _début_--the chance that had suddenly turned up and that she had caught, with a fierce leap, as it passed. He missed some of the details in his attention to his own task, and some of them he failed to understand, attached as they were to the name of Mr. Basil Dashwood, which he heard for the first time. It was through Mr. Dashwood's extraordinary exertions that a hearing--a morning performance at a London theatre--had been obtained for her. That had been the great step, for it had led to the putting on at night of the play, at the same theatre, in place of a wretched thing they were trying (it was no use) to keep on its feet, and to her engagement for the principal part. She had made a hit in it--she couldn't pretend not to know that; but she was already tired of it, there were so many other things she wanted to do; and when she thought it would probably run a month or two more she fell to cursing the odious conditions of artistic production in such an age. The play was a more or less idiotised version of a new French piece, a thing that had taken in Paris at a third-rate theatre and was now proving itself in London good enough for houses mainly made up of ten-shilling stalls. It was Dashwood who had said it would go if they could get the rights and a fellow to make some changes: he had discovered it at a nasty little place she had never been to, over the Seine. They had got the rights, and the fellow who had made the changes was practically Dashwood himself; there was another man in London, Mr. Gushmore--Miriam didn't know if Nick had heard of him (Nick hadn't) who had done some of it. It had been awfully chopped down, to a mere bone, with the meat all gone; but that was what people in London seemed to like. They were very innocent--thousands of little dogs amusing themselves with a bone. At any rate she had made something, she had made a figure, of the woman--a dreadful stick, with what Dashwood had muddled her into; and Miriam added in the complacency of her young expansion: "Oh give me fifty words any time and the ghost of a situation, and I'll set you up somebody. Besides, I mustn't abuse poor Yolande--she has saved us," she said. "'Yolande'--?" "Our ridiculous play. That's the name of the impossible woman. She has put bread into our mouths and she's a loaf on the shelf for the future. The rights are mine." "You're lucky to have them," said Nick a little vaguely, troubled about his sitter's nose, which was somehow Jewish without the convex arch. "Indeed I am. He gave them to me. Wasn't it charming?" "'He' gave them--Mr. Dashwood?" "Dear me, no--where should poor Dashwood have got them? He hasn't a penny in the world. Besides, if he had got them he'd have kept them. I mean your blessed cousin." "I see--they're a present from Peter." "Like many other things. Isn't he a dear? If it hadn't been for him the shelf would have remained bare. He bought the play for this country and America for four hundred pounds, and on the chance: fancy! There was no rush for it, and how could he tell? And then he gracefully pressed it on me. So I've my little capital. Isn't he a duck? You've nice cousins." Nick assented to the proposition, only inserting an amendment to the effect that surely Peter had nice cousins too, and making, as he went on with his work, a tacit, preoccupied reflexion or two; such as that it must be pleasant to render little services like that to youth, beauty and genius--he rather wondered how Peter could afford them--and that, "duck" as he was, Miss Rooth's benefactor was rather taken for granted. _Sic vos non vobis_ softly sounded in his brain. This community of interests, or at least of relations, quickened the flight of time, so that he was still fresh when the sitting came to an end. It was settled Miriam should come back on the morrow, to enable her artist to make the most of the few days of the parliamentary recess; and just before she left him she asked: "Then you _will_ come to-night?" "Without fail. I hate to lose an hour of you." "Then I'll place you. It will be my affair." "You're very kind"--he quite rose to it. "Isn't it a simple matter for me to take a stall? This week I suppose they're to be had." "I'll send you a box," said Miriam. "You shall do it well. There are plenty now." "Why should I be lost, all alone, in the grandeur of a box?" "Can't you bring your friend?" "My friend?" "The lady you're engaged to." "Unfortunately she's out of town." Miriam looked at him in the grand manner. "Does she leave you alone like that?" "She thought I should like it--I should be more free to paint. You see I am." "Yes, perhaps it's good for _me_. Have you got her portrait?" Miriam asked. "She doesn't like me to paint her." "Really? Perhaps then she won't like you to paint me." "That's why I want to be quick!" laughed Nick. "Before she knows it?" "Shell know it to-morrow. I shall write to her." The girl faced him again portentously. "I see you're afraid of her." But she added: "Mention my name; they'll give you the box at the office." Whether or no Nick were afraid of Mrs. Dallow he still waved away this bounty, protesting that he would rather take a stall according to his wont and pay for it. Which led his guest to declare with a sudden flicker of passion that if he didn't do as she wished she would never sit to him again. "Ah then you have me," he had to reply. "Only I _don't_ see why you should give me so many things." "What in the world have I given you?" "Why an idea." And Nick looked at his picture rather ruefully. "I don't mean to say though that I haven't let it fall and smashed it." "Ah an idea--that _is_ a great thing for people in our line. But you'll see me much better from the box and I'll send you Gabriel Nash." She got into the hansom her host's servant had fetched for her, and as Nick turned back into his studio after watching her drive away he laughed at the conception that they were in the same "line." He did share, in the event, his box at the theatre with Nash, who talked during the _entr'actes_ not in the least about the performance or the performer, but about the possible greatness of the art of the portraitist--its reach, its range, its fascination, the magnificent examples it had left us in the past: windows open into history, into psychology, things that were among the most precious possessions of the human race. He insisted above all on the interest, the importance of this great peculiarity of it, that unlike most other forms it was a revelation of two realities, the man whom it was the artist's conscious effort to reveal and the man--the interpreter--expressed in the very quality and temper of that effort. It offered a double vision, the strongest dose of life that art could give, the strongest dose of art that life could give. Nick Dormer had already become aware of having two states of mind when listening to this philosopher; one in which he laughed, doubted, sometimes even reprobated, failed to follow or accept, and another in which his old friend seemed to take the words out of his mouth, to utter for him, better and more completely, the very things he was on the point of saying. Gabriel's saying them at such moments appeared to make them true, to set them up in the world, and to-night he said a good many, especially as to the happiness of cultivating one's own garden, growing there, in stillness and freedom, certain strong, pure flowers that would bloom for ever, bloom long after the rank weeds of the hour were withered and blown away. It was to keep Miriam Rooth in his eye for his current work that Nick had come to the play; and she dwelt there all the evening, being constantly on the stage. He was so occupied in watching her face--for he now saw pretty clearly what he should attempt to make of it--that he was conscious only in a secondary degree of the story she illustrated, and had in regard to her acting a surprised sense that she was extraordinarily quiet. He remembered her loudness, her violence in Paris, at Peter Sherringham's, her wild wails, the first time, at Madame Carré's; compared with which her present manner was eminently temperate and modern. Nick Dormer was not critical at the theatre; he believed what he saw and had a pleasant sense of the inevitable; therefore he wouldn't have guessed what Gabriel Nash had to tell him--that for this young woman, with her tragic cast and her peculiar attributes, her present performance, full of actuality, of light fine indications and at moments of pointed touches of comedy, was a rare _tour de force_. It went on altogether in a register he hadn't supposed her to possess and in which, as he said, she didn't touch her capital, doing it all with her wonderful little savings. It conveyed to him that she was capable of almost anything. In one of the intervals they went round to see her; but for Nick this purpose was partly defeated by the extravagant transports, as they struck him, of Mrs. Rooth, whom they found sitting with her daughter and who attacked him with a hundred questions about his dear mother and his charming sisters. She had volumes to say about the day in Paris when they had shown her the kindness she should never forget. She abounded also in admiration of the portrait he had so cleverly begun, declaring she was so eager to see it, however little he might as yet have accomplished, that she should do herself the honour to wait upon him in the morning when Miriam came to sit. "I'm acting for you to-night," the girl more effectively said before he returned to his place. "No, that's exactly what you're not doing," Nash interposed with one of his happy sagacities. "You've stopped acting, you've reduced it to the least that will do, you simply are--you're just the visible image, the picture on the wall. It keeps you wonderfully in focus. I've never seen you so beautiful." Miriam stared at this; then it could be seen that she coloured. "What a luxury in life to have everything explained! He's the great explainer," she herself explained to Nick. He shook hands with her for good-night. "Well then, we must give him lots to do." She came to his studio in the morning, but unaccompanied by her mother, in allusion to whom she simply said, "Mamma wished to come but I wouldn't let her." They proceeded promptly to business. The girl divested herself of her hat and coat, taking the position already determined. After they had worked more than an hour with much less talk than the day before, Nick being extremely absorbed and Miriam wearing in silence an air of noble compunction for the burden imposed on him, at the end of this period of patience, pervaded by a holy calm, our young lady suddenly got up and exclaimed, "I say, I must see it!"--with which, quickly, she stepped down from her place and came round to the canvas. She had at Nick's request not looked at his work the day before. He fell back, glad to rest, and put down his palette and brushes. "_Ah bien, c'est tapé_!" she cried as she stood before the easel. Nick was pleased with her ejaculation, he was even pleased with what he had done; he had had a long, happy spurt and felt excited and sanctioned. Miriam, retreating also a little, sank into a high-backed, old-fashioned chair that stood two or three yards from the picture and reclined in it, her head on one side, looking at the rough resemblance. She made a remark or two about it, to which Nick replied, standing behind her and after a moment leaning on the top of the chair. He was away from his work and his eyes searched it with a shy fondness of hope. They rose, however, as he presently became conscious that the door of the large room opposite him had opened without making a sound and that some one stood upon the threshold. The person on the threshold was Julia Dallow. As soon as he was aware Nick wished he had posted a letter to her the night before. He had written only that morning. There was nevertheless genuine joy in the words with which he bounded toward her--"Ah my dear Julia, what a jolly surprise!"--for her unannounced descent spoke to him above all of an irresistible desire to see him again sooner than they had arranged. She had taken a step forward, but she had done no more, stopping short at the sight of the strange woman, so divested of visiting-gear that she looked half-undressed, who lounged familiarly in the middle of the room and over whom Nick had been still more familiarly hanging. Julia's eyes rested on this embodied unexpectedness, and as they did so she grew pale--so pale that Nick, observing it, instinctively looked back to see what Miriam had done to produce such an effect. She had done nothing at all, which was precisely what was embarrassing; she only stared at the intruder, motionless and superb. She seemed somehow in easy possession of the place, and even at that instant Nick noted how handsome she looked; so that he said to himself inaudibly, in some deeper depth of consciousness, "How I should like to paint her that way!" Mrs. Dallow's eyes moved for a single moment to her friend's; then they turned away--away from Miriam, ranging over the room. "I've got a sitter, but you mustn't mind that; we're taking a rest. I'm delighted to see you"--he was all cordiality. He closed the door of the studio behind her; his servant was still at the outer door, which was open and through which he saw Julia's carriage drawn up. This made her advance a little further, but still she said nothing; she dropped no answer even when Nick went on with a sense of awkwardness: "When did you come back? I hope nothing has gone wrong. You come at a very interesting moment," he continued, aware as soon as he had spoken of something in his words that might have made her laugh. She was far from laughing, however; she only managed to look neither at him nor at Miriam and to say, after a little, when he had repeated his question about her return: "I came back this morning--I came straight here." "And nothing's wrong, I hope?" "Oh no--everything's all right," she returned very quickly and without expression. She vouchsafed no explanation of her premature descent and took no notice of the seat Nick offered her; neither did she appear to hear him when he begged her not to look yet at the work on the easel--it was in such a dreadful state. He was conscious, as he phrased it, that this request gave to Miriam's position, directly in front of his canvas, an air of privilege which her neglect to recognise in any way Mrs. Dallow's entrance or her importance did nothing to correct. But that mattered less if the appeal failed to reach Julia's intelligence, as he judged, seeing presently how deeply she was agitated. Nothing mattered in face of the sense of danger taking possession of him after she had been in the room a few moments. He wanted to say, "What's the difficulty? Has anything happened?" but he felt how little she would like him to utter words so intimate in presence of the person she had been rudely startled to find between them. He pronounced Miriam's name to her and her own to Miriam, but Julia's recognition of the ceremony was so slight as to be scarcely perceptible. Miriam had the air of waiting for something more before she herself made a sign; and as nothing more came she continued to say nothing and not to budge. Nick added a remark to the effect that Julia would remember to have had the pleasure of meeting her the year before--in Paris, that day at old Peter's; to which Mrs. Dallow made answer, "Ah yes," without any qualification, while she looked down at some rather rusty studies on panels ranged along the floor and resting against the base of the wall. Her discomposure was a clear pain to herself; she had had a shock of extreme violence, and Nick saw that as Miriam showed no symptom of offering to give up her sitting her stay would be of the briefest. He wished that young woman would do something--say she would go, get up, move about; as it was she had the appearance of watching from her point of vantage the other's upset. He made a series of inquiries about Julia's doings in the country, to two or three of which she gave answers monosyllabic and scarcely comprehensible, only turning her eyes round and round the room as in search of something she couldn't find--of an escape, of something that was not Miriam. At last she said--it was at the end of a very few minutes: "I didn't come to stay--when you're so busy. I only looked in to see if you were here. Good-bye." "It's charming of you to have come. I'm so glad you've seen for yourself how well I'm occupied," Nick replied, not unconscious of how red he was. This made Mrs. Dallow look at him while Miriam considered them both. Julia's eyes had a strange light he had never seen before--a flash of fear by which he was himself frightened. "Of course I'll see you later," he added in awkward, in really misplaced gaiety while she reached the door, which she opened herself, getting out with no further attention to Miriam. "I wrote to you this morning--you've missed my letter," he repeated behind her, having already given her this information. The door of the studio was very near that of the house, but before she had reached the street the visitors' bell was set ringing. The passage was narrow and she kept in advance of Nick, anticipating his motion to open the street-door. The bell was tinkling still when, by the action of her own hand, a gentleman on the step stood revealed. "Ah my dear, don't go!" Nick heard pronounced in quick, soft dissuasion and in the now familiar accents of Gabriel Nash. The rectification followed more quickly still, if that were a rectification which so little improved the matter: "I beg a thousand pardons--I thought you were Miriam." Gabriel gave way and Julia the more sharply pursued her retreat. Her carriage, a victoria with a pair of precious heated horses, had taken a turn up the street, but the coachman had already seen his mistress and was rapidly coming back. He drew near; not so fast, however, but that Gabriel Nash had time to accompany Mrs. Dallow to the edge of the pavement with an apology for the freedom into which he had blundered. Nick was at her other hand, waiting to put her into the carriage and freshly disconcerted by the encounter with Nash, who somehow, as he stood making Julia an explanation that she didn't listen to, looked less eminent than usual, though not more conscious of difficulties. Our young man coloured deeper and watched the footman spring down as the victoria drove up; he heard Nash say something about the honour of having met Mrs. Dallow in Paris. Nick wanted him to go into the house; he damned inwardly his lack of delicacy. He desired a word with Julia alone--as much alone as the two annoying servants would allow. But Nash was not too much discouraged to say: "You came for a glimpse of the great model? Doesn't she sit? That's what I wanted too, this morning--just a look, for a blessing on the day. Ah but you, madam--" Julia had sprung into her corner while he was still speaking and had flashed out to the coachman a "Home!" which of itself set the horses in motion. The carriage went a few yards, but while Gabriel, with an undiscouraged bow, turned away, Nick Dormer, his hand on the edge of the hood, moved with it. "You don't like it, but I'll explain," he tried to say for its occupant alone. "Explain what?" she asked, still very pale and grave, but in a voice that showed nothing. She was thinking of the servants--she could think of them even then. "Oh it's all right. I'll come in at five," Nick returned, gallantly jocular, while she was whirled away. Gabriel had gone into the studio and Nick found him standing in admiration before Miriam, who had resumed the position in which she was sitting. "Lord, she's good to-day! Isn't she good to-day?" he broke out, seizing their host by the arm to give him a particular view. Miriam looked indeed still handsomer than before, and she had taken up her attitude again with a splendid, sphinx-like air of being capable of keeping it for ever. Nick said nothing, but went back to work with a tingle of confusion, which began to act after he had resumed his palette as a sharp, a delightful stimulus. Miriam spoke never a word, but she was doubly grand, and for more than an hour, till Nick, exhausted, declared he must stop, the industrious silence was broken only by the desultory discourse of their friend. XXVII Nick went to Great Stanhope Street at five o'clock and learned, rather to his surprise, that Julia was not at home--to his surprise because he had told her he would come at that hour, and he attributed to her, with a certain simplicity, an eager state of mind in regard to his explanation. Apparently she was not eager; the eagerness was his own--he was eager to explain. He recognised, not without a certain consciousness of magnanimity in doing so, that there had been some reason for her quick withdrawal from his studio or at any rate for her extreme discomposure there. He had a few days before put in a plea for a snatch of worship in that sanctuary and she had accepted and approved it; but the worship, when the curtain happened to blow back, showed for that of a magnificent young woman, an actress with disordered hair, who wore in a singular degree the appearance of a person settled for many hours. The explanation was easy: it dwelt in the simple truth that when one was painting, even very badly and only for a moment, one had to have models. Nick was impatient to give it with frank, affectionate lips and a full, pleasant admission that it was natural Julia should have been startled; and he was the more impatient that, though he would not in the least have expected her to like finding a strange woman intimately installed with him, she had disliked it even more than would have seemed probable or natural. That was because, not having heard from him about the matter, the impression was for the moment irresistible with her that a trick had been played her. But three minutes with him alone would make the difference. They would indeed have a considerable difference to make, Nick reflected, as minutes much more numerous elapsed without bringing Mrs. Dallow home. For he had said to the butler that he would come in and wait--though it was odd she should not have left a message for him: she would doubtless return from one moment to the other. He had of course full licence to wait anywhere he preferred; and he was ushered into Julia's particular sitting-room and supplied with tea and the evening papers. After a quarter of an hour, however, he gave little attention to these beguilements, thanks to his feeling still more acutely that since she definitely knew he was coming she might have taken the trouble to be at home. He walked up and down and looked out of the window, took up her books and dropped them again, and then, as half an hour had elapsed, became aware he was really sore. What could she be about when, with London a thankless void, she was of course not paying visits? A footman came in to attend to the fire, whereupon Nick questioned him as to the manner in which she was possibly engaged. The man disclosed the fact that his mistress had gone out but a quarter of an hour before Nick's arrival, and, as if appreciating the opportunity for a little decorous conversation, gave him still more information than he invited. From this it appeared that, as Nick knew, or could surmise, she had the evening before, from the country, wired for the victoria to meet her in the morning at Paddington and then gone straight from the station to the studio, while her maid, with her luggage, proceeded in a cab to Great Stanhope Street. On leaving the studio, however, she had not come directly home; she had chosen this unusual season for an hour's drive in the Park. She had finally re-entered her house, but had remained upstairs all day, seeing no one and not coming down to luncheon. At four o'clock she had ordered the brougham for four forty-five, and had got into it punctually, saying, "To the Park!" as she did so. Nick, after the footman had left him, made what he could of Julia's sudden passion for the banks of the Serpentine, forsaken and foggy now, inasmuch as the afternoon had come on grey and the light was waning. She usually hated the Park and hated a closed carriage. He had a gruesome vision of her, shrunken into a corner of her brougham and veiled as if in consequence of tears, revolving round the solitude of the Drive. She had of course been deeply displeased and was not herself; the motion of the carriage soothed her, had an effect on her nerves. Nick remembered that in the morning, at his door, she had appeared to be going home; so she had plunged into the drearier resort on second thoughts and as she noted herself near it. He lingered another half-hour, walked up and down the room many times and thought of many things. Had she misunderstood him when he said he would come at five? Couldn't she be sure, even if she had, that he would come early rather than late, and mightn't she have left a message for him on the chance? Going out that way a few minutes before he was to come had even a little the air of a thing done on purpose to offend him; as if she had been so displeased that she had taken the nearest occasion of giving him a sign she meant to break with him. But were these the things Julia did and was that the way she did them--his fine, proud, delicate, generous Julia? When six o'clock came poor Nick felt distinctly resentful; but he stayed ten minutes longer on the possibility that she would in the morning have understood him to mention that hour. The April dusk began to gather and the unsociability of her behaviour, especially if she were still rumbling round the Park, became absurd. Anecdotes came back to him, vaguely remembered, heard he couldn't have said when or where, of poor artists for whom life had been rendered difficult by wives who wouldn't allow them the use of the living female model and who made scenes if they encountered on the staircase such sources of inspiration. These ladies struck him as vulgar and odious persons, with whom it seemed grotesque that Julia should have anything in common. Of course she was not his wife yet, and of course if she were he should have washed his hands of every form of activity requiring the services of the sitter; but even these qualifications left him with a power to wince at the way in which the woman he was so sure he loved just escaped ranking herself with the Philistines. At a quarter past six he rang a bell and told the servant who answered it that he was going and that Mrs. Dallow was to be informed as soon as she came in that he had expected to find her and had waited an hour and a quarter. But he had just reached the doorstep of departure when her brougham, emerging from the evening mist, stopped in front of the house. Nick stood there hanging back till she got out, allowing the servants only to help her. She saw him--she was less veiled than his mental vision of her; but this didn't prevent her pausing to give an order to the coachman, a matter apparently requiring some discussion. When she came to the door her visitor remarked that he had been waiting an eternity; to which she replied that he must make no grievance of that--she was too unwell to do him justice. He immediately professed regret and sympathy, adding, however, that in that case she had much better not have gone out. She made no answer to this--there were three servants in the hall who looked as if they might understand at least what was not said to them; only when he followed her in she asked if his idea had been to stay longer. "Certainly, if you're not too ill to see me." "Come in then," Julia said, turning back after having gone to the foot of the stairs. This struck him immediately as a further restriction of his visit: she wouldn't readmit him to the drawing-room or to her boudoir; she would receive him in the impersonal apartment downstairs where she saw people on business. What did she want to do to him? He was prepared by this time for a scene of jealousy, since he was sure he had learned to read her character justly in feeling that if she had the appearance of a cold woman a forked flame in her was liable on occasion to break out. She was very still, but from time to time she would fire off a pistol. As soon as he had closed the door she said without sitting down: "I daresay you saw I didn't like that at all." "My having a sitter in that professional way? I was very much annoyed at it myself," Nick answered. "Why were _you_ annoyed? She's very handsome," Mrs. Dallow perversely said. "I didn't know you had looked at her!" Nick laughed. Julia had a pause. "Was I very rude?" "Oh it was all right; it was only awkward for me because you didn't know," he replied. "I did know; that's why I came." "How do you mean? My letter couldn't have reached you." "I don't know anything about your letter," Julia cast about her for a chair and then seated herself on the edge of a sofa with her eyes on the floor. "She sat to me yesterday; she was there all the morning; but I didn't write to tell you. I went at her with great energy and, absurd as it may seem to you, found myself very tired afterwards. Besides, in the evening I went to see her act." "Does she act?" asked Mrs. Dallow. "She's an actress: it's her profession. Don't you remember her that day at Peter's in Paris? She's already a celebrity; she has great talent; she's engaged at a theatre here and is making a sensation. As I tell you, I saw her last night." "You needn't tell me," Julia returned, looking up at him with a face of which the intense, the tragic sadness startled him. He had been standing before her, but at this he instantly sat down close, taking her passive hand. "I want to, please; otherwise it must seem so odd to you. I knew she was coming when I wrote to you the day before yesterday. But I didn't tell you then because I didn't know how it would turn out, and I didn't want to exult in advance over a poor little attempt that might come to nothing. Moreover, it was no use speaking of the matter at all unless I told you exactly how it had come about," Nick went on, explaining kindly and copiously. "It was the result of a visit unexpectedly paid me by Gabriel Nash." "That man--the man who spoke to me?" Her memory of him shuddered into life. "He did what he thought would please you, but I daresay it didn't. You met him in Paris and didn't like him; so I judged best to hold my tongue about him." "Do _you_ like him?" "Very much." "Great heaven!" Julia ejaculated, almost under her breath. "The reason I was annoyed was because, somehow, when you came in, I suddenly had the air of having got out of those visits and shut myself up in town to do something that I had kept from you. And I have been very unhappy till I could explain." "You don't explain--you can't explain," Mrs Dallow declared, turning on her companion eyes which, in spite of her studied stillness, expressed deep excitement. "I knew it--I knew everything; that's why I came." "It was a sort of second-sight--what they call a brainwave," Nick smiled. "I felt uneasy, I felt a kind of call; it came suddenly, yesterday. It was irresistible; nothing could have kept me this morning." "That's very serious, but it's still more delightful. You mustn't go away again," said Nick. "We must stick together--forever and ever." He put his arm round her, but she detached herself as soon as she felt its pressure. She rose quickly, moving away, while, mystified, he sat looking up at her as she had looked a few moments before at him. "I've thought it all over; I've been thinking of it all day," she began. "That's why I didn't come in." "Don't think of it too much; it isn't worth it." "You like it more than anything else. You do--you can't deny it," she went on. "My dear child, what are you talking about?" Nick asked, gently... "That's what you like--doing what you were this morning; with women lolling, with their things off, to be painted, and people like that man." Nick slowly got up, hesitating. "My dear Julia, apart from the surprise this morning, do you object to the living model?" "Not a bit, for you." "What's the inconvenience then, since in my studio they're only for me?" "You love it, you revel in it; that's what you want--the only thing you want!" Julia broke out. "To have models, lolling undressed women, do you mean?" "That's what I felt, what I knew," she went on--"what came over me and haunted me yesterday so that I couldn't throw it off. It seemed to me that if I could see it with my eyes and have the perfect proof I should feel better, I should be quiet. And now I _am_ quiet--after a struggle of some hours, I confess. I _have_ seen; the whole thing's before me and I'm satisfied." "I'm not--to me neither the whole thing nor half of it is before me. What exactly are you talking about?" Nick demanded. "About what you were doing this morning. That's your innermost preference, that's your secret passion." "A feeble scratch at something serious? Yes, it was almost serious," he said. "But it was an accident, this morning and yesterday: I got on less wretchedly than I intended." "I'm sure you've immense talent," Julia returned with a dreariness that was almost droll. "No, no, I might have had. I've plucked it up: it's too late for it to flower. My dear Julia, I'm perfectly incompetent and perfectly resigned." "Yes, you looked so this morning, when you hung over her. Oh she'll bring back your talent!" "She's an obliging and even an intelligent creature, and I've no doubt she would if she could," Nick conceded. "But I've received from you all the help any woman's destined to give me. No one can do for me again what you've done." "I shouldn't try it again; I acted in ignorance. Oh I've thought it all out!" Julia declared. And then with a strange face of anguish resting on his own: "Before it's too late--before it's too late!" "Too late for what?" "For you to be free--for you to be free. And for me--for me to be free too. You hate everything I like!" she flashed out. "Don't pretend, don't pretend!" she went on as a sound of protest broke from him. "I thought you so awfully _wanted_ me to paint," he gasped, flushed and staring. "I do--I do. That's why you must be free, why we must part?" "Why we must part--?" "Oh I've turned it well over. I've faced the hard truth. It wouldn't do at all!" Julia rang out. "I like the way you talk of it--as if it were a trimming for your dress!" Nick retorted with bitterness. "Won't it do for you to be loved and cherished as well as any woman in England?" She turned away from him, closing her eyes as not to see something dangerous. "You mustn't give anything up for me. I should feel it all the while and I should hate it. I'm not afraid of the truth, but you are." "The truth, dear Julia? I only want to know it," Nick insisted. "It seems to me in fact just what I've got hold of. When two persons are united by the tenderest affection and are sane and generous and just, no difficulties that occur in the union their life makes for them are insurmountable, no problems are insoluble." She appeared for a moment to reflect upon this: it was spoken in a tone that might have touched her. Yet at the end of the moment, lifting her eyes, she brought out: "I hate art, as you call it. I thought I did, I knew I did; but till this morning I didn't know how much." "Bless your dear soul, _that_ wasn't art," Nick pleaded. "The real thing will be a thousand miles away from us; it will never come into the house, _soyez tranquille_. It knows where to look in and where to flee shrieking. Why then should you worry?" "Because I want to understand, I want to know what I'm doing. You're an artist: you are, you are!" Julia cried, accusing him passionately. "My poor Julia, it isn't so easy as that, nor a character one can take on from one day to the other. There are all sorts of things; one must be caught young and put through the mill--one must see things as they are. There are very few professions that goes with. There would be sacrifices I never can make." "Well then, there are sacrifices for both of us, and I can't make them either. I daresay it's all right for you, but for me it would be a terrible mistake. When I think I'm doing a certain thing I mustn't do just the opposite," she kept on as for true lucidity. "There are things I've thought of, the things I like best; and they're not what you mean. It would be a great deception, and it's not the way I see my life, and it would be misery if we don't understand." He looked at her with eyes not lighted by her words. "If we don't understand what?" "That we're utterly different--that you're doing it all for _me_." "And is that an objection to me--what I do for you?" he asked. "You do too much. You're awfully good, you're generous, you're a dear, oh yes--a dear. But that doesn't make me believe in it. I didn't at bottom, from the first--that's why I made you wait, why I gave you your freedom. Oh I've suspected you," Julia continued, "I had my ideas. It's all right for you, but it won't do for me: I'm different altogether. Why should it always be put upon me when I hate it? What have I done? I was drenched with it before." These last words, as they broke forth, were attended with a quick blush; so that Nick could as quickly discern in them the uncalculated betrayal of an old irritation, an old shame almost--her late husband's flat, inglorious taste for pretty things, his indifference to every chance to play a public part. This had been the humiliation of her youth, and it was indeed a perversity of fate that a new alliance should contain for her even an oblique demand for the same spirit of accommodation, impose on her the secret bitterness of the same concessions. As Nick stood there before her, struggling sincerely with the force that he now felt to be strong in her, the intense resolution to break with him, a force matured in a few hours, he read a riddle that hitherto had baffled him, saw a great mystery become simple. A personal passion for him had all but thrown her into his arms (the sort of thing that even a vain man--and Nick was not especially vain--might hesitate to recognise the strength of); held in check at moments, with a strain of the cord that he could still feel vibrate, by her deep, her rare ambition, and arrested at the last only just in time to save her calculations. His present glimpse of the immense extent of these calculations didn't make him think her cold or poor; there was in fact a positive strange heat in them and they struck him rather as grand and high. The fact that she could drop him even while she longed for him--drop him because it was now fixed in her mind that he wouldn't after all serve her resolve to be associated, so far as a woman could, with great affairs; that she could postpone, and postpone to an uncertainty, the satisfaction of an aching tenderness and plan for the long run--this exhibition of will and courage, of the larger scheme that possessed her, commanded his admiration on the spot. He paid the heavy price of the man of imagination; he was capable of far excursions of the spirit, disloyalties to habit and even to faith, he was open to rare communications. He ached, on his side, for the moment, to convince her that he would achieve what he wouldn't, for the vision of his future she had tried to entertain shone before him as a bribe and a challenge. It struck him there was nothing he couldn't work for enough with her to be so worked with by her. Presently he said: "You want to be sure the man you marry will be prime minister of England. But how can you be really sure with any one?" "I can be really sure some men won't!" Julia returned. "The only safe thing perhaps would be to-marry Mr. Macgeorge," he suggested. "Possibly not even him." "You're a prime minister yourself," Nick made answer. "To hold fast to you as I hold, to be determined to be of your party--isn't that political enough, since you're the incarnation of politics?" "Ah how you hate them!" she wailed again. "I saw that when I saw you this morning. The whole place reeked of your aversion." "My dear child, the greatest statesmen have had their distractions. What do you make of my hereditary talent? That's a tremendous force." "It wouldn't carry you far." Then she terribly added, "You must be a great artist." He tossed his head at the involuntary contempt of this, but she went on: "It's beautiful of you to want to give up anything, and I like you for it. I shall always like you. We shall be friends, and I shall always take an interest--!" But he stopped her there, made a movement which interrupted her phrase, and she suffered him to hold her hand as if she were not afraid of him now. "It isn't only for you," he argued gently; "you're a great deal, but you're not everything. Innumerable vows and pledges repose upon my head. I'm inextricably committed and dedicated. I was brought up in the temple like an infant Samuel; my father was a high-priest and I'm a child of the Lord. And then the life itself--when _you_ speak of it I feel stirred to my depths; it's like a herald's trumpet. Fight _with_ me, Julia--not against me! Be on my side and we shall do everything. It is uplifting to be a great man before the people--to be loved by them, to be followed by them. An artist isn't--never, never. Why _should_ he be? Don't forget how clever I am." "Oh if it wasn't for that!" she panted, pale with the effort to resist his tone. Then she put it to him: "Do you pretend that if I were to die to-morrow you'd stay in the House?" "If you were to die? God knows! But you do singularly little justice to my incentives," he pursued. "My political career's everything to my mother." This but made her say after a moment: "Are you afraid of your mother?" "Yes, immensely; for she represents ever so many possibilities of disappointment and distress. She represents all my father's as well as all her own, and in them my father tragically lives again. On the other hand I see him in bliss, as I see my mother, over our marriage and our life of common aspirations--though of course that's not a consideration that I can expect to have power with you." She shook her head slowly, even smiling with her recovered calmness and lucidity. "You'll never hold high office." "But why not take me as I am?" "Because I'm abominably keen about that sort of thing--I must recognise my keenness. I must face the ugly truth. I've been through the worst; it's all settled." "The worst, I suppose, was when you found me this morning." "Oh that was all right--for you." "You're magnanimous, Julia; but evidently what's good enough for me isn't good enough for you." Nick spoke with bitterness. "I don't like you enough--that's the obstacle," she held herself in hand to say. "You did a year ago; you confessed to it." "Well, a year ago was a year ago. Things are changed to-day." "You're very fortunate--to be able to throw away a real devotion," Nick returned. She had her pocket-handkerchief in her hand, and at this she quickly pressed it to her lips as to check an exclamation. Then for an instant she appeared to be listening to some sound from outside. He interpreted her movement as an honourable impulse to repress the "Do you mean the devotion I was witness of this morning?" But immediately afterwards she said something very different: "I thought I heard a ring. I've telegraphed for Mrs. Gresham." He wondered. "Why did you do that?" "Oh I want her." He walked to the window, where the curtains had not been drawn, and saw in the dusk a cab at the door. When he turned back he went on: "Why won't you trust me to make you like me, as you call it, better? If I make you like me as well as I like you it will be about enough, I think." "Oh I like you enough for _your_ happiness. And I don't throw away a devotion," Mrs. Dallow continued. "I shall be constantly kind to you. I shall be beautiful to you." "You'll make me lose a fortune," Nick after a moment said. It brought a slight convulsion, instantly repressed, into her face. "Ah you may have all the money you want!" "I don't mean yours," he answered with plenty of expression of his own. He had determined on the instant, since it might serve, to tell her what he had never breathed to her before. "Mr. Carteret last year promised me a pot of money on the day we should be man and wife. He has thoroughly set his heart on it." "I'm sorry to disappoint Mr. Carteret," said Julia. "I'll go and see him. I'll make it all right," she went on. "Then your work, you know, will bring you an income. The great men get a thousand just for a head." "I'm only joking," Nick returned with sombre eyes that contradicted this profession. "But what things you deserve I should do!" "Do you mean striking likenesses?" He watched her a moment. "You do hate it! Pushed to that point, it's curious," he audibly mused. "Do you mean you're joking about Mr. Carteret's promise?" "No--the promise is real, but I don't seriously offer it as a reason." "I shall go to Beauclere," Julia said. "You're an hour late," she added in a different tone; for at that moment the door of the room was thrown open and Mrs. Gresham, the butler pronouncing her name, ushered in. "Ah don't impugn my punctuality--it's my character!" the useful lady protested, putting a sixpence from the cabman into her purse. Nick went off at this with a simplified farewell--went off foreseeing exactly what he found the next day, that the useful lady would have received orders not to budge from her hostess's side. He called on the morrow, late in the afternoon, and Julia saw him liberally, in the spirit of her assurance that she would be "beautiful" to him, that she had not thrown away his devotion; but Mrs. Gresham remained, with whatever delicacies of deprecation, a spectator of her liberality. Julia looked at him kindly, but her companion was more benignant still; so that what Nick did with his own eyes was not to appeal to her to see him a moment alone, but to solicit, in the name of this luxury, the second occupant of the drawing-room. Mrs. Gresham seemed to say, while Julia said so little, "I understand, my poor friend, I know everything--she has told me only _her_ side, but I'm so competent that I know yours too--and I enter into the whole thing deeply. But it would be as much as my place is worth to accommodate you." Still, she didn't go so far as to give him an inkling of what he learned on the third day and what he had not gone so far as to suspect--that the two ladies had made rapid arrangements for a scheme of foreign travel. These arrangements had already been carried out when, at the door of the house in Great Stanhope Street, the announcement was made him that the subtle creatures had started that morning for Paris. XXVIII They spent on their way to Florence several days in Paris, where Peter Sherringham had as much free talk with his sister as it often befell one member of their family to have with another. He enjoyed, that is, on two different occasions, half an hour's gossip with her in her sitting-room at the hotel. On one of these he took the liberty of asking her whether or no, decidedly, she meant to marry Nick Dormer. Julia expressed to him that she appreciated his curiosity, but that Nick and she were nothing more than relations and good friends. "He tremendously wants it," Peter none the less observed; to which she simply made answer, "Well then, he may want!" After this, for a while, they sat as silent as if the subject had been quite threshed out between them. Peter felt no impulse to penetrate further, for it was not a habit of the Sherringhams to talk with each other of their love-affairs; and he was conscious of the particular deterrent that he and Julia entertained in general such different sentiments that they could never go far together in discussion. He liked her and was sorry for her, thought her life lonely and wondered she didn't make a "great" marriage. Moreover he pitied her for being without the interests and consolations he himself had found substantial: those of the intellectual, the studious order he considered these to be, not knowing how much she supposed she reflected and studied and what an education she had found in her political aspirations, viewed by him as scarce more a personal part of her than the livery of her servants or the jewels George Dallow's money had bought. Her relations with Nick struck him as queer, but were fortunately none of his business. No business of Julia's was sufficiently his to justify him in an attempt to understand it. That there should have been a question of her marrying Nick was the funny thing rather than that the question should have been dropped. He liked his clever cousin very well as he was--enough for a vague sense that he might be spoiled by alteration to a brother-in-law. Moreover, though not perhaps distinctly conscious of this, Peter pressed lightly on Julia's doings from a tacit understanding that in this case she would let him off as easily. He couldn't have said exactly what it was he judged it pertinent to be let off from: perhaps from irritating inquiry as to whether he had given any more tea-parties for gross young women connected with the theatre. Peter's forbearance, however, brought him not quite all the security he prefigured. After an interval he indeed went so far as to ask Julia if Nick had been wanting in respect to her; but this was an appeal intended for sympathy, not for other intervention. She answered: "Dear no--though he's very provoking." Thus Peter guessed that they had had a quarrel in which it didn't concern him to meddle: he added her epithet and her flight from England together, and they made up to his perception one of the little magnified embroilments which do duty for the real in superficial lives. It was worse to provoke Julia than not, and Peter thought Nick's doing so not particularly characteristic of his versatility for good. He might wonder why she didn't marry the member for Harsh if the subject had pressingly come up between them; but he wondered still more why Nick didn't marry that gentleman's great backer. Julia said nothing again, as if to give him a chance to address her some challenge that would save her from gushing; but as his impulse appeared to be to change the subject, and as he changed it only by silence, she was reduced to resuming presently: "I should have thought you'd have come over to see your friend the actress." "Which of my friends? I know so many actresses," Peter pleaded. "The woman you inflicted on us in this place a year ago--the one who's in London now." "Oh Miriam Rooth? I should have liked to come over, but I've been tied fast. Have you seen her there?" "Yes, I've seen her." "Do you like her?" "Not at all." "She has a lovely voice," Peter hazarded after a moment. "I don't know anything about her voice--I haven't heard it." "But she doesn't act in pantomime, does she?" "I don't know anything about her acting. I saw her in private--at Nick Dormer's studio." "At Nick's--?" He was interested now. "What was she doing there?" "She was sprawling over the room and--rather insolently--staring at me." If Mrs. Dallow had wished to "draw" her brother she must at this point have suspected she succeeded, in spite of his care to divest his tone of all emotion. "Why, does he know her so well? I didn't know." "She's sitting to him for her portrait--at least she was then." "Oh yes, I remember--I put him up to that. I'm greatly interested. Is the portrait good?" "I haven't the least idea--I didn't look at it. I daresay it's like," Julia threw off. "But how in the world"--and Peter's interest grew franker--"does Nick find time to paint?" "I don't know. That horrid man brought her." "Which horrid man?"--he spoke as if they had their choice. "The one Nick thinks so clever--the vulgar little man who was at your place that day and tried to talk to me. I remember he abused theatrical people to me--as if I cared anything about them. But he has apparently something to do with your girl." "Oh I recollect him--I had a discussion with him," Peter patiently said. "How could you? I must go and dress," his sister went on more importantly. "He _was_ clever, remarkably. Miss Rooth and her mother were old friends of his, and he was the first person to speak of them to me." "What a distinction! I thought him disgusting!" cried Julia, who was pressed for time and who had now got up. "Oh you're severe," said Peter, still bland; but when they separated she had given him something to think of. That Nick was painting a beautiful actress was no doubt in part at least the reason why he was provoking and why his most intimate female friend had come abroad. The fact didn't render him provoking to his kinsman: Peter had on the contrary been quite sincere when he qualified it as interesting. It became indeed on reflexion so interesting that it had perhaps almost as much to do with Sherringham's now prompt rush over to London as it had to do with Julia's coming away. Reflexion taught him further that the matter was altogether a delicate one and suggested that it was odd he should be mixed up with it in fact when, as Julia's own affair, he had but wished to keep out of it. It might after all be his affair a little as well--there was somehow a still more pointed implication of that in his sister's saying to him the next day that she wished immensely he would take a fancy to Biddy Dormer. She said more: she said there had been a time when she believed he _had_ done so--believed too that the poor child herself had believed the same. Biddy was far away the nicest girl she knew--the dearest, sweetest, cleverest, _best_, and one of the prettiest creatures in England, which never spoiled anything. She would make as charming a wife as ever a man had, suited to any position, however high, and--Julia didn't mind mentioning it, since her brother would believe it whether she mentioned it or no--was so predisposed in his favour that he would have no trouble at all. In short she herself would see him through--she'd answer for it that he'd have but to speak. Biddy's life at home was horrid; she was very sorry for her--the child was worthy of a better fate. Peter wondered what constituted the horridness of Biddy's life, and gathered that it mainly arose from the fact of Julia's disliking Lady Agnes and Grace and of her profiting comfortably by that freedom to do so which was a fruit of her having given them a house she had perhaps not felt the want of till they were in possession of it. He knew she had always liked Biddy, but he asked himself--this was the rest of his wonder--why she had taken to liking her so extraordinarily just now. He liked her himself--he even liked to be talked to about her and could believe everything Julia said: the only thing that had mystified him was her motive for suddenly saying it. He had assured her he was perfectly sensible of her goodness in so plotting out his future, but was also sorry if he had put it into any one's head--most of all into the girl's own--that he had ever looked at Biddy with a covetous eye. He wasn't in the least sure she would make a good wife, but liked her quite too much to wish to put any such mystery to the test. She was certainly not offered them for cruel experiments. As it happened, really, he wasn't thinking of marrying any one--he had ever so many grounds for neglecting that. Of course one was never safe against accidents, but one could at least take precautions, and he didn't mind telling her that there were several he had taken. "I don't know what you mean, but it seems to me quite the best precaution would be to care for a charming, steady girl like Biddy. Then you'd be quite in shelter, you'd know the worst that can happen to you, and it wouldn't be bad." The objection he had made to this plea is not important, especially as it was not quite candid; it need only be mentioned that before the pair parted Julia said to him, still in reference to their young friend: "Do go and see her and be nice to her; she'll save you disappointments." These last words reverberated for him--there was a shade of the portentous in them and they seemed to proceed from a larger knowledge of the subject than he himself as yet possessed. They were not absent from his memory when, in the beginning of May, availing himself, to save time, of the night-service, he crossed from Paris to London. He arrived before the breakfast-hour and went to his sister's house in Great Stanhope Street, where he always found quarters, were she in town or not. When at home she welcomed him, and in her absence the relaxed servants hailed him for the chance he gave them to recover their "form." In either case his allowance of space was large and his independence complete. He had obtained permission this year to take in scattered snatches rather than as a single draught the quantum of holiday to which he was entitled; and there was, moreover, a question of his being transferred to another capital--in which event he believed he might count on a month or two in England before proceeding to his new post. He waited, after breakfast, but a very few minutes before jumping into a hansom and rattling away to the north. A part of his waiting indeed consisted of a fidgety walk up Bond Street, during which he looked at his watch three or four times while he paused at shop windows for fear of being a little early. In the cab, as he rolled along, after having given an address--Balaklava Place, Saint John's Wood--the fear he might be too early took curiously at moments the form of a fear that he should be too late: a symbol of the inconsistencies of which his spirit at present was full. Peter Sherringham was nervously formed, too nervously for a diplomatist, and haunted with inclinations and indeed with designs which contradicted each other. He wanted to be out of it and yet dreaded not to be in it, and on this particular occasion the sense of exclusion was an ache. At the same time he was not unconscious of the impulse to stop his cab and make it turn round and drive due south. He saw himself launched in the breezy fact while morally speaking he was hauled up on the hot sand of the principle, and he could easily note how little these two faces of the same idea had in common. However, as the consciousness of going helped him to reflect, a principle was a poor affair if it merely became a fact. Yet from the hour it did turn to action the action _had_ to be the particular one in which he was engaged; so that he was in the absurd position of thinking his conduct wiser for the reason that it was directly opposed to his intentions. He had kept away from London ever since Miriam Rooth came over; resisting curiosity, sympathy, importunate haunting passion, and considering that his resistance, founded, to be salutary, on a general scheme of life, was the greatest success he had yet achieved. He was deeply occupied with plucking up the feeling that attached him to her, and he had already, by various little ingenuities, loosened some of its roots. He had suffered her to make her first appearance on any stage without the comfort of his voice or the applause of his hand; saying to himself that the man who could do the more could do the less and that such an act of fortitude was a proof he should keep straight. It was not exactly keeping straight to run over to London three months later and, the hour he arrived, scramble off to Balaklava Place; but after all he pretended only to be human and aimed in behaviour only at the heroic, never at the monstrous. The highest heroism was obviously three parts tact. He had not written to his young friend that he was coming to England and would call upon her at eleven o'clock in the morning, because it was his secret pride that he had ceased to correspond with her. Sherringham took his prudence where he could find it, and in doing so was rather like a drunkard who should flatter himself he had forsworn liquor since he didn't touch lemonade. It is a sign of how far he was drawn in different directions at once that when, on reaching Balaklava Place and alighting at the door of a small detached villa of the type of the "retreat," he learned that Miss Rooth had but a quarter of an hour before quitted the spot with her mother--they had gone to the theatre, to rehearsal, said the maid who answered the bell he had set tinkling behind a stuccoed garden-wall: when at the end of his pilgrimage he was greeted by a disappointment he suddenly found himself relieved and for the moment even saved. Providence was after all taking care of him and he submitted to Providence. He would still be watched over doubtless, even should he follow the two ladies to the theatre, send in his card and obtain admission to the scene of their experiments. All his keen taste for these matters flamed up again, and he wondered what the girl was studying, was rehearsing, what she was to do next. He got back into his hansom and drove down the Edgware Road. By the time he reached the Marble Arch he had changed his mind again, had determined to let Miriam alone for that day. It would be over at eight in the evening--he hardly played fair--and then he should consider himself free. Instead of pursuing his friends he directed himself upon a shop in Bond Street to take a place for their performance. On first coming out he had tried, at one of those establishments strangely denominated "libraries," to get a stall, but the people to whom he applied were unable to accommodate him--they hadn't a single seat left. His actual attempt, at another library, was more successful: there was no question of obtaining a stall, but he might by a miracle still have a box. There was a wantonness in paying for a box at a play on which he had already expended four hundred pounds; but while he was mentally measuring this abyss an idea came into his head which flushed the extravagance with the hue of persuasion. Peter came out of the shop with the voucher for the box in his pocket, turned into Piccadilly, noted that the day was growing warm and fine, felt glad that this time he had no other strict business than to leave a card or two on official people, and asked himself where he should go if he didn't go after Miriam. Then it was that he found himself attaching a lively desire and imputing a high importance to the possible view of Nick Dormer's portrait of her. He wondered which would be the natural place at that hour of the day to look for the artist. The House of Commons was perhaps the nearest one, but Nick, inconsequent and incalculable though so many of his steps, probably didn't keep the picture there; and, moreover, it was not generally characteristic of him to be in the natural place. The end of Peter's debate was that he again entered a hansom and drove to Calcutta Gardens. The hour was early for calling, but cousins with whom one's intercourse was mainly a conversational scuffle would accept it as a practical illustration of that method. And if Julia wanted him to be nice to Biddy--which was exactly, even if with a different view, what he wanted himself--how could he better testify than by a visit to Lady Agnes--he would have in decency to go to see her some time--at a friendly, fraternising hour when they would all be likely to be at home? Unfortunately, as it turned out, they were none of them at home, so that he had to fall back on neutrality and the butler, who was, however, more luckily, an old friend. Her ladyship and Miss Dormer were absent from town, paying a visit; and Mr. Dormer was also away, or was on the point of going away for the day. Miss Bridget was in London, but was out; Peter's informant mentioned with earnest vagueness that he thought she had gone somewhere to take a lesson. On Peter's asking what sort of lesson he meant he replied: "Oh I think--a--the a-sculpture, you know, sir." Peter knew, but Biddy's lesson in "a-sculpture"--it sounded on the butler's lips like a fashionable new art--struck him a little as a mockery of the helpful spirit in which he had come to look her up. The man had an air of participating respectfully in his disappointment and, to make up for it, added that he might perhaps find Mr. Dormer at his other address. He had gone out early and had directed his servant to come to Rosedale Road in an hour or two with a portmanteau: he was going down to Beauclere in the course of the day, Mr. Carteret being ill--perhaps Mr. Sherringham didn't know it. Perhaps too Mr. Sherringham would catch him in Rosedale Road before he took his train--he was to have been busy there for an hour. This was worth trying, and Peter immediately drove to Rosedale Road; where in answer to his ring the door was opened to him by Biddy Dormer. XXIX When that young woman saw him her cheek exhibited the prettiest, pleased, surprised red he had ever observed there, though far from unacquainted with its living tides, and she stood smiling at him with the outer dazzle in her eyes, still making him no motion to enter. She only said, "Oh Peter!" and then, "I'm all alone." "So much the better, dear Biddy. Is that any reason I shouldn't come in?" "Dear no--do come in. You've just missed Nick; he has gone to the country--half an hour ago." She had on a large apron and in her hand carried a small stick, besmeared, as his quick eye saw, with modelling-clay. She dropped the door and fled back before him into the studio, where, when he followed her, she was in the act of flinging a damp cloth over a rough head, in clay, which, in the middle of the room, was supported on a high wooden stand. The effort to hide what she had been doing before he caught a glimpse of it made her redder still and led to her smiling more, to her laughing with a confusion of shyness and gladness that charmed him. She rubbed her hands on her apron, she pulled it off, she looked delightfully awkward, not meeting Peter's eye, and she said: "I'm just scraping here a little--you mustn't mind me. What I do is awful, you know. _Please_, Peter, don't look, I've been coming here lately to make my little mess, because mamma doesn't particularly like it at home. I've had a lesson or two from a lady who exhibits, but you wouldn't suppose it to see what I do. Nick's so kind; he lets me come here; he uses the studio so little; I do what I want, or rather what I can. What a pity he's gone--he'd have been so glad. I'm really alone--I hope you don't mind. Peter, _please_ don't look." Peter was not bent on looking; his eyes had occupation enough in Biddy's own agreeable aspect, which was full of a rare element of domestication and responsibility. Though she had, stretching her bravery, taken possession of her brother's quarters, she struck her visitor as more at home and more herself than he had ever seen her. It was the first time she had been, to his notice, so separate from her mother and sister. She seemed to know this herself and to be a little frightened by it--just enough to make him wish to be reassuring. At the same time Peter also, on this occasion, found himself touched with diffidence, especially after he had gone back and closed the door and settled down to a regular call; for he became acutely conscious of what Julia had said to him in Paris and was unable to rid himself of the suspicion that it had been said with Biddy's knowledge. It wasn't that he supposed his sister had told the girl she meant to do what she could to make him propose to her: that would have been cruel to her--if she liked him enough to consent--in Julia's perfect uncertainty. But Biddy participated by imagination, by divination, by a clever girl's secret, tremulous instincts, in her good friend's views about her, and this probability constituted for Sherringham a sort of embarrassing publicity. He had impressions, possibly gross and unjust, in regard to the way women move constantly together amid such considerations and subtly intercommunicate, when they don't still more subtly dissemble, the hopes or fears of which persons of the opposite sex form the subject. Therefore poor Biddy would know that if she failed to strike him in the right light it wouldn't be for want of an attention definitely called to her claims. She would have been tacitly rejected, virtually condemned. He couldn't without an impulse of fatuity endeavour to make up for this to her by consoling kindness; he was aware that if any one knew it a man would be ridiculous who should take so much as that for granted. But no one would know it: he oddly enough in this calculation of security left Biddy herself out. It didn't occur to him that she might have a secret, small irony to spare for his ingenious and magnanimous effort to show her how much he liked her in reparation to her for not liking her more. This high charity coloured at any rate the whole of his visit to Rosedale Road, the whole of the pleasant, prolonged chat that kept him there more than an hour. He begged the girl to go on with her work, not to let him interrupt it; and she obliged him at last, taking the cloth off the lump of clay and giving him a chance to be delightful by guessing that the shapeless mass was intended, or would be intended after a while, for Nick. He saw she was more comfortable when she began again to smooth it and scrape it with her little stick, to manipulate it with an ineffectual air of knowing how; for this gave her something to do, relieved her nervousness and permitted her to turn away from him when she talked. He walked about the room and sat down; got up and looked at Nick's things; watched her at moments in silence--which made her always say in a minute that he was not to pass judgement or she could do nothing; observed how her position before her high stand, her lifted arms, her turns of the head, considering her work this way and that, all helped her to be pretty. She repeated again and again that it was an immense pity about Nick, till he was obliged to say he didn't care a straw for Nick and was perfectly content with the company he found. This was not the sort of tone he thought it right, given the conditions, to take; but then even the circumstances didn't require him to pretend he liked her less than he did. After all she was his cousin; she would cease to be so if she should become his wife; but one advantage of her not entering into that relation was precisely that she would remain his cousin. It was very pleasant to find a young, bright, slim, rose-coloured kinswoman all ready to recognise consanguinity when one came back from cousinless foreign lands. Peter talked about family matters; he didn't know, in his exile, where no one took an interest in them, what a fund of latent curiosity about them he treasured. It drew him on to gossip accordingly and to feel how he had with Biddy indefeasible properties in common--ever so many things as to which they'd always understand each other _à demi-mot_. He smoked a cigarette because she begged him--people always smoked in studios and it made her feel so much more an artist. She apologised for the badness of her work on the ground that Nick was so busy he could scarcely ever give her a sitting; so that she had to do the head from photographs and occasional glimpses. They had hoped to be able to put in an hour that morning, but news had suddenly come that Mr. Carteret was worse, and Nick had hurried down to Beauclere. Mr. Carteret was very ill, poor old dear, and Nick and he were immense friends. Nick had always been charming to him. Peter and Biddy took the concerns of the houses of Dormer and Sherringham in order, and the young man felt after a little as if they were as wise as a French _conseil de famille_ and settling what was best for every one. He heard all about Lady Agnes; he showed an interest in the detail of her existence that he had not supposed himself to possess, though indeed Biddy threw out intimations which excited his curiosity, presenting her mother in a light that might call on his sympathy. "I don't think she has been very happy or very pleased of late," the girl said. "I think she has had some disappointments, poor dear mamma; and Grace has made her go out of town for three or four days in the hope of a little change. They've gone down to see an old lady, Lady St. Dunstans, who never comes to London now and who, you know--she's tremendously old--was papa's godmother. It's not very lively for Grace, but Grace is such a dear she'll do anything for mamma. Mamma will go anywhere, no matter at what risk of discomfort, to see people she can talk with about papa." Biddy added in reply to a further question that what her mother was disappointed about was--well, themselves, her children and all their affairs; and she explained that Lady Agnes wanted all kinds of things for them that didn't come, that they didn't get or seem likely to get, so that their life appeared altogether a failure. She wanted a great deal, Biddy admitted; she really wanted everything, for she had thought in her happier days that everything was to be hers. She loved them all so much and was so proud too: she couldn't get over the thought of their not being successful. Peter was unwilling to press at this point, for he suspected one of the things Lady Agnes wanted; but Biddy relieved him a little by describing her as eager above all that Grace should get married. "That's too unselfish of her," he pronounced, not caring at all for Grace. "Cousin Agnes ought to keep her near her always, if Grace is so obliging and devoted." "Oh mamma would give up anything of that sort for our good; she wouldn't sacrifice us that way!" Biddy protested. "Besides, I'm the one to stay with mamma; not that I can manage and look after her and do everything so well as Grace. But, you know, I _want_ to," said Biddy with a liquid note in her voice--and giving her lump of clay a little stab for mendacious emphasis. "But doesn't your mother want the rest of you to get married--Percival and Nick and you?" Peter asked. "Oh she has given up Percy. I don't suppose she thinks it would do. Dear Nick of course--that's just what she does want." He had a pause. "And you, Biddy?" "Oh I daresay. But that doesn't signify--I never shall." Peter got up at this; the tone of it set him in motion and he took a turn round the room. He threw off something cheap about her being too proud; to which she replied that that was the only thing for a girl to be to get on. "What do you mean by getting on?"--and he stopped with his hands in his pockets on the other side of the studio. "I mean crying one's eyes out!" Biddy unexpectedly exclaimed; but she drowned the effect of this pathetic paradox in a laugh of clear irrelevance and in the quick declaration: "Of course it's about Nick that she's really broken-hearted." "What's the matter with Nick?" he went on with all his diplomacy. "Oh Peter, what's the matter with Julia?" Biddy quavered softly back to him, her eyes suddenly frank and mournful. "I daresay you know what we all hoped, what we all supposed from what they told us. And now they won't!" said the girl. "Yes, Biddy, I know. I had the brightest prospect of becoming your brother-in-law: wouldn't that have been it--or something like that? But it's indeed visibly clouded. What's the matter with them? May I have another cigarette?" Peter came back to the wide, cushioned bench where he had previously lounged: this was the way they took up the subject he wanted most to look into. "Don't they know how to love?" he speculated as he seated himself again. "It seems a kind of fatality!" Biddy sighed. He said nothing for some moments, at the end of which he asked if his companion were to be quite alone during her mother's absence. She replied that this parent was very droll about that: would never leave her alone and always thought something dreadful would happen to her. She had therefore arranged that Florence Tressilian should come and stay in Calcutta Gardens for the next few days--to look after her and see she did no wrong. Peter inquired with fulness into Florence Tressilian's identity: he greatly hoped that for the success of Lady Agnes's precautions she wasn't a flighty young genius like Biddy. She was described to him as tremendously nice and tremendously clever, but also tremendously old and tremendously safe; with the addition that Biddy was tremendously fond of her and that while she remained in Calcutta Gardens they expected to enjoy themselves tremendously. She was to come that afternoon before dinner. "And are you to dine at home?" said Peter. "Certainly; where else?" "And just you two alone? Do you call that enjoying yourselves tremendously?" "It will do for me. No doubt I oughtn't in modesty to speak for poor Florence." "It isn't fair to her; you ought to invite some one to meet her." "Do you mean you, Peter?" the girl asked, turning to him quickly and with a look that vanished the instant he caught it. "Try me. I'll come like a shot." "That's kind," said Biddy, dropping her hands and now resting her eyes on him gratefully. She remained in this position as if under a charm; then she jerked herself back to her work with the remark: "Florence will like that immensely." "I'm delighted to please Florence--your description of her's so attractive!" Sherringham laughed. And when his companion asked him if he minded there not being a great feast, because when her mother went away she allowed her a fixed amount for that sort of thing and, as he might imagine, it wasn't millions--when Biddy, with the frankness of their pleasant kinship, touched anxiously on this economic point (illustrating, as Peter saw, the lucidity with which Lady Agnes had had in her old age to learn to recognise the occasions when she could be conveniently frugal) he answered that the shortest dinners were the best, especially when one was going to the theatre. That was his case to-night, and did Biddy think he might look to Miss Tressilian to go with them? They'd have to dine early--he wanted not to miss a moment. "The theatre--Miss Tressilian?" she stared, interrupted and in suspense again. "Would it incommode you very much to dine say at 7.15 and accept a place in my box? The finger of Providence was in it when I took a box an hour ago. I particularly like your being free to go--if you are free." She began almost to rave with pleasure. "Dear Peter, how good you are! They'll have it at any hour. Florence will be so glad." "And has Florence seen Miss Rooth?" "Miss Rooth?" the girl repeated, redder than before. He felt on the spot that she had heard of the expenditure of his time and attention on that young lady. It was as if she were conscious of how conscious he would himself be in speaking of her, and there was a sweetness in her allowance for him on that score. But Biddy was more confused for him than he was for himself. He guessed in a moment how much she had thought over what she had heard; this was indicated by her saying vaguely, "No, no, I've not seen her." Then she knew she was answering a question he hadn't asked her, and she went on: "We shall be too delighted. I saw her--perhaps you remember--in your rooms in Paris. I thought her so wonderful then! Every one's talking of her here. But we don't go to the theatre much, you know: we don't have boxes offered us except when _you_ come. Poor Nick's too much taken up in the evening. I've wanted awfully to see her. They say she's magnificent." "I don't know," Peter was glad to be able honestly to answer. "I haven't seen her." "You haven't seen her?" "Never, Biddy. I mean on the stage. In private often--yes," he conscientiously added. "Oh!" Biddy exclaimed, bending her face on Nick's bust again. She asked him no question about the new star, and he offered her no further information. There were things in his mind pulling him different ways, so that for some minutes silence was the result of the conflict. At last he said, after an hesitation caused by the possibility that she was ignorant of the fact he had lately elicited from Julia, though it was more probable she might have learned it from the same source: "Am I perhaps indiscreet in alluding to the circumstance that Nick has been painting Miss Rooth's portrait?" "You're not indiscreet in alluding to it to me, because I know it." "Then there's no secret nor mystery about it?" Biddy just considered. "I don't think mamma knows it." "You mean you've been keeping it from her because she wouldn't like it?" "We're afraid she may think papa wouldn't have liked it." This was said with an absence of humour at which Peter could but show amusement, though he quickly recovered himself, repenting of any apparent failure of respect to the high memory of his late celebrated relative. He threw off rather vaguely: "Ah yes, I remember that great man's ideas," and then went on: "May I ask if you know it, the fact we're talking of, through Julia or through Nick?" "I know it from both of them." "Then if you're in their confidence may I further ask if this undertaking of Nick's is the reason why things seem to be at an end between them?" "Oh I don't think she likes it," Biddy had to say. "Isn't it good?" "Oh I don't mean the picture--she hasn't seen it. But his having done it." "Does she dislike it so much that that's why she won't marry him?" Biddy gave up her work, moving away from it to look at it. She came and sat down on the long bench on which Sherringham had placed himself. Then she broke out: "Oh Peter, it's a great trouble--it's a very great trouble; and I can't tell you, for I don't understand it." "If I ask you," he said, "it's not to pry into what doesn't concern me; but Julia's my sister, and I can't after all help taking some interest in her life. She tells me herself so little. She doesn't think me worthy." "Ah poor Julia!" Biddy wailed defensively. Her tone recalled to him that Julia had at least thought him worthy to unite himself to Bridget Dormer, and inevitably betrayed that the girl was thinking of that also. While they both thought of it they sat looking into each other's eyes. "Nick, I'm sure, doesn't treat _you_ that way; I'm sure he confides in you; he talks to you about his occupations, his ambitions," Peter continued. "And you understand him, you enter into them, you're nice to him, you help him." "Oh Nick's life--it's very dear to me," Biddy granted. "That must be jolly for him." "It makes _me_ very happy." Peter uttered a low, ambiguous groan; then he cried with irritation; "What the deuce is the matter with them then? Why can't they hit it off together and be quiet and rational and do what every one wants them to?" "Oh Peter, it's awfully complicated!" the girl sighed with sagacity. "Do you mean that Nick's in love with her?" "In love with Julia?" "No, no, with Miriam Rooth." She shook her head slowly, then with a smile which struck him as one of the sweetest things he had ever seen--it conveyed, at the expense of her own prospects, such a shy, generous little mercy of reassurance--"He isn't, Peter," she brought out. "Julia thinks it trifling--all that sort of thing," she added "She wants him to go in for different honours." "Julia's the oddest woman. I mean I thought she loved him," Peter explained. "And when you love a person--!" He continued to make it out, leaving his sentence impatiently unfinished, while Biddy, with lowered eyes, sat waiting--it so interested her--to learn what you did when you loved a person. "I can't conceive her giving him up. He has great ability, besides being such a good fellow." "It's for his happiness, Peter--that's the way she reasons," Biddy set forth. "She does it for an idea; she has told me a great deal about it, and I see the way she feels." "You try to, Biddy, because you're such a dear good-natured girl, but I don't believe you do in the least," he took the liberty of replying. "It's too little the way you yourself would feel. Julia's idea, as you call it, must be curious." "Well, it is, Peter," Biddy mournfully admitted. "She won't risk not coming out at the top." "At the top of what?" "Oh of everything." Her tone showed a trace of awe of such high views. "Surely one's at the top of everything when one's in love." "I don't know," said the girl. "Do you doubt it?" Peter asked. "I've never been in love and I never shall be." "You're as perverse, in your way, as Julia," he returned to this. "But I confess I don't understand Nick's attitude any better. He seems to me, if I may say so, neither fish nor flesh." "Oh his attitude's very noble, Peter; his state of mind's wonderfully interesting," Biddy pleaded. "Surely _you_ must be in favour of art," she beautifully said. It made him look at her a moment. "Dear Biddy, your little digs are as soft as zephyrs." She coloured, but she protested. "My little digs? What do you mean? Aren't you in favour of art?" "The question's delightfully simple. I don't know what you're talking about. Everything has its place. A parliamentary life," he opined, "scarce seems to me the situation for portrait-painting." "That's just what Nick says." "You talk of it together a great deal?" "Yes, Nick's very good to me." "Clever Nick! And what do you advise him?" "Oh to _do_ something." "That's valuable," Peter laughed. "Not to give up his sweetheart for the sake of a paint-pot, I hope?" "Never, never, Peter! It's not a question of his giving up," Biddy pursued, "for Julia has herself shaken free. I think she never really felt safe--she loved him, but was afraid of him. Now she's only afraid--she has lost the confidence she tried to have. Nick has tried to hold her, but she has wrested herself away. Do you know what she said to me? She said, 'My confidence has gone for ever.'" "I didn't know she was such a prig!" Julia's brother commented. "They're queer people, verily, with water in their veins instead of blood. You and I wouldn't be like that, should we?--though you _have_ taken up such a discouraging position about caring for a fellow." "I care for art," poor Biddy returned. "You do, to some purpose"--and Peter glanced at the bust. "To that of making you laugh at me." But this he didn't heed. "Would you give a good man up for 'art'?" "A good man? What man?" "Well, say me--if I wanted to marry you." She had the briefest of pauses. "Of course I would--in a moment. At any rate I'd give up the House of Commons," she amended. "That's what Nick's going to do now--only you mustn't tell any one." Peter wondered. "He's going to chuck up his seat?" "I think his mind is made up to it. He has talked me over--we've had some deep discussions. Yes, I'm on the side of art!" she ardently said. "Do you mean in order to paint--to paint that girl?" Peter went on. "To paint every one--that's what he wants. By keeping his seat he hasn't kept Julia, and she was the thing he cared for most in public life. When he has got out of the whole thing his attitude, as he says, will be at least clear. He's tremendously interesting about it, Peter," Biddy declared; "has talked to me wonderfully--has won me over. Mamma's heart-broken; telling _her_ will be the hardest part." "If she doesn't know," he asked, "why then is she heart-broken?" "Oh at the hitch about their marriage--she knows that. Their marriage has been so what she wanted. She thought it perfection. She blames Nick fearfully. She thinks he held the whole thing in his hand and that he has thrown away a magnificent opportunity." "And what does Nick say to her?" "He says, 'Dear old mummy!'" "That's good," Peter pronounced. "I don't know what will become of her when this other blow arrives," Biddy went on. "Poor Nick wants to please her--he does, he does. But, as he says, you can't please every one and you must before you die please yourself a little." Nick's kinsman, whose brother-in-law he was to have been, sat looking at the floor; the colour had risen to his face while he listened. Then he sprang up and took another turn about the room. His companion's artless but vivid recital had set his blood in motion. He had taken Nick's political prospects very much for granted, thought of them as definite and almost dazzling. To learn there was something for which he was ready to renounce such honours, and to recognise the nature of that bribe, affected our young man powerfully and strangely. He felt as if he had heard the sudden blare of a trumpet, yet felt at the same time as if he had received a sudden slap in the face. Nick's bribe was "art"--the strange temptress with whom he himself had been wrestling and over whom he had finally ventured to believe that wisdom and training had won a victory. There was something in the conduct of his old friend and playfellow that made all his reasonings small. So unexpected, so courageous a choice moved him as a reproach and a challenge. He felt ashamed of having placed himself so unromantically on his guard, and rapidly said to himself that if Nick could afford to allow so much for "art" he might surely exhibit some of the same confidence. There had never been the least avowed competition between the cousins--their lines lay too far apart for that; but they nevertheless rode their course in sight of each other, and Peter had now the impression of suddenly seeing Nick Dormer give his horse the spur, bound forward and fly over a wall. He was put on his mettle and hadn't to look long to spy an obstacle he too might ride at. High rose his curiosity to see what warrant his kinsman might have for such risks--how he was mounted for such exploits. He really knew little about Nick's talent--so little as to feel no right to exclaim "What an ass!" when Biddy mentioned the fact which the existence of real talent alone could redeem from absurdity. All his eagerness to see what Nick had been able to make of such a subject as Miriam Rooth came back to him: though it was what mainly had brought him to Rosedale Road he had forgotten it in the happy accident of his encounter with the girl. He was conscious that if the surprise of a revelation of power were in store for him Nick would be justified more than he himself would feel reinstated in self-respect; since the courage of renouncing the forum for the studio hovered before him as greater than the courage of marrying an actress whom one was in love with: the reward was in the latter case so much more immediate. Peter at any rate asked Biddy what Nick had done with his portrait of Miriam. He hadn't seen it anywhere in rummaging about the room. "I think it's here somewhere, but I don't know," she replied, getting up to look vaguely round her. "Haven't you seen it? Hasn't he shown it to you?" She rested her eyes on him strangely a moment, then turned them away with a mechanical air of still searching. "I think it's in the room, put away with its face to the wall." "One of those dozen canvases with their backs to us?" "One of those perhaps." "Haven't you tried to see?" "I haven't touched them"--and Biddy had a colour. "Hasn't Nick had it out to show you?" "He says it's in too bad a state--it isn't finished--it won't do." "And haven't you had the curiosity to turn it round for yourself?" The embarrassed look in her face deepened under his insistence and it seemed to him that her eyes pleaded with him a moment almost to tears. "I've had an idea he wouldn't like it." Her visitor's own desire, however, had become too sharp for easy forbearance. He laid his hand on two or three canvases which proved, as he extricated them, to be either blank or covered with rudimentary forms. "Dear Biddy, have you such intense delicacy?" he asked, pulling out something else. The inquiry was meant in familiar kindness, for Peter was struck even to admiration with her having a sense of honour that all girls haven't. She must in this particular case have longed for a sight of Nick's work--the work that had brought about such a crisis in his life. But she had passed hours in his studio alone without permitting herself a stolen peep; she was capable of that if she believed it would please him. Peter liked a charming girl's being capable of that--he had known charming girls who wouldn't in the least have been--and his question was really a form of homage. Biddy, however, apparently discovered some light mockery in it, and she broke out incongruously: "I haven't wanted so much to see it! I don't care for her so much as that!" "So much as what?" He couldn't but wonder. "I don't care for his actress--for that vulgar creature. I don't like her!" said Biddy almost startlingly. Peter stared. "I thought you hadn't seen her." "I saw her in Paris--twice. She was wonderfully clever, but she didn't charm me." He quickly considered, saying then all kindly: "I won't inflict the thing on you in that case--we'll leave it alone for the present." Biddy made no reply to this at first, but after a moment went straight over to the row of stacked canvases and exposed several of them to the light. "Why did you say you wished to go to the theatre to-night?" her companion continued. Still she was silent; after which, with her back turned to him and a little tremor in her voice while she drew forth successively her brother's studies, she made answer: "For the sake of your company, Peter! Here it is, I think," she added, moving a large canvas with some effort. "No, no, I'll hold it for you. Is that the light?" She wouldn't let him take it; she bade him stand off and allow her to place it in the right position. In this position she carefully presented it, supporting it at the proper angle from behind and showing her head and shoulders above it. From the moment his eyes rested on the picture Peter accepted this service without protest. Unfinished, simplified and in some portions merely suggested, it was strong, vivid and assured, it had already the look of life and the promise of power. Peter felt all this and was startled, was strangely affected--he had no idea Nick moved with that stride. Miriam, seated, was represented in three-quarters, almost to her feet. She leaned forward with one of her legs crossed over the other, her arms extended and foreshortened, her hands locked together round her knee. Her beautiful head was bent a little, broodingly, and her splendid face seemed to look down at life. She had a grand appearance of being raised aloft, with a wide regard, a survey from a height of intelligence, for the great field of the artist, all the figures and passions he may represent. Peter asked himself where his kinsman had learned to paint like that. He almost gasped at the composition of the thing and at the drawing of the difficult arms. Biddy abstained from looking round the corner of the canvas as she held it; she only watched, in Peter's eyes, for this gentleman's impression of it. That she easily caught, and he measured her impression--her impression of _his_ impression--when he went after a few minutes to relieve her. She let him lift the thing out of her grasp; he moved it and rested it, so that they could still see it, against the high back of a chair. "It's tremendously good," he then handsomely pronounced. "Dear, dear Nick," Biddy murmured, looking at it now. "Poor, poor Julia!" Peter was prompted to exclaim in a different tone. His companion made no rejoinder to this, and they stood another minute or two side by side and in silence, gazing at the portrait. At last he took up his hat--he had no more time, he must go. "Will you come to-night all the same?" he asked with a laugh that was somewhat awkward and an offer of a hand-shake. "All the same?" Biddy seemed to wonder. "Why you say she's a terrible creature," Peter completed with his eyes on the painted face. "Oh anything for art!" Biddy smiled. "Well, at seven o'clock then." And Sherringham departed, leaving the girl alone with the Tragic Muse and feeling with a quickened rush the beauty of that young woman as well as, all freshly, the peculiar possibilities of Nick. XXX It was not till after the noon of the next day that he was to see Miriam Rooth. He wrote her a note that evening, to be delivered to her at the theatre, and during the performance she sent round to him a card with "All right, come to luncheon to-morrow" scrawled on it in pencil. When he presented himself at Balaklava Place he learned that the two ladies had not come in--they had gone again early to rehearsal; but they had left word that he was to be pleased to wait, they would appear from one moment to the other. It was further mentioned to him, as he was ushered into the drawing-room, that Mr. Dashwood was in possession of that ground. This circumstance, however, Peter barely noted: he had been soaring so high for the past twelve hours that he had almost lost consciousness of the minor differences of earthly things. He had taken Biddy Dormer and her friend Miss Tressilian home from the play and after leaving them had walked about the streets, had roamed back to his sister's house, in a state of exaltation the intenser from his having for the previous time contained himself, thinking it more decorous and considerate, less invidious and less blatant, not to "rave." Sitting there in the shade of the box with his companions he had watched Miriam in attentive but inexpressive silence, glowing and vibrating inwardly, yet for these fine, deep reasons not committing himself to the spoken rapture. Delicacy, it appeared to him, should rule the hour; and indeed he had never had a pleasure less alloyed than this little period of still observation and repressed ecstasy. Miriam's art lost nothing by it, and Biddy's mild nearness only gained. This young lady was virtually mute as well--wonderingly, dauntedly, as if she too associated with the performer various other questions than that of her mastery of her art. To this mastery Biddy's attitude was a candid and liberal tribute: the poor girl sat quenched and pale, as if in the blinding light of a comparison by which it would be presumptuous even to be annihilated. Her subjection, however, was a gratified, a charmed subjection: there was beneficence in such beauty--the beauty of the figure that moved before the footlights and spoke in music--even if it deprived one of hope. Peter didn't say to her in vulgar elation and in reference to her whimsical profession of dislike at the studio, "Well, do you find our friend so disagreeable now?" and she was grateful to him for his forbearance, for the tacit kindness of which the idea seemed to be: "My poor child, I'd prefer you if I could; but--judge for yourself--how can I? Expect of me only the possible. Expect that certainly, but only that." In the same degree Peter liked Biddy's sweet, hushed air of judging for herself, of recognising his discretion and letting him off while she was lost in the illusion, in the convincing picture of the stage. Miss Tressilian did most of the criticism: she broke out cheerfully and sonorously from time to time, in reference to the actress, "Most striking certainly," or "She _is_ clever, isn't she?" She uttered a series of propositions to which her companions found it impossible to respond. Miss Tressilian was disappointed in nothing but their enjoyment: they didn't seem to think the exhibition as amusing as she. Walking away through the ordered void of Lady Agnes's quarter, with the four acts of the play glowing again before him in the smokeless London night, Peter found the liveliest thing in his impression the certitude that if he had never seen Miriam before and she had had for him none of the advantages of association, he would still have recognised in her performance the richest interest the theatre had ever offered him. He floated in the felicity of it, in the general encouragement of a sense of the perfectly _done_, in the almost aggressive bravery of still larger claims for an art which could so triumphantly, so exquisitely render life. "Render it?" he said to himself. "Create it and reveal it, rather; give us something new and large and of the first order!" He had _seen_ Miriam now; he had never seen her before; he had never seen her till he saw her in her conditions. Oh her conditions--there were many things to be said about them; they were paltry enough as yet, inferior, inadequate, obstructive, as compared with the right, full, finished setting of such a talent; but the essence of them was now, irremovably, in our young man's eyes, the vision of how the uplifted stage and the listening house transformed her. That idea of her having no character of her own came back to him with a force that made him laugh in the empty street: this was a disadvantage she reduced so to nothing that obviously he hadn't known her till to-night. Her character was simply to hold you by the particular spell; any other--the good nature of home, the relation to her mother, her friends, her lovers, her debts, the practice of virtues or industries or vices--was not worth speaking of. These things were the fictions and shadows; the representation was the deep substance. Peter had as he went an intense vision--he had often had it before--of the conditions still absent, the great and complete ones, those which would give the girl's talent a superior, a discussable stage. More than ever he desired them, mentally invoked them, filled them out in imagination, cheated himself with the idea that they were possible. He saw them in a momentary illusion and confusion: a great academic, artistic theatre, subsidised and unburdened with money-getting, rich in its repertory, rich in the high quality and the wide array of its servants, rich above all in the authority of an impossible administrator--a manager personally disinterested, not an actor with an eye to the main chance; pouring forth a continuity of tradition, striving for perfection, laying a splendid literature under contribution. He saw the heroine of a hundred "situations," variously dramatic and vividly real; he saw comedy and drama and passion and character and English life; he saw all humanity and history and poetry, and then perpetually, in the midst of them, shining out in the high relief of some great moment, an image as fresh as an unveiled statue. He was not unconscious that he was taking all sorts of impossibilities and miracles for granted; but he was under the conviction, for the time, that the woman he had been watching three hours, the incarnation of the serious drama, would be a new and vivifying force. The world was just then so bright to him that even Basil Dashwood struck him at first as a conceivable agent of his dream. It must be added that before Miriam arrived the breeze that filled Sherringham's sail began to sink a little. He passed out of the eminently "let" drawing-room, where twenty large photographs of the young actress bloomed in the desert; he went into the garden by a glass door that stood open, and found Mr. Dashwood lolling on a bench and smoking cigarettes. This young man's conversation was a different music--it took him down, as he felt; showed him, very sensibly and intelligibly, it must be confessed, the actual theatre, the one they were all concerned with, the one they would have to make the miserable best of. It was fortunate that he kept his intoxication mainly to himself: the Englishman's habit of not being effusive still prevailed with him after his years of exposure to the foreign infection. Nothing could have been less exclamatory than the meeting of the two men, with its question or two, its remark or two, about the new visitor's arrival in London; its off-hand "I noticed you last night, I was glad you turned up at last" on one side and its attenuated "Oh yes, it was the first time; I was very much interested" on the other. Basil Dashwood played a part in Yolande and Peter had not failed to take with some comfort the measure of his aptitude. He judged it to be of the small order, as indeed the part, which was neither that of the virtuous nor that of the villainous hero, restricted him to two or three inconspicuous effects and three or four changes of dress. He represented an ardent but respectful young lover whom the distracted heroine found time to pity a little and even to rail at; but it was impressed upon his critic that he scarcely represented young love. He looked very well, but Peter had heard him already in a hundred contemporary pieces; he never got out of rehearsal. He uttered sentiments and breathed vows with a nice voice, with a shy, boyish tremor, but as if he were afraid of being chaffed for it afterwards; giving the spectator in the stalls the sense of holding the prompt-book and listening to a recitation. He made one think of country-houses and lawn-tennis and private theatricals; than which there couldn't be, to Peter's mind, a range of association more disconnected from the actor's art. Dashwood knew all about the new thing, the piece in rehearsal; he knew all about everything--receipts and salaries and expenses and newspaper articles, and what old Baskerville said and what Mrs. Ruffler thought: matters of superficial concern to his fellow-guest, who wondered, before they had sight of Miriam, if she talked with her "walking-gentleman" about them by the hour, deep in them and finding them not vulgar and boring but the natural air of her life and the essence of her profession. Of course she did--she naturally would; it was all in the day's work and he might feel sure she wouldn't turn up her nose at the shop. He had to remind himself that he didn't care if she didn't, that he would really think worse of her if she should. She certainly was in deep with her bland playmate, talking shop by the hour: he could see this from the fellow's ease of attitude, the air of a man at home and doing the honours. He divined a great intimacy between the two young artists, but asked himself at the same time what he, Peter Sherringham, had to say about it. He didn't pretend to control Miriam's intimacies, it was to be supposed; and if he had encouraged her to adopt a profession rich in opportunities for comradeship it was not for him to cry out because she had taken to it kindly. He had already descried a fund of utility in Mrs. Lovick's light brother; but it irritated him, all the same, after a while, to hear the youth represent himself as almost indispensable. He was practical--there was no doubt of that; and this idea added to Peter's paradoxical sense that as regards the matters actually in question he himself had not this virtue. Dashwood had got Mrs. Rooth the house; it happened by a lucky chance that Laura Lumley, to whom it belonged--Sherringham would know Laura Lumley?--wanted to get rid, for a mere song, of the remainder of the lease. She was going to Australia with a troupe of her own. They just stepped into it; it was good air--the best sort of London air to live in, to sleep in, for people of their trade. Peter came back to his wonder at what Miriam's personal relations with this deucedly knowing gentleman might be, and was again able to assure himself that they might be anything in the world she liked, for any stake he, the familiar of the Foreign Office, had in them. Dashwood told him of all the smart people who had tried to take up the new star--the way the London world had already held out its hand; and perhaps it was Sherringham's irritation, the crushed sentiment I just mentioned, that gave a little heave in the exclamation, "Oh that--that's all rubbish: the less of that the better!" At this Mr. Dashwood sniffed a little, rather resentful; he had expected Peter to be pleased with the names of the eager ladies who had "called"--which proved how low a view he took of his art. Our friend explained--it is to be hoped not pedantically--that this art was serious work and that society was humbug and imbecility; also that of old the great comedians wouldn't have known such people. Garrick had essentially his own circle. "No, I suppose they didn't 'call' in the old narrow-minded time," said Basil Dashwood. "Your profession didn't call. They had better company--that of the romantic gallant characters they represented. They lived with _them_, so it was better all round." And Peter asked himself--for that clearly struck the young man as a dreary period--if _he_ only, for Miriam, in her new life and among the futilities of those who tried to lionise her, expressed the artistic idea. This at least, Sherringham reflected, was a situation that could be improved. He learned from his companion that the new play, the thing they were rehearsing, was an old play, a romantic drama of thirty years before, very frequently revived and threadbare with honourable service. Dashwood had a part in it, but there was an act in which he didn't appear, and this was the act they were doing that morning. Yolande had done all Yolande could do; the visitor was mistaken if he supposed Yolande such a tremendous hit. It had done very well, it had run three months, but they were by no means coining money with it. It wouldn't take them to the end of the season; they had seen for a month past that they would have to put on something else. Miss Rooth, moreover, wanted a new part; she was above all impatient to show her big range. She had grand ideas; she thought herself very good-natured to repeat the same stuff for three months. The young man lighted another cigarette and described to his listener some of Miss Rooth's ideas. He abounded in information about her--about her character, her temper, her peculiarities, her little ways, her manner of producing some of her effects. He spoke with familiarity and confidence, as if knowing more about her than any one else--as if he had invented or discovered her, were in a sense her proprietor or guarantor. It was the talk of the shop, both with a native sharpness and a touching young candour; the expansion of the commercial spirit when it relaxes and generalises, is conscious of safety with another member of the guild. Peter at any rate couldn't help protesting against the lame old war-horse it was proposed to bring into action, who had been ridden to death and had saved a thousand desperate fields; and he exclaimed on the strange passion of the good British public for sitting again and again through expected situations, watching for speeches they had heard and surprises that struck the hour. Dashwood defended the taste of London, praised it as loyal, constant, faithful; to which his interlocutor retorted with some vivacity that it was faithful to sad trash. He justified this sally by declaring the play in rehearsal sad trash, clumsy mediocrity with all its convenience gone, and that the fault was the want of life in the critical sense of the public, which was ignobly docile, opening its mouth for its dose like the pupils of Dotheboys Hall; not insisting on something different, on a fresh brew altogether. Dashwood asked him if he then wished their friend to go on playing for ever a part she had repeated more than eighty nights on end: he thought the modern "run" was just what he had heard him denounce in Paris as the disease the theatre was dying of. This imputation Peter quite denied, wanting to know if she couldn't change to something less stale than the greatest staleness of all. Dashwood opined that Miss Rooth must have a strong part and that there happened to be one for her in the before-mentioned venerable novelty. She had to take what she could get--she wasn't a person to cry for the moon. This was a stop-gap--she would try other things later; she would have to look round her; you couldn't have a new piece, one that would do, left at your door every day with the milk. On one point Sherringham's mind might be at rest: Miss Rooth was a woman who would do every blessed thing there was to do. Give her time and she would walk straight through the repertory. She was a woman who would do this--she was a woman who would do that: her spokesman employed this phrase so often that Peter, nervous, got up and threw an unsmoked cigarette away. Of course she was a woman; there was no need of his saying it a hundred times. As for the repertory, the young man went on, the most beautiful girl in the world could give but what she had. He explained, after their visitor sat down again, that the noise made by Miss Rooth was not exactly what this admirer appeared to suppose. Sherringham had seen the house the night before and would recognise that, though good, it was very far from great. She had done very well, it was all right, but she had never gone above a point which Dashwood expressed in pounds sterling, to the edification of his companion, who vaguely thought the figure high. Peter remembered that he had been unable to get a stall, but Dashwood insisted that "Miriam" had not leaped into commanding fame: that was a thing that never happened in fact--it happened only in grotesque works of fiction. She had attracted notice, unusual notice for a woman whose name, the day before, had never been heard of: she was recognised as having, for a novice, extraordinary cleverness and confidence--in addition to her looks, of course, which were the thing that had really fetched the crowd. But she hadn't been the talk of London; she had only been the talk of Gabriel Nash. He wasn't London, more was the pity. He knew the esthetic people--the worldly, semi-smart ones, not the frumpy, sickly lot who wore dirty drapery; and the esthetic people had run after her. Mr. Dashwood sketchily instructed the pilgrim from Paris as to the different sects in the great religion of beauty, and was able to give him the particular "note" of the critical clique to which Miriam had begun so quickly to owe it that she had a vogue. The information made our friend feel very ignorant of the world, very uninitiated and buried in his little professional hole. Dashwood warned him that it would be a long time before the general public would wake up to Miss Rooth, even after she had waked up to herself; she would have to do some really big thing first. _They_ knew it was in her, the big thing--Peter and he and even poor Nash--because they had seen her as no one else had; but London never took any one on trust--it had to be cash down. It would take their young lady two or three years to pay out her cash and get her equivalent. But of course the equivalent would be simply a gold-mine. Within its limits, however, certainly, the mark she had made was already quite a fairy-tale: there was magic in the way she had concealed from the first her want of experience. She absolutely made you think she had a lot of it, more than any one else. Mr. Dashwood repeated several times that she was a cool hand--a deucedly cool hand, and that he watched her himself, saw ideas come to her, saw her have different notions, and more or less put them to the test, on different nights. She was always alive--she liked it herself. She gave him ideas, long as he had been on the stage. Naturally she had a great deal to learn, no end even of quite basic things; a cosmopolite like Sherringham would understand that a girl of that age, who had never had a friend but her mother--her mother was greater fun than ever now--naturally _would_ have. Sherringham winced at being dubbed a "cosmopolite" by his young entertainer, just as he had winced a moment before at hearing himself lumped in esoteric knowledge with Dashwood and Gabriel Nash; but the former of these gentlemen took no account of his sensibility while he enumerated a few of the elements of the "basic." He was a mixture of acuteness and innocent fatuity; and Peter had to recognise in him a rudiment or two of criticism when he said that the wonderful thing in the girl was that she learned so fast--learned something every night, learned from the same old piece a lot more than any one else would have learned from twenty. "That's what it is to be a genius," Peter concurred. "Genius is only the art of getting your experience fast, of stealing it, as it were; and in this sense Miss Rooth's a regular brigand." Dashwood condoned the subtlety and added less analytically, "Oh she'll do!" It was exactly in these simple words, addressed to her, that her other admirer had phrased the same truth; yet he didn't enjoy hearing them on his neighbour's lips: they had a profane, patronising sound and suggested displeasing equalities. The two men sat in silence for some minutes, watching a fat robin hop about on the little seedy lawn; at the end of which they heard a vehicle stop on the other side of the garden-wall and the voices of occupants alighting. "Here they come, the dear creatures," said Basil Dashwood without moving; and from where they sat Peter saw the small door in the wall pushed open. The dear creatures were three in number, for a gentleman had added himself to Mrs. Rooth and her daughter. As soon as Miriam's eyes took in her Parisian friend she fell into a large, droll, theatrical attitude and, seizing her mother's arm, exclaimed passionately: "Look where he sits, the author of all my woes--cold, cynical, cruel!" She was evidently in the highest spirits; of which Mrs. Rooth partook as she cried indulgently, giving her a slap, "Oh get along, you gypsy!" "She's always up to something," Dashwood laughed as Miriam, radiant and with a conscious stage tread, glided toward Sherringham as if she were coming to the footlights. He rose slowly from his seat, looking at her and struck with her beauty: he had been impatient to see her, yet in the act his impatience had had a disconcerting check. He had had time to note that the man who had come in with her was Gabriel Nash, and this recognition brought a low sigh to his lips as he held out his hand to her--a sigh expressive of the sudden sense that his interest in her now could only be a gross community. Of course that didn't matter, since he had set it, at the most, such rigid limits; but he none the less felt vividly reminded that it would be public and notorious, that inferior people would be inveterately mixed up with it, that she had crossed the line and sold herself to the vulgar, making him indeed only one of an equalised multitude. The way Nash turned up there just when he didn't want to see him proved how complicated a thing it was to have a friendship with a young woman so clearly booked for renown. He quite forgot that the intruder had had this object of interest long before his own first view of it and had been present at that passage, which he had in a measure brought about. Had Sherringham not been so cut out to make trouble of this particular joy he might have found some adequate assurance that their young hostess distinguished him in the way in which, taking his hand in both of hers, she looked up at him and murmured, "Dear old master!" Then as if this were not acknowledgment enough she raised her head still higher and, whimsically, gratefully, charmingly, almost nobly, kissed him on the lips before the other men, before the good mother whose "Oh you honest creature!" made everything regular. XXXI If he was ruffled by some of her conditions there was thus comfort and consolation to be drawn from others, beside the essential fascination--so small the doubt of that now--of the young lady's own society. He spent the afternoon, they all spent the afternoon, and the occasion reminded him of pages in _Wilhelm Meister_. He himself could pass for Wilhelm, and if Mrs. Rooth had little resemblance to Mignon, Miriam was remarkably like Philina. The movable feast awaiting them--luncheon, tea, dinner?--was delayed two or three hours; but the interval was a source of gaiety, for they all smoked cigarettes in the garden and Miriam gave striking illustrations of the parts she was studying. Peter was in the state of a man whose toothache has suddenly stopped--he was exhilarated by the cessation of pain. The pain had been the effort to remain in Paris after the creature in the world in whom he was most interested had gone to London, and the balm of seeing her now was the measure of the previous soreness. Gabriel Nash had, as usual, plenty to say, and he talked of Nick's picture so long that Peter wondered if he did it on purpose to vex him. They went in and out of the house; they made excursions to see what form the vague meal was taking; and Sherringham got half an hour alone, or virtually alone, with the mistress of his unsanctioned passion--drawing her publicly away from the others and making her sit with him in the most sequestered part of the little gravelled grounds. There was summer enough for the trees to shut out the adjacent villas, and Basil Dashwood and Gabriel Nash lounged together at a convenient distance while Nick's whimsical friend dropped polished pebbles, sometimes audibly splashing, into the deep well of the histrionic simplicity. Miriam confessed that like all comedians they ate at queer hours; she sent Dashwood in for biscuits and sherry--she proposed sending him round to the grocer's in the Circus Road for superior wine. Peter judged him the factotum of the little household: he knew where the biscuits were kept and the state of the grocer's account. When he himself congratulated her on having so useful an inmate she said genially, but as if the words disposed of him, "Oh he's awfully handy." To this she added, "You're not, you know"; resting the kindest, most pitying eyes on him. The sensation they gave him was as sweet as if she had stroked his cheek, and her manner was responsive even to tenderness. She called him "Dear master" again and again, and still often "_Cher maître_," and appeared to express gratitude and reverence by every intonation. "You're doing the humble dependent now," he said: "you do it beautifully, as you do everything." She replied that she didn't make it humble enough--she couldn't; she was too proud, too insolent in her triumph. She liked that, the triumph, too much, and she didn't mind telling him she was perfectly happy. Of course as yet the triumph was very limited; but success was success, whatever its quantity; the dish was a small one but had the right taste. Her imagination had already bounded beyond the first phase unexpectedly great as this had been: her position struck her as modest compared with the probably future now vivid to her. Peter had never seen her so soft and sympathetic; she had insisted in Paris that her personal character was that of the good girl--she used the term in a fine loose way--and it was impossible to be a better girl than she showed herself this pleasant afternoon. She was full of gossip and anecdote and drollery; she had exactly the air he would have wished her to have--that of thinking of no end of things to tell him. It was as if she had just returned from a long journey and had had strange adventures and made wonderful discoveries. She began to speak of this and that, then broke off to speak of something else; she talked of the theatre, of the "critics," and above all of London, of the people she had met and the extraordinary things they said to her, of the parts she was going to take up, of lots of new ideas that had come to her about the art of comedy. She wanted to do comedy now--to do the comedy of London life. She was delighted to find that seeing more of the world suggested things to her; they came straight from the fact, from nature, if you could call it nature; she was thus convinced more than ever that the artist ought to _live_ so as to get on with his business, gathering ideas and lights from experience--ought to welcome any experience that would give him lights. But work of course _was_ experience, and everything in one's life that was good was work. That was the jolly thing in the actor's trade--it made up for other elements that were odious: if you only kept your eyes open nothing could happen to you that wouldn't be food for observation and grist to your mill, showing you how people looked and moved and spoke, cried and grimaced, writhed and dissimulated, in given situations. She saw all round her things she wanted to "do"--London bristled with them if you had eyes to see. She was fierce to know why people didn't take them up, put them into plays and parts, give one a chance with them; she expressed her sharp impatience of the general literary _bétise_. She had never been chary of this particular displeasure, and there were moments--it was an old story and a subject of frank raillery to Sherringham--when to hear her you might have thought there was no cleverness anywhere but in her own splendid impatience. She wanted tremendous things done that she might use them, but she didn't pretend to say exactly what they were to be, nor even approximately how they were to be handled: her ground was rather that if _she_ only had a pen--it was exasperating to have to explain! She mainly contented herself with the view that nothing had really been touched: she felt that more and more as she saw more of people's goings-on. Peter went to her theatre again that evening and indeed made no scruple of going every night for a week. Rather perhaps I should say he made a scruple, but a high part of the pleasure of his life during these arbitrary days was to overcome it. The only way to prove he could overcome it was to go; and he was satisfied, after he had been seven times, not only with the spectacle on the stage but with his perfect independence. He knew no satiety, however, with the spectacle on the stage, which induced for him but a further curiosity. Miriam's performance was a thing alive, with a power to change, to grow, to develop, to beget new forms of the same life. Peter contributed to it in his amateurish way and watched with solicitude the effect of his care and the fortune of his hints. He talked it over in Balaklava Place, suggested modifications and variations worth trying. She professed herself thankful for any refreshment that could be administered to her interest in _Yolande_, and with an energy that showed large resource touched up her part and drew several new airs from it. Peter's liberties bore on her way of uttering certain speeches, the intonations that would have more beauty or make the words mean more. She had her ideas, or rather she had her instincts, which she defended and illustrated, with a vividness superior to argument, by a happy pictorial phrase or a snatch of mimicry; but she was always for trying; she liked experiments and caught at them, and she was especially thankful when some one gave her a showy reason, a plausible formula, in a case where she only stood on an intuition. She pretended to despise reasons and to like and dislike at her sovereign pleasure; but she always honoured the exotic gift, so that Sherringham was amused with the liberal way she produced it, as if she had been a naked islander rejoicing in a present of crimson cloth. Day after day he spent most of his time in her society, and Miss Laura Lumley's recent habitation became the place in London to which his thoughts and his steps were most attached. He was highly conscious of his not now carrying out that principle of abstention he had brought to such maturity before leaving Paris; but he contented himself with a much cruder justification of this lapse than he would have thought adequate in advance. It consisted simply in the idea that to be identified with the first fresh exploits of a young genius was a delightful experience. What was the harm of it when the genius was real? His main security was thus that his relations with Miriam had been placed under the protection of that idea of approved extravagance. In this department they made a very creditable figure and required much less watching and pruning than when it had been his effort to adjust them to a worldly plan. He had in fine a sense of real wisdom when he pronounced it surely enough that this momentary intellectual participation in the girl's dawning fame was a charming thing. Charming things were not frequent enough in a busy man's life to be kicked out of the way. Balaklava Place, looked at in this philosophic way, became almost idyllic: it gave Peter the pleasantest impression he had ever had of London. The season happened to be remarkably fine; the temperature was high, but not so high as to keep people from the theatre. Miriam's "business" visibly increased, so that the question of putting on the second play underwent some revision. The girl persisted, showing in her persistence a temper of which Peter had already caught some sharp gleams. It was plain that through her career she would expect to carry things with a high hand. Her managers and agents wouldn't find her an easy victim or a calculable force; but the public would adore her, surround her with the popularity that attaches to a good-natured and free-spoken princess, and her comrades would have a kindness for her because she wouldn't be selfish. They too would, besides representing her body-guard, form in a manner a portion of her affectionate public. This was the way her friend read the signs, liking her whimsical tolerance of some of her vulgar playfellows almost well enough to forgive their presence in Balaklava Place, where they were a sore trial to her mother, who wanted her to multiply her points of contact only with the higher orders. There were hours when Peter seemed to make out that her principal relation to the proper world would be to have within two or three years a grand battle with it resulting in its taking her, should she let it have her at all, absolutely on her own terms: a picture which led our young man to ask himself with a helplessness that was not exempt, as he perfectly knew, from absurdity, what part _he_ should find himself playing in such a contest and if it would be reserved to him to be the more ridiculous as a peacemaker or as a heavy backer. "She might know any one she would, and the only person she appears to take any pleasure in is that dreadful Miss Rover," Mrs. Rooth whimpered to him more than once--leading him thus to recognise in the young lady so designated the principal complication of Balaklava Place. Miss Rover was a little actress who played at Miriam's theatre, combining with an unusual aptitude for delicate comedy a less exceptional absence of rigour in private life. She was pretty and quick and brave, and had a fineness that Miriam professed herself already in a position to estimate as rare. She had no control of her inclinations, yet sometimes they were wholly laudable, like the devotion she had formed for her beautiful colleague, whom she admired not only as an ornament of the profession but as a being altogether of a more fortunate essence. She had had an idea that real ladies were "nasty," but Miriam was not nasty, and who could gainsay that Miriam was a real lady? The girl justified herself to her patron from Paris, who had found no fault with her; she knew how much her mother feared the proper world wouldn't come in if they knew that the improper, in the person of pretty Miss Rover, was on the ground. What did she care who came and who didn't, and what was to be gained by receiving half the snobs in London? People would have to take her exactly as they found her--that they would have to learn; and they would be much mistaken if they thought her capable of turning snob too for the sake of their sweet company. She didn't pretend to be anything but what she meant to be, the best general actress of her time; and what had that to do with her seeing or not seeing a poor ignorant girl who had loved--well, she needn't say what Fanny had done. They had met in the way of business; she didn't say she would have run after her. She had liked her because she wasn't a slick, and when Fanny Rover had asked her quite wistfully if she mightn't come and see her and like her she hadn't bristled with scandalised virtue. Miss Rover wasn't a bit more stupid or more ill-natured than any one else; it would be time enough to shut the door when she should become so. Peter commended even to extravagance the liberality of such comradeship; said that of course a woman didn't go into that profession to see how little she could swallow. She was right to live with the others so long as they were at all possible, and it was for her and only for her to judge how long that might be. This was rather heroic on his part, for his assumed detachment from the girl's personal life still left him a margin for some forms of uneasiness. It would have made in his spirit a great difference for the worse that the woman he loved, and for whom he wished no baser lover than himself, should have embraced the prospect of consorting only with the cheaper kind. It was all very well, but Fanny Rover was simply a rank _cabotine_, and that sort of association was an odd training for a young woman who was to have been good enough--he couldn't forget that, but kept remembering it as if it might still have a future use--to be his admired wife. Certainly he ought to have thought of such things before he permitted himself to become so interested in a theatrical nature. His heroism did him service, however, for the hour; it helped him by the end of the week to feel quite broken in to Miriam's little circle. What helped him most indeed was to reflect that she would get tired of a good many of its members herself in time; for if it was not that they were shocking--very few of them shone with that intense light--they could yet be thoroughly trusted in the long run to bore you. There was a lovely Sunday in particular, spent by him almost all in Balaklava Place--he arrived so early--when, in the afternoon, every sort of odd person dropped in. Miriam held a reception in the little garden and insisted on all the company's staying to supper. Her mother shed tears to Peter, in the desecrated house, because they had accepted, Miriam and she, an invitation--and in Cromwell Road too--for the evening. Miriam had now decreed they shouldn't go--they would have so much better fun with their good friends at home. She was sending off a message--it was a terrible distance--by a cabman, and Peter had the privilege of paying the messenger. Basil Dashwood, in another vehicle, proceeded to an hotel known to him, a mile away, for supplementary provisions, and came back with a cold ham and a dozen of champagne. It was all very Bohemian and dishevelled and delightful, very supposedly droll and enviable to outsiders; and Miriam told anecdotes and gave imitations of the people she would have met if she had gone out, so that no one had a sense of loss--the two occasions were fantastically united. Mrs. Rooth drank champagne for consolation, though the consolation was imperfect when she remembered she might have drunk it, though not quite so much perhaps, in Cromwell Road. Taken in connection with the evening before, the day formed for our friend the most complete exhibition of his young woman he had yet enjoyed. He had been at the theatre, to which the Saturday night happened to have brought the very fullest house she had played to, and he came early to Balaklava Place, to tell her once again--he had told her half-a-dozen times the evening before--that with the excitement of her biggest audience she had surpassed herself, acted with remarkable intensity. It pleased her to hear this, and the spirit with which she interpreted the signs of the future and, during an hour he spent alone with her, Mrs. Rooth being upstairs and Basil Dashwood luckily absent, treated him to twenty specimens of feigned passion and character, was beyond any natural abundance he had yet seen in a woman. The impression could scarcely have been other if she had been playing wild snatches to him at the piano: the bright up-darting flame of her talk rose and fell like an improvisation on the keys. Later, the rest of the day, he could as little miss the good grace with which she fraternised with her visitors, finding always the fair word for each--the key to a common ease, the right turn to keep vanity quiet and make humility brave. It was a wonderful expenditure of generous, nervous life. But what he read in it above all was the sense of success in youth, with the future loose and big, and the action of that charm on the faculties. Miriam's limited past had yet pinched her enough to make emancipation sweet, and the emancipation had come at last in an hour. She had stepped into her magic shoes, divined and appropriated everything they could help her to, become in a day a really original contemporary. He was of course not less conscious of that than Nick Dormer had been when in the cold light of his studio this more detached observer saw too how she had altered. But the great thing to his mind, and during these first days the irresistible seduction of the theatre, was that she was a rare revelation of beauty. Beauty was the principle of everything she did and of the way she unerringly did it--an exquisite harmony of line and motion and attitude and tone, what was at once most general and most special in her performance. Accidents and instincts played together to this end and constituted something that was independent of her talent or of her merit in a given case, and which as a value to Peter's imagination was far superior to any merit and any talent. He could but call it a felicity and an importance incalculable, and but know that it connected itself with universal values. To see this force in operation, to sit within its radius and feel it shift and revolve and change and never fail, was a corrective to the depression, the humiliation, the bewilderment of life. It transported our troubled friend from the vulgar hour and the ugly fact; drew him to something that had no warrant but its sweetness, no name nor place save as the pure, the remote, the antique. It was what most made him say to himself "Oh hang it, what does it matter?" when he reflected that an _homme sérieux_, as they said in Paris, rather gave himself away, as they said in America, by going every night to the same sordid stall at which all the world might stare. It was what kept him from doing anything but hover round Miriam--kept him from paying any other visits, from attending to any business, from going back to Calcutta Gardens. It was a spell he shrank intensely from breaking and the cause of a hundred postponements, confusions, and absurdities. It put him in a false position altogether, but it made of the crooked little stucco villa in Saint John's Wood a place in the upper air, commanding the prospect; a nest of winged liberties and ironies far aloft above the huddled town. One should live at altitudes when one could--they braced and simplified; and for a happy interval he never touched the earth. It was not that there were no influences tending at moments to drag him down--an abasement from which he escaped only because he was up so high. We have seen that Basil Dashwood could affect him at times as a chunk of wood tied to his ankle--this through the circumstance that he made Miriam's famous conditions, those of the public exhibition of her genius, seem small and prosaic; so that Peter had to remind himself how much this smallness was perhaps involved in their being at all. She carried his imagination off into infinite spaces, whereas she carried Dashwood's only into the box-office and the revival of plays that were barbarously bad. The worst was its being so open to him to see that a sharp young man really in the business might know better than he. Another vessel of superior knowledge--he talked, that is, as if he knew better than any one--was Gabriel Nash, who lacked no leisure for hatefully haunting Balaklava Place, or in other words appeared to enjoy the same command of his time as Peter Sherringham. The pilgrim from Paris regarded him with mingled feelings, for he had not forgotten the contentious character of their first meeting or the degree to which he had been moved to urge upon Nick Dormer's consideration that his talkative friend was probably one of the most eminent of asses. This personage turned up now as an admirer of the charming creature he had scoffed at, and there was much to exasperate in the smooth gloss of his inconsistency, at which he never cast an embarrassed glance. He practised indeed such loose license of regard to every question that it was difficult, in vulgar parlance, to "have" him; his sympathies hummed about like bees in a garden, with no visible plan, no economy in their flight. He thought meanly of the modern theatre and yet had discovered a fund of satisfaction in the most promising of its exponents; and Peter could more than once but say to him that he should really, to keep his opinions at all in hand, attach more value to the stage or less to the interesting a tress. Miriam took her perfect ease at his expense and treated him as the most abject of her slaves: all of which was worth seeing as an exhibition, on Nash's part, of the beautifully imperturbable. When Peter all too grossly pronounced him "damned" impudent he always felt guilty later on of an injustice--Nash had so little the air of a man with something to gain. He was aware nevertheless of a certain itching in his boot-toe when his fellow-visitor brought out, and for the most part to Miriam herself, in answer to any charge of tergiversation, "Oh it's all right; it's the voice, you know--the enchanting voice!" Nash meant by this, as indeed he more fully set forth, that he came to the theatre or to the villa simply to treat his ear to the sound--the richest then to be heard on earth, as he maintained--issuing from Miriam's lips. Its richness was quite independent of the words she might pronounce or the poor fable they might subserve, and if the pleasure of hearing her in public was the greater by reason of the larger volume of her utterance it was still highly agreeable to see her at home, for it was there the strictly mimetic gift he freely conceded to her came out most. He spoke as if she had been formed by the bounty of nature to be his particular recreation, and as if, being an expert in innocent joys, he took his pleasure wherever he found it. He was perpetually in the field, sociable, amiable, communicative, inveterately contradicted but never confounded, ready to talk to any one about anything and making disagreement--of which he left the responsibility wholly to others--a basis of harmony. Every one knew what he thought of the theatrical profession, and yet who could say he didn't regard, its members as embodiments of comedy when he touched with such a hand the spring of their foibles?--touched it with an art that made even Peter laugh, notwithstanding his attitude of reserve where this interloper was concerned. At any rate, though he had committed himself as to their general fatuity he put up with their company, for the sake of Miriam's vocal vibrations, with a practical philosophy that was all his own. And she frankly took him for her supreme, her incorrigible adorer, masquerading as a critic to save his vanity and tolerated for his secret constancy in spite of being a bore. He was meanwhile really not a bore to Peter, who failed of the luxury of being able to regard him as one. He had seen too many strange countries and curious things, observed and explored too much, to be void of illustration. Peter had a sense that if he himself was in the _grandes espaces_ Gabriel had probably, as a finer critic, a still wider range. If among Miriam's associates Mr. Dashwood dragged him down, the other main sharer of his privilege challenged him rather to higher and more fantastic flights. If he saw the girl in larger relations than the young actor, who mainly saw her in ill-written parts, Nash went a step further and regarded her, irresponsibly and sublimely, as a priestess of harmony, a figure with which the vulgar ideas of success and failure had nothing to do. He laughed at her "parts," holding that without them she would still be great. Peter envied him his power to content himself with the pleasures he could get; Peter had a shrewd impression that contentment wouldn't be the final sweetener of his own repast. Above all Nash held his attention by a constant element of easy reference to Nick Dormer, who, as we know, had suddenly become much more interesting to his kinsman. Peter found food for observation, and in some measure for perplexity, in the relations of all these clever people with each other. He knew why his sister, who had a personal impatience of unapplied ideas, had not been agreeably affected by Miriam's prime patron and had not felt happy about the attribution of value to "such people" by the man she was to marry. This was a side on which he had no desire to resemble Julia, for he needed no teaching to divine that Nash must have found her accessible to no light--none even about himself. He, Peter, would have been sorry to have to confess he couldn't more or less understand him. He understood furthermore that Miriam, in Nick's studio, might very well have appeared to Julia a formidable force. She was younger and would have "seen nothing," but she had quite as much her own resources and was beautiful enough to have made Nick compare her with the lady of Harsh even if he had been in love with that benefactress--a pretension as to which her brother, as we know, entertained doubts. Peter at all events saw for many days nothing of his cousin, though it might have been said that Nick participated by implication at least in the life of Balaklava Place. Had he given Julia tangible grounds and was his unexpectedly fine rendering of Miriam an act of virtual infidelity? In that case to what degree was the girl to be regarded as an accomplice in his defection, and what was the real nature of Miriam's esteem for her new and (as he might be called) distinguished ally? These questions would have given Peter still more to think about had he not flattered himself he had made up his mind that they concerned Nick and his sitter herself infinitely more than they concerned any one else. That young lady meanwhile was personally before him, so that he had no need to consult for his pleasure his fresh recollection of the portrait. But he thought of this striking production each time he thought of his so good-looking kinsman's variety of range. And that happened often, for in his hearing Miriam often discussed the happy artist and his possibilities with Gabriel Nash, and Nash broke out about them to all who might hear. Her own tone on the subject was uniform: she kept it on record to a degree slightly irritating that Mr. Dormer had been unforgettably--Peter particularly noted "unforgettably"--kind to her. She never mentioned Julia's irruption to Julia's brother; she only referred to the portrait, with inscrutable amenity, as a direct consequence of this gentleman's fortunate suggestion that first day at Madame Carré's. Nash showed, however, such a disposition to dwell sociably and luminously on the peculiarly interesting character of what he called Dormer's predicament and on the fine suspense it was fitted to kindle in the breast of the truly discerning, that Peter wondered, as I have already hinted, if this insistence were not a subtle perversity, a devilish little invention to torment a man whose jealousy was presumable. Yet his fellow-pilgrim struck him as on the whole but scantly devilish and as still less occupied with the prefigurement of so plain a man's emotions. Indeed he threw a glamour of romance over Nick; tossed off toward him such illuminating yet mystifying references that they operated quite as a bait to curiosity, invested with amusement the view of the possible, any wish to follow out the chain of events. He learned from Gabriel that Nick was still away, and he then felt he could almost submit to instruction, to initiation. The loose charm of these days was troubled, however--it ceased to be idyllic--when late on the evening of the second Sunday he walked away with Nash southward from Saint John's Wood. For then something came out. BOOK SIX XXXII It mattered not so much what the doctors thought--and Sir Matthew Hope, the greatest of them all, had been down twice in one week--as that Mr. Chayter, the omniscient butler, declared with all the authority of his position and his experience that Mr. Carteret was very bad indeed. Nick Dormer had a long talk with him--it lasted six minutes--the day he hurried to Beauclere in response to a telegram. It was Mr. Chayter who had taken upon himself to telegraph in spite of the presence in the house of Mr. Carteret's nearest relation and only surviving sister, Mrs. Lendon. This lady, a large, mild, healthy woman with a heavy tread, a person who preferred early breakfasts, uncomfortable chairs and the advertisement-sheet of the _Times_, had arrived the week before and was awaiting the turn of events. She was a widow and occupied in Cornwall a house nine miles from a station, which had, to make up for this inconvenience as she had once told Nick, a fine old herbaceous garden. She was extremely fond of an herbaceous garden--her main consciousness was of herbaceous possibilities. Nick had often seen her--she had always come to Beauclere once or twice a year. Her sojourn there made no great difference; she was only an "Urania dear" for Mr. Carteret to look across the table at when, on the close of dinner, it was time for her to retire. She went out of the room always as if it were after some one else; and on the gentlemen's "joining" her later--the junction was not very close--she received them with an air of gratified surprise. Chayter honoured Nick with a regard which approached, though not improperly competing with it, the affection his master had placed on the same young head, and Chayter knew a good many things. Among them he knew his place; but it was wonderful how little that knowledge had rendered him inaccessible to other kinds. He took upon himself to send for Nick without speaking to Mrs. Lendon, whose influence was now a good deal like that of some large occasional piece of furniture introduced on a contingency. She was one of the solid conveniences that a comfortable house would have, but you couldn't talk with a mahogany sofa or a folding screen. Chayter knew how much she had "had" from her brother, and how much her two daughters had each received on marriage; and he was of the opinion that it was quite enough, especially considering the society in which they--you could scarcely call it--moved. He knew beyond this that they would all have more, and that was why he hesitated little about communicating with Nick. If Mrs. Lendon should be ruffled at the intrusion of a young man who neither was the child of a cousin nor had been formally adopted, Chayter was parliamentary enough to see that the forms of debate were observed. He had indeed a slightly compassionate sense that Mrs. Lendon was not easily ruffled. She was always down an extraordinary time before breakfast--Chayter refused to take it as in the least admonitory--but usually went straight into the garden as if to see that none of the plants had been stolen in the night, and had in the end to be looked for by the footman in some out-of-the-way spot behind the shrubbery, where, plumped upon the ground, she was mostly doing something "rum" to a flower. Mr. Carteret himself had expressed no wishes. He slept most of the time--his failure at the last had been sudden, but he was rheumatic and seventy-seven--and the situation was in Chayter's hands. Sir Matthew Hope had opined even on a second visit that he would rally and go on, in rudimentary comfort, some time longer; but Chayter took a different and a still more intimate view. Nick was embarrassed: he scarcely knew what he was there for from the moment he could give his good old friend no conscious satisfaction. The doctors, the nurses, the servants, Mrs. Lendon, and above all the settled equilibrium of the square thick house, where an immutable order appeared to slant through the polished windows and tinkle in the quieter bells, all these things represented best the kind of supreme solace to which the master was most accessible. It was judged best that for the first day Nick should not be introduced into the darkened room. This was the decision of the two decorous nurses, of whom the visitor had had a glimpse and who, with their black uniforms and fresh faces of business, suggested the barmaid emulating the nun. He was depressed and restless, felt himself in a false position, and thought it lucky Mrs. Lendon had powers of placid acceptance. They were old acquaintances: she treated him formally, anxiously, but it was not the rigour of mistrust. It was much more an expression of remote Cornish respect for young abilities and distinguished connexions, inasmuch as she asked him rather yearningly about Lady Agnes and about Lady Flora and Lady Elizabeth. He knew she was kind and ungrudging, and his main regret was for his meagre knowledge and poor responses in regard to his large blank aunts. He sat in the garden with newspapers and looked at the lowered blinds in Mr. Carteret's windows; he wandered round the abbey with cigarettes and lightened his tread and felt grave, wishing everything might be over. He would have liked much to see Mr. Carteret again, but had no desire that Mr. Carteret should see him. In the evening he dined with Mrs. Lendon, and she talked to him at his request and as much as she could about her brother's early years, his beginnings of life. She was so much younger that they appeared to have been rather a tradition of her own youth; but her talk made Nick feel how tremendously different Mr. Carteret had been at that period from what he, Nick, was to-day. He had published at the age of thirty a little volume, thought at the time wonderfully clever, called _The Incidence of Rates_; but Nick had not yet collected the material for any such treatise. After dinner Mrs. Lendon, who was in merciless full dress, retired to the drawing-room, where at the end of ten minutes she was followed by Nick, who had remained behind only because he thought Chayter would expect it. Mrs. Lendon almost shook hands with him again and then Chayter brought in coffee. Almost in no time afterwards he brought in tea, and the occupants of the drawing-room sat for a slow half-hour, during which the lady looked round at the apartment with a sigh and said: "Don't you think poor Charles had exquisite taste?" Fortunately the "local man" was at this moment ushered in. He had been upstairs and he smiled himself in with the remark: "It's quite wonderful, quite wonderful." What was wonderful was a marked improvement in the breathing, a distinct indication of revival. The doctor had some tea and chatted for a quarter of an hour in a way that showed what a "good" manner and how large an experience a local man could have. When he retired Nick walked out with him. The doctor's house was near by and he had come on foot. He left the visitor with the assurance that in all probability Mr. Carteret, who was certainly picking up, would be able to see him on the morrow. Our young man turned his steps again to the abbey and took a stroll about it in the starlight. It never looked so huge as when it reared itself into the night, and Nick had never felt more fond of it than on this occasion, more comforted and confirmed by its beauty. When he came back he was readmitted by Chayter, who surveyed him in respectful deprecation of the frivolity which had led him to attempt to help himself through such an evening in such a way. He went to bed early and slept badly, which was unusual with him; but it was a pleasure to him to be told almost as soon as he appeared that Mr. Carteret had asked for him. He went in to see him and was struck with the change in his appearance. He had, however, spent a day with him just after the New Year and another at the beginning of March, and had then noted in him the menace of the final weakness. A week after Julia Dallow's departure for the Continent he had again devoted several hours to the place and to the intention of telling his old friend how the happy event had been brought to naught--the advantage he had been so good as to desire for him and to make the condition of a splendid gift. Before this, for a few days, he had been keeping back, to announce it personally, the good news that Julia had at last set their situation in order: he wanted to enjoy the old man's pleasure--so sore a trial had her arbitrary behaviour been for a year. If she had offered Mr. Carteret a conciliatory visit before Christmas, had come down from London one day to lunch with him, this had but contributed to make him subsequently exhibit to poor Nick, as the victim of her elegant perversity, a great deal of earnest commiseration in a jocose form. Upon his honour, as he said, she was as clever and "specious" a woman--this was his odd expression--as he had ever seen in his life. The merit of her behaviour on that occasion, as Nick knew, was that she had not been specious at her lover's expense: she had breathed no doubt of his public purpose and had had the strange grace to say that in truth she was older than he, so that it was only fair to give his affections time to mature. But when Nick saw their hopeful host after the rupture at which we have been present he found him in no state to deal with worries: he was seriously ailing, it was the beginning of worse things and not a time to put his attention to the stretch. After this excursion Nick had gone back to town saddened by his patient's now unmistakably settled decline, but rather relieved that he had had himself to make no confession. It had even occurred to him that the need for making one at all might never come up. Certainly it wouldn't if the ebb of Mr. Carteret's strength should continue unchecked. He might pass away in the persuasion that everything would happen as he wished it, though indeed without enriching Nick on his wedding-day to the tune he had promised. Very likely he had made legal arrangements in virtue of which his bounty would take effect in case of the right event and in that case alone. At present Nick had a bigger, an uglier truth to tell--the last three days had made the difference; but, oddly enough, though his responsibility had increased his reluctance to speak had vanished: he was positively eager to clear up a situation over which it was not consistent with his honour to leave a shade. The doctor had been right on coming in after dinner; it was clear in the morning that they had not seen the last of Mr. Carteret's power of picking up. Chayter, who had waited on him, refused austerely to change his opinion with every change in his master's temperature; but the nurses took the cheering view that it would do their charge good for Mr. Dormer to sit with him a little. One of them remained in the room in the deep window-seat, and Nick spent twenty minutes by the bedside. It was not a case for much conversation, but his helpless host seemed still to like to look at him. There was life in his kind old eyes, a stir of something that would express itself yet in some further wise provision. He laid his liberal hand on Nick's with a confidence that showed how little it was really disabled. He said very little, and the nurse had recommended that the visitor himself should not overflow in speech; but from time to time he murmured with a faint smile: "To-night's division, you know--you mustn't miss it." There was probably to be no division that night, as happened, but even Mr. Carteret's aberrations were parliamentary. Before Nick withdrew he had been able to assure him he was rapidly getting better and that such valuable hours, the young man's own, mustn't be wasted. "Come back on Friday if they come to the second reading." These were the words with which Nick was dismissed, and at noon the doctor said the invalid was doing very well, but that Nick had better leave him quiet for that day. Our young man accordingly determined to go up to town for the night, and even, should he receive no summons, for the next day. He arranged with Chayter that he should be telegraphed to if Mr. Carteret were either better or worse. "Oh he can't very well be worse, sir," Chayter replied inexorably; but he relaxed so far as to remark that of course it wouldn't do for Nick to neglect the House. "Oh the House!"--Nick was ambiguous and avoided the butler's eye. It would be easy enough to tell Mr. Carteret, but nothing would have sustained him in the effort to make a clean breast to Chayter. He might equivocate about the House, but he had the sense of things to be done awaiting him in London. He telegraphed to his servant and spent that night in Rosedale Road. The things to be done were apparently to be done in his studio: his servant met him there with a large bundle of letters. He failed that evening to stray within two miles of Westminster, and the legislature of his country reassembled without his support. The next morning he received a telegram from Chayter, to whom he had given Rosedale Road as an address. This missive simply informed him that Mr. Carteret wished to see him; it seemed a sign that he was better, though Chayter wouldn't say so. Nick again accordingly took his place in the train to Beauclere. He had been there very often, but it was present to him that now, after a little, he should go only once more--for a particular dismal occasion. All that was over, everything that belonged to it was over. He learned on his arrival--he saw Mrs. Lendon immediately--that his old friend had continued to pick up. He had expressed a strong and a perfectly rational desire to talk with his expected visitor, and the doctor had said that if it was about anything important they should forbear to oppose him. "He says it's about something very important," Mrs. Lendon remarked, resting shy eyes on him while she added that she herself was now sitting with her dear brother. She had sent those wonderful young ladies out to see the abbey. Nick paused with her outside Mr. Carteret's door. He wanted to say something rather intimate and all soothing to her in return for her homely charity--give her a hint, for which she was far from looking, that practically he had now no interest in her brother's estate. This was of course impossible; her lack of irony, of play of mind, gave him no pretext, and such a reference would be an insult to her simple discretion. She was either not thinking of his interest at all, or was thinking of it with the tolerance of a nature trained to a hundred decent submissions. Nick looked a little into her mild, uninvestigating eyes, and it came over him supremely that the goodness of these people was singularly pure: they were a part of what was cleanest and sanest and dullest in humanity. There had been just a little mocking inflexion in Mrs. Lendon's pleasant voice; but it was dedicated to the young ladies in the black uniforms--she could perhaps be humorous about _them_--and not to the theory of the "importance" of Nick's interview with her brother. His arrested desire to let her know he was not greedy translated itself into a vague friendliness and into the abrupt, rather bewildering words: "I can't tell you half the good I think of you." As he passed into Mr. Carteret's room it occurred to him that she would perhaps interpret this speech as an acknowledgment of obligation--of her good nature in not keeping him away from the rich old man. XXXIII The rich old man was propped up on pillows, and in this attitude, beneath the high, spare canopy of his bed, presented himself to Nick's picture-seeking vision as a figure in a clever composition or a "story." He had gathered strength, though this strength was not much in his voice; it was mainly in his brighter eyes and his air of being pleased with himself. He put out his hand and said, "I daresay you know why I sent for you"; on which Nick sank into the seat he had occupied the day before, replying that he had been delighted to come, whatever the reason. Mr. Carteret said nothing more about the division or the second reading; he only murmured that they were keeping the newspapers for him. "I'm rather behind--I'm rather behind," he went on; "but two or three quiet mornings will make it all right. You can go back to-night, you know--you can easily go back." This was the only thing not quite straight that Nick found in him--his making light of his young friend's flying to and fro. The young friend sat looking at him with a sense that was half compunction and half the idea of the rare beauty of his face, to which, strangely, the waste of illness now seemed to have restored something of its youth. Mr. Carteret was evidently conscious that this morning he shouldn't be able to go on long, so that he must be practical and concise. "I daresay you know--you've only to remember," he continued. "I needn't tell you what a pleasure it is to me to see you--there can be no better reason than that," was what Nick could say. "Hasn't the year come round--the year of that foolish arrangement?" Nick thought a little, asking himself if it were really necessary to disturb his companion's earnest faith. Then the consciousness of the falsity of his own position surged over him again and he replied: "Do you mean the period for which Mrs. Dallow insisted on keeping me dangling? Oh _that's_ over!" he almost gaily brought out. "And are you married--has it come off?" the old man asked eagerly. "How long have I been ill?" "We're uncomfortable, unreasonable people, not deserving of your interest. We're not married," Nick said. "Then I haven't been ill so long?" his host quavered with vague relief. "Not very long--but things _are_ different," he went on. The old man's eyes rested on his--he noted how much larger they appeared. "You mean the arrangements are made--the day's at hand?" "There are no arrangements," Nick smiled. "But why should it trouble you?" "What then will you do--without arrangements?" The inquiry was plaintive and childlike. "We shall do nothing--there's nothing to be done. We're not to be married--it's all off," said poor Nick. Then he added: "Mrs. Dallow has gone abroad." The old man, motionless among his pillows, gave a long groan. "Ah I don't like that." "No more do I, sir." "What's the matter? It was so good--so good." "It wasn't good enough for Julia," Nick declared. "For Julia? Is Julia so great as that? She told me she had the greatest regard for you. You're good enough for the best, my dear boy," Mr. Carteret pursued. "You don't know me: I _am_ disappointing. She had, I believe, a great regard for me, but I've forfeited her good opinion." The old man stared at this cynical announcement: he searched his visitor's face for some attenuation of the words. But Nick apparently struck him as unashamed, and a faint colour coming into his withered cheek indicated his mystification and alarm. "Have you been unfaithful to her?" he still considerately asked. "She thinks so--it comes to the same thing. As I told you a year ago, she doesn't believe in me." "You ought to have made her--you ought to have made her," said Mr. Carteret. Nick was about to plead some reason when he continued: "Do you remember what I told you I'd give you if you did? Do you remember what I told you I'd give you on your wedding-day?" "You expressed the most generous intentions; and I remember them as much as a man may do who has no wish to remind you of them." "The money's there--I've put it aside." "I haven't earned it--I haven't earned a penny of it. Give it to those who deserve it more," said Nick. "I don't understand, I don't understand," Mr. Carteret whimpered, the tears of weakness in his eyes. His face flushed and he added: "I'm not good for much discussion; I'm very much disappointed." "I think I may say it's not my fault--I've done what I can," Nick declared. "But when people are in love they do more than that." "Oh it's all over!" said our young man; not caring much now, for the moment, how disconcerted his companion might be, so long as he disabused him of the idea that they were partners to a bargain. "We've tormented each other and we've tormented you--and that's all that has come of it." His companion's eyes seemed to stare at strange things. "Don't you care for what I'd have done for you--shouldn't you have liked it?" "Of course one likes kindness--one likes money. But it's all over," Nick repeated. Then he added: "I fatigue you, I knock you up, with telling you these troubles. I only do so because it seems to me right you should know. But don't be worried--everything's for the best." He patted the pale hand reassuringly, inclined himself affectionately, but Mr. Carteret was not easily soothed. He had practised lucidity all his life, had expected it of others and had never given his assent to an indistinct proposition. He was weak, yet not too weak to recognise that he had formed a calculation now vitiated by a wrong factor--put his name to a contract of which the other side had not been carried out. More than fifty years of conscious success pressed him to try to understand; he had never muddled his affairs and he couldn't muddle them now. At the same time he was aware of the necessity of economising his effort, and he would gather that inward force, patiently and almost cunningly, for the right question and the right induction. He was still able to make his agitation reflective, and it could still consort with his high hopes of Nick that he should find himself regarding mere vague, verbal comfort, words in the air, as an inadequate guarantee. So after he had attached his dim vision to his young friend's face a moment he brought out: "Have you done anything bad?" "Nothing worse than usual," Nick laughed. "Ah everything should have been better than usual." "Well, it hasn't been that--that I must say." "Do you sometimes think of your father?" Mr. Carteret continued. Nick had a decent pause. "_You_ make me think of him--you've always that pleasant effect." "His name would have lived--it mustn't be lost." "Yes, but the competition to-day is terrible," Nick returned. His host considered this as if he found a serious flaw in it; after which he began again: "I never supposed you a trifler." "I'm determined not to be." "I thought her charming. Don't you love Mrs. Dallow?" Mr. Carteret profoundly asked. "Don't put it to me so to-day, for I feel sore and injured. I don't think she has treated me well." "You should have held her--you shouldn't have let her go," the old man returned with unexpected fire. His visitor flushed at this, so strange was it to receive a lesson in energy from a dying octogenarian. Yet after an instant Nick answered with due modesty: "I haven't been clever enough, no doubt." "Don't say that, don't say that--!" Mr. Carteret shrunk from the thought. "Don't think I can allow you any easing-off of that sort. I know how well you've done. You're taking your place. Several gentlemen have told me. Hasn't she felt a scruple, knowing my settlement on you to depend----?" he pursued. "Oh she hasn't known--hasn't known anything about it." "I don't understand; though I think you explained somewhat a year ago"--the poor gentleman gave it up. "I think she wanted to speak to me--of any intentions I might have in regard to you--the day she was here. Very nicely, very properly she'd have done it, I'm sure. I think her idea was that I ought to make any settlement quite independent of your marrying her or not marrying her. But I tried to convey to her--I don't know whether she understood me--that I liked her too much for that, I wanted too much to make sure of her." "To make sure of me, you mean," said Nick. "And now after all you see you haven't." "Well, perhaps it was that," sighed the old man confusedly. "All this is very bad for you--we'll talk again," Nick urged. "No, no--let us finish it now. I like to know what I'm doing. I shall rest better when I do know. There are great things to be done; the future will be full--the future will be fine," Mr. Carteret wandered. "Let me be distinct about this for Julia: that if we hadn't been sundered her generosity to me would have been complete--she'd have put her great fortune absolutely at my disposal," Nick said after a moment. "Her consciousness of all that naturally carries her over any particular distress in regard to what won't come to me now from another source." "Ah don't lose it!" the old man painfully pleaded. "It's in your hands, sir," Nick returned. "I mean Mrs. Dallow's fortune. It will be of the highest utility. That was what your father missed." "I shall miss more than my father did," said Nick. "Shell come back to you--I can't look at you and doubt that." Nick smiled with a slow headshake. "Never, never, never! You look at me, my grand old friend, but you don't see me. I'm not what you think." "What is it--what is it? _Have_ you been bad?" Mr. Carteret panted. "No, no; I'm not bad. But I'm different." "Different----?" "Different from my father. Different from Mrs. Dallow. Different from you." "Ah why do you perplex me?" the old man moaned. "You've done something." "I don't want to perplex you, but I have done something," said Nick, getting up. He had heard the door open softly behind him and Mrs. Lendon come forward with precautions. "What has he done--what has he done?" quavered Mr. Carteret to his sister. She, however, after a glance at the patient, motioned their young friend away and, bending over the bed, replied, in a voice expressive at that moment of an ample provision of vital comfort: "He has only excited you, I'm afraid, a little more than is good for you. Isn't your dear old head a little too high?" Nick regarded himself as justly banished, and he quitted the room with a ready acquiescence in any power to carry on the scene of which Mrs. Lendon might find herself possessed. He felt distinctly brutal as he heard his host emit a weak exhalation of assent to some change of position. But he would have reproached himself more if he had wished less to guard against the acceptance of an equivalent for duties unperformed. Mr. Carteret had had in his mind, characteristically, the idea of a fine high contract, and there was something more to be said about that. Nick went out of the house and stayed away for two or three hours, quite ready to regard the place as quieter and safer without him. He haunted the abbey as usual and sat a long time in its simplifying stillness, turning over many things. He came back again at the luncheon-hour, through the garden, and heard, somewhat to his surprise and greatly to his relief, that his host had composed himself promptly enough after their agitating interview. Mrs. Lendon talked at luncheon much as if she expected her brother to be, as she said, really quite fit again. She asked Nick no awkward question; which was uncommonly good of her, he thought, considering that she might have said, "What in the world were you trying to get out of him?" She only reported to our young man that the invalid had every hope of a short interview about half-past seven, a _very_ short one: this gentle emphasis was Mrs. Lendon's single tribute to the critical spirit. Nick divined that Mr. Carteret's desire for further explanations was really strong and had been capable of sustaining him through a bad morning, capable even of helping him--it would have been a secret and wonderful momentary conquest of weakness--to pass it off for a good one. He wished he might make a sketch of him, from the life, as he had seen him after breakfast; he had a conviction he could make a strong one, which would be a precious memento. But he shrank from proposing this--the dear man might think it unparliamentary. The doctor had called while Nick was out, and he came again at five o'clock without that inmate's seeing him. The latter was busy in his room at that hour: he wrote a short letter which took him a long time. But apparently there had been no veto on a resumption of talk, for at half-past seven his friend sent for him. The nurse at the door said, "Only a moment, I hope, sir?" but took him in and then withdrew. The prolonged daylight was in the room and its occupant again established on his pile of pillows, but with his head a little lower. Nick sat down by him and expressed the hope of not having upset him in the morning; but the old man, with fixed, enlarged eyes, took up their conversation exactly where they had left it. "What have you done--what have you done? Have you associated yourself with some other woman?" "No, no; I don't think she can accuse me of that." "Well then she'll come back to you if you take the right way with her." It might have been droll to hear the poor gentleman, in his situation, give his views on the right way with women; but Nick was not moved to enjoy that diversion. "I've taken the wrong way. I've done something that must spoil my prospects in that direction for ever. I've written a letter," the visitor went on; but his companion had already interrupted him. "You've written a letter?" "To my constituents, informing them of my determination to resign my seat." "To resign your seat?" "I've made up my mind, after no end of reflexion, dear Mr. Carteret, to work on quite other lines. I've a plan of becoming a painter. So I've given up the idea of a political life." "A painter?" Mr. Carteret seemed to turn whiter. "I'm going in for the portrait in oils. It sounds absurd, I know, and I'm thus specific only to show you I don't in the least expect you to count on me." The invalid had continued to stare at first; then his eyes slowly closed and he lay motionless and blank. "Don't let it trouble you now; it's a long story and rather a poor one; when you get better I'll tell you all about it. Well talk it over amicably and I'll bring you to my view," Nick went on hypocritically. He had laid his hand again on the hand beside him; it felt cold, and as the old man remained silent he had a moment of exaggerated fear. "This is dreadful news"--and Mr. Carteret opened his eyes. "Certainly it must seem so to you, for I've always kept from you--I was ashamed, and my present confusion is a just chastisement--the great interest I have always taken in the----!" But Nick broke down with a gasp, to add presently, with an intention of the pleasant and a sense of the foolish: "In the pencil and the brush." He spoke of his current confusion, though his manner might have been thought to show it but little. He was himself surprised at his brazen assurance and had to recognise that at the point things had come to now he was profoundly obstinate and quiet. "The pencil--the brush? They're not the weapons of a gentleman," Mr. Carteret pronounced. "I was sure that would be your feeling. I repeat that I mention them only because you once said you intended to do something for me, as the phrase is, and I thought you oughtn't to do it in ignorance." "My ignorance was better. Such knowledge isn't good for me." "Forgive me, my dear old friend," Nick kept it bravely up. "When you're better you'll see it differently." "I shall never be better now." "Ah no," Nick insisted; "it will really do you good after a little. Think it over quietly and you'll be glad I've stopped humbugging." "I loved you--I loved you as my son," the old man wailed. He sank on his knee beside the bed and leaned over him tenderly. "Get better, get better, and I'll be your son for the rest of your life." "Poor Dormer--poor Dormer!" Mr. Carteret continued to lament. "I admit that if he had lived I probably shouldn't have done it," said Nick. "I daresay I should have deferred to his prejudices even though thinking them narrow." "Do you turn against your father?" his host asked, making, to disengage his arm from the young man's touch, an effort betraying the irritation of conscious weakness. Nick got up at this and stood a moment looking down at him while he went on: "Do you give up your name, do you give up your country?" "If I do something good my country may like it." Nick spoke as if he had thought that out. "Do you regard them as equal, the two glories?" "Here comes your nurse to blow me up and turn me out," said Nick. The nurse had come in, but Mr. Carteret directed to her an audible dry, courteous "Be so good as to wait till I send for you," which arrested her in the large room at some distance from the bed and then had the effect of making her turn on her heel with a professional laugh. She clearly judged that an old gentleman with the fine manner of his prime might still be trusted to take care of himself. When she had gone that personage addressed to his visitor the question for which his deep displeasure lent him strength. "Do you pretend there's a nobler life than a high political career?" "I think the noble life's doing one's work well. One can do it very ill and be very base and mean in what you call a high political career. I haven't been in the House so many months without finding that out. It contains some very small souls." "You should stand against them--you should expose them!" stammered Mr. Carteret. "Stand against them, against one's own party!" The old man contended a moment with this and then broke out: "God forgive you, are you a Tory, are you a Tory?" "How little you understand me!" laughed Nick with a ring of bitterness. "Little enough--little enough, my boy. Have you sent your electors your dreadful letter?" "Not yet; but it's all ready and I shan't change my mind." "You will--you will. You'll think better of it. You'll see your duty," said the invalid almost coaxingly. "That seems very improbable, for my determination, crudely and abruptly as, to my great regret, it comes to you here, is the fruit of a long and painful struggle. The difficulty is that I see my duty just in this other effort." "An effort? Do you call it an effort to fall away, to sink far down, to give up every effort? What does your mother say, heaven help her?" Mr. Carteret went on before Nick could answer the other question. "I haven't told her yet." "You're ashamed, you're ashamed!" Nick only looked out of the west window now--he felt his ears turn hot. "Tell her it would have been sixty thousand. I had the money all ready." "I shan't tell her that," said Nick, redder still. "Poor woman--poor dear woman!" Mr. Carteret woefully cried. "Yes indeed--she won't like it." "Think it all over again; don't throw away a splendid future!" These words were uttered with a final flicker of passion--Nick had never heard such an accent on his old friend's lips. But he next began to murmur, "I'm tired--I'm very tired," and sank back with a groan and with closed lips. His guest gently assured him that he had but too much cause to be exhausted and that the worst was over now. He smoothed his pillows for him and said he must leave him, would send in the nurse. "Come back, come back," Mr. Carteret pleaded against that; "come back and tell me it's a horrible dream." Nick did go back very late that evening; his host had sent a message to his room. But one of the nurses was on the ground this time and made good her opposition watch in hand. The sick-room was shrouded and darkened; the shaded candle left the bed in gloom. Nick's interview with his venerable friend was the affair of but a moment; the nurse interposed, impatient and not understanding. She heard Nick say that he had posted his letter now and their companion flash out with an acerbity still savouring of the sordid associations of a world he had not done with: "Then of course my settlement doesn't take effect!" "Oh that's all right," Nick answered kindly; and he went off next morning by the early train--his injured host was still sleeping. Mrs. Lendon's habits made it easy for her to be present in matutinal bloom at the young man's hasty breakfast, and she sent a particular remembrance to Lady Agnes and (when he should see them) to the Ladies Flora and Elizabeth. Nick had a prevision of the spirit in which his mother at least would now receive hollow compliments from Beauclere. The night before, as soon as he had quitted Mr. Carteret, the old man said to the nurse that he wished Mr. Chayter instructed to go and fetch Mr. Mitton the first thing in the morning. Mr. Mitton was the leading solicitor at Beauclere. XXXIV The really formidable thing for Nick had been to tell his mother: a truth of which he was so conscious that he had the matter out with her the very morning he returned from Beauclere. She and Grace had come back the afternoon before from their own enjoyment of rural hospitality, and, knowing this--she had written him her intention from the country--he drove straight from the station to Calcutta Gardens. There was a little room on the right of the house-door known as his own room; but in which of a morning, when he was not at home, Lady Agnes sometimes wrote her letters. These were always numerous, and when she heard our young man's cab she happened to be engaged with them at the big brass-mounted bureau that had belonged to his father, where, amid a margin of works of political reference, she seemed to herself to make public affairs feel the point of her elbow. She came into the hall to meet her son and to hear about their benefactor, and Nick went straight back into the room with her and closed the door. It would be in the evening paper and she would see it, and he had no right to allow her to wait for that. It proved indeed a terrible hour; and when ten minutes later Grace, who had learned upstairs her brother's return, went down for further news of him she heard from the hall a sound of voices that made her first pause and then retrace her steps on tiptoe. She mounted to the drawing-room and crept about there, palpitating, looking at moments into the dull street and wondering what on earth had taken place. She had no one to express her wonder to, for Florence Tressilian had departed and Biddy after breakfast betaken herself, in accordance with a custom now inveterate, to Rosedale Road. Her mother was unmistakably and passionately crying--a fact tremendous in its significance, for Lady Agnes had not often been brought so low. Nick had seen her cry, but this almost awful spectacle had seldom been offered to Grace, and it now convinced her that some dreadful thing had happened. That was of course in order, after Nick's mysterious quarrel with Julia, which had made his mother so ill and was at present followed up with new horrors. The row, as Grace mentally phrased it, had had something to do with the rupture of the lovers--some deeper depth of disappointment had begun to yawn. Grace asked herself if they were talking about Broadwood; if Nick had demanded that in the conditions so unpleasantly altered Lady Agnes should restore that awfully nice house to its owner. This was very possible, but why should he so suddenly have broken out about it? And, moreover, their mother, though sore to bleeding about the whole business--for Broadwood, in its fresh comfort, was too delightful--wouldn't have met this pretension with tears: hadn't she already so perversely declared that they couldn't decently continue to make use of the place? Julia had said that of course they must go on, but Lady Agnes was prepared with an effective rejoinder to that. It didn't consist of words--it was to be austerely practical, was to consist of letting Julia see, at the moment she should least expect it, that they quite wouldn't go on. Lady Agnes was ostensibly waiting for this moment--the moment when her renunciation would be most impressive. Grace was conscious of how she had for many days been moving with her mother in darkness, deeply stricken by Nick's culpable--oh he was culpable!--loss of his prize, but feeling an obscure element in the matter they didn't grasp, an undiscovered explanation that would perhaps make it still worse, though it might make _them_, poor things, a little better. He had explained nothing, he had simply said, "Dear mother, we don't hit it off, after all; it's an awful bore, but we don't"--as if that were in the dire conditions an adequate balm for two aching hearts. From Julia naturally no flood of light was to be looked for--Julia _never_ humoured curiosity--and, though she very often did the thing you wouldn't suppose, she was not unexpectedly apologetic in this case. Grace recognised that in such a position it would savour of apology for her to disclose to Lady Agnes her grounds for having let Nick off; and she wouldn't have liked to be the person to suggest to Julia that any one looked for anything from her. Neither of the disunited pair blamed the other or cast an aspersion, and it was all very magnanimous and superior and impenetrable and exasperating. With all this Grace had a suspicion that Biddy knew something more, that for Biddy the tormenting curtain had been lifted. Biddy had come and gone in these days with a perceptible air of detachment from the tribulations of home. It had made her, fortunately, very pretty--still prettier than usual: it sometimes happened that at moments when Grace was most angry she had a faint sweet smile which might have been drawn from some source of occult consolation. It was perhaps in some degree connected with Peter Sherringham's visit, as to which the girl had not been superstitiously silent. When Grace asked her if she had secret information and if it pointed to the idea that everything would be all right in the end, she pretended to know nothing--What should she know? she asked with the loveliest arch of eyebrows over an unblinking candour--and begged her sister not to let Lady Agnes believe her better off than themselves. She contributed nothing to their gropings save a much better patience, but she went with noticeable regularity, on the pretext of her foolish modelling, to Rosedale Road. She was frankly on Nick's side; not going so far as to say he had been right, but saying distinctly how sure she was that, whatever had happened, he couldn't have helped it, not a mite. This was striking, because, as Grace knew, the younger of the sisters had been much favoured by Julia and wouldn't have sacrificed her easily. It associated itself in the irritated mind of the elder with Biddy's frequent visits to the studio and made Miss Dormer ask herself if the crisis in Nick's and Julia's business had not somehow been linked to that unnatural spot. She had gone there two or three times while Biddy was working, gone to pick up any clue to the mystery that might peep out. But she had put her hand on nothing more--it wouldn't have occurred to her to say nothing less--than the so dreadfully pointed presence of Gabriel Nash. She once found that odd satellite, to her surprise, paying a visit to her sister--he had come for Nick, who was absent; she remembered how they had met in Paris and how little he had succeeded with them. When she had asked Biddy afterwards how she could receive him that way Biddy had replied that even she, Grace, would have some charity for him if she could hear how fond he was of poor Nick. He had talked to her only of Nick--of nothing else. Grace had observed how she spoke of Nick as injured, and had noted the implication that some one else, ceasing to be fond of him, was thereby condemned in Biddy's eyes. It seemed to Grace that some one else had at least a right not to like some of his friends. The studio struck her as mean and horrid; and so far from suggesting to her that it could have played a part in making Nick and Julia fall out she only felt how little its dusty want of consequence, could count, one way or the other, for Julia. Grace, who had no opinions on art, saw no merit whatever in those "impressions" on canvas from Nick's hand with which the place was bestrewn. She didn't at all wish her brother to have talent in that direction, yet it was secretly humiliating to her that he hadn't more. Nick meanwhile felt a pang of almost horrified penitence, in the little room on the right of the hall, the moment after he had made his mother really understand he had thrown up his scat and that it would probably be in the evening papers. That she would take this very ill was an idea that had pressed upon him hard enough, but she took it even worse than he had feared. He measured, in the look she gave him when the full truth loomed upon her, the mortal cruelty of her distress; her face was like that of a passenger on a ship who sees the huge bows of another vessel towering close out of the fog. There are visions of dismay before which the best conscience recoils, and though Nick had made his choice on all the grounds there were a few minutes in which he would gladly have admitted that his wisdom was a dark mistake. His heart was in his throat, he had gone too far; he had been ready to disappoint his mother--he had not been ready to destroy her. Lady Agnes, I hasten to add, was not destroyed; she made, after her first drowning gasp, a tremendous scene of opposition, in the face of which her son could only fall back on his intrenchments. She must know the worst, he had thought: so he told her everything, including the little story of the forfeiture of his "expectations" from Mr. Carteret. He showed her this time not only the face of the matter, but what lay below it; narrated briefly the incident in his studio which had led to Julia Dallow's deciding she couldn't after all put up with him. This was wholly new to Lady Agnes, she had had no clue to it, and he could instantly see how it made the event worse for her, adding a hideous positive to an abominable negative. He noted now that, distressed and distracted as she had been by his rupture with Julia, she had still held to the faith that their engagement would come on again; believing evidently that he had a personal empire over the mistress of Harsh which would bring her back. Lady Agnes was forced to recognise this empire as precarious, to forswear the hope of a blessed renewal from the moment the question was of base infatuations on his own part. Nick confessed to an infatuation, but did his best to show her it wasn't base; that it wasn't--since Julia had had faith in his loyalty--for the person of the young lady who had been discovered posturing to him and whom he had seen but half-a-dozen times in his life. He endeavoured to recall to his mother the identity of this young lady, he adverted to the occasion in Paris when they all had seen her together. But Lady Agnes's mind and memory were a blank on the subject of Miss Miriam Rooth and she wanted to hear nothing whatever about her: it was enough that she was the cause of their ruin and a part of his pitiless folly. She needed to know nothing of her to allude to her as if it were superfluous to give a definite name to the class to which she belonged. But she gave a name to the group in which Nick had now taken his place, and it made him feel after the lapse of years like a small, scolded, sorry boy again; for it was so far away he could scarcely remember it--besides there having been but a moment or two of that sort in his happy childhood--the time when this parent had slapped him and called him a little fool. He was a big fool now--hugely immeasurable; she repeated the term over and over with high-pitched passion. The most painful thing in this painful hour was perhaps his glimpse of the strange feminine cynicism that lurked in her fine sense of injury. Where there was such a complexity of revolt it would have been difficult to pick out particular wrongs; but Nick could see that, to his mother's imagination, he was most a fool for not having kept his relations with the actress, whatever they were, better from Julia's knowledge. He remained indeed freshly surprised at the ardour with which she had rested her hopes on Julia. Julia was certainly a combination--she was accomplished, she was a sort of leading woman and she was rich; but after all--putting aside what she might be to a man in love with her--she was not the keystone of the universe. Yet the form in which the consequences of his apostasy appeared most to come home to Lady Agnes was the loss for the Dormer family of the advantages attached to the possession of Mrs. Dallow. The larger mortification would round itself later; for the hour the damning thing was that Nick had made that lady the gift of an unforgivable grievance. He had clinched their separation by his letter to his electors--and that above all was the wickedness of the letter. Julia would have got over the other woman, but she would never get over his becoming a nobody. Lady Agnes challenged him upon this low prospect exactly as if he had embraced it with the malignant purpose of making the return of his late intended impossible. She contradicted her premises and lost her way in her wrath. What had made him suddenly turn round if he had been in good faith before? He had never been in good faith--never, never; he had had from his earliest childhood the nastiest hankerings after a vulgar little daubing, trash-talking life; they were not in him, the grander, nobler aspirations--they never had been--and he had been anything but honest to lead her on, to lead them all on, to think he would do something: the fall and the shame would have been less for them if they had come earlier. Moreover, what need under heaven had he to tell Charles Carteret of the cruel folly on his very death-bed?--as if he mightn't have let it all alone and accepted the benefit the old man was so delighted to confer. No wonder Mr. Carteret would keep his money for his heirs if that was the way Nick proposed to repay him; but where was the common sense, where was the common charity, where was the common decency of tormenting him with such vile news in his last hours? Was he trying what he could invent that would break her heart, that would send her in sorrow down to her grave? Weren't they all miserable enough and hadn't he a ray of pity for his wretched sisters? The relation of effect and cause, in regard to his sisters' wretchedness, was but dimly discernible to Nick, who, however, perceived his mother genuinely to consider that his action had disconnected them all, still more than she held they were already disconnected, from the good things of life. Julia was money, Mr. Carteret was money--everything else was the absence of it. If these precious people had been primarily money for Nick it after all flattered the distributive impulse in him to have taken for granted that for the rest of the family too the difference would have been so great. For days, for weeks and months to come, the little room on the right of the hall was to vibrate for our young man, as if the very walls and window-panes still suffered, with the odious trial of his true temper. XXXV That evening--the evening of his return from Beauclere--he was conscious of a keen desire to get away, to go abroad, to leave behind him the little chatter his resignation would be sure to produce in an age of publicity which never discriminated as to the quality of events. Then he felt it decidedly better to stay, to see the business through on the spot. Besides, he would have to meet his constituents--would a parcel of cheese-eating burgesses ever have been "met" on so queer an occasion?--and when that was over the incident would practically be closed. Nick had an idea he knew in advance how it would affect him to be pointed at as a person who had given up a considerable chance of eventual "office" to take likenesses at so much a head. He wouldn't attempt down at Harsh to touch on the question of motive; for, given the nature of the public mind of Harsh, that would be a strain on his faculty of exposition. But as regards the chaff of the political world and of society he had a hope he should find chaff enough for retorts. It was true that when his mother twitted him in her own effective way he had felt rather flattened out; but then one's mother might have a heavier hand than any one else. He had not thrown up the House of Commons to amuse himself; he had thrown it up to work, to sit quietly down and bend over his task. If he should go abroad his parent might think he had some weak-minded view of joining Julia and trying, with however little hope, to win her back--an illusion it would be singularly pernicious to encourage. His desire for Julia's society had succumbed for the present at any rate to a dire interruption--he had become more and more aware of their speaking a different language. Nick felt like a young man who has gone to the Rhineland to "get up" his German for an examination--committed to talk, to read, to dream only in the new idiom. Now that he had taken his jump everything was simplified, at the same time that everything was pitched in a higher and intenser key; and he wondered how in the absence of a common dialect he had conversed on the whole so happily with Mrs. Dallow. Then he had aftertastes of understandings tolerably independent of words. He was excited because every fresh responsibility is exciting, and there was no manner of doubt he had accepted one. No one knew what it was but himself--Gabriel Nash scarcely counted, his whole attitude on the question of responsibility being so fantastic--and he would have to ask his dearest friends to take him on trust. Rather indeed he would ask nothing of any one, but would cultivate independence, mulishness, and gaiety, and fix his thoughts on a bright if distant morrow. It was disagreeable to have to remember that his task would not be sweetened by a sense of heroism; for if it might be heroic to give up the muses for the strife of great affairs, no romantic glamour worth speaking of would ever gather round an Englishman who in the prime of his strength had given up great or even small affairs for the muses. Such an original might himself privately and perversely regard certain phases of this inferior commerce as a great affair; but who would give him the benefit of that sort of confidence--except indeed a faithful, clever, exalted little sister Biddy, if he should have the good luck to have one? Biddy was in fact all ready for heroic flights and eager to think she might fight the battle of the beautiful by her brother's side; so that he had really to moderate her and remind her how little his actual job was a crusade with bugles and banners and how much a grey, sedentary grind, the charm of which was all at the core. You might have an emotion about it, and an emotion that would be a help, but this was not the sort of thing you could show--the end in view would seem so disproportionately small. Nick put it to her that one really couldn't talk to people about the "responsibility" of what she would see him pottering at in his studio. He therefore didn't "run," as he would have said, to winged words any more than he was forced to, having, moreover, a sense that apologetic work (if apology it should be called to carry the war straight into the enemy's country) might be freely left to Gabriel Nash. He laid the weight of explanation on his commentators, meeting them all on the firm ground of his own amusement. He saw he should live for months in a thick cloud of irony, not the finest air of the season, and he adopted the weapon to which a person whose use of tobacco is only occasional resorts when every one else produces a cigar--he puffed the spasmodic, defensive cigarette. He accepted as to what he had done the postulate of the obscurely tortuous, abounding so in that sense that his critics were themselves bewildered. Some of them felt that they got, as the phrase is, little out of him--he rose in his good humour so much higher than the "rise" they had looked for--on his very first encounter with the world after his scrimmage with his mother. He went to a dinner-party--he had accepted the invitation many days before--having seen his resignation, in the form of a telegram from Harsh, announced in the evening papers. The people he found there had seen it as well, and the wittiest wanted to know what he was now going to do. Even the most embarrassed asked if it were true he had changed his politics. He gave different answers to different persons, but left most of them under the impression that he had strange scruples of conscience. This, however, was not a formidable occasion, for there had happened to be no one present he would have desired, on the old basis, especially to gratify. There were real good friends it would be less easy to meet--Nick was almost sorry for an hour that he had so many real good friends. If he had had more enemies the case would have been simpler, and he was fully aware that the hardest thing of all would be to be let off too easily. Then he would appear to himself to have been put, all round, on his generosity, and his deviation would thus wear its ugliest face. When he left the place at which he had been dining he betook himself to Rosedale Road: he saw no reason why he should go down to the House, though he knew he had not done with that yet. He had a dread of behaving as if he supposed he should be expected to make a farewell speech, and was thankful his eminence was not of a nature to create on such an occasion a demand for his oratory. He had in fact nothing whatever to say in public--not a vain word, not a sorry syllable. Though the hour was late he found Gabriel Nash established in his studio, drawn thither by the fine exhilaration of having seen an evening paper. Trying it late, on the chance, he had been told by Nick's servant that Nick would sleep there that night, and he had come in to wait, he was so eager to congratulate him. Nick submitted with a good grace to his society--he was tired enough to go to bed, but was restless too--in spite of noting now, oddly enough, that Nash's congratulations could add little to his fortitude. He had felt a good deal, before, as if he were in this philosopher's hands; but since making his final choice he had begun to strike himself as all in his own. Gabriel might have been the angel of that name, but no angel could assist him much henceforth. Nash indeed was as true as ever to his genius while he lolled on a divan and emitted a series of reflexions that were even more ingenious than opportune. Nick walked up and down the room, and it might have been supposed from his manner that he was impatient for his friend to withdraw. This idea would have been contradicted, however, by the fact that subsequently, after the latter had quitted him, he continued to perambulate. He had grown used to Gabriel and must now have been possessed of all he had to say. That was one's penalty with persons whose main gift was for talk, however inspiring; talk engendered a sense of sameness much sooner than action. The things a man did were necessarily more different from each other than the things he said, even if he went in for surprising you. Nick felt Nash could never surprise him any more save by mere plain perpetration. He talked of his host's future, talked of Miriam Rooth and of Peter Sherringham, whom he had seen at that young woman's and whom he described as in a predicament delightful to behold. Nick put a question about Peter's predicament and learned, rather to his disappointment, that it consisted only of the fact that he was in love with Miriam. He appealed to his visitor to do better than this, and Nash then added the touch that Sherringham wouldn't be able to have her. "Oh they've ideas!" he said when Nick asked him why. "What ideas? So has he, I suppose." "Yes, but they're not the same." "Well, they'll nevertheless arrange something," Nick opined. "You'll have to help them a bit. She's in love with another man," Nash went on. "Do you mean with you?" "Oh, I'm never another man--I'm always more the wrong one than the man himself. It's you she's after." And on his friend's asking him what he meant by this Nash added: "While you were engaged in transferring her image to the tablet of your genius you stamped your own on that of her heart." Nick stopped in his walk, staring. "Ah, what a bore!" "A bore? Don't you think her formed to please?" Nick wondered, but didn't conclude. "I wanted to go on with her--now I can't." Nash himself, however, jumped straight to what really mattered. "My dear fellow, it only makes her handsomer. I wondered what happy turn she had taken." "Oh, that's twaddle," said Nick, turning away. "Besides, has she told you?" "No, but her mother has." "Has she told her mother?" "Mrs. Rooth says not. But I've known Mrs. Rooth to say that which isn't." "Apply that rule then to the information you speak of." "Well, since you press me, I know more," Gabriel said. "Miriam knows you're engaged to a wonderful, rich lady; she told me as much, told me she had seen her here. That was enough to set her off--she likes forbidden fruit." "I'm not engaged to any lady whatever. I was," Nick handsomely conceded, "but we've altered our minds." "Ah, what a pity!" his friend wailed. "Mephistopheles!"--and he stopped again with the point of this. "Pray then whom do you call Margaret? May I ask if your failure of interest in the political situation is the cause of this change in your personal one?" Nash went on. Nick signified that he mightn't; whereupon he added: "I'm not in the least devilish--I only mean it's a pity you've altered your minds, since Miriam may in consequence alter hers. She goes from one thing to another. However, I won't tell her." "I will then!" Nick declared between jest and earnest. "Would that really be prudent?" his companion asked more completely in the frolic key. "At any rate," he resumed, "nothing would induce me to interfere with Peter Sherringham. That sounds fatuous, but to you I don't mind appearing an ass." "The thing would be to get Sherringham, out of spite," Nash threw off, "to entangle himself with another woman." "What good would that do?" "Ah, Miriam would then begin to think of him." "Spite surely isn't a conceivable motive--for a healthy man." The plea, however, found Gabriel ready. "Sherringham's just precisely not a healthy man. He's too much in love." "Then he won't care for another woman." "He would try to, and that would produce its effect--its effect on Miriam." "You talk like an American novel. Let him try, and God keep us all straight." Nick adverted in extreme silence to his poor little Biddy and greatly hoped--he would have to see to it a little--that Peter wouldn't "try" on _her_. He changed the subject and before Nash withdrew took occasion to remark--the occasion was offered by some new allusion of the visitor's to the sport he hoped to extract from seeing Nick carry out everything to which he stood committed--that the comedy of the matter would fall flat and the incident pass unnoticed. But Nash lost no heart. "Oh, if you'll simply do your part I'll take care of the rest." "If you mean by doing my part minding my business and working like a beaver I shall easily satisfy you," Nick replied. "Ah, you reprobate, you'll become another Sir Joshua, a mere P.R.A.!" his companion railed, getting up to go. When he had gone Nick threw himself back on the cushions of the divan and, with his hands locked above his head, sat a long time lost in thought. He had sent his servant to bed; he was unmolested. He gazed before him into the gloom produced by the unheeded burning-out of the last candle. The vague outer light came in through the tall studio window and the painted images, ranged about, looked confused in the dusk. If his mother had seen him she might have thought he was staring at his father's ghost. XXXVI The night Peter Sherringham walked away from Balaklava Place with Gabriel Nash the talk of the two men directed itself, as was natural at the time, to the question of Miriam's future fame and the pace, as Nash called it, at which she would go. Critical spirits as they both were, and one of them as dissimulative in passion as the other was paradoxical in the absence of it, they yet took her career for granted as completely as the simple-minded, a pair of hot spectators in the pit, might have done, and exchanged observations on the assumption that the only uncertain element would be the pace. This was a proof of general subjugation. Peter wished not to show, yet wished to know, and in the restlessness of his anxiety was ready even to risk exposure, great as the sacrifice might be of the imperturbable, urbane scepticism most appropriate to a secretary of embassy. He couldn't rid himself of the sense that Nash had got up earlier than he, had had opportunities of contact in days already distant, the days of Mrs. Rooth's hungry foreign rambles. Something of authority and privilege stuck to him from this, and it made Sherringham still more uncomfortable when he was most conscious that, at the best, even the trained diplomatic mind would never get a grasp of Miriam as a whole. She was constructed to revolve like the terraqueous globe; some part or other of her was always out of sight or in shadow. Peter talked to conceal his feelings, and, like many a man practising that indirectness, rather lost himself in the wood. They agreed that, putting strange accidents aside, the girl would go further than any one had gone in England within the memory of man; and that it was a pity, as regards marking the comparison, that for so long no one had gone any distance worth speaking of. They further agreed that it would naturally seem absurd to any one who didn't know, their prophesying such big things on such small evidence; and they agreed lastly that the absurdity quite vanished as soon as the prophets knew as _they_ knew. Their knowledge--they quite recognised this--was simply confidence raised to a high point, the communication of their young friend's own confidence. The conditions were enormously to make, but it was of the very essence of Miriam's confidence that she would make them. The parts, the plays, the theatres, the "support," the audiences, the critics, the money were all to be found, but she cast a spell that prevented this from seeming a serious hitch. One mightn't see from one day to the other what she would do or how she would do it, but this wouldn't stay her steps--she would none the less go on. She would have to construct her own road, as it were, but at the worst there would only be delays in making it. These delays would depend on the hardness of the stones she had to break. As Peter had noted, you never knew where to "have" Gabriel Nash; a truth exemplified in his unexpected delight at the prospect of Miriam's drawing forth the modernness of the age. You might have thought he would loathe that modernness; but he had a joyous, amused, amusing vision of it--saw it as something huge and fantastically vulgar. Its vulgarity would rise to the grand style, like that of a London railway station, and the publicity achieved by their charming charge be as big as the globe itself. All the machinery was ready, the platform laid; the facilities, the wires and bells and trumpets, the roaring, deafening newspaperism of the period--its most distinctive sign--were waiting for her, their predestined mistress, to press her foot on the spring and set them all in motion. Gabriel brushed in a large, bright picture of her progress through the time and round the world, round it and round it again, from continent to continent and clime to clime; with populations and deputations, reporters and photographers, placards and interviews and banquets, steamers, railways, dollars, diamonds, speeches and artistic ruin all jumbled into her train. Regardless of expense the spectacle would be and thrilling, though somewhat monotonous, the drama--a drama more bustling than any she would put on the stage and a spectacle that would beat everything for scenery. In the end her divine voice would crack, screaming to foreign ears and antipodal barbarians, and her clever manner would lose all quality, simplified to a few unmistakable knock-down dodges. Then she would be at the fine climax of life and glory, still young and insatiate, but already coarse, hard, and raddled, with nothing left to do and nothing left to do it with, the remaining years all before her and the _raison d'être_ all behind. It would be splendid, dreadful, grotesque. "Oh, she'll have some good years--they'll be worth having," Peter insisted as they went. "Besides, you see her too much as a humbug and too little as a real producer. She has ideas--great ones; she loves the thing for itself. That may keep a woman serious." "Her greatest idea must always be to show herself, and fortunately she has a great quantity of that treasure to show. I think of her absolutely as a real producer, but as a producer whose production is her own person. No 'person,' even as fine a one as hers, will stand that for more than an hour, so that humbuggery has very soon to lend a hand. However," Nash continued, "if she's a fine humbug it will do as well, it will perfectly suit the time. We can all be saved by vulgarity; that's the solvent of all difficulties and the blessing of this delightful age. One doesn't die of it--save in soul and sense: one dies only of minding it. Therefore let no man despair--a new hope has dawned." "She'll do her work like any other worker, with the advantage over many that her talent's rare," Peter obliquely answered. "Compared with the life of many women that's security and sanity of the highest order. Then she can't help her beauty. You can't vulgarise that." "Oh, can't you?" Gabriel cried. "It will abide with her till the day of her death. It isn't a mere superficial freshness. She's very noble." "Yes, that's the pity of it," said Nash. "She's a big more or less directed force, and I quite admit that she'll do for a while a lot of good. She'll have brightened up the world for a great many people--have brought the ideal nearer to them and held it fast for an hour with its feet on earth and its great wings trembling. That's always something, for blest is he who has dropped even the smallest coin into the little iron box that contains the precious savings of mankind. Miriam will doubtless have dropped a big gold-piece. It will be found in the general scramble on the day the race goes bankrupt. And then for herself she'll have had a great go at life." "Oh yes, she'll have got out of her hole--she won't have vegetated," Peter concurred. "That makes her touching to me--it adds to the many good reasons for which one may want to help her. She's tackling a big job, and tackling it by herself; throwing herself upon the world in good faith and dealing with it as she can; meeting alone, in her youth, her beauty, her generosity, all the embarrassments of notoriety and all the difficulties of a profession of which, if one half's what's called brilliant the other's frankly odious." "She has great courage, but you speak of her as solitary with such a lot of us all round her?" Nash candidly inquired. "She's a great thing for you and me, but we're a small thing for her." "Well, a good many small things, if they but stick together, may make up a mass," Gabriel said. "There must always be the man, you see. He's the indispensable element in such a life, and he'll be the last thing she'll ever lack." "What man are you talking about?" Peter asked with imperfect ease. "The man of the hour, whoever he is. She'll inspire innumerable devotions." "Of course she will, and they'll be precisely a part of the insufferable side of her life." "Insufferable to whom?" Nash demanded. "Don't forget that the insufferable side of her life will be just the side she'll thrive on. You can't eat your cake and have it, and you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs. You can't at once sit by the fire and parade about the world, and you can't take all chances without having some adventures. You can't be a great actress without the luxury of nerves. Without a plentiful supply--or without the right ones--you'll only be second fiddle. If you've all the tense strings you may take life for your fiddlestick. Your nerves and your adventures, your eggs and your cake, are part of the cost of the most expensive of professions. You play with human passions, with exaltations and ecstasies and terrors, and if you trade on the fury of the elements you must know how to ride the storm." Well, Peter thought it over. "Those are the fine old commonplaces about the artistic temperament, but I usually find the artist a very meek, decent, little person." "You _never_ find the artist--you only find his work, and that's all you need find. When the artist's a woman, and the woman's an actress, meekness and decency will doubtless be there in the right proportions," Nash went on. "Miriam will represent them for you, if you give her her cue, with the utmost charm." "Of course she'll inspire devotions--_that's_ all right," said Peter with a wild cheerfulness. "And of course they'll inspire responses, and with that consequence--don't you see?--they'll mitigate her solitude, they'll even enliven it," Nash set forth. "She'll probably box a good many ears: that'll be lively!" Peter returned with some grimness. "Oh magnificent!--it will be a merry life. Yet with its tragic passages, its distracted or its pathetic hours," Gabriel insisted. "In short, a little of everything." They walked on without further speech till at last Peter resumed: "The best thing for a woman in her situation is to marry some decent care-taking man." "Oh I daresay she'll do that too!" Nash laughed; a remark as a result of which his companion lapsed afresh into silence. Gabriel left him a little to enjoy this; after which he added: "There's somebody she'd marry to-morrow." Peter wondered. "Do you mean her friend Dashwood?" "No, no, I mean Nick Dormer." "She'd marry _him_?" Peter gasped. "I mean her head's full of him. But she'll hardly get the chance." Peter watched himself. "Does she like him as much as that?" "I don't quite know how much you mean, but enough for all practical ends." "Marrying a fashionable actress is hardly a practical end." "Certainly not, but I'm not speaking from his point of view." Nash was perfectly lucid. "Moreover, I thought you just now said it would be such a good thing for her." "To marry Nick Dormer?" "You said a good decent man, and he's one of the very decentest." "I wasn't thinking of the individual, but of the protection. It would fence her about, settle certain questions, or appear to; it would make things safe and comfortable for her and keep a lot of cads and blackguards away." "She ought to marry the prompter or the box-keeper," said Nash. "Then it would be all right. I think indeed they generally do, don't they?" Peter felt for a moment a strong disposition to drop his friend on the spot, to cross to the other side of the street and walk away without him. But there was a different impulse which struggled with this one and after a minute overcame it, the impulse that led to his saying presently: "Has she told you she's--a--she's in love with Nick?" "No, no--that's not the way I know it." "Has Nick told you then?" "On the contrary, I've told _him_." "You've rendered him a questionable service if you've no proof," Peter pronounced. "My proof's only that I've seen her with him. She's charming, poor dear thing." "But surely she isn't in love with every man she's charming to." "I mean she's charming to _me_," Nash returned. "I see her that way. I see her interested--and what it does to her, with her, _for_ her. But judge for yourself--the first time you get a chance." "When shall I get a chance? Nick doesn't come near her." "Oh he'll come, he'll come; his picture isn't finished." "You mean _he'll_ be the box-keeper, then?" "My dear fellow, I shall never allow it," said Gabriel Nash. "It would be idiotic and quite unnecessary. He's beautifully arranged--in quite a different line. Fancy his taking that sort of job on his hands! Besides, she'd never expect it; she's not such a goose. They're very good friends--it will go on that way. She's an excellent person for him to know; she'll give him lots of ideas of the plastic kind. He would have been up there before this, but it has taken him time to play his delightful trick on his constituents. That of course is pure amusement; but when once his effect has been well produced he'll get back to business, and his business will be a very different matter from Miriam's. Imagine him writing her advertisements, living on her money, adding up her profits, having rows and recriminations with her agent, carrying her shawl, spending his days in her rouge-pot. The right man for that, if she must have one, will turn up. '_Pour le mariage, non_.' She isn't wholly an idiot; she really, for a woman, quite sees things as they are." As Peter had not crossed the street and left Gabriel planted he now suffered the extremity of irritation. But descrying in the dim vista of the Edgware Road a vague and vigilant hansom he waved his stick with eagerness and with the abrupt declaration that, feeling tired, he must drive the rest of his way. He offered Nash, as he entered the vehicle, no seat, but this coldness was not reflected in the lucidity with which that master of every subject went on to affirm that there was of course a danger--the danger that in given circumstances Miriam would leave the stage. "Leave it, you mean, for some man?" "For the man we're talking about." "For Nick Dormer?" Peter asked from his place in the cab, his paleness lighted by its lamps. "If he should make it a condition. But why should he? why should he make _any_ conditions? He's not an ass either. You see it would be a bore"--Nash kept it up while the hansom waited--"because if she were to do anything of that sort she'd make him pay for the sacrifice." "Oh yes, she'd make him pay for the sacrifice," Peter blindly concurred. "And then when he had paid she'd go back to her footlights," Gabriel developed from the curbstone as his companion closed the apron of the cab. "I see--she'd go back--good-night," Peter returned. "_Please_ go on!" he cried to the driver through the hole in the roof. And while the vehicle rolled away he growled to himself: "Of course she would--and quite right!" XXXVII "Judge for yourself when you get a chance," Nash had said to him; and as it turned out he was able to judge two days later, for he found his cousin in Balaklava Place on the Tuesday following his walk with their insufferable friend. He had not only stayed away from the theatre on the Monday evening--he regarded this as an achievement of some importance--but had not been near Miriam during the day. He had meant to absent himself from her company on Tuesday as well; a determination confirmed by the fact that the afternoon turned to rain. But when at ten minutes to five o'clock he jumped into a hansom and directed his course to Saint John's Wood it was precisely upon the weather that he shifted the responsibility of his behaviour. Miriam had dined when he reached the villa, but she was lying down, unduly fatigued, before going to the theatre. Mrs. Rooth was, however, in the drawing-room with three gentlemen, in two of whom the fourth visitor was not startled to recognise Basil Dashwood and Gabriel Nash. Dashwood appeared to have become Miriam's brother-in-arms and a second child--a fonder one--to Mrs. Rooth; it had reached Peter on some late visit that the young actor had finally moved his lodgings into the quarter, making himself a near neighbour for all sorts of convenience. "Hang his convenience!" Peter thought, perceiving that Mrs. Lovick's "Arty" was now altogether one of the family. Oh the family!--it was a queer one to be connected with: that consciousness was acute in Sherringham's breast to-day as he entered Mrs. Rooth's little circle. The place was filled with cigarette-smoke and there was a messy coffee-service on the piano, whose keys Basil Dashwood lightly touched for his own diversion. Nash, addressing the room of course, was at one end of a little sofa with his nose in the air, and Nick Dormer was at the other end, seated much at his ease and with a certain privileged appearance of having been there often before, though Sherringham knew he had not. He looked uncritical and very young, as rosy as a school-boy on a half-holiday. It was past five o'clock in the day, but Mrs. Rooth was not dressed; there was, however, no want of finish in her elegant attitude--the same relaxed grandeur (she seemed to let you understand) for which she used to be distinguished at Castle Nugent when the house was full. She toyed incongruously, in her unbuttoned wrapper, with a large tinsel fan which resembled a theatrical property. It was one of the discomforts of Peter's position that many of those minor matters which are superficially at least most characteristic of the histrionic life had power to displease him, so that he was obliged constantly to overlook and condone and pretend. He disliked besmoked drawing-rooms and irregular meals and untidy arrangements; he could suffer from the vulgarity of Mrs. Rooth's apartments, the importunate photographs which gave on his nerves, the barbarous absence of signs of an orderly domestic life, the odd volumes from the circulating library (you could see what they were--the very covers told you--at a glance) tumbled about under smeary cups and glasses. He hadn't waited till now to feel it "rum" that fate should have let him in for such contacts; but as he stood before his hostess and her companions he wondered perhaps more than ever why he should. Her companions somehow, who were not responsible, didn't keep down his wonder; which was particularly odd, since they were not superficially in the least of Bohemian type. Almost the first thing that struck him, as happened, in coming into the room, was the fresh fact of the high good looks of his cousin, a gentleman, to one's taste and for one's faith, in a different enough degree from the stiff-collared, conversible Dashwood. Peter didn't hate Nick for being of so fine an English grain; he knew rather the brush of a new wave of annoyance at Julia's stupid failure to get on with him under that good omen. It was his first encounter with the late member for Harsh since his arrival in London: they had been on one side and the other so much taken up with their affairs. Since their last meeting Nick had, as we know, to his kinsman's perception, really put on a new character: he had done the finest stroke of business in the quietest way. This had made him a presence to be counted with, and in just the sense in which poor Peter desired least to count. Poor Peter, after his somersault in the blue, had just lately been much troubled; he was ravaged by contending passions; he paid every hour in a torment of unrest for what was false in his position, the impossibility of keeping the presentable parts of his character together, the opposition of interest and desire. Nick, his junior and a lighter weight, had settled _his_ problem and showed no wounds; there was something impertinent and mystifying in it. Yet he looked, into the bargain, too innocently young and happy, and too careless and modest and amateurish, to figure as a rival or even as the genius he was apparently going to try to be--the genius that the other day, in the studio there with Biddy, Peter had got a startled glimpse of his power to become. Julia's brother would have liked to be aware of grounds of resentment, to be able to hold she had been badly treated or that Nick was basely fatuous, for in that case he might have had the resource of taking offence. But where was the outrage of his merely being liked by a woman in respect to whom one had definitely denied one's self the luxury of pretensions, especially if, as the wrong-doer, he had taken no action in the matter? It could scarcely be called wrong-doing to call, casually, on an afternoon when the lady didn't seem to be there. Peter could at any rate rejoice that Miriam didn't; and he proposed to himself suggesting to Nick after a little that they should adjourn together--they had such interesting things to talk about. Meanwhile Nick greeted him with a friendly freedom in which he could read neither confusion nor defiance. Peter was reassured against a danger he believed he didn't recognise and puzzled by a mystery he flattered himself he hadn't heeded. And he was still more ashamed of being reassured than of being puzzled. It must be recorded that Miriam's absence from the scene was not prolonged. Nick, as Sherringham gathered, had been about a quarter of an hour in the house, which would have given her, gratified by his presence, due time to array herself to come down to him. At all events she was in the room, prepared apparently to go to the theatre, very shortly after one of her guests had become sensible of how glad he was she was out of it. Familiarity had never yet cured him of a certain tremor of expectation, and even of suspense, in regard to her entrances; a flutter caused by the simple circumstance of her infinite variety. To say she was always acting would too much convey that she was often fatiguing; since her changing face affected this particular admirer at least not as a series of masks, but as a response to perceived differences, an intensity of that perception, or still more as something richly constructional, like the shifting of the scene in a play or like a room with many windows. The image she was to project was always incalculable, but if her present denied her past and declined responsibility for her future it made a good thing of the hour and kept the actual peculiarly fresh. This time the actual was a bright, gentle, graceful, smiling, young woman in a new dress, eager to go out, drawing on fresh gloves, who looked as if she were about to step into a carriage and--it was Gabriel Nash who thus formulated her physiognomy--do a lot of London things. The young woman had time to spare, however, and she sat down and talked and laughed and presently gave, as seemed to Peter, a deeper glow to the tawdry little room, which could do for others if it had to do for her. She described herself as in a state of nervous muddle, exhausted, blinded, _abrutie_, with the rehearsals of the forthcoming piece--the first night was close at hand, and it was going to be of a vileness: they would all see!--but there was no correspondence between this account of the matter and her present bravery of mood. She sent her mother away--to "put on some clothes or something"--and, left alone with the visitors, went to a long glass between the windows, talking always to Nick Dormer, and revised and rearranged a little her own attire. She talked to Nick, over her shoulder, and to Nick only, as if he were the guest to recognise and the others didn't count. She broke out at once on his having thrown up his seat, wished to know if the strange story told her by Mr. Nash were true--that he had knocked all the hopes of his party into pie. Nick took it any way she liked and gave a pleasant picture of his party's ruin, the critical condition of public affairs: he was as yet clearly closed to contrition or shame. The pilgrim from Paris, before Miriam's entrance, had not, in shaking hands with him, made even a roundabout allusion to his odd "game"; he felt he must somehow show good taste--so English people often feel--at the cost of good manners. But he winced on seeing how his scruples had been wasted, and was struck with the fine, jocose, direct turn of his kinsman's conversation with the young actress. It was a part of her unexpectedness that she took the heavy literal view of Nick's behaviour; declared frankly, though without ill nature, that she had no patience with his mistake. She was horribly disappointed--she had set her heart on his being a great statesman, one of the rulers of the people and the glories of England. What was so useful, what was so noble?--how it belittled everything else! She had expected him to wear a cordon and a star some day--acquiring them with the greatest promptitude--and then to come and see her in her _loge_: it would look so particularly well. She talked after the manner of a lovely Philistine, except perhaps when she expressed surprise at hearing--hearing from Gabriel Nash--that in England gentlemen accoutred with those emblems of their sovereign's esteem didn't so far forget themselves as to stray into the dressing-rooms of actresses. She admitted after a moment that they were quite right and the dressing-rooms of actresses nasty places; but she was sorry, for that was the sort of thing she had always figured in a corner--a distinguished man, slightly bald, in evening dress, with orders, admiring the smallness of a satin shoe and saying witty things. Nash was convulsed with hilarity at this--such a vision of the British political hero. Coming back from the glass and making that critic give her his place on the sofa, she seated herself near Nick and continued to express her regret at his perversity. "They all say that--all the charming women, but I shouldn't have looked for it from you," Nick replied. "I've given you such an example of what I can do in another line." "Do you mean my portrait? Oh I've got it, with your name and 'M.P.' in the corner, and that's precisely why I'm content. 'M.P.' in the corner of a picture is delightful, but I want to break the mould: I don't in the least insist on your giving specimens to others. And the artistic life, when you can lead another--if you've any alternative, however modest--is a very poor business. It comes last in dignity--after everything else. Ain't I up to my eyes in it and don't I truly know?" "You talk like my broken-hearted mother," said Nick. "Does she hate it so intensely?" "She has the darkest ideas about it--the wildest theories. I can't imagine where she gets them; partly I think from a general conviction that the 'esthetic'--a horrible insidious foreign disease--is eating the healthy core out of English life (dear old English life!) and partly from the charming pictures in _Punch_ and the clever satirical articles, pointing at mysterious depths of contamination, in the other weekly papers. She believes there's a dreadful coterie of uncannily artful and desperately refined people who wear a kind of loose faded uniform and worship only beauty--which is a fearful thing; that Gabriel has introduced me to it; that I now spend all my time in it, and that for its sweet sake I've broken the most sacred vows. Poor Gabriel, who, so far as I can make out, isn't in any sort of society, however bad!" "But I'm uncannily artful," Nash objected, "and though I can't afford the uniform--I believe you get it best somewhere in South Audley Street--I do worship beauty. I really think it's me the weekly papers mean." "Oh I've read the articles--I know the sort!" said Basil Dashwood. Miriam looked at him. "Go and see if the brougham's there--I ordered it early." Dashwood, without moving, consulted his watch. "It isn't time yet--I know more about the brougham than you. I've made a ripping good arrangement for her stable--it really costs her nothing," the young actor continued confidentially to Peter, near whom he had placed himself. "Your mother's quite right to be broken-hearted," Miriam declared, "and I can imagine exactly what she has been through. I should like to talk with her--I should like to see her." Nick showed on this easy amusement, reminding her she had talked to him while she sat for her portrait in quite the opposite sense, most helpfully and inspiringly; and Nash explained that she was studying the part of a political duchess and wished to take observations for it, to work herself into the character. The girl might in fact have been a political duchess as she sat, her head erect and her gloved hands folded, smiling with aristocratic dimness at Nick. She shook her head with stately sadness; she might have been trying some effect for Mary Stuart in Schiller's play. "I've changed since that. I want you to be the grandest thing there is--the counsellor of kings." Peter wondered if it possibly weren't since she had met his sister in Nick's studio that she had changed, if perhaps she hadn't seen how it might give Julia the sense of being more effectually routed to know that the woman who had thrown the bomb was one who also tried to keep Nick in the straight path. This indeed would involve an assumption that Julia might know, whereas it was perfectly possible she mightn't and more than possible that if she should she wouldn't care. Miriam's essential fondness for trying different ways was always there as an adequate reason for any particular way; a truth which, however, sometimes only half-prevented the particular way from being vexatious to a particular observer. "Yet after all who's more esthetic than you and who goes in more for the beautiful?" Nick asked. "You're never so beautiful as when you pitch into it." "Oh, I'm an inferior creature, of an inferior sex, and I've to earn my bread as I can. I'd give it all up in a moment, my odious trade--for an inducement." "And pray what do you mean by an inducement?" Nick demanded. "My dear fellow, she means you--if you'll give her a permanent engagement to sit for you!" Gabriel volunteered. "What singularly crude questions you ask!" "I like the way she talks," Mr. Dashwood derisively said, "when I gave up the most brilliant prospects, of very much the same kind as Mr. Dormer's, expressly to go on the stage." "You're an inferior creature too," Miriam promptly pronounced. "Miss Rooth's very hard to satisfy," Peter observed at this. "A man of distinction, slightly bald, in evening dress, with orders, in the corner of her _loge_--she has such a personage ready made to her hand and she doesn't so much as look at him. Am _I_ not an inducement? Haven't I offered you a permanent engagement?" "Your orders--where are your orders?" she returned with a sweet smile, getting up. "I shall be a minister next year and an ambassador before you know it. Then I shall stick on everything that can be had." "And they call _us_ mountebanks!" cried the girl. "I've been so glad to see you again--do you want another sitting?" she went on to Nick as if to take leave of him. "As many as you'll give me--I shall be grateful for all," he made answer. "I should like to do you as you are at present. You're totally different from the woman I painted--you're wonderful." "The Comic Muse!" she laughed. "Well, you must wait till our first nights are over--I'm _sur les dents_ till then. There's everything to do and I've to do it all. That fellow's good for nothing, for nothing but domestic life"--and she glanced at Basil Dashwood. "He hasn't an idea--not one you'd willingly tell of him, though he's rather useful for the stables. We've got stables now--or we try to look as if we had: Dashwood's ideas are _de cette force_. In ten days I shall have more time." "The Comic Muse? Never, never," Peter protested. "You're not to go smirking through the age and down to posterity--I'd rather see you as Medusa crowned with serpents. That's what you look like when you look best." "That's consoling--when I've just bought a lovely new bonnet, all red roses and bows. I forgot to tell you just now that when you're an ambassador you may propose anything you like," Miriam went on. "But forgive me if I make that condition. Seriously speaking, come to me glittering with orders and I shall probably succumb. I can't resist stars and garters. Only you must, as you say, have them all. I _don't_ like to hear Mr. Dormer talk the slang of the studio--like that phrase just now: it _is_ a fall to a lower state. However, when one's low one must crawl, and I'm crawling down to the Strand. Dashwood, see if mamma's ready. If she isn't I decline to wait; you must bring her in a hansom. I'll take Mr. Dormer in the brougham; I want to talk with Mr. Dormer; he must drive with me to the theatre. His situation's full of interest." Miriam led the way out of the room as she continued to chatter, and when she reached the house-door with the four men in her train the carriage had just drawn up at the garden-gate. It appeared that Mrs. Rooth was not ready, and the girl, in spite of a remonstrance from Nick, who had a sense of usurping the old lady's place, repeated her injunction that she should be brought on in a cab. Miriam's gentlemen hung about her at the gate, and she insisted on Nick's taking his seat in the brougham and taking it first. Before she entered she put her hand out to Peter and, looking up at him, held his own kindly. "Dear old master, aren't you coming to-night? I miss you when you're not there." "Don't go--don't go--it's too much," Nash freely declared. "She is wonderful," said Mr. Dashwood, all expert admiration; "she _has_ gone into the rehearsals tooth and nail. But nothing takes it out of her." "Nothing puts it into you, my dear!" Miriam returned. Then she pursued to Peter: "You're the faithful one--you're the one I count on." He was not looking at her; his eyes travelled into the carriage, where they rested on Nick Dormer, established on the farther seat with his face turned toward the farther window. He was the one, faithful or no, counted on or no, whom a charming woman had preferred to carry off, and there was clear triumph for him in that fact. Yet it pleased, it somewhat relieved, his kinsman to see his passivity as not a little foolish. Miriam noted something of this in Peter's eyes, for she exclaimed abruptly, "Don't kill him--he doesn't care for me!" With which she passed into the carriage and let it roll away. Peter stood watching it till he heard Dashwood again beside him. "You wouldn't believe what I make him do the whole thing for--a little rascal I know." "Good-bye; take good care of Mrs. Rooth," said Gabriel Nash, waving a bland farewell to the young actor. He gave a smiling survey of the heavens and remarked to Sherringham that the rain had stopped. Was he walking, was he driving, should they be going in the same direction? Peter cared little about his direction and had little account of it to give; he simply moved away in silence and with Gabriel at his side. This converser was partly an affliction to him; indeed the fact that he couldn't only make light of him added to the oppression. It was just to him nevertheless to note that he could hold his peace occasionally: he had for instance this afternoon taken little part in the talk at Balaklava Place. Peter greatly disliked to speak to him of Miriam, but he liked Nash himself to make free with her, and even liked him to say such things as might be a little viciously and unguardedly contradicted. He was not, however, moved to gainsay something dropped by his companion, disconnectedly, at the end of a few minutes; a word to the effect that she was after all the best-natured soul alive. All the same, Nash added, it wouldn't do for her to take possession of a nice life like Nick's; and he repeated that for his part he would never allow it. It would be on his conscience to interfere. To which Peter returned disingenuously that they might all do as they liked--it didn't matter a button to _him_. And with an effort to carry off that comedy he changed the subject. XXXVIII He wouldn't for a moment have admitted that he was jealous of his old comrade, but would almost have liked to be accused of it: for this would have given him a chance he rather lacked and missed, the right occasion to declare with plausibility that motives he couldn't avow had no application to his case. How could a man be jealous when he was not a suitor? how could he pretend to guard a property which was neither his own nor destined to become his own? There could be no question of loss when one had nothing at stake, and no question of envy when the responsibility of possession was exactly what one prayed to be delivered from. The measure of one's susceptibility was one's pretensions, and Peter was not only ready to declare over and over again that, thank God, he had none: his spiritual detachment was still more complete--he literally suffered from the fact that nobody appeared to care to hear him say it. He connected an idea of virtue and honour with his attitude, since surely it was a high case of conduct to have quenched a personal passion for the good of the public service. He had gone over the whole question at odd, irrepressible hours; he had returned, spiritually speaking, the buffet administered to him all at once, that day in Rosedale Road, by the spectacle of the _crânerie_ with which Nick could let worldly glories slide. Resolution for resolution he preferred after all another sort, and his own _crânerie_ would be shown in the way he should stick to his profession and stand up for British interests. If Nick had leaped over a wall he would leap over a river. The course of his river was already traced and his loins were already girded. Thus he was justified in holding that the measure of a man's susceptibility was a man's attitude: that was the only thing he was bound to give an account of. He was perpetually giving an account of it to his own soul in default of other listeners. He was quite angry at having tasted a sweetness in Miriam's assurance at the carriage--door, bestowed indeed with very little solemnity, that Nick didn't care for her. Wherein did it concern him that Nick cared for her or that Nick didn't? Wherein did it signify to him that Gabriel Nash should have taken upon himself to disapprove of a union between the young actress and the young painter and to frustrate an accident that might perhaps prove fortunate? For those had also been cooling words at the hour, though Peter blushed on the morrow to think that he felt in them anything but Nash's personal sublimity. He was ashamed of having been refreshed, and refreshed by so sickly a draught--it being all his theory that he was not in a fever. As for keeping an eye on Nick, it would soon become clear to that young man and that young man's charming friend that he had quite other uses for his eyes. The pair, with Nash to help, might straighten out their complications according to their light. He would never speak to Nick of Miriam; he felt indeed just now as if he should never speak to Nick of anything. He had traced the course of his river, as I say, and the real proof would be in the way he should, clearing the air, land on the opposite bank. It was a case for action--for vigorous, unmistakable action. He had done very little since his arrival in London but moon round a _fille de théâtre_ who was taken up partly, though she bluffed it off, with another man, and partly with arranging new petticoats for a beastly old "poetic drama"; but this little waste of time should instantly be made up. He had given himself a definite rope, and he had danced to the end of his rope, and now he would dance back. That was all right--so right that Peter could only express to himself how right it was by whistling with extravagance. He whistled as he went to dine with a great personage the day after his meeting with Nick in Balaklava Place; a great personage to whom he had originally paid his respects--it was high time--the day before that meeting, the previous Monday. The sense of omissions to repair, of a superior line to take, perhaps made him study with more zeal to please the personage, who gave him ten minutes and asked him five questions. A great many doors were successively opened before any palpitating pilgrim who was about to enter the presence of this distinguished man; but they were discreetly closed again behind Sherringham, and I must ask the reader to pause with me at the nearer end of the momentary vista. This particular pilgrim fortunately felt he could count on recognition not only as a faithful if obscure official in the great hierarchy, but as a clever young man who happened to be connected by blood with people his lordship had intimately known. No doubt it was simply as the clever young man that Peter received the next morning, from the dispenser of his lordship's hospitality, a note asking him to dine on the morrow. Such cards had come to him before, and he had always obeyed their call; he did so at present, however, with a sense of unusual intention. In due course his intention was translated into words; before the gentlemen left the dining-room he respectfully asked his noble host for some further brief and benevolent hearing. "What is it you want? Tell me now," the master of his fate replied, motioning to the rest of the company to pass out and detaining him where they stood. Peter's excellent training covered every contingency: he could always be as concise or as diffuse as the occasion required. Even he himself, however, was surprised at the quick felicity of the terms in which he was conscious of conveying that, were it compatible with higher conveniences, he should extremely like to be transferred to duties in a more distant quarter of the globe. Indeed, fond as he was of thinking himself a man of emotions controlled by civility, it is not impossible that a greater candour than he knew glimmered through Peter's expression and trembled through his tone as he presented this petition. He had aimed at a good manner in presenting it, but perhaps the best of the effect produced for his interlocutor was just where it failed, where it confessed a secret that the highest diplomacy would have guarded. Sherringham remarked to the minister that he didn't care in the least where the place might be, nor how little coveted a post; the further away the better, and the climate didn't matter. He would only prefer of course that there should be really something to do, though he would make the best of it even if there were not. He stopped in time, or at least thought he did, not to betray his covertly seeking relief from minding his having been jilted in a flight to latitudes unfavourable to human life. His august patron gave him a sharp look which for a moment seemed the precursor of a sharper question; but the moment elapsed and the question failed to come. This considerate omission, characteristic of a true man of the world and representing quick guesses and still quicker indifferences, made our gentleman from that moment his lordship's ardent partisan. What did come was a good-natured laugh and the exclamation: "You know there are plenty of swamps and jungles, if you want that sort of thing," Peter replied that it was very much that sort of thing he did want; whereupon his chief continued: "I'll see--I'll see. If anything turns up you shall hear." Something turned up the very next day: our young man, taken at his word, found himself indebted to the postman for a note of concise intimation that the high position of minister to the smallest of Central American republics would be apportioned him. The republic, though small, was big enough to be "shaky," and the position, though high, not so exalted that there were not much greater altitudes above it to which it was a stepping-stone. Peter, quite ready to take one thing with another, rejoiced at his easy triumph, reflected that he must have been even more noticed at headquarters than he had hoped, and, on the spot, consulting nobody and waiting for nothing, signified his unqualified acceptance of the place. Nobody with a grain of sense would have advised him to do anything else. It made him happier than he had supposed he should ever be again; it made him feel professionally in the train, as they said in Paris; it was serious, it was interesting, it was exciting, and his imagination, letting itself loose into the future, began once more to scale the crowning eminence. It was very simple to hold one's course if one really tried, and he blessed the variety of peoples. Further communications passed, the last enjoining on him to return to Paris for a short interval a week later, after which he would be advised of the date for his proceeding to his remoter duties. XXXIX The next thing he meanwhile did was to call with his news on Lady Agnes Dormer; it is not unworthy of note that he took on the other hand no step to make his promotion known to Miriam Rooth. To render it probable he should find his aunt he went at the luncheon-hour; and she was indeed on the point of sitting down to that repast with Grace. Biddy was not at home--Biddy was never at home now, her mother said: she was always at Nick's place, she spent her life there, she ate and drank there, she almost slept there. What she contrived to do there for so many hours and what was the irresistible spell Lady Agnes couldn't pretend she had succeeded in discovering. She spoke of this baleful resort only as "Nick's place," and spoke of it at first as little as possible. She judged highly probable, however, that Biddy would come in early that afternoon: there was something or other, some common social duty, she had condescended to promise she would perform with Grace. Poor Lady Agnes, whom Peter found somehow at once grim and very prostrate--she assured her nephew her nerves were all gone--almost abused her younger daughter for two minutes, having evidently a deep-seated need of abusing some one. I must yet add that she didn't wait to meet Grace's eye before recovering, by a rapid gyration, her view of the possibilities of things--those possibilities from which she still might squeeze, as a parent almost in despair, the drop that would sweeten her cup. "Dear child," she had the presence of mind to subjoin, "her only fault is after all that she adores her brother. She has a capacity for adoration and must always take her gospel from some one." Grace declared to Peter that her sister would have stayed at home if she had dreamed he was coming, and Lady Agnes let him know that she had heard all about the hour he had spent with the poor child at Nick's place and about his extraordinary good nature in taking the two girls to the play. Peter lunched in Calcutta Gardens, spending an hour there which proved at first unexpectedly and, as seemed to him, unfairly dismal. He knew from his own general perceptions, from what Biddy had told him and from what he had heard Nick say in Balaklava Place, that his aunt would have been wounded by her son's apostasy; but it was not till he saw her that he appreciated the dark difference this young man's behaviour had made in the outlook of his family. Evidently that behaviour had sprung a dreadful leak in the great vessel of their hopes. These were things no outsider could measure, and they were none of an outsider's business; it was enough that Lady Agnes struck him really as a woman who had received her death-blow. She looked ten years older; she was white and haggard and tragic. Her eyes burned with a strange fitful fire that prompted one to conclude her children had better look out for her. When not filled with this unnatural flame they were suffused with comfortless tears; and altogether the afflicted lady was, as he viewed her, very bad, a case for anxiety. It was because he had known she would be very bad that he had, in his kindness, called on her exactly in this manner; but he recognised that to undertake to be kind to her in proportion to her need might carry one very far. He was glad he had not himself a wronged mad mother, and he wondered how Nick could bear the burden of the home he had ruined. Apparently he didn't bear it very far, but had taken final, convenient refuge in Rosedale Road. Peter's judgement of his perverse cousin was considerably confused, and not the less so for the consciousness that he was perhaps just now not in the best state of mind for judging him at all. At the same time, though he held in general that a man of sense has always warrant enough in his sense for doing the particular thing he prefers, he could scarcely help asking himself whether, in the exercise of a virile freedom, it had been absolutely indispensable Nick should work such domestic woe. He admitted indeed that that was an anomalous figure for Nick, the worker of domestic woe. Then he saw that his aunt's grievance--there came a moment, later, when she asserted as much--was not quite what her recreant child, in Balaklava Place, had represented it--with questionable taste perhaps--to a mocking actress; was not a mere shocked quarrel with his adoption of a "low" career, or a horror, the old-fashioned horror, of the _louches_ licences taken by artists under pretext of being conscientious: the day for this was past, and English society thought the brush and the fiddle as good as anything else--with two or three exceptions. It was not what he had taken up but what he had put down that made the sorry difference, and the tragedy would have been equally great if he had become a wine-merchant or a horse-dealer. Peter had gathered at first that Lady Agnes wouldn't trust herself to speak directly of her trouble, and he had obeyed what he supposed the best discretion in making no allusion to it. But a few minutes before they rose from table she broke out, and when he attempted to utter a word of mitigation there was something that went to his heart in the way she returned: "Oh you don't know--you don't know!" He felt Grace's eyes fixed on him at this instant in a mystery of supplication, and was uncertain as to what she wanted--that he should say something more to console her mother or should hurry away from the subject. Grace looked old and plain and--he had thought on coming in--rather cross, but she evidently wanted something. "You don't know," Lady Agnes repeated with a trembling voice, "you don't know." She had pushed her chair a little away from her place; she held her pocket-handkerchief pressed hard to her mouth, almost stuffed into it, and her eyes were fixed on the floor. She made him aware he did virtually know--know what towering piles of confidence and hope had been dashed to the earth. Then she finished her sentence unexpectedly--"You don't know what my life with my great husband was." Here on the other hand Peter was slightly at fault--he didn't exactly see what her life with her great husband had to do with it. What was clear to him, however, was that they literally had looked for things all in the very key of that greatness from Nick. It was not quite easy to see why this had been the case--it had not been precisely Peter's own prefigurement. Nick appeared to have had the faculty of planting that sort of flattering faith in women; he had originally given Julia a tremendous dose of it, though she had since shaken off the effects. "Do you really think he would have done such great things, politically speaking?" Peter risked. "Do you consider that the root of the matter was so essentially in him?" His hostess had a pause, looking at him rather hard. "I only think what all his friends--all his father's friends--have thought. He was his father's son after all. No young man ever had a finer training, and he gave from the first repeated proof of the highest ability, the highest ambition. See how he got in everywhere. Look at his first seat--look at his second," Lady Agnes continued. "Look at what every one says at this moment." "Look at all the papers!" said Grace. "Did you ever hear him speak?" she asked. And when Peter reminded her how he had spent his life in foreign lands, shut out from such pleasures, she went on: "Well, you lost something." "It was very charming," said Lady Agnes quietly and poignantly. "Of course he's charming, whatever he does," Peter returned. "He'll be a charming artist." "Oh God help us!" the poor lady groaned, rising quickly. "He won't--that's the worst," Grace amended. "It isn't as if he'd do things people would like, I've been to his place, and I never saw such a horrid lot of things--not at all clever or pretty." Yet her mother, at this, turned upon her with sudden asperity. "You know nothing whatever about the matter!" Then she added for Peter that, as it happened, her children did have a good deal of artistic taste: Grace was the only one who was totally deficient in it. Biddy was very clever--Biddy really might learn to do pretty things. And anything the poor child could learn was now no more than her duty--there was so little knowing what the future had in store for them all. "You think too much of the future--you take terribly gloomy views," said Peter, looking for his hat. "What other views can one take when one's son has deliberately thrown away a fortune?" "Thrown one away? Do you mean through not marrying----?" "I mean through killing by his perversity the best friend he ever had." Peter stared a moment; then with laughter: "Ah but Julia isn't dead of it!" "I'm not talking of Julia," said his aunt with a good deal of majesty. "Nick isn't mercenary, and I'm not complaining of that." "She means Mr. Carteret," Grace explained with all her competence. "He'd have done anything if Nick had stayed in the House." "But he's not dead?" "Charles Carteret's dying," said Lady Agnes--"his end's dreadfully near. He has been a sort of providence to us--he was Sir Nicholas's second self. But he won't put up with such insanity, such wickedness, and that chapter's closed." "You mean he has dropped Nick out of his will?" "Cut him off utterly. He has given him notice." "The old scoundrel!"--Peter couldn't keep this back. "But Nick will work the better for that--he'll depend on himself." "Yes, and whom shall we depend on?" Grace spoke up. "Don't be vulgar, for God's sake!" her mother ejaculated with a certain inconsequence. "Oh leave Nick alone--he'll make a lot of money," Peter declared cheerfully, following his two companions into the hall. "I don't in the least care if he does or not," said Lady Agnes. "You must come upstairs again--I've lots to say to you yet," she went on, seeing him make for his hat. "You must arrange to come and dine with us immediately; it's only because I've been so steeped in misery that I didn't write to you the other day--directly after you had called. We don't give parties, as you may imagine, but if you'll come just as we are, for old acquaintance' sake--" "Just with Nick--if Nick will come--and dear Biddy," Grace interposed. "Nick must certainly come, as well as dear Biddy, whom I hoped so much to find," Peter pronounced. "Because I'm going away--I don't know when I, shall see them again." "Wait with mamma. Biddy will come in now at any moment," Grace urged. "You're going away?" said Lady Agnes, pausing at the foot of the stairs and turning her white face upon him. Something in her voice showed she had been struck by his own tone. "I've had promotion and you must congratulate me. They're sending me out as minister to a little hot hole in Central America--six thousand miles away. I shall have to go rather soon." "Oh I'm so glad!" Lady Agnes breathed. Still she paused at the foot of the stair and still she gazed. "How very delightful--it will lead straight off to all sorts of other good things!" Grace a little coarsely commented. "Oh I'm crawling up--I'm an excellency," Peter laughed. "Then if you dine with us your excellency must have great people to meet you." "Nick and Biddy--they're great enough." "Come upstairs--come upstairs," said Lady Agnes, turning quickly and beginning to ascend. "Wait for Biddy--I'm going out," Grace continued, extending her hand to her kinsman. "I shall see you again--not that you care; but good-bye now. Wait for Biddy," the girl repeated in a lower tone, fastening her eyes on his with the same urgent mystifying gleam he thought he had noted at luncheon. "Oh I'll go and see her in Rosedale Road," he threw off. "Do you mean to-day--now?" "I don't know about to-day, but before I leave England." "Well, she'll be in immediately," said Grace. "Good-bye to your excellency." "Come up, Peter--_please_ come up," called Lady Agnes from the top of the stairs. He mounted and when he found himself in the drawing-room with her and the door closed she expressed her great interest in his fine prospects and position, which she wished to hear all about. She rang for coffee and indicated the seat he would find most comfortable: it shone before him for a moment that she would tell him he might if he wished light a cigar. For Peter had suddenly become restless--too restless to occupy a comfortable chair; he seated himself in it only to jump up again, and he went to the window, while he imparted to his hostess the very little he knew about his post, on hearing a vehicle drive up to the door. A strong light had just been thrown into his mind, and it grew stronger when, looking out, he saw Grace Dormer issue from the house in a hat and a jacket which had all the air of having been assumed with extraordinary speed. Her jacket was unbuttoned and her gloves still dangling from the hands with which she was settling her hat. The vehicle into which she hastily sprang was a hansom-cab which had been summoned by the butler from the doorstep and which rolled away with her after she had given an address. "Where's Grace going in such a hurry?" he asked of Lady Agnes; to which she replied that she hadn't the least idea--her children, at the pass they had all come to, knocked about as they liked. Well, he sat down again; he stayed a quarter of an hour and then he stayed longer, and during this time his appreciation of what she had in her mind gathered force. She showed him that precious quantity clearly enough, though she showed it by no clumsy, no voluntary arts. It looked out of her sombre, conscious eyes and quavered in her preoccupied, perfunctory tones. She took an extravagant interest in his future proceedings, the probable succession of events in his career, the different honours he would be likely to come in for, the salary attached to his actual appointment, the salary attached to the appointments that would follow--they would be sure to, wouldn't they?--and what he might reasonably expect to save. Oh he must save--Lady Agnes was an advocate of saving; and he must take tremendous pains and get on and be clever and fiercely ambitious: he must make himself indispensable and rise to the top. She was urgent and suggestive and sympathetic; she threw herself into the vision of his achievements and emoluments as if to appease a little the sore hunger with which Nick's treachery had left her. This was touching to her nephew, who didn't remain unmoved even at those more importunate moments when, as she fell into silence, fidgeting feverishly with a morsel of fancy-work she had plucked from a table, her whole presence became an intense, repressed appeal to him. What that appeal would have been had it been uttered was: "Oh Peter, take little Biddy; oh my dear young friend, understand your interests at the same time that you understand mine; be kind and reasonable and clever; save me all further anxiety and tribulation and accept my lovely, faultless child from my hands." That was what Lady Agnes had always meant, more or less, that was what Grace had meant, and they meant it with singular lucidity on the present occasion, Lady Agnes meant it so much that from one moment to another he scarce knew what she might do; and Grace meant it so much that she had rushed away in a hansom to fetch her sister from the studio. Grace, however, was a fool, for Biddy certainly wouldn't come. The news of his promotion had started them off, adding point to their idea of his being an excellent match; bringing home to them sharply the sense that if he were going away to strange countries he must take Biddy with him--that something at all events must be settled about Biddy before he went. They had suddenly begun to throb, poor things, with alarm at the ebbing hours. Strangely enough the perception of all this hadn't the effect of throwing him on the defensive and still less that of making him wish to bolt. When once he had made sure what was in the air he recognised a propriety, a real felicity in it; couldn't deny that he was in certain ways a good match, since it was quite probable he would go far; and was even generous enough--as he had no fear of being materially dragged to the altar--to enter into the conception that he might offer some balm to a mother who had had a horrid disappointment. The feasibility of marrying Biddy was not exactly augmented by the idea that his doing so would be a great offset to what Nick had made Lady Agnes suffer; but at least Peter didn't dislike his strenuous aunt so much as to wish to punish her for her nature. He was not afraid of her, whatever she might do; and though unable to grasp the practical relevancy of Biddy's being produced on the instant was willing to linger half an hour on the chance of successful production. There was meanwhile, moreover, a certain contagion in Lady Agnes's appeal--it made him appeal sensibly to himself, since indeed, as it is time to say, the glass of our young man's spirit had been polished for that reflexion. It was only at this moment really that he became inwardly candid. While making up his mind that his only safety was in flight and taking the strong measure of a request for help toward it, he was yet very conscious that another and probably still more effectual safeguard--especially if the two should be conjoined--lay in the hollow of his hand. His sister's words in Paris had come back to him and had seemed still wiser than when uttered: "She'll save you disappointments; you'd know the worst that can happen to you, and it wouldn't be bad." Julia had put it into a nutshell--Biddy would probably save him disappointments. And then she was--well, she was Biddy. Peter knew better what that was since the hour he had spent with her in Rosedale Road. But he had brushed away the sense of it, though aware that in doing so he took only half-measures and was even guilty of a sort of fraud upon himself. If he was sincere in wishing to put a gulf between his future and that sad expanse of his past and present over which Miriam had cast her shadow there was a very simple way to do so. He had dodged this way, dishonestly fixing on another which, taken alone, was far from being so good; but Lady Agnes brought him back to it. She held him in well-nigh confused contemplation of it, during which the safety, as Julia had called it, of the remedy wrought upon him as he wouldn't have believed beforehand, and not least to the effect of sweetening, of prettily colouring, the pill. It would be simple and it would deal with all his problems; it would put an end to all alternatives, which, as alternatives were otherwise putting an end to him, would be an excellent thing. It would settle the whole question of his future, and it was high time this should be settled. Peter took two cups of coffee while he made out his future with Lady Agnes, but though he drank them slowly he had finished them before Biddy turned up. He stayed three-quarters of an hour, saying to himself she wouldn't come--why should she come? Lady Agnes stooped to no avowal; she really stooped, so far as bald words went, to no part of the business; but she made him fix the next day save one for coming to dinner, and her repeated declaration that there would be no one else, not another creature but themselves, had almost the force of the supplied form for a promise to pay. In giving his word that he would come without fail, and not write the next day to throw them over for some function he should choose to dub obligatory, he felt quite as if he were putting his name to such a document. He went away at half-past three; Biddy of course hadn't come, and he had been sure she wouldn't. He couldn't imagine what Grace's idea had been, nor what pretext she had put forward to her sister. Whatever these things Biddy had seen through them and hated them. Peter could but like her the more for that. XL Lady Agnes would doubtless have done better, in her own interest or in that of her child, to have secured his company for the very next evening. This she had indeed attempted, but her application of her thought had miscarried, Peter bethinking himself that he was importantly engaged. Her ladyship, moreover, couldn't presume to answer for Nick, since after all they must of course _have_ Nick, though, to tell the truth, the hideous truth, she and her son were scarcely on terms. Peter insisted on Nick, wished particularly to see him, and gave his hostess notice that he would make each of them forgive everything to the other. She returned that all her son had to forgive was her loving him more than her life, and she would have challenged Peter, had he allowed it, on the general ground of the comparative dignity of the two arts of painting portraits and governing nations. Our friend declined the challenge: the most he did was to intimate that he perhaps saw Nick more vividly as a painter than as a governor. Later he remembered vaguely something his aunt had said about their being a governing family. He was going, by what he could ascertain, to a very queer climate and had many preparations to make. He gave his best attention to these, and for a couple of hours after leaving Lady Agnes rummaged London for books from which he might extract information about his new habitat. It made apparently no great figure in literature, and Peter could reflect that he was perhaps destined to find a salutary distraction in himself filling the void with a volume of impressions. After he had resigned himself to necessary ignorance he went into the Park. He treated himself to an afternoon or two there when he happened to drop upon London in summer--it refreshed his sense of the British interests he would have to stand up for. Moreover, he had been hiding more or less, and now all that was changed and this was the simplest way not to hide. He met a host of friends, made his situation as public as possible and accepted on the spot a great many invitations; all subject, however, to the mental reservation that he should allow none of them to interfere with his being present the first night of Miriam's new venture. He was going to the equator to get away from her, but to repudiate the past with some decency of form he must show an affected interest, if he could muster none other, in an occasion that meant so much for her. The least intimate of her associates would do that, and Peter remembered how, at the expense of good manners, he had stayed away from her first appearance on any stage at all. He would have been shocked had he found himself obliged to go back to Paris without giving her at the imminent crisis the personal countenance she had so good a right to expect. It was nearly eight o'clock when he went to Great Stanhope Street to dress for dinner and learn that a note awaiting him on the hall-table and which bore the marks of hasty despatch had come three or four hours before. It exhibited the signature of Miriam Rooth and let him know that she positively expected him at the theatre by eleven o'clock the next morning, for which hour a dress-rehearsal of the revived play had been hurriedly projected, the first night being now definitely fixed for the impending Saturday. She counted on his attendance at both ceremonies, but with particular reasons for wishing to see him in the morning. "I want you to see and judge and tell me," she said, "for my mind's like a flogged horse--it won't give another kick." It was for the Saturday he had made Lady Agnes his promise; he had thought of the possibility of the play in doing so, but had rested in the faith that, from valid symptoms, this complication would not occur till the following week. He decided nothing on the spot as to the conflict of occupations--it was enough to send Miriam three words to the effect that he would sooner perish than fail her on the morrow. He went to the theatre in the morning, and the episode proved curious and instructive. Though there were twenty people in the stalls it bore little resemblance to those _répétitions générales_ to which, in Paris, his love of the drama had often attracted him and which, taking place at night, in the theatre closed to the public, are virtually first performances with invited spectators. They were to his sense always settled and stately, rehearsals of the _première_ even more than rehearsals of the play. The present occasion was less august; it was not so much a concert as a confusion of sounds, and it took audible and at times disputatious counsel with itself. It was rough and frank and spasmodic, but was lively and vivid and, in spite of the serious character of the piece, often exceedingly droll: while it gave Sherringham, oddly enough, a more present sense than ever of bending over the hissing, smoking, sputtering caldron in which a palatable performance is stewed. He looked into the gross darkness that may result from excess of light; that is, he understood how knocked up, on the eve of production, every one concerned in the preparation of a piece might be, with nerves overstretched and glasses blurred, awaiting the test and the response, the echo to be given back by the big, receptive, artless, stupid, delightful public. Peter's interest had been great in advance, and as Miriam since his arrival had taken him much into her confidence he knew what she intended to do and had discussed a hundred points with her. They had differed about some of them and she had always said: "Ah but wait till you see how I shall do it at the time!" That was usually her principal reason and her most convincing argument. She had made some changes at the last hour--she was going to do several things in another way. But she wanted a touchstone, wanted a fresh ear, and, as she told Sherringham when he went behind after the first act, that was why she had insisted on this private trial, to which a few fresh ears were to be admitted. They didn't want to allow it her, the theatre people, they were such a parcel of donkeys; but as to what she meant in general to insist on she had given them a hint she flattered herself they wouldn't soon forget. She spoke as if she had had a great battle with her fellow-workers and had routed them utterly. It was not the first time he had heard her talk as if such a life as hers could only be a fighting life and of her frank measure of the fine uses of a faculty for making a row. She rejoiced she possessed this faculty, for she knew what to do with it; and though there might be a certain swagger in taking such a stand in advance when one had done the infinitely little she had yet done, she nevertheless trusted to the future to show how right she should have been in believing a pack of idiots would never hold out against her and would know they couldn't afford to. Her assumption of course was that she fought for the light and the right, for the good way and the thorough, for doing a thing properly if one did it at all. What she had really wanted was the theatre closed for a night and the dress-rehearsal, put on for a few people, given instead of _Yolande_. That she had not got, but she would have it the next time. She spoke as if her triumphs behind the scenes as well as before would go by leaps and bounds, and he could perfectly see, for the time, that she would drive her coadjutors in front of her like sheep. Her tone was the sort of thing that would have struck one as preposterous if one hadn't believed in her; but if one did so believe it only seemed thrown in with the other gifts. How was she going to act that night and what could be said for such a hateful way of doing things? She thrust on poor Peter questions he was all unable to answer; she abounded in superlatives and tremendously strong objections. He had a sharper vision than usual of the queer fate, for a peaceable man, of being involved in a life of so violent a rhythm: one might as well be hooked to a Catharine-wheel and whiz round in flame and smoke. It had only been for five minutes, in the wing, amid jostling and shuffling and shoving, that they held this conference. Miriam, splendid in a brocaded anachronism, a false dress of the beginning of the century, and excited and appealing, imperious, reckless and good-humoured, full of exaggerated propositions, supreme determinations and comic irrelevancies, showed as radiant a young head as the stage had ever seen. Other people quickly surrounded her, and Peter saw that though, she wanted, as she said, a fresh ear and a fresh eye she was liable to rap out to those who possessed these advantages that they didn't know what they were talking about. It was rather hard for her victims--Basil Dashwood let him into this, wonderfully painted and in a dress even more beautiful than Miriam's, that of a young dandy under Charles the Second: if you were not in the business you were one kind of donkey and if you _were_ in the business you were another kind. Peter noted with a certain chagrin that Gabriel Nash had failed; he preferred to base his annoyance on that ground when the girl, after the remark just quoted from Dashwood, laughing and saying that at any rate the thing would do because it would just have to do, thrust vindictively but familiarly into the young actor's face a magnificent feather fan. "Isn't he too lovely," she asked, "and doesn't he know how to do it?" Dashwood had the sense of costume even more than Peter had inferred or supposed he minded, inasmuch as it now appeared he had gone profoundly into the question of what the leading lady was to wear. He had drawn patterns and hunted up stuffs, had helped her to try on her clothes, had bristled with ideas and pins. It would not have been quite clear, Peter's ground for resenting Nash's cynical absence; it may even be thought singular he should have missed him. At any rate he flushed a little when their young woman, of whom he inquired whether she hadn't invited her oldest and dearest friend, made answer: "Oh he says he doesn't like the kitchen-fire--he only wants the pudding!" It would have taken the kitchen-fire to account at that point for the red of Sherringham's cheek; and he was indeed uncomfortably heated by helping to handle, as he phrased it, the saucepans. This he felt so much after he had returned to his seat, which he forbore to quit again till the curtain had fallen on the last act, that in spite of the high beauty of that part of the performance of which Miriam carried the weight there were moments when his relief overflowed into gasps, as if he had been scrambling up the bank of a torrent after an immersion. The girl herself, out in the open of her field to win, was of the incorruptible faith: she had been saturated to good purpose with the great spirit of Madame Carré. That was conspicuous while the play went on and she guarded the whole march with fagged piety and passion. Sherringham had never liked the piece itself; he held that as barbarous in form and false in feeling it did little honour to the British theatre; he despised many of the speeches, pitied Miriam for having to utter them, and considered that, lighted by that sort of candle, the path of fame might very well lead nowhere. When the ordeal was over he went behind again, where in the rose-coloured satin of the silly issue the heroine of the occasion said to him: "Fancy my having to drag through that other stuff to-night--the brutes!" He was vague about the persons designated in this allusion, but he let it pass: he had at the moment a kind of detached foreboding of the way any gentleman familiarly connected with her in the future would probably form the habit of letting objurgations and some other things pass. This had become indeed now a frequent state of mind with him; the instant he was before her, near her, next her, he found himself a helpless subject of the spell which, so far at least as he was concerned, she put forth by contact and of which the potency was punctual and absolute: the fit came on, as he said, exactly as some esteemed express-train on a great line bangs at a given moment into the station. At a distance he partly recovered himself--that was the encouragement for going to the shaky republic; but as soon as he entered her presence his life struck him as a thing disconnected from his will. It was as if he himself had been one thing and his behaviour another; he had shining views of this difference, drawn as they might be from the coming years--little illustrative scenes in which he saw himself in strange attitudes of resignation, always rather sad and still and with a slightly bent head. Such images should not have been inspiring, but it is a fact that they were something to go upon. The gentleman with the bent head had evidently given up something that was dear to him, but it was exactly because he had got his price that he was there. "Come and see me three or four hours hence," Miriam said--"come, that is, about six. I shall rest till then, but I want particularly to talk with you. There will be no one else--not the tip of any tiresome nose. You'll do me good." So of course he drove up at six. XLI "I don't know; I haven't the least idea; I don't care; don't ask me!"--it was so he met some immediate appeal of her artistic egotism, some challenge of his impression of her at this and that moment. Hadn't she frankly better give up such and such a point and return to their first idea, the one they had talked over so much? Peter replied to this that he disowned all ideas; that at any rate he should never have another as long as he lived, and that, so help him heaven, they had worried that hard bone more than enough. "You're tired of me--yes, already," she said sadly and kindly. They were alone, her mother had not peeped out and she had prepared herself to return to the Strand. "However, it doesn't matter and of course your head's full of other things. You must think me ravenously selfish--perpetually chattering about my vulgar shop. What will you have when one's a vulgar shop-girl? You used to like it, but then you weren't an ambassador." "What do you know about my being a minister?" he asked, leaning back in his chair and showing sombre eyes. Sometimes he held her handsomer on the stage than off, and sometimes he reversed that judgement. The former of these convictions had held his mind in the morning, and it was now punctually followed by the other. As soon as she stepped on the boards a great and special alteration usually took place in her--she was in focus and in her frame; yet there were hours too in which she wore her world's face before the audience, just as there were hours when she wore her stage face in the world. She took up either mask as it suited her humour. To-day he was seeing each in its order and feeling each the best. "I should know very little if I waited for you to tell me--that's very certain," Miriam returned. "It's in the papers that you've got a high appointment, but I don't read the papers unless there's something in them about myself. Next week I shall devour them and think them, no doubt, inane. It was Basil told me this afternoon of your promotion--he had seen it announced somewhere, I'm delighted if it gives you more money and more advantages, but don't expect me to be glad that you're going away to some distant, disgusting country." "The matter has only just been settled and we've each been busy with our own affairs. But even if you hadn't given me these opportunities," Peter went on, "I should have tried to see you to-day, to tell you my news and take leave of you." "Take leave? Aren't you coming to-morrow?" "Oh yes, I shall see you through that. But I shall rush away the very moment it's over." "I shall be much better then--really I shall," the girl said. "The better you are the worse you are." She returned his frown with a beautiful charity. "If it would do you any good I'd be bad." "The worse you are the better you are!" Peter laughed. "You're a devouring demon." "Not a bit! It's you." "It's I? I like that." "It's you who make trouble, who are sore and suspicious and supersubtle, not taking things as they come and for what they are, but twisting them into misery and falsity. Oh I've watched you enough, my dear friend, and I've been sorry for you--and sorry as well for myself; for I'm not so taken up with myself, in the low greedy sense, as you think. I'm not such a base creature. I'm capable of gratitude, I'm capable of affection. One may live in paint and tinsel, but one isn't absolutely without a soul. Yes, I've got one," the girl went on, "though I do smear my face and grin at myself in the glass and practise my intonations. If what you're going to do is good for you I'm very glad. If it leads to good things, to honour and fortune and greatness, I'm enchanted. If it means your being away always, for ever and ever, of course that's serious. You know it--I needn't tell you--I regard you as I really don't regard any one else. I've a confidence in you--ah it's a luxury! You're a gentleman, _mon bon_--ah you're a gentleman! It's just that. And then you see, you understand, and that's a luxury too. You're a luxury altogether, dear clever Mr. Sherringham. Your being where I shall never see you isn't a thing I shall enjoy; I know that from the separation of these last months--after our beautiful life in Paris, the best thing that ever happened to me or that ever will. But if it's your career, if it's your happiness--well, I can miss you and hold my tongue. I _can_ be disinterested--I can!" "What did you want me to come for?" he asked, all attentive and motionless. The same impression, the old impression, was with him again; the sense that if she was sincere it was sincerity of execution, if she was genuine it was the genuineness of doing it well. She did it so well now that this very fact was charming and touching. In claiming from him at the theatre this hour of the afternoon she had wanted honestly (the more as she had not seen him at home for several days) to go over with him once again, on the eve of the great night--it would be for her second creation the critics would lie so in wait; the first success might have been a fluke--some of her recurrent doubts: knowing from experience of what good counsel he often was, how he could give a worrying question its "settler" at the last. Then she had heard from Dashwood of the change in his situation, and that had really from one moment to the other made her think sympathetically of his preoccupations--led her open-handedly to drop her own. She was sorry to lose him and eager to let him know how good a friend she was conscious he had been to her. But the expression of this was already, at the end of a minute, a strange bedevilment: she began to listen to herself, to speak dramatically, to represent. She uttered the things she felt as if they were snatches of old play-books, and really felt them the more because they sounded so well. This, however, didn't prevent their really being as good feelings as those of anybody else, and at the moment her friend, to still a rising emotion--which he knew he shouldn't still--articulated the challenge I have just recorded, she had for his sensibility, at any rate, the truth of gentleness and generosity. "There's something the matter with you, my dear--you're jealous," Miriam said. "You're jealous of poor Mr. Dormer. That's an example of the way you tangle everything up. Lord, he won't hurt you, nor me either!" "He can't hurt me, certainly," Peter returned, "and neither can you; for I've a nice little heart of stone and a smart new breastplate of iron. The interest I take in you is something quite extraordinary; but the most extraordinary thing in it is that it's perfectly prepared to tolerate the interest of others." "The interest of others needn't trouble it much!" Miriam declared. "If Mr. Dormer has broken off his marriage to such an awfully fine woman--for she's that, your swell of a sister--it isn't for a ranting wretch like me. He's kind to me because that's his nature and he notices me because that's his business; but he's away up in the clouds--a thousand miles over my head. He has got something 'on,' as they say; he's in love with an idea. I think it's a shocking bad one, but that's his own affair. He's quite _exalté_; living on nectar and ambrosia--what he has to spare for us poor crawling things on earth is only a few dry crumbs. I didn't even ask him to come to rehearsal. Besides, he thinks you're in love with me and that it wouldn't be honourable to cut in. He's capable of that--isn't it charming?" "If he were to relent and give up his scruples would you marry him?" Peter asked. "Mercy, how you chatter about 'marrying'!" the girl laughed. "_C'est la maladie anglaise_--you've all got it on the brain." "Why I put it that way to please you," he explained. "You complained to me last year precisely that this was not what seemed generally wanted." "Oh last year!"--she made nothing of that. Then differently, "Yes, it's very tiresome!" she conceded. "You told me, moreover, in Paris more than once that you wouldn't listen to anything but that." "Well," she declared, "I won't, but I shall wait till I find a husband who's charming enough and bad enough. One who'll beat me and swindle me and spend my money on other women--that's the sort of man for me. Mr. Dormer, delightful as he is, doesn't come up to that." "You'll marry Basil Dashwood." He spoke it with conviction. "Oh 'marry'?--call it marry if you like. That's what poor mother threatens me with--she lives in dread of it." "To this hour," he mentioned, "I haven't managed to make out what your mother wants. She has so many ideas, as Madame Carré said." "She wants me to be some sort of tremendous creature--all her ideas are reducible to that. What makes the muddle is that she isn't clear about the creature she wants most. A great actress or a great lady--sometimes she inclines for one and sometimes for the other, but on the whole persuading herself that a great actress, if she'll cultivate the right people, may _be_ a great lady. When I tell her that won't do and that a great actress can never be anything but a great vagabond, then the dear old thing has tantrums, and we have scenes--the most grotesque: they'd make the fortune, for a subject, of some play-writing rascal, if he had the wit to guess them; which, luckily for us perhaps, he never will. She usually winds up by protesting--_devinez un peu quoi_!" Miriam added. And as her companion professed his complete inability to divine: "By declaring that rather than take it that way I must marry _you_." "She's shrewder than I thought," Peter returned. "It's the last of vanities to talk about, but I may state in passing that if you'd marry me you should be the greatest of all possible ladies." She had a beautiful, comical gape. "Lord o' mercy, my dear fellow, what natural capacity have I for that?" "You're artist enough for anything. I shall be a great diplomatist: my resolution's firmly taken, I'm infinitely cleverer than you have the least idea of, and you shall be," he went on, "a great diplomatist's wife." "And the demon, the devil, the devourer and destroyer, that you are so fond of talking about: what, in such a position, do you do with that element of my nature? _Où le fourrez-vous_?" she cried as with a real anxiety. "I'll look after it, I'll keep it under. Rather perhaps I should say I'll bribe it and amuse it; I'll gorge it with earthly grandeurs." "That's better," said Miriam; "for a demon that's kept under is a shabby little demon. Don't let's be shabby." Then she added: "Do you really go away the beginning of next week?" "Monday night if possible." "Ah that's but to Paris. Before you go to your new post they must give you an interval here." "I shan't take it--I'm so tremendously keen for my duties. I shall insist on going sooner. Oh," he went on, "I shall be concentrated now." "I'll come and act there." She met it all--she was amused and amusing. "I've already forgotten what it was I wanted to discuss with you," she said--"it was some trumpery stuff. What I want to say now is only one thing: that it's not in the least true that because my life pitches me in every direction and mixes me up with all sorts of people--or rather with one sort mainly, poor dears!--I haven't a decent character, I haven't common honesty. Your sympathy, your generosity, your patience, your precious suggestions, our dear sweet days last summer in Paris, I shall never forget. You're the best--you're different from all the others. Think of me as you please and make profane jokes about my mating with a disguised 'Arty'--I shall think of _you_ only in one way. I've a great respect for you. With all my heart I hope you'll be a great diplomatist. God bless you, dear clever man." She got up as she spoke and in so doing glanced at the clock--a movement that somehow only added to the noble gravity of her discourse: she was considering his time so much more than her own. Sherringham, at this, rising too, took out his watch and stood a moment with his eyes bent upon it, though without in the least seeing what the needles marked. "You'll have to go, to reach the theatre at your usual hour, won't you? Let me not keep you. That is, let me keep you only long enough just to say this, once for all, as I shall never speak of it again. I'm going away to save myself," he frankly said, planted before her and seeking her eyes with his own. "I ought to go, no doubt, in silence, in decorum, in virtuous submission to hard necessity--without asking for credit or sympathy, without provoking any sort of scene or calling attention to my fortitude. But I can't--upon my soul I can't. I can go, I can see it through, but I can't hold my tongue. I want you to know all about it, so that over there, when I'm bored to death, I shall at least have the exasperatingly vain consolation of feeling that you do know--and that it does neither you nor me any good!" He paused a moment; on which, as quite vague, she appealed. "That I 'do know' what?" "That I've a consuming passion for you and that it's impossible." "Oh impossible, my friend!" she sighed, but with a quickness in her assent. "Very good; it interferes, the gratification of it would interfere fatally, with the ambition of each of us. Our ambitions are inferior and odious, but we're tied fast to them." "Ah why ain't we simple?" she quavered as if all touched by it. "Why ain't we of the people--_comme tout le monde_--just a man and a girl liking each other?" He waited a little--she was so tenderly mocking, so sweetly ambiguous. "Because we're precious asses! However, I'm simple enough, after all, to care for you as I've never cared for any human creature. You have, as it happens, a personal charm for me that no one has ever approached, and from the top of your splendid head to the sole of your theatrical shoe (I could go down on my face--there, abjectly--and kiss it!) every inch of you is dear and delightful to me. Therefore good-bye." She took this in with wider eyes: he had put the matter in a way that struck her. For a moment, all the same, he was afraid she would reply as on the confessed experience of so many such tributes, handsome as this one was. But she was too much moved--the pure colour that had risen to her face showed it--to have recourse to this particular facility. She was moved even to the glimmer of tears, though she gave him her hand with a smile. "I'm so glad you've said all that, for from you I know what it means. Certainly it's better for you to go away. Of course it's all wrong, isn't it?--but that's the only thing it can be: therefore it's all right, isn't it? Some day when we're both great people we'll talk these things over; then we shall be quiet, we shall be rich, we shall be at peace--let us hope so at least--and better friends than others about us will know." She paused, smiling still, and then said while he held her hand: "Don't, _don't_ come to-morrow night." With this she attempted to draw her hand away, as if everything were settled and over; but the effect of her movement was that, as he held her tight, he was simply drawn toward her and close to her. The effect of this, in turn, was that, releasing her only to possess her the more completely, he seized her in his arms and, breathing deeply "I love you, you know," clasped her in a long embrace. His demonstration and her conscious sufferance, almost equally liberal, so sustained themselves that the door of the room had time to open slowly before either had taken notice. Mrs. Rooth, who had not peeped in before, peeped in now, becoming in this manner witness of an incident she could scarce have counted on. The unexpected indeed had for Mrs. Rooth never been an insuperable element in things; it was her position in general to be too acquainted with all the passions for any crude surprise. As the others turned round they saw her stand there and smile, and heard her ejaculate with wise indulgence: "Oh you extravagant children!" Miriam brushed off her tears, quickly but unconfusedly. "He's going away, the wretch; he's bidding us farewell." Peter--it was perhaps a result of his acute agitation--laughed out at the "us" (he had already laughed at the charge of puerility), and Mrs. Rooth went on: "Going away? Ah then I must have one too!" She held out both her hands, and Sherringham, stepping forward to take them, kissed her respectfully on each cheek, in the foreign manner, while she continued: "Our dear old friend--our kind, gallant gentleman!" "The gallant gentleman has been promoted to a great post--the proper reward of his gallantry," Miriam said. "He's going out as minister to some impossible place--where is it?" "As minister--how very charming! We _are_ getting on." And their companion languished up at him with a world of approval. "Oh well enough. One must take what one can get," he answered. "You'll get everything now, I'm sure, shan't you?" Mrs. Rooth asked with an inflexion that called back to him comically--the source of the sound was so different--the very vibrations he had heard the day before from Lady Agnes. "He's going to glory and he'll forget all about us--forget he has ever known such low people. So we shall never see him again, and it's better so. Good-bye, good-bye," Miriam repeated; "the brougham must be there, but I won't take you. I want to talk to mother about you, and we shall say things not fit for you to hear. Oh I'll let you know what we lose--don't be afraid," she added to Mrs. Rooth. "He's the rising star of diplomacy." "I knew it from the first--I know how things turn out for such people as you!" cried the old woman, gazing fondly at Sherringham. "But you don't mean to say you're not coming to-morrow night?" "Don't--don't; it's great folly," Miriam interposed; "and it's quite needless, since you saw me to-day." Peter turned from the mother to the daughter, the former of whom broke out to the latter: "Oh you dear rogue, to say one has _seen_ you yet! You know how you'll come up to it--you'll be beyond everything." "Yes, I shall be there--certainly," Peter said, at the door, to Mrs. Rooth. "Oh you dreadful goose!" Miriam called after him. But he went out without looking round at her. BOOK SEVENTH XLII Nick Dormer had for the hour quite taken up his abode at his studio, where Biddy usually arrived after breakfast to give him news of the state of affairs in Calcutta Gardens and where many letters and telegrams were now addressed him. Among such missives, on the morning of the Saturday on which Peter Sherringham had promised to dine at the other house, was a note from Miriam Rooth, informing Nick that if he shouldn't telegraph to put her off she would turn up about half-past eleven, probably with her mother, for just one more sitting. She added that it was a nervous day for her and that she couldn't keep still, so that it would really be very kind to let her come to him as a refuge. She wished to stay away from the theatre, where everything was now settled--or so much the worse for the others if it wasn't--till the evening; in spite of which she should if left to herself be sure to go there. It would keep her quiet and soothe her to sit--he could keep her quiet (he was such a blessing that way!) at any time. Therefore she would give him two or three hours--or rather she would herself ask for them--if he didn't positively turn her from the door. It had not been definite to Nick that he wanted another sitting at all for the slight work, as he held it to be, that Miriam had already helped him to achieve. He regarded this work as a mere light wind-fall of the shaken tree: he had made what he could of it and would have been embarrassed to make more. If it was not finished this was because it was not finishable; at any rate he had said all he had to say in that particular phrase. The young man, in truth, was not just now in the highest spirits; his imagination had within two or three days become conscious of a check that he tried to explain by the idea of a natural reaction. Any decision or violent turn, any need of a new sharp choice in one's career, was upsetting, and, exaggerate that importance and one's own as little as one would, a deal of flurry couldn't help attending, especially in the face of so much scandal, the horrid act, odious to one's modesty at the best, of changing one's clothes in the marketplace. That made life not at all positively pleasant, yet decidedly thrilling, for the hour; and it was well enough till the thrill abated. When this occurred, as it inevitably would, the romance and the glow of the adventure were exchanged for the chill and the prose. It was to these latter elements he had waked up pretty wide on this particular morning; and the prospect was not appreciably fresher from the fact that he had warned himself in advance it would be dull. He had in fact known how dull it would be, but now he would have time to learn even better. A reaction was a reaction, but it was not after all a catastrophe. It would be a feature of his very freedom that he should ask himself if he hadn't made a great mistake; this privilege would doubtless even remain within the limits of its nature in exposing him to hours of intimate conviction of his madness. But he would live to retract his retractations--this was the first thing to bear in mind. He was absorbed, even while he dressed, in the effort to achieve intelligibly to himself some such revolution when, by the first post, Miriam's note arrived. At first it did little to help his agility--it made him, seeing her esthetic faith as so much stronger and simpler than his own, wonder how he should keep with her at her high level. Ambition, in her, was always on the rush, and she was not a person to conceive that others might in bad moments listen for the trumpet in vain. It would never have occurred to her that only the day before he had spent a part of the afternoon quite at the bottom of the hill. He had in fact turned into the National Gallery and had wandered about there for more than an hour, and it was just while he did so that the immitigable recoil had begun perversely to make itself felt. The perversity was all the greater from the fact that if the experience was depressing this was not because he had been discouraged beyond measure by the sight of the grand things that had been done--things so much grander than any that would ever bear his signature. That variation he was duly acquainted with and should know in abundance again. What had happened to him, as he passed on this occasion from Titian to Rubens and from Gainsborough to Rembrandt, was that he found himself calling the whole exhibited art into question. What was it after all at the best and why had people given it so high a place? Its weakness, its limits broke upon him; tacitly blaspheming he looked with a lustreless eye at the palpable, polished, "toned" objects designed for suspension on hooks. That is, he blasphemed if it were blasphemy to feel that as bearing on the energies of man they were a poor and secondary show. The human force producing them was so far from one of the greatest; their place was a small place and their connexion with the heroic life casual and slight. They represented so little great ideas, and it was great ideas that kept the world from chaos. He had incontestably been in much closer relation with them a few months before than he was to-day: it made up a great deal for what was false and hollow, what was merely personal, in "politics" that, were the idea greater or smaller, they could at their best so directly deal with it. The love of it had really been much of the time at the bottom of his impulse to follow them up; though this was not what he had most talked of with his political friends or even with Julia. No, political as Julia was, he had not conferred with her much about the idea. However, this might have been his own fault quite as much as hers, and she in fact took such things, such enthusiasms, for granted--there was an immense deal in every way that she took for granted. On the other hand, he had often put forward this brighter side of the care for the public weal in his discussions with Gabriel Nash, to the end, it is true, of making that worthy scoff aloud at what he was pleased to term his hypocrisy. Gabriel maintained precisely that there were more ideas, more of those that man lived by, in a single room of the National Gallery than in all the statutes of Parliament. Nick had replied to this more than once that the determination of what man did live by was required; to which Nash had retorted (and it was very rarely that he quoted Scripture) that it was at any rate not by bread and beans alone. The statutes of Parliament gave him bread and beans _tout au plus_. Nick had at present no pretension of trying this question over again: he reminded himself that his ambiguity was subjective, as the philosophers said; the result of a mood which in due course would be at the mercy of another mood. It made him curse, and cursing, as a finality, lacked firmness--one had to drive in posts somewhere under. The greatest time to do one's work was when it didn't seem worth doing, for then one gave it a brilliant chance, that of resisting the stiffest test of all--the test of striking one as too bad. To do the most when there would be the least to be got by it was to be most in the spirit of high production. One thing at any rate was certain, Nick reflected: nothing on earth would induce him to change back again--not even if this twilight of the soul should last for the rest of his days. He hardened himself in his posture with a good conscience which, had they had a glimpse of it, would have made him still more diverting to those who already thought him so; and now, by a happy chance, Miriam suddenly supplied the bridge correcting the gap in his continuity. If he had made his sketch it was a proof he had done her, and that he had done her flashed upon him as a sign that she would be still more feasible. Art was _doing_--it came back to that--which politics in most cases weren't. He thus, to pursue our image, planted his supports in the dimness beneath all cursing, and on the platform so improvised was able, in his relief, to dance. He sent out a telegram to Balaklava Place requesting his beautiful sitter by no manner of means to fail him. When his servant came back it was to usher into the studio Peter Sherringham, whom the man had apparently found at the door. The hour was so early for general commerce that Nick immediately guessed his visitor had come on some rare errand; but this inference yielded to the reflexion that Peter might after all only wish to make up by present zeal for not having been near him before. He forgot that, as he had subsequently learned from Biddy, their foreign, or all but foreign, cousin had spent an hour in Rosedale Road, missing him there but pulling out Miriam's portrait, the day of his own last visit to Beauclere. These young men were not on a ceremonious footing and it was not in Nick's nature to keep a record of civilities rendered or omitted; nevertheless he had been vaguely conscious that during a stay in London elastic enough on Peter's part he and his kinsman had foregathered less than of yore. It was indeed an absorbing moment in the career of each, but even while recognising such a truth Nick judged it not impossible that Julia's brother might have taken upon himself to resent some suppositions failure of consideration for that lady; though this indeed would have been stupid and the newly appointed minister (to he had forgotten where) didn't often make mistakes. Nick held that as he had treated Julia with studious generosity she had nothing whatever to visit on him--wherefore Peter had still less. It was at any rate none of that gentleman's business. There were only two abatements to disposing in a few frank words of all this: one of them Nick's general hatred of talking of his private affairs (a reluctance in which he and Peter were well matched); and the other a truth involving more of a confession--the subtle truth that the most definite and even most soothing result of the collapse of his engagement was, as happened, an unprecedented consciousness of freedom. Nick's observation was of a different sort from his cousin's; he noted much less the signs of the hour and kept throughout a looser register of life; nevertheless, just as one of our young men had during these days in London found the air peopled with personal influences, the concussion of human atoms, so the other, though only asking to live without too many questions and work without too many rubs, to be glad and sorry in short on easy terms, had become aware of a certain social tightness, of the fact that life is crowded and passion restless, accident and community inevitable. Everybody with whom one had relations had other relations too, and even indifference was a mixture and detachment a compromise. The only wisdom was to consent to the loss, if necessary, of everything but one's temper and to the ruin, if necessary, of everything but one's work. It must be added that Peter's relative took precautions against irritation perhaps in excess of the danger, as departing travellers about to whiz through foreign countries mouth in phrase-books combinations of words they will never use. He was at home in clear air and disliked to struggle either for breath or for light. He had a dim sense that Peter felt some discomfort from him and might have come now to tell him so; in which case he should be sorry for the sufferer in various ways. But as soon as that aspirant began to speak suspicion reverted to mere ancient kindness, and this in spite of the fact that his speech had a slightly exaggerated promptitude, like the promptitude of business, which might have denoted self-consciousness. To Nick it quickly appeared better to be glad than to be sorry: this simple argument was more than sufficient to make him glad Peter was there. "My dear fellow, it's an unpardonable hour, isn't it? I wasn't even sure you'd be up, yet had to risk it, because my hours are numbered. I'm going away to-morrow," Peter went on; "I've a thousand things to do. I've had no talk with you this time such as we used to have of old (it's an irreparable loss, but it's your fault, you know), and as I've got to rush about all day I thought I'd just catch you before any one else does." "Some one has already caught me, but there's plenty of time," Nick returned. Peter all but asked a question--it fell short. "I see, I see. I'm sorry to say I've only a few minutes at best." "Man of crushing responsibilities, you've come to humiliate me!" his companion cried. "I know all about it." "It's more than I do then. That's not what I've come for, but I shall be delighted if I humiliate you a little by the way. I've two things in mind, and I'll mention the most difficult first. I came here the other day--the day after my arrival in town." "Ah yes, so you did; it was very good of you"--Nick remembered. "I ought to have returned your visit or left a card or written my name--to have done something in Great Stanhope Street, oughtn't I? You hadn't got this new thing then, or I'd have 'called.'" Peter eyed him a moment. "I say, what's the matter with you? Am I really unforgivable for having taken that liberty?" "What liberty?" Nick looked now quite innocent of care, and indeed his visitor's allusion was not promptly clear. He was thinking for the instant all of Biddy, of whom and whose secret inclinations Grace had insisted on talking to him. They were none of his business, and if he wouldn't for the world have let the girl herself suspect he had violent lights on what was most screened and curtained in her, much less would he have made Peter a clumsy present of this knowledge. Grace had a queer theory that Peter treated Biddy badly--treated them all somehow badly; but Grace's zeal (she had plenty of it, though she affected all sorts of fine indifference) almost always took the form of her being unusually wrong. Nick wanted to do only what Biddy would thank him for, and he knew very well what she wouldn't. She wished him and Peter to be great friends, and the only obstacle to this was that Peter was too much of a diplomatist. Peter made him for an instant think of her and of the hour they had lately spent together in the studio in his absence--an hour of which Biddy had given him a history full of items and omissions; and this in turn brought Nick's imagination back to his visitor's own side of the matter. That general human complexity of which the sense had lately increased with him, and to which it was owing that any thread one might take hold of would probably be the extremely wrong end of something, was illustrated by the fact that while poor Biddy was thinking of Peter it was ten to one poor Peter was thinking of Miriam Rooth. All of which danced before Nick's intellectual vision for a space briefer than my too numerous words. "I pitched into your treasures--I rummaged among your canvases," Peter said. "Biddy had nothing whatever to do with it--she maintained an attitude of irreproachable reserve. It has been on my conscience all these days and I ought to have done penance before. I've been putting it off partly because I'm so ashamed of my indiscretion. _Que voulez-vous_, my dear chap? My provocation was great. I heard you had been painting Miss Rooth, so that I couldn't restrain my curiosity. I simply went into that corner and struck out there--a trifle wildly no doubt. I dragged the young lady to the light--your sister turned pale as she saw me. It was a good deal like breaking open one of your letters, wasn't it? However, I assure you it's all right, for I congratulate you both on your style and on your correspondent." "You're as clever, as witty, as humorous as ever, old boy," Nick pronounced, going himself into the corner designated by his companion and laying his hands on the same canvas. "Your curiosity's the highest possible tribute to my little attempt and your sympathy sets me right with myself. There she is again," Nick went on, thrusting the picture into an empty frame; "you shall see her whether you wish to or not." "Right with yourself? You don't mean to say you've been wrong!" Peter returned, standing opposite the portrait. "Oh I don't know. I've been kicking up such a row. Anything's better than a row." "She's awfully good--she's awfully true," said Peter. "You've done more to her since the other day. You've put in several things." "Yes, but I've worked distractedly. I've not altogether conformed to the good rule about being off with the old love." "With the old love?"--and the visitor looked hard at the picture. "Before you're on with the new!" Nick had no sooner uttered these words than he coloured: it occurred to him his friend would probably infer an allusion to Julia. He therefore added quickly: "It isn't so easy to cease to represent an affectionate constituency. Really most of my time for a fortnight has been given to letter-writing. They've all been unexpectedly charming. I should have thought they'd have loathed and despised me. But not a bit of it; they cling to me fondly--they struggle with me tenderly. I've been down to talk with them about it, and we've passed the most sociable, delightful hours. I've designated my successor; I've felt a good deal like the Emperor Charles the Fifth when about to retire to the monastery of Yuste. The more I've seen of them in this way the more I've liked them, and they declare it has been the same with themselves about me. We spend our time assuring each other we hadn't begun to know each other till now. In short it's all wonderfully jolly, but it isn't business. _C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre_." "They're not so charming as they might be if they don't offer to keep you and let you paint." "They do, almost--it's fantastic," said Nick. "Remember they haven't yet seen a daub of my brush." "Well, I'm sorry for you; we live in too enlightened an age," Peter returned. "You can't suffer for art--that grand romance is over. Your experience is interesting; it seems to show that at the tremendous pitch of civilisation we've reached you can't suffer from anything but hunger." "I shall doubtless," Nick allowed, "do that enough to make up for the rest." "Never, never, when you paint so well as this." "Oh come, you're too good to be true," Nick said. "But where did you learn that one's larder's full in proportion as one's work's fine?" Peter waived this curious point--he only continued to look at the picture; after which he roundly brought out: "I'll give you your price for it on the spot." "Ah you're so magnanimous that you shall have it for nothing!" And Nick, touched to gratitude, passed his arm into his visitor's. Peter had a pause. "Why do you call me magnanimous?" "Oh bless my soul, it's hers--I forgot!" laughed Nick, failing in his turn to answer the other's inquiry. "But you shall have another." "Another? Are you going to do another?" "This very morning. That is, I shall begin it. I've heard from her; she's coming to sit--a short time hence." Peter turned away a little at this, releasing himself, and, as if the movement had been an effect of his host's words, looked at his watch earnestly to dissipate that appearance. He fell back to consider the work from further off. "The more you do her the better--she has all the qualities of a great model. From that point of view it's a pity she has another trade: she might make so good a thing of this one. But how shall you do her again?" he asked ingenuously. "Oh I can scarcely say; we'll arrange something; we'll talk it over. It's extraordinary how well she enters into what one wants: she knows more than one does one's self. She isn't, as you Frenchmen say, the first comer. However, you know all about that, since you invented her, didn't you? That's what she says; she's awfully sweet on you," Nick kindly pursued. "What I ought to do is to try something as different as possible from that thing; not the sibyl, the muse, the tremendous creature, but the charming woman, the person one knows, differently arranged as she appears _en ville_, she calls it. I'll do something really serious and send it to you out there with my respects. It will remind you of home and perhaps a little even of me. If she knows it's for you she'll throw herself into it in the right spirit. Leave it to us, my dear fellow; we'll turn out something splendid." "It's jolly to hear you, but I shall send you a cheque," said Peter very stoutly. "I suppose it's all right in your position, but you're too proud," his kinsman answered. "What do you mean by my position?" "Your exaltation, your high connexion with the country, your treating with sovereign powers as the representative of a sovereign power. Isn't that what they call 'em?" Peter, who had turned round again, listened to this with his eyes fixed on Nick's face while he once more drew forth his watch. "Brute!" he exclaimed familiarly, at the same time dropping his eyes on the watch. "When did you say you expect your sitter?" "Oh we've plenty of time; don't be afraid of letting me see you agitated by her presence." "Brute!" Peter again ejaculated. This friendly personal note cleared the air, made their communication closer. "Stay with me and talk to me," said Nick; "I daresay it's good for me. It may be the last time I shall see you without having before anything else to koo-too." "Beast!" his kinsman once more, and a little helplessly, threw off; though next going on: "Haven't you something more to show me then--some other fruit of your genius?" "Must I bribe you by setting my sign-boards in a row? You know what I've done; by which I mean of course you know what I haven't. My genius, as you're so good as to call it, has hitherto been dreadfully sterile. I've had no time, no opportunity, no continuity. I must go and sit down in a corner and learn my alphabet. That thing isn't good; what I shall do for you won't be good. Don't protest, my dear fellow; nothing will be fit to look at for a long time." After which poor Nick wound up: "And think of my ridiculous age! As the good people say (or don't they say it?), it's a rum go. It won't be amusing." "Ah you're so clever you'll get on fast," Peter returned, trying to think how he could most richly defy the injunction not to protest. "I mean it won't be amusing for others," said Nick, unperturbed by this levity. "They want results, and small blame to them." "Well, whatever you do, don't talk like Mr. Gabriel Nash," Peter went on. "Sometimes I think you're just going to." Nick stared a moment. "Ah he never would have said _that_ 'They want results, the damned asses'--that would have been more in his key." "It's the difference of a _nuance_! And are you extraordinarily happy?" Peter added as his host now obliged him by arranging half-a-dozen canvases so that he could look at them. "Not so much so, doubtless, as the artistic life ought to make one: because all one's people are not so infatuated as one's electors. But little by little I'm learning the charm of pig-headedness." "Your mother's very bad," Peter allowed--"I lunched with her day before yesterday." "Yes, I know, I know"--Nick had such reason to know; "but it's too late, too late. I must just peg away here and not mind. I've after all a great advantage in my life." His companion waited impartially to hear. "And that would be--?" "Well, knowing what I want to do. That's everything, you know." "It's an advantage, however, that you've only just come in for, isn't it?" "Yes, but the delay and the probation only make me prize it the more. I've got it now; and it makes up for the absence of some other things." Again Peter had a pause. "That sounds a little flat," he remarked at last. "It depends on what you compare it with. It has more point than I sometimes found in the House of Commons." "Oh I never thought I should like that!" There was another drop during which Nick moved about the room turning up old sketches to see if he had anything more to show, while his visitor continued to look at the unfinished and in some cases, as seemed, unpromising productions already exposed. They were far less interesting than the portrait of Miriam Rooth and, it would have appeared, less significant of ability. For that particular effort Nick's talent had taken an inspired flight. So much Peter thought, as he had thought it intensely before; but the words he presently uttered had no visible connexion with it. They only consisted of the abrupt inquiry; "Have you heard anything from Julia?" "Not a syllable. Have you?" "Dear no; she never writes to me." "But won't she on the occasion of your promotion?" "I daresay not," said Peter; and this was the only reference to Mrs. Dallow that passed between her brother and her late intended. It left a slight stir of the air which Peter proceeded to allay by an allusion comparatively speaking more relevant. He expressed disappointment that Biddy shouldn't have come in, having had an idea she was always in Rosedale Road of a morning. That was the other branch of his present errand--the wish to see her and give her a message for Lady Agnes, upon whom, at so early an hour, he had not presumed to intrude in Calcutta Gardens. Nick replied that Biddy did in point of fact almost always turn up, and for the most part early: she came to wish him good-morning and start him for the day. She was a devoted Electra, laying a cool, healing hand on a distracted, perspiring Orestes. He reminded Peter, however, that he would have a chance of seeing her that evening, and of seeing Lady Agnes; for wasn't he to do them the honour of dining in Calcutta Gardens? Biddy, the day before, had arrived full of that excitement. Peter explained that this was exactly the sad subject of his actual _démarche_: the project of the dinner in Calcutta Gardens had, to his exceeding regret, fallen to pieces. The fact was (didn't Nick know it?) the night had been suddenly and perversely fixed for Miriam's première, and he was under a definite engagement with her not to stay away from it. To add to the bore of the thing he was obliged to return to Paris the very next morning. He was quite awfully sorry, for he had promised Lady Agnes: he didn't understand then about Miriam's affair, in regard to which he had given a previous pledge. He was more grieved than he could say, but he could never fail Miss Rooth: he had professed from the first an interest in her which he must live up to a little more. This was his last chance--he hadn't been near her at the trying time of her first braving of the public. And the second night of the play wouldn't do--it must be the first or nothing. Besides, he couldn't wait over till Monday. While Peter recited all his hindrance Nick was occupied in rubbing with a cloth a palette he had just scraped. "I see what you mean--I'm very sorry too. I'm sorry you can't give my mother this joy--I give her so little." "My dear fellow, you might give her a little more!" it came to Peter to say. "It's rather too much to expect _me_ to make up for your omissions!" Nick looked at him with a moment's fixedness while he polished the palette; and for that moment he felt the temptation to reply: "There's a way you could do that, to a considerable extent--I think you guess it--which wouldn't be intrinsically disagreeable." But the impulse passed without expressing itself in speech, and he simply brought out; "You can make this all clear to Biddy when she comes, and she'll make it clear to my mother." "Poor little Biddy!" Peter mentally sighed, thinking of the girl with that job before her; but what he articulated was that this was exactly why he had come to the studio. He had inflicted his company on Lady Agnes the previous Thursday and had partaken of a meal with her, but had not seen Biddy though he had waited for her, had hoped immensely she'd come in. Now he'd wait again--dear Bid was thoroughly worth it. "Patience, patience then--you've always me!" said Nick; to which he subjoined: "If it's a question of going to the play I scarcely see why you shouldn't dine at my mother's all the same. People go to the play after dinner." "Yes, but it wouldn't be fair, it wouldn't be decent: it's a case when I must be in my seat from the rise of the curtain." Peter, about this, was thoroughly lucid. "I should force your mother to dine an hour earlier than usual and then in return for her courtesy should go off to my entertainment at eight o'clock, leaving her and Grace and Biddy languishing there. I wish I had proposed in time that they should go with me," he continued not very ingenuously. "You might do that still," Nick suggested. "Oh at this time of day it would be impossible to get a box." "I'll speak to Miss Rooth about it if you like when she comes," smiled Nick. "No, it wouldn't do," said Peter, turning away and looking once more at his watch. He made tacitly the addition that still less than asking Lady Agnes for his convenience to dine early would _this_ be decent, would it be thinkable. His taking Biddy the night he dined with her and with Miss Tressilian had been something very like a violation of those proprieties. He couldn't say that, however, to the girl's brother, who remarked in a moment that it was all right, since Peter's action left him his own freedom. "Your own freedom?"--and Peter's question made him turn. "Why you see now I can go to the theatre myself." "Certainly; I hadn't thought of that. You'd naturally have been going." "I gave it up for the prospect of your company at home." "Upon my word you're too good--I don't deserve such sacrifices," said Peter, who read in his kinsman's face that this was not a figure of speech but the absolute truth. "Didn't it, however, occur to you that, as it would turn out, I might--I even naturally _would_--myself be going?" he put forth. Nick broke into a laugh. "It would have occurred to me if I understood a little better--!" But he paused, as still too amused. "If you understood a little better what?" "Your situation, simply." Peter looked at him a moment. "Dine with me to-night by ourselves and at a club. We'll go to the theatre together and then you'll understand it." "With pleasure, with pleasure: we'll have a jolly evening," said Nick. "Call it jolly if you like. When did you say she was coming?" Peter asked. "Biddy? Oh probably, as I tell you, at any moment." "I mean the great Miriam," Peter amended. "The great Miriam, if she's punctual, will be here in about forty minutes." "And will she be likely to find your sister?" "That will depend, my dear fellow, on whether my sister remains to see her." "Exactly; but the point's whether you'll allow her to remain, isn't it?" Nick looked slightly mystified. "Why shouldn't she do as she likes?" "In that case she'll probably go." "Yes, unless she stays." "Don't let her," Peter dropped; "send her away." And to explain this he added: "It doesn't seem exactly the right sort of thing, fresh young creatures like Bid meeting _des femmes de théâtre_." His explanation, in turn, struck him as requiring another clause; so he went on: "At least it isn't thought the right sort of thing abroad, and even in England my foreign ideas stick to me." Even with this amplification, however, his plea evidently still had for his companion a flaw; which, after he had considered it a moment, Nick exposed in the simple words: "Why, you originally introduced them in Paris, Biddy and Miss Rooth. Didn't they meet at your rooms and fraternise, and wasn't that much more 'abroad' than this?" "So they did, but my hand had been forced and she didn't like it," Peter answered, suspecting that for a diplomatist he looked foolish. "Miss Rooth didn't like it?" Nick persisted. "That I confess I've forgotten. Besides, she wasn't an actress then. What I mean is that Biddy wasn't particularly pleased with her." "Why she thought her wonderful--praised her to the sides. I remember that." "She didn't like her as a woman; she praised her as an actress." "I thought you said she wasn't an actress then," Nick returned. Peter had a pause. "Oh Biddy thought so. She has seen her since, moreover. I took her the other night, and her curiosity's satisfied." "It's not of any consequence, and if there's a reason for it I'll bundle her off directly," Nick made haste to say. "But the great Miriam seems such a kind, good person." "So she is, charming, charming,"--and his visitor looked hard at him. "Here comes Biddy now," Nick went on. "I hear her at the door: you can warn her yourself." "It isn't a question of 'warning'--that's not in the least my idea. But I'll take Biddy away," said Peter. "That will be still more energetic." "No, it will be simply more selfish--I like her company." Peter had turned as if to go to the door and meet the girl; but he quickly checked himself, lingering in the middle of the room, and the next instant Biddy had come in. When she saw him there she also stopped. XLIII "Come on boldly, my dear," said Nick. "Peter's bored to death waiting for you." "Ah he's come to say he won't dine with us to-night!" Biddy stood with her hand on the latch. "I leave town to-morrow: I've everything to do; I'm broken-hearted; it's impossible"--Peter made of it again such a case as he could. "Please make my peace with your mother--I'm ashamed of not having written to her last night." She closed the door and came in while her brother said to her, "How in the world did you guess it?" "I saw it in the _Morning Post_." And she kept her eyes on their kinsman. "In the _Morning Post_?" he vaguely echoed. "I saw there's to be a first night at that theatre, the one you took us to. So I said, 'Oh he'll go there.'" "Yes, I've got to do that too," Peter admitted. "She's going to sit to me again this morning, his wonderful actress--she has made an appointment: so you see I'm getting on," Nick pursued to his sister. "Oh I'm so glad--she's so splendid!" The girl looked away from her cousin now, but not, though it seemed to fill the place, at the triumphant portrait of Miriam Rooth. "I'm delighted you've come in. I _have_ waited for you," Peter hastened to declare to her, though conscious that this was in the conditions meagre. "Aren't you coming to see us again?" "I'm in despair, but I shall really not have time. Therefore it's a blessing not to have missed you here." "I'm very glad," said Biddy. Then she added: "And you're going to America--to stay a long time?" "Till I'm sent to some better place." "And will that better place be as far away?" "Oh Biddy, it wouldn't be better then," said Peter. "Do you mean they'll give you something to do at home?" "Hardly that. But I've a tremendous lot to do at home to-day." For the twentieth time Peter referred to his watch. She turned to her brother, who had admonished her that she might bid him good-morning. She kissed him and he asked what the news would be in Calcutta Gardens; to which she made answer: "The only news is of course the great preparations they're making, poor dears, for Peter. Mamma thinks you must have had such a nasty dinner the other day," the girl continued to the guest of that romantic occasion. "Faithless Peter!" said Nick, beginning to whistle and to arrange a canvas in anticipation of Miriam's arrival. "Dear Biddy, thank your stars you're not in my horrid profession," protested the personage so designated. "One's bowled about like a cricket-ball, unable to answer for one's freedom or one's comfort from one moment to another." "Oh ours is the true profession--Biddy's and mine," Nick broke out, setting up his canvas; "the career of liberty and peace, of charming long mornings spent in a still north light and in the contemplation, I may even say in the company, of the amiable and the beautiful." "That certainty's the case when Biddy comes to see you," Peter returned. Biddy smiled at him. "I come every day. Anch'io son pittore! I encourage Nick awfully." "It's a pity I'm not a martyr--she'd bravely perish with me," Nick said. "You are--you're a martyr--when people say such odious things!" the girl cried. "They do say them. I've heard many more than I've repeated to you." "It's you yourself then, indignant and loyal, who are the martyr," observed Peter, who wanted greatly to be kind to her. "Oh I don't care!"--but she threw herself, flushed and charming, into a straight appeal to him. "Don't you think one can do as much good by painting great works of art as by--as by what papa used to do? Don't you think art's necessary to the happiness, to the greatness of a people? Don't you think it's manly and honourable? Do you think a passion for it's a thing to be ashamed of? Don't you think the artist--the conscientious, the serious one--is as distinguished a member of society as any one else?" Peter and Nick looked at each other and laughed at the way she had got up her subject, and Nick asked their kinsman if she didn't express it all in perfection. "I delight in general in artists, but I delight still more in their defenders," Peter made reply, perhaps a little meagrely, to Biddy. "Ah don't attack me if you're wise!" Nick said. "One's tempted to when it makes Biddy so fine." "Well, that's the way she encourages me: it's meat and drink to me," Nick went on. "At the same time I'm bound to say there's a little whistling in the dark in it." "In the dark?" his sister demanded. "The obscurity, my dear child, of your own aspirations, your mysterious ambitions and esthetic views. Aren't there some heavyish shadows there?" "Why I never cared for politics." "No, but you cared for life, you cared for society, and you've chosen the path of solitude and concentration." "You horrid boy!" said Biddy. "Give it up, that arduous steep--give it up and come out with me," Peter interposed. "Come out with you?" "Let us walk a little or even drive a little. Let us at any rate talk a little." "I thought you had so much to do," Biddy candidly objected. "So I have, but why shouldn't you do a part of it with me? Would there be any harm? I'm going to some tiresome shops--you'll cheer the frugal hour." The girl hesitated, then turned to Nick. "Would there be any harm?" "Oh it's none of _his_ business!" Peter protested. "He had better take you home to your mother." "I'm going home--I shan't stay here to-day," Biddy went on. Then to Peter: "I came in a hansom, but I shall walk back. Come that way with me." "With pleasure. But I shall not be able to go in," Peter added. "Oh that's no matter," said the girl. "Good-bye, Nick." "You understand then that we dine together--at seven sharp. Wouldn't a club, as I say, be best?" Peter, before going, inquired of Nick. He suggested further which club it should be; and his words led Biddy, who had directed her steps toward the door, to turn a moment as with a reproachful question--whether it was for this Peter had given up Calcutta Gardens. But her impulse, if impulse it was, had no sequel save so far as it was a sequel that Peter freely explained to her, after Nick had assented to his conditions, that her brother too had a desire to go to Miss Rooth's first night and had already promised to accompany him. "Oh that's perfect; it will be so good for him--won't it?--if he's going to paint her again," Biddy responded. "I think there's nothing so good for him as that he happens to have such a sister as you," Peter declared as they went out. He heard at the same time the sound of a carriage stopping, and before Biddy, who was in front of him, opened the door of the house had been able to say to himself, "What a bore--there's Miriam!" The opened door showed him that truth--this young lady in the act of alighting from the brougham provided by Basil Dashwood's thrifty zeal. Her mother followed her, and both the new visitors exclaimed and rejoiced, in their demonstrative way, as their eyes fell on their valued friend. The door had closed behind Peter, but he instantly and violently rang, so that they should be admitted with as little delay as possible, while he stood disconcerted, and fearing he showed it, by the prompt occurrence of an encounter he had particularly sought to avert. It ministered, moreover, a little to this sensibility that Miriam appeared to have come somewhat before her time. The incident promised, however, to pass off in a fine florid way. Before he knew it both the ladies had taken possession of Biddy, who looked at them with comparative coldness, tempered indeed by a faint glow of apprehension, and Miriam had broken out: "We know you, we know you; we saw you in Paris, and you came to my theatre a short time ago with Mr. Sherringham!" "We know your mother, Lady Agnes Dormer. I hope her ladyship's very well," said Mrs. Rooth, who had never struck Peter as a more objectionable old woman. "You offered to do a head of me or something or other: didn't you tell me you work in clay? I daresay you've forgotten all about it, but I should be delighted," Miriam pursued with the richest urbanity. Peter was not concerned with her mother's pervasiveness, though he didn't like Biddy to see even that; but he hoped his companion would take the overcharged benevolence of the young actress in the spirit in which, rather to his surprise, it evidently was offered. "I've sat to your clever brother many times," said Miriam; "I'm going to sit again. I daresay you've seen what we've done--he's too delightful. _Si vous saviez comme cela me repose_!" she added, turning for a moment to Peter. Then she continued, smiling at Biddy; "Only he oughtn't to have thrown up such prospects, you know. I've an idea I wasn't nice to you that day in Paris--I was nervous and scared and perverse. I remember perfectly; I _was_ odious. But I'm better now--you'd see if you were to know me. I'm not a bad sort--really I'm not. But you must have your own friends. Happy they--you look so charming! Immensely like Mr. Dormer, especially about the eyes; isn't she, mamma?" "She comes of a beautiful Norman race--the finest, purest strain," the old woman simpered. "Mr. Dormer's sometimes so good as to come and see us--we're always at home on Sunday; and if some day you found courage to come with him you might perhaps find it pleasant, though very different of course from the circle in which you habitually move." Biddy murmured a vague recognition of these wonderful civilities, and Miriam commented: "Different, yes; but we're all right, you know. Do come," she added. Then turning to Sherringham: "Remember what I told you--I don't expect you to-night." "Oh I understand; I shall come,"--and Peter knew he grew red. "It will be idiotic. Keep him, keep him away--don't let him," Miriam insisted to Biddy; with which, as Nick's portals now were gaping, she drew her mother away. Peter, at this, walked off briskly with Biddy, dropping as he did so: "She's too fantastic!" "Yes, but so tremendously good-looking. I shall ask Nick to take me there," the girl said after a moment. "Well, she'll do you no harm. They're all right, as she says. It's the world of art--you were standing up so for art just now." "Oh I wasn't thinking so much of that kind," she demurred. "There's only one kind--it's all the same thing. If one sort's good the other is." Biddy walked along a moment. "Is she serious? Is she conscientious?" "She has the makings of a great artist," Peter opined. "I'm glad to hear you think a woman can be one." "In that line there has never been any doubt about it." "And only in that line?" "I mean on the stage in general, dramatic or lyric. It's as the actress that the woman produces the most complete and satisfactory artistic results." "And only as the actress?" He weighed it. "Yes, there's another art in which she's not bad." "Which one do you mean?" asked Biddy. "That of being charming and good, that of being indispensable to man." "Oh that isn't an art." "Then you leave her only the stage. Take it if you like in the widest sense." Biddy appeared to reflect a moment, as to judge what sense this might be. But she found none that was wide enough, for she cried the next minute: "Do you mean to say there's nothing for a woman but to be an actress?" "Never in my life. I only say that that's the best thing for a woman to be who finds herself irresistibly carried into the practice of the arts; for there her capacity for them has most application and her incapacity for them least. But at the same time I strongly recommend her not to be an artist if she can possibly help it. It's a devil of a life." "Oh I know; men want women not to be anything." "It's a poor little refuge they try to take from the overwhelming consciousness that you're in very fact everything." "Everything?" And the girl gave a toss. "That's the kind of thing you say to keep us quiet." "Dear Biddy, you see how well we succeed!" laughed Peter. To which she replied by asking irrelevantly: "Why is it so necessary for you to go to the theatre to-night if Miss Rooth doesn't want you to?" "My dear child, she does want me to. But that has nothing to do with it." "Why then did she say that she doesn't?" "Oh because she meant just the contrary." "Is she so false then--is she so vulgar?" "She speaks a special language; practically it isn't false, because it renders her thought and those who know her understand it." "But she doesn't use it only to those who know her," Biddy returned, "since she asked me, who have so little the honour of her acquaintance, to keep you away to-night. How am I to know that she meant by that that I'm to urge you on to go?" He was on the point of replying, "Because you've my word for it"; but he shrank in fact from giving his word--he had some fine scruples--and sought to relieve his embarrassment by a general tribute. "Dear Biddy, you're delightfully acute: you're quite as clever as Miss Rooth." He felt, however, that this was scarcely adequate and he continued: "The truth is that its being important for me to go is a matter quite independent of that young lady's wishing it or not wishing it. There happens to be a definite intrinsic propriety in it which determines the thing and which it would take me long to explain." "I see. But fancy your 'explaining' to me: you make me feel so indiscreet!" the girl cried quickly--an exclamation which touched him because he was not aware that, quick as it had been, she had still had time to be struck first--though she wouldn't for the world have expressed it--with the oddity of such a duty at such a season. In fact that oddity, during a silence of some minutes, came back to Peter himself: the note had been forced--it sounded almost ignobly frivolous from a man on the eve of proceeding to a high diplomatic post. The effect of this, none the less, was not to make him break out with "Hang it, I _will_ keep my engagement to your mother!" but to fill him with the wish to shorten his present strain by taking Biddy the rest of the way in a cab. He was uncomfortable, and there were hansoms about that he looked at wistfully. While he was so occupied his companion took up the talk by an abrupt appeal. "Why did she say that Nick oughtn't to have resigned his seat?" "Oh I don't know. It struck her so. It doesn't matter much." But Biddy kept it up. "If she's an artist herself why doesn't she like people to go in for art, especially when Nick has given his time to painting her so beautifully? Why does she come there so often if she disapproves of what he has done?" "Oh Miriam's disapproval--it doesn't count; it's a manner of speaking." "Of speaking untruths, do you mean? Does she think just the reverse--is that the way she talks about everything?" "We always admire most what we can do least," Peter brought forth; "and Miriam of course isn't political. She ranks painters more or less with her own profession, about which already, new as she is to it, she has no illusions. They're all artists; it's the same general sort of thing. She prefers men of the world--men of action." "Is that the reason she likes you?" Biddy mildly mocked. "Ah she doesn't like me--couldn't you see it?" The girl at first said nothing; then she asked: "Is that why she lets you call her 'Miriam'?" "Oh I don't, to her face." "Ah only to mine!" laughed Biddy. "One says that as one says 'Rachel' of her great predecessor." "Except that she isn't so great, quite yet, is she?" "Far from it; she's the freshest of novices--she has scarcely been four months on the stage. But no novice has ever been such an adept. She'll go very fast," Peter pursued, "and I daresay that before long she'll be magnificent." "What a pity you'll not see that!" Biddy sighed after a pause. "Not see it?" "If you're thousands of miles away." "It is a pity," Peter said; "and since you mention it I don't mind frankly telling you--throwing myself on your mercy, as it were--that that's why I make such a point of a rare occasion like to-night. I've a weakness for the drama that, as you perhaps know, I've never concealed, and this impression will probably have to last me in some barren spot for many, many years." "I understand--I understand. I hope therefore it will be charming." And the girl walked faster. "Just as some other charming impressions will have to last," Peter added, conscious of keeping up with her by some effort. She seemed almost to be running away from him, an impression that led him to suggest, after they had proceeded a little further without more words, that if she were in a hurry they had perhaps better take a cab. Her face was strange and touching to him as she turned it to make answer: "Oh I'm not in the least in a hurry and I really think I had better walk." "We'll walk then by all means!" Peter said with slightly exaggerated gaiety; in pursuance of which they went on a hundred yards. Biddy kept the same pace; yet it was scarcely a surprise to him that she should suddenly stop with the exclamation: "After all, though I'm not in a hurry I'm tired! I had better have a cab; please call that one," she added, looking about her. They were in a straight, blank, ugly street, where the small, cheap, grey-faced houses had no expression save that of a rueful, unconsoled acknowledgment of the universal want of identity. They would have constituted a "terrace" if they could, but they had dolefully given it up. Even a hansom that loitered across the end of the vista turned a sceptical back upon it, so that Sherringham had to lift his voice in a loud appeal. He stood with Biddy watching the cab approach them. "This is one of the charming things you'll remember," she said, turning her eyes to the general dreariness from the particular figure of the vehicle, which was antiquated and clumsy. Before he could reply she had lightly stepped into the cab; but as he answered, "Most assuredly it is," and prepared to follow her she quickly closed the apron. "I must go alone; you've lots of things to do--it's all right"; and through the aperture in the roof she gave the driver her address. She had spoken with decision, and Peter fully felt now that she wished to get away from him. Her eyes betrayed it, as well as her voice, in a look, a strange, wandering ray that as he stood there with his hand on the cab he had time to take from her. "Good-bye, Peter," she smiled; and as the thing began to rumble away he uttered the same tepid, ridiculous farewell. XLIV At the entrance of Miriam and her mother Nick, in the studio, had stopped whistling, but he was still gay enough to receive them with every appearance of warmth. He thought it a poor place, ungarnished, untapestried, a bare, almost grim workshop, with all its revelations and honours still to come. But his visitors smiled on it a good deal in the same way in which they had smiled on Bridget Dormer when they met her at the door: Mrs. Rooth because vague, prudent approbation was the habit of her foolish face--it was ever the least danger; and Miriam because, as seemed, she was genuinely glad to find herself within the walls of which she spoke now as her asylum. She broke out in this strain to her host almost as soon as she had crossed the threshold, commending his circumstances, his conditions of work, as infinitely happier than her own. He was quiet, independent, absolute, free to do what he liked as he liked it, shut up in his little temple with his altar and his divinity; not hustled about in a mob of people, having to posture and grin to pit and gallery, to square himself at every step with insufferable conventions and with the ignorance and vanity of others. He was blissfully alone. "Mercy, how you do abuse your fine profession! I'm sure I never urged you to adopt it!" Mrs. Rooth cried, in real bewilderment, to her daughter. "She was abusing mine still more the other day," joked Nick--"telling me I ought to be ashamed of it and of myself." "Oh I never know from one moment to the other--I live with my heart in my mouth," sighed the old woman. "Aren't you quiet about the great thing--about my personal behaviour?" Miriam smiled. "My improprieties are all of the mind." "I don't know what you _call_ your personal behaviour," her mother objected. "You would very soon if it were not what it is." "And I don't know why you should wish to have it thought you've a wicked mind," Mrs. Rooth agreeably grumbled. "Yes, but I don't see very well how I can make you understand that. At any rate," Miriam pursued with her grand eyes on Nick, "I retract what I said the other day about Mr. Dormer. I've no wish to quarrel with him on the way he has determined to dispose of his life, because after all it does suit me very well. It rests me, this little devoted corner; oh it rests me! It's out of the row and the dust, it's deliciously still and they can't get at me. Ah when art's like this, _à la bonne heure_!" And she looked round on such a presentment of "art" in a splendid way that produced amusement on the young man's part at its contrast with the humble fact. Miriam shone upon him as if she liked to be the cause of his mirth and went on appealing to him: "You'll always let me come here for an hour, won't you, to take breath--to let the whirlwind pass? You needn't trouble yourself about me; I don't mean to impose on you in the least the necessity of painting me, though if that's a manner of helping you to get on you may be sure it will always be open to you. Do what you like with me in that respect; only let me sit here on a high stool, keeping well out of your way, and see what you happen to be doing. I'll tell you my own adventures when you want to hear them." "The fewer adventures you have to tell the better, my dear," said Mrs. Rooth; "and if Mr. Dormer keeps you quiet he'll add ten years to my life." "It all makes an interesting comment on Mr. Dormer's own quietness, on his independence and sweet solitude," Nick observed. "Miss Rooth has to work with others, which is after all only what Mr. Dormer has to do when he works with Miss Rooth. What do you make of the inevitable sitter?" "Oh," answered Miriam, "you can say to the inevitable sitter, 'Hold your tongue, you brute!'" "Isn't it a good deal in that manner that I've heard you address your comrades at the theatre?" Mrs. Rooth inquired. "That's why my heart's in my mouth." "Yes, but they hit me back; they reply to me--_comme de raison_--as I should never think of replying to Mr. Dormer. It's a great advantage to him that when he's peremptory with his model it only makes her better, adds to her expression of gloomy grandeur." "We did the gloomy grandeur in the other picture: suppose therefore we try something different in this," Nick threw off. "It _is_ serious, it _is_ grand," murmured Mrs. Rooth, who had taken up a rapt attitude before the portrait of her daughter. "It makes one wonder what she's thinking of. Beautiful, commendable things--that's what it seems to say." "What can I be thinking of but the tremendous wisdom of my mother?" Miriam returned. "I brought her this morning to see that thing--she had only seen it in its earliest stage--and not to presume to advise you about anything else you may be so good as to embark on. She wanted, or professed she wanted, terribly to know what you had finally arrived at. She was too impatient to wait till you should send it home." "Ah send it home--send it home; let us have it always with us!" Mrs. Rooth engagingly said. "It will keep us up, up, and up on the heights, near the stars--be always for us a symbol and a reminder!" "You see I was right," Miriam went on; "for she appreciates thoroughly, in her own way, and almost understands. But if she worries or distracts you I'll send her directly home--I've kept the carriage there on purpose. I must add that I don't feel quite safe to-day in letting her out of my sight. She's liable to make dashes at the theatre and play unconscionable tricks there. I shall never again accuse mamma of a want of interest in my profession. Her interest to-day exceeds even my own. She's all over the place and she has ideas--ah but ideas! She's capable of turning up at the theatre at five o'clock this afternoon to demand the repainting of the set in the third act. For myself I've not a word more to say on the subject--I've accepted every danger, I've swallowed my fate. Everything's no doubt wrong, but nothing can possibly be right. Let us eat and drink, for to-night we die. If you say so mamma shall go and sit in the carriage, and as there's no means of fastening the doors (is there?) your servant shall keep guard over her." "Just as you are now--be so good as to remain so; sitting just that way--leaning back with a smile in your eyes and one hand on the sofa beside you and supporting you a little. I shall stick a flower into the other hand--let it lie in your lap just as it is. Keep that thing on your head--it's admirably uncovered: do you call such an unconsidered trifle a bonnet?--and let your head fall back a little. There it is--it's found. This time I shall really do something, and it will be as different as you like from that other crazy job. Here we go!" It was in these irrelevant but earnest words that Nick responded to his sitter's uttered vagaries, of which her charming tone and countenance diminished the superficial acerbity. He held up his hands a moment, to fix her in her limits, and in a few minutes had a happy sense of having begun to work. "The smile in her eyes--don't forget the smile in her eyes!" Mrs. Rooth softly chanted, turning away and creeping about the room. "That will make it so different from the other picture and show the two sides of her genius, the wonderful range between them. They'll be splendid mates, and though I daresay I shall strike you as greedy you must let me hope you'll send this one home too." She explored the place discreetly and on tiptoe, talking twaddle as she went and bending her head and her eyeglass over various objects with an air of imperfect comprehension that didn't prevent Nick's private recall of the story of her underhand, commercial habits told by Gabriel Nash at the exhibition in Paris the first time her name had fallen on his ear. A queer old woman from whom, if you approached her in the right way, you could buy old pots--it was in this character that she had originally been introduced to him. He had lost sight of it afterwards, but it revived again as his observant eyes, at the same time that they followed his active hand, became aware of her instinctive, appraising gestures. There was a moment when he frankly laughed out--there was so little in his poor studio to appraise. Mrs. Rooth's wandering eyeglass and vague, polite, disappointed, bent back and head made a subject for a sketch on the instant: they gave such a sudden pictorial glimpse of the element of race. He found himself seeing the immemorial Jewess in her hold up a candle in a crammed back shop. There was no candle indeed and his studio was not crammed, and it had never occurred to him before that she was a grand-daughter of Israel save on the general theory, so stoutly held by several clever people, that few of us are not under suspicion. The late Rudolf Roth had at least been, and his daughter was visibly her father's child; so that, flanked by such a pair, good Semitic presumptions sufficiently crowned the mother. Receiving Miriam's sharp, satiric shower without shaking her shoulders she might at any rate have been the descendant of a tribe long persecuted. Her blandness was beyond all baiting; she professed she could be as still as a mouse. Miriam, on the other side of the room, in the tranquil beauty of her attitude--"found" indeed, as Nick had said--watched her a little and then declared she had best have been locked up at home. Putting aside her free account of the dangers to which her mother exposed her, it wasn't whimsical to imagine that within the limits of that repose from which the Neville-Nugents never wholly departed the elder lady might indeed be a trifle fidgety and have something on her mind. Nick presently mentioned that it wouldn't be possible for him to "send home" his second performance; and he added, in the exuberance of having already got a little into relation with his work, that perhaps this didn't matter, inasmuch as--if Miriam would give him his time, to say nothing of her own--a third and a fourth masterpiece might also some day very well struggle into the light. His model rose to this without conditions, assuring him he might count upon her till she grew too old and too ugly and that nothing would make her so happy as that he should paint her as often as Romney had painted the celebrated Lady Hamilton. "Ah Lady Hamilton!" deprecated Mrs. Rooth; while Miriam, who had on occasion the candour of a fine acquisitiveness, wished to know what particular reason there might be for his not letting them have the picture he was now beginning. "Why I've promised it to Peter Sherringham--he has offered me money for it," Nick replied. "However, he's welcome to it for nothing, poor chap, and I shall be delighted to do the best I can for him." Mrs. Rooth, still prowling, stopped in the middle of the room at this, while her daughter echoed: "He offered you money--just as we came in?" "You met him then at the door with my sister? I supposed you had--he's taking her home," Nick explained. "Your sister's a lovely girl--such an aristocratic type!" breathed Mrs. Rooth. Then she added: "I've a tremendous confession to make to you." "Mamma's confessions have to be tremendous to correspond with her crimes," said Miriam. "She asked Miss Dormer to come and see us, suggested even that you might bring her some Sunday. I don't like the way mamma does such things--too much humility, too many _simagrées_, after all; but I also said what I could to be nice to her. Your sister _is_ charming--awfully pretty and modest. If you were to press me I should tell you frankly that it seems to me rather a social muddle, this rubbing shoulders of 'nice girls' and _filles de théâtre_: I shouldn't think it would do your poor young things much good. However, it's their own affair, and no doubt there's no more need of their thinking we're worse than we are than of their thinking we're better. The people they live with don't seem to know the difference--I sometimes make my reflexions about the public one works for." "Ah if you go in for the public's knowing differences you're far too particular," Nick laughed. "_D'où tombez-vous_? as you affected French people say. If you've anything at stake on that you had simply better not play." "Dear Mr. Dormer, don't encourage her to be so dreadful; for it _is_ dreadful, the way she talks," Mrs. Rooth broke in. "One would think we weren't respectable--one would think I had never known what I've known and been what I've been." "What one would think, beloved mother, is that you're a still greater humbug than you are. It's you, on the contrary, who go down on your knees, who pour forth apologies about our being vagabonds." "Vagabonds--listen to her!--after the education I've given her and our magnificent prospects!" wailed Mrs. Rooth, sinking with clasped hands upon the nearest ottoman. "Not after our prospects, if prospects they be: a good deal before them. Yes, you've taught me tongues and I'm greatly obliged to you--they no doubt give variety as well as incoherency to my conversation; and that of people in our line is for the most part notoriously monotonous and shoppy. The gift of tongues is in general the sign of your true adventurer. Dear mamma, I've no low standard--that's the last thing," Miriam went on. "My weakness is my exalted conception of respectability. Ah _parlez-moi de ça_ and of the way I understand it! If I were to go in for being respectable you'd see something fine. I'm awfully conservative and I know what respectability is, even when I meet people of society on the accidental middle ground of either glowering or smirking. I know also what it isn't--it isn't the sweet union of well-bred little girls ('carefully-nurtured,' don't they call them?) and painted she-mummers. I should carry it much further than any of these people: I should never look at the likes of us! Every hour I live I see that the wisdom of the ages was in the experience of dear old Madame Carré--was in a hundred things she told me. She's founded on a rock. After that," Miriam went on to her host, "I can assure you that if you were so good as to bring Miss Dormer to see us we should be angelically careful of her and surround her with every attention and precaution." "The likes of us--the likes of us!" Mrs. Rooth repeated plaintively and with a resentment as vain as a failure to sneeze. "I don't know what you're talking about and I decline to be turned upside down, I've my ideas as well as you, and I repudiate the charge of false humility. I've been through too many troubles to be proud, and a pleasant, polite manner was the rule of my life even in the days when, God knows, I had everything. I've never changed and if with God's help I had a civil tongue then, I've a civil tongue now. It's more than you always have, my poor, perverse, passionate child. Once a lady always a lady--all the footlights in the world, turn them up as high as you will, make no difference there. And I think people know it, people who know anything--if I may use such an expression--and it's because they know it that I'm not afraid to address them in a pleasant way. So I must say--and I call Mr. Dormer to witness, for if he could reason with you a bit about it he might render several people a service--your conduct to Mr. Sherringham simply breaks my heart," Mrs. Rooth concluded, taking a jump of several steps in the fine modern avenue of her argument. Nick was appealed to, but he hung back, drawing with a free hand, and while he forbore Miriam took it up. "Mother's good--mother's very good; but it's only little by little that you discover how good she is." This seemed to leave him at ease to ask their companion, with the preliminary intimation that what she had just said was very striking, what she meant by her daughter's conduct to old Peter. Before Mrs. Rooth could answer this question, however, Miriam broke across with one of her own. "Do you mind telling me if you made your sister go off with Mr. Sherringham because you knew it was about time for me to turn up? Poor Mr. Dormer, I get you into trouble, don't I?" she added quite with tenderness. "Into trouble?" echoed Nick, looking at her head but not at her eyes. "Well, we won't talk about that!" she returned with a rich laugh. He now hastened to say that he had nothing to do with his sister's leaving the studio--she had only come, as it happened, for a moment. She had walked away with Peter Sherringham because they were cousins and old friends: he was to leave England immediately, for a long time, and he had offered her his company going home. Mrs. Rooth shook her head very knowingly over the "long time" Mr. Sherringham would be absent--she plainly had her ideas about that; and she conscientiously related that in the course of the short conversation they had all had at the door of the house her daughter had reminded Miss Dormer of something that had passed between them in Paris on the question of the charming young lady's modelling her head. "I did it to make the idea of our meeting less absurd--to put it on the footing of our both being artists. I don't ask you if she has talent," said Miriam. "Then I needn't tell you," laughed Nick. "I'm sure she has talent and a very refined inspiration. I see something in that corner, covered with a mysterious veil," Mrs. Rooth insinuated; which led Miriam to go on immediately: "Has she been trying her hand at Mr. Sherringham?" "When should she try her hand, poor dear young lady? He's always sitting with us," said Mrs. Rooth. "Dear mamma, you exaggerate. He has his moments--when he seems to say his prayers to me; but we've had some success in cutting them down. _Il s'est bien détaché ces jours-ci_, and I'm very happy for him. Of course it's an impertinent allusion for me to make; but I should be so delighted if I could think of him as a little in love with Miss Dormer," the girl pursued, addressing Nick. "He is, I think, just a little--just a tiny bit," her artist allowed, working away; while Mrs. Rooth ejaculated to her daughter simultaneously: "How can you ask such fantastic questions when you know he's dying for _you_?" "Oh dying!--he's dying very hard!" cried Miriam. "Mr. Sherringham's a man of whom I can't speak with too much esteem and affection and who may be destined to perish by some horrid fever (which God forbid!) in the unpleasant country he's going to. But he won't have caught his fever from your humble servant." "You may kill him even while you remain in perfect health yourself," said Nick; "and since we're talking of the matter I don't see the harm of my confessing that he strikes me as far gone--oh as very bad indeed." "And yet he's in love with your sister?--_je n'y suis plus_." "He tries to be, for he sees that as regards you there are difficulties. He'd like to put his hand on some nice girl who'd be an antidote to his poison." "Difficulties are a mild name for them; poison even is a mild name for the ill he suffers from. The principal difficulty is that he doesn't know what the devil he wants. The next is that I don't either--or what the devil I want myself. I only know what I don't want," Miriam kept on brightly and as if uttering some happy, beneficent truth. "I don't want a person who takes things even less simply than I do myself. Mr. Sherringham, poor man, must be very uncomfortable, for one side of him's in a perpetual row with the other side. He's trying to serve God and Mammon, and I don't know how God will come off. What I like in you is that you've definitely let Mammon go--it's the only decent way. That's my earnest conviction, and yet they call us people light. Dear Mr. Sherringham has tremendous ambitions--tremendous _riguardi_, as we used to say in Italy. He wants to enjoy every comfort and to save every appearance, and all without making a scrap of a sacrifice. He expects others--me, for instance--to make all the sacrifices. _Merci_, much as I esteem him and much as I owe him! I don't know how he ever came to stray at all into our bold, bad, downright Bohemia: it was a cruel trick for fortune to play him. He can't keep out of it, he's perpetually making dashes across the border, and yet as soon as he gets here he's on pins and needles. There's another in whose position--if I were in it--I wouldn't look at the likes of us!" "I don't know much about the matter," Nick brought out after some intent smudging, "but I've an idea Peter thinks he has made or at least is making sacrifices." "So much the better--you must encourage him, you must help him." "I don't know what my daughter's talking about," Mrs. Rooth contributed--"she's much too paradoxical for my plain mind. But there's one way to encourage Mr. Sherringham--there's one way to help him; and perhaps it won't be a worse way for a gentleman of your good nature that it will help me at the same time. Can't I look to you, dear Mr. Dormer, to see that he does come to the theatre to-night--that he doesn't feel himself obliged to stay away?" "What danger is there of his staying away?" Nick asked. "If he's bent on sacrifices that's a very good one to begin with," Miriam observed. "That's the mad, bad way she talks to him--she has forbidden the dear unhappy gentleman the house!" her mother cried. "She brought it up to him just now at the door--before Miss Dormer: such very odd form! She pretends to impose her commands upon him." "Oh he'll be there--we're going to dine together," said Nick. And when Miriam asked him what that had to do with it he went on: "Why we've arranged it; I'm going, and he won't let me go alone." "You're going? I sent you no places," his sitter objected. "Yes, but I've got one. Why didn't you, after all I've done for you?" She beautifully thought of it. "Because I'm so good. No matter," she added, "if Mr. Sherringham comes I won't act." "Won't you act for me?" "She'll act like an angel," Mrs. Rooth protested. "She might do, she might be, anything in all the world; but she won't take common pains." "Of one thing there's no doubt," said Miriam: "that compared with the rest of us--poor passionless creatures--mamma does know what she wants." "And what's that?" Nick inquired, chalking on. "She wants everything." "Never, never--I'm much more humble," retorted the old woman; upon which her daughter requested her to give then to Mr. Dormer, who was a reasonable man and an excellent judge, a general idea of the scope of her desires. As, however, Mrs. Rooth, sighing and deprecating, was not quick to acquit herself, the girl tried a short cut to the truth with the abrupt demand: "Do you believe for a single moment he'd marry me?" "Why he has proposed to you--you've told me yourself--a dozen times." "Proposed what to me?" Miriam rang out. "I've told you _that_ neither a dozen times nor once, because I've never understood. He has made wonderful speeches, but has never been serious." "You told me he had been in the seventh heaven of devotion, especially that night we went to the foyer of the Français," Mrs. Rooth insisted. "Do you call the seventh heaven of devotion serious? He's in love with me, _je le veux bien_; he's so poisoned--Mr. Dormer vividly puts it--as to require a strong antidote; but he has never spoken to me as if he really expected me to listen to him, and he's the more of a gentleman from that fact. He knows we haven't a square foot of common ground--that a grasshopper can't set up a house with a fish. So he has taken care to say to me only more than he can possibly mean. That makes it stand just for nothing." "Did he say more than he can possibly mean when he took formal leave of you yesterday--for ever and ever?" the old woman cried. On which Nick re-enforced her. "And don't you call that--his taking formal leave--a sacrifice?" "Oh he took it all back, his sacrifice, before he left the house." "Then has that no meaning?" demanded Mrs. Rooth. "None that I can make out," said her daughter. "Ah I've no patience with you: you can be stupid when you will--you can be even that too!" the poor lady groaned. "What mamma wishes me to understand and to practise is the particular way to be artful with Mr. Sherringham," said Miriam. "There are doubtless depths of wisdom and virtue in it. But I see only one art--that of being perfectly honest." "I like to hear you talk--it makes you live, brings you out," Nick contentedly dropped. "And you sit beautifully still. All I want to say is please continue to do so: remain exactly as you are--it's rather important--for the next ten minutes." "We're washing our dirty linen before you, but it's all right," the girl returned, "because it shows you what sort of people we are, and that's what you need to know. Don't make me vague and arranged and fine in this new view," she continued: "make me characteristic and real; make life, with all its horrid facts and truths, stick out of me. I wish you could put mother in too; make us live there side by side and tell our little story. 'The wonderful actress and her still more wonderful mamma'--don't you think that's an awfully good subject?" Mrs. Rooth, at this, cried shame on her daughter's wanton humour, professing that she herself would never accept so much from Nick's good nature, and Miriam settled it that at any rate he was some day and in some way to do her mother, _really_ do her, and so make her, as one of the funniest persons that ever was, live on through the ages. "She doesn't believe Mr. Sherringham wants to marry me any more than you do," the girl, taking up her dispute again after a moment, represented to Nick; "but she believes--how indeed can I tell you what she believes?--that I can work it so well, if you understand, that in the fulness of time I shall hold him in a vice. I'm to keep him along for the present, but not to listen to him, for if I listen to him I shall lose him. It's ingenious, it's complicated; but I daresay you follow me." "Don't move--don't move," said Nick. "Pardon a poor clumsy beginner." "No, I shall explain quietly. Somehow--here it's _very_ complicated and you mustn't lose the thread--I shall be an actress and make a tremendous lot of money, and somehow too (I suppose a little later) I shall become an ambassadress and be the favourite of courts. So you see it will all be delightful. Only I shall have to go very straight. Mamma reminds me of a story I once heard about the mother of a young lady who was in receipt of much civility from the pretender to a crown, which indeed he, and the young lady too, afterwards more or less wore. The old countess watched the course of events and gave her daughter the cleverest advice: '_Tiens bon, ma fille_, and you shall sit upon a throne.' Mamma wishes me to _tenir bon_--she apparently thinks there's a danger I mayn't--so that if I don't sit upon a throne I shall at least parade at the foot of one. And if before that, for ten years, I pile up the money, they'll forgive me the way I've made it. I should hope so, if I've _tenu bon_! Only ten years is a good while to hold out, isn't it? If it isn't Mr. Sherringham it will be some one else. Mr. Sherringham has the great merit of being a bird in the hand. I'm to keep him along, I'm to be still more diplomatic than even he can be." Mrs. Rooth listened to her daughter with an air of assumed reprobation which melted, before the girl had done, into a diverted, complacent smile--the gratification of finding herself the proprietress of so much wit and irony and grace. Miriam's account of her mother's views was a scene of comedy, and there was instinctive art in the way she added touch to touch and made point upon point. She was so quiet, to oblige her painter, that only her fine lips moved--all her expression was in their charming utterance. Mrs. Rooth, after the first flutter of a less cynical spirit, consented to be sacrificed to an effect of the really high order she had now been educated to recognise; so that she scarce hesitated, when Miriam had ceased speaking, before she tittered out with the fondest indulgence: '_Comédienne_!' And she seemed to appeal to their companion. "Ain't she fascinating? That's the way she does for you!" "It's rather cruel, isn't it," said Miriam, "to deprive people of the luxury of calling one an actress as they'd call one a liar? I represent, but I represent truly." "Mr. Sherringham would marry you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you like that?" "Like my wife to be the most brilliant woman in Europe? I think I can do with it." "Aren't you afraid of me?" "Not a bit." "Bravely said. How little you know me after all!" sighed the girl. "I tell the truth," Peter ardently went on; "and you must do me the justice to admit that I've taken the time to dig deep into my feelings. I'm not an infatuated boy; I've lived, I've had experience, I've observed; in short I know what I mean and what I want. It isn't a thing to reason about; it's simply a need that consumes me. I've put it on starvation diet, but that's no use--really, it's no use, Miriam," the young man declared with a ring that spoke enough of his sincerity. "It is no question of my trusting you; it's simply a question of your trusting me. You're all right, as I've heard you say yourself; you're frank, spontaneous, generous; you're a magnificent creature. Just quietly marry me and I'll manage you." "'Manage' me?" The girl's inflexion was droll; it made him change colour. "I mean I'll give you a larger life than the largest you can get in any other way. The stage is great, no doubt, but the world's greater. It's a bigger theatre than any of those places in the Strand. We'll go in for realities instead of fables, and you'll do them far better than you do the fables." Miriam had listened attentively, but her face that could so show things showed her despair at his perverted ingenuity. "Pardon my saying it after your delightful tributes to my worth," she returned in a moment, "but I've never listened to anything quite so grandly unreal. You think so well of me that humility itself ought to keep me silent; nevertheless I _must_ utter a few shabby words of sense. I'm a magnificent creature on the stage--well and good; it's what I want to be and it's charming to see such evidence that I succeed. But off the stage, woe betide us both, I should lose all my advantages. The fact's so patent that it seems to me I'm very good-natured even to discuss it with you." "Are you on the stage now, pray? Ah Miriam, if it weren't for the respect I owe you!" her companion wailed. "If it weren't for that I shouldn't have come here to meet you. My gift is the thing that takes you: could there be a better proof than that it's to-night's display of it that has brought you to this unreason? It's indeed a misfortune that you're so sensitive to our poor arts, since they play such tricks with your power to see things as they are. Without my share of them I should be a dull, empty, third-rate woman, and yet that's the fate you ask me to face and insanely pretend you're ready to face yourself." "Without it--without it?" Sherringham cried. "Your own sophistry's infinitely worse than mine. I should like to see you without it for the fiftieth part of a second. What I ask you to give up is the dusty boards of the play-house and the flaring footlights, but not the very essence of your being. Your 'gift,' your genius, is yourself, and it's because it's yourself that I yearn for you. If it had been a thing you could leave behind by the easy dodge of stepping off the stage I would never have looked at you a second time. Don't talk to me as if I were a simpleton--with your own false simplifications! You were made to charm and console, to represent beauty and harmony and variety to miserable human beings; and the daily life of man is the theatre for that--not a vulgar shop with a turnstile that's open only once in the twenty-four hours. 'Without it,' verily!" Peter proceeded with a still, deep heat that kept down in a manner his rising scorn and exasperated passion. "Please let me know the first time you're without your face, without your voice, your step, your exquisite spirit, the turn of your head and the wonder of your look!" Miriam at this moved away from him with a port that resembled what she sometimes showed on the stage when she turned her young back upon the footlights and then after a few steps grandly swept round again. This evolution she performed--it was over in an instant--on the present occasion; even to stopping short with her eyes upon him and her head admirably erect. "Surely it's strange," she said, "the way the other solution never occurs to you." "The other solution?" "That _you_ should stay on the stage." "I don't understand you," her friend gloomed. "Stay on _my_ stage. Come off your own." For a little he said nothing; then: "You mean that if I'll do that you'll have me?" "I mean that if it were to occur to you to offer me a little sacrifice on your own side it might place the matter in a slightly more attractive light." "Continue to let you act--as my wife?" he appealed. "Is it a real condition? Am I to understand that those are your terms?" "I may say so without fear, because you'll never accept them." "Would you accept them _from_ me?" he demanded; "accept the manly, the professional sacrifice, see me throw up my work, my prospects--of course I should have to do that--and simply become your appendage?" She raised her arms for a prodigious fall. "My dear fellow, you invite me with the best conscience in the world to become yours." "The cases are not equal. You'd make of me the husband of an actress. I should make of you the wife of an ambassador." "The husband of an actress, _c'est bientôt dit_, in that tone of scorn! If you're consistent," said Miriam, all lucid and hard, "it ought to be a proud position for you." "What do you mean, if I'm consistent?" "Haven't you always insisted on the beauty and interest of our art and the greatness of our mission? Haven't you almost come to blows with poor Gabriel Nash about it? What did all that mean if you won't face the first consequences of your theory? Either it was an enlightened conviction or it was an empty pretence. If you were only talking against time I'm glad to know it," she rolled out with a darkening eye. "The better the cause, it seems to me, the better the deed; and if the theatre _is_ important to the 'human spirit,' as you used to say so charmingly, and if into the bargain you've the pull of being so fond of me, I don't see why it should be monstrous of you to give us your services in an intelligent, indirect way. Of course if you're not serious we needn't talk at all; but if you are, with your conception of what the actor can do, why is it so base to come to the actor's aid, taking one devotion with another? If I'm so fine I'm worth looking after a bit, and the place where I'm finest is the place to look after me!" He had a long pause again, taking her in as it seemed to him he had never done. "You were never finer than at this minute, in the deepest domesticity of private life. I've no conception whatever of what the actor can do, and no theory whatever about the importance of the theatre. Any infatuation of that sort has completely dropped from me, and for all I care the theatre may go to the dogs--which I judge it altogether probably will!" "You're dishonest, you're ungrateful, you're false!" Miriam flashed. "It was the theatre brought you here--if it hadn't been for the theatre I never would have looked at you. It was in the name of the theatre you first made love to me; it's to the theatre you owe every advantage that, so far as I'm concerned, you possess." "I seem to possess a great many!" poor Peter derisively groaned. "You might avail yourself better of those you have! You make me angry, but I want to be fair," said the shining creature, "and I can't be unless you are. You're not fair, nor candid, nor honourable, when you swallow your words and abjure your faith, when you throw over old friends and old memories for a selfish purpose." "'Selfish purpose' is, in your own convenient idiom, _bientôt dit_," Peter promptly answered. "I suppose you consider that if I truly esteemed you I should be ashamed to deprive the world of the light of your genius. Perhaps my esteem isn't of the right quality--there are different kinds, aren't there? At any rate I've explained to you that I propose to deprive the world of nothing at all. You shall be celebrated, _allez_!" "Vain words, vain words, my dear!" and she turned off again in her impatience. "I know of course," she added quickly, "that to befool yourself with such twaddle you must be pretty bad." "Yes, I'm pretty bad," he admitted, looking at her dismally. "What do you do with the declaration you made me the other day--the day I found my cousin here--that you'd take me if I should come to you as one who had risen high?" Miriam thought of it. "I remember--the chaff about the honours, the orders, the stars and garters. My poor foolish friend, don't be so painfully literal. Don't you know a joke when you see it? It was to worry your cousin, wasn't it? But it didn't in the least succeed." "Why should you wish to worry my cousin?" "Because he's so provoking!" she instantly answered; after which she laughed as if for her falling too simply into the trap he had laid. "Surely, at all events, I had my freedom no less than I have it now. Pray what explanations should I have owed you and in what fear of you should I have gone? However, that has nothing to do with it. Say I did tell you that we might arrange it on the day you should come to me covered with glory in the shape of little tinkling medals: why should you anticipate that transaction by so many years and knock me down such a long time in advance? Where's the glory, please, and where are the medals?" "Dearest girl, am I not going to strange parts--a capital promotion--next month," he insistently demanded, "and can't you trust me enough to believe I speak with a real appreciation of the facts (that I'm not lying to you in short) when I tell you I've my foot in the stirrup? The glory's dawning. _I_'m all right too." "What you propose to me, then, is to accompany you _tout bonnement_ to your new post. What you propose to me is to pack up and start?" "You put it in a nutshell." But Peter's smile was strained. "You're touching--it has its charm. But you can't get anything in any of the Americas, you know. I'm assured there are no medals to be picked up in those parts--which are therefore 'strange' indeed. That's why the diplomatic body hate them all." "They're on the way, they're on the way!"--he could only feverishly hammer. "The people here don't keep us long in disagreeable places unless we want to stay. There's one thing you can get anywhere if you've ability, and nowhere if you've not, and in the disagreeable places generally more than in the others; and that--since it's the element of the question we're discussing--is simply success. It's odious to be put on one's swagger, but I protest against being treated as if I had nothing to offer--to offer a person who has such glories of her own. I'm not a little presumptuous ass; I'm a man accomplished and determined, and the omens are on my side." Peter faltered a moment and then with a queer expression went on: "Remember, after all, that, strictly speaking, your glories are also still in the future." An exclamation at these words burst from Miriam's lips, but her companion resumed quickly: "Ask my official superiors, ask any of my colleagues, if they consider I've nothing to offer." He had an idea as he ceased speaking that she was on the point of breaking out with some strong word of resentment at his allusion to the contingent nature of her prospects. But it only deepened his wound to hear her say with extraordinary mildness: "It's perfectly true that my glories are still to come, that I may fizzle out and that my little success of to-day is perhaps a mere flash in the pan. Stranger things have been--something of that sort happens every day. But don't we talk too much of that part of it?" she asked with a weary patience that was noble in its effect. "Surely it's vulgar to think only of the noise one's going to make--especially when one remembers how utterly _bêtes_ most of the people will be among whom one makes it. It isn't to my possible glories I cling; it's simply to my idea, even if it's destined to betray me and sink me. I like it better than anything else--a thousand times better (I'm sorry to have to put it in such a way) than tossing up my head as the fine lady of a little coterie." "A little coterie? I don't know what you're talking about!"--for this at least Peter could fight. "A big coterie, then! It's only that at the best. A nasty, prim, 'official' woman who's perched on her little local pedestal and thinks she's a queen for ever because she's ridiculous for an hour! Oh you needn't tell me, I've seen them abroad--the dreariest females--and could imitate them here. I could do one for you on the spot if I weren't so tired. It's scarcely worth mentioning perhaps all this while--but I'm ready to drop." She picked up the white mantle she had tossed off, flinging it round her with her usual amplitude of gesture. "They're waiting for me and I confess I'm hungry. If I don't hurry they'll eat up all the nice things. Don't say I haven't been obliging, and come back when you're better. Good-night." "I quite agree with you that we've talked too much about the vulgar side of our question," Peter returned, walking round to get between her and the French window by which she apparently had a view of leaving the room. "That's because I've wanted to bribe you. Bribery's almost always vulgar." "Yes, you should do better. _Merci_! There's a cab: some of them have come for me. I must go," she added, listening for a sound that reached her from the road. Peter listened too, making out no cab. "Believe me, it isn't wise to turn your back on such an affection as mine and on such a confidence," he broke out again, speaking almost in a warning tone--there was a touch of superior sternness in it, as of a rebuke for real folly, but it was meant to be tender--and stopping her within a few feet of the window. "Such things are the most precious that life has to give us," he added all but didactically. She had listened once more for a little; then she appeared to give up the idea of the cab. The reader need hardly be told that at this stage of her youthful history the right way for her lover to take her wouldn't have been to picture himself as acting for her highest good. "I like your calling the feeling with which I inspire you confidence," she presently said; and the deep note of the few words had something of the distant mutter of thunder. "What is it, then, when I offer you everything I have, everything I am, everything I shall ever be?" She seemed to measure him as for the possible success of an attempt to pass him. But she remained where she was. "I'm sorry for you, yes, but I'm also rather ashamed." "Ashamed of _me_?" "A brave offer to see me through--that's what I should call confidence. You say to-day that you hate the theatre--and do you know what has made you do it? The fact that it has too large a place in your mind to let you disown it and throw it over with a good conscience. It has a deep fascination for you, and yet you're not strong enough to do so enlightened and public a thing as take up with it in my person. You're ashamed of yourself for that, as all your constant high claims for it are on record; so you blaspheme against it to try and cover your retreat and your treachery and straighten out your personal situation. But it won't do, dear Mr. Sherringham--it won't do at all," Miriam proceeded with a triumphant, almost judicial lucidity which made her companion stare; "you haven't the smallest excuse of stupidity, and your perversity is no excuse whatever. Leave her alone altogether--a poor girl who's making her way--or else come frankly to help her, to give her the benefit of your wisdom. Don't lock her up for life under the pretence of doing her good. What does one most good is to see a little honesty. You're the best judge, the best critic, the best observer, the best _believer_, that I've ever come across: you're committed to it by everything you've said to me for a twelvemonth, by the whole turn of your mind, by the way you've followed us up, all of us, from far back. If an art's noble and beneficent one shouldn't be afraid to offer it one's arm. Your cousin isn't: he can make sacrifices." "My cousin?" Peter amazedly echoed. "Why, wasn't it only the other day you were throwing his sacrifices in his teeth?" Under this imputation on her straightness Miriam flinched but for an instant. "I did that to worry _you_," she smiled. "Why should you wish to worry me if you care so little about me?" "Care little about you? Haven't I told you often, didn't I tell you yesterday, how much I care? Ain't I showing it now by spending half the night here with you--giving myself away to all those cynics--taking all this trouble to persuade you to hold up your head and have the courage of your opinions?" "You invent my opinions for your convenience," said Peter all undaunted. "As long ago as the night I introduced you, in Paris, to Mademoiselle Voisin, you accused me of looking down on those who practise your art. I remember how you came down on me because I didn't take your friend Dashwood seriously enough. Perhaps I didn't; but if already at that time I was so wide of the mark you can scarcely accuse me of treachery now." "I don't remember, but I daresay you're right," Miriam coldly meditated. "What I accused you of then was probably simply what I reproach you with now--the germ at least of your deplorable weakness. You consider that we do awfully valuable work, and yet you wouldn't for the world let people suppose you really take our side. If your position was even at that time so false, so much the worse for you, that's all. Oh it's refreshing," his formidable friend exclaimed after a pause during which Peter seemed to himself to taste the full bitterness of despair, so baffled and cheapened he intimately felt--"oh it's refreshing to see a man burn his ships in a cause that appeals to him, give up something precious for it and break with horrid timidities and snobberies! It's the most beautiful sight in the world." Poor Peter, sore as he was, and with the cold breath of failure in his face, nevertheless burst out laughing at this fine irony. "You're magnificent, you give me at this moment the finest possible illustration of what you mean by burning one's ships. Verily, verily there's no one like you: talk of timidity, talk of refreshment! If I had any talent for it I'd go on the stage to-morrow, so as to spend my life with you the better." "If you'll do that I'll be your wife the day after your first appearance. That would be really respectable," Miriam said. "Unfortunately I've no talent." "That would only make it the more respectable." "You're just like poor Nick," Peter returned--"you've taken to imitating Gabriel Nash. Don't you see that it's only if it were a question of my going on the stage myself that there would be a certain fitness in your contrasting me invidiously with Nick and in my giving up one career for another? But simply to stand in the wing and hold your shawl and your smelling-bottle--!" he concluded mournfully, as if he had ceased to debate. "Holding my shawl and my smelling-bottle is a mere detail, representing a very small part of the whole precious service, the protection and encouragement, for which a woman in my position might be indebted to a man interested in her work and as accomplished and determined as you very justly describe yourself." "And would it be your idea that such a man should live on the money earned by an exhibition of the person of his still more accomplished and still more determined wife?" "Why not if they work together--if there's something of his spirit and his support in everything she does?" Miriam demanded. "_Je vous attendais_ with the famous 'person'; of course that's the great stick they beat us with. Yes, we show it for money, those of us who have anything decent to show, and some no doubt who haven't, which is the real scandal. What will you have? It's only the envelope of the idea, it's only our machinery, which ought to be conceded to us; and in proportion as the idea takes hold of us do we become unconscious of the clumsy body. Poor old 'person'--if you knew what _we_ think of it! If you don't forget it that's your own affair: it shows you're dense before the idea." "That _I_'m dense?"--and Peter appealed to their lamplit solitude, the favouring, intimate night that only witnessed his defeat, as if this outrage had been all that was wanting. "I mean the public is--the public who pays us. After all, they expect us to look at _them_ too, who are not half so well worth it. If you should see some of the creatures who have the face to plant themselves there in the stalls before one for three mortal hours! I daresay it would be simpler to have no bodies, but we're all in the same box, and it would be a great injustice to the idea, and we're all showing ourselves all the while; only some of us are not worth paying." "You're extraordinarily droll, but somehow I can't laugh at you," he said, his handsome face drawn by his pain to a contraction sufficiently attesting the fact. "Do you remember the second time I ever saw you--the day you recited at my place?" he abruptly asked; a good deal as if he were taking from his quiver an arrow which, if it was the last, was also one of the sharpest. "Perfectly, and what an idiot I was, though it was only yesterday!" "You expressed to me then a deep detestation of the sort of self-exposure to which the profession you were taking up would commit you. If you compared yourself to a contortionist at a country fair I'm only taking my cue from you." "I don't know what I may have said then," replied Miriam, whose steady flight was not arrested by this ineffectual bolt; "I was no doubt already wonderful for talking of things I know nothing about. I was only on the brink of the stream and I perhaps thought the water colder than it is. One warms it a bit one's self when once one's in. Of course I'm a contortionist and of course there's a hateful side, but don't you see how that very fact puts a price on every compensation, on the help of those who are ready to insist on the _other_ side, the grand one, and especially on the sympathy of the person who's ready to insist most and to keep before us the great thing, the element that makes up for everything?" "The element--?" Peter questioned with a vagueness that was pardonably exaggerated. "Do you mean your success?" "I mean what you've so often been eloquent about," she returned with an indulgent shrug--"the way we simply stir people's souls. Ah there's where life can help us," she broke out with a change of tone, "there's where human relations and affections can help us; love and faith and joy and suffering and experience--I don't know what to call 'em! They suggest things, they light them up and sanctify them, as you may say; they make them appear worth doing." She became radiant a while, as if with a splendid vision; then melting into still another accent, which seemed all nature and harmony and charity, she proceeded: "I must tell you that in the matter of what we can do for each other I have a tremendously high ideal. I go in for closeness of union, for identity of interest. A true marriage, as they call it, must do one a lot of good!" He stood there looking at her for a time during which her eyes sustained his penetration without a relenting gleam, some lapse of cruelty or of paradox. But with a passionate, inarticulate sound he turned away, to remain, on the edge of the window, his hands in his pockets, gazing defeatedly, doggedly, into the featureless night, into the little black garden which had nothing to give him but a familiar smell of damp. The warm darkness had no relief for him, and Miriam's histrionic hardness flung him back against a fifth-rate world, against a bedimmed, star-punctured nature which had no consolation--the bleared, irresponsive eyes of the London firmament. For the brief space of his glaring at these things he dumbly and helplessly raged. What he wanted was something that was not in _that_ thick prospect. What was the meaning of this sudden, offensive importunity of "art," this senseless, mocking catch, like some irritating chorus of conspirators in a bad opera, in which her voice was so incongruously conjoined with Nick's and in which Biddy's sweet little pipe had not scrupled still more bewilderingly to mingle? Art might yield to damnation: what commission after all had he ever given it to better him or bother him? If the pointless groan in which Peter exhaled a part of his humiliation had been translated into words, these words would have been as heavily charged with a genuine British mistrust of the uncanny principle as if the poor fellow speaking them had never quitted his island. Several acquired perceptions had struck a deep root in him, but an immemorial, compact formation lay deeper still. He tried at the present hour to rest on it spiritually, but found it inelastic; and at the very moment when most conscious of this absence of the rebound or of any tolerable ease he felt his vision solicited by an object which, as he immediately guessed, could only add to the complication of things. An undefined shape hovered before him in the garden, halfway between the gate and the house; it remained outside of the broad shaft of lamplight projected from the window. It wavered for a moment after it had become aware of his observation and then whisked round the corner of the lodge. This characteristic movement so effectually dispelled the mystery--it could only be Mrs. Rooth who resorted to such conspicuous secrecies--that, to feel the game up and his interview over, he had no need to see the figure reappear on second thoughts and dodge about in the dusk with a sportive, vexatious vagueness. Evidently Miriam's warning of a few minutes before had been founded: a cab had deposited her anxious mother at the garden door. Mrs. Rooth had entered with precautions; she had approached the house and retreated; she had effaced herself--had peered and waited and listened. Maternal solicitude and muddled calculations had drawn her from a feast as yet too imperfectly commemorative. The heroine of the occasion of course had been intolerably missed, so that the old woman had both obliged the company and quieted her own nerves by jumping insistently into a hansom and rattling up to Saint John's Wood to reclaim the absentee. But if she had wished to be in time she had also desired not to be impertinent, and would have been still more embarrassed to say what she aspired to promote than to phrase what she had proposed to hinder. She wanted to abstain tastefully, to interfere felicitously, and, more generally and justifiably--the small hours having come--to see what her young charges were "up to." She would probably have gathered that they were quarrelling, and she appeared now to be motioning to Peter to know if it were over. He took no notice of her signals, if signals they were; he only felt that before he made way for the poor, odious lady there was one small spark he might strike from Miriam's flint. Without letting her guess that her mother was on the premises he turned again to his companion, half-expecting she would have taken her chance to regard their discussion as more than terminated and by the other egress flit away from him in silence. But she was still there; she was in the act of approaching him with a manifest intention of kindness, and she looked indeed, to his surprise, like an angel of mercy. "Don't let us part so harshly," she said--"with your trying to make me feel as if I were merely disobliging. It's no use talking--we only hurt each other. Let us hold our tongues like decent people and go about our business. It isn't as if you hadn't any cure--when you've such a capital one. Try it, try it, my dear friend--you'll see! I wish you the highest promotion and the quickest--every success and every reward. When you've got them all, some day, and I've become a great swell too, we'll meet on that solid basis and you'll be glad I've been dreadful now." "Surely before I leave you I've a right to ask you this," he answered, holding fast in both his own the cool hand of farewell she had chosen finally to torment him with. "Are you ready to follow up by a definite promise your implied assurance that I've a remedy?" "A definite promise?" Miriam benignly gazed--it was the perfection of indirectness. "I don't 'imply' that you've a remedy. I declare it on the house-tops. That delightful girl--" "I'm not talking of any delightful girl but you!" he broke in with a voice that, as he afterwards learned, struck Mrs. Rooth's ears in the garden with affright. "I simply hold you, under pain of being convicted of the grossest prevarication, to the strict sense of what you said ten minutes ago." "Ah I've said so many things! One has to do that to get rid of you. You rather hurt my hand," she added--and jerked it away in a manner showing that if she was an angel of mercy her mercy was partly for herself. "As I understand you, then, I may have some hope if I do renounce my profession?" Peter pursued. "If I break with everything, my prospects, my studies, my training, my emoluments, my past and my future, the service of my country and the ambition of my life, and engage to take up instead the business of watching your interests so far as I may learn how and ministering to your triumphs so far as may in me lie--if after further reflexion I decide to go through these preliminaries, have I your word that I may definitely look to you to reward me with your precious hand?" "I don't think you've any right to put the question to me now," she returned with a promptitude partly produced perhaps by the clear-cut form his solemn speech had given--there was a charm in the sound of it--to each item of his enumeration. "The case is so very contingent, so dependent on what you ingeniously call your further reflexion. While you really reserve everything you ask me to commit myself. If it's a question of further reflexion why did you drag me up here? And then," she added, "I'm so far from wishing you to take any such monstrous step." "Monstrous you call it? Just now you said it would be sublime." "Sublime if it's done with spontaneity, with passion; ridiculous if it's done 'after further reflexion.' As you said, perfectly, a while ago, it isn't a thing to reason about." "Ah what a help you'd be to me in diplomacy!" Peter yearningly cried. "Will you give me a year to consider?" "Would you trust _me_ for a year?" "Why not, if I'm ready to trust you for life?" "Oh I shouldn't be free then, worse luck. And how much you seem to take for granted one must like you!" "Remember," he could immediately say, "that you've made a great point of your liking me. Wouldn't you do so still more if I were heroic?" She showed him, for all her high impatience now, the interest of a long look. "I think I should pity you in such a cause. Give it all to _her_; don't throw away a real happiness!" "Ah you can't back out of your position with a few vague and even rather impertinent words!" Peter protested. "You accuse me of swallowing my opinions, but you swallow your pledges. You've painted in heavenly colours the sacrifice I'm talking of, and now you must take the consequences." "The consequences?" "Why my coming back in a year to square you." "Ah you're a bore!"--she let him have it at last. "Come back when you like. I don't wonder you've grown desperate, but fancy _me_ then!" she added as she looked past him at a new interlocutor. "Yes, but if he'll square you!" Peter heard Mrs. Rooth's voice respond all persuasively behind him. She had stolen up to the window now, had passed the threshold, was in the room, but her daughter had not been startled. "What is it he wants to do, dear?" she continued to Miriam. "To induce me to marry him if he'll go upon the stage. He'll practise over there--where he's going--and then come back and appear. Isn't it too dreadful? Talk him out of it, stay with him, soothe him!" the girl hurried on. "You'll find some drinks and some biscuits in the cupboard--keep him with you, pacify him, give him _his_ little supper. Meanwhile I'll go to mine; I'll take the brougham; don't follow!" With which words Miriam bounded into the garden, her white drapery shining for an instant in the darkness before she disappeared. Peter looked about him to pick up his hat, but while he did so heard the bang of the gate and the quick carriage get into motion. Mrs. Rooth appeared to sway violently and in opposed directions: that of the impulse to rush after Miriam and that of the extraordinary possibility to which the young lady had alluded. She was in doubt, yet at a venture, detaining him with a maternal touch, she twinkled up at their visitor like an insinuating glow-worm. "I'm so glad you came." "I'm not. I've got nothing by it," Peter said as he found his hat. "Oh it was so beautiful!" she declared. "The play--yes, wonderful. I'm afraid it's too late for me to avail myself of the privilege your daughter offers me. Good-night." "Ah it's a pity; won't you take _anything_?" asked Mrs. Rooth. "When I heard your voice so high I was scared and hung back." But before he could reply she added: "Are you really thinking of the stage?" "It comes to the same thing." "Do you mean you've proposed?" "Oh unmistakably." "And what does she say?" "Why you heard: she says I'm an ass." "Ah the little wretch!" laughed Mrs. Rooth. "Leave her to me. I'll help you. But you are mad. Give up nothing--least of all your advantages." "I won't give up your daughter," said Peter, reflecting that if this was cheap it was at any rate good enough for Mrs. Rooth. He mended it a little indeed by adding darkly: "But you can't make her take me." "I can prevent her taking any one else." "Oh _can_ you?" Peter cried with more scepticism than ceremony. "You'll see--you'll see." He passed into the garden, but, after she had blown out the candles and drawn the window to, Mrs. Rooth went with him. "All you've got to do is to be yourself--to be true to your fine position," she explained as they proceeded. "Trust me with the rest--trust me and be quiet." "How can one be quiet after this magnificent evening?" "Yes, but it's just that!" panted the eager old woman. "It has launched her so on this sea of dangers that to make up for the loss of the old security (don't you know?) we must take a still firmer hold." "Aye, of what?" Peter asked as Mrs. Rooth's comfort became vague while she stopped with him at the garden door. "Ah you know: of the _real_ life, of the true anchor!" Her hansom was waiting for her and she added: "I kept it, you see; but a little extravagance on the night one's fortune has come!--" Peter stared. Yes, there were people whose fortune had come; but he managed to stammer: "Are you following her again?" "For you--for you!" And she clambered into the vehicle. From the seat, enticingly, she offered him the place beside her. "Won't you come too? I know he invited you." Peter declined with a quick gesture and as he turned away he heard her call after him, to cheer him on his lonely walk: "I shall keep this up; I shall never lose sight of her!" BOOK EIGHTH XLVII When Mrs. Dallow returned to London just before London broke up the fact was immediately known in Calcutta Gardens and was promptly communicated to Nick Dormer by his sister Bridget. He had learnt it in no other way--he had had no correspondence with Julia during her absence. He gathered that his mother and sisters were not ignorant of her whereabouts--he never mentioned her name to them--but as to this he was not sure if the source of their information had been the _Morning Post_ or a casual letter received by the inscrutable Biddy. He knew Biddy had some epistolary commerce with Julia; he had an impression Grace occasionally exchanged letters with Mrs. Gresham. Biddy, however, who, as he was also well aware, was always studying what he would like, forbore to talk to him about the absent mistress of Harsh beyond once dropping the remark that she had gone from Florence to Venice and was enjoying gondolas and sunsets too much to leave them. Nick's comment on this was that she was a happy woman to have such a go at Titian and Tintoret: as he spoke, and for some time afterwards, the sense of how he himself should enjoy a like "go" made him ache with ineffectual longing. He had forbidden himself at the present to think of absence, not only because it would be inconvenient and expensive, but because it would be a kind of retreat from the enemy, a concession to difficulty. The enemy was no particular person and no particular body of persons: not his mother; not Mr. Carteret, who, as he heard from the doctor at Beauclere, lingered on, sinking and sinking till his vitality appeared to have the vertical depth of a gold-mine; not his pacified constituents, who had found a healthy diversion in returning another Liberal wholly without Mrs. Dallow's aid (she had not participated even to the extent of a responsive telegram in the election); not his late colleagues in the House, nor the biting satirists of the newspapers, nor the brilliant women he took down at dinner-parties--there was only one sense in which he ever took them down; not in short his friends, his foes, his private thoughts, the periodical phantom of his shocked father: the enemy was simply the general awkwardness of his situation. This awkwardness was connected with the sense of responsibility so greatly deprecated by Gabriel Nash, Gabriel who had ceased to roam of late on purpose to miss as few scenes as possible of the drama, rapidly growing dull alas, of his friend's destiny; but that compromising relation scarcely drew the soreness from it. The public flurry produced by his collapse had only been large enough to mark the flatness of our young man's position when it was over. To have had a few jokes cracked audibly at your expense wasn't an ordeal worth talking of; the hardest thing about it was merely that there had not been enough of them to yield a proportion of good ones. Nick had felt in fine the benefit of living in an age and in a society where number and pressure have, for the individual figure, especially when it's a zero, compensations almost equal to their cruelties. No, the pinch for his conscience after a few weeks had passed was simply an acute mistrust of the superficiality of performance into which the desire to justify himself might hurry him. That desire was passionate as regards Julia Dallow; it was ardent also as regards his mother; and, to make it absolutely uncomfortable, it was complicated with the conviction that neither of them would know his justification even when she should see it. They probably couldn't know it if they would, and very certainly wouldn't if they could. He assured himself, however, that this limitation wouldn't matter; it was their affair--his own was simply to have the right sort of thing to show. The work he was now attempting wasn't the right sort of thing, though doubtless Julia, for instance, would dislike it almost as much as if it were. The two portraits of Miriam, after the first exhilaration of his finding himself at large, filled him with no private glee; they were not in the direction in which he wished for the present really to move. There were moments when he felt almost angry, though of course he held his tongue, when by the few persons who saw them they were pronounced wonderfully clever. That they were wonderfully clever was just the detestable thing in them, so active had that cleverness been in making them seem better than they were. There were people to whom he would have been ashamed to show them, and these were the people whom it would give him most pleasure some day to please. Not only had he many an hour of disgust at his actual work, but he thought he saw as in an ugly revelation that nature had cursed him with an odious facility and that the lesson of his life, the sternest and wholesomest, would be to keep out of the trap it had laid for him. He had fallen into this trap on the threshold and had only scrambled out with his honour. He had a talent for appearance, and that was the fatal thing; he had a damnable suppleness and a gift of immediate response, a readiness to oblige, that made him seem to take up causes which he really left lying, enabled him to learn enough about them in an hour to have all the air of having converted them to his use. Many people used them--that was the only thing to be said--who had taken them in much less. He was at all events too clever by half, since this pernicious overflow had wrecked most of his attempts. He had assumed a virtue and enjoyed assuming it, and the assumption had cheated his father and his mother and his affianced wife and his rich benefactor and the candid burgesses of Harsh and the cynical reporters of the newspapers. His enthusiasms had been but young curiosity, his speeches had been young agility, his professions and adhesions had been like postage-stamps without glue: the head was all right, but they wouldn't stick. He stood ready now to wring the neck of the irrepressible vice that certainly would tend to nothing so much as to get him into further trouble. His only real justification would be to turn patience--his own of course--inside out; yet if there should be a way to misread that recipe his humbugging genius could be trusted infallibly to discover it. Cheap and easy results would dangle before him, little amateurish conspicuities at exhibitions helped by his history; putting it in his power to triumph with a quick "What do you say to that?" over those he had wounded. The fear of this danger was corrosive; it poisoned even lawful joys. If he should have a striking picture at the Academy next year it wouldn't be a crime; yet he couldn't help suspecting any conditions that would enable him to be striking so soon. In this way he felt quite enough how Gabriel Nash had "had" him whenever railing at his fever for proof, and how inferior as a productive force the desire to win over the ill-disposed might be to the principle of quiet growth. Nash had a foreign manner of lifting up his finger and waving it before him, as if to put an end to everything, whenever it became, in conversation or discussion, to any extent a question whether any one would "like" anything. It was presumably in some degree at least a due respect for the principle of quiet growth that kept Nick on the spot at present, made him stick fast to Rosedale Road and Calcutta Gardens and deny himself the simplifications of absence. Do what he would he couldn't despoil himself of the impression that the disagreeable was somehow connected with the salutary, and the "quiet" with the disagreeable, when stubbornly borne; so he resisted a hundred impulses to run away to Paris or to Florence, coarse forms of the temptation to persuade himself by material motion that he was launched. He stayed in London because it seemed to him he was there more conscious of what he had undertaken, and he had a horror of shirking the consciousness. One element in it indeed was his noting how little convenience he could have found in a foreign journey even had his judgement approved such a subterfuge. The stoppage of his supplies from Beauclere had now become an historic fact, with something of the majesty of its class about it: he had had time to see what a difference this would make in his life. His means were small and he had several old debts, the number of which, as he believed, loomed large to his mother's imagination. He could never tell her she exaggerated, because he told her nothing of that sort in these days: they had no intimate talk, for an impenetrable partition, a tall, bristling hedge of untrimmed misconceptions, had sprung up between them. Poor Biddy had made a hole in it through which she squeezed from side to side, to keep up communications, at the cost of many rents and scratches; but Lady Agnes walked straight and stiff, never turning her head, never stopping to pluck the least little daisy of consolation. It was in this manner she wished to signify that she had accepted her wrongs. She draped herself in them as in a Roman mantle and had never looked so proud and wasted and handsome as now that her eyes rested only on ruins. Nick was extremely sorry for her, though he marked as a dreadful want of grace her never setting a foot in Rosedale Road--she mentioned his studio no more than if it had been a private gambling-house or something worse; sorry because he was well aware that for the hour everything must appear to her to have crumbled. The luxury of Broadwood would have to crumble: his mind was very clear about that. Biddy's prospects had withered to the finest, dreariest dust, and Biddy indeed, taking a lesson from her brother's perversities, seemed little disposed to better a bad business. She professed the most peace-making sentiments, but when it came really to doing something to brighten up the scene she showed herself portentously corrupt. After Peter Sherringham's heartless flight she had wantonly slighted an excellent opportunity to repair her misfortune. Lady Agnes had reason to infer, about the end of June, that young Mr. Grindon, the only son--the other children being girls--of an immensely rich industrial and political baronet in the north, was literally waiting for the faintest sign. This reason she promptly imparted to her younger daughter, whose intelligence had to take it in but who had shown it no other consideration. Biddy had set her charming face as a stone; she would have nothing to do with signs, and she, practically speaking, wilfully, wickedly refused a magnificent offer, so that the young man carried his high expectations elsewhere. How much in earnest he had been was proved by the fact that before Goodwood had come and gone he was captured by Lady Muriel Macpherson. It was superfluous to insist on the frantic determination to get married written on such an accident as that. Nick knew of this episode only through Grace, and he deplored its having occurred in the midst of other disasters. He knew or he suspected something more as well--something about his brother Percival which, should it come to light, no phase of their common history would be genial enough to gloss over. It had usually been supposed that Percy's store of comfort against the ills of life was confined to the infallibility of his rifle. He was not sensitive, and his use of that weapon represented a resource against which common visitations might have spent themselves. It had suddenly come to Nick's ears, however, that he cultivated a concurrent support in the person of a robust countrywoman, housed in an ivied corner of Warwickshire, in whom he had long been interested and whom, without any flourish of magnanimity, he had ended by making his wife. The situation of the latest born of the pledges of this affection, a blooming boy--there had been two or three previously--was therefore perfectly regular and of a nature to make a difference in the worldly position, as the phrase ran, of his moneyless uncle. If there be degrees in the absolute and Percy had an heir--others, moreover, supposedly following--Nick would have to regard himself as still more moneyless than before. His brother's last step was doubtless, given the case, to be commended; but such discoveries were enlivening only when made in other families, and Lady Agnes would scarcely enjoy learning to what tune she had become a grandmother. Nick forbore from delicacy to intimate to Biddy that he thought it a pity she couldn't care for Mr. Grindon; but he had a private sense that if she had been capable of such a feat it would have lightened a little the weight he himself had to carry. He bore her a slight grudge, which lasted till Julia Dallow came back; when the circumstance of the girl's being summoned immediately down to Harsh created a diversion that was perhaps after all only fanciful. Biddy, as we know, entertained a theory, which Nick had found occasion to combat, that Mrs. Dallow had not treated him perfectly well; therefore in going to Harsh the very first time that relative held out a hand to her so jealous a little sister must have recognised a special inducement. The inducement might have been that the relative had comfort for her, that she was acting by her cousin's direct advice, that they were still in close communion on the question of the offers Biddy was not to accept, that in short Peter's sister had taken upon herself to see that their young friend should remain free for the day of the fugitive's inevitable return. Once or twice indeed Nick wondered if Julia had herself been visited, in a larger sense, by the thought of retracing her steps--if she wished to draw out her young friend's opinion as to how she might do that gracefully. During the few days she was in town Nick had seen her twice in Great Stanhope Street, but neither time alone. She had said to him on one of these occasions in her odd, explosive way: "I should have thought you'd have gone away somewhere--it must be such a bore." Of course she firmly believed he was staying for Miriam, which he really was not; and probably she had written this false impression off to Peter, who, still more probably, would prefer to regard it as just. Nick was staying for Miriam only in the sense that he should very glad of the money he might receive for the portrait he was engaged in painting. That money would be a great convenience to him in spite of the obstructive ground Miriam had taken in pretending--she had blown half a gale about it--that he had had no right to dispose of such a production without her consent. His answer to this was simply that the purchaser was so little of a stranger that it didn't go, so to speak, out of the family, out of hers. It didn't matter, Miriam's retort that if Mr. Sherringham had formerly been no stranger he was utterly one now, so that nothing would ever less delight him than to see her hated image on his wall. He would back out of the bargain and Nick be left with the picture on his hands. Nick jeered at this shallow theory and when she came to sit the question served as well as another to sprinkle their familiar silences with chaff. He already knew something, as we have seen, of the conditions in which his distracted kinsman had left England; and this connected itself, in casual meditation, with some of the calculations imputable to Julia and to Biddy. There had naturally been a sequel to the queer behaviour perceptible in Peter, at the theatre, on the eve of his departure--a sequel lighted by a word of Miriam's in the course of her first sitting to Nick after her great night. "Fancy"--so this observation ran--"fancy the dear man finding time in the press of all his last duties to ask me to marry him!" "He told me you had found time in the press of all yours to say you would," Nick replied. And this was pretty much all that had passed on the subject between them--save of course her immediately making clear that Peter had grossly misinformed him. What had happened was that she had said she would do nothing of the sort. She professed a desire not to be confronted again with this obnoxious theme, and Nick easily fell in with it--quite from his own settled inclination not to handle that kind of subject with her. If Julia had false ideas about him, and if Peter had them too, his part of the business was to take the simplest course to establish the falsity. There were difficulties indeed attached even to the simplest course, but there would be a difficulty the less if one should forbear to meddle in promiscuous talk with the general, suggestive topic of intimate unions. It is certain that in these days Nick cultivated the practice of forbearances for which he didn't receive, for which perhaps he never would receive, due credit. He had been convinced for some time that one of the next things he should hear would be that Julia Dallow had arranged to marry either Mr. Macgeorge or some other master of multitudes. He could think of that now, he found--think of it with resignation even when Julia, before his eyes, looked so handsomely forgetful that her appearance had to be taken as referring still more to their original intimacy than to his comparatively superficial offence. What made this accomplishment of his own remarkable was that there was something else he thought of quite as much--the fact that he had only to see her again to feel by how great a charm she had in the old days taken possession of him. This charm operated apparently in a very direct, primitive way: her presence diffused it and fully established it, but her absence left comparatively little of it behind. It dwelt in the very facts of her person--it was something she happened physically to be; yet--considering that the question was of something very like loveliness--its envelope of associations, of memories and recurrences, had no great destiny. She packed it up and took it away with her quite as if she had been a woman who had come to sell a set of laces. The laces were as wonderful as ever when taken out of the box, but to admire again their rarity you had to send for the woman. What was above all remarkable for our young man was that Miriam Rooth fetched a fellow, vulgarly speaking, very much less than Julia at the times when, being on the spot, Julia did fetch. He could paint Miriam day after day without any agitating blur of vision; in fact the more he saw of her the clearer grew the atmosphere through which she blazed, the more her richness became one with that of the flowering work. There are reciprocities and special sympathies in such a relation; mysterious affinities they used to be called, divinations of private congruity. Nick had an unexpressed conviction that if, according to his defeated desire, he had embarked with Mrs. Dallow in this particular quest of a great prize, disaster would have overtaken them on the deep waters. Even with the limited risk indeed disaster had come; but it was of a different kind and it had the advantage for him that now she couldn't reproach and denounce him as the cause of it--couldn't do so at least on any ground he was obliged to recognise. She would never know how much he had cared for her, how much he cared for her still; inasmuch as the conclusive proof for himself was his conscious reluctance to care for another woman--evidence she positively misread. Some day he would doubtless try to do that; but such a day seemed as yet far off, and he had meanwhile no spite, no vindictive impulse, to help him. The soreness that mingled with his liberation, the sense of indignity even, as of a full cup suddenly dashed by a blundering hand from his lips, demanded certainly a balm; but it found the balm, for the time, in another passion, not in a rancorous exercise of the same--a passion strong enough to make him forget what a pity it was he was not so formed as to care for two women at once. As soon as Julia returned to England he broke ground to his mother on the subject of her making the mistress of Broadwood understand that she and the girls now regarded their occupancy of that estate as absolutely over. He had already, several weeks before, picked a little at the arid tract of that indicated surrender, but in the interval the soil appeared to have formed again to a considerable thickness. It was disagreeable to him to call his parent's attention to the becoming course, and especially disagreeable to have to emphasise it and discuss it and perhaps clamour for it. He would have liked the whole business to be tacit--a little triumph of silent delicacy. But he found reasons to suspect that what in fact would be most tacit was Julia's certain endurance of any chance failure of that charm. Lady Agnes had a theory that they had virtually--"practically" as she said--given up the place, so that there was no need of making a splash about it; but Nick discovered in the course of an exploration of Biddy's view more rigorous perhaps than any to which he had ever subjected her, that none of their property had been removed from the delightful house--none of the things (there were ever so many things) heavily planted there when their mother took possession. Lady Agnes was the proprietor of innumerable articles of furniture, relics and survivals of her former greatness, and moved about the world with a train of heterogeneous baggage; so that her quiet overflow into the spaciousness of Broadwood had had all the luxury of a final subsidence. What Nick had to propose to her now was a dreadful combination, a relapse into the conditions she most hated--seaside lodgings, bald storehouses in the Marylebone Road, little London rooms crammed with objects that caught the dirt and made them stuffy. He was afraid he should really finish her, and he himself was surprised in a degree at his insistence. He wouldn't have supposed he should have cared so much, but he found he did care intensely. He cared enough--it says everything--to explain to his mother that her retention of Broadwood would show "practically" (since that was her great word) for the violation of an agreement. Julia had given them the place on the understanding that he was to marry her, and once he was definitely not to marry her they had no right to keep the place. "Yes, you make the mess and _we_ pay the penalty!" the poor lady flashed out; but this was the only overt protest she made--except indeed to contend that their withdrawal would be an act ungracious and offensive to Julia. She looked as she had looked during the months that succeeded his father's death, but she gave a general, a final grim assent to the proposition that, let their kinswoman take it as she would, their own duty was unmistakably clear. It was Grace who was principal representative of the idea that Julia would be outraged by such a step; she never ceased to repeat that she had never heard of anything so "nasty." Nick would have expected this of Grace, but he felt rather bereft and betrayed when Biddy murmured to him that _she_ knew--that there was really no need of their sacrificing their mother's comfort to an extravagant scruple. She intimated that if Nick would only consent to their going on with Broadwood as if nothing had happened--or rather as if everything had happened--she would answer for the feelings of the owner. For almost the first time in his life Nick disliked what Biddy said to him, and he gave her a sharp rejoinder, a taste of the general opinion that they all had enough to do to answer for themselves. He remembered afterwards the way she looked at him--startled, even frightened and with rising tears--before turning away. He held that they should judge better how Julia would take it after they had thrown up the place; and he made it his duty to arrange that his mother should formally advise her, by letter, of their intending to depart at once. Julia could then protest to her heart's content. Nick was aware that for the most part he didn't pass for practical; he could imagine why, from his early years, people should have joked him about it. But this time he was determined to rest on a rigid view of things as they were. He didn't sec his mother's letter, but he knew that it went. He felt she would have been more loyal if she had shown it to him, though of course there could be but little question of loyalty now. That it had really been written, however, very much on the lines he dictated was clear to him from the subsequent surprise which Lady Agnes's blankness didn't prevent his divining. Julia acknowledged the offered news, but in unexpected terms: she had apparently neither resisted nor protested; she had simply been very glad to get her house back again and had not accused any of them of nastiness. Nick saw no more of her letter than he had seen of his mother's, but he was able to say to Grace--to their parent he was studiously mute--"My poor child, you see after all that we haven't kicked up such a row." Grace shook her head and looked gloomy and deeply wise, replying that he had no cause to triumph--they were so far from having seen the end of it yet. Thus he guessed that his mother had complied with his wish on the calculation that it would be a mere form, that Julia would entreat them not to be so fantastic and that he himself would then, in the presence of her wounded surprise, consent to a quiet continuance, so much in the interest--the air of Broadwood had a purity!--of the health of all of them. But since Julia jumped at their sacrifice he had no chance to be mollified: he had all grossly to persist in having been right. At bottom probably he was a little surprised at Julia's so prompt assent. Literally speaking, it was not perfectly graceful. He was sorry his mother had been so deceived, but was sorrier still for Biddy's mistake--it showed she might be mistaken about other things. Nothing was left now but for Lady Agnes to say, as she did substantially whenever she saw him: "We're to prepare to spend the autumn at Worthing then or some other horrible place? I don't know their names: it's the only thing we can afford." There was an implication in this that if he expected her to drag her girls about to country-houses in a continuance of the fidgety effort to work them off he must understand at once that she was now too weary and too sad and too sick. She had done her best for them and it had all been vain and cruel--now therefore the poor creatures must look out for themselves. To the grossness of Biddy's misconduct she needn't refer, nor to the golden opportunity that young woman had forfeited by her odious treatment of Mr. Grindon. It was clear that this time Lady Agnes was incurably discouraged; so much so as to fail to glean the dimmest light from the fact that the girl was really making a long stay at Harsh. Biddy went to and fro two or three times and then in August fairly settled there; and what her mother mainly saw in her absence was the desire to keep out of the way of household reminders of her depravity. In fact, as turned out, Lady Agnes and Grace gathered themselves together in the first days of that month for another visit to the very old lady who had been Sir Nicholas's godmother; after which they went somewhere else--so that the question of Worthing had not immediately to be faced. Nick stayed on in London with the obsession of work humming in his ears; he was joyfully conscious that for three or four months, in the empty Babylon, he would have ample stores of time. But toward the end of August he got a letter from Grace in which she spoke of her situation and of her mother's in a manner that seemed to impose on him the doing of something tactful. They were paying a third visit--he knew that in Calcutta Gardens lady's-maids had been to and fro with boxes, replenishments of wardrobes--and yet somehow the outlook for the autumn was dark. Grace didn't say it in so many words, but what he read between the lines was that they had no more invitations. What, therefore, in pity's name was to become of them? People liked them well enough when Biddy was with them, but they didn't care for her mother and her, that prospect _tout pur_, and Biddy was cooped up indefinitely with Julia. This was not the manner in which Grace had anciently alluded to her sister's happy visits at Harsh, and the change of tone made Nick wince with a sense of all that had collapsed. Biddy was a little fish worth landing in short, scantly as she seemed disposed to bite, and Grace's rude probity could admit that she herself was not. Nick had an inspiration: by way of doing something tactful he went down to Brighton and took lodgings, for several weeks, in the general interest, the very quietest and sunniest he could find. This he intended as a kindly surprise, a reminder of how he had his mother's and sisters' comfort at heart, how he could exert himself and save them trouble. But he had no sooner concluded his bargain--it was a more costly one than he had at first calculated--than he was bewildered and befogged to learn that the persons on whose behalf he had so exerted himself were to pass the autumn at Broadwood with Julia. That daughter of privilege had taken the place into familiar use again and was now correcting their former surprise at her crude indifference--this was infinitely characteristic of Julia--by inviting them to share it with her. Nick wondered vaguely what she was "up to"; but when his mother treated herself to the line irony of addressing him an elaborately humble request for his consent to their accepting the merciful refuge--she repeated this expression three times--he replied that she might do exactly as she liked: he would only mention that he shouldn't feel himself at liberty to come and see her there. This condition proved apparently to Lady Agnes's mind no hindrance, and she and her daughters were presently reinstated in the very apartments they had learned so to love. This time in fact it was even better than before--they had still fewer expenses. The expenses were Nick's: he had to pay a forfeit to the landlady at Brighton for backing out of his contract. He said nothing to his mother about that bungled business--he was literally afraid; but a sad event just then reminded him afresh how little it was the moment for squandering money. Mr. Carteret drew his last breath; quite painlessly it seemed, as the closing scene was described at Beauclere when the young man went down to the funeral. Two or three weeks later the contents of his will were made public in the _Illustrated London News_, where it definitely appeared that he left a very large fortune, not a penny of which was to go to Nick. The provision for Mr. Chayter's declining years was remarkably handsome. XLVIII Miriam had mounted at a bound, in her new part, several steps in the ladder of fame, and at the climax of the London season this fact was brought home to her from hour to hour. It produced a thousand solicitations and entanglements, and she rapidly learned that to be celebrated takes up almost as much of one's own time as of other people's. Even though, as she boasted, she had reduced to a science the practice of "working" her mother--she made use of the good lady socially to the utmost, pushing her perpetually into the breach--there was many a juncture at which it was clear that she couldn't too much disoblige without hurting her cause. She made almost an income out of the photographers--their appreciation of her as a subject knew no bounds--and she supplied the newspapers with columns of characteristic copy. To the gentlemen who sought speech of her on behalf of these organs she poured forth, vindictively, floods of unscrupulous romance; she told them all different tales, and, as her mother told them others more marvellous yet, publicity was cleverly caught by rival versions, which surpassed each other in authenticity. The whole case was remarkable, was unique; for if the girl was advertised by the bewilderment of her readers she seemed to every sceptic, on his going to see her, as fine as if he had discovered her for himself. She was still accommodating enough, however, from time to time, to find an hour to come and sit to Nick Dormer, and he helped himself further by going to her theatre whenever he could. He was conscious Julia Dallow would probably hear of this and triumph with a fresh sense of how right she had been; but the reflexion only made him sigh resignedly, so true it struck him as being that there are some things explanation can never better, can never touch. Miriam brought Basil Dashwood once to see her portrait, and Basil, who commended it in general, directed his criticism mainly to two points--its not yet being finished and its not having gone into that year's Academy. The young actor audibly panted; he felt the short breath of Miriam's rapidity, the quick beat of her success, and, looking at everything now from the standpoint of that speculation, could scarcely contain his impatience at the painter's clumsy slowness. He thought the latter's second attempt much better than his first, but somehow it ought by that time to be shining in the eye of the public. He put it to their friend with an air of acuteness--he had those felicities--that in every great crisis there is nothing like striking while the iron is hot. He even betrayed the conviction that by putting on a spurt Nick might wind up the job and still get the Academy people to take him in. Basil knew some of them; he all but offered to speak to them--the case was so exceptional; he had no doubt he could get something done. Against the appropriation of the work by Peter Sherringham he explicitly and loudly protested, in spite of the homeliest recommendations of silence from Miriam; and it was indeed easy to guess how such an arrangement would interfere with his own conception of the eventual right place for the two portraits--the vestibule of the theatre, where every one going in and out would see them suspended face to face and surrounded by photographs, artistically disposed, of the young actress in a variety of characters. Dashwood showed superiority in his jump to the contention that so exhibited the pictures would really help to draw. Considering the virtue he attributed to Miriam the idea was exempt from narrow prejudice. Moreover, though a trifle feverish, he was really genial; he repeated more than once, "Yes, my dear sir, you've done it this time." This was a favourite formula with him; when some allusion was made to the girl's success he greeted it also with a comfortable "This time she _has_ done it." There was ever a hint of fine judgement and far calculation in his tone. It appeared before he went that this time even he himself had done it--he had taken up something that would really answer. He told Nick more about Miriam, more certainly about her outlook at that moment, than she herself had communicated, contributing strongly to our young man's impression that one by one every gage of a great career was being dropped into her cup. Nick himself tasted of success vicariously for the hour. Miriam let her comrade talk only to contradict him, and contradicted him only to show how indifferently she could do it. She treated him as if she had nothing more to learn about his folly, but as if it had taken intimate friendship to reveal to her the full extent of it. Nick didn't mind her intimate friendships, but he ended by disliking Dashwood, who gave on his nerves--a circumstance poor Julia, had it come to her knowledge, would doubtless have found deplorably significant. Miriam was more pleased with herself than ever: she now made no scruple of admitting that she enjoyed all her advantages. She had a fuller vision of how successful success could be; she took everything as it came--dined out every Sunday and even went into the country till the Monday morning; kept a hundred distinguished names on her lips and abounded in strange tales of the people who were making up to her. She struck Nick as less strenuous than she had been hitherto, as making even an aggressive show of inevitable laxities; but he was conscious of no obligation to rebuke her for it--the less as he had a dim vision that some effect of that sort, some irritation of his curiosity, was what she desired to produce. She would perhaps have liked, for reasons best known to herself, to look as if she were throwing herself away, not being able to do anything else. He couldn't talk to her as if he took a deep interest in her career, because in fact he didn't; she remained to him primarily and essentially a pictorial object, with the nature of whose vicissitudes he was concerned--putting common charity and his personal good nature of course aside--only so far as they had something to say in her face. How could he know in advance what turn of her experience, twist of her life, would say most?--so possible was it even that complete failure or some incalculable perversion (innumerable were the queer traps that might be set for her) would only make her for his particular purpose more precious. When she had left him at any rate, the day she came with Basil Dashwood, and still more on a later occasion, that of his turning back to his work after putting her into her carriage, and otherwise bare-headedly manifesting, the last time, for that year apparently, that he was to see her--when she had left him it occurred to him in the light of her quick distinction that there were deep differences in the famous artistic life. Miriam was already in a glow of glory--which, moreover, was probably but a faint spark in relation to the blaze to come; and as he closed the door on her and took up his palette to rub it with a dirty cloth the little room in which his own battle was practically to be fought looked woefully cold and grey and mean. It was lonely and yet at the same time was peopled with unfriendly shadows--so thick he foresaw them gather in winter twilights to come--the duller conditions, the longer patiences, the less immediate and less personal joys. His late beginning was there and his wasted youth, the mistakes that would still bring forth children after their image, the sedentary solitude, the grey mediocrity, the poor explanations, the effect of foolishness he dreaded even from afar of in having to ask people to wait, and wait longer, and wait again, for a fruition which to their sense at least might well prove a grotesque anti-climax. He yearned enough over it, however it should figure, to feel that this possible pertinacity might enter into comparison even with such a productive force as Miriam's. That was after all in his bare studio the most collective dim presence, the one that kept him company best as he sat there and that made it the right place, however wrong--the sense that it was to the thing in itself he was attached. This was Miriam's case too, but the sharp contrast, which she showed him she also felt, was in the number of other things she got with the thing in itself. I hasten to add that our young man had hours when this last mystic value struck him as requiring for its full operation no adjunct whatever--as being in its own splendour a summary of all adjuncts and apologies. I have related that the great collections, the National Gallery and the Museum, were sometimes rather a series of dead surfaces to him; but the sketch I have attempted of him will have been inadequate if it fails to suggest that there were other days when, as he strolled through them, he plucked right and left perfect nosegays of reassurance. Bent as he was on working in the modern, which spoke to him with a thousand voices, he judged it better for long periods not to haunt the earlier masters, whose conditions had been so different--later he came to see that it didn't matter much, especially if one kept away; but he was liable to accidental deflexions from this theory, liable in particular to feel the sanctity of the great portraits of the past. These were the things the most inspiring, in the sense that while generations, while worlds had come and gone, they seemed far most to prevail and survive and testify. As he stood before them the perfection of their survival often struck him as the supreme eloquence, the virtue that included all others, thanks to the language of art, the richest and most universal. Empires and systems and conquests had rolled over the globe and every kind of greatness had risen and passed away, but the beauty of the great pictures had known nothing of death or change, and the tragic centuries had only sweetened their freshness. The same faces, the same figures looked out at different worlds, knowing so many secrets the particular world didn't, and when they joined hands they made the indestructible thread on which the pearls of history were strung. Miriam notified her artist that her theatre was to close on the tenth of August, immediately after which she was to start, with the company, on a tremendous tour of the provinces. They were to make a lot of money, but they were to have no holiday, and she didn't want one; she only wanted to keep at it and make the most of her limited opportunities for practice; inasmuch as at that rate, playing but two parts a year--and such parts: she despised them!--she shouldn't have mastered the rudiments of her trade before decrepitude would compel her to lay it by. The first time she came to the studio after her visit with Dashwood she sprang up abruptly at the end of half an hour, saying she could sit no more--she had had enough and to spare of it. She was visibly restless and preoccupied, and though Nick had not waited till now to note that she had more moods in her list than he had tints on his palette he had never yet seen her sensibility at this particular pitch. It struck him rather as a waste of passion, but he was ready to let her go. She looked round the place as if suddenly tired of it and then said mechanically, in a heartless London way, while she smoothed down her gloves, "So you're just going to stay on?" After he had confessed that this was his dark purpose she continued in the same casual, talk-making manner: "I daresay it's the best thing for you. You're just going to grind, eh?" "I see before me an eternity of grinding." "All alone by yourself in this dull little hole? You _will_ be conscientious, you _will_ be virtuous." "Oh my solitude will be mitigated--I shall have models and people." "What people--what models?" Miriam asked as she arranged her hat before the glass. "Well, no one so good as you." "That's a prospect!" the girl laughed--"for all the good you've got out of me!" "You're no judge of that quantity," said Nick, "and even I can't measure it just yet. Have I been rather a bore and a brute? I can easily believe it; I haven't talked to you--I haven't amused you as I might. The truth is that taking people's likenesses is a very absorbing, inhuman occupation. You can't do much to them besides." "Yes, it's a cruel honour to pay them." "Cruel--that's too much," he objected. "I mean it's one you shouldn't confer on those you like, for when it's over it's over: it kills your interest in them. After you've finished them you don't like them any more at all." "Surely I like _you_," Nick returned, sitting tilted back before his picture with his hands in his pockets. "We've done very well: it's something not to have quarrelled"--and she smiled at him now, seeming more "in" it. "I wouldn't have had you slight your work--I wouldn't have had you do it badly. But there's no fear of that for you," she went on. "You're the real thing and the rare bird. I haven't lived with you this way without seeing that: you're the sincere artist so much more than I. No, no, don't protest," she added with one of her sudden, fine transitions to a deeper tone. "You'll do things that will hand on your name when my screeching is happily over. Only you do seem to me, I confess, rather high and dry here--I speak from the point of view of your comfort and of my personal interest in you. You strike me as kind of lonely, as the Americans say--rather cut off and isolated in your grandeur. Haven't you any confrères--fellow-artists and people of that sort? Don't they come near you?" "I don't know them much," Nick humbly confessed. "I've always been afraid of them, and how can they take me seriously?" "Well, _I_'ve got confrères, and sometimes I wish I hadn't! But does your sister never come near you any more," she asked, "or is it only the fear of meeting me?" He was aware of his mother's theory that Biddy was constantly bundled home from Rosedale Road at the approach of improper persons: she was as angry at this as if she wouldn't have been more so had her child suffered exposure; but the explanation he gave his present visitor was nearer the truth. He reminded her that he had already told her--he had been careful to do this, so as not to let it appear she was avoided--that his sister was now most of the time in the country, staying with an hospitable relation. "Oh yes," the girl rejoined to this, "with Mr. Sherringham's sister, Mrs.--what's her name? I always forget." And when he had pronounced the word with a reluctance he doubtless failed sufficiently to conceal--he hated to talk of Julia by any name and didn't know what business Miriam had with her--she went on: "That's the one--the beauty, the wonderful beauty. I shall never forget how handsome she looked the day she found me here. I don't in the least resemble her, but I should like to have a try at that type some day in a comedy of manners. But who the devil will write me a comedy of manners? There it is! The danger would be, no doubt, that I should push her _à la charge_." Nick listened to these remarks in silence, saying to himself that if she should have the bad taste--which she seemed trembling on the brink of--to make an allusion to what had passed between the lady in question and himself he should dislike her beyond remedy. It would show him she was a coarse creature after all. Her good genius interposed, however, as against this hard penalty, and she quickly, for the moment at least, whisked away from the topic, demanding, since they spoke of comrades and visitors, what had become of Gabriel Nash, whom she hadn't heard of for so many days. "I think he's tired of me," said Nick; "he hasn't been near me either. But after all it's natural--he has seen me through." "Seen you through? Do you mean," she laughed, "seen through you? Why you've only just begun." "Precisely, and at bottom he doesn't like to see me begin. He's afraid I shall do something." She wondered--as with the interest of that. "Do you mean he's jealous?" "Not in the least, for from the moment one does anything one ceases to compete with him. It leaves him the field more clear. But that's just the discomfort for him--he feels, as you said just now, kind of lonely: he feels rather abandoned and even, I think, a little betrayed. So far from being jealous he yearns for me and regrets me. The only thing he really takes seriously is to speculate and understand, to talk about the reasons and the essence of things: the people who do that are the highest. The applications, the consequences, the vulgar little effects, belong to a lower plane, for which one must doubtless be tolerant and indulgent, but which is after all an affair of comparative accidents and trifles. Indeed he'll probably tell me frankly the next time I see him that he can't but feel that to come down to small questions of action--to the small prudences and compromises and simplifications of practice--is for the superior person really a fatal descent. One may be inoffensive and even commendable after it, but one can scarcely pretend to be interesting. '_Il en faut comme ça_,' but one doesn't haunt them. He'll do his best for me; he'll come back again, but he'll come back sad, and finally he'll fade away altogether. Hell go off to Granada or somewhere." "The simplifications of practice?" cried Miriam. "Why they're just precisely the most blessed things on earth. What should we do without them?" "What indeed?" Nick echoed. "But if we need them it's because we're not superior persons. We're awful Philistines." "I'll be one with _you_," the girl smiled. "Poor Nash isn't worth talking about. What was it but a small question of action when he preached to you, as I know he did, to give up your seat?" "Yes, he has a weakness for giving up--he'll go with you as far as that. But I'm not giving up any more, you see. I'm pegging away, and that's gross." "He's an idiot--_n'en parlons plus_!" she dropped, gathering up her parasol but lingering. "Ah I stick to him," Nick said. "He helped me at a difficult time." "You ought to be ashamed to confess it." "Oh you _are_ a Philistine!" Nick returned. "Certainly I am," she declared, going toward the door--"if it makes me one to be sorry, awfully sorry and even rather angry, that I haven't before me a period of the same sort of unsociable pegging away that you have. For want of it I shall never really be good. However, if you don't tell people I've said so they'll never know. Your conditions are far better than mine and far more respectable: you can do as many things as you like in patient obscurity while I'm pitchforked into the _mêlée_ and into the most improbable fame--all on the back of a solitary _cheval de bataille_, a poor broken-winded screw. I read it clear that I shall be condemned for the greater part of the rest of my days--do you see that?--to play the stuff I'm acting now. I'm studying Juliet and I want awfully to do her, but really I'm mortally afraid lest, making a success of her, I should find myself in such a box. Perhaps the brutes would want Juliet for ever instead of my present part. You see amid what delightful alternatives one moves. What I long for most I never shall have had--five quiet years of hard all-round work in a perfect company, with a manager more perfect still, playing five hundred things and never being heard of at all. I may be too particular, but that's what I should have liked. I think I'm disgusting with my successful crudities. It's discouraging; it makes one not care much what happens. What's the use, in such an age, of being good?" "Good? Your haughty claim," Nick laughed, "is that you're bad." "I mean _good_, you know--there are other ways. Don't be stupid." And Miriam tapped him--he was near her at the door--with her parasol. "I scarcely know what to say to you," he logically pleaded, "for certainly it's your fault if you get on so fast." "I'm too clever--I'm a humbug." "That's the way I used to be," said Nick. She rested her brave eyes on him, then turned them over the room slowly; after which she attached them again, kindly, musingly--rather as if he had been a fine view or an interesting object--to his face. "Ah, the pride of that--the sense of purification! He 'used' to be forsooth! Poor me! Of course you'll say, 'Look at the sort of thing I've undertaken to produce compared with the rot you have.' So it's all right. Become great in the proper way and don't expose me." She glanced back once more at the studio as if to leave it for ever, and gave another last look at the unfinished canvas on the easel. She shook her head sadly, "Poor Mr. Sherringham--with _that_!" she wailed. "Oh I'll finish it--it will be very decent," Nick said. "Finish it by yourself?" "Not necessarily. You'll come back and sit when you return to London." "Never, never, never again." He wondered. "Why you've made me the most profuse offers and promises." "Yes, but they were made in ignorance and I've backed out of them. I'm capricious too--_faites la part de ça_. I see it wouldn't do--I didn't know it then. We're too far apart--I _am_, as you say, a Philistine." And as he protested with vehemence against this unscrupulous bad faith she added: "You'll find other models. Paint Gabriel Nash." "Gabriel Nash--as a substitute for you?" "It will be a good way to get rid of him. Paint Mrs. Dallow too," Miriam went on as she passed out of the door he had opened for her--"paint Mrs. Dallow if you wish to eradicate the last possibility of a throb." It was strange that, since only a moment before he had been in a state of mind to which the superfluity of this reference would have been the clearest thing about it, he should now have been moved to receive it quickly, naturally, irreflectively, receive it with the question: "The last possibility? Do you mean in her or in me?" "Oh in you. I don't know anything about 'her.'" "But that wouldn't be the effect," he argued with the same supervening candour. "I believe that if she were to sit to me the usual law would be reversed." "The usual law?" "Which you cited a while since and of which I recognised the general truth. In the case you speak of," he said, "I should probably make a shocking picture." "And fall in love with her again? Then for God's sake risk the daub!" Miriam laughed out as she floated away to her victoria. XLIX She had guessed happily in saying to him that to offer to paint Gabriel Nash would be the way to get rid of that visitant. It was with no such invidious purpose indeed that our young man proposed to his intermittent friend to sit; rather, as August was dusty in the London streets, he had too little hope that Nash would remain in town at such a time to oblige him. Nick had no wish to get rid of his private philosopher; he liked his philosophy, and though of course premeditated paradox was the light to read him by he yet had frequently and incidentally an inspired unexpectedness. He remained in Rosedale Road the man who most produced by his presence the effect of company. All the other men of Nick's acquaintance, all his political friends, represented, often very communicatively, their own affairs, their own affairs alone; which when they did it well was the most their host could ask of them. But Nash had the rare distinction that he seemed somehow to figure _his_ affairs, the said host's, and to show an interest in them unaffected by the ordinary social limitations of capacity. This relegated him to the class of high luxuries, and Nick was well aware that we hold our luxuries by a fitful and precarious tenure. If a friend without personal eagerness was one of the greatest of these it would be evident to the simplest mind that by the law of distribution of earthly boons such a convenience should be expected to forfeit in duration what it displayed in intensity. He had never been without a suspicion that Nash was too good to last, though for that matter nothing had yet confirmed a vague apprehension that his particular manner of breaking up or breaking down would be by his wishing to put so fresh a recruit in relation with other disciples. That would practically amount to a catastrophe, Nick felt; for it was odd that one could both have a great kindness for him and not in the least, when it came to the point, yearn for a view of his personal extensions. His originality had always been that he appeared to have none; and if in the first instance he had introduced his bright, young, political prodigy to Miriam and her mother, that was an exception for which Peter Sherringham's interference had been mainly responsible. All the same, however, it was some time before Nick ceased to view it as perhaps on the awkward books that, to complete his education as it were, Gabriel would wish him to converse a little with spirits formed by a like tonic discipline. Nick had an instinct, in which there was no consciousness of detriment to Nash, that the pupils, possibly even the imitators, of such a genius would be, as he mentally phrased it, something awful. He could be sure, even Gabriel himself could be sure, of his own reservations, but how could either of them be sure of those of others? Imitation is a fortunate homage only in proportion as it rests on measurements, and there was an indefinable something in Nash's doctrine that would have been discredited by exaggeration or by zeal. Providence happily appeared to have spared it this ordeal; so that Nick had after months still to remind himself how his friend had never pressed on his attention the least little group of fellow-mystics, never offered to produce them for his edification. It scarcely mattered now that he was just the man to whom the superficial would attribute that sort of tail: it would probably have been hard, for example, to persuade Lady Agnes or Julia Dallow or Peter Sherringham that he was not most at home in some dusky, untidy, dimly-imagined suburb of "culture," a region peopled by unpleasant phrasemongers who thought him a gentleman and who had no human use but to be held up in the comic press--which was, moreover, probably restrained by decorum from touching upon the worst of their aberrations. Nick at any rate never ran his academy to earth nor so much as skirted the suburb in question; never caught from the impenetrable background of his life the least reverberation of flitting or of flirting, the fainting esthetic ululation. There had been moments when he was even moved to anxiety by the silence that poor Gabriel's own faculty of sound made all about him--when at least it reduced to plainer elements (the mere bald terms of lonely singleness and thrift, of the lean philosophic life) the mystery he could never wholly dissociate from him, the air as of the transient and occasional, the likeness to curling vapour or murmuring wind or shifting light. It was, for instance, a symbol of this unclassified state, the lack of all position as a name in cited lists, that Nick in point of fact had no idea where he lived, would not have known how to go and see him or send him a doctor if he had heard he was ill. He had never walked with him to any door of Gabriel's own, even to pause at the threshold, though indeed Nash had a club, the Anonymous, in some improbable square, of which he might be suspected of being the only member--one had never heard of another--where it was vaguely understood letters would some day or other find him. Fortunately he pressed with no sharpness the spring of pity--his whole "form" was so easy a grasp of the helm of consciousness, which he would never let go. He would never consent to any deformity, but would steer his course straight through the eventual narrow pass and simply go down over the horizon. He in any case turned up Rosedale Road one day after Miriam had left London; he had just come back from a fortnight in Brittany, where he had drawn refreshment from the tragic sweetness of--well, of everything. He was on his way somewhere else--was going abroad for the autumn but was not particular what he did, professing that he had come back just to get Nick utterly off his mind. "It's very nice, it's very nice; yes, yes, I see," he remarked, giving a little, general, assenting sigh as his eyes wandered over the simple scene--a sigh which for a suspicious ear would have testified to an insidious reaction. Nick's ear, as we know, was already suspicious; a fact accounting for the expectant smile--it indicated the pleasant apprehension of a theory confirmed--with which he returned: "Do you mean my pictures are nice?" "Yes, yes, your pictures and the whole thing." "The whole thing?" "Your existence in this little, remote, independent corner of the great city. The disinterestedness of your attitude, the persistence of your effort, the piety, the beauty, in short the edification, of the whole spectacle." Nick laughed a little ruefully. "How near to having had enough of me you must be when you speak of me as edifying!" Nash changed colour slightly at this; it was the first time in his friend's remembrance that he had given a sign of embarrassment. "_Vous allez me lâcher_, I see it coming; and who can blame you?--for I've ceased to be in the least spectacular. I had my little hour; it was a great deal, for some people don't even have that. I've given you your curious case and I've been generous; I made the drama last for you as long as I could. You'll 'slope,' my dear fellow--you'll quietly slope; and it will be all right and inevitable, though I shall miss you greatly at first. Who knows whether without you I shouldn't still have been 'representing' Harsh, heaven help me? You rescued me; you converted me from a representative into an example--that's a shade better. But don't I know where you must be when you're reduced to praising my piety?" "Don't turn me away," said Nash plaintively; "give me a cigarette." "I shall never dream of turning you away; I shall cherish you till the latest possible hour. I'm only trying to keep myself in tune with the logic of things. The proof of how I cling is that precisely I want you to sit to me." "To sit to you?" With which Nick could fancy his visitor a little blank. "Certainly, for after all it isn't much to ask. Here we are and the hour's peculiarly propitious--long light days with no one coming near me, so that I've plenty of time. I had a hope I should have some orders: my younger sister, whom you know and who's a great optimist, plied me with that vision. In fact we invented together a charming little sordid theory that there might be rather a 'run' on me from the chatter (such as it was) produced by my taking up this line. My sister struck out the idea that a good many of the pretty ladies would think me interesting and would want to be done. Perhaps they do, but they've controlled themselves, for I can't say the run has commenced. They haven't even come to look, but I daresay they don't yet quite take it in. Of course it's a bad time--with every one out of town; though you know they might send for me to come and do them at home. Perhaps they will when they settle down. A portrait-tour of a dozen country-houses for the autumn and winter--what do you say to that for the ardent life? I know I excruciate you," Nick added, "but don't you see how it's in my interest to try how much you'll still stand?" Gabriel puffed his cigarette with a serenity so perfect that it might have been assumed to falsify these words. "Mrs. Dallow will send for you--_vous allez voir ça_," he said in a moment, brushing aside all vagueness. "She'll send for me?" "To paint her portrait; she'll recapture you on that basis. She'll get you down to one of the country-houses, and it will all go off as charmingly--with sketching in the morning, on days you can't hunt, and anything you like in the afternoon, and fifteen courses in the evening; there'll be bishops and ambassadors staying--as if you were a 'well-known,' awfully clever amateur. Take care, take care, for, fickle as you may think me, I can read the future: don't imagine you've come to the end of me yet. Mrs. Dallow and your sister, of both of whom I speak with the greatest respect, are capable of hatching together the most conscientious, delightful plan for you. Your differences with the beautiful lady will be patched up and you'll each come round a little and meet the other halfway. The beautiful lady will swallow your profession if you'll swallow hers. She'll put up with the palette if you'll put up with the country-house. It will be a very unusual one in which you won't find a good north room where you can paint. You'll go about with her and do all her friends, all the bishops and ambassadors, and you'll eat your cake and have it, and every one, beginning with your wife, will forget there's anything queer about you, and everything will be for the best in the best of worlds; so that, together--you and she--you'll become a great social institution and every one will think she has a delightful husband; to say nothing of course of your having a delightful wife. Ah my dear fellow, you turn pale, and with reason!" Nash went lucidly on: "that's to pay you for having tried to make me let you have it. You have it then there! I may be a bore"--the emphasis of this, though a mere shade, testified to the first personal resentment Nick had ever heard his visitor express--"I may be a bore, but once in a while I strike a light, I make things out. Then I venture to repeat, 'Take care, take care.' If, as I say, I respect _ces dames_ infinitely it's because they will be acting according to the highest wisdom of their sex. That's the sort of thing women do for a man--the sort of thing they invent when they're exceptionally good and clever. When they're not they don't do so well; but it's not for want of trying. There's only one thing in the world better than their incomparable charm: it's their abysmal conscience. Deep calleth unto deep--the one's indeed a part of the other. And when they club together, when they earnestly consider, as in the case we're supposing," Nash continued, "then the whole thing takes a lift; for it's no longer the virtue of the individual, it's that of the wondrous sex." "You're so remarkable that, more than ever, I must paint you," Nick returned, "though I'm so agitated by your prophetic words that my hand trembles and I shall doubtless scarcely be able to hold my brush. Look how I rattle my easel trying to put it into position. I see it all there just as you show it. Yes, it will be a droll day, and more modern than anything yet, when the conscience of women makes out good reasons for men's not being in love with them. You talk of their goodness and cleverness, and it's certainly much to the point. I don't know what else they themselves might do with those graces, but I don't see what man can do with them but be fond of them where he finds them." "Oh you'll do it--you'll do it!" cried Nash, brightly jubilant. "What is it I shall do?" "Exactly what I just said; if not next year then the year after, or the year after that. You'll go halfway to meet her and she'll drag you about and pass you off. You'll paint the bishops and become a social institution. That is, you'll do it if you don't take great care." "I shall, no doubt, and that's why I cling to you. You must still look after me," Nick went on. "Don't melt away into a mere improbable reminiscence, a delightful, symbolic fable--don't if you can possibly help it. The trouble is, you see, that you can't really keep hold very tight, because at bottom it will amuse you much more to see me in another pickle than to find me simply jogging down the vista of the years on the straight course. Let me at any rate have some sort of sketch of you as a kind of feather from the angel's wing or a photograph of the ghost--to prove to me in the future that you were once a solid sociable fact, that I didn't invent you, didn't launch you as a deadly hoax. Of course I shall be able to say to myself that you can't have been a fable--otherwise you'd have a moral; but that won't be enough, because I'm not sure you won't have had one. Some day you'll peep in here languidly and find me in such an attitude of piety--presenting my bent back to you as I niggle over some interminable botch--that I shall give cruelly on your nerves and you'll just draw away, closing the door softly. You'll be gentle and considerate about it and spare me, you won't even make me look round. You'll steal off on tiptoe, never, never to return." Gabriel consented to sit; he professed he should enjoy it and be glad to give up for it his immediate foreign commerce, so vague to Nick, so definite apparently to himself; and he came back three times for the purpose. Nick promised himself a deal of interest from this experiment, for with the first hour of it he began to feel that really as yet, given the conditions under which he now studied him, he had never at all thoroughly explored his friend. His impression had been that Nash had a head quite fine enough to be a challenge, and that as he sat there day by day all sorts of pleasant and paintable things would come out in his face. This impression was not gainsaid, but the whole tangle grew denser. It struck our young man that he had never _seen_ his subject before, and yet somehow this revelation was not produced by the sense of actually seeing it. What was revealed was the difficulty--what he saw was not the measurable mask but the ambiguous meaning. He had taken things for granted which literally were not there, and he found things there--except that he couldn't catch them--which he had not hitherto counted in or presumed to handle. This baffling effect, eminently in the line of the mystifying, so familiar to Nash, might have been the result of his whimsical volition, had it not appeared to our artist, after a few hours of the job, that his sitter was not the one who enjoyed it most. He was uncomfortable, at first vaguely and then definitely so--silent, restless, gloomy, dim, as if on the test the homage of a directer attention than he had ever had gave him less pleasure than he would have supposed. He had been willing to judge of this in good faith; but frankly he rather suffered. He wasn't cross, but was clearly unhappy, and Nick had never before felt him contract instead of expanding. It was all accordingly as if a trap had been laid for him, and our young man asked himself if it were really fair. At the same time there was something richly rare in such a relation between the subject and the artist, and Nick was disposed to go on till he should have to stop for pity or for shame. He caught eventually a glimmer of the truth underlying the strangeness, guessed that what upset his friend was simply the reversal, in such a combination, of his usual terms of intercourse. He was so accustomed to living upon irony and the interpretation of things that it was new to him to be himself interpreted and--as a gentleman who sits for his portrait is always liable to be--interpreted all ironically. From being outside of the universe he was suddenly brought into it, and from the position of a free commentator and critic, an easy amateurish editor of the whole affair, reduced to that of humble ingredient and contributor. It occurred afterwards to Nick that he had perhaps brought on a catastrophe by having happened to throw off as they gossiped or languished, and not alone without a cruel intention, but with an impulse of genuine solicitude: "But, my dear fellow, what will you do when you're old?" "Old? What do you call old?" Nash had replied bravely enough, but with another perceptible tinge of irritation. "Must I really remind you at this time of day that that term has no application to such a condition as mine? It only belongs to you wretched people who have the incurable superstition of 'doing'; it's the ignoble collapse you prepare for yourselves when you cease to be able to do. For me there'll be no collapse, no transition, no clumsy readjustment of attitude; for I shall only _be_, more and more, with all the accumulations of experience, the longer I live." "Oh I'm not particular about the term," said Nick. "If you don't call it old, the ultimate state, call it weary--call it final. The accumulations of experience are practically accumulations of fatigue." "I don't know anything about weariness. I live freshly--it doesn't fatigue me." "Then you need never die," Nick declared. "Certainly; I daresay I'm indestructible, immortal." Nick laughed out at this--it would be such fine news to some people. But it was uttered with perfect gravity, and it might very well have been in the spirit of that gravity that Nash failed to observe his agreement to sit again the next day. The next and the next and the next passed, but he never came back. True enough, punctuality was not important for a man who felt that he had the command of all time. Nevertheless his disappearance "without a trace," that of a personage in a fairy-tale or a melodrama, made a considerable impression on his friend as the months went on; so that, though he had never before had the least difficulty about entering into the play of Gabriel's humour, Nick now recalled with a certain fanciful awe the special accent with which he had ranked himself among imperishable things. He wondered a little if he hadn't at last, balancing always on the stretched tight-rope of his wit, fallen over on the wrong side. He had never before, of a truth, been so nearly witless, and would have to have gone mad in short to become so singularly simple. Perhaps indeed he was acting only more than usual in his customary spirit--thoughtfully contributing, for Nick's enlivenment, a purple rim of mystery to an horizon now so dreadfully let down. The mystery at any rate remained; another shade of purple in fact was virtually added to it. Nick had the prospect, for the future, of waiting to see, all curiously, when Nash would turn up, if ever, and the further diversion--it almost consoled him for the annoyance of being left with a second unfinished thing on his hands--of imagining in the portrait he had begun an odd tendency to fade gradually from the canvas. He couldn't catch it in the act, but he could have ever a suspicion on glancing at it that the hand of time was rubbing it away little by little--for all the world as in some delicate Hawthorne tale--and making the surface indistinct and bare of all resemblance to the model. Of course the moral of the Hawthorne tale would be that his personage would come back in quaint confidence on the day his last projected shadow should have vanished. L One day toward the end of March of the following year, in other words more than six months after Mr. Nash's disappearance, Bridget Dormer came into her brother's studio and greeted him with the effusion that accompanies a return from an absence. She had been staying at Broadwood--she had been staying at Harsh. She had various things to tell him about these episodes, about his mother, about Grace, about her small subterraneous self, and about Percy's having come, just before, over to Broadwood for two days; the longest visit with which, almost since they could remember, the head of the family had honoured their common parent. Nick noted indeed that this demonstration had apparently been taken as a great favour, and Biddy loyally testified to the fact that her elder brother was awfully jolly and that his presence had been a pretext for tremendous fun. Nick accordingly asked her what had passed about his marriage--what their mother had said to him. "Oh nothing," she replied; and Percy had said nothing to Lady Agnes and not a word to herself. This partly explained, for his junior, the consequent beatitude--none but cheerful topics had been produced; but he questioned the girl further--to a point which led her to say: "Oh I daresay that before long she'll write to her." "Who'll write to whom?" "Mamma'll write to Percy's wife. I'm sure he'd like it. Of course we shall end by going to see her. He was awfully disappointed at what he found in Spain--he didn't find anything." Biddy spoke of his disappointment almost with commiseration, for she was evidently inclined this morning to a fresh and kindly view of things. Nick could share her feeling but so far as was permitted by a recognition merely general of what his brother must have looked for. It might have been snipe and it might have been bristling boars. Biddy was indeed brief at first about everything, in spite of all the weeks that had gone since their last meeting; for he quickly enough saw she had something behind--something that made her gay and that she wanted to come to quickly. He was vaguely vexed at her being, fresh from Broadwood, so gay as that; for--it was impossible to shut one's eyes to the fact--what had practically come to pass in regard to that rural retreat was exactly what he had desired to avert. All winter, while it had been taken for granted his mother and sisters were doing what he wished, they had been doing precisely what he hated. He held Biddy perhaps least responsible, and there was no one he could exclusively blame. He washed his hands of the matter and succeeded fairly well, for the most part, in forgetting he was not pleased. Julia herself in truth appeared to have been the most active member of the little group united to make light of his decencies. There had been a formal restitution of Broadwood, but the three ladies were there more than ever, with the slight difference that they were mainly there with its mistress. Mahomet had declined to go any more to the mountain, so the mountain had virtually come to Mahomet. After their long visit in the autumn Lady Agnes and her girls had come back to town; but they had gone down again for Christmas and Julia had taken this occasion to write to Nick that she hoped very much he wouldn't refuse them all his own company for just a little scrap of the supremely sociable time. Nick, after reflexion, judged it best not to refuse, so that he passed, in the event, four days under his cousin's roof. The "all" proved a great many people, for she had taken care to fill the house. She took the largest view of hospitality and Nick had never seen her so splendid, so free-handed, so gracefully active. She was a perfect mistress of the revels; she had arranged some ancient bravery for every day and for every night. The Dormers were so much in it, as the phrase was, that after all their discomfiture their fortune seemed in an hour to have come back. There had been a moment when, in extemporised charades, Lady Agnes, an elderly figure being required, appeared on the point of undertaking the part of the housekeeper at a castle, who, dropping her _h_'s, showed sheeplike tourists about; but she waived the opportunity in favour of her daughter Grace. Even Grace had a great success; Grace dropped her _h_'s as with the crash of empires. Nick of course was in the charades and in everything, but Julia was not; she only invented, directed, led the applause. When nothing else was forward Nick "sketched" the whole company: they followed him about, they waylaid him on staircases, clamouring to be allowed to sit. He obliged them so far as he could, all save Julia, who didn't clamour; and, growing rather red, he thought of Gabriel Nash while he bent over the paper. Early in the new year he went abroad for six weeks, but only as far as Paris. It was a new Paris for him then; a Paris of the Rue Bonaparte and three or four professional friends--he had more of these there than in London; a Paris of studios and studies and models, of researches and revelations, comparisons and contrasts, of strong impressions and long discussions and rather uncomfortable economies, small cafés, bad fires and the general sense of being twenty again. While he was away his mother and sisters--Lady Agnes now sometimes wrote to him--returned to London for a month, and before he was again established in Rosedale Road they went back for a third course of Broadwood. After they had been there five days--and this was the salt of the whole feast--Julia took herself off to Harsh, leaving them in undisturbed possession. They had remained so--they wouldn't come up to town till after Easter. The trick was played, and Biddy, as I have mentioned, was now very content. Her brother presently learned, however, that the reason of this was not wholly the success of the trick; unless indeed her further ground were only a continuation of it. She was not in London as a forerunner of her mother; she was not even as yet in Calcutta Gardens. She had come to spend a week with Florry Tressilian, who had lately taken the dearest little flat in a charming new place, just put up, on the other side of the Park, with all kinds of lifts and tubes and electricities. Florry had been awfully nice to her--had been with them ever so long at Broadwood while the flat was being painted and prepared--and mamma had then let her, let Biddy, promise to come to her, when everything was ready, so that they might have a happy old maids' (for they _were_, old maids now!) house-warming together. If Florry could by this time do without a chaperon--she had two latchkeys and went alone on the top of omnibuses, and her name was in the Red Book--she was enough of a duenna for another girl. Biddy referred with sweet cynical eyes to the fine happy stride she had thus taken in the direction of enlightened spinsterhood; and Nick hung his head, immensely abashed and humiliated, for, modern as he had fatuously supposed himself, there were evidently currents more modern yet. It so happened that on this particular morning he had drawn out of a corner his interrupted study of Gabriel Nash; on no further curiosity--he had only been looking round the room in a rummaging spirit--than to see how much or how little of it remained. It had become to his view so dim an adumbration--he was sure of this, and it pressed some spring of melancholy mirth--that it didn't seem worth putting away, and he left it leaning against a table as if it had been a blank canvas or a "preparation" to be painted over. In this posture it attracted Biddy's attention, for on a second glance it showed distinguishable features. She had not seen it before and now asked whom it might represent, remarking also that she could almost guess, yet not quite: she had known the original but couldn't name him. "Six months ago, for a few days, it represented Gabriel Nash," Nick replied. "But it isn't anybody or anything now." "Six months ago? What's the matter with it and why don't you go on?" "What's the matter with it is more than I can tell you. But I can't go on because I've lost my model." She had an almost hopeful stare. "Is he beautifully dead?" Her brother laughed out at the candid cheerfulness, hopefulness almost, with which this inquiry broke from her. "He's only dead to me. He has gone away." "Where has he gone?" "I haven't the least idea." "Why, have you quarrelled?"--Biddy shone again. "Quarrelled? For what do you take us? Docs the nightingale quarrel with the moon?" "I needn't ask which of you is the moon," she said. "Of course I'm the nightingale. But, more literally," Nick continued, "Nash has melted back into the elements--he's part of the great air of the world." And then as even with this lucidity he saw the girl still mystified: "I've a notion he has gone to India and at the present moment is reclining on a bank of flowers in the vale of Cashmere." Biddy had a pause, after which she dropped: "Julia will be glad--she dislikes him so." "If she dislikes him why should she be glad he's so enviably placed?" "I mean about his going away. She'll be glad of that." "My poor incorrigible child," Nick cried, "what has Julia to do with it?" "She has more to do with things than you think," Biddy returned with all her bravery. Yet she had no sooner uttered the words than she perceptibly blushed. Hereupon, to attenuate the foolishness of her blush--only it had the opposite effect--she added: "She thinks he has been a bad element in your life." Nick emitted a long strange sound. "She thinks perhaps, but she doesn't think enough; otherwise she'd arrive at this better thought--that she knows nothing whatever about my life." "Ah brother," the girl pleaded with solemn eyes, "you don't imagine what an interest she takes in it. She has told me many times--she has talked lots to me about it." Biddy paused and then went on, an anxious little smile shining through her gravity as if from a cautious wonder as to how much he would take: "She has a conviction it was Mr. Nash who made trouble between you." "Best of little sisters," Nick pronounced, "those are thoroughly second-rate ideas, the result of a perfectly superficial view. Excuse my possibly priggish tone, but they really attribute to my dear detached friend a part he's quite incapable of playing. He can neither make trouble nor take trouble; no trouble could ever either have come out of him or have got into him. Moreover," our young man continued, "if Julia has talked to you so much about the matter there's no harm in my talking to you a little. When she threw me over in an hour it was on a perfectly definite occasion. That occasion was the presence in my studio of a dishevelled, an abandoned actress." "Oh Nick, she has not thrown you over!" Biddy protested. "She has not--I've proof." He felt at this direct denial a certain stir of indignation and looked at the girl with momentary sternness. "Has she sent you here to tell me this? What do you mean by proof?" Biddy's eyes, at these questions, met her brother's with a strange expression, and for a few seconds, while she looked entreatingly into them, she wavered there with parted lips and vaguely stretched out her hands. The next minute she had burst into tears--she was sobbing on his breast. He said "Hallo!" and soothed her; but it was very quickly over. Then she told him what she meant by her proof and what she had had on her mind ever since her present arrival. It was a message from Julia, but not to say--not to say what he had questioned her about just before; though indeed, more familiar now that he had his arm round her, she boldly expressed the hope it might in the end come to the same thing. Julia simply wanted to know--- she had instructed her to sound him discreetly--if Nick would undertake her portrait; and she wound up this experiment in "sounding" by the statement that their beautiful kinswoman was dying to sit. "Dying to sit?" echoed Nick, whose turn it was this time to feel his colour rise. "At any moment you like after Easter, when she comes up. She wants a full-length and your very best, your most splendid work." Nick stared, not caring that he had blushed. "Is she serious?" "Ah Nick--serious!" Biddy reasoned tenderly. She came nearer again and he thought her again about to weep. He took her by the shoulders, looking into her eyes. "It's all right if she knows _I_ am. But why doesn't she come like any one else? I don't refuse people!" "Nick, dearest Nick!" she went on, her eyes conscious and pleading. He looked into them intently--as well as she could he play at sounding--and for a moment, between these young persons, the air was lighted by the glimmer of mutual searchings and suppressed confessions. Nick read deep and then, suddenly releasing his sister, turned away. She didn't see his face in that movement, but an observer to whom it had been presented might have fancied it denoted a foreboding that was not exactly a dread, yet was not exclusively a joy. The first thing he made out in the room, when he could distinguish, was Gabriel Nash's portrait, which suddenly filled him with an unreasoning rancour. He seized it and turned it about, jammed it back into its corner with its face against the wall. This small diversion might have served to carry off the embarrassment with which he had finally averted himself from Biddy. The embarrassment, however, was all his own; none of it was reflected in the way she resumed, after a silence in which she had followed his disposal of the picture: "If she's so eager to come here--for it's here she wants to sit, not in Great Stanhope Street, never!--how can she prove better that she doesn't care a bit if she meets Miss Rooth?" "She won't meet Miss Rooth," Nick replied rather dryly. "Oh I'm sorry!" said Biddy. She was as frank as if she had achieved a virtual victory, and seemed to regret the loss of a chance for Julia to show an equal mildness. Her tone made her brother laugh, but she went on with confidence: "She thought it was Mr. Nash who made Miss Rooth come." "So he did, by the way," said Nick. "Well then, wasn't that making trouble?" "I thought you admitted there was no harm in her being here." "Yes, but _he_ hoped there'd be." "Poor Nash's hopes!" Nick laughed. "My dear child, it would take a cleverer head than you or me, or even Julia, who must have invented that wise theory, to say what they were. However, let us agree that even if they were perfectly fiendish my good sense has been a match for them." "Oh Nick, that's delightful!" chanted Biddy. Then she added: "Do you mean she doesn't come any more?" "The dishevelled actress? She hasn't been near me for months." "But she's in London--she's always acting? I've been away so much I've scarcely observed," Biddy explained with a slight change of note. "The same silly part, poor creature, for nearly a year. It appears that that's 'success'--in her profession. I saw her in the character several times last summer, but haven't set foot in her theatre since." Biddy took this in; then she suggested; "Peter wouldn't have liked that." "Oh Peter's likes--!" Nick at his easel, beginning to work, conveniently sighed. "I mean her acting the same part for a year." "I'm sure I don't know; he has never written me a word." "Nor me either," Biddy returned. There was another short silence, during which Nick brushed at a panel. It ended in his presently saying: "There's one thing certainly Peter _would_ like--that is simply to be here to-night. It's a great night--another great night--for the abandoned one. She's to act Juliet for the first time." "Ah how I should like to see her!" the girl cried. Nick glanced at her; she sat watching him. "She has sent me a stall; I wish she had sent me two. I should have been delighted to take you." "Don't you think you could get another?" Biddy quavered. "They must be in tremendous demand. But who knows after all?" Nick added, at the same moment looking round. "Here's a chance--here's quite an extraordinary chance!" His servant had opened the door and was ushering in a lady whose identity was indeed justly reflected in those words. "Miss Rooth!" the man announced; but he was caught up by a gentleman who came next and who exclaimed, laughing and with a gesture gracefully corrective: "No, no--no longer Miss Rooth!" Miriam entered the place with her charming familiar grandeur--entered very much as she might have appeared, as she appeared every night, early in her first act, at the back of the stage, by the immemorial middle door. She might exactly now have been presenting herself to the house, taking easy possession, repeating old movements, looking from one to the other of the actors before the footlights. The rich "Good-morning" she threw into the air, holding out her right hand to Biddy and then giving her left to Nick--as she might have given it to her own brother--had nothing to tell of intervals or alienations. She struck Biddy as still more terrible in her splendid practice than when she had seen her before--the practice and the splendour had now something almost royal. The girl had had occasion to make her curtsey to majesties and highnesses, but the flutter those effigies produced was nothing to the way in which at the approach of this young lady the agitated air seemed to recognise something supreme. So the deep mild eyes she bent on Biddy were not soothing, though for that matter evidently intended to soothe. Biddy wondered Nick could have got so used to her--he joked at her as she loomed--and later in the day, still under the great impression of this incident, she even wondered that Peter could have full an impunity. It was true that Peter apparently didn't quite feel one. "You never came--you never came," Miriam said to her kindly and sadly; and Biddy, recognising the allusion, the invitation to visit the actress at home, had to explain how much she had been absent from London and then even that her brother hadn't proposed to take her. "Very true--he hasn't come himself. What's he doing now?" asked Miss Rooth, standing near her young friend but looking at Nick, who had immediately engaged in conversation with his other visitor, a gentleman whose face came back to the girl. She had seen this gentleman on the stage with the great performer--that was it, the night Peter took her to the theatre with Florry Tressilian. Oh that Nick would only do something of that sort now! This desire, quickened by the presence of the strange, expressive woman, by the way she scattered sweet syllables as if she were touching the piano-keys, combined with other things to make our young lady's head swim--other things too mingled to name, admiration and fear and dim divination and purposeless pride and curiosity and resistance, the impulse to go away and the determination to (as she would have liked fondly to fancy it) "hold her ground." The actress courted her with a wondrous voice--what was the matter with the actress and what did she want?--and Biddy tried in return to give an idea of what Nick was doing. Not succeeding very well she was about to appeal to her brother, but Miriam stopped her with the remark that it didn't signify; besides, Dashwood was telling Nick something--something they wanted him to know. "We're in a great excitement--he has taken a theatre," Miriam added. "Taken a theatre?" Biddy was vague. "We're going to set up for ourselves. He's going to do for me altogether. It has all been arranged only within a day or two. It remains to be seen how it will answer," Miriam smiled. Biddy murmured some friendly hope, and the shining presence went on: "Do you know why I've broken in here to-day after a long absence--interrupting your poor brother so basely, taking up his precious time? It's because I'm so nervous." "About your first night?" Biddy risked. "Do you know about that--are you coming?" Miriam had caught at it. "No, I'm not coming--I haven't a place." "Will you come if I send you one?" "Oh but really it's too beautiful of you!" breathed the girl. "You shall have a box; your brother shall bring you. They can't squeeze in a pin, I'm told; but I've kept a box, I'll manage it. Only if I do, you know, mind you positively come!" She sounded it as the highest of favours, resting her hand on Biddy's. "Don't be afraid. And may I bring a friend--the friend with whom I'm staying?" Miriam now just gloomed. "Do you mean Mrs. Dallow?" "No, no--Miss Tressilian. She puts me up, she has got a flat. Did you ever see a flat?" asked Biddy expansively. "My cousin's not in London." Miriam replied that she might bring whom she liked and Biddy broke out to her brother: "Fancy what kindness, Nick: we're to have a box to-night and you're to take me!" Nick turned to her a face of levity which struck her even at the time as too cynically free, but which she understood when the finer sense of it subsequently recurred to her. Mr. Dashwood interposed with the remark that it was all very well to talk about boxes, but that he didn't see how at that time of day the miracle was to be worked. "You haven't kept one as I told you?" Miriam demanded. "As you told me, my dear? Tell the lamb to keep its tenderest mutton from the wolves!" "You shall have one: we'll arrange it," Miriam went on to Biddy. "Let me qualify that statement a little, Miss Dormer," said Basil Dashwood. "We'll arrange it if it's humanly possible." "We'll arrange it even if it's inhumanly _im_possible--that's just the point," Miriam declared to the girl. "Don't talk about trouble--what's he meant for but to take it? _Cela s'annonce bien_, you see," she continued to Nick: "doesn't it look as if we should pull beautifully together?" And as he answered that he heartily congratulated her--he was immensely interested in what he had been told--she exclaimed after resting her eyes on him a moment: "What will you have? It seemed simpler! It was clear there had to be some one." She explained further to Nick what had led her to come in at that moment, while Dashwood approached Biddy with a civil assurance that they would see, they would leave no stone unturned, though he would not have taken upon himself to promise. Miriam reminded Nick of the blessing he had been to her nearly a year before, on her other first night, when she was all impatient and on edge; how he had let her come and sit there for hours--helped her to possess her soul till the evening and to keep out of harm's way. The case was the same at present, with the aggravation indeed that he would understand--Dashwood's nerves as well as her own: Dashwood's were a great deal worse than hers. Everything was ready for Juliet; they had been rehearsing for five months--it had kept her from going mad from the treadmill of the other piece--and he, Nick, had occurred to her again, in the last intolerable hours, as the friend in need, the salutary stop-gap, no matter how much she worried him. She shouldn't be turned out? Biddy broke away from Basil Dashwood: she must go, she must hurry off to Miss Tressilian with her news. Florry might make some other stupid engagement for the evening: she must be warned in time. The girl took a flushed, excited leave after having received a renewal of Miriam's pledge and even heard her say to Nick that he must now give back the seat already sent him--they should be sure to have another use for it. LI That night at the theatre and in the box--the miracle had been wrought, the treasure found--Nick Dormer pointed out to his two companions the stall he had relinquished, which was close in front; noting how oddly it remained during the whole of the first act vacant. The house was beyond everything, the actress beyond any one; though to describe again so famous an occasion--it has been described repeatedly by other reporters--is not in the compass of the closing words of a history already too sustained. It is enough to say that these great hours marked an era in contemporary art and that for those who had a spectator's share in them the words "revelation," "incarnation," "acclamation," "demonstration," "ovation"--to name only a few, and all accompanied by the word "extraordinary"--acquired a new force. Miriam's Juliet was an exquisite image of young passion and young despair, expressed in the truest, divinest music that had ever poured from tragic lips. The great childish audience, gaping at her points, expanded there before her like a lap to catch flowers. During the first interval our three friends in the box had plenty to talk about, and they were so occupied with it that for some time they failed to observe a gentleman who had at last come into the empty stall near the front. This discovery was presently formulated by Miss Tressilian in the cheerful exclamation: "Only fancy--there's Mr. Sherringham!" This of course immediately became a high wonder--a wonder for Nick and Biddy, who had not heard of his return; and the prodigy was quickened by the fact that he gave no sign of looking for them or even at them. Having taken possession of his place he sat very still in it, staring straight before him at the curtain. His abrupt reappearance held the seeds of anxiety both for Biddy and for Nick, so that it was mainly Miss Tressilian who had freedom of mind to throw off the theory that he had come back that very hour--had arrived from a long journey. Couldn't they see how strange he was and how brown, how burnt and how red, how tired and how worn? They all inspected him, though Biddy declined Miss Tressilian's glass; but he was evidently indifferent to notice and finally Biddy, leaning back in her chair, dropped the fantastic words: "He has come home to marry Juliet!" Nick glanced at her and then replied: "What a disaster--to make such a journey as that and to be late for the fair!" "Late for the fair?" "Why she's married--these three days. They did it very quietly; Miriam says because her mother hated it and hopes it won't be much known! All the same she's Basil Dashwood's wedded wife--he has come in just in time to take the receipts for Juliet. It's a good thing, no doubt, for there are at least two fortunes to be made out of her, and he'll give up the stage." Nick explained to Miss Tressilian, who had inquired, that the gentleman in question was the actor who was playing Mercutio, and he asked Biddy if she hadn't known that this was what they were telling him in Rosedale Road that morning. She replied that she had understood nothing but that she was to be where she was, and she sank considerably behind the drapery of the box. From this cover she was able to launch, creditably enough, the exclamation: "Poor, poor Peter!" Nick got up and stood looking at poor, poor Peter. "He ought to come round and speak to us, but if he doesn't see us I suppose he doesn't." He quitted the box as to go to the restored exile, and I may add that as soon as he had done so Florence Tressilian bounded over to the dusk in which Biddy had nestled. What passed immediately between these young ladies needn't concern us: it is sufficient to mention that two minutes later Miss Tressilian broke out: "Look at him, dearest; he's turning his head this way!" "Thank you, I don't care to watch his turns," said Biddy; and she doubtless demeaned herself in the high spirit of these words. It nevertheless happened that directly afterwards she had certain knowledge of his having glanced at his watch as if to judge how soon the curtain would rise again, as well as of his having then jumped up and passed quickly out of his place. The curtain had risen again without his reappearing and without Nick's returning. Indeed by the time Nick slipped in a good deal of the third act was over; and even then, even when the curtain descended, Peter had not come back. Nick sat down in silence to watch the stage, to which the breathless attention of his companions seemed attached, though Biddy after a moment threw round at him a single quick look. At the end of the act they were all occupied with the recalls, the applause and the responsive loveliness of Juliet as she was led out--Mercutio had to give her up to Romeo--and even for a few minutes after the deafening roar had subsided nothing was said among the three. At last Nick began: "It's quite true he has just arrived; he's in Great Stanhope Street. They've given him several weeks, to make up for the uncomfortable way they bundled him off--to get there in time for some special business that had suddenly to be gone into--when he first went out: he tells me they even then promised that. He got into Southampton only a few hours ago, rushed up by the first train he could catch and came off here without any dinner." "Fancy!" said Miss Tressilian; while Biddy more generally asked if Peter might be in good health and appeared to have been happy. Nick replied that he described his post as beastly but didn't seem to have suffered from it. He was to be in England probably a month, he was awfully brown, he sent his love to Biddy. Miss Tressilian looked at his empty stall and was of the opinion that it would be more to the point if he were to come in to see her. "Oh he'll turn up; we had a goodish talk in the lobby where he met me. I think he went out somewhere." "How odd to come so many thousand miles for this and then not to stay!" Biddy fluted. "Did he come on purpose for this?" Miss Tressilian asked. "Perhaps he's gone out to get his dinner!" joked Biddy. Her friend suggested that he might be behind the scenes, but Nick cast doubts; whereupon Biddy asked if he himself were not going round. At this moment the curtain rose; Nick said he would go in the next interval. As soon as it came he quitted the box, remaining absent while it lasted. All this time, in the house, there was no sign of Peter. Nick reappeared only as the fourth act was beginning and uttered no word to his companions till it was over. Then, after a further delay produced by renewed vociferous proofs of the personal victory won, he depicted his visit to the stage and the wonderful sight of Miriam on the field of battle. Miss Tressilian inquired if he had found Mr. Sherringham with her; to which he replied that, save across the footlights, she had not been in touch with him. At this a soft exclamation broke from Biddy. "Poor Peter! Where is he, then?" Nick seemed to falter. "He's walking the streets." "Walking the streets?" "I don't know--I give it up!" our young man replied; and his tone, for some minutes, reduced his companions to silence. But a little later Biddy said: "Was it for him this morning she wanted that place--when she asked you to give yours back?" "For him exactly. It's very odd she had just managed to keep it--for all the good use he makes of it! She told me just now that she heard from him, at his post, a short time ago, to the effect that he had seen in a newspaper a statement she was going to do Juliet and that he firmly intended, though the ways and means were not clear to him--his leave of absence hadn't yet come out and he couldn't be sure when it would come--to be present on her first night; whereby she must do him the service to provide him a place. She thought this a speech rather in the air, so that in the midst of all her cares she took no particular pains about the matter. She had an idea she had really done with him for a long time. But this afternoon what does he do but telegraph to her from Southampton that he keeps his appointment and counts on her for a stall? Unless she had got back mine she wouldn't have been able to help him. When she was in Rosedale Road this morning she hadn't received his telegram; but his promise, his threat, whatever it was, came back to her: she had a vague foreboding and thought that on the chance she had better hold something ready. When she got home she found his telegram, and she told me he was the first person she saw in the house, through her fright when she came on in the second act. It appears she was terrified this time, and it lasted half through the play." "She must be rather annoyed at his having gone away," Miss Tressilian observed. "Annoyed? I'm not so sure!" laughed Nick. "Ah here he comes back!" cried Biddy, behind her fan, while the absentee edged into his seat in time for the fifth act. He stood there a moment, first looking round the theatre; then he turned his eyes to the box occupied by his relatives, smiling and waving his hand. "After that he'll surely come and see you," said Miss Tressilian. "We shall see him as we go out," Biddy returned: "he must lose no more time." Nick looked at him with a glass, then exclaiming: "Well, I'm glad he has pulled himself together!" "Why what's the matter with him--if he wasn't disappointed of his seat?" Miss Tressilian demanded. "The matter with him is that a couple of hours ago he had a great shock." "A great shock?" "I may as well mention it at last," Nick went on. "I had to say something to him in the lobby there when we met--something I was pretty sure he couldn't like. I let him have it full in the face--it seemed to me better and wiser. I let him know that Juliet's married." "Didn't he know it?" asked Biddy, who, with her face raised, had listened in deep stillness to every word that fell from her brother. "How should he have known it? It has only just taken place, and they've been so clever, for reasons of their own--those people move among a lot of considerations that are absolutely foreign to us--about keeping it out of the papers. They put in a lot of lies and they leave out the real things." "You don't mean to say Mr. Sherringham wanted to _marry_ her!" Miss Tressilian gasped. "Don't ask me what he wanted--I daresay we shall never know. One thing's very certain--that he didn't like my news, dear old Peter, and that I shan't soon forget the look in his face as he turned away from me and slipped out into the street. He was too much upset--he couldn't trust himself to come back; he had to walk about--he tried to walk it off." "Let us hope, then, he _has_ walked it off!" "Ah poor fellow--he couldn't hold out to the end; he has had to come back and look at her once more. He knows she'll be sublime in these last scenes." "Is he so much in love with her as that? What difference does it make for an actress if she _is_ mar--?" But in this rash inquiry Miss Tressilian suddenly checked herself. "We shall probably never know how much he has been in love with her, nor what difference it makes. We shall never know exactly what he came back for, nor why he couldn't stand it out there any longer without relief, nor why he scrambled down here all but straight from the station, nor why after all, for the last two hours, he has been roaming the streets. And it doesn't matter, for it's none of our business. But I'm sorry for him--she is going to be sublime," Nick added. The curtain was rising on the tragic climax of the play. Miriam Rooth was sublime; yet it may be confided to the reader that during these supreme scenes Bridget Dormer directed her eyes less to the inspired actress than to a figure in the stalls who sat with his own gaze fastened to the stage. It may further be intimated that Peter Sherringham, though he saw but a fragment of the performance, read clear, at the last, in the intense light of genius with which this fragment was charged, that even so after all he had been rewarded for his formidable journey. The great trouble of his infatuation subsided, leaving behind it something appreciably deep and pure. This pacification was far from taking place at once, but it was helped on, unexpectedly to him--it began to work at least--the very next night he saw the play, through the whole of which he then sat. He felt somehow recalled to the real by the very felicity of this experience, the supreme exhibition itself. He began to come back as from a far-off province of his history where miserable madness had reigned. He had been baffled, he had got his answer; it must last him--that was plain. He didn't fully accept it the first week or the second; but he accepted it sooner than he could have supposed had he known what it was to be when he paced at night, under the southern stars, the deck of the ship bearing him to England. It had been, as we know, Miss Tressilian's view, and even Biddy's, that evening, that Peter Sherringham would join them as they left the theatre. This view, however, was not confirmed by the event, for our troubled gentleman vanished utterly--disappointingly crude behaviour on the part of a young diplomatist who had distinguished himself--before any one could put a hand on him. And he failed to make up for his crudity by coming to see any one the next day, or even the next. Indeed many days elapsed and very little would have been known about him had it not been that, in the country, Mrs. Dallow knew. What Mrs. Dallow knew was eventually known to Biddy Dormer; and in this way it could be established in his favour that he had remained some extraordinarily small number of days in London, had almost directly gone over to Paris to see his old chief. He came back from Paris--Biddy learnt this not from Julia, but in a much more immediate way: she knew it by his pressing the little electric button at the door of Florence Tressilian's flat one day when the good Florence was out and she herself was at home. He made on this occasion a very long visit. The good Florence knew it not much later, you may be sure--and how he had got their address from Nick--and she took an extravagant pleasure in it. Mr. Sherringham had never been to see _her_--the like of her--in his life: therefore it was clear what had made him begin. When he had once begun he kept it up, and Miss Tressilian's pleasure grew. Good as she was, she could remember without the slightest relenting what Nick Dormer had repeated to them at the theatre about the dreary side of Peter's present post. However, she was not bound to make a stand at this if persons more nearly concerned, Lady Agnes and the girl herself, didn't mind it. How little _they_ minded it, and Grace and Julia Dallow and even Nick, was proved in the course of a meeting that took place at Harsh during the Easter holidays. The mistress of that seat had a small and intimate party to celebrate her brother's betrothal. The two ladies came over from Broadwood; even Nick, for two days, went back to his old hunting-ground, and Miss Tressilian relinquished for as long a time the delights of her newly arranged flat. Peter Sherringham obtained an extension of leave, so that he might go back to his legation with a wife. Fortunately, as it turned out, Biddy's ordeal, in the more or less torrid zone, was not cruelly prolonged, for the pair have already received a superior appointment. It is Lady Agnes's proud opinion that her daughter is even now shaping their destiny. I say "even now," for these facts bring me very close to contemporary history. During those two days at Harsh Nick arranged with the former mistress of his fate the conditions, as they might be called, under which she should sit to him; and every one will remember in how recent an exhibition general attention was attracted, as the newspapers said in describing the private view, to the noble portrait of a lady which was the final outcome of that arrangement. Gabriel Nash had been at many a private view, but he was not at that one. These matters are highly recent, however, as I say; so that in glancing about the little circle of the interests I have tried to evoke I am suddenly warned by a sharp sense of modernness. This renders it difficult to me, for instance, in taking leave of our wonderful Miriam, to do much more than allude to the general impression that her remarkable career is even yet only in its early prime. Basil Dashwood has got his theatre, and his wife--people know now she _is_ his wife--has added three or four new parts to her repertory; but every one is agreed that both in public and in private she has a great deal more to show. This is equally true of Nick Dormer, in regard to whom I may finally say that his friend Nash's predictions about his reunion with Mrs. Dallow have not up to this time been justified. On the other hand, I must not omit to add, this lady has not, at the latest accounts, married Mr. Macgeorge. It is very true there has been a rumour that Mr. Macgeorge is worried about her--has even ceased at all fondly to believe in her. 
31370	----	MISTRESS NELL The Illustrations Shown in this Edition are Reproductions of Scenes from the Photo-Play of "Mistress Nell," Produced and Copyrighted by the Famous Players Film Company, Adolf Zukor, President, to whom the Publishers Desire to Express their Thanks and Appreciation for Permission to use the Pictures. [Illustration: Nell Gwyn the King's Favorite.] MISTRESS NELL A MERRY TALE OF A MERRY TIME (T'wixt Fact and Fancy) BY GEORGE C. HAZELTON, Jr. Author of the Play "Let not poor Nelly starve." ILLUSTRATED WITH SCENES FROM THE PHOTO-PLAY PRODUCED AND COPYRIGHTED BY THE FAMOUS PLAYERS FILM COMPANY, ADOLPH ZUKOR, PRESIDENT. NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1901, by Charles Scribner's Sons All rights reserved A WORD It is the vogue to dramatize successful novels. The author of the present Nell Gwyn story has pursued the contrary course. His "merry" play of the same name was written and produced before he undertook to compose this tale, suggested by the same historic sources. A word of tribute is gratefully given to the _comédienne_, Miss Crosman, whose courage and exquisite art introduced the "Mistress Nell" of the play to the public. CONTENTS CHAPTER I 1 "And once Nell Gwyn, a frail young sprite, Looked kindly when I met her; I shook my head perhaps--but quite Forgot to quite forget her." CHAPTER II 10 It's near your cue, Mistress Nell! CHAPTER III 41 He took them from Castlemaine's hand yo throw to you. CHAPTER IV 62 Flowers and Music feed naught but Love. CHAPTER V 87 It was never treason to steal a King's kisses. CHAPTER VI 101 Softly on tiptoe; Here Nell doth lie. CHAPTER VII 111 Come down! Come up! CHAPTER VIII 126 "And the man that is drunk is as great as a king." CHAPTER IX 142 Three chickens! CHAPTER X 168 Arrest him yourself! CHAPTER XI 182 In the field, men; at court, women! CHAPTER XII 195 Beau Adair is my name. CHAPTER XIII 232 For the glory of England? CHAPTER XIV 240 He loves me! He loves me! CHAPTER XV 259 I come, my love; I come. CHAPTER XVI 276 Ods-pitikins, my own reflection! CHAPTER XVII 290 The day will be so happy; for I've seen you at the dawn. MISTRESS NELL A MERRY TALE OF A MERRY TIME MISTRESS NELL "And once Nell Gwyn, a frail young sprite, Look'd kindly when I met her; I shook my head perhaps--but quite Forgot to quite forget her." It was a merry time in merry old England; for King Charles II. was on the throne. Not that the wines were better or the ladies fairer in his day, but the renaissance of carelessness and good-living had set in. True Roundheads again sought quiet abodes in which to worship in their gray and sombre way. Cromwell, their uncrowned king, was dead; and there was no place for his followers at court or in tavern. Even the austere and Catholic smile of brother James of York, one day to be the ruler of the land, could not cast a gloom over the assemblies at Whitehall. There were those to laugh merrily at the King's wit, and at the players' wit. There were those in abundance to enjoy to-day--to-day only,--to drink to the glorious joys of to-day, with no care for the morrow. It was, indeed, merry old England; for, when the King has no cares, and assumes no cares, the people likewise have no cares. The state may be rent, the court a nest of intrigue, King and Parliament at odds, the treasury bankrupt: but what care they; for the King cares not. Is not the day prosperous? Are not the taverns in remotest London filled with roistering spirits who drink and sing to their hearts' content of their deeds in the wars just done? Can they not steal when hungry and demand when dry? Aye, the worldly ones are cavaliers now--for a cavalier is King--e'en though the sword once followed Cromwell and the gay cloak and the big flying plume do not quite hide the not-yet-discarded cuirass of an Ironside. Cockpits and theatres! It is the Restoration! The maypole is up again at Maypole Lane, and the milk-maids bedecked with garlands dance to the tunes of the fiddle. Boys no longer serve for heroines at the play, as was the misfortune in Shakespeare's day. The air is full of hilarity and joy. Let us too for a little hour forget responsibility and fall in with the spirit of the times; while we tipple and toast, and vainly boast: "The King! Long live the King!" Old Drury Lane was alive as the sun was setting, on the day of our visit to London Town, with loungers and loafers; busy-bodies and hawkers; traffickers of sweets and other petty wares; swaggering soldiers, roistering by, stopping forsooth to throw kisses to inviting eyes at the windows above. As we turn into Little Russell Street from the Lane, passing many chairs richly made, awaiting their fair occupants, we come upon the main entrance to the King's House. Not an imposing or spacious structure to be sure, it nevertheless was suited to the managerial purposes of the day, which were, as now, to spend as little and get as much as may be. The pit was barely protected from the weather by a glazed cupola; so that the audience could not always hear the sweetest song to a finish without a drenching, or dwell upon the shapeliness of the prettiest ankle, that revealed itself in the dance by means of candles set on cressets, which in those days sadly served the purposes of foot-lights. It was Dryden's night. His play was on--"The Conquest of Granada." The best of London were there; for a first night then was as attractive as a first night now. In the balcony were draped boxes, in which lovely gowns were seen--lovely hair and lovely gems; but the fair faces were often masked. The King sat listless in the royal box, watching the people and the play or passing pretty compliments with the fair favourites by his side, diverted, perchance, by the ill-begotten quarrel of some fellow with a saucy orange-wench over the cost of her golden wares. The true gallants preferred being robbed to haggling--for the shame of it. A knowing one in the crowd was heard to say: "'Tis Castlemaine to the King's left." "No, 'tis Madame Carwell; curse her," snarled a more vulgar companion. "Madame Querouaille, knave, Duchess of Portsmouth," irritably exclaimed a handsome gallant, himself stumbling somewhat over the French name, though making a bold play for it, as he passed toward his box, pushing the fellow aside. He added a moment later, but so that no one heard: "Portsmouth is far from here." It was the Duke of Buckingham--the great Duke of Buckingham, in the pit of the King's House! Truly, we see strange things in these strange times! Indeed, William Penn himself did not hesitate to gossip with the orange-wenches, unless Pepys lied--and Pepys never lied. "What said he?" asked a stander-by, a butcher, who, with apron on and sleeves to elbow, had hastily left his stall at one of the afternoon and still stood with mouth agape and fingers widespread waiting for the play. Before, however, his sooty companion could answer, they were jostled far apart. The crowd struggled for places in eager expectation, amid banter none too virtuous, whistlings and jostlings. The time for the play had arrived. "Nell! Nell! Nell!" was on every lip. And who was "Nell"? From amidst the players, lords and coxcombs crowded on the stage stepped forth Nell Gwyn--the prettiest rogue in merry England. A cheer went up from every throat; for the little vixen who stood before them had long reigned in the hearts of Drury Lane and the habitués of the King's House. Yea, all eyes were upon the pretty, witty Nell; the one-time orange-girl; now queen of the theatre, and the idol of the Lane. Her curls were flowing and her big eyes dancing beneath a huge hat--more, indeed, a canopy than a hat--so large that the audience screamed with delight at the incongruity of it and the pretty face beneath. This pace in foolery had been set at the Duke's House, but Nell out-did them, with her broad-brimmed hat as large as a cart-wheel and her quaint waist-belt; for was not her hat larger by half than that at the rival house and her waist-belt quainter? As she came forward to speak the prologue, her laugh too was merrier and more roguish: _"This jest was first of the other house's making, And, five times tried, has never fail'd of taking;_ * * * * * _This is that hat, whose very sight did win ye To laugh and clap as though the devil were in ye,_ * * * * * _I'll write a play, says one, for I have got A broad-brimm'd hat, and waist-belt, towards a plot. Says the other, I have one more large than that, Thus they out-write each other with a hat! The brims still grew with every play they writ; And grew so large, they cover'd all the wit. Hat was the play; 't was language, wit, and tale: Like them that find meat, drink, and cloth in ale."_ The King leaned well out over the box-rail, his dark eyes intent upon Nell's face. A fair hand, however, was placed impatiently upon his shoulder and drew him gently back. "Lest you fall, my liege." "Thanks, Castlemaine," he replied, kindly but knowingly. "You are always thoughtful." The play went on. The actors came and went. Hart appeared in Oriental robes as Almanzor--a dress which mayhap had served its purposes for Othello, and mayhap had not; for cast-off court-dresses, without regard to fitness, were the players' favourite costumes in those days, the richness more than the style mattering. With mighty force, he read from the centre of the stage, with elocution true and syllable precise, Dryden's ponderous lines. The King nodded approvingly to the poet. The poet glowed with pride at the patronage of the King. The old-time audience were enchanted. Dryden sat with a triumphant smile as he dwelt upon his poetic lines and heard the cherished syllables receive rounds of applause from the Londoners. Was it the thought, dear Dryden; or was it Nell's pretty ways that bewitched the most of it? Nell's laugh still echoes in the world; but where are your plays, dear Dryden? CHAPTER II _It's near your cue, Mistress Nell!_ The greenroom of the King's House was scarcely a prepossessing place or inviting. A door led to the stage; another to the street. On the remaining doors might have been deciphered from the Old English of a scene-artist's daub "Mistress Gwyn" and "Mr. Hart." These doors led respectively to the tiring-room of the sweet sprite who had but now set the pit wild with a hat over a sparkling eye and to that of the actor-manager of the House. A rough table, a few chairs, a mirror which had evidently seen better days in some grand mansion and a large throne-chair which might equally well have satisfied the royalty of Macbeth or Christopher Sly--its royalty, forsooth, being in its size, for thus only could it lord-it over its mates--stood in the corner. Old armour hung upon the wall, grim in the light of candles fixed in braziers. Rushes were strewn about the floor. Ah! Pepys, Pepys, was it here that you recalled "specially kissing of Nell"? Mayhap; for we read in your book: "I kissed her, and so did my wife, and a mighty pretty soul she is." Be that as it may, however, you must have found Nell's lips very agreeable; for a great wit has suggested that it was well that Mrs. Pepys was present on the occasion. On great play-nights, however, this most unroyal room assumed the proportions of royalty. Gallants and even lords sought entrance here and elbowed their way about; and none dared say them nay. They forced a way even upon the stage during the play, though not so commonly as before the Restoration, yet still too much; and the players played as best they could, and where best they could. _Billets-doux_ passed, sweet words were said,--all in this dilapidated, unpretentious, candle-lighted room. At the moment of which we speak, the greenroom was deserted save for a lad of twelve or fourteen years, who stood before the mirror, posing to his personal satisfaction and occasionally delivering bits from "Hamlet." He was none other than "Dick," the call-boy of the King's House. The lad struck a final attitude, his brow clouded. He assumed what seemed to him the proper pose for the royal Dane. His meditations and his pose, however, were broken in upon by the sudden entrance of Manager Hart, flushed and in an unusual state of excitement. "Where is my dagger, Dick?" he exclaimed, pacing the room. The boy came to himself but slowly. "What are you doing? Get my dagger, boy," wildly reiterated the irate manager. "Don't you see there will be a stage-wait?" He cast an anxious glance in the direction of the door which led to the stage. "Where did you leave it, sir?" asked the lad, finally realizing that it would be wise not to trifle at such a time. "Never mind where I left it. Get it, get it; do you hear! Nell's on the stage already." Hart rushed to the door and looked off in an increasing state of excitement. "Why, you've got your dagger on, sir," hesitatingly suggested the lad, as he caught the gleam of a small scimiter among the folds of Almanzor's tunic. Hart's face flushed. "Devil take you, boy," he exclaimed; "you are too stupid ever to make an actor!" With this speech, the manager strode out of the greenroom toward the stage. Poor Dick sank back in an attitude of resignation. "How long, O Rome, must I endure this bondage?" he said, sadly. He again observed his boyish figure in the mirror, and the pretty face brightened as he realized that there might still be hope in life, despite Manager Hart's assertion that he would never be able to act. His features slowly sank into a set expression of tremendous gloom, such as he thought should characterize his conception of himself as Hamlet when in days to come the mantles of Burbage and of Betterton should be his and Manager Hart must bow to him. He stood transfixed before the glass in a day-dream, forgetful of his ills. His pretty lips moved, and one close by might have heard again, "To be or not to be" in well-modulated phrase. "Ah, boy; here!" Dick started. It was a richly dressed gallant, in old-rose with royal orders, who had entered the room quietly but authoritatively from the street--the same lordly personage we observed in the pit. His manner was that of one accustomed to be obeyed and quickly too. The lad knew him and bowed low. "Tell Mistress Nell, Buckingham would speak with her. Lively, lad; lively," he said. "She is on the stage, my lord," replied Dick, respectfully. "Gad, I thought otherwise and stepped about from my box. Here; put these flowers in her tiring-room." The boy took the beautiful bouquet of white roses. "Yes, my lord," he replied, and turned to do the bidding. "Flowers strewn in ladies' ways oft' lead to princely favours," muttered his lordship, thoughtfully, as he removed his gloves and vainly adjusted his hat and sword. "Portsmouth at Dover told me that." It was apparent from his face that much passed before his mind, in that little second, of days when, at Dover Castle not long since, he had been a part--and no small part--of the intrigue well planned by Louis of France, and well executed by the Duchess of Orléans assisted by the fair Louise, now Duchess of Portsmouth, in which his own purse and power had waxed mightily. Whatever his lordship thought, however, it was gone like the panorama before a drowning brain. He stopped the lad as he was entering Nell's tiring-room, with an exclamation. The boy returned. "You gave Mistress Nell my note bidding her to supper?" he asked, questioningly. "I did, my lord," answered Dick. "'Sheart, a madrigal worthy of Bacchus! She smiled delightedly?" continued his lordship, in a jocular mood. "No, my lord; quite serious." His lordship's face changed slightly. "Read it eagerly?" he ventured, where he might have commanded, further to draw out the lad. "Yes, my lord," added Dick, respectfully, "after a time." The boy's lids dropped to avoid revealing his amused recollection of the incident; and his lordship's quick eye noted it. "Good!" he exclaimed, with an assumed triumphant air. "She folded it carefully and placed it in her bosom next her heart?" "She threw it on the floor, my lord!" meekly answered Dick, hiding his face in the flowers to avoid revealing disrespect. "My _billet-doux_ upon the floor!" angrily exclaimed his lordship. "Plague on't, she said something, made some answer, boy?" The diplomat was growing earnest despite himself, as diplomats often do in the cause of women. Dick trembled. "She said your dinners made amends for your company, my lord," he said, meekly. Buckingham's eyes snapped; but he was too clever to reveal his feelings further to a call-boy, whom he dismissed with a wave of the hand. He then swaggered to the table and complacently exclaimed: "The rogue! Nelly, Nelly, your lips shall pay tribute for that. Rosy impudence! Buckingham's dinners make amends for his company? Minx!" He threw himself into a chair, filled with deep reflections of supper and wine, wit and beauty, rather than state-craft. Thus lost in selfish reflection, he did not observe, or, if he did, cared not for, the frail figure and sweet face of one who cautiously tiptoed into the greenroom. It was Orange Moll, whose sad countenance and tattered garments betokened a sadder story. Her place was in the pit, with her back to the stage, vending her oranges to artisans, girls with vizards or foolish gallants. She had no right behind the scenes. "I am 'most afraid to enter here without Nell," she thought, faint-heartedly, as she glanced about the room and her eyes fell upon the great Lord Buckingham. "Oranges? Will you have my oranges? Only sixpence, my lord," she ventured at length, then hesitatingly advanced and offered her wares; but his lordship's thoughts were far away. "What shall we have for supper?" was his sole concern. "I think Nelly would like spiced tongue." Instantly his hands and eyes were raised in mock invocation of the intervention of the Powers that Be, and so suddenly that Moll drew back. "Ye Gods," he exclaimed aloud, "she has enough of that already! Ah, the vintage of----" It was more habit than courage which brought to Moll's trembling lips the familiar orange-cry, which again interrupted him: "Oranges; only sixpence. Here is one picked for you, my lord." Buckingham's eyes flashed with anger; he was not wont to have his way, much less his pleasure, disturbed by the lowly. "Oh, hang you, you disturb me. I am thinking; don't you perceive I am thinking? Begone!" "Only sixpence, my lord; I have not sold one to-night," pleaded the girl, sadly. His lordship rose irritably. "I have no pauper's pence," he exclaimed. "Out of my way! Ragbag!" He pushed the girl roughly aside and crossed the room. At the same instant, there was confusion at the stage-door, the climax of which was the re-entrance of Hart into the greenroom. "How can a man play when he trembles for his life lest he step upon a lord?" cried the angry manager. "They should be horsewhipped off the stage, and"--his eyes falling upon Buckingham--"out of the greenroom." "Ah, Hart," began his lordship, with a patronizing air, "why is Nelly so long? I desire to see her." Hart's lips trembled, but he controlled his passion. "Indeed? His Majesty and the good folk in front would doubtless gladly await your interview with Mistress Eleanor Gwyn. Shall I announce your will, my lord, unto his Majesty and stop the play?" "You grow ironical, friend Hart," replied his lordship. "Not so," said the actor, bowing low; "I am your lordship's most obedient servant." Buckingham's lip curled and his eyes revealed that he would have said more, but the room was meantime filling with players from the stage, some exchanging compliments, some strutting before the glass, and he would not so degrade his dignity before them. Dick, foil in hand even in the manager's room, was testing the steel's strength to his utmost, in boyish fashion. This confusion lent Moll courage, and forth came again the cry: "Oranges? Will you have my oranges? Only sixpence, sir." She boldly offered her wares to Almanzor, but started and paled when the hero turned and revealed Manager Hart. "What are you doing here, you little imp? Back to the pit, where you belong." The manager's voice was full of meaning. "Nell told me I might come here, sir," said the girl, faintly excusing herself. Hart's temper got the better of him. To admit before all that Nell ruled the theatre was an affront to his managerial dignity which he could not brook. "Oh, Nell did, did she?" he almost shrieked, as he angrily paced the room like some caged beast, gesticulating wildly. The actors gathered in groups and looked askant. "Gadso," he continued, "who is manager, I should like to know! Nell would introduce her whole trade here if she could. Every orange-peddler in London will set up a stand in the greenroom at the King's, next we know. Out with you! This is a temple of art, not a marketplace. Out with you!" He seized Moll roughly in his anger and almost hurled her out at the door. He would have done so, indeed, had not Nell entered at this moment from the stage. Her eye caught the situation at a glance. "Oh, blood, Iago, blood!" she exclaimed, mock-heroically, then burst into the merriest laugh that one could care to hear. "How now, a tragedy in the greenroom! What lamb is being sacrificed?" Hart stood confused; the players whispered in expectation; and an amused smile played upon the features of my Lord Buckingham at the manager's discomfiture. Finally Hart found his tongue. "An old comrade of yours at orange-vending before you lost the art of acting," he suggested, with a glance at Moll. [Illustration: "ENEMIES TO THE KING--BEWARE!"] "By association with you, Jack?" replied the witch of the theatre in a way which bespoke more answers that wisdom best not bring forth. Nell's whole heart went out to the subject of the controversy. Poor little tattered Orange Moll! She was carried back in an instant to her own bitter life and bitter struggles when an orange-girl. Throwing an arm about the child, she kissed away the tears with, "What is the matter, dear Moll?" "They are all mocking me, and sent me back to the pit," replied the girl, hysterically. "Shame on you all," said Nell; and the eyes that were so full of comedy revealed tragic fire. "Fy, fy," pleaded Hart; "I'll be charitable to-morrow, Nell, after this strain is off--but a first night--" "You need charity yourself?" suggested Nell; and she burst into a merry laugh, in which many joined. Buckingham instantly took up the gauntlet for a bold play, for a _coup d'état_ in flattery. "Pshaw!" he cried, waving aside the players in a princely fashion. "When Nell plays, we have no time to munch oranges. Let the wench bawl in the street." Poor Moll's tears flowed again with each harsh word. Nell was not so easily affected. "Odso, my lord! It is a pity your lordship is not a player. Then the orange-trade would flourish," she said. Buckingham bowed, amused and curious. "Say you so, i' faith! Pray, why, mad minx?" "Your lordship would make such a good mark for the peel," retorted Nell, tossing a bit of orange-peel in his face, to the infinite delight of Hart and his fellow-players. "Devil!" angrily exclaimed his lordship as he realized the insult. "I would kill a man for this; a woman, I can only love." His hand left his sword-hilt; and he bowed low to the vixen of the theatre, picked from the floor the bit of peel which had fallen, kissed it, tossed it over his shoulder and turned away. Nell was not done, however; her revenge was incomplete. "There! dry your eyes, Moll," she exclaimed. "Give me your basket, child. You shall be avenged still further." The greenroom had now filled from the stage and the tiring-rooms; and all gathered gleefully about to see what next the impish Nell would do, for avenged she would be they all knew, though the course of her vengeance none could guess. The manager, catching at the probable outcome when Nell seized from Moll's trembling arm the basket heaped with golden fruit, gave the first warning: "Great Heavens! Flee for your lives! I'faith, here comes the veteran robber at such traffic." There was a sudden rush for the stage, but Nell cried: "Guard the door, Moll; don't let a rascal out. I'll do the rest." It was not Moll's strength, however, which kept the greenroom filled, but expectation of Nell. All gathered about with the suspense of a drama; for Nell herself was a whole play as she stood in the centre of that little group of lords and players, dressed for Almahyde, Dryden's heroine, with a basket of oranges on her dimpled arm. What a pretty picture she was too--prettier here even than on the stage! The nearer, the prettier! A band of roses, one end of which formed a garland falling to the floor, circled and bound in her curls. What a figure in her Oriental garb, hiding and revealing. Indeed, the greenroom seemed bewitched by her cry: "Oranges, will you have my oranges?" She lifted the basket high and offered the fruit in her enchanting old-time way, a way which had won for her the place of first actress in England. Could it not now dispose of Moll's wares and make the child happy? Almahyde's royal train was caught up most unroyally, revealing two dainty ankles; and she laughed and danced and disposed of her wares all in a breath. Listen and love: _Sweet as love-lips, dearest mine, Picked by Spanish maids divine, Black-eyed beauties, who, like Eve, With golden fruit their loves deceive! Buy oranges; buy oranges!_ _Close your eyes, when these you taste; Think your arm about her waist: Thus with sixpence may you win Happiness unstained with sin. Buy oranges; buy oranges!_ _As the luscious fruit you sip, You will wager 'tis her lip; Nothing sweeter since the rise Of wickedness in Paradise. Buy oranges; buy oranges!_ There were cries of "Brava!" "Another jig!" and "Hurrah for Nelly!" It was one of those bits of acting behind the scenes which are so rare and exquisite and which the audience never see. "Marry, gallants, deny me after that, if you dare"; and Nell's little foot came down firmly in the last step of a triumphant jig, indicating a determination that Moll's oranges should be sold and quickly too. "Last act! All ready for the last act," rang out in Dick's familiar voice from the stage-door as she ended. It was well some one thought of the play and of the audience in waiting. Many of the players hastily departed to take up their cues; but not so Nell. Her eyes were upon the lordly Buckingham, who was endeavouring to effect a crafty exit. "Not so fast, my lord," she said as she caught his handsome cloak and drew him back into the room. "I want you with me." She looked coyly into his lordship's face as though he were the one man in all the world she loved, and her curls and cheek almost nestled against his rich cloak. "A dozen, did you say? What a heart you have, my lord. A bountiful heart!" Buckingham was dazed; his eyes sought Nell, then looked aghast at the oranges she would force upon him. The impudence of it! "A dozen!" he exclaimed in awe. "'Slife, Nelly; what would I do with a dozen oranges?" "Pay for them, in sooth," promptly replied the vixen. "I never give a lord credit." The player-folk gathered closer to watch the scene; for there was evidently more fun brewing, and that too at the expense of a very royal gentleman. "A player talk of credit!" replied his lordship, quite ironically, as he straightened up proudly for a wit-encounter. "What would become of the mummers, if the lords did not fill their empty pockets?" he said, crushingly. "What would become of the lords, if the players' brains did not try to fill their empty skulls with wits?" quickly retorted Nell. "If you were a man, sweet Nelly, I should answer: 'The lords first had fools at court; then supplanted them with players!'" "And, being a woman, I do answer," replied the irrepressible Nell, "'--and played the fools themselves, my lord!'" The players tried to smother their feelings; but the retort was too apt, and the greenroom rang with laughter. Buckingham turned fiercely upon them; but their faces were instantly mummified. "Gad, I would sooner face the Dutch fleet, Nelly. Up go my hands, fair robber," he said. He had decided to succumb for the present. In his finger-tips glistened a golden guinea. Nell eyed the coin dubiously. "Nay, keep this and your wares too," added his lordship, in hope of peace, as he placed it in her hand. "Do you think me a beggar?" replied Nell, indignantly. "Take your possessions, every one--every orange." She filled his hands and arms to overflowing with her golden wares. His lordship winced, but stood subdued. "What am I to do with them?" he asked, falteringly. "Eat them; eat them," promptly and forcefully retorted the quondam orange-vender. "All?" asked his lordship. "All!" replied her ladyship. "Damme, I cannot hold a dozen," he exclaimed, aghast. "A chair! A chair!" cried Nell. "Would your lordship stand at the feast of gold?" Before Buckingham had time to reflect upon the outrage to his dignity, Nell forced him into a chair, to the great glee of the by-standers, especially of Manager Hart, who chuckled to an actor by his side: "She'll pluck his fine feathers; curse his arrogance." "Your knees together, my lord! What, have they never united in prayer?" gleefully laughed Nell as she further humbled his lordship by forcing his knees together to form a lap upon which to pile more oranges. Buckingham did not relish the scene; but he was clever enough to humour the vixen, both from fear of her tongue and from hope of favours as well as words from her rosy lips. "They'll unite to hold _thee_, wench," he suggested, with a sickly laugh, as he observed his knees well laden with oranges. "I trow not," retorted Nell; "they can scarce hold their own. There!" and she roguishly capped the pyramid which burdened his lordship's knees with the largest in her basket. "I'll barter these back for my change, sweet Nell," he pleaded. "What change?" quickly cried the merry imp of Satan. "I gave you a golden guinea," answered his lordship, woefully. "I gave you a golden dozen, my lord!" replied Nell, gleefully. "Oranges, who will have my oranges?" She was done with Buckingham and had turned about for other prey. Hart could not allow the opportunity to escape without a shot at his hated lordship. "Fleeced," he whispered grimly over his lordship's shoulder, with a merry chuckle. Buckingham rose angrily. "A plague on the wench and her dealings," he said. His oranges rolled far and wide over the floor of the greenroom. "You should be proud, my lord, to be robbed by so fair a hand," continued Hart, consolingly. "'Tis an honour, I assure you; we all envy you." Buckingham did not relish the consolation. "'Tis an old saw, Master Hart," he replied: "'He laughs best who laughs last.'" As he spoke, Nell's orange-cry rang out again above the confusion and the fun. She was still at it. Moll was finding vengeance and money, indeed, though she dwelt upon her accumulating possessions through eyelashes dim with tears. "It's near your cue, Mistress Nell," cried out the watchful Dick at the stage-door. "Six oranges left; see me sell them, Moll," cried the unheeding vender. "It's near your cue, Mistress Nell!" again shouted the call-boy, in anxious tones. "Marry, my cue will await my coming, pretty one," laughed Nell. The boy was not so sure of that. "Oh, don't be late, Mistress Nell," he pleaded. "I'll buy the oranges rather than have you make a stage-wait." "Dear heart," replied Nell, touched by the lad's solicitude. "Keep your pennies, Dick, and you and I will have a lark with them some fine day. Six oranges, left; going--going--" She sprang into the throne-chair, placed one of the smallest feet in England impudently on one of its arms and proceeded to vend her remaining wares from on high, to the huge satisfaction of her admirers. The situation was growing serious. Nell was not to be trifled with. The actors stood breathless. Hart grew wild as he realized the difficulty and the fact that she was uncontrollable. King and Parliament, he well knew, could not move her from her whimsical purpose, much less the manager of the King's. "What are you doing, Nell?" he pleaded, wildly. "You will ruin the first night. His Majesty in front, too! Dryden will never forgive us if 'Granada' goes wrong through our fault." "Heyday! What care I for 'Granada'?" and Nell swung the basket of oranges high in air and calmly awaited bids. "Not a step on the stage till the basket is empty." It was Buckingham's turn now. "Here's music for our manager," he chuckled. "Our deepest sympathy, friend Hart." This was more than Hart could bear. The manager of the King's House was forced into profanity. "Damn your sympathy," exclaimed he; and few would criticise him for it. He apologized as quickly, however, and turned to Nell. "There goes your scene, Nell. I'll buy your oranges, when you come off," he continued to plead, in desperation, scarcely less fearful of offending her than of offending the great Lord Buckingham. "Now or never," calmly replied the vender from her chair-top. "The devil take the women," muttered Hart, frantically, as he rushed headlong into his tiring-room. "Marry, Heaven defend," laughed Nell; "for he's got the men already." She sprang lightly from the chair to the floor. Hart was back on the instant, well out of breath but purse in hand. "Here, here," he exclaimed. "Never mind the oranges, wench. The audience will be waiting." "Faith and troth, and is not Nell worth waiting for?" she cried, her eyes shining radiantly. Indeed, the audience would have gladly waited, could they have but seen her pretty, winsome way! "These are yours--all--all!" she continued, as she gleefully emptied the basket of its remaining fruit over Prince Almanzor's head. Hart protested vainly. Then rushing back to Moll, Nell threw both arms about the girl triumphantly. "There, Moll," she said, "is your basket and all the trophies"; and she gave Moll the basket with the glittering coins jangling in it. "Your cue--your cue is spoken, Mistress Nell," shrieked Dick from the stage-door. Nell heeded not. Her eyes happening upon an orange which had fallen near the throne-chair, she caught it up eagerly and hurled it at Manager Hart. "Forsooth, here's another orange, Master Manager." He succeeded in catching it despite his excitement. "Your cue--your cue--Mistress Nell!" came from every throat as one. Nell tossed back her head indifferently. "Let them wait; let them wait," she said, defiantly. The stage-beauty crossed leisurely to the glass and carelessly arranged her drapery and the band of roses encircling her hair. Then the hoyden was gone. In an instant, Nell was transformed into the princess, Almahyde. The room had been filled with breathless suspense; but what seemed to the players an endless period of time was but a minute. Nell turned to the manager, and with all the suavity of a princess of tragedy kissed her hand tantalizingly to him and said: "Now, Jack, I'll teach you how to act." She passed out, and, in a moment, rounds of applause from the amphitheatre filled the room. She was right; the audience would wait for her. A moment later, the greenroom was deserted except for Manager Hart and Lord Buckingham. Hart had thrown the call-boy almost bodily through the door that led to the stage, thus venting his anger upon the unoffending lad, who had been unfortunate enough to happen in his way ill betimes. He now stood vainly contemplating himself before the glass and awaiting his cue. Buckingham leaned upon a chair-top, uncertain as to his course. "Damme! She shall rue this work," he muttered at length. "A man might as well make love to a wind-mill. I forgot to tell her how her gown becomes her. That is a careless thing to forget." The reflection forthwith determined his course. "Nelly, Nelly, Nelly," he called as he quickly crossed the room after the departed Nell, "you are divine to-night. Your gown is simply--" The manager's voice stayed him at the stage-door. "My lord, come back; my lord--" Buckingham's hand had gone so far, indeed, as to push open the door. He stood entranced as he looked out upon the object of his adoration upon the stage. "Perfection!" he exclaimed. "Your eyes--" "My lord, my lord, you forget--" Buckingham turned indignantly at the voice which dared to interrupt him in the midst of his rhapsody. "You forget--your oranges, my lord," mildly suggested Hart, as he pointed to the fruit scattered upon the floor. Buckingham's face crimsoned. "Plague on't! They are sour, Master Hart." With a glance of contempt, he turned on his heel and left the room. A triumphant smile played upon the manager's face. He felt that he had annoyed his lordship without his intention being apparent. "A good exit, on my honour," he muttered, as he stood contemplating the door through which Buckingham had passed; "but, by Heaven, he shall better it unless he takes his eyes from Nell. Great men believe themselves resistless with the fair; more often, the fair are resistless with great men." He took a final look at himself in the glass, adjusted his scimiter; and, well satisfied with himself and the conceit of his epigram unheard save by himself, he also departed, to take up his cue. CHAPTER III _He took them from Castlemaine's hand to throw to you._ The greenroom seemed like some old forest rent by a storm. Its furniture, which was none too regular at best, either in carving or arrangement, had the irregularity which comes only with a tempest, human or divine. The table, it is true, still stood on its four oaken legs; but even it was well awry. The chairs were scattered here and there, some resting upon their backs. To add to all this, oranges in confusion were strewn broadcast upon the floor. A storm in fact had visited the greenroom. The storm was Nell. In the midst of the confusion, a jolly old face peeped cautiously in at the door which led to the street. At the sound of Manager Hart's thunderous tones coming from the stage, however, it as promptly disappeared, only to return when the apparent danger ceased. It was a rare old figure and a rare old dress and a rare old man. Yet, not an old man either. His face was red; for he was a tavern spirit, well known and well beloved,--a lover of good ale! Across his back hung a fiddle which too had the appearance of being the worse for wear, if fiddles can ever be said to be the worse for wear. The intruder took off his dilapidated hat, hugged his fiddle closely under his arm and looked about the room, more cautiously than respectfully. "Oons, here is a scattering of props; a warfare of the orange-wenches!" he exclaimed. "A wise head comes into battle after the last shot is fired." He proceeded forthwith to fill his pockets, of which there seemed to be an abundance of infinite depth, with oranges. This done, he calmly made a hole in the next orange which came to his hand and began to suck it loudly and persistently, boy-fashion, meanwhile smacking his lips. His face was one wreath of unctuous smiles. "There is but one way to eat an orange," he chuckled; "that's through a hole." At this moment, Hart's voice was heard again upon the stage, and the new-comer to the greenroom liked to have dropped his orange. "Odsbud, that's one of Master Hart's love-tones," he thought. "I must see Nell before he sees me, or it will be farewell Strings." He hastened to Nell's tiring-room and rapped lightly on the door. "Mistress Nell! Mistress Nell!" he called. The door opened, but it was not Nell. Her maid pointed toward the stage. Strings--for Strings was his name, or at least none knew him by a better--accordingly hobbled across the room--for the wars too had left their mark on him--and peeped off in the direction indicated. "Gad," he exclaimed, gleefully clapping his hands, "there she goes on the stage as a Moorish princess." There was a storm of applause without. "Bravo, Nelly, bravo!" he continued. "She's caught the lads in the pit. They worship Nell out there." The old fellow straightened up as if he felt a personal pride in the audience for evincing such good taste. "Oons! Jack Hart struts about like a young game-cock at his first fight," he observed. He broke into an infectious laugh, which would have been a fine basso for Nell's laugh. From the manager, his eye turned toward the place which he himself had once occupied among the musicians. He began to dance up and down with both feet, his knees well bent, boy-fashion, and to clap his hands wildly. "Look ye, little Tompkins got my old place with the fiddle. Whack, de-doodle-de-do! Whack, de-doodle, de-doodle-de-do!" he cried, giving grotesque imitations to his own great glee of his successor as leader of the orchestra. Then, shaking his head, confident of his own superiority with the bow, he turned back into the greenroom and, with his mouth half full of orange, uttered the droll dictum: "It will take more than catgut and horse-hair to make you a fiddler, Tommy, my boy." Thus Strings stood blandly sucking his orange with personal satisfaction in the centre of the room, when Dick entered from the stage. The call-boy paused as if he could not believe his eyes. He looked and looked again. "Heigh-ho!" he exclaimed at last, and then rushed across the room to greet the old fiddler. "Why, Strings, I thought we would never see you again; how fares it with you?" Strings placed the orange which he had been eating and which he knew full well was none of his own well behind him; and, assuming an unconcerned and serious air, he replied: "Odd! A little the worse for wear, Dickey, me and the old fiddle, but still smiling with the world." There was a bit of a twinkle in his eye as he spoke. Dick, ever mindful of the welfare and appearance of the theatre, unhooked from the wall a huge shield, which mayhap had served some favourite knight of yore, and, using it as a tray, proceeded to gather the scattered fruit. "Have an orange?" he inquired of Strings, who still stood in a reflective mood in the centre of the room, as he rested in his labours by him. "How; do they belong to you?" demanded Strings. "Oh, no," admitted Dick, "but--" The fiddler instantly assumed an air of injured innocence. "How dare you," he cried, "offer me what don't belong to you?" He turned upon the boy almost ferociously at the bare thought. "Honesty is the best policy," he continued, seriously. "I have tried both, lad"; and, in his eagerness to impress upon the boy the seriousness of taking that which does not belong to you, he gestured inadvertently with the hand which till now had held the stolen orange well behind him. [Illustration: A FRIEND EVEN UNTO HER WORST ENEMY.] Dick's eye fell upon it, and so did Strings's. There was a moment's awkwardness, and then both burst into a peal of joyous laughter. "Oh, well, egad,--I _will_ join you, Dick," said Strings, with more patronage still than apology. He seated himself upon the table and began anew to suck his orange in philosophic fashion. "But, mind you, lad; never again offer that which is not your own, for there you are twice cursed," he discoursed pompously. "You make him who receives guilty of your larceny. Oons, my old wound." He winced from pain. "He becomes an accomplice in your crime. So says the King's law. Hush, lad, I am devouring the evidence of your guilt." The boy by this time had placed the shield of oranges in the corner of the room and had returned to listen to Strings's discourse. "You speak with the learning of a solicitor," he said, as he looked respectfully into the old fiddler's face. Strings met the glance with due dignity. "Marry, I've often been in the presence of a judge," he replied, with great solemnity. His face reflected the ups and downs in his career as he made the confession. "Is that where you have been, Strings, all these long days?" asked Dick, innocently. "Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Strings, with sadly retrospective countenance. "Travelling, lad--contemplating the world, from the King's highways. Take note, my boy,--a prosperous man! I came into the world without a rag that I could call my own, and now I have an abundance. Saith the philosopher: Some men are born to rags, some achieve rags and some have rags thrust upon them." "I wish you were back with us, Strings," said the boy, sympathetically, as he put a hand upon Strings's broad shoulder and looked admiringly up into his face. "I wish so myself," replied the fiddler. "Thrice a day, I grow lonesome here." A weather-beaten hand indicated the spot where good dinners should be. "They haven't all forgot you, Strings," continued his companion, consolingly. "Right, lad!" said Strings, musingly, as he lifted the old viol close against his cheek and tenderly picked it. "The old fiddle is true to me yet, though there is but one string left to its dear old neck." There was a sob in his voice as he spoke. "I tell you, a fiddle's human, Dick! It laughs at my jokes alone now; it weeps at my sorrows." He sighed deeply and the tears glistened in his eyes. "The fiddle is the only friend left me and the little ones at home now, my lad." "--And Dick!" the boy suggested, somewhat hurt. He too was weeping. "It's a shame; that's what it is!" he broke out, indignantly. "Tompkins can't play the music like you used to, Strings." "Oons!" exclaimed the fiddler, the humour in his nature bubbling again to the surface. "It's only now and then the Lord has time to make a fiddler, Dickey, my boy." As he spoke, the greenroom shook with the rounds of applause from the pit and galleries without. "Hurrah!" he shouted, following Dick to the stage-door--his own sorrows melting before the sunshine of his joy at the success of his favourite. "Nell has caught them with the epilogue." He danced gleefully about, entering heartily into the applause and totally forgetful of the fact that he was on dangerous ground. Dick was more watchful. "Manager Hart's coming!" he exclaimed in startled voice, fearful for the welfare of his friend. Strings collapsed. "Oh, Lord, let me be gone," he said, as he remembered the bitter quarrel he had had with the manager of the King's House, which ended in the employment of Tompkins. He did not yearn for another interview; for Hart had forbidden him the theatre on pain of whipping. "Where can you hide?" whispered Dick, woefully, as the manager's voice indicated that he was approaching the greenroom, and that too in far from the best of humour. "Behind Richard's throne-chair! It has held sinners before now," added the fiddler as he glided well out of sight. Dick was more cautious. In a twinkling, he was out of the door which led to the street. The greenroom walls looked grim in the sputtering candle-light, but they had naught to say. The door from the stage opened, and in came Nell. There was something sadly beautiful and pathetic in her face. She had enjoyed but now one of the grandest triumphs known to the theatre, and yet she seemed oblivious to the applause and bravas, to the lights and to the royalty. A large bouquet of flowers was in her arms--a bouquet of red roses. Her lips touched them reverently. Her eyes, however, were far away in a dream of the past. "From the hand of the King of England!" she mused softly to herself. "The King? How like his face to the youthful cavalier, who weary and worn reined in his steed a summer's day, now long ago, and took a gourd of water from my hand. Could he have been the King? Pooh, pooh! I dream again." She turned away, as from herself, with a heart-heavy laugh. The manager entered from the stage. "See, Jack, my flowers," she said, again in an ecstasy of happiness. "Are they not exquisite?" "He took them from Castlemaine's hand to throw to you," snarled Hart, jealously. "The sweeter, then!" and Nell broke into a tantalizing laugh. "Mayhap he was teaching the player-king to do likewise, Jack," she added, roguishly, as she arranged the flowers in a vase. "I am in no mood for wit-thrusts," replied Hart as he fretfully paced the room. "You played that scene like an icicle." "In sooth, your acting froze me," slyly retorted Nell, kindly but pointedly. She took the sweetest roses from the bunch, kissed them and arranged them in her bosom. This did not improve Hart's temper. Strings seized the opportunity to escape from his hiding-place to the stage. "I say, you completely ruined my work," said Hart. "The audience were rightly displeased." "With you, perhaps," suggested Nell. "I did not observe the feeling." Hart could no longer control himself. "You vilely read those glorious lines: _"See how the gazing People crowd the Place; All gaping to be fill'd with my Disgrace. That Shout, like the hoarse Peals of Vultures rings, When, over fighting Fields they beat their wings."_ "And how should I read them, dear master?" she asked demurely of her vainglorious preceptor. "Like I read them, in sooth," replied he, well convinced that his reading could not be bettered. "Like you read them, in sooth," replied Nell, meekly. She took the floor and repeated the lines with the precise action and trick of voice which Hart had used. Every "r" was well trilled; "gaping" was pronounced with an anaconda-look, as though she were about to swallow the theatre, audience and all; and, as she spoke the line, "When, over fighting Fields they beat their wings," she raised her arms and shoulders in imitation of some barn-yard fowl vainly essaying flight and swept across the room, the picture of grace in ungracefulness. "'Tis monstrous!" exclaimed Hart, bitterly, as he realized the travesty. "You cannot act and never could. I was a fool to engage you." Nell was back by the vase, toying with the flowers. "London applauds my acting," she suggested, indifferently. "London applauds the face and figure; not the art," replied Hart. "London is wise; for the art is in the face and figure, Master Jack. You told me so yourself," she added, sharply, pointing her finger at her adversary in quick condemnation. She turned away triumphant. "I was a fool like the rest," replied Hart, visibly irritated that he could not get the better of the argument. "Come, don't be angry," said Nell. Her manner had changed; for her heart had made her fearful lest her tongue had been unkind. "Mayhap Almahyde is the last part Nell will ever play." She looked thoughtfully into the bunch of roses. Did she see a prophecy there? He approached the table where she stood. "Your head is turned by the flowers," he said, bitterly. "An honest motive, no doubt, prompted the royal gift." Nell turned sharply upon him. Her lips trembled, but one word only came to them--"Jack!" Hart's eyes fell under the rebuke; for he knew that only anger prompted what he had said. He would have struck another for the same words. "Pardon, Nell," he said, softly. "My heart rebukes my tongue. I love you!" Nell stepped back to the mirror, contemplating herself, bedecked as she was with the flowers. In an instant she forgot all, and replied playfully to Hart's confession of love: "Of course, you do. How could you help it? So do others." "I love you better than the rest," he added, vehemently, "better than my life." He tried to put his arms about her. Nell, however, was by him like a flash. "Not so fast, dear sir," she said, coyly; and she tiptoed across the room and ensconced herself high in the throne-chair. Hart followed and knelt below her, adoring. "Admit that I can act--a little--just a little--dear Hart, or tell me no more of love." She spoke with the half-amused, half-indifferent air of a beautiful princess to some servant-suitor; and she was, indeed, most lovable as she leaned back in the great throne-chair. She seemed a queen and the theatre her realm. Her beautiful arms shone white in the flickering candle-light. Her sceptre was a rose which the King of England had given her. Hart stepped back and looked upon the picture. "By heaven, Nell," he cried, "I spoke in anger. You are the most marvellous actress in the world. Nature, art and genius crown your work." Nell smiled at his vehemence. "I begin to think that you have taste most excellent," she said. Hart sprang to her side, filled with hope. As the stage-lover he ne'er spoke in tenderer tones. "Sweet Nell, when I found you in the pit, a ragged orange-girl, I saw the sparkle in your eye, the bright intelligence, the magic genius, which artists love. I claimed you for my art, which is the art of arts--for it embraces all. I had the theatre. I gave it you. You captured the Lane--then London. You captured my soul as well, and held it slave." "Did I do all that, dear Jack?" she asked, wistfully. "And more," said Hart, rapturously. "You captured my years to come, my hope, ambition, love--all. All centred in your heart and eyes, sweet Nell, from the hour I first beheld you." Nell's look was far away. "Is love so beautiful?" she murmured softly. Her eye fell upon her sceptre-rose. "Yea, I begin to think it is." She mused a moment, until the silence seemed to awaken her. She looked into Hart's eyes again, sadly but firmly, then spoke as with an effort: "You paint the picture well, dear Jack. Paint on." Her hand waved commandingly. "I could not paint ill with such a model," said he, his voice full of adoration. "Well said," she replied; "and by my troth, I have relented like you, dear Jack. I admit you too can act--and marvellously well." She took his trembling hand and descended from the throne. He tried once again to embrace her, but she avoided him as before. "Is't true?" he asked, eagerly, without observing the hidden meaning in her voice. "'Tis true, indeed--with proper emphasis and proper art and proper intonation." She crossed the room, Hart following her. "I scarce can live for joy," he breathed. Nell leaned back upon the table and looked knowingly and deeply into Hart's eyes. Her voice grew very low, but clear and full of meaning. "In faith," she said, "I trow and sadly speak but true; for I am sad at times--yea--very sad--when I observe, with all my woman's wiles and arts, I cannot act the hypocrite like men." "What mean you, darling cynic?" asked he, jocosely. "Darling!" she cried, repeating the word, with a peculiar look. "To tell two girls within the hour you love each to the death would be in me hypocrisy, I admit, beyond my art; but you men can do such things with conscience clear." Hart turned away his face. "She's found me out," he thought. "Nell, I never loved the Spanish dancing-girl. You know I love but you." "Oh, ho!" laughed Nell. "Then why did you tell her so?--to break her heart or mine?" The manager stood confused. He scarce knew what to say. "You are cruel, Nell," he pleaded, fretfully. "You never loved me, never." "Did I ever say I did?" Hart shook his head sadly. "Come, don't pout, Jack. An armistice in this, my friend, for you were my friend in the old days when I needed one, and I love you for that." She placed her hands kindly on the manager's shoulders, then turned and began to arrange anew the gift-flowers in the vase. "I'll win your life's love, Nell, in spite of you," he said, determinedly. She turned her honest eyes upon him. "Nay, do not try; believe me, do not try," she said softly. "Nell, you do not mean--?" His voice faltered. "You must not love me," she said, firmly; "believe me, you must not." "I must not love you!" His voice scarcely breathed the words. "There, there; we are growing sentimental, Jack,--and at our age," she replied. She laughed gaily and started for her tiring-room. He followed her. "Sup with me, Nell," he pleaded. "No word of this, I promise you." "Heyday, I'll see how good you are, Jack," she answered, cordially. "My second bid to sup to-night," she thought. "Who sets the better feast?" The tiring-room door was open; and the little candles danced gleefully about the make-up mirror, for even candles seemed happy when Nell came near. The maid stood ready to assist her to a gown and wrap, that she might leave the theatre. Nell turned. Hart still stood waiting. The spirit of kindness o'er-mastered her. "Your hand, friend, your hand," she said, taking the manager's hand. "When next you try to win a woman's love, don't throw away her confidence; for you will never get it back again entire." Hart bowed his head under the rebuke; and she entered her room. CHAPTER IV _Flowers and Music feed naught but Love._ The manager stood a moment looking through the half-closed door at Nell. There was a strange mingling of contending forces at work in his nature. To be sure, he had trifled with the affections of the Spanish dancing-girl, a new arrival from Madrid and one of the latest attractions of the King's House; but it was his pride, when he discovered that Nell's sharp eyes had found him out, that suffered, not his conscience. Was he not the fascinating actor-manager of the House? Could he prevent the ladies loving him? Must he be accused of not loving Nell, simply because his charms had edified the shapely new-comer? Nell's rebuke had depressed him, but there was a smouldering fire within. "'Slife!" he muttered. "If I do not steal my way into Nell's heart, I'll abandon the rouge-box and till the soil." As he approached his tiring-room, he bethought him that it would be well first to have an oversight of the theatre. He turned accordingly and pulled open the door that led to the stage. As he did so, a figure fell into the greenroom, grasping devotedly a violin, lest his fall might injure it. Strings had been biding his time, waiting an opportunity to see Nell, and had fallen asleep behind the door. "How now, dog!" exclaimed the manager when he saw who the intruder was. Strings hastened to his feet and hobbled across the room. "I told you not to set foot here again," shouted Hart, following him virulently. Strings bowed meekly. "I thought the King's House in need of a player; so I came back, sir," said he. Hart was instantly beside himself. "Zounds!" he stormed. "I have had enough impudence to contend with to-night. Begone; or up you go for a vagrant." "I called on Mistress Gwyn, sir," explained Strings. "Mistress Gwyn does not receive drunkards," fiercely retorted Hart; and he started hastily to the stage-door and called loudly for his force of men to put the fiddler out. Nell's door was still ajar. She had removed the roses from her hair and dress. She caught at once her name. Indeed, there was little that went on which Nell did not see or hear, even though walls intervened. "Who takes my name in vain?" she called. Her head popped through the opening left by the door, and she scanned the room. As her eye fell upon the old fiddler, who had often played songs and dances for her in days gone by, a cry of joy came from her lips. She rushed into the greenroom and threw both arms about Strings's neck. "My old comrade, as I live," she cried, dancing about him. "I am joyed to see you, Strings!" Turning, she saw the manager eying them with fiery glances. She knew the situation and the feeling. "Jack, is it not good to have Strings back?" she asked, sweetly. Hart's face grew livid with anger. He could see the merry devil dancing in her eye and on her tongue. He knew the hoyden well. "Gad, I will resign management." He turned on his heel, entered his tiring-room and closed the door, none too gently. He feared to tarry longer, lest he might say too much. Nell broke into a merry laugh; and the fiddler chuckled. "You desert me these days, Strings," she said, as she leaned against the table and fondly eyed the wayfarer of the tattered garments and convivial spirits. "I don't love your lackey-in-waiting, Mistress Nell," said he, with a wink in the direction of the departed manager. "Poor Jack. Never mind him," she said, with a roguish laugh, though with no touch of malice in it, for there was devil without malice in Nell's soul. As she again sought the eyes of the fiddler, her face grew thoughtful. She spoke--hesitated--and then spoke again, as if the thought gave her pain. "Have you kept your word to me, Strings, and stopped--drinking?" she asked. The last word fell faintly, tremblingly, from her lips--almost inaudibly. "Mistress Nell, I--I--" Strings's eyes fell quickly. Nell's arm was lovingly about him in an instant. "There, there; don't tell me, Strings. Try again, and come and see me often." There was a delicacy in her voice and way more beautiful than the finest acting. The words had hurt her more than him. She changed her manner in an instant. Not so with Strings. The tears were in his eyes. "Mistress Nell, you are so good to me," he said; "and I am such a wretch." "So you are, Strings," and she laughed merrily. "I have taught my little ones at home who it is that keeps the wolf from our door," he continued. "Not a word of that!" she exclaimed, reprovingly. "Poor old fellow!" Her eyes grew big and bright as she reflected on the days she had visited the fiddler's home and on the happiness her gifts had brought his children. For her, giving was better than receiving. The feeling sprang from the fulness of her own joy at seeing those about her happy, and not from the teachings of priests or prelates. Dame Nature was her sole preceptor in this. "I'll bring the babes another sugar plum to-morrow. I haven't a farthing to-night. Moll ran away with the earnings, and there is no one left to rob," she said. "Heyday," and she ran lightly to the vase and caught up the flowers. "Take the flowers to the bright eyes, to make them brighter." They would at least add cheerfulness to the room where Strings lived until she could bring something better. As she looked at the roses, she began to realize how dear they were becoming to herself, for they were the King's gift; and her heart beat quickly and she touched the great red petals lovingly with her lips. Strings took the flowers awkwardly; and, as he did so, something fell upon the floor. He knelt and picked it up, in his eagerness letting the roses fall. "A ring among the flowers, Mistress Nell," he cried. "A ring!" she exclaimed, taking the jewel quickly. Her lips pressed the setting. "Bless his heart! A ring from his finger," she continued half aloud. "Is it not handsome, Strings?" Her eyes sparkled brightly and there was a triumphant smile upon her lips. The fiddler's face, however, was grave; his eyes were on the floor. "How many have rings like that, while others starve," he mused, seriously. Nell held the jewel at arm's length and watched its varying brightness in the candle-light. "We can moralize, now we have the ring," she said, by way of rejoinder, then broke into a ringing laugh at her own way-of-the-world philosophizing. "Bless the giver!" she added, in a mood of rhapsody. She turned, only again to observe the sad countenance of Strings. "Alack-a-day! Why do you not take the nosegay?" she asked, wonderingly; for she herself was so very happy that she could not see why Strings too should not be so. "It will not feed my little ones, Mistress Nell," he answered, sadly. Nell's heart was touched in an instant. "Too true!" she said, sympathetically, falling on her knee and lovingly gathering up the roses. "Flowers and Music feed naught but Love, and often then Love goes hungry--very hungry." Her voice was so sweet and tender that it seemed as though the old viol had caught the notes. "Last night, Mistress Nell," said Strings, "the old fiddle played its sweetest melody for them, but they cried as if their tiny hearts would break. They were starving, and I had nothing but music for them." "Starving!" Nell listened to the word as though at first she did not realize its meaning. "What can I send?" she cried, looking about in vain and into her tiring-room. Her eyes fell suddenly upon the rich jewel upon her finger. "No, no; I cannot think of that," she thought. Then the word "starving" came back to her again with all its force. "Starving!" Her imagination pictured all its horrors. "Starving" seemed written on every wall and on the ceiling. It pierced her heart and brain. "Yes, I will," she exclaimed, wildly. "Here, Strings, old fellow, take the ring to the babes, to cut their teeth on." Strings stood aghast. "No, Mistress Nell; it is a present. You must not," he protested. "There are others where that came from," generously laughed Nell. "You must not; you are too kind," he continued, firmly. [Illustration: NELL PREVENTS A QUARREL.] "Pooh, pooh! I insist," said Nell as she forced the jewel upon him. "It will make a pretty mouthful; and, besides, I do not want my jewels to outshine me." Strings would have followed her and insisted upon her taking back the beautiful gift, but Nell was gone in an instant and her door closed. "To cut their teeth on!" he repeated as he placed the jewelled ring wonderingly upon his bow-finger and watched it sparkle and laugh in the light as he pretended to play a tune. "She is always joking like that; Heaven reward her." He stood lost in the realization of sudden affluence. Buckingham entered the room from the stage-door. His eyes were full of excitement. "The audience are wild over Nell, simply wild," he exclaimed in his enthusiasm, unconscious of the fact that he had an auditor, who was equally oblivious of his lordship's presence. "Gad," he continued, rapturously, half aloud, half to himself, "when they are stumbling home through London fog, the great _comédienne_ will be playing o'er the love-scenes with Buckingham in a cosy corner of an inn. She will not dare deny my bid to supper, with all her impudence. _Un petit souper!_" He broke into a laugh. "Tis well Old Rowley was too engaged to look twice at Nelly's eyes," he thought. "His Majesty shall never meet the wench at arm's length, an I can help it." He observed or rather became aware for the first time that there was another occupant of the room. "Ah, sirrah," he called, without noting the character of his companion, "inform Mistress Nell, Buckingham is waiting." Strings looked up. He seemed to have grown a foot in contemplation of his sudden wealth. Indeed, each particular tatter on his back seemed to have assumed an independent air. "Inform her yourself!" he declared; and his manner might well have become the dress of Buckingham. "Lord Strings is not your lackey this season." Buckingham gazed at him in astonishment, followed by amusement. "Lord Strings!" he observed. "Lord Rags!" Strings approached his lordship with a familiar, princely air. "How does that look on my bow-finger, my lord?" and he flourished his hand wearing the ring where Buckingham could well observe it. His lordship started. "The King's ring!" he would have exclaimed, had not the diplomat in his nature restrained him. "A fine stone!" he said merely. "How came you by it?" "Nell gave it to me," Strings answered. Buckingham nearly revealed himself in his astonishment. "Nell!" he muttered; and his face grew black as he wondered if his Majesty had out-generalled him. "Damme," he observed aloud, inspecting the ring closely, "I have taken a fancy to this gem." "So have I," ejaculated Strings, as he avoided his lordship and strutted across the room. "I'll give you fifty guineas for it," said Buckingham, following him more eagerly than the driver of a good bargain is wont. Strings stood nonplussed. "Fifty guineas!" he exclaimed, aghast. This was more money than the fiddler had ever thought existed. "Now?" he asked, wonderingly. "Now," replied his lordship, who proceeded at once to produce the glittering coins and toss them temptingly before the fiddler's eyes. "Oons, Nell surely meant me to sell it," he cried as he eagerly seized the gold and fed his eyes upon it. "Odsbud, I always did love yellow." He tossed some of the coins in the air and caught them with the dexterity of a juggler. Buckingham grew impatient. He desired a delivery. "Give me the ring," he demanded. Strings looked once more at the glittering gold; and visions of the plenty which it insured to his little home, to say nothing of a flagon or two of good brown ale which could be had by himself and his boon comrades without disparagement to the dinners of the little ones, came before him. If he had ever possessed moral courage, it was gone upon the instant. "Done!" he exclaimed. "Oons, fifty guineas!" and he handed the ring to Buckingham. The fiddler was still absorbed in his possessions, whispering again and again to the round bits of yellow: "My little bright-eyes will not go to bed hungry to-night!" when Manager Hart entered proudly from his tiring-room, dressed to leave the theatre. Buckingham nodded significantly. "Not a word of this," he said, indicating the ring, which he had quickly transferred to his own finger, turning the jewel so that it could not be observed. "'Sdeath, you still here?" said Hart, sharply, as his eyes fell upon the fiddler. Strings straightened up and puffed with the pomposity and pride of a landed proprietor. He shook his newly acquired possessions until the clinking of the gold was plainly audible to the manager. "Still here, Master Hart, negotiating. When you are pressed for coin, call on me, Master Hart. I run the Exchequer," he said, patronizingly. It was humorous to see his air of sweeping condescension toward the tall and dignified manager of the theatre who easily overtopped him by a head. "Gold!" exclaimed Hart, as he observed the glitter of the guineas in the candle-light. His eyes turned quickly and suspiciously upon the lordly Buckingham. There was nothing, however, in his lordship's face to indicate that he was aware even of the existence of the fiddler or of his gold. He sat by the table, leaning carelessly upon it, his face filled with an expression of supreme satisfaction. He had the attitude of one who was waiting for somebody or something and confidently expected not to be disappointed. "Sup with me, Hart," continued Strings, with the air of a boon comrade. "Sup with me--venison, capons, and--Epsom water." "Thank you, I am engaged to supper," replied Hart, contemptuously, brushing his cloak where it had been touched by the fiddler, as if his fingers had contaminated it. The insult clearly observable in the manager's tone, however, had no effect whatever upon Strings. He tossed his head proudly and said indifferently: "Oh, very well. Strings will sup with Strings. My coach, my coach, I say. Drive me to my bonnie babes!" He pushed open the door with a lordly air and passed out; and, for some seconds, they heard a mingling of repeated demands for the coach and a strain of music which sounded like "Away dull care; prythee away from me." Buckingham had observed the fiddler's tilt with the manager and the royal exit of the ragged fellow with much amusement. "A merry wag! Who is that?" he asked, as Strings's voice grew faint in the entry-way. Hart was strutting actor-fashion before the mirror, arranging his curls to hang gracefully over his forehead and tilting now and again the big plumed hat. "A knave of fortune, it seems," he answered coolly and still suspiciously. "Family?" asked Buckingham, indifferently. "Twins, I warrant," replied Hart, in an irritated tone. Buckingham chuckled softly. "No wonder he's tattered and gray," he declared, humorously philosophizing upon Hart's reply, though it was evident that Hart himself was too much chafed by the presence of his lordship in the greenroom after the play to know what he really had said. An ominous coolness now pervaded the atmosphere. Buckingham sat by the table, impatiently tapping the floor with his boot, his eyes growing dark at the delay. Hart still plumed himself before the mirror. His dress was rich; his sword was well balanced, a Damascus blade; his cloak hung gracefully; his big black hat and plumes were jaunty. He had, too, vigour in his step. With it all, however, he was a social outcast, and he felt it, while his companion, whose faults of nature were none the less glaring than his own, was almost the equal of a king. There was a tap at Nell's door. It was the call-boy, who had slipped unobserved into the room. "What is it, Dick?" asked Nell, sweetly, as she opened the door slightly to inspect her visitor. "A message,--very important," whispered Dick, softly, as he passed a note within. "Thank you," replied the actress; and the door closed again. Dick was about to depart, when the alert Buckingham, rising hastily from his seat, called him. "That was Nell's voice?" he asked. "Yes, my lord. She's dressing," answered Dick. "Good night, Master Hart," he added, as he saw the manager. Hart, however, was not in a good humour and turned sharply upon him. Dick vanished. "She will be out shortly, my lord," the manager observed to Buckingham, somewhat coldly. "But it will do you little good," he thought, as he reflected upon his conversation with Nell. Buckingham leaned lazily over the back of a chair and replied confidently, knowing that his speech would be no balm to the irate manager: "Nell always keeps her engagements religiously with me. We are to sup together to-night, Hart." "Odso!" retorted the other, drawing himself up to his full height. "You will be disappointed, methinks." "I trow not," Buckingham observed, with a smile which made Hart wince. "Pepys's wife has him mewed up at home when Nelly plays, and the King is tied to other apron-strings." His lordship chuckled as he bethought him how cleverly he had managed that his Majesty be under the proper influence. "What danger else?" he inquired, cuttingly. Though the words were mild, the feelings of the two men were at white-heat. "Your lordship's hours are too valuable to waste," politely suggested the manager. "I happen to know Mistress Gwyn sups with another to-night." "Another?" sneered his lordship. "Another!" hotly repeated the actor. "We shall see, friend Hart," said Buckingham, in a tone no less agreeable, with difficulty restraining his feelings. He threw himself impatiently into a big arm-chair, which he had swung around angrily, so that its back was to the manager. The insult was more than Hart could bear. He also seized a chair, and vented his vengeance upon it. Almost hurled from its place, it fell back to back with Buckingham's. "We shall see, my lord," he said as he likewise angrily took his seat and folded his arms. It was like "The Schism" of Vibert. It is difficult to tell what would have been the result, had the place been different. Each knew that Nell was just beyond her door; each hesitated; and each, with bitterness in his heart, held on to himself. They sat like sphinxes. Suddenly, Nell's door slightly opened. She was dressed to leave the theatre. In her hand she held a note. "A fair message, on my honour! Worth reading twice or even thrice," she roguishly exclaimed unto her maid as she directed her to hold a candle nearer that she might once again spell out its words. "'To England's idol, the divine Eleanor Gwyn.' A holy apt beginning, by the mass! 'My coach awaits you at the stage-door. We will toast you to-night at Whitehall.'" Nell's eyes seemed to drink in the words, and it was her heart which said: "Long live his Majesty." She took the King's roses in her arms; the Duke's roses, she tossed upon the floor. The manager awoke as from a trance. "You will not believe me," he said to Buckingham, confidently. "Here comes the arbiter of your woes, my lord." He arose quickly. "It will not be hard, methinks, sir, to decide between a coronet and a player's tinsel crown," observed his princely rival, with a sneer, as he too arose and assumed an attitude of waiting. "Have a care, my lord. I may forget--" Hart's fingers played upon his sword-hilt. "Your occupation, sir?" jeered Buckingham. "Aye; my former occupation of a soldier"; and Hart's sword sprang from its scabbard, with a dexterity that proved that he had not forgotten the trick of war. Buckingham too would have drawn, but a merry voice stayed him. "How now, gentlemen?" sprang from Nell's rosy lips, as she came between them, a picture of roguish beauty. Hart's pose in an instant was that of apology. "Pardon, Nell," he exclaimed, lifting his hat and bowing in courtly fashion. "A small difference of opinion; naught else." "Between friends," replied Nell, reprovingly. "By the Gods," cried Buckingham,--and his hat too was in the air and his knee too was bent before the theatre-queen,--"the rewards are worth more than word-combats." "Pshaw!" said Nell, as she hugged the King's roses tighter in her arms. "True Englishmen fight shoulder to shoulder, not face to face." "In this case," replied his lordship, with the air of a conqueror, "the booty cannot be amicably distributed." "Oh, ho!" cried Nell. "Brave generals, quarrelling over the spoils. Pooh! There is no girl worth fighting for--that is, not over one! Buckingham! Jack! For shame! What coquette kindles this hot blood?" "The fairest maid in England," said Hart, with all the earnestness of conviction, and with all the courtesy of the theatre, which teaches courtesy. "The dearest girl in all this world," said Buckingham as quickly; for he too must bow if he would win. "How stupid!" lisped Nell, with a look of baby-innocence. "You must mean me! Who else could answer the description? A quarrel over poor me! This is delicious. I love a fight. Out with your swords and to't like men! To the victor! Come, name the quarrel." "This player--" began his lordship, hotly. He caught the quick gleam in Nell's eyes and hesitated. "I mean," he substituted, apologetically, "Master Hart--labours under the misapprehension that you sup with him to-night." "Nell," asserted the manager, defensively, "it is his lordship who suffers from the delusion that the first actress of England sups with him to-night." "My arm and coach are yours, madame," pleaded his lordship, as he gallantly offered an arm. "Pardon, my lord; Nell, my arm!" said Hart. "Heyday!" cried the witch, bewitchingly. "Was ever maid so nobly squired? This is an embarrassment of riches." She looked longingly at the two attending gallants. There was something in her voice that might be mockery or that might be love. Only the devil in her eyes could tell. "Gentlemen, you tear my heart-strings," she continued. "How can I choose between such loves? To-night, I sup at Whitehall!" and she darted quickly toward the door. "Whitehall!" the rivals cried, aghast. "Aye, Whitehall--_with the King_!" There was a wild, hilarious laugh, and she was gone. [Illustration: MISTRESS NELL IS TOLD OF THE KING'S DANGER.] Buckingham and Hart stood looking into each other's face. They heard the sound of coach-wheels rapidly departing in the street. CHAPTER V _It was never treason to steal a King's kisses._ A year and more had flown. It was one of those glorious moon-lit nights in the early fall when there is a crispness in the air which lends an edge to life. St. James's Park was particularly beautiful. The giant oaks with their hundreds of years of story written in their rings lifted high their spreading branches, laden with leaves, which shimmered in the light. The historic old park seemed to be made up of patches of day and night. In the open, one might read in the mellow glow of the harvest-moon; in the shade of one of its oaks, a thief might safely hide. Facing on the park, there stood a house of Elizabethan architecture. Along its wrinkled, ivy-mantled wall ran a terrace-like balustrade, where one might walk and enjoy the night without fear. The house was well defined by the rays of the moon, which seemed to dance upon it in a halo of mirth; and from the park, below the terrace, came the soft notes of a violin, tenderly picked. None other than Strings was sitting astride of a low branch of an oak, looking up at a window, like some guardian spirit from the devil-land, singing in his quaintly unctuous way: _"Four and twenty fiddlers all in a row, And there was fiddle-fiddle, and twice fiddle-fiddle."_ "How's that for a serenade to Mistress Nell?" he asked himself as he secured a firm footing on the ground and slung his fiddle over his back. "She don't know it's for her, but the old viol and old Strings know." He came to a stand-still and winced. "Oons, my old wound again," he said, with a sharp cry, followed as quickly by a laugh. His eyes still wandered along the balustrade, as eagerly as some young Romeo at the balcony of his Juliet. "I wish she'd walk her terrace to-night," he sighed, "where we could see her--the lovely lady!" His rhapsody was suddenly broken in upon by the approach of some one down the path. He glided into the shadow of an oak and none too quickly. From the obscurity of the trees, into the open, a chair was swiftly borne, by the side of which ran a pretty page of tender years, yet well schooled in courtly wisdom. The lovely occupant leaned forward and motioned to the chairmen, who obediently rested and assisted her to alight. "Retire beneath the shadow of the trees," she whispered. "Have a care; no noise." The chairmen withdrew quietly, but within convenient distance, to await her bidding. Strings's heart quite stopped beating. "The Duchess of Portsmouth at Mistress Nell's!" he said, almost aloud in his excitement. "Then the devil must be to pay!" and he slipped well behind the oak-trunk again. Portsmouth's eyes snapped with French fire as she glanced up at Nell's terrace. Then she turned to the page by her side. "His Majesty came this path before?" she asked, with quick, French accent. "Yes, your grace," replied the page. "And up this trellis?" "Yes, your grace." "Again to-night?" "I cannot tell, your grace," replied the lad. "I followed as you bade me; but the King's legs were so long, you see, I lost him." Portsmouth smiled. "Softly, pretty one," she said. "Watch if he comes and warn me; for we may have passed him." The lad ran gaily down the path to perform her bidding. "State-business!" she muttered, as she reflected bitterly upon the King's late excuses to her. "_Mon Dieu_, does he think me a country wench? I was schooled at Louis's court." Her eyes searched the house from various points of advantage. "A light!" she exclaimed, as a candle burned brightly from a window, like a spark of gold set in the silver of the night. "Would I had an invisible cloak." She tiptoed about a corner of the wall--woman-like, to see if she could see, not Nell, but Charles. Scarcely had she disappeared when a second figure started up in the moonlight, and a gallant figure, too. It was the Duke of Buckingham. "Not a mouse stirring," he reflected, glancing at the terrace. "Fair minx, you will not long refuse Buckingham's overtures. Come, Nelly, thy King is already half stolen away by Portsmouth of France, and Portsmouth of France is our dear ally in the great cause and shall be more so." To his astonishment, as he drew nearer, he observed a lady, richly dressed, gliding between himself and the terrace. He rubbed his eyes to see that he was not dreaming. She was there, however, and a pretty armful, too. "Nell," he chuckled, as he stole up behind her. Portsmouth meanwhile had learned that the window was too high to allow her to gain a view within the dwelling. She started--observing, more by intuition than by sight, that she was watched--and drew her veil closely about her handsome features. "Nelly, Nelly," laughed Buckingham, "I have thee, wench. Come, a kiss!--a kiss! Nay, love; it was never treason to steal a King's kisses." He seized her by the arm and was about to kiss her when she turned and threw back her veil. "Buckingham!" she said, suavely. "Portsmouth!" he exclaimed, awestruck. He gathered himself together, however, in an instant, and added, as if nothing in the world had happened: "An unexpected pleasure, your grace." "Yes," said she, with a pretty shrug. "I did not know I was so honoured, my lord." "Or you would not have refused the little kiss?" he asked, suggestively. "You called me 'Nelly,' my lord. I do not respond to that name." "Damme, I was never good at names, Louise," said he, with mock-apology, "especially by moonlight." "Buz, buz!" she answered, with a knowing gesture and a knowing look. Then, pointing toward the terrace, she added: "A pretty nest! A pretty bird within, I warrant. Her name?" "Ignorance well feigned," he thought. He replied, however, most graciously: "Nell Gwyn." "Oh, ho! The King's favourite, who has more power, they say, than great statesmen--like my lord." Her speech was well defined to draw out his lordship; but he was wary. "Unless my lord is guided by my lady, as formerly," he replied, diplomatically. A look of suspicion crept into Portsmouth's face: but it was not visible for want of contrast; for all things have a perverted look by the light of the moon. She had known Buckingham well at Dover. Their interests there had been one in securing privileges from England for her French King. Both had been well rewarded too for their pains. There were no proofs, however, of this; and where his lordship stood to-day, and which cause he would espouse, she did not know. His eyes at Dover had fallen fondly upon her, but men's eyes fall fondly upon many women, and she would not trust too much until she knew more. "My chairmen have set me down at the wrong door-step," she said, most sweetly. "My lord longs for his kiss. _Au revoir!_" She bowed and turned to depart. Buckingham was alert in an instant. He knew not when the opportunity might come again to deal so happily with Louis's emissary and the place and time of meeting had its advantages. "Prythee stay, Duchess. I left the merry hunters, returning from Hounslow Heath, all in Portsmouth's interest," he said. "Is this to be my thanks?" She approached him earnestly. "My lord must explain. I am stupid in fitting English facts to English words." "Have you forgotten Dover?" he asked, intensely, but subdued in voice, "and my pledges sworn to?--the treaty at the Castle?--the Duchess of Orléans?--the Grand Monarch?" "Hush!" exclaimed Portsmouth, clutching his arm and looking cautiously about. "If my services to you there were known," he continued, excitedly, "and to the great cause--the first step in making England pensioner of France and Holland the vassal of Louis--my head would pay the penalty. Can you not trust me still?" "You are on strange ground to-night," suggested Portsmouth, tossing her head impatiently to indicate the terrace, as she tried to fathom the real man. "I thought the King might pass this way, and came to see," hastily explained his lordship, observing that she was reflecting upon the incongruity of his friendship for her and of his visit to Madame Gwyn. "And if he did?" she asked, dubiously, not seeing the connection. "I have a plan to make his visits less frequent, Louise,--for your sweet sake and mine." The man was becoming master. He had pleased her, and she was beginning to believe. "Yes?" she said, in a way which might mean anything, but certainly that she was listening, and intently listening too. "You have servants you can trust?" he asked. "I have," she replied as quickly; and she gloried in the thought that some at least were as faithful as Louis's court afforded. "They must watch Nell's terrace here, night and day," he almost commanded in his eagerness, "who comes out, who goes in and the hour. She may forget her royal lover; and--well--we shall have witnesses in waiting. We owe this kindness--to his Majesty." Portsmouth shrugged her shoulders impatiently. "_Mon Dieu!_" she said. "My servants have watched, my lord, already. The despatches would have been signed and Louis's army on the march against the Dutch but for this vulgar player-girl, whom I have never seen. The King forgets all else." The beautiful Duchess was piqued, indeed, that the English King should be so swayed. She felt that it was a personal disgrace--an insult to her charms and to her culture. She felt that the court knew it and laughed, and she feared that Louis soon would know. Nell Gwyn! How she hated her--scarce less than she loved Louis and her France. "Be of good cheer," suggested Buckingham, soothingly; and he half embraced her. "My messenger shall await your signal, to carry the news to Louis and his army." "There is no news," replied she, and turned upon him bitterly. "Charles evades me. Promise after promise to sup with me broken. I expected him to-night. My spies warned me he would not come; that he is hereabouts again. I followed myself to see. I have the papers with me always. If I can but see the King alone, it will not take long to dethrone this up-start queen; wine, sweet words--England's sign-manual." There was a confident smile on her lips as she reflected upon her personal powers, which had led Louis XIV. of France to entrust a great mission to her. His lordship saw his growing advantage. He would make the most of it. "In the last event you have the ball!" he suggested, hopefully. "Aye, and we shall be prepared," she cried. "But Louis is impatient to strike the blow for Empire unhampered by British sympathy for the Dutch, and the ball is--" "A fortnight off," interrupted Buckingham, with a smile. "And my messenger should be gone to-night," she continued, irritably. She approached him and whispered cautiously: "I have to-day received another note from Bouillon. Louis relies upon me to win from Charles his consent to the withdrawal of the British troops from Holland. This will insure the fall of Luxembourg--the key to our success. You see, Buckingham, I must not fail. England's debasement shall be won." There was a whistle down the path. "Some one comes!" she exclaimed. "My chair!" The page, who had given the signal, came running to her. Her chairmen too were prompt. "Join me," she whispered to Buckingham, as he assisted her to her seat within. "Later, Louise, later," he replied. "I must back to the neighbouring inn, before the huntsmen miss me." Portsmouth waved to the chairmen, who moved silently away among the trees. Buckingham stood looking after them, laughing. "King Charles, a French girl from Louis's court will give me the keys to England's heart and her best honours," he muttered. He glanced once again quickly at the windows of the house, and then, with altered purpose, swaggered away down a side path. He was well pleased with his thoughts, well pleased with his chance interview with the beautiful Duchess and well pleased with himself. His brain wove and wove moonbeam webs of intrigue as he passed through the light and shadow of the night, wherein he would lend a helping hand to France and secure gold and power for his pains. He had no qualms of conscience; for must not his estates be kept, his dignity maintained? His purpose was clear. He would bring Portsmouth and the King closer together: and what England lost, he would gain--and, therefore, England; for was not he himself a part of England, and a great part? Then too he must and would have Nell. CHAPTER VI Softly on tiptoe; Here Nell doth lie. As often happens in life, when one suitor departs, another suitor knocks; and so it happened on this glorious night. The belated suitor was none other than Charles, the Stuart King. He seemed in the moonlight the picture of royalty, of romance, of dignity, of carelessness, of indifference--the royal vagabond of wit, of humour and of love. A well-thumbed "Hudibras" bulged from his pocket. He was alone, save for some pretty spaniels that played about him. He heeded them not. His thoughts were of Nell. "Methought I heard voices tuned to love," he mused, as he glanced about. "What knave has spied out the secret of her bower? Ho, Rosamond, my Rosamond! Why came I here again to-night? What is there in this girl, this Nell? And yet her eyes, how like the pretty maid's who passed me the cup that day at the cottage where we rested. Have I lived really to love--I, Solomon's rival in the entertainment of the fair,--to have my heart-strings torn by this roguish player?" His reflections were broken in upon by the hunters' song in the distance. The music was so in harmony with the night that the forest seemed enchanted. "Hush; music!" he exclaimed, softly, as he lent himself reluctantly to the spell, which pervaded everything as in a fairyland. "Odds, moonlight was once for me as well the light for revels, bacchanals and frolics; yet now I linger another evening by Nell's terrace, mooning like a lover o'er the memory of her eyes and entranced by the hunters' song." [Illustration: THE KING PROFESSES HIS LOVE FOR NELL.] The singers were approaching. The King stepped quickly beneath the trellis, in an angle of the wall, and waited. Their song grew richer, as melodious as the night, but it struck a discord in his soul. He was thinking of a pair of eyes. "Cease those discordant jangles," he exclaimed impatiently to himself; "cease, I say! No song except for Nell! Nell! Pour forth your sweetest melody for Nell!" The hunters stopped as by intuition before the terrace. A goodly company they were, indeed; there were James and Rochester and others of the court returning from the day's hunt. There was Buckingham too, who had rejoined them as they left the inn. The music died away. "Whose voice was that?" asked James, as he caught the sound of the King's impatient exclamation from the corner of the wall. "Some dreamer of the night," laughed Buckingham. "Yon love-sick fellow, methinks," he continued, pointing to a figure, well aloof beneath the trees, who was watching the scene most jealously. It was none other than Hart, who rarely failed to have an eye on Nell's terrace and who instantly stole away in the darkness. "This is the home of Eleanor Gwyn we are passing," said Rochester, superfluously; for all knew full well that it was Nelly's terrace. "The love-lorn seer is wise," cried the Duke of York, quite forgetting his frigid self as he bethought him of Nell, and becoming quite lover-like, as he, sighing, said: "It were well to make peace with Nelly. Sing, hunters, sing!" The command was quickly obeyed and the voices well attuned; for none were there but worshipped Nelly. Hail to the moonbeams' Crystal spray, Nestling in Heaven All the day, Falling by night-time, Silvery showers, Twining with love-rhyme Nell's fair bowers. Sing, hunters, sing, Gently carolling, Here lies our hart-- Sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. Hail to the King's oaks, Sentries blest, Spreading their branches, Guarding her rest, Telling the breezes, Hastening by: "Softly on tiptoe; Here Nell doth lie." Sing, hunters, sing, Gently carolling, Here lies our hart-- Sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. The King heard the serenade to the end, then stepped gaily from his hiding-place. "Brother James under Nelly's window!" he said, with a merry laugh. "The King!" exclaimed James, in startled accents, as he realized the presence of his Majesty and the awkward position in which he and his followers were placed. "The King!" repeated the courtiers. Hats were off and knees were bent respectfully. "Brother," saluted Charles, as he embraced the Duke of York good-naturedly. Buckingham withdrew a few steps. He was the most disturbed at the presence of the King at Nelly's bower. "As I feared," he thought. "Devil take his Majesty's meandering heart." "Odsfish," laughed Charles, "we must guard our Nelly, or James and his saintly followers will rob her bower by moonlight." The Duke of York assumed a devout and dignified mien. "Sire," he attempted to explain, but was interrupted quickly by his Majesty. "No apologies, pious brother. God never damned a man for a little irregular pleasure." There was a tittering among the courtiers as the King's words fell upon their ears. James continued to apologize. "In faith, we were simply passing--" he said. Again he was interrupted by his Majesty, who was in the best of humour and much pleased at the discomfiture of his over-religious brother. "Lorenzo too was simply passing," he observed, "but the fair Jessica and some odd ducats stuck to his girdle; and the Jew will still be tearing his hair long after we are dust. Ah, Buckingham, they tell me you too have a taste for roguish Nelly. Have a care!" The King strode across to Buckingham as he spoke; and while there was humour in his tone, there was injunction also. Buckingham was too great a courtier not to see and feel it. He bowed respectfully, replying to his Majesty, "Sire, I would not presume to follow the King's eyes, however much I admire their taste." "'T'is well," replied his Majesty, pointedly, "lest they lead thee abroad on a sleeveless mission." Others had travelled upon such missions; Buckingham knew it well. "But what does your Majesty here to-night, if we dare ask?" questioned James, who had just bethought him how to turn the tables upon the King. Charles looked at his brother quizzically. "Humph!" he exclaimed, in his peculiar way. "Feeding my ducks in yonder pond." His staff swept indefinitely toward the park. "Hunting with us were nobler business, Sire," suggested James, decisively. "Not so," replied the King, quite seriously. "My way--I learn to legislate for ducks." "'T'were wiser," preached York, "to study your subjects' needs." The King's eyes twinkled. "I go among them," he said, "and learn their needs, while you are praying, brother." At this sally, Rochester became convulsed, though he hid it well; for Rochester was not as pious as brother James. York, feeling that the sympathy was against him, grew more earnest still. "I wish your Majesty would have more care," he pleaded. "'Tis a crime against yourself, a crime against the state, a crime against the cavaliers who fought and died for you, to walk these paths alone in such uncertain times. Perchance, 'tis courting lurking murder!" "No kind of danger, James," answered the King, with equal seriousness, laying a hand kindly on his brother's shoulder; "for I am sure no man in England would take away my life to make you King." There was general laughter from the assembled party; for all dared laugh, even at the expense of the Duke of York, when the jest was of the King's making. Indeed, not to laugh at a king's jest has been in every age, in or out of statutes, the greatest crime. Fortunately, King Charles's wit warranted its observation. James himself grew mellow under the influence of the gaiety, and almost affectionately replied, "God grant it be ever so, brother." He then turned the thought. "We heard but now an ambassador from Morocco's court is lately landed. He brings your Majesty two lions and thirty ostriches." "Odsfish, but he is kind," replied the King, reflecting on the gift. "I know of nothing more proper to send by way of return than a flock of geese." His brow arched quizzically, as he glanced over the circle of inert courtiers ranged about him. "Methinks I can count them out at Whitehall," he thought. "He seeks an audience to-night. Will you grant it, Sire?" besought James. "'Sheart!" replied the King. "Most cheerfully, I'll lead you from Nelly's terrace, brother. Hey! Tune up your throats. On to the palace." CHAPTER VII Come down! Come up! The music died away among the old oaks in the park. Before its final notes were lost on the air, however, hasty steps and a chatter of women's voices came from the house. The door leading to the terrace was thrown quickly open, and Nell appeared. Her eyes had the bewildered look of one who has been suddenly awakened from a sleep gilded with a delightful dream. She had, indeed, been dreaming--dreaming of the King and of his coming. As she lay upon her couch, where she had thrown herself after the evening meal, she had seemed to hear his serenade. Then the music ceased and she started up and rubbed her eyes. It was only to see the moonlight falling through the latticed windows on to the floor of her dainty chamber. She was alone and she bethought herself sadly that dreams go by contraries. Once again, however, the hunters' song had arisen on her startled ear--and had died away in sweet cadences in the distance. It was not a dream! As she rushed out upon the terrace, she called Moll reprovingly; and, in an instant, Moll was at her side. The faithful girl had already seen the hunters and had started a search for Nell; but the revellers had gone before she could find her. "What is it, dear Nell?" asked her companion, well out of breath. "Why did you not call me, cruel girl?" answered Nell, impatiently. "To miss seeing so many handsome cavaliers! Where is my kerchief?" Nell leaned over the balustrade and waved wildly to the departing hunters. A pretty picture she was too, in her white flowing gown, silvered by the moonlight. "See, see," she exclaimed to Moll, with wild enthusiasm, "some one waves back. It may be he, sweet mouse. Heigh-ho! Why don't you wave, Moll?" Before Moll could answer, a rich bugle-horn rang out across the park. "The hunters' horn!" cried Nell, gleefully. "Oh, I wish I were a man--except when one is with me"; and she threw both arms about Moll, for the want of one better to embrace. She was in her varying mood, which was one 'twixt the laughter of the lip and the tear in the eye. "I have lost my brother!" ejaculated some one; but she heard him not. This laconic speech came from none other than the King, who in a bantering mood had returned. "I went one side a tree and pious James t'other; and here I am by Nelly's terrace once again," he muttered. "Oh, ho! wench!" His eyes had caught sight of Nell upon the terrace. He stepped back quickly into the shadow and watched her playfully. Nell looked longingly out into the night, and sighed heavily. She was at her wit's end. The evening was waning, and the King, as she thought, had not come. "Why do you sigh?" asked Moll, consolingly. "I was only looking down the path, dear heart," replied Nell, sadly. "He will come," hopefully suggested Moll, whose little heart sympathized deeply with her benefactress. "Nay, sweet," said Nell, and she shook her curls while the moonbeams danced among them, "he is as false as yonder moon--as changeable of face." She withdrew her eyes from the path and they fell upon the King. His Majesty's curiosity had quite over-mastered him, and he had inadvertently stepped well into the light. The novelty of hearing himself derided by such pretty lips was a delicious experience, indeed. "The King!" she cried, in joyous surprise. Moll's diplomatic effort to escape at the sight of his Majesty was not half quick enough for Nell, who forthwith forced her companion into the house, and closed the door sharply behind her, much to the delight of the humour-loving King. Nell then turned to the balustrade and, somewhat confused, looked down at his Majesty, who now stood below, calmly gazing up at her, an amused expression on his face. "Pardon, your Majesty," she explained, falteringly, "I did not see you." "You overlooked me merely," slyly suggested Charles, swinging his stick in the direction of the departed hunters. "I'faith, I thought it was you waved answer, Sire," quickly replied Nell, whose confusion was gone and who was now mistress of the situation and of herself. "No, Nell; I hunt alone for my hart." "You hunt the right park, Sire." "Yea, a good preserve, truly," observed the King. "I find my game, as I expected, flirting, waving kerchiefs, making eyes and throwing kisses to the latest passer-by." "I was encouraging the soldiers, my liege. That is every woman's duty to her country." "And her country_men_," said he, smiling. "You are very loyal, Nell. Come down!" It was irritating, indeed, to be kept so at arm's length. She gazed down at him with impish sweetness--down at the King of England! "Come up!" she said, leaning over the balustrade. "Nay; come down if you love me," pleaded the King. "Nay; come up if you love me," said Nell, enticingly. "Egad! I am too old to climb," exclaimed the Merry Monarch. "Egad! I am too young yet for the downward path, your Majesty," retorted Nell. The King shrugged his shoulders indifferently. "You will fall if we give you time," he said. "To the King's level?" she asked, slyly, then answered herself: "Mayhap." Thus they stood like knights after the first tilt. Charles looked up at Nell, and Nell looked down at Charles. There was a moment's silence. Nell broke it. "I am surprised you happen this way, Sire." "With such eyes to lure me?" asked the King, and he asked earnestly too. "Tush," answered Nell, coyly, "your tongue will lead you to perdition, Sire." "No fear!" replied he, dryly. "I knelt in church with brother James but yesterday." "In sooth, quite true!" said Nell, approvingly, as she leaned back against the door and raised her eyes innocently toward the moon. "I sat in the next pew, Sire, afraid to move for fear I might awake your Majesty." The King chuckled softly to himself. Nell picked one of the flowers that grew upon the balustrade. "Ah, you come a long-forgotten path to-night," she said abruptly. The King was alert in an instant. He felt that he had placed himself in a false light. He loved the witch above despite himself. "I saw thee twa evenings ago, lass," he hastily asserted, in good Scotch accents, somewhat impatiently. "And is not that a long time, Sire," questioned Nell, "or did Portsmouth make it fly?" "Portsmouth!" exclaimed Charles. He turned his face away. "Can it be my conscience pricks me?" he thought. "You know more of her than I, sweet Nell," he then asserted, with open manner. "Marry, I know her not at all and never saw her," said Nell. "I shall feel better when I do," she thought. "It were well for England's peace you have not met," laughed Charles. "Faith and troth," said Nell, "I am happy to know our King has lost his heart." "Odso! And why?" asked Charles; and he gazed at Nell in his curious uncertain way, as he thought it was never possible to tell quite what she meant or what she next would think or say or do. "We feared he had not one to lose," she slyly suggested. "It gives us hope." "To have it in another's hand as you allege?" asked Charles. "Marry, truly!" answered Nell, decisively. "The Duchess may find it more than she can hold and toss it over." "How now, wench!" exclaimed the King, with assumption of wounded dignity. "My heart a ball for women to bat about!" "Sire, two women often play at rackets even with a king's heart," softly suggested Nell. "Odsfish," cried the King, with hands and eyes raised in mock supplication. "Heaven help me then." Again the hunters' horn rang clearly on the night. "The horn! The horn!" said Nell, with forced indifference. "They call you, Sire." There was a triumphantly bewitching look in her eyes, however, as she realized the discomfiture of the King. He was annoyed, indeed. His manner plainly betokened his desire to stay and his irritation at the interruption. "'Tis so!" he said at last, resignedly. "The King is lost." The horn sounded clearer. The hunters were returning. "Again--nearer!" exclaimed Charles, fretfully. His mind reverted to his pious brother; and he laughed as he continued: "Poor brother James and his ostriches!" He could almost touch Nell's finger-tips. "Farewell, sweet," he said; "I must help them find his Majesty or they will swarm here like bees. Yet I must see my Nell again to-night. You have bewitched me, wench. Sup with me within the hour--at--Ye Blue Boar Inn. Can you find the place?" There was mischief in Nell's voice as she leaned upon the balustrade. She dropped a flower; he caught it. "Sire, I can always find a rendezvous," she answered. "You're the biggest rogue in England," laughed Charles. "Of a _subject_, perhaps, Sire," replied Nell, pointedly. "That is treason, sly wench," rejoined the King; but his voice grew tender as he added: "but treason of the tongue and not the heart. Adieu! Let that seal thy lips, until we meet." He threw a kiss to the waiting lips upon the balcony. "Alack-a-day," sighed Nell, sadly, as she caught the kiss. "Some one may break the seal, my liege; who knows?" "How now?" questioned Charles, jealously. Nell hugged herself as she saw his fitful mood; for beneath mock jealousy she thought she saw the germ of true jealousy. She laughed wistfully as she explained: "It were better to come up and seal them tighter, Sire." "Minx!" he chuckled, and tossed another kiss. The horn again echoed through the woods. He started. "Now we'll despatch the affairs of England, brother; then we'll sup with pretty Nelly. Poor brother James! Heaven bless him and his ostriches." He turned and strode quickly through the trees and down the path; but, as he went, ever and anon he called: "Ye Blue Boar Inn, within the hour!" Each time from the balcony in Nell's sweet voice came back--"Ye Blue Boar Inn, within the hour! I will not fail you, Sire!" Then she too disappeared. There was again a slamming of doors and much confusion within the house. There were calls and sounds of running feet. The door below the terrace opened suddenly, and Nell appeared breathless upon the lawn--at her heels the constant Moll. Nell ran some steps down the path, peering vainly through the woods after the departing King. Her bosom rose and fell in agitation. "Oh, Moll, Moll, Moll!" she exclaimed, fearfully. "He has been at Portsmouth's since high noon. I could see it in his eyes." Her own eyes snapped as she thought of the hated French rival, whom she had not yet seen, but whose relation to the royal household, as she thought, gave her the King's ear almost at will. She walked nervously back and forth, then turned quickly upon her companion, asking her, who knew nothing, a hundred questions, all in one little breath. "What is she? How looks she? What is her charm, her fascination, the magic of her art? Is she short, tall, fat, lean, joyous or sombre? I must know." "Oh, Nell, what will you do?" cried Moll in fearful accents as she watched her beautiful mistress standing passion-swayed before her like a queen in the moonlight, the little toe of her slipper nervously beating the sward as she general-like marshalled her wits for the battle. "See her, see her,--from top to toe!" Nell at length exclaimed. "Oh, there will be sport, sweet mouse. France again against England--the stake, a King!" She glanced in the direction of the house and cried joyously as she saw Strings hobbling toward her. "Heaven ever gave me a man in waiting," she said, gleefully. "Poor fellow, he limps from youthful, war-met wounds. Comrade, are you still strong enough for service?" "To the death for you, Mistress Nell!" he faithfully replied. "You know the Duchess of Portsmouth, and where she lives?" artfully inquired Nell. "Portsmouth!" he repeated, excitedly. "She was here but now, peeping at your windows." Nell stood aghast. Her face grew pale, and her lips trembled. "Here, here!" she exclaimed, incredulously. "The imported hussy!" She turned hotly upon Strings, as she had upon poor Moll, with an array of questions which almost paralyzed the old fiddler's wits. "How looks she? What colour eyes? Does her lip arch? How many inches span her waist?" Strings looked cautiously about, then whispered in Nell's ear. He might as well have talked to all London; for Nell, in her excitement, repeated his words at the top of her voice. "You overheard? Great Heavens! Drug the King and win the rights of England while he is in his cups? Bouillon--the army--Louis--the Dutch! A conspiracy!" "Oh, dear; oh, dear," came from Moll's trembling lips. Nell's wits were like lightning playing with the clouds. Her plans were formed at once. "Fly, fly, comrade," she commanded Strings. "Overtake her chair. Tell the Duchess that her beloved Charles--she will understand--entreats her to sup at Ye Blue Boar Inn, within the hour. Nay, she will be glad enough to come. Say he awaits her alone. Run, run, good Strings, and you shall have a hospital to nurse these wounds, as big as Noah's ark; and the King shall build it for the message." Strings hastened down the path, fired by Nell's inspiration, with almost the eagerness of a boy. "Run, run!" cried Nell, in ecstasy, as she looked after him and dwelt gleefully upon the outcome of her plans. He disappeared through the trees. "Heigh-ho!" she said, with a light-hearted step. "Now, Moll, we'll get our first sight of the enemy." She darted into the house, dragging poor Moll after her. CHAPTER VIII _"And the man that is drunk is as great as a king."_ An old English inn! What spot on earth is more hospitable, even though its floor be bare and its tables wooden? There is a homely atmosphere about it, with its cobwebbed rafters, its dingy windows, its big fireplace, where the rough logs crackle, and its musty ale. It has ever been a home for the belated traveller, where the viands, steaming hot, have filled his soul with joy. Oh, the Southdown mutton and the roasts of beef! If England has given us naught else, she should be beloved for her wealth of inns, with their jolly landlords and their pert bar-maids and their lawns for the game of bowls. May our children's children find them still unchanged. In a quaint corner of London, there stood such an inn, in the days of which we speak; and it lives in our story. When it was built, no one knew and none cared. Tradition said that it had been a rendezvous for convivial spirits for ages that had gone. A sign hung from the door, on which was a boar's head; and under it, in Old English lettering, might have been deciphered, if the reader had the wit to read, "Ye Blue Boar Inn." It was the evening of a certain day, known to us all, in the reign of good King Charles. Three yesty spirits sat convivially enjoying the warmth of the fire upon the huge hearth. A keg was braced in the centre of the room. One of the merry crew--none other, indeed, than Swallow, a constable to the King--sat astride the cask, Don Quixote-like. In place of the dauntless lance, he was armed with a sturdy mug of good old ale. He sang gaily to a tune of his own, turning ever and anon for approbation to Buzzard, another spirit of like guild, who sat in a semi-maudlin condition by the table, and also to the moon-faced landlord of the inn, who encouraged the joviality of his guests--not forgetting to count the cups which they demolished. Swallow sang: _"Here's a health unto his Majesty, with a fa, la, fa, Conversion to his enemies with a fa, la, fa, And he that will not pledge his health, I wish him neither wit nor wealth, Nor yet a rope to hang himself-- With a fa, la, fa, With a fa, la, fa."_ The song ended in a triumphant wave of glory. The singer turned toward the fellow, Buzzard, and demanded indignantly: "Why don't ye sing, knave, to the tune of the spigot?" "My gullet's dry, Master Constable," stupidly explained his companion, as he too buried his face in the ale. "Odsbud, thou knowest not the art, thou clod," retorted the constable, wisely. "Nay; I can sing as well as any man," answered Buzzard, indignantly, "an I know when to go up and when to come down." He pointed stupidly, contrary to the phrase, first to the floor and then to the ceiling. The landlord chuckled merrily, imitating him. "When to go up and when to come down!" he repeated with the same idiotic drawl and contradictory gesture. "Go to, simple," replied Swallow, with tremendous condescension of manner. "Thy mother gave thee a gullet but no ear. Pass the schnapps." He arose and staggered to the table. "Good Master Constable, how singest thou?" sheepishly inquired Buzzard, as he filled Swallow's tankard for the twentieth time. "Marry, by main force, thou jack-pudding; how else?" demanded Swallow, pompously. He reseated himself with much effort astride the cask. "Oh, bury me here," he continued, looking into the foaming mug, and then buried his face deep in the ale. His companions were well pleased with the toast; for each repeated it after him, each in his turn emphasizing the "me" and the "here"--"Oh, bury _me here!"_ "Oh, bury _me here!_"--Buzzard in a voice many tones deeper than that of Swallow and the landlord in a voice many tones deeper than that of Buzzard. Indeed, the guttural tones of the landlord bespoke the grave-yard. The three faces were lost in the foam; the three sets of lips smacked in unison; and the world might have wagged as it would for these three jolly topers but for a woman's voice, calling sharply from the kitchen: "Jenkins, love!" "Body o' me!" exclaimed the landlord, almost dropping his empty tankard. "Coming, coming, my dear!" and he departed hastily. The constable poked Buzzard in the ribs; Buzzard poked the constable in the ribs. "Jenkins, love!" they exclaimed in one breath as the landlord returned, much to his discomfiture; and their eyes twinkled and wrinkled as they poked fun at the taverner. "Body o' me! Thou sly dog!" said the constable, as he continued to twit him. "Whence came the saucy wench in the kitchen, landlord? A dimpled cook, eh?" The landlord's face grew serious with offended dignity as he attempted to explain. "'Tis my wife, Master Constable," he said. "Marry, the new one?" inquired Swallow. "'Tis not the old one, Master Swallow," replied the old hypocrite, wiping away a forced tear. "Poor soul, she's gone, I know not where." "I' faith, I trow she's still cooking, landlord," consolingly replied the constable, with tearful mien, pointing slyly downward for the benefit of Buzzard and steadying himself with difficulty on the cask. "Bless Matilde," said the landlord as he wiped his eyes again, "I had a hard time to fill her place." "Yea, truly," chuckled Swallow in Buzzard's ear, between draughts, "three long months from grave to altar." "A good soul, a good soul, Master Swallow," continued the landlord, with the appearance of deep affliction. "And a better cook, landlord," said Swallow, sadly. "Odsbud, she knew a gooseberry tart. Patch your old wife's soul to your new wife's face, and you'll be a happy man, landlord. Here's a drop to her." "Thank ye, Master Constable," replied the landlord, much affected. He looked well to the filling of the flagon in his hand, again wiped a tear from his eye and took a deep draught to the pledge of "The old one!" Swallow, with equal reverence, and with some diplomacy, placed his flagon to his lips with the pledge of "The new one!" Buzzard, who had not been heard from for some time, roused sufficiently to realize the situation, and broke out noisily on his part with "The next one!" A startled expression pervaded the landlord's face as he realized the meaning of Buzzard's words. He glanced woefully toward the kitchen-door, lest the new wife might have overheard. "Peace, Buzzard!" Swallow hastened to command, reprovingly. "Would ye raise a man's dead wife? Learn discretion from thy elders, an thou hop'st to be a married man." "Marry, I do not hope," declared Buzzard, striking the table with his clenched hand. He had no time for matrimony while the cups were overflowing. There was a quick, imperative knock at the door. The constable, Buzzard and the landlord, all started up in confusion and fear. "Thieves," stammered Swallow, faintly, from behind the cask, from which he had dismounted at the first sign of danger. "They are making off with thy tit-bit-of-a-wife, landlord." "Be there thieves in the neighbourhood, Master Constable?" whispered the landlord, in consternation. "Why should his Majesty's constable be here else?" said Swallow, reaching for a pike, which trembled in his hand as if he had the ague. "The country about's o'er-run with them; and I warrant 'tis thy new wife's blue eyes they are after." He steadied himself with the pike and took a deep draught of ale to steady his courage as well. Buzzard started to crawl beneath the table, but the wary constable caught him by his belt and made a shield for the nonce of his trembling body. The landlord's eyes bulged from their sockets as if a spirit from the nether regions had confronted him. The corners of his mouth, which ascended in harmony with his moon-face, twitched nervously. "Mercy me, sayest thou so?" he asked. [Illustration: MISTRESS NELL FINDS HAPPINESS.] "And in thine ear," continued Swallow, consolingly, "and if thou see'st Old Rowley within a ten league, put thy new huswife's face under lock and key and Constable Swallow on the door to guard thy treasure." It was not quite clear, however, what the constable meant; for "Old Rowley" was the name of the King's favourite racehorse, of Newmarket fame, and had also come to be the nickname of the King himself. Charles assumed it good-naturedly. Assuredly, neither might be expected as a visitor to Ye Blue Boar. There came a more spirited knock at the door. The constable sought a niche in the fireplace, whence he endeavoured to exclude Buzzard, who was loath to be excluded. "Pass the Dutch-courage, good landlord," entreated Swallow, in a hoarse whisper. The landlord started boldly toward the door, but his courage failed him. "Go thou, Master Constable," he exclaimed. "Go thou thyself," wisely commanded Swallow, with the appearance of much bravery, though one eye twitched nervously in the direction of the kitchen-door in the rear, as a possible means of exit. "There's no need of his Majesty's constable till the battery be complete. There must be an action and intent, saith the law." "Old Rowley!" muttered the landlord, fearfully. "Good Master Constable--" he pleaded. His face, which was usually like a roast of beef, grew livid with fear. Swallow, however, gave him no encouragement, and the landlord once more started for the door. On the way his eye lighted on a full cask which was propped up in the corner. Instinct was strong in him, even in death. It had been tapped, and it would be unsafe to leave it even for an instant within reach of such guests. He stopped and quickly replaced the spigot with a plug. There was a third knock at the door--louder than before. "Anon, anon!" he called, hastily turning and catching up the half-filled flagon from the table. He disappeared in the entry-way. The brave representatives of the King's law craned their necks, but they could hear nothing. As the silence continued, courage was gradually restored to them; and, with the return of courage, came the desire for further drink. Swallow again seized his pike and staggered toward the entry-way to impress his companion with his bravery. Buzzard caught the spirit of the action. "Marry, I'd be a constable, too, an it were to sit by the fire and guard a pretty wench," he said. His face glowed in anticipation of such happiness as he glanced through the half-open door to the kitchen, where the landlord's wife reigned. "Egad, thou a constable!" ejaculated Swallow, contemptuously, throwing a withering glance in the direction of his comrade. "Thou ignoramamus! Old Rowley wants naught but brave men and sober men like me to guard the law. Thou art a drunken Roundhead. One of Old Noll's vile ruffians. I can tell it by the wart on thy nose, knave." "Nay, Master Constable," explained Buzzard, with an injured look at the mention of the wart, "it will soon away. Mother says, when I was a rosy babe, Master Wart was all in all; now I'm a man, Master Nose is crowding Neighbour Wart." Swallow put his hands on his knees and laughed deeply. He contemplated the nose and person of his companion with a curious air and grew mellow with patronage. "Thy fool's pate is not so dull," he said, half aloud, as he lighted a long pipe and puffed violently. "Thy wit would crack a quarter-staff. 'Sbud, would'st be my _posse?_ This was, indeed, a concession on the part of the constable, who was over-weighted with the dignity of the law which he upheld. "Would'st be at my command," he continued, "to execute the King's _Statu quos_ on rogues?" "Marry, Constable Buzzard!" exclaimed the toper, gleefully. "Nay, and I would!" "Marry, 'Constable' Buzzard!" replied Swallow, with tremendous indignation at the assumption of the fellow. "Nay, and thou would'st not, ass! By my patron saint--" As the constable spoke, Buzzard's eye, with a leer, lighted on the cask in the corner. He bethought him that it had a vent-hole even though the landlord had removed the spigot. He tiptoed unsteadily across the room, and proceeded with much difficulty to insert a straw in the small opening. He had thus already added materially to his maudlin condition, before Swallow discovered, with consternation and anger, the temporary advantage which the newly appointed _posse_ had secured. The cunning constable held carefully on to his tongue, however. He quietly produced a knife and staggered in his turn to the cask, unobserved by the unsuspecting Buzzard, whose eyes were tightly closed in the realization of a dream of his highest earthly bliss. In an instant, the straw was clipped mid-way and the constable was enjoying the contents of the cask through the lower half, while Buzzard slowly awakened to the fact that his dream of bliss had vanished and that he was sucking a bit of straw which yielded naught. "Here, knave," commanded Swallow, between breaths, pushing the other roughly aside, "thou hast had enough for a _posse_. Fill my mug, thou ignoranshibus." Buzzard staggered toward the table to perform the bidding. "The flagon's empty, Master Constable," he replied, and forthwith loudly called out, "Landlord! Landlord!" The constable dropped his straw and raised himself with difficulty to his full height, one hand firmly resting on the cask. "Silence, fool of a _posse_" he commanded, when he had poised himself; "look ye, I have other eggs on the spit. To thy knee, sirrah; to thy knee, knave!" Buzzard with difficulty and with many groans unsuspectingly obeyed the command. Swallow lifted the cask which not long since he had been riding and which had not as yet been tapped upon the shoulder of his kneeling companion. There was another groan. "'Tis too heavy, good Master Constable," cried Buzzard, in sore distress. "Thou clodhopper'" yelled Swallow, unsympathetically. "An thou cannot master a cask of wine, thou wilt never master the King's law. To the kitchen with thee; and keep thy eyes shut, thou knave of a _posse_." The constable made a dive for his pike and lantern, and enforced his authority by punctuating his remarks with jabs of the pike from behind at his powerless friend, who could scarce keep his legs under the weight of the cask. As Buzzard tottered through the kitchen-door and made his exit, the constable, finding his orders faithfully obeyed, steadied himself with the pike to secure a good start; and then, with long staggering strides, he himself made his way after the _posse_, singing loudly to his heart's content: _"Good store of good claret supplies everything And the man that is drunk is as great as a king."_ CHAPTER IX _Three chickens!_ The door opened quickly, and in came King Charles; but who would have known him? The royal monarch had assumed the mien and garb of a ragged cavalier. His eyes swept the inn quickly and approvingly. He turned upon the landlord, who followed him with dubious glances. "Cook the chickens to a turn; and, mark you, have the turbot and sauce hot, and plenty of wine," he said. "Look to't; the vintage I named, Master Landlord. I know the bouquet and sparkle and the ripple o'er the palate." "Who is to pay for all this, sir?" asked the landlord, aghast at the order. "Insolent!" replied Charles. "I command it, sirrah." "Pardon, sir," humbly suggested the landlord; "guineas, and not words, command here." "Odso!" muttered the King, remembering his disguise. "My temper will reveal me. Never fear, landlord," he boasted loudly. "You shall be paid, amply paid. I will pledge myself you shall be paid." "Pardon, sir," falteringly repeated the landlord, rubbing his hands together graciously; "but the order is a costly one and you--" "Do not look flourishing?" said Charles, as he laughingly finished the sentence, glancing somewhat dubiously himself at his own dress. "Never judge a man by his rags. Plague on't, though; I would not become my own creditor upon inspection. Take courage, good Master Landlord; England's debt is in my pocket." "How many to supper, sir?" asked the landlord, fearful lest he might offend. "Two! Two! Only two!" decisively exclaimed Charles. "A man is an extravagant fool who dines more. The third is expensive and in the way. Eh, landlord?" The King winked gaily at the landlord, who grinned in response and dropped his eyes more respectfully. "Two, sir," acquiesced the landlord. "Aye, mine host, thou art favoured beyond thy kind," laughed Charles, knowingly, as he dwelt upon the joys of a feast incognito alone with Nell. "A belated goddess would sup at thy hostelry." The landlord's eyes grew big with astonishment. "I will return. Obey her every wish, dost hear, her every wish, and leave the bill religiously to me." Charles swaggered gaily up the steps to the entry-way and out the door. The moon-face of the inn-keeper grew slowly serious. He could not reconcile the shabby, road-bespattered garments of the strange cavalier with his princely commands. "Body o' me!" he muttered, lighting one by one the candles in the room, till the rafters fairly glowed in expectation of the feast. "Roundhead-beggar, on my life! Turbot and capons and the best vintage! The King could not have better than this rogue. Marry, he shall have the best in the larder; but Constable Swallow shall toast his feet in the kitchen, with a mug of musty ale to make him linger." The corners of the mouth in the moon-face ascended in a chuckle. "His ragged lordship'll settle the bill very religiously," he thought, "or sleep off his swollen Roundhead behind the bars." He passed into the kitchen and gave the order for the repast. As he returned, there was a tap at the door; and he hastened to the window. "Bless me, a petticoat!" he cried. "Well, he's told the truth for once. She's veiled. Ashamed of her face or ashamed of him." He opened the door and ushered in a lady dressed in white; across her face and eyes was thrown a scarf of lace. "Not here?" questioned the new-comer, glancing eagerly about the room and peeping into every nook and corner without the asking, to the astonishment of the inn-keeper. "Not here?" she asked herself again, excitedly. "Tell me, tell me, is this Ye Blue Boar Inn?" "Yes, lady--" replied the landlord, graciously. "Good, good! Has she been here? Have you seen her?" "Who, the goddess?" asked the landlord, stupidly. "The goddess!" retorted Nell, for it was none other, with humorous irony of lip. "How can you so belie the Duchess?" She laughed merrily at the thought. There was a second knock; and the landlord again hastened to the window. "'Tis she; 'tis she!" exclaimed Nell, excitedly. "Haste ye, man; I am in waiting! What has she on? How is she dressed?" "Body o' me!" exclaimed the landlord, in awe, as he craned his neck at the sash. "'Tis a lady of quality." "Bad quality," ejaculated Nell. "She has come in a chair of silver," cried the landlord. "My chair shall be of beaten gold, then," thought Nell, with a twinkle of the eye. "Charles, you must raise the taxes." "Mercy me, the great lady's coming in," continued the landlord, beside himself in his excitement. "She shall be welcome, most welcome, landlord," observed Nell promptly. "Body o' me! What shall I say?" asked the landlord, in trembling accents. "Faith and troth," replied Nell, coming to his rescue, "I will do the parlez-vousing with her ladyship. Haste thee, thou grinning fat man." She glided quickly into a corner of the old fireplace, where she could not be observed so readily. The Duchess of Portsmouth entered, with all the haughty grandeur of a queen. She glanced about contemptuously, and her lip could be seen to curl, even through the veil which partially hid her face. "This _bourgeois_ place," she said, "to sup with the King! It cannot be! _Garçon!_" "What a voice," reflected Nell, in her hiding-place, "in which to sigh, 'I love you.'" "Barbarous place!" exclaimed Portsmouth. "His Majesty must have lost his wits." She smiled complacently, however, as she reflected that the King might consent even within these walls and that his sign-manual, if so secured, would be as binding as if given in a palace. "_Garçon!_" again she called, irritably. Nell was meanwhile inspecting her rival from top to toe. Nothing escaped her quick eye. "I'll wager her complexion needs a veil," she muttered, with vixenish glee. "That gown is an insult to her native France." "_Garçon_; answer me," commanded Portsmouth, fretfully. The landlord had danced about her grace in such anxiety to please that he had displeased. He had not learned the courtier's art of being ever present, yet never in the way. "Yes, your ladyship," he stupidly repeated again and again. "What would your ladyship?" "Did a prince leave commands for supper?" she asked, impatiently. "No, your ladyship," he replied, obsequiously. "A ragged rogue ordered a banquet and then ran away, your ladyship." "How, sirrah?" she questioned, angrily, though the poor landlord had meant no discourtesy. "If he knew his guests, he would ne'er return," softly laughed Nell. "_Parbleu_," continued Portsmouth, in her French, impatient way, now quite incensed by the stupidity of the landlord, "a cavalier would meet me at Ye Blue Boar Inn; so said the messenger." She suddenly caught sight of Nell, whose biting curiosity had led her from her hiding-place. "This is not the rendezvous," she reflected quickly. "We were to sup alone." The landlord still bowed and still uttered the meaningless phrase: "Yes, your ladyship." The Duchess was at the end of her patience. "_Mon Dieu_," she exclaimed, "do you know nothing, sirrah?" The moon-face beamed. The head bowed and bowed and bowed; the hands were rubbed together graciously. "Good lack, I know not; a supper for a king was ordered by a ragged Roundhead," he replied. "Here are two petticoats, your ladyship. When I know which petticoat is which petticoat, your ladyship, I will serve the dinner." The tavern-keeper sidled toward the kitchen-door. As he went out, he muttered, judiciously low: "I wouldn't give a ha'penny for the choice." "Beggar!" snapped Portsmouth. "Musty place, musty furniture, musty _garçon_, musty everything!" She stood aloof in the centre of the room as if fearful lest she might be contaminated by her surroundings. Nell approached her respectfully. "You may like it better after supper, madame," she suggested, mildly. "A good spread, sparkling wine and most congenial company have cast a halo o'er more time-begrimed rafters than these." "Who are you, madame?" inquired the Duchess, haughtily. "A fellow-passenger on the earth," gently replied Nell, "and a lover of good company, and--some wine." "Yes?" said the Duchess, in a way that only a woman can ask and answer a question with a "yes" and with a look such as only a woman can give another woman when she asks and answers that little question with a "yes." There was a moment's pause. The Duchess continued: "Perhaps you have seen the cavalier I await." "Marry, not I," replied Nell, promptly; and she bethought her that she had kept a pretty sharp lookout for him, too. "Is this a proper place for a lady to visit?" pompously inquired the Duchess. "You raise the first doubt," said Nell quickly. "Madame!" exclaimed Portsmouth, interrupting her, with fiery indignation. "I say, you are the first to question the propriety of the place," explained Nell, apologetically, though she delighted inwardly at the intended shot which she had given her grace. "I came by appointment," continued the Duchess; "but it seems I was misled. _Garçon_, my chair!" The Duchess made a move toward the door, but Nell's words stopped her. "Be patient, Duchess! He is too gallant to desert you." "She knows me!" thought Portsmouth. She turned sharply upon the stranger. "I have not the pleasure of your acquaintance, madame." "Such is my loss, not yours," replied Nell, suavely. "Remove your veil," commanded the Duchess; and her eyes flashed through her own. "I dare not before the beauty of Versailles," continued Nell, sweetly. "Remove yours first. Then I may take mine off unseen." "Do I know you?" suspiciously inquired Portsmouth. "I fear not," said Nell, meekly, and she courtesied low. "I am but an humble player--called Nell Gwyn." The Duchess raised herself to her full height. "Nell Gwyn!" she hissed, and she fairly tore off her veil. "Your grace's most humble servant," said Nell, again courtesying low and gracefully removing her veil. "This is a trap," exclaimed the Duchess, as she realized the situation. "Heaven bless the brain that set it then," sweetly suggested Nell. "Your own, minx," snapped Portsmouth. "I'll not look at the hussy!" she muttered. She crossed the room and seated herself upon the bench, back to Nell. "Your grace would be more kind if you knew my joy at seeing you." "And why?" asked the Duchess, ironically. "I would emulate your warmth and amiability," tenderly responded Nell. "Yes?" said Portsmouth; but how much again there was in her little "yes," accented as it was with a French shrug. "I adore a beautiful woman," continued Nell, "especially when I know her to be--" "A successful rival?" triumphantly asked the Duchess. "A rival!" exclaimed Nell, in well-feigned astonishment, still toying with the Duchess's temper. "Is the poor actress so honoured in a duchess's thought? Your grace is generous." If all the angels had united, they could not have made her speech more sweet or her manner more enticing. "I presumed you might conceive it so," replied Portsmouth, with mocking, condescending mien. Nell approached her timidly and spoke softly, lovingly, subserviently. "A rival to the great Duchess of Portsmouth!" she said. "Perish the thought! It is with trepidation I look upon your glorious face, madame; a figure that would tempt St. Anthony; a foot so small it makes us swear the gods have lent invisible wings to waft you to your conquest. Nay, do not turn your rosy lip in scorn; I am in earnest, so in earnest, that, were I but a man, I would bow me down your constant slave--unless perchance you should grow fat." The turn was delicious: Nell's face was a study; and so was Portsmouth's. The Duchess sprang to her feet, realizing fully for the first time that she had been trapped and trifled with. "Hussy! Beware your own lacings," she angrily exclaimed, turning now full face upon her adversary. Nell was leaning against the table across the room, quietly observing Portsmouth upon the word-wrack. Her whole manner had changed. She watched with evident delight the play of discomfiture, mingled with contempt, upon the beautiful Duchess's face. "_Me_ fat!" she derisively laughed. "Be sure I shall never grow too much so. And have not the stars said I shall ne'er grow old?" "Your stars are falser than yourself," tartly snapped the Duchess. "Mayhap," said Nell, still gleeful; "but mark you this truth: I shall reign queen of Love and Laughter while I live, and die with the first wrinkle." She was interrupted by his Majesty, who, unsuspecting, swaggered into the room in buoyant spirits. "The King!" exclaimed Nell, as she slyly glanced over her shoulder. The King looked at one woman and then at the other in dismay and horror. "Scylla and Charybdis!" he muttered, nervously, glancing about for means of escape. "All my patron-saints protect me!" Nell was by his side in an instant. "Good even' to your Majesty," she roguishly exclaimed. "How can I ever thank you, Sire, for inviting the Duchess to sup with me! I have been eager to meet her ladyship." "Ods-pitikins," he thought, "a loophole for me." "Well,--you see--" he said, "a little surprise, Nelly,--a little surprise--for me." The last two words were not audible to his hearers. He looked at the beautiful rivals an instant, then ventured, "I hoped to be in time to introduce you, ladies." "Oh, your Majesty," asserted Nell, consolingly, "we are already quite well acquainted. I knew her grace through her veil." "No doubt on't," observed the King, knowingly. "Yes, Sire," said the Duchess, haughtily, casting a frigid glance at Nell, "I warrant we understand each other perfectly." "Better and better," said Charles, with a sickly laugh. His Majesty saw rocks and shoals ahead, and his wits could find no channel of escape. He turned in dire distress upon Nell, who stood aloof. She looked up into his face with the innocence of a babe in every feature. "Minx, this is your work!" he whispered. "Yes, Sire!" she answered, mock-reprovingly, bending quite to the floor as she courtesied low. "'Yes, Sire.' Baggage!" he exclaimed good-naturedly despite himself. As he turned away, praying Heaven to see him out of the difficulty, he observed the landlord, who had just entered with bread and cups, muttering some dubious invocations to himself. He clutched at this piece of human stupidity--like a drowning man clutching at a straw: "Ah, landlord, bring in what we live for; and haste ye, sirrah. The wine! The wine!" "It is ready, sir," obsequiously replied the landlord, who had just sense enough in his dull cranium to reflect also, by way of complement, "So is Constable Swallow." "Good news, good news!" cried Charles; and he tossed his plumed hat upon the sideboard, preparatory to the feast. "D'ye hear, my fair and loving friends? Come, it is impolite to keep the capons waiting. My arms; my arms!" The King stepped gallantly between the ladies, making a bold play for peace. The Duchess took one arm formally. Nell seized the remaining arm and almost hugged his Majesty, nestling her head affectionately against his shoulder. Charles observed the decorum of due dignity. He was impartial to a fault; for he realized that there only lay his salvation. The phalanx approached the feast in solemn march. The King tossed his head proudly and observed: "Who would not play the thorn with two such buds to blush on either side?" There was a halt. The Duchess looked coldly at the table, then coldly at the King, then more coldly at Nell. The King looked at each inquiringly. "I thought your Majesty ordered supper for three," she said. "It is set for two." "Odsfish, for two!" cried Charles, glancing, anxiously, for the first time at the collation. Nell had taken her place at the feast, regardless of formality. She was looking out for herself, irrespective of King or Duchess. She believed that a dinner, like the grave, renders all equal. "Egad!" she exclaimed, as she dwelt upon the force of the Duchess's observation. "Our host is teaching us the virtues of economy." The unsuspecting landlord re-entered at this moment, wine in hand, which he proceeded to place upon the table. "What do you mean, knave, by this treachery!" almost shrieked the King at sight of him. "Another plate, dost hear; another plate, dog!" "Bless me," explained the landlord, in confusion, "you said supper for two, sir; that a man was a fool who dined more; that the third was expensive and in the way." "Villain!" cried Charles, in a hopeless effort to suppress the fellow, "I said two-two--beside myself. I never count myself in the presence of these ladies." The landlord beat a hasty retreat. The Duchess smiled a chilling smile, and asked complacently: "Which one of us did you expect, Sire?" "Yes, which did you expect, Sire?" laughed Nell. "Oh, my head," groaned Charles; "well, well,--you see--Duchess, the matter lies in this wise--" "Let me help your Majesty," generously interrupted Nell. "Her ladyship is ill at figures. You see, Charles and I are one, and you make two, Duchess." "I spoke to the King," haughtily replied the Duchess, not deigning to glance at Nell. The King placed his hands upon his forehead in bewilderment. "This is a question for the Prime Minister and sages of the realm in council." "There are but two chairs, Sire," continued Portsmouth, coldly. "Two chairs!" exclaimed the Merry Monarch, aghast, as he saw the breach hopelessly widening. "I am lost." "That is serious, Sire," said Nell, sadly; and then her eye twinkled as she suggested, "but perhaps we might make out with one, for the Duchess's sake. I am so little." She turned her head and laughed gaily, while she watched the Duchess's face out of the corner of her eye. "'Sheart," sighed the King, "I have construed grave controversies of state in my time, but ne'er drew the line yet betwixt black eyes and blue, brunette and blonde, when both were present. Another chair, landlord! Come, my sweethearts; eat, drink and forget." The King threw himself carelessly into a chair in the hope that, in meat and drink, he might find peace. "Aye," acquiesced Nell, who was already at work, irrespective of ceremony, "eat, drink and forget! I prefer to quarrel after supper." "I do not," said the Duchess, who still stood indignant in the centre of the room. Nell could scarce speak, for her mouthful; but she replied gaily, with a French shrug, in imitation of the Duchess: "Oh, very well! I have a solution. Let's play sphinx, Sire." Charles looked up hopefully. "Anything for peace," he exclaimed. "How is't?" "Why," explained Nell, with the philosophical air of a learned doctor, "some years before you and I thought much about the ways and means of this wicked world, your Majesty, the Sphinx spent her leisure asking people riddles; and if they could not answer, she ate them alive. Give me some of that turbot. Don't stand on ceremony, Sire; for the Duchess is waiting." The King hastened to refill Nell's plate. "Thank you," laughed the vixen; "that will do for now. Let the Duchess propound a riddle from the depths of her subtle brain; and if I do not fathom it upon the instant, Sire, 't is the Duchess's--not Nell's--evening with the King." "Odsfish, a great stake!" cried Charles. He arose with a serio-comic air, much pleased at the turn things were taking. "Don't be too confident, madame," ironically suggested the Duchess; "you are cleverer in making riddles than in solving them." As she spoke, the room was suddenly filled with savoury odour. The moon-faced landlord had again appeared, flourishing a platter containing two finely roasted chickens. His face glowed with pride and ale. "The court's famished," exclaimed Charles, as he greeted the inn-keeper; "proceed!" "Two capons! I have it," triumphantly thought Portsmouth, as she reflected upon a riddle she had once heard in far-off France. It could not be known in England. Nothing so clever could be known in England. She looked contemptuously at Nell, and then at the two chickens, as she propounded it. "Let your wits find then three capons on this plate." "Three chickens!" cried Charles, in wonderment, closely scrutinizing the two fowl upon the plate and then looking up inquiringly at the Duchess. "There are but two." Nell only gurgled. "Another glass, landlord, and I'll see four," she said. "Here's to you two, and to me too." She drank gaily to her toast. "That is not the answer, madame," coldly retorted the Duchess. "Are we come to blows over two innocent chickens?" asked Charles, somewhat concerned still for the outcome. "Bring on your witnesses." "This is one chicken, your Majesty," declared the Duchess. "Another's two; and two and one make three." With much formality and something of the air of a conjurer, she counted the first chicken and the second chicken and then recounted the first chicken, in such a way as to make it appear that there were three birds in all. The King, who was ill at figures, like all true spendthrifts, sat confused by her speech. Nell laughed again. The landlord, who was in and out, stopped long enough to enter upon his bill, in rambling characters, "3 chickens." This was all his dull ear had comprehended. He then piously proceeded on his way. "Gadso!" exclaimed the King, woefully. "It is too much for me." "Pooh, pooh, 'tis too simple for you, Sire," laughed Nell. "I solved it when a child. Here is my bird; and here is your bird; and our dearest Duchess shall sup on her third bird!" Nell quickly spitted one chicken upon a huge fork and so removed it to her own plate. The second chicken, she likewise conveyed to his Majesty's. Then, with all the politeness which she only could summon, she bowed low and offered the empty platter to the Duchess. Portsmouth struck it to the board angrily with her gloved hand and steadied herself against the table. "Hussy!" she hissed, and forthwith pretended to grow faint. Charles was at her elbow in an instant, supporting her. "Oh,--Sire, I--" she continued, in her efforts to speak. "What is it?" cried Charles, seriously, endeavouring to assist her. "You are pale, Louise." "I am faint," replied she, with much difficulty. "Pardon my longer audience, Sire; I am not well. _Garçon_, my chair. Assist me to the door." The fat landlord made a hasty exit, for him, toward the street, in his desire to help the great lady. Charles supported her to the threshold. "Call a leech, Sire," cried Nell after them, with mock sympathy. "Her grace has choked on a chicken-bone." "Be still, wench," commanded the King. "Do not leave us, Louise; it breaks the sport." "Nay," pleaded Nell also, "do not go because of this little merry-making, Duchess. I desire we may become better friends." Her voice revived the Duchess. "_Sans doute_, we shall, madame," Portsmouth replied, coldly. "_À mon bal! Pas adieu, mais au revoir_." The great Duchess courtesied low, kissed the King's hand, arose to her full height and, with an eye-shot at Nell, took her departure. CHAPTER X _Arrest him yourself!_ The King stood at the door, thoughtfully reflecting on the temper of the departing Duchess. She was a maid of honour and, more than that, an emissary from his brother Louis of France. Gossip said he loved her, but it was not true, though he liked her company exceeding well when the mood suited. He regretted only the evening's incident, with the harsher feeling it was sure to engender. Nell stood by the fireplace, muttering French phrases in humorous imitation of her grace. Observing the King's preoccupation, she tossed a _serviette_ merrily at his head. This brought his Majesty to himself again. He turned, and laughed as he saw her; for his brain and heart delighted in her merry-making. He loved her. "What means this vile French?" she asked, with delicious suggestion of the shrug, accent and manner of her vanquished rival. "The Duchess means," explained the King, "that she gives a royal ball--" "And invites me?" broke in Nell, quickly, placing her elbows upon a cask and looking over it impishly at Charles. "And invites you _not_" said the King, "and so outwits you." "By her porters' wits and not her own," retorted Nell. She threw herself into a chair and became oblivious for the moment of her surroundings. "The French hussy! So she gives a ball?" she thought. "Well, well, I'll be there! I'll teach her much. Oh, I'll be pretty, too, aye, very pretty. No fear yet of rivalry or harm for England." Charles watched her amusedly, earnestly, lovingly. The vixen had fallen unconsciously into imitating again the Duchess's foreign ways, as an accompaniment even for her thoughts. "_Sans doute_, we shall, _madame_" Nell muttered audibly, with much gesticulating and a mocking accent. "_À mon bal! Pas adieu, mais au revoir_." The King came closer. "Are you ill," he asked, "that you do mutter so and wildly act?" "I was only thinking that, if I were a man," she said, turning toward him playfully, "I would love your Duchess to devotion. Her wit is so original, her repartee so sturdy. Your Majesty's taste in horses--and some women--is excellent." She crossed the room gaily and threw herself laughing upon the bench. The King followed her. "Heaven help the being, naughty Nell," he said, "who offends thy merry tongue; but I love thee for it." He sat down beside her in earnest adoration, then caught her lovingly in his arms. "Love me?" sighed Nell, scarce mindful of the embrace. "Ah, Sire, I am but a plaything for the King at best, a caprice, a fancy--naught else." "Nay, sweet," said Charles, "you have not read this heart." "I have read it too deeply," replied Nell, with much meaning in her voice. "It is this one to-day, that one to-morrow, with King Charles. Ah, Sire, your love for the poor player-girl is summed up in three little words: 'I amuse you!'" "Amuse me!" exclaimed Charles, thoughtfully. "Hark ye, Nell! States may marry us; they cannot make us love. Ye Gods, the humblest peasant in my realm is monarch of a heart of his own choice. Would I were such a king!" "What buxom country lass," asked Nell, sadly but wistfully, "teaches your fancy to follow the plough, my truant master?" "You forget: I too," continued Charles, "have been an outcast, like Orange Nell, seeking a crust and bed." He arose and turned away sadly to suppress his emotion. He was not the King of England now: he was a man who had suffered; he was a man among men. "Forgive me, Sire," said Nell, tenderly, as a woman only can speak, "if I recall unhappy times." "Unhappy!" echoed Charles, while Fancy toyed with Recollection. "Nell, in those dark days, I learned to read the human heart. God taught me then the distinction 'twixt friend and enemy. When a misled rabble had dethroned my father, girl, and murdered him before our palace gate, and bequeathed the glorious arts and progressive sciences to religious bigots and fanatics, to trample under foot and burn--when, if a little bird sang overjoyously, they cut out his tongue for daring to be merry--in some lonely home by some stranger's hearth, a banished prince, called Charles Stuart, oft found an asylum of plenty and repose; and in your eyes, my Nell, I read the self-same, loyal, English heart." There was all the sadness of great music in his speech. Nell fell upon her knee, and kissed his hand, reverently. "My King!" she said; and her voice trembled with passionate love. He raised her tenderly and kissed her upon the lips. "My queen," he said; and his voice too trembled with passionate love. "And Milton says that Paradise is lost," whispered Nell. Her head rested on the King's shoulder. She looked up--the picture of perfect happiness--into his eyes. "Not while Nell loves Charles," he said. "And Charles remembers Nell," her voice answered, softly. Meanwhile, the rotund landlord had entered unobserved; and a contrast he made, indeed, to the endearing words of the lovers as at this instant he unceremoniously burst forth in guttural accents with: "The bill! The bill for supper, sir!" Nell looked at the King and the King looked at Nell; then both looked at the landlord. The lovers' sense of humour was boundless. That was their first tie; the second, their hearts. "The bill!" repeated Nell, smothering a laugh. "Yes, we were just speaking of the bill." "How opportune!" exclaimed Charles, taking the cue. "We feared you would forget it, sirrah." "See that it is right," ejaculated Nell. The King glanced at the bill indifferently, but still could not fail to see "3 chickens" in unschooled hand. His eyes twinkled and he glanced at the landlord, but the latter avoided his look with a pretence of innocence. [Illustration: THE DECEPTION.] "Gad," said Charles, with a swagger, "what are a few extra shillings to Parliament? Here, my man." He placed a hand in a pocket, but found it empty. "No; it is in the other pocket." He placed his hand in another, only to find it also empty. Then he went through the remaining pockets, one by one, turning them each out for inspection--his face assuming an air of mirthful hopelessness as he proceeded. He had changed his garb for a merry lark, but had neglected to change his purse. "Devil on't, I--have--forgotten--Odsfish, where is my treasurer?" he exclaimed at last. "Your treasurer!" shrieked the landlord, who had watched Charles's search, with twitching eyes. "Want your treasurer, do ye? Constable Swallow'll find him for ye. Constable Swallow! I knew you were a rascal, by your face." Charles laughed. This exasperated the landlord still further. He began to flutter about the room aimlessly, bill in hand. He presented it to Charles and he presented it to Nell, who would have none of it; while at intervals he called loudly for the constable. "Peace, my man," entreated Nell; "be still for mercy's sake." "Good lack, my lady," pleaded the landlord, in despair, "good lack, but you would not see a poor man robbed by a vagabond, would ye? Constable Swallow!" The situation was growing serious indeed. The King was mirthful still, but Nell was fearful. "Nell, have you no money to stop this heathen's mouth?" he finally ejaculated, as he caught up his bonnet and tossed it jauntily upon his head. "Not a farthing," replied she, sharply. "I was invited to sup, not pay the bill." "If the King knew this rascal," yelled the landlord at the top of his voice, pointing to Charles, "he would be behind the bars long ago." This was too much for his Majesty, who broke into the merriest of laughs. "Verily, I believe you," he admitted. Then he fell to laughing again, almost rolling off the bench in his glee. "Master Constable," wildly repeated the landlord, at the kitchen-door. "Let my new wife alone; they are making off with the house." Nell was filled with consternation. "He'll raise the neighbourhood, Sire," she whispered to Charles. "Have you no money to stop this heathen's mouth?" "Not even holes in my pockets," calmly replied the Merry Monarch. "Odsfish, what company am I got into!" sighed Nell. She ran to the landlord and seized his arm in her endeavour to quiet him. The landlord, however, was beside himself. He stood at the kitchen-door gesticulating ferociously and still shouting at the top of his voice: "Constable Swallow! Help, help; thieves; Constable Swallow!" Swallow staggered into the room with all his dignity aboard. Tankard in hand, he made a dive for the table, and catching it firmly, surveyed the scene. Nell turned to her lover for protection. "Murder, hic!" ejaculated the constable. "Thieves! What's the row?--Hic!" "Arrest this blackguard," commanded the landlord, nervously, "this perfiler of honest men." "Arrest!--You drunken idiot!" indignantly exclaimed Charles; and his sword cut the air before the constable's eyes. Nell seized his arm. Her woman's intuition showed her the better course. "You will raise a nest of them," she whispered. "You need your wits, Sire; not your sword." "Nay; come on, I say," cried Charles, fearlessly. "We'll see what his Majesty's constables are made of." "You rogue--_Posse!_" exclaimed Swallow, starting boldly for the King, then making a brilliant retreat, calling loudly for help, as the rapier tickled him in the ribs. "You ruffian--_Posse!_" he continued to call, alternately, first to one and then to the other; for his fear paralyzed all but his tongue. "You outlaw--_Posse commi-ti-titous_--hic!" Buzzard also now entered from his warm nest in the kitchen, so intoxicated that he vented his enthusiasm in song, which in this case seemed apt: _"The man that is drunk is as great as a king."_ "Another champion of the King's law!" ejaculated Charles, not without a shadow of contempt in his voice, once more assuming an attitude of defence. "Oh, Charles!" pleaded Nell, again catching his arm. "_Posse_, arrest that vagabond," commanded the constable, from a point of safety behind the table. "Aye, aye, sir," replied the obedient Buzzard. "On what charge--hic?" "He's a law-breaker and a robber!" yelled the watchful landlord. "He called the law a drunken idiot. Hic--hic!" woefully wailed Swallow. "Odsbud, that's treason! Arrest him, _posse_--hic!" "Knave, I arrest--hic!" asserted Buzzard. The _posse_ started boldly enough for his game, but was suddenly brought to a stand-still in his reeling course by the sharp point of the rapier playing about his legs. He made several indignant efforts to overcome the obstacle. The point of the blade was none too gentle with him, even as he beat a retreat; and his enthusiasm waned. "Arrest him yourself--hic!" he exclaimed. Swallow's face grew red with rage. To have his orders disobeyed fired him with much more indignation of soul than the escape of the ruffian, who was simply defrauding the landlord of a dinner. He turned hotly upon the insubordinate _posse_, crying: "I'll arrest you, you Buzzard--hic!" "I'll arrest you, you Swallow--hic!" with equal dignity retorted Buzzard. "I'm his Majesty's constable--hic!" hissed Swallow, from lips charged with air, bellows-like. "I'm his Majesty's _posse_--hic!" hissed Buzzard in reply. The two drunken representatives of the law seized each other angrily. The landlord, in despair, endeavoured hopelessly to separate them. "A wrangle of the generals," laughed Charles. "Now is our time." He looked about quickly for an exit. "Body o' me! The vagabonds'll escape," shouted the landlord. "Fly, fly!" said Nell. "This way, Charles." She ran hastily toward the steps leading to the entry-way; the King assisted her. "Stop, thief! Stop, thief!" screamed the landlord. "The bill! The bill!" "Send it to the Duchess!" replied Nell, gaily, as she and the Merry Monarch darted into the night. The landlord turned in despair, to find the drunken champions of the King's law in a struggling heap upon the floor. He raised his foot and took out vengeance where vengeance could be found. CHAPTER XI _In the field, men; at court, women!_ It was the evening of Portsmouth's long-awaited _bal masqué_. Music filled her palace with rhythmic sound. In the gardens, its mellowing strains died away among the shrubs and over-hanging boughs. In every nook and corner wandered at will the nobility--the richest--the greatest--in the land. None entertain like the French; and the Duchess had, indeed, exhausted French art in turning the grand old place into a land of ravishing enchantment, with its many lights, its flowers, its works of art. Her abode was truly an enlivening scene, with its variety of maskers, bright dominoes and vizards. The King was there and took a merry part in all the sport, although, beneath his swaggering abandon, there lurked a vein of sadness. He laughed heartily, he danced gaily, he jested with one and all; but his manner was assumed. The shrewdest woman's eye could not have seen it; though she might have felt it. Brother James too enjoyed the dance, despite his piety; and Buckingham, Rochester and a score of courtiers beloved by the King entered mirthfully into the scene, applauding the Duchess's entertainment heartily. As the evening wore apace, the merry maskers grew merrier and merrier. In a drawing-room adjoining the great ball-room, a robber-band, none other than several gallants, whose identity was concealed by silken vizards, created huge amusement by endeavouring to steal a kiss from Lady Hamilton. She feigned shyness, then haughtiness, then anger; then she ran. They were after her and about her in an instant. There were cries of "A kiss!" "A kiss!" "This way!" "Make a circle or she'll escape us!" A dozen kisses so were stolen by the eager gallants before my lady broke away, stamping her foot in indignation, as she exclaimed: "Nay, I am very angry, very--" "That there were no more, wench!" laughed Buckingham. "Marry, 'tis a merry night when Portsmouth reigns. Long live the Duchess in the King's heart!" "So you may capture its fairer favourite, friend Buckingham?" suggested the King, softly; and there was no hidden meaning in his speech, for the King suspected that Buckingham's heart as well was not at Portsmouth's and Buckingham knew that the King suspected it. Buckingham was the prince of courtiers; he bowed low and, saying much without saying anything, replied respectfully: "So I may console her, Sire, that she is out-beautied by France to-night." "Out-beautied! Not bidden, thou mean'st," exclaimed the King, his thoughts roving toward Nelly's terrace. Ah, how he longed to be there! "The room is close," he fretted. "Come, gallants, to the promenade!" He was dressed in white and gold; and a princely prince he looked, indeed, as the courtiers separated for him to pass out between them. All followed save Buckingham, whom Portsmouth's eye detained. She broke into a joyous laugh as she turned from the tapestry-curtains, through which she could see his Majesty--the centre of a mirthful scene without. "What say you now, my lord?" she asked, triumphantly, of Buckingham. "I am half avenged already, and the articles half signed. The King is here despite his Madame Gwyn, and in a playful mood that may be tuned to love." Buckingham's ardour did not kindle as she hoped. "Merriment is oft but Sadness's mask, Louise," he replied, thoughtfully. "What meanest thou?" she asked, in her nervous, Gallic way, and as quickly, her mind anticipating, answered: "This trifle of the gossips that Charles advances the player's whim to found a hospital at Chelsea, for broken-down old soldiers? _Ce n'est rien!"_ She broke into a mocking laugh. "Aye!" replied Buckingham, quietly but significantly. "The orders are issued for its building and the people are cheering Nell throughout the realm." "_Ma foi!_" came from the Duchess's contemptuous lips. "And what say the rabble of Portsmouth?" "That she is Louis's pensioner sent here from France--a spy!" he answered, quickly and forcefully too. "The hawkers cry it in the streets." "Fools! Fools!" she mused. Then, making sure that no arras had ears, she continued: "Before the night is done, thou shalt hear that Luxembourg has fallen to the French--Mark!--Luxembourg! Feed the rabble on that, my lord. Heaven preserve King Louis!" The Duke started incredulously. When had Portsmouth seen the King? and by what arts had she won the royal consent? A score of questions trembled on his lips--and yet were checked before the utterance. Not an intimation before of her success had reached his ear, though he had advised with the Duchess almost daily since their accidental meeting below Nell's terrace. Indeed, in his heart, he had never believed that she would be able so to dupe the King. The shadow from the axe which fell upon Charles I. still cast its warning gloom athwart the walls of Whitehall; and, in the face of the temper of the English people and of well-known treaties, the acquiescence of Charles II. in Louis's project would be but madness. Luxembourg was the key strategetically to the Netherlands and the states beyond. Its fall meant the augmentation of the Empire of Louis, the personal ignominy of Charles! "Luxembourg!" He repeated the word cautiously. "King Charles did not consent--" "Nay," replied the Duchess, in her sweetest way, "but I knew he would; and so I sent the message in advance." "Forgery! 'Twas boldly done, Louise," cried Buckingham, in tones of admiration mixed with fear. "I knew my power, my lord," she said confidently; and her eyes glistened with womanly pride as she added: "The consent will come." Buckingham's eyes--usually so frank--fell; and, for some seconds, he stood seemingly lost in abstraction over the revelations made by the Duchess. He was, however, playing a deeper game than he appeared to play. Apparently in thoughtlessness, he began to toy with a ring which hung upon a ribbon about his neck and which till then had been cautiously concealed. "Nay, what have you there?" questioned Portsmouth. Buckingham's face assumed an expression of surprise. He pretended not to comprehend the import of her words. She pointed to the ring. He glanced at it as though he regretted it had been seen, then added carelessly, apparently to appease but really to whet the Duchess's curiosity: "Merely a ring the King gave Nell." There was more than curiosity now in Portsmouth's eyes. "I borrowed it to show it you," continued Buckingham, indifferently, then asked, with tantalizing calmness: "Is your mission quite complete?" With difficulty, the Duchess mastered herself. Without replying, she walked slowly toward the table, in troubled thought. The mask of crime revealed itself in her beautiful features, as she said, half to herself: "I have a potion I brought from France." She was of the Latin race and poison was a heritage. Buckingham caught the words not meant for him, and realized too well their sinister meaning. Poison Nell! His eyes swept the room fearfully and he shuddered. He hastened to Portsmouth's side, and in cold whispers importuned her: "For Heaven's mercy, woman, as you love yourself and me--poison is an unhealthy diet to administer in England." The Duchess turned upon him impatiently. The black lines faded slowly from her face; but they still were there, beneath the beauty-lines. "My servants have watched her house without avail," she sneered. "Your plan is useless; my plan will work." "Stay!" pleaded Buckingham, still fearful. "We can ourselves entice some adventurous spirit up Nell's terrace, then trap him. So our end is reached." "Aye," replied the Duchess, in milder mood, realizing that she had been over-hasty at least in speech, "the minx presumes to love the King, and so is honest! But of her later. The treaties! He shall sign to-night--to-night, I say." With a triumphant air, she pointed to the quills and sand upon a table in readiness for his signing. Buckingham smiled approvingly; and in his smile lurked flattery so adroit that it pleased the Duchess despite herself. "Lord Hyde, St. Albans and the rest," said he, "are here to aid the cause." "Bah!" answered Portsmouth, with a shrug. "In the field, men; at court, women! This girl has outwitted you all. I must accomplish my mission alone. Charles must be Louis's pensioner in full; England the slave of France! My fortune--_Le Grand Roi's_ regard--hang upon it." Buckingham cautioned her with a startled gesture. "Nay," smiled Portsmouth, complacently, "I may speak frankly, my lord; for your head is on the same block still with mine." "And my heart, Louise," he said, in admiration. "Back to the King! Do nothing rash. We will banish thy rival, dear hostess." He did not add, save in thought, that Nell's banishment, if left to him, would be to his own country estate. There was almost a touch of affection in the Duchess's voice as she prepared to join the King. "Leave all to me, my lord," she said, then courtesied low. "Yea, all but Nell!" reflected his lordship, as he watched her depart. "With this ring, I'll keep thee wedded to jealous interest, and so enrich my purse and power. Thou art a great woman, fair France; I half love thee myself. But thou knowest only a moiety of my purpose. The other half is Nell!" He stood absorbed in his own thoughts. The draperies at the further doorway, on which was worked in Gobelin tapestry a forest with its grand, imposing oaks, were pushed nervously aside. Jack Hart entered, mask in hand, and scanned the room with skeptic eye. "A happy meeting," mused Buckingham, reflecting upon Hart's one-time ardour for Mistress Nell and upon the possibility that that ardour, if directed by himself, might yet compromise Nell in the King's eyes and lead to the realization of his own fond dreams of greater wealth and power and, still more sweet, to the possession of his choice among all the beauties of the realm. "It is a sad hour," thought Hart, glancing at the merry dancers through the arch, "when all the world, like players, wear masks." Buckingham assumed an air of bonhomie. "Whither away, Master Hart?" he called after the player, who started perceptibly at his voice. "Let not thy fancy play truant to this gay assemblage, to mope in St. James's Park." "My lord!" exclaimed Hart, hotly. The fire, however, was gone in an instant; and he added, evidently under strong constraint: "Pardon; but we prefer to change the subject." "The drift's the same," chuckled the shrewd Buckingham; "we may turn it to advantage." He approached the player in a friendly manner. "Be not angry," he exclaimed soothingly; "for there's a rift even in the clouds of love. Brighter, man; for King Charles was seeking your wits but now." "He'd have me play court-fool for him?" asked the melancholy mime, who had in his nature somewhat of the cynicism of Jaques, without his grand imaginings of soul. "There are many off the stage, my lord, in better practice." "True, most true," acquiesced Buckingham; "I could point them out." He would have continued in this vein but beyond the door, whence Hart had just appeared, leading by a stair-way of cupids to the entrance to the palace, arose the sound of many voices in noisy altercation. "Hark ye, hark!" he exclaimed, in an alarmed tone. "What is't? Confusion in the great hallway below. We'll see to't." He had assumed a certain supervision of the palace for the night. With the player as a body-guard, he accordingly made a hasty exit. CHAPTER XII _Beau Adair is my name._ The room was not long vacant. The hostess herself returned. She was radiant. As she crossed the threshold, she glanced back proudly at the revellers, who, led by his Majesty, were turning night into day with their merry-making. She had the right, indeed, to be proud; for the evening, though scarce half spent, bespoke a complete triumph for her entertainment. This was the more gratifying too, in that she knew that there were many at court who did not wish the "imported" Duchess, as they called her, or her function well, though they always smiled sweetly at each meeting and at each parting and deigned now to feast beyond the limit of gentility upon her rich wines and collations. The _bal masqué_, however, as we have seen, was with the Duchess but a means to an end. She took from the hand of a pretty page the treaties, lately re-drawn by Bouillon, and glanced hastily over the parchments to see that her instructions from Louis were covered by their words. A smile played on her arching lips as she read and re-read and realized how near she was to victory. "'Tis Portsmouth's night to-night!" she mused. "My great mission to England is nearly ended. Dear France, I feel that I was born for thy advancement." She seated herself by the table, where the materials for writing had been placed, and further dwelt upon the outcome of the royal agreements, their contingencies and triumphs. She could write Charles Rex almost as well as the King, she thought, as her eye caught the places left for his signature. "Bouillon never fails me," she muttered. "Drawn by King Charles's consent, except perchance some trifling articles which I have had interlined for Louis's sake. We need not speak of them. It would be troublesome to Charles. A little name and seal will make these papers history." Her reflections were interrupted by the return of Buckingham, who was laughing so that he could scarcely speak. "What is 't?" she asked, petulantly. "The guard have stayed but now a gallant, Irish youth," replied he, as best he could for laughter, "who swore that he had letters to your highness. Oh, he swore, indeed; then pleaded; then threatened that he would fight them all with single hand. Of course, he won the ladies' hearts, as they entered the great hall, by his boyish swagger; but not the guards. Your orders were imperative--that none unbidden to the ball could enter." "'Tis well," cried Portsmouth. "None, none! Letters to me! Did he say from whom?" "He said," continued Buckingham, still laughing, "that he was under orders of his master to place them only in the Duchess's hands. Oh, he is a very lordly youth." The Duke throughout made a sad attempt at amusing imitations of the brogue of the strange, youthful, Irish visitor who, with so much importunity, sought a hearing. Portsmouth reflected a moment and then said: "I will see him, Buckingham, but briefly." Buckingham, not a little surprised, bowed and departed graciously to convey the bidding. The Duchess lost herself again in thought. "His message may have import," she reflected. "Louis sends strange messengers ofttimes." In the midst of her reverie, the tapestry at the door was again pushed back, cautiously this time, then eagerly. There entered the prettiest spark that ever graced a kingdom or trod a measure. It was Nell, accoutred as a youth; and a bold play truly she was making. Her face revealed that she herself was none too sure of the outcome. "By my troth," she thought, as she glanced uncomfortably about the great room, "I feel as though I were all breeches." She shivered. "It is such a little way through these braveries to me." Her eyes turned involuntarily to the corner where Portsmouth sat, now dreaming of far-off France. "The Duchess!" her lips breathed, almost aloud, in her excitement. "So you'd play hostess to his Majesty," she thought, "give a royal ball and leave poor Nelly home, would you?" The Duchess was conscious only of a presence. "_Garçon!_" she called, without looking up. Nell jumped a foot. "That shook me to the boots," she ejaculated, softly. "_Garçon!_" again called the impatient Duchess. "Madame," answered Nell, fearfully, the words seeming to stick in her fair throat, as she hastily removed her hat and bethought her that she must have a care or she would lose her head as well, by forgetting that she was an Irishman with a brogue. "Who are you?" asked Portsmouth, haughtily, as, rising, with surprised eyes, she became aware of the presence of a stranger. Indeed, it is not strange that she was surprised. The youth who stood before her was dressed from top to toe in gray--the silver-gray which lends a colour to the cheek and piquancy to the form. The dress was of the latest cut. The hat had the longest plume. The cloak hung gracefully save where the glistening sword broke its falling lines. The boots were neat, well rounded and well cut, encasing a jaunty leg. The dress was edged with silver. Ah, the strange youth was a love, indeed, with his bright, sparkling eyes, his lips radiant with smiles, his curls falling to his shoulders. "Well," stammered Nell, in awkward hesitation but in the richest brogue, as the Duchess repeated her inquiry, "I'm just I, madame." The Duchess smiled despite herself. "You're just you," she said. "That's very clear." "Yes, that's very clear," reiterated Nell, still fearful of her ground. "A modest masker, possibly," suggested Portsmouth, observing the youth's embarrassment and wishing to assist him. "Yea, very modest," replied Nell, her speech still stumbling, "almost ashamed." Portsmouth's eyes looked sharply at her. "She suspects me," thought Nell, and her heart leaped into her throat. "I am lost--boots and all." "Your name?" demanded the Duchess again, impatiently. For the life of her Nell could not think of it. "You see," she replied evasively, "I'm in London for the first time in my present self, madame, and--" "Your name and mission, sir?" The tone was imperative. Nell's wits returned to her. "Beau Adair is my name," she stammered, "and your service my mission." It was out, though it had like to have choked her, and Nell was more herself again. The worst she had feared was that the Duchess might discover her identity and so turn the tables and make her the laughing-stock at court. She grew, indeed, quite hopeful as she observed a kindly smile play upon the Duchess's lips and caught the observation: "Beau Adair! A pretty name, and quite a pretty fellow." A smile of self-satisfaction and a low bow were Nell's reply. "Vain coxcomb!" cried Portsmouth, reprovingly, though she was highly amused and even pleased with the strange youth's conceit. "Nay; if I admire not myself," wistfully suggested Nell, in reply, with pretence of much modesty, "who will praise poor me in this great palace?" "You are new at court?" asked Portsmouth, doubtingly. "Quite new," asserted Nell, gaining confidence with each speech. "My London tailor made a man of me only to-day." "A man of you only to-day!" cried the Duchess, in wonderment. "He assured me, madame," Nell hastened to explain, "that the fashion makes the man. He did not like my former fashion. It hid too much that was good, he said. I am the bearer of this letter to the great Duchess of Portsmouth; that you are she, I know by your royalty." She bowed with a jaunty, boyish bow, sweeping the floor with her plumed hat, as she offered the letter. "Oh, you are the gentleman," said Portsmouth, recalling her request to Buckingham, which for the instant had quite escaped her. She took the letter and broke the seal eagerly. "She does not suspect," thought Nell; and she crossed quickly to the curtained arch, leading to the music and the dancing, in the hope that she might see the King. Portsmouth, who was absorbed in the letter, did not observe her. "From Rochet! Dear Rochet!" mused the Duchess, as she read aloud the lines: "'The bearer of this letter is a young gallant, very modest and very little versed in the sins of court.'" "Very little," muttered Nell, with a mischievous wink, still intent upon the whereabouts and doings of the King. "'He is of excellent birth,'" continued the Duchess, reading, "'brave, young and to be trusted--_to be trusted_. I commend him to your kindness, protection and service, during his stay in town.'" She reflected a moment intently upon the letter, then looked up quickly. Nell returned, somewhat confused, to her side. "This is a very strong letter, sir," said Portsmouth, with an inquiring look. "Yes, very strong," promptly acquiesced Nell; and she chuckled as she recalled that she had written it herself, taking near a fortnight in the composition. Her fingers ached at the memory. "Where did you leave Rochet?" inquired the Duchess, almost incredulously. "Leave Rochet?" thought Nell, aghast. "I knew she would ask me something like that." There was a moment's awkwardness--Nell was on difficult ground. She feared lest she might make a misstep which would reveal her identity. The Duchess grew impatient. Finally, Nell mustered courage and made a bold play for it, as ever true to her brogue. "Where did I leave Rochet?" she said, as if she had but then realized the Duchess's meaning, then boldly answered: "In Cork." "In Cork!" cried Portsmouth, in blank surprise. "I thought his mission took him to Dublin." She eyed the youth closely and wondered if he really knew the mission. "Nay; Cork!" firmly repeated Nell; for she dared not retract, lest she awaken suspicion. "I am quite sure it was Cork I left him in." "Quite sure?" exclaimed the Duchess, her astonishment increasing with each confused reply. "Well, you see, Duchess," said Nell, "we had an adventure. It was dark; and we were more solicitous to know whither the way than whence." The Duchess broke into a merry laugh. The youth had captured her, with his wistful, Irish eyes, his brogue and his roguish ways. "We give a ball to-night," she said, gaily. "You shall stay and see the King." "The King!" cried Nell, feigning fright. "I should tremble so to see the King." "You need not fear," laughed the hostess. "He will not know you." "I trust not, truly," sighed Nell, with much meaning, as she scanned her scanty masculine attire. "Take my mask," said the Duchess, graciously. "As hostess, I cannot wear it." Nell seized it eagerly. She would be safe with this little band of black across her eyes. Even the King would not know her. "I shall feel more comfortable behind this," she said, naïvely. "Did you ever mask?" inquired Portsmouth, gaily. [Illustration: AS A CAVALIER MISTRESS NELL DECEIVES EVEN THE KING.] "Nay, I am too honest to deceive," answered Nell; and her eyes grew so round and so big, who would not believe her? "But you are at court now," laughed the Duchess, patronizingly. "Masking is the first sin at court." "Then I'll begin with the first sin," said Nell, slyly, raising the Duchess's fingers to her lips, "and run the gamut." They passed together into the great ball-room, Nell exercising all her arts of fascination--and they were many. The music ceased as they entered. The dancers, and more especially the ladies, eyed curiously the jaunty figure of the new-comer. There were merry whisperings among them. "Who can he be?" asked one, eagerly. "What a pretty fellow!" exclaimed a second, in admiration. "I've been eying him," said a third, complacently. The men too caught the infection. "Who can he be?" inquired Rochester. "Marry, I'll find out," said Lady Hamilton, with an air of confidence, having recovered by this time from the kisses which had been thrust upon her and being now ready for a new flirtation. She approached Adair, artfully, and inquired: "Who art thou, my butterfly? Tell me now, e'er I die." Her attitude was a credit to the extremes of euphuism. There was general laughter at her presumptuous and effete pose and phrase. The ladies had gathered about the new hero, like bees about new clover. The gallants stood, or sat as wall-flowers in a row, deserted. The King too had been abandoned for the lion of the hour and sat disconsolate. "Peace, jealous ones!" cried Lady Hamilton, reprovingly, then continued, with a winning way: "I know thou art Apollo himself, good sir." Nell smiled complacently, though she felt her mask, to assure herself that it was firm. "Apollo, truly," she said, jauntily, "if thou art his lyre, sweet lady." Lady Hamilton turned to the Duchess. "Oh, your grace," she asked, languishingly, "tell us in a breath, tell us, who is this dainty beau of the ball?" "How am I to know my guests," answered Portsmouth, feigning innocence, "with their vizors down? Nay, sweet sir, unmask and please the ladies. I'faith, who art thou?" The hostess was delighted. The popularity of the new-comer was lending a unique novelty to her entertainment. She was well pleased that she had detained Monsieur Adair. She thought she saw a jealous look in the King's usually carelessly indifferent gaze when she encouraged the affectionate glances of the Irish youth. "I'faith," laughed Nell, in reply, "I know not, Duchess." "D'ye hear?" said Portsmouth. "He knows not himself." "But I have a suspicion, Duchess," sighed Nell. "Hark ye," laughed Portsmouth, with a very pretty pout, "he has a suspicion, ladies." "Nay, you will tell?" protested Nell, as the ladies gathered closer about her in eager expectation. There was a unison of voices to the contrary. "Trust us, fair sir," said one. "Oh, we are good at keeping secrets." "Then, 'twixt you and me, I am--" began Nell; and she hesitated, teasingly. The group about grew more eager, more wild with curiosity. "Yes, yes--" they exclaimed together. "I am," said Nell, "the Pied Piper of Hamlin Town." "The rat-catcher," cried Portsmouth. "Oh, oh, oh!" There was a lifting of skirts, revealing many high-born insteps, and a scramble for chairs, as the ladies reflected upon the long lines of rats in the train of the mesmeric Pied Piper. "Flee, flee!" screamed Lady Hamilton, playfully. "He may pipe us into the mountains after the children." "You fill me with laughter, ladies," said Portsmouth to her guests. "The man does not live who can entrap me." "The woman does," thought Nell, as, mock-heroically, she placed near her lips a reed-pipe which she had snatched from a musician in the midst of the fun; and, whistling a merry tune which the pipe took no part in, she circled about the room, making quite a wizard's exit. The ladies, heart and soul in the fun, fell into line and followed, as if spell-bound by the magic of the Piper. Charles, James, Rochester and the gallants, who remained, each of whom had been in turn deserted by his fair lady, unmasked and looked at one another in wonderment. Of one accord, they burst into a peal of laughter. "Sublime audacity," exclaimed Charles. "Who is this curled darling--this ball-room Adonis? Ods-pitikins, we are in the sear and yellow leaf." "Truly, Sire," said James, dryly, "I myself prefer a gathering of men only." "Brother James," forthwith importuned the King, waggishly, "will you favour me with your lily-white hand for the next dance? I am driven to extremity." "Pardon, Sire," replied James, quite humorously for him, "I am engaged to a handsomer man." "Odsfish," laughed Charles, "King Charles of England a wall-flower. Come, Rochester, my epitaph." The King threw himself into a chair, in an attitude of hopeless resignation, quite delicious. Rochester perked up with the conceit and humour of the situation. With the utmost dignity, and with the quizzical, pinched brow of the labouring muse, halting at each line, he said: _"Here lies our sovereign lord, the King, Whose word no man relies on; Who never said a foolish thing, And never did a wise one!"_ The post-mortem verse was sufficiently subtle and clever to revive the King's drooping spirits; and he joined heartily in the applause. "The matter," he said, approvingly, "is easily accounted for--my discourse is my own, my actions are my Ministry's." There was a _frou-frou_ of petticoats. The hostess entered gaily. "The King! The courtiers! Unmasked!" she exclaimed, in coy reproof. "Fy, fy, your Majesty! For shame! Gallants! Are you children that I must pair you off?" "We are seeking consolation," suggested Charles, dryly; "for modest souls have small chance to-night, Louise." He nodded significantly in the direction of the great ball-room, where the chatter of women's voices betokened the unrivalled popularity of Nell. "When did you turn modest, Sire?" slyly inquired Portsmouth, with a look of love. "When I was out-stripped in audacity by yon Hibernian youth," replied the King, seriously. "Who is this peacock you are introducing?" A peal of laughter from without punctuated the King's speech. It was the reward of a wit-thrust from Nell. "The Piper the maids would now unmask?" queried Portsmouth, rapturously. "Marry, 'tis the fascinating Beau Adair of Cork, entertaining the ladies. Oh, he is a love, Sire; he does not sulk in corners. See! See!" She pointed toward the archway, through which Nell was plainly visible. She was strutting jauntily back and forth upon the promenade. It is unnecessary to say that she was escorted by the assembled fair ones. As Nell caught the eye of the hostess in the distance, she gaily tossed a kiss to her. "'Sdeath, that I were a woman to hope for one of his languishing smiles," observed Buckingham. "Even the old hens run at his call," sneered the pious James, in discontent; for he too had been deserted by his ladylove and even before the others. The King looked at his brother with an air of bantering seriousness, to the delight of all assembled. "Brother James is jealous of the old ones only," he observed. "You know his favourites are given him by his priests for penance." A merry ripple ran through the group. The hostess took advantage of the King's speech to make a point. "And you are jealous of the young ones only," she said, slyly, quickly adding as a bid for jealousy: "Pooh, pooh! _Le Beau_ had letters to me, Sire. Nay, we do not love him very much. We have not as yet had time." "Alas, alas," sighed Charles, with drooping countenance, "that it should come to this." "My liege, I protest--" cried Portsmouth, hastily, fearful lest she might have gone too far. "To-night is the first I ever saw the youth. I adore you, Sire." "Not a word!" commanded Charles, with mock-heroic mien. He waved his hand imperatively to his followers. "Friends," he continued, "we will mix masks and dominoes and to't again to drown our sorrow." "In the Thames?" inquired James, facetiously for him. "Tush! In the punch-bowl, pious brother!" protested the Merry Monarch, with great dignity. "You know, a very little water will drown even a king." The gallants mixed masks and dominoes in obedience to the royal wish. The King, sighing deeply, cast a hopeless glance at Portsmouth, not without its tinge of humour. He then sauntered slowly toward the windows of the great ball-room, followed subserviently by all the courtiers, save Buckingham, who was lost in converse with player Hart. "Hark ye," suddenly broke off Buckingham, observing the approach of Adair and his adorers, "here come again the merry maskers. By Bacchus, the little bantam still reigns supreme. The King and his gallants in tears. Let us join the mourners, Master Hart." As the Duke and the player, the former assuming a fraternal air for an end of his own, joined the royal group, Nell re-entered gaily, every inch the man. She was still surrounded by the ladies, who, fluttering, flattering and chattering, hung upon her every word. With one hand she toyed with her mask, which she had good-naturedly dropped as none were about who knew her. She clapped it, however, quickly to her eyes at sight of the King. "You overwhelm me, my fair ones," she said, with spirit, as she held court in the centre of the room. "I assure you, I am not used to such attention--from the ladies." "Our hospitality is beggarly to your deserts," sighed Portsmouth, who had joined the bevy, but loud enough for the King to hear. "You quite o'erpower me, Duchess," answered Nell, modestly, adding for the satisfaction of her own sense of humour: "No wonder we men are fools, if you women talk like this." While she was speaking, Lady Hamilton whispered facetiously in Portsmouth's ear. "Beau Adair married!" exclaimed the Duchess, in response. "It cannot be. He looks too gay for a married man." "No confidences, my pretty ones," observed Nell, reprovingly. The hostess hesitated; then she out with it in a merry strain. "Lady Hamilton asks after the wife you left at home." "My wife!" cried Nell, in astonishment; for this phase of her masquerading had not presented itself to her before. "Great Heavens, I have no wife--I assure you, ladies!" "So?" observed Portsmouth, her curiosity awakened. "Modest--for a bachelor." "A bachelor!" exclaimed Nell, now fully _en rapport_ with the spirit of the situation. "Well,--not exactly a bachelor either,--ladies." "Alack-a-day," sighed Lady Hamilton, with a knowing glance at her companions, "neither a bachelor nor a married man!" "Well, you see--" explained Nell, adroitly, "that might seem a trifle queer, but--I'm in mourning--deeply in mourning, ladies." She drew a kerchief from her dress and feigned bitter tears. "A widower!" tittered Lady Hamilton, heartlessly. "Our united congratulations, sir." The other ladies one by one sobbed with affected sympathy, wiping their eyes tenderly, however, lest they might remove the rich colour from their cheeks. "Mesdames," said Nell, reprovingly, "the memory is sacred. Believe me, very sacred." She fell apparently once again to weeping bitterly. "The memory is always sacred--with men," observed Portsmouth, for the benefit of her guests, not excepting the Irish youth. "Nay, tell us the name of the fair one who left you so young. My heart goes out to you, dear Beau." "Kind hostess," replied Nell, assuming her tenderest tones, "the name of my departed self is--Nell!" Hart caught the word. The player was standing near, reflecting on the scene and on the honeyed words of the Duke of Buckingham, who was preparing the way that he might use him. "Nell!" he muttered. "Who spoke that name?" The hostess too was startled. "Nell!" she exclaimed, with contending emotions. "Strange! Another cavalier who graces _mon bal masqué_ to-night has lost a loved one whose name is Nell. Ah, but she was unworthy of his noble love." She spoke pointedly at the masked King, who started perceptibly. "Yes," he thought; for his conscience smote him, "unworthy--he of her." "Unworthy, truly, if he dances so soon and his own Nell dead," added Nell, reflectively, but so that all might hear, more especially Charles. "Perchance Nell too thinks so," thought he, as he restlessly walked away, sighing: "I wish I were with her on the terrace." "'Sdeath, Duchess," continued Nell abruptly, in assumed horror at the sudden thought, "the lady's spirit may visit the ball, to the confusion of us all. Such things have been." "The Nell I mean," said Portsmouth, with a confident smile, "will not venture here, e'en in spirit." Nell assumed a baby-innocence of face. "She has not been bidden, I presume?" she queried. "The vixen would not stop for asking," declared Portsmouth, almost fiercely. "Come without asking?" cried Nell, as if she could not believe that there could be such people upon the earth. "How ill-bred! Thine ear, loved one. My Nell revisits the world again at midnight. The rendezvous--St. James's Park." Hart brushed close enough to the group, in his biting curiosity, to catch her half-whisper to Portsmouth. He at once sought a window and fresh air, chafing with surprise and indignation at what he had overheard. "St. James's at midnight," he muttered. "'Tis my Nell's abode." The Duchess herself stood stunned at what appeared to her a possible revelation of great import. "St. James's!" she thought. "Can he mean Madame Gwyn? No, no!" The look of suspicion which for an instant had clouded her face changed to one of merriment, under Adair's magic glance. "And you would desert me for such a fleshless sprite?" she asked. "Not so," said Nell, with a winning look; "but, when my better-half returns to life, I surely cannot refuse an interview--especially an she come from afar." Nell's eyes arose with an expression of sadness, while her finger pointed down--ward in the direction of what she deemed the probable abode of her departed "Nell." Her lips twitched in merriment, however, despite her efforts to the contrary; and the hostess fell a-laughing. "Ladies," she cried, as she appealed to one and all, "is not _le Beau_ a delight--so different from ordinary men?" "I am not an ordinary man, I assure you," Nell hastened to declare. This assertion was acquiesced in by a buzz of pretty compliments from the entire bevy of ladies. "Positively charming!" exclaimed one. "A perfect love!" said another. Nell listened resignedly. "'Sheart," she said, at length, with an air of _ennui_, "I cannot help it. 'Tis all part of being a man, you know." "Would that all men were like you, _le Beau_!" sighed the hostess, not forgetting to glance at the King, who again sat disconsolate, in the midst of his attendant courtiers, drawn up, as in line of battle, against the wall. "Heaven help us if they were!" slyly suggested Nell. Rochester, who had been watching the scene in his mischievous, artistic way, drew from Portsmouth's compliment to Adair another meaning. He was a mixture 'twixt a man of arts and letters and Satan's own--a man after the King's own heart. Turning to the King, with no desire to appease the mischief done, he said, banteringly: "Egad, there's a rap at you, Sire. France would make you jealous." The Duke of Buckingham too, though he appeared asleep, had seen it all. "And succeeds, methinks," he reflected, glancing approvingly in the direction of the Irish youth. "A good ally, i'faith." Nell, indeed, was using all her arts of fascination to ingratiate herself with the Duchess, and making progress, too. "Your eyes are glorious, fair hostess," she said, in her most gallant love-tones, "did I not see my rival in them." She could not, however, look at Portsmouth for laughter, as she thought: "I believe lying goes with the breeches; I never was so proficient before." The compliment aroused the King's sluggish nature. "I can endure no more, gallants," cried he, with some pretence of anger, rising abruptly, followed, of course, in each move and grimace by his courtier-apes, in their desire to please. "Are we to be out-done in our own realm by this usurper with a brogue? Ha! The fiddlers! Madame, I claim the honour of this fair hand for the dance." At the sound of the music, he had stepped gallantly forward, taking the hostess's hand. "My thanks, gallant masker," replied the Duchess, pretending not to know him for flattery's sake, "but I am--" To her surprise, she had no opportunity to complete the sentence. "Engaged! Engaged!" interposed Nell, coming unceremoniously between them, with swaggering assumption and an eye-shot at the King through the portal of her mask. "Forsooth, some other time, strange sir." The hostess stood horrified. "Pardon, Sir Masker," she hastened to explain; "but the dance was pledged--" "No apologies, Duchess," replied the King, as he turned away, carelessly, with the reflection: "All's one to me at this assemblage." He crossed the room, turning an instant to look, with a humorous, quizzical glance, at Portsmouth. Nell mistook the glance for a jealous one and, perking up quickly, caught the royal eye with a challenging eye, tapping her sword-hilt meaningly. Had the masks been off, the situation would have differed. As it was, the King smiled indifferently. The episode did not affect him further than to touch his sense of humour. Nell turned triumphantly to her partner. "Odsbud," she exclaimed, with a delicious, youthful swagger, "we may have to measure swords in your behalf, dear hostess. I trow the fellow loves you." "Have a care," whispered the Duchess, nervously. "It is the King." "What care I for a king?" saucily replied Nell, with a finger-snap. She had taken good care, however, to speak very low. "My arm, my arm, Duchess!" she continued, with a gallant step. "Places, places; or the music will outstrip us." "Strut on, my pretty bantam," thought Buckingham, whose eyes lost little that might be turned to his own advantage; "I like you well." There was no mending things at this stage by an apology. The Duchess, therefore, tactfully turned the affair into one of mirth, in which she was quickly joined by her guests. With a merry laugh, she took the Irish gallant's proffered arm, and together they led the dance. The King picked a lady indifferently from among the maskers. It was a graceful old English measure. Nell's roguish wits, as well as her feet, kept pace with the music. She assured her partner that she had never loved a woman in all her life before and followed this with a hundred merry jests and sallies, keyed to the merry fiddles, so full of blarney that all were set a-laughing. Anon, the gallants drew their swords and crossed them in the air, while the ladies tiptoed in and out. Nell's blade touched the King's blade. When all was ended the swords saluted with a knightly flourish, then tapped the floor. There was an exultant laugh from one and all, and the dance was done. Nell hastened to her partner's side. She caught the Duchess's hand and kissed it. "You dance divinely, your grace," she said. "A goddess on tiptoe." "Oh, Beau Adair!" replied the Duchess, courtseying low; and her eyes showed that she was not wholly displeased at the warmth of his youthful adoration. "Oh, Duchess!" said Nell, fondly, acknowledging the salute. The Duchess hastened to join his Majesty and together they threaded their way through many groups. Nell tossed her head. "How I love her!" she muttered, veiling the sarcasm under her breath. She crossed the great room, her head erect. Her confidence was quite restored. This had been the most difficult bit of acting she had ever done; and how well it had been done! The other dancers in twos and threes passed from the room in search of quiet corners, in which to whisper nothings. Nell's eyes fell upon Strings, who had had a slight turn for the better in the world and who now, in a dress of somewhat substantial green, was one of the fiddlers at the Duchess's ball. "How now, sirrah!" she said, sharply, as she planted herself firmly before him to his complete surprise. "I knew you were here." She placed one of her feet in a devil-may-care fashion upon a convenient chair in manly contempt of its upholstery and peeped amusedly through her mask at her old friend. He looked at her in blank amazement. "Gads-bobbs," he exclaimed, in confusion, "the Irish gentleman knows me!" "There's nothing like your old fiddle, Strings," continued Nell, still playing with delight upon his consternation. "It fills me with forty dancing devils. If you were to play at my wake, I would pick up my shroud, and dance my way into Paradise." "Your lordship has danced to my fiddling before?" he gasped, in utter amazement. "Danced!" gleefully cried Nell. "I have followed your bow through a thousand jigs. To the devil with these court-steps. I'm for a jig, jig, jig, jig, jig! Oh, I'm for a jig! Tune up, tune up, comrade; and we'll have a touch of the old days at the King's House." "The King's House! Jigs!" exclaimed the fiddler, now beside himself. "Jigs!" chuckled Nell. "Jigs are my line of business." _Oranges, will you have my oranges? Sweet as love-lips, dearest mine, Picked by Spanish maids divine,--_ The room had now quite cleared; and, protected by a friendly alcove, Nell punctuated the old song with a few happily turned jig-steps. Strings looked at her a moment in bewilderment: then his face grew warm with smiles; the mystery was explained. "Mistress Nell, as I live," he cried, joyously, "turned boy!" "The devil fly away with you, you old idiot! Boy, indeed!" replied Nell, indignantly. "I'm a full-grown widower!" She had removed her mask and was dancing about Strings gleefully. There was the sound of returning voices. "Oons, you will be discovered," exclaimed Strings, cautiously. "Marry, I forgot," whispered Nell, glancing over her shoulder. "You may have to help me out o' this scrape, Strings, before the night is done." "You can count on me, Mistress Nell, with life," he replied, earnestly. "I believe you!" said Nell, in her sympathetic, hearty way. Her mind reverted to the old days when Strings and she were at the King's. "Oh, for just one jig with no petticoats to hinder." Nell, despite herself, had fallen into an old-time jig, with much gusto, for her heart was for a frolic always, when Strings, seized her arm in consternation, pointing through the archway. "The King!" she exclaimed. She clapped her mask to her eyes and near tumbled through the nearest arras out of the room in her eagerness to escape, dragging her ever-faithful comrade with her. CHAPTER XIII _For the glory of England?_ The King entered the room with his historic stride. His brow was clouded; but it was all humorous pretence, for trifles were not wont to weigh heavily upon his Majesty. With him came Portsmouth. "Can you forgive me, Sire?" she asked. "I had promised the dance to Beau Adair. I did not know you, Sire; you masked so cleverly." "'Sdeath, fair flatterer!" replied the King. "I have lived too long to worry o'er the freaks of women." "The youth knew not to whom he spoke," still pleaded Portsmouth. "His introduction here bespeaks his pardon, Sire." The King looked sardonic, but his laugh had a human ring. "He is too pretty to kill," he declared, dramatically. "We'll forgive him for your sake. And now good night." "So soon?" asked Portsmouth, anxiously. "It is late," he replied. "Not while the King is here," she sighed. "Night comes only when he departs." "Your words are sweet," said Charles, thoughtfully observing her. She sighed again. "My thoughts stumble in your speech," she said. "I regret I have not English blood within my veins." "And why?" "The King would trust and love me then. He does not now. I am French and powerless to do him good." There was a touch of honest sadness in her speech which awakened the King's sympathy. "Nay," he said hastily, to comfort her; "'tis thy fancy. Thy entertainment hath made me grateful--to Louis and Louise." "Think not of Louis and Louise," she said, sadly and reproachfully, "but of thy dear self and England's glory. For shame! Ah, Sire, my childhood-dreams were of sunny France, where I was born; at Versailles--at Fontainebleau among the monarch trees--my early womanhood sighed for love. France gave me all but that. It came not till I saw the English King!" The siren of the Nile never looked more bewitchingly beautiful than this siren of France as she half reclined upon the couch, playing upon the King's heart with a bit of memory. His great nature realized her sorrow and encompassed it. "And am I not good to thee, child?" he asked. He took her hand and responded to her eyes, though not with the tenderness of love--the tenderness for which she sought. "You are good to none," she replied, bitterly; "for you are not good to Charles." "You speak enigmas," he said, curious. "Have you forgotten your promise?" she asked, naïvely. "Nay; the passport, pretty one?" he answered, amused at the woman's wiles. "All this subterfuge of words for that! There; rest in peace. Thy friend hath a path to France at will." He smiled kindly as he took the passport from his girdle, handed it to her and turned to take his leave. "My thanks are yours. Stay, Sire," she said, hastily; for her mission was not yet complete and the night was now well gone. "Passports are trifles. Will you not leave the Dutch to Louis and his army? Think!" She placed her arms about his neck and looked enticingly into his eyes. "But," he replied, kindly, "my people demand that I intervene and stay my brother Louis's aggressive hand." "Are the people king?" she asked, with coy insinuation. "Do they know best for England's good? Nay, Sire, for your good and theirs, I beseech, no more royal sympathy for Holland. I speak to avoid entanglements for King Charles and to make his reign the greater. I love you, Sire." She fell upon her knee. "I speak for the glory of England." His Majesty was influenced by her beauty and her arts,--what man would not be?--but more by the sense of what she said. "For the glory of England?" he asked himself. "True, my people are wrong. 'Tis better we remain aloof. No wars!" He took the seat by the table, which the Duchess offered him, and scanned casually the parchment which she handed to him. Nell peered between the curtains. Strings was close behind her. "Bouillon's signature for France," mused the King. "'Tis well! No more sympathy for the Dutch, Louise, until Holland sends a beauty to our court to outshine France's ambassador." He looked at Portsmouth, smiled and signed the instrument, which had been prepared, as he thought, in accordance with his wishes and directions. He then carelessly tossed the sand over the signature to blot it. The fair Duchess's eyes revealed all the things which all the adjectives of all the lands ever meant. "Holland may outshine in beauty, Sire," she said, kneeling by the King's side, "but not in sacrifice and love." She kissed his hand fervently. He sat complacently looking into her eyes, scarce mindful of her insinuating arts of love. He was fascinated with her, it is true; but it was with her beauty, flattery and sophistry, not her heart. "I believe thou dost love England and her people's good," he said, finally. "Thy words art wise." Portsmouth leaned fondly over his shoulder. "One more request," she said, with modest mien, "a very little one, Sire." The King laughed buoyantly. "Nay, an I stay here," he said, "thy beauty will win my kingdom! What is thy little wish, sweet sovereign?" "No more Parliaments in England, Sire," she said, softly. "What, woman!" he exclaimed, rising, half-aghast, half-humorous, at the suggestion; for he too had an opinion of Parliament. "To cross the sway of thy great royal state-craft," she continued, quickly following up the advantage which her woman's wit taught her she had gained. "The people's sufferings from taxation spring from Parliament only, Sire." "'Tis true," agreed Charles, decisively. Portsmouth half embraced him. "For the people's good, Sire," she urged, "for my sweetest kiss." "You are mad," said Charles, yet three-fourths convinced; "my people--" "Will be richer for my kiss," the Duchess interrupted, wooingly, "and their King, by divine right and heritage, will rule untrammelled by country clowns, court knaves and foolish lords, who now make up a silly Parliament. With such a King, England will be better with no Parliament to hinder. Think, Sire, think!" "I have thought of this before," said Charles, who had often found Parliament troublesome and, therefore, useless. "The taxes will be less and contention saved." [Illustration: BETWEEN TWO FIRES] "Why hesitate then?" she asked. "This hour's as good for a good deed as any." "For England's sake?" reflected Charles, inquiringly, as he took the second parchment from her hands. "Heaven direct my judgment for my people's good. I sign." The treaties which Louis XIV. of France had sent the artful beauty to procure lay signed upon her desk. Nell almost pulled the portières from their hangings in her excitement. "I must see those papers," she thought. "There's no good brewing." Portsmouth threw her arms about the King and kissed him passionately. "Now, indeed, has England a great King," she said, adding to herself: "And that King Louis's slave!" Charles smiled and took his leave. As he passed through the portal, he wiped his lips, good-humouredly muttering: "Portsmouth's kisses and Nell's do not mix well." Portsmouth listened for a moment to his departing footsteps, then dropped into the chair by the table and hastily folded and addressed the papers. Her mission was ended! CHAPTER XIV _He loves me! He loves me!_ Nell, half draped in the arras, had seen the kiss in reality bestowed by Portsmouth but as she thought bestowed by the King. As his Majesty departed through the door at the opposite end of the room, the colour came and went in her cheeks. She could scarce breathe. Portsmouth sat unconscious of all but her own grand achievement. She had accomplished what shrewd statesmen had failed to bring about; and this would be appreciated, she well knew, by Louis. "'Sdeath!" muttered Nell to herself, hotly, as, with quite a knightly bearing, she approached the Duchess. "He kisses her before my very eyes! He kisses her! I'll kill the minx!" She half unsheathed her blade. "Pshaw! No! No! I am too gallant to kill the sex. I'll do the very manly act and simply break her heart. Aye, that is true bravery in breeches." Her manner changed. "Your grace!" she said suavely. "Yes," answered Portsmouth, her eyes still gleaming triumphantly. "It seems you are partial of your favours?" "Yes." "Such a gift from lips less fair," continued Nell, all in wooing vein, "would make a beggar royal." The hostess was touched with the phrasing of the compliment. She smiled. "You would be pleased to think me fair?" she coyly asked, with the air of one convinced that it could not well be otherwise. "Fairer than yon false gallant thinks you," cried Nell, with an angry toss of the head in the direction of the departed King. "Charles's kiss upon her lips?" she thought. "'Tis mine, and I will have it." In the twinkling of an eye, she threw both arms wildly about the neck of the astonished hostess and kissed her forcefully upon the lips. Then, with a ringing laugh, tinged with triumph, she stepped back, assuming a defiant air. The Duchess paled with anger. She rose quickly and, turning on the pretty youth, exclaimed: "Sir, what do you mean?" "Tilly-vally!" replied the naughty Nell, in her most winning way. "A frown upon that alabaster brow, a pout upon those rosy lips; and all for nothing!" "_Parbleu!_" exclaimed the indignant Duchess. "Your impudence is outrageous, sir! We will dispense with your company. Good night!" "Ods-pitikins!" swaggered Nell, feigning umbrage. "Angry because I kissed you! You have no right, madame, to be angry." "No right?" asked Portsmouth, her feelings tempered by surprise. "No right," repeated Nell, firmly. "It is I who should be outraged at your anger." "Explain, sir," said the Duchess, haughtily. Nell stepped toward the lady, and, assuming her most tender tone, with wistful, loving eyes, declared: "Because your grace can have no appreciation of what my temptation was to kiss you." The Duchess's countenance glowed with delight, despite herself. "I'faith, was there a temptation?" she asked, quite mollified. "An overwhelming passion," cried Nell, following up her advantage. "And you were disappointed, sir?" asked Portsmouth suggestively, her vanity falling captive to the sweet cajolery. "I only got yon courtier's kiss," saucily pouted Nell, "so lately bestowed on you." "Do you know whose kiss that was?" inquired the Duchess. "It seemed familiar," answered Nell, dryly. "The King's," said Portsmouth, proudly. "The King's!" cried Nell, opening wide her eyes. "Take back your kiss. I would not have it." "Indeed!" said Portsmouth, smiling. "'Tis too volatile," charged Nell, decisively. "'Tis here, 'tis there, 'tis everywhere bestowed. Each rosy tavern-wench with a pretty ankle commands it halt. A kiss is the gift of God, the emblem of true love. Take back the King's kiss; I do not wish it." "He does not love the King," thought Portsmouth, ever on the lookout for advantage. "A possible ally!" She turned upon the youth, with humorous, mocking lip, and said reprovingly: "A kiss is a kiss the world over, fair sir; and the King's kisses are sacred to Portsmouth's lips." "Zounds," replied Nell, with a wicked wink, "not two hours since, he bestowed a kiss on Eleanor Gwyn--" "Nell Gwyn!" cried the Duchess, interrupting; and she started violently. "With oaths, mountains high," continued Nell, with pleasurable harshness, "that his lips were only for her." The Duchess stood speechless, quivering from top to toe. Nell herself swaggered carelessly across the room, muttering mischievously, as she watched the Duchess from the corner of her eye: "Methinks that speech went home." "He kissed her in your presence?" gasped Portsmouth, anxiously following her. "I was not far off, dear Duchess," was the quizzical reply. "You saw the kiss?" "No," answered Nell, dryly, and she could scarce contain her merriment. "I--I--felt the shock." Before she had finished the sentence, the King appeared in the doorway. His troubled spirit had led him to return, to speak further with the Duchess regarding the purport of the treaties. He had the good of his people at heart, and he was not a little anxious in mind lest he had been over-hasty in signing such weighty articles without a more careful reading. He stopped short as he beheld, to his surprise, the Irish spark Adair in earnest converse with his hostess. "I hate Nell Gwyn," he overheard the Duchess say. "Is't possible?" interrogated Nell, with wondering eyes. The King caught this utterance as well. "In a passion over Nelly?" reflected he. "I'd sooner face Cromwell's soldiers at Boscobel! All hail the oak!" His Majesty's eye saw with a welcome the spreading branches of the monarch of the forest, outlined on the tapestry; and, with a sigh of relief, he glided quickly behind it and, joining a group of maskers, passed into an anteroom, quite out of ear-shot. "Most strange!" continued Nell, wonderingly. "Nell told me but yesterday that Portsmouth was charming company--but a small eater." "'Tis false," cried the Duchess, and her brow clouded at the unpleasant memory of the meeting at Ye Blue Boar. "I never met the swearing orange-wench." "Ods-pitikins!" acquiesced Nell, woefully. "Nell's oaths are bad enough for men." "Masculine creature!" spitefully ejaculated the Duchess. "Verily, quite masculine--of late," said Nell, demurely, giving a significant tug at her boot-top. "A vulgar player," continued the indignant Duchess, "loves every lover who wears gold lace and tosses coins." "Nay; 'tis false!" denied Nell, sharply. The Duchess looked up, surprised. Nell was all obeisance in an instant. "Pardon, dear hostess, a thousand pardons," she prayed; "but I have some reason to know you misjudge Mistress Nell. With all her myriad faults, she never loved but one." "You seem solicitous for her good name, dear Beau?" suggested Portsmouth, suspiciously. "I am solicitous for the name of all good women," promptly explained Nell, who was rarely caught a-napping, "or I would be unworthy of their sex--I mean their friendship." The Duchess seemed satisfied with the explanation. "Dear Beau, what do the cavaliers see in that horrid creature?" archly asked the Duchess, contemptuous of this liking of the stronger sex. "Alack-a-day, we men, you know," replied Nell, boastfully, "well--the best of us make mistakes in women." "Are you mistaken?" questioned Portsmouth, coyly. "What?" laughed Nell, in high amusement. "I love Nelly? Nay, Duchess," and her voice grew tender, "I adore but one!" "And she?" asked the hostess, encouraging the youth's apparently awakening passion. "How can you ask?" said Nell, with a deep sigh, looking adoringly into Portsmouth's eyes and almost embracing her. "Do you not fear?" inquired Portsmouth, well pleased. "Fear what?" questioned Nell. "My wrath," said Portsmouth. "Nay, more, thy love!" sighed Nell, meaningly, assuming a true lover's dejected visage. "My love!" cried Portsmouth, curiously. "Aye," again sighed Nell, more deeply still; "for it is hopeless." "Try," said the Duchess, almost resting her head upon Nell's shoulder. "I am doing my best," said Nell, her eyes dancing through wistful lashes, as she embraced in earnest the Duchess's graceful figure and held it close. "Do you find it hopeless?" asked Portsmouth, returning the embrace. "Until you trust me," replied Nell, sadly. She shook her curls, then fondly pleaded: "Give me the secrets of your brain and heart, and then I'll know you love me." The hostess smiled and withdrew from the embrace. Nell stood the picture of forlorn and hopeless love. "Nay," laughed Portsmouth, consolingly, "they would sink a ship." "One would not," still pleaded Nell, determined at all odds to have the packet. "One!" The Duchess's eyes fell unconsciously upon the papers which she had bewitched from the King and which lay so near her heart. She started first with fear; and then her countenance assumed a thoughtful cast. There was no time now for delay. The papers must be sent immediately. The King might return and retract. Many a battle, she knew, had been lost after it had been won. That night, at the Rainbow Tavern, well out of reach of the town, of court spies and gossips, Louis would have a trusted one in waiting. His commission was to receive news from various points and transmit it secretly to France. It was a ride of but a few hours to him. She had purposed to send the packet by her messenger in waiting; but he had rendered her suspicious by his speech and action in the late afternoon, and she questioned whether she would be wise in trusting him. Nor was she willing to risk her triumph in the hands of Buckingham's courier. It was too dear to her. Indeed, she was clever enough to know that state-secrets are often safer in the custody of a disinterested stranger than in the hands of a friend, especially if the stranger be truly a stranger to the court. She glanced quickly in the direction of Nell, who looked the ideal of daring youth, innocent, honest and true to the death. "Why not?" she thought quickly, as she reflected again upon Rochet's words, "to be trusted." "Of Irish descent, no love for the King, young, brave, no court ties; none will suspect or stay him." Her woman's intuition said "yes." She turned upon Nell and asked, not without agitation in her voice: "Can I trust you?" Nell's sword was out in an instant, glistening in the light, and so promptly that the Duchess started. Nell saluted, fell upon one knee and said, with all the exuberance of audacious, loving youth: "My sword and life are yours." Portsmouth looked deeply into Nell's honest eyes. She was convinced. "This little packet," said she, in subdued tones, summoning Nell to her side, "a family matter merely, must reach the Rainbow Tavern, on the Canterbury Road, by sunrise, where one is waiting. You'll find his description on the packet." Nell sheathed her sword. "I know the place and road," she said, earnestly, as she took the papers from the Duchess's hand and placed them carefully in her doublet. A rustle of the curtains indicated that some one had returned and was listening by the arras. "Hush!" cautioned Portsmouth. "Be true, and you will win my love." Nell did not reply, save to the glance that accompanied the words. Snatching her hat from a chair on which she had tossed it, she started eagerly in the direction of the great stairs that led to the hallway below, where, an hour since, she had been at first refused admission to the palace. Could she but pass again the guards, all would be well; and surely there was now no cause for her detention. Yet her heart beat tumultuously--faster even than when she presented herself with Rochet's letter written by herself. As she was hastening by the arras, her quick eye, however, recognized the King's long plume behind it; and she halted in her course. She was alert with a thousand maddening thoughts crowding her brain, all in an instant. "The King returned--an eavesdropper!" she reflected. "Jealous of Portsmouth; his eyes follow her. Where are his vows to Nell? I'll defame Nell's name, drag her fair honour in the mire; so, Charles, we'll test your manliness and love." She recrossed the room quickly to Portsmouth. "Madame," she exclaimed, in crisp, nervous tones, loud enough for the King's ear, "I have been deceiving, lying to you. I stood here, praising, honouring Eleanor Gwyn--an apple rotten to the core!" "How now?" ejaculated Charles, in an undertone. His carelessness vanished upon the instant. Where he had waited for the single ear of Portsmouth, he became at once an earnest listener. Nell paused not. "I had a friend who told me he loved Nell. I loved that friend. God knows I loved him." "Yes, yes!" urged Portsmouth, with eagerness. "A man of noble name and princely mien," continued Nell, so standing that the words went, like arrows, straight to the King's ear and heart, "a man of honour, who would have died fighting for Nell's honour--" "Misled youth," muttered Portsmouth. Nell seemed not to hear the words. "Who, had he heard a murmur of disapproval, a shadow cast upon her name, would have sealed in death the presumptuous lips which uttered it." "She betrayed his confidence?" asked Portsmouth, breathlessly. "Betrayed--and worse!" gesticulated Nell, with the visage of a madman. "A woman base, without a spark of kindliness--an adventuress! This is the picture of that Eleanor Gwyn! Where is a champion to take up the gauntlet for such a Nell?" As quick as light, the King threw back the arras and came between them. The Duchess saw him and cried out in surprise. Nell did not turn--only caught a chair-top to save herself from falling. "Here, thou defamer!" he called, his voice husky with passion. "Thou base purveyor of lies, answer me--me, for those words! I am Nell's champion! I'll force you to own your slander a lie." The King was terribly in earnest. "The guard! The guard!" called Portsmouth, faintly, almost overcome by the scene. In her passion that the King so revealed his love for Nell, she quite forgot that Adair was the bearer of her packet. "I want no guard," commanded the King. "An insult to Nell Gwyn is my cause alone." Nell was in an elysium of ecstasy. She realized nothing, saw nothing. "He loves me! He loves me!" her trembling lips breathed only. "He'll fight for Nell." "Come; draw and defend yourself," angrily cried the King. Portsmouth screamed and fell upon his arm. It is doubtful what the result would otherwise have been. True, Nell ofttimes had fenced with the King and knew his wrist, but she was no swordswoman now. Though she took up in her delirium the King's challenge with a wild cry, "Aye, draw and defend yourself!" she realized nothing but his confession of love for Nell. The scene was like a great blur before her eyes. She rushed upon the King and by him, she scarce knew how. Their swords harmlessly clashed; that was all. The cries had been taken up without. "The guard! The guard!" "Treason!" "Treason!" The air was alive with voices. Nell ran up the steps leading to a French window, which opened upon a tiny railed balcony. Below, one story only, lay a soft carpet of greensward, shimmering in the moonlight. With her sword, she struck the frail sash, which instantly yielded. Meantime, the room had filled with courtiers, guards and gallants, who had rushed in, sword and spear in hand, to guard the King. As the glass shivered and flew wide, under the point of Nell's blade, all eyes turned toward her and all blades quivered threateningly in the air. Buckingham was first to ascend the steps in pursuit. He was disarmed--more through the superiority of Nell's position than through the dexterity of her wrist. Then for the first time, she realized her danger. Her eyes staring from their sockets, she drew back from her murderous pursuers, and, in startled accents, she knew not why, screamed in supplication, with hands uplifted: "Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" The storm was stayed. All paused to hear what the stranger-youth would say. Would he apologize or would he surrender? The suspense was for but a second, though it seemed an eternity to Nell. The open window was behind. With a parting glance at the trembling blades, she turned quickly and with reckless daring leaped the balcony. "T' hell with ye!" was wafted back in a rich brogue defiantly by the night. Astonishment and consternation filled the room; but the bird had flown. Some said that the wicked farewell-speech had been Adair's, and some said not. How it all happened, no one could tell, unless it was a miracle. CHAPTER XV _I come, my love; I come._ One lonely candle, or to speak more strictly a bit of one, sputtered in its silver socket in the cosy drawing-room; and a single moonbeam found its way in through the draperies of the window leading to the terrace and to St. James's Park. Moll lay upon a couch asleep; but it was a restless sleep. The voice of a town-crier resounded faintly across the park: "Midnight; and all is well." She started up and rubbed her eyes in a bewildered way. "The midnight crier!" she thought; and there was a troubled expression in her face. "I have been asleep and the candle's nearly out." She jumped to her feet and hastily lighted two or three of its more substantial mates, of which there was an abundance in the rich candelabra about the room. A cricket in a crevice startled her. She ran to the window and looked anxiously out upon the park, then hastened to the door, with equal anxiety, lest it might be unlocked. Every shadow was to her feverish fancy a spirit of evil or of death. "I wish Nell would come," she thought. "The ghosts and skeletons fairly swarm in this old house at midnight; and I am all alone to-night. It's different when Nell's about. The goblins are afraid of her merry laugh. Boo! I am cold all over. I am afraid to stand still, and I am afraid to move." She ran again to the window and this time pulled it open. The moonlight instantly flooded the room, dimming the candles which she had lighted. She saw her shadow, and started back in horror. "Some one glided behind the old oak in the park," she cried aloud, for the company of her voice. "Oh, oh! Nell will be murdered! I begged her not to go to Portsmouth's ball. She said she just wanted to peep in and pay her respects to the hostess. Moll! You better pray." She fell upon her knees and reverently lifted her hands and eyes in prayer. Something fell in the room with a heavy thud. She shut her eyes tight and prayed harder. The object of her fear was a long gray boot, which had been thrown in at the window and had fallen harmlessly by her side. It was followed in an instant by its mate, equally harmless yet equally dreadful. A jaunty figure, assisted by a friendly shoulder, then bounded over the balustrade and rested with a sigh of relief just within the window-opening. It was Nell, returning from the wars; she was pale, almost death-like. The evening's excitement, her daring escapade and more especially its exciting finish had taken hold of her in earnest. Her dainty little self was paying the penalty. She was all of a tremble. "Safe home at last!" she cried wearily. "Heaven reward you, Strings." From below the terrace, without the window, responded the fiddler, in sympathetic, loving tones: "Good night, Mistress Nell; and good sleep." "Good night, comrade," answered Nell, as she almost fell into the room, calling faintly: "Moll! Moll! What are you doing, Moll?" Moll closed her eyes tighter and prayed still more fervently. "Praying for Nell," her trembling lips mechanically replied. "Humph!" cried Nell, half fainting, throwing herself upon the couch. "There's no spirit in this flesh worth praying for. Some wine, some wine; and the blessing after." The command brought Moll to her senses and she realized that it was really Nell who had entered thus unceremoniously. She rushed to her for safety, like a frightened deer to the lake. "Nell, dear Nell!" she cried. "You are ill." "Wine, wine, I say," again fell in peremptory tones from the half-reclining Nell. Moll glanced in dismay at her bootless mistress: her garments all awry; her sword ill sheathed; her cloak uncaught from the shoulder and half used, petticoat-like, as a covering for her trembling-limbs; her hair dishevelled; her cheeks pale; her wild eyes, excitement-strained, staring from their sockets. "You are wounded; you are going to die," she cried. "Moll will be all alone in the world again." Her hands shook more than Nell's as she filled a glass half full of wine and passed it to her mistress. "To the brim, girl, to the brim," commanded Nell, reviving at the prospect of the draught. "There!" She tossed off the drink in gallant fashion: "I tell you, sweetheart, we men need lots of stimulating." "You are all of a tremble," continued Moll. "Little wonder!" sighed Nell. "These braveries are a trifle chilly, sweet mouse. Boo!" She laughed hysterically, while Moll closed the window. "You see, I never was a man before, and I had all that lost time to make up--acres of oats to scatter in one little night. Open my throat; I cannot breathe. Take off my sword. The wars are done, I hope." She startled Moll, who was encasing her mistress's pretty feet in a pair of dainty shoes, with another wild, hilarious laugh. "Moll," she continued, "I was the gayest mad-cap there. The sex were wild for me. I knew their weak points of attack, lass. If I had been seeking a mate, I could have made my market of them all and started a harem." She seemed to forget all her dangers past in the recollection. "Wicked girl," said Moll, pouting reprovingly. "Oh, I am a jolly roisterer, little one," laughed Nell, in reply, as with cavalier-strides she crossed the room. She threw herself upon the table and proceeded to boast of her doings for Moll's benefit, swinging her feet meanwhile. "I ran the gamut. I had all the paces of the truest cavalier. I could tread a measure, swear like one from the wars, crook my elbow, lie, gamble, fight--Fight? Did I say fight?" She hid her curly head in her hands and sobbed spasmodically. "You have been in danger!" exclaimed Moll, fearfully. "Danger!" repeated Nell, breaking out afresh. "I taught the King a lesson he will dream about, my sweet, though it near cost me my life. He loves me, d'ye hear; he loves me, pretty one! Dance, Moll, dance--Dance, I say! I could fly for very joy!" With the tears still wet upon her cheeks, she seized Moll by both hands and whirled the astonished girl wildly about the room, until she herself reeled for want of breath. Then, catching at a great carved oaken chair, she fell into it and cried and laughed alternately. "Nell, Nell," gasped Moll, as she too struggled for breath; "one minute you laugh and then you cry. Have you lost your wits?" "I only know," exulted Nell, "I made him swear his love for Nell to Portsmouth's face. I made him draw his sword for Nell." "Great Heavens!" exclaimed Moll, aghast. "You did not draw yourself? A sword against the King is treason." "Ods-bodikins, I know not!" answered Nell. "I know not what I did or said. I was mad, mad! All I remember is: there was a big noise--a million spears and blunderbusses turned upon poor me! Gad! I made a pretty target, girl." "A million spears and blunderbusses!" echoed Moll, her eyes like saucers. "An army, child, an army!" continued Nell, in half-frantic accents. "I did not stop to count them. Then, next I knew, I was in my coach, with dear old Strings beside me. The horses flew. We alighted at the Chapel, tiptoed about several corners to break the scent; then I took off my shoes and stole up the back way like a good and faithful husband. Oh, I did the whole thing in cavalier-style, sweetheart. But,'twixt us, Moll," and she spoke with a mysterious, confidential air,"--I wouldn't have it go further for worlds--Adair is a coward, a monstrous coward! He ran!" As if to prove the truth of her words, at a sudden, sharp, shrill sound from the direction of the park, the sad remnant of Adair clutched Moll frantically; and both girls huddled together with startled faces and bated breaths. "Hark! What is that?" whispered Nell. "The men, perchance, I told you of," answered Moll; "they've spied about the house for weeks." "Nonsense, you little goose," remonstrated Nell, though none too bravely; "some of your ex-lovers nailing their bleeding hearts to the trees." "No, no; listen!" exclaimed Moll, frantically, as the noise grew louder. "They're in the entry." "In the entry!" stammered Nell; and she almost collapsed at the thought of more adventures. "I wish we were in bed, with our heads under the sheet." "Here is your sword," said Moll, as she brought Nell the sharp weapon, held well at arm's length for fear of it. "Oh, yes, my sword!" exclaimed Nell, perking up--for an instant only. "I never thought of my sword; and this is one of the bravest swords I ever drew. I am as weak as a woman, Moll." "Take heart," said Moll, encouraging her from the rear, as Nell brandished the glittering blade in the direction of the door. "You know you faced an army to-night." "True," replied Nell, her courage oozing out at her finger-tips, "but then I was a man, and had to seem brave, whether I was or no. Who's there?" she called faintly. "Who's there? Support me, Moll. Beau Adair is on his last legs." Both stood listening intently and trembling from top to toe. A score of rich voices, singing harmoniously, broke upon the night. The startled expression on Nell's face changed instantly to one of fearless, roguish merriment. She was her old self again. She tossed the sword contemptuously upon the floor, laughing in derision now at her companion's fear. "A serenade! A serenade!" she cried. "Moll--Why, Moll, what feared ye, lass? Come!" She ran gaily to the window and peeped out. "Oh, ho, masqueraders from the moon. Some merry crew, I'll be bound. I am generous. I'll give thee all but one, sweet mouse. The tall knight in white for me! I know he's gallant, though his vizor's down. Marry, he is their captain, I trow; and none but a captain of men shall be captain of my little heart." "It is Satan and his imps," cried Moll, attempting to draw Nell from the window. "Tush, little one," laughed Nell, reprovingly. "Satan is my warmest friend. Besides, they cannot cross the moat. The ramparts are ours. The draw-bridge is up." In a merry mood, she threw a piece of drapery, mantle-like, about Adair's shoulders, quite hiding them, and, decapitating a grim old suit of armour, placed the helmet on her head. Thus garbed, she threw the window quickly open and stepped boldly upon the ledge, within full view of the band beneath. As the moonlight gleamed upon her helmet, one might have fancied her a goodly knight of yore; and, indeed, she looked quite formidable. "Nell, what are you doing?" called Moll, wildly, from a point of safety. "They can see and shoot you." "Tilly-vally, girl," replied Nell, undaunted now that she could see that there was no danger, "we'll parley with the enemy in true feudal style. We'll teach them we have a man about the house. Ho, there, strangers of the night--breakers of the King's peace and the slumbers of the righteous! Brawlers, knaves; would ye raise honest men from their beds at such an hour? What means this jargon of tipsy voices? What want ye?" A chorus of throats without demanded, in muffled accents: "Drink!" "Drink!" "Sack!" "Rhenish!" [Illustration: "I WAS THAT BOY!"] "Do ye think this a tavern, knaves?" responded Nell, in a husky, mannish voice. "Do ye think this a vintner's? There are no topers here. Jackanapes, revellers; away with you, or we'll rouse the citadel and train the guns." Her retort was met with boisterous laughter and mocking cries of "Down with the doors!" "Break in the windows!" This was a move Nell had not anticipated. She jumped from the ledge, or rather tumbled into the room, nervously dropping her disguise upon the floor. "Heaven preserve us," she said to Moll, with quite another complexion in her tone, "they are coming in! Oh, Moll, Moll, I did not think they would dare." Moll closed the sashes and bolted them, then hugged Nell close. "Ho, there, within!" came, in a guttural voice, now from without the door. "Yes?" Nell tried to say; but the word scarce went beyond her lips. Again in guttural tones came a second summons--"Nell! Nell!" Nell turned to Moll for support and courage, whispering: "Some arrant knave calls Nell at this hour." Then, assuming an attitude of bravery, with fluttering heart, she answered, as best she could, in a forced voice: "Nell's in bed!" "Yes, Nell's in bed," echoed the constant Moll. "Everybody's in bed. Call to-morrow!" "No trifling, wench!" commanded the voice without, angrily. "Down with the door!" "Stand close, Moll," entreated Nell, as she answered the would-be intruder with the question: "Who are ye? Who are ye?" "Old Rowley himself!" replied the guttural voice. This was followed by hoarse laughter from many throats. "The King--as I thought!" whispered Nell. "Good lack; what shall I do with Adair? Plague on't, he'll be mad if I keep him waiting, and madder if I let him in. Where are your wits, Moll? Run for my gown; fly--fly!" Moll hastened to do the bidding. Nell rushed to the entry-door, in frantic agitation. "The bolt sticks, Sire," she called, pretending to struggle with the door, hoping so to stay his Majesty until she should have time to dispose of poor Adair. "How can I get out of these braveries?" she then asked herself, tugging awkwardly at one part of the male attire and then at another. "I don't know which end of me to begin on first." Moll re-entered the room with a bundle of pink in her arms, which turned out to be a flowing, silken robe, trimmed with lace. "Here is the first I found," she said breathlessly. Nell motioned to her nervously to put it upon the couch. "Help me out of this coat," she pleaded woefully. Moll took off the coat and then assisted Nell to circumscribe with the gown, from heels to head, her stunning figure, neatly encased in Adair's habit, which now consisted only of a jaunty shirt of white, gray breeches, shoes and stockings. "Marry, I would I were a fairy with a magic wand; I could befuddle men's eyes easier," Nell lamented. The King knocked again upon the door sharply. "Patience, my liege," entreated Nell, drawing her gown close about her and muttering with personal satisfaction: "There, there; that hides a multitude of sins. The girdle, the girdle! Adair will not escape from this--if we can but keep him quiet; the rogue has a woman's tongue, and it will out, I fear." She snatched up a mirror and arranged her hair as best she could in the dim light, with the cries without resounding in her ears and with Moll dancing anxiously about her. "Down with the door," threatened the King, impatiently. "The ram; the battering ram." "I come, my love; I come," cried Nell, in agitation, fairly running to the door to open it, but stopping aghast as her eye caught over her shoulder the sad, telltale condition of the room. "'Sdeath," she called in a stage-whisper to Moll; "under the couch with Adair's coat! Patience, Sire," she besought in turn the King. "Help me, Moll. How this lock has rusted--in the last few minutes. My sword!" she continued breathlessly to Moll. "My boots! My hat! My cloak!" Moll, in her efforts to make the room presentable, was rushing hither and thither, first throwing Adair's coat beneath the couch as Nell commanded and firing the other evidences of his guilty presence, one behind one door and another behind another. It was done. Nell slipped the bolt and calmly took a stand in the centre of the room, drawing her flowing gown close about Adair's person. She was quite exhausted from the nervous strain, but her actress's art taught her the way to hide it. Moll, panting for breath, across the room, feigned composure as best she could. The door opened and in strode the King and his followers. "Welcome, royal comrades, welcome all!" said Nell, bowing graciously to her untimely visitors. CHAPTER XVI _Ods-pitikins, my own reflection!_ Upon the fine face of the King, as he entered Nell's drawing-room, was an expression of nervous bantering, not wholly unmixed with anxiety. The slanderous Adair and his almost miraculous escape had not long weighed upon his Majesty's careless nature. As he had not met Adair until that night or even heard of him, his heart had told him that the Irish roisterer could scarcely be a serious obstacle in the way of Nell's perfect faith, if, indeed, he had met Nell at all, which he doubted. His command to the guard to follow and overtake the youth had been more the command of the ruler than of the man. Despite himself, there had been something about the dainty peacock he could not help but like; and the bold dash for the window, the disarming of the purse-proud Buckingham, who for many reasons displeased him, and the leap to the sward below, with the accompanying farewell, had especially delighted both his manhood and his sense of humour. He had, therefore, dismissed Adair from his mind, except as a possible subject to banter Nell withal, or as a culprit to punish, if overtaken. His restless spirit had chafed under the Duchess's lavish entertainment--for the best entertainment is dull to the lover whose sweetheart is absent--and he had turned instinctively from the ball to Nell's terrace, regardless of the hour and scarce noticing his constant attendants. The night was so beautiful that their souls had found vent in song. This serenade, however, had brought to Nell's window a wide-awake fellow, who had revealed himself in saucy talk; and the delighted cavaliers, in hope of fun, had charged jeeringly that they had outwitted the guard and had found Adair. It was this that had brought the anxious look to the King's face; and, though his better judgment was still unchanged, the sight of the knave at the window, together with the suggestions of his merry followers, had cast a shadow of doubt for the moment upon his soul, and he had reflected that there was much that the Irish youth had said that could not be reconciled with that better judgment. With a careless shrug, he had, therefore, taken up the jest of his lawless crew, which coincided with his own intended purpose, and had sworn that he would turn the household out of bed without regard to pretty protests or formality of warrant. He would raise the question forthwith, in jest and earnest, and worry Nell about the boaster. "Scurvy entertainment," he began, with frowning brow. "Yea, my liege," explained Nell, winsomely; "you see--I did not expect the King so late, and so was unpresentable." "It is the one you do not expect," replied Charles, dryly, "who always causes the trouble, Nell." "We were in bed, Sire," threw in Moll, thinking to come to the rescue of her mistress. "Marry, truly," said Nell, catching at the cue, "--asleep, Sire, sound asleep; and our prayers said." "Tilly-vally," exclaimed the King, "we might credit thy tongue, wench, but for the prayers. No digressions, spider Nell. My sword is in a fighting mood. 'Sdeath, call forth the knight-errant who holds thy errant heart secure for one short hour!" "The knight of my heart!" cried Nell. "Ah, Sire, you know his name." She looked at his Majesty with eyes of unfailing love; but the King was true to his jest. "Yea, marry, I do," laughed Charles, tauntingly, with a wink at his companions; "a pretty piece of heraldry, a bold escutcheon, a dainty poniard--pale as a lily, and how he did sigh and drop his lids and smirk and smirk and dance your latest galliard to surpass De Grammont. Ask brother James how he did dance." "Nay, Sire," hastily interceded the ever-gallant Rochester, "his Highness of York has suffered enough." York frowned at the reference; for he had been robbed of his lady at the dance by Adair. He could not forget that. Heedless of his royalty, bestowed by man, she, like the others, had followed in the train of the Irish spark, who was royal only by nature. "Hang the coxcomb!" he snarled. "'Slife, I will," replied Charles, slyly, "an you overtake him, brother." "His back was shapely, Sire," observed Rochester, with quaint humour. "Yea, and his heels!" cried the King, reflectively. "He had such dainty heels--Mercury's wings attached, to waft him on his way." "This is moonshine madness!" exclaimed Nell, with the blandest of bland smiles. "There's none such here. By my troth, I would there were. Nay, ask Moll." Moll did not wait to be asked. "Not one visitor to-night," she asserted promptly. "Odso!" cried Charles, in a mocking tone. "Whence came the Jack at the window--the brave young challenger--'Would ye raise honest men from their beds at such an hour?'" A burst of laughter followed the King's grave imitation of the window-boaster. "Sire!" sighed Rochester, in like spirit. "'Do you think this a vintner's? There are no topers here.'" Another burst of merry laughter greeted the speaker, as he punctuated his words by catching up the wine-cups from the table and clinking them gaily. Nell's face was as solemn as a funeral. "To your knees, minx," commanded James, grimly, "and crave mercy of your prince." "Faith and troth," pleaded Nell, seriously, "'t was I myself with helmet and mantle on. You see, Sire, my menials were guests at Portsmouth's ball--to lend respectability." "Saucy wag," cried the Merry Monarch. "A ball?--A battle--which would have killed thee straight!" "It had liked to," reflected Nell, as she tartly replied: "A war of the sex without me? It was stupid, then. The Duchess missed me, I trow." "Never fear," answered Charles, with difficulty suppressing his mirth; "you were bravely championed." "I am sure of that," said Nell, slyly; "my King was there." "And a bantam cock," ejaculated Charles, sarcastically, "upon whose lips 'Nell' hung familiarly." "Some strange gallant," cried Nell, in ecstasy, "took my part before them all? Who was he, Sire? Don't tantalize me so." She smiled, half serious, half humorous, as she pleaded in her charming way. "A chip from the Blarney Stone," observed the King at length, ironically, "surnamed Adair!" "Adair! Adair!" cried Nell, to the astonishment of all. "We spent our youth together. I see him in my mind's eye, Sire, throw down the gauntlet in Nell's name and defy the world for her. Fill the cups. We'll drink to my new-found hero! Fill! Fill! To Beau Adair, as you love me, gallants! Long life to Adair!" The cups were filled to overflowing and trembled on eager lips in response to the hostess's merry toast. "Stay!" commanded the King, in peremptory tones. "Not a drop to a coward!" "A coward!" cried Nell, aghast. "Adair a coward? I'll never credit it, Sire!" She turned away, lest she reveal her merriment, as she bethought her: "He is trembling in my boots now. I can feel him shake." "Our pledge is Nell, Nell only!" exclaimed the King, his cup high in air. With one accord, the gallants eagerly took up the royal pledge. "Aye, aye, Nell!" "Nell!" "We'll drink to Nell!" "You do me honour, royal gentlemen," bowed Nell, well pleased at the King's toast. She had scarce touched the cup to her lips, however, with a mental chuckle, "Poor Adair! Here's a health to the inner man!" when her eye fell upon one of Adair's gray boots, which Moll had failed to hide, in her excitement, now revealing itself quite plainly in the light of the many candles. She caught it adroitly on the tip of her toe and sent it whizzing through the air in the direction of poor Moll, who, fortunately, caught it in midair and hid it quickly beneath her apron. The King turned at the sound; but Nell's face was as woefully unconcerned as a church-warden's at his hundredth burial. The wine added further zest to the merry-making and the desire for sport. "Now, fair huswife," continued Charles, his thoughts reverting to Adair, "set forth the dish, that we may carve it to our liking. 'Tis a dainty bit,--lace, velvet and ruffles." "Heyday, Sire," responded Nell, evasively, "the larder's empty." "Devil on't," cried Charles, ferociously; "no mincing, wench. In the confusion of the ball, the bird escaped my guard by magic. We know whither the flight." The King assumed a knowing look. "Escaped the guard?" gasped Nell, in great surprise. "Alas, I trow some petticoat has hid him then." "I'll stake my life upon't," observed James, who had not been heard from in some time but who had been observing the scene with decorous dignity. "Sire, you would not injure Adair," pleaded Nell, now alert, with all her arts of fascination. "You are too generous. Blue eyes of heaven, and such a smile! Did you mark that young Irishman's smile, Sire?" Her impudence was so bewitching that the King scarce knew whether it were jest or earnest. He sprang to his feet from the couch, where he had thrown himself after the toast to Nell, and, with some forcefulness, exclaimed: "Odsfish, this to my teeth, rogue! Guard the doors, gallants; we'd gaze upon this paragon." "And set him pirouetting, Sire," sardonically suggested James. "Yea, to the tune of these fiddle-sticks," laughed Charles, as he unsheathed his rapier. "Search from tile to rafter." "Aye, aye," echoed the omnipresent Rochester, "from cellar to garret." Before, however, the command could be obeyed, even in resolution, Nell moved uneasily to a curtain which hung in the corner of the room and placed herself before it, as if to shield a hidden man. "Sire," she pleaded fearfully, "spare him, Sire; for my sake, Sire. He is not to blame for loving me. He cannot help it. You know that, Sire!" "Can he really be here?" muttered Charles, with clouding visage. "Saucy wench! Hey! My blood is charging full-tilt through my veins. Odsfish, we'll try his mettle once again." "Prythee, Sire," begged Nell, "he is too noble and brave and handsome to die. I love his very image." "Oh, ho!" cried Charles. "A silken blind for the silken bird! Hey, St. George for merry England! Come forth, thou picture of cowardice, thou vile slanderer." He grasped Nell by the wrist and fairly dragged her across the room. Then, rushing to the curtain, he seized its silken folds and tore it completely from its hangings--only to face himself in a large mirror. "Ods-pitikins, my own reflection!" he exclaimed, with menacing tone, though there was relief as well in his voice. He bent the point of his blade against the floor, gazed at himself in the pier-glass and looked over his shoulder at Nell, who stood in the midst of his courtiers, splitting her sides with laughter, undignified but honest. "Rogue, rogue," he cried, "I should turn the point on thee for this trick; but England would be worse than a Puritan funeral with no Nell. Thou shalt suffer anon." "I defy thee, Sire, and all thy imps of Satan," laughed the vixen, as she watched the King sheathe his jewelled sword. "Cast Nell in the blackest dungeon, Adair is her fellow-prisoner; outlaw Nell, Adair is her brother outlaw; off with Nell's head, off rolls Adair's. Who else can boast so true a love!" "Thou shalt be banished the realm," decided the King, jestingly; for he was now convinced that her Adair was but a jest to tease him--a Roland for his Oliver. "Banished!" cried Nell, with bated breath. "Aye; beyond sea, witch!" answered the King, with pompous austerity. "Virginia shall be thy home." "Good, good!" laughed Nell, gaily. "Sire, the men grow handsome in Virginia, and dauntless; and they tell me there are a dearth of women there. Oh, banish me at once to--What's the name?" "Jamestown," suggested York, recalling the one name because of its familiar sound. "Yea, brother James," said Nell, fearlessly mimicking his brusque accent, "Jamestown." "Savages, wild men, cannibals," scowled Charles. "Cannibals!" cried Nell. "Marry, I should love to be a cannibal. Are there cannibals in Jamestown, brother James? Banish me, Sire; banish me to Jamestown of all places. Up with the sails, my merry men; give me the helm! Adair will sail in the same good ship, I trow." "Adair! I trow thou wert best at home, cannibal Nelly," determined the King. "Then set all the men in Britain to watch me, Sire," said Nell; "for, from now on, I'll need it." The King shook his finger warningly at her, then leaned carelessly against the window. "Ho there!" he cried out suddenly. "A night disturbance, a drunken brawl, beneath our very ears! Fellow-saints, what mean my subjects from their beds this hour of night? Their sovereign does the revelling for the realm. James, Rochester and all, see to 't!" CHAPTER XVII _The day will be so happy; for I've seen you at the dawn._ The room was quickly cleared, the King's courtiers jostling one another in their efforts to carry out the royal bidding. Charles turned with a merry laugh and seized Nell in his arms almost fiercely. "A subterfuge!" he cried eagerly. "Nell, quick; one kiss!" "Nay; you question my constancy to-night," said Nell, sadly, as she looked into his eyes, with the look of perfect love. "You do not trust me." "I do, sweet Nell," protested the King, earnestly. "You bring me Portsmouth's lips," said Nell, with sad reproof. "I left her dance for you," replied the King, drawing her closer to him. "At near sunrise, Sire," sighed Nell, reprovingly, as she drew back the curtain and revealed the first gray streaks of the breaking light of day. "Nay, do not tantalize me, Nell," besought the King, throwing himself upon the couch. "I am sad to-night." The woman's forgiving heart was touched with sympathy. Her eyes sought his sadly beautiful face. She ran to him, fell upon her knees and kissed his hand tenderly. "Tantalize my King!" she cried. "The day will be so happy; for I've seen you at the dawn." There was all the emotional fervour and pathetic tenderness which the great composer has compressed into the love-music of "Tristan and Isolde" in her voice. "My crown is heavy, Nell," he continued. "Heaven gives us crowns, but not the eye to see the ending of our deeds." "God sees them," said Nell. "Ah, Sire, I thank the Maker of the world for giving a crown to one whom I respect and love." "And I curse it," cried the King, with earnest eyes; "for 'tis the only barrier to our united love. It is the sparkling spider in the centre of a great web of intrigue and infamy." "You make me bold to speak. Cut the web, Sire, which binds thy crown to France. There is the only danger." "Thou art wrong, Nelly, wrong!" He spoke in deep, firm accents. "I have decided otherwise." He rose abruptly, his brow clouded with thought. She took his hand tenderly. "Then, change your mind, Sire," she pleaded; "for I can prove--" "What, girl?" he asked eagerly, his curiosity awakened by her manner. Nell did not respond. To continue would reveal Adair, and she could not think of that. "What, I say?" again asked Charles, impatiently. "To-morrow, Sire," laughed Nell, evasively. "Aye, to-morrow and to-morrow!" petulantly repeated the King. He was about to demand a direct reply but was stayed by the sound of a struggle without. It befell in the nick of time for Nell, as all things, indeed, in life seemed to befall in the nick of time for her. The impious huswives shook their heads and attributed it to the evil influence; the pious huswives asserted it was providential; Nell herself laughingly declared it was her lucky star. "Ho, without there!" Charles cried, impatiently--almost angrily--at the interruption. "Whence comes this noisy riot?" James, Rochester and the others unceremoniously re-entered. "Pardon, Sire," explained the Duke of York; "the guard caught but now an armed ruffian prowling by the house. They report they stayed him on suspicion of his looks and insolence." "Adair! Adair! My life upon't!" laughed the King, ever ready for sport. "Set him before us." An officer of the guard departed quickly to bring in the offender. The courtiers took up the King's cry most readily; and there was a general cackle of "Adair!" "Adair!" "A trial!" "Sire!" "Bring in the coward!" Nell stood in the midst of the scene, the picture of demure innocence. "They've caught Adair!" she whispered to Moll, mischievously. "Aye, gallants," cried the Merry Monarch, approvingly, "we'll form a Court of Inquiry. This table shall be our bench, on which we'll hem and haw and puff and look judicial. Odsfish, we will teach Radamanthus and Judge Jeffreys ways of terrorizing." He sprang upon the table, which creaked somewhat beneath the royal burden, and assumed the austere, frowning brow of worldly justice. "_Oyer, oyer_, all ye who have grievances--" cried the garrulous Rochester in the husky tones of the crier, who most generally assumes that he is the whole court and oftentimes should be. "Mistress Nell," commanded the royal judge, summoning Nell to the bar, "thou shalt be counsel for the prisoner; Adair's life hangs upon thy skill to outwit the law." "Or bribe the judge, Sire?" suggested Nell, demurely. "Not with thy traitor lips," retorted Charles, with the injured dignity of a petty justice about to commit a flash of true wit for contempt of court. "Traitor lips?" cried Nell, sadly. "By my troth, I never kissed Adair. I confess, I tried, your Majesty; but I could not." "Have a care," replied the King, in a tone which indicated that the fires of suspicion still smouldered in his breast; "I am growing jealous." Nell fell upon one knee and stretched forth her arms suppliantly. "Adair is in such a tight place, Sire, he can scarcely breathe," she pleaded, with the zeal of a barrister hard-working for his first fee in her voice, "much less speak for himself. Mercy!" "We will have justice; not mercy," replied the court, with a sly wink at Rochester. "Guilty or not guilty, wench?" "Not guilty, Sire! Did you ever see the man who was?" The King laughed despite himself, followed by his ever-aping courtiers. "I'll plead for the Crown," asserted the grim James, with great vehemence, "to rid the realm of this dancing-Jack." "Thou hast cause, brother," laughed the King. "Rochester, thou shalt sit by us here." Rochester sprang, with a contented chuckle, into a chair on the opposite side of the table to that upon which his Majesty was holding his mock-court and seated himself upon its high back, so poised as not to fall. From this lofty bench, with a queer gurgle, to say nothing of a swelling of the chest, and with an approving glance from his Majesty, he added his mite to the all-inspiring dignity of the revellers' court. "Judge Rochester!" continued the King, slapping him with his glove, across the table. "Judge--of good ale. We'll confer with the cups, imbibe the statutes and drink in the law. Set the rascal before us." In obedience to the command, a man well muffled with a cloak was forced into the room, a guard at either arm. Behind them, taking advantage of the open door to appease their curiosity, crowded many hangers-on of courtdom, among whom was Strings, who had met the revellers some distance from the house and had returned with them. "Hold off your hands, knaves," commanded the prisoner, who was none other than Hart, the player, indignant at the detention. "Silence, rogue!" commanded the King. "Thy name?" "Sire!" cried Hart, throwing off his mantle and glancing for the first time at the judge's face. He sank immediately upon one knee, bowing respectfully. "Jack Hart!" cried one and all, craning their necks in surprise and expectation. "'Slife, a spy upon our merry-making!" exclaimed the displeased monarch. "What means this prowling, sir?" "Pardon, pardon, my reply, your Majesty," humbly importuned the player. "Blinded by passion, I might say that I should regret." "Your strange behaviour and stranger looks have meaning, sir," cried the King, impatiently. "Out with it! These are too dangerous times to withhold your thoughts from your King." "No need for commands, Sire," entreated Hart. "The words are trembling on my lips and will out themselves in spite of me. At Portsmouth's ball, an hour past, I o'erheard that fop Adair boast to-night a midnight rendezvous here with Nell." Nell placed her hands upon her heart. "This--my old friend," she reflected sadly. "Our jest turned earnest," cried Charles. "Well? Well?" he questioned, in peremptory tones. "I could not believe my ears, Sire," the prisoner continued, faltering. "I watched to refute the lie--" "Yes--yes--" exhorted the King, in expectation. "I cannot go on." "Knave, I command!" "I saw Adair enter this abode at midnight." Hart's head fell, full of shame, upon his breast. "'Sblood," muttered the King, scarce mindful that his words might be audible to those about him, "my heart stands still as if't were knifed. My pretty golden-head, my bonnie Nell!" He turned sharply toward the player. "Your words are false, false, sir! Kind Heaven, they must be." "Pardon, Sire," pleaded Hart; "I know not what I do or say. Only love for Nell led me to this spot." "Love!" cried Nell, with the irony of sadness. "Oh, inhuman, to spy out my ways, resort to mean device, involve my honour, and call the motive love!" "You are cruel, cruel, Nell," sobbed Hart; and he turned away his eyes. He could not look at her. "Love!" continued Nell, bitterly. "True love would come alone, filled with gentle admonition. I pity you, friend Hart, that God has made you thus!" "No more, no more!" Hart quite broke beneath the strain. "Dost hear, dost hear?" cried Charles, in ecstasy, deeply affected by Nell's exposition of true love. "Sir, you are the second to-night to belie the dearest name in England. You shall answer well to me." "Ask the lady, Sire," pleaded Hart, in desperation. "I'll stake my life upon her reply." "Nell?--Nell?" questioned the King; for he could scarce refuse to accept her word when a player had placed unquestioned faith in it. Nell hid her face in her silken kerchief and burst into seeming spasmodic sobs of grief. "Sire!" was all the response the King could hear. He trembled violently and his face grew white. He did not know that Nell's tears were merry laughs. "Her tears convict her," exclaimed Hart, triumphantly. "I'll not believe it," cried the King. Nell became more hysterical. She sobbed and sobbed, as though her heart would break, her face buried in her hands and her flying curls falling over and hiding all. "Adair's sides are aching," she chuckled, in apparent convulsions of sorrow. "He's laughing through Nell's tears." Meanwhile, Moll had been standing by the window; and, though she was watching eagerly the exciting scene within the room, she could not fail to note the sound of galloping horses and the rattling of a heavy coach on the roadway without. "A coach and six at break-neck speed," she cried, "have landed at the door. A cavalier alights." "Time some one arrived," thought Nell, as she glanced at herself in the mirror, to see that Adair was well hidden, and to arrange her curls, to bewitch the new arrivals, whosoever they might be. As the cavalier dashed up the path, in the moonlight, Moll recognized the Duke of Buckingham, and at once announced his name. "Ods-pitikins!" exclaimed Charles, angrily. "No leisure for Buckingham now. We have other business." He had scarce spoken, however, when Buckingham, unceremoniously and almost breathless, entered the room. "How now?" cried the King, fiercely, as the Duke fell on his knee before him; for his temper had been wrought to a high pitch. "Pardon, your Majesty," besought his lordship, in nervous accents. "My mission will excuse my haste and interruption. Your ear I crave one moment. Sire, I am told Nell has to-night secreted in this house a lover!" "Another one!" whispered Nell to Moll. "'Tis hearsay," cried the King, now at fever-heat, "the give-and-take of gossips! I'll none of it." "My witness, Sire!" answered Buckingham. He turned toward the door; and there, to the astonishment of all, stood the Duchess of Portsmouth, who had followed him from the coach, a lace mantilla, caught up in her excitement, protecting her shapely shoulders and head. As the assembled courtiers looked upon the beautiful rivals, standing, as they did, face to face before the King, and realized the situation, their faces grew grave, indeed. The suspense became intense. "The day of reckoning's come," thought Nell, as she met with burning glances the Duchess's eyes. "Speak, your grace," exhorted Buckingham. "The King attends you." "Nay, before all, my lord?" protested Portsmouth, with pretended delicacy. "I could not do Madame Gwyn so much injustice." "If your speech concerns me," observed Nell, mildly, "out with it boldly. My friends will consider the source." "Speak, and quickly!" commanded Charles. "I would rather lose my tongue," still protested the Duchess, "than speak such words of any one; but my duty to your Majesty--" "No preludes," interrupted the King; and he meant it, too. He was done with trifling, and the Duchess saw it. "My servants," she said, with a virtuous look, "passing this abode by chance, this very night, saw at a questionable hour a strange cavalier entering the boudoir of Madame Gwyn!" "She would make my honour the price of her revenge," thought Nell, her eyes flashing. "She shall rue those words, or Adair's head and mine are one for naught." "What say you to this, Nell?" asked the King, the words choking in his throat. "Sire,--I--I--" answered Nell, evasively. "There's some mistake or knavery!" "She hesitates," interpolated the Duchess, eagerly. "You change colour, wench," cried Charles, his heart, indeed, again upon the rack. "Ho, without there! Search the house." An officer entered quickly to obey the mandate. "Stay, Sire," exclaimed Nell, raising herself to her full height, her hot, trembling lips compressed, her cheeks aflame. "My oath, I have not seen Adair's face this night." Her words fell upon the assemblage like thunder from a June-day sky. The King's face brightened. The Duchess's countenance grew pale as death. "_Mon Dieu!_ Adair!" she gasped in startled accents to Lord Buckingham, attendant at her side. "Could it be he my servants saw? The packet! Fool! Why did I give it him?" Buckingham trembled violently. He was even more startled than Portsmouth; for he had more to lose. England was his home and France was hers. "The scales are turning against us," he whispered. "Throw in this ring for safety. Nell's gift to Adair; you understand." He slipped, unobserved, upon the Duchess's finger the jewelled ring the King had given to Almahyde among the roses at the performance of "Granada." "Yes! Yes! 'Tis my only chance," she answered, catching at his meaning; for her wits were of the sharpest in intrigue and cunning, and she possessed the boldness too to execute her plans. She approached the King, with the confident air possessed by great women who have been bred at court. "Your Majesty recognizes this ring?" she asked in mildest accents. "The one I gave to Nell!" answered the astonished King. "The one Adair this night gave to me," said Portsmouth, calmly. "'Tis false!" cried Nell, who could restrain her tongue no longer. "I gave that ring to dear old Strings." "A rare jewel to bestow upon a fiddler," said the Duchess, sarcastically. "It is true," said Strings, who had wormed his way through the group at mention of his name and now stood the meek central figure at the strange hearing. "My little ones were starving, Sire; and Nell gave me the ring--all she had. They could not eat the gold; so I sold it to the Duke of Buckingham!" "We are lost," whispered Buckingham to Portsmouth, scarce audibly. "Coward!" sneered the Duchess, contemptuously. "I am not ready to sail for France so soon." The King stood irresolute. Events had transpired so quickly that he scarce knew what it was best to do. His troubled spirit longed for a further hearing, while his heart demanded the ending of the scene with a peremptory word. Before he could decide upon his course, the Duchess had swept across the room, with queenly grace. "Our hostess will pardon my eyes for wandering," she said, undaunted; "but her abode is filled with pleasant surprises. Sire, here is a piece of handiwork." She knelt by the couch, and drew from under it a coat of gray, one sleeve of which had caught her eye. Nell looked at Moll with reproving glances. "Marry, 'tis Strings's, of course," continued Portsmouth, dangling the coat before the wondering eyes of all. "The lace, the ruffle, becomes his complexion. He fits everything here so beautifully." As she turned the garment slowly about, she caught sight of a package of papers protruding from its inner pocket, sealed with her own seal. For the first time, the significance of the colour of the coat came home to her. "_Mon Dieu_," she cried, "Adair's coat.--The packet!" Her fingers sought the papers eagerly; but Nell's eye and hand were too quick for her. "Not so fast, dear Duchess," said Nell, sweetly, passing the little packet to his Majesty. "Our King must read these papers--and between the lines as well." "Enough of this!" commanded Charles. "What is it?" "Some papers, Sire," said Nell, pointedly, "given for a kiss and taken with a kiss. I have not had time to read them." "Some family papers, Sire," asserted the Duchess, with assumed indifference, "stolen from my house." She would have taken them from his Majesty, so great, indeed, was her boldness; but Nell again stayed her. "Aye, stolen," said Nell, sharply; "but by the hostess herself--from her unsuspecting, royal guest. There, Sire, stands the only thief!" She pointed accusingly at Portsmouth. "My signature!" cried Charles, as he ran his eye down a parchment. "The treaties! No more Parliaments for England. I agreed to that." "I agree to that myself," said Nell, roguishly. "England's King is too great to need Parliaments. The King should have a confidential adviser, however--not French," and she cast a defiant glance at Portsmouth, "but English. Read on; read on." She placed her pretty cheek as near as possible to the King's as she followed the letters over his shoulder. "A note to Bouillon!" he said, perusing the parchments further. "Charles consents to the fall of Luxembourg. I did not sign all this. I see it all: Louis's ambition to rule the world, England's King debased by promises won and royal contracts made with a clever woman--forgery mixed with truth. Sweet Heaven, what have I done!" "The papers have not gone, Sire," blandly remarked Nell. "Thanks to you, my Nell," said Charles. He addressed Portsmouth sharply: "Madame, your coach awaits you." "But, Sire," replied the Duchess, who was brave to the last, "Madame Gwyn has yet Adair to answer for!" "Adair will answer for himself!" cried Nell, triumphantly. She threw aside the pink gown and stood as Adair before the astonished eyes of all. "At your service," she said, bowing sweetly to the Duchess. "A player's trick!" cried Portsmouth, haughtily, as a parting shot of contempt. "Yes, Portsmouth," replied Nell, still in sweetest accents, "to show where lies the true and where the false." "You are a witch," hissed Portsmouth. [Illustration: "ONCE MORE YOU HAVE SAVED ME."] "You are the King's true love," exclaimed the Merry Monarch. "To my arms, Nell, to my arms; for you first taught me the meaning of true love! Buckingham, you forget your courtesy. Her grace wishes to be escorted to her coach." "_Bon voyage_, madame," said Nell, demurely, as the Duchess took Buckingham's arm and departed. The King's eyes fell upon the player, Hart, who was still in custody. "Away with this wretch!" he cried, incensed at his conduct. "I am not done with him." "Forgive him, Sire," interceded Nell. "He took his cue from Heaven, and good has come of it." "True, Nell," said the King, mercifully. Then he turned to Hart: "You are free; but henceforth act the knave only on the stage." Hart bowed with shame and withdrew. "Sire, Sire," exclaimed Strings, forgetting his decorum in his eagerness. "Well, Strings?" inquired the King, good-humouredly; for there was now no cloud in his sky. "Let me play the exit for the villains?" he pleaded unctuously. "The old fiddle is just bursting with tunes." "You shall, Strings," replied his Majesty, "and on a Cremona. From to-day, you lead the royal orchestra." "Odsbud," cried Strings, gleefully, "I can offer Jack Hart an engagement." "Just retribution, Strings," laughed Nell, happily. "Can you do as much for Nell, and forgive her, Sire?" "It is I who should ask your pardon, Nell," exclaimed the King, ecstatically, throwing both arms passionately about her. "You are Charles's queen; you should be England's." _So the story ends, as all good stories should, in a perfect, unbroken dream of love._ EPILOGUE Spoken by Miss Crosman for the first time in New York at the Bijou Theatre on the evening of October 9, 1900: _Good friends, before we end the play, I beg you all a moment stay: I warn my sex, by Nell's affair, Against a rascal called Adair!_ _If lovers' hearts you'd truly scan, Odsfish, perk up, and be a man!_ GROSSET & DUNLAP'S DRAMATIZED NOVELS Original, sincere and courageous--often amusing--the kind that are making theatrical history. MADAME X. By Alexandre Bisson and J. W. McConaughy. Illustrated with scenes from the play. A beautiful Parisienne became an outcast because her husband would not forgive an error of her youth. Her love for her son is the great final influence in her career. A tremendous dramatic success. THE GARDEN OF ALLAH. By Robert Hichens. An unconventional English woman and an inscrutable stranger meet and love in an oasis of the Sahara. Staged this season with magnificent cast and gorgeous properties. THE PRINCE OF INDIA. By Lew. Wallace. A glowing romance of the Byzantine Empire, presenting with extraordinary power the siege of Constantinople, and lighting its tragedy with the warm underglow of an Oriental romance. As a play it is a great dramatic spectacle. TESS OF THE STORM COUNTRY. By Grace Miller White. Illust. by Howard Chandler Christy. A girl from the dregs of society, loves a young Cornell University student, and it works startling changes in her life and the lives of those about her. The dramatic version is one of the sensations of the season. YOUNG WALLINGFORD. By George Randolph Chester. Illust. by F. R. Gruger and Henry Raleigh. A series of clever swindles conducted by a cheerful young man, each of which is just on the safe side of a State's prison offense. As "Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford," it is probably the most amusing expose of money manipulation ever seen on the stage. THE INTRUSION OF JIMMY. By P. G. Wodehouse. Illustrations by Will Grefe. Social and club life in London and New York, an amateur burglary adventure and a love story. Dramatized under the title of "A Gentleman of Leisure," it furnishes hours of laughter to the play-goers. Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York GROSSET & DUNLAP'S DRAMATIZED NOVELS THE KIND THAT ARE MAKING THEATRICAL HISTORY May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list WITHIN THE LAW. By Bayard Veiller & Marvin Dana Illustrated by Wm. Charles Cooke. This is a novelization of the immensely successful play which ran for two years in New York and Chicago. The plot of this powerful novel is of a young woman's revenge directed against her employer who allowed her to be sent to prison for three years on a charge of theft, of which she was innocent. WHAT HAPPENED TO MARY. By Robert Carlton Brown. Illustrated with scenes from the play. This is a narrative of a young and innocent country girl who is suddenly thrown into the very heart of New York, "the land of her dreams," where she is exposed to all sorts of temptations and dangers. The story of Mary is being told in moving pictures and played in theatres all over the world. THE RETURN OF PETER GRIMM. By David Belasco, Illustrated by John Rae. This is a novelization of the popular play in which David War, field, as Old Peter Grimm, scored such a remarkable success. The story is spectacular and extremely pathetic but withal, powerful, both as a book and as a play. THE GARDEN OF ALLAH. By Robert Hichens. This novel is an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of vastness and loneliness. It is a book of rapturous beauty, vivid in word painting. The play has been staged with magnificent cast and gorgeous properties. BEN HUR. A Tale of the Christ. By General Lew Wallace. The whole world has placed this famous Religious-Historical Romance on a height of pre-eminence which no other novel of its time has reached. The clashing of rivalry and the deepest human passions, the perfect reproduction of brilliant Roman life, and the tense, fierce atmosphere of the arena have kept their deep fascination. A tremendous dramatic success. BOUGHT AND PAID FOR. By George Broadhurst and Arthur Hornblow. Illustrated with scenes from the play. A stupendous arraignment of modern marriage which has created an interest on the stage that is almost unparalleled. The scenes are laid in New York, and deal with conditions among both the rich and poor. The interest of the story turns on the day-by-day developments which show the young wife the price she has paid. Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York TITLES SELECTED FROM GROSSET & DUNLAP'S LIST RE-ISSUES OF THE GREAT LITERARY SUCCESSES OF THE TIME May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list BEN HUR. A Tale of the Christ. By General Lew Wallace This famous Religious-Historical Romance with its mighty story, brilliant pageantry, thrilling action and deep religious reverence, hardly requires an outline. The whole world has placed "Ben-Hur" on a height of pre-eminence which no other novel of its time has reached. The clashing of rivalry and the deepest human passions, the perfect reproduction of brilliant Roman life, and the tense, fierce atmosphere of the arena have kept their deep fascination. THE PRINCE OF INDIA. By General Lew Wallace A glowing romance of the Byzantine Empire, showing, with vivid imagination, the possible forces behind the internal decay of the Empire that hastened the fall of Constantinople. The foreground figure is the person known to all as the Wandering Jew, at this time appearing as the Prince of India, with vast stores of wealth, and is supposed to have instigated many wars and fomented the Crusades. Mohammed's love for the Princess Irene is beautifully wrought into the story, and the book as a whole is a marvelous work both historically and romantically. THE FAIR GOD. By General Lew Wallace. A Tale of the Conquest of Mexico. With Eight Illustrations by Eric Pape. All the annals of conquest have nothing more brilliantly daring and dramatic than the drama played in Mexico by Cortes. As a dazzling picture of Mexico and the Montezumas it leaves nothing to be desired. The artist has caught with rare enthusiasm the spirit of the Spanish conquerors of Mexico, its beauty and glory and romance. TARRY THOU TILL I COME or, Salathiel, the Wandering Jew. By George Croly. With twenty illustrations by T. de Thulstrup A historical novel, dealing with the momentous events that occurred, chiefly in Palestine, from the time of the Crucifixion to the, destruction of Jerusalem. The book, as a story, is replete with Oriental charm and richness and the character drawing is marvelous. No other novel ever written has portrayed with such vividness the events that convulsed Rome and destroyed Jerusalem in the early days of Christanity. Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York STORIES OF WESTERN LIFE May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE, By Zane Grey. Illustrated by Douglas Duer. In this picturesque romance of Utah of some forty years ago, we are permitted to see the unscrupulous methods employed by the invisible hand of the Mormon Church to break the will of those refusing to conform to its rule. FRIAR TUCK, By Robert Alexander Wason. Illustrated by Stanley L. Wood. Happy Hawkins tells us, in his humorous way, how Friar Tuck lived among the Cowboys, how he adjusted their quarrels and love affairs and how he fought with them and for them when occasion required. THE SKY PILOT, By Ralph Connor. Illustrated by Louis Rhead. There is no novel, dealing with the rough existence of cowboys, so charming in the telling, abounding as it does with the freshest and the truest pathos. THE EMIGRANT TRAIL, By Geraldine Bonner. Colored frontispiece by John Rae. The book relates the adventures of a party on its overland pilgrimage, and the birth and growth of the absorbing love of two strong men for a charming heroine. THE BOSS OF WIND RIVER, By A. M. Chisholm. Illustrated by Frank Tenney Johnson. This is a strong, virile novel with the lumber industry for its central theme and a love story full of interest as a sort of subplot. A PRAIRIE COURTSHIP, By Harold Bindloss. A story of Canadian prairies in which the hero is stirred, through the influence of his love for a woman, to settle down to the heroic business of pioneer farming. JOYCE OF THE NORTH WOODS, By Harriet T. Comstock. Illustrated by John Cassel. A story of the deep woods that shows the power of love at work among its primitive dwellers. It is a tensely moving study of the human heart and its aspirations that unfolds itself through thrilling situations and dramatic developments. Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York THE NOVELS OF STEWART EDWARD WHITE THE RULES OF THE GAME. Illustrated by Lajaren A. Killer The romance of the son of "The Riverman." The young college hero goes into the lumber camp, is antagonized by "graft" and comes into the romance of his life. ARIZONA NIGHTS. Illus. and cover inlay by N. C. Wyeth. A series of spirited tales emphasizing some phases of the life of the ranch, plains and desert. A masterpiece. THE BLAZED TRAIL. With illustrations by Thomas Fogarty. A wholesome story with gleams of humor, telling of a young man who blazed his way to fortune through the heart of the Michigan pines. THE CLAIM JUMPERS. A Romance. The tenderfoot manager of a mine in a lonesome gulch of the Black Hills has a hard time of it, but "wins out" in more ways than one. CONJUROR'S HOUSE. Illustrated Theatrical Edition. Dramatized under the title of "The Call of the North." Conjuror's House is a Hudson Bay trading post where the head factor is the absolute lord. A young fellow risked his life and won a bride on this forbidden land. THE MAGIC FOREST. A Modern Fairy Tale. Illustrated. The sympathetic way in which the children of the wild and their life is treated could only belong to one who is in love with the forest and open air. Based on fact. THE RIVERMAN. Illus. by N. C. Wyeth and C. Underwood. The story of a man's fight against a river and of a struggle between honesty and grit on the one side, and dishonesty and shrewdness on the other. THE SILENT PLACES. Illustrations by Philip R. Goodwin. The wonders of the northern forests, the heights of feminine devotion, and masculine power, the intelligence of the Caucasian and the instinct of the Indian, are all finely drawn in this story. THE WESTERNERS. A story of the Black Hills that is justly placed among the best American novels. It portrays the life of the new West as no other book has done in recent years. THE MYSTERY. In collaboration with Samuel Hopkins Adams Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York JOHN FOX, JR'S. STORIES OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list. THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE. Illustrated by F. C. Yohn. [Illustration] The "lonesome pine" from which the story takes its name was a tall tree that stood in solitary splendor on a mountain top. The fame of the pine lured a young engineer through Kentucky to catch the trail, and when he finally climbed to its shelter he found not only the pine but the _foot-prints of a girl_. And the girl proved to be lovely, piquant, and the trail of these girlish foot-prints led the young engineer a madder chase than "the trail of the lonesome pine." THE LITTLE SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COME Illustrated by F. C. Yohn. This is a story of Kentucky, in a settlement known as "Kingdom Come." It is a life rude, semi-barbarous; but natural and honest, from which often springs the flower of civilization. "Chad," the "little shepherd" did not know who he was nor whence he came--he had just wandered from door to door since early childhood, seeking shelter with kindly mountaineers who gladly fathered and mothered this waif about whom there was such a mystery--a charming waif, by the way, who could play the banjo better that anyone else in the mountains. A KNIGHT OF THE CUMBERLAND. Illustrated by F. C. Yohn. The scenes are laid along the waters of the Cumberland the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners' fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making of the mountaineers. Included in this volume is "Hell fer-Sartain" and other stories, some of Mr. Fox's most entertaining Cumberland valley narratives. Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York STORIES OF RARE CHARM BY GENE STRATTON-PORTER May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list. THE HARVESTER Illustrated by W. L. Jacobs [Illustration] "The Harvester," David Langston, is a man of the woods and fields, who draws his living from the prodigal hand of Mother Nature herself. If the book had nothing in it but the splendid figure of this man, with his sure grip on life, his superb optimism, and his almost miraculous knowledge of nature secrets, it would be notable. But when the Girl comes to his "Medicine Woods," and the Harvester's whole sound, healthy, large outdoor being realizes that this is the highest point of life which has come to him--there begins a romance, troubled and interrupted, yet of the rarest idyllic quality. FRECKLES. Decorations by E. Stetson Crawford Freckles is a nameless waif when the tale opens, but the way in which he takes hold of life; the nature friendships he forms in the great Limberlost Swamp; the manner in which everyone who meets him succumbs to the charm of his engaging personality; and his love-story with "The Angel" are full of real sentiment, A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST Illustrated by Wladyslaw T. Brenda. The story of a girl of the Michigan woods; a buoyant, lovable type of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and unpromising surroundings those rewards of high courage. It is an inspiring story of a life worth while and the rich beauties of the out-of-doors are strewn through all its pages. AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW. Illustrations in colors by Oliver Kemp. Design and decorations by Ralph Fletcher Seymour. The scene of this charming, idyllic love story is laid in Central Indiana. The story is one of devoted friendship, and tender self-sacrificing love; the friendship that gives freely without return, and the love that seeks first the happiness of the object. The novel is brimful of the most beautiful word painting of nature, and its pathos and tender sentiment will endear it to all. Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York CHARMING BOOKS FOR GIRLS May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list WHEN PATTY WENT TO COLLEGE, By Jean Webster. Illustrated by C. D. Williams. One of the best stories of life in a girl's college that has ever been written. It is bright, whimsical and entertaining, lifelike, laughable and thoroughly human. JUST PATTY, By Jean Webster. Illustrated by C. M. Relyea. Patty is full of the joy of living, fun-loving, given to ingenious mischief for its own sake, with a disregard for pretty convention which is an unfailing source of joy to her fellows. THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL, By Eleanor Gates. With four full page illustrations. This story relates the experience of one of those unfortunate children whose early days are passed in the companionship of a governess, seldom seeing either parent, and famishing for natural love and tenderness. A charming play as dramatized by the author. REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM, By Kate Douglas Wiggin. One of the most beautiful studies of childhood--Rebecca's artistic, unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand out midst a circle of austere New Englanders. The stage version is making a phenomenal dramatic record. NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA, By Kate Douglas Wiggin. Illustrated by F. C. Yohn. Additional episodes in the girlhood of this delightful heroine that carry Rebecca through various stages to her eighteenth birthday. REBECCA MARY, By Annie Hamilton Donnell. Illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green. This author possesses the rare gift of portraying all the grotesque little joys and sorrows and scruples of this very small girl with a pathos that is peculiarly genuine and appealing. EMMY LOU: Her Book and Heart, By George Madden Martin, Illustrated by Charles Louis Hinton. Emmy Lou is irresistibly lovable, because she is so absolutely real. She is; just a bewitchingly innocent, hugable little maid. The book is wonderfully human. Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York THE NOVELS OF CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list. JEWEL: A Chapter in Her Life. Illustrated by Maude and Genevieve Cowles. A sweet, dainty story, breathing the doctrine of love and patience; and sweet nature and cheerfulness. JEWEL'S STORY BOOK. Illustrated by Albert Schmitt. A sequel to "Jewel" and equally enjoyable. CLEVER BETSY. Illustrated by Rose O'Neill. The "Clever Betsy" was a boat--named for the unyielding spinster whom the captain hoped to marry. Through the two Betsys a clever group of people are introduced to the reader. SWEET CLOVER: A Romance of the White City. A story of Chicago at the time of the World's Fair. A sweet human story that touches the heart. THE OPENED SHUTTERS. Frontispiece by Harrison Fisher. A summer haunt on an island in Casco Bay is the background for this romance. A beautiful woman, at discord with life, is brought to realize, by her new friends, that she may open the shutters of her soul to the blessed sunlight of joy by casting aside vanity and self love. A delicately humorous work with a lofty motive underlying it all. THE RIGHT PRINCESS. An amusing story, opening at a fashionable Long Island resort, where a stately Englishwoman employs a forcible New England housekeeper to serve in her interesting home. How types so widely apart react on each other's lives, all to ultimate good, makes a story both humorous and rich in sentiment. THE LEAVEN OF LOVE. Frontispiece by Harrison Fisher. At a Southern California resort a world-weary woman, young and beautiful but disillusioned, meets a girl who has learned the art of living--of tasting life in all its richness, opulence and joy. The story hinges upon the change wrought in the soul of the blasè woman by this glimpse into a cheery life. Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York LOUIS TRACY'S CAPTIVATING AND EXHILARATING ROMANCES May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list CYNTHIA'S CHAUFFEUR. Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy. A pretty American girl in London is touring in a car with a chauffeur whose identity puzzles her. An amusing mystery. THE STOWAWAY GIRL. Illustrated by Nesbitt Benson. A shipwreck, a lovely girl stowaway, a rascally captain, a fascinating officer, and thrilling adventures in South Seas. THE CAPTAIN OF THE KANSAS. Love and the salt sea, a helpless ship whirled into the hands of cannibals, desperate fighting and a tender romance. THE MESSAGE. Illustrated by Joseph Cummings Chase. A bit of parchment found in the figurehead of an old vessel tells of a buried treasure. A thrilling mystery develops. THE PILLAR OF LIGHT. The pillar thus designated was a lighthouse, and the author tells with exciting detail the terrible dilemma of its cut-off inhabitants. THE WHEEL O'FORTUNE. With illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg. The story deals with the finding of a papyrus containing the particulars of some of the treasures of the Queen of Sheba. A SON OF THE IMMORTALS. Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy. A young American is proclaimed king of a little Balkan Kingdom, and a pretty Parisian art student is the power behind the throne. THE WINGS OF THE MORNING. A sort of Robinson Crusoe _redivivus_ with modern setting and a very pretty love story added. The hero and heroine are the only survivors of a wreck, and have many thrilling adventures en their desert island. Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York B. M. Bower's Novels Thrilling Western Romances Large 12 mos. Handsomely bound in cloth. Illustrated CHIP, OF THE FLYING U A breezy wholesome tale, wherein the love affairs of Chip and Della Whitman are charmingly and humorously told. Chip's jealousy of Dr. Cecil Grantham, who turns out to be a big, blue eyed young woman is very amusing. A clever, realistic story of the American Cow-puncher. THE HAPPY FAMILY A lively and amusing story, dealing with the adventures of eighteen jovial, big hearted Montana cowboys. Foremost amongst them, we find Ananias Green, known as Andy, whose imaginative powers cause many lively and exciting adventures. HER PRAIRIE KNIGHT A realistic story of the plains, describing a gay party of Easterners who exchange a cottage at Newport for the rough homeliness of a Montana ranch-house. The merry-hearted cowboys, the fascinating Beatrice, and the effusive Sir Redmond, become living, breathing personalities. THE RANGE DWELLERS Here are everyday, genuine cowboys, just as they really exist. Spirited action, a range feud between two families, and a Romeo and Juliet courtship make this a bright, jolly, entertaining story, without a dull page. THE LURE OF DIM TRAILS A vivid portrayal of the experience of an Eastern author, among the cowboys of the West, in search of "local color" for a new novel. "Bud" Thurston learns many a lesson while following "the lure of the dim trails" but the hardest, and probably the most welcome, is that of love. THE LONESOME TRAIL "Weary" Davidson leaves the ranch for Portland, where conventional city life palls on him. A little branch of sage brush, pungent with the atmosphere of the prairie, and the recollection of a pair of large brown eyes soon compel his return. A wholesome love story. THE LONG SHADOW A vigorous Western story, sparkling with the free, outdoor, life a mountain ranch. Its scenes shift rapidly and its actors play the game of life fearlessly and like men. It is a fine love story from start to finish. Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York NOVELS OF SOUTHERN LIFE By THOMAS DIXON, JR. May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list THE LEOPARD'S SPOTS: A Story of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900. With illustrations by C. D. Williams. A tale of the South about the dramatic events of Destruction, Reconstruction and Upbuilding. The work is able and eloquent and the verifiable events of history are followed closely in the development of a story full of struggle. THE CLANSMAN. With illustrations by Arthur I. Keller. While not connected with it in any way, this is a companion volume to the author's "epoch-making" story _The Leopard's Spots_. It is a novel with a great deal to it, and which very properly is going to interest many thousands of readers. * * * It is, first of all, a forceful, dramatic, absorbing love story, with a sequence of events so surprising that one is prepared for the fact that much of it is founded on actual happenings; but Mr. Dixon has, as before, a deeper purpose--he has aimed to show that the original formers of the Ku Klux Klan were modern knights errant taking the only means at hand to right intolerable wrongs. THE TRAITOR. A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire. Illustrations by C. D. Williams. The third and last book in this remarkable trilogy of novels relating to Southern Reconstruction. It is a thrilling story of love, adventure, treason, and the United States Secret Service dealing with the decline and fall of the Ku Klux Klan. COMRADES. Illustrations by C. D. Williams. A novel dealing with the establishment of a Socialistic Colony upon a deserted island off the coast of California. The way of disillusionment is the course over which Mr. Dixon conducts the reader. THE ONE WOMAN. A Story of Modern Utopia. A love story and character study of three strong men and two fascinating women. In swift, unified, and dramatic action, we see Socialism a deadly force, in the hour of the eclipse of Faith, destroying the home life and weakening the fiber of Anglo Saxon manhood. Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York 
55378	----	Archive (Emory University) Transcriber's Notes: 1. Page scan source: https://archive.org/details/36180099.2240.emory.edu (Emory University) [Illustration: Front Cover] MISS MEPHISTOPHELES. _A NOVEL_. (SEQUEL TO MADAME MIDAS.) BY FERGUS HUME, AUTHOR OF "THE MYSTERY OF A HANSOM CAB," "MADAME MIDAS," "THE PICCADILLY PUZZLE," ETC. _IN ONE VOLUME_. LONDON: F. V WHITE & CO., 31 SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND, W.C. ----- 1890. [_All Rights reserved_.] CONTENTS CHAP. I. Faces in the Fire II. Keith meets with an Adventure III. Prince Carnival IV. Lazarus V. A Woman's Appeal VI. The Annoyance of Hiram J. Fenton VII. Mirth and Laughter VIII. A Mysterious Affair IX. An Unknown Benefactor X. Naball makes a Discovery XI. What Naball overheard XII. Naball tells a Story XIII. The Gossip of Clubs XIV. A Struggle for Fame XV. The Russell Street Crime XVI. The Inquest XVII. A Council of Three XVIII. Circumstantial Evidence XIX. A Lovers' Meeting XX. The Rivals XXI. A First Night at the Bon-Bon XXII. Eugénie _v_. Naball XXIII. The Cypher XXIV. What Kitty knew XXV. The Evidence of a Bank Note XXVI. On The Track XXVII. Meg proves Useful XXVIII. Malton makes a Discovery XXIX. Light at Last XXX. Exit Kitty Marchurst MISS MEPHISTOPHELES. CHAPTER I. FACES IN THE FIRE. A wet Sunday--dreary, dismal, and infinitely sloppy. Even the bells ringing the people into evening service seemed to feel the depressing influence of the weather, and their brazen voices sounded hoarse and grumbling, as if they rang under protest. Cold, too!--not a brisk sharp frost--for here in Melbourne frost and snow are unknown; but a persevering, insinuating, gnawing cold, just disagreeable enough to make one shiver and shake with anxiety to get home to a bright fire and dry clothes. Overhead a leaden-coloured sky, with great masses of black clouds, from out whose sombre bosoms poured the steady rain, splashing noisily on the shining roofs, and swelling the gutters in the streets to miniature torrents. And then the wind,--a gusty, chilly wind,--that came along unexpectedly, and drove the unwilling rain against the umbrellas of struggling pedestrians, or else took a mean advantage of its power, and turned their umbrellas inside out, with a shrill whistle of triumph. The steady light streamed out from the painted church windows, and the dull, blurred glare of the street lamps was reflected in the wet pavements. Ugh! a night not fit for a dog to be out in, and yet there were a good many people hurrying along to the church, in answer to the clamorous voices of the bells. Some folk, however--wise in their generation--preferred staying at home to sitting in church, with damp boots and a general sense of stickiness about their clothes, and though possibly their souls suffered from such an omission, their bodies were certainly more comfortable. Among these godless people, who thus preferred comfort to religion, were two young men occupying a room on a first floor, the windows of which looked across to the church, now full of damp and steaming worshippers. A room in a boarding-house--especially one where boarders only pay twenty-five shillings a week--is not generally a very luxurious apartment, and this special room was certainly no exception to the rule. It was square, with a fairly lofty ceiling, and the walls were covered with a dull red paper, which, being mellowed by time, had assumed a somewhat rusty hue. It was rapidly growing dark outside, and there was no light in the room, save that which came from a roaring coal fire blazing brightly up the chimney, and illuminating the apartment in a curiously fantastic manner. It sent out red shafts of light into dark corners, as if to find out what was hidden there, and then being disappointed, would sink back into a dull, sulky glow, only to fall into a chaotic mass, and blaze merrily up once more. The apartment wherein the fire played these elfish tricks was furnished comfortably, but the furniture had a somewhat dingy look. The carpet was threadbare, except under the table, where there could be traced some vestiges of its original pattern. A cottage piano was pushed into a corner slanting ways, and beside it was a great untidy pile of music. At one end of the room, a desk covered with papers, and immediately above it a shelf containing a small array of well-worn books. Near the desk stood an aggravatingly bright sideboard, whereon were some glasses, a jug of water, and a half-empty bottle of whisky. Four or five lounging chairs of wicker-work were scattered about, covered with rugs of wallaby fur, whilst the walls and mantelpiece were almost covered with photographs, mostly of women, but here and there a male face, showing the well-known features of Beethoven, Chopin, and other famous musicians. This somewhat incongruous apartment was a private sitting-room in an East Melbourne boarding-house, and was at present in the occupation of Ezra Lazarus, journalist. Ezra Lazarus himself was seated at the piano playing snatches of music, while on the hearth-rug, smoking a pipe, lay a man propped up on his elbow, with his head resting on his hand, staring into the burning coals, and listening to his friend playing. Ezra Lazarus was a young man of medium height, with a slender figure, a pale face, rather dreamy, dark eyes, and black hair and beard carefully trimmed. He dressed neatly, and, in contrast to most of his race, wore no jewellery. Why he had become a journalist no one knew,--himself least of all,--as his tastes did not lie in the direction of newspaper work, for having all the Hebraic love of music, he was an accomplished pianist. As for the rest--staid in his demeanour, soft-spoken in his language, and much given to solitary wanderings. Yet he was no misanthrope, and those who knew him intimately found him a most charming companion, full of quaint ideas and bookish lore, but he was essentially a man of ideality, and shrank from contact with the work-a-day world. For such a nature as this a journalistic sphere was most unsuitable, and he felt it to be so, but having drifted into such a position, he lacked the energy to extricate himself from his uncongenial employment, and accepted his fate with oriental apathy, recompensing himself in some measure by giving every spare moment to the study of music. The man lying before the fire was the direct opposite of Ezra, both in appearance and temperament. A tall, sinewy-figured young fellow of six-and-twenty, with restless keen grey eyes under strongly-marked eyebrows, and a sensitive mouth, almost hidden by a small fair moustache. His nose was thin and straight, with delicately-cut nostrils, and his head was well set on his broad shoulders, albeit he had a trick of throwing it back which gave him a somewhat haughty carriage. He had a fair complexion, with that reddish-brown hue which comes from constantly living in the open air, and altogether looked like a man addicted to sport rather than to study. This was Keith Stewart, who, having passed most of his life in Gippsland, and in wandering about Australia generally, had a year previously come down to Melbourne with the laudable intention of devoting himself to literature. That he was poor might be surmised from his shabby, well-brushed clothes, and his face constantly wore that expression of watchfulness habitual to those who have to fight the world in their youth and be on their guard against everyone. That two such dissimilar natures as these could find any reciprocity appears strange, but curiously enough some undercurrent of sympathy had drawn them together from the first time they met. Jew and Gentile, musician and student, different nationalities, different trains of thought, yet the mere fact that they could both live in an ideal world of their own creation, heedless of the restless life which seethed around, seemed to form a bond of concord between them, and their mutual isolation drew them almost imperceptibly together. Keith had only been boarding in the house a week, consequently Ezra knew nothing about his friend's life, beyond the fact that he was poor and ambitious. As Stewart never volunteered any information about himself, Ezra, with the delicacy of a sensitive nature, shrank from forcing himself on his confidence. The inexhaustible subjects of books and music, a walk by the banks of the Yarra, or an occasional visit to the theatre, had been, so far, the limit of their social companionship. Their inner selves were still unknown to each other. To all, however, there comes a moment when the desire to unburden the mind to a sympathetic nature is strong, and it was in such a moment that Ezra Lazarus first learned the past life of Stewart. On this dreary Sunday night Ezra let his fingers wander over the piano, vaguely following his thoughts, and the result was a queer mingling of melodies--now a bizarre polonaise of Chopin, with its fantastic blending of patriotic joy and despairing pain, then a rush of stormy chords, preluding a Spanish dance, instinct with the amorous languor and fierce passion of the south. Outside, the shrill wind could be heard sweeping past, a sheet of rain would lash wildly against the windows, and at intervals the musical thunder of the organ sounded from the adjacent church. Keith smoked away steadily and listened drowsily to the pleasant mingling of sounds, until Ezra began to play the Traviata music, with its feverish brilliancy and undercurrent of sadness. Then he suddenly started, clenched his hand, and taking his pipe from his mouth, heaved an impatient sigh, upon hearing which, Lazarus stopped playing, and turned slowly round. "A link of memory?" he said, in his soft voice, referring to the music. Stewart replaced his pipe, blew a thick wreath of smoke, and sighed again. "Yes," he replied, after a pause; "it recalls to me--a woman." Ezra laughed half sadly, half mockingly. "Always the Eternal feminine of George Sand." Keith sat up cross-legged in front of the fire and shrugged his shoulders. "Don't be cynical old chap," he said, glancing round; "I'm sick of hearing the incessant railing against women--good heavens! are we men so pure ourselves, that we can afford to cast stones against the sex to which our mothers and sisters belong." "I did not mean to be cynical," replied Ezra, clasping his hands round one of his knees, "I only quoted Sand, because when a man is thinking, it is generally--a woman. "Or a debt--or a crime--or a sorrow," interposed the other quickly; "we can ring the changes on all of them." "Who is cynical now?" asked the Jew, with a smile. "Not I," denied Keith, emphatically, drawing hard at his pipe; "or if I am, it is only that thin veneer of cynicism, under which we hide our natural feelings now-a-days; but the music took me back to the time when 'Plancus was consul'--exactly twelve months ago." "Bah! Plancus is consul still; don't be downhearted, my friend; you are still in the pleasant city of Prague." "Pleasant? that is as it may be. I think it a very disagreeable city without money. Bohemianism is charming in novels, but in real life it is generally a hunt after what Murger calls that voracious animal, the half-crown." "And after women!" "Ah, bah! Lais and Phryne; both charming, but slightly improper, not to say expensive." "Take the other side of the shield," said the Jew gently. "Lucretia, and--and--by Jove, I can't recollect the name of any other virtuous woman." "Who is the lady of the music?" "My affianced wife," retorted Stewart curtly. "Ah!" said Ezra thoughtfully, "then we have a feeling in common, I am also engaged." Stewart laughed gaily. "And we both think our lady-loves perfect," he said lightly. "'Dulcinea is the fairest woman in the world,'--poor Don Quixote." "Mine is to me," said Ezra emphatically. "Of course," answered Stewart, with a smile. "I can picture her, tall, dark, and stately, an imperial daughter of Judah, with the beauty of Bathsheba and the majesty of Esther." "Entirely wrong," replied Lazarus dryly, "she is neither tall, dark, nor stately, but--" "The exact opposite--I take your meaning," said Keith composedly; "well, my Dulcinea is like the sketch I have given--beautiful, clever, poor, and--a governess." "And you haven't seen her for a year?" "No--a whole twelvemonth--she is up Sandhurst way trying to hammer dates and the rule of three into the thick heads of five small brats, and I--well I'm an unsuccessful literary man, doing what is vulgarly known as 'a perish.'" "What made you take up writing?" asked Lazarus. "What made me take up writing?" repeated Stewart, staring vaguely into the fire. "Lord knows--destiny, I suppose--I've had a queer sort of life altogether. I was born of poor but honest parents, quite the orthodox style of thing, isn't it?" "Are your parents alive?" "Dead!" laconically. There was a pause of a few moments, during which time Keith was evidently deep in thought. "According to Sir Walter Scott," he observed at length, "every Scotchman has a pedigree. I've got one as long as the tail of a kite, only not so useful. I'd sell all my ancestors, as readily as Charles Surface did his, for a few pounds. My people claim to be connected with the royal Stewarts." "Your name is spelt differently." "It's spelt correctly," retorted Keith coolly, "in the good old Scottish fashion; as for the other, it's the French method acclimatised by Mary Stuart when she married the Dauphin of France." "Well, now I know your pedigree, what is the story of your life?" "My life?--oh! I'm like Canning's knife-grinder. 'Story, I've got none to tell.' My father and mother found royal descent was not bread and butter, so they sold the paternal acres and came out to Australia, where I was born. The gold fever was raging then, but I suppose they inherited the bad luck of the Stewarts, for they did not make a penny; then they started a farm in Gippsland and ruined themselves. My father died of a broken heart, and my mother soon followed, so I was left an orphan with next to nothing. I wandered all over Australia, and did anything that turned up. Suppressing the family pride, I took a situation in a Sandhurst store, kept by a man called Proggins, and there I met Eugénie Rainsford, who, as I told you, taught the juvenile Progginses. I had a desultory sort of education from my father, and having read a good deal, I determined to take to literature, inspired, I suppose, by the poetic melancholy of the Australian bush. I wrote poetry with the usual success; I then went on the stage, and found I wasn't a heaven-born genius by any means, so I became a member of the staff of a small country paper, wrote brilliant articles about the weather and crops, varied by paste-and-scissors' work. Burned the midnight oil, and wrote some articles, which were accepted in Melbourne, so, with the usual prudence of genius, I threw up my billet and came down here to set the Thames, or rather the Yarra, on fire. Needless to remark, I didn't succeed or I shouldn't be here, so there is my history in a nutshell." "And Miss Rainsford?" "Oh, I engaged myself to her before I left Sandhurst," said Keith, his face growing tender, "bless her--the letters she has written me have been my bulwark against despair--ah! what a poor devil a man is in this world without a good woman's love to comfort him." "Are you doing anything now?" said Ezra thoughtfully. "Nothing. I'm leading a hand-to-mouth, here-to-day-gone-to-morrow existence. I'm a vagabond on the face of the earth, a modern Cain, Bonnie Prince Charlie in exile--the infernal luck of my royal ancestors still sticks to me, but, ah, bah!" shrugging his shoulders, "don't let's talk any more, old chap, we can resume the subject to-morrow, meanwhile play me something. I'm in a poetic mood, and would like to build castles in the air." Ezra laughed, and, turning to the piano, began to play one of Henselt's morceaux, a pathetic, dreamy melody, which came stealing softly through the room, and filled the soul of the young man with vague yearnings. Staring idly into the heart of the burning coals, he saw amid the bluish flames and red glimmer of the fire a vision of the dear dead days of long ago--shadows appeared, the shadows of last year. A glowing sunset, bathing a wide plain in delicate crimson hues; a white gate leading to a garden bright with flowers, and over the gate the shadow of a beautiful woman stood talking to the shadow of a man--himself. Mnenosyne--saddest of deities--waved her wand, and the shadows talked. "And when will you come back, Keith?" asked the girl shadow. "When I am a great man," replied the other shadow proudly. "I am riding forth like Poe's knight in search of El Dorado." "El Dorado is far away," returned the sweet voice of the girl; "it is the Holy Grail of wealth, and can never be discovered." "I will find it," replied the man shadow hopefully. "Meanwhile, you will wait and hope." "I will wait and hope," replied the girl, smiling sadly; and the shadows parted. The rain beat steadily against the panes, the soft music stole through the room, and Stewart, with idle gaze, stared into the burning heart of the fire, as if he expected to find there the El Dorado of his dreams. CHAPTER II. KEITH MEETS WITH AN ADVENTURE. After a storm comes a calm; so next morning the sun was shining brightly in the blue sky, and the earth had that clean, wholesome appearance always to be seen after heavy rains. The high wind had dried the streets, the drenched foliage of the trees in the Fitzroy Gardens looked fresh and green, and there was a slight chilliness in the atmosphere which was highly invigorating. Indeed, it was like a spring morning, mildly inspiriting; whilst all around there seemed to be a pleasant sense of new-born gladness quickening both animal and vegetable life. After breakfast, Ezra, who was going to the office of _The Penny Whistle_, the paper for which he worked, asked Keith to walk into town with him, and, as the young man had nothing particular to do, he gladly assented. They strolled slowly through the gardens, admiring the glistening green of the trees, the white statues sharply accentuated against their emerald back-ground, and the vivid dashes of bright colour given by the few flowers then in bloom. Stewart appeared to have quite recovered from his megrims of the previous night, and strolled gaily along, every now and then inhaling a long breath of the keen air. Ezra, who was watching him closely, saw from his actions his intense appreciation of his surroundings, and was satisfied that the young man possessed in a high degree that poetical instinct which has such an affinity with the joyousness or gloom of Nature. "Ah! this is a morning when it is good to live," said Keith brightly. "I always envied the satyrs and dryades of heathendom, with their intense animal enjoyment of Nature--not sensuality, but exuberant capability of enjoying a simple life." "Like that with which Hawthorn endowed Donatallo?" suggested Ezra. "Poor Donatallo!" said Stewart, with a sigh; "he is a delightful illustration of the proverb, 'Where ignorance is bliss'--he was happy till he loved--so was Undine till she obtained a soul." "You seem to have read a great deal?" observed Lazarus, looking at him. "Oh, faith; my reading has been somewhat desultory," replied Stewart carelessly. "All is fish that comes to my net, and the result is a queer jumble of information; but let us leave this pleasant gossiping, and come down to this matter-of-fact world. How do you think I can better my position?" "I hardly know as yet," replied the Jew, thoughtfully caressing his beard; "but if you want immediate work, I can put you in the way of obtaining employment." "Literary work?" "Unfortunately no--a clerkship in a--a--well, an office." "Ugh! I hate the idea of being cribbed and confined in an office; it's such an artificial existence. However, beggars can't be choosers, so tell me all about it." "My father wants a clerk," said Ezra deliberately, "and if I recommended you I think you could get the position." "Humph! And what is your father's occupation?" "Not a very aristocratic one,--a pawnbroker." Keith stopped short, and looked at his companion in surprise. "I can't imagine you being the son of a pawnbroker," he said in a puzzled tone. "Why not?" asked Ezra serenely. "I must be the son of some one." "Yes; but a pawnbroker, it's so horribly un-poetical. Your father ought to have been a man of letters--of vague speculations and abstruse theories--a modern Rabbi Judah holding disputations about the Talmud." Lazarus shrugged his shoulders, and walked slowly onward, followed by his companion. "My dear lad, the days of Maimonides are past, and we are essentially a money-making race. The curse which Jehovah pronounced on the Jews was the same as that of Midas--they turn everything they touch into gold." "A pleasant enough punishment." "Midas did not find it so; but to resume--my father, Jacob Lazarus, has his shop in Russell Street, so I will speak to him to-day, and if he is agreeable, I will take you with me to-morrow. I've no doubt you'll get the billet, but the wages will be small." "At all events, they will keep body and soul together till I find my El Dorado." "You refer to literary fame, I suppose. How did you first take to writing?" "I think you asked me that question last night," said Keith, smiling, "and I told you I couldn't explain. Like Pope, I lisped in numbers, and the numbers came. I've no doubt they were sufficiently bad. I'm sure I don't know why all authors begin with verse; perhaps it's because rhymes are so easy--fountain suggests mountain, and dove is invariably followed by love." "Have you had any articles accepted since your arrival in Melbourne?" "One or two, but generally speaking, no one acknowledges that a possible Shakespeare or Dickens is embodied in me. I've sent plays to managers, which have been declined on the plea that all plays come from London. I have seen editors, and have been told there was no room on the press--publishers have seen me, and pointed out that a colonial novel means ruination--encouraging for the future brainworkers of Australia, isn't it?" "We must all serve our apprenticeship," answered Lazarus quietly. "The longest lane has a turning." "No doubt; but my particular lane seems devilish long." Ezra laughed, and they walked down Collins Street, watching the crowd of people hurrying along to business, the cabs darting here and there, and the cable tramcars sliding smoothly along. Pausing a moment near the Scotch Church, they heard a street organ playing a bright melody. "What tune is that?" asked Keith, as they resumed their walk. "Sounds awfully pretty." "Song from 'Prince Carnival,'" replied Ezra, referring to an opera then running at the Bon-Bon Theatre. "Caprice sings it." "Oh, Caprice. I'd like to see that opera," said Keith. "You might take me to the theatre to-night to see it." "Very well," assented Ezra. "You will like Caprice--she is very charming." "And if rumour speaks truly, very wicked." "Added to which, she is the best-hearted woman in the world," finished the Jew dryly. "What a contradiction," laughed Stewart. "Women are always contradictory--'tis a privilege of the sex." "And one they take full advantage of." This airy badinage came to an end somewhat abruptly, for just as they arrived near the Victoria Coffee Palace, they were startled by the shriek of a woman. On the other side of the street a gaudily-dressed girl was crying and wringing her hands, while a child of about seven years of age was standing paralysed with fear directly in the way of a tram-car that came rushing down the incline. The two men stood horror-struck at what seemed to be the inevitable death of the child, for, though the driver put on the brakes, the speed was too great, and destruction appeared inevitable. Suddenly Keith seemed to recover the use of his limbs, and, with a sudden spring, bounded forward and tore the child off the fatal track, himself falling together with the child to the ground. He was not a moment too soon, for hardly had he fallen before the car at a slower speed rolled past, and ultimately came to a standstill at the foot of the incline. Stewart arose to his feet considerably shaken, his clothes torn and covered with mud, and a painful feeling in the arm, on which he had fallen. Ezra crossed over to him, and the rescued child was standing on the footpath in the grasp of the gaudily-dressed girl who spoke volubly, regardless of the crowd of people standing by. The conductor of the car came to inquire into the affair, and having found that no one was hurt, retired, and the tram was soon sliding down the street. The crowd dispersed gradually, until only the child, Ezra, Keith, and the shrill-voiced girl were left. "Oh! gracious, good 'eavens!" said this young lady, who appeared to be a nursemaid, and spoke rapidly, without any stops; "to think as you should have bin nearly squashed by that ingine, and all comin' of runnin' out into the road, an' taking no notice of me as was postin' a letter in the pillar-box, not seeing anythin', thro' want of eyes at the back of me 'ead." The child, a quaint, thin-faced little girl, with dark eyes and glorious reddish-coloured hair, took no notice of this outburst, but pulled Keith's coat to attract his attention. "Thank you, man," she said, in a thin, reedy voice; "I will tell mumsey, and she will say nice things to you, and I will give you a kiss." Keith was touched in his soft heart by this naïve appeal, and, bending down, kissed the pale little face presented to him, much to the alarm of the nursemaid, who lifted up her hands in horror. "Oh! gracious, good 'eavens!" she piped shrilly, "as to what your mar will say, Miss Megs, I don't know, a-kissin' strange gents in the h'open street; not but what he don't deserve it, a-dragin' you from under the ingine, as oughtn't to be let run to spile--" "Hold your tongue, Bliggings," said Ezra sharply; "you ought to look more carefully after Meg, or she'll be killed some day." "Oh! gracious and good 'eavens!" cried Bliggings sniffing, "if it ain't Mr. Lazarhouse; and, beggin' your pardon, sir, it ain't my fault, as is well known to you as children will 'ookit unbeknown't to the most wary." "There, there," said Lazarus, bending down to kiss Meg; "least said, soonest mended; thanks to my friend here, it's no worse." "Which he ought to git a meddler," asserted Miss Bliggings, on whose feminine heart Keith's handsome face had made an impression. "But, gracious and good 'eavens, they only gives 'em for drowndin', though I never lets Miss Megs go near water, ingines bein' unexpected in their actions, and not to be counted on in their movin's." "Good-bye, Meg," said Lazarus, cutting short Bliggings in despair. "Tell your mamma I'll call and see her about this." "And bring the man," said Meg, glancing at Keith. "Yes, and bring the man," repeated Ezra, upon which Meg, being satisfied, made a quaint-like curtsey to both men, and was going away, when she suddenly came back, and pulling Keith's coat till he bent down, put her arms round his neck and kissed him. "Mumsey will be nice," she murmured, and then trotted quietly off with Bliggings, who kept expressing her opinion that, "Oh! gracious, good 'eavens! she was red up to her eyes at such conduct," a somewhat unnecessary assertion, seeing her complexion was permanently the colour of beetroot. "Come into Lane's Hotel and have a glass of brandy," said Ezra, when Meg and her attendant had disappeared; "you need it after the shaking you have had." "What is the child's name?" asked Keith, as he went into the bar. "You seem to know her." Ezra laughed softly, and ordered a glass of brandy for his friend. "A curious way Fate has of working," he said, rather irrelevantly. "She has played into your hands to-day, for that child is Kitty Marchurst's, better known as 'Caprice.'" "I didn't know she had a child," said Keith. "Who is the father? Is she married?" "No, she is not married. As to the father, it's a long story; I'll tell you all about it some day. Meanwhile, you have done her a service she will never forget." "Much good it will be to me," said Keith disbelievingly "You've exactly hit it," replied Ezra composedly. "She can do you a great deal of good, seeing that she is the reigning favourite of the stage at present. I will introduce you to her to-night, and then--" "Well?" Ezra shrugged his shoulders, and replied slowly,-- "The best friend an ambitious man can have is a clever woman; a wiser man than I made that remark." CHAPTER III. PRINCE CARNIVAL. The "Bon-Bon" was the smallest, prettiest, and most luxurious theatre in Melbourne, and was exclusively devoted to farcical comedy, burlesque, and opera-bouffe, the latter class of entertainment being now the attraction. There was no pit, the circle and boxes being raised but little above the level of the stalls. The decorations were pink, white, and gold, the seats being covered with pale, rose-coloured plush, with curtains and hangings to match, while the electric lights, shining through pink globes, gave quite a warm glow to the theatre. The dome was decorated with allegorical figures representing Momus, the God of laughter, and Apollo, the God of music, while all round the walls were exquisitely-painted medallions of scenes from celebrated operas and burlesques. The proscenium was a broad frame of dullish gold, the curtain of roseate plush, and on either side of the stage were life-size statues of Offenbach and Planché in white marble. Altogether, a charming theatre, more like a cosy drawing-room than a place of public entertainment. At the entrance was a high flight of white marble stairs, leading to a wide corridor, the walls of which were hidden by enormous mirrors, and at intervals stood white marble statues of the Greek divinities, holding aloft electric lights. On the one side was the smoking-room,--a luxurious lounge,--and on the other a refreshment bar, all glass and glitter, which was crowded between the acts by the thirsty patrons of the play. Ezra and Keith arrived about nine o'clock, just as the first act of "Prince Carnival" was over, and finding the _salon_ tolerably full, Lazarus sat down near one of the small, marble-topped tables, and lighting his cigarette, proceeded to point out to Keith all the notabilities present. The first to whom he called Stewart's attention was a group of three. One, a tall, portly-looking man, with a red, clean-shaven face and black hair, was irreproachably attired in evening dress, and chatted to a fair-haired youth with a supercilious smile, and a short, bald-headed old gentleman. "You see those three?" said Ezra, indicating the group. "The dark man of the ponderous Samuel Johnson type is Ted Mortimer, the lessee of the theatre; the idiot with the eyeglass is Lord Santon, who has come out from London to see us barbarians, and the apoplectic party with the bald head is no less a personage than Mr. Columbus Wilks, the great globe-trotter, who is going to write a book about Australia and New Zealand." "That will take him some time," observed Keith, with a smile. "Not at all," said Lazarus coolly. "He will run through the whole of Australasia in a few weeks, be the guest of the governors of the different colonies, and then give his impressions of our government, politics, trade, amusements, and scenery in a series of brilliant articles, whose truth and accuracy will be quite in accordance with the time which he has taken to collect his materials." "But he cannot judge of things so rapidly." "Of course not; but he will view everything through the rose-coloured spectacles of champagne and adulation, so his book will depict our land as a kind of nineteenth-century Utopia." "And Lord Santon?" "An hereditary legislator, who is being _fêted_ for his title, and will go back to his ancestral halls with the firm conviction that we are a kind-hearted race of--savages." "You are severe," said Keith, in an amused tone; "you ought to give a lecture, entitled 'Men I have noticed;' it would certainly draw." "Yes, all the women, not the men; they don't care for hearing remarks about themselves; but there is the bell for the rising of the curtain, so we had better go to our seats." They left the now empty salon, and went into the dress circle, which holds the same rank in the colonies as the stalls do in the London theatres. Though the house was crowded, they succeeded in getting excellent seats, being, in fact, those always reserved for the critics of _The Penny Whistle_. The orchestra played a lively waltz, to which the gods in the gallery kept time, and then the curtain drew up on a charming scene, representing a square in Rome. "Prince Carnival" was one of those frivolous French operas with a slightly naughty plot, witty dialogue, brilliant music, and plenty of opportunity for gay dresses and picturesque scenery. The principals and chorus consisted mostly of girls, with just a sprinkling of men, so that their deeper voices might balance the shrillness of those of the women. Of the plot, the least said the better, as it was merely a string of intrigues, connected by piquant couplets and sparkling choruses, with occasional ballets intervening. As far as Keith could gather, it had something to do with the adventures of the quack Cagliostra in Rome, who was the comic man of the play, and figured in various disguises, the most successful being that of a prominent politician. Cagliostra tries to gain the affections of a young girl beloved by a mountebank called Prince Carnival, who thwarts him all through the play. The second act was the carnival at Rome, and a crowd of masquers were singing a riotous chorus and pelting one another with flowers. Suddenly, during a lull in this fantastic medley, a high, clear voice was heard executing a brilliant shake, and immediately afterwards Caprice bounded gaily on to the stage, singing a melodious waltz song, to which the masquers moved in measured time. She was dressed in a harlequin costume, a mask on her face, a fool's baton in her hand, and innumerable silver bells hanging from her cap and dress, which jingled incessantly as she danced. But what attracted Keith's attention were the diamonds she wore--several stars and a necklace. She seemed one splendid blaze of jewels, and his eyes ached watching their flash and glitter during the rapid gyrations of her restless figure. "Are those paste jewels?" he asked Ezra, in a whisper. "Paste!" echoed that young man, with a soft, satirical laugh. "Caprice wear paste jewels! Ask the men she's ruined where all their thousands went---where all their lands, horses, shares, salaries, disappeared to! Paste! Bah! my dear fellow, you don't know the number of ruined homes and broken hearts those diamonds represent." The act proceeded; the dialogue scintillating with wit, and the choruses becoming more riotous. Intrigue followed after intrigue, and situation after situation, in all of which Caprice was the central figure, until the climax was reached, in a wild bizarre chorus, in which she danced a vigorous cancan with Cagliostra, and finished by bounding on his shoulders to form the tableau as the curtain fell, amid the enthusiastic applause of the audience. Ezra and Stewart went out into the smoking-room to light their cigarettes, and heard on all sides eulogies of Caprice. "She'd make her fortune on the London stage," said Santon to Mortimer. "Got such a lot of the devil in her--eh?--by Jove! Why the deuce don't she show in town?" "Aha!" replied Mortimer shrewdly, "I'm not going to let her go if I can help it. Don't tempt away my only ewe lamb, when you've got so many flocks of your own." "She doesn't look much like a lamb," said Columbus Wilks dryly. "Then she doesn't belie her looks," retorted Mortimer coolly. "My dear sir, she's got the temper of a fiend, but she's such a favourite, that I put up with her tantrums for the sake of the cash." While this conversation was going on, Ezra and his friend were smoking quietly in a corner of the room chatting about the opera, when the Jew suddenly drew Keith's attention to a tall man talking to a friend in a confidential manner. He had a thin, sharp-looking face, keen blue eyes, and fair hair and beard. "That gentleman," said Lazarus, "could probably tell you something about those diamonds, he is an American called Hiram Jackson Fenton, manager of the 'Never-say-die Life Insurance Company.' Rumour--which is true in this case, contrary to its usual custom--says he is Caprice's latest fancy." "He must have a lot of money to satisfy her whims," said Keith, looking at the American. "Money!" Ezra shrugged his shoulders. "He hasn't much actual cash, for he lives far above his income. However, with a little judicious dabbling in the share market, and an occasional help from the children of Israel, he manages to get along all right. Our friend Caprice will ruin him shortly, and then he'll return to the Great Republic, I presume--good riddance of bad rubbish for Australia." "And who is that colourless-looking little man who has just come up?" "He is rather washed out, isn't he?" said Ezra critically. "That is his assistant manager, Evan Malton. For some inexplicable reason they are inseparable." "Oh, and is Mr. Malton also smitten with Caprice." "Very badly--more shame to him, as he's only been married for twelve months--he neglects his young wife, and dances attendance at the heels of his divinity." "Doesn't Hiram J--what's his name, object?" "Not at all. You see they're both mixed up in speculation, and work together for their mutual benefit. Malton is the Lazarus--I don't mean myself--who picks up the crumbs of love that fall from Mr. Dives Fenton's table." "It can't last long," said Keith in disgust. "It will last till Malton gets rid of Fenton, or Fenton gets the better of Malton--then there'll be a row, and the weakest will go to the wall. Tell me, whom do you think will win?" "I should say Fenton," replied Keith, glancing from the effeminate countenance of Malton to the shrewd, powerful face of the American. "Exactly; he is, I fancy, the stronger villain of the two." "Villain?" "Yes; I call any man a villain who neglects his wife for the sake of a light-o'-love. As for Fenton, he is the most unscrupulous man I know." "You seem to be pretty well acquainted with the scandal of Melbourne society," said Stewart as they went back to their seats. "Of course, it is my duty; the press is ubiquitous. But tell me your opinion of Caprice?" "Judging by her acting to-night, she's a devil." "Wait till the end of this act, and you'll swear she's an angel." "Which will be correct?" "Both--she's a mixture!" The curtain again drew up, amid the shuffling of the audience settling themselves in their places, and represented a _fête_ in the gardens of Cagliostra's palace, brilliant with coloured lights and fantastically-dressed people. According to the story, Cagliostra has obtained possession of his prize, and woos her successfully, when Prince Carnival enters and sings a ballad, "So Long Ago," in the hope of touching the heart of his false love. Caprice, dressed in a tight-fitting costume of silk and velvet, which showed off her beautiful figure to perfection, stood in the centre of the stage with a sad smile, and sang the waltz-refrain of the song with great feeling. "For it was long ago, love, That time of joy and woe, love! Yet still that heart of thine Is mine, dear love, is mine!" She gave to the jingling words a touch of pathos which was exquisitely beautiful. "I believe she feels what she sings," whispered Keith. "If you knew her story you would scarcely wonder at that," said Ezra bitterly. The song was redemanded, but Caprice refused to respond, and, the clamour still continuing, she shrugged her shoulders and walked coolly up the stage. "She's in a temper to-night," said Mortimer to Santon. "They can applaud till they're black in the face, but devil an answer they'll get from her, the jade! She isn't called Caprice for nothing." And so it happened, for the audience, finding she would not gratify them, subsided into a sulky silence, and Caprice went coolly on with the dialogue. Cagliostra, repentant, surrenders the girl to Prince Carnival, and the opera ended with a repetition of the galop chorus, wherein Keith saw the sad-eyed woman of a few moments before once more a mocking jibing fiend, dancing and singing with a reckless _abandon_ that half-fascinated and half-disgusted him. "What a contradiction," said Keith, as they left the theatre; "one moment all tears, the next all laughter!" "With a spice of the devil in both," replied Ezra cynically. "She is the Sphinx woman of Heine--her lips caress while her claws wound." They had a drink and a smoke together, after which they went round to the stage-door, as Ezra, in pursuance of improving Keith's fortunes, was anxious to introduce him to Caprice. Lazarus appeared to be well-known to the door-keeper, for, after a few words with him, they were admitted to the mysterious region behind the scenes. Caprice, wrapped up in a heavy fur cloak, was standing on the stage talking to Fenton. All around was comparatively quiet, as the scene-shifters having ended their duties for the night had left the theatre. Stewart could hardly believe that the little golden-haired woman he saw before him was the brilliant being of the previous hour, she looked so pale and weary. But soon another side of her versatile nature showed itself, for Fenton, saying something to displease her, she rebuked him sharply, and turned her back on the discomfited American. In doing so she caught sight of Lazarus, and ran quickly towards him with outstretched hand. "My dear Mr. Lazarus," she said rapidly, "I'm so glad to see you! Meg told me all about her accident to-day, and how narrowly she escaped death. Good God, if I had lost her! But the gentleman who saved her--where is he?" "He is here," said Lazarus, indicating Keith, who stood blushing and confused before this divinity of the stage. In another moment, with a sudden impulse, she was by his side, holding his two hands in her own. "You have done what I can never repay," she said rapidly, in a low voice. "Saved my child's life, and you will not find me ungrateful. Words are idle, but if actions can prove gratitude, you may command me." "I hope the young lady is all right," stammered Keith, as she dropped his hands. "Oh, yes; rather shaken, but quite well," answered Caprice, in a relieved tone. "Dear me, how careless I am; let me introduce you to these gentlemen--Mr. Fenton, Mr. Malton, and last, but not least, Mr. Mortimer." The three gentlemen bowed coldly, Fenton in particular, eyeing Keith in a supercilious manner, which made him blush with rage, as he thought it was owing to his shabby clothes. "Is my carriage there?" said Caprice, in reply to a speech of Malton's. "Oh, then, I may as well go. Good-night, everybody. Mr. Stewart, will you give me your arm?" and she walked off with the delighted Keith, leaving Fenton and Malton transfixed with rage, while Mortimer and Ezra looked on chuckling. Caprice talked brightly to her new friend till he placed her in her brougham, then suddenly became grave. "Come down and have supper with me on Sunday fortnight," she said, leaning out of the window. "Mr. Lazarus will be your guide. Good-bye at present," giving him her gloved hand. "God bless you for saving my child." The carriage drove off, but not before Keith had seen that tears were falling down her face, whereat he marvelled at this strange nature, and stood looking after the carriage. "She's not as bad as they say," he said aloud. Ezra, who was just behind him, laughed aloud. "I knew you'd say she was an angel." CHAPTER IV LAZARUS. It was a very little shop of squat appearance, as if the upper storey had gradually crushed down the lower. Three gilt balls dangling in mid-air over the wide door indicated the calling of the owner, and, in order that there should be no mistake, the dusty, rain-streaked windows displayed the legend, "Lazarus, Pawnbroker," in blistered golden letters. There were three windows in the upper storey, and these being innocent of blinds or curtains, with the addition of one or two panes being broken, gave the top of the house a somewhat dismantled look. The lower windows, however, made up for the blankness of the upper ones, being full of marvels, and behind their dingy glass could be seen innumerable articles, representing the battered wrecks of former prosperity. Gold and silver watches, with little parchment labels attached, setting forth their value, displayed themselves in a tempting row, and their chains were gracefully festooned between them, intermixed with strings of red coral, old-fashioned lockets, and bracelets of jet and amber. Worn-out silver teapots were placed dismally at the back in company with cracked cups and saucers of apparently rare old Worcester and Sêvres china. Dingy velvet trays, containing innumerable coins and medals of every description, antique jewellery of a mode long since out of date, were incongruously mingled with revolvers, guns, spoons, cruets, and japanned trays, decorated with sprawling golden dragons; richly-chased Indian daggers, tarnished silver mugs, in company with deadly-looking American bowie knives; bank-notes of long since insolvent banks were displayed as curiosities, while a child's rattle lay next to a Book of Beauty, from out whose pages looked forth simpering faces of the time of D'Orsay and Lady Blessington. And over all this queer heterogeneous mixture the dust lay thick and grey, as if trying for very pity to hide these remnants of past splendours and ruined lives. The shop was broad, low-roofed, and shallow, with a choky atmosphere of dust, through which the golden sunlight slanted in heavy, solid-looking beams. On the one side there was a row of little partitions like bathing-boxes, designed to secure secrecy to those who transacted business with Mr. Lazarus, and, on the other, long rows of old clothes were hanging up against the wall, looking like the phantoms of their former owners. At the back, a door, covered with faded green baize, and decorated with brass-headed nails, gave admittance to the private office of the presiding genius of the place. The whole appearance of the shop was gloomy in the extreme, and the floor, being covered with boxes and bundles, with a little clearing here and there, it was naturally rather embarrassing to strangers (especially as the bright sunlight outside prevented them seeing an inch before their noses) when they first entered the dismal den wherein Mr. Lazarus sat like a spider waiting for unwary flies. In one of the bathing machines aforesaid, a large red-faced woman, with a gruff voice and a strong odour of gin, was trying to conclude a bargain with a small, white-faced Jewish youth whose black beady eyes were scornfully examining a dilapidated teapot, which the gruff lady asserted was silver, and which the Jewish youth emphatically declared was not. The gruff female, who answered to the name of Tibsey, grew wrathful at this opposition, and prepared to do battle. "Old 'uns knows more nor youngers," she growled in an angry tone. "'Tain't by the sauce of babes and sucklers as I'm goin' to be teached." "'Old your row," squeaked Isaiah, that being the shrill boy's name. "Five bob, and dear at that." Mrs. Tibsey snorted, and her garments--a tartan shawl and a brown wincey--shook with wrath. "Lor a mussy, 'ear the brat," she said, lifting up her fat hands; "why, five poun' wouldn't buy it noo; don't be 'ard on me, my lovey--me as 'ave popped everythink with you, includin' four silver spoons, a kittle, a girdiron, an' a coal-scuttle; don't be 'ard, ducky; say ten an' a tizy." "Five bob," returned the immovable Isaiah. "You Jewesis is the cuss of hus hall," cried Mrs. Tibsey, whacking the counter with a woefully ragged umbrella. "You cheats an' you swindles like wipers, an' I 'ates the sight of your 'ook noses, I do." "You'll 'ave the boss out," said Isaiah, in a high voice, like a steam whistle, to which Mrs. Tibsey replied in a rolling bass, a duet which grew wilder and wilder till the sudden opening of the green baize door reduced them both to silence. An old man appeared--such a little old man--very much bent, and dressed in a greasy old ulster which covered him right down to his ragged carpet slippers. He had white hair and beard, piercing black eyes under shaggy white eyebrows, sharply-cut features, and a complexion like dirty parchment, seared all over with innumerable lines. "You again?" he said, in a feeble Jewish voice. "Oh, you devil!--you--you--" here a fit of coughing seized him, and he contented himself with glaring at Mrs. Tibsey, upon which he was immediately confronted by that indomitable female, who seized the teapot and shook it in his face. "Five bob!" she shrieked; "five bob for this!" "Too much--far too much," said Lazarus in dismay; "say four, my dear, four." "Ten; I want ten," said Mrs. Tibsey. "No, no; four; you say ten, but you mean four." "Say six." "Four." "Then take it," said Mrs. Tibsey, clashing it down in wrath, "and the devil take you." "All in good time--all in good time," chuckled the old man, and disappeared through the door. "You see, you oughter 'ave taken the five," sniggered Isaiah, making out the pawnticket. "There's four bob, don't spend it in drink." "Me drink, you hugly himp," said the lady, sweeping the money into her capacious pocket, where it reposed in company with an empty gin bottle; "me drink, as takes in washin' and goes hout nussin', an' was quite the lady afore I fell into the company of wipers: me dr-- well," and, language failing her, Mrs. Tibsey sailed majestically out of the shop, coming into collision with Ezra and Keith, who were just entering. "A whirlwind in petticoats," said Keith, startled by this ragged apparition. "Askin' your parding, gents both," said Mrs. Tibsey, dropping a very shaky curtsey, "but a young limb h'insides bin puttin' my back hup like the wrigglin' heel 'e h'are, and if you're goin' to pop anythink, don't let it be a silver teapot, 'cause old Sating h'inside is the cuss of orphens and widders," and, having relieved her mind, Mrs. Tibsey flounced indignantly away to refresh herself with her favourite beverage. "Complimentary to your parent," observed Keith, as they entered the shop. "Oh, they're much worse sometimes," said Ezra complacently. "Isaiah, where's my father?" "In 'is room," replied Isaiah, resuming the reading of a sporting newspaper. Ezra opened the green baize door without knocking, and entered, followed by Keith. A small square room, even dingier than the shop. At one side a truckle bed pushed up against the wall, and next to it a large iron safe. A rusty grate, with a starved-looking fire, had an old battered kettle simmering on its hob. At the back a square dirty-paned window, through which the light fell on a small table covered with greasy green cloth, and piled up with papers. At this table sat old Lazarus, mumbling over some figures. He looked up suddenly when the young men entered, and cackled a greeting to his son, after which effort he was seized with a violent fit of coughing, which seemed to shake him to pieces. The paroxysm having passed, he began to talk in his feeble, Jewish voice. "He, he! my dear," looking sharply at Keith, "is this the young man you spoke of? Well, well--too good-looking, my dear--the women--ah, the women, devil take 'em, they'll be turning his head." "That's his own business, not yours," said Ezra curtly. "He, he! but it is my business--they'll love him, and love means presents--that means money--my money--I can't trust him." "That's rather severe, isn't it?" said Keith, speaking for the first time. "You can't tell a man's character altogether by his face--good looks do not invariably mean libertine principles." "Ah! I know, I know!" muttered Lazarus, rubbing his hands together; "well, well, can you keep books?" "Yes, I have been accustomed to do so." "Are you honest?" Keith laughed. "I'm generally considered so." "He, he! that's not saying much. What wages do you want?" "Three pounds a week," said Stewart modestly. "Oh, my dear, my dear, what a large sum; say two, my dear, two pounds, or forty shillings, it's very large; you can save out of two pounds." "I'm glad you think so," said Keith dryly. "I've got my doubts on the subject; however, beggars must not be choosers, so I agree." "On trial, mind on trial," muttered the old man cautiously. "I'm quite agreeable," replied Keith complacently, hoping that by the time his trial is over he would be on the staff of some paper. "What are the hours?" "Nine, my dear," said Lazarus, stroking his beard, "nine till six, with half-an-hour for something to eat in the day--a bun and a cup of coffee--don't be extravagant." "I can't very well be, on such a salary," replied Stewart. "Well, Mr. Lazarus, as it's all settled, I'll come at nine o'clock to-morrow morning." "Yes! yes! quite right; but no horse-racing, no gambling, no women--they're the devil, my dear, the devil." "You're rather hard on the sex, father," said Ezra satirically, "considering how useful they are to you." "Aha! quite right, quite right," chuckled the old man. "Oh, I know fine ladies; they come to old Lazarus for money--to sell diamonds--ah, my dear, there's lots of diamonds in that safe, he, he!" "I wonder you're not afraid of being robbed," said Keith. The old man looked up with a sudden gleam of suspicion in his eyes. "No, no; I keep the keys under my pillow, and I've got a pistol. I can fire it, oh, yes, I can fire it, then the neighbours, my dear, all round; oh, I'm quite safe--yes, yes, quite safe; no one would hurt old Lazarus. How's Esther, my dear?" turning suddenly to his son. Esther was the girl to whom Ezra was engaged. "Oh, she's all right," he replied. "I took her the other night to see Caprice." "Aha!" cried old Lazarus, lifting up his hands. "Oh, dear, dear, what a woman. I know her, oh, I know her." "Personally?" asked Keith, whereupon Mr. Lazarus suddenly became deaf. "Yes, yes, a fine woman; ruins everybody, ruins 'em body and soul, and laughs at 'em, like the fiend she is." Ezra looked at his paternal relative in disgust, and took Keith's arm. "Come along," he said, "I've got an engagement." "Good boy, good boy," muttered his parent, nodding his head, "make money, my dear, make--" here another fit of coughing interrupted him, and Ezra hurried Keith away. "Faugh!" said Ezra, lifting up his hat when they were in the street; "how I hate the miasma of that place. It's like the upas tree, and kills all who come within its circle." "Do you think your father knows Caprice?" asked Keith, as they walked down Bourke Street. "Can't tell you," answered Lazarus coolly; "I shouldn't be surprised--he knows half the women in Melbourne. When a spendthrift wants money, he goes to my father; when a woman is in trouble, she goes there also; in spite of her lovers, Caprice is such an extravagant woman, that I've no doubt she's had dealings with my father. If the secret life of Lazarus the pawnbroker were only written, it would be very interesting, I assure you." "I'm glad I got the place," said Keith thoughtfully; "it isn't much, but will keep me alive till I get on my feet." "You are sure to drop into a newspaper appointment," replied Ezra, "and of course I will do my best for you." "You're very good," answered Keith gratefully; "ha, ha, what queer tricks the jade Fortune plays us. I come to Melbourne full of poetic dreams, and find my fate in a pawnbroker's office--it isn't romantic, but it's bread and butter." "You're not the first poet who has gone to the pawnbroker." "I expect I'm the first that ever went on such good terms," retorted Keith shrewdly. CHAPTER V A WOMAN'S APPEAL. According to some writer, "Human beings are moulded by circumstances," and truly Kitty Marchurst, better known as Caprice, was an excellent illustration of this remark. The daughter of a Ballarat clergyman, she was a charming and pure-minded girl, and would doubtless have married and become a happy woman, but for the intervention of circumstances in the form of M. Gaston Vandeloup. This gentleman, an ex-convict, and a brilliant and fascinating scoundrel, ruined the simple, confiding girl, and left her to starve in the streets of Melbourne. From this terrible fate, however, she was rescued by Mrs. Villiers, who had known her as a child, and it seemed as though she would once more be happy, when circumstances again intervened, and through her connection with a poisoning case, she was again thrown on the world. Weary of existence, she was about to drown herself in the Yarra, when Vandeloup met her, and tried to push her in. With a sudden craving for life, she struggled with him, and he, being weak for want of food, fell in and was drowned, while the unhappy girl fled away, she knew not whither. A blind instinct led her to "The Home for Fallen Women," founded by a Miss Rawlins, who had herself been an unfortunate, and here for a time the weary, broken-hearted woman found rest. A child, of which Vandeloup was the father, came to cheer her loneliness, and she called the little one Margaret, hoping it would comfort her in the future. But the seeds of evil implanted in her breast by Vandeloup began to bear fruit, and with returning health came a craving; for excitement. She grew weary of the narrow, ascetic life she was leading--for young blood bounded through her veins--and she was still beautiful and brilliant. So, much against the wishes of the matron of the institution, she left the place and returned to the stage. The Wopples family, with whom she had previously acted, had gone to America, and she was alone in the world, without a single friend. She called herself Caprice, for her real name and history were too notorious for such a public career as she had chosen. All avoided her, and this worked her ruin. Had one door been open to her--had one kind hand been stretched forth to save her--she might have redeemed the past; but the self-righteous Pharisees of the world condemned her, and in despair she determined to defy the world by giving it back scorn for scorn. It was a terribly hard and dreary life she led at first--no friends, very little money, and a child to support. The future looked black enough before her; but she determined to succeed, and Fortune at length favoured her. She was playing a minor part in a Christmas burlesque, when the lady who acted the principal character suddenly fell ill, and Kitty had to take her place at a very short notice. She, however, acquitted herself so well that, with one bound, she became a popular favourite, and the star still continuing ill for the rest of the run of the piece, she was able to consolidate the favourable impression she had made. She awoke to find herself famous, and played part after part in burlesque and modern comedy, always with great success. In a word, she became the fashion, and found herself both rich and famous. Ted Mortimer, the manager of the Bon-Bon Theatre, persuaded her to try opera-bouffe, and she made her first appearance in the Grand Duchess with complete success. She followed up her triumph by playing the title _rôles_ in Giroflé Girofla, La Perichole, and Boccaccio, scoring brilliantly each time; and now she had created the part of Prince Carnival, which proved to be her greatest success. Night after night the Bon-Bon was crowded, and the opera had a long and successful run, while Kitty, now at the height of her fame, set herself to work to accomplish her revenge on the world. She hated women for the way they had scorned her, and she detested men for the free and easy manner in which they approached her; so she made up her mind to ruin all she could, and succeeded admirably. One after another, not only the gilded youth of Melbourne, but staid, sober men became entangled in her meshes, and many a man lived to curse the hour he first met Kitty Marchurst. Her house at Toorak was furnished like a palace, and her dresses, jewels, horses, and extravagances formed a fruitful topic of conversation in clubs and drawing-rooms. She flung away thousands of pounds in the most reckless manner, and as soon as she had ruined one man, took up with another, and turned her back on the poor one with a cynical sneer. Her greatest delight was to take away other women's husbands, and many happy homes had she broken up by her wiles and fascinations. Consequently, she was hated and feared by all the women in Melbourne, and was wrathfully denounced as a base adventuress, without one redeeming feature. They were wrong: she loved her child. Kitty simply idolised Meg, and was always in terror lest she should lose her. Consequently, when she heard how Keith had rescued her child from a terrible death, her gratitude knew no bounds. She heard of the young man's ambitions from Ezra, and determined to help him as far as it lay in her power. Thus, for the first time for many years, her conduct was actuated by a kindly feeling. The drawing-room in Kitty's house at Toorak was a large, lofty apartment, furnished in a most luxurious style. Rich carpets, low lounging chairs, innumerable rugs and heavy velvet curtains. A magnificent grand piano, great masses of tropical foliage in fantastically-coloured jars, priceless cabinets of china, and costly, well-selected pictures. One of her lovers, a rich squatter, had furnished it for her. When he had lost all his money, and found her cold and cruel, he went off to the wilds of South America to try and forget her. There were three French windows at the end of the room, which led out on to a broad verandah, and beyond was the lawn, girdled by laurels. Kitty sat at a writing-desk reading letters, and the morning sun shining through the window made a halo round her golden head. No one who saw her beautiful, childish face, and sad blue eyes, would have dreamed how cruel and relentless a soul lay beneath that fair exterior. At her feet sat Meg, dressed in a sage-green frock, with her auburn curls falling over her face, playing with a box of bricks, and every now and then her mother would steal an affectionate glance at her. Curiously enough, Kitty was reading a letter from the very man who had given her the house, and who was now dying in a pauper hospital in San Francisco. "I forgive you freely," he wrote; "but, ah, Kitty, you might have feigned a love you did not feel, if only to spare me the degradation of dying a pauper, alone and without friends!" The woman's face grew dark as she read these pitiful words, and, crushing up the letter in her hands, she threw it into the waste-paper basket with a cynical sneer. "Bah!" she muttered contemptuously, "does he think to impose on me with such tricks? Feign a love! Yes, kiss and caress him to gratify his vanity. Did I not give him fair warning of the end? And now he whimpers about mercy--mercy from me to him--pshaw! let him die and go to his pauper grave, I'll not shed a tear!" And she laughed harshly. At this moment Meg, who had been building two edifices of bricks, began to talk to herself. "This," said Meg, putting the top brick on one building, "is the House of Good, but the other is the House of Sin. Mumsey," raising her eyes, "which house would you like to live in?" "In the House of Good, dear," said Kitty in a tremulous voice, touched by the artless question of the child. "Come to mumsey, darling, and tell her what you have been doing." Meg, nothing loath, accepted this invitation, and, climbing up on her mother's knee, threw her arms round Kitty's neck. "I had some bread and milk," she said confidentially; "then I went and saw my Guinea pigs. Dotty--you know, mumsey, the one with the long hair--oh, he squeaked--he did squeak! I think he was hungry." "Have you been a good little girl?" "Good?" echoed Meg doubtfully. "Well, not very good. I was cross with Bliggings. She put soap into my eyes." "It's naughty to be cross, darling," said her mother, smoothing the child's hair. "What makes you naughty?" "Mother," said Meg, nodding her head sagely, "it's the wicked spirit." Kitty laughed, and, kissing the child, drew her closer to her. "Mumsey!" "Yes, darling?" "I should like to give the man who stopped the wheels a present." "What would you like to give him, my precious?" This took some consideration, and Meg puckered up her small face into a frown. "I think," she decided at length, "the man would like a knife." "A knife cuts love, Meg." "Not if you get a penny for it," asserted Meg wisely. "Bliggings told me; let me get a knife for the man, mumsey." "Very well, dear," said Kitty smiling; "the man will then know my little daughter has a kind heart." "Meg is a very good girl," asserted that small personage gravely; and, climbing down off her mother's knee, she began to play with the bricks, while Kitty went on with her correspondence. The next letter evidently did not give Kitty much satisfaction, judging by the frown on her face. She had written to Hiram J. Fenton asking for some money, and he had curtly refused to give her any more. She tore up the letter, threw it into the waste-paper basket, and smiled sardonically. "You won't, won't you?" she muttered angrily. "Very well, my friend, there are plenty of others to give me money if you won't." At this moment there came a ring at the door, and shortly after the servant entered with a card. Kitty took it carelessly, and then started. "Mrs. Malton," she muttered, in a puzzled tone. "Evan Malton's wife! what does she want, I wonder? I thought I was too wicked for virtue to call on me--it appears I'm not." She glanced at the card again, then made up her mind. "Show the lady in," she said calmly; and, when the servant disappeared, she called Meg. "Mumsey's sweetheart must go away for a few minutes." "What for?" asked mumsey's sweetheart, setting her small mouth. "Mumsey has to see a lady on business." Meg collected the bricks in a pinafore, and walked off to the French window, when she turned. "Meg will play outside," she said, shaking her curls, "and will come in when mumsey calls." Scarcely had Meg vanished when the servant threw open the door and announced,-- "Mrs. Malton." A tall, slender girl entered the room quickly, and, as the door closed behind, paused a moment and looked steadily at Kitty through her thick veil. "Mrs. Malton?" said Kitty interrogatively. The visitor bowed, and, throwing back her veil, displayed a face of great beauty; but she had a restless, pitiful look in her eyes, and occasionally she moistened her dry lips with her tongue. "Will you take a seat?" said the actress politely, taking in at a glance the beautiful, tired face and quiet, dark costume of her visitor. "Thank you," replied Mrs. Malton, in a low, clear voice, and sat down in the chair indicated by her hostess, nervously clasping and unclasping her hands over the ivory handle of her umbrella. She glanced at Kitty again in a shrinking kind of manner, then, with a sudden effort, burst out quickly,-- "I have called--I have called to see you about my--my husband." Kitty's lip curled, and she resumed her seat with an enigmatical smile. "Yes; what about him?" "Cannot you guess?" said Mrs. Malton imploringly. Kitty shook her head in a supercilious manner. "I am at a loss to understand the reason of your visit," she said, in a cold, measured manner. "I am Evan Malton's wife," said the other rapidly. "We have only been married a year--and--and we have one child." "I presume you did not call to inform me of your domestic affairs," replied Kitty mercilessly. "He was so fond of me--we loved one another devotedly till--till--" "Till he met me, I suppose," said Kitty coolly, throwing herself back with an amused laugh. "I've heard that complaint before--you wives never seem to know how to retain your husbands' affections." "Give him back to me--oh give him back to me," cried the young wife, clasping her hands. "You have many richer and better than he. I love my husband, and you have parted us--oh, do--do--give him back to me." "My dear Mrs. Malton," replied the actress coldly, "I do not encourage him, I assure you. He's a bore, and I detest bores." "But he loves you--he loves you--he worships the ground you tread on." "A waste of good material; for his devotion will never be rewarded." "Then you don't love him?" said Mrs. Malton breathlessly. Kitty rose to her feet, and laughed bitterly. "Love him--love any one," she muttered, with a choking cry. "I hate the whole lot of them. Do you think I care for their flattery, their kisses, their protestations--bah! I know the value of such things. Love--I hate the word." "Yet my husband comes here," said the other timidly. Kitty turned on her fiercely. "Can I help that? Is it the candle's fault that the moths are attracted? I don't ask your husband to come; if he finds in me what he misses in you, it is your fault, not mine--your errand is useless, I cannot help you." She turned to go, but the young woman sprang forward and caught her dress. "You shall not go--you shall not!" she almost shrieked. "You and Fenton are dragging us both to perdition; he has ruined himself for your sake, and his friend--God help him--his friend has insulted me with words of love." "Am I the guardian of your virtue?" said Kitty pitilessly. Mrs. Malton stood wringing her hands. "Oh, God, have you no pity? I am a woman like yourself--my husband should protect me, but he leaves me for you--and," in a whisper, "you don't know all--he has given you presents, rich presents, and to do so has committed a crime." "A crime!" "Hush! hush!" glancing fearfully around, "not so loud--not so loud--yes, he has embezzled money, thousands of pounds, for your sake." Kitty gave a cry, and grasped at a chair for support. "I--I--did not--not ask him for his presents." "No; but it was for your sake--your sake. You must help him." "I," laughed Kitty mockingly, "help him? Help him!--help any man! My good woman, if he went into the prisoner's dock to-morrow, I would not lift one finger to save him." Mrs. Malton fell on her knees. "Oh, my God, don't talk like that!" she cried wildly. "You will ruin him--you will ruin him." Kitty swept round with a cold glitter, like steel, in her eyes. "Yes! it is my business to ruin men. When I was poor, and anxious to lead a good life, any outstretched hand might have saved me; but no, I was a pariah and outcast--they closed their doors against me. I asked for bread, they gave me a stone--they made of me a scourge for their own evil doing--this is the time for my revenge; fallen and degraded though I be, I can wring their hearts and ruin their homes through their nearest and dearest, and you come to ask me to relent--you, who, if you saw me to-morrow on the streets, would draw your skirts aside from the moral leper!" "No, no!" moaned the other, beating her breasts with her hands. "Have mercy, have mercy!" "What do you want me to do?" "You know the manager of the company, Mr. Fenton; he is your lover--he can refuse you nothing. Speak to him, and see if anything can be done." "No!" "For God's sake!" "No!" "You have a child?" "What is my child to you?" "Everything. You are a mother--so am I: you love your child--I love mine; yet you would make my innocent child suffer for its father's crime. Oh, if you have any feelings of a mother, spare the father for the sake of the child." Kitty stood irresolute, while the woman at her feet burst into wild and passionate weeping. At this moment Meg entered the room by the window, and paused for a moment. "Mumsey," she said, "why does the lady cry?" Kitty would have interposed, but Mrs. Malton stretched out her hands to Meg with a quiet in-drawing of her breath. "I am crying for my little girl." "Is she dead?" asked Meg, coming to the kneeling woman, and touching her shoulder. "Poor lady--poor, poor lady!" Kitty could contain herself no longer. With a sudden impulse, she bent down and raised the weeping woman. "I will do what I can," she said huskily, and sank into a chair. "Thank God!" cried Mrs. Malton, advancing, but Kitty waved her off, while Meg stood looking from one to the other in amazement. "Go, go!" Mrs. Malton bent down and kissed her hand. "May God be merciful to you, as you have been to me," and, without another word, she departed. "Mumsey," said Meg, trying to take her mother's hands from her face, "were you cross to the lady?" "No, darling, no!" replied Kitty, drawing Meg close to her. "Mother was kind to the lady because of her little girl." "Good mumsey, dear mumsey; Meg loves you," and she put her arms round Kitty's neck, while the poor woman leaned her aching head against the innocent breast of her child, and burst into tears. CHAPTER VI THE ANNOYANCE OF HIRAM J. FENTON. It is a curious fact that Melbourne has, in its social and business aspects, a strong leaven of Americanism, and visitors from the great Republic find themselves quite at home in the Metropolis of the South. There are the same bold, speculative qualities, the same restless pursuit of pleasure, and the same rapidity and promptness of action which characterises the citizen of San Francisco or New York. Consequently, there are many Americans to be found in a city so congenial to their tastes, and of these Hiram J. Fenton was one. He had come over from the States as the agent of a dry-goods firm, and, travelling all through the Australasian colonies, soon saw the enormous capabilities of wealth that lay before him. Gifted with a ready tongue and a persuasive manner, he interested several opulent Victorians in a scheme for floating a Life Insurance Company. A prospectus was drawn up, which promised incalculable wealth to those who would take shares, and, by means of Mr. Fenton's brilliant command of words, and skilful manipulation of figures, The Never-say-die Insurance Company soon became an accomplished fact. A handsome suite of offices was taken in Collins' Street, a large staff of clerks engaged, a genial medical man, whose smile itself was a recommendation, remained on the premises to examine intending policy-holders, and the emissaries of the company went to the four quarters of the globe to trumpet forth the praises of the affair, and persuade people to insure their lives. The company prospered, a handsome dividend was soon declared, and, thanks to his Yankee sharpness, Mr. Fenton now found himself occupying the enviable position of manager with a large salary. He was a handsome man in a bold, sensual way, with a certain dash and swagger about him which impressed strangers favourably, but a physiognomist would have mistrusted his too ready tongue and the keen glance of his eye. There is no greater mistake than to suppose a villain cannot meet an honest eye, for, as a matter of fact, a successful villain having his nerves under admirable control can stare any one out of countenance, and the keen, rapid glance can take in at once the weak points of a stranger. Mr. Fenton occupied pleasant apartments, went into society a great deal, and altogether was a very popular man. Cold, calculating, and far-seeing as he was, he had yet a weak spot in his character, and this was extreme partiality for the female sex. Any woman, provided she was pretty, could twist him round her finger; and as Kitty Marchurst now had him in her toils, she took full advantage of his infatuation. There was a certain amount of notoriety in being the lover of the now famous Caprice; but Fenton had to pay pretty dearly for his position. Kitty spent his money like water, and when he ventured to remonstrate, laughed in his face, and told him he could go if he liked, an intimation which only made him resolve to stick closer to her. Nevertheless, about this time relations were rather strained between them, and any one knowing the facts of the case would have seen that the end was not far off. As to Evan Malton, he was Fenton's assistant manager, and was the moon to the astute American's sun. Weak, irresolute, and foolish, he was, nevertheless, by some strange contradiction, a capital business man. This arose from his long training in office work; he could do nothing by himself, but guided by Fenton, he made an admirable subordinate, and was amenable to his superior in every way. He admired Fenton greatly, copied him in his dress and mannerisms, affected a rakish demeanour towards his friend's mistress, and thoroughly neglected his poor wife, a neglect of which Fenton tried to take advantage. Had Malton known this, it would doubtless have changed his feelings towards the American, for though he thought he was justified in leading a fast life, he strongly objected to his wife showing any liking for any one but himself. Fenton, however, believing in no woman's virtue, did not despair, but protected Kitty openly, to delude Malton into a false security, and made love to Mrs. Malton _sub rosâ_. It was quite warm out of doors in spite of the season, and out on Kitty's lawn were a group of people laughing and talking together. Kitty, in a comfortable chair, was chatting to Keith and Ezra, who had just arrived, and there were several other ladies present, including Milly Maxwell, who was the second lady at the Bon-Bon--dark-browed, majestic, and passionate; Dora Avenant, who looked like a doll and had the brains of one; and Mrs. Wadby, who wrote scandal and dresses for _The Penny Whistle_ under the _nom de plume_ of "Baby." As to the gentlemen, there were present Ted Mortimer, bland and smiling; Slingsby, the parliamentary reporter; Delp, the theatrical critic; Toltby, the low comedian at the Bon-Bon, and about half-a-dozen others, who were more or less connected with the stage and the press. The men were smoking, chatting, or drinking, according to their various tastes, whilst the ladies were sipping their afternoon tea; and, of course, the conversation was mostly about theatrical matters. In the drawing-room, however, close to the window, sat Meg, buried in a big armchair, reading a fairy tale, and a pretty picture she made with her little loose white dress, and her glorious hair falling about her pale face. "And the beautiful Princess," read Meg in ecstasy, "fell asleep in the Magic Castle for one hundred years--oh!" breaking off suddenly, "how hungry she must have been when she woke up." Meg shook her head over this problem and resumed the story. "And a great forest grew round the castle, which could not be got through till the handsome Prince arrived." Here the drawing-room door opened, and Meg looked up, half expecting to see the handsome prince. It was only Fenton, however, and he disliked Meg intensely, a dislike which that young person was by no means backward in returning, so she went calmly on reading her book. "Well, where's mother?" asked Fenton, in his slightly nasal voice, looking at the little figure with a frown. "Mumsey's in the garden," replied Meg with great dignity, flinging back her curls. "Just where you ought to be," said Fenton ill-naturedly, "getting fresh air." "I'm reading a fairy tale," explained Meg, closing her book; "mumsey said I could do what I liked." "Your mother don't rear you well," retorted the American, and he walked away, when a peal of laughter made him turn round. "What funny faces you make," said the child; "I feel quite laughy." "I'd like to spank you," observed Fenton, with no very amiable expression of countenance. "You're a bad man," said Meg indignantly; "I don't know a badder--not a bit like my Mr. Keith." "Oh," sneered Fenton, "and who is Mr. Keith?" "He is a very nice gentleman," replied Meg, pursing up her lips; "he stopped the wheels going over me." "I wish he hadn't," muttered Fenton vindictively. "Meg, go and tell mother I want her right away." "I sha'n't," retorted Meg obstinately; "you're a rude man." "I'll make you smart," said Fenton, catching her arm. "Oh, mumsey," cried the child, in a tone of relief, and Fenton turned just to see Kitty looking at him like an enraged tigress. "You lay a finger on my child," she said viciously, "and I'll kill you!" The American released his hold on Meg with an awkward laugh, and took a seat. "Why don't you teach her manners," he growled. "That's my business," flashed out Kitty haughtily. "And now you are here, I wish to speak with you. Meg, my treasure, run out and say mumsey won't be long." "Mumsey's going to be cross with you now," said Meg consolingly to Fenton, and then ran out laughing, the man looking angrily after her. Left alone, Kitty sat down near Fenton and began to talk. "I asked you for five hundred," she said coldly. "Yes--and I refused," sulkily. "So I saw by your letter. What is your reason?" "That's my business." "Mine also. Why did you refuse?" she reiterated. "I'm sick of your extravagance." Caprice laughed in a sneering way that brought the blush to his cheek. "Do you think I'm dependent on you for money?" she said, with scorn. "I know fifty better men than you who would give me the money if I asked them." "Then go and ask them," he returned brutally. Kitty sprang to her feet. "Of course I will; that means your dismissal." Fenton caught at her dress in genuine alarm. "No, no! don't go; you know I love you--" "So well," she interrupted, "that you refuse me a paltry five hundred pounds." "I would give it to you, but I haven't got it." "Then get it," she said coolly. "I'm nearly ruined," he cried desperately. "Then retire, and make room for better men." "You're a devil!" hissed Fenton. "No doubt. I told you what to expect when I first met you." "Do you mean to say you will throw me over because I've no money left?" he said fiercely, grasping her wrist. "Like an old glove," she retorted. "I'll kill you first." "Bah! you are melodramatic." "Oh, Kitty, Kitty!" with a sudden change to tenderness. "Don't call me by that name," said the woman, in a low, harsh voice. "Kitty Marchurst is dead; she died when she went on the stage, and all womanly pity died with her. You are speaking to Caprice, the most notorious woman in Melbourne." Fenton sat sullenly silent, glancing every now and then at her beautiful, scornful face. "If you won't give me money," she said at length, mindful of her promise to Mrs. Malton, "you can do something else." "What's that?" eagerly. "Mrs. Malton was here--" "Mrs. Malton!" he interrupted, springing to his feet. "What did she say?" "Several unpleasant things about your love for her," said Kitty coolly. "It's a lie," he began, but Kitty shrugged her shoulders. "Bah! I'm not jealous; I only care for your money, not for you. But about this visit; her husband has embezzled money in your office." Fenton turned a little pale, and looked steadily at her. "Embezzled money, the scoundrel!" he said furiously. "Yes, isn't he?" said Kitty derisively. "Not a noble, upright gentleman like Hiram Fenton." He turned from her with an oath. "I've been a good friend to him right along," he said in an angry tone. "He was fixed up for life, if he'd only behaved himself; now I'll put him in prison." "So that you can make love to his wife," retorted Kitty coolly. "I don't care two straws about his wife," replied Fenton, with a scowl. "You are the only woman I love." "Then promise me to help this unhappy man?" "Certainly not; you are asking me to compound a felony." "I'm not a lawyer," she said coldly, "and don't understand legal terms. I am only asking you to save him from gaol for his wife's sake." "You don't love him?" jealously. "Bah! do I love any one except myself?" "And your child," with a sneer. "Let my child be. Will you help Evan Malton?" "No; the law must take its course." "Then I'll help him myself." "But how?" "That's my business--the money must be replaced--find out how much is missing, and let me know." "What's the good? you've not got the cash." "Do what I ask!" "Very well!" sulkily. "I can't pay the money myself; but I'll give him time to repay it." "You will?" "Yes; and Kitty," shamefacedly, "I'll let you have that five hundred.' "Good boy," said Kitty approvingly, and laughed. She had gained both her points, so could afford to do so. At this moment Meg entered the room from the garden, followed by Keith, on seeing whom Fenton's face darkened. "Mumsey!" said Meg, bounding up to Kitty, "I've given him the knife, and he says it's lovely--don't you," turning to Keith. "Words fail me to express my appreciation," said Stewart, with a smile, looking at the large--very large ivory-handled knife, "and it's got an inscription, 'From Meg,'--beautiful." "It will cut love, Mr. Stewart," said Kitty, with a laugh. "Oh, no," interposed Meg, "he's given me a lucky sixpence. He says we're engaged now, and when I grow up, mumsey, I'm going to marry him." "Is this true?" asks Kitty gaily. "Are you going to rob me of my daughter? This is dreadful! What do you say, Mr. Fenton?" Mr. Fenton smiled in a ghastly manner, then hurried away muttering under his breath. "It's bad temper," observed Stewart, looking after him. "No, my dear," said Kitty airily, "it's jealousy." CHAPTER VII. MIRTH AND LAUGHTER. Kitty's supper parties were always delightful, though slightly godless. The guests were usually men and women of the world, connected with art, literature, and the drama, so a general tone of brilliancy permeated the atmosphere. The hostess herself was an admirable conversationalist, and what with the wine, the laughter, and the influence of the midnight hour, the excitement seemed contagious. Every one was amusing, and witty stories, caustic remarks, and sarcastic epigrams followed one after the other in reckless profusion. Very pretty the supper-table looked, though, it must be confessed, rather disorderly. It was not a very large table, but accommodated the present company admirably, and under the soft light of the tapers, with which the room was illuminated, the silver and glass sparked brilliantly. Half-filled glasses of champagne and burgundy, crumbs on the white table-cloth, and a general array of disorderly plates, showed that supper was over. The guests had pushed away their chairs, and were smoking and chatting, while a light breeze came in through the open French window, and somewhat cooled the temperature of the room. The smoky atmosphere, the flashing of the light on the bare shoulders of the women, gay feminine, laughter, and the general air of unconventionality, fascinated Keith as he sat beside his hostess, listening to the desultory conversation, and occasionally joining in. Slingsby was speaking about a new book which had come out, and this gave rise to a brilliant rattle of pungent wit. "It's called 'Connie's Crime,' a mixture of blood and atheism." "Yes, so they say; a hash-up of the Newgate Calendar and Queen Mab, with a dash of realism to render it attractive." "Awfully bad for the public." "Bah! they read worse in papers. _The Penny Whistle_ was bewailing the prevalence of criminal literature, yet you can't take up a night's issue without finding a divorce case or a murder--the pot calling the kettle black with a vengeance." "Don't suppose either it or shilling shockers have much to do with the morals of the public--we're all going to the deuce." "Pessimistic!" "But true. It's a game of follow my leader, with Father Adam at the head." "Gad, he ought to have arrived at his destination by this time!" "Oh! we'll all find that out when we get there." "But' you forget we start in this new country with all the old-world civilisation." "Yes, and all the old-world vices." "Which are a natural concomitant of aforesaid civilisation." "How abusive you all are," said Kitty, shrugging her shoulders; "people are not so bad as you make out." "No, they're worse," said Delp lightly. "Put on your diamonds and go through Victoria like that young person in Moore's song, 'Rich and rare were the gems she wore,' you won't be treated as well, I promise you." "I'm afraid I'm very careless of my diamonds," laughed Kitty; "I certainly take them home from the theatre every night, but I generally put the case safely away in the drawer of my looking-glass." "A very safe place," observed Lazarus approvingly; "for illustration see Poe's story of 'The Purloined Letter.'" "All the same, I wouldn't trust to fiction for suggestions," said Fenton gaily; "some night you'll be minus your jewels." "I'll take the risk," retorted Kitty rising. "I'm going into the drawing-room. Mr. Lazarus, you come also. I have got the score of that new opera-bouffé 'Eblis,' and I want you to try it." "Bah! a failure in town," growled Mortimer. "That doesn't necessarily mean a failure in Melbourne," replied Kitty, and with this parting shot she went away, followed by the ladies and Ezra Lazarus. Keith remained behind, and, lighting a fresh cigarette, listened to the conversation, which was now slightly horsey. "I know what's going to win the cup. "Never knew a man who didn't." "This is true, 'Devil-may-care.'" "An outsider." "They generally win, but don't prophesy too soon." "No, or like Casandra, your prophecies won't be believed." "Who is Casandra--another dark 'un?" "No--a woman." "Talking about women, I wish you'd get more chorus girls, Mortimer." "Got quite enough." "Of course--quantity, not quality." "They've been snubbing you?" "Wrong again; they never snub any one who can give them diamonds." "Which you can't." "No, by Jove. I wish I had some myself--say Caprice's." "Don't grudge them to her, dear boy--the savings of years." Every one grinned. Meanwhile, Keith grew tired of this scintillating talk, and leaving Ezra rattling away at a gallop in the drawing-room, he arose and went out into the hall. Glancing carelessly up the stairs, he saw a little figure in white coming down. "Why, Meg," said Keith, going to the foot of the stairs to receive her, "what are you doing at this hour of the night?" "Meg wants mumsey," said the child, putting her arms round his neck. "Mumsey's busy," replied Keith, lifting her up. "I'll take you back to bed, dear." "Don't want to go to bed," said the child, though she could hardly keep her eyes open. Keith laughed, and rocked her slowly to and fro in his arms for a few minutes, humming softly till Meg grew tired. "Will Meg go to bed now?" he whispered, seeing she had closed her eyes. "Yes! Meg's sleepy." Keith went upstairs with the quiet little figure in his arms, and seeing an open door leading to a room in which there was a subdued light, caused by the lowering of the gas, he went in, and finding Meg's cot, placed her in it, and tucked her carefully in. "Good-night, dear," he whispered, kissing her. "Good-night, mumsey; good-night, God," murmured Meg, thinking she was saying her prayers, and fell fast asleep. Keith went downstairs again, and met Fenton in the hall. "Say!" exclaimed that gentleman, "where have you been?" "Putting Meg to bed," replied Stewart, laughing. "I found her wandering about like an unquiet spirit," and having no desire for a conversation with Fenton, he strolled off to the drawing-room leaving the American looking after him with an angry frown. No one was in the drawing-room but Ezra and the ladies--the former being seated at the piano playing over the music of "Eblis," while Kitty Marchurst stood beside him, looking over his shoulder. Lazarus had just finished a valse, which was not by any means original, being made out of reminiscences of other music. "There's only one decent thing in the whole opera," said Kitty impatiently--"this," and she hummed a few bars; "it's called, 'Woman's Deceit.'" "Disagreeable title," said Keith idly. "But a capital song," retorted Kitty "Eblis sings it--that's the principal character." "You seem anxious to play the devil," said Stewart, with a smile. "What do you mean?" Keith shrugged his shoulders. "Eblis is the Oriental name for the Devil." "Oh, I understand." Kitty's quick perception seized the idea at once. "Yes, there would be some fun in playing such a character." "Then give myself and Lazarus a commission to write you a part. I am anxious to make a start, and I think Lazarus would write charming music. I'll be librettist, and, of course, can write the character to suit you." Kitty glanced critically at him. "Can you compose music," she asked Lazarus. In answer, he played a charming gavotte, bright and crisp, with a quaint rhythm. "Very pretty," said Kitty critically, "but not my style. Play something with a little more 'go' in it." "Like this?" He brought his hands down on the ivory keys with a tremendous crash, and plunged into a wild fantastic galop that made everybody long to dance. Kitty clapped her hands, and her whole face lighted up with enthusiasm as the brilliancy and dash of the melody carried her away. "Bravo!" she cried, when he finished. "That's what I want; write me music like that, and I'll engage to have it produced. You'll do. Now, sir," turning to Keith, "what's your idea?" "Rather a burlesque than opera-bouffe," he answered; "what would you say to 'Faust Upset?'" "Ah, bah! we've had so many burlesques on Faust." "Not such a one as I propose to write. I intend to twist the whole legend round; make Miss Faust a Girton girl who has grown old, and longs for love, invokes the Power of Evil, enter Caprice as Miss Mephistopheles, a female demon, rejuvenates Miss Faust by paint and powder, takes her to see Mr. Marguerite, who is a young athlete, and so throughout the whole legend; to conclude with Miss Mephistopheles falling in love with Mr. Marguerite, and disputing possession with Miss Faust." "Ha! ha!" laughed Kitty, "what a capital idea. It will be new, at all events; but I won't decide till I see the first act complete; if it's as good as it promises, I'll get Mortimer to stage it after 'Prince Carnival.'" Keith was delighted, as now he seemed to have obtained a chance of seeing what he could do. Ezra smiled, and nodded to Stewart. "I told you she'd be a good friend," he said. The gentlemen all came into the room, and in a short time there was a perfect babel of voices talking about everything and everyone. Suddenly Fenton, with a half-smoked cigar in his hand, entered the room and crossed over to Kitty. "There's a rough-looking man outside who wants to see you," he said quietly. "What's his name?" "Villiers." Kitty turned a little pale. "The husband of Madame Midas," she said, in an annoyed tone. "Where is he?" "Walking up and down in front of the dining-room." "Remain here; I'll see him," she said, in a decided tone, and, without being noticed, left the room. On entering the dining-room, she found Mr. Villiers seated at the supper-table drinking champagne from a half-empty bottle, having entered through the window. "What do you want?" she asked, coming down to him. Mr. Villiers was in his usual condition of intoxication, and began to weep. "It's Kitty, dear little Kitty," he said, in a maudlin tone, "the friend of my dear wife." "Your dear wife," said Kitty scornfully; "the woman you deceived so shamefully; she was well quit of you when she went to live in England." "She left me to die alone," wept Villiers, filling his glass again, "and only lets me have a hundred pounds a year, and she's rolling in money." "Quite enough for you to get drunk on," retorted Kitty. "What do you want?" "Money." "You sha'n't get a penny." "Yes I shall. You talk about me treating my wife badly; what about you--eh?" Kitty clenched her hands. "I did treat her badly," she said, with a cry. "God help me, I've repented it often enough since!" "You were a nice girl till you met Vandeloup," said Villiers. "Ah, that confounded Frenchman, how he made me suffer!" "Leave Vandeloup alone; he's dead, and it will do no good you reviling him now. At all events, he was a man, not a drunkard." "She loves him still, blow me!" hiccupped Mr. Villiers rising--"loves him still." "Here's a sovereign," said Kitty, thrusting some money into his hand. "Now, go away at once." "I want more." "You won't get more. Get away, or I'll order my servants to turn you out." Villiers staggered up to her. "Will you, indeed? Who are you to talk to me like this? I'll go now, but I'll come back, my beauty! Don't try your fine airs on me. I'll get money from you when I want it; if I don't, I'll make you repent it." Kitty stood looking at him like a statue of marble, and pointed to the open window. "I spare you for your wife's sake," she said coldly. "Go!" Villiers lurched towards the window, then, turning round, shook his fist at her. "I've not done with you yet, my fine madam," he said thickly. "You'll be sorry for these fine airs, you----" He staggered out without saying the vile word, and disappeared in the darkness. A vile word, and yet what was that Mrs. Malton said about her child blushing for her father? God help her, would Meg live to blush for her mother? Kitty put out her hands with a sob, when a burst of laughter from the next room sounded in her ears. The momentary fit of tenderness was over, and, with a harsh laugh, she poured out a glass of champagne and drank it off. "My world is there," she muttered. "I must part with the child for her own good, and she will lead that virtuous, happy life which a miserable wretch like myself can never hope to reach." CHAPTER VIII. A MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR. _The Penny Whistle_ was a purely sensational newspaper, and all those who liked spicy articles and exaggerated details purchased it, in order to gratify their tastes. Its circulation was enormous, and its sale increased still more when the following article appeared in its columns on the Tuesday after Kitty's supper party:-- "Burglary at the House of a well-known Actress. "We often hear accounts of great jewel robberies having taken place in London, but nothing of the kind, at least in any noticeable degree, has been perpetrated in the colonies until last Sunday night, or, to speak more exactly, Monday morning, when the house of Caprice, the well-known actress, was entered, and jewels to the amount of £5000 were stolen. The house in question is situated in Toorak, almost immediately on the banks of the Yarra-Yarra, and, as far as we can learn, the following are the circumstances connected with the affair:-- "On Sunday night Caprice entertained a number of friends at a supper party, and the servants all being downstairs attending to the guests, the upper part of the house was left entirely uninhabited. It is at this time, probably between twelve and one o'clock, that the burglary is supposed to have been perpetrated. The company departed about three o'clock, and on going up to her room, Caprice found the window wide open. Knowing that it had been closed, she suspected something was wrong, and went to the place where she kept her diamonds, only to find them gone. She sent at once for her servants, and an examination was made. It was found that the house had evidently been entered from the outside, as the window was not very far from the ground, and some ivy growing on the wall made a kind of natural ladder, which any man of ordinary agility could scale. Curiously enough Caprice's child, aged seven, was asleep in the room, but appears to have heard nothing. Next morning another examination was made, and it was found that the ivy was broken in several places, showing clearly the mode of entrance. The window had not been latched, as no chance of a burglary was apprehended, the house always having been looked upon as a remarkably safe one. The diamonds were usually kept in a small safe, but on returning from the theatre on Saturday night they had been placed in the drawer of the looking-glass, where they were judged to be safe, as it was not thought likely any thief would look in so unlikely a place for valuable jewellery. Below will be found a plan of the house and grounds as furnished by our special reporter, and the probable track of the burglars indicated." [Illustration: Floor Plan of First and Ground Floor.] "It will be seen from this plan that the drawing-room and dining-room, in both of which the guests were assembled, are in the front of the house, so that the most likely thing is that the burglar or burglars entered the grounds by the gate, or along the banks of the river, and climbed up into the house by the window C shown on the plan. "After securing the plunder, two modes of exit were available, either as indicated by the dotted line which would take the thief out of the gate into the road, from whence it would be easy to escape, or along the banks of the river, as shown by the other lines. In either case escape was perfectly easy. Of course the danger lay in detection while in the house, but this was considerably guarded against by the fact that the noise and laughter going on below effectually drowned all sounds of any one entering the house. "The thief must have known that the diamonds were in the bedroom, and that a number of people would be present on Sunday night, therefore he chose a time when he would be most likely to escape detection. We believe that a detective has gone down to Toorak to make inquiries, and we have no doubt that the thief will soon be secured, as it would be impossible for such valuable jewels to be disposed of in Melbourne or other colonial cities without arousing suspicion." It was Fenton who insisted upon a detective being employed to investigate the robbery, as, for some extraordinary reason, Kitty seemed unwilling to allow the matter to be inquired into. The detective who accompanied Fenton to Kitty's house was known by the name of Naball, and on the retirement of Kilsip had taken his place. He was only of the age of thirty, but remarkably clever, and had already distinguished himself in several difficult cases. Detective work was a positive mania with him, and he was never so happy as when engaged on a difficult case--it had for him the same fascination as an abstruse mathematical problem would have for an enthusiastic student. To Kilsip belonged the proud honour of having discovered this genius, and it seemed as though the pupil would soon surpass the master in his wonderful instinct for unravelling criminal puzzles. Mr. Naball was an ordinary-looking young man, who always dressed fashionably, and had very little to say for himself, so that few guessed the keen astute brain that was hidden under this somewhat foppish exterior. He listened to everything said to him, and rarely ventured an opinion, but the thieves of Melbourne well knew that when "The Toff," as they called Naball, was on their track, there was very little chance of escape from punishment. On this day when they were on their way to Toorak, Fenton was excited over the matter, and ventured all kinds of theories on the subject, while Mr. Naball smoked a cigarette, and admired the fit of his gloves. "Do you think the thief will try and dispose of them in Melbourne?" he asked. "Possibly," returned Naball, "if he's a born fool." "I'm certain I know the thief," said Fenton quietly. "I told you that the man Villiers was seen about the place on the night of the robbery." "By whom?" "Myself and Caprice." "Who saw him last?" "Caprice." "Oh," said Naball imperturbably, "then she's the best person to see on the subject." "He's a bad lot," said Fenton; "he was mixed up in that poisoning case eight years ago." "The Midas case?" "Yes. Caprice, or rather Kitty Marchurst, was concerned in it also." "So I believe," replied Naball; "every one was innocent except Jarper and Vandeloup--one was hanged, the other committed suicide. I don't see what it has to do with the present case." "Simply this," said Fenton sharply, annoyed at the other's tone, "Villiers is a scoundrel, and wouldn't stop at robbery if he could make some money over it." "He knew Caprice had diamonds worth five thousand?" "Of course; every one in Melbourne knows that." "Did he know where they were kept?" "There's a safe in the room, and a thief, of course--" "Would go there first--precisely--but you forget the diamonds were taken out of the drawer of her looking-glass--a most unlikely place for a thief to examine. The man who stole the jewels must have known where they were kept." "Oh," said Fenton, and looked astonished, as he was quite unable to explain this. He was about to reply, when the train having arrived at its destination, they got out, and walked to Kitty's house. She was in the drawing-room writing letters and looked pale and haggard, her eyes having dark circles beneath them, which told of a sleepless night. When the two men entered the room she welcomed them gracefully, and then resumed her seat as they began to talk. "I have brought you Mr. Naball to look after this affair," said Fenton, looking at her. "You are very kind," she replied coldly; "but, the fact is, I have not yet decided about placing it in the hands of the police." "But the diamonds?"--began Fenton in amazement. "Were mine," finished Kitty coolly; "and as the loss is mine, not yours, I will act as I think fit in the matter." Then, turning her back on the discomfited Fenton, she addressed herself to the detective. "I should like your opinion on the subject," she said graciously, "and then I will see if the case can be gone on with." Naball, who had been keeping his keen eyes on her face the whole time, bowed. "Tell me all the details of the robbery," he observed cautiously. "They are simple enough," replied Kitty, folding her hands. "I bring them home from the theatre every night, and usually put them in the safe, which is in my room. On Saturday night, however, I was tired, and, I must confess, rather careless, and as the case was on my dressing-table, I placed it in the drawer of my looking-glass, to save me the trouble of going to the safe. I gave a supper party on Sunday night, and when every one had gone away, I went upstairs to bed, and found the window open; recollecting where I had put the diamonds, I opened the drawer and found them gone. My servants examined the ground beneath the window, and found footmarks on the mould of the flower-bed, so I suppose the thief must have entered by the window, stolen the jewels, and made off with them." When she had finished, Naball remained silent for a minute, but just as Fenton was about to speak, he interposed. "I will ask you a few questions, madame," he said thoughtfully. "When did you see the diamonds last?" "About six o'clock on Sunday night. I opened the drawer to get something, and saw the case." "Not the diamonds?" "They were in the case." "Are you sure?" "Where else would they be?" "Some one might have stolen them previously, and left the case there to avert suspicion." Kitty shook her head. "Impossible. The case is also gone besides, I locked the case on Saturday night, and had the key with me. No other key could have opened it, and had the case been forced, I would have seen it at once. See," lifting up her arm, "I always wear this bracelet, and the key is attached to it by a chain." Naball glanced carelessly at it, and went on with his questions. "You generally kept the diamonds in the safe?" "Yes." "And it was quite an oversight not placing them in there on Saturday?" "Quite." "No one knew they were in the drawer of your looking-glass on that particular night?" "No one." Here Fenton interposed. "You get along too fast," he said quickly. "Everyone at the supper-table knew you kept them there; you said it to them yourself." Naball glanced sharply at Kitty. "I know I did," she replied quietly; "but I spoke as if the diamonds were always kept there, which they were not. I did not say they were in the drawer on that particular night." "You mentioned it generally?" said Naball tranquilly. "Yes. All the people present were my guests, and I hardly think any of them would rob me of my diamonds." "Were any of the servants in the room when you made the remark?" said the detective slowly. "No, none; and the door was closed." Naball paused a moment. "I tell you what," he said slowly, "the diamonds were stolen between six o'clock and the time you went to bed." "About three o'clock," said Kitty. "Precisely. You saw the diamonds last at six; they were gone by three; you mentioned where you kept them at the supper-table; now, the thief must have overheard you." "You--you suspect my guests, sir," cried Kitty angrily. "Certainly not," said the detective quietly; "but I suspect Villiers." "Villiers!" "Yes. Mr. Fenton tells me you saw him on that night." Kitty flashed a look of anger on the American, who bore it unmoved. "Yes, he was outside, and wanted to see me. I saw him, gave him some money, and he left." "Then I tell you he overheard you say where you kept the diamonds, because he was hiding outside the window; so, after seeing you, he committed the robbery." "That's what I think," said Fenton. "You!" cried Kitty. "What have you got to do with it? I don't believe he stole them, and, whether he did or not, I'm not going to continue this case." "You'll lose your diamonds," cried Fenton. "That's my business," she returned, rising haughtily; "at all events, I have decided to let the matter rest, so Mr. Naball will have all his trouble for nothing. Should I desire to reopen the affair, I will let you both know. At present, good morning," and, with a sweeping bow, she turned and left the room. Fenton stared after her in blank amazement. "Good God! what a fool!" he cried, rising. "What's to be done now?" Naball shrugged his shoulders. "Nothing," he replied, "since she declines to give me power to investigate. I must throw the affair up. But," also rising, and putting on his hat, "I'd like to have a look at the ground beneath the window." They both went out, Naball silent, and Fenton in great wrath, talking of Kitty's conduct. "What an idiot she is!" he cried. "What is she going on in this way for?" "I don't know." "She must have some motive." "Women don't require a motive for anything," said Naball, imperturbably proceeding to examine the ground under the window, through which the thief had made his exit. The flower-bed was filled with tall hollyhocks, and some of these were broken as if some heavy body had fallen from above. "He clambered down by the ivy," murmured Naball to himself, as he bent down. "The ivy is broken here and there; the flowers are also broken, so he fell on them in a heap--probably having missed his footing. Humph! Clever man, as he did not step again on the flower-bed, but jumped from where he fell on to the grass. Humph! grass hard and rather dry; no chance of footmarks. Question is, which way did he go?" "By the gate, of course," said Fenton impatiently. The detective walked across the lawn to the gate, but could find no trace of footmarks, as the lawn was dry, and the footpath, leading out into the pavement of the street was asphalted. "No; he did not go by the gate, as a man in such rags as Villiers would have been sure to be seen coming out of a private house. That would be suspicious; besides, he would have been afraid." "Of the police?" "Exactly; he's been in prison two or three times since his connection with the Midas case, and has got a wholesome dread of the law. No; he did not go by the gate, but by the river." "The river!" repeated Fenton, in amazement. Naball did not answer, but walked back to the window, then along the side of the house, turned the corner, and went down the sloping green bank which led to the river. Still he could see no footmarks. The grass ended at an iron fence, and beyond was the uncultivated vegetation, rank and unwholesome, that clothed the banks of the river. Between this and the grass, however, there was a strip of black earth, and this Naball examined carefully, but could find nothing. If Villiers had come this way, he could only have climbed the fence by first standing on this earth in order to get near enough, but apparently he had not done so. "He did not come this way," he said, as they walked back. "But how could he have left the place?" asked Fenton. "By the gate." "The gate? You said he would be afraid of the police." "So he would, had he been doing anything wrong. Had he stolen the diamonds, he would have gone down by the bank of the river rather than chance meeting a policeman on the street." "But what does this prove?" "That, had he met a policeman, he could have explained everything, and referred him to Caprice as to his interview, and right to come out of the house. In a word, it proves he did not steal the diamonds." "Then who, in Heaven's name, did?" "I don't give an opinion unless I'm certain," said Naball deliberately; "but I'll tell you what I think. You heard Caprice say she won't go on with the case? "Yes; I can't understand her reason." "I can; she stole the diamonds herself." CHAPTER IX. AN UNKNOWN BENEFACTOR. Everyone was greatly excited over the great jewel robbery, especially as it had taken place at the house of so celebrated a person as Caprice, and numerous were the conjectures as to the discovery of the thieves. When, however, it became known that the lady in question declined to allow an investigation to be made, and was apparently contented to lose five thousand pounds' worth of diamonds, the excitement grew intense. What was her motive for acting in such a strange way? All Melbourne asked itself this question, but without obtaining a satisfactory answer. Reference was made to Kitty's antecedents in connection with the Midas poisoning case, and the public were quite prepared to hear any evil of her, particularly as her career since then had been anything but pure. The name of Villiers was mentioned, and then it transpired that Villiers had been seen outside her house on the night of the robbery It was curious that another crime should have happened where these two, formerly implicated in a murder case, should have come together, and disagreeable rumours began to circulate. Then, by some unexplained means, the opinion of Naball became known regarding his assertion that Caprice had stolen the diamonds herself. Here was another mystery. Why on earth should she steal her own jewels? One theory was that she required money, and had sold them for this purpose, pretending that they were stolen, in order to satisfy the lovers who gave them to her. This was clearly absurd, as Caprice cared nothing for the opinion of her lovers, and, moreover, the donors of the diamonds were long since dead or ruined, so the idea of the detective was unanimously laughed at. But then the fact remained, she would not allow an investigation to be made; and how was this to be accounted for? One idea was mooted, that Villiers had stolen the diamonds, and she would not prosecute him because he was the husband of the woman who had been kind to her. In this case, however, she would have easily got back her jewels by a threat of prosecution, whereas they were still missing. Other solutions of the problem were offered, but they were unsatisfactory, and Melbourne settled itself down to the opinion that the whole affair was a mystery which would never be solved. Keith and Ezra had both been puzzled over the affair, and offered Kitty their services to unravel the mystery, but she curtly dismissed them with the remark that she wished the affair left alone, so they had to obey her, and remain in ignorance like the rest of the public. Affairs thus went on as usual, and the weeks slipped by with no further information being forthcoming. Meanwhile, "Prince Carnival" was still running to crowded houses, and Kitty appeared nightly, being now a still greater attraction on account of the robbery of which she was the heroine. She had fulfilled her promise to Keith, in seeing Mortimer about the chances of production for "Faust Upset." The manager was doubtful about the success of the experiment of trying Colonial work, and told Kitty plainly he could not afford to lose money on such a speculation. "It's all stuff," he said to her when she urged him to give the young men a chance; "I can get operas from London whose success is already assured, and I don't see why I should waste money on the crude production of two unknown Colonials." "That's all very true," retorted Caprice, "and, from a business point of view, correct; but considering you make your money out of Colonial audiences, I don't see why you shouldn't give at least one chance to see what Colonial brains can do. As to crudity, wait and see. I don't want you to take the opera if it is bad, but if you approve of it, give it a chance." In the end Mortimer promised, that if he approved of the libretto and music, he would try the piece at the end of the run of "Prince Carnival," but put "Eblis" in rehearsal, in case his forebodings of failure should be justified. When, however, the first act was finished and shown to him, he was graciously pleased to say there was good stuff in it, and began to be a little more hopeful as to its success. So Keith worked hard all day at his employment, and at night on his libretto, to which Ezra put bright, tuneful music. With the usual sanguine expectations of youth, they never dreamt of failure, and Keith wrote the most enthusiastic letters to his betrothed, announcing the gratifying fact that he had got his foot on the lowest rung of the ladder of fame. As to his uncongenial employment at the pawnshop, he strove to conquer his repugnance to it, and succeeded in winning the approval of old Lazarus by his assiduous attention to business. He attended to the books, and, as time went on, the pawnbroker actually let him pay money into the bank, so great had his confidence in the young man become. He increased Keith's salary, and even then chuckled to himself over his cleverness in retaining such a clever servant at so low a price. Though his business was ostensibly that of a pawnbroker, he was in the habit of conducting very much more delicate transactions. In his dingy little den at the back of the shop he sat like a great spider waiting for flies, and the flies generally came in at a little door which led from the room into a dirty yard, and there was a kind of narrow right-of-way which gave admittance to this yard from the street. By this humble way many well-known people came, particularly at night--the fast young man who had backed the wrong horse, the speculative sharebroker, and the spendthrift society lady, all came here in quest of money, which they always got, provided their security was good, and, of course, they paid an exorbitant percentage. Lazarus had dealings with all sorts and conditions of men and women, but he was as silent as the grave over their affairs, and no one knew what secrets that dirty old Hebrew carried in his breast. Of these nocturnal visitors Keith saw nothing, as he left at six o'clock, after which Isaiah shut up the shop, and the front of the house was left in profound darkness, while business went on in the little back room. It was now a fortnight since the robbery, and the nine days' wonder having ceased to amuse, people were beginning to forget all about it. Keith still lived in East Melbourne with Ezra, and on going home one night was surprised to find a letter from the manager of the Hibernian Bank, which informed him that the sum of five hundred pounds had been placed to his credit. Stewart went next day to find out the name of his unknown benefactor, but the manager refused to tell him, as he had been pledged to secrecy. So Keith returned to Ezra in a state of great perplexity to talk over the affair. They sat in Ezra's sitting-room, and discussed the matter late at night with great assiduity, but were unable to come to any conclusion. "You don't know any one who would do you a good turn?" asked Lazarus, when he heard this news. "No--no one," replied Keith. "I haven't a single relative in the Colonies, and no friend rich enough to give me so much money--unless it were your father," with a sudden inspiration. "He!" laughed Ezra scornfully; "he'd as soon part with his blood. Why, I asked him to give me some money so that I could marry, and he refused. What he wouldn't do for his son he certainly would not do for a stranger." "It's very queer," observed Keith meditatively. "It can't be Caprice?" "Not likely; she needs all her money herself," said Ezra. "Besides, I hear she's been rather hard up of late. I suppose Fenton will soon go broke, and then, _Le roi est mort, vive le roi_." "What a pity she goes on like that," said Keith, regretfully. "I like her so much." "Yes, and she likes you," retorted Ezra pointedly. "Don't you get entangled in the nets, or you'll forget all about the girl at Sandhurst. Does she know you're engaged?" "No." "I wouldn't tell her if I were you," said the Jew significantly, "or she'll withdraw the light of her countenance, and then it will be all up with our burlesque." "Pooh, nonsense," replied Stewart, with an uneasy laugh. "I wonder who'll be Fenton's successor?" "Yourself." "Not I. I'm not far enough gone for that. Besides, I've no money." "True, except your anonymous five hundred, which would be nothing to Caprice. So, as she wants money, I expect it will be old Meddlechip." "But he's married." "True, O Sir Galahad," retorted Ezra sarcastically; "but he's an unholy old man for all that--she'll ensnare him, and we'll see how long it will take her to break the richest man in the Colonies." "Oh, the deuce take Kitty Marchurst and her affairs," said Keith impatiently. "I want to know who sent me this money?" "Better not ask," murmured Ezra. "Curiosity is a vice. Remember Adam and Eve, Bluebeard's wife, etcetera. Take the goods the gods bestow, and don't try to find out where they come from; but now you are rich, you'll be giving up the shop." "No, I'll stay on for a time till I find that the five hundred is really and truly mine. Who knows, some day it may take to itself wings and fly." "It certainly would with some young men," said Ezra; "but I don't think you are that sort." "You are right. I want to save up all my money for Eugénie." "Ah! you are going to marry her?" "When I get rich. Yes." "You won't marry her if Caprice can help it." "Why?" disbelievingly. "Because she's fallen in love with you, and her love, like the gifts of the Danaes, is fatal. "Rubbish. I'm not a child. Caprice will never take my heart from Eugénie." "Hercules," remarked Ezra musingly, "was a strong man; yet he became the slave of a woman. Solomon was a wise man--same result. My friend, you are neither Hercules nor Solomon, therefore--" Keith departed hurriedly. CHAPTER X. NABALL MAKES A DISCOVERY. When Kilsip undertook to educate Naball in the business of a detective, he gave him an epigrammatical piece of advice: "Cultivate curiosity." This golden rule Naball constantly followed, and found it of infinite service to him in his difficult profession. He was always on the lookout for queer cases, and when he discovered one that piqued his curiosity, he never rested until he found out all about it. The Red Indian follows the trail of his enemy by noting the most trivial signs, which to others with a less highly cultivated instinct would appear worthless. And Naball was a social Red Indian, following up the trail of a mystery by a constant attention to surrounding events. A casual observation, a fleeting expression, a scrap of paper--these were the sign-posts which led him to a satisfactory conclusion, and he never neglected any opportunity of exercising his faculties. By this constant practice he sharpened his senses in a wonderful degree, and cultivated to the highest extent the unerring instinct which he possessed in discovering crimes. Consequently, when he found there was no legal authority to be given him in unravelling the mystery of the diamond robbery, he determined to investigate it on his own account, in order to satisfy his curiosity. To a casual spectator, it appeared to be a mere vulgar burglary, in which the thieves had got off with their plunder, and until his interview with Caprice the detective had supposed it to be so. But when he went over in his own mind the peculiar circumstances of that interview, he saw there was a complicated criminal case to be investigated, so he set himself to work to unravel the mystery, and gratify his inquiring mind. In the first place, he drew up a statement of the case pure and simple, and then, deducing different theories from the circumstances, he tried to get a point from whence to start. He placed his ideas in the form of questions and answers, as follows:-- _Q_. Was Villiers outside on the verandah when Caprice mentioned where her diamonds were kept? _A_. To all appearances he was. _Q_. Had he any inducement to steal the diamonds? _A_. Undoubtedly. He was poor, and wanted money, proved by his calling on Caprice and asking for some. He said he would be revenged because she did not give him more than a sovereign, and there would be no sweeter revenge than to steal her diamonds, as it would punish her, and benefit himself. _Q_. Did he know the room where the diamonds were kept? _A_. Yes. Caprice said her bedroom, and as Villiers had been several times to the house before, he knew where it was. _Q_. Did Caprice know Villiers had stolen her jewels? _A_. Extremely probably, hence her refusal to prosecute, as he was the husband of Madame Midas, whom she had treated so basely. The refusal to prosecute Villiers might be, in Caprice's opinion, an act of expiation. When he had got thus far, Naball paused. After all, this was pure theory. He had not a single well authenticated fact to go on, but all the circumstances of the case seemed to point to Villiers, so he determined to go on the trail of Villiers, and find out what he was doing. Mr. Villiers had of late been under the espionage of the police, owing to some shady transactions with which he was connected, so Naball knew exactly where to find him, and, putting on an overcoat, he sallied forth in the direction of the slums in Little Bourke Street, with the intention of calling on a Chinaman named Ah Goon, who kept an opium den in that unsavoury locality. To his drinking habits Villiers now added that of being a confirmed opium smoker, and was on terms of intimacy with Ah Goon, in whose den he was accustomed to pass his evenings. Naball therefore intended to watch for Villiers, and find out, if possible, when, owing to drink and opium combined, he was not master of himself, what he had done on the night of the robbery after leaving Caprice. He soon entered Little Bourke Street, and plunged into the labyrinth of slums, which he knew thoroughly. It was a clear, starry night, but the cool, fresh air was tainted in this locality by the foul miasma which pervaded the neighbourhood, and even the detective, accustomed as he was to the place, felt disgusted with the sickly odours that permeated the atmosphere. Ah Goon's house was in a narrow right-of-way off one of the larger alleys, and there was a faint candle burning in the window to attract customers. Pausing at the door a moment, Naball listened to hear if there was any European within. The monotonous chant of a Chinese beggar could be heard coming down the alley, and every now and then the screams of two women fighting, while occasionally a number of noisy larrikins would come tramping heavily along, forming a strong contrast to the silent, soft-footed Orientals. Pushing open the door, Naball entered the den, a small, low-ceilinged room, which was filled with a dull, smoky atmosphere. At the end was a gaudy-looking shrine, all yellow, red, and green, with tinsel flowers, and long red bills with fantastic Chinese letters on them in long rows. Candles were burning in front of this, and cast a feeble light around--on a pile of bamboo canes and baskets heaped up against the wall; on strange-looking Chinese stools of cane-work; on _bizarre_ ivory carvings set on shelves; and on a low raised platform at the end of the room, whereon the opium-smokers reclined. Above this ground-floor were two or three other broad, shallow shelves, in each of which a Chinaman was lying, sunk deep in an opium slumber; there was also a kerosene lamp on the lower floor, beside which Ah Goon was reclining, and deftly preparing a pipe of opium for a fat, stolid-looking Chinaman, who watched the process with silent apathy. Ah Goon looked up as the detective entered, and a bland smile spread over his face as he nodded to him, and went on preparing his pipe, while Naball stood watching the queer operation. There was an oil lamp with a clear flame in front of Ah Goon, who was holding a kind of darning-needle. Dipping this into a thick, brown, sticky-looking substance, contained in a small pot, he twirled the needle rapidly, spinning round the glutinous mass like treacle. Then he placed it in the flame of the lamp, and turned it slowly round and round for a short time until it was ready; then, having placed it in the small hole of the opium pipe, which he held ready in his other hand, he gave it to his countryman, who received it with a grunt of satisfaction, and, lying back, took the long stem between his lips and inhaled the smoke with long, steady breaths. When his pipe was done, which was accomplished in three or four whiffs, he devoted himself to preparing another, while Ah Goon arose to his feet to speak to Naball. He was a tall man, with a thin, yellow-skinned, emaciated face, cunning, oblong eyes, and flattish nose. His pigtail, of course--black hair craftily lengthened by thick twisted silk--was coiled on top of his head; and his dress, consisting of a dull blue blouse, wide trousers of the same colour, and thick, white-soled Chinese slippers, by no means added to his personal beauty. Standing before Naball, with an unctuous smile on his face, and his long, slender hands clasped in front of him, Ah Goon waited for the detective to speak. Naball glanced rapidly round the apartment, and not seeing Villiers, addressed himself to the stolid Celestial, who was looking slyly at him. "Ah Goon, where is the white man who comes here every night?" "Plenty he come allee muchee night--me no have seen," replied Ah Goon, blinking his black eyes. "Yes, I know that," retorted Naball quickly; "but this one is short--black hair and whiskers--smokes opium--drinks a lot--is called Villiers." Whether Ah Goon recognised the gentleman thus elegantly described was doubtful; at all events, he put on a stolid air. "Me no sabee," he answered. Naball held out a half-a crown, upon which Ah Goon fixed his eyes lovingly. "Where is he?" The money was too much for Ah Goon's cupidity, so he gave in. "Him playee fan-tan-ayah!" he answered, in a sing-song voice, "allee same." "Oh!" Mr. Naball did not waste any words, but threw the half-crown to the expectant Ah Goon, and turned towards the door. Just as he reached it there was a noise of hurried footsteps outside, and Villiers' voice, husky and savage, was heard,-- "Ah Goon, you yellow devil, where are you?" and there came a heavy kick at the door. In a moment Naball drew back into a shadowy corner, and placed his finger on his lips to ensure silence, a pantomime which the intelligent Ah Goon understood at once. Villiers opened the door and lurched noisily into the room, stopping for a minute on the threshold, dazed by the yellow, smoky glare. "Here, you, Ah Goon," he cried, catching sight of the Chinaman, "I want some money--more money." "Ah Goon no have," murmured that individual, clutching his half-crown. "I've lost all I had on that infernal fan-tan of yours," shrieked Villiers, not heeding him; "but my luck must change--give me another fiver." "Ah Goon no have," reiterated the Chinaman, edging away from the excited Villiers. "Curse your no have," he said fiercely; "why, I've only had twenty pounds from you, and those diamonds were worth fifty." Diamonds! Naball pricked up his ears at this. He was winning after all. Kitty did not steal her jewels, but this was the thief, or perhaps an accomplice. "Give me more money," cried Villiers, lurching forward, and would have laid his hand on the shoulder of the shrinking Chinaman, when Naball stepped out of his corner. "What's the matter?" he asked, in his silky voice. Villiers turned on the new-comer with a sudden start, and stared suspiciously at him; but the detective being muffled up in a heavy ulster, with his hat pulled over his eyes, he did not recognise him. "What do you want?" he said ungraciously. "Nothing," replied Naball quickly. "I'm only strolling round the Chinese quarter out of curiosity, and heard you rowing this poor devil." "Poor devil!" sneered Villiers, with a glance of fury at Ah Goon, who had complacently resumed his occupation of preparing an opium pipe; "he's rich enough." "Indeed," said the detective, carelessly--"to lend money?" "What's that to you?" growled Villiers, with a snarl. "I s'pose I can borrow money if I like." "Certainly, if you've got good security to give." Villiers glared angrily at the young man. "Don't know what you're talking about," he said sulkily. "Security," explained Naball smoothly; means "borrowing money on land, clothes, or--or diamonds." Villiers gave a sudden start, and was about to reply, when the door opened violently, and a bold, handsome woman, dressed in a bright green silk, dashed into the room and swooped down on Ah Goon. "Well, my dear," she said effusively, "'ere I am; bin to the theatre, and 'ere you are preparing that pisin of yours. Oh, I must 'ave one pipe to-night, just one, and--Who the blazes are you?" catching sight of the two strangers. "Shut up," said Villiers, and made a step towards her, for just on the bosom of her dress sparkled a small crescent of diamonds set in silver. The woman's eyes caught his covetous glance, and she put her hand over the ornament. "No, you don't," she said scowling. "Lay a finger on me and I'll--ah!" She ended with a stifled cry, for without warning, Villiers had sprung on her, and his hands were round her throat. Ah Goon and another Chinaman jumped up and threw themselves on the two, trying to separate them. The woman got Villiers' hands off her, and started to sing out freely, so Naball began to think of retreating, as the noise would bring all the undesirable bullies of the neighbourhood into the unsavoury den. While thus hesitating, the woman flung the diamond ornament away from her with an oath, and it fell at Naball's feet. In a moment the detective had picked it up and slipped in into his pocket. Villiers, seeing the ornament was gone, flung the woman from him with a howl of fury, and turned to look for it, when the door was burst violently open, and a crowd of Chinese, all chattering in their high shrill voices like magpies, surged into the room. Ah Goon, with many gesticulations, began to explain, Villiers to swear, and the woman to shriek, so in the midst of this pandemonium Naball slipped away, and was soon walking swiftly down Little Bourke Street, with the diamond ornament safe in his pocket. "I believe this is one of the stolen jewels," he muttered exultingly, "and Villiers was the thief after all. Humph! I'm not so sure of that. Well, I'll find out the truth when I see how she looks on being shown this little bit of evidence." CHAPTER XI. WHAT NABALL OVERHEARD. It is said that "Counsel comes in the silence of the night," so next morning Mr. Naball, having been thinking deeply about his curious discovery, decided upon his plan of action. It was evidently no good to go straight to Caprice and show her the diamond crescent, as, judging from her general conduct with regard to the robbery, she would deny that the jewel belonged to her. The detective therefore determined to ascertain from some independent person whether the jewel was really the property of Caprice, and after some consideration came to the conclusion that Fenton would be the most likely individual to supply the necessary information. "He's her lover," argued Naball to himself as he walked along the street, "so he ought to know what jewellery she's got. I dare say he gave her a lot himself; but, hang it," he went on disconsolately, "I don't know why I'm bothering about this affair; nothing will come of it; for some reason best known to herself, Caprice won't let me follow up the case. I can't make it out; either she stole the jewels herself, or Villiers did, and she won't prosecute him. Ah! women are rum things," concluded the detective with a regretful sigh. He had by this time arrived at The Never-say-die Insurance Office, and on entering the door found himself in a large, lofty apartment, with a long shiny counter at one end, and a long shiny clerk behind it. This individual, who looked as if he were rubbed all over with fresh butter, so glistening was his skin, received him with a stereotyped smile, and asked, in a soft oily voice, what he was pleased to want? "Take my card up to Mr. Fenton," said Naball, producing his pasteboard from an elegant card-case, "and tell him I want to see him for a few minutes." The oleaginous clerk disappeared, and several other clerks looked up from their writing at the detective with idle curiosity. Naball glanced sharply at their faces, and smiled blandly to himself as he recognised several whom he had seen in very equivocal places. Little did the clerks know that this apparently indolent young man knew a good deal about their private lives, and was anticipating coming into contact with several of them in a professional manner. Presently the oily clerk returned with a request to Mr. Naball to walk into the manager's office, which that gentleman did in a leisurely manner; and the shiny clerk, closing the door softly, returned to his position behind the shiny counter. Mr. Fenton sat at a handsome writing-table, which was piled up with disorderly papers, and looked sharply at the detective as he took a seat. "Well, Naball," he said, in his strident voice, "what is the matter? Can't give you more than five minutes--time's money here. Yes, sir." "Five minutes will do," replied the detective, tapping his varnished boots with his cane. "It's about that robbery." "Oh, indeed!" Mr. Fenton laid down his pen, and, leaning back in his chair, prepared to listen. "Yes! I've been looking after Villiers." "Quite right," said the American. "That's the man I suspect--fixed up anything, eh?" "Not yet, but I was down Little Bourke Street last night in an opium den, to which Villiers goes, and I found this." Fenton took the diamond crescent, which Naball held out to him, and looked at it closely. "Humph!--set in silver--rather toney," he said; "well, is this part of the swag?" "That's what I want to find out," said Naball quickly. "You know the peculiar way in which Caprice has treated this robbery." "I know she's a fool," retorted Fenton politely. "She ought to go right along in this matter; but for some silly reason, she won't." "No; and that's why I've come to you. I'm going down to see her when I leave here, and it's likely she'll deny that this belongs to her. Now, I want your evidence to put against her denial. Is this the property of Caprice?" Fenton examined the jewel again and nodded. "Yes, sir," he replied, with a nasal drawl, "guess I gave her this." "I thought you'd recognise it," said Naball, replacing the jewel in his pocket; "so now I'll go and see her, in order to find out how Villiers got hold of it." "Stole it, I reckon?" "I'm not so sure of that," replied the detective coolly. "I don't believe Caprice cares two straws about Villiers being the husband of Madame Midas. If he stole the diamonds, she'd lag him as sure as fate; no, as I told you before, she's got a finger in this pie herself, and Villiers is helping her." "But the diamonds were stolen on that night," objected the American. "I know that--don't you remember you told me that Caprice had an interview in the supper room with Villiers? Well, I believe she went upstairs, took the diamonds, and gave them to Villiers to dispose of." "For what reason?" "That's what I'd like to find out," retorted Naball. "She evidently wanted a sum of money for something; now, are you aware that she wanted money?" "Why, she's always wanting money." "No doubt--but this must have been a specially large sum?" Fenton glanced keenly at Naball's impassive face, drummed impatiently with his fingers on the table, then evidently made up his mind. "Tell you what," he said rapidly, "she did want a large sum of money--fact is, a friend of hers got into a fix, and his wife went howling to her, so she said she would replace the money, and I've no doubt sold her diamonds to do so." "I thought it was something like that," said Naball coolly; "but why the deuce couldn't she sell her diamonds openly without all this row?" "Guess you'd better ask her," said Fenton, rising to his feet; "she won't let me meddle with the affair, so I can't do anything--if she's fool enough to lose or sell five thousand pounds' worth of diamonds, I can't help it: and now, sir, the five minutes--" glancing at his watch. "Are up long ago," replied Naball, rising to his feet. "Well, I'm curious about this case, and I'm going to get at it somehow, so at present I'm off down to see Caprice about this," and he tapped his breast-pocket, where the jewel was placed. "You won't get anything out of her," said Fenton yawning, "if all you surmise is true." "I don't care what she says," observed Naball, going to the door. "I can discover all I want from the expression of her face when she knows what I've got, and where I got it." With this Naball disappeared, and Fenton, returning to his desk, flung himself back in his chair. "Why the devil won't she prosecute?" he muttered savagely to himself. "Guess she knows more about this robbery than she says, but even then--confound it, I'm mixed." Having come to this unsatisfactory conclusion, Mr. Fenton went on with his work, and dismissed all thoughts of the diamond robbery from his mind. Meanwhile, Naball was on his way down to Toorak, meditating over the revelation made to him by Fenton about Caprice's sudden fit of generosity. "I didn't think she was so tender-hearted," murmured Naball, full of perplexity; "she must have had some strong reason for selling her diamonds. I wonder who the man is?--and the wife called. Humph! this is quite a new game for Caprice." When he left the station, and walked to the house, instead of ringing the front-door bell, he strolled round the corner to the verandah, on which the drawing-room windows looked out. He did this because--wondering if Villiers was concerned in the robbery--he wanted to see the window by which he entered the dining-room on the night of the robbery. Soft-footed and stealthy in his motions, the detective made no noise, and was just pausing on the edge of the verandah, wondering whether he would go forward or return to the front door, when he heard Kitty's voice in the drawing-room raised in a tone of surprise. "Mrs. Malton!" "Hullo!" said Naball to himself, "that's the name of Fenton's assistant manager. Now, I wonder what his wife is calling here about? I'll wait and hear." So the detective, filled with curiosity, took up his position close to one of the windows, so that he could hear every word that was said, but, of course, was unable to see anything going on inside. He commenced to listen, out of mere curiosity, but soon the conversation took a turn which interested him greatly, and, to his mind, threw a great deal of light on the diamond robbery. "Why have you called to see me again?" asked Kitty, in a cold tone. "Because I want to thank you for saving my husband," replied Mrs. Malton. "They told me you were busy, but I have waited in the next room for half-an-hour to see you. My husband is safe." "I congratulate you--and him," answered Caprice, in an ironical tone. "It is to be hoped Mr. Evan Malton won't embezzle any more money." Naball, outside, could hardly refrain from giving a low whistle. So this was the man mentioned by Fenton--his own familiar friend--and Kitty Marchurst had helped him. In Heaven's name, why? "It is due to your kindness that he is safe," said Mrs. Malton, in a faltering tone; "you replaced the money." "Not at all," said Caprice; "I never replaced a sixpence." "But you did, you did!" said Mrs. Malton vehemently, falling on her knees before Kitty; "every penny of the money has been paid back, and only you could have done it." "I did not pay a penny, I tell you," said Caprice; "still, I have had something to do with it." "I knew it! I knew it!" cried the poor wife, kissing the hand of the actress. "May God bless you for doing this good action." "I wouldn't have done it had it not been for the sake of your child," said Kitty coldly. "Wonderful," thought the listener; "Kitty Marchurst has a heart." "Good-bye, good-bye!" said Mrs. Malton, rising to her feet. "I may never see you again." "I've no doubt of that," replied Caprice, with a cynical laugh; "you've got all you wanted, so now you leave me." "No, no!" cried the other woman vehemently. "I am not ungrateful. I will visit you if you will let me. I am sorry for you. I pity you." "Keep your pity and your visits for some one else--I want neither." "But your heart?" "My heart is stone; it was hardened long, long ago. Leave me--I have done all I can for you--now go." Mrs. Malton made a step forward, and, catching Kitty in her arms, kissed her. "God bless you!" she cried, in a low voice, and as she kissed her she felt a hot tear fall on her hand. It was Caprice who wept, but, with a stifled sigh, she pushed Mrs. Malton away. "You are a good woman," she said hoarsely. "Go! go! and if you ever think of me, let it be as one who, however bad her life, did at least one good action." She sank back into a chair, covering her face with her hands, while Mrs. Malton, with a look of pity on her face, and a low "God bless you," left the room. Meanwhile, the detective outside was smitten with a kind of remorse at having overheard this pathetic scene. "I've found out what Caprice wanted the money for," he muttered; "but I'm sorry for her--very sorry. I never knew before she was a woman--I thought she was a fiend." Kitty, drying her eyes, arose from her seat and dragged herself slowly across the room to the window near which the detective was standing. He heard her coming and tried to escape, and in another moment Kitty had opened the window, and they were face to face. "Mr. Naball," she cried, with a sudden, angry light in her eyes, "you have heard--" "Every word," said Naball, looking straight at her wrathful face. CHAPTER XII. NABALL TELLS A STORY. Kitty looked at him in silence with flashing eyes, and then laughed bitterly. "And how long is it since you added the spy business to your usual work?" she asked, with a sneer on her colourless face. "Since a few moments ago," replied Naball coolly. "I came to see you on business, and, hearing you in conversation with a lady, did not like to interrupt till you were disengaged." "I'm very much obliged to you for your courtesy," said Caprice scornfully; "but now you have satisfied your curiosity. M. le Mouchard, I'll trouble you to take yourself off." "Certainly, after I've had a few moments' conversation with you." "I decline to listen," said Kitty haughtily. "I think you had better," observed Naball significantly, "as it's about the robbery of your jewels." "I forbade you to go on any further with that matter." "You did; but I disobeyed your injunction." "So I understand," replied Kitty indignantly; "and may I ask if you have discovered anything?" "Yes--this!" and he showed the diamond crescent to Caprice. She started violently, and her pale face flushed a deep red. "Where did you get it?" she asked. "From Randolph Villiers." "Villiers!" she echoed in surprise. "How did it come into his possession?" "That is what I want to discover." "Then you may save yourself the trouble, for you will never know." "I understand that," said Naball quietly; "nothing can be done unless you permit me to go on." "I forbid you to go on," she retorted angrily. Naball bowed. "Very well," he said quietly, "then there is nothing for me but to leave." "No, I don't think there is," assented Kitty coldly, turning to re-enter the house. "But, before I go," went on the detective, playing his great card, "I will leave your jewel with you." "That," said Kitty, glancing over her shoulder at the crescent--"that is not mine." "Mr. Fenton says it is." "Mr. Fenton!" echoed Caprice jeeringly; "and how does Mr. Fenton know?" "I should think he was the best person to know," retorted Naball, nettled at her mockery. "A good many people think the same way," said Kitty disdainfully, "but in this case Mr. Fenton is wrong--I never saw those diamonds before." "Then how did it come into Mr. Villiers' possession?" "I don't know, not being in Mr. Villiers' confidence." "Oh!" said Naball significantly, "you are quite certain you are not?" "I don't understand you," replied Kitty coldly; "explain yourself." "Certainly, if you wish it," said the detective smoothly. "I will tell it in the form of a little story--have I your permission to be seated?" She nodded carelessly, whereupon Naball sat down on one of the lounging chairs, and, crossing his legs, settled himself composedly, while Kitty, standing near him with loosely-clasped hands, looked idly at the green lawn, with its brilliant border of many-coloured flowers. "There was once a woman called Folly, who lived--let us say--in Cloudland--" began Naball airily. "Rubbish!" said Kitty angrily. "Nothing of the sort," retorted Naball coolly, "it is truth in disguise. I have been to school--I have read Spenser's 'Faery Queen'--if you please, we will consider this story, though not in verse, as one of the lost cantos of the poem." Kitty shrugged her shoulders with contempt. "I think you're mad," she said coldly. "Perhaps I am," retorted Naball sharply, "but there's method in my madness, as you will soon find out--so, to go on with the lost canto of the 'Faery Queen.' This woman, Folly, was reputed to have a hard heart--no doubt she had, but there was one soft spot in it--love for her child. Many men loved this charming Folly, and paid dearly for the privilege. One man, misnamed Strength, loved her madly, and gave her many jewels. Strength had a friend, called Weakness, and though they were so dissimilar in character, they worked together. Weakness also loved Folly, though he had a wife, and, to gain Folly's love, he stole a lot of money. His wife discovered this, and going to Folly, implored her to help Weakness, but in vain, till at last she gained her point by appealing to the one soft spot in Folly's heart--love for her child. She was successful, and Folly promised to save the husband by replacing the money, which she could do through the agency of Strength, who was her lover. "Folly, however, did not know where to get the money, so, in despair, determined to part with her jewels. She dared not do so openly, lest the inhabitants of Cloudland should find out what Weakness had done, so she enlisted the services of a man called Vice. Here," said Naball gaily, "we will leave the narrative style, and finish the story dramatically." Kitty, who had grown pale, made no sign, so Naball resumed. "Scene, a supper-room, with a window open--time, night--supper ended--guests away--enter Vice through open window--helps himself to champagne. Folly, informed of presence of Vice, enters the room and orders him out--he refuses to leave till he gets money--she refuses to give it to him. Suddenly an idea strikes her, and she tells Vice she will give him money if he sells her jewels for her secretly--Vice consents. Folly goes up to her room, gets jewels, gives them to Vice, who goes away and breaks down shrubs under window, which is opened by Folly to show every one that a burglar has stolen the jewels. Rumours of the theft get about--Bloodhound goes on the track--traces Vice to his den--finds one jewel--comes to show it to Folly--overhears wife of Weakness thanking Folly for replacing money stolen by her husband--exit wife of Weakness--enter Bloodhound to Folly, who denies having ever seen jewel before. Bloodhound tells a story to Folly, which Folly--" "Denies, yes, denies!" broke in Kitty angrily; "your story is wrong." "Pardon me," said Naball, rising, "allegorical." "I can understand what you mean," said Kitty, after a pause; "but it's all wrong. I never paid this money for Malton." "Pardon me,--Weakness," said Naball politely. "Bah! why keep up this transparent deception? Your story is excellent, and I understand all about Folly, Vice, and Strength, but you are wrong--that jewel is not mine. I never paid the money, and I don't know anything about Malton's business, so you can leave me at once, and never show your face again." "But the jewel?" said the detective, holding it out. Kitty snatched it out of his hand, and flung it across the lawn. It flashed brilliantly in the sunlight, and fell just on the verge of the flower-bed. "You can follow it,--Bloodhound," she said disdainfully, and, entering the house, closed the window after her. Naball stood for a moment smiling in a gratified manner to himself, then, sauntering slowly across the lawn, picked up the jewel and replaced it in his pocket. "I knew I was right," he murmured quietly, as he strolled to the gate; "she stole the diamonds to pay Malton's debt, and Villiers got this for payment as an accomplice. I wish I could get on with the case, but she won't let me--what a pity; dear, dear, what a pity!" He had by this time reached the gate, and was passing through it, when a hansom drove up, from out which Fenton jumped. "Well?" he asked, when he saw Naball. "Well," said Naball, dusting his varnished boots with a silk handkerchief. "What does she say?" asked Fenton inquiringly "What a woman generally does say--everything but the truth. Going to see her?" "Yes," said Fenton, paying his cab fare; "can I do anything?" "Two things," observed Naball quietly: "in the first place, let me have your cab; and in the second, give this to Caprice with my compliments," and he handed the crescent of diamonds to Fenton. "Why didn't you give it to her yourself?" asked Fenton, taking it. "Because she said it wasn't hers," replied Naball, getting into the cab. "I can't do anything more in the matter; it's a beautiful case spoiled." "Why spoiled?" asked Fenton, pausing at the gate. "Because there's a woman in it," replied Naball; "good-bye!" and the cab drove off in a cloud of dust, leaving Fenton at the gate looking in a puzzled manner at the diamond crescent. "Why the deuce did she deny this being hers?" he asked himself as he opened the gate. "I know it well--I ought to, considering I paid for it--there's some game in this." He rang the bell, which was answered by Bliggings, who, in reply to his question as to whether Kitty was at home, burst out into a volley of language. "Oh, gracious an' good 'eavens, missus 'ave bin talkin' to a lady this mornin', and is that upset as never was--chalk is black to her complexing, and penny hices 'ot to the chill of her feets." "Humph!" said Fenton, entering the house and leisurely taking off his hat, "just tell your mistress I want to see her." "Oh, gracious an' good 'eavens!" cried Bliggings, "she's a-lyin' down in company with a linseed poultase an' a cup of tea, both bein' good for removin' 'eadaches." "Great Scot!" said Fenton impatiently, pushing the voluble Bliggings aside, "I'll go and see her straight off myself." He went upstairs and knocked at the sitting-room door. Hearing a faint voice telling him to come in, he entered the room, which he found in semi-darkness, with the pungent aroma of _eau de cologne_ pervading the atmosphere. "What do you want?" asked Kitty fretfully, thinking it was the servant. "To see you," replied Fenton gruffly. "Oh, it's you!" cried Caprice, sitting up on the sofa, looking pale and wan in her white dress. "I'm glad of that--I've just seen that Naball, and he's been accusing me of stealing my own jewels." "Well, did you?" asked Fenton complacently. "Of course I didn't," she retorted angrily; "why should I? Naball thinks I did it to replace the money Malton stole." "How did he find out that?" asked Fenton, who knew quite well he had told him about it himself. "He overheard Mrs. Malton thanking me," retorted Kitty impatiently; "the money has been replaced, so I suppose, you did it." "Yes, I did," said Fenton boldly, "for your sake." "You're a good fellow, Fenton," said Kitty, in a softened tone. "I'm glad you did what I asked you--now, go away, for I must get a sleep, or I'll never be able to act to-night." "But what about this jewel?" asked Fenton, taking the crescent out of his pocket. "Naball said you denied it being yours." "So I did," replied Caprice pettishly. "But why? I gave it to you." "Well, you can give it to me again," she said coolly. "Put it on the table, and go away." Fenton thought a moment, then, going over to the table, placed the jewel thereon, and turned once more to Caprice. "Look here, Kitty," he said slowly, "did you do anything with those diamonds?" "Perhaps I did, and perhaps I didn't," replied Caprice enigmatically; "at all events, I'm not going to have any more fuss made over them." "Well, good-bye at present," said Fenton carelessly. "I say, you might give me a kiss, after fixing up Malton's affair." "So I will--at the theatre to-night. Do leave me, my head is so bad." "Not so bad as you are, you little devil," murmured Fenton, closing the sitting-room door softly after him. "Well, I guess there'll be no more trouble about those diamonds, at all events." CHAPTER XIII. THE GOSSIP OF CLUBS. It was called "The Skylarks' Club," because, like those tuneful birds, the members were up very early in the morning. Not that the aforesaid members were early risers by any means--but because they never went to bed till three or four o'clock. To put it plainly, they stayed up nearly all night, and it seemed to be a point of honour with them that, as long as a quorum were on the premises, the club should be kept open. Most of the members were dissipated and led fast lives, drank a good deal, gambled away large sums, betted freely, and, to all appearances, were going to the dogs as fast as they possibly could. The code of morality was not very strict, and the "Skylarks" generally viewed each other's good or bad luck in a cynical manner. Occasionally a member disappeared from his accustomed place, and it was generally understood he had "gone under," or, in other words, was vegetating on some up-country station, doubtless cursing the "Skylarks" freely as the cause of his ruin. Other clubs in Melbourne were fast--not a doubt about that--but every one declared that the "Skylarks" overstepped all bounds of decency. Whatever devilment was to be done, they would do it, and, as they had no characters to lose, they generally amused themselves by trying to destroy other people's good name, and generally succeeded. It was a Bohemian club, and among its members were stock-brokers, musicians, journalists, and actors, so that, whatever the moral tone of the place, the conversation was generally brilliant, albeit rather malicious. One way and another, there was a good deal of money floating about, for if the members worked hard at business during the day, they also worked hard at pleasure during the night, so, systematically, burned the candle at both ends. "_Fay ce que vouldras_" was their motto, and they certainly carried it out to the very last letter. Keith Stewart was a member of this delectable fraternity, having been introduced by Ezra Lazarus, and, thanks to his mysterious five hundred pounds, was able to cut a very decent figure among the members. He was still in the pawnbroker's office, although he very much wanted to leave it, but, having passed his word to old Lazarus to stay six months, he was determined to do so. It was now about three months since the diamond robbery, and, after being a nine days' wonder, it had passed out of the minds of every one. Nothing more was heard of the theft, and, after a great number of surmises, more or less wrong, the matter was allowed to drop, as a new divorce case of a novel character now engrossed the public mind. "Prince Carnival" had been withdrawn after a very successful run, and Kitty Marchurst was now appearing in "Eblis," which, as she expected, had turned out a failure. Under these circumstances, "Prince Carnival" was revived, pending the production of "Faust Upset," a new burlesque by Messrs. Stewart and Lazarus. Both these young men had worked hard at the piece, and Mortimer, having approved of the first act, had determined to put the play on the stage: first, because he saw it was by no means a bad piece, and secondly, he had nothing else handy to bring forward. If he could have obtained a new and successful opera-bouffe from London, "Faust Upset" would have been ignominiously shelved, but, luckily for Keith and his friends, all the late opera-bouffes had been failures, so Mortimer made a virtue of necessity, and gave them a chance. It was about eleven o'clock at night, and the smoking-room of the "Skylarks" was full. Some of the members had been there for some hours, others had dropped in after the theatres were closed, and here and there could be seen a reporter scribbling his notes for publication next day. A luxurious apartment it was, with lounging chairs covered with crimson plush, plenty of mirrors, and a number of marble-topped tables, which were now covered with various beverages. Every one was talking loudly, and the waiters were flitting about actively employed in ministering to the creature comforts of the patrons of the club. What with the dusky atmosphere caused by the smoking, the babel of voices, the jingle of glasses, and the constant moving about of the restless crowd, it looked like some fantastic nightmare. Keith was seated in a corner smoking a cigarette and waiting for Ezra, who had promised to meet him there, and in the meantime was idly watching the crowd of his friends, and listening to their gossip. Malton was also lounging about the room, chatting to his friends on current topics. "Anything going on in the House?" asked Pelk, a theatrical critic, of Slingsby, who had just entered. That gentleman shrugged his shoulders. "A slanging match, as usual," he replied, taking a seat and ringing the bell. "Some members have got an idea that abuse is wit. I don't think much of the Victorian Parliament." "It's better than the New South Wales one, at all events," said Keith, smiling. "That's not saying much," retorted Slingsby, lighting a cigar. "The Sydney men are more like fractious children than anything else, though to be sure that's only proper, seeing our Parliaments are nurseries for sucking politicians." "That's severe." "But true--the truth is always disagreeable." "Perhaps that's the reason so few people speak it." "Exactly--truth is a sour old maid whom nobody wants." "Not you, at all events, Slingsby" "No--it's a matter of choice--_Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor_." "Don't be classical--it's out of place here." "Not a bit," retorted Slingsby smoothly, looking round at the circle of grinning faces, "it's out of the dictionary, you know, foreign words and affixes." Every one roared at this candid confession. "No wonder _The Penny Whistle_ flourishes when there's such men as you on the staff," said Toltby, with a sneer. "You've no cause to complain," replied Slingsby; "they've been kind enough to you." "Yes; they recognise good acting." Slingsby looked at him queerly. "Dear boy, I prefer the stage of the House to that of the theatre--the actors are much more amusing." At this moment Felix Rolleston, now looking much older since the Hansom Cab murder case, but as lively as ever, entered the room and danced up to the coterie. "Well, gentlemen," he said gaily, "what is the news?" "Good news, bad news, and such news as you've never heard of," quoted Keith lazily. "Thank you, my local Gratiano," replied Felix, quickly recognising the quotation as from the "Merchant of Venice." "By the way, there's a letter for you outside." "Oh, thanks," said Stewart rising, "I'll go and get it," and he sauntered out lazily. "Humph!" ejaculated Felix, looking after him, "our friend is the author of 'Faust Upset,' I understand?" "Yes," replied Toltby; "deuced good piece." "That means you've got an excellent part," struck in Slingsby mercilessly. "Quite right," retorted Toltby complacently; "all the parts are good--especially Caprice's." "Oh, that goes without saying," said Pelk, with a grin; "our friend is rather sweet there." "So is she," said Felix significantly; "case of reciprocity, dear boy!" "She's given Fenton the go-by." "Yes, and Meddlechip is elevated to the vacancy. Wonder how long it will be before she breaks him?" "Oh, even with her talents for squandering, Caprice can't burst up the richest man in Victoria," said Slingsby vulgarly; "when she does give him up, I suppose Stewart will succeed him." "Not enough cash." "Pooh! what is cash compared to love?" "Eh! a good deal in this case, as Fenton found out." "Speak of the devil," said Felix quickly; "here comes the gentleman in question." Fenton, looking harassed and worn, entered the room, and glanced round. Seeing Rolleston, he came over to him and began to talk. "Guess you look happy, boys," he said, in his nasal voice. "It's more than you do," replied Rolleston, scanning him keenly. "No; I've overworked myself," said Fenton coolly, "I need pulling up a bit." "Go and see a doctor--try tonics." "Ah, bah! glass of champagne will fix me straight. Here, waiter, bring in a bottle of Heidsieck. Any of you boys join?" All the boys assenting to the hospitable proposition, Fenton ordered two bottles, and lighted a huge cigar. When the waiter came back with the wine, Keith also entered, with a soft look on his face which puzzled Rolleston. He had put on his overcoat. "Ah!" said that astute gentleman, "you look pleased--your letter was pleasant?" "Yes, very," replied Keith laconically. "Then it was from a woman," said Fenton. "Humph! that's generally anything but pleasant," grunted Slingsby. "No doubt, to such a Don Juan as you," said Pelk, amid a general laugh. The waiter was opening the wine so slowly that Fenton lost patience, and snatched one bottle up from the table. "Guess we had better fix those two up at once," he said. "Any one got a knife?" Keith put his hand in his pocket, and produced therefrom Meg's present. "Great Cæsar, what a pig-sticker," said Fenton, holding it up. "What made you buy such a thing, Stewart?" asked Felix, laughing. "I didn't buy it," replied Keith; "it's a present from a lady." "A very young lady, I should say," said Slingsby drily; "not much idea of taste." "Matter of opinion," said Keith serenely; "I like the knife for the sake of the donor--her name's on the handle." Fenton by this time had opened the bottle, and laid the knife down on the table, from whence Felix picked it up and examined it. "'From Meg,'" he read, in an amused tone; "gad, Stewart, I thought it was the mother, not the daughter." Fenton shot a fiery glance at Keith, who laughed in rather an embarrassed manner. "It was just the child's whim," he said, laughing. "I saved her from the tram-car, so she gave me this as a souvenir;" and, taking up the knife, he shut it with a sharp click, and slipped it into his overcoat pocket. When they had all finished the wine, Fenton said he had to see Mortimer about some business. "Half-past ten," he said, looking at his watch; "they'll just be about through." "I've got to see Mortimer to-night," observed Keith, "and I'm waiting here for Lazarus." "About the new play, I reckon," said Fenton; "well, you'd better walk up with me." Keith shook his head. "No, thanks; I must wait for Lazarus." "Then come and have a game of billiards in the meantime," said Felix, rising; "take off your coat, you'll find it hot." "All right," assented Keith readily "Here, Alfred," and, slipping off his coat, handed it to a waiter, who was just passing, "hang this up for me." The waiter took the coat, threw it over his arm, and vanished; while Keith and Felix strolled leisurely away in the direction of the billiard-room. "How the deuce does Stewart run it?" asked Fenton, looking after them; "he can't get much salary at old Lazarus' place." "Case of God tempering the wind to the shorn lamb," said Slingsby ironically. "Hang it, I don't think he ought to be a member of the Club, a confounded pawnbroker's clerk." "It is rather a topsy-turvy business, ain't it; but you see, in the colonies Jack's as good as his master." "And in some cases a deal better," said Pelk, referring to the relative positions of Malton and Fenton. "Particularly when Jack's got a pretty wife," finished Toltby significantly. Fenton knew this was a hint at his _penchant_ for Mrs. Malton, but he did not very well see how he could take it to himself, particularly when he saw every one smiling, so he smiled back saturninely at the circle. "You're devilish witty, boys," he said coldly; "guess the wine has sharpened your brains." As he strolled away in his usual cool manner, Slingsby looked after him. "Our friend's hard hit over Mrs. Malton," he said at length. "Every one knows that," grinned Toltby, "except the husband." "Yes, the husband is generally the last to find out these things," remarked Pelk drily; and the conversation ended. Meanwhile Rolleston and Keith were playing their game of billiards, a pastime in which the former was an adept, and soon defeated Keith, who threw down his cue in half anger. "You always win," he said pettishly; "it's no use playing with you." "Oh, yes, it is," said Felix cheerfully. "I know I'm a good player, so if you play with me it will improve you very much--that remark sounds conceited, but it's true--come and have another game." "Not to-night," replied Keith; "I've got to keep my appointment with Mortimer--it's no use waiting for Lazarus." "Oh, yes, it is," cried a new voice, and Lazarus made his appearance at the door of the billiard-room. "I'm sorry for having kept you waiting, but it was unavoidable. I'll tell you all about it as we walk up." "All right," replied Keith, and turned to go, followed by Ezra, who nodded to Rolleston. "Good-night," cried that gentleman, making a cannon. "Good luck be with you." "Amen," responded Keith laughing, and disappeared with Ezra. CHAPTER XIV. A STRUGGLE FOR FAME. The two young men walked slowly up the street in the direction of the Bon-Bon Theatre, passing into Swanston Street just as the Town Hall clock struck eleven. It was a beautiful moonlight night, but no breeze was blowing, and the heat which the earth had drawn to her bosom during the day was now exhaled from the warm ground in a faint humid vapour. Crowds of people were in the streets sauntering idly along, evidently unwilling to go to bed. The great buildings stood up white and spectral-like on the one side of the street, while on the other they loomed out black against the clear sky. The garish flare of the innumerable street lamps seemed out of place under the serene splendour of the heavens, and the frequent cries of the street boys, and noisy rattling of passing cabs, jarred on the ear. At least Keith thought so, for, after walking in silence for some time, he turned with a gesture of irritation to his companion. "Isn't this noise disagreeable?" he said impatiently; "under such a perfect sky the city ought to lie dead like a fantastic dream of the Arabian Nights, but the gas lamps and incessant restlessness of Melbourne vulgarises the whole thing." "Poetical, certainly," replied Ezra, rousing himself from his abstraction; "but I should not care to inhabit an enchanted city. To me there is something grand in this restless crowd of people, all instinct with life and ambition--the gas lamps jar on your dream, but they are evidences of civilisation, and the hoarse murmur of the mob is like the mutterings of a distant storm, or white waves breaking on a lonely coast. No, my friend, leave the enchanted cities to dreamland, and live the busy life of the nineteenth century." "Your ideas and wishes are singularly at variance," said Keith smiling. "The city suggests poetical thoughts to you, but you reject them and lower yourself to the narrow things of everyday." "I am a man, and must live as one," replied the Jew, with a sigh; "it's hard enough to do so--Heaven knows!--without creating Paradises at whose doors we must ever stand like lost Peris." "What's the matter with you to-night?" asked Keith abruptly. "Nothing particular; only I've had a quarrel with my father." "Is that all? My dear Lazarus, your father lives in an atmosphere of quarrelling--it's bread and meat to him--so you needn't fret over a few words. What was the quarrel about?" "Money." "Humph!--generally a fruitful cause of dissension. Tell me all about it." "You know how I love Rachel?" said Lazarus quietly. "Well, I am anxious to marry her and have a home of my own. It's weary work living in tents like a Bedouin. I get a good salary, it's true; but I asked my father to give me a sufficient sum of ready money to buy a piece of land and a house. I might have saved myself the trouble--he refused, and we had angry words, so parted in anger." "I wouldn't bother about it, if I were you," said Keith consolingly. "Words break no bones--besides, this burlesque may bring us a lot of money, and then you can marry Rachel when you please." "I don't expect much money out of it," replied the Jew, with a frown. "It's our first piece, and Mortimer will drive a hard bargain with us--but you seem very hopeful to-night." "I have cause to. Eugénie has written me a letter, in which she says she is coming to Melbourne." "That's good news, indeed. Is she going to stay?" "I think so," said Keith gaily. "I told you she was a governess, so she has replied to an advertisement in the _Argus_, and hopes to get the situation." "I trust she will," observed Ezra, smiling at Keith's delight. "She will do you a lot of good by her presence, and guard you from the spells of Armida." "_Alias_ Caprice. Thanks for the warning, but I've not been ensnared by the fair enchantress yet, and never mean to; but here we are at the theatre. I hope we get good terms from Mortimer." "So do I, for Rachel's sake." "We are both _preux chevaliers_, anxious to gain for our lady-loves not fame, but money. Oh, base desire!" "It may be base, but it's very necessary," replied the prudent Jew, and they both entered the stage-door of the theatre. Mortimer's sanctum was a very well-furnished room, displaying considerable taste on the part of the occupant, for the manager of the "Bon-Bon" was sybaritic in his ideas. The floor was covered with a heavy velvet carpet, and the walls adorned with excellent pictures, while the furniture was all chosen for comfort as well as for ornament. Mortimer was seated at his desk with a confused mass of papers before him, and leaning back in a chair near him was Caprice, who looked rather pale and worn. There was a lamp on the table with a heavy shade, which concentrated all the light into a circle, and Kitty's pale face, with its aureole of fair hair seen in the powerful radiance, appeared strange and unreal. Dark circles under her heavy eyes, faint lines round the small mouth, and the weary look now habitual to her, all combined to give her face a wan and spiritual look which made even Mortimer shiver as he looked at her. "Hang it, Kitty," he said roughly, "don't look so dismal. You ought to see a doctor." "What for?" she asked listlessly. "I'm quite well." "Humph! I don't think so. You've been going down the hill steadily the last few months. Look how thin you are--a bag of bones." "So was Rachel," replied Caprice, with a faint smile. "Well, she didn't live very long. Besides, you ain't Rachel," growled Mortimer, "and I don't want you to get ill just now." "No, you could hardly supply my place," said Caprice, with a sneer. "Don't you bother yourself, Mortimer, I'm not going to die yet. When I do I sha'n't be sorry; life hasn't been so pleasant to me that I should wish to live." "I don't know what you want," grumbled the manager; "you've got all Melbourne at your feet." "I can't say much for Melbourne's morality, then," retorted Caprice bitterly; "circumstances have made me what I am, but I'm getting tired of the cakes and ale business. If I could only secure the future of my child, I'd turn religious." "Mary Magdalen!" "Yes, a case of history repeating itself, isn't it?" she replied, with a harsh laugh. "Strange!" said Mortimer, scrutinising her narrowly; "the worse a woman is in her youth, the more devout she becomes in her old age." "On the authority of M. de la Rochefoucauld, I suppose," answered Caprice; "old age gives good advice when it no longer can give bad example." "Who told you that?" "A man you never knew--Vandeloup." "I don't know that my not being acquainted with him was much to be regretted." "No, I don't think it was," replied Caprice coolly; "he had twice your brains--to know him was a liberal education." "In cheap cynicism, gad, you've been an apt pupil." Kitty laughed, and, rising from her seat, began to walk to and fro. "I wish those boys would come," she said restlessly; "I want to go home." "Then go," said Mortimer; "you needn't stay." "Oh, yes, I need," she replied; "I want to see that they get good terms for their play." "I'll give them a fair price," said Mortimer; "but I'm not going to be so liberal as you expect." "I've no doubt of that." "I believe you're sweet on that Stewart." "Perhaps I am!" "Meddlechip won't like that," "Pish! I don't care two straws for Meddlechip." "No; but you do for his money." "Of course; that goes without saying." "You're a hardened little devil, Caprice." "God knows I've had enough to make me hard," she replied bitterly, throwing herself down in her chair, with a frown. There was a knock at the door at this moment, and, in reply to Mortimer's invitation to "come in," Ezra and Keith appeared. "Well, you two are late," said Mortimer, glancing at his watch; "a quarter-past eleven." "I'm very sorry," said Ezra quietly; "but it was my fault. I was telling Stewart about some business." "Well, we won't take long to settle this affair," remarked Mortimer, looking over his papers. "Be seated, gentlemen." Keith took off his overcoat and threw it over the back of a chair, on which Kitty's fur-lined mantle was already resting. Caprice, who had flushed up on the advance of Stewart, leaned back in her chair, while Keith sat down near her, and Ezra took a position opposite, close to Mortimer. "Now then, gentlemen," said Mortimer, playing with a paper-cutter, "about this burlesque--what is your opinion?" "That's rather a curious question to ask an author," replied Keith gaily. "We naturally think it excellent." "I hope the public will think the same," observed Mortimer drily; "but I don't mean that. I want to know your terms." "Of course," said Ezra, smoothly; "but just tell us what you are prepared to give." "I'm buyer, gentlemen, you are sellers," replied the manager shrewdly; "I can't take up your position." Kitty leaned back in her chair and bent over close to Keith's ear. "Ask five pounds a night," she whispered. Stewart glanced at Ezra, and seeing he was in doubt as to what to say, spoke out loudly. "Speaking for myself and partner, I think we'll take five pounds a night." "Yes, I'll agree to that," observed Ezra eagerly "I've no doubt you will," rejoined Mortimer, raising his eyebrows; "that's thirty pounds a week, fifteen pounds apiece--a very nice sum, gentlemen--if you get it." "Then what do you propose to give?" asked Keith. "One pound for every performance." Stewart laughed. "Do you take us for born fools?" he asked angrily. "No, I do not," replied Mortimer, catching his chin between finger and thumb, and looking critically at the two young men; "I take you for very clever boys who are just making a start, and I'm willing to help you--at my own price--which is one pound a night." "The game's not worth the candle," said Ezra, in a disappointed tone. "Oh, yes, it is," retorted Mortimer; "it gives you a chance. Now, look here, I've no desire to take advantage of my position, which, as you see, is a very strong one." "In what way?" asked Caprice, elevating her eyebrows. Mortimer explained in his slow voice as follows,--"I can write home to London and get successful plays with big reputations already made." "Yes, and pay big prices for them." "That may be," replied the manager imperturbably; "but if I give a good price I get a good article that is sure to recoup me for my outlay. I don't say that 'Faust Upset' isn't good, but at the same time it's an experiment. Australians don't like their own raw material." "They never get the chance of seeing it," said Keith bitterly; "you of course look at it from a business point of view, as is only proper, but seeing that you draw all your money from Colonial pockets, why not give Colonial brains a chance?" "Because Colonial brains don't pay, Colonial pockets do," said Mortimer coolly; "besides, I am giving you a chance, and that at considerable risk to myself. I will put on this burlesque in good style because Caprice is dead set on it; but business is business, and I can't afford to lose money on an untried production." "Suppose it turns out a great success," said Ezra, "we, the authors, only make six pounds a week, while you take all the profits." "Certainly," retorted Mortimer; "I've taken the risk." "Then if we make a great success of this burlesque," said Keith, "you will give us better terms for the next thing we write?" "Well, yes," said the manager, in a hesitating manner; "but, of course, though your position is improved, mine is still the same." "I understand; as long as you have the run of the London market, you can treat Colonial playwrights as you choose?" "You've stated the case exactly." "It's an unfair advantage." "No doubt, but business is business. I hold the trump card." "It's a bad lookout for the literary and musical future of Australia when such men as you hold the cards," said Ezra gloomily; "but it's no use arguing the case. I've heard all this sort of thing before. The Australians are too busy making money to trouble about such a contemptible thing as literary work." "I'll tell you what, Mortimer," broke in Caprice, "give them two pounds a night for the piece." "Not I." "Yes you will, or I don't show at the Bon-Bon." "You forget your engagement, my dear," said Mortimer complacently. "No, I don't," retorted Kitty, snapping her fingers; "that for my engagement. I don't care if I broke it to-morrow. You've got your remedy, no doubt; try it, and see what you'll make of it." Mortimer looked uneasily at her. He knew he had the law on his side, but Caprice was so reckless that she cared for nothing, and would do what she pleased in spite of both him and the law. Besides, he could not afford to lose her, so he met her half way. "Tell you what," he said genially, "I've no wish to be hard on you, boys--I'll give you one pound a night for a week, and if the burlesque is a success, two pounds--there, that's fair." "I suppose it's the best terms we can get," said Keith recklessly; "anything for the chance of having a play put on the stage. What do you say, Lazarus?" "I accept," replied the Jew briefly. "In that case," said Kitty, rising, "I needn't stay any longer. Mr. Lazarus, will you take me to my carriage?" "Allow me," said Keith advancing. Kitty recoiled, and an angry light flashed in her eyes. "No, thank you," she said coldly, snatching up her cloak, "Mr. Lazarus will see me down," and without another word she swept out of the room, followed by Ezra, who was much astonished at the rebuff Keith had received. "What's that for?" asked Mortimer looking up. "I thought you were the white boy there." "I'm sure I don't know," said Keith, in a puzzled tone. "She has been rather cold to me for the last three months, but she never snubbed me till now." "Oh, she's never the same two minutes together," said Mortimer, turning once more to his desk. "Have a drink?" Keith nodded, whereupon Mortimer, who was the most hospitable of men, brought forth whisky and seltzer. As he was filling the glasses, Ezra re-entered with Keith's coat. "Caprice carried this downstairs with her by mistake," he said, giving it to Keith, "and called me back to return it." "Gad! she went off in such a whirlwind of passion I don't wonder she took it. I'm glad she left the chair," said Mortimer coolly. "Will you join us?" "No, thanks," replied Ezra, putting on his hat. "I've got to go back to the office. Good-night. See you to-morrow, Keith; you can settle with Mortimer about the agreement," and thereupon he vanished. Keith and Mortimer sat down, and the latter drafted out an agreement about the play which he promised to send to his lawyer, and then, if the young men approved of it, the whole affair could be settled right off. This took a considerable time, and it was about half-past twelve when Keith, having said good-night to Mortimer, left the theatre. He walked down Collins Street, smoking his cigarette, and thinking about his good luck and Eugénie. How delighted she would be at his success. He would make lots of money, and then he could marry her. After wandering about for some considerable time, he turned homeward. Walking up Bourke Street, he entered Russell Street, and went on towards East Melbourne. Passing along in front of Lazarus' shop, he saw a man leaning against the door. "What are you doing there?" asked Keith sharply, going up to him. The man struck out feebly with his fists, and giving an indistinct growl, lurched heavily against Keith, who promptly knocked him down, and had a tussle with him. The moon was shining brightly, and, as the light fell on his face, Keith recognised him instantly--it was Randolph Villiers. "You'd better go home, Villiers," he said quickly, raising him to his feet, "you'll be getting into trouble." "Go to devil," said Mr. Villiers, in a husky voice, lurching into the centre of the street. "I'm out on business. I know what I know, and if you knew what I knew, you'd know a lot--eh! wouldn't you?" and he leered at Stewart. "Pah, you're drunk," said Stewart in disgust, turning on his heel; "you'd better get home, or you'll get into some mischief." "No, I won't," growled Villiers, "but I know some 'un as will." "Who?" "Oh, I know--I know," retorted Villiers, and went lurching down the street, setting the words to a popular tune,-- "I know a thing or two, Yes I do--just a few." Keith looked at the drunken man rolling heavily down the street--a black, misshapen figure in the moonlight--and then, turning away with a laugh, walked thence to East Melbourne thinking of Eugénie. CHAPTER XV. THE RUSSELL STREET CRIME. The next morning a rumour crept through the city that a murder had been committed in a house in Russell Street, and many people proceeded to the spot indicated to find out if it were true. They discovered that for once rumour had not lied, and Lazarus, the pawnbroker, one of the best known characters in the city, had been found dead in his bed with his throat cut. The house being guarded by the police, who were very reticent, no distinct information could be gained, and it was not until _The Penny Whistle_ came out at four o'clock that the true facts of the crime were ascertained. A general rush was made by the public for copies of the paper, and by nightfall nothing was talked of throughout Melbourne but the Russell Street crime. The version given by _The Penny Whistle_, which was written by a highly imaginative reporter, was as follows, and headed by attractive titles:-- TERRIBLE CRIME IN RUSSELL STREET _Lazarus has passed in his Checks_. An Unknown Assassin is In Our Midst. It is often said that truth is stranger than fiction, and we have now an excellent illustration of this proverb. A crime has been committed before which the marvellous romances of Gaboriau sink into insignificance, and the guilty wretch who has stained his soul with murder is still at large. The bare facts of the case are as follows:-- Early this morning it was noticed by a policeman that the shop of Lazarus, a well-known pawnbroker, was not opened, and knowing the methodical habits of the old man, the policeman was much surprised. However, thinking that Lazarus might have overslept himself, he passed on, and had gone but a few yards when a boy called Isaiah Jacobs rushed into the street from an alley which led to the back of the house. The lad was much terrified, and it was with considerable difficulty that the policeman elicited from him the following story:-- He had come to his work as usual at eight o'clock, and went round to the back door in order to get into the house. This door was generally open, and Lazarus waiting for him, but on this morning it was closed, and although the boy knocked several times, no response was made. He then noticed that the window which is on the left-hand side of the door going in, was wide open, and becoming impatient, he climbed up to it, and looked in to see if the old man was asleep. To his consternation he saw Lazarus lying on the floor in a pool of blood, and, seized with a sudden terror, he dropped from the window and rushed into the street. On hearing this, the policeman sent him for Sergeant Mansard, who soon arrived on the scene, with several other members of the force. They went round to the back and found the door closed and the window open as the boy had described. Having tried the door and found it locked, the police burst it open, and entered the house to view a scene which baffles description. The murdered man was lying nearly nude in the middle of the room in a pool of blood. His throat was cut from ear to ear, and, judging from the bruises and cuts on his hands and arms, there must have been a terrible struggle before the murderer accomplished his act. The bed-clothes, all stained with blood, were lying half on the bed and half on the floor, so that it is surmised that the deceased must have been attacked while asleep, and woke suddenly to fight for his life. A large iron safe which stood near the head of the bed was wide open, the keys being in the lock, and all the drawers pulled out. A lot of papers which had evidently been in the safe were lying on the floor, but in spite of a rigid examination, no money could be found, so it is presumed that the murder was effected for the sake of robbery. On one sheet of the bed were several stains of blood, as if the assassin had wiped his hands thereon, but the weapon with which the crime was committed cannot be found. A door looking into the shop was closed and bolted, so the murderer must have made his entry through the window, and, departing the same way, forgot to close it. The body of the deceased has been removed to the Morgue, and an inquest will be held to-day. The case has been placed in the hands of Detective Naball, who is now on the spot taking such notes as he deems necessary for the elucidation of this terrible mystery. Hereunder will be found a plan of the room in which the murder was committed, and also the alley leading to the street. We wish our readers to take particular note of this, as we wish to give our theory as to the way in which the murderer went about his diabolical work. ---------------------------------------------------------------- RUSSELL STREET ---------------------------------|--------|--------------------- SHOP | ALLEY | ________________A________________| | ==| | C | | FIREPLACE |_____ B | | ==| ____| F | | G ____ |____ | |________________| E | | D | |_________________________________________| [Illustration: Diagram of Pawn Shop] A. Door leading into shop--found bolted. B. Bed with clothes in disorder. C. Safe found open, with all valuables abstracted. D. Window found open by which assassin probably entered. E. Door leading to alley--found locked. F. Alley leading to street, by which entrance was gained to back of house. G. Place where body of murdered man was discovered. In the first place, there is no doubt that the motive of the crime was robbery, as is proved by the open safe rifled of its contents. The murderer evidently knew that Lazarus slept in the back room and had the keys of the safe--as we have since ascertained--under his pillow. He must also have known the position of the safe and bed, for had he groped about for them, he would have awakened the old man, who would have instantly have given the alarm. The window D is about five feet from the ground, and was fastened with an ordinary catch, as it never seemed to have entered the old man's head that an attempt would be made to rob him. Our theory is that the murderer is a man who knew the deceased, and had been frequently in the back room, so as to assure himself of the position of things. Last night he must have entered the alley--at what hour we are not prepared to say, as the time of the murder can only be determined by medical evidence--and opened the window by slipping the blade of his knife between the upper and lower parts, and pushing back the latch. He then climbed softly into the room, and going straight to the bed, found the deceased asleep. Very likely he did not intend to kill him had he slept on, but in trying to abstract the keys from under the pillow, Lazarus must have sprung up and tried to give the alarm. Instantly the murderer's clutch was on his throat; but the old man, struggling off the bed, fought with terrible strength for his life. The struggle took them into the centre of the room, and there Lazarus, becoming exhausted, must have fallen, and the murderer, with diabolical coolness, must have cut his throat, so as to effectually silence him. Then, taking the keys from under the pillow, he must have opened the safe, taken what he wished, and made his escape through the window, and from thence into the street. Probably no one was about, and he could slink away unperceived, for, had he met any one, his clothes, spotted with the blood of his victim, would have attracted attention. We conclude he must have had a dark lantern in order to see the contents of the safe, but, as none has been found, he must have taken it with him, together with the knife with which the crime was committed. This is all we can learn at the present time, but whether any sounds of a struggle were heard, can only be discovered from the witnesses at the inquest to-morrow. Of one thing we are certain, the murderer cannot escape, as his blood-stained clothes must necessarily have been noticed by even the most casual observer. We will issue a special edition of _The Penny Whistle_ to-morrow, with a full account of the inquest and the witnesses examined thereat. CHAPTER XVI. THE INQUEST. There was naturally a great deal of excitement over the murder, as, apart from the magnitude of the crime, Lazarus was a well-known character in Melbourne. He knew more secrets than any priest, and many a person of apparently spotless character felt a sensation of relief when they heard that the old Jew was dead. Lazarus was not the sort of man to keep a diary, so to many people it was fortunate that he had died unexpectedly, and carried a number of disagreeable secrets with him to the grave. The report of the inquest was followed with great interest, for though it was generally thought that robbing was the motive for the crime, yet some hinted that, considering the character of the old man, there might be more cogent reasons for the committal of the murder. One of these sceptics was Naball, in whose hands the case had been placed for elucidation. "I don't believe it was robbery," he said to a brother detective. "Old Lazarus knew a good many dangerous secrets, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find that the murderer was some poor devil whom he had in his power." "But the open safe?" said the detective. "Pish! that can easily be accounted for; there may have been papers implicating the murderer, or the robbery might have been a blind, or--oh, there's dozens of reasons--however, we'll find it all out at the inquest." In opening the proceedings, the Coroner mentioned all the circumstances in connection with the murder which had come to the knowledge of the police, and said that as yet no clue had been found likely to lead to the detection of the assassin, but without doubt the evidence of the witnesses about to be examined would afford some starting point. The first witness called was the policeman who had found the body, and he deposed to the circumstances which led to the discovery. He was succeeded by Dr. Chisholm, who had examined the body of the deceased, and, having been sworn in the usual manner, deposed as follows:-- "I am a duly qualified medical practitioner. I have examined the body of the deceased. It is that of an old man--I should say about seventy years of age--very badly nourished; I found hardly any food in the stomach. There were many bruises and excoriations on the body, which, I have no doubt, are due to the struggle between the murderer and his victim. I examined the neck, back, and limbs, but could find no fractures. The throat was cut evidently by some very sharp instrument, as the windpipe was completely severed. I examined the body about nine o'clock in the morning,--it was then warm, and, according to my belief, the deceased must have been dead eight or nine hours." _Coroner_.--"Are you certain of that?" _Dr. Chisholm_.--"Not absolutely. It is a very difficult thing to tell exactly, by the temperature of the body, what length of time has elapsed since death. After a sudden and violent death, the body often parts with its heat slowly, as I think it has done in this case. Besides, the night was very hot, which would be an additional reason for the body cooling slowly." _Coroner_.--"Was the body rigid when you examined it?" _Dr. Chisholm_.--"Yes; _rigor mortis_ had set in. It generally occurs within six hours of death, but it might occur earlier if there had been violent muscular exertion, as there was in this case. I think that the deceased was awakened from his sleep, and struggled with his murderer till he became exhausted; then the murderer cut his throat with a remarkably sharp knife." _Coroner_.--"And, according to your theory, death took place about midnight?" _Dr. Chisholm_.--"Yes--I think so; but, as I said, before, it is very difficult to tell." The next witness called was Isaiah Jacobs, who gave his evidence in an aggressively shrill voice, but the Coroner was unable to elicit more from him than had already been published in _The Penny Whistle_. After the echo of the young Israelite's shrill voice had died away, Keith Stewart was sworn, and deposed as follows:-- "I was clerk to the deceased, and had occupied the position for some months. On the day previous to the murder, I had received a hundred pounds, in twenty bank notes of five pounds each, which I gave to the deceased, and saw him place them in his safe. He always slept on the premises, and kept his keys under his pillow. He told me that he always had a loaded revolver on the table beside his bed. On the night, or rather morning, of the murder I was passing along Russell Street on my way home. I saw a man standing near the shop. I knew him as Randolph Villiers. I asked him what he was doing, but could get no very decided answer--he was quite intoxicated, and went off down the street." _Coroner_.--"About what time was this?" _Stewart_.--"Two o'clock." _Coroner_.--"You are certain?" _Stewart_.--"Quite--I heard it striking from the Town Hall tower." _Coroner_.--"Was Villiers' intoxication real or feigned?" _Stewart_.--"Real, as far as I could see." _Coroner_.--"It was a moonlight night, I believe?" _Stewart_.--"Yes; the moon was very bright." _Coroner_.--"Did you notice anything peculiar about Villiers? Was he confused? Were his clothes in disorder? Any marks of blood?" _Stewart_.--"No; I saw nothing extraordinary about him. He is generally more or less drunk, so I did not notice him particularly." _Coroner_.--"I believe, Mr. Stewart, you belong to the Skylarks' Club?" _Stewart_.--"I do." _Coroner_.--"And yet you are a clerk in a pawnbroker's office--aren't the two things rather incongruous?" _Stewart_.--"No doubt; but I am in a position to be a member of the Skylarks' Club, and as to being a clerk to Lazarus, it's merely a matter of honour. When he engaged me he stipulated that I should stay for six months, and though I unexpectedly came in for some money, I felt myself bound in honour to keep my agreement." _Coroner_.--"Thank you, that will do, Mr. Stewart. Call Mrs. Tibsey." That lady, large, red-faced, and energetic, was sworn and gave her evidence in a voluble manner. She had evidently been drinking, as there was a strong odour of gin in the air, and kept curtseying to the Coroner every time she answered. "My name's Tibsey, my lord--Maria Tibsey. I've bin married twice, my first being called Bliggings, and died of gunpowder--blowed up in a quarry explosion. My second, also dead, sir, 'ad no lungs, and a corf which tored him to bits. Only one child, sir, 'Tilda Bliggings, out in service, my lord." _Coroner_.--"Yes, yes, Mrs. Tibsey, we don't want to learn all these domestic affairs. Come to the point." _Mrs. Tibsey_.--"About Sating, sir?--I called 'im Sating, sir, 'cause he were a robber of the widder and orfin--me, sir, and my darter. I was a-talking to my darter on that night, your worships, she 'aving visited me. I lives near old Sating, as it was 'andy to drop in to pop anything, and about twelve I 'eard a scream--a 'orrid 'owl, as made my back h'open and shut, so I ses, ''Tilda,' ses I,' old Sating is 'avin' a time of it, e's boozin',' and that's all, sir." _Coroner_.--"You never went to see what it was?" _Mrs. Tibsey_.--"Me, my lord? no, your worship, it weren't my bisiniss. I didn't think it were murder." _Coroner_.--"You are quite sure it was twelve o'clock?" _Mrs. Tibsey_.--"I swears h'it." Miss Matilda Bliggings was then called, and deposed she also heard the scream, and that her mother had said it must be old Lazarus. It was twelve o'clock. Ezra Lazarus was then called, but could give no material evidence. He said he had quarrelled with his father on the day preceding the murder, and had not seen him since. The next witness called caused a sensation, as it was none other than Mr. Randolph Villiers, who stated:-- "My name is Villiers. I do nothing. I know old Lazarus. I was passing through Russell Street, and leaned up against the shop door--I was drunk--on my way to Little Bourke Street. I remember meeting Mr. Stewart--think it was two, but ain't sure." _Coroner_.--"Where were you before you met Mr. Stewart?" _Villiers_.--"About the town somewhere." _Coroner_.--"Alone?" _Villiers_.--"Sometimes I was, sometimes I wasn't." This ended all the evidence procurable, and the Coroner summed up. The crime had evidently been committed for the purpose of robbery, as the hundred pounds which Mr. Stewart swore had been placed in the safe by the deceased were gone; the knife with which the deed had been committed had not yet been found; in fact, all the evidence was of the barest character. According to Dr. Chisholm's evidence, the deceased had been murdered about midnight, and as Mrs. Tibsey and her daughter heard a scream also at that time, all the evidence seemed to point to that hour as having been the time of death. Mr. Stewart met Villiers at two o'clock, and Villiers stated that he had only been in Russell Street a few minutes before he met Mr. Stewart. The jury would be kind enough to bring in a verdict in accordance with the facts before them. The jury had a long argument; some wanted to bring in a charge of murder against Villiers, as he certainly had not accounted for his presence in Russell Street; but the evidence altogether was so vague that they at length came to the conclusion it would be best to leave the matter to the police, and brought in a verdict that the deceased had met his death at the hands of some person or persons unknown. Great dissatisfaction was expressed by the public at this verdict, as, in the opinion of most people, Villiers was the guilty man. A regular battle was fought in the newspapers over the whole affair; but one man said nothing. That man was Naball! CHAPTER XVII. A COUNCIL OF THREE. When the inquest was over, Naball went straight home, and carefully read all the notes he had taken of the evidence given. After doing so, he came to the conclusion that the person on whom most suspicion rested was Keith Stewart. "In the first place," said Naball, thoughtfully eyeing his papers, "Stewart was the clerk of old Lazarus, and knew what was in the safe, and where the keys were kept; he is a member of an expensive club, which he can't possibly afford to pay for out of his salary as a clerk; as to his coming in for money, that's bosh!--if he had, agreement or no agreement, he wouldn't have remained with old Lazarus. He states that he left the theatre at half-past twelve, and the doctor says the death took place at midnight; but then he wasn't sure, and it might have taken place at half-past one, which would give Stewart time to commit the crime. He could not account for his time between leaving the theatre and seeing Villiers except by saying he had been walking, which is a very weak explanation. Humph! I think I'll see Mr. Stewart and ask him a few questions." Mr. Naball glanced at himself in the mirror, arranged the set of his tie, dusted his varnished boots, and then sallied forth in search of Keith. Passing along Swanston Street, he went into a florist's, and purchased himself a smart buttonhole of white flowers, then held a short council of war with himself as to where to find Stewart. "Wonder where he lives?" muttered the detective, in perplexity; "let me see, what's the time," glancing at his watch--"nearly five; he's a great friend of Mr. Lazarus, and I know Lazarus is sub-editor of _The Penny Whistle_; I'll go along and ask him--he's sure to be in just now." He walked rapidly along to the newspaper office, and, being admitted to Ezra's room, found that young man just putting on his coat preparatory to going away, his labours for the day now being concluded. "Well, Mr. Naball," asked Ezra, in his soft voice, "what can I do for you--anything about this unfortunate affair?" "Yes," said Naball bluntly; "I want to see Mr. Stewart." "Oh, you do!" broke in a new voice, and Stewart stepped out of an adjoining room, where he had been waiting for his friend; "what is the matter?" "Nothing much," observed Naball, in a frank voice; "but as this case has been put into my hands, I want to ask you a few questions.' "Am I in the way?" asked Lazarus, taking up his hat. "By no means," replied Naball politely; "in fact, you may be of assistance." "Well, fire away," said Keith, coolly lighting a cigarette. "I'm ready to answer anything." Naball glanced keenly at both the young men before he began to talk, and noted their appearance. Keith had a rather haggard look, as though he had been leading a dissipated life; while Ezra's face looked careworn and pale. "Cut up over his father's death, I guess," said Naball to himself; "poor chap!--but as for the other, it looks like late hours and drink. I must find out all about your private life, Mr. Stewart." "I'm waiting," said Keith impatiently; "I wish you wouldn't keep me very long; I've got to meet a train from the country to-night." Naball closed both doors of the room, and, resuming his seat, looked steadily at Keith, who, seated astride a chair, leaned his elbows on the back, and smoked nonchalantly. "Are you aware," asked Naball deliberately, "if the late Mr. Lazarus had any enemies?" "I can answer that question best," said Ezra quickly, before Keith could speak. "Yes, he had plenty; my father, as you know, was a moneylender as well as a pawnbroker, and, as he took advantage of his possession of money to extort high interest, I know it made a lot of people feel bitter against him." "Considering that you are his son, sir," said Naball, in a tone of rebuke, "you do not speak very well of the dead." "I have not much cause to," rejoined Ezra bitterly; "he was father to me in name only. But you need not make any comments--my duty to my father's memory is between myself and my conscience. I have answered your question--he had many enemies." "So I believe also," said Keith slowly; "but I don't think any one was so hostile as to desire his death." "As you don't think so," observed Naball sharply, "I myself believe that the murder was committed for the sake of robbery." "That's easily seen," said Ezra calmly, "from the fact of the safe being open and the money gone." "That might have been a blind," retorted Naball quickly, "but you talk of money being stolen; I think, Mr. Stewart, in your evidence to-day you said they were bank notes?" "Yes; twenty ten-pound notes," replied Keith. "Do you know the numbers of them?" "No; I never thought of taking the numbers." "And you handed them to Mr. Lazarus?" "I did; at half-past five--he put them in his safe." "Were there any other valuables in the safe?" "I don't know," retorted Keith coldly; "I was not in the confidence of my employer." "Do you know?" said Naball, turning to Ezra. The young Jew smiled bitterly. "I also was not in my father's confidence," he said, "so know nothing." "There was some gold and silver money also in the safe," said Keith to Naball, knocking the ashes off his cigarette. "Humph! that's not much guide," replied the detective; "it's the notes I want--if I could only find the numbers of those notes--where did they come from?" "A man at Ballarat, called Forbes." "Oh! I'll write to Mr. Forbes of Ballarat," said Naball, making a note, "but if those notes are put in circulation, do you know of any means by which I can identify them?" Keith shook his head, then suddenly gave a cry. "Yes; I can tell you how to identify one of the notes." "That will be quite sufficient," said the detective eagerly. "How?" "That boy, Isaiah," said Stewart, "he's great on backing horses, and frequently tells me about racing. When I was making up my cash on that night, the notes were lying on the desk, and as the door of Mr. Lazarus' room was open, Isaiah was afraid to speak aloud about his tip, so he wrote it down." "But how can that identify the bank-note?" asked the perplexed detective. "Because the young scamp wrote his tip, 'Back Flat-Iron,' on the back of a ten-pound note." "In pencil?" asked Naball. "No; in ink!" "So one of the notes that were stolen has the inscription 'Back Flat-Iron' on the back of it?" "Exactly!" Naball scribbled a line or two in his pocket-book, and shut it with a snap. "If that note goes into circulation," he said, in a satisfied tone, "I'll soon trace it to its original holder." "And then?" asked Ezra. "And then," reiterated Naball quietly, "I'll lay my hands on the man who killed your father. And now, Mr. Stewart, I want to ask you a few questions about yourself." "Go on!" said Keith imperturbably; "I hope you don't think I killed Lazarus?" "I think--nothing," replied Naball quietly; "I only want to find out as much as I can. You were at the Bon-Bon Theatre on that night?" "Yes; talking to Mr. Mortimer." "Any one else with you?" "Yes," replied Ezra, "I was, and Caprice; we left about half-past eleven." "And you, Mr. Stewart?" "I left at half-past twelve." "Where did you go then?" "I was excited over some business I had done, and strolled about the city." "Anywhere in particular?" "No. I went along Collins Street, up William Street, round about the Law Courts, and then came down Bourke Street, on my way home." "How long were you thus wandering about?" "I think about an hour and a half, because as I turned into Russell Street the clock struck two." "Why did you turn into Russell Street?" "Why!" echoed Keith, in surprise, "because I wanted to go home. I went through Russell Street, down Flinders Street, and then walked to East Melbourne, past the Fitzroy Gardens." "Oh! and you saw Villiers standing about the shop?" "Yes; he was leaning against the door." "Drunk?" "Very!" "What did you do?" "I ordered him off." "Did he go?" "Yes; rolled down the street towards Bourke Street, singing some song." "You noticed nothing peculiar about him?" "No." "Was the door of the alley leading to the back open or shut?" "I don't know--I never noticed." "After Villiers disappeared, you went home?" "I did--straight home." Naball pondered for a few moments. Stewart certainly told all he knew with perfect frankness, but then was he telling the truth? "Do you want to ask me any more questions?" asked Keith, rising. Naball made up his mind, and spoke out roughly,-- "I want to know how you, with a small salary, can afford to belong to an expensive club like the 'Skylarks?'" Keith's face grew as black as thunder. "Who the devil gave you permission to pry into my private affairs?" "No one except myself," retorted Naball boldly, for, though inferior to Stewart in size, he by no means wanted pluck; "but I'm engaged in a serious case, and it will be best for you to speak out frankly. "You surely don't suspect Stewart of the murder?" interposed Ezra warmly. "I suspect nobody," retorted Naball. "I'm only asking him a question, and, if he's wise, he'll answer it." Keith thought for a moment. He saw that, for some extraordinary reason or another, Naball suspected him, so, in order to be on the safe side, resolved to take the detective's advice and answer the question. "It is, as you say, a serious matter," he observed quietly, "and I am the last person in the world not to give any assistance to the finding out of the criminal; ask what you please, and I will answer." This reply somewhat staggered Naball, but, as he had strong suspicions about Stewart's innocence, he put down the apparent frankness of the answer to crafty diplomacy. "I only want to know," he said mildly, "how a gentleman in your position can afford to belong to an expensive club." "Because I can afford to do so," replied Keith calmly. "When I first came to Melbourne, I had no money, and was engaged by Mr. Lazarus as his clerk, with the understanding I should stay with him six months. To this I agreed, but shortly afterwards a sum of five hundred pounds was placed to my credit, and afforded me a chance of living in good style. I wished to leave the pawnshop, but Mr. Lazarus reminded me of my position, and I had to stay. That is all." "Who placed this five hundred to your credit?" asked Naball. "I don't know." "You don't know?" echoed Naball, in surprise. "Do you mean to say that a large sum like that was placed to your credit by a person whom you don't know?" "I do." "And I can substantiate that statement," said Ezra quietly. Naball looked from one to the other in perplexity, puzzled what to ask next. Then he felt the only thing to be done was to go away and think the matter over. But he did not intend to lose sight of Keith, and this absurd statement about the five hundred only seemed to strengthen his suspicions, so he determined to have him shadowed. "Thank you, Mr. Stewart," he said quietly. "I have nothing more to ask. What time did you say you were going to meet a country train?" "I mentioned no time," replied Keith sharply. Baffled by this answer, Naball tried another way. "Will you kindly give me your address?" he asked, pulling out his pocket-book. "I may want to communicate with you." "Vance's boarding-house, Powlett Street, East Melbourne." Mr. Naball noted this in his book, and then, with a slight nod, took his leave. "Damn him," cried Keith fiercely, "he suspects me of this crime." "Pooh! that's nonsense," replied Ezra, as they went out, "you can easily prove an alibi." "No, I can't," replied Keith, in a hard tone. "From half-past twelve o'clock till two I was by myself, and no one saw me. I say I was wandering about the streets, he thinks I was in Russell Street committing a murder." "I don't think you need be a bit afraid of anyone suspecting you," said Ezra bitterly. "Why, they might as well think I killed my father." "You!" "Yes. I had a quarrel with him, and then he was murdered. Oh, I assure you they could get up an excellent case against me." "But you could prove an alibi." "That's just where it is," said Ezra coolly; "I can't." "Why not?" "Because, after leaving Kitty Marchurst, I went down the street to _The Penny Whistle_ office, and found it closed. I then walked home along Collins Street, through the Fitzroy Gardens. It was a beautiful night, and, as I was thinking over my quarrel with my father, I sat down on one of the seats for a time, so I did not get home till two o'clock in the morning. No one saw me, and I've got quite as much difficulty in proving an alibi as you have." "Do you think Naball suspects you?" "No; nor do I think he suspects you, but I've got a suspicion that he suspects some one." "And that some one--" "Is called Randolph Villiers." CHAPTER XVIII. CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE. When Naball left the two young men, he went straight to the Detective Office in order to get some one to look after Keith Stewart, and see that he did not leave Melbourne. Naball did not believe that he was going to meet any one that night, and wanted to find out why he was going to the station. "If he wanted to give me the slip," he thought, "he wouldn't have told me he was going to the railway station--humph! can't make out what he's up to." The gentleman who was to act as Mr. Stewart's shadow was a short, red-nosed man with a humbled appearance and a chronic sniffle. He was sparing of words, and communicated with his fellow-man by a series of nods and winks which did duty with him for conversation. "Tulch!" said Naball, when this extraordinary being appeared, "I want you to go to Vance's boarding-house, Powlett Street, East Melbourne, and keep your eye on a man called Keith Stewart." An interrogatory sniff from Tulch. "Ah, I forgot you don't know his personal appearance," said Naball thoughtfully; "he's tall, with fair hair, wears a suit of home-spun--humph;--that won't do, there are dozens of young men of that description. Here!--tell you what, I'll give you a note to deliver to him personally; muffle yourself up in an ulster when you deliver it, so that he won't know you--understand?" Mr. Tulch sniffed in the affirmative. "Follow him wherever he goes, and tell me what he's up to," said Naball, scribbling a note to Stewart and handing it to Tulch. "That's all--clear out." A farewell sniffle, and Tulch was gone. "Humph," muttered Naball to himself, "now I'd like to know the meaning of all this--I don't believe this cock-and-bull story about Stewart having money left him in this mysterious manner--people don't do that sort of thing now-a-days--I believe he's been robbing the old man for some time and was found out--so silenced him by using his knife. Knife," repeated Naball, "that's not been found yet--I must see about this--now there's Villiers--I wonder if he could help me? It was curious that he should have been about the shop at that special time--he's a bad lot--gad, I'll go and see what I can find out from him." Knowing Mr. Villiers' habits, he had no difficulty in discovering his whereabouts. Ah Goon's was where Villiers generally dwelt, so, after Naball had partaken of a nice little dinner, he went off to Little Bourke Street. It was now between seven and eight o'clock, which was the time Villiers generally dined, so, Naball not finding him at Ah Goon's, betook himself to a cook-shop in the neighbourhood, to which he was directed by a solid-looking Chinaman. It was a low-roofed place, consisting of a series of apartments all opening one into the other by squat little door-ways. The atmosphere was dull and smoky, and the acrid smell of burning wood saluted Naball's nostrils when he entered. Near the door-way a Chinaman was rolling out rice bread to the thinness of paper; then, cutting it into little squares, he wrapped each round a kind of sausage meat, and placed the rolls thus prepared on a tray for cooking. In the next apartment was a large boiler, with the lid off, filled with water, in which ten or twelve turkeys, skewered and trussed, were bobbing up and down amid the froth and scum of the boiling water. A crowd of Chinese, all chattering in their high shrill voices, were moving about half seen in the smoky atmosphere, through which candle and lamp light flamed feebly. Villiers, in a kind of little cell apartment, was having his supper when the detective entered. Before him was a large bowl filled with soup, and in this were squares of thin rice bread, and portions of turkey and duck mixed up into a savoury mess, and flavoured with the dark brown fluid which the Chinese use instead of salt. "Oh, it's you," growled Villiers, looking up with a scowl, "what do you want?" "You, my friend," said Naball cheerfully, taking a seat. "Oh, do you?" said Villiers, rubbing his bleared eyes, inflamed by the pungent smoke of the wood-fire. "I s'pose you think I killed old Lazarus?" "No, I don't," retorted the detective, looking straight at him, "but I think you know more than you tell." "He! he!" grinned the other sardonically. "Perhaps I do--perhaps I don't--it's my business." "And mine also," said Naball, somewhat nettled. "You forget the case is in my hands." "Don't care whose hands it's in," retorted Villiers, finishing his soup, "t'aint any trouble of mine." The detective bit his lip at the impenetrable way in which Villiers met his advances. Suddenly a thought flashed across his mind, and he bent forward with a meaning smile. "Got any more diamonds?" Villiers pushed back his chair from the table, and stared at Naball. "What diamonds?" he asked, in a husky voice. "Come now," said Naball, with a wink, "we know all about that--eh? Ah Goon is a good pawnbroker, isn't he?" "Ah Goon!" gasped Villiers, turning a little pale. "Yes; though he did only lend twenty pounds on those diamonds." "Look here, Mr. Jack-o'-Dandy," said Villiers, bringing his fist down on the table, "I don't want no beating about the bush, I don't. What do you mean, curse you?" "I mean that I know all about your little games," replied Naball, leaning over the table. "I know Caprice stole her own jewels for some purpose, and gave you some of the swag to shut your mouth, and I know that you're going to tell me all you know about this Russell Street business, or, by Jove, I'll have you arrested on suspicion." Villiers gave a howl like a wild beast, and, flinging himself across the table, tried to grapple with the detective, but recoiled with a shriek of wrath and alarm as he saw the shining barrel of a revolver levelled at his head. "Won't do, Villiers," said Naball smoothly; "try some other game." Whereupon Villiers, seeing that the detective was too strong for him, sat down sulkily in his chair, and after invoking a blessing on Naball's eyes, invited him to speak out. The detective replaced the revolver in his pocket, whence it could be easily seized if necessary, and smiled complacently at his sullen-faced friend. "Aha!" he said, producing a dainty cigarette, "this is much better. Have you a light?" Villiers flung down a lucifer match with a husky curse, which Naball, quite disregarding, took up the match and lighted his cigarette. Watching the blue smoke curling from his lips for a few moments, he turned languidly to Villiers, and began to talk. "You see, I know all about it," he said quietly; "you were too drunk to remember that night when you tried to take a diamond crescent off that woman, and I expect Ah Goon never told you!" "It was you who took it, then," growled Villiers fiercely. "In your own words, perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn't," replied Naball, in an irritating tone; "at all events, it's quite safe. You had better answer all my questions, because you bear too bad a character not to be suspected of the crime, particularly as you were about Russell Street on that night." "Yes, I was," said Villiers angrily; "and who saw me--Keith Stewart--a mighty fine witness he is." "Aha!" thought the astute Naball, "he does know something, then." "I could put a spoke in Stewart's wheel," grumbled the other viciously. "I don't think so," replied the detective, fingering his cigarette, "he is far above you--he's got money, is going to make a name by a successful play, and, if report speaks truly, Caprice loves him. "I don't care a farthing whether she does or not," said Villiers loudly; "she'd love any one who has money. Stewart's got some, has he; where did he get it?" "I'm sure I don't know." "I do!" "Indeed! where?" "Never you mind," said Villiers suspiciously. "I know my own knowing." "Remember what I said," observed Naball quietly, "and tell me all." "If I tell you all, what will you do?" asked Villiers. "I'll save your neck from the gallows," replied Naball smoothly. "Not good enough." "Oh, very well," said the detective rising, "I've no more to say. I'm off to the magistrate." "What for?" Naball fixed his keen eyes on the bloated face of the other. "To get a warrant for your arrest." "You can't do that." "Can't I--you'll see." "No; wait a bit," said Villiers in alarm; "I can easily prove myself innocent." "Indeed; then you'd better do so now, before a warrant is out for your arrest." "You won't give me any money?" "Not a cent--it's not a question of money with you, but life or death." Villiers deliberated for a moment, and then apparently made up his mind. "Sit down," he said sullenly. "I'll tell you all I know." Naball resumed his seat, lighted a fresh cigarette, and prepared to listen. "I was rather drunk on the night of the murder," he said, "but not so bad as Stewart thought me. He saw me at the shop-door at two o'clock, but I was there a quarter of an hour before." "Did you see anything?" "I saw the gate which led into the alley open," replied Villiers. "No one was about, so I walked in." "What for?" asked Naball, glancing at him keenly. "Oh, nothing," replied Villiers indifferently; "the fact was, I saw a policeman coming along, and though I was pretty drunk, I'd sense enough to know I might be run in, so I went into the alley and closed the gate till he passed." "And then you came out." "No, I didn't. I walked to the back of the house just to see where it led to. I saw the window wide open, and looked in and saw--" "The murdered man?" Villiers nodded. "Yes; the moonlight was streaming in at the window, and I could see quite plainly. I was in a fright, as I thought, seeing I had no business on the premises, I might be accused, so I got down from the window and went off, closing the gate of the alley after me." "It wasn't wise of you to stay about the premises," said Naball. "I know that," rejoined Villiers tartly; "but I couldn't get away, because I saw Stewart coming up the street just as I was wondering where to go; I then pretended to be drunk, so that I could get away without suspicion." "Why didn't you run?" asked Naball. "Because he was too close, and besides, he might have given chase, thinking I had been robbing the shop; then, with the open window and the murdered man, it would have been all up with me." "I don't know if it isn't all up with you now," said Naball drily. "How do I know you are innocent!" "Because I know who killed Lazarus." "The deuce you do--who?" "Stewart himself." "Humph! that's what I thought; but what proof have you?" Villiers put his hand in his pocket and brought out a large knife. "I found this just under the window," he said, handing it to Naball. "You'll see there's blood on the handle, so I'm sure it was with it the crime was committed." "But how do you know it's Stewart's knife?" asked Naball. Villiers placed his finger on one side of the handle. "Read that," he said briefly. "From Meg," read Naball. "Exactly," said Villiers. "Meg is Kitty Marchurst's child, and she gave it to Keith Stewart." "By Jove, it looks suspicious," said Naball. "He is in possession of a large sum of money, and can't tell how he got it. He can't account for his time on the night of the murder, and this knife with his name on it is found close to the window through which the murderer entered--humph!--things look black against him." "I suppose you'll arrest him at once?" said Villiers malignantly. "Then you suppose wrong," retorted Naball. "I'll have him looked after so that he won't escape; but I'll hold my tongue about this, and so will you." "Until when?" "Until I find out more about Stewart. I must discover if the knife was in his possession on the night of the murder, and also if this story about his money is true; again, I want to wait till some of these stolen bank notes are in circulation, so as to get more evidence against him." "But what am I to do?" asked Villiers sulkily. "You are to hold your tongue," said Naball, rising to his feet, "or else I may make things unpleasant for you--it's a good thing for your own sake you have told me all." "Told you all," muttered Villiers, as Naball took his departure. "I'm not so sure about that." CHAPTER XIX. A LOVERS' MEETING. It is a great blessing that the future is hidden from our anxious eyes, otherwise, to use a familiar expression, we would go out in a coach and four to meet our troubles. If Keith Stewart had only known that the detective suspected him of the murder of Lazarus, and was surely but slowly finding out strong evidence in favour of such a presumption, he, no doubt, would have been much troubled. But he thought that Naball's hints at the interview were not worth thinking about, for, strong in the belief of his own innocence, such an idea of his being accused of the crime never entered his mind. In spite of the disagreeable event which had occurred, Keith felt very happy on this night. He was young, he had a good sum of money in the bank, the gift of some beneficent fairy, he was going to make his _début_ as a dramatic author, and, above all, he was going to see Eugénie again. Therefore, as he sat at dinner, his heart was merry, and to him the future looked bright and cheerful. Things seemed so pleasant that, with the sanguine expectations of youth, he began to build castles in the air. "If this burlesque's a success," he thought, "I'll write a novel, and save every penny I make; then I'll go to London, after marrying Eugénie, and see if I can't make a name there--with perseverance I'm bound to do it." Poor youth, he did not know the difficulty of making a name in London; he was quite unaware that the literary market was overstocked, and that many criticisms depend on the state of the critic's liver. He did not know any of these things, so he went on eating his dinner and building castles in the air, all of which buildings were inhabited by Eugénie. From these pleasant dreams he was aroused by the entrance of the housemaid, a fat young person, who breathed hard, and rolled up to Keith, puffing and panting like a locomotive. "If you please," said the young lady, "the man." "What man?" asked Keith sharply. "He's waiting to see you," returned the housemaid stolidly. From experience Keith knew it was useless to expect sense from the housemaid, so he got up from the table and went out to the front-door, where a bundle, with a head at one end and a pair of boots at the other, held out a letter. "For me?" asked Keith, taking it. The bundle sniffed in an affirmative manner, so Stewart opened the letter and read it quickly. It only contained a line from Naball that if he heard of any new development of the case he would let Keith know, so that young gentleman, wondering why the detective took the trouble to write to him slipped the letter in his pocket, and nodded to the bundle. "All right," he said quickly; "no answer," and he shut the door in the bundle's face, whereupon the bundle sniffed. "I know him now," said Mr. Tulch to himself in a husky voice, as he walked away. "I'd know 'im if he was dooplicated twice h'over." Having come to this satisfactory conclusion, Mr. Tulch took up his position a short distance away, and began his dreary task of watching the house. And it was dreary work. The long hot day was over, and the long hot night had begun. It was just a quarter past seven, and the sky was a cloudless expanse of darkish blue, blazing with stars; a soft wind was whispering among the leaves of the trees, and making little whirls of white dust in the road. Every now and then a gay party of men and women on their way to some amusement would pass the spy, but he remained passively at his post, watching the sun-blistered varnished door of Vance's boarding-house. At last his patience was rewarded, for, somewhere about half-past seven, Keith came hurriedly out, and sped rapidly down the street. "What's he arter?" sniffed Mr. Tulch, stretching his cramped limbs. "I'll 'ave to ketch 'im h'up," and he rolled as quickly as he was able after the tall figure of the young man. A tram came along, and, without stopping it, Keith jumped on the dummy--the spy, breathless with running, sprang on the step of the end car and got inside, keeping his eye on Keith. The tram car went rapidly along Flinders Street, stopping every now and then to pick up or drop passengers, at which Keith seemed impatient. At last Spencer Street station was reached, and Keith sprang out; so did Tulch, keeping close to his heels. Stewart walked impatiently up and down one of the long platforms, which shortly began to fill with people expecting their friends. The shrill whistle of an approaching engine was heard, a red light suddenly appeared, advancing rapidly, and presently the long train, with its lighted carriages, drew up inside the station. Such a hurry-scurry; people jumping out of the train to meet those pressing forward on the platform, porters calling to one another, boxes, rugs, portmanteaus, bundles, all strewing the ground--a babel of voices, and at intervals the shrill whistle of a departing train. Amid all this confusion Tulch missed Keith, and was in a terrible state, for he knew what Naball would say. He dived hither and thither among the crowd with surprising activity, and at last came in sight of Stewart putting a young lady into a cab, in front of which was the luggage. He tried to hear the address given the cabman, but was unsuccessful, so he rapidly jumped into another cab and told him to follow. The cabby obeyed at once, and whipping up his horse, which was a remarkably good one, he easily kept the first cab in sight. The front cab drove up Collins Street as far as the Treasury Buildings, and then turned off to the left, going towards Fitzroy. It stopped at the Buttercup Hotel, in Gertrude Street, and, Stewart alighting, helped the young lady out; then the luggage was taken care of by the porter of the hotel, and Keith, with his charge, vanished through the swing doors of the private entrance. On seeing this, Tulch dismissed his cab, went into the bar of an hotel on the opposite side of the street, and, ordering a pint of beer, sat watching the door of the Buttercup Hotel. Meanwhile Keith and Eugénie had been shown into a private room, and the landlady, a stout, buxom woman, in a silk dress and lace cap, made her appearance. "Miss Rainsford?" she said interrogatively, advancing towards the girl. "Yes," replied Eugénie brightly. "You are Mrs. Scarth, I suppose. Did you get Mrs. Proggins' letter?" "Oh, yes, that's all right," replied the landlady, nodding. "Your room is ready, and I will do anything I can for you. Mrs. Proggins is an old friend of mine, and I'm only too happy to oblige her." "Thank you," said Eugénie, taking off her hat. "Let me introduce Mr. Stewart to you; he kindly came to the station to meet me." Mrs. Scarth nodded with a smile, for Mrs. Proggins had informed her of the relationship between the two young people, then observing she would go and order some tea for Eugénie, sailed majestically out of the room. "Why did you introduce me to that old thing?" asked Keith, in a discontented tone. "Policy, my dear," replied Eugénie mildly. "Mrs. Proggins wrote to her to look after me, and I'm very glad, otherwise a young lady with you as escort would hardly have found shelter for the night in this place. I always like to be in favour with the powers that be." Eugénie Rainsford was a tall, dark-complexioned girl, with clearly cut features and coils of black hair twisted round the top of her well-shaped head. She was dressed in a blue serge costume, with a red ribbon round her throat, and another round her waist. A handsome girl with a pleasant smile, and there was a look in her flashing dark eyes which showed that she had a will of her own. Keith stood beside her, as fair as she was dark, and a handsomer couple could not have been found in Melbourne. "Well, here I am at last. Keith," said Eugénie, slipping her arm through his. "Aren't you pleased to see me?" "Very," replied Stewart emphatically; "let me look at you--ah, you are more beautiful than ever." "What delightful stories you do tell," said Eugénie with a blush. "I wish I could believe them; now, my friend, let me return the compliment by looking at you." She took his face between her hands and looked at it keenly beneath the searching glare of the gas, then shook her head. "You are much paler than you used to be," she said critically. "There are dark circles under your eyes, deep lines down the side of your mouth, and your face looks haggard. Is it work, or--or the other thing?" "Do you mean dissipation, Eugénie?" said Keith, with a smile, taking a seat. "Well, I expect I have been rather dissipated, but now you are here I'll be a good boy." "Have you been worried?" asked Miss Rainsford. Keith sighed. "Yes; very much worried over this terrible case. I suppose you've seen all about it?" Eugénie nodded. "Yes; I've read all about it in the papers. Now I suppose you've nothing to do?" "No--not that I care much--you see I've got this burlesque coming off, and then there's that money." "The five hundred pounds," said Miss Rainsford reflectively. "Have you found out who sent you that?" "No; I can't imagine who did so, unless it was Caprice." "Caprice!" "Yes," replied Keith hurriedly, flushing a little; "the actress I told you about, who is going to play the principal part in 'Faust Upset.'" "Oh!" It was all the comment Miss Rainsford made, but there was a world of meaning in the ejaculation. "From what I've heard of the lady, I don't think it's likely," she said quietly. "Well, at all events, I suppose I'd better use the money." "Yes; I suppose so." "You're not very encouraging, Eugénie," said her lover angrily. "Well," observed the girl deliberately, "if you think this money came from Caprice, I certainly would not touch it. Why don't you ask her?" "I can't; she's been so disagreeable to me lately." "Oh!" Eugénie Rainsford was of a very jealous temperament, and she began to feel vaguely jealous of this actress whom Keith seemed to know so well. She remained silent for a few moments, during which Keith felt somewhat awkward. He was not in love with Kitty, nor, as far as he knew, was she in love with him, yet he saw that some instinct had warned Eugénie against this woman. "Come, Eugénie," said Keith, putting his arm round her slender waist; "you mustn't be angry with me the first night we meet." "I'm not angry," said the girl, turning her face towards him; "but I'd like to see this Caprice." "So you shall, dear--on the stage." "Why not in private?" Keith frowned, and pulled his moustache in a perplexed manner. "Well, she's hardly a fit person for a girl to see." "Pshaw!" replied Eugénie impatiently; "I'm not a girl, but a woman, and am not afraid of anything like that, and besides--besides," with hesitation, "I'm going to see her." "What do you mean?" asked Keith, abruptly withdrawing his arm. "Nothing; only I saw an advertisement in the paper wanting a governess for a little girl. I answered it, and found it was Miss Marchurst who wanted a governess. She engaged me, and I'm going there to-morrow." "No, no," cried Keith vehemently; "you must not--you shall not go." Eugénie raised her eyes to his. "Have you any reason for wishing me not to go?" "Yes, every reason--she's a bad lot." "I thought you knew her?" "So I do, but men may know women of that class, and women like you may not." "I don't agree with you," said Eugénie, rising; "what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and if you persist in wishing me not to go, I'll begin to think you've some reason." "I have none except what I've stated," said Keith doggedly. "Then I'll go to-morrow," replied Eugénie quietly; "at all events, I've got the right to have a personal interview, whether I take the situation or not." "You must not see her." "That decides it," said Eugénie composedly; "I will." "Eugénie, don't go, or I'll begin to think you don't trust me." "Yes, I do, but--but you've been so much with this Caprice lately, that I want to see her." "I don't care two straws about her." "I know that, but I wish to see her." "You intend to go?" "I do." Keith snatched up his hat and stick. "Then I'll say good-bye," he said angrily; "if you disregard my wishes so much, you can't love me." "Yes, I can!" "You are jealous of this confounded woman." "Perhaps I am." Keith looked at her angrily for a moment--then dashed out of the room, whereon Eugénie burst out laughing. "What a dear old boy he is," she said to herself; "he thinks I'm jealous. Well," with a frown, "perhaps I am. I wonder, if he knew that I gave him the five hundred pounds, what he'd say? He doesn't know that I'm a rich woman now, so I can test his love for me. I'm sure he's as true as steel." She picked up her hat, and, going over to the mirror, leaned her elbows on the mantelpiece, looked searchingly at her beautiful face. "Are you jealous, you foolish woman?" she said, with a laugh. "Yes, my dear, you are; at all events, you'll see your rival to-morrow. I'm afraid I'll make Keith a dreadful wife," she said, with a sigh, turning away. "For I think every woman is in love with him. Poor Keith, how angry he was!" She burst out laughing, and left the room. CHAPTER XX. THE RIVALS. Eugénie Rainsford was a very clever young woman, much too clever to pass her life in the up-country wilds of Australia, and no doubt she would have left her solitude in some way even had not fortune favoured her. Luckily, however, fortune did favour her and in a rather curious way, for a rich sharebroker having seen her, fell in love with her, and wanted to marry her; she however refused, telling him that she was engaged to marry Keith Stewart, whereupon he made inquiries, and she told him the whole story. He was so delighted with her fidelity to a poor man, that he made his will in her favour, feeling sure that, as he had no relations, she would be the most deserving person to leave it to. A carriage accident killed him six months afterwards, and Eugénie found herself a very rich woman, with as many thousands as she had pence before. She took her good fortune very calmly, telling no one about it, not even her employers; but, after consultation with the lawyer, she sent five hundred pounds to Keith, with instructions to the bank that he was not to know where it came from. Then she set herself to work out a little scheme she had in her head, to find out if he were true to her. In many of the letters he had written, she had been struck with the frequent mention of one name, Caprice, and on making inquiries, found out all about the actress. She bought a photograph of her, and was struck with the pathetic face of a woman who was said to lead so vile a life. Dreading lest Keith should have fallen in love with this divinity of the stage, she determined to go down to Melbourne and see for herself. By chance, however, she found in a newspaper an advertisement that Kitty Marchurst wanted a governess for her little girl, and seeing at once an excellent opportunity of finding out if her suspicions were correct, wrote offering herself for the situation. Kitty on her side remembered the name of Eugénie Rainsford as that of the girl to whom Keith told her he was engaged, so, curious to see what she was like, engaged her for a governess at once. Eugénie was delighted when she received this letter, and, still in the character of a poor and friendless girl, she left Mr. Chine, the lawyer, to manage her property, after binding him to secrecy, and came down to take the situation. Keith's evident desire that she should not accept the situation made her all the more determined to do so, and twelve o'clock the next day found her in the drawing-room of Caprice's house, waiting for the entrance of her future mistress. When Kitty entered the room she could not help admiring the handsome woman before her, and on her part Eugénie was astonished to see the bright vivacity of the melancholy face, for Caprice's features were sad only when in repose. The two women stood opposite to one another for a moment, mentally making up their minds about each other. Kitty was the first to speak. "Miss Rainsford, I believe?" "Yes; I came to see you about--about the situation." "Governess for my little girl," said Kitty, nodding her head. "Yes, I want some one whom I can trust." "I hope you will be able to trust me." Caprice looked keenly at her, and then burst out into a torrent of words. "Yes, I think I can trust you--but the question is, will you take care of my child--I mean will you accept the trust? You have come from the country--you don't know who I am?" "Yes, I do--Miss Marchurst." "No! not Miss Marchurst--Caprice!" She waited for a moment to see what effect this notorious name would have on her visitor, but, to her surprise, Eugénie simply bowed. "Yes, I know," she replied. Caprice arose and advanced towards her. "You know," she exclaimed vehemently, "and yet can sit down in the same room with a woman of my character. Are you not afraid I'll contaminate you--do you not shrink from a pariah like me--no--you do not--great heavens!" with a bitter laugh, sitting down again; "and I thought the age of miracles was past--ah, bah! But you are only a girl, my dear, and don't understand." Eugénie arose and crossed over to her. "I do understand; I am a woman, and feel for a woman." Kitty caught her hand and gave a gasping cry. "God bless you!" she whispered, in a husky voice. Then in a moment she had dashed the tears away from her eyes, and sat up again in her bright, resolute manner. "No woman has spoken so kindly as you have for many years," she said quickly; "and I thank you. I can give you my child, and you will take care of her for me when I am far away." "What do you mean?" asked Eugénie, puzzled. "Mean--that I am not fit to live with my child, that I am going to send her to England with you, that she may forget she ever had a mother." "But why do this," said Eugénie in a pitying tone, "when you can keep her with you?" "I cannot let her grow up in the atmosphere of sin I live in." "Then why not leave this sinful life, and go to England with your child?" Kitty shook her head with a dreary smile. "Impossible--to leave off this life would kill me; besides, I saw a doctor some time ago, and he told me I had not very long to live; there is something wrong with my heart. I don't care if I do die so long as my child is safe--you will look after her?" "Yes," replied Eugénie firmly; "I will look after her." Kitty approached her timidly. "May I kiss you?" she said faintly, and seeing her answer in the girl's eyes, she bent down and kissed her forehead. "Now I must introduce you to your new pupil," she said, cheerfully overcoming her momentary weakness. "Wait a moment," said Eugénie, as Caprice went to the bell-pull. "I want to ask you about Mr. Stewart." Caprice turned round quickly. "Yes--what--about him?" "Does he love you?" Caprice came over to the fire and looked closely at her. "You are the girl he is engaged to?" "Yes." "Then, make your mind easy, my dear, he loves no one but you." Eugénie gave a sigh of relief, at which Kitty smiled a little scornfully. "Ah! you love him so much as that?" she said half pathetically; "it's a pity, my dear, he's not worth it." "What do you mean?" "Don't be angry, Miss Rainsford," said Kitty, quietly; "I don't mean that he loves any one else, but he's not the man I took him for." "I don't understand." "I wouldn't try to, if I were you," replied Kitty significantly. "I helped him when I first met him, because he saved my child's life. He came down here, and I liked him still more." "You loved him?" "No; love and I parted company long ago. I liked him, but though I do my best to help him, I don't care for him so much as I did, my dear: he's not worthy of you." "That's all very well, but I don't see the reason." "Of course not, what woman in love ever does see reason; however, make your mind easy, things are all right. I will tell you the reason some day." "But I want to know now." "Curiosity is a woman's vice," said Kitty lightly "Don't worry yourself, Miss Rainsford, whatever I know of Keith Stewart won't alter him in your eyes--now, don't say anything more about it. I'll ring for Meg." Eugénie tried to get a more explicit answer out of her, but Kitty only laughed. "It can't be anything so very bad," she said to herself, "or this woman would not laugh at it." Meg came in quietly, a demure, pensive-faced little child, and after Kitty had kissed her she presented her to Eugénie. "This is your new governess, Meg," she said, smoothing the child's hair, "and I want you to love her very much." Meg hung back for a few moments, with the awkward timidity of a child, but Eugénie's soft voice and caressing manner soon gained her confidence. "I like you very much," she said at length, nestling to Eugénie's side. "As much as mumsey, Meg?" said Kitty, with a sad smile. "Oh, never--never as much as mumsey," cried Meg, leaving her new-found friend for her mother, "There's no one so good and kind as mumsey." Kitty kissed the child vehemently, and then bit her lips to stop the tears coming to her eyes. "Mumsey," said Meg at length, "can I tell the lady a secret?" "Yes, dear," replied Kitty smiling. Thereupon Meg slipped off Kitty's lap and ran to Eugénie. "What is this great secret?" asked Eugénie, bending down with a laugh. Meg put her mouth to Eugénie's ear, and whispered,-- "When I grow up I'm going to marry Keith." "You see," said Kitty, overhearing the whisper, "my daughter is your rival." "And a very dangerous one," replied Eugénie with a sigh, touching the auburn hair. Meg was sent off after this, and then Kitty arranged all about the salary with Eugénie, after which she accompanied her to the door to say good-bye. "I'm sorry I put any distrust into your heart about Mr. Stewart," she said; "but don't trouble, my dear, get him to give up his dissipated habits, and you'll no doubt find he'll make an excellent husband." "Ah!" said Eugénie to herself as she walked to the station, "it was only dissipation she meant--as if anything like that could hurt Keith in my eyes." Then she began to think of the strange woman she had left--with her sudden changes of temperament from laughter to tears--with her extraordinary nature, half-vice half-virtue, of the love she bore for her child, and the strong will that could send that child away for ever from her lonely life. CHAPTER XXI. A FIRST NIGHT AT THE BON-BON. "Faust Upset" had been put into rehearsal at once, and three weeks after the murder of Lazarus it was to be produced. Mortimer had hurried on the production of the burlesque with the uttermost speed, as "Prince Carnival" was now playing to empty houses. The Bon-Bon company were kept hard at work, and, what with rehearsals during the day, the performance of the opera-bouffe in the evening, and rehearsals afterwards till two in the morning, they were all pretty well worn-out. In spite of Kitty's indomitable spirit, she was looking haggard and ill, for the incessant work was beginning to tell on her system. The doctor told her plainly that she was killing herself, and that absolute rest was what she required; but in spite of those warnings she never gave herself a moment's peace. "I don't care two straws if I die," she said recklessly to Dr. Chinston; "I've made arrangements for the future of my child, and there's nothing else for me to live for." She was determined to make the burlesque a success, and worked hard at rehearsals getting the author and composer to alter some things, and cut out others, making several valuable suggestions as to stage-management, and in every way doing her best. But though friendly towards Keith, yet he was conscious of a kind of reserve in her manner towards him, and thought it was due to the knowledge that he was engaged to Eugénie. He had become reconciled to his sweetheart, and she went down every day to teach Meg at Toorak. It had been arranged that in three months she was to go to England with Meg, and Kitty guaranteed to pay a certain sum annually for the salary of the governess and the maintenance of the child. Of course Eugénie never meant to take any money, as she had become strongly attached to Meg, but still kept up her semblance of poverty till such time as she judged it fit to tell Keith. Meanwhile, in spite of Keith's opposition, she lived with Caprice, and led a very quiet life, for what with the state of her health and constant rehearsals, Kitty gave no Sunday receptions. But while Stewart fumed and fretted over the fact of his sweetheart staying with a woman of bad character like Caprice, and attended to all the rehearsals of the burlesque, Naball was silently winding his net round him. The detective had made inquiries at the Skylarks' Club, and found that Keith had been there on that night, in the company of Fenton. On discovering this, he went to Fenton and discovered that Stewart had lent the American the knife with which the crime had been committed, to cut the wires of a champagne bottle, and afterwards slipped it into his coat pocket. From the club he went to the Bon-Bon Theatre, and, as the detective knew from Keith's own admission, had left there at half-past twelve. "And then," said Naball to himself, "he told me he wandered about the streets till two o'clock, and then saw Villiers--rubbish--he went straight to Russell Street and committed the crime." It had taken Naball some time to collect the necessary evidence, and it was only on the day previous to the production of "Faust Upset" that he was able to get a warrant for Keith's arrest, so he determined to let the performance take place before he arrested him. "If it's a success," said Naball to himself, as he slipped the warrant in his pocket, "he'll have had one jolly hour to himself, and if it's a failure--well, he'll be glad enough to go to gaol." So, with this philosophical conclusion, Mr. Naball settled in his own mind that he would go to the theatre. Keith wanted Eugénie to go to a box with him in order to see the play, but she said she would rather go to the stalls by herself, in order to judge of the effect the burlesque had on the audience. After a good deal of argument, Stewart gave way; so on the momentous night she took her seat in the stalls, eager to see the first bid her lover made for fame. Tulch had been recalled from his task of watching Stewart, as Naball judged that the vanity of an author seeing his work on the stage would be enough to keep the young man in Melbourne; but Tulch, true to his instincts of finishing a job properly, took his place in the gallery and kept his eye on Keith, who sat with Ezra in a private box. The Jew was calm and placid, as having succeeded to his father's fortune, he had not staked everything, like Keith, on the burlesque being a success; still, for his partner's sake as well as his own, he was anxious that it should go well. Such a crowded house as it was--everybody in Melbourne was there--for a new play by a colonial author was a rare thing, and a burlesque by a colonial author, with original music by a colonial composer, was almost unheard of. The critics who were present felt an unwonted sense of responsibility to-night, for as this was the first production of the piece on any stage, they had to give an opinion on their own responsibility. Hitherto the generality of plays produced in Melbourne had their good and bad points settled long before by London critics, so it was comparatively easy to give a verdict; but to-night it was quite a different thing, therefore the gentlemen of the press intended to be extra careful in their remarks. Although "Faust Upset" was called a burlesque, it was more of an opera-bouffe, as there was an absence of puns and rhyme about the dialogue, besides which, the lyrics were really cleverly written, and the music brisk and sparkling. Keith had taken the old mediæval legend of Faust, and reversed it entirely--all the male characters of the story he made female, and _vice versa_. There was a good deal of satire in the piece about the higher education of women, and the devotion of young men to athletics, to the exclusion of brain work. In fact, the libretto was of a decidedly Gilbertian flavour, albeit rather more frivolous, while the music was entirely of the Offenbachian school, light, tuneful and rapid. After a medley overture, containing a number of taking melodies in the piece, the curtain rose on the study of Miss Faust, a blue-stocking of the deepest dye, who, after devoting her life to acquiring knowledge, finds herself, at the age of fifty, an old maid with no one to care for her. The character was played by Toltby, who was a genuine humorist; and he succeeded in making a great deal out of the part, without ever condescending to vulgarity. His appearance as a lank, long maiden, in a dingy sage-green gown, with wan face and tousled hair, was ludicrous in the extreme. The opening chorus was sung by a number of pretty girls, in caps and gowns, and on their going out to meet their lovers, Miss Faust, overcome with loneliness, summons to her aid the powers of evil, and in response "Miss Mephistopheles" appears. Kitty looked charming as she stood in the centre of the red limelight. She was arrayed in the traditional dress of red, but as a female demon wore a petticoat, and her face was also left untouched. Miss Faust fainted in her chair, and Miss Mephistopheles, with a bright light in her eyes, and a reckless devil may-care look on her expressive face, whirled down to the footlights, and dashed into a rattling galop song, "Yes, this is I," which melody ran all through the opera. With the assistance of various cosmetics, new dress, and sundry other articles of feminine toilet, which were brought in by a number of small imps, Miss Mephistopheles succeeds in making Miss Faust young; shows her a vision of Mr. Marguerite, a young athlete; and finally changes the scene to the market-place, where there was a chorus of young men in praise of athletic sports. It would be useless to give the plot in detail, as Keith followed the lines of the legend pretty closely. Miss Faust meets Mr. Marguerite, who is beloved by Miss Siebel, a sporting young woman. There was the garden scene, with a lawn tennis ground; a vision on the Brocken, of the future of women, with grotesque ballets and fantastic dresses; the scene of the duel, which was a quarrel scene between Mrs. Valentine and Miss Faust, after the style of Madame Angot; then Miss Mephistopheles runs off with Mr. Marguerite, having fallen in love with him; the lovers are followed and thrown into a prison, which is changed by the magic power of Miss Mephistopheles to a race-course, in which scene there is a bewildering array of betting men, pugilists, pretty girls, and fortune-tellers. Miss Mephistopheles then resigns Mr. Marguerite to Miss Siebel, and wants to carry off Miss Faust to the nether regions, when a flaw is discovered in the deed, and everything is settled amicably, the whole play ending with the galop chorus of the first number. When the curtain fell on the first act, the audience were somewhat bewildered; it was such an entirely new departure from the story of Faust, that they almost resented it. But as the piece progressed, they saw the real cleverness of the satire, and when the curtain came down they called loudly for the author and composer, who came forward and bowed their acknowledgments. When Mortimer heard the eulogies lavished on the piece, he drew a long breath of relief. "Jove! I thought it was going to fail," he said, "and I believe it would have, if Caprice hadn't pulled it out of the fire." And, indeed, Caprice, with her wonderful spirits and reckless _abandon_, had carried the whole play with her, and saved it at the most critical moment, A young man sitting near Eugénie summed up his idea of the piece in a few words. "It's a deuced clever play," he said; "but Caprice makes it go--if any one else plays her part, the theatre will be empty." Eugénie turned angrily to look for the author of this remark, but could not see him. Just as she was turning away, a shrill voice near her said,-- "Ain't Caprice a stunner! I've seen 'er lots of times at old Lazarus's." The speaker was a small, white-faced Jewish youth, being none other than Isaiah. Miss Rainsford pondered over these words as she walked out of the theatre. "Goes to old Lazarus's," she said to herself; "that was the old man who was killed. I wonder why she went there." There was a crowd in the vestibule of the theatre, and she saw Keith standing in the corner, looking as pale as death, talking to a man. She went up to congratulate him on the success of the performance, but something in his face made her afraid. "What's the matter, Keith?" she asked, touching him. "Hush!" he said in a hoarse whisper, "don't say a word--I'm arrested." "Arrested! What for?" she gasped. The man standing next to Keith interposed. "For the murder of Jacob Lazarus," he said in a low voice. Eugénie closed her eyes with a sensation of horror, and caught hold of the wall for support. When she opened her eyes again, Keith and the detective had both vanished. "Arrested for the murder of Lazarus!" she muttered. "My God! it can't be true!" CHAPTER XXII. EUGÉNIE _V_ NABALL. As a rule first performances in Melbourne take place on Saturday night, consequently the criticisms on "Faust Upset" were in Monday's papers. Simultaneously with the notices of the burlesque, there appeared an announcement that the author of the piece had been arrested for the murder of Jacob Lazarus. Keith was very little known in Melbourne, so his arrest personally caused little talk; but the fact that a successful author and a murderer were one and the same person caused a great sensation. The criticisms on the burlesque were, as a rule, good, and though some of the papers picked out faults, yet it was generally agreed that the piece had been a wonderful success; but the sensation of a successful colonial production having taken place was merged in the greater sensation of the discovery of the Russell Street murderer. Keith Stewart, protesting his innocence of the charge, had immediately been taken off to gaol, and Eugénie was unable to see him until she got the permission of the proper authorities; but feeling certain that he had not committed the crime, she called on Ezra at _The Penny Whistle_ early on Monday morning. On sending up her card, she was shown into Ezra's room, and there found that Naball was present. The detective, who was fully convinced of Keith's guilt, had called in order to find out for certain from Ezra all about the prisoner's movements on the night in question. When Eugénie entered the room, Ezra, who looked pale and careworn, arose and greeted her warmly. He then introduced her to Naball, who looked keenly at the sad face of the woman who was engaged to the man he had hunted down. "Mr. Naball," said Ezra, indicating the detective, "has called upon me to find out about Stewart's movements on the night my father was murdered." "Yes; that's so," replied Naball, with a shrewd glance at the Jew. "Well," said Eugénie impatiently, "surely you can explain them, for Keith told me you were with him all the time." Ezra looked dismal. "No, I wasn't with him all the time; I only met him at the Bon-Bon, and I left before he did." "Yes," interposed the detective smoothly; "and, according to Mr. Mortimer, Stewart left there about half-past twelve o'clock." "And then, I presume," said Eugénie, with fine disdain, "you think he went and murdered Lazarus right off?" "Well," observed Naball, deliberately smoothing his gloves, "according to the doctor's evidence, the crime was committed about twelve o'clock, or a little later. Now Stewart can't say where he was between the time he left the theatre and the time he met Villiers." "He was wandering about the streets," explained Eugénie. Naball smiled cynically. "Yes; so he says." "And so every one else says who knows Keith Stewart," retorted the girl. "He is incapable of such an act." Naball shrugged his shoulders as much as to say that he had nothing to urge against such an eminently feminine argument. Eugénie looked angrily at the detective, and then turned in despair to the Jew. "You don't believe him guilty?" she asked. "No, on my soul, I do not," he replied fervently; "still appearances look black against him." Miss Rainsford thought for a few moments, and at last bluntly asked Naball the same question. "Do you believe him guilty?" "As far as my experience goes," said the detective coolly, "I do." "Why?" Naball produced a little pocket-knife, and began to trim his nails. "The evidence is circumstantial," he said, shrugging his shoulders, "but the evidence is conclusive." "Would you mind telling me what the evidence is?" The detective shut his knife with a sharp click, slipped it into his waistcoat pocket, and, leaning over the table, looked steadily at Eugénie. "Miss Rainsford," he said gravely, "I admire you very much for the way you stand up for Stewart, but, believe me, that though I would gladly see him free, yet the proofs are too strong to suppose him innocent." Eugénie bent her head coldly. "Would you mind telling me the evidence?" she reiterated. Naball, rather perplexed, looked at Ezra. "Yes, tell her all you know," said that gentleman. "I think, myself, Stewart is innocent, and perhaps Miss Rainsford may throw some light on the mystery." "I don't call it a mystery," retorted Naball impatiently; "it's as clear as day. I'm willing to tell all I know; but as to Miss Rainsford throwing any light on the subject, it's absurd." Eugénie questioned him for the third time in the same words. "Would you mind telling me the evidence?" "Certainly," said Naball sharply. "Stewart was in employment of the deceased as his clerk. He came to Melbourne with no money, and, according to his own account, given in this very room, and in the presence of this gentleman, he becomes possessed of a sum of five hundred pounds, which was mysteriously placed to his credit at the Hibernian Bank. I went to the bank, and discovered from the manager that such a sum had been placed to the prisoner's credit, but he refused to tell me by whom, so, as was only natural, I concluded that Stewart had robbed his employer of the money, and under a feigned name placed it to his credit. My reasons for such a belief are this--he had full command of all the books, and could cook the accounts as he liked. He did so, and obtained this money. Lazarus, however, who I know was a very sharp man, had suspicions, and determined to examine the books; this, of course, meant ruin to Stewart, so he made up his mind to kill his master. He was at the Skylarks' Club on the night of the murder, and gave Mr. Fenton, the manager of The Never-say-die Insurance Company, his knife to open a champagne bottle; that knife was one given to him by the child of Kitty Marchurst, and has on it an inscription, 'From Meg.' On receiving it back, he placed it in the pocket of his overcoat, and walked to the Bon-Bon. After an interview with Mr. Mortimer, he left the Bon-Bon at half-past twelve o'clock, went up to Russell Street, and entering by the back window (the position of which he knew thoroughly), killed the old man; then he took the keys from under the pillow, and robbed the safe of various things, including bank-notes to the amount of one hundred pounds, which he knew were placed therein; while leaving the place, he dropped his knife outside the window; he then wanders about the streets, perhaps goes home, but horror-struck with the dread of being found out, returns to the scene of his crime, and there sees Villiers, whom he questions, but getting no response from him, thinks Villiers is drunk. Villiers, however, was only shamming, and tells me some time afterwards that he picked up a knife under the open window, and was cognisant of the murder. I obtain the knife, and it is the one Stewart had in the club, with the inscription on it. I think, therefore, the evidence is very clear." "In what way?" asked Eugénie quietly. The detective became a little exasperated. "Good heavens!" he said in an annoyed tone of voice, "there are three strong proofs: first, he is possessed of a large sum of money he can't account for; second, he is unable to prove an _alibi_; and third, his knife, covered with blood, is found on the scene of the crime." "So far so good," said Eugénie ironically; "your reasoning is excellent, Mr. Naball, but untrue." "Untrue?" "I repeat untrue," she replied. "With regard to the five hundred pounds--I paid that into his credit." "You," said Ezra, while Naball stared at her thunder-struck, "a poor girl." "I'm not a poor girl," said Miss Rainsford coolly. "On the contrary, I'm worth fifty thousand pounds left to me by a sharebroker in Sandhurst. I did not tell Keith of my fortune as I wanted him to love me for myself. But as I knew he was poor, I placed to his credit the sum of five hundred pounds; so that settles your first proof, Mr. Naball." "Well, it's certainly very curious," said Naball, after a pause. "I hardly know what to think--what about my second proof?" "Oh! that's more difficult to prove," said Eugénie; "but I quite believe he did wander about. He's rather absent-minded, I know." "Your answer to my second proof is weak," replied Naball sardonically. "And the third--" "About the knife? Well," said Miss Rainsford, knitting her brows, "he had it at the club, you say, and slipped it into his overcoat pocket." "Exactly." "Then he went to the Bon-Bon." "He did." "And what happened to his overcoat there?' asked Eugénie. "I can tell you," replied Ezra. "He took it off, and in mistake Caprice carried it downstairs with her fur mantle." "Oh, did she take it away with her?" asked Naball quickly. "No," said Ezra quietly, "she found out she had it when she was putting on her mantle in the carriage, and called me back to return it. I took it upstairs again, and gave it to Keith, who put it on." "And the knife was still in the pocket?" said Eugénie. "I suppose so," replied Ezra, rather confused. "I didn't even know the knife was there." "What do you think?" asked Miss Rainsford, turning to Naball. That astute young man wrinkled his brows. "I see what you are driving at," he said rapidly. "You think that Caprice took the knife out of the pocket, saw the whole chance in a flash, and committed the crime." "No! no!" cried Eugénie, horror struck. "I'm sure I don't believe she could be guilty of a crime." "Humph! I don't know so much about that," said Naball disbelievingly. "What nonsense," broke in Ezra angrily; "she could not have done such a thing--she had no motive." Naball did not reply to this remark, but rising from his seat, walked hurriedly up and down the room in a state of great excitement. He had been fully convinced of the guilt of Stewart, but the conversation of Eugénie had shaken his belief, and he began to puzzle over the new aspect of the case. "I wonder if Caprice ever had any dealings with Lazarus?" he said to himself, thinking of the diamond robbery. "Yes," broke in Eugénie sharply, "she had--at least," in answer to Naball's questioning look, "when I was at the theatre on Saturday night a boy near me said he had seen her at Lazarus's place." "A boy," asked Ezra sharply, "what boy?" "I don't know," she replied; "a thin, pale-faced Jewish-looking boy, with a shrill voice." "Isaiah," said Naball and Ezra with one voice, and then looked at one another, amazed at this new discovery. "By Jove!" said the detective, "this is becoming exciting. You are sure you heard the boy say that?" "Yes, I'm sure--quite sure," answered Eugénie firmly; "but I don't think that could prove Caprice guilty. Much as I wish to serve Keith, I don't want to ruin her." Naball glanced at her keenly, then turned to Ezra. "Send for the boy," he said sharply, "and we'll find out all about Caprice's visits to your father's place." "It mightn't have anything to do with the murder," said Ezra, ringing the bell for the messenger. "True," replied Naball, "but, on the other hand, it might have a good deal to do with the diamond robbery." CHAPTER XXIII. THE CYPHER. When the messenger had been despatched, Naball drew his seat up to the table, and began to make some notes, after which he turned to Eugénie. "I was firmly convinced of Stewart's guilt," he said quietly; "but what you have told me throws a new light on the subject. I said you could not do that--I beg your pardon--you can." Eugénie bowed her head in acknowledgment of the apology, and asked him a question in a hesitating manner. "You don't think Caprice is guilty?" "I think nothing at present," he replied evasively; "not even that Stewart is innocent. When I see the boy, I'll tell you what I think." They talked on together for a few minutes, and then there came a knock at the door. In reply to Ezra's permission to enter, the door opened, and Isaiah appeared on the threshold, holding some papers in his hand. "Oh, you've come," said Ezra, as the boy shut the door after him. "Yes; did you want me?" demanded Isaiah in a jerky manner, "'cos I never knowed you did." "Didn't you meet a messenger?" asked Naball, turning his head round. Isaiah deposited the papers he carried on Ezra's desk, and shook his head. "No, I never met any one, I didn't," he answered. "Mr. Ezra asked me to bring all letters that came to the old 'un, so as these came, I did." "That's right," said Lazarus, looking through the letters. "By-the-way, Isaiah, this gentleman wants to ask you a few questions." "What, Mr. Naball?" said Isaiah in alarm. "Oh, sir, I never had nothing to do with it." Naball smiled. "No! no! that's all right," he said good-naturedly. "It would take a bigger man than a sprat like you to commit such a crime; but, tell me, do you know Caprice?" Isaiah leered significantly. "I've seen her on the stage, that's all." "Never off?" "Drivin' about the streets." "Anywhere else?" Isaiah glanced uneasily at Ezra, who laughed. "Go on, Isaiah; it's all right." "Well, I've seen her at the old 'un's place." "Oh, indeed," said Naball quickly. "Often?" "Yes--lots of times--at night--came to do business, I s'pose." "When did you see her last?" "Oh, not for a long time," replied Isaiah; "but do you remember the week them diamonds were stolen?" "Yes, yes," said Naball eagerly. Isaiah nodded. "Well, she came to see the old 'un, then." Naball suppressed his exultation with difficulty, and asked Isaiah another question. "I say--those bank-notes that were stolen--" "I never stole 'em." "No one said you did," retorted Naball tartly; "but you wrote something on the back of one of 'em." Isaiah turned scarlet, and shifted from one leg to the other. "Well, you see," he murmured apologetically, "Mr. Stewart wanted to know a good 'un to back for the Cup, so I was afraid of the old 'un hearing, and as there wasn't no paper, I wrote on the back of one of 'em, 'Back Flat-Iron.'" "In pencil?" "No, in ink. Mr. Stewart, he laughs and nods, then puts the notes in the cash box, and puts 'em in the safe." "That's all right," said Naball, dismissing him; "you can go." Isaiah put on his hat, put his hands in his pockets, and departed, whistling a tune. When the door closed on him, Naball turned to his two companions with an exulting light in his eyes. "What do you think now, Mr. Naball?" asked Eugénie. "Think. I think as I've done all along," he replied. "Caprice stole those jewels herself, and sold them to old Lazarus." "But what's that got to do with the death of my father?" asked Ezra. "Perhaps nothing--perhaps a lot," said the detective. "I don't know but that boy's evidence has given me a clue. Suppose--I'm only supposing, mind you--Caprice stole her own diamonds, with Villiers as an accomplice. Suppose she took them to old Lazarus and sold 'em. Suppose Villiers, thinking the old man has them in his safe, goes to rob him, and commits the murder to do so. Suppose all that--I should think there would be a very pretty case against Villiers." "Yes; but Keith's knife?" said Eugénie. "Ah, now you have me," answered Naball, puzzled. "I don't know, unless Villiers managed to get it while Stewart was fighting with him on that night, and covered it in blood in order to throw suspicion on him." "All your ideas are theoretical," said Ezra drily. "Perhaps Caprice never stole her own jewels, or sold them to my father." "Yes, she did, I'll swear," retorted Naball decisively. "Why wouldn't she prosecute? why did I find Villiers with one of the jewels? You bet, she stole them for some freak, and I daresay Villiers committed the murder to get them back." "I don't think my father would have kept such valuable jewels as that about the premises." "No; he'd put 'em in the bank." "No, he wouldn't," retorted Ezra; "he sent all his jewels to Amsterdam. And here," holding up a letter, "is an envelope with the Dutch postmark." "By Jove!" ejaculated Naball, under his breath, "what a queer thing if it should turn out to be those diamonds of Caprice's. Open the letter." "Suppose it does turn out to be the diamonds," said Ezra, slowly tearing the envelope. "Well"--Naball drew a long breath--"it will be the beginning of the end." "I hope it will end in Keith's being released," said Eugénie, looking at Ezra with intense anxiety. That gentleman took out the letter, and glancing at it for a moment, gave vent to an ejaculation of disgust. "What's the matter?" asked Eugénie and Naball together. "The letter is in cypher," said Lazarus, tossing it over to the detective. "I don't think we'll be able to read it." "Oh, we'll have a try," said Naball, quickly spreading oat the letter. "Let's have a look at it." The letter was as follows:-- "Dsidanmo seaf utnes teh ssteon ryiks sgenlil gto teher tdhnoaus sgennid it lses teher hduenrd bneiertns." "What the deuce does it mean?" asked Naball in a puzzled tone. "It's a cypher, evidently, of which my father alone possesses the key," said Ezra. "I'll have a look among his papers, and if I find it, it will soon make sense of this jumble of words." "It's like a Chinese puzzle," observed Naball, glancing at it. "I never could find out these things." "Let me look," said Eugénie, taking the letter. "I used to be rather good at puzzles." "We'll find this one out," said Naball significantly, "and you'll do some good for Stewart." "You think it's about Caprice's diamonds?" she asked. "I think it's about Caprice's diamonds," he replied. "I think the words have been written backwards," said Ezra, looking over her shoulder. Eugénie shook her head. "I don't think so," she replied, scanning the letter closely. "If so, the word 'it' would have been written 'ti.'" "Try a word of three letters, if there's one," suggested Naball, "and you can see how the letters are placed." "Here's one spelt 'g-t-o.' What word can be made out of that." "Got," said Ezra eagerly. "Well, if so, in the cypher it reads, the first letter 'g,' the last, letter 't,' and the middle letter at the end." "What do you think of that?" asked Naball bluntly. "That the sender of this has taken the first and last letters of a word, and written them in rotation." "I don't understand," said Naball in a puzzled tone. "I think I do," said Eugénie quickly. "Let us take another word, and instead of guessing it, try my idea, Here is a word, 'teher.' Now, Mr. Naball, take a sheet of paper and write down what I say." Naball got some paper and a pencil. "Now," said Eugénie, "this word 'teher.' The first letter is 't,' now the second letter, which, I think, is the end one of the proper word, is 'e'--place that at the end." Naball wrote "t--e." "The third letter of the cypher, and the second of the proper word, is 'h'--put that next the 't;' and the fourth letter of the cypher, and third of the proper word, is 'e'--place that at the end also." Naball added two letters as instructed, "t,h--e,e." "Now," said Eugénie, "there's only one letter left, which must naturally be in the middle." Naball finished his writing thus: t-h-r-e-e. "That is three," he said, with a cry of triumph. "By Jove! Miss Rainsford, you are clever; let's make certain, by trying another letter." "Take 's-s-t-e-o-n,'" suggested Ezra. Naball wrote the letters as follows:-- s -- s t -- e o -- n Then he wrote them in a line, down the first column and up the second, which made the word "stones." "Glad we've got it right, after all," he said delightedly, and then the whole three of them went to work on the same system, with the result that the letter read thus:-- "Diamonds safe, unset the stones, risky selling, got three thousand, sending it less three hundred, bernstein." "Ah!" said Naball when he read this, "wasn't I right?" "So I think," said Ezra sadly; "my father evidently bought the jewels from her, and sent them to Amsterdam to be sold." "Still," said Eugénie impatiently, "this does not clear up the mystery of the murder." "You don't think Caprice did it?" said Ezra. "No," replied the detective; "but Villiers might have done it in order to recover the jewels. But I tell you what, there's only one thing to be done, we'll go down and see Caprice." This was agreed to, and without losing a moment they started. "I may be wrong, as I was before," said Naball when they were in the train, "but I'll lay any money that Villiers has seen Caprice since the murder." "You don't think she's an accomplice?" cried Eugénie. "I think nothing," retorted Naball, "till I see Caprice." CHAPTER XXIV. WHAT KITTY KNEW. The trio soon arrived at Kitty's house, and Ezra was just about to ring the front-door bell, when suddenly Naball touched his arm to stop him. "Hist!" he said in a quick whisper; "listen." A woman's voice, talking in a high key, and then the deep tones of a man's voice, like the growl of an angry beast. "What did I tell you?" whispered Naball again. "Villiers and Caprice, both in the drawing-room; wait a moment, count twenty, and then ring the bell." He stepped round the corner of the porch, stepped stealthily on to the verandah, and then stole softly towards one of the French windows in order to listen. He was correct in his surmise; the two speakers were Kitty Marchurst and Randolph Villiers. "You'd better give me what I ask," growled Villiers in a threatening tone, "or I'll go straight and tell how you were at Lazarus's on the night of the murder." "Perhaps you'll tell I killed him?" said Caprice, with a sneer. "Perhaps I will," retorted Villiers; "there's no knowing." "There's this much knowing," said Kitty deliberately, "that I won't give you a single penny. If I am called on to explain my movements, I can't do so; but it will be the worse for you, it will place--" At this moment the bell rang, and Caprice started in alarm. "Hush," she cried, advancing towards Villiers; "come to me again. I must not be seen talking with you here. Go away--not by the door," she said, with an angry stamp of her foot as Villiers went towards the door; "by the window--no one will see you." Villiers moved towards the French window, opened it, and was just about to step out when Naball stepped forward. "I'm afraid some one will," he said serenely, pushing Villiers back into the room, and closing the window. "Naball!" cried Kitty and Villiers in a breath. "Exactly," replied that gentleman, taking a chair. "I've come to have a talk with you both." "How dare you force your way into my house?" cried Kitty angrily, while Villiers stood looking sullenly at the detective. "It's about the diamond robbery," went on Naball, as if he never heard her. "Leave the house," she cried, stamping her foot. "And about the murder," he finished off, looking from one to the other. Kitty glanced at Villiers, who looked at her with a scowl, and sank into a chair. Just as he did so, the drawing-room door opened, and Eugénie entered, followed by Ezra Lazarus. "I don't understand the meaning of all this," said Caprice, with a sneer; "but you seem to have a good idea of dramatic effect." "Perhaps so," replied Naball lazily. Kitty shrugged her shoulders and turned to Eugénie. "Perhaps you can explain all this, Miss Rainsford?" she said coolly. "Yes," answered Eugénie slowly; "it's about Mr. Stewart. You know he has been arrested for this murder?" "Know," repeated Kitty impatiently, "of course, I know. I'm sure I ought to--morn, noon and night I've heard nothing else. I don't know how it will affect the piece, I'm sure." "Never mind the piece," said Ezra, a trifle sternly. "I don't mind that, as long as I save my friend." "I hope you will," said Caprice heartily. "I am certain he never committed the crime. What do you say?" turning to the detective. "I'm beginning to be of your opinion," replied Naball candidly. "I did think him guilty once," fixing his eyes on Villiers, "but now I don't." "What about the knife I gave you?" asked Villiers abruptly. "Ah!" said Naball musingly, "what, indeed." "I found it on the scene of the crime," said Villiers in a defiant manner. "So you said." "Don't you believe me?" "Humph!" At this ambiguous murmur Villiers gave a savage growl, and would have replied, but Kitty stopped him by waving her hand. "It's no good talking like this," she said quickly. "There is some reason for you all coming here; what is it?" "I'll tell you," said Naball in a sharp official tone. "Do you remember the diamond robbery at this place? Well, those diamonds were sold to old Lazarus, and he sent them to Amsterdam for sale. The person who stole those diamonds thought they were still in the safe of Jacob Lazarus; and the person who stole those diamonds murdered Jacob Lazarus to recover them." He finished triumphantly, and then waited to see what effect his accusation would have on Kitty. To his astonishment, however, she never moved a muscle of her face, but asked calmly,-- "And who is the thief and the murderer?" "That's what I want to find out." "Naturally; but why come to me?" "Because, you know." "I!" she cried, rising to her feet in anger. "I know nothing." "Yes, you do, and so does Villiers there," persisted Naball. Villiers glanced strangely at Kitty, and growled sullenly. "Now, look here Miss Marchurst," said Naball rapidly, "it's no use beating about the bush--I know more than you think. You denied that you stole your own jewels, but I know you did, in order to pay the money embezzled by Malton. Lazarus's boy saw you go to his place during the week of the robbery, late at night. You did so in order to dispose of the jewels. The crescent I took from Villiers down Bourke Street was given to him by you as an accomplice; and I listened at that window to-day and heard Villiers say you were on the Russell Street premises on the night of the murder. Now, what do you say?" Kitty, still on her feet, was deadly pale, but looked rapidly at Naball. "You have made up a very clever case," she said quietly; "but entirely wrong--yes, entirely. I did not take my own jewels, as I told you before, therefore I was unable to pay the money for Mr. Malton. I did go to see Lazarus one night during the week of the robbery, in order to get some money, but was unable to do so. I never gave the crescent to Villiers, as he will tell you; and lastly, as you overheard him state, I was at Lazarus's on the night of the murder, but did not think it necessary to state so. I went there after I left the Bon-Bon, and made no secret of my doing so, as my coachman can inform you. I found the door locked, and no light inside, so thinking the old man had gone to bed, I came away, and went home; so, you see, your very clever case means nothing." "Is this true?" asked Naball, turning to Villiers. "Is what true?" asked that gentleman angrily. "What she says." "Some of it. Well, yes, most of it." "You'd better go a little further," said Kitty quietly, "and say all of it. Did I give you the diamond crescent?" "No, you didn't." "Then, who did?" asked Naball pertinaciously. "I sha'n't tell you," growled Villiers. "Oh, yes, you will," said the detective, "because if you know who stole the diamonds, you know the murderer of Lazarus." "No, I don't," retorted Villiers savagely. "I tell you I saw her round about the place on that night, and I picked up the knife I gave you; that's all I know." "Humph! we'll see about that." "You are sure that the person who stole the diamonds committed the crime?" asked Caprice, with a strange smile on her pale lips. "Well, I'm pretty sure; it looks uncommon like it." "And you think I stole the diamonds?" "Yes," retorted Naball bluntly; "I believe you did." "In that case, by your own reasoning, I'm a murderess," said Caprice. "I don't say that," said the detective; "but I believe you know who did it," looking significantly at Villiers. "I'm afraid your reasonings and your assertions are at variance," said Kitty quietly. "I don't know who committed the murder, but I do know who stole my diamonds." "Who?" asked Ezra, in an excited tone. "Keith Stewart!" "Keith Stewart!" echoed all; "impossible!" Eugénie stepped forward with a frown on her pale face, and looked at Kitty. "I don't believe it," she said, "and you are a wicked woman to say so." "Unfortunately, it's true," replied Caprice, with a sigh. "I have kept the secret as long as I could, but now it's impossible to do so any longer. Keith Stewart was at my place on the night of the robbery, and heard me say where my diamonds were. He was coming to the drawing-room, and saw my child descending the stairs, having got out of bed. He picked her up, and put her in bed again. The temptation was too strong to resist, I suppose, and he opened the drawer of the mirror, and took the jewels. He then got out of the window, and came round by the front of the house so as to enter by the front-door. Meg was awake all the time, and told it to me in her childish way, how he had gone to the window and got out of it. I told her not to speak of it, and kept silence." "Why did you keep silence?" asked Naball. "Why," cried Kitty, her face flushing with anger, "because he saved my child from death. He might have stolen anything of mine, but I would have kept silent, nor would I have betrayed him now but that you accuse me of murder." There was a dead silence in the room, as every one was touched by the way in which Kitty spoke. Then Villiers gave a coarse laugh. "Ha! ha!" he said harshly; "you said, Naball, that the person who stole the diamonds committed the murder also, so you've got the right man in gaol." Naball cast a look of commiseration at Eugénie, and said nothing. "Wait a moment," cried Ezra, stepping forward, "we've got to find the stolen bank-notes first. I don't believe Keith Stewart committed such a base crime; he is no murderer." "No," cried Eugénie, springing to her feet; "nor is he a thief. I will prove his innocence." "I'm afraid that's difficult," said Naball reflectively; "things look black against him." "Of course they do," said Villiers coarsely. "Who knows he is innocent?" Eugénie stepped in front of the ruffian, and raised her hand to the ceiling. "There is One who knows he is innocent--God." CHAPTER XXV. THE EVIDENCE OF A BANK-NOTE. All this time while his friends were trying to prove his innocence, Keith was mewed up in prison, having now been there a week. The disgrace of being arrested on such a charge had aged him considerably, and his face had changed from a healthy bronzed colour to a waxen paleness, while the circles under his eyes, and the deep lines furrowing his brow, showed how deeply he was affected by the position in which he found himself. He steadily denied that he committed the crime imputed to him, and regarding the knife found by Villiers, could only say that, after putting it in his pocket at the club, he thought no more of it till next morning, when, having occasion to use it, he found it had disappeared. Some time after the interview with Kitty, when she told how Keith had stolen the diamonds, Eugénie was admitted to the presence of her unfortunate lover. She had tried to see him before, but had always been refused; so when she did gain her object at last, and they stood face to face, both were so overcome with emotion that they could hardly speak. Keith held out his arms to her, with a smile on his wan face, and with an inarticulate cry she flung herself on his breast, weeping bitterly. "Don't cry, dear," he said soothingly, making her sit down on the bed. "There! there!" and he quieted her as if she had been a little child. "I can't help it," she said, drying her eyes; "it seems so terrible to see you here." "No doubt," replied Keith quietly; "but I know I am innocent, and that robs the disgrace of a good deal of its sting." "I know you are innocent," answered Eugénie, "but how to prove it; I thought things would have turned out all right; but when we saw Kitty Marchurst--" "She said I had stolen her diamonds," finished Stewart, with a satirical laugh. "I've no doubt she fully believes it, and I thank her for having held her tongue so long; but she was never more mistaken in her life. I did put Meg back to bed, but I came down the stairs again, and did not leave the room by the window." "But how is it the child saw you? Of course, you know--" "I know everything. Yes. Naball told me all. Meg says she saw a man she thought was me getting out of the window. I've no doubt she did see a man, but not me." "But why should she think it you?" asked Eugénie, puzzled. "Simply in this way. I put her to bed when she was half-asleep, and she knew I was in the room with her. When I left, she fell asleep, and as her slumber was fitful, as I am sure it was, seeing she came downstairs, she no doubt woke up at the sound of the window being opened, and saw a man getting out. You know how an hour's sleep passes as a moment when one wakes, so I've no doubt Meg thought she'd just closed her eyes, and opened them again to see me getting out of the window." "I understand," said Eugénie; "but who could it have been?" "I believe it was Villiers," observed Keith thoughtfully. "He was about the house on that night; he was in want of money, so no doubt when Caprice left him in the supper-room, he walked upstairs to the bedroom, stole the diamonds, and left by the window. He could easily do this, as every one was in the drawing-room. Then Naball found that diamond clasp in his possession, or, at least, in the possession of the Chinaman to whom he sold it." "But if he sold all those diamonds to old Lazarus, he must have got a good deal of money for them. Why did he not leave the country?" Keith sighed. "I'm sure I don't know. It seems all so mysterious," he said dismally. "What do you think should be done, Eugénie?" "I think I'll see Naball again, or some other detective, and sift the whole affair to the bottom." Keith looked at her with a pitying smile. "My dear child, that will cost a lot of money, and you have not--" Eugénie gave a laugh. She was not going to tell him just yet, so she gave an evasive answer. "I've got my salary," she said gaily. "Some of it was paid to me the other day. See!" And taking out her purse, she emptied it into his hand. "Oh! what a lot of money," said Keith smiling. "A five-pound note, three sovereigns, and two one-pound notes." "Which makes exactly ten pounds," remarked Eugénie, with a smile; "and I'm going to pay it all away to Naball, to get you out of this trouble." Stewart, kissed her, and smoothed out the notes one after the other. "It's no use, Eugénie," he said, offering her the notes back; "it will take more than that to help me; besides, you forget I have five hundred pounds in the bank." "Yes," she said, turning away her face; "five hundred." "And you'll have it--if--if I die." She turned to him, and threw her arms round his neck. "Oh, my darling! my darling!" she cried vehemently, "why do you say such things? You will not die. You will live to be happy and famous." "Famous!" he said bitterly, "no; I'm not famous yet, but notorious enough. There's only one chance of escape for me." "And that is?" "To trace those notes that were stolen--twenty five-pound notes like this," taking up the five-pound note. "But you haven't got the numbers." "No; but, as I told Naball, that boy wrote something on the back of one of them." Here Keith turned over the five-pound note; and then, giving a cry of surprise, sprang to his feet. "Eugénie, look, look!" She snatched the note from him, and there on the back were traced in ink the words, "Back Flat-Iron." "One of the notes," said Keith hoarsely. "One of the notes stolen on that night by the person who murdered Jacob Lazarus." Eugénie had also risen to her feet and her face wore a look of horror. She looked at her lover, and he looked back again, with the same name in their thoughts. "Kitty Marchurst!" "Good God!" said Stewart, moistening his dry lips with his tongue, "can she be guilty, after all?" "I can't believe it," said Eugénie determinedly, "though Naball says he thinks she did it. But I certainly got this note from her." "She may have received it from some one else," cried Keith eagerly. "God knows, I don't want to die myself, but to put the rope round the neck of that unhappy woman--horrible," and he covered his face with his hands. Eugénie put on her gloves, and then touched his arm. "I'm going," she said in a quiet voice. "Going?" he repeated, springing to his feet. "Yes, to see Naball, and show him the note." "But Kitty Marchurst!" "Don't trouble about her," said Eugénie, a trifle coldly. "She is all right, and I've no doubt can explain where she got this note. Wherever it was, you can depend it was not from the dead man's safe. Good-bye, Keith," kissing him. "This note gives us the clue, and before many days are over you will be free, and the murderer of Jacob Lazarus will be in this cell." CHAPTER XXVI. ON THE TRACK. When Eugénie left the prison, she went straight to Naball's office, and finding him in, told all about the wonderful discovery of the veritable five-pound note endorsed in Isaiah's writing. To say that Naball was astonished would be a mild way to state his feelings on receipt of this intelligence. "It's an uncommon piece of luck," he said, looking at the note; "we might have searched for a twelvemonth, and never come across this piece of evidence. I think we'll get to the bottom of things this time. You got it from Kitty Marchurst?" "Yes, I got it yesterday in payment of my salary" Naball whistled softly. "Things look uncommon black against that young woman," he observed thoughtfully. "I didn't half believe that story of hers about Stewart's stealing the diamonds, and now this note turning up in her possession--humph!" "But you don't think she's guilty?" said Eugénie, clasping her hands. "I don't say anything," replied Naball savagely, for the difficulties of this case were beginning to irritate him. "I only say things look black against Caprice--she's as deep as a well." "What are you going to do now?" asked Miss Rainsford in a trembling voice, as she rose to go. The detective placed his hat jauntily on one side of his head, drew on his gloves, then taking his cane, walked to the door of the office, which he he held open for Eugénie to pass through. "What are you going to do now?" she repeated when they were standing in the street. "I'm going down to Toorak," said Naball quietly, "to trace this note, beginning with Kitty Marchurst as the last holder of it; she'll tell lies, but whether she does or not, I'll get to the bottom of this affair. Good-day, Miss Rainsford," and taking off his hat with a flourish, he left her abruptly, and strolled leisurely down the street. Eugénie watched him with eager eyes until he was out of sight, and then turned round to walk home. "Oh, my dear! my dear!" she murmured, "if I can only save you from this terrible danger--but not at the cost of that poor woman's life--oh, not that!" The detective, on his way down to Toorak, went over the case in his own mind, in order to see against whom the evidence was strongest. At last, after considerable cogitation, he came to the conclusion that, after all, Villiers must be the guilty man, and that Kitty knew more about the crime than she chose to tell. "I can't get over Villiers having had that diamond crescent," he thought, looking out of the carriage windows. "She denied it was hers, and then Fenton told me he gave it to her. I wonder if he had anything to do with the affair--humph!--not likely. If she thought it was him, she'd tell at once. Perhaps she really thinks Stewart stole the diamonds. Pish! I don't believe it. She's had a finger in the pie, whoever did it, and this murder is the outcome of the robbery. Well, I'll see if she can account for her possession of this five-pound note--that's the main thing." Kitty Marchurst was at home, and sent a message to the detective that she would see him in a few minutes, so Naball walked up and down the long drawing-room with some impatience. "If she'll only tell the truth," he muttered restlessly; "but I'm getting to doubt her, so that I can't be sure. There's one thing, Keith Stewart's fate rests entirely with her now, so if he saved her child's life, as she says he did, this is the time to prove her gratitude." At this moment the door opened, and Caprice entered. She looked pale and weary, for the trials of the last few months had not been endured without leaving some mark of their passage. Naball did not know whether this haggard-looking woman was guilty or innocent, but he could not help pitying her, so worn-out did she seem. "You are not well," he said when she seated herself. Kitty sighed wearily, and pushed the loose hair off her forehead. "No," she replied listlessly. "I'm getting worn-out over this trouble. It's no good my telling you anything, because you don't believe me. What is the matter now? Have you got further proof of my guilt?" "I don't know," said Naball, coolly producing the five-pound note; "unless you call this proof." "A five-pound note," she said contemptuously. "Well?" "It is a five-pound note," explained Naball smoothly; "but not an ordinary one--in fact, it is one of the notes stolen from Lazarus's safe." "Oh, how do you know that? By a very curious thing. One of the notes placed in the safe on the night of the murder was endorsed by the office-boy with the words 'Back Flat-Iron,' and strange to say the endorsed note has turned up." "And that is it?" "Exactly. Now, do you understand?" Kitty shrugged her shoulders. "I understand that you have secured an excellent piece of evidence, nothing more. Where did you get the note?" "From Miss Rainsford." "From Miss Rainsford!" repeated Kitty in surprise; "but you surely don't suspect--" "No, I don't," interposed the detective; "because she was able to tell me where she got the note from." "Well, I presume she got it from me." "Yes," replied Naball, rather surprised at this cool admission. "She received it yesterday from you." "Oh! then, you think I'm guilty?" "Not if you can tell me where you got the note from." "Certainly I can--from Mortimer--paid to me the day before yesterday." "Your salary?" "Not exactly," answered Kitty; "if it had been, you'd never be able to trace the note further back. No; I was at the theatre in the morning, and found myself short of money, so I asked Mortimer for some. He gave me that five-pound note, and, as he took it, from his waistcoat pocket, I've no doubt he'll be able to recollect from whom he received it." "Why?" "Because Mortimer doesn't carry fivers in his waistcoat pocket generally," said Caprice impatiently, "so he must have put that note there for some special reason. You'd better go and ask him." "Certainly," said Naball, and arose to his feet. "I'm very much obliged to you." "Then you don't think me guilty?" asked Kitty, with a smile. "Upon my word, I don't know what to think," said the detective dismally. "The whole case seems mixed up. I'll tell you when I find the man who can't account for the possession of this fiver." Kitty smiled, and then Naball took his leave, going straight from Toorak to the Bon-Bon Theatre, where he found Mortimer in his sanctum, up to the ears in business, as usual. "Well, Naball," said the manager, looking up sharply, "what's up? Look sharp, I'm awfully busy." "I only want to know where you got this?" asked Naball, giving him the five-pound note. Mortimer took it up, and looked perplexed. "How the deuce should I know; I get so many. Why do you want to know?" "Oh, nothing. I just want to trace the note. Caprice said you gave it to her the day before yesterday." "Eh! did I?" "Yes. You took it from your waistcoat pocket." "Of course; to be sure, she wanted some money. Yes; I kept it apart because it was made money--won it off Malton at euchre." "Malton!" repeated Naball in amazement; "are you sure?" "Yes, quite. You know I'm generally unlucky at cards, and this is about the first fiver I've made, so I kept it just to bring me luck; but Caprice wanted money, so I handed over my luck to her. There's nothing wrong, eh?" "Oh, dear, no," replied Naball; "not the slightest--only some professional business." "Because I shouldn't like to get any poor devil into a row," said Mortimer. "Now, be off with you, I'm busy. Good-day." "Good-day, good-day." Naball departed, curiously perplexed in his feelings. He had never thought of Malton in the light of a possible criminal, and yet it was so very strange that this note should have been traced back to him. Then he remembered the conversation he had overheard between Mrs. Malton and Kitty concerning the embezzlement, when Kitty denied that she had paid the money. "By Jove!" said Naball, a sudden thought striking him, "he was present at that supper, and was in a regular hole for want of money. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he stole those diamonds to replace the money, and his wife's thanking Caprice was all a blind, and then this note--humph!--things look rather fishy, my friend." When he arrived at the Never-say-die Insurance Company Office, he sent in his card to the assistant manager, and in a few minutes was shown into Malton's room, where that individual received him with visible uneasiness. "Well, Naball, and what brings you here?" he asked, watching the detective's face stealthily. "Only a little business, in which I want your help," said Naball, taking the note out of his pocket-book. "Can you tell me where you got that?" Malton's pink-and-white complexion grew a little pale, but he laughed in a forced manner as he glanced at the note. "Got this?" he said. "I can't tell you. Was it ever in my possession?" "It was," asserted Naball. "You gave it to Mortimer the day before yesterday." "Oh, yes, I remember now," said Malton quickly. "He won it off me at cards." "Exactly. Where did you get the note?" Malton shifted uneasily in his seat, and his nether lip twitched uneasily. "I'm afraid I can hardly remember," he murmured, pushing back his chair. Naball's suspicions were now rapidly ripening to certainties. If Malton were innocent, why these signs of agitation? He wriggled and twisted about like an eel, yet never once met the keen eye of the detective. "You'd better remember," said Naball mercilessly, "or it will be the worse for you." "Why?" asked Malton, trying to appear composed. "Because," explained Naball, in a low voice, "that note is one of those stolen by the man who murdered Jacob Lazarus." Malton, with a smothered exclamation, started to his feet, and then, shaking in every limb, sat down again. "No, no," he stammered, "that's absurd. It can't be--I tell you, it can't be." "Oh, but it can be, and it is. I tell you, the note is endorsed 'Back Flat-Iron,' which was done by the office-boy a few moments before the notes were put in the safe by Stewart. They were gone after the murder, so there is no doubt they were taken by the man who committed the crime. I got this note from Miss Rainsford, who received it from Caprice; she, in her turn, got it from Mortimer, and he has referred us to you. Now, where did you get it?" Malton drummed nervously on the table. "I can't tell you," he said in a tremulous voice. "You must." "It's impossible." "I tell you what, sir," said Naball coolly, "if you don't tell, it means trouble for you and the other man." "What other man?" asked Malton shakily. "The man you got this note from." Malton thought for a moment, and then apparently made up his mind. "You saw I was taken aback?" he asked Naball curiously. The detective nodded. "It's because I'm sorry for what I have to tell you--the man I got the note from was Ezra Lazarus." Naball jumped to his feet with a cry. "The dead man's son?" he said. "Yes; the dead man's son," replied Malton slowly. Naball stood for a few minutes, then putting the note in his pocket-book, once more took up his hat, and moved to the door. "Where are you going?" asked Malton, rising. "To see Mr. Ezra Lazarus," said Naball, pausing a moment. "In the meantime, till I have certain proof of his guilt, you hold your tongue." And he walked out, leaving Malton standing at his desk as if turned into stone. Naball, on his way to the newspaper office, rapidly ran over in his own mind all the details of the case against Ezra. "His father wouldn't give him any money, and he wanted to get married to that girl; father and son had a quarrel on the day preceding the murder; he was at the Bon-Bon on that night, and took Caprice downstairs to her carriage; she gave him Stewart's coat to take back to him again; in that coat was the knife found by Villiers under the window; she left the theatre long before Stewart,--where did he go? to his office, or--good heavens! if it should turn out to be true--" Ezra received him, looking rather knocked up, but his face, though pale, was quite placid, and Naball wondered how a man guilty of such a terrible crime as parricide could be so calm. "You look tired," he said, taking a seat. "I am tired," admitted Ezra wearily. "I've been busy with my father's affairs." "Humph!" thought Naball; "counting his gains, I suppose." "Any fresh development of the case?" asked Ezra. "Yes," said Naball solemnly. "I received this note to-day, and traced it back to Malton; he says it was given to him by you." Ezra examined the note with great interest, and on turning it over saw the fatal words endorsed. He looked up quickly to Naball. "This is one of the notes that were stolen?" he asked. "Yes," replied Naball; "and Malton said it was given to him by you." "By me!" repeated Ezra in amazement. "How on earth could I come across this note?" "That's what I want to find out," said Naball. Ezra looked at him for a moment, then the whole situation seemed to burst on him, and with a stifled groan the unhappy young man fell back into his chair, burying his face in his hands. "Good God!" he cried, "you don't suspect me of killing my father?" "If you are innocent, you can explain where you got the note." "I cannot--I cannot," cried Ezra feverishly. "I had to pay some money to Malton, and did so last week. There were some five-pound notes among that money, but I cannot tell where this particular one came from." "Where did you get the money?" asked Naball. "From the Hibernian Bank." "Oh, but if you had to pay Malton money, why did you not do so by cheque?" "Because I wanted some money myself, and did not care about drawing two cheques, so I drew one, covering what I owed to him and a little over." "Humph!" Naball thought a moment. "You are sure of this?" "Yes; it's the only way I can account for having the note. Whoever killed my father, must have paid it into the bank, and it came round to me by some fatality." "Where were you on the night of the murder?" "At the Bon-Bon Theatre." "Afterwards?" "At this office." "You can prove an _alibi?_" "I'm afraid I can't. I was all alone." "Look here, Mr. Lazarus," said Naball in a kind tone, "I must say things look black against you; but I'm not satisfied yet about the real criminal. To-day is Saturday, so I'll go to the bank the first thing on Monday, and find out what I can. There's so many suspected of this business, that one more or less don't matter." Ezra groaned. "You don't think I'm guilty?" he asked imploringly. Naball looked keenly at him. "No; I believe you innocent," he replied abruptly. CHAPTER XXVII. MEG PROVES USEFUL. The next day was Sunday, and Caprice, quite worn-out with the excitement of the week and the strain of the performances of "Faust Upset," was lying in bed. The burlesque had become a great success, but the papers, with their usual kindly generosity towards authors, declared that it was due not so much to the intrinsic merit of the work, as to the wonderfully clever acting of Caprice. Last night, however, she had acted badly, going through her part with mechanical precision, but without that dash which usually characterised her performance. The worry of this murder case, anxiety for the future of her child, and pity for the unfortunate young man now in prison, had all wrought on her nerves, so that she felt overcome with extreme lassitude, and lay supinely in bed, with half-closed eyes, incapable of the slightest exertion. From this state of tranquillity she was aroused by the entrance of Eugénie, who was also looking pale and worn. She had learned all about the tracing of the five-pound note to Ezra, and had now come to tell Kitty about it. The room was in a kind of semi-darkness, as all the blinds had been pulled down to keep out the dazzling sunlight, and the atmosphere was permeated by the smell of some pungent scent which Kitty had been using to bathe her aching head. Eugénie came straight to the bed, and bent over it, on which Kitty opened her eyes and smiled faintly. "Oh, is it you, Miss Rainsford?" she said drowsily. "I did not expect you to-day." "No!" replied Eugénie. "I came to tell you all about that five-pound note; but I'm sorry to find you so ill." "I'm worn-out," said Kitty fretfully. "All the worry and trouble of my earlier years are beginning to tell on me, and the anxiety of this case is the climax. I believe I'll die soon, and I don't much care, for I have your promise about the child." "You have!--my solemn promise." "Thank you. I don't mind when I die. My life has been a very unhappy one. I've had more than my share of sorrow, and now I would like to go to sleep, and slumber on--on for ever." She finished the sentence in a sleepy tone, then suddenly recollecting why Eugénie had come down, she opened her eyes wide, and spoke briskly. "Well, what about this five-pound note? To whom did it originally belong?" "I'd better go through the whole history," said Eugénie slowly. "I received it from you." "Exactly," interrupted Caprice, raising herself on her elbow; "and I got it from Mortimer. Who gave it to him?" "Mr. Malton, for a gambling debt." "Malton," repeated Kitty vivaciously. "Why, is he--did they--" "Suspect him of the murder. No; because he says he got the note from Ezra Lazarus, and he cannot tell from whom he received it." Kitty was wide awake by this time, and sitting up in bed, pushed the fair curls off her forehead. "But, my dear," she said rapidly, "surely they don't suspect that poor young man of murdering his father?" "Not exactly suspect him," observed Eugénie; "but, you see, Mr. Lazarus cannot account for the possession of that particular note, so that makes things look bad against him." "I don't see why," said Caprice impatiently. "I'm sure I couldn't account for every individual five-pound note I receive--it's absurd;--is that all the case they have against him?" "I think so; but Mr. Naball says--" "Says!" interrupted Kitty impatiently; "Naball's a fool. I often heard what a clever detective he was, but I'm afraid I can't see it. He's mismanaged the whole of this case shamefully. Why he suspects every one all round on the slightest suspicion: first he thought it was me, because I was at Lazarus's place on that night; then he swore it was Villiers, because he found the knife Meg gave Mr. Stewart; then poor Mr. Stewart is arrested simply because he cannot prove an alibi. I daresay, when he found Malton had the note, he suspected him, and now, I'll be bound, he has firmly settled in his own mind that Ezra Lazarus killed his own father--pish! My dear, I tell you again Naball's a fool." "That may be," observed the other woman bitterly; "but he's a fool on whose folly Keith's life depends." "Not a bit of it," said Caprice cheerfully; "we'll find some way to save him yet. The only evidence against him is that knife, and I don't believe it was in his possession at the Bon-Bon Theatre." "Why not?" "Because no one could have taken it out of his overcoat pocket there. I took the coat downstairs by mistake, but I'm sure I never abstracted the knife. Ezra Lazarus took it back, and I'll swear, in spite of Mr. Naball, he didn't take it. It's not likely Mortimer would go fiddling in another man's pockets, so I believe the knife was taken from the coat pocket, without his knowledge, at the club." "But who took it, and how?" asked Eugénie, with great interest. "My dear," replied Kitty, with a shrug, "how do I know. Perhaps, after receiving back the knife from Fenton, and putting it in his pocket, he hung his coat up again; in that case, anyone who saw him put the knife away could have stolen it." "But who would do so?" "That's what our clever Naball ought to find out," said Caprice, with a disdainful smile, "only he's such an idiot. I tell you whom I suspect--mind you, it's only suspicion--and yet appearances are quite as black against him as any one else." "Who is it?" "Malton." "Malton!" repeated Eugénie, starting up. "None other," said Kitty coolly. "He was at the club, and I know was hard up for money. His wife came to me one day, and told me he had embezzled a lot of money at his office. Then, after the crime, she came to me, and thanked me for paying it. I never did so. Fenton said he did, but I doubt it, as there isn't much of the philanthropist about him, so the only one who could have replaced the money was Malton himself. How? Well, easily enough. He was at the club--saw Keith's knife, and, knowing he was Lazarus's clerk, the idea flashed across his mind of murdering the old man with the knife, and dropping it about, so as to throw suspicion on Stewart. So, by some means, I don't know how, he obtains the knife before Stewart leaves the club, commits the crime, gets the money, circulates the notes, and when taxed with the possession of a marked one, says he got it from Ezra Lazarus--very weak, my dear, very weak indeed. Ezra says he paid him some money, so naturally doesn't know each individual note; so such a thing favours Mr. Malton's little plan. So there you are, my dear. I've made up a complete case against Malton, and quite as feasible as any of Naball's theories. Upon my word," said Kitty gaily, "I ought to have been a detective." Eugénie was walking to and fro hurriedly. "If this is so, he ought to be arrested," she said quickly. "Then go and tell Naball, my dear," said Kitty in a mocking voice. "He'll arrest any one on suspicion. I wonder half the population of Melbourne aren't in jail, charged with the murder. Oh, Naball's a brilliant man! He says the man who committed the murder stole my diamonds--pish!" "And you say Keith stole them," said Eugénie reproachfully, "therefore--" "Therefore the lesser crime includes the greater," finished Kitty coolly. "No, my dear, I don't believe he is a murderer; but as to the diamonds, what am I to think after what Meg told me?" "Meg! Meg!" said that young person, dancing into the room, holding a disreputable doll in her arms, "mumsey want Meg?" "Yes," said Kitty, as Meg came to the bedside. "Come up here, dear, and tell mumsey how you are." "Meg is quite well, and so is Meg's daughter," holding out the doll for Kitty to kiss; "but, mumsey, why is the lady so sad?" Eugénie, who had remained silent since Kitty's speech, now came forward and kissed the child. "I'm not sad, dear," she said quietly, taking her seat by the bed, "only I want Meg to tell me something." Meg nodded. "A fairy tale?" she asked sedately. Kitty laughed, though she looked anxious. "No, my dear, not a fairy tale," she said, smoothing the child's hair; "mumsey wants you to tell the story of the man who got out of the window." "My Mr. Keith," said Meg at once. Kitty glanced at Eugénie, who sat with bowed head, gazing steadfastly at her hands. "You see," she observed with a sigh, "the child says it was Mr. Keith." Miss Rainsford re-echoed the sigh, then looked at Meg. "Meg, dear," she said in her soft, persuasive voice, "come here, dear, and sit on my knee." Meg, nothing loth, scrambled down off the bed, and soon established herself on Eugénie's lap, where she sat shaking her auburn curls. Kitty glanced affectionately at the serious little face, and picked up her doll, which was lying on the counterpane. "Now, Meg," she said gaily, "you tell Miss Rainsford the story of the man and the window. I'll play with this." "Meg's daughter," observed Meg reprovingly. "Yes, Meg's daughter," repeated Kitty with a smile. "Come, Meg," said Eugénie, smoothing the child's hair, "tell me all about the man." "It was my Mr. Keith, you know," began Meg, resting her cheek against Eugénie's breast, "He took me upstairs--'cause I was so sleepy--an' he put me to bed, an' then I sleeped right off." "And how long did you sleep, dear?" asked Eugénie. "Oh, a minute," said Meg, "just a minute; then I didn't feel sleepy, and opened my eyes wide--quite wide--as wide as this," lifting up her face in confirmation, "and Mr. Keith, he was getting out of the window." "How do you know it was Mr. Keith?" asked Eugénie quickly, "'Cause he put me in bed," said Meg wisely, "and he was there all the time." "He didn't speak to you when he was near the window?" "No; he got out, and tumbled. I laughed when he tumbled," finished Meg triumphantly; "then I sleeped again, right off." Eugénie put the girl down off her knee, and turned to Kitty. "I believe Keith did put the child to bed," she said quietly, "but I think she must have slept for some time, and that the man she saw getting out of the window was some one else; of course, being awakened by the noise, she would only think she had slept a minute." "A minute, a minute," repeated Meg, who had climbed back on to the bed, and was jumping the doll up and down. "But who could the second man have been?" asked Kitty, perplexed. "You know Naball's theory that the man who stole the diamonds committed the murder," said Eugénie. "You think Malton is guilty of the murder, why not of the robbery also? He was present at the supper-party, and knew where the jewels were kept." Kitty drew her brows together and was about to speak, when Meg held up her doll for inspection. "Look at the locket," she said triumphantly; "it's like Bliggings's locket--all gold." Kitty smiled, and touched the so-called locket, which was in reality part of a gold sleeve-link, and was tied round the neck of the doll with a bit of cotton. "Who gave you this?" she said. "Bliggings?" "No; Meg found it herself, here, after the man had got out of the window." Eugénie gave a cry, and started up, but Kitty in a moment had seized the doll, and wrenched off the gold link which Meg called the locket. "When did you find this, Meg?" she asked the child in a tone of suppressed excitement. "After the man went out of the window," said Meg proudly. "In the dark?" asked her mother. "No, when Meg was dressed, and the sun was shining," said Meg, trying to get back the locket. "Wait a moment, dear," said Kitty, pushing the child away. "Miss Rainsford, do you know what this link means?" "I half guess," faltered Eugénie, clasping her hands. "Then you guess right," cried Kitty, raising herself on her elbow. "It means that the man who stole the jewels dropped this link, and I know who he is, because I gave it to him myself." "Keith?" said Eugénie faintly. "Keith!" repeated Caprice in a tone of scorn. "No; not Keith, whom I have suspected wrongfully all these months, but my very good friend, Hiram J. Fenton." "Fenton!" echoed Eugénie in surprise. "Yes; he must have committed the crime," said Kitty in anger, grinding her teeth. "The coward, he knew I suspected Keith, and let another man bear the stigma of his crime. I spared Keith when I thought him guilty, because he saved my child's life; but I'll not spare Fenton now I know he is a thief." "What will you do?" asked Eugénie quickly. "What will I do!" cried Caprice, with a devilish light shining in her beautiful eyes. "I'll put him in prison--ring the bell for pen, ink, and paper--I'll write him to come down here to-night to see me; and when he comes, I'll have Naball waiting to arrest him." "But Keith?" faltered Eugénie. "As for Keith," said Caprice, throwing herself back in the bed, "I'm sure he'll soon be free, for it's my belief that Fenton stole the diamonds, but was too cowardly to commit a murder. No; he did not do it himself, but he got some one else to do it." "And that some one?" cried Eugénie. "Is Evan Malton," said Caprice solemnly. CHAPTER XXVIII. MALTON MAKES A DISCOVERY. Evan Malton had a house in Carlton, not a very fashionable locality certainly, but the residence of the assistant manager was a comfortable one. His wife and child were invariably to be found at home, but Malton himself was always away--either at his club, the theatre, or at some dance. He was one of those weak men who can deny themselves nothing, and kept his wife and child stinted for money, while he spent his income on himself. But with such tastes as he possessed, his income did not go very far, so in a moment of weakness he embezzled money in order to gratify his desires. When he told his wife what he had done, the news came like a thunder-clap on her. She knew her husband was weak, pleasure-loving and idle, but she never dreamt he could be a criminal. With the desire of a woman to find excuses for the conduct of a man she loved, Mrs. Malton thought that his crime was due to the evil influence of Kitty Marchurst; hence her visit and appeal to the actress. It seemed to have been successful, for the money had been replaced, though Kitty denied having paid it, and Mrs. Malton breathed freely. Her husband loved her in a kind of a way; he did not mind being unfaithful himself, but he would have been bitterly angered had he found her following his example. This type of husband is not uncommon; he likes to be a butterfly abroad, to lead a man-of-the-world existence, neglecting his home; yet he always expects on his return to find a hearty welcome and a loving-wife. Of course, as Mrs. Malton was a handsome woman, with a neglectful husband, the inevitable event happened, and Fenton, the bosom friend of the husband, fell in love with the solitary wife. She repelled his advances proudly, as she really loved her husband; but the effect of long months of neglect were beginning to tell on her, and she asked herself bitterly if it was worth while for her to remain faithful to a husband who neglected her. On the Sunday afternoon following the interview Malton had with Naball, she sat down in her drawing-room, idly watching the child playing at her feet. Malton had come home in a fearful temper the night before, and had been in bed all Sunday. Dinner had been early, and she had left him in the dining-room, with a scowling face, evidently drinking more than was good for him. "What is the use of trying to make his life happy?" she said to herself with a sneer. "He cares no more for me than he does for the child. If I were to allow his dearest friend to betray me, I don't believe he would care a fig about it." While she was thus talking, the door opened, and her husband came into the room, with a sullen look on his face. He was, as she saw, in a temper, and ready for a domestic battle; but, determined not to give him a chance, she sat in her chair in silent disdain. "Well," he said, throwing himself on the sofa, "haven't you got a word to say for yourself?" "What can I say?" she replied listlessly. "Anything! Don't sit there like a cursed sphynx. How do you expect a man to come home when he finds things so disagreeable?" She looked at him scornfully. "You find things disagreeable," she said slowly. "You, who have neglected me ever since our marriage; who have passed your time with actresses and betting men; you, who--" "Go to the devil," said Malton sulkily, cutting short her catalogue of his vices. "I don't want you to preach. I'll go where I like, and do what I like." "Yet you deny me the right to do the same." "What do you mean?" "Mean!" she cried, rising to her feet; "mean that I'm tired of this sordid way of living. I'm tired of seeing you at the beck and call of every woman except your wife. I have tried to do my duty by you and the child, yet you neglect me for others. You squander your honestly earned money, and then embezzle thousands of pounds. I tell you, I'm sick of this life, Evan Malton; and if you don't take care, I'll make a change." He listened in amazement to this tirade coming from his meek wife, then, with a coarse laugh, flung himself back on the sofa. "You'll make a change!" he said, with a sneer. "You--I suppose that means bolting with another man--you do, my lady, and I'll kill you and your lover as well." "My lover, as you call him, could break your neck easily," she said contemptuously. "Then you have a lover!" he cried, starting to his feet in a transport of fury. "You tell me _that_--you a wife and a mother--in the presence of our child." Without a word, she touched the bell, and a maid-servant appeared. Mrs. Malton pointed to the child. "Take her away," she said coldly, and when the door closed again, she turned once more to her husband. "Now that the child is away," she said calmly, "I do tell you I have a would-be lover. Stay," she cried, holding up her hand, "I said a would-be lover. Had I been as careless of your honour as you have been of mine, I would not now be living with you." Evan Malton listened in dogged silence, and then burst out into a torrent of words. "Ah! I knew it would be so--curse you! What woman was ever satisfied with a husband?" "Yes, and such a husband as you have been," she said sarcastically. He stepped forward, with an oath, to strike her, then restraining himself by an effort, said in a harsh voice,-- "Tell me his name." Mrs. Malton walked over to a writing-desk, unlocked it, and taking from thence a bundle of letters, flung them on the floor before him. "You'll find all about him there." Malton bent down, picked up the letters, and staggered back, with a cry, as he recognised the writing. "My God! Fenton!" he cried. "Exactly," she said coolly. "Your dear friend Fenton, who came to me with words of love on his lips, and lies in his heart, to get me to elope with him--in the last letter, you see, he asked me to go with him to Valparaiso." "Oh, did he?" muttered Malton vindictively; "and you were going, I suppose?" "If I had been going," she replied, with grave scorn, "I would not now be here, for he leaves for Valparaiso to-night." "To-night!" "Yes. I presume he's followed your example, and embezzled money. At all events, I refused his offer, and left him as I now leave you, Evan Malton, with the hope that this discovery may teach you a lesson." "Where are you going?" he cried hoarsely, as she moved towards the door. She turned with a cold smile. "I am going to our child; and you--" "And I," he said vindictively, "I'm going to Hiram Fenton's house, to give him back those letters. He'll go to Valparaiso will he? No, he won't. To-night, the police shall know all." "All what?" his wife cried in sudden terror. "All about the diamond robbery and the Russell Street murder." She shrank back from him with a cry; but he came straight to the door, and taking her by the arm, flung her brutally on the floor. "You lie there," he hissed out. "I'll deal with him first, and afterwards with you." She heard the door close, and knew that he had left the house: then, gathering herself up slowly and painfully, she went to the chamber of her child, and sank on her knees beside the cot. Meanwhile, Malton, with his brain on fire, his heart beating with jealous rage, and the bundle of letters in his breast-pocket, was rapidly walking down the hill, intending to go to Fenton's rooms and tax him with his treachery. It was partly on this account that he wished to see him; but there was also a more serious cause, for in the event of Fenton bolting, as he intended to do, things would be very awkward for his assistant manager. "Curse him!" muttered Malton as he hailed a hansom, and told the man to drive to East Melbourne. "Does he think I'm such a fool as to let him go now? No, no, my boy; we've floated together for a good time, and, by Jove! we'll sink together." Like all weak men, he was unable to restrain his temper, and was now working himself up into a state of fury which boded ill for the peace of Mr. Fenton. Fast as the cab was rolling along, it seemed hours to the impatient man, and it was with a cry of joy that he jumped out at Fenton's door, keeping the hansom waiting in case he should find the American absent. The woman who opened the door told him that Mr. Fenton had gone out about half-an-hour ago, with a black bag in his hand, and had told her he was going to see some friends. "Curse the man," groaned Malton, who saw what this meant at once, "he's off; I must follow---but where? I don't suppose he'd leave his address in his room, but I'll see if I can find anything there." "Can I give him any message, sir?" asked the woman, who was still holding the door open. "Yes; that is, I'll write him a note; show me up to his sitting-room." "Yes, sir," and in a few minutes Malton found himself alone in the room so lately occupied by his enemy. He sat down at the writing-table till the woman closed the door, then springing to his feet, began to examine the desk with feverish energy to see if Mr. Fenton had left any trace as to his whereabouts. There was a newspaper lying on a small table near, and Malton, seizing this, looked at the shipping announcements to see by what boat Fenton intended to go to South America. "He's certain to go there," he said, as he ran his finger eagerly down the column, "or he wouldn't have told my wife. Here, oh, here it is--The 'Don Pedro,' for Valparaiso, at eight, Monday morning. He's going by that boat, now," he went on, putting down the paper, and pulling out his watch; "it's about six o'clock--why did he leave to-night, eh? I suppose he means to go on board, so as to avoid suspicion by going so early in the morning. He can't have gone back to see my wife, or she would have told me, for I'll swear she's true. Confound him, where can he have gone?" He turned over the papers on the desk in feverish eagerness, as if he expected to find an address left for him, when suddenly, slipped in between the sheets of the blotting-pad, he found a note in Caprice's handwriting asking Fenton to come down to Toorak on that night. Melton struck a blow on the desk with his fist when he read this. "He's gone there, I'll swear," he cried, putting the letter in his pocket. "It was only because Caprice laughed at him that he made love to my wife. Now she's whistled him back, he'll try and get her to go off with him to Valparaiso. Ah, Hiram Fenton, you're not off yet, and never will be--sink or swim together, my boy--sink or swim together." He called the woman, gave her a short note for Fenton, in order to avert suspicion, then getting into the cab once more, told the man to drive to Toorak as quickly as possible. "If I don't find you there, my friend," he muttered angrily, "I'll go straight down to the 'Don Pedro' at Sandridge. You won't escape me--sink or swim together, sink or swim together." The evening sky was overcast with gloomy clouds, between the rifts of which could be seen the sharp, clear light of the sky, and then it began to rain, a tropical downpour which flooded the streets and turned the gutters to miniature torrents; a vivid flash of lightning flare in the sky, and the white face of the man in the hansom could be seen for a moment; then sounded a deep roll of thunder, as if warning Hiram Fenton that his friend and victim was on his track. CHAPTER XXIX. LIGHT AT LAST. It was certainly a remarkable thing that when Kitty had prepared her trap for Fenton just on the eve of his going away, by having Naball in hiding to arrest him, that Malton, the only man who could effectually accuse the American, should also have come down to Toorak in the nick of time. But, then, coincidences do happen in real life as well as in novels; and had Kitty carefully constructed the whole scene with an eye to dramatic effect, it could hardly have turned out better. Eugénie sat with the actress in the drawing-room, waiting for the arrival of Fenton, and talking to Naball, who was seated near them. The detective had listened to all with the keenest interest, but, much to Kitty's disgust, seemed doubtful of the American's guilt. "You were quick enough in accusing other people," she said angrily, "myself among the number, and now, when I show you plain proof, you disbelieve." "I don't think the proof is strong enough, that's all," replied Naball drily. "We have only the word of a child that she picked up the link in the bedroom." "Meg never tells falsehoods," interposed Eugénie quickly. "I daresay not," he replied coolly. "However, Fenton may have lost this link before." "No, he didn't," said Caprice decisively. "He had the links on when he was at supper. I saw them, and I ought to know, because I gave them to him myself." "But why should Fenton steal your diamonds? He's got lots of money," argued Naball, who was rather annoyed at Kitty finding out more than he had. "I don't know why he should," retorted the actress; "it's not my business or yours to discover motives--all I know is, he did it, and I'm going to have him arrested." "Perhaps he'll be suspicious, and won't come." "Oh yes, he will. He thinks I believe Stewart to be the thief, and as to coming, I can whistle him back at any moment. Hark!" as a ring came at the door. "There he is; get behind that screen. Miss Rainsford, you go into the next room till I call." Naball promptly did as he was told, so did Eugénie, and when Fenton entered the room, he only found Kitty, calmly seated beside a little table, reading a book. Fenton was looking wonderfully well, but with a watchful look on his face, as if he feared discovery. He had a good sum of money with him, his passage to Valparaiso, and never for a moment thought that he was on the edge of an abyss. Of course, Kitty did not know he was about to abscond, and never thought how near her prey had escaped. She received him quietly, with friendly interest, and Fenton, pulling a chair next to hers, began to talk eagerly, never dreaming that an officer of the law was listening to every word. Not only that, but outside, crouching on the verandah, was a dark figure, with a livid face, listening to what the man inside was saying. Hiram Fenton, utterly unconscious, was surrounded on all sides by his enemies, and went on telling all his plans to Kitty, never thinking how near he was to the felon's dock from which he was flying. "And what did you want to see me about!" asked Fenton, taking Caprice's hand. "Nothing in particular," she replied carelessly; "the fact is, I haven't seen you for such a long time." "Then you do care for me a little?" Caprice shrugged her shoulders. "As much as I do for any man; but I didn't ask you to come here to make love. I want to talk seriously about giving up the stage." She was leading him on so that he should betray himself to the detective, and he walked straight into the trap. "Oh, you're tired of acting," said Fenton thoughtfully. "Yes; and of Melbourne. I want to go away." Fenton started, and wondered if she knew he was going away also. He thought for a moment, and then replied,-- "Then, why not come with me?" "With you!" cried Kitty derisively. "What about Mrs. Malton?" "I tell you, I don't care two straws about Mrs. Malton," he rejoined angrily. "I was only amusing myself with her." Amusing himself! The man outside ground his teeth together in anger, and clutched the packet of letters fiercely. "And what about your dear friend--her husband?" "Oh, Malton," said Fenton carelessly. "I don't know, nor do I care; he was a very useful man to me for a time. But, now, I'm off." "Off!--where?" "To Valparaiso. Yes, I'm sick of Australia, so I sail to-morrow morning for South America. Will you come with me, Kitty?" Kitty looked doubtful. "I don't know. We have no money." "I have plenty. I've arranged all that, and if there's a row, my dear friend Malton will have to bear it. But now, Kitty, I've told you all, you must come with me. We can live a delightful life in South America. I know it well, and some of the places are Paradises. Come, say you'll come to-night." He put his arms round her, and pressed a kiss on her lips. She shuddered at the impure caress, then pushing him away, arose to her feet. "Don't touch me," she said harshly, "you--you thief!" In a moment Fenton was on his feet, with an apprehensive look on his face. "Thief! thief!" he cried fiercely; "what do you mean?" "Mean," she said, turning on him like a tiger, "that I know now who stole my diamonds, Mr. Hiram Fenton." "Do you accuse me?" he asked, with a pale face, gripping her wrist. "Yes, I do," said Kitty, wrenching her wrist away, "and I've got a proof--this broken sleeve-link, dropped by you in my room on the night of the robbery." "It's a lie!" "It's true! I accuse you of stealing my diamonds. Detective Naball, arrest that man." Fenton started as Naball stepped out from behind the screen, and then folded his arms, with an evil smile. "So!" he said coolly, "this is a trap, I see; but I'm not to be caught in it. You say I stole your diamonds?" "I do," said Kitty boldly. "And your proof is that you picked up a broken sleeve-link?" "Yes." "Then, Mr. Detective," said Fenton, holding out both his wrists to Naball, "if you examine these, you will see neither of the links are broken." Naball, with an ejaculation of surprise, examined both the links, and found what he said was correct--neither of the sleeve-links were broken. "Have you not made a mistake?" he said to Caprice. "No, I have not," she replied coolly. "When he found he had lost a sleeve-link, he got another made, in order to avert suspicion. I say Hiram Fenton stole my diamonds, and I give him in charge." Naball stepped forward, but the American, who was now uneasy at the turn affairs had taken, waved him back. "Wait a moment," he said quickly; "I deny the charge, and will prove it false to-morrow." Kitty laughed derisively. "By which time you will be on your way to Valparaiso. No, I'm not going to let you go." "Neither am I," said Naball decisively. "I arrest you on this charge of robbery now," and he laid his hand on the shoulder of the American. In a moment Fenton twisted himself away, and dexterously throwing Naball on the ground, darted towards one of the French windows. "Not so fast, my friend," he said sneeringly, while Naball, half-stunned, was picking himself up; "guess I'll beat you this time. I care nothing for you nor that she-devil there. You can prove nothing." Naball made a bound forward, but with a mocking laugh Fenton was about to step lightly through the window, when he was dashed violently back into Naball's arms, and Malton, pale as death sprang into the room. "Hold him," he cried, clutching Fenton, who was too much astonished to make any resistance. "Don't let him go. He's guilty--I can prove it." Eugénie had hurried into the room, attracted by the noise, and Kitty was standing near her, the two women clinging together for protection. Naball held Fenton firmly, while Malton, in a frenzy of rage, spoke rapidly. "He is guilty of the robbery," he shrieked, menacing Fenton with his fists. "He embezzled money with me, and had it been found out, we would both have been put in prison. He stole the diamonds on the night of the supper, by going upstairs to your room, and then leaving by the window, so as to make people think it was a burglary." "A cursed lie!" growled Fenton, making an effort to shake Naball off. "No, it isn't," cried Malton furiously. "Villiers can prove it. You met him as you were coming round the house, and gave him some diamonds to make him hold his tongue." "Oh, the crescent!" cried Naball. "Yes, yes; and then he sold the diamonds to old Lazarus, and afterwards murdered him. Yes, he killed Jacob Lazarus!" Fenton's nostrils dilated, he drew a deep breath, and gave a cry of anger; but Malton went on speaking rapidly. "I got that note not from Ezra Lazarus, but from Fenton, and lied to shield him; but now, when I find out he makes love to my wife, I'll do anything to hang him. See, these letters--your cursed letters," flinging them on the ground before Fenton. "You liar, thief, murderer, you're done for at last!" "Not yet!" yelled Fenton, and with a sudden effort he flung Naball off, and dashed for the window, but Malton sprang on him like a wild cat, and they both rolled on the floor. Naball jumped up, and went to Malton's help, when suddenly the American, with a supreme effort, wrenched himself clear of them, and ran once more for the window. Seeing this, Kitty, who had remained a passive spectator, tried to stop him, but with an oath he hurled her from him, and she, falling against a table, knocked it over, and fell senseless on the ground. Fenton, with a cry of anger, dashed through the window, and disappeared into the darkness. But, quick as he was, Malton was quicker; for seeing his enemy escape him, he also sprang through the window, and gave chase. Naball, breathless, and covered in blood, was about to go also, when a cry from Eugénie stopped him. The girl was kneeling down beside Kitty, while the frightened servants crowded in at the door. "Oh, she is dead! dead!" cried Eugénie, looking down at the still face. "No; she can't be. Brandy--bring some brandy!" A servant entered with the brandy, and Eugénie, filling a glass, forced some of the liquid between Kitty's clenched teeth. Naball also took a glass, as he was worn-out with the struggle, then, hastily putting on his hat, went out, leaving Kitty lying, to all appearances dead, in Eugénie's arms. Meanwhile, Malton was close on the heels of the American, who had cleared out by the gate, and was making for the railway station. There were few people about; but the spectacle of two men racing bare-headed soon brought a crowd around. Fenton, with deep curses, sped on through the driving rain, and at last flew on to the platform, followed by Malton, who gasped out,-- "Seize him! Murderer! murderer!" The station-master, a porter, and some passengers who were waiting, all sprang forward at this; so Fenton, seeing himself surrounded, gave one yell of rage, and, jumping on the line, ran along. "My God!" cried the station-master, "the train is coming down; he will be killed." He tried to hold Malton, who was mad with anger at seeing his prey escape him, and, foaming with anger, wrenched himself away. "You'll be killed!" cried the porter; but Malton, with a hoarse cry, sprang on to the line, and sped after Fenton through the driving rain. It was pitch dark, and the rain swept along in slanting sheets, through which gleamed the red and green of the signals. Malton, only actuated by a mad desire to seize Fenton, staggered blindly over the sleepers, stumbling at every step. Suddenly he heard the hard breathing of the man he was pursuing, and the foremost figure loomed up dark and misshapen in the thick night. They were now near the railway bridge which crosses the Yarra-Yarra at this point, and the steady sweep of the river could be heard as it flowed against the iron girders. Fenton, hearing some one close behind him, made a bound forwards, then fell on the line, with a shriek of despair. In a moment Malton was on him, and the two men rolled on the line, fighting like devils. "Curse you!" hissed Malton, putting his knee on Fenton's chest, "I'll kill you!--I'll kill you!" And he dashed Fenton's head against the iron rails. The American, in despair, flung up his hands, and caught Malton round the neck. Once more they fought, wrapped in a deadly embrace, when suddenly they felt the bridge vibrate, and, even in their struggle, saw rapidly approaching, through the darkness the light of the down train. Malton, with a cry of horror, tried to release himself from Fenton's grip, but the American held him tight, and in another moment the train, with a roar, was on the bridge, and over their bodies. One hoarse yell, and all was over. Evan Malton and Hiram Fenton were torn to pieces under the cruel wheels. CHAPTER XXX. EXIT KITTY MARCHURST. So this was the end of it all. The criminal, guilty of the two crimes which had agitated Melbourne for so many months, turned out to be the respected manager of The Never-say-die Insurance Company. After the discovery of his guilt, the affairs of the company were examined, and found to be in a terrible state of confusion. Fenton, aided by Malton, had embezzled large sums of money, and so carefully manipulated the accounts that their defalcations had never been noticed. It was true that once they were on the verge of discovery unless some of the money was paid back, and this had been accomplished by the robbery of Kitty Marchurst's diamonds. As the two guilty men were dead, the only man who knew anything about the affair was Mr. Villiers, who soon found things made so warm for him that he confessed all he knew about the crime. It appeared that, on the night of the supper, Fenton was in great straits for want of money to replace that embezzled by himself and Malton. Hearing Kitty state where she kept her diamonds, he determined to steal them if he could do so with safety. In going to the drawing-room, he saw Stewart descending the stairs, and, as the young man told him he had been in Kitty's room putting the child to bed, he thought he could steal the jewels on that night, and let Stewart bear the blame. With this idea, he went upstairs, took the diamonds from their place, and, in order to make things doubly secure, should his idea of implicating Stewart fail, he got out of the window, and clambered down, so as to show that the house had been burglariously entered. In stealing round to the front of the house, he met Villiers, who had seen all, and, in order to make him hold his tongue, had given him the small diamond crescent which Naball secured in Little Bourke Street. Of course, Kitty would not prosecute Keith, as he had saved her child's life; and it was his security in this belief that caused Fenton to urge on the detective. About the murder, Villiers, as a matter of fact, knew very little; but when Naball said that the man who stole the diamonds also committed the crime, he went to Fenton, and taxed him with it. Fenton, at first, indignantly denied the accusation, but ultimately confessed to Villiers that he had done so. After giving back Keith his knife at the club, he had seen him hang up his coat, and dexterously extracted the weapon therefrom unknown to the owner. Then he went to Russell Street and committed the crime, in reality to gain possession of the diamonds, thinking they were in the safe, as he did not know that Lazarus had sent them to Amsterdam. Therefore, the whole mystery was cleared up; and after making his confession, Villiers found public opinion so much against him, that he left the colony, and disappeared, no one knew where. The dead bodies of the American and Malton were found on the railway line, and, after an inquiry had been made, were duly buried. Mrs. Malton went back to live with her father, and shortly afterwards married again. Stewart was released from prison and became quite the hero of the hour, as every one sympathised with him for the way in which he had been treated. Eugénie told him all about her accession to fortune, and they agreed to get married and go to Europe. Ezra, also, now that he was wealthy, turned Benedict, and was united to Rachel a short time after his father's death. "Faust Upset" ran for some time, but was ultimately withdrawn, as the part of Miss Mephistopheles was taken by another woman, and she failed to draw the public. But Caprice? Ah! poor woman, she was dying. In the struggle with Fenton, she had fallen in a perilous position, and had so injured her spine, that there was no hope of recovery. It was on a Tuesday evening, and poor, wicked Kitty was lying in bed, with her weary eyes fixed on Meg, who was seated on Eugénie's lap, rather puzzled by the whole affair. Keith and Ezra were also present, in deference to Kitty's desire, as she wanted to formally give Meg over to Eugénie to bring her up. All the legal formalities had been gone through, and now they were waiting for the end--alas! it was not very far off. "Do you feel easier, dear?" asked Eugénie, gently bending over the bed. "Yes," replied Kitty in a slow, tired voice. "Better now; it will soon be over. You--you will look after my child?" "I promise you, I will," said Eugénie fervently. "Would you like to see a minister?" Kitty smiled with a touch of her old cynicism, and then her eyes filled with tears. "A minister, yes," she said in a faltering voice. "God help me! and I was a minister's daughter. Look at me now, fallen and degraded, dying, with my life before me, and glad--yes, glad to die." In obedience to a sign from Eugénie, Keith had slipped out of the room in order to bring the clergyman, and Kitty lay quiet, with the clear light of the evening shining on her pale face. "Give me my child," she said at length, and then, as she took Meg to her breast and kissed her, she wept bitterly. "God bless you, my darling," she sobbed; "think of me with pity. Eugénie, never--never let her know what I was. Let her believe me to have been a good woman. If I have sinned, see how I was tempted--see how I have suffered--let my child think her mother was a good woman." Eugénie, crying bitterly, promised this, and then tried to take Meg away. "Mumsey," said Meg, clinging to her mother, "why do you cry? Where are you going?" "I'm dying, Meg, darling." "Dying!" said Meg, to whom the word conveyed no idea, "dying!" "Yes, dear; going away." "I'll go, too." "No, dear, no. You must stay here, and be a good girl. Mumsey is going far away--to the sky," finished poor Kitty, in a faltering voice. "To the sky--then you'll see God," said Meg. At this Kitty could bear no more, but burst into tears, and Meg was taken out of the room, being pacified with difficulty. Then Keith entered with the clergyman, who was left alone with the dying woman for some time. When they all returned, they saw she was sinking rapidly, but she smiled faintly as Eugénie approached. "I've told him all," she said in a low voice, "and he says God will forgive me." "I'm sure He will, dear," said Eugénie in a faltering voice. "Strange," said the dying woman, in a dreamy voice, "I, who never cared for religion, should want it now. I'm glad to die, for there was nothing to live for; but this terrible Death--I fear it. I don't know where I'm going--where am I going?" she asked piteously. "To Heaven, dear," said Eugénie. "Heaven!" repeated Kitty, her memory going back to her childhood; "that is where there is neither sun nor moon--the glory of God is there. Oh, I'll never go there--never--never!" The room w T as now filled with floating shadows, and all present were kneeling by the bed. Meg, who had been brought back, and held by Eugénie, was beside her mother, awed by the solemnity of the scene. A pale shaft of clear light came through the window, and shone on the disordered white clothes of the bed and the still face of the dying woman. No sound save the sighing of the wind outside, the sobs of Eugénie, and the grave tones of the clergyman's voice, reading the Sermon on the Mount, which in former days had been a great favourite with Kitty. "_Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God_." Poor soul, she that had not been pure was now dying, and dreaded lest her impurity should be brought up against her. "_Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy_." Ah, Kitty Marchurst, what mercy did you ever show? The inward voice came to her like an accusing spirit, and she shrank back in the bed. Then she opened her eyes. "I would have been a good woman," she said pathetically; "but I--I was so young when I met Gaston." Her voice became inarticulate, and with an effort she kissed her child, while the clergyman said the Lord's Prayer. "_Our Father which art in Heaven_." "Meg, Meg," she murmured, "Meg--God bless my little child!" And those were the last words of Kitty Marchurst, for when the prayer was ended she was lying back, with her pure, childlike face stilled in death. So she went into the outer darkness laden with sins, but surely God in His mercy pardoned this woman, whose impurity was more the result of circumstances than anything else. Let us not deny to others the mercy which we ourselves will need some day. Kitty was dead, with all her frailties and passions; and as the clergyman arose from his knees, he repeated reverently the words of his Master,-- "_He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her_." FINIS. ---------------------------------------- COLSTON AND COMPANY, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH. 
35055	----	scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print archive. [Illustration: Book Cover] A PASTEBOARD CROWN [Illustration: "I will place the crown upon your head," said the actor-manager; "only promise not to reproach me when you find for yourself that it is only pasteboard!"] A PASTEBOARD CROWN _A Story of the New York Stage_ BY CLARA MORRIS _Author of "Life on the Stage," etc._ _WITH A FRONTISPIECE FROM A DRAWING BY HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY_ [Illustration] CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK 1902 Copyright, 1902, by Clara Morris Harriott CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE LAWTONS ARRIVE 1 II. A POWERFUL NEIGHBOR 12 III. SHOPPING UNDER DIFFICULTIES 23 IV. AN ACQUAINTANCE RENEWED 32 V. "THE WOMAN OF FATE" 44 VI. A RECOGNITION AND A DINNER 53 VII. A PRAYER AND A PROMISE 64 VIII. "TELL HER YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION" 73 IX. THE ACCIDENT--A FRIEND IN NEED 85 X. CALLING ON THE MANAGER 97 XI. THE DOUBLE BIRTHDAY 113 XII. THE PROMISED CROWN 129 XIII. THE FORMING OF THE CHRYSALIS 143 XIV. THE RETURN FROM THE WEST 152 XV. MRS. LAWTON LAYS PLANS 163 XVI. A STRANGE BETROTHAL 171 XVII. THE COSTUMING OF JULIET 188 XVIII. A LOVER'S PLEA 204 XIX. A FAMILY SCENE 219 XX. A PROFESSIONAL LESSON 228 XXI. SEEKING REFUGE FROM THE STORM 243 XXII. PREPARING THE PIT 265 XXIII. THE WOMAN IN THE BOX 279 XXIV. "I WILL NOT DIVORCE YOU" 294 XXV. "TO LOVE IS TO FORGIVE" 309 XXVI. THE OPAL 325 XXVII. THE FALL OF THE CURTAIN 344 XXVIII. "THOU KNOWEST!" 359 A PASTEBOARD CROWN CHAPTER I THE LAWTONS ARRIVE It was on a Monday, the 30th of April, that the boys with the grocers' and butchers' delivery wagons, the gray-uniformed postmen behind their bony, always-tired horses, and the blue-coated, overfed mounted policemen began to circulate the report that the old White house had found a tenant; and every soul that listened made answer: "Impossible! No one could live in that old rookery!" and then, with incredible inconsistency, ended with: "Who's taken it?" At first no answer could be given to that question, but later in the day a man who strung telegraph wires won a brief importance through overhearing a conversation between two men standing below him and beside the pole he was mounted on. One man was Jacob Brewer, who now owned the old White estate, and the other he ascertained, by careful listening, to be John Lawton; and he learned that Mr. Lawton was to take possession of the old house the next day, which would be May 1st, the conventionally correct day for moving. Through the usual suburban channels this bit of information was put into circulation and swiftly reached every householder in the village--to say nothing of outlying farmhouses. And everywhere women with towels about their heads--sure sign that the house-cleaning microbe is abroad in the land--could be seen talking over back fences to neighbors whose fingers were still puckered from long immersion in the family wash-tub, and the name Lawton and such disjointed exclamations as: "Who?" "Why--how many do you suppose?" and "Did you ever hear of such a thing?" filled the warm air, even as the frail, inconsequent little May-flies filled it. The telegraph lineman over his noon beer told many times what old Brewer had called the stranger: "Lawton--yes, John Lawton--was the name, and he was coming up the next day; yes, come to think of it, he had said _they_ were coming--so there was a family of some sort." The letter-carrier, in leaving the mail, paused a moment to catch these last words, and at his next stopping-place he was enabled to leave with a letter the information that "John Lawton, who had taken that roofless old sheebang, had a family coming with him"; and the lady informed made sure "he would not have a family very long, if he tried to keep them in that mouldering old ruin." Doctors hearing the news exchanged jests as they met on the roads, one opining that "some business was coming their way and that quinine would soon be in demand," while another, always a pessimist, said that "any one that was poor enough to take the White house to live in was too hard up to pay a doctor." But really, no one knowing anything about the old place could help having a feeling of amazement at hearing of a tenant being found for it. It was that saddest, most uncanny thing--a deserted house. A great, big, Colonial-like frame structure, it stood high on the hillside, showing white and ghostly between the too-closely set evergreens and conifers before it. That money had been lavished upon the place in the distant past was evident even in these very trees, which were the choicest of their kind. He who had planted them must have been a melancholy man. Drooping, mournful trees seemed particularly to appeal to him, for the very rare weeping hemlock, like a black fountain, was there as well as the weeping larch, with its small cones; and a veritable army of white pines, Norway spruces, balsam firs, and the red cedar that in its blackish stateliness is so like the Irish yew. A solemn company at the best of times, when properly spaced and trimmed, but now with unpruned branches intertwining, the trees that were killing one another in their struggle for light were positively lugubrious. And behind that screen of matted, many-shaded evergreen the pallid, bony old house stood trembling under high winds, while its upper windows stared blankly down upon that Broadway that, escaping from the hurrying city with its millions of restless feet, here passed calmly on, by woodland and green meadows, toward distant Albany. The cruel roadway had swept away with it all the footsteps that had used to make life in the old house. Two great gates were let into the stone wall. One was locked so securely that even a burglar might have failed to solve the combination of a ten years' twisted leafy growth of woodbine; but whenever anyone wished to enter the grounds he went to the second gate, which was easily opened by the simple process of throwing it down and walking over it. Grass grew in tufts down the old carriage drive, and all about the lower part of the house were curious stains that looked as though little green waves had washed up against it, while on the north side the long streaks of green beneath the windows painfully suggested tear-marks on its white old face. A melancholy and unwholesome place for people to seek a home in, and yet the morning's report proved reliable, for Jacob Brewer's handy man had been over to the old White house, as people would call it, because Peter White had lived and died there years ago, and had cleared up a bit; had secured two or three hanging shutters, put a swing-door in the kitchen and a bolt on the front door, and had tacked on to the mighty body of an ancient willow--a landmark for miles about that grew directly by the unhinged gate--a strip of black painted tin, bearing in gold letters the word "Woodsedge"--and lo! the old house was ready for the new tenant. Promptly the Lawtons arrived upon the scene the next day, preceded by a furniture van under the directorship of a very young, very rumpled, but most optimistic German maid-of-all-work, who proudly carried a large key in her hand as a symbol of authority. She had unlocked and thrown wide the creaking front door, opened the windows, made a fire in the kitchen, and had undone the bundle she had carried in her lap all the way from the city, revealing to the astonished men a small black tea-kettle. "Oh, ja! I carry him mysel', und den I have him alretty und can make quick de tea for de mistress--right so soon as she gits here!" And before the van had been emptied a dust-covered hack arrived, with four people inside and several boxes and a trunk sharing the top with the driver. A mounted policeman, loitering along Broadway and watching the debarkation, saw John Lawton--tall and thin and almost white-haired, a gentleman without a doubt--descending. Then an elderly lady, with surprisingly red cheeks glowing through a dotted veil, followed, and then--"Oh, by Jove!" muttered the blue-coat, as out sprang, one after the other, the two young girls, as fresh and bright and full of bubbling laughter as the day was bright and full of sunshine and bird song. Suddenly a voice cried: "Sybil--O Sybil, take care--you've broken the package of bird seed!" And with a laugh the girl addressed caught up her skirt to save the falling seeds, revealing as she did so a pair of pretty feet, that presently began to dance wildly about as their owner cried: "Dorothy--O Dorothy! did you see it--a robin? it's over there!" And up went two veils, and two young faces turned eagerly toward the spot where Mr. Robin, with black cap, yellow bill, and orange-red breast, sat and looked at them with round black eyes, quite unmoved by their human beauty, as was right and proper--seeing that he was himself a bridegroom just settling in life. But the policeman suddenly put his horse to the gallop, and in an hour's time everyone in the village knew that the Lawtons had arrived, that they were gentlefolk, and that the two girls were "regular beauties." While at Woodsedge, secure in the privacy the screening evergreens provided, the Lawtons turned to and assisted the small German maid in setting up their somewhat battered household gods upon the altars that had been so long empty and cold in that sad old house. As Mrs. Lawton crossed the sagging porch the front door was held open by Lena, who, curtseying and smiling her widest, flattest smile, told her that "She was com' at de right place und she vas velcom' alretty as anyt'ing," the dignity of this reception being somewhat marred by the fact that Lena was hooking herself up as she spoke, she having hastily exchanged her Sunday clothes for her working ones. "Ah," moaned the welcomed mistress to her following husband and daughters, "in former years my butler and housekeeper would have received me, and with their clothes all on" (the girls choked audibly), "but," sighed Mrs. Lawton, "that was before your poor misguided father had lost everything for us!" "Including the servants' clothes," whispered Dorothy, and with a "Poor papa!" each girl gave him a pat on the arm as, passing him by, they took hold of their mother, and with much loving bustle got her bonnet and veil and gloves and beady mantle off and put her into the only chair yet brought into the house, where, with a soap-box beneath her feet, she could sit and comfortably give directions that no one heeded, and scold people who were unconscious that they were the objects of her wrath. Some shades were up, two carpets were down, and a gruesome old piano stood, glooming, from one end of the sitting-room, before the girls would consent to have lunch, for, said Sybil, "That piano, that noble instrument of perfect tone and action, standing outside on the grass, was a direct challenge to Heaven to send down rain." "My dear," mildly remonstrated Mr. Lawton, "don't be sarcastic." "John!" interrupted Mrs. Lawton, "I don't see why you should accuse the child of being sarcastic. You must remember that in about the seventies some of our greatest pianists sat before that instrument, which was one of my many wedding gifts, and Sybil very reasonably called it a piano of perfect tone and action. You should not be so ready to criticise your children, John. Oh, I do hope that tea is going to be strong, my dears, for I am positively beyond speech." A declaration which lost considerable of its force when she continued to describe the glorious past of her rosewood monster, until she was silenced momentarily by a cup of strong tea. For, camping in all the wild confusion of boxes and bundles, they proceeded to enjoy a luncheon of bread and butter and chipped dried beef, with the soul-reviving accompaniment of fragrant though forbidden green tea. Just as Mrs. Lawton, groaning over the thickness of the bread, was starting out to describe the transparent thinness of the slices cut by some bondwoman of the past, Lena, all smiles, came tramping in with a boiled egg in a shaving-mug: "Youst for de mistress," she announced, and placed the mug on that lady's knee. "Dat's youst laid fresh dis minute alretty. Wat you t'ink of dat, eh?" "But--but!" flustered Mr. Lawton, "that doesn't belong to us--we have no hens!" "No," acquiesced Lena, "but dot hen she nest on us--so I tak' dot egg!" "Well, that's dishonest!" declared Mr. Lawton. "Nein! nein!" contradicted Lena, who always grew more German in excitement: "Uf it is tree egg--four--six egg, dot may make of de steal--but youst one eggs only pay for de use of de nest!" And Lena made a triumphant exit to the laughter of the girls and a thrill of song from the canary on the mantel-piece, who dearly loved a noise. Meantime Mrs. Lawton, untroubled by questions of right or wrong, enjoyed the fresh egg without even a word of protest against the shaving-mug accompaniment. As she wiped her lips, she asked, suddenly: "Girls, where on earth are your dear grandparents?" "Under the piano," promptly replied Sybil, who was worrying a tough chip of beef between her white teeth. Dorothy giggled hysterically, while John Lawton exclaimed: "Sybil, are you absolutely without reverence?" "Why, papa," replied the indomitable Sybil, "I'm sure the old people are better off under the piano than they would have been lying with the tables and chairs in the grass out there, a temptation to Lena's fairy footsteps. We'll hang the old people up as soon as we finish our luncheon. They had better stay in this room--don't you think so, mamma?" And Mrs. Lawton again took up the proffered thread of direction and never laid it down till she at the same moment laid her head upon her pillow. After that picnicky luncheon Mr. Lawton betook himself to the village to hunt up the butcher, the baker, and, if not the candle-stick maker, at least his successor, the gas man. Firmly rejecting the piece of string Mrs. Lawton wished to tie about his thumb as an assistance to his somewhat unreliable memory, he rearranged his thin locks with the aid of a pocket-comb, tightly buttoned his well-fitting, seedy old coat, and with a warm young kiss on either cheek sallied forth, pursued by his wife's warning cry: "Candles--candles! Now, John, no matter what they promise at the gas-store, gas-house--er--er, I mean office--don't I, girls? Oh, well, no matter what _anyone_ promises, _anywhere_, do you buy some candles for fear of accidents, for light we must have! Food for to-morrow is desirable, but light for to-night is an absolute necessity! So get candles, for fear----"--then, as John disappeared, "Do you suppose your father understood?" she asked, anxiously. "Why--er! why--er!" hesitated Sybil, as she gently rubbed the canvas that preserved Grandmamma Bassett's antique prettiness: "Dorothy--what is the condition of papa's intelligence at present?" But Dorothy, passing an armful of bed linen to the waiting Lena, soothingly declared: "It's no fault of yours, mamma dear, if he does not understand--I'm sure you tried hard enough," and Mrs. Lawton, bridling and important, at once followed Lena upstairs to make things interesting for that handmaiden. As soon as they were alone the girls looked ruefully at each other, and Dorothy exclaimed: "Fancy sending papa on such an errand!" "Yes," groaned Sybil, "it _is_ funny--and oh, if he could only throw a little light on the family finances, I'd forgive him if we all lay in total darkness to-night. Dorrie! Dorrie! what are we coming to? Is not this an awful place? I would not say a word against it before poor papa--he seems so proud of his bargain. But, Dorrie, we'll all find our teeth rattling like castanets some fine morning, and chills mean quinine, and quinine means money--money!" Dorothy sat down dejectedly on a step of the ladder and pushed her sunny brown hair back from her damp forehead. "Yes--it is dreadful! We must put mamma and papa in the driest room and see what the cellar is like, and perhaps we may find some boy about who will cut away some of those branches and let a little sunlight in on this window that I see mamma has marked for her own. A little shaking and shivering won't matter so much for us, Sybil. We are young and can stand it, but papa is not strong and fever would simply eat him up, poor dear!" Sybil bent suddenly, and, kissing her sister's cheek: "You're a patient little soul, Dorrie," she said, "but I tell you I shall go mad presently over this never-ending mending and turning and dyeing, this wearing of each other's clothes, this mad effort to keep up appearances! Why can't we do something as other girls do--who help themselves?" "Ah, but mamma!" interposed Dorothy. "She would never consent. We are ladies, you know, dear, and----" "Idiots!" savagely completed Sybil, "who don't know how to do one single thing well. I can paint--a little; you can play--a little. We both can sing--a little, and we both can dance perfectly!" And she flung her arm about Dorothy's slim waist and together they went waltzing out into the old hall, their light, swaying figures skimming swallow-like over the sunken porch and out into the sunshine, where presently a great brown root tripped them up, and they fell, a laughing heap, on the moss. Next instant two excited voices were crying: "Violets! Oh, real violets!" And with fingers trembling with haste, and eyes wide with delight, they gathered the timid little hooded darlings of the spring, forgetting their poverty, their makeshifts, and their anxieties, as God meant young things should forget at times, and only remembering that they were sisters, who loved each other and had found out there under the sky their first bed of sweet wild violets. CHAPTER II A POWERFUL NEIGHBOR It was near the end of the week. Already Woodsedge seemed to have wakened, drawn a long breath, and assumed that pleasant expression so earnestly sought for by generations of photographers. In fact, the old house had taken on a homelike look, and both the girls had been sewing at break-needle speed trying to finish some muslin curtains that they wished to have put up in their own room before Sunday, as those windows were in full view of Broadway drivers, and they felt that propriety demanded muslin curtains as well as shades. And this, according to Lena, was "Friday alretty," so together they were driving Dick, the canary, nearly wild by singing against him over their work, when John Lawton, wearing an ancient alpaca coat and a mournful and repentant straw hat, appeared upon the porch clasping a left finger in a very bloody right hand; remarking, with his usual moderation of speech: "I think I have got a cut." "Do you, indeed?" Sybil snapped, as she rushed for an old handkerchief. "I suppose a severed artery would about convince you of the fact! Bring me a bit of thread, Dorrie! Oh, you white-faced goose, that screech of yours has brought mamma!" And mamma was followed by the ever-faithful Lena. And so it happened that Mr. Lawton's injured finger drew to his service four devoted women. Sybil, first pouring some fair water over the cut, proceeded to bandage it with a bit of old linen. Dorothy, keeping her face averted, held out a spool of white silk. Lena, with a trail of rejected cobweb in one hand and an enormous pair of shears in the other, waited to cut the thread off; while Mrs. Lawton, with eye-glasses on nose, superintended Sybil's efforts and sagely advised her that if she wound the bandage too tight it would stop circulation, and if it were too loose it would come off, and---- "And if I should get it just right, what would happen, mamma?" meekly questioned the girl. "Why--why--er," confusedly stammered Mrs. Lawton, "why--really I----" "Your mother can't conceive the idea of anything being just right, this side of our heavenly home, my dear," gravely remarked her husband, which was unexpected, not to say ungrateful. "John!" sternly spoke the lady, "instead of jeering at the wife of your bosom in the presence of your children----" "There, mamma washes her hands of us, you see, Dorrie," interposed Sybil; but Mrs. Lawton went straight on: "--you would do well, first, to remember that though I have lost my illusions, I have not neglected my religious duties, and next to explain what you were about to get a cut shaped like that?" "O observant mamma!" laughed Sybil, while Lena remarked, with unconscious impertinence: "I tink dot cut make himself mit a sickle alretty. Ain't dot so, my Herr Mister?" "Oh, papa," cried both girls, "you were never trying to cut the grass yourself, were you?" "Why not?" asked the old gentleman. "It needs it badly, and it will be a bit of change saved if I can do it myself." "Nein! nein!" cried Lena, indignantly. "I make mit de sickles myself by and bye, ven I got of de times. I vork youst so well as any mans on de grass! Dot is not for you, my Herr Mister; dot is for me. Und you don't see alretty yet vat I got in dose gartens. You come with me, Miss Ladies--I show!" and all one broad, flat laugh, she led Sybil and Dorothy to the rear of the house, and proudly pointed to a freshly dug garden bed. "Why!" cried they, "who did it?" and "Oh, Lena, did you make a bargain beforehand?" asked the sadly experienced young Dorothy. But Lena laughed and laughed and pounded her knee so vigorously that the girls fairly winced at sight of the blows. Then joyously, if slangily, she explained: "Dot mash-man, he do dot diggins--youst for me. Und he say he do more to-morrow. Und Sunday I rake 'em fine, dot bed, und put in der seeds, und behold, der vill be a garten one of dose days. Vat you tink, eh?" Both the girls had very bright eyes. They looked at each other. Sybil started to unfasten the pretty belt she wore, but Dorothy shook her head warningly, then put her hand up and drew from her hair a little side-comb. "Wait!" cried Sybil, and she took out one of hers, and with much laughter saw Lena proudly place the combs in her own flaxen locks; and as the maid returned to her endless work, Sybil exclaimed: "What a nature! what a good-hearted creature!" "And yet," laughed Dorothy, "how mercenary in her treatment of her 'mash-man'! Oh, Sybil, where do you suppose she got that word? Poor thing, I did not dare let you give her the belt, dear, because we have but the one between us, just now. But here is the other comb--yes, take it! Your hair is heavier than mine. Oh, Sybil, darling girl, don't, oh, don't cry! Things will come right, somehow--only wait!" "I can't! I--I won't!" cried Sybil. "The shame, the mortification of accepting help from that poor, overworked little German girl, who coquets with a laborer for our benefit--oh, it sickens one! Dorrie, I'm going to tell papa, right out, straight and plain, that I'm going on the stage! There--I can at least earn my own living, if I can't win fame. I know he will be terribly upset, but I'll say--that----" "Suppose," gently suggested the practical Dorothy, "that we finish the curtains, Sybil dear, and you can tell me all about what you intend saying to papa while we sew!" When, twenty-five years ago, "all in the merry month of May," John Lawton had married Letitia Bassett, there had not been wanting at the wedding-feast one or two of those distant relatives who generally make such unwelcome guests; since not near enough to be known and loved, yet not distant enough to be ignored, they are very apt to amuse themselves by keeping tab on the bride's birthdays and the groom's debts, while with suspicious glances they closely search the wedding gifts for something plated. Grandaunt Lucilla and old James Baker, with blood chilled against the kindly influence of sparkling champagne or rare good sherry, had that day peered into the future with wise old eyes, and, foreseeing, had mumblingly foretold the financial ruin that was now full upon John Lawton. Of those who heard the croaking of the ancient pair the most indignant had been Nellie Douglass--bridesmaid and intimate of Letitia Lawton. She cried: "Shame," to Grandaunt Lucilla, "for prophesying evil upon one of her own blood, and the very handsomest bride the Bassetts had ever led to altar-rail and expectant groom. But then, it was just crass envy and malice that moved her, unmarried at seventy-five, to such wicked speech--ruin indeed!" And she tossed her flower-wreathed head, as she glanced about at the lavish decorations, at the newly added shelf, circling the library walls, to accommodate the many late-coming wedding gifts: "Only--only, she wished now, more than ever, that Letitia had not been a May bride, and had not wound all those lovely pearls around her slender throat! What on earth had made her so reckless? it was risky enough to say 'Yes,' without winding yourself up in pearls and saying it in May!" But certain men who heard the prophesy looked over at the wealthy bridegroom, and, noting the dimpled, pointed chin, the wide-apart blue eyes, with their absent expression, they thought of the far-away coffee plantations that had come with the fortune they had already made into his helpless looking hands, and shook their heads, fearing old man Baker's saying might yet come true. Lawton had come to New York on a matter of business connected with those plantations, and, instead of devoting himself to that and returning at once, he fell head over heels in love and straightway married, and as his bride was of a very fair complexion and dreaded the sun, and was very fond of society and dreaded loneliness, she simply could not go to South America with him; and when once he bravely tried to go alone back to his duty, she indulged in such an hysterical outburst of temper and grief combined as did herself serious injury at the time, and ended at once and forever his personal management of the plantations. They were both outrageously extravagant--not in a gross, flaunting way, desiring the pained humiliation of those less fortunate than themselves, but in a way that showed an almost childish ignorance of the value of money. John Lawton, Sr., had been a shrewd, far-sighted, honorable man, a hard worker, who held fast to what he earned until it could earn too. Strong and self-denying, he yet fathered a son who seemed to have been born for the express purpose of being fleeced. Honest, honorable, temperate, moral, without a single vice, possessing most of the virtues, he was nevertheless that piteous creature--the well-intentioned but unsuccessful man. After the plantations had gently slipped away from him he did not attempt to retrench. He loved his wife; he had not the heart to deny her anything; also he remembered the hysterical outburst and a tiny, tiny little grave, and he--well, he dared not suggest even a slight change in their style of living, but he did decide that something must be found to take the place of the money-yielding coffee plantations. Hence it followed that for some years there were few salted mines, whether of gold or silver; few gushing oil-wells, located miles outside of the oil belt; few Eden-like land-booms in Southern swamps, that had not found in John Lawton an eager purchaser of shares. Some fine corner lots in the business centre of a Western city--built entirely on paper--were his last, large, losing investment. After that he dribbled away the few dollars left to him in helping to secure patents for such useless inventions as an ink-well with automatic cover that was meant to keep the ink from evaporating, but failed to do it. A dish-washing machine looked like a winner, until he found it was apt suddenly to go wrong and crush more dishes in a moment than the most impetuous Bridget would destroy in a week. And a cow-milker had lately absorbed the money that should have gone for walking boots. Each time he was deceived he was as greatly surprised as he had been on the first occasion; then, sadly gathering up his worthless shares, he tied them neatly together with pink tape, labelled them, laid them aside--and was ready to be taken in again. In all these foolish investments he was actuated solely by love for his family. There was no taint of selfishness underlying his desire to regain a lost fortune. He suffered twice to their once, since he felt every one of their privations in addition to his own. In his slow way he had come to understand that his weakness had brought about the family's downfall. He had not been strong enough to hold what he had once possessed, and even when he knew they were rushing to destruction, he had not been strong enough to put the brakes down hard. He said little--almost nothing; but there were times when his wife thought him sleeping when he sat with closed eyes thanking God for that tiny grave which held his only son, for had he lived a weakling like himself he might have carried the good old name down to no one knows what depths; while the girls, such good girls, such pretty girls they were, would doubtless marry some time, and so the name would pass, would be forgotten; and the absent look would be very marked, when his pale blue eyes opened again. The poor, tender-hearted, gullible old gentleman! That Grandaunt Lucilla, who at their wedding feast had prophesied ruin within twenty years for the Lawtons, had lived long enough to see the seeds of extravagance sown by them take root, develop stalk and stem, and blossom forth into many mortgages--for stranger hands to gather; so, leaving her savings to that "tinkling cymbal of humanity," as she called her grandniece, Letitia Lawton, she first secured the legacy with so many legal knots and seals and witnesses and things, that it simply could not be squandered by one Lawton, nor invested by the other; and now it was to that small inheritance that they clung for their lives. The family's position was most painful, but the girls suffered most. In the past John and Letitia had danced long and merrily, so it was but fair that they should now "pay the piper," but Sybil and Dorothy, for all their warm young blood and springy feet, danced not, for their hands were empty, and there was no one to "pay the piper" for them. Poor things, they could remember when their fine feathers had made them very fine little birds, indeed; when they had taken their walks abroad under the care of a voluble French nurse. They could remember, too, the day their pretty, ever-talkative mamma had refused to go to church with but one man on the carriage box. Then there had come a time when there was no man and no carriage and no French maid. Then flittings followed, and after each one fewer friends had followed them, and the last flitting had brought them here, to the old White house, or to Woodsedge, as Mrs. Lawton sternly commanded all to call it; and no old friends seemed likely to follow them out of the land of plenty, while it was too soon yet to know whether they would find new friends in the desert. So they could only make the best appearance possible and rush up their bedroom curtains. And as they worked, Sybil, the impetuous, with flushing cheeks, told Dorothy, who steadily turned-down and hemmed, how impossible it was for her to do anything but act; how sure she was she could act; how clearly she was going to put the case before papa. And then Dorothy wished to know how Sybil was going to get into a theatre--a really nice theatre was not so easily entered. For herself, she would rather try to write--then you could send your manuscript to the publishers and not go outside of your own home-- "That is," she added, reluctantly, "if--you have plenty of stamps." And just then John Lawton lowered the paper he had been reading, as he sat at the far end of the porch, and asked: "Girls, have you noticed a young woman who rides past here on horseback evenings, generally without a groom?" "Yes!" cried the girls. "Sometimes she comes scrambling down that rocky lane below us," said Sybil, "but she never does that on the big chestnut--he'd break his legs." "Nice horse, that," commented Mr. Lawton. "But do you know who she is?" "No, papa, do you?" asked Dorothy, turning the last hem. "Y--e--s," was the slow answer. "I was looking at the swelling on the leg of that black police-horse last night, and I told him--the policeman, I mean--that a bandage was needed, and just then along came the young woman, riding a small bay at almost a dead run. I thought at first there was work for the policeman to do, but the rider touched her cap as she rushed past, and the officer guessed my thought, for he said: 'No; that ain't no runaway! I suspect the bay's been a bit unruly; anyway, she never rides at such a spanking gait as that except in the cool of the evening and when the roads are quiet.' He seemed to know the lady so well that I asked if she lived in the neighborhood, and he said: 'Why, good Lord! Don't you know who she is? Why, that's Claire Morrell, the actress.'" With a cry Sybil sprang to her feet, wide-eyed and palpitating with excitement, while Dorothy exclaimed, reproachfully: "Oh, papa, why did you not tell us before? Where does she live? Now don't say you don't know and so reduce us to the necessity of interviewing the policeman for ourselves!" Mr. Lawton gently pinched his bandaged finger, to see how much it was hurt, before answering: "Miss Morrell, who is Mrs. Barton in private life, you know, lives as the crow flies exactly opposite us on Riverdale Avenue, at a place called The Beeches." "Oh! oh!" cried Dorothy. "Let's go and tell mamma whom she has for a neighbor--she will be so interested! She used to be quite proud of living near a former residence of Miss Kemble, the English actress. Come, Sybil dear--why, are you asleep?" For her sister had been standing, staring dumbly into space. Now she leaned forward and whispered, rapidly: "Dorrie! Dorrie! Here is the answer to your question, and here is my one chance! This woman has power to help me, and she shall use it--yes, if I have to go upon my knees to her! Her hand shall open to me the stage-door of the theatre!" CHAPTER III SHOPPING UNDER DIFFICULTIES Early in their second week at Woodsedge it became evident that someone would have to go to the city to do some very necessary shopping, and a great gloom descended and enwrapped the Lawtons in consequence. The ancient legend says that the prospect of a shopping expedition ever fills the female soul with wild, unreasoning joy, which is a too general and too positive prediction. But that is the trouble with most legends, composed as they are of a little truth, much imagination, and more sweeping assertion; and I have no doubt this last irritating quality has caused the destruction of many a legend that was both beautiful and poetic. Now, fable to the contrary notwithstanding, shopping is not an unalloyed joy--always fatiguing--often a positive penance. It is sometimes a pleasure, and on rare occasions it may become an absolute delight, say, for instance, when a woman is young and pretty and has a full purse. The knowledge of her own beauty and her ability to adorn it will make the selecting, the choosing, the trying, the adapting, the decision, the retraction, the fluttering, and the hesitating--all delightful. Or when a woman who has herself passed the period of coquettish dressing shops from a full purse for those she loves, whose tastes and desires she knows perfectly, with what beaming eyes she will hover over the best, the rarest, comparing, selecting without a thought of price, only seeking beauty and quality--such shopping is unqualified pleasure. But the gates of this shopping Paradise were closed against the Lawtons, and Sybil and Dorothy, like two made-over, rebound, cotton-backed little Peris, stood and wept as they shook vainly at the bars. Mr. Lawton had in all good faith offered to go to the city and do their errands for them, but his services had been promptly declined, though with many qualifying pats and strokes from Sybil and a violet boutonnière from Dorothy, who had remarked, as she tied it with a blade of grass: "Poor papa--he would come home with barely half the list filled." "Worse than that," said Sybil. "Poor papa would have come home plucked bare to his innocent old breast." "Yes!" sighed Dorothy, "someone would surely swindle him out of part of his money, if he went down by his tempting old self." It was very difficult for the sisters to go out together, because of the lack of appropriate clothing, yet neither one wished to have Mrs. Lawton as a shopping companion. Not that they were lacking in affection for their mother--far from it; but, truth to tell, she was a very silly old person, who, like a certain royal house of France, never learned anything and never forgot anything; and when she walked through the shopping district with her girls, she invariably made them wish they had never been born. She had such a dreadful habit of stopping before some show window and remarking, in a high shrill voice: "Yes, that's fairly good, but it's not to be compared with what I had when," etc., etc. Or she would sit at a counter, and, with eye-glasses on nose, carefully examine forty-cent pairs of cotton stockings, describing meantime to the clerk the exact style of silk stockings she used to wear years before, closing the incident with a condescending: "You may give me three pairs of these--though, to confess the truth, my foot has never yet become accustomed to such coarse web." Small wonder the girls did not care to shop with their mamma. Therefore, they had spent an entire day making the preparations that were necessary if they were to go to the city together. Dorothy had pulled apart a black velvet bow from an old hat, steamed it free of wrinkles, and had made a fairly decent belt, and hours had gone to the minute stitching of her gloves; while Sybil's wrath had been aroused by the necessity of inking her purplish boot heels. "No other shoes but mine go like that," she grumbled. "One would suppose my skirts had teeth to gnaw my heels," and at Dorothy's quick laughter Sybil attacked her with her inky bit of cotton, and their wild struggle so aroused Yellow Dick that he instantly assumed the horrid front of war--quivering his drooping wings, extending his neck, with wee beak open an eighth of an inch wide, and fierce crest rising and lowering rapidly. He felt himself to be a terrifying object, and nothing short of three fat hemp seeds, held to him between the lovely lips of Sybil could induce him to accept peace. "What a quick-tempered little wretch Dick has become of late," said Dorothy. "Oh, well--never mind his small tantrums, so long as he doesn't begin to tell about what a splendid cage he used to have." "He can't," laughed Dorothy, "for he was hatched as well as brought up in this old cage--he doesn't know any other." "Thank Heaven for that!" responded Sybil, who then ran to the window, crying: "There she goes, Dorrie!" and her sister understood at once that "she" was that actress-neighbor of whom Sybil dreamed at night and talked by day. For of late the girl's desire to go upon the stage had developed into a passion. Ardent, romantic, and imaginative as she was, the sweetness of a life of ease and pleasure would probably have smothered the ambition that sharp necessity was now rapidly developing. For it is the almost sterile soil of poverty that oftenest produces the cactus-like plant of Ambition, whose splendid and dazzling flowers are, alas, so often without perfume. And now Dorothy had John Strange Winter and The Duchess quite to herself evenings, while Sybil thumbed the family Shakspere--a dreadful edition of the fifties, all aflaunt with gilt edges and gilt lettering on the outside, and sprinkled through with most harrowing pictures and libellous and defamatory portraits of Forrest, Cushman, and the rest--for the steel engraver too "loveth a shining mark." Looking once at a picture of the "Merry Wives of Windsor"--a blowsy, frowsy, dreadfully decolleté couple--Dorothy had deprecatingly exclaimed: "Oh, Syb, dear! You won't ever have to look like that, will you, if you become an actress?" "Good heavens, no! Don't be such a goose, Dorrie! Can't you see these are not actresses at all? They are just imaginary pictures of Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page, drawn by some stupid, coarse-minded man!" And Dorrie, properly snubbed, went back to "Molly Bawn," and left Sybil to rumple her hair and grow very red-cheeked over her study of Juliet--for where is the stage-struck girl who begins with any lesser character? Then, while they brushed their hair and plaited it à la Chinoise for the night, Sybil laid before her sister some wildly impossible plan for making the immediate acquaintance of Claire Morrell, and Dorothy listened to her continual harping on that one string with a gentle patience that was wonderful in one so young. But Dorrie had a firm faith in God's promise to His people--His people being, in her eyes, those who loved Him; and from that faith came the patience that was her strength, and that often supported older members of the family through trying hours. All being in readiness, it did not take long for the girls to dress for breakfast and for an early start cityward. So, carrying down their hats and gloves and the sunshade they had borrowed over night from Mrs. Lawton, they came laughing into the dining-room, to find that lady trussed up in her street gown, instead of the usual breakfast jacket, and heard her sharply announce: "I, too, am going to the city this morning!" "W--why, mamma!" faltered both girls, and then Dorothy turned her blue eyes away, that the rising tears might not be seen. "But--but I thought everything was all settled last night?" quavered Sybil. "I can't help last night!" snapped Mrs. Lawton. "This is to-day, and I've got to go down town. Time was when I had not to account for every movement to my own children--when my husband would have risen in his place and forbidden such a humiliating action----" Now to be just, one must admit that, though very garrulous, Letitia Lawton was not an ill-tempered woman, and this unusual sharpness of tone and word brought utter amazement into the eyes of her daughters. John Lawton's slippered feet shifted uneasily beneath the table: "I'm afraid your coffee will grow cold, my dear!" he murmured. Sybil ventured to suggest that the shopping list, though long, was simple enough for a child to manage successfully, and just then both girls became aware of something unusual in their mother's appearance--of a sort of toning down--a--a lessening of color--a--not a pallor exactly, but a--why? As they turned troubled, bewildered eyes toward each other, Lena, who always left them to wait upon themselves at breakfast, while she played femme de chambre upstairs, came stumbling down, volubly defending herself in advance from some unspoken charge and holding something in her closed wet hand: "I no have done dot ting! no, I neffer make mit dot ting! No, neffer! My Miss Ladies! Vunce--youst vunce--I touch dot cork to de tongue--youst dot I see if it vas beet juice alretty, und it vasn't--und I ain't broke nottings! No, my Herr Mister--nottings!" "In other days," groaned Mrs. Lawton, "this girl would only have known my scullery!" "Why, Lena," said Dorothy, "nothing has been broken--so, of course, you cannot be blamed." "Oh!" cried Lena, desperately, "der mistress's red-cheeks bottle is broked, und I don't do it!" "Lena!" ejaculated Mrs. Lawton, "leave the room!" "I show first, den I leave der rooms!" said Lena, tearfully. "See you here, my Miss Ladies," said she, opening her hand. "I find him in der slops-jar--but, I don't neffer break der lady's cheeks-bottle--neffer!-- no!" There, on the wet palm, lay the half of a tiny bottle, whose contents had been red, and on its front still clung the legend "Rouge-Vinaigre." The girls' eyes sank, their faces flushed red all over. This explained the unusual paleness of their mother, the sudden necessity for visiting the city, and the spoiling of their day. A painful silence, broken only by Lena's snuffle, held them for a moment; then Mr. Lawton spoke, almost sternly: "You may go, Lena--I know all about who broke the toilet bottle. Give me my coffee, Letitia." And then Sybil gave unconscious proof of an ability to act. For, conquering her shamed surprise at learning that her mother painted, she raised calm eyes, and said, in a perfectly matter-of-course way: "Oh, mamma, it's a shame not to feel more sorry for your accident, but I was always a selfish little wretch, and I know right where that lovely store is where all the imported toilet articles are on sale--and oh, dear mamma! if you will only trust me to get your 'vinaigre de toilette' I shall have a chance of seeing all those exquisite shell ornaments, and the Rhinestone hair-pins, and the newest models for hair dressing. Indeed, Dorrie and I might pick up some very useful ideas there." Mrs. Lawton hesitated. Sybil's manner of accepting the mortifying discovery as a mere matter of course was certainly comforting, but she "did not think it proper," she said, "for young girls to go into a store and buy r--r--that is, vinaigre de toilette." "But," urged Sybil, who knew her mother, enjoying perfect health, dearly loved to be treated as an invalid, "the day is going to be a warm one, and the first heat is very trying to one inclined to be delicate." Mrs. Lawton sighed, and unconsciously drooped a little. Sybil continued: "And bonnet and gloves and corset and walking-boots and all the harness a well-dressed woman has to carry are so fatiguing. And the car-ride after the shopping--you will be used up, mamma!" And in a burst of self-pity mamma concluded she would best serve the family by conserving her own poor strength. And Dorrie, meantime, under cover of following the flight of an oriole past the window, had dried the shamed tears from her eyes, and her father, cup in hand, discoursing upon the superiority of the Baltimore over the orchard oriole, had screened her from the other two, and had left a pitying kiss on the crown of her bonnie head. And so at last they started for what Sybil called their day of "ninety-nine-and-a-half-cent" shopping. CHAPTER IV AN ACQUAINTANCE RENEWED As they came out of the Forty-second Street station they rushed, after the true American fashion, for a Fourth Avenue car. Another followed in two minutes, and had they been German or English they would in leisurely comfort have taken that, but being American they quite needlessly made a breathless rush for the first car, and at its step collided violently with a rotund and florid old male--"glass-of-fashion and mould-of-form." Three "beg pardons" rose simultaneously into the air. Each party drew back deferentially. The conductor, with murder in his eye, yelled fiercely: "Step lively there, will youse!" With beautiful obedience they all sprang forward to a--second collision. Puffing like a porpoise, the old man, hat in hand, gasped apologies to the now helplessly confused girls, until the conductor, with a contemptuous: "Ah--what's the matter wid youse--eider get on or take de nex'," began hauling the girls roughly up the steps with one hand, while with the other he savagely jerked the starting-bell, leaving the man to decide for himself whether to risk his elderly limbs boarding a moving car or to wait for "de nex'" The decision was swiftly made, for, firmly grasping the platform railing, he ran a few steps by the car and then swung himself safely up, in quite a jaunty fashion--for this rakish old beau had determined to keep the girlish young beauties in sight. Coming from the station, and each carrying, as he noticed, a small black silk bag, he correctly concluded that, all unattended, they were undertaking a shopping expedition, and he drew himself up with an air and began to twirl his gray mustache, for, relying on their innocence, his own impressive manner, and the recent contretemps for assistance, he hoped to force an acquaintance--one of those chance acquaintances that, dreaded by all parents, are the absolute bête noir of those mothers who have not been able to teach their young daughters to distinguish between a very courteous reserve and an almost "hail fellow" freedom of speech with amiable strangers. So, it was not long before Sybil, earnestly discussing at what point on their list they should begin, and whether they should leave the car at Twenty-third or at Fourteenth Street, discovered that the overdressed old man opposite was ogling Dorrie outrageously, and her dark eyes flashed indignant glances at him, while she did her best to hold her sister's attention, that she might not be annoyed and shamed by his conduct. This comedy of glances finally caught the attention of a grave-faced young man sitting next to Sybil. He followed the direction of the old man's bold glances, and Dorothy's sweet face held him like a magnet. The rounded cheek, the soft, clear coloring, the sunny, brown hair, the innocent, widely open blue eyes, and the slight lift of the brows, that all unconsciously gave her the pathetic, pleading look that made people ever eager to serve her, moved him instantly to a feeling of positive gratitude for the other girl who was trying to protect her. The car had filled rapidly, and people, mechanically hanging themselves each by one hand from the overhead straps, swayed back and forth and trampled alike upon the feet of the just and the unjust, forming a solidly opaque screen between tormentor and tormented. Suddenly the whirr of the wheels and the demoniacal voice of the conductor crying: "Move up there--move up! There's room enough up front, if you'se'll step up to the end!" became faint and far off to the hearing of the grave-faced young man, whose gray eyes had discovered a little knot of wild violets snuggled into one of their own round green leaves and drawn through the button-hole of Dorothy's jacket. Through one dim moment he saw a boy's stumpy brown fist holding out a bunch of "vi'lets" to a sick white hand all netted over with distended blue veins, and heard a thin whispering voice saying: "And mother would have loved them quite as well if her boy had called them 'violets' instead of 'vi'lets,'" and the little blossoms became but a purple blur as he thought with a pang how long that dear admonishing voice had been silent. The crowd had increased, and Sybil, in bobbing her head this way and that in an effort to see just where they were, became conscious of a young woman standing before her. She was very pale, and great drops of perspiration stood on her hollow temples. She carried a heavy-looking baby in her arms, and, having no strap to hold to, she reeled and staggered and pitched with every sudden start or jerking stop of the car. Sybil, with a pitying exclamation, rose and gave her place to the poor, sick-looking creature, who, sinking into the seat, raised grateful, tear-filled eyes to the dark, glowing face above her, saying: "It's the baby--he's that heavy, or I wouldn't take it from you, ma'am." Then up sprang the old beau, and offered his place to Sybil, who coldly thanked him, but preferred to stand by her sister. But that was just what he proposed to do himself--to stand by her, and quite naturally to address a few words to that fair sister, and he so far forgot himself as to put his hand on Sybil's arm and try to force her into his seat, when suddenly the grave young man rose, touched the woman with the baby on the shoulder, and said: "Move into my place, please, and allow this young lady to resume her seat." The thing had been done so quickly that there was no time for thought, and the two quick "thank yous" of the girls were followed by a grateful smile and an upward glance of Dorrie's blue eyes straight into the face of the young man, who felt his hand tremble as he lifted his hat and silently made his way through the crowd to the rear platform. The elderly ogler, meantime, very red as to face and neck, looked out of the window nearest him. The girls, who had been consulting their lists, rose suddenly while he was so occupied, and with several other passengers left the car. The moment he missed them he started to his feet, but as he moved he saw a card fallen on the matting, and stooping picked it up. It was one of Mrs. Lawton's visiting cards, and on its back was scribbled yards and pounds of various articles, evidently a shopping list. As he turned it over and read "Mrs. John W. Lawton," with a former address crossed off and "Woodsedge" written beneath it, he exclaimed: "The devil! Lawton's girls grown up, and I didn't recognize them? By thunder! I must find them again! Hi! conductor!" He plunged toward the platform, brushing against open papers and stepping on toes without apology, and, dropping off the car, he returned to the corner of the street where the girls had disappeared. "Lawton's girls!" he muttered. "Woodsedge--where the devil is Woodsedge, I'd like to know! But that blondest girl's a beauty, and no mistake! The dark one glared at me like a cat. Let's see, now, what did they call those youngsters when they were over in the Oranges?" And hunting through his wicked old memory for the names he had forgotten, he placed himself on guard in front of a certain great store, on the chance of seeing Sybil and Dorothy come out. A most undignified occupation for Mr. William Henry Bulkley, aged fifty-five years, worth some eight hundred thousand dollars, but rated as a millionaire. Yet there were certain people in the city who would have expressed no surprise had they seen him so engaged, since they knew the occupation was neither new nor strange to him. He had long retired from business, and now relied principally upon the devil to provide work for his idle hands to do, and it is but fair to admit that he was seldom without a job. That he was looked upon and spoken of as a millionaire filled him with pride unspeakable. There is not a doubt that from the two hundred thousand dollars with which the world mistakenly accredited him he drew greater satisfaction and delight than from the eight hundred thousand dollars he really owned. So much pleasanter it is to be over, rather than correctly, estimated. A big man was Mr. Bulkley--whose employees used to call "Old Hulkey"--a heavily breathing man, who had lost his waist-line years ago, to his great chagrin. He had long yellow teeth, his own beyond a doubt, since no dentist on earth would have risked his reputation by making such an atrocious set. His cheeks sagged, and were of a brick red, netted over with tiny purplish veins. He had pale, impudent blue eyes, and his occasional trick of leering from under half-drooped lids made them offensively ugly. He dressed in the fashion of--to-morrow. No novelty escaped him, and his jewelry was really the best thing about him, since it was genuine and modest. In the days when he had been a neighbor of the Lawtons, over in the picturesque Orange Mountains, he had had a wife, or, to be more exact, there had been a Mrs. Bulkley, since for many years she had been nothing more to him than an unsalaried housekeeper. His contemptuous indifference as to her knowledge of his infamies deprived her even of the cloak of pretended ignorance with which many a betrayed wife hides her wounded pride and self-respect. So, from a rosy, cheery, happy wife, she had been changed into a pale and silent housekeeper. Sometimes a certain alleviating friendship exists between a wife and her disloyal husband, but not in this case; for without sympathy there can be no friendship, and there was not a particle of sympathy between the dutiful, pure-minded, humiliated Anna Bulkley and the lax, self-loving, and carnal William H. Bulkley. So she had folded her lips closely to hide their tendency to tremble, and had borne her lot silently, growing a little paler, a little thinner, a little more retiring year by year, until there came that hottest morning of a long, hot stretch of weather when she failed to descend to breakfast, and her husband had angrily rapped upon her door, declaring that because he wished to go to the city early that day he supposed she meant to sleep forever, and was surprised to find his supposition was an absolutely correct one, for she slept forever. "Heart failure," said the hastily summoned doctor, and doubtless he accurately stated the immediate cause of death, but there were certain women among these lovely country homes who felt sure that the fatal weakness was neither recent nor caused by the summer heat; who believed the poor wife's heart failure dated from the time her husband abandoned home for harem, and by the publicity of his infidelities had made her an object of contemptuous pity. Therefore cold and unfriendly were the glances they cast upon the black-clothed, crêpe-bound widower in their midst. Now, looking back to that time, he recalled his dead wife's fondness for the little ones of her neighbor's--the bon-bons she always kept at hand, the swing she had put up for her childish visitors' amusement, and the accident, one day, when the rope broke, and--yes, these very children of Lawton's were the ones that fell; and then quite suddenly he seemed to hear his wife's voice, crying: "Oh, Dorrie, Sibbie, are you hurt?" With a triumphant laugh he struck his hands together, exclaiming: "I've found them! I've got their names at last! Now, if I can find the girls again in this confounded crowd, I'll have fair sailing!" But it happened that the girls saw him first, and cleverly avoided him by whipping through a side street over to Sixth Avenue, where, with a sigh for the salads and strawberries of Broadway, they lunched upon coffee and buns in a clean little bakery; for, by so doing and by walking and saving cross-town fares both ways, they were able each to buy a bit of bright ribbon for Lena to turn into the awful bows with which she loved to plaster her honest German breast. "Poor thing!" sighed Dorothy; "I wish we could get her something worth while!" "So do I," answered Sybil; "for positively she is the staff of our family at present, and to think that papa should have found her! I believe the one dollar he paid to the intelligence office that day was the only lucky investment of his life!" "Poor thing!" repeated Dorothy; "I'm afraid she will not walk a primrose path to-day!" "No!" answered Sybil, "it will not be easy for mamma to forgive that 'cheeks bottle' speech, and Lena will probably hear a good many allusions to sculleries in consequence, or mamma may crush her into speechless awe by suddenly and apropos of nothing telling her that she--the mistress--once danced in the same room with the Prince of Wales!" And they laughed a little over the old boast as they hastened back to Broadway to secure the new bottle of rouge-vinaigre. Meantime Mr. Bulkley, who, like most vain men, had a corn or two, had grown weary of watching from the sidewalk, and, swearing a little to himself, had gone to a fashionable restaurant, much favored by women; and, little dreaming that the place was far beyond the means of the girls he sought, he secured a seat near the door, where he sat, and, like a fat old spider, watched for his pretty flies. But they came not, and when he could decently sit there no longer, he cursed just under his breath with an ease and fluency that showed long and earnest practice; then, red and hot with wine and anger, he paid his bill and went out, quite forgetting that truthful old saying, "The devil takes care of his own," until his infernal majesty did it in his case by suddenly bringing into view the two girlish figures he had so long been searching for. Having mamma's new "cheeks-bottle" concealed in a non-committal box of white pasteboard, Sybil came forth, followed slowly by Dorothy, who had not completed her study of the coiffure worn by one of the waxy beauties with inch-long eyelashes and button-hole mouth, who lived in the window and turned about slowly and steadily all the time the public eye was upon her. "Just wait, Sybil," said Dorothy, "until her back comes this way again. I'm sure that jug-handle knot is not tied, and yet how can you make a knot of back hair stand up firmly like that without tying it, I should like to know?" "Why," replied Sybil, "I believe it's done by extremely tight twisting. Haven't you noticed how a tightly twisted cord will double itself back in just that shape, and----" She got no farther. A cough, "I beg your pardon!" interrupted her. Both girls turned, to face the smiling, bowing William Henry Bulkley, who, ignoring their frowns, hastened to say, with a sort of bluff and fatherly cordiality: "My dear Miss Lawton--Miss Dorothy--I hesitated to recall myself to your memory at our first meeting this morning, as I saw with regret you had quite forgotten me. [This is the sort of thing that keeps Truth at the bottom of her well.] But this second accidental meeting seems so like a Providence restoring a valued friendship that I venture to address you with messages to my old-time friend and neighbor, John Lawton!" "Yes?" softly queried Dorothy, but Sybil, with back-thrown head, regarded him with an angry suspicion he could have shaken her for. Still he proceeded, blandly: "A man I highly esteemed, and have long hoped to meet again. You have, then [regretfully], quite forgotten me? You used to be rather fond of visiting my wife and swinging----" "Oh, Mrs. Bulkley!" exclaimed Dorothy, catching Sybil's arm. "Don't you remember our fall from the swing, and how good she was to us?" And maliciously interrupted Sybil: "How angry Mr. Bulkley was? Yes, I remember you, sir!" And looking into each other's eyes, they hated one another right heartily. But Dorothy, thinking only of what a pleasant surprise this finding of an old friend would be to her father, hastened to say: "Papa will remember you well, Mr. Bulkley, I'm sure!" "Thank you!" beamed that gentleman. "And your charming mamma, how is she? Well? So glad! A very lovely woman. May I ask your present address, and your kind permission to call upon your parents--that, according to our foreign critics, is, I believe, the correct formula, since they declare that parents are governed absolutely by their children in America. Woodsedge? Broadway? Ah, yes--yes, near the new park the city is about opening--quite so! I--I shall do myself the pleasure of driving out to present my compliments to your mamma and renew my friendship with your father. Do allow me, Miss Dorrie--no trouble at all. I am on my way uptown, and I shall esteem it a pleasure to see you young ladies on to your home train." And almost forcibly removing various packages from both girls' hands, he constituted himself their escort and guardian, feasting his eyes upon the fresh young beauty of Dorothy when the noise prevented talking. At the station he added to their parcels a couple of magazines and a box of chocolates, and, seeing them safely through the door that admitted them to their train's platform, he doffed his hat in farewell. And Dorothy gave him a rather forced smile and hasty good-by, while Sybil, with unsmiling lips, gave a short nod of her haughty young head, and William Henry Bulkley said, low: "You damned little cat," put on his hat again and went out, and, climbing into a car, added to himself: "But the other one--good Lord! When you come to talk about peaches, why----" CHAPTER V "THE WOMAN OF FATE" At the back of Woodsedge there was a place of green and fragrant mystery. In former years it had been an orchard, but unlimited sun and rain had combined, with man's neglect, to reduce it to this state of ruinous beauty. At one end the trees were so close, the boughs so intermingled, that their foliage seemed a canopy dense enough to turn aside the sharpest sun-lance, and the orchard, abutting, as it did, upon the forest growth belonging to the park, seemed but the more like a wilderness. For the girls it had many delights, the chief one being that the unscraped, uncleaned trunks, the unpruned branches, the weedy, seedy growths by the walls, all provided food in incalculable quantities for innumerable birds--long before fruit time. Your bird hates the well-cleaned, scraped-down, poison-washed, eggless, larvæless orchard of the commercially inclined farmer; but this seemed to be the general refectory for all the birds in the county. Baltimore orioles hung a nest from the tip of an elm bough directly over it. Orchard orioles, cat-birds, thrushes, and robins took apartments in it. A cuckoo and his wife dropped an inadequate and slovenly nest into an overgrown shrub, and though their slim, gray shapes were seldom seen, their "chug, chug, chug" was so often heard that Lena indignantly declared: "Dem rain crows cum make great lies in dis country. In de olt country, ven dey says 't-chug, t-chug,' ten it rain by jiminy! But here dey youst say 't-chug, t-chug' to make you worry mit de clothes dryin'," while the dainty antics of a jewel-like little redstart filled her with laughter. "I vork youst behind dat grapevine arbor, und I see him, my Miss Ladies; and he got von frau--youst so big as my tum, und so qwiet, und he make to dance und yump before her--und cock de eye at her, und he shiver out dem orange und black fedders for her to look at, und he svitch de leetle tail dis vay und dat vay, und she youst look up und say, plain, my Miss Ladies: 'Gott in himmel! Vas dere eber such a bird-mans as dis von of mine?'" And though the refectory was visited by warblers of many kinds, none of them made music sweeter than the innocent laughter of the sisters over the bird courtship Lena described. On this particular morning the girls had gone to the tangled old orchard for secret conclave. The ground was white with spring's snowstorm of fruit blossoms, and they could feel the petals falling lightly upon their uncovered heads as they walked. Sybil pulled a monster dandelion, and, after touching the great golden disc with her lips, she drew the long stem through her dark hair, leaving the blossom blazing just above her ear. "If this was only a rare growth," said she, "how people would rave over its beauty. Dorothy, take warning--don't be common! Always remember old gardener Jake's words to us when we were little: 'Make yerselves skeerce, young ladies, and y'ell be valley'd accordin'.' But what's the use of trying to teach wisdom to a girl who shows she's chock full of black superstitions!" For beyond a doubt Dorothy was earnestly searching for a four-leaf clover, and presently she held out a five-leaf specimen for Sybil to look at. But she waved it away, gloomily misquoting: "That clover doth protest too much, methinks. You will do better to cling to the three-leaf, that, promising nothing, has no power to disappoint you, Dorrie!" "Oh, but I'm looking for the four-leaf for _you_, Sib dear! If I find it, you will get the introduction you long for without another such disappointment as yesterday." "Oh, don't!" cried Sybil, leaning her brow against a tree trunk; "don't talk about it!" though that was exactly what they had come out there for--to talk over the failure of Sybil's last, best, most natural seeming plan for an accidental meeting with the woman of her dreams. She was busy winking back her tears when Dorothy gave an exclamation, thrust out her hand to brush aside a big, yellow-belted, booming bumble-bee, then plucked and held up triumphantly a four-leaf clover, and, her face all flushed with heat and excitement, she cried: "See that! She's yours, dear! The Woman of Fate--she's yours! Now you see if she isn't!" Sybil took the little emblem of good luck, and, putting her arm around her sister's waist to hug her close, she laughed: "Oh, Dorrie, for a girl who says her prayers every night and morning, you are the most superstitious little beast--what's that?" "It's her!" answered Dorothy, in ungrammatical delight; and Sybil, catching some of her spirit, held the little emblem above her head, crying, laughingly: "Now let the poor leaf get in its fine work!" The words were scarcely out of her lips when clear and sharp there rose the sound of metal's ringing blow against stone, followed by a quick "Ho--lá" in a woman's voice, and the instant stoppage of the regular "click-klack, click-klack" of a trotting horse. Down under the gigantic willow--his favorite tree--had been sitting John Lawton, reading his paper, and now the girls saw him rise and hasten out to Broadway; saw him, with hat off, speaking to the fretful chestnut and his blue habited rider, who pointed backward with her crop. The watching girls, without hesitation, clambered over the low stone wall and came nearer. They made out that their father remonstrated, and the woman laughed. And then they caught from her the words: "Very kind, and in half an hour," and she was away again; but this time the "clipperty-clapperty-clip" told that she rode at a gallop. The girls fairly tore down the hill, crying "Papa--papa! what was it? Tell us about it!" But first he pointed to the disappearing pair, saying: "Look at that--that's not bad riding for a woman to do without a stirrup!" "Without a stirrup?" questioned the girls. "Why, what do you mean, papa?" "Just what I say. I told her it wasn't safe, but she says it's a poor horsewoman who can't ride from balance, and on she went; but she's--just wait a bit," he broke off, "I'll be back in a moment;" and he went down the road, crossed over to a large stone at the roadside, and, stooping, picked something up. Returning, the girls saw that he carried a woman's stirrup. "That's what we heard clear up in the orchard!" said Sybil. "Is she going to send for it?" asked Dorothy. Sybil's very breath was suspended as she waited for the answer. How slow he was about it! At last, feeling in his pocket for a bit of twine, he replied: "No; she's going to stop here and pick it up on her way home." Sybil went white for an instant, then flushed red from brow to chin. Dorothy squeezed her hand sympathetically. Mr. Lawton took up the stirrup and examined the leather straps critically. "I'm going to try to tie this thing on when she comes back. She rides all right enough for looks without it, but if that horse should shy, and I don't believe he's a bit above it, for he's as nervous as a headachy woman, she might be unseated, so I'm going----" The girls did not wait for him to finish, but hand in hand they made a rush for the house, and flew up the outraged and groaning old stairs, to bathe their flushed faces and to brush into propriety certain flying locks of hair, and, in old-time parlance, to "prink" themselves generally for the coming interview. As they hastened down again they were disappointed to see their father standing at the gate. "Oh!" cried Dorothy, "why did he not stay here and let her ride up to the porch for the stirrup. Then we could have appeared naturally and as a matter of course; now----" "Now!" broke in Sybil, "as a matter of course we'll appear unnaturally, thrusting ourselves forward like ill-bred children! Oh, let's run down and bring papa back!" And away they started, but almost immediately the "clipperty-clapperty-clip" of the approaching horse was heard, and they stopped. Dorothy, noting how swiftly the color came and went on her sister's cheek, said, piteously: "I wonder if--oh, I hope she will be nice, dear!" "Nice?" repeated Sybil, savagely. "Why should she be nice? She is on the top wave of success--we're two little nobodies! Why nice, pray? But my pride is pushed well down in my pocket, Dorrie, and, if need be, I'll grovel for the help she alone can give me!" She said no more, for the horse had already been pulled up, and with a laugh Miss Morrell held out her hand for the broken stirrup; but with almost incredible determination Mr. Lawton not only refused to give it up, but, leading the horse into the willow's dense shade, he produced an old awl and some twine, at sight of which the rider smilingly lifted her knee from the pommel and twisted about in the saddle, to give him a chance to find the broken strap--and the girls looked at her in amazement. They had seen her often at the theatre--had wept themselves sick over her stage heart-break and death; but now they saw no faintest trace of that moving actress in the pleasant-faced woman before them--a fair-complexioned, wholesome-looking woman, with lots of brown hair, that had glittering threads all through and through it that were accentuated by the blackness of the velvet derby-cap she wore. Her straight nose was a little too short, her cheek-bones a little too high, her mouth a little too wide; in fact, she had escaped being a beauty so easily that one could not help feeling she had never been in danger. All of which did not prevent her from being adored by women. Presently Mr. Lawton called: "Girls, come here and help me a moment! One of you keep this horse still and the other hold Miss Morrell's habit out of the way for me." Dorothy, forgetting her timidity, ran to the big chestnut's head, so that her sister might take the place nearest to the rider; and as Sybil held the habit's folds out of her father's way, she raised such passionately pleading dark eyes that the actress, ever sensitive to human emotions, felt her heart give a quickened throb, and said to herself: "What on earth is it this girl is demanding of me?" Then she spoke: "I beg your pardon, sir, but if these are your young daughters, will you not introduce them to me?" And John Lawton, who had the twine between his lips and the awl just piercing the strap, jerked his head to the right, and mumbled: "M--m--my oldest daughter, Sybil," then jerked it to the left, with: "M--m--my youngest daughter, Dorothy--Miss Morrell." And pulling off her loose riding-glove, Miss Morrell gave her hand to each of the girls with a close, warm pressure of the long, nervous fingers that was like the greeting of an old friend. Dorothy chatted away, asking the name of the horse and making extravagant love to him. But what had happened to Sybil--the voluble, sometimes the sharp? She stood there dumb, and apparently unable to take her pleading eyes from the smiling face above her. At last the job was finished, and as Mr. Lawton placed the bronze-booted foot in the stirrup Miss Morrell's sigh of comfort and exclamation: "Ah, it does feel good to have it again, after all!" made that melancholy old gentleman laugh aloud from sheer self-satisfaction; and then, as she gathered up her reins, she gayly remarked: "Young ladies, since your father has introduced you by your first names only, perhaps you will now introduce him to me?" And with much laughter they each took him by a hand and presented him in full name--"Mr. John W. Lawton." Still feeling Sybil's glance, and being well used to adoring girls, Claire Morrell said, after thanking him for his kindness: "Mr. Lawton, I live just opposite, on Riverdale Avenue. If you go so far afield, will you not call upon me?" Then, touching the fading dandelion with her crop, she added: "I see you are fond of flowers. Perhaps your father will permit you and Miss Dorothy to come over some day and take a look at my posies?" The color rushed over Sybil's face and her eyes fairly blazed in sudden joy, and the actress felt she had at least partly translated that beseeching gaze. Dorothy accepted the invitation very prettily for herself and sister, Mr. Lawton raised his hat, and as the actress wheeled her horse about her white glove fell to the ground and she rode on, leaving it there. Dorothy snatched it up and passed it to Sybil, while John Lawton looked after the rider and remarked, with emphasis: "A charming woman!" And Dorothy answered, excitedly: "I always thought actresses had to be pretty women, though at night even this Miss Morrell looks----" "Never mind what she looks!" interrupted her father. "She's a charming woman! You must go over some day and see her at home!" And he returned to his paper under the willow. Dorothy went at once to her mother to give that lady a voluminous and detailed account of what had happened, and to be cross-examined at great length as to the make of the actress's habit, the quality of her horse, and the condition of her complexion, greatly doubting, as she did, Dorothy's assertion as to its naturalness. But Sybil fled upstairs and flung herself across the bed and pressed her hot cheek against the crumpled rein-rubbed glove. Her wish had been granted, and all had happened so unexpectedly. Nervous, foolish, joyful tears ran down her cheeks, and, as she recalled the comprehending blue eyes of her Woman of Fate, she knew in her heart that she had found help. CHAPTER VI A RECOGNITION AND A DINNER It was Sunday. The inevitable May cold spell was over. Like half-perished insects, the Lawtons gathered on the porch and basked in the early sunshine. Presently John Lawton, who was sensitive to heat, particularly on Sundays, remarked that by the calendar it was May, but by his feelings it was late June. And Sybil dabbed at his forehead with her wisp of a handkerchief, and answered, with affectionate impertinence: "Well, it's not excessive originality of thought that wears you out, papa, for yesterday you made the dignified and impressive statement that the calendar said it was May, but your feelings told you it was November. No, don't apologize, dear," and she gave him an explosive kiss, "but put your little calendar idea away now for a while--say till fall, and it'll come out quite bright and useful." Mrs. Lawton exclaimed: "Sybil!" then, in an excusing tone, "Ah! if we had our former surroundings I'm sure your manners and words would be quite in consonance with them!" "No doubt of it!" promptly acquiesced Sybil, while Dorothy cried: "Papa, positively you ought to take strong measures with Syb, even though she is as tall as you are--you should shake her!" And the utter absurdity of the suggestion sent them indoors in a gale of laughter that Mrs. Lawton denounced from behind the coffee urn as "absolutely heretical." Instantly Sybil, with lance in rest, came charging at her mother: "Ho--ho! To the rescue! The English language is in danger! Mamma, had I so misused a word, you would have rapped me on the head with your thimble, _à la_ governess Anna Smith, of evil memory." Mrs. Lawton pushed up the quite dry bandage from her brows--that bandage was generally visible on Sunday mornings till after church bells ceased their troubling--and said: "'Pon my word, Sybil, your conduct sometimes approaches the contumacious! Dorothy, a smile may degenerate into a grin, and what amuses you is beyond my power of vision. I do know, however, that my English is unassailable." "But," Dorothy tremulously ventured, "but, by heretical laughter, mamma, did you not mean instead that our noise was inappropriate, or----?" "Miss!" broke in Letitia Lawton, "I meant what I said. It's Sunday, and it's heresy to laugh aloud on that day! Pass your father the cream-jug; I've lived with him in honorable wedlock for twenty years, but I can't sugar or cream his coffee right to this day." "But, mamma," said Sybil, crunching a tiny radish, "is not heresy an unsound opinion----" "Well, it's got to be an opinion opposed to Scripture!" and Mrs. Lawton hammered the words to the table with her knife-handle. "Not necessarily," mildly objected John Lawton, as he pushed his cup toward the deity behind the urn. "People have committed heresy against other things than the Scriptures. You can have an unsound opinion without its being a religious one." "There! That's just what I said!" cried Mrs. Lawton. "Immoderate laughter on Sunday is ill-bred, and is, therefore, unsound religious conduct, which is worse than unsound opinion, which you, yourself declare to be heresy. Thank you, John, you seldom back me up so readily. Why! those girls have scarcely tasted breakfast, and there they go rushing upstairs. Oh, well, the walk is rather long to St. John's, and I suppose they wish to take their time over it!" And she settled down contentedly to her own dilly-dallying meal, while Mr. Lawton, with a very red face, silently drank his second cup of coffee. After the girls had gone churchward, and Lena was in full control of the apartment, which Mrs. Lawton always referred to till three o'clock as the breakfast-room, and afterward as the dining-room, father and mother again resorted to the porch, each occupying one of its corners. Mrs. Lawton, who prided herself upon the propriety of her attitude toward the church, sat with the prayer-book open at the lesson for the day, feeling that the bandage on her brow so fully justified her absence from the church that she was exceptionally devout in thus following the service at the correct moment, and making her responses distinctly a few times, so that she might properly impress her dangerously lax husband. Then--well, the book seemed to be a long way off--the printed words ran together, jumped apart, whirled round about, a warm haze closed softly down--she, she could not see. She slept, while over in the other corner Mr. Lawton sat by the Sunday paper that itself occupied an entire chair, and in its bulky entirety might well have required the ice-man's tongs to carry it up the hill. And in St. Johns, that church, picturesque and time-honored, that, gathering the little town about its knees, stands with it in the very centre of a hill-girdled hollow, and is in May already greenly veiled with tender ivy and young clambering rose, there sat none more devoutly attentive to the stately service than those two fair sisters from the old White house. Both were used to attracting more or less attention; therefore, when they rose for the Gospel, Sybil's "Glory be to Thee!" died away in her throat from sheer astonishment at the burning blush she saw sweeping over Dorothy's face from chin to down-bent brow. With swift, indignant eyes she searched for the cause of her sister's embarrassment, and no sooner had she found the guilty man, who stood at gaze, wrapped in what truly seemed unconscious admiration for that sweet face, than she gave a violent start of recognition; then, with sharp question in her eye, turned back to Dorothy, to find that blush even hotter, redder than it was before, and knew instinctively that she, too, had recognized the grave young man of the city car--he who had frustrated Mr. Bulkley's plan; and with a sudden swelling of the throat the conviction came to her that these two had fallen in love at sight, and in a very passion of tenderness for her sister Sybil whispered to herself, "Dorrie! little Dorrie! what are you doing, dear? He looks brave and gentle, and--and exacting, and--you dear little idiot, you are conscious of nothing but his gaze! And he, grave as he is, has quite lost track of any other presence here but Dorrie's--my little Dorrie, who is barely done with dolls!" And Sybil's dark eyes were dimmed with tears for a little time. While they were sitting through the sermon, the dozing Letitia and John were being sorely confused and disturbed by the unexpected arrival of the oppressively opulent Mr. Bulkley. Poor Mrs. Lawton had been the last to awaken, and the glittering trap and big high-stepping sorrel with the wickedly rolling eye were coming up the unused grass-grown driveway before her eyes opened. She could not fly; she was fairly caught in bedroom slippers and bandaged head. There was but one thing to do, she decided, as John Lawton with drowsy eyes went forward to welcome his guest; she must hide her feet and play up to the bandage. In pursuance of this plan she instantly became very languid in manner and patiently enduring in expression; nor did she forget the bright bloom on her cheeks, but touching their cool surface with the back of her hand announced resignedly that she supposed her fever was coming on again. And Mr. Bulkley frowned at the trees and talked malaria and quinine and thinning out; and finding the young ladies absent, decided to await their return. And so the evil moment came when Mr. Lawton had to confess himself unable to offer hospitality to the fretting sorrel, who was fidgeting and stamping and throwing gravel all over the place. And Mr. Bulkley had ordered his man to take the horse back the road a bit to a stable attached to a road-house they had passed and put him up there; and as Letitia heard him add, "You can also get your dinner at the house, Dolan," her heart sank like lead before a vision of her almost empty pantry. As the returning girls stepped aside to let the horse and trap pass out they heard Mr. Bulkley's big laugh from the porch, and in an instant two frightened blue eyes were staring into two troubled dark ones, while both girls exclaimed, in absolute terror: "Dinner!" To those who have lived in the midst of plenty all their days, this dinner question may seem very amusing or very absurd, but the genteel poor understand it well. They know the humiliation and torture the sensitive hostess feels in trying to entertain the uninvited stranger within her gates; and here was this great, flaunting, high-feeding old man! There were people to whom the girls could have frankly offered bread and butter and tea, or crackers and cheese and a cup of coffee, but not to this "big animal," as Sybil called him. Dorothy laid her hand on her sister's arm and whispered: "Let us climb through the break in the wall and go up to the orchard and signal Lena to come to us, and there arrange what we are to do." "Good idea, that!" agreed Sybil, "for you--er--I mean, we shall never be able to escape papa's ponderous friend after we once make our appearance upon the scene." So in the orchard the sorely troubled three held secret conclave. "Uf id vasn't Suntay!" Lena kept groaning, "or uf id vas breakfas' alretty instet of dinner, ven tings get chopped all up mit demselves so peoples don't know vat tings dey com' eat; but der dinner, Himmel! Und dat old mans, he eat--ach! I know he eat like dot great hop-up-on-to-mus at der park! Himmel!" And Sybil threatened. "Dorrie! Dorrie! stop laughing this moment! Don't you dare grow hysterical! Lena, hold your tongue, and only answer direct questions. One chicken, you say? Only one? For five people? Dear heaven! But, Lena, has mamma her head bandaged up yet? Yes? Oh, joy! She need have no helping, then! She will be too sick, you see!" "Nein! nein!" cried Lena, "der mistress lofes der dinner too mooch!" "Yes, I know all that," sternly answered Sybil, "but she will restrain her appetite to-day for the reputation of her house! Dorrie, you _must_ manage that mamma demands in her most plaintive tone some very thin toast and some tea, and she must shiver daintily at the merest suggestion of dinner. Promise her eggs for late supper, to comfort her." Lena was for broiling their solitary chicken, but a cry of condemnation burst from Dorothy. "Broil it? Never! It must be eked out in some way. Lena, you can fry it--can't you? And make a great deal of cream sauce, and have some diamonds of toast around the edge of the dish to make it look full?" "Ja!" nodded the willing Lena, "but dat young hens only make four goot pieces for all dat gravy sauce; und you can't be sick too, my Miss Ladies!" "Oh!" cried Sybil. "Listen, Dorrie, listen! Lena, was there not a bit of veal left from dinner yesterday?" "Ja!" answered Lena, "but dat goes mit de oder scraps to be chopped for der breakfas'!" "No, no!" interrupted Sybil, "put them on the platter with the chicken; cover them well with sauce and drop a tiny morsel of parsley on each piece to mark it; and we will coach papa, Dorrie, to help us to the parsley marked portions without letting the old dear know just why, and with a little care on our part no one need guess we are not eating chicken. That will leave the whole of it for the gentlemen, and Mr. Bulkley can have the second helping he will want, for you can cook a chicken à la Maryland as well as any aunty, Lena!" Then they agreed that neither one of them would care for salad that day, but might freely indulge in coffee, though sharing very delicately in dessert. And so, patting Lena's sturdy shoulder in sign of their trust and gratitude, they picked up from the grass their shabby old prayer-books, and presently made demure appearance, coming slowly up the steep path that led to the weary, sagging, old porch. And William Henry Bulkley, who for the last half hour had been calling himself every kind of a fool, ran his greedy old eyes over the tempting loveliness of Dorothy and changed his mind suddenly, feeling that the boredom caused by John and Letitia Lawton was not too high a price to pay for the pleasure of loitering by the side of this wonderful girl. And so he made his devoirs in most expansive fashion; cast dust in Mr. Lawton's mild blue eyes by referring, in quite a fatherly tone, to his daughters as little Dorrie and Sybbie, was deferential in the extreme to Sybil, and confessed to a distinct recollection of every horse, every equipage, of Mrs. Lawton's ownership in the past, even to one or two she had owned only in her imagination. But never, she observed, did he for one moment lose sight of Dorothy. At last Sybil, like a pitying angel, placed herself between Mr. Bulkley and her mother's slippers, and covered that lady's retreat to her own room to arrange herself for dinner. And it was Sybil who had sternly to replace the bandage and coach the hungry and irate mother in her part of delicate sufferer, closing the scene with the words: "I know, darling, you're too proud to allow anyone to guess at the straits we are in." Then, kissing the hungry tears from her mother's eyes, she added: "Just say to yourself, now and then, 'Eggs! eggs!' and that will keep your courage up--that and the knowledge that you are the only woman alive who can wear a handkerchief about her forehead and yet look pretty." And Letitia simpered, and sprinkled a little bay-rum on her hair to suggest headache; ate a handful of crackers to take off the sharp edge of her keen appetite, and languidly descended to the distinctly musty parlor. Dorothy had desired to go for a few wild flowers for the table, but she had not escaped from William Henry Bulkley. In all the immaculate glory of his spring attire, as tightly trussed up as a large fowl ready for the oven, he walked at her side when the path permitted, and breathed stertorously behind her when it wouldn't. And when with a cry of joy she discovered that a twisted old hawthorn had actually hung out some garlands of snowy blossoms, he nearly had an apoplexy from his frantic efforts to obtain them for her. He loaded her with fulsome compliments, and he looked so strangely at her that the poor child hurried back to the house, vowing it was the last time she would go out with him, if he were papa's friend twenty times over; and passing him over to mamma in the parlor, she hastily arranged her handful of blossoms for the centre of the table, and captured her father and instructed him as to the serving of the chicken. As she spoke a trembling came upon his weak mouth, and his pained blue eyes looked away over her head. She put a pink-tipped forefinger on his lip and said, low: "Don't, papa, don't! It's all right, only dear, dear papa, you won't forget, will you now--for Syb and me the portions with the bits of green--you understand, papa?" And he sighed and answered bitterly: "Yes, I understand! God knows I understand!" At last, then, they sat at table. Sybil, holding her hatchet behind her in temporary amity, glowed and sparkled, cheerfully proclaimed her interest in the cult of delicate feeding, and boldly challenged judgment on the principal dish before them, the chicken _à la_ Maryland, sorely frightening her family by her reckless daring. But Mr. Bulkley, with Dorothy's wistful blue eyes upon him, without hesitation gallantly declared it could not be equalled this side of Mason and Dixon's line; and, to poor Lena's sorrow, proved his sincerity by accepting a second helping, which was hard on that help-maiden, who had not even eggs to look forward to later on. But Mrs. Lawton's shiver of repulsion at the offered soup and her faint consent to the making of a little thin toast--"oh, very, _very_ thin"--were so cleverly done that both girls mentally promised her a hug and a kiss by and by. And William Henry Bulkley, who lived solely for physical comfort and mental excitement, and was enjoying both at that moment, beamed and sympathized and complimented and ogled, and finally left the table swept so bare of food that the very locusts of Egypt might have gained points from the completeness of his ravages. And when with grateful hearts the Lawtons saw his red face smiling "good-by" from the gorgeous trap, as it went glittering down the drive, John went directly to his beloved willow, Letitia flew to the dining-room, but Sybil, dashing her fist upon the porch railing, cried, with white lips: "Oh, what a tawdry farce life has become for us! Dorothy Lawton, I go to Miss Morrell's to-morrow! If she helps me--good! If she does not, I'll kill myself! I swear I will! Oh, mamma--Lena! Come quick! Dorrie has fainted!" CHAPTER VII A PRAYER AND A PROMISE Next day, in spite of the faint her sister had frightened her into, Dorothy's cheeks and lips wore their usual clear, bright color, and it was Sybil's face that seemed drained of blood down to the edges of her scarlet lips, while faint violet shadows lay beneath her brooding dark eyes. True to the resolve formed the evening before, she prepared herself, early in the day, for a walk over to Riverdale Avenue. She did not ask Dorothy to go with her, but when the latter noted the preparations being made, she cast down the paper she was dawdling over and herself made ready to go out, and Sybil put her arm about her sister's neck for a moment, in sign of gratitude for her companionship, and together they started forth to make the fateful call. As they scrambled through the stony lane that made a short cut for them Dorothy said: "Did you pray to God to help you, Sybbie? I did." "Oh!" recklessly replied Sybil. "I notice God generally helps those who help themselves!" "You mean," corrected Dorothy, "who try to help themselves. All one can do by one's own self, Syb, is just to try. But God always keeps His promises, and will surely give help if you ask for it, _believing_ in Him. And you do believe--you do, don't you dear?" Sybil shot a quick sidelong glance at her sister, hesitated a moment, then stopped, bent her head, and whispered, rapidly: "Lord! dear Lord! who seems always so far off, hear me, I pray! Soften this woman's heart toward me, incline her to help me, not because of any merit, but because of my great need. In your blessed Son's name I ask it. Amen!" And then she hurried on ahead, while Dorothy, radiant with faith, scrabbled and slipped and laughed quite happily as they came out upon the wide, shady avenue, short of breath but sound of limb and skirt and shoe. As they passed the big gate and walked slowly up the driveway of The Beeches they saw a large red sunshade go bobbing around the corner of the house and halted. "Shall we go on and ring the bell," asked Dorothy, "or shall we venture to follow her?" "No! no!" answered Sybil. "The last refuge of the genteel beggar who comes to ask a favor is an absolute propriety of behavior--strict conformity to the demands of etiquette. To follow and join our hostess in her garden would be delightfully informal, but it would be too suggestive of familiarity. No! no! We must ring the bell and pass in a few ounces of pasteboard to the housemaid or the boy or----" But just then there came a sound like a splash of something into water, a scream that trailed off into a gurgle of laughter, and finally clear and distinct the words: "You abominable little beast--poor angel! Hold still! You're wetting me all over, far worse than the lawn sprinkler!" And around the corner of the house came their hostess, her skirts wound well about her, while from her two outstretched hands dangled and kicked a muddy, dripping, coughing, spitting morsel of a skye-terrier. The three women gazed at one another a moment and then burst into laughter. "If you will rest a little on the veranda--there are seats there--I will join you the moment I am divorced from this small martyr to scientific research. No levity, please, Miss Dorothy." Then suddenly lifting her voice Miss Morrell cried: "Frida! Mary! M--a--r--y! Somebody come here, please!" and swiftly resumed her reproachfully explanatory tone, saying: "This animated bit of mud is, when washed and dried, a very earnest student of biology, or, to be more exact, of zoology, since she is most deeply interested in the structure and daily habits of the fugacious frog, which, up to this time, she has considered a terrestrial beast, inhabiting shady garden beds; but now she knows him to be amphibious; has proved it, indeed, by plunging after him into the muddy depths of the lily tub, just to see for herself, you know. There's devotion to study! Oh, Frida, here you are, at last! Take Mona and put her kindly but very firmly into her tub, no soap, you know, just a thorough rinsing--and then dry her as you would be dried, that is, tenderly. Miss Dorothy, I'm afraid you are what the old comedies call 'a frivol.'" And so with light banter they entered the house. But Miss Morrell, being an observant person, saw from the first the preoccupation of Sybil, and to her the girl's pale face, cloudy hair, insistent dark eyes, and sullen red mouth, suggested a touch of tragedy, and again she asked herself: "What does she want? What is she demanding of me?" Dorothy, in answer to Sybil's look, was trying to find some excuse for leaving the two together, and had just expressed a desire to cross the lawn to look at a very fine hawthorn when they saw a young woman coming up the steps and heard a ring of the doorbell. Claire Morrell's eyes happened to be upon Sybil's at the moment, and the look of despair that settled whitely down upon her face made her think, with a quickening pulse, "That's just the expression of face many a woman must have seen reflected from the clear water a moment before the fatal plunge." And going swiftly forward to greet the new-comer, who was her neighbor, she decided to give Miss Lawton a chance to speak with her alone if she so desired. Therefore, directly introductions had been made, she asked Miss Helen Gray if she would not show Miss Dorothy about a bit, and, laughingly joining their hands, she shoo'd them before her, crying: "Go forth, lovers of flowers, and seek diligently for the oriole that hideth the nest in mine orchard! A prize awaits the fair, the chaste, the inexpressive she who first locates that nest!" And as they went willingly forth Miss Morrell returned to the parlor, pushing to the door nearest the stairs, and remarked, casually: "We've got the whole floor to ourselves, now, so we may expand!" Then, with a jerk and apropos of nothing, Sybil asked: "Miss Morrell, is it very difficult to get upon the stage?" A flash came from the blue eyes of the actress, and her lip curled contemptuously as she answered: "Oh, no! If a woman has been party to a particularly offensive scandal, or to a shooting, or has come straight from the divorce court, then she turns quite naturally to the stage-door, which seems to open readily to her touch--such is the baneful power of notoriety. But your respectable, clean-minded girl, who wishes to enter a theatre of high standing, will find it easier to break through the wall, removing brick by brick, than to open unaided the door closed against her." "Oh, don't!" cried Sybil, in a pained voice, "don't jest! I am in earnest! I--I--I want to go on the stage, Miss Morrell. Can you, will you, help me?" "Certainly not!" came the swift answer. "Help to the stage a young girl who has a father and a mother and a good home? Be grateful for them, and----" But her words were crossed by a shrill laugh and the bitter cry: "'A good home!' Dear God, hear her! 'A good home!'" And Sybil clasped her throat with both hands to choke back the strangling sobs that were following that laugh. Claire Morrell rose, and, swiftly crossing to her guest, remarked: "You are not well." Then, quite ignoring the gasped: "Oh, yes, I am! I am well enough," she drew out the long pins securing it, lifted the heavy hat from Sybil's head, and, running her long fingers through the dark waves, said, gently: "What is it, child?" And Sybil threw her arms about the actress's waist, crying: "May I tell you? Will you listen?" A moment's pause; then, with a swiftly clouding face, she continued: "But, what's the use, you will not understand my trouble! If death had robbed me--if a lover had deserted me--any great disaster would touch your heart! But you, who are rich, successful, secure, cannot be expected to understand the shame, the humiliation, the suffering caused by mere poverty! And yet, it is genteel poverty that is crushing out the lives of all those who are dear to me! That is my trouble, but," she let her arms drop heavily away from the waist they had clasped, "you cannot understand!" Claire Morrell stood tall in her soft amber gown, looking down into the troubled eyes lifted to her face. A half quizzical, half tender smile was on her lips. "You must not jump so hastily to your conclusions, Miss Lawton," she said. "I am very comfortable now, it is true. I have sufficient to eat, to wear, but I have known the time when I had neither." As Sybil's eyes widened, she went on: "You think you know poverty? Well, have you ever wandered about the city streets, clinging to the fingers of a mother who staggered with weakness, while she searched for work--for shelter? Have you felt the pinch of cold, the gnawing, the actual pangs of hunger? Once Death and I were kept apart by a single slice of bread. I think you may go on, my dear, for I have matriculated, and can well understand. Thank you, dear!" For Sybil had caught the speaker's hand, and, with quick sympathy, had pressed it to her lips. And as the actress sank down beside her, on the dark red cushions, Sybil poured forth all the story of her early luxury, her aimless education, their ever-deepening poverty, the isolation of her sister and herself, her mother's obstinate determination not to let them work, confessing even to her own dark thoughts and wicked threats, should this one hope be taken from her. "For, you see," said she, "I can do nothing else--nothing, _nothing_! But I am young, I have intelligence, I have good common sense. I don't expect ever to be a crowned queen of the stage, but might not I be one of the little people that are required in so many plays? I think I might, for, oh, Miss Morrell, I do believe I could act!" And noticing the swift play of expression on the vivid young face before her, that lady answered, quietly: "Yes, and I believe so, too." Sybil clasped her hands, fairly gasping the words: "You will help me, then?" "Wait? wait!" cried the other. "You are again jumping too quickly. I do not refuse entirely to consider your wishes; but, my dear girl, before I lift one finger, speak one word in your behalf, I must have the assurance that you are acting with the full approval, or at least with the consent, of your parents. No! No!" raising her hand imperatively, "don't coax, it would be useless, it would be unpardonable, dishonorable, to assist a daughter to enter a profession that her father and mother disapproved of." Sybil leaned forward, and clutching a fold of the amber gown, asked, with dry lips: "And--and, if I win their consent? Oh, Miss Morrell, Miss Morrell, what then?" She trembled all over with excitement. The actress, looking back to the days of her own desperate struggle, felt a great pity for this poor child, who was so eager to rush, all unarmed, into the fray--a pity and a dread. "Child," she said, earnestly, almost piteously, "promise me that in the future you will never blame me for opening the stage-door to you. No matter what happens, promise to hold me in kindly, even forgiving memory, if need be!" And Sybil said, fervently: "I shall worship you all your life and honor and revere you my own life through, if of your mercy you make me a bread-winner!" "Had you come to me one week ago," continued Miss Morrell, "I could have given you a small position in my company for next season, but a young widow, who has never looked upon the footlights yet, came before you, and, well, she will undertake the small parts you might have experimented with. Don't look so hopeless! When your father and mother have consented to the step we will go down to the city to do a little shopping, and we will just happen in at a certain theatre where I have often played, and I will present you to its manager, and will speak a little word for you, and _perhaps_ he may give you the chance you long for. Child! child! Rise this moment! Kneel only to your God! Quick! Here are the others! Go over to that farthest mirror and put on your hat! Well, what luck?" as the girls came in, flushed and laughing. "What, you really found the nest?" "Yes," said Dorothy; "but you misled us. It was not in the orchard, but hanging from the tip of an elm-bough this side the orchard wall." "And who won the prize?" smilingly inquired Miss Morrell. "Miss Lawton did," said Miss Gray. "My neck soon grew tired, and I gave up staring upward." "Then behold the reward of the patient searcher and the strong of neck!" And Miss Morrell handed Dorothy a silver souvenir spoon, bearing on the bowl an etched picture of The Beeches. "Oh, how pretty!" exclaimed the recipient. "Sybil, see! Is this not charming?" And as her sister turned to look at the bit of silver Miss Morrell was positively amazed at the brilliant beauty of the girl's face when hope-illumined! As the Lawtons withdrew, Sybil, who passed out last, looked at her Woman of Fate with luminous worshipping eyes, and whispered: "God was very good when He created you!" CHAPTER VIII "TELL HER YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION" When the girls had returned from their call on the actress they were met at the door by a wildly excited, tearfully angry Lena: "Oh, my Miss Ladies!" she cried. "Vat you tink now? Vas I a mans I could say tarn! But I'm youst a vomans, so I cry mit my eyes! Dose mens of der gas houses com und dey make mit de bill und vant money right now dis minute down. Und I say der Herr Boss he's out, und der Frau Mistress comes in der bed mit der headaches, und de Miss Ladies go visitin' mit dat big actor lady's over yonter, und dey shall put de bill on der mantel-poard unter dat clock, dot doan't go no more! Und dot smarty mans, he gif big laughs, und say, 'Oh, no! dot plan's like de clock, it doan't go!' Und he say gif him right avay quick de pay for der gas! Und I say, Did he tink I carry de gas money in my clothes? Und den dey say dey cut off dot gas--cut it short off unless dey hav' de money. Und dey shov' me avay und go down in der cellar, und for sure, my Miss Ladies, I haven't seen dem mens cut nodings at all. But after dot dey take avay demselves. I youst go to light der dark entry vay out dere, and oh! oh! der gas don't light it, it don't even make no smells, und dose men did cut off dot gas, und carry it off mit 'em! Und we ain't got only vun candles in der house! And [sobbing loudly] uf anybody in der fam'ly should be took to die, all unexpec' like, it vill be in der dark to-night--you see, now!" Perhaps Sybil's courage might have required a little time to tighten it up to the sticking point, but this tale of Lena's was like a sharp goad pricking her forward. Throwing off her hat she said: "Lena, go make me a cup of coffee! Miss Dorothy will give you some change to buy a few candles for to-night." And as Lena trotted off to the kitchen Dorothy asked: "Shall you want me, Sybbie?" And as a shaken head was her only answer, she picked up her sister's hat and slowly turned away. At the stairs she looked back and said: "If you should want me, I'll be in our room waiting." And the set, frowning face of Sybil softened for a moment, and she answered, gently: "Thank you, Dorrie! I know you will be wishing me success!" And, satisfied with a kind word, Dorothy ascended to her own room, and presently heard the high shrill voice of her mother, crying out against "needless ignominy" and "degradation," caught the words "strollers, play-actors," "constables," "depths of vulgarity," "painted caricatures," and "serpent-tooth," and then suddenly the long wavering shriek and laugh of hysteria; and, knowing that Sybil needed help by that time, she softly entered the room and held her mother's beating hands, while Sybil administered soothing drops, applied a bit of plaster here and there to the self-inflicted scratches, and fastened a cologne-soaked handkerchief tightly about the doubtless aching head. But after the girls had placed her in bed she suddenly lifted her head and said, resentfully: "Miss Morrell might at least have called on me before talking things over seriously with you girls. I've been fifty times better off than she is! She may be a very great actress, but her social usages are all wrong, I can tell her that! And she can call on me, or you can keep off the stage all your life, Sybil Lawton!" And with violently restrained laughter the girls stole out of the room, leaving their mother to enjoy a nap. "Oh," cried Dorothy, when they had locked themselves into their own room, "was not that mamma all over? Now it is Miss Morrell who is trying to induce you to go on the stage, and mamma will not consent unless she is called upon in state by the famous suppliant! Oh, it is funny!" But Sybil's laugh was not hearty. She was thinking of her father, whose coming she waited anxiously; and when at last they were out on the porch, alone in the sweet June dusk, she, leaning back against the railing, said, suddenly: "Dada!" John Lawton started at the word. In an instant his memory presented him the picture of his handsome, vexed young wife as she fretted over the dark-eyed baby's persistent use of "dada" instead of papa; and his blue old eyes were very tender as they looked at the speaker expectantly. "I went over to call upon Miss Morrell to-day." "Did you?" he asked, in a pleased tone. "I'm sure you found her a charming companion?" "She?" exclaimed Sybil. "She is the best, she is the kindest woman in the whole world!" "It's a habit with you, dear, to indulge in somewhat hasty conclusions. And you are a little extravagant, too, are you not? I have heard some very pretty stories of Miss Morrell's kindness to the people about here, but 'the whole world'?" He smiled indulgently, and was going on to complete his remark, when, noticing the tightly clasped hands, the eager manner of his daughter, he paused, and, quick as a flash, she flung herself into the story of the day. Once only he moved, once only he spoke. When first she declared her intention of going on the stage he cried "Sybil!" then clasped his hand about his lips and chin and said no other word. She was passionately portraying their hopeless, friendless state, when he turned restlessly in his chair, and murmured: "Why doesn't Lena light the gas--the house looks so dreary?" "Why? why?" cried Sybil. "Why, because there is no gas to light. The bill was not paid to-day! Oh! see--see, dear! Something _must_ be done! And I'm the only one to do it, you know that!" Faintly a groaned "Oh, God! Oh, God!" came to her ear, and she cried: "Don't misunderstand! Oh, dada, don't! There was no reproach in that! I only mean I'm so well and strong I ought to help, at least, myself!" "It's a hard life," he whispered. "No harder for me than for other girls," she answered. "You might fail--you might, you know?" "Even so," responded Sybil, "it would be more brave, more honorable to try and fail than not to try at all, but be content to cling like a parasitical growth to you and mamma, stealing from your vitality!" He turned his pale face to her, and said: "There speaks my father, through your lips. The courage, the spirit, that passed by me reappears in you, a girl!" Again he turned away, and silence fell. She had reasoned, argued, entreated. Had it all been in vain? she asked herself. At last she faltered: "Dada, are you going to refuse your consent? Shall you forbid me?" He turned upon her in a white passion of misery: "Refuse you? Forbid you? What right have I to forbid anything? Fathers who bring honor to the family name, who support, shelter, and protect their children, have earned the right to guide them--to forbid them for their good! But what right have I? My father gave me a fortune--I was too weak to hold it! God gave me daughters, and I am too weak to protect them!" His head fell upon his breast, he extended his trembling old hands to her, and abjectly murmured: "Pardon me, my daughter! pardon me!" In an instant his shamed old face was resting above the high-beating young heart of his child. She smoothed back the silvery hair from his lined brow, and said, imperatively: "Dada, answer me this one question, and we will have done. Answer truly! Do you believe there is a father, great, strong, rich, influential, in this city to-night who is more truly, reverently loved than you are? Tell me!" And the old man answered: "No! no! Though I have lost everything else in the world, my children's love remains to me. That is the one sweet drop left in the bottom of the cup! It is compensation, daughter, it is compensation!" Sybil rested her cheek upon his head, and crooned over him as though he were a sick child, until the young summer night lifted her mighty silver shield high above the grewsome black trees, then a peevish voice from above called: "Sybil! John! What are you mooning over down there? Why on earth don't you come in out of the damp? The quinine bottle's more than half empty now! No one ever seems to consider ways and means in this house unless I do! And John, this room's full of all sorts of flopping, flying things! They've put the candle out twice, and you ought to come up here and try and chase 'em away! Besides, I--I don't want you two down there, anyway!" John answered, obediently, "Yes, Letitia!" But Sybil laughed a short laugh, and said: "The wasp carries his sting in his tail, and the pith of mamma's remarks are generally found at their end. No, she doesn't want us two down here anyway! Papa, I knew mamma was jealous of me when I was only as high as your knee, and----" But her father put his finger on her lip, saying: "Don't, daughter; it is not a gracious thing to speak of a mother's faults." And Sybil said, hastily: "I beg your pardon, papa!" Then, as they rose, she put her hands on his shoulders and asked, very prettily: "Papa, will you not in so many words give me your permission to try for a position on the stage? Miss Morrell will not move an inch without it." "She is a good woman, an honest woman!" he said. Then he put his hand under Sybil's chin and, lifting her face to the moonlight, looked steadily at her a long moment, sighed heavily, and answered: "Since you are so determined, dear, yes, you may tell Miss Morrell you are acting with my permission in seeking to enter her profession." And he put her quickly from him and went slowly into the house, stumbling up the stairs in the darkness. And Sybil lifted her arms above her head, stretching her hands up toward the moon in a very ecstasy of joy. "Oh," she whispered, "_am_ I to escape from this 'slough of despond'--_am_ I to have my chance in life? Perhaps I may become successful, happy?" And right across her smiling, upturned face a hideous creature of the night flew so low, so near, one leathery wing touched her loosened hair. She flung her hands across her face with a startled cry, then laughed a little tremulously, saying: "B-r-r-r! a bat--ugh! How I loathe them! I--I think I'll go in" and she entered the house, closing and with some difficulty locking the door in the darkness. As she reached the top step of the stairs a door opened, and Mrs. Lawton in her undress uniform of mind as well as body, a guttering candle held high above her head, stood enframed in the doorway--Mrs. Lawton in night-dress and knitted bedroom slippers, but without her upper teeth, without her thick switch of hair, without her rosy bloom of rouge vinaigre; and without all these things it was surprising how little there seemed to be left of the every-day familiar Letitia Lawton. Looking at the small, sleek head; the pallid, sunken face; the flattened figure--Sybil thought, rather wickedly: "This is a sort of skeleton mamma. I wonder if papa would like to put her in the closet?" But the lady was addressing her querulously: "Oh, you have decided it to be worth while to follow a mother's suggestion, and come into the house at last? In former days I could have called in a doctor for every chill in the family, even for the servants--though, to tell the truth, servants rarely have real hearty chills; indeed, I doubt their ability to contract genuine malaria. It's a mere desire to imitate their employers. But now that your poor father has lost everything--that is, everything except his good name [with a stinging look at Sybil, which, that young person understood perfectly]--I can only defend the health of my family with the quinine bottle, and I do think you and your father might have held your secret consultation inside the house. I'm sure neither Dorothy nor I would have tried to pry!" "Oh, mamma!" indignantly exclaimed Sybil, "you know what I was asking of papa!" "I know!" broke in Mrs. Lawton, "that you were twisting him about your little finger, as you usually do. It is not for a father to decide a girl's destiny, without even asking the mother's advice. You two have connived together, I believe, with that Morrell woman, who has not even called upon the mother she would rob! But remember this--the house that is divided against itself goes to the wall, or--er falls, or something; and how you can stand and laugh at the mother that bore you is more than I can understand! Your Grandmother Bassett never received such treatment from me--I know that! But you and your father may think everything is safely settled, and you as good as on the stage; but let me tell you I am not quite helpless in this matter. There is still one link between me and the life of ease and luxury and beauty I once knew! You seem to forget you have a god-mother--though how you can forget the only human being who has been able to give you presents for ten long years, I don't know! But you have a god-mother, and Sybil Van Camp has at least enough of her fortune left to merit our respect! Oh, you need not pout! Down you go to-morrow to Mrs. Van Camp, and if she sees no shame in spreading the name of Lawton all over New York, well and good! She was a power in her day. I nearly fainted from joy and pride when she consented to stand god-mother to you! You don't like to trouble her--very private matter? I wish it was a private matter. As for trouble, didn't she vow in church to become your surety and see that you renounced things and--ah, well, what's a god-mother for if she don't take some responsibility? Anyway, you go on to no stage without Mrs. Van Camp's consent, nor without proper social amenities being extended to your mother! "And Sybil, I simply _can't_ be kept standing here all night in my state of health! Of course, dear, I am interested in all your plans, but it would have been more thoughtful had you waited till morning to talk them over. But that's where you take after your poor father in a certain unpremeditated selfishness--unpremeditated, I admit, for he's a gentleman and you've had the upbringing of a lady--though you are deprived of the surroundings of one, but through no fault of yours or mine! John!"--turning sharply to peer into the darkness behind her--"what are you groaning about, I'd like to know? It's my legs and back that are bearing the fatigue of this interview. I saw you took good care to loll comfortably through your talk with Sybil. So why you should groan now, I don't know, unless you've hit your bunion on the frame of the sewing-machine again, and you generally swear a little when you do that. Sybil, I'm fairly worn out in mind as well as body, and you tore your veil the other day, didn't you? Cheap lace always goes that way. There was a time when my veils made people turn around to look at them. I had one with a border of grapes and vines, I remember; I am always an honest woman, and as the border had the effect of cutting off one's chin, I can't pretend it was becoming--but, my dear, it cost thirty dollars, as I'm a living woman! But you can wear my net veil to-morrow, and you will have to take Dorothy with you, for I shall be utterly used up and unable to chaperon you; though once they get you upon the stage, I suppose you'll go prancing about without attendance of any sort. But until that time, you will show some respect to social conventions. Good-night, Sybil! Take a quinine pill before you go to bed. You have advanced me well upon my way to the grave this day. But I can't forget you are my child, and if you should get a chill, you couldn't go down to Mrs. Van Camp, who will probably put an estoppel upon these theatre plans of yours. Yes, yes! John! I'm coming! It does seem that I might be allowed to speak a few words of advice and caution to my own daughter without interruption every moment or two!" And profiting by the momentary diversion, Sybil flew past her mother to the room she shared with her sister. Dorothy had placed the candle high on a small bracket that held their shabby little hymnals and prayer-books, and as Sybil entered she saw directly before her the young girl on her knees at the bedside praying. The light fell upon her uplifted, happy face, making a faint aureole in the bright hair that at the back fell in a long queue. A tenderness came into Sybil's eyes, but as they fell upon the upturned soles of Dorrie's feet from beneath the night-dress, rising mischief triumphed. She looked at the pink round heels, at the whiteness of the hollows, and then the pinkness again across the balls of the little trotters; and, resisting not a moment, stooped and drawing her finger zig-zag across them both, produced a wild lash out, a startled: "Oh! ouch!--for ever and ever--Amen! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Syb!" And before Dick could pull his head out from beneath his wing and set it in the right direction, the bed was pillowless; those useful articles serving as ammunition in the battle royal raging gloriously between the dressed and the undressed, while happily neither one guessed they were bidding farewell to childish romps in this, their last great pillow fight. And across the hall the subdued John bowed in silence, and allowed the conquering Letitia to place her foot a little more firmly upon his neck. The light had gone out, 'tis true; yet, as the victorious one could talk on perfectly well in the dark, it was nothing short of a merciful dispensation that permitted meek and conquered John, under cover of the darkness, to sleep--sleep quietly, almost attentively, thus escaping actual madness. For as constant dropping weareth away a stone, so constant talking weareth away the listener's brain! CHAPTER IX THE ACCIDENT--A FRIEND IN NEED Early the next morning the girls prepared for their ride cityward, for, though their sharp young eyes saw Mrs. Lawton's follies and her faults; though they writhed under her despairing lamentations and blushed at her outrageous boastings--perhaps because they were guiltily conscious of sitting in judgment upon their mother--they yielded her prompt obedience whenever she gave a command. Mr. Lawton elected to walk with them to the station, and Lena, on her way upstairs to the "frau mistress," bearing on a tray a breakfast of simple material but of amazing size, nodded and smiled, and with unconscious impertinence commented upon their looks, declaring with hearty admiration that they were "youst lofely right away down to der ground!" Dorothy laughed and said, "Take good care of mamma, Lena!" And that handmaiden glanced down at the stack of buttered toast and the eggs and young home-raised onions, and made answer with a droll not to say sly look in her light blue eye: "Oh, ja! I make goot care mit her, my Miss Ladies--und ven she eat all dese breakfas', she'll be all right, uf she don't be vorse!" And away she went up the groaning stairs with the odor of coffee trailing behind her. When the three had reached the little station that like a hen covering her brood nestles low at the very foot of the hill, with the glistening metal rails passing on one side and the glittering, dimpling, rippling river flowing by on the other, John Lawton lifted his hat and kissed his daughters good-by with the careful courtesy habitual with him, and holding Sybil's hand a moment he said: "I--I shall walk over to The Beeches to-day, dear----" "Papa!" exclaimed the girl. "Yes," he went on; "I shall make my acknowledgments to Miss Morrell. You think she did a fine thing when she sympathized with and promised to help you, but she did a finer thing when she refused to ignore the parents--the old people, who are generally pushed to the wall in such cases. I shall thank her for her consideration, and----" but the roar of the approaching train sent the girls scurrying through the little waiting-room out to the platform and into the car. A pair of kisses were waved, and they had lost sight of the tall, slender, old gentleman. And Sybil, as she sank into the seat beside Dorothy, exclaimed: "Is he not a dear? Is it not wonderful that this sordid poverty has not made him selfish, narrow-minded, sullen? Poor papa! Do you know, Dorrie, I'm afraid he suffers more than we imagine!" "Oh!" cried Dorothy, "don't say that! I always thought papa was almost contented with things, except on our birthdays! But now we must love him more than ever, Sybbie!" And to drive away the anxious look from her sister's eyes, Sybil called attention to the odd appearance of the car, which was almost filled with gentlemen, and remarked, laughingly: "We have taken what mamma calls 'the busy man's train.' They are a sociable lot, are they not--every man-jack of them with his nose in his paper, and a nice little wrinkle between his puckered brows?" "That's from trying to get and keep the proper focus," laughed Dorrie, who added: "I've a five-cent nickel in my pocketbook, and I'll give it to you, Syb, if you can learn the color of a single pair of eyes in this car--barring mine, of course." "Well, the nickel must be plugged or you wouldn't have it, so I'm not losing much; but, oh! after all, I may win it--plug and all! One male creature has eyes, for he has lifted them, and they are--are! Pass over the nickel, Miss, they are gray with black lashes, and--_oh_!" She stopped in confusion, for the male creature she was watching had lowered his paper a moment, and she recognized the grave young man; and to herself she ruefully remarked: "And the third time's the charm!" And though Dorothy busied herself in finding the despised nickel, her swiftly deepening color told her sister that she, too, had recognized their fellow-traveller whose calm features showed no trace of the surprised delight he felt at again seeing the face of the "violet-girl," as he termed her in his thoughts. He only gave a severe, scrutinizing glance at the shade of his window, carefully lowered it about an inch, and then returned to his paper, reading over and over and over again how a certain Mr. Somebody had become the benefactor of his race through selling shoes to men for three dollars a pair. Yet, in spite of his steady reading, he kept saying to himself how strange it was that the fair-faced Violet-Girl should cross his path on this the red-letter day of his life--the setting of whose sun would leave him so much better off financially than it had found him in the morning. And he could not help thinking how much sweeter his good fortune would seem if there was someone to share it with him. If his mother had not left him, what soft, silky, flowery pillows and spreads her couch should have; what rich, dull rugs! But the almost surreptitious care bestowed upon her grave was all that he could give her now. Yet he could imagine how those appealing eyes over there would widen with surprise and dance with pleasure if one she cared for brought a story of endeavor crowned with success. He wondered what her name was. He knew her family name, for he had heard someone at the church corner, on Sunday, refer to them as "those Lawton girls," and had winced at both tone and words. And the Lawton girls, meantime, were discussing the probable result of their visit to Mrs. Van Camp. "I'm afraid the chances are against you," said Dorothy, anxiously. "You know how she goes on about family. 'Old families and the proprieties' are words of sweetness to her, though she is as gay as a girl and as droll as a Merry Andrew--on occasions. 'The stage'--only two words--but when spoken in relation to Mrs. Van Camp's god-daughter, Sybbie, I'm afraid you can't manage her." "She won't need managing, Dorrie. She's mercenary to the point of worshipping Mammon, but, thank heaven, she never meanders as mamma does, who wanders away from the subject into tortuous and serpentine courses. No manoeuvring will be required with God-mother Sybil. I shall marshal my facts, dwell upon the honor of being introduced by Miss Morrell into the profession--she has professed the greatest admiration for her all her life--and, as she knows already our unspeakably helpless condition, I'm sure she will come to a quick decision. Oh, mercy! They are already lighting the gas. How I do detest the tunnel! I always come out so sticky and prickly about my face and neck--and grimy, too!" "Oh," answered Dorothy, "I wouldn't object to being sticky and grimy, if only I were not afraid. But, Syb, I can't help it; I never have passed through this tunnel yet without taking part in an imaginary accident." "You should follow the example of your religious friend, Mr. Walton," laughed Sybil, "who declares he always fills in the time by praying." "Yes, and I think he should be ashamed of himself!" indignantly interrupted Dorothy. "It's nothing short of an insult to his Maker to pass through the beautiful green fields and the warm, sunny air reading a newspaper; and, when entering a foul, ill-smelling, black hole of man's creating, to begin praying because he can't do anything else!" Under cover of the roar of the train Sybil laughed aloud, delighted to have got a rise, as the slang phrase is, out of Dorrie's mild temper. The men, looking waxy pale under the light of the overhead lamps, were folding up papers, settling hats afresh and preparing for the famous American rush from the train when Sybil, noticing that her sister's eyes were closed, exclaimed, with malicious triumph: "I believe you are praying yourself! You are, at this very moment!" "Well," smiled Dorothy, "you see, you don't know how frightened I am, and anyway I don't reserve my prayers for an otherwise useless moment. I prayed this morning, with my eyes open, looking right into God's rising sun!" Crash! _Recoil!_ CRASH! And a swift, appalling darkness, cut across by one woman's piercing scream! Running footsteps! The venomous hissing of escaping steam; the stench of gas; and then in that Stygian darkness, rising clear above the undertone of groans and short-breathed oaths, was a girl's voice crying: "Dorrie! Dorrie! Oh, Dorrie!" Noises outside were growing louder, and Sybil scrambled up from the floor, where she had fallen, and, mad with terror, stretched out groping hands in the direction she had last seen Dorothy, and oh! blessed God! encountered two little hands, that closed on hers. The next moment she had her utterly silent sister in her arms, and impatiently shook away something warm that kept creeping, creeping down her temple and her cheek. The din outside was awful, the darkness an anguish! Suddenly there was a flare of a match--it went out! A groping, searching hand struck Sybil's shoulder. Another match, a wax one, was lighted, and the young man she had jested about, hatless and very pale, asked, swiftly: "Is she hurt? I hope she has not fainted?" He leaned closer, and Dorothy's great, strained blue eyes stared up at him from her sister's breast. "Can't you speak, dear?" pleaded Sybil. "Oh, she is half killed with fright!" she added, turning to the stranger, and again the creeping thing was on her cheek, and Dorothy cried, sharply: "Blood! blood! Oh! Sybbie's hurt! Can't you help her?" And the match was out, and they were again in that hell of darkness and steam and gas and roar! But a calm and friendly voice came to them, saying: "Stay here; take part of these matches and light one now and then while I get out and find what can be done! Oh, here come the torches! Now we'll soon have help!" But before he left them he drew from a pocket a handkerchief, folded it, and swiftly tied it about Sybil's head, and even then the girl smiled at his naïve, lover-like excuse: "The blood frightens her so!" And through a few agonized minutes the girls clung tightly together, shivering in a very ague of terror. And then, through the billows of steam, the low-hanging, strangling clouds of smoke, they saw men with lanterns, heard orders, short and sharp, then their friend was lifting them down from the high, high step; and Sybil, with her arms about Dorothy, was aided, led, pushed, or pulled along at the will of the only person who noticed their presence or existence. There had been much noise--noise of voices, of metal ringing on metal, of hurrying feet--but suddenly it ceased. A moment's quiet came into that place of mad excitement. The crowd before them drew apart. Like lightning, their guide threw himself in front of the girls, whispering: "Don't look! Don't let her look!" And Sybil, with chilling blood, recalled that one piercing cry, that woman's cry, and to save her soul could not help sending a glance toward the four men who bore upon a stretcher a hastily covered form, so still, so pathetically slight! Covered? Yes, but one little foot in oxford-tie was exposed. A foot so like--so like-- And Sybil caught Dorothy in an embrace fierce enough to wring a cry from her, and the words: "What is it, dear? Are you hurt again? Have you turned your ankle, or-- Oh, Sybbie! It was that poor man! Oh, can't we get out? _Can't we?_" and her voice broke into frightened sobs. The other two exchanged meaning glances, for, as this outburst had been caused by the sight of two stalwart blue-coated men, who, after the manner of children "making a chair" were carrying on their crossed arms a passenger whose leg was broken, they trembled at the thought of the collapse that must surely have followed upon the sight of that frail, broken thing, whose mute authority had yet the power to silence the awful din. How they escaped from the stifling, sloppy, grimy place of torment they could not have told, had the saving of an immortal soul depended upon such telling. There was a ladder, and a failure, and a carrying of the ladder to another place by the aid of a trainman, who roared some advice as he stole a few moments for their service. Then coaxings for Dorrie, sharp directions for Sybil, and--and somehow they were standing in a street, dazzled by the sunlight, sick and faint and dirty and drabbled, but out in the pure air once more. And knowing that Dorothy's life might have gone out from sheer terror but for the aid and encouragement of the grave young man, Sybil held out both hands to him, crying: "I thank you from my heart, and I will serve you at command, for Dorrie's sake, who--who----" Her lips whitened--trembled. She clutched blindly at his arm for support. Her self-control had been wonderful, but, like everything else, it had to be paid for. The shock to her nerves had been terrible, her wound had bled profusely, and when a strong arm about her waist lifted her over the threshold into a quiet pharmacy she was just barely conscious and no more. The bald-headed little proprietor closed his doors upon the gaping crowd, and, while reviving Sybil and dressing the really ugly cut her head had received from striking against the frame of a seat, when she had fallen to the floor, he called upon his wife to descend from her room above, and she, with ready sympathy, brushed and pinned up Dorothy's raiment and sponged away the smears and smuts from her face. And when the cheerful little woman turned for a moment to the young man, to tell him she could bring him her husband's second hat, if he did not mind its being a bit burned by the suns of last summer, he overheard poor Dorothy saying: "Whatever shall we do, Sybbie? We bought return tickets, and--and we only have left ten cents, that was to have paid our street-car fare to god-mother's." A swift "S-h-h!" from Sybil silenced her. The man's heart contracted with a pang of pity for their distressful situation. The next moment he stood before them, and, addressing the elder, said: "Miss Lawton, I am going to ask permission to introduce myself to you, as there is no one to perform the service for me. I am a sort of neighbor of your family, since I, too, am summering at Yonkers. My name is Galt--Leslie Galt--and in consequence of this accident I ask you to trust yourself and your sister to my care, until I can leave you at your own front door--will you?" He waited for no answer, but continued: "I will have a carriage here almost directly, and we will board a Harlem train, get off at Mount Vernon, and then drive to your house." Sybil's spirits began to rise. "Don't you think," she asked, glancing at their sooty, oily, dirty white gowns, "we should be sent to the steam laundry before that?" "No," he gravely replied, though his eye gleamed; "not before, but after, by all means." "But," Dorothy began, anxiously, "do you suppose mamma and----?" "I am going to send them word," broke in Galt, "that you are quite safe before I get the carriage. You are safe, you know, physically, mentally, morally. Only your wardrobe's ruin is complete." And gayly donning the proprietor's ancient hat he hurried away, in their service. And so it happened that the reassuring telegram had not yet reached the old White house, though a rumor of an accident in the tunnel had, when a shabby old hack came rattling up the grass-grown drive and stopped before the sagging porch, where Letitia, ghastly under all her rouge, stood clinging to John Lawton, who trembled visibly all his length. And when a strange man got out he closed his eyes a moment, and passed his tongue over his dry under lip. Then, as thrilling sweet as had been their faint birth-cries, there came to his ears two joyous "Papas! Mammas!" And then ensued a very whirlwind of embraces, of kisses, of cries, of exclamations! And when Sybil had said: "Mr. Galt saved us and brought us back to you, papa!" the old man held out his hands and grasped those of the young man. His kindly, frightened blue eyes gazed and gazed. His piteous old mouth trembled and formed words that would not be said. And like a flash Leslie Galt saw again Dorothy's wide blue eyes and fright-stricken mouth, as she lay upon her sister's breast, beneath the flare of the waxen taper. And, recognizing the likeness between father and daughter, he opened his heart to the helpless old gentleman then and there. Though John Lawton never got his thanks into words, his silent gratitude made a deeper impression than did the bursting dam of Letitia's eloquence. And Lena, rushing upon the scene to inquire as to the welfare of her Miss Ladies, started out joyously with: "Ach! You com' all right again? Eh? You com' back mit all your arms und legs und feet, und--und [a look of horror growing on her face] mein Gott! mein Gott! Get avay, quick, und put yourselves by der vash-tubs!" an ending which sent everyone into laughter. And as the girls were swept away by their mother, one blue flash met a waiting pair of gray eyes; and as John Lawton walked down to the gate with Leslie Galt, who had asked for and obtained leave from Mrs. Lawton to make a call of inquiry next day as to the young ladies' healths, they paused a moment, and Lawton, holding his new friend's hand tightly, waved his left, indicating all the forlorn and neglected old place in one gesture, and said: "You see, our daughters are all we have left on earth--all, all! And you----" He gently drew his hand away, lifted his hat punctiliously, and, turning, walked slowly back to the decaying old White house! CHAPTER X CALLING ON THE MANAGER It was the last week of the season at the Globe Theatre, and it was closing in a blaze of glory. To leave a good taste in the mouth of the public, the actor-manager, Stewart Thrall, had given it a final week of Shakspere. "Romeo and Juliet" was playing with a very good and beautiful young woman as star, who could not quite hide her contemptuous misunderstanding of the passion-shaken little maid of Verona, the swiftness of whose love is ever matched by its purity; and who, therefore, seized upon the potion scene, making much of it and of the final scene of all, so that it was not an ideal Juliet, but a most beautiful woman in a rich and picturesque setting, who, brilliantly successful in other characters, was accepted readily in this, because, forsooth, nothing is so successful as success. A large and beefy but an emphatic Romeo, who had to enthuse for two, an exquisite Mercutio, a deliriously droll Nurse, and an excellent general cast by their united efforts gave this very pleasing performance, whose seven repetitions would do much to dim the memory of the many French abominations that earlier in the season had freely scattered wink, innuendo, and double-entendre while trailing their chic indecencies about the same stage. Of course a few real lovers and students of Shakspere felt the pity of the marred, misunderstood characters, while keenly enjoying other more poetic presentations; but Stewart Thrall was appealing to another class, the great uncultivated, who, though secretly bored to extinction, dearly loved to pose (for one week only) as patrons of the Bard; and as they exchanged platitudes with one another, when meeting by chance at the box-office window, they invariably congratulated themselves upon having one manager in their midst who dared to produce Shakspere. And some declared, with enthusiasm, that he deserved a public vote of thanks for thus giving their sons and daughters an opportunity to study a Shaksperian drama. And Mr. Thrall, sitting in the box-office out of sight, but not out of hearing, smiled sardonically, and signed a cable order to his Paris agent to secure a great Frenchman's newest, wittiest indecency for New York's future delight, knowing well that the Shaksperian poseurs outside would be found among its most generous patrons. Then, glancing at the treasurer, busy over his floor-plans, change-drawer, and ticket stamps, he said: "By the way, Barney, you reserved the wrong box for Claire Morrell last night. I told you plainly the right box--didn't you understand me so?" "Yes, sir," replied that young man of amazing collars, throwing back his head and tilting up his cruelly scraped jaw in an effort to escape the strangle-hold of the white linen long enough to answer his employer's question. "Yes, sir; but--but you remember you were standing on the stage when you called out to me to hold the right-hand box, and I thought you meant the box to your right as you stood, and that, of course, is the left box on the seat chart; and so I reserved that, and----" "And spoiled the evening for Miss Morrell, who, for some reason, will never occupy a seat on the left of the house if she can help it." "Well, sir, I thought----" writhed and twisted he of the collar. "Don't think, then, Barney. I'll do the thinking if you'll do the obeying. Next time ask--that's easier than thinking, or [with a laugh] it would be to anyone else. Barney, that infernal collar will cut your head off one of these days. Why don't you have it lowered a couple of inches and enjoy some of the comforts of life?" And, striking a match, he lifted it toward his cigar, stopped suddenly, shook out the small flame, put the cigar back into the box on the shelf, and turning to Barney said: "I'll take your place five minutes. I want you to run as quickly as you can round to the confectioner's and get me some sugared violets. Hurry, now, that's a good fellow!" And Barney, snatching his hat from the nail, made a dash for the street, wondering as he ran "who was coming to see the governor, for, of course, he wasn't going to squat down there alone and stuff himself with violets." By which anyone can see what a coarse-minded young person this seller of tickets was. But he was swift of foot, and was soon back in his place at the office window, while, dainty package in hand, his employer came out, crossed the vestibule, and, entering his private office, proceeded to untie his parcel and pour the fragrant, crystallized violets into a charming bonbonnière standing on the corner of his desk. The prevailing tone of this room was a dull, rich red, and it made an agreeable background for the figure of the man standing there, Stewart Thrall, the actor-manager of the Globe Theatre, who was at that moment expecting a call from the popular actress, Claire Morrell, and a certain young lady who wished (oh, foolish young lady!) to go upon the stage. A tall man, of excellent figure. He was a well-groomed, clean-skinned man. There was nothing of the long-haired, floating necktied, fur-coated, comic-journal actor about him. He was no "beauty man," either; but, as a certain very great lady had once truly said, "He had eyes and a manner." A charming manner it was--gracious, graceful, sincere. And as one takes a certain simple base for a sauce, and, by adding various flavors or acids, produces innumerable different sauces, so to that natural manner he, by adding a touch of dignity or sternness or jollity or deprecation, came very near making himself all things to all men. His closely cropped hair was black--not the blue-black of the Latins, but that darkest brown that is America's black--and his eyes were those Irish blue ones that are "smudged in" with black lashes, luminous, quick sparkling, softly darkening, wooing, winning, faithless eyes--an actor's eyes par excellence, but with a droop of the heavily fringed lids that played sad havoc with the dreams of the romantic girl patrons of the theatre. Stewart Thrall was a popular idol. His stroll down the sweet sunny side of Broadway was a triumphal progress. Glances, smiles, turning heads, and flattering remarks trailed after him like a tail to the kite of his vogue. He had earned his popularity--it had not been thrust upon him. He had been shrewd and clever and determined. He had acted up to the motto of his choice: "To be agreeable." He made everything serve him. If he had a friend in a high place he never forgot it or allowed anyone else to forget it either. If he went occasionally to church on a fine Sunday, where wealthy pewholders vied with one another in courteous hospitality, he saw to it that that was the church attended by his banker. "The recollection will do him no harm and may do me a service," he would say to himself with a laugh. When he went to a dance he never failed to bestow attentions upon any homely girl or woman who wore jewels, and in more than one instance the effects of such a one's gratitude had been distinctly felt in the box-office. But these wealthy wall-flowers were never waltzed with. The very prettiest girl in the room could be relied upon to arrange her card to favor this man with the speaking eyes. And so, with drooping lids in full evidence, he swayed and whirled, reversed and backed, apparently by instinct, since his challenging glance never left his partner's face. He would think triumphantly of the two birds he had brought down with one stone, winning gratitude from one and a flirtation from another. Nor did he fail "to be agreeable" to humble people, for no one knew better than he how swift were the ups and downs of his profession. Therefore, he treated with friendly consideration the "nobody" who might be a "somebody" the next time he saw him. Gravely respectful to the gray old solid men of commerce, hail fellow with that body of men known as "the boys," gambling just enough to keep in friendly touch with the big guns of the business, and seemingly ready to give up his very soul to the reporters, he was a matinée idol, a successful man, a general favorite. And yet, after all, disappointed; so many brief, transient loves had he known; so many charming hypocrites had made a farce of the grand passion, depriving it of any touch of sanctity, that now an apathetic weariness had come upon him, and yet that was not the worst. No one could have forced the confession from him, but in his heart he admitted his defeat. He had started out to win fame, but had attained only notoriety; and though he sneered and said to himself: "Fame has generally gone hungry, and I at least am well fed and have a nice little story to read in my bank-book," he was, all the same, a disappointed man. As he turned to toss the paper wrapper and bits of ribbon from his parcel into the waste-basket his eyes encountered a picture of himself as the young Laertes. And he paused, looked at it frowningly, and commented: "You poor young fool! What a burning mass of hope and ambition you were! So honestly believing in acting as a veritable art, and--and forgetting everything in the joy of it! Damned if you didn't! But Lord! that was before you found your motto and began 'to be agreeable' to the world! Couldn't serve two gods, could you, sonny? Well, being agreeable has paid, in some ways. But I have put up with your reproachful glances long enough. I think I'll take you down from there and send you over to the Missus. You won't hurt her the way you do me!" And, with a half-laughing, half-frowning face, he stepped on a low couch, that he might reach and lift down the offending, boyish Laertes. He hurried a bit, for he knew that Claire Morrell was very exact in keeping her appointments, and that she might come in at any moment now, with her confounded stage-struck protégée, to whom he would never have given a thought, let alone an engagement, for he hated amateurs, had it not been that he had met the clever and witty, if ancient, Mrs. Van Camp, and knew her to be of the best old Dutch stock. Therefore, it would rather flatter his vanity to be able to exploit the name of her god-daughter as a member of his company, if only she might not be too heavy a load of awkward self-consciousness--if only she might be moderately good-looking. And then he set the picture down hard, with its long wire hooping, and coiling, like a live and very angry thing about it, and whistled, exclaiming aloud: "Oh, by Jove! I wonder if either of those bright and pretty girls the Morrell had with her last night might be the protégée? They were both charming, but how that dark one did light up when Morrell led the applause for my Queen Mab speech! But no such luck, I suppose!" And, man-fashion, he drew out his handkerchief to dust the small wingless Love on the pedestal between the draped curtains of a mock-window, whose long Holland shade really covered a very narrow door, spring locked and never used--never, one could readily understand that from the inconvenience of its approach, but Mr. Thrall carried the key. And out in Broadway Claire Morrell was saying: "It's so very tiring, this shopping; suppose, Miss Lawton, that we step in at the theatre and see if Mr. Thrall is there now, instead of making a special trip to-morrow. If he is in he will see us, if he has gone home we can cool off in the dark auditorium. What do you say, Miss Dorothy?" For Miss Morrell had kept her talk with the manager and her appointment a secret, feeling that Sybil would thus be more at her ease, more natural in manner, than she could possibly be if she knew she was being inspected or examined, like a servant seeking a new place. And now, as the sisters smilingly consented to her plan, she turned in between the big billboards that announced the week's run of "Romeo and Juliet," with the name of the lady star in very, very large letters and "supported by" in small type. Then the name of the gentleman who played Romeo appeared in letters two sizes smaller than those of the star, and lower down, in quite small type, one read: "Mr. Stewart Thrall as Mercutio." And Sybil tapped the letters with her parasol-tip, and said: "His performance was the best in the play. Why are his letters not the biggest?" And the actress laughed, as she answered: "Children always ask difficult questions. Wait till you're older, my dear. Perhaps this time next year all this mystery of type and printers' ink will be clear to your understanding. But you are right about the acting of Thrall; his Mercutio is the best of his time." She went to the box-office window, and learning from the half-strangled Barney that the manager was in his private office, she swept them across the vestibule, from whose walls the gold-framed pictured actors looked down inquiringly, tapped at a door, and, in answer to a cheery "Entrez!" entered the room, crying: "May I bring up my light infantry?" And in answer to his laughing "By all means--I'm in need of reinforcements, you know!" she drew the girls inside, saying: "The Misses Lawton, Mr. Thrall, who ask of your grace a few moments hospitality and rest, as they, like myself, are country bred, and therefore easily shop-wearied." "Well, none of you are shop-worn, at all events!" He laughed, as he found seats for them by the simple process of sweeping manuscripts, sheet-music, and what-not from the chair to the floor in a corner. "Ah!" exclaimed Miss Morrell to the girls, "would he not make a blithe and bonnie housekeeper?" And Sybil acquiesced with: "A place for everything and everything in that one place," while Thrall drew up the shade of the one real window, and let the full light into the dull red room, showing the age-blackened, iron-heavy, splendidly carved table and desk and chair and the freshness of the two young creatures looking up at him with such honest admiration in their innocent eyes as to fairly embarrass him. And, so strange a thing is memory, for just one moment he was a boy again in roundabout jacket and broad white collar, and his only sister, seventeen years old, stood at the altar with her young minister bridegroom, and looked at him with just such sweetly innocent eyes. He shook his head sharply and passed his hand across his eyes. His sister had been dead these twenty years--what had come over him? And then Miss Morrell, who had been peering under and over everything in the room, asked, plaintively: "Where is it, Stewart, mon ami? What have you done with it? Am I to die before your eyes from sheer exhaustion, and without even an effort on your part to save me?" And he, pointing to a hanging cabinet, said: "There's the life-saving station!" and threw open the door, revealing a complete outfit for coffee-making. Then, noting the girls' surprised looks, he went on: "Ah! I see you are not very well acquainted with my friend here, or has she been clever enough to conceal her dissipation? Be that as it may, we have here an awful example--a victim to----" "Stewart Thrall!" threateningly exclaimed Miss Morrell, as she lighted the spirit-lamp beneath the coffee-pot. "A victim to coffee! Morning, noon, or night, her one cry is 'Coffee!' Ah, it's sad! Such a promising young-creature as she was, too! But you see what coffee has brought her to!" "I'll buy a French pot and a bottle of alcohol on the way home," laughed Sybil, "and see where it will land me!" "Gracious!" cried Dorothy, "you will land in a sanitarium if you attempt to increase the amount of coffee you are taking already!" "Oh, are you one of the devotees of the little brown berry?" asked Miss Morrell. "Well, we are three, then, for that man there adores it, in spite of his jibes at me!" "I drink but a reasonable amount," declared Thrall, "while you--Miss Lawton, will you push that biscuit-jar this way? Do you know, when the rehearsal is called, this enslaved creature drinks coffee because work is beginning. Later she drinks coffee because work is over. When it is cold, she drinks coffee to warm her. When it is warm, she drinks coffee to cool her!" "My very dear friend," interrupted Miss Morrell, "there is a strangely familiar sound about all that. Do you really believe no one else ever heard of Thackeray?" "And Thackeray's daughter?" laughed Sybil. "Who read Dickens," added Dorothy, with dancing eyes. "'When she was glad, she read Dickens,'" quoted Miss Morrell. "'When she was sad, she read Dickens,'" added Sybil. "So you see, sir," continued the actress, "even if quotations are not exact to the letter, they are sufficient to prove you are a plagiarist!" "Good heavens! Who would have believed so many people remembered a man named Thackeray!" said Thrall, with mock astonishment. "Now Vanity Fair forgets him entirely." "A very natural revenge! Who cares to remember the artist who paints an unflattering portrait? Poor Vanity Fair wanted to be idealized a bit. Oh, wait, Stewart--wait! Don't pour yet, there's a cigar-clip and a postage-stamp in the bottom of that cup! Now pour! If only you could be induced to write a few 'Household Hints' for the aid of young house-keepers!" "Yes! My services to domestic science would about equal in value my services to art!" he jeered. Honest little Dorothy, accepting the Sèvres cup extended to her, lifted clear blue eyes to her host's face, saying: "You should not speak so contemptuously of what you have done, Mr. Thrall. If acting is an art, as persons say, a man who acts Shaksperian characters very beautifully does a real service to that art--I think!" "Bravo!" cried Miss Morrell, tapping her spoon against her cup. "Bravo, little play-lover! A charming compliment, and a very just rebuke also for your insincerity of speech, Stewart, my friend!" And he, jumping to the conclusion that it was Dorothy who wanted to go upon the stage, felt a pang of disappointment that surprised him by its sharpness, as he somewhat gravely answered: "It was not insincere. You know well enough," nodding his head toward Claire Morrell, "that this week's return to the fountain-head of English drama has not been made from love or from a desire to improve public taste. You know it is but a catch-penny device--an advertisement. I might"--he glanced at the wrapt face of the young Laertes as he spoke--"I might have served art once. Indeed, I know it; but"--he laughed a hard little laugh--"art and mammon are no more to be served by the same man than God and mammon, and he who serves art entirely and lovingly will have mighty little to show for his labor!" "At least," broke in Sybil, hotly, with dark face aglow, "he would have the joy of his unskimped service and the comfort of a thorough self-respect!" And again Thrall felt that swift pang of regret that this was not the stage aspirant. For to himself he had been saying: "These innocent, wholesome girls are two buds in the garden of life. This fair one, like a pale blush-rose, reaches her most perfect beauty now, in the close-folded bud form; later its perfect blossoming will reveal it pale and shallow, though very sweet. But the other one, she with the lustrous eyes and the mutinous red mouth, is like one of the red damask buds of Southern France, now ideally beautiful, yet the opening of velvety petals will betray depth after depth of deepening color, free wave after wave of perfume, until the very sweetest, the very purest tint of glowing color, will be found at last in the deep splendor of the fully open heart! Yes, this girl will blossom into a splendid womanhood. And what a face for the stage!" And then he was aware of Miss Morrell setting down her cup and saying, briskly: "A little business now, Mr. Manager, if you please! Miss Lawton here is very keen to go upon the stage. She is immensely ambitious, absolutely without experience, but humble in mind enough to be willing to begin at the bottomest bottom. I would gladly give her her start in my company, if I had room for her, and I would not ask you to consider her wish if I did not truly believe she had in her the making of a good actress." Mr. Thrall turned surprised eyes toward the happily smiling Dorothy. Sybil had gone white when her friend began to speak for her, and sat still and cold, waiting for her doom. "In heaven's name!" thought he. "What has come to the Morrell--to think that child can act?" Then he glanced at the rigid figure of Sybil, and said, slowly: "And you--have you no desire for the stage life?" She raised her dark eyes, and said, very low: "I would give my soul to act!" Miss Morrell's nervous fingers closed sharply. She wished the girl had not said that, and in the same instant Dorothy exclaimed: "Oh, Miss Morrell, Mr. Thrall thought you were speaking of me!" And actor as he was, the man turned suddenly to his desk to hide the color he knew was burning over his face, and the senseless delight that flashed through him at the words. Presently he asked if her friends permitted her to take this step. Being reassured on that point, he inquired if she had had any experience as an amateur. And when she replied "No!" with a sadly fallen countenance, he smilingly commented: "No tears are called for yet!" And Miss Morrell broke in with: "And no lessons in elocution has she had--no, not one!" "Thank God!" fervently exclaimed Thrall. "Decidedly, your case looks hopeful, Miss Lawton." After some further conversation, finding Sybil would be in town for a day or two, he asked permission to call on her at Mrs. Van Camp's home and let her know what his decision was. As he spoke he caught the swift expression of anxiety on Dorothy's face and followed her glance, and, noting the close attention Sybil was bestowing on a picture, knew she was hiding the tears of disappointment, of fear, and felt a throb of sympathy. Poor little soul! Had he not been just as impatient, just as sensitive--once? So, while Dorothy gathered up the fans and parcels, and Miss Morrell paused to place a candied violet between her lips, Stewart Thrall stepped close to Sybil's side, and said, very low: "Don't be distressed--you shall have the engagement. Only I don't know yet just how or where I can place you!" And the incredulous joy flashing through the tears, the tremulous smile on her lips, as she turned her face to him, made him exclaim, mentally: "Good God! If she could do but the half of that upon the stage!" Then, as they were ready to depart, ever punctually exact in the small courtesies, he placed himself at Miss Morrell's side and led the way to the vestibule, where a tall, shabby fellow was slouching before the box-office window, while young Barney could be plainly heard refusing to give him money without Mr. Thrall's order. Hearing advancing footsteps, the man turned a pale, liquor-soddened face toward them, and, seeing the ladies, he let go of the window-ledge he had clung to, removed his hat with a trembling hand, advanced hesitatingly, and attempted to address Thrall, who said, savagely: "Step aside! I'll speak to you presently!" And, as the poor wreck drew back, they passed on to the open front doors. And Claire Morrell raised mildly surprised eyes, and said: "Jim Roberts is still with you, then?" And Thrall, with a shrug of his shoulders, answered, flippantly: "Like the poor!" and bowed them out. CHAPTER XI THE DOUBLE BIRTHDAY With June a renewal of life seemed to have come to the old White house. A riotous maple massed its vivid green canopy over a side door, tender young vines with small, tenacious fingers felt their way over its southern wall, an old-time peony at the corner of the porch lifted its enormous, bitter-sweet blossoms of deepest pink. A length of white matting lay on the porch, two neatly painted butter-tubs (in lieu of majolica jars) held plants, a few chairs and a table kept them company, and every wind that blew the white curtains in or out of the upper windows brought forth a ripple of laughter or a snatch of song. For the old house had received the gift of tongues, and spoke, not only with the voice of age and disappointment and regret, but with that of youth and hope and joy; and Dick's yellow throat, like a small golden ewer, poured forth trill and gurgle all day long in happy answer to all the delightful sounds about him. And two little paths were creeping through the thick-growing grass--one, leading up to the tangle of orchard and an oft-mended old hammock, had been worn by the feet of the sisters; the other, leading down to a side lane, was shorter but broader, for Lena's feet were sturdy, her step heavy, and her "mash-man's" whistle called her often to the lane in the twilight. So, with love flitting about the kitchen door and youth and beauty dreaming dreams in its ancient chambers, no wonder the White house seemed rejuvenated. Sybil was happy--happy as she had never been before. Nothing definite had yet been decided beyond the fact that she was to begin her work in September. Mr. Thrall might let her play a small part in New York, or he might send her with a travelling company and let her have something better to start with. Meantime, he had advised her to learn several small parts, and when she had done so, swiftly and willingly, he told her it would be good practice for her to study a number of important characters, since she might be called upon to play a Jessica or a Nerissa, if not the difficult Portia, a Celia, if not a Rosalind; and it would give her an immense advantage if she were already familiar with the lines, while, if she had not to play any of them, she would herself be the richer for her knowledge and her brain would be trained to the habit of quick study. Then Mrs. Van Camp, flattered by the popular actor's deferential attitude toward herself and his warily moderate admiration for Sybil--well he knew that any rapturous praise of her beauty would act as a danger-signal to the ancient butterfly of fashion--had not only consented to her god-daughter's going upon the stage, but for a birthday gift had lined her hungry little purse with crisp bank-notes, of modest denomination, it is true, but with power to free her from the care of things bodily and temporal for all that coming summer, and had added a note to her "very dear Letitia" earnestly requesting her "not to make a fool of herself!" So Sybil, having passed the pocketbook over to Dorothy's management, knowing that she would get twice as much out of it, gave herself up to study and to dreams. John Lawton's misty old eyes noted how she sweetened under this small ray of prosperity; missed the old sharpness from her tongue, the sting from her words; saw the increase in her beauty, and was tortured with shame that his child's happiness came to her from strangers. His wistful, apologetic eyes often hurt Sybil to the heart, and one morning, on her way to the orchard, play-book in hand, she saw him leaning against the grape arbor, gazing at her with such jealous pain in his face that suddenly she understood, and, throwing an arm about his neck, she exclaimed: "I am so happy, father, I just have to stop and thank you!" and she kissed him soundly. He drew away a little, saying, incredulously: "Thank me? Your happiness does not come from me, poor little one; to my sorrow, dear--to my sorrow!" "Not from you?" cried the girl. "Why--why, what could I have done without your consent, dada? That was the very corner-stone of my whole plan!" His face brightened, then clouded again, as he asked, hesitatingly: "Supposing I--had--refused, daughter; would--would that have made any difference to you?" "Oh, father!" cried Sybil, reproachfully, "you would have closed the incident with a vengeance--I could not have moved another step!" Seeing the troubled old face beginning to brighten, she laid her arm upon his shoulder, and added: "Everything depended on your word. No one wanted to help a girl who had not the backing of her own father. So, you see, all hung on your 'yes' or 'no,' dear!" And the poor old gentleman, comforted and heartened up, kissed her and patted her back and told her, quite patronizingly, she should have had more confidence in his willingness to assist her, and, seeing she was studying Jessica that morning, he devoted himself to a careful reading of Shylock down under the monster willow. Thus Sybil, with passions and desires all sleeping, studied and dreamed, and wondered vaguely would she always be unknown, or would she, some day, some far away radiant day, be a crowned Queen of the Drama? And to Dorothy--the patient, practical Dorothy, who knew to the hour how long a pound of tea would last; who knew to a spoonful how much sugar, salt, or baking-powder there was in the house--there had come a habit of musing, a trick of sudden and utter abstraction at the most improbable moments, when her hands would drop idly at her sides, and, gazing into space, she would wonder vaguely why all her anxieties, worries, and annoyances could be so swiftly drowned in the depths of a pair of gray eyes, whose steely look always darkened and softened when their owner spoke to her. For so swift is the blossoming of love when once the magic hour has struck, that already Leslie Galt, the friend of three weeks' standing, was her reliance and her ever-quoted authority. Sybil quite understood the situation, and when she jibed gently at the girl's fits of abstraction, Dorothy would answer nothing, save with smile and blush and dimple, and surely they were eloquent enough. John Lawton, considering his daughters as mere well-grown babes, saw nothing but a liking for himself in young Galt's visits, and Letitia's usually quick eyes were so dazzled by a certain jack-o'-lantern of her own discovery that she saw in the young man only a patient listener, whom she believed she was training to fetch and carry quite nicely. The discordant note in all this melody of love was William Henry Bulkley. The overbearing, consequential manner, the fine raiment, and the red face and neck of the elderly beau aroused the imagination of Lena, and she named him "Dat Herr Gobbler-mans," and it was with ill-suppressed laughter and but half-hearted severity that Miss Dorothy called her to account for her disrespect; and Lena, somewhat sullenly, made answer that "she guessed she had youst as much respect for der Herr Bulkley as der Herr Bulkley has for himself. For her mash-mans, he knowed some tings about----" "Lena!" interrupted Dorothy, warningly. "Lena!" And Lena, catching the laughing eyes of Sybil, grinned broadly back at her while in the very act of making her apologetic peasant bob to Dorothy, and murmuring: "Oxcuse me! I don't make mit der Herr Gobbler name, nein! no more!" She retired to the kitchen, while the laughing Sybil inquired of Dorothy how much she thought she had gained by her lecture on propriety to the sharp little German girl. 'Twas well for all of them that Mrs. Lawton had not heard of the "Herr Gobbler" episode, for she alone approved of William Henry Bulkley, she alone greeted him warmly, effusively, and urged him to repeat his patronizing visits. She passed much of her time in trying to appraise at its exact value that long gloating look of admiration he had bestowed upon the fair Dorothy that day of his first visit to them, back in May. Like a very small cat in waiting for a very large mouse, she sat with unwinking eyes, with sharply alert ears, with every strained nerve ready, like a sensitive whisker, to warn her back from a dangerously tight place, and watched tensely, patiently watched, ready to spring upon the silky-coated, cheese-fed big mouse and drag him in triumph to the feet of her little white kitten, whom she would instruct to pat him judiciously, with velvet paw, or tear punitively, with sharp curved claws, just as pussy-mamma should think fit. Nothing in all Letitia Lawton's silly, superficial life had betrayed so completely her absolute selfishness as did this eager desire to secure a son-in-law in the person of William Henry Bulkley. Her knowledge of the man in the past, and the piteous picture her memory held of Mrs. Bulkley's pale, fast-thinning face, when, bravely hiding her wounded pride and slain affection, she received her sympathetically prying neighbors with uncomplaining chill courtesy, but such woful eyes, that they had withdrawn without daring to speak one word of condemnation against the man of whom a certain splendid infamy had but recently caused it to be said: "Why, his conduct brings a blush of shame to the cheek of impropriety's self!" These memories should have filled her mother's heart with sick repulsion, but, instead, it was filled with fallacies. His conduct had not been quite what it should have been, perhaps, but then, no one knew--perhaps his wife had not been entirely faultless. She may not have been a suitable companion for so jovial and high-spirited a man. She had probably not known how to manage him. Now she herself had had no such trouble with her husband, though, of course, she had been a much prettier woman than had been the late Mrs. Bulkley. Then he had been a very wealthy man (Letitia's eyes gleamed at the thought), and much was to be forgiven to the wealthy, they were more tried and tempted than other men, and--and--oh, well! someone had said that a man had to break the heart of one wife before he learned how to care properly for a second one. Dorothy, too, was so young and unsuspicious that he would probably justify her sweet confidence in him, while she, Letitia, would keep her eyes very wide open. Not that she would ever interfere between husband and wife--not she! But still there could be no harm in keeping a mother's eye upon what was going on. And then, her very soul hungered after the unforgotten flesh-pots. She calculated to a nicety what William Henry would in common decency have to do for the parents of his bride. They could not be left in that shackly old White house, that was sure; and, of course, she would pay very long visits to her daughter, and--and assist her in guiding her household. Almost she felt the caressing touch of rich furs about her; in imagination she ordered "the brougham," and closely inspected the liveries of the men on the box; and, in fact, was so dazzled with the gleam of Mr. Bulkley's money, so a-hungered for the flesh-pots in his keeping, that she was almost blinded to the sin and shame and degradation that covered his moral character like a leprosy. Yet, not quite--surely not quite! Else why was she so silent as to her wild hopes? A secret she had never kept in all her life before! For years she had crowded the portals of John Lawton's unwilling ears with not only her own secrets but all those she could come by of other people's. Why, then, did she often catch herself up, in that expansive and confidential chat or monologue, peculiar to the marital chamber? Why did she press her thin, rouge-tinted lips so closely and stop so suddenly every time she started to speak of a "splendid chance"? Whose "chance" was she thinking of, and why did she not complete her sentence? John, slow John, began to wonder to himself. It was odd. All her married life Letitia had exalted herself--had proclaimed herself; her superiority, mentally and spiritually, had usurped the husband's authority; yet now it was that helpless, broken gentleman, whose pathetic eyes she shrank from meeting, into whose ears she dared not pour her shameful secret wish: to marry little Dorothy to William Henry Bulkley. Slow and uncertain, foolishly trustful, weak as he had been in business matters, there was a certain austerity in John Lawton's moral character. His life had been singularly clean and wholesome. He had known how to resist the temptations that many men consider it rather "goody-goody" or "middle-class" to resist. The "high-roller" and the gambler he classed together, but the immoral married man was, to his old-fashioned belief, the man unspeakable! And that was why Letitia was learning to keep a secret! She, the tyrant, was afraid of her slave! So John Lawton was the only person in that house who was not dreaming dreams or weaving plans for the future! He was like a mossy stone, immovable, in the middle of a gentle stream. The water does not rush over it, but parts and races about it with touches of white caressing foam, then joins again below it and continues on in one united stream. But this June day was a special one in the Lawton family, since on it fell the birthdays of both Mrs. Lawton and Sybil; a fact sufficiently unusual to justify the mentioning of it, according to Mrs. Lawton's ideas, though her doing so to such mere acquaintances as Mr. Galt and Mr. Bulkley covered the girls with mortification. "Poor Sybil!" said Dorothy, sympathetically, when the mother had mentioned the interesting coincidence to the second gentleman, "but don't mind, dear! Anyone can see you are innocent of--of----" "Of giving a disgracefully broad hint! Oh, what is coming to mamma! Her pride--where is it? Poor papa simply tries to hide his needs, as mamma did formerly, at least from strangers. She would always demand help from any relative, but of late--oh, nothing is so humiliating as the hint direct! There's no use denying it, mamma reminds me of one of those creamy-white, fine silky sponges----" "Oh, don't!" almost whispered Dorothy. "For truly, I'd a great deal rather hear her say boldly: 'Stand and deliver!'" At which both girls had broken into laughter. Now Sybil, who had read his signs of love aright from the first, was greatly admired and honestly liked by young Galt, and he was quick to turn to her when he needed a friend at court. Sybil had noted the swift disappointment clouding his face when he learned that it was not Dorothy who shared the honors of the twenty-fifth of June with Mrs. Lawton. More, with swift intuition she had even guessed the exact gift he wished to offer her young sister; for, being very short of fans, Mrs. Lawton, when on dress parade, nearly always took Dorrie's little fan from her, with "Just for a moment, my dear," which moment generally reached to her final withdrawal, while the owner meantime crimped up a sheet of newspaper with which to fan her flushed cheeks or defend herself from the persistent fly. And Galt's brows would knit and his lips twitch nervously as he helplessly noted the need of his Violet Girl. So it was easy to guess, when Mrs. Lawton had, with joyous abandon, confided to him the date of the double birthday, that a fan for his adored was the first thought that sprang into his mind, and lo! the name of Sybil dashed all his hopes to flinders. Though she laughed at his disappointed face, she felt sorry for him too, and determined to help him to his wish if possible, for she argued: "He simply can't help himself; he is forced to accept that coy hint--not more than a yard broad--of mamma's offering, but I think he is a gentleman sufficiently well-bred not to humiliate us with extravagant offerings, and he ought to have the pleasure of remembering Dorrie." So: "Mr. Galt!" she cried, "will you help me fasten up a bit of vine on the side of the house? It's just above my reach." And, as he obediently followed her, she continued: "Now, you may weep unobserved." He looked frowningly at her, and she went on: "You are not going to deny your vexed disappointment, are you?" A wry smile twisted his lips as he murmured: "I beg your pardon-- I did not mean-- I was not aware----" "No, I suppose not," she laughed; "but you must better control your features or wear a good heavy veil, to hide them, after this." "Good Lord! What an idiot you must think me," he said. "But honesty is the best policy, and I admit I want awfully to offer a certain trifle to Dor--to Miss Dorothy, and I fancied the opportunity had arrived, and--and----" "And it hadn't!" laughed Sybil. "But see here, now, you don't know much about our family--you are a stranger to us." "Oh! Miss Sybil!" gasped Leslie Galt. "That's downright cruel. You said the other day----" "Do be still!" snapped Sybil, "and attend to what I am saying. You are--or you ought to be--a stranger yet to the Lawton family history. You have learned of a double birthday, and you wish to mark the occasion with some small remembrances; but, for the life of you, being a stranger, you can't remember which girl it is who shares the day with Mrs. Lawton, therefore----" But Galt, with a whoop, had both her hands in his, crying, rapturously: "Oh, you angel! You angel! Of course I am uncertain, and so I have taken the liberty! Oh, what a blessed little brick you are!" and on that hint he acted. So, on this twenty-fifth of June, many kisses had been exchanged, some piteously small gifts offered and joyously accepted. A few mixed roses, with very plenteous greens, were presented by the tremulous hand of John Lawton to his Letitia, but he had laid aside all the deep red ones, then made them into a knot, with thorns all carefully removed, and, as he kissed his first-born daughter on lip and brow and from his soul wished happy returns of the day, he laid them against her rounded throat, and said: "Because they are so like you, dear!" Later in the day Leslie Galt drove up in the dusty old station hack, carrying in one hand his mandolin and in the other a basket of the choicest, rarest fruits, prettily decorated with vines and blossoms. These being accepted, he next brought forth two slim parcels in white wrappers--but standing before Mrs. Lawton, and suddenly conscious that Sybil's laughing eyes were upon him, he blushed and stammered and lied his lie, so redly, so confusedly, that anyone would have sworn he told the truth, and did not know which girl to congratulate. And Mrs. Lawton clapped her hands in juvenile delight, and gave consent to Dorothy's acceptance of the gift. "She really had no right to, naughty thing!" And the boxes being opened revealed two little Empire fans: one a bit of scarlet gauze, gold flecked in sandal frame, and the other of cream-tinted silk, which some true artist's hand had showered thick with violets so heavenly blue, so mauve, so white, so real that involuntarily one bent to catch the perfume. No apportionment had been made at all, yet with a single blue gleam of an upward glancing eye, a swirl of color in a peachy cheek, Dorothy put out her hand unhesitatingly and claimed her own, thus proving that she knew herself to be the Violet Girl, and Sybil, fluttering her gay fan above her head, said, aside to Galt: "I suppose then, I am a sort of dahlia-girl or a--a--hibiscus-girl?" And he, being merry and light of heart because of that sweet, comprehending blue-eyed glance, caught up the mandolin and sang in answer: "My love is like the red, red rose!" At this Mrs. Lawton, speaking against a rather large portion of fruit which gave her words a somewhat muffled sound, remarked that "that used to be a very popular air in her own blooming days. She had been serenaded by it once; that is, those who serenaded her sang it; and a public singer--oh, mercy goodness!" coughed and choked the fruit-eater. Then, the unexpected pit having been ejected from her throat, she proceeded, with quite watery eyes--"A public singer, of no breeding at all, no offence meant to you, Sybil, though of course you will not be a singer--but she was stopping a few days next door, and if you'll believe me, that creature came to her window and bowed and smiled, when my serenaders sang: 'Red, red rose!' Her name, by the way, was Roze--with a z, you understand, not an s. Did you ever hear of anything more incredibly impertinent? Well, I was a very pretty woman in those days! Sybil, here, is almost my exact image--not quite so rich in coloring, perhaps, even now. You may have noticed my color is good for a poor buried-alive creature who knew only luxury in the past and knows only penury in the present. I'm sorry I ate the last of those strange Japanese plums; I meant to save one to show to John. Yes, that's right, practice a little, my dears--as much as you like--but--but if that is what you are going to do I won't urge this fruit upon you--it's fatal to the voice." And thus it was that Sybil took her place at the piano--which she hated--and played accompaniments stumblingly but cheerfully, because she knew that, to the pair behind her, singing together thus unobserved by others was as the joy of Paradise. And finally it was upon the picture of Leslie Galt, bending over and half encircling Dorothy with his arm, as he tenderly placed her unaccustomed little hands in position to hold the mandolin correctly, that William Henry Bulkley stumbled, and stood and glared and mentally swore. Loaded with gifts whose expense made their acceptance a humiliation, he had, without hesitation, included Dorothy in his list of recipients, and oddly enough he too presented a fan--a gorgeous affair of white ostrich plumes mounted on sticks of carved white pearl; and when Mrs. Lawton had rather sharply commanded its acceptance by the reluctant girl, Sybil remarked, sweetly: "It is so beautiful, and will be so useful when you attend balls or the opera, my dear! I suppose you will hardly care to carry it with a white linen gown to church, will you?" And truly Mr. Bulkley could have strangled her. The men understood each other in an instant, and each measured the other swiftly and savagely. Leslie Galt, who was supposed to be a very poor young lawyer, yielded not one inch before the old friend-of-the-family air of the wealthy visitor, and held his place by his Violet Girl's side as long as it was possible. He was quick to recognize Mrs. Lawton's efforts to throw Dorothy and Bulkley together, and he was filled with a sick rage as he saw the blasé old eyes greedily devouring the innocent loveliness of the girl he adored. This undercurrent of concealed hatred made itself so plainly felt that no one was sorry when the little party broke up. Mr. Bulkley, after using a heavy gold-handled pocket knife in cutting some cord from his parcels, had left it on the piano. As he was leaving he remembered it and thought to secure a few moments alone with Dorothy, so he paused at the porch-step and with amazing ill-breeding called familiarly to Dorothy to bring his knife to him. But Leslie Galt, black-browed, took the knife from her a moment, and, going to Mr. Bulkley, said, as he extended it to him: "Permit me to be your servant, sir, for this occasion!" For a moment they glared at each other, then Bulkley went his way, saying to himself: "The impudent young upstart!" while Galt turned back, muttering, with curling lip: "Gross old animal!" And when Mrs. Lawton had moaned several times that she "did not know--no, she was sure she did not know--what was the matter with dear Mr. Bulkley that day," Sybil, on mischief bent, whispered to Galt: "Do you know what is the matter with him, by any chance?" And the young man's eyes were very hard and bright as he replied, slowly: "Yes, I know what is the matter with him," and then, with a grim smile, he added, "just as well as he knows what is the matter with me!" CHAPTER XII THE PROMISED CROWN The Globe Theatre had closed for the summer and the season had ended in the triumphant manner desired by the manager. He had waved his flags and beaten his tin pans lustily up to the very last moment, and had successfully hived the public's swarm of bees in his theatre, as the honey in the box-office amply proved. Nothing that made for this success had been too small to receive personal attention, so even that city directory-like quarter column of "among those present were" had been cleverly made to serve him through his careful and judicious introduction of the names of two or three of the great nouveau riche, among the fashionably holy ones of the Vandergrifts, the Asteroids, the revolutionary Byrds, the colonial Fishers, the Carmichaels, and the Vinelanders, etc.--not, mind you, as of them, but as notedly close students of Shakspere. Oh, what a court-jester was lost in Thrall! These very new rich men, who, had they owned a folio of earliest edition, would eagerly have swapped it for an édition de luxe of to-day and given fifty dollars to boot--so much they knew of Shakspere--were nevertheless filled with joy to see their names in that dear list, "among those present were." And their gratitude to the man who had worked the miracle for them would take the form of steady attendance in the future, of many box parties, of loud public praise. So, with these additions to his sure clientèle, the season closed, and Manager Thrall, at first amused and then annoyed by the haunting memory of a twice seen face, accepted, as had been his wont in former summers, an invitation to join a gay yachting party, only to find himself more or less bored. Eating too much, drinking too much, and smoking like a chimney palled on him. The stories told were all frankly old or poorly revamped, and he grumbled one night that "chestnuts in summer-time were an anomaly!" A young sap-head, dizzy with champagne, gazing at him in heavy-eyed admiration, remarked: "Isn't he deep? Must be college man, eh--Thrall? I'm pretty f-fly myself; I know 'chestnut' a-and 'summer,' but 'n-nomaly' puts me out in the first round!" And with a pencil and paper he went about almost tearfully, begging people to explain the meaning of the word "anomaly"; and each one appealed to wrote out a more wildly absurd definition than had the man before him, which was a highly intellectual amusement indeed. Only one thing had power to lay, for a little while, the lovely, dark-eyed ghost haunting the actor, and that was poker--the great American game played with the aid of the gayly colored pasteboards and an astonishing vocabulary, containing, among other things, "kitties," "antes," and "lob--" no, "jack-pots." A long line of "flushes," "straights"--royal, bob-tailed; and people "came in" and "went out" and "stood pat," and "opened things" and "shut them," and, indeed, did so much in the course of the wonderful game that it claimed the whole attention and left no room for memories of any kind. Still poker could not go on all the time, and finally when one night all hands went ashore to attend a hotel-hop, Thrall, the waltzer par excellence, suddenly realized that each frisky young matron, each pretty débutante who so readily honored him, was being measured by the standard of Sybil's beauty. This one he found slender to the point of angularity; that one plump to the verge of lost outlines; another pretty but crudely overdressed; while the fair face that seemed floating before him as on waves of melody, with the almost sullen red mouth that could flash into smiles of such penetrating sweetness, the sensitive color, wavering, fading, flaming again, the level, tragic brows and dark eyes, in which burning passion still slept, but lightly--he knew but lightly--was, he told himself, "simply incomparable"! And then he pulled up short, saying, angrily: "What in the devil's name has come to me? Am I a green boy to be bowled over and left sprawling in the dust by a glance from a pair of fine eyes? Eyes owned by an inexperienced girl, too, a mere miss--one of those creatures who, knowing nothing, suspect everything, and keep you ever on guard? Bah! I hate green fruit! let me have it ripe, with all its florid coloring and rich mellowness--even if many rough experiences have left a bruised spot here or there. One can turn the blemished side away, and until the bruise becomes a taint that embitters all the pulp--then?--why then leave the fruit and seek something fresher, but not green enough to be astringent to the lips." He decided, finally, "This is a case of nerves, just such an one as women suffer from. I am at the end of a long season, I have overworked, I have lived well but not wisely--no, certainly not wisely! Result--nerves are all at loose ends, imagination over-stimulated, so that a strange face makes an unusually vivid impression. Now the thing for me to do is to see this girl's face again and let a second impression efface the first, since my imagination has, no doubt, been playing me tricks, and the real face will fall far short of the beauty of the imaginary one." So, acting at once upon that idea, he fell back upon the perennial "business telegram" excuse, tore himself away from his jovial companions, and returned to the oven-like city, from which wild horses could not have dragged Mrs. Van Camp until August, when she left with a heavy heart and "wholly in the interest of appearances," she said. He arranged with the old lady for a business chat with her god-daughter next day but one and spent the intervening time superintending the movements of a brigade of cleaners, painters, and paper-hangers whom he had sent charging through the closed theatre--the cleaners routing out dust and dirt from stairs and floors and long-dimmed windows, the painters following and covering up head-marks, finger-marks, scratches, or bruises appearing on the white woodwork and retouching the gilding where it had darkened or worn thin; while the paper-hangers made the boxes not only fresh but most attractive to women, through hanging them with the dull, lustreless velvet paper that makes such a perfect background for a careful toilette and its lovely wearer. It was a dreary job, for surely one can find no more desolate and melancholy place in a great city than a theatre seen by daylight. From the front of the house one receives an impression of loss. The sight of an empty chair is saddening--here are a thousand of them. This dimness and vastness, this gilding and crystal and metal that does not glisten nor glitter. The depressing silence of checked music, of vanished laughter--even an actor shivers at sight of the auditorium of a closed theatre; it is like looking on the face of a dead pleasure. But to turn about and look at the stage is even worse, so distressingly complete is the betrayal of its shabby deceptions. It is as though an admired, brilliant, and successful liar stood there who had been found out and suddenly reduced to telling the bare, bald truth. No, a day in a closed theatre during the house-cleaning period is not an enlivening experience, and Thrall told himself that that was why he looked forward so eagerly to his late afternoon call at Mrs. Van Camp's, where he was to have his business chat with Sybil. And then when he had arrived and was being effusively greeted by Mrs. Van Camp, a gracious young figure in a white linen gown came slowly out from the shadows of the darkened room, a red damask rose drowsing on her breast, and, smiling, waited to offer him greeting; and in that moment he knew his plan had failed--the second impression would not efface the first, because the real, the living face was fairer than his mental portrait of it. So it happened that Mr. Thrall's manner toward this young would-be actress was one of dignity and reserve that was in sharp contrast to the gay freedom and almost boyish liberty of his conduct toward his ancient hostess, who did her fair share toward spoiling him. And not knowing the true cause of the swift change and difference, she could but consider him a very properly correct young man in his attitude as the manager of her namesake, Sybil Lawton; and therefore she withdrew into the far extension breakfast-room and conversed with a mumbling old parrot, who for thirty years had implored the people of his world to "scratch Polly's head," and had invariably rewarded the good Samaritan who heeded his appeal by biting viciously the hand that scratched. Only an occasional artificial laugh from Polly reached to the dim parlor, whose white-matted floor, flowery chintz furniture covering, great Chinese screens, strange sea-shells, old portraits, and mighty china jars made a quaint eighteenth century sort of background for the white-gowned maiden with the dark, eager face, whom her father had lovingly likened to a June rose. And the ever-alert dramatic instinct of the actor-manager, working in seeming independence of the preoccupied mere man and naissant lover, took note of the room as a possible charming stage-setting for some new comedy. That instinct, keen, never sleeping, is one of the unpleasant traits in the make-up of a great actor; for there is no situation in life too sacred, no emotion even of his own heart too tender not to be "used" if it seems dramatic. And so now, through the bald, forced questions with which he began his interview, like his dignified reserve of manner, were the result of a violent restraint, he was putting upon a sudden passionate longing--an idiotic impulse that had seized him at sight of Sybil, to take her head between his hands and bury his face in the warm darkness of her cloudy hair--even that struggle with impulse did not prevent the dramatic instinct of the stage-manager from taking note of surroundings. Presently the calm and earnest answers of the girl and his own effort at self-control restored his poise, and his more gracious manner returned to him. He found that she was faithfully devoting herself to the small parts first; and in discussing the Shaksperian characters she put questions to him anent the meaning of certain passages that more than once "gave him pause" ere he could answer them. She even so far forgot her awe of him as manager as boldly to differ with the view he took of Desdemona's character, she declaring that a greater tragedy than mere physical murder would have come about had the fair Venetian lived longer. "No! no!" cried Sybil, "she was not the doll you think her! High-born, high-bred, musician, artist, student, over-accomplished, over-cultivated--the intellect rebelled! Over-guarded, over-restrained, repressed--nature revolted. Othello, the splendid perfection of the animal-man looming in black majesty against a background of flame and smoke, glittering in harness, blazing with honors and orders, armed with barbaric weapons--his very power to destroy fascinated! Contrariety attracted and a great wave of passion swept the petted daughter of the Venetian senator into the arms of the Moorish warrior. But had she lived to regain her normal vision--to see her husband as the world saw him, merely a rough but very honest soldier, without tastes or even memories in common--she would have wearied of him and of their wandering life. She would have longed for the ease and luxury and refinement of old days. She would have sighed for the companionship of the learned and accomplished--and the beautiful "misunderstood," being no longer blind with passion, would probably have gone, girl fashion, to the other extreme and have loathed the blackness of her lord, while adoring, possibly, the whiteness of--y-e-s, there might be a worse tragedy than the dreadful murder of innocent Desdemona!" "Oh!" exclaimed Sybil, in trepidation, for Thrall had broken into sudden, hearty laughter, "oh, are my ideas so bad as that? It's--it's horrid to be laughed at, but I suppose I have not expressed myself very clearly; only if Desdemona inherited the characteristics of her people, duplicity was as strong in her as love of luxury and appreciation of art--and a dead passion is a thing to conceal; and when concealment begins, duplicity may follow, may it not?" She stopped suddenly; she had spoken rapidly, in impetuous self-defence. Now angry tears rushed to her eyes. "Oh," she cried, "I don't make you understand one bit! No wonder you laugh! Only I feel somehow that Desdemona's was not a love that would have lasted. But I'm punished for going out beyond my depth in argument. I won't do it again!" The fact that Sybil's reasoning had been so good made it all the harder for Thrall to explain his laughter. Few men understood the eternal feminine better than he did; and when the young girl, with innocent, instinctive knowledge, was speaking of a "passion" as distinct from "love," her glance met his as straightly, as frankly, as if she had been a boy. And suddenly there came to him the memory of a little child he had once seen playing, ignorantly happy, with his mother's scissors and his father's knife, and he laughed aloud in spite of himself, for he knew well that the girl was clashing together her terms of "love" and "passion" with just as much real knowledge as the baby had had of the scissors and the knife. And when he saw the angry tears shining in her eyes he could have kissed them away with as pure tenderness as if she had been that baby's self. And all the time the managerial side of his brain, so to speak, was receiving impressions and was trying to get the attention of the man's whole mind; and presently, through the smallest of incidents, it succeeded. While Thrall was trying to reassure Sybil and convince her that he had meant no mockery by his laughter, she sat with down-bent face, hiding her mortifying tears. He noted the hair, dark clouding over the straight, black brows, the outward thrust of the sullen, red lip that made and kept the whole face mutinous, when a quick glint came to the averted eyes, a lift to the brows, a tremor to the lips that suddenly parted, curling like petals into the most delicious smile ever made for man's undoing. Old Poll, sidling into view and waddling across the floor in search of mischief, had caused the swift change of expression, and the expression had brought the stage-manager to the front with a bound. "Great Shakspere!" said Thrall to himself; "what a face for the balcony scene! The sweetness--the positive radiance--the lovely outline of the down-bent face! I've half a mind--I--why, the girl has just shown she has brains, whether her ideas of Desdemona are right or wrong; it proves that she can think for herself! And--and if to her beauty, youth, and brains you can add good family, and to them all the subtle, intangible thing we call charm--what do all these things mean to a manager? Why, unless he's a dolt, a blind bat, they mean a find, a discovery, a future card of great commercial value! Dear Lord! if I only knew whether she could walk across the stage without going to pieces, whether the sight of the audience would give her a palsy!" He had come there intending to tell her that she was to have a part of eight lines in the opening play of the New York season--but now, but now! New ideas were rushing through his mind. If only she had a little training! All at once--apropos of nothing, he asked: "Miss Lawton, do you dance?" She raised her eyes in unspeakable surprise. His face brightened; he went on rising as he spoke: "Do you waltz?" In a breath she was swaying in his encircling arms to the waltz he softly hummed. As they circled the big room and stopped by the window a boy went down the street, whistling high and clear, and simply from the actor-like habit of quoting, Thrall said, with a laugh: "It was the lark--the herald of the morn!" When, like a flash, Sybil, with pretty impatience and obstinacy, made response: "It was the nightingale and _not_ the lark, That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear!" The surprise was so startling that Thrall caught the girl's face between his hands almost roughly, exclaiming: "Why! do you know the lines of Juliet?" And poutingly she answered: "Does not every stage-struck girl know them?" But he frowned: "That's no answer! Be direct in matters of business! Do you or do you not know Juliet's lines?" She was vaguely conscious that she really ought to be angry at the liberty this man was guilty of, but she quailed at the frown and answered, meekly: "Only part of them. I studied up to the potion scene, and there I got frightened and stopped!" "Ah!" he exclaimed; "and may I ask what frightened you?" He released her as he spoke. "Well," she said, with her head a little to one side, as she traced the pattern on the curtain with one slim finger, "well, you see, it was night, and--and Dorrie was asleep--and--there are a good many owls in our trees, and they do hoot and shiver their voices so! And they and the vault and the 'dead men's bones' rather got on my nerves, I suppose, for I only got as far as Tybalt--in his 'festering shroud'--when I was so scared I backed over to the bed and Dorrie! Oh, I didn't dare turn around, you see!" Stewart Thrall fairly shook with laughter, in which this time both Sybil and Polly joined. Then he said at last, not without a touch of sarcasm: "It was not the fear of acting the part that disturbed you, then?" "Oh, no!" she replied with great simplicity. "It's too soon to get frightened about that--ages too soon!" She sighed heavily: "I'm nineteen now, and I suppose I must wait years and years--five at the very least--before I dare even to hope to act Juliet? And then people say no one can play her unless they have loved." "No one can," assented Thrall. "Oh, well, in five years," Sybil responded, hopefully and vaguely. "Yes," thought the man, "in far less than five years, you lovely child, you will have learned to play Juliet!" An old engraving of Mrs. Siddons hung upon the wall, and Sybil stood looking at it. The crown the actress wore well became the high chill beauty of her face. "Queen of the English-speaking stage," murmured Sybil. "How proud and happy she must have been! what love and homage her fame must have won from her countrymen!" Quickly turning her head, she asked: "Mr. Thrall, when you have become famous, do you forget all the bitterness of past struggles and feel like loving the whole world for very joy and gratitude?" "Having no experience to guide me, I am unable to answer your question," was the somewhat curt reply. "Unable?" repeated the girl, all her respectful admiration writ large upon her face. "You mean----" "I mean," he interrupted, "that I am not famous; that now I never shall be! I started out meaning to--to win fame, but I--missed the way." He paused a moment, then went on, bitterly: "Question me about notoriety, Miss Lawton, and no man alive can give you more authentic information as to the method of its creation, its staying power, and its value. But I know not fame! If I died to-morrow I'd die like a dog--so far as memory or renown is concerned. Learn early to distinguish between the sound, noise, and rumor of notoriety and the credit, honor, and excellence of fame!" "I'll try," the girl answered, simply, and then she added, gently: "I'm sorry you missed the way!" A dimness came into the man's eyes as he responded, briefly, "Thank you!" and gazed at the picture that Sybil had returned to. "Crowned queen!" she repeated. "Of course if you give me the chance, Mr. Thrall, I shall work hard for work's own sake, as well as to be a bread-winner. But all the time down in my heart I shall hope and hope that some day, in years to come, I may win a crown like that!" The actor laughed derisively. "A pasteboard crown," he cried, "so thinly covered with gold-leaf you dare not try to burnish it!" "You do not mean that, Mr. Thrall!" "I do mean it! A cheap and gaudy thing, the outside blazing with rare jewels, made of glass! Inside, paper, glue--a pasteboard crown! A thing worthless, meaningless!" "No!" protested the girl; "your words are very cruel! I do not think you rightly judge the value of the Crown Dramatic, for even if it were but pasteboard it would not be worthless or meaningless! It would still be a sign, a symbol, of artistic triumph, of true excellence, of the world's approval!" "You are obstinate," he declared. "And you are not grateful to your profession, I'm afraid," she said, reproachfully; then she hurriedly added: "I beg your pardon! Of course you know of what you speak, and I am very presuming in my ignorance, but"--she clasped her hands tightly above the rose on her breast--"I long to wear that crown some day." A few red petals fell from the rose and were caught in Thrall's hand. He glanced at Sybil's rapt young face--his resolve was taken. "You shall have your wish," he said. "I will place the crown upon your head; only promise not to reproach me when you find for yourself that it is only pasteboard!" CHAPTER XIII THE FORMING OF THE CHRYSALIS That Stewart Thrall wasted no time when once a plan was settled upon and a thing seriously undertaken may be gathered from a letter written in a Western city by the manager of a stock company playing a summer season in the theatre attached to a soldiers' home. The park coaxed people from the city, and the theatre then drew them from the park to the play. This letter, having mentioned the safe arrival of certain manuscripts, scene-plots, and property-plots, continued: "And now about the young maid of high degree you sent us, with the valiant Jim Roberts acting as guard and henchman. And, to begin at the ending, like the Irishman I am, let me just tell you no better sheep-dog ever lived than this same James. He's kept as straight as a colonial front-door--honest, he has! If you could see the poor devil shake and quake for need of a few drops of 'mountain dew,' you'd believe me fast enough! He escorts her to and from the theatre and follows her like a secret-service man whenever she goes to the city of an errand. Of course, keeping straight to play sheep-dog leaves him all right as to memory too, and he hasn't lost a word since he's been here. "Now as to the young damsel you want me to report on. She's all right and safe in the boarding-house my wife secured for her. She's a little too stiff and reserved and a great deal too pretty to be very thoroughly liked by the women. She started out very friendly and pleasant, but--well, you see, Lou Daskam and Dick Turner are engaged to each other, and George Jones and his wife Grace have only been married a few months, and their unrestrained endearments were somewhat confusing to her conservative mind. My wife explained matters to her; but though she now understands that the whole affair was a question of manners, not of morals, she remains a bit starchy toward the amorous four. "As to business--she's doing well. She's got _act_ in her, _sure_! And Lord! what a face for the footlights! My wife's teaching her how to make-up, and when she's properly rouged and carmined and promaded, and that fleece of black hair loosened about her head, she's a cross between a princess and a gypsy, with the bearing of one and the coloring of the other. The audience has not disturbed her much. At my advice she looks at the people who are on the stage with her, instead of staring in front all the time. The thing that embarrassed her most was the tilt of the stage, which is very steep in this shop. That worried her a bit at first, but she walks quite naturally and unconsciously now. She is learning to gauge her voice to the house--by my rule. I send someone out in front, who stands at the back of the seats. When her scene is on, she glances at him. If he shifts about, or bends his head as if to hear better, she gently raises her voice or speaks with a little more force, until he stands still, hearing satisfactorily. She will soon be able to make the voice test in any theatre by watching for a moment or two some distant auditor. "The greatest stumbling-block in her way is that, so far, she simply cannot talk while walking. She speaks her exit speech standing still, and then walks off in an awkward silence, or she walks to the door silently, then speaks her lines and _pops_ off--making the house laugh. "To-day Jim Roberts has taken her in hand, and out on the stage I can hear this going on: (Girl's voice) 'I will go' (Jim's voice, warningly: 'Step!') 'to my aunt's' (Jim: 'Step!') 'and say' ('Step!') 'I shall keep' ('Step!') 'my promise' ('Step!') 'to marry Harry!' ('Exit!!' shouts Jim.) 'Now, Miss Sybil, try it again, and say "step" to yourself this time. Pretty soon your feet will carry you along unconsciously.' "Now her voice, sounding very forlorn and unbelieving, begins: 'I will go (step) to my aunt's (step)----' "It sounds awfully funny, but she's a persistent little devil, and she will hang on till she can make a decent exit. "I'd like to bet something, old man, that I'm on to your game! You are not a man to put me into baby-farming like this for nothing. Well, good luck! She's bright and quick, and I'm crowding as much 'shop' into her head as I can on short notice. Jim Roberts has done a good deal in the way of teaching her technicalities. She understands all the entrance directions, the uppers and lowers and centres, etc. "I believe that's all. Any further orders will be attended to. Thank you for the use of that play--it pulled us through in fine shape. "Fraternally, "J. A. WILLIAMSON." By the same mail there had come a second letter from the theatre at the Soldiers' Home. It was written with woful shakiness showing in every spidery line, and with more than a spider's venom in its words. The envelope held, too, a folded ten-dollar note, which was a return for the like amount paid out by Thrall to a certain Mrs. Hoskins, who in her character of suspicious landlady had basely broken her promise "to wait a week," and had impudently presented her claim against Roberts to his manager--which was certainly an injurious proceeding and treacherous as well. Therefore the letter opened with some remarks about landladies, individual and in bulk, and though his style was a trifle florid and his spirit somewhat bitter, he nevertheless showed a thorough and discriminating knowledge of his subject, particularly where he pointed out the difference between a "she-shylock" and a harpy (Mrs. Hoskins was a harpy), the shylock being, he declared, ever satisfied with her single pound of flesh, while the harpy, beginning with your eyes, picks your every bone bare, and then tries to reach through your vitals. Having eased his bosom of much perilous stuff, he went on: "Business is very good. The company is far better than you'd expect to see at the salaries paid, but every one's so devilish glad to get something to do in the summer that they are willing to work on half pay. Old Williamson's a first-class stage-manager--queer thing he never gets into New York, and he's taking so much pains with Miss Lawton, or Miss Sylvia Latimer, as you've got her billed here, that everyone is talking and wondering about it. But there's no mystery to me in this matter any longer. I went to her door yesterday to hand in a few pounds of mail from her people--they must all write every day of the week to her. She was not in the room, but the door was ajar, and I entered and placed the letters on the table. As I did so the wind fluttered open the leaves of a play-book--it was 'Romeo and Juliet,' and the lines of Juliet were all pencil-marked for study. So that's the game, is it? That's why the girl is hidden under a stage-name, while she is learning her acting a-b-abs out here in the West? That's why I suddenly become of service to you? I am to guard this fruit from wicked little boys who may look over the orchard wall and spy it out? Oh, you think you are immeasurably deep, don't you? Well, you're not! But you're the damndest, luckiest beggar on earth! And you're smart--oh, yes, you're smart, where number one comes in! "What a card you have found! and how cleverly you will play it, and gather in the stakes--for yourself! Beautiful, talented, poor, and good--now! Don't give me your sneer, please! Even a drunkard knows an honest woman when he comes up with one. And this girl is a wonder! She is innocent, though she's not ignorant. Theoretically she knows of sin's existence--her stories, poems, and plays have all made her so monstrous wise; but, practically, she is as much of a child as was that other girl who came to you to learn to be an actress. Damn you! Oh, yes, I know this girl has gifts my sister Bess never had, but--purity is the subject now, and Sybil Lawton looks at you with precisely the same innocent, dauntless eyes that made my sister irresistible. Poor little maid! If it were not that she and the Missus, and even this last, your pet devil of a divorcée, were all such fair women, I'd think your sending me on here to guard this girl would have made me suspicious of another sort of game! See here, Thrall, don't you come any of your dam'd drooping-eyelid and lowered-voice effect over this girl! Leave her alone, if you know when you are well off. I know I've been your dog, your cur, but curs snap sometimes, and a silence, however long, may be broken. No, we don't want any Bessie in this! Stewart Thrall, manager--even Stewart Thrall, Romeo to the loveliest Juliet God ever made! But, don't you see how like she is to your victim, little Bessie, save in color of her hair and eyes? How like! For God's sake let that likeness protect-- I--oh, my head's all gone to pieces! No, I'm not drunk! I'm queer for want of drink--but I dare not touch it while I have her to care for. I think if I met her eyes when I was 'off' I'd curl up like a worm that's stepped on! "She--so gentle and so kind! And yet Herod could not touch her for pride! There, I've had a smoke; I'm steadier now. Yes, your find is a great one. When once she conquers her trouble over her exits she will be quite a decent actress. Her voice is clear and carries well. Hers is a genuine stage beauty too, lighting up radiantly. To your question--yes, she is easily coached. I've got rather a long part to break in, so I guess I'll go at it, after I mail this and get a bite. Watching others' preserves is hungry work. Tout à vous!--which I wish I wasn't! "_Jim_." "Confound him!" said Thrall, "I don't know when he is worst--crazy drunk or crazy sober! Why must he remind me of that resemblance? For, deuce take him, it does exist! It's not his drunken fancy, as I wish it were!" He shivered in the warmth as he recalled the fair, childish face that used to beam with adoration upon him, unconscious avowal shining in each blue, honest eye. Shallow and inconsequent he had thought the little creature, and yet she had snapped the thread of life with her own hand rather than wait for its slow fraying under abandonment and separation from him. And Jim, by his silence and his craft combined, had averted an awful scandal. He wiped his forehead and re-read the letter. Suddenly his face flushed. "The drivelling idiot!" he muttered. "I believe in my soul he's in love with this little Crown Princess, who yearns to be a Queen! If he dares to let her know of it I'll wring his neck! He's mighty brave on paper--threatening me, who has kept him out of the poor-house these five years! And my young affections are supposed to be strictly confined to 'the fair Ophelia' type, eh? I am to be blind to the fact that there's more beauty in this dark, lowering young face, more temptation in the upward curl of her swift smile, than could be found in the pink-and-white redundancy of the most perfect Rubens type alive! Oh, I am a fool to notice his rambling, maudlin nonsense! Let me keep to the business in hand. It's very evident that this girl has something in her, when tough old Williamson finds her promising and can see her beauty too. And this crazy wretch, Jim, who knows the requirements of a good actress as well as I do, says she's quite a decent actress now. All of which means that if she is let alone she will probably succeed only after years of struggle and hard work and many disappointments. Yet that is the natural, normal way to success. Perhaps I'd better leave her alone [surely, if Stewart Thrall ever had a guardian angel, its friendly whisper was in his ear at that moment]--leave her to work out her own artistic salvation? I--I could give her a start--I could use my influence to secure a good position somewhere for her first season. That would be the wise thing, Stewart, my boy! For there's no denying the girl's getting too strong a hold on my imagination. Yet what a furore it would create to spring this unknown, unheard-of beauty upon the public! What a vision she would be in the white satin lace and pearls of Juliet, with her young, dark, swift-changing face; and, as for acting the part, why--" A slow smile crept across his lips, unconsciously he drooped his heavily fringed eyelids, in the very way that Jim Roberts had cursed, and murmured: "I could teach her--I could teach her. This letter says she is easily coached. I could open the season with this new French play, holding 'The Duke's Motto' ready for revival in case the new play doesn't strike hard enough; and meantime I could either place my little Princess with old Mrs. Mordaunt for training, or--coach her myself, work the press to arouse curiosity, and by February at furthest spring my surprise--play my great card! The production will cost--but I'll gather it in again from the houses she will draw, if I bring her out as a star. I suppose I'd be wiser to drop this plan--but, oh, by Jove, I can't! I promised, fairly and squarely promised, she should have her crown. Poor little girl! I'd like to make the path to success easier to her than most people find it. Then, again, some cheap tuppenny-ha'penny actor may gather her up and marry her, out of hand, and so spoil all her future. Oh, devil take it! I'll toss a coin. No, I won't, either; that doesn't seem decent! But I'll wait for the next letter, and if she has learned by that time to make a correct exit, I'll bring her back here at the end of old Williamson's summer season, and begin coaching her on the quiet for the great coup! If she has not yet succeeded, I leave her to her own efforts. There, fate has it to manage now! I stand aside and wait!" Seven days later this telegram reached Jim Roberts: "Bring Miss L---- on here at close. She can't go with Williamson for winter season. Train arrives late, so escort her to Riverdale first, then report to me at theatre.--Thrall." While in a certain paper's "Stage Gossip" there appeared: "The air of the Rialto is full of mystery just now. There are whispers of a society _débutante_ who is to become a stage _débutante_. Sometimes she comes from the West with consenting friends; sometimes, being wealthy, she has defied the authority of lover and guardian alike and is openly preparing for a stage career. The one thing that steadies the wavering rumor is that the name of the theatre to be favored by this shadowy society actress never changes--that part of the story is ever the same. Stewart Thrall is to be her manager and the Globe is to be the scene of her triumph. So much for the _on dit_ of the Rialto. Perhaps Mr. Thrall will kindly rise and explain." And a more staid and conservative paper stated: "That it was undoubtedly true that a young lady of birth and breeding, a member of one of New York's oldest families, was to be brought before the public as soon as the full consent of her family could be obtained, Mr. Stewart Thrall, with a most commendable sense of honor, refusing by his aid to place the beautiful suppliant in opposition to her natural guardians. The lady's name will only be given to the public when all opposition to her wishes have been withdrawn." So the good angel had whispered his warning all in vain; and Thrall was already busy with glue-pot and paper and book of gold-leaf, for had he not promised, with the rose-petals that fell from her breast held red in his hand--had he not promised to crown the obstinate, ambitious girl who longed to be Queen of that fair domain, the Drama, who, while hoping to win fame herself, was "sorry that he had missed the way"? "God bless her!" he murmured, "God bless her!" and he made note of several new fables to give to the press anent the social débutante's private brougham, her lovers, her maids; for thus is the chrysalis formed from which, the dormant time being passed, the radiant butterfly will flutter forth to gladden the eyes of those whose curiosity has been cleverly aroused. Ah, yes! no chrysalis, no butterfly! CHAPTER XIV THE RETURN FROM THE WEST It was October already. The old White house stood and shivered when the wind came sharp from the steely river. Lena, making ineffectual war upon fallen leaves, could not even keep the porch free from them, and they skirled and whirled and gently slid and madly rushed, while in the house their movement could be distinctly heard like light pattering footsteps, ever seeking, never resting. They even disturbed Lena's nerves. She looked about uneasily, while Dorothy laughed as they tied up each other's fingers, for they had been engaged in what Lena called "veather vending," and what Dorothy called "battening" the windows in her mother's room. For there was no question about it, the Lawtons had to face the winter right where they were. So Lena, with Dorothy's help, was doing her best to make a few rooms comfortable, and the hammering of nails and tacks had included thumb-nails as well. But what of that; their "veather vending" was turning lots of cold air from the rooms, and there was a comforting smell of freshly baked cookies coming from the kitchen, and great crimson and dappled branches of dogwood--Sybil's favorite autumn leaf--were over mantel and door, while dark purple and pale grayish lavender asters were nodding from corner and vase. For joy! oh joy! Sybil was coming home from the West--that vague, chaotic place that had swallowed her sister, an outsider, and now cast her back a professional, a "for-true" actress, with three real newspaper notices of her work, though they had been won under an assumed name. Dear Syb! how proud they all were! Papa had split up a cigar-box and made a little frame for her very first newspaper notice and had it hanging in the corner by the window where he shaved. And then, late that night, poor, pallid Jim Roberts had handed Sybil out of the shaky old hack at the White house door, and saying "Good-night," had turned to go, when grateful hands had drawn him inside, to receive courteous thanks from John Lawton and an explanation from Mrs. Lawton as to her present inability to send a comfortable carriage for her daughter and her escort. "Oh, Mrs. Jones was Miss Lawton's escort quite as much as I was!" stammered Roberts. "I--I only looked after the checks and things, and----" "And," said Sybil, "hungry and tired, came away up here with me instead of going straight to your supper and your bed. And, papa, he had no overcoat with him, and he shivered dreadfully in the hack after the fearful heat of the car." Whereupon Dorothy insisted upon coffee being brought to him, and Sybil cried out: "I smell fresh cookies! Oh, Lena, bring some here!" Then, still in hat and gloves, she stood before him, saying: "You shall not miss the next train down. I will watch the time for you, so please drink your coffee and eat your cookies in peace!" "Cookies and coffee!" moaned Mrs. Lawton. "Barbarous combination! Mr. Roberts's dinner will be destroyed, or, to speak more correctly, his appetite will be destroyed. And while I'll not call it vulgar, still there is something so very domestic, so very intimate about a home-made cookie, that personally--no, my daughter, I could not have offered one to a stranger! Still I suppose we must expect these touches of bohemianism, now that you have become a professional actress!" In the few moments that he sat there, Jim saw the poverty surrounding them. He could not help noticing the carpets and curtains, worn to the bone; the ancient and honorable furniture, the severity of the chairs; and yet the Lawtons were, temporarily at least, unconscious of it all. They were caught up in a golden glory of family love, of mutual admiration, of ineffable tenderness, and while all other eyes were turned with pride upon the dear wanderer returned, she, still timing him, still holding the plate of cookies, with an impulse that would not be denied, stretched out her free arm and drew her sister close to her side, gazing at her with an expression of love so protecting, so maternal, she might have been Dorrie's elder by ten years instead of two. "Ah!" thought Roberts, "you'd be quick to suspect danger for her, and you'd be strong to protect; but to your own peril you'd be as blind as a young white owl facing the sun!" With almost a groan he sprang to his feet, a movement that wrung a disappointed "Ach!" from Lena, who, to the amusement of Dorothy and the fuming indignation of Mrs. Lawton, had been eagerly peering through the crack of the door, trying to get a good look at "Vun of dem Herr actin' mens, ven dey vasn't makin' no believes to nobody," and her betraying "Ach!" came with such a pony-like snort that even Mr. Lawton had joined in his daughters' laughter. Then Sybil stepped close to Roberts and whispered, swiftly: "Will you be vexed if I ask you just to speak one word to our little German maid, who is the staff of the whole family, and whose manner is the only bad thing about her? Ah, you are good! [What would he not have done for Sybil's asking?] Dorrie, you call her. She wouldn't come for anyone else now." "Lena! Lena!" called Dorothy's gay voice. "Lena! Quick, please!" And then, very, very red in the face, the sturdy, square little serving-woman stood in the doorway. "We are in such a hurry, Lena," said Sybil, "because Mr. Roberts has to catch this next train; but, as he is the gentleman who brought me safe home after helping me to learn to act, I know you too want to thank him." "Oh, ja! I doos so!" answered Lena, heartily, making her peasant-like bob of a courtesy. But Jim Roberts went over to her, saying, with a laugh: "If there's any thanking to be done, I'm the one to do it; for, Mistress Lena, I haven't tasted cookies like yours since, as a bad boy, I came home at recess to hook them fresh and warm from my mother's pantry. Thank you, Lena!" As she backed smilingly out of the doorway, Sybil laughed: "You have saved her life by granting her a good look at that wondrous thing, a real, sure-enough actor!" "Carefully edited and lavishly illustrated, this tale will doubtless reach her grandchildren," smiled John Lawton. "Oh!" cried the girls, "hear papa making jokes!" "You all seem to forget that you have an actress of your own in the family now for your little maid to feast her eyes upon," remarked Roberts. "Oh!" exclaimed Sybil, flushing beautifully, "not yet. I am only 'a trying-to-be actress' yet! There, your time's up!" And she caught up his travelling cap and tossed it to him. "Sybil!" remonstrated Mrs. Lawton, "Sybil! a little more decorum, even in the protecting presence of your family! Good-night, sir! In former days I should have sent you in my own brougham to the----" But Mr. Lawton had swept the actor out of the room to a chorus of "Good-nights." On the porch, he said: "Mr. Roberts, I have some clippings from the papers about my little daughter's work. Can you tell me, for I am very ignorant of such things, whether those--er--those notices were inspired, or--you understand me, were they--er--commanded from the box-office, or at--er--a manager's suggestion, or were they unsought by anyone?" The old gentleman's voice trembled with eagerness and anxiety. "My dear sir," replied Roberts, "what may happen in that line in the future I dare not say, but as to the past, nothing was inspired. Those notices commending Miss Lawton's work were honestly earned, for she has natural gifts, neither is she afraid of work, and does not resent criticism--as yet." Mr. Lawton took his hand and pressed it gratefully. "Thank you!" he said, "thank you, for your goodness to my Sybil!" Roberts flung himself into the old hack, muttering, as he slammed the door: "Hear him! Just hear him!" He burst into a laugh that ended in a groan. "Oh!" he continued, "I wonder if God, in some mighty shuffle of His worlds, has dropped this one out of His hands entirely! For surely nothing higher, nothing wiser than blind fate or a malicious devil can be guiding the affairs of man!" He threw off his cap and held his head hard between his bony, long hands, and broke out again: "That gentle, helpless old fool, with his unmistakably aristocratic elbows nearly out of his sleeves, is the natural protector of two lovely daughters! How the devil will laugh when he takes note of the situation! If so weak a creature was to be trusted with daughters at all, they should for their own sakes have been plain girls, whose homeliness would have acted as a prohibitory tariff on folly of any kind! Again, the circling arms of some mothers would be as towers of strength for the guarding of innocent beauty; but not this mother--this elegant 'has been,' who twists her memories of past wealth and power into thongs to lash her friends and family with! And, by Jove, the old rattle can carry herself well! She's been a fine-looking woman in her day--a fact she will never forget in this world, probably not in the next! But selfish? Lord! I'll bet her time is principally given to pulling out for her own use any plum of comfort to be found in their economical family pie! But they see nothing amiss! It's 'this chair for mamma!' One places a stool for her feet, and another brings a cushion for her back, and papa throws a scarf about her shoulders and lowers the light to suit her eyes; and when they have all made her quite comfortable, she rewards them with sighs and moans and tales of her former glory. But for family love commend me to this Lawton set. I never saw anything so beautiful in my life as the palpitating pride of that old gentleman in his daughters and their protecting love for him! And there it is. The natural position of father and child is reversed, and that lovely creature, Sybil, with father and mother both living, is as absolutely unprotected as any orphan on earth! Lord! How I wish I had a drink of whiskey! My nerves will jump clear through my skin before I get to the city! I wonder what Stewart would say if he knew I'd been travelling without a flask? Wouldn't believe it, I suppose. Gad! I've had heaven and hell pretty thoroughly well mixed together these last few weeks. Thrall gave me a bit of heaven when he sent me to act as sheep-dog for this girl, and I ordered up a portion from the other place when I doomed myself to sobriety, out of consideration for her trust in me! Not a drop of anything to be had either at this infernal, suicidal station, and I've had nothing since Albany! Well, I must grin and bear it! I wish I hadn't to see Thrall to-night, and yet I want to know just what he's up to. Of course I'm dead sure he's going to coach this ambitious child for Juliet, but maybe he'll pass her over to old mother Mordaunt. She's clever and knows her business. Perhaps, too, he means to put young Fitzallen up for Romeo, and play Mercutio himself? May be! Ah, bah! May-bees don't fly at this time of year. I'd bet my bottom dollar--a coin always within easy reach--that he will coach her himself--yes, and play Romeo, too! But as I live by bread, Stewart, my boy, there must be no Bessie in this case, or something will happen--something that would have happened five years ago had I not been as completely under the spell of your fascination as ever she was, poor little maid! Hello, here we are, and the train coming, thank the Lord!" Roberts hurried through the little waiting-room, past the small office, from which came the curt, short "tick-tick tack" that is as the voice of the ever-imperative telegraph wire, crossed the open space, tripping over the line of rails in the darkness, clambered up the steps, and entered the purgatorial heat of the car, made nauseating by the odor of banana and stale orange-peel, and dropped into a seat by the side of a sleeping man, only to spring up again when suddenly aware that he had sat upon a bottle. The movement aroused the sleeper, who, with his hat on the back of his head and a lock of hair clinging damply to his forehead, muttered apologies as he gathered up his overcoat out of the way. Having felt carefully in one of its outer pockets, he turned to Roberts with that loose smile of world-embracing geniality peculiar to the good-natured man who is "three sheets in the wind," and thickly remarked: "I's all right! Best kind of glass! I've sat on that flask dozen times myself 'nd never cracked it!" His head wobbled a moment, then he added, confidentially: "Soon's I can think--w-where in thunder I put cup--w-we'll have a drink together--like little men, eh? Why h-here it is, r-right in other pocket! Been a b-bear it might 'a' tore my g-gizzard out! Join me?" Jim Roberts glanced a moment down the brilliantly lighted, well-filled car, then clenched his hands and, drawing a long, almost sobbing breath--declined. "W-what's--w-what's reason you won't join me?" demanded the stranger, indignantly, yet showing at the same time a disposition to weep. "W-what have I done--say, now, w-what have I done? Slept with my m-mouth open, I s'pose? Slept out loud, too--very likely? But w-what of that? It isn't pretty, of course--but's no crime--eh?" He brought forth the metal cup and carefully wiped it out with a stubby forefinger, while he tearfully added that "the very dogs in the streets'd bark at him when they knew a gentleman had refused to drink with him!" And Roberts, with set jaws and feet twisting together, tried to control the leaping muscles and nerves that seemed to be crying out with a thousand gasping mouths for liquor! liquor! The tears of self-inflicted disappointment were stinging beneath his lids when there came to his ears, with infernal power to charm, the delicious "blub-blub-blub" of whiskey poured from a full bottle. He gave a gasp. In an instant his left hand held his hat before his face, his right hand grasped the cup and poured the contents straight and raw down his aching throat. The drink was followed by that convulsive shudder, so familiar to most drunkards. Heart shock someone has called it; but almost before he had returned the cup to its rejoicing owner a delicious warmth and comfort was stealing over him, a sense of well-being made him tolerant even of the disjointed conversation of his chance acquaintance. * * * * * He reported presently at the private office of Manager Thrall, who received him eagerly and greeted him with unusual heartiness. The interview was long and confidential--very. When Jim Roberts finally reached his own room he had been drinking heavily and had been tramping the streets for hours. He was at his very worst. Flinging off only his hat and coat, he cast himself across the bed, and rolling his head face downward on his folded arms, he groaned: "I can't do anything! I'm less than a fly on the wheel! He's all right now--he means well--he honestly does! But, oh! good God! don't I know the man better than he knows himself! Don't I know that Stewart Thrall is never more dangerous than when he means well?" and the poor wretch lay there and grovelled in helpless, drunken misery. CHAPTER XV MRS. LAWTON LAYS PLANS Before Sybil's trunks had been opened and her simple little home-coming gifts distributed, she knew that her sister, the patient, cheerful Dorothy, was being seriously worried by somebody or something, and she had not sat at the family table three times before she saw that her mother waged a secret, petty warfare against the young girl, who was really the mainspring that kept the whole family machinery in clock-work motion. They had been so wholly united in their home-life that this surreptitious nagging, these swift side-glances that made sure John Lawton was out of ear-shot before the jeer or sneer or wounding innuendo was delivered, filled Sybil with amazement as well as hot anger. "Poor little Dorrie!" she thought; "denied every pleasure that a young, healthy, pretty girl longs for! Skimping and saving, turning and cleaning and pressing, rarely going out dressed entirely in her own garments, never complaining, always smilingly winking back threatening tears, smoothing rough places, straightening out the tangles for others, and when the burden becomes too heavy, the cloud of small torments unendurable, instead of bursting into bitter railing or furious tears as I do, Dorrie, with the absolute, unquestioning faith of a child, goes to her room and prays, asking that her burden be made lighter, or, if that may not be, that the blessed Lord will give her strength and patience and please make her understand what it is wisest for her to do in that special emergency! Poor little trusting ninny! As though God could trouble about her infinitesimal affairs! As though He would distinguish her faint appeal when once it had fluttered upward and been caught in that mighty whirlwind of a world's anguished prayer that, with a thousand times Niagara's sound, goes thundering to the Throne! Dear Dorrie! Such a patient little slave as she is to mamma, too! But I'll take a few hours from work and find out what is going on here--yes, even if I have to question Lena!" She shook her head. "An indecorous and undignified proceeding that, but what else can I do? Poor papa never sees an inch beyond his handsome old nose! If it concerned anyone but mamma, Dorothy would tell me everything herself, for we have confided in each other ever since we had to 'make up' the secrets we shared. But she and papa always make a sort of fetish of mamma. It's strange, too," said Sybil to herself, "for mamma was very little to either of us, indeed, in the old days of luxury. As that English housemaid once said of us, 'we were little better nor horphans for all our finery and our sweets!' Mamma was always out, or going out, or just getting ready to go out. Or there were people staying with her, and we had to keep close to the nursery. We should just have been servant-bred but for papa. Shall I ever forget his face the day he asked Dorrie some question, which she answered with a hearty, 'Bedad! I have then!' After he had read us a lecture on the subject of English as it should be used by intelligent and obedient little girls, Dorothy lifted her repentant, small countenance to be kissed, saying, 'Please forgive me, papa!' and he caught her up in his arms and said, 'Oh, baby girl, it is for you to forgive us--forgive us!' And when he was gone we talked and talked, and finally concluded that 'us' meant papa and Delia, because she was all the time saying 'bedad' and 'bad-cess,' and such words. That same night I heard mamma's voice, high and excited, from her dressing-room. She was saying, 'I really do _not_ see why I am to be held responsible for the aimless chatter of children of _that_ age. Of course, when they are older, and it's worth while, I shall impress myself upon them--shall take complete charge of--what? my mother? Never mind my mother! Times are changed, and really it's more than a trifle presumptuous for any Lawton to attempt to teach a Bassett how to--' and the voice became inaudible, because mamma had entered her sleeping-room and closed the door. But next day we took our drive with her, instead of the nurse or maid, and in our big feathered hats--I in pink and Dorrie in blue--we sat one on each side of her and swung our slim, black-silk legs against her skirts and wished papa was there. And that very day she cut Mr. Bulkley dead as he saluted her in passing, and said, under her breath, 'Horrid wretch!' Horrid wretch then! And now? She can't be too cordial to him, actually pressing him to come again. Has she no eyes? Can't she see how he stares poor Dorrie out of countenance, and how--how--" Suddenly the girl started. "Why," she said, "it can't be! Oh, it can't be that she _does_ see and understand and--and--still welcomes him--that she is tormenting my little sister about _him_?" A certain ominous tremble of the ceiling told of the energetic Lena's presence in the room above. Sybil flew up the stairs, went first to her trunk, and a moment later came to Lena, holding in her hand a spray of artificial flowers, and saying: "If you will bring me your hat I'll freshen it up with these velvet roses. I can do it right here while you are finishing mamma's room." With a cry of rapture the little, square-rigged German girl dropped the pillow she was holding between her teeth, while trying to introduce its further end into a fresh cover, and rushed from the room, to return in the twinkling of an eye with one of those forlornly tawdry hats, peculiar to the foreign servant. They always seemed to be trimmed with samples, boasting a pale spring blossom twisted with a dahlia or a few hips and haws of autumnal tinting, a bit of feather, always straight; a bit of lace, always cotton; a scrap of velvet, always dusty--the whole incongruity invariably suggesting the police station, no matter how respectable the wearer of the "mussy" confection may be. For a moment Lena looked frightened as Sybil's long fingers swiftly tore the rubbish apart; but a glance at the deep rich glow of color in the crushed velvet rose with the trail of bronzy-green leaves reassured her, and she smiled the whole breadth of her honest moon-face as she exclaimed: "Mein Gott! my Miss Lady! Dot mash-man will sure make me of der name of Miss Klippert, ven I make der Sunday valk, mit der roses on, youst like I com' by America! Ja! dot is too fine youst for Lena--all short! Dot make of me Miss Klippert--sure! you see now!" And full of excitement and happy anticipations, Lena rose like a hungry trout to Sybil's first cast, which was the remark: "I don't think Miss Dorothy is looking quite well?" In her broken English the maid poured out the story of the trials and persecutions to which Dorothy had been subjected; of how her mother's selfishness in her imaginary illness had taxed the girl's strength; of how Leslie Galt had tried unsuccessfully to take Miss Dorrie for a drive, to bring the color back to her cheeks; of how Mrs. Lawton had changed her mind about the proprieties when Mr. Bulkley had driven up to the house with a similar object; and of a disgraceful scene at a near-by resort in which Mr. Bulkley and several "painted ladies" figured--a scene of which she and her "mash-man" were the witnesses. The pitiful story finished, Sybil, controlling her feelings, went to the troubled Lena, set the newly trimmed hat on her head, gave her a little push toward the glass, and then fled to her own room, where, with blazing eyes and flushed cheeks, she paced the floor, repeating, over and over: "How dare he? How dare he force his attentions upon an innocent young girl? He is as vulgar as he is wicked! His conduct is unpardonable--disgraceful! Oh, what can I do? How can I shield Dorrie, and where is Leslie Galt? I know he loves her, devotedly, but he can't have spoken yet, for she would have shared the secret with me within an hour of my coming! He's not a man to change, nor yet to hesitate without grave cause. Oh, I suppose it's poverty that commands his silence--poverty, fruitful mother of many miseries, of shame and humiliation! And yet--and yet," frowned Sybil, as she called up a mental picture of Leslie Galt, "he never looks like a poor man; and surely I ought to recognize any or all of the symptoms of indigence, know all the dear little earmarks made by straitened circumstances. And now that I think of it, his dress is perfect in its way, quiet, oh, yes, quiet enough, but such perfect cut and fit can scarcely belong to ready-made 'marked-downs.'" And when had she ever seen spot or soil or sagging pocket, loose button, frayed binding, or faded tie? Her mother had called him "a salaried boy," but she recalled Lena's statement that he wished to take her sister to drive. She knew he often rode a horse, hired in Yonkers. He lavished gifts of fruit upon Mrs. Lawton and music and books and flowers on Dorrie. Surely, she thought, a young lawyer must receive a good salary to do all that and dress so well. She wondered if she ought to make him understand Dorothy's position. Even if they were only engaged, that engagement would protect the young fiancée from the detested approaches of another man. Papa? Ah! poor dear papa had no authority where mamma was concerned! What should she do? Then suddenly she began to dress for the street. She decided that she would go to her god-mother with her trouble. She had always been fond of Dorothy, and if Mrs. Lawton feared any adverse opinion it was that of Mrs. Van Camp. As she hurried down-stairs, hoping, by fast walking to the station, to catch the next train cityward, Mrs. Lawton came into the hall, to express shocked disapproval of her daughter's action and her sorrow at not having more fully impressed herself upon that daughter's mind and character, in which case she could have seen for herself the horrible impropriety of going to the city unaccompanied; in fact, to be perfectly explicit and exact, 'er _alone_! And Sybil, as she rapidly buttoned her gloves, replied with the humble deference of tone, which usually cloaked her worst impertinences: "Yes, mamma dear, undoubtedly the girl who can buy tickets for two and pay the salary of a chaperon who watches her, is guilty of a criminal impropriety in travelling alone. You see the point, don't you, dear mamma? Without wealth there is no impropriety. Of course that's unfair, but the fact remains that a poor girl may ride for an hour in a public car in broad daylight, and not only retain her self-respect, but fail to hear a single charge of impropriety. Of course it's hard, but since we have fallen upon poverty, we must not lay claim to the attributes of the wealthy. Good-by, dear mamma! Tell Dorrie and papa I shall probably have to see the costumer to-morrow, if Mr. Thrall can spare the time to accompany me, and decide upon correct designs; but I shall be home in time for tea--D. V.--I mean of course." As she flew down the steep driveway leading to the street, Mrs. Lawton, looking after her, said, aloud: "Dear me! With Sybil assuming this freedom of action and Dorothy developing a streak of real obstinacy, I have to ask myself why I ever assumed the responsibility of bringing daughters into the worlds. Sons would doubtless have been far more satisfactory, particularly under the present unfortunate circumstances." And she returned to her rocker, her smelling-bottle, and her French novel, shaking her head and sighing portentously. CHAPTER XVI A STRANGE BETROTHAL Nothing of Dorothy's doing in all her young life had so exasperated Mrs. Lawton as her refusal to drive out with William Henry Bulkley. How, she asked herself, could a child of hers be so stupidly content in poverty and obscurity, when, by a little self-sacrifice, she could acquire wealth; then with beauty and wealth combined with the Bassett-Lawton finesse she could attain position and exist socially. With the slightest sense of her own value and an adroit touch of coquetry now and then, she could simply twist Mr. Bulkley about her little finger. "Of course he is a bit old for her, indeed," admitted Mrs. Lawton to herself. "He is a trifle older than her father, but--but--love for me, a tender desire for my welfare, should outweigh that objection; and I have tried hard to make her understand that my worldly salvation depends wholly upon her conduct. And yet the stupid creature receives the rich man who has cast her his handkerchief with frightened silence or with prim monosyllables! I--I could shake her! In my days of affluence and power, I always raised my voice against corporal punishment for children; but live and learn, live and learn! I know now I was in error, for the other day when she hid herself to avoid going to drive with William Henry Bulkley nothing would have given me more unalloyed pleasure than to have soundly trounced Miss Dorothy Lawton, my own youngest born daughter! If he only had an opportunity, no doubt Mr. Bulkley would flatter her vanity, arouse her ambition; but if he has no chance even to make splendid promises to her--well, he _shall_ have a chance! She _shall_ go out for a drive with him! Simpleton! She might herself have been driving a pair of dear little ponies this month past but for John Lawton's stiff-necked refusal to permit her to accept them. He's always ready to join hands with the girls in any sentimental folly. But I have a plan in my mind. The bird that can sing, but won't sing, my dear, must be made to sing! So next time Mr. Bulkley drives out here you will accept the seat beside him for at least a short drive, or I am not Letitia Lawton and your mother, Miss!" While she was brooding over her plans in the sitting-room, Dorothy and Lena were busy in the kitchen, which was filled with the pleasant odor of baking bread. A large bottle of Lena's providing had been carefully covered with white flannel, and around and around it Dorothy was smoothly winding and basting down a bit of good old lace that was soiled beyond all using, and, as there was no money to spare for its renovation, she was taking this slow and tiresome way of cleaning it herself. Lena, always delighted to do something for her favorite Miss Lady, was shaving some white soap up, ready for melting in a kettle of boiling water, and was earnestly assuring Miss Dorothy that she would "get uf der hands scalded, uf she attempted to do dose jobs! Youst tell me, my Miss," she begged, "und I vill boil de bottle, or younce him up und down, or twist him round or vat you vant every hows, only don' you get of der hands scalted." And just then, around at the front of the house, William Henry Bulkley drove to the door. Mrs. Lawton heard the approaching horse dashing through the sea of fallen leaves, and, springing from her chair, she hurried to the hall, opened the door a crack, and, with finger on lip, whispering: "Don't ring! wait a moment!" she closed it again upon the wondering visitor, who, nevertheless, obeyed, and stood there waiting. Mrs. Lawton, with astonishing speed, ascended the stairs, entered her room, and taking a bottle from her dressing-table containing a mixture known to the whole family as "Mamma's drops," she swiftly poured the contents from the window, corked the bottle, and returned it empty to its place. She then seized a handkerchief, shook a few drops of camphor upon it, and, tying it about her head as she moved, hurried lightly on tiptoe down-stairs, and, opening the door again, whispering to Mr. Bulkley "Ring now!" she slipped into the sitting-room, and became instantly a stricken sufferer from violent sick headache. As the bell jangled loudly in the kitchen it startled both occupants. Lena made an exclamation, and Dorothy, starting out with: "Why, surely, it's too early for----," stopped and flushed consciously, for she had that morning received a wee bit of a note from Leslie Galt, saying that he would be returning from the office earlier than usual that day and asking her permission to call, that he might speak to her on a very important subject--"a subject the enclosed might faintly hint at." And the enclosed being a violet, had "hinted" so sweetly that a sort of blissful misery of anticipation had been thrilling her nerves and flushing and paling her cheeks all the day. Now, as Lena left the kitchen, she glanced into the bit of broken looking-glass the little German maid had tacked on the wall for guidance in her own Sunday prinking, and, with tremulous fingers, was training the fluffy curls on her brow in the way they should go, when Lena returned with the heavy dragoon's men stride that anger always engendered in her, announcing, sullenly: "It's dot Herr Bergamots man, miss"--a name she had given Mr. Bulkley on account of the perfumes he used so lavishly--"und smellin' like a whole drug-store turned outside der door!" "Oh!" gasped poor Dorothy in dismay, for she instantly realized that if his ponderous loitering was as long as usual poor Leslie Galt would find no opportunity to discuss that important subject with her that day. With a fallen countenance she was turning toward the door, when Lena added: "Und miss, der Mistress Mudder, she say you shall first com' quick right away by her, in der sittin'-rooms, where she make almost to die by der sick stomach head!" "What!" exclaimed Dorothy, "mamma sick--why, since when?" Then anxiously: "Had she not her lunch and tea as usual, Lena?" "Ja! she had, und she eat like a soldier!" scornfully asserted that handmaiden. "Und den sit mit der feet on der cushions und der plate full of der Herr Galt's grapes on der knee, und eat und tell me, vile I clear der tray avay, how hard is der life by her now! Und how hard for her to have der children mit ungrateful teeth not so sharp as der serpents! Und now she com' all tied up by der head und all crazy like by der pains, und vant you quick pefore even you go to der parlor to see der Herr Bulkley!" "Oh!" cried Dorothy, "get a glass and spoon quick, for mamma will want her 'drops' the very first thing!" As she hurried to the sitting-room she wondered why on earth her mother had not called or rang the bell, as was her custom when she was not feeling well. Entering the room she asked: "What can I do for you, mamma, and what has made you ill so suddenly?" "Anxiety for the future of my family and the unhappiness of being a disobeyed, unloved mother has made me ill!" answered the sufferer. "I am of a very sensitive and delicate temperament; I have borne the neglect of the world in patience; I have suffered for the ordinary comforts of life without a murmur." "Oh, mamma!" deprecatingly interjected Dorothy. "Hold your tongue, miss!" snapped Mrs. Lawton. "You know, as well as I do, I have not had a silk stocking to my leg for years, and I have borne it all, and lived on, some way! But when my own flesh and blood flout me, and coldly deny me a little comfort for my last days, my courage breaks, and sickness supervenes--'er--'er, perhaps I mean intervenes. I--'er--'er, well, anyway--oh, dear heaven! help me, someone! My drops! my drops!" She rolled her head frantically about and called louder and louder for "drops." Dorothy ran out, but, Mr. Bulkley stopping her in the hall, she took glass and spoon from Lena, and told her to run upstairs for mamma's drops-bottle (Mrs. Lawton smiled as she heard), and then explained that a sudden headache had attacked her mother, but her drops would relieve her and produce sleep. "Hum! Opium, I should think!" remarked Mr. Bulkley. "Oh, I hope not!" said Dorothy, and held out her hand for the bottle Lena had brought, and lo! it was empty. "Did you spill it?" she asked, in a frightened voice. "Nein! I huf not spilled nottings, my Miss Lady!" said Lena, shortly. "And my bread com' burn uf I don't go back by der kitchen!" "O--o--h! o--o--h!" groaned Mrs. Lawton. "Where are my drops? What's that? _All_ gone? Not even _one_ dose? Well, I shall die without it! I simply can't bear this pain!" She shot a meaning glance at Mr. Bulkley, who caught the cue, and exclaimed: "My poor dear friend! If this remedy can be had at Yonkers, and Miss Dorothy will direct me, I will go at once and procure these precious drops!" A distressed, a harried look came into the girl's face. "Mamma," she said, "Sybil will go and I'll stay by you." "Sybil's in New York by this time!" answered Mrs. Lawton. "I have been too ill to be able to tell you before! So, hurry your hat on and start at once!" "Dear mamma, Lena can get the drops--she knows where the store is--and then we need not trouble Mr. Bulkley." "No trouble!--no trouble at all!" pompously declared that gentleman. "Lena has an oven full of bread to watch!" snapped the suffering one, whose head seemed surprisingly clear, by spells, at least. "Then," despairingly cried Dorothy, "I will run for it myself! I can go very quickly, mamma, and perhaps Mr. Bulkley will be so good as to keep you company till I return!" "Dorothy," cried Mrs. Lawton, "are you so utterly heartless that you can deliberately lengthen out this period of suffering, simply to gratify some whim of your own? O--o--o--h!" she groaned, dismally. While Mr. Bulkley remonstrated: "Really, now, my dear little girl, while we have no right to--er--er, to expect logic from a lovely creature like yourself--you'll pardon me, Miss Dorrie, but you really don't show your usual good sense in this instance! It is quite absurd, your idea of walking when you can reach the village and return in less than a third of the time by driving, and--and you know the poor lady's comfort should be our first thought, so toss on your hat and let us start at once!" With a lump big and hard in her throat the girl turned and left the room, and half way up the stairs she was almost sure that she heard a low laugh from the room she had left. "Oh," she thought, "if only papa was back from his long walk, or if my Syb were here! How I wish Leslie had arrived before this dreadful old man, who quite wears himself out pretending to be a young man! Oh, dear! oh, dear! if Leslie should happen to see me out with Mr. Bulkley--on the very day he was to call! Oh, mamma, mamma! you are not playing fair!" and she dried two big tears from her eyes before pulling down her veil, and then, all ungloved, she ran down, and scrambling unassisted--to Mr. Bulkley's annoyance--into the trap, sat there clutching the empty bottle, whose various labels told plainly of visits to more than one chemist's shop, and so overheard, though imperfectly, the groom making some suggestion about the horse, "the chin-strap (mumble, mumble), curb, pretty severe (mumble, mumble), tender mouth." Mr. Bulkley's domineering tones answered: "Let it alone, I tell you! I know what I'm about! I don't want my arms pulled out! Stay here till I come back!" And, without the comforting presence of even a groom, they started toward Yonkers. The mounted police of those days found little to do on Broadway, and even less on the quiet length and breadth of Riverdale Avenue, and many of them, from very weariness and ennui, made pets of their horses, sometimes teaching them simple tricks. Most of the men walked a good deal, and, with bridles hanging loosely over their arms, allowed the horses to browse the grass at the roadside. But one man had fallen into the habit of leaving his horse entirely free, to follow him like a dog. This animal was the big black, whose swollen leg Mr. Lawton had been interested in, in the spring. His name was Napoleon. He had been on the force for years, and was famous for his speed in short dashes. He had become well acquainted with the Lawtons, and would beg from the girls in the most barefaced manner whenever he met them; while he had established apron-nibbling relations with Lena, who talked much to the policeman of her "mash-man," who was his friend, while Napoleon meditatively sampled the gingham she wore. Sometimes, while the officer gossiped, the horse would be a third of a block and more away, climbing an embankment, or reaching into some hollow after an enticing bit of dandelion or clover clump; and though he answered to a whistle, as a dog would, Sybil had several times remarked that some day an interesting moment would arrive for that policeman, that some sudden call would come for his services, and before the sundered man and horse could be united time would be lost and trouble would accrue--for the man, at least. But October had arrived, and her prophecy was as yet unfulfilled. As Mr. Bulkley drove out of the old White house gateway the most unobservant person must have noticed that the big chestnut gelding was either in great discomfort or in a very bad temper. Dorothy was surprised, too, to see Mr. Bulkley trying to pull the animal, who wanted to go, down to a walk, and, finally, in a burst of temper, sawing the poor brute's mouth so cruelly that Dorothy, with a cry of pity, caught at Mr. Bulkley's wrist with her ungloved hand, saying: "Please, oh, please, don't do that, it hurts him so! See, there's a streak of blood on the foam of his mouth!" And, at that unconscious touch, William Henry Bulkley, with the red of his cheek spreading over brow and neck, turned avid eyes upon her, saying thickly that "that little hand of hers had power to guide him where it would," adding, with brutal coarseness, that he "would crush the horse's jaw, like a nutshell, to spare her annoyance!" a speech that was a trifle wide of the mark, since he, and not the horse, had hurt and frightened her. "Mr. Bulkley," said Dorothy, "won't you please let him go on a little faster? Mamma will find the time very long!" And her companion laughed aloud, as, with ill-considered frankness, he made answer: "Oh, I guess mamma's all right!" Then he traitorously added: "She's being treated vicariously. The drive _you_ take will cure _her_ headache!" laughing immoderately. "I do not understand you," said Dorothy, coldly. "Oh, my little girl!" he gurgled; "my little girl, whims in the young and beautiful are not only pardonable, they are adorable. They should be obeyed without hesitation, but the whims of the elderly are ridiculous. My friend Mrs. Lawton has whims, and that headache of hers will be helped quite as readily by a little quiet as by these wonderful drops. This is a lovely day for the view from Park Hill, and we'll just drive up there and enjoy it!" "Mr. Bulkley," broke in the distressed and angry girl, "I must insist upon getting mamma's medicine and returning at once!" And just then, through a side street leading to Broadway, came Leslie Galt, tall, well set up, well-dressed, some law books under his arm, and in his face all the pride and bright hopefulness that belong by natural right to the face of the man who goes to seek his love and ask her promise. He recognized the big chestnut as it passed his corner, and also he knew but too well who was the wearer of the white-winged, blue-veiled hat, and his heart sank like lead in his breast in bitter disappointment. He stood a moment at the corner, then, instead of turning down Broadway toward Woodsedge, he followed up the street in the direction taken by the slowly moving carriage. Dorothy had not seen him, but, instead, caught a glimpse of old black Napoleon, half-way up a bank, after a bunch of late clover blooms peeping out invitingly from the fallen leaves, while his uniformed master, a third of a block away, conversed gallantly with a sturdy young blowzy-belle of his own nationality. And even as Sybil's prophecy came into her mind, she noted a small store on her left with red and blue bottle-filled windows and stands of soda-water and cod-liver oil signs outside, and she eagerly cried: "Stop, please! Here's a drug-store!" "But," grumbled Mr. Bulkley, "I thought we were going up into the town? This is not the place you intended going to?" "Oh, any drug-store will answer," insisted the girl; "the drops are not difficult to prepare." And with an angry jerk her vexed companion pulled the fretting horse in close to the sidewalk and stopped. But as Dorothy, bottle in hand, rose, the animal started, throwing her back into her seat, and Mr. Bulkley's loud "whoa!" and violent jerk on the tormented mouth did not add much to his steadiness in standing. For again, yes, and a third time, was Dorothy's effort to descend frustrated by the irritable, nervous starting of the chestnut. And then Mr. Bulkley's always feeble hold upon his temper gave way entirely, and, snatching the bottle from the girl's hand, he violently exclaimed: "Good God! Let _me_ get out! Here!" and he flung the reins into her lap and sprang out of the trap. Answering her startled cry with "I won't be more than a moment" he started across the walk to the store. And sometimes more than one would be superfluous, for some moments are crowded with incident; this was one of them. In the same instant that followed the sudden lessening of the strain upon the horse's mouth there had come Dorrie's startled cry and the sharp bang of the store door, violently slammed by Mr. Bulkley, each causing a leap of the chestnut's every nerve, and followed by the swift response of a raked up pile of leaves to some impish current of air that sent them in swirling circle out into the street, where, whirling down the hill like a veritable dancing Dervish of the Dust, they passed fair between the horse's legs! A bound, a long, wild scream from Dorothy, and the chestnut was off, with the trap slewing this way and that from side to side! That cry had reached Galt's ears, and it almost stopped the beating of his heart for a hideous moment. Then, hurling the books he carried to the ground, he started on a run, when suddenly he heard the shrill, long whistle of the policeman recalling his horse, and glancing behind him he saw the officer racing toward him. Right in front came the big, black Napoleon, obediently answering his master's call. With a single bound Galt was at the horse's side, had grabbed the bridle with one hand, the pommel with the other, and hurling himself into the saddle, pelted by a very hail of furious oaths and threats to shoot, he gave the good old black the heel and a chance once more to prove his vaunted speed, for the runaway was now a race between the chestnut and the black! And all the time, this frantic lover on his illegal mount, though praying dumbly for the safety of his love, was, all unconsciously, swearing like a madman. The policeman followed until his breath was gone, and, pausing an instant to regain it, he saw a boy come from a side street, who was exercising a livery horse. Before the half of Jack Robinson could have been said the policeman had the boy by the leg, down, and himself striding the horse, and pelted madly off in wild pursuit--and the race became a hunt. At sight of the girl in the swaying, swinging vehicle, people racing along the sidewalks cried out in pity. Drivers turned out to give free passage to the furious horse. And Dorothy, who, white-faced, staring straight ahead, had gasped once or twice, "Sybbie! oh, Sybbie!" feeling faintness stealing over her, could only hope it might come before the inevitable crash. And then she was dimly conscious of regularly beating hoofs behind her. Something dark showed close at her side, fell back, reappeared, seemed stationary for a moment, then rushed ahead, and she recognized Napoleon, and wondered vaguely why his rider wore no uniform. The old horse knew his business well. He had avoided the wheels, but now crowded in close upon the runaway. Galt reached for and caught the bridle; the chestnut swerved to the sidewalk; then a tree, a high curb, cramped wheels, sudden splintering of a shaft, and the high cart was over, and Dorothy, hurled half-way across the street, fell on one doubled-up arm and lay silent and motionless. The crowd that so miraculously appears upon the scene of even a suburban accident, was closing about her, when, leaving the horses to the care or the neglect of others, Leslie Galt dropped on one knee, and lifting the pallid face, whose left side, dust-smeared, bruised, and sand-cut, was so piteous a sight to him, in breathless, unthinking haste, cried: "Dorothy! my darling! For God's sake, speak to me!" And even as the words left his lips he remembered his situation, but it was too late. He caught the exchanged glances, the half-wink, half-leer on the face of a hulking fellow, and, like a flash, boldly lied to protect the helpless girl, saying: "Run for a doctor, someone, please! This is my affianced wife, Miss Lawton, and I dare not think of leaving her!" The effect of that statement was instantaneous. Murmurs of sympathy were heard, women pressed closer. One drew the tossed skirt smooth about the girl's ankles; another produced a smelling bottle from her chatelaine; a third gently strove to straighten that crumpled looking arm; while the leering fellow went plunging diagonally across the street to call out a doctor residing near. Galt had barely time to feel a pang of terror over his headlong assertion, an awful fear that Dorothy might repudiate his claim, when the furious policeman came pounding up, threatening unspeakable and dire punishment for this disturber of the peace, this breaker of the law, and--and horse-thief, and demanding that he submit at once to arrest. "All right," answered Galt. "As an officer you have every right to hale me to prison; and yet, as a man, I'm sure you will make some allowance for a fellow who sees his future wife in danger! For," desperately thought Leslie, "I may as well hang for a sheep as a lamb, and stick now to my claim." Then, with a glint in his eye, he added, innocently: "I know you are anxious not only to lock me up, officer, but to get the opportunity to explain to your superiors how you and your horse came to be so widely separated while you were on duty?" The policeman's jaw dropped a bit. He looked distinctly troubled. A lady came out just then and asked that the injured girl be brought into her house, and, as the policeman stooped to help Leslie lift her, he exclaimed: "God be good to us! Wh-y it's Miss Dorothy Lawton! Won't there be ructions when the old man at home hears of this! Them girls are just his two eyes! What's that? Will I be leavin' you free of arrist till the doctor comes? What kind of a bounder do you take me for, anyway? I'll leave you free till you'll be gettin' the little colleen safe home, sure, and thin maybe you'll show up and stand for a fine and the like? Divil take that gang out there!" and out he charged upon the crowd. Finding himself for a few precious moments alone with Dorothy, who was lying on a settle in a hall, Galt began a hurried search of his breast-pocket. He brought out a small box, and, opening it, was shaking out into his palm a glittering ring, when a faint moan reached his ear, and, bending over, he saw the blue eyes he loved slowly open, saw the dazed look passing, and as glad recognition dawned in them he swiftly took her hand, and slipping the ring upon her finger, he whispered, rapidly, urgently: "Little Dorothy, listen! Try to understand! And oh, try, too, to forgive me! But you are hurt, dear, and that I may have the right to protect and care for you, I--I--oh, Dorrie, see, dear!" He lifted her hand that she might see the ring. "I have dared to claim you, sweet--have declared you my promised wife! For God's sake, don't deny me! Promise!" But Dorothy promised nothing. The faint blush that had crept into her cheek died there. The wide-amazed eyes slowly closed, and in utter silence she slipped back into the unconsciousness in which the doctor presently found her. CHAPTER XVII THE COSTUMING OF JULIET While Dorothy was taking prominent and uncomfortable part in that impromptu "Wild West" show on Broadway, in picturesque and hilly Yonkers, Sybil, in New York, sat in Mrs. Van Camp's old-timey drawing-room and fairly astounded her hostess by confiding to her Mrs. Lawton's evident desire to marry Dorrie to William Henry Bulkley. "Has Letitia gone stark, staring mad?" she exclaimed. "Why, the man is the merest nobody, who could no more name his grandfather than he could fly! Money he has--yes, of course! But money without family can't balance the public flaunting of all his coarse amours, his bad manners, and worse temper! She must perfectly remember, too, the life he led his poor wife--who was, by the way, a member of the Massachusetts Stone family. Why, her great-uncle was a judge, and her second cousin was lieutenant-governor of the State. How she ever came to accept young Bulkley is a mystery. But she paid for her folly, poor thing. However, I shall take it upon myself to inform Letitia Lawton of some of the atrocities of his recent years, and tell her that as his wife Dorothy would be as dead socially as if she were over in Greenwood." "Oh, don't!" shivered Sybil, "dear god-mamma! I hope I may go to Greenwood before my little sister Dorrie does!" And Mrs. Van Camp pushed the girl's dark hair back with a caressing touch and said: "How devoted you two girls are to each other! You might be twins. Even as children I never knew you to squabble or sulk. You, Sybbie, had a furious temper, but your rages were almost always in defence of Dorothy. Do you remember how you kicked the shins of the gardener once because he had kicked her dog?" "Yes!" laughed Sybil, "and scratched and bit a boy-tramp who attempted to snatch her little locket from her neck. But I can't help loving her, for she's the bravest, sweetest, jolliest, prettiest sister a girl ever had, and she's all the world to me!" And Mrs. Van Camp, laughing a little at her enthusiasm, held up a finger and said, "Wait!" And a bit later Sybil was on her way to the theatre, where Mr. Thrall joined her, and together they walked to a house on Fourth Avenue, where Sybil was presented to an ancient couple, who in the profession were recognized as authorities on the subject of correct historic costuming. Never had the girl received a greater surprise. She had expected a stately and dignified presence, and certainly the sumptuous entourage of a very fashionable dressmaker. But here there was no reception-room, no parlor, no fitting-room, no boy in buttons. Here the thing that first commanded attention and longest held it was the almost overpowering odor of garlic. It led them through the little drab hallway, up the stairs, and to the door of the stuffy and crowded living room, where an old woman in a false front and a black alpaca dress and a snuffy old man in carpet slippers received them. And, as they heartily greeted the manager, Sybil wondered what on earth there could be in common between the rich and splendid dresses she had seen at the theatre and these frumpish old people, while she shuddered at the thought of their stumpy, uncared-for hands, pulling about beautiful satins and velvets. "But of course," she thought, "they have people under them who do the real work." Afterward she knew that it was the cunning of these same fingers that produced all the wonderful embroideries in bullion and spangles that are so difficult to obtain in this country. Now, however, she saw that Mr. Thrall treated the couple most deferentially. Indeed, he was secretly anxious to see what impression his "Princess," as he mentally called Sybil, would make upon the old pair, who had dressed every famous Juliet of the past twenty years, and who were in their own way veritable artists. He had come there with one or two fixed ideas on the subject in hand, and he hoped there might not be a struggle with the old pair, whose obstinacy he well knew. But he had a vision of Sybil with cloudy, dark hair, all netted over with pearls, after the Venetian fashion, with pearl-encircled neck and arms, and pearl-engirdled waist; and he was determined that she should not wear glittering ornaments of any kind--which he rather fancied they would favor--or much gold and general splendor, after the style in which they had clothed the Juliet of his previous season. For he forgot how well these old people knew their business, or perhaps he did not know the passionate love of beauty that produced in them an almost poetic power of expression, through color, fabrics, draperies. They were like artists, who got their "darks" from heavy velvets, "middle tints" from cloths and satins, and their "highest lights" from laces and jewels. Sybil, hatted and veiled and jacketted, had remained in the background, a position that gave her a glimpse of another room, shelved about from floor to ceiling, with every shelf quite crowded with green boxes. She had been so interested in her surroundings that she had not heeded the conversation going on until the strong disapproval on both old faces drew her attention to the words "society" and "débutante"; and when, to a question, Mr. Thrall answered, "Juliet," they gazed at him with incredulous wonder for a moment. Then, exchanging glances of contemptuous derision that made poor Sybil's cheeks burn, with innumerable shrugs and much sniffing they scuffled back and forth, bringing out and throwing open boxes, until the room was presently a confusion of such splendid materials as velvets, satins, crêpes, of silver tissues and cloth of gold; while camphor gum and cedar wood sent odors from the boxes holding rare furs, cut into strips of trimming width, correct for king or prince, for judge or queen. For in this cramped and shabby place one could be provided with everything, from the rough woolens and leathers of Macbeth, the black and purple satins, the jet and sable of Hamlet, the crimson velvets and ermine of queens, the embroideries and laced fripperies of white-wigged courtiers, down to the floating gauze of a Titania and the silvered wings of a cupid. In the splendor of the display Sybil forgot her recent mortification, and thrilled with delight at the thought that some portion of it was to be placed at her service--for her adornment! As the old man came lumbering in with two great volumes, bearing the title "Modes et Costumes Historique--�tranger," and, slamming them down on the table, began ostentatiously turning over the colored plates, Thrall, laughing good-naturedly, closed the book, saying: "Now, now, Lefebvre! You and Nonna Angelique here need no plates to dress Shakspere's people by, and you won't be so cross when you _see_ your new Juliet! Come now, Madame, no one knows better than you do how important is the setting of a jewel! Oh, I know what that shrug means and that 'la, la, la!' But as a just woman you must at least see my young Capulet before you condemn her. Miss Lawton," he continued, "please remove your jacket. Thanks! And now take off your veil and hat, please!" The autumn wind had somewhat roughened Sybil's hair, and she raised her hands to smooth it, but he stopped her: "Not for the world!" he said, laughingly. Then he took her by the hand and led her to the centre of the room, saying: "Monsieur et Madame, you will kindly costume this young girl for me, but only _if_ you can see in her a Juliet. If not, why--" he stopped. Flushed, excited, embarrassed under deliberate inspection, Sybil stood with downcast eyes and red, half-sullen lip, already quivering to a smile. The old pair stood at gaze. Then mutely the woman's hand went out and was caught in his. The girl saw, and with her sudden flashing smile, she raised imploring, dark eyes and looked at them. "Par Dieu!" cried old Lefebvre, "'tis Juliet's self!" "And oh, mon Dieu! mon Dieu!" the old woman exclaimed, "if you can act as you can look the part! Oh, Mr. Thrall, I crave your pardon! Will I costume her?--_will I?_ We shall make of her that last blossom of the House of Capulet--the very Juliet herself!" She turned and half whispered to the old man, "Slight and dark!" He took snuff furiously, and added: "Rich colored, quick tempered, hot!" And then, together: "Let's see! let's see!" and they turned excitedly toward their boxes. "No velvet, I think?" suggested Thrall, who was highly elated that his judgment, so far, had been so heartily seconded by this experienced old couple. "Velvet? Bah!" responded Nonna Angelique, with a condemnatory wave of the hand that swept velvet entirely out of consideration. "Too old! too heavy! but--but--" She tossed things right and left in hurried, nervous search.--"Where's that blond lace scarf?" she fretted, "where?--where? And why don't you open the cabinet, and not stand there wasting time, mon mari?" As they stood waiting, Stewart Thrall said, laughingly: "Patience, patience! We are in the hands of the powers that be. These are the people who 'paint the lily' and--er--er--touch up refined gold! And, Miss Lawton, haven't you been about a theatre long enough to learn how indiscreet it is to laugh at your manager's imperfect quotations? You should reserve your merriment for those occasions when he tells a supposedly funny story. Ah! ah! the lost is found!" For Nonna Angelique came trotting up with a long scarf of silky old blond lace trailing from her hands, and Sybil, turning toward her, gave a cry of rapture. Drawer, too, after drawer had been drawn out from the chiffonier, and from their velvet-lined depths there came a blaze and glow and gleam and such dancing prismatic colors of violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, from jewels in such good and careful setting that, imitation though they were, they commanded admiration even in broad daylight. Among these crowns and crosses, stomachers and necklaces, there were minutely exact copies of some famous originals treasured in the museums of Europe. Nor were these ornaments cheap; the price of many of them was told in hundreds of dollars, not tens. And Sybil, while missing their real value, which lay in their historical accuracy, might well be forgiven for her childish delight in their meretricious splendor. "Oh, how I wish Dorrie could see, too!" she exclaimed, and the snuffy old man nudged his rumpled old wife with his elbow, and, looking at Sybil's flushed and happy young face, they wagged their heads knowingly. And Stewart Thrall said to himself: "To watch her countenance is like watching the surface of a land-locked lake--one moment glass-smooth beneath the sun, then reflecting a slow white cloud, then breaking into ripples, fretting into waves and blackening to sudden storm! Ah, surely you are the headlong Capulet in love with love!" and his meditation broke off short. Lefebvre was advancing, diamond coronet in hand, and he anxiously waited results. Nonna Angelique, with stumpy brown fingers, had still further loosened Sybil's black hair and fluffed it out, crooning to herself the while, and had turned her head this way and that, bent it down, lifted it, then put her hand out for the coronet her husband brought, placed it, drew back a step, then tore it off to a chorus of, "o! no!" "Too old!" said Lefebvre. "C'est cela! too old!" nodded Nonna Angelique. "Too old!" acquiesced Thrall. Then was handed over a golden net, studded with jewels; and oh, Sybil did hope they would let her wear that! Old Angelique put it on with deft hands. "Mais comme elle est belle!" she exclaimed; "but----" Thrall shook his head and repeated: "Beautiful, but----" And the old man explained the "buts" fully with the remark: "Too Zingary, n'est ce pas?" "Yes! yes!" cried Nonna, throwing her arms over her head and snapping her fingers to imitate castanets. "Oui! oui! too Zingary--too gypsy-like!" and off came the golden net. A head-piece of colored stones barely touched her brow when, with a contemptuous "Bah! too Egyptian" it was returned to the drawer. The costumers stood looking at each other, silently. Thrall waited; he wanted them to propose pearls themselves, and thus avoid a wrangle, for they did not accept suggestions willingly. Then, suddenly, Nonna Angelique said: "Let me hear the voice, Mr. Thrall. Give her a cue; let me know whether her voice matches the mobilité of her face. That may give me my idée!" Sybil gave a frightened, deprecating, "Oh, Mr. Thrall!" But he answered with: "Steady! steady!" then added: "Give her 'Wherefore art thou Romeo?'" She looked at him with dilating eyes, then clasped her hands, and gazing into space, obediently began: "Oh, Romeo! Romeo! wherefore art thou, Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name-- Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn--my--love! And [with a rush] I'll no longer be a Capulet!" Nonna Angelique caught the girl's face between her hands and kissed her soundingly. It had been an unexpected test, and Thrall, pleased at her courage and obedience, was simply delighted with the effect she got from that pause, as if at her own temerity in using the words: "... be but sworn--_my_ love!" and then the reckless dash of the declaration: "... I'll no longer be a Capulet!" And Sybil, glancing up, noted for the very first time the extreme beauty of the man's eyes, and if the open admiration beaming from their sapphire depths gave her a thrill of gratification, it was the approval of the manager that moved her, not the man, she told herself; and since there is no one in this world so easy to deceive as one's self, she undoubtedly believed her own statement. "Ah! ah! monsieur, you have a find in this young girl!" said old Lefebvre to Thrall. "She should be a big card--and in your hands, eh?" he poked the managerial ribs and winked his round black eye knowingly. "The wires will be pulled, eh? And the public, it will dance! And the dollars they will rattle, eh? A-a-ah! Qu'est-ce, cherie? Les perles? mais oui--certainement! In a moment I shall bring them! My key? Ah, the devil flies away with everything this day! Where is my key? Ah, here in my vest-pocket all the time!" And at last Thrall's patience was rewarded as pearls came to the front, and "Oh!" exclaimed Sybil, in amazed delight. For her idea of imitation pearls had been founded upon the cheap bluish-white glass beads with just a skim of wax for lining. Now she stood astonished by the weight and lustre of these lovely things from Paris, where by some clever artifice the scales of fish are used to produce upon the forms of almost solid wax the wonderful "nacre" of the true gem of the sea. So artistic was the work that small imperfections in shape and flaws in tinting had been carefully reproduced, the monotony of a mechanical perfection being thus avoided. Really they were very beautiful, and among those selected strands intended for the throat it was as if color, having life and breath, a rosy pink, had gently breathed across their milky lustre, faintly flushing the swelling round of each great pearl. Nor were they too frail for service; weight and solidity made them almost as durable as the true jewel's self. And here was bunch after bunch of seed pearls, so small, for embroidery on lace or satin; long strands for plaiting in the hair, for the suspension from the waist of feather fan or tiny mirrors à la Marie Stuart, when dauphine of France; great girdles for the waist, whose pendant tassels fell almost to the wearer's feet. And at last--at last, the heavy net which he so much wished to see upon that waywardly waving dark cloud of hair! Old Angelique, having raised a sternly instructing index finger to close proximity with Sybil's glowing face, proceeded to strike off with it upon the air these verbal commands: "You will do exact now as I tell you, if you wish to look the little Juliet--so high-bred, so headstrong, yet so young! Mais, _so_ young--mon Dieu! mon Dieu! comme--like a bébé! Now make the mark of my words, Miss--Miss--er? Lawsons! oui! oui! merci! For I have in the mind that Juliet--me--I know! So you must make no height on the top of the head, no cross braid, no pile up curl, no coronet! No--no! that make very handsome, mais--but not _the Juliet_! Tumble the hair to the shoulders, half curl! No curl, all regular! Wat is call 'em, 'em ring-a-let? No! no! half-curl, half-wave--oui! all natural! And for the front, the hair all fluff--so! [puffing out her breath]--low to the brows, that the big eyes look from under it, like from a cloud. Then turn all back from the cheeks, after the manner of the angels in the old masters' pictures! Obey me, and you shall see! The city shall see! Why, even now!" She flung the net upon Sybil's head, drawing a pear-shaped pendant pearl forward to rest upon her brow, rapidly twisted the white lace scarf about her shoulders to hide the street gown, threw a rope of pearls about her neck, and with triumphant eyes turned to Thrall, saying: "Is not the Italian angel's the coiffure correct for this, Miss Lawsons?" Thrall answered, briefly, "Quite correct!" And Sybil, with an ecstatic sigh, said again: "How I do wish Dorothy were here!" And Thrall commented: "Your lovers have cause for jealousy of that young sister, I fancy, Miss Lawton?" But, with careless frankness, Sybil answered: "I never had a lover in my life! So Dorrie can have caused no jealousy, you see!" and turned her whole attention back to Nonna Angelique, who was checking off costumes on her fingers. And she would have been an astonished girl had she been told that her brusquely spoken words had made this man's heart leap in his breast, as no seductive wile of most tactful coquetry could have done; and the fact that he had no right to heed the words of any maid, however sweet or fair, did nothing to check that hurried thumping at his ribs. For, like many other men, he had something of the explorer's spirit about him--something that responded eagerly to the charm of the strange, the vague, the new,--something that makes the would-be explorer of the terra incognita ignore all thought of danger, and dream only of the beauty of virgin forests, strange flowers, and fabled fountains of youth and love eternal! No one could have guessed that the calm-faced, stately gentleman, looking on at the selection of Juliet's finery, was mentally repeating those candid, girlish words: "I never had a lover in my life!" "Ah, no!" he thought; "no more had Juliet ever had a lover in her life, up to an hour before that 'trifling, foolish banquet,' given by old Capulet. Yet, ere its end, swift love had grown so great that she had declared already for the grave, if 'twere a passion unrequited!" Then old Angelique broke in upon his thought, and claimed attention with: "The cloak, now, Mr. Thrall--the cloak for the visit to old Laurence's cell? Shall it be black or brown or gray?" "Gray!" he answered, readily. "Dark gray, I think, gives a hint of mystery. Though, 'tis true, Juliet seeks the Friar with her parents' knowledge, still it is with secret purpose. So gray and very large and full and hooded, Nonna Angelique, so that a young maid might slip like a shadow by high walls and through Verona's streets to the cloisters of the convent without revealing a trace of beauty or of rich attire." "C'est bon! c'est bon!" nodded Lefebvre, taking a prodigious pinch of snuff, and entering in a greasy little note-book "One large, gray, circle cloak, hooded"--"c'est bon!" On Angelique's four fingers her grimy thumb checked off "Cloak for Friar's cell--gray. Chamber scene--white, of course, but flowing, loose, long, light as air. For tomb--white also, but heavy, rich, eh? The satin gown for County Paris bride, and only one spot of color, eh? The jewelled sheath of the dagger, at the waist. Oh, yes! oh, yes! all that is clear, but--but, my Mr. Manager, how shall it be for the ball--for that first time to meet the Romeo--eh?" She pursed her lips, she scratched her forehead thoughtfully, and so pushed her false front over to a most rakish angle. But the old man shuffled across the room, and with a: "Permettez that I correct the coiffure, my Angelique! It have slide, and it make a little of what you call the--the 'jaky' look! That way--so!" And with the palms of both hands he calmly replaced the foxy-red front, and the search for a color suitable for the first act went on. Thrall, drawing his hand lightly across the loosened folds of many webs, over purples, mauves, ambers, with a snapping accompaniment of "No! no! no!" paused, by merest chance, at a delicate blue brocade, at which Angelique almost shrieked: "No! no!--I say no! Pretty? Yes, mais too calm--cool--collected--obedient! Ah, bah! A fool color! What, that amber would become her? Hear you that, old man?" She appealed to Lefebvre with up-cast hands: "Y-es, and it would be Spanish in effect! Oh, what _is_ it that we want?" The old man squinted up his eyes, and, studying Sybil, answered: "Something happy, v-e-r-y happy! Something like a flower, a-a very early flower--but what?" And Thrall, who had caught the old snuff-taker's idea, asked, quickly: "Why not the blossom of the peach? That's early!" "God bless the man!" cried Nonna Angelique, throwing her arms about him in frantic demonstration of delight. "It is the coup-de-grâce! The pinks, mon mari! vite! vite done! Vraiment you have the head still! A happy color, said you!" She threw out a fold of satin her husband offered: "Non! non! it is too deep--too common!" Another: "Bah! too pale, but mere flesh color!" A beautiful bright pink brocade next was tried. "Oh, non! non!" she almost cried from disappointment; "too-'er, too-'er!" In despair she resorted to pantomime to help make her meaning clear, and, catching up her skimpy alpaca skirt, she danced a wild step or two, saying: "Too comme-ça! too what you call 'frisky,' eh? You feel me, what I mean? But that sweet, first flowering thing--that soft promise of the spring, that peach-blossom pink, that would make this dark girl beautiful--can I not find it, then?" She beat her breast with Gallic despair. Lefebvre clutched his few hairs, and apparently pulled up a memory, and cried: "One chance more! The old chest with Eastern things! India, China, Japan!" He disappeared--he lost a shoe, but left it lying till he came back, and slid into it in passing. Some rolls were cast down, soft, non-crackling paper removed, and, with cries of joy and gurgles of delight, Nonna Angelique flung out, fold upon fold, a silky crêpe of so pure and true a peach-blossom pink that the petals of the flower itself scattered over it could hardly have been perceived. Pearls with this color would be perfection. Then the round white fan, dagger,--everything ordered, the measures were taken in the inner room of shelves, a day fixed for fitting, and, quivering with excitement and delight, Sybil was descending the house-steps, when Jim Roberts came up to Thrall, and looking rather oddly at him--the girl thought--said: "The property-man says that cloisonné-jar you made such a fuss about was cared for by the Missus. So, if you want it used, give me her key!" There was a sort of half-frightened daring in the pale face of Roberts, and the look of sardonic comprehension burning in Thrall's eyes might well have shaken the nerves of such a poor wreck as he answered: "We won't trouble about the cloisonné, just now; but I understand your good intention in following me here to tell me about it. And--I--shall-- remember--it! Oh, here's your car, Miss Lawton; good-by!" CHAPTER XVIII A LOVER'S PLEA With all her gentleness, Dorothy Lawton was not without spirit, and she might have resented the unauthorized announcement made by Leslie Galt had she not been reduced to helpless terror by the prompt reappearance of William Henry Bulkley, pompously claiming the privilege of "restoring her to her home and her parents." Trembling like a leaf, she lifted pleading eyes to Galt, who, reading with deep gratitude their prayer, answered it by turning to the old beau, and coldly remarking that "the doctor had placed his carriage at Miss Lawton's service, and together they were about to escort her home." "You will do nothing of the kind, sir!" blustered the bombastic William Henry. "This young lady was placed under my care. I have been made responsible for her safety; therefore, she will return home under my escort, sir!" "Safety?" sneered Galt. "That word does not come gracefully from your lips! Safety? Your utter irresponsibility is amply illustrated by the injuries Miss Lawton has received while under your thoughtful care!" "Anyone," hotly interrupted Mr. Bulkley, "anyone may be the victim of an act of Providence, of--of a catastrophe!" "Act of Providence!" cried Galt; "act of bad temper--act of stupid discourtesy! No man has the right to take a woman out behind a tricky horse, even when he exercises every caution in handling him! And no one but a madman or a man in an unspeakably bad temper would think of leaving a woman alone and utterly at the mercy of a shying, nervous brute! The wonder is that we have been spared a tragedy to-day! And this young lady can scarcely be blamed for not wishing to trust herself to such doubtful protection again!" "You will let the young lady speak for herself, you young upstart!" answered the now furious Mr. Bulkley. "She will do well to remember she is still in tutelage to her parents, and that by a parent she was given to my care!" Then, turning to the girl, he went on: "I have obtained a buggy from the livery man, and we can start at once!" "Oh, Mr. Bulkley," quavered Dorothy, "I can't! I am afraid of that horse! Please--please don't ask me to ride behind him again!" She trembled so violently that the doctor interposed, saying, curtly: "I must disallow your claim, sir! My patient's nerves are to be considered, and, really, though you were acting as the young lady's escort for this unfortunate drive, it seems to me her fiancé is the proper person to look after her now!" William Henry Bulkley's eyes stood out like a crab's. His red face purpled. He breathed in loud gasps. "Her--her what?" he exclaimed. "Her fiancé! Who the devil are you talking about? She has no fiancé!" The doctor had raised Dorothy and given her his arm, but now he turned in astonishment from the white, set face of Galt to the red fury of Bulkley, and back again. When, with a little tremulous laugh, Dorothy, with surprised blue eyes, said: "Why, Mr. Bulkley, were you not told, then? Now, had you been a woman," she held out her hand, the third finger all brave with flashing solitaire, "you would not have needed telling. See?" And Leslie, bending to draw down her veil and hide the wounded cheek, whispered: "Ah! my love! my love!" And then they were in the doctor's carriage and on the way to Woodsedge, while William Henry Bulkley, in a black devil's rage, followed. John Lawton had returned from his walk, and, as a hen-mother frets over her ducklings in the water, so he fretted over the absence of both his girls. He wandered aimlessly about, instead of piling up the wood in the shed, as he had intended doing, while the lengthening absence of Dorothy filled Mrs. Lawton with secret satisfaction. They were taking a drive, just as she had intended they should, and Mr. Bulkley was undoubtedly making the most of his opportunity. She hoped he might not make the mistake of being too--too impulsively ardent. "Very young girls sometimes take alarm so easily!" she thought. "And Dorrie is the merest baby in such matters!" And then confusion reigned, when, with helpless arm, bruised, cut face, and yet such curiously shining eyes, Dorothy, who had gone forth with Mr. Bulkley, was assisted into the house by a strange doctor and young Galt. Then came tender greetings, hurried footsteps, and curt explanations. The doctor, aided by the temporarily German-speaking Lena, whose fright had strangled English in her very throat, was attending the injured girl in her own room. Letitia was weeping hysterically, and John Lawton, the father, was struggling hard to maintain the composure expected of Mr. Lawton, the man. For the calm indifference of a doctor's attitude toward a simple fracture, especially when young bones are in question, is rarely emulated by anxious relatives. Even within the ordinary family circle a broken limb is regarded as a serious mishap; but in this abode of genteel poverty, where yet there was such wealth of family love, a daughter's broken arm was a terrifying disaster, a grievous catastrophe. Mrs. Lawton was piteously inquiring of heaven, which she seemingly located in the far corner of the ceiling, near the biggest stain: "Why had she permitted Sybil to leave her alone, to face the contretemps that was sure to occur in her most desolate hour?" ignoring the fact that her "desolate hour" had been carefully contrived by herself. Galt, catching sight of Mr. Lawton, went to him, and, taking his arm, led him out across the porch and drive down to the great old willow, whose mighty drooping made a gray green tent of privacy. Then he seated him, and, taking off his own hat, he stood before the older man, who, though looking at him with anxious eyes, yet noted the erect figure, the clear gaze, and rather stern, well-featured face, and thought him a goodly sight. A moment of silence, then Leslie said, slowly: "Mr. Lawton, you have shown me great kindness, and I----" The old man held up his hand, saying, with quick deprecation: "No! no! Without power, one can show kindness to no man! I like you, my lad! I shall be grateful to you all my life, but I have done you no kindness!" Leslie moistened his lips as might a nervous girl: "I--you--" he stammered, then went on eagerly--"How well do you like me, sir? Well enough to trust me with--oh, good God!" he cried, "what's the use of beating about the bush? If you don't know it already, you ought to know that I love your daughter with all my heart, and--don't look at me like that, Mr. Lawton! I know I don't deserve her! But--I'd be true to her, as my father was true to his choice before me! If--if Dorothy tells you that she wishes it so, will you then give her to me, for my wife?" Two slow tears crept into the pale blue eyes. Again there came that piteous, silent movement of the lips, that had so touched Leslie on the day he had rescued the girls from the tunnel accident. "What is it?" asked Galt, gently. "You know who I am--who my father was. You know personally one, at least, of the firm of Gordon, Stone & Wheatleigh, in whose offices I have read and worked, and who have promised--but never mind that now. What troubles you so, sir? My past is an open book for you. Is it a question of age?" John Lawton shook his head, and just then Mr. Bulkley drove through the farthest gate and on up to the house. They paid no heed to that; Galt went on questioning the silent, distressed, old man: "Is it that you cannot trust me--that you doubt the sincerity of my love?" A faint, reproachful smile accompanied a second shake of the head. "Is it----" started Leslie. "It's poverty!" gasped John Lawton. Then, having regained his power of speech, he went on: "Don't ask me to condemn my girl to poverty for life. Love sweetens the draught, but the bitterness is there all the time! Wait, my boy, wait! It is not for her alone I speak! Spare yourself the torment, the shame, the pain of denying to the woman that you love the little fripperies and follies and small luxuries that she craves as a flower craves sunshine! There's no pain like it in the world! And," his lips writhed as he spoke, "I ought to know, for--for ten years past it has so pierced my heart that there can be but a shapeless pulp there now! No! no! you can't afford to marry my daughter!" "It's hard to think of you as a lover of mammon--a seeker after mere wealth!" frowned Leslie. "Don't be unjust, my lad. The joy of counting one's dollars in seven figures is a joy without savor for me. Very great wealth is either a great trust or a greater temptation. I neither seek for nor desire it for our girls; but I cannot calmly face for them a future of such poverty as they are enduring now. You should be able, positively able, to provide at least a modest home; be able to make both of these inelastic ends not only meet but lap over a bit. The poor working-man has a right to marry a poor girl, but a poor gentleman has no right to condemn a girl with the training, tastes, and requirements of a lady to a lifelong struggle with ways and means. Then, remember, when a man marries he not only doubles his joys but his responsibilities as well. Oh, my boy! if only you had a few thousands in hand--a wall to plant your back against if the fight went against you for awhile! But--but, I dare not give my child into empty hands! Why--why--boy? What in heaven's name?" Galt was flinging his hat high in the autumn sunlight, catching it and flinging it again, like a boy at boisterous play! Then, with dancing eyes, he made apology for his antics, adding: "I have no father, as you know. So I think I'll follow the fashion of the Japanese and adopt one!" taking a chill, veiny old hand in his firm, warm ones. "You, sir, by your leave? So, Father Lawton, listen! I have not deceived you at any time, but I may have been a trifle more reticent than was necessary, for I hate talking of myself. But now I'll tell you what, I see, should have been told before, and, when I've done, I'll ask again for Dorothy! No! no! adopted father, you may only answer yea or nay when you have earned the right by listening!" And just then both men fancied they heard a sort of screech from the house, and glanced up toward it. But old John said, indifferently: "An owl, I guess. Lena disturbs them when she's rooting about that tumbling barn behind the cedars. Go on!" But, up in the sitting-room, William Henry Bulkley, rampant and blindly furious while charging Mrs. Lawton with insincerity and bad faith, had flung the engagement of Dorothy in her astonished face, and it was the screech of the stricken Letitia that faintly reached them. But Mr. Lawton, whose mind moved slowly, and who, though undoubtedly American, was yet no "guesser," being all at sea as to the meaning of Galt's sudden change from bitter disappointment to an exuberance of spirits he had not thought the grave young man capable of, repeated, more urgently: "Go on, please, go on!" And, in the handsome weak old face and piteous faded eyes raised to him, Galt saw again the likeness to Dorothy, and, with a pang, he thought: "This is what years of sorrow and privation might put into her fair face," and swiftly prayed, "protect, defend her, Lord, in part at least, through my poor human agency," and then plunged into the simple story, whose telling might change the color of the sky for him and make the old world new for his young sweetheart and himself. "You remember, sir, I told you before, that it was through Mr. Wheatleigh's friendship for my dead father that I was first taken into the office where so many wished to secure a berth. He advanced me, too, as rapidly as he could, because he knew the mother I worked so hard for would not be with me long. Well, the only property my father left me, besides a small cottage, was an extensive sweep of swamp, over in our neighboring State. This inheritance was considered a great jest, and was continually referred to as my 'mosquito foundry.' The only harvest ever gathered from its acres was a harvest of poor and pointless jokes. My mother and I used to spend two or three months in the cottage during the summer, and the rest of the year an old couple used it rent free, save for keeping the small shell in repair. That my father had twice refused, when the neighboring town was making spasmodic spurts of growth, to sell portions of his swampy holdings, made people think him quite off his head. But my mother told me he had once declared the time would come when thousands of dollars would be offered eagerly where hundreds were then spoken of grudgingly. She had said, 'Why, do you believe these swamps can ever be made healthy enough to attract the wealthy?' and he had answered, 'My dear wife, wealthy people often have other uses for property than the making of homes. Nor do I anticipate a sudden fad among millionnaires for personally cultivating cranberries. Nevertheless, there's money lying in those mud-flats and out there in the meadows--money waiting for a Galt; and if we don't gather it up, Leslie will.' "Every word," the young man continued, "I treasured, and while I was yet a lad I used to rack my brain to find a cause for my father's faith, and though I found it not I yet resolved to follow his plan and--wait. So silently, tenaciously I kept my hold upon my 'mosquito foundry,' and endured many things in the name of wit from my companions, who sought information as to proper 'treatment of stings,' as to the usual period 'for mating among the young birds,' as to the 'outlook for cranberries,' etc. As years went by the subject dropped, thank heaven! I had worked desperately for my mother's needs. Then--well, when I found myself alone, I worked desperately still, to prove to Mr. Wheatleigh that I was grateful. The firm noticed me. They tested my discretion. Then one day old Mr. Gordon said to Mr. Stone: 'A young fellow who can so lock his lips, and give the combination to no one is wanted in this office for confidential work.' It was a big step they offered me, and--and, Father Lawton, I did not have a soul to rejoice with me or say 'well done!' I was so desolately alone in my good fortune that when I locked my room door behind me I buried my face in my mother's old crêpe shawl, and talked to it, and yet," he laughed a little, "upon my soul I quite expect people to consider me a man! "Well, one day I was mildly surprised to receive a letter making an offer for a small portion of my land. The price was modest--I declined it, briefly. But before I had mailed my note another letter and another offer to purchase reached me. I declined both, and dropped the matter from my mind, when lo! my correspondents renewed their efforts to buy, doubling the price first offered, at a single bound. I had heard of no boom in town lots--no sudden growth outward in my direction, yet both letters expressly stated that 'simple cottage homes were to be built.' Homes out there on those dreary flats? Builders of simple cottages were rarely able to double an offered price for the ground alone. I astonished Mr. Wheatleigh by asking for half a day's absence. The old pair at the cottage could only tell me that two or three of the widely scattered residents had recently sold out and all but one had gone away. These people had lived along the river. I walked out in that direction, and stopped at the small truck garden, that had been sold but was not yet vacated. I questioned the woman--a dull creature--from whom I gained no information beyond her joy at going to live in the town. Her little girl was teasing for a penny to spend for that childish solace--gum. Being refused, I told her if she would walk along with me for company I would give her a nickel; I paid in advance, and we went out together. She was a sharp little monkey, as keen as her mother was dull. Inquiring about what had been going on, I learned of the advent of six puppies down the road a bit; of the lamentable fate of old Tom Hale, a local ne'er-do-weel, and also of the presence of the 'queer men,' who used to get dinner at her house. 'Why were they queer?' 'Why, because they did funny things, and were squintin' along the road and across the meadows,' 'Squinting?' I repeated. 'Yes,' she explained; 'they had three wooden legs, that had a funny brass and glass fixin' on top, that they squinched through, and then they'd make marks in books and stick sticks in the ground.' Surveyors, I thought. 'And,' went on the child, 'they used to say, before they came into dinner, "don't talk!"' "Ah! I pricked up my ears! Surveyors doing work that was not to be talked of. I dropped another nickel into the child's hand. 'Tell me,' I asked, 'what the funny men said outside the house, when they were squinting through the meadows.' The child's face clouded. 'They didn't say nothin'! Must I give back the nickel now?' 'Oh,' I urged, 'they must have talked among themselves, and you must have heard a word now and then, when you were watching them or playing. Come, think a bit! Perhaps I have another nickel.' Her eyes shone--she knit her brows and bit her lips. 'Well,' she said, doubtfully, 'I 'spose just words without no sense to 'em ain't no use? But they did use to say things about "the shops," and they said, too, "beds" many times.' 'Beds?' I repeated. 'Are you sure?' 'Yes, beds, 'cause I thought it was a funny thing for a man to say! And--oh, yes! Once, over by that mud flat, they said that their "beds" would cost lots of money, and one man said they might be glad there wasn't snakes here to cost more. And I told 'em there was snakes in some places, and they laughed at me, they did.' I caught her hand, and said: 'Lou, think again. Did not the men talk of "road-beds"?' I held my breath till the answer came. 'Well, my ma says I'm a fool, and I guess I am. That is just the kind of beds they said, "road-beds."' 'Oh, thank you, thank you!' I replied, for, like a cheap modern god, I showered my small Danaë, not with gold, but with nickels and with dimes. "I understood at last the possible value of my property. Mosquito stock went up! This child had given me the clew to what was going on. At once I laid the facts before Mr. Wheatleigh. He chuckled. 'Leave this matter with us, my boy. Railroads are bulldozers! They pay low to the poor, but high to the rich and strong. If this thing works out as it should, and you should care to enter our firm as its youngest member in, say another year, I think it can be arranged.' Well, Father Lawton, it has been arranged, and the day that made me independent of money worries was the very day of the railroad accident in the tunnel. And as the crash came I was looking at Dorothy with all my heart in my eyes, for I had seen her twice before, and I knew quite well that I loved her, and that I should marry her, if we both lived long enough. You, sir, can have full details of my financial situation whenever you may desire. 'Tis true I have no splendor to offer. My only Aladdin's lamp is the partnership, but in such a firm that means rare opportunity, and good work brings good pay. But even Aladdin had to rub his lamp before his wish was granted. So, never doubt my willingness to rub my lamp hard. I may not promise both town and country houses; and butler, coachman, and groom may be conspicuous by their absence--just at first. But a home, a pretty one of her very own, a few maids inside, a man to potter about a bit of lawn, and a jewel-box not quite empty--so much I can safely and reasonably promise to my wife, if you will trust your little girl to my honor and my love! Once more, Mr. Lawton, will you give me your daughter Dorothy for wife?" Lawton closed his eyes, and in that moment he recalled the day when she was gurgling on his clasping arm, the yellow, downy covering of her baby head so like a wee new chick's coat that he had laughed, and when, at the sound, her blue eyes opened wide at him, and with a thrill he noted her likeness to himself. Then, half proud, half pitiful, he had kissed her many times--why! that was only yesterday--surely but little more! Yet, here was this man, almost a stranger, asking her for his wife. He opened his eyes, and asked, piteously: "D-o-e-s, does Dorrie wish this?" "I think she will tell you so, sir," Leslie answered, gently. "Have you spoken to Leti--to Mrs. Lawton?" "N-no, sir," said the young man. "I--I thought I should speak first to you." "Dear me! I'm afraid you've made a mistake, my boy," murmured the old man, innocently. "Letitia thinks that, in the case of daughters, you understand, the mother is in authority--is the head, so to speak--of the family. You--er, you should have spoken to her, but--now----" "Yes, sir, now?" eagerly repeated Galt. The old man rose. He held out his hand, which the younger man grasped tightly. "I believe you are an honest man, and since you have the power to care for and protect her I give you my Dorothy, than whom a truer, sweeter, purer girl God never gave to undeserving father or adoring lover!" The two men stood eye to eye a long moment, then Leslie Galt said, slowly: "Thank you, sir!" dropped Lawton's hand, and, turning, walked rapidly away, leaving the shaken, excited, and confused old man in his gray green tent, trying to straighten things out and prepare himself for the meeting with his Letitia. CHAPTER XIX A FAMILY SCENE While Mr. Lawton still strove to regain his self-control he saw, passing out through the further gate, the big chestnut, the battered looking livery buggy, and the gorgeous William Henry Bulkley, whose cowed, dispirited "man" was driving, while he--W. H.--gave himself the pleasure of vigorously damning the entire outfit, individually and collectively. A little later the doctor drove his lightly built, dark bays out--full sisters they were, with faces so kind and manners so gentle as always to suggest a pair of nurses. After that John Lawton thought he might then go up to the house and get a quiet peep at Dorothy, whose face he half expected to see changed somehow since she had given him her morning kiss. "She had been a child then, and now, yes now, she was a woman." He did not realize that the sudden change had been but in his point of view. Walking slowly up the steep rise to the porch, he thought he heard high voices, and, opening the door, he stood amazed. Looking up, where at the stair-top German Lena stood, one outstretched hand against the wall, the other on the bannister, both feet braced firm and wide apart, her small blue eyes a-light, a girl on guard! And just beneath her, hair disarranged, face crimson, and eyes snapping, Mrs. Lawton, in high, piercing tones, was spitting and hissing abusive epithets: "You! how dare you? You German steerage rat! You stupid wooden-headed, wooden-shod _thing_! How dare you--dare you! In my days of wealth, my housekeeper, my _cook_, wouldn't have allowed you to care for my pots and pans! My daughter's nothing to you! I can say what I please to her, and say it how I please! How dare you interfere! You shall feel the law for your Dutch insolence! Stand aside, and let me into that room!" "Nein! _nein!_" said Lena, savagely. "_Nein!_ I don't stand on my sides! I make by Herr Doctor's orders, und I keep my Miss Lady quiet uf I can!" Then, catching sight of John Lawton, she cried: "Oh, my Herr Mister! is dat you? Oh, you vas velcome as never vas!" "John Lawton!" cried Mrs. Lawton, at the same time, "if you have one spark of manhood in you, if you even dimly remember your promise to protect and cherish me, you will order this crazy Dutch slattern to the scullery!" "Letitia! Letitia!" remonstrated the mortified and bewildered man, "come away, I beg of you, and explain quietly what has happened." But a perfect shriek of rage leapt from the woman's throat: "What has happened? Do you know, that _thing_ there has struck me--me--a lady!" "Nein! nein!" stoutly protested Lena, "I don't strike nobodys, my Herr Mister! She com' mad by me! for dat--dat doctor mans--ven he have put der sticks und shplinters on der Miss Lady's arm, dat com' got break by der Bergamots man, he com' say dat I must make for der quiet! Und two time he tell me dot! He say she make of der fever rite avay quick uf she com' get excite! und nobody shall com' by her, for much talk! Und I shall vatch until der odder vun, der Miss Sybells com', und take care by her! Und--und--I tell you true now, Herr Boss, he say der mutter downstair seem very hy-strikle like, und not fit to com' by der sickroom! Und den he go und der Frau Mistress, she com' fly in der room, und she com' mad like a vitch! Und she say some tings at my Miss Lady 'how she dare do sometings?' Und my Miss Lady, she com' vite, com' red, und begin shake! Und I say, 'Blease for go!' Und she say, 'Miss Doroty is a God-forsakens simpletons!' und I say vonce more, 'Blease!' und--und den I don't strike, I don't shuf der Frau Mistress, I youst pick her round by der waist, und I histe her out of der room! Und she shmack me on der cheek und try to come by der room again! Und I lock der door, und now I stand here und keep my Miss Lady quiet, youst so long as I have der legs to shtand by! Ja! So!" The old man's face was a study of pained bewilderment. He slowly ascended the stairs, and taking by the arm the dishevelled creature, in whom it was hard for him to recognize his wife, he said: "Come to your room, Letitia. You will bring upon yourself an attack of nerves if this continues. You need some drops." And the innocently spoken words wrung a cry of rage from the woman, as she recalled how, down-stairs, a few minutes before, William Henry Bulkley had hurled the bottle across the room to the sofa, with the courteous words: "There's your damned old drops! Much good they've done us, haven't they!" "Come!" continued John. Then, looking back, he added to Lena: "Open Miss Dorothy's door and tell her 'my love' and I'll be with her directly, and will read a little out of Sybbie's play to her while you get tea ready." "Ha! ha! ha!" laughed Mrs. Lawton. "When you hear of her outrageous conduct it will be a lecture, not Sybil's play, that you will read! Anything, _anything_ but slyness in a girl!" "_Letitia!_" The tone rather startled the angry woman. She allowed herself to be led into her room, where John filled the basin with water, added a little cologne, and opened out a fresh towel ready for use. For though Letitia had had no maid for years past, she had not been without trained service. Now, however, she could not put aside her grievance even to lave her burning face. She went on: "Never have I been so--so discredited, so lowered, so belittled! One does not often meet two such hypocrites on the same day! She, with her pretended coyness and shyness! That any child of mine should be capable of such deception, such concealment!" "My dear! my dear!" interrupted John Lawton, "you are not stopping to consider the force of your words. There has been no deception, no concealment. Our young people have been learning to love each other, wife, and we were too blind to see what was going on." "W-why! w-why! do you know about it?" surprisedly questioned Mrs. Lawton. "Did Mr. Bulkley tell you, too, before he drove away?" "Mr. Bulkley?" frowned Lawton, "I don't see what on earth Mr. Bulkley has to do with our affairs. Besides, he has been most unpleasant in his manner toward Leslie Galt." "It's a pity that we have not followed his example--the young hypocrite! with his suave tone and underhand conduct!" "No! no!" interrupted Lawton, "there has been nothing underhand in Leslie Galt's conduct. He loves Dorothy; there's no crime in that, surely, and he has come like a man and asked for her, and----" "And you! Have you presumed to encourage that mere salaried clerk to hope to marry a Lawton? Understand this, if any child of mine ever went to live in a flat, I would not recognize her though she lay upon her death-bed! To be dragged down to poverty by another [the old man winced] is no crime, but to deliberately choose poverty is a vulgarity that is worse than crime! You will forbid this thing at once! What--love? They love each other? Bah! He's got a straight, flat back and good teeth and eyes--will they make up for a shabby wardrobe and no visiting list? Love? Love in poverty is an impossibility! I ought to know by this time!" she sneered, bitterly. "I've had plenty of opportunity for experimenting!" Without noticing the quivering of her husband's chin and mouth, she went on: "She's mad or a fool to throw away money and position for some hole-in-a-corner existence with a good-looking lawyer's clerk!" "Letitia," broke in her husband very gently, "I don't just know what you mean, my dear, but I suppose you are speaking figuratively of money and position; but if you will let me explain all about young Galt's present standing and his future prospects, I think you will yourself sanction an engagement." "The prospects of a mere clerk!" she jeered. "What a poor-spirited, broken thing you have become, calmly permitting one daughter to go upon the public stage, and giving the other to the first poverty-stricken applicant that asks for her! No! I'm not speaking figuratively of money and position! They are within her reach, and she shall accept them! She has no right to keep me in poverty, because she prefers it for herself! The time will come when she will thank me for my interference--that is, if she has not driven the man off forever! Perhaps even I may not be able to whistle back a Mr. Bulkley, once he is gone!" "_My God!_" the words came in a sort of choking gasp. The man's pale eyes stared at her with a sort of questioning horror. "You do not mean--you can not mean?" "I mean," recklessly responded the woman, "that with a few smiles and half promises from Dorothy and a little veiled management on my part, her well-ringed fingers might this moment be holding the strings of the Bulkley purse!" "She must be mad!" interjected the trembling voice of the husband, as if thinking aloud. "It is a charity to believe her mad!" "Then I'm mad from disappointment and wasted effort. Any opportunity is thrown away upon you! And Sybil hated him and opposed me at every turn! Yet with a little more time my finesse would have brought William Henry Bulkley to the point of marrying Dorothy!" "_Damnation!_" cried John Lawton, as he sprang to his feet and stood a hard, breathing moment, holding fast to the corner of the dressing-table for support. His pale eyes shone with the phosphorescent glare of the angry cat. His long fingers opened and closed convulsively. For the first time in all her life, Letitia saw danger in him. "You--are--an--infamous woman!" The words came slowly and with effort from his tremulous lips. "You have forgotten your motherhood, your womanhood! But you never forget the sweetly spicy savor of the flesh-pots of Egypt! No!" he cried with increasing anger, "nor have you forgotten the nature, the gross brutality, of this man, who has control of the flesh-pots you still dream of! You have not forgotten either the long, slow dying of his faithful wife, whom he crowned with public infamies! And since that time you know, as all people know, he has been one of the mightiest in a very sink of iniquity--know him to be a walking danger to unprotected innocence and a vainglorious 'friend' of fashionable vice! Yet to this immorality add an uncontrollably violent temper, impaired health, and a grandfather's years; and for a few fripperies and gew-gaws, a wrap or two of fur and velvet for the satisfaction of your vanity, you would fling, without a thought of her pure soul's fate--fling the white, sweet body of your innocent child into his foul embrace, relying on the name of wife to cover the iniquity! Dorothy, my little white-souled woman-child, and Bulkley? I--I wonder--I don't kill you, Letitia!" He advanced toward her so fiercely that she shrank back, crying out in terror: "John! John! don't hurt me!" "Why not?" he asked, savagely. "Why not? Do you know what you have done for me? You have dragged down the woman I have loved and honored as my wife--down, down to within one step of being a procu----!" Her sharp scream of shame and terror cut across the hideous word. "No, I won't hurt you; but oh, God! oh, God! to wake and find the wife you have pillowed on your breast for twenty years is, after all, a stranger to you! That hurts!--yes, that hurts!" He passed his hand across his eyes, then he said, sternly: "Never bring that man into Dorothy's presence again--I forbid it! Yes, I told you you would make yourself ill!" But as she lapsed into a faint she was dimly conscious that John was leaving the room. She had gone too far--her slave had rebelled for once. He who always had waited upon her himself in her previous attacks, now called on Lena to attend her and get her to bed, while he went to Dorothy's room and kissed and blessed her and made her very soul sing for joy, because he praised her beloved. And in the silence, when his cheek rested on her piled-up sunny hair, she did not know of the bitter tears creeping down his face--tears of disapppointment and sorrow, because he had that day learned that the wife he believed to be but frivolous was in truth a personified selfishness. CHAPTER XX A PROFESSIONAL LESSON Sybil, hurried by a message from Leslie Galt, had come flying back from the city to the aid of her injured sister; and, as she dropped upon her knees beside the bed, she cried, breathlessly: "Oh, Dorrie! what an unfortunate, lucky, lucky girl you are!"--a bull that scattered threatening tears and set them both laughing. As Sybil tossed off her street garments and prepared to make Dorothy more comfortable, she said, heedlessly: "No wonder you believe so in your God, when He never fails to save you from danger. Let me put myself behind a vicious, bolting brute of a horse, and the Supreme Power would leave me to the broken neck appropriate to the situation; and a good diamond and a lover saved for--why! why! silly girl! I meant no harm! Did I say something irreverent? Oh, don't you understand? My heart's so full of gratitude for your safety, dear, that my head is turning a bit silly. You would trust Him anyway? Of course you would, you loyal little Christian! I have known your prayers unanswered many a long month, and that you thought the fault was somehow yours. You are one of those wonderful beings who could wring joy out of sorrow, believing that 'whom God loveth, He chasteneth'! I am not saint enough for that, but at this moment my very heart is beating out the triumphant old Doxology, 'Praise God from whom all blessings flow!' because you were not killed yesterday; but are here at home only a little chipped and scratched, and because you have a promised husband and I have a strapping big-promised brother. And I do pray, I honestly do! on my knees, dear! that God will bless you both, and so renew your love each day that it may never grow old. And there's a kiss for _you_ [kissing her on the lips], and here's a kiss for _him_ [kissing Dorothy's cheek], and, ah! you simpleton-- you--you boiled beet! Oh, why have you an arm in splints? To blush so idiotically before just _me_! Oh, what joy it would be to pound you with a pillow! But sit up instead, and let me brush that tangled hair. The idea of poor papa trying to arrange it for the night, and yet his efforts were to be preferred to Lena's. Now, miss, while I am engaged behind you with the brush, you may proceed to explain how it feels to wear a solitaire--such a solitary solitaire! Poor little ringless-fingers girl! And you may also throw some light upon the feelings of a young person who engages herself to be married over her elder sister's head." But Dorothy had groaned a little from pain, and Sybil silenced her teasing tongue, made Dorothy all orderly and comfortable, cast hemp-seed recklessly before noisy Dick to buy his quiet; and then, seating herself by the bed, was studying Juliet's lines while Dorothy dozed, until awakened by the arrival of a big bunch of flowers and a note. For several days there seemed to be an odd constraint upon the household. John Lawton, always rather silent, now became fairly dumb. He never entered the sitting-room, but remained out of doors nearly all the time. Mrs. Lawton looked heavy-eyed and nervous, and evidently greatly missed Dorothy's care and gentle coddling. Lena she had attempted to ignore; but, alas, she depended too utterly upon that sole servitor for food and drink and warmth and order. So she had to content herself with giving commands in a very cold voice, using very large words, and averting her face during their delivery. Her manner during her short visits to the girls' room was one of poorly restrained anger. She had not seen Dorothy alone since her attempted lecture on the day of the accident; and, as John Lawton had never resumed the interrupted subject of the hated engagement, she remained uninformed as to Leslie Galt's bright prospects until that day when, with nerve worthy of respect, he had presented himself before the irate mother of his sweetheart, and, remembering her contemptuous disregard of the famous warning against "Greeks bearing gifts"--knowing, indeed, that she really had no use for Greeks otherwise engaged--he kept some suggestive small packages in evidence as he entered the sitting-room. And as he brought himself a chair and placed it close to her never-resting "rocker," he recognized in the buzzing swarm of verbal wasps she turned loose upon him the words "disrespectful--unnerved-- paralysed--disingenuous--stealthy--infringing--intruding--inveigling," and with failing breath the last warning injunction: "And let me hear no panegyrical eulogy on poverty, if you please, sir!" Then with a wisdom far beyond his years he retired to the background his lover's raptures, his glowing admiration for her daughter's beauty; and bringing forward the thrilling question of "pounds, shillings, and pence," they soon resolved themselves into a "ways and means committee." And presently Letitia's wasps turned to bees, and the bees began to bear the honey of sweet words. Then she accepted most graciously these offerings, and bridled and declared she "already felt quite old at the prospect of mothering such a great wicked man!" And when he made the usual complimentary rejoinder, she pronounced him "saucy," and "wondered, if he talked in that fashion to her, what on earth he would not say to Dorothy!" and was full of regret when he insisted upon going out to look for Mr. Lawton. Then up she went to the room above, where Dorothy was holding the play-book in her free hand and giving the cues, while Sybil repeated her lines to see how nearly letter perfect she was. Both girls exclaimed: "Why, mamma!" Her expression had changed so completely and her walk was so important--quite her old-time society movement. And then as she approached the bed they caught the first glimpse of a long fine chain of exquisite workmanship, strung at intervals of five or six inches with pale pink coral beads that were in turn girdled with a circle of tiny diamonds. Mrs. Lawton ostentatiously lifted her lorgnon, and again the girls exclaimed: "Why, mamma!" And then, as she stooped over to kiss Dorothy, she remarked, quite patronizingly: "Yes, our Leslie is very generous and thoughtful. He wanted me to have a little memento of your engagement, dear fellow!" She did not add that the other memento was a large Strasbourg pâté. She kept that fact, like the pâté, to herself. * * * * * Some weeks slipped by, and early winter was turning the old white house into a very Franz Joseph Land. "Oh!" cried Dorothy one day, "to think of your having to buy all the coal, Sybil! What stupid things the conventions are! I may accept any extravagant outlay of money in flowers or candy or fruit, but the entire family would be under the grand taboo if I received a ton of coal or a barrel of flour." "Is the flour out, dear?" quickly asked Sybil, laying down her play-book. "Have you been worrying your poor little head? Don't hide things from me, Dorrie! If I have the money, I love to spend it for home. Of course my salary is small, but, dear heaven! what should we have done without it in this old sieve of a building, where fuel simply melts away, and the grate or stove is always calling out for more? Oh, Dorrie, if I could only make a hit in Juliet! Mr. Thrall would surely raise my salary; yes, in spite of the cost of those costumes that fall upon him, poor man! Are they not a wonderful people--Claire Morrell and Stewart Thrall? Think of the kindness of that woman to me, a nobody! And think of such an actor as Thrall--Stewart Thrall--taking the trouble to teach me the business of Juliet, his very self. Oh, I shall be so frightened! Dorrie, Mr. Roberts has been very patient, going over and over the scenes with me; telling me where I am to stand and where the other people will be, and what they will do, but he never has taught me anything about the actual acting of Juliet. And now to think that I am to be coached at God-mother Van Camp's house by Mr. Thrall in person! I only hope and pray he may not light up as he does sometimes when he is acting, for, if he does, I shall forget my own lines in rapturously listening to him. Do you know, Mr. Roberts is sorry that Mr. Thrall ever undertook the management of a theatre?" "Why?" asked Dorothy, "he is successful--he must make a great deal of money?" "That is the very thing poor Mr. Roberts bemoans. He says the artist in him has been suffocated by his commercially won money. He says that Mr. Thrall will himself admit that his acting to-day is not as convincingly true and fine as it was five years ago. Because then he was all enthusiasm, and believed in the dignity and beauty of the art of acting, while to-day he regards it as a means to an end--and that end, money. Poor Mr. Roberts, he seems to know so much about the profession, and yet only plays such small parts. It must be very humiliating. His lip curled so contemptuously when he told me he was going to play the Apothecary. Do you know, Dorrie, I have a suspicion about him, poor man! He always, always smells of cloves, and twice yesterday when he pulled out his handkerchief some cloves fell to the floor, and I said: 'I believe you have a corner on cloves, Mr. Roberts.' And, oh, his poor face turned so red, and I added, hurriedly, 'Don't you think the excessive use of cloves may be injurious to the digestion?' 'Possibly,' he answered, satirically, 'and doubtless still more injurious to the reputation.' I saw his trembling hands; I recalled the watery look his eyes sometimes have; his rapid, almost incoherent speech as opposed to his long silences; and, all at once, I suspected him of drinking." "Sybil!" exclaimed Dorothy in a shocked voice, "and you have been under his care, and may be again, and he----" "Has acted like some kind and patient old relative or friend of the family; don't let us forget that. Besides, I may be wrong and ungrateful in suspecting such a thing, but--but it would explain why Mr. Thrall, whom he so admires, only trusts him with such poor, small parts." Sybil had been nursing her right elbow in her left hand while speaking, and now suddenly exclaimed: "Oh, where's the arnica bottle? I can't bear this last bruise--it's the worst one yet!" "The bottle is on the wash-stand behind the ewer, but I'm afraid it's nearly empty, for Lena fairly baptized me with it that day of the----" "Circus?" put in Sybil. "Just look, Dorrie." She pushed up her loose sleeve, and her sister gave a cry of pity at sight of a cruel black bruise on that most sensitive spot--the elbow. "And your poor shoulder only yesterday?" "And my poor knees only last week!" ruefully groaned Sybil, tenderly sopping some arnica dregs upon the bruised member. "Oh, those black knees!" giggled Dorothy, "they looked as if you had knelt in the coal cellar!" "You heartless little beast!" cried Sybil. "See here, if you laugh at my professional troubles and ensuing physical pains--I'll----" "You can't pound me," triumphed Dorothy, "my arm is too weak!" "No, but I can do worse! Lena has fully informed you of the horrors that follow upon 'calling a maid by a married name,' and the certainty that said maid will never have a married name to be called by, so Mrs.--Mrs.----" "Oh, Syb! Syb! don't!" pleaded the repentant one. "Syb, I'm awfully sorry for your knees--honestly I am! And if I could fall for you, I would--gladly; though how in mercy's name actresses tumble down in faints or in death-scenes, without either breaking their bones or getting laughed at, is more than I can understand." "Oh, it's the fear of being laughed at that tortures me, Dorrie. I could never, never face an audience again. Why, last summer out at the Soldiers' Home theatre, a woman had to fall in the play and the people fairly screamed with laughter, and a newspaper said that 'Miss ---- had not fallen, but had tumbled down in sections.' Ever since I have been studying this part, I have agonized over my fall, and with what result? I've bruised myself from head to foot; shaken mamma's nerves--crumbled the ceiling--frightened papa out of the house at each crash, and"--actually tears were in Sybil's dark eyes--"and I always land in a hunched-up heap that would arouse scornful merriment in the very supers." "Poor Sybbie!" condoled Dorothy. Then more brightly: "As you can't ask Mr. Thrall or Mr. Roberts to help you, why don't you go over to Brooklyn; make papa take you--Claire Morrell's playing there this week. Ask for just a moment's interview, and make a clean breast of your trouble to her. I'm sure she would help you--she's so kind." "Oh, I hate to trouble her when she is working so hard; and, besides, I am afraid falling is a thing that can't be taught, Dorothy. But, oh, do you remember her lovely fall in 'Camille'--the ballroom one I mean--all stretched out so long and smooth, and yet falling with a crash that made you nearly leap from your chair? It's a mystery beyond my solving." "Lena's mash-man told her--Miss Morrell's coachman told _him_--she was coming over home one day this week, and perhaps----" Jangle-jangle interrupted the bell at the front door, followed by the peculiarly business-like tread of Lena that ever indicated a suspicion of pedler or tramp, and a shuffling, slippered flight by Mrs. Lawton, who hissed over the banisters: "Say I'm lying down, resting, but will descend--that is, if she has sufficient knowledge of the amenities of social life to ask for me instead of my offspring." Then as the girls gazed wonderingly at each other Lena appeared, smiling broadly, but somewhat puzzled too, saying: "The big actor voman's com' und ask for der mudder und for der miss ladies. Und I say ja, dey all com' by der house, und blease com' in by der sittin'-rooms, 'cause we didn't ever make of der fire in der parlor. Und she say dat vas right, der parlor never com' like a home, und I com' up to tell. Und she leave all dose visitin' tickets on der hall table. Und I don't know for vy." And she held out five cards, adding, distressedly, "Und von of 'em has a man's name on it. Dat com' by mistake, eh? I take dat back to her?" "No, no! Lena!" laughed the girls, "that's the card of her husband!" "Vell, shall I take back of der extra tickets? She com', a nice voman, und it is too bad to have of der tickets vasted?" "Oh, Lena! do go and tell mamma Miss Morrell is waiting, and leave the cards alone," said Dorothy, "and we will explain about them to you by and by!" And after Mrs. Lawton had attempted to crush her caller by explaining the "wait" for her descent by the statement that she "hardly expected callers before three," Miss Morrell, with a gracious ignoring of the intended snub that the girls adored her for, proceeded to explain the necessity of calling early or not at all, as she had to return to Brooklyn in time for her play. Whereupon Mrs. Lawton found herself, to her own surprise be it stated, descending from her high horse and eagerly discussing the probabilities of English five-o'clock teas ever becoming really domesticated in America. And presently she went in search of Mr. Lawton (whom she knew to be in the kitchen whittling kindlings for the quick lighting of Lena's fire in the arctic-like morning). And then Miss Morrell, happening to press Sybil's arm, brought forth a whimper of pain and an exhibition of bruises the cause of which she comprehended in a moment. "Oh, you poor mottled child--what a state you must be in? Have you been falling on the bare floor, then?" "I've tried to fall on a mattress," confessed Sybil, "but some part of me always flies over on the floor." Miss Morrell threw back her head and laughed till the tears stood in her eyes. "Then you must let me help you," she said, "it is very, very easy." She was drawing off her gloves as she spoke, and, tossing them to the piano, she stepped toward the centre of the room, saying, "You see, now--" She raised her hands toward her head, and without further preparation, without a warning word, she fell suddenly face downward with a crash that made things jingle on the mantel, and brought two startled screams from the girls and Mr. Lawton rushing to her assistance. That gentleman, bending over to lift her, was stricken helpless by her raising her head and asking, pleasantly: "My skirts are lying all right, aren't they?" Then she added: "Oh, how do you do, Mr. Lawton? Just give me your hand, will you? This dress is a little tight for falling in, and I can't get up." Then, turning to Sybil, she laughed at her astonished face: "I'm afraid you did not catch the trick, did you?" "Oh!" answered the girl with her hand on her heart, "I never got such a scare in my life! How, oh, how do you do it? Just look at Dorothy! She's quite white." And it was difficult for the girl to believe that Miss Morrell had not suffered in the least from such a fall. "Why, it's just a trade secret," laughed the actress. "Some people never fall well because their nerve fails them at the last moment, but all their lives long are content with a sort of jointed fall--they drop on their knees and then forward on their faces. If it is done very quickly it passes, but one never looks graceful, and the immense effect of the crash of the fall is missing. Then, too, an actress who goes down in that manner not only runs the risk of being made fun of, but the bruising over and over again of the same spot may produce a lump with a very ugly and alarming name. "But here is the whole wonderful secret." She held out her open hands, and both girls saw their palms were slightly reddened. "Always throw out your hand, both of them in beginning; keep your knees nearly stiff, and just topple over like a great tree, but strike on the flats of your open hands. The blow won't hurt them beyond making them sting a little. Your knees, elbows, head, shoulders, are all safe--yet you have fallen with immense force." Sybil lifted her hands and made a movement as if about to try the trick, but stopped, looking rather frightened. "No, no--not here!" said Miss Morrell. "Try on your mattress first, and close your eyes when you have marked where you want to strike, and then the distance won't frighten you so. The bolder you get, the less you will extend your hands. It requires nerve, but I'm sure that is a quality you possess, my dear. Besides, you may not play a part requiring a fall for a year or two yet." And Sybil blushed hotly because she had been so charged to secrecy that she dared not tell even this woman who was so good to her that she was the girl about whom all the newspaper stories were appearing, and that she was being coached for Juliet. After a few moments of general conversation the caller rose to go, and, while Mr. Lawton stepped to the door to signal the coachman, who had been keeping his horses moving, Mrs. Lawton explained that in former years the "porte cochère of her old home would have made such action needless, but this," waving her hand condemningly, "was not a home, but--er--er a mere shelter." "Ah!" graciously responded the actress, "but you know there are people who have the gift of carrying the home atmosphere with them even to a--mere shelter." And Mrs. Lawton really looked very handsome and quite impressive, for she felt she was receiving her due, and all the time Sybil was secretly squeezing the fingers of her friend, and in the hall, while her father gallantly opened the carriage door, she whispered: "I love you so for having helped me! And Dorothy prays for you!" With quick anxiety in eye and voice the woman questioned: "Why not do it yourself, my child?" But good-byes were being repeated, and with that slight sense of dissatisfaction upon her she had to take her departure. Then the floodgates of Mrs. Lawton's eloquence were opened, and Dorothy and John Lawton were caught in the swirl of eulogy and reminiscence until suddenly a heavy jar overhead and a rattling of mortar between the partitions was followed by a shrill cry of: "I've done it! I've done it! Dorothy! Papa! Mamma! Come here, quick! quick!" They all fled up the stairs to find Sybil stretched out on her face on a mattress, kicking her slippers impatiently for their coming: "Look at me!" she cried. "See my skirts--they are just exactly as I fell! I haven't moved an inch!" John said, slowly: "I-t wasn't an accident, was it, daughter? Are you sure you can do it again?" "Oh, Sybbie!" cried Dorothy, "do try it once more--only be very careful not to fly over and get bruised!" And willingly enough up scrambled Sybil, and, standing at the foot of the mattress, she threw up her hands and with closed eyes pitched recklessly forward, and arrived in good order to cries of admiration and wonder from the lookers-on when, suddenly, Lena appeared, saying: "Miss Sybbils, uf you blease, do dose yumps und tumbles in der odder room. Der ceilin's too tender under here, und a chunk com' by der floor down youst now." And while Mr. and Mrs. Lawton went below to measure the disaster, Sybil threw her arm about Dorothy's waist, crying: "Oh, won't Mr. Thrall be surprised and delighted with me when he finds I can make a real Morrell fall!" Then to the tune of "Take back the heart that thou gavest!" she burst into singing: Take back the bottle thou gavest What are my bruised knees to thee! and tossed the arnica bottle at Dorothy, and renewed her everlasting study of Juliet. CHAPTER XXI SEEKING REFUGE FROM THE STORM The first appearance of the new Juliet was but one week off. Sybil had spent the last fortnight with Mrs. Van Camp, and some very hard work had been done in the quaint old drawing-room, for be it known there are few more difficult undertakings than the proper coaching of an inexperienced girl for the playing of a great part. The actress who has made her way gradually acquires, all unconsciously, a hundred nameless graces, little tricks of manner, movement or expression, poses, poises, flutterings, the turn of the head or the glance of the eye, and all seem so natural, so spontaneous; but try to teach them to a novice and both coach and pupil will find their work cut out for them. The process is an unnatural one, and the result is a forced blossom, that, however brilliantly beautiful, has a frail exotic air that makes even admirers wonder if the plant has sufficient strength ever to bloom again. Stewart Thrall knew perfectly what drudgery coaching meant, and perversely told himself, up to the very last moment, that he should send, in a day or two, to-morrow, next day, for "Mother Mordaunt" (whose home was irreverently termed "The Hatchery," because of the numbers of amateurs she ever had in training there), and place the Crown Princess in her hands, "for drill, tuition, and discipline," and with insidious self-deception he went so far as to write a note to summon her. Then he caught at the word "drill" to hang his changed opinion on. He did not want her "drilled" out of all the bright spontaneity that was in her now; and, come to think of it, all Mrs. Mordaunt's pupils were trained to the same pattern--they were merely weak copies of herself. He believed, after all, he would undertake the task himself, and he tore to bits the note summoning Mrs. Mordaunt, and wrote instead that line to Sybil, which had caused her so much surprised gratitude, and then remarked casually to Jim Roberts, who sat in the private office with him and carefully polished the metalled gauntlets that belonged to a coat of mail: "I don't know but what young Fitzallen is too inexperienced to do Romeo with a green-girl Juliet. It's rather too great a risk. Maybe I had better go on for it myself, though I suppose I'll scarcely look the part now, even in some new and youthful toggery?" Roberts looked up from his task, with a queer expression of blended admiration and anger on his face, and answered: "You'll look the part all right, just as well as you ever did, but--what's the use of trying to deceive yourself, for you wouldn't condescend to try to deceive me surely. You know well enough that as long ago as when you telegraphed me to bring Miss Lawton back from the West you had already decided to play Romeo to her Juliet, and I knew it as well as you did, so what's the use?" "Indeed! Why, you are becoming clairvoyant! Isn't that what they call the fellow who lies about seeing things that have never occurred? Jim, you're off your base!" "Easy, Thrall!" answered Roberts, in a low tone. "A sneer more or less doesn't matter much, but we will draw the line at 'lying!' And if I'm off my base no one knows why better than you do!" With a muttered oath Thrall left the room, but he took the note that summoned Sybil and mailed it himself. They had worked hard and long in the old-timey drawing-room, for only the very last rehearsals were to be held upon the stage with the full company. Sybil had rehearsed until her head ached, her throat throbbed, and her lips were dry and parched. High-spirited, restless, quick-tempered, she forced herself to docility, and patiently repeated, went back, and began over, bore criticisms with hard-won meekness, and when she received an approving word her tired lips curled into the lovely smile that thrilled her teacher's nerves. Then her patience, her determination to succeed, her passionate desire to understand the part, added to her keen appreciation of the beauty of the language, all appealed to the artist in him; while her attitude of reverent admiration toward himself touched even while it humiliated him, in that he knew he was not worthy of such reverence. Yet, in some strange way, he seemed to see in her the reincarnation of his own youthful sincerity, passionate ambition, and eager, loving labor, before the testing fires of life had found so much dross in him; and, with a great wave of tenderness swelling in his heart, he vowed she should not "lose the way," as he had done; that her dainty imaginings, her original ideas, should not be frightened back by sneer or sarcasm; and that her reverent love for the mighty playwright of the ages should not be ridiculed or "guyed" into a mere question of which of his plays had the most money in it. She had the fire, the magnetism, the imaginative power of the artistic temperament, and, in guarding her from the banalities and the cheap cynicisms that are so deadly in their effect upon the enthusiastic young beginner, he somehow felt as if he were making reparation for the wrong he had done that younger self, who had hoped for fame, but had been given notoriety instead. Nor was that the last excuse Thrall found for his willing work in training this young actress. The manager, the money-getter in him, was appealed to also. More and more plainly he saw in this young gentlewoman of the unusual beauty, whose very imperfections were just enough to humanize, to attract, the public--not to repel and chill as absolutely statuesque perfection has a way of doing, a "card" of great value. More and more surely he knew that there was "money in her," and he meant that every dollar she could be made to draw should roll safely into the box-office drawer. And so he told himself that in order to discount the dulled edge of a curiosity gratified she must be taught really to act--to act well. For that was what they would have to rely upon at the last--beauty and acting combined, when the drawing power of mere novelty was exhausted. Therefore, it was simply good, sound, business tactics to train and explain and repeat--repeat--repeat! and to be very stern sometimes, because a drooping figure and a white, tired face made him long so to gather the weary young body into his arms and whisper: "Rest! poor little queen to be! rest!" All these reasons for coaching Sybil himself, instead of engaging Mrs. Mordaunt to do it for him, he acknowledged, and if there was yet another one, he ignored its existence until that morning when the first performance was but one week off. Leslie Galt, the grave young lover of Dorothy, had from the first found a friend in Sybil, and she had been a willing screen for hardly secured hand-pressures at sundry partings; had made swift and fairly reasonable excuses for brief, but to Mrs. Lawton unaccountable, absences from porch or parlor; had given many a vital hint, that he had followed to his profit, and, in consequence, he had fallen into the habit of depending upon her sisterly advice in his love-affairs. "When in doubt, consult your Sybil!" was his way of describing the situation; and on that morning, being in doubt, he had appeared at Mrs. Van Camp's and had sought an interview before work began. After greetings and a few commonplaces had been exchanged, a slight pause was broken by Sybil saying, briskly: "Brother-to-be! you are evidently on the anxious seat about something, so rise up like a little man and tell me all about what brought you there! Do you know [she cocked her head to one side in a ludicrous imitation of old Poll], you look like a young person who, having gone and done something he is half sorry for, is now in search of a friend who will brace him up and tell him how wondrous wise he has been?" Galt laughed rather nervously, rather flatly, and a dismal "Ha! ha!" came in quick response from beneath the sofa. "There!" the speaker went on; "did you hear that? There's the same clear, mirthful ring in that laugh that yours had just now--so hearty!" He threatened the girl with the walking-stick he was rolling restlessly across his knee. "Upon my word," he said, "you are wonderfully well named. I believe you are a true descendant of the mighty Cumæan Sybil of old, whose peculiar business methods worried Tarquin of Rome--just as you will in all probability worry Mr. Thrall! Sybil, do you see what that wretched bird is about? He is cutting the buckle off your slipper." "Go away!" exclaimed she, pushing the ancient torment from her. "Scratch poor Poll!" hoarsely suggested the bird, cocking his head to one side in just the manner she had been imitating a moment before. "I won't!" she refused. "I scratched your treacherous old head for half an hour, and had to trim my nails for my trouble! Go away, Poll! Oh, Leslie! take him off, he's getting cross, and he'll bite my skirt full of holes if you don't!" And, after some little manoeuvring, the green tyrant was induced to clamber laboriously and profanely on to the stick, and was thus carried to Mrs. Van Camp, who cried: "Come to his mamma, then, and stop his naughty damning! and let dear mamma scratch Poll's pretty head!" adding aside to Galt: "It's so odd, he always speaks so much more distinctly when he swears. Just hear how plainly he is damning me now, yet words that I have been trying with all possible care to teach him he gives in such guttural tones that only a loving ear can comprehend them." "Yes," replied the young man, "it's probably an inherited preference, since it is common to all parrots. Sailors have told me that even the females--who do not talk, you know, save in the exceptional case that makes the rule--even they are capable of saying 'hell!' with apparent appreciation, though they never learn another word." "Dear me, how interesting!" smiled Mrs. Van Camp, who then sweetly asked: "Are you, by any chance, concerned in the establishment of Sunday-schools in your river town?" Amid general laughter Leslie returned to Sybil, who gurgled: "Oh, dear boy; never again try to poke fun at my god-mother! But now that Poll has gone, what is the matter?" "Just this: day after to-morrow is Dorothy's birthday, and----" "Oh!" murmured Sybil, and drew nearer with brightening eyes. "You want to get a present for her. Well?" "I've already got it," said Galt, anxiously, "and now I'm wondering what she will think of it. May I show it to you, and will you tell me honestly whether I should offer it or get something else?" She nodded her head, and first he drew from his coat-pocket a cabinet photograph of Mrs. Lawton, which he returned, thanking her for its, to her, mysterious loan. Then he took from its tissue wrapping a locket. "Oh, how pretty!" cried Sybil. "A 'D' in pearls on one side, and on the other"--she gave him a roguish glance of understanding--"a violet in enamel!" But his face kept its unsmiling, anxious look. "Open it," he said. "Is there a picture, Leslie? Oh, I am glad! An empty locket always seems such an absurdity. Oh!" For two pictures were within. She gave a startled glance, and continued, "Mamma! Such a good likeness, too, and--" a pause, and, in a lower tone, she added, "and _your_ mother!" For, looking at that fair-haired, gentle-faced woman, one saw at a glance from whom Galt had obtained his steady gray eyes. "You don't think Dorothy will misunderstand, do you?" he asked. "Yet it has just occurred to me that some people shrink from reminders of, of-- Sybil, there is just that one cloud upon my perfect joy that my beloved mother cannot know and love my promised wife!" Raising big, tear-brimmed eyes to his face she said, gently: "Very likely Dorrie will tell you that she can, for _her_ faith is absolutely boundless." "God bless her!" whispered Galt. "Amen! to that," answered her sister. "Leslie," she went on, "your gift is an inspiration! I did not know a man was capable of such delightful sentiment. And Dorothy will be touched to the heart by your pathetic little effort to share your happiness with the dear mother who is absent." His face cleared. "Thank you!" he said. "I see no one wears lockets at the throat now, so I got this to suspend it from." He rose to bring from his pocket a box. The bell rang, but they did not notice it, and the man going to the door in his ancient and wonderfully cut mulberry livery for once failed to wring surreptitious laughter from the young visitor. The box held a heavy chain bracelet of gold. "Goodness!" cried Sybil, "don't put that on Dorrie's left arm, or you will break it again!" Then, as he slipped the gifts back into his pocket, she said: "Leslie, dear, they are beautiful! Dorothy will be delighted, and I love you because you are so good to her!" She took his face between her hands, and, reaching up, kissed his cheek, and Stewart Thrall, unannounced, entering the front room, saw her, and stood stock still, while a sick qualm of jealousy drained the color from his face and turned his hands to ice. Then, like one cruelly wounded by a treachery, he recalled, with fierce anger, those seemingly honest words, "I never had a lover in my life!" and, out of a momentary darkness about him, came the clear voice of Sybil, saying: "You are not looking well this morning, Mr. Thrall." Being coldly assured he was quite as well as usual, she went on: "Let me introduce Mr. Galt, of whom I am very proud, because I never had a brother until Dorothy presented me with this one." The sudden lighting of the new-comer's face, was startling as he turned his brilliant eyes on Galt and crushed his hand in hearty greeting. "Let me offer congratulations," he smiled. "Indeed, you should be doubly congratulated, your position is so much more secure and agreeable as a brother to this young lady than it would have been had she 'been a sister to you.'" "Oh!" laughed Sybil, "he never gave me a chance to make him that offer! There's no flitting from flower to flower about a Galt! They may be a bit cool and hard, but they are true!" Thrall winced at the unconscious thrust. She slipped her hand under Leslie's arm, and, giving it a little squeeze, added: "You see, I've been studying up your family records along with those of the Montagues and Capulets." After a few courteous words the men saluted, and Sybil went on out into the hall with Leslie, to give some final message for Dorothy before saying good-by. And Thrall walked to a window and leaned his head against the cool glass. He closed his eyes and muttered to himself: "Good God! Good God!" and yet again, in utter helplessness, "Good God!" He recalled that sick jealousy, the almost insensate rage, that had possessed him at the sight of that innocent caress, and said to himself: "It is useless to deny it longer, I love that child blindly, stupidly, senselessly!" Then he lifted his head quickly, indignantly saying: "No! no! that would mean infatuation--the besotting, mere physical attraction, that men who are not Galts yield to, and repent of so swiftly! No! In her, I love the dear ideal I sought and dreamed of in young manhood. It is the purity, the joyous spirit, the high ambition, the unawakened power of loving, and the beauty--the sullen, smiling, changing beauty--that charms, holds, and fascinates me! Oh, yes! I love her--no doubt left of that. And principally because she has no right in it at all she is becoming the ruling factor of my life. I knew the danger to myself of this daily close companionship; yet that being the devil's plan and he my honored master, I pretended doubt of Mordaunt's skill, and took the task of training into my own hands. And now--well, self-deception being over, I must trust to my powers of dissembling to hide from her the longing love that may only speak through lips dead three hundred years ago. Ah, Will! sweet Will Shakspere! you were ever a warm lover; but, depend upon it, your glowing words will not be the cooler from my delivery of them!" He laughed at his own fancy, and Sybil, returning, said: "I'm glad to hear that laugh, Mr. Thrall; for positively, when I saw you first, I thought you looked almost ill. And, see how unconsciously selfish one can be, I was quite aware of a fleeting regret for a lost rehearsal, when my better self came forward in sympathy for you! But you will observe that I thought of my own interests first. Humanity must be very disappointing to its Creator! What on earth is the matter with god-mamma?" Mrs. Van Camp, with ringed hands high in air, was summoning them both to come to the extension-room, from whence she distantly chaperoned all their many and prolonged rehearsals. "Come! come quickly!" she cried. "You, neither of you, really appreciate him! And you will doubt my assertions unless you hear him your own selves! Hush! hush!" She lifted a warning finger, and they drew cautiously near to the big sun-flooded window, where, on his perch, standing on one foot, the other curled up into a bluish gray ball, stood Poll, his head on one side, a white film drawn over his vicious old eye, while, in a rasping voice, he said, over and over again: "'Omeo! 'Omeo!" "Is he not wonderful?" whispered his adoring mistress. "Why? what?" began Thrall. But Sybil shook her head warningly, and even while Mrs. Van Camp's eyes flashed ominously at him he understood, and exclaimed, in tones of amazed admiration: "If he is not calling Romeo, I'm a sinner!" "'Omeo! 'Omeo!" rasped Poll, and Mrs. Van Camp, unable to restrain herself longer, clasped him to her bosom, whereupon he yelled and swore and screeched, and swallowed two buttons from the front of her gown. "Perhaps they will kill him?" hopefully whispered Thrall. "Not a bit of it!" laughed Sybil; "they do him good! He has bolted nearly half a string of beads for me since I've been here! Oh, is he not awful?" Mrs. Van Camp was finally forced to put him in his cage for punishment, and to quiet him a blanket was being wrapped about the top, when suddenly, with surprising distinctness, he croaked "Dead! dead!" then "'Omeo! 'Omeo!" again. And Mrs. Van Camp, with emotion, pressed Thrall's hands and kissed Sybil, and blessed them for their long rehearsals, that were ending in instructing her dear, dear Polly! And the pair writhed in a very anguish of suppressed mirth, until Mrs. Van Camp went back to her embroidery, and their laughter in the drawing-room could be laid to the account of "acting." * * * * * Next day Sybil had been presented to the company, on the stage of the Globe. She was being announced as an amateur, and people were filled with wonder that a young girl could pass from the drawing-room directly to the stage. But her first scene was not over before some knowing smiles and glances were being exchanged, and one of the actresses was saying: "Amateur--drawing-room? Well, she is from the drawing-room, no doubt of that; but she has halted at some other theatre before reaching this one, for she is no amateur!" "Oh, I don't know!" argued the "old woman," who was, of course, cast for the Nurse. "I find her quite novicey in the 'business' of our scenes." "That may be," replied the other speaker, a blonde person, referred to by Roberts as "that devil divorcée!" the first term alluding to her malicious temper, the second to the scandalous divorce that preceded her appearance in New York. "It may be that she is not familiar with the 'business' of Juliet, but did you see her awhile ago looking for her boa? The carpenter told her it was hanging across a chair on the 'o. p.' side, and she crossed over instantly to get it? To an amateur the 'o. p.' side would have been Greek. And when something was said about 'the borders,' did you see how quickly she looked up at them? Amateur? Call up the marines to listen to that yarn, but I was not born yesterday!" "No, dear!" pleasantly acquiesced the other. "No one who has seen you would make such a charge, I'm sure!" "Oh, don't be too clever, for your own good! You shouldn't waste such brilliant bon-mots on a mere actress!" "Merest mere!" interrupted a voice from behind her. "Don't glare so, you'll spoil your beautiful expression. Good Lord!" For the angry face had suddenly wreathed itself in smiles, and the divorcée advanced with outstretched hand to meet Sybil, who, the scene being over, was hesitating which way to turn. "Come and sit here by me," she cooed. "Does your throat get dry from long speaking? Mine does." And she offered a beautiful little bonbonnière, saying, "Try these French paste troches, they are delicious." And the actor, Joseph Grant, who detested her, said, aside to old Mrs. Elmer: "Do you see that? Manice is not getting ready to pump, is she? She'll know that pretty girl's history clear from the very day of her birth before the next act is set." "Not if Stewart Thrall is as clever as I think he is. There!" chuckled the old woman. "What did I tell you? Oh, do look at Manice's face!" For Mr. Thrall had suddenly called out, seeing who was talking to her: "Miss Lawton! Here I am in the parquet. Your aunt would like to speak to you during this wait!" And no one guessed that the white-haired, upright old person attending Sybil, as watchful chaperon, was really only Mrs. Van Camp's ancient maid, who, at the instigation of Thrall, had been commanded thus to masquerade. And the papers duly noted: "That the young society bud, who had abandoned all social delights for love of art, had arrived promptly at the stage-door, an aristocratic, white-haired lady--a relative--accompanying her, and waiting patiently during the entire rehearsal, thus disposing of the rumor that her family was bitterly opposing the step she was taking." Truly Thrall was pulling the wires, even the very little wires, for small people must be made to dance as well as great ones, if your ballroom is to present a really animated appearance. Miss Cora Manice was not in the bill, and her unnecessary presence at rehearsals met with such frowning disapproval from Thrall that she withdrew, but with a furious face that fully presaged, to those who understood, the tempest that burst later on, in that private office, whose secret, shade-hung door was never used. The other members of the company were wholly indifferent as to whether the interloper sank or swam. Jim Roberts stood afar off, and watched with burning, eager eyes every movement the young girl made, and his swift anticipation of her slightest wish soon attracted attention and comment; and one day some fellow said: "I believe Jim's gone back on Thrall, at last, and has taken a new master." "No," replied Joseph Grant, "you mean a new mistress!" and this exquisite joke almost strangled maker and hearer with laughter. The rehearsals were almost over. Scenery and properties took up much time, and made them very wearying, but there was a delightful break when Thrall made coffee in his office, and with Margaret, the ancient maid, doing propriety, in the corner, he served his "queen to be" with all the skill of a French waiter, and all the tenderness of a mother, while, with a hearty girl's appetite, she disposed of dainty sandwiches, coffee, and fruit--save on that one day when she ran out and gave every blessed sandwich there was to a poor waif whom she saw from the window. "Why did you not give him money?" Thrall asked. "I had none," she frankly answered. "You should have told me, then I would have given him something for you." She frowned a bit, and answered: "He would not have dared enter any place about here, and I could not put him to the torture of waiting--forgive me!" And one day--one threatening day, when gas was burning everywhere, so dark it was--Thrall told himself he could do no more for this creature who had grown so precious in his secret sight. Only one thing troubled his artistic sense: Sybil's Juliet was a trifle too frank--too boyishly honest in her love. The soft confusion, the flushing cheek and drooping eye, that sweetly contradict the open plainness of her speech, were missing. He knew why it was so; and when the artist in him asked if he would have it otherwise, the man, recalling that sick qualm of jealousy, answered: No! no! Rehearsal being over, Sybil had sent old Margaret home in the carriage that Thrall had hired for them, and had herself turned downtown a few blocks, and had then gone across to a little shop, where stage shoes were to be tried on. "I'm afraid Mrs. Van Camp will be angry if I leave you, Miss Sybil," the woman had protested. "There's an awful storm coming up, too!" "Nonsense!" said the girl, who even then had to hold her hat on with both hands, so high was the wind. "Go on, god-mother needs you at once! I'll be home in no time, but I can't leave those shoes another day. Suppose they should be wrong in some way? By-by!" and, laughing, she faced the tearing wind. Coming from the shop she felt the rain begin to fall. She fairly flew along the streets. Two cars passed without heeding her signal. What should she do? The theatre? She had a right to seek shelter there, surely, and that way she rushed. A sign came hurling through the air! She screamed, and the next moment dashed, damp, chill, dishevelled, into the vestibule. At the bang of the great door young Barney, pale under the box-office gas-light, raised his head and looked through the little window, trying to see who was outside, but the darkness was almost that of night, and Sybil, catching her breath in gasps, said: "I beg your pardon, Mr. Barney, I--I have just run in here for shelter--it's awful outside! Don't you know me? I'm Miss--Miss--" She stopped, in confusion. A tall man was stooping to peer out over Barney's shoulder. Those well-shaped, amazingly brilliant eyes were unmistakable. Then a voice of incredulity, of pleased incredulity, was saying: "It's not Miss Lawton, alone in this fearful storm, surely?" The door was pulled open, and through the out-streaming light came Stewart Thrall. His overcoat over one arm, and a closely furled umbrella in the hand, whose finger and thumb also held an unlit cigar, told plainly that he was just leaving, that had she been one single moment later she would have found only Barney in the theatre. Only one moment, but, oh, there are single moments full, replete, and pregnant with possibilities--moments that may bring forth results dire and strange! William Henry Bulkley's one moment had been sufficient for the mad runaway of the big chestnut, and things more terrible than horses may fiercely break away from all restraint in equally brief time. But Sybil, shaken, breathless, and embarrassed in the dusk, made, unconsciously, a mental, never-to-be-forgotten portrait of Stewart Thrall standing in that informing stream of light--handsome, debonair, stately of height, and graceful of bearing, and on his face that eager look that made it strangely young. He held his hand out: "Miss Lawton, is it really you? Why--good heaven, you are wet and cold!" The wind rattled windows, doors, and signs so that she could scarcely hear his words; but the warm pressure of his clasping hand was comforting to her. "Where is your carriage? eh? I can't hear you!" Something, probably a billboard, fell with a crash against the door, and the girl gave a violent start of terror. Suddenly Thrall turned, still holding her hand fast. He cast his coat, umbrella, and cigar into the office, saying sharply to Barney: "I'm not here--to anyone! You understand?" Barney looked up inquiringly. Their eyes met fully, and Thrall repeated: "Not to _anyone_!" And, closing the box-office door, he felt for the baize ones leading to the auditorium, pushed one leaf open and entered, drawing Sybil after him by the hand. As it closed he reached up and softly pushed the bolt. Outside, in the office, Barney stared stupidly, then began a double shuffle, chuckling to himself: "Oh, wait till Manice gets on to this! But one of these days the governor will stand up to her, and then she'll get a pointer on temper that will astonish her, I guess! He's too easy! I wish he'd chuck her out of the company--spiteful, bleached cat!" Undoubtedly a very vulgar-minded boy was Barney. Inside the red baize doors Sybil was amazed to find almost perfect silence. The auditorium, being in the very middle of the building, was cut off from outer sounds. Even the wild shriek of the wind was greatly softened. The darkness seemed at first complete, but the accustomed eye could see a faint grayness at the stage end opposite them. A row of open French boxes extended across the back of the lower circle. Thrall laid his hat in a chair in one of them as he passed, and still leading Sybil, said, in a cheerful, matter-of-course tone, intended to quiet any possible uneasiness of mind: "This way, Miss Lawton! Don't be afraid, there are no steps. The register is right in this corner, and there is at least enough heat on to dry your damp clothing. It would be a pretty serious thing, my young lady, for you to catch cold at this late hour. There, you can feel a little hot air, can't you?" The building now fairly trembled under the force of the gale, and Thrall, with a tightening of his fingers on hers, asked, reproachfully: "In God's name, child, what induced you to face a storm like this? Tell me." But in that warm, dark silence words would not come easily. She murmured something about "god-mamma's needing Margaret's services," paused, added a confused assurance that her "stage shoes had proved satisfactory," and became mute. The empty auditorium was vast, the white linen hangings, draping boxes and dress-circle, were mysterious as the swaying mosses of a Southern swamp. A sense of isolation came upon her, of distance from the world. She did not seem to think consecutively, but in broken, fragmentary, foolish bits. She wondered why Mr. Thrall was so silent. Was it because--. She wondered if her dress was drying all around evenly--if her boots would spoil from the heat--her mother had thought them expensive, and--and how many nerves and pulses did one girl carry about with her? And why need they all quiver and beat at the same time? She drew her hand gently from Thrall's, but he took up the other that was still in a wet and clammy glove. Silently, deftly unbuttoning and peeling it off, he softly chafed the little member. Sybil drew a long, slow breath--what was it that troubled her? The darkness seemed to hide something--secret, sweet! A strange, evanescent perfume seemed to have been left out there by beauty, wealth, and fashion! In the mingling odors of rice-powder, orris, violet, and fine tobacco in the close warm air there was a sensuous suggestion of eyes and smiles, of whispers and pressed hands! The potent perfume of human love was all about her! She moved restlessly. "I--the heat! my head!" she whispered, and drew away from him. He put his foot out and closed the register. "I--I must go now," she slowly added, when there came a sound--a steady, loud sort of even roar, and Thrall knew a very deluge of icy rain must be descending upon the city to be heard so plainly there. "Go?" he queried, gently. "Go? Why, my child, you could not stand on your feet a moment--the gale would dash you to the earth. Stay here, where you are safe." The silence closed about them again, yet she vaguely felt there was no calm in it--it seemed only dormant. Then dimly it came to her to ask Mr. Thrall to let her go to the box-office to wait, when suddenly the building shook as a toy house might have done, and there came a deafening, rumbling crash above their very heads, it seemed, though truly it was a chimney falling above the stage roof, and Sybil's one wild scream of terror was smothered on Thrall's breast! "Don't, don't, my--!" he whispered, hoarsely, holding her trembling hand to his lips and covering it with kisses. "Don't shiver so! 'Twas nothing! You are quite safe--quite safe! Sybil--Princess! I'd shelter you in my arms, and guard you with my life--always! if I might! if I might!" His arms were about her. The dull roar of the rain was like the roaring from a distant world--they were alone--utterly alone--in the dimness warm and fragrant. She was all unstrung and weak from fright. His words seemed half real, half dreamed. She raised her head--she put two impotent little hands against his breast. "Please!" she gasped. "I am not frightened now! I--" A strange lassitude was upon her. A door somewhere banged heavily--she shivered as at a blow! Her head sank back upon his breast. He bent over her, his face all passion-pale, his heavy, drooping lids betraying their girl-like length of lashes. "Sybil!" he breathed. Her eyes, wide and startled, met his. "Sybil!" he entreated. "Sweetheart!" His lips met hers in one long, tender kiss, and the house rocked in the fury of the gale! CHAPTER XXII PREPARING THE PIT For some time the question troubling the Lawton family had been how and where to establish Sybil for the term of her engagement at the Globe. Returning to Woodsedge after performances was not to be thought of. No, a residence in the city was an absolute necessity. Mrs. Lawton indignantly wondered if Sybil Van Camp had ever realized that a sort of deputy-maternity devolved upon a god-mother--a term that had taken Leslie Galt, who was sharing the family council, out of the room in search of a handkerchief in his overcoat pocket. At which Mrs. Lawton gloomily expressed a fear of his "becoming a fussy old man in time, because," said she, "Leslie had a handkerchief in his breast pocket that might easily have served his purpose. Now, Dorothy," she continued, "take a mother's advice, and check at once any symptom of faddishness that appears in him, or he'll have you in heelless shoes or on a milk diet, or something of that sort, before you know it. But really, dear, you shouldn't interrupt. [Leslie returned to his seat here.] The question at this moment is, what is to become of your unfortunate sister; for though she has cast in her lot with 'mere players,' and has rejected the comfort and sweet privacy of home life, it does not follow that she is prepared to pass the rest of her life upon the unsheltered, stony streets of the city. What is the matter with you, Leslie? You are not in need of another handkerchief, are you? As I was saying when someone interrupted me, I doubt if Sybil Van Camp ever had any idea of the duties of a god-mother." "Rattle," counted Sybil on her fingers, "silver mug, corals----" "Given long ago!" triumphed Dorothy. "Renouncing the devil for you," went on Sybil, "and seeing that you knew creed, prayers, commandments, and church catechism----" "Which she didn't do!" cried Mrs. Lawton; "for I have heard your father bribing you many a time to learn and repeat them to him. And now, if she had any appreciation of the duties devolving upon her, would she not open her home to her god-daughter, and shelter her for a brief period from the perils of the city?" "Upon my word, mamma," laughed Sybil, "if you keep on in that strain I'll drop down on all fours and beg for a bone. Anyone would think you were speaking of a homeless dog. God-mother Van Camp has done more for me than I can ever repay, and she has invited me to stay in her house during my engagement, but it is not to be thought of. Why, papa, dear, I am now quite turning the household topsy-turvey by the irregularity of my hours. Rehearsals may be short, or they may be long. The cook gets cross, and god-mamma gets anxious. Her daily life is regulated like a railroad schedule for precision and exactitude of time. Then, when acting once begins, the watching for my late return at night would be a cruel penance to god-mamma and ancient Margaret and the butler Murphy, who is the greatest old woman of the lot. No, I can't think of so desecrating that last retreat of all the Knickerbocker proprieties; but, in a boarding-house----" "A barracks!" said Leslie. "Oh, I know all about boarding-houses and their keepers, from the black-bugled lady with ancestors down to the loud-voiced, false-fronted person who makes her husband eat in the kitchen, and I tell you a boarding-house is quite out of the question for you." "That's just what Mr. Thrall said," eagerly interrupted Sybil, "when the matter was mentioned in his presence. And he knows a woman, whom he has employed for years as a wardrobe woman and sort of general dresser, to help those ladies who have no maids of their own. She is a widow, and she owns--mortgaged, of course--one of those old-fashioned, two-and-a-half-story, red-brick basemented houses----" "Take a breath, Syb!" laughed Dorothy. "That's a gem," gravely asserted Galt, "that descriptive sentence is. Spoken rapidly it does leave the impression that the widow is mortgaged and a doubt as to the red brick reaching beyond the basement. But when one writes it all out, and punctuates carefully----" "Leslie Galt, my young brother! Will you remember that you are still on probation? Final vows have not yet been administered. Though under instruction, you have not yet been admitted into the Lawton community for life!" "That's about the only thing I do remember at all clearly these days," answered Galt, smiling meaningly at Dorothy. But John Lawton rumpled his thin hair, and said, anxiously: "Let's get back to that mortgaged house, daughter--it's most train time for you, dear." "Well," went on Sybil, drawing her father's hand about her neck as she spoke, "her name is--is, oh, something with an S, Mrs.--Stow--Stover-- Stine--Sty--Stivers! that's it! Mrs. Jane Stivers--odd, isn't it, papa? And she----" "My dear child," remonstrated Mrs. Lawton, somewhat wearily, "why will you not adopt my method of remembering names? It's so embarrassing at times to have a cognomen escape you, just when you feel it, too, on the tip of your tongue, but can't get it off. Now, I always associate a name with a thing or an action or an idea, and the result is I never have to go skipping through the alphabet as you and Dorothy do. I recall the case of Mrs.--Mrs.--dear me! Mrs.--you know, girls, to whom I refer--that woman I disliked so. I like most people, but she was underbred--at One Hundredth Street? You must remember her perfectly. I know at the time I associated her name with something--er--er, something she hated. Now, what did that woman hate? Her husband was bandy--polite enough, but bandy, and he had a cross eye! Something she hated--now what?" "Perhaps she hated anything very straight," laughed Dorothy. "I think I should under the circumstances!" "There!" broke in Mrs. Lawton. "What did I tell you? Straight--she hated anything straight, because her name was Crook! And Mr. Crook was cross-eyed! It's infallible, my system! But do get on, Sybil, or really you will lose that train!" "Well, papa!" said the girl, in a quivering voice, "Mrs. Stivers's house is--Mr. Thrall says--fairly near the theatre. It is quiet as a church, and in a most respectable quarter. She has been in the habit of renting the second floor to student lodgers. She has never kept regular boarders, but Mr. Thrall thinks she might, for a few dollars increase in the rent, take me in, instead, and do for me. He uses so many Englishy expressions in ordinary conversation. He says her age, character, and habits would recommend her, and another advantage would be that I could go home nights under her wing, without troubling Mr. Roberts for escort, who lives in the opposite direction. The parlor, he says, is given over to horse-hair. Mrs. Stivers was married during the mahogany reign of terror, you see. But I could do what I liked in my own room, to modernize. And, mamma, he proposes, as she can't come from her work out here, to be interviewed by you, that you authorize Mrs. Van Camp [Letitia straightened up in her chair] to receive her and talk the matter over, and then to report to you for your decision." Mrs. Lawton closed her eyes, and said, impressively: "A most sensible suggestion from a man très comme il faut!" To Sybil's questioning eyes Mr. Lawton answered: "Yes, dear! That has a promising sound. What do you think, Leslie?" "I agree with you, sir, if the woman is kindly disposed. The fact of her working in the theatre should be a distinct advantage. The question is, will she board as well as lodge her guest? For even if a restaurant were next door Sybil is far too pretty a girl to pass in and out unnoticed." "So very like me," breathed Letitia. "It's the Bassett coloring, I think, that attracts the public eye." "Dorothy!" exclaimed Sybil, turning from adjusting her hat before the dim old mirror, "my descendants shall rise up and call you blessed, for in the fine art of selecting a brother for your only sister you take the cake. Oh, papa! I beg your pardon! I--I meant she wins the laurel!" "Sybil!" moaned Mrs. Lawton, distressfully, "I don't wish to rebuke you at the very moment of leave-taking, but, my very dear child, you must really check your tendency toward reckless speech. To allude to your descendants when you are not yet even engaged is not far from indelicacy; and, Dorothy, causeless laughter is rightly esteemed a proof of bad manners. Good-by, my dear; say to Mrs. Van Camp I am quite unable to go to the city in this cold weather, and must therefore ask her to act for me in the case of Mrs.--er, I don't think I quite caught the name? Eh? oh, Stivers--yes, I shall easily remember that by connecting it with a saying contradicted." "A what, mamma?" laughed the girls. "Stivers?" repeated Galt, meditatively, "a 'saying contradicted!' I can't find the connection. It's a mystery--impenetrable!" "Dear me!" exclaimed Mrs. Lawton, "it's very simple. You need just say to yourself 'not worth a stiver'--there's your saying; but she owns a house, there's your contradiction, and you have the name as quickly as possible. Yes, I shall always remember the name Stivers!" "If," slowly put in John, "if you don't happen to forget 'the saying.'" And good-by being said, with arms about waists the sisters held in the hall one of those secret conclaves over only heaven and themselves knew what, but without which they were never known to part for more than twenty-four hours. Then with her moon face all red with heat and hurry Lena rushed out with a package of hot cookies, crying: "I bake dem cake youst by der train time, und dere blazes hot! But I tie 'em mit a long string so you don't com' burnt by der hants!" Mrs. Lawton came to the door and indignantly demanded: "What folly and presumption is this, Lena Klippert? Retire at once and take your obnoxious offering with you!" "Den you don' vant dem cookies, my Miss Lady? You tink I com' by der cheek, uf I bring 'em here?" poor Lena quavered, shamefacedly. But Sybil fitted the looped string over her finger and flashed a radiant smile at the faithful little German drudge, and, dangling the package in the air, quoted: "'This little pig went to market!' Just wait till to-night, Lena, when I'm alone in my room, and the little pig will have cookies, eh?" "Ja! ja!" nodded and smiled Lena. "You com' make very fine little pig, Miss Sybbils; sometimes you can com' black, but ven you smiles, your lips youst curl up like a flower!" And, amid general laughter, Sybil departed for the city with Leslie doing escort duty, while John and Dorothy Lawton received an informing lecture upon the structure, quality, and quantity of brain to be found in the low-class Germans that nicely filled up the rest of their afternoon. At Mrs. Van Camp's house Sybil's return was followed almost immediately by the announcement from the wearer of the mulberry livery of: "A person--an elderly female person--to see you, ma'am; by appointment, she claims, ma'am. Show her up? Yes, ma'am. Hem! if you'll excuse the boldness--Mr. Poll's in the library, and he do be swearing awful, beyond anythink, ma'am. What for is it? Why, ma'am, someone--I suppose it's the young lady, ma'am--put a shaving-glass in his cage, and he's been cussin' of he'self ever since he laid eyes on it. Shall I be carryin' him to the basement, or covering him up? I don't know. Yes, ma'am, I'll take him down as you say." And a few moments later he returned, haughtily ushered in Mrs. Jane Stivers, and retired. Sybil, entering by the opposite door, saw a thin, elderly woman, whose dark hair sprinkled with gray and banded smoothly down over each ear, whose small, dark eyes, whose thin, pale-lipped, closely closed mouth, and long, drooping nose spelled as plainly as letters could the word--discreet. Her black gown and unspeakably respectable bonnet, her thick but plain cloak, her neat cashmere gloves, were all prim adjuncts to that picture of _discretion_. She stood in true servant-like attitude, eyes down and hands crossed at the exact waist-line; and as Sybil reached her god-mother's side that lady, raising her glasses to look at the stranger, said: "Mrs. Stivers, I wish to--why! why! you're Martin--you are surely Jane Martin?" and sat staring. "Yes, Madam Van Camp," she replied, "I am Jane that was in your sewing-room three years and more. I didn't think you'd remember a servant's face so long, so I didn't tell Mr. Thrall I'd been in your service. My husband was a boss carpenter in a theatre, and that took me there. Me being a good needle-woman, I got work in the wardrobe, and gradually learned the business thorough-like; and when my husband died, as I wanted to hold on to the house, I began taking lodgers as well as working at the theatre, so as to pay off the mortgage some time, I do hope, ma'am." Both women sighed sympathetically as they listened to Mrs. Stivers's calm and self-controlled statement of her financial and professional situation, little dreaming that the oppressive mortgage existed only in the imagination of the undemonstrative widow, who found it too powerful a lever in raising the rent of rooms, in raising her salary, and in raising the hats of compassionate observers--to be willingly abandoned. But though the house mortgage had been cancelled long ago, she was then by way of secretly placing a mortgage upon her own character for upright honesty, for sincerity, for honor. True, there was no overt agreement to dupe a young girl and to circumvent her friends; yet if she made no slip, trip, or blunder in this matter intrusted to her, she surely knew that at its end Stewart Thrall, who guided, governed, and controlled her, would hold first mortgage on her character, since by tacit, unspoken agreement she would become a living surveillance, a personified treachery, while still deceptively wearing the livery of prim respectability and honest labor. Now, Mrs. Van Camp asked the woman to be seated; expressed regret for her bereavement, and, because of the excellent impression Jane Martin had made upon her in the past, looked with unusually lenient eyes upon Jane Stivers of the present, and accepted readily her statements, and trustingly saw in her rectitude, her intelligence, and her respectful and deferential manner the most desirable sort of combination--landlady, maid, and sheep-dog. When terms came to be considered, though they seemed surprisingly easy, Sybil nervously checked Mrs. Van Camp's acceptance of them, saying that her salary hardly justified such an outlay. "Oh, Miss Lawton, if you'll pardon the interruption," said Jane Stivers, "your salary will be quite a different thing when you begin playing Juliet. Anyone would know that, as a mere matter of course. But besides that, when Mr. Thrall did me the service of mentioning this matter, he honored my little home with a call, and as he was going he puts on his hat and says: 'And I must have now a bit of a business talk with our little Royal Princess'--that's you, Miss; theatrical people are great for tagging folks with names, be you high or be you low--you're bound to get a tag; even I, miss, have been 'Jane Penny' ever since some rattle-brain found that Stiver was Dutch for a penny." Sybil recalled her mother's old saying, "Not worth a stiver," and laughed, while Jane went on. "Yes, ma'am, he said he must have a little talk with the Royal Princess and add a cipher to her salary, so she could settle down with a quiet mind, free for Juliet alone." And on the strength of that report Mrs. Van Camp accepted the offered terms, but advised Sybil to run over with "Martin," as she would call her, "to look at the apartments and ascertain if there was a sun exposure for at least one room; and whether the drains were all right, and the gas-pipes innocent of dangerous leakage." And Sybil--the wish being father to the thought--declared the house quite perfect. Mrs. Lawton was notified by letter, and while awaiting her answer a "lightning-change artist" had been at work upon walls and floor of the front room. The drab and blue horror of the wall had become a clear primrose yellow with white enamelled picture-rails. The floor being of old, badly matched pine-boards, and there being no time for painting or staining, was completely covered with a dull grayish-green carpet, with pure white rugs before sofa, writing-desk, etc.; and with flowing white curtains with broad primrose ribbon-ties and a white-framed rocker with cushion of grayish green, flowered over with pale primroses. These changes made so magical an effect that Sybil, coming on the third day to take possession, stood astounded. "Yes, ma'am," evenly admitted Jane Stivers, "it was a bit of a rush, and I could not manage to get the second room done so quickly. The expense? Oh, I have been saving up for months for the express purpose of doing up my rooms." But Sybil was amazed at the artistic taste shown here; it was in such strange contrast to the black hair-cloth, the shiny white and gold paper, the wax flowers of the parlor, that yet evidently filled Jane's soul with pride. "Whom did you advise with, Mrs. Stivers?" she asked, as her fingers stroked the flowered cushion. "No one. I did it all myself." Then, as a quick side-glance caught the unbelief on her lodger's face, she added: "No, I don't know, on second thought, but what I did get a hint about the color you would be likely to favor. I recall now that Mr. Thrall remarked, seeing that paper hanging in the dealer's window: 'What a fine background for some dark-haired woman.' So I just caught the idea, as you may say." "You are a very clever woman, I see," answered Sybil, who went joyously about her unpacking, looking every ten minutes from the window for Dorothy, who was coming with home photographs, Lena's personally constructed pillow-sham with a large blue cotton "S. L." worked in the middle, a beautiful old paper-knife from papa, a silver powder-box from Leslie, and two pretty but broken fans from mamma, who thought they would decorate a room nicely, giving quite a little studio-like touch--all to be used in "homing the rooms," as Dorothy put it. Godmamma Van Camp sent three really precious old engravings that Dorothy, with hat still on, went about rapturously holding up against the clear yellow wall, smacking her young lips as though she were tasting something. The most exciting moment of the girls' day was when going into the second room Dorothy pointed to a corner cabinet and said: "What's that, Syb?" "What's what?" asked that person from near the bottom of the trunk Jane was waiting to remove to the attic. "That in the corner?" Sybil rose, red and hot, and looked while Jane pulled the trunk out. Then she exclaimed: "Why, that was not there when I came to look at the rooms first!" She went over to it. A small visiting-card was attached to the key--the card of Stewart Thrall. She opened the cabinet door and revealed a coffee outfit. Two cries of delight arose; alcohol was sent for--the picnic was on! In Africa when a creature is too mighty for the hunters, the wily natives contrive a great trap--they dig a deep pit, and then cover it over with frail green boughs and grasses, until it looks like the rest of the green matted ground about it. They are careful, too, to place this trap in the neighborhood of some rushing river or some stilly pool where in the moonlight or at earliest flush of dawn the great creature must go to lap the cooling water. Then, when it has crashed through into helpless captivity, the small cunning enemy may work their will upon it. Now, the strange thing is--this cruel and treacherous practice is not confined to Africa. Sometimes pits are dug before young feet and carefully hidden beneath boughs of friendship and flowers of love. Right here in our great city, if we listen closely, we may hear the crashing fall of the victim! CHAPTER XXIII THE WOMAN IN THE BOX At the Globe Theatre they were settling down to a long and brilliant run. Thrall had staged the old play splendidly, costumed it royally, rehearsed it to exact precision of movement, and cast it with such knowledge, such consideration for the requirements of each character that the fiery Tybalt, the stately Prince, the benignant Friar Laurence, and the grotesque Peter were not more judiciously placed than the Apothecary, Gregory, or the Page. "Romeo and Juliet" had "caught the town"; for once the matinée girl had two idols in the same theatre. Never, never had Thrall been so raved over. In his desire to make himself look as youthful as possible for the early acts, he had permitted the Lefebvres to costume him in white, from his cap and floating ostrich plume down to his shoes; but shoes with yellow leathered heels, cloak lined with a golden yellow satin, that reappeared in such trunk puffings and love-knots of yellow lustre that all suggestion of coldness was lost in extreme richness and delicacy. Indeed, in grace and beauty and extravagance, he was the ideal courtly young popinjay of Verona--the idolized only son and heir of the mighty family of Montague. And Juliet? Truly they were a pair to joy the eye of poet or of painter! From the moment when she appeared upon the scene and the laughing mockery of her "How now! who calls?" to the Nurse, had changed into the respectful "Madam, I am here!" to her mother, the public had been enslaved by the vividness of the dark and changeful beauty of her girlish face. For Thrall's was the artificial youth of the wig, the grease paint; of skilful costuming and brilliant acting; a youth that does not care to come quite down to the footlights. But Sybil was so young that even some of the dear gaucheries of the still growing girl showed faintly in her and made tender tears start to some very worldly eyes; therefore but little was expected from her in the way of acting. So, when at the end of the first act Juliet learns from the Nurse that the young masker is really a Montague, her moaning words, "My only love sprung from my only hate; Too early seen unknown, and known too late!" were given in tones so helpless and amazed, and she stood so dazed and motionless under the shock of her discovery, that with a great roar of applause the audience hailed the actress in her! Sybil had given much thought to her part, and she had advanced some ideas of her own now and then when Thrall was teaching her the "business" of the play, as, for instance, in the potion scene. The Juliets generally rave and wildly scream the line: "As with a club, dash out my desperate brains!" and, if they have strength left, scream louder still the "----Stay, Tybalt, stay!--" and then, having swallowed the potion, declare it has "----chilled me to the heart!" that their "senses fail" them, etc., but still in fullest voice cry they: "Oh, Romeo! Romeo!" and collapse. When this was being explained Sybil asked gravely, but with dancing eyes: "Where were the rest of the Capulet family that night, I wonder? Such a dreadful row would bring the entire household, maids and stable-boys included, to the rescue. I thought this potion-taking was a secret between the Friar, Romeo, and Juliet? I believed she was half suffocated with the horror of the scenes she conjured up, and gasped the words out. Then that scream would be just as effective, I should think, if she fell on her knees near the bed and stifled her shrieks in the pillows or the bed-clothing. Would not the suppressed, almost whispering, voice add to the sense of secrecy--of danger?" And Thrall, whenever it was possible, permitted her small innovations, was even proud of them, as evidences of her natural ability. And so it came about that this new Juliet had a tang of originality about her that was delightful to the old theatre-goer; while the remarkable appreciation of the public for sheer physical beauty was shown night after night in the rounds of applause it bestowed, one after another, before a line was spoken by the ill-fated lovers as they were "discovered" in Juliet's chamber. Thrall had taken his idea in part from a picture he had seen abroad. The balcony of Juliet's wide-open window, all swathed in vines, lay before the audience. The silken ladder, plainly seen between the tubbed oranges, dangled from the ledge; the room in some disorder; the bed-curtains drawn close; low burnt candles on the dressing-table; Juliet with feet thrust into small Turkish mules, all free from pearls or ornament of any kind--a sort of idealized robe de chambre, white, trailing voluminously, frothed with lace, its open wing-like sleeves touching the floor, fell free from chin to foot, while all the dark mass of hair tumbling riotously over shoulders and clouding about her level, tragic brows suggested the new dear freedom of the nuptial chamber. In the picture, then, that the public loved, Romeo, close cap on head, long travelling cloak depending from his shoulders--being under the ban of the law--was secretly about to leave his few hours-made bride. Out on the balcony, with right foot on the silken ladder, he rested the left bent knee upon the balcony's ledge. With right arm aloft he steadied himself by holding to the vines above, while with his left arm he crushed the slender, white-robed figure close. Upon his breast her face was resting, with maddening lips and glowing eyes uplifted, her round young arms wreathing his neck; the warm, soft hair flowing over his hand and arm, seeming to him magnetic, alive, tingling! So he stood, a gracious shape, with regular fine features, with heavy amorous lids and sweeping black lashes that, downcast, helped to soften the almost savage love burning in the blue depths of his bold eyes. No more perfect picture of physical beauty and passionate, romantic love could be imagined, and it was nightly received with admiring applause, beneath which his whisper came to her: "My beloved! my beloved!" And her eyes would sink and all her throat flush red, for she had lived a lover's life-time during that one storm-shaken kiss--and she understood! Others, too, there were who, though they heard no whispered word, saw the lowered lids and moving lips of Thrall, and, knowing him of old, guessed the rest. And Roberts groaned and Manice was so like a spitting cat that poor Jim said wearily one night: "Look out, Thrall! I know the wrong side of woman pretty well, and that bleached friend of yours is going to play you a trick before long--either you or--or--" He could not force himself to speak the name, but looked so piteously at the manager that Thrall nodded, answeringly: "All right, Jim! all right! She can try all the tricks she likes on me! The--the other person's safe enough--they don't come in contact, you know! Why, you're all to pieces, and imagine things!" "She's dangerous, I tell you!" persisted Jim. "She's a coward!" contemptuously replied Thrall. "Besides, if you must know, I've succeeded in shipping her. She's to be starred in a comedy next season. Jake Huntley takes her out." "Humph!" said Jim, "that must cost you something?" "Well, yes! But better pay your piper quietly when your dance is over, and not stop to count your pennies. I'm mighty lucky to get rid of a firebrand so peaceably." "You look out, Thrall!" repeated Jim, nervously. "Don't you see that's unnatural conduct for her? She is laying a trap for you--look out, I say!" "Oh, come out and take a nip of something. You want bracing--come on!" But in a fortnight's time Thrall saw Roberts's fears justified. Miss Manice, enraged by her "release"--theatrical synonym for "dismissal"--even when profiting most by the managerial generosity, was making secret use of that coward's weapon, the anonymous letter, and each foreign mail day was watched for eagerly, and Thrall's face studied covertly with treacherous feline eyes that sought there some reflex pain or fear from the wounds she was dealing to another--until at last she was rewarded. Sybil was living in a sort of trance. Stewart Thrall had become her only law. This great success she accepted as a direct gift from him. She had been so helplessly poor, friendless! He, only, had discovered some talent in her, and she had been at first ashamed because she was dependent upon him for all the means of making anything of herself until--until, oh, pride! oh, joy! wonderful! inexplicable! he loved her! Then all was changed. She could go to him in every difficulty--she could accept help, instruction, everything, without thought of shame. Before, she had simply regarded him as the master of a beautiful art, as a stern and exacting teacher, whose approval was hard to win--until love came to glorify and lift her up to the high throne of his heart. And so absolute, so unquestioning was her faith and pride and trust, that she had as yet no thought at all of shame or of wrong done, but breathed the incense of public worship and read and re-read her printed praises, and saw the turning heads in the street, the nudging elbows, heard the swift whisper: "There she is--there's Sybil Lawton!" and all day long dreamed of that moment on the balcony when they two were as alone as though they stood upon an island and the applause was surf thundering an accompaniment to his passion-choked words. It was a double intoxication--that of both mind and heart. For a little space her life was pure joy, without one clouding thought of--_after_; without conscious knowledge of the envy and calumny, the conflict and detraction going on about her. Occasionally she heard allusions to the "Missus," as when some one would "wonder how the Missus would like this or that," and once or twice she had intended to ask Jane Stivers whether it was a nickname or just a slang term. But what did it matter--what did anything matter?--save to win the approbation of Stewart Thrall, and consequently the public. And Thrall, spoiled by the world, looking back along the twenty arid years between them, saw dead passions cast aside like so many outworn gloves; knew the price of every illegitimate whim, and had seen his own danger. Yet instead of flying from it he had trusted to the strange new desire he felt to help, to guard, to advance the interests of another, and now he found himself dominated by a great passion, such a one as none who knew him gave him credit for. Jim Roberts writhed miserably, crying: "She thinks he loves her! Great God! See her worshipping eyes! But it's not love with him--it's the joy of the pursuit; damn him! Why, oh, why do good women always love such men? Even if I were a man instead of a miserable wreck, just trembling to the fall--my reverent worship, my humble, waiting, devoted love would stand no chance against him or one like him! But why?" Poor Jim did not know that it is the bold man, who, not restrained by deep respect, pushes past the reverent waiting one, and speaking first, is first loved; and worthiness all unconsidered! But now he judged Thrall from his conduct in the past and groaned to himself: "He will leave her, just as he did my little Bess--not so soon, perhaps. This girl is many-sided and fascinating, and will not pall so soon, but the change will come. Not to her, though--Heaven bless her! She's as true as steel. Hot and fierce of temper if much tried, but loyal for life! No, the change will be in him. But when he puts her away from him--I'll put him away from the world he ko-tow's to so devotedly! I will, I swear it! in spite of threatening chair or noose! How cleverly he played his cards in placing the poor child under the 'protection'--God be merciful to the protected!--of that smug-faced, lynx-eyed hypocrite, Stivers, who would sell her soul for money! Had he really wanted Miss Lawton guarded, guided, and watched over, why did he not place her with old Mrs. Elmer--as good a woman and as true a lady as ever lived? But no, she is not a servant; she could not be dismissed or sent away on conveniently important matters of business. Sometimes I think Mrs. Elmer begins to suspect Thrall of a new treachery to the Missus, whom she is really fond of, because they are both English, I suppose. And I can see how sad the good old actress's face is as she watches the by-play between manager-actor and his beautiful young 'find.' But no matter what she may think, there'll be no scandal of her starting. And so far Sybil Lawton's own frankness has been her perfect concealment. Her immeasurable admiration of his 'manly grace and fine eyes,' her unstinted gratitude for his 'teaching and help,' are expressed openly, fervently, and as yet cause only concealed amusement. But Cora Manice is not deceived. Jealous eyes are as sharp as they are cruel. I should know, for my own show me many torturing things that other people are quite blind to; and when her sugary words of compliment became but vehicles for wounding sneer and cutting criticism, Thrall's cold anger and his expressed desire that Miss Lawton should not associate further with her told her spiteful catship all there was to tell. And if she does not drag this poor girl's name into a scandal, it will not be for want of stealthy trying. She dare not antagonize Thrall openly. If she did, her chance of starring would soar some hundred feet higher than 'Gilderoy's kite.' But oh, poor little girl! your beauty and your genius, like the bloom and perfume of the flower, act as lures to the roving, inconstant seeker of nectar. Your life will be spoiled--if it be not already. Why could Stewart Thrall not leave you alone? You would have made your way slowly, but surely and naturally. But it's no use to speculate now on what might have been. Thrall, who finds it difficult to say 'no' to anyone, could not say it to himself to save his immortal soul from burning fire! And so he wins your dear love, and by and by he will cast it away, and then my beautiful--I'll----" Jim laughed unsteadily; his pale eye had a greenish animal glare. "I'm a mere wreck--a poor broken-down, drunken actor; and yet it's curious how often it happens that the shaking, unaccustomed hand sends in the killing shot!" But Stewart Thrall loved Sybil with a difference. His life had become a drear, monotonous triviality. He had been sick to death of those brief amours that ring truest to the sound of gold. Love had so long degenerated into a coarse appetite that it had at last become veritable dead-sea fruit to him. But this little girl had thrilled him into life again, had aroused his ambition, touched his heart to tenderness and respect and love--real love, that made him try to be the man she thought him, that made him shake with fear lest she find him unworthy--as he knew himself to be. His passion was so adorned with poetry and grace and charm, so surrounded with every illusion his intellect could invent, that a wiser than Sybil Lawton might well have been swept unquestioningly into his arms. He knew the abyss he faced. He knew there was that "afterward," but he had trusted blindly to his own powers of concealment--to his self-control. Stewart Thrall's self-control! Truly, the devil has many a jest offered him in all gravity! But right or wrong--and it was all very wrong--he loved her with heart and brain, and being what he was, the immediate moment was sufficient. He was careful of the conventions, but so far as he dared he surrounded his Princess, his beloved, with the enchantments of luxury. Her rooms were bowers of flowers (they bore various cards on arrival), rare books, precious bibelots; but his fierce jealousy denied her a living pet. And in this fool's paradise they were walking, their feet among the grasses and the flowers, their beautiful mad heads high in the clouds, when the curtain rose on the play one night. The crowded house watching for Juliet's coming, at her laughing "How now, who calls?" broke into welcoming applause, which continued so long that she was forced to acknowledge the greeting. As she turned again and faced her mother, Lady Capulet, she saw a woman in the stage-box. She was alone. She leaned forward a little and looked intently, piercingly straight into her face, and Sybil noticed that the woman's hand resting on the box ledge clenched itself hard. Why, she could not have told, but at that movement her heart gave a frightened bound, and she was glad to get off the stage. She found herself strangely nervous during the balcony scene, but she could not see the strange woman from that side, and was happily forgetting her. But no sooner was she in line with the box again than its occupant fixed her as a basalisk might. No matter what went on, no matter who was speaking, those slowly moving pale-blue eyes with their whity lashes followed her, measuring her height, movements, her very heart-throbs, it seemed to the puzzled, distressed girl. She felt that there was something threatening, inimical, in the very air about her. When the chamber scene began, as she stood on the balcony with Romeo, she was instantly aware of the new rigid clasp of his arm, of the pallor about his mouth, and the sternness that shone in his erstwhile amorous eyes. Sensitive and quick, she translated these signs into disapproval of her work; her nervousness must have made her lose some point, blur some delicate passage or slur over some all-important sentence, she thought, and she tightened her arms about his neck, and whispered with dark eyes wide, like a pleading child: "Master, are you vexed? Is my work ill-done?" The rigid arm grew flexible and drew her close. The stern eyes fell to the level of her glance. "It's not negligence," she went on, "it's that woman with the cold, pale eyes--she frightens me!" He whispered swiftly, "Pay no heed! Ignore her! Let others tremble who have cause!" Tenderly he drooped the black-lashed, heavy lids which his followers adored, and, looking on his Juliet's face, he thought her mouth was like a fresh red rose, all dewy sweet and pure; and suddenly, for them, the applause was pierced by a short laugh--sneering, cold, and wounding. It might have been the sharp, cold thrust of an icicle, so violently Thrall started at the sound, and as the act moved on and Sybil faced again the occupant of the box, a slow, contemptuous smile grew about the woman's lips--a smile so injuriously significant that a flood of color rushed over Sybil's face and breast and arms, and her confusion and bewilderment were so great that those who shared the scene had once or twice to prompt her. Indeed, she might have failed utterly had she not recalled the tenderly whispered words, "Pay no heed; ignore her." Stewart's word was law. He said "ignore" this cruel, sneering creature, and she would obey and play her best--but, oh, she would be glad when the play was over! Sybil next became conscious of a certain amount of excitement--suppressed, yet evident, behind the scenes--whisperings and nudges and smiles that were gone the moment Thrall appeared; and, somehow, she felt that she was involved in what was going on; it was all vague, unreal, like a dream. Stivers, thin of figure, in black gown and white apron--her flat, hard chest covered with a sort of breastplate of neatly quilted-in needles of all numbers and pins of all sizes--had sidled into an entrance that commanded a view of the stranger's box, a most unusual thing for her to do, who rarely left the dressing-room save to carry Juliet's train as far as the stage and at once return. But there she was and Jim Roberts, dressed and ready for the Apothecary, stood shaking like a leaf beside her, and as she approached she heard him say: "I knew it! I knew she had some devil's trick in mind! That's Manice's work over there, bringing her back from London! Oh----" He stopped at sight of Sybil, and moved away a bit. She was just opening her lips to send Stivers for Mr. Thrall when a door slammed opposite, and she glanced across. It has been said that Thrall was a man who never forgot appearances, never disregarded the customary, regular social conventions, and now he was doggedly doing "the proper thing" in full view of the admiring public and the observant critic. For in his stage costume he, seemingly taking care to keep well back, was greeting with empressement the chill, flaxen blond woman there, leaning toward her to catch her valued remarks, and doing the agreeably surprised with such inimitable grace that Sybil's pained amazement at the sight wrung from her the question: "Who is that woman in the box?" Stivers slid quietly away. Miss Manice, who had been "in front," came back just then, her mean little face all aglow with satisfaction, and she it was who answered: "That, my dear? Why, that's the Missus." Sybil looked almost stupidly at her. Manice laughed. "Don't you hunderstand low-class Henglish?" she jeered, "or have you really never heard of her before?" "Who is the Missus?" slowly asked the girl. And Manice answered, sharply: "She is Mrs. Stewart Thrall!" It was Jim Roberts who caught Sybil as she fell, and, as he carried her past Manice, he whispered: "I'd like to kill you, you viper!" "Y-e-s?" she sneered, "I suppose your boss is too big game for you to tackle; but he's the party you ought to kill, if you will insist on being so melodramatic." And over in the box Mrs. Thrall, who had seen the fall, remarked, coolly: "There seems to be a commotion over there. Oh, I wouldn't leave the box suddenly if I were you; it might not look well, and you are always so careful of appearances." But Thrall was rushing back to the stage like a madman. CHAPTER XXIV "I WILL NOT DIVORCE YOU" In the "Stage Notes," or "Stage Whispers," or "Gossip of the Stage," of the Sunday papers (next morning), there had been mention made of "A pleasant little surprise at the Globe Theatre, where a lady had so successfully secluded herself in the shadows of her box that the play was half over before Mr. Thrall had discovered in her his wife, whom he supposed to be still in London. Strict disciplinarian as he is, the manager was so far lost in the husband that he hurried, all costumed as he was, to the box to greet and warmly welcome her. The audience would gladly have taken a hand in the greeting, had they been quite sure the lady was Mrs. Thrall, but as she had arrived too late to make a proper evening toilette, yet could not deny herself the pleasure of seeing at once her husband's latest great production, she almost wrapped herself in the box curtain, thus facing the stage while hiding herself from the house. When discovered, the returned wanderer laughingly told Mr. Thrall she hoped that, in common justice, he would place his own name at the head of that week's 'docked list,' as a heavy forfeit is demanded of anyone who appears in front of the house after taking any part, no matter how brief, in the performance, and he was doubly guilty, in that he was in full costume. He gravely argued there would be no one to profit by the forfeit, since he was himself manager as well as offending actor. But she quickly extended an open hand, and cheerfully offered to receive the forfeit, and even to invest it wisely and cautiously, and Mr. Thrall retired from both argument and box." Also, there had been a brief mention of "The swooning of Miss Sybil Lawton, between acts. The cause given was fatigue, the long run of the play, and the double performance of Saturday, making a heavy draught upon the strength of so young a girl." One paper added that "Miss Lawton herself made light of the matter, saying, 'Fainting was a mere family trait with the Lawtons, an inheritance the same as a very long thumb or a peculiar ear,' but though she laughed, she looked very white, and leaned heavily upon the arm of her woman companion." When the play ended that night the call-boy had been sent to tell Mr. Roberts that "he was wanted at Mr. Thrall's dressing-room, as quickly as possible," and presently, shabby and shambling, with every nerve aquiver, and in a most savage temper, he obeyed. Outside the door he stood respectfully enough, his hat in hand. Inside his manner became a half-cowed insolence. He put his hat on, and, nervously buttoning and unbuttoning his coat, said: "Well; you whistled your cur--here I am! Whom am I to be sic'd at this time?" The most of Romeo's delicate finery hung about on hooks; the splendor of his waving, golden-brown locks graced a wooden block standing on the dressing-shelf; his cloak and cap and sword were piled in a pell-mell heap; his dainty shoes were most anywhere; while everywhere were cigarettes--damp, spoiled, but unlighted, because of his own strict rule against smoking in the dressing-rooms, and the man himself, bending over the marble basin in that frenzy of soapy lather, without which the male countenance may not be considered cleansed, answered from its midst: "I'm not sic'ing you on anyone!" "That's queer! There was a time when I was often sent for, to discuss an important 'set,' or listen to some troublesome or involved scene, or was sent to libraries to root out notes for your information, but Lord! Lord! that was long ago! The stage-manager is your counsellor now, but I can still do all those hateful services that pass under the general term of 'dirty-work.' Whenever a request is to be refused; whenever a discharge is to be made; whenever a furious woman is to be faced--that a scene may be prevented at the theatre--I am summoned, and the damned funny part of it is, I come and accept my orders and carry them out; but even you can hardly expect me to enjoy the work of getting you out of every scrape." "You were not called upon in the Manice matter," Thrall somewhat sullenly remarked from the folds of a towel. "N--o!" assented Roberts, regretfully. "I should have enjoyed handing in her dismissal. But go ahead with your orders! The job must be pretty tough, judging from the way you hang fire in naming it." Thrall turned, and his face startled Roberts. It was so pale, so drawn, so anxious, he seemed to have washed away all its youth and pride and brightness, along with the grease paint and the rouge, in the basin of soapy water. He turned his troubled eyes in silent reproach upon the speaker, who asked, in a more respectful tone: "Well, what is it?" "It is," said Thrall, turning to the shelf and taking up a brush, which he began to use hurriedly upon his hair, "it's the child, Jim--the Princess! She--well, she's had a blow. The moment I'm out of here I'll run against some of the boys from the papers, then I'll have to see the Missus home--and stay there. And, Jim, those two women are all alone in that house, and should the child go to pieces, and need a doctor's care----" Jim muttered an oath. "As bad as that?" he asked, fiercely. "Didn't she know?" "Oh, I don't know--I don't know anything to-night," groaned Thrall, "except her need of protection! Jim, can't you go there? Jane Stivers will let you in, quietly; she'll give you a couch in the parlor to rest until dawn, and you can carry that old medicine case with you, too, so that any early rising neighbor may mistake you for a doctor leaving the house. Then, should any need arise, you would be on hand to serve her, and I--[he dropped the brush and held his head hard between his hands] I should be a trifle farther away from the insane asylum! Will you do it? Say, speak quick! I've got to hurry down to the Missus! Jim, what the devil brought her back from London so suddenly, though she will tell me presently herself, I suppose?" And Jim answered: "Manice brought her back--well, you see if I'm not right! She's been sending anonymous letters. Y-e-s, I'll follow Stivers, and stand by till morning. Hand down that medicine-case. But I'm doing it for her sake, not yours, mind you!" And then Stewart Thrall, with a pang at his heart, had seen Sybil leave the theatre on Stivers's arm, while he, with seeming gayety, was presenting Mrs. Thrall to a little group of friends, among whom were a couple of ubiquitous newspaper men--hence the "Stage Notes" next day. Early Sunday morning Stewart had slipped from his room and the house, and hurrying off in search of Jim Roberts had found him at his boarding-house, already well on the way to complete inebriation, early as it was; and so unruly, headstrong, and unmanageable that it was difficult indeed to learn anything about the passing of the night at Stivers's house; and what he did wring from him only added to his own pain. "For two hours by that cussed watch," said Jim, flinging the scratched and dented timepiece across the room, "minute by minute, I watched and listened to her unceasing walk--walk--walk over my head. She had shut Stivers out! She had acted a five-act tragedy twice that day, she had had neither dinner nor supper, and there she was walking miles up there alone--in the night! And then we heard speaking, and Jane and I listened on the stairs, and she was saying, over and over--oh, how I wish you had died last summer, Thrall, you with your infernal soft eyes and girl lashes and stony, hard heart! Friendship?--nothing! How can there be friendship without mutual respect and esteem and good will? You've a lot of esteem for me, haven't you? Well, I've less for you! Why should I tell you what she said or did? Oh, the _past_! You let that past alone, do you hear? Poor child, saying over and over, 'Too early seen unknown and known too late! known too late! _known too late!_' Oh, you're going, are you? Well, I was starting for a doctor when that cat Stivers played her last card. She said: 'Miss Sybil, dear, you _must_ take a little nourishment, or I shall send this telegram I've written to your mamma, Mrs. Lawton, and she will be here by ten in the morning. I can't have you fainting from exhaustion, and me getting the blame;' and at that the door opened quickly, and the cup of beef-tea was accepted. Stivers even got the chance to brush her hair a bit, but not one word did she speak of any trouble or worry, other than that she 'was suffering from an attack of the nerves.' Poor, plucky little soul! She'd never give anyone away! Well, go! I'm devilish glad to see your back, for your face puts murder in my heart!" And as Thrall left Jim, who was dragging a full flask from his pocket, he muttered to himself: "God! I begin to understand what makes drunkards of some men! Oh, my beloved! my beloved! If I could only go to you--claim you before all the world--do you public reverence! Perhaps--I wonder if Lettice would accept her freedom, we are such utter strangers to each other--perhaps----" He hastened back home, and was surprised to find that Mrs. Thrall had already breakfasted in her own room. He would have been more surprised had he known that her quick ears had heard and her pale eyes had watched his early departure, and that the suspicion it had aroused in her mind would add much to the difficulties of the interview he sought. For what he had to face, he faced without hesitation or delay. Stewart Thrall's knowledge of feminine character was considerable, yet it was neither deep nor thorough--it was superficial. He understood the tastes, the fancies, the caprices of women; he was a past-master in delicate flattery; he was quick to recognize the almost unconscious pose of a pretty woman. Was she literary, he was earnest and intellectual and quoted her favorite poet; was she artistic, he straightway saw in her the potential painter, only handicapped by circumstance; while, if she were simply coquettish, he was indeed upon solid ground. Women loved to be appreciated; he not only accepted them at their own valuation, but added something to the appraisement. What wonder, then, that he thought of them as conceited, vain, full of pride, without merit? But even what knowledge he had was to-day useless and unavailing, for there was probably no woman in the world so hopelessly incomprehensible to him as this chill, ashen-blonde creature, whom he had called his wife these twelve years past, though she remained abroad so long at a time for her health (which was perfect) that other people almost forgot he was a Benedick. Save in the theatre one never heard her mentioned. Long ago, a low-class English servant had habitually referred to her as the "Missus," and with gleeful unanimity the actors adopted the title, and thus Sybil remained all ignorant that behind the screening nickname of the "Missus" stood a secure and dominant Mrs. Stewart Thrall. The pair, who had been talking long, were sitting facing each other. The table between them had a dish of half-dead ferns in a handsome receptacle. Though meant for ornament, they were sadder even than the paper-dry, stick-dead contents of the window jardinière, for they at least no longer struggled, no longer suffered for loving care. Stewart had remarked apropos of their condition: "You see they have felt your absence, Lettice?" And she had given the little downward pull to the corners of her mouth that always made him wince, and answered: "But _you_ were never looking better or younger in your life than"--(she glanced at his thin, pale, anxious face, and significantly finished)--"than you were yesterday." There was a litter, too, of Sunday papers, a Tauchnitz novel, and writing materials keeping the dead ferns company, and now, in the pause that was lengthening out between them, he carefully piled up the pencils and penholders, building and unbuilding pens, some square, some three-cornered, while all the time the ash-blonde woman opposite sat steady, self-contained; and, though her satirical lightness of manner was changing fast into a sullen anger that settled heavily about her lips and clouded her brow, her hands yet rested quietly in her lap, while her cold eyes watched the man she wondered at not a little--for he was changed. Heretofore, innuendoes had ever had power to drive him to hot rage, to-day his tolerance might have passed for indifference, but for the quick trembling of those ever-building fingers. She told him of the anonymous letters that had convinced her that he was making a fool of himself, publicly enough, to endanger her dignity as a wife, and so---- "And so," he interrupted, "you broke faith with me on the strength of an anonymous lie? You have returned, not to find the scandal in existence, but to learn that your presence here makes life much harder for us both. You must feel proud to know that a creature like Manice has used you so easily!" "Almost as proud as you must be to recall certain love passages between you," retorted Lettice. "Pardon me, one cannot 'recall' what has never existed. I have even yet a little respect for the word and the sentiment of love, and would never think of casting such pearls into the Manice trough!" "You are so remarkably frank about this malicious young person, perhaps you will be equally so about this rare conservatory blossom--this quite wonderful Juliet, this new 'chère amie'? Oh, you can't deny--save to the blind--your infatuation for her! Admitting that you have had so far an eye to appearances, that no open scandal is yet afoot, it is still plain to all that you love her! Silence? That's odd--from you! Does she understand how she is honored? Have you acquainted her with the number she should wear upon her breast? Don't break that holder! What creatures men are! Deception, ingratitude, and treachery were your very wedding-gifts to me. Disloyalty has long become a habit with you." "Lettice, did it ever occur to you that a wife's unjust suspicions may help a man on to disloyalty? You no sooner took my name than you became a personified suspicion. You claimed dominion over my very thoughts. My every movement seemed to arouse your mistrust. You put spies upon me, when I had not even a thought of disloyalty. I discovered it, and, though I am ashamed now of the boyish folly, it's none the less true that I first broke my solemn vow to you out of revenge for your unjust suspicion. Then you helped me with your money and with your astonishing ability to twist and turn everything to our advantage and profit; and let me say that your audacious plans were not always quite scrupulous, Lettice! But when I found that that troubled you not a bit, I somehow felt that my disloyalty was not worth troubling about either. I was truly grateful for your help, but you wanted me on my knees, and you rubbed the service in so hard that it became unendurable, and I was in torment until I paid you the money back, with interest. But still you feel that I owe you a debt of gratitude, because, finding me an artist, full of dreams and willing to wait for their fulfilment, you have made of me a showman instead--a successful one at that. And now we have become such strangers that we place the ocean between us, for the comfort of its vast breadth dividing us. Lettice, we can't be less to each other than we are, and yet you reproach me with my infidelities. I can't understand why. I can't even understand why you married me. If you had ever loved me"--(he was busy with the pencils, he never saw the slowly rising blood creeping up even to the roots of her hair)--"but you never did, even at the first. I suppose you could not resist that craving you had to show what you could do with me, how you could push me. Lettice, don't you want to accept half of my earnings, and--and take your freedom--your legal freedom, I mean--without any blame being attached to you? Lettice, cast back my name, you can't care for it longer. See, I humble myself to entreat your favor in this matter! Accept your freedom--become once more Lettice Rowland!" And, as the urgent voice ceased, Lettice asked, coldly: "Why?" and then had followed the silence. And the man with the restless fingers saw all the time the dark, stricken face of the girl he loved, and seemed to hear the rapid, uneven footfalls of the young creature pursued by bitter memories through the heavy hours of the night, and the perspiration stood upon his forehead. The pale eyes opposite that watched saw he suffered, and bitterness grew evenly with the wonder that filled her heart. She was a tenacious woman, one who would even hold fast a thing which she no longer valued, simply because it belonged to her. She was clever and shrewd, and she was making some astonishingly correct deductions from Thrall's looks and manner as well as his words. Hitherto his amours had been lightly formed and lightly broken, and she had been conscious at times of a sort of contemptuous pity for the women whose reign she knew would be so brief--but this was different. She had known last night--she told herself, she had seen, she had heard the new tenderness in his glance and tone. She saw in Sybil a new type of rival, a creature of intelligence as well as of beauty; and then and there had lighted even the dull anger that was burning in her now. She looked at his goodly length of limb, at his well-shaped, closely cropped head, at the black sweep of lashes she knew he hated. A sudden quiver came about her pale lips as she recalled how, in their early married days, she had often called his attention to something on the floor just for the pleasure of seeing their silky length sweep downward. He had never known, or he would probably have repeated the deed of his boyhood, when in a rage he had cut them off close to the lids and had been shut up under the doctor's care in consequence. And now he wanted her to give him up. "Why?" She had not known that she had spoken the word until his start told her. Then he said, slowly: "You would be happier, I think, Lettice" (he smiled faintly). "You would not be distressed, then, by my bad conduct, you know." "Your consideration for my feelings is as touching as it is novel, but it is not a convincing reason for the putting away of a wife." "A wife?" repeated Thrall, as he raised his eyes and looked steadily, meaningly, at her. "I think the precise and unemotional dictionary itself will describe wife as a 'woman united to a man by marriage.' Are we united, Lettice? It is nearly three years since our tenderly emotional public parting at the steamer, but our real parting dates much farther back." She interrupted, to say, sharply: "Well, no one knows of that, and I'm sure my presence in London was of great service to you. At least two important plays would have escaped you, but for me and my clever planning." "Yes," he answered, a little weariedly. "But I was not speaking of our relations as manager and agent--they are quite satisfactory; but I was about to state that while I am not an unmarried man--I am wifeless." "Ah!" she ejaculated; "that never troubled you before!" He paid no heed, but went on, steadily: "The law cannot put us one inch farther asunder than we are now, but it can free us from this hypocrisy and pretence, and restore us our dignity and independence and freedom." "My friend," came in the well-modulated voice that was the sole charm of the woman opposite, "do you then take me for a fool? It required two to make our bargain, it will require two to break it. I am Mrs. Stewart Thrall as surely to-day as I have ever been. You have broken your vows; but I have kept mine, at least [in answer to an accusing look] I have not broken them--I have been loyal." "Why?" dryly put in Thrall. A little of color came into her face as she answered: "From self-respect, sir! I have pushed your interests, I have seen you rise, and I mean to stand by your side and share your honors! You are mine! You can't divorce me, and I won't divorce you, without more reason than this new whim of yours for a swarthy, black-browed girl with a red mouth that you will tire of in six months' time, and who, in spite of her good breeding, which is evident enough, may give you sufficient trouble for you to be glad to have this marriage service to hide behind!" "_Lettice!_" cried Thrall, springing to his feet, "so help me God, you tempt me to strangle you! Oh, but see here! You are hard as nails in seeming, but how can I tell what is in your heart? Perhaps it is big and generous and warm enough to pity the innocent victim of your husband's lust; yes, and there you have a reason strong enough for a divorce." Perhaps she might, in sheer swift contempt, have cast him his freedom had he not blundered, as men will in their dealings with women; and, in a sudden passionate burst of love and pity and remorse for the girl not yet twenty years old, whose life and honor were resting in their hands, "prayed her to be generous and great in magnanimity; to leave him free to right the horrible wrong he had done, and in return to accept his lifelong service, his reverent friendship!" His eyes were misty, his voice was trembling, his very soul was at his lips. She rose, and, looking coldly into his pleading face, she said: "I am Mrs. Stewart Thrall. I will not be cast aside!" Patiently he answered: "I ask you to put _me_ away!" Steadily she resumed: "I will not act against the law. Collusion is illegal!" He picked up a book, and bent it back and forth unconsciously. "You are my husband!" "That is false!" he said, sharply. "In the eyes of the law," she went on, unheedingly, "if I choose to condone your offences, that is sufficient. Your light o' love is naught to me. _I_ have been a faithful wife!" Thrall laughed aloud. "Hereafter I shall live here at your side. I will not divorce you, and so give you to another. I shall remain Mrs. Stewart Thrall, while I live and while I die. I am a good woman, and therefore you cannot be divorced by any law on earth!" Glancing down at the book, Thrall saw it was Milton's "Paradise Lost," and, flinging it on the table, he cried: "I wonder why Milton didn't make a virtuous woman the keeper of the gate of hell!" As he left the room he added: "Lettice, against your hard, repellent virtue a generous sinner shines like an angel!" And he went forth to the bitterest hour of his life--his next meeting with Sybil Lawton. CHAPTER XXV "TO LOVE IS TO FORGIVE" The troubles of the young are tragic in their intensity, and during that night of despair Sybil had suffered keenly, cruelly, hopelessly. It seemed to her that she had fallen into an abyss from which rescue was impossible. For the first time she realized that in the recklessly generous giving of her love there had been destroyed something more precious even than the "alabaster box" so recklessly shattered, centuries ago, by a loving woman in the eager doing of a more sacred homage. The bitterness of her fall revealed to her how great her pride had been, and at first a furious resentment filled her heart against the man who in love's name had so humbled her. Looking back through the golden light of that time of perfect joy, she tried to see what path had led her to the precipice, to understand why she had not resisted and held back. Then slowly, very slowly, it dawned on her that _opportunity_ had been the lure that gently led her into a laxity that almost imperceptibly through remissness became latitude. Her daily carefully guarded companionship with Stewart Thrall at Mrs. Van Camp's home had placed her upon a friendly footing of perfect confidence, and he was so great he must, she thought, be good; and so she had scarcely noticed when at Stivers's house he first read her her Tennyson, sitting at her feet, leaning against her knee, and had paid no heed to the increasing frequency of those afternoon demands for Stivers's presence at the theatre wardrobe-room; and when she played for him upon the little upright piano, standing across the corner of the room, it had not startled her, when he was turning her music, to feel him drop a kiss into her wavy, up-gathered hair. Experience and opportunity as against inexperience and foolish trust! Again the words of Juliet came to her lips: "Known too late! known too late!" And Juliet thought herself unhappy--unhappy, when she was not shamed, when she was loved! "Oh!" she wrung her hands hard, "he seemed--he truly seemed to love me! His beautiful eyes glowed so! His lips had a smile that seemed for me alone! But then, dear God! I forget now, as I forgot then, he is an actor!" She laughed contemptuously. "A great actor! and I have helped to pass away those weary hours, when he was bereft of the gayety of the joyous Mrs. Thrall!" For women know one another well, and, as Sybil had passed on Stivers's arm that night, Mrs. Thrall had sent a merry laugh forth, apropos of nothing spoken, but simply to pierce the lonely girl's heart with jealous pain--and she had succeeded perfectly. The long, sleepless night of agony and shame had left its mark on the girl, young and strong as she was. Her room, made bower-like with ferns and palms and many scarlet poinsettias (Thrall taboo'd all perfumed, growing plants there) seemed to accentuate the languor and the weariness of its girlish occupant. Wrapped in a Japanese kimona, white and gold outside and peachy pink within, with wavy, densely dark hair tucked up carelessly with a big shell comb, the bluish shadows beneath her heavy eyes, the level brows drawn close, and the sullen, red mouth all unsmiling, she looked a very tragic young figure and pitiful withal, to the haggard gaze of Stewart Thrall, the man who loved her and had wronged her. He stood before her, very erect, very pale. His dark-blue eyes, guiltless of amorous droop, wide and bright, had in them a strained intensity of regard that was painful. Raw soldiers, under waiting orders, though yet in sight of action, wear just that expression of strained vision--of desperate self-control. At first sight of him Sybil had felt her tired heart give a glad upward spring in her breast, and her impulse was to fly into his arms for shelter, and there to weep, and weep, and weep--while he, in fond, foolish fashion, kissed and beat her slim hand softly against his cheek--just as might the mother of a little wailing child. But suddenly she seemed to see beside him the pale, ashen-blonde woman, who, from the shadowy box, had so tormented her, and who later stood beneath the blazing lights, and, holding fast the arm of this man--her husband--had sent forth that mocking, triumphant laugh, that, like a hate-sped arrow, had fairly reached its victim's heart, where it would rankle for many a day to come! And she checked the impulse, and asked, instead, "What brings you here?" "Sybil! Sybil!" the man pleaded. She looked at him with gloomy eyes, and said, slowly: "My father is an old man, esteemed weak even by his family; yet, being one of those old-fashioned absurdities--a gentleman--he values the honor of his daughters so highly that if he knew the truth he would surely kill you, Mr. Thrall!" "And he would be within his rights," gravely assented Stewart. "But," continued the girl, in coldly contemptuous tones, "after all, we are not properly located, geographically, for such a deed. I lack, too, the instinctive love of carnage that makes the shedding of an enemy's blood necessary to the girl of the tropics, when the wrecking of her honor has been the amusement of some married man!" Thrall stood as if he had received the cut of a whip, but said nothing--not one word. "Why are you here?" she broke out then more hotly. "Your coming is an insult to me! Perhaps, pitying my loneliness and now having made me a fit companion for the Manice, you may be about to remove the embargo formerly placed upon my association with her!" He turned pained eyes upon her and said, faintly: "Child, you strike hard and deep, but don't turn the knife!" "Oh!" she cried, "so highly placed, so powerful, so flattered and so sought, why could you not pass _me_ by? Why need you stoop to break so poor and lowly a thing? You were cowardly! you were cruel! No wonder you are silent--had you no truth, no honor, no love?" He answered, still very low: "Of truth and honor, very little, but love?" he looked at her with devouring eyes, "dear God, _love_?" And she repeated bitterly, jeeringly: "Love? You, a married man?" He smiled a little and answered, gently: "Love comes as it wills, and--and--" There he stopped, for he saw by the horror in her eyes that for the first time she saw in their relations simply sin, bereft of all sophistry, and he was dumb--he, the clever, the brilliant, usually so full of subtlety and finesse, who in a like situation in the past would have laughingly denounced the folly of blushing for an undiscovered sin, or have gayly taught his fair companion in guilt that eleventh commandment, so dear to the worldly man and the light woman: "Be ye not found out, for of such is the kingdom of the Successful." He stood with all the artifices stricken from him, incapable of specious argument, of trick or wile of any kind. Erstwhile, where money had had power to tempt, he had seen that money had power to comfort, too--but not here! not here! Where grief and passionate reproach looked from eyes that yesterday had shone all radiant with love--her glory then--her shame to-day! And all there was of manhood in him was roused to vehement longing to honor publicly the creature whom he had secretly dishonored. "Oh!" she moaned, helplessly, "what shall I do with my life! I am ashamed to look back--I am afraid to look forward! They said there was no sex in art! And when you showed such patience with me and my ignorance, I almost worshipped you, and hoped art might make me as generous in time! But it was your approval I toiled for! It was your acting that I strove to emulate! Perhaps you thought I was not grateful; but, oh, I was! I was! And I used to think if I ever wore the dramatic crown I yearned for, I'd proudly tell to all the world whose hand had placed it in my reach! Perhaps if you had known how humbly grateful I was, you would not have made me pay this awful price!" The man's jaws clenched so tightly that their outlines showed white on his cheeks. "As a conquest, Mr. Thrall, I am scarcely worthy of your skill, and yet my being a 'society débutante' may add a slight fillip of novelty to the old, old story of ruined girlhood--such trifles help, no doubt, to keep up an actor's popularity!" "You are very cruel!" he groaned. "_I?_" she cried, accusingly, "_I_ am cruel?" "Yes; it is cruel to take pleasure in another's pain, but--" He closed his eyes an instant, and then went on very patiently. "I may not ask you for mercy. Being guilty, it is right I _should_ suffer!" "Suffer?" she repeated, unbelievingly. "You? Why should you suffer, pray? You have hung a millstone about _my_ neck for life! But you go lightly enough along the conqueror's path! _You_ suffer--from what? You have done nothing to unfit you for your world! You will be feasted and banqueted as usual; you are quite secure with your fashionable clientèle of women, who will applaud you rapturously, while looking upon me as forever defiled!" Then, rather wildly, she added: "You said the crown you promised me was pasteboard, but you did not tell me it was wreathed inside with thorns! Oh, why have you betrayed my adoring faith in you! What have I ever done to harm you? Why--why in God's great name--why have you so deceived me?" Slowly he answered: "I thought you----" "Do not dare!" gasped Sybil, "do not dare add a last infamous insult to cruel injury by telling me you thought I knew you were married!" "At first," he persisted, "I supposed you knew; then when I found you did not, I--I--was in the grasp of a merciless passion. Dear, I _could_ not speak! I _could not_, I tell you! Sybil! beloved! I would step between you and death without the flicker of an eyelash! I would give my life's blood for you as freely as a cup of water! Yet, I--who would gladly defend you from a world, was not strong enough to defend you from myself--from the love that possessed me utterly--at whose fire I relit ambition--romance--the desire for high achievement! You believe me guilty of a mere base passion; you are wrong! Doubtless there are men in the world who, loving even as I loved you, could have held their feelings well in leash, sealed their lips for honor's sake, but that power would come from long training and much practice in self-denial--not from one sporadic effort of self-control! And I, oh, child, flattered by the world--vain, egotistical, and spoiled--when had I acquired strength through patient endurance or through temptations resisted? I was incapable of self-abnegation; I, who had denied myself nothing all my life long, could not begin by denying my desperate love the possession that it longed for! For men are like that, dear, in spite of your contemptuous unbelief. Be they good or be they bad, be they ever so reverently true, their senses will demand possession of the beloved. And I was so desolate--so lonely! There was not even friendship within the whited sepulchre of my domestic life." The girl shrank. "Don't!" she cried, "don't add to cruelty and cowardice--treachery to her! She is very cruel, but then a good wife who suspects a wrong to her love has a right to be cruel!" "Oh, you innocent, just soul!" the man cried. "Yes, she is cruel in very deed, since being a wife in name alone these years past she yet clings tenaciously to that empty title. She has not enough womanly pride to free the man who earnestly pleads to be released, whose chill indifference protects her from temptation. She is technically a loyal wife, but practically a foe--a sort of satiric keeper of the records of my life. 'A wrong to her love,' you said. You generous child, she does not know what love means, but she does know her legal rights; and to my agony will maintain them to the last, since the shibboleth of her life is: 'What will the world say?' Yes, she is very cruel!" Sybil shivered as she recalled the contemptuous slow smile, the unrelenting, inquisitorial, pale eyes, but answered: "I suppose I should be cruel, too, if I were a wronged wife." She stopped; the blood rushed in a scarlet tide over all her shamed, pained face. "A wife?"--she gave a gasp and put her hand to her throat as if to remove some stricture there. "I may never be a wife! Marriage is honorable! Dorothy may wed, but I--" And then an agonized cry rang through the house: "Dorothy! oh, Dorothy! Little sister! I have lost you! I shall not dare to look into your honest eyes, lest you should see the sin in mine! I may not kiss your lips or touch your cheek, nor ever again pillow your dear head upon my arm the long night through because of the pollution on my life that makes me base, unworthy, and unfit associate for innocence like yours!" "Be silent!" savagely interrupted Thrall, with death-white face. "I have fallen to a level with the creatures you pity in the street, little sister! I am defiled forever!" And she fell prone upon the couch in an agony of tears. Thrall sprang at her like a tiger; he dragged her to a sitting position among the tumbled cushions, and, grasping her shoulders, he rocked her back and forth in savage rage, crying: "How dare you? how dare you, I say? You have been pleased to call me coward many times to-day, but you have the bitter right to say what you will to me, and I must bear it patiently because I merit more even than you say; but I am not coward enough to stand by and hear you blaspheme against yourself! I, by every wile at my command, by the compelling charm and strength of a great love, and by your ignorance of human nature, have led you into a breach of the law! Well, the fault is mine--God knows that! You vile? you defiled? how dare you? You are as pure in heart as any earthly creature can be! Your sense of honor, your respect for duty, your high ideals have made deception and falsehood hateful to me! Your quick sympathy for those who suffer has made me more considerate of the feelings of those about me! What have you done--what have you to blush for? You have been guilty of a generosity that brings me to my knees in adoration! All glorious as the morning, without suspicion, without fear, having given your great heart, with royal prodigality you gave yourself! You obeyed the instinct nature placed in you, in loving so! How dare you, then, compare yourself to those unfortunates who sell their forced and painted smiles? How dare you--you, pure-hearted, proud, gifted, clean-minded? Have I been rough to you? Forgive me, sweet, but you nearly drove me mad, and--and I suffer, Sybil!" He sank at her feet, and laid his brow against her knees. She trembled, but did not speak. "Beloved," he went on, "I only live through you! My soul is yours! I worship--I adore you! Let me serve you! I dare not say forgive, but try to forget this private pain in public triumph. You have great gifts; don't neglect them. You are a fashion now--if I live you shall have fame. You shall not be hippodromed, as I was, into the success that stifles faith in the purity of art, the prosperity that swallows up energy and sincerity." She sat as in a trance, her heart thrilling to the music of a voice that even the public found irresistible. Half her torture had been in the belief that she had become contemptible in his eyes--that she had been a mere "pour passer le temps"; therefore, this homage had something of comfort in its respectful wording as he went on: "I have experience, knowledge, skill; let me use them for your advancement. You shall be left free to study, to realize your beautiful ideals, unhampered by commercial questions of any kind. I will do my best, my very best, to warn you away from pitfalls of mannerisms; to polish and refine without producing artificiality. The service of my whole life shall be yours--the sole object of my life, the secure placing of the dramatic crown upon your head; and in return I ask [he held out empty, trembling hands] such scraps of affection as may fall from your table of family love--such crumbs of your time as you can spare to me!" And that humble pleading came from Stewart Thrall, to whom love had been before such a tumultuous, triumphant distraction and amusement! The girl flushed and paled, but kept her sombre eyes averted from the face, where rage had changed to tender pity and passionate pleading. "Sybil?" he almost whispered. Still she was silent. It was very hard what she had in mind to say. This winning, gracious man had been the hero of all her girlish dreams, as well as the honored "master," who was arbiter of her fate, and only now she realized how he had absorbed her life--how hard it was to give him up, all in a moment. Poor child! this second peril was almost greater than the first; but, worn and weary, she was incapable of reasoning, of seeking out motives then. "Sybil?" came again the dear, tempting voice, "if I begged for bread, you would not treat me so! Beloved, answer me!" Kneeling there he reached out his arms and clasped her waist. "Answer me, at least!" She sprang to her feet, and as she put her hands behind her, striving to break his strong clasp, she answered confusedly, brokenly: "I--I--can't--I must go--go quite away! You must know that! I--I--can't play--ever--any more!" Very compassionately he reminded her: "You must have learned before this, Princess, the inexorable claim of the stage. Nothing but death releases an actor from duty." "Well," she answered, bitterly, "that Sybil Lawton _is_ dead!" His face contracted painfully, but he answered steadily: "The world does not know that. It would be fatal to us all to close. I am sorry, but the play must go on, beloved." Like lightning she recalled the warm hand pressures, the whispered sweet "asides," the passionate love-scene, and that long embrace in the chamber balcony, and cried out sharply: "With _you_? with _you_? I must act again with _you_?" His arms fell from her waist; his face was hard and white as marble as he rose to his feet. His voice was icy, but during his next courteous, chill words he kept his eyes downcast that the tears might not bear witness to his pain. "I forgot," he said, "that you were not experienced enough to sink the man in the artist, and--and you must pardon my dulness, but--I did not fully appreciate the--[he moistened his unwilling, stammering lips] the loathing you feel for me personally. I have proved very slow-witted, but I am not a pachyderm, and my intelligence can be reached, you see, by sharp, stinging pain. Your method is severe, Miss Lawton, but eminently successful. I am not likely to forget the lesson now that I have learned it." Sybil's dark eyes dilated with pain. Her need of sympathy was so great that those icy tones turned her faint with misery. "It was hard enough before," she murmured, and a piteous quiver came about her lips. He had been mortified, humbled, and wounded when she shrank so from acting with him again. He thought it signified bitter hate, unconquerable aversion; and, instead, it had been an expression of terror, a confession of a weakness which she only began to realize when she found how hard if was not to yield at once to his pleading. There was something so pathetic, so unconsciously pleading in those words, "It was hard enough before," that he asked pardon, and went gravely on: "It is my duty to obey your wishes so far as my power goes. I cannot take off the play; you will understand yourself when you have time for thought, but being a gentleman, at least superficially [he corrected himself with a flush rising to his face], I will not publicly force my companionship upon you as Romeo, to your private annoyance [his voice shook a little in spite of himself, and he paused a moment]. I will put things in motion at once--looking to your relief." Sybil sank into the corner of the couch, and, folding her arms upon a pillow, buried her face in the loose sleeve of her kimona. "My throat," he went on, "can be in bad shape, and a drop of atropia now and then will keep me hoarse enough for our purpose--just at first. Young Fitzallen [Sybil's hand clenched suddenly], who is quite up in the lines, will take my place 'at short notice to oblige,' and--and, well, after a while we will find some excuse for continuing him in the part. 'Sufficient unto the day,' I have to scurry a bit about the printing and the finding of the young man. He will have to wear some of my costumes; you won't mind that, I hope--Monday night is so very close. He will come over here about ten or half-past in the morning to rehearse with you, and you must be very exacting about the 'business.' See that nothing is forgotten; the public is quick to miss anything it has become accustomed to. The balcony scene [the girl's figure seemed to writhe among the cushions] is--very--important--and--" He stopped, and then quite suddenly he turned toward the door, saying: "I'll do my best to save you from the degradation you dread. I'll send your new Romeo to you early." Like pictures on a scroll, she saw all the tender love-scenes, growing one out from another, ever sweeter, stronger, more intense, and at the balcony of Juliet's chamber, at the farewell embrace--that the applause made long--she thought "another's arms about me, another's eyes searching mine," and so, shuddering, repulsion seized upon her and wrung from her lips the cry: "No! no! don't! Oh, don't! I could not bear it--I should die!" She was standing, one bent knee among the cushions, leaning forward on one supporting arm. He turned. "Sybil--do you mean--you will have mercy on me--that you will try for art's sake to forget the man in the actor? Oh, beloved, if you could believe! To my arid life you brought freshness and strength and reverence--yes, in spite of my sin against you, oh, wife of my soul! Pity me! my sin is very hard to bear!" Suddenly she stretched out her arms to him. With wide, almost unbelieving eyes he sank on his knees before her, asking, faintly: "You pity me? But, oh, you cannot forgive?" She took his head between her hands and kissed his brow, saying: "To love is to forgive!" He gave a cry and started to his feet. A deadly paleness came upon her face. "I am not strong enough," she said, "for martyrdom--alas! I am no child of light! But where I love--be it strength or be it weakness--I love forever!" His arms closed about her, her weary head sank upon his breast. He stooped and kissed her tenderly, solemnly. She lifted her heavy eyes and added "My fidelity shall be my purification!" CHAPTER XXVI THE OPAL Three years had passed, and Sybil, now the reigning queen of the New York stage, still lived in the quiet little red brick house among the West Thirtieths, to the great indignation of Mrs. Lawton. Inside there was a frank luxury clearly explained to love-sealed eyes by that one elastic word "salary"; though an observant outsider, noting the age-darkened, carved wood, the rare polar-bear robes, and the exquisite bits of bronze, must have thought her a marvellously lucky buyer, or a remarkably well-paid actress. But there were no such observers at hand; perhaps that was why Sybil's vine-dripping, flower-crowded windows seemed to laugh in the face of the grim, shade-drawn propriety of the entire block. At the rear of the red brick house was a small cooper or carpenter shop that faced on the other street. It had long been unoccupied, so that when Stivers took a notion to hire it for a store-room and sort of laundry, she got it cheap; and after the neighbors had once or twice seen her going in and out, and hanging a few pieces of linen to dry, there was no further heed paid to the matter. But if one was very intimate with Mrs. Stivers, and received from her a shop key, why, one could both enter and leave the house from the back street without bothering with the front door bell. Sybil had "overflowed," as Dorothy said, and had swept away Stivers's too dreadful parlor, and in its stead there was now a library and sitting-room combined--a nook glorious in winter because of an open fire and in summer made dim and cool by many clambering vines, and sweet by boxes of mignonette crowding the small balcony, a room full of the scattered riches of rare books, of carved ivories, of miniatures, of bubbles of Venetian glass, beautiful as jewels and almost as precious, a room for study, for dreams, for love, and sometimes a room for bitter brooding and regret. Visitors to this house were a rare occurrence, but Sybil had just been speeding the parting guest in the person of her mother, who was "to pick up" John at Forty-second Street, and thus receive protection on the homeward ride to Riverdale; for "positively in these days," she declared, "unless you're perfectly white and doubled together with age, men ogle you as if you were twenty. There was a dreadful little pot-bellied, Hebraic person--that sounds queer, doesn't it, but it's an absolutely correct expression and perfectly descriptive of the man's shape--and I declare to you he kept his eyes on my face until I felt quite agitated, and everyone in the car must have noticed his conduct. Yet John Lawton was so unfeeling as to tell me that if I stopped looking at the man, I wouldn't know that he was staring. Not know it, indeed! Why, I could feel anyone ogling me through the back of my neck! Still, after such an experience, I hope I shall not miss John!" Mrs. Lawton had devoted one of her three days to her old friend, Mrs. Van Camp, and to shopping, and two days to Sybil. She had arrived in state, and after a supercilious glance at her, had addressed the owner and mistress of the house as "Stivers"--though Sybil was most punctilious in calling her Mrs. Stivers. She had so traduced the coffee (which was perfect) by asking "if the blackness was not the result of licorice," that, though Jane Penny had maintained a strictly respectful attitude, murder had shown so plainly in her eye that Letitia had not dared to take the second cup she longed for, for fear of poison. And when she was alone with her daughter she remarked: "She's a cat, that Stivers! Clean and neat, like any other cat, and purry! Oh, yes, she can purr about _you_, but she's crafty, cunning, shrewd! You keep your desk locked, my dear! She's too soft-footed for my taste; she's got an eye for a key-hole, too!" While Jane said to herself: "There's a vain old cockatoo--overbearing, hectoring, using her high and mighty birth as an excuse for wiping her shoes on us as is beneath her. I guess I could add a chapter to her family history that would take the wind out of her sails pretty quick! But my bank book's more important to me than her nasty slurs! 'Stivers,' indeed! It's a wonder it wasn't 'Penny.' The young ladies don't find it beneath them to call me Mrs. Of course in this one it might be policy, but the other one does it, too. It's plain enough to me the daughters get their decent manners from the father. A nice old man that, a gentleman clear through and always welcome here, even by Mr. Thrall; though for appearance sake he does then have to come hat and stick in hand and make a proper fifteen-minute or half-hour call and go. Poor, pale old gentleman; he's an idolator, if ever there was one, just bowing down to and worshipping those girls of his'n. If he knew the secret of that little locked closet upstairs, if he knew of the dinner-jacket, the lounging robe hanging there, he'd die without a word right as he stood. Poor old gentleman! But, Lord! how our boss does hate that old cockatoo! and how she does ko-tow to him and bridle and smirk! Not but what she looks well enough at the supper-table, for with all her rouge she can carry her clothes well. I think Mr. Thrall dislikes her for one thing, because of the likeness he sees in her to Miss Sybil. I overheard her saying in fun to him: 'I shall be just like mamma when I am as old,' and he said: 'Then for God's sake die in your youth!' and, though she tried hard to look angry, she had to laugh, and he looked ashamed of himself, and asked pardon. "It does beat all, how long this affair lasts. Talk about worshipping the ground she walks on; I believe he's jealous of the air she breathes. Well, my nest is getting a good warm lining, for they are both generous, and she's easy to serve besides, which is more than I can say of the Missus, who is always prowling about the wardrobe room, ready to make a fuss about a quarter of a yard of gold or silver lace, or an inch or two of linen-backed velvet, and weighing the camphor-gum to see if it agrees with the amount mentioned in the bill. These splendid Shaksperian productions deprive her of the delight of dickering with authors for new plays, and so she drives Barney wild by her visits to the box-office, and keeps tab on me in the wardrobe, hoping to prevent the escape of a nickel through someone's hands. That woman's heart--if she has one--bears the dollar-mark, I'll wager!" In the library, Sybil, being alone, dropped down on an old French tabouret, and with chin in hand fell into a reverie. Her other hand drew from her bosom the little diamond heart, whose centre was a registered ruby, flawless and exquisite. It had been Stewart's first gift to her after she had forgiven him, and he had said, very earnestly: "The real value of this jewel is in a word engraved back of that ruby. No, beloved! you cannot open and read without a jeweler's help, but if the locket will not open for you, why, when you have to remove it in your dressing-room, it will not open for another and betray our secret. No, I will not tell the precious word--only wear it always. If the ornament is not suitable to your gown or the occasion, then wear it inside and out of sight--but wear it, beloved, for my sake!" And now she wondered still what was the word that to him made the value of this rare gift? Was it _love_? Was it _forgiveness_? Was it _beloved_? She sighed a little. The house was rather lonely since her father and mother had departed. They had come down to see her new great triumph as Beatrice in "Much Ado about Nothing." Her improvement was wonderful, and Thrall had thrilled with pride when he had heard it commented upon. For Beatrice is a test part that combines comedy the lightest, airiest, and most polished, with both pathos and passion. All actors know that more technical knowledge is required for fine high-comedy acting than for sentiment or even tragedy. And it would have been a bold man who in the first weeks of Juliet had ventured to suggest a future Beatrice in the inexperienced, though immensely tragic, young actress. Yet here she was, Thrall's ideal Beatrice, well-born, well-bred, beautiful, graceful, but possessed of a young devil of mockery that you saw dancing in her eyes and heard in her bubbling laughter. The stings of her wit seemed healed by the honey of her manner. Full of affectations, airs, and graces toward the courtiers, her "If I were a man!" speech was so full of tender love and sorrow for her injured cousin Hero that its final hot burst of rage and scorn left her with tears wet upon her cheeks. And consummate artist that he was, Thrall threw such sudden passionate intensity into Benedick's answer, "By this hand I love thee!" that it was no wonder the act brought the people upstanding; and one old playgoer remarked that "it was like watching an exhibition of skilful fencing, where flying sparks made you uncertain whether the bout was friendly or a duel to the death." Thrall had kept his promise; he had warned her away from so many pitfalls that some of the critics declared she had triumphed through what she had not done almost as much as through what she had. She had avoided the absolute shrewishness with which Beatrice is often invested; also the vindictive ferocity of the "If I were a man!" that catches the gallery, while it "makes the judicious grieve," and wonder, too, why Benedick should have been called upon for assistance by such a man-eating creature. Neither did she fire her best witticisms point-blank at the audience and pause--to make her "point." And better still, she avoided that strained, unnatural merriment that makes the public pity the evident fatigue of an otherwise satisfactory Beatrice. And this last bore strongest witness to the depth of study she had given to the play--yes, the play; for the actress who studies only her own lines gains but the narrowest and baldest view of the character. Sybil had studied the environment of the brilliant, high-born, wilful "she Mercutio," as Jim Roberts in an inspired moment of intoxication had termed Beatrice, in order to know in what manner she should address her impertinences to her uncle--whether with a spoiled-child daring, made pardonable by a respectful bearing; in open insolence, or in veiled dislike. So she studied Leonato carefully, and so she did all the characters she came in contact with, with the result that her manner varied according to her varying companions; and the tension of the bow was not strained to the breaking-point at any time. Actors and certain critics knew that that swallow-like skimming from laughing badinage to biting satire--that fine restraint, that incredible lightness of touch was backed by certainty, that certainty meant knowledge, and that knowledge meant work. Yet, though Thrall told her again and again that she had in herself the same mocking spirit that informed Beatrice, she would have it that he and he alone had made the performance possible to her. And though he denied it, the assertion was like nectar to the vanity of the artist--like balm to the heart of the man who longed to serve her. And as it happened the newspapers had, in so many words, hailed her as Queen of the Stage. The term had not been inspired by a suggestion from him. It was extravagant, perhaps, but it was impromptu. And as he read it, the blood swept over his face so redly that the watchful eyes of Mrs. Thrall, sitting behind the tea-urn at the breakfast-table, saw and noted, and when he had left for the theatre, she had studied eagerly that side of the paper, but could not solve the riddle of that deep flush of pleasure. For, though the notice of the play was very flattering to his Benedick, he could not be moved so by the praise of a single newspaper, she thought, even though he triumphed doubly as actor of a part and as managerial producer of nobly correct scenery. No, she could not solve the riddle; she could never have understood that, because the praise had not been extorted, it was doubly precious, or that one who lauded Sybil--magnified him. * * * * * "Yes," the girl said to herself, as she sat there, "he has crowned me, but--" She sighed, and turned the ruby to catch the light. "I wonder what your message is? One word, he says; perhaps it's _faith_. And yet, no! that would be satirical. What is there to be faithful to--no churchly vows! no!" she bit her lip to silence. She missed Dorothy very greatly, now, in the lull that always follows the hurry and excitement of preparing for a production, for an irregular love is a great isolation--of necessity. Dorothy, now two years a wife, had become so precious that she might no more be permitted to pass through that tunnel than to kneel before the car of the Juggernaut. Indeed, Leslie challenged the right of the very winds of heaven to blow too harshly on her face, and if any sweet folly of exaggerated care escaped him John Lawton was on hand to bring it to his attention. "Ja!" said Lena, who was herself preparing for marriage to her "Mickle," her "mash-man." "Ja, my Miss Lady, I youst hav' ter make of der lies to der Herr Galts und der Herr Boss in der fron' uf der house, und keep der' tentions, vile der Miss Dorrie-Galts com' by der back porch und find out uf she's got any feet on der legs. Youst vat I tell you--der Herr Mens vatch her like der two pig cats, und, ven she get der chance, she laf und say, 'Lena! com' take me out uf der cottin'-battin, quvick! und let's see den uf I break ven I cross der room!" When the news had reached Sybil first, she had lain across her bed and sobbed and wept the night away. But next day, when she had repeated it to Thrall, she had withstood the piercing inquiry of his searching eyes, until she heard the sigh of relief that told her he had seen no sign of pain. And she had had hard work to convince him that the splendor of the gift he wished her to send the happy, expectant young mother would not be consistent with her supposed salary, and that Leslie would not be as innocently unobservant as Dorothy. So now she had not the dear pleasure of her sister's occasional visits. Her face was unutterably sad. Suddenly she stretched her arms above her head, in the same passionate gesture which she had used that night at the old White house, under the starry sky, and now as then she cried out against the bondage that held her! Then it had been poverty--now it was sin! She wore her crown; she lived in luxurious comfort; Stewart's loyalty was complete, beyond question, but--"Love and the world well lost!" she quoted, and laughed aloud--such a woful little laugh. For now, with tear-washed, experienced eyes, she saw the awful error she had made, when in ignorant young passion she had declared "that love was enough"! A certain austere power of endurance had developed in her during these crowded years. She neither whimpered nor complained, only to her own soul she admitted that lawful, virtuous living was better than love alone; that one could not depart from rectitude and morality without sorrow, tears, and much bitterness of spirit. Just at first the wild sweetness of the forbidden fruit enthralled her--the romance of secret love, the thrill of stolen caresses, of fingers pressed under cover of a stage direction, of kisses swiftly given upon the little "scolding" lock of hair upon her neck, as he deftly and gallantly tied her veil after rehearsal, the precious rare half-days stolen from task-mistress and the world, and spent with her among the palms and poinsettias. Then all the levity fell from him, and he was at his fascinating best--witty, gracious, tender, sympathetic, wholly free from the smell of the footlights that some actors carry about with them all their days. The tiny notes pressed into warm palms, the code of signals--had all been so deliciously mysterious that she had felt herself a real heroine of romance. "Poor little fool!" she murmured, contemptuously now, for she recalled that for a time in her infatuation she had felt how ineffably superior was her own romantic, secret, self-sacrificing love to the dull, commonplace, strictly legalized affection of Dorothy and Leslie. But since then--oh, since then! she had had time to wake from her beautiful dream, she had had time to think and to suffer. She knew now that the beautiful temple of love must stand on a foundation of legality, or it would tremble dangerously under every wind that blew! She no longer found anything to deride in the word "propriety," since she had come in bitterness of spirit to realize its meaning: "What ought to be--what should be." And dear Dorothy's life was what it should be, and she had peace and security and had never known humiliation. "Humiliation!" Sybil twisted her hands and gasped aloud, "God! oh, God!" at the recollections that came to her. For Stewart Thrall's wife had kept her word and stood at his side, and shared his popularity, and applauded him from her box, and called him "dear" before all men on all possible occasions. And suspecting that Sunday evenings might not be spent with "the boys," she had inaugurated small "at homes," to give her dear Stewart a chance to gather his valued friends about him in his own home. And he who had never disregarded public opinion felt compelled to dance attendance upon his wife in name, who held him to his bond for her vanity and convenience. The trite endearments necessity forced from his lips were torture to Sybil when she chanced to hear them; and oh, the agony of a woman, who is secretly loved, when she sees the man who is hers--for whom she has paid with her pride and honor and self-respect--held to the side of another woman, by her legitimate rights! Just as maddening pain will sometimes drive a sufferer to press upon the torturing wound, so Sybil would cry to herself: "She is his true wife, and I am a--caprice!" It was not true, she knew it was not true, yet a strange necessity for self-torture forced her to repeat the cruel words, as it forced her often to remind Stewart that it was time for him to hasten to some appointment, to drive or to lunch with Mrs. Thrall, who much enjoyed displaying publicly the devotion of her actor-husband. And once, when Sybil had longed to attend a sacred concert that offered her an only opportunity to hear a certain great singer, she had been forced either to accept Roberts's escort or remain at home, because Mr. Thrall learned at the last moment that Lettice had invited a large party, who were to return afterward and sup with them in the informal way "dear Stewart so enjoys." And, having swiftly decided in favor of a long evening of loneliness at home, taking a bitter pleasure in her own suffering, she had tried to hasten his departure, saying: "A man should never keep his wife waiting." And in sudden passion, shamed, wounded, angry, he had turned upon her, forbidding her ever to so misapply that word again. "If you must call her Mrs. Thrall, well, be it so--that is enough to bear!" But Sybil pressed upon the wound, insisting obstinately: "But she is your wife!" and he had doggedly contradicted: "No! no! She is a sort of legalized money-changer in the temple of marriage! She is not a wife! Our wedded life is a monstrous hypocrisy! We are false to ourselves, false to society, false in word, deed, and thought! And yet she is a good woman, whose legal and technical virtue would certainly have given her the valued right to hurl rocks at the woman taken in adultery. Wife? She? The woman whose companionship dragged me down to a lower level than that at which she found me? Oh, I see in your cloudy, scornful face your contempt for the man who blames a woman, and Lettice Rowland Thrall should not be censured for not giving what she has not to give! But oh, her chains are very heavy, and my bondage grows more bitter day by day! Sometimes I think that I could welcome the death that, taking me from you, beloved, would at least free me from her!" Frankness was so natural to Sybil's nature that the secrecy and stratagem of intrigue wearied her; the manoeuvring, the clandestine, the sly, the underhand, shamed her. She knew now the secret of the window-curtained door in Thrall's private office, opening on a narrow passage that led up a stair to another door opening in turn behind a wardrobe in a dressing-room--her dressing-room now these three years. And Jim Roberts knew of it, too; she wondered why, and reddened as she glanced toward a key that lay in an open desk-drawer. "Oh!" she groaned, "how can I bear it! I love him! I love him! but it is not right that love should bring only dishonor! I do not need churchly vows to keep me loyal! I shall be faithful till I die; but I am a woman, and I long for the privileges and prerogatives that marriage gives--and that _she_ receives!" She thought that she hid her suffering--she tried to do so, and sometimes, in her work, forgot for a while her false position and the weight of the chains she had herself forged. But those brilliant blue eyes saw more than she guessed; and always, beside the growing hatred of his bitter bondage, there was the agony of fear that this young creature, made to win love, would weary of the double life, would some day be sought by one brave enough to take her to wife--knowing all there was to know! He saw glowing admiration in the eyes of men young and free, and he cursed them in his heart _for_ their freedom, for he knew he had no claim upon her, no legal tie bound her to him. She, the wife of his heart and soul, might turn from him. Her beautiful, cloudy face might flash into smiles for another, should she weary of him and of his secret love. Therefore _his_ days, too, were often days of torment, and the blonde woman, who watched them both with cold, keen eyes, knew much and understood perfectly. She believed the taste for forbidden fruit was common to all men. Thrall's conduct in the past had done little to dispel that belief; but she knew now that his love for the beautiful, gifted girl, whose faith he longed to justify by wedding her, was a real--and oh! galling thought--a _loyal_ love! In the past her suspicions had often borne fruit, and she could recall certain gas-lit, laughing trysts, very scant of secrecy, mere counterfeit amours, that he had lived to loathe, and she knew that this was no such caprice. When he escaped for a little, she knew that he was at the feet of the girl whose sombre eyes were so woful that sometimes they moved her heart to a faint throb of pity. A nobler, warmer, more self-sacrificing woman would have set them free, to find a purer faith, to form happier ties. But Lettice, forced to realize the existence of this great mutual love, this loyal passion, watched, and slowly grew to hate--intensely, bitterly to hate--them both. Verily a noxious plant is illegitimate love, and its poison far-reaching! "Oh! Dorothy!" cried Sybil to the silent walls; "dear little mother to be! I shall be so thankful when you can once more bring a breath of honesty, of every-day open frankness, into this house!" And then she heard a step, light but firm, coming from the back of the hall, and the blood rushed into her face as she sprang to her feet, for her fear was great lest the approaching man might read her grieving thoughts in her face. He entered, and, tossing a bunch of violets to the table, came to her, and, taking her in his arms, buried his face in the cloudy, dark hair that had always tempted him. Presently he said: "I should have been here earlier, sweetheart, for I thought you would be lonely after your people's departure." (She looked gratefully at him.) "But Jim kept me; yes, he has broken loose again, and though I had someone take him home and look after him, I was so doubtful of his being able to play to-night that I gave his small part to an understudy, and that all took time." "How good you are to that poor, worthless fellow! I don't believe any other man in the world would be so generous and so patient as you are." But Thrall said quickly, almost sharply: "Don't--don't say that!" and turned away his face, while Sybil continued: "But actors are so queer--actresses, too. They will hide malice under compliments; they will deliver innuendoes in a jest; they will make most injurious statements about one another; but let one of them be stricken down with sickness or trouble and every hand goes instantly into the pocket, even if it is already nearly empty, and the only feeling is sympathy, the only thought relief for the unfortunate. You are a generous people, Stewart!" "_You?_" he repeated, pointedly. And she laughed, and answered: "Oh, well! _we_ are generous--is that better?" "Yes!--much!" he answered, and knelt at her feet. "What are you doing there?" she asked. "One kneels to a queen!" replied he. She laughed, and flushed a little. She had become actress enough to send out early for her papers. "And," he added, "particularly when one wishes to make an offering. This is an anniversary, beloved!" Her color fled, for that was the one unsympathetic note that had ever sounded between them. She did not understand him in that one respect. To her it seemed almost indelicate to remind her of that day when she had forgiven. She was to understand him later; but now he saw the shadow on her face, and his interpretation was, she "regrets her generosity," and all his love shone appealing in his eyes as he took her hand, and, whispering, "In memory of your mercy, beloved," slipped a great ring upon her finger. She glanced down at it, and a startled cry came from her lips. It was an opal--a marvel! a very wonder! It was not merely the play of color through the soft, milky translucence, the ghost of blue, the vivid flecks of green, the pale rose deepening into flashes of ruby red, the amber glow, but it was the strange quiver and throb in it that made it seem alive--uncanny! She looked at him questioningly. "Did he not know, then," she asked herself, "the superstition attached to this noblest, most fascinating gem, that he offered it as a love gift?" "See," he said, "how sharp the diamond scintillations are compared to this softened glory! Do you see that throbbing that keeps the colors all the time in play? That's my heart, beloved, as it quivers with pain and shame when, belonging to you utterly, I have to ignore you before the world. Do you guess how I suffer--I, who am bound--I, who am helpless! I live only by your mercy--for I love you with all my soul!" And, woman-like, she hid her own grief, and comforted him, and arranged her violets and talked over their mutual triumphs and Dorothy's last note. For he had great regard for the gentle creature in whom he recognized great moral strength. And, as he was leaving, he looked at a trophy of small arms and weapons on the wall, and said: "This Turkish inlaid thing is rusting, Sybil, and this dagger--which is genuine--needs attention, too. Let Jane Penny bring them over to-night, with that bulldog revolver I left upstairs. If Jim is straightened up by that time he will clean the whole outfit to-morrow. The property-man's shooting-irons are all out of kilter, too. There'll be a good day's job to clean and oil them all, but it's the sort of pottering work Jim likes. Good-by, sweetheart! Take an hour's rest, dear, before going to the theatre. Beatrice needs to be well keyed up, you know." He kissed her lips and eyes and hair, and left her. And she stood and cried: "He loves me! He has crowned me! I love him with my whole heart! I thank him from my very soul! But oh, what a position is mine! Unmarried--I am deprived of all freedom and girlish pleasures! A wife--I am denied the honors and prerogatives of marriage!" Her eyes fell upon the great opal, quivering, glowing, glinting! "He suffers, too," she said. "Poor Stewart!" and again she wondered if he knew the superstition attached to opals, and, turning, took the rusting weapons from the trophy. CHAPTER XXVII THE FALL OF THE CURTAIN Long before Sybil rose next morning Leslie Galt had left at the door a great bunch of lilacs, the very first spring blossoms from Dorothy's own garden, and with it a note. Stivers took them into the bedroom with the breakfast tray, and as Sybil put out her hand to take the letter Jane gave a cry of dismay. "For God's sake! is that thing real?" she asked, pointing to the splendid ring. "I--I thought last night it was an extra fine stage jewel. Do you mean to sit there with that unlucky stone just calling out for death and destruction, fire or flood or scandal or--or all of them together to come upon you? Take it off, I say! _take it off_! and let me carry it back, for, of course, it was Mr. Thrall who gave it to you! He must be off his head--and I'll tell him so!" "Oh!" laughed Sybil, "do you mind it so much? No! I could not send it back, that would hurt the giver's feelings; besides, what possible harm can a thing so beautiful do to one?" "H--uh!" snorted Stivers. "I suppose Mary Stuart thought opals beautiful, too, but they didn't help to keep her head on her shoulders!" "But," argued Sybil, "the poor, lovely, tormented, blundering queen would have lost her royal head even if she had never owned an opal." "You don't know that," answered Stivers; "but you do know that she wore opals and lost it. My very own cousin had a little, weeny, footy bit of an opal scarf-pin given him, and wore it, like the fool he always was, and had his house burned over his head for his pains. Don't talk to me! I _know_! Wasn't a friend of my husband's given an opal, and while he was carrying it round in his clothes, making up his silly mind how to set it, didn't his mother-in-law, a great, bouncing, big, hearty woman, up and die?" Sybil nearly strangled over a combination of coffee and laugh. "Oh, Mrs. Stivers," she exclaimed, "if you make that story public there will certainly be a boom in the sale of small opals--if one can believe the statements of the comic papers, at least." "All right, Miss. You may laugh, but I'll watch my home closer than ever for fire or burglars. I'd as soon move into a new house on Friday, and I'd a sight rather break a looking-glass than wear that thing for an hour!" and she retired pretty thoroughly vexed. Sybil touched the great, shimmering quiver of color with her lips, whispering: "Poor heart, that suffers for me!" And then, with the fresh odor of the lilacs about her, she opened the envelope which contained a note from Dorothy, enclosing a portion of a letter written by Mrs. Lawton within the hour of her arrival at the White house. Dorrie wrote briefly, sending proudest congratulations to "the successful, admired, newly triumphant actress, who was yet her own dear Sybbie--sweet sister, all unchanged, in truth and love," and a tender assurance of her own well-being, of her hopeful, trustful waiting, knowing that whether she received death or life the gift would come from God, who never made mistakes. So she waited calmly. "It seems rather mean," she added, "to enclose a portion of mamma's 'note'--of six pages--but, Syb, I can't help it, I simply _can't_! I wouldn't let papa or Leslie know it for the world, but you will understand and not think it disrespectful. Do write, Sybbie, to your Dorothy!" "Yes," the fragment of Mrs. Lawton's letter read, "I'm afraid I overdid it a bit. Shopping, you know, is very fatiguing, even to one who like myself never loiters or hesitates. Anyway, if my looking-glass did not so flatly contradict me, I should call myself quite an old woman to-day. But let me get on to what I wish to say. I hate anyone who meanders--never meander, Dorothy. Though you are a married woman you should not be averse to a little advice now and then from one who watched over your infancy--and a very quiet, well-sleeping babe you were, too, quite different from Sybil, who was-- Well, as I was saying, meeting Mr. Thrall--a man très comme il faut--as I have always said, I mentioned your hopes--he being a married man these years past, and most friendly in his inquiries. He, in offering congratulations, expressed the opinion that a gift of twins would be desirable, as it was easier to select names for two than for one, and family friction would be lessened in consequence. I confess I was startled, and 'er, well, not far from being vexed, and I plainly told him I hoped you would be guilty of no such vulgarity. You should have seen his eyes--very remarkable eyes, you must have noticed their amazing blueness--quite like the paler sapphires. Yes, he looked perfectly amazed. 'Vulgar?' he repeated. 'Could a Merivale-Merivale be guilty of vulgarity? You must surely know the Merivale-Merivales, Mrs. Lawton?' Imagine my haste to tell him that Mrs. Merivale-Merivale was the only child and heiress of my friend old Tom Bligh, who used to say she was so democratic that she would never be content till she had every Tom, Dick, and Harry in society about her. And people said she married Dick Merivale-Merivale so that she could help out her father's saying. And Mr. Thrall said: 'Dear me! and did you not know that she has twin boys, and that she calls them Tom and Harry? Quite clever, for society, is it not? Tom, Dick, and Harry, right in her own family, too!' My dear, I was never more taken aback! And then he went on to tell me of Lady Somebody-Somebody, of some sort of 'hurst,' in some shire in England, who has twin daughters, and drives about with them, and has them always mentioned as 'Lady So-and-So's lovely twins' in the society journals. I declare, I was quite startled; but fashions do change so, and I'm sure its no fault of mine that I have fallen so far behind the times--and been so out of everything. But I have hastened to write this all out for your comfort, in case you have any anxiety on that score. I don't suppose you have, but I frankly admit that I should myself have looked upon the simultaneous arrival of yourself and Sybil as verging upon an impropriety. But different times--different manners, and there is no questioning the fact that twins, if not de rigueur, are at least genuinely fashionable now." Peal after peal of laughter from Sybil brought Stivers to the door, pale and with distinctly frightened eyes. "In the name of heaven, what's the matter with you? Stop it! _stop it!_ You're _fey_--that's what you are! Ill will come of it--now mind!" "_Fey?_" repeated Sybil, gurgling still with laughter. "What is _fey_, Mrs. Stivers? Why, you look quite frightened!" "You laugh in a room all by yourself! You're _fey_, and that means you're sort of possessed. It's an evil spirit of mischievous fun that takes hold of you just before a stroke of bad luck comes upon you. Lord knows you've naught more to do now than to get up and smash a looking-glass!" "Don't be worried!" said Sybil, seeing the woman's distress! "I was not _fey_, because I had cause for laughter. It was this letter that amused me." "But you laughed in a room by yourself," gloomily insisted Stivers, who would not be comforted, and removed the tray rather sullenly. And Sybil laughed again and yet again, for she could not know that there was hurry and confusion at the old White house; that at the little Riverdale station, crouching at the foot of the hill beside the swift-running river, the quick tic-tic-tacking, and dot-dot-dot dashing were spelling out words of sorrow for her. But, later, as she rose from the piano and went to the window to look out, a messenger boy on the steps reached far over and stole a flower from her balcony before he rang the bell; and she laughed again, because he so nearly landed on his head in his effort to reach the blossom. She always remembered, with a sick misery, that she was laughing when she opened the telegram that said: "_Your mother has died in her sleep. Discovered an hour ago. Dorothy must not know. Come. Father._" She never remembered how she was made ready for the street. She seemed to recover her consciousness only as she found herself going into the theatre by the back way, and she wondered vaguely why she had not gone in the front. With the telegram crushed in her ungloved hand she had flown instantly to Stewart--in the first place, from the blind instinct that sends the stricken into the arms of the loved one for shelter, for comfort; and now, in the second place, she sought him for business reasons, so that he might have all the time possible in which to arrange matters theatrical during her necessary absence. She made her hurried way to Thrall's private office--that little red-walled room, where she had first met him, and where her own picture as Juliet now reigned supreme. An old cloth had been spread over the open desk, and on it lay a litter of oily rags, bits of wire, polishing powder, loose cartridges, several revolvers, a tiny pistol used by stage heroines, and Sybil's beautiful dagger. Jim Roberts, pallid, puffy-eyed, and trembling visibly, sat there at work, and Thrall, seeing the great trickling drops of perspiration which the slightest effort brought out upon his pasty skin, said: "Jim, either you must give that job up for to-day or you must take a nip to steady your nerves. You can't break short off after being on the rampage as you were yesterday." But Jim lifted miserable eyes, and said, doggedly: "No! She--the Princess--might come in, and notice--" (He had not forgotten that remark about his fondness for cloves.) "She's not at all likely to come in to-day, and if she did, she would only feel sorry for your recklessness." He turned, and, taking a handsome travelling-flask from a shelf, shook it, and smilingly announced: "Half full yet." He poured a pretty stiff drink into a glass, brought it to Jim, and, pointing to water standing on top of the desk, said: "There you are, old man--racer--chaser--everything to your hand, and, for heaven's sake, wipe your dripping face!" Jim swallowed his liquor and resumed his work, asking, querulously: "Where is that chamois skin? I've hunted that infernal thing till my head is all a-buzz." "Go to the box-office and get a new one," said Thrall. "There's a bundle of them in the drawer. Barney will give you one." "No! no!" irritably replied Jim. "I want the one I've been using! I hate a new chamois; besides, how the devil could the thing disappear! I used it on that 'bulldog' of yours a while ago. You're a nice man to own a fine revolver like that, and let it get spotted and ate into with rust. You ought to carry a bargain-counter ninety-nine-and-a-half-cent sort of shooting-iron." Thrall laughed good-temperedly, and, picking up the revolver, said: "Well, you have cleaned and polished and oiled the old thing up in great shape." He stood looking down at the weapon, whose white ivory handle and heavily nickled barrel and trimmings took nothing from its threatening look. Short, thick, heavy, the three-inch double barrel and the wide ugly muzzle were so suggestive that Thrall exclaimed: "By Jove! it's well named, for the bulldog is just what it reminds one of." "Yes," answered Jim, still searching for the mislaid chamois; "that's a dog whose bark is not worse than his bite. Be a little careful, will you! That's a mighty easy trigger, and something less than ten-horse power will cock the thing full. Oh, damn! damn! where is that chamois?" How cruel is the despotism of trifling circumstance! It is humiliating to think that a life's career--nay, even more than that--hung upon the finding or the losing of a dirty bit of leather! Thrall "broke" the revolver to look at the cartridges, somehow expecting to see new ones, and remarked: "Oh, you've returned the old cartridges, I see?" "Yes," replied Jim, fretfully; "but what of it? I haven't get any new 32s on hand, but the old ones will bore holes in a man that will serve every purpose. I wish I had an old silk handkerchief to polish this inlaid work with." And just then they heard the rustling of skirts, the tap of heels, and Sybil was in the room. Jim Roberts looked up, and, at sight of her white face and frightened eyes, his own expression changed so swiftly that Thrall was startled. The latter turned, and, in the instant of recognition, the thought flashed through him that, as Sybil had come without appointment, Barney, unwarned, might send anyone here that asked for him; and he said, surprisedly, even a little sharply: "Good heaven, child, what are you doing here?" and the girl moaned: "Oh, Stewart! Stewart! the message! the awful message!" and crept to him and hid her face on his arm. Roberts, weak and trembling, and with glaring eyes, made his way out, muttering something about "going to the office." Outside he held his head hard between his hands and leaned against the wall for support. "It's come," he said, "at last! Oh, damn him! It's so awfully sudden, too, but that's him all over--his love flaming sky-high one moment and black out the next!" He groaned, and rolled his head miserably about. He had understood Sybil's words to be: "Your message--your awful message!" and that was enough to arouse the suspicions of the poor half-crazed creature. "'What are you doing here?' Curse him! I can remember how hard it was for you to get her here in the first place! It was coax and plead and promise then! Now, it's 'what are you doing here!' She is not like little Bess. She will be more likely to kill _him_ than herself!" He started, and stood upright. "That must not be!" he said. "That would utterly ruin her young life! No, my beautiful! so pale--so frightened! Oh, I--" He broke off, and went shambling over to the box-office and asked for the chamois. "In the drawer, there," said Barney, briefly. "Hand one out," said Jim; "my hands are all oily and grimy from cleaning that arsenal in there. I can't touch anything without leaving a mark." Barney handed out the article, and Jim deliberately returned to the private office. As he entered he drew the heavy portière over the closed door and passed to the desk in the corner and sat down. Stewart had been much shocked at the blow that had fallen so suddenly upon Sybil, and had shown her such tender sympathy and love that at last the tears had rushed to her hot eyes, and now, within the circle of his arm, her head against his shoulder, she stood and sobbed piteously. Neither of them noticed Jim, and then suddenly, for the first time, she put into words something of her longing for his open protection and love. "Oh," she cried, "must I go there alone? Must I face this terrible thing without you?" Jim heard, and his face was dreadful. A pale fire shone in his watery eyes, his nostrils dilated and quivered rapidly, his upper lip drew tremblingly upward at one corner, he had all the look of a helpless cur about to pass into a convulsion. Sybil had but spoken Thrall's own thought. He, too, was thinking how hard it was that he could not take a husband's place by the side of this stricken creature of his love, and he groaned but made no answer. And then, poor child, the thought came to her of some other woman acting with him. A jealous pain was in her voice as she cried: "And you will put another woman in my place, Stewart? Oh, Stewart, how can I bear it all?" There came from the corner a strange sort of snarl. Jim Roberts was on his feet, a dull red had spread over his face, his very eyeballs were suffused. Thrall turned his head, saw, and, with all his strength, flung Sybil from him, and simultaneously with Jim's "No, damn you, you'll put no other woman in her place!" the "bulldog" barked, and the bullet crashed into the breast where her head had rested. For an instant there was utter silence; a smoke, an evil odor, and three white faces--that was all! Thrall, who had clapped his hand over the wound, stood tall and erect a moment, then he began to settle together, as it were, and slowly he sank backward upon the couch behind him, his head against the wall, his right hand partly supporting him. He was perfectly ghastly, but entirely conscious, and calm and self-controlled to an astounding degree. He tried to draw a long breath, and then a new horror was in the room--the horror of that agonized breathing. He spoke, painfully, word by word, and his thought was all for the woman he loved, who lay against the wall opposite, her arms outstretched on either side just as she had staggered there when Stewart flung her to safety. "Jim--the--private--door--get--Princess--away--quick! Save--her--from--scandal!" And Jim, falling back instantly into the old subserviency and obedience, sprang to the curtained door, that in opening outward took with it the pedestal and statuette of the little "Love," which were securely fastened to it, so that when the door was closed again the room looked utterly undisturbed. Pushing the door open he flew to Sybil, who had never moved, and, catching her about the waist, dragged her toward it. As she was passing Thrall he took his hand from his breast and caught at her fingers. She shuddered at the touch, so cold, so clammy, so--so wet! "Beloved!" his eyes looked enormous in his pallid face. "Beloved!--I--sinned--against--you--but--it--was--from--love! Forgive--can--you?" A sort of surprise came upon her face, and she said, simply, as if that answered completely his question: "I love you, dear heart!" One flash of the old triumphant light came to his eyes; then, though Death's grim face looked at him, over her shoulder, the tormenting jealousy of the passionate lover flared up in him, and he gasped, painfully: "For--all--time--beloved?" She bent and kissed his eyes, kissed his gasping clay-cold lips, and answered: "I love you for time and for eternity!" And Roberts, whispering: "Quick! Someone will come!" lifted her in his arms and carried her to the passage and set her down. As the door was closing on her she thought she heard Stewart say: "The word--the ruby--" and then she was hurrying up to her dressing-room, passing through it and down to the stage entrance, where there was no doorman at that hour, and so out into the street. At the corner she glanced down toward the theatre, and saw a hatless man tearing madly out of the front door. It was Barney. He said something as he ran. Two people stopped, turned, and stared at the building, and so formed the nucleus of the swiftly gathering, traffic-impeding crowd--that mushroom growth, so common to excitable Broadway. Her knees trembled threateningly beneath her, faintness seemed stealing over her senses. She dimly saw a cab, working its way up the street. The man lifted his whip inquiringly; she raised her bare hand to summon him, and then, there in the open street, she gave a cry of horror, fortunately drowned by other sounds, for that was the hand Thrall had clutched, and his chill, blood-wet fingers had left three close lines of red, that, circling her fingers, led straight across the great opal. She gasped out her street and number, and, stumbling into the cab, she heard an excited passer-by remark: "That's Sybil Lawton! I'll bet a dollar she was on her way to the theatre!" And as the cab passed on he continued: "Well, she couldn't get through that crowd! I 'spose a policeman has told her what's happened down there. We had seats for to-night, too--I guess they'll redeem the tickets." And ten minutes later the rumor was running like fire in dry grass: "That Sybil Lawton had been shopping and a policeman stopped her, and, without warning or preparation of any kind, had informed her of the shooting of her manager, and she collapsed, and was driven home in a cab." Murder became suicide--suicide became accident, before the clang of the ambulance-gong sent the depressing shivers through nerves that would thrill with pleasurable excitement at the sound of the fire-gong. Then a group of men came out of the front door, and hats came quickly off when those nearest caught a glimpse of a marble-white face, with long, inky lashes clinging close to ghastly cheeks. For, between those dreadful whistling breaths, Thrall had warned Jim, word by word, that it was "an accident," and explained that Jim, having supposed the old cartridges were withdrawn, snapped the revolver, standing at close range, adding: "Keep--steady--stick--to--story--Jim-- for--her--sake! Now--call--make--big--row! I'm--gone!" And Jim, conscious of an awful blunder, obeying to the letter, as Thrall fainted, tore away the heavy portière that had helped so much to deaden the sound of the shot, dashed open the door, and, like a madman, shouted: "A doctor! a doctor! for God's sake, Barney! I've shot Thrall! I have! I have! Oh, run! run! I'll call a policeman myself!" He was obeying orders--he was making "a big row," but suddenly he thought of Sybil. "Oh, my beautiful!" he cried; "I meant to serve you, and I've robbed you instead!" And, as the policeman advanced toward him, he fell forward in the fit that had threatened him all the day. Yes, Jim was obedient to the last--he made "a big row"! The next day, almost at the same hour, the pale woman who had watched at Thrall's side almost unwinkingly left the room for a moment to confer with her maid. "English crêpe," she whispered, "of course. The heaviest and best is always the cheapest in the long run." It was only a moment's absence, but the long lashes on the stricken man's ghastly face lifted, the hand went to the wounded breast. With the instinct of the actor, who always considers effect, he thought gratefully that the hemorrhage had been internal, and that he had not been an offensive-looking object. He turned his eyes to the side where Lettice had sat and watched. She was not there. His eyes widened with pleasure. He rose suddenly--the effort was a mistaken one. He realized it in a moment. There was a red spot creeping out on his shirt, and--and a salty taste in his mouth. Yet he smiled, almost maliciously, as he thought: "I am escaping her, after all!" Then he knew. He shivered. "Sybil!" he said; "beloved!" The door opened--the clock was striking down-stairs--from a near room came the whir of a sewing-machine--Stewart Thrall was dead. CHAPTER XXVIII "THOU KNOWEST!" Mrs. Van Camp put ease and comfort from her, placed Poll in his cage, and left a bunch of white grapes dangling from its top, hoping that the fruit might attract his attention sufficiently to stop his hoarse: "'Omeo! 'Omeo! dead! dead!" that now was more distressing to listen to than his most distinct profanity. She had dressed herself for the street, and in her character of god-mother hastened to Sybil's side. Then, finding her prostrated, and, for the time being, utterly incapable of action of any kind, like the loyal friend she was, she went on up to Riverdale at once to the assistance of John Lawton and Leslie Galt; who, dazed and confused, seemed as helpless as two male babes, until the bright, clever, capable old lady took charge and gave orders and made suggestions. Neither she nor Leslie liked the strange blank look in poor old John Lawton's eyes. The blow had stunned him seemingly. Yet he was observant enough about anything affecting his Letitia, and Sybil Van Camp had felt tears springing to her eyes when, having to enter Mrs. Lawton's sleeping-room, she saw John catch up the little bottle of rouge vinaigre from the toilet-table and hide it in his pocket. "Poor, loyal old gentleman!" she thought; "as if all her world did not know that Letitia Lawton rouged!" The absence of his worshipped children made the burden of his grief almost unbearable. He knew that Dorothy was to be deceived, if possible, for a few days, so that she might have undiminished strength and courage for the great trial she was approaching so rapidly; but Sybil--"where was Sybil?" That was all he said, muttering the words very low. He could give no assistance to anyone, could not tell where anything could be found; only he could not be kept away from that white, still thing, that he looked at with such blank, piteously faded eyes, as though he were trying to trace in it some resemblance to the light, frivolous but vivid Letitia, who for twenty-four years had talked him to sleep o' nights, and whose silence now was so sudden and so cruel. Once Leslie, coming softly in to try again to lead the old man away, overheard him murmuring: "She does not come--they are both independent of me now. I--I--think I'll just go with you Letitia, my dear!" and, frightened, he turned and sought Mrs. Van Camp. And that wise woman answered: "You see, you were in error trying to hide this disaster to Mr. Thrall from him. He thinks Sybil neglects him. The shock will not break him entirely, as you imagine, but it will arouse him to a desire to help his child." "Right!" exclaimed Leslie. "That's the dear old chap all over! We must make him believe her welfare depends wholly upon his protection and care--or, indeed, Mrs. Van Camp, I fear he will--well, let us say, let go!" And so the kindly conspirators planned that, as the death of Mr. Thrall could scarcely be kept from Dorothy's knowledge, and if she learned of it she would think her mother was with Sybil for a few days, the shattered old man Lawton should be made to believe Sybil's welfare depended entirely upon him; and Sybil,--poor child!--crushed as she was, would see at a glance that her father's life depended upon her loving companionship. And then they led the old gentleman from the darkened room out to the porch, and, each holding one of his hands, they told him of the accidental shooting of Mr. Thrall, of the crushing effect of the double blow upon Sybil. But before their story was done he was drawing his hands away and crying: "My little girl! my little girl! I must go to you at once!" and it required the repeated assurance of Mrs. Van Camp that his child would come to him by an early train next morning to keep him from hurrying to the city. When Mrs. Van Camp had left the red brick house with the flower-filled windows Sybil had raised herself from her pillows and had struck the small gong-bell on the stand by her bed sharply--twice--three times. And Stivers called up to her: "In a moment, Miss Sybil!" but did not appear; and again the gong sounded, and at last the woman came with a cup of black coffee in her hand. "It's no use frowning, Miss--no use waving your hand! That doctor gave you an opiate last night, and now you just--no! I won't listen to what you want until you swallow down this coffee--to steady your nerves. No! Miss--no! He's not gone yet--there's no 'extra' out at all. That's some pedler you hear. Take it down now, all of it. There! You'll be the better for that. Now, what was it you wanted?" And Sybil fastened her woful eyes on the woman's face, and begged: "Mrs. Stivers, will you bring a jeweler here to my room, as quickly as possible?" "A--a--what?" stammered Stivers, "a jeweler--no, I can't leave you to go away over----" "But," the girl interrupted, "anyone will do--any working jeweler. Right in the next avenue there is a little shop--you won't be gone more than fifteen minutes. You must, indeed you _must_!" "O-o-oh!" thought Stivers; "she wants to get rid of that opal, now all the damage is done." Aloud she warned: "If you're going to try to do any business, you don't want a little tu-penny-ha'penny creature like that to deal with. Well! well! I'm going--but suppose the bell rings? Yes, I'll hurry!" White and worn-looking, Sybil fell back upon the pillow, her tumbled dark hair clouding over her brows, her hot eyes staring before her, and every nerve tense, waiting for the "E-e-extray! e-e-extray!" at whose sound her world of love would crumble to nothingness. Had she or had she not heard Stewart gasp "The word--the _ruby_--?" If she had, then the word must have had an immense significance for him, and suddenly her dumb, inert despair was broken by an intense longing to know what the word was that even rapidly approaching death had not driven from his recollection. For Sybil did not try to deceive herself. Anyone hearing that awful breathing must have realized that it meant a pierced lung, and she had been hopeless from the first. She felt that the explanation given by Thrall and Roberts was not true--that the shooting had not been accidental; but she supposed it had been the motiveless act of a drink-maddened man. For Jim Roberts had never breathed a hint--drunk or sober--of the miserable fate of his young sister, still less of his piteous passion of love for herself. So, in the absence of reasonable motive, she charged the dreadful deed to drunkenness. Stivers had eagerly seized upon the cue given by rumor, and declared that Sybil had been shopping, and was going toward the theatre, when, etc., etc.; and she had carefully drilled her mistress in this story, before the arrival of Mrs. Van Camp. And now the unhappy girl lay there straining her ears for that cry of "Extra!" that she so dreaded, and tormenting herself with thoughts of what she might have said and done yesterday, had she not been so stupefied with terror. At last she heard Stivers opening the door, and presently she was showing in a sandy-haired, hooked-nosed young man, with thick red lips and an appraising eye, that seemed at a glance to put a price upon each article in the room. She took the glittering diamond heart from her neck, and, placing it in the man's hand, asked him to remove the back. She would not listen to his proposal to take it to his shop--it must be done there, even at the risk of scratching the gold. Scratch or dent it, if he must, but open it he should! At last the back came off, and the man remarked: "I think there's something engraved here." But Sybil's hand-clasp covered the inscription. "Wait in the other room," she commanded. She bolted the door, flew to the window, and, catching the light upon the metal, read the word she had worn upon her breast three years--the word Stewart said made the sole value of the gem--read and fell upon her knees, and buried her face in the pillow and sobbed and cried: "I understand you better now, dear heart!" and kissed again and again the four little letters that formed that one significant word, "Wife." An hour later the expected cry arose in the street. Hoarse bawling went up one side and down the other, and Sybil knew the man who had been her idol, dearer, more precious than the whole great world, he whose love had been as the very breath of life to her, was gone away forever! And, lying with the locket pressed against her lips, she breathed: "Wife, you said, dear heart? Then your widow now, and as loyal in the shadow of your death as I was in the sunlight of your life!" * * * * * In the passenger list there had appeared the names of Mr. J. Lawton Bassett and daughter, and the pair thus registered had gone on board over night because of the very early hour of sailing, they said, but it was really an effort to avoid public notice; and all the bell-ringing, pulling, hauling, rushing, and trampling were over and comparative quiet reigned before John Lawton and Sybil, his daughter, ascended to the deck to look about them and with sad eyes to take farewell of the great city they loved, with its rapidly softening outlines, blending, blurring into a grayish mass touched with a few strong darks, many sharp, white lights, and here and there a gleam from the golden cross of some sky-piercing spire. As they leaned against the rail, the girl with cloudy hair, sombre eyes, and black-robed figure clinging to the arm of the pale old gentleman, also in mourning, they made a pathetic picture. Silently they watched--each was trying to hide grief for the other's sake. It was well for Sybil that this helpless old father needed her devoted care, for an awful temptation had come to her in her despair. "Oh," she cried, now in her heart, "if I only had Dorothy's faith in God! Dorothy's hope for the beautiful hereafter! But," she mused bitterly, "Dorothy has not sinned, while I--and yet, if God is what she believes Him, He could pity even me!" Then she shivered, for, looking out over the water, she thought of the exultant old anthem, and quoting "The sea is His, and He made it!" she felt suddenly that she was too small, too insignificant, for her cry of repentance to be noticed. The wind was sharpening. Her thoughts came back to her father. They had been out there a very long time--too long, and--and what was that man--the purser--doing? Handing an envelope to a big man already in cap and ulster, and calling--could she be right--calling: "Miss Lawton? Is a Miss Sybil Lawton here?" The pilot had been dropped half an hour or more ago. Why--why, what was this? An envelope thrust into her unwilling hand, and the purser was away, calling for a Mr. Pemberton Something, and waving one last missive aloft for its claimant. "Dorothy!" gasped the old man, and closed his eyes a moment. Sybil's nervous fingers tore the envelope, and opened the bit of yellow paper. She read breathlessly, looked about her, passed her hand over her eyes, read again. And then she flung her arms about her father's trembling, frail old body, buried her face in his breast, and laughed--laughed with tears running down her cheeks--laughed and blessed God for his goodness! Then, looking up at her father's quivering mouth, she put her fingers on it, saying: "Don't, dada, it's good news--about Dorothy!" A smile came to his lips, an eager light to his eyes. "Why! why!" he said. "I expected the news would be awaiting us at Liverpool; but really, I----" Again that hysterical laughter shook the girl. "You're surprised, darling!" she said, "but wait till you hear the message." "_Sybil Letitia and Dorothy Grace have arrived. Mother and both babies well. Look for cable. Leslie._" John Lawton straightened up suddenly. "W-w-what!" stammered he. "Sybil Letitia? W-w-y? Who on earth--Dorothy Grace? Why, but that's two, Sybil! Two's twins! Well, I am astonished--at Dorothy!" And then, before she could answer, a pleased look came on his face, as he continued: "Poor Letitia would have thought that so fashionable! I wish she knew, dear! She so loved to be within the fashion!" He drew Sybil close to him, and she thought with sick longing of that stronger arm that used to circle her about so tenderly. He looked backward as he murmured: "Little Dorrie's babies!" Then, glancing down at the dark, drooping head without reason, a conviction came to him that Dorothy's children would have to be Sybil's children, too. She raised her woful eyes, and, meeting his pitying glance, answered the look, saying: "Dorothy never failed yet to share her joys with me, dada!" He turned his eyes again toward the land they were leaving. "Sybil Letitia--that's for you and wife. Dorothy Grace--that's for Dorrie and Leslie's mother. I--didn't he say anything about the color of their eyes, dear? Strange!" he murmured, discontentedly. "He might have said _that_ much!" "Probably we shall learn all you wish at Liverpool, dear!" she patiently answered, while her heart contracted with a new loneliness. They had fled together from two freshly made graves, but already it was evident that baby hands were tuning the worn old heart-strings anew; that these two creatures, with eyes full of knowledge from the great Beyond, held speechless till they should forget from whence they came, and allowed only wordless cries, were yet summoning him, with almost irresistible power, back, back! "Do you not think, daughter, that brief trips abroad at frequent intervals are as beneficial as one more prolonged visit?" he naïvely asked, his pale old eyes looking quite eagerly at her. "Yes, dear," she answered him, and then she led him away, fearing the effect on him of the cold and the increasing motion. Still he looked backward, and she persuadingly said: "Go, now, dear, and as soon as you are safely in your berth I'll come to you, and we will talk----" "About Dorothy's babies--our little twins?" "Yes, dada! All about them--their names and probable color, probable weight, everything we can think of!" And then she went back and looked long out over the vast gray, pathless expanse. "'The sea is His, and He made it!' What inconceivable power! And yet that mighty Creator noted the fall of a sparrow. Oh!" she thought, as she pressed the jewel to her breast till it hurt the tender flesh. "I--who am widowed for all my life--I thank you for your mercy and goodness in bringing safe and happy deliverance to my beloved sister! And humbly I beseech you now, to deliver me my soul! For I am a sinful woman--troubled and heavy, for that we lost our way through love! But now I cannot bear my woe alone! Help me, O mighty and powerful One, hereafter to live according to Thy will! Purify me in heart and mind, that I may be a fit companion for those little ones you have sent into our lives!" She, too, began to feel a longing for sight and touch of those precious mysteries--Dorrie's babies. Stewart had been so anxious for Dorothy's welfare. She pressed her locket closer. "Oh!" she thought, "how I will love them! Sybil Letitia--Dorothy Grace! Yes, you are very nice and stately, and will look well upon the records, and, later on, upon marriage cards; but, dear little gifts, you will answer, all your baby years at least, to the tenderly commonplace Sybbie and Dorrie, so familiar to a Lawton nursery, and will doubtless be as hardy, happy, and sturdy as Lawton-Galt babies ought to be! And oh, if you thrive and are spared to the years of your sweet budding, you shall, by your right divine, be taught frankly and by high authority those great truths that are too often learned only in degrading secrecy from unworthy lips. Do I not know the danger, the cruelty, of sending forth the young in the innocence of utter ignorance! But you, my Dorrie's little daughters, shall be taught to look forward to some proud day in your girlhood when, as a guerdon for patient waiting and unhesitating obedience, you shall receive from reverent lips knowledge of the mysteries of life and love--of the almost divine honor of a perfectly pure womanhood! So shall propinquity be as naught; so no moment of strange, overwhelming weakness, no sudden flaring up of impulse, shall have power to bewilder and confuse you, to your harm! And thus, knowing something of both your weakness and your strength, it will not be in the innocence of ignorance that you will face the world, but with the clear-eyed, pure-hearted innocence of wisdom!" * * * * * Just then Sybil's skirts snapped in the wind, and whipped close about her ankles. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "Papa! I must go to papa!" She smiled faintly as she thought, "While he has been waiting the babies have grown up into lovely womanhood." One more long look she gave over the heaving, restless, gray sea, and suddenly a very agony of grief swept over her. She bowed her head. "I can't help it," she breathed; "I repent of my sin, yet I still love and long for him!" She pressed the locket (with the word) closer. "But I will pray on, all my life; for"--she raised great tear-brimmed eyes to heaven--"to understand is to pardon, and 'Thou knowest'!" THE END. 
37545	----	"PERSONS UNKNOWN" BY VIRGINIA TRACY ILLUSTRATIONS BY HENRY RALEIGH NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1914 Copyright, 1914, by THE CENTURY CO. Copyright, 1914, by The Ridgway Company _Published, October, 1914_ TO MY FELLOW-CONSPIRATORS HELEN L. KLOEBER AND JESSIE C. SOULE When winter's breath was on the pane, Through dusk and snow, wild winds and rain, I fled to your bright hearth again To read about a _Shadow_! You lit the lamp, you brewed the tea, Pulled up the deepest chair for me, And set yourselves to guess and see-- _What ailed that minx, Christina?_ What Herrick found--what Nancy knew-- Whose motor raced the county through-- What could that harsh Policeman do-- You never failed to argue; Of moonlight, murders, lovers, threats, Vengeance and kisses, siren's nets, And pale, dark men with cigarettes, Not once I found you weary! Through broken music, sudden light In the deep darkness, jewels bright, Persons unknown in unknown plight, You still sought _unknown_ persons; Authors, if you would straightway know Where faith and cheer and counsel grow, Suggestions flourish and hints flow: _Go ask my Nancy Cornish!_ [Illustration: Suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange and splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as Herrick had never seen before] CONTENTS BOOK FIRST THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND I WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT 3 II HERRICK FINDS A DOOR BOLTED 7 III SOMETHING ELSE IS FOUND 12 IV HERRICK IS SURE OF ONE THING 14 V HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER 19 VI HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR 25 VII HERRICK HAS A BUSIEST DAY 36 VIII MRS. WILLING TELLS WHAT SHE KNOWS 51 IX JOE PATRICK IS DETAINED 58 X JOE PATRICK ARRIVES 67 XI PERSONS UNKNOWN 89 XII HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE 96 BOOK SECOND THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN I HERRICK PAYS A CALL, AND THE TEA IS SPILT 103 II IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS ARM IS OUTSTRETCHED 115 III HERRICK GUESSES AT THE MYSTERY AND GETS IN SOMETHING'S WAY 124 IV THE MYSTERY PAUSES, AND OTHER THINGS GO FORWARD 133 V HERRICK HEARS A BELL RING 158 VI AND HOLDS A RECEPTION AFTER ALL 166 VII MORNING IN THE PARK: THE SILENT OUTCRY 170 VIII A GREAT OCCASION APPROACHES AND THE VILLAIN ENTERS 177 IX PRESTO CHANGE: "OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME!" 184 X MIDNIGHT IN THE PARK; "JE SUIS AUSSI SANS DÉSIR--" 190 XI KEEPING CHRISTINA OUT OF IT 201 XII AULD ACQUAINTANCE: WHAT CHRISTINA SAW 206 XIII THE NIGHT OF NIGHTS: THE PRINCESS IN THE TRANSFORMATION SCENE 215 XIV ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS 219 XV "WHEN STARS GROW COLD" 222 BOOK THIRD WILL O' THE WISP I GLEAMS IN THE RAIN: WHEELER'S STORY 231 II CORPSE CANDLES IN THE NIGHT: MRS. DEUTCH'S STORY 242 III SEARCH-LIGHTS FLASHED IN THE EYES: KANE'S STORY 254 IV A LIGHT ALONG THE ROAD: DENNY GIVES AN ADDRESS 270 V THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LIGHT: WHERE CHRISTINA WAS 283 VI THE YELLOW HOUSE AND WHAT THEY FOUND AT IT 292 VII VANISHING LADY: THE SHADOW AT THE DANCE 298 VIII JILL-IN-THE-BOX! THE LAST OF THE GRAY TOURING CAR 305 IX A SIGN IN THE SKY 314 X "THE OLD EARL'S DAUGHTER": MRS. PASCOE ON FAMILY TIES 324 XI THE ARM OF JUSTICE ON CLEANING DAY: AN OVERTURE TO A COMIC OPERA 334 XII THE COMIC OPERA CHORUS: "AND SAID, 'WHAT A GOOD BOY AM I!'" 343 XIII "WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR?": A CRIMINAL PERFORMANCE 356 XIV THE SICILIAN TRAITOR: "YOU THAT CHOOSE NOT BY THE VIEW" 365 XV ONE WITNESS SPEAKS 377 XVI THE LAST SHADOW: "LEAVE ALL THAT TIES THY FOOT BEHIND AND FOLLOW, FOLLOW ME!" 380 XVII HERSELF 385 BOOK FOURTH THE LIGHTED HOUSE I THE HOSTESS PREPARING 389 II THE EXPECTED COMPANY 399 III THE SHIPS AT ACTIUM 401 IV TURN, FORTUNE, TURN THY WHEEL-- 423 V CARNAGE: A COMIC OPERA CLIMAX 433 VI THE DARKEST HOUR: "OF WOUNDS AND SORE DEFEAT I MADE MY BATTLE STAY!" 447 VII THE SHADOW'S FACE: BEING ALSO THE FULL STORY OF THE SHADOW'S FLIGHT 459 VIII IN WHICH CHRISTINA HOPE DOES POSITIVELY REAPPEAR 481 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange and splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as Herrick had never seen before _Frontispiece_ Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders 10 "Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to correct a false impression; may I? 76 "'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'There's Miss Hope!'" 86 "There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said. "Don't deny it--I know!" 160 Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name 296 "You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous fool! Thank God, I've done with you!" 420 "Shall I let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you are, through and through--?" 476 BOOK FIRST THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND CHAPTER I WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT "Ask Nancy Cornish!" The phrase might have exploded into Herrick's mind, it leaped there with such sudden violence, distinct as the command of a voice, out of the smothering blackness of the torrid August night. He started up instantly, as if to listen, sitting upright on the bed from which he had long since tossed all covering. Then he frowned at the tricks which the heat was playing upon even such strong nerves as his. In the unacknowledged homesickness of his heart his very first doze had brought him a dream of home; then the dream had slid along the trail of desire to a cool sea beach, where he and Marion used to be taken every summer when they were children, and a fog had rolled in along this beach which, at first, he had welcomed because it was so deliciously cold. It was no longer his sister who was there beside him; it was no less unexpected a person than the Heroine of the novel he was writing and whose conduct in the very next chapter he had been trying all day to decide. It was a delightful convenience to have her there, ready to tell him the secret of her heart! He saw that she had brought the novel with her, all finished. She held it out to him, open, and he read one phrase, "When Ann and her lover were down in Cornwall." He asked her what that was doing there--since her name was not Ann and he had never imagined her in Cornwall. And then the fog rolled up between them, blotting out the book, blotting out his Heroine; that fog became a horror, he was lost in it, and yet it vaguely showed him the shadowy forms of shadowy persons--he hoped if they were his other characters they really weren't quite so shadowy as that!--one of whom threateningly cried to him through the fog, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" And here he was, now, actually conscious of a great rush of energy and intention, as if he really had some way of asking Nancy Cornish, or anything to ask her, if he had! He remembered perfectly well, now, who she was--a little red-headed girl, a friend of his sister; a girl whom he had not seen in eight years and did not care if he never saw again. What had brought her into his dreams? She certainly had no business there. No girl had any business anywhere inside his head for the present, except that Heroine of his, whose photograph he had had framed to reign over his desk. It was a photograph which he had found forgotten, last winter, in the room of a hotel in Paris, and it had seemed to him the personality he had been looking for. Of the original he knew no more than that. But he knew well enough she was not Nancy Cornish. The novel was his first novel; and, after a long day of laborious failure at it, Herrick, in pure despair of his own work, had early flung himself abed. He had lain there waking and restless upon scorching linen, reluctantly listening, listening; to the passage of the trolley cars on upper Broadway; to the faint, threatening grumble of the Subway; the pitiful crying of a sick baby; the advancing, dying footfalls; to all the diabolic malevolence of shrieking or chugging automobiles. The mere act of sitting up, however, recalled him from the mussy stuffiness in which he had been tossing. Why, he was not buried somewhere in a black hole! He was occupying his landlady's best bedroom--the back parlor, indeed, of Mrs. Grubey's comfortable flat. Well, and to-morrow, after two months of loneliness, of one-sided conversations with the maddeningly mute countenance of his Heroine and of swapping jokes, baseball scores, weather prophecies, and political gossip with McGarrigle, the policeman on the beat, he was going to take lunch with Jimmy Ingham, the most eminent of publishers. Everything was all right! That peculiar sense of waiting and watching was growing on him merely with the restless brooding of the night, which smelt of thunder. In that burning, motionless air there was expectancy and a crouching sense of climax. Yet it was not so late but that, in the handsome apartment house opposite, an occasional window was still lighted. The pale blinds of one of these, directly on a level with Herrick's humbler casement, were drawn to the bottom; and Herrick vaguely wondered that any one should care to shut out even the idea of air. Just then, behind those blinds, some one began to play a piano. The touch was the touch of a master, and Herrick sat listening in surprise. The tide of lovely melody swept boldly out, filling the air with soaring angels. Could people be giving a party? Herrick got to his feet and struck a match. Five minutes past one! If he dressed and went down to the river, he would wake Mrs. Grubey and the Grubey children. He resigned himself; glancing at the precious letter of appointment with Ingham on his desk, and at the photograph of his Heroine, looking out at him with her quiet eyes; shy and candid, tender and bravely boyish, and cool with their first youth. To her he sighed, thinking of his novel, "Well, Evadne, we must have faith!" He turned out the light again, stripped off the coat of his pajamas, sopped the drinking water from his pitcher over his head and his strong shoulders, and drew an easy chair up to the window. Down by the curb one of those quivering automobiles seemed to purr, raspingly, in its sleep. Some one across the street was talking on and on, accompanied by the musician's now soft and improvising touch. Then, in Herrick's thoughts, the voice, or voices, and the fitful, straying music began to blend; and then he had no thoughts at all. He was wakened by a demonic crash of chords. His eyes sprang open; and there, on the blind opposite, was the shadow of a woman. She stood there with her back to the window, lithe and tense, and suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange and splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as Herrick had never seen before. For a full minute she stood so; and then the gesture broke, as though she might have covered her face. The music, scurrying onward from its crash, had never ceased; it had risen again, ringing triumphantly into the march from Faust, a man's voice rising furiously with it, and it flashed over Herrick that they might be rehearsing some scene in a play. Then the sound of a pistol-shot split through the night. Immediately, behind the blind, the lights went out. CHAPTER II HERRICK FINDS A DOOR BOLTED The sleepy boy at the switchboard of the house opposite did not seem to feel in the situation any of the urgency which had brought Herrick into that elegant vestibule, barefoot and with nothing but an unbuttoned ulster over his pajama trousers. The boy said he guessed the shot wasn't a shot; he guessed maybe it was an automobile tire. There couldn't be a lady in 4-B, anyhow; it was just a bachelor apartment. Well, he supposed it was 4-B because there was always complaints of him playing on the piano late at night. The switchboard called him imperatively as he spoke, and he reluctantly consented to ring up the superintendent. Instinctively, he refrained from interfering with Herrick when that young man possessed himself of the elevator and shot to the fourth floor. There was no further noises, no call for help, no woman's fleeing figure. But Herrick's sense of locality guided him down a little hall, upon which, toward the front, only two apartments opened. One of these was lettered 4-B. If Herrick had not stopped for his boots he had for his revolver and it was with the butt end of this that he began hammering upon the sheet-iron surface of that door. There was no answer. Was he too late? The other door opened the length of a short chain. A little man, with wisps of woolly gray standing up from his head as if in amazement, brought his face to the opening and quavered, "Be careful! You'll get hurt! Be--" "Good God!" cried Herrick. "There's a woman in there!" "A woman! Why--I _thought_ I heard a woman--!" It was not so long since Herrick's reporting days but that he believed he could still work the trick pressure by which two policemen will burst in the strongest lock. But he now gave up hope of the woolly gentleman as an assistant and turned his attention to the brass knob. "Get me a screw-driver!" "Theodore!" came a voice from behind the woolly gentleman, "Don't you open our door! It's no business of yours!" Herrick, glancing desperately about him for any aid, was sufficiently aware that he might be making a fool of himself for nothing. But the young fellow felt that was a risk he had to take. In the long hall crossing the little one he could hear doors opening; the clash of questioning voices mingled with excited cries--And then came a girl's voice shrilling, "Isn't anybody going to _do_ anything?" A husky business voice roared from secure cover, "You don't know what you may be breaking into, young man! You may get yourself in trouble." Herrick growled through his teeth an imprecation that ended in "Hand me a screw-driver, can't you? And a hammer!" The sweat was pouring down his face from the pressure of his strength upon the lock, but the lock held. What was going on in there? Or--what had ceased to go on? He could hear Theodore tremblingly protesting, "I have telephoned for the superintendent--He has the keys. It's the superintendent's business--" Had the one shot done the trick? Then, above the stairhead, across the longer hall, appeared the helmet of a policeman. At his heels came the superintendent, carrying the keys. The policeman was jolted from his first idea of arresting Herrick by Herrick's welcoming cry, "Get a gait on you, McGarrigle!" which proclaimed to him a valued acquaintance; then, with a hand shaking with excitement, the half-dressed superintendent fitted the key in the lock. The lock turned but nothing happened. The door was bolted on the inside. The re-captured elevator was heard in the distance, and the superintendent sang out, "Get the engineer! Hurry! Make him hurry!--You heard no cries--no?" he asked of Herrick. And he stood wiping his face and breathing hard, his brow dark with trouble. The halls had begun to be bravely peopled. Also, a second policeman had arrived. And the information spread that one of these reassuring figures had been left in the hall downstairs and that another had gone to the roof. Curiosity, comparatively comfortable and respectable, now, made itself audible and even visible on every side; some adventurers from the street had sallied in. When McGarrigle asked the superintendent, "Any way we can get a look in?" some one immediately volunteered, "There's Mrs. Willing's apartment right across the entrance-court. You can see in both these rooms from hers." "Only two rooms?" "Parlor, bedroom and bath," said somebody in the tone of a prospectus. "You go see what you can see, Clancy," said McGarrigle to the second policeman. "Now, Mr. Herrick?" Herrick told what he knew, and McGarrigle, his eyes resting with admiration on the extremely undraped muscles of his informant, plied him with attentive questions. Herrick's own eyes were on the engineer's steel. Would it never spring the bolt? "If only she'd cry out!" he said. "Why doesn't she make some sign?" "You're sure 'twas him fired?" "That shadow had no revolver." "He's done for her, then. Els't he'd never have barricaded himself like, in there. He didn't give himself a dose, after?" "Only the one shot." "If there's an inquest you'll be wanted." "All right.--But why hasn't he tried to gain time with some kind of parley--some kind of bluff?" "Knows he's cornered. He'll show fight as we go in on him. If there's more than one--" The bolt gave. McGarrigle turned like a fury. "Clear the hall," he cried. There was a confused movement. Obedient souls disappeared. Clancy returned and reported the front room invisible from Mrs. Willing's side window, the shade of its own side window being down. In the bedroom and bath all lights out, but shades up and nothing stirring. "Any hall?" The superintendent replied in the negative. "No fire-escapes, you say?" "No. Fireproof building." "They're right ahead of us, then." Again, with a long shudder, the door gave. The whole hall seemed to give a gasping breath. McGarrigle growled. "I'll have no mix-up in this hall!" He favored Herrick with a wink that said, "See me clear 'em out!" "Clancy, you stay here by the door; pick out half a dozen of 'em that see it through and hold 'em to be witnesses." The halls were cleared. Locks clicked as if by simultaneous miracles and even the adventurers from the street could be heard in full flight. Herrick and McGarrigle exchanged grim smiles. "Now! You keep back, Mr. Herrick! Clancy, look out!" The engineer jumped to one side. The door swung open. [Illustration: Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders] It gave directly into the dark room which had lately been full of light and music and a woman's passionate grace. Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders. No shadow, now, on the white blind. Whatever was within the dusk simply waited. Herrick, pushing past Clancy, entered the room with McGarrigle. Behind them the superintendent leaned in and pressed an electric button. Light sprang forth, flooding everything. The room was empty. CHAPTER III SOMETHING ELSE IS FOUND "Get-away, eh!" said McGarrigle, grimly. The superintendent, shaken and wide-eyed, responded only "The bolt!" They glanced round them, non-plused. The large living-room upon which they had entered was richly furnished, but it had no screens nor hidden corners, and, on that summer night, the windows were undraped. The doorway in which they stood faced the great window which took up nearly all the frontage of the room. The door opened against the left wall. Just beyond the door, along that left wall, stood the piano; beyond that a couch; between the head of the couch and the front window the wall was cut, up to the molding, by one of those high, narrow doors which, in a modern apartment house, indicate the welcome, though inopportune, closet. This door was the single object of suspicion; then, an overturned chair caught their attention. It lay between the great library-table which, standing horizontally, almost halved the room, and the narrow strip of paneling of wall to the right of the main door in which the superintendent had pressed the button for the lights. In the right wall, opening on the entrance-court, directly opposite the piano, but also with its blind drawn, was another window of ordinary size. "The bedroom," said the superintendent, moistening his lips, "'s on the court, there." Then they observed, to their right, the bedroom's arch hung with heavy portières. And the sight of these portières carried with it a cold thrill. But--"There ain't anybody in there!" Clancy persisted. McGarrigle walked over to the door in the wall and tried it. It was locked and there was no key in the lock. "What's this?" "A closet." "Open it, engineer. Clancy, you stand by him." He went up to the portières, opened them with some caution and peered in. Faced only by an empty room he jerked at the portières to throw them back; they were very heavy and the humidity made their rings stick to the pole so that Deutch, running to his assistance, held one aside for him, while with his other hand he himself fumbled to spring on the bedroom light. Herrick was hard upon McGarrigle's heels, but, a look round revealing nothing, he was struck by a sudden fancy and, recrossing the living-room, raised the shade. No, the little balcony was wholly empty. The great window had been made in three sections, and the middle section was really a pair of doors that opened outward on this balcony. Clancy commented upon the foolishness of their not opening in as he watched Herrick step through them into the calm night that offered no explanation of that bolted emptiness. Herrick stepped to the end of the balcony and craned round toward the entrance-court. From the now lighted bedroom window there was no access to any other. He glimpsed McGarrigle's head stuck forth from the bathroom for the same observation. And it somehow surprised him that a trolley car should still bang indifferently past the corner; that, just opposite, that automobile should still chug away, as if nothing had happened. Then he heard a cry from the superintendent, followed by the policeman's oath. Herrick ran into the bedroom and stopped short. On the floor at the foot of the bed lay the body of a young man in dinner clothes. He had been shot through the heart. CHAPTER IV HERRICK IS SURE OF ONE THING There was something at once commonplace and incredible about it--about the stupid ghastliness of the face and about the horrid, sticky smear in the muss of the finely tucked shirt. That gross, silly sprawl of the limbs!--was it those hands that had called forth angelic music? The dead man was splendidly handsome and this somehow accentuated Herrick's revulsion. McGarrigle bent over the body. After a moment he said to the superintendent, "No use for a doctor. But if you got one, get him." "He's dead!" said the superintendent. "It's suicide!" He spoke quietly, but with a dreadfully repressed and labored breath. "Officer, can't you see it's suicide?" He called up the doctor, and then to the silent group he again insisted, "It's him shot himself. The door was bolted on the inside. He had to shoot himself!" McGarrigle was at the 'phone, calling up the station. Turning his head he responded, "Where's the weapon?" They had got the closet open now; no one there. No one in the bedroom closet. No one under the big brass bed, in the folds of the portières, behind the piano, under the couch. No one anywhere. Nor any weapon, either. Herrick and Clancy began to examine the fastening of the door. It was an ordinary little brass catch--a slip-catch, the engineer called it--which shot its bolt by being turned like a Yale lock. "If this door shut behind any one with a bang, could the catch slip of itself?" The engineer shook his head. The hall was long since full again, though the adventurers were ready to pop back at a moment's notice; pushing through them came the doctor. Herrick did not follow him into the bedroom. The room he stood in had a personality it seemed to challenge him to penetrate. His most pervasive impression was of cool coloring. The portières were of a tapestry which struck Herrick as probably genuine Gobelin, but with their famous blue faded to a refreshing dullness and he now remembered that in handling them he had found them lined with a soft but very heavy satin of the same shade, as if to give them all possible substance. The stretched silk, figured in tapestry, which covered the walls, had been dyed a dull blue, washed with gray, to match them; and, to Herrick, this tint, sober as it was, somehow seemed a strange one for a man's room. In couch and rugs and lampshades these notes of gray and blue continued to predominate, greatly enhanced by all the woodwork, which, evidently supplied by the tenant, was of black walnut. He had been no anchorite, that tenant. In the corner between the bedroom and the court window the surface of a seventeenth century sideboard glimmered under bright liquids, under crystal and silver. Beyond that window all sorts of rich lusters shone from the bindings of the books that thronged shelves built into the wall until they reached the great desk standing in the farthest right hand corner to catch the front window's light. A lamp stood on this desk, unlighted. At present all the illumination in the room came from three other lamps; one that squatted atop of the grand piano, between the now flameless old silver candelabra; one, almost veiled by its heavy shade, in the middle of the library table; and one, of the standing sort, that rose up tall from a sea of newspapers at the head of the couch. All these lamps, worked by the same switch, were electric, and the ordinary electric fixtures had been dispensed with; the light was abundant, but very soft and thrown low, with outlying stretches of shadow. It was not remarkable that it had failed to show them the murdered man until the electricity in the bedroom itself had been evoked. Herrick looked again at the couch. Its cushions had lately been rumpled and lounged upon; at its head, under the tall lamp, stood a teakwood tabouret, set with smoking materials on a Benares tray. At its foot, as if for the convenience of the musician, a little ebony table bore a decanter and a bowl of ice; the ice in a tall glass, half-empty, was still melting into the whiskey; in a shallow Wedgewood saucer a half-smoked cigarette was smoldering still. "McGarrigle!" said Herrick, in a low voice. "Hallo!" "He was shot in here, after all. I was sure of it." And he pointed to the foot of the piano stool. Still well above the surface of the hardwood flooring was a little puddle of blood. McGarrigle contemplated this with a kind of sour bewilderment. "Well, the coroner's notified. You'll be wanted, y'know, to the inquest." "What's this?" asked somebody. It was a long chiffon scarf and it lay on the library table under the lamp. Clancy lifted it and its whiteness creamed down from his fingers in the tender lights and folds which lately it had taken around a woman's throat. Just above the long silk fringe, a sort of cloudy arabesque was embroidered in a dim wave of lucent silk. And Herrick noticed that the color of this border was blue-gray, like the blue-gray room. As they all grimly stared at it, the superintendent exclaimed, "I never saw it before!" McGarrigle looked from him to the scarf and commanded, in deference to the coming coroner, "You leave that lay, now, Clancy!" Clancy left it. But something in the thing's frail softness affected Herrick more painfully than the blood of the dead man. In no nightmare, then, had he imagined that shadow of a woman! She had been here; she was gone. And, on the floor in there, was that her work? Now that the interest of rescue had failed, he wanted to get away from that place. He wanted to dress and go down to the river and think the whole thing over alone. He had now heard the doctor's verdict of instant death; and McGarrigle, again reminding him that he would be wanted at the inquest, made no objection to his withdrawal. On his own curb stood a line of men, staring at the windows of 4-B as if they expected the tragedy to be reënacted for their benefit. They all turned their attention greedily to Herrick as he came up, and the nearest man said, "Have they got him?" "Him?" "Why, the murderer!" "Oh!" Herrick said. Even in the crude excitement of the question the man's voice was so pleasant and his enunciation so agreeably clear that Herrick, constitutionally sensitive to voices and rather weary for the sound of cultivated speech, replied familiarly, "I'm afraid, strictly speaking, that there isn't any murderer. It's supposed to be a woman." "Indeed! Well, have they caught her?" "They've caught no one. And, after all, there seems to be some hope that it's a suicide." "Oh!" said the other, with a smile. "Then you found him in evening dress! I've noticed that bodies found in evening dress are always supposed to be suicides!" The note of laughter jarred. "I see nothing remarkable," Herrick rebuked him, with considerable state, "in his having on dinner clothes." "Nothing whatever! 'Dinner clothes'--I accept the correction. Any poor fellow having them on, a night like this, might well commit suicide!--I'm obliged to you," he nodded. And, humming, went slowly down the street. Herrick suddenly hated him; and then he saw how sore and savage he was from the whole affair. The same automobile still waited, not far from his own door, and he longed to leap into it and send it rapid as fury through the night, leaving all this doubt and horror behind him in the cramped town. His troubled apprehension did not believe in that suicide.--What sort of a woman was she? And what deviltry or what despair had driven her to a deed like that? Where and how--in God's name, how!--had she fled? He, too, looked up at that window where he had seen the lights go out. It was brightly enough lighted, now. But this time there was no blind drawn and no shadow. The bare front of the house baulked the curiosity on fire in him. "How the devil and all did she get out?" It was more than curiosity; it was interest, a kind of personal excitement. That strange, imperial, and passionate gesture! The woman who made it had killed that man. Of one thing he was sure. "If ever I see it again, I shall know her," he said, "among ten thousand!" CHAPTER V HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER Late the next morning Herrick struggled through successive layers of consciousness to the full remembrance of last night. But now, with to-morrow's changed prospective, those events which had been his own life-and-death business, had, as it were, become historic and passed out of his sphere; they were no longer of the first importance to him. Inestimably more important was his appointment with Ingham. Herrick had passed such a lonely summer that the prospect of a civilized luncheon with an eminent publisher was a very exciting business. Moreover, this was a critical period in his fortunes. At twenty-eight years of age Bryce Herrick knew what it was to live a singularly baffled life--a life of artificial stagnation. His first twenty-two years, indeed, had been filled with an extraordinary popularity and success. In the ancient and beloved town of Brainerd, Connecticut, where he was born, it had been enough for him to be known as the son of Professor Herrick. The family had never been rich, but for generations it had been an honored part of the life of the town. It was Bryce's mother who, marrying in her girlhood a spouse of forty already largely wedded to his History of the Ancient Chaldeans and Their Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, brought him a little fortune; she brought, as well, the warm rich strain of mingled Irish and Southern blood which still touched the shrewdness of her son's clear glance and his boyish simplicity of manner, with something at once peppery and romantic. It was a popular combination. He grew into a tall youth with a square chin, with square white teeth and rather an aggressive nose, but, in his crinkly blue eyes, humor and kindness; with a kind of happy glow pervading all his thought and all his dealings--just as it pervaded his fresh color, his look of gay hardihood and enduring power, the ruddiness of his brown hair and his tanned skin, and of his sensitive and sanguine blood. At college he had appeared very much more than the son of an eminent man. Of that fortunate physical type which is at once large and slender--broad shouldered and deep chested, but narrow hipped, long of limb and strong and light of flank--it had surprised nobody when he became, as if naturally, spontaneously, a figure in athletics. What surprised people was the craftmanship in those articles of travel and adventure which sprang from his vacations. At twenty-two he was a reporter on the New York _Record_; soon other reporters were prophesying that rockets come down like sticks, and he was not yet twenty-three when the blow fell. Mrs. Herrick died, and it was presently found that her money had been a long time gone; mismanaged utterly by a hopeful husband. This amiable and innocent creature had been bitten, in his old age, by the madness and the vanity of speculation; he had made a score of ventures, not one of which had come to port. His health being now quite shattered, Switzerland was prescribed; there, for five years, in the country housekeeping of their straitened circumstances, his son and daughter tended him. There, during the first two years of exile, Herrick had written those short stories which had won him a distinguished reputation. No predictions had been thought too high for him; but he had never got anything together in book form, and bye-and-bye he had become altogether silent. It was all too painful, too futile, too muffling! He seemed to be meant for but two uses: to struggle with the knotted strains of Herrick senior's business affairs and to assist with that History of the Ancient Chaldeans and Their Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, which was his father's engrossing, and now sole and senile, mania. His father suffered, so that the young man was the more enslaved; and made him suffer, so that he was the more anxious his sister should do no secretary work for the Chaldeans. But it was his mother's suffering he thought of now; the years in which she had put up with all this, uncomforted, and struggled to save something out of the wreck for Marion and for him, struggled to keep the shadow of it from their youth--and he had not known! In so much solitude and so much distasteful occupation, this idea flourished and struck deep. He saw his sister's life sacrificed, too; given up to household work and nursing, to exile and poverty, with lack of tenderness and with continual ailing pick-thanks; and there grew up in him a passionate consideration for women, a romantic faith in their essential nobility, a romantic devotion to their right to happiness. Snatched from all the populous clamor and dazzle of his boyhood and set down by this backwater, alone with a young girl and the Ancient Chaldeans, he grew into a very simple, lonely fellow; sometimes irascible but most profoundly gentle; a little old-fashioned; perhaps something of the pack-horse in his daily round; but living, mentally, in a very rosy, memory-colored vision of the great, strenuous, lost, world. Death gave him back his life; Professor Herrick followed the Chaldeans, the Babylonians, and the Kassites; within a few months Marion was married; and Herrick, with something like Whittington's sixpence in his pocket, famished for adventure and companionship, with the appetite of a man and the experience of a boy, started for the rainbow metropolis of his five-years' dream. In this mood he had rushed into the hot stone desert of New York in summer--a New York already changed, and which seemed to have dropped him out! But he brought, like other young desperadoes, his first novel with him; and he had approached the junior partner of the famous old house of Ingham and Son with letters from mutual friends in Brainerd. Now, at last, within twenty-four hours after his own return from abroad, Ingham--himself scarcely a decade older than Herrick, preceding him at the same university, and with a Brainerd man for a brother-in-law,--had responded with the invitation to lunch. Yes, it was exciting enough! Herrick looked at his watch. It was barely ten. And then he took time to remember when he had last looked at his watch in that room. Certainly, it was rather grim! And yet, said the desperado, it wasn't going to be such a bad thing with which to command Ingham's interest at lunch and get him into a confidential humor that wouldn't be too superior. While he was attempting to inspire Ingham with a craving for his complete works, this thrilling topic would be just the thing to do away with self-consciousness. He mustn't lose faith in himself. And, before all things, he mustn't, as he had done last night, lose faith in his Heroine! He looked across the room at her picture; got out of bed; walked over to her, and humbly saluted. Lose faith in her? "Evadne," he said, "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous--You darling!" Lose faith in _her_! The photograph, which looked like an enlargement of a kodak, represented a very young girl, standing on a strip of beach with her back to the sea. Her sailor tie, her white dress, and the ends of her uncovered hair all seemed to flutter in the wind. Slim and tall as Diana she showed, in her whole light poise, like a daughter of the winds, and Herrick was sure that she was of a fresh loveliness, a fair skin and brown hair, with eyes cool as gray water. It was the eyes, after all, which had wholly captured his imagination. They were extraordinarily candid and wide-set; in a shifting world they were entirely brave. This was what touched him as dramatic in her face; she was probably in the new dignity of her first long skirts, so that all that candor and courage, all the alert quiet of those intelligent eyes were only the candor and courage of a kind of royal child. She wanted to find out about life; she longed to try everything and to face everything; but she was only a tall little girl! That was the look his Heroine must have! Thus had she come adventuring to New York with him, to seek their fortunes, and all during those dreary months of heat and dust she had borne him happy company; in the Park or in the Bowery, at Coney Island or along Fifth Avenue's deserted pomp, he had always tried to see, for the novel, how things would look to that young eagerness--no more ardent, had he but realized it, than his own!--"Evadne," said he, now, "if things look promising with Ingham this afternoon we'll take a taxi, to-night, and see the moon rise up the river." He called her Evadne when he was talking about the moon; when he required her pity because the laundress had faded his best shirt, he called her Sal. A sound as of the Grubey children snuffling round his door recalled him to the illustrious circumstance that he was by way of being a hero of a murder story. But, if he was nursing pride in that direction, it was destined to a fall. Johnnie Grubey thrust under the door something which, as he had brought it up from the mail-box in the vestibule, Johnnie announced as mail. But it was only a large, rough scrap of paper, which astonished Herrick by turning out to be wall-paper--a ragged sample of the pale green "cartridge" variety that so largely symbolizes apartment-house refinement--and which confronted him from its smoother side with the lines, penciled in a long, pointed, graceful hand, For the Apollo in the bath-robe! Or was it a raincoat? But should not Apollos stay in when it rains? It was many a day since Herrick had received a comic valentine, but all the appropriate sensations returned to him then. The hand of this neighborly jest was plainly a woman's and its slap brought a blush. He was forced to grin; but he longed to evade the solemn questioning of the Grubeys through whose domain he must presently venture to his bath and it occurred to him that the most peaceful method of clearing a road was to send out the younger generation for a plentiful supply of newspapers. Besides, he wished very much to see the papers himself. He distributed them freely and escaped back to his room still carrying three. When he had closed his door, the first paragraph which met his eyes was on the lower part of the sheet which he held folded in half. It began--"The body of Mr. Ingham was not found in the living-room, but--" He flapped it over, agog for the headlines. They read: DEATH BAFFLES POLICE. James R. Ingham, Noted Publisher, Found Shot in Apartment-- Herrick was still standing with the paper in his hand when the second Grubey boy brought him a visiting-card. It bore the name of Hermann E. Deutch; and scribbled beneath this in pencil was the explanatory phrase, "Superintendent, Van Dam Apartment House." CHAPTER VI HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR Hermann Deutch was a shortish, middle-aged Jew, belonging to the humbler classes and of a perfectly cheap and cheerful type. But at the present moment he was not cheerful. He showed his harassment in the drawn diffidence of his sympathetic, emotional face, and in every line of what, ten or fifteen years ago, must have been a handsome little person. Since that period his tight black curls, receding further and further from his naturally high forehead, had grown decidedly thin, and exactly the reverse of this had happened to his figure. But he had still a pair of femininely liquid and large black eyes, brimming with the romance which does not characterize the cheap and cheerful of other races, and Herrick remembered him last night as very impressionably, but not basely, nervous. He now fixed his liquid eyes upon Herrick with an anxiety which took humble but minute notes. Since the young fellow was at least half-dressed in very well-cut and well-cared-for, if not specially new, garments, it was clear to Mr. Deutch's reluctant admiration that he was thoroughly "_high-class_!" Whatever was Mr. Deutch's apprehension, it shrank weakly back upon itself. Then he simply took his life in his hands and plunged. "I won't keep you a minute, Mr. Herrick. But I've got a little favor I want to ask you.--You behaved simply splendid last night, Mr. Herrick.--Well, I will, thanks,"--as he dropped into a chair. "I--I won't keep you a minute--" "I'll be glad to do anything I can," Herrick interrupted. The news in his paper had made him feel as if he had just been disinherited and, now that the dead man was a personality so much nearer home, his brain rang with a hundred impressions of pity and wonder and excitement. But he sympathized with poor Mr. Deutch; it could be no sinecure to be the superintendent of a murder! Then, recollecting, "What made you so certain it was suicide?" he asked suddenly. "What else could it be? There wasn't anybody but him there." "There was a woman there," Herrick said, "when the shot was fired." The superintendent took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. "Well, now, Mr. Herrick, that's just what I wanted to see you about. Now please, Mr. Herrick, don't get excited and mad! All I want to say is, if there _was_ a lady there last night--but there _couldn't_ have been--well, of course, Mr. Herrick, if you say so! Why, you couldn't have seen her so very plain, now could you?" "What are you driving at?" Herrick asked. "Couldn't it have been a gentleman's shadow you saw, Mr. Herrick? Mr. Ingham's shadow? Raising his pistol, maybe, with one hand--" "While he played the piano with the other?" "Mr. Herrick, there couldn't have been any lady there!" He bridled. "It's against the rules--that time o' night! I wouldn't ever allow such a thing. There's never been a word against the Van Dam since I been running it. Why, Mr. Herrick, if there was to be that kind of talk, especially if she was to murder the gentleman and all like that, I'd be ruined. And so'd the house. It ain't one o' these cheap flat buildings. We got leases signed by--" "Oh, I see!" Herrick felt his temper rising. But he tried to be reasonable while he added, "I'm very sorry for you. But there was a woman there. I've reported so already to the police. Even if I had not, I couldn't go in for perjury, Mr. Deutch." "No, no! Of course not! Of course! I wouldn't ask you! You don't understand me! It's not to take back what you said already to the police. That'd get you into trouble. And it couldn't be done. I couldn't expect it. It's not facts you might go a little easy on, Mr. Herrick; it's your language!" "What!" "It's your descriptive language, Mr. Herrick. If only you wouldn't be quite so particular--" "Look here!" said Herrick with his odd, brusk slowness. "I didn't know it myself last night. But Mr. Ingham wasn't altogether a stranger to me." Deutch stared at him. "He had friends in the town I come from and a good many people I know are going to be badly cut up about his death. I was to have met him on business this very day. Now you can see that I don't feel very leniently to the person--not even to the woman--who murdered him. I don't believe he killed himself. He had no reason to do it. If there's anything I can do to prove he didn't, that thing's going to be done. If there's any word of mine that's a clue to tell who killed him, I can't speak it often enough nor loud enough. Understand that, Mr. Deutch. And, good-morning." "Oh, my God! Oh, dear! But my dear sir--" "And let me give you a word of warning. If you keep on like this what people will really say is, that you knew there was a woman there and that it was you who connived at her escape!" "All right!" cried Mr. Deutch, unexpectedly. "Let 'em say it! I got no kick coming if people tell lies about me, any. All I want stopped is the lies you're putting into people's heads about Miss Christina." "Miss Christina!" Herrick exclaimed. He stared, wondering if the poor worried little soul had gone out of his head. "I never mentioned any woman's name. I didn't know any to mention. I never heard of any Miss Christina!" "You told the policeman the way she made motions, moving around and all like that, it made you think maybe they were rehearsing something out of a play." "Did I? Well?" Mr. Deutch possessed himself of the newspaper which Herrick had dropped upon the bed, and pointed to the last line of the murder story. It ran: "About a year ago Mr. Ingham became engaged to be married to Christina Hope, the actress." And Herrick read the line with a strange thrill, as of prophecy realized. "Oh--ho!" he breathed. "Oh--ho!" hysterically mocked the superintendent. "You see what it makes you think, all right. Even me!--that was what brought her first to my mind, poor lady. The police officers may have forgot it or not noticed, any. But if you say it again, at the inquest, you'll make everybody think the same thing. And it's not so!" he almost shrieked. "It's not so. It's a damn mean lie! And you got no right to say such a thing!" "That's true," said Herrick, intently. After his impulsive whistle he had begun to furl his sails. He had heard vaguely of Christina Hope, as a promising young actress who had made her mark somewhere in the West, and was soon to attempt the same feat on Broadway. He knew nothing to her detriment. "Ain't it hard enough for her, poor young lady, with him gone and all, but what she should have that said about her! And it wouldn't stop there, even! She was there alone with him at night, they'd say, with their nasty slurs. She'd never stand a chance. For there ain't any denying she's on the stage, and that's enough to make everybody think she's guilty--" "Oh, come! Why--" "Wasn't it enough for you, yourself?" Herrick opened his lips for an indignant negative, but he closed them without speaking. "The minute you seen that paragraph you felt 'She's just the person to be mixed up with things that way.' And then you grabbed hold of yourself and said, 'Why, no. She may be as nice as anybody. Give her the benefit of the doubt.' But there's the doubt, all right. You're an edjucated gennelman," said Mr. Deutch, sympathetically, "but all these prejudiced, old-fashioned farmers and low-brows like they got on juries--people like them, and Miss Christina--Oh! Good Lord! Ach, don't I know 'em! Mr. Herrick, it's my solemn word, if you say that at the inquest to turn them on to Miss Christina, you--" "I shan't say it at the inquest," Herrick said. He was astonished at the completeness of the charge in his own mind. He was convinced, now, in every nerve, that Ingham had met death at the hands of his betrothed. But the very violence of his conviction warned him not to lay such a handicap upon other minds. His chance phrase, his chance impression, must color neither the popular nor the legal outlook. "I shall take very good care, you may be sure, to say nothing of the kind. Here!" he cried, "you want a drink!" For Mr. Deutch, at this emphatic assurance, had put his plump elbows on his plump knees and hidden his moon face, his spaniel eyes, with plump and shaky fists. He drank the whiskey Herrick brought him and slowly got himself together; without embarrassment, but with a comfort in his relaxation which made Herrick guess how tight he had been strung. As he returned the glass he said, "If you knew what a lot we thought, Mr. Herrick, me and my wife, of the young lady, I wouldn't seem anywheres near so crazy to you." Herrick sat down on the edge of the bed in his shirtsleeves and regarded his guest. Strict delicacy required that he ask no questions. But he was human. And he had been a reporter. He said, "You used to see her with Mr. Ingham?" "Oh, great Scott, Mr. Herrick, we knew her long before that! Long before ever _he_ set eyes on her. When she was a tiny little thing and her papa had money, he used to get his wine from my firm. He was such a pleasant-spoken, agreeable gentleman that when I went into business for myself I sent him my card. It wasn't the wine business, Mr. Herrick, it was oil paintings. I always was what you might call artistic; I got very refined feelings, and business ain't exactly in my line. I had as high-class a little shop as ever you set your eyes on; gold frames; plush draperies, electric lights; fine, beautiful oil paintings--oh, beautiful!--by expensive, high-class artists; everything elegant. But it wasn't a success. The public don't appreciate the artistic, Mr. Herrick, they got no edjucation. I lost my last dollar, and I don't know as I ever recovered exactly. I ain't ever been what you could call anyways successful, since." "But you saw something of Mr. Hope--" "Well, Mr. Hope was an edjucated gentleman, Mr. Herrick, like you are yourself. He had very up-to-date ideas; and when he'd buy a picture, once in a while I'd go up to the house to see it hung. Miss Christina was about eight years old, then, and I used to see her coming in from dancing school with her maid, or else she'd be just riding out with her groom behind her, like a little queen. When my shop failed; I went to manage my sister-in-law's restaurant. I was ashamed to let Mr. Hope know that time. But one Sunday night, my wife says to me, 'Ain't that little girl as pretty as the one you been telling me about?' And there in the door, with her long hair straight down from under her big hat and her little long legs in black silk stockings straight down from one o' them pleated skirts and her long, square, coat, was Miss Christina. Behind her was her papa and her mama. And after that they came pretty regular every week or two; we served her twelfth birthday party. My wife made a cake with twelve pink rosebuds, all herself. She was always the little lady, Miss Christina, but she made her own friends, and to people she liked she spoke as pretty as a princess. We got to feel such an affection for her, Mr. Herrick, we couldn't believe there was anybody like her in this world. We never had a child of our own, me and my wife, Mr. Herrick. It does knock out your faith in things to think a thing like that can happen, but it's what's happened to her and me. We was kind of cracked about all children, and Miss Christina was certainly the most stylish child I ever set eyes on!" "Father living?" Herrick prompted. "No, Mr. Herrick, no. And before he died, he got into business difficulties himself, and he didn't leave enough to keep a bird alive. I helped Mrs. Hope dispose of all the bric-a-brac, my paintings and all, everything that wasn't mortgaged, and they put it in with an aunt of Mr. Hope's, a catamaran, and went to keeping a high-class boarding-house. We're all apt to fall, Mr. Herrick. I've fallen myself." "The boarding-house didn't succeed either, then?" "I ask you, how could it, with that battle-ax? She cheated my poor ladies, and she bullied Miss Christina, and used to take the books she was always reading and burn 'em up, and say nasty common things to her, when she got older, about the young gentlemen that were always on her heels even then, and that she'd like well enough, one day, and the next she couldn't stand the sight of. If there's one thing Miss Christina has, more than another, it's a high spirit; she has what I'd call a plenty of it. They had fierce fights. Often, when she'd come to me with a little breastpin or other to pawn for her, so her and her mama'd have a mite o' cash, she'd put her pretty head down on my wife's shoulder and cry; and my wife'd make her a cup o' tea. She'd say then she was going to run away and be an actress. And, when she was sixteen yet, she ran. Two years afterward, her and her mama turned up in my first little flat-house; a cheap one, down Eighth Avenue, in the twenties. She was on the stage, all right, and what a time she'd had! It'd been cruel, Mr. Herrick; cruel hard work and, just at the first, cruel little of it. But now she's a leading lady. And this fall she's going to open in New York, in a big part. It's the play they call 'The Victors'; I guess you've heard. Mr. Wheeler, he's the star, and Miss Christina's part's better than what his is. But now--" There was a pause. Mr. Deutch mopped his face, and Herrick, cogitating, bit his lip. "This engagement to Ingham--" "She met him about two years ago, when she had her first leading part, and they went right off their heads about each other. I never expected I should see Miss Christina act so regular loony over any man. But she refused him time and again. She said she'd always been a curse to herself and she wasn't going to bring her curse on him. In the end, of course, she gave in. She said she'd marry him this winter, if he'd go away for the summer and leave her alone. You knew it was only day before yesterday he got back from Europe?" "Yes. I know." "My wife and me have seen a lot more of her this summer than since she was a little girl. There's been years at a time, all the while she was on the road, that we wouldn't know if she was alive or dead. And then some day I'd come home, and find her sitting in our apartment--it's a basement apartment, Mr. Herrick!--as easy as if she'd just stepped across the street. But I wouldn't like you should think it's Miss Christina's talked to us very much about her engagement. She's a pretty close-mouthed girl, in her way, and a simply elegant lady. Not but what Mrs. Hope is an elegant lady, too. But still she is--if you know what I mean--gabby! Miss Christina's always been a puzzle to her; and she's a great hand to sit and make guesses at her with my wife. Mr. Ingham left a key with Miss Christina when he went abroad so she could come and play his piano and read his books whenever it suited her, and she'd have a quiet place to study her part. Every once in a while Mrs. Hope would take a notion it wasn't quite the proper thing she should come by herself. But after she'd seen her inside, she'd drop down our way and wait. She wasn't just exactly gone on Mr. Ingham, and my wife wasn't either." Herrick lifted his head with a flash of interest. "Mrs. Hope opposed the marriage?" "Well, not opposed. She never opposed the young lady in anything, when you came down to it. But he wanted she should leave the stage. And he wasn't ever faithful to her, Mr. Herrick! For all he was so crazy about her and so wild-animal jealous of the very air she had to breathe, he wasn't ever faithful to her--and if ever you'd seen her, that'd make your blood boil! She'd hear things; and he'd lie. And she'd believe him, and believe him! If it wasn't for his money, she'd be well rid of him, to my mind." He sat nursing his wrath. And Herrick, still watching him, felt sorry. For, in Herrick's mind it was now all so clear; so pitiably clear! Poor little chap!--he didn't know how scanty was the reassurance in his portrait of his Miss Christina! The indulged, imperious child, choosing "her own" friends; the unhappy, bold, bedeviled girl, already with young men at her heels, whom she encouraged one day and flouted the next; pawning her trinkets at sixteen and plunging alone into the world, the world of the stage; the ambitious, adventurous woman capable of holding such a devotion as that of the good Deutch by so capricious and high-handed a return, snaring such a man of the world as Ingham by an adroit blending of abandon and retreat, putting up with the humiliations of his flagrant inconstancies only, perhaps, to find herself, after her stipulated summer alone, on the verge of losing him through his insensate jealousy--were there no materials here for tragic quarrel? Was not this the very figure that last night he had seen fling out an arm in unexampled passion and grace? In his heart he saw Christina Hope, while her betrothed, whether as accuser or accused, taunted her from the piano, kill James Ingham. And he profoundly knew that he had almost seen this with his eyes. His pulse beat high; but it was with a sobered mind that he beheld Mr. Deutch preparing to depart. "Well, you see how I had to ask you, Mr. Herrick, not to say that lady's shadow made you think any of an actress?" "I do, indeed." "There isn't any language can express how I thank you. But I know if only you was acquainted with her--" He had turned, in rising, to get his hat, and he now stopped short and exclaimed with bewildered reproach, "Oh, well, now, Mr. Herrick! Why wouldn't you tell me?" "Tell you?" Herrick's eyes followed his. They led to the likeness of his Evadne, of his dear Heroine. "Tell you what?" "Why, that you _was_ acquainted with--" said Mr. Deutch, extending his hat, as if in a magnificence of introduction, "Christina Hope." Herrick could not speak. And Deutch added, "You was acquainted with her, all along! It's a real old picture--'bout five years ago. You knew her then? You knew her--And you--saw--" His voice died away. His glance turned from Herrick's and traveled unwillingly to where, upon the blinds drawn down again, across the street, it seemed to both men the shadow must start forth. And, as he slowly withdrew his gaze, Herrick saw, looking out at him from those soft, spaniel eyes, the eyes of fear. Deutch bowed bruskly and withdrew. Herrick was alone, as he had been these many months, with the young challenge of his Heroine; the familiar face, long learned by heart, asking its innocent questions about life, shone softly out on him, in pride. And, on that August morning, he felt his blood go cold. CHAPTER VII HERRICK HAS A BUSIEST DAY There was a time coming when Herrick was to salute as prophetic what he now noted with a grim amusement; that from the moment the shadow sprang upon the blind the current of his life was changed. Peopled, busy, adventurous, it had passed, as one might say, into active circulation. He was suddenly in the center of the stage. This was brought home to him rather sharply when Deutch had been not five minutes gone. On the exit of that gentleman Herrick's first thought had been for Miss Hope's photograph. Although an actress seems less a woman than a type, yet, since, to any stray gossip, she was recognizable as a real person, she mustn't, at this critical time, be left hanging on his wall to excite comment. He had scarcely laid the photograph on his desk to compare it with a cut in one of the newspapers when information that he was "wanted on the 'phone" made him drop the paper atop of his dethroned Heroine and hurry into the hall. And the place to which the telephone invited him was the Ingham publishing house. The message was from old Gideon Corey, the prop and counselor of the House of Ingham, father and son. It told Herrick that Ingham senior had just arrived in New York and had not yet gone to an hotel; he had turned instinctively to his office, where he besought Herrick, whose name he had recognized, to come to him and tell him what there was to tell. It was only the piteous human longing to be brought nearer, by some detail, by some vision later than our own, to those to whom we shall never be near again. Herrick flinched from the task, but there could be no question of his obedience; and he came out from that interview humbly, softened by the gentleness of such a grief. It seemed to him that he had never seen so tender a dignity of reserve; that beautiful old gentleman who had wished to question him had also wished to spare him; wished, too,--and taken the loyalest precautions--to spare some one else. "I don't know if you are aware, Mr. Herrick," Ingham's father had said to him, "that my son was engaged to be married?" "I had just heard--" "Then you will understand how especially painful it is that there should be any mention of a--another lady--Miss Hope is a sweet girl," said the old gentleman, "a sweet, good girl--" He paused, as if he were feeling for words delicate enough for what he had to say; and then a little breath that was like a cry broke from him. "My son was a wild boy, Mr. Herrick, but he loved her--he loved her! Will it be necessary to add to her grief by telling her that, at the very last, he was entertaining--? I wanted her for my daughter! May she not keep even the memory of my son?" Herrick could have groaned aloud. "Only tell me," he said, "what can I do?" "Mr. Ingham means to ask"--Corey interposed--"whether, at the--the inquest, it will be necessary to lay so much emphasis on that shadow you observed?" Thus, for the second time that day, from what different mouths and under what different circumstances, came the same request! And there passed over Herrick that little shiver of the skin which takes place, the country people tell you, when some one steps over your grave. "Could you not assume that you might have been mistaken? That it might have been a man's shadow--?" "I was not mistaken--Why, look here!" he continued, eagerly. "Can't you see that it would be the worst kind of a mistake for me to change now? They'd think I'd heard who the woman was, and was trying to shield her! And, besides," he added to Corey, "it's your only clue." It occurred to him, as he spoke, that Ingham's family might be concerned for his reputation rather than for vengeance; this continued to seem probable even while they assured him that it was not the police, but Miss Hope alone, from whom they wished to keep the circumstance; they were thinking of what would have been the dead man's dearest wish. What she read in the papers they could perhaps deny; but what she heard at the inquest-- When, however, they reluctantly agreed with him that it was too late for any effectual reticence it was with unabated kindliness that Corey went with him into the hall. "We remain infinitely obliged to you, Mr. Herrick, and--later on--we mustn't lose track of you again--Well, good-morning! Good-morning!" It was nearly afternoon and Herrick stepped out from the dark, old-fashioned elevator into its sunny heat, which occasional spattering showers had vainly tried to dissipate, with a very highly charged sense of moving among vivid personalities. Concerning two of these there persisted a certain lack of reassurance, and as that of Ingham brightened or darkened the shadow herself now shone as a tigress devouring, now an avenging angel. Sometimes her figure stood out clearly, by itself; sometimes it wavered and changed, and passed, whether Herrick willed it or not, into the figure of Christina Hope. Then, whether for Deutch's or Ingham's sake, or for Evadne's, there was something oppressive in the sunshine. But the young fellow was not enough of a hypocrite to pretend, even to himself, that all this excitement, all this acquaintance with swift events, with salient people under the influence of strong emotion, all this quick, warm, and strong feeling which had been aroused in himself, were anything but very welcome. Nor were his adventures over yet. His walk brought him, with a thoughtful forehead but all in a breathing glow of interest, to City Hall Park; a spot where he had loitered that summer a score of times, wearying vaguely for a friendly face. To-day, his brisk step had scarcely carried him within its boundaries before he heard his name called and, turning, was accosted by a _Record_ acquaintance of six years ago whose recognition displayed the utmost eagerness. The spirit of New York City, which had hitherto considered him merely one of her returned failures, had now made up her mind to show what she could do for such a darling as the near-eye-witness of a murder. He found himself hailed into the office of the _Record_, whence they had been madly telephoning him this long while, and immediately commissioned, at the price of a high, temporary specialist, to report the Ingham inquest, and to write a Sunday special of the murder! He thought of Ingham's father, and "It isn't a tasty job!" he said to his old chief. But it swept upon him what material it was; it felt, in his empty hand, like the key of success; and then, there is always in our ears at such a time the whisper that it will certainly be done by somebody. "And never, surely," Herrick wrote his sister that night, "so chastely, so justly, with either such dash or such discretion, as by our elegant selves!" This, at least, was the view which the Ingham office took of it. Corey reported the family as glad to leave it in Herrick's hands; while a tremor at once of regret, pleasure and superstition pricked over Herrick's nerves as Corey followed up this statement with an invitation through the _Record_ phone to meet him at the Pilgrims' Club and talk some things over during lunch! "To shake the iron hand of Fate" was becoming so much the rule that Herrick was nearly capable of feeling gripped by it even in the somewhat remote circumstances that the Pilgrims' had been founded as a club of actors and, overrun as it was by men of all professions and particularly literary men, it had remained essentially a club of actors--while he, Bryce Herrick, hastening toward it through a smart shower, had at first conceived of his novel as a play and then, in Switzerland, been baffled by the inaccessibility of that world! His novel, of whom the heroine had been so unwittingly Christina Hope!--However, the low, wide portals of the Pilgrims' received him under their great, wrought iron lanterns without excitement and he passed, self-consciously and with a certain shyness, into the cooling twilight of a hallway still perfectly calm and over the lustrous, glinting sweeps of easy and quite indifferent stairs up to an "apartment brown and booklined" that looked out on a green park. At one of the windows Corey stood talking to a dark, heavy, vigorous man whose face was familiar to Herrick and whom Corey introduced as Robert Wheeler. It was a name of note but Herrick bewilderedly exclaimed "Miss Hope's manager?" Two or three men turned to Wheeler and grinned and he, himself, said with a gruff chuckle, yes, he supposed it had come to that, already! Herrick's embarrassed tactlessness sought refuge in looking out of doors. The famous square had kept its ancient privacy secure from all the city's noise and hurry. It was still, secluded; self-sufficient with an old-world grace; and the green park shone fresh after the shower, its flower beds and the window boxes of its grave, dark houses gave out a delicate, glimmering sparkle along with their moist and newly piercing sweetness. Nothing could have been more tranquil except the cool spaces, the dusky, sunny, airy, oak-hued shadows of the wide-windowed club--neither could anything have been less like Mrs. Grubey's or even Professor Herrick's idea of what an actors' club would be. The whole place seemed to rebuke its visitor, more graciously than had Hermann Deutch, for the feverish suggestion which Christina's calling had hinted round her name. The blithe young gentlemen in light clothes, fussing over with cigarette smoke and real and unreal English accents, the older men, less saddled and bridled and fit for the fray but still with something at once lazy and boyish in the quick sensibility of their faces, appeared to have no very lurid intensities up their sleeve and amid so much serene and humorous assurance Ingham senior's "sweet, good girl," Hermann Deutch's "Miss Christina" seemed better founded in kind and credible probabilities. She bloomed, indeed, hedged with all proprieties in the sound of Wheeler's voice saying, "But must Miss Hope appear at the inquest?" "Yes," said Corey, tartly, "since her name will add to its notoriety! Have you forgotten our coroner?" Wheeler lifted his thick brows in annoyance and with the same sourness of inflection Corey added, "Is it possible any corner of the universe can for a moment forget Cuyler Ten Euyck!" Herrick started and looked at the two men with quick eagerness. "You don't mean--" "Precisely! The mighty in high places--Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck! No less!" Wheeler broke into a curse and then into his deep laugh, and said Miss Hope's manager would do well to clear out before any Sherlock Holmes with wings got to throwing his mouth around here. "I can stand his always bringing down a curtain with 'Seventy times a millionaire--the world is at my feet!' A man has to believe in something! But it's his taking himself for a tin District-Attorney-on-wheels that'll get his poor jaw broken one of these days!" Herrick's curiosity was roused to certain reminiscences and he went on putting them together even while he followed Corey downstairs and out onto an open gallery whose tables overlooked a little garden. As soon as the waiter left them he asked Corey, "But--I've been so long away--this coroner can't be the same Ten Euyck--" "Can you think there are two?" Well, the world is certainly full of entertainment! A man born to one of the proudest names and greatest fortunes of his time serving as coroner--coroner! That was what certain references of McGarrigle's meant, certain newspaper flippancies. "Mr. Ten Euyck!" Herrick's extreme youth had witnessed the historic thrill that shook society when the full significance of the great creature's visiting-cards first burst upon a startled and ingenuous nation! But even then Mr. Ten Euyck must have aspired beyond social thrills and seen himself as a man of parts and public conscience. It was not so much later that Herrick remembered him as a literary dabbler, an amateur statesman, endeavoring by means of elegant Ciceronics to waken his class to its duty as leader of the people! He had then seemed merely a solemn ass who, having learned during a long residence abroad an aristocratic notion of government, took his caste and its duties much too seriously.--"But why coroner?" Despair, apparently, over that caste's lack of seriousness! There had been talk of abolishing the coronership, Corey said, and Ten Euyck had run for it. If irresponsible idlers dared to slight even the presidency in their choice of careers let them see what could be done with the least considerable of offices! If younger sons dared lessen class-power by neglecting government, let them see to what Mr. Ten Euyck could condescend in the public service! It was an old-fashioned, an old-world ambition; the man, essentially stiff-necked, essentially egotistical, was in no sense a reformer. "He pushes his office, upon my word, to the diversion of the whole town; holding court, if you please, as if he were launching a thunderbolt, making speeches and denunciations, and taking himself for a kind of District Attorney.--I may as well say, Mr. Herrick, that it's a black bitterness to me that that pretentious puppy should have authority in--in dealing with Mr. James. There was never anything cordial between them; in fact, quite the contrary. We refused a book of his once!" "But, great heavens,--" "It was a book of plays, Mr. Herrick; blank verse and Roman soldiery--with orations! I don't deny Mr. James's letter was a trifle saucy; he was often not conciliating; no, not conciliating! Well, now, it's Ten Euyck's turn. If he can soil Mr. James's memory in Miss Hope's eyes, why, that will be just to his taste, believe me. Now I come to think of it, I believe Miss Hope herself is rather in his black books! It seems to me she once took part in one of the plays, and it failed. I tell you all this, Mr. Herrick, because James Ingham had the highest admiration for you, and had great pleasure in the hope of bringing out your novel." Herrick gaped at him in an astonishment which had not so much as become articulate before--such is our mortal frailty--his slight, but hitherto persistent, repulsion from the dead man was shaken to its foundation and moldered in dust away. "Yes, when we are ourselves again, you must bring in that manuscript. Yes, yes, he wished it! They were almost the last words I had from him. He was very pleased to get your letter, very pleased. He was talking about it to Stanley, his young brother, and to me; we were all there yesterday--think of it, Mr. Herrick, yesterday!--working out his ideas for our new Weekly. He was always an enthusiast, a keen enthusiast, and the Weekly was his latest enthusiasm. Its politics would have been very different from Mr. Ten Euyck's--" A friendly visage at another table favored them with a sidelong contortion and a warning wink. Just behind them a shrewd voice ceased abruptly and a metallic tone responded, "Yes, but you--you're a man with a mania!" The first voice replied, "Well, you're down on criminals and I'm down on crime." Then Ten Euyck's was again lifted. "You're out after a criminal whom you think corrupting and to wipe him out you'll pass by fifty of the plainest personal guilt! In my view nobody but the corruptible is corrupted. Any person who commits a crime belongs in the criminal class." "Crime may end in the criminal class," the other voice took up the challenge, "but it begins at home. You can't always pounce upon the decayed core. But if you observe a very little speck on a healthy surface, one of two things--either you can cut it away and save the apple, or your tunneling will lead you farther and farther in, it will open wider and wider and the speck will vanish, automatically, because the whole rotten fruit will fall open in your hand." "Delightful, when it does! But in this short life I prefer the pounce!" By this time everybody was harkening and Herrick ventured to turn his chair and look round. He beheld a sallow man, nearer forty than thirty and as tall as himself or taller, but of a straighter and stiffer height; with a long head, a long handsome nose and chin, long hands and long ears. This elongated countenance was not without contradictions. Under the sparse, squarely cut mustache Herrick was surprised to find the lips a little pouting, and the glossily black eyes were prominent and full. Fastidiously as he was dressed there persisted something funereal in the effect; forward of each ear a shadow of clipped whisker leant him the dignity of a daguerreotype. He spoke neatly, distinctly. His excellent, strong voice was dry, cold and inflexible. On the whole Herrick's easy and contemptuous amusement received a slight set-back. "I prefer the pounce!" To be pounced upon by that bony intensity might not be amusing at all! Then he discovered what had changed his point of view: it had shifted a trifle toward the criminal's! All very well for Ten Euyck's guest--Herrick had somehow gathered that the other man was a guest--to give up the argument, indifferently refusing to play up to his host! All very well for the free-hearted lunchers to sit, diverted, getting oratorical pointers from the monologue into which Ten Euyck had plunged! It was neither the lunchers nor the guest, but Herrick who must, to-morrow morning, appear as a witness before Ten Euyck! He would have to tell the man something which the Inghams had asked him not to tell because it might prove prejudicial to James Ingham--his admirer--which Hermann Deutch had asked him not to tell because it might prove prejudicial to Christina Hope--she whose face had been his heart's companion through hard and lonely times! The idea of the inquest had become exceedingly disagreeable to Herrick. And the more he listened to Ten Euyck, the more disagreeable it became; the more he felt that a derisive audience had underestimated its man. Ten Euyck might take himself too seriously; he might show too small a sense of the ridiculous in loudly delivering, at luncheon, a sort of Oration-on-the-Respect-of-Law-in-Great-Cities. But this depended on whether you considered him as a man or a trap. The real quality in a trap is not a sense of the ridiculous nor a delicate repugnance to taking itself seriously. Its real quality is the ability to catch things. And, as a trap, Herrick began to feel that Ten Euyck was made for success. The new-born criminal actually felt an impulse to warn his unknown accomplice how trivial gossip had been, how blind the public gaze. Platitudes about law, yes. But, when the orator came to dealing with the lawless, the whole man awoke. Those who broke the rules of the world's game and yet struggled not to lose it were to him mere despicable impertinents whose existence at large was an outrage to self-respecting players and for what he despised he found excellent cold thrusts and even a kind of homely and savage humor. Then, indeed, "it was not blood which ran in his veins, but iced wine." Why, he was right to think of himself as a prosecutor--he was born a prosecutor! In unconsciously assuming the robes of justice he had simply found himself. To him justice meant punishment, punishment an ideal vocation for the righteous and life a thing continually coming up before him to be weighed, found wanting and rebuked. To admonish, to blame, and then--with a spring--to crush--it is a passion which grows by what it feeds on, so that even Ten Euyck's jests had become corrections and the whole creature admirably of one piece, untorn by conflicting beliefs and inaccessible to reason, provocation, pity or consequences; because illegal actions--ideas, too, daily spreading--must be suppressed at all costs by proper persons and the patriarchal arrangement of the world rebuilt over the body of a rebel.--Of course, as his cowed analyst admitted, with P. W. B. C. Ten Euyck on top! Thank heaven the monster had one weak spot! As he jibed at a newspaper cartoon of the coroner's office he displayed fully the symptom of his disease; a raging fever of egotism. He was one to die of a laugh and Herrick doubted if he could have survived a losing game. But when was he likely to lose? Not when, as now, he lifted the bugle of a universal summons, calling expertly on a primitive instinct. Your aristocrat may be a fool and a bore in your own workshop, but he is the hereditary leader of the chase; his mounted figure convinces you he will run down the fugitive and in the minds of men the weight of his millions add themselves, automatically, to his hand. This huntsman had branched off to the importance of motive in murder trials and his audience was not smiling, now. It had warmed itself at his cold fire and the excitement of the hunt was in the air. Ten Euyck always uttered the word "crime" with a gusto that spat it forth, indeed, but richly scrunched; and it was a day on which that word could not but start an electrical contagion. Nothing definite was said, in Corey's presence; still less was a name named--nor was any needed. But a sense of gathering issues, of closing in on some breathless revelation thickened in the heating, thrilling, restive atmosphere till a boy's voice said languidly, "Lead me to the air, Reginald! This is too rich for my blood!" and they all dropped the wet blanket of a shamefaced relief upon the coroner's inconsiderate eloquence. The quiet guest got suddenly to his feet and bore his host away. In a tone of tremulous scorn Corey said to Herrick, "He's grown a mustache, you see, because Kane wears one!" "Kane?" "You've no nose for celebrities! Ten Euyck brought him here to-day to pose before him as a literary man and before us as a political lion. But our coroner's founded himself on Gerrish so long I don't know what'll become of him now we've got a District-Attorney who has no particular appetite for the scalps of women!" Kane! So the District-Attorney was the quiet guest! To Herrick's roused apprehension Kane might just as well have been brought there to be presented with any chance mention which might indicate some circumstance connected with last night. And he understood too well the allusion to Gerrish, a District-Attorney of the past whose successful prosecutions had made a speciality of women; who had never delegated, who had always prosecuted with especial and eloquent ardor, any case in which the defendant was a woman, whether notorious or desperate. Herrick could scarcely restrain a whistle; this did indeed promise a lively inquest! Heaven help the lady of the shadow if this imitation prosecutor should nose her out! It was, perhaps, an immoral exclamation. Yet all the afternoon, as Herrick worked on his story for the _Record_, he could not rout his distaste for his own evidence. Even after his late and imposing lunch he brought himself to a cheap and early dinner, rather than go back to the Grubey flat. He affected, when he found himself downtown, a little Italian table d'hôte in the neighborhood of Washington Square; much frequented by foreign laborers and so humble that a plaintive and stocky dog, a couple of peremptory cats, and two or three staggering infants with seraphic eyes and a chronic lack of handkerchiefs or garters generally lolled about the beaten earth of the back yard, where the tables were spread under a tent-like sail-cloth. It was all quaint and foreign and easy; and, so far as might be, it was cool; on occasions, the swarthy _dame de comptoir_ was replaced by a spare, square, gray-haired woman, small and neat and Yankee, whom it greatly diverted Herrick to see at home in such surroundings; a little gray parrot, looking exactly like her, climbed and see-sawed about her desk; a vine waved along the fence; the late sun flickered on the clean coarseness of the table-cloths and jeweled them, through the bottles of thin wine, with ruby glories; there was a worthless, poverty-stricken charm about the place, and Herrick sat there, early and alone, smiling to himself with, after all, a certain sense of satisfying busyness and of having come home to life again. He had little enough wish to return to his close room where his perplexities would be waiting for him and he lingered after dinner, practicing his one-syllable Italian on Maria Rosa, the little eldest daughter of the house, who trotted back and forth bearing tall glasses of branching bread-sticks and plates of garnished sausage to where her mother was setting a long table for some fête, and, when the guests began to come, he still waited in his corner, idly watching. They were all men and all poor, but all lively; there was an almost feminine sweetness in the gallantry of the Latin effervescence with which they passed a loving-cup in some general ceremony. And no woman could have been more beautiful than the tall Sicilian whose grave stateliness, a little stern from the furrowing of brows still touched with Saracen blood, faced Herrick from the table's farther end. Herrick even inquired, as he paid his check, who this imposing creature was and the Yankee woman replied with unconcern that he was Mr. Gumama, who ran a pool-game at the barber's. It charmed Herrick to combine this name and occupation with the fervent kisses which Mr. Gumama, rising majestically and swooping to the nearer end of the table, implanted, one on each cheek, upon the hero of the fête. All the guests, as each finished the ceremonial draught, followed his example. None of the rest, however, had Saracen brows, nor long, grim earrings whose fringe swing beneath three stories of gilt squares. The Yankee woman turned contemptuously from "such monkey-shines," but Herrick lingered till the last kiss and as he even then walked home through the hot cloudy night it was after nine o'clock before he reached there. He had not been in since morning and he was greatly to blame. For he had had a caller and the caller was Cuyler Ten Euyck! The Grubeys were greatly excited by this circumstance and it excited Herrick, too. The coroner had himself examined Ingham's apartment and then the conscientious creature had climbed the stairs to Herrick's. He had even waited in the hope that his witness might return. All this was proudly poured forth while Herrick was also asked to examine a rival public interest--a most peculiar prize which the corner saloon-keeper's son had been awarded at a private school; he had loaned it to Johnnie Grubey for twenty-four hours if Johnnie would let him see the revolver with which Herrick would have shot the murderer last night if the murderer had been there! It was a sort of return in kind; for the school prize was also a revolver. It was a very little one and Johnnie insisted that it was solid gold. On the handle was a monogram of three capital A's in small bright stones, white, green and red--near them a straggling C had been wantonly scratched. Johnnie averred that the A's stood for Algebra, Astronomy and Art-Drawing and even had the combination of studies for one prize been less remarkable Herrick would have suspected that the boy was lying. What he suspected he hardly knew; still less when he discovered that this unwontedly sympathetic prize was, after all, a fake. The little golden pistol was not a pistol, but a curiously pointless trinket--the cylinder was nothing but a sculptured suggestion; the toy was made all in one piece!--"D'yeh ever see the like?" Mrs. Grubey asked him. And he never had. It was quainter than Mr. Gumama's kisses. But Herrick's head was full of other things. As he opened his door he grinned to think of that aristocratic scion waiting in his humble bedroom. Well, it had been a great day! Even if he had lost heart for that taxi-ride up the river with Evadne! And then from long habit, he glanced at Evadne's empty place. The picture had left an unfaded spot on the wall-paper. "I suppose I might add 'And on my heart!'" said Herrick. He lifted the concealing newspaper. Then he went out and made inquiries. No one but Ten Euyck and Mrs. Grubey had been in the room nor had Mrs. Grubey noticed that the picture had been moved. Now Herrick was certain he had left the likeness under the newspaper, lying face up. It was still under the newspaper, but face down. He said to himself, with a shrug of annoyance, that the coroner had made good use of his time. CHAPTER VIII MRS. WILLING TELLS WHAT SHE KNOWS The morning of the inquest was cloudy, with a wet wind. Herrick was nervous, and he could not be sure whether this nervousness sprang from the ardor of championship or accusation. But one thing was clear. Christina Hope had slain Evadne and closed his mouth to Sal; but, at last, he was to see her, face to face. She was there when he arrived, sitting in a corner with her mother. Herrick recognized her at once, but with a horrid pang of disappointment. Was this his Diana of the Winds? Or yet his Destroying Angel? This was only a tall quiet girl in a gray gown. To be more exact it was a gray ratine suit, with a broad white collar, and her small gray hat seemed to fold itself close in to the shape of her little head; the low coil of her hair was very smooth. Herrick observed with something oddly akin to satisfaction that he had been right about her coloring--there were the fair skin, the brown hair, the eyes cool as gray water. Under these to-day there were dark shadows and her face was shockingly pale. The first witness called was a Doctor Andrews. After the preliminary questions as to name, age, and so forth, he was asked, "You reside in the Van Dam Apartments?" "I do." "On what floor?" "The ninth." "On the night of August fifth did you hear any unusual sounds?" "Not until I heard the pistol-shot--that is, except Mr. Ingham, playing his piano--if you could call that unusual." "He often played late at night?" "He had been away during the summer; but, before that, there was a great deal of complaint. He gave a great many supper-parties; at the same time, he was such a charming fellow that people forgave him whenever he wished. Besides, he was a magnificent musician." "Were there ladies at these supper-parties?" "Not to my personal knowledge." "What did you do, Dr. Andrews, when you heard the shot?" "I looked out of the window, and saw nothing. I thought I might have been mistaken; it might have been a tire bursting. But I noticed that the piano had stopped." After the shot the witness had remained restless. "Presently I thought I heard some one hammering. I got up again and opened the door and then I heard it distinctly. I know now that it was the efforts of Mr. Herrick to break Ingham's lock with a revolver. I could hear a mixture of sounds--movements. I went back and began to get my clothes on and when I was nearly dressed my 'phone rang." "Tell us what it said." "It was the voice of the superintendent saying, 'Please come down to 4-B in a hurry, Dr. Andrews. Mr. Ingham's shot himself.'" "And you went?" "Immediately." "He was dead on your arrival?" "Quite." "How long should you, as a physician, say it was since death occurred?" "Not more than fifteen or twenty minutes." "Had the death been instantaneous?" "Certainly. He was shot through the heart." "Then, in your opinion, if the deceased had taken his own life, he could not have sprung off the electric lights, nor in any fashion done away with the weapon, after the shot." "He certainly could not." "In your professional opinion, then, he did not commit suicide?" "There is no question of an opinion. I know he did not." "You are very positive, Dr. Andrews?" "Absolutely positive. Death was instantaneous. Also, there was no powder about the wound, showing that the shot had been fired from a distance of four feet or more. Also, the body did not lie where it had fallen." "How do you know that?" "There was a little puddle of blood in the sitting-room, where Ingham fell. Your physician and myself called the attention of the police to marks on the rugs following a trail of drops of blood into the bedroom where the body was found." "You do not think that the deceased could have crawled or staggered there, after the shooting?" "I do not." "You believe that the body was dragged there, after death?" "Yes." "You remained with the body until the arrival of myself and Doctor Shippe?" "I did." "Dr. Andrews, the apartment in which the shooting occurred had no access to the windows of any other apartment, no fire-escape, and no means of egress except through a door which was found bolted on the inside. Suppose that a murder was committed. Have you any theory accounting for the murderer's escape?" "None whatever." "And does not the absence of all apparent means of escape shake your theory of the impossibility of suicide?" "Not in the least. It is unshakable." "Thank you. That will do." The coroner's physician confirmed Dr. Andrews in every particular. The coroner settled back and seemed to pause. And the listeners drew a long breath. Something at least had been decided. It was not suicide. It was murder. This had been established so completely and so early in the examination that Herrick found himself impressed with the idea of the coroner's knowing pretty distinctly what he was about. It seemed that he might very well have some theory to establish, for which, in the first place, he had now cleared the ground. Herrick stole a glance at Deutch. His face was wet and colorless, and his eyes fixed on vacancy. And then, curious to note the effect of hearing her lover proclaimed foully murdered, he permitted himself the cruelty of looking at Miss Hope. Apparently it had no effect on her at all. Her mother, a slight, handsome woman, very fashionably turned out, followed eagerly every suggestion of the evidence. But the girl still sat with lowered eyes. The next evidence, that of the police, threw no further light; and then came the tremulous Theodore of Herrick's acquaintance whose surname transpired as Bird. Bird, too, had been awake and had heard the shot; he had been fully aware from the first that it was a pistol-shot. He and Mrs. Bird had risen and put up the chain on their door, and then he had telephoned to the superintendent. "Did the hall-boy connect you at once?" "It isn't the hall-boy. It's the night-elevator-boy." "Well, did the night-elevator-boy connect you at once?" "No, I was a long time getting him." "The boy?" "Yes." "Ah! He, at least, was able to sleep. But, after you got him, was your connection with the superintendent immediate?" "Almost immediate, I guess." "It didn't strike you that he was purposely delaying?" The listeners leaned forward. And Herrick, as at a touch home, dropped his eyes. "Why, I couldn't say that it did. No, hardly. Besides, he might have been asleep, too." "Ah! So he might. And what was the first thing he said to you?" "Through the 'phone?" "Certainly. Through the 'phone." "He said, 'What is it?'" (Slight laughter from the crowd.) "Well? Go on!" "I said, 'Excuse me. But I heard a shot just now, in 4-B.' And he said, 'A pistol-shot?' And I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'Do you think somebody has got hurt?' And I said, 'I'm afraid so.' Then he said, 'Well, I'll come up.'" "Did he seem excited?" "Not so much as I was." Mrs. Bird, though she described at some length her forethought in dressing and getting their valuables together, had nothing material to add. Nor had the widow and her son in the apartment below that in which the catastrophe took place; nor the couple, Mr. and Mrs. Willing, in the apartment across the court which had been invaded as a look-out station by the police, anything further to relate; until, indeed, the lady stumbled upon the phrase--"The party had been going on for some time." "In 4-B?" "What? Yes." "What made you think there was a party going on in 4-B?" "There were voices. And then he often had them." "Did you, as a near neighbor, ever observe that there were any ladies at these parties?" "I wouldn't like to say." "I see. Well, on this occasion, how many voices were there?" "I don't know." "About how many? Two? A dozen? Twenty?" "Oh, not many at all. There was poor Mr. Ingham's voice, nearly all the time. And maybe a couple of others. I was in my bedroom, trying to sleep, and the piano was going all the time." "I see. So there may have been two or three persons besides Mr. Ingham, and there may have been only one?" "Yes, sir. At times I was pretty sure I heard another voice. I mean a third one, anyhow." "Was it a man's voice or a woman's?" "I don't know." "Could you swear you heard a third voice at all?" "Well, I don't believe I could exactly. No." "Now, Mrs. Willing, I want you to be very careful. And I want you to try and remember. Please tell exactly all that you can remember about what I am going to ask you and nothing more." "Oh, now, you're frightening me dreadfully." "I don't want to frighten you. But I do want you to think. Now. You are certain you heard at least two voices?" "Yes, I am, I--" "Mr. Ingham's and one other?" "Yes, sir." "Was that other voice the voice of a man?" "No, sir." "It was a woman's voice?" "I--I suppose so." "Aren't you sure?" "Well, yes, I am." "Was it angry, excited?" "Toward the end it was." "As if the speaker were losing control of herself?" "Yes, sir." "Now, Mrs. Willing, had you ever heard it before?" "The woman's voice?" "Yes." "I can't be sure." "What do you think?" "Well, I thought I had, yes. I told Mr. Willing so. He'd been to a bridge party upstairs and he came down just along there." "You recognized it then?" "Well, toward the end I thought I did; yes." "Mrs. Willing, whose was that voice?" "Oh, sir,--I--I'd rather not say!" "You must say, Mrs. Willing." "Well, then, I'll just say I don't know." "That won't do, Mrs. Willing.--When you told your husband that you thought you recognized that voice, exactly what did you say?" "Well, I said--oh!--I--Well, what I said was 'That's that actress he's engaged to in there with him.'" "Ah!--And, now, I suppose you know the name of the actress he was engaged to?" "Yes, of course. She's Miss Hope. Christina Hope her name is. Of course, I haven't said I was sure!" "Thank you. That will do." CHAPTER IX JOE PATRICK IS DETAINED A thrill shook the assemblage. It was plain enough now to what goal was the coroner directing his inquiry. The covert curiosity which all along had been greedily eyeing Christina Hope stiffened instantly into a wall, dividing her from the rest of her kind. She had become something sinister, set apart under a suspended doom, like some newly caught wild animal on exhibition before them in its cage. Through the general gasp and rustle, Herrick was aware of Deutch slightly bounding and then collapsing in his seat, with a muffled croak. His wife frowned; clucking indignant sympathy, she looked with open championship at the suspected girl. Mrs. Hope started up with a little cry; Herrick judged that she was much more angry than frightened. When the coroner said, "You will have your chance to speak presently, Mrs. Hope," she dropped back with exclamations of fond resentment, and taking her daughter's hand, pressed it lovingly. Christina alone, a sedate and sober-suited lily, maintained her composure intact. But, now, for the first time, she lifted her head and slowly fixed a long, grave look upon the coroner. There was no anger in this look. It was the expression of a very good and very serious child who regards earnestly, but without sympathy, some unseemly antic of its elders. Once she had fixed this gaze upon the coroner's face, she kept it there. In that devout decorum of expression and in the outline of her exact profile occasioned by her change of attitude, Herrick began once more to see the youthful candor of his Evadne. Yes, there _was_ something royally childlike in that round chin and softly rounded cheek, in that obstinate yet all too sensitive lip, and that clear brow. Yes, thus expectant and motionless, she was still strangely like a tall little girl. Where did the coroner get his certainty? By God, he was branding her!--"Mr. Bryce Herrick," the coroner called. The young man was aware at once of being a local celebrity. His evidence was to be one of the treats of the day. Not even the attack upon Christina had created a much greater stir. He took his place; and, "At last," said the coroner, "we are, I believe, to hear from somebody who saw _something_." Herrick told his story almost without interruption. He was listened to in flattering silence; the young author had never had a public which hung so intently on his words. The silence upon which he finished was still hungry. The coroner drew a long breath. "We're greatly obliged to you, Mr. Herrick. And now let us get this thing straight. It was one o'clock or thereabouts that Mr. Ingham began to play?" They established the time and they went over every minutest detail of changing spirit in Ingham's music. "That crash which waked you for the second time--do you think it could have been occasioned by an attack on Mr. Ingham?--that he may have been struck and thrown against the piano?" "Oh, not at all. It was a perfectly deliberate discord, a kind of hellish eloquence." "Ah! I'm obliged to you for that phrase, Mr. Herrick." And again he was asked--"That gesture which so greatly impressed you--do you think you could repeat it for us?" Herrick quelled the impulse to reply, "Not without making a damned fool of myself," and substituted, "I can describe it." "Kindly do so." "She threw her arm high up, as high as it would go, but at a very wide angle from her body, and at that time her hand was clenched. But while the arm was still stretched out, she slowly opened her fingers, as if they were of some stiff mechanism--and it seemed to me that it was the violence of her feeling they were stiff with--until the whole hand was open, like a stretched gauntlet." "Well, and then, when she took down her hand?" "She drew it in toward her quickly; I had an idea she might have covered her face." "And then she disappeared?" "Yes; but she seemed to dip a little forward." "As if to pick something up?" "Well, not as much as from the floor; no." "From a chair, then, or the couch?" "Possibly." "She would, standing at the window, have been some five or six feet from the piano, where Ingham sat?" "I should say about that." "Mr. Herrick, are you absolutely sure that this was not until after the shooting?--this forward dip?" "After? No, it was before!" "Ah--And directly after the shot the lights went out?" "Directly after. Almost as if the shot had put them out." "Now, Mr. Herrick, you have testified that from, as you say, the vague outline of the hair and shoulders and the slope of her skirts, and from the fact that when she raised her arm there was a bit of lace, or something of the kind, hanging from her sleeve, you were perfectly sure that this shadow was the shadow of a woman. Yet you still could not in the least determine anything whatever of her appearance. That I can quite understand. But didn't you gather, nevertheless, some notion of her personality?" Herrick avoided Deutch's eye. He said--"I don't think so." "That extraordinary movement, then, did not leave upon you a very distinct impression?" "In what way?" "An impression of a lady not much concerned with social constraint or emotional control; and of a very great habitual ease and flexibility in movement." Herrick managed to smile. "I'm afraid I'm no such observer as all that. Perhaps any lady, within sixty seconds of committing murder, is a little indifferent to social constraint." The coroner looked at him with a slight change of expression. "Well, then, let us put it another way. You would not expect to see your mother, or your sister, or any lady of your own class, make such a gesture? No? Yet you must often have seen an actress do so?" "That doesn't follow!" Herrick said. His flush resented for Christina the slur that his words overlooked. And suddenly words escaped him. "You answered the previous question yourself, remember! Be kind enough not to confuse my evidence with yours!" The coroner studied him a long time without speaking, while the young man's color continued to rise, and at length came the comment, "I'm not falling asleep, Mr. Herrick. I'm only wondering what charming influence has been at work with the natural appetite, at your age, for discussing an actress." "Ask me that later, outside your official capacity," said Herrick hotly, "and we'll see if we can't find an answer!" "Mr. Herrick, why, on the morning after the murder, did you take down Miss Hope's photograph from over your desk?" "Because, never having met Miss Hope, it was a photograph I had no right to. I took it down when I learned the identity of the original. I didn't want its presence to be misconstrued by cads." "Thank you. That will do. Hermann Deutch, if you please." Herrick retired, ruffled and angry at himself; and Deutch, in passing him, cast him a clinging glance, as of a fellow conspirator, that he found strangely indigestible. At Christina, he could not look. It did not take the coroner two minutes to make hay of Mr. Deutch. Not, indeed, that he was able to extract any very damaging admissions. The superintendent said that he was wakened by his wife, who had herself been wakened by the 'phone. He had held the before stated conversation with Mr. Bird, and, not being able to get the elevator, had walked upstairs, being joined in the office by a policeman. The rest of his proceedings were unquestionable. But the coroner, an expert in caricature and bullying and the twisting of phrases, by making him appear ridiculous, managed to make him appear mendacious; this was the easier because every now and then there was a slip in the sense of what he said, as if he had forgotten the meaning of words; he certainly perspired more than was at all persuasive; he soon began to stumble and to contradict himself about nothing; his slight accent thickened and, in a syntax with which his German tongue was habitually glib, but not accurate, he was soon making errors laughably contemptible to a public that presumably expressed itself with equal elegance in all languages. So that presently, when he was sufficiently harrowed, the coroner drew from him an admission; not only had Ingham frequently entertained ladies at his supper-parties, but complaints had been made to Deutch by various tenants, and these complaints he had not transmitted to the owners of the apartment house. The most searching inquiry failed to connect Christina with these parties, but the inference was obvious. "I didn't,"--Mr. Deutch burst forth--"keep 'em quiet any because she was there. She wouldn't have touched such doings, not with the sole of her foot. But I didn't want the gentleman she was engaged to should be put out of the house when I was running it, after her recommending it to him, on my account!" His eyes and his voice were full of exasperated tears. "He'd have told her one lie and yet another and another, and she'd have believed him, and he'd have wanted her to fight me. Not that she would. But he was fierce against her friends, any of 'em. And I didn't want she should have no more trouble than what she had with him already." "Very kind of you. Nature made you for a squire of dames, Mr. Deutch. Miss Hope, now,--you are a particularly old friend of hers, I believe. And I understand you would do a great deal for her." "I'd do anything at all for her." "I see." All that was crouching in the coroner coiled and sprang. "Even to committing perjury for her, Mr. Deutch. Even to concealing a murder for her sake?--Silence!" he commanded Christina's friends. In the sudden deathly stillness Deutch lifted his head. He looked at the coroner with the eyes of a lion, and in a firm voice he replied, "Say, when you speak like that about a lady, Mr. Coroner, you want to look out you don't go a little too far." "I am about to call a witness," said the coroner, with his cold laugh, "who will go even farther. Joseph Patrick, please!" Joe Patrick was the night-elevator boy. People stared about them. No witness. The coroner's man came forward, saying something about "telephoned--accident--get here shortly." "See that he does,--The day-elevator boy in court!" Disappointment reigned. After the glorious baiting of one whose race went so long a way to make him fair game, almost anything would have been an anti-climax. There now advanced for their delectation a slim, blond, anemic, peevish youth, feeble yet cocky, almost as much like a faded flower from a somewhat degenerated stalk as if he had been nipping down Fifth Avenue under a silk hat, and whose name of Willie Clarence Dodd proclaimed him of the purest Christian blood. Yet the stare of the assembly wandered from him, passed, grinning, where Deutch sat with hanging head, and settled down to feed upon the pallor of Christina's cheek. Herrick rose suddenly, displacing, as it were, a great deal of atmosphere with his large person, and stalking across the room, pulled up a chair to Deutch's side. If he had clasped and held that plump, that trembling hand, his intention could not have been more obvious. Christina turned her head a little and, with no change of expression, looked at him for a moment. Then she turned back again to Willie Clarence Dodd. That gentleman, ogling her with a canny glance, affably tipped his hat to her, and she bowed to him with utter gravity. Mr. Dodd was a gentleman cherishing a just grudge. By the accident of bringing him into day-service instead of night-service, when there was a murder up her sleeve, Fate had balked him of his legitimate rights in life. Notoriety had been near him, but it had escaped. Mr. Dodd's self-satisfaction, however, was not easily downed. He had still a card to play, and he played it as jauntily as if doom had not despoiled him of his due. He smiled. And he had a right to. The first important question asked him ran--"On the day after Mr. Ingham's return from Europe--the day, in fact, of his death--did Mr. Ingham have any callers?" "Yes, sir. He had one." Interest leaped to him. He bloomed with it. Apart from interruptions, his story ran--"Yes, sir. A lady. Quite a good-looker. Medium height. Might make you look round for a white horse; but curls, natural. Very neat dresser and up-to-date. Cute little feet. She wouldn't give her name. But not one o' _that_ sort, you understand. She came up to me--the telephone girl was sick and I was onto her job--and she says to me, very low, as if she'd kind of gone back on herself,--'Will you kindly tell Mr. James Ingham that the lady he expects is here?' He came down livelier than I'd ever known him, and she said it was good of him to see her and they sat down on the window-seat. That's one thing where the Van Dam's on the bum--no parlor. I was really sorry for the little lady--no, not short, but the kind a man just naturally calls little--she was so nervous and she talked about as loud as a mouse; I guess he felt the same way, for he says, 'Won't you come upstairs to tell me all this? We shall be quite undisturbed,' he says. And while they were waiting for the elevator--the hall-boy wasn't much on running it--she says to him, 'You understand; I don't want to get Christina into any trouble.' And he says, 'Of course; that is all quite understood.' In about half an hour down they came together and he had his hat. He wanted to send her off in a cab, but she wouldn't let him. The minute she was gone he says to me, ''Phone for a taxi!' They didn't answer, and he says, 'Ring like the devil!' It hadn't stopped at the door when he was in it and off." "You couldn't, of course, hear his direction?" "Nop! He got back about six--chewing the rag, but on the quiet. Went out in his dress suit about seven-thirty. I went off at eight." He was dismissed, strutting. "And now let us get down to business. If you please," said the coroner, "Miss Christina Hope." CHAPTER X JOE PATRICK ARRIVES If the young actress and Ten Euyck, now at his best as the coroner, had, as Corey had suggested, any previous knowledge of each other, neither of them stooped to signify it now. "Your name, if you please?" "Christina Hope." "Occupation?" "Actress." "May one ask a lady's age?" "Twenty-two years." She said she was single, and resided with her mother at No. -- West 93rd Street. The girl spoke very low, but clearly, and of these dry preliminaries in her case not a syllable was lost. Her audience, leaning forward with thumbs down, still took eagerly all that she could give them. On being offered a chair, she said that she would stand--"Unless, of course, you would rather I did not." The coroner replied to this biddable appeal--"I shan't keep you a moment longer than is necessary, Miss Hope. I have only to ask you a very few questions. Believe me, I regret fixing your mind upon a painful subject; and nothing that I have hitherto said has been what I may call _personally_ intended. I question in the interests of justice and I hope you will answer as fully as possible in the same cause." "Oh, certainly." "You were engaged to be married to Mr. Ingham, Miss Hope?" "Yes." "When did this engagement take place?" "About a year ago." "And your understanding with him remained unimpaired up to his death?" "Yes." "When did you last see him alive?" "On the day before he--died. He drove to our house from the ship." "Ah! Very natural, very natural and proper. But surely you dined together? Or met again during the next twenty-four hours?" "No." "No? What were you doing on the evening of the fourth of August--the evening of his death?" "My mother and I dined alone, at home. We were neither of us in good spirits. I had had a bad day at rehearsal--everything had gone wrong. My head ached and my mother was worn out with trying to get our house in order; it was a new house, we were just moving in." "You rented a new house just as you were going to be married?" "Yes, that was why. I was determined not to be married out of a flat." A smile of sympathy stirred through her audience. It might be stupidity which kept her from showing any resentment toward a man who had practically accused her of murder. Or, it might be guilt. But she was so young, so docile, so demure! Her voice was so low and it came in such shy breaths--there was something so immature in the little rushes and hesitations of it. She seemed such a sweet young lady! After all, they didn't want to feed her to the tigers yet awhile! And the coroner was instantly aware of this. "Then your mother," he said, "is the only person who can corroborate your story of how you passed that evening?" "Yes." "How did you pass it?" "I worked on my part until after eleven, but I couldn't get it. Then I took a letter of my mother's out to the post-box." "At that hour! Alone!" "Yes. I am an actress; I am not afraid. And I wanted the air." "You came straight home?" "Yes." "While you were out did any neighbor see you? Did you speak to any one?" "On the way to the post-box I saw Mrs. Johnson, who lives two doors below and who had told us about the house being for rent. She is the only person whom I know in the neighborhood. On the way back I met no one." "Then no one saw you re-enter the house?" "I think not." "Did the maid let you in?" "No, I had my key. The maids had gone to bed." "But it was a very hot night. People sat up late, with all their windows open, and caretakers in particular must have been sitting on the steps, some one must have seen you return." "Perhaps they did." "Did you, yourself, notice no one whom we can summon as a witness to your return?" "No one." "What did you do when you came in?" "I went to bed." "You do not sleep in the same room with your mother?" "No." "On the same floor?" "Yes." "Do you lock your door?" "No." "But she would not be apt to come into your room during the night?" "Not unless something had happened; no." "Could you pass her door without her hearing you?" "I should suppose so. I never tried." "So that you really have no witness but your mother, Miss Hope, that you returned to the house, and no witness whatever that you remained in it?" "No," Christina breathed. "Well, now I'm extremely sorry to recall a painful experience, but when and how did you first hear of Mr. Ingham's death?" "In the morning, early, the telephone began to ring and ring. I could hear my mother and the maids hurrying about the house, but I felt so ill I did not try to get up. I knew I had a hard day's work ahead of me, and I wanted to keep quiet. But, at last, just as I was thinking it must be time, my mother came in and told me to lie still; that she would bring up my breakfast herself. I said I must go to rehearsal at any rate; and she said, 'No, you are not to go to rehearsal to-day; something has happened.'" The naïveté of Christina's phrases sank to an awed whisper; her eyes were very fixed, like those of a child hypnotized by its own vision. "I saw then that she was trying not to tremble and that she had been crying. She couldn't deny it, and so she told me that Mr. Ingham was very, very ill, and she let me get up and helped me to dress. But then, when I must see other people--she told me--she told me--" Christina's throat swelled and her eyes filled suddenly with tears. The coroner, cursing the sympathy of the situation, forced himself to a commiserating, "Did she say how he died?" "She told me it was an accident. I said, 'What kind of an accident?' And she said he was shot. 'But,' I said, 'how could he be shot by an accident? He didn't have any pistol? You know he didn't own such a thing.'" A slight sensation traversed the court. "Then it came out--that no one knew--that people were saying it was--murder--" "Do you believe that, Miss Hope?" "I don't know what to believe." "Did Mr. Ingham have any enemies?" "I knew of none." "From your intimate knowledge of Mr. Ingham's affairs you know of no one, either with a grudge to satisfy or a profit to be made, by his death?" "No. No one at all." "So that you have really no theory as to how this terrible thing happened?" "No, really, I haven't." "Well, then, I suppose we may excuse you, Miss Hope." The girl, with her tranquil but slightly timid dignity, inclined her head, and heaving a deep sigh of relief, turned away.-- --"Oh, by the way, Miss Hope,--" And suddenly, with a violent change of manner, he began to beat her down by the tactics which he had used with Deutch. But with how different a result! Nothing could make that pale, tall girl ridiculous. Scarcely speaking above a breath, she answered question after question and patiently turned aside insult after insult. He found no opposition, no confusion, no reticence; nothing but that soft yielding, that plaintive ingenuousness. The crudest jokes, the cruelest thrusts still left her anxiously endeavoring to convey desired information. He took her back over her relations with Ingham, their interview upon his return, the events of the last evening, with an instance and a repetition that wearied even the auditors to distraction; he would let her run on a little in her answers and then bring her up with a round turn; twenty times he took with her that journey to and from the post-box and examined every step, and still her replies ran like sand through his fingers and left no trace behind. But, at last, she put out a hand toward the chair she had rejected, and sank slowly into it. Then indeed it became plain that she was profoundly exhausted. And because her exhaustion was so natural and so pitiable, the coroner, watching its effect, said, "Well, I can think of nothing more to ask you, Miss Hope. I suppose it would be useless to inquire whether, being familiar with the apartment, you could suggest any way in which, the door being bolted, the murderer could have escaped?" Christina looked up at him with a very faint smile and with her humble sweetness that had become almost stupidity, she said, "Perhaps the murderer wasn't in the apartment at all!" The whole roomful of tired people sat up. "Not in the apartment! And where, then, pray?" "Well," said Christina, softly, "he could have been shot through an open window, I suppose. Of course, I'm only a woman, and I shouldn't like to suggest anything. Because, of course, I'm not clever, as a lawyer is. But--" "Well, we're waiting for this suggestion!" "Oh!--Well, it seems to me that when this lady, whose shadow excited the young gentleman so much, disappeared as if it went forward, perhaps it did go forward, perhaps she ran out of the room. You can see--if you don't mind stopping to think about it--that she must have been standing right opposite the door. If she had been quarreling with Mr. Ingham, he may have bolted the door after her. I don't know if you've looked--but the button for the lights is right there--in the panel of the wall between the door and the bedroom arch. Mr. Ingham was a very nervous, emotional person. If there had been a scene, he might very well have meant to switch the lights out after her, too. If he had his finger on the button when the bullet struck him, he might very well, in the shock, have pressed it. And then the lights would have gone out, almost as if the bullet had put them out, just as the young man says. But, of course, if this were what had happened, you would have thought of it for yourself." And she looked up meekly at him, with her sweet smile. The coroner smiled, too, with compressed lips, and putting his hands in his pockets, threw back his head. "And how do you think, then, that--if he was killed instantly, as the doctors have testified,--the corpse walked into the bedroom, where it was found?" "Ah!" said Christina, "I can't account for everything! I'm not an observer, like you! But there has never been, has there, a doctor who was ever wrong? Of course, I don't pretend to know." "Well, it's a pretty theory, my dear young lady, and I'm sure you mean to work it out for us all you can. So give us a hint where this bullet, coming through an open window, was fired from." "It could have been fired from the apartment opposite. Across the entrance-court. You remember, the policeman who went in there found that the windows exactly--do you call it 'tallied'?" "Very good, Miss Hope. If it were an unoccupied apartment. But it is occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Willing, and Mrs. Willing was in the apartment the entire evening." "Yes," said Christina, turning and looking pleasantly at the lady mentioned, "alone." Then she was silent. After a staggered instant, the coroner asked, "And what became of this lady who ran out into the hall?" "Well, of course," said Christina, sweetly, "if it was Mrs. Willing--" The Willings leaped to their feet. "This is ridiculous! This is an outrage! Why!" cried the husband, "his blind opposite our sitting-room was down all the time. There isn't even a hole through it where a shot would have passed!" "Oh, isn't there?" asked Christina. "You see, it wasn't I who knew that!" "What do you mean, you wicked girl! How dare you! Why, you heard the policeman say that it was only when he looked through our bedroom that he could see into Mr. Ingham's apartment--" "And wasn't it in the bedroom that the body was found?" "Miss Hope!" said the coroner, sternly, "I must ask you not to perpetrate jokes. You know perfectly well that your implied charge against Mrs. Willing is perfectly ridiculous--" "Is it?" Christina interrupted, "she implied it about me!" And for the first time she lifted to his a glance alight with the faintest mockery of malice; a wintry gleam, within the white exhaustion of her face. Then,--if all the time she had been playing a part--then, if ever, she was off her guard. And she could not see what Herrick, from his angle, could see very well; that the coroner had been quietly slipping something from his desk into his hand, and was now dangling it behind his back. This something was the scarf found on Ingham's table--that white scarf with its silky border, cloudy, watery, of blue glimmering into gray. How the tender, misty coloring recalled that room of Ingham's! "Don't you know very well, Miss Hope," the coroner went on, "that Mrs. Willing had nothing whatever to do with Mr. Ingham's death?" "How can I? You see, I wasn't there!" "So that, by no possibility," said the coroner, "could this be yours?" He launched the scarf, like a soft, white serpent, almost in her face. And the girl shrank from it, with a low cry. She might as well have knotted it about her neck. And in the horrible stillness that followed her cry, the coroner said, "Your nerves seem quite shattered, Miss Hope. I was only going to ask you if you didn't think that ornament, in case it was not yours, might have been left on Mr. Ingham's table by the young lady who called on him that afternoon." With a brave attempt at her former mild innocence, Christina responded, "I don't know." "Neither can you tell us, I suppose,--it would straighten matters out greatly--who that caller was?" "No, I can't. I'm sorry." "Think again, Miss Hope. Are there so many smartly dressed and pretty young ladies of your acquaintance, with curly red hair and, as Mr. Dodd informs us, with cute little feet?" Christina was silent. "What? And yet she knows you well enough to say to your fiancé--'I don't wish to get Christina into trouble'!" Whose was the smile of malice, now! "Come, come, Miss Hope, you're trifling with us! Tell us the address of this lady, and you'll make us your debtors!" The girl opened her pale lips to breathe forth, "I can't tell you! I don't know!" "Let us assist your memory, Miss Hope, by recalling to you the lady's name. Her name is Ann Cornish." Herrick's nerves leaped like a frightened horse. And then he saw Christina start from her chair, and, casting round her a wild glance that seemed to cry for help, drop back again and put her hands over her face. A dozen people sprang to their feet. Mrs. Hope ran to her daughter's side, closely followed by Mrs. Deutch. The two women, crying forth indignation and comfort, and exclaiming that the girl was worn out and ought to be in bed, rubbed Christina's head, and began to chafe her hands. She was half fainting; but when a glass of whiskey had appeared from somewhere and Mrs. Deutch had forced a few drops between her lips, Christina, unlike the heroine of romance whose faints always refuse stimulants, lifted her head and drank a mouthful greedily. She sat there then, breathing through open lips, with a trace of color mounting in her face. Then the coroner, once more commanding attention, held up a slip of pasteboard. "This visiting-card," he said, "is engraved with Miss Cornish's name, but with no address. It was found leaning against a candlestick on Mr. Ingham's piano, as though he wished to keep it certainly in mind. As a still further reminder, Mr. Ingham himself had written on it in pencil--'At four.'" Christina, with the gentlest authority, put back her friends. She rose, slowly and weakly, to her feet. "Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to correct a false impression; may I?" [Illustration: "Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to correct a false impression; may I?"] "That's what we're here for, my dear young lady," the coroner scornfully replied. "I have said nothing," she went on, "that is not true, but I have allowed something to be inferred which is not true." She pressed her hands together and drew a long breath. "It is true that I was engaged to Mr. Ingham. And when you asked me if our understanding was unimpaired at the time of his death, I said yes; for, believe me, our understanding then was better than it had ever been before. But that was not what you meant. I will answer what you meant, now. At the time of his death, I was not engaged to marry Mr. Ingham." "You were not! Why not?" "We had quarreled." "When?" "The day before he died." An intense excitement began to prevail. Herrick longed to stand up and shout, to warn her, to muzzle her. Good God! was it possible she didn't see what she was doing? The coroner, weary man, sat back with a long sigh of satisfaction. His whole attitude said, "Now we're coming to it." "And may one ask an awkward question, Miss Hope? Who broke the engagement?" "I did." "Oh, of course, _naturally_. And may one ask why?" "Because I began to think that life with Mr. Ingham would not be possible to me." "But on what grounds?" "He was grossly and insanely jealous," said Christina, flushing. "Some women enjoy that sort of thing; I don't." "Jealous of anyone in particular, Miss Hope?" "Only," said Christina, "of everyone in particular." "There was never, of course, any grounds for this jealousy?" Christina looked through him without replying. "Well, well. And was there nothing but this?" "He objected to my profession; and when I was first in love with him I thought that I could give it up for his sake. But as I came to know more of--everything--and to understand more of myself, I knew that I could not. And I would not." "So that it was partly Mr. Ingham, himself, in his insistence upon your renouncing your profession, who broke the engagement?" "If you like." "At least, your continuance in it made his jealousy more active?" "It made it unbearable. And as it gradually became clear to me that he scarcely pretended to practise even the rudiments of the fidelity that he exacted, it seemed to me that there were limits to the insults which even a gentleman may offer to his betrothed. And I--freed myself." Two or three people exchanged glances. "Was the engagement ever broken before and patched up again?" "We had quarreled before, but not definitely. Last spring I asked him to release me, and he would not. But he consented to my remaining on the stage, and to going away for the summer, so that I could think things out." "And you immediately took a house from which to be married!" "Yes. I tried to go on with it. I thought furnishing it might make me want to. But I couldn't. I wrote him so, and he came home. While he was on the ocean I found out something which made any marrying between us utterly impossible. When he drove to my house the day before he was killed, I told him so. We had a terrible scene, but he knew then as well as I that it was the end. I never saw him again." "As a matter of fact, then, the definite breaking of the engagement was caused by something new and wholly extraneous to your profession or his jealousy?" "Yes." "And what was this discovery, Miss Hope?" "Oh!" said Christina, quite simply, "I am not going to tell you that." And she suddenly began to speak quite fast. "Do you think I don't know what I am doing when I say that? Do you think you have not taught me? But I don't care about appearing innocent any longer. And so I know, now, what I'm saying. I will never tell you the cause of our quarrel. It had nothing to do with Mr. Ingham's death. It was simply something--monstrous--which happened a long time ago. But, between us two, it had to fall like a gulf. More than that I will not tell you. And you can never make me." "And you don't know Ann Cornish?" Christina hesitated. "Of course I thought of her. But I couldn't bear to have that little girl brought into it. She's only twenty," Christina added, as if the difference in their ages were half a century. "And, besides, how could it be she? She scarcely knew Mr. Ingham; she never had an appointment with him; I can't believe she ever told him ill of me. She is my dearest friend. But ask her, Mr. Coroner, ask her. Her address is--" And Christina gave an address which was hastily copied. "She is rehearsing at the Sheridan Theater. She, too, is an actress, poor child!" "Let us go back a moment, Miss Hope. What do you mean,--you don't care about appearing innocent any longer?" "I mean that never again will I go through what I have gone through this afternoon. You have asked me the last question I shall answer. You've made me sound like a liar, and feel like a liar; you've made me turn and twist and dodge, trying to convince you of the truth about me, and now that I have told you all the truth, you may think a lie about me, if you choose!" Her face was all alive, now, and her voice thrilled out its deep notes, impassioned as they were soft. "Oh, I wished so much to say nothing! Not to have to stand up here and tell all sorts of intimate things, in this horrible place before these gaping people! But when you began to worry me, to threaten and jeer at me, trying to trip me, I was afraid of you! I know people say that your one thought is to make a mark and have a career, and I seemed to see in your face that you would be glad to kill me for that. I remembered all I had ever heard of you; how you hated women--once, I suppose, some woman hurt you badly;--how you copied an attorney who made all his reputation by the prosecution, by the persecution, of women, and how they say you never run a woman so hard as when she has to work for her living, as I do, and stands exposed to every scandal, as I am! And so I tried to convince you, to answer everything you asked; I am in great trouble, and I am not so very old, and since this came I have scarcely eaten and not slept at all. For if you imagine that, because I haven't really loved him this long while, it is easy to bear thinking how his life had been rived out of him like that, oh, you are wrong--and my nerves are all in shreds. So that it seemed as if I must clear myself, as if it were too hideous to be hated, and to have every one thinking I had murdered him! I struggled to defend myself, and I let you torture me. But oh, I was wrong, wrong! To be judged and condemned and insulted, that's hard, but it's not degrading. But to explain, and pick about, and plead, and wrack your brain to make people believe your word, oh, that degrades!" She paused on a little choking breath. "Think what you like! I have no witness but my mother, and I know very well, in such a case, she doesn't count. I can't prove that I returned to my house, I can't prove that I stayed in it. It's worse than useless to try. If I had friends to speak for me do you think I would have them subjected to what Mr. Deutch has borne for me to-day? I've nothing that shop-keepers call position; I've no money; I'm all alone. Think what you please." And Christina crossed the room and sat down beside her mother. Conflicting emotions clashed in the silence. She seemed to flash such different lights! She had so little, now, the manners or the sentiments of a sweet young lady. Many people were greatly moved, but no one knew what to think. If Christina had brought herself to slightly more conciliatory language or if, even now, she had thrown herself girlishly into her mother's arms, she could, at that moment, easily have melted the public heart. But she sat with her head tipped back against the wall, with her eyes on vacancy, and great, slow tears rolling down her unshielded face, "as bold as brass." And the coroner, leaning forward across his desk, surveyed the assemblage with a cold, fine smile. "My friends," he began, "after the young lady's eloquence, I can hardly expect you to care for mine. Nevertheless, while we are waiting for a witness unavoidably detained, I will ask you to listen to me. Let us get into shape what we have already learned.--The first thing of which we are sure is that James Ingham landed in New York on the afternoon of the third of August and drove directly to the residence of Miss Christina Hope, his betrothed. Miss Hope tells us that when he left that house their engagement was broken; that he was unbearably jealous; that he disapproved of the profession which she persisted in following and that they quarreled over something which she refuses to divulge. We have no witness to this quarrel, but I will ask you to remember it. I will ask you to remember that neither have we witnesses to Miss Hope's statement that it was she, rather than Mr. Ingham, who broke the engagement. "Let us get to our next positive fact. Our next positive fact is that Mr. Ingham, on the next afternoon, the afternoon of August fourth, had an appointment with a lady for four o'clock--an appointment the hour of which he was so anxious not to forget that he wrote it on the lady's visiting-card, and stood the card against a candle on his piano. Our next facts are that the lady kept this appointment, that she had a private interview with Mr. Ingham which greatly excited him; that, as soon as she was gone, he drove off in a taxi with desperate haste, and that he returned in about an hour, still under the repressed excitement of some disagreeable emotion. If, gentlemen of the jury, you should bring in a verdict warranting the State in examining that cabman and in questioning Miss Ann Cornish as to the news she imparted to Mr. Ingham, then, indeed, I am much mistaken if we do not have our hands upon the great clue to all murders, gentlemen, the motive. For, as you have clearly perceived, the meeting between Mr. Ingham and Miss Cornish was not a lover's meeting. Or, if so, it was not a meeting of acknowledged lovers. Miss Hope tells us that Miss Cornish is her confidential friend, and, as far as she knew, had only the most formal acquaintance with Mr. Ingham. No, Miss Cornish had a piece of information to give Mr. Ingham, and she expected this information to serve her own ends, for she said--'It is good of you to see me.' And Mr. Ingham found the information important, for he soon wished it told him at greater length upstairs, 'where we shall be quite undisturbed.' The lady agrees; although she adds, 'I don't want to get Christina into trouble.' Now, I ask you, gentlemen, what could have been her object except to get Christina into trouble. Why does a pretty young woman who refuses to give her name come to a specially attractive man with news of her dearest friend whom she supposes him to be still engaged to marry--news for which she feels it necessary to apologize--for but one of two reasons;--either she is in love with him herself, and wishes to injure her friend in his eyes, or she is in love with some other man and jealous of her friend whom she wishes warned off by the friend's legitimate proprietor. In either case, she evidently effected her point for she sent Mr. Ingham rushing from the house. He, however, apparently failed in what he set out to do. All this, gentlemen, is but conjecture. "Here is where I expected to present you with an astonishing bridge of facts. I had now meant to show you that Mr. Ingham, that evening, expected an unwelcome visitor; that he left orders she was not to be admitted; that she came, that she was well-known to the elevator boy, and to all of us here present as well as to a greater public; that despite the efforts of the elevator boy, she penetrated to Mr. Ingham's apartment, whence she was not seen to return, and that she was the only visitor he had that night. But in the continued absence of the boy, Joseph Patrick, all this must wait. "Our next known fact is that Mr. Herrick was wakened by Mr. Ingham's playing at one or shortly before. You will remember that it was after eleven when Miss Hope spoke to Mrs. Johnson on her way to the post-box, and that after that no one but her mother claims to have seen or spoken with her. For a quarter of an hour, Mr. Herrick tells us, Mr. Ingham played, calmly and beautifully. All was peace. But then there began to be the sound of voices talking through the music--the voices, as other witnesses have testified, of a man and a woman. And the piano begins to sound fitfully and brokenly. The man and the woman have begun to quarrel. Their voices--particularly the woman's voice--rise higher and stormier. Mr. Herrick, with the whole street between, has fallen asleep. But Mrs. Willing, just across the court, hears a voice she knows, and says to her husband, who has just come in, 'He's got that actress he's engaged to in there with him.' And then even Mr. Herrick is awakened by a deliberate discord from the piano; a jarring crash, 'a kind of hellish eloquence.' In other words, the man, with his comparative calm and his mastery over his instrument, is mocking and goading the woman, whose shadow, convulsed, threatening, furious, immediately springs out upon the blind. Gentlemen, can you not imagine the sensations of that woman? Let us suppose a case. Let us suppose that a girl ambitious and lovely, but of a type of loveliness not easily grasped by the mob, a girl who has had to work hard and fight hard, who is worthy to adorn the highest circles, but who is, in Miss Christina Hope's feeling expression, without position, without money, without friends, suddenly meets and becomes engaged to marry a distinguished and wealthy man. Let us suppose that she puts up with this man's exactions, with his furious jealousies, with his continual infidelities for the sake of the security and affluence of becoming his wife. But is it not possible that when this exacting gentleman is safely across the ocean she may allow herself a little liberty? That in the chagrin of knowing she is presently to be torn from her really more congenial friends and surroundings she goes, in his absence, a little too far? At any rate, he cuts short his visit in Europe, he flies to her from the steamer, full of accusations, but--contrary to the experience narrated by Miss Hope--he is perhaps soothed by her version of things and goes away, without having fully withdrawn his word, to examine matters. Let us suppose that on the next day he receives a call from his fiancée's confidential friend,--very possibly his informant while he was abroad--who circumstantially confirms his worst suspicions. Let us suppose he drives wildly to the house of his betrothed; but she is not at home, and after a time he gives up looking for her. He comes miserably back, dines out, returns early, but leaves word that he is not at home. But in the meanwhile may not the lady have got word of all this? Suppose that when she does, she comes to him,--at any hour, at any risk,--and uses her hitherto infallible charm to get him back. Suppose she gets him back; they are alone together; she is excited and confident and off her guard. She lets something slip. Instantly the battle is on. This time she cannot get him back. She becomes desperate. If he speaks, as perhaps he has threatened to, she loses not only him, but everything. For she is on the brink of the great step of her career. She is to play the leading feminine rôle under a celebrated star, who does not care for scandal in his advertisements. On the contrary, he has bruited everywhere her youth, her propriety, her breeding, her good blood. She is a fairy-tale of the girlish virtues. He has no use for her otherwise. And still the man at the piano proclaims her everything that is otherwise, and she sees that she is to lose him and all she has struggled for, professionally, in one breath. He sits there--he, he, the man who has been continually false to her, claiming for himself a different morality--he sits there playing, playing, shattering her nerves with his crash of chords, with his hellish eloquence. But with his back to her, you observe, where she stands at the window and suddenly she sees something lying on a little table or the foot of the couch--something not unusual in a man's apartment, although we have Miss Hope's word that Mr. Ingham did not possess one--something which, perhaps, in his wrecked happiness, he had loaded earlier in the evening with that sinister intention of suicide in which Miss Hope's respected friend, Mr. Deutch, so profoundly believes. Well, gentlemen, the frenzied eye of this tormented girl lights on that little object, she stoops to pick it up, he turns,--and then comes a pistol-shot. There is an end to the strength of a woman's nerves, gentlemen, and she has found it. She cannot look upon her handiwork. She springs off the light and flees. In the confusion she escapes. Gentlemen, with the dumbfounding mystery of that bolted door I can not deal, unless--as Miss Hope has reminded us--medical science may be for once at fault,--unless the wounded man instinctively staggered to the door and bolted it, staggered toward his telephone, in his bedroom, and died there. That, gentlemen, can be threshed out at the trial. In the meantime, I must ask you to remember that the lady whom events seem to indicate is high-strung and overwrought; that her natural grief and nervousness led her through a long cross-examination in which she never once betrayed any hesitation, or the fact that she had quarreled with Mr. Ingham or that she was aware of the existence of Ann Cornish, to a satirical attack upon Mrs. Willing, whose remarks had annoyed her; that, as she tells us, she has no one to take care of her, and if we are inclined to think that she can take very good care of herself, we must remember that when she was confronted with a lady's scarf found not far from the murdered man, she screamed at the sight of it, and when confronted with the visiting-card of Ann Cornish, she so much wished her friend to be kept out of it that she fainted, and, afterwards, _changed all her evidence_.--Gentlemen, I rejoice to see, entering this room, our witness, Joseph Patrick." Joe Patrick, a short, thick-set young fellow, with rough hair and a bright eye, advanced to the coroner's desk. His forehead was ornamented with a great deal of very fresh surgeon's plaster, and when asked why he was so late, he replied that he had been knocked down by an automobile on his way to the inquest. Well, yes, he would sit down; he did feel a little weak, but it wasn't so much from that--he'd had some candy sent him day before yesterday and he'd been awful sick ever since he ate it. Joe was a friendly soul and he added that he was sorry the man the coroner sent hadn't seen anybody but his mother. He was to the doctor's, then. "But you had telephoned a pretty detailed account to your mother, hadn't you, before you left the Van Dam--on the morning of the murder--much more detailed than you gave the police?" "Yes, sir. I guess I did." "Well, then, please give that account to us." Joe looked rather at sea, and the coroner added, "You have said from the beginning, that a lady called upon Mr. Ingham the night of his death?" "Oh, yes, sir! She did!" "Well, tell us first what happened when you went on watch. You had a message from Mr. Ingham?" "Yes, sir. He telephoned down to me. He says, 'I'm out. And if any lady comes to see me this evening, you say right away I'm out.'" "Well, and then?" "Well, along about half-past twelve--it was awful hot and lonesome, and--and--" "And you began to get sleepy! It seems that at least the house-staff was able to sleep that night!" "Well," said Joe, "I guess anybody'd get sleepy, been sittin' there for four hours in that heat! Anyhow, it seemed like I'd just closed my eyes, when they came open all of a sudden and I was looking at the front door. And there, all in white--'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'there's Miss Hope!' I don't know why it seemed so awful queer to me, unless because I wasn't really but half-awake." [Illustration: "'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'there's Miss Hope!'"] It is not too much to say that a shudder traversed the court. Christina, white as death, and her eyes black and strained with horror, leaned toward him in an agony. "Perhaps you thought she was rather a late visitor!" smiled the coroner. "Well? She didn't melt away, I suppose?" "No, sir. She came up to me, all smiles like, but you bet there was something that wasn't a bit funny in that smile. And she says to me, 'Is our friend, Mr. Ingham, at home?' she says. And I says, 'No, ma'am.' And she says, 'You're a bad liar, my boy! But you won't take me up, I suppose?' And I says, 'He told me not to, ma'am.'" "Well? Go on!" "So she says, 'Well, then, I must take myself up.' And before you could say 'Pop,' she was up the stairs." "And what did you do?" "'Oh, here, ma'am, ma'am,' I says, 'you mustn't do that!' She stopped and put her elbows on the stair-rail,--they run right up to one side o' the 'phone desk, you know,--and laughed down at me. She looked awful pretty, but there was something about her kind o' scared me. And 'It's all right, my boy,' she says. 'I shan't hurt him!' An' she laughed again an' ran on up." "And you did nothing?" "Well, what could I do, I like to know! But I grabbed at the switchboard and called up Mr. Ingham. 'Mr. Ingham,' I says, 'that lady's coming up anyhow.' An' he says, 'Damnation!' That's the last word I ever heard out o' him." "'That lady!' Didn't you give him her name?" "Why, I didn't know her name, sir!" "Not know her name! Why, you know Miss Hope--you know her name?" "Oh, yes, sir." "Well, are you crazy, then? It was Miss Hope, was it not?" "Why, no, you bet you it wasn't! It was another lady altogether!" CHAPTER XI PERSONS UNKNOWN The revulsion of feeling in Christina's favor was so immense that it became a kind of panic. It practically engulfed the rest of the inquest. The taking of testimony from her mother and Mrs. Deutch was the emptiest of formalities; the notion of holding her under surveillance until Ingham's cabman and Ann Cornish could be produced confessed itself ridiculous. Another woman, a strange woman, an aggressive, sarcastic woman forcing her way in upon Ingham a couple of hours before his death, and not coming down again! Well! As for the coroner, he suffered less a defeat than a rout. Even his instant leap upon Joe Patrick was only a plucky spurt. He was struggling now against the tide, and he knew it; the strength of his attack was sucked down. Even the remainder of Joe's own evidence did not receive its due consideration. The public fancy fastened upon that figure of a smiling woman, "awful pretty, but with something scaring about her," leaning over the baluster to laugh, "I won't hurt him!" It worked out the rest for itself. "Yes, sir," Joe persisted, "my mother misunderstood me, all right. I said I took her for Miss Hope at the door, and so I did. But she wasn't." "Did she look so much like Miss Hope?" "No, sir; not when she came near. That was the thing made me feel so queer. I can't understand it. First she was Miss Hope, and then she wasn't. She gave me a funny feeling when I seen her standing there in the door an' says to myself, 'There's Miss Hope.' 'Twas kind of's if I seen her ghost. An' then all of a sudden there she was, right on top o' me. An' not like Miss Hope a bit. An' that gimme a funny feeling, too!" "Well, never mind your sensations. If she didn't resemble Miss Hope, at least how did she differ from her?" "Why, I guess she was a good deal handsomer for one thing. At least I expect most people would think so, though I prefer Miss Hope's style, myself. She was dressier, for one thing, in white lace like, with a big hat, an' she was pretty near as slim, but yet she had, as you might say, more figger. An' she had red hair." Joe had made another sensation. "Red hair! Curly?" "Well, it was combed standin' out fluffy like one o' these here halos, up into her hat. It wasn't anyways common red, you know, sir, it was elegant, stylish red, like the goldy part in flames." "Don't get poetic, Joe. Was she a very young lady?" "I don't think so, sir.--Oh, I guess she wouldn't hardly see twenty-five again! Her feet, sir? I didn't notice. But she didn't walk kind o' waddlin', either, nor else kind o' pinchin', the way ladies mostly do; she just swum right along, like Miss Hope does." "But she didn't swim downstairs again, without your seeing her?" "No, sir." "Now look here, Joe Patrick, how do you know she didn't? When Mr. Bird went to the 'phone after the shooting he was a long time getting connected, and Mr. Herrick found you asleep at the desk." "I couldn't have fell asleep again until after one o'clock, sir, for I had a clock right on the desk and at one I noticed the time. I was watchin' for her, she was such a queer one, an' only one man came in all that time, that I had to carry upstairs. He only went to the fourth floor, just where she was, an' I rushed him up an' dropped right down again. She couldn't ha' walked down in that time. I could hear the piano goin' all the while, the front doors bein' open. But after one I must ha' dropped off. Because it was about twenty minutes past when Mr. Herrick shook me up. Then I knew I'd been kind o' comin' to, the last few minutes, hearin' Mr. Bird ringin'. When Mr. Herrick grabbed my elevator I called up Mr. Deutch, an' he was quite a minute, too. I says to him, 'Say, Mr. Deutch, somepun's happened,' an' I switched him onto Mr. Bird." "Well, we're very much obliged to you, Mr. Patrick, for an exceedingly full account. What apartment did the gentleman have whom you took up to the fourth floor? Perhaps he may have heard something." "I don't know, sir." "What?" "He just stepped into the elevator, like he lived there, an' he says to me, 'Fourth!' I never thought nothing about him." "You didn't know him?" "No, sir." "You'd never seen him before?" "No, sir." "Nor since?" "No, sir." "You took a man upstairs in the middle of the night, without announcing him, whom you knew to be a stranger?" "Why no, I thought he was a new tenant. We got a few furnished apartments in the building, goes by the month. And then there's always a good deal o' sublettin' in the summer. He was so quiet an' never asked any questions nor anything, goin' right along about his business, I never give him a thought." "Well, give him a thought now, my boy. When you let him out of the elevator, which way did he turn?" The boy started and his eyes jumped open. "Oh, good Lord! sir," he cried, "why, he turned down toward 4-B." His start was reproduced in the persons of all present. Only the coroner controlled himself. "What time was this?" "It hadn't quite struck one, sir." "And during all this talk about Mr. Ingham's murder, at one-fifteen, it never occurred to you that at just before one, you had taken up to his floor a man whom you had never seen, whom you never saw again, and who turned toward his apartment?" "I'm sorry, sir. I never thought of it till this minute." "Think hard, now. Give us a good description of this man." "A description of him?" "Yes, yes. What did he look like?" "Why, I don't hardly know, sir." "Try and remember. He at least, I presume, did not remind you of Miss Hope?" "No, sir; he didn't remind me of anything." "He looked so unlike other people?" "No, sir. He looked just like all gentlemen." "I see, Joseph, that you don't observe your own sex with the passionate attention which you reserve for ladies. Well, had he a beard or a mustache?" "No, sir, he hadn't any beard, I'm sure." "Come, that's something! And no mustache?" "Well, I don't think so, sir. But I wouldn't hardly like to say." "Was he light or dark?" "I never noticed, sir." "Was he tall?" "Well, sir, I should say he was about middle height." "About how old?" "Oh, maybe thirty, sir. Or forty, maybe. Or maybe not so old." "Stout?" "No, sir." "Ah! He was slender, then?" "Well, I shouldn't say he was either way particular, sir." "How was he dressed, then?" "Well, as far as I can remember; he had on a suit, and a straw hat." "Was the suit light or dark?" "About medium, sir." "Not white, then? Nor rose color, I presume? Nor baby blue?" "No, sir." "Black?" "I don't think so, sir." "Well, was it brown, gray, navy-blue?" "Well, it seems like it might have been a gray, the way I think of it. But then, again, when I think of it, it seems like it might ha' been a blue." "Thank you, Joe. Your description is most accurate. It's a pity you're not a detective." "There's no use getting mad at me, Mister," Joe protested. "I'm doing the best I know." "I'm sure you are. If Mr. Ingham's second anonymous visitor had only been a lady, what revelations we should have had! But this unfortunate and insignificant male, Mr. Patrick. Should you know him again if you saw him?" "I think so, sir. I wouldn't hardly like to say." "Well, to get back to more congenial topics!--The lady who was not Miss Hope--you would know her, I presume?" "Oh, yes, sir!"--Joe hesitated. "Out with it!" commanded the coroner. "Why, it's only--why, anybody'd know her, sir. They couldn't help it. She had--" He paused, blushing. "She had--what?" "I couldn't hardly believe it myself, sir. She had--I'm afraid you'll laugh." "Oh, not at you, Joe! Impossible!" "Well, she had a blue eye, sir." "A blue eye! You don't mean she was a Cyclops?" "Sir?" "She had more than the one eye, hadn't she?" "Oh, yes, sir. She had the two o' them all right." "Well, then, I don't see anything remarkable in her having a blue one." "No, sir. Not if they was both blue. But the other one was brown!" The anticipated laughter swept the room. After a pallid glare even the coroner laughed. "Well, Joe, I'm afraid you must have been very sleepy indeed! I don't wonder the lady gave you such a turn! But if only you had been awake, Joe, your friend would have had one invaluable quality--she would be easily identified!" Thus, almost gaily, the inquest ended. With Mr. Ingham closeted just before his death with an unaccounted-for woman and, presumably, with an unaccounted-for man, there was but one verdict for the jury to bring in, and they brought it. James Ingham had come to a violent death by shooting at the hands of a person or persons unknown. Christina was surrounded by congratulating admirers. But Herrick had not gone far in the free air of the rainy street when, hearing his name called, he turned and saw her coming toward him. She had, in Joe Patrick's phrase, swum right along. She came to him exactly as she had come along the sea-beach in his dream, the wet wind in her skirts and in her hair, the fog behind her, and the cool light of clearing in her eyes. And she said to him, "You're the man, I think, who thought a woman was in distress and went to help her?" He replied, awkwardly enough, "I didn't see what else I could do!" "You haven't been long in New York, Mr. Herrick," she replied. "I wonder, will you shake hands?" He had her hand in his, stripped of her long glove, her soft but electric vitality at once cool and vibrant in his clasp. "And try to believe, will you?" said Christina, "that perhaps, whoever she was and whatever she did, perhaps she was in distress, after all." CHAPTER XII HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE Herrick came home through a world which he had never seen before, blindly climbed his three flights of stairs, and, shutting himself into his room, sat down on his bed. He stared across the floor at the wall-paper, like a man drugged. Yes, there was wall-paper in the world, just as there had been this morning. This room had existed this morning! And so had he! Incredible! Almost indecent! To-day, for the first time, he had found himself. For he had found Her! Yes, he had lived twenty-eight years, and it had been so much time wasted! But he need waste little more. She was an actress. Incredibly, she did not abide in a sanctuary! She was stuck up there on the stage for fools to gape at. And, for two dollars a performance, he, too, could gape! Two dollars a vision--eight visions a week. He began to perceive that he would need some money! And, with the thought of money, there materialized out of the void of the past a quantity of loose scribbled papers, which, last night, had been of paramount importance. They belonged to his Sunday special. Good--that would buy many theater tickets! Yesterday it had been the key to Success. But now he said to himself, "Success?" And he looked dully at the scribbled sheets. "Success?" he thought again, as he might have thought "Turkish toweling?" It was a substance for which, at the moment, he had no use. He had no use for anything except the remembrance of being near her. First there was the time when she was just a girl, sitting beside her mother. He remembered that he, poor oaf, had been disappointed in her. And then came the time when she turned her head, and he had seen that strange, proud, childish innocence--like Evadne's. At the time he had reminded himself that this effect was largely due to her extraordinary purity of outline; to the curving perfection of modeling with which the length of her throat rose from that broad white collar of hers into the soft, fair dusk of her coiled hair; to the fine fashioning of brows and short, straight nose and little chin and the set of the little head, so that the incomparable delicacy of every slope and turn, of every curve and line and luminous surface at last seemed merely to flower in one innocent ravishment. He had then admitted that for a girl who wasn't a howling beauty she had at least the comeliness of being quite perfectly made. And no bolt from the blue had descended upon his gross complacency to strike him dead! He remembered next, how, at the end of his testimony, she had, with her first restless movement, begun pulling off her long gloves. Her hands were slim and strong and rather large, with that look of sensitive cleverness which one sees sometimes in the hands of an extremely nice boy. And with the backs of these hands she had a childish trick of pushing up the hair from her ears, which Herrick found adorable. Suddenly his brain became a kind of storm-center filled with snatches of verse, now high, now homely--she had risen to give her testimony! There she stood before that brute; and the thing he remembered clearest in the world was a line from his school-reader-- "My beautiful, my beautiful, that standest meekly by--" Did he, then, think that she was beautiful? Had he not denied it? For the first time she lifted her eyes, giving their soft radiance, so mild, so penetrating, out fully to the world. And every pulse in him had leaped with but the one cry, "Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air, Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!" "Your name?" "Christina Hope." "Occupation?" "Actress." "Age?" "Twenty-two years." Through the light, clear silver of Christina's speech there ran a strain deeper, lower, richer colored,--Irish girls speak so, sometimes. It trailed along the listener's heart; it dragged; it drawled; by the unsympathetic it might have been called husky. Conceivably, creatures may have existed who did not care for it. But to those who did, it was the last turn of the screw. "Name?" "Christina Hope." "Occupation?" "Actress." "The devil hath not yet in all his choice An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice!" This arrow, with Christina's very first word, pierced to the center and the quick of Herrick's heart, and nailed it to the mast! "Name?" "Christina Hope." "Age?" "Twenty-two years." At the beginning of that scrap of dialogue, Herrick, as a lover, had not yet been born; at its end, compared to him, Romeo was a realist. He did not tell himself that he was in love with her, and he would have denied convulsively that he wished her to be in love with him. With him? Fool! Dolt! Lout! Boor! Not to him did he wish her to stoop! All he wanted was to become nobler for her sake, to serve her, to die for her! Merely that! And before dying, to become humbly indispensable to her, to know her more intimately than any one had ever known her, to take up every moment of her time! It was entirely for the sake of her perfection, of the holy and ineffable vision, that he objected profoundly, almost with nausea, to Deutch's saying that she had acted loony about Ingham. Ingham!--why Ingham? Even he, Herrick, would be better than Ingham. For had not he, unworthy, by his deep perception of her become worthy? Great as her beauty was, it was not for the mob. It was too fine, too subtle; slim as a flame and winged as the wind yet April-colored, its aching ravishment could thrill only sensitive nerves. Yet he remembered something--the elevator boy had thought that, too! Joseph Patrick had declared he supposed that other people thought dressier ladies was handsomer, but he preferred Miss Hope! Deutch, too; hadn't he suggested something of the kind? Now he came to think of it, even the beast of a coroner had said so! Then, and not till then, did he fully perceive the cruel trick, the last refinement of her perfect beauty; that it came to you in such a humble, friendly, simple guise, so slight and helpless did it knock upon your heart, whispering its shy way into your blood with the sweet promise that it was yours alone and that you alone could understand it. Until, when it had taken you wholly, passion and spirit, it drew aside its veil and revealed itself as the dream of every common prince and laborer and lover; the poet's hope and the world's desire. He saw her now, coming toward him through the wet wind, shining in the gray day, with a smile on her uplifted face, and, at last, past its candor and its child's decorum, he knew it for the face that launch'd a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium! At that moment the summons of a Grubey infant declared him wanted on the telephone. And through the potent instrument a friendly voice from the _Record_ office brought him back to earth. It said, "Say, Herrick, we've got hold of a corking wind-up for your inquest story." He cared nothing, now, for inquests, since they no longer concerned her. But he said, "Have you?" "Yes. We thought we'd see what the Cornish girl had to say, and we sent right down, both to her boarding-house and her theater." "And what had she?" "Why, that's it. Since the day of the murder she hasn't showed up at either place. She's disappeared." BOOK SECOND THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN CHAPTER I HERRICK PAYS A CALL, AND THE TEA IS SPILT Herrick had written on his card, "Forgive what must seem an intrusion. I am asking your time on a matter of business, but I'm afraid I must call it a personal matter, too." After the maid had taken it, he suffered the terrors of considering this message at once pretentious and too emotional and in the worst possible taste. Christina's little reception-room was a delicate miracle of Spartan white, with a few dark gleams of slender formal mahogany shapes and a couple of water-colors in white frames. On a little table a broad, shallow bowl was filled with marigolds. Herrick had time for a second's charmed curiosity at the presence of the little country flowers, and then, from the floor above, he heard a low cry. Instinctively, he stepped into the hall, and there came Christina, flying down the stairs. "Oh, Mr. Herrick," she called out to him. "Have you any news?" And then, "Please don't hesitate. I can bear it! I can't bear suspense!" "News?" he queried. "Of Nancy!" He cursed himself for not having known that that would be her first thought. "I'm sorry and ashamed, Miss Hope. I've no news of her at all." Christina's legs gave way under her, and she sat down on the stairs. Herrick's chagrin and discomfiture were extreme. She paid no further attention to him. Dropping her head on her clenched hands, "Oh! Oh! Oh!" she said. Mrs. Hope came out of a room at the back, and, passing Herrick with as little ceremony as even her daughter had displayed, caught hold of Christina's wrists and shook her sharply. "Christina!" she exclaimed. "Christina! Now, there has been quite enough of this!" Christina did not seem to resent this summary treatment. She began to sob more quietly, until she suddenly burst forth, "Where is she, then? Can you tell me that? Where is she?" "I don't care where she is!" cried poor Mrs. Hope. "Or, at least, now you know very well what I mean, my dear. I can't have you going on in this hysterical way all the time, when you've rehearsals to attend to. Nancy probably went away to get out of all the disagreeable notoriety that you've got into. And I'm sure she's very well off." "Where is she, then?" Christina wailed. She seemed to have an extraordinary capacity for sticking to her point. "With all the police in New York looking for her, where is she?" "Well, she hasn't been murdered, as you seem to think! If she had been, she'd be found. If people kill people, they have to do something with their bodies! But if people are alive, they can do something with themselves!" Christina shuddered. "Now, my dear," said her mother, "it's very high time that we apologized to Mr. Herrick, who must think us mad. But let me tell you this. I am not going to have you go on the stage in a month looking like your own ghost and all unstrung. I'm not going to have the play ruined by you, and have you turn Mr. Wheeler and all of them into your enemies. It would be better for them to get some one else. You don't sleep, you won't eat, and you sit brooding all the time, as if you were looking at nightmares. Well, if you don't get some kind of hold over yourself within the next day or two, I shall tell Mr. Wheeler that you are nervously unfit to be entrusted with a part, and I am taking you away." Christina sat for an appreciable time without moving. Then she slowly lifted her face and smiled at Herrick with her wet eyes. "We have treated you to a strange scene," she said. "It is our bad hour. But--sometimes--we can be really nice." She held out her hand. Then, becoming aware of herself sitting on the steps, and of her mother and Herrick standing before her, "'Have we no chears?'" she quoted; and, springing up, she led the way into the little white room. Herrick found that it was only he who followed her there. Mrs. Hope, having dealt with the emergency, had again retreated; evidently feeling that Christina, even in tears, was quite capable of entertaining a young man single handed. But when he was seated near her, Herrick was shocked by the girl's appearance. It was not only that her face was worn with anxiety, but that, in twenty-four hours, she seemed actually to have lost flesh. The lovely outline of her cheek was sunken and the jaw sharpened; if it were possible to be paler than she had been yesterday, she was paler now. She looked so fine and light and frail that it seemed as if the beating of her heart must show through her body, and all during the talk that followed, Herrick had the sense of her bright, still eyes being concentrated in expectation,--almost, as it were, in listening,--through her thick, wet lashes; the gentle wildness of some woodland animal listens so for the moving of a twig. She was dressed in white serge with a knot of the marigolds in her belt, and they seemed like a kind of bright wound in the tragic pallor of her weariness. The cause of his visit seemed more than ever an impertinence, but it must be faced, and he began to stumble out the story of his Sunday special. "There's the old argument that it must be done by somebody. Only, of course, without your sanction, it will never be done by me. I've ventured to bring it to you," said he, guiltily producing the article which he had sat up all night to typewrite. "If I might, I'd leave it here, and the maid could give it to me when I called for it--you would only have had to run your pencil through anything that distressed you. I know how distasteful the idea--the horribly melodramatic and sensational idea--must be to you--" "Oh, well, I don't know that I joined a profession so retiring as all that!" Christina said, and she held out her hand for the manuscript. She seemed to weigh this for a moment, and then she handed it back to Herrick unopened. "No,--say what you please of me. It is sure to be only too good. Well, and if not?--What does it matter?" She closed her eyes, and the terrible fatigue of her face brought him to his feet. At the same time, he knew his story was amazingly good, and, despite his tremors, he couldn't help wanting her to read it. "But--" he ventured. "Well, then, I will tell you what we can do--give it to my mother. You will need it at once? She can have read it by tea-time. You may be quite easy that if there is anything in it which can injure me I shall break the news to you, over your tea-cup, that it is in ashes. Will that do?--Ada," she said to the maid, "please take this in to my mother and ask her to read it at once. She's alone, isn't she?" "Please, ma'am, Mrs. Deutch is with her." "Then they can both read it." Herrick expressed his thanks and added, "About five, then, I may come back?" Christina opened her eyes full on him; glancing from the portières to the softly curtained windows between which they two were completely alone, "Is it so terrible here?" she inquired. Herrick sat down. She waited for him to speak and he had something on his conscience. He told her, then and there, about the voice in his dream which had said to him, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" The little nerves in her skin trembled and he, too, felt a superstitious thrill. "But I must suppose, now, that I didn't dream it at all. Some one in that room must have called it out--perhaps when they saw her card on the piano. I was in a pretty fidgety state,--to speak grandly, an electric state,--and, being just on the sensitive borderline between sleeping and waking, I suppose I simply happened to catch it--like a wireless at sea." "Ask Nancy Cornish!" Christina repeated. "Ask Nancy--ah, if we could! What kind of voice was it? Should you recognize it, do you think, if you heard it again?" "How could I? I'm scarcely even sure that I heard a voice." "Only that you heard a shot and had to help! And didn't it occur to you that it might have been the woman who fired? I see--you don't think of women in that way. The reason I didn't ask you, yesterday, to call here," Christina volunteered, "was that I didn't want you to come." She made this rude announcement with an effect of such good faith that Herrick laughed, "Ah, well, it's too late for that! I'm here!" "Exactly! But not through me. My friends come to no good, Mr. Herrick--they are parted from me by a trouble as wide as the world, or else--" She put one hand over her eyes. "What is it?--a curse, a darkness?--I don't know! It's like a trap! It's as if vengeance baited a circle with me and, whenever a kindness advanced toward me, the trap fell. Even my poor Herr Hermy, who lost his picture-shop with the plush curtains, may lose his superintendency because I sent Mr. Ingham to his house. You would do better to take my word; to believe me when I tell you that somehow I bring danger. What have I done? What does it mean? I can't tell you. It's always been so. I'm like some bird that brings the storm on its wings, it doesn't know why. Life's hard for me, that's all." She pushed up her hair with the backs of her hands,--the quaint little gesture that he loved. "But what use is there in saying all this to frighten you. Something tells me you will never be afraid. Well, then, if you come here against my will, is that my fault? You do wish to befriend me? Isn't that true?" "It's the biggest truth in my life," Herrick replied. "You see. I, who am so unlucky, what am I to do? If ever a poor girl needed a friend, I am that girl. But I don't dare let you touch my need. I don't know what it may do to you." Herrick answered her with a smile--"And I don't care." She, too, smiled. It began to be borne in upon Herrick how great, when she chose to exercise it, was her self-control. She could talk to him with one part of her mind while the other was still listening, peering, questing, trembling for some fatal news. And he was suddenly aware of her murmuring-- "'Vous qui m'avez tant puni, Dans ma triste vie--'" "Well, then," she said, "if you must,--I want something. Not protection, not pity, not championship; I'm a little in your own line, you know, I'm not easily frightened. "'Je suis aussi sans désir Autre que d'en bien finir-- Sans regret, sans repentir--' "I don't know if you read Peter Ibbetson?" "Raised on it!" Herrick said. "Well, then, you understand things--I don't mean merely his French songs! And that is exactly what I want--to be quite simply and sensibly and decently understood! I am a more successful actress than you realize, you backward Easterners, and I am treated like a goddess, a bad child, a sibyl, an adventuress, a crazy woman. I should like to speak now and then with some one who knew that I was nothing but a lonely girl with some brains in her head, who often took herself too seriously and sometimes, alas! not seriously enough; who was capricious and perverse but not a coward, and oh, who meant so well! Such a person would sometimes say, 'She was silly to-day, but by this time she is ashamed. She had a strange girlhood and they taught her very bad manners, but she is not a fool and she will learn.' Well, I will not have any common person thinking like that about me! It takes an artist to understand an artist! You think me very arrogant to speak like that of you and me, because, at the bottom of your heart, you have the arrogance of all the world--you do not admit that an actress really is an artist! Wait a little, and you shall own that I am one. At any rate, I know a bit of other people's art; it's my pride I was among the first to be made happy by yours--and oh, but I could do very well with a friend I could be proud of!"--It was not very long before he had embarked upon the history of his novel. He went on and on; he explained to her Ten Euyck's thrust about the photograph; he told her of Evadne and of Sal. The first thing she said to him was--"Is there a play in it?" "I tried it as a play first, but--" "Oh, surely, the novel's better first! You can get it all out of your system in the novel, and then we could drain it of the pure gold for my end of it--for the play! You'd never sell it over my head! Why, I could have you up,--couldn't I?--for plagiarism! Do you know how you can keep me agreeable? Bring it to me here, when my rehearsals are over, and read it to me--it will please me and it can do you no harm. If you find me stupid, say to yourself, 'She is drunk with pleasure, poor thing, at what I have made of her.' Oh, you'd never have the heart to publish my portrait, and not let me see the proof!" The compact was concluded as the maid entered with the tea things. Mrs. Hope came in radiant. She began to thank Herrick for his article, and Christina said, "Where is Mrs. Deutch?" "She is in the sitting-room. She says she must go home." Christina went and parted the portières and Herrick heard her speaking with a kind of sweet authority in German, of which he caught the phrase--"Yes, you will stay! You will certainly stay!" She waited there till her friend joined her, and then, returning, she took charge of the tea-table. Henrietta Deutch was a large, handsome woman of about forty-five, too stout, but of a matronly dignity; her beautiful coloring was blended into a smooth, rich surface as foreign-looking as lacquer. So far as he was capable of perceiving anything but Christina, Herrick perceived that not only her physical but her social stature was higher than her husband's; she was neither ignorant nor fussy; she was a person of large silences, as well, he imagined, as of grave sympathies; for her age she was, to an American, strangely old-fashioned but, despite her addiction to black silk and the incessant knitting of white woolen clouds, she had, in her continental youth, received an excellent formal education "with accomplishments." "Tante Deutch," said Christina, "this is our new friend, Mr. Herrick, who stood up for us against that man." The little maid continued to throw out signals of distress and Mrs. Hope, going to her relief, was heard to say, "Well, she'll use her white one." She explained to Christina, "It's only about laying out your things for to-night. She can't find your blue cloak--you know, the long one with the hood--" "I am very glad to know you, sir," said Mrs. Deutch. "Christina, my lamb, you are ill!" "No, I am not ill. But I am distracted. Sugar, Mr. Herrick? Lemon? My hand shakes and if the coroner were here he would say it was with guilt. Poor soul, what a disappointment!" "Christina!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Don't laugh!" "I am not laughing. I think the man a dangerous enemy and now he is my enemy. He will never forgive me for letting him make himself ridiculous. He is too righteous to forget a grudge, for any one who earns such a thing from the excellent Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck becomes a criminal by that action. 'Winthrop.' Of course there had to be the New England strain--he was born to wear a steeple hat and snoop for witches! May he never light the faggots about me!" "Now, my dear, you are working yourself up!" "Dear mother, you are a bit hard to please! First you tell me not to laugh and then you reproach me with working myself up! But you are right! Why should I fash myself over a man with a personality like a pair of shears? Ah, if I could get news of Nancy, my hand would be steady enough!" "You'll have news of Nancy when she gets ready!" declared Mrs. Hope, with the maternal freedom of speech toward our dearest friends, "An ungrateful, stubborn, secretive girl!" "My mother," said Christina, "is enthusiastic but inaccurate. She means that Nancy is neither voluble nor impulsive, like the paragon before you, and that though her affection is steady it is not easily dazzled. We have been friends scarcely more than four years--since she made her first five dollars a week as part of a stage-mob--but I knew her at once for the little real sister of my heart. I told you I'd always been a lonely girl, Mr. Herrick, and that soft, little touch came close on my loneliness, like a child's. I have succeeded and she has not; I am the world's own daughter--I know the world and she does not; my hands are very keen, believe me, for the power and the glory--after all, one must have something!--and she can only put hers into mine. But where I am weak, she is strong. One can't ask one's family to forgive that!" said Christina. And with a tempestuous swoop she handed him a photograph upon which, whether for newspapers or detectives, had been pasted some memoranda. "This is more to the point." He beheld a charming little face, fresh and pretty, quaintly feminine, with sensible and resolute brows to balance the wistfulness of the soft mouth; a face at once grave and glad, with a deep dimple softening the stubborn little chin. Herrick, studying the memoranda, compared them with his own vague memories and the photograph. Height, five feet, four inches. Weight, a hundred and twenty pounds. Age, twenty years. Complexion, fair. Hair, dark auburn and curling. Eyes, blue. Wearing, when last seen, a white organdie dress with lace insertion; white shoes, stockings and gloves; small straw hat, dull green, trimmed with violets; carried a white embroidered linen sunshade and a small purse-bag, green suède with silver monogram, "A. C." No jewelry of any value. Wearing round her neck a string of green beads. Missing from her effects and commonly worn by her, two bangle bracelets--one silver, one jade. One silver locket. One scarab ring, bluish-green Egyptian turquoise, set in silver. Last seen on West Eighty --th Street, walking east, at five o'clock in the afternoon of August fourth. It was now August seventh; she had been missing for three days. "Where is she?" "And I thought it strange enough, before the inquest, that I was in such trouble and didn't hear from her! Mother, you say she is hiding herself. But,--all alone? I have telegraphed and telephoned everywhere, to every one! And then--does a girl throw down her work, her engagement, for nothing, without a syllable, and disappear! Her things are all at Mrs. McBride's; her bill for her room is still going on; she was to have gone out to an opening that night with Susie Grayce! She hadn't a valise with her, not a change of clothes! She turned east from Jim Ingham's doorway, and that's all!" Christina was beginning to lose control of herself; she looked as if her teeth were going to chatter. "Now, my pretty--" began Mrs. Deutch. "Turned east?" ruminated Mrs. Hope. "East? That's toward the park. She might have been going to meet--Well, Christina!" For the hand which Christina had criticized as trembling had dropped the tea-pot. This must have dropped rather hard, for it broke to pieces. Everything was deluged with tea. "My sweeting!" cried Mrs. Deutch. "Move yet a little!" For she was already at work upon the disaster which was threatening Christina's white gown. The fragments of the wreck were cleared away, and while fresh tea was being made Christina urged Mrs. Deutch to play "and get me quiet." "Yes, you will play. You will play for me and for Mr. Herrick. Mr. Herrick is not one of these deaf Yankees--don't you remember what he wrote about the music in Berlin?" "So!" said Mrs. Deutch. "In Berlin! Is it so!" She went seriously to the piano where she executed some equally serious music with admirable technique and some feeling, but her performance was scarcely so remarkable as to account for Christina's extreme eagerness. When she had finished Herrick took himself unwillingly away, and was still so agitated by the sweetness of Christina's farewell that after he had got himself into the hall he dropped his glove. The little maid who had opened the door for him, let it slam as she sprang to pick up the glove, and at the closing of the door he heard Christina's voice break hysterically forth, and rise above some remonstrance of her mother's. "Yes, you do. You spy on me, both of you." "But, my little one--" ejaculated Mrs. Deutch. "You spy on me, you whisper, you stare, you guess, you talk! Talk! Talk! And you remember nothing that I tell you! I shall go mad! I am among spies in my own house!" Herrick quickened his petrified muscles and went. Even to his infatuation it occurred that whatever might have been the faults of James Ingham, Christina herself was a person with whom it would not be too difficult to quarrel. CHAPTER II IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS ARM IS OUTSTRETCHED It was not because this reflection was in any way cooling to his love that Herrick did not see again, for some days, the lady of his heart. He was, perhaps, not very self-assured. Yet when his story of the murder and the inquest appeared he became a marked man. He awoke to find himself famous, and to be summoned to another interview at the Ingham publishing house. There seemed to be no thought of allowing the prestige of "Ingham's" to perish with its brilliant junior partner. Ingham, senior, who for years had been only nominally its head, intended to resume active work once more, at least until the younger son should have finished college and gone into training for his brother's place. Perhaps the real pillar of the house was Corey; and Corey remained, to sustain both father and son. And they had all three agreed not to forsake the new, the yet unborn enterprise of _Ingham's Weekly_. "Mr. James Ingham was wrapped up in it," Corey told Herrick, whom he had met with the kindest compliments, "and his father can't bear that all his work should be wasted now. Besides, in the whole of the business, it's the thing that most interests young Mr. Stanley, and it seems to me the place where the boy may be most of use. We want the _Weekly_ to be a real force, Mr. Herrick, and in its first number we shall want to give up the usual editorial pages to a memoir of its founder and his ideals for it. Mr. Herrick, if we could induce you to undertake that memoir we should think ourselves extremely fortunate." Herrick could not believe his ears; it seemed such a strange sequel to a kind of police report, however able, for the Sunday papers. There began to be something uncanny to him about his connection with Ingham's death and how it continued to seem his Open Sesame to fortune. But he was glad enough and grateful enough. He ventured to send Christina a note telling her that her new friend was now being pursued by good not evil fortune and her reply came in the same mail with a letter from his sister to whom he had written for details about Nancy Cornish. Marion remembered only that Nancy's parents had been killed in a runaway when she was about fourteen and that Nancy had gone out West somewhere,--to Portland, Oregon, Marion thought, to live with an uncle--and had gradually ceased to write. Of this uncle's name or address both Marion and the principal of the school which both girls had attended were amiably ignorant. "There's only one thing I'm positive about; she was the best little soul alive. Never in this world did she go to that man's rooms to tell tales of her friend. She never told tales. She was a natural born hero-worshiper; the most loyal child I ever saw and the most generous, the bravest, the lovingest, the most devoted. If she went to Mr. Ingham, it wasn't to injure that Christina Hope; it was to help her out of some scrape. She was just the kind of girl to be taken in by a woman like that, whom I must say sounds--" Herrick dropped this letter to return to that other which it cannot be denied he had read first. It was directed in a penmanship new to him but recognized at once in every nerve, and he had drawn forth Christina's note with that strange thrill which stirs in us at the first sight of the handwriting of the beloved. She thanked him, with a certain shyness, for his news. It was so good one must take it with their breath held! And now she had a favor to ask. Stanley Ingham had gone home to Springfield for the week-end, but he had just telephoned her that he would be back in town on Tuesday morning, by the train which got in to the Grand Central at eleven thirty-five. He had some news for her but she would be at rehearsal; she should not see him until the evening, and she was naturally an impatient person. Would not Mr. Herrick humor a spoiled girl, meet the train and bring her the news at about noon to a certain little tea-room of which she gave him the address. "You may find it a great bore. They are supposed to let us out for an hour, like the shop-girls. But, alas! they don't do it so regularly. They may push us straight through till mid-afternoon. But I know you will have patience with my eagerness to hear any news where it need not trouble my mother. She has had anxiety enough." It may be taken as a measure of Herrick's infatuation that he saw nothing in this letter which was not angelic. The Grand Central Station, however, is no sylvan spot and Herrick wondered how he should recognize an unknown Stanley Ingham among the hordes swarming in its vast marble labyrinth. But that gentleman proved to be a lively youth of about twenty, who plucked Herrick from the crowd without hesitation and led him to a secluded seat with that air of deferential protection which a really smart chap owes it to himself to show to age. His collar was so high that it was remarkable how powerfully he had established winking terms with the world over the top of it, but he stooped to account for himself at once as an emissary of Christina's. "She wired me to see you here, and here I am. You know I'm the bearer of some new exhibits for the police. We think we've struck a new trail. After I've handed 'em over I'm dining with Miss Hope, and as she'd have heard all about 'em then, should think she might have waited. Still, you know how women are! "In the first place," young Mr. Ingham continued, "we want you, we want everybody, to know we're Miss Hope's friends. We want to go on record that the way she's been knocked around in this thing has been simply damnable, and, if poor old Jim were alive--" He stopped. At the mention of his brother a moisture, which Herrick knew he considered the last word of shame, rose in his eyes; behind his high collar something swelled and impeded his utterance. Then Mr. Stanley Ingham became once more a man of the world. "You can take it from me that if you hadn't treated her as jolly well as you did in that capital article of yours, we shouldn't be trying to lasso you now onto the staff of the _Weekly_." Herrick started, but the man of the world was not easily checked. "You were awfully decent, you know, to all of us, and Corey was all the more pleased because that--that last day, old Jim was down at the office till three o'clock--the first day after he was home, too,--working like a dog, and yet when he found that letter of Rennett's introducing you he was as pleased as Punch, and when he made the appointment with you for next day, he said to Corey, 'People are taking that boy pretty easy yet awhile, but he's the best short-story writer on this side of the Atlantic; and if he's really got a novel about him, the old house will show him it's still awake.'" The man of the world repeated these phrases with an innocent satisfaction in having them at first hand, and Herrick's own heart went questing into the future. Then his attention returned to the words of his young friend. "We don't think we've done enough for her, and we want to do all we can do." "Miss Hope?" "Of course. You see, we don't any of us feel she was wrong in quarreling with Jim--except the mater, who thinks she ought to have let him cut her throat for breakfast every morning and damned glad to get him--and, considering everything, we think she let him down pretty easy at the inquest. There's no denying the dear old fellow had been a gay one in his time, and, of course, he drove a high-spirited girl like that frantic with a lot of antiquated notions about the stage. You see, he was pretty close to thirty-five, and when a man gets along about there he's apt to lose touch with what's going on. Well, having her in our pew and our carriage at the funeral didn't shut all the fools' mouths in New York nor Springfield either! So now we're going to do something really swotting--we've taken a box for her first night, and we're going to get mother into it, mourning and all, if we have to bring her in a bag. It's our duty. Read that." "My dear and kind Mr. Ingham (ran Christina's letter): You must try and be patient with me, and not think hardly of me, when I tell you that I can not profit by the terms of Jim's will. He made those provisions for the girl who was to be his wife, and not for me who never could be. "As I write this I feel your good heart harden to me, with the sense that I never loved him. But oh, believe me!--time was when I loved him better than earth or heaven. We couldn't agree, he and I. Let it remain my consolation that between us there was never any question of expedient nor compromise. "If she can bear it, give my love to his mother. "My heart is full of fondest gratitude to all that family which I should have been so proud to enter. And do you keep a little kindness for your unhappy, "CHRISTINA HOPE." "What do you think of that? Won't take a cent! You can easily see," commented the wise one, "that they'd have made it up all right. Splendid girl! Best thing the poor old chap ever did was trying to get her into the family. I don't suppose you're as hipped about her good looks as I am? Takes a special kind of eye, I fancy! I snaked this particularly to show you--but we want everybody to know she's turned down the coin. And we're going to have the beast that fired that shot if he's alive on this planet. 'Tisn't only on Jim's account! It's for her--it's the only way you can knock that damned lie on the head about her being up there in his rooms that night.--Chris! Why, she's a regular kid! And the straightest kid that ever lived! We mean to keep the police hot at it. And look here what I'm turning in to them!" It was a typewritten envelope, postmarked "New York City" and addressed to Mr. James Ingham. "We found it, opened, in his desk at the office," the boy explained. "But we've only just got it away from my mother." Its contents were a piece of red ribbon and a single sheet of paper, closely typed. The Arm of Justice warns Mr. James Ingham-- ("Is this a joke?") "Go on! Read it!" --warns Mr. James Ingham that it demands ten thousand dollars. ("By George!") If Mr. Ingham wisely decides to grant this application, he will tie the enclosed ribbon to the frame work of his awning on the afternoon of August fourth, at four o'clock. It will be seen by an agent of the Society, who will then advise Mr. Ingham as to how and where the money may be paid. If Mr. Ingham decides against the application, he will do nothing. But in that case he must be prepared for the publication of a paragraph in the _Voice of Justice_, beginning--"There has recently come to light an episode in the career of Mr. James Ingham, the well-known publisher, eldest son of Robert Ingham of Springfield and New York, who is engaged to be married to the popular actress, Christina Hope--" It will go on to relate the story of his association with a young, pure and helpless girl eight years ago; how he betrayed her, and, after a promise of marriage--she being then destitute--abandoned her. It will tell this girl's name and where she is. It will give all names in connection with the affair. It will publish letters that passed between Mr. Ingham and this young girl, corroborating the worst that has been said. Mr. Ingham knows the standards of society, the reputation, the probity and the justice of his father, and also the temper of Miss Christina Hope. Mr. Ingham is the best judge of whether or not it will be wise to pay for silence. "That's all!" exclaimed Stanley Ingham, as if the absence of signature were really remarkable. "Well, how's that! Poor old chap, you know--how dare they!" He reddened. "Because, hang it all, of course a man has to be a man, and you've got to be liberal-minded and all that; but, just the same, a fellow that would do what that thing says--why, he'd be regularly rotten! You can't deny it, he'd be rotten." Herrick sat dumb. Words of Christina's were passing in his mind.--"I will never tell you the cause of our quarrel. It was simply something monstrous which happened a long time ago." Because he had to say something, he said--"And you're taking this in to the police?" "Yes. Isn't it a mercy Jim didn't destroy it? Meant it for the detectives himself, I dare say. Perhaps his not hanging out that piece of ribbon didn't have anything to do with his death. And perhaps it did. Anyhow, wait a bit--I'm a walking post-office this morning. Here's the last exhibit!" And he plumped down on Herrick's knee the duplicate of the typewritten envelope. The postmark, however, was dated August ninth, and it was directed to Ingham senior. "It opened with the same formalities, but this time its threat ran-- "The _Voice_ will relate the actual circumstances connected with the death of Mr. James Ingham--" "Jove!" cried Herrick, "that would be something!" "Wait till you read 'em!" "It will not pause after the story of the young girl whom Ingham abandoned years ago. It will tell how, on the eve of his departure for Europe, just such a story was reënacted, but this time with a close friend of his intended bride, an actress named Ann Cornish; who, on his return, appealed to him for the only reparation in his power; even slandering her friend Christina Hope in the attempt to win him back. Failing in this, she fled, and disappeared--perhaps destroyed herself. It will tell how Miss Hope suspected the intrigue, having quarreled about it with her lover the day before, when he denied all knowledge of Nancy Cornish; how, suspecting an appointment for the evening instead of the afternoon of August fourth, Miss Hope disguised herself in a red wig and dabs of paint about her eyes and penetrated to Ingham's apartment; how, finding no one there, she was placated until she spied Nancy Cornish's card on the piano and how then a terrible quarrel arose; the excitable young woman, springing in front of the window with her arm outstretched, the fingers slowly spreading and stiffening in the air, uttered a terrible, low cry, and snatching up Ingham's revolver from the table at the head of the couch, shot him dead. It will follow the flight of Miss Hope exactly as she described it at the inquest--out through the door which Ingham must have bolted behind her. She ran upstairs and escaped over the roof into the apartment house next door. It was a terribly hot night, and, against all rules, the roof-doors of both apartment houses had been fastened back. Miss Hope came quietly downstairs, passed through an entrance hall, empty of the boy who had run to join the crowd in the street, and walked away. This will be the conclusion of the narrative." CHAPTER III HERRICK GUESSES AT THE MYSTERY AND GETS IN SOMETHING'S WAY The light in the little tea-room was rather dim. Christina spread out Herrick's copies of the two blackmailing letters upon the table and studied them, propping her chin on her hands. Herrick, in surrendering them, had dreaded the squalid clutch which they laid upon herself. But when she lifted her eyes it was to say--"We must never let them credit this trash about Nancy!" "None of it, then--?" "Not a syllable! Not a breath!--Jim! Little she cared for Jim, poor child! She was unhappy, but not with that unhappiness. It's true her only love-affair had come to grief. That's what my mother means by calling her secretive--even I have never been able to get out of her what happened to it. But disgrace--run away! Disgrace could never have looked at her, and never in her life did she run away from anything! And if she were alive and free, anywhere upon this earth, the first word against me would have brought her back. She would butt walls down, with her little red head, to stand by a friend's side!" "That's what my sister says. It's odd!" "Odd?" "I mean--Well, there's the circumstance that the hour when she called on Ingham was the hour when the ribbon was to have signaled from the window. And she didn't give her name, you know; she said, 'The lady he expects.' Then one remembers that this mysterious woman who passed Joe had red hair. Joe says she had on a white lace dress, Miss Hope--well, Miss Cornish was in white with lace trimming. He mistook her for you. Still, he was very sleepy, and though she's not so tall as you are, she's not short, and she's very slender, too. Forgive me for making you impatient. But the boy's devoted to you, isn't he?" "I suppose so," Christina ingenuously replied. "Well, he knows, now, that Nancy Cornish is your dear friend. I can't altogether rely upon his not recognizing her photograph." "I can," said Christina, almost tartly. "White--everybody's in white. I wore a white dress that night, myself. It wasn't Nancy. You may put that out of your mind." Herrick considered. "That business of the variegated eyes--people seem to suppose he threw it in for good measure. But could such an effect be produced by make-up?" "I think not. On the stage we generally use blue pencil to darken our lashes. Well, once in a way, some one from the front assures us that we have blue eyes. Or else brown, if we use brown. But close to, and--and in combination--surely not! And why try so thin a disguise?" "To suggest a striking mark of identification which does not really exist. That would explain so much. Why she was willing to make a conspicuous impression on the boy--she may have been a dark woman, you know, in a red wig, only too glad to leave behind her the picture of a blonde. There always lingers the impression that it may have been some one whom Joe knew, or was used to seeing, and that it was merely this vague familiarity which he recognized before he had time to be taken in by her disguise. Ingham was on his mind; that may have been why he first thought of you.--Miss Hope, do you know what other impression, or superstition, or whatever you like, I can't get rid of? That the mystery of who fired the shot is part of the answer to the mystery of that bolted door. When we know how he got out, we shall know who he was." "He?" "Well--man or woman. It's ridiculous, it's silly, but I feel as if that personality were somehow still imprisoned in those rooms. As though, if we knew how to look, it would be there and there only we should find the truth." Christina murmured a soft sound of regret and wonder. "What a strange thing! His poor mother--she feels so, too! She won't have a thing in his rooms touched till the lease is up. She says the secret is still there." He loved the pity in Christina's face. And then he watched her reabsorption in the letters. But though they absorbed, they did not impress her. They somehow seemed even to bring her mind relief. "Heavens!" said she, presently. "Is it altogether a bad joke?--'The Arm of Justice!'" "I did think at first they were a hoax of some sort. But the Inghams are far from thinking so." "They think--?" "Yes. They've accepted these letters as changing the whole course of the investigation. They believe now that the scandalous, the personal motive was an entirely wrong lead; that Ingham was murdered in cold blood, as a matter of business; that the woman was only a cat's paw. And they're looking for a man." "Dear God!" said Christina. "How hot it is in here! That fan--can't they start it?" She took off her hat; the cool air from the fan came about her face, carrying to Herrick's nostrils a scent of larkspur and verbena and candy-tuft (how she clung to those garden flowers!), and she closed her eyes. Herrick sat watching her with concern. He thought of how she had said her mother had had anxiety enough. It seemed now, to Herrick, that Christina, too, had had anxiety enough. "Evadne!" he said, suddenly. She opened her eyes, smiling at him. "You know I have known you very intimately and served you very faithfully for an immensely long time. I am your author, and I'm going to bully you. I want you to drop all this! What is it to you? Something hideous, that's over. In no way can the miserable muck of these letters touch you! Let the Inghams and the police and the District Attorney worry--it's their business. It's your business to make beautiful things for the world. Dear Evadne, you've got to possess your own soul if you're going to polish up ours! Forget these lies!" It was rather late in the little restaurant and they were the only patrons. After a moment the girl leaned toward him, and laid her hand on his. "I will try!" she said, gently. "And you will dine with us to-night? And Stan can tell what the detectives say to you, and not to me? Oh, please! You are right. I want to forget. I am worn out, my soul and my body; my heart's drying up. Nancy! Nancy! Oh, Nancy! If I could only know about Nancy! But for the rest, I don't care. You are my friend, and I will tell you something. Whenever they've wanted to show me they didn't think me a murderess, they've said, 'Of course, my dear, you're as eager to have the criminal caught as any of us.' It's false! Why should I wish for anything so horrible?" He looked at her with a start of wonder that was half agreement. "In what age are we living that I am expected to enjoy an execution? Do you know what one's like? I've been on trial for my life now, and I've been reading it up! They--" "Hush!" said Herrick, sternly. "But isn't it wicked? Why should I wish that done?--to man or woman?--Or to lock some one up for life--that's worse! Why should it amuse me to have people tortured? Who tortured Jim? Poor fellow, he scarcely could have known! Why should they suffer more than he? For the act of one little minute to burn in fire all the rest of one's life. Oh, my good friend, what's the use of pretending? We know perfectly well that some girl's despair may have fired that shot, that if she had a brother or a lover--Can't you stop them, Mr. Herrick? Must they go frothing on in this man-hunt? It's to clear my name? My name's my own; I won't have it put up against any human being's misery! If they catch and kill some unhappy creature for my sake--it will kill me, too. I shall die of it!" "What you'll do now," said Herrick, "is to come out of here into the sunlight, and get some air before you go back to rehearsal." She let him walk with her to the stage-door, and before it swallowed her, she abruptly and almost gaily soliloquized, "A man! A man wrote those letters! Does one man send a piece of ribbon to another, and ask him to hang it out of his window? Do you mean, to tell me that it was a man who made that remark about my temper? 'The Arm of Justice' forsooth! There's a female idea of a brigand." It was plain that she inclined to believe the blackmailer some mercenary trickster, who knew no more of the murder than herself. Some woman, she said. But there were two persons in Joe Patrick's testimony. And Herrick believed there were two in the attempted blackmail. As to their knowledge of Ingham's death, one circumstance appeared to him highly significant; the changed standpoint of the second letter! He said to himself, "The first is obviously sincere; it was written in the genuine hope of getting money out of Ingham by a person who really felt that he or she had a case. And the second is nothing on earth but an attempt to divert suspicion from the murderer by a lot of villainous poppycock. Between the writing of those two letters they lost their case and they lost their nerve. Suppose the first letter had been written by a woman,--by a woman of some cultivation, with a very strong taste for expressing herself picturesquely. But her picturesqueness all streams into one channel--into hatred for Ingham. When she cuts at him, her pen scorches the paper. She has only one sentiment of anything like equal strength--her sympathy with the girl whom Ingham is supposed to have deserted. There, now, is a person whom she thoroughly admires. Was she herself once that girl?" Herrick was on his way to dine at Christina's by the time that he hazarded this runaway guess, and he told himself that he must pull up a little, now he was on the public street, or he would be holding people with his glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner. But one fact continued to strike him. The man whom Joe Patrick had taken up to the fourth floor after the arrival of the red-haired woman did not appear in the narrative. How if this man himself had written the second letter? The writer had sacrificed the only other persons mentioned--Christina and Nancy--without a scruple, but that curt and silent male it had never occurred to him to sacrifice. He was consistently shielded. Having no feasible way of accounting for him, the writer had not even explained him away. He had simply left him out, hoping that, in the definiteness of the accusation of a woman, he would be forgotten. For this reason he had gone into details of her flight without even touching the great dark points of the moving of Ingham's body and the bolted door. He was too busy pointing: "Look, look, there she goes! The murderess! The woman! I am calling her Christina Hope. But, in any case, a woman. No man has had anything to do with it." Herrick turned off the avenue into Christina's street. And trying to clear his brain lest its feverish contagion should presently reach hers, he told himself, "You're cracked, my friend. You know nothing whatever. Simply cracked." But he could not cure himself. Right or wrong, his obsession continued. Nonsense or no, there grew steadily within him the notion of that man who had seen all, who knew all, and who had done his work! This figure became strangely potent, and singularly ominous. They were all suffering and struggling here, ridiculously ignorant, ridiculously in pain, and he could laugh at them. Not a sound had escaped him. He had betrayed himself by no melodramatic shadow. "He was so quiet," Joe Patrick had said, "goin' right along about his business--" Yes, he had come upon his business, he had accomplished it, he had vanished, and left no trace behind. Blackmailer, slanderer, murderer, and maybe coward and traitor, there was about him a stillness that had a strange effect. The very blankness of his passage--he looked so like "all gentlemen," neither tall nor short, stout nor thin, light nor dark, thirty, forty, or some other age--why, Beelzebub himself could not have accomplished a more complete disguise! It was as if, going so quietly on such an errand, some evil of devilish mockery looked out from behind that featureless face, as from behind a mask. And about the heart of the big, lean, ruddy youth striding toward his beloved through the warm August evening, the cold breath of superstition lightly breathed. It was, for one instant, as though it were at him the mockery were directed; as though, when that mask should be removed, it would be his blood that would be frozen by the sight. The next moment his strength exulted. Patience! He must be found, that fellow--he had made Christina suffer! The young man's heart winced and then steeled itself upon the phrase. He drew deep into his spirit the horrid degradation that had been breathed upon her; the sickening danger that had struck at her; he saw the thinned line of her cheek, her pallor and her tears, and the dark circles under those dear eyes. He saw and his teeth set themselves. Oh, yes, that featureless and silent fellow should be found! And when that hour came, and Herrick's hand was on that mask, it made him laugh to think how well its wearer should learn that it was not only a woman at whom he had struck! Immersed in these thoughts Herrick had not noticed a scudding automobile which now passed him so close that he had to spring backward in order to avoid being knocked down. And he was not in the mood when springing backward could be in the least agreeable to him. The rescuer of ladies was thrown into a fuming rage. What, he, he, a free-born American citizen, he, a knight-errant on his way to the queen of love and beauty, he, Bryce Herrick, a presentable young man of the privileged classes to bound into the air like a ball or a mountebank! Made to retreat ignominiously and hurriedly!--actually to--in the language of his childhood--to "skip the gutter" by the menial of upstarts with his horn!--By George, the fellow had not blown his horn! Herrick came to a raging pause and looked about him for a policeman. He could at least complain to a policeman! Then he discovered that he was within half a block of Christina's corner; her house was on the other side of the street. To come into her presence was to forget everything else. As he reached the corner and started to cross the road he heard the whirr of another motor and then beheld it speeding toward him, some distance off, from the same direction as his first enemy. Determined not to skip the gutter this time he advanced at a dignified pace, deliberately fixing the automobile with the power of the human eye. The wild beast approached headlong, nevertheless, and Herrick, observing that it, too, dispensed with the formality of blowing its horn, stopped dead in its path. He was filled with the immense public spirit of outraged dignity and pure temper. The automobile was a long, low touring-car, gray, with an unfashionable look of hard usage, and there were three roughly dressed men in it. If they thought he would move unless that horn were blown, they were mistaken! He glared pointedly at the number which was streaked, illegibly, with mud. And the truth came to him, that this was no second automobile--it was the same one! And now it was so near that, above the man's raised collar, he could see the eyes of the chauffeur looking straight at him. Then it was he knew that they did not expect him to get out of the way; that they did not intend to blow the horn; nor did they intend to swerve aside. What they intended was to run him down! With inconceivable rapidity the thing had loomed out of the distance and was here; death lunged at him in a flash, bulked right upon him, the wind of it in his angry eyes. The shock of that anger utterly controlled him and took up the challenge; he could not have changed the set of his whole nature and broken his defiance if he would. But from the sidewalk some one screamed. Automatically, he started, and the touring-car, as though rocked by the scream, swayed a hair's breadth to one side. Only a hair's breadth! Herrick felt an impact like the end of things; then a horrible, jarring pain as if his bones were coming out through himself and knocking him to splinters. And then--nothing. CHAPTER IV THE MYSTERY PAUSES, AND OTHER THINGS GO FORWARD The doctor drew back from examining a badly bruised, cut, and skinned youth and smiled. "Well, young man," said he, "if I were you, the next time I saw an automobile making right for me, I'd get out of its way." "I guess I'm all right," Herrick grinned. The grin was rather sketchy. He was not very secure yet in which world he was. On first recovering consciousness he had found himself lying with his head in Christina's lap, and had supposed he was in heaven. But it hadn't been heaven; it had still been the middle of Ninety-third Street and Christina was sitting in the dust thereof. And then he had another glimmer; he was on a couch, and, facing him, Christina was huddled on her heels on the floor with large tears running down her nose and plumping off the end of it into a bowl, full of funny red water, that she held; a cloth in her hand was even redder, and her mouth had such a piteous droop that if only he could have sat up it would have been the natural thing to kiss it. "Darling!" he had said, to comfort her; and she had said, eagerly, "Yes!" just as if that were her name; then another blackness. And now the couch was in her drawing-room and everywhere was the scent and the sheen of her country flowers--larkspur and sweet alyssum and mignonette, the white of wild cucumber vine, the lavender of horsemint, and everywhere the breath of clover--the house was filled with them! Wherever did she get them? "What's that?" he asked sharply. It was a policeman's helmet. The policeman was merely left there,--the automobile having escaped without leaving its number behind it,--to take his evidence of the accident. Herrick rather dreaded being laughed at for his surety that it was no accident; but a man who had seen it from a window and the passing lady who had saved his life by shrieking had already testified to the same effect. They had both declared the offending car to be a gray touring-car; a very dark gray, Herrick thought. The policeman, who had read his Sunday special, stooped to be communicative. "Do you remember the young feller," he asked, "that was a witness to the Ingham inquest? Do you remember he got there late through bein' knocked over by 'n automobile?" Herrick stared. "Well, the young lady called him on the 'phone with me listenin', an' I guess you're on a'ready to what kind of a car it was that hit him--'twas a gray tourin'-car." By-and-by, when the policeman and the doctor were gone, and Mrs. Hope and Mrs. Deutch, without whom no crisis in the life of the Hope family seemed to be complete, had swathed him tastefully in one of Mrs. Hope's kimonos they began to tell him that he must send for his things, because he would have to convalesce as Christina's guest. The idea was distressing to him, but he was a little surprised by the soft bitterness with which Christina opposed it. "Do you want him murdered outright?" she said. "What has he done that he should be mixed up with my house and my life? I was wrong ever to let him be my friend." She was spreading a cloth over a little table which Stanley Ingham had brought close to the couch. She lifted a lighted lamp out of Herrick's eyes and set it on the mantel shelf behind his head. Looking down as the light touched his bandaged forehead and the unusual pallor of his bronzed face she said, so gently that Herrick's heart melted with a painful sweetness, "I warned you!" "It does look awfully funny," young Ingham exclaimed, "about this touring-car. Wonder what the police will say to that! Wouldn't open their mouths about the letters, and warned me not to open mine. Wouldn't even let me tell you, Chris!" "Fortunately," said Christina, "Mr. Herrick had told me before any one could possibly interfere.--The police think they're genuine, then?" "You bet they do! At least, I s'pose they do. They didn't say. But they grabbed them, fast enough." Christina asked no more, and thereafter, if she kept the talk around Herrick quiet, she kept it almost gay. She and the boy ate their dinner with him in order to wait on him and watch his comfort; and before long she seemed scarcely the older of the two. It was all wonderfully simple and kind; there could be no embarrassment in that light, genial atmosphere; when the dishes had been cleared away the girl went to the piano and sang softly--tender negro melodies, little folk lullabies, snatches of German love-songs. Just as Herrick, greatly soothed and at peace, was beginning to feel tired, Deutch arrived and he and Stanley Ingham took the patient home in a taxi and put him to bed. To Herrick's indignant astonishment, it was four or five days before he could get about again, and at the end of that period the Deutches had become almost as large a part of his life as of the Hopes. It was in vain he protested. Mrs. Deutch came twice a day and looked after his comfort with a devotion as arbitrary as a mother's; she inspected all his garments, and, with clucks of consternation, took them away with her and returned them, perfected; between her and Mrs. Grubey a deep distrust as to each other's cookery arose. She cooked him three meals a day, beside all sorts of elaborate "foreign" trifles, Mr. Deutch bringing them over in a basket, piping hot; and Mrs. Grubey, entering with her own dainty contribution of pork chops and canned lobster, professed herself unable to understand how he could eat such messes. He finished his memorial of Ingham amid the perpetual bloom and fragrance of Christina's garden flowers; once Mr. Ingham came, with Stanley, to inquire; Mrs. Hope came twice. On her second visit, when he was almost ready to re-enter the world, she brought Christina with her. The girl had lost her air of tragic greatness; there was more color in her face, the pupils of her eyes were less expanded and her nostrils less inflated. She seemed, too, to have been rather put back into her place as a young lady, for she smiled sweetly but a little shyly about Herrick's room, and left the talking to her mother; when her eyes encountered the photograph which had been replaced over the desk a faint flush suffused her face. "My daughter has at last allowed herself to be persuaded," said Mrs. Hope, "that Miss Cornish is hiding voluntarily; and that, if there is a blackmailing society trying to slander us and to injure any one who is apt to defend us, the police are quite as capable of dealing with it as she is. Therefore she is now able to give a little attention to her own affairs." Herrick was sorry for the poor lady; he knew that she was devoted to Christina and that she must have had a great deal to endure. He had learned by this time that she had been a Miss Fairfax, and that her family, however desperately poor, considered her to have made a misalliance with a mere wealthy manufacturer of wall-papers, like Hope. It had been, indeed, a runaway match and relations with her family were never really resumed. Now Deutch reported that of late conciliatory relatives, making advances to the rising star, had been routed with great slaughter. But both men guessed that this had not been the real wish of a person so socially inclined as Mrs. Hope; she was too plainly dragged at the chariot-wheels of a freer spirit, and in this light even her occasional asperities, her method of communicating with her daughter mainly by protesting exclamations, became only pathetic attempts at an authority she did not possess. "You know, Mr. Herrick," she now went on, "that the opening of 'The Victors' three weeks from next Thursday night is the great occasion of my daughter's life. I can't begin to tell you what it means to us; it's everything. At such a time I think we--we ought to have our friends about us. The Inghams are so kind; they are taking me in their box. But Christina had already ordered me two of the best seats in the house, and I'm sure I'm speaking for her, too, when I say what a pleasure it would be if you would accept them. Indeed it would be a favor.--My dear, can't you persuade him?" "It's only--" said Christina, slowly, "that I'm afraid." "Christina! I do wish you would drop that ridiculous pose. No horrible fate has overtaken me!" "Ah, mother," said the girl, touching her mother's shoulder, "perhaps because we were both born, you and I, under the same ban!" "My dear!" cried Mrs. Hope, as if Christina had mentioned something indecent. "I hope you won't pay any attention to her, Mr. Herrick." "I certainly shan't. I shall be too glad to get those seats." "Ah, now you're a dear! You'll see Christina at her best, and I'm going to say that that's something to see. It's a magnificent part and Mr. Wheeler has been so wonderful in rehearsing her in it. Christina doesn't find him at all intimidating or brutal, as people say. Though, of course, he's a very profane man." "I love every bone in his body," Christina said. "My child! I wish you wouldn't speak so immoderately!" "I'm an immoderate person," the girl replied. She rose, and pointing out of the window she said to Herrick--"You sat here? It was there, on that shade?" "Yes." Christina shuddered; just then Mr. Deutch arrived with the luncheon basket. The ladies passed him in taking their leave and Christina slipped her hand through his arm. "Mr. Herrick," she said, "Herr Hermy does not look wise--no, Herr Hermy, you don't,--but if ever I puzzle you, ask him. Do not ask Tante Deutch, she will tell you something noble and solid, for she herself is wise, and so she can never understand me. But Herr Hermy is a little foolish, just as I am. He is flighty; he has the artistic temperament and understands us; he knows me to the core.--Herr Hermy, he is coming to see me act; tell him I am really Sal, not Evadne; tell him that I am a hardworking girl." As he came to know her better, Herrick did not need to be told that. He had never seen any one work so hard nor take their work quite so seriously. But her advice remained with him and he began to listen more respectfully to Hermann Deutch on his favorite subject. "Wait till you see her, Mr. Herrick! She's like Patti, and the others were the chorus; you'll say so, too. And it don't seem but yesterday, hardly, she didn't know how she should go to faint, even! Drop herself, she would, about the house, and black and blue herself in bumps! We used to go in the family circle, when I had a half-a-dollar or two, and watch great actresses and when one did something she had a fancy for, she'd pinch me like a pair o' scissors! And she'd be up practising it all night, over and over, and the gas going! She'd wear herself out, and there's those that would expect she shouldn't wear them out, too!" "She takes things too hard," said the lover fondly. "Yes," said Mr. Deutch, after a pause, "she takes 'em hard, but she can drop 'em quick!" Herrick felt a little knife go through his heart; and then Deutch added, "Not that she's the way people talk--insincere. Oh, that's foolish talk! She's only quick-like; she sees all things and she feels all things, and not one of 'em will she keep quiet about! Those glass pieces, you know, hang from chandeliers?--when they flash first in the one light and then the way another strikes 'em, they ain't insincere. An' that's the way Miss Christina is--she's young, an' she's got curiosity, an' she wants she should know all things an' feel all things, so she can put 'em in her parts; she wants all the lights to go clean through her. And there's so many of 'em! So many to take in and so many to give out! There ain't one of 'em, Mr. Herrick, but what she'll reflect it right into your face." Although, in this elaborate fancy, Herrick suspected an echo of Christina's own eloquence, he did not listen to it less eagerly on that account. "After all," he translated, "it's only that she's willingly and extraordinarily impressionable, and then willingly and extraordinarily expressive! In that case, instead of being less sincere than other people, she's more so!" "You got it!" cried Mr. Deutch with satisfaction. "That's what these outsiders, they can't ever understand. The best friend she ever had says to me once, 'If ever Miss Hope gets enough really good parts to keep her interested, she'll take things more quietly around the house!' That's been a great comfort to me, Mr. Herrick.--She's got these emotions in her, I'll say to myself, and what harm is it she should let 'em off?" "The best friend she ever had?" "Well, now, Mr. Herrick, he was an old hand when she first came into the business. He taught her a lot; she'd be the first to say so. Often I've thought if she hadn't been so young then, what a match they might ha' made of it! But she never thought of it, nor, I shouldn't wonder, he neither, and now it's too late. But don't you worry because she takes all things hard; she's got a kind of a spring in her. When she's laid down to die of one thing, comes along another and she gets up again." If Herrick did not complete this analysis, it was not for lack of opportunity. As soon as he was about again he found himself as merged in the life of the Hopes as were the Deutches themselves. "You interest Christina," Mrs. Hope told him. "You take her mind off these dreadful things. It's a very critical week with us. I hope you won't leave her alone." Herrick did all that in him lay to justify this hope, and if Christina never urged nor invited, never made herself "responsible" for his presence, she accepted it unquestioningly. His first outing was a Sunday dinner at their house, and again Christina kept herself in the background, and only drew her mother's affectionate wrath upon herself by one remark; saying, as Herrick helped himself from the dish the maid was passing him, "I hope it's not poisoned!" She seemed rather tired, and he hoped this was not because she had made him come at an outrageously early hour and read her the beginning of his novel. He knew she was recasting it into scenes as he read; she got him to tell her all that he meant to do with it and, as they all, save Mrs. Hope, lighted their cigarettes over the coffee in the sitting-room, she began telling Wheeler about it.--Wheeler had dined there, too. Christina's star was a big, stalwart man of about fifty, who had not quite ceased to be a matinée idol in becoming one of the foremost of producers. He listened with a good deal of interest and indeed the story lost nothing on Christina's tongue; Herrick began to see that her mind was a highly sensitized plate which could catch reflections even of disembodied things. Then Wheeler exclaimed what an actor's approval has to say first, whatever he may bring himself to deal with afterward. "Why, but there's a play in that!" "Yes," said Christina, promptly. "For me!" Humor shone out of the good sense and good feeling of Wheeler's heavy, handsome face. "Give me more coffee, my cormorant! Do you think I want to play the young lady myself? Nay, 'I know the hour when it strikes!'--heavy fathers for mine! Stouter than I used to be--Tut-tut, no sugar!--There will be too much of me--Did you get your idea of moral responsibility out of New England, Mr. Herrick?" "Well, this form of it I got from such a different source as a very suave, amiable Italian, Emile Gabrielli, an intending author, too,--a lawyer who had exiled himself to Switzerland. Do you know a line of Howell's?--'The wages of sin is more sinning.' And it's seemed to me that the more-sinning doesn't stop with ourselves; it draws the most innocent and indifferent people into our net. Well, I always wanted to find a vehicle for that notion." "And your Italian told you this story?" "Something like it. Set the tone for it, too, in a way. He was a highly respectable sentimental person, and used to carry about an old miniature of a lovely girl to whom, I believe, he had once been betrothed. The bans had been forbid by cruel parents but he used to brag to me, at fifty, that they could never force him to part from her idolized face! Yet he knew so many shady stories I've often wondered if he hadn't left home in order to avoid a circle of too embarrassing clients. At any rate he had known a woman whose husband had got into trouble with the police in Italy--for swindling, I think he said. She had to clear out and disappeared. Years afterward he found that she had run into the arms of a respectable, God-fearing family; the natural prey of cheats because years before their little daughter had been kidnapped or lost and never found. They cry out at this young woman's resemblance to the child; the young woman puts two and two together into a story which deceives those who wish to be deceived, and settles down to be taken care of for the rest of her life. It must have been any port in a storm, for I didn't gather her adopted family had money. Spent all they had in looking for her when she was a baby, as I understood. To Signor Gabrielli the cream of the jest was that this girl was being petted and cherished and labored for by industrious people who would have perished of horror if they had known who she was, and who had not one drop of their blood in her veins.--I may not have got the incidents at all straight, but that's the idea." "But you've changed the relationship--?" "Oh, yes. I've cut down the family to a daughter and, as you see, I've reversed the parts--in my story it is the daughter who is deceived; it is the supposed mother who settles down upon the devoted innocence and labor of a generous girl." "Oh, of course!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Put it all on the mother! Nowadays, everything's sure to be her fault!" Christina gave her mother her hand, much as she might have given her a cup of tea and said, "Well, but that is only where your novel begins?" "Yes. I thought the interesting part was all to come. I thought I should be justified in supposing my reformed lady to go back to her old habits, perhaps through the mere claim of genuine ties,--old friendships, real relationships--to be caught in some serious crime, involve those friends and, finally, without in the least intending it, draw her daughter and her daughter's lover into her quicksand--of course, by means of their efforts to pull her out! And then to see what happened!" "When the daughter finds out," Wheeler cogitated, "that should be a strong scene, a very strong scene.--What made you think of reversing the characters?--less trite?" "Simply, I could handle it this way and not the other. When I had the cheat a young woman, she was very strenuous--I couldn't keep her from being the most lurid of common adventuresses. And I had a theory that people are never like that to themselves. Well, as soon as I substituted a rather passée woman she became much quieter--just a feeble, worthless, selfish person a good deal battered by life, and wanting nothing but comfort--trying to get it in the easiest way. I wanted so much to give the commonplace quality of crime, of what a simple, sensible, ordinary piece of business it seems to the person engaged in it--at any rate until it's found out, and he begins to be reacted on by fear and other people's minds. Ah, if I can only give these people their own point of view, and make one thing after another seem quite ordinary and human, just the necessary thing to do! Until they begin to lose their heads when one gate and then another closes and, finding themselves cornered, they fight like rats in a trap! The good as well as the bad, in one panic degradation of despair! I heard a figure of crime the other day which I should like to carry out. I should like to start with the smallest blemish on the outside of the clean, rosy apple of respectable society, 'the little, pitted speck in garnered fruit, which, rotting inward' lets you, by following it, down and down, from one layer of human living to another, at last hold a whole sphere of crime, collapsed, crumbling and wide open, in your hand. Then I've got to save Evadne in the end, without the effect of dragging her through a trap-door!" "Well, if you made it into a play," Wheeler persisted, "would the mother or the daughter be the star-part?" "I could play both!" Christina cried. Wheeler laughed aloud. "You are too good to be true!" "Well, but why not? Why not a dual rôle? Even if the relationship were false, the resemblance would have to be real--it's the backbone of the story! Mother and I look a good deal alike, but I've seen chance resemblances incomparably stronger!" She went on eagerly and Herrick was surprised to see that it was not she alone but Wheeler who took the idea of dramatization seriously. It was his first real gage of what was expected of Christina as an actress--that in a year or two she would be starring on her own account. She was not only Wheeler's leading-woman, she was his find, his speculation; he meant to be her manager and Christina meant that he should, too. Again Ingham's death seemed to be dragging Herrick into the path of success. Then his attention was caught by Wheeler's saying, "Well, we must all be as criminal as we can, while we can. Once P. L. B. C. Ten Euyck gets to be a police inspector there will be no more crime. The word will be blotted from the vocabulary of New York." "That man!" Mrs. Hope cried. "Well, all these recent scandals in the Department are making them remove Simmonds; they want somebody beyond the reach of graft; and Ten Euyck has resigned his coronership. What does that look like to you? "It will be nuts to watch," Wheeler went on. "The force, down in his district, will be shaken up till its teeth rattle. Ten Euyck won't rest contented till he has stopped mice from stealing scraps of cheese! But my leading-woman must be civil to him, now, or he's the sort of fellow to get my license revoked. Nobody's ever run up against his self-righteousness and got away with it, yet. Poor chap, he'd be mighty able if he weren't crazy! I believe I could do a Valjean if I could engage him as Javert!" "Don't let us speak forever of that bilious person! Why do you distract a poor girl from her work? Come," cried she to Wheeler, "are we going to do our scene?" She drove her rather reluctant star to action.--"Young miss!" he said, "it is not every ageing favorite who would take a girl on the word of a mutual friend, give her a better part than his own, push her over his own head, and coach her in private into the bargain!" He put his big hand on Christina's shoulder. "But she's worth it!" he said. "A scene with her is a tonic to me--I did not know the old man had so much blood in him! Sally, the poor working-girl, what are you going to do to the critics, that still sleep unconscious? 'Ha--ha! Wait till Monday week!' or whenever we open! "'They'll be all gangin' East an' West, They'll be all gane a-glee! They'll be all gangin' East an' West, Courtin' Molly Lee!' "Mr. Herrick, as you come up Broadway, you don't see her name on the bills! But they might as well be printing the paper!--for the younger generation is knocking at the door. Ah, Christina, my dear, thou art thy Wheeler's glass, and he in thee calls back the lovely April of his prime!" His indulgent sardonic glance caught Christina's and the flaming sword of hers drove him to work. They left behind them such a vivid sense of Herrick's having written his play and their having taken it, that he might have thought it a scene of his they were working on. From the room where they were immured strange sounds occasionally escaped; sometimes Wheeler laughed and sometimes he swore furiously. "She'll get everything that he knows out of him!" said Mrs. Hope with great satisfaction. Herrick discovered this, in no ignoble sense, to be the keynote of Christina's life. It was borne in upon him with every hour that her work in the theater was the essence of her; that no matter where nor how utterly she should consciously give her heart the unconscious course of her nature would still flow through the field of dramatic endeavor. He might admire or condemn this, like it or leave it; but the jealous humility of his love must recognize it. She seemed largely to have recovered from the terrors that had enveloped her upon Ingham's death. If for Nancy Cornish she had lain down to die, for her opening night she had got up again. And she was ready to bend the whole world to that night's service. Herrick saw that she had always been so. It became a thrilling amusement to him to watch her at work; to see how vividly she perceived, how unscrupulously she absorbed! In the vocabulary of her profession, everything was so much "experience." All her life long she had sucked out of every creature that came near her some sort of artistic sustenance; learning from the jests of her own heart and its despair; out of the shop windows and the night sky. At an age when other girls were being chaperoned to dancing-parties she had worked,--she with her soft cheek and slight strength and shy eye,--"like a miner buried in a landslide"; she was mistress of her body's every curve, of her voice's every note; she had read widely and with passionate intelligence; as soon as she had begun to make money, she had poured it into her accomplishments; she was a diligent student of passing manners and historic modes, and of each human specimen through which she did not hesitate to run her pin. For instance, what use had she not made of the Deutches? From Henrietta Deutch she had learned German and a not inconsiderable amount of music; they had a venerated library of standard works that contained a few modern continentals in the original; she developed her school-girl French by reading the Parisians under Mrs. Deutch's supervision and in Italian she surpassed her; while all the time she learned just enough knitting to know how people feel when they knit, and just what the sensation is of stirring sugar into the preserves. She liked to go to their apartment of an evening and, once, when Mrs. Hope sent Herrick after her, he found her sitting on the floor with her hair down and her head against Mrs. Deutch's black silk knee while that lady crooned German lullabies to the baby she had never borne, and "Herr Hermy" played the pianola. As soon as she had twisted up her hair, she put on a long apron and got supper and waited on them all with the charming daughterly ways which lent her such a tender girlishness; and Herrick perceived that when a part required her to move about a kitchen she would be able to welcome the kitchen as an old friend. She could reproduce Deutch's accent, his whole personal equation, with inhuman exactness, even his tremors at the inquest, his inarticulate stammer--as of a mental dumbness, groping for words--that overtook him in moments of extreme excitement, she had caught in her net; she had learned from him some jokes and stories, some student songs, which would have astonished the many delicate tea-tables at which she shyly cast down her thieving eyes to observe exactly what service was in vogue; she did not hesitate to stir him up to dreadful stories of old racial hates and though Herrick saw her eyes darken and her nostrils expand he knew that she was drawing thoroughly into her system the dark passion of retaliation with which she would some day scorch an astonished audience. "If ever I get a queen to do--oh, one of the virtuous queens, of course," she said, "I shall have to fall back on Tante Deutch." And Herrick saw how right she was; how all along she had modeled her grand moments--and Christina, though so fond of describing herself as a poor working girl, had occasional moments of extreme grandeur--upon that simple, domestic stateliness which was really the stateliness of a great lady. On the other hand when she was out with her mother she modeled herself--except for a stray vagary of speech--upon Mrs. Hope's excellent idea of a-young-lady-out-with-her-mother-a-la-mode; and she was by no means insensible to the glories of the smart world, nor to the luxuries of the moneyed world. "I want them all," she confessed to Herrick as they walked up Fifth Avenue from rehearsal. "I covet them; I long to own them, and I dare swear I should never be owned by them. I'm infinitely more fit than those that have them, and thank heaven I've stood out here when I was cold and wet and _oh!_ how hopeless, and felt in me the anarchist and his bomb. I was never made to smile on conquerors. One man, from these great houses, once taught me how to hate them! How I should like to do a Judith! How I should like to _tame_ all this!" She looked, with a bitterer gaze than he had ever seen in her, down the incomparable pomp of the great street. Then more lightly, with a curving lip, "My Deutches, I believe," she said, "are supposed to belong to the moneyed camp. But it is borne in upon me, every now and then, that our own race has occasionally put by a dollar or two." She moved in such an atmosphere of luxury that it was difficult to imagine her what she plainly called "hard up." But it will be seen that they were now continually together and there was something about her which made it possible to offer her the simplest and the cheapest pleasures. In her rare hours of freedom he had the fabulous happiness of taking her where he had often taken Evadne in that old empty time; to Coney Island, to strange Bowery haunts, to the wharves where the boys dive, and even to his table d'hôte in the back yard. She had a zest, a fresh-hearted pleasure in everything and her sense of characterization fed upon queer colors and odd flavors just as he had known it would. He was so sorry that the little Yankee woman was absent from his table d'hôte, particularly as he had recently had a specimen of her which he longed to hear Christina reproduce. She had a little sewing-table behind her desk at which she sat playing solitaire with a grim precision which made Herrick think of the French Revolution and the knitting women; but as she had then been absent from the restaurant for some time he ventured a "Buon giorno" as he passed. She instantly replied, "You needn't talk that Dago talk to me. I just took my daughter's paul-parrot away from here, case 't 'ed get so it couldn't talk real talk." "That's what I call a good firm prejudice!" Herrick laughed to himself, and he continued to hope for some such specimen, or at least for Mr. Gumama, when he should bring Christina again. But as the opening drew near, she began to limit her interests and to exclude from her vision everything which could interfere with the part in hand. It sometimes seemed to him, indeed, as if even her new calm about Nancy were only because Nancy--yes, and the threatening Arm of Justice,--were among these conscious, these voluntary exclusions. It was almost as though, over the very body of Ingham's death, she had thrown her part's rosy skirts and shut it out of sight. Beneath her innumerable moods one seemed permanent, strangely compounded of languor and excitement. By-and-by, she seemed to dwell within it, veiled, and Herrick knew that only her part was there behind the veil with her. It was Mrs. Hope who could least endure this sleepwalking abstraction. There came an evening when some people whom Mrs. Hope considered of importance were asked to dinner. Christina improved this occasion by having her own dinner served upstairs, so that she would not be too tired to rehearse that night with Wheeler. And to Herrick Mrs. Hope reported this behavior, biting her lips. "She's the most self-willed person living! I declare to you, Mr. Herrick, she has the cruelest tricks in the world. The best friend that any girl ever had said once that, if acting were in question, she would grind his bones to make its bread!" Later, Herrick said jealously to the girl, "Who _was_ the best friend you ever had?" Her head happened to be turned from him and it seemed to him a long time before she spoke. Even then her indifference was so great she almost yawned as "Who has told you of him?" she asked. "Both Deutch and your mother called some old actor that." "They meant a dear fellow who put me in the moving-picture business, bless him, when I hadn't enough to eat!" "And where's he now?" "I dare say he's very well off. He taught me poise. He taught me independence, too. That's enough for one man. He had a singular way of turning his eyes, without turning his head. I learned that, too." Was it true, then--what had been hinted to him often enough--that once she had plucked out the heart of your mystery, the heart of the human being she forgot all about? She might be of as various moods as she would, she was very single-minded, and was all she valued in her friends some personal mannerism?--any peculiar impression of which she might master the physical mechanism and reproduce it? A trait like this naturally made Herrick take anxious stock of his own position. What personal peculiarity of his was she studying? But it was nevertheless in such a trait that the staunchness of his love found its true food. He found his faith digested such things capitally; his passion at once nourished and clarified itself by every human failing, by all the little nerves and little ways of his darling divinity, until it ceased to be merely the bleeding heart of a valentine and found within itself the solid, articulated bones of mortal life. If, in return, there was the least thing she could learn of him, let her, in heaven's name, learn it! Only, how long before she would have finished with it? In the blessed meantime she scarcely stirred without him. With a freedom unthinkable in girls of his own world, she let him take her to lunch every day; unlike a proper heroine of romance, Christina required at this time a great deal of food and he waited for her after rehearsal and took her to tea. It was a mercy that he was now doing a series of Famous Crimes in Manhattan, for the Record, as he certainly did not wish to put her on a diet of Italian table d'hôtes! She accepted all this quite as a matter of course; and it had become a matter of course that he should go home with her for dinner. Sometimes they walked up through the Park, sometimes they took a taxi and drove to shops or dressmakers; she did not scruple, when she was tired or wanted air, to drive home with her hat off and her eyes shut. It seemed to the poor fellow that she had accepted him like the weather. For she had become strangely quiet in his presence. Eventually she ceased to use upon him any conscious witchery whatever; something had spiked all her guns, and Herrick was too much in love to presume that this quiet meant anything except that he did not irritate her. Every now and again, it is true, he was breathlessly aware of something that brooded, touchingly humble and anxious and tender, in a tone, in a glance. He feared that this anxiety, this tenderness, was only that royal kindness with which, for instance, when Joe Patrick gave up his elevator, hating that haunted job, she at once got him taken on as usher at the theater. But Herrick dared not translate her expression, when, looking up suddenly, he would find her eyes swimming in a kind of happy light and fastened on his face. At such moments a flush would run through him; there would fall between them a painful, an exquisite consciousness. And, with the passing of the wave, she would seem to him extraordinarily young. He considered it a bad sign that seldom or never did she introduce him to any of her mates. Public as was their companionship, she kept him wholly to herself. This was particularly noticeable in the restaurants where she would go to strange shifts to keep actors from dallying at her table; she would forestall their advances by paying visits to theirs, leaving Herrick to make what he liked of it; and, do what he would, the poor fellow could find no flattering reason for this. Already he knew Christina too well to have any hope that it was the actors who were not good enough. They were to her, in the most drastic and least sentimental sense, her family. She quarreled with them; often enough she abused and mimicked them; at the memory of bad acting scorn and disdain rode sparkling in her eye, and if her vast friendliness was lighted by passionate enthusiasms, it was capable, too, of the very sickness of contempt. But this was in private and among themselves; there was not the least nor the worst of them whom she would not have championed against the world. Quite apart from goodness or badness of art, Christina conceived of but two classes of human beings, artists and not artists; as who should say "Brethren"; "Cattle." Herrick congratulated himself that he could be scooped in under at least the title of "Writer." It was not so good as "Actor," but 't was enough, 't would serve. All her sense of kin, of race, of patriotism, and--once you came to good acting--of religion, was centered in her country of the stage. Herrick had never seen any one so class conscious. With those whom she called "outsiders," she adopted the course most calculated, as a matter of fact, to make her the rage; she refused to know them. And when, for the sake of some day reproducing high life upon the boards, she brought herself to dine out, this little protégée of the Deutches had always said to herself, with Arnold Bennett's hero, "World, I condescend." Such an affair took place on the Monday before Christina's opening. Some friends of the Inghams made a reception for her; and Herrick saw a dress arrive that was plainly meant for conquest. Now Herrick considered that this reception had played him a mean trick. He had a right to! He who had recently been a desperado with sixpence was soon to be an associate editor of _Ingham's Weekly_!--While he was still dizzy with this knowledge a friend on the _Record_ had pointed out a suite in an old fashioned downtown mansion, which had been turned into bachelor lodgings: a friend of the friend wished to sub-let these rooms furnished, and Herrick had extravagantly taken them. A beautiful Colonial fireplace had decided him. He remembered a mahogany tea-table and some silver which Marion could be induced to part with, and it seemed to him that he could not too quickly bring about the hour when Christina, before that fireplace and at that tea-table, should pour tea for whatever Thespians she might think him worthy to entertain. But it had taken time for the things to arrive; to-morrow she was going on the road for the preliminary performances, and to-day was set for the reception! He had, of course, kept silence. But it was heartbreaking to see how perfect a day it was for tea and fires--one of those cool days of earliest September. He kindled the flame; alas, it didn't matter! Then, toward six he went uptown to hear about the party. He found Mrs. Hope, but not Christina, and the elder lady received him almost with tears. "She is out driving, Mr. Herrick; she is out driving about all by herself and she won't come home. She is in one of her tantrums and all about Mr. Wheeler--a fine actor, of course, but why bother?" Herrick had never seen the poor lady so ruffled. "It was such a beautiful reception," she told him, "all the best people. She got there late. She always does. You can't tell me, Mr. Herrick, that she doesn't do it on purpose to make an entrance. All the time I was brushing her up after the rehearsal she stood with her eyes shut, mumbling one line over and over from her part. Nobody could be more devoted to her success than I am, but it got on my nerves so I stuck her with a hairpin and I thought she would have torn her hair down. 'What are these people to me?' she said. 'Or I to them.' You know how she goes on, Mr. Herrick, as if she were actually disreputable, instead of being really the best of girls. Then, again, she's so exclusive it seems sometimes as if she really couldn't associate with anybody, except the Deutches! She likes well enough to fascinate people, all the same. She behaved beautifully after she got there; and oh, Mr. Herrick, you can't imagine how beautiful she looked! Surely, there never was anything so lovely as my daughter!" "Can't I?" Herrick exclaimed. "Well, every one just lay down flat in front of her. Even Mr. Ten Euyck. Yes, he was there. I trembled when they should meet. You know, he has his inspectorship now. He wants to give her a lunch on board his yacht! It was a triumph. Christina was very demure. But by-and-by I began to feel a trifle uneasy. You know that soft, sad look she's got?--it's so angelic it just _melts_ you--when she's really thinking how dull people are! Well, there, I saw it beginning to come! And about then they had got rid of all but the very smartest people, just the cream, you know, for a little intimacy! We were all getting quite cozy, when some one asked Christina how she could bear to play love-scenes with a man like Wheeler--of course, Mr. Herrick, it _is_ annoying, but they will ask things like that; they can't help it." "And Miss Hope?" "She looked up at them with the sugariest expression I ever saw and asked them why, and they all began reminding her of the--well, you know! And I must say, when you come to think of his--ah--affairs--! And they talked about how dear Miss So-and-So had refused to act with him in amateur theatricals, he said such rough things! And how lovely Christina was, and how hard it was on her, and all the time I could see Christina clouding up." Herrick, with his eyes on the rug, smilingly murmured, "Wave, Munich, all thy banners wave! And charge, with all thy chivalry!" "Well, Mr. Herrick, she stood up and looked all round her with that awful stormy lower she has, and then, in a voice like one of those pursuing things in the Greek tragedies, 'I!' she said, 'I am not worthy to kiss his feet!' Oh, Mr. Herrick, why should she mention them? There are times when she certainly is not delicate!" Herrick burst out laughing. He thought Christina might at least have exhibited some sense of humor. "And was the slaughter terrible?" "Why, Mr. Herrick, what could any one say? She looked as if she might have hit them. She shook the crumbs off her skirt, as if they were the party, and then she said good-by very sweetly, but coldly and sadly, like Mary Queen of Scots going to execution, and left. Mr. Herrick, I don't know where to hide my head!" Herrick stayed for some time to counsel and console, but Christina did not return and as Mrs. Hope did not ask him to dinner he was at length obliged to go. For all his amusement he felt a little snubbed and blue and lonely; his eyes hungered for Christina in her finery; he saw her at once as the darling and the executioner of society and he longed to reassure himself with the favor of the spoiled beauty; how was he to wait till to-morrow for the summons of his proud princess? As he opened his door he saw that the fire had been kept up; some one kneeling before it turned at his entrance and faced him. It was Christina. The shock of her presence was cruelly sweet. The firelight played over her soft light gown; she had taken off her gloves and the ruddiness gleamed on her arms and her long throat and on the sheen of her hair. As she rose slowly to her feet that something at once ineffably luxurious and ineffably spiritual which hung about her like the emanation of a perfume stirred uneasily in him and his senses ached. Never had her fairness hurt him like that; his passion rose into his throat and held him dumb. "The man looked at me, hard," she told him, "and let me in. I came here to rest. And because I didn't want to be scolded. Don't scold me. Perhaps I've thrown away a world this afternoon. But no; it will roll back to be picked up again. Listen, and tell me that I was right." Without stirring, "I can never tell you but the one thing," he said. "I love you!" It was no sooner said than he loathed himself for speaking. He had not dreamed that he should say such a thing. It was not yet a month since her engagement to Ingham had been broken; she was a young girl; she was here alone with him in his rooms, to which she had paid him the perfect honor of coming--she, who had accepted him so simply, so nobly, as a gentleman. Hot shame and black despair seized upon him. The girl stood quiet as if controlling herself. Then, so gently that she was almost inaudible, she said, "I must go!" He could not answer her; he was aware of the ripple and murmur of her dress as she fetched her wraps; she put on her hat and the lace of her sleeves foamed back from her arms in the ruddy light; he felt how soon she would be engulfed by that world which was already rolling back to be picked up. He stepped forward to help her with her thin chiffon coat and she suffered this, gently, passively; as it slipped over her shoulders he felt her turn; he felt her arms come around his neck, clinging to him, and the sweetness of her body on his breast. In that firelit room her lips were cold, as they stumbled on his throat with the low cry, "Oh, you love me!--You love me!" she repeated. "And you're a man! Save me!" CHAPTER V HERRICK HEARS A BELL RING "Don't let them take me!" Christina entreated. "Don't let them lock me up! That door--! Turn the key!" Without demur he turned it. He was in that commotion of bewildered feeling where one shock after another deliciously and terribly strikes upon the heart, and anything seems possible. From the trembling girl his pulses took a myriad alarms; apprehension of he knew not what ran riot in them and credited the suggestions of her terror; but all the while his blood rushed through him, warm and singing, and his heart glowed. She was here, with him! She had fled here and clung to him for defense! She loved him! In no dream, now, did she lie back there, in the deep chair beside his fire, with her hand clasping his eagerly as he knelt and her shoulder leaning against his. It was keener than any dream; it was that fullness of life, which, even at Herrick's age, we have mostly ceased to expect. "There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said. "Don't deny it--I know! They've been following me from the beginning!" [Illustration: "There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said. "Don't deny it--I know!"] "But why, dearest, why?" "Because they think I killed Jim Ingham." "Christina! Why should they think such a thing?" "Why shouldn't they? Don't you?" She put her finger on his lips to still his cry of protest, and, looking down into his face, her own eyes slowly filled with that brooding of maternal tenderness which seemed to search him through and through. For a moment he thought that her eyes brimmed, that her lips trembled with some communication. But, without speaking, she ran her hand along his arm and a quiver passed through her; taking his face in her two hands she bent and kissed his mouth. In that kiss they plighted a deeper troth than in ten thousand promises. And, creeping close into his breast with a shuddering sigh, she pressed her cheek to his. "Oh, Bryce, you won't let them take me away? I can stand anything but being locked up--I couldn't bear that--I couldn't! What can I do?" "My dearest, no one in the world can harm you!" "I came here to be safe, where I could touch you. Let me rest here a little, and feel your heart close to me. Oh, my love, I'm so frightened! I thought I was strong! I thought I was brave and could go through with it! But I can't! I'm tired--to death! All through my soul, I'm cold. It's only here I can get warm!" "Christina," he asked her, "go through with what?" She stirred in his arms and drew back. "Look first--ah, carefully!--from the window. What do you see?" "Nothing but ordinary people passing. And the usual number of waiting taxis." "Well, in the nearest of those taxis is a detective. He has been following me all the afternoon. He is sitting there waiting for me to come out." Herrick carried her hand to his lips. "Christina, don't think me a cursed schoolmaster. But it's imagination, dear. You've driven yourself wild with all this worry and excitement. Why, believe me, they're not so clumsy! If they were following you, you wouldn't know it." "I tell you I've known it for at least two weeks! I'm an actress, and if, as they say, we've no intelligence, only instincts, well then, our instincts are extraordinarily developed. And mine tells me that, over my shoulder, there is a shadow creeping, creeping, looming on my path." A series of sounds burst on the air. Herrick went to the window. "There, my sweet, the taxi's gone." "Did no one get out?" "No one." He had snatched up her hand again and he felt her relax. "Well, I ought to be used to shadows; all my girlhood there has been a shadow near me. Bryce, when I was really a child, something happened. Something that changed my whole heart--oh, you shall know before you marry me! I shall find a way to tell you!--It made me a rebel and a cynic; it made me wish to have nothing to do with the rules men make; I had to find my own morality. Only, when I saw you, I felt such a strength and freshness, like sunny places. Bryce!" "Yes." "My feeling for Jim was dead a year ago. Do you believe that?" "Oh, my darling! Why--" "Because I won't have you think me shameless! Nor that an accident, like death, turned my light love to you! I was just twenty when he first asked me to marry him; I was so mad about him that my head swam. And yet it wasn't love. It was only infatuation and I knew it. I was still young enough for him to be a sort of prince--all elegance and the great world. The last two have been my big years, Bryce. I was rather a poor little girl till then. Even so, I held him off ten months. I felt that there was a curse on it and that it could never, never be! What did I know of men or that great world--well, God knows he taught me! When I did consent to our engagement the fire was already dying. But by that time the idea of him had grown into me. He had always a great influence over me, Bryce, and he could trouble and excite me long after he had broken my dream. Oh, my dear, it was one long quarrel. It was a year's struggle for my freedom! Well, I got my release. I didn't wait for fate." She paused. And then with a low gasp, "All my life I've stood quite alone. I have been hard. I have been independent. I have been brave--oh, yes, I can say it; I have been brave!--but I've broken down. Only, if you will let me keep hold of you, I shall get courage." "Christina!" "Do you know how big you are? Or what a clear look your eyes have got? There in that coroner's office--oh, heavens,--among those _stones_!--Bryce, he was there this afternoon! that man!" "Ten Euyck? Yes, I know." "Do you know what he means to do as Police Inspector? He means to run me down! Wait--you've never known. I've kept so still--I didn't want to think of it. Four years ago he payed for the production of a play of his, by a stock company I was with. Oh, my dear, that play! It gave us all quite a chill! He wanted his Mark Antony played like a young gentleman arranging the marriage-settlements. But he took the rehearsals so hard, he nearly killed us." She hesitated. "He was very kind to me. He was too kind. One night, he met me as I was coming out of the theater, and--forgot himself. One of the boys in the company, who was right behind me, slapped him in the face! Do you mean to tell me that he has ever forgotten that? At the inquest he thought he had me down, and the laugh turned against him! Is he the man to forget that?" "But what can he do?" "How I detested him!" Christina hurried on. "He taught me, in that one minute, when I was eighteen, how men feel about girls who aren't in their class! Just because I was on the stage, he took it for granted I--Well, he, too, learned something! Since then I've heard about him. He isn't a hypocrite, he's an egoist. I wonder, were some of the Puritans really like that? He's so very proper, and so particular not to entangle himself with respectable women! But with women he calls bad he doesn't mind--because for him bad women don't count, they don't exist! Oh, dear God, how I despise a man who feels like that! How I love you, who never, never could! Does he really know, I wonder, that sometimes it's the coldest of heart who can be made to turn his ships at Actium?--'What can he do?' He can hope I'm guilty! And he can use all the machinery of his office to prove me so!" "Why, look here, dearest, if he's never revenged himself on the man who struck him--" Christina gave a shrill little cry. "But, now he has his chance with me! His great spectacular chance! Oh, Bryce, I'm afraid of him, and I was never afraid before!--Dearest dear, I know you can't do anything! But the girl's in love with you, poor thing, and she feels as if you can! I've wanted you--oh, how I've wanted you!--all my life. I've known the dearest fellows in the world, the cleverest, the gamest, the most charming. But they were too much like poor Christina; fidgety things, nervous and on edge. 'You take me where the good winds blow and the eternal meadows are!'--What are you doing?" He had bowed down to kiss her wrist and he replied, "I'm thanking God I look like a farmer!" "My poor boy!" cried Christina, breaking her tears with little laughs, "I've got your cheek all wet! Bryce dear, we're engaged, aren't we? You haven't said.--Bryce!" He slipped back onto the floor, with his head in her lap and her two hands gathered in his one. They were both silent. The little fire was going out and the room was almost dark. And in that happy depth of life where she had led him he was at first unaware of any change. Then he knew that the hands he held had become tense, that rigidity was creeping over her whole body, and looking up, he could just make out through the dusk, the alert head, the parted lips of one who is waiting for a sound. "Bryce," she said, "you were mistaken. That detective has not gone!" "What do you hear?" "I don't hear. I simply know." Their senses strained into the silence. "If he went away, it was only to bring some one back. He went to get Ten Euyck!" "Christina! Tell me what you're really afraid of!" "Oh! Oh!" she breathed. "Christina, what was it you couldn't go through with?" "Death!" she said. "Not that way! I can't!" She rocked herself softly to and fro. "If I could die now!" she whispered. "You shan't die. And you shan't go crazy, either. You're driving yourself mad, keeping silence." He drew her to her feet, and she stood, shaking, in his arms. "Christina, what's your trouble?" "Nancy,--that murder--my opening--my danger--aren't they enough?" "For everything but your conviction that it is you who are pursued, and you who will be punished. Some horrible accident, dear heart, has shown you something, which you must tell. Tell it to me, and we will find that it is nothing." "Bryce," she said, "they're coming. It's our last time together. Don't let's spend it like this." "Did you--" he asked her so tenderly that it sounded like a caress, "did you, in some terrible emergency, in some defense, dear, of yourself, Christina--did you fire that shot?" Her head swung back; she did not answer. "My darling, if you did we must just take counsel whether to fight or to run. Don't be afraid. The world's before us. Christina, did you?" "No, no, no!" she whispered. "I did not!" She felt his quiver of relief, and her nervous hands closed on his sleeve. "Oh, if you only knew. There is a thing I long to tell you! But not that! Oh, if I could trust you!" "Can't you?" "I mean--trust you to see things as I do! To do only what I ask! What I chose--not what was best for me! Suppose that some one whom--Bryce?" "Yes?" "If any one should hear--" "There is no one to hear." "You can't tell where they are." "Christina, can't you see that we're alone here? That the door's locked? That you're safe in my arms? The cab went away. No one followed you. No one even knows where I live; my dear, dear love, we're all alone--" The door-bell sounded through the house. He thought the girl would have fallen and his own heart leaped in his side. "Darling, it's nothing. It's for some one else." "It's for me." "That's impossible." There was a knock on the door. Herrick called--"Who's there?" "It's a card, sir." "A card?" "A gentleman's card, sir. He's down in the hall." "I can't see any one at present." "It's not for you, sir; it's for the young lady." "Did you tell him there was a lady here?" "He knew it himself, sir." "Well, she came in here because she felt ill; I'm just taking her home. She can't be bothered." "He said it was very important, sir. Something she's to do to-morrow," he said. "Christina! It's only some one about your going away." "No. It's the end. Take the card." Springing on the light, he took the card to reassure her. She motioned him to read it. And he read aloud the words "Mr. Ten Euyck." CHAPTER VI AND HOLDS A RECEPTION AFTER ALL Christina took the card from him, and seemed to put him to one side. Almost inaudibly she said, "I will go down." Before Herrick could prevent her, a voice from just outside the door replied, "Don't trouble yourself, Miss Hope. May I come in?" Ten Euyck, hat in hand, appeared in the doorway. He looked from one to the other, noting Christina's tear-stained face, with a civil, sour smile. "I am sorry if I intrude. I had no idea Mr. Herrick was to be my host. The truth is, Miss Hope, I followed you and have been waiting for you, in the hope of making peace--where it was once my unhappy fortune to make war." Christina said, "You followed me!" "But I shouldn't have yielded to that impulse so far as to--well, break into Mr. Herrick's apartment, if I had not become, in the meanwhile, simply the messenger of--a higher power." Ten Euyck tried to say the last phrase like a jest, but it stuck in his throat. He moved out of the doorway, and there stepped past him into the room the man whom Herrick had seen at the Pilgrims'. "Miss Hope, Mr. Herrick," Ten Euyck said, "Mr. Kane; our District Attorney." Kane nodded quickly to each of them. "Miss Hope," he said, "I don't often play postman; but when I met our friend Ten Euyck outside and he told me you were here, the opportunity was too good to lose." He took a letter out of his pocket, watching her with shrewd and smiling eyes. "We've been tampering with your mail. Allow me." Christina took the letter wonderingly, but at its heading her face contemptuously brightened. "I can hardly see," she said, passing it to Herrick. "Read it, will you?--He would have to know anyhow," she said sweetly to the two officials. "We are just engaged to be married. You must congratulate us." Herrick, never very eloquent, was stricken dumb. "Sit down, won't you?" was as much as he could ask his guests. The letter ran-- "The Arm of Justice suggests to Miss Christina Hope that she exert her well-known powers of fascination to persuade the Ingham family into paying the Arm of Justice its ten thousand dollars. Miss Hope need not work for nothing, nor even in order to avert an accusation against which she doubtless feels secure. But the Arm of Justice has in its possession a secret which Miss Hope would give much to know. She may learn what that secret is, and how it may be negotiated if she will hang this white ribbon out of the window wherever she may be dining on Monday. She will receive a communication at once." "Exactly!" said Kane, as though in triumph. "For such swells as the Arms of Justice it's about dinner-time now. Would you oblige me, Miss Hope, by tying the ribbon out of the window? Show yourself as clearly as possible. All the lights, please." As Christina stepped to the window, he added, "I'm trusting they didn't recognize us as we came in. It's pretty dark." They waited. The three men were strung to a high degree of expectation. "But it's all so silly!" Christina said. The call of the telephone shrilled through the room. "Miss Hope?" Herrick asked. "Yes, she's here." Then they heard Christina answering, "Yes, yes, it's Miss Hope. I hear. I understand. I'll be there." She hung up the receiver and turned round. "The Park. To-morrow. At ten in the morning. The bench under the squirrel's house at the top of the hill beyond the Hundred-and-tenth Street entrance. And be sure to come alone." She sat down, staring at Kane. He said, "Excuse me!" and went to the 'phone. "Boy! Did that party ask for Miss Hope in the first place? All right. That's queer. They asked for Mr. Herrick's apartment." "They knew I was living here? Why, I only moved in this morning." "And they must know I'm going on the road to-morrow; the eleven-thirty train!" "Exactly. They're well informed." Kane had been passing up and down; now he stopped in front of Christina and again he seemed to measure her with his keen eyes. "Well!" he said; "are you game for it?" Christina sprang up and stood before him, glowing. "You'll keep this appointment?" "Surely! And alone!" "Not by a long shot! Your mother and Mr. Ingham have feared exactly some such escapade; that's why you've had to be shadowed all this while and not advised of the activities of the police. There will be plenty of plain clothes men, well planted. But not you, Mr. Herrick, whom they would know. If you attempt to smuggle yourself in, we'll have to put you in irons. Well, Miss Hope?" "My mother," said Christina, rising, and faintly smiling, "deserves to have her hair turn as white as I'm sure it has by this time." She held out her hand. "You gave me a great fright," she said. "Did you know it? I thought you had all come to execute me. Don't! I'm not worth it!" The admiration which no man could withhold from her for very long colored Kane's studying face and warmed his handshake. "I can count on your not losing your head, I think. You'll be there?" "I'll be there.--But have these people really any secret? Are they really going to tell me something?" "Well, my dear young lady, we'll know that to-morrow." CHAPTER VII MORNING IN THE PARK: THE SILENT OUTCRY The week in which Christina was to open in "The Victors" was one of those which call down the curses of dramatic critics by producing a new play each night. Thursday was to see the opening of openings; there were but two nights on the road and Mrs. Hope and Herrick were to live through these as best they might in a metropolis that was once more a desert. After that momentous interview of Monday evening Christina would not let Herrick drive home with her. "Come to the station in the morning, and hear what has happened. Lunch with me on Thursday. But don't let me see you alone again till Friday noon, when--" she laughed--"when I've read my notices. Let your poor Christina tell you her trouble then. Till then she has trouble enough!" She put her face up with a kind of humble frankness, to be kissed. And he saw that it was a weary face, indeed. Throughout the night his anxiety concerning the next day's meeting with the blackmailers contended in him with that other anxiety: what she was to tell him on Friday--when she had read her notices! Whatever it was, it was not for his passion that he feared. There were even times when he could almost have wished it were not some distorted molehill that the girl's excitable broodings had swollen past all proportion, but some test of his strength, some plumbing of his tenderness. And then again he would be aware of a cold air crawling over his heart, of that horrible sinking of the stomach with which, walking in the dark, we feel that we are taking a step into space. A black wall, ominous, menacing and very near, would loom upon him and blind him from the wholesome and habitable world. The daylight reinforced his faith in simpler probabilities. It washed away all but the sweetly humble arrogance of the one fact which all night long had shot in glory through his veins and built itself into the foundations of his life. With the day he remembered only that she loved him. He hung about the outskirts of One Hundred-and-tenth Street till he saw her enter the Park and till he saw her leave it--safe, but with an exceedingly clouded brow. "They didn't come, of course!" she said to him at the station. "They very naturally refused to swim into a net. Mr. Kane is a great dear, but I wish he would mind his own business! Mother, speak to Bryce." She took leave of them both with a serenely fond indifference to public conjecture and the train bore her away. Mrs. Hope may habitually have endeavored to clutch at the life-lines of her own world even while she was being submerged in the billows of Christina's but she was not mercenary and she accepted Herrick with an evident thankfulness that he was no worse. When he had taken her home, he found himself at a loss as to what to do with his life. Christina had become so wholly his occupation that to lose her even for a few days was to lose the bottom out of the world. Although the morning was still swathed in yesterday's fog, the sun was struggling, the damp air was very warm, and his steps turned toward the Park. But he did not follow the paths which he and Christina had trod homeward from rehearsals; instinctively, he turned north. Then he smiled to see that he was once more making for the Hundred-and-tenth Street entrance. Yes, here was the last spot which had held her, and, as he looked about him, his heart stirred to think of her here. They should come here together, he and she. The place was a little wilderness; he could not have believed that in that kempt and ordered domain there could be so wild and sweet a grace of nature and charmed loneliness. The hill was high and thinly wooded; finely veiled in the mist and the faint sunshine it was the very spot for the dryad length and lightness of Christina's movements. At the same time, so close to the city's hum, there seemed something magic, something ominous and waiting in the utter, perfect stillness, and the little clearing at the top of the hill somehow, whether by its broken boulders or the columnar straightness of a semicircle of trees, suggested a Druid clearing. Those who wished to make a sacrifice here would be very strangely unmolested. High and low and far away there was no human figure, and a cry might perish long before it traveled those misty distances. Herrick thought, "If she had come alone!" and shuddered. But there was the little squirrel house; there the bench where she had waited; and at its base he smiled to see the scattered nuts which Christina, with her variegated interests, had not failed to bring her furry hosts. A lassitude of loneliness came over him; he was still not wholly recovered from his accident of three weeks before and with a weary yielding to stiffness and weakness he dropped down on the bench. Then he saw that along one of its slats some one had recently penciled a line, and he recognized Christina's hand. "I will come again for three days running, after Thursday. At the same hour. And I will come _alone_." He was startled, but he smiled. It was so like her! Looking up, he saw behind him a man sweeping leaves in the distance, and, far down the hill, there appeared a loafer with a newspaper. The charm was broken. Good heavens, where were people starting from! He could perceive, now, to his left a man sleeping in the grass. Could any of these be the plain clothes men, still lingering hopefully about? By George, they must be! And Christina was right--they were too obvious a snare! Why, there was a fourth, altogether too loutishly and innocently eating an apple as he strayed on! Herrick looked down at Christina's message, wondering if the detectives had seen it. Intrepid and obstinate darling, how resolute she was to know all there was to be known! When he looked up again he saw that the slumberer had wakened and was sitting up. The other three men were approaching from their respective angles, nearer and nearer to the bench. And then it occurred to him--did they take him for a blackmailer? It made him laugh and then somehow it vexed him; and he began to stir the fallen leaves with a light stick he carried, restlessly. The men came on, and it annoyed him to be surrounded like this, as by a pack of wolves. He lifted his head impatiently, and was about to hail the nearest man when a splash of sun fell full on that man's face. It was the face of the chauffeur in the gray touring-car. He knew then that he was in a trap. Controlling his first impulse to spring up and bring the struggle to an issue, he counted his chances. He remembered how far and still was this deserted spot; his muscles were very stiff, and he felt the slimness of the stick in his hand. He had no other weapon. And there were four of those figures sauntering in upon him through the silence and the pale, dreamy sunshine. He felt the high, hot beating of his heart. The city lay so close at hand! He could still feel on his mouth Christina's kiss! And the immense desire to live, and all a man's fury against outrage, against this causeless and inexplicable brute-hate, which already, in the city's very streets, had dared to maim and tried to murder him, rose in him with a colder rage and kept him quiet and expressionless. He rose; and striking the dust of the bench from his clothes, he glanced about. Yes, the man behind him was still advancing, sweeping leaves; down the hill before him the man climbed upward, still mumbling over his newspaper; to his right the apple-eater, chewing his last bite, tossed away the core as he came on; the chauffeur alone disdained subterfuge, advancing quietly; he carried in his hand some lengths of rope. Herrick believed that he had one chance. This wooded isolation could not be so far-reaching as it seemed: they would scarcely dare to fire a shot. Leisurely he idled a step or two down the slope toward the man with the newspaper, till he was just outside the closing semicircle of the others. Then, lowering his head, he shot swiftly forward. Immediately there was a shrill whistle and the reader cast his newspaper away. It was too late; Herrick's lowered head struck him in the diaphragm and knocked him backwards. As he fell, Herrick leaped over him and turning, caught the chauffeur a stinging blow across the eyes with his stick. The stick broke; and Herrick, dropping to his knees, caught the ankle of the next comer and threw him flat upon his face. The fourth man flung a blackjack which, as Herrick rose up, caught him just below the right elbow; the young fellow sprang up and, shouting now for help at the top of his strong voice, he raced down the hill as if, once more, he were bearing the ball to its last goal. For a moment he felt that he had snatched the victory, but his stiff muscles played him false and his right arm hung as if paralyzed. His shouts, too, were leaving him winded and the fourth man, now considerably in advance of the others, was gaining on him at every step. Suddenly Herrick mistook the shadow of a little bush for the shadow of a fifth opponent; in his second's wavering the fourth man lunged at him, missed him, and losing his own balance clutched the end of Herrick's coat. They both went down together, getting and giving blows; and though Herrick was up and off again in an instant, the breath was pretty well knocked out of him. Violent pains were throbbing now through his arm; he seemed to himself as heavy as lead; near the bottom of the hill the fourth man was on him again; Herrick landed on the fellow's head with his left, only to fall himself into the hands of the two whom he had thrown at first and who now fell upon him with a zeal that all his French boxing, which enabled him to land a kick in one jaw and a horrible backheeled stroke into the ribs of the fellow who was trying to wrap a coat round his head, scarcely availed to rid him of. He gathered himself together for one shout that seemed to him to crack the tree-trunks. But the game was up; without knowing it he was turning faint from the pain in his arm, and then the men were all round him now; barring his path and only holding off from him a little because the chauffeur was running down hill toward them, aiming at Herrick, as he came, the rope which he had tied into a noose. Herrick leaped to one side, and clinging to the tactics which had served him best, dropped to the ground and pulled the chauffeur down atop of him. They clenched like that and went, rolling and struggling, down the hill; striking against trees, kicking, clawing, blind with rage, till they were stopped by the flat ground. It was Herrick who landed on his back and found himself staring up at the revolver the chauffeur was drawing from his pocket. At that moment there sounded a policeman's whistle. The man who had been running after them with the coat for Herrick's head, dropped it and ran like mad. His companion's arm had been broken by Herrick's kick, but this man and the fourth continued wildly searching for something they had dropped on the hill. The chauffeur had had to ease a little on Herrick in order to draw his gun; but when he felt Herrick struggling onto his right side and even rolling himself on top of his right arm, he quickly slid the barrel of the revolver into his palm and lifted the butt-end. As he did so Herrick's left fist shot up and dealt him a blow on the point of the chin. He fell back as if his neck were broken; the pistol slipped out of his hand and Herrick caught it just as the man with the broken arm dropped on his chest. The policemen's whistles were sounding nearer and nearer; the man on Herrick's chest kept him from aiming the pistol, but he discharged it in the grass, shot after shot, five of them, to guide the police. "Let him have it!" said the man on top of Herrick, but in an Italian phrase, to the fourth man, who leaned over Herrick raising what the other had dropped back there on the hill. It was the blackjack. Herrick could just turn the pistol a little and point it upward from his side. He fired it straight into the fourth man's face; and he was always glad, afterward, that, like a sick girl, he had closed his eyes. The next man who bent over him was a policeman. "Don't mind me," Herrick said, "get them! Get after them!" But that automobile of theirs must have been waiting on the driveway near at hand; for the man whom Herrick had shot dead was the only one they caught. At first the body seemed to offer no clue; save a soiled and torn half of a blank card on which had been uncouthly scribbled the number 1411--unless its being the body of a young Italian could be called a clue. Herrick, who had, of course, accompanied it to the station under a nominal arrest, turned sick with disappointment. At that moment the lieutenant in charge emitted an exclamation. He had found on the dead man a letter addressed in the typewriting of the Arm of Justice to Christina Hope. The inclosure was intact, and the lieutenant held it out to Herrick. To the single sheet of paper was fastened a thick, soft curl of dark red hair. Under the curl, in a rounded but girlish handwriting, were four words: "Help me, dear Chris!" CHAPTER VIII A GREAT OCCASION APPROACHES AND THE VILLAIN ENTERS This piece of information was very carefully guarded from the newspapers. Nothing of the Arm of Justice had as yet leaked out. But the fight in the Park was another matter; people linked it with the sinister automobile, and it broke out in headlines everywhere. Herrick began to find himself the most widely advertised man in New York; his battle-scarred appearance was but too apt to proclaim his identity and he did not know whether he most objected to being considered a hero who had slain four ruffians with one hand or a presumptuous nine-pin always being bowled over and having to be rescued by the police! There was a good deal of pain below his elbow, where the blackjack had temporarily paralyzed certain muscles, so that for another day or so his arm hung helpless at his side; he could almost have wished it a more dangerous wound! Curious or jeering friends made his life a burden; Christina called him up over the long distance 'phone and swore him not to leave the house without his revolver; Marion telegraphed him entreaties to come home, and his own mind seethed in a turmoil of question and of horrible fancy to which the young figure of Nancy Cornish was the unhappy center. Nor could Mrs. Hope be called a comforting companion. "Besides, Mr. Herrick,--Bryce--were they trying to kidnap you, too? And if so, wouldn't you think they had enough on their hands already? Or did they mean to murder you, really? And if so, why? Why? And, oh, Mr. Bryce, just think how uncontrollable Christina is--and who will it be next?" Often as Herrick had asked himself these and many other questions, they could not lose their interest for him. His mind spun round in them like a squirrel which finds no opening to its cage. Notoriety, however, sometimes brings strange fish in its net. And when Mrs. Grubey stopped Herrick on the street to applaud his prowess as a pugilist, within the loose-woven mesh of her wonder and concern he seemed to catch a singular gleam, significant of he knew not what. For Mrs. Grubey, in celebrating the hero which Herrick had become to her Johnnie, did hope that he would see the boy, sometime, and use his influence against his being such a little liar.--"You remember that queer toy pistol, Mr. Herrick, that he said he borrowed off a boy friend?" "A. A. A., Algebra, Astronomy and Art-Drawing! It had no connection with them?" "Why, it never come from a school at all!" "I misdoubted it! Art-Drawing was rather elaborate than convincing." "Oh, you'd oughtn't to laugh, Mr. Herrick--and the child so naughty! Why that morning after Mr. Ingham was killed he found it propping open the slit in our letter box." Herrick ceased to laugh. "He was so set on keeping it he made up that story, and then to go to work and lose it, an' it so queer the stones in it was maybe real--" "He lost it, then?" "Els't we'd never have known on account of him coming home crying. He lost it in the Park, where he'd been playing train-robber with it an' lots o' the loafers on benches watchin' him. A bigger boy got it away from him, larkin' back an' forth, an' threw it to him, an' just then a horse took fright from an automobile and run up on the grass with its rig. The boys scattered in a hurry an' when they come back the pistol was gone. He hadn't noticed no particular person watching, so he didn't know who was gone, too. I tell him, God took it to punish his lyin'," concluded Mrs. Grubey, with the self-righteousness of perfect truth, "but I certainly would like to know how much it was worth! An' how it ever got there an' who it belonged to." Herrick had a vision of a comic valentine he had received on the same morning. "I'm afraid it was meant for me!" he said. He knew this could not clear things up much for Mrs. Grubey; and afterward he fell to wondering if the capital "C" scratched on the dummy pistol's golden surface bore any similarity to the slender, pointed lettering which had formed the words "To the Apollo in the bath-robe." He could never remember when the initials rose before him in a new order; the A's blent as one and then the C--A. C.--Oh, madness! Yet, on Friday, he would ask Christina. One other tribute to his popular fame gave him a new idea. It came from his Yankee woman at the table d'hôte. The night after the attack she motioned him to her as he was leaving and without ceasing to play solitaire she said, "If I was you, young feller, I guess I wouldn't come down here for one while." His eyes opened in amused surprise. "Why not?" "Ain't you the one shot a Dago yesterday in the Park? Pshaw, you needn't tell me--I know 'twas 'cause you had t' do it! An' good riddance! But it's healthier for you to stay where you belong." Herrick looked round him on the good-tempered, smiling people at the little clean tables, and laughed. "But you don't suppose the whole nation is one united Black-Hand, do you? You seem to have a mighty poor opinion of Italians!" "Well," said the woman, with a grim smile of her own, "I married one. I'd oughta know!" She finished her game and seeing him still lingering, in enjoyment of her tartness, she said, "All forriners 're pretty poor folks. When I get mad at my children I say it's the streak of forrin' in 'em. Well, my girl's good Yankee, anyhow. Fair as anybody. It's my son's took after his father, poor fellow!" "Then the proprietress, here, isn't your daughter?" "Her? Sakes, no! She's my niece-in-law. I brought up my daughter like she was an American girl! It's my son keeps in with these! He's homesick. My daughter's husband got into a little bit o' trouble in the Old Country," said this remarkable little dame, without the least embarrassment, "and her an' me's glad enough to stay here. But the men kind o' mope. Their business worries 'em and as I say, 'tain't the business I ever would have chose, but I s'pose when I married a Dago I might's well made up my mind to it!" She said this with an air inimitably business like, and so continued--"Now I want you should clear out from here, young man! There's all kinds of fellers come here. It may be awful funny to you to think o' gettin' a knife in your back, but I don't want it any round where I am! When they're after Dagoes, it ain't my business. But my own folks is my own folks." Now it could not be denied that there was something not wholly reassuring as to the pursuits of this respectable old lady's family in this speech, and in lighter-hearted times Herrick might have noted it as a testimonial to that theory of his concerning the matter-of-fact in crime. But now it suggested to him that he might do worse than look for the faces of the blackmailers in such little eating-places as this one. After all, they evidently were Italians, and it was with Italians that they would sojourn. Yes--that was one line to follow! He remembered that this region was in or adjacent to Ten Euyck's district and he wondered if he could bring himself to ask the favor of a list of its Latin haunts. He and Mrs. Hope were on their way to a big Wednesday night opening when this resolution took definite shape, and it was strange, with his mind full of these ideas, to come into the crush and dazzle of the theater lobby. Mrs. Hope at once began bowing right and left; the theatrical season was still so young that there were actors and actresses everywhere. Herrick, abnormally aware of his new conspicuousness, could only endeavor to look pleasant; and, trailing, like a large helpless child, in her wake, was glad to catch the friendly eye of Joe Patrick; fellow-sufferer in a common cause, whom Christina's recommendation as usher he perceived to have landed him here, instead of at the theater where she was to play. Unfortunately Joe hailed him by name, in an unexpectedly carrying voice; a blush for which Herrick could have kicked himself with rage flamed over him to the roots of his hair, and when he perceived, with horror, that they were entering a box, he clutched Mrs. Hope's cloak and slunk behind the curtains with it like a raw boy. But even so, there was a continual coming and going of acquaintances, many of whom conveyed a sort of sympathetic flutter over Mrs. Hope's interest in to-night's play; an impression that Christina must feel her own absence simply too hard, and Herrick smiled to think how much more concentrated were Christina's interests than they realized. Not but their expectation of her appearance to-morrow was keen enough. It seemed to Herrick that there was a thrill of it in all the audience, which persistently studied Mrs. Hope's box. Christina's genius was a burning question, and the unknown quantity of her success agitated her profession like a troubled air--through which how many eyes were already ardently directed toward to-morrow night, passionate astronomers, attendant on a new star! Murders come and murders go, but here was a girl who, in a few hours, might throw open the brand-new continent of a new career; who, next season, might be a queen, with powers like life and death fast in her hands. And, with that tremendous absorption in their own point of view which Herrick had not failed to observe in the members of Christina's profession, people asked if it wasn't too dreadful that this business of Ingham's murder and Nancy Cornish's disappearance should happen just at this time, when it might upset Christina for her performance? Mrs. Hope introduced him to all comers with a liberality which her daughter had been far from displaying, and he could see them studying him and trying to place him in Christina's life. It was clear to him that if he ranked high, they were glad he had not gone and got himself beaten to death in the Park, or it might have upset her still more. He thought of the girl whose wet cheek had pressed his in the firelight. The sweetness of the memory was sharp as a knife, and the rise of the curtain, displaying wicked aristocrats of Louis the Fourteenth, sporting on the lawns of Versailles, could not deaden it. For if there is one quality essential to the effect of wicked aristocrats it is that of breeding; and of all mortal qualities there is none to which managers are so indifferent. In a costume play more particularly, there is one requisite for men and one only; size. Solemn bulks, with the accents of Harlem, Piccadilly and Pittsburgh, bowed themselves heavily about the stage in conscientiously airy masquerade and, since nothing is so terrible as elegance when she goes with a flat foot, Herrick's eyes roved up and down the darkened house studying the faces of Christina's confreres, there, and endeavoring to contrast them with the faces of the public and the critics to whom, to-morrow, she must entrust her fate. A burst of applause, recalling his attention to the stage, pointed out to him a real aristocrat. Among the full-calved males in pinks and blues, the entrance of a slender fellow in black satin, not very tall, with an order on his breast and the shine of diamonds among his laces, had created something the effect of the arrival of a high-spirited and thoroughbred racehorse among a drove of caparisoned elephants. Herrick, the ingenuous outsider, supposed this actor the one patrician obtainable by the management; not knowing that it was his hit as the spy in "Garibaldi's Advance" which had opened to him the whole field of foreign villains, and that he could never have been cast for a treacherous marquis of Louis Quatorze this season if he had not succeeded as a treacherous private of Garibaldi the season before. With a quick, light gesture, which acknowledged and dismissed the welcome of the audience, the newcomer crossed the stage and bowed deeply before his king. The king stood at no great distance from Herrick's box, and when the newcomer lifted his extraordinarily bright, dark eyes they rested full on Herrick's own. Then Herrick found himself looking into the face of the man in the street who had questioned him about the murder on the night of Ingham's death. Herrick had a strange sensation that for the thousandth part of an instant the man's eyes went perfectly blind. But they never lost their sparkle, and his lips retained the fine light irony that made his quiet face one pale flash of mirth and malice. "Who is that?" Herrick asked Mrs. Hope. "Who? Oh--that's Will Denny." Herrick was startled by a hand on his sleeve, and a hoarse, boyish voice said in his ear, "That's him!" He knew the voice for Joe Patrick's. "That's the man I took up in the elevator." CHAPTER IX PRESTO CHANGE: "OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME!" Herrick excused himself to Mrs. Hope and followed Joe Patrick out of the box. "But are you sure, Joe?" he asked. "Could you swear to it?" "Sure I could! Why couldn't I?" "And you couldn't tell the coroner that that man was as slim as a whip and as dark as an Indian, about middle height and over thirty, and of a very nervous, wiry, high-strung build." "Well, now I look at him close again I can see all that. But he didn't strike me anyways particular." Herrick had an exasperated moment of wondering, if Joe considered Denny commonplace, what was his idea of the salient and the vivid. Was the whole of Joe's testimony as valueless as this? He stood now and watched their man with wonder. Had Denny recognized him? Had he seen Joe Patrick rooted upright there, behind his chair, with staring eyes? If so, after that first flicker of blindness, not an eyelash betrayed him. He was triumphantly at his ease; his part became a thing of swiftness and wit, with the grace of flashing rapiers and of ruffling lace, so that from the moment of his entrance the act quickened and began to glow; the man seemed to take the limp, stuffed play up in his hand, to breathe life in it, to set it afire, to give it wings. And all this so quietly, with merely a light, firm motion, an eloquent tone, a live glance! He had, as Herrick only too well remembered, a singularly winning voice, an utterance of extraordinary distinction, with a kind of fastidious edge to his words that seemed to cut them clear from all duller sounds. But Herrick recalled how, after the first pleasure of hearing him speak, he had disliked a mocking lightness which seemed to blend, now, with the something slightly satanic of the wicked marquis whom Denny played. He remembered Shaw's advice, "Look like a nonentity or you will get cast for villains!" Truly, they didn't cast men like that for heroes! And in the light of that sinister flash, Herrick was aware of vengeance rising in him. He rejoiced to be hot on the trail, and when he and Joe parted it was with the understanding that he was to allay suspicion by returning to the box and Joe was to telephone the police. Rather to his surprise the performance continued without interruption and he somehow missed Joe as he came out. Now at the ungodly hour of one-thirty in the morning, Christina was expected home. She was to take the midnight train from some Connecticut town, and the thought of her approach began gradually to overcome, in Herrick's mind, the thought of justice. As he walked to meet her through the beautiful warm, windless dark, he told himself, indeed, that he had a great piece of news for her and took counsel of her how he should carry it to Kane. But when, under the night lights of the station, he saw how she was ready to drop with fatigue, he simply changed his mind. He had sufficiently imbibed the tone of her colleagues to feel that nothing was so necessary as that she shouldn't be upset. It was bad enough that to-morrow she must be told of Nancy's message and add her identification of that curly hair; let her sleep to-night. In the cab she drooped against him with a simplicity of exhaustion that was full, too, of content. "I was afraid I should never get you back!" she said, and again, "I thought, all the evening, how you had been--hurt; and how all that theaterful of women could see that you were safe--and I couldn't! Do you know how I comforted myself?" And she began to murmur into his shoulder a little scrap of song-- "Careless and proud, That is their part of him-- But the deep heart of him Hid from the crowd!" "You know where my heart was!" he said. He had forgotten how large a part of it had been excited by the apparition of Denny. Still humming, she drew back a little and let her look shine up to his. "Simple and frank, Traitors be wise of him! Are not the eyes of him Pledge of his rank?" "Christina!" he said, humbly. "Don't!" "You don't like it!" she softly jeered. And though when he put her into her mother's arms her little smile was so pitiful that it frightened him, and he would have given anything that to-morrow night were past, yet she turned on the stairway and cast him down, with a teasing fondness, a final verse. "Vigor and tan! Look at the strength of him! Oh, the good length of him! There is my man!" "Christina!" cried Mrs. Hope, scandalized. And Christina, with a hysterical and weary laugh, dragged herself upstairs. Herrick went forth into the street bathed in the sense of her love and with a soul that trembled at her sweetness. He was himself very restless, and, sniffing the fresh dark, he dismissed the cab. He had begun to be really in dread lest Christina should break down; after he had crossed the street he turned, with anxious lingering, to look up at her window, and he saw the light spring forth behind it as he looked. It was so hard to leave the sense of her nearness that Herrick, like a boy, stood still and there rose in his breast a tenderness that seemed to turn his heart to water. He had no desire, ever again, on any blind, to see a woman's shadow. Yet he hoped that she might come to the window to pull this blind down; in case some one else did so for her, he stepped backward into a little area-way in the shadow of a tall stoop. But she did not come. The hall light went out, and then hers. He gave up, and just then the front door opened and Christina, not having so much as removed her hat, appeared upon the threshold. He remained quite still with astonishment; and the girl, after glancing cautiously up and down the street, descended the steps and set off eastward at a brisk pace. When she turned the corner into Central Park West, the explanation was clear to him. In some way or another, she had got into communication with the blackmailers and made a rendezvous which she was determined this time to keep alone. For the first time, Herrick felt angry with her. He had a sense of having been trifled with and he was really frightened; now, indeed, he cursed himself for continuing to go unarmed. He knew that it would be worse than useless to reason with her, and the instant she was out of sight, he merely followed. Gaining the avenue, he looked up the long line of the Park without seeing her. Ah! This time she was going south. He went as far as he dared on the other side of the street but he knew her ears were quick and, reaching the Park side he vaulted the wall, and gained the shelter of the trees. He had scarcely done so when Christina turned sharply round; and she continued to take this precaution every little while, but he could see that it was a mere formality. She no longer thought herself followed and never glanced among the trees; his steps were inaudible on the soft turf. At the Seventy-sixth Street entrance she turned into the park; pausing, wearily, she took off her hat and pushed up her hair with the backs of her hands. She looked as if she were likely to drop; but then she set off rapidly again, and Herrick prayed they would meet a policeman. But no member of the law put in an appearance, and presently Herrick smelled water, and knew that they were near the border of the big lake. Under the white electric light Christina stopped and looked at her watch; she frowned as if her heart would break; and then, in a few steps, she paused on the threshold of a little summer-house that stood with the lake lapping its outer edge. The doorway was faintly lighted from an electric light outside, and Christina glanced expectantly within. But there was no one there. She uttered a little moan of disappointment and entering dropped onto the bench beside the lake; she rested her elbow on the latticework and Herrick could see her dear, outrageous, uncovered head mistily outlined against the water. Never in his life had he so little known what to do. A wrong step now might precipitate untold disaster. His instinct was merely to remain there, like a watchdog, and never take his eyes off her till the time came for him to spring. But reason insisted that on the drive, less than a block away, there must be policemen, and that the quicker he sought one the better. He had not even yesterday's stick, his right arm was now useless, and in a struggle by the water the odds against him were doubled. Moreover, he had no reason to think that the blackmailers intended Christina any violence. They had come to her yesterday in order to deliver a message. This failing, they had allowed her to depart unmolested and, on her side, her only thought was to do as they asked. He perceived that the meeting would at least open with a parley; if he could return with reinforcements in time to prevent foul play or to effect a capture! But he simply could not bear to try it! And then the nearness of the roadlights and the sense of his own extreme helplessness overbore his instinct, and kicking off his shoes, he sped noiselessly over grassy slopes. It seemed to him his feet were leaden; his heart tugged at him to be back; his senses strained backward for a sound and when he burst out on the drive he could have cursed the officer he saw for being fifty feet away. It did not occur to him until afterwards that if his likeness had not been in every paper in New York he might himself have been immediately arrested. But the policeman listened with interest to his story and then ambled out with the circumstance that the summer-house was not on his beat, but that Herrick would find another officer near such and such a place! With the blackness of death in his heart, Herrick sped back as he had come, and then, hearing nothing, slackened speed. There, still, thank God, was that dim outline of an uncovered head against the lake! But so motionless that Herrick was stabbed by one of those quick, insensate pangs of nightmare. Suppose they had killed her and set her there, like that! He controlled himself; but he was determined, now, at all hazards to get her away and stepping into the path before the door, "Christina!" he said. The figure rose, and as it did so, he saw that it was not Christina at all, but a man. A slight man, not over tall, who, as he stepped forward toward the light, turned upon Herrick the pale, dark, restless face of the actor, Will Denny. CHAPTER X MIDNIGHT IN THE PARK; "JE SUIS AUSSI SANS DÉSIR--" The men were equally startled; a very slight quiver passed over Denny's face, but he said nothing. "Good God!" Herrick cried, "what are you doing here?" "The same to you," Denny replied. "But Christina! Where's Miss Hope?" "Christina! Has she been here?" Herrick pushed roughly past him. There was no sign of the girl, and in a cold apprehension, Herrick stared out over the lake. Denny's voice at his elbow said, "She doesn't seem to float! Why not see if I've thrown her under the bench?" "Why not?" Herrick savagely replied. The other smiled faintly. "Christina? It wouldn't be such an easy job!" She wasn't under the bench and Herrick hurried back into the path. "Go and look for her, if you like. I'll wait here." He called in a sibilant whisper after Herrick, "You'll have to hurry. Don't yell." No hurry availed, but as Herrick burst out of the Park he caught a glimpse of her back as she passed into a moving trolley car bound for home. Only love's baser humors and blacker claims were left in him. He knew that his dignity lay anywhere but in that little arbor, yet he deliberately retraced his steps. Again he found Denny sitting there, and this time the actor did not rise. But he must have been walking about in Herrick's absence for he made a slight motion to a dark blot on the bench near him. He said, "Are those your shoes?" Herrick sat down angrily and put them on, more and more exasperated even by the dim shape of a cigar in Denny's fingers; although he was a seething volcano of accusation he could not think of anything to say and besides, what with emotion and with haste, he was rather breathless. So that at last it was Denny who broke the silence with, "Well, now that you are here, have you got a match?--Thank you!" But he did not light it. He seemed to forget all about it as he sat there silent again in the darkness waiting for Herrick to speak. When Herrick struggled with himself and would not, Denny at length began. "I won't pretend to deny that she came here to find me. I only deny that she did find me. I missed her, poor child. Doesn't that content you?" And Herrick asked him in the strangling voice of hate, "Do you usually have ladies meet you here? At this hour?" "No. That's what disturbs me. It must have been something very urgent. She couldn't trust the telephone and she couldn't wait till morning. She knows that now I almost never sleep, and that I can't bear to be awake with walls around me; if I'm not careful I shall have walls around me close enough. I come here, as Chris remembered, because--I must be somewhere. So she chanced it. She didn't find me. I came just too late." Herrick rose. He felt as if he were stifling. "Do you pretend to tell me, then, that you don't know why she came?" "No, I'd better not pretend that. I suppose I know why she came." He added, very low, in his clear voice, "I suppose she came to warn me." "Warn you? Of what?" "Come, do I need to tell you that? Her mother must have told her that you recognized me to-night and that the elevator boy recognized me, too, and told you." "You saw all that?" "I saw all that." "And did nothing?" "What could I do?" "You've had time, since the performance, to get away!" "Where to?" asked Denny. If it was the simplicity of despair it affected the distraught and baffled Herrick like the simplicity of some subtle and fiendish triumph. Not for nothing had he observed the calm of the French marquis. Taking a violent hold on himself, "Do you realize--" he demanded, "what you're admitting?" "The mark of Cain?" said the other, with his faint smile. "Oh, yes!" Herrick incredulously demanded, "You don't deny it?" "Deny it? Why, yes, I deny it. I'm not looking for trouble and I deny it absolutely. But what then? Will anybody believe me? Between friends, do you believe me? Well--what's the use?" "You've no proofs? No defense?" "None whatever!--And I've been playing villains here for four years! My dear fellow, don't blush! I'm complimented to find that you, too, are hit by that impression. And I shan't tell Christina!" "If I could see by what damned theatrical trick you go about admitting all this!" Denny seemed to take no offense. "I'm indifferent to who knows it. I'm tired out." Herrick flounced impatiently and, "But season your solicitude awhile," the other added. "Remember that even to you I don't admit my--what's the phrase? My guilt! And legally I shall never admit it." "You merely 'among friends' allow its inference?" "If you like." "You don't seem very clear in your own mind!" "Clear?" The brilliance of his eyes searched Herrick's face with a singular, quick, sidelong glance for which he did not turn his head. Then the glance drooped heavily to earth and Herrick could just hear him add, in a voice that fell like a stone, "No--pit-murk!" He sat there with his elbows on his knees and seemed to stare at the loose droop of his clasped hands. He said, "I shall never play Hamlet. But at least I am like him in one thing; I do not hold my life at a pin's fee." "Good God!" Herrick burst forth. "Do you think it's you I care about?" The other man replied softly into the darkness, "You mean, I've implicated Christina?" "You've admitted that she knows--and shields you!" "So she does, poor girl! But don't think I shall put either Chris or me to the horrors of a trial. I seem to have given some proof that I carry a revolver. And I haven't the least fear of being taken alive." "I care nothing about you!" Herrick repeated. "What I want to understand is why Miss Hope should shield you--if she is shielding you. Why she should come here, in the middle of the night, to warn you? Whoever shot Ingham was mixed up with everything that's rotten--with blackmail--with the disappearance of that girl--" "O!" Denny had perceptibly winced. But then he said, "I don't confess to all the crimes in the decalogue! For instance, Mr. Herrick, I am perfectly guiltless of those rude--ah--ornamentations on your own brow." He laughed outright. "How could I face Chris?" he said. Herrick jumped at him with an oath and bore him, by pure force of weight, back against the lattice. His hand was on Denny's throat and it was a moment before Denny could tear it away. When he had done so, he said nothing; he continued to sit there as if nothing had happened; and Herrick, a little ashamed, sulked at him, "Don't speak of her like that, then!" He walked to the door of the arbor and back, facing Denny and controlling himself, with his hands in his pocket. "There's been enough of this," he said, through his teeth. "I've got to know now--what's she to do with you? What's it to her, if you're caught? How, in the first place, did she ever come to know such a secret? Why should you confide it to _her_?" He was aware of Denny lifting his eyes and looking at him steadily through the half-dark. "I'll tell you why, if you'll sit down. I've done a hard night's work and, at any rate, I don't care to shout." Herrick dropped down beside him and Denny struck his match. "Smoke?" he queried. Herrick shook his head and again, by the light of the little flame, Denny stared gravely into his set and haggard face. "Is it so much as that to you?" he said. "Well, then, I never told Christina. Nothing--whether I was innocent or guilty. I didn't need to. There was a--friend of hers in the room when it was done. But here's my connection with the thing. You don't know, I suppose, that two months ago, I expected to marry Nancy Cornish?" "I might have known it!" Herrick said. "I don't see why! Unless you've observed that the sweetest women are born with a natural kindness for cads. I was perfectly sure that she loved me. I used to meet her here"--Herrick started--"and take her out in a boat and all that, as if I were a boy,--she was _so_ young! Well, then I displeased her and she sent me to the right about. It was hard. I don't know if you're too happy and too virtuous to see that when another woman was good to me, then, I fell in what it pleases us to call love with her. It came and passed, like fever. No matter. She belonged legally, at that time, to another man, but she swore to me she would get free and marry me--yes, I believed she loved me, too, if you can swallow that! You see, there were no limits to my complacency! There were certain things I couldn't help but know, and she accounted for them all, to me, by a dreadful tale of ill-usage when she was just growing up--a man of the world, older than she, her first love, promise of marriage, desertion, the horrors after it; how she had been forced to accept the first chance of respectability--but now--for love of me--All the old story! She never would tell me that man's name. She pretended to hate him and fear him, and I lashed myself into such a rage against him, and the insults with which she said he was following her again, that I hardly saw the streets I walked through. The afternoon before the shooting Nancy called me up; she said she had something to tell me, and asked me to meet her at the old place in the Park at five o'clock. It was cruel hard, because now I'd doubly lost her. I was sick of myself and the whole world. It was touch and go with me. I sat here, waiting, waiting--if she'd brought her goodness, her freshness, her gentleness even within hailing distance of me, then, they might have shed a little sanity on me as she passed." "And Christina?" Herrick persisted. "Well--this other woman was Christina's friend. That day that Nancy didn't come I had a dress rehearsal, and Christina and this other woman dined with me, just before that. She said, then, for the first time that Ingham was the man she had told me of. She said she told me now because it was he who had sent Nancy away; that Nancy was afraid of me because he and she--I went straight for him after rehearsal. They didn't expect me. And up there, in that room with Ingham, I found that other woman. Would anybody believe in my innocence after that? Ought I to be innocent? 'Deny it?' No, on the whole, I'd better not deny it!' That's all!" They were both silent. Then through his groping thoughts Herrick could hear Denny half-humming a catch of song whose words were instantly familiar. "Je suis aussi sans désir Autre que d'en bien finir-- Sans regret, sans repentir, Sans espoir ni crainte--" "Without regret, without repentance--Repentance? Surely! But--without regret? He asked a good deal, that lad! You ought to like my little song--it was taught me by the erudite Christina." "Where's that woman, now?" "Ah!" said Denny, "that's her secret." "And Christina?" said Herrick, again. "Christina and I are very old chums; aside from the Deutches I am the oldest friend she has. It was I got Wheeler to go West and see her. I was in the first company she ever joined, when she was just a tall, slim kid--sixteen, I think--and I was twenty-six. We've worked together, and won together and--gone without together. I had been at it for eight years when she first went on; and I taught her all I knew; when I got into the moving pictures for a summer I worked her in--" Herrick started. "The best friend Christina ever had!" he exclaimed. "Oh!" said the other. "Thank you!" Herrick was aware of his quaint smile. "Yes, I suppose I might be called that!" "I was told--I was led to believe you were an older man." "Ah, that's one of Christina's sweetest traits--she colors things so prettily! She can't help it! But you see, now, don't you, that she'd never give me away? Chris would shield her friends as long as she had breath for a lie. She's pretended a quarrel with me all these weeks, because, thinking the police were following her, she didn't want them to find me. She's kept you from knowing people who might speak of me. She's had but the one thought since the beginning; and that was to save my life. But she's in love with you, and she can't lie to you any longer--you'll see. Besides, she thinks she can make you our accomplice; that because you're a friend of hers, you're a friend of mine. She has still her innocences, you see, and, in the drama, so many lovers behave so handsomely." The ring had died out of his voice; but he went on, with a kind of rueful amusement, spurring himself to be persuasive, "Come, now, stop thinking of what would influence you, and try to think of what would influence Chris! Do you think she'd like to see Wheeler hanged?" "Wheeler!" "Well, allow me to put forward that Chris thinks me quite as good an actor as Wheeler, with the double endearment of not being so well appreciated by outsiders!" He leaned forward with an intent flash. "If you think she wouldn't stand by me, you don't know her!" "And is that the reason," asked Herrick, "why you left her in the lurch?" He was aware of behaving like a quarrelsome old woman, now that he had a probable murderer on his hands and didn't quite know what to do with him. The man must feel singularly safe. There was something at once annoying and disarming in his passiveness, and Herrick drove home this question with a voice as hard as a blow. "Was it because you could play on the loyalty and courage of a romantic girl, that, when you were likely to be suspected, you ran away and left her to bear the public accusation?" Denny answered, with that gentleness which Herrick found offensive, "I didn't run far." "You've been filling her, too, I suppose, with this cock and bull melodrama of suicide if you're arrested?" He had touched a live nerve. "Would it be less melodramatic to crave that other exit--have my head shaved so that the apparatus could be fitted on--let them take half an hour strapping me into an electric chair! Do you think that would be soothing to her? No, thank you! Or do you want me to hide and run, to twist and duck and turn and be caught in the end?--I can't help your calling me a coward," Denny said, "and I dare say I am a coward. A jump over the edge I could manage well enough. But 'to sit in solemn silence, in a dark, dank dock, awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock--'" He seemed to rein in his voice in the darkness. "If I were even sure of that! But to be shut up for life, for twenty years, death every minute of them! To be starved and degraded, pawed over and mishandled by bullies--" He shuddered with a violence that seemed to snap his breath; even his eyebrows gave a convulsive twitch, as if he felt something crawling over his face. And, rising, he went across to the entrance of the arbor and stood leaning in the doorway, looking out. Herrick did not want him to get away and at the same time he did not want to bring about any crisis until he had seen Christina. He thought Denny's explanation of her attitude only too probable. "I've known the dearest fellows in the world--the cleverest, the gamest, the most charming. But they were all like poor Christina--fidgety things, nervous and on edge." Was she thinking of Denny then? "Oblige me by staying where you are!" he said to Denny's back. Denny turned the grim delicacy of his pale face to smile at him and the smile maddened Herrick. He went on, "You must see yourself I can't let you go! Will you come to my rooms for to-night, and in the morning Miss Hope can tell me if this story's true!" Denny walked slowly out and stood smoking in the center of the pathway, under the tall electric light. He was far from a happy-looking man, and yet he looked as if he were going to laugh. "And what then?" he asked. "Then I shall know if this isn't all a bid for sympathy. Whether there's really any other woman beside this Nancy Cornish--" Denny wheeled suddenly round on him. "Or whether you don't know more of her--" "Damn you!" Denny said. "You fool,--" He had come close to Herrick and then remembering the limp hang of Herrick's arm, he paused. And as he paused a man stepped out from among the trees and touched him on the shoulder. He wheeled round; there were two men behind him. They were in plain clothes but the man who had touched Denny showed a shield. "Come along! You're wanted at headquarters." Denny stood quiet, breathing a little rapidly. "Let me see your warrant," he said, and he took two steps backward to get it under the light. So that before any one could stop him, he had whipped out a revolver, put the end of the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. There was a little click before the man could jump on him and then another; and then Herrick heard the steel cuffs snap over his wrists. The man with the shield drew back, and grinning, shook into his palm what were not even blank cartridges but only careful imitations. "The next time you rely on a gun," he said, "you want to look out for that valet of yours!" Denny was standing with his heavy hair shaken by the struggle about his eyes; one of the men obligingly pushed it back with the edge of Denny's straw hat which he picked up and put on Denny's head. "Come! Get a gait on us," said the man with the star. Denny said, aloud, "You overheard those last remarks for which this gentleman raised his voice?" "Rather!" the three grinned. "Ah, well, then there is certainly no more to be said." He nodded agreeably to Herrick, and then between his captors, walked lightly and quickly off, into the darkness. CHAPTER XI KEEPING CHRISTINA OUT OF IT Daylight was in the streets when Herrick got to bed, sure he should not close his eyes; then he was wakened only by the cries of the newsboys underneath his windows, calling, as if it had been an extra--"Ingham Murderer Arrested! Murderer Arrested! Popular Actor Arrested in the Ingham Murder!" Herrick tumbled into his clothes and bought a paper on his way to a very late breakfast at the Pilgrims', where he had a card. In the account of the arrest he himself figured as something between a police decoy and an accomplice in crime, but Christina's midnight sally remained unknown and he breathed freer. Now that she was to be kept out of it, he could but admire the quiet good sense with which the police had gone about their business. While those more closely concerned had dashed and bewildered themselves against their own points of view like blind, flying beetles, the police had simply made haste to ascertain if Nancy Cornish had a lover. She had been engaged to Denny; a recent coolness between them had been common gossip; and, since Nancy's disappearance, their common friend, Christina Hope, had kept aloof from Denny, as though embracing her friend's quarrel or suspecting her friend's sweetheart. It now transpired for the first time that the police had dug further into that evidence of Mrs. Willing's which Ten Euyck's eagerness to turn it against Christina had left undeveloped. Mrs. Willing had heard a man's voice which she did not think to be Ingham's, call out loudly and very clearly, "Ask--" somebody or something the name of which was unfamiliar to her, and which she had forgotten until later events had violently recalled it--"Ask Nancy Cornish." Herrick did not read any further till he was seated and had given his order to a friendly waiter. There were some men at a table near him; it seemed to him that everybody in the room was talking of the arrest and as a matter of fact most of them were talking of it. He had an uneasy desire to know how Christina appeared in her own world's version. But she remained there the friend of Denny, and of the girl over whom Ingham and Denny must have quarreled. When he looked at the paper again, he read that on the night in question by no less a person than Theodore Bird, Denny had been seen to enter Ingham's apartment! Yes, the tremulous Theodore, despite his wife's particular instructions that he should keep out of it, had called at headquarters and delivered up the fact that at one o'clock or thereabouts, when he was just on the point of retiring, he had heard what sounded like a ring at his door-bell. But he had opened the door only a crack because the wires between his apartment and Ingham's were apt to get crossed, and, indeed, this was what had happened in the present case. He had seen a man standing there, at Ingham's door; and Theodore, safe behind his crack, his constitution being not entirely devoid of rubber, had taken a good look; had seen Ingham fling wide his door, and the stranger enter. On being asked if he could identify this stranger, he said he was certain of it. Confronted with photographs of a dozen men he had unhesitatingly selected Denny's. The police had delayed Denny's arrest in the hope of finding him in correspondence with Nancy Cornish. Sure of their man, they had given him rope to hang himself. But Joe Patrick's recognition, which, at any moment, he might reveal to the suspected man, had forced their hand. They did not add that until yesterday they had never connected Denny or Nancy with the blackmailing letters, but Herrick now added it for them; and he saw how Nancy's message, with its suggestion of the girl's peril, had forced it, too. He deduced that, by the summer-house, they had not been able to overhear anything until Denny had gone to the doorway and Herrick had raised his voice. He read, finally, how, while Denny was changing for the street, after the performance, his dresser had managed to unload and reload the revolver. The number of the cartridge used in it was the same as that of the bullet taken from Ingham's body. Up to the last line of the article Herrick kept a hope that Denny had given some clue of Nancy's whereabouts but the police were obliged to admit that the young man had proved a mighty tough customer. "He has undergone six hours of as stiff an examination as Inspector Corrigan has ever put a prisoner through and nothing whatever save the barest denial has been got out of him. However, the Inspector is confident that in the near future--" There was something in this last statement which made Herrick slightly sick. He hoped Christina had not seen it. He understood well enough the weakness and blankness of Denny's account of himself. The young man denied the murder much more definitely than he had troubled himself to deny it to Herrick, but with the same listless lack of hope and even of conviction. He made no secret of his having gone to Ingham's room with the intention of shooting him, though he asserted that Ingham had proved false the story which had occasioned their quarrel and he had gone away again--that was all. Expect to be believed? Of course he didn't expect to be believed! On the reason of their quarrel he remained mute. To all further questions, such as what other visitors Ingham had that night, he opposed the blankest, smoothest ignorance. And Herrick, filling out the blanks, was still impatient of the reticence which left it possible for any woman of the men's mutual acquaintance to be taken for the woman of the shadow. No effort for the good name of another woman justified to him the suspicion and the suffering that Christina had already been allowed to endure. Denny's guilt he did not and he could not doubt, but he might have respected a guilt which, after so strong a provocation, had instantly given itself up. Such an avowal might have kept further silence with the highest dignity and Herrick wondered why an actor, of all people, could not see that that would have been even the popular course. Then he heard another actor, a much handsomer and more stalwart person, remark, "I always said, poor chap, that he hadn't the physique for a hero!" "Well," agreed a manager, solemnly, after every possible version of the affair had been discussed, "what I've always said is--Strung on wires! He's the best in his own line, I don't deny it! You could have your star and your juvenile man tearing each other to pieces in the middle of the stage and he'd be down in a corner, with an eye on a crack, and everybody'd be looking at him! But I've always said, and I say it again--Strung on wires!" The manager seemed to think that this remark met the occasion fully at every point. And as the men became more and more excited in their talk, Herrick discovered that the very heart of their excitement was their sympathy for Denny's own manager who would have to replace him by to-morrow night. Heaped all around lay this morning's papers, every one of them extolling Denny's performance of the night before, and little guessing what the next editions would bring forth; these fine notices made the management's position all the more difficult and the talkers all seemed to feel that it was very hard, after so expensive a production, that Denny should get himself arrested for murder at such a moment. So that between this extremely business-like sympathy which suited Herrick to perfection and his own desire that Christina should be kept out of it, he perceived that about the last person for whom any one was excited was Denny himself. He was congratulating himself that Mrs. Hope was a person to keep distressing newspapers out of sight as long as possible and that her daughter was sure to rise late on the morning of the night of nights when a boy brought him a 'phone message. "You're please to go and ask to see Mr. Denny at Inspector Corrigan's office!" With somewhat restive promptitude Herrick obeyed. As he was shown into the office the first person his eye lighted upon was Christina. CHAPTER XII AULD ACQUAINTANCE: WHAT CHRISTINA SAW The only professional appearance which Wheeler had hitherto permitted Christina to make in New York had been when she recited at a benefit early in the preceding spring. The benefit was for the families of some policemen who had perished valiantly in the public service and when Christina had enlisted the Ingham influence in the cause Wheeler had made the whole affair appear of her contriving. To procure herself an interview with Denny in the Inspector's office before the formalities of the Tombs should close about him she had not scrupled to make use of this circumstance, and whether because it combined with her having business there, in the identification of Nancy's message, or because the Inspector believed she could really influence Denny to talk, as she said she could, or because he wanted to watch them together, or, after all, because she was one of those who get what she desired, there she was. Herrick was no longer at a loss to account for a sort of tickled admiration which admitted him as one at least near the rose. She had evidently been treated with the consideration due the chief mourner, whatever one may think of the corpse; the Inspector, over by the window, had made himself inconspicuous and for a moment Herrick saw only Christina--a Christina wholly baffled and at a loss! She had, indeed, that air of having spent her life in the office which was her distinguishing characteristic in any atmosphere. Her hat was, as usual, anywhere but on her head; she had stripped off her gloves and tossed them into it. But she now sat in an attitude of despairing quiet which she broke on Herrick's entrance only to catch his arm with one hand; turning her face in upon his sleeve, "Bryce," she moaned, "I brought him to this!" Then he saw that Denny was standing looking through the barred window with his back to them. When he turned Herrick had to struggle against a touch of sympathy for the change in his appearance. Although he had never seen Denny in the daylight before, there was no denying that he was only the worn ghost of what he had been last night. His slenderness had the broken droop of physical and emotional exhaustion; beneath the intense black of his hair, his face was the color of ashes and his quick, brilliant eyes looked lifeless and burned out. Nevertheless, Herrick preferred the daytime version. The sort of evil phosphorescence of the French marquis which had continued to dazzle his eyes in the darkness and the sharp electric light, had wholly vanished; Denny was not playing a villain now--and in the blue serge suit of ordinary life, there was something almost boyish in him. "He won't help me, Bryce," Christina said. "He won't tell me anything, he won't say anything. He won't even tell me what lawyer he wants." Denny stood with his eyes fixed on his visitors but in an abstraction which seemed to take no note of them; and Christina went on to Herrick, as to a more sympathetic audience. "I tell him he shall have the best lawyers in the world! He shan't be tormented any longer; he shall have the law to look out for him! He'll be all right, won't he, Bryce, won't he? If he'll only help himself! If he'll only say something!" Her voice rose desperately and broke. "Tell him you're simply _for_ him, as I am--that's what I brought you here for! Tell him we're with him, both of us, all the world to nothing, and that we urge him to anything he can say or do to help himself! And that it will never make any difference to--either of us!" When Herrick had made out to say that Christina's friends were his friends, she went up to Denny and took him by the shoulders. "Don't you understand? I want to speak not only for myself, but for all those dear to me!" Denny broke into a nervous laugh, but he said nothing. Herrick guessed that his denial of his guilt had taken Christina wholly by surprise; that she had relied greatly on the story of his provocation and that now she did not know what to do. That it is not seemly for young ladies to display such extreme emotion over gentlemen to whom they are not related and who have had the misfortune to be imprisoned for murder did not cross her mind. She was now reduced to a sort of hysterical practicality in which, for lack of the treacherous valet, she enlisted Herrick to discuss with a surprised Inspector what clothes and furnishings of Denny's she would be allowed to have packed up and sent to the Tombs--"What ought I to do to make them like me there? Oh, yes, Bryce, it makes a difference everywhere! I mustn't wear a veil; and I must get them plenty of passes. It's a pity we can't pretend to be engaged--it would interest every one so!--How about money, Will?" "I've plenty, thanks." "Most ladies don't think beyond flowers!" contrasted the Inspector, in amused admiration. Exasperated beyond endurance, Herrick heard himself launch the sickly pleasantry, "Any use for flowers, Mr. Denny?" "Not before the funeral," Denny said. She shook him a little in her eagerness. "Books. And tobacco. And things to drink. And the best food. And magazines. And all the newspapers." Christina clung to the items like a child trying to comfort itself. "Or--perhaps--not the newspapers--" Denny flung restlessly out of her hands. "Oh, yes," he said, "the newspapers, please! Let me at least know how I am admired." He went back to staring out of the window; he seemed so little interested in his visitors that it was as though he had left them alone. Christina stood looking at him with an infinite pity. She was not crying but her magnificent eyes swam in a sort of luminous ether and Herrick had never seen her so girlishly helpless.--"Knowing me brought him to this!" "Don't talk like a fool, Christina!" Denny interrupted over his shoulder in his dead-and-alive voice. "It's true. If you'd never known me, or if I'd never engaged myself to Jim--" "Or if I'd never been born. It's just as true and just about as relevant." His absent voice died in his throat. Then, of a sudden, he turned on her with a kind of restive suspicion. "What did you say, awhile ago, about Kane's office?" "He's sent for me to come there to-morrow at two." "Well, whatever you begin telling him, remember there's one thing I can't put up with. And that's--Well, anything less than--the full dose." He came up to the girl and took her hand in his cold fingers. "And I implore you, Christina, whatever you do, not to set such a motion on foot, not to work up any sympathies nor bring forward any circumstances which might lead to what they call a merciful sentence. I couldn't stand it, Chris. It's the one thing I can't bear.--Oh, don't cry, don't cry! Come, my dear! Why, you surely don't want me to live--like this! With nothing to think of except--about Nancy! Well, then!" But Christina was visibly gasping for breath and, in a nature easily drawn together against a world harsh or indifferent, all the defenses against feeling began to give way. Some comfort must be found for those that insist upon caring! But what comfort?--"Ah now, Chris, dear old girl, such a brave girl--it's all right. It's bound to be. Why, it's what I want, really. Really it is. You know that. You know I've been pretty well through, all these weeks, isn't that so?--Oh, take her away, won't you?" he cried to Herrick. But Christina had by this time begun to cry, indeed, and now she threw her arms round Denny's neck, pulled down his face and kissed him. "To leave you here!" she wept. For a moment he stood stiff in her embrace and then he gently returned her kiss; suddenly, with a sobbing breath, he caught her by the shoulders as a man clings to something tried and dear, which he knows he may not often see again. "Poor Chris!" he said. "All right, Chris!" The Inspector signed to the doorman who stepped up, pleasantly enough, to Denny, and at his touch Denny took the girl by her elbows and held her off. "Come," he said, "you've got a performance to-night!" "Oh, God help me!" Christina cried. "How am I to go through with it!" "Why," said Denny, quickly, "do it for me! Don't let me wreck everything I touch!" He looked at Herrick as though to say, "Be good to her--she's only a girl! You needn't fear she can help me!" And aloud he continued, "Look here, Christina, you mustn't fail. You're my friend, to pull me through and make friends for me, isn't that so? Well, then, you mustn't be a nobody! If you're going to get me out of here, you've got to be a celebrity, and move worlds. Well, you've got nothing but to-night to do it with. People like us, my dear, we've nothing but ourselves to fight with, just ourselves! Come, get yourself together and pull it off to-night! For me!" Over her head his miserable eyes besought Herrick to take her away while she could believe this. But the girl, straightening up, held out her hand. Denny took it and "All right," she said, "I will!" As they stood thus, a door from within the building opened and there was admitted no less a person than Cuyler Ten Euyck. Christina was standing between him and Denny. The eyes of the two men met and slashed like whips. Herrick never needed to be told whose was the hand that long ago, for Christina's sake, had struck Ten Euyck. Now Denny said in a quick undertone, "Don't fret, old girl!" And the guard took him away. The newcomer looked rather more frozen than usual; he was surprised and he did not take kindly to surprises. "It seems to be my fate to interrupt! Mr. Herrick, don't you feel de trop?" He indulged himself in this discomforting question while his byplay of glances was really saying to Inspector Corrigan, "What are all these people doing here?" and Corrigan's was replying, "None of your business!" There was evidently no love lost between the types, particularly when the first glance persisted, "You got nothing out of him?" And the second was obliged to admit, "Nothing!"--"But I implore your toleration," Ten Euyck continued to Christina, "I can perhaps do you some service for the prisoner with Inspector Corrigan." "The prisoner thanks you, as I do. But we have played in melodrama and we are acquainted with the practice of poisoned bouquets. Inspector Corrigan and I are doing very well as we are!" "You are unkind and, believe me, you are unwise. I really wish to please you--do you find that so unnatural?--and to justify myself in your regard. I want to begin by advising you not to let your friend's melodramatic silence suggest to the public that he is going to hide behind some story of a woman--" "He is very foolishly trying to keep a woman's name out of his story," Christina clearly and boldly declared. "Nonsense! There is no such person!" "Why not?" "Because if there were he would be only too anxious to get her to come forward and tell the jury what she told him. It might get him off." "How do you know what she told him?" "My dear lady, they all tell the same thing. It seems to those who are interested--" "It seems nothing whatever but a chance to divert yourself with what you consider his disgrace, because the idea of disgrace comes natural to you--and, indeed, to you, in his presence, it should do so! But I rely on Inspector Corrigan to limit your diversions. His favors are the favors of a practical man; neither he nor I are fortune's darlings; we both work for our living and we both understand one another.--I ought to say that I am sorry to be rude. But I am not sorry, I rejoice. While there was a suspicion for you to nose out I was afraid of you. But now I am free of you. If I were your poor mother," cried Christina, catching up her hat, "I should pray you were ever in a disgrace that did you so much honor!" This outburst produced a silence: Inspector Corrigan amused and gratified, Inspector Ten Euyck struggling to appear amused and tolerant. In fact, as Christina, still breathing fire, drew on her gloves, he became so very easy and happy as to hum a little tune. The words instantly fitted themselves to it in Herrick's mind. "Je suis aussi sans désir Autre que d'en bien finir--" "That's very charming!" said Christina, in the tone of a person always governed by amiability. "Where did you hear that?" "I don't really know. I'll trace it for you, if that will make my peace." "Thank you, no.--Then you think," said Christina, sharply to both officials, "that it would do him great good if this woman, whether he's innocent or guilty, should come forward of her own accord, and repeat the story of her trouble as she repeated it to him?" "Undoubtedly!" "Well, then, she shall!" "Christina!" "Miss Hope!" Christina was inexpressibly grave; she trembled a little, but her voice was firm. "What must be, must be!" she said. "But, Miss Hope, in person?" "In person, yes." "But how, when, where?" "Very simply. On Friday. At the office of the District Attorney." "And you can be certain of this?" "I can." "You know who she is then?" "Most assuredly I do." "Mr. Herrick's terrible shadow?" "Oh, she needn't bring her shadow, need she?" Christina said. Ten Euyck, who was just leaving the building, turned and looked at her; there was always a covert, sullen admiration in his glances at her. "I'm glad to see your spirits are improving. It's now you who are singing!" "'Auld acquaintance'--a sad enough song! But my Nancy's favorite! Don't begrudge it me, Inspector Ten Euyck; it reminds all who love her of kind hours. '_Should_ auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?' Good-by, Mr. Ten Euyck." The outside door closed after him, and she said to the Inspector, "There is something you wish me to identify?" "Here we are!" said the Inspector. "The experts say she wrote it!" Christina looked at the four words a long time. The tears rose in her eyes again. "Yes. She did." She turned to Herrick. "This was what I came to tell Will last night. My mother had just told me. But now that he's helpless, he mustn't know!" "Well?" said the Inspector, and he handed Christina the red lock of curly hair. She took it a little gingerly; studying it, as it lay in the palm of her hand. "Of course, one could be deceived," she said, slowly. "But it's either her hair or it's exactly like it." She lifted the curl and held it to the light. She untied the string which bound it, and thinning it out in her fingers spread it to a soft flame of color. "Oh, surely, it's her hair--oh, poor little girl!" she cried, and crossed by a sudden shiver, she let the hair fall from her hand. Swifter than the men about her she gathered it up again, and again stood studying the tumbled and scattered little mass. And then Herrick saw a terrible change come over her face--an immense amazement, mingled almost at once with passionate incredulity; slowly, the incredulity gave way to conviction and to fear; and then there swept upon Christina's face a blaze of such anger as Herrick had never seen in a woman's eyes. "What is it?" they all cried to her. She opened her lips, as if to call it forth; but then she seemed to lose her breath, and, all at once, she slipped down in a dead faint at their feet. CHAPTER XIII THE NIGHT OF NIGHTS: THE PRINCESS IN THE TRANSFORMATION SCENE If the police believed Christina when she revived enough to say that it had seemed to her as if the hair were soaked in blood it was more than Herrick did. He only wondered that they let her go and if they were perhaps not spreading a net about her as they had spread one about Denny. But thereafter she was very composed, allowed herself to be taken quietly home, and took a sedative so as to get some sleep. Herrick came in from an errand at four and found the house subdued to the ordinary atmosphere--high-pressured enough in itself--of the house of an actress before a big first night. Down in the drawing-room Mrs. Hope said they must not talk about anything exciting or Christina would be sure to feel it. But she herself seemed to feel that the fact of her coming appearance in the Inghams' box was about the only satisfactory piece of calmness in connection with her daughter's future. She congratulated herself anew upon the outcome of an old bout with Christina in which the girl had wished to go to supper afterward with Wheeler rather than with the devoted Inghams, and in which Mrs. Hope had unwontedly conquered. She said now that she wished she had spoken to the Inghams about inviting Herrick; it could have been arranged so easily. When Christina came in she allowed herself to be fondly questioned as to how she felt and even to be petted and pitied. She was perhaps no more like a person in a dream than she would have been before the same occasion if Ingham had never been shot; when she spoke at all she varied between the angelic and the snappish; and before very long she excused herself and went to her room. She was to have a light supper sent up and Mrs. Hope adjured Herrick not to worry! He duly sent his roses and his telegram of good wishes, but that she could really interest herself in the play at such a time seemed horrible to him and he arrived at the theater still puzzled and rather resentful of the intrusion of this unreal issue. But the first thrill of the lighted lobby, glowing and odorous with the stands of Christina's flowers; the whirr of arriving motors; the shining of jeweled and silken women with bare shoulders and softly pluming hair; the expectant crowd; the managerial staff, in sacrificial evening dress, smiling nervously, catching their lips with their teeth; the busy movements of uniformed ushers; the clapping down of seats; the high, light chatter, a little forced, a little false, sparkling against the memory of those darker issues that clung about Christina's skirts; the whole, thrilling, judging, waiting house; all this began to affect Herrick like strong drink on jaded nerves. From his seat in the third row he observed Mrs. Hope and the Inghams take their places; the attention of the audience leaped like lightning on them. Just then one man came into the box opposite and drawing his chair into its very front, sat down. It was Cuyler Ten Euyck. Herrick forgot him quickly enough. It was a real play, acted by real artists; the production held together by a master hand; and it continued to string up Herrick's nerves even while to himself he scarcely seemed to notice it. He had had no idea that it would be so terrible to live through the moment of Christina's entrance. He sat with his eyes on his program, suffering her nervousness, feeling under what an awful handicap she was waiting there, the other side of that painted canvas, to lose or win. There was the wracking suspense of waiting for her, and then, as in a dream, the sound of her voice. Her dear, familiar voice! She was there! She was there; radiant, unshadowed, exulting in the flood of light, at home, at ease; softly, shyly, proudly bending to the swift welcome and carrying, after that, the hearts of the audience in her hand. She had only to go on, now, from triumph to triumph; her sun swam to the meridian and blazed there with a splendid light. Mrs. Hope with lowered eyes, breathed deep of a success that passed her dreams; Ten Euyck, compressing his lips, his arms folded, never took his eyes from Christina's face. And Bryce Herrick, watching her move, watching her speak, not accepting this, as did the public, for a gift from heaven, but aware to the bone of its being all made ground, of the art that had lifted her as it were from off the wrack into this divine power of breathing and creating loveliness, could have dropped down before her and begged to be forgiven. Who was he to have judged her?--to-day or last night? to have exacted from her a line of conduct? to have tried to force upon her the motives and the standards of tame, of ordinary women? He remembered having often smiled, however tenderly, at her pretensions; not having taken quite seriously her attitude to her work. And here was a genius of the first order, whose gifts and whose beauty would remain a happy legend in the hearts of men when he was dust; whose name youth would carry on its lips for inspiration when no one would care that he had ever been born! Oh, dear and beautiful Diana who had stooped to a mortal! For this was the secret thrill that ran like wildfire through the homage of his heart--the knowledge that she loved him, and the feel of her lips on his! Let them worship, poor creatures, poor mob! Unknowing and unguessing that between him and her there was a bond that crossed the footlights--the memory of a dark room and firelight, a girl in his arms.--"Bryce dear, are we engaged? You haven't said?--I've wanted you--Oh, how I've wanted you--all my life!"--At the end of the performance it was impossible not to try to see her; not to get a word with her, to confess and to have absolution. But at the stage-door there were so many people that he could not have endured to share his minute with them. He knew the Babel that it must be inside, and he decided to wait here; by-and-by the Inghams wouldn't grudge him a moment. They seemed to stay forever; but at last all were gone but two or three, and he decided to send in his card. As he stepped forward the door opened, and Christina, in the oblong of light, stood drawing on her gloves. She was dressed as if for a coronation and not even upon the stage had the effulgence of her beauty seemed so drawn together for conquest. Her long white gown had threads of silver in it; the white cloak thrown back from her shoulders did not conceal her lovely throat nor the long string of diamonds that to Herrick's amazement were twisted round her neck and fell down along her breast; she carried on one arm a great white sheaf of orchids, and Iphigenia led to the sacrifice was surely not so pale. Upon her appearance the closed motor which had been waiting across the street swept into place. It was a magnificent car, lined with white; the little curtains at the windows were drawn back and a low electric lamp showed the swinging vases of orchids and white violets. Christina turned her eyes from it till they met Herrick's; for a moment they widened as if galvanized, and then, with a sweet, icy bow, she went right past him. A man who had jumped out of the motor got in after her, and closed the door. It was the man who had sat all alone in the stage box; Cuyler Ten Euyck. CHAPTER XIV ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS There are violences to nature in which she is reined up so suddenly that after them we are left stupid rather than unhappy. In such a mood of held-in turmoil Herrick walked home and waited for to-morrow. His appointment with Christina was at twelve, noon, and until noon he struggled not to think at all. Anything was better than thought; yet nothing would now answer save security--security past, present and future--a full understanding of her life, of her trouble, of her actions, of what game she was playing and of what part in it she was ready to give him. By-and-by the wound began to throb, but he merely kept it closed with a firm hand. Till noon to-morrow! With the morning the papers he had ordered, in a time that seemed long ago, came to his door; he found himself opening them, and tracing the dazzling streams of Christina's notices. Their flaming praises left him cold; already they seemed to be written about some one whom he did not know. Here, at any rate, was a Christina Hope with whom he could imagine parting. The greatness of her destiny was full upon her; she seemed ringed with a cold fire, brilliant as the golden collar of the world and passible, perhaps, by Cuyler Ten Euycks, but hardly by a young literary man from the country. Never again, whether she wished or no, could she be quite the same girl in the gray gown who had sat in a corner of the coroner's office beside her mother. Hermann Deutch's Miss Christina had become one of the great successes of all time. And Herrick shrank a little at the loud clang of her fame. He was going that morning to the Ingham offices at ten o'clock to sign his contract. The day was oppressively warm, with hot glints of sunshine, and it seemed to Herrick that the bright, feverish streets swarmed with the rumors of Christina's triumph. He wondered if it had got in to that man in jail and acquainted him with the strange difference in their fates. His contract meant nothing to him; he got away as soon as he could. Yet already the atmosphere was changed, the sky was overcast, and as the clocks about Herald Square struck eleven, a warm, dusty wind, even now bearing heavy drops of rain, swept down the street. If Herrick took a car he would reach the Hopes a good half hour too early, and he had no mind, after walking in the wet, to present himself in muddied boots and a wilted collar before Christina. He looked about him. He could choose between hotel bars--where actors might be talking of her glory--dry goods shops and a moving-picture show. Perhaps because Christina had gratefully mentioned moving-pictures, he chose the latter. His longing and dread were so concentrated upon twelve o'clock that he had no consciousness of buying his ticket. Only of wondering--wondering-- The place was not yet full enough to be oppressive, and Herrick sat there in the welcome dark, with the rhythmic pounding of the music stunning his nerves. He closed his eyes; and immediately there sprang up before his consciousness the eternal, monotonous procession of questions--What had she meant last night, by throwing over everything for Ten Euyck? Why had she fainted at the sight of Nancy Cornish's hair and what strange bond linked Nancy with Ingham's murder? Why had Nancy disappeared a few hours before the shot; who had said, in Ingham's room, "Ask Nancy Cornish," and to whom had they said it? Why had her visiting-card broken down Christina's earlier evidence, and was that her scarf which had frightened Christina so, or did it belong to that woman of the shadow? And who was that woman? Why had an uncontrolled and variable man, such as Denny had described himself, suffered six hours of the third degree rather than risk revealing her name? By what authority did Christina promise to produce her, that very afternoon, at the office of the District Attorney? Had she made Christina break with Ingham, as she had made Denny kill him, by that story of his betrayal of her youth? He felt intuitively that in this woman was the key to the entire situation. She had created it; she would be found, more than they now knew, to have controlled it; and she, and perhaps she alone, could solve its manifold involutions. She had arrived before Denny, she had spoken boldly and insolently to Joe of Ingham; she had forced herself in upon him when he did not want her; she had come openly in a white lace dress--he remembered the lace that hung from the shadow's sleeve--and made herself as conspicuous as possible--why? And as Herrick asked himself these questions in the darkness he could almost have believed himself surrounded by the darkness of that night; the brisk strumming of the orchestra was not much like Ingham's piano, but it had the same excited hurry of those last few moments; and Herrick's mind called up again the light, bright surface of the blind and then the shadow of the woman cast upon it, lithe and tense, with uplifted arm, the fingers stiffening in the air. His eyes sprang open, and there before him, on the pictured screen, among the moving figures of the play, was the same shadow, with uplifted arm, the fingers spreading and stiffening in the air. Then in the movement of the scene, the shadow turned clean round and disclosed Christina's face. CHAPTER XV "WHEN STARS GROW COLD" Herrick sat without moving while the shadows played out their play. But he saw them no longer. They had begun and ended for him with that certainty which it seemed to him, now, that he had always felt. When Christina's film came round again he watched it carefully all through from the beginning. The play was of some western episode, and he saw Christina come on, a spare slip of a girl in short skirts and long braids, a little awkward, a little jerky, like a suspicious colt, and he observed quite coolly what she had gained in five years. He saw Denny come on, dressed as a Mexican--cast for the villain even then!--and he saw for himself how greatly Denny had been her superior in those days, and all the method and knowledge which she had absorbed from him as she absorbed everything from everybody; and Herrick smiled there, in the darkness, to think of it. As the action of the play quickened it shook the novice from her self-consciousness; the promise of her great talent began to show; already she did things that were magnificent; and when at last her wedding was interrupted at the church door by the Mexican's attempt to claim her as his sweetheart, her fire and fury became superb. Herrick leaned forward watching. He saw Denny pour out his accusation, he saw the bridegroom hesitate, he saw Christina sweep round denouncing them both, saw the lithe, tense length of her, and her proudly lifted head, saw her suddenly fling one arm up and out in her strange and splendid gesture of her free, her desperate passion; the hand clenched for an instant and then the fingers slowly spreading and stiffening in the air. He waited for the shot, but no shot came. Only once more the shadow turned and revealed the young face of Christina, as she was at seventeen, and shone upon him through the darkness with Christina's eyes. Herrick rose to his feet and pushed out of the theater. The streets were full of wind and rain, but he did not know it, and along the crowded crossings, among multitudes that he did not see, he had the luck of the drunken and the blind. He walked for hours without knowing where he went. His soaked clothes hung on him like lead and the wind pounded him and made him wrestle with it, but the burning poison of his thoughts could not be put out by wind or rain. Towards nightfall he found himself at the door of the house where he lived, and having nothing else to do, he went in. His sitting-room was dark and cold; he threw himself into a chair and lounged there, sodden with fatigue and wet, and staring at the empty grate. There, when it was all aglow, had she leaned to him and put her face to his and lied. As she had lied to Ingham, waking on his breast! As she had lied to Denny, folded in his arms! Harlot and liar, liar and cheat--oh, liar, liar, liar! For that was the poison in the wound, and the bitterness beyond death--that not for one hour had she been true! That flower-sweetness of her dear touch, of her hand in his, was as corrupt as hell. His dear, wild, brave, demure Diana had never drawn one breath of life--and the adventuress who wore her masque had all along laughed at him in her sleeve! If she had only told him! It was a challenge he could have met and carried; he felt his hand lock on Christina's, strong to draw her from any quicksand of which she struggled to be free. But that she should have fooled him and played with him and led him blindfold, that she should have gone out of her way to snare and laugh at him--what one of the lies with which she had been waiting for him this noon could he now believe? She had betrayed and thrown over Ingham for Denny as she had thrown over Denny for him, and as she had thrown him over for Ten Euyck! She had played them all four against each other--them, and how many others!--as in her insatiable vanity she would yet throw Ten Euyck over for some new fool! She was all vanity and nothing else; foul in her heart and scheming in her tongue, cruel, cheating, worthless! Oh, Christina, oh, sweet, my sweet--liar, liar, liar!--oh, Christina!--you! How could you? He sprang up; going to his sideboard, he poured out a strong drink of the raw liquor and drained the glass. And as he stood there, with the rank fire coursing through his exhaustion, the chilled stiffness of his body and the heavy reeking damp of his crumpled clothes gave way to a terrible warm sense of life and pain, and to a hunger, such as he had never known, for that pain to be eased. Only one thing on earth could ease it and that was the sight of Christina's face. He struck a light and looked at his watch. It was eight o'clock. In the mirror opposite he could see his leaden face, stiff with soil and weariness and framed in his moist, rumpled hair. He looked at it with a sense of its being very ugly and unseemly, and that the dull red beginning to creep into it from the whiskey was uglier and unseemlier still. His body weighed upon him horribly, it seemed to creak and prickle in its reluctant joints, and to loom up tangibly before him, as if he saw double. But his spirit was very light and fierce and swift, and throbbed in him, mad to be out of jail. Mechanically he got his hat, and started for Christina's theater. He did not want to speak to her, to have any sort of dealings with her; but see her he must. It was a need like any other, but stronger than any other; not to be argued with. Now that he knew her, he must see her. That would cure him. Let him see her once more and he could forget her in peace. Something heavy, like his body, told him that this wouldn't do; this was death and damnation, this would destroy him through and through! And he replied that he hated her, and would forget her, and never wished to pass another word with her! But see her this once more, he must. Once more! Through the night and the pouring rain, the lights of her theater began to gleam. They gleamed on arriving motors; on high hats and snowy shirt-fronts, on opera cloaks and jeweled hair. Despite the storm, the city had driven forth to do homage to the new star. The candles at Christina's altar were burning high and clear; the lobby, all brightness and warmth, was filled with delicate rustlings, frou-frous of light feet and chattering voices and soft, merry sounds, idle excitement. There was a little sparkle on all faces; the glimmer reflected from Christina's eyes. In all men's mouths was the sound of her name. Not last night had been more crowded nor more brilliant. And Herrick was very quiet and knew quite well how to behave. There would not be a seat left at the box-office, nor would he appeal to the management. He pushed to the center of the little crowd around a speculator; then, clutching his ticket, went in. Just as last night, the ushers ran up and down the aisles, and the seats clapped into place; just as last night, he was surrounded by a garden of chiffon and satin and perfume, of gossip and murmur. The audience, a little nervous, was waiting to be thrilled. The overture was in, and the music quivered through Herrick as the drink had done. He sat there very still, muddy and damp, with a wilted collar, a rough head, and no gloves; there was a little fixed smile on his lips and he stared at the curtain. He couldn't see through it. But soon it must go up. He was nothing but one waiting expectancy. They played a second overture and this did not surprise him. Then he saw Wheeler, dressed for the first act, come before the curtain. And his smile broke. Because the delay was so terrible. Then he realized that Wheeler was making a speech. "You can imagine, ladies and gentlemen, with what regret I am obliged to inform you that there will be no performance this evening. On account of the sudden illness of Miss Christina Hope the theater will be closed for to-night." There was something about getting back money at the box-office. Herrick continued to sit there, unable to accept what had happened to him. He wasn't going to see her! It was the snatching back of food from a starving man; he had laid his lips to the spring in the desert and found it dry! The thing wasn't possible. All his nature had been running violently forward, and the shock of its stoppage stupefied him. As for any concern over Christina's illness, it never occurred to him. By-and-by he stood a long while on the corner of the street, not knowing where to go. He was not so lost as to seek Christina in person, and after his recent vigil there his own rooms were insupportable to him. Presently some one jostled him, and he was face to face with Wheeler. "Great God, man!" Wheeler said. "Where have you been! What are you standing here for! We've been looking for you all afternoon. Called up your rooms a dozen times! Deutch and Mrs. Hope and I, we've scoured the city--been to the Tombs, the District Attorney's, Police Headquarters, everywhere. The Inghams are raving crazy. Ten Euyck's worse. Well, and how about me? After all it's my loss! Everything's been done that can be done. By to-morrow morning the whole city of New York'll be hit by a tornado. This little old town's going to get the shock of its life and go right off its trolley! Say something! Don't stand there like a stuck pig! Speak, can't you? Have you got any idea?" Herrick heard his own voice saying, "Is she so ill?" "Ill? Heavens and earth--you didn't swallow that drool, did you? Where have you been? Ill? No, the girl's gone--vanished, kidnapped, run away, whatever you like. She's disappeared!" BOOK THIRD WILL O' THE WISP CHAPTER I GLEAMS IN THE RAIN: WHEELER'S STORY Herrick made no outcry at Wheeler's words. He simply stood looking out into the wet and windy spaces of Times Square, where the great splashes of colored lights wavered and shone in manifold reflections on the gleaming pavement. And a tremendous and ultimate change arose like new life in his heart. There is a common human fallacy, touching and perhaps profounder than we know, by which we instinctively assume any person in danger to be an innocent person. To both men the missing girl was now in danger. It occurred no more to Herrick than to Wheeler that Christina, by any possibility whatever, could have voluntarily deserted a performance. Something had happened. Inevitably, Herrick remembered the once laughed at Arm of Justice. Had it known, all along, what the shadow on the screen had told him to-day? A hundred references of hers, a hundred inconsistencies, were solved at a stroke. Alone with that insensate malignity which he had himself encountered, had she now tried to break some blackmailing game and--lost?--He remembered with a horrid shock that once let her be identified with the shadow on the blind and in the eyes of the law she became the perjured witness of a murder, accessory before and after!--Threatened, thus, on every side, Christina's face seemed to flower for him there, on the night sky; as once, upon a foggy afternoon just as the wind began to rise, it had shone on him in the rainy street--when Christina had first held out her hand to him and said, "Try to believe that perhaps she was in distress, after all!" In what hectic hot-house had he been stifling?--It was as though, in this wild hour of sweeping rain and blowing air, of lights that flashed and changed in the surrounding darkness, of isolation amid the myriad noises of the theater traffic and the clanging trolleys, he heard, of a sudden, Christina's cry for help; as though, running out into the freedom of the storm, he gained her side of the road and took her hand. It might be the hand of an outlaw, it was empty, forever, of any love or hope for him; but he could feel it, now, in his and he did not care against what world, whether his own or hers, he held it. For their personal relation was no longer the great thing. The great thing could be only that somewhere beyond him in the darkness, desperately needing help, _she was_. And the next thing was to find her. "Well," he heard himself say to Wheeler in a commonplace voice, "let's hear about it." "I want to eat something beside trouble!" Wheeler groaned. "Come in across the way. Stan's to 'phone there at nine." Instinctively they chose a table by a window, as though in the great street she had loved so much and won so lately, they might see her hurrying by. The restaurant was almost empty, but the news was already there. It peered out of the cigar-smoke of the men to whom Wheeler curtly nodded; it questioned them from the waiter's face. "Where'll I begin?" asked Wheeler. "Well, this afternoon they wouldn't let me see Denny. But I met Stan, and he told me Chris had jumped her appointment with Kane, never brought her witness! Partly, I could have choked the girl--and, partly, I couldn't believe it of her. I called up her house and I've been jumping ever since." And he poured out a story of haste and confusion, of friends interrogated, detectives summoned, of a mother more ignorant than any one and more prostrated.--"God, Herrick, I'm sick! The girl's such a monkey, up to the last minute I hoped she'd show up! About seven Kane got me over the coals. Wonder what he's hit the trail so hard for? He'd had his suspicions of the Park,--the little Cornish girl was last seen, you remember, going that way--but the police have searched every bush for hours. The Inghams are all stewed up with him and Stanley's wished on to him like a burr. The first thing he said to me was, 'At what time did Mrs. Hope inform you of her daughter's absence? Don't hesitate--I can remind you. She never informed you at all!' Was he trying to see if I'd lie to him? What does he think I've done with her? But funny thing--Mrs. Hope and the Deutches had been worrying round looking for that girl all day and yet she'd never consulted me! Look here, it's not possible--No, what cause would she have to harm herself?--Mrs. Hope blames herself because last night when Christina didn't come home--You didn't know that? Well, she didn't. Her mother thought she was at the Deutches, out of temper. You knew she quarreled with her mother about Ten Euyck? They nearly knifed each other!" "For God's sake," said Herrick, "tell me whatever you know!" Across his shoulder the zest of Broadway seemed to peer and listen. But it was too late to consider that. "You see, last night's supper has been delicate ground from the beginning. Before I knew what the Inghams had planned I asked Christina to come to supper with me--to bring her mother and any one she liked. She seemed to be down on Denny since he and that Cornish girl disagreed and, as a particular bait, I mentioned you. I knew she was interested in you. And when she isn't interested, the Lord help her host! Well, she preferred my scheme to the Inghams'--she seems to have shown all along the most ungodly resistance to their help or countenance in any way! But I could see, as well as her mother, which was best for my leading-woman, and she finally gave in. It's remarkable how entirely one thinks of Christina as the head of the house, and yet how often she does give in--what an influence her mother has over her when she has any at all!" He drained his long glass with a sigh. "But last night, right after the performance, Mrs. Hope comes running into my dressing-room, well--as I may say, at death's door. Christina was going off to supper with Ten Euyck. You can understand that I didn't listen to her then as I should now. She wanted me, as the only person Christina would be likely to take a word from, to reason with her. I said, 'Yes, yes. By-and-by.' I only wanted to shut her up, you understand. For just then, in the first flush of Christina's triumph, I didn't any more think of interfering with her than with the sun in heaven! I won't say I'd been rehearsing an angel unawares, but the girl had grown, in that one night, way out of my sphere. I thought probably Ten Euyck had just prostrated himself and she'd gone a little off her head, and no wonder! It didn't seem necessarily so terrible to me. But the old lady is a great stickler for the proprieties--yes, and for all her talk, Christina has her own eye on social splendor! It's one thing not to receive people and it's quite another not to have them call!--When I'd got rid of my friends and had given Christina time to get rid of hers, I went round to thank her and congratulate her and at the same time to ask her if she didn't think she was doing the Inghams a pretty dirty trick. There stood my young lady dressed out--I was going to say 'to kill'--why, to make Solomon in all his glory turn pale and fade away! Great Scott!--She looked like the kingdoms of the earth and the wonders thereof! Christina is always bewailing the money she owes but you may have noticed that, for a poor working-girl, she does herself rather well in frocks. Mrs. Hope was sitting quiet in a corner, quashed, and Christina was humming--'Auld acquaintance,' if you please!--to herself in front of the glass. 'Auld acquaintance,' indeed! I thought of Denny, and how he'd stood by this radiant image through thick and thin--in a way, you might say, made her! And though you'll forgive a good deal to a first night like that, I began to agree with the people who say she hasn't any heart. And then I saw--" "Yes--" "I saw she had a long string of diamonds twisted round her neck. 'Great God, girl!' I said, 'where did those come from?'" "And she answered?" Wheeler had been speaking slower and slower and now, for a long time, it seemed as if he were not going to speak at all. Then "She answered, 'They have come from Cuyler Ten Euyck. But don't breathe it. It has just killed dear mamma.'" "Well, go on." "Her mother got up at that and started to go. But Christina stopped her at the door and took hold of her arm. 'Mother,' she said, 'what does it matter? Oh, my poor mother, can't you see that whatever happens we have done with respectability? It's inevitable, it must be done. And to-night or to-morrow, what does it matter? Twenty-four hours, one way or the other, and then--mud to the right of us, mud to the left of us, and unto dust we shall return!' I thought they were the strangest words that ever came out of a girl's mouth on the night of what you might call her coronation!" "And Mrs. Hope?" "Mrs. Hope just took her daughter's hand off her arm and walked out of the door and out of the theater.--Well," said Wheeler, with a deep sigh, "it wasn't for me to do that. I'm a pretty long way from a Puritan! All the same, this thing made me sick. 'Chris,' said I, 'don't go with him! Take off those damned diamonds and tell him to go to hell! You can soon make diamonds for yourself, old girl!' She looked up, singing, in my face. And that's the last I saw of her." "Go on!" "My boy, you need a drink!" "And Ten Euyck says--?" "Oh, poor Ten Euyck--his dignity can't bend, so it's all cracked. He took her to supper at the Palisades and she left early." The Palisades was a new roadhouse up the river and the rage of that summer. "The zealous creature has even run to Kane and disgorged the names of his guests. So it leaks out that, once the poor soul had unbent so far as to be seen with an actress, he couldn't be devilish by halves. It seems miss was annoyed at the character of said guests, as well as at finding supper served in a private room. So with the offended majesty of an injured queen, she withdrew to no less public a spot than the entrance porch. There she sat, swathed in her cloak and with her skirts drawn about her, till the arrival of the cab she had insisted upon." Wheeler broke into a laugh. "That girl," he said, "is the devil himself!" "And that--was that the very--last--?" "Exactly. There she is, togged out in a white, silky crepe-y, trail-y dress, embroidered in silver, and a white lace opera cloak. In these useful and inconspicuous garments, she vanishes." His grim grin soured. "You know what they'll all say! Kane tells the Inghams she couldn't catch Ten Euyck so surely as with an irritant. She took, of all ways, the way to hold him. Why, she left him in public--him, the invulnerable corrector of women! He'll never rest until she is seen, in public, hanging on his arm! And then the man values his diamonds at forty thousand dollars!" "She drove off alone, at midnight, in a taxicab, with forty thousand dollars' worth of diamonds round her neck--" "Yes, and the cabman was discharged this morning for drunkenness! Stan's to 'phone if they've found him. Oh, but look here--take it slow! She 'phoned Ten Euyck's house at eight this morning and left a message, openly, with her name! The servant who took the message describes exactly that trailing voice of hers--'tell him he may come for his necklace to-night!'" "Come! Come where?" "Search me! Or Ten Euyck, either, from the foam on his mouth!--Well, doesn't that put it up that wherever she 'phoned from they got on to the diamond necklace. So, where was she? You and I, we know old Chris--we know, after all, that she just went somewhere for the night on account of her quarrel with her mother. But, oh, lord, Herrick, who else is going to believe it? The whole braying pack of this intelligent world--all it can think of's dirt--the devilish gay sensation of the whole business! Christina Hope! D'you think there's a bank clerk or a submissive wife that won't recognize her proper atmosphere at a glance? You and I and little Stan--a poor author, a profane actor and a brat! In a few hours that's what her kingdom's crumbled to--'that was so wondrous sweet and fair!' Police and all, there's the spirit in which they're going to look for her, and that's going to be one of the worst things in our way. Well, I'm not a rich man and our precious kid's just about ruined me this night! But I've done for her what may bust me sky-high and worth it--I've offered ten thousand for her--safe, you understand! It ought to be in to-night's late editions, so by now, in one spirit or the other, this town's out after her like a hound!--Eh? All right! It's Stan, now!" Herrick sat there staring into the street. A newsboy ran past with the last extra of the evening. Two of the interested smokers had just left the restaurant and now stopped in the rain to buy a paper, opening and scanning the flapping sheets against the wind. Ah, yes, of course! He, too, sent for a paper. Yes, there, on the first page--scare headings, but in itself the meagerest fact. Scarcely even insinuations yet--"friends fear some serious accident," "friends deny suicide," "suspicious circumstance--Ten Euyck necklace"--Wheeler's reward, and news three hours old. When he looked up the square seemed full of newsboys; several people as they came into the restaurant had papers in their hands. She was just news, now; disreputable news! "The town's out after her like a hound!"--Wheeler's hand was on his shoulder. "No cabman yet. But they want you, Herrick, on the 'phone." Stanley's voice told him only to hold the wire. Then a crisper tone asked pleasantly, "Mr. Herrick? This is Henry Kane. I just wanted to ask you--you had an appointment with Miss Hope for noon to-day. If you didn't know she was not at home, why didn't you keep it?" How sharply the trap bit! "You've had no communication with her since last evening? Nothing happened to arouse your anxiety? Nor distrust? No, nothing? And yet, just as it began to rain, you started for a walk in a light suit--or" (the telephone itself seemed to give forth a dry smile) "what I am told was once a light suit, and walked about all day in an equinoctial storm! Taking yourself to the theater at night without changing, without shaving, without dining, but still carrying on your person a good deal of the surface of the earth and of the waters under the earth! Well, sorry to have disturbed you. Only my dear sir, don't trouble yourself to conceal too much. Don't fancy yourself the only man in New York who has been to a moving-picture show." Kane hung up the receiver. That stunned, sick, silent curse of the man on the wrong side of the law! This attorney fellow was like a hound after her, too! He, then, since he was so clever, in God's name let him find her and find her--soon! It was all he asked!--As Herrick stepped out of the booth into the corridor of mirrors that ran through the building to the next street a page boy came briskly up the gilded lane, pattering out a phrase that washed across Herrick's mind in a wave of sound dimly familiar; he saw the boy turn into the orangerie and through the glass-screen he vaguely watched him wend his way between the little green tables with their golden lamps, lifting his flatted tones into the orange-scented air so that its mechanical legend was caught by trailing vines and mingled with the plashing of a little fountain. His mind aimlessly followled the boy's cry till it was lost in the music of a mezzanine orchestra hidden in the foliage of a tame tropical jungle! This was what they called civilization--this trash which had achieved no mechanism to find her, to protect her! But which could know that she had been struck out of its midst and yet sit there in its futile nonsense, stuffing--A voice rose from the velvet lounge beside him in the toneless delivery of one who reads aloud. It was reading the extra's account of a gesture in a moving picture show. "The police say that boys began reporting it before noon, and, the attention of the theater having been called to the film, its patrons are now offered a thrill of realism by the piano in the orchestra accompanying the gesture with the march from Faust. This time, it will be remembered..." Oh, no doubt it would be remembered! Its exultant shout sounded like the hunter's cry after her now, winged by Wheeler's offer of ten thousand dollars! Doubtless the film would be repeated on the morrow, that all the world might steel its heart as it watched with its own eyes Christina Hope moving with that motion to that time! Oh, for something to do! Some untried search, some shrewder question! Something to do, to suffer, to dare--some clue--some suggestion--Denny! Had they tried Denny? He who knew so much at the least would set them right, would know and would tell them that she had never deserted his cause of her own free will, that he who knew her believed in her--Wheeler came out into the lobby and took him by the arm. He, too, had bought a paper and now he held it under Herrick's eyes. "This is why I couldn't see him, then!" In the Tombs that afternoon, Denny had again attempted suicide. So that was how he proclaimed his confidence! He had somehow got hold of a knife, but the blow aimed at his heart had been averted by a watchful guard and he had received only fleshwounds--one in the left shoulder, one in the left forearm. A little ludicrous, a little sickening that a man so expert in killing another should always bungle about killing himself! But he had been prompt enough and successful enough in setting upon the girl who had failed him the brand of his despair! Who would credit, now, that he did not believe in her flight? Herrick felt a thickness in his throat; with a longing for fresh, dark spaces he pushed open a door of the lobby and was confronted by the city, glittering in wet gold. There, up Long Acre, lay the heart of her world. And from down where the bronze workmen struck the hours in Herald Square up past where the gathering streets parted again under a new electric girl, high in the sky, who winked a knowing colossal eye over a rainbow cocktail, what faith did it keep with her? Her flight, her shadow on the screen, they burned in a newer sky-sign, they flashed a fearful but a more stirring legend! This swept up the thoroughfare that never colors itself more like Harlequin than in its mirrors of wet asphalt and sped down every side street starred with theaters where, between the acts, men gathered and returned with news, and it became clear to thrilling audiences that so long as there had been nothing against this Christina Hope she had meant to tell some tale to Kane in Denny's behalf--it would have been a pretty piece of acting--but the mute witness of the shadow had broken her down. She had fled from that writing on the screen--even in the dressing-rooms they would say that! And later, in all these hot, bright jardins de danse that yesterday were cabarets, these cabarets that were restaurants yesterday, among the pellucid proprieties of slit skirts, tango turns, and trotting music it would be said that all along Denny had kept at least the half of his silence for Christina's sake. Oh, street of a thousand feverish tongues, how she loved you! And why did she leave you? Where is she, and where is she? How near, how far? "Where is she? And how doth she?" There lay her theater; what stroke could be so heavy as to drive her from that? "The Victors!" Leave "The Victors!" There were great blurs of light before the billboards. But the wind tore through them at the boards, struggling to wrench the signs away. Fierce as it was it was still rising and it ran like a crazy newsboy whooping through the world, senseless as the cry of the page that came nearer and nearer. So that Wheeler said, "Good lord, man, don't you know your own name?" Yes, that was what the boy had been saying all along--"Herr--ick! Herr--ick! Mr. Bry--us Herrick!" "No card, sir. Forty-fifth Street entrance. In a taxi, sir. A lady wants to speak to you." CHAPTER II CORPSE CANDLES IN THE NIGHT: MRS. DEUTCH'S STORY The monstrous hope died almost in the pang that gave it birth. The lady who leaned out to him from the cab, putting aside her heavy veil, showed him the troubled countenance of Henrietta Deutch. It came to him even then that he had arrived at the turning of a corner. So that he was surprised when she said to him, "Oh, sir, where have you been? Sir, sir, have you any news?" She had none, then! "Hours have I waited and waited at your rooms! There the young Ingham sends me word that you are here. We have hoped always you might be with her! Oh, dear heaven! You know nothing, young sir? Nothing at all?" "Nothing." She drew back. "Tell me only this. Are you--for her, Mr. Herrick? Or _rid_ of her?" Herrick replied, "Well, what do you think?" She, whom grief somehow became and illumined like her native and revealing element, peered into his haggard face, worn and soiled and sharpened and grim. "Then, young gentleman, I am asked by Mrs. Hope if of her daughter you have any word or trace, do not give it to the police." What? Herrick felt something cold breaking about the roots of his hair. Then this clinging, this devoted mother did not want her daughter found!--"She said nothing more than this?" "Nothing more." He digested it in silence and it was with a heavy gathering dread that when she asked him to drive home with her he put himself in her hands. Then, in what seemed a single convulsion of the storm, the taxi rocked to a standstill before the Deutch apartment. As Mrs. Deutch sprung on the light their eyes vainly quested for some envelope beneath the door; she went out again to the mail-box, to the elevator, inquiring for a message. Then the woman and the young man, not knowing where to turn next, sat down amid the emptiness of those walls which had so often held Christina. Here, more than ever, everything said, "She must be just round the corner! Where is she? Where can she be?" And still Herrick knew that Mrs. Hope's message was but a part of what he had to hear and that his hostess still groped for terms in which to tell the rest. The pause lay heavy between them. Then, "Young gentleman," said Mrs. Deutch, "you love my Christina, is it not so?" "Don't make me laugh!" Herrick desolately replied. She rose. "Then I will say to you what I have long had on my heart." She opened the door. The halls were empty. She turned the key in the lock, and glanced at the closed windows; sitting close to him again she laid a kind hand on his. "Mr. Herrick, there is something wrong with Hermann Deutch. There is something in his mind to make him crazy. And in the last days--say it is two or three--it makes him crazier all the while. Yes, this is so. It is fear. And something that he will not tell. He knows something, and it makes him afraid. It has been so since he went up to the room of Mr. Ingham on _that_ night." Herrick looked down at her hand and then he put his other hand atop of both and gave hers a little pressure. "Mrs. Deutch, what is it that you know about that night? Don't be afraid of me. Don't be afraid for me. What is it?" "Oh, my young sir, I am ready to tell you. Yesterday, no. But to-day, when all the world has seen the shadow-picture, yes--why not? On that night till very late I was away. For I had a friend with a sick baby, and nurses one can not always pay. When I came to the basement gate there was in our flat no lights. But when I went in there was my husband, with his coat over his shirt, standing, listening, in the dark. And he said, 'Christina is upstairs!'--very cross and ugly. I said, 'At Ingham's? Why, what for?--Why,' I said, before he could tell it to me, 'are you out of your mind that you should let her go up there with that man at midnight?' He said, 'Tell me the one thing. How would you have prevented her from going up?'" They smiled at one another, ruefully, as at an evocation of Christina. "'Oh, my God!' he cries out. 'There is going to be trouble! Mr. Denny, he has found out why she quarreled with that Ingham, yesterday. She says he will kill him. She wants that Ingham should go away.'" "Do you know why they did quarrel?" "No, neither of us. Never at all.--But then, I started to go up to her, by the freight elevator as he had taken her. Down that back hall we did not hear the shot. But the telephone made us halt. Joe told us." The clasp of Herrick's hand lent her its reassurance and she went on. "My husband was all at once like a man in a fit. He seemed to have no head. He is not to say fearful, but he is the way men are. 'Go!' I said, 'Hasten! It may be that it is he who himself shot!' And this gave him heart to go upstairs. Then comes to me Christina, slipping along from the back. I saw her white dress in the dark. And then she came into a little patch of light and put her finger to her lips. I ran and pulled her in and shut the door. And I took her in my arms to warm her, for she was made all of ice. 'Is he dead?' I asked her. And she shivered out, 'Oh, a doctor! Get a doctor! Go up to him, Tante Deutch! And hurry!' she would say, 'Hurry!' But, indeed, I thought there was enough with him. I asked her the one thing: 'Who did it?' She looked at me with her lips all wide apart. But not a name would she breathe out. Neither then nor to this day. And by that I knew it was Mr. Denny. For no man but him would she be so still. Or not then, when you she did not yet know." The color rushed into Herrick's face. But he could not speak and Mrs. Deutch went on. "I asked her not one thing more. I held her and tried to give her comfort, and at first she clung to me. She did not cry, but by and by she would sit alone, waiting, listening, and her nostrils made themselves large. But at last it was only my husband who came, and Christina flew up and looked at him. And her eyes were big and wild with questions, but still speak she would not. But my husband's face, Mr. Herrick, it was the face of him who has been struck, who has been stabbed. Not then nor now do I know why that look he has. But it is not gone, it grows worse. He said only to Christina, looking straight at her, 'You left your scarf!' and his voice had in it a sound that was hard. She looked at him a long time, and she said, 'Very well, then. I shall know what to do!' At that moment, see you, she said to herself, 'Me they will suspect, and not him!' And oh, my brave heart, her mind she made up: 'So be it!' We kept her there till just before dawn. And then, because of her white lace dress, we put upon her my old black coat and hat, and both of us went home with her that she might be the less looked at. She let herself in, and all the rest you know. Only--" "Only that Deutch knows something more!" "And in all our life the one with the other, it is to me the one thing he has not told. He is not a secret man. Mr. Herrick, here is what makes my heart heavy. This thing--it is something not good for our little girl or he would have told it long ago! But to-day when she vanishes like that other girl who was her friend, he tells it to the mother of Christina!" So, that was why! Herrick rose. No hour seemed too late, no scene too strange. "Mrs. Hope will have to tell me!" he said. Henrietta Deutch rose, too, and put her hands on his two shoulders, as if at once to comfort and control. She said, "She is not here!" "Not where?" "Not in New York. She is gone. She has fled away that she need not tell at all. A train to some other city where there are boats for Europe--he says it is best I know no more. He has gone West somewhere. You see, he must have thought Christina, too, has fled. And what he told her mother, it has made them not dare to stay. My poor boy!" said Mrs. Deutch, tightening her hold of Herrick, "my poor boy!" "It's all right!" Herrick said, "It's all right! They're wrong, that's all! They're wrong!" He moved up and down the room with long, excited strides. False lights of misery--horrible corpse candles, leading their lying way toward that which was bitterer than a new-made grave!--"Why, Denny did it! We all know that! You've just said so, yourself!" "Ah, yes, truly. Surely! But--yet--" "What could Deutch have seen that we didn't see? We were all there--he only went in with us. He may guess something--he can't know. What are we all afraid of?" "And yet," said Mrs. Deutch, "we are all afraid!" There was a brisk knock on the door. The newcomer smiled grimly at them from under a dripping hat brim. "I hope I'm welcome," he said. It was the District Attorney. He seemed to take his own appearance quite naturally and perhaps he was not averse to their being stunned by it. Standing with his back against the door he removed his hat and rubbed his hand over the wet mark across his forehead. "Mrs. Deutch? As soon as my assistants get here I want to try an experiment in the Ingham apartment. You're rather an exceptional--janitress, madam! I think I'm going to ask you at once if there isn't some story connected with your marriage to Hermann Deutch. It looks as though there must have been scandal of some sort to account for it." The wife's glow of indignation maintained in silence an unruffled dignity. After awhile she said very slowly, "It is true. There was a scandal. It did make our marriage." Herrick's defensive frown faltered over a sense of something coming true. He knew, now, that he had always felt in that rich simplicity of Henrietta Deutch a superiority somehow mysterious. Yes, he had always seen that figure of domestic tranquillity as not wholly detached from a dense background, somehow somber and mysterious. "Before you commit yourself on that point, just tell me who or what enforces obedience with a triangular knife?--Let her alone!" For Mrs. Deutch had uttered a dreadful cry. It was low, but full of incredible pain. Kane grinned triumphantly at Herrick. "Great heaven!" Herrick begged. "What is it? What do you know?" "Here! Let's sit down and get at this! Mrs. Deutch, this is nearer than you think to our young lady. Best help me!" "Wait! A moment! No, what I know it is far from Christina. It happened before she was born. But I will tell it. You shall judge." A long painful breath labored from her bosom. Then she spoke. "The scandal was this. My father died in prison. He was imprisoned for his life. He was accused that he had killed a child." "Yes. Well, go on." "It begins long before, with my home in Germany. My father was a merchant of wines there, and he had in business relations with a Neapolitan family named Gabrielli. Their son, Emile, was my brother's friend.----Emile Gabrielli, Herrick's Italian lawyer, who had suggested his novel!" "I had but the one brother; for my mother was never strong and of her children only two grew up. We were very old fashioned; we lived in comfort but we had neither the new thoughts nor the new manners. Only my brother was very advanced. He was so modern that when he looked upon us, even, it gave him exasperation. His friend was not of his faith. But that was so old-fashioned a thought it could not be at all mentioned before him. Well, then, I--too--for one thing perhaps we are all enough advanced! I came to love Emile. He loved me, too. And no one was pleased--not even my brother! But, after a long time, when they began to think I, too, was falling ill like all the rest who died, we were betrothed. And my father sold his business out and bought a vineyard in Sicily, near to the estate of Emile's father, taking there my mother, whose health failed." Yes, with the bewildered indifference of his own emotion, Herrick remembered the miniature of which the parents of that sentimental gentleman had not been able to deprive him and recognized the changed original in Henrietta Deutch. "And one morning, walking far before breakfast, my father came upon a dead little boy under a bush among some rocks. He brought it to our home in his arms; it was the baby of a poor farmer. It had been stabbed between the little shoulders. And there was a strange, three-cornered wound." She stopped and her hands stirred in her lap. But she clasped them and went on. "My father was accused. Witnesses appeared against him with strange tales. How could we make ourselves believed. I have told you how he fared. "Do you think my brother could rest? He left his law in Germany; he came to Sicily to fight, to hunt, to turn every stone. He was found like the child. There was the same three-cornered mark." Kane gave a low whistle. "My mother and I, we were all alone." She smoothed out a little fold in her dress. "We had but the one message from the family of my betrothed--that they withdrew the word of their son." Kane looked up quickly. "Yes?" he urged. "And then?" "Then came to us Hermann Deutch, who in the old days sold our wine. He gave us escort to Naples, for my mother could go no farther, and returned to attend our property. It was all in a ruin. The house had burned. The cattle were gone. The laborers, too, nor would any return. The land none would buy. It was a place accursed. Our money was soon all gone." She paused, struggling with a sudden sob. "Hermann Deutch, to stay on he had lost his position, and he took one that was poor but in Naples, to be near me. He was all that came near us, who had word or dealing with us, while my mother grew too weak to live. When she, too, died, I married him. There was the scandal, sir, to account for my marriage." She looked with deep, mild scorn at Kane. He remained imperturbable, while Herrick blushed for him. "There was one thing more. Mr. Deutch had spent much for us and before he could take me from Naples he must save something from what work he had. One month came upon another in that terrible city and we had not gone. So the time came when I, like other women, thought to have a child. One night there were fire-works at the seashore and, to liven my mind, he made me go. As we came home there was a lonely bit of beach, though toward the cars. Out of the dark a voice called some words at us and something fell--it rang on a stone at our feet. They had thrown a kind of dagger. Sirs," said Mrs. Deutch, "it was a triangular knife." Kane gave a cry with a strange note of satisfaction. But the tears were running down Mrs. Deutch's face. "The shock and the fear, they were too much for me. I never bore my child. God has never given me a child to love except Christina. Tell me what all this can be to her?" "Do you know what aphasia is, Mrs. Deutch? And doesn't Mr. Deutch suffer, occasionally, from a confusion of words?" "Not so much that it could be called by a name. Except that one time. Mr. Deutch has been all his life an excited man. And when that knife fell at my feet he was like one crazed. Then he forgot language, sir, and could not speak well for days. English and German he ran together, and what of French he knows with what Italian. Though he knew well what he wished to say. And there is yet a smear in his brain where the words may sometimes a little mix together. But--Christina?" "Mrs. Deutch, what did all this suggest to you? Of what did you think you were the victims?" "Imagine yourselves that it was in a time of one of those outcries against Jewish people which come like stupid fever as though nations, ignorantly, have eaten too much in strong sun. They needed to blame some one and, just then, in blaming us they could blame as they would." "H'm!--Do either of you know what happened at the Tombs this afternoon?" "The papers say that Mr. Denny has tried to kill himself." "Well, and very obliging of them. But, for a desperate man, he gave himself rather queer wounds--scratches in the shoulder and arm. The guard ran for the doctor and seems to be running yet. But where was our suicide really cut to the bone? On the insides of his hands!" He had produced his sensation. "The guard was one of the new Italian contingent. And the blow aimed by an Italian, then, at the prisoner's heart and caught by his arm, was given with a triangular knife!" They were all three on their feet. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Deutch, for my opening gallery play with you. I didn't know the tragedy I was running into. And our friend Herrick, here, and the excellent Wheeler both tried to hoodwink me to-night when I asked them straight questions. You're going to tell me the truth, I know, for now I'm telling it to you. We got hold of your husband at the Pennsylvania Station. Our intelligent police tried to frighten him with the stab of Denny's triangular prick and they succeeded in putting him clean out of the game with aphasia--sensory aphasia. Word blindness--speech or writing--heavens, what a gag! But don't be alarmed; fortunately it goes with a perfectly clear mind and it's only temporary. Only--time's everything! Well, it gave me the cue to come up here and dig for some three-cornered mystery, blackmailing if procurable, in Deutch's life. Every District-Attorney his own detective! Yes--when it's this District-Attorney and this crime--Amen! Amen!--What is it?" "Oh, sir, the Italian!" "Yes?" "All morning one hung about the house of Mrs. Hope. Not coming near, but watching, watching. A little, slim, soft, pretty man, in gentleman's clothes. And it made her afraid." "Ah!" "Look here, the fellow in the park--the one with the message--he was an Italian! They all were!" "Exactly! Now--Mrs. Deutch, what was that old secret in the life of the Hopes which turned the daughter into a cynic and a hater of social conventions? Ah, come, please!" "Oh, sir, that was not a great thing!" "What was it?" "The sister of Mr. Hope found letters from him--old letters when Christina was fourteen--written to her who was afterwards his wife. The marriage had been so long forbidden, they were driven to see each other so seldom, secretly, alone, and in strange places. Sir, they were in love and they were very young." "This was not known till Christina was fourteen?" "No, sir." "Then her birth was, of course, legitimate." "Oh, of a surety!" "And this was all?" "All!" Herrick found himself listening with a strange excitement. He could not have told why he had a sudden sense of having touched a spring. That brief revelation of rash love--what was there in that? Such a thing might loom large in a society novel; in the vast, mixed, multitudinous life of men and women it was small enough. How could it arrest his attention at a time like this? As though some small, mysterious, irrelevant key had been slipped into his hand! By the fleeing figure of Mrs. Hope? That amiable, vacant, and correct lady, how could any young and long-dead folly of hers, reaching across a generation, strike down Ingham and shatter a little world? "The little pitted speck"--What was that? What was he remembering now? "The wages of sin are more sinning!" Why, that was the motto he had taken for his novel? Sin? Nonsense! "The little pitted speck in garnered fruit that, rotting inward,--" He woke himself roughly to hear Mrs. Deutch adding, "But they lived with that hard woman, she and her mother, in poverty. And to have it nagged at and flaunted at the mother, it made her a morbid child. No more. But now, sir, the Italians?" "The Italians, indeed! Mrs. Deutch, as you owe them such a grief, as you believe in justice and the protection of the weak, as you have had enough of government by the triangular knife, give me the name of your Christina's Italian host!" CHAPTER III SEARCH-LIGHTS FLASHED IN THE EYES: KANE'S STORY "Well, for one thing," Kane said, "no mortal creature ever looked at that girl and thought her a quitter." He was standing at Ingham's table, wrinkling his eyebrows at the storied blind. "I've come within the fascinations of that young person myself, but I don't think it's infatuation which makes me say that she didn't drop down in a dead faint yesterday afternoon, just to pass the time. When those clear eyes of hers looked at that lock of hair she learned something that astonished and horrified her. From that moment she made up her mind to go somewhere and, at the appointed hour, go she did. Devil take her for not confiding in Mrs. Deutch! She meant, I daresay, to return. But she must have been greeted with the news of the moving picture advertisement and thought herself very well off where she was. Eventually, she'll pull some string from there." He began putting out all lights but the table-lamp. "I fancied, at first, the mother had followed, for she lied about going to Europe. We've had every steamship and railway line watched since long before she left, so she's not beyond the scope of trolleys. But she'd only be a nuisance to the girl, nor is she one to pursue risks--more likely, she just skipped out early to avoid the rush. All sorts of intimidating things have happened lately; then, last night, Christina threatened her with some exposure, this morning she was frightened by an Italian, and the climax has been capped by whatever it was Deutch told her--Don't jump! No, I'm no mind-reader. But I had, of course, the Deutch apartment, as well as yours, wired for a dictograph. Useful thing a dictograph--especially when there are ladies about!" With a happy indifference to the effect of this statement upon Herrick he cast about the room, appearing to sniff up its suggestions and to compare them with a vision in his mind's eye. Absorbed, elate, on edge, tingling with some suspended energy, as he raised the blind and peered out he radiated a good humor somehow inhuman. "That wasn't a taxi? I'm expecting a couple of my boys and," he grinned, "poor Ten Euyck!" He disappeared, bent on examining the bedroom. Herrick still stood, dumb and raging, with his back against the door. In his impotent rebellion against Kane's inferences he had been almost indifferent to the fateful setting of the new scene in that night's hurrying kinetoscope. But slowly this had begun to assume its natural imaginative sway. There were the dim blue walls framed in their outline of smooth, black wood. There before him was the long white blind; to his left the piano where Ingham had sat playing; by stretching out his right hand he could touch the portières of the room in which they had found Ingham's body. It was all in order now. The cushions of the couch had been smoothed and set up. The chair that had lain overturned beside the table had been stood in its proper place, at the edge of the portières, near the door. The newspapers and ashes, the siphon and half-empty glass had been cleared away. The little puddle by the piano stool, too, was gone. All was in order; Ingham's hand might have been about to draw those portières, he might have stepped between them to tell--what? What, the poor fellow persisted, was there to tell? He knew the secret of the shadow on the blind, the secret of the shot in Ingham's breast. Only the one thing was unknown--Who had contrived to bolt the door? That he had always felt the puzzle's essence and its answer; there stole through him again that sense of a skeleton still locked within those walls to be discovered with some recognizing shock; once more his fancy began to search through those hollow rooms in desperate hope, driven by that superstition, by the obstinate unreason with which a starving hand continues to fumble in an empty pocket. Futilest of occupations! The sense of shamed stupidity, of failure in Christina's cause, warned him with a squelching sneer that he was the merest pawn in Kane's hand and that the room would yield its secret, if it had one, to Kane and not to him. At any rate, how could that secret find Christina? And, if he were not looking for Christina, what was he doing there? As he turned to go it was Kane who came back through the portières and said, "Sit down, for heaven's sake! Don't stand there glaring at me as if I were Ingham's corpse!" The sharpness of his entrance suggested something. Herrick answered with his hand on the knob, "I'm virtually a prisoner, I suppose?" "Oh, don't you care to sit out the show?" "If I left here should I be arrested?" "Arrested's an exaggeration." "I should be shadowed, then?" "Well, my dear fellow, there've been so many disappearances! And you're so near the storm-center--you make such a sensitive barometer!" Herrick dropped on to the couch as a mouse might give itself up to a cat and leaned forward, frowning, motionless. "It's a great game, this, of 'Vanishing Lady'! But I don't mind telling you that it's the Italian background to the vanishings that interests us. An obscure young girl--but a great friend of Christina Hope's--is the first to vanish. She sends an appeal for aid to Christina Hope, through the Arm of Justice. "A publisher--betrothed to Christina Hope--receives blackmailing letters from the Arm of Justice, and is murdered. "A young author--also betrothed to Christina Hope--is attacked. But, as a victim, proves a failure. "An actor--also--well, also an old friend of Christina Hope, and said to have been recently in love with the vanished Nancy Cornish is arrested for Ingham's murder. And what happens? S-s-z-boum! A cluster of respectable and comfortable persons scatter for the ends of the earth. While, ahead of them all, pop goes the beauty! In a white and silver dress. So she didn't go farther than the embrace held wide open to receive her." "You mean, of course, the Arm of Justice?" "Of course." "What are you trying to do with me?" Herrick snarled. Kane answered with great deliberation, "I'm trying to save you, you young fool!" "Spare yourself wasted time. What does all this matter to me? What does a lot of gab matter? I've heard enough of it to-night, God knows! But does it tell me anything? You're all full of suggestions, but where is she? Do something if you know how--find her, find her! She's in danger, that's all that matters! Where is she? Where is she?" "You talk about danger! And you want _me_ to find her?" "Has Denny retained you, then?" "Oh, you poor kid!--Now, Herrick, I know your place in life. I studied, one term, under your father. I breathe familiarly the air of Brainerd, Connecticut. Corey and old Ingham are friends of mine. This muss of--Paah! Come out of it, Herrick, it isn't good enough! She in her rotten world and you--Oh, all right!" Kane rose and went again to the window. "Rain's held up." He looked at his watch. Strolling back to his chair he fixed his eyes on Herrick, across his interwoven knuckles. "But you've listened so willingly to Wheeler and to Mrs. Deutch, why not listen to me? I've something of a confession to make, myself. Do you know what it is to be possessed by a mania?" A man with a mania! "I heard Ten Euyck call you that, the first time I ever saw you." "Good! A man with a mania, a prosecutor with a pet criminal! But he didn't mention the criminal? Allow me--the Arm of Justice!" Herrick's pulse gave a mad leap and he slowly raised his head. "You've taken that business, all along, as just a mask for some desperate amateur. Then, too, you were all thrown off the track--and small wonder!--by those literate, unbusinesslike letters in idiomatic English. A lady's letters, in fact!--My dear fellow, a very real and definite 'Arm of Justice,' a low-lived little gang that sunny Italy knew how to get rid of, has made its living at blackmailing certain gutters of ours for a generation. What nobody but your humble servant has believed is that this more stylish business, using our language and dwelling very evidently in our midst, has any connection with the original A. of J. beyond borrowing its title from the police reports. Not for the first time! See here! The Arm of Justice started life as the humblest little blackguard gang, extorting money from low-class Italians. It was like all its class, strictly minding its own business in its own nationality and considered worth nobody's while to catch. But to my mind about four years ago this violet by a mossy stone burst out like a sunflower. To my mind, it was this very same Arm of Justice which abandoned every precedent by entering, with one bound, into American life." His look seemed to ring with triumph, but his voice kept a cold edge. "No Italian gang, real or bogie, big or little, had ever thrown its shadow there. But the Arm of Justice flew high, carried the new territory at a rush, and struck at the very proudest families in New York, the most powerful individuals!" "But how? How?" "Ah, if I knew! What's its source of information? How does it get hold of those unhappy secrets that its owners guard like Koh-i-noors? Well, men will tell a good deal to a woman--and those were a woman's letters, Herrick! Once it gets its secret it starts a correspondence. How often it has succeeded, grabbed its hush-money and retreated, of course I don't know. But when its advances are rejected it abandons its typewriter and calmly prints a scant edition of a dirty little rag calling itself _The Voice of Justice_ and telling the blackmailing story. It then mails marked copies through various New York post offices to the family, friends and enemies of its victims--the three before Ingham were all of Knickerbocker standing. What a revenge! What a prestige for next time such a threat gave it! The desire of my life is to smash that printing-press!" "But it followed up the Ingham business with letters alone?" "There you are--the whole Ingham business is a departure! Observe that until Ingham's death the English-speaking branch of the business never committed itself to violence; it caused four tragedies in four years, but it simply pressed the button of exposure and its vengeance came off automatically. The first time a young girl went crazy. The second there was a divorce and the wife shot herself. And the third time a bad stumble, lived down for twenty years by a fine old friend of mine, a judge of the highest standing who had made himself an honorable character, was exposed to such relentless political foes that this office had to prosecute. Well, Mrs. Deutch's father isn't the only gentle soul who's died in jail!" Kane's voice had risen in hot anger. "Perhaps you think I ought to be grateful--thank them for doing my work! Am I to do theirs, then? Execute their orders, their sentences? Make my office the tool of cowards and criminals worse than those I convict? Ah, my boy, that did turn me into a monomaniac! Is there anything I wouldn't give to break that particular bone in the Arm of Justice?--to lay hands on the real villain of that little evening party in these rooms that night--not the one who fired the shot but who prompted it! Believe me, the death of Ingham was a slip, an accident, bitterly repented. Some last new element got in this time and got in wrong. The Arm was using a new tool and pushed it farther than it dreamed the tool would go. The English-speaking branch, always so careful not to commit murder--I could almost be thankful for this time--it's put a definite, popular crime into my hand! And now the poor fools've lost their heads! They that were so cautious, they're following one sensation with another. They've tried anything, everything, to get clear! They've only floundered further and further in! And now they're wild as rats in a trap!" "Like rats in a trap!" There it was again! "The wages of sin is more sinning!" Good heavens, what was his novel to him, now? "Still people don't believe me. They can't credit that a single criminal gang has its feet in the slums, its hand in the pocket of Fifth Avenue, and its head--well, for instance, on Broadway. Naturally, it wants a connecting thread. I was so keen after that, even before I came into office, that they used to call me The Blackhander and say I ought to write a comic opera. Well, Italy's an operatic nation! And this great brat of a city, that thinks there's nothing doing in the world but Anglo-Saxon temperaments, embezzling and baseball games, doesn't know what it may get up against! I'm sure if I can nab either end of the skein it will carry conviction. But unfortunately even the Eastsiders never gave us a map of their whereabouts. There are about seven hundred Italians in New York who might be called professional gangsters and very likely a cozy, private little affair like the A. of J. but murmurs, 'We are seven.' So I've never been able to put the slightest Italian accent on those illustrious letters till I saw the body of your gunman from Central Park. Encouraging though not overwhelming evidence! But the knife that stuck in Denny's arm is a bigger business." He might well congratulate himself, Herrick inwardly groaned, over the color and the emphasis liberally supplied him in the story of Mrs. Deutch. "Of course, you understood what had happened? The farmer had refused toll to the brigands who governed the south so capably in those days. They killed his child, leaving their mark on it as a warning that toll must be paid. The poor wine-merchant attempted to set the authorities on that sign. The authorities were too weak to take up the gage, and, of course, a stranger and a Jew made an easy scape-goat. But the brother didn't take warning from the father's fate. Then the mark on him warned the countryside that the family was taboo. They became simply lepers. Not, this time, because the people were religious bigots nor social asses but because they were scared stiff. Every one connected with the tabooed strangers must have dreaded some brigand dictum. Every Gabrielli may have squirmed under that thumb for many a year. Whatever she romantically believes, her fiancé's family simply dared not, for their lives, receive Henrietta. Nobody dared, except, apparently, our little friend, Hermann Deutch. Hats off--I salute Hermann! Really, for an excited man--! But how's that for the nationality of the three-cornered knife? The nation's pitched it out, over there; and now, to-day, in the city of New York, in the city's jail, in broad daylight, some descendant of this agreeable Sicilian clan uses the same weapon to silence a wiry gentleman who turns out a bit too much for him--being a little on the Sicilian order himself! But isn't that a sign of something doing between the slums and Broadway? For what were they afraid Denny would tell? Why did they wish to silence him except for what he could tell of a certain lady?" Herrick rose, lighted a cigar and flicked out the match with steady fingers. "And you picture Miss Hope as The Queen of the Black Hand?" This pleasantry was delivered with such a raucous and guttural attempt at quiet satire that Kane returned to earth and smiled. "Put in that way it's comic opera, indeed. But it's the tune that makes the song. I know how crass the thing seems. Good heavens, says common sense, in what century are we living? And who believes in comic opera? What's the clue? What's the connecting thread that can reach from the lowest dives of the East Side, out of another country and another race, and mix with the grandeurs of so extremely well-known and high-flying a young lady, on the very day that she becomes a world-celebrity? What's the answer?" The extreme nonchalance of Herrick's voice shook a little as he remarked, "That's up to you, isn't it?" "It's bound to lie in some dangerous indiscretion of her youth. She's had hard struggling years, in which her temper was still luxurious--a youth that's ambitious is never too scrupulous--if she had a friend unscrupulous by profession--And yet I was so sure they had got hold of her by some secret of her mother's! The Hope honeymoon took place in Italy--but, in that day, so did everybody's! After all, perhaps they had a closer clutch. What do we inevitably find in the pasts of all very young, very beautiful and very successful actresses? We find a dark and early husband. Italians whose humbler connections still sojourn in tenements are often highly ornamental and blackmailers aren't branded, you know, to keep them out of matrimony. Well, whatever the start, whether she was coaxed in or threatened or married, forced by poverty or blackmail, she's made them a wonderful--Do you know the thieves' slang of Naples? And the term 'basista'?" "A basista's a sort of fence, isn't he? A confederate on the outside?" "A good deal more. A basista, without being a member of the gang, is the invaluable unsuspected spy in the camp of the victims, who loots profitable news and sends it in. He or she is sometimes the brilliant amateur director, the educated person with an outlook, the Adviser Plenipotentiary. A dramatic-minded young lady with extravagant tastes and some kind of righteous grudge against society might hardly realize at first what she was doing--and oh, how she has struggled to be rid of it, since! Naturally, she's become worth double to them. And she's recently furnished them with such a hold that, so far from getting clear, I fancy she was pushed to furnish them with another victim; that if it hadn't been for the moving-picture another person would soon have received an Arm of Justice letter, and that person Cuyler Ten Euyck. What do you think of my thread?" "Pretty thin, isn't it?" "Wait, encouraging youth! You'll be grateful some day! Come, I'll show you my hand! Ever since the inquest it has been perfectly clear to the unprejudiced mind that Christina Hope was in that room when Ingham was shot. It was perfectly evident that she was shielding somebody. We say, now, that she was shielding Denny. When we began to suspect Denny we had to run down his friend, Christina Hope, who left behind her a scarf bordered with the color in which, through his craze for her, Ingham's apartment was decorated--a color which up to the time of the murder she wore so constantly that it was like a part of her personal effect, and which she has never worn since." The color was all about them--blue-gray. What could that have to do with the shimmer of a dummy pistol, scratched upon whose golden surface Herrick once more confronted the initial "C"? But he did not put this question to the District-Attorney. And it was Kane who continued. "Shall I treat you to a bit of ancient history; shall I reconstruct for you the movements of Miss Hope on the night of the fourth of August?" "As you please." "She testified to have dined at home. So she did; but with so poor an appetite that the maids said to each other that she had really dined early somewhere else. She testified to being ill and out of sorts; so she was. But she was incited by this being out of sorts to something very different from the languor to which she testified. Far from having bade Ingham farewell forever she called him up at the Van Dam on an average of every half hour, as well as at his club, and at two restaurants which he frequented. Failing to find him, at eleven o'clock she did, indeed, go to the post-box and mail a letter; but at twenty minutes past eleven she was waiting in a taxi outside the theater where Denny was rehearsing and sent in a message, without any concealment of her name, that she wished to speak to him. He sent out word that he was engaged. An hour later she was there again, and not believing the back doorman who told her that he had left, she stopped Wheeler, who had been inside, and besought him to get Denny to speak to her. He replied that Denny was gone, whereupon she called out to her chauffeur, with every adjuration to hurry, the name of the Van Dam apartment house--where, say at a quarter after one, you, Herrick, saw her shadow on the blind. According to Joe Patrick she was the first on the spot.--Was she the last there, too?" Herrick paused in a long stride; with his bones slowly freezing in him he turned and faced the District-Attorney. "If Denny loved her and went there on her account did he shoot down Ingham before her eyes? Or did she run out, as she suggested at the inquest, and Denny shoot Ingham as he turned to follow her? There's your chance, Herrick, prove that! Mr. Bird tells us when our prisoner came in. But, before all and everything, when did he come out?" He had a way for which Herrick could have slain him, of driving points home with a smile. "But suppose, now, she did most of the loving on her own account. Ingham, to a certainty, had found out her connection with the Arm of Justice, when it tried to blackmail him through her. From the row you heard between them he's likely to have been threatening her with exposure. Suppose Denny's story is straight and when he found her there with Ingham he just turned and walked off. Was Ingham a man to refrain from threatening to send his revelations, first of all, to a man who had treated him so cavalierly? Is she a girl to stop short of the desperate in preventing him? Isn't she one to avenge herself in advance? It may not have been wholly in revenge. Ingham was himself a wild revengeful fellow who sometimes had too much to drink. He may have provoked her even to bodily fear. If he guessed such a thing do you think Denny would not keep silence? I see it strikes you." It seemed to him as if it struck the life out of his heart over which he folded his arms. "Try somebody else," he said, in defiance of the little clasps of proof which he could hear snapping into each other, "next time you accuse her." "Yes, I'll try Deutch. I gave her every doubt till I heard of his secret. Is it possible you don't know what he found? And is it possible that you don't see a preparation for emergency in her taking such pains to establish--well, not an alibi, but a substitute?--A mysterious unknown lady with the most conspicuous physical attributes, in whose person this admirable actress appears before Joe Patrick as the red-headed murderess of the drama on the front stairs, before, on the back stairs, with which she appears to be so familiar, she resumes herself and turns to see what can be done with Ingham! That's the worst point in the story of a distracted girl, pushed to the wall, driven past her last stand, maddened by a suddenly enlightened and too cruel Ingham, hounded by her friends, the Arm of Justice, to their work; herself no more--as I was once no more!--than a trigger pulled by their hand! No wonder they've had a firmer hold on her than ever since that night, and shield her, now, with all their care because in doing so they shield themselves!" "That's what you think, is it?" "It's what I fear--and it's what you fear! Or--what's a District-Attorney to a lover?--you'd have knocked me down long ago!--There's not a man of you, knowing the girl, in whose mind, in whose pulse, it hasn't been from the first hour! Yet there's not one of you who hasn't sacrificed Denny to her without a scruple. One man in the end won't do it. I mean Denny himself. He, too, is prepared to go extraordinary lengths not to betray her. He will deny, of course, that it was she who was there that night. But I rely on one thing. He knows that in the State of New York he can not plead guilty to murder in the first degree. And he won't send himself up for anything less. He's not afraid of death, but he's mortally afraid of prison--it gets on every one of his nerves. And he seems to have a great many of them. If they are ground on the idea of jail so that they break they may break quite contrary to poor Deutch's--they may set him talking! Ah, if he and Deutch could happen to meet; those two temperamental persons!--Here, in this room, in the night, now when neither of them are quite themselves, what a start they might get! What mightn't it shake out of them?--There's one final thing the person who shot Ingham, the person who was last with him in this room, alone, can tell me--How came that door bolted? Whatever Denny guesses, you'll find he won't guess me that!--Come in!" He conferred with some one on the threshold. "Ask Inspector Ten Euyck to come up." Turning back to take his place at the library table he motioned Herrick to a seat. "Pity the sorrows of a poor policeman whose legal sense is too strong to let him ask a single question of an accused man, yet who was born to be the head of the Inquisition and looks at the prisoner with a deep desire quite simply to tear him open! The prisoner is well held together with surgeon's plaster, but the poor Inspector's pride in his profession is suffering horribly from the inadequate conduct of his city's jail to-day and of our detectives' search.--Here we are!" A group of young men appeared in the doorway, with Ten Euyck looming like a damaged monument in their wake. Civility and self-control forced themselves on Herrick. He and Ten Euyck sniffed each other, wary as strange dogs, their spines beginning to rise. "Inspector," said Kane, "cheer up!" And indeed the funereal quality in that gentleman's appearance had greatly increased. He sat down, as directed, but when he looked at Herrick he had to turn his growl into a cough and when he looked at Kane he winced. It was evidently not alone the errors of the Tombs and the police department which had bowed his head. It was the knowledge of last night. His magnificent storm coat could not hide his riddled dignity. Only by the sight of Christina in his grasp could he get his dignity back again. "Ten Euyck, I sent for you because this is so largely your affair, but you are not going to be asked to do anything immoral. I am about to examine a witness, but with no illegal questions nor shall I force him to testify against himself. He is only going to be asked about another, a missing witness. Your legal mind doesn't quarrel with his being hard pushed in that direction? I thought not!" Ten Euyck exclaimed, eagerly, "But Deutch can't talk yet!" "Deutch? Did you think I meant Deutch? There is some one dearer to Christina Hope than her dear Deutches and still nearer to the habits of her life. I mean a gentleman who can talk but won't. Ah, brighten up Ten Euyck--he shall be got to! He may be ignorant of certain amiable Italians as criminal characters, it's inconceivable he can be ignorant of them as Christina Hope's familiar friends. He mayn't be able to tell me the secret of their lives. But he can give me their address. And he will." They were all grouped about the long table: Kane at its center, facing the window; Ten Euyck and Herrick bearing with each other at one end; Holt, an assistant of Kane's, between him and Ten Euyck; to his right, a stenographer with a short-hand pad. The end of the table was still vacant. Kane's own doorman stood on the threshold. "Wade, have you got Mrs. Deutch? Please step into the bedroom, Mrs. Deutch. Sit down comfortably, keep silent and listen to everything.--I want to remind you all that, wise as our witness is, there are some things he doesn't know. So far as we know he has never connected the Cornish girl's disappearance with the blackmailers. He's not supposed to know there are any blackmailers. And, for certain, he's seen no papers nor been allowed to talk with any one. He doesn't know that Christina Hope has disappeared! He doesn't know that New York has seen a moving-picture!" Turning to the man at the door Kane said, "Bring in William Denny." CHAPTER IV A LIGHT ALONG THE ROAD: DENNY GIVES AN ADDRESS Herrick felt the strong light of the one lamp like something hypnotic; it reminded him of the glare in some Sardou or Belasco torture chamber. It seemed to him that the scene wasn't real; it was like a council of wolves and he powerless and quiet with them there, as they hungered to run, baying, on Christina. It was only a nightmare and yet it was more real and keen than life, and only God knew what would come of it! Then he saw the slight, dark figure pass the door; every eye, but with what different desires, turned, ravenous as his, for the secret that it carried in its breast. The doorman brought Denny up to the end of the table and withdrew. The prisoner was very carefully dressed, his black hair brushed as smooth as satin, and against his dark blue coat the black silk handkerchief that supported his arm was scarcely noticeable. He looked a model of rigid decorum until you observed the heavy straps of plaster across his hands. Only his skin, always dark and pale, seemed really to be drained of blood. He nodded gravely to Kane, and with a sort of still surprise to Herrick. Ten Euyck he passed over. He remained standing until Kane told him to sit down. If he then dropped rather wearily into a chair he contrived to sit upright, with a good show of formal manners. As his dark eyes met the keen light ones of the lawyer a faint, derisive smile appeared, and was instantly suppressed, upon both their faces. "You seem very sure of yourself!" Ten Euyck exploded. Denny appeared to become slowly conscious of him. "Even the persuasive manners of your department," he said, "couldn't make me tell what I didn't know!" Ten Euyck said quickly, "You don't know who killed Ingham?" "If I said anything more incriminating, it's possible it might be used against me." "We're not here," Kane interposed, "to discuss Ingham's death. Mr. Denny, within the last few days there have been some very grave occurrences, about which it's possible you can enlighten us. If you can, we shan't be ungrateful. Did you ever hear of an organization called the Arm of Justice?" "Is this a joke?" "You never heard of it?" "No." "Well, then, you can have no objection to repeating the name and address of Miss Hope's Italian friends?" "Not the least in the world. Has she any?" "You mean to tell me you don't know she has?" "Not if it annoys you. I thought you asked." Ten Euyck, with a gesture as of uncontrollable impatience, rose and went to the window. "Since you're in a jocular mood, I will ask you something you may think extremely amusing. Do you know if Miss Christina Hope owns a red wig?" He didn't think it amusing. He seemed to think little enough about it. "I suppose so." "But you never saw one about her house?" "She wouldn't keep it about her house, like a pet. She'd keep it in a trunk. She's not an amateur." "You never saw her wear one in private life?" "Not even on the first of April." "You couldn't even swear she had one, perhaps." "I certainly could not." "Nor that she had not?" "No." "So that you wouldn't recognize hers if you saw it?" "No." The light was very strong upon his face, which remained relaxed and tranquil. But he was very weak and a faint moisture broke out upon it. "Was there any love affair between you and Miss Hope which angered Nancy Cornish?" "No." "Don't lie to me!" Denny drew in his breath a little. But he did not speak. "What was your trouble with Nancy Cornish?" Silence. "Didn't she quarrel with you because of some woman?" Silence. "You know she did. You can't deny it. Do you know what many of your friends are saying? That you kept that appointment with her and got rid of her. They think you were tired of her and preferred Christina Hope!" "Do they?" It had missed fire utterly. Yet, since the mention of that other girl, a kind of hunger had been growing in his face, and suddenly Kane wholly veered on that new track. "But I don't!" said Kane, leaning toward him, and trying to catch and hold his eye. "I think you really care for Nancy Cornish, whether she's alive or dead!" He paused. "I think you'll end by telling me what you know of the woman whom you'll find parted you." The same dead silence; only Denny had closed his eyes. "Come, give me your attention. Look at me, please. Look at me, and you'll see that I'm sincere. Did you hear me say if you can help me I shan't be ungrateful? But you can do better for yourself than that. You can simply tell the truth! Tell the truth and you won't need my favor. You'll be free. And you'll have set me in the way to find Nancy Cornish! It isn't possible you prefer to keep this ridiculous silence, to die like a criminal for nothing; or spend fifteen to twenty years in the penitentiary--spend life there,--ah, I thought so!" The District-Attorney laughed with triumph at the little straightening of Denny's nostrils. "There's your weak point, my friend! I have never seen a man to whom the idea of jail was so entirely uncongenial! Get rid of it, then! Admit the truth about Christina Hope! What do you owe her? She never even came to me with the witness that she promised." "I rather thought she'd have trouble doing that!" "Because you knew there was no such woman. Or rather that that woman was Christina Hope; that she tried to get up courage to incriminate herself in your place and failed!" "You're a bad guesser, Kane!" Denny said. He had sunk a little forward with his arms upon his knees, and Kane rose and stood over him. "Admit that your whole attitude is dictated simply by loyalty to her. You need be loyal no longer. Has she been near you since you've been in the Tombs?" "No, you've kept her out. And a fine time you must have had doing it!" Ten Euyck turned round and said, "She's so _fond_ of you, I suppose!" Denny flushed. "Yes," he said, "she's fond of me. She was born to be a good comrade-in-arms, to carry the flag of a forlorn hope and stand by you in the last ditch. If you gentlemen can't understand that, I'm sorry for you. I can't change her." "Exactly," Kane said. "I knew that was your ground. Well, this comrade-in-arms has deserted you altogether. The day she should have brought me that witness, she threw down her engagement and left New York!" "Oh, guess again!" said Denny. "Not while she lived, she didn't!" "And she took with her," Ten Euyck cried, "forty thousand dollars' worth of my diamonds! Perhaps she was in hopes you'd get away and join her!" "Well," said Denny, turning his eyes toward Herrick, without raising his head, "you!--you're not a criminal!--are you going to stand for that?" "Doesn't his standing for it speak for itself!" said Ten Euyck. "If you want to defend a woman, why don't you come out like a man and confess that you did it yourself." They all looked at him in astonishment and, flushing at himself, he subsided. "Ah, thanks, Ten Euyck, that's what I've been suspecting! You think you can trap me into one of your damned confessions with these tricks! Get rid of that idea. I'll not confess. It's up to you to prove it; prove it! Why should I help you!" He turned again to Herrick, as if in justification. "Yes, I am afraid of jail! I'm a coward about prison, I confess that! and to give myself up to a lifetime of it--no!--Herrick, there's no chance of their being serious in this talk about Christina." Kane took him by the unwounded shoulder and forced him from his leaning posture, till his face came full into the light. "Upon my word of honor, Denny," he said, "Christina Hope has disappeared." The shock struck Denny like a sort of paralysis. He did not stir, but he seemed to stiffen. His eyes dilated with a horrified amazement. "What do you mean?" he said. Kane handed him that evening's paper, folded to the headlines that dealt with the missing girl. He read them with greed, but it was plain that he found their information stupefying. "Chris, now! First, Nancy!" he said, "and then, Christina! What is this thing? What can it be? You," to Kane, "you that are so clever, have you any explanation at all? Have you the least clue? Have you?" he insisted, and from the dark meaning of their faces he seemed to kindle, and half rose, leaning on the table. "My God, then," he cried, "what is it? What is it?" "Well, then," said Kane, "as you yourself suggest, she is very probably in the same place with Nancy Cornish." Denny continued to lean on the table, looking at him with ravenous eyes. "You know that Joe Patrick was knocked down by an automobile on his way to the inquest, that the same so-called accident happened two or three days later to Herrick, here; you know that subsequently four armed men attacked him in the park; to-day you had an experience of your own. Well, all these things hang together and were committed by a band of blackmailers. Your own shoulder gives you a taste of their quality. You can judge for yourself what they'll stop at. Brace yourself. We know, now, for a certainty that Nancy Cornish is in their hands." Denny continued to lean there, without stirring. "It's a trick! It's one of your little tricks! Is it?" he said to Herrick with a sudden shrillness, "Is it?" "One of them brought us a message from her. It said, 'Help me, dear Chris!'" "No, no, no!" said Denny, as if to himself. "It's a lie. It's all a lie. I won't be frightened. I know it's a lie." "Is that her writing?" He cried out, a dreadful, formless sound, and covered his face with his hands. Kane's glance said to the others, "Let him alone! It's working!" He asked them then, quite gravely and clearly, "When--do you expect--to catch--this--gang?" "I don't know that we can catch them at all. We don't know how to get at them. We've no idea where they are." His hands dropped from his face; it throbbed now and blazed; all the nerves had come to life in a quivering network. "Oh, for God's sake," he said, "don't tell me that!--Go on, then, go on! Tell me!" He looked beseechingly and then in a fury of impatience from face to face. "Don't stand gaping! You must know something! Look here, you don't understand! You don't know all I've been through all these weeks--wondering!--If she was in that lake where we used to row! If she'd only gone away, hating me! My mind's in pieces trying to think--think--following every sign! Hundreds of times I've seen her dead! And now you tell me she's alive! and calling--calling for help! Do you? Do you?" "Yes," said Kane. He swayed forward so suddenly that he had to catch at the table. "It's horrible! It's a nightmare!" With a strange monotonous inflection his voice rose higher and higher on the one strained note. "It's the thing I've dreamed of night and day, week out and in! That she was frightened and in danger! With brutes! With the faces of beasts round her! Oh, God--!" "Don't!" Herrick cried. "Yes, but look here!" With an eagerness sudden as a child's, he said to Herrick, "But it's hope! Hope, isn't it? She's alive! And she didn't just leave me!--I've got to get out of here! Yesterday--why, yesterday--this morning--but now! 'Help me!' she says! I've got to get out! I--" He stopped. The dusky choking red that had surged up horribly over his face and forehead receded sharply, and left only his eyes burning black in the white incredulous horror of his face. He cried, "There's no way out!" "There may be," said the District-Attorney, "if you will look very carefully at this lock of hair." Denny took the soft red curl in a hand that he vainly strove to steady; they could read recognition, but no further enlightenment in his tormented face. "Sit down!" Kane said. "Untie the string. Shake the hair loose here on the table under the lamp. Now, does anything strike you? No?" Once more Herrick had that singular impression of Denny's going, for an instant's flash, perfectly blind. Then he said, quite quietly, "Go! The station you want is Waybrook. Drive five miles inland, on the road to Benning's Point; about three miles south of the Hoover estate. The left-hand side of the road; an old house newly fixed up and painted yellow. Pascoe's the name. And, for God's sake, go quickly." The District-Attorney sat back and wiped his forehead. It had been a hard day's work. "Don't you, Herrick, want to take a look at the curiosity without which I might as well have asked a clam for a Fourth of July oration?" The hair was spread out and thinned under the lamp. And now Herrick could see distinctly that it was of two shades. The outer curl was the dark red of Nancy Cornish; hidden within it was a smaller lock of a singularly fine light shade, like the red of golden fire. This it was which had wrung the address from Denny and stricken down Christina in a faint. "Nancy Cornish hid it there in the message she was allowed to send," guessed Herrick. "She was certain Miss Hope would know the head it came from." "Then I needn't point out to a gentleman of your discernment that it was the head which astonished Joe Patrick on the night of Ingham's murder. Directly afterward, I think Miss Hope stored that head, inconspicuously, with her friends in the Arm of Justice." Denny, rabid with impatience, seemed eating them alive with his savage eyes. "Start!" he bit out. "Go, can't you? Go! What are you waiting for?" Kane looked up at him with a smile of triumphant ice. "We're waiting for your account of midnight in these rooms between the fourth and fifth of August. And no one stirs to Nancy Cornish till we get it." Denny's jaw dropped and he hung against the edge of the table as if he were struck too sick to stand. Ten Euyck, too, cried out and Kane silenced him. "Why not--since he says he's innocent?" "You dog!" Denny groaned. "You won't save her?" "_You_ won't save her--you know how!" "Lose time and you lose everything!" "What do you know?" "Know! Know! Of course I know! But do you think you can make me tell? Try that game! Try it! Try! You know damned well you can't! So what'll you give for what I know?" "You mean--?" "Come back to me when you've found Nancy Cornish and you shall have your murderer fast enough! Every detail, every fact, every clue! Till then I don't trust you! Bring her here, bring her!" He leaned forward, beside himself; shaken and exhausted, burning with fever, weak with loss of blood, he reached toward Kane and beat the table with his wounded hands. "That's my bargain! That's my price! I'm not going to give up for nothing! You don't get my life unless you give me hers--" "_What?_" The great gasp broke into a buzz. Denny came slowly to himself and read what he had uttered in their looks. His face went dead, a cold sweat stood out upon it. "O!" he breathed. And once more he covered his face with his hands. It didn't take many questions to get his story from him after that. "Yes, I killed him. Yes, I'm confessing. I've got to. All right,--take it down. I killed James Ingham. I went to his apartment after my dress-rehearsal on the night of the fourth of August. I had been told that he had injured Nancy Cornish. I shot him dead. I've regretted it every moment of my life since then. That's all. What are you waiting for now?" "Then, Miss Hope--was not in Ingham's rooms that night?" There was a dead pause. Denny looked hard in Kane's face. "Yes," he said, "she was. She came there to try and prevent our quarrel." The men who had seen the moving-picture of the shadow breathed again. "What did she do when you fired?" "I sent her down to the Deutches to get a doctor. I wanted her out of the way, and I switched off the lights so she need not see how useless any doctor was!" "How did you yourself escape?" "Up the back stairs, across the roof, into the next house." "But she went out of the room before you did?" The earth swam before Herrick's eyes, and then he heard Denny's "Yes." "Then since you were the last to leave, explain how you were able to bolt the door behind you?" "I didn't bolt it behind me. I stayed in the room." Herrick lifted his head. "I had dropped my revolver and in feeling for it on the rug I got my hand stained." He spoke lower and lower, but every now and then his voice flickered, licking upward like a flame, and cracked. "I ran into the bathroom and put it under the faucet, and after that it was too late to get away. People were peering and listening from their doors. I got in a blind panic--you've noticed I'm upset by jail!--I knew I was cornered--I bolted the door. But in doing that I saw how close the portières hung." Herrick drew a long breath. "I thought once I could clear that outside room a little I could make a dash for it. To do that it was necessary to remove the magnet. I dragged Ingham's body into the bedroom. The bed's head was toward the portières. I went and stood in its shadow, in the portières' folds. Then they burst in. When Deutch held the portière aside for the policeman I was so close at his back that he touched me. When he saw me he screened me almost completely. They had been so obliging as to clear the hall. There was plenty of noise; the men were opening the closet door, a motor whirring, a trolley passing the corner; they all had their backs to me, and I made but a couple of steps of it into the hall. A few moments later I had the honor and privilege of addressing Mr. Herrick, and of hearing from him that the murderer was a lady and had not been caught." "Deutch screened you, you say? Why?" A queer little color came into Denny's face. "I'm fated to be ridiculous," he said. "I had seen a hooded cloak of Christina's lying on the table; it was Christina's own blue-gray; just the shade of the portières. The hood covered my head. The shadow back there is very deep. Well, Deutch knew Christina had been there, you know. He must have left his apartment just before she got to it, for he was simply one funk of anxiety about her." Denny had to struggle up, for the interview had told on him terribly, and he kept one hand on the back of his chair. "I'm of no greatly imposing bulk," he said. "And Christina Hope is la tall woman!" A cry came from within the portières. Denny, his self-control utterly shattered, flashed round. Henrietta Deutch greeted him with a radiant face. "Ah, sirs, thank God! Oh, oh, it was that he saw! Mr. Deutch saw one he took for her! And Christina it could not have been! He was not two minutes gone when she was with me!" "Thanks, Mrs. Deutch! I couldn't have trusted even you for the truth of that point if I'd simply asked you! But we must make sure that was what he saw--that and no other proof. Here's the same depth of shadow, then, and the same portières. Take this couch cover, Denny, for a cloak. Stand back, and screen your face with it.--Wade, bring in Deutch." Herrick shuddered and anticipation choked him. This man had suffered so much for Christina, and now he was to decide her fate! The superintendent stepped into a silent room. All those eyes fed on him. The place cast its spell of horror. His plump, pale, sagging face quivered with dread; his eyes floundered from Herrick to Kane, and a kind of dumb moan burst from him. Kane pointed to the portières and his panic was complete. "Show him, Herrick. Just as he stood, that night." He stood there, dizzy with bewilderment, and suddenly he screamed. Gasping, he clutched at the portière through which some touch, some motion had repeated for him a dreadful moment. Behind it he once more beheld a dim, blue figure. He fell on his knees, strangling, his breath raving and rattling in his mouth, and brought out like a convulsion the one word "Christina!" Sobbing, he caught at a fragment of the cloak and covered it with piteous, protecting kisses. Denny let the cloaking stuff fall from him, and, stepping out, broken as a thing thrown away, stood in full view with hanging head. Every eye was fastened upon Deutch. He had no need for words. What he had believed himself to have seen, what he had suffered, the mad relief, the almost ludicrous exultation in what he now learned, passed one after the other across that tormented visage and broke in one happy blubber as he ducked his head in his wife's skirts. The relief that shook Herrick touched, too, every one in the room. No man there had really wished to sentence a girl. It was as though, at last, they had all got air to breathe. When into this new air Denny's voice broke with a sick snarl. "And do you think you've saved her? You miserable, gabbling fools, did you think your Arm of Justice was her friend? Why, she knew no more of it than you do! If they've got the girl there, she's fighting, accusing, threatening them, she's facing her death! And now in God's name, can you hurry? Hurry!" CHAPTER V THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LIGHT: WHERE CHRISTINA WAS At nine o'clock on the morning of Friday, the day when Christina disappeared, there stood at the little interior station of Waybrook, awaiting the train from New York, a touring-car which had very recently been painted black. In the body of this car an observing person might have descried a couple of indentations which, were he of a sensational turn of mind, would have suggested to him the marks of bullets. This touring-car was, at that time of day, the only vehicle in waiting, and when the train rushed on again from its brief pause, only one person had alighted from it. This was a tall woman, heavily veiled, wearing a long dark ulster, considerably too large for her, and a rather shabby black hat. This woman walked directly up to the touring-car and flung herself into it without a word. When the chauffeur turned and said to her, in surprise, "You all alone?" she responded, "Yes. And in twice the hurry on that account!" The curt command of the words did not conceal the quality of a voice which all the newspapers in New York were that morning praising; and the face from which she then lifted her veil, although furrowed with anger and ravaged with grief, was the unforgettable face of Christina Hope. She sat for the five miles which led to her destination with her eyes closed and her hands wrung tight together in her lap. The touring-car stopped at the gate of an old yellow house, very carefully kept, its bright windows screened by curtains rather elegantly pretty; and a flagged path leading up to its brass-knockered door. On either side of the flagged path stretched a garden, a little sobered by its autumn coloring, but still abounding in the country flowers which to Bryce Herrick's admiration had kept Christina's house so sweet. The door was opened by a small, square, hard-featured, close-mouthed old woman, very neatly dressed, with gray hair and a white apron. In other words, by the occasional cashier at the Italian table d'hôte. This woman, as the chauffeur had done, looked over Christina's shoulder in expectation and then said, grudgingly, "Oh, it's you!" "As you see," said Christina, pressing inside. "But I shan't trouble you long. I should like some coffee, if you please. I've had no breakfast." The woman stood still, staring at Christina's ill-fitting clothes and sunken eyes, and the girl added, with the same peremptory coldness which had marked her manner from the beginning, "I must ask you to be quick. I have only come to relieve you of our guest." "You have!" said the old woman. "Who says so?" "I think you heard me say so," Christina responded, from the foot of the stairs. The old woman hurried after her. "Yes, I daresay. But by whose orders?" Christina turned round. "Who owns this place?" she demanded. "Well, you do." "Who pays for every mouthful that is eaten here and for everything that is brought into this house? Who makes your living for you?" "You do, I suppose." "Well, then, I suppose, by my orders. Where is she?" "She's in your room, the same as ever." "Locked in, of course?" "Of course." "The key, please." The old woman hesitated, then she took the key out of her pocket. And at that moment Christina noticed something. There came from the floor above the sound of a voice speaking rapidly, incessantly, and indistinctly like a child talking to itself. An expression of amused and contemptuous malice broke upon the old woman's face and she handed over the key with greater readiness. "Much good may it do you!" said she, turning toward the kitchen. Christina snatched it and fled upstairs. "Bring the coffee up here, please," she called over her shoulder. For all her haste she paused at the top of the stair, and, with her hand over her heart, listened to the babbling voice. Then she turned to the right and knocked on a closed door. The voice ran on, heedlessly. "Nancy!" Christina called. "Nancy! It's I, Chris! Dear Nancy, I've come to take you home." She was answered only by the endless repetition of some phrase, and unlocking the door, she went in. She stepped into a charming, simple, sunny room, comfortably appointed, the windows open toward the road and their thin, flowery curtains stirring in the low, sultry wind. But on the inside of these curtains the windows were completely screened with poultry wire, and, over the door, the transom was wired, too. In the bed a young, slight girl half lay, half sat; her dark red curls had been gathered into a heavy braid and her blue eyes were blank with fever; she rocked her head from side to side upon the pillow with an indescribable weariness, and without breath, without change, with a monotonous and yet agitated inflection, she repeated over and over again the same phrases: "No, no, no, no! I don't believe it! Oh, Will, Will, Will, I don't believe it! You did it yourself! You did it yourself! You did it yourself! Ask Nancy Cornish!" And then, always with a little listening pause, "I'll promise anything!" Christina shrank back against the door-jamb as if she were going to fall. "Whatever does this mean? How came she like this? Oh, God!" she breathed, "what shall I do? What can I do?" "Oh, Will, Will, Will!" said the other voice. "No, no, no, I don't believe it!" "Ah, me!" Christina breathed. "Nor I! If only I hadn't been there, and seen!" "You did it yourself! You did it yourself! You did it yourself! Ask Nancy Cornish!" Christina sank on her knees beside the bed, in an agony of terror and tenderness, and for the first time since she had seen the lock of hair, her tears poured forth. But she took the girl's hand and held it; and she tried to master those feverish eyes with the eyes of her own despair. "Nancy!" she said, "Nancy! It's Christina. Nancy dear, it's Chris. Oh, try to know me. Look at me. Listen to me. You must know me. You shall. Nancy, stop it! Stop it and look at me!--Oh, God!" Christina prayed. "Help me! Help me!" She caught the sick girl in her arms and covered the young little face with tears and kisses. And as she held Nancy on her breast she became aware of a thin ribbon round the girl's neck, with a key to it. She picked up this strange ornament, and immediately Nancy's fingers came creeping in search of it and she cried out. Christina dropped it and rose to her feet. "Why!" she said aloud. "It's the key to my desk!" The desk stood against the wall and she tried it. It was locked. Nancy lay almost quiet clutching the key. Christina stood there, puzzled. In a drawer of the dressing-table there was a key much the same in shape and size. Christina took it out, drew the ribbon from Nancy's neck, and, steeling her heart, plucked open Nancy's hand. The girl set up a shrill cry but was instantly quieted by the substitute key; the old woman could be heard rattling with a tray at the foot of the stairs. Christina sprang to the desk and opened it; it was in order and almost empty, containing no object that Christina did not know. She pulled open one after the other of the three little drawers. And thus she came, with an amazed start, upon a bulky envelope bearing an address which was the last she could have expected. The envelope was addressed to the District-Attorney of New York. Christina appropriated it without pause or scruple, slipped it into her little handbag and restored Nancy's property almost with one swift movement. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in an attitude of listless dejection when the housekeeper entered with the tray. "Well," said the old woman, "why don't you take her? Mebbe everything ain't just as you expected. What'd she yell out like that for?" "I touched that ribbon round her neck. What has she got clutched in her hand?" "Oh, just some old trash! Better leave it be. She yells blue murder if you try to take it away from her." These two truthful ladies looked down together on the turning head and chattering lips and the eyes burning with fever. "Ain't it a sight?" said the old woman. "It's wonderful what frettin' 'll do. She ain't been like this but since Wednesday. She kep' up surprisin' until then. Guess her not hearin' anything from you set her off. She counted on that. I'd know why she sh'd be so terrible set on gettin' away from here. She's been well treated. When there's been anybody here fit to keep an eye on her, she ain't even been locked up. Nicola fastened down the window in the closet where you had the sink put in--y' know, under the stairs?--in case she sh'd take to carryin' on. But mercy me, we found out soon enough that wa'n't the idea. She's had the best in the house.--Well, you 'bout scalded yerself." "I'm in a hurry," said Christina, setting down the empty coffee-cup. "Where are some loose clothes for her?" "Land sakes!" said the old woman. "You want to kill her!" Christina went to a closet and found some skirts and a cloak. "Please go down," she said, "and tell Nicola to put the hood up and let down the rain curtains." The old woman's suspicion and resentment had never been allayed, but she kept them choked under. "Well," said she, "I s'pose it's all right. I guess she's goin' t' die anyhow. An' I guess it's 'bout the best thing she can do. I dunno what on earth we're goin' t' do with her if she don't. I ain't goin' to stand for any o' them Dago actions. But I dunno as I can always put a veto on 'em!--Well, I don't see as you got any call to make such a face as that--seems to me that Denny fellow got a long way ahead o' anything any o' our boys done, if they are Dagoes!" "Take my message to Nicola, please," Christina said, "and don't stand there talking. Hurry!" The old woman got as far as the door. "I s'pose you know's well as anybody why she's here!" she said, intently studying Christina's face. She went out and downstairs muttering. "But I'd jus' like to know why you're takin' a hand in it! The idea! I guess that Denny feller--" The front door closed after her; Christina looked out of the window and saw her speaking with Nicola. She had Nancy partly dressed, and now wrapped her in the cloak. "What am I to ask you, my poor Nancy? Do you know what he never would tell me--how that door came to be bolted?" The girl's babble kept on undiminished. "God forgive me!" Christina cried, "if I do wrong!" With a strong effort, she lifted the girl in her arms. And then she was struck still by a sudden sound. It was the sound of the automobile racing down the road. She laid Nancy down and ran to the window; she flew downstairs and opened the front door. The rear of the car in which she had arrived, speeding in an opposite direction, was still visible in its own dust. Had Nicola gone to borrow rain curtains or some tool? Puzzled, Christina called to the old woman. "Mrs. Pascoe!" Getting no answer she went into the dining-room and from thence to the kitchen; they were empty. Her glance scoured the weedy homeliness of the backyard. She went to the shed, to the barn; they were deserted. A strange silence had fallen upon the place. In the hot lowering sunshine the girl stood still, and for the first time the cold fingers of suspicion began to creep along her pulse. She had been very sure of her position, and she felt, as yet, nothing that could be called fear. But the defiance of her authority was amply evident. She knew now that she had been a fool to come here alone, to depend entirely on her personal force. But her mouth set itself in a smile like light on steel. Did they know what they were doing when they pushed her to the wall like this? Perhaps, in some way, they counted on the time it would take her to leave Nancy behind her and go for help--the nearest house was half a mile away. Leave Nancy behind her! For reply Christina sped into the hall, and caught up the New York telephone book. She ran her finger down a column until, having come to the number 3100 Spring, she picked up the receiver. Something said, in her little steely smile, that with the utterance of that number she would throw a world away. The number was that of Police Headquarters. The exchange was a long time answering. Christina shook the receiver hook vigorously. Still silence. As she gave an impatient movement something brushed, swinging, against her wrist. It was a loose end of dark green cord from the receiver in her hand. The wire had been cut. Christina remained there quite quiet, while that cold hand of the suspicion that was now certainty seemed to stop her heart. She remembered that, in the world of help she was cut off from, not a living human being knew where she was. Well, she was a strong girl. She said to herself, "It is better Nancy should die on the road in my arms than that I should leave her here!" She ran up to Nancy's room. When she had first descended to the road, some one must have mounted the back stairs. Nancy's door was locked. With a firm step Christina entered the kitchen and opened the table-drawer. They had thought of that, too. Everything with which a lock might be pried open had been swept up and away. Christina lifted a dining-room chair and carried it upstairs. She brought it down with all the force she had upon the lock. Failing in this, she held the chair in front of her and charged the door with it. But whereas in anything requiring swiftness, elasticity, endurance even, Christina was as strong as wire, she had absolutely no weight. After half a dozen of these batteries every one of which seemed to strike through her own heart on Nancy's fever, she decided that whether or no she might shatter the door in time, time was the last thing she had to waste. And she could run half a mile like an arrow. She had all along retained her hold on the little bag which held her purse and she thanked heaven for the money in it. She had her hand on the front door when she was arrested by the sound of voices and approaching footsteps; Mrs. Pascoe's, Nicola's and the heavier step of an older man. From her earlier confidence Christina had now jumped to an extreme of accusation in which any violence seemed probable. Mad to get away for help, it seemed better to delay for a moment or two than to be caught. She slipped back across the hall and hid herself in the little closet under the stairs. She was scarcely secure there when the front door opened, and Christina hardly dared to breathe lest the click of her own door closing should have betrayed her presence. To her highly wrought nerves the utter darkness, the airless pressure of her sanctuary were terrible, and she found and held the knob that at the first stillness she might slip out. She could hear calling and running about; she could hear them talking in Nancy's room. After a while, the men went out and then she heard Mrs. Pascoe come downstairs and the dining-room door close after her. The time had come. Christina, all her life subject to fainting-fits, felt that she scarcely could have borne, for a moment longer, that black airlessness. With infinite softness, she turned the knob. And then, indeed, her heart stood still. Mrs. Pascoe had omitted to mention one improvement with which, in preparation for Nancy's occupancy, the outside of the closet-door had been fortified. This improvement was a Yale lock. CHAPTER VI THE YELLOW HOUSE AND WHAT THEY FOUND AT IT It was after midnight when Stanley Ingham stopped his car and yielded up the steering-wheel to Herrick. Besides themselves their car carried three of Kane's detectives and they were followed by the sheriff and a roadster full of armed men. The detectives had a secondary mission. At the last minute Kane had received a message from a much concerned elderly cousin of Joe Patrick's. This cousin was a waiter at "Riley's," a roadhouse which was not only a cheap edition of the aristocratic Palisades, whence Christina had disappeared, but was kept by a brother-in-law and erstwhile partner of the Palisades' proprietor. The waiter at Riley's declared that a drunken taxi-driver had just turned up with a note from the Palisades urging Riley's to keep him over night. This man was quite drunk enough to talk about having lost his place through obliging the Palisades and Joe's cousin volunteered to keep an eye on him till the arrival of the detectives. These were to return to New York with their prisoners of the yellow house not from Waybridge, but from Benning's Point, stopping on the way to that station at Riley's and telephoning thence all news to Kane. At Waybridge they had been fortunate in finding the sheriff up and starting forth after some marauders who were reported to have robbed a still burning post-office at Benning's Point; the station agent whom they found with him had seen Nicola, that morning, meet a lady with that old car of his that he had painted black when there was so much talk about those New York Guinees having a gray one; the agent was sure the lady had taken no return train. From both him and the sheriff it was evident that the Pascoes as foreigners, had been contemptible, but not disliked. The unpopular person was a boarder they had; a woman with red hair who stayed out there to write novels and thought she was so much too good for other people that she never so much as passed the time of day with anybody. Friends of hers did come out from the city to see her sometimes. Going or coming from the city herself she was tied up in one o' those automobile veils--might 'uv been her come back this morning, only she looked kind of shabby-dressed. The sheriff added that there was old Mrs. Pascoe, Nicola's mother, as nice a little woman as you'd want to see; real neat, trim, gray-haired lady, an American lady. Herrick suddenly turned and stared. But now they were within half a mile of the Pascoe house. Stanley and the detectives crowded into the sheriff's car. They had been instructed to send Herrick on alone; he was to attempt an entrance by a message of urgent and friendly warning, endeavoring to get the lay of the land and to make his presence known to any watchful captive, but otherwise awaiting reinforcements. One of the detectives said to Herrick, "If they won't let you in, just leave your message. And let them hear you drive off. Then we'll get together." Herrick ran the car slowly along the unfamiliar road. This was still clogged and rutted with mud, which had begun to stiffen since the rain had stopped; a high wind shouldered the clouds in driving masses. His destination was the second house on his left; and, as he peered along the roadside, the deep excitement, the terrible questions which glowed in that dark night, worked in him with a fearful gladness. Certainty was at hand! A bitter exultation rode within him nearer and nearer to whatever stroke Fate stood to deal him in the yellow house. A hundred visions of Christina shone and darkened before him, leaping along his pulse, and his blood sang in him with a kind of madness.--The second house on the left! There it rose, a blot on the blackness! Dark as a stone, it somehow struck cold on his hot hopes. He brought up the car before the gate and flung a falsely cheerful halloo upon the wind. Nothing answered. The gate yielded to his hand; as he went up the path a fragrance greeted him like Christina's presence--the cold, moist air was filled with the sweetness of old-fashioned, garden flowers. His fingers missed the bell; but, lighting on the brass knocker, sent loud reverberations through the house. Nothing within it seemed to stir. But the silence echoed horribly and swung, quaking, in his breast. Of a sudden he knew that house was empty. Nothing else mattered. Discretion ceased to exist. He drew back and scanned the vacant, shuttered windows; he ran round the house; there was still no light; he tried the kitchen door and drew back to listen; it was as though within the house he could hear silence walking and her step was ominous. He put his shoulder to the kitchen door and burst it in. Once again, as on that night in August, a dark room lay waiting; the darkness seemed to breathe. He had matches in his pocket and once again the light discovered only emptiness. But he remembered what, that other time, the inner chamber had revealed. He found a candle and then a lamp, and, lighting that, crossed the dining-room and then the hall into the living-room. All prettily upholstered, all in order, and vacant as the eye of idiotcy. His soul knew there was nothing living in that house; and yet it seemed to him there would surely be a step upon the stair, that a voice behind him or an opening door would certainly reveal some fateful presence. There in the hall, under the stairs, a door was open and he paused to look into a closet. It contained a sink with running water, gardening tools, wraps hanging upon nails, and, on the floor, a big silk umbrella without a handle, the rod recently broken. There were also some old flower-pots, two of them half full of earth. Nothing else. At the foot of the stairs he called out, "Christina!" and stood and listened while his voice went dying about the empty house. "Christina--it's I--Bryce!" and then "Nancy Cornish! Can you hear me, Nancy Cornish?" But no face leaned over the balusters to him. He went upstairs. But his step was heavy, and up there the silence weighed on him, like silence in a vault. Two rooms on the left told him nothing. But in a room on his right he found a small forgotten slipper. That slipper had fitted the slim foot of some littler maid than Christina! Holding the lamp high, he was struck to see the transom covered with poultry-wire. He went at once to the windows. Yes, there were the holes in the woodwork; even, here and there, a nail. There had been poultry wire over the windows, too. In this room some one had been held a prisoner. They had taken her away; and in such haste that they had forgotten to strip the transom and they had forgotten her slipper. At one side of the room a desk lay open, all its drawers pulled out and empty; he snatched at the waste basket; there was a crumpled sheet of paper in it and a handful of torn-up scraps. He shook the scraps into his handkerchief and, setting the lamp on the desk, he bent above the crumpled sheet. There leaped before him, in an illiterate, but very firm hand, an opening of such unimpeachable decorum as to stagger his prying eyes. Mrs. Hope, Honored Madam, There was no date or other heading. The note ran: Mrs. Hope, Honored Madam, Would say don't come here or send. You can tell where by knowing my handwriting. She is not here. Where she is now I got no idee on earth. I surmise she will be heard from. There was no signature. Why had the letter not been sent? It had evidently been volunteered upon some early intimation of Christina's disappearance. "Perhaps they found out, later, that Mrs. Hope had gone away--" Then he heard Stanley hailing him from the road. The sheriff's party, taking advantage of his house breaking, were with him immediately. They examined the place from the small, bare, air-chamber into which Stanley, mounting on Herrick's shoulders, stuck his head, to the cellar; where only a coal-bin, almost empty beneath their flinching quest, an ice-box, and an admirable array of preserves confronted them. Upstairs, clothes had been found in all the closets--the clothes of working people for the most part; but in one, the long, slim, sophisticatedly simple gowns of a pretty woman. In that room they had forced another desk, which kept them busy for a while with tradesmen's bills, all made out, regularly enough, to Nicola Pascoe. Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name. In the barn a couple of trunks disgorged only some winter coats and a smell of camphor; the tools in the shed were in empty order, and when, considerably soiled and stuck about with lint and hay, they met again in the composed and pretty living-room, there on the mantelshelf the face of Christina Hope smiled mockingly at them from a silver frame. Indifferent to prayer or scrutiny, it had nothing to tell them. And it seemed to ask if they, on their part, had anything to say. [Illustration: Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name.] Herrick never knew what instinct took him back to the closet under the stairs. He could not bear to leave it; there was a little broken glass on the floor and a sudden wavering in his lamp suggested that this came from a break in one of the minute panes in a small window over head. He tried to reach this window to see if it were fastened and found it nailed down, with outside shutters that were closed. But in getting near enough for this he knocked over one of the flower-pots. "Find anything?" Stanley cried, bounding forward. The smashed flower-pot lay at their feet. "No, only broken something!" Herrick instinctively picked it up and the loosened earth parted in his hand. "Yes, after all," he said, "I think I have." There had been buried, smooth and deep in the flower-pot, the diamond necklace. CHAPTER VII VANISHING LADY: THE SHADOW AT THE DANCE The countryside slept vigorously and an hour's exhaustive inquiry gleaned but the one circumstance--the search party itself discovered, pinned to the first door they came to, a note informing the neighbor he might have the livestock in lieu of certain debts. It had not been there when the man had closed his house at nine o'clock. This limitation of time was their sole reward, unless they counted the talk of an old farmer, after the sheriff, promising to drop the detectives at Riley's, had gone on to his post-office. The farmer said that hours ago, when he'd been ever so long in bed and asleep, he thought he heard somebody hollerin' an' bangin' on his door. Kind o' half dreamed it. Kind o' half fancied it was a woman's voice. Storm was so bad he warn't sure. It was with this pale fancy to keep them company that Herrick and Stanley let out their car along the road again, this time in a dryly nipping air and under a troubled, scudding moon. From that desert purity and freedom of cold space Riley's accosted them like Babylon. It was one blare and glare of hot lights and jigging music; colored globes over the gates, colored lanterns in the garden; along the driveway the blazing headlights of continually arriving and departing motor cars that hissed and shrieked and shuddered; on the veranda, where the tables indeed were nearly deserted, fur-coated men stood smoking huge cigars and women with complexions artificially secure against the wind passed in and out; their solitaire earrings pushed forward beyond the streaming scarlet or purple of the veils that bound their heads. The change of atmosphere warmed Herrick with that unreasonable anger which the young feel against those who do not suffer when they suffer. He followed Stanley Ingham morosely through the hubbub and felt no fitting gratitude for the table miraculously provided with a fortifying meal, since Thompson, the chief detective, had not yet been able to get Kane upon the 'phone. The cabman was upstairs under guard of the others, babbling some trash about having taken the lady to the Amsterdam hotel and left her there. The thick smoke, the smell of wine and food and abominable coffee, the clatter of cheap china, the banging of the music and the motions of the "trotting" dancers in street dress, the cries of acquaintances urging them to new contortions, disgusted Herrick and set an edge upon the iron of his self-contempt. The woman calling and knocking in the night confronted him like a ghost, in the rank profusion and fever of that place. He, to eat and drink and wile away the time; what was _she_ doing? Was that she who had begged in vain for shelter, beaten by the wind and drenched by the storm, and with God knew what terrors in her heart! Out of her pale face, with the rain upon it, her eyes besought him. Stanley, anxious, but waving a cigar, for at twenty an adventure is still an adventure, commented, "Say, old man, you want to relax! I could let things wear on me, too, if I wanted to!--What are those?"--For the detective having again fidgetted to the 'phone, Herrick had shaken out upon the table-cloth the handful of torn scraps from the waste-paper basket. They were in the same handwriting as the interrupted note, but much more hurried and scrawled on cheap pad paper as if to a more intimate associate. Only six of them were of appreciable size and these came to Herrick's hand in this order-- This time get rid of her. I say. She but she can't g real dau mother et rid do the way een any She can but mebbe of she's got to ain't ever b ghter to me At the phrase "get rid of her" Stanley quailed. But what the words brought clearest to Herrick's mind was a small, spare face in its gray frame bent above its game of solitaire. Without help from the law could he make her speak? He heard Stanley saying, "How did Chris ever get mixed up with this lot? What kind of hold _can_ they have on her?" "Sssh!'" he said, dropping his handkerchief over the scraps. The detective was returning. Thompson sat down at their table, baulked and restive, and Herrick, a hundred times more so, was reduced to scowling at their surroundings. Near him sat a wrinkled, enameled, fluffy mite stubbing out her cigarette as she giggled at a masculine bulk whose face Herrick could not see. Dark and handsome as it vaguely promised to be this did not account for a curiosity which Herrick somehow at once felt to see it; but between them reared a gorged Amazon with a high bust and a coiffure of corrugated brass. The band struck up again, this time to a music-hall ditty, so that the customers kept their seats. But the hired singers were straining their poor voices above the tumult and some musicians blacked up as negroes joined in the chorus, performing shuffles as they walked up and down and slapping steps with a dreary, noisy simulation of irrepressible glee; infected by this whirl of gaiety the Amazon frisked back from the little dyed man to whom she had been bending and gave Herrick a clear view of a portly seigneur with a close beard. Instinct had not misled his curiosity; the portly seigneur was his old acquaintance, Signor Emile Gabrielli. He could not have told why this struck him as portentous. The men smiled and bowed. Then Gabrielli bowed to Stanley. "Didn't you know?" Stanley asked. "He brought us letters--this is his first visit. He's going to do our Italian correspondence." It was the more remarkable that there should be, in Signor Gabrielli's honeyed civility, a kind of chill. Then Herrick remembered that he, at least, was a marked man and that his old suspicion of shady corners in the lawyer's experience had been partly due to that gentleman's extreme dislike of being "mixed up" in things. Henrietta Deutch could also have borne witness to that characteristic! Far from advancing toward their old familiarity the signor began to round up his innocent flock and insinuate it mildly from Herrick's polluted neighborhood. And though this splendor retreated Herrick did not regret being left alone, as if beside the dear ghost with the rain upon its face! But there was a singular beating at his heart, a feeling that he was plucking at a veil which he longed and feared to raise. Yet that at some other time he had raised it and lived through a shock upon the threshold of which he stood again. It was already time for another dance and the groups about the tables rose to their feet. Herrick had a moment's vision, fever keen, of the room's arrested motion. Even the Gabrielli party paused in the doorway; Herrick was moved by an uncontrollable impulse to follow and accost the Italian and oddly impelled by his excitement Stanley, too, rose to his feet; all round them the couples clasped each other; the musicians lifted their bows; after ten minutes' enforced repose the whole world seemed to hang in expectation of the maxixe. When, just ahead of the orchestra, from somewhere outside, beyond, above, into that instant's perfect silence there thrilled forth the voice of a single instrument; the full-tongued call of a piano, leaping, swelling, swaying into the march from Faust! A gasp of amazement, a prickle, a shudder, ran over the skin of that susceptible assembly. It was a tune, just then, so well advertised! They recovered themselves with amused, scared smiles, awaiting some jest in the sequel. The piano stopped with a wild crash. Instantly, from the front courtyard where the motors waited, a bomb of oaths, cries and movement burst upon the night. The sound of men jumping and running, exclaiming, stumbling, swearing, of people bounding up the steps, of the hall filled with astonished, excited questioners merged with one phrase growing over, topping all the others--"The shadow! It's the shadow! The shadow on the blind!" Amazement, bewilderment, incredulity, obstructed the story which Herrick traced to a knot of chauffeurs. "Yes--up there! The third window! Look, it's dark--they've turned out the lights!" As Stanley, Herrick and Thompson ran to the second story the legend still beat about their ears. "It had its back to the window--it threw out its right arm--" The door of the room was thrown open. The proprietor's wife, shaken with hysterical laughter, ushered in the crowd. She was a flushed, stout woman in the gaudiest of kimonos, larger than the fat man in the driving-coat to whom she appealed. "My brother here 's from Mizzouri and I was just showing him how the shadow must have done--you can't earn any reward's round here! Anyhow, you don't suppose that hussy spends all her time giving signals for murders, do you?"--"But the shadow was so slim!" somebody said, as Mrs. Riley scornfully assisted Thompson in his researches. These coming to nothing the young men were powerless to refuse going oil to Benning's Point and telephoning from there--Thompson had begun to be suspicious of this exchange. They had gone perhaps a mile, moving slowly, watchful of the leaves in every bush, and Herrick was remounting from the examination of a false alarm when they heard a hail in their rear and beheld approaching through the moonlight a hatless figure on a motorcycle. The elderly cousin of Joe Patrick, whom they had not seen since he first welcomed them, bore down upon them in timid and disheveled haste.--"Yis, sor. I tried to see y' alone, sor, but yeh were gone. 'T is the reward, sor; I'd not be sharin' it with the policeman an' him takin' th' whole of it, not a doubt! An' impidence, beside, they do always give yeh! But a gintleman, sor, I don't mind tellin' him; if yeh 'll exscuse me sayin' so, Mrs. Riley's a liar!" Not that he really knew anything. "No more than yirselves! But the piana, sor! It stands there fer the upstairs dances, an' her not knowin' wan note from another!--An' what's more, comin' down the back stairs from that same room wid the dhirty dishes, what did I see standin' at the back door but a car like yer own--only still as death an' no lights in its head! Wasn't that a queer thing, now? An' it gone whin I rode out." What was that?--down the road which crossed theirs, where they had just reconnoitered for a sound! Nothing but their distorted fancy, their roused longing! "An' all I can tell surely, sor, is that awhile back, whin Riley sinds me upstairs with a bite o' supper for Mrs. Riley's brother that's just come in, barrin' the long drink, stheamin' hot, 'twas chicken an' like that yeh'd give to a lady. He has his own room, has the brother, but 'twas to hers I took the thray. An' though I saw no wan an' I heard no wan, yit sure there was some wan beyond Riley she was yellin' at an' him prayin' her 'Hoosh! Hoosh!' as I come to the door!" "Did you hear anything of what she was saying?" "Just the wan thing, sor, an' you'll remimber 'twas me told yeh. She said, 'I'll thank yeh to hand over that diamond necklace!'" There was something there! They could not hear, but they could somehow feel from far behind them a stealthy purring. They turned; no lamp nor headlight but their own was anywhere to be seen. The second and less traveled road crossed theirs just above them at a narrow angle; but it, too, lay untenanted, not a breath quivering on the stillness. They saw themselves quite alone beneath the moon, breathing a night silence drenched with coldest sweetness; the last words rang in their blood with an accent that could not leave them wholly sober; they were, perhaps, a little "fey." At any rate, it was by an impulse with which reason had nothing to do that, as the old waiter continued--"'Twas for her, surely, they'd have that dark car waitin'!" Herrick held up a warning hand. The waiter hushed himself, stricken, and huddled in against their car; Herrick bent forward in a passionate readiness, and from far in the rear, but nearing swifter than the flight of time, along the intersecting road came the tremulous vibration of a second automobile. CHAPTER VIII JILL-IN-THE-BOX! THE LAST OF THE GRAY TOURING CAR They listened, incredulous, straining their eyes among the black pools and bright patches of wooded, winding way up from the river and discerned--almost on the instant close at hand--a gray ghost dipped in moonshine; lost under the trees and then springing out upon them, a black shape against the darkness, heralded by no sound of voice or horn, speeding as if with its head down like some sullen thunderbolt. With their lights blazing defiance Herrick, catching out his revolver, attempted to cross the junction in time to throw their own car across the narrow road. He was too late; she grazed them as she passed; they fell in behind her, shouting threats which were lost in the wind of that flight; the road fell away before them; the hilled and wooded earth tore past; the noise, as of blowing forests, of multitudinous crowds and the roaring of the sea, surged in their ears; great waves and solid hills of air rose up and moved upon them, and, as they passed through, split into stinging, icy shreds that whipped their faces; the car rocked in the wild tide of its own speed, and in a world where they had gone blind to everything but one crazy whirl, they yet saw their lights fall ever nearer and brighter upon the fugitive. It was now nearing three o'clock, the moon wholly victorious and the cars leaping through a world of molten silver. Herrick said to the boy beside him, "Can you shoot?" "Not so that you can tell it!" "Take the wheel, then!" He could not make out her figure in the car. But in such thickly looming dangers, what must be, must be. The men ahead heard him call to them to stop before he fired. In answer they merely leaned forward shielding themselves, and Herrick let fly two shots, aiming for the back tires; but, in that swaying speed, he missed. With a kind of harsh gaiety he answered Stanley, "No more can I!" and with the words the man beside Nicola turned and fired straight at Herrick's head. The wind-shield shattered in their faces; as the bullet passed between them Stanley felt a little sting, like the scorch of a quick, hot iron, on his cheek. "Slide down," Herrick said to him, "way under the wheel! Keep your head to one side." He himself was kneeling, resting his revolver on the frame of the broken wind-shield. At his third bullet they heard Nicola cry out and clap his hand to the back of his neck; the touring-car swerved and gave a kind of bounce; the man beside Nicola fired again and put a hole through Herrick's cap. The next minute the revolver dropped out of his hand; Herrick's fourth shot had broken his wrist. And now the road broadened a little, and the Ingham car was drawing on a level with its opponent. The touring-car did not carry Christina. "Get as far forward as you can," Herrick said, "I'm after the front tires." Their own front tires passed the rear of the first car; as they came abreast the man with the broken wrist, using his left hand, emptied his pistol almost in their faces; a shot from the man in the body of the car struck their steering-wheel; there was a cloud now between the two cars, smelling so thick of powder that Stanley seemed to himself to eat it. He was aware of Herrick suddenly casting aside all defenses, leaning forward into this cloud, his brows knotted and his arm outstretched. There came the quick Ping!--Ping! of his last two shots and as if in the same breath, the earthquake! The black touring-car seemed to spring into the air; then her fore wheels collapsed and she sank forward, still sliding a little as if on her nose, and, running quietly over the edge of the road into the shallow ditch that edged it, turned on her side. They were well passed by this time, and despite the jerk with which Stanley brought up, Herrick had leaped out before they were stopped, and at the same moment a figure scrambled from the fallen hulk and, without a glance behind, made off across the fields. Herrick, shifting his empty revolver as he ran, till he carried it by the barrel, swung into full pursuit. This was the more foolhardy because on getting to his feet Nicola had drawn his own revolver, from which Herrick had to dodge as he ran, and at length indeed to throw himself down, and get forward only by his hands and knees. They were now in a broken, stony lot, spotted with underbrush; a brook running through it, and here and there tall chestnut trees. By screening himself with these, and making a run for it in any patch of shadow, he kept his man in sight and even gained upon him; he was waiting till Nicola's gun should be as empty as his own before he came to closer quarters. For this he knelt and rose and ran and crawled, now showing himself, to draw--and waste!--a bullet; and now plumping down among bushes. It was at one of these moments that he heard a shot behind him and, peering through the screen of twigs, saw that Nicola's comrades had freed themselves from the ditch and were advancing, apparently full-armed, and he of the uninjured hand beating the coverts as they came. They called to each other, and in Italian sure enough; and they carried a lantern from Stanley's car. What had become of Stanley? And what now was he himself to do? He crept forward to the edge of his thicket and could just make out a figure, not very far off, running heavily across a cleared space. Then, in a blanket of darkness, the figure disappeared as though through a trap-door, and Herrick, for all his listening, could hear only the calling and trampling of the men with the lamp. He told himself that Nicola had taken a leaf from his own book and was perhaps lying flattened to the earth--there came a disturbance in the bushes, a jar along the ground, as of some one plunging back from that cleared space toward the road; it appeared to him that a bulk of blacker blackness appeared and disappeared where those sounds rose. But the moon had so gone under a cloud that he could not be sure. So he thought; and then his heart leaped to admit the blessed truth--the moon had set! He slipped to his feet and fled, swift as a shadow and strong as a hound, after the heavier runner. He had guessed the truth, that Nicola was returning to the road. He had been led out across the fields on a false scent, but now Nicola, thinking to have doubled and shaken him off, was on the home trail straight for the high road. They came out upon it perhaps two hundred feet to the south of their empty motors; Herrick steadily gaining, and surprised cries and lantern-flashes piercing the field they had left behind. But as Herrick lifted his gun to let the lagging quarry have its butt-end, suddenly Nicola pitched forward and lay at his feet. He brought up short, suspicious of a trick. And then he remembered how Nicola had clapped his hand to the back of his neck. Holding the gun ready, he stooped and put his own hand to the same spot. It was covered with something hot and wet, which Herrick, with a surprising lack of sentiment, wiped off on the man's coat; he tried to lift the senseless figure and get it back to his own car. Something fell out of Nicola's breast with a little silver tinkle. The sound, as of some woman's trinket, drove the sense out of Herrick's head. Though he might as well have run up an electric target, he struck a match. A silver locket lay in his hand. It had been violently wrested from a neck-chain in whose wrenched links a thread or two of lace still clung. In one broken side the glass had been ground to fragments, as though under a man's heel, but the marred lines of a likeness were still there. The likeness, cut from an old kodak picture, was of Will Denny. Some one, like Signor Gabrielli, had never voluntarily parted with the features of her love! Out of the locket's other side, warm from Nicola's breast and unmarred but by the trickling of his blood, cried mutely, eagerly, to Herrick the fresh youth of Nancy Cornish. Almost as he saw the bullets sang about him, as if he had charged into a bee hive. The lamp the Italians carried swallowed up his little match and picked him out with brightness, holding him in the circle of its light. He snatched up Nicola's gun and pulled the trigger, but the barrel was empty as that of his own; he might have flung himself down and taken his chance to crawl off in the ditch, but he had no mind to die like that; and what he did was to snatch off his coat and hold it before him, back and forth like a moving screen, as he ran forward into the mouth of the revolvers to crack at least one man on the head with his cold weapon before he fell. Just then from down the road a fresh volley of bullets shattered the night, and the voice of Stanley and the sheriff came to him like music. The rescue which so much firing had helped Stanley to summon swept in full chase after the Pascoes and the tables were completely turned. But the shouts of the sheriff's party--"Got one?" "No; haven't you?" "Hi, Williams, they must have got over the wall of the Hoover place!" "We'll scramble over from the hood and see if they've struck down to the river!" "Blake, you and Cobbett drive round and ring up the lodge. Them old folks are easy a million, but get 'em up!"--warned Herrick of a blank in the sequel. And sure enough when the conquerors foregathered, the escape of the Pascoes, presumably by the river, was the end of their conquest. For this had they fought and ridden, crawled and run! No wonder they felt a certain need of cheering each other with what gains they had. There was the yellow house; the home of the Pascoes and their Arm of Justice, the rainbow end of Kane's dream! And there, in the ditch beside them was a vague tumble of wreckage. "Hail, and farewell!" Herrick whistled, with a curious laugh. "We've met once too often!" For there, at least, was the end of his acquaintance, the gray touring-car. As the two young men reëntered New York with the milk wagons and drove soberly through the Park, a cool gray light, more like darkness than light and yet perfectly and strangely clear like shadowed water, had begun to break above the sleeping town. Then Herrick drew from his pocket his paper puzzle and spread it out beside him on the rear seat of the car. This time get rid of her. I say. She but she can't g real dau mother et rid do the way een any She can but mebbe of she's got to ain't ever b ghter to me Some of the connections were obvious enough, but what the torn edges helped him still further to form was a purely domestic statement. "This time she's got to do the way I say. She ain't ever been any real daughter to me. But--" Then there was a bit gone. Then, "She can get rid of" word missing, "mebbe, but she can't get rid of her mother--" "Well!" cried Stanley in disdainful disappointment. "What's that got to do with anything?" "How should I know?" He made the scraps into a little pile on the floor of the car, set fire to them, and ground them to ashes with his heel. For he knew only too well. That gray parrot face, that sharp, ignorant, cold voice in the sunny table d'hôte! "I want you should clear out from here, young man. I'd oughta know Dagoes; I married one." Yes, that was it! Wasn't it Stanley who wanted to know what hold such people had on Chris? "My girl's good Yankee--fair as any one. I brought her up so fine--" As they turned down still unawakened Broadway to his rooms Herrick looked into the light that was like darkness with eyes that made nothing of the first pale blush of peach blow nor the first hint of vaporous blue. Till he heard Stanley say, "And if that Pascoe Arm-of-Justice gang have run away and yet come back, where did they run to?" Through all his preoccupation Herrick was aware of an immense stupidity. "You're right. We went over that place inch by inch. And you know, when they left, they must have tumbled into their car and off--no time for anything. They packed nothing, they took nothing. Well, then, Stan, where was Justice's typewriter? And in what room or garret or cellar was the printing-press?" Stanley gaped. "Agreed--there wasn't any. And so that never was their real shop. Only a blind. Their real place of business, Stan, their fortress, their retreat, we've never found at all!" This was the net result of town and country in their search for a missing girl, twenty-four hours after Christina had disappeared. * * * * * The anxiety of her friends would have been scarcely more enlightened, or even more relieved, had the search not happened to miss one accident of that cross-wired night. At about eleven o'clock, more than an hour before Herrick had forced an entrance, the since damaged touring-car, returning from its expedition of the morning, had drawn up before the gate of the yellow house. The night world was then still a world of wind and rain; the car was splashed as though it had passed through a flood, and Nicola, stiff, muddy and drenched, was not in a very good humor when he got no reply to his knock at the kitchen door. He had driven quietly and knocked quietly, but now he lost control of himself and began to hammer; catching hold of the knob impatiently, he felt it turn in his grasp and entered. The door had not been locked, though the kitchen was lighted. He thought he could hear, somewhere, some one knocking. He took the lamp and went up the back stairs; then it seemed to him that the knocking came from the front of the house. He retraced his steps. Yes, there was a light in the hall and the knocking came from the closet under the stairs. The Pascoes were in desperate straits, and Nicola was alone. He drew his knife from the capacious foldings of his coat, and stepped a little behind the door as he flung it open. There stumbled out, and sank, gasping, at his feet, the figure of a woman. She brought with her, out of the reeking closet, a strong odor of ammonia. Nicola gave a grunt of amazement. Then, like Herrick afterward, he lifted his lamp, and stared about the closet. On the floor lay an empty quart bottle which had recently been full of household ammonia, a still soaking towel, and a large silk umbrella, the rod broken and the handle missing. With the point of this umbrella a pane of the little window overhead had been broken and a slant of the outside shutter forced open for air. Nicola could make nothing of it; he turned at length, and grouchily pulled the gasping woman to her feet. This woman was the gray-haired housekeeper, Mrs. Pascoe. At ten o'clock she said she had gone to get something from the closet and, as she opened the door, she had smelled ammonia. Then a towel, soaking with it, had been pressed on her face. Before she could do more than struggle with that, she had been pushed into the closet and the door had clicked upon her. That was all she knew. She must have been unconscious part of the time.--At ten o'clock! What an eternity of despair, then, had Christina not lived through before she thus ruthlessly freed herself! And what, now, had become of her; under a dawn some seven hours later than when, leaving Nancy behind, she had rushed out of that house and sped away, along the storm-tossed road? CHAPTER IX A SIGN IN THE SKY At the end of four days Christina's friends gave up their private search for the retreat of the Arm of Justice. During those days Herrick and the faithful Stanley, sometimes accompanied by Wheeler's stalwart hopefulness, had persistently attempted to take up the trail where it had broken--in the fields at one end of the Hoover estate. The beautiful old place, one of the great show places of the Hudson, stretched three miles deep to the river bank and a mile and a half along the road; remembering the theory of an escape through the grounds they presented themselves as richly tipping tourists to the little old, old couple at the lodge. These aged folk accustomed, during the Hoovers' prolonged absence abroad, to curious sightseers, welcomed them beneath the winged marble lions of the entrance-gates and made them free of the grounds with a host-like courtesy. But no broken shrubbery, no footstep save of that of a stray gardener or of their rival searchers the police, rewarded them; from the Hudson Club's boathouse, which had rented a strip of the beach, no boat was missing; the shores of unbroken woodland for a league on either side yielded no sign; when a hanging shutter at the great house led to a belief that the refugees had sheltered there the friends watched anxiously the disappointed ransacking of privileged authorities, and their only gain came from the gossip of the old lodge-keepers which informed them that the body of Nicola Pascoe had never been found. He could, then, have been only stunned. Thus it was still he they were most alert for during the next three days when the whole district--inns and post-offices, country-stores and stable-yards as well as every grove and by-lane--yielded them by day or night no scrap of news. During their search, indeed, what clues existed had crumbled away. The cabman, for instance, had most truly driven Christina to the Amsterdam hotel, where she had simply given him so large a tip as to upset his sobriety and earn his discharge. Meeting in with the manager of The Palisades and applying fuddleheadedly for relief he had conveyed to that gentleman the idea of "knowing something," and had been sent to sober up at Riley's in order to keep the reward in the family. Then the day-clerk of the Amsterdam brought forth Christina's registered signature, engaging a suite on Thursday afternoon for Thursday night; she had claimed this suite from the night-clerk and occupied it; early in the morning she had sent for the housekeeper and hired some clothes of hers, saying she couldn't wait for her maid to bring her any. The frightened housekeeper had at length displayed the white and silver dress. Last and worst, to Herrick, when, on Saturday, he had sought out the table d'hôte, the dogs, the cats, the babies were unchanged, the Italian proprietress greeted him with a smile of welcome, but no gray-haired woman played solitaire behind the desk. It was a curious enough blight without being heightened by the fact that Kane's patience with Herrick had plainly given out. Ever since the young man's return from Waybridge he had been aware of a change in the official attitude which rendered it suddenly impossible for him to see any one whom he asked to see and stretched like a fine wire excluding him from the whole affair. It increased his sense of outlawry, but a private preoccupation kept it from striking home. This preoccupation ran parallel with, but, alas! could never be brought to meet that old story of the Hopes' love-affair which he could not help feeling to be the key to the true, the hidden, situation. That little pitted speck--and his novel! His novel of the Italian impostor! On the morrow of his chase after Nicola the table d'hôte had scarcely failed him before he was knocking at the door of Mrs. Deutch. He took her for a walk on Riverside Drive, to be out of the way of dictographs, and laid before her not only the whole labyrinth of his perplexities but the best outline he could make of his dim conjectures. He had not failed to secure Signor Gabrielli's address from the Ingham office and he now put forward a petition which he tried not to feel monstrous. "Mrs. Deutch, there is a man who knows some strange things and strange people, who might perhaps send to Naples and receive from there a very enlightening cablegram. I am less than nothing to him, he will never send it for me. But I needn't tell you he is a man of great sensibility, very susceptible both to shame and pride. And still, after twenty-five years, he carries the miniature of his betrothed." Mrs. Deutch looked out across the proud bright waters. Through the serene air the somber glory of an autumn leaf floated to her feet; its fellows were gathered everywhere in withered piles which shouting children rejoiced to trample into powder. "Yes," she said, by-and-by, "I will see him. There are always perhaps those of whom he is afraid. Perhaps he is like that. But it will be easy to say, 'We were very fond of each other, you and I, we were so young and you were so beautiful a person! It would be a great happiness to think that now you were brave!' I can tell him 'Christina is my youth and my prettiness and my true faith and all that you once knew.' Oh, yes, he will give them back to me! He will send your message!" He had, indeed, sent it; but on Tuesday afternoon no reply had arrived. Having given up the countryside in despair Herrick could not keep away from the table d'hôte and, merely as a curious resort, he asked Stanley, who was returning to Springfield on Wednesday, to meet him there for dinner. He was able to show his guest the gorgeous Mr. Gumama with the knit, gloomy glories of his Saracen brow, but no mystery showed a feather. Inquiry, in his primitive Italian, elicited a statement that nearly wrenched a groan from his lips--his old lady had taken her eldest grandniece, Maria Rosa, to visit relations in the country! The mother of Maria Rosa insisted with a sweet smile that she could not remember the name of the place. The young men sat for a while in the square, where Stanley's astuteness discovered so many blackmailers in the gentle, lolling crowd that even the statue of Garibaldi seemed scarcely safe, and then they started up Fifth Avenue; the austere, departing dignities of whose lower end never seem so faded, so historic, so composed, as in September dusks. When they made out the identity of an angular correctness sailing stiffly but handsomely some distance ahead of them, it seemed of all neighborhoods the most suitable in which to encounter Ten Euyck; yet they loitered, lacking the spirit to cope with their opportunities. And Stanley, who was still in favor with the powers, began to attempt the diversion of his moodier companion with an account of Ten Euyck's efforts to propel the Commissioner of Police. "Every little while you forget that he isn't anybody and can't do anything, even if there were anything to do. And you say to yourself, 'Golly! I'd rather Chris stayed lost than that he laid hands on her.' He looks so black and white and dried in vinegar he does get on your nerves all right. You remember what a lot of money he's got, after all, and pull and all the rest of it, and you feel as if he'd be able to find _something_ against her--or, even if he didn't--" In the warm still evening his voice had carried farther than he thought; Ten Euyck turned round and recognized them. Evidently without offense, since he stood waiting for them to overtake him. "Good news for you, Ingham," he greeted the boy. "Judge Fletcher does not consider a confession equivalent to pleading guilty in the first degree! Moreover, in strict confidence, the judge is a veteran with an extreme distaste for the artistic temperament! If the prisoner is brought before him we shall get a first degree sentence yet!" "Oh, I don't care!" cried the lad, making a disgusted face. "It's all too horrible and--and queer, somehow! I don't want to hear about it." "Oh, if your consideration is for the actor in the lady's cloak--what a symbol of his whole conduct!--I understand he prefers it." Ten Euyck gave a short laugh. He was evidently in his happy vein of inquisitorial power. "When a man's been ruffling before the public in lace and satin and diamonds of course he baulks at prison accommodations. Yet even there our temperamental friend is welching."--He had evidently approached his point and they could not deny him the tribute of a stare. "We may be very foolish, my dear sirs, but we are not incapable of learning and I may tell you that we have acted on a hint." "You mean by 'we' yourself and the law?" "Perhaps I do, Mr. Herrick. At any rate, this time to-morrow we shall have rung the door-bell of the Arm of Justice." He took a tolerant pity on their restiveness, relaxing to an urbane smile as though his machinery were eased by the oil which always flowed when his prosecuting talent raised its head. "When that disgraceful laxity occurred at the Tombs and a prisoner was attacked there, we took a leaf from the criminals' book and put in among the guards some men of our own. One of these, a man named Firenzi, a very capable fellow, informed himself in no time of a marvelously well-paid plan for the prisoner's escape. Yes, by the very tribe who tried to kill him. Anything, you see, to get him out of the way. The idea is the old one of passing him out as a guard, leaving the true-false guard quite overcome in his cell;--a slim chap who's let wear a black beard on account of asthma or some such nonsense. They naturally suppose that an actor will look less conspicuous than most criminals in a bit of make-up! Does our consistent hero refuse to go? Filled with the bright hope of a hanging judge he does have to be coaxed a little, but not much. He is not lured by being told that he is to be sent to the safety of foreign lands, a far-off country and, I believe, a tropical climate, suited to his complexion. Firenzi reports him as demanding what they suppose there is in this foreign country to interest him. 'The lady who throws a shadow that you know.' 'It's enough!' says Denny, through his teeth, I am informed. I don't mind telling you that it's enough for us, too! They will be sure to take him to their nest to transfer him to the escort of their gang and his visit--before a Sampson shorn of his new beard and having still further done for himself with Fletcher, is returned to a jail somewhat less porous than he imagines to-night--his visit will be well watched!" They had reached Thirty-fourth Street and turned toward Broadway where Stanley had an errand. The two puppets in Ten Euyck's hands had nothing to say. Neither of them could bring himself to utter his excitement in that now potent presence and Herrick wondered if he were really trembling. A far-off country! The phrase chilled and hardened him, as premeditated safety always does. He was scarcely even grateful for the strength and fleetness of her wings. Never had Ten Euyck's inspectorship seemed less absurd or more really a fact. Of to-night and to-morrow he was now the master. And yet, beside the news of a far-off country, what news could he wring from the Arm of Justice to-morrow for which Herrick need care so much? They stopped on the corner of Long Acre and as Stanley plunged into a drug-store, a certain embarrassment fell upon the two men left together. "It's remarkable how warm it is!" Ten Euyck said. Herrick refrained from the flippancy of replying, "Wonderful weather for the time of year!" On closer inspection Ten Euyck proved a good deal worked up. His excitement was like a sort of dry paste and as he now grew pastier and pastier something that was almost a tremor seemed about to crack it; in fact the dry mask of his face was suffering from a lockjaw which was his form of hysteria. He took off his hat and, cold as he looked, produced an extremely superior handkerchief and wiped his brow. He said something about the last hot spell of the year and his lips clicked on the words as though they were rather a compromising statement; was it the coming crisis that creaked in his throat? It occurred to Herrick that Ten Euyck might be suffering from a sense that his vanity of achievement and his taste for torture, in leading him to disclose to-morrow's program, had led him injudiciously far. At any rate he studied, as if for sympathy, the irreproachable excellence of his hat-lining and a little pink line came out about his nose. Herrick looked uneasily at the doorway beyond which Stanley still loitered; he saw no reprieve. And as he made sure of this Ten Euyck again fortified himself with the interior of his hat and spoke. "On your honor, now, Herrick, you wouldn't keep it from me? You've no idea where she is?" And he followed this extraordinary question with a piteous, a blenching glance. Herrick did not speak; and Ten Euyck moistened his lips. The whole outline of his face seemed to take on a certain sharpness, and famine and fever thrust themselves, for a moment, into the windows of his eyes. In the silence which Herrick could not break, he murmured, "I'm not like this about women! You know that! Only she--" His voice cracked and then snapped off short, but with a hundred quiverings, like the string of a banjo breaking. Herrick seemed to himself to look through a door, in a house of revelations. Was this what covered Ten Euyck's complacent coldness to the other sex? Did those neat and formal lips often stifle an outcry like this? True, Christina's own story had revealed to him that Ten Euyck's coldness was all hot ice and very swarthy snow. But he had presumed that incident to be a deliberate brutality; Ten Euyck had always appeared to govern his instincts masterfully or to walk on them, indeed, with heels of iron. To see him bared and shaken like this was to put a new value on the force that had betrayed him; but Herrick was too young and too much in love to endure this lusting and trembling breath when it blew upon Christina. "On the whole," said he, deliberately, "keep your confidences to yourself, can't you? They make me sick." The pinkness spread over Ten Euyck's face: "Oh, I had forgotten your happiness!" he managed to cry, with a fierce shaking laugh. "Do let me know the date of the wedding!" He lifted his hat and strode from a neighborhood dangerous to dignity. But as he flung over his shoulder the ejaculation, "I hope you thought my diamonds became her!" Stanley's return arrested him. "These infernal papers!" the boy cried. Neither he nor Herrick had ever been strong enough to deny themselves the foolish headlines where one hour Christina had been seen as a passenger for Hongkong and another as a chambermaid in Yonkers. Nancy's ill-treated locket had roused the public to frenzy, but its imagination had definite items only of the eclipsing Christina Hope who, in the mid-day editions, generally lapsed to a lunatic in a suburban sanitarium; but nightfall always saw her mount again to the ghastliest and most criminal of "bodies." It was some such horror upon which Stanley had now fallen; below it Herrick saw the statement that in a day or two Denny would come up for sentence before Judge Fletcher. He had little enough love for Will Denny, but it was with a feeling of nausea that he observed the mounting satisfaction of Ten Euyck. After four years the law was to wipe out, for its most obedient son, a blow across the mouth! It was, nevertheless, the poisoned rumor of Christina which had set the air afire between all three men. This dealt with some lovely fugitive hunted out that day by wireless and then disappearing from a steamer in mid-ocean. The languor of an incredible fatigue stole feverishly through Herrick's veins. Ten Euyck shouted to Stanley in a kind of bark, "Well, no waves can hold her down!" And he began to hum a tune in defiance of the faith with which Herrick's silence defied the printed words. Herrick looked up and their gaze met across the screaming columns. Ten Euyck's tune was, "Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer." Herrick knocked the newspaper out of his hand and there was a second's tense fury before these two, who had forgotten everything else, should leap at each other. In that second Stanley, lifting his eyes, whistled excitedly and caught Herrick's arm. They were standing at the corner of Long Acre where five nights ago Herrick had met Wheeler in the rain. Fiery words and figures flashed their announcements, bright as ever, against the soft, lowering, purple blackness of the night. Down the side street Wheeler's theater, since Christina's disappearance, had been dark. It was still closed, but Wheeler must now have taken heart; for dark, save in theatrical parlance, it was no longer. The electric sign-- ROBERT WHEELER IN THE VICTORS had been re-lighted. And beneath this, in letters of equal size and brilliancy ran the surprising legend-- THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20TH, CHRISTINA HOPE WILL POSITIVELY REAPPEAR CHAPTER X "THE OLD EARL'S DAUGHTER": MRS. PASCOE ON FAMILY TIES "I know no more than you do," Wheeler said. "Or rather, no more than this." And he spread before them a sheet of writing-paper. Above the penciled scribble was neither date nor heading, but the signature in Christina's slapdash scrawl made the world spin before Herrick's eyes. Upon that sheet of paper her hand had rested and had written there to Wheeler, but not to him! The message ran-- "Announce me for Thursday night, September 20th. I will be there. "CHRISTINA HOPE." "Where did it come from?" "From the infernal regions, apparently. It was left here at the club without the mannikin in buttons so much as noticing by whom. It may have been written from across the street; it may have been enclosed from anywhere." "When?" "This noon-time. You don't doubt its being genuine?" Wheeler asked. "No more do I. As for what to think, I haven't a guess. The girl may be, for all I know, a mere born-devil, or the tool of devils. Let her come back to my cast, and, for what I care, she may bring all hell in her pocket! I've had a very nasty interview with Ten Euyck, who thinks I can explain my sign." Stanley stood there with his face working. "You don't mean to tell me," he cried aloud, "you don't mean to tell me that it's been nothing but an advertising trick from the beginning!" "God forgive you!" Wheeler said. "You are our public!--No, my dear lad, there is one thing in this angelic wildcat of ours that you can tie to. When she tells me, in our business, to bank on her being in the theater Thursday night, I bank on it; if she can set one foot before the other, there she will be. That's my belief, if it were my last breath, and I'm staking everything on it. But we've got to allow for one thing. _If she can!_ Christina has a great idea of her powers. But, even for her, heaven and earth are not always movable." More people than one were perhaps discovering a certain helplessness before fate. About noon of the next day Mrs. Pascoe sat knitting in a bedroom above her niece's table d'hôte. There was only one other person in the room, a smallish man in the early thirties, who looked as though he had once been a gentleman, and whose correct feminine little features were now drawn into an expression at once weak and wild. His soft helpless-looking figure writhed and twitched as he now lay down and now sat up upon the bed; his face was swollen with weeping and the tears still flowed from his eyes. "Well, if yeh're goin' to take on that way," said Mrs. Pascoe, "I dunno as I can blame her any. I dunno as I blame her anyhow. Yeh never objected when there was any money in it. It's kind o' late to carry on, now. What say?" The gentleman poured forth in Italian, which Mrs. Pascoe understood better than he did English, that the lady he lamented had never wished to leave him before; she had never loved anybody before; hitherto it had always been business. The business of the whole family he had never interfered with, but this he would not bear; he had borne too much. And, indeed, from his language, it appeared that he had. "My," said Mrs. Pascoe, "men are funny! Yeh been married to my girl since she was sixteen years old, and she ain't never treated yeh like anything but dirt. Well, what do yeh want to hang on to her for! Clear out! You ain't like me. Yeh can get another wife but I ain't got no other daughter. I gotta stick. She don't want me either. She wants swift folks an' gay folks, she'd forget she was mine if she could. But she can't! An' I can't! I can't deny anything yeh got to say. You say she ruined yer life. She'd ruin anybody's she can get her clutch onto. You say she don't love you. If you ask me, why should she? Even if 'twasn't herself she was thinkin' of, first, last an' all the time! She ain't never cared for any human bein' but this actin' feller, an' that's 'cause he cares 'bout the other one. Still, she got hold of him, oncet, an' do you think if she can get him again, if she can get them fellers our boys know to snake him out onto that boat for 'er, she's goin' to care whether you like it or not? You take it from me you ain't goin' to sail to-morrow any--or anyway not with us. You ain't never wanted anything but a wife that could take care o' you, an' you're quite a pretty lookin' little feller. The best you can do is to get some money out of her an' get a divorce." The young man rolled back and forth and bit the pillows. Mrs. Pascoe, who had hitherto regarded him with contemptuous tolerance, observed a wave of genuine despair in this sea of grief and her eyes narrowed. "See here, young man," she said, "don't you let me ketch ye doin' anything underhanded--squealin' on us or tryin' to keep us here, 'cause we got to get out. If I was to say a word to my son that I thought that, there wouldn't be no prettiness left to you. I ain't goin' to have her locked up in no jail for any man that ever was born. Mebbe you think, 'cause I speak harsh of her, I ain't fond of 'er. Why, you little fool, I ain't never had a thought but for that minx since she was born. Even when I first see the other child, an' the resemblance gimme such a turn, the first thing I think of was how I was goin' to get somepun' out of it for her. That's why when I got to nurse the little thing I never let on fur a minute that I had one the spittin' breathin' image of it,--hair, mouth and nose, an' the eyes, too, so I near fainted when I first seen theirs--somepun' warned me to shut up an' somepun' 'ud come of it. They thought I'd just gone cracked on their baby. It's been the same ever since. I read all them yarns about changed children an' I thought it would be funny if I couldn't work it. An' I did. She used to act it all to me afterwards, right out in poertry. 'The ol' earl's daughter died at my breast'--Didn't she ever do any of her actin' fur you? Goes--'I buried her like my own sweet child an' put my child in her stead.'" Mrs. Pascoe gave this forth with an inimitable relish of its stylish precedent. "If theirs hadn't died I'd ha' worked it somehow. They was rich then. She's walked on me an' on them, an' on the whole blame lot of us, ever since. But she's mine. What she wants she's goin' to have,--him or anything--I can't prevent her. No more can you. I'm goin' to stan' by her. An' you've got to." "He's a murderer!" shrieked the Italian gentleman. "He's a murderer!" "Seems like it's catchin'," Mrs. Pascoe commented. "Here's my daughter tells me you was hangin' round Mrs. Hope's all last Friday, lookin' fur that spy feller, an' all is you wasn't even competent to find him.--I guess I don't want to hear no talk outer you! Though as far forth as what roughness goes I don't say but what you wus druv to it." The young man rose and stretching out a delicate hand, over which a gold bracelet drooped from underneath a highly fashionable British cuff, tremulously lighted a cigarette. Under its soothing influence he replied that of course he was a lost soul and he didn't deny that his companions had at last succeeded in dragging him to their level. Mrs. Pascoe snorted like an angry horse. "Now you look here, Filly; when I married Mr. Ansello I didn't have no more idee what his business was than what you had. So far forth as what that goes, I didn't rightly ketch the whole o' what was goin' on till you come whoopin' along an' got us all into that muss where we had to clear out back to my country. I was mighty glad we did an' cut loose from all them demons--I said then an' I say now I won't stand fur nothin' rough! But you know as well as I do, oncet we was started out fur ourselves there's nobody ain't worked harder to keep to the quiet part o' the business 'un what yer brother-in-law an' yer wife has. It usta be, before Ally come back, that things did get oncet in a while beyond Nick's control, but never any more, thank the Lord--not in his own little crowd 'ut he has anything to do with! I guess there's one thing we agree on, young feller; it's jus' druv me crazy, lately, to get mixed up with the regular Society again. It's gettin' to be so big, even in this country, it won't let none o' the little ones work fur themselves--all this month since it took us in I've felt there was things goin' on I never got to hear of an' I'm mighty glad we're goin' to get away from it to-morrer." She caught herself back from what was evidently a favorite topic. "But don't let me hear any more talk about draggin' down! You've done considerable draggin' on us with all that feller spyin' on yeh costs us, an' yeh'd ought to thank the children the way they've kep' yeh clear out o' the whole business. Why, nobody hardly knows 'ut yer alive! Y' ain't asked to do anything, y' ain't asked to show yerself, y' ain't even ever been a member, so now the Society ain't nabbed on yeh none. I wisht it hadn't sent fur yeh to the meetin' to-day, jus' to take Nick the word an' his money. Ally nor me, we won't do--no, they gotta have a man, an' I s'pose they take you fur one! So far forth as what that goes the less I have to do with their greasy meetin's the better I like it, but I want you should be awful careful. If oncet they was to get on to who you was--Now, Filly, don't you smash them mugs!" The Italian hastily resigned the object with which he had been angrily and absently rapping the table, and, exhausted with sobbing, began to breathe upon and polish his fingernails. The mug, or jug, a little earthenware copy of a two-handled Etruscan drinking-vase, was one of three which stood there side by side, exactly alike save that the crude design which each of them bore--an arm and hand holding a scales--was differently colored; one red, one white, one green. But Mrs. Pascoe was aware of another difference and she turned the jugs around in a bar of sunlight till she found it; on one jug the scales of justice were gilded, on another silvered, on the third painted a dull gray. The single exclamation stenciled over each design translated into a sort of jingle: Gold buys! Silver pays! Lead slays! "Ain't she the hand," exclaimed Mrs. Pascoe, "for monkey-shines! Don't you wonder what they do with these here, Filly? Mr. Gumama asked Ally to get him these new ones fur to-day. She'd have to fancy a thing up if 't was only to take a pill out of. Comin' in las' night without the car, what with luggin' these here an' the paul-parrot--'t ain't spoke a word, that bird ain't, since it left here!--I dunno but I'd ha' broke my neck hadn't been fur M'ree. I do hate turrible to part from M'ree--I declare, if ever anything happens to my Ally, I'll come back here an' put up with these Dagoes on M'ree's account--Now, for mercy's sake, Filly, don't howl!" For the mention of parting had brought on a still more violent attack of the young man's anguish. The smile--wan but touched with the charm of Sicilian plaintiveness--with which he had been reconciling himself to life utterly disappeared; he ceased half-way through an excellent polish and casting himself down as from the Tarpeian rock, blubbered into the bedspread. The old lady regarded him with contempt passing again into suspicion and then into a softening weariness that rose in her manner like an anxiety that all the time had barely been held down. "Filly," said Mrs. Pascoe with sudden friendliness and such an uneasy, furtive look of dread as quite transformed her face, "what'er they goin' to do with that girl?" He lay quiet a moment, as if discomfortably arrested by the question. Then he asked, how did he know? Take her, leave her; what was it to him? "Well, 't ain't hardly likely they're goin' to take her--an' her feller on the boat! An' I should jus' like to know how they could leave her!" A strange, helpless tremor passed across that firm mouth. "Oh, why was she ever brought away? I allus knoo what it 'ud come to! Times there I did hope she was goin' to die, poor thing! But it war n't to be!" There was no sound but the sound of Filly, growling moistly into the bed. Mrs. Pascoe,--or, according to her own reference, Mrs. Ansello--looked at the clock and began to fold up her knitting. But her long pent-up broodings burst from her again in a new channel. "One while I was scared Nick was kind o' losin' his head about the little piece. What with him gettin' more an' more stuck on her, all the time, an' her sick with love uv another feller, even to the farm I didn't know from one day to the next what he would do. But when he made out 't was safer to take her alone with him up t' the old place--Well, we all had to scuttle there that very same night, an' when she begun to take on for that letter I guess he forgot all them feelin's. He ain't never let a human bein' stand in his sister's way an', however pretty that little neck o' hers might strike him, 't wouldn't take him two minutes t' wring it if he got scared she'd shoot her mouth against Allegra. I've had bad dreams before you ever was born, but I ain't ever had any like waitin' fur the bunch to come home that night an' the river so handy! I never thought I'd be glad to see my son half-bled to death--but there, there's allus mercies! I expect he wishes, though, he'd come straight home from the post-office, instead o' snoopin' round that hotel! The sea-voyage'll fix him up all right, an' he's strong enough an' cross enough an' sick enough to pull the whole house down 'cause he can't get back an' forth without the car. Filly," she shot forth, "sure as you live he's got something made up fur to-night about that girl!" The Italian gentleman taking this as a still further personal degradation, inquired aloud why he ever was born. But Mrs. Pascoe did not attempt the obvious retort. She rose, fetched paper and string and, with an impotence foreign to her whole nature, fumbled in tying up the jugs. "I've allus said I wouldn't stand fur it, allus! But what can I do? I tell him I'll curse the last breath he draws--but can I stop him? Yeh know what he is--can anybody stop him? I tell yeh what 't is, Filly, I'm gettin' scared uv him! Yes, now I'm past sixty, I'll say it fur oncet--I'm scared uv him! And then, poor boy, so far forth as what that goes, what can he do, himself? When you come down to it, what can any uv us do? The girl knows everything--nobody knows that better'n you!--an' what she knows she'll blab. She's soft-lookin' but she's got a chin an' she's in love! If her feller's done fur, we're goin' to be done fur, too! There's my daughter to consider an' every last one uv us. Jus' now, too, when Ally's goin' to get her divorce an' be so happy! What can I do?" There was the sound of doors opening and closing and of some one coming upstairs. But Mrs. Pascoe paid no heed. Her unaccustomed garrulity, which had hitherto seemed the result of mere strain, began to appear as her idea of conciliation for the ushering in of a plan. "I've only one thing I can say favorable to you, Filly," she urged him, "yeh ain't rough an' yeh was a gentleman. Yeh don't want screamin' an' hurtin', I'll be bound. She's a little lady, Filly, an' she's 'n American girl. Well, what I'm gettin' at is, would yeh dare do this? Now she's conscious, they won't lemme near her. But they'll never suspect you. I want yeh should tell her there's a bottle o' laudanum fur M'ree's tooth in my closet an' if she wants it, give it to her. Give it to her quick!" The Italian gentleman giving no sign of finding consolation in this prospect, "Oh, yeh'll never in the world do it!" Mrs. Pascoe groaned. "Yeh ain't got the nerve uv a sick worm! Why, it's different,--can't yeh see, Filly?--if she asks fur it herself--it's different, ain't it? It's what she promised to do in the beginnin'. An' now, jus' out o' spitework, she won't. But I bet she will to-night. Whatever's up, she'll know it before they get her feller out there to-night. Give it to her, Filly!" There was a knock at the door and the proprietress of the table d'hôte entered cheerfully. "They come?" inquired Mrs. Pascoe. "Well, time I went. There, get up, Filly, an' blow yer nose, do! Come, come, yeh don't want the gentleman yer wife's goin' to marry to be brought up an' find yeh wallerin' on yer stomach!--Well, stay where yeh be! But now yeh mind what I was tellin' yeh, awhile back, about bein' anyways treacherous. 'T wouldn't be the first time but 't would be the last! My daughter's my daughter, an' as fur my son--I never said there was anythin' so rough I wouldn't stand fur it, when it come to Dagoes!" CHAPTER XI THE ARM OF JUSTICE ON CLEANING DAY: AN OVERTURE TO A COMIC OPERA Mrs. Pascoe had some last minute shopping on hand, including farewell gifts for her niece's family and a special token for Maria Rosa, and she was quite unaware that it would have been a godsend for her daughter's plans had she kept her sharp eyes, that day, on the interior of the table d'hôte. But even had this occurred to her the number of figures on the background of her son's life had lately so increased that she could scarcely have been expected to recognize that the friendly Italians who arrived at the appointed time were not a guard of Nicola's choosing, sent to carry a willing captive to the freedom of Allegra's waiting ship, but plain clothes men, who bore their prisoner back to jail. She and little Maria Rosa shopped successfully, refreshed themselves at an ice-cream parlor, returned home for a distribution of the farewells and, re-emerging from the house in mid-afternoon, walked briskly enough eastward, though now laden with heavier packages. Mrs. Pascoe carried so many bottles of wine that even the stout wrappings threatened to give way and, wrapped in many folds of clean dust-cloth, Maria bore the pretty jugs. "I did lay out you should wait an' take those home," said Mrs. Pascoe to the little girl, "since your cousin Ally's fixed 'em up so pretty! But it'll be too late, likely, an' I don't like you should be crossin' the street after dark. You better tell me good-by an' run home soon 's I get the loft cleaned up fer the meetin'. I told yer ma you an' me 'd unpack that barrel o' backyard party truck an' the boys could bring a bundle of it over when they leave to-night. No use it settin' in a empty garradge. Don't fergit yer old great-aunt, now will you, M'ree?--an' I'll send you somepun' reel pretty from furrin' parts, where yer parrot come from." She added, as they crossed under a bend of the Elevated Road into South Fifth Avenue, "Remember, I've told yer ma ye're always to go out an' visit my folks, same as if I was there. Mercy, I hope it don't rain with all of us trapesin' out there fer our last night! I don't see how the boys are goin' to get that feller out, with them fools skiddin' round the roads the way they be--an' Filly'll faint away most likely!" They turned in at the door of a small dingy structure, which had been something else before it became a garage and that now looked vaguely out of use; from its obscure depths emerged the tall Sicilian, Mr. Gumama, who relieved her of the wine. She and the child mounted a ladder-like staircase and emerged through a sort of hatchway, scarcely more than an opening in the boards, with its lid tipped back against the wall. It was not yet four in the afternoon, but the September light was already failing under the low roof of the loft. The windows were built close to the floor and that at the rear had a little, begrimed straggle of vine waving in at it. For the window looked out upon a triangle of trodden earth, heaped as with the rubbish of an old machine-shop but producing spears of grass and black, stunted bushes to show it had once been part of a yard. In front the loft gave directly upon a turning of the Elevated Road, and when a deafening train roared by the whole flimsy structure rattled and shook; the walls were irregularly studded with nails and hooks from which hung lengths of rope and buckled straps as of old harness that shook, too. Among these, from a cleared space of honor, a head of Garibaldi, in gaily colored lithograph, confronted the flyspecked grandeur of the Italian royal family, domestically grouped; the pink paper of cheap gazettes brightened some of the murkier boards with woodcuts of prizefighters or disrobing ladies. Three or four stools stood about on the dingy boards and rather a greater number of worn out chairs; a couple of heaping barrels in one corner were covered with an old awning; there was a small bureau, once yellowishly glazed, without any glass; a kitchen table, stained with al fresco dinners, had been brought in from the yard; in another corner, torn rubber curtain-flaps, collapsed tires and threadbare leather cushions supported each other. Suddenly Mrs. Pascoe uttered a little hiss. She had perceived, sitting in the frame of the front window, a listless, undersized, undeveloped lad with the delicate, soft-eyed face of a young seraph, who looked seventeen and had probably turned twenty. This young person was reading an Italian newspaper and sucking a limp cigarette which hung from between his teeth and occasionally scattered sparks down the slim chest which his inconceivably filthy shirt left open to his belt. He was greeted devotedly by Maria as Cousin Beppo and, though he was evidently the old lady's abomination, when she accosted him with the unconciliatory greeting, "Here, you! You stir yourself!" he reared himself slowly to his feet and, with a good-natured smile, sagged amicably toward her. "I don't s'pose you think so," snapped Mrs. Pascoe, "but this place's got to be swep' out!" Fortunately, the tidying of the loft did not depend upon the sweet-smiling indolence which remained unbroken while she swept and rubbed; when the barrels were despoiled of their green and pink netting, their feast-day lanterns and paper flowers Beppo nosed ingratiatingly up; but long before the old woman had laid clean oil-cloth over table and bureau he was playing charmingly with Maria, whom he coaxed to carry a chair to the rear window, to fill and set upon it a tin basin, and to filch him a clean dust-cloth. Then he began cautiously to wash his face, down almost to the black rim midway of his pretty throat; cleansing his hands, too, but not so as to disturb the fingernails. Out from the top drawer of the bureau he took a broken bit of mirror, also richly scented pomatum with which he smoothed his hair well down over his brows and then he brought forth a velvet jacket and a waistcoat sprigged with embroidered flowers. He handled them as if they were vestments and, despite the warmth of the afternoon, their weight did not appal him. To these, over the filthy shirt, he added a silk neckerchief of robin's egg blue and a glittering scarfpin; there came forth, from its hiding-place about his person, a very graceful little knife which he stuck with airy bravado in his belt. Lastly, he lighted a huge cigar and assumed, though for indoor display only, a soft hat balanced on the left side of the head, and a light cane swung from the left hand. Standing thus, full-costumed, with a hip-swaying swagger, he was more picturesque though less fashionable than his confreres of northern races, but his infamous profession was none the less proclaimed in every line of him. And once more he turned the sweet beam of his smile upon the little girl. Beppo had not, however, dressed himself for professional purposes. The coming occasion was more solemn and his toilette an act of the purest piety. Perhaps that was why, when Mrs. Pascoe turned her contempt on him again, he was no longer amused. The old woman, as she set out the jugs, was saying, "Fetch up them bottles, M'ree. An' Becky or whatever your name is--" She turned and beheld the basin of dirty water. "You take that right down stairs!" cried she, in outrage. "An' the rest o' yer trash with yeh! When I clean a place, I want it left clean!" He said something, sulkily, about emptying it herself. "Well, when I come to emptyin' swill, 't won't be no Dago swill! Here--" For he had furiously snatched the basin above his head to dash it on the floor. She caught at and somehow prevented him, but not from whirling it through the window into the back yard. He was smiling again at this assuagement to his dignity when he suddenly perceived that the struggle had sprinkled his vest; spots appeared also upon his scarf's cerulean blue! He became, on the instant, a maniac, not human; he raved, he shrieked, his delicate skin flamed, tears suffused his eyes, he ran up and down scattering prayers, howls and curses. Until, one of these voyages bringing him close to Mrs. Pascoe's small disgusted figure, he seized her by the wrist and with the deliberate, systematic skill of custom began to wrench her arm. Mrs. Pascoe very promptly kicked him in the shins. "If my son Nick was here he'd take the buckle-end o' one o' those straps an' spank the life out o' yeh! Yeh wax-face! Yeh--" For once stooping to Italian she shot forth the word, "Ricondoterro!" It was his calling and he should not have objected to it. None the less, pursing his soft lips he spat a fine spray over her face. She jumped at him in such a fury that Maria threw protecting arms about her playfellow; then they were all parted by the tall Sicilian, Mr. Gumama. This imposing person had, with dramatic quiet, brought up the wine; and now, holding Beppo by one wrist, he listened to Mrs. Pascoe's angry cluckings. Then he seemed merely to put out one fist. The boy fell on his back without even a cry and lay as he fell. "Why, you beast, you!" cried Mrs. Pascoe. "Mebbe you've killed him!" "No. But no matter," said Mr. Gumama. "Go and make your guard. Come not up again till I call you. Take the child." She went, holding Maria's hand and looking back, with her old mingling of curiosity and reluctance at the prone figure of the pretty ricondoterro, from whose nostrils blood had begun copiously to gush on her clean floor. The tall Mr. Gumama was evidently not one to be defied. It was half-past four and those who were expected began to come. First a couple of laborers, warm from their work; the next had the proud bearing of a chauffeur; after him came a respectable professional man, probably a dentist, wearing a black suit, a full beard and glasses; then a plump and coquettish little beau, the owner of a fruit-and-candy stand, who bore a flower in his light, ornamental coat and the scar of a knife across his rosy left cheek. He was followed by his cousin, who had only a fruit cart and sold for him on commission. One and all were obliged to halt before Mrs. Pascoe, who sat on a stool at the foot of the stairs, playing solitaire on a couple of orange boxes. She bent her tongue Italianwards and asked of each the same question. "What do you want here?" "Justice!" "How can you get it?" "By the Arm of God." "Who is your enemy and mine and your children's children's?" "A traitor!" "Y' can g'won up." As they emerged into the loft they were each greeted by Mr. Gumama and then dropped themselves awkwardly about on stools and window-sills, with the whispering stiffness of people in their best clothes. Beppo, moaning, now lay huddled on his side and, as occasion arose, they stepped about and over him without the slightest interest or even malign amusement in his plight. By-and-by he got to his hands and knees and crawled into a corner, where, with the now fatally ruined blue scarf held to his nose, he shivered himself slowly quiet. But his pomatum came into play with the laborers, who sat seriously down by the still bright rear window and beautified their heads with it, cheerfully assisting each other's toilet as amiable monkeys often do and even smearing themselves a little from the communal mercies of the water-pitcher. "Enough!" Mr. Gumama sternly rebuked them. "Business alone!" They looked meekly at him, stricken, and he called one of them by name--"Take the stairs!" The man crossed to the opening in the floor and seated himself a little back from where it gave into the room; the knife which he drew from inside his clothes seemed a trifle clouded and he sat idly polishing it. Mr. Gumama looked at his large silver watch and, stepping to the front window, glanced out. A certain anxiety in him began to make itself felt. More and more men arrived, but evidently not the looked-for men. A strapping youth began unconcernedly to converse with Beppo about a duel they were to fight. "I cannot remain forever a picciotto. If I do not fight the next duel how shall I ever get to be a member?" "Me they will not yet let fight again." Beppo stopped sniffling and displayed, a bit above his knee, a wound that might have been made with a knife like that in his belt or a short dagger. "In two duels have I lost, and if I lose the third I lose my entry." The strapping youth began to get excited. "With whom, then, can I fight? How long do they intend to keep me waiting? See, now, I want my rights--I want to be promoted--" A man with turned-up red mustaches, sporting a carnation and a pair of highly polished boots, interrupted his complaint that the bootblack under the Elevated had overcharged him and reproved Beppo for kicking his chair. The fruit-vendors also stopped quarreling over the accusation of the huckster that the merchant had supplied him with decayed fruit; the merchant allying himself with the strapping youth and declaring that his wife's brother was right and ought to be promoted. Then, with the one word, "Peace!" Mr. Gumama struck them into abject silence. "Peace! Ludovisi, your wife's brother may win all three duels and yet endure years of probation. Beppo, let your squeal rise once more and you are suspended for a month.--Have you, then, no wits at all? Let the result of this meeting go a little wrong and promotion it will be no more! At least for us, fellow members of the old-days Arm of Justice, for we shall be no more!" A number of men cast glances of horror. But after a few lightning-shot growls even this number returned to its knitting, being accustomed to obey and not to ask questions. Again Mr. Gumama looked at his watch. More and more men arrived till the loft was crowded. The unknown persons who had so long so strangely shadowed the pathway of Christina Hope were beginning to mass for action and to detach themselves from the background. And still as the loft darkened with the passage of each train and relightened less and less when that was gone, another presence seemed to enter and abide; the growing, shadowy presence of suspense. It was in the air, for the ignorant many as well as for the few who understood. There were brief silences so deep that the little vine, spying in at the window, could be heard tapping on the upper pane. Then a cab stopped outside and a startled thrill passed through the assembly. The man who had been told to take the stairs rose with a soft, business-like precision and drew his knife. He stood, waiting. Something in his attitude defined his duty as preventative not of an entrance, but an exit. Any unwelcome comer who got past Mrs. Pascoe's guard would get farther; he would enter the loft, but he would never leave it. He would not even turn round. Mr. Gumama, watching the cab avidly, opened his fateful mouth. But the men disgorged from its disreputable depths were friends to that house. The first two tumbled into the garage, glanced round, saluted Mrs. Pascoe, and returned to the assistance of those on the sidewalk. These manoeuvered between them a man with his hat pulled down over his eyes and an overcoat hanging about his shoulders whom they supported like a drunkard. A fascinated crowd stopped to wink and advise. As soon as the two men were inside they threw their burden flat on the floor and returned to the cab for another. The man on the floor was gagged, his arms were tied behind him and even his thighs were bound. Swarthy as was the man's face Mrs. Pascoe was still observing with annoyance these signs of roughness when a second human bundle was brought in from the cab and the cavalcade somehow hoisted itself upstairs. In the loft the human bundles were propped against the wall and the meeting came to attention. CHAPTER XII THE COMIC OPERA CHORUS: "AND SAID, 'WHAT A GOOD BOY AM I!'" "The eighth district, members of the Honorable Society," said Mr. Gumama, bowing to the assembly as if he were ascending a throne, "it is my duty to inform you that, for reasons which you shall presently know, Nicola Pascoe is no longer our capo d'intini. Unworthy that I am," he continued with pomp, "be pleased to signify by the vote whether it is your pleasure that I assume this post of glory." It was their pleasure and the vote acclaimed it. Instantly Beppo, the merchant's brother-in-law and three or four other lads ranged chairs and barrels in a circle nearly as might be round the kitchen-table and all of the assembly that could find seats sat quietly down. Mr. Gumama filled the earthen jugs with wine and they were passed from hand to hand, each man taking a ceremonial draught; then the man at Mr. Gumama's right rose and, with dramatic gesture and winy mouth, kissed him on the forehead. So, in turn, did each of those to whom, by some mystic precedence, the seats at the table had been spontaneously allotted. All was accomplished with due ceremony, but rapidly and with an undertone of nervous expectation, the weight of some unusual circumstance. It was another and less flowery version of the festivity which had so amused Herrick that evening, a month ago, when it had frothed round Nicola Pascoe under the sail-cloth of the table d'hôte. Almost immediately the meeting proceeded to business. The man with the carnation and the resplendent shoes rose ponderously and began to hurry through a fortnightly financial report. This report was starred with titles--capos of various departments, first voters, senior members, cashiers, secretaries--and with references to local districts, twelve or fourteen of them, into which that blundering mammoth baby, New York City, would have been surprised to find itself divided. The administrative looting of these departments was again crossed off into eight sub-divisions--paranze, the treasurer called them, each of which had, apparently, its own committee and procedure; for each paranza had turned over its earnings to its capo d'intini, these capos in turn had passed them to the capo in testa who had turned them into the treasurer in exchange for a receipt. One of these receipts Mr. Gumama now produced. The fortnightly gains were deposited upon the table in two cigar-boxes; in one the baratolo, won at games and swindling; the other held the sbruffo, more heroically acquired from extortion or theft. Every one began to praise what he had himself contributed, and it became evident that the apprentices, like Beppo, were expected to do most of this light work. However, save for a glass of wine to each, which they were told to drink thankfully, they did not share in the spoils they had so largely produced. These were apportioned by Mr. Gumama without the protestation of a single voice. Percentages for three funds were set aside; one for what was politely called "social expenses," which, to a gross mind, might have suggested corruption; one for legal defense; the other for pensioners--retired members, families of those unfortunately detained in jail, and widows of members deceased while in good standing. Not till then was the remainder paid equally into each individual hand, in a model of just and scrupulous dealing.--As, in various dialects, a foam of pent-up exclamations now rose, Mr. Gumama again looked at his watch and, with an awe-inspiring contraction of his beautiful brows, once more betook himself to the window. A slick, sleek oily youth in a gray derby began to deliver some mail which he had just collected from the branch post-office in Marco Morello's drug-store down the street; among the innocent pleasantries of indecent post cards there seemed to be at least two enigmatic warnings in dirty envelopes and a happy suggestion of workable scandal about a rich jeweler; one postal, demanding in scarcely legible and very illiterate Neapolitan slang the "suppression" of a woman who had turned the writer out of his job in her fake employment agency, was frowned upon by Mr. Gumama as unnecessarily careless. Directly the meeting had formed itself into a rough semblance of a court, the writer of the careless postal was condemned to be suspended for six months, so that his earnings were cut off from both sources. One of the laborers rose to complain that the capo of his paranza had sentenced him to a week's suspension for quarreling with a companion; the evidence showed injustice and the complaint was sustained. A saloon-keeper broke into passionate appeal against another sentence of suspension, this time for a year, because he had shed a tear of pity for the child of a wine-merchant which had died while held for ransom. But his capo d'intini, the head of a whole district, had seen the tear and the punishment was confirmed. A picciotto di sgarro, a novice, who had passed two duels with credit, was found to have hesitated in obedience and was expelled from possible membership for all time. Now popped up a red, bushy stub of a man, with a full tuck under his chin and a certain unshaven dinginess, to declare that something outrageous was going on in his neighborhood: there were rowdies who hung about the street corners and offended the female foundlings of the good sisters, making remarks when these took exercise! The gentle ladies had appealed to the police in vain, but to the Honorable Society they could now in tranquillity trust. The Honorable Society, shocked and indignant, assumed the future immunity of the female foundlings for a slight consideration. Finally amidst an ominous silence Balbo the Wolf, a chauffeur, a full member, was convicted of having practised extortion without orders and on his own account. "Lupo Balbo," said Mr. Gumama, in the profound chest notes of an outraged parent, "you deserve to sleep forever. You have broken your oath of humility, you have rebelled against your father and scandalized your mother, you have taken food from the mouth of your family, for the Society is your family and your father and your mother.--Tommaso Antonelli--" He spoke low and quick to a man near him, who sprang forward, there was an instant's sharp, half-voluntary struggle and then Antonelli drew back with a dripping razor in his hand. Lupo, the chauffeur, covered a face marked forever with a double slash. And Mr. Gumama somewhat unnecessarily added, "The spreggio is for you the punishment, you wolf Balbo. Bathe your face, there in the pitcher by the innocent vine, and leave the council." Lupo Balbo, no more than his predecessors, winced, argued, nor rebelled. Against the decree of the capo no appeal was possible. All this time--so much shorter a time than any agreeable social club would have taken to despatch a single item of business--the human bundles had remained propped against the wall; silent perforce and wrapped in the indifference of their own doom. Mr. Gumama now turned an attentive eye upon these lumps of misery, and a kind of brightening glimmered through the assemblage; the duller preliminaries were disposed of at last. The poor souls being brought forward the capo pronounced their names with scorn. "Luigi Pachotto and Carlo Firenzi, you deserve no trial. But the Society honors its strict laws and does not condemn without justice. Beppo, Chigi, remove those gags." The eyes of the human bundles goggled avidly forward; their mouths puffed moistly in physical relief. Still, they made no complaint. "Full members of the Society, alas!" Mr. Gumama tragically continued, "members, also, of our Arm of Justice, ere the Society accepted that Arm as part of its own body, we have received demands for your suppression and, from our camorrista scelto, proof of your guilt. Luigi Pachotto, of the eight crimes against the Society which incur the penalty of death you are charged with the first--Number one, to reveal the secrets of the Society. And you, Carlo Firenzi, with the second,--spying on behalf of the police. It is true that Lupo Balbo was guilty of the sixth, and I made his penalty little. But of such crimes, like disobedience, the punishment at its worst is death. Yours are the crimes of treachery, for which the death is slow. Most for you, Carlo Firenzi, there can be no excuse. When you began to suspect the news which I am about to break to the paranza you turned police operative and betrayed the system by which our unfortunate friends communicate in horrible prisons and become properly organized. And when, last night, you were set by the paranza to do a service this morning to your basista you gave notice to the police. So that they came and took back the friend of our basista and now guard the nest of our social gatherings. Did you think the Arm of Justice had grown too weak to punish? Carlo Firenzi, what have you to say?" He had nothing to say; only, hanging his head, he ground his teeth. Yet the form--the form? the very core and gist--of a trial was put through; the evidence heard and questioned, the witnesses confronted with the mute despair of a guilt taken red handed and making no denial; fifteen minutes of the truth passionately sought and no law-game played. The conclusion, however, was foregone and Firenzi was soon stood back out of the way. "Luigi Pachotto, you have, I believe, affirmed good intention. You knew that the old-days' Arm of Justice, now the fifth paranza of this eighth district of the Honorable Society, had long sheltered in its midst, all unknowing, a traitor to the Honorable Society." He had touched a spring that vibrated through the whole room. Unable to proceed he waited till the murmur of incredulous horror that had risen to a growl should die away. "You betook yourself to the capo in testa of the Honorable Society rather than to your old friends of the Arm or even to this district, and to him pointed out the whereabouts of the traitor. Did you dare to insinuate that the Arm itself would not have punished had it known? What good to it or to the Society did you expect of this?" It was more a slur than a question and he answered it in a hopeless mumble. "I did it for the good of the Arm and to make our peace with the Honorable Society. I say it, who am about to die--I thought to resign the traitor, to give him into its hand who sullies ours, to be done with him and at peace." "Luigi Pachotto, you took too much upon yourself! It is for the Arm to make its own terms. I think it was your private peace you wished to make, thus to save your own throat. But you have cut it." Mr. Gumama paused and sententiously expanded his beautiful brows. "Nevertheless, it may be that you are to be shown strange mercy!" The murmur rose again, humming with amazement. "The Society can be merciful for its own just ends. There is a service to be rendered, a deed to be done, beyond the skill of any garzione di mala vita, its apprentice, or yet of its novice, the picciotto di sgarro, the young one. It should be done by one who is past life. Therefore, the Society, yet a little while, suspends your execution." Pachotto was thrust into the background and Mr. Gumama, who all this time had been seated at the table, rose and leaned forward, indicating that the meeting had reached its climax. "Dear friends, you observed well what Pachotto said? For this have we come together. We of the Fifth paranza, Hands of the Arm, we, in particular, must take heed to ourselves." He paused, collecting attention. But it was already in his pocket. "He who used the Arm of Justice to shelter a traitor, is its long-time chief, Nicola Pascoe--called in the country from which he carried his bowed head, Nicola Ansello! Ah, you know the name! Then you know well that the serpent whom he nourished in our bosom is the traitor at whose word, ten years ago in Italy, four members perished!" A shudder shook the assembly. Many crossed themselves. Mr. Gumama, in the relish of his own rhetoric, grew increasingly impressive. He was, moreover, extremely pale. "The Society passes sentence--that Arm still enfolds the traitor!" The assembly cried out as against a sacrilege and its cry was menacing. The Hands of the Arm were now easily distinguishable by their very long faces. "Ah, my friends," wailed Mr. Gumama with a sudden shrillness, "the Society falters not, but strikes--Fifth paranza, Hands of the Arm, it condemns us, every one!" A horrible yelling broke loose like a storm. Sobs and hysterical curses strangled together amidst the revilements of the now inimical district. One man was seized with convulsions and had to have wine and water dashed over him, another fainted and got stepped on. Mr. Gumama remained superior and at last made himself heard. "But was it not from the Society I learned lenience to Pachotto? Does it not, in wisdom, leave me in place to address you? On one condition the Society withdraws its condemnation." The very melody of howling rose. "The condition! Tell! Tell!" "First, lest too great the shock, listen a moment. You know well how in this America where, since Italy drove her forth, she grows so great, the conditions of the Mother Society are greatly relaxed; so that, in a new country, she may strengthen herself with all her children. When heads of small societies, existing ere here she had waxed great, came to be absorbed in her she accepted the members for whom they vouched without requiring the apprenticeship nor the novitiate. So it was with the Arm of Justice. Of all the small societies we were the most distinguished. It was not seemly so superior a collection should exist outside the Honorable Society. So much truth do I speak that in accepting us it made our chief, Nicola Pascoe, chief of this district, made ourselves into one paranza where we are yet a unit with our own rules, fifth paranza of the eighth district. The Society decrees that after to-day this paranza shall be broken up and scattered among the others and that name, the Arm of Justice, be spoken no more. So shall the true forget the traitor!" His breath failed him. But fortunately his audience came to his rescue with a hissing snarl--"Traditore! Traditore!" "Fellow members, it is nothing. We who are innocent expect to suffer for the guilt of friends. What I entreat, it is that you examine what kind of a friend Nicola Pascoe has been to us. It is true he found us little and made us great. It is true he taught us, formed us and was our leader. But knew we who he was? Did he tell us he had fled from Naples to this place carrying in his arms a traitor? Now that we know, to us what is he?--Ah, we, guileless, true shoot of the parent vine, branch of her root, of the Honorable Society the pious children!" Mr. Gumama, sincerely overcome by this pastoral vision, rolled up his eyes for a long pause. But as he had to sneeze he continued, "Hands of the Arm, for to-day we are still ourselves. For to-day I might have called one last meeting of the fifth paranza and we, all alone, have discussed our own affairs. But that there may be no stain on us of secret counsel we show our hand to the whole district.--How may we again be dear children of the Mother from Naples, held safe in her embrace? Hands of the Arm, to save the Arm cut off always the Hand, one, three, how many, it is no matter! Hear the one condition of the Honorable Society: We divulge the whereabouts this night of Nicola Pascoe, the basista and all their house; we offer them neither warning, shelter nor defense; we lead, ourselves, this district in their suppression!" And he leaned towards them, glaring and sweating, his voice still cautiously lowered and waited their answer with open mouth. They who never yet had disobeyed Nicola Pascoe stared at him a trifle wanly, huddling one on the other. Astonished gutturals mingled hoarsely with shrill peeps; "Body of Bacchus!" "Woe, woe! Beware!" "Presence of the devil!" clashed with gobs of thieves' slang and the less amiable expressions that were overwhelmed by the general assurances of the district that the paranza had no choice. Then a well-to-do little soul with a black beard rose to speak. "Listen to the voice of reason. If we condemn ourselves, can we save Nicola Pascoe? But if we condemn Nicola Pascoe, we still do save ourselves! All must not die--a few it is better to die! It is well I should say this, for I am a man of gentle speech. I do not wish to be thought like a bad murderer nor the companion of murderers. I am a business-man--a dealer in tortoise-shells which I send mostly to Chicago, and I am unique for the perfection of my wares. I have now the one hope for the support of my family and small children--that the Society if it suppresses us all will leave upon each of us its mark. That would cause a sensation and perhaps advertise my unique tortoise-shells to improve the business for my wife. But this hope is not enough. Nicola Pascoe, the basista, all, all, suppress them! Me, I wish to live!" He sat down. But then, from Nicola's closer brethren immediate and violent opposition arose, with arguments that Nicola himself had done no wrong and pleading for a lighter sentence. The meeting was in scarcely less than an apoplectic fit when, from its outskirts, a young farmhand shrieked out that they must take the counsel of the good priest, the Angel of the Society. A tall man at once began to weep and to utter horrible invectives against the last speaker, while Mr. Gumama exhorted him to be more calm. It turned out that the Angel of the Society was in jail for perjury and that the tall man was his brother. "I must leave the room! I must have air! How could he, the bad of heart, the pig, mention my brother before me--" "Angelo, you are a man and must show more strength! Antonio was not aware of the trouble of your brother--" "Not aware of--He who celebrated masses for the soul of King Humbert, he who remained tender to us though all other fathers refused us absolution while we practised our profession, he who among us was best for plausible defenses, that holy man!" "We revere him. But it is impossible to allow you to leave the room every time he is mentioned! You have disordered in that way the last four meetings!" Angelo threw himself on the ground with cries of injustice, and an equally angry person started up from his corner. "What is he screaming about? Has he the only feelings to be considered? Do I thus weep like a woman? I, too, have a brother in a dark prison--and if I were with him I would be more safe! While that one there slobbers do I wish to die? And to thus make a martyr not only of me, but of that holy soul, my mother! Who, at eighty-four would weep for me and tear her sacred hair, all gray!" A chorus of sympathetic wails responded to this touching reference. "Me, I see in this room one who once took my lock of that hair for another woman's!" Hisses arose. "Yet do I ask to leave the room? Let it be the house of Pascoe which forever leaves this room. Rather than meet in the dark with the agent of the Honorable Society I will surrender me to the police!" This, indeed, achieved tumult, breaking into personal rancors in which the issue of Nicola seemed to vanish. "You are a liar! He did not--" "I will swear on the ashes of my father and of my dead son!" "You would swear on anything!" "Beware! Beware the anathema!" "I am sorry for you--I take you to my bosom!" "I curse you down to the seventh generation!" "Once you dug, quiet, in my sewer! But now you are proud and a gentleman--" "I was always more of a gentleman than you are!" "I remind you that you must die!" At last the voice of Mr. Gumama was able to make itself heard. "Beautiful friends, the vote, the vote!--Ah! Now, attention! This is what you do not know. Who thinks to be faithful to Nicola Pascoe, is Nicola Pascoe faithful to him? Nicola Pascoe flees away! A-a-ah! Doubt you that the Society will have _some_ atonement? He flees to Brazil, this coming sunrise, he and his, and leaves us to bear his blame!" It was enough. The meeting could not speak; it could only shake and froth in one united epilepsy. As the fifth paranza found voice it groaned, "We have been betrayed! We are innocent! We have been cast like lambs to the slaughter! He has trampled not only on the human but the divine law! He leaves us to perish in this infamous market--" And a very old man, as he called down upon the Pascoes all the curses of heaven mixed with descriptions of his sufferings from nightmare as a child, put up insane appeals for their punishment. He rose from hysteria to hysteria; sobbing with exhaustion he buried his face in his hands after summoning God, personally, to convince Nicola's friends; suddenly he raised his head and, plucking at one of his wild eyes, with a sweeping movement he cast a small object apparently at Jehovah's feet. His magnificent gesture defying their mercies, he lifted to their gasp of amazement the seared, empty, gaping socket in his ancient, bearded face, and, uttering a choking shriek, he fell to the ground. A stampede of horror was averted by Mr. Gumama, who picked up the eye-ball, cast it down again and ground it under foot. It was glass. There being no hope of capping this climax they got down to business and surrendered Nicola in a wink. There remained to be dealt with a flourish of Mr. Gumama's. "This is all demanded by our kind Mother. But shall we not give a little more? Shall she herself be obliged to slay the serpent that we have fed and made strong? Will she not be pleased by a little more zeal on our part, while still we are ourselves? My friends, I have made a little arrangement." Fortunately for Mr. Gumama's climax as he now sent another of his impatient glances out of the window he gave an uncontrollable cry of relief. "Here they come!" Strolling along the sidewalk appeared three men, all evidently Italians; but two, in their rough clothes, lumpish sailors. The slenderer and finer-made came sauntering between them; he had a charming smile with which he listened attentively to some oath embroidered anecdote. As they entered the garage one of the sailors, looking up, caught the eye of Mr. Gumama and made a quick signal. "Bene! They have not been followed!" Mr. Gumama exclaimed. "By the grace of heaven they have not been followed! And he has no suspicion!" The confidential aides purred aloud, the whole meeting slightly relaxed and the man with the knife decided to sit down. But he kept his knife in his hand. Mr. Gumama stationed two men at the window to watch the sidewalk and then motioned half a dozen distinguished members to the stairs. Crouching forward they could see the slight man leaning in the doorway, whistling, and glancing up and down the swarming street with quick, dark eyes. Mr. Gumama squatted until he was in danger of falling through the opening and pointing a long, soiled finger at the slight man, "Il traditore," hissed Mr. Gumama. "He whom Nicola and the basista shelter in our midst! Alieni, o' n'infama! Traditore! He, Filippi Alieni!" CHAPTER XIII "WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR?": A CRIMINAL PERFORMANCE Once more a hand had touched the spring. Once more the meeting vibrated to a universal shock. Mr. Gumama signed to the fruit-peddler and a brace of laborers that they provide themselves with lengths of rope and the three withdrew to a position across the stairhead from the man with the knife, where they, too, waited in the shadow of the walls. Confiding in the sharpshooters at the window Mr. Gumama had the sailors called upstairs. Meanwhile the man at the door, happily unaware of the preparations for receiving him above, came lounging inside with his hands in his pockets; and Mrs. Pascoe, whose greeting had shown some slight surprise at his appearance, laughed aloud. "It's funny how it does become you! I can't deny it!" For he had doffed his gentleman's attire and was dressed like the shabbiest laborer, the tawny, earth-stained shirt open at his throat against a red cotton handkerchief; his loose, frayed, dingy jacket had once been of square, seafaring cut. "I bet she picked them out fur yeh!" Mrs. Pascoe jeered. "She ain't one to miss the artistic touch!" Her mockery took him all in. "She'd be sure t' have yeh more uv a Dago organ-grinder 'n any Dago organ-grinder ever was! But I will say you wear 'em t' the manner born!" Well, truly, the swinging gold earrings, rounder than Mr. Gumama's, had been carefully tarnished; his bracelet shot its golden gleam from under a ragged cuff; the cord of a scapular, scarlet against his olive skin, had been torn and knotted, and a handkerchief in the Sicilian colors was thrust into a belt supple with age. But, truly again, they became him mightily. For in those weathered boots, of which the soles were almost gone, his feet gripped the earth with a loping, elastic tread like a young animal's; and when, at the disconcerting coldness of her greeting, he snatched off his old cap and stood with it crushed flat in his nervous fingers the smooth and coal-black glitter of his head called her attention to the alertness of its carriage, like some prowler's scouting in the woods. Doubtless morning-coats and starched British linen are very discreet garments. But the worn softness of those old borrowed properties, in loosing the movement and the poise of his lithe body, had released some other change in him; something wild, light and strong, with the strength of a hound and the lightness of a cat, which, in the dense jungle where he was about to enter, might yet stand him in good stead. After all, one does not dress as a Sicilian for nothing! Particularly when there are ladies about! Mrs. Pascoe was as much a woman as any silkier petticoat and it must have been some such momentary glimmer of the national presence, of the primitive equation, which had won her forgotten girlhood as it had once wooed and won her daughter's fancy. "Well, I vum!" said she again with tart amusement. Was he going to turn out a man? She leaned toward him all intentness. _Was he?_ "What yeh got up yer sleeve?" she whispered, for she thought she saw an impulse flickering in his eyes. "Look here, my lad, you pluck up heart an' mebbe yeh'll win through yet. She ain't God A'mighty, whoever she is; she ain't got rid o' that Cornish girl yet, nor, p'raps she ain't goin' to. She'll fin' she's gotta answer t' somebody in this world--she's got her ma. An' I don't see but what, when all's said, she's got her husband!" He drew back with that little viperish black motion of his head and she cautioned him, "Now, now! Don't yer go puttin' those fellers' back up! I got no doubt they mean well by yeh if yeh keep quiet. But they're natcherul born devils--she's a natcherul born devil, as seems to me yeh had oughtta know by this time! An' only thing fur you is to jus' lay low an' squirm through.--Yeh goin' to do what yeh can fur that girl out there?" He turned from her with the impatience of a man tested beyond his strength and as she went back to her solitaire her lips twitched. A man came down past her and quietly but with tremendous dramatic consciousness touched the arm of the slim figure in the doorway. "You will, above, attend the council!" Without a sign to her he followed the messenger. Putting out one claw she clutched his cuff in her hold like a parrot's. She was looking in his face for her answer and he made that motion, palm downwards, with which an Italian dismisses some slight unpleasantness. "Ah, che voul pazienza!" he intoned as the messenger turned round, shrugging and pulling mildly at his cuff. The claw held. "Ah, let 'em wait! An' don't yeh gimme none o' that gibberish--I been altogether _too_ patient, this good while!" The messenger beckoned and she lowered her voice. "Yeh claim yer a gentleman an', as far forth as what that goes, I dun't say but yeh be. I never thought one o' yer kind was a man, exactly, but if yer be, be one now. I hadn't ought to let yer do it, but, if yeh can, do! An' if not, yeh got all the rest o' yer life to think what kind uv a gentleman y' are!--Yeh can g'won up." Did she feel a pressure of his hand? Did she imagine a sharp breath through his whole body, like an outcry, like a pledge? Under his guide's disapproving glance his face was merely sulky and she could only gape wistfully after him as he was swallowed up into the dusky loft. At any rate it was with these words in his ears that he found himself standing, facing the light, and between it and him a blurred sea of faces. The air, heavy from so many lungs, was thick with cigarette smoke and the odors of cheese, garlic and cheap scent; here and there the cruder and uglier features, expressions of gutter enmity or degenerate glee, sprang out like exclamations; here and there a jaunty pose, a bright tie, the treasurer's carnation or a pair of earrings reassured him of a peaceful and joyous gathering. No! As he stood there, facing that assemblage, there crept through his nerves a sense of being on trial, of being a satisfaction to its lust and fear. The poor fellow looked from one to the other of those fervid, luscious faces, great-eyed and full-mouthed, smiling a little, festivally decked, oiled and curled; he was groping for some unguessed doom in their amusement, as if he were thrown into an arena which they watched, pleasantly; surrounding him not with harsh horrors but with that horror of softness which hardness can never equal. A nausea, a blind faintness, crept in upon him; where were the hopes of Mrs. Pascoe, now?--A satisfied, panting breath, full of heat, rose from the crowd. "Filippi Alieni?" "Suor servitor, signor." He did not deny it! "Filippi Alieni, are you duly grateful that you, an outsider, are admitted to the Council of the Arm of Justice?" "Si, Signor." "Filippi Alieni, twelve years ago was it not you who were admitted to another council? You, who were brother in the law to Nicola Ansello, were not you in Naples received into the bosom of the Honorable Society?" "Si, signor." "He admits it, he admits it!" The cry broke forth, quickening dead wires and releasing muffled sparks. The old murmur swelled and grew and beat in little waves of angry, of fearful sound, trembling about the name of Alieni. Black looks, shudders of repulsion and denial began to translate themselves into the curses of a dozen dialects; against Alieni all the accents of the south crossed fingers. Then there was a low whistle from somewhere without. Every one started on guard. The lid of the hatch was softly lifted. The voice of Mrs. Pascoe was heard, dryly bargaining. It was only some one come in to buy gasoline. The baited guest still stood sulky and utterly bewildered, searching their faces. "So, you admit it! You, brother in the law of our chief, husband of our basista, you joined the Honorable Society! You received the kiss upon both cheeks, you accepted the salutation on the brow, you took the oath of the Omerta! That oath of humility and obedience, that oath never to reveal to any one, brother nor sister, father nor mother, wife of your bosom nor child of your loins, the secrets of the Society! Never to avenge but by the Society's permission and your own hand any wrong done you by any brother in the Society, nor ever, even on the bed of your death, dying from his knife, to denounce him to the police! You sang the sacred song If I live, I will kill thee, If I die, I forgive thee! You took that oath and you broke it. You revealed a secret and you denounced to the police! For you four heroes died! Yet you live--because you were shielded by Nicola Pascoe. He forsook the Honorable Society and fled with you, you and your wife, and for love of that sister, whom he feared to be condemned like you, has he lived an exile and a shamed man! And for this has the Honorable Society sought and found you at the last--is it not so!" He knew better than to answer, this time. But his silence did him no good. "He denies not! He can not speak! He knows well his guilt! His guilty heart, it shows in his face! He has an evil eye!" So howled the pure-minded chorus, feeling that Mr. Gumama had had the floor long enough. Timid spirits began to call upon the saints for protection when through the hubbub there lightly threaded the clipped final syllables and soft, melancholy rhythm of some Parmesan; strangely netted out of the virtuous north and lifting the tender chant, "I demand the suppression of Filippi Alieni!" "I demand--" "I demand--" The loft was full of it. "Let him be put to sleep." "I volunteer!" "I volunteer!" "NO, I! I am the older novice!" And then the Parmesan, "I will put him to sleep and bear him to the capo in testa in our name!" "Pazienza! Pepe, the greed for glory is well. But be not too greedy.--Admit, Alieni!" thundered Mr. Gumama. "All else is useless! Admit! Admit!" "Oh, si! Si! Si!" cried the young fellow, who had been standing as if stunned. And now he threw his arms above his head and rocked himself between them, with a transport that matched the crowd's. It, too, was stunned by that simple admission into a moment's silence in which Mr. Gumama gave forth, "You have said. You are condemned. Filippi Alieni, you must now be put to sleep." Still he took it quietly, stupidly, looking questioningly, incredulously, into Mr. Gumama's face. Then some instinct turned his head and at last he saw and quite mistook the sentinel with the knife. He gave a convulsive start and sprang through their hands like an uncoiled whiplash. As he leaped on the surprised sentinel the rope of the little vendor caught him in its noose. Still there was a moment when he was the active center of a writhing knot, a centipede of men rolling, tearing and struggling upon the ground; bounding and falling like one, tripping and throttling each other and kicking the wrong ribs. A babel of oaths and sporting outcries shook the place, pierced from the street without by the strains of an emulous organ-grinder jocularly jerking out the tango. And then the noose tightened, the strength which was only energy collapsed, and the struggling prisoner, prone upon his back, could only bite the hand which agreeably attempted a bit of triumphant tickling. The bitten one, with an outraged shriek, caught him a buffet between the eyes that made his head swim and then a train roared past and its infernal reverberations quieted all sound. When it was gone the renewed stillness and the restored, dim light found the prisoner on his feet; upheld by a guard on either hand and safely lashed, from knee to shoulder, in firm-laced rope. "Filippi Alieni, have you anything to say before you sleep?" The young man stood drooping in the hands of his captors, still breathing desperately; not flushed from his struggle but pale and faint as if his blood were stolen by some hidden pain. His throat swelled with a bitterness which he was now too hopeless or too spiritless to loose, and Mr. Gumama saw that it was doubtful if his question had penetrated to a mind that was one concentrated egoism. A barrel which Mrs. Pascoe had emptied of its finery, was brought into the cleared space before the court and Mr. Gumama, examining it, ordered, "Find a cover. And nails." Before he repeated, "Do you, then, make no request?" This time he shook his head, with a long automatic shake, playing for time. Yet he had no hope. He had used himself up in that first spurt and the spirit upon which Mrs. Pascoe had lately built sank slowly back again till there was no life left in his face except, in the depths of his dark eyes, a waiting, raging stillness of despair.--Mr. Gumama regarded him disapprovingly. "You do not wish to make peace with God?" He answered with a grinding laugh and let his head drop down again upon his breast. Even the organ-grinder had changed from the tango to the Miserere. Those present had piously removed their hats. Mr. Gumama pointed toward the bonds of the two condemned men as if giving a signal. "Wait yet a little!" It was the coo of the Parmesan. He had been diligently and amusedly studying the last prisoner. "I wish to ask him a thing." The prisoner drew a quick, scared breath, but he did not look up. Mr. Gumama, annoyed at the Parmesan for putting himself forward, tartly replied, "Ask, then!" "Alieni o' n'infama," said the Parmesan, pleasantly, "what would you do to remain awake?" The crowd and the prisoner gave a simultaneous start. This was too much! The cry of the crowd was a baulked tiger's. Regardlessly, the dark eyes of the prisoner leaped to those of the Parmesan and clung there with their bright questioning, tenacious as bats. Mr. Gumama turned upon the Parmesan with a gesture like a blow. "Oh, oh, oh!" sighed the Parmesan, lightly reproachful. "Let me speak, who have thought of things. We of the Arm know a game of our own. It was invented by the basista Alieni, and it calls itself the Duel by Wine." He bowed low to Mr. Gumama. "Sir, it is not our custom to bring evildoers here in packages and let them be warned of that which might befall them so much the easier accidentally, after dark, in the rough street. So I suppose--what else?--that those two are to attempt the Duel by Wine. Yes? And that he who wins lives to suppress the traitor-leaving him in the barrel on the wharf, signed with our sign? And bearing his token--that bracelet will do--to the capo in testa?" "It is the plan." "And have you not one more plan? No? Sir--pardon!--you do not--in your greatness you do not--reflect! There is, to us of the fifth paranza, another danger. Enlighten us, sir, please, what this other is." His look met and challenged Mr. Gumama's, upon whose face intelligence and admission reluctantly broke forth. "Ah-ha! Is, then, the sentence of the Mother Society the only sentence that we have to fear? Is there not a sentence that will strike at us and, perhaps, through us at her? The foe which has enchained Angelo's brother, the foe from which, suspecting us not at all, Nicola flees--the policemen of the Americans! Ay di me--listen, my dears! Does not this cold foe ever seek and question night and day, with pictures always in the journals, for one who perhaps knows too much and who has a girl's tongue to talk? You think all will be well when you have suppressed the traitor. What if there should be a danger deeper than the traitor? Tell us, sir, your plan about the pretty one, the little one, the little Nancia--Oh, what name! Nancia Cornees!" CHAPTER XIV THE SICILIAN TRAITOR: "YOU THAT CHOOSE NOT BY THE VIEW" The prisoner had never taken his eyes from the Parmesan's face. Their hope was so cruel that it might have been fear, instead. If, from the world of responsibility, the girl's name penetrated to him with any meaning he gave no sign. The same animal concentration abode in his close stare. But the new anxiety at once affected the meeting. Only Mr. Gumama, resenting this intrusion, shrugged, snubbingly. "Clever youth, there is a plan for her, wholly good. When the Signora Alieni expected her American lover to travel with her she could not take with her his betrothed--it would not have been seemly! So Nicola sends her to-night with the gang of Roselli, which is soon, too, sailing for Brazil. There they must restore her to himself. He knows not he will not sail. Very well. She is slight but she is fair. She will do well for the Rosellis in Brazil." "I do not--pardon!--I do not think of the Rosellis. What will she do for us?" "In Brazil? If she were a danger even there would not the Signora Alieni have destroyed that danger?" "The Signora Alieni has never done such work--she has no practice. Moreover, be sure she fears what Nicola feared in the beginning--the curse of his mother!" A voice remarked, "His mother is ugly and old. If she should die she could not curse." "True. But we are busy." Beppo began to exclaim, "It is too bad! Time after time have I asked for her! I, too, love her and could be happy. And I need them like her every day! Why should she be sent to Brazil? I never have anything!" He stamped with rage and his nose began to bleed again. Other young ricondeterros, complaining of the dearth of blondes, began to protest against Brazil. The Parmesan looked at Mr. Gumama with a smile. "Is she not a firebrand, eh? She who is so sought by the police, is it to the police she shall tell her story?" Brushing the Parmesan aside the capo insisted, "She is not of our nation. It is against the custom. It is a greater danger than she is. Even if she should meet, so far away, with men of the Americans, what does she know?" The Parmesan, now visibly measuring strength with Mr. Gumama, responded merely, "What is it, Beppo?" Beppo, past the handkerchief he ostentatiously held to his nose, cried out, "She knows everything!" As this won him the center of the stage he proceeded in a series of sniffling shrieks, "I will tell you! I am the cousin of Nicola. I am the friend of their house. I play much with Maria but I watch and listen. Attention! She knows all, all, all! She seemed at first wrapped in the love of the basista. They slept side by side. She made a promise to ask, of her own accord, for sleep; but then she is ill and when she is well again she has some notion and she will not--why? Because she wills to tell all she knows! She, too, has watched and listened! She knows my name--and yours, Giuseppe Gumama! Under her red hair she carries death for you, Antonelli! And for you--and you--and you!" The meeting was on its feet, swaying with passion and fear and gesticulating, with congenial resolution, "I demand the suppression--" "I, too!" "And I!" "And I!" "I demand the suppression of Mees Cornees!" The capo's authority was shaken in a paranza which was a paranza no longer. Obedience was not what it had been in the Arm of Justice. "Hands of the Arm," Beppo adjured, "is she not now at our meeting-place? Knows she not that? Did the basista conceal when Nicola was made a capo in the Honorable Society? Knows she not that? Oh, friends of my blood, can she not tell _that name_? By the body of Bacchus, I see her in my dreams! There is a shower of gold about her! If she is not for me, do not give her to the Rosellis--let her sleep!" The meeting echoed, in one soft whisper of satisfaction, "Let her sleep!" "S-s-ssh!" said Mr. Gumama. He said it instinctively, glancing toward the scuttle. But he realized that the precedent of dealing solely with his own nation must now be set aside; he heard the people's voice. Alas, he had also to baulk it of its Duel by Wine. "Let it be so. Firenzi, you will suppress the traitor and deliver him to the wharf. Choose two apprentices to help you with the barrel. Pachotto, you will take Beppo and the brother of Antonelli's wife and proceed to our old meeting-place. When you have suppressed the girl Cornees bring back her token." "Sir," the Parmesan again coolingly corrected, "Nicola has still with him some of his men and the Rosellis. There is but one man who, without suspicion, can reach past these to the little Cornees.--Alieni o' n'infama," he pleasantly repeated, "would you do this to remain awake?" The prisoner felt himself quiver as though he had been struck. He could not control the hope which was almost a sickness that rose in him at these words. He heard the popular cry surge up against him, hissing and protesting; Firenzi and Pachotto were the most horribly excited for he and they were the only persons in the room not having a good time. His quick glances, furtive and secret, ran questing among the lips that condemned him; when he lifted them to his questioner the sharp intake of his breath promised his soul away. But Mr. Gumama turned upon the Parmesan and told him that he forgot himself. "Ah, sir, in private a word. Alieni, does he speak English?" He broke his beautiful Italian into a strange sound. "Spik Inglese, Alieni?" The prisoner, trembling to oblige, responded in the same dialect, "Unstan' Inglese!" It did not oblige--the Parmesan frowned. "Unstan' Inglese verra goood?" He coaxed, winningly, hoping for a denial. Now the prisoner, though he understood English perfectly, was no fool and could see a possible weapon when it was put into his hand. "I deplore!" said he, shrugging sadly. "Heartseek! Unstan' notta mooch!" And he tried not to vibrate with greed of what they should say. "Va bene! Spik Inglese, us! Spik low! Oh, Gumama, let heem put da girl to slip--heem! Let heem tak' for token--Whatta she wear?" he asked Beppo. Beppo considered and then pointed to the gold bracelet under the old Sicilian cuff. "But silvere!" He lapsed into Italian. The girl had had three silver trinkets--a ring, a locket, a bracelet. Nicola had taken the locket, the ring she had lost. "It ees time she loosa da t'ird!" grinned the Parmesan. "Ssh! He ees leesten!" Their voices sank to a whisper. Inordinately acute though his senses always were the prisoner could no longer understand a syllable. "I go weeth Beppo an' Chigi. Let heem settle da girl an' tak' her token. Den _we_ settle heem an' tak' botta tokens! Tak' dem to capo in testa for show extrra gooda faith in nama da Arma of Zhoostees. Den Honorrahble Soceeata embrass us! We done gooda!" He inhaled with languid elegance and returned to the world a ring of cigarette smoke. Still the prisoner could not catch a word. The decision hung fire. The protesting roar surged louder and louder and the cries of Pachotto and Firenzi became tiger cries. Mr. Gumama suddenly called to order. He had found a way to satisfy the Parmesan and yet to maintain his supremacy. "This meeting promised Firenzi and Pachotto a chance of mercy and a chance of service. This meeting keeps its word. The chance is to be now. But for Alieni, also. Do not rebel. They were to enter on the Duel by Wine. But for the Duel by Wine the basista Alieni has sent us three cups. Why should not the prisoner Alieni play at the game of his wife?" He had turned the tide. Their craving for games of chance, always temporarily stronger than fear, anger or duty, flared into high fire. Again was Mr. Gumama the popular man. Even on the prisoner smiles were lavished. And still for some crevice of safety, as if in every muscle of their faces, his eyes sought. The meeting got happily to work, like a good child. It brought forth a dice-box and dice, a bottle of wine and, wrapped in a colored handkerchief, two triangular knives. In that musical neighborhood another hand-organ had long since followed the first; "The Wearing of the Green," which had made melodious the Parmesan's battle, now gave way to the Tales of Hoffman and the Barcarolle, a rhythm that swayed in every busy motion and humming tongue as the prisoner watched the table cleared and the painted jugs set forth. Mrs. Pascoe was called up to fetch a lantern; as she withdrew all three prisoners were faced toward the wall; Mr. Gumama took a twist of paper from his pocket, shielded it from view, and dropped a tablet from it into each of two jugs. Then he filled them all with wine. The prisoners were turned round again. "Alieni o' n'infama," called the Parmesan, blithely, "you are very much afraid!" He knew it and sank his head on his breast. "Cowards play well. They grow brave from fear. You will be desperate." The young fellow shuddered. But he tried to keep his head clear. "Cheer up, traditore! It is true our haste but sentenced you to the knife and the knife is quick. But do you not choose to risk a few drops and die wriggling--when, if you are lucky, you may live? When you have but to strike, afterwards, a little soft blow to make your peace!" The Parmesan, snatching up a triangular knife and, despite the remonstrances of Mr. Gumama, one of the jugs, thrust them jocularly under the prisoner's nose. The tormented fellow, with an uncontrollable gasp that spilled the wine, bent and kissed the jug. A burst of childish applause approved his enthusiasm. A dank moisture of relief broke out upon him. At least they saw that he was resolved and would not fear to let him try. What was coming? The meeting had formed into a circle as for a cock fight. He, Firenzi and Pachotto and the table with the dice and wine were in the center. The silent circle devoured him with applauding, encouraging glances. He was horribly aware of the two other men, larger, heavier, perhaps therefore luckier--the bigger the build, he had thought before, the greater the luck!--They were all too still! What were they going to make him do now? Mr. Gumama himself took down a strap from the wall and tested its strength. "Firenzi, then you, Pachotto, then you, Alieni, you will appeal to the dice. He who throws highest will have first choice of the jugs. Of the three who drink, one will live. It will take some time to settle this. The meeting will disperse, but a committee will return. The man whom they find alive will go with Beppo and Chigi and you, Pepe, to our meeting-place and put to sleep that girl. Those not surviving will be signed with our sign--but only one thrust for each paranza of this district.--Filippi Alieni, what is the matter with you? You show no feeling at what I say!" For all his brilliant, questioning eyes, it was true he looked extremely blank; his expression too often merely followed theirs with an opposite. "Well, there must always be a first time. It is true, Alieni, is it not so, that you have never suppressed a life?" There are bitternesses which fear cannot quench. Having no free hand to beat his breast he turned his head with restless passion from side to side and in a high, shrill, wild desolation, a Latin sweetness of hysteria roughened by his grinding laugh, he cried aloud, "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!" "There is no need for irreverence!" exclaimed Mr. Gumama, scandalized. "That is all. Loose their bonds." Firenzi and Pachotto ran to examine the jugs, voting simultaneously for the immunity of the golden scales--what others? So that the first choice would be all important. But the third prisoner had given his last flash. He dropped his shivering face and hid it in his hands. "Sit!" They dropped beside the table. "Swear obedience to the decree of Fate!" All three laid a hand on the crossed triangular knives. Mr. Gumama purposed the oath. "Filippi Alieni, your lips shake so that you do not repeat distinctly. Say, I swear!" "I swear!" "Rise!" "Firenzi, make your appeal." Firenzi started forward on a rush. But after a step or two he halted, glared about him as if just waking up, and then went forward, sagging like a drunkard. Arrived at the table he crossed himself, shook the dice, and, whimpering, fell on his knees. His shaking hand crawled along the table, groping for the dice-box and lifted it. The crowd, straining in upon him, buzzed. For the number was moderate. He had thrown a three and a two. And kneeled there, blubbering. The courage of the Honorable Society does not remain fast in all washes. "Pachotto, make the appeal." He, too, started with bravado; he was perhaps half way across when they had to catch and drag him forward. He threw wild and they had to support his wrist. Even so one die fell underneath the edge of the saucer in which the box had stood. That in view was another two-spot. If, however, that under the saucer were even a four he was ahead in the throw. They moved the saucer--the die was a five. Pachotto leaped in the air with triumph--Firenzi, yellow and cursing, tried to fold his arms. Frightful sounds issued from his throat, upon which the cords stood out. "Alieni, you will make the appeal." He who had been a gentleman drew himself together and came slowly forward. He was now the darling of the crowd. But he did not guess that; he came of a superstitious tribe and to him, too, it seemed important to win from the start. His soul trembled, but steadily and softly he stole to the table. Now he was arrived, looking down, one concentrated apprehension, on his fate. Lifting the dice-box he once more threw out his bright suspicious glance into the crowding faces. "Whatever gods there be!"--he threw the dice. Over these he bent with a sort of sweep and then, uttering a sharp hiss, sprang up like a jack-knife. The crowd swayed, yelped and shivered with amusement into a triumphing crow. He had thrown two sixes. Pachotto uttered a piercing yell and fell on his stomach in a dead faint. "Filippi Alieni, of the jugs you have the first choice." He stood as if nothing had happened. He had suddenly realized that his situation was really more terrible than ever. Watching, watching, he could descry no help. None of those alert, elated faces had a hint in it, not a congratulating hand pointed toward the fateful jug. He moistened his lips and looked mechanically at the dice which had thrown him this choice. But the dice, too, were dumb. Then, at last, he looked at the jugs. There was the red design, the white and the green. His hand crept up and touched the chord at his throat. Scarlet was her favorite! But did she know? White--there was no luck in white. Green, the color of hope! Of resurrection! Yes, but to be resurrected one must first die! Red, again, was blood-color--but there was blood at every turn! Whose blood did this stand for--whose? Ah, yes, the scales--the scales were different! Gold, silver, and gray! The scales were very little, so it was they that held the secret! Silver, gray and gold! Why gray? Silver--hadn't he heard them whispering about silver? Why, there were some words--He dropped to the ground with the jug, leaning on the table and pressing the scrolled legend to the lantern.--Silver pays! Pays whom? Pays what? Oh, God, to understand! What was the other--gold? He was panting--his breath smeared the glass of the lantern. It was dry and cut his lips like grass-blades! Yet he reeked with cold sweat, it was running into his mouth! He wiped the glass clear with one cuff. Steady! Take care! Can't you read, you fool! Gold buys. Oh, heaven, what would it buy here? Life--freedom--what else would anybody buy? What was the sense of it, if it meant anything else? But it might be a lie! "She's a natcherul-born devil." It was a lie she would delight in! One chance! One! Everything on it--everything! Never to leave here--to die here--here, where no one would ever know! Without doing what he had secretly meant to do, without ever having lifted a hand--to die in torment, squirming on the floor like a rat with torn bowels--There was one other jug. Gray--what a color! Ghost-color--was that what she meant? Lead slays! But, once more, slays whom? Lead slays--lead--lead--Lead! A change passed over him. He became very still. Then, shaking with suppressed eagerness, he got slowly to his feet. He put his dense hair back from his eyes. And those eyes, hypnotized by the little jug with its gray scales, never left it; drinking it up before he could raise it to his lips. His mouth gaped for it with hanging jaw. He raised it in hands that gradually steadied and then over its brim, he gave the faces that fawned in upon him, breathless, one last look.--"He has chosen!" They might be less than human, but he and they were still living creatures; and, in ten minutes, what would he be? Beyond them were dusky walls, built by human hands, chairs, a bureau, lithographs, all the warm furnishings of life; windows into the world, into the swarming, chattering streets where the lamps began to glow, while from round the corner came the clang of trolley-cars; whistles, calls, footsteps, were in his ears, laughter above the crash of wheels, "Give my regards to Broadway--" That was the hand-organ, tired of opera and getting down to business; "Remember me to Herald Square--" It filled the whole room! A lighted train swept by; he could see the faces of people reading evening papers, people who complained at hanging on to straps! The roar of it was familiar and dear as a beloved voice at home but it passed and left him quite alone. "Tell all the boys on Forty-second Street That I will soon be there!" --"Choose, Alieni, choose! Drink! Drink!" Everything passed from his eyes. He was blind as before he was born. Then his mouth was in the wine; he drank it to the last drop; the jug, with a clatter that he heard perfectly but no longer understood, rolled at his feet. "É fatto!" said he, in a low, clear voice. "É fatto--it is done!" And his face dropped into his hands. The meeting came about him but he did not know it. Around one wrist a strap was buckled and the strap's other end nailed to the table so that the death-agonies might not wander too far. A like precaution was taken with the other men when they had drunk. He did not notice it. He looked at the floor. Firenzi, upon whom chance had forced the silver scales, gave a horrible sound of retching and slid from his stool, the strap holding his arm. A quiver passed through the body of the first drinker, but he would not look. The meeting picked up its lantern and trooped--rather reluctantly but leaving the hatch open--chattering down the steps. The hands of the Arm dismissed Mrs. Pascoe, fetched some more wine, cut some tobacco and sat down to the business of making bets while they waited. He did not miss them. He, too, waited. Twenty minutes later, in the darkness, the loft was quite still. Two bodies, horribly contorted, lay straining on their straps. The rigor of death was already settling upon those convulsive heaps. The faint squares of the windows made a kind of glimmer by which it was possible to discern a pale face, a slight figure; this leaned against the table, which it clutched with hands of steel. He who had trusted to the leaden scales had trusted well. In that darkness, in that silence, through that horror of squalid death which had not been silent, he had shed the rags of his hysteria and had caught again the concentration, the keenness, the readiness of that moment when Mrs. Pascoe had called on him to be a man. But what did he see in those empty shadows, and for what did he nerve himself? The figure there at the table was desperate, but it was very slight, and at the end of no road--valor nor cowardice nor vengeance--could he see escape. They were all blocked, those roads, the program too close built and every knot too tightly tied. Whatever he might wish, there was but one thing he could do. A knife was to be put into his hand and he had no choice except to strike. After all that had passed it was perhaps even with eagerness that silently, alone among those shadows, he embraced his fate. A stir began to rise from below; the men down in the garage were coming to pack the barrel. He heard the mounting footstep of his guard, ready to convey him to the secret meeting-place of the Arm of Justice; along that road where it should deal with him, when he had dealt with Nancy Cornish. CHAPTER XV ONE WITNESS SPEAKS It was fully dark under the sail-cloth of the table d'hôte. A strong smell of rancid wicks disturbed nobody and in the charged, suspensive air the cheap lamps burned with a still flame. This may in part have been due to Herrick's tensely strung imagination, which Christina's message of the night before still mercilessly played upon. From that source no drop of further information had fallen through Tantalus on to the parched tongue of Herrick's nor of Wheeler's nor of the Law's desire. That afternoon Herrick had seen Stanley off from the station where not six weeks ago they had met as strangers. And so little was Fate's veil lifted for him, even now, that he had no forewarning of when next, nor why, he should be there again!--Stanley had, however, told him Ten Euyck's latest news--how it was to the table d'hôte the Italians had conveyed their liberated prisoner from the Tombs! The boy looked at his friend a little suspiciously even while he repeated Ten Euyck's chagrin: "That's a hideously shameful thing to happen to me! It's the annoyance of a blind, stupid, brutal reproof--when I've worked so hard and suffered so much! Here, in my own district--Under my own hand--!" There are no unalloyed elations in this world! Nor did there seem any doubt in Ten Euyck's mind that this was the long-sought-for secret place, where they should find a printing-press. But he forebore to raid it until evening, when all possible birds should have returned to the nest, and contented himself with the sending of his disguised operatives peacefully to fetch from it Will Denny, before whose coming Stanley had fled the police station. That young gentleman had also gathered from Wheeler's thunderstorm of oaths that Christina's manager considered himself under surveillance. And this had made Herrick wonder if the same were not true of himself. On account of his momentarily expected cablegram it was a crushing suspicion. He spent an afternoon of aloof and goaded wandering, and at last, shielded as he hoped by the darkness and by the company of a whole group of entering diners, yielded to the temptation of the table d'hôte. He could not doubt it was encompassed by spies; he could not but attend the seizure, the crisis, the outcome. Here, more than anywhere, were the lines converging; here, for to-night, was the center of the web. He said to himself, then, in his ignorance, that nothing mortal should induce him to forsake it. Under the sail-cloth there was no longer any room; but, within doors, save for a couple of men at a distant table, Herrick was quite alone. There was no change in the deportment of the place, no disturbance. The Italian proprietress, in her comings and goings, found time to reply that the old lady was still in the country but her prototype, the little gray parrot, which he had not seen for a long time, was climbing in and out of its cage and the angelic children still snuffled about the floor. It was on these innocents that Herrick began as usual to practise his Italian when the proprietress had gone affably to see about his order, but if he thought one of them would lightly drop Christina's address he was mistaken. Smother-y as the place was, with that same looming sultriness of a week ago, agitated in its daily business, its pulse did not beat so hard as his, its imagination did not quiver, like the figures of a cinematograph, reviewing the movements of a motor-car that until yesterday had sped through mire and dust and blood, through sunrise and midnight, past the spread, astonished wings of the marble Hoover lions, past the smoking-ruins of a post-office, past Riley's where the shadow danced, after a will o' the wisp. There was no suggestion, here, which could lift that phantom light; the customers ordered, the little fat boy, next in age to Maria Rosa, leaned familiarly against his knee, the parrot continued to clamber over its cage, talking steadily, rapidly and monotonously to itself, and then Herrick said in surprise, "Why, the bird's speaking English!" The parrot looked at him coldly, disinterred something which it had buried in its food-cup, gnawed on the treasure, and dropped it. The little fat boy picked it up and smiled at Herrick. Herrick said, "Let's see!" It was a silver ring, holding a bluish-green Egyptian scarab. It seemed to Herrick that he had heard of such a ring before, and he tried to remember where. One of the men at the further table left and the other was buried in a foreign newspaper. Herrick got up and went over to the desk. That was English the bird was speaking. "No, no, no, no! I don't believe it. I don't beli--" "Polly," said Herrick, "what are you talking about? And what do I know about this ring?" The bird burst into a shriek of the ungodly laughter of its kind, pecked the ring out of his hand, backed away with it, dropped it again; and then, out of a perfect stillness, with its little eyes fixed on his face it replied-- "Ask Nancy Cornish!" CHAPTER XVI THE LAST SHADOW: "LEAVE ALL THAT TIES THY FOOT BEHIND AND FOLLOW, FOLLOW ME!" Oh, yes, the Italian proprietress cheerfully informed him, the parrot had been in the country with Maria Rosa and her great-aunt. Truly, the great-aunt was fond of the country, she was still there. When was he going to see Maria Rosa again? Oh, there, alas!--Maria Rosa had gone with her father to the moving-picture show-- He could get no further and he feared to excite conjecture. He might waylay the little girl as she returned, but not too near the watched house--nor was the idea of the father encouraging. Nevertheless, he betook himself outside, turning toward Third Avenue where the picture-shows flourished. About two blocks down the street he took refuge in the hole of a tobacconist, whose door stood open into the warm dusk. On the farther corner the bright blue interior of a delicatessen that was also a fruit stand blazed hot with gas and, in exchange for a bottle of oil, a child passed a coin over the counter. The gas gleamed on the child's face and Herrick crossed the street. Here was Maria Rosa and here the moving-picture show which she attended! He stopped on the outside for some nuts and affected surprise when Maria appeared. She accepted various delicacies and was freely chatty about her country visit. Oh, she had been in a beautiful place; grass, trees, flowers--nothing of its whereabouts could be ascertained. Great-auntie had lived there with old auntie--old auntie was her mama--when she was a little girl no bigger than Maria Rosa! But they had gone often to a grand big place where Cousin Nick's office used to be in the basement. But the morning after they brought the sick lady the things for the office were all gone! Ah, the grand big place had made the greater impression, but ignorance had evidently been carefully preserved. Herrick tried the words "Waybridge" and "Benning's Point" to no avail. With "river" he was more successful. Did you go there by the boat? Apparently not. Finally it came out that you went there by the walk past old auntie's house. And what pretty thing had she ever noticed about old auntie's house? Eh? Come, now? What did she like best? "The marble kitties with wings." The marble-- A child had dropped an address, after all! Herrick, reaching into his pocket for a time table, had discovered a train for Benning's Point at eight-fifteen when, hearing his name he turned; beyond the now hurrying figure of Maria Rosa Joe Patrick was advancing toward him. The boy came up hastily, extending an envelope addressed to Herrick in Mrs. Deutch's hand. As he took it he saw that Joe was brimming with some communication. "I saw you from down street. She sent for me an' says to bring you this. I was lookin' for you when I met Mr. Ten Euyck and he said the place to find you was around here." "Touché!" Herrick said to himself. Even at that moment he vouchsafed an admiring smile to Ten Euyck's able conveying of a taunt. "Mr. Herrick?" "Yes, Joe." "I got to get right back in time for the theayter. But I'd like to speak to you a minute." "Walk back toward the Square with me." "It's something I been worried about telling for days an' now I'm goin' to. I mean--Mr. Herrick, I wouldn't tell it to anybody but a friend o' hers! But I make out that it's right to tell it to you.--You remember that night out to Riley's?" "Yes." "An' the shadder the chaufers seen?" "Yes?" "I was there. My cousin Sweeney sent for me, an' my uncle an' me come out together. As we come into the yard--that toon--you know! There was the shadder--I seen it, too! And another man seen it an' skipped up the steps an' went inside. Me after him! An' before he'd got in, hardly, out he bounced with a lady. That lady wasn't no Mrs. Riley, Mr. Herrick. It was--_her_!" "You've seen the moving-picture?" "Yes, sir." "And this gesture was the same?" "Yes, sir." "So that you thought you saw Miss Hope's shadow?" "I know I did, sir." "Wait. This gentleman, had you ever seen him before?" "No, I never laid eyes on him." "He went right into the room?" "Popped right in as if he lived there!" "And came out with Miss Hope?" "Yes, sir." "How was she dressed?" "She had on a long coat an' a fussed up hat o' Mrs. Riley's." "And no one else saw them?" "No, sir. They run down the back-stairs as everybody come up the front." "She was willing to go with him, then? He wasn't forcing her?" "Well, you bet he wasn't! She was hangin' right on to him!" "What was your idea of the whole business?" "I thought mebbe she done it for a signal to him when to come in." "Now, Joe, don't you believe that--it being, as you say, done so quick--and you having just seen this shadow which you had taken for Miss Hope's, you might have imagined it was she who came out with this man?" "No, Mr. Herrick. I was at the door when they come out. I saw her face clear. I didn't make no mistake this time." "And you didn't follow?" "No, sir. Because--because--Oh, Mr. Herrick, she seen me as plain as I see you an' she smiled at me!" Herrick paused with a threatening cry. "Why didn't you speak to her, then? Why didn't you tell--" "Because, Mr. Herrick, when she opened her eyes wide and smiled at me, that way, she put her finger to her lips! Oh, Mr. Herrick, I ain't ever told a soul but you!" She put her finger to her lips! Secret she had ever been, and there was another way in which Christina had never failed. She had never failed, in any stress of change or chance, to seize the measure of a devotion and use it to its hilt. She smiled and put her finger to her lips! She pleased herself, then! She was free! She came and went at her own pleasure! Secretly, with companions of her choice! While he, in the room below--That night, too! That night of the road and the fields, of Denny and the yellow house! Bitterness mastered him. An indifference like the indifference of sleep somehow wearied him to the bone. After Joe's departure, when he stopped under a street-lamp to open Mrs. Deutch's letter, he scarcely cared what it contained. "--When you were not at home he sent this to me. Think you for yourself the meaning for it. What in myself I believed and prayed, that afternoon, now in person have I ascertained. Christina was born in this city of New York; she was baptized in the same month in the Church of the Holy Service, April 17, 1892." He unfolded Gabrielli's cablegram: Girl you inquire of victimized family named Hope, in America. They lived at Naples 1886. Record daughter born to Hopes, Allegra, not Christina, 1886. Died 1889. The Hopes had had a child, that died three years before Christina was born! What was the meaning in the case of this dead baby? And if Christina was Mrs. Pascoe's child, what had the death of Allegra Hope to do with her? How could she have passed herself off on the Hopes for a dead child six years older than herself? He knew that somewhere in his aching brain the answer quivered to spring forth, when--at about the time when the Italians started with their prisoner from the garage--an open taxi hesitated at the corner nearest to the table d'hôte and then spun on without stopping. As it passed under the lamp Herrick was just leaving, a veiled lady rose in it to her tall height and pulled on a long, light coat. And all the pulses in his body stopped as though they had been stricken dead. For his eyes had recognized Christina. CHAPTER XVII HERSELF There was no other cab in sight. But fortunately a 'bus was just starting, and bye and bye he plunged from that into a taxi. All the way up Fifth Avenue he continued to keep his quarry well in sight; flashing in and out beneath the lamps, the beautiful tall figure sitting lightly erect and neither shunning nor avoiding the public gaze. At first he thought she had come back to be well in time for to-morrow night, but at Forty-second Street she turned toward the depot. She was making for the same train as himself. A policeman, who should have died before he ever was born, let her cab through the block and held up Herrick's. He saw with horror that it was possible he should miss the train. Then, with a thrill of hope, that they would probably both miss it. When he got to the depot there was no sign of her. He tore like a madman across the vast stretches and up and down the flights of stairs by which modern travel is precipitated and came to the gate. She was inside, just stepping on the last car of the train. Officials were shouting at her, enraged, because the train had begun to creep. "Tickets, tickets!" said the man at the gate. He was resolute, and Herrick had to pick him up and lift him to one side. It took an instant, and now the train was under way. But Herrick, as a free-born male unhampered even by a suit-case, was privileged to risk his neck, and he flew down the platform and gathered himself to leap upon the car. His hand was outstretched for the railing but it never reached it. A single zealous employee plunged at him, roaring. The sound halted his quarry in the doorway, and when she saw him she stepped back on to the platform of the car, bending toward him with a look of eager amusement, and throwing back her veil. And Herrick lost his chance to jump. For her face, framed in soft flames of red, of golden fire, was the face of a stranger. It was extremely lovely, but for one curious defect. She had a blue eye and a brown. BOOK FOURTH THE LIGHTED HOUSE CHAPTER I THE HOSTESS PREPARING Herrick lay in the long grass of the wooded lot, against the wall of the Hoover place. Already the night was velvet-black, and hot and thunder-scented as in summer. A million vibrations that were scarcely sound stirred with the myriad lives of leaf and blade in the dense silence. And his expectancy vibrated too, reaching for the end of a long chase. His slower train had followed on the very heels of that malign and radiant red-haired changeling, whose mysterious brew he was at last to taste for himself. Not this time in a little yellow cottage beside an open road, but in that great house, walled and guarded, deep and still in its own woodland, between the stone lions with their lifted wings and the mighty current of the tidal river! What he should do when he got there could be decided only by what he found. He had his revolver, and he scarcely knew whether to pray that he might, or that he might not, have need for it. He remembered, tumbling over the wall from the inside, cascades of ivy, which he now hoped might give him a hand up the rough stone. But they tore away, one after the other, and sagged in his hold. He went on down the field, scouting in the darkness for some friendly tree; when he found one at last it was not so near the wall as he could have desired, and the first branch that seemed likely to bear him for any distance he judged to be about twenty feet above the ground. He crawled along this till its circumference seemed so slight he dared not trust another inch and peered into the pit. There was no way to make sure that the wall was there but to let go; he lowered himself the whole six feet of his length; let go; landed on the coping; by a miracle of balance maintained his equilibrium; and then, dropping cautiously to his knees, flattened himself along the edge. When you have dropped on to a wall which might or might not be there, it is nothing at all to drop on to the earth, which can not escape. He stood up, at last, within the Hoover grounds. All was perfectly silent; the noise of his descent, which had seemed to crash like an earthquake, in reality had not waked a bird. He had now to make his way to the house through about a mile of perfect blackness; as a good beginning, he ran into a tree, and this rebuke of nature's seemed to put him in his place, and tell him to walk here like a spy, not like a combatant. He went on, but now with infinite caution. This part of the ground was as little tended as a wild wood; then presently he came forth upon an old-fashioned garden, run wild, but still sending out sweet smells beneath his trampling feet; beds of white gillyflowers and fever-few and white banks of that odorous star-shaped bloom which opens to the night made a kind of paleness in the dark which perhaps he rather breathed and guessed than saw. It was an approach for a Romeo, and seemed to cast a kind of dream over his desperate and grimy business. He sped on to another little grove upon a rise of ground and coming to the top of the slope saw, far ahead of him through the trees, the shining of bright lights. He could scarcely believe his eyes, for surely they would never dare to light the house. And then again he remembered how far and lonely that house stood, a mile and a half in from the road, and save through the lodge or from the river how hard to come at! If this was really their haunt it must have been so a long time; they must have grown used to it, like their own house. All the more chance, then, for his spying! Expectancy sprang higher. He kept on down the slope, this time at something of a reckless pace, and, at the bottom, plumped full into a pond. The shock was horrid and without even the dignity of danger. He could easily have scrambled back but that, as he re-opened his eyes, he found himself gazing at a lantern, held up from across the pond. At that moment three shots flew past him, aimed at the bank he had so involuntarily and violently quitted. It seemed well to remain inconspicuous as might be; the bullets began to skip close to him, and, experimentally sinking, he found a fair depth and struck out under water for the opposite shore. In the middle of the pond his hands touched a solid and terrifying obstruction. Heavens, what was this? Through what snares did he clumsily struggle to make his way? And in what nightmare? Involuntarily he came to the surface and found himself confronted by a high, overhanging shape, bulking featureless in the darkness and chilling him with a sort of superstitious despair. The more so that he seemed to be grasping something shaped like a foot; his hand climbed a vast, cold leg and the next moment he could have laughed aloud. He remembered, now, from his daylight forays, an ornamental wilderness of rocks and ferns, across which he had once glimpsed a stone lady; seated, and bending forward with a vase extended in her hand. The pond had been hidden by that wilderness; the vase had once been a playing fountain, and the lady herself sat on a rock in the middle of the waters. It was against this rock his hand had struck and it was her ankles which he thus ungallantly grasped. He hung to them a moment, resting in her shadow, and then with infinite precautions began to pull himself up those smooth, cold knees. She was very large and dense, a bulwark between him and the spitting bullets; he felt her rocky island beneath his feet, and gave himself, even with ardor, to her embraces. The light upon the shore split in two and one-half of it began to skirt the pond at a brisk pace. He clambered across the stone lady's lap and crouched, kneeling, in the shadow of her arm. Thus sheltered, his first thought was for the priming of his revolver. It was soaked through! He could have cried out like a child! But already his breathing space was past. The runner with the lantern had reached the spot where Herrick had plunged in and the surface of the pond was now raked with rays of light, crossing each other and striking perilously near his refuge so that they sought out at once the breast and the bent back of the stone lady. Herrick, as he blotted himself down the rock, observed that on the further side the pond was edged by a coping of rough stones rising, perhaps, two feet above the water and irregularly surmounted by small boulders--the beginning of the ornamental wilderness. He came up close against the wall; his fingers wedging themselves in a crack between the stones, and his head, shadowed by a boulder, half above the water. Thus, as he could hear and was not likely to be seen, he had every advantage of that dangerous neighborhood. And also time for a somewhat chill reflection. Suppose the life were not knocked out of him in the next five minutes, what use was there in going on with a useless pistol? It seemed even the outer grounds were being patroled or perhaps searched--he remembered the light shining from the house--it came in upon him that something unusual was going on, and that he might presently succeed in being either the victim or the witness of a climax. That thought was enough; his blood committed him beyond denial; and when the searchers, without having dropped a single significant remark, began scouting their own fears, and, accepting the surrounding silence as empty of intruders, turned back through the artificial wilderness toward the center of the estate, Herrick pulled himself out of the water and, sometimes on his hands and knees, sometimes upon his stomach, followed among the rocks. The group with the lantern came out upon the carriage-way and paused. A horse and two-seated wagon awaited them, the horse's head turned toward the house; in the wagon sat Herrick's old friend, Mrs. Pascoe and the little old, old couple from the lodge. As the other men tumbled in the old lodge-keeper lifted up his voice: "I ain't slep' out o' the lodge, nor your ma ain't, either, in forty years!" "Well, you'll have to to-night, pa," said Mrs. Pascoe. "An' there ain't any time to talk about it, either." She added, "You an' ma can come back when we're gone. Don't ferget M'ree's your great gran'niece by marriage. Have her visit yeh again." They were off and through the shrubbery; Herrick followed. But the carriage-way was clear of everything save errant weeds and at an ordinary trot they very easily distanced him. After a while he ceased to hear the wheels, but now again he could see the house shine among the trees, and as he came closer still he listened for the sounds of their arrival but heard nothing. It was extraordinary what a stillness had again fallen upon the night. No sound covered his approach, and when he came at last in view of the great entrance no wagon waited on the path nor did any voice challenge him from the doorway. He stood among the trees and stared across the wide sweep of carriage-way. He saw on either side depths of lawn, kept cut and roughly trimmed, merging at last again into the darkness. The drive was bright from the great glowing portico, and from the entrance doors set wide into a stately hall; the hall was all in order as though for a reception, with rugs and palms and candelabra, and to its left a vast apartment like a ballroom flung from its long open windows, that crossed the left front of the house and shone far along the side, spaces of lamplight down the terraces. Save for one pane gleaming overhead, the rest of the house stood dark, as if unoccupied. But in that still yet quivering night, in that dense, black, vast but sultry silence, this made a great illumination, and that wing of the old mansion seemed to blaze like a palace in a wood; in the lack of sound or motion, it seemed swept, opened and made ready by enchantment, and waiting for the conqueror. It had indeed so great an air, so composed, so ordered, and of such stately openness that it seemed to rebuke suspicion; surely law and seemliness were on its side and not that of the dark, soiled, muddied, creeping figure that skulked, staring, in the shrubbery like a thief in the night; totally confounded, oppressed by every terror of the house-breaker and yet with empty hands. But the bright house, which should have threatened, invited him with every luster. He was a fool, if you wish, but at least he knew his foolhardiness to the core. The wagon he had followed must have passed the house and gone on toward the river, but this bright vacancy and quiet had not been arranged for nothing. To go forward was most likely death; a death quite futile and unremarked, and scarcely a breathing-stage in the wild story whose blazed trail of ruin and murder he had already followed so far. Well, he had followed too far to go back. He was too near the goal; he was too near the turning of the page, and, as far as was mortally possible, he must read it. The empty drive, the empty hall, the empty, shining windows drew him like wires, and, dropping back across the border of the drive to a far-lying depth of shadow, he crossed it like a ghost; taking advantage of every unclipped shrub and moldering urn, began to mount the terraces. Thus at last he came to the long windows, and huddling at one side, peered in. He saw a proud interior, brilliant and pale, with panels of latticed glass, after the French fashion, and other panels frescoed with Pierrots and Columbines and with great clusters of wax candles set between the panels. There was a great chandelier with swinging prisms reflected in the floor that was waxed like satin; but this chandelier was not lighted, and indeed everything suggested that they had never dared to use any electricity, for which they would have to work the power-house on the estate. But the clustered candles and the many lamps made the place afloat with liquid gold, and the room trembled and bloomed with the scent and the beauty of hot-house flowers, so that the air seemed to shimmer with their sweetness. There was little enough furniture; a golden grand piano with Cupids painted on it; a few chairs from which Herrick guessed the holland had but lately been removed; and near the huge, rose-filled fireplace, a little table, gleaming with silver and linen, with lilies and crystal and lace. It was set for two; close at hand was a serving-table with silver covers showing on it, and, for a practical and modern touch, a chafing-dish! There was no one in the room. But the table was hint enough. Here was the center of these preparations. Here two people were to meet, and Herrick thought he knew the hostess. In the departing wagon-load, there had been no beautiful tall figure with red hair. To this little private festivity Fate had led him through the rough magic of his scramble in the night; she pointed at the table with a very sure finger, and now all his vague expectancy was centered in a single question, and his first necessity was to behold the face of the red-haired woman's guest. Now at the first glance he had taken this room for a sort of music-room which had been used, too, for informal dances. And sure enough, along one wall, just as though put there to tempt him to the final madness, ran a little gallery for the dance-music. It had a balustrade about it and within this balustrade hung short yellow brocaded curtains, in a sort of valance, that seemed to Herrick strangely fresh, as though hung there yesterday. And he determined if it should be his last move on earth to get behind those curtains. There was no staircase to the balcony from within the room. He crept to the hall-door; the hall opened out square as a courtyard with doorways and arches upon every side. At the rear the great staircase, after perhaps a dozen steps, branched off to either hand, and on its left a little gallery ran along the wall behind that very room and led to a curtained niche. This would be the entrance to the musicians' balcony, and there was nothing for it but that Herrick should traverse the hall and mount the staircase. It was as if the house had turned to one great eye; he thanked heaven for the rugs upon the marble and for the scanty shelter of the palms; while with every step he took and every breath he drew the house-breaker dreaded to hear another footstep in his rear or to see an assailant rise before his eyes. But all remained vacant and was as silent as the tomb. Running up those marble steps, he came at one bound to the curtained niche, and, as he darted in between its hangings, he had a strong inclination to laugh; for, if there were any one within, it would be quaint to see whether he or they were the more startled! But there was no one there. He had now his private box for the coming entertainment. He dropped softly to the floor and, as he did so, some one in the room below struck a match. It startled him like the crack of doom. He parted the little curtains of the valance, and beheld himself so far right that there stood the red-haired lady lighting the chafing-dish. Herrick was not more than about nine feet above the flooring of the room, with the main door from the hall to his right hand and the fireplace on his left, so that the little glittering table was before him and to the left of him but a few feet. And there the red-haired woman blew out the flame she had kindled, as if she had but meant to test the wick. It was Herrick's first long clear look at her and he looked hard. The resemblance to Christina lay only in a very striking suggestion of the tall figure, a pose, a poise, an indescribable lightness and sense of life; they had the same gracious, gallant bearing, the same proud carriage of the head, and he suddenly realized that he was looking at one of Christina's gowns. For the rest, she was, of course, six years the elder, and her equal slenderness was much more richly hued and softly curved. Handsome enough, her face at once attracted and repelled by the diverse coloring of the eyes. It was a face at once selfish and fierce and soft, with the softness of a woman who is fashioned from head to foot in one ardent glow; a softness like a panther's. In the flame-white allure of sex she struck straight at you, as undisguised and challenging as lightning, and, to any but a monomaniac, as soon wearied of. It seemed that she could never be satisfied with her preparations. She walked about the room, touching and re-touching the flowers; over and over again she scrutinized the appointments of the table; lifted the silver covers; peered into the chafing-dish, and tested the champagne in its bucket of ice. At last she could find nothing more to do. Through all her coming and going, she had seemed to be mocking and triumphing to herself; humming, singing and even whistling very low with her mouth pursed into a confident and quizzing little smile, or inclining her bright head, in victorious scrutinies, from side to side; so that it seemed the guest must be very welcome and, if she were bent on conquest, the conquest very sure. She was not yet gowned for a festival, and, remembering the light in the room above, Herrick, grim as the hour was, smiled to imagine that here was to be played a little domestic comedy like thousands that go on in Harlem flats and tame suburban cottages; the servantless hostess satisfied at length about her cooking and her table and flying upstairs at the last moment to dress for company. So indeed she turned to fly, but then her mood changed. She whirled round upon the vacant table, her comedy, her mockery quite fallen from her, and given way to a black hate. All her quick humors swarmed in her, in a threatening storm; she was not so much like a woman as like a great, bad, lovely, furious child that runs its tongue out in defiance. But there was a power in this defiance like the power in that soft panther of her grace. So that it was a sort of curse her swirling movement cast upon the pretty table as she flung one arm up and out above her head; the hand clinched, and then the fingers slowly spreading and stiffening in the air. Then she went out of the room and up the stair and overhead. Herrick, scarcely knowing what he did, rose to his knees! Just then, he thought he heard a slight noise behind him. As he turned, something struck him on the head; he fell millions of miles through a black horror stabbed with pain and forgot everything. CHAPTER II THE EXPECTED COMPANY When he came to himself he was trussed up like a bundle, with arms and ankles tied too tight for comfort. He still lay on the floor of the musicians' gallery and the room below him was still lighted. He rolled over and again could look through the valance. Only a little time must have elapsed, for the room was still empty. And with the sight of that emptiness, questions poured in upon him. Who had found him out? And for what fate was he reserved? How long did they mean to leave him here and why did they leave him here at all? Why had he not been finished and done with? There struck through him, with perhaps the first utter and broken fear of his life, the depth of the silence by which he was again surrounded. No breath, no stir; that intense stillness was vivid as a presence and positive like sound; he was alone in it; he lay there helpless; a bound fool and sacrifice in the bright house, in the middle of the wood and the depth of the night, and, if those chose who left him so, he must lie there till he died. He lurched up and sat quiet, waiting for the dreadful giddiness and nausea that came with movement to pass by; determined to struggle till he got to his knees and on his knees, if necessary, to attempt to pass out of that house. He knew it was impossible, but movement he must have. Then, through that density of silence, he heard a step upon the terrace. His curiosity rushed back on him, like fire in a back-draft. He held his breath; the step was a man's; it crossed the threshold of the great door and sounded on the tiling of the hall. The next instant the guest of the red-haired woman was in the room under Herrick's eyes. Removing a long driving ulster and a soft hat, he proved to be in full evening clothes, and expectancy, held firmly down, lay mute and rigid in every part of him. He lifted a face the color of tallow and, staring straight at Herrick's balcony with blank, black eyes, the visitor drew a quivering breath. This visitor was Cuyler Ten Euyck. The sound of his entrance had evidently been remarked. Again there was a light footstep overhead, and Herrick guessed that enough time had elapsed for the toilet to have been completed. The hostess came forth at once, and could be heard slowly, and with great deliberation, descending the stairs. Ten Euyck did not go to meet her. Only his eyes traveled to the door and he stood stiff, with little swallowings in his throat. Herrick could hear, as she came into the room, a swish, a tinkle about her steps as though she walked through jeweled silk, and before her on the waxed and gleaming floor there floated a pool of additional brightness, so that he saw she had not been satisfied, after all, with the lighting of her supper-party, but carried a lamp to her own beauty as she came. Another step and there swam into his sight the beautiful, tall figure, carrying her lamp high, and incomparably more than before the mistress of that great apartment. This time it was Christina herself. CHAPTER III THE SHIPS AT ACTIUM She stretched out one arm, keeping Ten Euyck at the tips of her fingers. He seemed content to stay so, looking at her. She was dressed in a trailing gown of silken tissue that was now gold, now silver, as the light took it; but the long vaporous slip beneath was of pale rose; molded to her motion and stirring with her breath, there dwelt in the gauze which covered her a perpetual faint flush. The stuffs were cut as low about the breast as if she had been some social queen, and her fair, pale arms were bare of gloves. Their adorable young flatness below the gleam of the slim, smooth shoulders, was now shimmered over and now revealed by short fringes of silver and gold, of cooler colored amber and crystal, which were their only sleeve; and these fringes hung about the borders of her gown and trembled into music as she moved. In the high-piled softness of her hair, diamonds glimmered like stars in a fair dusk; diamonds banded her brow in an inverted crescent; diamonds and topaz dropped in long pendants from her ears; diamonds and pearls clung round her arms; the restored necklace drooped down her breast, and the peep and shine of jewels glanced from her everywhere like glow-worms. She seemed to be clothed in fluctuant light, and yet it could not dim one radiance of her beauty. This was more than newly crowned; the rose was fully open; her loveliness had spread its folded wings and come into its own. There was no shyness now in those wide eyes; her spirit shone there, all in arms, and moved with a new and deeper strength in her young body. Very faintly, on the pure and delicate oval of her cheek, burned the soft, hot stain of rouge. This was the reality of the dear ghost, calling in the night with the rain upon its face; this was the pale girl in the gray suit who had once sat beside her mother in the corner of the coroner's office. It may be Ten Euyck thought of this; it may be she did. "Well," she said, "have I made myself fine? Do I please you?" He broke from his trance, took the lamp out of her hold, set it on the mantelshelf, and returned to her without a word. "Pray speak!" she said; "I am all yours!" "Christina!" he broke out, and caught and covered her hand with kisses. "It is quite true. Do I do you credit? "Look at me here, Look at me there, Criticize me everywhere--" He leaned toward her and she swayed past him to the piano. Over her shoulder she sang to him-- "From head to feet I am most sweet, And most perfect and complete!" She struck the chords a crash and whirled round to him with her hands in her lap. "Yes, it is quite true. From my head to my feet--" here she thrust forth through the music of the shaken fringe a slim gold shoe with its buckle winking up at him--"you have paid for every rag I stand in." Christina's accent upon the word "rag" suggested that she was accustomed to standing in something much better. "It would be hard if you were not suited. Would you like to go to your room a moment? It's all ready." He must have considered this jabber at somewhat its true worth, for what he did was to draw up a chair and take and hold her hands. "Christina," said he, studying her face, "do you hate me so much?" She remained a moment, silent. Then, "Yes!" she said. "I am a good hater!" And she smiled at him, a soft, stinging smile, with her eyes lingering on his. "And yet you come--willingly--to me?" "Willingly?" she said. "Oh, greedily!" "Of your own suggestion?" "Of my own suggestion." "And on my terms?" "Ah, no!" she cried. "On mine!" "Well, then, for simply what you know I have?" "For that," she said, "and nothing else." "Great heavens!" he cried. "You're a cool hand!--You, who value yourself so well, are willing to pay so high for it." She replied, "To the last breath of my life!" He leaned down and kissed her wrist and then her arm, and she sat quiet in his grasp. "What are you thinking of?" he asked, looking up. She replied, "Of other kisses." He sprang to his feet with a kind of snort, going to one of the windows, and Christina purled at his broad back, "Don't be angry. How can I help what I think? Have I not kept my part of the bargain? Have I not come here to meet you without another soul? To a house I never saw before? That you tell me you have hired? In a sort of wood, at night, quite alone, not even a servant--although I must say everything seems to have been well arranged and left quite handy! Would you like some supper, now? If you ordered it, I am sure it must be good. I am very obedient. All the same, I am rather hungry." He came back to the table with the little pink line showing about his nostrils. "I do not mind your not desiring me," he said, "and perhaps, after all, I shall not mind your desiring another man. As you say, it is not a question of what you desire, but of what I do. Well, Christina, I am satisfied with your preparations for me; do you approve mine for you? You shall have servants enough, Christina, when I am sure we may not be traced by your sister's gentry! How do you like my trysting-place? You gave me very little time. If you consider it a cage, is it sufficiently gilded?" Christina drew a long breath. "It's wonderful. A palace--wonderful! Surely I was born to walk rooms like these! And a far cry from the little boarding-house I lived in when you first met me! God knows," said Christina, in a voice that trembled, "I am glad to be here!" "You like it then?" he cried eagerly. "It's for sale. It shall be yours to-morrow!" "Give me some wine!" she said. "I am tired!" He looked at her and said, yes, she was right; and she would better have something to eat. The wine brought back her brightness; it was she who lighted the wick, heated the supper, and set the smoking chafing-dish before him. Till it came to the serving she would not let him stir and he could only lean forward on the table, looking and looking at her. During this she said little enough, except that he must be sure to praise her cooking, for she had always boasted she could be a good wife to a poor man! But once she was seated she poured out a stream of chatter which he sometimes answered and sometimes not, being intent upon but one thing, and that was to drink deeper and deeper of her presence. Now through much of this Herrick lost sight of them, for he had come upon an interest of his own. He had discovered in one of the balusters against which he lay the jutting head of a nail. Never was an object, not in itself alluring, more dearly welcomed. For he saw that his legs were bound with only the soft cord that had once looped back the curtains between the inner and the outer balcony; there must have been two of these cords, and if his arms were but fastened with the other the edge of the nailhead might make, in the course of time, some impression upon it. He sat up and found the nail of a good height to saw back and forth upon, and if it did not convincingly appear that any effect would be made upon the cord, at least it provided him with a violent, if furtive, exercise. This was better than to lie there and let those below saw upon his heart instead. But he must stop at last from pure exhaustion; and at that moment there was the sound of a chair pushed back. "I thank you for your hospitality," said Christina's voice. "But, now to business. I have played in too many melodramas to sign a contract without reading it. The yacht sails at sunrise?" "Or when you will." "And takes with her Allegra and Mrs. Pascoe and whatever of their tribe they choose?" "Safely and secretly to Brazil! They have chosen their own crew. They must be aboard of her already." At such words as these Herrick may well be said to have picked up his ears. He heard Ten Euyck go on: "She is yours, Christina; and theirs if you choose to make her so!" "You are very generous!" said Christina dryly. "But there is only one way I can be sure of the end of all this. You know what is most important to me." Herrick, leaning against the banisters had got his eye to the opening in the valance again, and he could now see Christina with her hands in her lap facing Ten Euyck. "Have you got that letter?" she said. Ten Euyck gave his breast a smart rap so that Christina, being so near, must have heard the paper crackle there. "Very well," said she; "so much for the District-Attorney's mail!" He stood up, and his voice croaked with triumph as he talked. "Christina," he said, "I have brought you that letter--it's the price of my professional, my political honor; it's bought with my disgrace, with my career! But I have brought it. I'm ridiculous to you, Christina, but who got it for you? Your friends, the Inghams? your admirer, Wheeler? your poor fool of a Herrick? your cherished jail-bird, Denny?--No, I did! This letter that I have here Ann Cornish fell ill guarding, for her vengeance. You stole and lost it. Your enterprising family broke into a post-office to get it back. But the despised policeman brings it to you." "You got it by accident, you say," commented Christina. "Don't forget that!" "Forget! I shall never forget the triumph of catching that gang, although I renounce it at your bidding. I shall never forget your message when the letter was barely in my hands!-- "'I know now that I am come of a family of criminals. My pride is in the dust, as deep as you could wish it. If you do not help us, if it must come out that I am tied to blackmailers whom you will catch and send to prison, I shall die of it!' Christina, can I forget that?" "No," said Christina, "I never thought you could." "And you will remember my answer, my dear! That I had the proof, the letter in my hand, to publish or to destroy, as you should choose. You haven't forgotten that?" "No," said Christina again. "But the destroying, that's the thing! You'll burn it?" "Yes." "Before my eyes?" "Of course." "To-night?" "To-morrow!" She seemed, for a moment, to take counsel with herself. "Very well." An extraordinary limp helplessness, a kind of dejection of acquiescence, seemed to melt her with lassitude at the words. It was enough to sicken the heart of any lover, and even Ten Euyck cried out, as if to justify himself, "Ah, remember--you gave me the slip once before!" And at the memory he seemed to lose all control of himself, falling suddenly forward, clinging to her knees and hiding his face in her skirts. She sat for a moment motionless. Then, with fastidious deliberation, as if they were bones which a dog had dropped in her lap, she plucked up his wrists in the extreme tips of her fingers, and slowly pushed him off. "Quietly!" she said. "You are one who would always do well to be quiet!" He sat on his heels, the picture of misery, already ashamed and almost frightened at himself. And suddenly, "Christina," he whispered, while another flash branded itself across his face, "whose kisses were you thinking of?" She did not, at first, understand; and then, remembering--"I will take a page from your book. I will tell you to-morrow." "Was it Denny?" he snapped. "Denny?" said she, abstractedly. "Will? God bless me, no!" He sighed with a kind of vacancy. "You could easily tell me so!" "Well, then," said Christina, with considerable temper, "I will tell you something else. When I came here to-night, that I might not die of my own contempt I promised myself one thing. I swore to that girl I used to be, who carried so high a head she could not breathe the same air with you and never thought to stand you miawling and whimpering here about her feet, that at least I should tell no lies of love. There shall never come one out of my mouth to you and may God hear me. So if I do not tell you the man I thought of, it is only because I can not bear to speak his name in this place!--But rest easy! I am very capricious. Things will be different to-morrow. To-morrow, if you still think it interesting, you shall know." "Know!" he cried. And catching her arm, looked at her with a baleful face. "Yes, there's my trouble! What do I know of you at all! I met you once four years ago--well, I forget myself, I know it! But did I?--Were you even then--? Well, at the inquest, at that reception, in the station, holding to Denny, the night of your performance, and now, to-night! There's my knowledge of you! You dazzle, you befool, you drive me crazy, and you leave me empty--why should I throw my life away for that! After all, where were you when all New York was looking for you? Nearly a week! Where were you?" "Where was I!" Christina cried. "Well, it's rather long. But does not the favorite slave always tell stories to her master? Listen to Scheherezade." Then, for the first time, Herrick heard the story of Christina's visit to the yellow house; how she had determined that Allegra must tell the authorities, in Denny's behalf, the story of his provocation against Ingham; how then, hidden in Nancy's, she had found Allegra's hair and guessed everything. "Then it seemed that the first thing was to get Nancy away, quietly, without warning, so that there should be no danger to her. I thought that then I could manage Allegra." She had had Allegra come into town for her performance, and go straight from it to the Amsterdam, up to Christina's apartment in Christina's name; following her there she had slept on the couch, and slipped off early in the morning. Suspecting the identity of the motor, she had telephoned for it as though to meet them both, and now she went on to tell Ten Euyck of her attempt to deceive Mrs. Pascoe, as though she had come from Allegra, and of her imprisonment in the closet. "Ah, that wretched necklace! I said to myself, 'If it comes to a fight, they may find it and take it from me.' And then I should really have been in your power! I buried it in the flower-pot, thinking to come back with reinforcements!" She told of the flight in the rain, and of the farmers who wouldn't wake up. Both men listened, absorbed, staring. And Christina said, "I was afraid to go toward Waybrook, in case those men followed me. I ran toward Benning's Point. I feared the main road, too, and I thought I could follow the short cut. It is very hilly and broken and I had never seen it before in the dark; the sheets of rain were like the heavens falling, and the wind beat out my last strength; I was mud up to my knees and I had on heavy clothes, too large for me, all dragging down with wet. Perhaps it all made me stupid; at any rate, I lost my way. Oh!" said Christina, "that was hard!" and she put her hand over her heart. "I don't know--it must have been hours--I ran and staggered and stumbled and climbed! You are to remember I had had no food all day, and little enough the day before. And by and by I fell. I got up and on again for a little, but I had hurt myself in falling, and I fell again. And this time I lay there." Ten Euyck lifted the border of her golden dress and put it to his lips. The moisture of self-pity swam in Christina's eyes. "Nancy!" she said. "That was worst to think of!" In her own lip she set her teeth and soon she went on--"While I was still unconscious, a man came along with a motor. Somehow, he didn't run over me; he found me. And he recognized me! He wanted the reward. He took me to his sister's; to that Riley's. They gave me all sorts of hot drinks and things; I think they saved my life. But when I tried to thank them, something very comic had happened--I had lost my voice." Christina closed her eyes. "Well?" said Ten Euyck. "Well, that woman said I needed sleep, so she sent her brother out of the room--but she didn't send her husband. When she found I could not speak, she pulled down the blinds of her room for fear some one should see in, and said I needn't make a fuss, trying to get away, for she knew as well as any one I was mixed up with murder and trying to clear out. She said she was not going to hold any poor girl that was in trouble, not for the few hundreds he would give her out of that reward. She was going to let me go. 'But first,' said she, 'I'll thank you to hand over that diamond necklace!'" Both Ten Euyck and the unseen Herrick started and stared. "She wouldn't believe me. If I didn't have it, I had hidden it since I got in the house. 'Very well, if you won't do anything for me, I think there's a gentleman who will. I think the party for me to send for is Mr. Ten Euyck.' I wasn't ready for you, then, nor did I mean to be handed over to you, like a thief done up in a bundle! But what was I to do? I was still weak and she was between me and the locked door! I'm grand at screaming," said Christina, "but I couldn't even speak! And then, out of the stones of the courtyard, heaven raised up a miracle for me!" "It was you, then?" "The shadow? yes. But how could I dream a friend would be going by? It was just a desperate game, a wild chance! She had been telling me what an outcry there was, how I would be recognized anywhere, and about the moving-picture, and how they played the march from Faust, now, at that film--and I thought of the reward and how there must be many looking for it. There was a piano in that room and I went to it, put my foot on the loud pedal and began to play. 'Oh,' I thought, 'will some one glance up? Will some one guess?' And then I threw the shadow on the blind! Before she could do much more than drag me away, my unsuspected friend was in the room. She didn't dare to try to keep me. He put a hat and cloak on me from her closet--oh, I'm sure he sent them back!--and snatched me off!" "And is this your idea of explanation?" said Ten Euyck. "Who was this friend?" "Ah," she said, "you ask too much! Leave something for to-morrow!" And she went and sat at the piano, with her elbows on the keyboard and her head in her hands. This was the first moment in which Herrick began to be sensible of a little hope. It seemed to him that the edge of the nail was beginning to make some impression upon the soft silk cord that bound him. He ground away, desperately, but always there was the dread of any sound, and quivers of terror that the violence of his pressure might loosen the nail. The blow on his head made him easily dizzy, and as he leaned there quiet to recover himself, it was plain that Ten Euyck with a dozen questions had endeavored to follow Christina to the piano, and been checked where he was. "No, we are both getting fussed. It is my right, perhaps, but hardly the man's. As for me, I'm all for decorum. Sit back and smoke and when you have smoked you will not fidget. I will play and sing to you--yes, I should love it!" softly laughed Christina, her fingers moving on the keys and her voice breaking into song-- "I'm only a poor little singing girl That wanders to and fro, Yet many have heard me with hearts awhirl; At least they tell me so! At least--" she chanted, leaning with gay insolence toward Ten Euyck, "At least they tell me so!" "Christina!" he said hoarsely. "You like personal ditties! You shall have another! "You dressed me up in scarlet red And used me very kindly-- But still I thought my heart would break For the boy I left behind me! That's too rowdy a song for a patrician! But I can sing only very simple things! The one I always think of when I think of you is the simplest of all!-- "We twa hae run about the braes And pu'd the gowans fine; But we've wandered many a weary foot Sin auld lang syne." The color rose up in her face and her eyes shone; her bosom rose and fell in long, triumphing breaths, and--"Damn him!" Ten Euyck cried. "It's not me you think of when you sing that! It's Denny!" "For auld lang syne, my dear, For auld lang syne-- Is it?" Christina broke out. "Who knows! "We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet For auld lang syne. Ah, that stays my heart!--Ten Euyck!" "My God!" he cried. "I won't bear it!" He had his two hands on her shoulders and as she continued to play she lifted up toward his at once a laughing and a tragic face. "What does he matter to you?" she said, "to you, the Inspector of Police! Aren't you here, with me, and isn't he down and done for, and out of every race? As good as dead? "He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone, At his heels a grass-green turf; At his head, a stone! Come, pluck up spirit! "Tramp, tramp, across the land they ride! Hark, hark, across the sea! Ah-ha, the dead do ride with speed! Dost fear to ride with me? --'Dost fear to ride with me?'" she sang, on the deepest note of her voice, and turning, rose and held Ten Euyck off from her, seeming to study and to challenge him, and then, with the excitement and the wild emotion which she had kindled in both of them, dying slowly from her face but not from his. She released him, and, going to a little table, unclasped her necklace, and slipped the strings of diamonds from her arms. The crescent round her head came next. "What are you doing?" he almost whispered. "Unclasp this earring. Thank you!" She lifted one foot and then the other and tore the buckles from her shoes. She did not hesitate above that bewildering heap, but pushed closer and closer together those fallen stars and serpents of bright light. "There!" she cried. "Are they all there? No--here!" At her breast there was still a quivering point or two; she wrenched off the lace that held them and flung it on the pile. "There!" she said again, "they are all there! My poor fellow, I have changed my mind." She walked away and leaned her forehead on the tall mantelshelf. Whence she was perhaps prepared to have him turn her round and holding her by the wrists say to her through stiff lips,--"Explain yourself!" He shook from head to foot with temper; doubtless, too, with the scandalous outrage to commonsense. "There is so little to explain. I thought I could. I can't! It wouldn't pay!" "Not pay!" "Oh," said Christina, indicating, with a scornful glance, the mirrored, golden room and piled-up jewels, "these were only incidents! Try to understand. Long ago, when I was a child, I set out to vanquish the world. Not to belong to it, not to be of it, but to have it under foot! I was so poor, so weak, so unbefriended. I thought it would be a fine day when I could give this great, contemptuous, cold, self-satisfied world a little push with my shoe and pass it by. It was a childish ambition--well, in some ways I have never grown up! And to me, since our first encounter, _you_ have always typified that world." He started back, and released her hands. "All that I really wanted I won for myself last week! And Allegra stole from me when I saw her hair! You tell me that you can save it for me in saving her, but it's not true! It was easy to think of you as the world, to feel that you were giving me yourself and it to play with! It's easy to imagine that you would be under my heel.--No, I should be under yours! I shouldn't have vanquished the world, I should be vanquished by it!--No, I thank you!" "And Allegra?" he asked her, grimly. Christina shuddered and closed her eyes. But she said, "Has Allegra been so tender to me that I should lose myself for her? Understand me, it never was for Allegra that I came here to-night. Ah, Ten Euyck, I have been a good sister. It is time I thought of myself." "Think," he replied, "that she will pass from ten to twenty years in jail." The girl's face trembled as if he had struck it, but--"Well," she said, "you the upholder of the law--you shall judge. She lived off me--that's nothing!--But she lived off and bled others, and drove and hounded them, and made me an ignorant partner in it--that's something, you'll admit! And--Nancy! How about that? She lied to Will about Nancy and Jim Ingham.--Come, isn't the balance getting heavy? She just as much killed Jim as if she had done it with her hand; and if Will--dies," cried Christina, with a breath like a little scream upon the word, "it is my sister kills him! I am stone and ice to her! When I saw Nancy's message, in that moment I knew who and what my sister was, and then and there I had done with her! Let me hear you blame me! And yet," said Christina with a change of voice, "there is one more count!" Her look had changed and darkened. "When that crew of hers laid hands on _him_--O!" she cried out, suddenly. And flinging forth her arms buried her face in them. The effect on Ten Euyck was electrical. Hitherto drugged and fascinated by the mobility of her beauty, the lights and emotions varying in it, he now shot forward on his sofa as if, in a mechanical toy, a spring had been touched. "It isn't possible!" he cried. "That calf! That milk-sop! Christina, you don't mean--Herrick!" She let her arms fall, and without raising her head, lifted her eyes for him to read. He broke into a loud laugh that jangled, hysterically cold, round the great, brilliant room. "And to think," he said, "that all this time I have thought of him as my pet diversion, my wittol, my moon-calf! It has been my one jest through all this wretched business to see the importance of that great baby! To watch him industriously acquiring bumps and bruises, and getting more and more scratches on his innocent nose! I waited to see it put out of joint forever when you threw him flat upon it! I thought that we were laughing in our sleeves at him, together! When I had this appointment with you safe, I smiled to see him careering up and down the country like Lochinvar in a child's reader.-- "'He stayed not for brake and he stopped not for stone, He swam the Eske River--'" Ten Euyck sprang up and catching Christina by the elbows snatched her smartly to her feet and shook her till, on her slim neck, her head bobbed back and forth. "What did you tell me for," he cried, "if you hoped to be rid of me! I, at least, am no baby, and I have had enough of this! Your dear Lochinvar is doubtless swimming and riding somewhere in the neighborhood. But not within call! And let me assure you, though he stay not for brake and he stop not for stone--yet ere he alights here at Netherby Gate--" "Go on!" said Christina, "you know the end of the verse." She flung it, with a gallant backward movement of her head, straight in his teeth-- "'For a laggard in love and a dastard in war--' Oh, listen, listen, listen! Now you know! Now you know whose name I would not speak! Not in this place! Oh, oh!--Will and Nancy; after all, they are only pieces of myself! They are no more to me than--me! But he is all I am not and long for! He is life outside myself, to meet mine! He is my light and my air and my hope and my heart's desire! She knew it--_she knew it_! She had taken my youth and my faith and my kindness with the world, and killed them, and then she tried to kill him too!--Love him? O God!" cried Christina, "what must he think of me!" And she began to shake with weeping. "That cub!" said Ten Euyck. "You love that cub!" And he took her in his arms; and covering her throat and hair with kisses, he held her off again, and tried to see into her face. "Do you?" he cried. "Do you? Do you?" "Give me a handkerchief!" Christina snapped. He was surprised into releasing her; and plucking forth her own scrap of lace, she wiped her nose with some deliberation. "I look hideous. I should like those lights out!" He went about putting out light after light, till she said, "Leave my lamp!" She was standing beneath it, pensive and grave and now quite pale, with her back to the mantelshelf, her soft, fair arms stretched out along its length, and her head hanging. She might have been bound there, beneath the single lamp, like an olden criminal to a seacoast rock before the rising tide. The pale light floated over her as Ten Euyck came up and seemed to illumine her within a magic circle. "My dear," Ten Euyck began, with a kind of solemn fierceness, "when you made me accomplice in a crime, when you came here to me like this to-night, did you really dream that you could change your mind? Did you suppose you could make me ridiculous again? Do you know where you are? And under what circumstances? There is a slang phrase, Christina--do you really think you can get away with it?" "No," Christina replied. She quietly lifted her head. Her eyes rested soberly on his. "I am here, with you. I am alone. There is no Rebecca's window here to dash myself from. You see I have counted up everything. And this is what I will do. If I cannot die now, I can die to-morrow. You can not watch me forever. And in the hour when you leave me, I shall find a way to die." His face grayed as he looked at her. "Do you think I am not acquainted," Christina went on, "with the story of Lucretia? I could strike a blow like hers! And oh, believe me, like her I should not die in silence!" She felt him start. "Do you suppose I should not tell why I came here? Do you by any chance suppose I should not tell what bait I had from the Inspector of Police? Ah, when we have something to lose, we stumble and make terms. But when we have no longer anything, we are the masters of terms.--Is this my last night?" Christina asked. "By God!" he said, "you know how to defend yourself!" And his arms dropped at his side. He was a moment silent, his mouth twitching, his eyes drinking her up. Christina had, in argument, that better sort of eloquence that calls up convincing pictures. Doubtless, he knew she might denounce his theft of the letter. Doubtless he saw her, then, clay-cold; lost to him, utterly. On the other hand, to lose her, now, was a thing outside nature and not to be endured. So that suddenly he broke out in a kind of high, hoarse whisper; "Christina, there's another way! I never meant to marry--but--Christina, shall it be that?" "_What!_" she exclaimed. It was a volcanic outcry, not a question. She stretched out her two arms, with the palms of her hands lifted against him, and laughter and amazement seemed to course through her and to wave and shine out of her face, like fire in a wind. "Christina," he said; "Christina, I will marry you!--Oh, Christina, isn't that the way! There's your ambition! There's your satisfaction! There's the world under your shoe! Christina, will you?" "Is it possible?" she said. And again--"Is it possible! What! Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck and the girl in the moving-picture show? 'Mr. Ten Euyck' and the sister of a jail-bird! Eh, me, my poor soul, is it as bad as that?" Her laughter died and her brows clouded. "It's a far cry, Ten Euyck, since you stole my kiss on the sly! You laid the first bruise on my soul! You put the first slur and sense of shame into the shabby little girl in the stock-company who had no one to defend her but a boy as poor as herself. What did it feel like, dear sir, that check? We have come a long way since then, but have you forgotten? And does the pure patrician and the representative of high life now lay the cloak of his great name down at my feet? To walk on it, yes! But to pick it up? After all, I think it would be stopping! Ah, my good fellow, I don't jump at it!" "I know you don't! That's why I want you! I've been jumped at all my life!" Thus Ten Euyck, holding her fast, his face burning darkly under her little blows of speech, and his pulse rising with the sense of battle. "I think I've never known a woman who wouldn't have given her eyes to marry me! I've never taken a step among them without looking out for traps! Christina, I long to do the trapping and the giving, yes, and the taking, for myself! You don't want me; well, I want you! Yes, for my wife! I see it now. You dislike me, you despise me. Well, your dislike doesn't count; believe me, you'd not despise me long! I'd rather see you bearing my name--you, with another man for me to wipe out of your heart, you, as cold as ice and as hard as nails to me,--than any of those soft, waiting women! See, we'll play a great trick on the world! We'll be married to-morrow! We'll sail for Europe. From there we'll send back word we've been married all along. People shall think that when you left me the other night I followed you; that we fooled them from the beginning, and when next they see you, you shall be on my arm! Come, Christina, will not that be a reëntry? Will not the world be vanquished, then?" "Hush!" she said, with lifted finger. "I thought I heard some one!" She lifted the lamp from the mantelshelf and going to the window held it far out into the darkness with an anxious face. "No!" she breathed. Ten Euyck observed with joy that her manner to him had changed; it had become that of a fellow-conspirator. Up and down the terrace she sent the light, her apprehensive eyes searching the shadows and the bushes. "No!" said she again, "I was wrong." She came back to him flushed and eager, and setting the light upon the table, he caught her hands. "Remember!" he said, "otherwise I shall stop your sister. And where will your name be then?" Her nostrils widened, her eyes contracted, doubt succeeded to triumph in her face. "If it were not the truth!" she said. "What do you mean?" "If there were no such necessity! If you did not have my name in your power at all. If you have no such letter!" "Christina!" "It is what I have doubted from the beginning! How do I know you haven't lied to me all along? I ask you if you have that letter, and you thump your breast! I ask you to show it to me and you answer, 'To-morrow'! Traps--did you say? Did you think I was to be caught in a trap? When you were looking for a poor gull, did you cast eyes on Christina Hope? If you had that proof to show me, you wouldn't hesitate! There is no such letter--I can see it in your face!" He took the letter from his coat and held it up. "Oh, well," Christina said, "I see an envelope. Am I to marry for an envelope?" He cast the envelope away, folded the letter to a certain page and held it for her to read. She read it and a faintness seized her. She stood there, swaying, with closed eyes, and he put an arm about her for support. She leaned upon him, and he put down his mouth to hers. "Christina, look up!" he cried. "Don't be afraid! Don't tremble so! My darling, here's your first wedding-present!" And, alarmed by her half-swoon, transported by that surrender in his arms, he held the letter above the lamp and let its edge catch fire. Christina opened her sick eyes and they dwelt dully on the paper and then with pleasure on the little flame. "Let me!" she breathed. "Yes, let me. It's my right." He put the burning paper in her hands, smiling on her with a tender playfulness. "Take care!" he said. [Illustration: "You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous fool! Thank God, I've done with you!"] "I will take care." She held up the paper, intent on the thin edges crisping in the glowing fire, and then, swift as a deer and wild as a lion's mate, she sprang away, clapped her hands hard upon the burning paper, pressed out the flame upon the bosom of her gown, and thrust the letter in her breast. "You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous fool! Thank God, I've done with you!" CHAPTER IV TURN, FORTUNE, TURN THY WHEEL-- Ten Euyck's face blazed white with anger. Sick with rage, driven with bewilderment and some touch of vague suspicion, all his cold strength gathered itself. He was no longer merely a harp for Christina's fingers. She stood at the far end of the room with her back against the wall, barricaded, indeed, by a little gilded table, but not at all alarmed or even concerned, and the master of the situation forced himself to say quietly, "I am tired of play, my dear. I shall not run after you. Bring that letter here!" Christina laughed. "You will come to me, quite obediently, and give that letter here to me." "Oh, I think not!" Christina said. "Not to a thief! Not to a blackmailer! Nor even to a gentleman who tried, and failed, at murder.--How much did you give the man in the Tombs?" A profound silence fell upon that house. It was as if, in that great golden room, among the mirrored gulfs of shadow, something held its breath. Night seemed to look in at the windows with a startled face. Then somewhere, a hawk cried. And still there was no movement in the room. The homely sound of crickets rose from without like the stir of a world immeasurably far away. And Christina, in the changing lusters of her gold and silver gown, stood half in shadow; flushed and radiant, a little shaken with triumph, as a spent runner who has touched his goal, and with her hand above the letter on her heaving breast. Ten Euyck did not make one sound. But his face had a paralyzed, chalky stiffness, and the jaw dropped, like the jaw of a corpse. "You fatuous hypocrite!" cried the girl. "You pillar of society! And could you ever imagine it was for _you_ I came! For your name, for your position! I thank you, I prefer my own! For your protection? Can you protect yourself? Am I the girl to throw myself away on you for the sake of a bad sister, who has treated me with so much hate? It took all your greed, all your vanity, all your stupid, cruel pomp and dullness to be fooled like that! Did you ever really think I could stoop to such a scene as this to-night for you--or me? Oh, blind, blind, blind! How could you imagine I would leave him in your hands and never make a fight for it? Did you think I didn't remember?--that I couldn't still hear, as I heard when I was a frightened girl, the stroke of his hand across your face, and that I didn't know you had always had death for him in your heart?" She covered her face with her hands and then she stood up tall again. "My dear Will, my poor boy!--who treated me as if I were his little brother! Oh, the cold night trips on railway trains when I couldn't pay for a sleeper and used to sit wrapped in his coat; the morning races down the track for coffee; the scenes we used to work and work on and get so cross we almost struck each other; the time I was discharged and he lent me his few dollars till I should get work again; his first big hit and then mine; and then--Nancy, and all the sweetness of a hundred times with both my dears! Did you think I was going to sit quiet and let you turn your heel on all of that? Allow your conceit and insolence and spite to feed on his disgrace and danger! Let _you_ sneer at _him_! Leave _him_ to be triumphed over by _you_!--Will Denny by a Ten Euyck! An artist by a bourgeois Inspector of Police! An actor," cried Christina, beginning to soar, "and _such_ an actor, by a mere outsider! Your side over mine!--Why did you try? Will to be shamed and hidden in the dark! And you to be bowed down to, to swell and strut and smirk and look dull and glossy and respectable, and be brushed by valets, and have prize cattle raised for you to eat, and carry gold umbrellas! He to die! And you to pillow yourself upon a hundred crimes he never dreamed of!--Tybalt in triumph and Mercutio slain!--You poor, pretentious, silly, vulnerable soul!--not while he was paying for one moment's madness, and I began to guess and hope and pray that about you there was something prisons had been gaping for, year after year, if only I could find it out! Did you really think I didn't guess what was in this letter? Do you think I didn't know you sent Nicola into that post-office to steal it? Why, it was I, with my last strength, who mailed it there. He must have found some trace of me and guessed. Nothing in heaven or earth would have brought me here, except to steal it back!" "How did you--" he tried to say. But the machinery of his throat was stiff and could not work. He swallowed once or twice, and then, dropping his dulled eyes, he got out--"When--did you--at first--?" "When you came so grandly to the station, a master of the trap that my poor boy was caught in, and said, 'If she would tell the jury what she told him--' Don't you remember that I answered, 'How do you know what she told him?' A strange confidant for Allegra! It wasn't accident, coincidence--for you knew the music that she made for Will's and my French song! Not five minutes later I learned what Allegra was! A queerer confidant, still, for an Inspector of Police! I said to myself, 'There is a very black spot frozen inside that block of bilious ice. If one could know, now, what it was!' Then came your necklace and your note. And I saw you were a violent, greedy creature, after all, who would go a long way to get your will; I saw you could be managed--and how. I remembered Will's saying that people like us had nothing but ourselves to fight with. Oh, it has been with myself that I have fought! I'm sorry, I'm ashamed. But I've won!--What was my second hint? Do you remember the torn card of the Italian Bryce Herrick had to kill? How it said, 1411--nothing more? When I 'phoned you to call for your necklace your number wasn't in the book. The girl, at first, gave me a wrong direction. Then she remembered that was your old number which you had just had changed. The district was the same, of course. But the old number ran, 1--4--1--1.--Ah, wait for my third--the best of all! My good Ten Euyck, you never made quite such a mistake as when you lost one symbol of respectability--as when you forgot your umbrella!" This time he looked up with a stare. "You left it at Allegra's, and, like all excellent housekeepers, Mrs. Pascoe put it in the closet under the stairs. I found it there. I was looking for something to break the window with. A little light came in then, and I saw the gold handle, like a staff of office, with your name. I broke the rod and have the handle still." Christina paused and smiled at him. "My sister's partner in the business of blackmail; you, whose money robbed and burned a post-office of the United States; you, whose influence attempted murder in jail, on the highroads, in the Park, rather than be found out, I make you my bow! If I cannot save Will with you, if I cannot trade you for him with the law--and oh, I think I can!--at least our side shan't fall alone! If he is to be punished, at least he will never be punished by you! But you, Mr. Ten Euyck, who exulted in his trouble, who are afraid, as he is not, who will perish at the scorn of every fool, as he has not, you, who of shame are about to die, I salute you! Your career as a criminal, your career as a shining light, they are both at an end!--And why? Because you declared war against people without money, without position, without influence, whom you despised! Because you weren't strong enough to fight Christina Hope! Remember that!" The heart knoweth its own bitterness. For one little moment Ten Euyck stood with his eyes upon the reckless girl who was driving him to the last terrible extreme of self-defense. He had come there a happy and indulgent conqueror, and even the sweetness of a necessary revenge was black and poisoned in him. Then, in that moment, he heard what Christina, flushed with victory, did not hear at all--a little sound behind him and above his head. His driving-coat still lay across a chair and he went slowly to it and drew the case of his revolver from its pocket; the revolver was fully loaded; he looked at the barrel a long time, as if he were thinking something out, and then he heard Christina laugh. "Take care!" she said. "I did not come without a guard." He did not turn upon her. He still stood with his back to her, and, from under his bent brows, his glance shot up and found the parting of the valance. Now, since the lessening of the lights, Herrick, half-mad and goaded by the continual slight weakening of the cords, had grown careless of concealment. There, in the opening, his face showed. Not much, indeed; not enough to be easily recognized; all masked, too, with blood and sweat and with the gag across the mouth. But still whiter than the Italian face Ten Euyck had most expected. Then he caught a glimpse of the brown, ruddy hair, and knew. This was Nicola's and Allegra's idea of a jest. "A guard?" he said. And he turned then upon Christina. "Don't come near me!" the girl cried. "And if you want to live, don't shoot! My friends are all about this house! They are in waiting down the road! They have waited the whole evening long, watching for my signal. They started to close in on us when I waved my lamp. Let me cry out my name and you will hear, in answer, the horn of an automobile. It will blow three times--two short notes and one long. That means--Stand out of the way, Christina Hope; the men are ready!--Don't come near me!" "Cry out your name!" Ten Euyck replied. The girl lifted up her voice, and gave forth the words "Christina Hope" so that they leaped out in the still darkness and went shrilling and searching through the night, the vibrations dying in the distance, and the air giving back an echo of their call. Till, after an age-long moment, their last note died away. And nothing happened. No note from the horn of an automobile broke forth in answer; there was only a profounder stillness. Christina was left face to face with nothingness and Cuyler Ten Euyck. "You spoke too soon!" he said. "You were always foolhardy. This time you have outdone yourself. The clever Christina was not the only person, on coming here, to take precautions. If I gave so much to the guard in the Tombs, what did I give to buy off these friends of yours? The agreeable gang your sister commands--did you think it was in your pay for to-night? It is in mine! I suspected nothing, but I took no chances. I prepared for accident. No automobile can pass that lodge. No spy can creep about these grounds. One tried, my dear. They caught him. He is lying in that little gallery gagged and bound. When his body is discovered, he will have been shot by blackmailers, whom Cuyler Ten Euyck never so much as saw. I thought you wouldn't leave me!" Christina had gathered up her train for flight and had been manoeuvering nearer and nearer to the window that gave deepest into the shelter of the dark. Only at the first word of a spy she had stood still. "Yes," Ten Euyck went on, "I see that you guess his name. I am not a bad shot, and he can't move, poor fellow. Give me that letter!" Christina looked along his arm, along the lifted revolver, to what was now only a dark opening in the valance. Her mouth opened, but no sound came. The life went out of her like the flame from a dying candle, and she seemed to shrink and crumple and to sway upon her feet. There was a long stillness. "That letter, if you please!" Ten Euyck said. "Bryce!" Christina called, quite low. "Bryce, are you there! Let me see!" she screamed out, and ran forward. Ten Euyck held up a finger, and she stopped dead. "Do you understand that I, too, have a signal and these fellows will come at it? Do you understand what cause they have to love Herrick?--Fetch that chair!" She brought it forward. "No, under the balcony. Pardon my not helping you. I dare not lower my hand. Stand on the chair! Can you reach those little curtains? No? Take this candlestick--push them back! What do you see?" Christina shuddered like a stricken birch, and gave forth a lamentable cry. The candlestick fell to the ground. She had met Herrick's eyes. "Have I won?" said Ten Euyck. "You are a brave girl, but you lack discretion.--Get down! Take that letter from your breast. That's right. What a pretty change in manners, my dear! Come here! Come!" Her face looked thin and her eyes were set with fear. She came slowly on, like a person in a trance, half hanging back, half drawn with ropes. She stopped at one end of the little table, a few feet from him. "Put out your hand and offer me that letter." She put it out and he seized the letter and the hand in his. "And now, my dear, understand me. In my connection with the Arm of Justice, I hold myself neither stained nor shamed. It has been an arm of _justice_; when I have struck it was--as poor Kane will tell you!--always at those who had sinned against the law, though I could not then reach them through the law. In that punishment I used an imperfect instrument, as a man who stands for decency must do, in an imperfect world. When I recognized your sister as our mysterious shadow I forced her to write this account of her disgraceful life not, as she supposed, for fear she might some day blackmail me--for there was nothing in my life to be used for blackmail--but for a net to snare you with! In that net you are caught. Never till its loss determined me to have it back at any cost did I really sin. And never legally! For when I give money to a needy woman I do not question what she does with it. If there is violence--why not? In self-defense! But if I sinned, at least I have succeeded in my sin. For here you are! While you--you have forfeited even your price. But when Denny is dead, talk over with Allegra, in her prison, the story of his death--it may divert you both! For now she, too, is lost, as well as he. And through your fault as Herrick is!" She lifted her white face and questioned him, with the darkness of her eyes. "Let him go! After all that he has heard? How could I? You gave your signal and now I must give mine!--It's been a hard fight, Christina! And to the victor belong the spoils!" He dragged her slowly toward him by the clenched hand he held, his hungry smile flushed and yet cold with hate, feeding on her desperate compliance. And as he drew her past the table, Christina caught up the lamp and struck it with her whole force into his face. There was a tremendous noise of crashing glass, and then darkness, filled with the smell of oil. Christina's slender strength had found force for such a blow that the lamp had been put out before it could explode,--and what it had been put out upon was Ten Euyck's head. He floundered back; dazed, cut, with the sense battered out of him. And at the same moment the last knot yielded to stiff fingers and Herrick staggered to his feet. He dropped over the balcony to the ground, and Christina ran toward the sound of him, in the darkness. "Oh! Oh!" she said, and clung like a child upon his breast. But for a little crack under the door into the hall, the blackness had swallowed every shape. This was all in their favor. They stood listening, holding their breath, knowing that Ten Euyck was there before them but not able to see where; and then he fired. Herrick followed the lead of the flash and leaped upon him. Ten Euyck sank to one knee, but he had gripped Herrick as he fell; the two men struggled to their feet, and across the room and up and down they fought and clung and swayed and trampled, upsetting chairs, their feet slipping and grinding on the smooth floor; and though the shots continued to sound, they were fired downward and Christina guessed that Herrick forced Ten Euyck's hand toward the ground and was struggling for possession of the pistol. She could hear their breath pulsing and sobbing in the darkness. Suddenly their black, struggling bulk crashed down on the piano and the shots ceased. The pistol fell to the ground. Ten Euyck's voice gasped out, like rending cloth: "All six are fired! That's my signal!" Then there was an oath, a lurch, a sound of blows, the table tipped over with a smash, followed by the thud of both men falling to the floor; there was a groan, a pause, a last decisive blow, and then some one rose and came slowly toward Christina through the dark room. In a childish terror of broken nerves, "Bryce!" Christina shrieked. Then her shrieking, outstretched fingers touched a rough, damp sleeve, and "Bryce!" she sobbed contentedly. They met with a bump, and clutched each other, laughing with joy, in this little moment before the last. Already they could hear the hurrying men; dark figures blackened on the darkness, the terraces came alive with sound, lights showed and were gone; and Herrick, holding the empty gun, sought vainly to put Christina back from him. She held to him, leaning on him, hardly breathing. "It's death, dear!" she said. "Forgive me!" "Oh!" She felt him bend his head, and lifting up her face, she set her mouth to his. From the carriage sweep without there came--two short and one long--three notes from the horn of an automobile. CHAPTER V CARNAGE: A COMIC OPERA CLIMAX The door from the hall opened, letting in a flood of light. At the same time a man stepped through one of the windows. He was the first of a number whom the halls and staircases instantly absorbed. Out of Herrick's very hold Christina slipped and caught this man by the arm and hung away from him as she was wont to hang upon the arm of Hermann Deutch. "Oh, heaven and our fathers!" cried she in a faint wail. "But you were a little late!" The man, standing tense in the shadow, was examining the room with appraising eyes. Christina, blind to something rigid in him, hurried on. "And I did so depend on a quick curtain! But all's well that ends well--I've got it! Mr. District-Attorney, your mail!" "Who's that with you?" said the voice of Henry Kane. As he took, from the hand that had never once resigned them, the scorched and torn sheets and buttoned them beneath his coat he glanced over his shoulder, expectantly. "You'll go to the Governor, yourself, to-morrow? To-morrow!" "Please God! Ah, Herrick, you make one more! Hear anything, Sheriff?" he called into the hall. Kane had turned to close the shutters at his back but Christina, blind with triumph, continued to Herrick: "He saw my shadow at Riley's. I told him all that I suspected and he believed me. He spoke to the Governor. They promised me if I could give Mr. Kane that man and the headquarters of the others I should have Will's life in exchange. I knew from Nancy's holding that letter and it's being addressed in Allegra's hand that it must be the story which caused his feeling against Ingham--that Nancy, as well as I, must have hoped it might even set him free. Mr. Kane got me a doctor and as soon as I had my voice he sent me to a little hotel up the river here, kept by Ten Euyck's old servants whom he would know must recognize him, and there I sent for him. He was afraid to come there, of course, into my disreputable company. But he was fine and eager to meet me somewhere. We hoped he would name that stronghold of Allegra's where he would feel safe and when he named this house our hopes leaped.--Oh, I'm so tired!" cried Christina, sitting down on the floor like a worn-out child and snuggling her head forward in her lap. "Are those doors fast?" called Kane from his second window. "That shutter's loose! What's that balcony? This room won't stand a siege! You, Herrick, the sheriff and I and five men--can we hold this house?" Sheriff Buckley had just limped in with his bruised, cut face further discolored by the blood from a scalp-wound which he was binding with a handkerchief. Herrick had already noticed that Kane's arm was tied tight, just above the elbow, with a gaily flaunting necktie and around this necktie the torn sleeve was soaked and stained.--"Against how many?" he replied. It was not till then that, lifting a face of weary dismay, "Are we still fighting?" Christina almost sobbingly demanded. "Now, don't frighten the lady!" The sheriff turned to Kane. "We just got into a mix-up at the gate with the whole Dago gang. They'll never come up here after us." All three men, none the less, were busy latching shutters, locking, barricading. They were not interrupted and no alarm but their own seemed in the air. As they worked Kane said, "There's something up we don't understand. This is something more than any bunch of Pascoes. We expected a fight. We had over a dozen men. We were attacked by a hundred. They had made an obstacle race for the motors. One they put out for good. But the sheriff got this one through." "We've left 'em a mile behind!" said the sheriff. "Before they can get here the river police'll have taken the yacht. They'll be up here before long. We're safe here awhile, all to ourselves, and they can't get within a hundred feet of the house without being picked off by our boys upstairs!" As he spoke the pane above Herrick's head, where he struggled with the loose shutter, cracked into flying splinters. A small hard object had hurtled into the room and thumped at Kane's feet. A bewilderment ludicrous as hysteria came over Herrick. For the object that carried a bit of paper rolled in its mouth was a little golden pistol--which though sufficiently valued to carry on its handle a monogram of three capital A's, picked out in jewels, was yet no pistol at all. It was a dummy made all in one piece! "So!" said the District-Attorney. "Now we know!" "What?" "I asked you, Herrick, if we could hold this house. And you asked me against how many. I can't tell you against how many but I can now tell you against what. Against an army of which you have read, not so long since, a considerable deal in the papers. Against the Camorra." "Here!" "After us?" "The Italian Camorra!" "In America!" "Yes," Kane insisted, "and under those trees." "In costume!" cried Christina, with rising spirits and flitting to the window. "A skeleton pistol is its badge. The owner of this trinket is a member. Please, Miss Hope, translate us this paper." She read aloud, "Alieni the infamous and all his house die here to-night the death of traitors." "Well, the information's dear, but we're getting plenty of it! There's an advance guard, evidently, set hereabouts!--Alieni! And capital A's! It's their traitor's badge they've stolen to threaten him. If we only knew who Alieni is? And where he is! And what they think he has to do with us!" Herrick told them where he had seen the pistol before. To no one did this, at that time, bring any light. Kane's mind was busy with the fortunes of the police-boat. "The Camorra easily swarms thick enough to overpower that!" He paused, surveying their fortress. If they had needed anything to tell them they were doomed they might have found it in the colloquial, dry calm of Kane's voice as he said, "We should, perhaps, have sent Miss Hope upstairs." "Oh, I beseech you--anything but a trap. Let me stay where I can run!" "The more as they may try to smoke us out!" Silence grew up in their midst. The great front doors were barred and chained; through the house five men were on watch; the door into the hall was barricaded with the gilt piano, whence still the Cupids smiled, stacked above and below with the little table and the chairs; down the room's long front the five great windows, three more crossing at the farther end, were dark with the latched shutters of which the second on the front was the suspected. So frail were the defenses! So short a time from the first blow must the slats give and the glass crash in! "I think you'd best take the end, Mr. Kane; me and Mr. Herrick the front windows--Lord, who's this?" The black figure with gleaming shirt-front was seated in a little gilt chair in the wall's darkest angle; with outstretched legs and tilted head it confronted them from very glassy eyes. But it was only the dead body of Ten Euyck, who must have reared up thus with his last breath and joined their council. "Well," cried the sheriff, gaily, "you make another--if they think so!" Seizing the chair he trundled it across the room; on the floor he found Ten Euyck's gun and propped it into the passive fingers. "There! If this blind falls down, you'll be better 'n the piano--they'll waste a lot of attention on you! Now, if they only make noise enough, down by the river--Oh, you mustn't let him make you whimper, miss!" Herrick was mainly aware of a terrible impatience. The surprise and confusion of their peril made its expectation a raging fever, as if only a horrible scarecrow in a mirror waited to be smashed. Despite the whole week's frenzied pulse, despite the happenings of the last four hours, Herrick could not believe in what lay before and all about them. These were men he knew, with whom he had put through other adventures; the girl beside him had never seemed so much a girl as in this failure of her hardihood--he saw her for the first time with loosened hair that touched her face with a childish softness, made for cherishing--it tightened something in his heart as though to crack it, but it was absurd to suppose that in half an hour, in ten or twenty minutes, they would be there on the floor, unconscious of each other, ended, wiped out! Christina lifted her arms in a gesture instinctive with all womankind and gathering up this tumble of hair her dear, quick fingers twined and thrust till it was heaped into its place--why, of course not! This strange night camp amid broken furniture, the spreading pool of oil, the jewels lying mixed with the supper's wreckage, Christina silent again and holding his hand tight, the two wounded, haggard men, all these his mind admitted, all these were conceivable. But what was soon to come was not conceivable! Yet--hark! Was that--No, only some creak of the old house! What sound would be the last before the deluge? How long must they wait? Already the air seemed thick and hard to breathe, the twilight of the room hung on them like a solid weight and the one candle Christina had lighted made scarce a twinkle of sane, human comfort in the vast yellowish gloom.-- "If you please, miss, put out that light!" "Oh!" "We can't afford to advertise!" The light was gone. In the pitch-black airlessness Herrick could feel Christina kneeling against him, quiet but for the broken breathing that told him she was still afraid of the dark. As he put his left arm round her shoulders she pressed her cold cheek to his hand. "It's funny, isn't it? We never even had time to get an engagement-ring!--Here they come!" A sound as of excited animals plunged through the groves about the house; with tramplings and scufflings a great herd seemed to surge out upon the vacant drive. As it confronted the empty automobile, the tranquil terraces and the blank front of the locked house it paused, uncertainly; then a high, prolonged whistle sounded, shorter whistles responded from every stretch and nook of woodland and there fell again, to the stupefaction of those within, a perfect silence. This continued unbroken, baffling, interminable, inscrutable, and solid as the walls of a cell. Christina in her endeavor for control gave a slight, nervous cough, no more than a rough catch of the breath, such as Herrick had heard her give many a time when their taxi skimmed too close to a trolley in the safe, crowded, far-off streets. And with this familiar little sound apprehension awoke in him, full-armed. The merciful veil was torn from his imagination, his soul gaped to the knowledge of death and of direr things that precede death. On the instant all he had ever known of struggle changed; chivalry, civilization, restraint, vanished like things that never were; if, at that moment, the bodies of a hundred other women as sweet, as defenseless, as tender as his love's had stood in her way he could have set his heel upon them all to save her. Then, close at hand, as if from somewhere within the wall, came the imperative, prolonged tingle of a telephone! They turned, dumbfounded, shaken with incredulous, mad hope. But whence came it? Where was it? Christina stirred and slid to her feet; her dress went whispering across the room; the men, not daring to leave their posts, knew she must be feeling along the rear wall and still through the darkness the telephone rang. Then she gave a low cry--a narrow door in the glass paneling had slipped sideways so that she stretched her hands into a kind of pantry; the instrument's shrill call was now directly in her ears--"It's Nicola!" The three questioning whispers sprang at her at once. "He wants to speak to Mr. Ten Euyck." Blankness answered. The ringing became more impatient. "Take the message." But no message was to be had. Nicola's party was at the boathouse, in great trouble, in danger--never mind what! He wanted to speak to Mr. Ten Euyck. "He says, 'Get him to pass me his word to shelter us or what will you give--what will you give for news of Nancy Cornish?'" "Tell him I, Kane, 'll buy his news." Christina dropped back against the wall. "When he has spoken to Mr. Ten Euyck." Perhaps, in the helpless pause, the glassy face taking aim behind the shutter smiled to itself in the dark. Before they had time to try if the wire connected only with the boathouse, a single shot sprang from across the drive. There was a sharp crack and splintering, a hot puff on Christina's cheek, and the shattered telephone hung crazily on the wall. The besieging force had misinterpreted what seemed the reinforcement of the world and used its best marksman. Having done so it was content and reassumed its patient crouching. "Rifles!" cried the sheriff. "And yet they don't attack!" Kane peered through the broken slat and with a very grim expression drew back for the others. "Look under the trees, there. Is it just dark? Or is it dark with men?" "Looks like Birnam Wood!" said Herrick. It was that blackest hour before the morning when darkness takes on weight and bulk so that the eye must carve a way through. But the blazing dazzle of the entrance porch broke and distorted the besieging dark, exaggerating, multiplying the forces that it held. Beyond the brightness of the steps the stone and then the grassy terraces fell indistinct and shallow to the lawns, beyond which, perhaps a hundred feet away, the drive was rather known than discerned; twenty feet or so farther still the wood lay shapeless and invisible but filled by the monstrous darkness as close as with a great tide. There the most straining eye could see nothing whatever; now and again the night came alive with snapping twigs, every grove would wake and rustle; then not a leaf would stir. But through all the intermediate borderland shadows seemed to loom, to creep, dissolve and disappear; then to their more accustomed eyes these shadows began to take on form--they were the shadows of softly moving men, individuals and small groups, unknown persons on unknown errands which carried them here and there but closer and closer about the house. "Queer the boys upstairs don't spot them!" One group passed so close to the end windows that Kane fired at it and produced a commotion which he followed by another shot. There was no response, but from all directions the fringe of figures drew nearer, a crouching, irregular line behind its faggot-like shields of broken boughs. The defenders spent their shots recklessly, now, for the same thought was in all their minds; it seemed to take form from its own apprehension when, as the invaders drew back their wounded, those within became aware of something across the tree-tops, down toward the river; a ruddier dusk, a glow that was not morning, far against the sky. Close at their backs Christina's voice murmured with an icy softness, "The boathouse! It's afire!" Her tone told Herrick that the telephone had stolen all her weakness, she was strung like a bow; side by side with his her glance strained out and forward as the knots of men continued to advance with velvet stealth. The fire of the defenders ceased. Automatically, for they had nothing left to fire with. "What's become of my fellows?" Sheriff Buckley wondered. The first foam of the tide began to lap the terraces. Christina looked beyond it toward the flames that flared on the horizon. And from that way Herrick, too, heard a new sound, the thudding of a horse galloping clumsily on soft turf. The shadows blotted themselves to the ground. The hoofbeats began to run amuck as though the horse had lost its rider. Hither and yon round the corners of the house shapeless movements hurried, there came the step of a heavy runner and the cursing of a deep voice in some Italian patois. The long, single whistle darted out again and once more there fell that motionless waiting of the profoundly brooding night. It was Christina who first said, "Some one else is in this room!" As they listened they, too, could hear the sound of crawling. Something was creeping into the room. It was coming through the pantry door which Christina had left open and it advanced with a dragging sound as a wounded beast drags on its stomach. Kane, dropping on it, found his hands in a man's hair. The man sank under him with a deathly groan and now it was Kane who called for a candle. "Nicola!" Christina breathed. He was making horrible motions with his mouth; Christina found some unspilled wine and thrust the edge of the glass between his lips. "Tell me! Nancy--?" Kane held up his hand. Beyond, in the pantry, a step sounded--backing from Nicola's trail. Herrick and the sheriff dragged in between them a tall Sicilian whose triangular knife was still wet. The embroidered table-cloth with which they bound him to the piano strained under his renewed efforts to attack the dying man whom Christina still entreated, "Is she with my sister? Is she?" A hoarse sob raged through Nicola and gasped past his last grin of pride and hate. "You fool of hers! Fool of us all! _Your_ sister? _My_ sister, mine! You think _you_ ever have a sister like that?" The girl stood above him, tranced and wide-eyed, with distended nostrils; as she turned to Herrick a face which release and knowledge were even then palely lighting the figure of a man darted into the gallery where Herrick had lain; a slim, soft man whose pretty little face was all flecked and sweated with the insane hate and courage which come of insane fear. The Sicilian greeted what he took for reinforcement with a cry of triumph and encouragement; but it was not Nicola, it was Herrick at whom this tremulous assassin, yelling "Spy! Spy! Will you show me again to the Camorra?" extended his revolver. At the same moment, Nicola, turning on his side and aiming upward, shot him dead. The slim, soft figure doubled over the rail and the refined, pretty, convulsed face swung there with open mouth. At this Nicola spat the wine which he had sucked as he lay: "Thus my sister salutes thee!" Then his head knocked back upon the floor and he lay still. The tall Sicilian, who had watched the action without fully understanding the quick English words, now strained forward, peering with a kind of gratified thirst into Christina's face. He said to her in Italian that was almost a whisper, "You are very fair!" "Do you think that is news to me?" asked the girl, with a kind of fury. "But my fairness has done all it can! What's to do, now?" "You are fair. But you are the devil. You brought police to the river, who will return with more. You have plunged this night in the blood of your brothers. There was one who was like a little sister. Where is she?" Christina started; half in appeal, half in defense against the omen of his tones, she stretched out her hands. The Sicilian lowered his mouth to the bosom of his shirt and brought forth in his teeth a little hoop of silver which he shook before Christina's eyes. "Where is she now? Of her tokens _she has lost the third_!" It was Nancy's bracelet that he dropped at Christina's feet. "Devil of fine fairness," he said, "I shall pick it up again, when you are lying low! When not one shot is left for our hurt we there, without, will come quietly in! Then shall I bear this to my chief. I took it from the hand of Beppo, who lay bleeding in the grass. Were Chigi and Pepe caught in the fire? They reached her late, for they had rowed their boat back, to escape those policemen on the river. Only when Alieni jumped and swam they must follow him and tramp to the house for boats along the shore. But they reached her! I was against it always--she was not of our nation. Ah, she was pretty! Had you not let her know too much she need not have been put to sleep!" Christina made no outcry. If his attack on herself bewildered her, her imagination caught the significance of the Camorrist phrase. "Where," asked she slowly, "does she sleep?" "In the dead ashes of the house of boats." His malignant sneer took in the stricken, threatened group, as well as his own bondage. And turning once more to Christina he smilingly informed her, "I seek in the house for boats Nicola Pascoe. I hear him talking as at a telephone. They have brought a lamp and in the window I see a pretty girl, young and not so tall, with a face very sweet but sick and the hair falls curling and red. She has in her hands a tiny bottle filled with a dark liquid. She throws it from the window where it fills the air with laudanum smell. And at that up runs to her Nicola--and she, away! They must have knocked over the lamp, for next the house for boats is blazing high. And, as the smoke comes in the window, there she runs again--just as I see the woman's figure and in the fiery smoke one light of her red hair at that out from the bushes a bullet springs. She clasps her hands over her breast with a small cry and down she sinks. And Alieni flies out of the bushes with Beppo and Chigi and Pepe at his back and he races into the flaming house. It is after that down plunges Nicola, down and past us, running here to this place, and I follow him, sure that past him I shall come, too, upon his sister. Before we reach here, through the dark, comes a horse with two men on its back--one is yelling 'I have killed her! I have killed her!' and he passes. The other falls off. It is Beppo, who dies at my feet, giving me the bracelet. He had it from Pepe, the Parmesan, whom he saw meet with Alieni in the doorway of the house for boats. By this time all, everywhere, is fighting and the house for boats blows up in a puff and falls in upon itself in crumbling fire." Christina had never taken her eyes from his face and in those eyes alone there now seemed any life to hold her body upright. "It's not true!" said she, gently and at length. "Life's not so silly!" But she stretched out a blind hand to Herrick and leaned on him a little. "Ah!" mocked the Sicilian, "it made a beautiful grave! You will not have so fine! But yours gapes for you now as well as for your lover, and for your husband, who caused all the death! Do not pity the girl who died. Exult not over Giuseppe Gumama. Read, instead, the writing in your golden pistol--of Alieni--and the Signora Alieni--" He stopped with a gratified gasp. The handle of the door into the hall had been softly turned from the outside. No one moved. In a strange voice the sheriff called to know if this were one of his men. There was no answer. "Where are they? Why don't they--" Gumama the Sicilian laughed aloud. "The long cellar-way, where by night we carried out to the river our broken press--It has let us in--so quietly--Many went upstairs--" Herrick translated. With one impulse the three men turned toward the slide in the paneling. It was closed. But their intent listening made sure of more than one soft touch, straying in search of the mechanism. Of crowding whispers they could not be so sure. Herrick reached for Nicola's gun. But it had only one charge and then, indeed, though without turning her head, Christina closed her hand on his and took it from him. "That's mine, you know!" No man gainsaid her and she put it in her breast. Undisguised, unhurried footsteps sounded overhead. An alien presence pervaded all that house. Caged in their shelter, they drew together, close under the balcony. Christina suffered herself to be drawn with them, but she was considering aloud the Sicilian's words. "My golden pistol!" Christina looked from the little femininely jeweled dummy to the script, "'Filippi Alieni and all his house'--And all his house! 'The death of traitors'--My husband, you say? The Signora Alieni--A. A. A. Alieni, of course! But--Allegra?--Allegra?--Alieni?" "Signora Alieni!" Gumama smilingly repeated. The girl gave him one glance, sprang past him and flung herself against the shuttered windows. "Whom do you mean by traitors?" she called. "For whom do you take us? Answer! Answer!" At the sound of her voice a deep-bayed, many-throated yell roared out derision and victory. As the men dragged Christina back a coarse laugh mocked loudly from across the road. "Signora Alieni, we rejoice at the last to salute you!" And the whole woodland took up his phrase in chorus, "Buona sera, Signora Alieni!" Then, uncontrollably, at length the darkness volleyed, the earth was rived with sound and fire, the flashes of it scorching their skin while glass, plaster, woodwork, split and spattered round them as through the windows the hail beat. CHAPTER VI THE DARKEST HOUR: "OF WOUNDS AND SORE DEFEAT I MADE MY BATTLE STAY!" Christina's stream of Italian left Herrick so far behind that he could only watch the incredulity of Gumama's face turn to doubt and then to reflection. The word "American" was often repeated, and then came Gumama's slower answer, puzzling out the question--But was not the Signora Alieni herself much American? Did not she to-night meet here in this house her brother Nicola? And was she not to run away at sunrise with--and he pointed to Herrick--an American? And how well was it not known that the Signora Alieni was bella, bella donna?--"Bella--bella!" with mounting fervor he violently repeated. "But you, yourself? You never saw her?" "The Signora Alieni goes always veiled." "Are there none--out there--who know her?" "Old friends ten years ago in Naples. And the laborers of Nicola." "When they come, they will know at once she is not here," said Christina, with an odd, proud calm. "Ah, please, let me see what they are about!" And she persistently advanced to a window and peered between the slats of a blind. Blackness was lifting from the earth. That clear gray light, clearer and grimmer than ever they had seen it, of the slowly rising dawn had begun to fill the open spaces. Under the trees it was still a dusk of living shadows, and, from within the house, the half-muffled, surrounding pressure strained closer still against the walls. Christina faced round, uttered a piercing shriek and pointed toward the panel. To this, the men who watched her turned. And on the instant, the shutters clicking as she flung them open, the girl flashed through and ran straight into the dawn on the white terrace. "You who know Allegra Alieni, am I she? Am I she?" A wail of amazement and denial greeted her. The men within, the men without, came to a standstill.--"If you ever loved me," said Christina to Herrick, "keep back from me, now!" He replied only by swinging forward Gumama, who thereupon stood in the sight of his friends with the mute argument of a revolver at his head. Not a voice replied. But not a shot was fired. In the pause produced by the concerned and puzzled hesitation of the besiegers, Christina gathered up her voice. She was used to send it far, to hush and rouse with it, to pierce and move at will, and neither misery nor fatigue seemed now to have weakened its flexible and winning melody. "Sirs," cried the girl, "I ask you the one thing. Are you not here as the executioners of the great Camorra? Do you, then, wish to disobey?" She had centered upon herself a bewildered stare. "And do you not disobey if you blunder? Do you wish to bring all the new world about your ears for the wrong thing? Believe me, we four, we are strong persons in that world--we do not fall unavenged! If we are to die here, now, and the great society of the Camorra is to wreck itself upon our death, let it not be in a mistake!--Ah, you see! Believe me! We are not false brethren of yours, we are Americans, every one! But in a way you and I are brethren, for I, like you, have seen my heart's good faith betrayed--and by the same hand!" A startled murmur rose. "I, too, was brought to come here by the ruin of my life through Allegra Alieni! Of her husband I never knew. Only hold back the force that masses at our door and here is a plan. We are here four--three men and a woman. Send us four men--mask them, if you will--and let them look at us close and well; they will see that we cannot be those whom you seek. But we have with us the body of Nicola whom this one here, calling himself Giuseppe Gumama, slew, and who was brother to the Alienis. Let your men take this Nicola from our house, for we, no more than you, have any use for traitors!" These words produced an extraordinary effect. A murmur of admiration, of fellowship, exclamations, argument, a sort of congratulation traversed the green spaces through the still strengthening dawn. Christina, as always, had found her audience. "Oh, sirs," cried the girl, in a softer cadence, advancing to the very edge of the terrace, and still eagerly baring her face to the pale light, "you seek our lives and I am so weary I am almost glad to die. But die or live, oh, now, for the dear love of God, let me go down to the river! Let me see who is still alive there! Send whom you will with me, but let me go!" And Christina stretched out her arms to the men of the Camorra as to the brothers of her soul and for the moment they were all more than her brothers in their inflammable hearts. But even a little noise could still distract them. And this time it was the noise of the unhinged shutter as it slid, bumping, for a second and then fell with a crash upon the terrace. In the half-light Ten Euyck's hand, holding a pistol, was visible at the window and above it the white leer of his face. Voices cried, "A fourth man! A man of whom she did not tell!" A prisoner from the yellow farmhouse called out in an insufferable, fawning yelp, "I know him! He used to visit the signora! He is the confidant of the signora and of her brother!" A roar rose and drowned out Christina's voice. "That man--how comes he there! The friends of Allegra Alieni are her friends!" The crowd did not advance for the ring of Herrick's gun was still pressed against Mr. Gumama's beautiful brow. But some shrill voice rose, a-quiver with exhorting hate. "The hour is come! For what have we waited? Till they had not a shot left! They have none now! If they had they would have shot Gumama when he came in! They do not shoot him, now--they have nothing to shoot! Give the signal! They hid the friend of Allegra Alieni behind the window--how shall they tell us her friends are not their friends? How shall they tell us they can injure our Gumama? Close in! Close in!" The tide of the Camorra washed forward, and surged up the first terrace. But it came to a halt. "How?" Christina had cried. And then, extending the revolver that carried the last shot, she had fired straight into the dead face of Ten Euyck. The jar shattered that perilous equilibrium. The corpse fell in upon itself, its weapon dropping with a clank, the tongue suddenly protruding beneath the shattered cheekbones and the head goggling on the breast. The note of one still unaffrighted bird came through the perfect stillness. The invading army shivered, shocked and applausive; then, apprehensively, it glanced at Gumama. It drew together in consulting knots. Some men, coming from round the house, joined the counsel and created a sensation. A puzzled but now rather friendly voice shouted, "Some one lies! Alieni was seen to enter where you are!" They all looked at Christina. But the wire had snapped at last. She stood with a scared vagueness on her white face, the pistol swinging loose in her hand and her eyes fixed on the hunched clutter of what had been Ten Euyck. Herrick made out to translate the message and Kane said, "Ask 'em if they'll send up that investigating committee?" Christina's shot had made, however, too great an impression. If they had ammunition to spare, they were no hosts for the Camorra. Would the Americans come out, each one, upon the second terrace?--bringing, also, the dead and wounded, till Gumama shall tell us there are no more? "When the devil drives--! Say we'll begin with the dead!" They began with Ten Euyck. Sheriff Buckley took the head, Kane the feet; the long, bony figure sagged between them and the tails of its dress-coat flopped as if pointing jocularly toward the ground. As they bore this burden down the terraces and laid it on the smooth greenness of the lawn, amid the ever brightening daylight and the ever growing chirp and twitter of the slowly calming birds, various disheveled figures began to hurry into view along the drive from the river. These arrivals had all the air of refugees and continued to excite, in counsel, an increasing perturbation. Yet the truce remained unbroken. So long as Kane and Buckley, exposed, defenseless, to the first marksman, carried forth Nicola no word nor movement was given in enmity. But the delay in reaching the figure in the gallery produced great restiveness. Taunts and outcries of nervous impatience gave way, when the two men appeared with their slighter burden, to a chorus of half-derisive welcome. The Camorra had begun to be in a hurry. Its nervousness communicated itself to the men who bore this third body down the great stone steps and laid it at Ten Euyck's right hand. A thick sweat stood out upon them when a sharp storm of curses, geysers and downpours of venom broke suddenly from heavens and earth. But the tempest was not for them. The face of their last burden had become visible to the advance guard stationed among the foremost trees and this now leaned violently forth, tossing like branches with the shriek, "Alieni! Traditore! Alieni!" Upon that the shadow of the woodland broke at last. A dozen men, their hats screened low to shield their faces, detached themselves from the mass which crouched greedily after them and, racing out upon the lawn, threw themselves prostrate on the soft, supine thing that lay there. Behind them the tide became ungovernable; rose, swelled forward; covered the road, the lowest terrace; raving, shrieking, leaping and falling; biting the grass upon which it rolled in frenzy. There were perhaps two minutes of pandemonium. Then a whistle sounded. Then another. The tide rolled back; the groves of oak and pine and maple swallowed it into their shadow; and of that orgy of living hate no trace remained in the full clearness of the fresh morning but the trampled, mangled body of Filippi Alieni, pierced with fifty-eight wounds and still bearing between the shoulder blades a triangular knife. The will of the Camorra was satisfied. A chorus of whistles sounded from the wood. Then arose a single voice, demanding Gumama. His captors realized that the war was over; the prisoner was released. Despite the hurrying bird-calls of his mates he paused, thoughtfully knitting his Saracen brows, for a look at Christina. The girl was standing perfectly still, with her eyes intent upon Ten Euyck's empty chair, as if she had not observed his removal; her gaze was fixed, but her lower lip strained and quivered. As Gumama paused the pistol slid from her hand; the noise of its dropping at her feet attracted her eyes; she shivered violently; broke into trembling mirth and sank, till her soft cheek and the convulsive throbbing of her young body lay pressed upon the stone. Herrick and Gumama both sprang to her. Herrick lifted her head upon his knee, but she lay limp and shook from head to foot with sobbing laughter. Gumama shrugged and stood back. "Is it," he asked, "the silver bracelet?" Then they all saw that the bracelet snatched from Nancy was on Christina's wrist. Herrick nodded; his soul was sick with that horror. There was no triumph, now, in victory. "Tell her," said the tall Sicilian, "when she avenges her friend to think of me. I will come. Always. She is the pearl of everything. All would not see it. But I have the piercing eye. I see." He ran off swiftly; and the sort of uproarious twitter which welcomed him under the trees ended in a final message. "Farewell, Americans. You do us the courtesy of our beloved Gumama! We do you our courtesy--Flee! Whoever you are, the policemen are upon you! They are coming from the gate, they are coming from the river! In ten minutes they will be here! Americans, farewell!" It was the last word of the Camorra in their lives. The undergrowth of the wood seemed to grow scantier; it was the backward fading of the shadows, it was the passing of a great, black bulk; the disappearance of innumerable unknown persons whom they had never even seen, of whose existence they had never even known, out of their path. Nothing remained but the signaling whistles of the Camorra, gathering its children in its retreat. The thing was over. The last consequence of the Ingham murder, of the birth of the Hopes' first child twenty-eight years ago in Naples, was over and done. And the three men regarded each other with a strange feeling of vacancy. But in the mouths of Kane and the sheriff the morning air was good and life ran sweet in their veins. Even to Herrick, with the exhausted girl laughing and shuddering in his arms, there seemed to rise a kind of future hope when forgetfulness should deal tenderly with her. Soon she must begin to weep and the other side of weeping a kind of consolation lies. "Why, her own youth and life must heal her!" Kane said. "It's hard, it's bitter hard! But there's her feeling for you, her future, her work--Don't look at her as if she were dying! Time, my boy, she needs time, that's all!--As for Nancy Cornish, she fell with one shot. And since she was so much in love with that poor fellow, believe me, she's better off!" Herrick looked up in alarm, lest Christina should hear bad news. But she was lost in the hot surge of tears that had come to her at last and lay only quieter and quieter in his hold. Till at length, since there was a time coming when she must know if Fate had played her doubly false, he fetched a coat to put under her head and drew Kane aside. "You meant just now--?" "I meant what I've had on my mind through all this night, as something with which I didn't know how to face Miss Hope. I meant that this chap Denny was never a very lucky fellow--" "_Was?_" "But that never was anything unluckier than his consenting to leave the Tombs." "Because they followed and brought him back?" "They followed. But they didn't bring him back!--I forgot you wouldn't know. The Italians somehow palmed off on Ten Euyck's men another Italian made up with the things in which they took Denny from the Tombs. It's easy enough to understand now why Ten Euyck, with discreet mercy, called this substitute simply a mistake and let him go." He paused, studying the driveway with clouded eyes. "The Italians must have got clear away with Denny, but why did they take so much pains? Were they really going to hand over to Allegra a man whom they certainly considered in some way their enemy, when already they must have begun to turn against her? What were they going to do with him? What _did_ they try to do with him when he was first imprisoned in the Tombs? Don't groan, my boy! It's the one way out. It's the most merciful thing for that poor girl, there; it's the most merciful thing for Denny himself. Hope for it! If his captors didn't get away, if he's been retaken with them, then marry Christina Hope as fast as may be and get her out of this country for awhile. You understand?" Herrick looked up. "I intend, with all my strength, to keep my bargain. I'll go to the Governor to-morrow. But he let me know, as I was starting here, that it would be useless." "After his promise?" "Since that promise Denny broke jail. There are minds to which such a move is always the unpardonable sin! Against it the mere justifying provocation in any story Allegra Alieni may tell could make no appeal. Besides, it's told by a woman who was in love with him, and who, by this time, is either dead or run away. So must be every witness to it. Even as evidence against the blackmailers, if there are any left, Miss Hope can't force the state to sell her his life for this, now. Well, some day, perhaps, you can make her see that whatever happens, police or Camorra, he managed to get his way, poor chap! If she weren't fooled by life's being hope she would see, well enough, that he was the last man to thank her for a light sentence. He was keen against jail, you remember?" They were both silent. Yes, Herrick remembered. "The best friend Christina ever had" she would surely some day see could not have lingered in the black durance that he loathed.--Rest, rest, perturbed spirit! It was the hour for resolution, for new birth. Herrick felt a strength of pity in his breast whose tide should lift Christina from the whirlpools of which the lessening eddies still plucked at her sick soul. Poor girl, poor, brave, spoiled, wilful, imperious, generous heart! To have fought so hard and to be checked thus at the end! To have outwatched, outstalked, outrun the hounds for this! "Thus far shalt thou go...." Hers had been a heroic presumption, but it had been presumption all the same. You cannot outface consequences nor outdare natural tragedy; no, not even you, Christina Hope! After all, could she have expected to clear out from a morass like this without a loss? Ah, for her defeat he suffered, but for her safety he thanked God! Rest, time, the irrevocable--these in the end would place the past under her feet. Was it because she read the tender vowing of his thought that she had a little ceased to weep? For she lifted her exhausted face, where the wild, wet eyes still seemed to listen, just as Herrick remembered their continual guard six weeks ago. She was listening to those chorusing signals, still whistled from far stations nearer road and river and returned in such imitation of bird voices that bird after bird replied. They were growing fainter--they were retreating on every hand--all but one, which seemed to advance and to give forth a more familiar note. And suddenly Christina answered it. Herrick caught her closer, in a new terror of delirium. The girl rose to her knees and put him back. "But we've wandered many a weary foot--" From among the fleeing whistles of the wood one had certainly warned or questioned in articulate notes with which hers joined in a familiar bar--"Since auld lang syne, my dear--" Through the colorless day a strong yellow light had begun to flood the earth; the clouds were carved out sharp in it, the woods stood black; the light had a blush of happy fire and the air sparkled. In that cool radiance, in that bright hour, out from among the very waves of the Camorra's receding sea, a single figure stepped from the border of the wood and came straight up the terraces. Not so tall as Mr. Gumama but still vaguely Sicilian in cut, the messenger or fugitive or whatever he might be advanced under the gaze of those who grew terribly pale and could not speak; Christina peering forward, shaking from head to foot, her clenched hands hanging at her side and her lips caught between the knocking of her teeth. The echoing, ominous whistles, the noises of rescue approaching from two sides, the hails of the police, the sound of wheels, tires, horses' hoofs and running feet did not deter the single figure which, mounting with a kind of steady stumble, like one far spent, blind, now, to the danger of sudden bullets, indifferent to arrest or punishment or anything in heaven or earth but his own ends, gained at length the foot of the stone steps and lifted his face. At the same instant the risen sun glinted on the swinging gold of sailors' earrings, on the bracelet slipped out below a ragged cuff, on the red cord of a scapular and on the scarf in the Sicilian colors that had helped to play their part in the Duel by Wine in the loft above the garage. The wearer was damp from the river and stained with earth, yet smelling of singed cloth and grimed with smoke; torn, wounded, blackened, haggard, with bright, steady eyes. It was Will Denny. He carried the unconscious but still breathing figure of Nancy Cornish in his arms. * * * * * The first thing she woke to was Allegra's letter and Kane's question, "Do you know what this document contains? Can you witness its truth?" And then answered Nancy Cornish, "Of course I can! I saw her come out in Christina's cloak. They kept me waiting in the motor outside while she shot Mr. Ingham." CHAPTER VII THE SHADOW'S FACE: BEING ALSO THE FULL STORY OF THE SHADOW'S FLIGHT The whole of Allegra's document was never made public. Before it was read even by those concerned they heard from Nancy how, when she had run from the window of the boathouse, it was Allegra who had reappeared there, she whose red hair Gumama had glimpsed through the smoke and she whom Alieni had found courage to shoot. Afterwards they got from Denny the story of his venture: how he had guessed that, on leaving the Tombs, he would, in his own person, be kept a prisoner by his Italian hosts till he was got out of the country; and how he had therefore persuaded Filippi Alieni to change places with him--Filippi to be carried to Allegra and he to receive at the meeting of the Camorra a message that would take him to Nicola, to the hiding of the Arm of Justice and to Nancy Cornish. What must forever sicken Denny to think of was that hour in the boathouse when Nancy might have yielded and taken the laudanum that Mrs. Pascoe had finally secured, before he could get to her. Nancy's eyes were upon him, regarding him fixedly and strangely. With the vividness of his remembrance he broke off to question her. "How, at such a time, among such dangers, did you dare to throw it away?" "Why, I had to! No matter what! I had to live till the last minute. The letter was gone. I was your life. I was the only one who knew!" He dropped his face into her lap with a strange laugh. By and by, they turned to the story of Allegra. That great donkey of a Ten Euyck wishes me to write this. He says it is for his protection, but I know well enough what it is for. It is a net to catch a peacock--to whom he is welcome. He will never bray about me--this is two-edged; it would avenge me. It is a pity none will ever read it, for it is a good story and I should like every one to know about me. Then, too, sometimes, I almost think that when I am far away and sheltered with my friends, I will send word of it to high places for _his_ sake. For I shall be always in torment if they kill him. That is, if by then there shall be no Nancy Cornish. To send him, free, to the arms of another woman--no, that would be a little too much! I am a remarkable girl. It has taken to crush me the same as to crush Napoleon--bad luck. My bad luck began when I was born, with the two colors of my eyes. Thus a mark was put upon me, keeping me always in holes and corners unless I would be known, and making most men, who love me by nature, growing in time to weary of my face. If it had not been for the blue eye and the brown, my mother would never have noticed, among the children in the park, the American baby with the fair down upon its head who, when she came to look at it, was made with a shaped face like mine, and who also had a brown eye and a blue. She would never have made friends with the nurse and learned how the child was named Allegra Hope, and how the rich Americans had been married but four months before it was born, and were to wait in Italy till it could be brought home a year younger than it was. This the nurse had picked up, not being supposed to speak much English. And then came the telegram to come home, somebody was dying. And at the same time the nurse was sick, and there was no one with whom to leave the child. And then the nurse brings forth her friend who has always showed so fond of the child, and there is rejoicing because she is American, and the English doctor says she is healthy and the child is left with her. It is treated well; it grows; it grows more and more like me, who am but one year the older, so that all laugh to see us, and I am more like that other mother than my own, showing in what class it would have been just I should be born. And the old creature in America does not die, but hangs and hangs, and money is always sent for the baby, and by and by when it is three years old it catches the fever and it dies. And the English doctor is to write to the parents, but he does not write--he does an injury to one of the great clan of the Camorra and he writes no more. And I grow every day more beautiful, more strong, more strange to have sprung out of the mud, and the money keeps coming and coming; but that the dead one was fair in the head, and I am red like the sun, there is no great difference from what she might have been, and that she is dead and buried and the money spent and spent on me, is never told. But they there in America, thinking to be gone but a month at most, never said there was a daughter, so they know not how, now, one is to be produced. So that when I am seven years old, comes the Hope man; he looks upon the child with the blue eye and the brown, and sighs his great breath on my hair, and takes me to the English school. But I come every summer to my own people, so that I have all that is best of both kinds, and grow to be so beautiful and have such fascination, that when there comes sometimes a Hope father or Hope mother to take me on a trip and be sorry for me, I laugh at their backs! The mother I do not like, and she does not like me. She is a fool, and she has, too, another child. It is a girl and it is said to be pretty; but the picture she carries with her resembles a pale, shapeless child with dull hair,--not like mine that burns men's hearts like fire! Moreover this child has things that I should have, more money, more fuss, she is more shown. I am proud to be what I am; my mother, who is scarcely more than a common servant, had the great luck to marry into the Camorra, and my brother Nicola at eighteen takes the oath, so I am not come alone from dull peasants and these cackling Yankees, but from free men, born to judge, born to strike, born to live wild and to satisfy their blood. But all the same, as to this brat, Christina, I am the elder sister and I should have all, _all_! I make up my mind to be even with her and to spoil what things she has. I hear how she is strange, and is a lonely child, and plays she has a sister to talk to, a little girl who lives in the looking-glass; and how it is a game of hers that when she is in a gown of pink the sister is in blue, and when they buy her a doll there is another for the sister, and a place set at the dolls' teas, and Christina talks for the two. Then I know she is a fool, like her mother. When I am fifteen, and of the right age for passion and to break men's hearts, my bad luck comes and breaks my own. It could not leave me with the poor to be like the poor, it raised me up so that my nose sniffed at sight of them, and then it brought me together with Alonzo Pasquale, the son of a millionaire. He was mad for me, and well he might be, and I liked him so well, being young and fanciful, that I gave him encouragement. I ran away from school with him and we would have been happy forever, he having so much to give me, but that he grew weary of my blue eye and my brown. He told me so, for he was a dog and a devil, and I took little Filippi Alieni, and married him! It was wise. It was as well to be married, and he was a gentleman, with money. All was done as a wise girl should do, and yet see how my luck pursued me! His people cast him off, on my account, their own daughters being ugly; and Nicola, who has been the best of brothers to me, Nicola got him into the Camorra, where his gentlemanly manners would make him able to get, first, confidence, and then money, from the best. Yet when I had been but three months married and was not yet sixteen, he gets himself caught. And in prison he tells, he betrays his comrades, so that he is released, and for this Nicola does not kill him. No, he keeps the secret of that disgrace, and ships us to America, where I am to introduce my husband to the Hopes. All so well planned, and yet such luck! One of those to whom he had confessed loses his place, and then, by blackmail, that he will give my husband's treachery to the Camorra, he gets from him all the money that he now has. So that I have to lose him quickly; to take the little, ah, so little! there is left, and slip away! I do not wish a Camorra knife in my back! I am afraid to go to the Hopes, for there he will follow me, and he is a snivelling, watering thing to make a fuss and spoil all. So I ask for work to teach Italian, and I live for a little while as if I were quite commonplace. And so I meet with the great Jim. Hail and farewell, my poor Jim! You were only twenty-three and you cared too much! You did so many things for me, you thought such things about me, and were of such a considerate politeness and care, it made me laugh! But you were a beautiful lover, and I would have loved you, if I could! I would have been glad to marry you, as you made me so weary begging of me. I was very happy with you; you gave more to me and I think you loved me better than any one. But you were very silly to believe me, and silly to leave me when you found me out! That little whimpering puppy came; and, since you left me, and he had a good hint from Nicola how to get money from an Italian family here, what was I to do? We did very well, for a while, besides the money the Hopes sent me--I told them I came here to escape impertinence and was teaching Italian--and then they lost their money and I wrote to them no more. But Mrs. Hope, because of her sick conscience, was always trying, in sly ways, to find where I was. And it seems when her brat was come to fourteen years old it chanced upon my last letter and learned all. Heavens, what a row it raised! And how I was written to and written to; and some letters being forwarded me that they had tried sending me to Italy, were all about how she cried for me, and pitied and loved me and rejoiced, and said, again and again: "Oh, mother, I have a sister! I have a sister!" "Bene!" I thought, "she sounds like a tiresome little minx; but at least it is a thing to know!" So that by and by--when Filippi is clumsy again and goes to jail for four years, and they dare to put me there for two--when I come out I go to my sentimental miss, who is now more than sixteen and makes already a little money. Not a dollar has she made since but I have had the half of it. She has no frugality; she is all luxuries and caprices and always in debt; and for a while it seemed as if really she would be scarcely of any use at all. But it is strange how pale she is, and yet attracts and shoots onward! Since then I have found a letter about those two years when I was silent. She wrote it to Will Denny, who thought she did too much for me. Like this: "As I grew up and understood, and saw what little girls can come to in a world like this, I thought here was I and where was she?--My elder sister, born in wedlock, born of my father and my mother, grown up among peasants, among hardships, and if she had come to harm, lost, thrown away, forsaken and denied--for what? For any fault of hers? For a convention, a cowardice, done in obedience to the chatter of fools and in order to stand well with those that have no hearts! What can I think of my poor mother but that her weakness forsook and denied her child to please the world? What can I think of any shame or sorrow that touches Allegra but that this is what the world and her own family have made of her? Oh, Will, it came to be my madness to find her and to ask her forgiveness for being in her place. All that I am and have and ever shall be I stole from her, and only give her back again to repay what can never in this world be repaid!" You see, she was a crazy girl from the beginning. As soon as ever I see her I know the thing to tell her is that I have been in prison for stealing--I do not tell her I am innocent; I tell her I was starving! It was funny to see her--I was like a saint to her! I think of all I can that is piteous and wild and of a great pride, broken, like a sick eagle! I tell her about Ingham, but all wrong and round the other way, and how he cannot marry me because I am without money or place, and leaves me, when I am eighteen, without a dollar and without a name. And how when that had come to a young girl I could not write. All, all because society had kept me from my place in life and, having turned me out, had locked me into jail because I could not starve. Eh me, you should have seen her! She used herself like a maid to me, and a mother and a little lover, all in one. And I might have done very well with her, and the world would have been all for me to walk,--or this little running colt, she would have known the reason!--but for my bad luck. Nicola who would do better in this country with education wishes me to work with him. And how can I guess the growing brat will grow so far and high? So I am glad enough to make a little butter to my bread. Try living once, three women, the Hope woman and Christina and me, off the salary of a girl younger than eighteen and you will see. But who would think that all the while this monkey girl was looking in the glass of my grace, to steal and steal and steal from me? And would steal once too often, for the moving-picture show, and gets herself into a corner! That was, indeed, the justice of the gods. All this time I have made Christina keep me secret. I have still the brown and the blue eye, to be noticed everywhere, and I do not want Filippi on my hands, nor yet Jim Ingham. And for all she begs me to know this Denny, whom she persists to tell about me, I think he has a look that is not simple--the look of a man who has been about, and may guess too much--and so I will not--I am too sensitive and proud, and cannot face a person in the world except my little sister, whom I love so much and who is all I have! Except, I want the poor, devoted, kind, good folk who brought me up! So when she is eighteen she begins to buy for me this farm and here she welcomes my mother and Nicola. Nicola has found out friends of ours and kinsfolk who have long run, among people of our nation in New York, a business called the Arm of Justice, and we work for that; I having the best ideas, but, alas, ever doomed to hide. And on the farm we live in innocence and peace, and conduct our business excellently, out of the way of those from whom we make a little money, and here comes at last the sick puppy, Filippi, not to be kept off, who can but sit quiet and lick his paws in the background, that Christina shall not know of him. And then, it is the first year of Ten Euyck being coroner, and a man who has been paying us, unfortunately, dies, and Ten Euyck, nosing, nosing, he comes upon our trail. And he sees how we have had nothing to do with the death, only the man had no more to pay and so he killed himself. And Ten Euyck sends for me, and tells me he is sorry for me and he will not inform against me. He tells me of a young girl he knows in the highest of society, for whom a friend of his had so great a fancy he was ready to marry her, and I knew he was that friend. And the girl dare not but lead him on, but all the time she prefers some one else and is in trouble; and he tells me all he has found out and he says, "I would not tell this to you, if I did not think you grateful to me and too discreet to use it otherwise than as I wish, when you know liberty is in my hand!" So I know what I am to do, and the girl goes mad. And he pays me by and by, but not enough. But what can I do? We are going mad, too, for money, for our bad luck is always there! That man who made Filippi pay has found us out, and exacts of us more and more. We are in terror of the law from Ten Euyck, who has let none see him but me, and not one strand to hold him by, and of the Camorra from this brute. We work hard, we run great danger, and we remain poor, so that if we lose Christina we have nothing but what we must make and pay away--and Christina engages herself to Ingham! Was it not enough to break the heart! What use is it to work, to struggle, to be beautiful, and to have nothing? And here is this silly girl, not worth my little finger, who has all! Three times more I work for Ten Euyck, and that man Kane gets after us. It is all the fault of Ten Euyck, who has made us conspicuous, and he knows Kane thinks there is something strange, and he loses his nerve. He comes always to the farm like a caller, when I have sent all away but me, for he will put nothing in writing, and he drives his own machine. And one day he is raging against Ingham and Christina, and what he would give to know against them, any more than Ingham's dissipation, and I think "Maybe I can make something out of this!" By and by I rejoice to hear that there is trouble with Jim Ingham. He is not the boy I found him. He has let himself go wild so long he cannot tame himself, all at once, and then he is exacting, like a fiend, and jealous and suspicious, not believing in himself, nor anything, nor anybody; and I laugh to myself, if she should know why! For were there nothing else at all, it would annoy me that chit should marry him! But I am pleased, and in that moment I let her bring out to me her Will Denny and her Nancy Cornish. And so I spoil my life and break my heart, and do not know myself with love. I have come to be twenty-eight years old and nothing has counted. Then I meet him, and nothing else can count. I say to myself that I will have him, and I know it is not possible but I shall get him. But still he is all eyes and ears for a rag of a girl, who is so sick with love she knows not even how to charm. She knows nothing at all but to love him; and to love him nicely--so that she would not make him unhappy, even to hold him forever! It makes me ill to look at her, and still I cannot get him to look at me. But I can make him seem to look at me. I can make him ever with me, and amused by me, and of a manner a little sweet and tender to me--the poor sister of Christina, whom he can see to be dying on her feet for love of him. And the little rag of a girl sees how beautiful I am and full of life and far above her every way and fit for him, and knows no better than to grow pale and to keep out of the way, and to be silent and cold with him. And he begins to be hurt and not to follow her so hard, and then she finds me crying, crying. And at first I will not tell, but then I say how I must go away, because I love him. By and by I say that I would not have to go but I am afraid if I stay I will steal him from her. And at last, very reluctant, I show her a letter--for Nicola, who has done something in that line, too, was ever a good brother to me and taught and helped me well, so that it was in Will's hand. It said how he would never forsake Nancy, who loved him, for she could not live without him, but I was brave and strong and he must be so, too. It said how we were each other's mates, he and I, but met too late, and his heart would be mine forever, but he could never forsake nor pain his poor Nancy. Crack, she broke her engagement, the little fool! Who never had scarcely been able to understand how he should love her, as no more could I--and she shuts herself away from him, and will not answer and will tell him nothing! Only, she's changed her mind. And he says to Christina, "I am too old for her, and not so gay!" And I see him tear up the photographs she has sent back, and sneer at them, and say how God knows she could never have taken him for a beauty! And oh, I am so kind to him! I am so gentle and so sad, and I get new clothes and dress my hair, and always he can see me die of love. And so there comes a day when he asks me if I would be afraid to take the pieces of our lives and see what we could make of them together.--Ah me! and to think it all had to be kept secret because I was still so proud and sad! For bethink you, there was Filippi! I think at last what a fool I am not to have divorced Filippi long ago! Here I am, betrothed to marry and it is all to do yet! Long ago, had I not been so soft-hearted, or had I thought of it, I might have been rid of fearing the spy who threatens him with the Camorra, in being rid of him. I wonder how much Filippi will take to set me free, and he makes a horrible fuss and will take nothing at all! But his spy is begun all fresh, killing him by inches with demands for five thousand dollars. And he asks also five thousand, now, not to report Nicola who has remained silent and a friend to us! It is all like a mad spider's web which but entangles more and more. And I think I will get that ten thousand from Ingham because I do not publish the story I have told Christina. Or else from Ten Euyck, because I do. I send the Arm of Justice letter to Ingham's office that it may be forwarded to Europe. And then I hear from Christina that she cares for him no longer and has written him, and already he is coming back to argue with her. Oh, my luck, my bad luck! If he has lost her already, he will fight my lies! He will get my letter, too; he will connect that with her broken promise, he will ask her if she knows a girl with a brown eye and a blue, and what may he not guess and put into her head about my business? I am in despair, I have a fit of crazy rage, and I think, too, I will get ahead of him, so she will not listen to him. I say to her, "That man who ruined my life years ago, that was James Ingham!" I say to her, "I could not let it go on, dear sister. But don't let him know where I am." He comes straight to her, before he has my letter, and all she says to him is, "You have never known all these years that I had a sister." And then she tells him her sister's name, and he goes away. But Nicola ever hopes that perhaps he will pay and at four o'clock watches his window for my ribbon. Then he sees go in Nancy Cornish, and he thinks that very queer and comes to tell me, who am round the corner in the car. We watch and see her come out, and turn east, and we follow her, and I see her going into the Park; a thing to drive me wild, for I know well she used to meet Will Denny in the Park. She came much, much too soon this time, but did not care. Till she saw me. If she had not come so soon, if she had kept her mouth shut, how different all would be to-day! No! Out she came with it--Filippi has told her! He has told her we are married! She has telephoned to my betrothed, she is to tell him here! Filippi has done worse. He has said to her, "This I would not tell to every one. But if she should seek to injure you and get him back, say to her--What do you know of the Arm of Justice? She will let you alone, then!" With those words did she not seal her own fate? He must have got drunk on talk, Filippi,--not being used to be listened to--for he tells her that Nicola and I wrote that letter from Will I gave her to read. He gives this girl the address of my cousin, and says if Will comes there, directly, he will show him the papers of our marriage. Thus do these two little jealous, peeping fools spoil everything! In the meanwhile Ingham has got my letter, and has guessed I wrote it. And he calls up this girl, whom he knows to be Christina's dearest friend, and asks her, does she know Christina's sister? He tells her that though all is broken between Christina and him, there are things Christina must not believe, and perhaps there is something she must know. He asks when he can see this Cornish girl, and she tells him after rehearsal, but before five. She is very much excited, and she says how always in her own room girls run out and in and so she will come to him--She, mind you, the baby-girl! And there she tells him her tale and he tells her his, my letter for the money and all, and she gives him the address of my cousin, and there he has gone to find Filippi,--for she is not so crazy Will shall go!--while she is telling me what she thinks of me, softly, in a low voice, in the Park. I think how Will Denny is coming, and I make a little sign. And Nicola hits her once, and picks her up limp; I following with her hat, like a sister, in case we meet a policeman. And we lift her in the automobile and put up the hood, going fast as we dare. At my cousin's they have denied to know of Filippi. For Filippi, out of the window, saw it was not Will, but Ingham. And we take her in there. She comes to, before long, and all we can do with her is to take her out of town. Only I must leave her at my cousin's now, for I am to dine with Will before his rehearsal. It seems to me that any person of a pitiful heart, who also admires courage and address, must be sorry for me, now. Here am I, born for love and to command and charm, tied to Filippi and to lowly life; having planned so wisely and dared so well, now with this rag of a girl on my hands, not knowing what to do with her; with the Camorra itself, all unconscious, closing ever in and in, by its offer to absorb our Arm of Justice; with the spite of Ingham on my heels and tattlers and spies on all sides, just when I need all my wit to win my love. For he has not had time to learn to love me as he would love me before long. He is very, very sweet to me, but he does not care. Just when he first turned to me there was one flash. I hope and I pray to all the saints, I plan and watch and make myself fair and think of all that can please him; I spend my days and nights to feed the fire; but it burns out. He is kind, he thinks he is to marry me, he is fond of me, because I am sad and so is he. But he is sick for that Cornish girl who is not worth one hair of my head, and I have no time to wait till his love grows. I think how I am to defend myself with him if Ingham talks; and when I get to the restaurant where we have a private room--I am so shy and so sensitive, lest people laugh at my queer eyes!--there I find he has met Christina on the street and carried her along to ask her does she know why Nancy did not come in the Park. Well, I tell him. I tell him Ingham's name, as I have told it to Christina. And he does not like Ingham, whom he has seen fascinate Christina against her will, and whom he has heard of as a brute to women. And always Ingham has wished Christina to be less friends with him, and has done many little things in hate of him. So that he is all ready to believe what I say; how his Nancy was afraid to face him this long while, and meant to try this afternoon and failed; and how it is Ingham who has given her money to go away. I think it will make him hate her. I think it will make him not listen to Ingham. I do not know it will make him perfectly cold and perfectly still, not speaking a word--not even when Christina, for the first time in her whole life, is angry with me and tells me I deceive myself, I misunderstood Nancy, he does not speak. He talks nicely about other things at dinner, but he does not go toward the theater afterwards. And when Christina asks him why not, he says he forgot something which he has at home. And she says to him, "You cannot go to Ingham now, you have a dress-rehearsal." And he says, "I have not forgotten that." So she takes me with her to Nancy's boarding-house, and there they who are busy and notice no better, say she has gone out to dinner, before the theater, with a Miss Grayce. And Christina goes home to see if she can get word to Ingham to keep out of Will's way and I go back to my cousin's table d'hôte. Now we have never said to Christina that we have a car. She cannot afford us one, however she tries, and we do not want her to know we have ever a dollar but from her. We sell a little from the farm, and she knows we send this in to market by a man with a truck, and she is willing to spend so much on her own fancies that she even arranges with him to bring her my flowers. But for us she buys a little wagon with two seats and a plug of a horse. She needs not to know everything and watch all our movements. So mostly we keep the car at the other place; and half the time I am there myself. If she comes visiting to the farm I can take the Cornish girl out there. But I must first see Ingham and beg him to be merciful to me. And, indeed, he has loved me so much, I think he cannot resist to be a little kind. And I leave Nancy in the car with Nicola and the boys and with her mouth stopped, across the street from Ingham's house under the windows of that Herrick. So, without thought of fear, I enter. Afterward, when I read about the elevator boy, I remember I have on a favorite of Christina's dresses. For, naturally, of hers, I take what I choose. Well, there is nothing to be done with Ingham--he is mean, mean through. He will give me up to the police. He has heard before of the Arm of Justice; he says that he will break it. And then I tell him he would better clear out, for I know Christina thinks that Will will kill him. And it is then Will rings and when he, grinning, welcomes Will in, he sees, and any one may see, that Will has his revolver in his hand. But when Will finds me there he is stricken dumb. And Ingham laughs and says, "You wonder what this injured lady is doing here? Ask Nancy Cornish!" And Will cries out at him, not so very loud, but as a sword goes through the air, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" and then, very low, "Do not imagine but that I shall ask Nancy Cornish! And you shall tell me where she is!" Then Ingham says, "Well, if you didn't wish her to have done with you, my dear fellow, why did you throw her over for this married lady?" Will never gets any further than to stand by that panel of wall, between the portières and the door. He looks to me and not to Ingham, and it is the one time in my life when I can think of nothing to say. I talk on and on, but I say nothing. It is the fault of that Ingham who continues to laugh, and to play like an angel who is a devil, too. I tell him that Filippi married me when I was an ignorant child, with poor people, for the sake of the Hopes' money; how he brought me to this country and deserted me and came back after I had thought I was free, and had made friends with Ingham because I was destitute and alone. And he does not speak. But he does not believe me. I fall down on my knees and tell him, before Ingham's face, how I love him, and only him; how there never was any other man who had my heart! How when I saw him I knew he was my life, and I was born anew in knowing him. I tell him how I fear to let him know I am married. But how I am trying all the time to get free, and how I would have been free before I married him; how not for years have I been a wife to Filippi who hangs upon us and will not work and does not care for me! And I take his hand and cover it with kisses and with tears, and I implore him not to leave me, I shall die if he leaves me! And I ask him if he himself has never in his life done wrong! And I swear if I lied to him it was for love for him! He knows that is true; he cannot look at me, and not know! And I throw myself down, before his feet. He lifts me up by one shoulder, and he looks at me long and long; still kind but very cold and still, and what he says is, "Then was it a lie you told me about her--and this man?" He has not one thought of me, at all. It throws me into a great rage. I spring up and round the table, and Jim, who has not ceased to play, laughs loud, and gives one crash of chords. It is his triumph and I could kill him for it. I am all one fire of hate that tosses in the wind, and I lift my arm and Herrick sees my shadow on the blind. But quick I put my hand over my mouth, petrified. For at that moment there is a soft, quick knocking on the door and Christina's voice saying, "Let me in, both of you! Let me in!" By good luck, she has come while I am silent. And I leap forward and catch my hat up off the table and fly behind the curtains. For I know I have lost Will. And if I lose her, too, I have nothing. And Ingham breaks into the march from "Faust," triumphing, and just then I see through the curtain crack on the little chair at Will's side his pistol that he has dropped. And I hear Ingham say, now all in fury, "Shall I let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you are, through and through?--" And the door opens. She had her key, Christina, that she had forgot to give him back. And she calls out, sharp, to Will. But she turns to Ingham and says, "I implore you, leave me with him a moment!" And he swirls round to see where I have run. I snatch up Will's pistol and fire past him from behind the curtain into Ingham's heart. Will reaches back to catch my hand and shakes the pistol out of it. It has not taken one breath and his first thought is for Christina, yes, and for me, and he snaps off the light. There she stands in the doorway; the light in the hall on Ingham fallen back dead. And when she turns her eyes again, there is still no one there but Will. Will stoops for the pistol that still smokes and drops it loose in his pocket. [Illustration: "Shall I let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you are, through and through?--"] You are to remember it is what she has come there to prevent. And before she has time scarcely to breathe, he forces her back across the threshold. Up he swoops her in his arms for he is strong like wire, and light and swift as a hound is, and flies with her for the back stairs. I wait, for if she sees me I do not know, any more than he does, which way she will turn. She has stood by him, and perhaps she would have stood by me; but not if she had known the truth. And at the back stairway he asks her, "Can we trust the Deutches?" And she replies, "For me, yes. But I will not trust your life with any one." And then, poor fellow, he must have seen what she thought, and made up his mind to let her think it. I was her sister; and he had gone into that room the man who was to marry me. He could still feel my kisses and my arms about him; and he never dreamed that Ingham was to denounce me for a criminal--he thought I fired not from mingled frenzies, but from only the desperate love of him. Besides, it was only accident he had not fired himself. He would not have given me up if he had died. For me, almost in a moment, it is too late to run. I stumble on Christina's cloak and scarf, that she has had on her arm and dropped in the dark. I am terribly afraid! I am in panic to think they are all coming, and I bolt the door! I wish only to hide and yet I know I cannot hide! I am wild! I try the closet. It is locked. I run behind the portières, knocking over the little chair in the dark. I have no plan, nothing but fear! Till, with the feeling of the curtains close about me, I remember how I once slipped out of the rooms of a man I had been to see on business, for the Arm of Justice. He had called the people out of the front room into the other, the room where I was, and as they all got in, I had slipped out. How to get them in here? Then I drag in Ingham's body. I stand close in my cloak colored like the curtains, and once I hear Deutch's voice I remember that it is Christina's cloak. He makes it all easy. To come out while those men were working, there at the closet, is terrible, but there are the trolley-car and my automobile making good noises. I have pinned my hat under the cloak, and my slippers I put in its inside pocket. It is when the police have cleared the halls. I have scarcely got to the back-stairs when the people begin peeping out again. I have in my hand Christina's key. I turn to the door of the apartment nearest the back stairs, to pretend I am unlocking it. And the knob turns in my hand. The decorators have left it open and I walk in and slip the catch. There I wait till all the hunt is done. But I wish to be rid of the little pistol, shaped for the impunitura of the Camorra, which, in early days, Filippi had made for me and on which once, before Nicola forbade me, I had tried to scratch "Camorrist." Were I taken with that, I should have every foe on my heels! I wish that I might slip it into the coat-pocket of that great boy with the figure of gods--he who led the chase and deafened me with his hammering. Then I remember him telling the police where he lives. It makes me laugh; there are scraps of wall-paper about. On one of these I write a message and in this I wrap my impunitura. Then, long after, when all my cackling geese have cackled into bed again, I go up to the roof and across into the next house. There is an opening of some feet between the two apartment houses, and it may be that Will jumped it, but I think not. I think he must have gone up to the front, where the cornices join, and crept and balanced along the little ledge behind them, as I do. And I walk boldly down those stairs where all is still, and choose a moment when the night-boy takes some one up in the elevator, and then I cross the office, and Nicola is still waiting with the car. I stuff the impunitura in the letter-box and I am away, away!--But the little rag of a girl, she knows when I went in and when I came out! So now you see how hard my problem is, my problem that is double: what to do with her, and how to save my love! Three weeks and more go by, and for him I am beginning to breathe. And he tells Christina nothing, nothing at all. Only he asks her did she meet me as she came up, for I have only just run out as he and Ingham quarrel. And she says no, Deutch brought her up in the freight-elevator. Thus she is not surprised to hear about my shadow on the blind; she thinks I came there like her to get Jim away. But she fears I will be implicated and my poor story told. This she thinks of a great deal, and keeps me very quiet in the country. While she, if you please, is no sooner saved from Ingham but she takes up that boy with the figure of gods, who saw my shadow. The fool did not feel such a kindness for that which moved with splendid grace! Nor did he keep my pistol. But perhaps he wants her money. I tell Nicola and the boys he is the spy who drains us of ours, and who is carrying news to her from little Stanley of my letters. They will rid her of him! And no one knows who fired that shot but Will and me, no one. And Mother Pascoe-Ansello watches all the time what we do with Nancy Cornish. I am very good to Nancy Cornish. In case she should, by any chance, get away and tell Will and Christina. For there are some things they would not forgive. I am frightened, now, and I would let her go, if I could. And, then, Ten Euyck will not pay me! He is furious I have shot Ingham, which he finds out at the inquest, and yet he must give me his protection. And he says what I said in the Ingham letter was a lie, and he will not pay for lies; they are wrong in all ways, for they never work. And money I must have, or that spy of Filippi's will settle us. We have just been received by the Camorra and all must be careful. Then I think Christina can some way get it. But not to know it is for me. So at last I threaten the little Nancy, and she is glad to write as I say. And she cut off the lock of her hair at my own dressing-table with my own scissors, when mine was all down my back to show her that I had more than she. And when we do not have the answer that we hope for, she begins to fret terribly. She is always listening and watching; she is so helpless and I am lonely and perhaps I talk too much! Then, oh, my God, he is arrested! I cannot keep it to myself, I run screaming through the house! I think I shall die, and I think almost that that rag of a girl will kill me! She recognized his voice up there cry, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" and she has not said one word so that I think she thinks he did it. But when they catch him and she jumps at me that it was I, she can see it in my face. And she makes a terrible scene--begs me and prays me to denounce myself, to save him. And then I know that she must die. But I have a mind to Mother Pascoe-Ansello, and I make a bargain with this girl. I ask her what she will promise, and she says _anything_. And I ask her if I write a full confession to the District-Attorney and mail it when things go hard with Will, will that content her? Oh, very fine! So I tell her it is what I would do, who would die for him to-morrow, but that it would give him to her arms. And she says she will go away, she will never see him. I reply, "He will find you, he will make you." And she says to me eager, with open mouth, "What can I do?" I answer, "You are not very well. You grow every day more feverish. Nothing shall ever happen to you under my roof. But if it should, how it would solve all." She says, "Will you let me keep the letter myself and mail it myself?" and I say, "Yes." So then she says, "You gave me laudanum so I could sleep. When I have mailed that letter, give me some more." Oh, I feel such a relief! If she is found, even, with laudanum it is suicide. "Will you ask for it every night, aloud, before them all, and after you have mailed the letter will you take--enough? Will you swear?" "Oh," she says, "upon his freedom, I do swear." * * * * * So! Thus far has she read. And now she falls ill. And any hour, now, may Ten Euyck come for this. And I must warn him I will not have him drop another word before Nicola, as though Will would drag us all in by telling I was there with him. Nicola's hand might reach into his prison. When Nancy wakes, she has still this envelope--stuffed with blanks. But if I cannot fool her, Nicola has planned a better way. A fine way! For, after that, she will be silent--she, who thought to be bride to the man I choose.--Oh, my love, you love her. If you, too, must die, it is for that you die, my darling! For no little rag of a girl can frustrate the will of ALLEGRA ANSELLO ALIENI. CHAPTER VIII IN WHICH CHRISTINA HOPE DOES POSITIVELY REAPPEAR "Oh, then, I'll marry Sally! For she is the darling of my heart--" "But _is_ she?" queried Christina, swinging round from the piano, "Is she?" And she looked wistfully at Herrick as he took her outstretched hand. "Oh, if she's a very troublesome person, tell me at least she brought the author luck! Was it any wonder, eh, that the pulse of your life changed when you saw a shadow on the blind? Since at that very moment my hand was on the door? Oh, I can perhaps rouse luck with the best 'when I come knocking!'" It was Sunday evening, a month from that September Twentieth when, to a public that perhaps had never given quite such a welcome, Christina Hope had positively reappeared. This occasion was of a very homely gathering, an hour when Christina had simply confessed to the need of seeing all the people of one episode "alive together." She had spent the month in watching Nancy grow strong, here, in her house, and to-morrow was the day of Nancy's wedding. "Once I have packed off my daughter," Christina had been saying, "I shall marry myself out of hand--quite simply, by just stepping round the corner--to the patientest fellow living. The public and I meet often enough--it shall not stick its head in at my marriage!" But Herrick's sister was to arrive to-morrow and this seemed to have made Christina restive. "You know very well that you are marrying an actress. But there has been too much glare--to her you must be marrying, as some play says, 'The Queen of the Gipsies!' Ah, but Bryce--it's easy enough to be fond of me, now! After all, I behaved admirably, like a good girl. I was as grand as Evadne and as energetic as Sal! I had a very hard time and, really, I was quite a heroine. But my hard times are done and God send I may never be a heroine again! Well, what price the Queen of the Gipsies, dear, as a nice young lady? And through what rent in my admirable behavior will next--to try your patience--the real Christina Hope too positively reappear? I wonder!" Thus she spoke, a little sadly. And, then, at the ringing of the door-bell called out for her mother and Mrs. Deutch. "For heaven forbid," added Christina, "that ever I should be seen without a chaperone!" It was the simplest of supper-parties, at a table that jumbled Joe Patrick with the District-Attorney; but the great kindness of good-will still showed, inevitably, against a somber background. Before that company there continued to rise in vivid silences, sharp as though edged with acid, a wild space of death and hiding, of prison and darkness, when suddenly Christina's perverse lip twitched with a small, soft laugh. "And to think that, all the time, we were just as respectable as we could be!" "I don't know how respectable you can be," said Denny. "I think I could do better." "_I_ think it's a pretty good thing for you," said Wheeler, "that she is as she is. You appear to have what I don't mind calling--in a lean, black party of no particular stature--an almost inexplicable charm for the ladies!" "In that case," said Christina, "you can see what a waste it is for him to play villains. Give him to me for the hero of Bryce's play, when I star next year." "Thank you for waiting a year. You must have arranged your production with Ten Euyck so quickly that it makes a manager's hair raise!" "As fast as I could learn my lines!" Christina cried. "But sometimes he did throw me out. Ah, if I could only have spoken his speeches too!" "Many stars in your profession have made that complaint! But I forgive you everything, Christina, since you notified me for an advance sale!" "She broke her word to me," said Kane, "to do that! I was so anxious not a breath should get out--it might have ruined everything. I caught her second message--to you, Herrick--and stopped it." Herrick asked, "Will it always be the first which goes to Wheeler?" She responded with surprised earnestness, "Why, but, dearest, that was _business_!" He laughed; and there was no bitterness in his laugh. He was glad of her quick, earnest interest. A month and three days had softened the tragic brooding of Christina's face and drawn them all far from pain and fear, deep waters and dark night. But this first attempt to mention that time with any ease showed him how they all still winced at scars; even this ripple of mirth, glowing and vibrating like the air of all that house with love and joy, had glowed and vibrated too sharply. He wanted some happening that should clear the air, and he did not know what. Work was the safest thing he knew. And even his work, now they had begun, was a good thing to talk of. "How about that realistic tone?" Wheeler was asking. "Our experience doesn't leave much of Herrick's idea about the commonplaceness of crime--" "Oh, yes, it does!" Christina interrupted. "They were commonplace enough, to themselves. It was only where we rushed in that it turned into melodrama. That's the way with amateurs! They have to," she flung at Denny, "be more like Dago organ-grinders than any Dago organ-grinder ever was!" "I thank you," returned that unabashed young man. "It was quite realistic enough for me. If all my foreign traitors had done as well by me as this one!" His eyes sought Nancy's. For an instant neither of them could speak. But the girl could not resist putting out her hand. And no one minded when he took it. "But I thanked the gods," he could then say with a laugh, "for my Italian accent! I knew two or three phrases from the Garibaldi play--and then I knew the sound and some of the sense from--Chris's farm. But I could have wished, none the less, to be better equipped." "Rotten to have to make out so much funk!" contributed Stanley. "So's to seem like that scared-to-death fellow." "On the whole, that was the best thing I did. It came quite easy!" "But the choice?" inquired Mrs. Deutch. "How did you make that choice, dear sir, amidst the goblets?" "Only luck--I just chanced it. Gold, silver, and lead--can't you guess?" He looked at Christina, and Christina blushed. Deutch glanced up twinkling. "Ah, tante," said the girl, "you will never understand--you have not the artistic temperament! 'What find I here? Fair Portia's counterfeit!' That was it, Will? Ah, my dear, and to think you've never played the scene!" Her pensiveness turned sterner. She looked at him with reproving eyes. "You took it out of a part!" she said. "Heaven help us, of what are we made? That shot I fired--that last shot--I took that out of a part, too! 'A Princess Imprisoned,' the end of the third act. And you with your 'Merchant of Venice' and your casket scene! It's true what they say of us--we're stuffed with sawdust!" "We'd be fools not to use it, then," Denny comfortably retorted. "Though you might certainly have chosen a better play." "No, you don't understand me. It's too bad, it's wrong--all wrong! It cheapens life. It dulls the value of what we feel. To think of written things at such a moment and throw oneself on them--it's like an insincerity of the heart. It's like acting a lie. And with all my faults, that one fault I never had," Christina said. "I was never a liar!" And she turned on them the ineffable starry candor of her wide, cool eyes. A smile traversed the board. Christina looked puzzled. "Never mind, old girl," Wheeler came to her assistance. "Some lies are made in heaven. How about your pretending, at the inquest, not to know who Nancy was?" "Ah, that card of Nancy's! There, surely, was a dreadful moment! It was a shock. I didn't know what to say. Why, it was like seeing that horrible story fastened round her neck--it was like seeing Will pointed out! Oh, and I'd tried to keep away even the thought of them!" "I don't wonder that knocked you out all right. But, Miss Christina," pondered Deutch, "before that--a thing starts the trouble for you at that inquest always gives me a puzzle. Miss Christina, why did you holler when you saw the scarf? That wasn't a surprise, anyhow. You knew he had it!" "Yes," said Christina, "but it was _such_ a thrilling point! I'd worked so much further up into an accused murderess than I'd ever gone before, and I did so long to know how it would feel--" An aghast laugh silenced her. It rang about the room, it swept with gay and topsy-turvy cleansing through every heart and blew the cobwebs far away. The air was cleared for good and all. No more shudders skulked in emotional underbrush. Christina Hope had quite too positively reappeared. "Christina, you she-devil!" Denny cried. But he bent his black head with the words and kissed her hand. There were tears that were like worship in the teasing, jeering smile that lit his eyes. Christina caught his hand and stood up, flushing. Her eyes traveled round the table and came back to Herrick's face. He had never seen her thus bathed in rosy color before she sobered again to that meek gravity, like a good child's. "Very well, then, very well--there I am! Well, take me as I am! I will--myself! I will say, let's get down to it, then: the dearest or most terrible experience I ever had is none too terrible or too dear for Bryce's play! Is yours, Will? Is your own, Bryce? Ah, and then, we zealous ones, when we want to know the hardest, hardest, passive part, the loneliest suffering, the simplest courage, the deepest depths, we needn't experiment, we can humbly inquire--we can ask Nancy Cornish!" THE END 
30612	----	{Transcriber's note: The author's spelling and hyphenation are inconsistent, and have not been changed except in the case of obvious typographical errors, which are listed at the end of this e-text. Spellings and accents in foreign languages are particularly eccentric.} RECORDS OF LATER LIFE BY FRANCES ANN KEMBLE NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1882. COPYRIGHT, 1882, BY HENRY HOLT & CO. RECORDS OF LATER LIFE. PHILADELPHIA, October 26th, 1834. DEAREST MRS. JAMESON, However stoutly your incredulity may have held out hitherto against the various "authentic" reports of my marriage, I beg you will, upon receipt of this, immediately believe that I was married on the 7th of June last, and have now been a wife nearly five mortal months. You know that in leaving the stage I left nothing that I regretted; but the utter separation from my family consequent upon settling in this country, is a serious source of pain to me.... With regard to what you say, about the first year of one's marriage not being as happy as the second, I know not how that may be. I had pictured to myself no fairyland of enchantments within the mysterious precincts of matrimony; I expected from it rest, quiet, leisure to study, to think, and to work, and legitimate channels for the affections of my nature.... In the closest and dearest friendship, shades of character, and the precise depth and power of the various qualities of mind and heart, never approximate to such a degree, as to preclude all possibility of occasional misunderstandings. "Not e'en the nearest heart, and most our own, Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh." It is impossible that it should be otherwise: for no two human beings were ever fashioned absolutely alike, even in their gross outward bodily form and lineaments, and how should the fine and infinite spirit admit of such similarity with another? But the broad and firm principles upon which all honorable and enduring sympathy is founded, the love of truth, the reverence for right, the abhorrence of all that is base and unworthy, admit of no difference or misunderstanding; and where these exist in the relations of two people united for life, it seems to me that love and happiness, as perfect as this imperfect existence affords, may be realized.... Of course, kindred, if not absolutely similar, minds, do exist; but they do not often meet, I think, and hardly ever unite. Indeed, though the enjoyment of intercourse with those who resemble us may be very great, I suppose the influence of those who differ from us is more wholesome; for in mere _unison_ of thought and feeling there could be no exercise for forbearance, toleration, self-examination by comparison with another nature, or the sifting of one's own opinions and feelings, and testing their accuracy and value, by contact and contrast with opposite feelings and opinions. A fellowship of mere accord, approaching to identity in the nature of its members, would lose much of the uses of human intercourse and its worth in the discipline of life, and, moreover, render the separation of death intolerable. But I am writing you a disquisition, and no one needs it less.... I did read your praise of me, and thank you for it; it is such praise as I wish I deserved, and the sense of the affection which dictated it, in some measure, diminished my painful consciousness of demerit. But I thank you for so pleasantly making me feel the excellence of moral worth, and though the picture you held up to me as mine made me blush for the poor original, yet I may strive to become more like your likeness of me, and so turn your praise to profit. Those who love me will read it perhaps with more satisfaction than my conscience allows me to find in it, and for the pleasure which they must derive from such commendation of me I thank you with all my heart. What can I tell you of myself? My life, and all its occupations, are of a sober neutral tint. I am busy preparing my Journal for the press. I read but little, and that of old-fashioned kinds. I have never read much, and am disgracefully ignorant: I am looking forward with delight to hours of quiet study, and the mental hoards in store for me. I am busy preparing to leave town; I am at present, and have been ever since my marriage, staying in the house of my brother-in-law, and feel not a little anxious to be in a home of my own. But painters, and carpenters, and upholsterers are dirty divinities of a lower order, not to be moved, or hastened, by human invocations (or even imprecations), and we must e'en bide their time. I please myself much in the fancying of furniture, and fitting up of the house; and I look forward to a garden, green-house, and dairy, among my future interests, to each of which I intend to addict myself zealously. My pets are a horse, a bird, and a black squirrel, and I do not see exactly what more a reasonable woman could desire. Human companionship, indeed, at present, I have not much of; but as like will to like, I do not despair of attracting towards me, by-and-by, some of my own kind, with whom I may enjoy pleasant intercourse; but you can form no idea--none--none--of the intellectual dearth and drought in which I am existing at present. I care nothing for politics here, ... though I wish this great Republic well. But what are the rulers and guides of the people doing in England? I see the abolition of the Peerage has been suggested, but, I presume, as a bad joke.... If I were a man in England, I should like to devote my life to the cause of national progress, carried on through party politics and public legislation; and if I was not a Christian, I think, every now and then, I should like to shoot Brougham.... You speak of coming to this country: but I do not think you would like it; though you are much respected, admired, and loved here. I have not met Miss Martineau yet, but I am afraid she is not likely to like me much. I admire her genius greatly, but have an inveterate tendency to worship at all the crumbling shrines, which she and her employers seem intent upon pulling down; and I think I should be an object of much superior contempt to that enlightened and clever female Radical and Utilitarian. I was introduced to Mrs. Austin some years ago, and she impressed me more, in many ways, than any of the remarkable women I have known. Her husband's constant ill-health kept her in a state of comparative seclusion, and deprived London society of a person of uncommon original mental power and acquired knowledge; in most respects I thought her superior to the most brilliant female members of the society of my day, of which her daughter, Lucy Gordon, was a distinguished ornament. Once too, years ago, I passed an evening with Lady Byron, and fell in love with her for quoting the axiom which she does apply, though she did not invent it--"To treat men as if they were better than they are, is the surest way to _make_ them better than they are:"--and whenever I think of her I remember that. I congratulate you on your acquaintance with Madame von Goethe: to know any one who had lived intimately with the greatest genius of this age, and one of the greatest the world has produced, seems to me an immense privilege. Your letter is dated July--how many things are done that you then meant to do? I am just now seeing a great deal of Edward Trelawney; he traveled with us last summer when we went to Niagara, and professing a great regard for me, told me, upon reading your "notice" of me, that he felt much inclined to write to you and solicit your acquaintance.... Good-bye, and God bless you; write to me when the spirit prompts you, and believe me always Yours very truly, F. A. B. [My long experience of life in America presents the ideas and expectations with which I first entered upon it in an aspect at once ludicrous and melancholy to me now. With all an Englishwoman's notions of country interests, duties, and occupations; the village, the school, the poor, one's relations with the people employed on one's place, and one's own especial hobbies of garden, dairy, etc., had all been contemplated by me from a point of view which, taken from rural life in my own country, had not the slightest resemblance to anything in any American existence. Butler Place--or as I then called it, "The Farm," preferring that homely, and far more appropriate, though less distinctive appellation, to the rather pretentious title, which neither the extent of the property nor size and style of the house warranted--was not then our own, and we inhabited it by the kind allowance of an old relation to whom it belonged, in consequence of my decided preference for a country to a town residence. It was in no respect superior to a second-rate farm-house in England, as Mr. Henry Berkeley told a Philadelphia friend of ours, who considered it a model country mansion and rural residence and asked him how it compared with the generality of "country places" in England. It was amply sufficient, however, for my desires: but not being mine, all my busy visions of gardening and green-house improvement, etc., had to be indefinitely postponed. Subsequently, I took great interest and pleasure in endeavoring to improve and beautify the ground round the house; I made flower-beds and laid out gravel-walks, and left an abiding mark of my sojourn there in a double row of two hundred trees, planted along the side of the place, bordered by the high-road; many of which, from my and my assistants' combined ignorance, died, or came to no good growth. But those that survived our unskillful operations still form a screen of shade to the grounds, and protect them in some measure from the dust and glare of the highway. Cultivating my garden was not possible. My first attempt at cultivating my neighbors' good-will was a ludicrous and lamentable failure. I offered to teach the little children of my gardener and farmer, and as many of the village children as liked to join them, to read and write; but found my benevolent proposal excited nothing but a sort of contemptuous amazement. There was the village school, where they received instruction for which they were obliged and willing to pay, to which they were accustomed to go, which answered all their purposes, fulfilled all their desires, and where the small students made their exits and their entrances without bob or bow, pulling of forelock, or any other superstitious observance of civilized courtesy: my gratuitous education was sniffed at alike by parents and progeny, and of course the whole idea upon which I had proffered it was mistaken and misplaced, and may have appeared to them to imply an impertinent undervaluing of a system with which they were perfectly satisfied; of the conditions of which, however, I was entirely ignorant then. These people and their children wanted nothing that I could give them. The "ladies" liked the make of my gowns, and would have borrowed them for patterns with pleasure, and this was all they desired or required from me. On the first 4th of July I spent there, being alone at the place, I organized (British fashion) a feast and rejoicing, such as I thought should mark the birthday of American Independence, and the expulsion of the tyrannical English from the land. I had a table set under the trees, and a dinner spread for thirty-two guests, to which number the people on the two farms, with children and servants, amounted. Beer and wine were liberally provided, and fireworks, for due honoring of the evening; and though I did not take "the head of the table" (which would have been a usurpation), or make speeches on the "expulsion of the British," I did my best to give my visitors "a good time"; but succeeded only in imposing upon them a dinner and afternoon of uncomfortable constraint, from which the juniors of the party alone seemed happily free. Neither the wine nor beer were touched, and I found they were rather objects of moral reprobation than of material comfort to my Quaker farmer and his family, who were all absolute temperance people; he, indeed, was sorely disinclined to join at all in the "festive occasion," objecting to me repeatedly that it was a "shame and a pity to waste such a fine day for work in doing nothing"; and so, with rather a doleful conviction that my hospitality was as little acceptable to my neighbors as my teaching, I bade my guests farewell, and never repeated the experiment of a 4th of July Celebration dinner at Butler Place. Of all my blunders, however, that which I made with regard to the dairy was the most ludicrous. Understanding nothing at all of the entirely independent position of our "farmer"--to whom, in fact, the dairy was rented, as well as the meadows that pastured the cattle--and rather dissatisfied at not being able to obtain a daily fresh supply of butter for our home consumption, I went down to the farm-house, and had an interview with the dairymaid; to whom I explained my desire for a small supply of fresh butter daily for our breakfast table. But words are faint to express her amazement at the proposition; the butter was churned regularly in large quantities twice a week, and the necessary provision for our household being set aside and charged to us, the remainder was sent off to market with the rest of the farm produce, and there disposed of to the public in general. Philadelphia butter had then a high reputation through all the sea-board States, where it was held superior to that of all other markets; it was sold in New York and Baltimore, and sent as far as Boston as a welcome present, and undoubtedly not churned oftener than twice a week. Fresh butter every morning! who ever heard the like? Twice-a-week butter not good enough for anybody! who ever dreamt of such vagaries? The young woman was quiet and Quakerly sober, in spite of her unbounded astonishment at such a demand; but when, having exhausted my prettiest vocabulary of requests and persuasions, and, as I thought, not quite without effect, I turned to leave her, she followed me to the door with this parting address: "Well--anyhow--don't thee fill theeself up with the notion that I'm going to churn butter for thee more than twice a week." She probably thought me mad, and I was too ignorant to know that to "bring" a small quantity of butter in the enormous churn she used was a simple impossibility: nor, I imagine, was she aware that any machine of lesser dimensions was ever used for the purpose. I got myself a tiny table-churn, and for a little while made a small quantity of fresh butter myself for our daily breakfast supply; but soon weaned of it, and thought it not worth while--nobody cared for it but myself, and I accepted my provision of market butter twice a week, with no more ado about the matter, together with the conclusion that the dairy at Butler Place would decidedly not be one of its mistress's hobbies. Of any charitable interest, or humane occupation, to be derived from the poverty of my village neighbors, I very soon found my expectation equally vain. Our village had no _poor_--none in the deplorable English acceptation of that word; none in the too often degraded and degrading conditions it implies. People poorer than others, comparatively poor people, it undoubtedly had--hard workers, toiling for their daily bread; but none who could not get well-paid work or find sufficient bread; and the abject element of ignorant, helpless, hopeless pauperism, looking for its existence to charity, and substituting alms-taking for independent labor, was unknown there. As for "visiting" among them, as technically understood and practiced by Englishwomen among their poorer neighbors, such a civility would have struck mine as simply incomprehensible; and though their curiosity might perhaps have been gratified by making acquaintance with my various (to them) strange peculiarities, I doubt even the amusement they might have derived from them being accepted as any equivalent for what would have seemed the strangest of them all--my visit. A similar blessed exemption from the curse of pauperism existed in the New England village of Lenox, where I owned a small property, and passed part of many years. Being asked by my friends there to give a public reading, it became a question to what purpose the proceeds of the entertainment could best be applied. I suggested "the poor of the village," but, "We have no poor," was the reply, and the sum produced by the reading was added to a fund which established an excellent public library; for though Lenox had no paupers, it had numerous intelligent readers among its population. I have spoken of the semi-disapprobation with which my Quaker farmer declined the wine and beer offered him at my 4th of July festival. Some years after, when I found the men employed in mowing a meadow of mine at Lenox with no refreshment but "water from the well," I sent in much distress a considerable distance for a barrel of beer, which seemed to me an indispensable adjunct to such labor under the fervid heat of that summer sky; and was most seriously expostulated with by my admirable friend, Mr. Charles Sedgwick, as introducing among the laborers of Lenox a mischievous need and deleterious habit, till then utterly unknown there, and setting a pernicious example to both employers and employed throughout the whole neighborhood. In short, my poor barrel of beer was an offense to the manners and morals of the community I lived in, and my meadow was mowed upon cold "water from the well"; of which indeed the water was so delicious, that I often longed for it as King David did for that which, after all, he would not drink, because his mighty men had risked their lives in procuring it for him.[1] [1] In writing thus, I do not mean to imply that the abuse of intoxicating liquors, or the vice of drunkenness were then unknown in America. The national habits of the present day would suggest that such a change (albeit in the space of fifty years) would surpass the rapidity of movement of even that most rapidly changing nation. But the use of either beer or wine at the tables of the Philadelphians, when I first lived among them, was quite exceptional. There was a small knot of old-fashioned gentlemen (very like old-fashioned Englishmen they were), by whom good wine was known and appreciated; especially certain exquisite Madeira, of the Bingham and Butler names, the like of which it was believed the world could not produce; but this was Olympian nectar, for the gods alone; and the usual custom of the best society, at the early three-o'clock dinner, was water-drinking. Nor had the immense increase of the German population then flooded Philadelphia with perennial streams from innumerable "lager beer" cellars and saloons: the universal rule, at the time when these letters were written, was absolute temperance; the exception to it, a rare occasional instance of absolute intemperance. Very many fewer than fifty years ago, a celebrated professional English cricketer consulted, in deep dudgeon, a medical gentleman upon certain internal symptoms, which he attributed entirely to the "damned beastly cold water" which had been the sole refreshment in the Philadelphia cricket-field, and which had certainly heated his temper to a pitch of exasperation which made it difficult for the medical authority appealed to, to keep his countenance during the consultation. I need not say that, under the above state of things, no provision was made for what I should call domestic or household drunkenness in American families. Beer, or beer money, was not found necessary to sustain the strength of footmen driving about town on a coach-box for an hour or two of an afternoon, or valets laying out their masters' boots and cravats for dinner, or ladies'-maids pinning caps on their mistresses' heads, or even young housemaids condemned to the exhausting labor of making beds and dusting furniture. The deplorable practice of _swilling_ adulterated malt liquor two or three times a day, begun in early boy and girlhood among English servants, had not in America, as I am convinced it has with us, laid the foundation for later habits of drinking in a whole class of the community, among whom a pernicious inherited necessity for the indulgence is one of its consequences; while another, and more lamentable one, is the wide-spread immorality, to remedy (and if possible prevent) which is the object of the institution of the Girls' Friendly Society, and similar benevolent associations--none of which I am persuaded will effectually fulfill their object, until the vicious propensity to drink ceases to be fostered in the kitchens and servants' halls of our most respectable people. To English people, the character and quality of my "mowers" would seem astonishing enough; at the head of them was the son of a much respected New England judge, himself the owner of a beautiful farm adjoining my small estate, which he cultivated with his own hands--a most amiable, intelligent, and refined man, a gentleman in the deepest sense of the word, my very kind neighbor and friend, whose handsome countenance certainly expressed unbounded astonishment at my malt liquor theory applied to his labor and that of his assistants.] PHILADELPHIA, November 27th, 1837. MY DEAR H----, If in about a month's time you should grumble and fall out with me for not writing, you will certainly be in some degree justified; for I think it must be near upon three weeks since I wrote to you, which is a sin and a shame. To say that I have not had time to write is nonsense, for in three weeks there are too many days, hours, and minutes, for me to fancy that I _really_ had not had sufficient leisure, yet it has almost seemed as if I had not. I have been constantly driving out to the farm, to watch the progress of the painting, whitewashing, etc., etc.: in town I have been engaging servants, ordering china, glass, and furniture, choosing carpets, curtains, and house linen, and devoutly studying all the time Dr. Kitchener's "Housekeeper's Manual and Cook's Oracle." You see, I have been careful and troubled about many things, and through them all you have been several thorns in both my sides; for I thought of you perpetually, and knew I ought to write to you, and wanted and wished to do so--and didn't; for which pray forgive me. I want to tell you two circumstances about servants, illustrative of the mind and manners of that class of persons in this country. A young woman engaged herself to me, as lady's-maid, immediately before my marriage; she had been a seamstress, and her health had been much injured by constantly stooping at her sedentary employment. I took her into my service at a salary of £25 a year. She had little to do; I took care that every day she should be out walking for at least an hour; she had two holidays a week, all my discarded wardrobe, and every kindness and attention of every sort that I could bestow upon her, for she was very gentle and pleasant to me, and I liked her very much. A short time ago, she gave me warning; the first reason she assigned for doing so was that she didn't think she should like living in the country, but finally it resolved itself into this--that she could not bear _being a servant_. She told me that she had no intention of seeking any other situation, for that she knew very well that after mine she could find none that she would like, but she said the sense of entire independence was necessary to her happiness, and she could not exist any longer in a state of "_servitude_." She told me she was going to resume her former life, or rather, as I should say, her former process of dying, for it was literally that; she took her wages, and left me. She was very pretty and refined, and rejoiced in the singular Christian name of Unity.[2] [2] A lady's-maid was quite an unusual member of a household in America, at this time; I remember no lady in Philadelphia who then had such an attendant: it is not impossible that the singularity of her service, and therefore apparently anomalous character of her position, may have helped to disgust my maid Unity with her situation. Probably the influence of Quaker modes of thought, and feeling, and habits of life (even among such of the community as were not "friends"--technically so called), had produced the peculiarities which characterized the Philadelphian society of that day, and made people among whom I lived strange to me--as I to them. The other instance of domestic manners in these parts was furnished me by a woman whom I engaged as cook; terms agreed upon, everything settled: two days after, she sent me word that she had "_changed her mind_,"--that's all--isn't it pleasant?... My dear H----, you half fly into a rage with me all across the Atlantic, because I tell you that I hope ere long to see you; really that was not quite the return I expected for what I thought would be agreeable news to you; however, hear further.... If I am alive next summer, I hope to spend three months in England: one with my own family and Emily Fitzhugh: one in Scotland; and one with you, if you and Mrs. Taylor _please_.... I have been obliged to give up riding, for some time ago my horse fell with me, and though I was not at all hurt, I was badly frightened; so I trot about on my feet, and drive to and from town and the farm in a little four-wheeled machine called here a wagon. The other day, for the first time, I explored my small future domain, which is bounded, on the right, by the high-road; on the left, by a not unromantic little mill-stream, with bits of rock, and cedar-bushes, and dams, and, I am sorry to say, a very picturesque, half-tumbled-down factory; on the north, by fields and orchards of our neighbors, and another road; and on the south, by a pretty, deep, shady lane, running from the high-road to the above-mentioned factory.... I think the extent of our _estate_ is about three hundred acres. A small portion of it, perhaps some seventy acres, lies on the other side of the high-road. Except a kitchen-garden, there is none that deserves the name: no flower-beds, no shrubberies, no gravel-walks. A large field, now planted with maize, or Indian corn, is on one side of an avenue of maple-trees that leads to the house; on the other is an apple-orchard. There is nothing that can call itself a lawn, though coarse grass grows all round the house. There are four pretty pasture meadows, and a very pretty piece of woodland, which, coasting the stream and mill-dam, will, I foresee, become a favorite haunt of mine. There is a farm-yard, a cider-press, a pond, a dairy, and out-houses, and adjuncts innumerable. I have succeeded, after difficulties and disasters manifold, in engaging an apparently tolerably decent staff of servants; the house is freshly painted and clean, the furniture being finished with all expedition, the carpets ready to lay down; next week I hope to send our household out, and the week after I sincerely hope we shall transfer ourselves thither, and I shall be in a home of my own. Miss Martineau is just now in Philadelphia: I have seen and conversed with her, and I think, were her stay long enough to admit of so agreeable a conclusion, we might become good friends. It is not presumptuous for me to say that, dear H----, because, you know, a very close degree of friendship may exist where there is great disparity of intellect. Her deafness is a serious bar to her enjoyment of society, and some drawback to the pleasure of conversing with her, for, as a man observed to me last night, "One feels so like a fool, saying, 'How do you do?' through a speaking-trumpet in the middle of a drawing-room;" and unshoutable commonplaces form the staple of all drawing-room conversation. They are giving literary parties to her, and balls to one of their own townswomen who has just returned from abroad, which makes Philadelphia rather gayer than usual; and I have had so long a fast from dissipation that I find myself quite excited at the idea of going to a dance again. I toil on, copying my Journal, and one volume of it is already printed; but now that the object of its publication is gone, I feel rather disgusted at the idea of publishing it at all. You know what my Journal always was, and that no word of it was ever written with the fear of the printer's devil before my eyes, and now that I have become careless as to its money value, it seems to me a mere mass of trivial egotism.... When I sold it, it was an excellent, good book, for I thought it would help to make a small independence for my dear Dall; now she is gone, and it is mere trash, but I have sold it.... My country life will, I hope, be one of study, and I pray and believe, of quiet happiness. I drove out to the farm yesterday, and walked nearly four miles, through meadows and lanes and by-roads, and over plowed fields, and found mill-streams and bits of picturesque rock, and pretty paths to be explored at further length on horseback hereafter.... I have one very great pleasure almost in contemplation; I think it probable that my friend, Miss Sedgwick, will visit Philadelphia this winter. If she does, I am sure she will remain a short time here, which will be a great delight to me.... I wish to have no more _acquaintance_--that is a pure waste of time: I do not wish to know any one whom, if opportunity served, I should not desire to make my friend, as well as my visitor. I have begun learning book-keeping by double entry, and find it unspeakably tiresome; indeed, nothing in it engages my attention but various hypothetical cases of Loss of Ships and Cargoes (as per invoice, so and so, and so and so); Bankruptcies, with so much in the pound for creditors; Dissolutions of partnership, with estimates of joint property, or calculations of profit and loss; Insurances and fire-catastrophes; Divisions of capital invested in failing securities, or unlucky speculations; instead of attending to all which in their purely business aspect, my imagination flies off to the dramatic, passionate, human element involved in such accidents, and I think of all manner of plays and novels, instead of "Cash Accounts," to be extracted therefrom.... Good-bye, dearest H----. Ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. BRANCHTOWN, May 1st, 1835. DEAREST EMILY, Reflecting upon the loss I have sustained in the death of my dear Dall, you exclaim, "How difficult it is to realize that life has become eternity, hope is become certainty! How strange, how impossible, it seems to conceive a state of existence without expectation, and where all is fulfillment!" I have marked under the word "_impossible_," because such a belief is literally impossible to my mind; the sense of activity, of desire for, and aiming at, and striving after something better than what I am, is so essential a portion of the idea of happiness to me that I absolutely can conceive of no happiness but in the attempt at, and consciousness of, progress. The state where that hope did not exist, and where the spiritual energies were not presented with deeper and higher objects of attainment, would be no state of enjoyment to me. I cannot imagine heaven without inexhaustible means of increasing knowledge and excellence.... Perhaps in that state, dear Emily, we shall be able to find out how a mummy of the days of Memnon should have preserved in its dead grasp a living germ for 3000 years.... [This last sentence referred to a striking fact, which Miss Fitz Hugh's uncle, Mr. William Hamilton, told us, of a bulb found in the sarcophagus of a mummy, which was planted, and actually began to germinate and grow.] BRANCHTOWN, May 27th, 1835. MY DEAREST H----, ... It is curious that in a comparatively inactive state of life, the sense of the infinite business _of living_ has become far more vivid to me than it ever was before; existence seems so abounding in duties, in objects of interest and energy, in means of excellence and pleasure--happiness, I ought rather to say,--the immense and important happiness of constant endeavor after improvement.... Dear H----, my letter was interrupted here yesterday by a visitor. I will join my thread, and go on with a few words which I have this moment read in Hayward's Appendix to Goethe's "Faust." When Goethe had to bear the death of his only son, he wrote to Zelter thus: "Here then can _the mighty conception of duty_ alone hold us erect--I have no other care than to keep myself in equipoise. The body _must_, the spirit _will_, and he who sees a necessary path prescribed to his will has no need to ponder much." The first part of this is noble; but I am not going to do what I used to quarrel so much with you for doing--fill my letters with quotations, or even make disquisitions of them; at any rate, till I have answered your last. I am extremely vexed at all the trouble you and Emily have taken about my picture: for the artist himself (Mr. Sully, of Philadelphia) is not satisfied with it, and I am sure would be rather sorry than glad that it were exhibited. That artist is a charming person; and I must tell you how he proceeded about that picture. When your letter came, acknowledging the receipt of it, he asked how you were satisfied: I told him the truth, and what you had written on the subject of the likeness. He did not appear stupidly annoyed, but sorry for your disappointment, and told me that he had been from the first dissatisfied with it as a likeness, himself. He pressed upon my acceptance for you a little melancholy head of me, an admirable and not too much flattered likeness; but as he had given that to his wife, of whom I am very fond, of course I would not deprive her of it; and there the matter rested. But when, some time after, some pictures he had painted for us were paid for, he steadfastly refused the price agreed upon for yours, because it had not satisfied him _himself_. He said that had you been even less pleased with it, he should not _therefore_ have refused the money; but his own conscience, he added, bore witness to the truth of your objections, and when that was the case, he invariably acted in the same way, and declined to receive payment for what he didn't consider worth it. As he is our friend, we could not press the money upon him; but we have got him to undertake a portrait of Dr. Mease, and I have added sundry grains more to my regard for him. As to the likeness, had you seen me about three months after my marriage, you would have thought better of it. [The portrait in question, painted for my friend, and now, I believe, still at Ardgillan Castle, was one of six that my friend, Mr. Sully, painted of me at various times, the best likeness of them all being one that he took of me in the part of Beatrice, for which I did not sit.] You talk of "nailing me down," to send me to the Academy, and the expression brought a sudden shuddering recollection to my mind of the dismal night I passed in Boston _packing up our stage clothes_ in dear Dall's bedroom _while she was lying in her coffin_. I know not why your words recalled that miserable circumstance to me, and all the mingled feelings that accompanied such an occupation in such company.... You ask me if I do not love the country as I used to do. Indeed I do; for, like all best good things, it seems the lovelier for near and intimate acquaintance. Yet the country here, and this place in particular, is not to me what it might be, and will be yet. This place is not ours, and during the life of an old Miss B. will not belong to us: this, of course, keeps my spirit of improvement in check, and indeed, even if it were made over to us, with signing and sealing and all due legal ceremonies, I should still feel some delicacy in making wholesale alterations in a place which an elderly person, to whom it has belonged, remembers such as it is for many years. The absolute absence of all taste in matters of ornamental cultivation is lamentably evident in the country dwellings of rich and poor alike, as far as I have yet seen in this neighborhood. No natural beauty seems to be perceived and taken advantage of, no defect hidden or adorned; proximity to the road, for obvious purposes of mere convenience, seems to have been the one idea in the selection of building sites; and straight, ungraveled paths, straight rows of trees, straight strips of coarse grass, straight box borders, dividing straight narrow flower-beds, the prevailing idea of a garden; together with a deplorable dearth of flowers, shrubberies, ornamental trees, and everything that really deserves the name. Good-bye, and God bless you. Ever, as ever, yours, F. A. B. [The country between the Wissihiccon and Pennipack--two small picturesque streams flowing, the one into the Schuylkill, the other into the Delaware--is a prosperous farming region, with a pleasingly varied, undulating surface, the arable land diversified with stretches of pretty wild woodland, watered by numerous small water-courses, and divided by the main highroad, once the chief channel of communication between New York and Philadelphia. Six miles from the latter city, at a village called Branchtown, and only a few yards from the road, stood my home; and it would be difficult for those who do not remember "the old York road," as it was called, and the country between that and Germantown, in the days when these letters were written, to imagine the change which nearly fifty years have produced in the whole region. No one who now sees the pretty populous villadom which has grown up in every direction round the home of my early married years--the neat cottages and cheerful country houses, the trim lawns and bright flower-gardens, the whole well laid out, tastefully cultivated, and carefully tended suburban district, with its attractive dwellings, could easily conceive the sort of abomination of desolation which its aspect formerly presented to eyes accustomed to the finish and perfection of rural English landscape. Between five and six miles of hideous and execrable turnpike road, without shade, and aridly detestable in the glare, heat, and dust of summer, and almost dangerously impassable in winter, made driving into Philadelphia an undertaking that neither love, friendship, nor pleasure--nothing but inexorable business or duty--reconciled one to. The cross roads in every direction were a mere succession of heavy, dusty, sandy pitfalls, or muddy quagmires, where, on foot or on horseback, rapid progress was equally impossible. The whole region, from the very outskirts of the city to the beautiful crest of Chestnut Hill, overlooking its wide expanse of smiling foreground and purple distant horizon, was then, with its mean-looking scattered farm-houses and huge ungainly barns (whatever may have been its agricultural merits), uninteresting and uninviting in all the human elements of the landscape, dreary in summer and dismal in winter, and absolutely void of the civilized cheerful charm that now characterizes it. _Per contra_, it then was _country_, and now is suburb: there were woods and lanes where now there are stations and railroads, and the solitude of rural walks and rides instead of the "continuation of the city" which has now cut up and laid waste the old Stenton estate, and threatens the fields of Butler Place and the lovely and beloved woods of Champlost, and will presently convert that whole neighborhood into a mere appendage of Philadelphia, wildly driven over by city rowdies with fast-trotting teams or mad, gigantic daddy-long-legs-looking sulkies, and perambulated by tramps pretending poverty and practicing theft.] BRANCHTOWN, 1835. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, I have not written to you since I received a most interesting and delightful letter of yours from Saxe-Weimar, containing an account of your stay in Goethe's house. My answering you at all is a movement of gratitude for your kindness in remembering me in the midst of such surroundings, and nothing but my faith in your desire to hear something of me would induce me to send into the world of romantic and poetic associations you are now inhabiting, any dispatch from this most prosaic and commonplace world of my adoption. I think, however, it will please you to hear that I am well and happy, and that my whole state of life and being has assumed a placid, tranquil, serene, and even course, which, after the violent excitements of my last few years, is both agreeable and wholesome. I should think, ever since my coming out on the stage, I must have lived pretty much at the rate of three years in every one--I mean in point of physical exertion and exhaustion. The season of my repose is, however, arrived, and it seems almost difficult to imagine that, after beginning life in such a tumult of action and excitement, the remainder of my years is lying stretched before me, like a level, peaceful landscape, through which I shall saunter leisurely towards my grave. This is the pleasant probable future: God only knows what changes and chances may sweep across the smiling prospect, but at present, according to the calculations of mere human foresight, none are likely to arise. As I write these words, I _do_ bethink me of one quarter from which our present prosperous and peaceful existence might receive a shock--the South. The family into which I have married are large slaveholders; our present and future fortune depend greatly upon extensive plantations in Georgia. But the experience of every day, besides our faith in the great justice of God, forbids dependence on the duration of the mighty abuse by which one race of men is held in abject physical and mental slavery by another. As for me, though the toilsome earning of my daily bread were to be my lot again to-morrow, I should rejoice with unspeakable thankfulness that we had not to answer for what I consider so grievous a sin against humanity. I believe many years will not pass before this cry ceases to go up from earth to heaven. The power of opinion is working silently and strongly in the hearts of men; the majority of people in the North of this country are opposed to the theory of slavery, though they tolerate its practice in the South: and though the natural selfishness with which men cling to their interests is only at present increasing the vigilance of the planters in guarding their property and securing their prey, it is a property which is crumbling under their feet, and a prey which is escaping from their grasp; and perhaps, before many years are gone by, the black population of the South will be free, and we comparatively poor people--Amen! with all my heart.... I had hoped to revisit England before the winter, ... but this cannot be, and I shall certainly not see England this year, if ever again.... I think women in England are gradually being done justice to, and many sources of goodness, usefulness, and happiness, that have hitherto been sealed, are opened to them now, by a truer and more generous public feeling, and more enlightened views of education. I saw a good deal of Harriet Martineau, and liked her very much indeed, in spite of her radicalism. She is gone to the South, where I think she cannot fail to do some good, if only in giving another impulse to the stone that already topples on the brink--I mean in that miserable matter of slavery. Yours very truly, F. A. B. [No more striking instance can be given of the rapidity of movement, if not of progress, of American public opinion, than the so-called "Woman's Rights" question. When these letters were written, scarcely a whisper had made itself heard upon this and its relative subjects: the "Female Suffrage" was neither demanded nor desired; Margaret Fuller had not made public her views upon the condition of "Woman in the Nineteenth Century"; the different legislatures of the different States had not found it expedient to enact statutes securing to married women the independent use of their own property, and women's legal disabilities were, in every respect, much the same in the United States as in the mother country. Now, however, so great and rapid has been the change of public opinion in this direction in America, that in some of the States married women may not only possess and inherit property over which their husbands have no control, but their personal earnings have been so secured to them that neither their husbands nor their husbands' creditors can touch them; while at the same time, strange to say, their husbands are still liable for their support, and answerable for any debts they may contract, and men must pay these independent ladies' milliners' bills, if all these additional _rights_ have not brought with them some additional sense of justice, honesty, and old-fashioned right and wrong. This amazing consideration for the property claims of women is not, however, without its possible advantages for the magnanimous sex bestowing it; and unprincipled speculators, gamblers, in pursuits calling themselves business, but in reality mere games of chance, may now secure themselves from the ruin they deserve, and have incurred, by settling upon their wives large sums of money, or estates, which, by virtue of the women's independent legal tenure of property, effectually enable their husbands to baffle the claims of their creditors. Every use has its abuse. The melancholy process of divorce, by which an insupportable yoke may be dissolved with the sanction of the law, is achieved in America with a facility and upon grounds inadmissible for that purpose in England. Pennsylvania has long followed the German practice in this particular, allowing divorce, in cases of non-cohabitation for a space of two years, to either party claiming it upon those grounds; in some of the Western States the ease with which divorces are obtained is untrammeled by any condition but that of a sufficient term of residence, often a very brief one, within the State jurisdiction. Women lecture upon all imaginable subjects, and are listened to, whether treating of the right of their sex to the franchise, or the more unapproachable theme of its degraded misery in the public prostitution legally practiced in all the cities of this great New World, or the frantic vagaries of their theory of so-called Free Love. They are professors in colleges, practicing physicians; not yet, I believe, ordained clergywomen (the Quakers admit the female right to preach without the ceremony of laying on of hands), or admitted members of the bar; but it is difficult to imagine society existing at all under more absolute conditions of freedom for its female members than the women of the United States now enjoy. It is a pity that the use sometimes made of so many privileges forms a powerful argument to reasonable people in other countries against their possession.[3]] [3] I have learned since writing the above that in some of the Western States and cities--among others, I believe, Chicago--women are now practicing lawyers. A "legal lady" made at one time, I know not how successfully, an attempt to become a received member of the profession in Washington. In this, as in all other matters, the several States exercise uncontrolled jurisdiction within their own borders, and the Western States are naturally inclined to favor by legislation all attempts of this description; they are essentially the "New World." In the Eastern States European traditions still influence opinion, and women are not yet admitted members of the New York bar. BRANCHTOWN, 1835. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, It is so very long since I have written to you, that I almost fear my handwriting and signature may be strange to your eyes and memory alike. As, however, silence can hardly be more than a _passive_ sin--a sin of omission, not commission--I hope they will not be unwelcome to you. I am desirous you should still preserve towards me some of your old kindliness of feeling, for I wish to borrow some of it for the person who will carry this letter over the Atlantic--a very interesting young friend of mine, who begged of me, as a great favor, a letter of introduction to you.... I think you will find that had she fallen in your way _unintroduced_, she would have recommended herself to your liking. [The lady in question was Miss Appleton, of Boston, afterwards Mrs. Robert Mackintosh, whose charming sister, cut off by too sad and premature a doom, was the wife of the poet Longfellow.] And now, what shall I tell you? After so long a silence, I suppose you think I ought to have plenty to say, yet I have not. What should a woman write about, whose sole occupations are eating, drinking, and sleeping; whose pleasures consist in nursing her baby, and playing with a brace of puppies; and her miseries in attempting to manage six republican servants--a task quite enough to make any "Quaker kick his mother," a grotesque illustration of demented desperation, which I have just learned, and which is peculiarly appropriate in these parts? Can I find it in my conscience, or even in the nib of my pen, to write you all across the great waters that my child has invented two teeth, or how many pounds of tea, sugar, flour, etc., etc., I distribute weekly to the above-mentioned household of unmanageables? To write, as to speak, one should have something to say, and I have literally nothing, except that I am well in mind, body, and estate, and hope you are so too. Our summer has been detestable: if America had the grace to have fairies (but they don't cross the Atlantic), I should think the little Yankee Oberon and Titania had been by the ears together: such wintry squalls! such torrents of rain! The autumn, however, has been fine, and we spent part of it in one of the most charming regions imaginable. A "Happy Valley" indeed!--the Valley of the Housatonic, locked in by walls of every shape and size, from grassy knolls to bold basaltic cliffs. A beautiful little river wanders singing from side to side in this secluded Paradise, and from every mountain cleft come running crystal springs to join it; it looks only fit for people to be baptized in (though I believe the water is used for cooking and washing purposes.) In one part of this romantic hill-region exists the strangest worship that ever the craving need of religious excitement suggested to the imagination of human beings. I do not know whether you have ever heard of a religious sect called the Shakers; I never did till I came into their neighborhood: and all that was told me before seeing them fell short of the extraordinary effect of the reality. Seven hundred men and women, whose profession of religion has for one of its principal objects the extinguishing of the human race and the end of the world, by devoting themselves and persuading others to celibacy and the strictest chastity. They live all together in one community, and own a village and a considerable tract of land in the beautiful hill country of Berkshire. They are perfectly moral and exemplary in their lives and conduct, wonderfully industrious, miraculously clean and neat, and incredibly shrewd, thrifty and money-making. Their dress is hideous, and their worship, to which they admit spectators, consists of a fearful species of dancing, in which the whole number of them engage, going round and round their vast hall or temple of prayer, shaking their hands like the paws of a dog sitting up to beg, and singing a deplorable psalm-tune in brisk jig time. The men without their coats, in their shirt-sleeves, with their lank hair hanging on their shoulders, and a sort of loose knee-breeches--knickerbockers--have a grotesque air of stage Swiss peasantry. The women without a single hair escaping from beneath their hideous caps, mounted upon very high-heeled shoes, and every one of them with a white handkerchief folded napkin-fashion and hanging over her arm. In summer they all dress in white, and what with their pale, immovable countenances, their ghost-like figures, and ghastly, mad spiritual dance, they looked like the nuns in "Robert the Devil," condemned, for their sins in the flesh, to post-mortem decency and asceticism, to look ugly, and to dance like ill-taught bears. The whole exhibition was at once so frightful and so ludicrous, that I very nearly went off into hysterics, when I first saw them. We shall be in London, I hope, in the beginning of May next year, when I trust you will be there also, when I will edify you with all my new experiences of life, in this "other world," and teach you how to dance like a Shaker. Be a good Christian, forgive me, and write to me again, and believe me, Yours truly, F. A. B. BRANCHTOWN, June 27th, 1835. MY DEAREST H----, ... Did I tell you that the other day our farmer's wife sent me word that she had seen me walking in the garden in a gown that she had liked very much, and wished I would let her have the pattern of it? This message surprised me a little, but, upon due reflection, I carried the gown down to her with an agreeable sense of my own graceful condescension. My farmer's wife gave me small thanks, and I am sure thought I had done just what I ought.... I have resumed my riding, and am beginning to feel once more like my unmarried self. I may have told you that I had some time ago a pretty thoroughbred mare, spirited and good tempered too; but she turned out such an inveterate stumbler that I have been obliged to give up riding her, as, of course, my neck is worth more to me even than my health. So, this morning I have been taking a most delectable eight miles' trot upon a huge, high, heavy carriage-horse, who all but shakes my soul out of my body, but who is steady upon his legs, and whom I shall therefore patronize till I can be more _genteelly_ mounted with safety. You bid me study Natural Philosophy ... and ask me what I read; but since my baby has made her entrance into the world, I neither read, write, nor cast up accounts, but am as idle, though not nearly as well dressed, as the lilies of the field; my reading, if ever I take to such an occupation again, is like, I fear, to be, as it always has been, rambling, desultory, and unprofitable.... Come, I will take as a sample of my studies, the books just now lying on my table, all of which I have been reading lately: Alfieri's Life, by himself, a curious and interesting work; Washington Irving's last book, "A Tour on the Prairies," rather an ordinary book, upon a not ordinary subject, but not without sufficiently interesting matter in it too; Dr. Combe's "Principles of Physiology"; and a volume of Marlowe's plays, containing "Dr. Faustus." I have just finished Hayward's Translation of Goethe's "Faust," and wanted to see the old English treatment of the subject. I have read Marlowe's play with more curiosity than pleasure. This is, after all, but a small sample of what I read; but if you remember the complexion of my studies when I was a girl at Heath Farm, and read Jeremy Taylor and Byron together, I can only say they are still apt to be of the same heterogeneous quality. But my brain is kept in a certain state of activity by them, and that, I suppose, is one of the desirable results of reading. As for writing anything, or things--good gracious! no, I should think not indeed! It is true, if you allude to the mechanical process of caligraphy, here is close to my elbow a big book, in which I enter all passages I meet with in my various readings tending to elucidate obscure parts of the Bible: I do not mean disputed points of theology, mysteries, or significations more or less mystical, but simply any notices whatever which I meet with relating to the customs of the Jews, their history, their language, the natural features of their country; and so bearing upon my reading of passages in the Old Testament. I read my Bible diligently every day, and every day wish more and more earnestly that I understood what I was reading; but Philip does not come my way, or draw near and join himself to me as I sit in my wagon. I mean this with regard to the Old Testament only, however. The life of Christ is that portion of the New alone vitally important to me, and that, thank God, is comparatively comprehensible. I have just finished writing a long and vehement treatise against negro slavery, which I wanted to publish with my Journal, but was obliged to refrain from doing so, lest our fellow-citizens should tear our house down, and make a bonfire of our furniture--a favorite mode of remonstrance in these parts with those who advocate the rights of the unhappy blacks. You know that the famous Declaration of Independence, which is to all Americans what Moses commanded God's Law to be to the Israelites, begins thus: "Whereas all men are born free and equal." Somebody, one day, asked Jefferson how he reconciled that composition of his to the existence of slavery in this country; he was completely surprised for a moment by the question, and then very candidly replied, "By God! I never thought of that before." To proceed with a list of my _works_. Here is an article on the writings of Victor Hugo, another on an American book called "Confessions of a Poet," a whole heap of verses, among which sundry doggerel epistles to you; and last, not least, the present voluminous prose performance for your benefit. These are some of my occupations: then I do a little housekeeping; then I do, as the French say, a little music; then I waste a deal of time in feeding and cleaning a large cageful of canary-birds, of which, as the pleasure is mine, I do not choose to give the rather disgustful trouble to any one else; strolling round the garden, watching my bee-hives, which are full of honey just now; every chink and cranny of the day between all this desultoriness, is filled with "the baby"; and _study_, of every sort (but that most prodigious study of any sort, _i.e._, "the baby,") seems further off from me than ever.... I am looking forward with great pleasure to a visit we intend paying Miss Sedgwick in September. She is a dear friend of mine, and I am very happy when with her. And where will you be next spring, wanderer? for we shall surely be in England. [Miss St. Leger and Miss Wilson were wintering at Nice for the health of the latter.] Will you not come back from the ends of the earth that I may not find the turret-chamber empty, and the Dell without its dear mistress at Ardgillan? Dear H----, I shall surely see you, if I live, in less than a year, when we shall have so much to say to each other that we shall not know where to begin, and had better not begin, perhaps; for we shall know still less where to stop. Ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. BRANCHTOWN, October 31st, 1835. MY DEAREST H----, I wonder where this will find you, and how long it will be before it does so. I have been away from home nearly a month, and on my return found a long letter from you waiting for me.... I cannot believe that women were intended to suffer as much as they do, and be as helpless as they are, in child-bearing. In spite of the third chapter of Genesis, I cannot believe [the beneficent action of ether had not yet mitigated the female portion of the primeval curse] that all the agony and debility attendant upon the entrance of a new creature into life were ordained; but rather that both are the consequences of our many and various abuses of our constitutions, and infractions of God's natural laws. The mere items of tight stays, tight garters, tight shoes, tight waistbands, tight arm-holes, and tight bodices,--of which we are accustomed to think little or nothing, and under the bad effects of which, most young women's figures are suffered to attain their growth, both here and in civilized Europe,--must have a tendency to injure irreparably the compressed parts, to impede circulation and respiration, and in many ways which we are not aware of, as well as by the more obvious evils which they have been proved to produce, destroy the health of the system, affect disastrously all its functions, and must aggravate the pains and perils of child-bearing.... Many women here, when they become mothers, seem to lose looks, health, and strength, and are mere wrecks, libels upon the great Creator's most wonderful contrivance, the human frame, which, in their instance, appears utterly unfit for the most important purpose for which He designed it. Pitiable women! comparatively without enjoyment or utility in existence. Of course, this result is attributable to many various causes, and admits of plenty of individual exceptions, but I believe tight-lacing, want of exercise, and a perpetual inhaling of over-heated atmosphere, to be among the former.... They pinch their pretty little feet cruelly, which certainly need no such _embellishment_, and, of course, cannot walk; and if they did, in the state of compression to which they submit for their beauty's sake, would suffer too much inconvenience, if not pain, to derive any benefit from exercise under such conditions.... When one thinks of the tragical consequences of all this folly, one is tempted to wish that the legislature would interfere in these matters, and prevent the desperate injury which is thus done to the race. The climate, which is the general cause assigned for the want of health of the American women, seems to me to receive more than its due share of blame. The Indian women, the squaws, are, I believe, remarkable for the ease with which they bear their children, the little pain they suffer comparatively, and the rapidity with which they regain their strength; but I think in matters of diet, dress, exercise, regularity in eating, and due ventilation of their houses, the Americans have little or no regard for the laws of health; and all these causes have their share in rendering the women physically incapable of their natural work, and unequal to their natural burdens. What a chapter on American female health I have treated you to!... Sometimes I write to you what I think, and sometimes what I do, and still it seems to me it is the thing I have not written about which you desire to know.... You ask if I am going through a course of Channing,--not precisely, but a course of Unitarianism, for I attend a Unitarian Church. I did so at first by accident (is there such a thing?), being taken thither by the people to whom I now belong, who are of that mode of thinking and have seats in a church of that denomination, and where I hear admirable instruction and exhortation, and eloquent, excellent preaching, that does my soul good.... I am acquainted with several clergymen of that profession, who are among the most enlightened and cultivated men I have met with in this country. Of course, these circumstances have had some effect upon my mind, but they have rather helped to develop, than positively cause, the result you have observed.... In reading my Bible--my written rule of life--I find, of course, much that I have no means of understanding, and much that there are no means of understanding, matters of faith.... Doctrinal points do not seem to me to avail much here: how much they may signify hereafter, who can tell? But the daily and hourly discharge of our duties, the purity, humanity, and activity of our lives, do avail much here; all that we can add to our own worth and each other's happiness is of evident, palpable, present avail, and I believe will prove of eternal avail to our souls, who may carry hence all they have gained in this mortal school to as much higher, nobler, and happier a sphere as the just judgment of Almighty God shall after death promote them to.... I have been for the last two days discharging a most vexatious species of duty--vexatious, to be sure, chiefly from my own fault. We have a household of six servants, and no housekeeper (such an official being unknown in these parts); a very abundant vegetable garden, dairy, and poultry-yard; but I have been very neglectful lately of all domestic details of supply from these various sources, and the consequences have been manifold abuses in the kitchen, the pantry, and the store-room; and disorder and waste, more disgraceful to me, even, than to the people immediately guilty of them. And I have been reproaching myself, and reproving others, and heartily regretting that, instead of Italian and music, I had not learned a little domestic economy, and how much bread, butter, flour, eggs, milk, sugar, and meat ought to be consumed per week in a family of eight persons, not born ogres.... I am sorry to find that my physical courage has been very much shaken by my confinement. Whereas formerly I scarcely knew the sensation of fear, I have grown almost cowardly on horseback or in a carriage. I do not think anybody would ever suspect that to be the case, but I know it in my secret soul, and am much disgusted with myself in consequence.... Our horses ran away with the carriage the other day, and broke the traces, and threatened us with some frightful catastrophe. I had the child with me, and though I did not lose my wits at all, and neither uttered sound nor gave sign of my terror, after getting her safely out of the carriage and alighting myself I shook from head to foot, for the first time in my life, with fear; and so have only just attained my full womanhood: for what says Shakespeare?-- "A woman naturally born to fears." ... God bless you, dearest friend. I am ever yours affectionately, F. A. B. ... I was at first a little disappointed that my baby was not a man-child, for the lot of woman is seldom happy, owing principally, I think, to the many serious mistakes which have obtained universal sway in female education. I do not believe that the just Creator intended one part of his creatures to lead the sort of lives that many women do.... In this country the difficulty of giving a girl a good education is even greater, I am afraid, than with us, in some respects. I do not think even accomplishments are well taught here; at least, they seem to me for the most part very flimsy, frivolous, and superficial, poor alike both in quality and quantity. More solid acquirements do not abound among my female acquaintance either, and the species of ignorance one encounters occasionally is so absolute and profound as to be almost amusing, and quite curious; while there is, also, quite enough native shrewdness, worldly acuteness, and smattering of shallow superficial reading, to produce a result which is worthless and vulgar to a pitiable degree. Of course there are exceptions to this narrowness and aridity of intellectual culture, but either they are really rare exceptions, or I have been especially unfortunate.... My dear Dorothy, this letter was begun three months ago; I mislaid it, and in the vanity of my imagination, believed that I had finished and sent it; and lo! yesterday it turns up--a fragment of which the Post Office is still innocent: and after all, 'tis a nonsense letter, to send galloping the wild world over after you. It seems hardly worth while to put the poor empty creature to the trouble of being sea-sick, and going so far. However, I know it will not be wholly worthless to you if it brings you word of my health and happiness, both of which are as good as any reasonable human mortal can expect.... Kiss dear Harriet for me, and believe me, Very affectionately yours, F. A. B. BRANCHTOWN, March 1st, 1836. DEAREST H----, Are you conjecturing as to the fate of three letters which you have written to me from the Continent? all of which I have duly received, I speak it with sorrow and shame; and certainly 'tis no proof that my affection is still the same for you, dear H----, that I have not been able to rouse myself to the effort of writing to you.... You will ask if my baby affords me no employment? Yes, endless in prospect and theory, dear H----; but when people talk of a baby being such an "occupation," they talk nonsense, such an _idleness_, they ought to say, such an interruption to everything like reasonable occupation, and to any conversation but baby-talk.... You ask of my society. I have none whatever: we live six miles from town, on a road almost impracticable in the fairest as well as the foulest weather, and though people occasionally drive out and visit me, and I occasionally drive in and return their calls, and we semi-occasionally, at rare intervals, go in to the theatre, or a dance, I have no friends, no intimates, and no society. Were I living in Philadelphia, I should be but little better off; for though, of course, there, as elsewhere, the materials for good society exist, yet all the persons whom I should like to cultivate are professionally engaged, and their circumstances require, apparently, that they should be so without intermission; and they have no time, and, it seems, but little taste for social enjoyment. There is here no rich and idle class: there are two or three rich and idle individuals, who have neither duties nor influence peculiar to their position, which isolates without elevating them; and who, as might be expected in such a state of things, are the least respectable members of the community. The only unprofessional man that I know in Philadelphia (and he studied, though he does not practice, medicine) who is also a person of literary taste and acquirement, has lamented to me that all his early friends and associates having become absorbed in their several callings, whenever he visits them he feels that he is diverting them from the labor of their lives, and the earning of their daily bread. No one that I belong to takes the slightest interest in literary pursuits; and though I feel most seriously how desirable it is that I should study, because I positively languish for intellectual activity, yet what would under other circumstances be a natural pleasure, is apt to become an effort and a task when those with whom one lives does not sympathize with one's pursuits.... Without the stimulus of example, emulation, companionship, or sympathy, I find myself unable to study with any steady purpose; however, in the absence of internal vigor, I have borrowed external support, and on Monday next I am going to begin to read Latin with a master.... Any pursuit to which I am compelled will be very welcome to me, and I have chosen that in preference to German, as mentally more bracing, and therefore healthier. I have already described what calls itself my garden here--three acres of kitchen-garden, and a quarter of an acre of flower-garden, divided into three straight strips, bordered with mangy box, and separated from the vegetables by a white-washed paling. I am the more provoked with this, because there are certain capabilities about the place; money is spent in keeping it up, and three men, entitled gardeners, are constantly at work on it; and it is not want of means, but of taste and knowledge and care, that makes it what it is. The piece of coarse grass dignified by the name of a lawn, in front of the house, is mowed twice in the whole course of the summer; of course, during the interval, it looks as if we were raising a crop of poor hay under our drawing-room windows. However, the gardening of Heaven is making the whole earth smile just now; and the lights and shadows of the sky, and wild flowers and verdure of the woods are beneficently beautiful, and make my spirit sing for joy, in spite of the little that men have done here gratefully to improve Heaven's gifts. This is not audacious, for Adam and Eve landscape-gardened in Paradise, you know; and I wish some little of their craft were to be found among their descendants hereabouts. My paper is at an end: do I tell you "nothing of my mind and soul"? What, then, is all this that I have been writing? Is it not telling you more than if I were to attempt to detail to you methodically, circumstantially (and perhaps unconsciously quite falsely), the state of either?... I am expecting a visit from Dr. Channing, whom I love and revere. After reading a sermon of his before going to bed the other night, I dreamt towards morning that I was in Heaven, from whence I was literally pulled down and awakened to get up and go to church, which, you will allow, was a ridiculous instance of bathos and work of supererogation. But, dear me, that dream was very pleasant! Rising, and rising, and rising, into ever-increasing light and space, not with effort and energy, as if flying, but calmly and steadily soaring, as if one's _property_ was to float upwards, _mounting eternally_. I send you my dream across the Atlantic; there is something of my "mind and soul" in that. God bless you, dear. Ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. [After my first introduction to Dr. Channing, I never was within reach of him without enjoying the honor of his intercourse and the privilege of hearing him preach. I think he was nowhere seen or heard to greater advantage than at his cottage near Newport, in the neighborhood of which a small church afforded the high advantage of his instruction to a rural congregation, as different as possible from the highly cultivated Bostonians who flocked to hear him whenever his state of health permitted him to preach in the city. King's Chapel, as it originally was called, dating back to days when the colony of Massachusetts still acknowledged a king, was dedicated at first to the Episcopal service of the Church of England, and I believe the English Liturgy in some form was the only ritual used in it. But when I first went to America, Boston and the adjacent College, Cambridge, were professedly Unitarian, and the service in King's Chapel was such a modification of the English Liturgy as was compatible with that profession: a circumstance which enabled its frequenters to unite the advantage of Dr. Channing's eloquent preaching with the use of that book of prayer and praise unsurpassed and unsurpassable in its simple sublimity and fervid depth of devotion. I retain a charmingly comical remembrance of the last visit I paid Dr. Channing, at Newport; when, wishing to take me into his garden, and unwilling to keep me waiting while he muffled himself up, according to his necessary usual precautions, he caught up Mrs. Channing's bonnet and shawl, and sheltering his eyes from the glare of the sun by pulling the bonnet well down over his nose, and folding the comfortable female-wrap (it was a genuine woman's-shawl, and not an ambiguous plaid of either or no sex) well over his breast, he walked round and round his garden, in full view of the high-road, discoursing with the peculiar gentle solemnity and deliberate eloquence habitual to him, on subjects the gravity of which was in laughable contrast with his costume, the absurdity of which only made me smile when it recurred to my memory, after I had taken leave of him and ceased hearing his wise words.] MY DEAREST HARRIET, ... There is one interest and occupation of an essentially practical nature, such as would give full scope to the most active energies and intellect, in which I am becoming passionately interested,--I mean the cause of the Southern negroes. We live by their labor; and though the estate is not yet ours (elder members of the family having a life interest in it), it will be our property one day, and a large portion of our income is now derived from it. I was told the other day, that the cotton lands in Georgia, where our plantation is situated, were exhausted; but that in Alabama there now exist wild lands along the Mississippi, where any one possessing the negroes necessary to cultivate them, might, in the course of a few years, realize an enormous fortune; and asked, jestingly, if I should be willing to go thither. I replied, in most solemn earnest, that I would go with delight, if we might take that opportunity of at once placing our slaves upon a more humane and Christian footing. Oh, H----! I can not tell you with what joy it would fill me, if we could only have the energy and courage, the humanity and justice, to do this: and I believe it might be done. Though the blacks may not be taught to read and write, there is no law which can prevent one from living amongst them, from teaching them all--and how much that is!--that personal example and incessant personal influence can teach. I would take them there, and I would at once explain to them my principles and my purpose: I would tell them that in so many years I expected to be able to free them, but that those only should be liberated whose conduct I perceived during that time would render their freedom prosperous to themselves, and safe to the community. In the mean time I would allot each a profit on his labor; I would allow them leisure and property of their own; I would establish a Savings Bank for them, so that at the end of their probation, those into whom I had been able to instill industrious and economical habits should be possessed of a small fund wherewith to begin the world; I would remain there myself always, and, with God's assistance and blessing, I do believe a great good might be done. How I wish--oh, how I wish we might but make the experiment! I believe in my soul that this is our peculiar duty in life. We all have some appointed task, and assuredly it can never be that we, or any other human beings were created merely to live surrounded with plenty, blessed with every advantage of worldly circumstance, and the ties of happy social and domestic relations,--it cannot be that anybody ought to have all this, and yet do nothing for it; nor do I believe that any one's duties are bounded by the half-animal instincts of loving husband, wife, or children, and the negative virtue of wronging no man: besides we _are_ villainously wronging many men.... What would I not give to be able to awaken in others my own feeling of this heavy responsibility! I have just done reading Dr. Channing's book on slavery; it is like everything else of his, written in the pure spirit of Christianity, with judgment, temper and moderation, yet with abundant warmth and energy. It has been answered with some cleverness, but in a sneering, satirical tone, I hear. I have not yet read this reply, but intend doing so; though it matters little what is said by the defenders of such a system: truth is God, and must prevail. Enough of this side of the water. Your wanderings abroad, dear H----, created a feeling of many mingled melancholies in my mind: in the first place, you are so very, very far off, the dead seem scarcely further; perhaps they indeed are nearer to us, for I believe we are surrounded by "a cloud of witnesses." Your description of those southern lands is sad to me. I have always had a passionate yearning for those regions where man has been so glorious, and Nature is so still. I thought of your various emotions at my uncle's grave at Lausanne. Life seems to me so strange, that the chain of events which forms even the most commonplace existence has, in its unexpectedness, something of the marvelous. I rejoice that dear Dorothy is benefited by your traveling, and pray for every blessing on you both. As to the possibility of my coming to England and not finding you there, my dear H----; I can say nothing and you must do what you think right. God bless you. I am ever yours, F. A. B. [The ideas and expectations, with which I entered upon my Northern country life, near Philadelphia, were impossible of fulfillment, and simply ridiculous under the circumstances. Those with which I contemplated an existence on our Southern estate, or the new one suggested in this letter, in the State of Alabama, were not only ridiculously impossible, but would speedily have found their only result in the ruin, danger, and very probably death, of all concerned in the endeavor to realize them. The laws of the Southern States would certainly have been forestalled by the speedier action of lynch-law, in putting a stop to my experimental abolitionism. And I am now able to understand, and appreciate, what, when I wrote this letter, I had not the remotest suspicion of,--the amazement and dismay, the terror and disgust, with which such theories as those I have expressed in it must have filled every member of the American family with which my marriage had connected me; I must have appeared to them nothing but a mischievous madwoman.] BRANCHTOWN, March 28th, 1836. MY DEAREST H----, You say that thinking of you makes me fancy that I have written to you: not quite so, for no day passes with me without many thoughts of you, and I certainly am well aware that I do not write to you daily.... But, dearest H----, once for all, believe this: whether I am silent altogether, or simply unsatisfactory in my communications, I love you dearly, and hope for a happier intercourse with you,--if never here--hereafter, in that more perfect state, where, endowed with higher natures, our communion with those we love will, I believe, be infinitely more intimate than it can be here, subject as it is to all the imperfections of our present existence. You laugh at me for what you consider my optimism, my incredulity with regard to the evils of this present life, and seem to think I am making out a case of no little absurdity in ascribing so much of what we suffer to ourselves. But I do not think my view of the matter is altogether visionary. Even from disease and death, those stern and inexorable conditions of our present state, spring, as from bitter roots, some of the sweetest virtues of which our nature is capable; and I do not believe it to be the great and good God's appointment that the earth should be loaded as it is with barren suffering and sorrow. And as to believing that women were intended to lead the helpless, ailing, sickly, unprofitable, and unpleasurable lives, which so many of them seem to lead in this country, I think it would be a direct libel on our Creator to profess such a creed.... I walked into town, the other day, a distance of only six miles, and was very much tired by the expedition: to be sure I am not a good walker, riding being my _natural_ exercise, in which I persist, in spite of stumbling and shying horses, high-roads three feet deep in dust, and by-roads three feet deep in mud, at one and the same time. Taking exercise has become, instead of a pleasure, a sometimes rather irksome duty to me; a lonely ride upon a disagreeable horse not being a great enjoyment; but I know that my health has its reward, and I persevere.... The death of an elderly lady puts us in possession of our property, which she had held in trust during her life.... Increase of fortune brings necessarily increased responsibility and occupation, and for that I am not sorry, though the circumstance of the death of this relation, of whom I knew and had seen but little, has been fruitful in disappointments to me.... In the first place, I have been obliged to forego a visit from my delightful friend, Miss Sedgwick, who was coming to spend some time with me; this, in my lonely life, is a real privation. In the next place, our proposed voyage to England is indefinitely postponed, and from a thing so near as to be reckoned a certainty (for we were to have sailed the 20th of next month), it has withdrawn itself into the misty regions of a remote futurity, of the possible events of which we cannot even guess.... We have had a most unprecedented winter; the cold has been dreadful, and the snow, even now, in some places, lies in drifts from three to five feet deep. There is no spring here; the winter is with us to-day, and to-morrow the heat will be oppressive; and in a week everything will be like summer, without the full-fledged foliage to temper the glare. I have taken up your letter to see if there are any positive questions in it, that I may not this time be guilty of not replying to you while I answer it.... I do not give up my music quite, but generally, after dinner, pass an hour at the piano, not so much from the pleasure it now gives me, as from the conviction that it is wrong to give up even the smallest of our resources; and also because, as wise Goethe says, "We are too apt to suffer the mean things of life to overgrow the finer nature within us, therefore it is expedient that at least once a day we read a little poetry, or sing a song, or look at a picture." Upon this principle, I still continue to play and sing sometimes, but no longer with any great pleasure to myself. Good-bye, dearest H----.... Oh, I should like to see you once again! I am ever yours, F. A. B. BRANCHTOWN, July 31st, 1836. MY DEAREST H----, You ask me if I do not write anything; yes, sometimes reviews, for which I am solicited. It is an occupation, but returns neither reputation, the articles being anonymous; nor remuneration, as they are also gratuitous; and I do it without much interest, simply not to be idle. As to anything of more literary pretension, I never shall attempt it again: I do not think nature intended mothers to be authors of anything but their babies; because, as I told you, though a baby is not an "occupation," it is an absolute hindrance to everything else that can be called so. I cannot read a book through quietly for mine; judge, therefore, how little likely I am to write one.... You ask me if I take no pleasure in gardening; and suggest the cutting of carnations and raising of lettuce, as wholesome employments for me. The kitchen-garden is really the only well-attended-to horticulture of this place. The gardener raises early lettuces and cauliflowers in frames, which remunerate him, either by their sale in market or by prizes that he may obtain for them. His zeal in floriculture is less; as you will understand, when I tell you that, discovering some early violets blowing along a sunny wall in the kitchen-garden, and seizing joyfully upon them, with reproaches to him for not having let me know that there were any, he replied--"letting fall a lip of much contempt,"--"Well, ma'am, I quite forgot them violets. You see, them flowers is such frivolous creatures." Profane fellow! I spend generally about three hours a day pottering in my garden, but, alas! my gardening consists chiefly of slaughter. The heat of the climate generates the most enormous quantity of insects, for the effectual prevention or destruction of which the gardeners in these parts have yet discovered no means. The consequence is that, in spite of my daily executions, every shrub and every flower-bush is fuller of _bugs_ (so they here indiscriminately term these displeasing beasts) than of leaves. They begin by _eating up_ the roses bodily (these are called distinctively, rose-bugs; of course, they have a pet name, but it's Latin, and is only used by their familiars); they then attack and devour the large white lilies, and honeysuckles; finally, they spread themselves impartially all over the garden, and having literally stripped that bare, are now attacking the fruit. It is an insect which I have never seen in England; a species of beetle, much smaller, but not unlike the cockchafer we are familiar with. Their number is really prodigious, and they seem to me to propagate with portentous rapidity, for every day, in spite of the sweeping made by the gardener and myself, they appear as thick as ever. But for the dread of their coming in still greater force next year, if we do not continue our work of extermination, I should almost be tempted to give it up in despair. I have a few flower-beds that I have had made, and keep under my own especial care; also some pretty baskets, which I have had expressly manufactured with exceeding difficulty; these, filled with earth, and planted with roses, I have placed on the stumps of some large trees, which were cut down last spring and form nice rustic pedestals; and thus I contrive to produce something of an English garden effect. But the climate is against me. The winter is so terribly cold that nothing at all delicate can stand it unless cased up in straw-matting and manure. We have, therefore, no evergreen shrubs, such as the lauristinus, and Portugal and variegated laurels, which form our English garden shrubberies; nor do they seem to replace these by the native growth of their own woods, the kalmias and rhododendrons, but principally by hardy evergreens of the fir and pine species, which are native and abundant here. Then, with scarcely any interval of spring to moderate the sudden extreme change, the winter becomes summer--summer, without its screen of thick leaves to shelter one from the blazing, scorching heat. Everything starts into bloom, as it were, at once; and, instead of lasting even their proverbially short date of beauty, the flowers vanish as suddenly as they appeared, under the fierce influence of the heat and the devastations of the swarming insects it engenders. To make up for this, I have here almost an avenue of fine lemon-trees, in cases; humming-birds, which are a marvel and enchantment to me; and fire-flies, which are exquisite in the summer evenings. I have, too, a fine hive of bees, which has produced already this spring two strong young swarms, whose departure from the parent hive formed a very interesting event in my novel experiences; especially as one of the stablemen, who joined the admiring domestic crowd witnessing the process, proved to be endowed with the immunity some persons have from the stings of those insects, and was able to take them by handfuls from the tree where they were clinging, and put them on the stand where the bee-hive prepared for them was placed. I had read of this individual peculiarity with the incredulity of ignorance (incomparably stronger than that of knowledge); but seeing is believing, and when my fiery-haired Irish groom seized the bees by the handful, of course there was no denying the fact. There is a row of large old acacia-trees near the house, inhabited by some most curious ants, who are gradually hollowing the trees out. I can hear them at work as I stand by the poor vegetables, and the grass all round is literally whitened with the fine sawdust made by these hard-working little carpenters. The next phenomenon will be that the trees will tumble on my head, while I am pursuing my entomological studies. [To avert this catastrophe, the trees had all to be cut down].... Dear H----, I never contemplated sacrificing my child's, or anybody else's, health to my desire for "doing good." There is a difference between living all the year round on a rice-swamp, and retiring during the summer to the pinewood highlands, which are healthy, even in the hot season; nor am I at all inclined to advocate the neglect of duties close at hand for quixotical devotion to remote ones. But you must remember that _we are slave owners_, and live by slave-labor, and if the question of slavery does not concern us, in God's name whom does it concern? In my conviction, that is _our_ special concern.... There is a Convention about to meet at Harrisburg, the seat of Government of this State, Pennsylvania, for the election of Van Buren, the Democratic candidate for the Presidency.... The politics of this country are in a strange, uncertain state, but I have left myself no room to enlarge upon them. I have just finished reading Judge Talfourd's "Ion," and Lamartine's "Pélérinage" to Palestine. God bless you, dearest H----. Ever yours, F. A. B. [Sydney Smith said that he never desired to live in a hot climate, as he disliked the idea of processions of ants traversing his bread and butter. The month of June had hardly begun in the year 1874, when I was residing close to the home of my early married life, Butler Place, when the ants appeared in such numbers in the dining-room sideboards, closets, cupboards, etc., that we were compelled to isolate all cakes, biscuits, sugar, preserves, fruit, and whatever else was kept in them, by placing the vessels containing all such things in dishes of water--moats, in fact, by which the enemy was cut off from these supplies. Immediately to these succeeded swarms of fire-flies, beautiful and wonderful in their evening apparition of showers of sparks from every bush and shrub, and after sunset rising in hundreds from the grass, and glittering against the dark sky as if the Milky Way had gone mad and taken to dancing; but even these shining creatures were not pleasant in the house by day, where they were merely like ill-shaped ugly black flies. These were followed by a world of black beetles of every size and shape, with which our room was alive as soon as the lights were brought in the evening. Net curtains, and muslin stretched over wooden frames, and fixed like blinds in the window-sashes, did indeed keep out the poor mouthful of stifling air for which we were gasping, but did not exclude these intolerable visitors, who made their way in at every crack and crevice and momentarily opened door, and overran with a dreadful swiftness the floor of the room in every direction; occasionally taking to the more agreeable exercise of flying, at which, however, they did not seem quite expert, frequently tumbling down and struggling by twos and threes upon one's hair, neck, and arms, and especially attracted to unfortunate females by white or light-colored muslin gowns, which became perfect receptacles for them as they rushed and rattled over the matting. After the reign of the beetles came that of the flies, a pest to make easily credible the ancient story of the Egyptian plague. Every picture and looking-glass frame, every morsel of gilding, every ornamental piece of metal about the rooms, had to be covered, like the tarts in a confectioner's shop, with yellow gauze; whatever was not so protected--unglazed photographs, the surface of oil pictures, necessary memoranda, and papers on one's writing-table--became black with the specks and spots left by these creatures. Plates of fly-paper poison disfigured, to but small purpose, every room; and at evening, by candlelight, while one was reading or writing, the universal hum and buzz was amazing, and put one in mind of the-- "Hushed by buzzing night-flies to thy slumber" of poor King Henry. The walls and ceiling of the servants' offices and kitchen, which at the beginning of the spring had been painted white, and were immaculate in their purity, became literally a yellow-brown coffee color, darkened all over with spots as black as soot, with the defilement of these torments, of which three and four dustpanfuls a day would be swept away dead without appreciably diminishing their number. These flies accompanied our whole summer, from June till the end of October. Before, however, the beginning of the latter month, the mosquitoes made their appearance; and though, owing to the peculiar dryness of the summer of 1874, they were much less numerous than usual, there came enough of them to make our days miserable and our nights sleepless. These are the common indoor insects of a common summer in this part of Pennsylvania, to which should be added the occasional visits of spiders of such dimensions as to fill me with absolute terror; I have, unfortunately, a positive physical antipathy to these strangely-mannered animals (the only resemblance, I fear, between myself and Charles Kingsley), some of whose peculiarities, besides their infinitely dexterous and deliberate processes for ensnaring their prey, make them unspeakably repulsive to me,--indeed, to a degree that persuades me that, at some former period of my existence, "which, indeed, I can scarcely remember," as Rosalind says, I must have been a fly who perished by spider-craft. It is not, however, only in these midland and comparatively warmer states of North America that this profusion of insect life is found; the heat of the summer, even in Massachusetts, is more than a match in its life-engendering force, for the destructive agency of the winter's cold; and in the woods, on the high hill-tops of Berkshire, spiders of the most enormous size abound. I found two on my own place, the extremities of whose legs could not be covered by a large inverted tumbler; one of these perfectly swarmed with parasitical small spiders, a most hideous object! and one day, on cutting down a hollow pine tree, my gardener called me to look at a perfect jet of white ants, which like a small fountain, welled up from the middle of the decayed stump, and flowed over it in a thick stream to the ground. As far north as Lenox, in Berkshire, the summer heat brings humming-birds and rattlesnakes; and of less deadly, but very little less disagreeable, serpent-beasts, I have encountered there no fewer than eight, in a short mile walk, on a warm September morning, genial even for snakes. The succession of creatures I have enumerated is the normal entomology of an average Pennsylvania summer. But there came a year, a horrible year, shortly before my last return to England, when the Colorado beetle (_alias_ potato-bug), having marched over the whole width of the continent, from the far West to the Atlantic sea-board, made its appearance in the neighborhood of Philadelphia. These loathsome creatures, varying in size from a sixpence to a shilling, but rather oval than round in shape, of a pinkish-colored flesh, covered with a variegated greenish-brown shell, came in such numbers that the paths in the garden between the vegetable beds seemed to _swim_ with them, and made me giddy to look at them. They devoured everything, beginning with the potatoes; and having devastated the fields and garden, betook themselves to swarming up the walls of the house, for what purpose they alone could tell--but didn't. In vain men with ladders went up and scraped them down into buckets of hot water; they seemed inexhaustible, and filled me with such disgust that I felt as if I must fly, and abandon the place to them. I do not think this pest lasted much more than a week; then, having devoured, they departed, still making towards the sea, and were described to me by a gentleman who drove along the road, as literally covering the highway, like a disbanded army. One's familiar sensations under this visitation were certainly "crawling and creeping"; it is a great pity that flying might not have been added to them.] BRANCHTOWN, Monday, August 29th, 1836. DEAREST H----, You are in Italy! in that land which, from the earliest time I can remember, has been the land of my dreams; and it seems strange to me that you should be there, and I here; for when we were together the realities of life, the matter-of-fact interests of every-day existence always attracted your sympathies more than mine; nor do I remember ever hearing you mention, with the longing which possessed me, Italy, or the shores of the Mediterranean.... If, as I believe, there is a special Providence in "the fall of a sparrow," then your and my whereabouts are not the result of accidental circumstance, but the providential appointment of God. Dearest H----, your life's lesson just now is to be taught you through variety of scene, the daily intercourse of your most precious friend [Miss Dorothy Wilson], and the beautiful and lofty influences of the countries in which you are traveling and sojourning: and mine is to be learnt from a page as different as the chapters of Lindley Murray's Grammar are different from those of a glorious, illuminated, old vellum book of legends. I not only believe through my intuitive instincts, but also through my rational convictions, that my own peculiar task is the wholesomest and best for me, and though I might desire to be with you in Italy, I am content to be without you in America.... How much all separation and disappointment tend to draw us nearer to God! To me upon this earth you seem almost lost--you, and those yet nearer and dearer to me than yourself; your very images are becoming dim, and vague, and blurred in outline to my memory, like faded pictures or worn-out engravings. I think of you all almost as of the dead, and the feverish desire to be once more with you and them, from which I have suffered sometimes, is gradually dying away in my heart; and now when I think of any of you, my dear distant ones, it is as folded with me together in our Heavenly Father's arms, watched over by His care, guarded over by His merciful love, and though my imagination no longer knows where to seek or find you on earth, I meet you under the shadow of His Almighty Wings, and know that we are together--now--and forever. [To those who know the rate of intercourse between Europe and America now, these expressions of the painful sense of distance from my country and friends, under which I suffered, must seem almost incomprehensible,--now, when to go to Europe seems to most Americans the easiest of summer trips, involving hardly more than a week's sea voyage; when letters arrive almost every other day by some of the innumerable steamers flying incessantly to and fro, and weaving, like living shuttles, the woof and warp of human communication between the continents; and the submarine telegraph shoots daily tidings from shore to shore of that terrible Atlantic, with swift security below its storms. But when I wrote this to my friend, no words were carried with miraculous celerity under the dividing waves; letters could only be received once a month, and from thirty to thirty-seven days was the average voyage of the sailing packets which traversed the Atlantic. Men of business went to and fro upon their necessary affairs, but very few Americans went to Europe, and still fewer Europeans went to America, to spend leisure, or to seek pleasure; and American and English women made the attempt still seldomer than the men. The distance between the two worlds, which are now so near to each other, was then immense.] Let me answer your questions, dear H----; though when I strive most entirely to satisfy you, I seem to have left out the very things you wish to know.... I am reading Sir Thomas Browne's "Religio Medici." What charming old English it is! How many fantastical and how many beautiful things there are in it! Yesterday I walked down, with a basket of cucumbers and some beautiful flowers, to Mrs. F----'s, the wife of the Unitarian clergyman whose church I attend, and who is an excellent and highly valued friend of mine; and I sat two hours with her and another lady, going through an interminable discussion on the subject of intellectual gifts: the very various proportions in which they were distributed, and the measure of consciousness of superiority which was inevitable, and therefore allowable, in the possessor of an unusual amount of such endowments.... I wish Mr. and Mrs. F---- lived near me instead of being merely come to spend a few weeks in this neighborhood.... I do not keep a diary any more; I do not find chronicling my days helps me to live them, and for many reasons I have given up my journal. Perhaps I may resume it when we set out for the South.... We are now altogether proprietors of this place, and I really think, as I am often told, that it is getting to be prettier and better kept than any other in this neighborhood. It is certainly very much improved, and no longer looks quite unlike an English place, but there are yet a thousand things to be done to it, in the contemplation of which I try to forget its present mongrel appearance. Now, dear, I have answered as many of your questions as my paper allows. Do not, I beseech you, send me back word that my letter was "thoroughly unsatisfactory." God bless you. I am ever your affectionate F. A. B. BRANCHTOWN, Wednesday, October 5th. MY DEAREST H----, It is a great disappointment to me that I am not going to the South this winter. There is no house, it seems, on the plantation but a small cottage, inhabited by the overseer, where the two gentlemen proprietors can be accommodated, but where there is no room for me, my baby, and her nurse, without unhousing the poor overseer and his family altogether. The nearest town to the estate, Brunswick, is fifteen miles off, and a wretched hole, where I am assured it will be impossible to obtain a decent lodging for me, so that it has been determined to leave me and baby behind, and the owner will go with his brother, but without us, on his expedition to Negroland. As far as the child is concerned, I am well satisfied; ... but I would undergo much myself to be able to go among those people. I know that my hands would be in a great measure tied. I certainly could not free them, nor could I even pay them for their labor, or try to instruct them, even to the poor degree of teaching them to read. But mere personal influence has a great efficiency; moral revolutions of the world have been wrought by those who neither wrote books nor read them; the Divinest Power was that of One Character, One Example; that Character and Example which we profess to call our Rule of life. The power of individual personal qualities is really the great power, for good or evil, of the world; and it is upon this ground that I feel convinced that, in spite of all the cunningly devised laws by which the negroes are walled up in a mental and moral prison, from which there is apparently no issue, the personal character and daily influence of a few Christian men and women living among them would put an end to slavery, more speedily and effectually than any other means whatever. You do not know how profoundly this subject interests me, and engrosses my thoughts: it is not alone the cause of humanity that so powerfully affects my mind; it is, above all, the deep responsibility in which we are involved, and which makes it a matter of such vital paramount importance to me.... It seems to me that we are possessed of power and opportunity to do a great work; how can I not feel the keenest anxiety as to the use we make of this talent which God has entrusted us with? We dispose of the physical, mental, and moral condition of some hundreds of our fellow-creatures. How can I bear to think that this great occasion of doing good, of dealing justly, of setting a noble example to others, may be wasted or neglected by us? How can I bear to think that the day will come, as come it surely must, when we shall say: We once had it in our power to lift this burden from four hundred heads and hearts, and stirred no finger to do it; but carelessly and indolently, or selfishly and cowardly, turned our back upon so great a duty and so great a privilege. I cannot utter what I feel upon this subject, but I pray to God to pour His light into our hearts, and enable us to do that which is right. In every point of view, I feel that we ought to embrace the cause of these poor people. They will be free assuredly, and that before many years; why not make friends of them instead of deadly enemies? Why not give them at once the wages of their labor? Is it to be supposed that a man will work more for fear of the lash than he will for the sake of an adequate reward? As a matter of policy, and to escape personal violence, or the destruction of one's property, it were well not to urge them--ignorant, savage, and slavish, as they are--into rebellion. As a mere matter of worldly interest, it would be wise to make it worth their while to work with zeal and energy for hire, instead of listlessly dragging their reluctant limbs under a driver's whip. Oh, how I wish I was a man! How I wish I owned these slaves! instead of being supported (disgracefully, as it seems to me) by their unpaid labor.... You tell me, dear H----, that you are aged and much altered, and you doubt if I should know you. That's a fashion of speech--you doubt no such thing, and know that I should know you if your face were as red as the fiery inside of Etna, and your hair as white as its snowy shoulders. I have had the skin peeled off the back of my neck with standing in the sun here, and my whole face and hands are burnt, by constant exposure, to as fine a coffee-color as you would wish to see of a summer's day. Yet, after all, I got as sharp a sunstroke on my shoulders, driving on a coach-box by the side of Loch Lomond once, as could be inflicted upon me by this American sky. The women here, who are careful, above all things, of their appearance, marvel extremely at my exposing myself to the horrors of tanning, freckling, etc.; but with hair and eyes as dark as mine, a gipsy complexion doesn't signify, and I prefer burning my skin to suffocating under silk handkerchiefs, sun-bonnets, and two or three gauze veils, and sitting, as the ladies here do, in the dark till the sun has declined. I am certainly more like a Red Indian squaw than when last you saw me; but that change doesn't signify, it's only skin deep.... You speak of the beauty of the Italian sky, and say that to pass the mornings with such pictures, and the evenings with such sunsets, is matter to be grateful for. I have been spending a month with my friends, the Sedgwicks, in a beautiful hilly region in the State of Massachusetts; and I never looked abroad upon the woods and valleys and lakes and mountains without thinking how great a privilege it was to live in the midst of such beautiful things. I felt this the more strongly, perhaps, because the country in my own neighborhood here is by no means so varied and interesting. I am glad you are to have the pleasure of meeting your own people abroad, and thus carrying your home with you: give my kindest love to them all whenever you see them.... I have not been hot this summer: the weather has been rainy and cold to a most uncommon degree; and I have rejoiced therefore, and so have the trees and the grass, which have contrived to look green to the end of the chapter, as with us.... If I am not allowed to go to the South this winter, it is just possible that I may spend three months in England. Good-bye, my dearest H----. I am ever yours, F. A. B. [This was the last letter I wrote to my friend from America this year; it was decided that I should not go to the South, and so lonely a winter as I should have had to spend in the country being rather a sad prospect, it was also decided that I should return to England, and remain during my temporary widowhood with my own family in London. I sailed at the beginning of November, and reached England, after a frightfully stormy passage of eight and twenty days. I and my child's nurse were the only women on board the packet, and there were very few male passengers. The weather was dreadful; we had violent contrary winds almost the whole time, and one terrific gale that lasted nearly four days; during which time I and my poor little child and her nurse were prisoners in the cabin, where we had not even the consolation of daylight, the skylights being all closely covered to protect us from the sea, which broke all over the decks. I begged so hard one day to have the covering removed, and a ray of daylight admitted, if only for five minutes, that I was indulged, and had reason to repent it; the sea almost instantly broke the windows and poured down upon us like Niagara, and I was thankful to be covered up again as quick as possible in dry darkness. This storm was made memorable to me by an experience of which I have read one or two descriptions, by persons who have been similarly affected in seasons of great peril, and which I have never ceased regretting that I did not make a record of as soon as possible; but the lapse of time, though it has no doubt enfeebled, has in no other way altered, the impressions I received. The tempest was the first I had ever witnessed, and was undoubtedly a more formidable one than I have ever since encountered in eighteen passages across the Atlantic. I was told, after it was over, that the vessel had sprung its mainmast--a very serious injury to a sailing ship, I suppose, by the mode in which it was spoken of; and for three days we were unable to carry any sail whatever for the fury of the wind. At the height of the storm, in the middle of a night which my faithful friend and servant, Margery O'Brien, passed in prayer, without once rising from her knees, the frightful uproar of the elements and the delirious plunging and rearing of the convulsed ship convinced me that we should inevitably be lost. As the vessel reeled under a tremendous shock, the conviction of our impending destruction became so intense in my mind, that my imagination suddenly presented to me the death-vision, so to speak, of my whole existence. This kind of phenomenon has been experienced and recorded by persons who have gone through the process of drowning, and afterwards recovered; or have otherwise been in imminent peril of their lives, and have left curious and highly interesting accounts of their sensations. I should find it impossible adequately to describe the vividness with which my whole past life presented itself to my perception; not as a procession of events, filling a succession of years, but as a whole--a total--suddenly held up to me as in a mirror, indescribably awful, combined with the simultaneous acute and almost despairing sense of _loss_, of _waste_, so to speak, by which it was accompanied. This instantaneous, involuntary retrospect was followed by a keen and rapid survey of the religious belief in which I had been trained, and which then seemed to me my only important concern.... The tension, physical and mental, of the very short space of time in which these processes took place, gave way to a complete exhaustion, in which, strangely enough, I found the sort of satisfaction that a child does in crooning itself to sleep, in singing, one after another, every song I could call to memory; and my repertory was a very numerous one, composed of English, Scotch, Irish, Welsh, French, German, Italian, and Spanish specimens, which I "chanted loudly, chanted lowly," sitting on the floor, through the rest of the night, till the day broke, and my sense of danger passed away, but not the recollection of the never-to-be-forgotten experience it had brought to me. I have often since wondered if any number of men going into action on a field of battle are thus impressed. Several thousands of human beings, with the apparition of their past life thus suddenly confronting them, is not a bad suggestion of the Day of Judgment. I have heard it asserted that the experience I have here described was only that of persons who, in the full vigor of life and health, were suddenly put in peril of immediate death; and that whatever regret, repentance, or remorse might afflict the last moments of elderly persons, or persons prepared by previous disease for dissolution, this species of revelation, by the sudden glare of death, of the whole past existence was not among the phenomena of death-beds. As a curious instance of the very mistaken inferences frequently drawn from our actions by others, when the storm had sufficiently subsided to allow of our very kind friend, the captain, leaving his post of vigilant watch on deck, to come and inquire after his poor imprisoned female passengers, he congratulated me upon my courage. "For," said he, "at the very height of the storm, I was told that you were heard singing away like a bird." I am not sure that I succeeded in making him understand that that was only because I had been as frightened as I was capable of being, and, having touched the extremest point of terror, I had subsided into a sort of ecstacy of imbecility, in which I had found my "singing voice." I returned to my home and family, and stayed with them in London all the time of my visit to England, which, from unforeseen circumstances, was prolonged far beyond what had originally been intended. I returned to the intercourse of all my former friends and acquaintance, and to the London society of the day, which was full of delightful interest for me, after the solitary and completely unsocial life I had been leading for the two previous years. My friend, Miss S----, was still abroad, and her absence was the only drawback to the pleasure and happiness of my return to my own country. My father resided then in Park Place, St. James's, in a house which has since become part of the Park Hotel; we have always had a tending towards that particular street, which undoubtedly is one of the best situated in London: quiet in itself, not being a thoroughfare, shut in by the pleasant houses that look into the Green Park below Arlington Street, and yet close to St. James's Street, and all the gay busyness of the West End, Pall Mall, and Piccadilly. While we were living at No. 10 Park Place, my cousin, Horace Twiss, was our opposite neighbor, at No. 5, which became my own residence some years afterwards; and, since then, my sister had her London abode for several years at No. 9. The street seems always a sort of home to me, full of images and memories of members of my family and their intimates who visited us there. My return to London society at this time gave me the privilege of an acquaintance with some of its most remarkable members, many of whom became, and remained, intimate and kind friends of mine for many years. The Miss Berrys, Lady Charlotte Lindsay, Lady Morley, Lord and Lady Lansdowne, Lord and Lady Ellesmere, Lord and Lady Dacre, Sydney Smith, Rogers, were among the persons with whom I then most frequently associated; and in naming these members of the London world of that day, I mention only a small portion of a brilliant society, full of every element of wit, wisdom, experience, refined taste, high culture, good breeding, good sense, and distinction of every sort that can make human intercourse valuable and delightful. I was one of the youngest members of that pleasant society, and have seen almost all its brilliant lights go out. Eheu! of what has succeeded to them in the London of the present day, I know nothing.] PARK PLACE, St. James's, December 28th, 1836. Nevertheless, and in spite of all your doubts, and notwithstanding all the improbabilities and all the impossibilities, here I am, dearest H----, in very deed in England, and in London, once again. And shall it be that I have crossed that terrible sea, and am to pass some time here, and to return without seeing you? I cannot well fancy that. Surely, now that the Atlantic is no longer between us, though the Alps may be, we shall meet once more before I go back to my dwelling-place beyond the uttermost parts of the sea. The absolute impossibility of taking the baby to the South determined the arrangements that were made; and as I was at any rate to be alone all the winter, I obtained leave to pass it in England, whither I am come, alone with my chick, through tempestuous turbulence of winds and waves, and where I expect to remain peaceably with my own people, until such time as I am fetched away. When this may be, however, neither I nor any one else can tell, as it depends upon the meeting and sitting of a certain Convention, summoned for the revising of the constitution of the State of Pennsylvania; and there is at present an uncertainty as to the time of its opening. It was at first appointed to convene on the 1st of May, and it was then resolved that I should return early in March, so as to be in America by that time; but my last news is that the meeting of the Convention may take place in February, and my stay in England will probably be prolonged for several months in consequence.... Your various propositions, regarding negro slavery in America, I will answer when we meet, which I hope will be ere long.... I wish to heaven I could have gone down to Georgia this winter!... Your impression of Rome does not surprise me; I think it would be mine. I have not seen dear Emily, but expect that pleasure in about a fortnight.... My father took his farewell of the stage last Friday. How much I could say upon that circumstance alone! The house was immensely full, the feeling of regret and good-will universal, and our own excitement, as you may suppose, very great. My father bore it far better than I had anticipated, and his spirits do not appear to have suffered since; I know not whether the reaction may not make itself felt hereafter. Perhaps his present occupation of licenser may afford sufficient employment of a somewhat kindred nature to prevent his feeling very severely the loss of his professional excitement; and yet I know not whether a sufficient _succedaneum_ is to be found for such a dram as that, taken nightly for more than forty years.... Who do you think Adelaide and I went to dine with last Friday? You will never guess, so I may as well tell you--the C----s! The meetings in this world are strange things. She sought me with apparent cordiality, and I had no reason whatever for avoiding her. She is very handsome, and appears remarkably amiable, with the simple good breeding of a French great lady, and the serious earnestness of a devout Roman Catholic. They are going to Lisbon, where he is attaché to the Embassy. I had a letter from Mr. Combe the other day, full of the books he had been publishing, and the lectures he had been delivering. He seems to be very busy, and very happy. [Mr. Combe had lately married my cousin, Cecilia Siddons.] ... Farewell, my dearest H----. I am ever your most affectionate, F. A. B. PARK PLACE, ST. JAMES'S, May 13th, 1837. MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON, You will never believe I am alive, not sooner to have answered your kind letter; yet I was grateful for your expressions of regard, and truly sorry for all you have had to undergo. Certainly the chances of this life are strange--that you should be in Toronto, and I in London now, is what neither of us would have imagined a little while ago. I wish I could think you were either as happy or as well amused as I am. I hope, however, you have recovered your health, and that you will be able to visit some of the beautiful scenery of the St. Lawrence this summer; that, at least, you may have some compensation for your effort in crossing the Atlantic. I heard of you from my friend, Miss Sedgwick, whose sympathies were as much excited by your personal acquaintance as her admiration had been by your books. I heard of you, too, from Theodore Fay, whom I saw a short time since, and who gave me a letter of yours to read, which you wrote him from New York. [Mr. Theodore Fay was a graceful writer of prose and poetry, and achieved some literary reputation in his own country; he was for some time United States Minister at Berlin.] Lady Hatherton, whom I met the other evening at old Lady Cork's, was speaking of you with much affection; and all your friends regret your absence from England; and none more sincerely than I, who shall, I fear, have the ill fortune to miss you on both sides of the Atlantic. I find London more beautiful, more rich and royal, than ever; the latter epithet, by-the-bye, applies to external things alone, for I do not think the spirit of the people as royal, _i.e._, loyal, as I used to fancy it was. Liberalism appears to me to have gained a much stronger and wider influence than it had before I went away; liberal opinions have certainly spread, and I suppose will spread indefinitely. Toryism, on the other hand, seems as steadfast in its old strongholds as ever; the Tories, I see, are quite as wedded as formerly to their political faith, but at the same time more afraid of all that is not themselves, more on the defensive, more socially exclusive; I think they mix less with "the other side" than formerly, and are less tolerant of difference of opinion. I find a whole race of _prima donnas_ swept away; Pasta gone and Malibran dead, and their successor, Grisi, does not charm and enchant me as they did, especially when I hear her compared to the former noble singer and actress. When I look at her, beautiful as she is, and think of Pasta, and hear her extolled far above that great queen of song, by the public who cannot yet have forgotten the latter, I am more than ever impressed with the worthlessness of popularity and public applause, and the mistake of those who would so much as stretch out their little finger to obtain it. I came to England just in time to see my father leave the stage, and close his laborious professional career. After a long life of public exhibition, and the glare of excitement which inevitably attends upon it, to withdraw into the sober twilight of private life is a great trial, and I fear he finds it so. His health is not as good as it was while he still exercised his profession, and I think he misses the stimulus of the daily occupation and nightly applause. What a dangerous pursuit that is which weans one from all other resources and interests, and leaves one dependent upon public exhibition for the necessary stimulus of one's existence! This aspect of it alone would make me deprecate that profession for any one I loved; it interferes with every other study, and breaks the thread of every other occupation, and produces mental habits which, even if distasteful at first, gradually become paramount to all others, and, in due time, inveterate; and besides perpetually stimulating one's personal vanity and desire for admiration and applause, directs whatever ambition one has to the least exalted of aims, the production of evanescent effects and transitory emotions. I am thankful that I was removed from the stage before its excitement became necessary to me. That reminds me that, within the last two days, Pasta has returned to England: they say she is to sing at Drury Lane, Grisi having possession of the Opera House. Now, will it not be a pity that she should come in the decline of her fine powers, and subject herself to comparisons with this young woman, whose voice and beauty and popularity are all in their full flower? If I knew Pasta, I think I would go on my knees to beg her not to do it. I find my sister's voice and singing very much improved, and exceedingly charming. She speaks always with warm regard of you, and remembers gratefully your kindness to her. My dear Mrs. Jameson, it is a great disappointment to me that I cannot welcome you to my American home, and be to you that pleasant thing, an old friend in a foreign land. It appears to me that we shall have the singular ill-luck of passing each other on the sea; at least, if it is true that you return in the autumn. Much as I had desired to see my own country again, my visit to it has had one effect which I certainly had not anticipated, and for which I am grateful: it has tended to reconcile me to my present situation in life, comparatively remote as it is from the best refinements of civilization and all the enjoyments of society.... The turmoil and dissipation of a London life, amusing as they are for a time, soon pall upon one, and I already feel, in my diminished relish for them, that I am growing old. To live in the country in England!--that indeed would be happiness and pleasure; but we shall never desert America and the duties that belong to us there, and I should be the last person to desire that we should do so; and so I think henceforth England and I are "Paradises Lost" to each other,--and this is a very strange life; with which "wise saw," but not "modern instance," I will conclude, begging you to believe me, Ever yours most truly, F. A. B. [Madame Pasta did return then to the stage, and her brilliant young rival, Grisi, was to her what the Giessbach would be to a great wave of the Atlantic. But, alas! she returned once more after that to the scene of her former triumphs in London; the power, majesty, and grace of her face, figure, and deportment all gone, her voice painfully impaired and untrue, her great art unable to remedy, in any degree, the failure of her natural powers. She came as an agent and emissary of the political party of Italian liberty, to help the cause of their _Italia Unita_, and our people received her with affectionate respect, for the sake of what she had been; but she accepted their applause with melancholy gestures of disclaimer, and sorrowful head-shaking over her own decline. Those who had never heard or seen her before were inclined to laugh; those who had, _did_ cry. The latent expression of a face is a curious study for the physiognomist, and is sometimes strikingly at variance with that which is habitual, as well as with the general character of the features. That fine and accurate observer of the symptoms of humanity, George Eliot, gives her silly, commonplace, little second-heroine in "Adam Bede," Hester, a pathetic and sentimental expression, to which nothing in her mind or character corresponds, and which must have been an inheritance from some ancestress in whom such an expression had originated with a meaning. Madame Pasta was not handsome, people of uneducated and unrefined taste might have called her plain; but she had that indescribable quality which painters value almost above all others--style, and a power and sweetness of expression, and a grandeur and grace of demeanor, that I have never seen surpassed. She was not handsome, certainly; but she was _beautiful_, and never, by any chance, looked common or vulgar. Madame Grisi was almost perfectly handsome; the symmetry of her head and bust, and the outline of her features resembled the ideal models of classical art--it was the form and face of a Grecian goddess; and her rare natural gifts of musical utterance and personal loveliness won for her, very justly, the great admiration she excited, and the popularity she so long enjoyed. In a woman of far other and higher endowments, that wonderful actress, Rachel, whose face and figure, under the transforming influence of her consummate dramatic art, were the perfect interpreters of her perfect tragic conceptions, an ignoble, low-lived expression occasionally startled and dismayed one, on a countenance as much more noble and intellectual, as it was less beautiful than Grisi's,--the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual disgrace, which made it possible for one of her literary countrymen and warmest admirers to say that she was adorable, because she was so "_déliceusement canaille_." Emilie, Camille, Esther, Pauline, such a "delightful blackguard"! Grazia, the Juno of the Roman sculptors of her day, their model of severe classical beauty, had a perfectly stolid absence of all expression; she was like one of the oxen of her own Campagna, a splendid, serious-looking animal. No animal is ever vulgar, except some dogs, who live too much with men for the interest of their dignity, and catch the infection of _the_ human vice. With us coarse-featured English, and our heavy-faced Teutonic kinsfolk, a thick outline and snub features are generally supposed to be the vulgar attributes of our lower classes; but the predominance of spirit over matter vindicates itself strikingly across the Atlantic, where, in the lowest strata of society, the native American rowdy, with a face as pure in outline as an ancient Greek coin, and hands and feet as fine as those of a Norman noble, strikes one dumb with the aspect of a countenance whose vile, ignoble hardness can triumph over such refinement of line and delicacy of proportion. A human soul has a wonderful supremacy over the matter which it _informs_. The American is a whole nation with well-made, regular noses; from which circumstance (and a few others), I believe in their future superiority over all other nations. But the _lowness_ their faces are capable of "flogs Europe."] BANNISTERS, August 1st, 1837. MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON, After a riotous London season, my family has broken itself into small pieces and dispersed. My mother is at her cottage in Surrey, where she intends passing the rest of the summer; my father and sister are gone to Carlsbad--is not that spirited?--though indeed they journey in search of health, rather than pleasure. My father has been far from well for some time past, and has at length been literally packed off by Dr. Granville, to try the Bohemian waters. I am at present staying with my friends, the Fitz Hughs, at Bannisters. I leave this place on Friday for Liverpool, where I shall await the arrival of the American packet; after that, we have several visits to pay, and I hope, when we have achieved them, to join my father and Adelaide at Carlsbad. I am pretty sure that we shall winter in America; for, indeed, I was to have written to you, to beg you to spend that season with us in Philadelphia, but as I had already received your intimation of your intended return to England in the autumn, I knew that such an offer would not suit your plans. How glad you will be to see England again! and how glad your friends will be to see you again! Miss Martineau, who was speaking of you with great kindness the other day, added that your publishers would rejoice to see you too. I do not know whether her book on America has yet reached you. It has been universally read, and though by no means agreeable to the opinions of the majority, I think its whole tone has impressed everybody with respect for her moral character, her integrity, her benevolence, and her courage. She tells me she is going to publish another work upon America, containing more of personal narrative and local description; after which, I believe, she thinks of writing a novel. I shall be quite curious to see how she succeeds in the latter undertaking. The stories and descriptions of her political tales were charming; but whether she can carry herself through a work of imagination of any length with the same success, I do not feel sure. I saw the Montagues, and Procters, and Chorley (who is, I believe, a friend of yours), pretty often while I was in London, and they were my chief informers as to your state of being, doing, and suffering. I am sorry that the latter has formed so large a portion of your experience in that strange and desolate land of your present sojourn. You do not say in your last letter whether you intend visiting the United States before your return, or shall merely pass through so much of them as will bring you to the port from which you sail. As I am not there to see you, I should hardly regret your not traveling through them; for, in spite of your popularity, which is very great in all parts of the country that I have visited, I do not think American tastes, manners, and modes of being would be, upon the whole, congenial to you. I believe I told you how I had met your friend, Lady Hatherton, at a party at old Lady Cork's, and how kindly she inquired after you.... We are here in the midst of the elections, with which the whole country is in an uproar just now. My friends are immovable Tories, and I had the satisfaction of being personally hissed (which I never was before), in honor of their principles, as I drove through the town of Southampton to-day in their carriage. The death of poor old King William, and the accession of the little lady, his niece, must be stale news, even with you, now. She was the last excitement of the public before the "dissolution of London," and her position is certainly a most interesting one. Poor young creature! at eighteen to bear such a burden of responsibility! I should think the mere state and grandeur, and slow-paced solemnity of her degree, enough to strike a girl of that age into a melancholy, without all the other graver considerations and causes for care and anxiety which belong to it. I dare say, whatever she may think now, before many years are over she would be heartily glad to have a small pension of £30,000 a year, and leave to "go and play," like common folk of fortune. But, to be sure, if "_noblesse oblige_," royalty must do so still more, or, at any rate, on a wider scale; and so I take up my burden again--poor young Queen of England!... Emily sends you her best remembrances.... We shall certainly remain in England till October, so that I feel sure that I shall have the pleasure of seeing you here before I return to my _other_ country--for I reckon that I have two; though, as the old woman said, and you know, "between two stools," etc. I should have thought you and Sir Francis Head would have become infinite cronies. I hear he is so very clever; and as you tell me he says so many fine things of me, I believe it. Ever yours most truly, F. A. B. [The admirable novel of "Deerbrook" sufficiently answered all who had ever doubted Miss Martineau's capacity for that order of composition; in spite of Sydney Smith's determination that no village "poticary," as he called it, might, could, would, or ever should, be a hero of romance, and the incessant ridicule with which he assailed the choice of such a one. If, he contended, he takes his mistress's hand with the utmost fervor of a lover, he will, by the mere force of habit, end by feeling her pulse; if, under strong emotion, she faints away, he will have no salts but Epsom about him, wherewith to restore her suspended vitality; he will put cream of tartar in her tea, and (a) flower of brimstone in her bosom. There was no end to the fun he made of "the medicinal lover," as he called him. Nevertheless, the public accepted the Deerbrook M. D., and all the paraphernalia of gallipots, pill-boxes, vials, salves, ointments, with which the facetious divine always represented him as surrounded; and vindicated, by its approval, the authoress's choice of a hero. I do not know whether Mr. Gibson is not, to me, decidedly the hero of Mrs. Gaskell's "Wives and Daughters." I like him infinitely better than all the younger men of the story; and I think the preponderating interest with which one closes George Eliot's wonderful "Middlemarch" is decidedly in behalf of Lydgate, the country surgeon and hospital doctor. To be sure, we have come a long way since the Liberalism of Sydney Smith and 1837. I was indebted to my kind friend, Lord Lansdowne, for the memorable pleasure of being present at the first meeting between Queen Victoria and her Houses of Parliament. The occasion, which is always one of interest when a new sovereign performs the solemnity, was rendered peculiarly so by the age and sex of the sovereign. Every person who, by right or favor, could be present, was there; and no one of that great assembly will ever forget the impression made upon them. Lady Lansdowne, who was Mistress of the Robes, was herself an important member of the group round the throne, and I went with her niece, Lady Valletort, under Lord Lansdowne's escort, to places most admirably situated for hearing and seeing the whole ceremony. The queen was not handsome, but very pretty, and the singularity of her great position lent a sentimental and poetical charm to her youthful face and figure. The serene, serious sweetness of her candid brow and clear soft eyes gave dignity to the girlish countenance, while the want of height only added to the effect of extreme youth of the round but slender person, and gracefully moulded hands and arms. The queen's voice was exquisite; nor have I ever heard any spoken words more musical in their gentle distinctness, than the "My Lords and Gentlemen" which broke the breathless silence of the illustrious assembly, whose gaze was riveted upon that fair flower of royalty. The enunciation was as perfect as the intonation was melodious, and I think it is impossible to hear a more excellent utterance than that of the queen's English, by the English queen.] WEDNESDAY, July 26th, 1837. _Bannisters!_ (Think of that, Master Brook!!) DEAREST H----, These overflowing spirits of mine all come of a gallop of fifteen miles I have been taking with dear Emily, over breezy commons and through ferny pine-woods, and then coming home and devouring luncheon as fast as it could be swallowed; and so you get the result of all this physical excitement in these very animal spirits; and if my letter is "all sound and fury, signifying nothing," under the circumstances how can I help it? That rather ill-conducted person, Ninon de l'Enclos, I believe, said her soup got into her head; and though "comparisons are odious," and I should be loth to suggest any between that wonderful no-better-than-she-should-be and myself, beyond all doubt my luncheon has got into my head, though I drank nothing but water with it; but I rather think violent exercise in the cold air, followed immediately by eating, will produce a certain amount of intoxication, just as easily as stimulating drink would. I suppose it is only a question of accelerated circulation, with a slight tendency of blood to the head. However that may be, I wish you would speak to Emily (you needn't bawl, though you are in Ireland), and tell her to hold her tongue and not disturb me. She is profanely laughing at a sermon of Dr. South's, and interrupting me in this serious letter to you with absurd questions about such nonsense as Life, Death, and Immortality. I can't get on for her a bit, so add her to the cold ride and the hot lunch in the list of causes of this crazy epistle--I mean, the causes of its craziness. Do you know old South? I don't believe you do even this much of him:-- "Old South, a witty Churchman reckoned, Was preaching once to Charles the Second: When lo! the King began to nod, Deaf to the zealous man of God; Who, leaning o'er his pulpit, cried To Lauderdale by Charles's side:-- 'My Lord, why, 'tis a shameful thing! You snore so loud, you'll wake the King!'" I quote by memory, through my luncheon, and I dare say all wrong; but it doesn't matter, for I don't believe you know it a bit better than I remember it. I and my baby came here on Monday, and shall stay until to-morrow week; after that I go to Liverpool, to meet and be met; and after that I know nothing, of course.... If, however, by that time you are likely to be near London, we will come up thither forthwith, and you must come and stay in Park Place with us. We shall be alone keeping house there; for my mother is in the country, and my father and Adelaide are going to Carlsbad, where we think to join them by-and-by; in the mean time, we hope to enjoy ourselves much sight-seeing all over London, which we shall then have entirely to ourselves; and you had better come and help us. Good-bye, dearest H----. Yours ever, F. A. B. [This letter was written from Bannisters, the charming country home of my dear friend, Miss Fitz Hugh. For years it had been a resort of rest for Mrs. Siddons, who was always made welcome as one of her own sisters, by Mrs. Fitz Hugh; and for years it was a resort of rest for me, to whom my friend was as devoted as her mother had been to my aunt.] LIVERPOOL, Saturday, August 17th, 1837. MY DEAREST HARRIET, I have but one instant in which to write. I hope this will meet you at Emily's, in Orchard Street [No. 18 Orchard Street, Portman Square, Mr. Fitz Hugh's town house]; it is to entreat you to remain there until I come to town, which must be in less than a week.... I left Bannisters--most unnecessarily, as it has proved--a fortnight ago, which time I have been spending in heart-eating suspense, waiting in vain, and bolstering up my patience, which kept sinking every day more and more, like an empty sack put to stand upright. I have, since I arrived here, received a letter which has caused me considerable distress, inasmuch as I find I must leave England without again seeing my father and Adelaide, who are gone to Carlsbad in the full expectation of our joining them there.... The political body upon whose movements ours are just now depending has not dispersed, but is merely adjourned to the 17th October. This allows its absent member but a few days in Europe, as we must sail on the 8th September; and those few days are gradually becoming fewer in consequence of this long prevalence of contrary winds, which is keeping the vessel just at the entrance of the Channel, within one good day's sail of me. All this is a trial, and my heart has sunk, as hour after hour I have watched that watery horizon, and seen the masts appear and disappear, and yet no tidings of the ship I look for. I have ridden, bathed, tried to write, tried to read, marked my Shakespeare for you, and laid my hand--but, God knows, not with all my heart--to whatsoever I found to do: still I have been ashamed and displeased at the little command I have achieved over my impatience, and the little use I have made of my time. It has been my great good fortune to meet with old friends, and to make new ones, during this period of my probation; and never was kindly intercourse more needed and more appreciated. But, after all, is it not always thus? and are not unexpected pleasures and enjoyments furnished us quite as often as the trials which render them doubly welcome? 'Tis now the 14th of August, and yet no tidings of that ship. There is no ground whatever for anxiety, for it is the prevalence of calm, and light contrary winds, which alone delay its arrival. Dearest Harriet, I shall soon see you again, and will not that be a blessing to both of us? Farewell, my dear friend. How long it is since we have been even thus near each other! how long since we have hoped so soon to hear each other's voice! Ever your affectionate, F. A. B. [This letter was written from Crosby, a little strip of sandy beach, three miles from Liverpool, to which I betook myself with my child, rather than remain in the noisy, smoky town, while waiting for the arrival of the vessel from America which I was expecting. I dare say Crosby is by this time a flourishing, fashionable bathing-place. It was then a mere row of very humble seaside lodging-houses, where persons constrained as I was to remain in the close vicinity of Liverpool, were able to obtain fresh air, salt water, and an uninterrupted sea view. A Liverpool lady told me that, having once spent some weeks at this place one summer, her son, a lad of about twelve years old, used to ride along the sands to Liverpool every day for his lessons, and that she could see him through the telescope all the way to the first houses on the outskirt of the town. Just about midway, however, there was a spot of treacherous quicksand, and I confess I wondered at my friend's courage in watching her boy pass that point: he knew it well, and was little likely to take his pony too near it; but I confess I would rather have trusted to his caution to avoid the place, than watched him pass it through a telescope. From Liverpool, the long-expected ship having arrived, we went to London, and spent as much time with our friends there and elsewhere as our very limited leisure would then allow; and by the 10th of September, we were again on the edge of English ground, about to sail for the United States.] LIVERPOOL, Friday, September 8th, 1837. MY DEAR LADY DACRE, My time in England is growing painfully short, for the watch says half-past eleven, and at two o'clock I shall be on board the ship. My promise, as well as my desire, urge me to write you a few parting words. And yet what can they be, that may give you the slightest pleasure? My parting with my poor mother was calmer than I had ventured to anticipate, and I thank Heaven that I was not obliged to leave England without seeing her once more. I have heard from my sister, who had just received the news of my sudden departure from England when she wrote. She was bitterly disappointed; but yet I think this unexpected parting without seeing each other again is perhaps well. Our last leave-taking, when she started with my father for Carlsbad, was quite cheerful, because we looked soon to meet again. We have been spared those exceedingly painful moments of clinging to what we are condemned to lose, and in the midst of novelty and variety she will miss me far less than had I left her lonely, in the home where we have been together for the past year. Dear Lady Dacre, pray, if it is in your power to show her kindness at any time, do so; but I am sure that you would, and that such a request on my part is unnecessary. The days that we spent in London after leaving you formed a sad contrast to the happy time we enjoyed at the Hoo. We were plunged in bustle and confusion; up to our eyes in trunks, packing-cases, carpet-bags, and valises; and I don't believe Marius in the middle of his Carthaginian ruins was more thoroughly _uncomfortable_ than I, in my desolate, box-encumbered rooms. You know that we were disappointed of our visit to Bowood, but we spent a few days delightfully at Bannisters, and I am happy to say that _we_ are leaving England with the desire and determination to return as soon as possible. I found on my arrival here a most pressing and cordial invitation from Sydney Smith (I cannot call him Mr.) to Combe Flory, which, like many other pleasant things, must be foregone. Pray, if you are with him when or after you receive this, thank him again for his kindness and courtesy to us. I did not quite like him, you know, when first I met him at Rogers's; but that was Lady Holland's fault; even now, his being a clergyman hurts my mind a little sometimes, and I fancy I should like him more entirely if he were not so. I have a superstitious veneration for the cloth, which his free-and-easy wearing of it occasionally disturbs a little; but I feel deeply honored by his notice, and most grateful for the good-will which he expresses towards me, and should have been too glad to have heard him laugh once more at his own jokes, which I acknowledge he does with a better grace than any man alive,--though the last time I had that pleasure it was at my own expense: I gave him an admirable chance, and I think he used his advantage most unmercifully. And now, dear Lady Dacre, what message will you give your kind and good husband from me? May I, with "one foot on land and one on sea," send him word that I love him almost as well as I do you? This shall rest with you, however. Pray thank him with all my heart, as I do you, for your manifold kindnesses to me. God bless and preserve you both, and those you love! Remember me most kindly to Mrs. Sullivan. I cannot tell you how my heart is _squeezed_, as the French say, at going away. Luckily, I am too busy to cry to-day, and to-morrow I shall be too sea-sick, and so, farewell! Believe me, my dear Lady Dacre, Yours affectionately, F. A. B. [The occasion of my becoming acquainted with my admirable and very kind friend, the Rev. Sydney Smith, was a dinner at Mr. Rogers's, to which I had been asked to meet Lord and Lady Holland, by special desire, as I was afterwards informed, of the latter, who, during dinner, drank out of her neighbor's (Sydney Smith's) glass, and otherwise behaved herself with the fantastic, despotic impropriety in which she frequently indulged, and which might have been tolerated in a spoilt beauty of eighteen, but was hardly becoming in a woman of her age and "personal appearance." When first I came out on the stage, my father and mother, who occasionally went to Holland House, received an invitation to dine there, which included me; after some discussion, which I did not then understand, it was deemed expedient to decline the invitation for me, and I neither knew the grounds of my parents' decision, nor of how brilliant and delightful a society it had then closed the door to me. On my return to England after my marriage, Lady Holland's curiosity revived with regard to me, and she desired Rogers to ask me to meet her at dinner, which I did; and the impression she made upon me was so disagreeable that, for a time, it involved every member of that dinner-party in a halo of undistinguishing dislike in my mind. My sister had joined us in the evening, and sat for a few moments by Lady Holland, who dropped her handkerchief. Adelaide, who was as unpleasantly impressed as myself by that lady, for a moment made no attempt to pick it up; but, reflecting upon her age and size, which made it difficult for her to stoop for it herself, my sister picked it up and presented it to her, when Lady Holland, taking it from her, merely said, "Ah! I thought you'd do it." Adelaide said she felt an almost irresistible inclination to twitch it from her hand, throw it on the ground again, and say, "Did you? then now do it yourself!" Altogether the evening was unsuccessful, if its purpose had been an acquaintance between Lady Holland and myself; and I remember a grotesque climax to my dissatisfaction in the destruction of a lovely nosegay of exquisite flowers which my sister had brought with her, and which, towards the middle of the evening, mysteriously disappeared, and was looked for and inquired for in vain, until poor Lord Holland, who was then dependent upon the assistance of two servants to move from his seat, being raised from the sofa on which he had been deposited when he was brought up from the dining-room, the flowers, which Adelaide had left there, were discovered, pressed as flat as if for preservation in a book of botanical specimens. The kindly, good-natured gentleman departed, luckily, without knowing the mischief he had done, or seeing my sister's face of ludicrous dismay at the condition of her flowers; which Sydney Smith, however, observed, and in a minute exclaimed, "Ah! I see! Oh dear, oh dear, what a pity! Hot-bed! hot-bed!" It has always been a matter of amazement to me that Lady Holland should have been allowed to ride rough-shod over society, as she did for so long, with such complete impunity. To be sure, in society, well-bred persons are always at the mercy of ill-bred ones, who have an immense advantage over everybody who shrinks from turning a social gathering into closed lists for the exchange of impertinences; and people gave way to Lady Holland's domineering rudeness for the sake of their hosts and fellow-guests, and spared her out of consideration for them. Another reason for the toleration shown Lady Holland was the universal esteem and affectionate respect felt for her husband, whose friends accepted her and her peculiarities for his sake, and could certainly have given no stronger proof of their regard for him. The most powerful inducement to patience, however, to the London society upon which Lady Holland habitually trampled, was the immense attraction of her house and of the people who frequented it. Holland House was, for a series of years, the most brilliant, charming, and altogether delightful social resort. Beautiful, comfortable, elegant, picturesque,--an ideal house, full of exquisite objects and interesting associations, where persons the most distinguished for birth, position, mental accomplishments, and intellectual gifts, met in a social atmosphere of the highest cultivation and the greatest refinement,--the most perfect civilization could produce nothing more perfect in the way of enjoyment than the intercourse of that delightful mansion. As Lady Tankerville pathetically exclaimed on Lady Holland's death, "Ah! poore, deare Lady 'Olland! what shall we do? It was such a pleasant 'ouse!"--admission to which was, to most of its frequenters, well worth some toleration of its mistress's brusqueries. If, as a friend of mine once assured me (a well-born, well-bred man of the best English society), it was quite well worth while to "eat a little dirt" to get the _entrée_ of Stafford House, I incline to think the spoonfuls of dirt Lady Holland occasionally administered to her friends were accepted by them as the equivalent for the delights of her "pleasant 'ouse"; and that I did not think so, and had no desire to go there upon those terms, was, I imagine, the only thing that excited Lady Holland's curiosity about me, or her desire to have me for her guest. She complained to Charles Greville that I would not let her become acquainted with me, and twice after our first unavailing meeting at Rogers's, made him ask me to meet her again: each time, however, with no happier result. The first time, after making herself generally obnoxious at dinner, she at length provoked Rogers, who, the conversation having fallen upon the subject of beautiful hair, and Lady Holland saying, "Why, Rogers, only a few years ago, I had such a head of hair that I could hide myself in it, and I've lost it all," merely answered, "What a pity!"--but with such a tone that an exultant giggle ran round the table at her expense. After dinner, when the unfortunate female members of the party had to encounter Lady Holland unprotected, she singled out one of the ladies of the Baring family, to whom, however, she evidently meant to be particularly gracious; not, I think, without some intention of also pleasing me by her patronizing laudation of American people and American things; winding up with, "You know, my dear, we are Americans." The young Baring lady, who may or may not have been as familiar as I was with the Bingham and Baring alliances of early times in Philadelphia, merely raised her eyebrows, and said, "Indeed!" while I kept my lips close and breathed no syllable of Longfellow's house near Boston, which had been not only Washington's temporary abode, but the residence, in colonial days, of the Vassalls, to whom Lady Holland belonged, and where Longfellow showed me one day an iron plate at the back of one of the fire-places, with the rebus, the punning arms (_Armoiries parlantes_) of the Vassall family: a vase with a sun above it, _Vas Sol_. _Je suis méchante, ma chére_, as Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter; _et cela m'a fait plaisir_, to suppress the nice little anecdote which might have helped Lady Holland on so pleasantly just at that juncture. But, holding one's tongue because one chooses, and being compelled to hold one's tongue by somebody else, is quite a different thing; and I am not sure that the main reason of my dislike to Lady Holland is not that I held my tongue to "spite her" during the whole course of the last dinner-party to which Rogers invited me to meet her. The party consisted of fewer men than women, and Lady ---- and myself agreed to take each other down to dinner, which we did. Just, however, as we were seating ourselves, Lady Holland called out from the opposite side of the table, "No, no, ladies, I can't allow that; I must have Mrs. Butler by me, if you please." Thus challenged, I could not, without making a scene with Lady Holland, and beginning the poet's banquet with a shock to everybody present, refuse her very dictatorial behest; and therefore I left my friendly neighbor, Lady ----, and went round to the place assigned me by the imperious autocratess of the dinner-table: between herself and Dr. Allen ("the gentle infidel," "Lady Holland's atheist," as he was familiarly called by her familiars). But though one man may take the mare to the water, no given number of men can make her drink; so, having accepted my place, I determined my complaisance should end there, and, in spite of all Lady Holland's conversational efforts, and her final exclamation, "Allen! do get Mrs. Butler to talk! We _really must_ make her talk!" I held my peace, and kept the peace, which I could have done upon no other conditions; but the unnatural and unwholesome effort disagreed with me so dreadfully, that I have a return of dyspepsia whenever I think of it, which I think justifies me in my dislike of Lady Holland.... I do not feel inclined to attribute to any motive but a kindly one, the attention Lady Holland showed my father during a severe indisposition of his, not long after this; though, upon her driving to his door one day with some peculiarly delicate jelly she had had made for him, Frederick Byng (Poodle, as he was always called by his intimates, on account of his absurd resemblance to a dog of that species), seeing the remorseful gratitude on my face as I received her message of inquiry after my father, exclaimed, "Now, she's done it! now, she's won it! now, she's got you, and you'll go to Holland House!" "No, I won't," said I, "but I'll go down to the carriage, and thank her!" which I immediately did, without stopping to put a bonnet on my head. Lady Holland was held, by those who knew her, to be a warm and constant friend, and had always been cordially kind to my father and my brother John. After Lord Holland's death she left Holland House, and took up her abode in South Street near the Park. One morning, when I was calling on Lady Charlotte Lindsay, Lady Morley came in, and being reproached by Lady Charlotte for not having come to a party at her house on the previous evening, in which reproach I joined, having been also a loser by her absence from that same party, "Couldn't," said the lively lady, "for I was spending the evening with the pleasantest, most amiable, gentlest-mannered, sweetest-tempered, and most charming woman in all London--Lady Holland!" A conversation then ensued, in which certainly little quarter was shown to the ill qualities of the former mistress of Holland House. Among several curious instances of her unaccountably unamiable conduct to some of even Lord Holland's dearest friends, who, for his sake, opened their houses to her, allowed her to come thither, bespeaking her own rooms--her own company, who she would meet and who she would bring, and in every way consulting her pleasure and convenience, as was invariably the case on the occasion of her visits to Panshanger and Woburn,--Lady Morley said that Landseer had told her, that he was walking one day by the side of Lady Holland's wheel-chair, in the grounds of Holland House, and, stopping at a particularly pretty spot, had said, "Oh, Lady Holland! this is the part of your place of which the Duchess of Bedford has such a charming view from her house on the hill above." "Is it?" said Lady Holland; and immediately gave orders that the paling-fence round that part of her grounds should be raised so as to cut off the Duchess's view into them. Upon my venturing to express my surprise that anybody should go to the house of a person of whom they told such anecdotes, Lady Morley replied, "She is the only woman in the world of whom one does tell such things and yet goes to see her. She is the most miserable woman in England; she is entirely alone now, and she cannot bear to be alone, and, for his sake who was the dearest and most excellent and amiable creature that ever breathed, one goes on going to her, as I shall till she or I die." But what a description of the last days of the mistress of Holland House! Sidney Smith, with whom I had become well acquainted when I wrote the letter to Lady Dacre in which I mention him, used to amuse himself, and occasionally some of my other friends, by teasing me on the subject of what he called my hallucination with regard to my having married in America. He never allowed any allusion to the circumstance without the most comical expressions of regret for this, as he called it, curious form of monomania. On the occasion to which I refer in this letter, he and Mrs. Smith had met some friends at dinner at our house, and I was taking leave of them, previous to my departure for Liverpool, when he exclaimed, "Now do, my dear child, be persuaded to give up this extraordinary delusion; let it, I beg, be recorded of us both, that this pleasing and intelligent young lady labored under the singular and distressingly insane idea that she had contracted a marriage with an American; from which painful hallucination she was eventually delivered by the friendly exhortations of a learned and pious divine, the Rev. Sydney Smith." Everybody round us was in fits of laughter, as he affectionately held my hand, and thus paternally admonished me. I held up my left hand with its wedding-ring, and began, "Oh, but the baby!" when the ludicrous look with which my reverend tormentor received this overwhelming testimony of mine, threw the whole company into convulsions, and nothing was heard throughout the room but sighs and sobs of exhaustion, and faint ejaculations and cries for mercy, while everybody was wiping tears of laughter from their eyes. As for me, I covered up my face, and very nearly went into hysterics. The special and reportable sallies of Sydney Smith have been, of course, often repeated, but the fanciful fun and inexhaustible humorous drollery of his conversation among his intimates can never be adequately rendered or reproduced. He bubbled over with mirth, of which his own enjoyment formed an irresistible element, he shook, and his eyes glistened at his own ludicrous ideas, as they dawned upon his brain; and it would be impossible to convey the faintest idea of the genial humor of his habitual talk by merely repeating separate witticisms and repartees. On that same evening, at my father's house, the comparative cheapness of living abroad and in England having been discussed, Sydney Smith declared that, for his part, he had never found foreign quarters so much more reasonable than home ones, or foreign hotels less exorbitant in their charges. "I know I never could live under fifty pounds a week," said he. "Oh, but how did you live?" was the next question. "Why, as a canon should live," proudly retorted he; "and they charged me as enemy's ordnance." A question having arisen one evening at Miss Berry's as to the welcome Lady Sale would receive in London society after her husband's heroic conduct, and her heroic participation in it, during the Afghan war, Miss Berry, who, for some reason or other, did not admire Lady Sale as much as everybody else did, said she should not ask her to come to her house. "Oh, yes! pooh! pooh! you will," exclaimed Sydney Smith; "you'll have her, he'll have her, they'll have her, we'll have her. She'll be Sale by auction!" Later on that same evening, it being asked what Lord Dalhousie would get for his successful exploit in carrying of the gates of some Indian town, "Why," cried Lady Morley, "he will be created Duke Samson Afghanistes." It was pleasant living among people who talked such nonsense as that. A party having been made to go and see the Boa Constrictor soon after its first arrival at the Zoölogical Gardens, Sydney Smith, who was to have been there, failed to come; and, questioned at dinner why he had not done so, said, "Because I was detained by the Bore Contradictor--Hallam"--whose propensity to controvert people's propositions was a subject of irritation to some of his friends, less retentive of memory and accurate in statement than himself. Sydney Smith, not unnaturally, preferred conversation to music; and at a musical party one evening, as he was stealing on tip-toe from the concert-room to one more remote from the performance, I held up my finger at him, when he whispered, "My dear, it's all right. You keep with the dilettanti; I go with the talkettanti." Afterwards, upon my expostulating with him, and telling him that by such habits he was running a risk of being called to order on some future eternal day with "Angel Sydney Smith, hush!" if he did not learn to endure music better, he replied, "Oh, no, no! I'm cultivating a judicious second expressly for those occasions." Of his lamentations for the "flashes of silence" which, he said, at one time made Macaulay's intercourse possible, one has heard; but when he was so ill that all his friends were full of anxiety about him, M----, having called to see him, and affectionately asking what sort of night he had passed, Sydney Smith replied, "Oh, horrid, horrid, my dear fellow! I dreamt I was chained to a rock and being talked to death by Harriet Martineau and Macaulay." Rogers's keen-edged wit seemed to cut his lips as he uttered it; Sydney Smith's was without sting or edge or venomous point of malice, and his genial humor was really the overflowing of a kindly heart. Rogers's helpful benevolence and noble generosity to poor artists, poor authors, and all distressed whom he could serve or succor, was unbounded; he certainly had the kindest heart and the unkindest tongue of any one I ever knew. His benefits remind me of a comical story my dear friend Harness once told me, of a poor woman at whose lamentations over her various hardships one of his curates was remonstrating, "Oh, come, come now, my good woman, you must allow that Providence has been, upon the whole, very good to you." "So He 'ave, sir; so He 'ave, mostly. I don't deny it; but I sometimes think He 'ave taken it out in corns." I think Rogers took out his benevolence, in some directions, in the corns he inflicted, or, at any rate, trod upon, in others. Mr. Rogers's inveterate tongue-gall was like an irresistible impulse, and he certainly bestowed it occasionally, without the least provocation, upon persons whom he professed to like. He was habitually kind to me, and declared he was fond of me. One evening (just after the publication of my stupid drama, "The Star of Seville"), he met me with a malignant grin, and the exclamation, "Ah, I've just been reading your play. So nice! young poetry!"--with a diabolical _dig_ of emphasis on the "_young_." "Now, Mr. Rogers," said I, "what did I do to deserve that you should say that to me?" I do not know whether this appeal disarmed him, but his only answer was to take me affectionately by the chin, much as if he had been my father. When I told my sister of this, she, who was a thousand times quicker-witted than I, said, "Why didn't you tell him that young poetry was better than old?" Walking one day in the Green Park, I met Mr. Rogers and Wordsworth, who took me between them, and I continued my walk in great glory and exultation of spirit, listening to Rogers, and hearing Wordsworth,--the gentle rill of the one speech broken into and interrupted by sudden loud splashes of the other; when Rogers, who had vainly been trying to tell some anecdote, pathetically exclaimed, "He won't let me tell my story!" I immediately stopped, and so did Wordsworth, and during this halt Rogers finished his recital. Presently afterwards, Wordsworth having left us, Rogers told me that he (Mr. Wordsworth), in a visit he had been lately paying at Althorpe, was found daily in the magnificent library, but never without a volume of his own poetry in his hand. Years after this, when I used to go and sit with Mr. Rogers, I never asked him what I should read to him without his putting into my hands his own poems, which always lay by him on his table. A comical instance of the rivalry of wits (surely as keen as that of beauties) occurred one day when Mr. Rogers had been calling on me and speaking of that universal social favorite, Lady Morley, had said, "There is but one voice against her in all England, and that is her own." (A musical voice was the only charm wanting to Lady Morley's delightful conversation.) I was enchanted with this pretty and appropriate epigram, so unlike in its tone to Mr. Rogers's usual _friendly_ comments; and, very soon after he left me, Sydney Smith coming in, I told him how clever and how pleasant a remark the "departed" poet (Sydney Smith often spoke of Rogers as dead, on account of his cadaverous complexion) had made on Lady Morley's voice. "He never said it," exclaimed my second illustrious visitor. "But he did, Mr. Smith, to me, in this room, not half an hour ago." "He never _made_ it; it isn't his, it isn't a bit like him." To all which I could only repeat that, nevertheless, he _had_ said it, and that, whether he made it or not, it was extremely well made. Presently Sydney Smith went away. I was living in upper Grosvenor Street, close to Park Lane; and he in Green Street, in the near neighborhood. But I believe he must have run from my house to his own, so short was the interval of time, before I received the following note: "Dans toute l'Angleterre il n'y a qu'une voix contre moi, et c'est la mienne." Then followed the signature of a French lady of the eighteenth century, and these words: "What a dear, innocent, confiding, credulous creature you are! and how you _do_ love Rogers! "SYDNEY SMITH." When I was leaving England, I received two most kind and affectionate letters from him, bidding me farewell, and exhorting me, in a most comical and yet pathetic manner, to be courageous and of good cheer in returning to America. One of these epistles ended thus: "Don't forget me, whatever you do; talk of me sometimes, call me Butler's Hudibras, and believe me always. "Affectionately yours, "SYDNEY SMITH."] LIVERPOOL, Monday, September 11th, 1837. Here we are again, dearest Harriet, returned from our ship, after a wretched day and night spent on board of her most unnecessarily. When we reached the quay yesterday morning, we saw the vessel lying under close-reefed sails; the favorable wind had died away, and the captain, whom we found standing on the wharf, said that, it being Sunday morning, he did not know how he should get a steamboat to tow us out. All this seemed to me very much like not sailing, and I begged not to go on board; at all events, I proposed, if we did not sail, that we should return to shore, and received a promise that we certainly should do so; so we went off in a small boat to the ship. She is crowded to excess, and the greater proportion of passengers are emigrant women and children.... I busied myself in stowing away everything in our state-room, and removing the upper berth so as to secure a little more breathing space. I even was guilty of the illicit proceeding--committed the outrage, in fact--of endeavoring to break one of my bull's-eyes, preferring being drenched to dry suffocation in foul air; but my utmost violence, even assisted with an iron rod, was ineffectual, and I had to give up breaking that window as a bad job. I found Margery's state-room one chaos of confusion, she at the same time protesting that everything was as tidily disposed of as possible; so I had to stand by and show her where to put every individual article, and having cleared the small space of the heap of superfluous things with which it was crammed, and removed the upper berth, I left it to her option whether she or baby should occupy the floor at night. At about half-past ten the captain came on board to say that we should not sail then, but if the wind grew fair, we _might perhaps_ sail in the afternoon. He then took himself off the vessel, the wind was fast veering to dead ahead, ... and, with an aching heart and head, I remained in my berth all day long. In the night a perfect gale arose, the ship dragged her anchor for two miles, and we had thus much consolation that, had we put to sea, we should have encountered a violent storm, and, in all probability been driven back into the Mersey. This morning the wind was still contrary, and so we at length exerted ourselves to return to shore. Had we done so yesterday in good time--or, rather, not gone on board at all, you and I might have spent two more days together, and the baby and myself been spared considerable misery. But lamenting cures nothing; ... but I wish we never had left the quay yesterday morning, for everything showed against the probability of our sailing, and so here we are back in our old quarters at the Star and Garter, and you are gone. We have taken places at the theater for this evening, to see Macready in "Macbeth." The Captain says we are to sail to-morrow morning, but I shall do my utmost this time to avoid going on board except in his company; and then, I think, we shall perhaps have some chance of not spending another day in vain in our sea-prison. Ever your affectionate, F. A. B. [The foregoing letter gives some idea of the difference between crossing from England to the United States in those days, and in these; when a telegram bears the defiance to fate of this message: "We sail in the _Russia_ on the 3d; have dinner for us at the Adelphi on the 11th."] PHILADELPHIA, Sunday, October 29th, 1837. MY DEAREST HARRIET, We landed in New York, ten days ago, _i.e._, on Friday, the 20th October; and had we come on immediately hither, your letter would have been just in time to greet me on my arrival here; but our passage was of thirty-seven days, stormy as well as tedious, and I was so ill that I did not leave my bed six times during the crossing; the consequence was, that on landing I looked more like a ghost than a living creature, and was so reduced in strength as hardly to be able to stand, so we remained in New York a few days, till I was able to travel.... Our fellow-passengers, the women, I mean, were rather vulgar, commonplace people, with whom I should not have had much sympathy, had I been well. As it was, I saw but little of them, and may consider that one of the counterbalancing advantages of having suffered so much. One of them was in circumstances which interested me a good deal, though there was little in herself to do so. Her husband was a Staffordshire potter, and had gone to the United States to establish a pottery there; to begin the building up of a large concern, and lay the foundation for probable future wealth and prosperity. He had been gone two years, and she was now going out to join him with their four children. In his summons to her after this long separation, he told her that all had prospered with him, that he had bought a large tract of land, found excellent soil, water, and means of every description for his manufacturing purposes, obtained a patent, and established his business, and was every way likely to thrive and be successful. What hope, what energy, what enterprise, what industry, in but two years of one human existence! What a world of doubt, of distressful anxiety and misgiving in the heart of the woman, left to patient expectation, to prayerful, tearful hopes and fears! What trust in man and faith in God during those two years! And now, with her children, she was coming to rejoin her helpmate, and begin life all over again, with him and them, in a strange country, in the midst of strangers, with everything strange about her. I lay thinking with much sympathy of this poor woman and her feelings, during my miserable confinement to my berth through that dismal voyage. She was an uneducated person, of the lower middle class, and not in herself interesting: though I do not know why I say that, when I was deeply interested about her, and I do not know that any creature endowed with a heart and soul can fail to be an object of interest in some way or other; and human existence, with all its marvelous developments, going on round one, must always furnish matter for admiration, pity, or sympathy. Moreover, this woman was carrying out with her the wives of several of her husband's workmen, who had accompanied him out on his experimental voyage; and, being settled in his employment, had got their master's wife to bring their partners out to them. Think what a meeting for all these poor people, dear Harriet, in this little hive of English industry and energy in the far west, the fertile wildernesses of Indiana! How often I thought of the fears and misgivings of these poor women in the steerage, when our progress was delayed by tempestuous, contrary winds, when the heavy seas leaped over our laboring vessel's sides, and when, during a violent thunderstorm, our masts were tipped with lambent fire, which played round them like a halo of destruction. All this while I have forgotten to tell you why I have not written sooner; and I suppose my accusation is yet bitter in your heart while you are reading this. I told you on my first page I was obliged to stay in New York to recruit my strength; the first time I went out, after walking about a quarter of a mile, I was obliged to sit down and rest, for half an hour, in a public garden, before I could crawl back again to the hotel. On Monday, when I was a little better, we came on here. I am every day now expecting to be fetched to Harrisburg.... A woman should be her husband's friend, his best and dearest friend, as he should be hers: but friendship is a relation of equality, in which the same perfect respect for each other's liberty is exercised on both sides; and that sort of marriage, if it exists at all anywhere, is, I suspect, very uncommon everywhere. Moreover, I am not sure that marriage ever is, can be, or ought to be, such an equality; for even "When two men ride on one horse," you know, etc. In the relation of friendship there is perfect freedom, and an undoubted claim on each side to be neither dependent on, nor controlled by, each other's will. In the relation of marriage this is impossible; and therefore certainly marriage is not friendship.... A woman should, I think, love her husband better than anything on earth except her own soul; which, I think, a man should respect above everything on earth but his own soul: and there, my dear, is a very pretty puzzle for you, which a good many people have failed to solve. It is, indeed, a pretty difficult problem; and perhaps you have chosen, if not the wiser and better, at any rate the easier and safer part. God bless you, dear friend. Ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. HARRISBURG, Friday, November 14th, 1837. Thank you, dearest Harriet, for your epitome of the history of the New Testament. I have read the same things, in greater detail, more than once.... I have repeatedly gone over accounts of the history and authenticity of the Gospel narratives; but I have done so as a duty, and in order to be able to give to others some reason for the faith that is in me,--not really because I desired the knowledge for its own sake; and therefore my memory had gradually lost its hold of what I had taken into my mind, chiefly for the satisfaction of others, to enable me to make sufficient answers upon a subject whose best evidence of truth seems to me to reside in itself, and to be altogether out of the region of logic.... Christ received the last and perfect revelation of moral truth, brought it into the world, preached it by his practice, and bore witness to it by his death; and since he came, every holy life and death, in those portions of the globe where his name is known, has been moulded upon his teaching and example; and those individuals least inclined to acknowledge it have unconsciously imbibed the influence of the inspiration which he breathed into the soul of humanity. He has saved, and is daily and hourly saving, the world: and so far from imagining the possibility of any end to the work he has begun, or any superseding of his revelation by any other, it appears to me that civilized societies and nations calling themselves Christian have hardly yet begun to comprehend, believe, or adopt his teaching; under the influence of which I look for the regeneration of the race through the coming ages: it will extend above and beyond all discoveries of science and developments of knowledge, and more and more approve itself the only moral and spiritual theory that will at once carry forward and keep pace with the progress of humanity.... If, by telling you that my mind dwelt more upon religious subjects now than formerly, I have led you to suppose that I ever investigate or ponder creeds, theologies, dogmas, or systems of faith, I have given you a false impression. But I live alone--much alone bodily, more alone mentally; I have no intimates, no society, no intellectual intercourse whatever; and I give myself up, as I never did in my life before, to mere musing, reverie, and speculation--I cannot dignify the process by the title of thought or contemplation. My mind is much less active than it was: I read less, write less, study little, plan no work, and accomplish none. It is curious how, immediately upon my return to England, my mind seemed to flow back into its former channels; how my thoughts were roused and awakened; and how my imagination revived, and with what ease and rapidity I wrote, almost _currente calamo_, the only thing worth anything that I ever have written, my "English Tragedy." Here, all things tend to check any utterance of my thoughts, spoken or written; and while in England I could not find time enough to write, I here have no desire to do so, and lament my inability to force myself to mental exertion as a mere occupation and fill-time: _I dare not say kill-time, "for that would be a sin."_ ... I ride and walk, and pass my days alone; and lacking converse with others, have become much addicted to desultory thinking (almost as bad a thing as desultory reading), which is indeed no thinking at all. Real thinking is what Cleopatra calls "sweating labor," to which the hewing of wood and drawing of water is a joke; but this I carefully avoid, knowing my own incapacity for it; so I dawdle about my mind, and, naturally, arrive at few conclusions; and among those few, no doubt, many false ones.... We are established here during the rest of the Session of the Convention, which is a gain to me, as here I get companionship. There is a recess of a couple of hours, too, in the middle of the day, which the members avail themselves of for their very early dinner, but which we employ, and I enjoy immensely, in riding about the neighboring country. It is not thought expedient that I should ride alone about this strange region, on a strange horse, so I am escorted, at which I rejoice for all sakes, as everybody's health here would be the better for more exercise than they take. This place, which is the seat of Government of the State of Pennsylvania, is beautifully situated in a valley locked round by purple highlands, through which runs the Susquehanna; in some parts broad, bright, rapid, shallow, brawling, and broken by picturesque reefs of rock; in others, deep and placid, bearing on its bosom beautiful wood-crowned islands, whose autumnal foliage, through which the mellow sunshine is now pouring, gives them the appearance of fairyland planted with golden woods. The beautiful river is bountifully provided, too, with a most admirable species of trout, weighing from two to four pounds, silvery white without, and pale pink within (just the complexion of a fresh mushroom), and very excellent to eat, as well as lovely to behold. Many of the members of the Convention have been kind enough to come and see me, and I have attended one of their debates. They are for the most part uncultivated men, unlettered and ungrammared; and those among them who are the best educated, or rather the least ignorant, carry their small _lore_ much as a school-boy carries his, stiffly, awkwardly, and ostentatiously: an Eton sixth-form lad would beat any one of them in classical scholarship. But though in point of intellectual acquirement, I do not find much here to excite my sympathy, there is abundant matter of interest, as well as much that is curious and amusing to me in their intercourse. The shrewdness, the sound sense, the original observations, and the experience of life of some of these men are striking and remarkable. Though not one of them can speak grammatically, they all speak fluently, boldly, readily, easily, without effort or hesitation. There is, of course, among them, the usual proportion of well, and less well, witted individuals; and perhaps the contrast is the more apparent because the education has here covered no natural deficiencies and developed no natural gifts; so that there is not the usual superficial, civilized level produced by a common intellectual training. The questions they discuss are often in themselves interesting, though I cannot say that they often treat them in the most interesting manner.... Ever your affectionate, F. A. B. [The play which I have called an "English Tragedy," was suggested by an incident in the life of Lord de Ros, which my father heard at dinner at Lady Blessington's, and, on his return from Gore House, related it to us. I wrote the principal scene of the third act the same evening, under the impression of the story I had just heard; and afterwards sketched out and wrote the drama, of which I had intended, at first, to write only that one scene. The whole fashionable world of London had been thrown into consternation by the discovery that Lord de Ros, premier Baron of England, cheated at cards. He was, notoriously, one of the most worthless men of his day; which circumstance never prevented his being perfectly well received by the men and women of the best English society. That he was an unprincipled profligate made him none the less welcome to his male associates, or their wives, sisters, and daughters; but when Lord de Ros cheated his fellow-gamblers at the Club, no further toleration of his wickedness was, of course, possible; and then every infamous story, which, if believed, should have made him intolerable to decent people before, was told and re-told; and it seemed to me, that of all the evil deeds laid to his charge, his cheating at cards was quite the least evil. Lady Ellesmere, from whom I heard a story of his cold-blooded profligacy far more dreadful than that on which I founded my "English Tragedy," told me that she thought Lord de Ros's influence had been exceedingly detrimental to her brother, Charles Greville, who was his most intimate friend; and who, she said, burst into tears in speaking to her of it, when the fact of his cheating was discovered,--certainly a strong proof of affection from such a man to such a man; and I remember how eagerly and earnestly he endeavored to persuade me that the incident on which I had founded my "English Tragedy" had not been so profoundly base on Lord de Ros's part as I supposed. Besides the revival of these tragical stories of his misdeeds, the poor man's disgrace gave rise to some bitter jokes among his friends of the club-house and gambling-table. An epitaph composed for him to this effect was circulated among his intimates:-- "Here lies Henry, twenty-sixth Baron de Ros, in joyful expectation of the last trump." Of course he was cut by all his noble associates; and Lord Alvanley, being hailed one day by some of them with an inquiry as to whether it was true that he had called on De Ros, replied, "I left a card on Lord de Ros, and I marked it, that he might know it was an honor."] HARRISBURG, Saturday, November 11th, 1837. MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON, It seems useless for me to wait any longer for the chance of giving you some definite idea of our plans, for day after day passes without their assuming anything like a decided form, and I am now as uncertain of what is to become of us when the Convention leaves this place, as I was when I saw you in New York. From the date of your last, I perceive that you have taken your intended trip [to the Sault St. Marie, and some of the then little frequented Canadian Lake scenery]. I rejoice at this, as your health must, of course, be better than when you wrote to me before, and I think the scenery and people you are now amongst fit to renovate a sick body and soothe a sore mind. [Mrs. Jameson was staying at Stockbridge, with the Sedgwick family.] Catherine Sedgwick is my best friend in this country, but the whole family have bestowed more kindness upon me than I can ever sufficiently acknowledge.... They have all been exceedingly good to me, and the place of their dwelling combines for me the charms of great natural beauty with the associations that belong to the intellect and the affections. After your first letter from New York, I never rested till I got Mrs. Griffith's review of your book. The composition itself did not surprise me, but what did a little--only a little (for I am growing old, and have almost done with being surprised at anything), was that such a production should have gained admission into one of the principal magazines of this country; it is a sad specimen, truly, of the periodical literature it accepts.... Criticism in periodical journals is apt to be slightly malignant, ... and more often the result of personal sentiment than impartial literary or artistic judgment: so that I rather admired the article in question for its ignorance and vulgarity than the qualities which it exhibited in common with other criticisms to be met with in our own periodical literature, which, however unjust or partial in their censures and commendations, are decidedly inferior to Mrs. Griffith's composition in the two qualities I have specified.... My baby acquired a cough in coming from Philadelphia to this place in a railroad carriage (car, as they are called here), which held sixty-four persons in one compartment, and from which we were all obliged to alight, and walk a quarter of a mile through the woods, because the railroad, though traveled upon, is not finished. We are here upon the banks of the Susquehanna, and surrounded by fine blue outlines of mountainous country. How thankful I am that God did not despise beauty! He is the sole provider of it here. Believe me ever yours very truly, F. A. B. P. S.--"A change has come o'er the spirit of my dream" since yesterday; upon due deliberation, it is determined that when the Convention goes to Philadelphia we shall take possession of Butler Place; and therefore (however uncomfortably), I shall be able to receive you there after the first of next month. If a half-furnished house and half-broken household do not deter you, you will find me the same you have ever known me, there, as elsewhere, Yours most truly, F. A. B. PHILADELPHIA, Thursday, November 20th, 1837. MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON, I write in haste, for I find our garden-cart is just starting for town, and I wish this to be taken immediately to the post-office. I was beginning to be almost anxious about you, when your letter from Boston arrived, to remove the apprehension of your being again ill, which I feared must be the case. You tell me that you will let me know the day on which to expect you in Philadelphia, and bid me, if I cannot receive you in my house, seek out a shelter for you. The inconveniences, I fear, are yours, and not mine; though a residence of even a few days in an American boarding-house, must, I should think, make even the discomforts of my housekeeping seem tolerable. But that you are yourself likely to be a sufferer in so doing, I should not be sorry to show you the quite indescribable difference between an English and an American home and household; which, I assure you, nothing less than seeing is believing. From your bidding me, if I intended to relinquish your visit (which I do not), seek you a lodging near me, I do not think that you understand that we live six miles from town, and see as little of Philadelphia as if that six were sixty. This circumstance, too, made me hesitate as to whether I ought to remove you from seeing what there is to be seen there--which is little enough, to be sure,--and withdraw you beyond the reach of those civilities which you would receive on all hands in the city. All this, though, is for yourself to determine on; bed, board, and welcome, we tender you freely; your room, and the inkstand you desire in it, shall be ready on the day you name; and we will joyfully meet you when and where you please to be met, and convey you to our abode, where I can positively promise you absolute quiet, which perhaps in itself may not be unacceptable, after all your mind and body have gone through during your stay in this country. The Reform Convention is now sitting in Philadelphia, and is no mean curiosity of its kind, I assure you; I should like you to see and hear it. Ever yours truly, F. A. B. [Mrs. Jameson paid us a short, sad visit, and returned to Europe with the bitter disappointment of her early life confirmed, to resume her honorable and laborious career of literary industry. Her private loss was the public gain. When next we met, it was in England.] BRANCHTOWN, Friday, December 29th, 1837. MY DEAR LADY DACRE, Doubtless you have long ago accounted your kind letter lost, for I am sure you would not imagine that I could have received, and yet so long delayed to answer it: yet so it is; and I hardly know how to account for it, for the receipt of your letter gratified and touched me very much; the more so, probably, that my father and mother hardly ever write to any of us, and so a letter from any one much my senior always seems to me a condescension; and though I may have appeared so, believe me, I am not ungrateful for your kindness in making the effort of writing to me.... I wish it were in my power to give you a decent excuse for not having written sooner, but the more I reflect, the less I can think what I have been doing; yet I have been, and am, busy incessantly from morning to night, about nothing. My whole life passes in trifling activities, and small recurring avocations, which do not each seem to occupy an hour, and yet at last weigh down the balance of the twenty-four. I cannot name the thing I do, and but that our thoughts are to be revealed at the Day of Judgment, I should on that occasion be in the knife-grinder's case: "Story! Lord bless you! I have none to tell, sir!" for except ordering my dinner (and eating it), and riding on horseback every day, I have no distinct idea of any one thing I accomplish. Mine is not a life of much excitement, yet the time goes, and all the more rapidly, perhaps, that it flows with uninterrupted monotony. I neither read, write, nor cast up accounts; and shall soon have to begin again with the first elements. Do you not think that an ignorance, unbroken even by the slightest tincture of these, would be rather a fine thing for one's original powers? If one did nothing but a "deal of thinking," perhaps one's thinking might be something worth. Is it not Goethe who says: "Thought expands and weakens the mind; action contracts and strengthens it"? If this be true, mine should be an intellect of vast extent, and too shallow to drown a fly.... Do you know that I consider pain and disease as inventions of our own; and every death _unnatural_, but that gradual decay of all the faculties, and cessation of all the functions, which is, as we manage matters now, the rarest termination of human existence? Therefore, besides pitying people when they are ill, I blame them too, unless their suffering be an inheritance, the visitation of God, even unto the third and fourth generation, for disobedience to His wise and beneficent laws. One would think, if this belief in hereditary retribution was _real_, instead of a mere profession, people would be thoughtful, if not for themselves, at least for those to whom they are to transmit a healthy or diseased nature; one sees so much sin and so much suffering, the manifest causes of which lie at our own doors.... Thank you for your account of Lady Beecher; she always made a most pleasing impression upon me. I think, however you must be mistaken in saying that she and I excited our audiences _alike_: I should think that impossible in such very dissimilar actresses as we must have been. The quantity of effect produced, of course I cannot judge of; but it seems to me, from what I have seen and known of her off the stage, that the quality must have been essentially different. This theme, however, should not be begun in the corner of a letter already too long. Your letter was brought to me into the Harrisburg Convention, whose sessions I once or twice attended. That Convention was very funny, and very strange, and very interesting too; I've a great mind to write Lord Dacre an account of it, because, you know, you disclaim being a "political lady," though I presume you admit that he is a "political lord." And that reminds me that no democrat would accept your three-legged stool and its inferences [Lady Dacre had compared the stability of our Government, by the Sovereign, the Lords, and the Commons, to a solid, three-legged stool, contrasting it disadvantageously with that of the United States], for nature scorns plurality of means where one suffices; and the broadest shadowing tree needs but one stem, if the root be deep and widespread enough. This is merely by the way, for I am as little "political" as you are. Give my love to Lord Dacre, if that is respectful enough; and also to Mrs. Sullivan, whose intercourse, briefly as I was able to enjoy it, was very delightful to me. Affectionately yours, F. A. B. PHILADELPHIA, Tuesday, January 8th, 1838. MY DEAREST HARRIET, I am not prone to that hungry longing for letters which you have so often expressed to me, yet I was getting heart-sick for some intelligence from some of my dear ones beyond the seas. My own people have not written to me since I left England, and it seemed to me an age since I had heard from you. The day before yesterday, however, brought me letters from you and Emily, and they were dearly welcome. A poor woman, who of course had more children than she could well feed or honestly provide for, said to me the other day, alluding to my solitary blessing in that kind, that "Providence had spared me wonderfully." ... How fatal this notion, so prevalent among the poor and ignorant, and even the less ignorant and better-to-do classes, is!--this fathering of our progeny upon Providence, which produces so much misery, and so much crime to boot, in our swarming pauper populations. I have had it in my mind lately once or twice, to write an "Apology for," or "Defense of" Providence. I am sick of hearing so much misery, so much suffering, so much premature death, and so much unnecessary disease, laid to the charge of our best Friend, our Father who is in heaven. Moreover, it is the _good_ (not the reasonable, though) who bring these railing accusations against Providence. Let what calamity soever visit them, they never bethink themselves of their own instrumentality in the business; but with a resignation quite more provoking than praiseworthy, turn up their eyes, and fold their hands, and miscall it a dispensation of Providence. The only application of that "technical" term that I ever heard with pleasure, was that of the delightfully _devout_ old Scotch lady, who said, "Hech, sirs, I'm never weary of reflecting on the gracious dispensations of Providence towards myself, and its righteous judgments on my neighbors!" Doubtless, God has ordained that sin and folly shall produce suffering, that the consequences may warn us from the causes. Madame de Staël, whose brilliancy, I think, has rather thrown into the shade her very considerable common sense, has well said, "Le secret de l'existence, c'est le rapport de nos peines avec nos fautes." And to acknowledge the just and inevitable results of our own actions only as the inscrutable caprices of an inscrutable Will, is to forego one of the most impressive aspects of the great goodness and wisdom of the Providence by which we are governed. Death, and the decay which should be its only legitimate preparation, are not contrary to a right conception of either. But instead of sitting down meekly under what godly folks call "mysterious dispensations" of the Divinity, I think, if I took their view of such unaccountable inflictions, I should call them devilish rather than Divine, and certainly go mad, or _very bad_. Bearing the righteous result of our own actions, while we suffer, we can adore the mercy that warns us from evil by its unavoidable penalties, at the same time remembering that even our sins, duly acknowledged, and rightly used, may be our gain, through God's merciful provision, that our bitterest experience may become to us a source of virtue and a means of progress. The profound sense of the justice of our Maker renders all things endurable; but the idea of the arbitrary infliction of misery puts one's whole soul in revolt. Wretchedness poured upon us, we cannot conceive why or whence, may well be intolerable; suffering resulting from our own faults may be borne courageously, and with a certain _comfort_,--forgive the apparent paradox--the comfort is general, the discomfort individual; and if one is not too selfish, one may rejoice in a righteous law, even though one suffers by it. Moreover, if evil have its inevitable results, has not good its inseparable consequences? If the bad deeds of one involve many in their retribution, the well-doing of one spreads incalculable good in all directions. It is because we are by no means wholly selfish, that the consequences of our actions affect others as well as ourselves; so that we are warned a thousand ways to avoid evil and seek good, for the whole world's sake, as well as our own. What a sermon I have written you! But it was my thought, and therefore, I take it, as good to you as anything else I could have said. Of course, children cannot love their parents _understandingly_ until they become parents themselves; then one thinks back upon all the pain, care, and anxiety which for the first time one becomes aware has been expended on one, when one begins in turn to experience them for others. But the debt is never paid _back_. Our children get what was given to us, and give to theirs what they got from us. Love descends, and does not ascend; the self-sacrifice of parents is its own reward; children can know nothing of it. In the relations of the old with the young, however, the tenderness and sympathy may well be on the elder side; for age has known youth, but youth has not known age. You say you are surprised I did not express more admiration of Harriet Martineau's book about America. But I _do_ admire it--the spirit of it--extremely. I admire her extremely; but I think the moral, even more than the intellectual, woman. I do not mean that she may not be quite as wise as she is good; but she has devoted her mind to subjects which I have not, and probably could not, have given mine to, and writes upon matters of which I am too ignorant to estimate her merit in treating of them. Some of her political theories appear to me open to objection; for instance, female suffrage and community of property; but I have never thought enough upon these questions to judge her mode of advocating them. The details of her book are sometimes mistaken; but that was to be expected, especially as she was often subjected to the abominable impositions of persons who deceived her purposely in the information which she received from them with the perfect trust of a guileless nature. I do entire justice to her truth, her benevolence, and her fearlessness; and these are to me the chief merits of her book.... When Sully, the artist who painted the picture of me now in your possession, found that it did not give entire satisfaction, he refused to receive any payment for it, saying that he wished to have it back, because, as a work of art, it was valuable to him, and that he would execute another likeness (what a good word _execute_ is, so applied!) _upon_ me, instead of that you have. We have never been able to alter this determination of his, and therefore, as he will not take his money, he should have his picture back. So, Harriet, dear, pack me up, and send me to Messrs. Harrison and Latham, Liverpool; and as soon as Sully returns from England, where he now is, you shall have another and, if possible, a better likeness of me; though I do not feel very sanguine about it, for Sully's characteristic is delicacy rather than power, and mine may not be power, but certainly is not delicacy.... Alas! my dear Harriet, the little stone-pine [a seedling planted by my friend from a pine-cone she brought from Italy], in one of our stormy nights at sea, was dislodged from its place of security and thrown out of the pot with all the mould. I watched its decay with extreme regret, and even fell into some morbid and superstitious fancies about it; but I could still cry to think that what would have been such a source of pleasure to dear Emily, and might have prospered so well with her, was thus unavailingly bestowed upon me. It made quite a sore place in my heart.... God bless you, dear. I am ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. PHILADELPHIA, February 6th, 1838. MY DEAREST HARRIET, The box and two letters arrived safely about a week ago. I read over my old journal: this returning again into the midst of old events and feelings, affected my spirits at first a good deal.... Of course this passed off, and it afforded me much amusement to look over these archives, ancient as they now almost appear to me.... It surely is wisdom most difficult of attainment, to form a correct estimate of things or people while we are under their immediate influence: the just value of character, the precise importance of events, or the true estimate of joy and sorrow, while one is subject to their action and pressure. I suppose, with my quick and excitable feelings, I shall never attain even so much of this moral power of comparison and just appreciation as others may; but it cannot be easy to anybody.... Habitual accuracy of thought and moderation of feeling, of course, will help one to conjecture how our present will look when it has become past; but the mind that is able to do this must be naturally just, and habitually trained to justice. With the majority of people, their present must always preponderate in interest; and it is right that it should, since our work is in the present, though our hopes may be in the future, as our memories and examples must be in the past. There must be some of this intense, vivid feeling about what is immediate, to enable us to do the work of _now_--to bear the burden, surmount the impediment, and appreciate the blessing of _now_. St. Paul very wisely bade us "beget a temperance in all things" (I wish he had told us how to do it). He also said, "Behold, _now_ is the accepted time, _now_ is the day of salvation." ... The medical mode of treatment in this country appears to me frightfully severe, and I should think, with subjects as delicate as average American men and women, it might occasionally be fatal. I have a violent prejudice against bleeding, and would rather take ten doses of physic, and fast ten days, than lose two ounces of my blood. Of course, in extreme cases, extreme remedies must be resorted to; but this seems to be the usual system of treatment here, and I distrust medical systems, and cannot but think that it might be safer to reduce the quality rather than the quantity of the vital fluid. Abstinence, and vegetable and mineral matters of divers kinds, seem to me natural remedies enough; but the merciless effusion of blood, because it is inflamed, rather reminds me of my school-day cutting and gashing of my chilblains, in order to obtain immediate relief from their irritation.... S----'s scarlet fever has been followed by the enlargement of one of the tonsils, which grew to such a size as to threaten suffocation, and the physician decided that it must be removed. This was done by means of a small double-barreled silver tube, through the two pipes of which a wire is passed, coming out in a loop at the other end of the instrument. This wire being passed round the tonsil, is tightened, so as to destroy its vitality in the course of four and twenty hours, during which the tube remains projecting from the patient's mouth, causing some pain and extreme inconvenience. The mode usually resorted to with adults (for this, it seems, is a frequent operation here), is cutting the tonsil off at once; but as hemorrhage sometimes results from this, which can only be stopped by cauterizing the throat, that was not to be thought of with so young a patient.... At the end of the twenty-four hours, the instrument is removed, the diseased part being effectually killed by the previous tightening of the wire. It is then left to rot off in the mouth, which it does in the course of a few days, infecting the breath most horribly, and, I should think, injuring the health by that means.... At the same time, I was attacked with a violent sore throat, perhaps a small beginning of scarlet fever of my own, and which seized, one after another, upon all our household, and for which I had a hundred leeches at once applied to my throat, which, without reducing me very much, enraged me beyond expression. No less than seven of us were ill in the house. We are now, however, thank God, all well.... I cannot obtain from our physician any explanation whatever of the cause of this swelling of the tonsils, so common here; and when, demurring about the removal of my child's, I inquired into their functions, I received just as little satisfaction. He told me that they were not ascertained, and that all that was known was, that removing them did not affect the breathing, speaking, or swallowing--with which I had to be satisfied. This uncertainty seems to me a reason against the operation; cutting away a part of the body whose functions are not ascertained, seems to me rather venturesome; but of course the baby couldn't be allowed to choke, and so we submitted to the inevitable. The disease and the remedy are common here, and may be in England, though I never heard of them before. Pray, if you know anything about either, write me what, as I cannot rest satisfied without more information.... God bless you, dear. Always affectionately yours, F. A. B. PHILADELPHIA, Wednesday, February 21st, 1838. MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON, Although it was a considerable disappointment to me not to see you again, after the various rumors and last most authentic announcement of your coming to Philadelphia, yet, upon the whole, I think it is as well that we did not meet again, simply to renew that dismalest of ceremonies, leave-taking. I had not the hope which you expressed, that a second edition of our parting would have been less painful than the first.... I think I should have felt less gloomily on that occasion, if I had not had to leave you in such a dismal den of discomfort. External things always, even in moments of strong emotion, affect me powerfully; and that dreariest room, the door of which closed between us, left a most forlorn impression upon my memory. I have been of late myself living in an atmosphere darkened by distress.... Typhus fever has carried off our most intimate friend, Mr. B----, after but a fortnight's illness; and closed, almost at its opening, a career which, under all worldly aspects, was one of fair and goodly promise. He has left a young widow, to whom he had been married scarcely more than two years, and a boy-baby who loses in him such a preceptor as few sons in this country are trained under. I have lost in him one of the few persons who cheer and make endurable my residence here. Doubtless our loss is reckoned by Him who decrees it, and I pray that none of us, by impatience of suffering, may forfeit the precious uses of sorrow. Our friend and neighbor, W----, has just endured a most dreadful affliction in the death of his youngest child, his only daughter, one girl among six sons, the very darling of his heart, loved above all the others, who, while she was still a baby, not a year old, drew from him that ludicrously pathetic exclamation, "Oh, the man that marries one's daughter must be hateful!" She died of scarlet fever, which, after passing so lightly by our doorposts, has entered, like the destroying angel, our poor friend's dwelling. His brother has been at the point of death with it too, and I cannot but rejoice in trembling when I think how happily we escaped from this terrible plague. As you may suppose, my spirits have been a good deal affected by all the sorrow around me. _Mirabile dictu!_ I _have_ read the volume of Scott's Life which you left here, also the volume of Miss Edgeworth, with which I was disappointed; also the volume of Milton: not the Treatise on Divorce, and the Areopagitica, alone; but Letters, Apologies for Smectymnuus, and Denunciations against Episcopacy, and all. Did you do as much? Moreover, I am just finishing Carlyle's "French Revolution"; so that you see, as my friend Mr. F---- says, I am improving; and if I should ever happen to read another book, I will be sure to mention the circumstance in my letters. Very truly yours, F. A. B. March 9th, 1838. DEAREST EMILY, I am almost ashamed to say I forgot the anniversary your letter recalls to me; but the artificial or conventional epochs which used to divide my time, and the particular days against which affection set its special marks, are, by degrees, losing their peculiar associations for me. Even the great division of all, death, which makes us miscall a portion of eternity Time (as if it were different from, or other than, it), seems less of an interruption to me than it did formerly. Is it not all one, let us parcel it out as we will into hours, days, months, years, or lifetimes? The boundary line exists in our narrow calculation alone. The greatest change of all the changes we know, to mortal senses implying almost cessation of being, to the believer in the immortality of spirit suggests not even the idea of change, in what relates to the soul, so much as uninterrupted progress, and the gradual lengthening of the chain of moral consequence, inseparable from one's conception of a responsible, rational agent, whose existence is to be eternal. No doubt there are properties of our minds which find delight in order, symmetry, recurring arrangement, and regular division; and the harmonious course of the material world, alternately visited by the sweet succession of day and night, the seasons, and all their lovely variety of gradation, naturally creates the idea of definite periods, to which we give definite names; but with God and with our souls there is no time, and this material world in which our material bodies are existing is but a shadow or reflection cast upon the surface of that uninterrupted stream on which our true and _very selves_ are borne onward; the real, the existing is within us. I think it probable that the general disregard of times and seasons formerly observed by me, in the community where I now live, may have tended to lessen my regard for them; but, besides this, in thinking of anniversaries connected with those I love--periods which used to appeal to my affectionate remembrance,--I have come in a measure to feel that to the very young alone, these marks we draw upon our life can appear other than as the fictitious lines with which science has divided the spheres of heaven and earth. PHILADELPHIA, Saturday, March 18th, 1838. Touching my picture, my dearest Harriet, I am desired to say that your spirited defense of your right to it (whether you like it or not) is admirable; that it certainly shall not be taken from you by force, and that there was no intention whatever of infuriating you by the civil proposal that was made to relieve you of it by sending you a more satisfactory one, under the impression that you are not satisfied with what you have. My dear, the first two pages of your letter might have been written with a turkey-cock's quill, they actually gobble in the pugnacity of their style, and as it lies by me, the very paper goes fr-fr-fr. But you shall keep that identical picture, my dearest, since you have grown to like it; so shake your feathers smooth again, funny woman that you are! and let your soul return into its rest. Sully is now in England. I wish there were any chance of your seeing him, but after remaining there long enough to paint the queen, he intends visiting Paris for a short time and then returning home. He is a great friend of mine, and one of the few people here that I find pleasure in associating with. As his delicacy about being paid for the picture arose from the idea that, not being satisfied with the likeness, you probably did not care to keep it, I have no doubt that, the present state of your regard for it being made clear to him, he will not object any more to receiving the price of it. I presume that the long chapter you have written me upon the inevitability of people's folly and the expediency of believing, first, that God makes us fools, and then that he punishes us for behaving like fools, is a result of your impeded circulation, under the effect of the east wind upon your cuticle. How I wish, without the bitter month's sea-sickness, you could be here beside me now, this 24th of March, between an open window and door, and with my fire dying out; to be sure, as I have just been taking two monstrous unruly dogs to a pond at some distance from the house, for a swim, and as S---- was with me and I had to carry her (now a pretty heavy lump) through several mud passages, the agreeable glow in which I feel myself may not be altogether due to the warmth of the atmosphere, although it is really as hot as our last of May. How I wish you could spend the summer with me! How you would rejoice in the heat, to me so hateful and intolerable! To persons of your temperament, I suppose hell, instead of the popular idea of fire and brimstone, presents some such frigid horror as poor Claudio's: "thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice." I was walking once with Trelawney, who is as chilly as an Italian greyhound, at Niagara, by a wall of rock, upon which the intense sun beat, and was reflected upon us till I felt as if I was being roasted alive, and exclaimed, "Oh, this is hell itself!" to which he replied with a grunt of dissatisfaction, "Oh, dear, I hope hell will be a great deal _warmer_ than this!" In my observation about the development of our filial affections after we become parents ourselves, I may have fallen into my usual error of generalizing from too narrow a basis, and taken it for granted that my own experience is necessarily that of others.... But after all, though _everybody_ is not like me, _somebody_ must be, and one's self is therefore a safe source from whence to draw conclusions with regard to others, up to a certain point. Made of the same element, however diversely fashioned and tempered by various influences, we still are all alike in the main ingredients of our humanity; and it must be quite as contrary to sound sense to imagine the processes of one's own mind singular, as to suppose them universal. Profound truism! but truisms are profound--they lie at the foundations of existence--for they are truths. My journal is fast disappearing behind the fire. How I wish I had spent the time I wasted in writing it, in making extracts from the books I read!... I wrote my sister a long answer, by Mrs. Jameson, to her last letter, in which I entered at some length upon the various objections to a public life; not that I was then aware of the decision she has now adopted of going upon the stage--a decision, however, for which I have been entirely prepared ever since my visit to England and my return home.... I hope she may succeed to the fullest extent of her desires, for I do not think that hers is a nature that would be benefited by the bitter medicine of disappointment. Oh, how I wish she could once enter some charmed sphere of peace and happiness! The discipline of happiness, in which I have infinite faith, would I think be of infinite use to her, but--God knows best.... I am anxious, too, that her experiment of a life of excitement should be the most favorable possible, that, under its happiest aspect, she may learn how remote it is from happiness.... Had she remained in England, I should have rejoiced to think that Mrs. Somerville was her friend: such a friend would be God's minister to the heart and mind of any young woman. It is not a small source of regret to me, to think of how much inestimable human intercourse my residence in America deprives me. I think my father's selecting Paris for the first trial of my sister's abilities a mistake; and I am very, _very_ anxious about the result. Natural talent is sufficient for a certain degree of success in acting, but not in singing, where the expression of feeling, the dramatic portion of the performance, is so severely trammeled by mechanical difficulties: the execution of which is all but rendered impossible by the slightest trepidation, the tone of the voice itself being often fatally affected by the loss of self-possession. Pasta and Malibran both failed _at first_ in Paris, and I confess I shall be most painfully anxious till I hear the issue of this experiment.... I am in the garden from morning till night, but am too impatient for mortal roots and branches. I should have loved the sort of planting described in Tieck's "Elves," where they stamp a pine-cone into the earth, and presently a fir-tree springs up, and, rising towards the sky with the happy children who plant it, rocks them on its topmost branches, to and fro in the red sunset. Good-bye, God bless you. I am ever your affectionate, F. A. B. [Many years after these letters were written, in 1845, when I joined my sister in Rome, I found her living in the most cordial intimacy with the admirable woman whose acquaintance I had coveted for her and for myself. My year's residence in Rome gave me frequent opportunities of familiar intercourse with Mrs. Somerville, whose European celebrity, the result of her successful devotion to the highest scientific studies, enhanced the charm of her domestic virtues, her tender womanly character, and perfect modesty and simplicity of manner. During my last visit to Rome, in 1873, speaking to the old blind Duke of Sermoneta, of my desire to go to Naples to pay my respects to Mrs. Somerville, who was then residing there, at an extremely advanced age, he said, "Elle est si bonne, si savante, et si charmante, que la mort n'ose point la toucher." I was unable to carry out my plan of going to Naples, and Mrs. Somerville did not long survive the period at which I had hoped to have visited her. Early in our acquaintance I had expressed some curiosity, not unmixed with dread, upon the subject of scorpions, never having seen one. Mrs. Somerville laughed, and said that a sojourn in Italy was sure to introduce them sooner or later to me. The next time that I spent the evening with her after this conversation, as I stood by the chimney talking to her, I suddenly perceived a most detestable-looking black creature on the mantelpiece. I started back in horror to my hostess's great delight, as she had been at the pains of cutting out in black paper an imitation scorpion, for my edification, and was highly satisfied with the impression it produced upon me. Urania's reptile, however, was the conventional mythical scorpion of the Zodiac, and only vaguely represented the evil-looking, venomous beast with which I subsequently became, according to her prophecy, acquainted, in all its natural living repulsiveness. Besides this sample scorpion, which I have carefully preserved, I have two drawings which Mrs. Somerville made for me; one, a delicate outline sketch of what is called Othello's House in Venice, and the other, a beautifully executed colored copy of his shield, surmounted by the Doge's cap, and bearing three mulberries for a device,--proving the truth of the assertion, that the _Otelli del Moro_ were a noble Venetian folk, who came originally from the Morea, whose device was the mulberry, the growth of that country, and showing how curious a jumble Shakespeare has made, both of name and device, in calling him a _Moor_ and embroidering his arms on his handkerchief as _strawberries_. In Cinthio's novel, from which Shakespeare probably took his story, the husband is a Moor, and I think called by no other name.] PHILADELPHIA, May 7th, 1838. DEAREST HARRIET, I fear this will scarce reach you before you leave England upon your German pilgrimage, but I presume it will follow you, and be welcome wherever it finds you. Do you hear that the steamships have accomplished their crossing from England to America in perfect safety, the one in seventeen, the other in fifteen days! just half the usual time, thirty days being the average of the finest passages this way. Oh, if you knew what joy this intelligence gave me! It seemed at once to bring me again within reach of England and all those whom I love there. And even though I should not therefore return thither the oftener, the speed and certainty with which letters will now pass between these two worlds, hitherto so far apart, is a thing to rejoice at exceedingly. Besides all personal considerations in the matter, the wonder and delight of seeing this great enterprise of man's ingenuity and courage thus successful is immense. One of the vessels took her departure for England the other day, filled with passengers, and sent from the wharf with a thousand acclamations and benedictions. The mere report of it overcame me with emotion; thus to see space annihilated, and the furthest corners of the earth drawn together, fills one with admiration for this amazing human nature, more potent than the whole material creation by which it is surrounded, even than the three thousand miles of that Atlantic abyss. These manifestations of the power of man's intellect seem to me to cry aloud to him to "stand in awe [of his own nature] and sin not." And yet these victories over matter are nothing compared to the achievements of human souls, with their powers of faith, of love, and of endurance. I will not, however, inflict further exclamations upon you.... Certainly mere details of personal being, doing, and suffering are of some value when one would almost give one's eyes for a moment's sight of the bodily presence of the soul one loves: so you shall have my present history; which is, that at this immediate writing, I am sitting in a species of verandah (or piazza, as they call it here), which runs along the front of the house. It has a low balustrade and columns of white-painted wood, supporting a similar verandah on the second or bedroom story of the house; the sitting-rooms are all on the ground floor. It is Sunday morning, but I am obliged to be content with such devotions and admonitions as I can enjoy here, from within and around me, as my plight does not admit of my leaving home.... I am sorry to say that the fact of letters miscarrying between this country and England has been very disagreeably proved to me this morning by the receipt of one from dear William Harness, who mentions having written another to me five months ago, which other has never yet made its appearance, and I presume would hardly think it worth while to do so now. We have had an uncommonly mild winter, without, I think, more than a fortnight of severe weather, and in March the sun was positively summer hot. I am out of doors almost all day. Our spring, however, has made up for the lenient winter, by being as cold and capricious as possible, and at this moment hardly a fruit-tree is in blossom or a lilac-tree in bud; and looking abroad over the landscape, 'tis only here and there that I can detect faint symptoms of that exquisite green haze which generally seems to hang like a halo over the distant woods at this season. I do not remember so backward a spring since I have been in this country. I do not complain of it, however, though everybody else does; for the longer the annihilating heat of the summer keeps off, the better the weather suits me. Will you not come over and spend the summer with me, now that the sea voyage is only half as long as it was? Come, and we will go to Niagara together, and you shall be half roasted alive for full five months, an effectual warming through, I should think, for the rest of the year. Dear Harriet, Niagara is the one thing of its kind for which no fellow has yet been found in the world, and to see it is certainly worth a fortnight's sea-sickness. I cannot say more in its praise. You speak of the sufferings of your wretched Irish population; and because patience, fortitude, benevolence, charity, and many good fruits spring from that bitter root, you seem to be reconciled to the fact that ignorance and imprudence are the real causes from which the greater part of this frightful misery proceeds. Though God's infinite mercy has permitted that even our very errors and sins may become, if we please, sources of virtue in, and therefore of good to, us, do you not think that our nature, such as He has seen fit to form it, with imperfection in its very essence, and such a transition as death in its experience, furnishes us with a sufficient task in the mere ceaseless government and education which it requires, without our superadding to this difficult charge the culpability of infinite neglect, the absolute damage and injury and all the voluntary deterioration, sin, and sorrow which we inflict upon ourselves? Why are we to charge God with all these things, or conceive it possible that He ordained a state of existence in which mercy's supplication would be that sudden death might sweep a hundred sufferings of worse kind from the face of the earth? God is unwearied in producing good; and we can so little frustrate His determinate and omnipotent goodness, that out of our most desperate follies and wickednesses the ultimate result is sure to be preponderating good; but does this excuse the sinners and fools who vainly attempt to thwart His purpose? or will they be permitted to say that they are "tempted of God"? Indeed, dear Harriet, I must abide in the conviction that we manufacture misery for ourselves which was never appointed for us; and because Mercy, unfailing and unbounded, out of these very miseries of our own making, draws blessed balsam for our use, I cannot believe that it ordained and inflicted all our sufferings. I began this letter yesterday, and am again sitting under my piazza, with S----, in a buff coat, zigzagging like a yellow butterfly about the lawn, and Margery mounting guard over her, with such success as you may fancy a person taking care of a straw in a high wind likely to have.... I have just been enjoying the pleasure of a visit from one of the members of the Sedgwick family. They are all my friends, and I do think all and each in their peculiar way good and admirable. Catharine Sedgwick has been prevented from coming to me by the illness of the brother in whose family she generally spends the winter in New York.... Like most business men here, he has lived in the deplorable neglect of every physical law of health, taking no exercise, immuring himself for the greater part of the day in rooms or law courts where the atmosphere was absolute poison; and using his brains with intense application, without ever allowing himself proper or sufficient relaxation. Now, will you tell me that Providence _intended_ that this man should so labor and so suffer? Why, the very awfulness of the consequence forbids such a supposition for a moment. Or will you, perhaps, say that this dire calamity was sent upon him in order to try the fortitude, patience, and resignation of his wife, within a month of her confinement; or of his sister, whose nervous sensibility of temperament was of an order to have been driven insane, had they not been mercifully relieved from the worst results of the fatal imprudence of poor R----? Whenever I see that human beings do act up as fully as they can to _all_ the laws of their Maker, I shall be prepared to admire misery, agony, sickness, and all tortures of mind or body as excellent devices of the Deity, expressly appointed for our benefit; but while I see obvious and abundant natural causes for them in our _disobedience_ to His laws, I shall scarce come to that conclusion, in spite of all the good which He makes for us out of our evil. I know we must sin, but we sin more than we _must_; and I know we must suffer, but we suffer more than we _must_ too.... God bless you, dear. Ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. PHILADELPHIA, Sunday, May 27th. MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON, I have received within the last few days your second letter from London; the date, however, is rather a puzzle, it being _August the 10th_, instead (I presume) of April. I hasten, while I am yet able, to send you word of R. S----'s rapid and almost complete recovery.... In spite of the admirable forethought which prompted the beginning of this letter, my dear Mrs. Jameson, it is now exactly a fortnight since I wrote the above lines; and here I am at my writing-table, in my drawing-room, having in the interim _perpetrated_ another girl baby.... My new child was born on the same day of the month that her sister was, and within an hour of the same time, which I think shows an orderly, systematic, and methodical mode of proceeding in such matters, which is creditable to me.... I should have been unhappy at the delay of my intelligence about R. S----, but that I feel sure Catharine must ere this have written to you herself. I am urging her might and main to come to us and recruit a little, but, like all other very good people, she thinks she can do something better than take care of herself; a lamentable fallacy, for which good people in particular, and the world in general, suffer. As you may suppose, I do not yet indulge in the inditing of very long epistles, and shall therefore make no apology for this, which is almost brief enough to be witty. I am glad you like Sully, because I love him. I am ever yours very truly, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, 1838. MY DEAREST HARRIET, This purposes to be an answer to a letter of yours dated the 10th of May; the last I have received from you.... I cannot for the life of me imagine why we envelope death in such hideous and mysterious dreadfulness, when, for aught we can tell, being born is to an infant quite as horrible and mysterious a process, perhaps (for we know nothing about it) of a not much different order. The main difference lies in the fact of our anticipation of the one event--_ma, chî sa?_--but although some fear of death is wholesomely implanted in us, to make us shun danger and to prevent the numbers who, without it, would impatiently rush away from the evils of their present existence through that gate, yet certainly one-half of the King of Terror's paraphernalia we invest him with ourselves; since, really, being born is quite as wonderful, and, when we consider the involuntary obligations of existence thus thrust upon us, quite as awful a thing as dying can possibly be. You retort upon me for having fallen from the observance of anniversaries, that I am still a devout worshiper of places, and in this sense, perhaps, an idolater.... My love for certain places is inexplicable to myself. They have, for some reasons which I have not detected, so powerfully affected my imagination, that it will thenceforth never let them go. I retain the strongest impression of some places where I have stayed the shortest time; thus there is a certain spot in the hill country of Massachusetts, called Lebanon, where I once spent two days.... I was going to tell you how like Paradise that place was to my memory, and with what curious yearning I have longed to visit it again, but I was interrupted; and in the intervening hours S---- has sickened of the measles, and I am now sitting writing by her bedside, not a little disturbed by my own cogitations, and her multitudinous questions, the continuous stream of which is nothing slackened by an atmosphere of 91° in the shade, and the furious fever of her own attack.... As soon as S---- is sufficiently recovered, we purpose going to the seaside to escape from the horrible heat. Our destination is a certain beach on the shore of Long Island, called Rockaway, where there is fine bathing, and a good six miles of hard sand for riding and driving. After that, I believe we shall go to the hill country of Berkshire, to visit our friends the Sedgwicks. I wonder whether your love for heat would have made agreeable to you a six-mile ride I took to-day, at about eleven o'clock, the thermometer standing at 94° in the shade. If this is not more _warmth_ than even you can away with, you must be "bold and determined like any salamander, ma'am." ... My love for flowers is the same as ever. Last winter in London I almost ruined myself in my nosegays, and came near losing my character by them, as nobody would believe I was so gallant to myself _out of my own pocket_. My room is always full of them here, and in spite of recollecting (which I always do in the very act of sticking flowers in my hair) that I am upon the verge of _thirty_, they are still my favorite ornaments. Thank you for your constant affection, my dear friend. It makes my heart sink to think how much is lost to me in the distance that divides us. If death severs forever the ties of this world, and our intercourse with one another here is but a temporary agency, ceasing with our passage into another stage of existence, how strong a hold have you and I laid upon each other's souls, to be sundered at the brief limit of this mortal life! It may possibly have accomplished its full purpose, this dear friendship of ours, even here; but it is almost impossible to think that its uses may not survive, or its duration extend beyond this life;--that is an awful thought overshadowing all our earthly loves, yet throwing us more completely upon Him, the Father, the Guardian of all; for on him alone can we surely rest always and forever. But how much must death change us if we can forget those who have been as dear to us here as you and I have been to each other! A friend of mine asked me the other day if I thought we should have other senses hereafter, and if I could imagine any but those we now possess: I cannot, can you? To be sure I can imagine the possession of _common sense_, which would be a new one to me; but it is very funny, and impossible, to try to fancy a power, like seeing or hearing, of a different kind, though one can think of these with a higher degree of intensity, and wider scope.... Good-bye, dearest Harriet. God bless you. I am ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. PHILADELPHIA, Monday, July 23d, 1838. It is now high-summer mark, and such a summer as we are now dying under is scarcely remembered by the oldest human creature yet extant in these parts. And where are you, my dear Mrs. Jameson? Sojourning in Bohemian castles; or wandering among the ruins of old Athens? Which of your many plans, or dreams of plans have you put into execution? I am both curious and anxious to know something of your proceedings, and shall dispatch this at a hazard to your brother-in-law's, where I suppose your movements will always be known, and your whereabouts heard of. Your book is advertised I know, and if you have adhered to your former determination, you have withdrawn yourself from your own blaze, and left England to profit by its light. Of myself I can tell you little that is particularly cheerful.... The friends of good order, in this excellent city of brotherly love, have been burning down a large new building erected for _purposes of free discussion_, because Abolition meetings were being held in it; and the Southern steamer has been wrecked with dreadful loss of life, owing to the exceeding small esteem in which its officers appear to have held that "quintessence of dust, Man." The vessel was laden with Southerners, coming north for the summer; and I suppose there is scarcely a family from Virginia to Florida, that is not in some way touched by this dreadful and wanton waste of life. Pray, when you have time, write me some word of your doing, being, and suffering, and Believe me ever yours truly, F. A. B. [The above mention of shipwreck, refers to the disastrous loss of the _Pulaski_; an event, the horror of which was rendered more memorable to me by an episode of noble courage, of which our neighbor, Mr. James Cooper, of Georgia, was the hero, and of which I have spoken in the journal I kept during my residence on our plantation.] ROCKAWAY, Friday, August 10th. Where are you, my dearest Harriet; and what are you doing? Drinking of queer-tasting waters, and soaking in queer-smelling ones? Are you becoming saturated with sulphur, or penetrated with iron? Are you chilling your inside with draughts from some unfathomable well, or warming your outside with baths from some ready-boiled spring? Oh! vainest quest of that torment, the love for the absent! Do you know, Harriet, that I have more than once seriously thought of never writing any more to any of my friends? the total cessation of intercourse would soon cause the acutest vividness of feeling to subside, and become blunt (for so are we made): the fruitless feeling after, the vain eager pursuit in thought of those whose very existence may actually have ceased, is such a wearisome pain! This being linked by invisible chains to the remote ends of the earth, and constantly feeling the strain of the distance upon one's heart,--this sort of death in life, for you are all so far away that you are almost as _bad_ as dead to me,--is a condition that I think makes intercourse (such intercourse as is possible) less of a pleasure than of a pain; and the thought that so many lives with which mine was mingled so closely are flowing away yonder, in vain for me here (and of hereafter who can guess!), prevents my contentedly embracing my own allotted existence, and keeps me still with eyes and thoughts averted towards the past, from the path of life I am appointed to tread. If I could believe it right or kind, or that those who love me would not be grieved by it, I really feel sometimes as if I could make up my mind to turn my thoughts once and for all away from them, as from the very dead, and never more by this disjointed communion revive, in all its acuteness, the bitter sense of loss and separation.... You see I discourse of my child's looks; for at present, indeed, I know of nothing else to discourse about in her. Of her experiences in her former states of existence she says nothing, though I try her as Shelley used to do the speechless babies that he met; and her observations upon the present she also keeps religiously to herself, so that I get no profit of either her wisdom or her knowledge.... The vast extent of this country offers every variety of climate which an invalid can require, and its mineral waters afford the same remedies which are sought after in the famous European baths. God has everywhere been bountiful, and doubtless no country is without its own special natural pharmacopæia, its medicines, vegetable and mineral, and healing influences for human disease and infirmity. The medicinal waters of this country are very powerful, and of every variety, and I believe there are some in Virginia which would precisely answer our purpose.... We are now staying for a short time on the Long Island shore, at a place called Rockaway. As I sit writing at my window here, the broad, smooth, blue expanse of the Atlantic stretches out before me, and ships go sailing by that are coming from, or returning to, the lands where you live. You cannot conceive anything more strange, and to me more distasteful than the life which one leads here. The whole watering-place consists of a few detached cottages, the property of some individuals who are singular enough to comprehend the pleasure of privacy; and one enormous hotel, a huge wooden building, of which we are at present among the inmates. How many _can_ sleep under this mammoth roof, I know not; but upwards of _four hundred_ have sat down at one time to feed in the boundless dining-hall. The number of persons now in the house does not, I believe, exceed eighty, and everybody is lamenting the smallness of the company, and the consequent dullness of the place; and I am perpetually called upon to sympathize with regrets which I am so far from sharing, that I wish, instead of eighty, we had only eight fellow-lodgers.... The general way of life is very disagreeable to me. I cannot, do what I will, find anything but constraint and discomfort in the perpetual presence of a crowd of strangers. The bedrooms are small, and furnished barely as well as a common servant's room in England. They are certainly not calculated for comfortable occupation or sitting alone in; but sitting alone any part of the day is a proceeding contemplated by no one here. As for bathing, we are carried down to the beach, which is extremely deep and sandy, in an omnibus, by batches of a dozen at a time. There are two little stationary bathing-huts for the use of the whole population; and you dress, undress, dry yourself, and do all you have to do, in the closest proximity to persons you never saw in your life before.... This admitting absolute strangers to the intimacy of one's most private toilet operations is quite intolerable, and nothing but the benefit which I believe the children, as well as myself, derive from the bathing would induce me to endure it. From this place we go up to Massachusetts--a delightful expedition to me--to our friends the Sedgwicks, who are very dear to me, and almost the only people among whom I have found mental companionship since I have been in this country. I have not had one line from my sister since her return from Germany, whence she wrote me one letter. I feel anxious about her plans--yet not very--I do not think her going into public life adds much to the anxiety I feel about her.... God bless you, dear. What would I give to be once more within reach of you, and to have one more of our old talks! Ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. ROCKAWAY, LONG ISLAND, August 23d, 1838. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, ... I forget whether you visited any of the watering-places of this New World; but if you did not, your estate was the more gracious. This is the second that I have visited, and I dislike it rather more than I did the first, inasmuch as the publicity here extends not only to one's meals, but to those ceremonies of one's toilet which in all civilized parts of the world human beings perform in the strictest seclusion. The beach is magnificent--ten good miles of hard, sparkling sand, and the broad, open Atlantic rolling its long waves and breaking in one white thunderous cloud along the level expanse. The bathing would be delightful but for the discomfort and positive indecency of the non-accommodation. There are two small stationary dressing-huts on the beach, and here one is compelled to disrobe and attire one's self in the closest proximity to any other women who may wish to come out of the water or go into it at the same time that one does one's self. Moreover, the beach at bathing time is daily thronged with spectators, before whose admiring gaze one has to emerge all dripping, like Venus, from the waves, and nearly as naked; for one's bathing-dress clings to one's figure, and makes a perfect wet drapery study of one's various members, and so one has to wade slowly and in much confusion of face, thus impeded, under the public gaze, through heavy sand, about half a quarter of a mile, to the above convenient dressing-rooms, where, if one find only three or four persons, stripped or stripping, nude or semi-nude, one may consider one's self fortunate.... I have wished, as heartily as I might for any such thing, that I could have seen the glorification of our little Guelph Lady, the Queen, particularly as the coronation of another English sovereign is scarcely likely to occur during my life; but this unaccomplished desire of mine must go and keep company with many others, which often tend to the other side of the Atlantic. Thank you for your account of my sister.... Hereafter, the want of female sympathy and companionship may prove irksome to her, but at present she will scarcely miss it; she and my father are exceedingly good friends, and pleasant companions and fellow-travelers, and are likely to remain so, unless she should fall in love with, and insist upon marrying, a "fiddler." Instead of being at Lenox, where I had hoped to be at this season, we are sweltering here in New York, for whatever good we may obtain from doctors, leeches, and medicine. I mean to send S---- up into Berkshire to-morrow; she is well at present, but I fear may not continue so if confined to the city during this dreadfully hot weather.... For myself, I am keeping myself well as hard as I can by taking ice-cold baths, and trudging round the Battery every evening, to the edification of the exceedingly disreputable company who (beside myself) are the only haunters of that one lovely lung of New York.... It is not thought expedient that I should be stared at alone on horseback; being stared at alone on foot, apparently, is not equally pernicious; and so I lose my most necessary exercise; but I may comfort myself with the reflection that should I ever become a sickly, feeble, physically good-for-nothing, broken-down woman, I shall certainly not be singular in this free and enlightened republic, where (even more than anywhere else in the world) singularity appears to be dreaded and condemned above any or all other sins, crimes, and vices.... Pray be kind enough to continue writing to me. Every letter from the other side is to me what the drop of water would have been to the rich man in Hades, whom I dare say you remember. What do you think I am reading? "The Triumphs of God's revenge against the crying and execrable _sinne_ of wilful and premeditated _murther_"--that's something new, is it not?--published in 1635. So believe me ever very truly yours, F. A. B. NEW YORK, Friday, August 24th, 1838. MY DEAREST HARRIET, I wrote to you (I believe) a short time ago, ... but I have since then received a letter from you, and will thank you at once for it, and especially for the details concerning my sister.... I rejoice in the change which must have taken place in her physical condition, which both you and dear Emily describe; indeed, the improvement had begun before I left England.... I believe I appreciate perfectly all the feelings which are prompting her to the choice of the stage for her profession; but I also think that she is unaware (which I am not) of the necessity for excitement, which her mode of life and the influences that have surrounded her from her childhood have created and fostered in her, and for which she is no more answerable than for the color of her hair. I do not even much regret her election, little as I admire the vocation of a public performer. To struggle is allotted to all, let them walk in what paths they will; and her peculiar gifts naturally incline her to the career she is choosing, though I think also that she has much higher intellectual capabilities than those which the vocation of a public singer will ever call into play.... We are always so greatly in the dark in our judgments of others, and so utterly incapable of rightly estimating the motives of their actions and springs of their conduct, that I think in the way of blame or praise, of vehement regret or excessive satisfaction, we need not do much until we know more. I pray God that she may endeavor to be true to herself, and to fulfill her own perception of what is right. Whether she does so or not, neither I, nor any one else, shall know; nor, indeed, is any one _really_ concerned in the matter but herself. She possesses some of the intellectual qualities from which the most exquisite pleasures are derived.... But she will not be happy in this world; but, as nobody else is, she will not be singular in that respect: and in the exercise of her uncommon gifts she may find a profound pleasure, and an enjoyment of the highest kind apart from happiness and its far deeper and higher springs. Her voice haunts me like something precious that I have lost and go vainly seeking for; other people play and sing her songs, and then, though I seem to listen to them, I hear _her_ again, and seem to see again that wonderful human soul which beamed from every part of her fine face as she uttered those powerful sweet spells of love, and pity, and terror. To me, her success seems almost a matter of certainty; for those who can make such appeals to the sympathy of their fellow-beings are pretty sure not to fail. Pasta is gone; Malibran is abroad; and Schroeder-Devrient is the only great dramatic singer left, and she remains but as the _remains_ of what she was; and I see no reason why Adelaide should not be as eminent as the first, who certainly was a glorious artist, though her acting surpassed her singing, and her voice was not an exceptionally magnificent one.... This letter has suffered an interruption of several days, dear Harriet, ... and I and my baby have been sent after S----; and here I am on the top of a hill in the village of Lenox, in what its inhabitants tautologically call "Berk_shire county_," Massachusetts, with a view before my window which would not disgrace the Jura itself. Immediately sloping before me, the green hillside, on the summit of which stands the house I am inhabiting, sinks softly down to a small valley, filled with thick, rich wood, in the centre of which a little jewel-like lake lies gleaming. Beyond this valley the hills rise one above another to the horizon, where they scoop the sky with a broken, irregular outline that the eye dwells on with ever new delight as its colors glow and vary with the ascending or descending sunlight, and all the shadowy procession of the clouds. In one direction this undulating line of distance is overtopped by a considerable mountain with a fine jagged crest, and ever since early morning, troops of clouds and wandering showers of rain and the all-prevailing sunbeams have chased each other over the wooded slopes, and down into the dark hollow where the lake lies sleeping, making a pageant far finer than the one Prospero raised for Ferdinand and Miranda on his desert island.... F. A. B. LENOX, Monday, September 3d, 1838. It is not very long since I wrote to you, my dear Mrs. Jameson, and I have certainly nothing of very special interest to communicate to warrant my doing so now; but I am in your debt by letters, besides many other things; and having leisure to back my inclination just now, I will indite. I am sitting "on top," as the Americans say, of the hill of Lenox, looking out at that prospect upon which your eyes have often rested, and making common cause in the eating and living way with Mary and Fanny A----, who have taken up their abode here for a week [Miss Mary and Fanny Appleton; the one afterwards married Robert, son of Sir James Mackintosh; the other, alas! the poet Longfellow]. Never was village hostelry so graced before, surely! There is a pretty daughter of Mr. Dewey's staying in the house besides, with a pretty cousin; and it strikes me that the old Red Inn is having a sort of blossoming season, with all these sweet, handsome young faces shining about it in every direction. You know the sort of life that is lived here: the absence of all form, ceremony, or inconvenient conventionality whatever. We laugh, and we talk, sing, play, dance, and discuss; we ride, drive, walk, run, scramble, and saunter, and amuse ourselves extremely with little materials (as the generality of people would suppose) wherewith to do so.... The Sedgwicks are under a cloud of sorrow just now.... They are none of them, however, people who suffer themselves to be absorbed by their own personal interests, whether sad or gay; and as in their most prosperous and happy hours they would have sympathy to spare to the sufferings of others, so the sickness and sorrow of these members of their family circle, and the consequent depression they all labor under (for where was a family more united?), does not prevent our enjoying every day delightful seasons of intercourse with them.... Pray write me whatever you hear about my people. Lady Dacre wrote me a kind and very interesting account of my sister the other day. Poor thing! her ordeal is now drawing near, if anybody's ordeal can properly be said to be "drawing near," except before they are born; for surely from beginning to end life is nothing but one long ordeal. I am glad you like Lady M----; she is a person whom I regard very dearly. It is many years since I first became acquainted with her, and the renewal of our early intimacy took place under circumstances of peculiar interest. Is not her face handsome; and her manner and deportment fine?... I must stop. I see my young ladies coming home from their afternoon drive, and am going with them to spend the hours between this and bed-time at Mrs. Charles Sedgwick's. Pray continue to write to me, and Believe me ever yours very truly, F. A. B. Begun at LENOX, ended at PHILADELPHIA, Sunday, October 29th, 1838. DEAREST HARRIET, ... Since the receipt of your last letter, one from Emily has reached me, bringing me the intelligence of my mother's death!... There is something so deplorable in perceiving (what one only fully perceives as they are ceasing forever) all the blessed uses of which these mysterious human relations are capable, all their preciousness, all their sweetness, all their holiness, alas! alas!... Cecilia and Mr. Combe arrived in this country by the _Great Western_ about a fortnight ago. On their road from New York to Boston they passed a night within six miles of Lenox, and neither came to see nor sent me word that they were so near, which was being rather more phrenological and philosophically phlegmatical than I should have expected of them. For my heart had warmed to Cecilia in this pilgrimage of hers to a foreign land, where I alone was of kin to her; and I felt as if I both knew and loved her more than I really do.... I understand Mr. Combe has parceled out both his whereabouts and whatabouts, to the very inch and minute, for every day in the next two years to come, which he intends to devote to the phrenological regeneration of this country. I am afraid that he may meet with some disappointment in the result of his labors: not indeed in Boston, where considerable curiosity exists upon that subject, and a general proneness to intellectual exercises of every description.... Throughout New England, his book on the "Constitution of Man," and his brother's, on the treatment of that constitution, are read and valued, and their name is held in esteem by the whole reading community of the North. But I doubt his doing more than exciting a mere temporary curiosity in New York and Philadelphia; and further south I should think he would not be listened to at all, unless he comes prepared to demonstrate phrenologically that the colored population of the Southern States is (or are), by the conformation of their skulls, the legitimate slaves of the whites. Can anything be stranger than to think of Cecilia trotting over the length and breadth of North America at the heels of a lecturing philosopher? When I think of her in her mother's drawing-room in London, in the midst of surroundings and society so different, I find no end to my wonderment. She must have extraordinary adaptability to circumstances in her composition. I have just finished the play of which you read the beginning in England--my "English Tragedy"--and am, as usual, in high delight just now with my own performance. I wish that agreeable sentiment could last; it is so pleasant while it does! I think I will send it over to Macready, to try if he will bring it out at Covent Garden. I think it might succeed, perhaps; unless, indeed, the story is too objectionable for anything--but _reality_. Perhaps I have had my share of health. I am sure I have had enough to be most grateful for, if I should lie on a sick-bed for the rest of my days.... God bless you, dear. I am ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. PHILADELPHIA, Tuesday, November 13th, 1838. ... The sad news of my poor mother's death, my dear Mrs. Jameson, reached me while I was staying up at Lenox, among those whom my good fortune has raised up in this strange country to fill for me the place of the kindred and friends from whom I am so widely sundered.... That the winter in Georgia, whither we are going immediately, may be beneficial to the invalid member of our party, is the only pleasant anticipation with which I set my face towards a part of the country where the whole manner of existence is repugnant to my feelings, and where the common comforts of life are so little known, that we are obliged to ship a freight of necessary articles of food, for our use while we are on the plantation. Wheaten bread is unknown, meal made of the Indian corn being alone used there: and though the provision Nature has furnished, in the shape of game, abounds, the only meat, properly so called, which can be procured there, is shipped in barrels (salted, of course) from the North. Society, or the shadow of it, is not to be dreamt of; and our residence, as far as I can learn, is to be a half-furnished house in the midst of rice-swamps, where our habitual company will be our slaves, and our occasional visitors an alligator or two from the Altamaha. Catharine Sedgwick is spending the winter in Lenox. She and Mr. and Mrs. R---- and Kate are going to Europe in the spring; and if I should return alive from Slavery, perhaps I may go with them. Pray do not fail to let me know everything you may hear or see of my sister.... I was at Lenox when your parcel for Catharine Sedgwick arrived. We were all enchanted with the engraving from the German picture of the "Sick Counsellor." F. A. B. DEAREST HARRIET, On Friday morning we started from Philadelphia, by railroad, for Baltimore. It is a curious fact enough, that half the routes that are traveled in America are either temporary or unfinished,--one reason, among several, for the multitudinous accidents which befall wayfarers. At the very outset of our journey, and within scarce a mile of Philadelphia, we crossed the Schuylkill, over a bridge, one of the principal piers of which is yet incomplete, and the whole building (a covered wooden one, of handsome dimensions) filled with workmen, yet occupied about its construction. But the Americans are impetuous in the way of improvement, and have all the impatience of children about the trying of a new thing, often greatly retarding their own progress by hurrying unduly the completion of their works, or using them in a perilous state of incompleteness. Our road lay for a considerable length of time through flat, low meadows that skirt the Delaware, which at this season of the year, covered with snow and bare of vegetation, presented a most dreary aspect. We passed through Wilmington (Delaware), and crossed a small stream called the Brandywine, the scenery along the banks of which is very beautiful. For its historical associations I refer you to the life of Washington. I cannot say that the aspect of the town of Wilmington, as viewed from the railroad cars, presented any very exquisite points of beauty; I shall therefore indulge in a few observations upon these same railroad cars just here. And first, I cannot but think that it would be infinitely more consonant with comfort, convenience, and common sense, if persons obliged to travel during the intense cold of an American winter (in the Northern States), were to clothe themselves according to the exigency of the weather, and so do away with the present deleterious custom of warming close and crowded carriages with sheet-iron stoves, heated with anthracite coal. No words can describe the foulness of the atmosphere, thus robbed of all vitality by the vicious properties of that dreadful combustible, and tainted besides with the poison emitted at every respiration from so many pairs of human lungs. These are facts which the merest tyro in physiological science knows, and the utter disregard of which on the part of the Americans renders them the amazement of every traveler from countries where the preservation of health is considered worth the care of a rational creature. I once traveled to Harrisburg in a railroad car, fitted up to carry sixty-four persons, in the midst of which glowed a large stove. The trip was certainly a delectable one. Nor is there any remedy for this: an attempt to open a window is met by a universal scowl and shudder; and indeed it is but incurring the risk of one's death of cold, instead of one's death of heat. The windows, in fact, form the walls on each side of the carriage, which looks like a long green-house upon wheels; the seats, which each contain two persons (a pretty tight fit too), are placed down the whole length of the vehicle, one behind the other, leaving a species of aisle in the middle for the uneasy (a large portion of the traveling community here) to fidget up and down, for the tobacco-chewers to spit in, and for a whole tribe of little itinerant fruit and cake-sellers to rush through, distributing their wares at every place where the train stops. Of course nobody can well sit immediately in the opening of a window when the thermometer is twelve degrees below zero; yet this, or suffocation in foul air, is the only alternative. I generally prefer being half frozen to death to the latter mode of martyrdom. Attached to the Baltimore cars was a separate apartment for women. It was of comfortable dimensions, and without a stove; and here I betook myself with my children, escaping from the pestilential atmosphere of the other compartment, and performing our journey with ease enough. My only trial here was one which I have to encounter in whatever direction I travel in America, and which, though apparently a trivial matter in itself, has caused me infinite trouble, and no little compassion for the rising generation of the United States--I allude to the ignorant and fatal practice of the women of stuffing their children from morning till night with every species of trash which comes to hand.... I once took the liberty of asking a young woman who was traveling in the same carriage with me, and stuffing her child incessantly with heavy cakes, which she also attempted to make mine eat, her reason for this system,--she replied, it was to "keep her baby good." I looked at her own sallow cheeks and rickety teeth, and could not forbear suggesting to her how much she was injuring her poor child's health. She stared in astonishment, and pursued the process, no doubt wondering what I meant, and how I could be so cruel as not to allow pound-cake to my child. Indeed, as may easily be supposed, it becomes a matter of no little difficulty to enforce my own rigid discipline in the midst of the various offers of dainties which tempt my poor little girl at every turn; but I persevere, nevertheless, and am not seldom rewarded by the admiration which her appearance of health and strength excites wherever she goes. I remember being excessively amused at the woeful condition of an unfortunate gentleman on board one of the Philadelphia boats, whose sickly-looking wife, exhausted with her vain attempts to quiet three sickly-looking children, had in despair given them into his charge. The miserable man furnished each of them with a lump of cake, and during the temporary lull caused by this diversion, took occasion to make acquaintance with my child, to whom he tendered the same indulgence. Upon my refusing it for her, he exclaimed in astonishment-- "Why, madam, don't you allow the little girl cake?" "No, sir." "What does she eat, pray?" (as if people lived upon cake generally). "Bread and milk, and bread and meat." "What! no butter? no tea or coffee?" "None whatever." "Ah!" sighed the poor man, as the chorus of woe arose again from his own progeny, the cake having disappeared down their throats, "I suppose that's why she looks so healthy." I supposed so, too, but did not inquire whether the gentleman extended his inference. We pursued our way from Wilmington to Havre de Grace on the railroad, and crossed one or two inlets from the Chesapeake, of considerable width, upon bridges of a most perilous construction, and which, indeed, have given way once or twice in various parts already. They consist merely of wooden piles driven into the river, across which the iron rails are laid, only just raising the train above the level of the water. To traverse with an immense train, at full steam-speed, one of these creeks, nearly a mile in width, is far from agreeable, let one be never so little nervous; and it was with infinite cordiality each time that I greeted the first bush that hung over the water, indicating our approach to _terra firma_. At Havre de Grace we crossed the Susquehanna in a steamboat, which cut its way through the ice an inch in thickness with marvelous ease and swiftness, and landed us on the other side, where we again entered the railroad carriages to pursue our road. We arrived in Baltimore at about half-past two, and went immediately on board the Alabama steamboat, which was to convey us to Portsmouth, and which started about three-quarters of an hour after, carrying us down the Chesapeake Bay to the shores of Virginia. We obtained an unutterably hard beefsteak for our dinner, having had nothing on the road, but found ourselves but little fortified by the sight of what we really could not swallow. Between six and seven, however, occurred that most comprehensive repast, a steamboat tea; after which, and the ceremony of choosing our berths, I betook myself to the reading of "Oliver Twist" till half-past eleven at night. I wonder if Mr. Dickens had any sensible perception of the benedictions which flew to him from the bosom of the broad Chesapeake as I closed his book; I am afraid not. Helen says, "'tis pity well-wishing has no body," so it is that gratitude, admiration, and moral approbation have none, for the sake of such a writer, and yet he might, peradventure, be smothered. I had a comical squabble with the stewardess,--a dirty, funny, good-humored old negress, who was driven almost wild by my exorbitant demands for towels, of which she assured me one was a quite ample allowance. Mine, alas! were deep down in my trunk, beyond all possibility of getting at, even if I could have got at the trunk, which I very much doubt. Now I counted no less than _seven_ handsome looking-glasses on board of this steamboat, where one towel was considered all that was requisite, not even for each individual, but for each washing-room. This addiction to ornament, and neglect of comfort and convenience, is a strong characteristic of Americans at present, luxuries often abounding where decencies cannot be procured. 'Tis the necessary result of a young civilization, and reminds me a little of Rosamond's purple jar, or Sir Joshua Reynolds's charming picture of the naked child, with a court cap full of flowers and feathers stuck on her head. After a very wretched night on board the boat, we landed about nine o'clock, at Portsmouth, Virginia. I must not omit to mention that my morning ablutions were as much excepted to by the old negress as those of the preceding evening. Indeed, she seemed perfectly indignant at the forbearance of one lady, who withdrew from the dressing-room on finding me there, exclaiming-- "Go in, go in, I tell you; they always washes two at a time in them rooms." At Portsmouth there is a fine dry dock and navy yard, as I was informed.... The appearance of the place in general was mean and unpicturesque. Here I encountered the first slaves I ever saw, and the sight of them in no way tended to alter my previous opinions upon this subject. They were poorly clothed; looked horribly dirty, and had a lazy recklessness in their air and manner as they sauntered along, which naturally belongs to creatures without one of the responsibilities which are the honorable burthen of rational humanity. Our next stopping-place was a small town called Suffolk. Here the negroes gathered in admiring crowds round the railroad carriages. They seem full of idle merriment and unmeaning glee, and regard with an intensity of curiosity perfectly ludicrous the appearance and proceedings of such whites as they easily perceive are strangers in their part of the country. As my child leaned from the carriage-window, her brilliant complexion drew forth sundry exclamations of delight from the sooty circle below, and one woman, grinning from ear to ear, and displaying a most dazzling set of grinders, drew forward a little mahogany-colored imp, her grandchild, and offered her to the little "Missis" for her waiting-maid. I told her the little missis waited upon herself; whereupon she set up a most incredulous giggle, and reiterated her proffers, in the midst of which our kettle started off, and we left her. To describe to you the tract of country through which we now passed would be impossible, so forlorn a region it never entered my imagination to conceive. Dismal by nature, indeed, as well as by name, is that vast swamp, of which we now skirted the northern edge, looking into its endless pools of black water, where the melancholy cypress and juniper-trees alone overshadowed the thick-looking surface, their roots all globular, like huge bulbous plants, and their dark branches woven together with a hideous matting of giant creepers, which clung round their stems, and hung about the dreary forest like a drapery of withered snakes. It looked like some blasted region lying under an enchanter's ban, such as one reads of in old stories. Nothing lived or moved throughout the loathsome solitude, and the sunbeams themselves seemed to sicken and grow pale as they glided like ghosts through these watery woods. Into this wilderness it seems impossible that the hand of human industry, or the foot of human wayfaring should ever penetrate; no wholesome growth can take root in its slimy depths; a wild jungle chokes up parts of it with a reedy, rattling covert for venomous reptiles; the rest is a succession of black ponds, sweltering under black cypress boughs,--a place forbid. The wood which is cut upon its borders is obliged to be felled in winter, for the summer, which clothes other regions with flowers, makes this pestilential waste alive with rattlesnakes, so that none dare venture within its bounds, and I should even apprehend that, traveling as rapidly as one does on the railroad, and only skirting this district of dismay, one might not escape the fetid breathings it sends forth when the warm season has quickened its stagnant waters and poisonous vegetation. After passing this place, we entered upon a country little more cheerful in its aspect, though the absence of the dark swamp water was something in its favor,--apparently endless tracts of pine-forest, well called by the natives, Pine-Barrens. The soil is pure sand; and, though the holly, with its coral berries, and the wild myrtle grow in considerable abundance, mingled with the pines, these preponderate, and the whole land presents one wearisome extent of arid soil and gloomy vegetation. Not a single decent dwelling did we pass: here and there, at rare intervals, a few miserable negro huts squatting round a mean framed building, with brick chimneys built on the outside, the residence of the owner of the land and his squalid serfs, were the only evidences of human existence in this forlorn country. Towards four o'clock, as we approached the Roanoke, the appearance of the land improved; there was a good deal of fine soil well farmed, and the river, where we crossed it, although in all the naked unadornment of wintry banks, looked very picturesque and refreshing as it gushed along, broken by rocks and small islands into rapid reaches and currents. Immediately after crossing it, we stopped at a small knot of houses, which, although christened Weldon, and therefore pretending to be a place, was rather the place where a place was intended to be. Two or three rough-pine warerooms, or station-houses, belonging to the railroad; a few miserable dwellings, which might be either not half built up, or not quite fallen down, on the banks of a large mill-pond; one exceedingly dirty-looking old wooden house, whither we directed our steps as to the inn; but we did not take our ease in it, though we tried as much as we could. However, one thing I will say for North Carolina--it has the best material for fire, and the noblest liberality in the use of it, of any place in the world. Such a spectacle as one of those rousing pine-wood chimneyfuls is not to be described, nor the revivification it engenders even in the absence of every other comfort or necessary of life. They are enough to make one turn Gheber,--such noble piles of fire and flame, such hearty, brilliant life--full altars of light and warmth. These greeted us upon our entrance into this miserable inn, and seemed to rest and feed, as well as warm us. We (the women) were shown up a filthy flight of wooden stairs into a dilapidated room, the plastered walls of which were all smeared and discolored, the windows begrimed and darkened with dirt. Upon the three beds, which nearly filled up this wretched apartment, lay tattered articles of male and female apparel; and here we drew round the pine-wood fire, which blazed up the chimney, sending a ruddy glow of comfort and cheerfulness even through this disgusting den. We were to wait here for the arrival of the cars from a branch railroad, to continue our route; and in the mean time a so-called dinner was provided for us, to which we were presently summoned. Of the horrible dirt of everything at this meal, from the eatables themselves to the table-cloth, and the clothes of the negroes who waited upon us, it would be impossible to give any idea. The poultry, which formed here, as it does all through the South, the chief animal part of the repast (except the consumers, always understood), were so tough that I should think they must have been alive when we came into the house, and certainly died very hard. They were swimming in black grease, and stuffed with some black ingredient that was doubt and dismay to us uninitiated; but, however, knowledge would probably have been more terrible in this case than ignorance. We had no bread but lumps of hot dough, which reminded me forcibly of certain juvenile creations of my brothers, yclept dumps. I should think they would have eaten very much alike. I was amused to observe that while our tea was poured out, and handed to us by a black girl of most disgustingly dirty appearance, no sooner did the engine drivers, and persons connected with the railroads and coaches, sit down to their meal, than the landlady herself, a portly dame, with a most dignified carriage, took the head of the table, and did the honors with all the grace of a most accomplished hostess. Our male fellow-travelers no sooner had dispatched their dinner than they withdrew in a body to the other end of the apartment, and large rattling folding-doors being drawn across the room, the separation of men and women, so rigidly observed by all traveling Americans, took place. This is a most peculiar and amusing custom, though sometimes I have been not a little inclined to quarrel with it, inasmuch as it effectually deprives one of the assistance of the men under whose protection one is traveling, as well as all the advantages or pleasure of their society. Twice during this southward trip of ours my companion has been most peremptorily ordered to withdraw from the apartment where he was conversing with me, by colored cabin-girls, who told him it was against the rules for any gentleman to come into the ladies' room. This making rules by which ladies and gentlemen are to observe the principles of decorum and good-breeding may be very necessary, for aught I can tell, but it seems rather sarcastical, I think, to have them enforced by servant-girls. The gentlemen, on their side, are intrenched in a similar manner; and if a woman has occasion to speak to the person with whom she is traveling, her entrance into the male den, if she has the courage to venture there, is the signal for a universal stare and whisper. But, for the most part, the convenient result of this arrangement is, that such men as have female companions with them pass their time in prowling about the precincts of the "ladies' apartment"; while their respective ladies pop their heads first out of one door and then out of another, watching in decorous discomfort the time when "their man" shall come to pass. Our sole resource on the present occasion was to retire again to the horrible hole above stairs, where we had at first taken refuge and here we remained until summoned down again by the arrival of the expected train. My poor little children, overcome with fatigue and sleep, were carried, and we walked from the _hotel_ at Weldon to the railroad, and by good fortune obtained a compartment to ourselves. It was now between eight and nine o'clock, and perfectly dark. The carriages were furnished with lamps, however, and, by the rapid glance they cast upon the objects which we passed, I endeavored in vain to guess at the nature of the country through which we were traveling; but, except the tall shafts of the everlasting pine trees, which still pursued us, I could descry nothing, and resigned myself to the amusing contemplation of the attitudes of my companions, who were all fast asleep. Between twelve and one o'clock the engine stopped, and it was announced to us that we had traveled as far upon the railroad as it was yet completed, and that we must transfer ourselves to stage-coaches; so in the dead middle of the night we crept out of the train, and taking our children in our arms, walked a few yards into an open space in the woods, where three four-horse coaches stood waiting to receive us. A crowd of men, principally negroes, were collected here round a huge fire of pine-wood, which, together with the pine-torches, whose resinous glare streamed brilliantly into the darkness of the woods, created a ruddy blaze, by the light of which we reached our vehicles in safety, and, while they were adjusting the luggage, had leisure to admire our jetty torch-bearers, who lounged round in a state of tattered undress, highly picturesque,--the staring whites of their eyes, and glittering ranges of dazzling teeth exhibited to perfection by the expression of grinning amusement in their countenances, shining in the darkness almost as brightly as the lights which they reflected. We had especially requested that we might have a coach to ourselves, and had been assured that there would be one for the use of our party. It appeared, however, that the outside seat of this had been appropriated by some one, for our coachman, who was traveling with us, was obliged to take a seat inside with us; and though it then contained five grown persons and two children, it seems that the coach was by no means considered full. The horrors of that night's journey I shall not easily forget. The road lay almost the whole way through swamps, and was frequently itself under water. It was made of logs of wood (a corduroy road), and so dreadfully rough and unequal, that the drawing a coach over it at all seemed perfectly miraculous. I expected every moment that we must be overturned into the marsh, through which we splashed, with hardly any intermission, the whole night long. Their drivers in this part of the country deserve infinite praise both for skill and care; but the road-makers, I think, are beyond all praise for their noble confidence in what skill and care can accomplish. You will readily imagine how thankfully I saw the first whitening of daylight in the sky. I do not know that any morning was ever more welcome to me than that which found us still surrounded by the pine-swamps of North Carolina, which, brightened by the morning sun, and breathed through by the morning air, lost something of their dreary desolateness to my senses.... Not long after daybreak we arrived at a place called Stantonsborough. I do not know whether that is the name of the district, or what; for I saw no village,--nothing but the one lonely house in the wood at which we stopped. I should have mentioned that the unfortunate individual who took our coachman's place outside, towards daybreak became so perished with cold, that an exchange was effected between them, and thus the privacy (if such it could be called) of our carriage was invaded, in spite of the promise which we had received to the contrary. As I am nursing my own baby, and have been compelled to travel all day and all night, of course this was a circumstance of no small annoyance; but as our company was again increased some time after, and subsequently I had to travel in a railroad carriage that held upwards of twenty people, I had to resign myself to this, among the other miseries of this most miserable journey. As we alighted from our coach, we encountered the comical spectacle of the two coach-loads of gentlemen who had traveled the same route as ourselves, with wrist-bands and coat-cuffs turned back, performing their morning ablutions all together at a long wooden dresser in the open air, though the morning was piercing cold. Their toilet accommodations were quite of the most primitive order imaginable, as indeed were ours. We (the women) were all shown into one small room, the whole furniture of which consisted of a chair and wooden bench: upon the latter stood one basin, one ewer, and a relic of soap, apparently of great antiquity. Before, however, we could avail ourselves of these ample means of cleanliness, we were summoned down to breakfast; but as we had traveled all night, and all the previous day, and were to travel all the ensuing day and night, I preferred washing to eating, and determined, if I could not do both, at least to accomplish the first. There was neither towel, nor glass for one's teeth, nor hostess or chambermaid to appeal to. I ran through all the rooms on the floor, of which the doors were open; but though in one I found a magnificent veneered chest of drawers, and large looking-glass, neither of the above articles were discoverable. Again the savage passion for ornament occurred to me as I looked at this piece of furniture, which might have adorned the most luxurious bedroom of the wealthiest citizen in New York--here in this wilderness, in a house which seemed but just cut out of the trees, where a tin pan was brought to me for a basin, and where the only kitchen, of which the window of our room, to our sorrow, commanded an uninterrupted prospect, was an open shed, not fit to stable a well-kept horse in. As I found nothing that I could take possession of in the shape of towel or tumbler, I was obliged to wait on the stairs, and catch one of the dirty black girls who were running to and fro serving the breakfast-room. Upon asking one of these nymphs for a towel, she held up to me a horrible cloth, which, but for the evidence to the contrary which its filthy surface presented, I should have supposed had been used to clean the floors. Upon my objecting to this, she flounced away, disgusted, I presume, with my fastidiousness, and appeared no more. As I leaned over the bannisters in a state of considerable despondency, I espied a man who appeared to be the host himself and to him I ventured to prefer my humble petition for a clean towel. He immediately snatched from the dresser, where the gentlemen had been washing themselves, a wet and dirty towel, which lay by one of the basins, and offered it to me. Upon my suggesting that that was not a _clean_ towel, he looked at me from head to foot with ineffable amazement, but at length desired one of the negroes to fetch me the unusual luxury. Of the breakfast at this place no words can give any idea. There were plates full of unutterable-looking things, which made one feel as if one should never swallow food again. There were some eggs, all begrimed with smoke, and powdered with cinders; some unbaked dough, cut into little lumps, by way of bread; and a white, hard substance, calling itself butter, which had an infinitely nearer resemblance to tallow. The mixture presented to us by way of tea was absolutely undrinkable; and when I begged for a glass of milk, they brought a tumbler covered with dust and dirt, full of such sour stuff that I was obliged to put it aside, after endeavoring to taste it. Thus _refreshed_, we set forth again through the eternal pine-lands, on and on, the tall stems rising all round us for miles and miles in dreary monotony, like a spell-land of dismal enchantment, to which there seemed no end.... North Carolina is, I believe, the poorest State in the Union: the part of it through which we traveled should seem to indicate as much. From Suffolk to Wilmington we did not pass a single town,--scarcely anything deserving the name of a village. The few detached houses on the road were mean and beggarly in their appearance; and the people whom we saw when the coach stopped had a squalid, and at the same time fierce air, which at once bore witness to the unfortunate influences of their existence. Not the least of these is the circumstance that their subsistence is derived in great measure from the spontaneous produce of the land, which, yielding without cultivation the timber and turpentine, by the sale of which they are mainly supported, denies to them all the blessings which flow from labor. How is it that the fable ever originated of God's having cursed man with the doom of toil? How is it that men have ever been blind to the exceeding profitableness of labor, even for its own sake, whose moral harvest alone--industry, economy, patience, foresight, knowledge--is in itself an exceeding great reward, to which add the physical blessings which wait on this universal law--health, strength, activity, cheerfulness, the content that springs from honest exertion, and the lawful pride that grows from conquered difficulty? How invariably have the inhabitants of southern countries, whose teeming soil produced, unurged, the means of life, been cursed with indolence, with recklessness, with the sleepy slothfulness which, while basking in the sunshine, and gathering the earth's spontaneous fruits, satisfied itself with this animal existence, forgetting all the nobler purposes of life in the mere ease of living? Therefore, too, southern lands have always been the prey of northern conquerors; and the bleak regions of Upper Europe and Asia have poured forth from time to time the hungry hordes, whose iron sinews swept the nerveless children of the gardens of the earth from the face of their idle paradises: and, but for this stream of keener life and nobler energy, it would be difficult to imagine a more complete race of lotus-eaters than would now cumber the fairest regions of the earth. Doubtless it is to counteract the enervating effects of soil and climate that this northern tide of vigorous life flows forever towards the countries of the sun, that the races may be renewed, the earth reclaimed, and the world, and all its various tribes, rescued from disease and decay by the influence of the stern northern vitality, searching and strong, and purifying as the keen piercing winds that blow from that quarter of the heavens. To descend to rather a familiar illustration of this, it is really quite curious to observe how many New England adventurers come to the Southern States, and bringing their enterprising, active character to bear upon the means of wealth, which in the North they lack, but which abound in these more favored regions, return home after a short season of exertion, laden with the spoils of the indolent southerners. The southern people are growing poorer every day, in the midst of their slaves and their vast landed estates: whilst every day sees the arrival amongst them of some penniless Yankee, who presently turns the very ground he stands upon into wealth, and departs a lord of riches at the end of a few years, leaving the sleepy population, among whom he has amassed them, floated still farther down the tide of dwindling prosperity.... At a small place called Waynesborough, ... I asked for a glass of milk, and they told me they had no such thing. Upon entering our new vehicle, we found another stranger added to our party, to my unspeakable annoyance. Complaint or remonstrance, I knew, however, would be of no avail, and I therefore submitted in silence to what I could not help. At a short distance beyond Waynesborough we were desired to alight, in order to walk over a bridge, which was in so rotten a condition as to render it very probable that it would give way under our weight. This same bridge, whose appearance was indeed most perilous, is built at a considerable height over a broad and rapid stream, called the Neuse, the color of whose water we had an excellent opportunity of admiring through the numerous holes in the plankage, over which we walked as lightly and rapidly as we could, stopping afterwards to see our coach come at a foot's pace after us. This may be called safe and pleasant traveling. The ten miles which followed were over heavy sandy roads, and it was near sunset when we reached the place where we were to take the railroad. The train, however, had not arrived, and we sat still in the coaches, there being neither town, village, nor even a road-side inn at hand, where we might take shelter from the bitter blast which swept through the pine-woods by which we were surrounded; and so we waited patiently, the day gradually drooping, the evening air becoming colder, and the howling wilderness around us more dismal every moment. In the mean time the coaches were surrounded by a troop of gazing boors, who had come from far and near to see the hot-water carriages come up for only the third time into the midst of their savage solitude. A more forlorn, fierce, poor, and wild-looking set of people, short of absolute savages, I never saw. They wandered round and round us, with a stupid kind of dismayed wonder. The men clothed in the coarsest manner, and the women also, of whom there were not a few, with the grotesque addition of pink and blue silk bonnets, with artificial flowers, and imitation-blonde veils. Here the gentlemen of our party informed us that they observed, for the first time, a custom prevalent in North Carolina, of which I had myself frequently heard before--the women chewing tobacco, and that, too, in a most disgusting and disagreeable way, if one way can be more disgusting than another. They carry habitually a small stick, like the implement for cleaning the teeth, usually known in England by the name of a root,--this they thrust away in their glove, or their garter-string, and, whenever occasion offers, plunge it into a snuff-box, and begin chewing it. The practice is so common that the proffer of the snuff-box, and its passing from hand to hand, is the usual civility of a morning visit among the country-people; and I was not a little amused at hearing the gentlemen who were with us describe the process as they witnessed it in their visit to a miserable farm-house across the fields, whither they went to try to obtain something to eat. It was now becoming dark, and the male members of our caravan held council round a pine fire as to what course had better be adopted for sheltering themselves and us during the night, which we seemed destined to pass in the woods. After some debate, it was recollected that one Colonel ----, a man of some standing in that neighborhood, had a farm about a mile distant, immediately upon the line of the railroad; and thither it was determined we should all repair, and ask quarters for the night. Fortunately, an empty truck stood at hand upon the iron road, and to this the luggage and the women and children of the party, were transferred. A number of negroes, who were loitering about, were pressed into the service, and pushed it along; and the gentlemen, walking, brought up the rear. I don't know that I ever in my life felt so completely desolate as during that half-hour's slow progress. We sat cowering among the trunks, my faithful Margery and I, each with a baby in our arms, sheltering ourselves and our poor little burthens from the bleak northern wind that whistled over us. The last embers of daylight were dying out in dusky red streaks along the horizon, and the dreary waste around us looked like the very shaggy edge of all creation. The men who pushed us along encouraged each other with wild shouts and yells, and every now and then their labor was one of no little danger, as well as difficulty,--for the road crossed one or two deep ravines and morasses at a considerable height, and, as it was not completed, and nothing but the iron rails were laid across piles driven into these places, it became a service of considerable risk to run along these narrow ledges, at the same time urging our car along. No accident happened, however, fortunately, and we presently beheld, with no small satisfaction, a cluster of houses in the fields at some little distance from the road. To the principal one I made my way, followed by the rest of the poor womankind, and, entering the house without further ceremony, ushered them into a large species of wooden room, where blazed a huge pine-wood fire. By this welcome light we descried, sitting in the corner of the vast chimney, an old, ruddy-faced man, with silver hair, and a good-humored countenance, who, welcoming us with ready hospitality, announced himself as Colonel ----, and invited us to draw near the fire. The worthy colonel seemed in no way dismayed at this sudden inbreak of distressed women, which was very soon followed by the arrival of the gentlemen, to whom he repeated the same courteous reception he had given us, replying to their rather hesitating demands for something to eat, by ordering to the right and left a tribe of staring negroes, who bustled about preparing supper, under the active superintendence of the hospitable colonel. His residence (considering his rank) was quite the most primitive imaginable,--a rough brick-and-plank chamber, of considerable dimensions, not even whitewashed, with the great beams and rafters by which it was supported displaying the skeleton of the building, to the complete satisfaction of any one who might be curious in architecture. The windows could close neither at the top, bottom, sides, nor middle, and were, besides, broken so as to admit several delightful currents of air, which might be received as purely accidental. In one corner of this primitive apartment stood a clean-looking bed, with coarse furniture; whilst in the opposite one, an old case-clock was ticking away its time and its master's with cheerful monotony. The rush-bottomed chairs were of as many different shapes and sizes as those in a modern fine lady's drawing-room, and the walls were hung all round with a curious miscellany, consisting principally of physic vials, turkey-feather fans, bunches of dried herbs, and the colonel's arsenal, in the shape of one or two old guns, etc. According to the worthy man's hearty invitation, I proceeded to make myself and my companions at home, pinning, skewering, and otherwise suspending our cloaks and shawls across the various intentional and unintentional air-gaps, thereby increasing both the comfort and the grotesqueness of the apartment in no small degree. The babies had bowls of milk furnished them, and the elder portion of the caravan was regaled with a taste of the colonel's home-made wine, pending the supper to which he continued to entreat our stay. Meantime he entered into conversation with the gentlemen; and my veneration waxed deep, when the old man, unfolding his history, proclaimed himself one of the heroes of the revolution,--a fellow-fighter with Washington. I, who, comforted to a degree of high spirits by our sudden transition from the cold and darkness of the railroad to the light and shelter of this rude mansion, had been flippantly bandying jokes, and proceeded some way in a lively flirtation with this illustrious American, grew thrice respectful, and hardly ventured to raise either my eyes or my voice as I inquired if he lived alone in this remote place. Yes, alone now; his wife had been dead near upon two years. Suddenly we were broken in upon by the arrival of the expected train. It was past eight o'clock. If we delayed we should have to travel all night; but then, the colonel pressed us to stay and sup (the bereaved colonel, the last touching revelation of whose lonely existence had turned all my mirth into sympathizing sadness). The gentlemen were famished and well inclined to stay; the ladies were famished too, for we had eaten nothing all day. The bustle of preparation, urged by the warmhearted colonel, began afresh; the negro girls shambled in and out more vigorously than ever, and finally we were called to eat and refresh ourselves with--dirty water--I cannot call it tea,--old cheese, bad butter, and old dry biscuits. The gentlemen bethought them of the good supper they might have secured a few miles further and groaned; but the hospitable colonel merely asked them half a dollar apiece (there were about ten of them); paying which, we departed, with our enthusiasm a little damped for the warrior of the revolution; and a tinge of rather deeper misgiving as to some of his virtues stole over our minds, on learning that three of the sable damsels who trudged about at our supper service were the colonel's own progeny. I believe only three,--though the young negro girl, whose loquacity made us aware of the fact, added, with a burst of commendable pride and gratitude, "Indeed, he is a father to us all!" Whether she spoke figuratively, or literally, we could not determine. So much for a three hours' shelter in North Carolina.... F. A. B. DEAREST HARRIET, I had been very much struck with the appearance of the horses we passed occasionally in enclosures, or gathered round some lonely roadside pine-wood shop, or post-office, fastened to trees in the surrounding forest, and waiting for their riders. I had been always led to expect a great improvement in the breed of horses as we went southward, and the appearance of those I saw on the road was certainly in favor of the claim. They were generally small, but in good condition, and remarkably well made. They seemed to be tolerably well cared for, too; and those which we saw caparisoned were ornamented with gay saddle-cloths, and rather a superfluity of trappings for _civil_ animals. At our dismal halt in the woods, while waiting for the railroad train, among our other spectators was a woman on horseback. Her steed was uncommonly pretty and well-limbed; but her costume was quite the most eccentric that can be imagined, accustomed as I am to the not over-rigid equipments of the northern villages. But the North Carolinian damsel beat all Yankee girls, I ever saw, hollow, in the glorious contempt she exhibited for the external fitness of things in her exceeding short skirts and huge sun-bonnet. After our departure from Colonel ----'s, we traveled all night on the railroad. One of my children slept in my lap, the other on the narrow seat opposite to me, from which she was jolted off every quarter of an hour by the uneasy motion of the carriage, and the checks and stops of the engine, which was out of order. The carriage, though full of people, was heated with a stove, and every time this was replenished with coals we were almost suffocated with the clouds of bituminous smoke which filled it. Five hours, they said, was the usual time consumed in this part of the journey; but we were the whole mortal night upon that uneasy railroad, and it was five o'clock in the morning before we reached Wilmington, North Carolina. When the train stopped it was yet quite dark, and most bitterly cold; nevertheless, the distance from the railroad to the only inn where we could be accommodated was nothing less than a mile; and, weary and worn out, we trudged along, the poor little sleeping children carried by their still more unfortunate, sleepless nurses--and so by the cheerless winter starlight we walked along the brink of the Cape Fear River, to seek where we might lay our heads. We were shown into a room without window-curtains or shutters, the windows, as usual, not half shut, and wholly incapable of shutting. Here, when I asked if we could have some tea, (having fasted the whole previous day with the exception of Colonel ----'s bountiful supper), the host pleasantly informed us that the "public breakfast would not be ready for some hours yet." I really could not help once again protesting against this abominable tyranny of the traveling many over the traveling few in this free country. It is supposed impossible that any individual can hunger, thirst, or desire sleep at any other than the "public hours." The consequence is, that let one arrive starved at an inn, one can obtain nothing till such hours as those who are not starving desire to eat;--and if one is foredone with travel, weary, and wanting rest, the pitiless alarum-bell, calling those who may have had twelve hours' sleep from their beds, must startle those who have only just closed their eyes for the first time, perhaps for three nights,--as if the whole traveling community were again at boarding-school, and as if a private summons by the boots or chambermaid to each apartment would not answer the same purpose. We were, however, so utterly exhausted, that waiting for the public appetite was out of the question; and, by dint of much supplication, we at length obtained some breakfast. When, however, we stated that we had not been in bed for two successive nights, and asked to be shown to our rooms, the same gentleman, our host, an exceedingly pleasant person, informed us that _our_ chamber was prepared,--adding, with the most facetious familiarity, when I exclaimed "Our chamber!" (we were three, and two children)-- "Oh! madam, I presume you will have no objection to sleeping with _your infant_" (he lumped the two into one); "and these two ladies" (Miss ---- and Margery) "will sleep together. I dare say they have done it a hundred times." This unheard-of proposition, and the man's cool impudence in making it, so astonished me that I could hardly speak. At last, however, I found words to inform him that none of our party were in the habit of sleeping with each other, and that the arrangement was such as we were not at all inclined to submit to. The gentleman, apparently very much surprised at our singular habits, said, "Oh! he didn't know that the ladies were not acquainted" (as if, forsooth, one went to bed with all one's acquaintance!) "but that he had but one room in the ladies' part of the house." Miss ---- immediately professed her readiness to take one in the gentlemen's "part of the house," when it appeared that there was none vacant there which had a fireplace in it. As the morning was intensely cold, this could not be thought of. I could not take shelter in ----'s room; for he, according to this decent and comfortable mode of lodging travelers, had another man to share it with him. To our common dormitory we therefore repaired, as it was impossible that we could any of us go any longer without rest. I established Margery and the two babies in the largest bed; poor Miss ---- betook herself to a sort of curtainless cot that stood in one corner; and I laid myself down on a mattress on the floor; and we soon all forgot the conveniences of a Wilmington hotel in the supreme convenience of sleep. It was bright morning, and drawing towards one o'clock, when we rose, and were presently summoned to the "public dinner." The dirt and discomfort of everything was so intolerable that I could not eat; and having obtained some tea, we set forth to walk to the steamboat _Governor Dudley_, which was to convey us to Charleston. The midday sun took from Wilmington some of the desolateness which the wintry darkness of the morning gave it; yet it looked to me like a place I could sooner die than live in,--ruinous, yet not old,--poor, dirty, and mean, and unvenerable in its poverty and decay. The river that runs by it is called Cape Fear River; above, on the opposite shore, lies Mount Misery,--and heaven-forsaken enough seemed place and people to me. How good one should be to live in such places! How heavenly would one's thoughts and imaginations of hard necessity become, if one existed in Wilmington, North Carolina! The afternoon was beautiful, golden, mild, and bright,--the boat we were in extremely comfortable and clean, and the captain especially courteous. The whole furniture of this vessel was remarkably tasteful, as well as convenient,--not forgetting the fawn-colored and blue curtains to the berths. But what a deplorable mistake it is--be-draperying up these narrow nests, so as to impede the poor, meagre mouthfuls of air which their dimensions alone necessarily limit one to. These crimson and yellow, or even fawn-colored and blue silk suffocators, are a poor compensation for free ventilation; and I always look at these elaborate adornments of sea-beds as ingenious and elegant incentives to sea-sickness, graceful emetics in themselves, all provocation from the water set aside. The captain's wife and ourselves were the only passengers; and, after a most delightful walk on deck in the afternoon, and comfortable tea, we retired for the night, and did not wake till we bumped on the Charleston bar on the morning of Christmas-day. The _William Seabrook_, the boat which is to convey us from hence to Savannah, only goes once a week.... This unfrequent communication between the principal cities of the great Southern States is rather a curious contrast to the almost unintermitting intercourse which goes on between the northern towns. The boat itself, too, is a species of small monopoly, being built and chiefly used for the convenience of certain wealthy planters residing on Edisto Island, a small insulated tract between Charleston and Savannah, where the finest cotton that is raised in this country grows. This city is the oldest I have yet seen in America--I should think it must be the oldest in it. I cannot say that the first impression produced by the wharf at which we landed, or the streets we drove through in reaching our hotel, was particularly lively. Rickety, dark, dirty, tumble-down streets and warehouses, with every now and then a mansion of loftier pretensions, but equally neglected and ruinous in its appearance, would probably not have been objects of special admiration to many people on this side the water; but I belong to that infirm, decrepit, bedridden old country, England, and must acknowledge, with a blush for the stupidity of the prejudice, that it is so very long since I have seen anything old, that the lower streets of Charleston, in all their dinginess and decay, were a refreshment and a rest to my spirit. I have had a perfect red-brick-and-white-board fever ever since I came to this country; and once more to see a house which looks as if it had stood long enough to get warmed through, is a balm to my senses, oppressed with newness. Boston had two or three fine old dwelling-houses, with antique gardens and old-fashioned court-yards; but they have come down to the dust before the improving spirit of the age. One would think, that after ten years a house gets weak in the knees. Perhaps these houses do; but I have lodged under roof-trees that have stood hundreds of years, and may stand hundreds more,--marry, they have good foundations. In walking about Charleston, I was forcibly reminded of some of the older country towns in England--of Southampton a little. The appearance of the city is highly picturesque, a word which can apply to none other American towns; and although the place is certainly pervaded with an air of decay, 'tis a genteel infirmity, as might be that of a distressed elderly gentlewoman. It has none of the smug mercantile primness of the northern cities, but a look of state, as of quondam wealth and importance, a little gone down in the world, yet remembering still its former dignity. The northern towns, compared with it, are as the spruce citizen rattling by the faded splendors of an old family-coach in his newfangled chariot--they certainly have got on before it. Charleston has an air of eccentricity, too, and peculiarity, which formerly were not deemed unbecoming the well-born and well-bred gentlewoman, which her gentility itself sanctioned and warranted--none of the vulgar dread of vulgar opinion, forcing those who are possessed by it to conform to a general standard of manners, unable to conceive one peculiar to itself,--this "what-'ll-Mrs.-Grundy-say" devotion to conformity in small things and great, which pervades the American body-social from the matter of church-going to the trimming of women's petticoats,--this dread of singularity, which has eaten up all individuality amongst them, and makes their population like so many moral and mental lithographs, and their houses like so many thousand hideous brick-twins. I believe I am getting excited; but the fact is, that being politically the most free people on earth, the Americans are socially the least so; and it seems as though, ever since that little affair of establishing their independence among nations, which they managed so successfully, every American mother's son of them has been doing his best to divest himself of his own private share of that great public blessing, liberty. But to return to Charleston. It is in this respect a far more aristocratic (should I not say democratic?) city than any I have yet seen in America, inasmuch as every house seems built to the owner's particular taste; and in one street you seem to be in an old English town, and in another in some continental city of France or Italy. This variety is extremely pleasing to the eye; not less so is the intermixture of trees with the buildings, almost every house being adorned, and gracefully screened, by the beautiful foliage of evergreen shrubs. These, like ministering angels, cloak with nature's kindly ornaments the ruins and decays of the mansions they surround; and the latter, time-mellowed (I will not say stained, and a painter knows the difference), harmonize in their forms and coloring with the trees, in a manner most delightful to an eye that knows how to appreciate this species of beauty. There are several public buildings of considerable architectural pretensions in Charleston, all of them apparently of some antiquity (for the New World), except a very large and handsome edifice which is not yet completed, and which, upon inquiry, we found was intended for a guard-house. Its very extensive dimensions excited our surprise; but a man who was at work about it, and who answered our questions with a good deal of intelligence, informed us that it was by no means larger than the necessities of the city required; for that they not unfrequently had between fifty and sixty persons (colored and white) brought in by the patrol in one night. "But," objected we, "the colored people are not allowed to go out without passes after nine o'clock." "Yes," replied our informant, "but they will do it, nevertheless; and every night numbers are brought in who have been caught endeavoring to evade the patrol." This explained to me the meaning of a most ominous tolling of bells and beating of drums, which, on the first evening of my arrival in Charleston, made me almost fancy myself in one of the old fortified frontier towns of the Continent where the tocsin is sounded, and the evening drum beaten, and the guard set as regularly every night as if an invasion were expected. In Charleston, however, it is not the dread of foreign invasion, but of domestic insurrection, which occasions these nightly precautions; and, for the first time since my residence in this free country, the curfew (now obsolete in mine, except in some remote districts, where the ringing of an old church-bell at sunset is all that remains of the tyrannous custom) recalled the associations of early feudal times, and the oppressive insecurity of our Norman conquerors. But truly it seemed rather anomalous hereabouts, and nowadays; though, of course, it is very necessary where a large class of persons exists in the very bosom of a community whose interests are known to be at variance and incompatible with those of its other members. And no doubt these daily and nightly precautions are but trifling drawbacks upon the manifold blessings of slavery (for which, if you are stupid, and cannot conceive them, see the late Governor M'Duffy's speeches); still I should prefer going to sleep without the apprehension of my servants cutting my throat in my bed, even to having a guard provided to prevent their doing so. However, this peculiar prejudice of mine may spring from the fact of my having known many instances in which servants were the trusted and most trustworthy friends of their employers, and entertaining, besides, some odd notions of the reciprocal duties of _all_ the members of families one towards the other. The extreme emptiness which I observed in the streets, and absence of anything like bustle or business, is chiefly owing to the season, which the inhabitants of Charleston, with something akin to old English feeling, generally spend in hospitable festivity upon their estates; a goodly custom, at least in my mind. It is so rare for any of the wealthier people to remain in town at Christmas, that poor Miss ----, who had come on with us to pay a visit to some friends, was not a little relieved to find that they were (contrary to their custom) still in the city. I went to take my usual walk this morning, and found that the good citizens of Charleston were providing themselves with a most delightful promenade upon the river, a fine, broad, well-paved esplanade, of considerable length, open to the water on one side, and on the other overlooked by some very large and picturesque old houses, whose piazzas, arches, and sheltering evergreens reminded me of buildings in the vicinity of Naples. This delightful walk is not yet finished, and I fear, when it is, it will be little frequented; for the southern women, by their own account, are miserable pedestrians,--of which fact, indeed, I had one curious illustration to-day; for I received a visit from a young lady residing in the same street where we lodged, who came in her carriage, a distance of less than a quarter of a mile, to call upon me. It is impossible to conceive anything funnier, and at the same time more provokingly stupid, dirty, and inefficient, than the tribe of black-faced heathen divinities and classicalities who make believe to wait upon us here,--the Dianas, Phillises, Floras, Cæsars, et cetera, who stand grinning in wonderment and delight round our table, and whom I find it impossible, by exhortation or entreaty, to banish from the room, so great is their amusement and curiosity at my outlandish modes of proceeding. This morning, upon my entreating them not to persist in waiting upon us at breakfast, they burst into an ungovernable titter, and withdrawing from our immediate vicinity, kept poking their woolly heads and white grinders in at the door every five minutes, keeping it conveniently open for that purpose. A fine large new hotel was among the buildings which the late fire at Charleston destroyed, and the house where we now are is the best at present in the city. It is kept by a very obliging and civil colored woman, who seems extremely desirous of accommodating us to our minds; but her servants (they are her slaves, in spite of her and their common complexion) would defy the orderly genius of the superintendent of the Astor House. Their laziness, their filthiness, their inconceivable stupidity, and unconquerable good humor, are enough to drive one stark, staring mad. The sitting-room we occupy is spacious, and not ill-furnished, and especially airy, having four windows and a door, none of which can or will shut. We are fortunately rid of that familiar fiend of the North, the anthracite coal, but do not enjoy the luxury of burning wood. Bituminous coal, such as is generally used in England, is the combustible preferred here; and all my national predilections cannot reconcile me to it, in preference to the brilliant, cheerful, wholesome, poetical warmth of a wood fire. Our bedrooms are dismal dens, open to "a' the airts the wind can blaw," half furnished, and not by any means half clean. The furniture itself is old, and very infirm,--the tables all peach with one or other leg,--the chairs are most of them minus one or two bars,--the tongs cross their feet when you attempt to use them,--and one poker travels from room to room, that being our whole allowance for two fires. We have had occasion to make only two trifling purchases since we have been here; but the prices (if these articles are any criterion) must be infinitely higher than those of the northern shopkeepers; but this we must expect as we go further south, for, of course, they have to pay double profits upon all the commonest necessaries of life, importing them, as they do, from distant districts. I must record a curious observation of Margery's, on her return from church Tuesday morning. She asked me if the people of this place were not very proud. I was struck with the question, as coinciding with a remark sometimes made upon the South, and supposed by some far-fetching cause-hunters to have its origin in some of their "domestic institutions." I told her that I knew no more of them than she did; and that I had had no opportunity of observing whether they were or not. "Well," she replied, "I think they are, for I was in church early, and I observed the countenances and manner of the people as they came in, and they struck me as the haughtiest, proudest-looking people I ever saw!" This very curious piece of observation of hers I note down without comment. I asked her if she had ever heard, or read, the remark as applied to the southern people? She said, "Never," and I was much amused at this result of her physiognomical church speculations. Last Thursday evening we left our hotel in Charleston, for the steamboat which was to carry us to Savannah: it was not to start until two in the morning; but, of course, we preferred going on board rather earlier, and getting to bed. The ladies' cabin, however, was so crowded with women and children, and so inconveniently small, that sleeping was out of the question in such an atmosphere. I derived much amusement from the very empress-like airs of an uncommonly handsome mulatto woman, who officiated as stewardess, but whose discharge of her duties appeared to consist in telling the ladies what they ought, and what they ought not to do, and lounging about with an indolent dignity, which was irresistibly droll, and peculiarly Southern. The boat in which we were, not being considered sea-worthy, as she is rather old, took the inner passage, by which we were two nights and a day accomplishing this most tedious navigation, creeping through cuts and small muddy rivers, where we stuck sometimes to the bottom, and sometimes to the banks, which presented a most dismal succession of dingy, low, yellow swamps, and reedy marshes, beyond expression wearisome to the eye. About the middle of the day on Friday, we touched at the island of Edisto, where some of the gentlemen-passengers had business, that being the seat of their plantations, and where the several families reside--after the eldest member of which, Mr. Seabrook, the boat we were in was named. Edisto, as I have mentioned before, is famous for producing the finest cotton in America--therefore, I suppose, in the world. As we were to wait here some time, we went on shore to walk. The appearance of the cotton-fields at this season of the year was barren enough; but, as a compensation, I here, for the first time, saw the evergreen oak-trees (the ilex, I presume) of the South. They were not very fine specimens of their kind, and disappointed me a good deal. The advantage they have of being evergreen is counterbalanced by the dark and almost dingy color of the foliage, and the leaf being minute in size, and not particularly graceful in form. These trees appeared to me far from comparable, either in size or beauty, to the European oak, when it has attained its full growth. We were walking on the estate of one of the Mr. Seabrooks, which lay unenclosed on each side of what appeared to be the public road through the island. At a short distance from the landing we came to what is termed a ginning-house--a building appropriated to the process of freeing the cotton from the seed. It appeared to be open to inspection; and we walked through it. Here were about eight or ten stalls on either side, in each of which a man was employed at a machine, worked like a turner's or knife-grinder's wheel, by the foot, which, as fast as he fed it with cotton, parted the snowy flakes from the little black first cause, and gave them forth soft, silky, clean, and fit to be woven into the finest lace or muslin. This same process of ginning is performed in many places, and upon our own cotton-estate, by machinery; the objection to which however, is, that the staple of the cotton--in the length of which consists its chief excellence--is supposed by some planters to be injured, and the threads broken, by the substitution of an engine for the task performed by the human fingers in separating the cotton and presenting it to the gin. After walking through this building, we pursued our way past a large, rambling, white wood house, and down a road, bordered on each side with evergreen oaks. While we were walking, a young man on horseback passed us, whose light hair, in a very picturesque contempt of modern fashion, absolutely flowed upon the collar of his coat, and was blown back as he rode, like the disheveled tresses of a woman. On Edisto Island such a noble exhibition of individuality would probably find few censors. As we returned towards the boat we stopped to examine an irregular scrambling hedge of the wild orange, another of the exquisite shrubs of this paradise of evergreens. The form and foliage of this plant are beautiful, and the leaf, being bruised, extremely fragrant; but, as its perfume indicates, it is a rank poison, containing a great portion of prussic acid. It grows from cuttings rapidly and freely, and might be formed into the most perfect hedge, being well adapted, by its close, bushy growth, to that purpose. After leaving Edisto, we pursued the same tedious, meandering course, over turbid waters, and between low-lying swamps, till the evening closed in. The afternoon had been foggy and rainy and wretched. The cabin was darkened by the various outer protections against the weather, so that we could neither read nor work. Our party, on leaving the island, had received an addition of some young ladies, who were to go on shore again in the middle of the night, at a stopping-place called Hilton Head. As they did not intend to sleep, they seemed to have no idea of allowing any one else to do so; and the giggling and chattering with which they enlivened the dreary watches of the night, certainly rendered anything like repose impossible; so I lay, devoutly wishing for Hilton Head, where the boat stopped between one and two in the morning. I had just time to see our boarding-school angels leave us, and a monstrous awkward-looking woman, who at first struck me as a man in disguise, enter the cabin, before my eyes sealed themselves in sleep, which had been hovering over them, kept aloof only by the incessant conversational racket of my young fellow-travelers. I was extremely amused at two little incidents which occurred the next morning before we were called to breakfast. The extraordinary-looking woman who came into the boat during the night, and who was the most masculine-looking lady I ever saw, came and stood by me, and, seeing me nursing my baby, abruptly addressed me with "Got a baby with you?" I replied in the affirmative, which trouble her eyes might have spared me. After a few minutes' silence, she pursued her unceremonious catechism with "Married woman?" This question was so exceedingly strange, though put in the most matter-of-course sort of way, that I suppose my surprise exhibited itself in my countenance, for the lady presently left me--not, however, appearing to imagine that she had said or done anything at all unusual. The other circumstance which amused me was to hear another lady observe to her neighbor, on seeing Margery bathing my children (a ceremony never omitted night and morning, where water can be procured); "How excessively ridiculous!" Which same worthy lady, on leaving the boat at Savannah, exclaimed, as she huddled on her cloak, that she never had felt so "_mean_ in her life!" and, considering that she had gone to bed two nights with the greater part of her day clothes on her, and had abstained from any "ridiculous" ablutions, her _mean_ sensations did not, I confess, much surprise me. When the boat stopped at Savannah, it poured with rain; and in a perfect deluge, we drove up to the Pulaski House, thankful to escape from the tedious confinement of a _slow_ steamboat,--an intolerable nuisance and anomaly in the nature of things. The hotel was, comparatively speaking, very comfortable; infinitely superior to the one where we had lodged at Charleston, as far as bed accommodations went. Here, too, we obtained the inestimable luxury of a warm bath; and the only disagreeable thing we had to encounter was that all but universal pest in this crowd-loving country, a public table. This is always a trial of the first water to me; and that day particularly I was fatigued, and out of spirits, and the din and confusion of a long _table d'hôte_ was perfectly intolerable, in spite of the assiduous attentions of a tiresome worthy old gentleman, who sat by me and persisted in endeavoring to make me talk. Finding me impracticable, however, he turned, at length, in despair, to the hostess, who sat at the head of her table, and inquired in a most audible voice if it were true, as he had understood, that Mr. and Mrs. Butler were in the hotel? This, of course, occasioned some little amusement; and the good old gentleman being informed that I was sitting at his elbow, went off into perfect convulsions of apologies, and renewed his exertions to make me discourse, with more zeal than ever, asking me, among other things, when he had ascertained that I had never before been to the South, "How I liked the appearance of 'our blackies' (the negroes)?--no want of cheerfulness, no despondency, or misery in their appearance, eh, madam?" As I thought this was rather begging the question, I did not trouble the gentleman with my impressions. He was a Scotchman, and his adoption of "our blackies" was, by his own account, rather recent, to be so perfectly satisfactory; at least, so it seems to me, who have some small prejudices in favor of freedom and justice yet to overcome, before I can enter into all the merits of this beneficent system, so productive of cheerfulness and contentment in those whom it condemns to perpetual degradation. Our night-wanderings were not yet ended, for the steamer in which we were to proceed to Darien was to start at ten o'clock that evening, so that we had but a short interval of repose at this same Pulaski House, and I felt sorry to leave it, in proportion to the uncertainty of our meeting with better accommodation for a long time. The _Ocmulgee_ (the Indian name of a river in Georgia, and the cognomen of our steamboat) was a tiny, tidy little vessel, the exceeding small ladies' cabin of which we, fortunately, had entirely to ourselves. On Sunday morning the day broke most brilliantly over those southern waters, and as the sun rose, the atmosphere became clear and warm, as in the early northern summer. We crossed two or three sounds of the sea. The land in sight was a mere forest of reeds, and the fresh, sparkling, crisping waters had a thousand times more variety and beauty. At the mouth of the Altamaha is a small cluster of houses, scarce deserving the name of a village, called Doboy. At the wharf lay two trading-vessels; the one with the harp of Ireland waving on her flag; the other with the union-jack flying at her mast. I felt vehemently stirred to hail the beloved symbol; but, upon reflection, forbore outward demonstrations of the affectionate yearnings of my heart towards the flag of England, and so we boiled by them into this vast volume of turbid waters, whose noble width, and rapid rolling current, seem appropriately called by that most euphonious and sonorous of Indian names, the Alatamaha, which, in the common mode of speaking it, gains by the loss of the second syllable, and becomes more agreeable to the ear, as it is usually pronounced, the Altamaha. On either side lay the low, reedy swamps, yellow, withered Lilliputian forests, rattling their brittle canes in the morning breeze.... Through these dreary banks we wound a most sinuous course for a long time; at length the irregular buildings of the little town of Darien appeared, and as we grazed the side of the wharf, it seemed to me as if we had touched the outer bound of civilized creation. As soon as we showed ourselves on the deck we were hailed by a shout from the men in two pretty boats, which had pulled alongside of us; and the vociferations of "Oh, massa! how you do, massa? Oh, missis! oh! lily missis! me too glad to see you!" accompanied with certain interjectional shrieks, whoops, whistles, and grunts, that could only be written down in negro language, made me aware of our vicinity to our journey's end. The strangeness of the whole scene, its wildness (for now beyond the broad river and the low swamp lands the savage-looking woods arose to meet the horizon), the rapid retrospect which my mind hurried through of the few past years of my life; the singular contrasts which they presented to my memory; the affectionate shouts of welcome of the poor people, who seemed to hail us as descending divinities, affected me so much that I burst into tears, and could hardly answer their demonstrations of delight. We were presently transferred into the larger boat, and the smaller one being freighted with our luggage, we pulled off from Darien, not, however, without a sage remark from Margery, that, though we seemed to have traveled to the very end of the world, here yet were people and houses, ships, and even steamboats; in which evidences that we were not to be plunged into the deepest abysses of savageness she seemed to take no small comfort. We crossed the river, and entered a small arm of it, which presently became still narrower and more straight, assuming the appearance of an artificial cut or canal, which indeed it is, having been dug by General Oglethorpe's men (tradition says, in one night), and afforded him the only means of escape from the Spaniards and Indians, who had surrounded him on all sides, and felt secure against all possibility of his eluding them. The cut is neither very deep nor very long, and yet both sufficiently to render the general's exploit rather marvelous. General Oglethorpe was the first British governor of Georgia; Wesley's friend and disciple. The banks of this little canal were mere dykes, guarding rice-swamps, and presented no species of beauty; but in the little creek, or inlet, from which we entered it, I was charmed with the beauty and variety of the evergreens growing in thick and luxuriant underwood, beneath giant, straggling cypress trees, whose branches were almost covered with the pendant wreaths of gray moss peculiar to these southern woods. Of all parasitical plants (if, indeed, it properly belongs to that class) it assuredly is the most melancholy and dismal. All creepers, from the polished, dark-leaved ivy, to the delicate clematis, destroy some portion of the strength of the trees around which they cling, and from which they gradually suck the vital juices; but they, at least, adorn the forest-shafts round which they twine, and hide, with a false, smiling beauty, the gradual ruin and decay they make. Not so this dismal moss: it does not appear to grow, or to have root, or even clinging fibre of any sort, by which it attaches itself to the bark or stem. It hangs in dark gray, drooping masses from the boughs, swinging in every breeze like matted, grizzled hair. I have seen a naked cypress with its straggling arms all hung with this banner of death, looking like a gigantic tree of monstrous cobwebs,--the most funereal spectacle in all the vegetable kingdom. After emerging from the cut, we crossed another arm of the Altamaha (it has as many as Briareus)--I should rather, perhaps, call them mouths, for this is near its confluence with the sea, and these various branches are formed by a numerous sisterhood of small islands, which divide this noble river into three or four streams, each of them wider than England's widest, the Thames. We now approached the low, reedy banks of Butler's Island, and passed the rice-mill and buildings surrounding it, all of which, it being Sunday, were closed. As we neared the bank, the steersman took up a huge conch, and in the barbaric fashion of early times in the Highlands, sounded out our approach. A pretty schooner, which carries the produce of the estate to Charleston and Savannah, lay alongside the wharf, which began to be crowded with negroes, jumping, dancing, shouting, laughing, and clapping their hands (a usual expression of delight with savages and children), and using the most extravagant and ludicrous gesticulations to express their ecstasy at our arrival. On our landing from the boat, the crowd thronged about us like a swarm of bees; we were seized, pulled, pushed, carried, dragged, and all but lifted in the air by the clamorous multitude. I was afraid my children would be smothered. Fortunately, Mr. O----, the overseer, and the captain of the little craft above-mentioned, came to our assistance, and by their good offices the babies and nurse were protected through the crowd. They seized our clothes, kissed them--then our hands, and almost wrung them off. One tall, gaunt negress flew to us, parting the throng on either side, and embraced us in her arms. I believe I was almost frightened; and it was not until we were safely housed, and the door shut upon our riotous escort, that we indulged in a fit of laughing, quite as full, on my part, of nervousness as of amusement. Later in the day I attempted to take some exercise, and thought I had escaped observation; but, before I had proceeded a quarter of a mile, I was again enveloped in a cloud of these dingy dependents, who gathered round me, clamoring welcome, staring at me, stroking my velvet pelisse, and exhibiting at once the wildest delight and the most savage curiosity. I was obliged to relinquish my proposed walk, and return home. Nor was the door of the room where I sat, and which was purposely left open, one moment free from crowds of eager faces, watching every movement of myself and the children, until evening caused our audience to disperse. This zeal in behalf of an utter stranger, merely because she stood to them in the relation of a mistress, caused me not a little speculation. These poor people, however, have a very distinct notion of the duties which ownership should entail upon their proprietors, however these latter may regard their obligation towards their dependents; and as to their vehement professions of regard and affection for me, they reminded me of the saying of the satirist, that "gratitude is a lively sense of benefits to come." BUTLER'S ISLAND, GEORGIA, January 8th, 1839. I have some doubt whether any exertion whatever of your imaginative faculties could help you to my whereabouts or whatabouts this day, dearest Emily; and therefore, for your enlightenment, will refer you to my date, and inform you that yesterday I paid my first visit to the Sick House, or infirmary, of our estate; and this morning spent three hours and a half there, cleaning with my own hands the filthy room where the sick lay, and washing and dressing poor little nearly new-born negro babies. My avocations the whole morning have been those of a sister of charity, and I doubt if the unwearied and unshrinking benevolence of those pious creatures ever led them, for their souls' sake, into more abominable receptacles of filth, degradation, and misery. It is long enough since I first mentioned to you my intention of coming down to these plantations, if I was permitted to do so. As the time for setting forth on our journey drew near, I became not a little appalled at the details I heard of what were likely to be the difficulties of the mere journey: at the very end of December, with a baby at the breast, and a child as young as S----, to travel upwards of a thousand miles, in this half-civilized country, and through the least civilized part of it, was no joke. However, happily, it was accomplished safely, though not without considerable suffering and heart-achings on my part.... These and other befallings may serve for talking matter, if ever we should meet again. We all arrived here safely on Sunday last, and my thoughts are engrossed with the condition of these people, from whose labor we draw our subsistence; of which, now that I am here, I feel ashamed. The place itself is one of the wildest corners of creation--if, indeed, any part of this region can be considered as thoroughly _created_ yet. It is not consolidated, but in mere process of formation,--a sort of hasty-pudding of amphibious elements, composed of a huge, rolling river, thick and turbid with mud, and stretches of mud banks, forming quaking swamps, scarcely reclaimed from the water. The river wants _straining_ and the land draining, to make either of them properly wet or dry. This island, which is only a portion of our Georgia estate, contains several thousand acres, and is about eight miles round, and formed of nothing but the deposits (leavings, in fact) of the Altamaha, whose brimming waters, all thick with alluvial matter, roll round it, and every now and then threaten to submerge it. The whole island is swamp, dyked like the Netherlands, and trenched and divided by ditches and a canal, by means of which the rice-fields are periodically overflowed, and the harvest transported to the threshing mills. A duck, an eel, or a frog might live here as in Paradise; but a creature of dry habits naturally pines for less wet. To mount a horse is, of course, impossible, and the only place where one can walk is the banks or dykes that surround the island, and the smaller ones that divide the rice-fields. I mean to take to rowing, boats being plentiful, and "water, water everywhere"; indeed, in spring, the overseer tells me we may have to go from house to house in boats, the whole island being often flooded at that season. There is neither shade nor shelter, tree nor herbage, round our residence, though there is no reason why there should not be; for the climate is delicious, and the swampy borders of the mainland are full of every kind of evergreen--magnolias, live oak (a species of ilex), orange-trees, etc., and trailing shrubs, with varnished leaves, that bind the tawny, rattling sedges together, and make summer bowers for the alligators and snakes which abound and disport themselves here in the hot season. I am wrong in saying that there are no trees on the island, though there are as bad as none now. They formerly had a great number of magnificent orange-trees, that were all destroyed by an unusually severe winter; there are a few left, however, which bear most excellent oranges.... BUTLER'S ISLAND, January 8th, 1839. DEAREST HARRIET, The stars are shining like one vast incrustation of diamonds; and though 'tis the 8th of January, I have been out with bare neck and arms, standing on the brink of the Altamaha, and seeking relief from the oppressive heat of the house. I am here, with the children, in the midst of our slaves; and it seems to me, as I look over these wild wastes and waters, as though I were standing on the outer edge of creation. That this is not absolutely the case, however, or that, if it is, civilization in some forms has preceded us hither, is abundantly proved by the sights and sounds of busy traffic, labor, and mechanical industry, which, encountered in this region (still really half a wilderness), produce an impression of the most curiously anomalous existence you can imagine. Right and left, as the eye follows the broad and brimming surface of this vast body of turbid water, it rests on nothing but low swamp lands, where the rattling sedges, like a tawny forest of reeds, make warm winter shelters for the snakes and alligators, which the summer sun will lure in scores from their lurking-places; or hoary woods, upon whose straggling upper boughs, all hung with gray mosses like disheveled hair, the bald-headed eagle stoops from the sky, and among whose undergrowth of varnished evergreens the mocking-birds, even at this season, keep a resounding jubilee. All this looks wild enough; and as the peculiar orange light of the southern sunset falls upon the scene, I almost expect to see the canoes of the red man shoot from the banks, which were so lately the possession of his race alone. Immediately opposite to me, however (only about a mile distant, the river and a swampy island intervening), lies the little town of Darien, whose white gable-ended warehouses, shining in the sun, recall the presence of the prevailing European race, and we can hear distinctly the sound of the steam which the steamboat at the wharf is letting off. Upon this island of ours (I think I look a little like Sancho Panza) we enjoy the perpetual monotonous burden of two steam-engines working the rice mills, and instead of red men and canoes, my illustrious self and some prettily built and gaily painted boats, which I take great delight in rowing. The strangeness of this existence surprises me afresh every hour by its contrast with all my former experiences; and as I sat resting on my oars at the Darien wharf the other evening, watching a huge cotton-raft float down the broad Altamaha, my mind wandered back to my former life--the scenes, the people, the events, the feelings which made up all my former existence; and I felt like the little old woman whose petticoats were cut all round about. "O Lord a mercy! sure this is never I!" But, then, she had a resource in her dog, which I have not; and so I am not quite sure that it is I.... The climate is too warm for me, and I almost doubt its being as wholesome for the children as a colder one. We have now summer heat, tempered in some degree by breezes from the river and the sea, which is only fifteen miles off; but the people of the place complain of the cold, and apologize to me for the chilliness of the weather, which they assure me is quite unusual. I have come home more than once, however, after a walk round the rice banks, with a bad headache, in consequence of the fierce sunshine pouring down upon these swamps, and do not think that I should thrive in such a climate. It is impossible here to take exercise on horseback, which has become almost indispensable to me; and though I have adopted rowing as a substitute I find it both a fatiguing and an inadequate one. We live here in a very strange manner. The house we inhabit, which was intended merely as the overseer's residence, is inferior in appearance and every decent accommodation to the poorest farm-house in any part of England. Neither cleanliness nor comfort enter into our daily arrangements at all. The little furniture there is in the rooms is of the coarsest and roughest description; and the household services are performed by negroes, who run in and out, generally barefooted, and always filthy both in their clothes and person, to wait upon us at our meals. How I have wished for a decent, tidy, English servant of all work, instead of these begrimed, ignorant, incapable poor creatures, who stumble about round us in zealous hindrance of each other, which they intend for help to us. How thankful I should be if I could substitute for their unsavory proximity while I eat, that of a clean dumb waiter. This unlimited supply of untrained savages, (for that is what they really are) is anything but a luxury to me. Their ignorance, dirt, and stupidity seem to me as intolerable as the unjust laws which condemn them to be ignorant, filthy, and stupid. The value of this human property is, alas! enormous; and I grieve to think how great is the temptation to perpetuate the system to its owners. Of course I do not see, or at any rate have not yet seen, anything to shock me in the way of positive physical cruelty. The refractory negroes are flogged, I know, but I am told it is a case of rare occurrence; and it is the injustice, and the kind, rather than the severity, of the infliction that is the most odious part of it to me. The people are, I believe, regularly and sufficiently fed and clothed, and they have tolerably good habitations provided for them, nor are they without various small indulgences; but of their moral and intellectual wants no heed whatever is taken, nor are they even recognized as existing, though some of these poor people exhibit intelligence, industry, and activity, which seem to cry aloud for instruction and the means of progress and development. These are probably rare exceptions, though, for the majority of those I see appear to be sunk in the lowest slough of benighted ignorance, and lead a lazy, listless, absolutely animal existence, far more dirty and degraded (though more comfortable, on account of the climate) than that of _your_ lowest and most miserable wild "bog trotters." I had desired very earnestly to have the opportunity of judging of this matter of slavery for myself; not, of course, that I ever doubted that to keep human beings as slaves was in itself wrong, but I supposed that I might, upon a nearer observation of the system, discover at any rate circumstances of palliation in the condition of the negroes: hitherto, however, this has not been the case with me; the wrong strikes me more forcibly every hour I live here. The theory of human property is more revolting to every sentiment of humanity; and the evil effect of such a state of things _upon the whites_, who inflict the wrong, impresses me as I did not anticipate that it would, with still more force. The habitual harsh tone of command towards these men and _women_, whose labor is extorted from them without remorse, from youth to age, and whose hopeless existence seems to me sadder than suffering itself, affects me with an intolerable sense of impotent pity for them.... Then, too, the disrepute in which honest and honorable labor is held, by being thus practiced only by a degraded class, is most pernicious. The negroes here, who see me row and walk hard in the sun, lift heavy burthens, and make various exertions which are supposed to be their peculiar _privilege_ in existence, frequently remonstrate with me, and desire me to call upon them for their services, with the remark, "What for you work, missus! You hab niggers enough to wait upon you!" You may suppose how agreeable such remonstrances are to me. When I remember, too, that here I see none of the worst features of this system: that the slaves on this estate are not bought and sold, nor let out to hire to other masters; that they are not cruelly starved or barbarously beaten, and that members of one family are not parted from each other for life, and sent to distant plantations in other States,--all which liabilities (besides others, and far worse ones) belong of right, or rather of wrong, to their condition as slaves, and are commonly practiced throughout the southern half of this free country,--I remain appalled at a state of things in which human beings are considered fortunate who are _only_ condemned to dirt, ignorance, unrequited labor, and, what seems to me worst of all, a dead level of general degradation, which God and Nature, by endowing some above others, have manifestly forbidden. Do you remember your admiration of philanthropy because I blew the dirty nose of a little vagabond in the street with my embroidered handkerchief? I wish you could see me cleansing and washing and poulticing the sick women and babies in the infirmary here; I think you would admit that I have what Beatrice commends Benedict for, "an excellent stomach." God bless you, dear! I am not well; this slavish sunshine dries up my vitality. I have hardly any time for writing, but shall find it to write to you. Ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. BUTLER'S ISLAND, January 20th, 1839. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, To you who have, besides "swimming in a gondola" (which many of the vulgar do nowadays), paddled in a canoe upon the wild waters of this wild western world, my present abode, savage as it seems to me, might appear comparatively civilized. Certain it is that we are within view of what calls itself a town, and, moreover, from that town I have received an invitation to what calls itself a _cotillon party_! and yet, right and left, stretch the swamps and forests of Georgia, where the red men have scarcely ceased to skulk, and where the rattlesnakes and alligators, who shared the wilderness with them, still lurk in undisturbed possession of the soil, if soil that may be called which is only either muddy water or watery mud, a hardly consolidated sponge of alluvial matter, receiving hourly additions from the turbid current of the Altamaha. We are here on our plantation, and if you will take a map of North America, and a powerful magnifying-glass, you may perceive the small speck dignified by the title of "Butler's Island," the Barataria where I am now reigning. Before I say any more upon this subject, however, I wish to thank you for your kind information about my father and sister. I had a letter from her not long ago, but it was written during her tour in Germany, before our poor mother's death, and, of course, contained little of what must be her present thoughts and feelings, and even little indeed by which I could understand what their plans were for the winter; but a long and very interesting account of your friends, the Thuns, whom I should like to know.... How little pleasure you lost, in my opinion, in not proceeding further south in this country! for your perception of beauty would have been almost as much starved as your sense of justice would have been outraged; at least it is so with me. The sky, God's ever blessed storehouse of light and loveliness, is almost my only resource here: for though the wide, brimming waters of this Briareus of a river present a striking object, and the woods, with their curtains of gray moss waving like gigantic cobwebs from every tree, and these magical-looking thickets of varnished evergreens, have a charm, partly real, and partly borrowed from their mere strangeness; yet the absence of all cultivation but these swampy rice-fields, and of all population but these degraded and unfortunate slaves, render a residence here as depressing to the physical as the moral sense of loveliness. In contemplating the condition of women generally (a favorite subject of speculation with you, I know), it is a pity that you have not an opportunity of seeing the situation of those who are recognized as slaves (all that are such don't wear the collar, you know, nor do all that wear it show it); it is a black chapter, and no _joke_, I can tell you. You ask after the Sullys, and I am sorry to say that the little I saw or heard of them previous to my leaving Philadelphia was not pleasant. He had had some disagreeable contention with the St. George's Society about the exhibition of his picture of the queen. The dispute ended, I believe, in his painting two; the one for the society, and the other for his own purposes of exhibition, sale or engraving. He spoke with delight of having made your acquaintance, and of some evenings he spent at your house. I think it very probable that he will revisit Europe; and I hope for his sake that he will get to Italy.... F. A. B. BUTLER'S ISLAND, Georgia, January 30th, 1839. DEAREST EMILY, I am told that a total change in my opinions upon slavery was anticipated from my residence on a plantation; a statement which only convinces me that one may live in the most intimate relations with one's fellow-creatures, and really know nothing about them after all. On what ground such an idea could be entertained I cannot conceive, or on what part of my character it could be founded, to which (if I do not mistake myself, even more than I am misunderstood by others) injustice is the most revolting species of cruelty. My dear friend, do not, do not repine, but rather rejoice for your brother's own sake, that wealth is cut off from him at such a source as slavery. [Mr. Fitzhugh had owned West Indian property, which his sister thought had been rendered worthless by the emancipation of the slaves.] It would be better in my mind to beg, and to see one's children beg, than to live by these means, thinking of them as I do.... It seems to me as if the worst result of this system, fraught as it is with bad ones, is the perversion of mind which it appears to engender in those who uphold it. I remember how hard our Saviour pronounced it to be for a rich man to enter into heaven, and as I look round upon these rice-fields, with their population of human beings, each one of whom is valued at so much silver and gold, and listen to the beat of that steam-mill, which I heard commended the other day as a "mint of money," and when I am told that every acre of this property is worth ten per cent. more than any free English land, however valuable, it seems almost impossible to expect that this terrible temptation to injustice should be resisted by any man; but with God all things are possible! and doubtless He weighs the difficulty more mercifully than I can.... Since this letter was begun, we have had a death on the plantation; a poor young fellow was taken off, after a few days' illness, yesterday. The attack was one to which the negroes are very subject, arising from cold and exposure.... We went to his burial, which was a scene I shall not soon forget. His coffin was brought out into the open air, and the negroes from over the whole island assembled around it. One of their preachers (a slave like the rest) gave out the words of a hymn, which they all sang in unison; after which he made an exhortation, and bade us pray, and we all kneeled down on the earth together, while this poor, ignorant slave prayed aloud and spoke incoherently, but fervently enough, of Life and Death and Immortality. We then walked to the grave, the negroes chanting a hymn by the light of pine torches and the uprising of a glorious moon. An old negro, who possessed the rare and forbidden accomplishment of letters, read part of the burial service; and another stood forward and told them the story of the raising of Lazarus. I have no room for comments, and could make none that could convey to you what I felt or how I prayed and cried for those I was praying with.... You know, I did not think my former calling of the stage a very dignified one; I assure you it appears to me magnificent compared with my present avocation of living by the unpaid labor of others, and those others half of them women like myself. There is nothing in the details of the existence of the slaves which mitigates in my opinion the sin of slavery; and this is forced upon me every hour of the day--so painfully to my conscience, that I feel as if my happiness for life would be affected by my involuntary participation in it. Their condition seems to me accursed every way, and only more accursed to those who hold them in it, on whom the wrong they commit reacts frightfully. Not a few of these slaves know and feel that they are wronged, deplore their condition, and are perfectly aware of its manifold hardships. Those who are not conscious of the robbery of their freedom and their consequent degradation, are sunk in a state of the most brutish ignorance and stupidity; and as for the pretense that their moral and mental losses are made up to them by the secure possession of food and clothing (a thing no moral and intellectual being should utter without a blush), it is utterly false. They are hard worked, poorly clothed, and poorly fed; and when they are sick, cared for only enough to fit them for work again; the only calculation in the mind of an overseer being to draw from their bones and sinews money to furnish his employer's income, and secure him a continuance of his agency. It is true that on this estate they are allowed some indulgence and some leisure, and are not starved or often ill-treated; but their indulgences and leisure are no more than just tend to keep them in a state of safe acquiescence in their lot, and it does not do that with the brighter and more intelligent among them. There is no attempt made to improve their condition; to teach them decency, order, cleanliness, self-respect; to open their minds or enlighten their understandings: on the contrary, there are express and very severe laws forbidding their education, and every precaution is taken to shut out the light which sooner or later must break into their prison-house. Dear Emily, if you could imagine how miserable I feel surrounded by people by whose wrong I live! Some few of them are industrious, active, and intelligent; and in their leisure time work hard to procure themselves small comforts and luxuries, which they are allowed to buy. How pitiable it is to think that they are defrauded of the just price of their daily labor, and that stumbling-blocks are put in the way of their progress, instead of its being helped forward! My mind is inexpressibly troubled whenever I think of their minds, souls, or bodies. Their physical condition is far from what it should be, far from what their own exertions could make it, and there is no improving even that without calling in mental and moral influences, a sense of self-respect, a consciousness of responsibility, knowledge of rights to be possessed and duties discharged, advantages employed and trusts answered for; and how are slaves to have any of these? There is no planting even physical improvement but in a moral soil, and the use of the rational faculties is necessary for the fit discharge of the commonest labor. Alas, for our slaves! and alas, alas, for us! I feel half distracted about it, and it is well for you that I have no more space to write on this theme. God bless you, my dear friend. Pray, as I do, for the end of this evil.... F. A. B. BUTLER'S ISLAND, GEORGIA, February 8th, 1839. Your letter of the 10th of November, my dear Lady Dacre, fulfilled its kindly mission without the delay at Butler Place, the anticipation of which did not prevent your making the benevolent effort of writing it. It reached me in safety here, in the very hindermost skirts of civilization, recalling with so much vividness scenes and people so remote and so different from those that now surround me, that it would have been a sad letter to me, even had it not contained the news of Mrs. Sullivan's illness. At any time any suffering of yours would have excited my sincere sympathy; but that your anxiety and distress should spring from such a cause, I can the more readily deplore, from my knowledge of your daughter, which, though too slight for my own gratification, was sufficient to make me aware of her many excellent and admirable qualities. In those books of hers, too, "Tales of a Chaperon," and "Tales of the Peerage and the Peasantry," which since my return to America I have re-read with increased interest, her mind and character reveal themselves very charmingly; and I know those in this remote "other world," as doubtless there are many in England, who, without enjoying my privilege of personal acquaintance with her, would be fellow-mourners with you should any evil befall her. But I shall not admit this apprehension, and I entreat you, my dear Lady Dacre, to add one more to the many kindnesses you have bestowed on me, by letting me know how it fares with your daughter. In the mean time, if she is well enough to receive my greeting, pray remember me most kindly to her, and tell her that from the half-savage banks of the Altamaha, those earnest wishes, which are unspoken prayers, ascend to heaven for her recovery. You ask after my children.... I am in no hurry to begin _educationeering_; indeed, as regards early instruction, I am a little behind the fervent zeal of the age, having considerably more regard for what may be found in, than what may be put into, a human head; and a more earnest desire that my child should think, even than that she should learn; and I want her to make her own wisdom, rather than take that of any one else (my own wise self not excepted). For fear, however, that you should imagine that I mean to let her grow up "savage," I beg to state that she does know her letters, a study which she prosecutes with me for about a quarter of an hour daily, out of "Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes." I have thought myself to blame, perhaps, for choosing a _work of imagination_ for that elementary study; but the child, like a rational creature, abhors the whole thing most cordially, and when I think what wondrous revelations are flowing to her hourly through those five gates of knowledge, her senses, I am not surprised that she despises and detests the inanimate dead letter of mere bookish lore.... My poor mother's death, which roused me most painfully to the perception of the distance which divides me from all my early friends, has filled my mind with the gloomiest forebodings respecting my father, and my sister's unprotected situation, should anything befall him. The passing away of my kindred, and those who are dear to me, while I, removed to an impassable distance, only hear of their death after a considerable lapse of time, without the consolation of being near them, or even the preparation of hearing they were ill, is a circumstance of inexpressible sadness.... If Macready would give me anything for my play, I would come over, if only for a month, and see my father, whose image in sickness and depression haunts me constantly.... F. A. B. BUTLER'S ISLAND, February 10th, 1839. It is only two days, I believe, dearest Harriet, since I finished a long letter to you, but I am yet in your debt by one dated the 30th of November, and being in the mind to pay my owings, I proceed to do so, as honestly as I may.... I have just been hearing a long and painful discussion upon the subject of slavery; a frequent theme, as you will easily believe, of thought and conversation with us, now that we are living in the midst of it; and I am assured, by those who maintain the justice of the practice of holding slaves, that had it been otherwise than right, Christ would have forbidden it. It is vain that I say that Christ has done so by implication, forbidding us to do otherwise than we would be done by: I am told in reply, that neither Christ nor his disciples having ever denounced slavery by name as unjust, or wrong, is sufficient proof that it is just and right; and, alas! my dear Harriet, it requires more of the spirit of Christ than I possess to hear such assertions without ungovernable impatience. I do not believe the people who utter them are insincere or dishonest in stating such convictions; but I am shocked at the indignation with which such fallacious arguments occasionally inspires me.... I know that (this one unfortunate question excepted) some of the persons who take these views are just men, and have a keen perception of, and conscientious respect for, the rights of others; but the exception is one of those perplexing moral anomalies that call for the exercise of one's utmost forbearance in judging or condemning the opinions of others. It seems to me, that I could tolerate an absolute moral insensibility upon the subject better than the strange moral obliquity of justifying this horrible system by arguments drawn from Christ's teaching. As for me, every day makes the injustice of the principle, and the cruelty of the practice, more intolerable to me; and but for the poor people's own sake (to whom my presence among them is of some little use and comfort), I would only too gladly turn my back upon the dreadful place, and never again set foot near it.... It would not surprise me if I was never allowed to return here, for these very conversations and discussions upon the subject of the slave system are considered dangerous, and justice and freedom cannot be mentioned safely here but with closed doors and whispering voices.... I pray with all the powers of my soul that God would enlighten these unfortunate slave-holders, and enable them to perceive better the spirit of Christ, who they say never denounced slavery as either an evil or sin; the evil consequences of it to themselves are by far the worst of all. So I go struggling on with this strange existence, and sometimes feel weary enough of it.... God bless you, dear. I believe I am going with the children to the cotton-plantation, where I shall be able to ride again, and shall be better in mind, body, though not estate, for my long-accustomed exercise. Ever your affectionate, F. A. B. ST. SIMON'S, March 10th, 1839. I wish, dear Emily, I could for an instant cause a vision to rise before you of the perfect paradise of evergreens through which I have been opening paths on our estate, in an island called St. Simon's, lying half in the sea and half in the Altamaha. Such noble growth of dark-leaved, wide-spreading oaks; such exquisite natural shrubberies of magnolia, wild myrtle, and bay, all glittering evergreens of various tints, bound together by trailing garlands of wild jessamine, whose yellow bells, like tiny golden cups, exhale a perfume like that of the heliotrope and fill the air with sweetness, and cover the woods with perfect curtains of bloom; while underneath all this, spread the spears and fans of the dwarf palmetto, and innumerable tufts of a little shrub whose delicate leaves are pale green underneath and a polished dark brown above, while close to the earth clings a perfect carpet of thick-growing green, almost like moss, bearing clusters of little white blossoms like enameled stars; I think it is a species of euphrasia. It is the exceeding beauty of the whole which I wish you could see, and to which the most exquisite arrangement of art is in no way superior. I know it is common with the lovers of nature to undervalue art; but for all that, there are exceedingly few scenes in nature (except those of pre-eminent wildness and sublimity) where the genius of man, and his perception of beauty, may not remove and supply some things with advantage. In these wild evergreen plantations this is not the case; and all I have had to do, in following the cattle-tracks through these lovely woods, has been to cut the lower branches of the oaks which impede my progress on horseback, and sever the loving links of the wild garlands of blossoms, which had bound the shrubs together and drawn their branches into a canopy too low to admit of my riding beneath it; and you would laugh to see me with my peculiar slave, a young lad named Jack, of great natural shrewdness and no little humor, who is my factotum, and follows me on horseback with a leathern bag slung round his shoulders, containing a small saw and hatchet, and thus, like Sir Walter and Tom Purdie, we prosecute our labor of embellishment. This Jack was out fishing with me the other day, and after about two hours' silent and unsuccessful watching of our floats, he gravely remarked, "Fishing bery good fun, when de fish him bite,"--an observation so ludicrous under the circumstances, that we both burst out laughing as soon as he uttered it. ST. SIMON'S ISLAND, Sunday, March 17th, 1839. MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON, I cannot conceive how you could do such a wicked thing as to throw a letter you had begun into the fire, or such a cruel one as to inform the person who was to have received it of your exploit. You burned your account of my sister's first appearance because, forsooth, the "newspapers" or "Harriet S----" would be sure to afford me the intelligence! But it so happens that I never see a newspaper, and that that identical letter of Harriet's was cast away in one of those unfortunate New York packets blown ashore in the late tremendous gales. It has since reached me, however; but she, too, thinking fit to go upon some fallacious calculation of human probabilities, takes it for granted that Adelaide has written me a full, true, and particular account of the whole business, and sums up all details in the mere intelligence, which had already reached me, of her having made a successful first appearance at Venice. Pray, my dear Mrs. Jameson, do not be afraid of supplying me with twice-told tales of my own people, but whenever you are good enough to write to me, let me know all that you know about them.... I do not know why you should have associated the ill-fated _Pennsylvania_ with any thought of me. I never crossed the Atlantic in a ship so named, but the _St. Andrew_, one of the wrecked vessels, was the one in which we returned to America two years ago, and probably you may have written the one name for the other by mistake. Of the appearance of your book, and the attention it has excited, I hear from Catharine Sedgwick. As for me, the only new book I have seen since my sojourn in these outhouses of civilization, is that exquisite volume whose evergreen leaves, of every tint and texture, are rustling in the bright sunshine and fresh sea-breeze of this delicious winter climate. Art never devised more perfect combinations of form and color than these wild woods present, with their gigantic growth of evergreen oak, their thickets of myrtle and magnolia, their fantastic undergrowth of spiked palmetto, and their hanging draperies of jessamine, whose gold-colored bells fill the air with fragrance long before one approaches the place where it grows. You would laugh if I were to recount some of my manifold avocations here; my qualifications for my situation should be more various than those of a modern governess, for it appears to me there is nothing strange and unusual by way of female experience that I have not been called upon to perform since I have lived here, from marking out the proper joints on the carcass of a dead sheep, into which it should be divided for the table, to officiating as clergyman to a congregation of our own poor people, whose desire for religious instruction appears to be in exact proportion to the difficulty they have in obtaining it.... I am on horseback every day, clearing paths through the woods; and though the life I lead has but a very remote resemblance to that of a civilized creature, a quondam dweller in the two great cities of the world and frequenter of polished societies therein, it has some recommendations of its own. To be sure, so it should have; for I inhabit a house where the staircase is open to the roof, and the roof, unmitigated by ceiling, plaster, skylight, or any intermediate shelter, presents to my admiring gaze, as I ascend and descend, the seamy side of the tiles, or rather wooden shingles, with which the house is covered; with all the rude raftering, through which do shine the sun, moon, and stars, the winds do blow, and the rain of heaven does fall. Every door in the house is fastened with wooden latches and pack-thread; the identical device of Red Riding-hood antiquity, and the solitary bell of the establishment rings by means of a rope, suspended from the lintel, _outside_ the room where I sit, and I expect to find myself hanging in it every time I go in and out, and which always inclines me to inquire what has been done with the body that was last cut down from it.... F. A. B. ST. SIMON'S ISLAND, March 17th, 1839. That letter of yours which I lamented as lost, my dear Harriet, has reached me all stained and defaced (yet not so but that it can be read), having evidently been steeped in the merciless waves of the Mersey. Your letter has suffered shipwreck, having of course been cast back towards you, in one of those unfortunate New York packets which were lost in those late tremendous gales; and if the poor pickled sheet of paper could speak anything beside what you have told it, how many sad horrors, unrecorded in the summary newspaper reports of the late disasters, it might reveal. I have a dreadful dread, and a fearful fear, of drowning, and the sight of your letter, all sea-stained, conjures up as many terrible thoughts as poor Clarence had in the last dream that preceded his last sleep. Almost the saddest to me of all the items of ruin and destruction enumerated in the newspaper records of the late storm, was the carrying away of the Menai Bridge, and that on your account. I thought of it as almost a personal loss and grief to you. You had so often described it to me, its beauty and its grandeur; and though I had never seen it, I had a distinct imagination of it, gathered far more from your descriptions, than from engravings or accounts of tourists: and it was so associated with you in my mind, that, reading of it being all blown to tatters, I felt dismayed to think of _your_ beautiful bridge thus ruined, and of your distress at its destruction. You used to speak of that with the same species of delight that beautiful natural objects excite in me: and enjoyment so vivid, and at the same time so abiding, that I sometimes, under the influence of such impressions, feel as if I loved some places better than any people. Certainly the magical effect of certain beautiful scenes upon my mind is the most intense and lasting pleasure I have ever known.... I returned here yesterday to my children, whom I left with Margery, while I went up to Butler's Island to do duty, I am sorry to say, as sick-nurse.... The observations of children, which are quoted as indications of peculiar intelligence, very often only appear so, because the objects which call them forth, having become familiar to us, have ceased to impress us rightly, or perhaps at all. Every child who is not a fool will frequently make remarks about many things which are only striking because conventional uses and educated habits of thought have, on many points, blunted their effect upon us, and obscured our perceptions of their qualities, and left us with duller senses, and a duller general sense in some respects, than those of a child or savage.... I have been performing an office this morning, which, like sundry others I have been called upon to discharge here (marking on the carcass of a sheep, for instance, the proper joints into which it should be cut for the table), is new to me. I read prayers to between twenty and thirty of the slaves, who are here without church, pastor, or any means whatever of religious instruction. There was something so affecting to me in my involuntary relation to these poor people,--in the contrast, too, between the infirm old age of many of them, and the comparative youth of me, their instructress,--in my impotence to serve them and my passionate desire to do so,--that I could hardly command my voice. The composition of our service was about as liberal as was ever compounded by any preacher or teacher of any Christian sect, I verily believe: it was selected from the English book of Common Prayer, a Presbyterian collection of Prayers, the "Imitation of Jesus Christ," which excellent Roman Catholic book of devotion I borrowed from Margery, and the Blessed Bible--the fountain from which have flowed all these streams for the refreshment of human souls. From these I compiled a short service, dismissing my congregation without a sermon, having none with me fit for their comprehension, and lacking courage to extemporize one, though vehemently moved by the spirit to do so. I think on Sunday next I will write one especially for their edification. After this I went with S---- and Margery, and baby in her little wicker carriage, accompanied by a long procession of negro children, to explore the woods near the house: not without manifest misgivings on the part of my dusky escort, whose terror of rattlesnakes is greater even than my terrified imagination about them. My greatest anxiety was to keep S---- from marching in the van and preceding us all in these reptiline discoveries.... _Way_, in the proper sense of the term, there was none; for the expedition was chiefly for the purpose of observing where paths could be cleared with best advantage through this charming wilderness. To crown the doings of the day, I have written you this long letter, the fifth I date to you from Georgia. Ever most affectionately yours, F. A. B. NEW YORK, April 30th, 1839. MY DEAR LADY DACRE, How much I wish I could but look into your face, but hold your hand, or embrace you! How much I wish I were near you, that I might silently as alone benefits such occasions, express to you my sympathy for your sorrow.... The news of your loss was the greater shock to me that I had just written a letter, introducing to you a dear friend of mine, Miss Sedgwick, now about visiting England, and bespeaking your kindness and good-will for her. This lady will still be the bearer of this (a most different epistle from the one I had prepared) and a little fan made of the feathers of one of our Southern birds, which you will not look upon with indifference, because it is sent to you by one who loves you truly and gratefully, and who would gladly do anything to afford you one moment's relief from those sad thoughts which I fear must possess you wholly. I had ventured with especial confidence to recommend my friend to your notice, because she possesses, in no small degree, some of those qualities which distinguished your excellent and accomplished daughter; the same talent, applied with profound conscientiousness to the improvement of the young and poor and ignorant; the same devotion to the good of all who come within her sphere; the same pervading sense of religious responsibility. Dear Lady Dacre, for the sake of those who love you,--for the sake of him whom you love above all others, your admirable husband,--for the sake of the darlings your child has left, a precious legacy and trust to you, do not let this affliction bow down the noble courage of your nature, but raise yourself even under this heavy burden, that the world may not by her death lose the good influence of _two_ bright spirits at once. Do not think me bold and impertinent that _I_ venture thus to exhort _you_. It is my affection that speaks, and the fear I feel of the terrible effect this loss may have upon you. Once more, God bless and support you, and give you that reliance upon Him which is our only strength in the hours of our earthly sorrows. She whom you mourn is blest, if ever goodness might secure blessing; and the recollection of her many virtues must take from her death those contemplations which alone can make death awful. Farewell, dear friend. My heart yearns towards you in your grief very tenderly, and I am always Most affectionately yours, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, PHILADELPHIA, June 24th, 1839. DEAREST HARRIET, I am afraid you will think my Northern residence less propitious to correspondence than the Georgia plantation, as I am again in your debt.... But what have I to tell you of myself, or anything belonging to me? Ever since I returned from New York, whither I went to see Catharine Sedgwick sail for England, I have been vegetating here, as much as in me lies to vegetate; but though my life has quite as few incidents as the existence of the lilies and the roses in the flower-beds, the inward nature makes another life of it, and the restless soul can never be made to _vegetate_, even though the body does little else.... My days roll on in a sort of dreamy, monotonous succession, with an imperceptible motion, like the ceaseless creeping of the glaciers. I teach S---- to read. I order my household, I read Mrs. Jameson's book about Canada, I write to you, I copy out for Elizabeth Sedgwick the journal I kept on the plantation, I ride every day, and play on the piano just enough not to forget my notes, _et voila!_ Once a week I go to town, to execute commissions, or return visits, and on Sundays I go to church; and so my life slides away from me. My head and heart, however, are neither as torpid nor as empty as my hours; and I often find, as others have done, that external stagnation does not necessarily produce internal repose. Occasionally, but seldom, people come from town to see us; and sometimes, but not often, small offices of courtesy and kindness are exchanged between me and my more immediate neighbors. And now my story is done.... I really live almost entirely alone.... I am beginning to fear that I shall not be taken to the Virginia springs this summer. If I go, I am told I must leave the children behind, the roads and accommodations being such as to render it perfectly impossible to take them with us. Indeed, the inconveniences of the journey and the discomforts of the residence there are represented to us as so great, that I am afraid I shall not be thought able to endure them. If it is settled that I cannot go thither, I shall go up to Massachusetts, where, though the material civilities of life are yet in their swaddling clothes, I have dear friends, and the country is lovely all around where I should be. I have just seen some plans for a large hotel, which it is proposed to build on some property we own in the city, in a position extremely well adapted for such a purpose. I was very much pleased with them: they are upon the wholesale scale of lodging and entertainment, which travelers in this country require and desire; and combine as much comfort and elegance as are compatible with such a style of establishment. We, you know, in England, always like our public houses to be as like private ones as possible. The reverse is the case here, and the lodging-house or hotel recommends itself chiefly by being able to accommodate as many people as can well congregate at a _table d'hôte_ or in a public drawing-room, that being a good deal the idea of society which appears to exist in many people's minds here.... F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, Thursday, July 4th, 1839. DEAREST HARRIET, It is the 4th of July, the day on which the Declaration of American Independence was read to the assembled citizens of Philadelphia from the window of the City State House. The anniversary is celebrated from north to south and east to west of this vast country: by the many, with firing of guns, and spouting of speeches, drinking of drams, and eating of dinners; by the few, with understanding prayer, praise and thankfulness for the past, and hope, not unalloyed with some misgiving, for the future. In the gravel walk, at the back of our house, under a double row of tall trees that meet overhead, all our servants and the people employed on the place and their children, are congregated at dinner, to the tune of thirty-seven apparently well-satisfied souls, and as I went to see them just now, a farmer who is our tenant across the road, and has tenanted the place where he lives for the space of twenty years, assured me that I was a "real American!" He is an Irishman, and I might have returned his compliment by telling him he was half an Englishman, for a man who remains twenty years in one place in this country, and upon ground that he does not own, is a very uncommon personage. You would scarcely believe how difficult it is to establish a pleasant footing with persons of this class here. Dependents they do not and ought not to consider themselves (for they are not such in any sense whatever); equals, their own perceptions show them they are not in any sense, but a political one; and they seem to me, in consequence, to be far less at their ease really in their intercourse with their employers or landlords than our own people, with their much more positive and definite sense of difference of condition and habits of life. Indeed, to establish a real feeling--a _true_ one--of universal equality, warranted by the fact of its existence, would require a population, not of American Republicans, such as they are, but of Christian philosophers, such as do not exist at all anywhere yet, or, if at all, only by twos or threes scattered among millions.... You ask me how far Butler's Island was from St. Simon's [the rice and cotton plantations in Georgia]. Fifteen miles of water--great huge river mouth or mouths, and open sounds of the sea, with half-submerged salt marsh islands wallowing in the midst of them.... Over these waters--pretty rough surfaces, too, sometimes--we traveled to and fro between the plantations in open boats, generally in a long canoe that flew under its eight oars like an arrow. The men often sang, while they rowed, the whole way when I was in the boat, and some of their melodies are very wild and striking, and their natural gift of music remarkable. As the boat approached the landing, the steersman brayed forth our advent through a monstrous conch, when the whole shore would presently be crowded with our dusky dependents, the whole thing reminding one of former semi-barbaric times, and modes of life in the islands of the northwest of Scotland. Some of the airs the negroes sing have a strong affinity to Scotch melodies in their general character.... It is near ten o'clock in the evening, and with you it is five hours earlier, so you are probably thinking of dressing for dinner; though, by-the-bye, you are not at home at Ardgillan, but wandering somewhere about in Germany--I know not where; neither may I by any means imagine how you are employed; and your image rises before me without one accompanying detail of familiar place, circumstance, or occupation, to give it a this-world's likeness. I see you as I might if you were dead--your simple apparition unframed by any setting that I can surround it with; and it is thus that I now see all my friends and kindred, all those I love in my own country; for the lapse of time and the space of distance between us render all thoughts of them, even of their very existence, vague and uncertain. Klopstock, who wrote letters to the dead, hardly corresponded more absolutely with the inhabitants of another world than I do.... I drove into town this morning by half-past ten o'clock to church, a six-miles' journey I take most Sundays. The weekday generally passes in reading "Nicholas Nickleby," walking about the garden, and devising alterations which I hope may turn out improvements, playing and singing half a dozen pieces of music half a century old, and writing to the "likes of you" (though, indeed, to me you are still a nonesuch). Farewell, dearest Harriet, _und schlafen sie recht wohl_. Is that the way you say it, whereabouts you are? Ever your affectionate, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, July 14th, 1839. I wrote to you a short time ago, dearest Harriet; but I am still in your debt, and though I have nothing to tell you (when should I write if I waited for that?), I have abundant leisure to tell it in, and the mind to talk with you. The last is never wanting, but now what a pity it is that I must make this miserable sheet of paper my voice, instead of having you here on this piazza, as we call our verandahs here, with the pomegranate and cape jessamine bushes in bloom in their large green boxes just before me, and a row of great fat hydrangeas (how is that spelled?) nodding their round, fat, foolish-looking pink and blue heads at me.... We are most strongly urged to try the effect of the natural hot sulphur baths of Virginia; their efficacy being very great in cases of rheumatic affections.... I am very much afraid, however, that I shall not be allowed to go thither; and in that case shall probably take my way up to my friends in Berkshire, Massachusetts, the Sedgwicks, who, though they have sent a detachment of six to perambulate Europe just now, still form with the remaining members of the family the chief part of the population of that district of New England. Catharine, who is one of them that I love best, is one among the gone; but her brother and his wife, next door to whom I generally take up my abode during some part of the summer, are as excellent, and nearly as dear to me, as she is.... My occupations are nothing; my amusements less than nothing. Of what avail is it that I should tell you of lonely rides taken in places you never heard of, or books I have read, the titles of which (being American) you never saw; or that I am revolutionizing the gravel walks in my garden, opening up new and closing up old ones? There is no use in telling you any of this. As long as I live, that is to all eternity, you know that I shall love you; but it is decreed that in this portion of that eternity you can know little else about me, however it may be hereafter. I wonder if it will ever be for us again to interchange communion daily and hourly, as we once did; I do not see how it should come to pass in this our present life; but it may be one of the blessings of a better and happier existence to resume our free and full former intercourse with each other, without any of the alloy of human infirmity or untoward circumstance. Amen! so be it! God bless you, dear. I long to see you once more, and am ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, July 21st, 1839. I was looking over a letter of yours, dear Harriet, just now, which answered one of mine from Georgia, and find therein a perfect burst of eloquence upon the subject of _fishing_. Now, though I know destructiveness to be not only a _bump_, but a passion of yours, I still should not have imagined that you could take delight in that dreamy, lazy, lounging pursuit, if pursuit that may be called in which one stands stock-still by the hour. As for me, the catching of fish was always a subject of perfect ecstasy to me--so much so, indeed, that our little company of piscators at Weybridge used to entreat me to "go further off," or "get out of the boat," whenever I had a bite, because my cries of joy were enough to scare all the fish in the river down to Sheerness. It was the lingering, fidgeting, gasping, plunging agonies of the poor creatures, after they were caught, which I objected to so excessively, and which made me renounce the amusement in spite of my passion for it. When I resumed it in Georgia, it was with the full determination to find out some speedy mode of putting my finny captives to death--as you are to understand that I have not the slightest compunction about killing, though infinite about torturing,--so my "slave," Jack, had orders to knock them on the head the instant he took the hook from their gills; but he banged them horribly, till I longed to bang him against the boat's side, and even cut their throats from ear to ear, so that they looked like so many Banquos without the "gory locks"; and yet the indomitable life in the perverse creatures would make them leap up with a galvanic spring and gasp, that invariably communicated an electric shock to my nerves, and produced the fellow-spring and gasp from me. This was the one drawback to my fishing felicity; oh! yes--I forgot the worms or live bait, though! Harriet, it _is_ a hideous diversion, and that is all that can be said for it; and I wonder at you for indulging in it. I tried paste, most exquisitely compounded of rice, flour, peach brandy, and fine sugar; but the Altamaha fish were altogether too unsophisticated for any such allurement; it would probably be safe to put a _paté de foie gras_ or a pineapple before an Irish hedger and ditcher. The white mullet, shad, and perch of the Altamaha are the most excellent animals that ever went in water. At St. Simon's the water is entirely salt, and often very rough, as it is but a mile and a half from the open sea, and the river there is in fact a mere arm of salt water. It is hardly possible ever to fish like a lady, with a float, in it; but the negroes bait a long rope with clams, shrimps, and oysters, and sinking their line with a heavy lead, catch very large mullet, fine whitings, and a species of marine monster, first cousin once removed to the great leviathan, called the drum, which, being stewed _long enough_ (that is, nobody can tell how long) with a precious French sauce, might turn out a little softer than the nether millstone, and so perhaps edible: _mais avec cette sauce là on mangerait son père_, and perhaps without the family indigestion that lasted the Atridæ so long. One of these creatures was sent to me by one of our neighbors as a curiosity; it was upwards of four feet long, weighed over twenty pounds, and had an enormous head. I wouldn't have eaten a bit of it for the world! The waters all round St. Simon's abound in capital fish; beds of oysters, that must be inexhaustible I should think, run all along the coast; shrimps and extraordinarily large prawns are taken in the greatest abundance, and good green turtle, it is said, is easily procured at a short distance from these shores. You ask what sort of house we had down there. Why, truly, wretched enough. There were on the two plantations no fewer than _eight_ dwelling houses, all in different states and stages of uninhabitableness, half of them not being quite built up, and the other half not quite fallen down. The grandfather of the present proprietor built a good house on the island of St. Simon's, in a beautiful situation on a point of land where two rivers meet--rather, two large streams of salt water, fine, sparkling, billowy sea rivers. Before the house was a grove of large orange-trees, and behind it an extensive tract of down, covered with that peculiar close, short turf which creates South Down and Pré Salé mutton: and overshadowed by some magnificent live-oaks and white mulberry-trees. By degrees, however, the tide, which rises to a great height here, running very strongly up both these channels, has worn away the bank, till tree by tree the orange grove has been entirely washed away, and the water at high tide is now within six feet of the house itself; or rather, there are only six feet of distance between the building and the brink of the bank on which it stands, which is considerably above the river. The house has been uninhabited for a great many years, and is, of course, ruinously out of repair. It contains one very good room, and might be made a decently comfortable dwelling; but it has been ordered to be pulled down, because, if it is not, the materials will soon be swept away in the rapid demolition of the bank by the water. The house we resided in was the overseer's dwelling, situated on the point also, but further from the water, and having the extent of grass-land and trees in front of it, together with a beautiful water prospect; in fact, in a better situation than the other. As for the house itself, it would have done very well for our short residence if it had been either finished or furnished. The rooms were fairly well-sized, and there were five of them in all, besides two or three little closets. But although the primitive simplicity of whitewashed walls in our drawing and dining-room did not affect my happiness, the wainscoting and even the crevices of the floor admitted perfect gusts of air that rather did. The windows and doors, even when professing to be shut, could never be called closed; and on one or two gusty evenings, the carpet in the room where I was sitting heaved and undulated by means of a stream of air from under the door, like a theatrical representation of the ocean in extreme agitation. The staircase was of the roughest description, such as you would not find in the poorest English farm-house, covered only by the inside of the roof, rough shingles--that is, wooden tiles--and all the beams, rafters, etc., etc., of the roofing, admitting little starry twinklings of sun or moonlight, perfectly apparent to the naked eye of whoever ascended or descended. Such was my residence on the estate of Hampton on great St. Simon's Island; and it was infinitely superior in size, comfort, and everything else to my abode on Butler's Island, which was indeed a very miserable hole. The St. Simon's house being sufficiently roomy, I presently set about making it as far as possible convenient and comfortable. I had a fine large table, such as might have become some august board of business men, made of plain white pine and covered in with sober-looking dark green merino. I next had a settee constructed--cushions, covers, etc., cut out and mainly stitched by my own fair fingers; we stuffed it with the native moss; and I had a pretty white _peignoir_ made for it, with stuff which I got from that emporium of fashionable luxury, Darien; and this was quite an item of elegance, as well as comfort. Another table in my sitting-room was an old, rickety, rheumatic piece of furniture of the "old Major's," the infirmities of which I gayly concealed under a Macgregor plaid shawl, never burdening its elderly limbs with any greater weight than a vase of flowers; and by the help of plenty of this exquisite, ornamental furniture of nature's own providing, and a tolerable collection of books, which we had taken down to the South with us, my sitting-room did not look uncomfortable or uncheerful. If, however, I am to winter there again this year, I shall endeavor to make it a little more like the dwelling of civilized human beings by the introduction of locks to the doors, instead of wooden latches pulled by pack-thread; and bells, of which at present there is but one in the whole house, and that is a noose, hanging just outside the sitting-room door, by which I expected to be caught and throttled every time I went in and out.... I am ever yours, F. A. B. LENOX, August 9th, 1839. I turn from interchange of thought and feeling with my friends here, dearest Harriet, to read again an unanswered letter of yours; and as I dwell upon your affectionate words, while my eyes wander over the beautiful landscape which my window commands, my mind is filled with the consideration of the great treasure of love that has been bestowed upon me out of so many hearts, and I wonder as I ponder. God knows how devoutly I thank Him for this blessing above all others, granted to me in a measure so far above my deserts, that my gratitude is mingled with surprise and a sense of my own unworthiness, which enhances my appreciation of my great good fortune in this respect.... In seasons of self-reproach and self-condemnation it is an encouragement and a consolation, and helps to lift one from the dust, to reflect that good and noble spirits have loved one--spirits too good and too noble, one would fain persuade one's self, to love what is utterly base and unworthy.... You ask me if I have kept any journal, or written anything lately. During my winter in the South I kept a daily journal of whatever occurred to interest me, and I am now busily engaged in copying it.... Since the perpetration of that "English Tragedy," now in your safe keeping, I have written nothing else; and probably, until I find myself again under the influence of some such stimulus as my mind received on returning to England, my intellectual faculties will remain stagnant, so far as any "worthy achievement," as Milton would say, is concerned. You see, I persist in considering that play in that light.... I am ashamed to say that I am exceedingly sleepy. I have been riding sixteen miles over these charming hills. The day is bright and breezy, and full of shifting lights and shadows, playing over a landscape that combines every variety of beauty,--valleys, in the hollows of which lie small lakes glittering like sapphires; uplands, clothed with grain-fields and orchards, and studded with farm-houses, each the centre of its own free domain; hills clothed from base to brow with every variety of forest tree; and woods, some wild, tangled, and all but impenetrable, others clear of underbrush, shady, moss-carpeted and sun-checkered; noble masses of granite rock, great slabs of marble (of which there are fine quarries in the neighborhood), clear mountain brooks and a full, free-flowing, sparkling river;--all this, under a cloud-varied sky, such as generally canopies mountain districts, the sunset glories of which are often magnificent. I have good friends, and my precious children, an easy, cheerful, cultivated society, my capital horse, and, in short, most good things that I call mine--on this side of the water--with one heavy exception.... My dearest Harriet, my drowsiness grows upon me, so that my eyelids are gradually drawing together as I look out at the sweet prospect, and the blue shimmer of the little lake and sunny waving of the trees are fading all away into a dream before me. Good-bye. Your sleepy and affectionate F. A. B. [When I was in London, some time after the date of this letter, I received an earnest request from one of the most devoted of the New England abolitionists, to allow the journal I kept while at the South to be published, and so give the authority of my experience to the aid of the cause of freedom. This application occasioned me great trouble and distress, as it was most painful to me to refuse my testimony on the subject on which I felt so deeply; but it was impossible for me then to feel at liberty to publish my journal. When the address, drawn up at Stafford House, under the impulse of Mrs. Beecher Stowe's powerful novel, and the auspices of Lord Shaftesbury and the Duchess of Sutherland (by Thackeray denominated the "Womanifesto against Slavery"), was brought to me for my signature, I was obliged to decline putting my name to it, though I felt very sure no other signer of that document knew more of the facts of American slavery, or abhorred it more, than I did; but also, no other of its signers knew, as I did, the indignant sense of offense which it would be sure to excite in those to whom it was addressed; its absolute futility as to the accomplishment of any good purpose, and the bitter feeling it could not fail to arouse, even in the women of the Northern States, by the assumed moral superiority which it would be thought to imply. I would then gladly have published my journal, had I been at liberty to do so, and thus shown my sympathy with the spirit, though not the letter, of the Stafford House appeal to the women of America. It was not, however, until after the War of Secession broke out, while residing in England, and hearing daily and hourly the condition of the slaves discussed, in a spirit of entire sympathy with their owners, that nothing but the most absolute ignorance could excuse, that I determined to publish my record of my own observations on a Southern plantation. At the time of my doing so, party feeling on the subject of the American war was extremely violent in England, and the people among whom I lived were all Southern sympathizers. I believe I was suspected of being _employed_ to "advocate" the Northern cause (an honor of which I was as little worthy as their cause was in need of such an advocate); and my friend, Lady ----, told me she had repeatedly heard it asserted that my journal was not a genuine record of my own experiences and observation, but "cooked up" (to use the expression applied to it) to serve the purpose of party special pleading. This, as she said, she was able to contradict upon her own authority, having heard me read the manuscripts many years before at her grandmother's, Lady Dacre's, at the Hoo. This accusation of having "cooked up" my journal for a particular end may perhaps have originated from the fact that I refused to place the whole of it in the hands of the printers, giving out to be printed merely such portions as I chose to submit to their inspection, which, as the book was my personal diary, and contained matter of the most strictly private nature, was not perhaps unreasonable. The republication of this book in America had not been contemplated by me; my purpose and my desire being to make the facts it contained known in England. In the United States, by the year 1862, abundant miserable testimony of the same nature needed no confirmation of mine. My friend, Mr. John Forbes, of Boston, however, requested me to let him have it republished in America, and I very gladly consented to do so.[4] [4] I have omitted from the letters written on the plantation, at the same time as this diary, all details of the condition of the slaves among whom I was living; the painful effect of which upon myself however, together with my general strong feeling upon the subject of slavery, I have not entirely suppressed--because I do not think it well that all record should be obliterated of the nature of the terrible curse from which God in His mercy has delivered English America. In countless thousands of lamentable graves the bitter wrong lies buried--atoned for by a four-years' fratricidal war: the beautiful Southern land is lifting its head from the disgrace of slavery and the agony of its defense. May its free future days surpass in prosperity (as they surely will a thousand-fold) those of its former perilous pride of privilege--of race supremacy and subjugation. An extremely interesting and clever book, called "A Fool's Errand," embodies under the form of a novel, an accurate picture of the social condition of the Southern States after the war--a condition so replete with elements of danger and difficulty, that the highest virtue and the deepest wisdom could hardly have coped successfully with them; and from a heart-breaking and perhaps unsuccessful struggle with which, Abraham Lincoln's murder delivered him, I believe, as a reward for his upright and noble career.] LENOX, September 11th, 1839. Thank you, my dear Lady Dacre, for your kindness in writing to me again. I would fain know if doing so may not have become a painful effort to you, or if my letters may not have become irksome to you. Pray have the real goodness to let me know, if not by your own hand, through our friends William Harness or Emily Fitzhugh, if you would rather not be disturbed by my writing to you, and trust that I shall be grateful for your sincerity. You know I do not value very highly the artificial civilities which half strangle half the world with a sort of floss-silk insincerity; and the longer I live the more convinced I am that real tenderness to others is quite compatible with the truth that is due to them and one's self. My regard for you does not maintain itself upon our scanty and infrequent correspondence, but on the recollection of your kindness to me, and the impression our former intercourse has left upon my memory; and though ceasing to receive your letters would be foregoing an enjoyment, it could not affect the grateful regard I entertain for you. Pray, therefore, my dear Lady Dacre, do not scruple to bid me hold my peace, if by taking up your time and attention in your present sad circumstances [the recent loss of her daughter] I disturb or distress you. Your kind wishes for my health and happiness are as completely fulfilled as such benedictions may be in this world of imperfect bodies and minds. I ride every day before breakfast, some ten or twelve miles (yesterday it was five and twenty), and as this obliges me to be in my saddle at seven in the morning, I am apt to consider the performance meritorious as well as pleasurable. (Who says that early risers always have a Pharisaical sense of their own superiority?) I am staying in the beautiful hill-region of Massachusetts, where I generally spend part of my summer, in the neighborhood of my friends the Sedgwicks, who are a very numerous clan, and compose the chief part of the population of this portion of Berkshire, if not in quantity, certainly in quality. There was some talk, at one time, of my going to the hot sulphur springs of Virginia; but the difficulties of the journey thither, and miseries of a sojourn there, prevented my doing so, as I could not have taken my children with me. We shall soon begin to think of flying southward, for we are to winter in Georgia again.... My youngest child does not utter so much as a syllable, which circumstance has occasioned me once or twice seriously to consider whether by any possibility a child of mine could be _dumb_. "I cannot tell, but I think not," as Benedict says. It would have been clever of me to have had a dumb child. Have you read Charles Murray's book about America? and how do you like it? Do you ever see Lady Francis Egerton nowadays? How is she? What is she doing? Is she accomplishing a great deal with her life? She always seemed to me born to do so. My dear Lady Dacre, do not talk of not seeing me again. We hope to be in England next autumn, and one of the greatest pleasures I look forward to in that expectation is once more seeing you and Lord Dacre. You say my sister will marry a foreigner. She has my leave to marry a German, but the more southern blood does not mingle well with our Teutonic race.... I am sorry the only book of Catharine Sedgwick's which you have read is, "Live and Let Live," because it is essentially an American book, and some Americans think it a little exaggerated in its views, even for this country. A little story, called "Home," and another called "The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man," are, I think, better specimens of what she can do.... F. A. B. LENOX, September 30th, 1839. And so, dearest Harriet, Cecilia writes you that my head is enlarged, my _benevolence_ and _causality_ increased, and that Mr. Combe thinks me much improved. Truly, it were a pity if I were the reverse, for it was more than two years since he had seen me; but though I heartily wish this might be the case, I honestly confess to you that I do not feel as if my mental and moral progress, during the last two years, has been sufficient to push out any visible augmentation of the "bumps" of my skull in any direction. Your saucy suggestion as to my having conciliated his good opinion by exhibiting a greater degree of faith in phrenology is, unluckily, not borne out by the facts; for, instead of more, I have a little less faith in it; and that, perversely enough, from the very circumstance of the more favorable opinion thus expressed with regard to my own "development." In the first instance, both Mr. Combe and Cecilia expressed a good deal of surprise to some of my friends here, at their high estimate of my brain.... Having very evidently never themselves perceived any sufficient grounds for such an exalted esteem. Moreover, Mr. Combe wrote a letter to Lucretia Mott (the celebrated Quakeress, who is a good friend of mine), when he heard that she had made my acquaintance, cautioning her against falling into the mistake which _all my American friends_ committed, of "exaggerating my reasoning powers." This was all well and good, and only amused me as rather funny; some of _my American friends_ being tolerably shrewd folk, and upon the whole, no bad judges of brains. But then the next thing that happens is, that I see the Combes myself for a short, hurried, and most confused five minutes, during which, even if Mr. Combe's judgment were _entirely_ in his eyes, he had no leisure for exercising it on me; and yet he now states (for Cecy is only his echo in this matter) that my disposition is much improved, and my reasoning powers much increased; and it is but two years since I was in his house, and this moral and mental progress, visible to the naked eye, on my thickly hair-roofed cranium, has taken place since then;--if so, so much the better for me, and I have made better use of my time than I imagined! To tell you the truth, dear Harriet, I have not thought about phrenology, one way or the other, but I have thought this phrenological verdict about myself nonsense. Mr. Combe has certainly not been influenced by any signs of conversion on my part; but I suppose he may have been influenced by the opinion held of me by my friends here, some of whom are sensible enough on all other subjects not to be suspected of idiocy, even though they do think me a rational, and, what is more, a reasoning creature. It has been a real distress to me not to see more of Mr. Combe and Cecilia. I have always had the highest regard for him, for his kind, humane heart, and benevolent, liberal, enlightened mind. Cecy, too, during my short visit to her in Scotland, appeared to me a far more lovable person than during my previous intercourse with her: and as kinsfolk and countryfolk, without any consideration for personal liking, I feel annoyed at not being able to offer them any kindness or hospitality. But we literally seem to be running round each other; they are now at Hartford, in Connecticut, not fifty miles away from here, where they intend staying some weeks, and will probably not be in Philadelphia until we have departed for the South. When I saw them in New York, they were both looking extremely well; Cecilia fat, and cheerful, and apparently very happy, in spite of her "incidents of American travel." ... The heat of the summer while we remained at Butler Place was something quite indescribable, and hardly varied at all for several weeks, either night or day, from between 90 and 100 degrees. People sat up all night at their windows in town; and as for me, more than once, in sheer desperation, after trying to sleep on a cane sofa under the piazza, I wandered about more than half the night, on the gravel walks of the garden, bare-footed,--_et dans le simple appareil d'une beauté qu'on vient d'arracher au sommeil_. We tried to sleep upon _everything_ in vain,--Indian matting was as hot as woolen blankets. At last I laid a piece of oilcloth on my bed, without even as much as a sheet over it, and though I could not sleep, obtained as much relief from the heat as to be able to lie still. It was terrible!... I have been for two months up here, not having been allowed to go to the Virginia springs, on account of the difficulty of carrying my children there; but I am promised that we shall all go there next summer, when there is to be something like a passable road, by which the health-giving region may be approached.... I have an earnest desire to return to Europe in the autumn--not to stay in England, unless my father should be there, but to go to him, wherever he may be, and to spend a little time with my sister.... All this, however, lies far ahead, and God knows what at present invisible prospects may reveal and develop themselves on the surface of the future, as a nearer light falls on it.... My youngest child's accomplishments are hitherto unaccompanied by a syllable of speech or utterance, and the idea sometimes occurs to me whether a child of mine could have enough genius to be dumb. Good-bye, my dearest Harriet. Ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, October 10th, 1839. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, Your interesting letter of 26th July reached me about ten days ago, at Lenox, where, according to my wont, I was passing the hot months. I had heard from dear Mr. Harness, a short time before, that you had suffered much annoyance from the withdrawal of your father's pension. Your own account of the disasters of your family excited my sincere sympathy; and yet, after reflecting a little, it appeared to me as if the exertions you felt yourself called upon to make in their behalf were happier in themselves than the general absence of any immediate object in life, which I know you sometimes feel very bitterly. At any rate, to be able to serve, effectually to save from distress, those so dear to you, must be in itself a real happiness; and to be blessed by your parents and sisters as their stay and support in such a crisis, is to have had such an opportunity of concentrating your talents as I think one might be thankful for. I cannot, consistently with my belief, say I am sorry you have thus suffered, but I pray God that your troubles may every way prove blessings to you. Your account of your "schoolmaster's party" interested me very much. [A gathering of teachers, promoted by Lady Byron, for purposes of enlightened benevolence.] Lady Byron must be a woman of a noble nature. I hope she is happy in her daughter's marriage. I heard a report a short time ago that Lady Lovelace was coming over to this country with her husband. I could not well understand for what purpose: that he should come from general interest and curiosity about the United States, I can well imagine; but that she should come from any motive, but to avoid being separated from her husband, is to me inconceivable.... I should like to have seen that play of Mr. Chorley's which you mention to me. He once talked about it to me. It is absurd to say, but for all its absurdity, I'll say it,--he does not _look_ to me like a man who could write a good play: he speaks too softly, and his eyelashes are too white; in spite of all which, I take your word for it that it is good. You ask after mine: Harriet has got the only copy, on the other side of the water; if you think it worth while to ask her for it, you are very welcome to read it. I was not aware that I had read you any portion of it; and cannot help thinking that you have confounded in your recollection something which I did read you--and which, as I thought, appeared to distress you, or rather not to please you--with some portion of my play, of which I did not think that I had ever shown you any part. I have some thoughts of publishing it here, or rather in Boston. I have run out my yearly allowance of pin-money, and want a few dollars very badly, and if any bookseller will give me five pounds for it, he shall be welcome to it.... I beg you will not call this a scrap of a letter, because it is all written upon one sheet: if you do, I shall certainly call yours a letter of scraps, being written on several; and am ever, Very truly yours, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, October 19th, 1839. DEAREST HARRIET, I have just been reading over a letter of yours written from Schwalbach, in August; and in answer to some speculation of mine, which I have forgotten, you say, "Our birth truly is no less strange than our death. The beginning--and whence come we? The end--and whither go we?" Now, I presume that you did not intend that I should apply myself to answer these questions categorically. You must have thought you were speaking to me, dearest Harriet, and have only written down the vague cogitations that rose in the shape of queries to your lips, as you read my letter, which suggested them; opening at the same time, doubtless, a pair of most _intensely sightless_ eyes, upon the gaming-table of the Cursaal, if it happened to be within range of vision. For myself, the older I grow the less I feel strength or inclination to speculate. The daily and hourly duties of life are so indifferently fulfilled by me, that I feel almost rebuked if my mind wanders either to the far past or future while the present, wherein lies my salvation, is comparatively unthought of. To tell you the truth, I find in the daily obligations to do and to suffer which come to my hands, a refuge from the mystery and uncertainty which veil all before and after life. For indeed, when the mind sinks bewildered under speculations as to our former fate or future destinies, the sense of things _to be done_, of duties to be fulfilled, even the most apparently trivial in the world, is an unspeakable relief; and though the whole of this existence of ours, material and spiritual, affords but this _one_ foothold (and it sometimes seems so to me), it is enough that every hour brings work; and more than enough--_all_--if that work be but well done. Thus the beginning and the end trouble me seldom; but the difficulty of dealing rightly with what is immediately before and around me does trouble me infinitely; but that trouble is neither uncertainty nor doubt. Our possible separation hereafter from those we have loved here, is almost the only idea connected with these subjects which obtrudes itself sometimes upon my mind. Yet, though I cannot conceive how Heaven would not be Hell without those I love, I am willing to believe that my spirit will be fitted to its future sphere by Him with whom all things are possible. It seems rationally consistent with all we believe, and the little we know, to entertain a strong hope that the affections we have cherished here will not be left behind us, or forgotten elsewhere; but I would give much to _believe_ this as well as to _hope_ it, and those are quite distinct things. Two conclusions spring from this wide waste of uncertainty; that the more we can serve and render happy those with whom our lives are bound up here, the better; for we may not elsewhere be allowed to minister to them: and the less we cling to these earthly affections, the less we grasp them as sources of personal happiness the better; as they may be withdrawn from us, and God, whose place they too often usurp in our souls, be the one Friend who shall supply the place of them all. Conjecture as we may, however, upon these subjects, the general experience of humanity is that of struggle with the _present_, the _actual_; and could I but be satisfied with the mode in which I fulfill my daily duties, and govern my heart and mind in their discharge, I should feel at peace as regards all such speculations--"I'd jump the life to come." You speak of the unhealthy life led by the members of the bar in Ireland, and their disregard of all the "natural laws," which yet, you say, does not appear to affect their constitutions materially. I presume, as far as the usual exercise of their profession goes, lawyers must lead pretty much the same sort of life everywhere; but in this country, everybody's habits are essentially unhealthy, and superadded to the special bad influences of a laborious and sedentary profession, make fearful havoc with life. The diet and the atmosphere to which most Americans accustom themselves, are alike destructive of anything like health. Even the men, compared with ours, are generally inactive, and have no idea of taking regular exercise as a salutary precaution. The absence of social enjoyment among the wealthier classes, and of cheerful recreation among the artisan and laboring part of the population, leaves them absorbed in a perpetual existence of care and exertion, varied only by occasional outbursts of political excitement; indeed, they appear to prefer a life of incessant toil to any other, and they seem to consider any species of amusement or recreation as a simple waste of time, taking no account of the renovation of health, strength, and spirits to be gained by diversion and leisure. All that travelers have said about their neglect of physical health is true; and you will have additional evidence furnished upon this subject, I believe, by Mr. Combe, who intends publishing his American experiences, and who will probably do full justice to the perpetual infraction of his ever-present and sacred rules of life, by the people of the United States.... Expostulations with people with regard to their health are never wise--they who most need such admonition are least likely to accept it; and, indeed, how many of us learn anything but from personal suffering? which too often, alas, comes too late to teach. I suppose, it is only the _exceeding_ wise who are taught anything even by their own experience; to expect the foolish to learn by that of others, is to be one of their number.... Experience is God's teaching; and I think the seldomer one interferes between children and that best of teachers, the better. I think it would be well if we oftener let them follow their wills to their consequences; for these are always _just_, but they are sometimes, according to our judgments, too severe; and so we not seldom, out of cowardice, interpose between our children and the teaching of experience; and substitute, because we will not see them suffer, our own authority for the inestimable instruction of consequences. I do not think I agree with you about the very early cultivation of the reasoning powers, but have left myself no room for further _educational_ disquisition. Farewell, dear. Believe me, ever yours affectionately, F. A. B. PHILADELPHIA, December, 1839. MY DEAR T----, The expression of one's sympathy can never, whatever its sincerity, be of the value it would have possessed if uttered when first excited. In this, above all things, "they give twice who give quickly." I feel this very much in writing to you now upon the events which have lately so deeply troubled the current of your life--your good father's death, and the birth of your second baby, together with the threatened calamity from which its mother's recovery has spared you. Tardy as are these words, my sympathy has been sincerely yours during this your season of trial; and though I have done myself injustice in not sooner writing to you, believe me I have felt more for you and yours than any letter could express, though I had written it the moment the news reached me.... That your father died as full of honor as of years, that his life was a task well fulfilled, and his death not unbecoming so worthy a life, is matter of consolation to you, and all who knew and loved him less than you. I scarce know how you could have wished any other close to his career; the pang of losing such a friend you could not expect to escape, but there was hardly a circumstance (as regarded your father himself) which it seems to me you can regret. Poor M---- will be the bitterest sufferer [the lady was traveling in Europe at the time of her father's death], and for her, indeed, my compassion is great, strengthened as it is by my late experience, and constant apprehension of a similar affliction,--I mean my mother's death, and the dread of hearing, from across this terrible barrier, that I have lost my father. I pity her more than I can express; but trust that she will find strength adequate to her need. Give my kindest love to your wife. I rejoice in her safety for your sake and that of her children, more even than for her own; for it always seems well to me with those who have gone to rest, but her loss would have been terrible for you, and her girl has yet to furnish her some work, and some compensation.... If Anne is with you, remember me very kindly to her, and Believe me ever most truly yours, F. A. B. [The little daughter referred to in the above letter became Mrs. Charles Norton, one of the loveliest and most charming of young American women, snatched by an untimely death from the midst of an adoring family and friends.] PHILADELPHIA, Friday, December 14th, 1839. DEAREST HARRIET, ... It is perhaps well for you that this letter has suffered an interruption here, as had this not been the case you might have been edified with a yet further "complaint." ... We have shut up our house in the country, and are at present staying in Philadelphia, at my brother-in-law's; but we are expecting every day to start for the plantation in Georgia, where I hope we are to find what is yet lacking to us in health and strength. I look forward with some dismay now to this expedition, in the middle of winter, with two young children, traveling by not very safe railroads and perhaps less safe steamboats, through that half-savage country, and along that coast only some months ago the scene of fearful shipwreck.... I have already written you word of our last residence there, of the small island in the Altamaha and below its level--the waters being only kept out by dykes, which protect the rice-marshes, of which the plantation is composed, from being submerged. The sole inhabitants, you know, are the negroes, who cultivate the place, and the overseer who manages them.... As early as March the heat becomes intense, and by the beginning of April it is no longer safe for white people to remain there, owing to the miasma which exhales from the rice-fields.... We shall find, no doubt, our former animal friends, from the fleas up to the alligators: the first, swarming in the filthy negroes' huts; the last, expatiating in the muddy waters of the Altamaha. I trust they will none of them have forgotten us. Did I tell you before of those charming creatures, the moccasin snakes, which, I have just been informed, abound in every part of the southern plantations? Rattlesnakes I know by sight: but the moccasin creature, though I may have seen him, I do not feel acquainted, or at any rate familiar, with. Our nearest civilized town, you know, is Savannah, and that is sixty miles off. I cannot say that the expedition is in any way charming to me, but the alternative is remaining alone here; and, as it is possible to live on the plantation with the children, I am going. Margery, of course, comes with me.... Did I tell you, my dear Irishwoman, that we had no _potatoes_ on the plantation, and that Indian meal holds the place of wheaten flour, bread baked of the latter being utterly unknown?... Do not be surprised if I dwell upon these small items of privation, even now that I am about to go among those people the amelioration of whose condition I have considered as one of my special duties. With regard to this, however, I have, alas! no longer the faintest shadow of hope.... Yours most truly, F. A. B. PHILADELPHIA, January 15th, 1840. DEAREST HARRIET, My last to you was dated the fourteenth of December, and it is now the tenth of January, a whole month; and you and Dorothy are, I presume, sundered, instead of together, and surrounded with ice and snow, and all wintry influences, instead of those gentle southern ones in which you had imagined you would pass the dismal season. I can fancy Ardgillan comfortably poetical (if that is not a contradiction in terms) at this time of year, with its warm, bright, cheerful drawing-room looking out on the gloomy sea. But perhaps you are none of you there?--perhaps you are in Dublin?--on Mr. Taylor's new estate?--or where--where, dear Harriet--where are you? How sad it seems to wander thus in thought after those we love, and conjecture of their whereabouts almost as vaguely as of the dwelling of the dead!... I am annoyed by the interruption which all this ice and snow causes in my daily rides. My horse is rough-shod, and I persist in going out on him two or three times a week, but not without some peril, and severe inconvenience from the cold, which not only cuts my face to pieces, but chaps my skin from head to foot, through my riding-dress and all my warm under-clothing. I do not much regret our prolonged sojourn in the North, on my children's account, who, being both hearty and active creatures, thrive better in this bracing climate than in the relaxing temperature of the South.... Dear Harriet, I have nothing to tell you; my life externally is _nothing_; and who can tell the inward history of their bosom--that internal life, which is often so strangely unlike the other? Suppose I inform you that I have just come home from a ride of an hour and a half; that I went out of the city by Broad Street, and returned by Islington Lane and the Ridge Road--how much the wiser will you be? that the roads were frozen as hard as iron, and here and there so sheeted with ice that I had great difficulty in preventing my horse from slipping and falling down with me, and, being quite alone, without even a servant, I wondered what _I_ should do if _he_ did. I have a capital horse, whom I have christened Forester, after the hero of my play, and who grins with delight, like a dog, when I talk to him and pat him. He is a bright bay, with black legs and mane, tall and large, and built like a hunter, with high courage and good temper. I have had him four years, and do not like to think what would become of me if anything were to happen to him. It would be necessary that I should commit suicide, for his fellow is not to be found in "these United States." Dearest Harriet, we hope to come over to England next September; and if your sister will invite me, I will come and see you some time before I re-cross the Atlantic. I am very anxious about my father, and still more anxious about my sister, and feel heart-weary for the sight of some of my own people, places, and things; and so. Fate prospering, to speak heathen, I shall go _home_ once more in the autumn of this present 1840: till when, dearest Harriet, God bless you! and after then, and always, I am ever your affectionate, F. A. B. [My dear horse, having been sold to a livery-stable keeper, I repurchased him by the publication of a small volume of poems, which thus proved themselves to _me_ excellent verses. The gallant animal broke his hip-joint by slipping in a striding gallop over some wet planks, and I had to have him shot. His face--I mean the anguish in it after the accident--is among the tragical visions in my memory.] PHILADELPHIA, February 9th, 1840. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, ... You ask me if I have read your book on Canada. With infinite interest and pleasure, and great sympathy and admiration, and much gratitude for the vindication of women's capabilities, both physical and mental, which all your books (but this perhaps more than all the others) furnish. It has been, like all your previous works, extremely popular here; and if you have received no remuneration for it, you are not justly dealt by, as I am sure its sale has been very considerable, and very profitable. [Mrs. Jameson was, undoubtedly, one of the greatest sufferers by the want of an author's copyright in America: her works were all republished there; and her laborious literary career, her careful research and painstaking industry, together with her restricted means and the many claims upon them, made it a peculiar hardship, in her case, to be deprived of the just reward of the toil by which she gave pleasure and instruction to so many readers in America, as well as in her own country.] Your latest publication, "Social Life in Germany," I have not seen, but have read numerous extracts from it, in the American literary periodicals. You ask me if you can "do anything" about my play? I thought I must have told you of my offering it to Macready, who civilly declined having anything to do with it. Circumstances induced me to destroy my own copy of it: the one Macready had is in Harriet's custody, another copy I have given to Elizabeth Sedgwick, and I now neither know nor care anything more about it. Once upon a time I wrote it, and that is quite enough to have had to do with it. Prescott, the historian of Ferdinand and Isabella, is urgent with me to let him have it published in Boston; perhaps hereafter, if I should want a penny, and be able to turn an honest one by so doing, I may. It is odd that I have not the remotest recollection of reading any of that play to you. You have mentioned it several times to me, and I have never been able to recall to my mind, either when I read it to you, or what portion of it I inflicted upon you. You were lucky, and I wonder that I let you off with a _portion_ of it; for, for nearly a year after I finished it, I was in such ecstasies with my own performance, that I martyrized every soul that had a grain of regard for me, with its perusal.... J---- B---- and his brother have just started for Georgia, leaving his wife and myself in forlorn widowhood, which, (the providence of railroads and steamboats allowing) is not to last more than three months. I have been staying nearly three months in their house in town, expecting every day to depart for the plantation; but we have procrastinated to such good effect that the Chesapeake Bay is now unnavigable, being choked up with ice, and the other route involving seventy miles of night traveling _on the worst road in the United States_ (think what that means!), it has been judged expedient that the children and myself should remain behind. I am about, therefore, to return with them to the Farm, where I shall pass the remainder of the winter,--how, think you? Why, reading Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," which I have never read yet, and which I now intend to study with classical atlas, Bayle's dictionary, the Encyclopædia, and all sorts of "aids to beginners." How quiet I shall be! I think perhaps I may die some day, without so much as being aware of it; and if so, beg to record myself in good season, before that imperceptible event, Yours very truly, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, February 16th, 1840. I have just been looking over a letter of yours, dearest Harriet, as old as the 19th of last September, describing your passage over the Splügen. About four days ago I was looking over some engravings of the passes of the Alps, in a work called "Switzerland Illustrated," by Bartlett, and lingered over those attempts of human art with the longing I have for those lands, which I always had, which has never died away entirely, but seems now reviving again in some of its earliest strength: I can compare it to nothing but the desire of thirst for water, and I must master it as I may, for of those mountain-streams I fear I never shall drink, or look upon their beauty, but in the study of my imagination. In the hill-country of Berkshire, Massachusetts, where I generally spend some part of the summer among my friends the Sedgwicks, there is a line of scenery, forming part of the Green Mountain range, which runs up into the State of Vermont, and there becomes a noble brotherhood of mountains, though in the vicinity of Stockbridge and Lenox, where I summer, but few of them deserve a more exalted title than hill. They are clothed with a various forest of oak, beech, chestnut, maple, and fir; and down their sides run wild streams, and in the valleys between them lie exquisite lakes. Upon the whole, it is the most picturesque scenery I have ever seen; particularly in the neighborhood of a small town called Salisbury, thirty miles from Lenox. This is situated in a plain surrounded by mountains, and upon the same level in its near neighborhood lie four beautiful small lakes; close above this valley rises Mount Washington, or, as some Swiss charcoal-burners, who have emigrated thither, have christened it, Mount Rhigi. In a recess of this mountain lies a deep ravine and waterfall; and a precipice, where an arch of rock overhangs a basin, where, many hundred feet below, the water boils in a mad cauldron, and then plunges away, by leaps of forty, twenty, and twelve feet, with the intermediate runs necessary for such jumps, through a deep chasm in the rocks, to a narrow valley, the whole character of which, I suppose, may represent Swiss scenery in _very small_. A week ago J---- B---- and ---- left Philadelphia for the South; and yesterday I received a letter giving a most deplorable account of their progress, if progress it could be called, which consisted in going _nine miles in four hours_, and then returning to Washington, whence they had started, the road being found utterly impassable. Streams swollen with the winter snows and spring rains, with their bridges all broken up by the ice or swept away by the water, intersect these delightful ways; and one of these, which could not admit of fording, turned them back, to try their fate in a steamboat, through the ice with which the Chesapeake is blocked up. This dismal account has in some measure reconciled me to having been left behind with the children; they have neither of them been as well as usual this winter, and the season is now so far advanced, our intended departure being delayed from day to day for three months, that, besides encountering a severe and perilous journey, we should have arrived in Georgia to find the weather almost oppressively hot, and, if we did wisely, to return again, at the end of a fortnight, to the North. I have come back to Butler Place with the bairns, and have resumed the monotonous tenor of my life, which this temporary residence in town had interrupted, not altogether agreeably; and here I shall pass the rest of the winter, teaching S---- to read, and sliding through my days in a state of external quietude, which is not always as nearly allied to content as it might seem to (_ought_ to) be.... When the children's bed-time comes, and their little feet and voices are still, the spirit of the house seems to have fallen asleep. I send my servants to bed, for nobody here keeps late hours (ten o'clock being considered late), and, in spite of assiduous practicing, reading, and answering of letters, my evenings are sad in their absolute solitude, and I am glad when ten o'clock comes, the hour for my retiring, which I could often find in my heart to anticipate.... I have taken vehemently to worsted-work this winter, and, _instead of a novel or two_, am going to read Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," which I have never read, and by means of Bayle, classical atlas, and the Encyclopædia, I mean to make a regular school-room business of it. Good-bye, dear. Events are so lacking in my present existence, that I am longing for the spring as I never did before--for the sight of leaves and flowers, and the song of birds, and the daily development of the great natural pageant of the year. I am grateful to God for nothing more than the abundant beauty with which He has adorned His creation. The pleasure I derive from its contemplation has survived many others, and should I live long, will, I think, outlive all that I am now capable of.... Ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, February 17th, 1840. MY DEAR LADY DACRE, ... I believe too implicitly in your interest in me and mine, ever to have _nothing_ to say to you; but my sayings will be rather egotistical, for the monotony of my life affords me few interests but those which centre in my family, the head of which left me ten days ago, with his brother, for their southern estate. I have since had a letter, which, as it affords an accurate picture of winter traveling in this country, would, I flatter myself, make your sympathetic hair stand on end. Listen. On Sunday morning, before day, they set out, two post-coaches, with four horses, each carrying eight passengers. They got to Alexandria, which is close to Washington, whence they started without difficulty, stopped a short time to gird up their loins and take breath, and at seven o'clock set off. It rained hard; the road was deep with mud, and very bad; several times the passengers were obliged to get out of the coach and walk through the rain and mud, the horses being unable to drag the load through such depths of mire. They floundered on, wading through mud and fording streams, until eleven o'clock, when they stopped to breakfast, having come but _eight miles_ in _four hours_. They consulted whether to go on or turn back: the majority ruled to go on; so after breakfast they again took the road, but had proceeded but one mile when it became utterly impassable--the thaw and rain had so swelled a stream that barred the way that it was too deep to ford; and when it was quite apparent that they must either turn back or be drowned, they reluctantly adopted the former course, and got back to Washington late in the evening, having passed nearly all day in going _nine miles_. I think you will agree with me, my dear Lady Dacre, that my children and myself were well out of that party of pleasure; though the very day before the party set off it was still uncertain whether we should not accompany them. The contrary having been determined, I am now very quietly spending the winter with my chickens at the Farm.... An imaginative nature makes, it is true, happiness as well as unhappiness for itself, but finds inevitable ready made disappointment in the mere realities of life.... I make no excuse for talking "nursery" to you, my dear Lady Dacre. These are my dearest occupations; indeed, I might say, my only ones. Have you looked into Marryatt's books on this country? They are full of funny stories, some of them true stories enough, and some, little imitation Yankee stories of the captain's own. Do explain to me what Sydney Smith means by disclaiming Peter Plymley's letters as he does? Surely he _did_ write them. This very youthful nation of the United States is "carrying on," to use their own favorite phrase, in a most unprecedented manner. Their mercantile and financial experiments have been the dearest of their kind certainly; and the confusion, embarrassment, and difficulty, in consequence of these experiments, are universal. Money is scarce, credit is scarcer, but, nevertheless, they will not lay the lesson to heart. The natural resources of the country are so prodigious, its wealth so enormous, so inexhaustible, that it will be presently up and on its feet again running faster than ever to the next stumbling-post. _Moral_ bankruptcy is what they have to fear, much more than failure of material riches. It is a strange country, and a strange people; and though I have dear and good friends among them, I still feel a stranger here, and fear I shall continue to do so until I die, which God grant I may do at home! _i.e._, in England. Give my kindest remembrance to Lord Dacre. We hope to be in England in September, and I shall come and see you as soon as ever I can. Believe me ever, my dear Lady Dacre, Yours affectionately, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, March 1st, 1840. Thank you, my dearest Harriet, for your extract from my sister's letter to you.... The strongest of us are insufficient to ourselves in this life, and if we will not stretch out our hands for help to our fellows, who, for the most part, are indeed broken reeds and quite as often pierce as support us, we needs must at last stretch them out to God; and doubtless these occasions, bitter as they may seem, should be accounted blest, which make the poor proud human soul discover its own weakness and God's all-sufficiency.... My winter--or rather, what remains of it--is like to pass in uninterrupted quiet and solitude; and you will probably have the satisfaction of receiving many _short_ letters from me, for I know not where I shall find the material for long ones. To be sure, S----'s sayings and F----'s looks might furnish me with something to say, but I have a dread of beginning to talk about my children, for fear I should never leave off, for that is apt to be a "story without an end." I hear they are going to bestow upon my father, on his return to England, a silver vase, valued at several hundred pounds. I am base-minded, dear Harriet, grovelling, and sordid; and were I he, would rather have a shilling's worth of honor, and the rest of the vase in hard cash: but he has lived his life upon this sort of thing, and I think with great pleasure of the great pleasure it will give him. I am very well, and always most affectionately yours, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, March 12th, 1840. DEAREST HARRIET, It is only a few days since I received your letter with the news of Mr. F----'s attack, from which it is but natural to apprehend that he may not recover.... The combination of the loss of one's father, and of the home of one's whole life, is indeed a severe trial; though in this case, the one depending on the other, and Mr. F----'s age being so advanced, Emily with her steadfast mind has probably contemplated the possibility of this event, and prepared herself for it, as much as preparation may be made against affliction, which, however long looked for, when it comes always seems to bring with it some unforeseen element of harsh surprise. We never can imagine what will happen to us, precisely as it _does_ happen to us; and overlook in anticipation, not only minute mitigations, but small stings of aggravation, quite incalculable till they are experienced.... I could cry to think that I shall never again see the flowerbeds and walks and shrubberies of Bannisters. I think there is something predominantly material in my nature, for the sights and sounds of outward things have always been my chiefest source of pleasure; and as I grow older this in nowise alters; so little so, that gathering the first violets of the spring the other morning, it seemed to me that they were things to _love_ almost more than creatures of my own human kind. I do not believe I am a normal human being; and at my death, only _half a soul_ will pass into a spiritual existence, the other half will go and mingle with the winds that blow, and the trees that grow, and the waters that flow, in this world of material elements.... Do I remember Widmore, you ask me. Yes, truly.... I remember the gay colors of the flowerbeds, and the fine picturesque trees in the garden, and the shady quietness of the ground-floor rooms.... You ask me how I have replaced Margery. Why, in many respects, if indeed not in all, very indifferently; but I could not help myself. Her leaving me was a matter of positive necessity, and some things tend to reconcile me to her loss. I believe she would have made S---- a Catholic. The child's imagination had certainly received a very strong impression from her; and soon after her departure, as I was hearing S---- her prayers, she begged me to let her repeat that prayer to "the blessed Virgin," which her nurse had taught her. I consider this a direct breach of faith on the part of Margery, who had once before undertaken similar instructions in spite of distinct directions to interfere in no way with the child's religious training. The proselytizing spirit of her religion was, I suppose, stronger than her conscience, or rather, was the predominant element in it, as it is in all very devout Catholics; and the opportunity of impressing my little girl with what she considered vital truth, not to be neglected; and upon this ground alone I am satisfied that it is better she should have left me, for though it would not mortally grieve me if hereafter my child were conscientiously to embrace Romanism, I have no desire that she should be educated in what I consider erroneous views upon the most momentous of all subjects. I have been more than once assured, on good authority, that it is by no means an infrequent practice of the Roman Catholic Irish women employed as nurses in American families, to carry their employers' babies to their own churches and have them baptized, of course without consent or even knowledge of their parents. The secret baptism is duly registered, and the child thus smuggled into the pope's fold, never, if possible, entirely lost sight of by the priest who administered the regenerating sacrament to it. The saving of souls is an irresistible motive, especially when the saving of one's own is much facilitated by the process. The woman I have in Margery's place is an Irish Protestant, a very good and conscientious girl, but most wofully ignorant, and one who murders our luckless mother-tongue after a fashion that almost maddens me. However, as with some cultivation, education, reading, reflection, and that desire to do what is best that a mother alone can feel for her own child, I cannot but be conscious of my own inability in all points to discharge this great duty, the inability of my nursery-maid does not astonish or dismay me. The remedy for the nurse's deficiencies must be in _me_, and the remedy for mine in God, to whose guidance I commit myself and my darlings.... Margery was very anxious to remain with me as my maid; but we have reduced our establishment, and I have no longer any maid of my own, therefore I could not keep her.... With regard to attempting to make "reason the guide of your child's actions," that, of course, must be a very gradual process, and may, in my opinion, be tried too early. Obedience is the first virtue of which a young child is capable, the first duty it can perform; and the authority of a parent is, I think, the first impression it should receive,--a strictly reasonable and just claim, inasmuch as, furnishing my child with all its means of existence, as well as all its amusements and enjoyments, regard for my requests is the proper and only return it can make in the absence of sufficient judgment, to decide upon their propriety, and the motives by which they are dictated. Good-bye, dearest Harriet. I am ever affectionately yours, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, March 16th, 1840. MY DEAREST HARRIET, It was with infinite pain that I received your last letter [a very unfavorable report, almost a sentence of death, had been pronounced by the physicians upon my friend's dearest friend, Miss Dorothy Wilson], and yet I know not, except your sorrow, what there is so deplorable in the fact that Dorothy, who is one of the living best prepared for death, should have received a summons, which on first reading of it shocked me so terribly. We calculate most blindly, for the most part, in what form the call to "change our life" may be least unwelcome; but to one whose eyes have long been steadily fixed upon that event, I do not believe the manner of their death signifies much. Pain, our poor human bodies shrink from; and yet it has been endured, almost as if unfelt, not only in the triumphant death of the mob-hunted martyr, but in the still, lonely, and, by all but God, unseen agony of the poor and humble Christian, in those numerous cases where persecution indeed was not, but the sorrowful trial of the neglect and careless indifference of their fellow-beings, the total absence of all sympathy--a heavy desolation whether in life or death. I have just lost a friend, Dr. Follen, a man to whose character no words of mine could do justice. He has been publicly mourned from more than one Christian pulpit; and Dr. Channing, in a discourse after his death, has spoken of him as one whom "many thought the most perfect man they ever knew." Among those many I was one. I have never seen any one whom I revered, loved, and admired more than I did Dr. Follen. He perished, with above a hundred others, in a burning steam-boat, on the Long Island Sound; at night, and in mid-winter, the freezing waters affording no chance of escape to the boldest swimmer or the most tenacious clinger to existence. He perished in the very flower of vigorous manhood, cut off in the midst of excellent usefulness, separated, _for the first time_, from a most dearly loved wife and child, who were prevented from accompanying him by sickness. In a scene of indescribable terror, confusion, and dismay, that noble and good man closed his life; and all who have spoken of him have said, "Could one have seen his countenance, doubtless it was to the last the mirror of his serene and steadfast spirit;" and for myself, after the first shock of hearing of that awful calamity, I could only think it mattered not how or where that man met his death. He was always near to God, and who can doubt that, in that scene of apparent horror and despair, God was very near to him? Even so, my dearest Harriet, do I now think of the impending fate of Dorothy; but oh, the difference between the sudden catastrophe in the one case, and the foreknowledge granted in the other! Time, whose awful uses our blind security so habitually forgets, is granted to her, with its inestimable value marked on it by the finger of death, undimmed by the busy hands of earthly pursuits and interests; she has, and will have, her dearest friends and lovers about her to the very end; and I know of no prayer that I should frame for her, but exemption from acute pain. For you, my dearest Harriet, if pain and woe and suffering are appointed you, it is to some good purpose, and you may make it answer its best ends. These seem almost cold-hearted words, and yet God knows from how warm a heart, full of love and aching with sympathy, I write them! But sorrow is His angel, His minister, His messenger who does His will, waiting upon our souls with blessed influences. My only consolation, in thinking upon your affliction, is to remember that all events are ordered by our Father, and to reflect, as I often do---- I had written thus far, dearest Harriet, when a miserable letter from Georgia came to interrupt me. How earnestly, in the midst of the tears through which I read it, I had to recall those very thoughts, in my own behalf, which I was just urging upon you, you can imagine.... We may not choose our own discipline; but happy are they who are called to suffer themselves, rather than to see those they love do so!... My head aches, and my eyes ache, and my heart aches, and I cannot muster courage to write any more. God bless you, my dearest Harriet. Remember me most affectionately to dear Dorothy, and Believe me ever yours, F. A. B. [Dr. Charles Follen, known in his own country as Carl Follenius, became an exile from it for the sake of his political convictions, which in his youth he had advocated with a passionate fervor that made him, even in his college days, obnoxious to its governing authorities. He wrote some fine spirited Volkslieder that the students approved of more than the masters; and was so conspicuous in the vanguard of liberal opinion, that the Vaterland became an unwholesome residence for him, and he emigrated to America, where all his aspirations towards enlightened freedom found "elbow-room." He became an ordained Unitarian preacher; and it was a striking tribute to his spirit of humane tolerance as well as to his eloquent advocacy of his own high spiritual faith, that he was once earnestly and respectfully solicited to give a series of discourses upon Christianity, to a society of intelligent men who professed themselves dis-believers in it (atheists, materialists, for aught I know), inasmuch as from him they felt sure of a powerful, clear, and earnest exposition of his own opinions, unalloyed by uttered or implied condemnation of them for differing from him. I do not know whether Dr. Follen complied with this petition, but I remember his saying how much he had been touched by it, and how glad he should be to address such a body of mis- or dis-believers. He was a man of remarkable physical vigor, and excelled in all feats of strength and activity, having, when first he came to Boston, opened a gymnasium for the training of the young Harvard scholars in such exercises. He had the sensibility and gentleness of a woman, the imagination of a poet, and the courage of a hero; a genial kindly sense of humor, and buoyant elastic spirit of joyousness, that made him, with his fine intellectual and moral qualities, an incomparable friend and teacher to the young, for whose rejoicing vitality he had the sympathy of fellowship as well as the indulgence of mature age, and whose enthusiasm he naturally excited to the highest degree. His countenance was the reflection of his noble nature. My intercourse with him influenced my life while it lasted, and long after his death the thought of what would have been approved or condemned by him affected my actions. Many years after his death, I was speaking of him to Wæleker, the Nestor of German professors, the most learned of German philologists, historians, archæologists, and antiquarians, and he broke out into enthusiastic praise of Follen, who had been his pupil at Jena, and to whose mental and moral worth he bore, with deep emotion, a glowing testimony.] BUTLER PLACE, March 23rd, 1840. I have just learned, dearest Harriet, that the Censorship [office of licenser of plays] has been transferred from my father to my brother John, which I am very glad to hear, as I imagine, though I do not know it, that the death of Mr. Beaumont must have put an end to the existence of the _British and Foreign Review_, for which he employed my brother as editor. If the salary of licenser is an addition to the income attached to his editorship of the _Review_, my brother will be placed in comfortable circumstances; and I hope this may prove to be the case--though ladies are not apt to be so in love with abstract political principles as to risk certain thousands every year merely to promote their quarterly illustration in a _Review_, and I shall not be at all surprised to learn that Mrs. Beaumont declines doing so any longer. [Mrs. Wentworth Beaumont, mother of my brother John's friend, must have been a woman of very decided political opinions, and very liberal views of the value of her convictions--in hard cash. Left the widowed mistress of a princely estate in Yorkshire, on the occasion when the most passionate contest recorded in modern electioneering made it doubtful whether the Government candidate or the one whose politics were more in accordance with her own would be returned to Parliament, she, then a very old lady, drove in her travelling-carriage with four horses to Downing Street, and demanding to see the Prime Minister, with whom she was well acquainted, accosted him thus: "Well, my lord, are you quite determined to make your man stand for _our_ seat?" "Yes, Mrs. Beaumont, I think quite determined." "Very well," replied the lady; "I am on my way down to Yorkshire, with eighty thousand pounds in the carriage for my man. Try and do better than that." I am afraid the _pros_ and _cons_ for Woman's Suffrage would alike have thought that very expensive female partisan politician hardly to be trusted with the franchise. Lord Dacre, who told me that anecdote, told me also that on one occasion forty thousand pounds, to his knowledge, had been spent by Government on a contested election--I think he said at Norwich.] ... The longer I live, the less I think of the importance of any or all outward circumstances, and the more important I think the original powers and dispositions of people submitted to their influence. God has permitted no situation to be exempt from trial and temptation, and few, if any, to be entirely exempt from good influences and opportunities for using them. The tumult of the inward creature may exist in the midst of the calmest outward daily life, and the peace which passeth understanding subsist in the turmoil of the most adverse circumstances.... Our desires tending towards particular objects, we naturally seek the position most favorable for obtaining them; and, stand where we will, we are still, if we so choose, on the heavenward road. If we know how barely responsible for what they are many human beings necessarily must be, how much better does God know it! With many persons, whose position we regret and think unfortunate for their character, we might have to go far back, and retrace in the awful influence of inheritance the source of the evils we deplore in them. We need have much faith in the future to look hopefully at the present, and perfect faith in the mercy of our Father in heaven, who alone knows how much or how little of His blessed light has reached every soul of us through precept and example.... You ask me of Margery's successor: she is an honest, conscientious, and most ignorant Irish Protestant. You cannot conceive of what materials our households are composed here. The Americans, whose superior intelligence and education make them by far the most desirable servants we could have, detest the condition of domestic service so utterly, that it is next to impossible to procure them, and absolutely impossible to retain them above a year. The lowest order of Irish are the only persons that can be obtained. They offer themselves, and are accepted of hard necessity, indiscriminately, for any situation in a house, from that of lady's-maid to that of cook; and, indeed, they are equally unfit for all, having probably never seen so much as the inside of a decent house till they came to this country. To illustrate--my housemaid is the sister of my present nursery-maid, and on the occasion of the latter taking her holiday in town, the other had the temporary charge of the children, and, when first she undertook it, had to be duly enlightened as to the toilet purposes of a wash-hand basin, a sponge, and a toothbrush, not one of which had she apparently been familiar with before; and this would have been the case with a large proportion of the Irish girls who present themselves here to be engaged as our servants. Our household has been reduced for some time past, and I have no maid of my own; and when the nurse is in town I am obliged to forego the usual decency of changing my dress for dinner, from the utter incapacity of my housemaid to fasten it upon my back. Of course, except tolerably faithful washing, dressing, and bodily care, I can expect nothing for my children from my present nurse. She is a very good and pious girl, and though her language is nothing short of heathen Greek, her sentiments are very much those of a good Christian. This same service is a source of considerable daily tribulations, and I wish I only improved all my opportunities of practising patience and forbearance.... F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, March 25th, 1840. MY DEAR T----, I have been reading with infinite interest the case of the _Amistad_; but understand, from Mrs. Charles Sedgwick, that there is to be an appeal upon the matter. As, however, the result will, I presume, be the same, the more publicity the affair obtains, the more it and all kindred subjects are discussed, spoken of, thought on, and written about, the better for us unfortunate slaveholders. I am very much obliged to you for sending me that article on Mr. Jay's book. You know how earnestly I look to every sign of the approaching termination of this national disgrace and individual misfortune; and when men of ability and character conscientiously raise their voices against it, who can be so faint-hearted as not to have faith in its ultimate downfall? Your very name pledges you in some sort to this cause, and, among your other important duties, let me (who am now involuntarily implicated in this terrible abuse) beg you to remember that this one is an inheritance; and for the sake of those, justly honored, who have bequeathed it to you, discharge it with the ability nature has so bountifully endowed you with, and you cannot fail to accomplish great good. In reading your article, I was much reminded of Legget, whose place, it seems to me, there is none but you to fill. I have just been interrupted by a letter from Elizabeth, confirming the news of your sister's return from Europe. I congratulate you heartily upon the termination of your anxieties about her. Remember me most kindly to her, and to your mother, if my message can be made acceptable to her in her present affliction, and believe me Ever yours most truly, F. A. B. [The _Amistad_ was a low raking schooner, conveying between fifty and sixty negroes, fresh from Africa, from Havannah to Guamapah, Port Principe, to the plantation of one of the passengers. The captain and three of the crew were murdered by the negroes. Two planters were spared to navigate the vessel back to Africa. Forced to steer east all day, these white men steered west and north all night; and after two months, coming near New London, the schooner was captured by the United States schooner _Washington_, and carried into port, where a trial was held by the Circuit Court at Hertford, transferred to the District Court, and sent by appeal to the United States Supreme Court. The District Court decreed that one man, not of the recent importation, should, by the treaty of 1795 with Spain, be restored to his master; the rest, delivered to the President of the United States, to be by him transported to their homes in Africa. Before the case could come before the United States Supreme Court, the President (Mr. Van Buren), upon the requisition of the Spanish minister, had the negroes conveyed, by the United States schooner _Grampus_, back to Havannah and to slavery, under the treaty of 1795. The case created an immense excitement among the friends and foes of slavery. The point made by the counsel for the negroes being that they were not slaves, but free Africans, freshly brought to Cuba, contrary to the latest enacted laws of Spain. The schooner _Amistad_ started on her voyage to Africa in June, 1839, reached New London in August, and was sent back in January, 1840.] BUTLER PLACE, April 5th, 1840. DEAREST HARRIET, I have received both your letters concerning Dorothy's health. The one which you sent by the _British Queen_ came before one you previously wrote me from Liverpool, and destroyed all the pleasure I should have received from the cheerful spirit in which the latter was written. I was reading the other evening a sermon of Dr. Channing's, suggested by the miserable destruction of a steamboat with the loss of upwards of a hundred lives; among them, one precious to all who knew him perished, a man who, I think, had few equals, and to whose uncommon character all who ever knew him bear witness. The fate of so excellent a human being, cut off in the flower of his age, in the midst of a career of uncommon worth and usefulness, inspired Dr. Channing, who was his dear friend, with one of the finest discourses in which Christian faith ever "justified the ways of God to Man." In reading that eloquent sermon, so full of hope, of trust, of resignation, and rational acknowledgment of the great purposes of sorrow, my thoughts turned to you, dearest Harriet, and dwelt upon your present trial, and on the impending loss of your dear friend. I have not the sermon by me, or I could scarce resist transcribing passages from it; but if you can procure it, do. It was written on the occasion of the burning of the steamboat _Lexington_, and in memory of Dr. Charles Follen. One of the views that impressed me most, of those urged by Channing, was that sorrow--however considered by us, individually, as a shocking accident,--in God's providence, was a large part of the appointed experience of existence: no blot, no jar, no sudden violent visitation of wrath; but part of the light, and harmony, and order, of our spiritual education; an essential and invaluable portion of our experience, of infinite importance in our moral training. To all it is decreed to suffer; through our bodies, through our minds, through our affections, through the noblest as well as the lowest of our attributes of being. This then, he argues, which enters so largely into the existence of every living soul, should never be regarded with an eye of terror, as an appalling liability or a fearful unaccountable disturbance in the course of our lives. I suppose it is the rarefied air our spirits breathe on great heights of achievement; as vital to our moral nature as the pure mountain element, which stimulates our lungs, is to our physical being. In sorrow, faithfully borne, the glory and the blessing of holiness become hourly more apparent to us; and it must be good for us to suffer, since our dear Father lays suffering upon us. If we believe one word of what we daily repeat, and profess to believe, of His mercy and goodness, we must needs believe that the pain and grief which enter so largely into His government of and provision for us are all part of His goodness and mercy.... I pray that you, and I, and all, may learn more and more to accept His will, even as His Son, our perfect pattern, accepted it.... J---- B---- has already returned home from the South, weary of the heat, and the oppressive _smell of the orange flowers_ on Butler's Island.... The tranquillity of my outward circumstances has its counterweight m the excitability of my nature. I think upon the whole, the task and load of life is very equal, its labors and its burdens very equal: they only have real sorrow who make it for themselves, in their own hearts, by their own faults; and they only have real joy who make and keep it there by their own effort.... Katharine Sedgwick writes in great disappointment at your not being in Italy this winter, and so does her niece, my dear little Kate. Those are loving hearts, and most good Christians; they have been like sisters to me in this strange land; I am gratefully attached to them, and long for their return. God bless you, dear. Give my affectionate remembrance to Dorothy, and Believe me ever yours, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, April 30th, 1840. MY DEAREST HARRIET, Of course I have begun to die already: which I believe people do as soon as they reach maturity; at any rate, the process begins, I am sure, much earlier, and is much more gradual and uninterrupted, than we suppose or are aware of. Most persons, I think, begin to die at about thirty; some take a longer, and some a shorter time in becoming quite entirely dead, but after that age I do not believe anybody is quite entirely alive.... Still, though somewhat dead (as I have most reason to know), to the eyes of most people I am even now an uncommonly lively woman; and while my soul is at peace, and my spirits cheerful, I am not myself painfully conscious that I am dying.... The treasure of health was mine in perfection, almost for five and twenty years, and I do not see that I should have any right to complain that I no longer possess it as fully as I once did.... You and I have changed places curiously enough, since first we began to hold arguments together; and it seems as strange that you should disparage reason to me, as the chief instrument of education, as that I should be upholding it against your disparagement. The longer I live, the more convinced my _reason_ is of the goodness and wisdom of God; and from what my _reason_ can perceive of these attributes of our Father my _faith_ derives the surest foundation on which to build perfect trust and confidence, where my _reason_ can no longer discern the meaning of my existence, the exact purpose of its several events, and significance of its circumstances. Entire faith in God seems to me entirely reasonable; but, indeed, I have yet had no experience of any dispensations of Divine Providence which at all tried or shook my reason, or disturbed my trust in their unfailing righteousness. Our reason, above all our other faculties, shows us how little we can know; and it is the very function of reason to perceive how finite, vague, and feeble all our conceptions of the Almighty must be; how utterly futile all our attempts to fathom His purposes, whose ways are assuredly not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts. The spring has come; the mysterious resurrection which with its annually recurring miracle adorns the earth, and makes the heavens above it bright; and even on this uninteresting place, the flush of rosy bloom down in the apple-orchard, the tender green halo above, the golden green atmosphere beneath the trees of the avenue, the smell of the blossoms, the songs of the birds, awaken impressions of delight; and while the senses rejoice, the soul worships. Tulips, and hyacinths, and lilacs, and monthly roses shake about in the soft wind, and scatter their colored petals like jewels among the young vivid verdure. Delicate shadows of delicate leaves lie drawn in quivering tracery on the smooth emerald grass. My garden is a source of pleasure and perpetual occupation to me. Here, where ornamental cultivation is so little attended to, my small improvements of our small pleasure-ground are repaid, not only by my own enjoyment, but by the admiring commendation of all who knew the place before we came to it; and as within the last two years I have planted upwards of two hundred trees, I begin to feel as if I had really done something in my generation. Good-bye, dear. I remain ever yours, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, June 7th, 1840. Thank you, my dear Mrs. Jameson, for your letter of April 4th. It was interesting and amusing enough to have been written by one whose thoughts and feelings were far otherwise free and cheerful than yours could have been when you indited it. I lament the protraction of your father's illness very much, for your mother's sake, and all your sakes. A serious illness at his period of life is not a circumstance to cause surprise; but its long continuance is to be deprecated, no less for the sufferer than those whose health and strength, expended in anxious watching, can leave them but little fortitude to meet the result should it prove fatal. I hope to hear in your next that your mother is relieved from her present painful position, and that your own spirits are more cheerful. I have not seen even as much as an extract from Leigh Hunt's play [I think called a "Legend of Florence," and founded upon the incident that gave its name to the Via della Morte in the fair city]; but I am very glad he has written one, and hope he will write others: certain elements of his genius are essentially those of an effective dramatist, and surely, if the public can swallow a play of ----'s, it might be brought to taste one of Leigh Hunt's. I dislike everything that ---- ever wrote, and think he ought to have been a Frenchman. Can one say worse of a man who is not?... You ask me if writing plays is not pleasanter and more profitable than reading Gibbon. Certainly, if one only has the mind to do the one instead of the other, which at present I have not. I have sometimes fancied it was my duty to work out such talent of that kind as was in me; but I have hitherto not felt at all sure that I had any such gift which, you know, would be necessary before I could determine what was my duty with regard to it. I never write anything but upon impulse--all my compositions are impromptus; and the species of atmosphere I live in is not favorable to that order of inspiration. The outward sameness of my life; its uniformity of color, level surface, and monotonous tone; its unvaried tenor, alike devoid of pleasurable and painful excitement; its wholesome abundance of daily recurring trivial occupations, and absence of any great or varied interests; its entire isolation from all literary and intellectual society, which might strike the fire from the sleepy stone--all these influences prevail against my writing. I once thought the material lay within me, but it will probably moulder away for want of use; and as long as I am neither the worse woman, wife, nor mother for its neglect, I take it it matters very little, and there is no harm done. My serious interest in life is the care of my children, and my principal recreation is my garden; and though I formerly sometimes imagined I had faculties whose exercise might demand a wider sphere, the consciousness that I discharge very imperfectly the obligations of that which I occupy, ought to satisfy me that its homely duties and modest tasks are more than sufficient for my abilities; and though I am not satisfied with myself, I should be with my existence, since, such as it is, it furnishes me with more work than I do as it should be done. From the interest you express in Fanny Ellsler, you will be glad to hear that her success here has been triumphant. I believe the great mass of people always recognize and acknowledge excellence when they see it, though their stupid or ignorant toleration of what is mediocre, or even bad, would seem to indicate the contrary.... The general mind of man is capable of perceiving the most excellent in all things, and prompt to seize it, too, when it meets with it. Even in morals it does so theoretically, however the difficulty of adhering to high standards may make the actions of most people conform but little to their best conceptions of right. The idea of perfection is recognized by the spirit of creatures capable of and destined for perfection in all things, whether great or small; and so (since this is _à propos_ of opera dancing) Fanny Ellsler's performances have been appreciated here to a degree that would astonish those who forget that education, though it develops, does not create our finer perceptions, and, moreover, that the finest are commoner than is commonly believed. The possession is almost universal: the cultivation in _any_ degree worth anything comparatively rare, and in a _high_ degree very rare indeed everywhere; and here--well! it does not exist. I hope we shall see you in England in the autumn; I am using every endeavor not to be sent over alone.... I cannot bear to go to England again a "widow bewitched." I am ever yours most truly, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, June 8th, 1840. DEAREST HARRIET, It is not to you that I apologize for talking over-much about my children, but to myself.... For what said the witty Frenchman of a man's love for wife and child? "_Ah! bien c'est de l'égoïsme à trois._" ... I hope you will see my children, both them and me, in a very few months; for I think we are coming to England in September, and I shall surely not leave it without borrowing some of your company from you, let you be where you may.... I must go and dress for dinner, hence the brevity of this letter, which pray accept for "the soul of wit." Did you ever see a humming-bird? Have they them in Italy? We have a honeysuckle hedge here, where the little jewels of creatures stuff themselves incessantly, early and late, sabbaths and week-days, flickering over the sweet bushes of fragrance, like the diamonds of modern fashion set on elastic wires, to make them quiver and increase their sparkle and brilliancy. I should like to have written some more to you. I am ever your affectionate F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, June 28th, 1840. MY DEAR T----, Your discoveries in the private character of Sir Samuel Romilly are none to me. I have known those who knew him intimately. My brother was school and college mate of his sons, one of whom I know very well; and their father's character, in all its most endearing aspects, was familiar to me. I think I was once told (not by them, however, of course) that the melancholy induced by the loss of his wife had been the chief cause of his destroying himself, for he was devotedly and passionately attached to her. We go every night to see Fanny Ellsler; only think what an extraordinary effort of dissipation for me, who hardly ever stir abroad of an evening, and who had almost as much forgotten the inside of a theatre as Falstaff had the inside of a church! My admiration for her grows rather than diminishes, though she is a better actress even than dancer, which I think speaks in favor of her intellect. Did you ever see Taglioni? Who invented and who suggested the expression the "poetry of motion"? It should have been _made_ for her. Her dancing is like nothing but poetic inspiration, and seems as if she was composing while she executed it. I wonder if it is the ballet-master who devises all the steps of these great dancers,--of course, not the national dances, but the inconceivably lovely things that Taglioni does, or whether she orders her own steps, and (given a certain dramatic situation and a certain strain of music) floats or flies, or glides, or gyrates at her own will and pleasure. Did you ever see her in the "Sylphide"? What an exquisite pathetic dream of supernatural sentiment that was! Other dances are as graceful as possible; that woman was grace itself. I was saying once to my friend, Frederick Rackeman, that Chopin's music made me think of Taglioni's dancing, to which he replied, to my great surprise, that Chopin had said that he had more than once received his inspiration from Taglioni's dancing; a curious instance of influence so strong as to be recognized by one who was perfectly unaware of it. If I remember rightly, Gibson, the sculptor, said that he owed many suggestions to the vigorous and graceful dancing of Cerito; but those, of course, were a suggestion of form to a creator of form, and not an inspiration of exquisite sound gathered from exquisite motion, as in the instance of Taglioni and Chopin. Certain music suggests the waving of trees, as in the Notturno in Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream" and Schubert's exquisite _beckoning_ song of the linden tree. Certainly dancers deserve to be well paid when one thinks of the mechanical labor, the daily hours of _battements_ and _changements de pieds_, and turning, and twisting, and torturing of the limbs before this apparently spontaneous result of mere movement can be obtained. Ellsler has great dramatic power. Her Tarentelle and Wylie are really finely tragical in parts; but then she had a first-rate _head_ as well as foot training. She is a wonderful artist; but there is something unutterably sad to me in the contemplation of such a career. The blending in most unnatural union of the elements of degradation and moral misery with such exquisite perceptions of beauty, grace, and refinement, produces the impression of a sort of monstrosity, a deformity of the whole higher nature, which fills one with poignant compassion and regret. Poor, fair, admired, despised, flattered, forlorn souls!... Pray come and see us when you can, and Believe me very truly yours, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, June 26th, 1840. DEAREST HARRIET, Mr. Combe and Cecilia spent the day with us on their way to New York, and I did rejoice to think her pilgrimage was over. She has gone through what her former habits of life must have made a severe experience in travelling in this country. Her affection for her husband, and her devotion to his views, are unbounded, and have helped her to submit to her trial with a cheerfulness and good humor worthy of all praise; for the luxurious comfort of her life in her mother's house was certainly a bad preparation for roughing it, as she has been doing for some months past, for the sake of the phrenologist and his phrenology.... I never knew any one more improved by the blessed discipline of happiness than she appears to be. I am afraid my incapacity to accept the whole of their system would always prevent our being as good friends as we might otherwise with opportunity become. Perhaps, however, as the opportunity is not likely to offer often, it does not much matter.... Saunders, the miniature-painter, of London celebrity, has come out here to look at the pretty faces on this side of the water.... He told me that he had once executed to order a miniature of me, partly from seeing me on the stage, and partly from memory. I knew nothing whatever of this, and think it is one among the many nuisances of being a "public character," or what the American Minister's wife said her position had made her, "_Une femme publique_," that one's likeness may thus be stolen, and sold or bought by anybody who chooses to traffic in such gear. I remember my mother telling me of a painful circumstance which had occurred to her from the same cause. A young officer of some distinction, who died in India, left among his effects a miniature of her; and she was disagreeably surprised by receiving from his mother a heartbroken appeal to her, saying that the fact of her son's being in possession of this portrait led her to hope that perhaps my mother might possess one of him, and entreating her, if such were the case, to permit her (his mother) to have a copy of it, as she had no likeness of her son. My mother was obliged to reply that she had no such portrait, and had never known or even heard the name of the gentleman who was in possession of hers.... How many things make one feel as if one's whole life was only a confused dream! Wouldn't it be odd to wake at the end, and find one had not lived at all? Many perhaps will wake at the end, and find it so indeed in one sense,--which brings us back to the more serious aspect of things.... I had some time ago a joint-stock letter from my brother John and his wife, informing me of the birth of their son. I do not think they mentioned who was to be its godmother; but I quite agree with Mrs. Kemble (my Uncle John's widow), as to the inexpediency of undertaking such a sponsorship for any one's child. If it means anything, it means something so serious that I should shrink from such a responsibility; and if it means (as it generally does) nothing, I think it would be better omitted altogether. When I was at home I dissuaded my sister from standing godmother to their little girl; but I do not think any of them understood my motive for doing so.... You ask me whether the specimens of Irish order, neatness, and intelligence which came over here to fill our domestic ranks are beyond training. Truly, training is, for the most part, so far beyond _them_, that it is no easy matter to simplify even the first rudiments of the science of civilization sufficiently to render them intelligible to these fair countrywomen of yours. Patience is a fine thing, and might accomplish something, perhaps; but there are insuperable bars to any hope of their progress in the high wages which they can all command at once, whether they ever saw the inside of a decent house before they came to this country or not; the abundance of situations; and the absence of everything like superior competition. The extraordinary comparative prosperity to which these poor ignorant girls are suddenly introduced on their arrival here, the high pay, the profusely plentiful living, the _equality_ treatment, which must seem almost _quality_ treatment to them, presently make them impertinent and unsteady; and as they can all command a new situation the instant that, for any cause, they leave the one they are in (unfit for the commonest situation in a decent household as they are), it is hardly worth their while, out of a mere abstract love of perfection, to labor at any very great improvement of their powers. A residence of some years in this country generally develops their intelligence into a sort of sharp-sighted calculating shrewdness, which they do not bring with them, but no way improves their own quick native wit and natural national humor. Of course there are exceptions; but the majority of them, after a short stay in America, contrive to combine their own least desirable race qualities with the independent tone of pert familiarity, the careless extravagance, and the passion for dress of American girls of the lower class.... F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, July 8th 1840. Perhaps, dearest Harriet, it might be better for me not to come to England, inasmuch as my roots are beginning to spread in my present soil, and to transplant them, even for a short time, might check the process materially.... But while my father still lives, I shall hope to revisit England once in every few years: when he is gone, I will give up all the rest that I own on the other side of the water, and remain here until it might be thought desirable for us to visit, not England only, but Europe; and should that never appear desirable, why, then, remain here till I die. My father's health received a beneficial stimulus from the excitement of his temporary return to the stage; but before that, his condition was by all accounts very unsatisfactory; and I am afraid that when the effect of the impulse his physical powers received from the pleasurable exertion of acting subsides, he may again relapse into feebleness, dejection, and general disorder of the system, from which he appeared to be suffering before he made this last professional effort. I _must_ see him once more, and he has written to me to say that as soon as he knows when we are coming to England, he will meet us there. He will, I am pretty sure, bring my sister with him, and this is an additional reason why I am very anxious to be in England this autumn.... I have no doubt that they will both come to England in September, to meet me, and I presume we should remain together until I am obliged to return to America. I have not expressed to you, my dearest Harriet, my delight at your relief from immediate anxiety about Dorothy. Sorrow seems to me so peculiarly severe in its administration--or discipline, should I call it?--to your spirit, that I thank God that its heavy pressure is lifted from your heart for the present. Dorothy is one of those with whom I always feel sure that all is well, let their circumstances or situation be what they will; but I rejoice that she is spared physical suffering, and preserved to you, to whom she is so infinitely precious.... F. A. B. LENOX, August 15th, 1840. DEAREST HARRIET, ... You bid me tell you when I shall leave America to pay my promised visit to my father. I have been thrown into a state of complete uncertainty by receiving a letter from my brother John, which informs me of my sister's engagement at Naples and Palermo, and possible further engagements at Malta and _Constantinople_! Think of her going to sing to the Turks!... I am at present alone here, and of course cannot myself determine the question of my going alone all over the Continent to join my father and Adelaide.... It is possible that I may have to renounce my visit to Europe altogether for the present, and, but for my father, I could do so without a moment's hesitation, but I dread postponing seeing him again, and, while I do so, shall live in a perpetual apprehension that I shall _hear_ of his death as I did of that of my poor mother. I consider the visit I contemplated making him our probable last season of reunion, and cannot banish the thought that if it is indefinitely postponed I may perhaps never see him again.... An intense interest is felt by all good Democrats in the coming election, which determines whether Mr. Van Buren is to retain the Presidency or not; and no zealous member of his party would leave the country while that was undetermined. John writes me, too, that he expects my father and sister both in London after Easter next year, and I have no doubt it will be thought best that I should wait till then to join them in England. However, all my plans must remain for the present in utter uncertainty, and I shall surely not meet you and Emily at Bannisters, which I could well have liked to do.... What lots of umbrellas you must wear out at Grasmere! [Miss S---- and Miss W---- were passing the summer at the English lakes.] I am writing pretty late at night, but if the Sedgwicks, whom you know, and those who, through them, know you, were round me, I should have _showers_ of love to send you from them: your rainy lake country suggested that image, but that would be a _warm_ shower, which you don't get in Westmoreland. I am growing very fat, but at the present there is no fatty degeneracy of the heart, so that I still remain Affectionately yours, F. A. B. LENOX, MASSACHUSETTS, August 28th, 1840. MY DEAR LADY DACRE, I have always considered your writing to me a very unmerited kindness towards one who had so little claim on your time and attention; and I need not tell you how much this feeling is increased by your present state of mind, and the effort I am sure it must be to you to remember one so far off, in the midst of your great sorrow [for the death of her daughter, Mrs. Sullivan].... I shall come alone to England; and this is the more dismal, that I have it in prospect to go down to Naples to join my father and sister, and stay with them till her engagements there and at Palermo are ended. This journey (once my vision by day and dream by night) will lose much of its delight by being a solitary pilgrimage to the long-desired Italy. I think of pressing one of my brothers into my service as escort; or if they are not able to go with me, shall write to my father to come to England, as he lately sent me word he would do, at any time that I would meet him there--of course, to return immediately with him to my sister. They will both, I believe, be in England after Easter next year; and then I shall hope to be allowed to see you, my dear Lady Dacre, and express to you how much I have sympathized with you in all you have suffered. I am not aware of having spoken unjustly or disparagingly of the dramatic profession. You say I am ungrateful to it: is it because I owe many of my friends (yourself among the number) to it that you say so? or do you think that I forget that circumstance? But to value it as an art, simply for the personal advantages or pleasures that it was the means of affording me, would be surely quite as absurd as to forget that it did procure such for me. Then, upon reflection, few things have ever puzzled me more than the fact of people liking _me_ because I pretended to be a pack of Juliets and Belvideras, and creatures who were _not_ me. Perhaps _I was jealous of my parts_; certainly, the good will my assumption of them obtained for me, always seemed to me quite as curious as flattering, or indeed rather more so. I did not think it an unbecoming comment on my father's acting again at the Queen's request, when I said that the excitement to which he had been habituated for so many years had still charms for him; it would be very strange indeed if it had not. It is chiefly from this point of view, and one or two others bearing on the moral health, that I deprecate for those I love the exercise of that profession; the claims of which to be considered as an art I cannot at all determine satisfactorily in my own mind. That we have Shakespeare's plays, written expressly for the interpretation of acting, is a strong argument for the existence of a positive art of acting: nevertheless----. But, if you please, we will settle that point when I have the pleasure of seeing you. I suppose I shall steam for England in October, when I shall endeavor to see you before I go abroad. Give my kindest regards to Lord Dacre, and believe me always Very affectionately yours, F. A. B. _Lenox_, September 4th, 1840. _My dearest Harriet_, ... First of all, let me congratulate you, and dear Dorothy, upon her improved health. Good as she is, I am sure she must value life; for those who use it best, best know its infinite worth; and for you, my dearest Harriet, this extension of the precious loan of her existence to you, I am persuaded, must be full of the greatest blessings. Give my affectionate love to her when you write to her or see her again; for, indeed, I suppose you are now at Bannisters, where I should like well to be with you, but I much fear that I shall not see you this winter, though I expect to sail for England next month.... You ask me of the distance between the Virginia Springs and Lenox, and I am ashamed to say I cannot answer; however, almost half the length of the United States, I think. This, my northern place of summer sojourn, is in the heart of the hill country of Massachusetts, in a district inhabited chiefly by Sedgwicks, and their belongings.... Our friends the Sedgwicks reached their homes about a fortnight ago, and the hills and valleys hereabouts rejoiced thereat.... Katharine's health and spirits are much revived by the atmosphere of love by which she is surrounded in her home. She bids me give her love to you. I wonder, with your miserable self-distrust, whether you have any idea of the affectionate regard all these people bear you. Katharine, a short time before leaving Europe, saw in a shop a dark gray stuff which resembled a dress you used to wear; she immediately bought it for herself, and carrying it home asked her brother who it reminded him of. He instantly kissed the stuff, exclaiming, "H---- S----!" Young Kate's journal contains a most affectionate record of their short intimacy with you at Wiesbaden; and you have left a deep impression on these hearts, where as little that is bad or base abides as in any frail human hearts I ever knew.... I have regained so much of my former appearance that I trust when I do see you I shall not horrify you, as you seemed some time ago to anticipate, by an apparition altogether unlike your, ever _essentially_ the same, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, October 7th, 1840. ... Dearest Harriet, whatever may be the evils which may spring from the amazing facilities of intercourse daily developing between distant countries (and with so great good, how should there not be some evil?), think of those whose lots are cast far from their early homes and friends; think of the deathlike separation that going to America has been to thousands who left England, and friends there, but a few years ago; the uncertainty of intercourse by letter, the interminable intervals of suspense, the impossibility of making known or understood by hearts that yearned for such information the new and strange circumstances of the exile's existence; the gradual dying out of friendships, and cooling of warm regard, from the impossibility of sufficient intercourse to keep interest alive; and sympathy, after endeavoring in vain to picture the distant home and surroundings and daily occupations of the absent friend, dwindling and withering away for want of necessary aliment, in spite of all the efforts which imagination could make to satisfy the affectionate desire and longing loving inquiries of the heart. Think of all that those two _existences_ as you call them (existences no more--but mere ideas), Time and Space, have caused of misery and suspense and heart-wearing anxiety, and rejoice that so much has been done to make parting less bitter, and absence endurable, through hope that now amounts almost to certainty. My own plans, which I thought so thoroughly settled a short time ago, have again become extremely indefinite. It is now considered inexpedient that I should travel on the Continent, though there is no objection to my remaining in England until my father's return, which I understand is expected soon after Easter. As, however, my motive in leaving America is to be with my father and sister, I have no idea of going to London to remain there three months, without any expectation of seeing them. This consideration would incline me to put off my visit to England till the spring, but it is not yet determined who, or whether any of us, will go to Georgia for the winter. My being taken thither is entirely uncertain; but should the contrary be decided upon, I might perhaps come to England immediately, as I would rather pass the winter in London, among my friends, if I am to spend it alone, than here, where the severe weather suspends all out-of-door exercise, interests, and occupations, and where the absolute solitude is a terrible trial to my nerves and spirits. At present, however, I have not a notion what will be determined about it, but as soon as I have any positive idea upon the subject I will let you know. We returned from Massachusetts a few days ago, and I find a profusion of flowers and almost summer heat here, though the golden showers that every now and then flicker from the trees, and the rustling sound of fallen leaves, and the autumnal smell of mignonette, and other "fall" flowers, whisper of the coming winter; still all here at present is bright and sweet, with that peculiar combination of softness and brilliancy which belongs to the autumn in this part of America. It is the pleasantest season of the year here, and indescribably beautiful.... Good-bye, dearest Harriet; I had hoped to have joined you and Emily at Bannisters, but that pretty plan is all rubbed out now, and I do not know when I shall see you; but, thanks to those blessed beings--the steam-ships, those Atlantic angels of speed and certainty, it now seems as if I could do so "at any moment." God bless you. Yours ever, F. A. B. BUTLER PLACE, October 26th. I beg you will not stop short, as in your last letter, received the day before yesterday, dearest Harriet, with "but I will not overwhelm you with questions:" it is particularly agreeable to me to have specific questions to answer in the letters I receive from you, and I hope you perceive that I do religiously reply to anything in the shape of a query. It is pleasant to me to know upon what particular points of my doing, being, and suffering you desire to be enlightened; because although I know everything I write to you interests you, I like to be able to satisfy even a few of those "I wonders" that are perpetually rising up in our imaginations with respect to those we love and who are absent from us. You ask me if I ever write any journal, or anything else now. The time that I passed in the South was so crowded with daily and hourly occupations that, though I kept a regular journal, it was hastily written, and received constant additional notes of things that occurred, and that I wished to remember, inserted in a very irregular fashion in it.... I think I should like to carry this journal down to Georgia with me this winter; to revise, correct, and add whatever my second experience might furnish to the chronicle. It has been suggested to me that such an account of a Southern plantation might be worth publishing; but I think such a publication would be a breach of confidence, an advantage taken on my part of the situation of trust, which I held on the estate. As my condemnation of the whole system is unequivocal, and all my illustrations of its evils must be drawn from our own plantation, I do not think I have a right to exhibit the interior management and economy of that property to the world at large, as a sample of Southern slavery, especially as I did not go thither with any such purpose. This winter I think I shall mention my desire upon the subject before going to the South, and of course any such publication must then depend on the acquiescence of the owners of the estate. I am sure that no book of mine on the subject could be of as much use to the poor people on Butler's Island as my residence among them; and I should, therefore, be very unwilling to do anything that was likely to interfere with that: although I have sometimes been haunted with the idea that it was an imperative duty, knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, to do all that lies in my power to show the dangers and evils of this frightful institution. And the testimony of a planter's wife, whose experience has all been gathered from estates where the slaves are universally admitted to be well treated, should carry with it some authority. So I am occupying myself, from time to time, as my leisure allows, in making a fair copy of my Georgia Journal. I occasionally make very copious extracts from what I read, and also write critical analyses of the books that please or displease me, in the language--French or Italian--in which they are written; but these are fragmentary, and do not, I think, entitle me to say that I am writing anything. No one here is interested in anything that I write, and I have too little serious habit of study, too little application, and too much vanity and desire for the encouragement of praise, to achieve much in my condition of absolute intellectual solitude.... Here are two of your questions answered; the third is--whether I let the slave question rest more than I did? Oh yes; for I have come to the conclusion that no words of mine could be powerful enough to dispel the clouds of prejudice which early habits of thought, and the general opinion of society upon this subject have gathered round the minds of the people I live among. I do not know whether they ever think or read about it, and my arguments, though founded in this case on pretty sound reason, are apt to degenerate into passionate appeals, the violence of which is not calculated to do much good in the way of producing convictions in the minds of others.... Even if the property were mine, I could exercise no power over it; nor could our children, after our death, do anything for those wretched slaves, under the present laws of Georgia. All that any one could do, would be to refrain from using the income derived from the estates, and return it to the rightful owners--that is, the earners of it. Had I such a property, I think I would put my slaves at once quietly upon the footing of free laborers, paying them wages, and making them pay me rent and take care of themselves. Of course I should be shot by my next neighbor (against whom no verdict would be found except "Serve her right!") in the first week of my experiment; but _if I wasn't_, I think, reckoning only the meanest profit to be derived from the measure, I should double the income of the estate in less than three years.... I am more than ever satisfied that God and Mammon would be equally propitiated by emancipation. You ask me whether I take any interest in the Presidential election. Yes, though I have not room left for my reasons--and I have some, besides that best woman's reason, sympathy with the politics of the man I belong to. The party coming into power are, I believe, at heart less democratic than the other; and while the natural advantages of this wonderful country remain unexhausted (and they are apparently inexhaustible), I am sure the Republican Government is by far the best for the people themselves, besides thinking it the best in the abstract, as you know I do. God bless you, my dearest Harriet. I am ever yours most affectionately, F. A. B. [The question of my spending the winter in Georgia was finally determined by Mr. J---- B---- 's decided opposition to my doing so. He was part proprietor of the plantation, and positively stipulated that I should not again be taken thither, considering my presence there as a mere source of distress to myself, annoyance to others, and danger to the property. I question the validity of the latter objection, but not at all that of the two first; and am sure that, upon the whole, his opposition to my residence among his slaves was not only justifiable but perfectly reasonable. My Georgia journal was not published until thirty years after it was written, during the civil war in the United States. I was then passing some time in England, and the people among whom I lived were, like most well-educated members of the upper classes of English society, Southern sympathizers. The ignorant and mischievous nonsense I was continually compelled to hear upon the subject of slavery in the seceding States determined me to publish my own observation of it--not, certainly, that I had in those latter years of my life any fallacious expectation of making converts on the subject, but that I felt constrained at that juncture to bear my testimony to the miserable nature and results of the system, of which so many of my countrymen and women were becoming the sentimental apologists. It being now settled that I was not to return to the plantation, my thoughts had hardly reverted to the prospect of a winter in England when I received the news of my father's return from the Continent, and dangerous illness in London; so that, I was told, unless I could go to him immediately, there was but little probability of my ever seeing him again. The misfortune I had so often anticipated now seemed to have overtaken me, and instant preparation for my leaving America being made, and an elderly lady, with whom I had become connected by my marriage, having exerted her influence in my behalf, I was not allowed, under such painful circumstances, again to cross the Atlantic alone, but returned with a very heavy heart to my own country, but with the comfort of being accompanied by my whole family. The news that met me on my arrival was that my father was at the point of death, that he would not probably survive twenty-four hours, and that it was altogether inexpedient that he should see me, as, if he recognized me, which was doubtful, my unexpected appearance, it having been impossible to prepare him for it, might only be the means of causing him a violent and perhaps painful shock of nervous agitation. This terrible verdict, pronounced by three of the most eminent medical men of the day, Bright, Liston, and Wilson, was a dreadful close to all the anxious days and hours of the sea voyage, during which I had hoped and prayed to be again permitted to embrace my father. But in my deep distress, I could not help remembering that, after all, his physicians, able as they were, had not the keys of life and death. And so it proved: my father made an almost miraculous rally, recovered, and survived the sentence pronounced against him for many years. Not many days after our arrival, his improved condition admitted of his being told of my return, and allowed to see me. Cadaverous is the only word that describes the appearance to which acute suffering and subsequent prostration had reduced him; he looked, indeed, like one returned from the dead, and, in his joy at seeing me again, declared that I had restored him to life, and that my arrival, though he had not known of it, had called him back to existence--a sympathetic theory of convalescence, to which I do not think his doctors gave in their adhesion. We now took up our abode in London; first at the Clarendon Hotel, and afterwards in Clarges Street, Piccadilly, where my father, as soon as he could be moved, came to reside with us, and where my sister joined us on her return from Italy. My friend Miss S----, coming from Ireland to stay with me soon after my arrival in England, added to my happiness in finding myself once more with my own family, and in my own country.] CLARGES STREET, March 21st. You will, ere this, dearest H----, have received my answer to your first letter. You ask me, in your second, what we think about the chances of a war with America. Our wishes prompt us to the belief that a war between the two countries is _impossible_, though the tone of the newspapers, within the last few days, has been horribly pugnacious. A letter was received the day before yesterday, from our Liverpool factor, asking us what is to be done about some cotton which had just come to them from the plantation, in the event of war breaking out: a supposition which he had treated as an utter impossibility when he was last in London, but which he confessed in this letter did not seem to him quite so impossible now. I do not, for my own part, see very well how either party is to get out of its present attitude towards the other peaceably and, at the same time, without some compromise of dignity. But I pray God that the hearts of the two nations may be inclined to peace, and then, doubtless, some cunning device will be found to save their _honor_. The virtuous "_if_" of Touchstone is, I am afraid, not as valid in national as individual quarrels. Tell Mr. H---- W----, with my love, that it is all a hoax about Niagara Falls having _fallen_ down; and that they are still _falling_ down, according to their custom; but if you should find this intelligence affect him with too painful a disappointment, you may comfort him by assuring him that they inevitably must and will fall down one of these days, and, what is more, stay fallen, and precisely in the manner they are now said to have begun their career--by the gradual wearing away of the rock between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. We were at the opera the Saturday after you left us; but it was a mediocre performance, both music and dancing, and gave me but little pleasure. I went last night again with my father, and was enchanted with the opera, which was an old favorite, "Tancredi," in which I heard Persiani, an admirable artist, with a mere golden wire of voice, of which she made most capital use, and Pauline Garcia, who possesses all the genius of her family; and between them it was a perfect performance. The latter is a sister of Malibran's, and will certainly be one of the finest dramatic singers of these times. But the proximity of people to me in the stalls is so intolerable that I think I shall give mine up; for I am in a state of nervous _crawling_ the whole time, with being pushed and pressed and squeezed and leaned on and breathed on by my fellow-creatures. You remember my old theory, that we are all of us surrounded by an atmosphere proper to ourselves, emanating from each of us,--a separate, sensitive envelope, extending some little distance from our visible persons. I am persuaded that this is the case, and that when my _individual atmosphere_ is invaded by any one, it affects my whole nervous system. The proximity of any _bodies_ but those I love best is unendurable to my body. My father is much in the same condition as when you went away, suffering a great deal, and complaining frequently; but by his desire we have a dinner-party here on Tuesday, and he has accepted two invitations to dine out himself. My chicks are pretty well.... May God bless you, dear. I am ever your own F. A. B. CLARGES STREET. This letter was begun three days ago, and it is now Thursday, March the 25th. Do not, I beseech you, ever make any appeals to my imagination, or my feelings. I have lost all I ever had of the first, and I never had any at all of the second.... You ask me if I have been riding. Only once or twice, for I may not do what I so fain would, give all the visiting to utter neglect, and ride every day. Yesterday I was on horseback for two hours with Henry, who, having sold his pretty mare, for £65, to the author of the new comedy at Covent Garden, was obliged to bestride one of Mr. Allen's screws, as he calls them. The day was dusty and windy, and very disagreeable, but I was all the better for my shaking, as I always am. I am never in health, looks, or spirits without daily hard exercise on horseback. My first meeting with Mrs. Grote (I am answering your questions, dearest H----, though you have probably forgotten them) took place after all at Sydney Smith's, at a dinner the very next day after you left us. We did not say a great deal to each other, but upon my saying incidentally (I forget about what) "I, who have always preserved my liberty, at least the small crumb of it that a woman can own anywhere," she faced about, in a most emphatical manner, and said, "Then you've struggled for it." "No, I have not been obliged to do so." "Ah, then you must, or you'll lose it, you'll lose it, depend upon it." I smiled, but did not reply, because I saw that she was not taking into consideration the fact of my living in America; and this was the only truly _Grotesque_ (as Sydney Smith says) passage between us. Since then we have again ineffectually exchanged cards, and yesterday I received an invitation to her house, so that I suppose we shall finally become acquainted with each other. [Mrs. Grote, wife of George Grote, the banker, member of Parliament, and historian of Greece, was one of the cleverest and most eccentric women in the London society of my time. No worse a judge than De Tocqueville pronounced her the cleverest woman of his acquaintance; and she was certainly a very remarkable member of the circle of remarkable men among whom she was living when I first knew her. At that time she was the female centre of the Radical party in politics--a sort of not-young-or-handsome feminine oracle among a set of very clever half-heathenish men, in whose drawing-room, Sydney Smith used to say, he always expected to find an altar to Zeus. At this time Mr. Grote was in the House of Commons, and as it was before the publication of his admirable history, his speeches, which were as remarkable for their sound sense and enlightened liberality as for their clear and forcible style, were not unfrequently attributed to his wife, whose considerable conversational powers, joined to a rather dictatorial style of exercising them, sometimes threw her refined and modest husband a little into the shade in general society. When first I made Mrs. Grote's acquaintance, the persons one most frequently met at her house in Eccleston Street were Roebuck, Leader, Byron's quondam associate Trelawney, and Sir William Molesworth; both the first and last mentioned gentlemen were then of an infinitely deeper shade of radicalism in their politics than they subsequently became. The other principal element of Mrs. Grote's society, at this time, consisted of musical composers and performers, who found in her a cordial and hospitable friend and hostess, and an amateur of unusual knowledge and discrimination, as well as much taste and feeling for their beautiful art. Her love of music, and courteous reception of all foreign artists, caused her to be generally sought by eminent professors coming to England; and Liszt, Madame Viardot, Dessauer, Thalberg, Mademoiselle Lind, and Mendelssohn were among the celebrated musicians one frequently met at her house. With the two latter she was very intimate, and it was in her drawing-room that my sister gave her first public concert in London. Mendelssohn used often to visit her at a small country-place she had in the neighborhood of Burnham Beeches. It was a very small and modest residence, situated on the verge of the magnificent tract of woodland scenery known by that name; a dependence, I believe, of the Dropmore estate, which it adjoined. It was an unenclosed space of considerable extent, of wild, heathy moorland; short turfy strips of common; dingles full of foxglove, harebell, and gnarled old stunted hawthorn bushes; and knolls, covered with waving crests of powerful feathery fern. It was intersected with gravelly paths and roads, whose warm color contrasted and harmonized with the woodland hues of everything about them; and roofed in by dark green vaults of the most magnificent beech foliage I have ever seen anywhere. The trees were of great age and enormous size; and from some accidental influence affecting their growth, the huge trunks were many of them contorted so as to resemble absolutely the twisted Saxon pillars of some old cathedral. In many of them the powerful branches (as large themselves as trunks of common trees) spread out from the main tree, at a height of about six feet from the ground, into a sort of capacious leafy chamber, where eight or ten people could have sat embowered. A more perfectly English woodland scene it would be impossible to imagine, and here, as Mrs. Grote told me, Mendelssohn found the inspiration of much of the music of his "Midsummer Night's Dream." (The overture he had composed, and played to us one evening at my father's house, when first he came to England, before he was one-and-twenty.) At one time Mrs. Grote contemplated erecting some monument in the beautiful wood to his memory, and showed me a copy of verses, not devoid of merit, which she thought of inscribing on it to his honor; but she never carried out the suggestion of her affectionate admiration; and to those who knew and loved Mendelssohn (alas! the expressions are synonymous), the glorious wood itself, where he walked and mused and held converse with the spirit of Shakespeare, forms a solemn sylvan temple, forever consecrated to tender memories of his bright genius and lovely character. When first I knew Mrs. Grote, however, her artistic sympathies were keenly excited in a very different direction; for she had undertaken, under some singular impulse of mistaken enthusiasm, to make what she called "an honest woman" of the celebrated dancer, Fanny Ellsler, and to introduce her into London society,--neither of them very attainable results, even for as valiant and enterprising a person as Mrs. Grote. When first I heard of this strange undertaking I was, in common with most of her friends, much surprised at it; nor was it until some years after the entire failure of this quixotic experiment, that I became aware that she had been actuated by any motive but the kindliest and most mistaken enthusiasm. Mademoiselle Ellsler was at this time at the height of her great and deserved popularity as a dancer, and whatever I may have thought of the expediency or possibility of making what Mrs. Grote called "an honest woman" of her, I was among the most enthusiastic admirers of her great excellence in her elegant art. She was the only intellectual dancer I have ever seen. Inferior to Taglioni (that embodied genius of rhythmical motion) in lightness, grace, and sentiment; to Carlotta Grisi in the two latter qualities; and with less mere vigor and elasticity than Cerito, she excelled them all in dramatic expression; and parts of her performance in the ballets of the "Tarantella" and the wild legend of "Gisele, the Willye," exhibited tragic power of a very high order, while the same strongly dramatic element was the cause of her pre-eminence in all national and characteristic dances, such as El Jaleo de Xeres, the Cracovienne, et cetera. This predominance of the intellectual element in her dancing may have been the result of original organization, or it may have been owing to the mental training which Ellsler received from Frederic von Genz, Gensius, the German writer and diplomatist, who educated her, and whose mistress she became while still quite a young girl. However that may be, Mrs. Grote always maintained that her genius lay full as much in her head as in her heels. I am not sure that the finest performance of hers that I ever witnessed was not a minuet in which she danced the man's part, in full court-suit of the time of Louis XVI., with most admirable grace and nobility of demeanor. Mrs. Grote labored hard to procure her acceptance in society; her personal kindness to her was of the most generous description: but her great object of making "an honest woman" of her, I believe failed signally in every way. On one occasion I paid Mrs. Grote a visit at Burnham Beeches. Our party consisted only of my sister and myself; the Viennese composer, Dessauer; and Chorley, the musical critic of the _Athenæum_, who was very intimately acquainted with us all. The eccentricities of our hostess, with which some of us were already tolerably familiar, were a source of unfeigned amazement and awe to Dessauer, who, himself the most curious, quaint, and withal nervously excitable and irritable humorist, was thrown into alternate convulsions of laughter and spasms of terror at the portentous female figure, who, with a stick in her hand, a man's hat on her head, and a coachman's box-coat of drab cloth with manifold capes over her petticoats (English women had not yet then adopted a costume undistinguishable from that of the other sex), stalked about the house and grounds, alternately superintending various matters of the domestic economy, and discussing, with equal knowledge and discrimination, questions of musical criticism and taste. One most ludicrous scene which took place on this occasion I shall never forget. She had left us to our own devices, and we were all in the garden. I was sitting in a swing, and my sister, Dessauer, and Chorley were lying on the lawn at my feet, when presently, striding towards us, appeared the extravagant figure of Mrs. Grote, who, as soon as she was within speaking-trumpet distance, hailed us with a stentorian challenge about some detail of dinner--I think it was whether the majority voted for bacon and peas or bacon and beans. Having duly settled this momentous question, as Mrs. Grote turned and marched away, Dessauer--who had been sitting straight up, listening with his head first on one side and then on the other, like an eagerly intelligent terrier, taking no part in the culinary controversy (indeed, his entire ignorance of English necessarily disqualified him for even comprehending it), but staring intently, with open eyes and mouth, at Mrs. Grote--suddenly began, with his hands and lips, to imitate the rolling of a drum, and then broke out aloud with, "_Malbrook s'en vat' en guerre_," etc.; whereupon the terrible lady faced right about, like a soldier, and, planting her stick in the ground, surveyed Dessauer with an awful countenance. The wretched little man grew red and then purple, and then black in the face with fear and shame; and exclaiming in his agony, "_Ah, bonté divine! elle m'a compris!_" rolled over and over on the lawn as if he had a fit. Mrs. Grote majestically waved her hand, and with magnanimous disdain of her small adversary turned and departed, and we remained horror-stricken at the effect of this involuntary tribute of Dessauer's to her martial air and deportment. When she returned, however, it was to enter into a most interesting and animated discussion upon the subject of Glück's music; and suddenly, some piece from the "Iphigenia" being mentioned, she shouted for her man-servant, to whom on his appearance she gave orders to bring her a chair and footstool, and "the big fiddle" (the violoncello) out of the hall; and taking it forthwith between her knees, proceeded to play, with excellent taste and expression, some of Glück's noble music upon the sonorous instrument, with which St. Cecilia is the only female I ever saw on terms of such familiar intimacy. The second time Mrs. Grote invited me to the Beeches, it was to meet Mdlle. Ellsler. A conversation I had with my admirable and excellent friend Sydney Smith determined me to decline joining the party. He wound up his kind and friendly advice to me upon the subject by saying, "No, no, my child; that's all very well for Grota" (the name he always gave Mrs. Grote, whose good qualities and abilities he esteemed very highly, whatever he may have thought of her eccentricities); "but don't mix yourself up with that sort of thing." And I had reason to rejoice that I followed his good advice. Mrs. Grote told me, in the course of a conversation we once had on the subject of Mdlle. Ellsler, that when the latter went to America, she, Mrs. Grote, had undertaken most generously the entire care and charge of her child, a lovely little girl of about six years old. "All I said to her," said this strange, kind-hearted woman, "was 'Well, Fanny, send the brat to me; I don't ask you whose child it is, and I don't care, so long as it isn't that fool d'Orsay's'" (Mrs. Grote had small esteem for _the_ dandy of his day), "'and I'll take the best care of it I can.'" And she did take the kindest care of it during the whole period of Mdlle. Ellsler's absence from Europe. The next time I visited the Beeches was after an interval of some years, when I went thither with my kind and constant friend Mr. Rogers. My circumstances had altered very painfully, and I was again laboring for my own support. I went down to Burnham with the old poet, and was sorry to find that, though he had consented to pay Mrs. Grote this visit, he was not in particularly harmonious tune for her society, which was always rather a trial to his fastidious nerves and refined taste. The drive of between three and four miles in a fly (very different from his own luxurious carriage), through intricate lanes and rural winding avenues, did not tend to soften his acerbities, and I perceived at once, on alighting from the carriage, that the aspect of the place did not find favor in his eyes. Mrs. Grote had just put up an addition to her house, a sort of single wing, which added a good-sized drawing-room to the modest mansion I had before visited. Whatever accession of comfort the house received within from this addition to its size, its beauty, externally, was not improved by it, and Mr. Rogers stood before the offending edifice, surveying it with a sardonic sneer that I should think even brick and mortar must have found it hard to bear. He had hardly uttered his three first disparaging bitter sentences, of utter scorn and abhorrence of the architectural abortion, which, indeed it was, when Mrs. Grote herself made her appearance in her usual country costume, box-coat, hat on her head, and stick in her hand. Mr. Rogers turned to her with a verjuice smile, and said, "I was just remarking that in whatever part of the world I had seen this building I should have guessed to whose taste I might attribute its erection." To which, without an instant's hesitation, she replied, "Ah, _'tis_ a beastly thing, to be sure. The confounded workmen played the devil with the place while I was away." Then, without any more words, she led the way to the interior of her habitation, and I could not but wonder whether her blunt straightforwardness did not disconcert and rebuke Mr. Rogers for his treacherous sneer. During this visit, much interesting conversation passed with reference to the letters of Sydney Smith, who was just dead; and the propriety of publishing all his correspondence, which, of course, contained strictures and remarks upon people with whom he had been living in habits of friendly social intimacy. I remember one morning a particularly lively discussion on the subject, between Mrs. Grote and Mr. Rogers. The former had a great many letters from Sydney Smith, and urged the impossibility of publishing them, with all their comments on members of the London world. Rogers, on the contrary, apparently delighted at the idea of the mischief such revelations would make, urged Mrs. Grote to give them ungarbled to the press. "Oh, but now," said the latter, "here, for instance, Mr. Rogers, such a letter as this, about ----; do see how he cuts up the poor fellow. It really never would do to publish it." Rogers took the letter from her, and read it with a stony grin of diabolical delight on his countenance and occasional chuckling exclamations of "Publish it! publish it! Put an R, dash, or an R and four stars for the name. He'll never know it, though everybody else will." While Mr. Rogers was thus delecting himself, in anticipation, with R----'s execution, Mrs. Grote, by whose side I was sitting on a low stool, quietly unfolded another letter of Sydney Smith's, and silently held it before my eyes, and the very first words in it were a most ludicrous allusion to Rogers's cadaverous appearance. As I raised my eyes from this most absurd description of him, and saw him still absorbed in his evil delight, the whole struck me as so like a scene in a farce that I could not refrain from bursting out laughing. In talking of Sydney Smith Mr. Rogers gave us many amusing details of various visits he paid him at his place in Somersetshire, Combe Flory, where, on one occasion, Jeffrey was also one of the party. It was to do honor to these illustrious guests that Sydney Smith had a pair of horns fastened on his donkey, who was turned into the paddock so adorned, in order, as he said, to give the place a more noble and park-like appearance; and it was on this same donkey that Jeffrey mounted when Sydney Smith exclaimed with such glee-- "As short, but not as stout, as Bacchus, As witty as Horatius Flacchus, As great a radical as Gracchus, There he goes riding on my _jackuss_." Rogers told us too, with great satisfaction, an anecdote of Sydney Smith's son, known in London society by the amiable nickname of the Assassin.... This gentleman, being rather addicted to horse-racing and the undesirable society of riders, trainers, jockeys, and semi-turf black-legs, meeting a friend of his father's on his arrival at Combe Flory, the visitor said, "So you have got Rogers here, I find." "Oh, yes," replied Sydney Smith's dissimilar son, with a rueful countenance, "but it isn't _the_ Rogers, you know." _The_ Rogers, according to him, being a famous horse-trainer and rider of that name. I have called him his father's dissimilar son, but feel inclined to withdraw that epithet, when I recollect his endeavor to find an appropriate subject of conversation for the Archbishop of York, by whom, on one occasion, he found himself seated at dinner: "Pray, my lord, how long do you think it took Nebuchadnezzar to get into condition again after his turn out at grass?" The third time I went to Burnham Beeches, it was to meet a very clever Piedmontese gentleman, with whom Mr. Grote had become intimate, Mr. Senior, known and valued for his ability as a political economist, his clear and acute intelligence, his general information and agreeable powers of conversation. His universal acquaintance with all political and statistical details, and the whole contemporaneous history of European events, and the readiness and fulness of his information on all matters of interest connected with public affairs used to make Mrs. Grote call him her "man of facts." The other member of our small party was Charles Greville, whose acquaintance Mrs. Grote had made through his intimacy with my sister and myself. This gentleman was one of the most agreeable members of our intimate society. His mother was the sister of the late Duke of Portland, and during the short administration of his uncle, Charles Greville, then quite a young man, had a sinecure office in the island of Jamaica bestowed upon him, and was made Clerk of the Privy Council; which appointment, by giving him an assured position and handsome income for life, effectually put a stop to his real advancement at the very outset, by rendering all effort of ambition on his part unnecessary, and inducing him, instead of distinguishing himself by an honorable public career, to adopt the life and pursuits of a mere man of pleasure, ... and to waste his talents in the petty intrigues of society, and the excitements of the turf. He was an influential member of the London great world of his day; his clear good sense, excellent judgment, knowledge of the world, and science of expediency, combined with his good temper and ready friendliness, made him a sort of universal referee in the society to which he belonged. Men consulted him about their difficulties with men; and women, about their squabbles with women; and men and women, about their troubles with the opposite sex. He was called into the confidence of all manner of people, and trusted with the adjustment of all sorts of affairs. He knew the secrets of everybody, which everybody seemed willing that he should know; and he was one of the principal lawgivers of the turf. The publication of Charles Greville's Memoirs, which shocked the whole of London society, surprised, as much as it grieved, his friends, the character they revealed being painfully at variance with their impression of him, and not a little, in some respects, at variance with that of a gentleman.... Our small party at the Beeches was broken up on the occasion of this, my third visit, by our hostess's indisposition. She was seized with a violent attack of neuralgia in the head, to which she was subject, and by which she was compelled to take to her bed, and remain there in darkness and almost intolerable suffering for hours, and sometimes days together. I have known her prostrated by a paroxysm of this sort when she had invited a large party to dinner, and obliged to leave her husband to do the honors to their guests, while she betook herself to solitary confinement in a darkened room. On the present occasion the gentlemen guests took their departure for London, and I should have done the same, but that Mrs. Grote entreated me to remain, for the chance of her being soon rid of her torment. Towards the middle of the day she begged me to come to her room, when, feeling, I presume, some temporary relief, she presently began talking vehemently to me about a French opera of "The Tempest," by Halévy, I believe, which had just been produced in Paris, with Madame Rossi Sontag as Miranda, and Lablache as Caliban. Mrs. Grote was violent in her abuse of the composition, deploring, as I joined her in doing, that Mendelssohn should not have taken "The Tempest" for the subject of an opera, and so prevented less worthy composers from laying hands upon it. Towards this time Mrs. Grote became absorbed by a passionate enthusiasm for Mademoiselle Jenny Lind, of whom she was an idolatrous worshipper, and who frequently spent her days of leisure at the Beeches. Mrs. Grote engrossed Mademoiselle Jenny Lind in so curious a manner that, socially, the accomplished singer could hardly be approached but through her. She was kind enough to ask me twice to meet her, when Mendelssohn and herself were together at Burnham--an offer of a rare pleasure, of which I was unable to avail myself. I remember, about this time, a comical conversation I had with her, in which, after surveying and defining her social position and its various advantages, she exclaimed, "But I want some lords, Fanny. Can't you help me to some lords?" I told her, laughingly, that I thought the lady who held watch and ward over Mademoiselle Jenny Lind might have as many lords at her feet as she pleased.... Besides her literary and artistic tastes, she took a keen interest in politics, and among other causes for the slight esteem in which she not unnaturally held my intellectual capacity was my ignorance of, and indifference to, anything connected with party politics, especially as discussed in coteries and by coterie queens. Great questions of European policy, and the important movements of foreign governments, or our own, in matters tending to affect the general welfare and progress of humanity, had a profound interest for me; but I talked so little on such subjects, as became the profundity of my ignorance, that Mrs. Grote supposed them altogether above my sympathy, and probably above my comprehension. I remember very well, one evening at her own house, I was working at some embroidery (I never saw her with that feminine implement, a needle, in her fingers, and have a notion she despised those who employed it, and the results they achieved), and I was listening with perfect satisfaction to an able and animated discussion between Mr. Grote, Charles Greville, Mr. Senior, and a very intelligent Piedmontese then staying at the Beeches, on the aspect of European politics, and more especially of Italian affairs, when Mrs. Grote, evidently thinking the subject too much for me, drew her chair up to mine, and began a condescending conversation about matters which she probably judged more on a level with my comprehension; for she seemed both relieved and surprised when I stopped her kind effort to entertain me at once, thanking her, and assuring her that I was enjoying extremely what I was listening to. Some time after this, however, I must say I took a mischievous opportunity of purposely confirming her poor opinion of my brains; for on her return from Paris, where she had been during Louis Napoleon's _coup d'état_, she offered to show me Mr. Senior's journal, kept there at the same time, and recording all the remarkable and striking incidents of that exciting period of French affairs. This was a temptation, but it was a greater one to me--being, as Madame de Sévigné says of herself, _méchante ma fille_--to make fun of Mrs. Grote; and so, comforting myself with thinking that this probably highly interesting and instructive record, kept by Mr. Senior, would be sure to be published, and was then in manuscript (a thing which I abhor), I quietly declined the offer, looking as like Audrey when she asks "What is poetical?" as I could: to which Mrs. Grote, with an indescribable look, accent, and gesture of good-humored contempt, replied, "Ah, well, it might not interest you; I dare say it wouldn't. It _is_ political, to be sure; it is political." This is the second very clever woman, to whom I know my intelligence had been vaunted, to whom I turned out completely "Paradise Lost," as my mother's comical old acquaintance, Lady Dashwood King, used to say to Adelaide of me: "Ah, yes, I know your sister is vastly clever, exceedingly intelligent, and all that kind of thing, but she is 'Paradise Lost' to me, my dear." I sometimes regretted having hidden my small light under a bushel as entirely as I did, in the little intercourse I had with the first Lady Ashburton, Lady Harriet Montague, with whom some of my friends desired that I should become acquainted, and who asked me to her house in London, and to the Grange, having been assured that there was something in me, and trying to find it out, without ever succeeding. Mrs. Grote had generally a very contemptuous regard for the capacity of her female friends. She was extremely fond of my sister, but certainly had not the remotest appreciation of her great cleverness; and on one occasion betrayed the most whimsical surprise when Adelaide mentioned having received a letter from the great German scholar Waelcker. "Who? what? you? Waelcker, write to you!" exclaimed Grota, in amazement more apparent than courteous, it evidently being beyond the wildest stretch of her imagination that one of the most learned men in Europe, and profoundest scholars of Germany, could be a correspondent of my sister's, and a devoted admirer of her brilliant intelligence. Mrs. Grote's appearance was extremely singular; "striking" is, I think, the most appropriate word for it. She was very tall, square-built, and high-shouldered; her hands and arms, feet and legs (the latter she was by no means averse to displaying) were uncommonly handsome and well made. Her face was rather that of a clever man than a woman, and I used to think there was some resemblance between herself and our piratical friend Trelawney. Her familiar style of language among her intimates was something that could only be believed by those who heard it; it was technical to a degree that was amazing. I remember, at a dinner-party at her own table, her speaking of Audubon's work on ornithology, and saying that some of the incidents of his personal adventures, in the pursuit of his favorite science, had pleased her particularly; instancing, among other anecdotes, an occasion on which, as she said, "he was almost starving in the woods, you know, and found some kind of wild creature, which he immediately disembowelled and devoured." This, at dinner, at her own table, before a large party, was rather forcible. But little usual as her modes of expression were, she never seemed to be in the slightest degree aware of the startling effect they produced; she uttered them with the most straightforward unconsciousness and unconcern. Her taste in dress was, as might have been expected, slightly eccentric, but, for a person with so great a perception of harmony of sound, her passion for discordant colors was singular. The first time I ever saw her she was dressed in a bright brimstone-colored silk gown, made so short as to show her feet and ankles, having on her head a white satin hat, with a forest of white feathers; and I remember her standing, with her feet wide apart and her arms akimbo, in this costume before me, and challenging me upon some political question, by which, and her appearance, I was much astonished and a little frightened. One evening she came to my sister's house dressed entirely in black, but with scarlet shoes on, with which I suppose she was particularly pleased, for she lay on a sofa with her feet higher than her head, American fashion, the better to display or contemplate them. I remember, at a party, being seated by Sydney Smith, when Mrs. Grote entered with a rose-colored turban on her head, at which he suddenly exclaimed, "Now I know the meaning of the word grotesque!" The mischievous wit professed his cordial liking for both her and her husband, saying, "I like them, I like them; I like him, he is so ladylike; and I like her, she's such a perfect gentleman;" in which, however, he had been forestalled by a person who certainly _n'y entendait pas malice_, Mrs. Chorley, the meekest and gentlest of human beings, who one evening, at a party at her son's house, said to him, pointing out Mrs. Grote, who was dressed in white, "Henry, my dear, who is the gentleman in the white muslin gown?"] You ask me, dear H----, about Lady Francis's visit. She did not come, as she had proposed doing, on the Friday, for she caught the influenza, and was extremely unwell for a few days; she was here on Monday, coughing incessantly and looking ill. In the course of our conversation, she exclaimed, "Education! bless me, I think of nothing else but the education of the poor. Don't you find people have got to think and talk about nothing else? I protest, I don't." This made me laugh, and you will understand why; but she didn't, and pressed me very much to tell her what there was absurd in the matter to me: but I declined answering her, at least then and there, as I could not enter into a full discussion of the subject, down to the roots of it, just at that moment. But, as you will well comprehend, the circumstances that render this feverish zeal for education comical, in some of its fine-lady advocates, are peculiarly strong in her case, though she is in earnest enough, and thoroughly well-intentioned in whatever she does. Unwittingly, they are serving the poor, as they certainly do not contemplate doing; for by educating them, even as they are likely to do so, they will gradually prepare them, intelligently and therefore irresistibly, to demand such changes in their political and social conditions as they may now impotently desire, and will assuredly hereafter obtain; but not, I think, with the entirely cordial acquiescence of their Tory educators. We went to the opera the Saturday after you left us, but both the opera and the ballet were indifferent performances.... Do you not know that to misunderstand and be misunderstood is one of the inevitable conditions, and, I think, one of the especial purposes, of our existence? The principal use of the affection of human beings for each other is to supply the want of perfect comprehension, which is impossible. All the faith and love which we possess are barely sufficient to bridge over the abyss of individualism which separates one human being from another; and they would not or could not exist, if we really understood each other. God bless you, dear. Yours ever, FANNY. CLARGES STREET, March 28th, 1841. DEAREST H----, My Sunday's avocations being over, or rather---- Here a loud, double knock, and Emily's entrance cut short my sentence; and now that she is gone, it is close upon time to dress for dinner. She bids me tell you that I am going to-morrow to sit to the sun for my picture for you. I cannot easily conceive how you should desire a daguerreotype of me; you certainly have never seen one, or you would not do so; as it is, I think you will receive a severe shock from the real representation of the face you love so well and know so little.... Emily and I went with the children to the Zoological Gardens the other day, where a fine, intelligent-looking lioness appeared exceedingly struck with them, crouched, and made a spring at little Fan, which made Anne scream, and Emily, and Amelia Twiss, who was with us, catch hold of the child. The keeper assured us it was only play; but I was well pleased, nevertheless, that there was a grating between that very large cat and the little white mouse of a plaything she contemplated. I have no news to give you, dear H----. A list of our dinner and evening engagements would be interminable, and not very profitable stuff for correspondence. I breakfasted with Mr. Rogers the other morning, and met Lord Normanby, to whom I preferred a request that he would procure for Henry an unattached company, by which he would obtain a captain's rank and half-pay, and escape being sent to Canada, or, indeed, out of England at all--which, in my father's present condition of health, is very desirable.... We hear of my sister's great success in Italy, in "Norma," from sources which can leave us no doubt of it.... Good-bye, dearest H----. Here is a list of my immediately impending _occupations_--Monday, Emily spends the evening with me, till I go to a party at Miss Rogers's; Tuesday, we go to the opera; Wednesday, we dine with the M----s, and go in the evening to Mrs. Grote's; Thursday, dinner at Mrs. Norton's; Friday, dine with Mrs. C----, who has a ball in the evening; Saturday, the opera again: and so, pray don't say I am wasting my time, or neglecting my opportunities. Yours ever, FANNY. CLARGES STREET, Thursday, April 2nd. DEAREST H----, I wrote to you yesterday, but have half an hour of leisure, and will begin another letter to you now. If it suffers interruption, I shall at any rate have made a start, and the end will come in time, doubtless, if Heaven pleases.... My father is much in the same condition as when last I wrote to you.... You ask if he does not begin to count the days till Adelaide's return [my sister was daily expected from Italy, where she had just finished engagements at the Fenice, the San Carlo, and the Scala]: he speaks of that event occasionally, with fervent hope and expectation; but he is seldom roused by anything from the state of suffering self-absorption in which he lives for the most part.... I forget whether we have heard from Adelaide herself since you left us; but my father had a letter the other day from C----, who sent him a detailed account of her success in "Norma," which by all accounts has indeed been very great. One of C----'s proofs of it amused me not a little. He said that one night, when she was singing it, although some of the royal family were in their box and appeared about to applaud, the people could not restrain their acclamations, but broke out into vociferous bravos, contrary to etiquette on such occasions, when it is usual for royalty to give the signal to public enthusiasm. Doubtless this was a very great proof of her power over her fellow-creatures, and of the irresistible human sympathies which are occasionally, even in such an atmosphere as that of a Neapolitan theatre, with Bourbon royalty present, stronger than social conventionalities.... You ask if the new comedy ("London Assurance") is sufficiently successful to warrant the author's purchase of Henry's horse. I heard, but of course cannot vouch for the truth of the report, that his fixed remuneration was to be three hundred pounds for the piece; and when, as I also hear (but again will not vouch for the truth of my story), besides Henry's, that he has bought another horse, and, besides that other horse, a miraculous "Cab," and, besides that miraculous "Cab," ordered no fewer than seven new coats, I think you will agree with me that the author of "London Assurance," successful as his piece may be, ought to have found a deeper mine than that is likely to prove to serve so many ends. When I expressed my disapprobation of Henry's assisting by any means or in any way such boyish extravagance, he said that the lad had guardians; and therefore I suppose he has property besides what may come of play-writing--for men's persons, however pretty, are seldom put under guardianship of trustees; and Henry argued, in the proper manly fashion, that the youth, having property, had also a right to be as foolish in the abuse of it as he pleased, or as his guardians would let him. We none of us went to see "Patter _versus_ Clatter," after all, having all some previous engagement, so that, though it was literally given for our special amusement, we were none of us there. I have received no less than four American letters by the last steamer, and this, though a welcome pleasure, is also a considerable addition to the things to be done. God bless you, dearest H----. This letter was begun about three days ago, and now it is the second of April. Yours ever, FANNY. [The young author of the clever play called "London Assurance" had a special interest for me from having been my brother Henry's schoolfellow at Westminster.... His career as a dramatic author and actor has won him a high and well-deserved reputation in both capacities, both in England and America.] CLARGES STREET, Friday, April 9th. MY DEAREST H----, My father is just now much better; he has regained his appetite, and talks again of going out.... I can tell you nothing about my daguerreotype; for having gone, according to appointment, last Monday, and waited, which I could ill afford to do, nearly three quarters of an hour, and finally come away, there being apparently no chance of my turn arriving at all that day, I saw nothing of it; and I think it was very well that it saw nothing of me, for such another sulky thunder-cloud as my countenance presented under these circumstances seldom sat for its picture to Phoebus Apollo, or any of his artist sons. I am to go again on Wednesday, and shall be able to tell you something about it, I hope. I have not seen Mr. T----'s sketch of the children. He is in high delight with it himself, I believe; and, moreover, has undertaken, in the plenitude of his artistical enthusiasm, to steal a likeness of me, putting me in a great arm-chair, with S---- standing on one side for tragedy, and F---- perched on the opposite arm of the chair for comedy. Lane was to have come here to draw the children this very evening; but it is half-past ten and he has not been, and of course is not coming.... Good-bye, dear. Ever affectionately yours, FANNY. CLARGES STREET, Monday, May 3rd, 1841. Thank you, dearest H----, for your prompt compliance with my request about your travelling information.... About the daguerreotype, you know, I should have precisely the same objection to taking another person's appointed time that I have to mine being appropriated by somebody else; but Emily has made another appointment for me: she had made one for the day on which my sister arrived, which rather provoked me; but I was resigned, nevertheless, because I had told her I would go at any time she chose to name. She let me off, however; not, I believe, from any compassion for me, but because my father had set his heart upon my going with him to the private view of the new exhibition, just a quarter of an hour after the time I was to have been at the daguerreotypist's. So to the gallery I went, an hour after Adelaide had returned from Italy; as you know, I had not seen her for several years (indeed, not since my marriage). And so to the gallery I went, with buzzing in my ears and dizziness in my eyes, and an hysterical choking, which made me afraid to open my lips. Why my father was so anxious to go to this exhibition I hardly know; but I went to please him, and came back to please myself, without having an idea of a single picture in the whole collection. Emily has now made another appointment for me, or rather for you, early on Wednesday morning, and I hope we shall accomplish something at last. Now you want to know something about Adelaide. There she sits in the next room at the piano, singing sample-singing, and giving a taste of her quality to Charles Greville, who, you know, is an influential person in all sorts of matters, and to whom Henry has written about her merits, and probable acceptability with the fashionable musical world. She is singing most beautifully, and the passionate words of love, longing, grief, and joy burst through that utterance of musical sound, and light up her whole countenance with a perfect blaze of emotion. As for me, the tears stream over my face all the time, and I can hardly prevent myself from sobbing aloud.... She has grown very large, I think almost as large as I remember my mother; she looks very well and very handsome, and has acquired something completely foreign in her tone and manner, and even accent.... She complains of the darkness of our skies and the dulness of our mode of life here as intolerable and oppressive to the last degree.... I cannot believe happiness to be the purpose of life, for when was anything ordained with an unattainable purpose?... But life, which, but for duty, seems always sad enough to me, appears sadder than usual when I try to look at it from the point of view of the happiness it contains. The children are well; Lane has taken a charming likeness of them, of which I promise you a copy. God bless you, dearest H----. I do not lean on human love; I do not depend or reckon on it; nor have I ever MISTAKEN any human being for my _best friend_. Affectionately yours, FANNY. CLARGES STREET, May 21st. DEAREST H----, From the midst of this musical Maelstrom I send you a voice, which, if heard instead of read, would be lamentable enough. We are lifted off our feet by the perfect torrent of engagements, of visits, of going out and receiving; our house is full, from morning till night, of people coming to sing with or listen to my sister. How her strength is to resist the demands made upon it by the violent emotions she is perpetually expressing, or how any human throat is to continue pouring out such volumes of sound without rest or respite, passes my comprehension. Now, let me tell you how I am surrounded at this minute while I write to you. At my very table sit Trelawney and Charles Young, talking to me and to each other; farther on, towards my father, Mr. G---- C----; and an Italian singer on one side of my sister; and on the other, an Italian painter, who has brought letters of introduction to us; then Mary Anne Thackeray; ... furthermore, the door has just closed upon an English youth of the name of B----, who sings almost as well as an Italian, and with whom my sister has been singing her soul out for the last two hours.... We dined yesterday with the Francis Egertons; to-morrow evening we have a gathering here, with, I beg you to believe, nothing under the rank of a viscount, Beauforts, Normanbys, Wiltons, _illustrissimi tutti quanti_. Friday, my sister sings at the Palace, and we are all enveloped in a golden cloud of fashionable hard work, which rather delights my father; which my sister lends herself to, complaining a little of the trouble, fatigue, and late hours; but thinking it for the interest of her future public career, and always becoming rapt and excited beyond all other considerations in her own capital musical performances.... As for me, I am rather bewildered by the whirl in which we live, which I find rather a trying contrast to my late solitary existence in America.... The incessant music wears upon my nerves a great deal; but chiefly, I think, because half the time I am not able to listen to it quietly, and it distracts me while I am obliged to attend to other things. But indeed, often, when I can give my undivided attention to it, my sister's singing excites me to such a degree that I am obliged, after crying my bosom full of tears, to run out of the room. My father continues in wonderful good looks and spirits.... Here, dear H----, a long interruption.... We are off to St. John's Wood, to dine with the Procters: ---- is not ready; my sister is lying on the sofa, reading aloud an Italian letter to me; the children are rioting about the room like a couple of little maniacs, and I feel inclined to endorse Macbeth's opinion of life, that it is all sound and fury and signifying nothing.... Thus far, and another interruption; and now it is to-morrow, and Lady Grey and Lady G---- have just gone out of the room, and Chauncy Hare Townsend has just come in, followed by his mesmeric German patient, who is going to perform his magnetic magic for us. I think I will let him try what sort of a subject I should be. I enclose a little note and silk chain, brought for you from America by Miss Fanny Appleton [afterwards Mrs. Longfellow], who has just arrived in London, to the great joy of her sister. I suppose these tokens come to you from the Sedgwicks. I have a little box which poor C---- S---- brought from Catherine for you--a delicate carved wooden casket, that I have not sent to you because I was afraid it would be broken, by any post or coach conveyance. Tell me about this, how I shall send it to you. I have obtained too for you that German book which I delight in so very much, Richter's "Fruit, Flower, and Thorn Pieces," and which, in the midst of much that is probably too German, in thought, feeling, and expression, to meet with your entire sympathy, will, I think, furnish you with sweet and pleasant thoughts for a while; I scarce know anything that I like much better. I was going to see Rachel this evening, but my brother and his wife having come up to town for the day, I do not think we ought all to go out and leave them; so that ---- is gone with Adelaide and Lady M----, and I shall seize this quiet chance for writing to Emily, to whom I have not yet contrived to send a word since she left town. God bless you. Ever yours, FANNY. [The young lad Alexis, to whom I have referred in this letter was, I think, one of the first of the long train of mesmerists, magnetizers, spiritualists, charlatans, cheats, and humbugs who subsequently appealed to the notice and practised on the credulity of London society. Mr. Chauncy Hare Townsend was an enthusiastic convert to the theory of animal magnetism, and took about with him, to various houses, this German boy, whose exhibition of mesmeric phenomena was the first I ever witnessed. Mr. Townsend had almost insisted upon our receiving this visit, and we accordingly assembled in the drawing-room, to witness the powers of Alexis. We were all of us sceptical, one of our party so incurably so that after each exhibition of clairvoyance given by Alexis, and each exclamation of Mr. Townsend's, "There now, you see that?" he merely replied, with the most imperturbable phlegm, "Yes, I see it, but I don't believe it." The clairvoyant power of the young man consisted principally in reading passages from books presented to him while under the influence of the mesmeric sleep, into which he had been thrown by Mr. Townsend, and with which he was previously unacquainted. The results were certainly sufficiently curious, though probably neither marvellous nor unaccountable. To make sure that his eyes were really effectually closed, cotton-wool was laid over them, and a broad, tight bandage placed upon them; during another trial the hands of our chief sceptic were placed upon his eyelids, so as effectually to keep them completely closed, in spite of which he undoubtedly read out of a book held up before him above his eyes, and rather on a level with his forehead; nor can I remember any instance in which he appeared to find any great difficulty in doing so, except when a book suddenly fetched from another room was opened before him, when he hesitated and expressed incapacity, and then said, "The book is French;" which it was. Believing entirely in a sort of hitherto undefined, and possibly undefinable, physical influence, by which the nervous system of one person may be affected by that of another, by special exercise of will and effort, so as to produce an almost absolute temporary subserviency of the whole nature to the force by which it is acted upon, and therefore thinking it extremely possible, and not improbable, that many of the instances of mesmeric influence I have heard related had some foundation in truth, I have, nevertheless, kept entirely aloof from the whole subject, never voluntarily attended any exhibitions of such phenomena, and regarded the whole series of experiments and experiences and pretended marvels of the numerous adepts in mesmerism with contempt and disgust--contempt for the crass ignorance and glaring dishonesty involved in their practices; and disgust, because of the moral and physical mischief their absurd juggleries were likely to produce, and in many instances did produce, upon subjects as ignorant, but less dishonest, than the charlatans by whom they were duped. The thing having, in my opinion, a very probable existence, possibly a physical force of considerable effect, and not thoroughly ascertained or understood nature, the experiments people practised and lent themselves to appeared to me exactly as wise and as becoming as if they had drunk so much brandy or eaten so much opium or hasheesh, by way of trying the effect of these drugs upon their constitution; with this important difference that the magnetic experiments severely tested the nervous system of both patient and operator, and had, besides, an indefinite element of moral importance, in the attempted control of one human will by another, through physical means, which appeared to me to place all such experiments at once among things forbidden to rational and responsible agents. I am now speaking only of the early developments of physical phenomena exhibited by the first magnetizers and mesmerizers--the conjurers by passes and somnolence and other purely physical processes; the crazy and idiotic performances of their successors, the so-called spiritualists, with their grotesque and disgusting pretence of intercourse with the spirits of the dead through the legs of their tables and chairs, seemed to me the most melancholy testimony to an utter want of faith in things spiritual, of belief in God and Christ's teaching, and a pitiful craving for such a faith, as well as to the absence of all rational common sense, in the vast numbers of persons deluded by such processes. In this aspect (the total absence of right reason and real religion demonstrated by these ludicrous and blasphemous juggleries in our Christian communities), that which was farcical in the lowest degree became tragical in the highest. I only witnessed this one mesmeric exhibition, on the occasion of this visit paid to us by Mr. Townsend and Alexis, until several years afterwards, in the house of my excellent friend Mr. Combe, in Edinburgh, when I was one of a party called upon to witness some experiments of the same kind. I was staying with Mr. Combe and my cousin Cecilia, when one evening their friend Mrs. Crow, authoress of more than one book, I believe, and of a collection of supernatural horrors, of stories of ghosts, apparitions, etc., etc., called "The Night Side of Nature" (the lady had an evident sympathy for the absurd and awful), came, bringing with her a Dr. Lewis, a negro gentleman, who was creating great excitement in Edinburgh by his advocacy of the theories of mesmerism, and his own powers of magnetizing. Mrs. Crow had threatened Mr. and Mrs. Combe with a visit from this _professor_, and though neither of them had the slightest tendency to belief in any such powers as those Dr. Lewis laid claim to, they received him with kindly courtesy, and consented, with the amused indifference of scepticism, to be spectators of his experiments. Under these circumstances, great as was my antipathy to the whole thing, I did not like to raise any objection to it or to leave the room, which would have been a still more marked expression of my feeling; so I sat down with the rest of the company round the drawing-room table, Mr. and Mrs. Combe, Dr. Lewis, Mrs. Crow, our friend Professor William Gregory, and Dr. Becker--the latter gentleman a man of science, brother, I think, to Prince Albert's private librarian--who was to be the subject of Dr. Lewis's experiments, having already lent himself for the same purpose to that gentleman, and been pronounced highly sensitive to the magnetic influence. I sat by Dr. Becker, and opposite to Dr. Lewis, with the width of the table between us. What ulterior processes were to be exhibited I do not know, but the first result to be obtained was to throw Dr. Becker into a mesmeric state of somnolence, under the influence of the operator. The latter presently began his experiment, and, drawing entirely from his coat and shirt sleeve a long, lithe, black hand, the finger-tips of which were of that pale livid tinge so common in the hands of negroes, he directed it across the table towards Dr. Becker, and began slowly making passes at him. We were all profoundly still and silent, and, in spite of my disgust, I watched the whole scene with considerable interest. By degrees the passes became more rapid, and the hand was stretched nearer and nearer towards its victim, waving and quivering like some black snake, while the face of the operator assumed an expression of the most concentrated powerful purpose, which, combined with his sable color and the vehement imperative gestures which he aimed at Dr. Becker, really produced a quasi-diabolical effect. The result, however, was not immediate. Dr. Becker was apparently less susceptible this evening than on previous occasions; but Dr. Lewis renewed and repeated his efforts, each time with a nearer approach and increased vehemence, and at length his patient's eyelids began to quiver, he gasped painfully for breath, and was evidently becoming overpowered by the influence to which he had subjected himself; when, after a few seconds of the most intense efforts on the part of Dr. Lewis, these symptoms passed off, and the mesmerizer, with much appearance of exhaustion, declared himself, for some reason or other, unable to produce the desired effect (necessary for the subsequent exhibition of his powers) of compelling Dr. Becker into a state of somnolency--a thing which he had not failed to accomplish on every previous occasion. The trial had to be given up, and much speculation and discussion followed as to the probable cause of the failure, for which neither the magnetizer nor his patient could account. Believing in this strange action of nervous power in one person over another, I am persuaded that I prevented Dr. Lewis's experiment from succeeding. The whole exhibition had from the very beginning aroused in me such a feeling of antagonism, such a mingled horror, disgust, and indignation, that, when my neighbor appeared about to succumb to the influence operating upon him, my whole nature was roused to such a state of active opposition to the process I was witnessing that I determined, if there was power in human will to make itself felt by mere silent concentrated effort of purpose, I would prevent Dr. Lewis from accomplishing his end; and it seemed to me, as I looked at him, as if my whole being had become absorbed in my determination to defeat his endeavor to set Dr. Becker to sleep. The nervous tension I experienced is hardly to be described, and I firmly believe that I accomplished my purpose. I was too much exhausted, after we left the table, to speak, and too disagreeably affected by the whole scene to wish to do so. The next day I told Mr. Combe of my counter-magnetizing, or rather neutralizing, experiment, by which he was greatly amused; but I do not think he cared to enter upon any investigation of the subject, feeling little interested in it, and having been rather surprised into this exhibition of it by Mrs. Crow's bringing Dr. Lewis to his house. That lady being undoubtedly an admirable subject for all such experiments, having what my dear Mr. Combe qualified as "a most preposterous organ of wonder," for which, poor woman, I suppose she paid the penalty in a terrible nervous seizure, a fit of temporary insanity, during which she imagined that she received a visit from the Virgin Mary and our Saviour, both of whom commanded her to go without any clothes on into the streets of Edinburgh, and walk a certain distance in that condition, in reward for which the sins and sufferings of the whole world would be immediately alleviated. Upon her demurring to fulfil this mandate, she received the further assurance that if she took her card-case in her right hand and her pocket-handkerchief in her left, her condition of nudity would be entirely unobserved by any one she met. Under the influence of her diseased fancy, Mrs. Crow accordingly went forth, with nothing on but a pair of boots, and being immediately rescued from the terrible condition of mad exposure, in which she had already made a few paces in the street where she lived, and carried back into her house, she exclaimed, "Oh, I must have taken my card-case and my handkerchief in the wrong hands, otherwise nobody would have seen me!" She recovered entirely from this curious attack of hallucination, and I met her in society afterwards, perfectly restored to her senses. On one occasion I allowed myself to be persuaded into testing my own powers of mesmerizing, by throwing a young friend into a magnetic sleep. I succeeded with considerable difficulty, and the next day experienced great nervous exhaustion, which, I think, was the consequence of her having, as she assured me she had, resisted with the utmost effort of her will my endeavor to put her to sleep. As I disapproved, however, of all such experiments, this is the only one I ever tried. My belief in the reality of the influence was a good deal derived from my own experience, which was that of an invariable tendency to sleep in the proximity of certain persons of whom I was particularly fond. I used to sit at Mrs. Harry Siddons's feet, and she had hardly laid her hand upon my head before it fell upon her knees, and I was in a profound slumber. My friend Miss ----'s neighborhood had the same effect upon me, and when we were not engaged in furious discussion, I was very apt to be fast asleep whenever I was near her. E---- S---- relieved me of an intense toothache once by putting me to sleep with a few mesmeric passes, and I have, moreover, more than once, immediately after violent nervous excitement, been so overcome with drowsiness as to be unable to move. I remember a most ludicrous instance of this occurring to me in the church of Stratford-upon-Avon, when, standing before Shakespeare's tomb, and looking intensely at his monument, I became so overpowered with sleep that I could hardly rouse myself enough to leave the church, and I begged very hard to be allowed to sleep out my sleep, then and there, upon the stones under which he lay. After extreme distress of mind, I have sometimes slept a whole day and night without waking; and once, when overcome with anguish, slept, with hardly an hour's interval at a time, the greater part of a week. The drowsiness inspired in me by some of my friends I attribute entirely to physical sympathy; others, of whom I was nearly as fond, never affected me in this manner in the slightest degree. I have often congratulated myself upon the fact that I had by no means an equal tendency to physical antipathy, though, in common with most other people, I have had some experience of that also. My very dear and excellent friend ---- always _m'agaçait les nerfs_, as French people say, though I was deeply attached to her and very fond of her society. Mrs. ----, of whose excellence I had the most profound conviction, and who was generally esteemed perfectly charming by her intimates, affected me with such a curious intuitive revulsion that the first time she came and sat down by me I was obliged to get up and leave the room--indeed, the house. Two men of our acquaintance, remarkable for their general attractiveness and powers of pleasing, ---- and ----, were never in the same room ten minutes with me without my becoming perfectly chilled through, as though I had suddenly had the door of an ice-house opened upon me. They were entirely dissimilar men in every respect.... Of the spiritualistic performances of Messrs. Hume, Foster, etc., etc., I never was a witness. An intimate acquaintance of mine, who knew Hume well, assured me that she knew him to be an impostor, adding at the same time, "But I also know him to be clairvoyant," which seemed to me mere tautology. My sister and Charles Greville, having had their curiosity excited by some of the reports of Mr. Foster's performances, agreed to go together to visit him, and having received an appointment for a _séance_, went to his house. Certainly, if Mr. Foster had taken in either of those two customers of his, it would have gone near converting me. Charles Greville, who was deaf, and spoke rather loud in consequence of that infirmity, said, as he entered, to my sister, "I shall ask him about my mother." Adelaide, quite determined to test the magician's powers to the utmost, replied, with an air of concern, as if shocked at the idea, "Oh, no, don't do that; it is too dreadful." However, this suggestion of course not being thrown away upon Mr. Foster, Charles Greville desired to be put in communication with the spirit of his mother, which was accordingly duly done by the operator, and various messages were delivered, as purporting to come from the spirit of Lady Charlotte Greville to her son. After this farce had gone on for a little while, Charles Greville turned to my sister with perfect composure, and said, "Well, now perhaps you had better ask him to tell you something about your mother, because, you know, mine is not dead." The _séance_ of course proceeded no further. At an earlier period of it, as they were sitting round a table, Mr. Foster desired that written names might be furnished him of the persons with whose spirits communication might be desired. Among the names written down for this purpose by my sister were several foreign, Italian and German, names, with which she felt very sure Mr. Foster could not possibly have any acquaintance; indeed, it was beyond all question that he never could have heard of them. Adelaide was sitting next to him, watching his operations with extreme attention, and presently observed him very dexterously convey several of these foreign names into his sleeve, and from thence to the ground under the table. After a little while, Mr. Foster observed that, singularly enough, several of the names he had received were now missing, and by some extraordinary means had disappeared entirely from among the rest. "Oh yes," said my sister very quietly, "but they are only under the table, just where you put them a little while ago." With such subjects of course Mr. Foster performed no miracles. Some years ago a new form of these objectionable practices came into vogue, and one summer, going up into Massachusetts, I found the two little mountain villages of Lenox and Stockbridge possessed, in the proper sense of the term, by a devil of their own making, called "Planchette." A little heart-shaped piece of wood, running upon castors, and that could almost be moved with a breath, and carrying along a sheet of paper, over which it was placed, a pencil was supposed to write, on its own inspiration, communications in reply to the person's thoughts whose finger-tips were to rest above, without giving any impulse to the board. Of course a hand held in this constrained attitude is presently compelled to rest itself by some slight pressure; the effort to steady it, and the nervous effort not to press upon the machine, producing inevitably in the wrist aching weariness, and in the fingers every conceivable tendency to nervous twitching. Add to this the intense conviction of the foolish folk, half of them hysterical women, that their concentrated effort of will was, in combination with a mysterious supernatural agency, to move the board; and the board naturally not only moved but, carrying the pencil along with it, wrote the answers required and desired by the credulous consulters of the wooden oracle. The thing would have been indescribably ludicrous but for the terrible effect it was having upon the poor people who were practising upon themselves with it. Excitable young girls of fifteen and sixteen, half hysterical with their wonderment; ignorant, afflicted women, who had lost dear relations and friends by death; superstitious lads, and men too incapable of consecutive reasoning to perceive the necessary connection between cause and effect; the whole community, in short, seemed to me catching the credulous infection one from another, and to be in a state bordering upon insanity or idiocy. A young lady-friend of mine, a miserable invalid, was so possessed with faith in this wooden demon that, after resisting repeated entreaties on her part to witness some of its performances, I at length, at her earnest request, saw her operate upon it. The writing was almost unintelligible, and undoubtedly produced by the vibrating impulse given to the machine by her nervous, feeble, diaphanous hands. Finding my scepticism invincible by these means, my friend implored me to think in my own mind a question, and see if Planchette would not answer it. I yielded at last to her all but hysterical importunity, and thought of an heraldic question concerning the crest on a ring which I wore, which I felt was quite beyond Planchette's penetration; but while we sat in quiet expectation of the reply, which of course did not come, my friend's mother--a sober, middle-aged lady, habitually behaving herself with perfect reasonableness, and, moreover, without a spark of imagination (but that, indeed, was rather of course; belief in such supernatural agencies betokening, in my opinion, an absence of poetical imagination, as well as of spiritual faith), practical, sensible, commonplace, without a touch of nonsense of any kind about her, as I had always supposed--sat opposite the _machine infernale_, over which her daughter's fingers hung suspended, and as the answer did not come, broke out for all the world like one of Baal's prophets of old: "Now, Planchette, now, Planchette, behave; do your duty. Now, Planchette, write at once," etc.; and I felt as if I were in Bedlam. One thing is certain, that if Planchette's answer had approached in the remotest degree the answer to the question of my thought, I would then and there have broken Planchette in half, and left my friends in the possession of their remaining brains until they had procured another. The strangest experience, however, that I met with in connection with this absurd delusion occurred during a visit that I received from Mrs. B---- S----. That lady was staying with her daughter in Stockbridge, and did me the honor to call on me at Lenox with that young lady. Among other things spoken of I asked my distinguished visitor some questions about this superstitious folly, Planchette, nothing doubting that I should hear from her an eloquent condemnation of all the absurd proceedings going on in the two villages. The lady's face assumed a decided expression of grave disapprobation, certainly, and she spoke to this effect: "Planchette! Oh dear, yes, we are perfectly familiar with Planchette, and, indeed, have been in the habit of consulting it quite often." "Oh, indeed," quoth I, and I felt my own face growing longer with amazement as I spoke. "Yes," continued my celebrated visitor, with much deliberation, "we have; but I think it will no longer be possible for us to do so. No, we must certainly give up having anything to do with it." "Dear me!" said I, almost breathless, and with a queer quaver in my voice, that I could hardly command, "may I ask why, pray?" "The language it uses----" "It!--the language _it_ uses!" ejaculated I. "Yes," she pursued, with increasing solemnity, "the language it uses is so reprehensible that it will be quite impossible for us to consult or have anything further to do with it." "Really," said I, hardly able to utter for suppressed laughter; "and may I ask, may I inquire what language it does use?" "Why," returned Mrs. S----, with some decorous hesitation and reluctance to utter the words that followed, "the last time we consulted it, it told us we were all a pack of damned fools." "Oh!" exploded I, "I believe in Planchette, I believe in Planchette!" Mrs. S---- drew herself up with an air of such offended surprise at my burst of irrepressible merriment that I suddenly stopped, and letting what was boiling below my laughter come to the surface, I exclaimed, in language far more shocking to ears polite than Planchette's own: "And do you really think that Satan, the great devil of hell, in whom you believe, is amusing himself with telling you such truths as those, through a bit of board on wheels?" "Really," replied the woman of genius, in a tone of lofty dignity, "I cannot pretend to say whether or not it is _the_ devil; of one thing I am very certain, the influence by which it speaks is undoubtedly devilish." I turned in boundless amazement to the younger lady, whose mischievous countenance, with a broad grin upon it, at once settled all my doubts as to the devilish influence under which Planchette had spoken such home truths to her family circle, and I let the subject drop, remaining much astonished, as I often am, at the degree to which _les gens d'ésprit sont bêtes_. I once attended some young friends to a lecture, as it called itself, upon electro-biology. It was tedious, stupid, and ridiculous; the only thing that struck me was the curious condition of bewildered imbecility into which two or three young men, who presented themselves to be operated upon, fell, under the influence of the lecturer. I had reason to believe that there was no collusion in the case, and therefore was surprised at the evident state of stupor and mental confusion (even to the not being able to pronounce their own name) which they exhibited when, after looking intently and without moving at a coin placed in their hand for some time, their faculties appeared entirely bewildered, and though they were not asleep, they seemed hardly conscious, and opposed not the slightest resistance to the orders they received to sit down, stand up, to try to remember their names,--which they were assured they could not, and did not,--and their general submission, of course in very trifling matters, to the sort of bullying directions addressed to them in a loud peremptory tone; to which they replied with the sort of stupefied languor of persons half asleep or under the influence of opium. I did not quite understand how they were thrown into this curious condition by the mere assumption of an immovable attitude and fixed gazing at a piece of coin; an experience of my own, however, subsequently enlightened me as to the possible nervous effect of such immobility and strained attention. My friend Sir Frederick Leighton, despairing of finding a model to assume a sufficiently dramatic expression of wickedness for a picture he was painting of Jezebel, was deploring his difficulty one day, when Henry Greville, who was standing by, said to him, "Why don't you ask her"--pointing to me--"to do it for you?" Leighton expressed some kindly reluctance to put my countenance to such a use; but I had not the slightest objection to stand for Jezebel, if by so doing I could help him out of his dilemma. So to his studio I went, ascended his platform, and having been duly placed in the attitude required, and instructed on what precise point of the wall opposite to me to fix my eyes, I fell to thinking of the scene the picture represented, of the meeting between Ahab and his wicked queen with Elijah on the threshold of Naboth's vineyard, endeavoring, after my old stage fashion, to assume as thoroughly as possible the character which I was representing. Before I had retained the constrained attitude and fixed immovable gaze for more than a short time, my eyes grew dim, the wall I was glaring at seemed to waver about before me, I turned sick, a cold perspiration broke out on my forehead, my ears buzzed, my knees trembled, my heart throbbed, and I suppose I was not far from a fainting fit. I sat abruptly down on the platform, and called my friendly artist to my assistance, describing to him my sensations, and asking if he could explain what had occasioned them. He expressed remorseful distress at having subjected me to such annoyance, saying, however, that my condition was not an uncommon one for painters' models to be thrown into by the nervous strain of the fixed look and attention, and rigid immobility of position, required of them; that he had known men succumb to it on a first experiment, but had thought me so strong, and so little liable to any purely nervous affection, that it had never occurred to him for a moment that there was any danger of my being thus overcome. I recovered almost immediately, the nervous strain being taken off, and resumed my duty as a model, taking care to vary my expression and attitude whenever I felt at all weary, and resting myself by sitting down and lending another aspect of my face to my friend for his Elijah. I found, after this experience, no difficulty in understanding the state of bewildered stupefaction into which the lecturer on electro-biology had thrown his patients by demanding of them a fixed attention of mind, look, and attitude to a given point of contemplation. I think, just before I quite broke down, I could neither have said where I was, nor who I was, nor contradicted Sir Frederick Leighton if he had assured me that my name was Polly and that I was putting the kettle on.] CLARGES STREET, June, 1844. DEAREST HARRIET, I have not a morsel of letter-paper in my writing-book; do not, therefore, let your first glance take offence at the poor narrow note-paper, on which our dear friend Emily is forever writing to me, and which throws me into a small fury every time I get an affectionate communication from her on it. Our drawing-room has only this instant emptied itself of a throng of morning visitors, among whom my brother John and his wife, Mary Anne Thackeray, Dick Pigott, Sydney Smith, and A---- C----.... My letter has suffered an interruption, dear Harriet; I had to go out and return all manner of visits, took a walk with Adelaide in Kensington Gardens, went and dined quietly with M---- M----, and came back at half-past ten, to find Mr. C---- very quietly established here with my father and sister.... This is to-morrow, my dear Harriet, and we are all engaged sitting to Lane, who is making medallion likenesses of us all. John and his wife together in one sphere, their two little children in another, ---- and I in one eternity, and our chicks in another, their two little profiles looking so funny and so pretty, one just behind the other; my father, my sister, and Henry have each their world to themselves in single blessedness. The likenesses are all good, and charmingly executed. I should like to be able to send you mine and my children's, but as he will accept no remuneration for them, and as time and trouble are the daily bread of an artist---- Here I was interrupted again, and obliged to put by my letter, which was begun last Thursday, and it is now Sunday afternoon. Our drawing-room has just emptied itself of A---- M---- and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Grote, Mr. H----, young Mr. K---- of Frankfort, and Chorley. Mrs. Grote brought with her Fanny Ellsler's little girl, a lovely child about seven years old.... I must tell you something of our event of yesterday. A concert was given for the benefit of the Poles, the Duchess of Sutherland condescending to lend Stafford House, provided the assemblage was quite select and limited to four hundred people; to accomplish which desirable point, and at the same time make the thing answer its charitable purpose, the tickets were sold at first at two guineas apiece, and on the morning itself of the concert at five guineas. Rachel was to recite, Liszt to play, and my sister was requested to sing, which she agreed to do, the occasion being semi-public and private, so to speak. A large assembly of our finest (and bluntest) people was not a bad audience, in a worldly sense, for her _début_. She sang beautifully, and looked beautiful, and was extremely admired and praised and petted. The whole scene was one of the gayest and most splendid possible, the entertainment and assembly taking place in the great hall and staircase of Stafford House, with its scarlet floor-cloths, and marble stairs and balustrades, and pillars of scagliola, and fretted roof of gold and white, and skylight surrounded and supported by gigantic gilt caryatides. The wide noble flights of steps and long broad galleries, filled with brilliantly dressed groups; with the sunlight raining down in streams on the panels and pillars of the magnificent hall, on the beautiful faces of the women, and the soft sheen and brilliant varied coloring of their clothes, and on perfect masses of flowers, piled in great pyramids of every form and hue in every niche and corner, or single plants covered with an exquisite profusion of perfect bloom, standing here and there in great precious china vases stolen from the Arabian Nights; it really was one of the grandest and gayest shows you can imagine, more beautiful than Paul Veronese's most splendid pictures, which it reminded one of. My sister's singing overcame me dreadfully.... I must close this letter, my dear; my head is in such a state of confusion that I scarcely know what I write; and if I keep it longer, you will never get it. Yours ever truly---- (I don't know what I am saying; I love you affectionately, but I am almost beside myself with--everything.) Yours ever, FANNY. CLARGES STREET, Sunday, June 20th, 1841. You know, dearest Harriet, my aversion to writing short letters; I have something of the same feeling about that hateful little note-paper on which I have lately written to you. The sight of these fair large squares laid on my table, and of at least six unanswered letters of yours, prompts me to use this quiet half-hour--quiet by comparison only, for ----, Adelaide, and little F---- are shouting all round me, and a distracting brass band, that I dote upon, is playing tunes to which I am literally writing in time; nevertheless, in this house, this may be called a moment of profoundest quiet. I do not believe that you will have quarrelled much with the note-paper, because I certainly filled it as well as I could; but I always feel insulted when anybody that I really care for writes to me on those frivolous, insufficient-looking sheets. I suppose, if you have missed Emily's Boswellian records of our sayings and doings here, you have received from her instead epistles redolent of the sweetness of the country, whole nosegays of words, that have made me gasp again for the grass and trees, and the natural enjoyments of life. Her affectionate remembrance reaches me every day by penny post, a little envelope full of delicious orange-blossoms, with which my clothes and everything about me are perfumed for the rest of the day. You have not said much to me about the daguerreotype, nor did you ask me anything about the process; but that, I suppose, is because Emily furnished you with so many more details than I probably should, and with much more scientific knowledge to make her description clear. I found it better looking than I had expected, but altogether different, which surprised me, because I thought I knew my own face. It was less thick in the outlines than I had thought it would be, but also older looking than I fancied myself, and it gave me a heavy jaw, which I was not conscious of possessing. The process was wonderfully rapid; I think certainly not above two minutes. I have seen several of Charles Young, which are admirable, and do not appear to me exaggerated in any respect.... My father and Adelaide dined with the Macdonalds on Sunday; and Sir John, who, you know, is adjutant-general, made her a kind of half promise that he would give Henry leave to come over from Ireland and see her. I believe the first time that S---- heard her aunt sing was one night after she was in bed (she sleeps in my room, where one does not lose a note of the music below). When I went up, I found her wide awake, and she started up in her bed, exclaiming, "Well, how many angels have you got down there, I should like to know?" I wrote thus much this morning, dear Harriet; this evening I have another quiet season in which to resume my pen.... I have been obliged to give up my dinner engagement for to-day, and I sat down by the failing light of half-past seven o'clock to eat a cold dinner alone, with a book in my hand: which combination of circumstances reminded me so forcibly of my American home, that I could hardly make out whether I was here or there. So far yesterday, Thursday evening; it is now Friday morning. Adelaide has gone out with Mary Anne Thackeray to buy cheap gowns at a bankrupt shop in Regent Street; the piano is silent, and I can hear myself think, and have some consciousness of what I am writing about.... Dearest Harriet, it is now Sunday morning; there is a most stupendous row at the pianoforte, and, luckily, there is no more space in this paper for my addled brains to testify to the effect of this musical tempest. God bless you. Ever yours, FANNY. CLARGES STREET, Wednesday, June 23rd, 1841. MY DEAREST HARRIET, You asked me some time ago some questions about Rachel, which I never answered, in the first place because I had not seen her then, and since I have seen her I have had other things I wanted to say. Everybody here is now raving about her. I have only seen her once on the stage, and heard her declaim at Stafford House, the morning of the concert for the Poles. Her appearance is very striking: she is of a very good height; too thin for beauty, but not for dignity or grace; her want of chest and breadth indeed almost suggest a tendency to pulmonary disease, coupled with her pallor and her youth (she is only just twenty). Her voice is the most remarkable of her natural qualifications for her vocation, being the deepest and most sonorous voice I ever heard from a woman's lips: it wants brilliancy, variety, and tenderness; but it is like a fine, deep-toned bell, and expresses admirably the passions in the delineation of which she excels--scorn, hatred, revenge, vitriolic irony, concentrated rage, seething jealousy, and a fierce love which seems in its excess allied to all the evil which sometimes springs from that bittersweet root. [I shall never forget the first time I ever heard Mademoiselle Rachel speak. I was acting my old part of Julia, in "The Hunchback," at Lady Ellesmere's, where the play was got up for an audience of her friends, and for her especial gratification. The room was darkened, with the exception of our stage, and I had no means of discriminating anybody among my audience, which was, as became an assembly of such distinguished persons, decorously quiet and undemonstrative. But in one of the scenes, where the foolish heroine, in the midst of her vulgar triumph at the Earl of Rochdale's proposal, is suddenly overcome by the remorseful recollection of her love for Clifford, and almost lets the earl's letter fall from her trembling hands, I heard a voice out of the darkness, and it appeared to me almost close to my feet, exclaiming, in a tone the vibrating depth of which I shall never forget, "_Ah, bien, bien, très bien!_"] Mademoiselle Rachel's face is very expressive and dramatically fine, though not absolutely beautiful. It is a long oval, with a head of classical and very graceful contour; the forehead rather narrow and not very high; the eyes small, dark, deep-set, and terribly powerful; the brow straight, noble, and fine in form, though not very flexible. I was immensely struck and carried away with her performance of "Hermione," though I am not sure that some of the parts did not seem to me finer than the whole, as a whole conception. That in which she is unrivalled by any actor or actress I ever saw is the expression of a certain combined and concentrated hatred and scorn. Her reply to Andromaque's appeal to her, in that play, was one of the most perfect things I have ever seen on the stage: the cold, cruel, acrid enjoyment of her rival's humiliation,--the quiet, bitter, unmerciful exercise of the power of torture, was certainly, in its keen incisiveness, quite incomparable. It is singular that so young a woman should so especially excel in delineations and expressions of this order of emotion, while in the utterance of tenderness, whether in love or sorrow, she appears comparatively less successful; I am not, however, perhaps competent to pronounce upon this point, for Hermione and Emilie, in Corneille's "Cinna," are not characters abounding in tenderness. Lady M---- saw her the other day in "Marie Stuart," and cried her eyes almost out, so she must have some pathetic power. ---- was so enchanted with her, both on and off the stage, that he took me to call upon her, on her arrival in London, and I was very much pleased with the quiet grace and dignity, the excellent _bon ton_ of her manners and deportment. The other morning too, at Stafford House, I was extremely overcome at my sister's first public exhibition in England, and was endeavoring, while I screened myself behind a pillar, to hide my emotion and talk with some composure to Rachel; she saw, however, how it was with me, and with great kindness allowed me to go into a room that had been appropriated to her use between her declamations, and was very amiable and courteous to me. She is completely the rage in London now; all the fine ladies and gentlemen crazy after her, the Queen throwing her roses on the stage out of her own bouquet, and viscountesses and marchionesses driving her about, _à l'envie l'une de l'autre_, to show her all the lions of the town. She is miserably supported on the stage, poor thing, the _corps dramatique_ engaged to act with her being not only bad, but some of them (the principal hero, principally) irresistibly ludicrous. By-the-by, I was assured, by a man who went to see the "Marie Stuart," that this worthy, who enacted the part of Leicester, carried his public familiarity with Queen Elizabeth to such lengths as to nudge her with his elbow on some particular occasion. Don't you think that was nice? Mrs. Grote and I have had sundry small encounters, and I think I perceive that, had I leisure to cultivate her acquaintance more thoroughly, I should like her very much. The other evening, at her own house, she nearly killed me with laughing, by assuring me that she had always had a perfect passion for dancing, and that she had entirely missed her vocation, which ought to have been that of an opera-dancer; (now, Harriet, she looks like nothing but Trelawney in petticoats.) I suppose this is the secret of her great delight in Ellsler. I find, in an old letter of yours that I was reading over this morning, this short question: "Does imagination make a fair balance, in heightening our pains and our pleasures?" That would depend, I suppose, upon whether we had as many pleasures as pains (real ones, I mean) to be colored by it; but as the mere possession of an imaginative temperament is in itself a more fertile source of unreal pains than pleasures, the answer may be short too; an imaginative mind has almost always a tendency to be a melancholy one. Shakespeare is the glorious exception to this, but then he is an exception to everything. I must bid you good-bye now.... God bless you, dear. Ever your affectionate, FANNY. [After seeing Mademoiselle Rachel, as I subsequently did, in all her great parts, and as often as I had an opportunity of doing so, the impression she has left upon my mind is that of the greatest dramatic genius, except Kean, who was not greater, and the most incomparable dramatic artist I ever saw. The qualities I have mentioned as predominating in her performances still appear to me to have been their most striking ones; but her expressions of tenderness, though rare, were perfect--one instance of which was the profound pathos of the short exclamation, "_Oh, mon cher, Curiace!_" that precedes her fainting fit of agony in "Camille," and the whole of the last scene of "Marie Stuart," in which she excelled Madame Ristori as much in pathetic tenderness as she surpassed her in power, in the famous scene of defiance to Elizabeth. As for any comparison between her and that beautiful woman and charming actress, or her successor on the French stage of the present day, Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt, I do not admit any such for a moment.] Bannisters, July 28th, 1841. DEAREST HARRIET, You certainly have not thought that I was never going to write to you again, but I dare say you have wondered when I should ever write to you again. This seems a very fitting place whence to address you, who are so affectionately associated with the recollection of the last happy days I spent here. How vain is the impatience of despondency! How wise, as well as how pleasant, it is to hope! Not that all can who would; but I verily believe that the hopeful are the wisest as well as the happiest of this mortal congregation; for, in spite of the credulous distrust of the desponding, the accomplishment of our wishes awaits us in the future quite as often as their defeat, and the cheerful faithful spirit of those who can hope has the promise of this life as well as of that which is to come. At the end of four years, here I am again with my dear friend Emily, even in this lovely home of hers, from which a doom, ever at hand, has threatened to expel her every day of these four years.... In spite of separation, distance, time, and the event which stands night and day at her door, threatening to drive her forth from this beloved home, here we are again together, enjoying each other's fellowship in these familiar beautiful scenes: walking, driving, riding, and living together, as we have twice been permitted to do before, as we are now allowed to do again, to the confusion of all the depressing doubts which have prevented this fair prospect from ever rising before my eyes with the light of hope upon it--so little chance did there seem of its ever being realized. Emily and I rode to Netley Abbey yesterday, and looked at the pillar on which your name and ours were engraved with so many tears before my last return to America. If I had had a knife, I would have rewritten the record, at least deepened it; but, indeed, it seems of little use to do so while the soft, damp breath of the air suffices to efface it from the stone, and while every stone of the beautiful ruin is a memento to each one of us of the other two, and the place will be to all time haunted by our images, and by thoughts as vivid as bodily presences to the eyes of whichever of us may be there without the others.... Our plans are assuming very definite shape, and you will probably be glad to hear that there is every prospect of our spending another year in England, inasmuch as we are at this moment in treaty for a house which we think of taking with my father for that time. My sister has concluded an extremely agreeable and advantageous engagement with Covent Garden, for a certain number of nights, at a very handsome salary. This is every way delightful to me; it keeps her in England, among her friends, and in the exercise of her profession; it places her where she will meet with respect and kindness, both from the public and the members of the profession with whom she will associate. Covent Garden is in some measure our vantage-ground, and I am glad that she should thence make her first appeal to an English audience. Our new house (if we get it) is in Harley Street, close to Cavendish Square, and has a room for you, of course, dearest Harriet; and you will come and see my sister's first appearance, and stay with me next winter, as you did last. Our more immediate plans stand thus: we leave this sweet and dear place, to our great regret, to-morrow; to-morrow night and part of Thursday we spend at Addleston with my brother; then we remain in town till Monday, when we go to the Hoo (Lord Dacre's); then we return to town, and afterwards proceed to Mrs. Arkwright's at Sutton, and then to the Francis Egertons', at Worsley; and after that we set off for Germany, where we think of remaining till the end of September. Adelaide's engagement at Covent Garden begins in November, when you must come and assist in bringing her out properly. God bless you, dear. Give my love to Dorothy, and believe me Ever affectionately yours, FANNY. THE HOO, Wednesday, July 28th, 1841. DEAREST HARRIET, I wrote you a long letter yesterday, which was no sooner finished than I tore it up.... We came down to this place yesterday. I obtained Lady Dacre's leave to bring my sister, and of course I have my children with me, so we are here in great force. Independently of my long regard for and gratitude to Lord and Lady Dacre, which made me glad to visit them, I like this old place, and find it pleasant, though it has no pretensions to be a fine one. Some part of the offices is Saxon, of an early date, old enough to be interesting. The house itself, however, is comparatively modern: it is a square building, and formerly enclosed a large courtyard, but in later days the open space has been filled up with a fine oak staircase (roofed in with a skylight), the carving of which is old and curious and picturesque. The park is not large, but has some noble trees, which you would delight in; the flower-garden, stolen from a charming old wood (some of the large trees of which are coaxed into its boundaries), is a lovely little strip of velvet lawn, dotted all over with flower-beds, like large nosegays dropped on the turf; and the rough, whitey-brown, weather-beaten stone of the house is covered nearly to the top windows with honeysuckle and jasmine. It is not at all like what is called a fine place; it is not even as pretty and cheerful as Bannisters: but it has an air of ancient stability and dignity, without pretension or ostentation, that is very agreeable.... We left my father tolerably well in health, but a good deal shaken in spirits.... I am expected downstairs, to read to them in the drawing-room something from Shakespeare; and our afternoon is promised to a cricket-match, for the edification of one of our party, who never saw one. I must therefore conclude.... Good-bye, dearest Harriet. As for me, to be once more in pure air, among flowers and under trees, is all-sufficient happiness. I do cordially hate all towns. Give my dear love to Mrs. Harry Siddons, if she is near you, and tell her I shall surely not leave Europe without seeing her again, let her be where she will. Remember me affectionately to Dorothy, and believe me. Ever yours, FANNY. THE HOO, Thursday, July 29th, 1841. DEAREST HARRIET, I wrote to you yesterday, but an unanswered letter of yours lies on the top of my budget of "letters to answer," and I take it up to reply to it. The life I am leading does not afford much to say; yet that is not quite true, for to loving hearts or thinking minds the common events of every day, in the commonest of lives, have a meaning.... After breakfast yesterday we took up Lady Dacre's translations from Petrarch--a very admirable performance, in which she has contrived to bend our northern utterance into a most harmonious and yet conscientious interpretation of those perfect Italian compositions. My sister read the Italian, which, with her pure pronunciation and clear ringing voice, sounded enchanting; after which I echoed it with the English translation; all which went on very prosperously, till I came to that touching invocation written on Good Friday, when the poet, no longer offering incense to his mortal idol, but penitential supplications to his God, implores pardon for the waste of life and power his passion had betrayed him into, and seeks for help to follow higher aims and holier purposes; a pathetic and solemn composition, which vibrated so deeply upon kindred chords in my heart that my voice became choked, and I could not read any more. After this, Adelaide read us some Wordsworth, for which she has a special admiration; after which, having recovered my voice, I took up "Romeo and Juliet," for which we all have a special admiration; and so the morning passed. After lunch, we went, B----, Lord Dacre, and I on horseback, Lady Dacre, Adelaide, and G---- S---- in the open carriage, to a pretty village seven miles off, where a cricket-match was being played, into the mysteries of which some of us particularly wished to be initiated. The village of Hitchin is full of Quakers, and I rather think the game was being played by them, for such a silent meeting I never saw, out of a Friends' place of worship. But the ride was beautiful, and the day exquisite; and I learned for the first time that clematis is called, in this part of England, "traveller's joy," which name returned upon my lips, like a strain of music, at every moment, so full of poetry and sweet and touching association does it seem to me. Do you know it by that name in Ireland? I never heard it before in England, though I have been familiar with another pretty nickname for it, which you probably know--virgin's-bower. This is all very well for its flowering season; I wish somebody would find a pretty name for it when it is all covered with blown glass or soap-bubbles, and looks at a little distance like smoke. Returning home, after entering the park, Lord Dacre had left us to go and look at a turnip-field, and B---- and I started for a gallop; when my horse, a powerful old hunter, not very well curbed, and extremely hard-mouthed, receiving some lively suggestion from the rhythmical sound of his own hoofs on the turf, put his head down between his legs and tore off with me at the top of his speed. I knew there was a tallish hedge in the direction in which we were going, and, as it is full seven years since I sat a leap, I also knew that there was a fair chance of my being chucked off, if he took it, which I thought I knew he would; so I lay back in my saddle and sawed at his mouth and pulled _de corps et a'âne_, but in vain. I lost my breath, I lost my hat, and shouted at the top of my voice to B---- to stop, which I thought if she did, my steed, whose spirit had been roused by emulation, would probably do too. She did not hear me, but fortunately stopped her horse before we reached the hedge, when my quadruped halted of his own sweet will, with a bound on all fours, or off all fours, that sent me half up to the sky; but I came back into my saddle without leap, without tumble, and with only my ignoble fright for my pains. We dine at half-past seven, after which we generally have music and purse-making and discussions, poetical and political, and wine and water and biscuits, and go to bed betimes, like wise folk.... This morning a bloodhound was brought me from the dog-kennel, the largest dog of his kind, and the handsomest of any kind, that I ever saw; his face and ears were exquisite, his form and color magnificent, his voice appalling, and the expression of his countenance the tenderest, sweetest, and saddest you can conceive; I cannot imagine a more beautiful brute. After admiring him we went to the stables, to see a new horse Lord Dacre has just bought, and I left him being put through his paces, to come and indite this letter to you.... We leave this place on Monday for London, at the thought of which I feel half choked with smoke already. The Friday after, however, we go into the country again, to the Arkwrights' and the Francis Egertons', and then to Germany; so that our lungs and nostrils will be tolerably free passages for vital air for some little time. God bless you, dearest Harriet. I have filled my letter with such matter as I had--too much with myself, perhaps, for any one but you; but unless I write you an epic poem about King Charlemagne, I know not well what else to write about here. Ever affectionately yours, FANNY. THE HOO, Sunday, August 1st, 1841. DEAREST HARRIET, I wrote you the day before yesterday, and gave you a sort of journal of that day's proceedings. I have nothing of any different interest to tell you, inasmuch as our daily proceedings here are much of a muchness. We return to town to-morrow afternoon, to my great regret; and I must, immediately upon our doing so, remove the family to our new abode. I am rather anxious to see how my father is; we left him in very low spirits, ... and I am anxious to see whether he has recovered them at all. I think our visit to Sutton, where we go on Friday, will be of use to him; for though he cordially dislikes the country and everything belonging to its unexciting existence, he has always had a very great attachment for Mrs. Arkwright, and perhaps, for so short a time as a week, he may be able to resist the ennui of _l'innocence des champs_.... I am well, and have been enjoying myself extremely. I love the country for itself; and the species of life which combines, as these people lead it, the pleasures of the highest civilization with the wholesome enjoyments which nature abounds in seems to me the perfection of existence, and is always beneficial as well as delightful to me. I rode yesterday a fine new horse Lord Dacre has just bought, and who is to be christened Forester, in honor of my beloved American steed, whom he somewhat resembles.... Considering our weather down here in Hertfordshire, I am afraid you must have most dismal skies at Ambleside, where you are generally so misty and damp; I am sure I recollect no English summer like this. As for poor Adelaide, she is all but frozen to death, and creeps about, lamenting for the sun, in a most piteous fashion imaginable. I have had a letter from Cecilia Combe within the last two days, anticipating meeting us on the Rhine, either at Godesberg, where she now is, or at Bonn, where she expects to pass some time soon. She complains of dulness, but accuses the weather, which she says is horrible. By-the-by, of Cecy and Mr. Combe I have now got the report containing the account of Laura Bridgman (the deaf, dumb, and blind girl of whom he speaks), and when you come to me you shall see it; it is marvellous--a perfect miracle of Christian love. Catherine Sedgwick's book (some notes of her visit to Europe) has just come out, and I am reading it again, having read the manuscript journal when first she returned home; a record, of course, of far more interest than the pruned and pared version of it which she gives to the public. I am also reading an excellent article in the last _Edinburgh_, on the society of Port Royal, which I find immensely interesting. I must now run out for a walk. It is Sunday, and the horses are not used, and I must acquire some exercise, through the agency of my own legs, before dinner. I have walked two miles this morning, to be sure; but that was to and from church, and should not count. God bless you, dearest Harriet. Ever yours, FANNY. LI�GE, Thursday, August 26th, 1841. MY DEAREST HARRIET, We have just returned from a lionizing drive about Liège, a city of which my liveliest impressions, before I saw it, were derived from Scott's novel of "Quentin Durward," and in which the part now remaining of what existed in his time is all that much interests me. I do not know whether in your peregrinations you ever visited this place; if you did, I hope you duly admired the palace of the prince bishop (formerly), now the Palais de Justice, which is one of the most picturesque remnants of ancient architecture I have seen in this land of them. Except this, and one fine old church, I have found nothing in the town to please or interest me much. I have seen one or two old dog-holes of houses, blackened and falling in with age, which seem as if they might be some of the cinders of Charles the Bold's burnings hereabouts. We left Brussels this morning, after spending a day and a half there. I was much pleased with the gay and cheerful appearance of that small imitation Paris, even to the degree of fancying that I should like to live there, in spite of the supercilious sentence of vulgarity, stupidity, and pretension which some of our friends, diplomatic residents there, passed upon the inhabitants.... We went to call upon the ----s, and, with something of a shock on my part, found one of the ornaments of his sitting-room a large crucifix with the Saviour in his death-agony--a horrible image, which I would banish, if I could, from every artist's imagination; for the physical suffering is a revolting spectacle which art should not portray, and the spiritual triumph is a thing which the kindred soul of man may indeed conceive, but which art cannot delineate, for it is God, and not to be translated into matter, save indeed where it once was made manifest in that Face and Person every imaginary representation of which is to me more or less intolerable. The face of Christ is never painted or sculptured without being painfully offensive to me; yet I have seen looks--who has not?--that were His, momentarily, on mortal faces; but they were looks that could not have been copied, even there.... These steamship and railroad times will do away with that staple idea, both in real and literary romances, of "never meeting again," "parting forever," etc., etc.; and people will now meet over and over again, no matter by what circumstances parted, or to what distance thrown from each other; whence I draw the moral that our conduct in all the quarters of the globe had better be as decent as possible, for there is no such thing nowadays as losing sight of people or places--I mean, for any convenient length of time, for purposes of forgetfulness. I forget whether, when you left us in London, my father had come to the determination of not accompanying but following us, which he intends doing as soon as he feels well enough to travel. Rubens's paintings have given us extreme delight.... I was much interested by the lace-works at Brussels and Mechlin, and very painfully so. It is beginning to be time, I think, in Christian countries, for manufactures of mere luxury to be done away with, when proficiency in the merest mechanical drudgery involved in them demands a lifetime, and the sight and health of women, who begin this twilight work at five and six years old, are often sacrificed long before their natural term to this costly and unhealthy industry. I hope to see all such manufactures done away with, for they are bad things, and a whole moral and intelligent being, turned into ten fingers' ends for such purposes, is a sad spectacle. I (a lace-worshipper, if ever woman was) say this advisedly; I am sorry there is still Mechlin and Brussels lace made, and glad there is no more India muslin, and rejoice in the disuse of every minute manual labor which tends to make a mere machine of God's likeness. But oh, for all that, how incomparably inferior is the finest, faultless, machine-made lace and muslin to the exquisite irregularity of the human fabric!... Good-bye, my dearest Harriet. We start for Aix-la-Chapelle at eight to-morrow. I am not in very good strength; the fact is, I am now never in thoroughly good plight without exercise on horseback, and it is a long time since I have had any, and, of course, it is now quite out of the question. I beg, desire, entreat, and command that you will immediately get and read Balzac's "Eugénie Grandet," and tell me instantly what you think of it. Your affectionate FANNY. WIESBADEN, Friday, September, 1841. MY DEAREST HARRIET, Walking along the little brook-side on the garden path under the trees towards the Sonnenberg, you may well imagine how vividly your image and that of Catherine Sedgwick were present to me. You took this walk together, and it was from her lively description of it that I knew, the moment I set my feet in the path, both where I was and where I was going. That walk is very pretty. I did not follow it to the end, because my children were with me, and it was too far for them; but yesterday I went to the ruin on horseback, and came home along the rough cart-road, on the hill on the other side of the valley, whence the views reminded me somewhat of the country round Lenox, in Massachusetts, though not perhaps of the prettiest part of the latter. I have not yet in my travels seen anything much more picturesque than the prettiest parts of the American Berkshire; and upon the whole (castles, of course, excepted) was rather disappointed in the Rhine, which is not, I think, as beautiful a river as the Hudson. Knowing the powerful charm of affectionate association, and the halo which happiness throws over any place where we attain to something approaching it, I have sometimes suspected that my admiration of and delight in that Lenox and Stockbridge scenery was derived in some measure from those sources, and that the country round them is not in reality as beautiful as it always appears in my eyes and to my memory. But, comparing it now with scenery admired by the travelling taste of all Europe, I am satisfied that the American scenery I am so fond of is intrinsically lovely, and compares very favorably with everything I have seen hitherto on the Continent. As for your friend Anne (my children's American nurse), coming up the Rhine she sat looking at the shores, her brown eyes growing rounder and rounder, and her handsome face full of as much good-humored contempt as it could express, every now and then exclaiming, "Well, to be sure, it's a pretty river, and it's well enough; but my! they hadn't need to make such a fuss about it." The fact is, that the noble breadth of the river forms one of its most striking features to a European, and this, you know, is no marvel to "us of the new world." Moreover, I suspect Anne does not consider the baronial castles "of much 'count," either; and, to confess the truth, I am rather disturbed at the little emotion produced in me by the romantic ruins and picturesque accompaniments of the Rhine. But it seems to me that I am losing much of my excitability; my imagination has become disgracefully tame, and I find myself here, where I have most desired to be, with a mind chiefly intent upon where, when, how, and on what my children can dine, and feelings principally occupied with the fact that I have no one with me to sympathize in any other thought or emotion if I should attempt to indulge in such. We arrived at Coblentz one melting summer afternoon, and I walked up to the top of the fortress alone, and the setting of the sun over beyond the lands and rivers at my feet, and the uprising of the moon above, the bristling battlements behind me, filled me with delight; but I had no one to express it to. This evening at Ehrenbreitstein, and the cathedral at Cologne, are my two events hitherto; the only two things that have stirred or affected me much. That cathedral is a whole liturgy in stone--eloquent, devout stone,--uttering so solemnly its great unfinished God-service of silent prayer and praise through all these centuries. I have seen many beautiful churches, but was never impressed by any as by this huge fragment of one. My father, as I have written you, stayed behind, saying that he would follow us. He has not done so yet, and I do not expect that he will, for reasons which I will not repeat, as I gave them to you in a long letter which I wrote to you from Liège, which I heartily hope you have received. [On arriving at Coblentz on a brilliant afternoon, so much of lovely daylight yet remained that I was most desirous to cross the river and ascend the great fortress of the Broad Stone of Honor, to see the sunset from its walls. I could not inspire anybody else with the same zeal, however; and, under the combined influence of disappointment and eager curiosity, started alone, at a brisk walk, and, crossing the bridge, began the ascent, and, gradually quickening my pace as I neared the summit, arrived, on a full run, breathless before the sentinel who guarded the last gates and amiably shook his head at my attempt to enter. The gates were open, and I saw, across the wide parade-ground, or _place d'armes_, where groups of soldiers were standing and loitering about, the parapet wall of the fortress, whence I had hoped to see the day go down over the Rhine, the Moselle, and all the glorious region round their confluence. "Oh, _do_ let me in," cried I in very emphatic English to the sentry, who gravely shook his head. "Where is your father?" quoth he in German, as I made imploring and impatient gestures, significant of my despair at the idea of having had that stupendous climb all for nothing. "I have none," cried I, in English and French all in a breath. Both were equally Greek to him. He gravely shook his head. "Where is your husband?" quoth he in German, to which I replied in German--oh, such German!--that "I had none, that I was a woman" (which he probably saw), "only a woman, an Englishwoman" (which he probably heard), "and that I could do no harm to his fortress; that I had come all alone, and run half the way up, and that I could not turn back, and he _must_ let me in!" He still shook his head gravely. I had the tears in my eyes, and felt ready to cry with vexation. Just then an officer approaching the gates from within, I addressed my eager supplications in sputtering, stuttering fragments of German, French, and English to him; and he, laughing good-naturedly, gave the sentinel the order to admit me; when I made straight across the great parade-ground, surrounded with the masses of the huge fortification, to the low parapet wall, whence I beheld the glorious landscape I had hoped to see, bathed in the sunset--a vision of splendor, which surpassed even what I had expected, as I looked down from the dizzy height, over the magnificent river and its beautiful tributary, and all the near and distant landscape, melting far away into golden vapory indistinctness. I did not dare to stay long, having to return again alone; so, thanking my kind conductor, who had evidently enjoyed my ecstasy at the beauty of his _Vaterland_, I left the fortress, stopping again at the gate to ask the name of my friendly sentinel whose resistance to my impetuous storming of the fort had been as mild and gentle as was consistent with his resolute refusal to admit me. Having not a scrap of paper with me, I wrote his name with my pencil on my glove, determined, when I returned through Coblentz, to bring him some token of my gratitude for his patient forbearance; and so I ran all the way down and back to the hotel. On our return, some weeks after, we visited Ehrenbreitstein with all the decorous solemnity of decent sight-seeing travellers; and, one of a party of four, I drove in state, in an open carriage, up the formidable approach that I had scaled so vehemently before. Duly armed with admits and permits, and all proper justifications of our approach, we drove under the huge archway, where stood another sentinel, and were received with courteous ceremony by some military gentlemen, under whose escort I leisurely went over the scene of my first visit, standing again, in more dignified enthusiasm, at the parapet where I had panted before in the breathless excitement of my run up the hill, my fight with the sentry, and my victory over him. Now, having been duly led and conducted and ushered and escorted all round, as we were about to depart, I begged, as a favor of the commanding officer, to be allowed to see again my friendly sentinel, for whom I had brought up a meerschaum of a pretty pattern that I had bought for him. "What was his name?" "Schneider." "Oh, there are several so called among the men. Should you know him again?" "Oh yes, indeed." And now ensued a general cry for Schneiders to present themselves. One after another was marched up, but without any resemblance to my friendly foe. Presently a word of command was given, followed by a brisk rolling of drums, when all the men came pouring out of the surrounding buildings, and formed in ranks on the ground. "You have seen them all--all the Schneiders," said the kindly commandant. "Ah, no! here is yet one;" and from the back ranks was pushed and pulled and thrust and shoved, perfectly crimson with shyness and suppressed laughter, one of the handsomest lads I ever saw. "Is this your man?" said the commanding officer, with a profound bow, and his face puckered up with laughing. "No," cried I (for it wasn't), quite overcome with confusion and the general laughter that followed the production of this last of the Schneiders. One of the officers then said that some of the troops had been sent elsewhere, not long after my first visit. "Ah, then," said the commandant, who had interested himself in my search with considerable amusement, "your Schneider, madame, has left Ehrenbreitstein." And so did we; I, not a little disappointed at not having seen again the worthy man who had not bayoneted me away from the gates, when I assailed them and him in such a frenzy.] We overtook my sister at Mayence, or rather, I and the children remained there, while some of our party went on to Frankfort, where she was. They returned to Mayence in a body: ----, Adelaide, Henry, Miss Cottin, Mary Anne Thackeray, our London friend Chorley, and the illustrious Liszt. Travelling leisurely, as we were compelled to do on account of the children, I missed, to my great regret, my sister's first two public performances--a concert, and a representation of Norma, which she gave at Frankfort, and of which everybody spoke with the greatest enthusiasm. On the evening of the day when she joined us at Mayence, she sang at a concert, and this was the first time that I really have heard her sing in public; for I did not consider the concert at Stafford House a fair test of her powers--the audience was too limited, in number and quality, to deserve the name of a public. The sweetness and freshness of her voice struck me more than ever, but it appears to me rather wanting in power; and the same impression was produced upon me when I heard her sing in the Kursaal here. If there should be deficiency of power in the voice, it will, I fear, affect her success in so large a theatre as Covent Garden.... She sings Norma again to-night at Mayence, and I am going--of course without any anxiety, for her success is already established here; and with great anticipations of pleasure--more even, if possible, from her acting than her singing; for the latter I am already familiar with, but of the former I have no experience, and have always entertained the greatest expectations of it, and I think I shall not be disappointed. We have obtained very pleasant apartments here, and I have established Anne and the children quite comfortably; they were beginning to suffer from the perpetual moving about, and I shall let them remain undisturbed here, during the rest of our stay in Germany, and shall either stay quietly with them, or accompany my sister, if it is determined that we are to do so, to the places of her various engagements. Since writing the above, I have seen my sister act Norma, and her performance fully equalled my expectation; which is great praise, for I have always had the highest opinion of her dramatic powers, and was, as I believe you know, earnest with her at one time to leave the opera stage and become an actress in her own language, as I was very sure of her entire success, and thought it a better and higher order of thing than this mere uttering of sound, and perpetual representation of passion and emotion, comparatively unmixed with intellect. To be sure, that would be to sacrifice some of her fine natural endowments, and the art and science of music, in which she has, at so much cost of time and labor, so thoroughly perfected herself, and which is in itself so exquisite a thing.... Her carriage is good, easy, and unembarrassed; her gestures and use of her arms remarkably graceful and appropriate. There is very little too much action, and that which appears to me redundant may simply seem so because her conception of the character is, in some of its parts, impulsive, where it strikes me as concentrated, and would therefore be sterner and stiller in its effect than she occasionally makes it. But she has evidently thought over the whole most carefully, considered the effects she intends to produce, and the means of producing them; and it is a far more finished performance, without any of the special defects which I should have expected in so great a lyrical tragic part, given by so young an artist. I suspect, however, that the severely mechanical element in music renders certainty in the performer's intentions necessary beforehand, to a much greater degree than in a merely dramatic performance; and thus a singer can seldom do the things which an actor sometimes does, upon the sudden inspiration of the moment, occasionally producing thus extraordinary effects. Some of the things my sister did were perfect--I speak now of her acting: they were as fine as some of Pasta's great effects, and her whole performance reminded me forcibly of that finest artist. I cannot help thinking, however, that she is cramped by the music, and I confess I should like to see her act Bianca without singing it, as I am satisfied that she would represent most admirably all characters of power and passion, and find in the great dramatic compositions of our stage, and especially in Shakespeare's plays, scope for her capacity which Italian operas cannot afford. Her voice is not as powerful as I expected, nor as I think it would have been if she had not striven to acquire artificial compass; that is, high notes which were not originally in her natural register,--the great aim of all singers being to sing the highest music, which is always that of the principal female character. The consequence of this is sometimes that the quality of the natural voice is in a measure sacrificed to the acquisition of notes not originally within its compass.... I have room for no more, dearest Harriet. Good-bye, and God bless you. Ever affectionately yours, FANNY. I wrote you an interminable letter from Liège. Did you ever get it? [The time we spent on the Rhine during this summer afforded me an opportunity of almost intimate acquaintance with the celebrated musician who had persuaded my sister to associate herself with him in the concerts he gave at the principal places on the Rhine where we stopped. Our whole expedition partook more of the character of a party of pleasure than a business speculation; and though Liszt's and my sister's musical performances were professional exhibitions of the highest order, the relations of our whole party were those of the friendliest and merriest tourists and _compagnons de voyage_. Nothing could exceed the charm of our delightful travelling through that lovely scenery, and sojourning in those pleasant picturesque antique towns, where the fine concerts of our two artists enchanted us even more, from personal sympathy, than the most enthusiastic audiences who thronged to hear them. Liszt was at this time a young man, in the very perfection of his extraordinary talent, and at the height of his great celebrity. He was extremely handsome; his features were finely chiselled, and the expression of his face, especially when under the inspiration of playing, strikingly grand and commanding. Of all the pianists that I have ever heard, and I have heard all the most celebrated of my time, he was undoubtedly the first for fire, power, and brilliancy of execution. His style, which was strictly original, and an innovation upon all that had preceded it, may be called the "Sturm und Drang," or seven-leagued-boot style of playing on the piano; and in listening to him, it was difficult to believe that he had no more than the average number of fingers, or that they were of the average length,--but that, indeed, they were not; he had stretched his hands like a pair of kid gloves, and accomplished the most incredible distances, while executing, in the interval between them, inconceivable musical feats with his three middle fingers. None of his musical contemporaries, Moscheles, Mendelssohn, Chopin, nor his more immediate rival, Thalberg, ever produced anything like the volcanic sort of musical effect which he did, perfect eruptions, earthquakes, tornadoes of sound, such as I never heard any piano utter but under his touch. But though he was undoubtedly a more amazing performer than any I ever listened to, his peculiar eccentricities were so inextricably interwoven with the whole mode and manner of his performances that, in spite of the many imitators they have inspired, he could by no means be regarded as the founder of anything deserving the name of a school of piano-playing. M. Rubinstein, I presume, in our own day, represents Liszt's peculiar genius better than any one else. The close, concise, crowded, and somewhat crabbed style of the great learned musical school of the Bachs, which may almost be called the algebra or geometry of musical composition, at any rate its higher mathematics, had certainly challenged a spirit of the most daring contrast in the young Hungarian prodigy, who electrified Paris, and carried its severe body of classical critics by storm, with the triumphant audacity of his brilliant and powerful style. Liszt became, at the very opening of his career, so immediately a miracle, and then an oracle, in the artistic and the great world of Paris that he was allowed to impose his own terms upon its judgment; and suffering himself the worst consequences of that order of success, he achieved too early a fame for his permanent reputation. A want of sobriety, a fantastical seeking after strange effects--in short, the characteristics of artistic _charlatanerie_--mixed themselves up with all that he did, and, as is inevitably the case, deteriorated the fine original gifts of his genius. When I first heard him, he had already reached the furthest limit of his powers, because they were exerted in a mistaken direction; and the exaggeration and false taste which were covered by his marvellous facility and strength gradually became more and more predominant in his performances, and turned them almost into caricatures of the first wonderful specimens of ability with which he had amazed the musical world. He could not go on being forever more astonishing than he had ever been before, and he paid the penalty of having made that his principal aim. His execution and composition alike became by degrees incoherent acrobatism, in which all that could call itself art was a mere combination of extraordinary and all but grotesque difficulties, devised for the sole purpose of overcoming them; musical convulsions and contortions, that forever recalled Dr. Johnson's epigram. In the summer of 1842 Liszt was but on the edge of this descent; his genius, his youth, his personal beauty, and the vivid charm of his manner and conversation had made him the idol of society, as well as of the artistic world, and he was then radiant with the fire of his great natural gifts, and dazzling with the success that had crowned them; he was a brilliant creature.... After this I never saw Liszt again until the summer of 1870. I had gone to the theatre at Munich, where I was staying, to hear Wagner's opera of the "Rheingold," with my daughter and her husband. We had already taken our places, when S---- exclaimed to me, "There is Liszt." The increased age, the clerical dress, had effected but little change in the striking general appearance, which my daughter (who had never seen him since 1842, when she was quite a child) recognized immediately. I went round to his box, and, recalling myself to his memory, begged him to come to ours, and let me present my daughter to him; he very good-naturedly did so, and the next day called upon us at our hotel, and sat with us a long time.... His conversation on matters of art (Wagner's music, which he and we had listened to the evening before) and literature was curiously cautious and guarded, and every expression of opinion given with extreme reserve, instead of the uncompromising fearlessness of his earlier years; and the abbé was indeed quite another from the Liszt of our summer on the Rhine of 1842. Liszt never composed any very good music; arrangement of the music of others was his specialty; and his versions of Schubert's, Weber's, and Mozart's finest melodies for the piano were the _ne plus ultra_ of brilliant and powerful adaptation, but required his own rendering to produce their full effect; and by far the most extraordinary exhibition of skill I ever heard on the piano was his performance of the airs from the Don Giovanni, arranged by himself. His literary style had the same qualities and defects as his music: brilliancy and picturesqueness, and an absence of genuineness and simplicity. He wrote a great deal of musical criticism, and an interesting life of Chopin. His conversation was sparkling and dazzling, and full of startling paradoxes; he had considerable power of sarcastic repartee, and once or twice is reported to have encountered the imperious queen of Austrian society, Madame de Metternich, with her own weapons, very successfully. She patronized Thalberg, and affected to depreciate Liszt; but having invited them both to her house on one occasion, thought proper to address the latter with some impertinent questions about a professional visit he had just been paying to Paris, winding up with, "Enfin, avez-vous fait de bonnes affaires là-bas?" To which he replied, "Pardon, Madame la Princesse, j'ai fait un peu de musique; je laisse les affaires aux banquiers et aux diplomates." Later in the evening, the lady, probably not well pleased with this rebuff, accosted him again, as he stood talking to Thalberg, with a sneering compliment on his apparent freedom from all jealousy of his musical rival; to which Liszt, who was very sallow, replied, "Mais, Madame la Princesse, au contraire, je suis furieusement jaloux de Thalberg; regardez donc les jolies couleurs qu'il a!" After which Madame la Princesse _le laissa en paix_. Between Thalberg and Liszt I do not think there could be any comparison. The exquisite perfection of delicate accuracy, combined with extraordinary lightness and velocity of execution, of Thalberg was his one unapproachable excellence, and as near the unerring precision of mere mechanism as possible: it was absolutely faultless; but it paid the penalty for being what things human may not be--it wanted the human element of passion and pathos. His performance was a miracle of art, and left his admiring auditors pleasingly amazed, but untouched in any of the deeper chords of sympathetic emotion. He had not a spark of the original genius or fire of Liszt. Moscheles, whom I have only named with the other two because he was a highly popular performer at the same time, was a more solid musician than either of them, and infinitely inferior as an executant to both. He was the most excellent of teachers, for which valuable office Thalberg would have wanted some and Liszt all the necessary qualifications. Of Chopin it is useless to speak: exceptional in his artistic nature and in his circumstances, he played his own most poetical music as no one else could; though his friend Dessauer, who was not a professional player at all, gave a most curious and satisfactory imitation of his mode of rendering his own compositions. But between Chopin and any other musical composer or performer there was never anything in common; he was original and unique in both characters. As for Mendelssohn, the organ was his real instrument, though he played very finely on the piano. He was not, however, a pre-eminent performer, but a composer of music; and I should no more think of comparing the quality of his genius with that of Liszt, than I should compare the Roman girandola with its sky-scaring fusees and myriads of sudden scintillations and dazzling coruscations, with the element that lights our homes and warms our hearths, or to the steadfast shining of the everlasting stars themselves. Of all the pianoforte players by whom I have heard Beethoven's music more or less successfully rendered, Charles Hallé has always appeared to me the one who most perfectly communicated the mind and soul of the pre-eminent composer. Our temporary fellowship with Liszt procured for us a delightful participation in a tribute of admiration from the citizen workmen of Coblentz, that was what the French call _saissant_. We were sitting all in our hotel drawing-room together, the _maestro_ as usual smoking his long pipe, when a sudden burst of music made us throw open the window and go out on the balcony, when Liszt was greeted by a magnificent chorus of nearly two hundred men's voices; they sang to perfection, each with his small sheet of music and his sheltered light in his hand, and the performance, which was the only one of the sort I ever heard, gave a wonderful impression of the musical capacity of the only really musical nation in the world.] WIESBADEN, Sunday, September. MY DEAREST HARRIET, I have already written to you from this place: one letter I wrote almost immediately after taking a walk which you had taken with Catherine Sedgwick, the year that you were here together, towards the Sonnenberg. You wrote me letters from here too, which I received up at Lenox, and read at a window looking out over a landscape very much resembling the neighborhood of this place. I remember your epistolary accounts of Wiesbaden were not very favorable: you did not like its watering-place aspect and fashions; and neither should I, if I was in any way mixed up with them. But we have hitherto none of us taken the waters; we have pretty and comfortable rooms, with the slight drawback of hearing our neighbors washing their hands and brushing their teeth, and drawing the natural conclusion as to the reciprocity of communications we make to them. We are at the Quatre Saisons, and with nothing but the Kursaal and its arcades between us and the gardens; so I am not oppressed with the feeling of a town, streets, houses, shops, etc., all which lie at my back and are never by any accident approached by me.... I have gone into the baths merely by way of what the French call _propreté_, being too lazy to go and fetch a wash under the arcade, in _de l'eau naturelle_. The water which supplies the baths in the Quatre Saisons is not by any means as strong as the _Kochbrunnen_, yet I fancied that it affected me unpleasantly, causing me a sensation of fullness in the head, and nausea, which was very disagreeable, as well as making me stupidly sleepy through the day.... Last Thursday I went to Frankfort to hear Adelaide sing; she was to perform, _en costume_, an act from three different operas, a sort of hotchpotch which, as she cares for her profession, I am surprised at her condescending to. We were not in time for the first, which was the last scene of the "Lucia di Lammermoor," but heard her in the last scene of "Beatrice di Tenda," and in the first scene of the "Norma." ... What she does is very perfect, but I think she occasionally falls short of the amount of power that I expected.... And all the time, I cannot help wishing that she would leave the singing part of the business, and take to acting not set to music. I think the singing cramps her acting, and I cannot help having some misgiving as to the effect she will produce in so large a theatre as Covent Garden; although, as she has sung successfully in the two largest theatres in Europe, the Scala at Milan and the San Carlo at Naples, I suppose my nervousness about Covent Garden is unnecessary.... Her movements and gesture are all remarkably graceful and easy; she is perfectly self-possessed, and impresses me even more as an artist than a genius, which I did not expect. I believe she will not sing to-morrow night, and, in that case, they will all come over and spend the day here, when Henry, Mary Anne Thackeray, and I purpose ascending Wiesbaden horses and riding to the duke's hunting-seat, which perhaps you drove to when you were here.... I confess to you, I cannot help sometimes feeling a little anxious about my sister's success in England, especially when I remember how formidable a predecessor she is to succeed--that wonderful Malibran, who added to such original genius and great dramatic power a voice of such uncommon force and brilliancy. Good-bye. This is the third long letter I have written to you since we came abroad. Ever yours, FANNY. AIX-LA-CHAPELLE, Monday, October 11th. MY DEAREST HARRIET, I begin to sniff the well-beloved fogs and coal-smoke of that best beloved little island to which I have the honor and glory of belonging, and my spirits are much revived thereby; for, to tell you the truth, England, bad as it is, is good enough for me, and I am grown old and stupid and sleepy and don't-carish, and think more about bugs and greasy food in the way of woe than of vine-clad hills and ruined castles in the way of bliss. Not that I have been by any means dissatisfied with my _tower_, though rather disappointed in the one fact of the Rhine: but I am incurious and always was, and I do not think that fault mends with age; and knights, squires, and dames too, alas! are no longer to me the interesting folk that they once were. "But it is past, the glory is congealing, The fervor of the heart grows dead and dim; I gaze all night upon a whitewashed ceiling, And catch no glimpses of the Seraphim." I think the ruins of the German hills especially excellent in that they are ruins, and can by no possibility ever again be made strongholds of debauchery, ferocity, and filth; and finally and to conclude, my dear Harriet, lights and shadows, the colors of the earth and sky, the beauty of God's creation, in short, alone now moves me very deeply, and this, I am thankful to say, is as powerful to do so as ever. I must tell you something pretty and poetical, and which I think has made more impression upon me than anything else in the course of my travels. The other evening at Cologne, by the sloping light of a watery autumnal sunset, the wind blowing loud and strong, the river rolling fast and free, and the great, violet-colored clouds drooping heavily down the sky, we suddenly heard the guns along each bank fire repeatedly, saluting the approach of some greatness or other down the stream. Whether it was king or kaiser, or only one of the merchant-princes to whom the navigation of this stream now belongs, and who receive these honors whenever they go up or down the river, nobody could tell; and still peal after peal was fired, and one echo rolled into another from shore to shore. At length a long low boat came in sight, sweeping down with the wide current towards the city walls. She was covered from stem to stern with bright flags and pennons, and was freighted with stone, which the Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt was sending down from his quarries, to help the people of Cologne to finish their beautiful cathedral; and as this cargo came along their shores they were saluting it with royal honors. The crane which was to lift the blocks from the boat had its great iron arm all wreathed with flowers, and flags and streamers floating from its top, which peaceful half-religious jubilee pleased me greatly, and affected me too. At Cologne, six weeks before, we had seen the King of Hanover, Ernest Augustus, the wicked Duke of Cumberland, received just in the same way, except that the cannonading was closed on that occasion, in an exceedingly appropriate manner to my mind, by a sudden fierce peal of derisive thunder. We went, while at Cologne, to the Museum, and there saw another beautiful thing of another sort, Bendermann's picture of the Jews weeping by the waters of Babylon--a very striking picture, sad and harmonious in its coloring, and full of feeling and expression; I was greatly impressed by it. And thus, you see, from only one of the places I have visited, I have brought away two living recollections, perpetual sources of pleasant mental contemplation. Two such treasures in one's storehouse of memory would have been worth the whole journey; but I have had many more such, and I incline to think that it is very often in retrospect that travel is most agreeable--the little annoyances and hindrances, which often qualify one's pleasure a good deal at the time one receives it, seldom mix themselves with the recollection of it in the same vivid manner; and so, as the American widow said she thought it was a charming thing "to have been married _and be done with it_," I think it is a charming thing to have been up the Rhine and be back again. I forget whether I wrote you word of my father's joining us for a single day at Frankfort, and then returning immediately to England.... He was not at all well, and the hurried journey was, I fear, a most imprudent one. My sister is at present at Liège with Henry, Liszt, and our friend Chorley.... Good-bye, my dearest H----. I am ever yours, FANNY. [My friend Miss S---- came to us in London, and witnessed with me my sister's coming out at Covent Garden, which took place on Tuesday, the 2nd of November, 1842, in Bellini's opera of "Norma," which she sang in English, retaining the whole of the recitative. My sister's success was triumphant, and the fortunes of the unfortunate theatre, which again were at the lowest ebb, revived under the influence of her great and immediate popularity, and the overflowing houses that, night after night, crowded to hear her. Her performances, which I seldom missed, were among my most delightful pleasures, during a season in which I enjoyed the companionship of my dear friend, and a great deal of pleasant social intercourse with the most interesting and agreeable people of the great gay London world.] BOWOOD, Sunday, December 19th. _To Theodore Sedgwick, Esq._ MY DEAR THEODORE, I cannot conceive how it happens that a letter of yours, dated the 8th September, should have reached me only a fortnight ago in London. Either it must have been forgotten after written, and not sent for some time, or Messrs. Harnden and Co.'s _Express_ is the slowest known conveyance in the world. However that may be, the letter and the Philadelphia Bank statement did arrive safe at last, and my father desires me to thank you particularly for your kindness in sending it to him. Not, indeed, that it is peculiarly consolatory in itself, inasmuch as it confirms our worst apprehensions about the fate of all moneys lodged in that disastrous institution. But perhaps it is better to have a term put to one's uncertainty, even by the positive conviction of misfortune not to be averted. My father's property in that bank--"The United States Bank"--was considerable for him, and had been hardly earned money. I understand from him that my share of our American earnings are in the New Orleans banks, which, though they pay no dividends, and have not done so for some time past, are still, I believe, supposed to be safe and solvent.... We are staying just now with Lord and Lady Lansdowne, in this pleasant home of theirs--a home of terrestrial delights. Inside the house, all is tasteful and intellectual magnificence--such pictures! such statues! And outside, a charming English landscape, educated with consummate taste into the very perfection of apparently natural beauty.... They are amiable, good, pleasant, and every way distinguished people, and I like them very much. He, as you know, is one of our leading Whig statesmen, a munificent patron of the arts and literature, a man of the finest taste and cultivation, at whose house eminences of all sorts are cordially received. Lady Lansdowne is a specimen Englishwoman of her class, refined, intelligent, well-bred, and most charming. I believe Lord Lansdowne was kindly civil to your aunt Catherine when she was in London; I wish she could have see this enchanting place of his. Rogers, Moore, and a parcel of choice _beaux esprits_ are staying here; but, to tell you a fact which probably accuses me of stupidity, they are so incessantly clever, witty, and brilliant that they every now and then give me a brain-ache. I do not know the exact depth of your patience, but I have an idea that it has a bottom, therefore I think it expedient not to pursue _crossing_ any further with you. Give my kindest love to Sarah, and Believe me ever, my dear Theodore, Yours very truly, FANNY BUTLER. Please remember me very kindly to your mother. I sat by a man at dinner yesterday, a Dr. Fowler of Salisbury, who was talking to me of having known her friends Mrs. Jay and Mrs. Banian, when they were in England; and their names were pleasant to me on account of their association with her. BOWOOD, Tuesday, December 21st, 1841. Did you expect an immediate answer from me, dear Harriet, or did you think your letters would be put at the bottom of the budget, to wait their appointed time? You say your thought in parting from me was chiefly to preserve your tranquillity; and so was mine to preserve my own and yours.... There are many occasions on which I both feel much more than I show, and perceive in others much more feeling than I believe they think I am aware of. There are times when, for one's own sake, as well as for that of others, to be--or, if that is not possible, to seem--absorbed in outward things of the most indifferent description is highly desirable; and I am even conscious sometimes of a sort of hardness, which seems to come involuntarily to my aid, in seasons when I know myself or fear that others are about to be carried away by their feelings, or to break down under them.... I was glad enough to get your second letter, and to know you were safe in Dublin. It was calm the night you crossed, but it has blown once or twice fearfully since. Our visit to the Francis Egertons, at Worsley, was prosperous and pleasant in the highest degree; and we are now paying our promised one at Bowood. I must tell you a trait of Anne [my children's American nurse], who, it is my belief, is nothing less than the Princess Pocahontas, who, having returned to earth, has condescended to take charge of my children. You know that this place is celebrated; the house is not only fine in point of size, architecture, and costly furnishing, but is filled with precious works of art, painting and sculpture, modern and ancient, beautiful, rare, and costly. The first day that we arrived, ushered up the great staircase to our rooms, I followed the servant with wide-open eyes, gazing in delighted admiration at everything I saw. "Well," said I to Anne, "is not this a fine house, Anne?" "The staircase is well enough," was her imperturbable reply. Wouldn't one think she had had the Vatican for her second-best house, and St. Peter's for her private chapel, all the days of her life? She certainly must have, some Indian blood in her veins. This morning I took a brisk walk along the sunny terrace, where, from under the shining shelter of holly, laurel, cedar, and all other evergreen shrubs and trees, one looks over a garden--that even now, with its graceful vases, its terraces, its ivy winter dressing, is gay and beautiful--to a lawn that slopes gently to a sheet of water, losing itself like a lake among irregular wooded banks, whose brown feathery outline borrows from the winter's sun a golden tinge of soft sad splendor. Upon this water swans and wild-fowl sail and sport about; and the whole scene this morning, tipped with sparkling frost, and shining under a brilliant sky, seemed very charming to me, and to S---- too, who, running by my side, exclaimed, "Well, this is my idea of heaven! I do think this might be called Paradise, or that garden--I forget its name--that Adam and Eve were put into!" (Eden had escaped her memory, as, let us hope, in time it did theirs.) I was pleased to find that my Biblical teachings had suggested positive images, and that she had caught none of her nurse's stolid insensibility to beauty.... We have a choice society here just now, and fortunately among them persons that we know and feel at our ease with: Rogers, Moore, Macaulay, Babbage, Westmacott, Charles Greville, and two or three charming, agreeable, unaffected women.... You ask if Lady Holland is at Bowood. No, she had returned home _by land_, as they say [at the beginning of railroad travelling, persons who still preferred the former method of posting on the high-road were said to go by land], not choosing to risk her precious body on the railway without Brunel's personal escort to keep it in order and prevent it from doing her any accident. He having had the happiness of travelling down to Bowood with her, which she insisted upon, naturally enough declined coming all the way down again from London to see her safe home; so not being able to accomplish his fetching her back to town, she contrived to extort from him a letter stating that, owing to the late heavy rains, her journey back to London upon the railroad would probably be both tedious and uncomfortable, and advising her by all means to go home "by land," which, considering that the Great Western is his own road--his iron child, so to speak,--by which he is bound to swear under all circumstances, is, I think, a pretty good specimen of her omnipotence. She did post home accordingly, but not without dismal misgivings as to what might befall her while crossing a wood of Lord Salisbury's, where she was to be, for a short space of time, seven miles off from any village or town. I never knew such a terrified, terrible, foolish old woman in my life. After all, she is right: life is worth more to very good and to very good-for-nothing people than to others. My father dined with her in town while we were away, and in her note of invitation she included us, if we had returned, saying all manner of civil fine things about me; but, as far as I am concerned, it won't do, and she cannot put salt upon my tail.... We returned to town on Friday. Charles Greville saw my father on Saturday, and says he is, and is looking, very well. Adelaide was gone down to Addlestone, to see John and his wife. My children--bless them!--are making such a riot here at my table that I scarcely know what I am writing. Good-bye, dearest Harriet. I will write to you again to-morrow. Ever yours, FANNY. _Bowood_, Wednesday, December 22nd, 1841. _Dearest Harriet_, I was a "happy woman" at Worsley [a "happy woman" was the term used by me from my childhood to describe a woman on horseback], and, as sometimes happens, had even too much of my happiness. My friend Lady Francis is made of whalebone and india-rubber in equal proportions, very neatly and elegantly fastened together with the finest steel springs, and is incapable of fatigue from exertion, or injury from exposure. Having an exalted idea of my capabilities in the way of horse exercise (which, indeed, when I am in my usual condition, are pretty good), she started off with me to H----, a distance of about eight miles, and we did the whole way there and back (besides an episodical gallop, three times full tear round a field, to tame our horses, which were wild) either at a hard gallop or a harder trot. I, who have grown fat and soft, and have hardly ridden since I left America, came home bruised and beaten, and aching in every limb to that degree that I was glad to lie down--conceive the humiliation!--and was much put to it to get up again to dress for dinner; having, moreover, the consolation of being assured by Lady Francis that she had ridden thus hard out of pure consideration for me; supposing that the faster I went, the better I should be pleased. I was, besides, mounted upon a fiery little fiend of a pony, who pulled my arms out of their sockets and would not walk. However, by repeating the dose every day, I suffered less and less, and am now once more in excellent riding condition. I remember a ludicrous circumstance of the same kind happening to me in America, on the occasion of the first ride I ever took with my brother-in-law, who was then comparatively a stranger to me. He was a cavalry officer, a capital horseman, and hard rider; which qualities he exhibited the first time I ever went out with him, by riding at such a pace and for such a length of time that, perceiving he did not kill himself, I asked if he was in the habit of killing his horse every time he rode out; when he burst out laughing, and assured me that he thought he was only conforming to my habitual pace. Yesterday I varied my exercise, for I went out on horseback with Lord Lansdowne, and finding the roads dangerously slippery for our horses, which were not sharped, when we were at some distance from Bowood we dismounted, and gave them to the groom, and came home on foot, a distance of three miles, which, carrying one's habit [riding-skirts in those days were very long], I think was as good as four. You cannot conceive anything more melancholy than the aspect of H----.... It was a miserable day, dark, dismal, and foggy; the Manchester smoke came down, together with a penetrating cold drizzle, like the defilement and weeping of irretrievable shame, and sin, and sorrow; and the whole aspect of the place struck me with dismay. The house was shut up, and looked absolutely deserted, not a soul stirring about it; the garden dismantled and out of order. Altogether, the contrast of the whole scene to that which I remembered so bright, cheerful, gay, and lovely, combined with the cause of its present condition, struck me as beyond measure mournful.... You ask after the welfare of my children's nurse, Anne; and I will tell you something comically characteristic both of the individual and her nation. Here at Bowood she eats alone with the children, as she has been in the habit of doing at home; but at Worsley the little ones dined with us at our luncheon-table, and she ate in the housekeeper's room. Not knowing myself exactly what would be the place assigned to an American nursery-maid in the society of the servants' hall at Worsley, I inquired of her whether she was comfortable and well-treated. She said, "Oh, yes, perfectly well;" but there seemed to me by her manner to be something or other amiss, and upon my inquiring further, she said, "Well, then, Mrs. Butler, I'll tell you what it is: I do wish they'd let me dine at the lower table. Everything is very good and very fine, to be sure, and the people are very kind and civil to me, but I cannot bear to have men in livery and maid-servants standing up behind my chair waiting on me, and that's the truth of it." She said this with an air of such sincere discomfort that it was quite evident to me that if, in common with her countrymen, she thought herself "as good as anybody," she certainly was not seduced by the glories of the upper table into forgetting that any one was as good as she. I was spared the discomfort of having the children in another house; for either Lady Francis has fewer guests than she expected, or she had contrived to manage better than she had supposed she could, for they were lodged under the same roof with me, and quite near enough for comfort or convenience.... Thank you for your kindness in copying that account of Cavanagh for me; thank you, too, for Archbishop Whately's book, which I read immediately. There is nothing in it that I have not read before, nor certainly anything whatever to alter my opinion that the accumulation of enormous wealth in the hands of individuals who transmit it to their eldest sons, who inherit it without either mental or physical exertion of theirs, is an inevitable source of moral evil. There was nothing in that book to shake my opinion that hereditary idleness and luxury are not good for the country where they exist. An opinion was expressed in general conversation by almost everybody at Worsley which suggested a conclusion to my mind that did not appear to occur to any one else. In speaking of the education of young English boys at our great public schools, the whole system pursued in those institutions was condemned as bad; but on all sides, nevertheless, admitted to be better (at any rate, for the sons of noblemen) than the incessant, base, excessive complaisance and flattery of their servants and dependents, from which they all said that it was impossible to screen them in their own homes, and equally impossible that they should not suffer serious moral evil. Lord Francis said that for a lad like his nephew, the Marquis of Stafford, there was but one thing worse than being educated at Eton, and that was being educated at home; therefore, concluded they all in chorus, we send our boys to our public schools. So the children are sent away lest they should be corrupted by the obsequious servants and luxurious habits and general mode of life of their parents. And this, of course, is one of the inevitable results of distinctions of classes and hereditary wealth and influence; it is not one of the good ones, but there are better. God bless you, dearest Harriet. I wrote to you yesterday, and shall probably do so again to-morrow. Ever yours, FANNY. HARLEY STREET, LONDON, Sunday, December 26th, 1841. DEAR HARRIET, I must tell you a droll little incident that occurred the day of our leaving Bowood. As I was crossing the great hall, holding little F---- by the hand, Lord Lansdowne and Moore, who were talking at the other end, came towards me, and, while the former expressed kind regrets at our departure, Moore took up the child and kissed her, and set her down again; when she clutched hold of my gown, and trotted silently out of the hall by my side. As the great red door closed behind us, on our way to my rooms, she said, in a tone that I thought indicated some stifled sense of offended dignity, "Pray, mamma, who was dat little dentleman?" Now, Harriet, though Moore's fame is great, his stature is little, and my belief is that my three-year-old daughter was suffering under an impression that she had been taken a liberty with by some enterprising schoolboy. Oh, Harriet! think if one of his own Irish rosebuds of sixteen had received that poet's kiss, how long it would have been before she would have washed that side of her face! I believe if he had bestowed it upon me, I would have kept mine from water for its sake, till--bed-time. Indeed, when first "Lalla Rookh" came out, I think I might have made a little circle on that cheek, and dedicated it to Tom Moore and dirt forever; that is--till I forgot all about it, and my habit of plunging my face into water whenever I dress got the better of my finer feelings. But, you see, he didn't kiss my stupid little child's intelligent mother, and this is the way that fool Fortune misbestows her favors. She is spiteful, too, that whirligig woman with the wheel. I am not an autograph collector, of course; if I was, I shouldn't have got the prize I received yesterday, when Rogers, after mending a pen for me, and tenderly caressing the nib of it with a knife as sharp as his own tongue, wrote, in his beautiful, delicate, fine hand, by way of trying it-- "The path of sorrow, and that path alone, Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown." Is that a quotation from himself or some one else? or was it an impromptu?--a seer's vision, and friend's warning? Chi sa? I cannot help being a little surprised at the earnestness with which you implore me to read Archbishop Whately's treatise. My objection to reading of books never extends to any book either given or lent, or strongly recommended to me. I am so fond of reading that I care very little what I read, so well satisfied am I with the movement and activity which even the stupidest, shallowest book rouses in my mind. With regard to the little work in question, you probably thought the subject might not interest me, and therefore I should neglect it. The subject, _i.e._, political economy, interests me so little that, though I have read at various times and in sundry places publications of the same nature with much attention, they, in common with other books on other subjects for which I do not care, have left not the slightest trace upon my memory; at least, until I come to read the matter all over again, when my knowledge of it reappears, as it were, on the surface of my mind, though it had seemed to me to run through my brain like water through a sieve. I have no doubt that from my mode of talking of different peoples, under various systems of government, you would not suspect me of having ever looked into the simplest treatise on political economy and similar subjects; but I have read most of the popular expositions of those grave matters that the press now daily puts forth; but as they, for the most part, deal with things as they _are_, and my cogitations are chiefly as to things as they _should be_, I do not find my studies avail me much. I believe I wrote you word after reading the book you sent me, and thinking it a very excellent abridged exposition of such subjects; I still could not understand what it had to do with the theory of laws for the division of property, or the expediency of the law of primogeniture, and the advantages of the distinctions of rank, to the societies where they exist. The question seems to me rather whether these remains of feudalism have or have not outlived their uses. By-the-by, in taking off the cover in which you had wrapped the book, I did not perceive that you had written upon it until I had thrown it into the fire. I assure you that at the moment I was a great deal sorrier than if the worthy little volume itself had been grilling on the top of the coals. We returned here on Friday, and found my father and Adelaide going on much as usual. Half a score of invitations, of one sort and another, waiting for us, and London, with its grim visage, looking less lovely than ever after the sweet, tender, wintry beauty of Bowood; where one walked, for a whole morning at a time, among hollies and laurels and glittering evergreens, which, by the help of the sunshine we enjoyed while we were there, gave the lie triumphant to the dead season. I have been nurse almost all the day. Anne, who, poor girl! has had a long fast from her devotional privileges, went to church, and I walked with the children to the broad gravel walk in the Regent's Park, where I took that "exercise of agony" with you one afternoon; the day was much the same too, bright and sunny above, and exceedingly muddy and hateful under foot. The servants having their Christmas dinner to-day, I offered to take entire charge of the children, if Anne liked to join the party downstairs. She affably condescended, and they prolonged the social meal, or their after-dinner converse, for considerably more than two hours. Since that, I have been reading to S----, and it is now time for me to dress for dinner. Adelaide and I dined _tête-à-tête_ to-day; my father dined with Miss Cottin. I have refused, because it is Sunday; Adelaide, because she is lazy; but she means to make the effort to go in the evening, and I shall go to bed early, and very glad I shall be to shut up shop, for this has been a very heavy day. How well nurses ought to be paid! God bless you, dear Harriet. Ever yours, FANNY. HARLEY STREET, Tuesday, December 28th, 1841. MY DEAREST HARRIET, I wrote you two long letters from Bowood, and one crossed note since I came back to town; yet in a letter I get from you this morning you ask me when your letters are "coming to the top" [of my packet of "my letters to be answered," to which I always replied in the succession in which they reached me]; at which, I confess, I feel not a little dismayed. However, it is to be hoped that you will get them sooner or later, and that, in this world or the next, you will discover that I wrote to you two such letters, at such a time.... How can you ask me if I _play fair_ with my letters? Are you not sure that I do? and, whatever may be the case with my better qualities, are not my follies substantial, reliable, consistent, constant follies, that are pretty sure to be found where you left them? Good-bye, my dearest Harriet. I am terribly out of spirits, but it is near bed-time, and the day will soon be done.... God bless you, dear. Give my kindest love to Dorothy. I am thinking of your return with earnest longing.... As we passed the evening at the Hen and Chickens, in the same room where I began reading you "Les Maîtres Mosaistes," on our return through Birmingham from the lately formed association, your image was naturally very vivid in our memories. I am ever yours, FANNY. HARLEY STREET, December 28th, 1841. DEAREST GRANNY, [This was an affectionate nickname that my friend Lady Dacre assumed towards me, and by which I frequently addressed her], I do not mean this time to tax your forgiveness of injuries quite so severely as before, though you really have such a pretty knack of generosity that it's a pity not to give you an opportunity of exercising it. Here we are again in our Harley Street abode, which, by favor of the fogs, smokes, and various lovely December complexions of London, looks but grimly after the evergreen shrubberies and bowers of Bowood, which I saw the evening before I came away to peculiar advantage, under the light of an unclouded moon. I left there the goodliest company conceivable: Rogers, Moore, Macaulay, Charles Austen, Mr. Dundas, Charles Greville, and Westmacott: so much for the mankind. Then there was dear old Miss Fox [Lord Holland's sister], whom I love, and Lady Harriet Baring [afterwards Lady Ashburton], whom I do not love, which does not prevent her being a very clever woman; and that exceedingly pretty and intelligent Baroness Louis Rothschild, et cetera. It was a brilliant party, but they were all so preternaturally witty and wise that, to tell you the truth, dear Granny, they occasionally gave me the mind-ache. As for Macaulay, he is like nothing in the world but Bayle's Dictionary, continued down to the present time, and purified from all objectionable matter. Such a Niagara of information did surely never pour from the lips of mortal man! I think our pilgrimages are pretty well over for the present, unless the Duke of Rutland should remember a particularly courteous invitation he gave us to go to Belvoir some time about Christmas--a summons which we should very gladly obey, as I suppose there are not many finer places in England or out of it. I am sorry you have parted with Forrester [a horse Lady Dacre had named after a favorite horse of mine]; I liked to fancy my dear old horse's namesake at the Hoo. Give my love to Lord Dacre, and my well-beloved B---- and G---- [Lady Dacre's granddaughters]. I am glad the former is dancing, because I like it so much myself. I look forward to seeing you all in the spring, and in the mean time remain, dear Granny, Yours most affectionately, FANNY. [I became subsequently well acquainted with Lord Macaulay, but no familiarity ever diminished my admiration of his vast stores of knowledge, or my amazement at his abundant power of communicating them. In my visits to the houses of my friends, alike those with whom I was most and least intimate, I always passed a great deal of my time in my own room, and never remained in the drawing-room until after dinner, having a decided inclination for solitude in the morning and society in the evening. I used, however, to look in during the course of the day, upon whatever circle might be gathered in the drawing or morning rooms, for a few minutes at a time, and remember, on this occasion of my meeting Macaulay at Bowood, my amazement at finding him always in the same position on the hearth-rug, always talking, always answering everybody's questions about everything, always pouring forth eloquent knowledge; and I used to listen to him till I was breathless with what I thought ought to have been _his_ exhaustion. As one approached the room, the loud, even, declamatory sound of his voice made itself heard like the uninterrupted flow of a fountain. He stood there from morning till evening, like a knight in the lists, challenging and accepting the challenge of all comers. There never was such a speech-"power," and as the volume of his voice was full and sonorous, he had immense advantages in sound as well as sense over his adversaries. Sydney Smith's humorous and good-humored rage at his prolific talk was very funny. Rogers's, of course, was not good-humored; and on this very occasion, one day at breakfast, having two or three times uplifted his thread of voice and fine incisive speech against the torrent of Macaulay's holding forth, Lord Lansdowne, the most courteous of hosts, endeavored to make way for him with a "You were saying, Mr. Rogers?" when Rogers hissed out, "Oh, what I was saying will keep!" I have spoken of Macaulay's discourse as a torrent; it was rather like the smooth and copious stream of the Aqua Paola, a comparison which it constantly suggested to me; the resonant, ceaseless, noble volume of water, the great fountain perpetually poured forth, was like the sonorous sound and affluent flow of his abundant speech, and the wide, eventful Roman plain, with all its thronging memories of past centuries, seen from the Janiculum, was like the vast and varied horizon of his knowledge, forever swept by his prodigious memory.] HARLEY STREET, Wednesday, December 29th, 1841. MY DEAREST HARRIET, Just imagine my ecstasy in answering your last letter, dated the 24th! I actually _do up_ the whole of that everlasting bundle of letters, which is a sort of waking nightmare to me. I have been within two or three of the last for the last week, and having seldom seen myself so very near the end, I had a perfect fever of desire to exist, if only for a day, without having a single letter to answer. And now that I have tossed into the fire a note of Charles Greville's, which I have just replied to, and have unfolded your last and do the same by it, _i.e._ answer and burn it, the yellow silk cord that bound that ominous bundle of obligations lies empty on the inkstand, and I feel like Charles Lamb escaping from his India House clerkship, a perfect lord, or rather lady, of unlimited leisure. You ask me if I think letters will go on to be answered in eternity? That supposition, my dear, involves the ideas of absence and epistolary labor, both of which may be included in the torments of the damned, but, according to my notions of heaven, there will be no letter-_writing_ there. As, however, the receiving of letters is, in my judgment, a pleasure extremely worthy to be numbered among the enjoyments of the blessed, I conclude that letters will occasionally come _to_ heaven, and always be written in--the other place; so perhaps our correspondence may continue hereafter. Who the writer and who the receiver shall be remains to be proved (it's my belief that the use of pen and ink would have made any one of the circles of the Inferno tolerable to you); and in any case, those are epistles that it is not necessary to antedate. Klopstock wrote and published--did he not?--letters which he wrote to his wife Meta in heaven. The answers are not extant; perhaps they were in an inferior style, humanly speaking, and he considerately suppressed them. But to speak seriously, you forget in your query one of the principal doubts that exercise my mind, _i.e._, whether there will be any continuation of communion at all hereafter between those who have been friends on earth; whether the relations of human beings to each other here are not merely a part of our spiritual experience, that portion of the education and progress of our souls that will terminate with this phase of our existence and be succeeded by other influences, new ones, fitted as these former have been to our (new) needs and conditions, by the Great Governor of our being. He alone knows; He will provide for them.... The Coutts and Lord Strangford business (a dirty piece of money-scandal) is nice enough, but I heard a still _nicer_ sequel to it at Bowood the other day. The gentlemen of the party were discussing the matter, and seemed all agreed upon the subject of Lord Strangford's innocence; but while declaring unanimously that the accusation was unfounded and unwarrantable, they added it was not half as bad as an attack of the same sort made by one of the papers upon Lords Normanby and Canterbury, which, after much discussion, was supposed to have been dictated entirely by political animosity; the sole motive assigned for the selection of those two men as the objects of such an odious accusation being the fact of their personal want of popularity, and also that they were known to be needy men, whose fortunes were considerably crippled by their extravagance. Of course, lie-makers must make plausibility one element of their craft; but this did seem a pleasant specimen of the manufacture. To be sure, I am bound to add that this account came from Whigs, and the attack was made by a Tory paper upon two members of the ex-Government; so you may believe it or not, according as you are Whig or Tory inclined to-day (that is to say, the motives assigned); the attack itself is not matter of doubt, having been visibly printed in one or more of the Tory papers. Both parties, however, have, I suppose, their staff of appointed technical and professional liars. Good-bye, dear. Ever yours, FANNY. HARLEY STREET, Thursday, December 30th, 1841. DEAREST HARRIET, ... I am a little surprised at your writing to me about my rule of correspondence as you do, because in several instances when you have particularly desired me to answer you immediately, I have done so; and should always do so, not by you alone, but by any one who requested an immediate reply to a letter. If it were in my power to answer such a communication on the same day, I should certainly do it, and, under such circumstances, always have done so. As for my _rule_ of letter-writing, absurd as some of its manifestations undoubtedly are, it is not, I think, absurd _per se_; and I adopted it as more likely to result in justice to _all_ my correspondents than any other I could follow. I have a great dislike to letter-writing, and, were I to consult my own disinclination, instead of answering letter for letter with the most scrupulous conscientiousness as I do, even the persons I love best would be very apt to hear from me once or twice a year, and perhaps, indulgence increasing the incapacity and disinclination to write (as the example of every member of my own family shows it must), I should probably end by never writing at all. I have always thought it most desirable to answer letters on the same day that I received them; but, of course, this is not always possible; and my rather numerous correspondence causing often a rapid accumulation of letters, I have thought, when such an _arrearage_ took place, the fittest thing to do was to answer first those received first, and so discharge my debts justly in point of time. With regard to replying to questions contained in letters received some time back, my scrupulousness has to do with my own convenience, as well as my correspondents' gratification. Writing as much as I do, I am, as Rosalind calls it, "gravelled for matter" occasionally, and in that emergency a specific question to answer becomes a real godsend; and, my cue once given me, I can generally contrive to fill my paper. I do not think you know how much I dislike letter-writing, and what an effort it sometimes costs me, when my spirits are at the lowest ebb, and my mind so engrossed with disheartening contemplations, that any exertions (but violent physical ones, which are my salvation for the most part) appear intolerable. But I ought to tell you about our journey from Bowood, which threatened to be more adventurous than agreeable. We did, as you suppose, come down the railroad only a few hours after the occurrence of the accident. When we started from Chippenham, some surprise was expressed by the guards and railroad officials that the early train from London had not yet come up. Farther on, coming to a place where there was but one track, we were detained half an hour, from the apprehension that, as the other train had not yet come up, we might, by going upon the single line, encounter it, and the collision occasion some terrible accident. After waiting about half an hour, and ascertaining (I suppose) that the other train was not coming, we proceeded, and soon learned what had retarded it. On the spot where the accident took place the bank had made a tremendous slide; numbers of workmen were busy in removing the earth from the track; the engine, which had been arrested in its course by this impediment, was standing half on the line, half on the bank; planks and wheels and fragments of wood were strewed all round; and a crowd of people, with terrified eager faces, were gazing about in that vague love of excitement which makes sights and places of catastrophes, to a certain degree, delectable to human beings. I cannot help thinking, dear Harriet, that this sad accident, sad enough as I admit it to be for the relations and friends of the dead, was not so particularly terrible as far as the individuals themselves were concerned. God only knows how I may feel when I am struck, either in my own life or that of any one I love; but hitherto death has not appeared to me the awful calamity that people generally seem to consider it. The purpose of life alone, time wherein to do God's will, makes it sacred. I do not think it _pleasant_ enough to wish to keep it for a single instant, without the idea of the _duty_ of living, since God has bid us live. The only thought which makes me shrink from the notion of suicide is the apprehension that to this life another _might_ succeed, as full of storm, of strife, of disappointment, difficulty, and unrest as this; and with that uncertainty overshadowing it, death has not much to recommend it. It is poor Hamlet's "perchance" that is the knot of the whole question, never here to be untied. Involuntarily, we certainly hope for better things, for respite, for rest, for enfranchisement from the thraldom of some of our passions and affections, the goods and bonds that spur us through this life and fasten us to it. We--perhaps I ought to say I--involuntarily connect the idea of death with that of peace and repose; delivery, at any rate, from some subjugation to sin, and from some subjection to "the ills we know" (though it may be none of this), so that my first feeling about it is generally that it is a happy rather than a deplorable event for the principals concerned; but then comes the loss of the living, and I perceive very well how my heart would bleed if those I love were taken from me. I see my own desolation and agony in that case, but still feel as if I could rejoice for them; for, after all, life is a heavy burden on a weary way, and I never saw the human being whose existence was what I should call happy. I have seen some whose lives were so _good_ that they justified their own existence, and one could conceive both why they lived and that they found it good to live. Of course, this is instinctive feeling; reflection compels one to acknowledge the infinite value of existence, for the purposes of spiritual progress and improvement; the education of the soul; but my nature, impatient of restraint and pain and trial (and therefore most in need of the discipline of life), always rejoices at the first aspect of death, as at that of the Deliverer. Sudden death I certainly pray _for_, rather than _against_, and I think my father and sister were horrified and indignant at my saying that I could not conceive a better way of dying than being smashed, as we were all together, on that railway, dashed to pieces in a moment, like those eight men who perished there the other day.... This drew forth a suggestion that, if such were my sentiments, we had better hire a carriage on the Brighton railroad, and keep incessantly running up and down the line, by which means there would be every probability of my dying in the way I thought most desirable. I wish you would just step over from Ireland and spend the evening with me; Adelaide and my father will be at the theatre.... God bless you, dearest Harriet. Ever yours, FANNY. [Some years after writing this letter, having returned to the stage, I was fulfilling an engagement at the Hull theatre, and as I stood at the side scene, waiting to go on, two poor young girls were standing near me, of that miserable class from which the temporarily employed supernumeraries of country theatres are recruited. One of them, who looked as if she was dying of consumption, and coughed incessantly, said to her companion, who remarked upon it, "Yes, I go on so pretty much all the time, and I have a mind sometimes to kill myself." "That's running away from school, my child," said I. "Don't do it, for you can't tell whether you mayn't be put to just as hard or even a harder life to finish your lesson in another world." "O Lord, ma'am!" said the girl, "I never thought of that." "But I have very often," said I to her, as I went on the stage to finish my mumming. The strange ignorance of all the conditions of life (except their own most wretched ones), even those but a few degrees removed from their own, of these poor creatures, betrayed itself in their awestruck admiration of my stage ornaments, which they took for real jewels. "Oh, but," said I, as they gazed at them with wonder, "if they were real jewels, you know, I should sell them to live, and not come to the theatre to act for my bread every night." "Oh, wouldn't you, ma'am?" exclaimed they, amazed that so blissful an occupation as that of a stage star, radiant with "such diamonds," should not be all that heart of woman could desire. Poor things--all of us!] HARLEY STREET, January 1st, 1842. It is New Year's Day, my dearest Harriet. May God bless you. You will, I hope, receive to-day my account of my journey home from Bowood. Any anxiety you might have felt about us was certain to be dispelled by the note I despatched to you after our arrival, and as to the accident which took place on the railroad, I have nothing to tell you about it more than you would see in the newspapers, and it did not occur to me to mention it. I read with attention the newspaper article you sent me about the corn laws and the currency, and, though I did not quite understand all the details given on the latter subject, yet the main question is one that I have been so familiar with lately as to have comprehended, I believe, the general sense of it. But I read it at Bowood, and though, as I assure you, with the greatest attention, I do not remember a single word of it now (the invariable practice of my memory with any subject that is entirely uncongenial to me). The mischievous influence of the undue extension of the credit system is matter of daily discussion and daily illustration, I am sorry to say, in the United States, where, in spite of their easy institutions, boundless space, and inexhaustible real sources of credit (the wealth of the soil and its agricultural and universal products), and all the commercial advantages which their comparatively untrammelled conditions afford them, they are all but bankrupt now; distressed at home and disgraced abroad by the excess to which this pernicious system of trading upon fictitious capital has been carried by eager, grasping, hastening-to-be-rich people. Of course, the same causes must tend to produce the same effects everywhere, though different circumstances may partially modify the results; and in proportion as this vicious system has prevailed with us in England, its consequences must, at some time or other, culminate in sudden severe pressure upon the trading and manufacturing interests, and I suppose, of course, upon all classes of the industrial population of the country. The difficult details of finance, and their practical application to the currency question, have not often been understood, and therefore not often relished by me whenever I have attempted to master them; but I have heard them frequently and vehemently discussed by the advocates of both paper money and coin currency; I have read all the manifestoes upon the subject put forth by Mr. Nicholas Biddle, late President of the United States Bank, who is supposed to have understood finance well, though the unfortunate funds committed to his charge do not appear to have been the safer for that circumstance.... The failure of the United States Bank has been sometimes considered as a political catastrophe, the result of party animosity and personal enmity towards Mr. Biddle on the part of General Jackson, who, being then President of the United States, gave a fatal blow to the credit of the bank (which, though calling itself the United States Bank, was not a Government institution) by removing from its custody the Government deposits. My impression upon the subject (simple, as I have no doubt you would expect to find the result of any mental process of mine) is that paper money is a financial expedient, the substitution of an appearance or makeshift for a real thing, and likely, like all other such substitutes of whatever kind, to become a source of shame, trouble, and ruin whenever, after the appointed time of circulation, which every expedient has, there should be a demand for the real article; more especially if the shadow has imposed upon the world by being twice as big as the substance. The papers and pamphlets you have sent me, dear Harriet, seem to me only to prove that excessive and unjust taxation, partial and unjust corn laws, and unwise financial ones (together with other causes, which seem to me ominous of evil results), have produced the distress, embarrassment, and discontent existing in this, the richest and most enlightened country in the world.... I have been interrupted half a dozen times while writing this letter, once by a long visit from Mrs. Jameson.... Lady M---- called too, with a pretty little widow, a Mrs. M----, a great friend of Adelaide's. Dearest Harriet, here my letter was broken off yesterday morning, Friday; it is now Saturday evening, and this morning arrived two long ones from America. Now, if I should get one to-morrow or the next day, from you, will it be very unjust to put yours under these, and answer them before I write any more to you? I think not, but I must make an end of this.... Good-bye, and God bless you. I am ever yours, FANNY. HARLEY STREET, Tuesday, January 4th, 1842. DEAREST HARRIET, ... You say you wonder that those who love and worship Christ should be wanting in patience and the spirit of endurance. Do you not wonder, too, that they should fail in self-denial, charity, mercy, all the virtues of their Divine Model? But this is a terrible chapter, and sad subject of speculation for all of us, and I can't bear to speak upon it. In talking once with my sister of self-condemnation, and our condemnation of others, I used an expression which she took up as eminently ridiculous; but I think she did not quite understand me. I said that there was a feeling of _modesty_ which prevented one's uttering the extent of one's own self-accusations, at which she laughed very much, and said she thought that modesty ought to interfere in behalf of others as well as one's self; but there are some reasons why it does not. Severely as one may judge and blame others, it is always, of course, with the perception that one cannot know the _whole_ of the case for or against them; nevertheless, even with this conviction, there are certain words and deeds of others which one condemns unhesitatingly. Such sentences as these I pronounce often and without scruple (harshly, perhaps, and therein committing most mischievous, foul sin in chiding sin), but one does not utter that which one feels more rarely (however strongly, in particular instances), one's impression of the evil tendency of a whole character, the weakness or wickedness, the disease which pervades the whole moral constitution, and which seems to denote certain inevitable results; on these one hesitates to pronounce opinion, not so much, I think, because of the uncertainty one feels, as in the case of a special motive, or temptation to any special act, and the liability to mistake, both in the quality of motive and quality of temptation; as because so much deeper a condemnation is involved in such judgments. It is the difference between a physician's opinion on an acute attack of illness or a radical and fatal constitutional tendency. This sort of condemnation requires such intimate knowledge that one can hardly pass it upon any but one's self. One cannot tear off all coverings from the hearts and minds of others, whereas one could strip one's own moral deformities naked, and that species of self-accusation does seem to me a kind of immodesty. One naturally shrinks, too, from speaking of deep and awful things, and then there is the all but insuperable difficulty of putting one's most intimate convictions, _the realities of one's soul_, into words at all.... Oh, my dear Harriet, I have told you nothing of John and Natalia's mesmeric practices [my brother and his German wife]. If you could have seen them, you would have split your lean sides more than you did at my aspect and demeanor while listening to A---- reading her favorite French novels to me. By-the-by, do you know that that very book, "Mathilde," which I could not listen to for a quarter of an hour with common patience, is cried up everywhere and by everybody as a most extraordinary production? At Bowood everybody was raving about it; Mrs. Jameson tells me that Carlyle excepted it from a general anathema on French novels. Sometimes I think I will try again to get through it, and then I think, as little F---- says when she is requested to do something that she ought, "_Eelly_, now, me _tan not_." I am finishing George Sand's "Lettres d'un Voyageur," because in an evil hour I began them. Her style is really admirable, and in this book one escapes the moral (or immoral) complications of her stories. God bless you, dear Harriet. Good-bye. Time and opportunity serving, you surely see that I am not only faithful, but prompt, in the discharge of my debts. Ever yours, FANNY. I forgot to tell you that my poor Margery [my children's former nurse] has at length applied to the tribunals of Pennsylvania for a separation from her cruel and worthless husband. Poor thing! I hope she will obtain it. [The tribunals of Pennsylvania followed, in the law of divorce, the German and not the English precedent and process. Divorce was granted by them, as well as mere separation, on plea of incompatibility of temper, and also for cause of non-cohabitation during a space of two years. In regard to the laws of marriage and divorce, as well as most other matters, each state in the Union had its own peculiar code, agreeing or differing from the rest. The Massachusetts laws of marriage and divorce were, I believe, the same as the English. In Pennsylvania a much greater facility for obtaining divorce--adopted, I suppose, from German modes of thought and feeling, and perhaps German legislature--prevailed, while in some of the western states, more exclusively occupied by a German population, the facility with which the bond of marriage was dissolved was greater than in any civilized Christian community in the world, I think.] HARLEY STREET, January 16th, 1842. At the end of a long, kind letter I received from you this morning, dearest Harriet, there is a most sudden and incomprehensible sentence, an incoherent, combined malediction upon yourself and your dog Bevis, which I found it difficult to connect in any way with the matter which preceded it, which was very good advice to me, abruptly terminating in a declaration that you were a fool and your dog Bevis a brute, and leaving me to conclude either that he had overturned your inkstand or that you had gone mad, though indeed your two propositions are sane enough: for the first I would contradict if I could; the second I could not if I would; and so, as the Italians say, "Sono rimasta." ... With regard to the likeness between my sister and myself, it is as great as our unlikeness.... Our mode of perceiving and being affected by things and people is often identical, and our impressions frequently so similar and so simultaneous that we both often utter precisely the same words upon a subject, so that it might seem as if one of us might save the other the trouble of speaking.... She is a thousand times quicker, keener, finer, shrewder, and sweeter than I am, and all my mental processes, compared with hers, are slow, coarse, and clumsy. Here my letter broke off yesterday morning, and yesterday evening I went to see the new opera, so that I shall have realities instead of speculations to treat you to. [The opera was an English version of the "Elena da Feltre," by Mercadante, whose dramatic compositions, "La Vestale," "Le Due Illustre Rivale," the "Elena da Feltre," and others, obtained a very considerable temporary popularity in Italy, but were, I think, little known elsewhere. They were not first-rate musical productions, but had a good deal of agreeable, though not very original, melody, and were favorable to a declamatory, passionate style of singing, having a great deal of dramatic power and pathos. My sister was fond of them, and gave them with great effect, and the celebrated _prima donna_, Madame Ungher, achieved great popularity and excited immense enthusiasm in some of them.] The opera was entirely successful, owing certainly to Adelaide, for the music is not agreeable, or of an order to become popular; the story is rather involved, which, however, as people have books to help them to it, does not so much matter. She was beautifully and becomingly dressed in mediæval Italian costume, and looked very handsome. Her voice was, as usual, very much affected by her nervousness, and comparatively feeble; this, however, signifies little, as it is only on the first night that it occurs, and every succeeding representation, her anxiety being less, she recovers more power of voice. She acted extremely well, so as again to excite in me the strongest desire to see her in an _acting_ part; a desire which is only qualified by the consideration that she makes more money at present as a singer than she probably could as an actress. At the end of the piece she _died_, with one of those expressions of feeling the effect of which may, without exaggeration, be called electrifying: it made me spring on my seat, and the whole audience responded with that voice of human sympathy that any true representation of feeling elicits instantaneously. Having renounced her lover, and married a man she hated, to save her father's life, after seeing her lover go to church and be married to another woman, her father being nevertheless executed (an old story, no doubt, but that's no matter), she loses her senses and stabs herself, and as she falls into the arms of her husband (the man she hated) she sees her lover, who just arrives at this moment, and the dying spring which she made, with her arms stretched towards him, falling, before she reached him, dead on the ground, was one of those terrible and touching things which the stage only can reproduce from nature--I mean, out of reality itself--a thing that of course neither painting nor sculpture could attempt, and that would have been comparatively cold and ineffective even in poetry, but which "in action" was indescribably pathetic. It had been, like many happy dramatic effects, a sudden thought with her, for it had only occurred to her yesterday morning; but the grace of the action, its beauty, truth, and expressiveness, are not to be conveyed by words. You will see it; not that, indeed, it may ever again be so very happy a thing in its effect.... God bless you, dear Harriet. Good-bye. Ever yours, FANNY. HARLEY STREET, January 31st, 1842. MY DEAREST HARRIET, Why do you ask me if I would not write to you unless you wrote to me? Do you not know perfectly well that I _would not_--unless, indeed, I thought you were ill or something was the matter with you; and then I would write just enough to find out if such was the case. Why should I write to you, when I hate writing, and yet nevertheless _always_ answer letters? Surely the spontaneous, or promiscuous (which did you call it, you Irishwoman?) epistle should come from the person who does not profess to labor under an _inkophobia_. And what can you righteously complain of, when I not only never fail scrupulously to answer your letters, but, be they long or short, invariably answer them _abundantly_, having as great an objection to writing a short letter almost as I have to writing any? Basta! never doubt any more about the matter, my dear Harriet. I never (I think) shall write to you, but I also (I think) shall never fail to answer you. If you are not satisfied with that, I can't help it.... We have a lull in our engagements just now--comparative quiet. We gave a family dinner on Friday.... My father, I am sorry to say, gets no rent from the theatre. The nights on which my sister does not sing the house is literally empty. Alas! it is the old story over again: that whole ruinous concern is propped only by her. That property is like some fate to which our whole family are subject, by which we are every one of us destined to be borne down by turn, after vainly dedicating ourselves to its rescue. On Saturday I spent the evening at Lady Charlotte Lindsay's, who has a very kind regard for you, and spoke of your brother Barry with great affection. To-morrow, after going to the opera, I shall go to Miss Berry's. My sister and father go to Apsley House, where the Duke of Wellington gives a grand entertainment to the King of Prussia. We were asked too, but, though rather tempted by the fine show, it was finally concluded that we should not go, so we shall only have it at second hand. This is all my news for the present, dear Harriet. God bless you. Good-bye. If you ever wish to hear from me, drop me a line to that effect. Ever yours (and the same), FANNY. [Circumstances occurred which induced us to change our plans, and I did go to the _fête_ at Apsley House, which was very beautiful and magnificent. A pleasant incident of the evening was a special introduction to and a few minutes' conversation with our illustrious host; and the pleasantest of all, I am almost ashamed to say, was the memorable appearance of Lady Douro and Mademoiselle d'Este, who, coming into the room together, produced a most striking effect by their great beauty and their exquisite dress. They both wore magnificent dresses of white lace over white satin, ornamented with large cactus flowers, those of the blonde marchioness being of the sea-shell rose color, and the dark Mademoiselle d'Este's of the deep scarlet; and in the bottom of each of these large, vivid blossoms lay, like a great drop of dew, a single splendid diamond. The women were noble samples of fair and dark beauty, and their whole appearance, coming in together, attired with such elegant and becoming magnificent simplicity, produced an effect of surprise and admiration on the whole brilliant assembly.] HARLEY STREET, February 4th, 1842. MY DEAREST HARRIET, At twelve o'clock to-day I rang for candles, in order that the fog might not prevent my answering your letter. I was obliged to go out, however, and the skies in the interim have cleared; and where do you think I have been? Why, like a fool as I am, to _see a sight_, and I am well paid by feeling so tired, and having such a headache, and having had such a fright, that--it serves me right. Our dear friend Harness has, as perhaps you know, an office which Lord Lansdowne gave him, by virtue of which he occupies a very pleasant apartment in the Council Office Building, the windows of which look out on Whitehall. Here he begged me to come and bring the children, that we might see the Queen, and the King of Prussia, and all the great folks, go to the opening of Parliament, and in an evil hour I consented, Harness informing me at what hour to come, and what way to take to avoid the crowd. But the carriage was ordered half an hour later than we ought to have started, and the coachman was ordered to take us down Whitehall (though Harness had warned me that we could not come that way, and that we must leave our carriage at the Carlton Terrace steps, and walk across the park to the little passage which leads straight into Downing Street). Down Whitehall, however, we attempted to go, and were of course turned back by the police. We then retraced our route to the Carlton steps, and here, with the two children, Anne, and the footman, I made my way through the crowd; but oh, what a way! and what a crowd! When we got down into the park, the only clear space was the narrow line left open for the carriages, and some of them were passing at a rapid trot, just as we found our way into their road, and the dense wall of human beings we had squeezed through closed behind us. I assure you, Harriet, the children were not half a foot from one of those huge carriage-horses, nor was there any means of retreat; the living mass behind us was as compact as brick and mortar. We took a favorable moment, and, rushing across the road into the protecting arms of some blessed, benevolent policemen, who were keeping the line, were seized, and dragged, and pushed, and pulled, and finally made way for, through the crowd on the other side, and then ran, without stopping, till we reached our destination; but the peril of the children, and the exertion of extricating them and ourselves from such a situation, had been such that, on reaching Harness's rooms, I shook so that I could hardly stand, and the imperturbable Anne actually burst into tears. So much for the delights of sight-seeing. As for me, you know I would not go to the end of the street to see the finest thing in the universe; but, in the first place, I had promised, and in the next, I was so miserably out of spirits that, though I could not bear to go out, I could not bear to stay at home; but certainly, my detestation of running after a sight was never more heartily confirmed. The concourse was immense, but I was much surprised at the entire want of excitement and enthusiasm in the vast multitude who thronged and all but choked up the Queen's way. All hats were lifted, but there was not a hatful of cheers, and the whole thing produced a disagreeable effect of coldness, indifference, or constraint. Harness said it was nineteenth-century breeding, which was too exquisite to allow even of the mob's shouting. He is a Tory. T---- M----, who is a very warm Whig, thought the silence spoke of Paisley starvation and Windsor banquets. I thought these and other things besides might have to do with the people's not cheering. E---- (who, bless her soul! has just been here, talking such gigantic nonsense) must have misunderstood me, or you must have misunderstood her, in supposing that I made a distinct _promise_ to answer four crossed sheets of paper to four lines of yours. I said it was my usual practice to do so, and one from which I was not likely to depart, because I hate writing a short letter as much as I hate writing any letter at all.... Have you received one letter from me since you have been in Mountjoy Square? I have written one to you there, but, owing to the habit of my hand, which is to write "Ardgillan Castle," the direction was so scratched and blurred that I had some doubts whether the letter would reach you. Let me know, dear Harriet, if it does.... E---- must have made another blunder about Lady Westmoreland and my sister. It is not the Duke of Wellington's money, in particular, that she objects to receiving; she does not intend to sing in private _for money_ at all, anywhere, or on any occasion; which I am very glad of, as, if she did, I think social embarrassments and professional complications of every sort, and all disagreeable ones, would arise from it. We were all very cordially invited to Apsley House by Lady Westmoreland, before my sister stated that she did not intend to sing there for money.... Besides this, there came a formal bidding in the Duke of Wellington's own hand [or Algernon Greville's, who used to forge his illustrious chief's signature on all common occasions], with which we were very well pleased to comply.... A---- has been trying to inoculate me with Paul de Kock, who, she assures me, is a _moral_ writer, and with whose books our tables, chairs, sofas, and beds are covered, as with the unclean plagues of Egypt. I read one of the novels and began another. They are very clever, very funny, very dirty, abominably immoral, and I do not think I _can_ read any more of them; for though I confess to having laughed till my sides ached over some parts of what I read, I was, upon reflection and upon the whole, disgusted and displeased.... I have _precisely_ your feeling about Mrs. F---- in every particular; I think her the funniest and the kindest old maniac I am acquainted with, and my intercourse with her is according to that opinion. Good-bye, my dearest Harriet; God bless you. I wish I was where I could see green fields. I am in miserable spirits, and would give "my kingdom for a horse," and the world for an hour's gallop in the country. Ever yours, FANNY. [My dear and excellent friend the Rev. William Harness refused from conscientious motives to hold more than one Church benefice, though repeated offers of livings were made to him by various of his influential friends. Lord Lansdowne, who had a very affectionate esteem for him, gave him the civil office I have alluded to in this letter, and this not being open to Mr. Harness's scruples with regard to sacred sinecures, he accepted. His means were always small, his charities great, and his genial hospitality unfailing. He was one of the simplest, most modest, unpretending, honorable, high-minded, warm hearted human beings I have ever known. Goodness appeared easy to him--the best proof how good he was.] HARLEY STREET, February 5th, 1842. DEAR HARRIET, I did not care very much about the _fête_ itself at Apsley House, but I was very glad to go to it upon the Duke of Wellington's invitation, and felt as much honored and gratified by that as I could be by any such sort of thing. My sister did sing for them, though, poor thing! not very well. She had just gone through the new opera, and was besides laboring under a terrible cough and cold, through which, I am sorry to say, she has been singing for the last week. There was no particular reason for her not taking money at _that_ concert. She does not intend to be paid for singing in society at all.... Of course, her declining such engagements will greatly diminish her income, popular singers making nearly half their earnings by such means; but I am sure that, situated as we all are, she is right, and will avoid a good many annoyances by this determination, though her pocket will suffer for it.... I know nothing whatever, of course, about the statements in the papers, which I never look at, about the financial disgraces and embarrassments in America. The United States Bank (in which my father had put four thousand pounds, which he could ill spare) is swept from the face of the earth, and everybody's money put into it has been like something thrust down a gaping mouth that had no stomach; it has disappeared in void space, and is irredeemably lost. I have seven thousand pounds in the New Orleans banks, which I have given my father for his life. Those banks, it is said, are sound, and will ere long resume specie payments, and give dividends to their stockholders. Amen, so be it. It is affirmed that Mr. Biddle's prosecution will lead to nothing, but that the state of Pennsylvania will pay its debts, means to do so, and will be able to do so without any difficulty.... God bless you, dear Harriet. Write to me soon again, for, though I do hate answering you, I hate worse not hearing from you. Ever yours, FANNY. I am glad you liked "Les Maîtres Mosaistes;" I think it charming. Thank you for your "Enfant du Peuple." I have been trying some Paul de Kock, but _cannot_ get on with it. [Of Madame George Sand's few unobjectionable books, "Les Maîtres Mosaistes" seems to me the best. As an historical picture of Venice and its glorious period of supremacy in art, it is admirable. As a pathetic human history, it is excellent; with this drawback, however, that in it the author has avoided the subject of the relations between the sexes--her invariable rock ahead, both morally and artistically; and it is by the entire omission of the important element of love that this work of hers is free from the reproach the author never escapes when she treats of it. It is a great pity her fine genius has so deep a flaw.] HARLEY STREET, February 11th, 1842. MY DEAREST HARRIET, ... I want to know if you can come to us on the 20th of this month, instead of the 1st of March, as I expected you. I believe I told you that the Duke of Rutland, when we met him at the Arkwrights', at Sutton, gave us all a very kind invitation to Belvoir, which we accepted, and have been expecting since that some more definite intimation when the time of our visit would be convenient. He called here the other day, but we were none of us at home, and this morning we and my father heard from him, recalling our promise to go to Belvoir, and begging us to fix any time between this and the month of April. Now, the only time when my sister can go, poor child! is during Passion Week; and as I am very anxious that she should have the refreshment of a week in the country, and her being with us will be a great addition to my own enjoyment, I want to appoint that time for our visit to the Duke of Rutland. That, however, happens about the 20th of March, when I expected you to be with us; but if, by coming earlier, you can give me as long a visit as you had promised me, without inconveniencing yourself, I shall be glad, dear Harriet; for though _we_ can go to Belvoir at any time before or after March, I wish my sister not to lose a pleasant visit to a beautiful place. To tell you the truth, it would be a great pleasure to me that you should come so much sooner than I had reckoned upon having you; and as Emily and I trotted round Portman Square together to-day, we both made out that, if you come into this arrangement, you will be here on Tuesday week, which appears to me in itself delightful. Let me know, dear, what you decide, as I shall not answer the Duke of Rutland until I have heard from you. I promise myself much pleasure from seeing Belvoir. The place, with which I am familiar through engravings and descriptions, is a fine house in one of the finest situations in England; and the idea of being out of London once more, in the country and on horseback, is superlatively agreeable to me. And now, my dearest, to answer your letter, which I got this morning. For pity's sake, let Lady Westmoreland rest, for the present; we will take her up again, if expedient, when we meet.... The Duke of Wellington called here the other day, and brought an exceedingly pretty bracelet and amiable note to my sister; both which, as you may suppose, she values highly, as she ought to do. About the cheering of the Queen on her way to Parliament the other day, I incline to think the silence was universal, for everybody with whom I was observed it, except Charles Greville, who swore she was applauded; but then he is deaf, and therefore hears what no one else can. Moreover, the majority of spectators were by no means well-dressed people; the streets were thronged with pure mobocracy, to a degree unprecedented on any previous occasion of the sort, and, though there was no exhibition of ill-feeling towards the Queen or any of the ministers, there was no demonstration of good will beyond the usual civility of lifting the hats as she passed. Indeed, Horace Wilson told me that, when he was crossing the park at the time of her driving through it, there was some--though not much--decided hissing. Your lamentation over my want of curiosity reminds me that on this very occasion Charles Greville offered to take me all over the Coldbath Fields Prison, and show me the delights of the treadmill, etc., and expressed great astonishment that I did not enthusiastically accept this opportunity of seeing such a cheerful spectacle, and still more amazement at my general want of enlightened curiosity, which he appeared to consider quite unworthy of so intelligent a person. I have not read Stephens's book on Central America, but only certain extracts from it in the last _Quarterly_, with which I was particularly charmed; but I admire your asking me why I did not send for his book from the circulating library instead of Paul de Kock. Do you suppose _I_ sent for Paul de Kock? Don't you know I never send for any book, and never _read_ any book, but such as I am desired, required, lent, or given to read by somebody? being, for the most part, very indifferent what I read, and having the obliging faculty of forgetting immediately what I have read, which is an additional reason for my not caring much what my books are. Still, there is a point at which my indifference will give way to disgust.... ---- recommended Paul de Kock's books strongly to me, therefore I read one of them, but found it so very little to my taste that I was obliged, against my usual rule of compliance with my friend's recommendations in these matters, to decline the rest of the author's works. I have begun your "Enfant du Peuple," and many are the heartaches I have had already, though I have read but little of it, over that poor Jean Baptiste's tender and touching love, which reminds one of Jacob's serving seven years for the sake of Rachel, and hardly counting them a day.... Dearest Harriet, if in the matter of your visit to us you cannot alter your plans, which have already been turned topsy-turvy once to suit ours, we will go at some other time to Belvoir, and my sister must e'en give it up, as in my professional days I had to forego Stoke, Chatsworth, and, hardest by far of all, Abbotsford. God bless you, dearest Harriet. Give my kind love to M----. I rejoice to hear of her convalescence. Remember me affectionately to Dorothy, and believe me, Ever yours, FANNY. GRIMSTHORPE, March 27th, 1842. MY DEAREST HARRIET, Thank God and O'Connell for your smooth passage. I really dreaded the effects of sea-sickness for you, combined with that racking cough.... We left Belvoir yesterday, and came on here, having promised Lady Willoughby to visit them on our way back to London. I do not know whether you ever saw Belvoir. It is a beautiful place; the situation is noble, and the views from the windows of the castle, and the terraces and gardens hanging on the steep hill crowned by it, are charming. The whole vale of Belvoir, and miles of meadow and woodland, lie stretched below it like a map unrolled to the distant horizon, presenting extensive and varied prospects in every direction, while from the glen which surrounds the castle hill like a deep moat filled with a forest, the spring winds swell up as from a sea of woodland, and the snatches of bird-carolling and cawing rook-discourse float up to one from nests in the topmost branches of tall trees, far below one's feet, as one stands on the battlemented terraces. The interior of the house is handsome, and in good taste; and the whole mode of life stately and splendid, as well as extremely pleasant and comfortable. The people--I mean the Duke and his family--kind and courteous hosts, and the society very easy and free from stiffness or constraint of any sort; and I have enjoyed my visit very much.... We had a large party at Belvoir. The gentlemen of the hunt were all at the castle; and besides the ladies of the family (one unmarried and two married daughters), we had the Duchess of Richmond and her granddaughter, the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, Lord and Lady Winchelsea, Mademoiselle d'Este, and a whole tribe of others whose names I forget, but which are all duly down in the butler's book. Every morning the duke's band marched round the castle, playing all sorts of sprightly music, to summon us to breakfast, and we had the same agreeable warning that dinner was ready. As soon as the dessert was placed on the table, singers came in, and performed four pieces of music; two by a very sweet single voice, and two by three or more voices. This, with intervals for conversation, filled up the allotted time before the ladies left the table. In the evening we had music, of course, and one evening we adjourned to the ball-room, where we danced all night, the duke leading down a country-dance, in which his house-maids and men-cooks were vigorously figuring at the same time. Whenever my sister sang, the servants used all to assemble on a large staircase at one end of the ball-room, where, for the sake of the sound, the piano was placed, and appeared among her most enthusiastic hearers.... The whole family were extremely cordial and kind to us; and when we drove away, they all assembled at an upper window, waving hats and handkerchiefs as long as we could see them. I have no room to tell you anything of Grimsthorpe. God bless you. Good-bye. Ever yours, _Fanny_. [My first introduction to "afternoon tea" took place during this visit to Belvoir, when I received on several occasions private and rather mysterious invitations to the Duchess of Bedford's room, and found her with a "small and select" circle of female guests of the castle, busily employed in brewing and drinking tea, with her grace's own private tea-kettle. I do not believe that now universally honored and observed institution of "five-o'clock tea" dates farther back in the annals of English civilization than this very private and, I think, rather shamefaced practice of it. Our visit to Grimsthorpe has left but three distinct images on my memory: that of my bedroom, with its furniture of green velvet and regal bed-hangings of white satin and point lace; that of the collection of thrones in the dining-room, the Lords Willoughby de Eresby being hereditary Lord Grand Chamberlains of England, whose perquisite of office was the throne or chair of state used by each sovereign at his or her coronation; and my intercourse with Mademoiselle d'Este, who, like ourselves, came from Belvoir to Grimsthorpe, and with whom I here began an acquaintance that grew into intimacy, and interested me a good deal from her peculiar character and circumstances.] HARLEY STREET, London, March 31st, 1842. MY DEAR T----, ... My father is in wonderful health, looks, and spirits, considering that in all these items this time last year he was very little better than dead. My sister is working very hard and very successfully, and proposing to herself, after two more years of assiduous labor, to retire on a moderate income to Italy, where she would rather live than anywhere else. But, oh dear me! how well I remember the day when that was my own vision of the future, and only see what a very different thing it has turned out! I think it not at all improbable that she will visit the United States next year, and that we shall find that moment propitious for returning; that is to say, about a twelvemonth from next month.... So much for private interests. As to the public ones: alas! Sir Robert Peel is losing both his health and his temper, they say; and no wonder at it! His modification of the corn laws and new tariff are abominations to his own party, and his income tax an abomination to the nation at large. I cannot conceive a more detestable position than his, except, perhaps indeed, that of the country itself just now. Poverty and discontent in great masses of the people; a pitiless Opposition, snapping up and worrying to pieces every measure proposed by the Ministry, merely for malignant _mischeevousness_, as the nursemaids say, for I don't believe they--the Whigs--will be trusted again by the people for at least a century to come; a determined, troublesome, and increasing Radical party, whose private and personal views are fairly and dangerously masked by the public grievances of which they advocate the redress; a minister, hated personally by his own party, with hardly an individual of his own political persuasion in either House who follows him cordially, or, rather, who does not feel himself personally aggrieved by one or other of the measures of reform he has proposed,--yet that minister the only man in England at this moment able to stand up at the head of public affairs, and the defeat of whose measures (distasteful as they are to his own party, and little satisfactory to the people in general) would produce instantaneously, I believe, such confusion, disorder, and dismay as England has not seen for many a year, not indeed since the last great Reform crisis;--all this is not pleasant, and makes me pity everybody connected with the present Government, and Sir Robert Peel more than anybody else. I wonder how long he'll be able to stand it. What have you done with Lord Morpeth? And what are you doing with "Boz"? The first has a most tenderly attached mother and sisters, and really should not, on their account, be killed with kindness; and the latter has several small children, I believe, who, I suppose, will naturally desire that your national admiration should not annihilate their papa.... I wish we were to come back to America soon, but wishes are nonsensical things.... Give my dear love to Catherine and Kate [Miss Sedgwick and her niece], if they are in New York when this reaches you. Good-bye, my dear T----. I would not have troubled you with this if I had known Mrs. Robert's address; but "Wall Street" will find you, though "Warren Street" knows her no longer. We have been spending ten days at Belvoir Castle, with all sorts of dukes and duchesses. Don't you perceive it in the nobility of my style? It is well for a foreigner to see these things; they are pretty, pleasant, gay, grand, and, in some of their aspects, good; but I think that who would see them even as they still subsist now had better lose no time about it. HARLEY STREET, Tuesday, April 12th, 1842. Did anyone ever say there was not a "soul of good even in things evil"? From your mode of replying to my first letter, dearest Harriet--the one from Belvoir, in which I told you I had been strongly minded to write to you _first_--you do not seem to me quite to believe in the existence of such an intention. Nor was it a "weak thought," but a very decided purpose, which was frustrated by circumstances for one day, and the next prevented entirely by the arrival of your letter. However, no matter for all that now; hear other things. You ask after "Figaro" [Mozart's opera of "Le Nozze di Figaro," then being given at Covent Garden, my sister singing the part of Susanna]. It draws very fine houses, and Adelaide's acting in it is very much liked and praised, as it highly deserves to be, for it is capital, very funny, and _fine_ in its fun, which makes good comedy--a charming thing, and a vastly more difficult one, in my opinion, than any tragic acting whatever.... Your boots have been sent safe and sound, my dear, and are in the custody of a person who, I verily believe, thinks me incapable of taking care of anything in the world, and has the same amount of confidence in my understanding that a friend of mine (a clergyman of the Church of England) expressed in his mother's honesty, "I wouldn't trust her with a bad sixpence round the corner." However, your boots, as I said, are safe, and will reach your hands (or feet, I should rather say) in due course of time, I have no doubt. I have had two letters from America lately, the last of them containing much news about the movements of the abolitionists, in which its writer takes great interest. Among other things, she mentions that an address had been published to the slaves, by Gerrit Smith, exhorting them to run away, to use all means to do so, to do so at any risk, and also by all means and at any risk to learn to read. By all means, he advises them, in no case to use violence, or carry off property of their masters' (except indeed themselves, whom their masters account very valuable property). I should have told you that Gerrit Smith himself was a large slave-holder, that he has given up all his property, renounced his home in the South (where, indeed, if he was to venture to set foot, he would be murdered in less than an hour). He lives at the North, in comparative poverty and privation, having given up his wealth for conscience' sake. I saw him once at Lucretia Mott's. He was a man of remarkable appearance, with an extremely sweet and noble countenance. He is one of the "confessors" in the martyr-age of America. I am much concerned at your account of E----, for though sprains and twists and wrenches are not uncommon accidents, I have always much more dread of them than of a _bonâ_ (bony) _fide_ fracture. I always fear some injury may be lodged in the system by such apparently lesser casualties, that may not reveal itself till long after the real cause is forgotten.... I must end this letter, for I have delayed it too shamefully long, and you must think me more abominable than ever, in spite of which I am still Your most affectionate FANNY. CRANFORD HOUSE, April 17th, 1842. I put a letter into the post for you, my dearest Harriet, this afternoon. This is all I was able to write to you yesterday--Wednesday; and now it is Thursday evening, and there is every prospect of my having leisure to finish my letter. Emily has asked me several times to come and spend the evening with her mother, and I have promised her each time that the first evening.... Thus far last night, my dear--that is to say, Thursday evening. It is now Friday evening, and the long and the short of the story was that Emily dined out, Mrs. FitzHugh _teaed_ with the Miss Hamiltons, my party went to Drury Lane, and I passed the evening alone; and the reason why this letter was not finished during that lonely evening, my dear, was that I was sitting working worsted-work for Emily in the parlor downstairs when my people all went away, and after they were gone I was seized with a perfect nervous panic, a "Good" fever, and could not bring myself to stir from the chair where they had left me. As to going up into the drawing-room, it was out of the question; I fancied every step of the stairs would have morsels of flesh lying on it, and the banisters would be all smeared with blood and hairs. In short, I had a fit of the horrors, and sat the whole blessed evening working heart's ease into Emily's canvas, in a perfect nightmare of horrible fancies. At one moment I had the greatest mind in the world to send for a cab, and go to Covent Garden Theatre, and sit in Adelaide's dressing-room; but I was ashamed to give way to my nerves in that cowardly fashion, and certainly passed a most miserable evening.... However, let me leave last night and its horrors, and make haste to answer your questions.... Another pause, dear Harriet, and here I am at this picturesque old place, Cranford House, paying another visit to ----'s _venerable_ friend, old Lady Berkeley. I have been taking a long walk this morning with Lady ----, whose London fine-ladyism gave way completely in these old walks of her early home, to which all the family appear extremely attached. Her unfeigned delight at the primroses, oxlips, wild cherry bloom, and varying greens of the spring season made me think that her lament was not applicable to herself, just then, at any rate. "What a pity," cried she, "it is that one cannot be regenerated as the earth is every spring!" _She_ seemed to me to be undergoing a very pretty process of regeneration even while she spoke. It is touching to observe natural character and the lingering traces of early impressions surviving under the overlaying of the artificial soil and growth of after years of society and conventional worldly habits. She pointed out to me a picturesque, pretty object in the grounds, over which she moralized with a good deal of enthusiasm and feeling--an old, old fir-tree, one of the cedar tribe, a tree certainly many more than a hundred years old, whose drooping lower branches absolutely lie upon the lawn for yards all round it. One of these boughs has struck into the ground, and grown up into a beautiful young tree, already twelve or fourteen feet high, and the contrast between the vivid coloring and erect foliage of this young thing, and the rusty, dusky green, drooping branches of the enormous tree, which seems to hang over and all round it, with parental tenderness, is quite exquisite. One of them, however, must, nevertheless, destroy or be destroyed by the other; a very pretty vegetable version of the ancient classical, family fate, superstitions.... Pray, if you know how flowers propagate, write me word. In gathering primroses this morning, Lady ---- and I exercised our ignorance in all sorts of conjectures upon the subject, neither of us being botanists, though she knew, which I did not, the male from the female flowers. I get a good deal of sleep since you have gone away, as I certainly do not sit up talking half the night with anybody else. But as for enough, is there such a thing as enough sleep? and was anybody ever known to have had it? and who was he or she? I have had two long letters from Elizabeth Sedgwick, containing much matter about the abolitionists, in whose movements, you know, she is deeply interested; also more urgent entreaties that I will "use my influence" to secure our return home in the autumn!... My father appears to be quite well, and in a state of great pleasurable excitement and activity of mind, having (alas! I regret to say) accepted once more the management of Covent Garden, which is too long a story to begin just at the end of my paper; but he is in the theatre from morning till night, as happy as the gods, and apparently, just now, as free from all mortal infirmity. It is amazing, to be sure, what the revival of the one interest of his life has done for his health. I went to the Portland Street Chapel last Sunday, and heard a sermon upon my peculiar virtue, _humility_, not from the same clergyman we heard together; and S----, who is too funny, sang the Psalms so loud that I had to remonstrate with her. Ever yours, F. A. B. [A horrible murder had just been committed by a miserable man of the name of Good, who endeavored to conceal his crime by cutting to pieces and scattering in different directions the mangled remains of his victim--a woman. The details of these horrors filled the public papers, and were the incessant subject of discussion in society, and were calculated to produce an impression of terror difficult to shake off even by so little nervous a person as myself. The Countess of Berkeley, to whom I have alluded in this letter, was a woman whose story was a singular romance, which now may be said to belong to "ancient history." She was the daughter of a butcher of Gloucester, and an extremely beautiful person. Mr. Henry Berkeley, the fifth son of Lady Berkeley, for many years Member of Parliament for Bristol, and as many years the persistent advocate of the system of voting by ballot, travelled and resided for some time in America, and formed a close intimacy with ----, who, when we came to England, accepted Mr. Berkeley's invitation to visit his mother at Cranford, and took me with him, to make the acquaintance of this remarkable old lady. She was near eighty years old, tall and stately, with no apparent infirmities, and great remains of beauty. There was great originality in all she said, and her manner was strikingly energetic for so old a woman. I remember, one day after dinner, she had her glass filled with claret till the liquid appeared to form a rim above the vessel that contained it, and, raising it steadily to her lips, looked round the table, where sat all her children but Lord Fitzhardinge, and saying, "God bless you all," she drank off the contents without spilling a drop, and, replacing the glass on the table, said, "Not one of my sons could do that." One morning, when I was rather indisposed, and unable to join any of the parties into which the guests had divided themselves on their various quests after amusement, I was left alone with Lady Berkeley, and she undertook to give me a sketch of her whole history; and very strange it was. She gave me, of course, her own version of the marriage story, and I could not but wonder whether she might have persuaded herself into believing it true, when she wound up her curious and interesting account of her life by saying, "And now I am ready to be carried to my place in the vault, and my place in the vault is ready for me" (she pointed to the church which adjoined the old mansion); "and I have the key of it here," and she gave a hearty slap upon her pocket. She told me of her presentation at Court, and the uproar it occasioned among the great ladies there, whose repugnance to admit her of their number she described with much humor, but attributed solely to the fact of her plebeian descent, of which she spoke unhesitatingly. The impression I gathered from her narrative, rather unconsciously on her part I suspect, was that the Queen, whose strictness upon the subject of reputation was well known, objected to receiving her (Lady Berkeley called her, rather disrespectfully, "Old Charlotte" all the time, but spoke of George III. as "the King"), but was overruled by the King, who had a personal friendship for Lord Berkeley. The strangest thing in her whole account of herself, however, was the details she gave me of her singular power over her husband. She said that in a very few years after their marriage (by courtesy) she perceived that her husband's affairs were in the most deplorable state of derangement: that he gambled, that he was over head and ears in debt, that he never had a farthing of ready money, that his tenantry were worse off than any other in the country, that his agents and bailiffs and stewards were rogues who ground them and cheated him, that his farmers were careless and incompetent, and that the whole of his noble estate appeared to be going irretrievably to ruin; when the earl complaining one day bitterly of this state of things, for which he knew no remedy, she told him that she would find the remedy, and undertake to recover what was lost and redeem what remained, if he would give her absolute discretionary power to deal with his property as she pleased, and not interfere with her management of it for a whole year. He agreed to this, but, not satisfied with his promise, she made him bind himself by oath and, moreover, execute documents, giving her legal power enabling her to act independently of him in all matters relating to his estate. The earl not unnaturally demurred, but at length yielded, only stipulating that she should always be prepared to furnish him with money whenever he wanted it. She bound herself to do this, and received regular powers from him for the uninterrupted management of his property and administration of his affairs for a whole year. She immediately set about her various plans of reform, and carried them on vigorously and successfully, without the slightest interference on the part of her dissipated and careless husband, who had entirely forgotten the whole compact between them. Some months after the agreement had gone into effect, she perceived that he was harassed and disturbed about something, and questioning him, found he had incurred a heavy gambling debt, which he knew not how to meet. His surprise was extreme when, recalling the terms of their mutual agreement, she put him in possession of the sum he required. "He called me an angel," she said. "You see, my dear, one is always an angel, when one holds the strings of the purse, and that there is money in it." She persevered in her twelvemonth's stewardship, and at the end of that time had redeemed her word, and relieved her husband's estate from its most pressing embarrassments. The value of the land had increased; the condition of the tenantry had improved; intelligent and active farmers had had the farms rented to them, instead of the previous sleepy set of incumbents; and finally, a competent and honest agent, devoted to carry out her views, was placed over the whole. The property never fell from this highly prosperous condition, for Lord Berkeley never withdrew it from his wife's supervision; and she continued to administer his affairs till his death, and maintained an extraordinary influence over all the members of her family at the time of my acquaintance with her. They were all rather singular persons, and had a vein of originality which made them unlike the people one met in common society. I suppose their mother's unusual character may have had to do with this. Lord Fitzhardinge was never at Cranford when I was there, though I have, at various times, met all the other brothers. Frederick Berkeley went into the navy, and rose to the important position of an admiral; Craven Berkeley, Grantley Berkeley, and Henry Berkeley were all in Parliament. The latter was for many years Member for the important constituency of Bristol, and, probably in consequence of opinions acquired during his residence in the United States, was a consistent advocate for the introduction of vote by ballot in our elections. This gentleman was an unusually accomplished person: he had made preparatory studies for two professions, the Church and the Bar; but though he embraced neither career (possibly on account of an accident he met with while hunting, which crippled him for life), the reading he had gone through for both had necessarily endowed him with a more than common degree of mental cultivation. He was an excellent musician, played on the piano and organ with considerable taste and feeling, and had a much more thorough acquaintance with the science of music than is usual in an amateur. Morton Berkeley sought no career; he lived with his mother and sister, Lady Mary, at Cranford, his principal pleasure and occupation being the preservation of the game on the estate--an object of not very easy accomplishment, owing to the proximity of Cranford to London, the distance being only twelve miles by railroad, and the facilities thus offered of escape and impunity to poachers necessarily considerable. The tract immediately round Cranford was formerly part of the famous, or rather infamous, Hounslow Heath; and I have heard Mr. Henry Berkeley say that in his youth he remembered perfectly, when he went to London with his father, by day or night, loaded pistols were an invariable part of the carriage furniture. My first acquaintance with Mr. Morton Berkeley's devotion to the duties of a gamekeeper was made in a very singular manner, and accompanied by a revelation of an unexpected piece of sentiment. ---- and myself were visiting at Cranford on one occasion, when the only strangers there beside ourselves were Lady C----, Lord and Lady S----, and Lord F---- and his sister, a lady of some pretensions to beauty, but still more to a certain fashionable elegance of appearance, much enhanced by her very Parisian elaborateness of toilette. One night, when the usual hour for retiring had come, the ladies, who always preceded the gentlemen by some hours to their sleeping apartments, had left the large room on the ground-floor, where we had been spending the evening. As we ascended the stairs, my attention was attracted by some articles of dress which lay on one of the window-seats: a heavy, broad-brimmed hat, a large rough pea-jacket, and a black leather belt and cutlass--a sort of coastguard costume which, lying in that place, excited my curiosity. I stopped to examine them, and Lady Mary exclaiming, "Oh, those are Morton's night-clothes; he puts them on when everybody is gone to bed, to go and patrol with the gamekeeper round the place. _Do_ put them on for fun;" she seized them up and began accoutring me in them. When I was duly enveloped in these very peculiar trappings, we all burst into fits of laughter, and it was instantly proposed that we should all return to the drawing-room, I marching at their head in my gamekeeper's costume. Without further consideration, I ran downstairs again, followed by the ladies, and so re-entered the room, where the gentlemen were still assembled in common council, and where our almost immediate return in this fashion was hailed by a universal shout of surprise and laughter. After standing for a minute, with a huge rough overcoat over my rose-colored satin and _moiré_ skirts, which made a most ludicrous termination to the pugnacious habit of my upper woman, I plunged my hand into one of the pockets, and drew forth a pair of hand-cuffs (a prudent provision in case of an encounter with poachers). Encouraged by the peals of merriment with which this discovery was greeted, I thrust my other hand into the other pocket, when Mr. Morton Berkeley, without uttering a word, rushed at me, and, seizing me by the wrist, prevented my accomplishing my purpose. The suddenness of this movement frightened me at first a good deal. Presently, however, my emotion changed, and I felt nothing but amazement at being thus unceremoniously seized hold of, and rage at finding that I could not extricate myself from the grasp that held me. Like a coward and a woman, I appealed to all the other gentlemen, but they were laughing so excessively that they were quite unable to help me, and probably anticipated no great mischief from Mr. Berkeley's proceeding. I was almost crying with mortification, and actually drew the cutlass and threatened to cut the fingers that encircled my wrist like one of the iron handcuffs, but, finding my captor inexorable, I was obliged, with extreme sulky confusion, to beg to be let go, and promise to take the coat off without any further attempts to search the pockets. I divested myself of my borrowed apparel a great deal faster than I had put it on, and its owner walked off with the pea-jacket, the right pocket of which remained unexplored. We ladies withdrew again, rather crestfallen at the termination of our joke, I rubbing my wrist like Mary Stuart after her encounter with Lord Ruthven, and wondering extremely what could be the mysterious contents of that pocket. The next day Lady Mary told me that her brother had long cherished a romantic sort of idolatry for Miss F----, and that, as a pendant to the handcuffs in one pocket of his dreadnought, the other contained her miniature, which he dreaded the night before that my indiscretion would produce, to the derision of the men, the distress and confusion of the young lady herself, and the possible displeasure of her brother. Mr. Morton Berkeley's manners to me after that were again, as they always had been, respectful and rather reserved; the subject of our "fight" was never again alluded to, and he remained to me a gentle, shy, courteous (and romantic) gentleman. He was habitually silent, but when he did speak, he was very apt to say something apposite, and generally containing the pith of the matter under discussion. I remember once, when I was reproaching his brother Henry and his sister with what I thought the unbecoming manner in which they criticised the deportment and delivery of a clergyman whose sermon they had just listened to (and who certainly was rather an unfortunate specimen of outward divinity), Mr. Morton Berkeley suddenly turned to me, and said, "Why, Mrs. Butler, he is only the rusty bars the light shines through"--a quotation, in fact, but a very apposite one, and I am not sure but that it was an unconscious one, and an original illustration on his part. Mr. Thomas Duncombe, the notorious Radical Member for Finsbury, very generally and very disrespectfully designated in the London society of his day as "Tommy Duncombe," and Mr. Maxse (Lady Caroline Berkeley's husband), were also among the persons with whom I became acquainted at Cranford. Of a curious feat of charioteership performed by the latter gentleman I was told once by the Duke of Beaufort, who said he had derived from it the nickname of "Go-along Maxse." Driving late one night with a friend on a turnpike road after the gates were closed, he said to his companion, "Now, if the turnpike we are just coming to is shut, I'll take the horse and gig over the gate." The gig was light, the horse powerful and swift. As they bowled along and came in sight of the gate, they perceived that it was closed; when Mr. Maxse's companion calling out to him, "Go-along, Maxse," that gentleman fulfilled his threat or promise, whichever it might be, and put his horse full at the gate, which the gallant creature cleared, bringing the carriage and its live freight safe to the ground on the other side; a feat which I very unintentionally imitated, in a humble degree, many years after, with an impunity my carelessness certainly did not deserve. Driving in a state of considerable mental preoccupation out of my own gate one day at Lenox, in a very light one-horse "wagon" (as such vehicles are there called), instead of turning my horse's head either up or down the road, I let him go straight across it, to the edge of a tolerably wide dry ditch, when, suddenly checking him, the horse, who was a saddle-horse and a good leaper, drew himself together, and took the ditch, with me in the carriage behind him, and brought up against a fence, where there was just room for him to turn round, which he immediately did, as if aware of his mistake, and proceeded to leap back again, quite successfully without any assistance of mine, I being too much amazed at the whole performance to do anything but sit still and admire my horse's dexterity. I have adverted to the still existing industry of "gentlemen of the road," in speaking of Cranford in the days of the Earl of Berkeley, who used to take pistols in the carriage when he went to London. On one occasion, when he was riding, unattended but fortunately not unarmed, over some part of Hounslow Heath, a highwayman rode up to him, and, saluting him by name, said, "I know, my lord, you have sworn never to give in to one of us; but now I mean to try if you're as good as your word." "So I have, you rascal, but there are two of you here," replied the earl. The robber, thrown off his guard, looked round for the companion thus indicated, and Lord Berkeley instantly shot him through the head; owing it to his ready presence of mind that he escaped a similar fate at the hands of his assailant. My mother, I think, had the advantage of a slight personal acquaintance with one of the very last of these Tyburn heroes. She lived at one time, before her marriage, with her mother and sisters and only brother, at a small country house beyond Finchley; to which suburban, or indeed then almost entirely rural, retreat my father and other young men of her acquaintance used occasionally to resort for an afternoon's sport, in the present highly distinguished diversion of pigeon-shooting. On one of these occasions some one of her habitual guests brought with him a friend, who was presented to my mother, and joined in the exercise of skill. He was like a gentleman in his appearance and manners, with no special peculiarity but remarkably white and handsome hands and extraordinary dexterity, or luck, in pigeon-shooting. Captain Clayton was this individual's name, and his visit, never repeated to my mother's house, was remembered as rather an agreeable event. Soon after this several outrages were committed on the high-road which passed through Finchley; and Moody, the celebrated comic actor, who lived in that direction, was stopped one evening, as he was driving himself into town, by a mounted gentleman, who, addressing him politely by name, demanded his watch and purse, which Moody surrendered, under the influence of "the better part of valor." Having done so, however, he was obliged to request his "very genteel" thief to give him enough money to pay his turnpike on his way into town, where he was going to act, whereupon the "gentleman of the road" returned him half-a-crown, and bade him a polite "Good-evening." Some time after this, news was brought into Covent Garden, at rehearsal one morning, that a man arrested for highway robbery was at the Bow Street Police Office, immediately opposite the theatre. Several of the _corps dramatique_ ran across the street to that famous vestibule of the Temple of Themis; among others, Mr. Moody and Vincent de Camp. The latter immediately recognized my mother's white-handed, gentleman-like pigeon-shooter, and Moody his obliging MacHeath of the Finchley Common highway. "Halloa! my fine fellow," said the actor to the thief, "is that you? Well, perhaps as you _are_ here, you won't object to return me my watch, for which I have a particular value, and which won't be of any great use to you now, I suppose." "Lord love ye, Mr. Moody," replied _Captain Clayton_, with a pleasant smile, "I thought you were come to pay me the half crown I lent you."] HARLEY STREET, Friday, April 22nd, 1842. MY DEAR T----, _I_ am not in the least indifferent to the advent of £100 sterling.... I am amused with your description of Dickens, because it tallies so completely with the first impression he made upon me the only time I ever met him before he went to America.... I admire and love the man exceedingly, for he has a deep warm heart, a noble sympathy with and respect for human nature, and great intellectual gifts wherewith to make these fine moral ones fruitful for the delight and consolation and improvement of his fellow-beings. Lord Morpeth is indeed, as we say, another guessman, but quite one of the most amiable in this world or _that_. He is universally beloved and respected, so tenderly cherished, by his own kindred that his mother and sisters seem absolutely miserable with various anxieties about him, and the weariness of his prolonged absence. He is a most worthy gentleman, and "goes nigh to be thought so" by all classes here, I can tell you.... You ask me if I have any warmer friends in England than your people, who are certainly my warmest friends in America. I have some friends in my own country who have known and loved me longer than your family; but I do not think, with one or two exceptions, that they love me better, nor do I reckon upon the faith and affection of my American friends less than upon that of my English ones. But the number of people whom I entirely love and trust is very small anywhere, and yet large enough to make me thank God every day for the share He has given me of worthy friendships--treasures sufficient for me to account myself very rich in their possession; living springs of goodness and affection, in which my spirit finds never-failing refreshment. But I have in my own country a vast number of very kind and cordial acquaintances, and, to tell you the truth, am better understood (naturally) and better liked in society, I think, here than on your side of the water. I fancy I am more popular, upon the whole, among my own people than among yours; which is not to be wondered at, as difference is almost always an element of dislike, and, of course, I am more different from American than English people. Indeed, I have come to consider the difference of nationality a broader, stronger, and deeper difference than that produced by any mere dissimilarity of individual character. It is tantamount to looking at everything from another point of view; to having, from birth and through education, other standards; to having, in short, another intellectual and moral horizon. No personal unlikeness between two individuals of the same nation, however strong it may be in certain points, is equal to the entire unlikeness, fundamental, superficial, and thorough, of two people of different nations. I am anxious to close this letter before I go out, and shall only add, in replying to your next question of whether I ever feel any desire to return to the stage, _Never_.... My very nature seems to me dramatic. I cannot speak without gesticulating and making faces, any more than an Italian can; I am fond, moreover, of the excitement of _acting_, personating interesting characters in interesting situations, giving vivid expression to vivid emotion, realizing in my own person noble and beautiful imaginary beings, and _uttering the poetry of Shakespeare_. But the stage is not only this, but much more that is not this; and that much more is not only by no means equally agreeable, but positively odious to me, and always was. Good-by. God bless you and yours. Believe me always yours most truly, FANNY BUTLER. HARLEY STREET, May 1st, 1842. MY DEAREST HARRIET, I have just despatched a letter to Emily, from whom I I have had two already since she reached Bannisters. She writes chiefly of her mother, whose efforts to bear her trial are very painful to poor Emily, whose fewer years and excellent mental habits render such exertions easier to her. To no one can self-control under such sorrow ever be easy. You ask about my going to the Drawing-room, which happened thus: The Duke of Rutland dined some little time ago at the Palace, and, speaking of the late party at Belvoir, mentioned me, when the Queen asked why I didn't have myself presented. The duke called the next day at our house, but we did not see him, and he being obliged to go out of town, left a message for me with Lady Londonderry, to the effect that her Majesty's interest about me (curiosity would have been the more exact word, I suspect) rendered it imperative that I should go to the Drawing-room; and, indeed, Lady Londonderry's authoritative "Of course you'll go," given in her most _gracious_ manner, left me no doubt whatever as to my duty in that respect, especially as the message duly delivered by her was followed up by a letter from the duke, from Newmarket, who, from the midst of his bets, handicaps, sweepstakes, and cups, wrote me over again all that he had bid the marchioness tell me. Wherefore, having no objection whatever to go to Court (except, indeed, the expense of my dress, the idea of which caused me no slight trepidation, as I had already exceeded my year's allowance), I referred the matter to my supreme authority, and it being settled that I was to go, I ordered my tail, and my top, train, and feathers, and went. And this is the whole story, with this postscript, that, not owning a single diamond, I hired a handsome set for the occasion from Abud and Collingwood, every single stone of which darted a sharp point of nervous anxiety into my brain and bosom the whole time I wore them. As you know that I would not go to the end of the street to see a drawing-room full of full moons, you will easily believe that there was nothing particularly delightful to me in the occasion. But after all, it was very little more of an exertion than I make five nights of the week, in going to one place or another; and under the circumstances it was certainly fitting and proper that I should go. I suffered agonies of nervousness, and, I rather think, did all sorts of awkward things; but so, I dare say, do other people in the same predicament, and I did not trouble my head much about my various _mis_-performances. One thing, however, I can tell you: if her Majesty has seen me, I have not seen her; and should be quite excusable in cutting her wherever I met her. "A cat may look at _a_ king," it is said; but how about looking at _the_ Queen? In great uncertainty of mind on this point, I did not look at my sovereign lady. I kissed a soft white hand, which I believe was hers; I saw a pair of very handsome legs, in very fine silk stockings, which I am convinced were not hers, but am inclined to attribute to Prince Albert; and this is all I perceived of the whole royal family of England, for I made a sweeping courtesy to the "good remainders of the Court," and came away with no impression but that of a crowded mass of full-dressed confusion, and neither know how I got in nor out of it.... You ask about Liszt. He does not take the management of the German Opera, as was expected; indeed, I wonder he ever accepted such an employment. I should think him most unfit to manage such an undertaking, with his excitable temper and temperament. I do not know whether he will come to London at all this season. Adelaide has been bitterly disappointed about it, and said that she had reckoned upon him in great measure for the happiness of her whole summer.... You ask next in your category of questions after Adelaide's dog, and whether it is led in a string successfully yet; and thereby hangs a tale. T'other morning she was awakened by a vehement knocking at her door, and S---- exclaiming, in a loud and solemn voice, "Adelaide, thy maid and thy dog are in a fit together!" which announcement she continued to repeat, with more and more emphasis, till my sister, quite frightened, jumped out of bed, and came upon the stairs, where she beheld the two women and children just come in from their walk; Anne, looking over the banisters with her usual peculiar air of immovable dignity, slowly ejaculating, "What a fool the girl is!" Caroline followed in her wake, wringing her hands, and alternately shrieking and howling, like all the Despairs in the universe. It was long before anything could be distinguished of articulate speech, among the fräulein's howls and shrieks; but at length it appeared that she had taken "die Tine" out in the Regent's Park with Anne and the children, who now go out directly after their breakfast. Tiny, it seems, enjoyed the trip amazingly, and became so excited and so very much transported with what we call animal spirits in human beings that it began to run, as the fräulein thought, away. Whereupon the fräulein began to run after it; whereupon Tiny, when it heard this Dutch nymph heavy in hot pursuit, ran till it knocked its head against a keeper's lodge, and here, because it shook and trembled and stared, probably at its own unwonted performance, a sympathizing crowd collected, who instantly proclaimed it at first in a _conwulsion_ fit, and then decidedly mad. Water was offered it, which it only stared at and shook its head, evidently dreading the cleansing element. A policeman coming by immediately proposed to kill it. This, however, the fräulein objected to; and catching the bewildered quadruped in her arms, she set off home, escorted by a running mob of sympathetic curiosity. But about half-way the struggle between herself and "die Tine" became so terrific that it ended by the luckless little brute escaping from her, and precipitating itself down an area, where it remained, invoking heaven with howls, while Caroline ran howling down the street. The man-servant was then sent (twice with a wrong direction) to fetch the poor little creature up, and bring it home. At length Caroline accompanied the footman to the scene of the dog-astrophe (you wouldn't call it _cat_-astrophe, would you?), and "die Tine" was safely lodged in the back-yard here, where, being left alone and not bothered with human solicitude, it presently recovered as many small wits as it ever had, drank voluntarily plenty of water, and gave satisfactory signs of being quite as rational as any lady's little dog need be; but the fräulein protests she will never take "die Tine" out walking again. Good-bye dear. God bless you. I am pretty well, if that comports with low spirits and terrible nervous irritability. Yours ever, FANNY. My father desires his love to you. HARLEY STREET, Friday, May 6th, 1842. I did ask Emily my botanical questions, but she could tell me no more than you have done, and knew nothing special about the primroses. You ask me a great deal in your letter about my father again taking the management of Covent Garden, and on what terms he has done so; all which I have told you in the letter I have just despatched to you.... Adelaide has repeatedly said that, as soon as she has realized three hundred a year, she will give up the whole business; and I comfort myself with that purpose of hers; for if at the conclusion of next season she will go to America for a year, she will more than realize the result she proposes to herself.... I cannot, however, help fearing that obstacles may arise to prevent her eventually fulfilling her purpose when the time comes for her retiring, according to her present expectation and wish.... I have not been out a great deal lately, We seem a little less inclined to fly at all quarry than last season; and as I never decide whether we shall accept the invitations that come or not, I am very well pleased that some of them are declined. I believe I told you that Lady Londonderry had asked us to a magnificent ball. This I was rather sorry to refuse, as a ball is quite as great a treat to me as to any "young miss" just coming out. Indeed, I think my capacity of enjoyment and excitement is greater than that of most "young misses" I see, who not only talk of being _bored_, but actually contrive, poor creatures! to look so in the middle of their first season. I spent two hours with poor Lady Dacre yesterday evening.... After sitting with her, we went to a large party at Sydney Smith's, where I was very much amused and pleased, and saw numbers of people that I know and like--rather. You ask about my walks.... They are now chiefly confined to my peregrinations in the Square, measuring the enclosed gravel walks of which I have already, since your departure, finished the "Mémoires de l'Enfant du Peuple," and brought myself, _mirabile dictu!_ to within twenty pages of the end of Mrs. Jameson's book upon Prussian school statistics.... I do not think Mr. W---- any authority upon any subject. I consider him a perfect specimen of a charlatan, and his opinions with regard to slavery and the abolitionists are particularly little worthy of credit in my mind, because he _used_ America precisely as an actor would, to make money wherever he could by his lectures, which he puffed himself, till he was absolutely laughed at all over the country, and which were, by the accounts of those who heard them, perfectly shallow and often quite erroneous as far as regarded the information they pretended to impart. The Southern States were a lucrative field for his lecturing speculation; the Northern abolitionists were far from being sufficiently numerous or influential for it to be worth his while to conciliate them; and for these reasons I attach little value to his statement upon that or indeed any other subject. You ask me what was my impression altogether of the Drawing-room. I have told you about my own performances there, of which, however, I dare say I exaggerated the awkwardness to myself. The whole thing wearied me, just as any other large, overcrowded assembly where I could not sit down would; and that is the chief impression it has left upon me. I believe I was flattered by the Queen's expressing any curiosity about me, but I went simply because I was told it was right that I should do so. I am always horribly shy, or nervous, or whatever that foolish sensation ought to be called, at even having to walk across a room full of people; and therefore the fuss and to-do and ceremonial of the presentation (particularly not having been very well drilled beforehand by Lady Francis, who presented me) were disagreeable to me; but I have retained no impression of the whole thing other than of a very large and fatiguing rout. We are advised to go again on the birthday, but that I am sure we shall not do; and now that the Queen--God bless her!--has perceived that I do not go upon all-fours, but am indeed, as Bottom says, "a woman like any other woman," I have no doubt her gracious Majesty is abundantly satisfied with what she saw of me. Good-bye, dearest Harriet. Ever yours, F. A. B. [The enthusiastic abolitionist, Mrs. Lydia Child, had written to me, requesting me to give her for publication some portions of the journal I had kept during my residence in Georgia; and I had corresponded with my friend Mrs. Charles Sedgwick upon the subject, deciding to refuse her request. My Georgia journal never saw the light till the War of Secession was raging in America, and almost all the members of the society in which I was then living in England were strongly sympathizing with the Southern cause, when I thought it right to state what, according to my own observation and experience, that cause involved.] HARLEY STREET, May 6th, 1842. MY DEAREST HARRIET, The carriage is waiting to take ---- to the _Levée_, and I am waiting till it comes back to go upon my thousand and one daily errands. Adelaide, it being her last day at home, appears anxious to enjoy as much as she can of my society, and has therefore gone fast asleep in the arm-chair by the table at which I am writing, and has expressed her intention of coming out and paying visits with me this morning. She starts at eight o'clock this evening, and will reach Birmingham, I believe, about one. This arrangement, which I should think detestable, pleases her very much.... Mr. Everett, our friend, presents ----, and I thought Anne would have fallen down in a fit when she heard that the ceremony consisted in going down on one knee and kissing the Queen's hand. She did not mind my doing it the least in the world, but her indignation has been unbounded at the idea of a free-born American citizen submitting to such degradation. Poor thing! "Lucifer, son of the morning," was meek and humble to her. We dined to-day with the Francis Egertons, to meet the young Guardsmen who are to form our _corps dramatique_ for "The Hunchback," which, you know, we are going to act in private. To-morrow evening we go to Sydney Smith's, and on Monday down to Oatlands for a few days. I am always delighted in that place and the lovely wild country round it. Lady Francis will mount me, and I expect my old enjoyment in riding about those beautiful and well-remembered haunts with her.... There has been a grand row at the Italian Opera-House, among the managers, singers, and singeresses. Mario (Mons. Di Candia; I suppose you know who I mean) has, it seems, for some reason or other, been _discharged_. Madame Grisi, who sympathizes with him, refuses to uplift her voice, that being the case; the new singeress, Frezzolini, does not please at all; and the new singer, Rouconi, isn't allowed by his wife to sing with any woman but herself, and she is a perfect _dose_ to the poor audience. Lumley, the solicitor, manager of these he and she divinities, declares that if they don't behave better he'll shut the theatre at the end of the week. In the mean time, underhand proposals have been made to Adelaide to stop the gap, and sing for a few nights for them--a sort of proposal which does not suit her, which she has scornfully rejected, and departed with her tail over her shoulder, leaving the behind scenes of Her Majesty's Theatre with their tails between their legs.... My dearest Harriet, you ask me if I do not think the spirit of martyrdom is often alloyed with self-esteem and wilfulness. God alone knows the measure in which human infirmity and human virtue unite in inducing the sacrifice of life and all that life loves for a point of opinion. I confess, for my own part, self-esteeming and wilful as I am, that to suffer bodily torture for the sake of an abstract question of what one believes to be right is an effort of courage so much above any that I am capable of that I do not feel as if I had a right to undervalue it by the smallest doubt cast upon the merit of those who have shown themselves capable of it. It may be that, without such admixture of imperfection as human nature's highest virtues are still tinged with, the confessors of every good and noble cause would have left unfulfilled their heroic task of witnessing to the truth by their death; but if indeed base alloy did mingle with their great and conscientious sacrifice, let us hope that the pangs of physical torture, the anguish of injustice and ignominy, and the rending asunder of all the ties of earthly affection, may have been some expiation for the imperfection of their most perfect deed.... Will you, my dear, be so good as to remember what a hang-nail is like? or a grain of dust in your eye? or a blister on your heel? or a corn on your toe? and then reflect what the word "torture" implies, when it meant all that the most devilish cruelty could invent. Savonarola! good gracious me! I would have _canted_ and _re_canted, and called black white, and white black, and confessed, and denied! Please don't think of it! God be praised, those days are over! Not but what I edified Mr. Combe greatly once, when I was a girl, by declaring that if, by behaving well under torture, I could have vexed my tormentors very much, and if I might have had plenty of people to see how well I behaved, I thought I could have managed it; to which he replied, "Oh, weel now, Fanny, ye've just got the very spirit of a martyr in you." See if that theory of the matter answers your notion.... You ask me how I managed about diamonds to go to Court in. I hired a set, which I also wore at the _fête_ at Apsley House; they were only a necklace and earrings, which I wore as a bandeau, stitched on scarlet velvet, and as drops in the middle of scarlet velvet bows in my hair, and my dress being white satin and point lace, trimmed with white Roman pearls, it all looked nice enough. The value of the jewels was only £700, but I am sure they gave me £7000 worth of misery; and if her Majesty had but known the anguish I endured in showing my respect for her by false appearances, the very least she could have done would have been to have bought the jewels and given them to me. Madame Dévy made my Court dress, which was of such material as, you see, I can use when I play "The Hunchback" at Lady Francis's. I am ruining myself, in spite of my best endeavors to be economical; but if it is any comfort for you to know it, my conscience torments me horribly for it.... God bless you. Good-bye, dear. Ever yours affectionately, F. A. B. HARLEY STREET, Saturday, May 7th, 1842. ... What an immense long talk I am having with you this morning, my dear Hal! I do not believe you are wearied, however; but you will surely wonder why I did not put all these letters under one cover with the three sovereign heads on the one packet; and I am sure I don't know why I have not. But it doesn't matter much my appearing a little more or a little less absurd to you. You ask who I shall associate with while ---- and Adelaide are away.... I presume with my own writing-table and the carriage cushions, just as I do now, just as I did before, and just as I am likely to do hereafter.... It was not the presence of the Queen that affected my nerves at the Drawing-room, but _my own_ presence, _i.e._, as the French say, I was "très embarrassée de ma personne." The uncertainty of what I was to do (for Lady Francis had been exceedingly succinct in her instructions), and the certainty of a crowd of people staring all round me,--this, I think, and not the overpowering sense of a royal human being before me, was what made me nervous. Were I to go again to a Drawing-room, now that I know my lesson, I do not think I should suffer at all from any embarrassment. We are not asked to the fancy ball at the Palace, I am told, because of our omission in not attending at the Birthday Drawing-room, which, it seems, is a usual thing after a first presentation. I should like to have seen it; it will be a fine sight. In the mean time, as many of our acquaintances are going, we come in for a full share of the insanity which has taken possession of men's and women's minds about velvets, satins, brocades, etc. You enter no room that is not literally _strewed_ with queer-looking prints of costumes; and before you can say, "How d'ye do?" you are asked which looks best together, blue and green, or pink and yellow; for, indeed, their selections are often as outrageous as these would be. I never conceived people could be so stupid at combining ideas, even upon this least abstruse of subjects; and you would think, to hear these fine ladies talk the inanity they do about their own clothes, now they are compelled to think about them for themselves, that they have no natural perceptions of even color, form, or proportion. The fact is that even their _dressing_-brains are turned over to their French milliners and lady's-maids. I understand Lady A---- says she will make her dress alone (exclusive of jewels) cost £1000. Some people say this sort of mad extravagance does good; I cannot think it. It surely matters comparatively little that the insane luxury of the self-indulgent feeds the bodies of so many hundred people if at the same time the mischievous example of their folly and extravagance is demoralizing their hearts and minds and injuring a great many more. Touching Lady A----, she gave the address of one of her milliners to Lady W----, who, complaining to her of the exorbitant prices of this superlative _faiseuse_, and plaintively stating that she had charged her fifty guineas for a simple morning dress, Lady A---- replied, "Ah, very likely, I dare say; I don't know anything about _cheap clothes_." I do not know where Adelaide is likely to lodge in Dublin, nor do I believe she knows herself; but before this letter reaches you, you will have found out. I had almost a mind to ask her to write to me, but then I knew both how she hates it and how little time she was likely to have, so I forbore. She has left me with the pleasing expectation that any of these days her eccentric musical friend Dessauer may walk in, to be by me received, lodged, entertained, comforted, and consoled, in her absence (in which case, by-the-by, you know, I should associate with him while she is away). From parts of his letters which she has read to me, I feel very much inclined to like him, ... and I imagine I shall find him very amusing.... You ask about our getting up of "The Hunchback" at the Francis Egertons'. I forget whether you knew that Horace Wilson [my kind friend and connection, the learned Oxford Professor of Sanscrit, who to his many important acquirements and charming qualities added the accomplishments of a capital musician and first-rate amateur actor] has been seriously indisposed, and so out of health and spirits as to have declined the part of Master Walter, which he was to have taken in it. This has been a great disappointment to me, for he would have done it admirably, and as he is a person of whom I am very fond, it would have been agreeable to me to have had him among us, and I should have particularly liked him for so important a coadjutor. He failing us, however, Knowles himself has undertaken to play the part, and I shall be glad enough to do it with him again. I have a great deal of compassionate admiration for poor Knowles, who, with his undeniable dramatic genius, his bright fancy, and poetical imagination, will, I fear, end his days either in a madhouse or a poorhouse. The characters beside Sir Thomas Clifford and Modus (which you know are taken by Henry Greville and ----) are filled by a pack of young Guardsmen, with whom I dined, in order to make acquaintance, at Lady Francis's t'other day. Two of them, Captain Seymour and a son of Sir Francis Coles, are acquaintances of yours and your people. You ask how I am amusing myself. Why, just as usual, which is well enough. I am of too troubled a nature ever to lack excitement, and have an advantage over most people in the diversion I am able to draw from very small sources. I went last night to the French play, to see a French actress called Déjazet make her first appearance in London. The house was filled with our highest aristocracy, the stalls with women of rank and character, and the performance was, I think, one of the most impudent that I ever witnessed. Dr. Whewell [the celebrated Master of Trinity] and Mrs. Whewell were sitting near us, and left the theatre in the middle of Déjazet's first piece--I suppose from sheer disgust. She is a marvellous actress, and without exception the most brazen-faced woman I ever beheld, and that is saying a great deal. Good-bye. Ever your affectionate FANNY. HARLEY STREET, Saturday, May 14th, 1842. MY DEAREST HAL, On my return from Oatlands yesterday, I found no fewer than four letters of yours, and this morning I have received a fifth.... I am most thankful for all your details about Adelaide, who, of course, will not have time to write to any of us herself.... Miss Rainsforth, her mother, and their travelling manager, Mr. Callcott, are her whole party.... Miss Rainsforth is a quiet, gentle, well-conducted, well-bred, amiable person; Mr. Callcott is a son of the composer, and a nephew of our friend Sir Augustus, and has the refinement of mind and manners which one would look for in any member of that family.... I am very sorry that Adelaide cannot see more of you, and you of her.... You ask whether it is a blessing or a curse not to provide one's own means of subsistence. I think it is a great blessing to be able and allowed to do so. But I dare say I am not a fair judge of the question, for the feeling of independence and power consequent upon earning large sums of money has very much destroyed my admiration for any other mode of support; and yet certainly my _pecuniary_ position now would seem to most people very far preferable to my former one; but having _earned_ money, and therefore most legitimately _owned_ it, I never can conceive that I have any right to the money of another person.... I cannot help sometimes regretting that I did not reserve out of my former earnings at least such a yearly sum as would have covered my personal expenses; and having these notions, which impair the comfort of _being maintained_, I am sometimes sorry that I no longer possess my former convenient power of coining. I do not think I should feel so uncomfortable about inheriting money, though I had not worked for it; for, like any other free gift, I think I should consider that legitimately my own, just like any other present that was made me.... "The Hunchback" is to be acted at the Francis Egertons', in London, though I do not very well see how; for Bridgewater House is in process of rebuilding, and their present residence in Belgrave Square, though large enough for all social purposes, is far from being well adapted to theatrical ones; insomuch--or, rather, so little--that it is my opinion we shall be in each other's arms, laps, and pockets throughout the whole performance, which will be inconvenient, and in some of the situations slightly indecorous. I have received this morning, my dear, your notice of the "Sonnambula," for which we are all very grateful to you. Give my love to my sister. I expected her success as a matter of course, and did not anticipate much annoyance to her from her present mode of life, ... because I have known her derive extreme amusement and diversion from circumstances and associates that would have been utterly distasteful to me. Her love and perception of the ridiculous is not only positive enjoyment, but a protection from annoyance and a mitigation of disgust. My father desires his love to you, and bids me thank you for your kindness in sending him the newspapers. With regard to that last song in the "Amina," of which you speak as of a _tour de force_, it is hardly so much so, in point of fact, as her execution of the whole part, which is too high for her; and though she sings it admirably in spite of that, she cannot give it the power and expression that she would if it lay more easily in her voice. This, however, is the case with other music that she sings, and the consequence is that, though she has great execution, and power, and sweetness, and finish in the use of her artificial voice, it wants the spontaneous force in high music of a naturally high organ. Pray, did you ever pity me as much as you do Adelaide in the exercise of her profession? You certainly never expressed the same amount of compassion for my strolling destinies, nor did I ever hear you lament in this kind over the fate of John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, both of whom had impertinences addressed to them by your Dublin gallery humorists. Pray, what is the meaning of this want of feeling on your part for _us others_, or your excess of it for Adelaide? Is it only singing histrions who appear to you objects of compassion? Good-bye, dearest Harriet. I have to write to Emily, and to answer an American clergyman, a friend of mine, who has written to me from Paris; and moreover, being rather in want of money, I am about to endeavor to make practicable for the English stage a French piece called "Mademoiselle de Belle Isle," which, with certain vicious elements, has some very striking and effective situations, and is, dramatically speaking, one of the most cleverly constructed plays I have seen for a long while. Therefore, farewell. If I could _earn_ £200 now, I should be glad. HARLEY STREET, Thursday, May 19th, 1842. Thank you, my dearest Harriet, for your long account of Adelaide. She has written to my father, which I was very glad of.... Of course, I have not expected to hear from her, but have been delighted to get all your details. In her letter to my father, she says she gets on extremely well with her companions, that they are gay and merry, and that her life with them is pleasant and amuses her very much. You do not ask me a single question about a single thing, and therefore I will just tell you how matters in general go on with me. In the first place, I heard yesterday that we are definitely to return to America in August. Some attempt was made to renew our lease of this house for a few months; but difficulties have arisen about it, and we shall probably return to the United States as soon as possible after our lease expires. I do not yet feel at all sure of the fulfilment of this intention, however; but at any rate it is one point of apparent decision indicated.... My feelings and thoughts about the return are far too numerous and various to be contained in a letter. One thing I think--I feel sure of--_that it is right_, and therefore I am glad we are to do it. My father, to whom this intention has not yet been mentioned, is looking wonderfully well, and appears to be enjoying his mode of life extremely. He spends his days at Covent Garden, and finds even now, when the German company are carrying on their _opera_tions there, enough to do to keep him interested and incessantly busy within those charmed and charming precincts. I am pretty well, though not in very good spirits; my life is much more quiet and regular than when you were here, and I enjoy a considerable portion of retiracy. I have taken possession of Adelaide's little sitting-room, and inhabit it all day, and very often till tea-time in the evening. Owing to our day no longer being cut to pieces by our three-o'clock dinner (on account of Adelaide), I do not run into arrears with my visits, and generally, after discharging one or two recent debts of that sort, am able to get an hour's walk in Kensington Gardens, and come home between four and five o'clock. We have not been out a great deal lately; we have taken, I am happy to say, to discriminating a little among our invitations, and no longer accept everything that offers. I spent three delightful days at Oatlands, which is charming to me from its own beauty and the association of the pleasure which I enjoyed there in past years. The hawthorn was just coming into blossom, the wild heaths and moors and commons were one sheet of deep golden gorse and pale golden broom, and nothing could be lovelier than the whole aspect of the country. The day before yesterday I dined _tête-à-tête_ with Mademoiselle d'Este, for whom I have taken rather a fancy, and who appears to have done the same by me. Her position is a peculiar and trying one, combined with her character, which has some striking and interesting elements. She is no longer young, but has still much personal beauty, and that of an order not common in England: very dark eyes, hair, and complexion, with a freedom and liveliness of manner and play of countenance quite unusual in Englishwomen.... She lives a great deal alone, and reads a great deal, and thinks a little, and I feel interested in her. She has sacrificed the whole comfort and, it appears to me, much of the possible happiness of her life to her notion of being a princess, which, poor thing! she is not; and as she will not be satisfied with, or even accept, the position of a private gentlewoman, she is perpetually obliged to devise means of avoiding situations, which are perpetually recurring, in which her real rank, or rather _no_ rank, is painfully brought home to her. This unfortunate pretension to princess-ship has probably interfered vitally with her happiness, in preventing her marrying, as she considers, below her birth [_i.e._ royally]; and as she is a very attractive woman, and, I should judge, a person of strong feelings and a warm, passionate nature, this must have been a considerable sacrifice; though in marrying, to be sure, she might only have realized another form of disappointment. Yesterday we went to a fine dinner at Lord F----'s. He and his sisters are good-natured young people of large fortune, whose acquaintance we made at Cranford, and who are very civil and amiable in their demonstrations of good-will towards us. A son of the Duke of Leinster was at this dinner, and invited ---- to go with him this morning and see Prince Albert review the Guards; which he has accordingly done. To-night we go to Sydney Smith's, which I always enjoy exceedingly; and for next week, I am happy to say, we have at present no engagements but a dinner at the Francis Egertons', and another evening at Sydney Smith's.... I believe I have now told you pretty much all I have to tell. I am working at a translation of a French piece called "Mademoiselle de Belle Isle," by which I hope to make a little money, with which I should be very glad to pay Mademoiselle Dévy's bill for my spring finery. I went to Covent Garden the other day, to see if I could find anything in the theatre wardrobe that I could make use of for "The Hunchback," and did find something; and, moreover, I think Adelaide will be able to get her dress for Helen from there, though it seemed rather a doleful daylight collection of frippery. My first dress I can make one of my own white muslin ones serve for, my last I shall get beautifully out of my Court costume; so that the three will only cost me the price of altering them for the private theatrical occasion. We met at Oatlands Mrs. G----, the mother of the Member for Dublin, who has been preparing herself, by a twelve years' residence on the Continent, for a plunge into savagedom, by a return to her home in Connemara; and it was both comical and sad to hear her first launch out upon the merits of the dear "wild Irish," and her desire to be among and serviceable to "her people," and then, all in the same breath, declare that the mere atmosphere of England and English society was enough to kill any one with "the blue devils" who had ever been abroad; and this, mind you, is the impression British existence makes upon her in the full height of the gay London season. Fancy what she will find Connemara! She knows you and your people, and gave me a most ardent invitation to the savage Ireland where she lives. Poor woman! I pity her; her case is not absolutely unknown to me, or quite without parallel in my own experience. Good-bye. God bless you. Your affectionate F. A. B. HARLEY STREET. This letter has been begun a week; it is now Saturday, May 28th, 1842. MY DEAREST HARRIET, Pray give my love to Mrs. Kemble, and tell her that the Queen Dowager sent for me to go and pay her a visit yesterday. For goodness' sake, Harriet, don't misunderstand me, I am only in joke! I live among such very matter-of-fact persons that I really tremble for an hour after every piece of nonsense I utter. You must observe by this that I am in a painfully frequent state of trepidation; but what I meant by this message to Mrs. Kemble is that I have been extremely amused at her taking the trouble to write to Mrs. George Siddons to find out "all about" my going to the Drawing-room, and the rumor which had reached her of the Queen having desired to see me. George Siddons told me this himself, and it struck me as such a funny interest in my concerns on the part of Mrs. Kemble, who takes none whatever in _me_, that I thought I would send her word of the piece of preferment which has occurred to me since, viz. being sent for by the Queen Dowager, who desired my friend Mademoiselle d'Este to bring me to call upon her. But what wonderful gossip it does seem to be writing gravely round and round from Leamington to London, and from London to Leamington, about! You ask me how it fares with me. Why, busily and wearily enough. We have had a perfect deluge of invitations lately, two or three thick of a night.... We are going to-night to the Duchess of Sutherland's fancy ball at Stafford House, which is to be a less formal, but not less magnificent, show than the Queen's masque. I have not begun to rehearse "The Hunchback" yet, for _I_ shall not require many rehearsals; but one of our party attended the first this morning, and said all the young amateurs promised very fairly, and that Henry Greville did his part extremely well, which I am very glad to hear. I have had but one visit from him since his return to town, when, of course, he discussed Adelaide's plans with great zeal. He certainly wishes very much that she should sing at the Opera, but his view of the whole matter is so different from mine ... that we are not likely to agree very well, even upon so general a point of discussion as her best professional interests. I am much concerned at your observations about her exhaustion and hoarseness. I am so anxious that her present life should not be prolonged, so anxious that she should realize her very moderate wishes and leave it, that I cannot bear to think of any possible failure of her precious gift from over-exertion.... I think, begging your pardon, you talk some nonsense when you compare your existence, as an object of rational pity, with my sister's. All other considerations set apart, there are certain conditions of life, which are the result of peculiar states and stages of society, that are indisputably less favorable for the production of happiness, and the exercise of goodness also, than others. Among these results of over-civilization are the careers of public exhibitors of every description. In judging of their conduct or character, we may make every allowance for the peculiar dangers of their position, and the temptations of their peculiar gifts; but I confess I am amazed at any woman who, sheltered by the sacred privacy of a home, can envy the one or desire the other. Dearest Harriet, this letter has lain so long unfinished, and I am now so engulfed in all sorts of worry, flurry, hurry, row, fuss, bustle, bother, dissipation and distraction, that it is vain hoping to add anything intelligible to it. Good-bye, dearest. Ever yours, FANNY. HARLEY STREET, May 29th, 1842. DEAREST HARRIET, This is Sunday, and, owing to my custom of neither paying visits nor going to dinner or evening parties on "the first day of the week," I look forward to a little leisure; though the repeated raps at the door already this morning remind me that it will probably be interrupted often enough to render it of little avail for any purpose of consecutive occupation.... You ask me if I think of "taking to translating." My dear Harriet, if you mean when I return to America, I shall take to nothing there but the stagnant life I led there before, which, in the total absence of any impulse from the external circumstances in which I live and the utter absence of any interest in any intellectual pursuit in those with whom I live, becomes absolutely inevitable; and so I think that, once again in my Transatlantic home, I shall neither originate nor translate anything. I have "taken to translating" "Mademoiselle de Belle Isle" because my bill at Mademoiselle Dévy's is £97, and I am determined _my brains_ shall pay it; therefore, also, I have given my father a ballet on the subject of Pocahontas, and am preparing and altering "Mademoiselle de Belle Isle" for Covent Garden, for both which pieces of work I hope to get something towards my £97. Besides this, I have offered my "Review of Victor Hugo" to John for the _British Quarterly Review_, of which he is, you know, the editor--of course, telling him that it was written for an American magazine--and he has promised me sixteen guineas for it if it suits him. Besides this, I have offered Bentley the beginning of my Southern journal, merely an account of our journey down to the plantation.... Besides this, I have drawn up and sketched out, act by act, scene by scene, and almost speech by speech, a play in five acts, a sequel to the story of Kotzebue's "Stranger," which I hope to make a good work of. Thus, you see, my brains are not altogether idle; and, with all this, I am rehearsing "The Hunchback" with our amateurs, for three and four hours at a time, attending to my own dresses and Adelaide's (who will attend to nothing), returning, as usual, all the visits, and going out to dinners and parties innumerable. This, you will allow, is rather a double-quick-time sort of existence; but the after-lull of the future will be more than sufficient for rest. Alexandre Dumas is the author of "Mademoiselle de Belle Isle," and I was led to select that piece to work upon, not so much from the interest of the story, which is, however, considerable, as from the dramatic skill with which it is managed, and the circumstances made to succeed each other. There is, unfortunately, an insuperably objectionable incident in it, which I have done my best to modify; but it is one of the most ingeniously constructed pieces I have seen for a long time, and gives admirable opportunities for good acting to almost every member of the _dramatis personæ_. Mademoiselle d'Este has no right to the painful feeling of illegitimacy, for her mother was her father's wife, and therefore she has not, what indeed I can conceive to be, a bitter source of wounded pride and incessant rational mortification. The Duke of Sussex married Lady Augusta Murray, and that, I should think, might satisfy his daughter, in spite of all the Acts of Parliament afterwards devised to restrict and regulate royal marriages. Mademoiselle d'Este's is merely a perpetual protest against an irreversible social decree, and an incessant, unavailing struggle for the observance and respect conventionally due to a rank which is _not_ hers; and though it appears to me as senseless a cause of trouble as ever human being chose to accept, yet as incessant bitterness and mortification and annoyance are its results for her, poor soul! of course to her it is real enough, if not in itself, in the results she gathers from it. My dinner has intervened, my dear, since this last sentence, and, moreover, a permission from my sister to inform you that _she is engaged to be married_!... You ask how Adelaide looks after her Dublin campaign. She looks better now, in spite of all her fatigue, than she has done since her return from Italy; her face looks almost fat, to which appearance, however, it is in some degree helped by her hair being already in rehearsal for "The Hunchback," falling in ringlets on each side of her head, which becomes her very much.... I have heard from Elizabeth Sedgwick, and she concurs in the propriety of my _not_ giving Mrs. Child my Southern journal. I shall say no more upon that subject.... Good-bye, dearest Harriet. I look forward with anticipated refreshment to a ride which I have some chance of getting to-morrow, and for which I am really gasping. I got one ride this week, and the escort that came to the door for me touched and flattered me not a little: old Lord Grey and Lady G----, and his two grandsons, and Lord Dacre, and B---- S----, all came up from their part of the town _to fetch me a ride_, which was a great kindness on their part, and an honor, pleasure, and profit to me. God bless you, dear. I feel, as Margery says, "in a kind of bewilder," but ever yours, FANNY. [My first meeting with Mademoiselle d'Este took place at Belvoir Castle, where we were both on a visit to the Duke of Rutland, and where my attention was drawn to the peculiarity of her conduct by my neighbor at the dinner-table, who said to me, just after we had taken our places, "Do you see Mademoiselle d'Este? She will do that now every day while she remains here." Mademoiselle d'Este at this moment entered the dining-room alone, and passed down the side of the table with an inclination to the duke, and a half-muttered apology about being late. This, it seems, was simply a pretence to cover her determination not to give precedence to any of the women in the house by being taken into dinner after them. The Duchesses of Bedford and Richmond, the Countess of Winchelsea, and other women of rank being then at the castle, Mademoiselle d'Este's pretensions stood not the slightest chance of acknowledgment, and she took this quite ineffectual way of protesting against her social position. Everybody at Belvoir was sufficiently familiar with her to accept these sort of proceedings on her part. To me they seemed more undignified and wanting in real pride and self-respect than a quiet acquiescence in the inevitable would have been. The conventional distinction she demanded had been legally refused her, and it was not in the power of the society to which she belonged to give it to her, however much they might have felt inclined to pity her position and excuse her resentment of it. But it was inconceivable to me that she should not either withdraw absolutely from all society (which is what I should have done in her place), or submit silently to an injury against which all protest was vain, which renewed itself, in some shape or other, daily, and which really involved no personal affront to her or injustice to the character of her mother. I thought she made a great mistake, which did not prevent my being attracted by her; and while we were at Belvoir, and immediately afterwards at Lord Willoughby's together, and subsequently on our return to London, we had a good deal of familiar and friendly intercourse with each other, in the course of which I had many opportunities of observing the perpetual struggle she maintained against what she considered the intolerable hardship of her position. She occupied a pretty little house in Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, and never allowed her servants to wear anything but the undress of the royal household; the scarlet livery being, of course, out of the question. On one or two occasions I dined with her _tête-à-tête_, and took no notice of the fact, which I remembered afterwards, that she invariably sent the servant out of the room, and helped herself and me with her own hands; but once, when the Duchess of B---- dined with us, and Mademoiselle d'Este had a dumb-waiter placed beside her, and, sending the man-servant out of the room, performed all the table service (except, indeed, bringing in the dishes), with our assistance only, the duchess assured me afterwards that this was simply because, in her own house, Mademoiselle d'Este would not submit to the unroyal indignity of being waited upon after her guests at her own table by her own servants. When the preparations for the fancy ball at the Palace were turning half the great houses in London into milliners' shops, filled with stuffs, and patterns, and pictures, and materials for fancy dresses, and drawings of costumes, and gabbling, shrieking, distracted women, Mademoiselle d'Este consulted me about her dress, and we passed a whole morning looking over a huge collection of plates of historical personages and picturesque portraits of real or imaginary heroines. Among these I repeatedly put aside several that I thought would be especially becoming to her dark beauty and fine figure; and as often was surprised to find that among those I had thus selected she had invariably rejected a certain proportion, among which were two or three particularly beautiful and appropriate, one or other of which I should certainly have chosen for her above the rest. I couldn't imagine upon what theory of selection she was guiding her examination of the prints until, upon closer examination, I perceived that the only portraits from which she had determined to make her choice of a costume were those of princesses of blood royal. Poor woman! I once saw a curious encounter between her and the Marchioness of L----, in which the most insolent woman of the London society of that day was worsted with her own peculiar weapon, by the princess "claimant," and ignominiously beaten from the field. The occasion of my being presented to the Queen Dowager was this: I had been dining one day with Mademoiselle d'Este, when the Marchioness of Londonderry came in, and read me a note she had received from the Duke of Rutland, in which the latter said that the Queen had asked him why I had not been presented at Court. After Lady Londonderry was gone, I expressed some surprise at this unexpected honor, and some dismay at finding that it was considered a matter of course that, under these circumstances, I should go to the Drawing-room. I felt shy about the ceremony, and sordidly reluctant to spend the sum of money upon my dress which I knew it must cost me. All this I discussed with Mademoiselle d'Este, and expressing my surprise at the Queen's having condescended to ask why I didn't have myself presented, Mademoiselle d'Este exclaimed, "Oh, my dear, those people are so curious!" meaning the Queen and Prince Albert, towards whom she had a great feeling of sore dislike; but whether she meant by "curious" inquisitive or singular--_queer_--I didn't ask her, being rather astonished at this "singular" mode of speaking of our liege lady and her illustrious consort. Poor Mademoiselle d'Este's feeling of bitterness against the Queen arose, I have since been told, from various small slights which her sensitive pride conceived she had received from her. Mademoiselle d'Este's determination to assert her right to be considered a royal personage had, perhaps, met with some other rebuffs from the Queen, besides the one which she herself told me of with great irritation. On the occasion of Queen Adelaide's Drawing-rooms, she had always permitted Mademoiselle d'Este to make her entrance by the same approach, and at the same time, with other members of the royal family. After the accession of Queen Victoria, Mademoiselle d'Este claimed the same privilege, which, however, was not granted her. She told me this with many passionate, indignant comments, and apparently desirous that I should be impressed by the superior charm and graciousness of Queen Adelaide, whom she called "her Queen," and of whom she spoke with the most affectionate regard and respect, she said, "You must come with me and see _my_ Queen," and accordingly she solicited permission to present me to the Queen Dowager, which was granted, and I went with her one morning to pay my respects to that great and good lady, and was to have done so a second time, but was prevented by our departure from town. I drove with Mademoiselle d'Este to Marlborough House in the morning, and we were ushered through several apartments into a small-sized sitting-room, where we were left. After a few moments a lady entered, to whom Mademoiselle d'Este presented me. The Queen Dowager was then apparently between fifty and sixty years old; a thin, middle-sized woman, with gray hair and a long face, discolored by the traces of some eruption. She looked in ill health, and was certainly very plain, but her manner and the expression of her face were very gentle and gracious, and her voice, with its German accent, sweet and agreeable. She asked Mademoiselle d'Este if she was going to the Duchess of Sutherland's ball, and on her replying that she was not going, and giving some trifling reason for not doing so, I couldn't help laughing, because on our way to Marlborough House she had told me, with what appeared to me very superfluous wrath and indignation, that she had received an invitation to the duchess's ball, but that as it was coupled with an intimation that it was hoped the persons who had been at the Queen's great fancy ball, given a week before, would wear the same costumes at Stafford House, Mademoiselle d'Este chose to consider this an impertinent dictation, and said first "she would go in a plain white satin gown," then "in a white muslin petticoat," finally, that "she wouldn't go at all;" and working herself up by degrees into more fury as she talked, she abused the Duchess of Sutherland vehemently, mimicking her in a most ludicrous manner, and saying that she always reminded her of "a great fat, white, trussed turkey," which comparison and the ridiculous rage in which she made it made me laugh till I cried, in spite of my admiration for the Duchess of Sutherland, whose beauty and gracious sweetness of manner always seemed to me very charming. When therefore, Mademoiselle d'Este assigned another reason for not going to the Stafford House ball, in answer to the Queen's inquiry, I couldn't help laughing, and told the Queen the truth was that Mademoiselle d'Este's pride was hurt at being requested to come in the fancy dress she had worn at the Palace; and so, for this imaginary absurd offence, she was going to give up a very fine and pleasant _fête_. The Queen laughed, and, turning to Mademoiselle d'Este, said, "Your friend is right. You are very foolish; you will lose a pleasant evening for nothing." After this the conversation fell on the French plays and the performances of Mademoiselle Déjazet, who was then acting at the St. James's Theatre. The Queen having asked my opinion of these representations, I said I was unwilling to enter upon the subject, as I did not know how far the forms of etiquette would permit me to express what I thought in her Majesty's presence. Upon her pressing me, however, to state my opinion upon the subject, I reiterated what I had said in a previous conversation with Mademoiselle d'Este upon the matter, objecting to the extreme immorality of the pieces, and expressing my astonishment at seeing decent Englishwomen crowd to them night after night, since they certainly would not tolerate such representations on the English stage. Mademoiselle d'Este replied that that was because, on the English stage, they would be coarse and vulgar. I denied that the difference of language made any essential difference in the matter, though she was certainly right in saying that the less refined style of English acting might make the offensiveness of such pieces more unpleasantly obtrusive; but that in looking round the assembly of fine ladies at Déjazet's performances, I comforted myself by feeling very sure that half of them did not understand what they were listening to; but I think it must have been "nuts" to the clever, cynical, witty, impudent Frenchwoman to see these _dames trois fois respectables_ swallow her performances _sans sourcilliez_. After some more conversation on general subjects, the Queen Dowager rose, saying she hoped Mademoiselle d'Este would bring me to visit her again; and so we received our _congé_. Mentioning the appearance of some eruption on the good Queen's face reminds me of a painful circumstance which took place one day when, meeting a beautiful child of about four years old, the daughter of one of the ladies of the Court, who was going into the Palace gardens under the escort of her nurse, the Queen stopped the child, and, attracted by her beauty, stooped to kiss her, when the little thing drew back with evident disgust, exclaiming, "No, no; you have a red face! Mamma says I must never kiss anybody with a red face." The poor Queen probably seldom received such a plain statement of facts in return for her condescension. Her unostentatious goodness and amiable character have now become matter of history. One of the most characteristic traits of her life was her ordering of her own funeral with a privacy and simplicity more touching than any royal pomp, specifying that her coffin should be carried to the grave by four sailors--a last tribute of affection to her husband's memory. Among the passages in Charles Greville's Memoirs that shocked me most, and that I read with the most pain, were the coarse and cruel terms in which he spoke of Queen Adelaide. Mademoiselle d'Este, when far advanced in middle life, married Lord Chancellor Truro. She may have found in so doing a certain satisfaction to her pride which no other alliance with a commoner could have afforded her, since the Lord Chancellor of England (no matter of how lowly an origin), on certain occasions, takes precedence of the whole aristocracy of the land.] HARLEY STREET, Monday, May 30th, 1842. MY DEAREST HARRIET, I have just finished a letter to you, in which I tell you that I have sketched out the skeleton of another tragedy; but I find Emily has been beforehand with me. You ask me what has moved me to this mental effort. My milliner's bill, my dear; which, being £97 sterling, I feel extremely inclined to pay out of my own brains; for, though they received a very severe shock, and one of rather paralyzing effect, upon my being reminded that whatever I write is not my own legal property, but that of another, which, of course, upon consideration, I know; I cannot, nevertheless, persuade myself that that which I invent--_create_, in fact--can really belong to any one but myself; therefore, if anything I wrote could earn me £97, I am afraid I should consider that I, and no one else, had paid my bill. In thinking over the position of women with regard to their right to their own earnings, I confess to something very like wrathful indignation; impotent wrath and vain indignation, to be sure--not the less intense for that, however, for the injustice is undoubtedly great. That a man whose wits could not keep him half a week from starving should claim as his the result of a mental process such as that of composing a noble work of imagination--say "Corinne," for example--seems too beneficent a provision of the law for the protection of male _superiority_. It is true that, by our marriage bargain, they feed, clothe, and house us, and are answerable for our debts (not my milliner's bill, though, if I can prevent it), and so, I suppose, have a right to pay themselves as best they can out of all we are or all we can do. It is a pretty severe puzzle, and a deal of love must be thrown into one or other or both scales to make the balance hang tolerably even. Madame de Staël, I suppose, might have said to Rocca, "If my brains are indeed yours, why don't you write a book like 'Corinne' with them?" You know, though he was perfectly amiable, and she married him for love, he was an intellectual zero; but perhaps the man who, acknowledging her brilliant intellectual superiority, could say, "Je l'aimerai tant, qu'elle finira par m'aimer," deserved to be master even of his wife's brains.... I wish women could be dealt with, not mercifully, nor compassionately, nor affectionately, but _justly_; it would be so much better--for men. How can you ask me if I despise, as great gossip, Emily's telling you that I am writing another tragedy! Why, my dear, I shouldn't consider it despicable gossip if Emily were to tell you what colored gloves I had on the last time she saw me. Do we not all three love each other dearly? and is not everything, no matter how trifling, of interest in that case? But Mrs. John Kemble does not pretend to love me dearly, I flatter myself, and therefore her writing to inquire into my proceedings, and for minute details of my presentation at Court, did seem to me contemptible gossip. At her age, perhaps, it is pardonable enough, though it appears to me rather inconsistent, when one has no liking for a person, to trouble one's head about where they go or what they do. You ask me about the subject of my play. It is one that my father suggested to me years ago, and which grew out of a question as to whether the Stranger (in Kotzebue's play so called) does or does not forgive his unfaithful wife in the closing scene. With several other dramatic schemes, it has hovered dimly before my imagination for some time past. The other night, however, as I was brushing my hair before going to bed, my brain, I suppose, receiving some stimulus from the scrubbing of my skull, the whole idea suddenly came towards me with increasing distinctness, till it gradually stood up as it were from head to foot before me--a very mournful figure, whose form and features were all vividly defined. I instantly caught up S----'s copy-books--there was no other paper at hand--and on the covers of two of them wrote out my play, act by act and scene by scene.... The short-lived triumph of this spirit of inspiration died away under the effect of a conversation by which it was interrupted, and I collapsed like a fallen _omelette soufflée_ (not to say _souffletée_). The story of my piece is a sequel to "The Stranger," the retribution which reaches the faithless wife and mother in her children, after they grow up; which, together with the perpetual struggle on the part of her husband (who has taken her home again) not to wound her conscience, which is so sick and sore that every word, breath, and look _does_ wound it, might form, I think, an interesting dramatic picture, with considerable elements for poetry to work upon. I went to the Duchess of Sutherland's fancy ball in my favorite costume, a Spanish dress, which suited my finances as well as my fancy, my person, and my purse; for I had nothing to get but a short black satin skirt, having beautiful flounces of black lace, high comb, mantilla, and, in short, all things needful already in my own possession. I have told you of Adelaide's new prospects, in which I rejoice as much as I can rejoice in anything. She is herself very happy, poor child! and 'tis a pleasure and a positive relief to see her face, with its bright expression of newly dawned hope upon it. Good-night, dear. My head aches, and I feel weary and worn out; our life just now is one of insane, incessant dissipation. Thank God, I have a bed, and have not lost the secret of sleeping. Ever yours, FANNY. [A long discussion with my wise and excellent friend and connection, Mr. Horace Wilson, induced me to think a good deal upon the possibility of a man, in the position of Kotzebue's "Stranger," receiving back his wife to the home she had deserted. Mr. Wilson condemned the idea as absolutely inadmissible and fatally immoral. In our Saviour's teaching it is said that a man shall put away his wife for only _one_ cause; but is it said that he shall in every case put her away for _that_ cause? and is the offence a wife commits against her husband the one exception to the universal law of the forgiveness which Christ taught? Men have so considered it; and in the general interest of the preservation of society, a wife's fidelity to her duties becomes one of the most important elements of security; the protection of the family, the integrity of inheritance, the rightful descent of property, are all involved in it. But these are questions of social expediency, and, though based on deep moral foundations, are not of such overwhelming moral force as to forbid the contemplation of any possible exception to their authority. I have heard--I know not if it is true--that in some parts of Germany, formerly, where the practice of divorce obtained to a degree tolerated nowhere else in Christendom, it occasionally happened that, after a legal separation and intermediate marriages (sanctioned also by the law), the original pair, set free once more by death or _second divorce_, resumed their first ties--a condition of things which appears monstrous, considered as that which we call marriage, with the English and American branch of the Anglo-Saxon family, the holiest of human ties; with Roman Catholic Christians, an indissoluble bond, sacred as a sacrament of their Church. Without being able to determine the question satisfactorily in my own mind with reference to the supposed conclusion of the play of "The Stranger," in which Mr. Wilson said that the husband, receiving his repentant wife in his arms, was highly offensive to all morality, which demanded imperatively her absolute rejection and punishment, I began to consider what sort of escape from punishment it might be which would probably follow the forgiveness of her husband, her readmission to her home, and the renewal of her intercourse with her children. In Kotzebue's play the persons are all German, and their nationality has to be borne in mind in contemplating Waldburg's possible forgiveness of his wife. Steinforth, his dearest friend, and a man of the highest honor and morality (as conceived by the author), urges upon Waldburg the pardon of Adelaide; urges it almost as a duty, and zealously assists Madame von Wintersen's plan of bringing the unhappy people together, and effecting a reconciliation between them by means of the unexpected sight of their children. Moreover, when Waldburg rejects his friend's advice and entreaties that he will forgive his wife, it is hardly upon the ground of any deep moral turpitude involved in such a forgiveness, but upon the score of the insupportable humiliation of reappearing in the great world of German society to which they both belong with "his runaway wife on his arm," and the "whispering, pointing, jeering" of which their reconciliation would be the object, winding up with the irrevocable "Never! never! never!" Nevertheless, in Kotzebue's play he does receive his wife in his arms as the curtain falls, and the German public go home comforted in believing her forgiven. I do not know how the dumb-show at the end of the English play is generally conducted; but in my father's instance, I know he so far carried out my friend Horace Wilson's sentiment (which was also his own on the subject) that, while his miserable wife falls senseless at his feet, he turns again in the act of flying from her as the curtain drops, leaving the English public to go home comforted in the belief that he had _not_ forgiven her. The result of these discussions, as I said, led me to imagine how far such a woman would escape her righteous punishment, even if restored to her home; and in the sequel to "The Stranger," which I endeavored to construct, I worked out my own ideas upon the subject. Forgiveness of sin is not remission of punishment; and the highest justice might rest satisfied with the conviction that God, who forgives every sinner, punishes every sin; nor can even His mercy remit the righteous consequence ordained by it. God's punishments are _consequences_, the results of His all-righteous laws, _never to be escaped from_, but leaving forever possible the blessed hope of His forgiveness; but no one ever yet outran his sin or escaped from its inevitable result. The grosser human justice, however, which is obliged to execute itself on the bodies of criminals demands the open degradation and social ostracism of unfaithful wives as a necessary portion of its machinery, and the well-being of the society which it maintains.] HARLEY STREET, Friday, June 10th, 1842. MY DEAREST HARRIET, I finished one letter to you last night, and, finding that I cannot obtain tackle to go on the river this morning and fish, I sit down to write you another. And first, dear, about getting an admission for E---- to see our play. I am sorry to say it is not in my power. Thinking I had rather a right to one or two invitations for my own friends on each of the nights, I asked Lady Francis to give me three tickets for the first representation, intending to beg the same number for each night. I gave one to Mr. S----, and another to a nephew of Talma's, a very agreeable French naval officer, with whom we have become acquainted, and who besought one of me. But when I had proceeded thus far in my distribution of admissions, I was told I had committed an indiscretion in asking for any, and that I must return the remaining one, which I did, ... and when your request came about a ticket for E----, I was simply assured that it was "impossible." So, dear, you must be, as I must be, satisfied with this decision--which I am not, for I am very sorry, ... Lady Francis would gladly, I have no doubt, have asked any of my friends had we wished her to do so; she did send an invitation to Horace Wilson and his wife, but that was because he was to have acted for her, and was only prevented by being too unwell to undertake the part. I am very glad that Captain Seymour likes me, as the liking is very reciprocal. Indeed, I think our whole company presents a very favorable specimen of our young English gentlemen: they are all of them very young, full of good spirits, amiable, obliging, good-humored, good-tempered, and well-mannered; in short, I think, very charming. How shall I feel, you say, acting that part again?... My dearest Harriet, thus much at Richmond on Monday morning; it is now Thursday evening, and I have been crying and in a miserable state of mind and body all day long. On Monday we acted "The Hunchback" for the third time, and on Tuesday we all went down to Cranford, and drew long breaths as we got into the delicious air, all fragrant with hay and honeysuckle and syringa. I left my children at what was in posting days a famous country inn, at about half a mile from Lady Berkeley's house, but which, since the completion of the railroad, has become much less frequented and important, but is quiet and comfortable and pleasant enough to make it a very nice place of deposit for my chicks. On Wednesday afternoon, when I went over to see them, I found F----, pale and coughing, and heard with dismay that the measles were pervading the whole neighborhood. I went to town that evening to act "The Hunchback" for the last time, and was haunted by horrid visions of my child ill and suffering, and the very first thing I met on entering London was a child's coffin and funeral. You can better judge than I can express how this sort of omen affected my imagination; and in this frame of mind I went through our last representation of "The Hunchback," and did not reach home till the white face of the morning was beginning to look down from the ends of the streets at us. We did not get to bed till past three, and were up again at a little after seven, in order to take the railroad to Cranford, where we had promised to breakfast. One of our party was too late for the train, and we posted down with four horses in order to save our time, which on the great Ascot day was not, as you may suppose, a very economical proceeding.... Good-bye, dear. I will answer all your questions about "The Hunchback" another time. Ever yours, FANNIE. HARLEY STREET, June 12th, 1842. MY DEAREST HAL, ... I am now going to answer your various questions to the best of my ability. You wanted to know how I felt at acting "The Hunchback" again. Why, so horribly nervous the first night that the chair shook under me while my hair was being dressed. I trembled to such a degree from head to foot, and the rustling of the curl-papers as the man twisted them in my hair almost drove me distracted, for it sounded like a forest cracking and rattling in a storm. After the performance, my limbs ached as if I had been beaten across them with an iron bar, and I could scarcely stand or support myself for exhaustion and fatigue. This, however, was only the first night, and I suppose proceeded from the painful uncertainty I felt as to whether I had not utterly forgotten how to act at all. This one representation over, I had neither fright, nervousness, nor the slightest fatigue, and it is singular enough that no recollections or associations whatever of past times were awakened by the performance. I was fully engrossed by the endeavor to do the part as well as I could, and, except in the particular of copying, as well as I could recollect it, my dress of former days, the Julia of nine years ago did not once present herself to my thoughts. The first time I played it, I rather think I was worse than formerly, but after that probably much the same.... How does this dreadfully hot weather agree with you, my dear? For my own part, I am parboiled and stupid beyond all expression. I hate heat always and everywhere, and it seems to me that in our damp climate it is even more oppressive than under the scorching skies of August in Pennsylvania. However, of that I won't be sure, for the present is, with me, always better or worse than the absent. I think I have nothing more to tell you about "The Hunchback." ... Beyond doing it as well as I could, I cared very little about it; it seemed a sort of routine business, just as it used to be, except for the inevitable unwholesome results of its being amusement instead of business; the late hours--three o'clock in the morning--and champagne and lobster salad suppers, instead of my former professional decent tea and to bed, after my work, before twelve o'clock. Adelaide acted Helen charmingly, without having bestowed the slightest pains upon it. Had she condescended to give it five minutes' careful study, it would have been a perfect performance of its kind; but as it was, it was delightfully droll, lively, and graceful, and certainly proved her natural powers of comic acting to be very great.... You ask me about my play. I have not touched it since I wrote to you last, and really do not know when I shall have a minute in which to do so, unless, indeed, in this coming week at Oatlands,--and a great deal may be done in a week; but I am altogether quite down about it. Our last representation of "The Hunchback" was, as in duty bound, the best, and everybody was, or pretended to be, in ecstasies with it. Our time and attention have been so engrossed with the dresses, rehearsals, and performances that we absolutely seemed to experience a sudden _lull_ in our daily lives after it was all over. I shall probably not be in town till the 24th. I am going down to Mrs. Grote's with my sister on the 21st, and as S---- is of the party, it will not, I suppose, be according to "received ideas" that I should leave her there. On the 24th, however, she must be back in town; and as for my departure for America, dear Hal, you do well not to grieve too much beforehand about that.... Therefore, my dear Hal, lament not over my departure, for Heaven only knows when we shall depart, or if indeed we shall depart at all. Good-bye. Ever yours, FANNY. OATLANDS, June 14th, 1842. MY DEAREST HAL, ... I return to town this evening in order to go to a party at Mrs. Grote's, to which we have been engaged for some time past, and remain in town all to-morrow, because we dine at Harness's.... The quiet of this place, and very near twelve hours' sleep, and, above all, a temporary relief from all causes of nervous distress, have done me all the good in the world.... I cannot but think mine, in one respect, a curious fate; and perhaps, with the magnifying propensity of egotism, I exaggerate what seems to me its peculiarity. But to be placed for years together out of the reach of all society; to be left day after day to the solitude of an absolutely lonely life; to be deprived of all stimulus from without; to hear no music; to see no works of art; to hear no intellectually brilliant or even tolerably cultivated or interesting conversation; indeed, often to pass days without exchanging a thought or even a word with any grown person but my servants; to ride for hours every day alone through lonely roads and paths, sit down daily to a solitary dinner, and pass most of my evenings listening to the ticking of the clock, or wandering round and round the dark garden-walks;--to lead, I say, such a life for a length of time, and then be plunged into the existence, the sort of social Maelstrom we are living in here now, is surely a great trial to a person constituted like myself, and would be something of one, I think, to a calmer mind and more equable temperament than mine.... You ask if my father has been told of our intended return to America. I have told him, but neither he nor any one else appears to believe in it; and from what I wrote you in my last letter, I think you will agree that they are justified in their incredulity. You ask how Adelaide is. Flourishing greatly; the annoyance and vexation of the late difficulties with the theatre being past, she has recovered her spirits, and seems enjoying to the full her present hopes of future happiness.... God bless you, my dear Hal. Ever yours, FANNY. OATLANDS, June 16th, 1842. MY DEAR T----, An hour's railroading from London has brought me into a lovely country, a perfect English landscape of broad lawns, thick tufted oaks, and placid waters, under my windows. But an hour from that glare, confusion, din, riot, and insanity, to the soothing sights and sounds of this rural paradise! And after looking at it till my spirits have subsided into something like kindred composure and placidity, I open my letter-case, and find your last unanswered epistle lying on the top of it. "If Cunard and Harnden have proved true," you must have received by this time our reply to your proposition touching the Coster business. Thus far on Monday last; and having proceeded thus far, I fell fast asleep, with the pen in my hand, the sound of the rustling trees in my ears, and the smell of the new-mown grass in my nose. Since that noonday nap of mine, I have been back to town for a party at Mrs. Grote's and a dinner at Harness's. I mention names because these worthies are known to Catherine and Kate; and here I am, thanks to the railroad, back again among all these lovely sights and sounds and smells, and pick up my pen forthwith to renew my conversation with you. And first, as in duty bound, business. I wrote you word that we did not disdain the compromise offered by Mr. Coster, and we now further beg that you will receive and keep for us the sum proposed by that gentleman as payment of his debt. Thank you very much for your kindness to H-----. Kate wrote me a most ludicrous account of the poor singer's first experiment on his voice in your presence. I have not the least idea what his merits really are, having never heard or, to the best of my knowledge, seen him; but, as a pupil of the Royal Academy, his acquirements ought certainly to be those of a competent teacher. However, I need not, I am sure, tell you that, in recommending him to you, I did not contemplate laying the slightest stress upon your conscience, and having heard him you must recommend him or not according to that.... My sister thanks you for your zeal on her behalf, and so do I; but you will not be called upon for any further, or rather, I should say, nearer demonstration of it; for the young lady has lately come to the conclusion that marrying and staying at home is better than wandering singing over the face of the earth; and I suppose by next Christmas she will be married. I have no room for more. Ever yours, F. A. B. [My correspondence with my friend Miss S---- was interrupted by a visit of several weeks which she paid us, and not resumed on my part until the month of August, when I was on my way back from Scotland, and she was travelling on the Continent with her friend Miss W----.] LIVERPOOL, Wednesday, August 10th, 1842. MY DEAREST HARRIET, You bid me write to you immediately upon receiving your letter of the 24th of July, dated from Ulm, but I only received that letter last night on my arrival here from Scotland, and I know not how long its rightful delivery to me has been delayed. I fear, in consequence of this circumstance, this answer to it may miscarry; for perhaps you will have left Munich by the time it gets there. However, I can but do as you bid me, and so I do it, and hope this, for me, rare exercise of the virtue of obedience may find its reward in my letter reaching you. I am glad your meeting with the Combes was so pleasant. I can bear witness to the truth of their melancholy account of dear Dr. Combe, whom I went to see while I was in Edinburgh. He is so emaciated that the point of his knee-bone, through his trousers, perfectly fascinated me; I couldn't keep my eyes off it, it looked so terribly and sharply articulated that it seemed as if it were coming through the cloth. His countenance, however, was the same as ever, or, if possible, even brighter, sweeter, and more kindly benevolent. I have always had the most affectionate regard and admiration for him, and think him in some respects superior to his brother. I am delighted to think of your fine weather, and the great enjoyment it must be to you two, so happy in each other, to travel through the lovely summer days together, filling your minds and storing your memories with beautiful things of art and nature, which will be an intellectual treasure in common, and a fountain of delightful retrospective sympathy.... You must continue to direct to Harley Street, for although we were, by our original agreement, to have left it on the 1st of August, I conclude, as it is now the 10th, and I have heard no word of our removing, that some arrangement has been made for our remaining there, at least till our departure, which I understand is fixed for October 21st.... I have received a letter from Elizabeth Sedgwick, informing me that Kate's marriage is to take place about October 10th. I shall not be at it, which I regret very much. In the same letter she tells me that Dr. Channing is spending the summer at Lenox; and that he had shown her a most interesting letter he had received from a house-builder in Cornwall, England. This man wrote to Channing to thank him for the benefit he had derived from his writings, particularly his lectures on the mental elevation of the working classes. Dr. Channing answered this letter, and the poor man was so overjoyed at this favor, as he esteemed it, that he could not refrain from pouring out his thankfulness in another letter, in which he assured his reverend correspondent that the influence of his writings upon his class of the community in that part of England was and had been very great, and instanced a fellow-artisan of his own, who said that Channing's writings had reconciled him to being a working man. Elizabeth said that Dr. Channing, while reading this letter, was divided between smiles and tears. She also told me that he had talked to her a good deal about Mrs. Child (you know, the abolitionist who wanted to publish my Southern journal; she is a correspondent of his, and a person for whom he has the highest esteem, regarding her as "a most highly principled and noble-minded woman.") I am so tired, dearest Hal, and feel such a general lassitude and discouragement of mind and body, that I will end my letter. Give my most affectionate love to Dorothy, whom I should love dearly if I saw her much. I wish I was with you, seeing the Danube, that river into which poor Undine carried her immortal soul, and her broken woman's heart, when she faded over the boat's side, saying, "Be true, be true, oh, misery!" God bless you, dearest Hal. Ever yours, FANNY. HARLEY STREET, September 16th, 1842. MY DEAREST HAL, You ask me what I am doing. Flying about in every direction, like one distracted, trying to _amuse_ myself; going to evenings at Lady Lansdowne's, and to mornings at the Duchess of Buccleuch's; dining at the Star and Garter at Richmond, in gay and great company, and driving home alone between one and two o'clock in the morning.... I have undertaken to keep and to ride S----'s horse while he is away; and I think, by means of regular exercise, I shall at any rate keep _paroxysms_ aloof. I am going to a ball at Lord Foley's on Monday; to a children's play at the Francis Egertons' on Tuesday; to Richmond again to dine with the Miss Berrys and Lady Charlotte Lindsay on Wednesday; on Thursday to dine at Horace Wilson's, etc.... Perhaps you will wonder, as I do sometimes, that I keep the few senses I have in the life I lead; but so it is, and so it has to be. Good-bye. God bless you. I keep this letter till I hear from you where to send it, and, with dearest love to Dorothy, am Ever yours, FANNY. HARLEY STREET, September 30th, 1842. MY DEAREST GRANNY [LADY DACRE], Yesterday morning we drove down to Chesterfield Street, not without sundry misgivings on my part that Lord Dacre would feel that we persecute him, that he might be busy and not like being interrupted, etc. When the door was opened, however, and while we were still interrogating the footman, his own dear lordship came to it, and graciously bade me alight, which of course I gladly did, and so we sat with him a matter of half an hour, hearing his discourse, which ran at first on you and the dear girls [his granddaughters], and then broadened gradually from private interests to his public experience, and all the varied observation of his honorable political career. "I could have stayed all night to have heard good counsel," but was obliged to drive to the theatre to fetch my sister from rehearsal, and so, most reluctantly, came away. It seemed to me very good, and amiable, and humane, and condescending of Lord Dacre to spare so much of his time and attention to us young and insignificant folk; the courtesy of his reception was as deeply appreciated by me, I assure you, as the interest of his conversation; and so tell my lord, with my best of courtesies. I went in the evening to hear my sister sing "Norma" for the last time, and cried most bitterly, and, moreover, thought exceedingly often of your ladyship; and why? I'll tell you; it was the _last_ time she was to do it, and when I saw that grace and beauty and rare union of gifts, which were adapted to no other purpose half so well as to this of dramatic representation; when I heard the voice of popular applause, that utterance of human sympathy, break at once simultaneously from all those human beings whose emotions she was swaying at her absolute will,--my heart sank to think that this beautiful piece of art (for such it now is, and very near perfection), would be seen no more; that this rare power (a _talent_, as it verily then seemed to me, in the solemn sense of the word, and a precious one of its own kind) was about to be folded in a napkin, to bear interest no more, of profit or pleasure, to herself or others. My dear Granny, you will well understand how I came to think of you during that performance; for the first time, I thought _like_ you on this subject. I caught myself saying, while the tears streamed down my face, "If she is only happy, after all!" (But oh, that _if_!) It seemed amazing to abdicate a secure fortune, and such a power--power to do anything so excellently (putting its recognition by the public entirely out of account) for that fearful risk. God help us all! 'Tis a hard matter to judge rightly on any point whatever; and settled and firm as I had believed my opinion on this subject to be, I was surprised to find how terrible it was to me to see my sister, that woman most dear to me, deliberately leave a path where the sure harvest of her labor is independent fortune, and a not unhonorable distinction, and a powerful hold upon the sympathy, admiration, and even kindly regard of her fellow-creatures, while she thus not unworthily ministers to their delight, for a life where, if she does not find happiness, what will atone to her for all this that she will have left? However, I have need to remember, while thinking of her and her future, what I have never forgotten hitherto, that the soul lives neither on fortune, fame, nor happiness; and that which is noblest in her, which is above either her genius, grace, or beauty, and far more precious than all of them united, will thrive, it may be, better in obscurity and the different trials of her different life than in the vocation she is now abandoning. _Amen!_ Thank you, my dear Granny, for all your advice, and still more for the love which dictates it; I lay both to heart. Thank you, too, for the little book. I wish I knew the woman who wrote it; she must be a paragon. God bless you, dear Granny. I write you a kiss as the children do, and am Ever your affectionate FANNY. HARLEY STREET, October 2nd, 1842. MY DEAR T----, It is hardly of any use writing to you, because, unless I am "drowned in the ditch," I shall see you very soon after you get this letter. I have, however, as I believe you know, a very decided principle upon the subject of answering letters, and therefore shall duly reply to your epistle, though I hope to follow this in less than a fortnight. I am sorry to say that if your ever "feeling young again" is to depend upon your seeing a _Miss Kemble_ once more in America, you are doomed to disappointment, and must decidedly go on, not only growing but feeling old, as _Miss Kembles_ there are now no more--at least at my father's house.... So you see a due regard for her fellow-creatures on the other side of the Atlantic has not existed in my sister's heart, or she would, of course, have postponed all personal prospects of happiness, or rather peace and quiet, to a proper consideration for the gratification of the American public. I think your observations upon my projected journey to Georgia are taken from an entirely mistaken point of view. I am utterly unconscious of entertaining any inimical feeling towards America or the Americans; on the contrary, I am distinctly conscious of the highest admiration for your institutions, and an affectionate regard for the northern part of your country (where those institutions can alone be said to be put in practice) that is second only to the love and reverence I bear to my own country. This being the case, I cannot think that anything I write about America can, with any sort of propriety, be characterized as "the lashings of a foe." With regard to Dickens, I do not know exactly what proceedings of his you refer to as exhibiting want of taste or want of temper towards your country-people.... But small counterweights may surely be allowed to such admirable qualities of both head and heart as he possesses. He sent me, on his return to England, a printed circular, which was distributed among all his literary acquaintances and friends, and which set forth his views with regard to the question of international copyright; but except this, I know of nothing that he has publicly put forth upon the matter. His "Notes" upon America come out, I believe, immediately; and I shall be extremely curious to see them, and sorry if they are unfavorable, because his popularity as a writer is immense, and whatever he publishes will be sure of a wide circulation. Moreover, as it is very well known that, before going to America, he was strongly prepossessed in favor of its institutions, manners, and people, any disparaging remarks he may make upon them will naturally have proportionate weight, as the deliberate result of experience and observation. M---- told me, after dining with Dickens immediately on his return, that one thing that had disgusted him was the almost universal want of conscience upon money matters in America; and the levity, occasionally approaching to something like self-satisfaction, for their "sharpness," which he had repeated occasions of observing, in your people when speaking of the present disgraceful condition of their finances and deservedly degraded state of their national credit.... But I do hope (because I have a friend's and not a "foe's" heart towards your country) that Dickens will not write unfavorably about it, for his opinion will influence public opinion in England, and deserves to do so. As for Lord Morpeth, you need not be afraid of his "booking" you; he is the kindliest gentleman alive, and moreover, I think, far too prudent a person for such a proceeding.... Lord Ashburton's termination of the boundary question is vehemently abused by the Opposition, but that is of course. Some old-school Whigs, sound politicians, and great friends of mine, were agreeing quietly among themselves the other day that _anyhow_ they were heartily glad that there was to be no war between the countries. I perceive, however, that the question of the right of search (_question brûlante_, as the French say) is still untouched, or rather unsettled; yet in my opinion it contains more elements of danger than the other. But I suppose your great diplomatists think one question settled in twenty years is quite enough for the rapid pace at which our Governments pant and puff after public opinion in these steam-speed-thinking times. We have been in the country till within the last fortnight, but have come up to town to prepare for our departure. London is almost empty, but the only topics that keep alive the sparse population of the club-houses are the dismissal of Baroness L---- from Court and her departure for Germany, and a terrible _esclandre_ in a very high circle, including royal personages.... I treat you to the London scandal, and my doing so is ridiculous enough; but there is nothing I would not sooner write about than myself and my own thoughts, feelings, and concerns, just now. How thankful I shall be when this month is over!... Believe me yours most truly, F. A. B. HARLEY STREET, Saturday, 8th, 1842. MY DEAR GRANNY, I dined yesterday at Charles Greville's, where dined also Mr. Byng; both of them, I believe, were your fellow-guests lately, at the Duke of Bedford's. Among other Woburn talk, there is no little discourse about B----. Westmacott, too (the sculptor), who is a very old friend of ours, chimed in, and we had a very pretty chorus on the argument of her fine countenance, striking appearance, intelligence, etc., which I listened to and joined in with great pleasure, because I love the child; thinking, at the same time, how many qualities, of which perhaps her gentlemen eulogists took no cognizance, went to make up the charm of the outward appearance which they admired--the candor, truth, humility, and moral dignity, the "inward and spiritual grace," of which what they praised is but "the outward and visible sign." As I know this, the commendation of her superficial good gifts, by superficial observers, was very agreeable to me. You ask me if I think you are going to keep up a correspondence with me at this rate. I do not know exactly what that means; but be sure of one thing, that as long as I can succeed in drawing an answer out of you, I shall _persewere_. My father has a violent lumbago; so, I am sorry to say, has the theatre, which, in spite of my sister's exertions, can hardly keep upon its legs. Her success has to compensate for the deplorable houses on the nights when she does not appear. But great as her success is, it will not make the nights pay on which she does not sing, when the theatre is absolutely empty. What they will do when she goes I cannot in the smallest degree conceive. _We_ are just being sucked into the Maelstrom of bills, parcels, packages, books, pictures, valuables, trumpery, rummaging, heaping together, throwing apart, selecting, discarding, and stowing away that precedes an orderly departure after a two years' disorderly residence; in the midst of all which I have neither leisure nor leave to attend to the heartache which, nevertheless, accompanies the whole process with but little intermission. Love to your dear lord and the dear girls, and believe me ever, my dear Granny, Your affectionate FANNY. HARLEY STREET, Friday, 14th, 1842. DEAR GRANNY, I find there is every probability of our not leaving England until the 4th of November (several people tell me they have been told so), and such is the extreme uncertainty of our movements always that it would not surprise me very violently if we did not go then. I fear, however, this will not afford me any further glimpses of you; and, indeed, at the bottom of my heart, I do not wish for any more "last dying speeches and confessions." To part is very bad, but to keep continually parting is unendurable. My sister goes on with the "Semiramide," and her attraction in it increases. She acts and sings admirably in it, and, all sisterly prepossessions apart, looks beautiful. We went the other night to see "As You Like It" at Drury Lane. It was _painfully_ acted, but the scenery, etc., were charming; and though we had neither the caustic humor nor poetical melancholy of Jacques, nor the brilliant wit and despotical fancifulness of the princess shepherd-boy duly given, we _had_ the warbling of birds, and sheep-bells tinkling in the distance, to comfort us. I hope it is not profanation to say, "These should ye have done, and not have left the others undone." Nevertheless, and in spite of all, the enchantment of Shakespeare's inventions is such to me that they cannot be marred, let what will be done to them. As long as those words of profoundest wisdom and those images of exquisite beauty are but uttered, their own perfection swallows up all other considerations and impressions with me, and I bear indifferent and even bad acting of Shakespeare better than most people. Why did you not make _him_, instead of the stage, the subject of our discussions together? For his works my enthusiasm grows every year of my life into a profounder and more wondering love and admiration. I am grateful for Lord Dacre's offer, though it was not made to me; and, had it been so, should have closed with it eagerly. To correspond with one who has seen and known and _thought_ so much is a rare privilege. Good-bye, dear Granny. Give my love to the girls, and my "duty" to my lord, and believe me Your affectionate FANNY BUTLER. HARLEY STREET, Friday, 23rd, 1842. MY DEAR GRANNY, That last half-hour before we got off from "The Hoo" the other day was a severe trial to my self-command; but I was anxious not to afflict you, and I was willing, if possible, to begin the bitter series of partings, of which the next month will be one succession, with something like fortitude, however I may end it. Thank you for writing to me, and thank you for all your kindness to me through these many years, now that you have _persevered_ in being fond of me.... Do not be anxious about my happiness, my dear friend, but pray for me, that I maybe enabled to do what is right under all circumstances; and then it cannot fail to be well with me, whether to outward observation I am what the world calls happy or not. Give my affectionate love to Lord Dacre, and thank him for all his goodness to me and mine. I send my blessing to the girls. I have written to B----. God bless you all, my kind friends, and make life and its vicissitudes minister to your happiness hereafter. You will hear of me, dear Granny, for the girls will write to me, and I shall answer them, and you will remember, whenever you think of me, how gratefully and affectionately I must Ever remain yours, FANNY BUTLER. [Lady Dacre saw much trouble in store for me in my intemperate expression of feeling on the subject of slavery in America, and repeatedly warned me with affectionate solicitude to moderate, if not my opinions, the vehement proclamation of them. She was wise and right, as well as kind in her advice.] [Extract from a letter of Miss Sedgwick's.] STOCKBRIDGE, October 26th, 1842. You have no doubt heard and lamented the death of our dear friend, Dr. Channing. Dead he is not; he lives, and will live in the widespreading life he has communicated. He passed the summer at Lenox, occupying with his family your rooms at the hotel. We passed some hours of every day together. He enjoyed our lovely hill country with the freshness of youth, his health was invigorated, and his mind freer, and his spirits more buoyant than I ever knew them; he endured more fatigue than he had been able to encounter since he travelled in Switzerland fifteen years ago. His affectionateness, purity, simplicity--a simplicity so perfect that it seemed divine--surrounded his greatness with an atmosphere of light and beauty. His life has been a most prosperous one, no storms without, and a heavenly calm within. His last work in his office was a discourse which he delivered in our village church on the 1st of August, on the emancipation of the slaves in the British West Indies. I shall send it to you, and pray mark the prophetic invocation with which it concludes. You should have seen the inspired expression of his intellectual brow, and the earnest, spiritual look that seemed to penetrate the clouds that hang over the eternal world and to reflect its light. On the Sundays of his sojourn with us he had domestic worship in our houses, and his last service was in that apartment where his beloved friend Follen officiated.... Eliza Follen is recovering the elasticity of her mind. Time can, I think, do all things, since it has dissipated that horrible image of the burning steamer in which her husband perished, that was ever before her. She is publishing his Memoirs, and, among other things, she read me some patriotic songs which he wrote in Sand's time in Germany; they were in the boldest tone of insurrection, and were, of course, proscribed and suppressed. She had heard her husband occasionally hum a stanza or two of them, and he had once written out a single one for her which she found in her work-basket. This she transmitted to his mother in Germany, and with this clue alone the mother obtained the rest; and eloquent outbreakings they are of a spirit glowing with freedom and humanity.... I have passed lately a day at our State Lunatic Asylum. On my first going there, in the evening the physician invited me into the dancing-hall, where some sixty of the patients were assembled. The two musicians were patients, one utterly _demented_, incapable of any reasonable act except playing a tune on his violin, which he did with accuracy. Except the doctor's children (as beautiful as cherubs, and ministering angels they are), there were no sane persons among the dancers. "There," said the physician, "is a homicide; there, a poor girl who went crazy the day after her brother drowned himself, and who fancies herself that brother; there, the King of England," etc. They were all dancing with the utmost decorum and regularity. They attend chapel on a Sunday without disturbance; they were all (among them maniacs who had been for half a score of years chained in dungeons of our common gaols) "clothed," and, if "not in their right mind," comfortable and cheerful; they _all_ had plants in their rooms and books on their tables. Much depends on individual character, and the physician is, as you would expect, a man of the highest moral power, and the very embodiment of the spirit of benevolence, and if poetry and painting had laid their heads together to give him a fitting form, they could have done nothing better than nature has. My heart was ready to burst with gratitude. Who can say the world does not move some forward steps? CLARENDON HOTEL, November 6th, 1842. DEAR GRANNY, You know that it is now determined that we do not sail by the next steamer.... Dearest Granny, do not you, any more than I do, reckon which love is best worth having, of young or old love; for all love is _inestimable_, and should be gratefully rendered thanks for. There is something charming and _pathetic_ in the _profusion_ with which the young love; it is touching, as one of the magnificent superabundances, one of the generous extravagances, of their prodigal time of life. But the love of the old is as precious as the beggared widow's mite; and in bestowing it they know what they give, from a store that day by day diminishes. The affections of the young are as sudden and soft, as bright and bounteous, as copious and capricious as the showers of spring; the love of the old is the one drop in the cruse, which outlasts the journey through the desert. You may perhaps see in the papers a statement of the disastrous winding up of the season at Covent Garden, or rather its still more disastrous abrupt termination. After our all protesting and remonstrating with all our might against my father's again being involved in that Heaven-forsaken concern, and receiving the most positive and solemn assurances from those who advised him into it for the sake of having his name at the head of it that _no_ responsibility or liability whatever should rest upon or be incurred by him; and that if the thing did not turn out prosperously, it should be put an end to, and the theatre immediately closed;--they have gone on, in spite of night after night of receipts below the expenses, and now are obliged suddenly to shut up shop, my poor father being, as it turns out, personally involved for a considerable sum. This, as you will well believe, is no medicine for his malady. I spend every evening with him, and generally see him in the morning besides. These last few days he suffers less acute pain, but complains more of debility, and hardly leaves his sofa, where he lies silent, with his eyes closed, apparently absorbed in painful sensations and reflections. Yet, though he neither speaks to nor looks at me, he likes to have me there; and, as Horace Twiss said, "to hear the scissors fall" now and then, by way of companionship; and certainly derives some comfort from the mere consciousness of my presence. My sister has gone to Brighton for a few days, her health having quite given way, what with hard work and harder worry. She returns on Monday, but it is extremely doubtful whether she will resume her performances at all, so that I fear the expectations of the clan Cavendish will be disappointed. She did act most charmingly in the "Matrimonio Segreto." In point of fact, her comic acting is more perfect than her tragic, although there are not in it, and naturally cannot be, the same striking exhibitions of dramatic power; but it is smoother, more even, better finished. You must get Lady Callcott's "Scripture Herbal." Lady Grey lent it me, and I read it with great pleasure. It is an interesting, graceful, and learned work, which she has illustrated very exquisitely. There is something very sweet and soothing in the idea of last thoughts having been thus devoted to what is loveliest in nature and holiest in religion. God bless you, dear Granny. Give my love to the lasses, and my affectionate "duty" to my lord; and believe me Your loving grandchild, F. A. B. [Our departure for America was indefinitely postponed, and the American nurse I had brought to England with my children left me and returned home alone.] THE CLARENDON, Monday, November 28th, 1842. MY DEAREST GRANNY, I duly delivered your message, and am desired to tell you that a house is being looked for for us in your neighborhood, and that, as soon as one is found that we think you will approve of, it will be taken. Moreover, I am desired to add that the expensive reputation of the Clarendon is very much exaggerated.... We have been here a fortnight to-day, and I think there is every probability of our being here at least a fortnight longer, even if we get away then.... My father suffers less acutely these last few days, but his debility appears to increase with the decrease of his positive pain.... My sister returned from Brighton to-day, completely set up again; she is to go on with her performances till Christmas, when the whole concern passes into the hands of Mr. Bunn, who perhaps is qualified to manage it. I think I should like to _act_ with my sister during this month, in order to secure their salaries to the actors, to make up the deficit which now lies at the door of my father's management, to put a good benefit into his poor pocket, to give rather a more cheerful ending to my sister's theatrical career, and, though last, not least, for the pleasure and _fun_ of acting with her. Don't you think we should have good houses? and wouldn't _you_ come and see us?... God bless you, dear Granny. Ever your affectionate F. A. B. THE CLARENDON, December 1st, 1842. MY DEAREST HARRIET, Lord Titchfield, who was here yesterday, begged me to ascertain from you whether it is only _my_ bust that you desire, or whether you would like to have casts from my father's and from the two of Adelaide. Write me word, dear, that the magnificent marquis may fulfil your wishes, which he is only waiting to know in order to send the one or the four heads to you in Ireland.... My sister returned from Brighton on Monday, apparently quite recovered; in good looks, good voice, and good spirits. The horrible mess in which everybody is mixed up who has anything to do with Covent Garden, and in which she is so deeply involved, renewed her annoyances and vexations immediately on her arrival in town; but I passed the evening with her yesterday, and she did not seem the worse for work or worry, for she sang, for her own pleasure and that of her guests, the whole evening.... Give my kind remembrances to all your people, and believe me Ever yours, FANNY. [The Marquis of Titchfield was employing the French sculptor Dantan to make busts of my father, my sister, and myself, for him; and most kindly gave me casts of them all, and sent my friend Miss St. Leger a cast of mine.] THE CLARENDON, January 5th, 1843. DEAREST HAL, I have sent your wishes to Lord Titchfield, and I am sure they will be quickly complied with. I have no idea that he means otherwise than to _give_ you my bust; any other species of transaction being apparently quite out of his line, and _giving_ his especial gift. I have, nevertheless, taken pains to make clear to him your intentions in the matter; I have desired him to have the bust forwarded to the care of Mr. Green, because I thought you would easily find means of transporting it thence to Ardgillan. Was this right? The houses at Covent Garden are quite full on my sister's nights, but deplorably empty on the others, I believe. I speak from hearsay, for I have not been into the theatre since the terrible business of the late break-up there, and do not think I shall even see her last performances, for I have no means of doing so; I can no longer ask for private boxes, as during my father's management, of course, nor indeed would it be right for me to do so on her nights, because they all let very well; and as for paying for one, or even for a seat in the public ones, I have not a single farthing in the world to apply to such a purpose.... So you see, my dear, I am in no case to treat myself to seats at the play, either private or public. Adelaide is still pretty well. The night before last was her benefit; she had a very fine house, and sang "Norma," and the great scene from "Der Freyschütz," and "Auld Robin Gray;" and yesterday evening she seemed very tired, but she had people to dinner and to tea nevertheless.... Certainly one had need believe in something better than one sees, or at any rate than I see just now; for such petty selfishnesses and despicable aims, pursued with all the energy and eagerness which should be bestowed upon the highest alone; such cheating, tricking, swindling, lying, and slandering, are enough to turn any Christian cat's stomach.... I must tell you two things about Miss Hall that have given me such an insight into the delights of the position of an English governess as I certainly never had before. When first she joined us here at the Clarendon, Anne was still with us, and she being always accustomed to take her meals with the children, and yet of course not a proper companion for Miss Hall, we thought that till the nurse went to America we would request the governess to dine with us. On Anne's departure, I signified to the head waiter that from that time Miss Hall would take her dinner with the children; whereupon, with a smirk and sniff of the most insolent disdain, and an air of dignity that had been hurt, but was now comforted, the bloated superior servant replied, "Well, ma'am, to be sure, it always was so in _them famullies_ where I have lived; the governess never didn't eat at the table." The fact is natural, and the reason obvious, but oh! my dear, the manner of the fat, pampered porpoise of a man-menial was too horrid. Then, on going for a candle into Miss Hall's room one evening, I found she had been provided with tallow ones, and, upon remonstrating about it with the chambermaid, she replied (with a courtesy at every other word to me), "Oh, ma'am, we always puts _tallow_ for the governesses." Good-bye, dear. God bless you. Ever yours, FANNY. CRANFORD HOUSE, January 8th, 1843. DEAREST HAL, I am spending two days at Cranford--you know, I believe, where I mean, old Lady Berkeley's place.... I came to get the refreshment of the country; old Lady Berkeley is very kind to me, and I like her daughters, Lady Mary particularly. I came down yesterday (Saturday), and shall return early to-morrow, for on Wednesday the children are to have a party of their little friends, and I am making a Christmas-tree for them (rather out of date), and expect to be exceedingly busy both to-morrow and Tuesday in preparing for their amusement. My father does not suffer nearly as much pain as he did a short time ago, but his strength appears to me to be gradually diminishing.... [Our return to America being once more indefinitely postponed, we now took a house in Upper Grosvenor Street, close to Hyde Park, to which we removed from the Clarendon, my sister residing very near us, in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square.] 26, UPPER GROSVENOR STREET, Wednesday, March 1st, 1843. Thank you, my dear T----, for your attention to our interests and affairs.... It seems to me that to have to accept the conviction of the unworthiness of those we love must be even worse than to lay our dearest in the earth, for we may believe that they have risen into the bosom of God. However, each human being's burden is the one whose weight must seem the heaviest to himself, and He alone who lays them on proportions them to our strength and enables us to walk upright beneath them.... [Extract from a letter from Miss Sedgwick.] NEW YORK, March 3rd, 1843. The great topic with us just now is the trial of Mackenzie, of whom, as the chief actor in the tragedy of the "Somers," you must have heard. Some of your journals cry out upon him, but, as we think, only the organs of that hostile inhuman spirit that bad minds try to keep alive on both sides of the water. His life has been marked with courage and humanity; all enlightened and unperverted, I may say all sane opinion with us, is in his favor. After the most honorable opinion from the Court of Inquiry, he is now under trial by court-martial, demanded by his friends to save him from a civil suit. S----, the father of the Ohio mutineer, is a man of distinguished talent, of education, and head of the War Department, but a vindictive and unscrupulous man. He is using every means to ruin Mackenzie, to revenge the death of a son, Heaven-forsaken from the beginning of his days, and whose maturest acts (he died at nineteen) were robbing his mother's jewel-case and stealing money from his father's desk. My nephew is acting as Mackenzie's counsel, and his wife, a Roman wife and mother, is a friend of mine.... I heard a story the other day, "a true one," that I treasured for you as racy, as characteristic of slavery and human nature. A most notoriously atrocious, dissolute, _hellish_ slave-owner died, and one of his slaves--an old woman--said to a lady, "Massa prayed God so to forgive him! Oh, how he prayed! And I am afraid God heard him; they say He's so good." UPPER GROSVENOR STREET, April 17th, 1843. MY DEAR T----, I have executed your commission with regard to two of the books you desired me to get, but the modern Italian work, published in 1840, in Florence, and the "Mariana" of 1600, I am very much afraid I shall not be able to procure; the first because it would be necessary to send to Florence for it, which could very easily be done, but then I shouldn't be here to receive it; and the second, the copy of "Mariana," of the edition you specify, because Bohn assures me that it is extremely rare, having been suppressed on account of the king-killing doctrines it inculcates, and the subsequent editions being all garbled and incorrect. As you particularly specified that of 1600, of course I would not take any other, and shall still make further attempts to procure that, though Panizzi, the librarian of the British Museum, and Macaulay, who are both friends of mine, and whom I consulted about it, neither of them gave me much encouragement as to my eventual success. The "Filangieri" and Buchanan will arrive with me. I would send them to G---- A----, but that, as we return on the 4th of May, I think there is every reason to expect that we shall be in America first. So much for your commission. With regard to your complaint that I give you nothing to do, I think you will have found that fault amended in my last communication, wherein I request you to accept my father's power of attorney, and undertake to watch over his interests in the New Orleans Bank.... As for people's comments on me or my actions, I have not lived on the stage to be cowardly as well as bold; and being decidedly bold, "I thank God," as Audrey might say, that I am not cowardly, which is my only answer to the suggestion of "people saying," etc. For a year and a half past I have been perfectly wretched at our protracted stay in Europe, and as often as possible have protested against our prolonged sojourn here, and all the consequences involved in it. This being the case, "people" attributing our remaining here to me troubles me but little, particularly as I foresaw from the first that that must inevitably be the result of our doing so. I seldom read the newspapers, and therefore have not followed any of the details of this Mackenzie trial. The original transaction, and his own report of it, I read with amazement; more particularly the report, the framing and wording of which appeared to me utterly irreconcilable with the fact of his having written, as Lord Ashburton informed me, a very pleasing book, of which certainly the style must have been very different. He, Lord Ashburton, spoke of him as though he knew him, and gave him the same character of gentleness and single-mindedness that you do. Although our return to America will be made under circumstances of every possible annoyance and anxiety, it gives me heartfelt pleasure to think I shall soon see all my good friends there again, among whom you and yours are first in my regard.... Butler Place is to be let, if possible, and at any rate we are certainly not to go back to it; whereat my poor little S---- cries bitterly, and I feel a tightening at the heart, to think that the only place which I have known as a _home_ in America is not what I am to return to.... The transfer of that New Orleans stock by my father to me--I mean the law papers necessary for the purpose--cost £50 sterling. England is a dear country many ways. Ellsler is in London now, and, I am assured by those who know, _diviner_ than ever. I think her gone off both in looks and dancing. That rascal W---- has robbed her of the larger portion of her earnings. What a nice lover to have! Believe me ever Yours most truly, F. A. B. April 15th 1843. MY DEAREST HAL, You must not scold if there are letters missing in my words this week, for I have enough to do and to think of, as you well know, to put half the letters of the alphabet out of my head for the next twelvemonth.... Immediately after breakfast on Saturday I went down on my knees and packed till Emily came to walk with me, and packed after I came in till it was time to go shopping and visiting. I went to bid the L----'s good-bye; we dined with the Procters, and had a pleasant dinner: Mr. and Mrs. Grote, Rogers, Browning, Harness and his sister. In the evening I went to Miss Berry's, where Lady Charlotte Lindsay and I discoursed about you, and she pitied you greatly for having, upon the top of all your troubles, forgotten your keys.... Sunday morning I packed instead of going to church, and, in fact, packed the blessed livelong day, with an interval of rest derived from an interminable visit from Frederick Byng (_alias_ Poodle). Yesterday my father and Victoire (my aunt), and Adelaide and E---- (who, to my infinite joy, came home on Saturday), dined with us. My father was better, I think, than the last evening we were with him, though, of course, a good deal out of spirits. Victoire was pretty well, but quite surprised and mortified at hearing that I would not suffer her to pack my things, for fear of its fatiguing her; and told me how she had been turning in her mind her best way of contriving to be here packing all day, and home in Charlotte Street in time to give my father his dinner. She is Dall's own sister! Yesterday I completed, with Emily's assistance (which nearly drove me mad), the packing of the great huge chest of books, boxes, etc., and she and I walked together, but it was bitter cold and ungenial, regular _beasterly_ wind. (Mrs. Grote says _she_ invented that name for it, and, for reasons which will be obvious to you, I gave it up to her without a blow.) In the afternoon I went shopping with Adelaide, and then flew about, discharging my own commissions. In the evening our "first grand party of the season came off;" nearly two hundred people came, and seemed, upon the whole, tolerably well amused. Adelaide and Miss Masson and I sang, and Benedict played, and it all went off very well. There were six policeman at the door, and Irish Jack-o'-lanterns without count; "the refreshment table was exceedingly elegantly set out" by _Gunter_--at a price which we do not yet know.... I dread our sea-voyage for myself, for all sorts of physical reasons; morally, I dare say I shall benefit from a season of absolute quiet and the absence of all excitement. The chicks are well; they are to go down to Liverpool on Saturday, in order to be out of the way, for we leave this house on Monday, and their departure will facilitate the verifying of inventories and all the intolerable confusion of our last hours. Mrs. Cooper, as well as Miss Hall, will go with them to Liverpool, and I have requested that, instead of staying in the town, they may go down to Crosby Beach, six miles from it, and wait there for our arrival. This is all my history. I am in one perpetual bustle, and I thank Heaven for it; I have no leisure to think or to feel.... I beg leave to inform you that Miss Hall came to my party in a most elegant black satin dress, with her hair curled in _profuse ringlets_ all over her head. God bless you, my dear Hal. Good-bye. Ever yours, F. A. B. Thursday, April 27th, 1843. DEAREST HAL, You ask how it goes with me. Why, I think pretty much as it did with the poor gentleman who went up in the flying machine t'other day, which, upon some of his tackle giving way, began, as he describes, to "turn round and round in the air with the most frightful velocity." My condition, I think, too, will find the same climax as his, viz. falling in a state of _senselessness_ into a steam-packet. If the account be true, it was a very curious one. As for me, I am absolutely breathless with things to do and things to think of.... Still, I get on (like a deeply freighted ship in a churning sea, to be sure), but I _do_ make some way, and the days _do_ go by, and I am glad to see the end of this season of trial approaching, for all our sakes. Any one would suppose I was in great spirits, for I fly about, singing at the top of my voice, and only stop every now and then to pump up a sigh as big as the house, and clear my eyes of the tears that are blinding me. Occasionally, too, a feeling of my last moments here, and my leave-taking of my father and sister, shoots suddenly through my mind, and turns me dead sick; but all is well with me upon the whole, nevertheless. Adelaide was in great health and spirits on Monday night, and sang for us, and seemed to enjoy herself very much, and gave great delight to everybody who heard her. She sang last night again at Chorley's, but I thought her voice sounded a little tired. To be sure, in those tiny boxes of rooms, the carpets and curtains choke one's voice back into one's throat, and it just comes out beyond one's teeth, with a sort of muffled-drum sound. Thus far, dearest Hal, yesterday. To-day, before I left my dressing-room, I got your present. Thank you a thousand times for the pretty chain [a beautiful gold chain, which, together with a very valuable watch, was stolen from me in a boarding-house in Philadelphia, almost immediately on my return there], which is exquisite, and will be very dear. Yet, though I found the "fine gold," the empty page of letter-paper on each side of it disappointed me more than it would have been grateful to express; but when I came down to breakfast I found your letter, and was altogether happy.... I was wearing my watch again, for I found the risk and inconvenience of always carrying it about very tiresome, but I had it on an old silver chain that I have had for some years. Yours is prettier even than my father's, and I love to feel it round my neck. You say you hope my sister will be brave on the occasion of our parting, and not try my courage with her grief. I will answer for her. I am sure she will be brave. I know of no one with more determination and self-control than she has.... The secret of helping people every way most efficiently is to stand by and be _quiet_ and _ready_ to do anything you _may be asked to do_. This is the only real way to help people who have any notion of helping themselves. On Monday evening we had our first party, which went off exceedingly well. On Tuesday morning Emily and I walked together, and I packed till lunch, after which I drove out with Adelaide, shopping for her, and doing my own _do's_. In the evening I went to my father, whom I found in most wretched spirits, but not worse in health. He has determined, I am thankful to say, not to see the children again before they go, which I think is very wise. After leaving him, I went to a party at our friend Chorley's, where dear Mendelssohn was, and where I heard some wonderful music, and read part of "Much Ado about Nothing" to them. Yesterday Emily came, and we walked together, and I packed and did commissions all day. Our second party took place in the evening, and we had all our grandee friends and fine-folk acquaintances.... God bless you, dear Hal. Emily is waiting for me to go out walking with her. Ever yours, FANNY. 26, UPPER GROSVENOR STREET. MY DEAR CHARLES GREVILLE, I send you back Channing's book, with many thanks. The controversial part of his sermons does not satisfy me. No controversy does; no arguments, whether for or against Christianity, ever appear to me _conclusive_; but as I am a person who would like extremely to have it demonstrated _why_ two and two make four, you can easily conceive that arguments upon any subject seldom seem perfectly satisfactory to me. As for my convictions, which are, I thank God, vivid and strong, I think they spring from a species of intuition, mercifully granted to those who have a natural incapacity for reasoning, _i.e._ the whole female _sect_. And, talking of them, I do not like Dryden, though I exclaim with delight at the glorious beauty and philosophical truth of some of his poetry; but oh! he has nasty notions about women. Did you ever see Correggio's picture of the Gismonda? It is a wonderful portrait of grief. Even Guercino's "Hagar" is inferior to it in the mere expression of misery. Knowing no more of the story years ago than I gathered from a fine print of Correggio's picture, I wrote a rhapsody upon it, which I will show you some day. The "Leaf and the Flower" is very gorgeous, but it does not touch the heart like earnest praise of a virtue, loved, felt, and practised; and Dryden's "Hymns to Chastity" would scarcely, I think, satisfy me, even had I not in memory sundry sublime things of Spenser, Dante, and Milton on the same theme. Thank you for both the books. Each in its kind is very good. I am yours very truly, F. A. B. [Mr. Greville had lent me a volume of Dr. Channing's "Sermons," and Dryden's "Fables," which I had never before read.] 26, UPPER GROSVENOR STREET, Saturday, April 29th. DEAREST GRANNY, I send you back, with thanks, the critique on Adelaide. It is very civil and, I think, not otherwise than just, except perhaps in comparing my sister _at present_ to Pasta. If genius alone were the same thing as genius and years of study, labor, experience, and practice, genius would be a finer thing even than it is. My sister perpetually reminded me of Pasta, and, had she remained a few years longer in her profession, would, I think, have equalled her. I could not give her higher praise, for nobody, since the setting of that great artist, has even remotely reminded me of her. My sister's voice is not one of the finest I have heard; Miss Paton's is finer, Clara Novello's (the most perfect voice I ever heard) is finer. Adelaide's real voice is a high mezzo-soprano, and in _stretching_ it to a higher pitch--that of the soprano-assoluto--which she has done with infinite pains and practice, in order to sing the music of the parts she plays, I think she has impaired the quality, the perfect intonation, of the notes that form the joint, the hinge, as it were, between the upper and middle voice; and these notes are sometimes not quite true--at any rate, weak and uncertain. In brilliancy of execution, I do not think she equals Sontag, Malibran, or Grisi; _but_ there is in other respects no possible comparison, in my opinion, between them and herself, as a lyrical dramatic artist; and Pasta is the only great singer who, I think, compares with her in the qualities of that noble and commanding order which distinguished them both. In both Madame Pasta and my sister the dramatic power is so great as almost occasionally to throw their musical achievements, in some degree, into the shade. But in their lyrical declamation there is a grandeur and breadth of style, and a tragic depth of passion, far beyond that of any other musical performers I have known. In one respect Adelaide had the promise of greater excellence than Pasta--the versatility of her powers and her great talent for comedy. How little her beautiful face was ever disfigured by her vocal efforts you have seen; and noted, I know, that power of appealing to Heaven at once with her lustrous eyes and her soaring voice; ending those fine, exquisite, prolonged shakes on the highest notes with that gentle quiver of the lids which hardly disturbed the expression of "the rapt soul sitting in her eyes." She has a musical sensibility which comprehends, in both senses of the word, every species of musical composition, and almost the whole lyrical literature of Europe; in short, she belongs, by organization and education, to the highest order of artists. But why--oh, why am I giving you a dissertation on her and her gifts, for a purpose which will never again challenge her efforts or their exercise? (Quite lately, one who knew and loved her well told me that Rossini had said of her, "To sing as she does three things are needed: this"--touching his forehead,--"this"--touching his throat,--"and this"--laying his hand on his heart;--"she had them all.") I sometimes think, when I reflect upon the lives of theatrical artists, that they are altogether unnatural existences, and produce--pardon the bull--_artificial natures_, which are misplaced anywhere but in their own unreal and make-believe sphere. They are the anomalous growth of our diseased civilizations, and, removed from their own factitious soil, flourish, I half believe, in none other. Do not laugh at me, but I really do think that creatures with the temperaments necessary for making good actors and actresses are unfit for anything else in life; and as for marrying and having children, I think crossing wholesome English farm stock with mythological cattle would furnish our fields with a less uncanny breed, of animals. I wish some laws were made shutting up all the theatres, and only allowing two dramatic entertainments every year: one of Shakespeare's plays, and one of Mozart's operas, at the cost of Government, and as a national festivity. Now, I know you think I am quite mad, wherefore adieu. I am ever yours most truly, F. A. B. UPPER GROSVENOR STREET, May, 1843. DEAREST GRANNY, I am of Lord Dacre's mind, and think it wisest and best to avoid the pain of a second parting with you. Light as _new_ sorrows may appear to you, the heart--your heart--certainly will never want vitality enough to feel pain through your kindly affections. God bless you, therefore, my good friend, and farewell. For myself, I feel bruised all over, and numbed with pain; so many sad partings have fallen one after another, day after day, upon my heart, that acuteness of pain is lost in a mere sense of unspeakable, sore weariness; and yet these bitter last days are to be prolonged.... God help us all! But I am wrong to write thus sadly to you, my kind friend; and indeed, though from this note you might not think my courage what it ought to be, I assure you it does not fail me, and, once through these cruel last days, I shall take up the burden of my life, I trust, with patience, cheerfulness, and firm faith in God, and that conviction which is seldom absent from my mind, and which I find powerful to sustain me, that duty and not happiness is the purpose of life; and that from the discharge of the one and the forgetfulness of the other springs that peace which Christ told His friends He gave, and the world gives not, neither takes away. Let dear B---- come and see me; I shall like to look on her bright, courageous face again. Give my affectionate love to Lord Dacre, and believe me Ever gratefully and affectionately Your grandchild, FANNY. UPPER GROSVENOR STREET, May 3rd, 1843. Thank you, dearest Hal, for Sydney Smith's letter about Francis Horner: it is bolder than anything I had a notion of, but very able and very amiable, and describes charmingly an admirable man. There is one expression he--Sydney Smith--applies to Horner that struck me as strange--he speaks of "important human beings" that he has known; and, I cannot tell why, but with all my self-esteem and high opinion of human nature and its capabilities in general, the epithet "important" applied to human beings made me smile, and keeps recurring to me as comical. It must have appeared much more so to you, I should think, with your degraded opinion of humanity. You ask how our second party went off. Why, very well. It was much fuller than the other, and in hopes of inducing people to "spread themselves" a little, we had the refreshments put into my drawing-room; but they still persisting in sticking (sticking literally) all in the room with the piano, which rather annoyed me, because I hate the proximity of "important human beings," I came away from them, and had a charming quiet chat in the little boudoir with Lord Ashburton and Lord Dacre, during which they discussed the merits of Channing, and awarded him the most _unmitigated_ praise as a good and great man. It is curious enough that in America the opponents of Dr. Channing's views perpetually retorted upon him that he was a clergyman, a mere man of letters, whose peculiar mode of life could not possibly admit of his having large or just, or, above all, practical political knowledge and ideas, or any opinions about questions of government that could be worth listening to; whereas these two very distinguished Englishmen spoke with unqualified admiration of his sound and luminous treatment of such subjects, and, instancing what they considered his best productions, mentioned his letter to Clay upon the annexation of Texas, even before his moral and theological essays. Our company stayed very late with us, till near two o'clock; and upon a remark being made about the much smaller consumption of refreshments than on the occasion of our first party, D----, our butler, very oracularly responded, "Quite a different class of people, sir;" which mode of accounting for the more delicate appetite of our more aristocratic guests, made with an ineffable air of cousinship to them all, sent me into fits of laughing. You ask me what I shall have to do from Monday till Wednesday, to fill up my time and keep my thoughts from drowning themselves in crying. I shall leave this house after breakfast for the _Clarendon_. I have a great many small last articles to purchase, and shall visit all my kindred once more. Then, too, the final packing for "board ship" will take me some time, and I have some letters to write too. I dine with Lady Dacre on Monday; they are to be alone except us and E---- and my sister. I shall leave them at eight o'clock to go and sit with my father till ten, his bed-time; and then return to Chesterfield Street [Lord Dacre's]. As for Tuesday--Heaven alone knows how I shall get through it. On Thursday last we dined with Sydney Smith, where we met Lord and Lady Charlemont, Jeffrey, Frederick Byng, Dickens, Lady Stepney, and two men whom I did not know,--a pleasant dinner; and afterwards we went to Mrs. Dawson Damer's,--a large assembly, more than half of them strangers to us.... On Friday morning Adelaide and E---- and we breakfasted with Rogers, to meet Sydney Smith, Hallam, and his daughter and niece, the United States Minister, Edward Everett, Empson, and Sir Robert Inglis. After breakfast I went to see Charles Greville, who is again laid up with the gout, and unable to move from his sofa. We dined with my sister, who had a large party in the evening; and as the hour for breaking up arrived, and I saw those pleasant kindly acquaintances pass one after another through the door, I felt as if I was watching the vanishing of some pleasant vision. The nearest and dearest of these phantasmagoria are yet round me; but in three days the last will have disappeared from my eyes, for who can tell how long? if not forever! All day yesterday I was extremely unwell, but packed vehemently.... Charles Young, who is a most dear old friend of mine, and dotes upon my children, came to see them off, and went with them to the railroad. S---- begged for some of her grandfather's hair, but that he might not be told it was for her, for fear of grieving him! This is the last letter you will get from me written in this house. Victoire, quite tired out with packing, is lying asleep on the sofa, and poor dear Emily sits crying beside me. Ever yours, F. A. B. LIVERPOOL, Thursday, May 4th, 1843. I wrote to you last thing last night, dearest Hal; and now farewell! I have received a better account of my father.... Dear love to Dorothy, and my last dear love to you. I shall write and send no more loves to any one. Lord Titchfield--blessings on him!--has sent me a miniature of my father and four different ones of Adelaide. God bless you, dear. Good-bye. Yours, FANNY. HALIFAX WHARF, Wednesday, May 17th, 1843. MY DEAR FRIEND, When I tell you that yesterday, for the first time, I was able to put pen to paper, or even to hold up my head, and that even after the small exertion of writing a few lines to my father I was so exhausted as to faint away, you will judge of the state of weakness to which this dreadful process of crossing the Atlantic reduces your very _robustious_ grandchild. It is now the 17th of May, and we have been at sea thirteen days, and we are making rapid way along the coast of Nova Scotia, and shall touch at Halifax in less than an hour. There we remain, to land mails and passengers, about six hours; and in thirty-six more, wind and weather favoring us across the Bay of Fundy, we shall be in Boston. In fifteen days! Think of it, my dearest Granny! when thirty used to be considered a rapid and prosperous voyage. My dear friend, how shall I thank you for those warm words of cheering and affectionate encouragement which I received when I was lying worn out for want of sleep and food, after we had been eight days on this dreadful deep? My kind friend, I do not want courage, I assure you; and God will doubtless give me sufficient strength for my need: but you can hardly imagine how deplorably sad I feel; how poor, who lately was so rich; how lonely, who lately was surrounded by so many friends. I know all that remains to me, and how the treasure of love I have left behind will be kept, I believe, in many kind hearts for me till I return to claim it. But the fact is I am quite exhausted, body and mind, and incapable of writing, or even thinking, with half the energy I hope to gather from the first inch of dry land I step upon. Like Antæus, I look for strength from my mother, the Earth, and doubt not to be brave again when once I am on shore. The moment I saw the dear little blue enamel heart I exclaimed, "Oh, it is Lady Dacre's hair in it!" But tears, and tears, and nothing but tears, were the only greeting I could give the pretty locket and your and dear B----'s letters. My poor chicks have borne the passage well, upon the whole--sick and sorry one hour, and flying about the deck like birds the next.... Our passage has been made in the teeth of the wind, and against a heavy sea the whole way. We have had no absolute storm; but the tender mercies of the Atlantic, at best, are terrible. Of our company I can tell nothing, having never left my bed till within the last three days. They seem to be chiefly English officers and their families, bound for New Brunswick and the Canadas. The ship stops, and to the perpetual flailing of the paddles succeeds the hissing sound of the escaping steam. We are at Halifax. I send you this earliest news of us because you will be glad, I am sure, to get it. Give my love to my dear lord; my blessing and a kiss to dear B----. I will write to her from New York, if possible. God bless you, my dear friend, and reward you for all your kindness to me, and comfort and make peaceful the remainder of your earthly pilgrimage. I can hardly hold my pen in my hand, or my head up; but am ever your grateful and affectionate FANNY. PHILADELPHIA, Tuesday, May 23rd, 1843. MY DEAREST HAL, We landed in Boston on Friday morning at six o'clock, and almost before I had drawn my first breath of Yankee air Elizabeth Sedgwick and Kate had thrown their arms round me. You will want to know of our seafaring; and mine truly was miserable, as it always is, and perhaps even more wretched than ever before. I lay in a fever for ten days, without being able to swallow anything but two glasses of calves'-foot jelly and oceans of iced water. At the end of this time I began to get a little better; though, as I had neither food, nor sleep, nor any relief from positive sea-sickness, I was in a deplorable state of weakness. I just contrived to crawl out of my berth two days before we reached Halifax, where I was cheered, and saddened too, by the sight of well-known English faces. I had just finished letters to my father, E----, and Lady Dacre, for the _Hibernia_, which was to touch there the next morning on her way _home_, and was sitting disconsolate with my head in my hands, in a small cabin on deck, to which I had been carried up from below as soon as I was well enough to bear being removed from my own, when Mr. Cunard, the originator of this Atlantic Steam Mail-packet enterprise, whom I had met in London, came in, and with many words of kindness and good cheer, carried me up to his house in Halifax, where I rested for an hour, and where I saw Major S----, an uncle of my dear B----, and where we talked over English friends and acquaintances and places, and whence I returned to the ship for our two days' more misery, with a bunch of exquisite flowers, born English subjects, which are now withering in my letter-box among my most precious farewell words of friends. The children bore the voyage as well as could be expected; sick one half hour, and stuffing the next; little F---- _pervading_ the ship from stem to stern, like Ariel, and generally presiding at the officers' mess in undismayed she-loneliness. Your friend Captain G---- was her devoted slave and admirer.... I saw but little of the worthy captain, being only able to come on deck the last four days of our passage; but he was most kind to us all, and after romping with the children and walking Miss Hall off her legs, he used to come and sit down by me, and sing, and hum, and whistle every imaginable tune that ever lodged between lines and spaces, and some so original that I think they never were imprisoned within any musical bars whatever. I gave him at parting the fellow of your squeeze of the hand, and told him that as yours was on my account, mine was on yours. He left us at Boston to go on to Niagara. Our ship was extremely full, and there being only one stewardess on board, the help she could afford any of us was very little.... While in Boston I made a pilgrimage to dear Dall's grave: a bitter and a sad few minutes I spent, lying upon that ground beneath which she lay, and from which her example seemed to me to rise in all the brightness of its perfect lovingness and self-denial. The oftener I think of her, the more admirable her life appears to me. She was undoubtedly gifted by nature with a temperament of rare healthfulness and vigor, which, combined with the absence of imagination and nervous excitability, contributed much to her uniform cheerfulness, courage, and placidity of temper; but her self-forgetfulness was most uncommon, her inexhaustible kindliness and devotedness to every creature that came within her comfortable and consolatory influence was "twice-blessed," and from her grave her lovely virtues seemed to call to me to get up and be of good cheer, and strive to forget myself, even as perfectly as she had done.... How bitter and dark a thing life is to some of God's poor creatures! I have told you now all I have to tell of myself, and being weary in spirit and in body, will bid you farewell, and go and try to get some sleep. God bless you, my beloved friend; I am very sad, but far from out of courage. Give dear Dorothy my affectionate love. I am ever yours, FANNY. PHILADELPHIA, Tuesday, 30th, 1843. MY DEAR F----, We are all established in a boarding-house here, where my acquaintances assure me that I am very comfortable; and so I endeavor to persuade myself that my acquaintances are better judges of that than I am myself. It is the first time in my life that I have ever lived in any such manner or establishment; so I have no means of trying it by comparison; it is simply detestable to me, but compared with _more_ detestable places of the same sort it is probably _less_ so. "There are differences, look you!" ... I am sure your family deserve to have a temple erected to them by all foreigners in America; for it seems to me that you and your people are home, country, and friends to all such unfortunates as happen to have left those small items of satisfaction behind them. The stranger's blessing should rest on your dwellings, and one stranger's grateful blessing does rest there.... Believe me, yours most truly, F. A. B. _Please to observe_ that the charge of 13_s._ 8_d._ is for personal advice, conferences, and tiresome morning visits; and if you make any such charge, I shall expect you to earn it. 6_s._ 4_d._ is all you are entitled to for anything but personal communication. [This postscript, and the beginning of the letter, were jesting references to a lawyer's bill, amounting to nearly £50, presented to me by a young legal gentleman with whom we had been upon terms of friendly acquaintance, and whom we had employed, as he was just beginning business, to execute the papers for the deed of gift I have mentioned, by which my father left me at his death my earnings, the use of which I had given up to him on my marriage for his lifetime. Our young legal gentleman used to pay us the most inconceivably tedious visits, during which his principal object appeared to be to obtain from us every sort of information upon the subject of all and sundry American investments and securities. Over and over again I was on the point of saying "Not at home" to these interminably wearisome visitations, but refrained, out of sheer good nature and unwillingness to mortify my _visitant_. Great, therefore, was our surprise, on receiving a _bill of costs_, to find every one of these intolerable intrusions upon our time and patience charged, as personal business consultations, at 13_s._ 8_d._ The thing was so ludicrous that I laughed till I cried over the price of our friend's civilities. On paying the amount, though of course I made no comment upon the price of my social and legal privileges, I suppose the young gentleman's own conscience (he was only just starting in his profession, and may have had one) pricked him slightly, for with a faint hysterical giggle, he said, "I dare say you think it rather sharp practice, but, you see, getting married and furnishing the house is rather expensive,"--an explanation of the reiterated thirteens and sixpences of the bill, which was candid, at any rate, and put them in the more affable light of an extorted wedding present, which was rather pleasant.] PHILADELPHIA, June 4th, 1843. DEAREST GRANNY, You will long ere this have received my grateful acknowledgments of your pretty present and most kind letter, received, with many tears and heart-yearnings, in the middle of that horrible ocean. I will not renew my thanks, though I never can thank you enough for that affectionate inspiration of following me on that watery waste, with tokens of your remembrance, and cheering that most dismal of all conditions with such an unlooked-for visitation of love. I wrote to you from Halifax, where, on the deck of our steamer, your name was invoked with heartfelt commendations by myself and Major S----. That was a curious conversation of his and mine, if such it could be called; scarcely more than a breathless enumeration of the names of all of you, coupled indeed with loving and admiring additions, and ejaculations full of regret and affection. Poor man, how I did pity him! and how I did pity myself! I have just written to our B----, and feel sad at the meagre and unsatisfactory account which my letter contains of me and mine; to you, my excellent friend, I will add this much more.... But I shall forbear saying anything about my conditions until they become better in themselves, or I become better able to bear them. God bless you and those you love, my dear Lady Dacre. Give my affectionate "duty" to my lord, and believe me ever your gratefully attached F. A. B. PHILADELPHIA, June 26th, 1843. MY DEAREST HAL, Your sad account of Ireland is only more shocking than that of the newspapers because it is yours, and because you are in the midst of all this wild confusion and dismay. How much you must feel for your people! However much one's sympathy may be enlisted in any public cause, the private instances of suffering and injustice, which inevitably attend all political changes wrought by popular commotion, are most afflicting. I hardly know what it is reasonable to expect from, or hope for, Ireland. A separation from England seems the wildest project conceivable; and yet, Heaven knows, no great benefit appears hitherto to have accrued to the poor "earthen pot" from its fellowship with the "iron" one. As for hoping that quiet may be restored through the intervention of military force, at the bayonet's point,--I cannot hope any such thing. Peace so procured is but an earnest of future war, and the victims of such enforced tranquillity bequeath to those who are only temporarily _quelled_, not permanently _quieted_, a legacy of revenge, which only accumulates, and never goes long unclaimed and unpaid. England seems to me invariably to deal unwisely with her dependencies; she performs in the Christian world very much the office that Rome did in the days of her great heathen supremacy--carry to the ends of the earth by process of conquest the seeds of civilization, of legislation, and progress; and then, as though her mission was fulfilled, by gradual mismanagement, abuse of power, and insolent contempt of those she has subjugated, is ejected by the very people to whom she had brought, at the sword's point, the knowledge of freedom and of law. It is a singular office for a great nation, but I am not sure that it is not our Heaven-appointed one, to conquer, to improve, to oppress, to be rebelled against, to coerce, and finally to be kicked out, _videlicet_, these United States. But now to matters personal.... The intense heat affects me extremely; and not having a horse, or any riding exercise, the long walks which I compel myself to take over these burning brick pavements, and under this broiling sun, are not, I suppose, altogether beneficial to me.... I went to church yesterday, and Mr. F---- preached an Abolition sermon. This subject seems to press more and more upon his mind, and he speaks more and more boldly upon it, in spite of having seen various members of his congregation get up and leave the church in the middle of one of his sermons in which he adverted to the forbidden theme of slavery. Some of these, who had been members of the church from its earliest establishment, and were very much attached to him, expressed their regret at the course they felt compelled to adopt, and said if he would only _give them notice_ when he intended to preach upon that subject they would content themselves with absenting themselves on those occasions only, to which his reply not unnaturally was, "Why, those who would leave the church on those occasions are precisely the persons who are in need of such exhortations!"--and of course he persevered. I think it will end by his being expelled by his congregation. It will be well with him wherever he goes; but alas for those he leaves! I expect to be forbidden to take S---- to church, as soon as the report of yesterday's sermon gets noised abroad.... God bless you, dear. Good-bye. I am heavy-hearted, and it is a great effort to me to write. What would I not give to see you! Love to dear Dorothy, when you see or write to her. I am ever yours, FANNY. YELLOW SPRINGS, PENNSYLVANIA, July 6th, 1843. MY DEAREST HAL, Here I am sitting (not indeed "on a rail"), but next thing to it, on the very hardest of wooden benches; my feet on the very hardest bar of the very hardest wooden chair; and my _cork_ inkstand, of the most primitive formation, placed on a rough wooden table about a foot square, which is not large enough to hold my paper (so my knees are my desk), and is covered with a coarse piece of rag carpeting;--the whole, a sort of prison-cell furnishing. Before me stretches as far as it can about a quarter of an acre of degraded uneven ground, enclosed in a dilapidated whitewashed wooden paling, and clothed, except in several mangy bare patches, with rank weedy grass, untended unwholesome shrubs, and untidy neglected trees.... Behind me is a whitewashed room about fifteen feet by twelve, containing a rickety, black horse-hair sofa, all worn and torn into prickly ridges; six rheumatic wooden chairs; a lame table covered with a plaid shawl of my own, being otherwise without cloth to hide its nakedness or the indefinite variety of dirt-spots and stains which defile its dirty skin. In this room Miss Hall and S---- are busily engaged at "lessons." Briefly, I am sitting on the piazza (so-called) of one of a group of tumble-down lodging-houses and hotels, which, embosomed in a beautiful valley in Pennsylvania, and having in the midst of them an exquisite spring of mineral water, rejoice in the title of the "Yellow Springs." Some years ago this place was a fashionable resort for the Philadelphians, but other watering-places have carried off its fashion, and it has been almost deserted for some time past; and except invalids unable to go far from the city (which is within a three hours' drive from here), and people who wish to get fresh air for their children without being at a distance from their business, very few visitors come here, and those of an entirely different sort from the usual summer haunters of watering-places in the country. The heat in the city has been perfectly frightful.... On Sunday last a thermometer, rested on the ground, rose to 130°, that being the heat of the earth; and when it was hung up in the shade the mercury fell, but remained at 119°. Imagine what an air to breathe!... Late in the afternoon last Sunday, a storm came on like a West Indian tornado; the sky came down almost to the earth, the dust was suddenly blown up into the air in red-hot clouds that rushed in at the open windows like thick volumes of smoke, and then the rain poured from the clouds, steadily, heavily, and continuously, for several hours. In the night the whole atmosphere changed, and as I sat in my children's nursery after putting them to bed in the dark, that they might sleep, I felt gradually the spirit of life come over the earth, in cool breezes between the heavy showers of rain. The next morning the thermometer was below 70°, 30° lower than the day before.... This morning the children took me up a hill which rises immediately at the back of the house, on the summit of which is a fine crest of beautiful forest-trees, from which place there is a charming prospect of hill and dale, a rich rolling country in fine cultivation--the yellow crops of grain, running like golden bays into the green woodland that clothes the sides and tops of all the hills, the wheat, the grass, the oats, and the maize, all making different checkers in the pretty variegated patchwork covering of the prosperous summer earth. The scattered farmhouses glimmered white from among the round-headed verdure of their neighboring orchards. Nowhere in the bright panorama did the eye encounter the village, the manor-house, and the church spire,--that picturesque poetical group of feudal significance; but everywhere, the small lonely farmhouse, with its accompaniments of huge barns and outhouses, ugly the one and ungainly the others, but standing in the midst of their own smiling well-cultivated territory, a type of independent republicanism, perhaps the pleasantest type of its pleasantest features. In the whole scene there was nothing picturesque or poetical (except, indeed, the blue glorious expanse of the unclouded sky, and the noble trees, from the protection of whose broad shade we looked forth upon the sunny world). But the wide landscape had a peaceful, plenteous, prosperous aspect, that was comfortable to one's spirit and exceedingly pleasant to the eye. After our walk we came down into the valley, and I went with the children to the cold bath--a beautiful deep spring of water, as clear as crystal and almost as cold as ice, surrounded by whitewashed walls, which, rising above it to a discreet height, screen it only from earthly observers. No roof covers the watery chamber but the green spreading branches of tall trees and the blue summer sky, into which you seem to be stepping as you disturb the surface of the water. Into this lucid liquid gem I gave my chickens and myself, overhead, three breathless dips--it is too cold to do more,--and since that I have done nothing but write to you. You ask what is said to Sydney Smith's "petition." Why, the honest men of the country say, "'Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis, 'tis true." It is thought that Pennsylvania will _ultimately_ pay, and not repudiate, but it will be _some time_ first. God bless you, my dear Hal. I have not been well and am miserably depressed, but the country always agrees excellently with me. Ever yours, FANNY. PHILADELPHIA, Sunday, 9th, 1843. MY DEAR T----, After last Sunday's awful heat, it became positively impossible to keep the children any longer in Philadelphia; and they were accordingly removed to the Yellow Springs, a healthy and pleasant bathing-place at three hours' distance from the city. On Saturday morning their nurse, the only servant we have, thought proper to disapprove of my deportment towards her, and left me to the maternal delights of dressing, washing, and looking after my children during that insufferable heat. Miss H---- was entirely incapacitated, and I feared was going to be ill, and I have reason to thank Heaven that I am provided with the constitution that I have, for it is certain that I need it. On Sunday night a violent storm cooled the atmosphere, and on Monday morning the nurse was good enough to forgive me, and came back: so that the acme of my trial did not last too long. On Tuesday the children were removed to the country, and though the physician and my own observation assured me that F---- required sea-bathing, it is an unspeakable relief to me to see her out of the city, and to find this place healthy and pleasant for them. The country is pretty, the air pure, the baths delightful; and my chicks, thank God, already beginning to improve in health and spirits. As for the accommodations, the less said about them the better. We inhabit a sort of very large barn, or barrack, divided into sundry apartments, large and small; and having gleaned the whole house to furnish our _drawing-room_, that chamber now contains one rickety table, one horse-hair sofa that has three feet, and six wooden chairs, of which it may be said that they have several legs among them; but I must add that we have the whole house to ourselves, and our meals are brought to us from the "Great Hotel" across the street,--privileges for which it behoves me to be humbly thankful, and so I am. If the children thrive I shall be satisfied; and as for accommodation, or even common comfort, my habitation and mode of life in our Philadelphia boarding-house have been so far removed from any ideas of comfort or even decency that I ever entertained, that the whitewashed walls, bare rooms, and tumble-down verandas of my present residence are but little more so.... I suppose there was something to like in Mr. Webster's speech, since you are surprised at my not liking it; but what was there to like? The one he delivered on the laying of the foundation-stone of the monument (on Bunker's Hill, near Boston) pleased me very much indeed; I thought some parts of it very fine. But the last one displeased me utterly.... Pray send me word all about that place by the sea-side, with the wonderful name of "Quoge." My own belief is that the final "e" you tack on to it is an affected abbreviation for the sake of refinement, and that it is, by name and nature, really "Quagmire." Believe me always Yours truly, F. A. B. YELLOW SPRINGS, July 12th, 1843. DEAR GRANNY, The intelligence contained in your letter [of the second marriage of the Rev. Frederick Sullivan, whose first wife was Lady Dacre's only child] gave me for an instant a painful shock, but before I had ended it that feeling had given place to the conviction that the contemplated change at the vicarage was probably for the happiness and advantage of all concerned. The tone of B----'s letter satisfied me, and for her and her sister's feeling upon the subject I was chiefly anxious. About you, my dearest Granny, I was not so solicitous; however deep your sentiment about the circumstance may be, you have lived long and suffered much, and have learned to accept sorrow wisely, let it come in what shape it will. The impatience of youth renders suffering very terrible to it; and the eager desire for happiness which belongs to the beginning of life makes sorrow appear like some unnatural accident (almost a personal injury), a sort of horrid surprise, instead of the all but daily business, and part of the daily bread of existence, as one grows by degrees to find that it is. His daughter's feeling about Mr. Sullivan's marriage being what it is, the marriage itself appears to me wise and well; and I have no doubt that it will bring a blessing to the home at the vicarage and its dear inmates. Pray remember me most kindly to Mr. Sullivan, and beg him to accept my best wishes for his happiness, and that of all who belong to him; the latter part of my wish I know he is mainly instrumental in fulfilling himself. May he find his reward accordingly! Of myself, my dear friend, what shall I tell you? I am in good health, thank God! and as much good spirits as inevitably belong to good health and a sound constitution in middle life.... The intense heat of the last month had made both my children ill, and a week ago they were removed to this place, called the Yellow Springs, from a fine mineral source, the waters of which people bathe in and drink. Round it is gathered a small congregation of rambling farm-houses, built for the accommodation of visitors. The country is pretty and well cultivated, and the air remarkable for its purity and healthiness; and here we have taken lodgings, and shall probably remain during all the heat of the next six weeks, after which I suppose we shall return to town. I wish you could see my present _locale_. The house we are in is the furthest from the "Hotel" (as it is magnificently called), and is a large, rambling, whitewashed edifice, with tumble-down wooden piazzas (verandas, as we should call them) surrounding its ground-floor. This consists of one very large room, intended for a public dining-room, with innumerable little cells round it, all about twelve feet by thirteen, which are the bedrooms. One of these spacious sleeping-apartments, opening on one side to the common piazza and on the other to the common eating-room, is appropriated to me as a "private parlor," as it is called; and being at present, most fortunately, the only inmates of this huge barrack, we have collected into this "extra exclusive" saloon all the furniture that we could glean out of all the other rooms in the house; and what do you think we have got? Two tiny wooden tables, neither of them large enough to write upon; a lame horse-hair sofa, and six lame wooden chairs. As the latter, however, are not all lame of the same leg, it is quite a pretty gymnastic exercise to balance one's self as one sits by turns upon each of them, bringing dexterously into play all the different muscles necessary to maintain one's seat on any of them. It makes sitting quite a different process from what I have ever known it to be, and separates it entirely from the idea usually connected with it, of rest. But this we call luxury, and, compared with the condition of the other rooms (before we had stripped them of their contents), so it undoubtedly is. The walls of this boudoir of mine are roughly whitewashed, the floor roughly boarded, and here I abide with my chicks. The decided improvement in their health and looks and spirits, since we left that horrible city, is a great deal better than sofas and armchairs to me, or anything that would be considered elsewhere the mere decencies of life; and having the means of privacy and cleanliness, my only two absolute indispensables, I take this rather primitive existence pleasantly enough. This house is built at the foot of a low hill, the sides of which are cultivated; while the immediate summit retains its beautiful crest of noble trees, from beneath which to look out over the wide landscape is a very agreeable occupation towards sunset. Chester County, as this is called, is the richest, agriculturally speaking, in Pennsylvania; and the face of the country is certainly one of the comeliest, well-to-do, smiling, pleasant earth's faces that can be seen on a summer's day; the variety of the different tinted crops (among them the rich green of the maize, or Indian corn, which we have not in England), clothing the hill-sides and running like golden bays into the green forest that once covered them from base to summit, and still crowns every highest point, forms the gayest coat of many colors for the whole rural region. The human interest in the landscape is supplied not by village, mansion, parsonage, or church, but by numerous small isolated farm-houses, their white walls gleaming in the intense sunlight from amidst the trim verdure of their orchards, and their large barns and granaries surveying complacently far and wide the abundant harvests that are to be gathered into their capacious walls. The comfort, solidity, loneliness, and inelegance, not to say ugliness, of these rural dwellings is highly characteristic, the latter quality being to a certain degree modified by distance; the others represent very pleasingly, in the midst of the prosperous prospect, the best features of the institutions which govern the land--security, freedom, independence. There is nothing visibly picturesque or poetical in the whole scene; nothing has a hallowed association for memory, or an exciting historical interest, or a charm for the imagination. But under this bright and ever-shining sky the objects and images that the eye encounters are all cheerful, pleasing, peaceful, and satisfactorily suggestive of the blessings of industry and the secure repose of modest, moderate prosperity. Dearest Granny, I had not intended to cross my letter to you; but the young ones will decipher the scrawl for you, and I flatter myself that you will not object to my filling my paper as full as it will hold. These four small pages, even when they are crossed, make but a poor amount of communication compared with the full and frequent personal intercourse I have enjoyed with you. What a shocking mess you are all making of it in Ireland just now! I hear too that you are threatened with bad crops. Should this be true, I do not wonder at my lord's croaking, for what will the people do? The water we bathe in here is strongly impregnated with iron, and so cold that very few people go into the spring itself. I do: and when the thermometer is at 98° in the shade, a plunge into water below 50° is something of a shock. B---- would like it, and so do I. Will you give my affectionate remembrance to my lord, and Believe me always, dear Granny, Your attached F. A. B. YELLOW SPRINGS, 19th July, 1843. And so, my dear T----, you are a "tied-by-the-leg" (as we used, in our laughing days, to call the penniless young Attachés to Legations)? I am heartily sorry, as yours is not diplomatic but physical infirmity; and would very readily, had I been anywhere within possible reach, have occupied the empty arm-chair in your library, and "charmed your annoys" to the best of my ability.... Dear me! through how long a lapse of years your desire that I would undertake a translation of Schiller's "Fiesco" leads me! When I was between sixteen and seventeen years old, I actually began an adaptation of it to the English stage; but partly from thinking the catastrophe unmanageable, and from various other motives, I never finished it: but it was an early literary dream of mine, and you have recalled to me a very happy period of my life in reminding me of that labor of love. You perhaps imagine from this that I understood German, which I then did not; my acquaintance with the German drama existing only through very admirably executed literal French translations, which formed part of an immense collection of plays, the dramatic literature of Europe in innumerable volumes, which was one of my favorite studies in my father's library. I am not, however, at all of your opinion, that "Fiesco" is the best of Schiller's plays. I think "Don Carlos," and "William Tell," and especially "Wallenstein," finer; the last, indeed, finest of them all. My own especial favorite, however, for many years (though I do not at all think it his best play) was "Joan of Arc." As for his violation of history in "Wallenstein" and "Mary Stuart," I think little of that compared with the singular insensibility he has shown to the glory of the French heroine's death, which is the more remarkable because he generally, above most poets, especially recognizes the sublimity of moral greatness; and how far does the red pile of the religious and patriotic martyr, surrounded by her terrified and cowardly English enemies and her more basely cowardly and ungrateful French friends, transcend in glory, the rose-colored battle-field apotheosis Schiller has awarded her! Joan of Arc seems to me never yet to have been done justice to by either poet or historian, and yet what a subject for both! The treatment of the character of Joan of Arc in "Henry VI." is one reason why I do not believe it to be wholly Shakespeare's. He never, it is true, writes out of the spirit of his time, neither was he ever absolutely and servilely subject to it--for example, giving in Shylock the delineation of the typical Jew as conceived in his day, think of that fine fierce vindication of their common humanity with which he challenges the Christian Venetians, Solanio and Solarino--"Hath not a Jew eyes?" etc. By-the-by, did you ever hear a whisper of a suggestion that Joan of Arc was _not_ burned? There is such a tradition, that she was rescued, reprieved, and lived to a fine old age, though rather scorched. And now, at the fag end of my paper, to answer your question about Leonora Lavagna. I think, beyond all doubt, the sentiment Schiller makes her express as occurring to her at the altar perfectly natural. When the character and position of Leonora are considered, her love for Fiesco--however, chiefly composed of admiration for his person and more amiable and brilliant personal qualities--must inevitably have derived some of its strength from her generous patriotism and insulted family pride; and nothing, in my opinion, can be more probable than that she should have see in him the deliverer of Genoa, at the moment when every faculty of her heart and mind was absorbed in the contemplation of all the noble qualities with which she believed him endowed. The love of different women is, of course, made up of various elements, according to their natural temperament, mental endowments, and educated habits of thought; and it seems to me the sort of sentiment Leonora describes herself as feeling towards Fiesco at the moment of their marriage is eminently characteristic of such a woman. So much for the Countess Lavagna. I think you are quite mistaken in calling Thekla a "merely ideal" woman; she is a very _real_ German woman--rarely perhaps, but to be found in all the branches of the Anglo-saxon tree, in England certainly, and even in America. To these subjects of very pleasing interest to me succeeds in your letter the exclamation elicited by poor Mrs. D----'s misfortune, "Blessed are they who die in the Lord!" to which let me answer, "Yea, rather, blessed are they who live in the Lord!" Our impatience of suffering may make death sometimes appear the most desirable thing in all God's universe; yet who can tell what trials or probations may be ordained for us hereafter? The idea that there "may be yet more work to do," probably _must_ be (for how few finish their task here before the night cometh when "no man can work," as far as this world is concerned, at any rate!), is a frequent speculation with me; so that whenever, in sheer weariness of spirit, I have been tempted to wish for death, or in moments of desperation felt almost ready to seize upon it, the thought, not of what I may have to suffer, but what I must have to do, _i.e._ the work left undone here, checks the rash wish and rasher imagination, and I feel as if I must sit down again to try and work. But weariness of life makes the idea of existence prolonged beyond death sometimes almost oppressive, and it seems to me that there are times when one would be ready to consent to lie down in one's grave and become altogether as the clods of the valley, relinquishing one's immortal birthright simply for rest. To be sure you will answer that, for rest to be pleasurable, consciousness must accompany it; but oh, how I should like to be _consciously unconscious_ for a little while!--which possibly may strike you as nonsense. I dare say women are, as you say, like cats in a great many respects. I acknowledge myself like one, only in the degree of electricity in my hair and skin; I never knew anybody but a cat who had so much. Thank you for the paper about Theodore Hook. I knew him and disliked him. He was very witty and humorous, certainly; but excessively coarse in his talk and gross in his manners, and was hardly ever strictly sober after dinner.... PHILADELPHIA, August 4th, 1843. MY DEAREST HAL, Indeed I am not spending my summer with my friends at Lenox, ... but boarding at a third-rate watering-place about thirty miles from Philadelphia, where there is a fine mineral spring and baths, remarkably pure and bracing air, and a pretty, pleasant country, under which combination of favorable influences we have all improved very much, and dear little F---- looks once more as if she would live through the summer, which she did not when we left Philadelphia. As for our accommodations at this place, they are as comfortless as it is possible to imagine, but that really signifies comparatively little.... I ride, and walk, and fish, and look abroad on the sweet kindly face of Nature, and commune gratefully with my Father in heaven whenever I do so; and the hours pass swiftly by, and life is going on, and the rapid flight of time is a source of rejoicing to me.... I laughed a very sad laugh at your asking me if my watch and chain had been recovered or replaced. How? By whom? With what? No, indeed, nor are they likely to be either recovered or replaced. I offered, as a sort of inducement to semi-honesty on the part of the thief or thieves, to give up the watch and pencil-case to whoever would bring back my dear chain, but in vain. Had I possessed any money, I should have offered the largest possible reward to recover it; but, as it is, I was forced to let it go, without being able to take even the usual methods resorted to for the recovery of lost valuables. I will now bid you good-bye, dearest Hal. I have no more to tell you; and whenever I mention or think of that chain, I feel so sad that I hate to speak or move. I flatter myself that, were you to see me now, you would approve highly of my appearance. I am about half the size I was when last you saw me. God bless you, dear. I am, therefore, only half yours, FANNY. PHILADELPHIA, August 15th, 1843. MY DEAR T----, Yesterday, at three o'clock, I was told that we must all return to town by five, which accordingly was accomplished, not without strenuous exertion and considerable inconvenience in making our preparations in so short a time. I do not know in the least whether we are to remain here now or go elsewhere, or what is to become of us.... I do not know the lines you allude to as mine, called "The Memory of the Past," and think you must have written them yourself in your sleep, and then accused me of them, which is not genteel. I have no recollection of any lines of my own so called. Depend upon it, you dreamt them. I hope you had the conscience to make good verses, since you did it in my name. I have not supposed you either "neglectful or dead." I knew you were at Quoge, which Mr. G---- reported to be a very nice place.... You have misunderstood me entirely upon the subject of truth in works of fiction and art; and I think, if you refer to my letter, if you have it, you will find it so. I hold truth sacred everywhere, but merely lamented over Schiller's departure from it in the instance of "Joan of Arc" more than in that of "Wallenstein." It has been an annoyance to me to leave the Yellow Springs, independently of the hurried and disagreeable mode of our doing so. I like the country, which is really very pretty, and I have been almost happy once or twice while riding over those hills and through those valleys, with no influences about me but the holy and consolatory ministerings of nature. My activity of temperament and love of system and order (perhaps you did not know that I possessed those last tendencies) always induce me to organize a settled mode of life for myself wherever I am, no matter for how short a space of time, and in the absence of nervous irritation or excitement, regular physical exercise, and steady intellectual occupation, always produce in me a (considering all things) wonderfully cheerful existence; ... and my spirits, obedient to the laws of my excellent constitution, rise above my mental and sentimental ailments, and rejoice, like those of all healthy animals, in mere physical well-being.... Good-bye, dear T----. Remember me most kindly to S----; and Believe me always yours very truly, F. A. B. PHILADELPHIA, August 22nd, 1843. MY DEAR T----, I am not sure that cordial sympathy is not the _greatest_ service that one human being can offer another in this woe-world. Certainly, without it, all other service is not worth accepting; and it is so strengthening and encouraging a thing to know one's self kindly cared for by one's kind, that I incline to think few benefits that we confer upon each other in this life are greater, if so great.... The horrible heat, and the admonishing pallor that is again overspreading my poor children's cheeks, has led to a determination of again sending them out of town; and I heard yesterday that on Saturday next they are to go to the neighborhood of West Chester. The fact of going out of town again is very agreeable to me on my own account, letting alone my sincere rejoicing that my children are to be removed from this intolerable atmosphere; but all this packing and unpacking which devolves upon me is very laborious and fatiguing, and the impossibility of obtaining any settled order in my life afflicts me unreasonably.... _Peccavi!_ The verses you mentioned are mine, and you certainly might have written much better ones for me in your sleep, if you had taken the least pains. They were indited as many as twenty years ago, and how Mr. Knickerbocker came possessed of them is a mystery to me.... I want you to do me a favor, which I have been thinking to ask you all this week past, and was now just like to have forgotten. Will you ask John O'Sullivan if he would care to have a review of Tennyson's Poems from me, for the _Knickerbocker_, and what he will give me for such review? I am compelled to be anxious for "compensation." Send me an answer to this inquiry, please; and believe me Very truly yours, F. A. B. P.S.--Lord Morpeth is a _lovely_ man, and I love him. PHILADELPHIA, August 25th, 1843. DEAR GRANNY, A thousand thanks for your kind and comfortable letter, from the tone of which it was easy to see that you were "as well as can be expected," both body and soul. Indeed, my dearest Granny, it is true that we do not perceive half our blessings, from the mere fact of their uninterrupted possession. Of our health this seems to me especially true; and it is too often the case that nothing but its suspension or the sight of its deplorable loss in others awakens us to a sense of our great privilege in having four sound limbs and a body free from racking torture or enfeebling, wasting disease. As for me, what I should do without my health I cannot conceive. All my good spirits (and I have a wonderful supply, considering all things) come to me from my robust physical existence, my good digestion, and perfect circulation. Heaven knows, if my cheerfulness had not a good tough root in these, as long as these last, it would fare ill with me; and I fear my spiritual courage and mental energy would prove exceedingly weak in their encounter with adverse circumstances, but for the admirable constitution with which I have been blessed, and which serves me better than I serve myself.... On the tenth of next month I am going up to the dear and pleasant hill-country of Massachusetts, to pay my friends a visit, which, though I must make it very short, will prove a most acceptable season of refreshment to my heart and spirit, from which I expect to derive courage and cheerfulness for the rest of the year, as I shall certainly not see any of them again till next spring, for they are about two hundred and fifty miles away from me, which, even in this country of quite unlimited space, is not considered exactly next-door neighborhood. You ask after "the farm," which is much honored by your remembrance. It is let, and we are at present living in a boarding-house in town, and I rather think shall continue doing so; but I really do not know in the least what is to become of me from day to day.... I am grieved to hear of the affliction of the Greys. Pray remember me very affectionately to Lady G. Her father's illness must be indeed a sore sorrow to her, devoted as she is to him. My dear Granny, do not you be induced to _croak_ about England. She may have to go through a sharp _operation_ or two; but, depend upon it, that noble and excellent constitution is by no means vitally impaired, and she will yet head the nations of the earth, in all great and good and glorious things, for a long time to come, in spite of Irish rows and Welsh _consonants_ (is there anything else in Wales? How funny a revolution must be without a vowel in it!) ... I believe that great and momentous changes are impending in England; and when I suggest among them as _possible_ future events the doing away with the law of primogeniture, hereditary legislation, and the Church establishment, of course you will naturally say that I think England is going to the dogs faster even than you do. But I think England will survive all her political changes, be they what they may, and, as long as the national character remains unchanged, will maintain her present position among the foremost peoples of the world; with which important and impressive prophecy comfort yourself, dear Granny. We are going out of town, to which we returned a fortnight ago, to-morrow at half-past six in the morning, and it is now past midnight, and I have every mortal and immortal thing to pack with my own single pair of hands, which is Irish, Lord bless us! So good-night, dear Granny. Believe me ever your affectionate FANNY. PHILADELPHIA, August 25th, 1843. You will pay no more, dear Hal, for this huge sheet of paper, being single, I believe, than for its half; and I do not see why I should cheat myself or you so abominably as by writing on such a miserable allowance as the half sheet I have just finished to you. Mr. Furness's abolition sermons have thinned his congregation a little--not much.... There is no other Unitarian church in Philadelphia, where the sect is looked upon with holy horror, pious commiseration, and Christian reprobation, but where, nevertheless, Mr. Furness's own character is held in the highest esteem and veneration. Your question about society here puzzles me a good deal, from the difficulty of making you understand the absolute absence of anything to which you would give that name. I do not think there is anything, either, which foreigners call _société intime_ in Philadelphia. During a certain part of the year certain wealthy individuals give a certain number of entertainments, evening parties, balls, etc. The summer months are passed by most of the well-to-do inhabitants somewhere out of the city, generally at large public-houses, at what are called fashionable watering-places. Everybody has a street acquaintance with everybody; but I know of no such thing as the easy, intimate society which you seem to think inevitably the result of the institutions, habits, and fortunes in this country. It does not strike me that social intercourse is easy at all here; the dread of opinion and the desire of conformity seem to me to give a tone of distrust and caution to every individual man and woman, utterly destructive of all freedom of conversation, producing a flatness and absence of all interest that is quite indescribable. I have hitherto always lived in the country, and mixing very little with the Philadelphians have supposed that the mere civil formality at which my intercourse with most of them stops short would lead necessarily to some more intimate intercourse if I ever lived in the city. I now perceive, however, that their communion with each other is limited to this exchange of morning visits, of course almost exclusively among the women; and that society, such as you and I understand it, does not exist here. Yet, of course, there must be the materials for it, clever and pleasant men and women, and I had sometimes thought, when I foresaw the probability of our leaving our country house and establishing ourselves in the city, that I should find some compensation in the society which I hoped I might be able to gather about me; ... but I am now quite deprived of any such resource as any attempt of the kind might have produced, by my present position in a boarding-house, where I inhabit my bedroom, contriving, for sightliness' sake, to sleep on a wretched sofa-bed that my room by day may look as decent and little encumbered as possible; but where the presence of wash-hand-stand and toilette apparatus necessarily enforces the absence of visitors, except in public rooms open to everybody.... I have received a great many morning visits, and one or two invitations to evening parties, but I do not, of course, like to accept civilities which I have no means of reciprocating, and so I have as little to expect in the way of social recreation as I think anybody living in a large town can have. So much for your inquiries about my social resources in this country. Had I a house of my own in Philadelphia, I should not at all despair of gradually collecting about me a society that would satisfy me perfectly well; but as it is, or rather as I am, the thing is entirely out of the question. Of the discomfort and disorder of our mode of life I cannot easily give you a notion, for you know nothing of the sort, and, until now, neither did I. The absence of decent regularity in our habits, and the slovenliness of our whole existence, is peculiarly trying to me, who have a morbid love of order, system, and regularity, and a positive delight in the decencies and elegancies of civilized life. God bless you, dear. Your affectionate FANNY. PHILADELPHIA, September 1st, 1843. MY DEAR T----, I know not how long your letter had been in Philadelphia, because I have been out of town, and in a place so difficult of access that letters are seldom forwarded thither without being lost or delayed long enough to be only fit for losing. I told you of our sudden removal from the Yellow Springs. In the succeeding fortnight, which we spent in town, the children began again to droop and languish and grow pale, and it was determined to send them into the country again: rooms have been accordingly hired for us three miles beyond West Chester, which is seven miles from the nearest railroad station on the Columbia railroad, altogether about forty miles from town, but for want of regular traffic and proper means of conveyance an exceedingly tedious and unpleasant drive thence to the said farm. Here there is indeed pure air for the children, and a blessed reprieve from the confinement of the city; but so uncivilized a life for any one who has ever been accustomed to the usual decencies of civilization, that it keeps me in a constant state of amazement. We eat at the hours and table of these worthy people, and I am a little starved, as I find it difficult to get up a dinner appetite before one o'clock in the day; and after that nothing is known in the shape of food but tea at six o'clock. We eat with _two-pronged iron forks_; _i.e._ we who are "sopisticate" do. The more sensible Arcadians, of course, eat exclusively with their knives. The farming men and boys come in to the table from their work, without their coats and with their shirt-sleeves rolled up above their elbows; and my own nursemaid, and the servant-of-all-work of the house, and any visitors who may look in upon our hostess, sit down with us promiscuously to feed; all which, I confess, makes me a little melancholy. It is nonsense talking about positive equality; these people are sorry associates for me, and so, I am sure, am I for them. To-day I came to town to endeavor to procure some of the common necessaries that we require: table implements that we can eat with, and lights by which we may be able to pursue our occupations after dark. I read your speech with great pleasure; it was good in every way. I am glad you do not withdraw yourself from the field of action where your like are so much wanted. I cannot give up my hope and confidence in the institutions of your country; they are the expectation of the world; and if the Americans themselves, by word or deed, proclaim their scheme of free government a failure, it seems to me that the future condition of the human race is ominously darkened, and that all endeavor after progress or improvement is a fruitless struggle towards an unattainable end. But this is not so. Your people will yet prove it, and it will and must be through the influence and agency of worthy men like yourself, to whom fitly belongs the task of rallying this faithless people, flying from their standards in the great world-conflict. Call them back, such of you as have voices that can be heard; for your nation is the vanguard of the race, and if they desert their trust its degradation will be protracted for long years to come. The despondency of some of your best men is deplorable, and the selfish discouragement in which they withdraw from the fight, giving place to public evil for the sake of their personal quiet, a fatal omen to the country. It is curiously unlike the spirit of Englishmen. Never, certainly, were good men and true so needed anywhere as here at this moment, when the noblest principles that men are capable of recognizing in the form of a government seem about to be cast down from the rightful supremacy your fathers gave them, and the light of freedom which they kindled to lighten the world extinguished in distrust and dismay. God bless you and prosper you in every good work. Remember me most kindly to S----, and believe me always Yours very truly, F. A. B. PHILADELPHIA, September 9th, 1843. Your English is undoubtedly better than Cicero's Latin to me, my dear T----, inasmuch as I understand the one and not the other. I shall not stop on my way through New York, on Monday, nor my way back, except to spend a Sunday in your city, when I shall be very glad to see S---- and you. I am disappointed at the uncertainty you express about being in Lenox while I am there. Can you ascertain for me whether the Harpers, the New York publishers, would be willing to publish a volume of Fugitive Poems for me, and would give me _anything_ for them? If it is not too much trouble to ascertain this, it would be doing me a great service.... I write in haste, but remain ever yours, F. A. B. DEAR T----, I shall not dine with you to-day for various, all good, reasons, and send you word to that effect, simply because it would not be so civil, either to S---- or you, to leave my excuse till the time when I should present myself. I had hoped to have returned to Philadelphia with Mr. F---- this morning, but I am to remain till after Thursday, when we were to have given a dinner to Macready. He called this morning, however, and said he had another engagement for Thursday, so what will be done in the matter of our proposed entertainment to him I know not. I hope your eyes are not the worse for that hateful theatre last night. You cannot imagine how that sort of thing, to which I was once so used, now excites and irritates my nerves. The music, the lights, the noise, the applause, the acting, the grand play itself, "Macbeth,"--it was all violent doses of stimulant; and I begin to think my mental constitution is like gunpowder, only unignitable when in the water: I suppose that accounts for my affection for water, apart from fishing. I have got the greatest quantity of letters to write, and must begin upon Tennyson, so I shall not want for occupation while I am kept here. Yours ever truly, F. A. B. NEW YORK, September 26th, 1843. DEAREST HAL, I was up till past two o'clock last night, and up at 5.30 this morning: I have travelled half the day, from Philadelphia to New York, and shopped the rest of the day, and am now steaming up the Hudson to Albany, on my way to Lenox, where I am going to spend a few days with my friends the Sedgwicks. Although I am very weary, and my eyes ache for want of sleep, I must write to you before I go to bed; for once up in Berkshire, I shall have but little time to myself, and I would not for a great deal that the steamer should go to England without some word from me to you.... So here I am wandering up forlornly enough, with poor Margery for my attendant, who appears to me to be in the last stage of a consumption, and to whom this little excursion may perhaps be slightly beneficial, and will certainly be very pleasurable.... I shall in all probability see none of the Sedgwicks again for a year.... I suppose, dear Hal, we are crossing the Tappan Zee (the broadest part of the Hudson River, where its rapid current spreads from shore to shore into the dimensions of a wide lake), and the boat rocks so much that I feel sick, and must leave off writing and go to bed, after all. God bless you, dear. Good-night. Dearest Hal, this letter, which I had hoped to finish on board the Hudson night-boat, was cut short by my fatigue and the rocking of the vessel; and, as I expected, during my stay at Lenox no interval of leisure was left me to do so.... I sprained my ankle slightly, jumping from off a fence; and though I have carefully abstained from using my foot since I did so, it is still so weak that I am afraid of standing upon it much, and must consequently abide the results (invariable with me) of want of exercise, headache, sideache, and nervous depression and irritability. When I get to Philadelphia, if I am no better, I will hire a horse for a little while, and shake myself to rights. God bless you, dear Hal. Good-bye. I am ever yours, FANNY. PHILADELPHIA, October 10th, 1843. MY DEAREST HAL, How much I thank you for your generosity to me! for the watch you are sending me, which I have not yet received. I cannot value it more than I did that precious chain, the loss of which, happening at a time when I was every way most unhappy, really afflicted me deeply. I hope nothing will happen to this new remembrance of yours and token of your love. I shall feel most anxious till it arrives, and then I think I shall sleep with it round my neck, so great will be my horror of having it stolen from me in this wretched and disorderly lodging-house, where, as it is, I am in perpetual misery lest I should have left any closet or drawer in my bed-room unfastened, and where we are obliged to lock our sitting-room if we leave it for a quarter of an hour, lest our property should be stolen out of it,--a state of anxious and suspicious caution which is as odious as it is troublesome.... When I arrived in New York last Sunday morning on my return from Berkshire, and was preparing to start for Philadelphia the next day, I found I was to stay in New York to meet and greet Mr. Macready, who had just landed in America, and to whom we are to give an entertainment at the Astor House, as we have no house in Philadelphia to which we can invite him.... My next errand, while I was out to-day, was to go and see a person who has thought proper to go out of her mind about me. She is poor and obscure, the sister of a tailor in this town; she had a little independence of her own, but lent it to the State of Pennsylvania, after the fashion of Sydney Smith, and has lost it, or at any rate the income of it, which, after all, is all that signifies to her, as she is no longer young and will probably not live to see the State grow honest, which its friends and well-wishers confidently predict that it will. This poor woman is really and positively mad about me, as I think you will allow when I tell you that she is never happy when she sees me unless she has hold of my hand _or my gown_; that she has bought a portrait of me by Sully, over which she has put a ducal coronet, as she says I am the _Duchess of Ormond_! It is really a serious effort of good nature in me to go and see her, for her crazy adoration of me is at once ludicrous and painful. But my visits are a most lively pleasure to her--she thanks me for coming with the tears in her eyes, poor thing; and it would be brutal in me to withhold from her a gratification apparently so intense, because to afford it her is irksome and disagreeable to me. Her name is N----, and she told me to-day (but that may have been only another demonstration of her craziness) that there was a large disputed inheritance in Ireland left to heirs unknown of that name; that the true heirs could not be found, and that she really believed she might be entitled to it if she only knew how to set about establishing her right. She is the daughter of an English or Irish man, and her family were well connected in England (I couldn't help thinking, while she was talking, of your and my uncle John's dear Guilford). What a curious thing it would be if this poor, obscure, old, ugly, half-insane woman were really entitled to such a property! She is tolerably well educated too, a good French and Italian scholar, and a reader of obsolete books. She is a very strange creature. I forget whether I told you that I had taken Margery up to Lenox with me, in the hope that the change of air and scene might be of benefit to her; but ever since her return she has been ill in her bed, poor thing! and though the only servant-girl she had has left her, and she is in the most forlorn and wretched condition possible, neither her mother nor her sisters have been near her to help or comfort her--such is the Roman Catholic horror of a divorced woman (for she has at length sued for and obtained her divorce from her worthless husband). And so, I suppose, they will let her die, such being, it seems, their notion of what is right.... Poor woman! her life has been one entire and perfect misery.... God bless you, dear. Good-bye. Ever yours, F. A. B. PHILADELPHIA, October 3rd, 1843. MY DEAR T----, I have just received, by Harnden's Express, my Tennyson, which I had left at Lenox, and with it your old note, written to me while I was yet there, which the conscientious folk sent me down. It seems odd to read all your directions about my departure from the dear hill-country and my arrival in New York. How far swept down the current of time already seem the pleasant hours spent up there! You do not know how earnestly I desire to live up there. I do believe mountains and hills are kindred of mine--larger and smaller relations, taller and shorter cousins; for my heart expands and rejoices and beats more freely among them, and doubtless, in the days which "I can hardly remember" (as Rosalind says of her Irish Rat-ship), I was a bear or a wolf, or what your people call a "panter" (_i.e._ a panther), or at the very least a wild-cat, with unlimited range of forest and mountain. [The forests and hill-tops of that part of Massachusetts had, when this letter was written, harbored, within memory of man, bears, panthers, and wild-cats.] That cottage by the lake-side haunts me; and to be able to realize that day-dream is now certainly as near an approach to happiness as I can ever contemplate. I am working at the Tennyson, and shall soon have it ready. Tell me, if you can, where and how I am to send it to John O'Sullivan. Thank you, my dear T----, for your and S----'s civility to C---- H----. His people are excellent friends of mine, and you cannot conceive anything more disagreeable--painful to me, I might say--than the mortification I felt in receiving him in my present uncomfortable abode, and being literally unable to offer him a decent cup of tea. It is an age since I saw Mr. G----, so can give you no intelligence of him. J---- C---- and the O----s form my _société intime_. They come and sit with me sometimes of an evening, otherwise _mon chez moi_ is undisturbed and lonely enough. I walk a great deal every day, for the weather is lovely, and the blessed blue sky an inexhaustible source of delight and enjoyment to me. To-morrow I am obliged to go out to the farm upon business. I shall go on horseback (upon the legs of my Tennyson article), and expect not only pleasure but profit from my old habitual exercise; but I would a little rather not be going _there_ at all. I went all over our town house yesterday. It is a fine house, and has an excellent garden, with quite large trees in it. It is let unfurnished for about half the price which such a house in London would command. I confess it was rather a trial to return from looking at this large house of--_mine?_ to the "Maison Vauquier" (see Balzac's "Père Goriot") which we inhabit. Thank you for your offer of helping me with my review. I could not possibly think of using your eyes, precious and perilled as they are, instead of my own. I dare say I shall manage with my own translated acquaintance with �schylus and Homer. However, and at any rate, if I find it necessary to _cram_, I will not do so by proxy. Good-bye. Give my kindest love to S----.... How is Master C----? How is his voice? Has he worked out that problem yet about that vexed question on which he threw so much light at your house, and about which you were so tiresome? Seriously, that lad is a clever fellow; and I assure you we perpetrated some pretty profound metaphysics between your house and the Astor Hotel that wet Sunday evening. Believe me yours truly, F. A. B. [The young gentleman alluded to in the above letter, who was visiting the United States, and had brought letters of introduction to my friends in New York, was the son of an old Yorkshire family, among whom had existed for several generations a passionate desire to _fly_, and a firm conviction that they could invent a machine which would enable them to do so. The last I heard of that young Icarus above mentioned was from two of his friends and companions, the sons of Mrs. Norton, who, standing with me above the tremendous precipice called the Salto di Tiberio, which plunges from the edge of the rocks of Capri straight down into the Mediterranean, told me they had had all the difficulty in the world in preventing C---- from launching forth upon his flying machine from that stupendous pier into mid air, and quite as infallibly mid ocean. With infinite entreaties they finally persuaded him to send forth his machine, unfreighted with human life, on its experimental trip. He did so, and his bird, turning ignominious somersaults on its way, at length found a perch, and folded its wings on a hoary rock-anchored tree that stretched out an arm of succor to it above the abyss, and there, perhaps, it still roosts; and elsewhere, perhaps, its author is pursuing other flights.] PHILADELPHIA, Wednesday, May 15th, 1844. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, My last letter to you was pretty nearly filled with dismal private affairs, and now, Heaven knows, all residents in Philadelphia have a gloomy story to tell of public ones. We have had fearful riots here last week between the low American population and the imported population from Ireland, who have also taken the opportunity of the present anarchy and confusion to indulge in violent exhibitions of their own special home-brewed feud of Protestant against Catholic. A few nights ago there was a general mob-crusade against the Roman Catholic churches, several of which, as well as various private dwellings, were burnt to the ground. The city was lighted from river to river with the glare of these conflagrations--this city of "brotherly love;" whole streets looking like pandemonium avenues of brass and copper in the lurid reflected light. Your people have lost little of their agreeable combined facetiousness and ferocity, as I think you will allow when I tell you that, while a large Catholic church was burning, the Orange party caused a band of music to play "Boyne Water;" and when the cross fell from above the porch of the building, these same Christian folk gave three cheers. "Where," I suppose you exclaim, "were the civil authorities and military force?" All on the ground of action, compelled to be idle spectators of these outrages, because they had no warrant to act, and could not shoot down the Sovereign People, even while committing them, without the Sovereign People's leave. The popular jealousy of power, which always exists more or less under republican institutions, interferes not a little with the efficiency of an organized police or other abiding check upon public effervescence. Rioters, therefore, in times of excitement have generally a fair start of the law, and are able to accomplish plenty of mischief before they can be prevented, because a powerful force of preventive police and municipal officers, invested with permanent authority, are abominations in the eyes of a free and independent American citizen. As, however, by a very wholesome law, the city pays for all damages committed by public violence upon property, the whole population of the town will be taxed for the _spree_ of these lively gentry; and under the pressure of this salutary arrangement the whole militia turned out, all the decent citizens organized themselves into patrols and policemen, and by the time the riot had raged three days, and the city had incurred a heavy debt for burnt and pillaged property, a stop was put to the disorder. Cannon were planted round all the remaining Catholic churches to protect them; the streets were lined with soldiers; every householder was out on guard in his particular district during the night, and by dint of effectual but, unfortunately, rather tardy measures order has been restored. My own affairs are far from flourishing, and I am heartily glad to have anything else to speak of, little cheerful as the anything else may be.... I hope all is well with you. Geraldine is almost a woman now, I suppose. I think of you much oftener than I write to you, and am Ever yours, FANNY. May 20th, 1844. No, my dearest Hal, the day is never long, but always short, even when I rise before six.... I have a vivid consciousness of an increased perception of the minor _goods_ of existence, in the midst of its greatest evils, and things that till now have been mere enjoyments to me now appear to me in the light of positive blessings. My delight in everything beautiful increases daily, and I now count and appreciate the innumerable alleviations that life has in every twenty-four hours, even in its seasons of severest trial. A spirit of greater thankfulness is often engendered by suffering itself; it is one of the "sweet uses of adversity," and mitigates it immensely. A beautiful flower was brought to me to-day; and while I remained absorbed in contemplating it, it seemed to me a very angel of consolatory admonition. God bless you, dearest friend. How full of sources of comfort He has made this lovely woe-world! Ever yours, FANNY. PHILADELPHIA, Sunday, June 9th, 1844. MY DEAR LADY DACRE, I am sure you will be sorry to hear of the accident which has befallen my poor little F----. She fell last week over the bannisters of the stairs, and broke her arm. The fracture was fortunately a simple one of the smaller bone of the arm, which, I suppose, in a little body of that sort, can hardly be much more than gristle. She is doing well, and, as she appears to have escaped all injury to the head, which was my first horrible apprehension, I have every reason to be thankful that the visitation has not been more severe. The accident occasioned me a violent nervous shock. I am now far from well myself, and I am pursued with debilitating feverish tendencies, which I vainly endeavor to get rid of.... I am much puzzled, my dear Lady Dacre, what to say to you beyond this bulletin. My circumstances do not afford any great variety of cheerful topics for correspondence, and the past and the future are either painful or utterly uncertain. I am studying German, in the midst of the small facilities for mental culture which my present not very easy or happy position affords, and have serious thoughts of beginning to work at Euclid, and trying to make myself something of a mathematician. Possibly some knowledge of the positive sciences might be of use to me in my further dealings with the world; for the proper comprehension and appreciation of and judicious commerce with which some element, either natural or acquired, is undoubtedly wanting in me. I have always wished very much that I had been made to study mathematics as a young person, and considering that Alfieri betook himself to Greek at forty-eight, I see no very good reason why I should not get at least as far as the _pons asinorum_ at thirty-four. I believe this latent hankering after mathematics has been a little fanned in me by reading De Quincey's letters to a young man upon the subject of a late education, which have fallen into my hands just now, and which so earnestly recommend the zealous cultivation of this species of knowledge. I hope Lord Dacre is well. Pray remember me to him very affectionately, and tell him that I am afraid, in answer to his question, I must reply that the Americans in this part of the United States do not at present appear over-scrupulous about paying their debts. Their demonstrations towards England just now seem to me rather absurd. The "sensible" of the community (alas! nowhere the majority, but here at this moment a most pitiful minority) are of course ashamed of, and sorry for, what is going on; and, moreover, of course do not believe in a war. But I am afraid, if the good sense of England does not keep this country out of a scrape, its own good sense will hardly do it that good turn. An American wrote to me the other day: "As for our calling ourselves a great people, I think we are a people who, with the greatest possible advantages, have made the least possible use of them; and if anything can teach these people what greatness is, it must be adversity." Farewell, and God bless you, my dear Lady Dacre. Believe me ever yours, FANNY. PHILADELPHIA, July 14th, 1844. MY DEAREST HAL, I am told that the newspapers in England have been filled with the severest comments upon the late outbreaks of popular disorder in this city of "brotherly love." About a month ago the town was lighted from one end to the other with the burning of Catholic churches; and now, within the last week, the outrages have recommenced with more fury than ever, because, for a wonder, the militia actually did fire upon the mob, who, unused to any such demonstration of being in earnest on their part, had possessed themselves of cannon and fire-arms, and would have exterminated the small body of militia which could be gathered together at the first outbreak of the riot, but which is now backed by a very considerable force of regular troops. The disturbance is not in the city proper, but in a sort of suburb not subject to the municipal jurisdiction of Philadelphia, but having a mayor and civil officers of its own. The cause assigned for all these outrages is fear and hatred of the Roman Catholic Irish; and there is no doubt an intensely bitter feeling between them and the low native population of the cities; added to which, the Irish themselves do not fail to bring over their home feud, and the old Orange spirit of bloody persecution joins itself to the dread of Popery, which is becoming quite a strong feeling among the American lower classes. It is absurd, and yet sad enough, that not six months ago "Repeal Unions"--Irish Repeal Unions--were being formed all over this country in favor of, and sympathy with, the poor, oppressed Roman Catholics in Ireland; "professional" politicians made their cause and England's oppression of them regular popularity capital; writing and speechifying in the most violent manner, and with the most crass ignorance, upon the subject of their wrongs and the tyranny they endured from our government; and now Philadelphia _flares_ from river to river with the burning of Roman Catholic churches, and the Catholics are shot down in the streets and their houses pillaged in broad daylight. The arrest of several of the ringleaders of the mob, and the arrival of large numbers of regular troops, have produced a temporary lull in the city; but the spirit of lawless violence has been permitted to grow and strengthen itself in these people for some time past now; and of course, as they were allowed, unchecked and unpunished, to set fire to the property of the negroes, and to murder them without anybody caring what befell the persons or property of "damned niggers," the same turbulent spirit is now breaking out in other directions, where it is rather less agreeable to the _respectable_ portion of the community, but where they will now find considerable difficulty in checking it; and, of course, if it is to choose its own objects of outrage and abuse, the _respectable_ portion of the community may some day be disagreeably surprised by having to take their turn with the poor Roman Catholic Irish and the poor American negroes. The whole is a lamentable chapter of human weakness and wickedness, that would cast shame and scorn upon republican institutions, if it were not that Christianity itself is liable to the same condemnation, judged by some of its apparent results. You ask me if I apportion my time among my various occupations with the same systematic regularity as formerly. I endeavor to do so, but find it almost impossible.... I read but very little. My leisure is principally given to my German, in which I am making some progress. I walk with the children morning and evening; I still play and sing a little at some time or other of the day, and write interminable letters to people afar off, who I wish were nearer. I walk before breakfast with the children, _i.e._ from seven till eight. Three times a week I take them to the market to buy fruit and flowers, an errand that I like as well as they do. The other three mornings we walk in the square opposite this house. After breakfast they leave me for the morning, which they now pass with their governess or nurse. For the last two months I have ridden every day, but have unhappily disabled my horse for the present, poor fellow! by galloping him during a sudden heavy rain-shower over a slippery road, in which process he injured one of his hip-joints, not incurably, I trust, but so as to deprive me of him for at least three months. [My dear and noble horse never recovered from this injury, but was obliged to be shot. He had been sold, and I had ransomed him back by the publication of a small volume of poems, which gave me the price demanded for him by the livery-stable keeper who had bought him; but the accident I mention in this letter deprived me of him. He was beautiful and powerful, high-spirited and good-tempered, almost a perfect creature, and I loved him very much.] I shall now walk after breakfast, as, my rides being suppressed, my walks with the chicks are not exercise enough for me. After that, I prepare for my German lesson (which I take three times a week) and write letters. I take the children out again at half-past six, and at half-past seven come in to my dinner; after dinner I go to my piano, and generally sit at it or read until I go to bed, which I do early,--_et voilà!_ Almost all the people I know are out of town now, and I do not see a human creature; the heat is intense and the air foul and stifling, and we are gasping for breath and withering away in this city atmosphere.... God bless you, dear Hal. I am ever yours, FANNY. [In the autumn of 1845 I returned to England, and resided with my father in Mortimer Street, Cavendish Square, until I went to Italy and joined my sister at Rome; a plan for my returning with my father to America having been entertained and abandoned in the mean time.] MORTIMER STREET, October 3d, 1845. Heaven be praised, my American letters are finished!--eleven long ones, eleven shillings' worth. I am sure somebody (but at this moment I don't rightly know who) ought to pay me eleven shillings for such a batch of work. So now I have nothing to do but answer your daily calls, my dearest Hal, which "nothing," as I write it, looks like a bad joke. If you expect me, however, to write you a long letter on the heels of that heavy American budget, you deceive yourself, my dear friend, and the truth is not in you. In the first place, I have nothing to say except that I am well and intensely interested by everything about me. I am very sorry to have neglected sending you "Arnold" [his Life, just published at that time], but it shall be done this day. London, with its distracting quantity of _things to do_, is already laying hold of me; and the species of vertigo which I experience after my lonely American existence, at finding myself once more overwhelmed with visits, messages, engagements, and endless notes to read and answer, is pitiable. I feel as if I had been growing idiotic out there, my life here is such an amazing contrast. I had a visit yesterday from dear old Lady Charlotte Lindsay, who was exceedingly kind and cordial indeed to me. We said many good words about you. After she was gone, the old Berry sisters (who still hang on the bush) tottered in, and I felt touched to the heart by the affectionate sympathy and kind goodwill exhibited towards me by these three very old and charming ladies. I had a delightful dinner yesterday at Milman's, where I met Lady Charlotte again, Harness, Lockhart, Empson, and several other clever pleasant people. To-day I carried my last six American despatches myself to the post, and then trotted all the way up to Horace Wilson's, to see him and my cousin Fanny, by way of exercise.... I am going to dine to-day with Sir Edward Codrington--the admiral, you know. He and his family are old friends of mine; he has been here twice this week, sitting two hours at a time with me, spinning long yarns about the battle of Navarino and all the to-do there was about it. He actually brought me a heap of manuscript papers on the subject to look over, which, quite contrary to my expectation, have interested me very much. To-morrow, at three o'clock, my maid and I depart for the Hoo; as we go per coach, and the distance is only twenty-five miles, I hope that journey won't ruin me. My father has just come home from Brighton, instead of remaining there till Monday, as he had intended; he said he felt himself getting fatigued, and therefore thought it expedient to come away. He has caught a slight rheumatic pain in one of his shoulders, but otherwise seems well. To-morrow I will send you another bulletin. Your affectionate, FANNY. MORTIMER STREET, October, 1845. Since beginning this letter, my beloved Hal, I have been reading Channing's sermon upon Dr. Follen's death. It is, in fact, a sermon upon human suffering, in a paroxysm of which I was when I began to write to you; and for a remedy took up this sermon, which has comforted me much. Chorley was expressing to me, two days ago, his unbounded veneration for the character of Dr. Follen, as it is faintly and imperfectly represented in the memoir which his wife published of him. I knew that I had with me Channing's sketch of him in that sermon on human suffering, and told Chorley that I would look for it for him. I found it yesterday, and merely read that part of it towards the end which referred to Dr. Follen's character; and it is to that circumstance that I attribute a dream I had last night, in which I sat devoutly at _Arnold's_ feet, expressing to him how earnestly I had desired the privilege of knowing him: he was surrounded by Channing, Follen, and others whom I could not remember. In reading to-day the whole of that fine discourse of Channing's, I was led to compare the great similarity of the expressions he uses, in speaking of sceptics and scepticism, to those Arnold makes use of on the same subjects in his letters to Lady Francis Egerton. For instance, "Scepticism is a moral disease, the growth of some open or latent depravity; deliberate, habitual questionings of God's benevolence argue great moral deficiency." Another thing that struck me was the resemblance between Dr. Arnold and Dr. Follen in the matter of independent self-reliance. Channing says of the latter, "He was singularly independent in his judgments. He was not only uninfluenced by authority, and numbers, and interest, and popularity; but by friendship, and the opinions of those he most loved and honored. He seemed almost too tenacious of his convictions." Do you remember what Sydney Smith says of Francis Horner? This great firmness of opinion in Arnold and Follen reminds me of it by contrast: "Francis Horner was a very modest person, which men of great understanding seldom are. It was his habit to confirm his opinion by the opinions of others, and often to form them from the same source." MORTIMER STREET, November, 1845. DEAR EMILY, During that hour that we spent at Netley, the last few moments of which were made full of hopeful thoughts by the passing away of the visible clouds from the visible sky, I could not but reflect upon the glorious stability of things spiritual, contrasted with the mutability and evanescence of things temporal. Our hearts, which are united by _real_ bonds--the love of truth, the fear of God, and the desire of duty--have remained so united through all these years of absence and distance from each other; and when I thought of our former visit to Netley, I remembered that nothing had failed me but that which could not be abiding and steadfast, for it was not good. To tell you how thence my soul wandered to the eventual reclaiming of all who have strayed from righteousness, and the possible reunion, in the immeasurable future, of souls which have been sundered here because of sin, and the final redemption of all God's poor erring children, would be to attempt to utter one of those rapid, deep, and ineffable actions of our spirits which are too full of hope, of faith, and the holiest peace, for words to be meant to express them. MORTIMER STREET, Thursday, 6th, 1845. DEAREST HAL, My father came home yesterday afternoon from Brighton. He said he was getting a little tired of his work, and complained of a touch of rheumatism in his shoulder.... He is making arrangements to read at Highgate next week. Harry Chester, some cousin or connection of Emily's, and a quondam kind friend of mine, is at the head of some institution at Highgate, and has been in negotiations with him for three readings at some public hall or lecture-room there. My father is to read there three times, and is to dine each time at some friend's house. Mr. Chester very kindly begged me to accompany him, and dine with them.... I dined at Sir Edward Codrington's yesterday, and was there introduced to a charmingly pretty Mrs. Bruce, formerly Miss Pitt, one of the queen's maids-of-honor; and I assure you my edification was considerable at some of her courtly experiences.... I believe Solomon says that "in the multitude of counsellors is safety;" it does not seem so with me just now, for in my multitude of counsels and counsellors I find only utter bewilderment. Until Monday I shall be at the Hoo, where you can address me, "To the care of Lord Dacre, the Hoo, Welwyn, Herts." God bless you, dearest Hal. Give my kind love to Dorothy. Yours ever, FANNY. [The days were not yet, either in England or America, when a married woman could claim or hold, independently, money which she either earned or inherited. How infinite a relief from bitter injustice and hardship has been the legislation that has enabled women to hold and own independently property left to them by kindred or friends, or earned by their own industry and exertions. I think, however, the excellent law-makers of the United States must have been intent upon atoning for all the injustice of the previous centuries of English legislation with regard to women's property, when they framed the laws which, I am told, obtain in some of the States, by which women may not only hold bequests left to them, and earnings gained by them, entirely independent of their husbands; but being thus generously secured in their own rights, are still allowed to demand their maintenance, and the payment of their debts, by the men they are married to. This seems to me beyond all right and reason--the compensation of one gross injustice by another, a process almost _womanly_ in its enthusiastic unfairness. It must be retrospective amends for incalculable former wrongs, I suppose.] MORTIMER STREET, November 17th, 1845. When I consider that this is the third letter I write to you this blessed day, dear Hal, I cannot help thinking myself a funny woman; and that if you are as fond of me as you pretend to be, you ought to be much obliged to the "streak of madness" which compels me to such preposterous epistolary exertions. And so because the sea rages and roars against the coast at St. Leonard's, and appals your eyes and ears there, my dearest Hal, you think we had better not cross the Atlantic now. But the storms on that tremendous ocean are so _local_, so to speak, that vessels steering the same course and within comparatively small distance of each other have often different weather and do not experience the same tempests. Moreover, Mrs. Macready has just been here, who tells me that her husband crossed last year rather earlier than I did, in October, and had a horrible passage; and the last time I came to England we sailed on the 1st of December, and had a long but by no means bad voyage. There is no certainty about it, though, to be sure, strong probability of unfavorable weather at this season of the year.... I told you that I had got off dining at the L----s' to-day by pleading indisposition, which is quite true, for I am very unwell. I shall remain dinnerless at home, which is no great hardship, and one for which I dare say I shall be none the worse. My father talks of going to Brighton this week, and then I shall scatter myself abroad in every direction.... My father leaves town on Wednesday, and as he is to be absent two or three weeks, I suppose he will only return in time to sail. I have written to Mrs. Grote to say I will come to Burnham on Thursday, and my present plan is to remain there until Monday next, and probably then go to the Hoo. The Grevilles, Charles and Henry, have been here repeatedly; they are both of them now gone out of town. I called to-day on Mrs. O'Sullivan, and there I found Dr. Holland, with whom I had one more laugh upon the subject of his never reaching Lenox after all dear Charles Sumner's efforts to get him there. [Dr. Holland, while in America, had made various unsuccessful attempts to visit the Sedgwick family in Berkshire, winding up with a failure more ludicrous than all the others, under the guidance of his, their, and my friend, Charles Sumner....] I have had a most affectionate note of welcome from Mrs. Jameson, and am rather in terror of her advent, as I feel considerable awkwardness about her various late passages-at-arms with my sister. Mrs. Macready came to see me this afternoon, and told me that she heard I was about to return forthwith to America.... Now, dear, I think I have really done my duty by you to-day. God bless you. Give my affectionate love to the "good angel" [Miss Wilson]. As for your "roaring sea," I only wish I was in it just where you are (nowhere else, though). I am not well, and very much out of spirits; disgusted, and, I have no doubt, disgusting; but, nevertheless, Ever yours, FANNY. Arnold's Christianity puzzles me a little. He justifies litigation between men and war between nations. Whenever I set about carrying out my own Christianity I shall do neither; for I do not believe either are according to Christ's law. I called on the Miss Hamiltons to-day, and we talked "some" of you. I have had another most affectionate note from Lizzie Mair, entreating me to go to Edinburgh. But oh! my dear Hal, the money? _Che vita!_ MORTIMER STREET, Thursday, 20th, 1845. MY DEAREST HARRIET, There is another thing that makes me pause about coming to Hastings--the time for my departure for America will be drawing very near when I return to town on Monday from Mrs. Grote's, which is the only visit that I shall have it in my power to pay.... Tuesday is the 25th. I must see my brother John again before I go. This will take two days and one night, and my father talks of going down to Liverpool on the 2nd or 3rd, so that I could only run down to Hastings for a few miserable hours, again to renew all the pain of bidding you another farewell.... I left off here to get my breakfast. We have lowered the price and the quality of our tea, in consequence of which, you see, my virtue and courage are also deteriorated [Miss S---- used to say that a cup of good tea was _virtue_ and _courage_ to her], and this is why I feel I had perhaps better not come to Hastings. Thus far, my dearest Harriet, when your letter of the 19th--yesterday (you see I did look at the date)--was brought to me. It is certainly most miserable to consider what horrible things men contrive to make of the mutual relations which might be so blest. I do not know if I am misled by the position from which I take my observations, but it seems to me that one of the sins most rife in the world is the _mis_use, or _dis_use, of the potent and tender ties of relationship and kindred. With regard to coming to you, my dear Hal, I am much perplexed. I have made Mrs. Grote enter into arrangements to suit me, which I do not think I ought now to ask her to alter. Old Rogers is going down to Burnham, to be with me there, going and coming with me; and with what I feel I ought and must do to see my brother, I know not what I can and may do to see you, my dear friends. I am full of care and trouble and anxiety, and feel so weary with all the processes of thinking and feeling, deliberating and deciding, that I am going through, that I must beg you to determine for me. If you, upon due consideration, say "Come," I will come. And forgive me that I put it thus to you, but I have a sense of mental incapacity, amounting almost to imbecility; and I feel, every now and then, as if my brain machinery was running down, and would presently stop altogether. Seriously, what with the greater and the less, the unrest of body and the disquiet of mind, I feel occasionally all but distracted.... I will write you more when I answer your letter of this morning. God bless you, my dearest friend.... I have so much to say to you about Arnold, but shall perhaps forget it. Is it not curious that reading his thoughts and words should have tended to strengthen in me a conviction of duty upon a point where he appears to take an absolutely different view from mine?--that of seeking and obtaining redress from wrong by an appeal to processes of litigation and legal tribunals; but the earnestness of his exhortations to the conscientious pursuit of one's individual convictions of duty was powerful in making me cleave to my own perception and sense of right, though it brought me to a conclusion diametrically opposite to his own. This, however, is often the case. The whole character of a good man has vital power over one even where his special opinions are different from one's own, and may even appear to one mistaken. The abiding spirit of a man's life, more than his special actions and peculiar theories, is that by which other men are moved and admonished. I have extreme faith in the potency of this species of influence, and comparatively less in the effect of example, in special cases and particular details of conduct. Christ's teaching was always aimed at the spirit which should govern us, not at its mere application to isolated instances; and to those who sought advice from Him for application to some special circumstance He invariably answered with a deep and broad rule of conduct, leaving the conscience of the individual to apply it to the individual case; and it seems to me the only way in which we can exhort each other is by the love of truth, the desire of right, the endeavor after holiness, which may still be ours, and to which we may still effectually point our fellow-pilgrims, even when we ourselves have fallen by the wayside under the weight of our own infirmities, failures, and sins. See! I intended to have broken off when I wrote "God bless you." How I have preached on! But I have much more to say yet. Dear love to Dorothy. Ever your affectionate FANNY. Friday, November 21st, 1845. The _Hibernia_ is in, the _Great Britain_ is in, and I have had my letters, ... not a few of them from various indifferent people, who want me to do business and attend to their affairs for them here. Truly I am in a plight to do so every way. One man wants me to exert the influence which he is sure _my intimacy with Mr. Bunn_ (!) must give me to have an opera of his brought out at Drury Lane; another writes to me that "my family's well-known interest in the _theatres_" (a large view of the subject) "must certainly enable me to have a play of his produced at one of them;" and so forth, and so on. All these people will think me a wretch, of course, because I cannot do any of the things they want me to do; moreover, no power of human explanation will suffice hereafter to make them aware that I am not upon terms of affectionate intimacy with Mr. Bunn, that no member of my family has now any interest whatever in any theatre whatever, and that I have been so overwhelmed with anxieties and troubles of my own as to make my attention to the production of operas and plays and such like things quite impossible just now. The strangest part of all this is that these men write to me, desiring me to commend that which I think bad, and that which, moreover, they know that I think bad; but they seem to imagine that some effort of sincere friendship and kindness on my part is all that is necessary to induce me, in spite of this, to recommend and heartily to praise what I hold to be worthless. Friendship with eyes and ears and a conscience is, I believe indeed, for the most part, and for the purposes of most people, tantamount to no friendship at all, or perhaps rather to a mild form of enmity. Do you not think it is rather farcical on your part to request me to answer your letters, when you know 'tis as much as my place (in creation) is worth not to do so, and that, moreover, every day's post brings me that which impresses the sufficiency of each day's _allotments_ devoutly to my mind? Did I ever _not_ answer your letters, you horrid Harriet? My dear Hal, in spite of the last which I received from you, after I had just concluded a very long one to you, bearing date November 20th (there now! you see I remember the date even of my yesterday's letter!), I still wish for another deliberate expression of your opinion about my coming down to Hastings. That you desire it, in spite of all considerations, I know. What your judgment is, now that I have laid all considerations before you, I should like to know.... To-day was appointed for my visit to Mrs. Grote, and Rogers was to have come for me at one o'clock, to go to the Paddington railroad, near the Ten-Mile Station, on which she lives; but lo and behold, just as I was completing my preparations comes an express to say that Mrs. Grote had been seized with one of her neuralgic headaches, and could not possibly receive us till to-morrow! so there ended the proposed business of the day. I had a visit from John O'Sullivan, a call from Rogers to readjust our plans for to-morrow, and a very kind long visit from Milman.... I receive infinite advice on all hands about my perplexed affairs, all of it most kindly meant, but little of it, alas! available to me. Some of it, indeed, appears to me so worldly, so false, and so full of compromise between right and wrong for the mere sake of expediency; sometimes for cowardice, sometimes for peace, sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for profit, sometimes for mere social consideration,--the whole system (for such it is) accepted and acknowledged as a rule of life--that, as I sit listening to these friendly suggestions, I am half the time shocked at those who utter them, and the other half shocked at myself for being shocked at people so much my betters.... My abiding feeling is that I had better go back to my beloved Lenox, to the side of the "Bowl" (the Indian name of a beautiful small lake between Lenox and Stockbridge), among the Berkshire hills, where selfishness and moral cowardice and worldly expediency exist in each man's practice no doubt quite sufficiently; but where they are not yet universally recognized as a social system, by the laws of which civilized existence should be governed. You know, "a bad action is a thousand times preferable to a bad principle." Among the other things which the American mail brought me was a charming sketch by my friend W---- of the very site upon which we settled that I should build my house. The drawing is quite rough and unfinished, but full of suggestion to one who knows the place. I went by appointment this afternoon to see Lady Dacre. Poor thing! she was much overcome at the sight of me. Her deep mourning for her young grandchild, and her pathetic exclamations of almost self-reproach at her own iron strength and protracted old age, touched me most deeply. She seemed somewhat comforted at finding that I had not grown quite old and haggard, and talked to me for an hour of her own griefs and my trials. She and Lord Dacre pressed me with infinite kindness to go down to them at the Hoo; and though I felt that if we sail on the 4th I ought to be satisfied with having had this glimpse of them, if my stay were prolonged I should like very much to go there for a short time. Lord Dacre told me that the _Great Western_ had arrived yesterday, and brought most threatening news of the hostile spirit of America about the Oregon question; he fears there will certainly be a war. Good God, how horrible! The two foremost nations of Christendom to disgrace themselves and humanity by giving such a spectacle to the world! After my visit to the Dacres, I came back to my solitary dinner in Mortimer Street; and, reflecting upon many things during this lonely evening, have wished myself between you and dear Dorothy, who neither of you tell falsehoods or pretend to like things and people that you dislike. Wouldn't it be a nice world if one could live all one's time with none but the best good people? I have spent the whole evening in reading my friend Charles Sumner's Peace Oration, which I only began in America; and to listening to the lady playing on the piano next door, and envying her. Our landlord has a piano in his room downstairs, I find, and he is not at home: now, that is a real temptation of the very devil. How I should like to pay half an hour's visit to it! My dear Hal, Mrs. Jameson is coming to see me to-morrow morning! What shall I do--what shall I say about her _tiff_ with Adelaide? Wasn't it a pity that Mrs. Grote was taken ill this morning? God bless you. I want to say one or two words to dear Dorothy, according to right, for she has written to me in your two last letters. Ever yours, FANNY. Oh, I do wish I was with you! for you are not in the least base, mean, cowardly, or worldly. DEAREST GOOD ANGEL, Do not fancy, from the vehemence of my style to Harriet, that I am in a worse mental or material condition than I am. I only do hope that before I have lived much longer it will please God to give me grace to love and admire the great bulk of my fellow-creatures more than I do at present. _Certainly_, dear Dorothy, if I should remain in England, I will come down to Hastings for a fortnight; and owe my subsistence for that time to you and Hal. Perhaps these rumors of wars may make some difference in my father's plans. I should be very happy with you both. I have a notion that you would spoil me as well as Hal, and, used to that as I used to be "long time ago," it would be quite an agreeable novelty now. Ever yours affectionately, FANNY. Friday, November 21st, 1845. This letter was begun yesterday evening, my beloved Hal. My nerves are rather in a quieter state than when I wrote last, thanks to a warm bath and cold head-douche, which, taken together, I recommend to you as beneficial for the brain and general nervous system.... I am going to dine _tête-à-tête_ with Rogers; I have persuaded him to come down with me to Burnham. Poor old man! he is very much broken and altered, very deaf, very sad. This last year has taken from him Sydney and Bobus Smith; and now, the day before yesterday, his old friend Lady Holland died, and he literally stands as though his "turn" were next--it may be mine. Do you know, that in reading that striking account or Arnold's death, I got such a pain in my heart that I felt as if I was going to die so. _So!_ So, indeed, God grant I might die! but none can die so who has not so lived. Two things surprise me in Arnold's opinions--three,--his detailed account of wars between nations without any expression of condemnation of war, but rather a soldierly satisfaction in strife and strategy. This, by-the-by, my friend Charles Sumner notices with regret in his "Peace Oration." Then Arnold's apparent approbation of men, even clergymen, going to law for their rights, while at the same time speaking with detestation of the legal profession, which surely involves some inconsistency. Clergymen, according to the vulgar theory, are imagined to be, if not less resentful in spirit, at any rate more pacific in action than the laity, and ought, to my thinking, no more to go to law than to war. The third thing that puzzles me is his constant reference to what he calls a Church, or "_the_ Church," which, with his views about Christianity, is a term that I do not comprehend. It is curious to me to see Emily's marks along the margin. They are the straight ones, and are applied zealously everywhere to passages of dogmatical discussion about doctrines. Mine you will find the crooked ones, and my pencil, of course, invariably flew to the side of what expressed moral excellence and a perception of material beauty. Those passages that Emily has marked I do not understand--does she? I ask this in all simplicity, and not at all in arrogance; for I cannot make head or tail of them. Perhaps she can make both, for I think she has a taste and talent for theological controversy. I was surprised to find she had not marked his diary and journals at all; I hardly knew how to leave them _un_marked at all. Those Italian journals of his made me almost sick with longing. It is odd that this southern mania should return upon me so strongly after so many years of freedom from it, merely because there seemed to arise just now a possibility of this long-relinquished hope being fulfilled. I know that I could not live in Italy, and I suppose that I should be dreadfully offended and grieved by the actual state of the people, in the midst of all the past and present glory and beauty, which remains a radiant halo round their social and political degradation. But I did once so long to live in Italy, and I have lately so longed to see it, that these journals of Arnold's have made me cry like a child with yearning and disappointment. My brother John told me that, in his opinion, Arnold was not entirely successful as a trainer of young men: that the power and peculiarity of his own character was such that, in spite of his desire that his pupils should be free, independent, and individual, they involuntarily became more or less mental and moral imitations of him: that he turned out nothing but young Arnolds--copies, on a reduced scale, of himself; few of them, if any, as good as the original. This involuntary conformity to any powerful nature is all but inevitable, where veneration would consciously and deliberately lead to imitation, and thus those minds which would most willingly leave freedom to others, both as a blessing and a duty, become unintentionally compelling influences to beget and perpetuate, in those around them, a tendency to subservience and dependency. Charles Greville seems very much amused at my enthusiasm for Arnold, and still more when I told him that, for Arnold's sake, I wished to know Bunsen. He said he was sure I should not like him. Rogers told me the same thing; ... that Arnold was a man easily to be taken in by any one who would devote themselves to him, which he--Rogers--said Bunsen did when they met abroad.... How much of this is true, God only knows: Rogers is often very cynical and ill-natured (alas, he has lived so long, and known so much and so many!) It may not be true; though, again, Arnold "was but a man as other men are," and went but upon two legs, like the best of them; nevertheless, if I were to remain in England, I would make some effort to know his chosen friend. Rogers, with whom I dined yesterday, told me that if he had known this wish of mine, he would have asked Bunsen to meet me. I then questioned him about Whately, and he said I should be delighted with him--perhaps, dear H., because he is a little mad, you know, and I appear to some of my friends here to have that mental accomplishment in common with other more illustrious folk. And now I have finished that book, Arnold's Life, by his spiritual son. It has been to me, in the midst of all that at present harasses and disgusts me, a source of peace and strength, and I have taken it up hour after hour, like the antidote to the petty poisons of daily life. I have had two notes from Lady Dacre about arranging hours to meet; but, unfortunately, the little time I have is so taken up that it will be impossible for me to see her, as she begs me, this morning. They leave town again on Saturday, and I do not suppose that it will be in my power to get down again to the Hoo, which she urges me very much to do, ... so that I fear I shall not see her before I go, which is a grief to me. John O'Sullivan does not sail till the 4th, and if we go then, I shall feel that my father will have somebody who will humanely look after him on board ship when I am disabled.... I think he has now some intention of making the expedition for the sake of giving readings, and perhaps of acting again, in the principal cities of the United States, and, apart from my interest and affairs, this may be a sufficient motive for his undertaking the voyage. I am going to write a word to the dear good angel, and therefore, my beloved Hal, farewell.... [I have not endorsed my brother's opinion about Arnold's influence on his pupils. Long after this letter was written, I had the honor and advantage of making the acquaintance of Baron Bunsen, and was able to judge for myself of the value of the opinions I had heard of him.] MY DEAREST DOROTHY, ... I shall hold my mind and body in readiness to come down on Wednesday, if up till Monday you still wish for me. I have told Hal all I have to tell of myself, and she may tell you as much of it as she pleases.... Just after my father's departure, I received a very kind invitation from my friend Lady M----, who is staying in Brighton, to come and remain with her while my father was there.... God bless you, dear Dorothy. I love you more than I seem to know you, but I know that you are good, and most good to my dear Harriet, and that I am Yours very affectionately, FANNY. MORTIMER STREET, Tuesday, November 25th, 1845. DEAREST HAL, I had a letter yesterday from my father, from Brighton.... He has renounced the project of crossing the Atlantic at present.... Of course, dear Hal, we are none of us half patient enough. Suffering and injustice are so intolerable to us that we _will_ not endure them, and forget all the time that God allows and endures them. You ask me if I recollect my discussion with you going down to Southampton. Very well, my dear Hal, and your appearance especially, which, in that witch's travelling-cap of yours, is so extremely agreeable to me that you recur to me in it constantly, and as often I execrate your bonnet. How much I do love beauty! How I delight in the beauty of any one that I love! How thankful I am that I am not beautiful! my self-love would have known no bounds. I am writing with a very bad pen. I told you of that pen Rogers mended for me, and sitting down to try it, wrote the two following lines, which he gave me, of Cowper's: "The path of sorrow, and that path alone, Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown." You will understand that this touched me much. You hope that my nerves will have leisure to become tranquillized in the country; but the intellectual life by which I am surrounded in England is such a contrast to my American existence that it acts like a species of perpetual intoxication. The subjects of critical, literary, and social interest that I constantly hear so ably and brilliantly discussed excite my mind to a degree of activity that seems almost feverish, after the stagnant inertia to which it has been latterly condemned; and this long-withheld mental enjoyment produces very high nervous excitement in me too. The antagonism I often feel at the low moral level upon which these fine intellectual feats are performed afterwards causes a reaction from my sense of satisfaction, and sometimes makes that appear comparatively worthless, the power, skill, and dexterity of which concealed the sophistry and seduced me while the debate was going on. My dearest H----, I wrote all this at Burnham. You will see by this that we do not leave England by the next steamer, and I think there is every probability of my remaining here for some time to come, and, therefore, spending a full fortnight with you at Hastings.... I have a quantity to say to you about everything, but neither time nor room. We had much talk about Arnold at the Beeches, and the justice dealt him by a cynical poet, a hard-headed political economist, a steeled man of the world, and two most dissimilar unbelievers was various and curious. Yours ever, FANNY. MORTIMER STREET, November 26th, 1845. MY DEAREST HAL, I expect my father home to-day; but, as I have written to you, his note from Brighton expressed no annoyance at my determination.... I must see if I cannot possibly write something for a few pence, so as not to stretch out a beggar's hand even to him.... I enjoyed my visit to Burnham extremely: the admirable clever talk, the capital charming music, the delight of being in the country, and the ecstasy of a fifteen miles' ride through beautiful parks and lanes, filled my time most pleasurably. I know no one who has such a capacity (that looks as if I had written _ra_pacity--either will do) for enjoyment, or has so much of it in mere life--when I am not being tortured--as I have. I ought to be infinitely thankful for my elastic temperament; there never was anything like it but the lady heroine of Andersen's story "The Ball," who had "cork in her body." We had much talk about Arnold and Bunsen, much about Sydney Smith, several of whose letters Mrs. Grote gave us to read. Rogers read them aloud, and his comments were very entertaining, especially with the additional fun of Mrs. Grote holding one of the letters up to me in a corner alone, when I read, "I never think of death in London but when I meet Rogers," etc. I have written a very long letter to my sister to-day, and one to E----. I am going to dine with Mrs. Procter, to meet Milnes, whose poetry you know I read to you here one evening, and you liked it, as I do, some of it, very much.... As for L----, I think one should be a great deal cleverer than he is to be so amazingly conceited, _and of course, if one was, one wouldn't be_; and if that sentence is not lovely, neither is "Beaver hats." ("Beaver hats is the best that _is_, for a shower don't hurt 'em, the least that _are_," quoth an old countrywoman to Mrs. FitzHugh, comparing the respective merits of beaver and straw.) Only think, Hal, what an enchanting man this landlord of ours must be! He has had his pianoforte tuned, and actually proposes sending it up into one of these rooms for my use. I incline to think the difficulty with him is not so much having a woman in the house, as a natural desire to receive a larger compensation if he takes this woman--me--in. God bless you, dear. I feel happy in the almost certain prospect of being with you before very long, and you cannot imagine how much my heart is lightened by the more hopeful circumstances in which I think I am placed.... Good-bye, dear Hal. Give my love to Dorothy, and believe me Ever yours, FANNY. November 29th, 1845. I have just returned home from a dinner at Mrs. Procter's. It is a quarter to twelve o'clock, and until twelve I will write to you, my dear Hal. I found your ink-bottle on my table. Thank you. This is my birthday. Did you give it me on that account?--a compliment to the anniversary. I have not written so much as usual to you these last few days; my time is very much taken up; for, even at this dead season of the year, as it is called in London, I have many morning visitors, who come and sit with me a long while, during which time no letters get written. I wrote to you last on Wednesday, the day on which my father was to come to town. At one o'clock, accordingly, he marched in, looking extremely well, kissed me, opened his letters, wrote me a check for £10, and at five o'clock went off to Brighton again, telling me he should remain there until next Monday week, and, in the mean time, bidding me "_amuse myself_, and make myself as comfortable as I could." ... It is past twelve now, and I am getting tired; the late hours and good dinners and wine and coffee are a wonderful change in my American habits of life, and seem to me more pleasant than wholesome, after the much simpler mode of existence to which I have become accustomed latterly. I took a good long walk on Friday, across the Green Park and St. James's Park to Spring Gardens, and up the Strand to Coutts', and home again.... I had a pleasant dinner yesterday at Lady Essex's. Rogers took me there, and brought me home in his carriage; he is exceedingly kind to me. Henry Greville dined with us, sat by me, and talked to me the whole time about my sister, which was very pleasant and did me good. Sir Edward Codrington and his daughter, who are old friends of mine, were there, and met me with great cordiality; and though the evening was not very brilliant, I enjoyed myself very much. Kinglake, the author of "Eothen," paid me a long visit to-day, and was very agreeable.... Mrs. Procter asked me to-day to take their family dinner with them, because she knew I should else dine all alone. Mr. Procter was not at home, so that we had a _tête-à-tête_ gossip about everybody.... I know very well that nobody likes to be bored, but I think it would be better to be bored to extinction than to mortify and pain people by rejecting their society because they are not intensely amusing or distinguished, or even because they are intensely tiresome and commonplace.... Good-night, dear. My eyes smart and ache; I must go to bed. I have seen to-day some verses written by an American friend of mine on my departure. I think they are good, but cannot be quite sure, as they are about myself. I will send them to you, if you care to see them. Ever yours, FANNY. MORTIMER STREET, November 30th, 1845. I wrote to you until 12.30 last night, and it is now 12.30 this morning, and it must be very obvious to you that, not being Dorothy, I can have nothing under the heavens to say to you. Let me see for the _events_ of these hours. After I went to bed I read, according to a practice which I have steadily followed for the past year, in the hope of substituting some other _last thoughts_ and visions for those which have haunted me, waking or sleeping, during that time. So last night, having, alas! long ago finished Arnold, and despatched two historical plays, long enough, but nothing else, to have been written by Schiller, which my brother gave me, I betook myself to certain agricultural reports, written by a Mr. Coleman, an American, who came over here to collect information upon these subjects for an agricultural society. These reports he gave me the other day, and you know I read implicitly whatever is put into my hands, holding every species of book worth reading for something. So I read about fencing, enclosing, draining, ditching, and ploughing, till I fell asleep, fancying myself Ceres. This morning, after some debate with myself about staying away from church, I deliberately came to the conclusion that I would do so, because I had a bad headache. (Doesn't that sound like a child who doesn't want to go to church, and says it has got a stomach-ache? It's true, nevertheless.) But--_and_ because I have such a number of letters to write to America, that I thought I would say my prayers at home, and then do that. And now, before beginning my American budget, I have written one to Lady Dacre, one to Emily, one to my brother, and this one to you; and shall now start off to the other side of the Atlantic, by an epistle to J---- C----, the son of the afore-mentioned agriculturist, a friend of mine, who when I last left America held me by the arm till the bell rang for the friends of those departing by the steamer to abandon them and regain the shore, and whose verses about me, which I mentioned to you in my last night's letter, please me more than his father's account of top-dressing, subsoiling, and all the details of agriculture, which, however, I believe is the main fundamental interest of civilization. Before this, however, I must go and take a walk, because the sun shines beautifully, and "I must breathe some vital air, If any's to be found in Cavendish Square." I'm sorry to say we are going to leave this comfortable lodging and our courteous landlord, whose civilities to me are most touching. I do not know what my father intends doing, but he talked of taking a house at _Brompton_. What a distance from everything, for him and for me! I have just had a kind note from the M----s, again earnestly bidding me down to Hampshire; another affectionate invitation from Lord and Lady Dacre to the Hoo, and a warm and sympathizing letter from Amelia Twiss, for whom, as you know, I entertain even a greater regard and esteem than for her sisters.... My dear Hal, when my father told me that he was going to Brighton for three weeks, it seemed quite impossible that we should sail for America on December 4th. Now that that question is settled, at any rate temporarily, I feel restored to something like calm, and think I shall probably go and see the M----s, and perhaps run down to Hastings to visit--Dorothy Wilson, of course. God bless you, dear. Does Dorothy write better about nothing than I do? Ever yours, FANNY. THE HOO, WELWYN, HERTS, December, 1845. MY DEAREST HAL, ... God knows I am admonished to patience, both by my own helplessness and the inefficiency of those who, it seems to me, ought to be able to help me.... Doubtless, my father reasonably regrets the independence which I might by this time have earned for myself in my profession, and feels anxious about my unprovided future. I have written to Chorley, the only person I know to whom I can apply on the subject, to get me some means of publishing the few manuscript verses I have left in some magazine or other.... If I cannot succeed in this, I shall try if I can publish my "English Tragedy," and make a few pounds by it. It is a wretchedly uncomfortable position, but compared with all that has gone before it is _only_ uncomfortable. I came down here yesterday, and found, though the night was rainy and extremely cold, dear Lord Dacre and B---- standing out on the door-step to receive me. She has grown tall, and stout, and very handsome.... Is it not wonderful that the spirit of life should be potent enough ever to make us forget the death perpetually hovering over and ready to pounce upon us? and yet how little dread, habitually, disturbs us, either for ourselves or others, lying all the time, as we do, within the very grasp of doom! Lord Dacre is looking well; my friend Lady Dacre is grown more deaf and much broken. Poor thing! she has had a severe trial, in the premature loss of those dearest to her.... God bless you, dear Hal. Good-by. Love to dear Dorothy. Ever yours, FANNY. THE HOO, WELWYN, December 6th, 1845. MY DEAREST HAL, I have been spending the greater part of the morning in sitting for my likeness to a young girl here, a Miss E----, daughter of some old friends of the Dacres, whose talent for drawing, and especially for taking likenesses, is uncommon. That which Lawrence pronounced the most difficult task he ever undertook could hardly prove an easy one to a young lady artist, who has, however, succeeded in giving a very sufficient likeness of one of my faces; and I think it so pretty that I am charmed with it, as indeed I always have been with every likeness almost that has ever been taken of me, but the only true ones--the daguerreotypes. However, even daguerreotypes are not absolutely accurate; the process is imperfect, except for plane (not _plain_, you know) surfaces. Besides, after all, it takes a human hand to copy a human face, because of the human soul in both; and the great sun in heaven wants fire, light, and power, to reproduce that spark of divinity in us, before which his material glory grows pale. As long as he was Phoebus Apollo, and went about, man-fashion, among the girls, making love to such of them as he fancied, he may have been something of an artist, his conduct might be called artistic, I should say; but now that he sits in the sky, staring with his one eye at womankind in general, Sir Joshua, and even Sir Thomas, are worth a score of him. While I was sitting, Mrs. E----, my young artist's mother, read aloud to us the new volume of Lord Chesterfield's writings. My impression of Lord Chesterfield is a very ignorant one, principally derived from the very little I remember of that profound science of superficiality contained in his "Letters to his Son." The matter I heard to-day exalted him infinitely in my esteem, and charmed me extremely, both by the point and finish of the style (what fine workmanship good prose is!) and the much higher moral tone than anything I remembered, and consequently expected from him. Mrs. E---- read us a series of his "Sketches of his Political Contemporaries," quite admirable for the precision, distinctness, and apparent impartiality with which they were drawn, and for their happiness of expression-and purity of diction. Among them is a character of Lord Scarborough, which, if it be a faithful portrait, is perhaps the highest testimony in itself to the merit of one who called such a man his intimate friend; and going upon the faith of the old proverbs, "Show me your company and I'll tell you what you are," "Like will to like," "Birds of a feather flock together," and all the others that, unlike Sancho Panza, I do not give you, has amazingly advanced Lord Chesterfield in my esteem. We have this morning parted with some of the company that was here. Mr. and Mrs. Hibbard, clever and agreeable people, have gone away, and, to my great regret, carried with them my dear B----, for whom my affection and esteem are as great as ever. Mrs. Hibbard is the daughter of Sydney Smith, and so like him that I kept wondering when she would begin to abuse the bishops.... Dearest Hal, I took no exercise yesterday but a drive in an open carriage with Lady Dacre. The Americans call the torture of being thumped over their roads in their vehicles _exercise_, and so, no doubt, was Sancho's tossing in the blanket; but voluntary motion being the only effectual motion for any good purpose of health (or holiness, I take it), I must be off, and tramp while the daylight lasts. What a delightful thing good writing is! What a delightful thing good talking is! How much delight there is in the exercise and perfection of our faculties! How _full_ a thing, and admirable, and wonderful is this nature of ours! So Hamlet indeed observes--but he was mad. Good-bye. Give my love to dear Dorothy, and Believe me ever yours, FANNY. THE HOO, WELWYN, December 7th, 1845. MY DEAREST HAL, Just before I came down here, Rogers paid me a long visit, and talked a great deal about Lady Holland; and I felt interested in what he said about the woman who had been the centre of so remarkable a society and his intimate friend for so many years. Having all her life appeared to suffer the most unusual terror, not of death only, but of any accident that could possibly, or impossibly, befall her, he said that she had died with perfect composure, and, though consciously within the very shadow of death for three whole days before she crossed the dark threshold, she expressed neither fear nor anxiety, and exhibited a tranquillity of mind by no means general at that time, and which surprised many of the persons of her acquaintance. If, however, it be true, as some persons intimate with her have told me, that her terrors were not genuine, but a mere expression of her morbid love of power, insisting at all costs and by all means upon occupying everybody about her with herself, then it is not so strange that she should at last have ceased to demand the homage and attention of others as she so closely approached the time when even their most careless recollection would cease to be at her command. Rogers said that she spoke of her life with considerable satisfaction, asserting that she had done as much good and as little harm as she could during her existence. The only person about whom she expressed any tenderness was her daughter, Lady ----, with whom, however, she had not been always upon the best terms; and who, being ultra-_serious_ (as it is comically called), had not unnaturally an occasional want of sympathy with her very unserious mother. Lady Holland, however, desired much to see her, and she crossed the Channel, having travelled in great haste, and arrived just in time to fulfil her mother's wish and receive her blessing. Her will creates great astonishment--created, I should say; for she is twice buried already, under the Corn Law question. She left her son only £2000, and to Lord John Russell £1500 a year, which at his death reverts to Lady L----'s children. To Rogers, strange to say, nothing; but he professed to think it an honor to be left out. To my brother, strange to say, something (Lord Holland's copy of the "British Essayists," in thirty odd volumes); and to Lady Palmerston her collection of fans, which, though it was a very valuable and curious one, seems to me a little like making fun of that superfine fine lady. I have just come back from church, dear Hal, where the Psalms for the day made me sick. Is it not horrible that we should make Christian prayers of Jewish imprecations? How can one utter, without shuddering, such sentences as "Let them be confounded, and put to shame, that seek after my soul. Let them be as the dust before the wind: and the angel of the Lord scattering them. Let their way be dark and slippery: and let the angel of the Lord persecute them"? Is it not dreadful to think that one must say, as I did, "God forbid!" while my eyes rested on the terrible words contained in the appointed _worship_ of the day; or utter, in God's holy house, that to which one attaches no signification; or, worst of all, connect in any way such sentiments with one's own feelings, and repeat, with lips that confess Christ, curses for which His blessed command has substituted blessings? We were speaking on this very subject at Milman's the other evening, and when I asked Mrs. Milman if she joined in the repetition of such passages, she answered with much simplicity, like a good woman and a faithful clergywoman, "Oh yes! but then, you know, one never means what one says,"--which, in spite of our company consisting chiefly of "witty Churchmen," elicited from it a universal burst of laughter. I have not space or time to enlarge more upon this, and you may be thankful for it.... I will just give you two short extracts from conversations I have had here, and leave you to judge how I was affected by them.... I am sometimes thankful that I do not live in my own country, for I am afraid I should very hardly escape the Pharisee's condemnation for thinking myself better than my neighbors; and yet, God knows, not only that I am, but that I do, not. But how come people's nations so inside out and so upside down? Good-bye, my dear. I am enjoying the country every hour of the day. Give my love to dear Dorothy. Ever yours, FANNY. MORTIMER STREET, Monday, December 8th, 1845. MY DEAREST HAL, Your delightful little inkstand is the very pest of my life; it keeps tumbling over backwards every minute, and pouring the ink all over, and making me swear (which is really a pity), and is, in short, invaluable; and I am so much more obliged to you than I was even at first for it, now that I know, I hope, all its inestimable qualities, that I think it right to mention the increased gratitude I feel for the hateful little bottle. There it goes again! Oh, thank you, my love! Just let me pick it up, and wipe the mess it has made. I left the Hoo this morning, and have just been a couple of hours in Mortimer Street. I find my father going to dine at Judge Talfourd's, and, I am happy to say, free from the pain in his side which had alarmed me, and which I now suppose, as he did at the time, to have proceeded only from cold. He looks well, and is in good spirits. I find a note here from Miss Berry, inviting me to dinner _to-day_, which has been waiting for me ever since Friday. Of course I could not go, and felt distressed that the old lady's kind bidding should have remained so long unanswered. Just as I was despatching my excuse, however, in rushed Agnes (Gooseberry, you know, as Sydney Smith used to call her), all screams and interjections, to know why I hadn't answered her note, which was very annoying. However, in nursery language, I _peacified_ the good old lady to the best of my ability. I am sorry to lose their pleasant party, but have an excessive dislike to hurrying immediately from one thing to another in this way, and therefore must really spend this evening of my arrival in peace and quiet. Mrs. ---- called to-day. I am sorry to say that she provokes me now, instead of only annoying me, as she used to do. It's really quite dreadful! She talks such odd bits of sentimental morality, that somehow or other don't match with each other, or with anything else in creation, that it disgusts me, and I am so disagreeable and so conscious of it, and she is so conscious that I am conscious of it, that, poor things! it is quite piteous for both of us. You ask me the name of the political economist I met at Burnham. William Nassau Senior, a very clever man, a great talker, good upon all subjects, but best upon all those on which I am even below my average depth of ignorance, public affairs, questions of government, the science of political economy, and all its kindred knowledges. The rest of our party were only Rogers and myself, our host and hostess (Mr. and Mrs. Grote), and a brother of the latter, who has been living many years in Sweden, has a charming countenance, a delightful voice, sings Swedish ballads exquisitely, worships Jenny Lind, and knows Frederica Bremer intimately. He added an element of gentleness and softness to the material furnished by our cast-iron "man of facts" and our acrid poet, that was very agreeable. In speaking of Arnold, I was ineffably amused at hearing Mrs. Grote characterize him as a "_very weak man_," which struck me as very funny. _The Esprit Forte_, however, I take it, merely referred to his belief in the immortality of the soul, the existence of a God, and a few other similar "superstitions." They seemed all to agree that he was likely to "turn out" _only_ such men as Lord Sandon and Lord Ashley. [The training of Arnold, acting upon a noble mind inherited from a noble-minded mother, produced the illustrious man whom all Protestant Christendom has lately joined to mourn, Dean Stanley, of whom, however, no mention was made in the above discussion.] You, who know the political bias of these men, will be better able to judge than I am, how far this was a compliment to Arnold's intellect; to his moral influence, I suppose, the character of "only such" pupils would bear high testimony. My father reads to-morrow at Highgate, and, I believe, twice again there in the course of next week. Beyond that, I think he has no immediate plans for reading, and indeed his plans seem altogether to me in the most undecided state. I found letters here from my sister and E----, both of them urging me to join them in Rome; these I read to my father, and I am thankful to say that he seemed to entertain the idea of my doing so, and even hinted at the possibility of his accompanying me thither, inasmuch as he felt rather fatigued with his reading, would be glad to recruit a little, would wish to protect me on my journey to Italy, and, finally, never having been in Rome, would like to see it, etc. He said, after we got there he could either leave me with my sister or stay himself till the spring, when we might all come back together. You may imagine how enchanted I was at the bare suggestion of such a plan. I told him nothing he could do would give me so much happiness, and that as I had come back upon his hands in the state of dependence in which I formerly belonged to him, it was for him to determine in what manner the burden would be least grievous to him, least costly, and least inconvenient; that if he thought it best I should go to my sister, I should be thankful to do so; but that if he would come with me, I should be enchanted. I think, dearest Hal, that this unhoped-for prospect will yet be realized for me. I am very fortunate in the midst of my misfortune, and have infinite cause to be grateful for the hope of such an opportunity of distracting my thoughts from it. Even to go alone would be far preferable for me to remaining here, but I should have to leave my father alone behind, and do most earnestly wish he may determine to come with me. Our landlord and he cannot agree about terms, and I suspect that he would not remain in the lodgings under any circumstances on that account. Oh! I hope we shall go together to Italy. "Dahin! Dahin!" ... How I do wish you were sitting on this little striped sofa by me! No offence in the world to you, my dear Dorothy (or the Virgin Martyr), because I wish you were here too--in the first place that Hal might not be too dissatisfied with my society; in the next place that I might enjoy yours; and in the third place that you might benefit by both of ours. I remain, dearly beloved females both of yours affectionately, FANNY. There goes your ink-pot head over heels backward again! Oh, it has recovered itself! Hateful little creature, what a turn it has given me--as the housemaids say--without even succeeding in overturning itself, which it tried to do! It is idiotic as well as malicious! MORTIMER STREET, Tuesday. DEAREST HAL, I did not hear a great deal more than I told you about Bunsen at Burnham. They all seemed to think him so _over-cordial_ in his manner as not to be sincere--or at any rate to produce the effect of insincerity. Senior said that one of his sons was for a time private tutor in a family, while Bunsen himself was one of the King of Prussia's ministers. I could not very well perceive myself the moral turpitude of this, but the answer was that it was _infra dig._, and of course that is quite turpitude enough. At the Hoo I asked Lord Dacre if he knew Bunsen, but he did not. I should have attached some value to his opinion of him, because he has no vulgar notions of the above sort, and also because, having lived at one time in Germany among Germans, he has more means of estimating justly a mind and nature essentially German like Bunsen's than most Englishmen, who--the very cleverest among them--understand _nothing_ that is not themselves, _i.e._ English, in intellect or character. Mrs. E---- told me that she had heard from some of the great Oxford dons that the impression produced among them by the first pupil of Arnold's who came among them was quite extraordinary--not at all from superior intelligence or acquirement, but from his being absolutely a _new creature_ (think of the Scripture use of that term, Hal, and think how this circumstance illustrates it)--a new _kind_ of man; and that so they found all his pupils to differ from any young men that had come up to their colleges before. When I deplored the cessation of this noble and powerful influence by Arnold's death, she said--what indeed I knew--that his spirit survived him and would work mightily still. And so of course it will continue to work, for to the increase of the seed sown by such a one there is no limit. She told me that one of his pupils--by no means an uncommon but rather dull and commonplace young man--had said in speaking of him, "I was dreadfully afraid of Arnold, but there was not the thing he could have told me to do that I should not instantly and confidently have set about." What a man! I do wonder if I shall see him in heaven--as it is called--if ever I get there. Mrs. E---- told me that Lady Francis [Egerton] knew him, and did not like him altogether; but then he, it seems, was habitually reserved, and she neither soft nor warm certainly in her outward demeanor, so perhaps they _really_ never met at all.... Mrs. E---- said Lady Francis had not considered her correspondence with Arnold satisfactory. I suspect it was upon theological questions of doctrine (or doctrinal questions of theology); and that Lady Francis had complained that his letters did not come sufficiently to the point. What can her point have been?... As for what you say about deathbed utterances--it seems to me the height of folly to attach the importance to them that is often given to them. The physical conditions are at that time such as often amply to account for what are received as spiritual ecstasies or agonies. I imagine whatever the _laity_ may do, few physicians are inclined to consider their patients' utterances _in articulo mortis_ as satisfactorily significant of anything but their bodily state. Certainly by what you tell me of ---- his moral perceptions do not appear to have received any accession of light whatever from the near dawning of that second life which seems sometimes to throw such awful brightness as the dying are about to enter it far over the past that they are leaving behind. My dinner at Mrs. Procter's was very pleasant. In the first place I love her husband very much; then there were Kenyon, Chorley, Henry Reeve, Monckton Milnes, and Browning!--a goodly company, you'll allow. Oh, how I wish wits were catching! but if they were, I don't suppose after that dinner I should be able to put up with poor pitiful _prose people_ like you for a long time to come. With regard to the London standard of morality, dear Hal, I do not think it lower, but probably a little higher upon the whole than that of the society of other great capitals: the reasons why this highly civilized atmosphere must be also so highly mephitic are obvious enough, and therefore as no alteration is probable, or perhaps possible in that respect, I am not altogether sorry to think that I shall live in a denser intellectual but clearer moral atmosphere in my "other world." I do not believe that the brains shrink much when the soul is well nourished, or that the intellect starves and dwindles upon what feeds and expands the spirit. My little sketch of Lenox Lake lies always open before me, and I look at it very often with yearning eyes ... for the splendid rosy sunsets over the dark blue mountain-tops, and for the clear and lovely expanse of pure waters reflecting both, above all for the wild white-footed streams that come leaping down the steep stairways of the hills. I believe I do like places better than people: these only look like angels _sometimes_, but the earth in such spots looks like heaven always--especially the mountain-tops so near the sky, so near the stars, so near the sun, with the clouds below them, and the humanity of the world and its mud far below them again--all but the spirit of adoration which one has carried up thither one's self. I do not wonder the heathen of whom the Hebrew Scriptures complain offered sacrifices on every high hill: they seem--they are--altars built by God for His especial worship. Good-bye, my dearest Hal. Yours ever, FANNY. [After I had the pleasure and honor of making Baron Bunsen's acquaintance, I was one day talking with him about Arnold, and the immense loss I considered his death to England, when he answered, almost in Mrs. E----'s words, but still more emphatically, that he would work better even dead than alive, that there was in him a powerful element of antagonism which roused antagonism in others: his individuality, he said, stood sometimes in the way of his purpose, he darkened his own light; "he will be more powerful now that he is gone than even while he was here." In Charles Greville's "Memoirs," he speaks of going down to Oatlands to consult his sister and her husband (Lord and Lady Francis Egerton) upon the expediency of Arnold's being made a bishop by the prime minister of the day--I think his friend, Lord Melbourne--and says that they gave their decided opinion against it. I wonder if the correspondence which Lady Francis characterized as "unsatisfactory" was her ground of objection against Arnold. It is a curious thing to me to imagine his calling to the highest ecclesiastical office to have depended in any measure upon her opinion. I forget what Arnold's politics were; of course, some shade of Whig or Liberal, if he was to be a bishop of Lord Melbourne's. The Ellesmeres were Tories: she a natural Conservative, and somewhat narrow-minded, though excellently conscientious; but if she prevented Arnold being named to the Queen, she certainly exercised an influence for which I do not think she was quite qualified. I think it not improbable that Arnold's orthodoxy may not have satisfied her, and beyond that question she would not go.] Wednesday, December 10th, 1845. Here, dearest Hal, are J---- C----'s verses; I think they have merit, though being myself the subject of them may militate against my being altogether a fair judge. He stood by me when last I sailed from America, until warned, with the rest of my friends, to forsake me and return to the shore.... All poets have a feminine element (good or bad) in them, but a feminine man is a species of being less fit, I think, than even an average woman to do battle with adverse circumstance and unfavorable situation.... You ask me about my interviews with Mrs. Jameson. She has called twice here, but did not on either occasion speak of her difference with my sister. To-day, however, I went to Ealing to see her, and she then spoke about it; not, however, with any feeling or much detail: indeed, she did not refer at all to the cause of rupture between them, but merely stated, with general expressions of regret, that they were no longer upon cordial terms with each other.... Mrs. Jameson told me a story to-day which has put the climax to a horrid state of nervous depression brought on by a conversation with my father this morning, during which every limb of my body twitched as if I had St. Vitus's dance. The scene of the story was Tetschen, the Castle of the Counts Thun, of which strange and romantic residence George Sand has given a detailed description in her novel of "Consuelo." ... As for the Moloch-worships of this world, of course those who practise them have their reward; they pass their children through the fire, and I suppose that thousands have agonized in so sacrificing their children. Is it not wonderful that Christ came eighteen hundred years ago into the world, and that these pitiless, mad devil-worships are not yet swept out of it?... I cannot tell you anything about myself, and, indeed, I can hardly think of myself.... My father has determined not to accompany me to Italy, so I shall go alone.... God bless you. Ever yours, FANNY. Friday, 12th, 1845. Your ink-bottle, my dear, has undergone an improvement, if indeed anything so excellent could admit of bettering. The little round glutinous stopper--india-rubber, I believe--from the peculiar inconvenience of which I presume the odious little thing derives its title as patent, has come unfastened from the top, and now, every time I open and shut it, I am compelled to ink my fingers all over, in order to extract this admirable stopper from the mouth of the bottle, or crane it back into its patent position in the lid, where it won't stay. 'Tis quite an invaluable invention for the practice of patience. I have nothing whatever to tell you. Two days ago my father informed me he had determined to send me alone to Italy. Since then I have not heard a word more from him upon the subject. He read at Highgate yesterday evening for the second time this week, but, as he had dinner engagements each time at the houses of people I did not know, I did not accompany him. I think he reads to-morrow at Islington, and if so I shall ask him to let me go with him. He reads again on Thursday next, at Highgate.... I believe my eyes are growing larger as I grow older, and I don't wonder at it, I stare so very wide so very often, Mrs. ---- talks sentimental morality about everything; her notions are _pretty near_ right, which is the same thing as pretty near wrong (for "a miss," you know, "is as good as a mile"). She is near right enough to amaze me how she contrives to be so much nearer wrong; she is like a person trying to remember a tune, and singing it not quite correctly, while you know it better, and can't sing it at all, and are ready to go mad with mistakes which you perceive, without being able to rectify them: that is a musical experience of which you, not being musical, don't know the torture.... Did I tell you that Mrs. Jameson showed me the other day a charming likeness of my sister which she had made--like that pretty thing she did of me--with all the dresses of her parts? If I could have done a great littleness, I could have gone down on my knees and begged for it; I wished for it so much. She spoke to me in great tribulation about a memoir of Mrs. Harry Siddons which it seems she was to have undertaken, but which Harry Siddons (her son) and William Grant (her son-in-law) do not wish written. Mrs. Jameson seems to feel some special annoyance upon this subject, and says that Mrs. Harry was herself anxious to have such a record made of her; and this surprises me so much, knowing Mrs. Harry as I thought I did, that I find it difficult to believe it.... Do you remember, after our reading together Balzac's "Récherche de l'Absolu," your objecting to the character of Madame de Cläes, and very justly, a certain meretricious taint which Balzac seldom escapes in his heroines, and which in some degree impaired the impression that character, in many respects beautifully conceived and drawn, would have produced? Well, there is a vein of something similar in Mrs. ----'s mind, and to me it taints more or less everything it touches. She showed me the other day an etching of Eve, from one of Raphael's compositions. The figure, of course, was naked, and being of the full, round, voluptuous, Italian order, I did not admire it,--the antique Diana, drawing an arrow from her quiver, her short drapery blown back from her straight limbs by her rapid motion, being my ideal of beauty in a womanly shape. "Ah, but," said Mrs. ----, "look at the inimitable _coquetry_ of her whole air and posture: how completely she seems to know, as she looks at the man, that he can't resist her!" (It strikes me that that whole sentence ought to be in French.) Now, this is not at all my notion of Eve; even when she damned Adam and all the generations of men, I think she was more innocent than this. I imagine her like an eager, inquisitive, greedy child, with the fruit, whatever it was, part in her hand and part between her teeth, holding up her hand, or perhaps her mouth, to Adam. You see my idea of Eve is a sensual, self-willed, ignorant savage, who saw something beautiful, that smelt good, and looked as if it tasted good, and so tasted it, without any aspiration after any other knowledge. This real innate fleshly devil of greediness and indiscretion would, however, not bear the heavy theological superstruction that has been raised upon it, and therefore a desire for forbidden knowledge is made to account for the woman's sin and the sorrows of all her female progeny. To me this merely sensual sin, the sin of a child, seems much more picturesque, a good deal fitter for the purposes of art, without the mystic and mythical addition of an intellectual desire for knowledge and the agency of the Satanic serpent. Alas! the mere flesh is devil enough, and serves for all the consequences. Blackwood will publish my verses, and, I believe, pay me well for them; indeed, I shall consider any payment at all good enough for such trumpery. Good-bye, dear. I am ever yours, FANNY. My dearest Dorothea, or the Virgin Martyr, I make a courtesy to you. [By this title of a play of Massinger's I used frequently to address Miss Wilson, whose name was Dorothy.] Saturday, December 13th, 1845. Thank you, dear Hal, again, for those elastic circles. Now that I know how to use them, I am extremely charmed with them. In my sister's letter to me she gave me no further detail of her health than merely to state that she had injured herself seriously by sitting for hours on the cold stones of St. Peter's.... You know, dear Harriet, that few women have ever had such an education as to enable them fully to appreciate the classical associations of Italy (by-the-by, do you remember that one brief and rather desponding notice of female education in "Arnold's Letters"?); and as for me, I am as ignorant as dirt, so that all that full and delightful spring of pleasure which a fine classical knowledge opens to the traveller in the heroic lands is utterly sealed to me. I have not even put my lips to the brink of it. I have always thought that no form of human enjoyment could exceed that of a thorough scholar, such a one as Arnold, for instance, visiting Rome for the first time. It is not, however, from recollection, association, or reflection that I look to deriving pleasure in Italy, but from my vivid perceptive faculties, from my senses (my nose, perhaps, excepted), and in the mere beauty that remains from the past, and abides in the present, in those Southern lands. You know what a vividly perceptive nature mine is; and, indeed, so great is my enjoyment from things merely material that the idea of ever being parted from this dear body of mine, through which I perceive them and see, hear, smell, touch, and taste so much exquisite pleasure, makes me feel rather uncomfortable. My spirit seems to me the decidedly inferior part of me, and, compared with my body, which is, at any rate, a good machine of its sort, almost a little contemptible, decidedly not good of its sort. I sometimes feel inclined to doubt which is the immortal; for I have hitherto suffered infinitely more from a defective spirit than from what St. Paul calls "this body of corruption." My dear Harriet, if I get a chance to get into the waterfall at Tivoli, you may depend upon it I will; because just at such times I have a perfectly immortal faith in my mortality. Good-bye. Ever yours, FANNY. Monday, December 15th, 1845. DEAREST HAL, Thank you for your nice inkstand, but I do not like your sending it to me, nevertheless; because I am sure it is a very great privation to you, being, as you are, particular and fidgety in such matters; and it is not a great gain to me, who do not care what I write out of, and surely I shall always be able, go where I will, among frogs or macaronis, to procure _sucre noir_ or _inchiostro nero_ to indite to you with. I shall send you back the poor dear little beloved pest you sent me first, because I am sure the stopper can be readjusted, and then it will be as _good_ as ever, and you will have a peculiar inkstand to potter with, without which I do not believe you would be yourself. Thank you for the extract from Arnold. I have no idea that Adam was "a mystical allegory," and you know that I believe every man to be his own devil, and a very sufficient one for all purposes of (so-called) damnation.... I suppose the history of Genesis to be the form assumed by the earliest traditions in which men's minds attempted to account for the creation and the first conditions of the human species. The laborious and perilous existence of man; the still more grievous liabilities of woman, who among all barbarous people is indeed the more miserable half of mankind: and it seems obvious that in those Eastern lands, where these traditions took their birth, the growth of venomous reptiles, the deadliest and most insidious of man's natural enemies, should suggest the idea of the type of all evil. Moses (to whom the Genesis is, I believe, in spite of some later disputants, generally attributed), I presume, accepted the account as literally true, as probably did the authorities, Chaldean or other, from which he derived it.... Moses' "inspiration" did not prevent his enacting some illiberal and cruel laws, among many of admirable wisdom and goodness; and I see no reason why it should have exempted him from a belief in the traditions of his age.... I have heard that there has lately been found in America part of the fossil vertebræ of a serpent which must have measured, it is said, _a hundred and forty feet_! I cannot say I believe it, but if any human creatures inhabited the earth at the time when such "small gear" are supposed to have disported themselves on its surface, if the merest legend containing reference to such a "worm" survived to scare the early risers on this planet of ours, in its first morning hours of consolidation, who can wonder that such a creature should become the hideous representative of all evil, the origin of all sin and suffering, and the special being between which and the human race irreconcilable enmity was to exist forever? for surely not even the most regenerate mind in Christendom could live on decent terms with the best-disposed snake of such a length as that. I do not think Mrs. Jameson had positively _done_ anything in the matter of Mrs. Harry Siddons's memoirs beyond looking over a good many papers and _preparing her mind_ with a view to it; and what you tell me a little shakes my confidence in my own opinion upon the subject, which, indeed, was by no means positively made up about it, because I know--at least I think--there _were_ elements in Mrs. Harry's mind not altogether incompatible perhaps with the desire of leaving some record of herself, or having such made for her by others.... There are few people whom I pity more than Mrs. Jameson. I always thought she had a great deal of good in her, but the finer elements in her character have become more apparent and valuable to me the longer I have known her; her abilities are very considerable, and her information very various and extensive; she is a devoted, dutiful daughter, and a most affectionate and generous sister, working laboriously for her mother and the other members of her family.... I compassionate and admire her very much. I dined on Friday last with dear Miss Cottin, who is a second edition of my dear Aunt Dall. Think of having known two such angels in one's life! On Saturday I dined _tête-à-tête_ with Mrs. Procter, who is extremely kind to me.... Yesterday I dined with my father at the Horace Wilsons'; to-day I dine with Chorley, and to-morrow at the George Siddonses'. You cannot think how much my late experiences have shattered me and broken my nervous equanimity.... To-day my father came suddenly into the room while I was playing on the piano, and startled me so by merely speaking to me that I burst into tears, and could not stand for several minutes, I trembled so. I have been suffering for some time past from an almost constant pain in my heart. I have wretched nights, and sometimes pass the whole morning of these days when I dine out, sitting on the floor, crying.... God bless you, dear. Ever your affectionate FANNY. MORTIMER STREET, December, 1845. No, my dearest Hal, it would be impossible for me to tell you how sad I am; and instead of attempting to do so, my far better course is to try and write of something else. My father still sits with maps and guide-books about him, debating of my route; and though I told him the other day that I would be ready to start at any moment he appointed, and that we both agreed that, on account of the cold, I had better not delay my departure, he has neither determined my line of march nor said a single word to me about my means of subsistence while I am abroad. This morning he said that he had not yet entirely resolved not to accompany me; that if he could conscientiously do it, he should like it of all things; but that he did not feel warranted in neglecting any opportunity of making money. I think, perhaps, he is postponing his determination till some answer is received from America about V----'s tiny legacy to me.... But the very quickest answer to that letter cannot reach England before the middle of next month, and it seems a great pity to delay starting till the weather becomes so cold that we must inevitably suffer from it in travelling. I feel no anxiety about the whole matter, or indeed any other. I am just as well here, and just as well there, and just as well everywhere as anywhere else. And though I should be glad to see all those much desired things, and most glad to embrace my sister again, and though I am occasionally annoyed and vexed here, I have many friends, and am very well off in London; and elsewhere, of course, I shall find what will annoy and vex me. I am quite "content," a little after Shylock's fashion at the end of the judgment scene. At the core of some "content" what heart-despair may abound!... I told you of my dining at Mrs. Procter's yesterday. She was quite alone.... She showed me a beautiful song written by my sister, words and music, a sort of lullaby, but the most woful words! I think I must have inspired her with them, they threw me into such a state of nervous agitation.... What a machine _I_ am shut up in! Surely a desire to beget a temperance in all things had need be the law of _my_ existence; and, but that I believe work left unfinished and imperfect in this life is finished in another, I should think the task almost too difficult of achievement to begin it here. God bless you, dear. Ever yours affectionately, FANNY. Wednesday, December 17th, 1845. I found at last the little cross you have made over your house in the engraving of the St. Leonard's Esplanade, and when I had found it wondered how I came to miss it; but the truth is it was a blot, and the truth is I took it for nothing more.... You know I think, in spite of the French proverb, "_Toute vérité n'est pas bonne à dire_," that I think all truth _is_ to be told; that is the teller's part: how it is received, or what effect it has, is the receiver's.... I think to suspect a person of wrongdoing more painful than to know that they have done wrong. In the first place, uncertainty upon the character of those we love--the most vital thing in life to us, except our own character--is the worst of all uncertainties. Your trust is shaken, your faith destroyed; belief, that soul of love, is disturbed, and, in addition to all this, as long as any element of uncertainty remains you have the alternate misery of suspecting yourself of unworthy, wicked, and base thoughts, of unjust surmises and uncharitable conclusions. When you know that those you love have sinned against you, your way is open and comparatively easy, for you have only to forgive them. I believe I am less sorry to find that A---- has wronged me by her actions than I should have been to find that I had wronged her by my thoughts.... I would a great deal rather have to forgive her for her misconduct, and pity her for her misery, poor woman! than blame myself for the wickedness of unworthily suspecting her. I am really relieved to know that, at any rate, I have not done her injustice. I have been about all day, getting my money and passport, and paying bills and last visits. I go on Saturday to Southampton, and cross to Havre. I do not know why Emily fancied I was to be at Bannisters to-night, but that last week, when my father suddenly asked me how soon I could start, I replied, "In twenty-four hours," and then wrote to Emily that possibly I might be at Southampton to-day. I go by diligence from Havre to Rouen, by railroad from Rouen to Paris, in the same _coupé_ of the diligence which is put bodily--the diligence, I mean--upon the rails; thence to Orleans by post-road, ditto; thence to Châlons-sur-Sâone, ditto, down the Sâone to Lyons, down the Rhone to Marseilles; steam thence to Civita Vecchia, and then vetturino to Rome. This is the route my father has made out for me; and, all things considered, I think it is the best, and presents few difficulties or inconveniences but those inevitable ones which must be encountered in travelling anywhere at this season of the year. I shall not see you before I go, my dearest Hal, but I shall be with you before the Atlantic separates us once again; I know not how or where, but look forward to some season of personal intercourse with you before I return once more to America. The future, to be sure, lies misty enough before me, but I have always a feeling of nearness to you which even the Alps rising between us will not destroy, and I do not doubt to see you again before many months are passed. I am going this evening to the Miss Berrys'; they have asked me repeatedly to dine with them, and I have not had a single disengaged day, and as they have taken the trouble of coming to see after me bodily several times, I must pay my respects to them before I go, as in duty bound.... I had a letter from T----; he had not yet received either of mine, and knew nothing of Philadelphia or any of its inhabitants. He seems to think the Oregon question very black, and that the aspect of affairs on both sides of the water threatens war.... My father now talks of reading in every direction as soon as I am gone--Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh; the latter place he told me he thought he should go to in March; and then again, every now and then, he says, as soon as he can settle his affairs he shall come after me, as he should like to be in Rome at Easter to get the Pope's blessing. God bless you with a better blessing, my dearest Hal! Ever yours, FANNY. ... Charles Greville has given me a book of his to read: it is very well written and interests me a good deal; it is upon the policy of England towards Ireland. He so habitually in conversation deals in the merest gossip, and what appears to me to be the most worldly, and therefore superficial, view of things, that I am agreeably surprised by the ability displayed in his book; for though it is not in any way extraordinary, it is in every way beyond what I expected from him. [The direct railroad routes through France are now followed by all travellers to Italy, and the picturesque coach-road which I took from Orleans to Autun at this time, when they did not exist, is little likely to draw wayfarers aside from them; nor was the season of the year when I made that journey at all a favorable one in which to visit the forest and mountain region of the Nivernais. I was snowed up at a miserable little village among the hills called Château Chinon; the diligences were unable for several days to come up thither, the roads being impassable, and I had to make my way through the picturesque wild region in a miserable species of dilapidated cabriolet, furnished me at an exorbitant price from Château Chinon to Autun, where I was again picked up by the diligence.] Thursday, December 18th, 1845. MY DEAREST HAL, I leave London the day after to-morrow for Southampton. I am full of calls, bills, visits, sorrow, perplexity, and nervous agitation, which all this hurry and bustle increase tenfold; letters to write, too, for the American post is in, and has brought me four from the other side of the water to deal with. In the middle of all this, Mrs. Jameson sends me long letters of Sarah Grant's and Mary Patterson's to read, which prove most distinctly to my mind that she, Mrs. Jameson, wishes to write a memoir of Mrs. Harry Siddons; but do not at all prove so distinctly to my mind that Mrs. Harry Siddons wished a memoir of herself to be written by Mrs. Jameson. So all this I have had to wade through, and shall have to answer, wondering all the while what under the sun it matters what I think about the whole concern, or why people care one straw what people's opinions are about them, or what they do. My opinion about memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, lives, letters, and books in general indeed, Mrs. Jameson is perfectly familiar with; and therefore her making me go through this voluminous correspondence just now, when she knows how pressed I am for time, seems to me a little unmerciful; but, however, I've done it, that's one comfort. Then comes dear George Combe, with a long letter, the second this week, upon the subject of Miss C----'s private character, family connections, birth, parentage, reputation, etc., desiring me to answer all manner of questions about her; and I know no more of her than I do of the man in the moon: and all this must likewise be attended to.... About my consulting Wilson (our attached friend and family physician), I did so when I was here before, and I am following the advice he then gave me; but for these physical effects of mental causes, what can be done as long as the causes continue?... Hayes (my maid) and I are to take the _coupé_ of the diligence wherever we can get it on our route, and so proceed together and alone. I shall pay for the third place, but it is worth while to pay something to be protected from the proximity of some travelling Frenchmen; and paying for this extra place is not a very great extravagance, as the cost of travelling by public conveyance on the Continent is very moderate. I do not know when Blackwood intends publishing my things. I gave them into Chorley's hands, and Chorley's discretion, and know nothing further about them, but that I believe I shall be paid for them what he calls "tolerably well," and therefore what I shall consider magnificently well, inasmuch as they seem to me worth nothing at all. I hear of nothing but the change of Ministry, but have been so much engrossed with my own affairs that I have not given much attention to what I have heard upon the subject. I believe Sir Robert Peel will come into some coalition with the Whigs, Lord John Russell, Lord Howick, etc., and this is perhaps the best thing that can happen, because, by all accounts, the Whigs have literally not got a man to head them. But I do not think anything is yet decided upon. And now, my dear, I must break off, and write to M---- M----, _and_ George Combe about Miss C----'s virtue (why the deuce doesn't he look for it in her skull?), _and_ Mrs. Jameson, _and_ all America. I breakfasted this morning with Rogers, and dine this evening at the Procters'. What an enviable woman I might appear!--only you know better. Yours truly, FANNY. MORTIMER STREET, Friday Night (_i.e._ Saturday Morning, at 2 o'clock), December 19th, 1845. No! my dearest Hal, I do not think that to one who believes that life is spiritual education it needs any very painful or difficult investigation of circumstances to perceive, not why such and such special trials are sent to certain individuals, but that all trial is the positive result of or has been incurred by error or sin; and beholding the beautiful face of bitterest adversity, for such is one of its aspects, that all trial is sent to teach us better things than we knew, or than we did, before. There is nothing for which God's mercy appears to me more praiseworthy than the essential essence of improvement, of progress, of growth, which _can_ be expressed from the gall-apple of our sorrows. To each soul of man the needful task is set, the needful discipline administered, and therefore it doesn't seem to me to require much investigation into mere circumstances to accept my own trials. They are appointed to me because they are best for me, and whatever my apparent impatience under them, this is, in deed and truth, my abiding faith.... But it is past two o'clock in the morning. I am almost exhausted with packing and writing. Seven letters lie on my table ready to be sealed, seven more went to the post-office this afternoon; but though I will not sleep till I bid you good-night, I will not write any more than just that now. My fire is out, my room cold, and, being tired with packing, I am getting quite chilled. You must direct to me to the care of Edward Sartoris, Esq., Trinità dei Monti, Rome, and I will answer you, as you know. I will write to you to-morrow, that is to-day, when I get to Bannisters; or perhaps before I start, if I can get up early enough to get half an hour before breakfast. Good-night. God bless you. I am unutterably sad, and feel as though I were going away from everybody, I know not whither--it is all vague, uncertain, indefinite, all but the sorrow which is inseparable from me, go where I will, a companion I can reckon upon for the rest of my life everywhere. As for the rest, if we did but recollect it, our next minute is always the unknown. Ever yours, FANNY. BANNISTERS, Saturday, December 20th, 1845. MY DEAREST HARRIET, My last words and thoughts were yours last night; but this morning, when I hoped to have written to you again, I found it impossible to do so; so here I am in the room at Bannisters where you and I and Emily were sitting together a few weeks ago,--she on her knees, writing for a fly to take me to the steamer to-night, and I writing to you from this place, where it seems as if you were still sitting beside us. Emily won't let me send you your little square ink-bottle for Queen's heads, but says she will keep it for you, so there I leave it in her hands. Charles Greville's book (for it is not a pamphlet) is called "The Policy of England to Ireland," or something as nearly like that as possible. My praise of it may occasion you some disappointment, for I am pleased with it more because it is so much better than anything I expected from him than because it is particularly powerful or striking in itself. The subject interests me a good deal, and the book is very agreeably and well written, and in a far better tone than I should have looked for in anything of his. I have besought Mr. Lowndes to forward my letters to me without any delay, and I have no doubt he will do so.... As for death, well is it with those who quietly reach the fifth act of their lives, with only the usual and inevitable decay and dropping off of all beloved things which time must bring; the sudden catastrophe of adverse circumstance, wrecking a whole existence in the very middle of its course, is a more terrible thing than death. My dearest Hal, I have no more to say but that "I love you." Emily is talking to me, and I feel as if I ought to talk to her. Give my dear love to dear Dorothy, and believe me Ever yours, FANNY. ROME, TRINIT� DEI MONTI, Monday, April 20th, 1846. You ask me what I shall do in the spring, my dear Hal. My present plan is to return to England next December, and remain with my father, if he can have me with him without inconvenience, till the weather is fine enough to admit of my returning without too much wretchedness to America.... When E---- and my father wrote to me to return to England, I had no idea but that I was to have a home with the latter, that he expected and wished me to live with him.... I think now that if his deafness obliges him to give up his public readings, and cuts him off from his club and the society that he likes, he will not be sorry that I should remain with him.... By-the-by, I take your question about my plans for the spring to refer not to this but to next spring, as I suppose you know that I mean to remain with my sister during the coming summer, and that we are going to spend the greater part of it at Frascati, where E---- has taken a charming apartment in a lovely villa belonging to the Borghese. You will be in England next winter, dear Hal, and I shall come then and stay with you and Dorothy. You have interfered so little with my journal-keeping by your letters that I have been wondering and lamenting that I did not hear from you for the last some time, and was all but wrought up to the desperate pitch of writing to you _out of turn_, to know what was the matter, when I received your last letter. I do not, however, keep my journal with any sort of regularity; my time is extremely and very irregularly occupied, and I should certainly preserve no record whatever of my impressions but for the very disagreeable conviction that it is my duty to do so, if there is, as I believe there is, the slightest probability of my being able by this means to earn a little money and to avoid drawing upon my father's resources. I have a great contempt for this process, and a greater contempt for the barren balderdash I write: but exchange is no robbery, a thing is worth what it will fetch, and if a bookseller will buy my trash, I will sell it to him; for beggars must, in no case, be choosers.... You say that I have yet told you nothing of my satisfaction in Rome. I wish you had not made your challenge so large. How shall I tell you of my satisfaction in Rome? and at which end of Rome, or my satisfaction, shall I begin? You must remember, in the first place, that its strangeness is not absolutely to me what it is to many English people; the brilliant and enchanting sky is not unlike that with which I have been familiar for some years past in America; the beautiful and (to us Anglo-Saxon islanders) unusual vegetation bears some resemblance to that of the Southern States in winter. Boston, you know, is in the same latitude as Rome, and though the American northern winter is incomparably more severe than that of Italy, the summer heat and the southern semi-tropical vegetation are kindred features in that other world and this. The difference of this winter climate and that of the United States has hitherto been an unfavorable one to me; for I have been extremely unwell ever since I have been here--the sirocco destroys me body and soul while it lasts, and there is a sultry heaviness in the atmosphere that gave me at first perpetual headaches, and still continues to disagree extremely with me. Now, of these abatements of my satisfaction I have told you, but of my satisfaction itself I should find it impossible to tell, but I should think you might form some idea of it, knowing both me and the place where I am. I have hitherto been more anxious to remain with my sister than to go and see even the sights of Rome. Now, however, that our departure for Frascati must take place in about a month, I get up at seven every morning, and go out before breakfast alone, and in this way I am contriving to do some of my traveller's duty. I walked this morning to the Pantheon, and heard Mass there. On my return home, I went into the Church of the Trinità dei Monti, to hear the French nuns sing their prayers. This afternoon we have been to the Villa Albani, which is ridiculously full of rose-bushes, which are so ridiculously full of roses that, except in a scene in a pantomime, I never saw anything like it. We remained in the garden, and the day was like a warm English April day, in consequence of which we had the loveliest pageant of thick sullen rain and sudden brilliant flashes of sunlight chasing each other all over those exquisite Alban Hills, with our very _un_-English foreground of terraces, fountains, statues, vases, evergreen garden walls of laurel, myrtle, box, laurestinus, and ridiculous rose-bushes in ridiculous bloom. There never was a more enchanting combination of various beauty than the landscape we looked at and the place from which we looked at it. I brought away some roses and lemon-blossoms: the latter I enclose in this letter, that some of the sweetness I have been enjoying may salute your senses also, and recall these divine scenes to your memory still more vividly. We came home from the Villa Albani in the most tremendous pour of rain, and had hardly taken off our bonnets when the whole sky, from the pines on Monte Maris to the Dome of Santa Maria Maggiore, was bathed all over in beauty and splendor indescribable. If we had only been Claude Lorraine, what a sunset we should have painted! We have a charming little terrace garden to our house here, in which my "retired leisure" takes perpetual delight.... God bless you, dear. Ever yours, FANNY. FRASCATI, Wednesday, May 20th, 1846. MY DEAR HAL, One would suppose that writing was to the full as disagreeable to you as it is to me, yet you do not profess that it is so, but merely write that you have little to say, as you think, that will interest me. Now, this is, I think, a general fallacy, but I am sure it is an individual one: the sight of your handwriting, representing as it does to me your face, your voice, and, above all, your generous and constant affection, makes the mere superscription of your letters worth a joyful welcome from me; and for any dearth of matter on your part, it lies, I rather think, chiefly in the direction which least affects me, _i.e._ society gossip, or "_news_," _as it is called_ (O Lord! such _old_ news as it is), being for ever the same stuff with a mere imperceptible difference in the pattern on it, let it come from what quarter of the civilized globe it will; and which, as far as I have had occasion to observe latterly, forms the chief resource of "polite letter-writers." Of matters that do interest me, you might surely have plenty to say--your own health and frame of mind; the books you read, and what you think of them; and whatever of special interest to yourself occurs, either at home or abroad. At Ardgillan, you know, I know every inch of _your_ ground, and between the little turret room and the Dell it seems to me many letters might be filled; then the state of politics in England interests me intensely; and the condition of Ireland is surely a most fruitful theme for comment just now.... We are now at Frascati, and in spite of the inexhaustible, immortal interest of Rome, I am rejoicing with my whole nature, moral, mental, and physical, in our removal to the country. The beautiful aspect of this enchanting region, occasionally, by rare accident, recalls the hill country in America that I am so fond of; but this is of a far higher and nobler order of beauty. The Campagna itself is an ever-present feature of picturesque grandeur in the landscape here, and gives it a character unlike anything anywhere else. The district of country round Lenox rejoices in a number of small lakes (from one hill-side one sees five), of a few miles in circumference, which, lying in the laps of the hills, with fine wooded slopes sweeping down to their bright basins, give a peculiar charm to the scenery; while here, as you know, the volcanic waters of Albano and Nemi lie so deep in their rocky beds as to be invisible, unless from their very margins. Of the human picturesqueness of this place and people no American scenery or population have an atom; and isolated, ugly, mean, matter-of-fact farm-houses, or whitewashed, clap-boarded, stiff, staring villages, alike without antiquity to make them venerable or picturesqueness to make them tolerable, are all that there represent the exquisitely grouped and colored masses of building, or solitary specimens of noble time-tinted masonry and architecture, that every half-fortress farmhouse in the plain, or hamlet or convent on the hill-side, present in this paradise of painters. I must confess to you, however, that the _populousness_ of this landscape is not agreeable to me. Absolute loneliness and the absence of every trace of human existence was such a striking feature of the American scenery that I am fond of, where it was possible in some directions to ride several miles without meeting man or woman or seeing their dwellings, that the impossibility of getting out of sight of human presence or human habitation is sometimes irksome to me here. It is true that this scenery is often wildly sublime in its character; nevertheless, it is overlooked in almost every direction by villas, monasteries, or villages, and if one escapes from these (as, indeed, I only suppose I _may_, for I have not yet been able to do so), one stumbles among the ruins and gigantic remains of the great race that has departed, and recollections of men, their works and ways, pursue one everywhere, and surround one with the vestiges of the humanity of bygone centuries. In the woods of Massachusetts wild-cats panthers, and bears are yet occasionally to be met with, and the absence of the human element, whether present or past, gives a character of unsympathizing savageness to the scenery; while here it has so saturated the very soil with its former existence that where there is nobody there are millions of ghosts, and that, if the sense of solitude is almost precluded, there is an abiding and depressing one of desolate desertion. The personal danger which I am told attends walking alone about the woods and hills here rather impairs my enjoyment of the lovely country.... How lamentably foolish human beings are in their intercourse with each other, to be sure, whether they love or hate, or whatever they do!... The epistle of yours that I am now answering I received only this morning, and, owing no one else a previous debt, sat down instantly to discharge my debt to you. Am I honest? am I just? If I am not, show me how I am not; if I am, why, hold your tongue. The climate of Rome disagreed with me more than any climate of which I have yet had experience. I had a perpetual consciousness of my bilious tendencies, and when the sirocco blew I found it difficult to bear up against that and the permanent causes of depression I always have to struggle against. The air here is undoubtedly freer and purer, but even here we do not escape from that deadly hot wind, that blast, that I should think came straight from hell, it is so laden with despair. I liked those pretty lasses, the Ladies T----, very much. All young people interest me, and must be wonderfully displeasing if they do not please me. I met them frequently, but they were naturally full of gayety and life and spirits, which I naturally was not. The little society I went into in Rome oppressed me dreadfully with its ponderous vapidity, and beyond exchanging a few words with these bonnie girls, and admiring their sweet pleasant faces, I had nothing to do with them. There was much talk about the chances of a marriage between Lord W---- and Lady M----, but though her father left no stone unturned to accomplish this great blessing for his pretty daughter, the matter seemed extremely doubtful when the season ended and they all went off to Naples. As for Mrs. H----, if she had chronicled me, I am afraid it would scarcely have been with good words. I met her at a party at Mrs. Bunsen's (whose husband is the son of Arnold's friend).... The young lady impressed me as one of that numerous class of persons who like to look at a man or woman whose name, for any reason, has been in the public mouth, and probably her curiosity was abundantly satisfied by my being brought up and shown to her. She made no particular impression upon me, but I have no doubt that in sorrow, or joy, or any real genuine condition, instead of what is called society, she might perhaps have interested me. It takes uncommon powers of fascination, or what is even rarer, perfect simplicity, to attract attention or arouse sympathy in the dead atmosphere of modern civilized social intercourse. All is so drearily dry, smooth, narrow, and commonplace that the great deeps of life below this stupid stagnant surface are never seen, heard, or thought of. If your nieces' constancy in following the round of monotonously recurring amusements of a Dublin season amazes me, they would certainly think it much more amazing to pass one's time as I do, wandering about the country alone, dipping one's head and hands into every wayside fountain one comes to, and sitting down by it only to get up again and wander on to the next spring of living water. The symbol is comforting, as well as the element itself, though it is a mere suggestion of the spiritual wells by which one may find rest and refreshment, and pause and ponder on this dusty life's way of ours. I rejoice the distress in Ireland is less than was anticipated, and am sorry that I cannot sympathize with your nephew's political views [Colonel Taylor was all his life a consistent and fervent Tory].... Politics appear to me, in a free government, to be the especial and proper occupation of a wealthy landowner; and, in such a country as Ireland, I am sure they might furnish a noble field for the exercise of the finest intelligence and the most devoted patriotism, as well as fill the time with occupation of infinite interest, both of business and benevolence. I should like to be a man with such a work.... My sister's little girl is lovely; she runs about, but does not speak yet. God bless you, my dear friend. Give my love to dear Dorothy. If I can, I will come and see you both at Torquay this next winter. I hope to be in England in November. Ever yours, FANNY. FRASCATI, Wednesday, July 1st, 1846. ... You know of old that the slightest word of blame from you is worse than hot sealing-wax on my skin to me, and that to my self-justifications there is no end. My dear friend, are mental perplexity and despondency, moral difficulty, spiritual apathy, and a general bitter internal struggle with existence, less real trials, less positive troubles, than the most afflicting circumstances generally so classed? I almost doubt it. It may be more difficult to formulate that species of anguish in words, and it may seem a less positive and substantial grief than some others, but the plagues of the soul are _real_ tortures, and I set few sufferings above them, few difficulties and few pains beyond those that have their source not in the outward dispensation of events, but in the inward conditions of our physical and moral constitutions. Comparing one lot with another, does not rather the equality of the general doom of trouble and sorrow, of difficulty and struggle, witness the impartiality with which we are governed and our several fates distributed to us? The self-assured and self-relying strength of my constitution (I mean by that my character as well as the temperament from which it results) knows nothing of the trials that beset yours--doubt, distrust, despondency. I have health, mental and physical activity, and a "mounting spirit" of indomitable enjoyment that buoyantly protects me from sufferings under which others wince and writhe; nevertheless, I have the sufferings proper to my individuality, and I needs must suffer, if it were only that I may be said to _live_, in the fit and proper sense of the term. Our lots are just; by God they are appointed.... But in spite of abiding sorrow, I have often hours of vivid enjoyment, enjoyment which has nothing to do with happiness, or peace, or hope; momentary flashes, bright gleams of exquisite pleasure, of which the capacity seems indestructible in my nature; and whatever bitterness may lie at my heart's core, it still leaves about it a mobile surface of sensibility, which reflects with a sort of ecstasy every ray of light and every form of beauty. You certainly do not enjoy as I do, and perhaps therefore you do not suffer as acutely; but we err in nothing more than in our estimate of each other's natures, and might more profitably spend the same amount of consideration upon our own lot, and its capabilities of sorrow or of joy for our own improvement. Why is it that people do perpetually live below their own pitch? as you very truly described their living. My return to civilized society makes me ponder much upon the causes of the desperate frivolity and dismal inanity which calls itself by that name, and in the midst of which we live and move and have our being. If people did really enjoy and amuse themselves, nothing could be better; because enjoyment and amusement _are_ great goods, and deserve to be labored for _sufficiently_; but the absence of amusement, of enjoyment, of life, of spirits, of vivacity, of _vitality_, in the society of the present day, and its so-called diversions, strikes me with astonishment and compassion. For my own part, I hold a good laugh to be inestimable in pleasure and in profit; good nonsense well talked only less admirable than good sense well delivered; and a spirit of fun the next best thing to a serious spirit; and moreover, thank God, they are quite compatible! I think the stupid shallowness of society has some deep causes; one among which is, of course, that by devoting all their energies and all their faculties and all their time to mere amusement, as they have no right to do, people fail of their aim, and are neither well amused nor well occupied, nor well anything else. For if "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," what does the reverse do for him? This passion for cakes and sugar-candy in adult, not to say advanced, life is rather lugubrious; and of course it strikes me forcibly on my return from America, where the absence of a wholesome spirit of recreation is one of the dreariest features of the national existence.... Here the absolute necessity for mere amusement strikes me as a sort of dry-rot in certain portions of the fabric of civilized society, and tends to make it a sapless crumbling mass of appearances--the most ostentatious appearance of all, that of pleasure, being perhaps the hollowest and most unreal. It takes, I believe, no meaner qualities than intelligence and goodness to enable a person to be thoroughly, heartily, and satisfactorily amused. Unless you, my dear friend, deprecate our meeting to part again, I have no intention whatever of leaving England without seeing you once more. I cannot imagine doing such a thing, unless in compliance with your wish, or submission to inevitable necessity. I hope to come down to Torquay, to you and Dorothy, for a few days in the winter. I am amused at your saying that you don't think any one would feel very comfortable living with me, who had not a great love of truth. Catherine Sedgwick once said it was impossible to tell a lie before me _with any comfort_; and yet I have told my own lies, and certainly sinned, as did not the worthy lady who, being charged with a falsehood, replied unhesitatingly, "Of course, I know it was a lie; _I made it!_ I thought it would do good." Another lady of my acquaintance, speaking of a person we both knew, who was indifferent, to say the least of it, upon the question of veracity, exclaimed, "Oh, but Mrs. C---- is really too bad, for she will tell stories _when there isn't the least necessity for it_." A---- was a curious instance of the distortion of a very upright nature; for she is undoubtedly a person of great natural truth and integrity, and yet, under the influence of an unfortunate passion, her pre-eminent virtue suffered total eclipse; and she must have condescended, proud and sincere as she was, to much duplicity and much absolute falsehood. Poor girl! I think one great argument against wrong-doing of every sort is that it almost invariably, sooner or later, leads to a sacrifice of truth in some way or other; and for that reason a hearty love of truth is a great preservative from sin in general. Your letters, directed either to Rome or here, to the care of Edward Sartoris, have reached me hitherto safely and punctually.... My sister particularly begs me to tell you that she rides ("a-horseback, you cuckoo!") between twelve and sixteen miles almost every day. I cannot clearly tell whether she has grown thinner or I have grown used to her figure. The heat is beginning to be very oppressive, and I wish I was in England, for I hate hot weather. The whole range of the Sabine Hills, as I see them from my window here, look baked and parched and misty, in the glare beyond the tawny-colored Campagna. Every flower in the garden has bloomed itself away; the trees loll their heads to the hot gusts of the sirocco, mocking one with the enchanting beckoning gesture of a breeze, while the air is in truth like a blast from an oven or the draught at the mouth of a furnace. I walk before breakfast, and steep myself in perspiration; and get into the fountain in the garden afterwards, and steep myself in cold water; and by dint of the double process, live in tolerable comfort the rest of the day. And I have no right to complain, for this is temperate to the summer climate of Philadelphia. Mary and Martha Somerville are paying us a visit of a few days, and I have spent the last two mornings in a vast, princely, empty marble gallery here, teaching them to dance the cachuca; and I wish you could have seen Mrs. Somerville watching our exercises. With her eyeglasses to her eyes, the gentle gentlewoman sat silently contemplating our evolutions, and as we brought them to a conclusion, and stood (_not_ like the Graces) puffing and panting round her, unwilling not to say some kindly word of commendation of our effort, she meekly observed, "It's very pretty, very graceful, very"--a pause--"ladylike." She spoke without any malicious intention whatever, dear lady, but she surely left out the _un_. Do you not think it is time I should begin to think of growing old? or do your nieces do anything more juvenile than this, with all their ball-going? God bless you, my dear Harriet. Good-bye. I am ever, as ever yours, FANNY. FRASCATI, Wednesday, September 2nd, 1846. MY DEAREST HARRIET, ... I think that the women who have contemplated _any_ equality between the sexes have almost all been unmarried, for while the father disposes of the children whom he maintains, and which thus endows him with the power of supreme torture, what mother's heart is proof against the tightening of that screw? At any rate, what number of women is ever likely to be found so organized or so principled as to resist the pressure of this tremendous power? My sister, in speaking to me the other day of what she would or would not give up to her husband of conscientious conviction of right, wound up by saying, "But sooner than lose my children, there is _nothing_ that I would not do;" and in so speaking she undoubtedly uttered the feeling of the great majority of women.... We suppose my father has gone to Germany, with some intention of giving readings there. He has been on the Continent now upwards of three months, but we never hear anything definite or precise about his engagements from himself; and in his letters he never mentions place, person, or purpose, where he is going, or where likely to be; so that I can form no idea how long I may be deprived of my letters, which are directed to London, to his care. My dearest Hal, I have kept no journal since I have been abroad but such as could be published verbatim. I have kept no record of my own life; I have long felt that to chronicle it would not assist me in enduring it.... Indeed, since I came to Italy, I should have kept no diary at all, but that my doing so was suggested to me as a possible means of earning something towards my present support, and with that view I have noted what I have seen, much to my own disgust and dissatisfaction; for I feel very strongly my own inability to give any fresh interest to a mere superficial description of things and places seen and known by everybody, and written about by all the world and his wife, for the last hundred years. Nevertheless, I have done it; because I could not possibly neglect any means whatever that were pointed out to me of helping myself, and relieving others from helping me.... I have given up my walk and my dip in the fountain before breakfast. We ride for three or four hours every afternoon, and a walk of two hours in the morning besides seemed to me, upon reflection, a disproportionate allowance of mere physical exercise for a creature endowed with brains as well as arms and legs.... Upon the whole, we have reason to be grateful for the health we have all of us enjoyed. There has been a great deal of violent and dangerous illness among the English residents passing the summer at Frascati and Albano; quite enough indeed, I think, to justify the ill repute of unhealthiness with which the whole of this beautiful region is branded. Our whole family has escaped all serious inconvenience, either from the malaria usual to the place or the unusual heat of the summer; the children especially have been in admirable health and lovely looks, the whole time we have been here.... God bless you, my dearest Hal! I am afraid that it is true that I often appear wanting in charity towards the vices and follies of my fellow-creatures; and yet I really have a great deal more than my outbreaks of vehement denunciation would seem to indicate; and of one thing I am sure, that with regard to any wrong or injury committed against myself, a very short time enables me not only to forgive it, but to perceive all the rational excuses and attenuations that it admits of. I certainly am not conscious of any bitterness of heart towards any one.... I believe it is only in the first perception of evil or sense of injury that I am unmeasured or unreasonable in my expression of condemnation--but you know, my dear, _suddenness_ is the curse of my nature.... But my self-love always springs up against the shadow of blame, and so you need pay no heed to what I say in self-justification. If I am censured justly, I shall accept the reproof inwardly, whatever outward show I may make of defending myself against it; for the grace of humility is even more deficient in me than that of charity, and to submit graciously to what seems to me unjust blame is hitherto a virtue I do not possess at all. [After my return to England, I resumed the exercise of my theatrical profession; the less distasteful occupation of giving public readings, which I adopted subsequently, was not then open to me. My father was giving readings from Shakespeare, and it was impossible for me to thrust my sickle into a field he was reaping so successfully. I therefore returned to the stage; under what disadvantageously altered circumstances it is needless to say. A stout, middle-aged, not particularly good-looking woman, such as I then was, is not a very attractive representative of Juliet or Julia; nor had I, in the retirement of nine years of private life, improved by study or experience my talent for acting, such as it was. I had hardly entered the theatre during all those years, and my thoughts had as seldom reverted to anything connected with my former occupation. While losing, therefore, the few personal qualifications (of which the principal one was youth) I ever possessed for the younger heroines of the drama, I had gained none but age as a representative of its weightier female personages--Lady Macbeth, Queen Katherine, etc. Thus, even less well fitted than when first I came out for the work I was again undertaking, I had the additional disadvantage of being an extremely incompetent woman of business; and having now to make my own bargains in the market of public exhibition, I did so with total want of knowledge and experience to guide me in my dealings with the persons from whom I had to seek employment. I found it difficult to obtain an engagement in London; but Mr. Knowles, of the Manchester Theatre, very liberally offered me such terms as I was thankful to accept; and I there made my first appearance on my return to the stage. Among the various changes which I had to encounter in doing so, one that might appear trivial enough occasioned me no little annoyance. The inevitable rouge, rendered really indispensable by the ghastly effect of the gaslight illumination of the stage, had always been one of its minor disagreeables to me; but I now found that, in addition to rouged cheeks, my fair theatrical contemporaries--fair though they might be--literally whitewashed their necks, shoulders, arms, and hands; a practice which I found it impossible to adopt; and in spite of my zealous friend Henry Greville's rather indignant expostulation, to the effect that what so beautiful a woman as Madame Grisi condescended to do, for the improvement of her natural charms, was not to be disdained by a person so comparatively ugly, I steadily refused to make a whited sepulchre of _that_ description of myself, and continued to confront the public with my own skin, looking, probably, like a gypsy, or, when in proximity with any feminine coadjutor, like a bronze figure arm-in-arm with a plaster-of-Paris cast. Before, however, beginning my new existence of professional toil, I stayed a few days at Bannisters, with Mrs. FitzHugh and my dear friend, her daughter Emily.] BANNISTERS, Tuesday, 13th, 1846. You say, my dear Hal, that you see Emily and me perpetually, in various positions, holding various conversations. Had you a vision of us this morning, by the comfortable fire in my room, I reading, and she listening to, your letter?... Thank you, my dear friend, for your _flagellatory_ recipe, which I beg to decline. The sponging with vinegar and water I do practise every morning, and as I persevere in it until my fingers can hardly hold the sponge for cold, and my throat is as crimson as if it were flayed, I hope it will answer the same purpose as lashing myself, which I object to, partly, I suppose, for Sancho Panza's reasons, and partly because of its great resemblance to, not to say identity with, the superstitious practices of the idolatrous and benighted Roman Catholic Church. The amount of medical advice and assistance which I have received since I have been restored to the affectionate society of my dear Emily and her kind mother is hardly to be told.... I shall not answer your letter seriously: I am convinced it is bad for you. I believe Dorothy never laughs (you know the Devil in "Faust" says the Almighty never does), and I am satisfied that what you are languishing for is a little _absurdity_, which she cannot by any possibility afford you. How I wish I was with you! because, though I am no more absurd than that sublime woman Dorothy, I at least know how to take the best advantage, both for you and myself, of the great gifts you possess in that line; and the mutual sweetness and utility of our intercourse is, I am persuaded, principally owing to the judicious use I make of the extraordinary amount of absurdity it has pleased Heaven to vouchsafe you, my most precious friend. And so you think I shall have plenty of "admiring friends" for my "gay hours" (!!!!), but shall be glad to fall back, in my less delightful ones, upon the devoted affection of--you? (Oh, Harriet, oughtn't you to be ashamed of yourself?) I have more friends, I humbly and devoutly thank God for them, than almost any one I know; those I depend upon I can count upon the fingers of one hand, and you are the _thumb_. In the useless struggle you persist in making to be reasonable (why don't you give it up? I've known you hopelessly at it now forty years or thereabouts), you really make use of very singular and, permit me to say, inappropriate language. After detailing, in a manner that nearly made me cry and laugh with distress for you and disapprobation of you, all your unnecessary agonies of anxiety about me, you suddenly rein yourself up with an extra-reasonable jerk, and say that "the foolish importance you attach to _trifles_ is as great as ever." Now, my dearest friend, for such you undoubtedly are, allow me to observe that this mode of speaking of me does not appear to me either reasonable or appropriate. From what point of view I can appear a _trifle_ to the most partial and rational of my friends, I am at a loss to conjecture. The parallel seems to me to halt on all its feet. A _white_, _light_, _sweet_, and _agreeable_ article of human consumption bears, I apprehend, extremely small affinity to a _dark_, _heavy_, _tart_, and _uneatable_ female. However, if you find that this, to me, singularly distorted mode of viewing facts assists your hitherto unsuccessful efforts at mental and moral equipoise, I am perfectly willing to be a trifle in your estimation, or indeed anywhere but on your table. The pretty, pretty plan you devise for our meeting here during Passion week, dear Hal, is a baseless vision. Our friends go up to London the week after next, and I do not know when I shall be able again to stay so far from it. I have written to Moxon about the publication of my journal, and I received a note from him this morning, intimating his purpose of visiting me here, in the course of to-day, at which I feel rather nervously dismayed.... There is a great quantity of it, and I suppose my return to the stage may perhaps have some effect in increasing its sale. Emily and I walk every day together, up and down the shrubbery and round the gardens; and innumerable are the ejaculations of "Oh, how I wish dear Hal was with us!" You are our proper complement, the missing side of the triangle, and it is unnatural for us two to be together here without you. Mrs. FitzHugh is certainly a wonderful old woman, especially in her kindliness and happy, easy cheerfulness.... We drive every day for about an hour in the pony-carriage, and walk again for about half an hour afterwards.... And now, God bless you, my dearest Hal. I long to see you, and am most thankful for all the tender, devoted, anxious affection you bestow on me; I am unspeakably _grateful_ to you. Kiss dear Dorothy for me, and tell her for goodness' sake to exert herself, and either be, or allow you to be, slightly ridiculous, or she will die of perfection, and you of a plethora of absurdity, or ridiculousness _rentré_--struck in, as the French say. I forgot to tell you that ---- has declined my terms, but offered me others, which I have declined. I have still two other managers, with one of whom I think I may perhaps be able to come to some agreement. Since writing thus far, I have seen Moxon, who has offered me far more than I expected for my journal before reading it; begging me to let him pay me a portion of it at once, and adding that if, upon perusal of the manuscript, he thinks his profits likely to warrant his giving me more than the sum now named, he should not consider himself justified in not doing so by the fact of his having offered me less. Good-bye, dearest. Yours ever, FANNY. [It is impossible to have been more generous than Mr. Moxon was in this whole transaction. While talking about the dealings of booksellers with authors, he said that he always bore in mind the liberality he had benefited by when, starting in business a poor and obscure publisher, he had been munificently assisted by Rogers, whose timely aid had laid the foundation of his prosperity. "As I was dealt by," he said, "I endeavor to deal by others, and should be glad to inspire them with the grateful regard towards me which I shall always retain for him." Rogers surely did himself more injustice by his tongue than all his enemies put together could have done him; his acts of kindly generosity were almost as frequent as his bitter, biting, cruel words.] BANNISTERS, Saturday, 16th. Yes, my dear Hal, I do intend to correct my own proofs (I thought my proofs corrected me).... I have just returned from a delightful visit of two hours, which our dear friend Emily contrived for me, to ----, the dentist! Not content with cheering and soothing my sadder hours with the number and variety of her medical resources (pills, draughts, doses, potions, lotions, lozenges, etc.), her ever active and considerate affection hit upon this agreeable method of relieving my stay at Bannisters of any possible tedium, and two hours of the darkest, dampest, dreariest winter weather have thus been charmed away through her tender and ingenious solicitude for my enjoyment. My dear Hal, what you say about laughing _with_ people, as an _instead_ for laughing _at_ them, is, like most things you say, frightful nonsense. And what sort of a laugh, moreover, is it that you offer that unfortunate Dorothy for her feeble participation? Nothing of a healthy, wholesome, vigorous, vital, individual, personal kind; but some pitiful pretence of wit or humor, having for its vague or indefinite object ideal or general, abstract, impersonal, or, so to speak, invisible intangible subjects, wanting all the vivacious pungent stimulus that belongs to real individual absurdity, and the direct ridicule of it, judiciously and dexterously applied; the only efficient--I had almost said legitimate--object of a rational creature's amusement. If Dorothy depends upon you for her entertainment (otherwise than as you involuntarily, unconsciously, naturally, and simply furnish it to me), I pity her; and if you depend upon her for yours, I pity you still more--for I doubt if even I, according to my own system, could extract any from her, she is so _painfully_ _un_ridiculous. You must be deplorably dull together, I am--certain, I was going to say--satisfied; but that's neither kind nor civil, and I heartily wish for both _your_ sakes that I was with you. I am not sure that that visit may not be accomplished yet; for my reappearance on the stage does not seem likely to take place so very immediately but that I might perhaps contrive to run down to you for a short time. But, indeed, all my concerns are like so many pennies tossed up in the air for "heads or tails," and I cannot tell how they will fall, or what results I may arrive at. I have been asked to go down to Manchester, to act, and if I have any great difficulty or delay to encounter in finding an engagement in London, I shall probably do so.... The step I am about to take is so painful to me that all petty annoyances and minor vexations lose their poignancy in the contemplation of it (_à quelque chose--à bien des choses malheur est bon_), and having at length made up my mind to it, smaller _repugnancies_ connected with it have ceased to affect me with any acuteness.... Moxon cannot publish my Italian journal immediately, because the whole of the American edition must be ready to go to press before he brings it out here. I suppose it will come out some time after Easter. Emily told you of his first offer for it, and of his gallant mode of making it. He is surely a pearl and a pattern of publishers. Kiss that facetious "Virgin Martyr" for me. Such a laugh as you two are likely to get up together! I declare it brings the tears to my eyes to think of it. I rejoice in your account of H---- W----. It must be a blessing to every one belonging to him to see him do well such a duty as that of an Irish proprietor, in these most miserable times. I have at present nothing further to impart to you but the newest news, that I am Ever yours, FANNY. [The last sentence of this letter refers to the failure of the potato-crop, and the consequent terrible famine that desolated Ireland.] 10, PARK PLACE, ST. JAMES'S, February 1st, 1847. I feel almost certain, my dear Hal, that it will be better for me to be _alone_ when I come out at Manchester than to have you with me, even if in all other respects it were expedient you should be there. My strength is much impaired, my nerves terribly shattered, and to see reflected in eyes that I love that pity for me which I shall feel only too keenly for myself, on the first night of my return to the stage, might, I fear, completely break down my courage. I am glad for this reason that I am to come out at Manchester, where I know nobody, and not in London, where, although I might not distinguish them, I should know that not a few who cared for me, and were sorry for me, were among my spectators. I am now so little able to resist the slightest appeal to my feelings that, at the play (to which I have been twice lately), the mere sound of human voices simulating distress has shaken and affected me to a strange degree, and this in pieces of a common and uninteresting description. A mere exclamation of pain or sorrow makes me shudder from head to foot. Judge how ill prepared I am to fulfil the task I am about to undertake.... This, however, is one of the most painful aspects of my work. It has a more encouraging one. It is an immense thing for me to be still able to work at all, and keep myself from helpless dependence upon any one.... The occupation, the mere _business_ of the business, will, I am persuaded, be good rather than bad for me; for though one may be strong against sorrow, sorrow and inactivity combined are too much for any strength. Such a burden might not kill one, but destroy one's vitality to a degree just short of, and therefore worse than, death--crush, instead of killing and releasing one.... I was reading over "The Hunchback" last night, and could not go through the scenes between Julia and Clifford, when he assumes the character of Lord Rochdale's secretary, without an agony of crying. I do not see how I am ever to act it again intelligibly, but I suppose when I _must_ do it I _shall_. Things that have to be done are done, somehow or other. God bless you, my dear Hal. I am ever yours, FANNY. One word to Dorothy. Now, my beloved and best Dorothy, haven't you enough to do with that most troublesome soul, Harriet, without being my "good angel" too? [Miss W---- often went by the name of Harriet's "good angel."] I have never seen mine; but if I have one, I should think he or she must be a sort of spiritual heavenly steam-engine, _a three-hundred angel-power_, in order effectually to take care of me. My dearest Hal, I have missed the dear nuisance of your letters so dreadfully these few days past, that I began seriously to meditate writing to you to know if I had offended you in any way. As for how I fare in this cold weather, the weather is nothing to me, and I used not to mind cold at all, but rather to like it; but my flesh is forsaking my bones at such a rate that I am beginning to shiver for want of covering, and I think to be reduced to a skeleton--a live one, I mean--while the thermometer is as low as it is will be very uncomfortable. The satisfaction I had in my visit to my brother was that of seeing a person for whom I have a very warm affection, and, in some respects, a very sincere admiration. I believe, too, it was a comfort to poor John to see me and receive the expressions of my love and sympathy.... For his warm heart, his truthfulness and great simplicity of character, his worldly poverty, his great intellectual wealth, but, above all, for that he is my brother, I love him. He and his children are living in a poor small cottage, on a wild corner of common near Cassiobury. How I thought of our old--no, our young days, driving along past "The Grove" and the Cassiobury Park paling. My brother's present home is certainly not an extravagant residence, and though, of course, sufficient for absolute necessary comfort (how much comfort is _necessary_?), is nothing more.... John has advertised in the _Times_ for a pupil to prepare for college, and should he be able to obtain one, it would, of course, materially assist him. In the mean time he is working with infinite ardor and industry upon an important work, the "History of the English Law." A friend of his, whom I met there, who is, I think, a competent judge, which, of course, I am not, of any such matter, assured me that the work was one of great erudition and research, but at the same time so dry and difficult, and therefore little likely to be popular, that it would not be easy to persuade any publisher to undertake it. He, Mr. B----, carried the first volume, which is complete, to town with him, to show it to persons capable of appreciating it, and endeavor to get it a little known, so as to procure an offer for its publication. Poor John! his perseverance in the studies he loves is very great, his devotion to them very deep, and if he could only live upon his means with his beloved mistress, Learning, I should think he had made a noble and honorable choice, however bitterly disappointed my father may feel at his not choosing to follow more lucrative pursuits. I am going to act in _Dublin_. I have neither time nor space for more. God bless you. Ever yours, FANNY. 10, PARK PLACE, Friday, 12th, 1847. Direct to me at Manchester, "Theatre Royal," my dear Hal, that is all; or, indeed, I should prefer your directing to the Albion Hotel, that same house where you and I were so charmed by the sunlight on the carpet. You say I do not know the value of letters. I think I do, for if I had not the very highest value for them I should long ago have given way to my detestation of writing, and put an end to my innumerable correspondences. Your letters have more than once been snatched up by me, and pressed to my lips; so have my sister's.... I hate writing, it is true, but am content to pay that price for the intercourse of my friends; and though I may not love letters as you do, I do think I have a reasonable appreciation of their value. I share in your feeling, dearest Harriet, about my being in Dublin while you are absent from it. I do not know that it seems to me "wrong," but it certainly does seem as unnatural as that there should be a theatre open in Dublin at all at this time, when famine and such dire distress are prevailing in parts of the country. I am troubled, too, at the uncertainty of how and when we are to meet; and the reason why these various considerations do not, perhaps, engross so much of my thoughts as they do of yours is because I have so many immediate and necessarily absorbing claims upon my attention. I incline with you, however, to think that I shall not go to Dublin. I have not heard again from the manager, and I begin to hope that he has thought better of his invitation to me. As my work is a matter of necessity, I could not, of course, refuse an engagement in Dublin; but it does seem monstrous that there should be people willing to pay for theatrical entertainments there at this time. If I do not go I shall lose an opportunity of seeing my brother Henry, which I am looking forward to with great pleasure--the only pleasure in the whole expedition, since you will not be there, which will indeed seem most strange and very _inappropriate_. Harriet, _you_ certainly have a passion for writing, for in your last you have repeated every word I said about my brother John, just as if you had invented it yourself. You are like Ariel, very; and I am like Prospero, very ("Dull thing! I said so"); or, no, I am like Falstaff, to be sure, and you like Prince Hal, with "damnable iteration." ... Various of my London men friends threaten coming down to Manchester during my engagement there; Charles and Henry Greville, Chorley, and even Moxon, who declared, if my play was brought out, he must be in the pit the first night to see it. [This was my play called "An English Tragedy," which there was some talk of bringing out at Manchester.] I dare say the courage of all of them will give out before this bitter cold, and I shall not be sorry if it does, for I want no sympathizers to make me pitiful over myself. I am tolerably well just now, and really believe that when once I am fairly out of the fangs of the dressmakers I shall gather strength rapidly. The crudest fact in my fate at present is that I have actually not been able to get all my things made here, and am taking the materials for my Juliet and Queen Katharine dresses to be made up at Manchester; and this is horrid, because, but for this, my off evenings would have really been seasons of rest and quiet. However, it is of no use lamenting over any one detail of such a whole as this business.... Give my love to dear Dorothy. She is half my good angel, by her own voluntary assumption of the character.... Do not be troubled overmuch for or about me, my dearest friend; but commend me, as I do you and myself, to God, and believe me Ever yours, FANNY. 10, PARK PLACE, Saturday Evening. MY DEAR HAL, I never did, and I never shall, offer anything I write to anybody. If my friends ask me for anything I write, I will get it for them, just as I would anything else they ask me to get or to do for them; but I have no idea of volunteering such a bestowal upon anybody. Emily asked me for a copy of my "Year of Consolation," and I have promised her one, and I will certainly give you one if you wish for it. As for accounting, by any process of reasoning of mine, for your desire to have my book, I am quite unable to do so. My love for my friends would never make me wish to read their books, unless I thought their book likely to be worth reading. Now, I cannot assume this with regard to my own, especially as I don't believe it. Our friends' characters, their love for us, and ours for them, is the stuff of which our adhesion is made; and unless I had a genius for a friend, I should care little for any other mental exhibitions from those I loved than those their daily intercourse afforded me. In personal intercourse, unless a person is a genius, you really get that which is best intellectually, as well as every other way, from your friend. Even in the case of a great genius, I should think his daily intercourse likely to be more valuable in an intellectual point of view than his best works; but then, of such a mind one would naturally wish to possess all and every product that one could obtain. If I thought myself a genius, I might offer you my books unasked--perhaps. I shall be at the Albion at Manchester, and if you wish to hear from me, you will do well to write to me there.... I have had a most terrible day of fatigue and worry, breaking my back with packing my things, and my heart with paying my bills. Dear Henry Greville goes to within fifty miles of Manchester with me to-morrow, and stays at a friend's house, whence he and Alfred Potocki purpose coming on for the play on Tuesday evening. After all, I am not sorry he is coming; his regard for me is not of a sort to make me dread the weakening effect of his sympathy, and it will be comfortable to know that among that strange audience I have just such a kind well-wisher as he is, to keep up whatever courage I have. Perhaps you may yet see me in Dublin, for the manager wishes me to renew my engagement after the first six nights; and, of course, if he pays me my terms, I shall be glad to remain there as long as he likes. Give my dear love to dear Dorothy. I am thoroughly worn out, and feel quite unwell; and oh, how cold it will be in that railroad carriage to-morrow! God bless you, dear. Ever yours, FANNY. ALBION HOTEL, MANCHESTER, Monday, 15th. MY DEAR HAL, I cannot tell you exactly _all_ why I dislike writing letters, because my dislike is made up of so many elements. One reason is that the limits of a letter do not permit of one's saying satisfactorily what one has to say upon any subject. I think frequently that my letters must be highly unsatisfactory because of my tendency to discussion, which makes them more like imperfect essays than letters, the chief charm and use of which is to tell of daily events, interests, and occurrences; how one is, what one does, where one goes, etc. Now, while I fear my letters must be unsatisfactory to my friends because they seldom contain details of this sort, they are still more so to me, because I have neither room nor time in them to say anything about anything as I wish to say it. Then, I have an indescribable impatience of the mere mechanical process. You say that I talk, though I do not write, willingly to my friends, but whenever I get upon any subject that interests me, with anybody whom I am not afraid of wearying, I talk till I have said all I have to say; and though I never spoke about anything that I cared for without afterwards perceiving that I had left unsaid many important things upon the subject while I spoke, I spoke all that came into my mind at the time. In writing this is never the case, and fast as my pen flies, it seems to me to stick to the paper; while in speaking, what with my voice, my face, and my whole body, I manage to convey an immensity of matter (stuff, you know, I mean) in an incredibly short time. Impatience of all my limitations, therefore, is one cause of my dislike to letter-writing. You say that I do not object to conversation, though I do to correspondence: and it is quite true that I sometimes have great pleasure in talking; but if I had to talk, even upon the subjects that interest me most, as much as I have to write in the discharge of my daily correspondence, I should die of exhaustion, and fancy, too, that I was guilty of a reprehensible waste of time. That I am doing what gives my friends pleasure, and is but their due, alone prevents my thinking my letter-writing a waste of time. As therefore it is not to me, as to you, a pleasurable occupation in itself, I do not think it can be compared with "reading Shakespeare, Schiller," or indeed any book worth reading. The exercise of justice towards, and consideration for, others is a form of virtue, and _therefore_ letter-writing is, in some cases, a good employment of time. I have a desire for mental culture, only equalled by my sense of my profound ignorance, and the feeling of how little knowledge is attained, even by scholars leading the most active and assiduously studious existences. My delight in my own superficial miscellaneous reading is not so much for the information I retain (for I forget, or at least seem to do so, much of what I read), as for the sense of mental activity produced at the time, by reading; and though I forget much, something doubtless remains, upon the whole. Knowledge, upon any subject, is an enchanting _curiosity_ to me; fine writing on elevated subjects is a source of the liveliest pleasure to me; in all kinds of good poetry I find exquisite enjoyment; and not having a particle of satisfaction in letter-writing for its own sake, I cannot admit any parallel between reading and writing (whatever I might think of arithmetic). I have sometimes fancied, too, that but for the amount of letter-writing I perform, I might (perhaps) write carefully and satisfactorily something that might (perhaps) be worth reading, something that might (perhaps) in some degree approach my standard of a tolerably good literary production--some novel or play, some work of imagination--and that my much letter-writing is against this; but I dare say this is a mistaken notion, and that I should never, under any circumstances, write anything worth anything. I have always desired much to cultivate the accomplishment of drawing; it is an admirable sedative--a soothing, absorbing, and satisfactory pursuit; but I have never found time to follow it up steadily, though snatching at it now and then according as opportunity favored me. I give but little time to my music now (though some every day, because I will not let go anything I have once possessed); for I shall never be a proficient in it, and I already have as much of it at my command as answers my need of it as a recreation. Any of these occupations is more agreeable to me than letter-writing; so is needlework, so is walking out, so is--almost anything else I could do. Now, as Shylock says, "Are you answered yet?" I should be sorry my brother Henry went to the trouble or expense of coming over to Manchester or Liverpool to see me, as there is every probability of my being in Dublin early in March, where I shall act till the 22nd, and perhaps longer. I have the privilege of sitting with an engraving of Lord Wilton, in his peer's robes, _hung_ opposite to me--enough surely for any reasonable woman's happiness.... God bless you, dear; give my love to dear Dorothy. I rejoice for her that the cold is gone. Ever yours, FANNY. My kind friend Henry Greville, and that very charming young Alfred Potocki, brother of the Austrian Ambassadress, Madame de Dietrichstein, and a great friend of Henry's, came down with me half way, yesterday; they stopped at a friend's house about fifty miles from Manchester, and come up to-morrow to see the play, so that I shall have the comfort of people that I like, and not the trial of people that I love, near me on that occasion. I am not very nervous about my _plunge_; the only thing that I dread is the noise (noise of any sort being what my nerves can no longer endure at all) which I am afraid may greet me. I wish I could avoid my "reception," as it is called, because any loud sound shakes me now from head to foot; this is the one thing that I do dread--I have gained some self-possession and strength in these past years, and I hope my acting itself, as well as my comfort in acting, may benefit by my increased self-command. Poor Hayes (my maid) says that the peace of being alone with me, after our late lodging, is like having left _Hell_; we shall see what she says to-morrow night at the theatre,--poor thing. Farewell. ALBION HOTEL, MANCHESTER, Wednesday, 17th. MY DEAR LADY DACRE, I acted Julia in "The Hunchback" last night (the first time for thirteen years); got up this morning with a dreadful cough and sore throat, the effect of over-exertion and exposure; went to rehearsal after breakfast, rehearsed Lady Macbeth and Juliana in "The Honeymoon" (a _dancing_ part!); have written to three managers, from whom I have received "proposals;" have despatched accounts of myself to my father and sundry of my friends; have corrected forty pages of proof of my Italian journal; have prepared all my dresses for to-morrow; have received sundry visits (among others, that of a doctor, whom I was obliged to send for), and have wished that I had not had so much to do. I am so far satisfied with my last night's experiment, that I think it has proved that my strength will serve to go through this sort of labor for a couple of years; and I hope during that time, by moving from one place to another, that my attraction may hold out sufficiently to enable me to secure the small capital upon which I can contrive to live independently. The theatre here is beautiful; the company very fair; the plays are well and carefully got up. The audience were most exceedingly kind and cordial to me, and I think I have every reason to be thankful, and grateful, and more than satisfied. The manager wants me to renew my engagement, which is a sign, I suppose, that he is satisfied too. With affectionate respects to my lord, believe me, my dear Lady Dacre, Ever yours, FANNY. MANCHESTER, Thursday, 18th. I cannot tell how many books have been written by geniuses, dear Hal, and therefore, being unable to answer the first question in your letter, pass on to the next. The people that I have to deal with here seem to me very much like all other people everywhere else. The proprietor and manager of the theatre is an active, enterprising, intelligent man, who knows the _value_ of liberality, and that generosity is sometimes the most remunerative as well as amiable and popular line of action. He is a shrewd man of business, a little rough in his manner, but kindly and good-natured withal, and extremely civil and considerate to me. He is anxious that I should renew my engagement, and I shall be very willing to do so, on my return from Dublin. My stage-manager is a brother of James Wallack, well bred, and pleasant to deal with, and also very kind and courteous to me. Everybody in the theatre is civil and good to me, and I am heartily grateful to them all. As for my good host and hostess of the Albion, they really look after me in the most devoted and affectionate manner, so that I am quite of my poor maid's opinion, that this is a paradise of peace and comfort compared with Mrs. ----'s lodging-house. My dressing-room at the theatre is wretched in point of size and situation, being not much larger than this sheet of paper, and up a sort of steep ladder staircase: in other respects, it is tidy enough, and infinitely better than the dark barrack-room you remember me dressing in when I was in Manchester years ago, when I was a girl--alas! I don't mean a pun! It is not the same theatre, but a new one, built by the Mr. Knowles who engaged me to act here, and one of the prettiest, brightest, and most elegant playhouses I ever saw; admirable for the voice, and of a most judicious size and shape. Unfortunately, a large hotel has been built immediately adjoining it (I suspect by the same person, who is a great speculator, and apt, I should think, to have many, if not too many, irons in the fire), and the space that should have been appropriated to the accommodation of the actors, behind the scenes in the theatre, has been sacrificed to the adjoining building, which is a pity. If I were to tell you the names of the people who act with me, you would be none the wiser. The company is a very fair one indeed, and might be an excellent one, if they were not all too great geniuses either to learn or to rehearse their parts. The French do not put the flimsiest vaudeville upon the stage without rehearsing it for _three months_; here, however, and everywhere else in England, people play such parts as Macbeth with no more than three rehearsals; and I am going to act this evening in the "Honeymoon," with a gentleman who, filling the principal part in the piece, has not thought fit to attend at the rehearsal; so that though I was there, I may say in fact that I have had no rehearsal of it,--which is businesslike and pleasant. Oh, my dear Hal, I strive to judge of my position as reasonably as I can! I do hope that in spite of the loss of youth, of person, and feeling (which latter communicates itself even to acting), I may be able to fill some parts better than I did formerly. I have no longer any nervousness to contend with--only a sense of the duty I owe to my employers and spectators, to take the utmost pains, and do my work as well as I possibly can for them. My physical power of voice and delivery is not diminished, which is good for tragedy; my self-possession is increased, which ought to be good for comedy; and I do trust I may succeed, at least sufficiently to be able, by going from one place to another, and returning to America when I have worn out my public favor here--say, in two years,--to make what will enable me to live independently, though probably upon very small means. I write this after my first night's performance, and I trust my views are not unreasonable. How I wondered at myself, as I stood at the side scene the other night, without any quickening of the pulse or beating of the heart--thanks to the far other experiences I have gone through, which have left me small sensibility for stage apprehensions; and yet I could hardly have believed it possible that I should have been as little nervous as I was. When I went on, however, I had to encounter the only thing I had dreaded; and the loud burst of public welcome (suggestive of how many associations, and what a contrast!) shocked me from head to foot, and tried my nerves to a degree that affected my performance unfavorably through several scenes. But this was my first appearance after thirteen years of absence from the stage; and, of course, no second emotion of the kind awaits me. The exertion and exposure of the performance gave me a violent cold and sore throat, and I have been obliged to send for a doctor. I had _two_ rehearsals yesterday, which did not mend matters, but I have bolstered myself up _pro tem._, and what with inhaling hot water and swathing my throat in cold, and lozenges and gargles, etc., I hope to fight through without breaking down.... I have heard from Catherine Sedgwick, who says that it is a long time since she heard from you or Emily. She adds: "I shall be very glad to hear from them again. In your absence, I had nothing to give interest to my letters to them, and I have not written; and they, naturally, had no sufficient motive to write to me, so that I have been in complete ignorance about them. Harriet S---- I reckon among my friends for both worlds." God bless you, my dear Hal. Give dear Dorothy my love. Ever yours, FANNY. MANCHESTER, Tuesday, 23d. A thousand thanks, my dear Lady Dacre, for all your kind inquiries about, and sympathy in, my concerns. I am going on prosperously. The theatre is quite full when I play, in spite of the very bad weather, and I think my employer can afford to pay me, without grudging, my nightly salary. I think you are right in saying I am my own best critic; my mother being gone, I believe I really am so. I have played, since I last wrote to you, Juliana, in the "Honeymoon," a rather pretty, foolish part, which I act accordingly; Lady Macbeth, which I never could, and cannot, and never _shall can_ act; and Juliet, which, I suppose, I play neither better nor worse than formerly, but which, naturally, I am no longer personally fit to represent. I am not very well, for the returning to such labor as this after thirteen years' disuse of it, and at thirty-seven years of age, is a severe physical trial, and has, of course, exhausted me very much. Nothing more, however, ails me than fatigue, and I have no doubt that a few more nights' "hard use" will enable me to stand steady under my new load of heavy circumstance. You have asked me for newspaper reports, and I send them to you. You know my feeling about such things, but that is nothing to the purpose; if you can care for such praise or dispraise of me, it is no less than my duty to furnish you with it, at your request, if I can. You know I never read critiques, favorable or unfavorable, myself; so I do not even know what I send you. Good-bye. Remember me respectfully and affectionately to Lord Dacre, and believe me ever Yours truly, FANNY. MANCHESTER, Thursday, 25th. DEAR HAL, Mr. H. F. Chorley I believe to be a great friend of mine, and an uncommonly honest man, but I may be mistaken in both points. Your inquiry about my health I cannot answer very triumphantly. I am not well, and my feet and ankles swell so before I have stood five minutes on the stage, that the prolonged standing in shoes, which, though originally loose for me, become absolute instruments of torture, like those infamous "boots" of martyrizing memory, is a terrible physical ordeal for either a tragic or comic heroine--who had need indeed be something of a real one to endure it. Some of this trouble is due to general debility, and some to the long-unaccustomed effort of so much standing, and will, I trust, gradually subside as I grow stronger and more used to my work.... I acted Juliet last night, and I am very weary to-day, but thankful to have my most arduous part well over. Give my love to dear Dorothy. I am very sorry to hear of her being so unwell, for I know how anxious you must be about her. Thank her for her kind words to me.... God bless you, my dear, I am ever as ever yours, FANNY. MANCHESTER, Friday, 26th. DEAR HAL, My throat has given me no more trouble since my first night's acting. I have a pertinacious cough, and a tremendous cold in my head, which are nuisances; but I am free from irritation in the throat, and have found hitherto, in my performances, my voice stronger, instead of weaker, than it was.... I am better than I was last week, and have no doubt I shall acquire strength as I go on, as my first start in this dismal work did not quite break me down. The people here have shown me the most extreme kindness and hospitality, and I have had invitations to dine out every day this week that I have not acted. My brother Henry has come over from Dublin, to spend a couple of days with me, and his visit has been an immense pleasure and comfort to me. My time, thank God, is so incessantly occupied with all kinds of business--writing letters to managers, acquaintances, and friends; rehearsing, acting, looking after my dresses, correcting proof-sheets, and receiving visits--that I have no leisure but what I spend in sleep. Henry has promised to mount me on a horse of his, when I get to Dublin; and I am sure that my favorite exercise will be of the greatest benefit to me. The actors here are not more inattentive than they generally are, everywhere, to their business; their carelessness and want of conscience about it is nothing new to me, and all my bygone professional experience had fully prepared me for it. The company here is a better one than I shall probably find anywhere, even in London; and I have the advantage of having to do with a very civil, considerate, and obliging stage-manager. I have made, at present, no further engagement for acting here. I shall spend Passion-week at Sutton Park with the Arkwrights, who have written to beg me to do so, and whose vicinity to this place makes that arrangement every way best for me, as in Easter-week I am to act in Manchester again, for the benefit of the above-mentioned courteous stage-manager. From the 12th to the 17th of April, I act at Bath and Bristol; and after that I think it is probable I shall act for a short time in London,--but this is uncertain. Your questions, for which you apologize, are particularly agreeable to me, as, in spite of the ready invention and fluent utterance on which you compliment me, I am always charmed to have the subject of my letters suggested to me by the questions of my friends. As my engagement in Dublin, like all the engagements I make, is _a nightly one_, if it does not answer to the manager I shall of course immediately put an end to it. I am secured from loss by payment after each performance but should never think of taking what I do not bring to my employer. Mr. Calcraft writes me that he is sanguine about the engagement, in spite of the public distress, and wants me to leave three nights open after the 22d for the extension of it. We shall see. God bless you, dear Hal. Give my affectionate love to Dorothy. I am most happy to hear she is better. The kindness of the Manchester people has filled my room with flowers, my "good angels," about which I am becoming every day more superstitious, for I am never four-and-twenty hours in a place that some do not make their appearance, to cheer and comfort me. Farewell. Ever yours, FANNY. BIRMINGHAM, Sunday, 28th. MY DEAR LADY DACRE, I played last night for the last time in Manchester. The house was immensely full, and when I went on the stage after the piece, so loud and long and cordial were they in their kind demonstrations of good-will to me that, what with the exhaustion of a whole day's packing (which I have to do for myself, my maid being utterly incompetent) and the getting through my part, the whole thing was too much for me, and I turned quite faint, and all but fell down on the stage. But I am not a fainting woman, and so only went into violent hysterics as soon as I was carried to my dressing-room. So much for that "pride" which you speak of as likely to prevent my shedding tears when encountering the kind acclamations of a multitude of my "fellow-creatures;" the most trying to the nerves of all demonstrations, except, perhaps, its howl of execration. I came to this place to-day, and feel indescribably cheerless and lonely in my strange inn. The room at Manchester was the _home_ of a fortnight, but this feels most disconsolately unfamiliar. Moreover, I only act here one night, Tuesday, and then go to Liverpool, where the master of the Adelphi Hotel, where I shall stay, is a person to whom I have been known for many years, in whose house I have been with my children, and where I shall feel less friendlessly forlorn than I do here. I shall remain there about a week, and then go to Dublin, where I expect to stay about a fortnight, and where I shall find my youngest brother--a circumstance of infinite consolation and comfort to me. Passion-week I spend at Sutton Park with the Arkwrights; after that go to Bath and Bristol, and then to London, where I have now an engagement for a month at the Princess's Theatre. You have now the map of my proceedings for the next six weeks, after which I hope I shall see you in London. I direct this to Chesterfield Street, as you say you shall be back there on Thursday. I have been kept constantly supplied with the loveliest flowers all the time of my stay in Manchester, by one kind person or another, which has greatly helped to keep up my courage and spirits. Pray give my respects to Lord Dacre. I am ever, my dear Lady Dacre, Yours truly, FANNY. ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, Thursday, March 4th, 1847. MY DEAR HAL, I do not go to Bath, but to Manchester, on the 25th and 27th, and perhaps on the Monday of Passion-week; but this is not certain. If not on that Monday, then early in Easter-week; and Passion-week I shall spend with Mrs. Arkwright at Sutton. On Thursday in Easter-week, April 8th, I must be in London, as I act there for two nights gratuitously for your poor starving fellow-countrymen, for whom an amateur performance is being got up. On April 15th I go down to Bath, and act there on the 17th, and my engagement at the Princess's Theatre does not begin till the 26th of that month. This is the plan of my campaign as far as it is laid out; should any change occur in it, I will let you know as soon as I know of it myself. And so your plan for my taking the air, my dear, was to get into a _close_ fly. I confess that would not have occurred to my ingenuity, or I should think to that of any but an Irish humorist. I don't feel sure that there mayn't be a pun hidden somewhere in your proposition. _The damp_, indeed, I might have taken, to the greatest perfection, for there did stand a whole row of vehicles before my very windows at Manchester which were being saturated through and through with the rain that fell upon them all day long, and must have adapted them admirably for the purposes of a healthful drive for an invalid suffering from sore throat and a heavy cold. I have nothing to say to your impertinent remarks on my zigzag progress to my various engagements, neither any observation to make about Emily's information upon the subject of my white cashmere gown. I am perfectly persuaded that, as a considerable amount of food goes into one's stomach, the use of which is merely to produce necessary distension of all the organs, channels, receptacles, machinery, etc., in short; so a considerable amount of words proceeds out of our mouths, the use of which is merely to keep our lungs aired and our speaking organs in exercise; and for that purpose the follies, and foibles, and even faults of our friends are excellent material, provided no bitterness mixes in the process; from which, as I feel myself very safe between you and Emily, I abandon myself absolutely to you both; and as I believe scribbling (apparently unnecessary) is as necessary to the health of both of you as the apparently superfluous food and words which people swallow and utter, I am quite content you should fill up your paper with the mad eccentricity of the order of my engagements, the rotation of my gowns, and the dripping street-cabs in which I refuse to take the air for the benefit of my health.... I do not know who the amateurs are who are to act for the starving Irish with me in London. Forster, the editor of the _Examiner_, I hear, is one; Henry Greville, who, indeed, is the getter-up of the whole thing, another; but for the rest I do not know. Your people are what are commonly called a generous people; and that, I suppose, is why they don't mind begging. I think it takes an immensity of generosity to beg. Only think of Mr. Radley, here at the Adelphi, expressing his surprise, when he saw me, that you were not with me! Was not that really quite touching and nice of him? My cousin, Charles Mason, is here.... His amiable temper and gentle manner made him a favorite with my poor mother, and I like to see him on that account.... How sorry I shall be for both you and Dorothy when your pleasant time at Torquay is over! especially for you, who will have to see misery and sometimes hear nonsense. I mean when you go back to Ireland; not, _of course_, while you are with me.... ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, Sunday, 7th. I have minded what you said (as when didn't I?), and am swallowing ipecacuanha lozenges by the gross. It drives me almost crazy that you should be compelled to make your plans so dependent upon mine, which are so dependent upon the uncertain wills and arrangements of so many people. The manager of the Princess's Theatre, where I am engaged to act in London, will not allow me to act for the proposed charity at the St. James's Theatre. I offered to give up the engagement with him rather than break my promise to the amateurs and disappoint all their plans; but he will not let me off my engagement to him, and will not permit me to appear anywhere else before that takes place. I think he is injuring himself by balking a pet plan of amusement in which all manner of fine folks, lady patronesses, and the Queen herself, had been induced to interest themselves; and I think his preventing my acting for this charity will injure him much more than my appearance on this occasion, before my coming out at his theatre, could have done. But, of course, he must be the judge of his own interest; and, at any rate, having entered into an engagement with him, I cannot render myself liable to squabbles, and perhaps a lawsuit with him, about it. All these petty worries and annoyances torment and confuse me a good deal. I have a very poor brain for business, and there is something in the ignoble vulgarity and coarseness of manner that I occasionally encounter that increases my inaptitude by the sort of dismay and disgust with which it fills me. If the person who has hired me does not relent about these charity representations, I shall be obliged to give them up, and then I shall act in Manchester at that time, instead of on the 25th and 27th of March, which had been before intended, but which I now think I should give to two representations in Chester on my way back from Dublin. All this, you see, is still in a state of most vexatious uncertainty, and I can give you no satisfaction about it, having been able to obtain none myself.... Perhaps, dearest Hal, I ought not to have asked you the precise meaning of what you wrote about dear little H----[her nephew, a charming child, who died in early boyhood], but, every now and then, those expressions which have become almost meaningless in the mouths of the great majority of those who use them strike me very much when used by thinking people. Unless death produces in us an immediate accession of goodness (which, I think, in those who have labored faithfully to be good here, and are therefore prepared and ready for more goodness, it may), I cannot conceive that it should produce greater nearness to God. Place, time, life, death, earth, heaven, are divisions and distinctions that we make, like the imaginary lines we trace upon the surface of the globe. But goodness, surely, is nearness to God, and _only_ goodness; and though I suppose those good servants of His who have striven to do His will while in this life are positively nearer to Him after death, I think it is because, in laying down the sins of infirmity that inevitably lodge in their mortal bodies, they really are thus much better after death. I do not think this is the case with those who have not striven after excellence, which a young child can hardly be supposed to have done; because if there is one thing I believe in, it is that there is work to do for every soul called into conscious existence.... If Dorothy were to die, I should believe she had gone nearer to God. His care and love for us is, I verily believe, the nearest of all things to us; but I think our _conscious_ nearness to Him depends upon how we do His will--_i.e._ how we _strive_ to do it. I do not speak of Christ in this discussion, because, you know, I think it was God's will, but man's nature, that He came to show us, and to teach; and this part of the subject would involve me in more than I have space to write: but we will speak of this hereafter. Is it not strange that Charles Greville and you should both be writing to me just now upon this same subject, of life after death? I have been walking to-day and yesterday in the Botanical Garden here.... The place is full of the saddest and tenderest recollections to me; it is full, too, of innumerable witnesses of God's mercy and wisdom; plants and flowers from every climate, and the annual resurrection of the earth is already begun among them. I am very unwell to-day, but I was well yesterday, and this seems to be now the sort of life-tenure I may expect:--so be it. God bless you, dear. I am ever yours, FANNY. DEAR DOROTHY, I send you a kiss, which Hal will give you for me. MORRISON'S HOTEL, DUBLIN, March 14th, 1847. MY DEAR HAL, I think you must have begun to think that I never meant to write to you again; for it is seldom that three unanswered letters of yours are allowed to accumulate in my writing-book; but since I left Liverpool, I have really not had leisure to write.... The houses at Liverpool were crammed, but here last night there was a very indifferent one, partly, they say, owing to the fact that the Lord Lieutenant bespeaks the play for to-morrow night; but I should think it much more rational to account for it by the deplorable condition to which the famine has reduced the country, which ought to affect the minds of those whose bodies do not suffer with something like a sympathetic seriousness, inimical to public diversions.... I do not care to pursue the argument with you about the change produced by death in the existence of a child. That which you say about it appears to me to involve some absolute contradictions; but I would rather postpone the discussion till we meet. Charles Greville began writing to me upon these subjects, with reference to the rapidly declining health and strength of his and my friend, Mary Berry; over whose approaching death he lamented greatly, although she is upwards of eighty years old, and, according to my notions, must be ready and willing to depart. Charles Greville's ideas, as far as I can make them out, appear to me those of a materialist. His chief regret seems to be for the loss of a person he cared for, and the departure of a remarkable member of his society. Beyond these two views of the subject he does not appear to me to go. He has sent me, in the last letter I received from him, an extract from one of Sir James Mackintosh's, on the death of his wife, which he calls a "touching expression of grief," but which strikes me as rather a deplorable expression of grief without other alleviation than the dim and doubtful surmise of a mind the philosophy of which had never accepted the consolations of revelation, and yet, under the pressure of sorrow, rejected the narrower and shallower ones of stoical materialism. You wish to hear of my arrangement with my cousin, Charles Mason, and I will tell you when it is decided on.... I have had a note from your sister, asking me to dine with them any day after the 16th, when they expect to come to town; but I have declined the invitation, because I do not wish to give up dining with my brother Henry, who comes to me every day when I don't act.... It seems strange that you should ask me if uncertainty, torments me. It torments me SO that I never endure it, even when the only escape from it is by some conclusion that I know to be rash and ill-advised. "The woman who deliberates," says the saying, "is lost." My loss has been, and ever will be, through precipitation, not deliberation. To choose anything, a gown even, is a martyrdom to me, and, unlike the generality of my sex, I generally go into a shop, wishing to look at nothing, and knowing only the precise color, material, and quantity of the stuff I mean to purchase; for if I were to leave myself the smallest discretion--option, we will say (I can hardly leave myself what I haven't got)--I should infallibly buy something revoltingly ugly, out of mere impatience of the investigation and deliberation necessary to get something that pleased me. It is to save myself from the trouble of choice that I have made so many arbitrary and, to your thinking, absurd rules about the details of my daily life; but they spare me indecision about trifles, and I find it, therefore, comfortable to follow them. I am at Morrison's hotel; the rooms are clean, comfortable, and cheerful, but the fare is bad and far from abundant; but if the charges are meagre in proportion, I shall be satisfied, if not with food, at least with equity. My friend Arthur Malkin is here, as secretary to one of the members of the committee sent out from England to organize relief for your wretched countrymen. He is good and clever, and it is a great pleasure to me to have him here. I am sorry Mr. Labouchère [afterwards Lord Taunton] is away in Parliament. I wished particularly to have met him. Lord Bessborough was at the play last night, and sent, after it was over, to invite me to the St. Patrick's ball on Wednesday; but I have declined, as I do not feel at all well enough for dissipations that would bore as well as tire me. I am told he means to ask me to dine at the Castle, which I rather dread, as it is not, I believe, allowable to refuse a representative of majesty; but I dread the exertion and the tedium of the thing, and have a particular dislike to the notion of meeting ----.... Good-bye, my dear. Ever yours, FANNY. [Our total ignorance of the laws of health and the accidents of sickness throws us necessarily for help upon the partial knowledge of physicians; but I am often reminded of what that admirable physician and charming man, Dr. Gueneau de Mussy, once said to me: "Madame, nous ne savons rien." "Ah mais!" remonstrated I, "cependant quelque chose?" "Absolument rien, madame," was the consolatory reply of one of the first medical men of Europe, under whose care both I and my sister then were, and to whose skilful and devoted care I attribute the preservation of my sister's life under circumstances of great peril. The amateur performance given at the St. James's Theatre was Lord Ellesmere's translation of Victor Hugo's "Hernani," which had been acted sixteen years before under such very different circumstances, as far as I was concerned, at Bridgewater House. Mr. C---- was again the hero, as I the heroine, of the piece, but the part of Don Carlos was filled by Henry Greville, and that of the old Spanish noble by Mr. John Forster. It was upon this performance that Mr. Macready passed such annihilating condemnation, not even excepting from his damnatory sentence of total incapacity his friend and admirer, John Forster, whose mode of delivering the part of Don Ruez bore ludicrous witness to Macready's own influence and example, if not direct teaching. Macready does not even mention poor Forster; the entry in his diary runs thus: "Went to the amateur play at the St. James's Theatre; the play "Hernani," translated by Lord Ellesmere, was in truth an _amateur_ performance. Greville and Craven were very good _amateurs_, but--tragedy by amateurs!" The recital of a very graceful and touching poetical address, written by Lady Dufferin for the occasion, was part of the evening's work assigned to me, and as I was so weak and suffering from my late severe illness as to be hardly able to stand, it was with a sense of having certainly done my share in the evening's charity that I brought my part of the performance to a close. While standing at the side-scene before going on to speak this address, dear Lord Carlisle brought me a most exquisite bunch of flowers, saying, "I know I ought to throw this at your head from the front of the house, but I would rather lay it at your feet here." He then, to my great amazement, proceeded to spread out my satin train for me with a dexterity so remarkable that I asked him where he had served his apprenticeship. "Oh, at Court," said he, "at the drawing-rooms, where I have spread out and gathered up oceans of silk and satin, thousands of yards more than a counter-gentleman at Swan and Edgar's." He certainly had learned his business very well. After leaving Dublin I entered into an arrangement with my cousin, Charles Mason, to become my agent, and make my engagements for me, undertaking the necessary correspondence with the managers who employed me, and looking after my money transactions with them for me. I stood greatly in need of some such assistance, being quite incompetent to the management of any business, and ignorant of all the usual modes of proceeding in theatrical affairs, to a degree that rendered it highly probable that my interests would suffer severely from my ignorance. My cousin, however, only rendered me this service for a very short time, as he left England for America soon after he undertook it; after which I reverted to my former condition of comparative helplessness, making my contracts with my employers as well as I could, and protecting myself from loss, and keeping out of troublesome complications and disputes, by the light of what natural reason and rectitude I possessed; always making my engagements by the night, and thus limiting any possible loss I might sustain or inflict upon my employers, to my salary and their receipts, for one performance. I also reduced my written transactions to the very fewest and briefest communications possible, with my various theatrical correspondents, and have more than once had occasion to observe that precision, conciseness, and a rigid adherence to mere statements of terms, times, and purely indispensable details of business, were not the distinguishing features of the letters of most of the men of business with whom I corresponded.] QUEEN'S HOTEL, BIRMINGHAM, Saturday, May 29th. MY DEAR HAL, How did you get through that dreary time after we parted? I did so repent not having left some of my "good angels," my flowers, with you; for though you do not care for them as I do, I love them so much that I think they would have seemed part of myself to you. What a vision remained to me of your lonely stay in that horrid room! But the day passed, and its sorrow, as they all do; and when this reaches you, you will be comfortable and rested, and among your own people again. From Liverpool to Crewe I had companions in the ladies' carriage in which I was; after that I had it to myself, and lay stretched on the ground for rest the whole of the rest of the way. I finished Dr. Mays's memoir, and read through half Harriet Martineau's book, before I reached this place. Women are always said to talk more than men, and yet I have generally observed that when Englishwomen who are strangers to each other travel together, not a single word is exchanged between them; while men almost invariably fall into discourse together. This, I suppose, is partly from the want of subjects of general interest among women, such as politics, agriculture, national questions of importance, etc., which form excellent common ground of conversation for chance companions; while the questions of human society and considerations which concern men and women alike may be too important or too futile, too general or too special, to admit of easy discussion with strangers. The fact is, that most women's subjects of interest are so purely personal and individual that they can only be talked over with intimates. I like Harriet Martineau's book very much, though perhaps not quite so much as I expected. What pleases me best is its spirit, the Christian faith in good, which is really delightful; though I cannot help thinking she mistakes in supposing that one _must_ be very ill before one believes in God's sole law, _good_, more almost than in one's own existence. The descriptions of natural objects are admirable, and the human loving-kindness excellent; but I think she pushes her propositions sometimes to the verge of paradox.... I am delighted to have it, and think it better reading than the _Dublin Magazine_. I got here at a little after three. The house is upside down with cleansing processes, by reason of which I am put (till a smaller one can be got ready for me) into an amazingly lofty large room, with some good prints hung on the walls, and a pianoforte; seeing which privileges, I have declined transferring myself to any other apartment, and shall be made to pay accordingly. Tell me of your errand to the theatre at Liverpool, and how you spent the day, and how the sea treated you, and everything about everything. God bless you, my dear. Ever yours, FANNY. BRISTOL, Sunday, May 30th, 1847. A thousand thanks, dear friend, for Liebig's book. You are right, I want something more to read. I finished Harriet Martineau (Oh, what ink! wait till I get some better) yesterday evening before tea, and the pamphlet on bread after I got into bed, and the "Liverpool Tragedy" (such a thing!) this morning in the railroad; so that your present of Liebig's book came to my wish and to my need, just as a gift from you should do; and I shall spend this Sunday afternoon in learning those wonderful things, and praising God for them. I regret very much that I cannot recollect anything distinctly that I read, because the consequence is that books of an order calculated to be of the greatest use to me, books of fact and positive scientific knowledge, are really of less advantage to me than any others, because of their making no appeal to what I should call my emotional memory, and so they only profit me for the moment in which I read them. Works of imagination, of criticism, of history, and biography (even of metaphysical speculation), leave more with me than treatises of positive knowledge or scientific facts. From the others, a spirit, an animus, a general impression, a mental, moral, or intellectual accretion, remains with me; indeed, that is pretty much the whole result I obtain from anything I read. But books of _knowledge_, of scientific or natural facts, though they sometimes affect me beyond the finest poetry with an awe and delight that brings tears to my eyes, have but one invariable result with me, to add to my love and wonder of God. Their other uses depend, of course, upon the memory which retains and applies them subsequently, either in action or observation; and this I fail to do, by reason of forgetting: and it is a sorrow and a loss to me, because the whole world is in some sort transfigured, and life endowed with double significance, to those who are familiar with the details of the wonderful laws that govern them, and their self-communion must be as full of variety and interest as their conversation is to others. I have infinite respect for knowledge; it is only second in value to wisdom, and to unite both is to be very _fortunate_--which word I use advisedly, for, though the nobler of the two, wisdom is allowed to all, knowledge is not. I agree with you in what you say of Harriet Martineau's book: the good in it is _her_ peculiar good (very good good it is, too), but it must be taken with the shadow of her bad upon it. It seems to me occasionally a little hard and dogmatical, and I have not liked it, upon the whole, as much as I expected, for it is rather less Christian than I expected; yet it is a very valuable book, and I was very thankful for it. I shall send the recipe for making effervescing bread forthwith to Lenox, to Catherine Sedgwick, who is a martyr to dyspepsia and bad baking, and who, being herself an expert cook, will know how to have the staff of life prepared from these directions, so as to support instead of piercing her, as it mostly does, up among those country operators. They never have good bread there, and are all miserable in consequence, especially herself and her brother Charles, who have delicate stomachs and cannot endure the heavy sour concoction which they are nevertheless obliged to swallow by way of daily bread. (I almost wonder how they manage to say the Lord's Prayer petition for it.) The note you forwarded me from Liverpool was another scream from that mad manageress about Macbeth. I wonder if her whole life is passed in such agonies; I think it must be worse than the greatest bodily pain. Only think, my dear, on arriving here, and inquiring for Hayes, I recollected that I had sent her to Bath and not to Bristol! "Consekens is," as Mr. Sam Weller says (but alas for you! you don't know Pickwick), that I have had to send off a porter from this house to Bath, per railway, to reclaim my erring maid, and fetch her hither; and, being Sunday, fewer trains go between the two places than usual, and she cannot get here till near four o'clock this afternoon, until which time I dare not trust myself to think of the state of mind of the abandoned (in the perfectly honest sense of the word) Bridget or Biddy Hayes; indeed, I shall not get her here till six this evening, and I only hope that I may then. What a moon there was last night! and how it made me think of you, as it shone into the dark lofty room at Birmingham, where I sat playing and singing very sadly all by myself! The sea must have been as smooth as glass, and you cannot have been sick, even with your best endeavor. The road from Birmingham here is quite pretty; the country in a most exquisite state of leaf and blossom; the crops look extremely well along this route; and the little cottage gardens, which delight my heart with their tidy cheerfulness, are so many nosegays of laburnum, honeysuckle, and lilac. The stokers on all the engines that I saw or met this morning had adorned their huge iron dragons with great bunches of hawthorn and laburnum, which hung their poor blossoms close to the hissing hot breath of the boilers, and looked wretched enough. But this dressing up the engines, as formerly the stage-coach horses used to be decked with bunches of flowers at their ears on Mayday, was touching. I suppose the railroad men get fond of their particular engine, though they can't pat and stroke it, as sailors do of their ship. Speculate upon that form of human love. I take it there is nothing which, being the object of a man's occupation, may not be made also that of his affection, pride, and solicitude, too. Were we--people in general, I mean--_Christians_, forms of government would be matters of quite secondary importance; in fact, of mere expediency. A republic, such as the American, being the slightest possible form of government, seems to me the best adapted to an enlightened, civilized _Christian_ community, a community who deserve that name; and, you know, the theory of making people what they should be is to treat them better than they deserve--an axiom that holds good in all moral questions, of which political government should be one. This hotel is charming, clean, comfortable, cheerful, very nice. Farewell. Give my kind regards to your people, and believe me Ever yours, FANNY. MY DEAR HAL, _Go to Atkinson's and Co., 31, College Green, Dublin, and Pay £8 13s. for my sister, and get a receipt for it, and send it to me, and do this just as fast as ever you love me--that is, this very minute._ I will repay you when we meet, or as much sooner as you may wish. I have this morning received a note of eleven lines from Rome from Adelaide, without one single word of anything in it but a desire that I will immediately pay this debt for her; not a syllable about her husband, her children, herself, or any created thing, but Messrs. Atkinson and Co., and £8 13s. Therefore do what she bids me, and I ask you "right away," as the Americans say, that I may send this afflicted soul her receipt, and bid her be at rest. That they are still in Rome I know only by the address, which she does put, though not the date; as a compensation for which, however, she heads her letter with the sum she wishes me to pay, thus-- _Rome, Trinita dei Monti._ £8 13_s._ --a new way of dating a letter, it strikes me. She must have had poplin on the brain. I wrote to you yesterday, my dear, and therefore have little to say to you. After all, _I_ had directed my poor maid perfectly _write_! (look how I've spelt this, in the tumult of my feelings and confusion of my thoughts!), and she arrived, but not till three o'clock in the afternoon, paper in hand, with the direction I had myself written as large as life--"The Great Western Hotel, Bristol." The fact is that I had made so sure that she would be here before I was, that, not finding her on my arrival, I made equally sure that I had misdirected her to Bath, and despatched one of the hotel porters thither to hunt for her, which he did, sans intermission, for two hours, and on his return had the pleasure of finding her here. What a capital thing a clear head is, to be sure! At least, I imagine so.... I have just come back from rehearsal at the theatre, where I found a letter from Emily, containing a bad account of her mother, and a most affectionate, cordial, illegible scrawl from poor dear old Mrs. Fitzhugh herself. I also received a letter from Henry Greville, full of strictures upon my carriage and deportment on the stage, and earnestly entreating me to suffer his _coiffeur_ ("a clean, tidy foreigner") to whitewash me after the approved French method, _i.e._, to anoint my skin with cold cream, and then cover it with pearl powder; and this, not only my face, but my arms, neck, and shoulders. Don't you see me undergoing such a process, and submitting to such "manipulation"? I have read more than half through Liebig, and am always tempted to glance at the paragraphs _ahead_ to see what wonders they contain. I have not yet consulted the last chapter for the "winding-up of the story." The marvels in the midst of which we exist are a "story without an end." I find some of his details of "quantity" a little puzzling sometimes, but nothing else, and the book is delightful. Charles Mason drank tea with me last night, and talked well, and with a good deal of information, about chemistry. He has read somewhat, and has some superficial knowledge of various subjects; moreover, is a judge of physiognomy, for he said he never saw a countenance with a more beautiful expression of goodness than yours. Evidently, like Beatrice, he can "see a church by daylight." Isn't it a pity that he can no longer be my agent? Were you not struck with his great resemblance to your idol, John Kemble? My mother used to say he was more like his son than his nephew; and never having seen his uncle even, the curious collateral likeness showed itself in all sorts of queer tricks in his delivery and deportment on the stage, where, in spite of his resemblance to his celebrated kinsman, he is a most lamentable actor. Of course, being an educated man, he speaks with "good discretion;" of the "emphasis" the less said the better. I go to Bath to-morrow morning, and remain there until Thursday, when I return here to act Lady Macbeth and then go back again to represent that same lady at Bath either Friday or Saturday. Farewell, my dear. God bless you. Ever yours, FANNY. BATH, Wednesday, June 2d. I have just had a long visit from Mr. C----, who is here, and who came to see me this morning with a young niece of his--a fair, sweet-looking girl of about eighteen, who, strangely enough, asked me a good many questions about my affairs.... At the end of their visit, I found that the young lady, while talking and listening to me, had torn up a visiting-card and, with the fragments of it, put together on the table the outline of a tiny Calvary, the cross upon a heap of rocks. I suppose she is a Catholic, like her uncle, and I wonder why so many religious people of all sorts and denominations take it for granted that others stand in need of "Hints to Religion." ... I was reminded (unnecessarily) of you at the theatre yesterday evening when, immediately after the hateful stage-warning at my dressing-room door of "Overture on, ma'am!" (the summons to the actors who are to begin a piece), I heard the orchestra break forth into your favorite strain of "Sad and fearful was the story." ... The instinctive horror of suffering of our poor human bodies is pitiful. What a sorry martyr I should have made! though I think I should not so much object to others inflicting pain upon me as to inflicting it upon myself,--that seems to me such an absurd and disagreeable work of supererogation, I should never have been a self-body-torturer for the salvation of my soul.... You would have been amused yesterday evening if you had been at the theatre with me. The weather was so beautifully bright that I could not bear to shut the shutters and light the gas, so I dressed by the blessed light of heaven, and was sitting all rouged and arrayed for my part, working, with my back to the window, when a small mob of poor little ragged urchins, who had climbed over a railing that separated the theatre from a mean-looking street behind it, collected round it, and, clambering on each other's shoulders, clustered and hung like a swarm of begrimed bees at the window, which was near the ground, to enjoy the sight of me and my finery. Bridget, who is kind-hearted and fond of children, turned the dresses that were hanging up right side out for the edification of the poor little ragamuffins, and their comments were exceedingly funny and touching. We could hear all that they said through the window--how they wondered if I put _them_ beautiful dresses on one by one, or over each other; the rose in my hair, which you gave me, and the roses in my shoes, made them scream with delight; and if you could have heard the pathetic earnestness with which one of them exclaimed, "Oh my! don't you wish _them ere windies was cleaner_!" for the dirt-dimmed glass obstructed the full glory of the vision not a little. Poor little creatures! my heart ached with compassion for them and their hard conditions, while they hung and clung in ecstatic amazement at my frippery. The house at Bristol the first night was wretched, my share of it only £14; here last night it was much better, but I do not yet know the proceeds of it. Charles Mason has latterly dropped a hint or two about intending shortly to go to America, so that I dare say he will be quite prepared to terminate his present arrangement with me. In the railroad, coming from Bristol to Bath, I met Edward Romilly, a kind and pleasant acquaintance of mine. I had Liebig's book in my hand, which he said was rather severe railroad reading, and proceeded to enlighten me as to the unsoundness of some of the author's positions and deductions. Now, you know, Edward Romilly married Mrs. Marcet's daughter, and, I take it for granted, in virtue of such a mother-in-law, is wise upon natural philosophy; but still, when one's ignorance is as huge and one's faith as implicit as mine,--when one's one endless, supreme question about everything is Pilate's bewildered, "What is Truth?"--when from history, science, literature, art, nature, one receives every impression with the child's yearning query, "But is it true?" it makes one feel desperate and deplorable thus to have one teacher contradict and discredit another. After all, all knowledge by degrees turns to ignorance, as it were, by dint of more knowledge; and human progress, passing from stage to stage in its incessant onward flight, leaves deserted, from day to day and hour to hour, its temporary abiding-places. There is no rest for those who learn, and ignorance is a great deal more complete and perfect a thing, _here_, at any rate, than knowledge; with which paradox let me hug my ignorance, only regretting that I ever spoiled it by learning even so much as my alphabet. In spite of Mrs. Marcet's son-in-law, I have finished Liebig, and now have only "Wilhelm Meister" to read, which is one of the most wonderful books that ever was written. I have read it often, and each time I do so I think it more wonderful than before. Do you remember poor Mignon's last song?--"Sorrow hath made me early old, make me again for ever young!" No wonder you love youth, my dear; in heaven there are no old people. The gardens in which this house stands are exquisite, and full of lovely children, who are a perpetual delight to me. Good-bye, my dear. BATH, Friday, June 4th. DEAR HAL, ... I have just spent a delightful hour with three charming little creatures, children of the master of this hotel, for whom I have been buying toys, and who have been amusing themselves with them and allowing me a time of enchanting participation. I drove this morning, because you told me to do so, through the piece of ground they call the park here. It is extremely pretty, and I never grow weary of admiring the orderly love of beauty of our people. I have had another long visit from Mr. C---- this morning.... Certainly novelists invent nothing more improbable than life. I had an explanation with Charles Mason yesterday afternoon, and he did not appear at all annoyed at my intention of discontinuing our present arrangement. I shall give up to him the entire receipts for one night, as else I am afraid he will hardly do more than cover his expenses. Then--the money that worthy man at Liverpool _borrowed_ from me, which I shall assuredly never see again, and my travelling and living expenses deducted--my clear gains for this fortnight will be £68. It is not much, but all that much better than nothing. I shall be in town next week, and had intended, at the end of it, to go down to Bannisters; but Emily writes me that they cannot have me then, so I shall probably go to Plymouth, where they want me to act, and after that return to town again, and organize some more country engagements for myself; for I can't afford to be doing nothing. I go to town to-morrow morning, and shall be glad to be _at home_ again. I am writing with a vile iron pen, that has neither mind, soul, nor body. God bless you, dear. Good-bye. Ever yours, FANNY. ROYAL HOTEL, PLYMOUTH, June 16th. MY DEAR HAL, Do not again put that sponge, saturated with that _stuff_, in your letters. The whiff of it I got accidentally in one I received some days ago was very pleasant, but the quantity you send me to-day is too much, and has given me a headache, and made me sick. Such virtue is there in proportion! Such immense difference in only _more_ or _less_! You bid me _lump_ my answers to you, but I hate to do that. I cannot bear to defraud you in quantity, though inevitable necessity condemns me to the disparity of quality in our communications; but to give you poor measure in both seems to me too bad.... I shall act here on Friday, and leave for Exeter on Saturday, and I shall act there one or two nights, but I do not yet know precisely how often. I expect to be in London by the end of next week, and to remain there for a week, after which I shall probably go for some nights to Southampton, so that, in a sort of way, I shall see Emily, and she will see me; further than this I have not at present decided. I have yet to visit the Midland Counties, where I have had engagements offered me, and York, Sheffield, and Leeds; after which I shall probably go on to Scotland. But all this is at present without fixed date. Some time in the summer, I have promised to visit the C----s (Roman acquaintances of ours) at Brighton; and I shall stay some time in Scotland at a place called Carolside, with that very nice Mrs. Mitchell, with whom I am fast growing into a fast friendship. We shall be a strange company of widows at her house--herself, T---- M----, poor Emily de Viry, and poorer myself. These are my floating plans for the summer. Of course you will hear into what specific arrangements they consolidate themselves by degrees. _All_ the theatres where I act--indeed, as far as I can see, all the theatres throughout the country--are Theatres Royal; and with very good reason, for they are certainly all equally patronized by royalty. I forgot to tell you that before leaving London, I carried your bag, _i.e._ my worsted-work, to your nephew's lodging, beseeching him, in a civil note, to take charge of it for you. I have received a civil note from him in reply, professing his readiness to do so, but adding that he will not be in Dublin till the dissolution of Parliament, which will not take place till the middle of July; in reply to which, I wrote him another civil note, telling him I would apprise you of this, and then you could either leave the bag in his custody, till he went to Ardgillan, or inform him of any method by which you might choose to have it forwarded to you more immediately. I am not satisfied with the way in which it is made up; my own work was thick and clumsy enough, and I think they have finished the bag with a view to matching, rather than counteracting, these defects in the original composition. However, its value to you I know will be none the less for this; though, as I also know you are very _particular_, I wish it had been more neatly and lightly finished. I have put the strip of worsted-work you wished preserved inside the bag, and would humbly advise you to cut it up for kettle-holders, for which purpose it appears to me infinitely better adapted than for the housewife you proposed to make of it. However, you know I am shy about giving advice, so never mind what I say.... The weather is cold, rainy, windy, in short, odiously tempestuous; in spite of which I went into the sea yesterday, and shall do so every day while I am here; the freshness of the salt water is delicious. Now, at this present moment, when I was about to close this letter, comes another from you, and I shall lump that in this answer; for 'tis absurd merely to wait till to-morrow that I may take up another sheet of paper to write to you upon, when in all human probability I shall have nothing new whatever to tell you. I find that Charles Mason has made arrangements for me with the Exeter manager, and that I shall act there four nights, and therefore be there all next week, and only return to London next Saturday week. This was in contemplation when I came here, but had not been determined on until to-day. I have had a very affectionate letter from Lady Dacre, asking me to go down to the Hoo and stay some time with them, which I will do between some of my coming engagements.... No, my dear Harriet, you cannot imagine, and I cannot say, how I shrink from demonstrating a great deal of the affection that I feel; there are no words or sign adequate to it that I should not be reluctant to use, and I think this is at variance with the unhesitating and vehement expression of thought and opinion, and mere impression that is natural to me: but we are all more or less compounded of contradictions, and I _more_ than _less_. At the Exeter Station, coming down to this place, an obliging omnibus or coach driver offered to carry me to Torquay if I was bound thither. Wouldn't it have been nice if I had said _Yes_, and you and Dorothy had still been there? but you weren't, so I said _No_.... Both the Grevilles are friends of ours. Henry has been very intimate with Adelaide for a long time. He has a great many good qualities, and, though essentially a society man, has a good deal of principle; he is not very clever, but bright and pleasant, and very amiable and charming. His brother Charles has better brains, and is altogether a cleverer person. He is a man of the world, and more selfishly worldly, I think, than Henry, whose standard of right is considerably the higher of the two; indeed, Charles Greville's _right_ always appears to me a mere synonym for _expedient_, and when I tell him so, he invariably says "they are the same thing," which I do not believe. He is, unfortunately, deaf, but excellent company in spite of that. I met him the day before I left London, at dinner at Lady Essex's, and he told me he and Lord de Maulay were going to start next week on a riding tour through England, beginning with Devonshire. I think it very probable that I shall see him in Exeter next week, as he is to be at the Duke of Bedford's in that neighborhood. He talked eloquently of the beauty of the scenery they were going through, and very seriously urged me to join their party, and ride over England with them, saying it would be a delightfully pleasant expedition--of which I have no doubt, or of the entire propriety of my joining it, and "cavalcading" through Great Britain in his and Lord de Maulay's company. Now I'll tell you what I've done to-day--my holiday. In the first place it poured with rain all the morning, so I sent for a pair of battledores and a shuttlecock, and when Charles Mason came to render up last night's account, I made him come into a beautiful large ball-room I had discovered in this house, and took a good breathing; and he, being like Hamlet, "fat and scant of breath," took it hard. NEW LONDON INN, EXETER, Monday, June 21st. DEAR HAL, Thanks for the purse, which I received this morning. I think you must imagine these country managers pay me as the monks did Correggio, in copper; perhaps, too, you have visions of me carrying my pay home on my back, as he did. (I forget whether that sad story is among the traditions exploded by modern _truth_.) You have not received my last letter from Plymouth, or you would not have sent me again this tremendous "smell." I beseech you, dear Hal, not to saturate your paper any more with Neroli, or whatever you call it; it gives me a headache, and turns me sick. My present address is as above, and I shall remain here until Saturday morning, when I return to town. I only like the leather purse because you have given it to me, and though that makes me _love_ it, it does not make me _like_ it--my preference is for the pretty, colored, delicately woven purses, through whose meshes the gold and silver smiles and glances, that you see me use, or abuse, as you think, and as their use is to be worn out, I am not much afflicted at their dropping into holes, and in due process of time fulfilling their destiny. This inn is in the middle of the town, and an old, dingy, dull house; and I have an old, dingy, dark sitting-room, and the only trees I see are two fine _felled_ elm trunks, which I have been industriously sketching. The cathedral here is a grand old church, and I went yesterday afternoon to service there; but the choir was full, so I sat on a sort of pauper's wooden bench, just outside the choir, and under the beautiful porch that forms the entrance to it; and heard the chanting, but nothing else. I had Hayes with me, and she earnestly entreated me to sit with my feet upon hers, to protect myself from the cold stone pavement; was not that touching and nice of her? I am sure I ought to be grateful for such a comfort as she is to me. Poor thing! she has been in great trouble about her mother. When she was in Ireland she took a small sum of about ten pounds, which belonged to her mother, and placed it in the hands of an aunt of hers, in whom she had implicit trust, wishing to withdraw the money from the possible risk of its being got from her mother by her brother, who lives with her,--he being selfish and unprincipled and likely to take it, and her mother affectionate and self-denying and likely to give it to him. And now poor Hayes gets word from her mother that her aunt says she can neither give her money nor money's worth, owing to the badness of the times; which of course troubles my poor maid very much, for she says her aunt is a woman of substance. However, she does not seem to think the money will ultimately be lost to her mother, but only inconveniently withheld for a time. At Plymouth, I had a very kind and pressing invitation from Lady Elizabeth Bulteel--Lord Grey's daughter, whom I have known for some time--to go and stay at her pretty place, Flete, two miles from Plymouth; but having to come on here, I could not go to her, which I was very sorry for. She sent me the most exquisite flowers, which I brought away with me, and which are still consoling me here. Good-bye; God bless you, my dear. Ever yours, FANNY. NEW LONDON INN, EXETER, Wednesday, June 23d. I do not plead guilty to general inconsistency, but only to particular inconsistency, in a particular instance, dear Hal.... You are quite welcome to accuse me of it, however; but as in your last letter you imply that I accept the accusation, I beg leave to state distinctly that I do not.... Not, indeed, that I make any pretensions to that order of coherency of action and opinion which is generally called consistency: my principles are few, simple, and comprehensive, and I rather desire so to embrace them with my heart, mind, and soul, that my conduct may habitually conform to them, than am careful in every instance of action to see whether I am observing them. Somebody said very well that principles were moral habits; and our habits become unconscious and spontaneous: and so I think should our consistency be, and not a sort of moral rule or measure to be applied and adjusted to each exigency as it occurs, to produce a symmetrical moral appearance. I think one reason why I appear, and perhaps am, inconsistent is because I seldom have any consideration for _expediency_--what I should call _secondary_ rules of conduct; and I have not much objection to contradicting my course of action in the present hour by that of the next, provided at each time I am endeavoring to do what seems best to me. I desire a certain _frame of mind_ that my conduct may flow habitually from it, without constant reference to outward coherency. In the course of life-long endeavor and practice, I suppose, this may be achieved. But do not think me presumptuous if I say that I think people are generally too afraid of appearing inconsistent, too desirous to seem reasonable,--in short, more anxious upon the whole about what they _do_ than what they _are_. Of course, the one will much depend upon the other; but they will _match_ well enough without an everlasting comparison of shades of color, if they are really in harmony, and, at all events, will certainly _harmonize_ even if they do not precisely _match_: there's a woman's shopping illustration for you.... Of course you will understand well enough that I have not referred to the capital inconsistency of which poor St. Paul so pathetically complained--wishing to do right and doing wrong,--nor would you have charged me individually and specially with this, alas! universal moral incoherency. This is my holiday, and I have been spending it between two famous nursery-gardens in the neighborhood of Exeter, and the cathedral. These great gardeners send up their exquisite and precious plants to the London horticultural exhibitions, and I saw many for whose beauty and variety gold and silver medals had been awarded to their foster-father florists. The masters of both these establishments very courteously went over them with me, showing me the hot-houses where their choicest and rarest plants were kept; there were some, such exquisite and wonderful creatures, lovely to the eye, delicious to the smell--Patagonians, Javanese, from the Cordilleras, from Peru, from Chili, from Borneo,--the flower tribes of the whole earth. Then, again, they showed me little pots of fine sand, covered with bell glasses, where the eye could hardly detect a point or shade of sickly green upon the surface,--the promise of some _unique_ foreign flower, sent from its savage home in the forests of another hemisphere, to blossom at the Chiswick horticultural exhibition, and win medals for the careful cultivators, who have watched with faith--assuredly in this case "the evidence of things not seen"--its precarious growth and doubtful development. One of these gentlemen horticulturists interested me extremely by his own fervent enthusiasm about his plants. He showed me two perishing-looking miserable dried-up _twigs_, and said, "Those are the only specimens of their kind in the kingdom. They come from Chili, and when healthy bear a splendid blossom as large as a tulip. These are just between life and death: I fear we may kill them with kindness, we are so anxious about them." He told me they had a flower-hunter out in South America, and another in India. And now I must go to bed, because it is twelve o'clock. I brought home some heavenly flowers from these earthly paradises, and then went and spent the rest of my afternoon in the cathedral--a beautiful old building, of various dates and architecture, the whole effect of which is extremely picturesque and striking. Good-night, my dear. I am ever yours, FANNY. ORCHARD STREET, Tuesday, August 24th. Rachel has been acting at Manchester, to houses of _sixty_ pounds (her nightly salary being _one hundred and twenty_), and this because Jenny Lind is going there. I must confess I have no patience with this--as if the rich Manchester merchants could not afford to treat themselves to both! Rachel is really pre-eminent in her art, and so this provokes me.... I dined with the Miss Berrys at Richmond on Wednesday, and met dear old Lady Charlotte Lindsay, who inquired as usual most affectionately after you. Mrs. Dawson Damer dined there, too, and said she remembered being as a very young girl at Wroxton Abbey (Lord Guildford's), and seeing you there a very young girl too. I began this letter two days ago, and am in all the full wretchedness of packing up. I set off to-morrow for Mrs. Mitchell's, where I hope to be on Thursday afternoon. I shall reach York to-morrow, at three o'clock, and intend sleeping there, of which I have written to apprise Dorothy, as I hope to see her for an hour or two in the evening. I am obliged to give up my Norwich engagement, which I am very sorry for; but the fast and loose style of the correspondence about it makes it impossible to fix any time for going there. The manager first asked me to go there in August, but now, because Jenny Lind is going there, he wants to put me off till the third week in September, at which time I expect to be in Glasgow, the manager of that theatre having written to me thence that October is not a good month there, and begged me to come in September. I am sorry to lose my Norwich engagement, but cannot help it. I have heard nothing more from the Princess's Theatre. ... My father talks of giving up his readings, and I have therefore spoken to Mitchell, of the St. James's Theatre, about giving some myself, and find him very willing to undertake the whole "speculation" and business, not only in London but all over the provinces, with me and for me; so that I do not feel quite as uncomfortable about the uncertainty of an engagement at the Princess's as I might have done. Mr. Mitchell is a Liberal, and an honest man, too, and I shall be quite safe in his hands; in the mean time I shall be very glad to be at Carolside instead of in London, though to-day and yesterday the weather has been very cold and chilly, and in Scotland is not likely to be warmer. Do you hear of this horrid murder in Paris [that of the Duchesse de Praslin, by her husband]? Ever so many people that I know here knew the unhappy woman and her still more wretched husband; and the woman who has been accused of having instigated the crime was little Lady Melgund's governess for six years. Good-bye, my dear. I am ever yours, FANNY. [Mademoiselle de Luzzy, the governess of the Duc de Praslin's children, was acquitted upon his trial of any complicity in his crime; that of which she was not acquitted, however, was, turning the hearts of her pupils against their unfortunate mother, and endeavoring to establish her position and authority in the duchess's home and family, at her expense. By a most strange turn of circumstance, Mademoiselle de Luzzy, thus connected with the great world of Paris and implicated in one of its most tragic occurrences, went to the United States, where she married a country clergyman, whose family belonged to the peaceful population of Stockbridge--one of the loveliest villages in the "Happy Valley" of the Housatonic. The residence of the Sedgwick family in this charming place attracted to it many foreigners of mark and distinction; but few, certainly, whose claims to notoriety were so peculiar and painful as this lady's. Mrs. Mitchell, of Carolside, was a Scotchwoman of an Aberdeen family. She was my dear friend for many years, and a perfectly charming person. Her face was exquisitely pretty and her figure faultless; she had very peculiar eyes of a lightish hazel, with such long lashes that it seemed occasionally as if her eyes were shining through a soft haze of golden brown rays. She spoke with a slight Scotch accent, the "winning Scottish speech" which Secretary Philips writes of as one of Mary Stuart's peculiar charms; and she was personally my notion of that "much blamed, much worshipped" modern Helen. She had remarkable decision of character and force of will, with the gentlest and most feminine appearance and manner; she was humorous and witty, and an incomparable mimic. She was a woman of admirably high principle and rectitude, and in every way as attractive as she was estimable. Her eldest son was proprietor of a charming place, Carolside, just over the Scottish border, and had hardly come of age and inherited it when the Crimean war broke out and compelled him, then a young officer in the army, to leave his pleasant home prospects and encounter the threatening aspect of "grim-visaged war." His mother, whose widowed life had been devoted to him and his younger brother, also a soldier, fluttered after her dear ones to the Crimea, and had the joy to get them safe back from the "world's great snare uncaught." Lady M---- and Mrs. Mitchell were attached and almost inseparable friends for many years, occupying the same house in London, travelling on the Continent together, and when in Scotland living together at Mrs. Mitchell's pretty home, Carolside, or hiring some house in the Highlands together. Emily de Viry (afterwards, alas! Emily de Revel) I met again, for the first time for many years, at Carolside. She was the daughter of our friends Mr. and Mrs. Basil Montague, and half-sister of my kind friend Mrs. Procter, and a very intimate friend of my sister Adelaide. She was an extremely interesting person, the tragic close of whose life can never be thought of without profound regret. She had married her cousin Count Charles de Viry, and after years of widowhood she married again the Count Adrien de Revel, Sardinian Ambassador in England, to whom she had not been united a week when they were both carried off by the cholera, which was then raging in Genoa: the same paper which announced their marriage brought the tidings of their untimely death to me. During this visit of mine to Carolside M. de Revel came there for a few days; I was well acquainted with him, and liked him very much.] CAROLSIDE, EARLSTON, Sunday, 29th. I am no more in London, my dear Hal, but in one of the sweetest places I ever was in, which, as you know, is a great delight to me. I am only just beginning to recover from the effects of the journey hither, which, though divided into two days, made me very unwell.... Surely, you never meant, in spite of my invariable habit of replying to all your questions, that I should ever attempt an answer to that suggestion of your love and sorrow which, in speaking of your brother [Barry S----, dead many years before], makes you exclaim, "What now is his nature?" ... I have been sorrier to think of the death of Dr. Combe than I was to hear of it, when, as is always the case with me, my first feeling was one almost of joy and congratulation. I never have any other emotion on first hearing of a good man's death. I have an instantaneous sense of relief, as it were, for such a one, of freer breathing, of expanded powers; of infirmity, pain, sorrow, trouble, fleshly hinderance, and earthly suffering for ever laid in the grave and left behind; and that glorious creature, a noble human soul, soaring into a purer atmosphere proper to it, and promoted to such higher duties as may well be deemed rewards for duties well fulfilled on earth. After a little while I began to cry, thinking of that sweet, beaming, intelligent, benevolent countenance, that I am never to see here again; but this was crying for myself, not him. I am truly grieved for his brother, and all who knew, and loved, and have lost so excellent a friend. I have a paper in my possession still, which he laughingly drew up and gave me when I was a girl in Edinburgh, a sort of legal document, binding him to appear to me after he was dead; and one or two evenings, as I lay on my sofa alone in Orchard Street, I thought of this, and could not help fancying that if indeed it had been possible he could have appeared to me, the familiar trust and affection with which I always regarded him would have been paramount to all fears and wonders in the first moment of my seeing him. I have heard nothing more of my engagement at the Princess's Theatre, and begin to think that perhaps I shall not hear anything more about it; but I scarcely expected to do so before the end of November, because till then I should not be wanted there, and I dare say the manager will leave me as long a time as possible to consider of his offers and my acceptance or rejection of them. I am charmed with my hostess. She is exceedingly pretty--a great virtue, as you know, in my estimation; she is upright, true, pious, and uncommonly reasonable and judicious: am I not right to be charmed with her? Then, too, she is most kind, gentle, considerate, and affectionate to me, and esteems me, as I believe I have before told you, far beyond my deserts--who can resist _that_ bribe? Upon several points upon which I differ from people's usual modes of thinking and feeling, I find there is a great similarity in our views; and I feel as if I might thank God for an addition to the treasure of excellent people's love that He has comforted my life withal; and count another friend added to those who have been such infinite blessings to me. I am left to conclude that Mrs. Grote was so absorbed in her interest in Mademoiselle Jenny Lind that I vanished utterly from her mind; for after coming to see me just before I went down to Bannisters and pressing me to go to the Beeches when I returned, I never heard another word about it, or even set eyes upon her again. I have been with your precious Dorothy, who came, both to my joy and sorrow, to meet me at the railroad station, with her poor face covered with that hideous respirator, and speaking when she had it off as if she still had it on, her voice was so pale and dim. It grieved me that she should have made an exertion that I feared might injure her, and yet I was delighted to see her and most grateful for her extreme kindness in thus troubling herself. She came, too, with her hands full of flowers (my "good angels" brought to me by your "good angel," which seemed to me pretty and proper, was it not?), and carried me straight off to Fulford [Miss Wilson's home near York], where, in spite of much pain and exhaustion consequent upon the long railroad journey, I passed a blessed few hours with her, though our talk inevitably was of much sorrow.... I have not had time yet to see anything of the condition of the people about this place. The villages and cottages we passed coming hither all struck me as poor and comfortless compared with England; but the less cleanly and tidy habits of the Scotch, and their almost universal practice of going barefoot--at least the women and children,--give an impression of greater poverty and discomfort than really exist, I believe. I have not yet received my American letters.... I am to act three nights at Glasgow. I think Kelso is the town nearest Carolside, and that is fourteen miles distant; the post town or village is Earlston (Ercildown), a mile from the house. The whole region belongs to poetry and legend and romance. The Eildon hills overlook it, and Thomas the Rhymer haunts it, and the Scotch ballads are full of it. Do you know--oh no, you know no songs, you unfortunate!--"Leader haughs and Yarrow," or that exquisite melody beloved of Mendelssohn:-- "Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride! Busk ye, busk ye, my winsome _marrow_!" (isn't that an odd term of endearment to one's mistress?) "Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride! And think nae mair on the braes of Yarrow"? Then there is that lovely ditty "Gala Water," which I always sing in honor of my young host, who is a sort of Laird of Galashiel. The whole place is full of such charming suggestions and associations. The Leader, a lovely, clear, rapid, shallow, sparkling trout-stream, makes a sudden bend across the lawn, opposite the drawing-room and dining-room windows here (last October the pixie got vexed at something and very nearly rushed in to the house); and early before breakfast this morning I walked along the banks of the stream, and then knee deep up its bright waters, and then over the breezy hills, "O'er the hills, amang the heather," whence I watched its gleaming course between red-colored rocks, like walls of porphyry or Roman tufa, and through corn-fields, and by tufted woods, and felt for an hour as if there was no bitterness in life.... I shall remain here till September 11th, when I go to Glasgow, where I expect to act on the 13th. I shall be very sorry to go away, but shall certainly by that time have had enjoyment enough to feel that it would be unwise to tempt the inevitable decree which makes all pleasure and happiness short-lived here, and which, when we strive to retain or detain them, makes us wise through some disappointment or disenchantment, which it is still wiser to anticipate and avoid. Farewell, dear Hal. I am ever as ever yours, FANNY. [Carolside was situated just beyond the Border in Scotland, in that region of romantic and poetical traditions, full of the charm of early legendary and ballad lore, of the associations of Burns's songs and Scott's Border minstrelsy, pervaded with the old superstitions, half-beliefs, dating from as far back as the days of Thomas the Rhymer, and the later powerful influence of the Wizard of the North, the mighty master-magician of our own day. Melrose, Dryburgh, and Abbotsford, Smailholme, and Beamerside, were all within easy distance of it; "the bonnie broom of Cowdenknowes" bloomed in its neighborhood; the Gala, the Leader, the Tweed, the Yarrow, ran singing through the lovely region, the exquisite melodies that have been inspired by their wild scenery. It was a region of natural beauty, heightened by every association that could add to its charm. The Eildon Hills were our landmarks in all our walks and rides and drives: and Ercildown, modernized into Earlston, the picturesque post-village at our gates.] CAROLSIDE, EARLSTON, September 5th. MY DEAR LADY DACRE, ... Of the advantageous engagement which you heard I had concluded I cannot speak with any certainty, for it never was settled definitively, and I begin to think will not be concluded. I think it may have been nothing more than a feint on the part of the manager of the Princess's Theatre, who has been urged by Mr. Macready's friends to engage me to act with him, and who, as he will not give me my terms, has, I think, perhaps merely tendered me an arrangement that he knew I would not accept, in order to be able to say that he had _endeavored_ to make an arrangement with me. I am very sorry for this, for employment during the winter months in London is what I much desired. However, "there is a soul of good even in things evil," and the later experiences of my life have left me little sensibility to spend upon crosses of this description. Not to be able to work for my own maintenance would indeed be a serious calamity to me; but if I fail of a theatrical engagement I shall fall back upon my original plan, to me so far preferable, of giving readings. I do not think that now, after a whole year of apparent relinquishment of that pursuit, my father has any thought of resuming it, which leaves me free to make the attempt. I am staying with a friend at a place on the Scottish Border; the Leader, famous in song, runs across the lawn; we are four miles from Melrose, and about as many from Abbotsford; the country is lovely, and full of poetical and romantic associations. I remain here another week, and then go to Glasgow, where I am to act; after that I expect to pass three weeks in Edinburgh, between my two cousins, Cecilia Combe (whom you remember as Cecy Siddons) and a daughter of my dear friend Mrs. Harry Siddons, who married Major Mair, and is living happily and prosperously in beautiful Edinburgh. I must either act or give readings during this time, as I can in no wise afford to be idle. It was a great disappointment to me to _boil_ by B----'s very door on my way here [Miss Barbarina Sullivan, Lady Dacre's granddaughter, now the Hon. Lady Grey], but my plans had been all disarranged and confused by other people, and I was most unwillingly compelled to pass by Howick. I have written to offer myself to her in the last week of October on my way back to London, and heartily hope she may be able and willing to receive me, as I long to see her in her new home. Pray give my kind regards to Mrs. Brand. You ought to be of the greatest use, comfort, and pleasure to each other, endowed, as you both are, with the especial graces of age and youth. With affectionate respects to Lord Dacre, believe me Ever yours, FANNY. [Miss Susan Cavendish had married the Hon. Thomas Brand, Lord Dacre's nephew and heir. When I wrote this letter young Mr. and Mrs. Brand lived a good deal at the Hoo with my kind old friends.] CAROLSIDE, EARLSTON, September 5th. You ask me what I am doing, dear Hal. I am driving fifteen miles in an open britzska, in a bitter blowing day, to return morning calls of neighbors, whose laudable desire is to "keep the county lively," and who have dragged my little hostess into active participation in a picnic at Abbotsford, which is to take place next Friday, the weather promising to reward the seekers after "liveliness" with their death of cold, if they escape their death of dulness. I have taken several charming rides; the country is beautiful. I have caught a tolerably good cold--I mean, good of its kind--by wading knee deep in the Leader, and then standing on cold rocks, fishing by the hour; in which process I did catch--cold, but nothing else; for, though the water is still drowning deep in some beautiful brown pools, set in the rocks like huge cairngorms, it is, for the most part, so shallow, and everywhere so clear with the long-continued drought, that the spotted trout and silver eels see me quite as well as I see them, and behave accordingly, avoiding me more successfully, but quite as zealously, as I seek them.... Our party has hitherto consisted of Emily de Viry, an uncle and brother of Mrs. Mitchell's, and a London banker, a friend of hers. This, with the "liveliness" of the neighborhood, with whom we have dined, and who have dined with us, has been our society. Next week Lady M----, who has been on a visit at Dunse Castle, returns, and various people are coming from sundry places; but, except the Comte de Revel, I do not know any of those who are expected. The only music I have is my own, _forbye_ a comic song or two, gasped and death-rattled out by poor old Sir Adam Fergusson, whom I met seventeen years ago at Walter Scott's house, and who is still tottering on, with inexhaustible spirits, but a body that seems quite threadbare, tattered, and ready to fall in pieces with long and hard use. I do not read to the party collectively, but occasionally to Emily de Viry alone, who has asked me once or twice to read her favorite poems of hers, of Wordsworth's, Tennyson's, and Milnes's.... I act in Glasgow on Monday, to-morrow week. On Sunday I shall be in Edinburgh, and shall go and see Cecilia and Mr. Combe. I am sorry you didn't see Mrs. Mitchell, for, though forty years old, she might be fallen in love with any day for her good looks only. She is my notion of what Mary Stuart must have looked like, but she is a marvellous wise and discreet body--mentally and morally, I should think, very unlike the bonnie Queen of Scots. Did I tell you that one place where we dined was Cowdenknowes? and I felt like singing "The Bonnie Broom" all the time, which would have been an awful accompaniment to the gastronomic enjoyments of the "liveliness of the county." Good-bye, my dear. Ever yours, FANNY. GLASGOW, Wednesday, September 15th. I do not know what my friend's religious opinions are. She was brought up in the midst of strict Presbyterians, but I suspect, from some things I have heard her say, that she is by no means an orthodox sample of that faith. But, you know, I am never curious about people's beliefs, nor anxious that my friends should think as I do upon any subject. The resemblance between Mrs. Mitchell's notions and mine was one that she was led to express quite accidentally on a matter on which few women would agree with me.... I have not heard from Adelaide for a long time--a month at least. The Comte de Revel, the Sardinian Ambassador, was at Carolside while I was there, and spoke of the condition of the whole of Italy as full of insecurity, and liable at any moment to sudden outbreaks of violent and momentous change. I cannot think that Rome will be a desirable residence for foreigners this winter; but E---- is so indolent that, unless people are massacred in the streets, and, moreover, in the identical street in which he lives, I should much doubt his being willing to move, or thinking it at all necessary to do so. I saw the old Countess Grey and Lady G---- just before they left London about three weeks ago. They were intending to winter in Rome, and told me they were much dissuaded by their friends from doing so. If you leave Ireland, as you say, on the 1st of October, I am afraid I shall not see you in London, for I expect to pass the whole of that month in Edinburgh; but I hope I shall find leisure to come to St. Leonard's, and see you and Dorothy while you are there. My plans are at present a little unsettled. I think of going back to Carolside with Mrs. Mitchell and Lady M---- until next Monday, when I shall return to Edinburgh, and from thence proceed to act four nights at Dundee; after that I shall be stationary in Edinburgh for, I hope, at least three weeks. I think I shall not act there, but have some thoughts of giving readings.... Good-bye, my dear. I am ever as ever yours, FANNY. DUNDEE, Thursday, 2d. MY DEAR HAL, Your letter directed to me to Greenock never reached me. I did not go there; and having left Glasgow without doing so, shall not visit that place at all now. I arrived yesterday in Dundee, having left Edinburgh in the morning. I act here two nights, and two in Perth, and return to Edinburgh on Wednesday week to remain with Elizabeth Mair (youngest daughter of Mrs. Harry Siddons) till the last week in October. After that I go southward to visit B---- G---- at Hawick, and the Ellesmeres at Worsley. Your letter about sleeping in Orchard Street, on your way through London, is so very undecided--I mean upon that particular point--that I shall write to Mrs. Mulliner (my housekeeper) to desire her to receive you, if you should apply for a lodging, so that you can do as you like--either go there or to Euston Square. I am delighted at the prospect of my three weeks' stay in Edinburgh. Nothing could exceed the affectionate kindness with which Lizzie and her husband received me. After all that I have seen at home and abroad, Edinburgh still seems to me the most beautiful city I ever saw, and all my associations with it (except those of my last stay there) are peaceful and happy, and carry me back to that year of my life spent with Mrs. Harry Siddons, which has been the happiest of my existence hitherto.... Elizabeth's children are like a troop of angels, one prettier than another; I never saw more lovely little creatures. The companionship of children is charming to me. I delight in them, and am happy to think that I shall live among Lizzie's angels for three weeks. I was living with children at Carolside. Emily de Viry had her little boy and girl with her, the latter a little blossom of only a year old, born, poor thing! after her father's death. Mrs. Mitchell's eldest son was at home from Eton for the holidays, a very fine lad of sixteen, devoted to his mother, who seems to me only to exist through and for him and his brother.... I am to act while I am in Edinburgh, which, of course, is a good thing for me. E---- has written to Henry Greville to take the house in Eaton Place which they looked at together when he was in London, so I feel sure they will be home in the spring. Adelaide has written a letter to Henry Greville, which he has sent on to me, assuring him of that fact.... She is enchanted at the idea of coming home. Good-bye, my dear. I will write this minute to Mrs. Mulliner to put you in my room, if you go to Orchard Street. Ever yours, FANNY. PERTH, Monday, September 27th. MY DEAR HAL, I do not understand your note of the 15th, which has only just reached me here on the 27th. You ask me if I "have not written to Lizzie Mair to ascertain her whereabouts." Lizzie is in Edinburgh. I spent the Monday and Tuesday of last week with her, and return there the day after to-morrow, after acting two nights in this lovely place, whither I came on from Dundee yesterday. I shall remain three weeks with Lizzie, and shall see Cecilia and Mr. Combe during some part of that time; for, though they did not return to Edinburgh, as I supposed they would on Dr. Combe's death, they are expected home daily now, and will certainly be there in the first days of October. I wrote from Dundee to Mulliner to make up my bed and do everything in the world for you that you required; and I wrote to you from Dundee, telling you that I had done so. I have now again this minute written to the worthy woman, reiterating my orders to that effect; so sincerely hope you will be properly attended to in my house. Jeffreys, I am sorry to say (sorry for my sake, glad for his), has found an opportunity of placing himself permanently with a gentleman with whom he lived formerly, and has written to tell me of this; so that you will not have his services while you are in Orchard Street. He was an excellent, quiet, orderly servant, and I am sorry I shall not have the advantage of his service during the remainder of my time here. I am engaged to act with Mr. Murray in Edinburgh for ten nights, from the 16th to the 25th of October. Before that I shall return for three nights to Glasgow, where my last three nights were very profitable, and the manager wishes to have me again. This will probably be next week, the 5th, 6th, and 7th of October. Perhaps I may go for a night or two to Greenock from Glasgow before I return to Edinburgh, but this is uncertain. From the 12th to the 15th I am going with Mrs. Mitchell, who will take me up in Edinburgh to visit the H---- D----s at Ardoch, and after that shall be stationary for ten days. PERTH, Tuesday, 28th. In spite of my innate English horror of untidiness, and my maid's innate Irish tendency to it, I should be very sorry if she were to leave me. She has lived with me many years, and I really love as well as esteem her. She has been more than a servant--she has been a friend to me; and I cried some tears at Carolside at the thought of parting with her.... I will tell you another point of agreement between Mrs. Mitchell and myself, which I also discovered accidentally. Emily de Viry was laughing at her for a peculiar mode of dress she has adopted, always wearing a cap upon her pretty head, and never uncovering her arms and neck, though both are beautiful, in evening dress. I was appealed to for my opinion about the costume of middle-aged gentlewomen, and could, of course, only state that it had been my own determination for some years past never to uncover either my arms or neck, or wear any but sober colors as soon as I was forty years old. This is one of those trivial points of agreement which sometimes indicate more resemblance between people's natures than a similarity of opinions on important matters, which may co exist with considerable difference in matters of taste and feeling. Mrs. Mitchell, like myself, does not think that stark nakedness would be indecent among decent savage people, but does object to full-dress semi-nudity among indecent civilized ones. Lady M---- did not come with me to Dundee. I would not let her, though her proposal to do so was certainly dictated partly by her affection for me.... But I would not let her come with me _strolling_, though I should only have been too glad of her company. She paints beautifully.... Alas! an empty heart is a spur and goad to drive one to the world's end, unless the soul be full of God, and the mind and time of wholesome occupation. The Mairs are excellently kind to me, and I look forward to my stay with them with great pleasure. Cecilia and Mr. Combe are expected daily in Edinburgh, so I shall lose little or nothing of them. I am just disappointed of a charming opportunity of seeing the lovely country round Perth. Lady Ruthven has sent me a very pressing invitation to spend some days at Freeland, seven miles from here; but I am obliged to return to Edinburgh to-morrow, for which I am very sorry, as I should have liked to go to Freeland, the whole neighborhood of which is beautiful. Good-bye. God bless you. Ever yours, FANNY. 29, ABERCROMBIE PLACE, EDINBURGH, Saturday, October 2d. DEAR HAL, I received a note from Mrs. Mulliner yesterday morning, expressing her readiness to receive you, and her full intention to devote herself to you to the very utmost of her ability. I am sorry Jeffreys will not be there to help you in getting cabs, etc.; but he has found a chance of placing himself permanently with a former master, and, of course, is glad of the opportunity to do so. I have not yet seen any of the Coxes. Cecilia and Mr. Combe only arrived last night from Hull, having come by Antwerp. They have both got the influenza, and are very much knocked up, and I have seen neither of them yet.... The railroad running through the Castle Gardens has cruelly spoiled them, of course, though from the depth of the ravine, at the bottom of which it lies, it is not seen from Prince's Street; but its silver wake floats up above the highest trees of the banks, and the Gardens themselves are ruined by it. I have a sadly affectionate feeling for every inch of that ground.... I do not admire Scott's monument very much. It is an exact copy in stone of the Episcopal Throne in Exeter Cathedral, a beautiful piece of wood carving. The difference between the white color of the statue and the gray shrine by which it is canopied is not agreeable to me. I should have liked it better if the figure had been of the same stone as the monument, and so of the same color. In Edinburgh it is never so much the detail of its various parts that arrests my attention and enchants me especially, as the picturesque and grand effect of its several parts in juxtaposition with each other--the beautiful result of all its features together, the striking and romantic whole. The Carlton Hill seems to me more covered with buildings than I thought it was; but I believe you have seen it since I have, so that I do not know how to answer your question about it. In determining to act in Edinburgh I followed the advice of the Mairs, who were, of course, more likely to be able to judge of the probable relative success of reading or acting here, and who counselled the latter.... Good-bye, dear. Ever yours, FANNY. [My cousin Elizabeth, youngest daughter of Mrs. Harry Siddons, married Major Mair, son of that fine old officer, Colonel Mair, Governor of Fort George. During several protracted seasons of foreign service, one of the banishments to which his military duty condemned Arthur Mair was a remote and lonely outpost on the furthest border of our then hardly peopled Canadian territory--a literal wilderness, without human inhabitants. Here, alone, with the small body of men under his command, he led a life of absolute mental and intellectual solitude, the effect of which upon his nervous system was such that, on his return to civilized existence, the society of his fellow-creatures, and all the intercourse of busy city life, affected him with such extreme shyness and embarrassment that in his own native town of Edinburgh, for some time after his return to it, he used to avoid all the more frequented thoroughfares, from mere nervous dread of encountering and being spoken to by persons of his acquaintance--an unfavorable result of "solitary confinement," even in a cell as wide as a wilderness.] STAR HOTEL, GLASGOW, GEORGE SQUARE, October 4th. DEAR HARRIET, My acquaintance with the H---- D----s dates only from my last visit to Glasgow, when they joined our party at this hotel, and returned to Carolside with us. The lady is a daughter of a family who are intimate friends of T---- M----, and was presented to me when a girl in London some years ago. She has since married, and I met her again, with her husband, here a little while ago.... They both show a very kind desire to be civil and amiable to me, and I like them both, and her especially. They have spent the last five years of their lives wandering together about Europe and Asia. They have no children, and have travelled without any of the servants that generally attend wealthy English people abroad (courier, lady's-maid, valet); and have come home so in love with their wild untrammelled life, that the possession of their estate at Ardoch, and their prospect of an income of many thousands a year, seem equally to oppress them as undesirable incumbrances, requiring them to sacrifice all their freedom, and submit to all sorts of civilized conventional constraints from which they have lived in blessed exemption abroad, and to adopt a style of existence utterly repugnant to their nomadic _no_-habits. G---- D----, on their return to Ardoch, proposed to his wife to take up their abode in two of the rooms of their fine large house, and let the rest to some pleasant and amusing people; for, he said, they never could think of living in that house by themselves.... Your distress about my readings I answered with a slight feeling that it was a pity you should begin to be anxious and troubled about the details of a project that may possibly never be carried out after any fashion. I paid heed, nevertheless, to your observations, of which I admit the force, and am so far from having determined to abide by any theoretical convictions of my own upon the subject that I shall be guided entirely by Mr. Mitchell's opinion about the best manner of giving my readings; for, as I do it for money, I shall do it in the way most likely to be profitable. At the same time, I shall certainly use my best endeavor to have the business so arranged as to desecrate as little as possible the great works of the master, in the exposition and illustration of which I look for infinite pleasure and profit of the highest order, whatever my meaner gain by it may be.... [I am afraid my excellent and zealous manager, Mr. Mitchell, was often far from satisfied with the views I took of the duty imposed upon me by reading Shakespeare. My entire unwillingness to exhaust myself and make my work laborious instead of pleasant to me, by reading more than three, or at the utmost four, times a week, when very often we could have commanded very full rooms for the six; my pertinacious determination to read as many of the plays (and I read twenty-five) as could be so given to an audience in regular rotation, so as to avoid becoming hackneyed, in my feeling or delivery of them, appeared to him vexatious particularities highly inimical to my own best interests, which he thought would have been better served by reading "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet," and the "Merchant of Venice," three times as often as I did, and "Richard II.," "Measure for Measure," and one or two others, three times as seldom, or not at all. But though Mr. Mitchell could calculate the money value of my readings to me, their inestimable value he knew nothing of.] Pray now, my dearest friend, consider that you too often challenge with affectionate anxiety for me that future which I may never live to see; and yet do not imagine that I consider your apprehensions and suggestions, were they a thousand times more numerous and more ridiculous, if that were possible, as in any way unsatisfactory; but highly the contrary, as testifying to that most comfortable fact that you, my beloved Hal, are the very same you ever have been to me, an excellent, precious, devoted, wise, most absurd, and every way invaluable friend. God bless you. Ever yours, FANNY. GREENOCK, October 9th. I am very glad I did the duty of a hostess, dear Hal, though only in your dreams, and received you hospitably in my own house, though I was not conscious of it. As for that fool Mulliner and that brute Jeffreys, I will hang them up together on one rope when I return, for allowing you to be so horribly disturbed.... If we are in Orchard Street together again, you shall put the Psyche [a fine cast of the Neapolitan truncated statue given to Mr. Hamilton, Mrs. Fitzhugh's brother, by the King of Naples] in whatever light you please; but, as I am certain not to return to London till the third week in November, if then, I feel as if, when I get back to Orchard Street, I should have nothing to do but pack up my things preparatory to removing to King Street, where I hope to get Mrs. Humphreys to receive me until I leave England. I shall certainly not be six weeks in Orchard Street when I return, and the Psyche will desert the drawing-room when I do, and resume her post on the staircase, where she always seemed to me to look down on dear Mrs. Fitzhugh's morning visitors, as they came up the stairs, with a divinely mild severity of expression, as if she felt the bore about to be inflicted by their presence on the inmates of her house, the mortals under her heavenly care. You ought to find two letters from me at Bannisters, for I have directed two to you there. How I wish I could be with you and dear Emily! Give my love to her, and believe me Ever yours, FANNY. [I was at this time occupying my friend Mrs. Fitzhugh's house in Orchard Street, Portman Square, which I rented for a twelvemonth from her. It was a convenient small house in an excellent situation, and one whole side of the drawing-room was covered with a clever painting, by Mr. Fitzhugh, of the bay and city of Naples--a pleasant object of contemplation in London winter days.] GLASGOW, October 12th. MY DEAREST HAL, I should very much wish that you would give me one of Loyal's children [a fine Irish retriever of my friend's]; but do not again end any letter to me so abruptly, without even signing your name, because it gives me a most uncomfortable notion that I have not got all you have written, that you have, by mistake, put only a part of your letter in your envelope, and so sent it off unfinished to me. I left Carolside, to my great regret, yesterday. I came in Mrs. Mitchell's carriage to within fourteen miles of Edinburgh, where I joined the railroad. She accompanied me thus far, and then returned home. At Edinburgh I transferred myself immediately to the Glasgow train, and so came on, without being able to ascertain whether Cecilia Combe and Lizzie Mair are at home or not. Mrs. Mitchell and Lady M----, and a party of their friends, are coming to Glasgow to-morrow. They will stay at the same inn where I am, and go to the theatre every night that I play, so that I do not feel yet as if I had taken leave of them; and Lady M---- intends going on with me to Dundee, where I am going to act when I have finished my engagement here and at Greenock. Is it not too provoking that the York manager has at length found out that he can afford to give me my terms, and now writes to me to beg that I will go and act in York at the beginning of next month? which, of course, I cannot, as I am to be three weeks in Edinburgh before I return to England. Neither you nor Dorothy mention your winter plans. Have you none made yet?... I do not think, dear Hal, that you have ever heard me express a positive rejection of phrenology, for the simple reason that, never having taken the pains thoroughly to study it, it would ill become me to do so. At the same time, you know, I have at various times lived much in the society of the principal professors of the science in this country, and they have occasionally taken pains to explain a good deal of their system to me. I have also read a good many of their books, and have had a great personal affection and esteem both for Mr. Combe and his excellent brother. But, in spite of all this, and my entire agreement with almost all their physiological doctrines, phrenology, as I have hitherto seen and heard it, has a positive element of inconclusiveness to me, and I doubt if by studying it I should arrive at any other opinion, since all the opportunities I have enjoyed of hearing it discussed and seeing it acted upon have left my mind in this frame regarding it. I believe myself to have no prejudice on this subject, for I have longed all my life to know something positive and certain about this wonderful machine which we carry about with us, or which carries us about with it, and incline to agree with the views which the phrenological physiologists entertain on the subjects of temperament and general organization. But, in spite of all this, phrenology, as I hear it perpetually referred to and mixed up by them with their habitual speech (it forms indeed so completely the staple of their phraseology that one had need be familiar with the terms to follow their usual conversation), produces no conviction on my mind beyond the recognized fact that a nobly and beautifully proportioned head indicates certain qualities in the human individual, and _vice versâ_. It appears to me merely a new nomenclature for long-known and admitted phenomena; and beyond those, they seem to me to involve themselves in contradictions, divisions, and subdivisions of the brain, so minute and various, and requiring so much allowance for so many conditions, as considerably to neutralize each other, and render the result of their observations, which to them seems positive and conclusive, to me uncertain and unsatisfactory. There are many things which my intellectual laziness prevents my examining, which I feel sure, if I did examine, would produce positive results on my mind; but phrenology does not seem to me one of these. If it had been, I should have adopted it, or felt the same sort of belief in it that I do in mesmerism, about which, understanding nothing, I still cannot resist an impression that it is a real and powerful physical agency.... Now you must draw your own conclusions as to the causes of this state of mind of mine with regard to phrenology. The phrenologists, you know, say I am deficient in "causality"--and undoubtedly it is not my predominant mental quality; but I incline to think that I _could_ think, as well as the average number of professing phrenologists, if I would take the trouble, for I have known some amongst them who certainly were anything but logical in their general use of their brains. The only time I ever was in the Highlands was when I went with Dall and my father to Loch Lomond twenty years ago. I had never seen a drop of Loch Katrine till now. We went from Glasgow to Stirling by railroad in an hour, on Saturday morning. From Stirling we took a light open carriage, a kind of britzska, and pair of horses, and posted the same afternoon sixteen miles to Callander, where we slept. Sunday morning we took the same carriage with fresh horses to Loch Katrine. The distance is only ten miles of an enchanting drive; and if I had been able to spend the night at the Trosachs, I could have done it perfectly well, for there is an immense big inn there for the reception of tourists; and though the house was shut up for the season, the servants were in it, and we could have procured bed and board there, and I have no doubt a roast fowl and sherry, or oatmeal and whiskey, if we had preferred them. I had, however, to be back in Stirling the same afternoon, and the weather was wild and gloomy, though not cold, nor positively wet till we got into a little one-horse "machine" to drive through the Trosachs, when the mist shrouded the mountains almost from base to summit, and even Ben Aven, close under him as we were, was barely discernible. Ben An was the feature of the scene that struck me most; the form of its crest is so singularly jagged and fine. We just drove through the pass to the first ripple of the lake, and then turned right-about to Stirling, which we reached before four o'clock in the afternoon, and yesterday morning I was back again in Glasgow, the lakes and mountains remaining in my memory absolutely like a dream. The country from Doune to Callander is beautiful, and in summer it must be an enchanting expedition, though such scenery has its own peculiar winter beauty, grander and more impressive perhaps than even its summer loveliness. I wish I was there again. I cannot tell you anything more of my receipts at Glasgow, except that those of the second night were much better than the first; but as those were small, this is not saying much. I have not yet received the "returns." I am glad the news you got from Ardgillan is satisfactory. Love to dear Dorothy. Ever as ever yours, FANNY. 29, ABERCROMBIE PLACE, EDINBURGH, Wednesday, 13th. I did not see the eclipse, my dear. I did not know there was to be one, and did not therefore look for it; and if I had, I doubt my having been any the wiser, inasmuch as our mornings of late have been very misty. I am off to-day with Mrs. Mitchell to Ardoch, where I stay only to-morrow, and return Friday to act here on Saturday. Having promised to go, I do not like to break my word, otherwise it seems to me rather a fuss, and a long way to go for one day's rest. Originally our plan was to spend two or three days there, that being all I could then give; but Mrs. Mitchell, with whom I had promised to go, could not get away from visitors at her own house sooner. I spent the evening with Cecilia and Mr. Combe on Monday. They are both tired from the effect of their journey still, and look fagged and ill. They have both got the influenza too, which does not mend matters; and I am struck with the alteration in Mr. Combe's appearance. He looks old, as well as ill, and very sad--naturally enough on his return to this place, where his dear brother died. The _becomingness_ of Cecilia's gray, or rather white, hair struck me more than any other change in her. She has lost the appearance of hardness (coarseness), which, I think, mingled slightly with her positive beauty formerly, and is to my mind handsomer now than I ever remember her. She is not nearly so stout as she was; her complexion has lost its excess of color, has become softer; and the contrast of her fine dark eyes and silvery curls gives her a striking resemblance to Gainsborough's lovely portrait of her mother. She is looking thin and ill, but seems tolerably cheerful. At the end of my engagement at the theatre, during the whole of which I shall remain with the Mairs, I shall spend a few days with her and Mr. Combe; after which I shall come as far south as Howick, and stay a day or two with B---- G----, and then cross over to Manchester to the Ellesmeres. I shall hardly be in London before the third week in November. I have had a letter from my sister, announcing their positive return in the spring; but, as she says they will only leave Rome in May, it is improbable that I should see them at all, as I propose going to America by the steamer of the first of June; but Heaven knows what may happen between this and then. Nobody has the same right to "bother" me, as you call it, that you have, for I love nobody so well; besides, as for Emily, she is a deuced deal quicker in her processes than you are, and snaps up one's affairs by the nape of the neck, as a terrier does a rat, and unless one is tolerably alert one's self, she is off with one in her zeal in no time, whither one would not.... I wish you would tell Mrs. Fitzhugh, with my love, that a man who was acting Joseph Surface with me the other night said to me, "Now, my dear Lady Teazle, if you could but be persuaded to commit a trifling _fore paw_ (_faux pas_)." Give my love to dear Emily. Ever as ever yours, FANNY. MY DEAREST HAL, I expect to be with the Combes for some few days at least, and do not feel altogether as happy as usual in the anticipation of their intercourse. I think I have observed growing, as it were, upon them, with regard to certain subjects, a sort of general attitude of antagonism, which strikes me painfully. All fanaticisms are bad, and the fanaticism of scepticism as bad or perhaps worse than most others, because it wounds more severely the prejudices of others than it can be wounded by them, professing, as it does, to have none to wound. I am going to stay with Cecilia all next week, and am rather afraid that I shall have to hear things that I love and reverence irreverently treated. We shall probably steer clear of much discourse on religious subjects, though of late Mr. Combe has appeared to me more inclined than formerly to challenge discussion on this ground. I am afraid I can at the utmost only expect to see my sister for a fortnight after they return, though Henry Greville writes me that I cannot possibly give her the mortification and myself the pain of going away just as she comes back, and that I ought, for both our sakes, to stay at least a month in England after her return: but then he wishes to get up a play with us both. I think Grantley Manor charming. It gave me a great desire to know Lady Georgiana Fullerton personally; but I am told she has a horror of me, for what she calls my "injustice to the Catholics." What that is I do not know; but whatever it is, I am very sorry for this result of it. Good-bye, dearly beloved. Ever yours, FANNY. 29, ABERCROMBIE PLACE, EDINBURGH, Monday, October 25th, 1847. The last question in your letter, which nevertheless heads it, having been added on over the date, "How is your health?" I can answer satisfactorily--much better.... I am much delighted at you and Dorothy reserving your visit to Battle Abbey till I come to you, and only hope the weather may give you no cause to regret having done so. I have promised Emily to go down to Bannisters in December, and shall then pay you my visit at St. Leonard's. I do much wish to be once more with you and Dorothy. I have just concluded a very pleasant arrangement with Arthur Malkin and his wife for staying a few days in the neighborhood of the lakes with them, between Keswick and Ambleside, after I leave Howick. The weather is, I believe, generally favorable for that scenery as late as November. I have never seen the English lakes, and am not likely soon to have so pleasant an opportunity of doing so. I have received an application from the York manager to act at Leeds, and having agreed to do so, think I shall probably also act a few nights at York, Hull, and Sheffield, while I am thereabouts; all which, together with my visit to the Ellesmeres, will take up so much of my time that I doubt my being more than a month or three weeks in Orchard Street before my term of possession there expires.... I shall be able to answer your questions about the Combes better when I am with them, but besides my own observation I have the testimony of the ----s to the fact of their having become much more aggressive in their feeling and conversation with regard to "Church abuses," "theological bigotry," and even Christianity itself. I am sorry to hear this; but if they _hurt_ me, I shall heal myself by looking at the Vatican [a fine engraving of St. Peter's, in Mr. Combe's house]. I had a letter from E---- the other day. I am delighted to say that they have quite determined to return in the spring, and it is just possible that I may see them before I leave England. E----'s account of the Roman reforms is most encouraging, and I must give you an extract from his letter about them. "A very important decree was published on the 2d of this month, relative to the organization of a municipal council and magistracy for the city of Rome. Besides the ordinary duties of a municipality, such as public works, _octroi_, etc., it is to have the direction of education. This is a circumstance the consequence of which it is impossible to overrate or to foresee. Hitherto, education has been monopolized by the clergy, and moreover by the Jesuits (whose schools have always been the best by a very great deal, to give the devil his due). The new law does not abolish their establishments, or interfere with them in any way, but the liberal feeling being so strong in the country, the rising generation will be almost entirely educated in the schools founded by the municipality; it is the greatest blow the hierarchy has yet received. The council consists of a hundred members, chosen from different classes of society. It is first named by the Pope, and then renews itself by elections; there are only four members to represent the ecclesiastical bodies." There, Hal, what do you think of that? I sit and think of that most lovely land, emerging gloriously into a noble political existence once more, till I almost feel like a poet. Love to Dorothy.... I only make Hayes _sensible_ that she is a _fool_ twice a week on an average, not twice a day. Yours ever, FANNY. HOWICK GRANGE, November 14th. Surely, my dearest Hal, the next time you say you almost despair of mankind, you should add, "in spite of God," instead of "in spite of the Pope." I arrived here about three hours ago, and have received a most severe and painful blow in a letter from Henry Greville which I found awaiting me, containing the news of Mendelssohn's death. I cannot tell you how shocked I am at this sudden departure of so great and good a creature from amongst his impoverished fellow-beings. And when I think of that bright genius (he was the _only_ man of genius I have known who seemed to me to fulfil the rightful moral conditions and obligations of one), by whose loss the whole civilized world is put into mourning; of his poor wife, so ardently attached to him, so tenderly and devotedly loved by him; of his children--his boy, who, I am told, inherits his sweet and amiable disposition; of my own dear sister, and poor E----, so deeply attached to him,--I cannot bear to think, I feel half stupid with pain. And yet your letter is full of other sorrow. O God! how much there is in this sorrowful life! and what suffering we are capable of! and yet--and yet--these can be but the accidents, while the sun still shines, and the beauty and consolation and _virtue_ of nature and human life still hourly abound. You ask me if I have written anything in Edinburgh but letters. I have hardly had leisure to write even letters. I do not know when I have worked so hard as during my last engagement there. I have hardly had an occupation or thought that was not perforce connected with my theatrical avocations. I am heartily glad it is over. Mr. Combe has given me the "Vestiges of Creation" to read, and I have been reading it.... The book is striking and interesting, but it appears to me far from strictly logical in its great principal deduction, as far as we "human mortals" are concerned. Indeed, Mr. Combe, who thinks it most admirable, was obliged to confess that the main question of progress, involving dissimilar products from similar causes, was _non-proven_. And I think there are discrepancies, moreover, in minor points: but that may only be because of my profound ignorance. The book is extremely disagreeable to me, though my ignorance and desire for knowledge combined give it, when treating of facts, a thousand times more interest than the best of novels for me; but its conclusions are utterly revolting to me,--nevertheless, they may be true. I cannot write any more. B---- has just given me the _Athenæum_, with a long notice of Mendelssohn; and I am thinking more of him just now than anything else in the world.... God bless you, my dear. I am ever yours, FANNY. LEEDS, Friday, November 19th. Mendelssohn's death did indeed give me a bitter and terrible shock. He was one of the bright sources of truth, at which I had hoped I might drink at some time or other. I always looked forward to some probable season of intercourse with him, the likelihood of which was increased by E---- and Adelaide's love for and intimacy with him. Intercourse with him seemed to me a privilege almost certainly to be mine, in the course of the next few years. This is only my own small selfish share of the great general grief. I feel particularly for E----. He seems to find so very few people that satisfy him, whom he is fond of, or who are at all congenial to him, that the loss of a dear friend, and such a man, will indeed fall heavily upon him. Those whose sympathies are more general, and whose taste can accept and find pleasure in the intercourse of the majority of their fellow-creatures, are fortunate in this respect, that no one loss can make the world empty for them; and thus the qualities of kindliness and benevolence are repaid, like all other virtues, even in this world (which is nevertheless not heaven), into the bosom of those who practise them. For a person who has permitted intellectual refinement to become almost a narrow fastidiousness, and whose sympathies are of that exclusive kind that none but special and rarely gifted persons can excite them, the loss of such a friend as Mendelssohn must be incalculable; and I am grieved to the heart for E----. I do not know what is to be done with Covent Garden. I suppose it will remain an opera-house; for to fit it for that it has been made well-nigh unavailable for any other purpose, as I think we shall find on the 7th December, when a representation of "Scenes" from various of Shakespeare's plays is to take place there, for the purpose of raising funds for the purchase of the house Shakespeare was born in. You know what my love and veneration for Shakespeare are; you know, too, how comparatively indifferent to me are those parts of the natures even of those I most love and honor which belong only to their mortality. The dead bodies of my friends appeal, perhaps, even less than they should do to my feelings, since they have been temporarily inhabited and informed by their souls; but acquainted as you are with these notions of mine, you will understand that I do not entirely sympathize with all that is being said and done about the four walls between which the king of poets came into his world. The thing is more distasteful to me, because originally got up by an American charlatan of the first water, with a view to thrust himself into notoriety by shrieking about the world stupendous commonplaces about the house where Shakespeare was born. It has been taken up by a number of people, theatrical and other, who, with the exception of Macready, have many of them the same petty personal objects in view. Those whose profession compels them, by the absolute necessity of its conditions, to garble and hack and desecrate works which else could not be fit for acting purposes (a fact which in itself sets forth what theatrical representation really is and always must be--do read, _à propos_ to this, Serlo's answer to Wilhelm Meister about the impossibility of representing dramatically a great poetical whole), and who now, on this very Shakespearian Memorial night, instead of acting some one of his plays in its integrity, and taking zealously any the most insignificant part in it, have arranged a series of truncated, isolated scenes, that the actors may each be the hero or heroine of their own _bit_ of Shakespeare.... This is all I know of the immediate destinies of Covent Garden. They have written to me to act the dying scene of Queen Katharine, to which I have agreed, not choosing to decline any part assigned me in this "Celebration," little as I sympathize with it. If I should hear anything further, as I very likely may, from Henry Greville, of the probable fate of Covent Garden next season, I will let you know, that you may dispose accordingly of your property in it. I have finished the "Vestiges of Creation." I became more reconciled to the theory it presents towards the close of the book, for obvious reasons. Of course, when, abandoning his positive chain (as he conceives it) of proved progression, after leading the whole universe from inorganic matter up to the "paragon of animals," the climax of development, man, he goes on to say that it is _impossible_ to limit the future progress, or predict the future destinies of this noble human result, he forsakes his own ground of material demonstration, on which he has jumped, as the French say, _à peds joints_, over many an impediment, and relieves himself (and me) by the hypothesis, which, after all, in no way belongs peculiarly to his system, that other and higher destinies, developments, may, and probably do, await humanity than anything it has yet attained here: a theory which, though most agreeable to the love of life and desire of perfection of most human creatures, in no sort hinges logically on to his _absolute chain of material progression_ and development. From the moment, however, that he admitted this view, instead of the one which I think legitimately belongs to his theory, irreconcilable as it seemed to me with what preceded it, the book became less distasteful to me, although I do not think the soundness of his theory (even admitting all his facts, which I am quite too ignorant to dispute) established by his work. Supposing his premises to be all correct, I think he does not make out his own case satisfactorily; and many of the conclusions in particular instances appear to me to be tacked or basted (to speak womanly) together loosely and clumsily, and yet with an effect of more mutual relation, coherence, and cohesion than really belongs to them. Mr. Combe is delighted with the book--because it quotes him and his brother, and professes a belief in phrenology; but Mr. Combe himself allowed that the main proposition of the work is not logically deduced from its arguments, and moreover admitted that though well versed in _all_ the branches of natural science, the author was perfectly master of _none_. He attributes the authorship to his friend Robert Chambers, or perhaps to the joint labor of him and his brother William. If his surmise in this respect is true there would be obvious reasons why they should not acknowledge so heterodox a book, especially in Edinburgh. In asking me for _my_ theory of human existence, dear Hal, you must have _forgotten me_ in your craving desire for some--any--solution of the great mystery with which you are so deeply and perpetually perplexed. How should I, who know nothing, who am _exceptionally_ ignorant, who seldom read, and seldomer think (in any proper sense of the word), have even the shadow of a theory upon this overpowering theme? To tell you the vague suggestions of my imagination at various times would doubtless be but to re-echo some of your own least satisfactory surmises. I thank God I have not the mental strength _and infirmity_ to seek to grapple with this impossible subject. The faint outlines of ideas that have at any time visited my brain about this tremendous mystery of human life have all been sad and dreary, and most bitterly and oppressively unsatisfactory; and therefore I rejoice that no mental fascination rivets my thoughts to the brink of this dark and unfathomable abyss, but that it is on the contrary the tendency of my nature to rest in hope, or rather in faith in God's mercy and power, and moreover to think that the perception we have (or as you would say, imagine we have) of DUTY, of right to be done and wrong to be avoided, gives significance enough to our existence to make it worth both love and honor, though it should consist of but one conscious day in which that noble perception might be sincerely followed, and though absolute annihilation were its termination. The whole value and meaning of life, to me, lies in the single sense of conscience--duty; and that is here, present, now, enough for the best of us--God knows how much too much for me. Good-bye, my dear. I have a most horrible cough and sore throat, and I have been acting with it, feeling every moment that I was doing my poor _parts of speech_ a serious injury by the strain I was compelled to put upon them. You may judge of the state of my voice when I tell you that I received from some anonymous kind friend this morning a bottle of cough-mixture, and all manner of lozenges, jujubes, etc. Give my love to Dorothy. Ever yours, FANNY. ORCHARD STREET. DEAREST H----, ... I am going with Henry Greville to see Rachel on Wednesday in "Marie Stuart." I wish I could afford to see her every night, but it is a dear recreation. Henry Greville is not "teaching me to act," though I dare say he thinks I may derive profit as well as pleasure from seeing Rachel.... All my friends are extremely impatient of my small gains; I am not, though I certainly should be glad if they were larger.... I have moved my Psyche, my beautiful and serene goddess. As the ancient Romans had especial tutelary gods for their private houses, the patron saints of the heathen calendar, she is my adopted divinity. You know I have had her with me in some of my blackest and bitterest seasons, and have often marvelled at the mere combination of lines which have produced so exquisite an image of noble graceful thoughtfulness. She is not without a certain sweet sternness, too; there is immense power, as well as repose, in that lovely countenance,--how--why--can mere curved and straight lines convey so profoundly moral an impression? She is an admirable companion, and reminds me of Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty," which I every now and then feel inclined to apostrophize her with. I have sent out the big centre china jar to the table on the stair-case, and have put my goddess in the drawing-room in its place.... I have received a kind invitation from Lady Dacre to the Hoo, and I shall spend next week there, which will be both good and agreeable for me. I expect to find Lady G---- there; she is a person for whom I have a great liking and esteem, and whom I shall be glad to meet. Perhaps, too, dear William Harness; but I do not know of anybody else. I forget whether I told you that the Sedgwicks had sent me a friend of theirs, an American country clergyman, to lionize about London, which I have been doing for the last three days. I took him to the British Museum, and showed him the Elgin Marbles, and the library, and the curious manuscripts and books which strangers generally care to see; but the profit and pleasure, I should think, of travelling is but little unless the mind is in some slight measure prepared for more knowledge by the possession of some small original stock; and a great many Americans come abroad but poorly furnished not only with learning but with the means of learning. Charles Greville got me an admission for my Yankee friend to the House of Lords. We were admitted while the business was going on, and saw the curious old form of passing the Acts of Parliament by Commission, than the ceremonies of which it is difficult to imagine anything more quaint, not to say ludicrous, and apparently meaningless. We heard Lord Brougham and the Duke of Wellington speak, and had an excellent view of both of them. The House appeared to me too minutely ornamented; it is rich, elaborate, but all in small detail, too subdivided and intricate and overwrought to be as imposing and good in effect as if it were more simple. I took my American friend to the Zoological Gardens, and to the Botanical Gardens, in the Regent's Park, which are very charming, and for which I have a private ticket of admission. This morning I have been with him to Stafford House, to show him the pictures, which are fine, and the house itself, which I think the handsomest in London. To-morrow I take him to the opera, and I have given him a breakfast, a lunch, and a dinner, and feel as if I had discharged the duty put upon me, especially as it involved what I have no taste for, _i.e._ sight-seeing. The Elgin Marbles I was glad enough to see again--one has never seen them too often,--and was sitting down to reflect upon them at my leisure, when my American friend, to whom, doubtless, they seemed but a parcel of discolored, dirty, decapitated bodies, proposed that we should pass on, which we accordingly did. I am struck with the spirit of conformity by which this gentleman seems troubled, and which Adelaide tells me the young American people they saw in Rome constantly expressed,--the dread of appearing that which they are, foreigners; the annoyance at hearing that their accent and dress denote them to be Americans. They certainly are not comfortable people in this respect, and I always wish, for their own sakes as well as mine, that they had more or less self-love. I was impelled to say to my young clergyman, whose fear of trespassing against English usages seemed to leave him hardly any other idea, "Sir, are you not a foreigner, an American? May I ask why it is to be considered incumbent upon you, either by yourself or others, to dress and speak like an Englishman?" ... Good-bye, dear. I am ever yours, FANNY. 18, ORCHARD STREET, November 18th. I do not know that I ever slept so near the sea as to hear it discoursing as loudly as you describe, though I have been where its long swelling edge was heard rolling up and tearing itself to ribbons on the shingly beach like distant thunder. As for night-sounds of any sort, you know my _sound_ sleep is the only one I am familiar with. In the hotel at Niagara, the voice of the cataract not only roared night and day through every chamber of the house, but the whole building vibrated incessantly with the shock of the mighty fall. I have still health and nerve and spirits to cope with the grand exhibitions of the powers of Nature: the majesty and beauty of the external world always acts as a tonic on me, and under its influence I feel as if a strong arm was put round me, and was lifting me over stony places; and I nothing doubt that the great anthem of the ocean would excite rather than overpower me, however nearly it sounded in my ears. Your description of the terrace, or parade walk, covered with my fellow-creatures, appals my imagination much more. My sympathies have never been half human enough, and in the proximity of one of nature's most impressive objects I shrink still more from contact with the outward forms of unknown humanity. However, this is merely an answer to your description; I shall find, by creeping down the shingles, some place below, or, by climbing the cliff, some place above, these dear men and women, where I can be a little alone with the sea. I observed nothing peculiar about the direction of any letter that I have recently received from you; but then, to be sure, I am not given to the general process, which, general as it is, always astonishes me, of examining the direction, the date, the postmark, the signature, of the letter I receive (as many of these, too, as possible, before opening the epistle); I hasten to read your words as soon as I have them, and seldom speculate as to when or where they were written, so that I really do not know whether I have received your Hull letter or not. I do not go thither until Monday next, and return to town the following Sunday.... Oh, my dear, what a world is this! or rather, what an unlucky experience mine has been--in some respects--yes, in _some_ respects! for while I write this, images of the good, and true, and excellent people I have known and loved rise like a cloud of witnesses to shut out the ugly vision of the moral deformity of some of those with whom my fate has been interwoven.... I have agreed with Mrs. Humphreys to take the apartments that T---- M---- had in King Street, from the beginning of January till the beginning of May. She says she cannot let me have them longer than that, but I shall endeavor for at least a month's extension, for it will be so very wretched to turn out and have to hunt for new lodgings, for a term of six weeks. My success at Leeds was very good, considering the small size of the theatre.... I am not exempt from a feeling about "illustrious localities," but the world seems to me to be so absolutely Shakespeare's domain and dwelling-place, that I do not vividly associate him with the idea of those four walls, between which he first saw the light of an English day. If the house he dwelt in in the maturity of his age, and to which he retired to spend the evening of his life, still existed, I should feel considerable emotion in being where his hours and days were spent when his mind had reached its zenith. A baby is the least intelligent form of a rational human being, and as it mercifully pleased God to remove His wonderfully endowed child before the approach of age had diminished his transcendent gifts, I do not care to contemplate him in that condition in which I cannot recognize him--that is, with an undeveloped and dormant intelligence. We know nothing of his childhood, nothing of the gradual growth and unfolding of his genius; his acknowledged works date from the season of its ripe perfection. You know I do not regret the dimness that covers the common details of his life: his humanity was allied to that of its kind by infirmities and sins, but I am glad that these links between him and _me_ have disappeared, and that those alone remain by which he will be bound, as long as this world lasts, to the love and reverence of his fellow-beings. Shakespeare's childhood, boyhood, the season of his moral and intellectual growth, would be of the deepest interest could one know it: but Shakespeare's mere birthplace and babyhood is not much to me; though I quite agree that it should be respectfully preserved, and allowed to be visited by all who find satisfaction in such pilgrimage. He could not have been different from other babies you know; nor, indeed, need be,--for a _baby_--_any_ baby--is a more wonderful thing even than Shakespeare. I have told you how curiously affected I was while standing by his grave, in the church at Stratford-upon-Avon: how I was suddenly overcome with sleep (my invariable refuge under great emotion or excitement), and how I prayed to be allowed to sleep for a little while on the altar-steps of the chancel, beside his bones: the power of association was certainly strong in me then; but his bones _are_ there, and above them streamed a warm and brilliant sunbeam, fit emblem of his vivifying spirit;--but I have no great enthusiasm for his house.... Does not the power of conceiving in any degree the _idea_ of God establish some relation between Him and the creature capable of any approach by thought to Him? Do we not, in some sense, possess mentally that which we most earnestly think of? is it not the possession over which earthly circumstances have the least power? The more incessantly and earnestly we think of a thing the more we become possessed _by_ and _of_ it, and in some degree assimilated to it; and can those thoughts which reach towards God alone fail to lay hold, in any sort or degree, of their object?... Surely, whether we are, or are not, the result of an immense chain of material progression, we have attained to that idea which preserves alive to all eternity the souls upon which it has once dawned. We have caught hold of the feet of the omnipotent Creator; and to the spirit that once has received the conception, however feeble or remote, of His greatness and goodness, there can be no cessation of the bond thus formed between itself and its great Cause. I cannot write about this; I could not utter in words what I think and feel about it: but it seems to me that if organization, mere development, has reached a pitch at which it becomes capable of _divine_ thoughts, it thenceforth can never be anything _less_ than a creature capable of such conceptions; and if so, then how much _more_? Farewell. Love to Dorothy. Yours ever, F. A. K. ORCHARD STREET, Monday, 18th. I arrived yesterday in town, my dearest Hal, and found your letter waiting for me. The aspect of these, my hired Penates, is comfortable and homelike to me, after living at inns for a fortnight; and the spasmodic and funereal greetings of the nervous Mulliner, and the lugubrious Jeffreys, _gladden_ my spirits with a sense of returning to _something_ that expects me. About Lady Emily ---- and her _ethereal_ confinement: did I not tell you that Mrs. C---- wrote me word from America that Fanny Longfellow had been brought to bed most prosperously under the beneficent influence of ether? at which my dear S---- C---- expresses some anxiety touching the authority of the Book of Genesis, which she thinks may be impaired if women continue, by means of ether, to escape from the special curse pronounced against them for their share in the original sin. For my part I am not afraid that the worst part of the curse will not abide upon us, in spite of ether; the woman's desire will still be to her husband, who, consequently, will still rule over her. For these (curses or not, as people may consider them), I fear no palliating ether will be found; and till men are more righteous than they are, all creatures subject to them will be liable to suffer misery of one sort or another.... I wonder if I have ever spoken to you of Lady Morley--a kind-hearted, clever woman (who, by the bye, always calls men "the softer sex"), a great friend of Sydney Smith's, whom I have known a good deal in society, and who came to see me just before I left town. In speaking of poor Lady Dacre, and the difficulty she found in accepting her late bereavement, Lady Morley said, "I think people should be very grateful whose misfortunes fall upon them in old age rather than in youth: they're all the nearer having done with them." There was some whimsical paradox in this, but some truth too. An habitual saying of hers (not serious, of course, but which she applies to everything she hears) is: "There's nothing new, nothing true, and nothing signifies." The last time I dined at Lady Grey's a discussion arose between Lady Morley, myself, and some of the other guests, as to how much or how little truth it was _right_ to speak in our usual intercourse with people. I maintained that one was bound to speak the whole truth; so did my friend, Lady G----; Lady F---- said, "Toute verité n'est pas bonne à dire;" and Lady Morley told the following story: "I sat by Rogers at dinner the other day (the poet of memory was losing his, and getting to repeat the same story twice over without being aware that he did so), and he told me a very good story, which, however, before long, he began to repeat all over again; something, however, suggesting to him the idea that he was doing so, he stopped suddenly, and said, 'I've told you this before, haven't I?' And he had, not a quarter of an hour before. Now, ladies, what would you have said? and what do you think I said? 'Oh yes,' said I, 'to be sure: you were beginning to tell it to me when the fish came round, and _I'm dying to hear the end of it_.'" This was on all hands allowed to have been a most ingenious reply; and I said I thought she deserved to be highly complimented for such graceful dexterity in falsehood: to which she answered, "Oh, well, my dear, it's all very fine; but if ever you get the truth, depend upon it you won't like it"--a retort which turned the laugh completely against me, and sent her ladyship off with flying colors; and certainly there was no want of tolerably severe sincerity in that speech of hers. Lady Morley's great vivacity of manner and very peculiar voice added not a little to the drollery of her sallies. A very conceited, effeminate, and absurd man coming into a room where she was one evening, and beginning to comb his hair, she exclaimed, "La! what's that! Look there! There's a mermaid!" Frederick Byng told me that he was escorting her once in a crowded public assembly, when she sat down on a chair from which another woman had just risen and walked away. "Do you know whose place you have just taken?" asked he. Something significant in his voice and manner arrested her attention, when, looking at him for an instant with wide-open eyes, she suddenly jumped up, exclaiming, "Bless my heart, don't tell me so! _Predecessor!_" Lord Morley, before marrying her, had been divorced from his first wife, who had just vacated the seat taken by his second, at the assembly to which they had both gone. On the occasion of my acting at Plymouth, Lady Morley pressed me very kindly to go and stay some days with her at Soltram, her place near there: this I was unable to do, but drove over to see her, when, putting on a white apron, to "sustain," as she said, "the character," she took me, housekeeper fashion, through the rooms; stopping before her own charming watercolor drawings, with such comments as, "Landscape,--capital performance, by Frances Countess of Morley;" "Street in a foreign town, by Frances Countess of Morley,--a piece highly esteemed by _connyshures_;" "Outside of a church, by Frances Countess of Morley,--supposed by good judges to be her _shiff duver_," etc.... I have just had a visit from that pretty Miss Mordaunt who acted with me at the St. James's Theatre, and who tells me that her sister, Mrs. Nisbett, was cheated at the Liverpool theatre precisely as I was; but she has a brother who is a lawyer, who does not mean to let the matter rest without some attempt to recover his sister's earnings.... I went this morning to inquire at the St. George's Workhouse for the unfortunate girl I took out of the hands of the police in the park the other day (her offence was being found asleep at early morning, and suspected of having passed the night there), and found, to my great distress and disappointment, that she was in the very act of starting for Bristol. I had, as I told you, interested dear Mr. Harness, and Mr. Brackenbury, the chaplain of the Magdalen, about her, and when I went out of town she seemed fully determined to go into that asylum. The chaplain of the workhouse in Mount Street, however, has dissuaded her from doing so, told her she would come out worse than she went in; in short, they have despatched her to Bristol, to the care and guardianship of a poor young sister, only a year older than herself, who earns a scanty support by sewing; and all that remained for me to do was to pay her expenses down, and send her sister something to help her through the first difficulties of her return. I am greatly troubled about this. They say the poor unfortunate child is in the family-way, and therefore could not be received at the Magdalen Asylum; but it seems to me that there has been some prejudice, or clerical punctilio, or folly, or stupidity at work, that has induced the workhouse officials thus to alter the poor girl's determination, and send her back whence she came, no doubt to go through a similar experience as soon as possible again. God help her, and us all! What a world it is!... The clergyman of the workhouse called upon me to explain why he had so advised the girl, but I did not think his reasons very satisfactory.... God bless you. Ever yours, FANNY. ORCHARD STREET. The houses at Plymouth and Exeter were wretched.... These gains, my dearest Hal, will not allow of my laying up much, but they will prevent my being in debt, that horror of yours and mine. I paid my expenses, besides bringing home something, and a considerable increase of health and strength--which is something more.... I remain in town till the end of next week, then go to Norwich, Ipswich, and Cambridge, my midland circuit, as I call it; after which I shall return to London. Towards the middle of August I go to York, Leeds, Sheffield, and Newcastle, thence to visit Mrs. Mitchell at Carolside; after which I shall take my Glasgow and Edinburgh engagements, and then come back to London. There is a rumor of Macready being about to take Drury Lane for the winter, but I have no idea whether it is true or not. I am sure I don't know what is to become of my poor dog Hero [a fine Irish retriever given me by my friend]. I am almost afraid that Mrs. Humphreys will not take him into her nice lodging. If I can't keep him with me till I go away to America, I should beg you in the interim to receive him, for my sake, at Ardgillan. You cannot think with what a sense of relief at laying hold of something _that could not lie_ I threw my arms round his neck the other day, after ---- had left me. This is melancholy, is it not? but I believe many poor human creatures whose hearts have been lacerated by their (un)kind have loved brutes for their freedom from the complicated and reflected falsehood of which the nobler nature is, alas! capable and guilty. Tell me if it will be inconvenient to you to take charge of Hero when I go away. In a place where he had a wider range than this narrow little dwelling of mine, and where his defects were not incessantly ministered to by the adulation of an idiotical old maid besotted with the necessity of adoring and devoting herself to something, he would be very endurable.... [I injured one of my hands in getting out of a pony-carriage at Hawick.] Touching my broken finger, my dear, I am sure I did take off the splints too soon, and the recovery has been protracted in consequence; but as I knew it would recover anyhow, and that the splints were inconvenient in acting, and, moreover, expensive, as they compelled me to cut off the little finger of all my white gloves, I preferred dispensing with them. The pain, inflammation, and stiffness are almost gone, and nothing remains but the thickening of the lower part of the finger, which makes it look crooked, and I think may continue after the injury is healed. I did not, I believe, break the bone at all, but tore away the ligament on one side, that keeps the upper joint in its socket. The cold water pumping is a capital thing, and I give it a douche every time I take my bath. It might, perhaps, be a little better for bandaging, but will get well without it.... A healthy body, with common attention to common-sense, will recover, undoctored, from a great many evils. In almost all cases of slight fractures, cuts, bruises, etc., if the patient is temperate and healthy, and has no constitutional tendency to fever or inflammation, the evil can be remedied by cold water bandages and rest. Give my dear love to my dear Dorothy and your dear Dorothy. I shall be happy with you both, for she is quite too good to be jealous of. God bless you, dear. I am ever yours, FANNY. ORCHARD STREET, Sunday, 4th. MY DEAREST HAL, First of all let me tell you, what I am sure you will be glad to learn, that E---- S---- is in England. You will imagine how glad I was to see him. I am very fond of him, have great reliance on his mind as well as his heart; and then he seems like something kind and dependable belonging to me--the only thing of the kind that I possess, for my sister is a woman, and you know I am heartily of opinion that we are the weaker sex, and that an efficient male protector is a tower of strength. In seeing E----, too, I saw, as it were, alive again the happy past. He seemed part of my sister and her children, and the blessed time I spent with them in Rome, and it was a comfort to me to look at him.... Charles Greville had been out of town, and found the letter announcing E----'s advent, and came up, very good-naturedly, dinnerless, to bring me word of the good news. The next day, however, he was as cross as possible (a way both he and his brother Henry have, in common with other spoiled children) because I expressed some dismay when he said E----'s obtaining a seat in Parliament was quite an uncertainty (I think Mr. S---- contemplated standing for Kidderminster). Now, from all he had said, and the letter he had written about it, I should have supposed E----'s return to have been inevitable; but this is the sort of thing people perpetually do who endeavor to persuade others that what they themselves wish is likely to happen. E---- seems quite aware himself that the thing is a great chance, but says that even if he does not get a seat in Parliament, he shall not regret having come, as he wanted change of air, is much the better for the journey, and has had the satisfaction of seeing his sister in Paris. Nevertheless, if this effort to settle himself to his mind in England proves abortive, I do not think the Grevilles will get him back in a hurry again.... I am surprised by the term "worthless fellow" which A---- applies to ----. I think him selfish and calculating, but I am getting so accustomed to find everybody so that it seems to me superfluous fastidiousness to be deterred from dealings with any one on that account.... I do not write vaguely to my sister about my arrangements; but you know I have no certain plans, and it is difficult to write with precision about what is not precise. I am not going to Norwich just yet; the theatre is at present engaged by the Keeleys, and the manager's arrangements with them and Mademoiselle Celeste are such that he cannot receive me until August. I may possibly act a night or two at Newcastle in Staffordshire, and at Rochdale, but this would not take me away for more than a week. In answer to your question of what "coarsenesses" L---- finds in my book ["A Year of Consolation"], I will give you an extract from her letter. "There are a few expressions I should like to have stricken out of it; _par exemple_, I hate the word _stink_, though I confess there is no other to answer its full import; and there are one or two passages the careless manner of writing which astonished me in you. You must have caught it from what you say is my way of talking." Now, Hal, I can only tell you that more than once I thought myself actually to blame for not giving with more detail the disgusting elements which in Rome mingle everywhere with what is sublime and exquisite; for it appeared to me that to describe and dilate upon one half of the truth only was to be an unfaithful painter, and destroy the merit, with the accuracy, of the picture. I remember, particularly, standing one morning absorbed in this very train of reflection, in the Piazza del Popolo, when on attempting to approach the fine fountains below the Pincio I found it impossible to get near them for the abominations by which they were surrounded, and thought how unfaithful to the truth it would be to speak of the grace and beauty of this place, and not of this detestable desecration of it. The place and the people can only be perfectly described through the whole, as you know. Farewell. Ever yours, FANNY. RAILWAY STATION, HULL, Friday, 4th. I have been spending the afternoon crying over the tender mercies of English Christians to their pauper population, till my eyes smart, and itch, and ache, and I shall have neither sight nor voice to read "Coriolanus," which I must do this evening. To this Hull Railway Hotel is attached a magnificent Railway Station (or rather _vice versa_), shaped like a horseshoe, with a spacious broad pavement, roofed with a skylight all round, making a noble ambulatory, of which I have availed myself every day since I have been here for my walking exercise.... I was just starting for my walk to-day, when in came old Mr. Frost, my Hull employer, President of the Literary and Scientific Institution, before which I am giving my present readings, the principal lawyer, and, I believe, Mayor of Hull,--a most charming, accomplished, courteous old gentleman of seventy years and upwards, who, finding that I was about to walk, proposed to accompany me, and we descended to the Station. As we paced up and down, I remarked, lying in a corner, what I took at first for a bundle of rags. On looking again, however, I perceived there was a live creature in the rags--a boy, whose attitude of suffering and weariness, as he crouched upon the pavement, was the most wretched thing you can imagine. I knelt down by him, and asked him what ailed him: he hardly lifted his face from his hands, and said, "Headache;" and then, coughing horribly, buried his miserable face again. Mr. Frost, seeing I still knelt by him, began to ask him questions; and then followed one of those piteous stories which make one smart all over while one listens to them; parental desertion, mother marrying a second time, cruelty from the step-father, beating, starving, and final abandonment. He did not know what had become of them; they had gone away to avoid paying their rent, and left this boy to shift for himself. "How long ago is that?" said Mr. Frost. "Before snow," said the lad,--the snow has been gone a fortnight and more from this neighborhood, and for all that time the child, by his own account, has wandered up and down, living by begging, and sleeping in barns and stables and passages. The interrogatory was a prolonged one: my friend Mr. Frost is slow by age, and cautious by profession, and a man by nature, and so not irresistibly prompted to seize up such an unfortunate at once in his arms and adopt it for his own. In the course of his answers the boy, among other things, said, "I wouldn't mind only for little brother." "How old is he?" "Going on two year." "Where is he?" "Mother got him." "Oh, well, then, you needn't fret about him; she'll take care of him." "No, she won't; he won't be having nothing to eat, I know he won't." And the boy covered his face again in a sullen despair that was pitiful to see. Now, you know, Hal, this boy was not begging; he did not come to us with a pathetic appeal about his starving little brother: he was lying starving himself, and stupefied, with his head covered over, buried in his rags when I spoke to him; and this touching reminiscence of his poor little step-brother came out in the course of Mr. Frost's interrogatory accidentally, and made my very heart ache. The boy had been in the workhouse for two years, with his mother, before she married this second husband; and, saying that he had been sent to school, and kindly treated, and well fed in the workhouse, I asked him if he would go back thither, and he said yes. So, rather to Mr. Frost's amazement I think, I got a cab, and put the child in, and with my kind old gentleman--who, in spite of evident repugnance to such close quarters with the poor tatterdemalion, would by no means leave me alone in the adventure--we carried the small forsaken soul to the workhouse, where we got him, with much difficulty, _temporarily_ received. The wife of the master of the poor-house knew the boy again, and corroborated much of what he had told us, adding that he was a good boy enough while he was there with his mother; but--would you believe it, Hal?--she also told us that this poor little creature had come to their gate the night before, begging admittance; but that, because he had not a _certain written order_ from a certain officer, the rules of the establishment prevented their receiving him, and he had been turned away _of course_. I was in a succession of convulsions of rage and crying all this time, and so adjured and besought poor old Mr. Frost to take instant measures for helping the little outcast, that when we left him by the workhouse fire, the woman having gone to get him some food, and I returned blaspheming and blubbering to my inn, he--Mr. Frost--went off in search of a principal police-officer of Hull, from whom he hoped to obtain some further information about the child, which he presently brought back to me. "Oh yes, the magistrate knew the child; he had _sent him to prison_ already several times, for being found lying at night on the wharves and about the streets." So this poor little wretch was _sent to prison_ because literally he had not where to lay his head!... I wouldn't be a man for anything! They are so cruel, without even knowing that they are so: the habit of seeing sin and suffering is such a _heart-hardener_. Well, the boy is safe in the workhouse now, and is, according to his own wish and inclination, either to be sent to sea or put out apprentice to some trade. I have pledged one of my readings for purposes of outfit or entrance-fee, and Mr. Frost has promised me not to lose sight of the child, so I hope he is rescued from sin and suffering for the present, and perhaps for the future. Do you remember what infinite difficulty I told you I had had in rescuing that poor little wretch out of the streets of Glasgow? But then she had the advantage of a _mother_, who drove her into them day after day, to sing her starvation in the miserable mud and rain,--luckily this poor Hull boy's mother had not this _interest_ in him. I have come home, dear Hal, after my reading, and resume my letter to you, though I am very tired, and shall go to bed before I have finished it. I do remember Robertson's sermon about Jacob wrestling with the angel, and I remember the passage you refer to. I remember feeling that I did not agree with it. The solemnity of night is very great; and the aspect of the star-sown heavens suggests the idea of God, by the overpowering wonder of those innumerable worlds by which one then _sees_ one's self surrounded,--which affect one's imagination in a reverse way from the daylight beauty of the earth, for that makes God seem as if He were _here_, in this world, which then is all we see (except its great eye, the sun) of these multitudinous worlds He has created, and that are hanging in countless myriads round us. Night suggests the vastness of creation, as day can never do; and darkness, silence, the absence of human fellowship, and the suspension of human activity, interests, and occupations, leave us a less disturbed opportunity of meditating on our Creator's inconceivable power. The day and the day's beauty make me feel as if God were very near me; the night and the night's beauty, as if I were very far off from Him. But, dear Harriet, do not, I entreat you, challenge me to put into words those thoughts which, in us all, must be unutterable. If I can speak of nothing that I feel deeply but with an indistinctness and inefficiency that make me feel sick as with a bodily effort of straining at what I cannot reach, how can I utter, or write, upon such a subject as this! Do not, I beg, ask me such questions, at least in writing; speaking to you, there might be times--seldom, indeed, but some--when I might stammer out part of what I felt on such a subject; but I _cannot_ write about it--it is impossible. I have many things to tell you, for which I am too tired to-night, but I will tell you them to-morrow. God bless you. It has just occurred to me that I have a morning reading to-morrow, and some visits to pay first, and I must go to the workhouse and see that boy once more, and satisfy myself that whatever he is put to hereafter is his own choice; and so I shall have no time to write to you to-morrow, and therefore I will finish my letter to-night.... I had an application from Dr. Hawtrey, the Provost of Eton, through Mary Ann Thackeray, the other day, to give some readings to the Eton boys, which I have delightedly agreed to do--but of course refused to be paid for what will be such a great pleasure to me; whereupon Dr. Hawtrey writes that my "generosity to his boys takes his breath away." I think _I_ ought to pay for what will be so very charming as reading Shakespeare to those children.... I had a letter from Mrs. Jameson yesterday, from whom I have heard nothing since she left my house.... And now, dear Hal, I have told you all my news,--oh no, I haven't either:--I went last night, it being my holiday, to hear Mr. Warren, the author of "Ten Thousand a Year," and the Recorder of Hull, address the members of the Mechanics' Institute on the duties, privileges, difficulties, dignity, and consolations of labor. I was greatly delighted. I sat on the platform, opposite that large concourse of working men and women--laborers well acquainted by daily experience with the subject of the eloquent speaker's discourses,--and was deeply touched by the silent attention and intelligent interest with which, for two hours, they listened to his admirable address. I have got it, and shall bring it down and read it to you. Good-bye. Do not fail to let me know what I can do for Dorothy. Good-night. Ever as ever yours, FANNY. HULL, Thursday, December 2nd, 1847. My chest and throat, my dear Hal, are well. I have still a slight cough, but nothing to signify.... I never acted in all Yorkshire before. I do not know why, during my "first theatrical career," I did not, but so it was. My harvest now is not likely to be very great, for the prices at the theatres in Leeds and Hull are very low, the theatres not large, and so habitually deserted that an occasional attraction of a few nights hardly has time to rouse the people from their general indifference to these sorts of exhibitions. However, I am both living and saving, and am content. We have in our last letters got upon those subjects which, upon principle and by choice, I avoid,--bottomless speculations, wherein the mind, attempting to gaze, falls from the very brink and is drowned, as it were, at the very surface of them. Your theory of _partial immortality_ is abhorrent to me--I can use no other term. Pray conceive me rightly--'tis an abhorrence of the opinion, which does not include you for holding it; for though my whole being, moral and mental, revolts from certain notions, this is a mere necessity of my nature, as to contemplate such issues is the necessity of certain others, differently organized from mine. I would rather disbelieve in the immortality of my own soul than suppose the boon given to me was withheld from any of my fellow-creatures. Besides, I did not, in the position I placed before you, suggest the efficacy of _any special kind of idea_ of God, as connecting the holder of it with Him. For aught I can tell, the noble conception of the Divinity, formed out of the extension of the noble qualities of his own soul by the noblest man, may be further from any adequate idea of God than the gross notion of a log-worshipper is from the spiritual conception of the most spiritually minded man (only remember _I don't believe this_). But, inasmuch as it is something out of himself, beyond himself, to which the religious element of his nature aspires--that highest element in the human creature, since it combines the sense of reverence and the sense of duty, no matter how distorted or misapplied--it _is_ an idea of a God, it _is_ a manifestation of the germ of those capacities which, enlightened and cultivated, have made (be it with due respect spoken) the God of Fénelon and of Channing. I do not believe that any human creature, called by God into this life, is without some notion of a Divinity, no matter how mean, how unworthy, how seldom thought of, how habitually forgotten. Superstition, terror, hope, misery, joy--every one of these sentiments brings paroxysms in every man's life when _some_ idea of God is seized upon, no matter of what value, no matter how soon relinquished, how evanescent. Eternity is long enough for the progress of those that we see lowest in our moral scale. You know I believe in the progress of the human race, as I do in its immortality; and the barbarous conception of the Divinity of the least advanced of that race confirms me in this faith as much as the purest Christianity of its foremost nations and individuals. Revelation, you say, alone gives any image of God to you; but which Revelation? When did God begin, or when has He ceased, to reveal Himself to man? And is it in the Christian Revelation that you find your doctrine of partial immortality and partial annihilation? I believe I told you once of my having read in America a pamphlet suggesting that sin eventually _put out_, destroyed, annihilated, and did away with, those souls of which it took possession; this is something like your present position, and I do not know when I received so painful an impression as from reading that pamphlet, or a profound distress that lasted so long, from a mere abstract proposition addressed to my imagination. I believe all God's creatures have known Him, in such proportion as He and _they_ have chosen; _i.e._, to none hath He left Himself utterly without witness; to some that witness has been the perfect life and doctrine of Jesus Christ, the most complete revelation of God that the world has known. All have known Him, by His great grace, in some mode and measure; and therefore I believe all are immortal: none have known Him as He is, and but few in any age of the world have known Him as they might; and an eternity of progress holds forth, to my mind, the only hope large enough to compensate for the difference of advantages here, and to atone for the inadequate use of those advantages. Dearest Harriet, I hate not to make an effort to answer you, and you like, above all things, this species of questioning, speculating, and discussing. But there is something to me almost irreverent in thus catching up these everlasting themes, as it were, in the breathing-time between my theatrical rehearsals and performances. You will not mistake me. I know that the soul may be about its work (does not George Herbert say "Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, Makes that and the action fine"?) even at such times, but a deep and difficult mental process should not be snapped at thus. You know I never can _think_, and to think on such subjects to any purpose would almost necessarily involve thinking on none others; and but for my desire to please you, and not put aside with apparent disregard your favorite mental exercises, I should be as much ashamed as I am annoyed by the crude utterance of crude notions upon such subjects to which you compel me. You say our goodness and benevolence are not those of God: in _quantity_, surely not; but in _quality_? Are there two kinds of positive goodness? I read this morning the following passage in a book by an American, which has been lent to me by a young Oxford man whom I met, and fell much in love with, at Carolside--he is a great friend of Dr. Hampden's: "The greater, purer, loftier, more complete the character, so is the inspiration; for he that is true to conscience, faithful to reason, obedient to religion, has not only the strength of his own virtue, wisdom, and piety, but the whole strength of Omnipotence on his side; for goodness, truth, and love, as we conceive them, are not one thing in man and another in God, but the same thing in each." I agree with this, dear Hal, and not with you, upon this point. These speculations are a severe effort to my mind, and, besides shrinking from the mere mental labor of considering them, I find it difficult, in the rapid and desultory manner in which I must needs answer letters, to place even the few ideas that occur to me upon them clearly and coherently before you. Did I tell you that that impudent---- I've no more room, I'll tell you in my next. Give my love to Dorothy, and Believe me ever yours, FANNY. HULL, Saturday, December 4th, 1847. I did tolerably uncomfortably without Jeffreys [a man-servant who had left me], and that, you know, was very well. I paid old Mrs. Dorr something extra for doing all the work in the rooms upstairs, had a fire made in the little man-servant's room in the hall, and, after twelve o'clock, established Hayes therein to attend to my visitors. My table was laid for dinner in the front drawing-room, and at dinner-time wheeled into the back drawing-room, where, you know, I always sit; and after my dinner wheeled out again, and the things all removed in the other room by Hayes. The work is really nothing at all, and it would have been most unnecessary to have hunted up a man-servant for a couple of weeks, for last and next week are the only two that I expect to pass in Orchard Street, before I remove to my King Street lodgings. You speculate more, dear Hal, than I do, and among all things on that Covent Garden performance, that "Series of Scenes from various Plays of Shakespeare, to be given in his honor, and towards the purchase of his house at Stratford-on-Avon." I suppose it will be a very protracted exhibition, but my only reflection upon the subject was, that I was glad to perceive that my share of it came early in the course of events. I had no idea of proposing Hero [my dog] as your sister's inmate, but supposed he would be harbored in the stables, the kennels, or some appropriate purlieu, be sufficiently well fed, and take his daily exercise in your society. This was my vision of Hero's existence under your auspices, and, as you may readily believe, I had no idea of quartering him on the reluctant _dogmanity_ of anybody.... I have just had a charming letter from Charles Sedgwick; if I can remember, I will keep it to show it to you. Order your boots, or anything else, to be sent to me, dear Hal, but you know I shall not be with you yet for a month, and possibly not then; for though no _pleasant_ engagement (how nice it is of you to suggest that!) would interfere with my coming to St. Leonard's, _unpleasant_ ones might; any opportunity of making money certainly would, and such may occur to interfere with my present plans, which stand thus: I return to town to-morrow (there is but one evening train, so I must travel all night to rehearse on Monday morning for the "Shakespeare Memorial Night," on Tuesday); I shall remain in London a week, and on the following Monday go down to Bannisters for a fortnight, which will bring me within a few days of the expiration of my term in Orchard Street, and I shall return from Bannisters to move myself; on the following Monday, the 3d of January, I will, please God and you, come down to St. Leonard's.... I was so ill in spirit yesterday that I could not write to you. I am better to-day. Thank God, my patience and courage do not often or long forsake me!... ---- has written again to borrow money of me; and that impudent Liverpool manager, who _borrowed_, _i.e._ did not pay me, my last night's earnings, when you were there with me, has written to say that, if I will go to Liverpool _and act for his benefit_, he will pay me what he owes me; to which I have replied that, when he _has_ paid me what he owes me, we will see about further transactions with each other. Certainly "Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time." Oh, my dear! in Parker's "Discourse upon Religion"--the book I told you I was reading--I light upon this passage: "The indolent and the sensual love to have a visible master in spiritual things, who will spare them the _agony_ of thought." Is not that definition of thought after my own heart, and just as I should have written it? God bless you. Give my love to dear Dorothy. Ever as ever yours, FANNY. DEAR HARRIET, I have not yet read either of Mrs. Gaskell's books, but I mean to do so. I have just got through, with unbounded amazement, a book called "Realities," written by a Miss L----, for whom Lady M---- has taken a great fancy. A more extraordinary production--realities with a vengeance--I certainly have seldom read; and the book is in such contrast with the manner and appearance of the authoress that it will be a long time before I get over my surprise at both. Imagine this lady having thought proper to introduce in her story an eccentric vagabond of a woman, whom she has called "Fanny Kemble." Upon Lady M----'s asking her--I think with some pardonable indignation, considering that I am her intimate friend--how she came to do such an unwarrantable thing; if she was not aware that "Fanny Kemble" was the real name of a live woman at this moment existing in English society, Miss L---- ingenuously replied, "Oh dear! that she'd never thought of that: that she only knew it was a celebrated dramatic name, and so she had put it into her book." _Sancta Simplicitas!_ I should think I might sue her for libel and defamation. The books that women write now are a curious sign of the times, and an indication of great changes in opinion, as well as alteration in practice. After all, women are _part_ men, "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." As long as they benefited--and they did highly--by the predominance of the conservative spirit in civilized society, they were the most timid and obstinate of conservatives. But emancipation, or, to speak more civilly, freedom, is dawning upon them from various quarters; Democracy is coming to rule the earth; and women are discovering that in _that_ atmosphere they must henceforth breathe, and live, and move, and have their being. But the beginning of a great deal of male freedom is mere emancipation; and so it will be, I suppose, with women. The drunken exultation of Caliban is no bad illustration of the emancipation of a slave; and the ladies, more gracefully intoxicated with the _elixir vitæ_ of liberty, may rejoice no more to "scrape trencher or wash dish," but write books (more or less foolish) instead. Do you remember that delightful negro song, the "Invitation to Hayti," that used to make you laugh so? "Brudder, let us leave Buckra land for Hayti: Dar we be receive' Grand as Lafayette! Make a mighty show, When we land from steamship, You be like Monroe, And I like Louis Philip!" And when, anticipating the elevation of his noble womankind to the elegant and luxurious _idlesse_ of the favored white female, the poet sings:-- "No more dey dust and scrub, No more dey wash and cookee; But all day long we see Dem read the nobel bookee." (For _read_, read _write_.) I am beset with engagements; and, though I am very anxious to get away abroad and rest, it would be both foolish and wrong to reject these offers of money, tendered me on all sides, _speciously_ with such _borrowing_ relations as I enjoy. Good-bye, dear. Ever as ever yours, FANNY. [My reading at Eton was a memorably pleasant incident of my working days. Dr. Hawtrey at first proposed to me to read "Coriolanus;" but I always read it very ill, and petitioned for some other play, giving the name of a tragedy, "Macbeth;" a comedy, the "Merry Wives of Windsor;" and one of the more purely poetical plays, "The Tempest;" suggesting that the "boys" should vote, and the majority determine the choice. This seemed a mighty innovation on all received customs, and was met with numerous objections, which, however, did not prove insuperable; and "The Tempest," my own favorite of all Shakespeare's dramas, was chosen by my young auditors. A more charming audience to look at I never had than this opening flower of English boyhood, nor a more delightfully responsive one. The extraordinary merriment, however, invariably caused by any mention of the name of Stefano whenever it occurred puzzled me not a little; and when, in the last scene, I came to the lines, "Is not this Stefano your drunken butler? Why, he's drunk now!" I was interrupted with such a universal shout of laughter that I couldn't help inquiring the cause of it; when Mr. Stephen Hawtrey, Dr. Hawtrey's brother and one of the masters, told me that Stephano was the nickname by which he was habitually designated among the lads, which sufficiently accounted for their ecstasy of amusement at all the ludicrous sayings and situations of the Neapolitan "drunken butler." The Eton young gentlemen addressed me with a kind and flattering compliment through their captain, and rewarded whatever pleasure I had been able to give them by a very elegant present, which I hope my children will value, but which, upon the whole, is less precious to me than the recollection of their young faces and voices while I read to them.] ORCHARD STREET, December 8th. DEAREST HAL, I was better than I expected to be after my night journey from Hull. Hayes and I had a carriage to ourselves after ten o'clock, and I took advantage of that circumstance to lie on the floor and get some rest. Of course I woke from each of my short naps aching rather severely, but I did sleep the greater part of the night; and the two hours I spent in bed before beginning the day unstiffened my bones and body. The night was beautifully fine when we left Hull, and continued so more than half-way. We made our entrance into London, however, in wretched rain and wind; but the weather has again become fine, and to-day is beautiful.... The detached stanza of French poetry you send me is a rather exaggerated piece of enthusiasm as it stands thus alone; though, incorporated in the poem to which it belongs, the effect of it may be striking. Some of the stanzas of Manzoni's "Ode to Napoleon" (a very noble poem), detached from their context, might appear strained and exaggerated. That which has real merit as a whole seldom gains by being disconnected. Trouble yourself no more about poor Hero, my dear Hal; I am afraid he is lost. Mrs. Mulliner left him in the area this morning, and as for nearly four hours now we have seen and heard nothing of him, there is no doubt that he has made his escape into the wide world of London, and I fear there is no chance of his finding his way back again. I should not have liked his being at Jenny Wade's [a cottager at Ardgillan, whom Miss S---- pensioned]. In the present condition of Ireland, I should scruple to quarter a dog in a poor person's cabin, giving them for his support what they must needs feel might go some way towards the support of some starving human being. In the stable or kennel of a rich house there is sure to be that much spent, if not wasted, which may warrant the addition of such another member to the establishment; and in your sister's stables and offices there can be no wretch who would look with envy upon the meal eaten by my dog. I would rather a great deal have carried him to America, if I could have managed it, than left him with any one but yourself. At Lenox everything, as well as everybody, has plenty to eat; and he would have been cared for, for his own sake by the young folks, and for mine by the old. But I fear he is so far provided for that I shall never see him again, for his uneducated senses will surely never suffice to guide him back to Orchard Street.... You will be glad, because I am very glad, that poor Hero has come back; and I think his doing so exhibits considerable _nous_ in a brute so brutally brought up as he has been. He returned with a bit of broken string round his neck; so somebody had already appropriated him, and tied him up, and he had effected his escape, and come home--much, I think, to his credit. I was delighted to see him, and poor Mulliner almost did a fit. Good-bye, dearest Hal. Give Dorothy my best love. You shall have your boots before I come, if Mr. W---- should call for them. Ever as ever yours, FANNY. BRADFORD, YORKSHIRE, Thursday, 10th. It is my opinion, my dear Hal, that you will see me again and again, and several times again, before I leave England. I have just come to this place from Manchester, and have to-day received offers of three new engagements, and have every prospect therefore of being detained until the beginning of next month, and so beholding your well-beloved visage before I set off on my travels; though, whenever I do go, it will certainly be from Folkestone, and not Dover. I left the Scotts this morning with deep regret. Mr. Scott has not been well during this last visit I have paid them, and I was much shocked to hear that he is threatened with disease of the heart, sudden death at any moment. His wife and her sisters are excellently kind to me; she has but two faults, an excessive _humility_ and an excessive _conscientiousness_; they wouldn't be bad for virtues, would they? Mr. Scott's intercourse is delightful to me; his mind is deep and high, logical and practical, humorous and tender, and he is as nearly _good_ as a man can be. He has a still, calm manner and slow, quiet speech, very composing to me. I wish it might be my good fortune to see more of him. Farewell, my dear. I begin to feel as if I never should get off; and instead of the pathetic uncertainty as to when we might meet again, which was beginning to affect me with melancholy, have fallen into a sort of reckless indifference about you: so sure am I that we shall see each other, maybe, _ad nauseam_ mutually, before I go. Give my love to Dorothy. Ever as ever yours, FANNY. [The remarkable man of whom I have spoken in this letter, John Alexander Scott, was one of the most _influential_ persons I have ever known, in the strongest sense of the word. I think the term, "an important human being," by which Sydney Smith described Francis Horner, might justly have been applied to Mr. Scott. The intimate friend of Edward Irving, Carlyle, and Maurice, he affected, to an extraordinary degree, the minds and characters of all those who were familiar with him; and his influence, like all the deepest and most powerful human influence, was personal. He delivered various courses of lectures, principally, I think, in Edinburgh--Dante being one of his favorite themes; and "Three Discourses" upon religious and moral subjects are, I think, all that remain in printed form of many that he delivered at various times and at various places. They are, as is always the case in the instance of his order of mind and character, though striking and powerful, very inadequate samples of his spirit and intellect. A very just tribute to his uncommon qualities and extraordinary power of influence appeared, after his death, in the _Spectator_. It was undoubtedly written by one who knew Mr. Scott well, and bore testimony, as all who ever had that privilege have done, to the singular force and virtue of his nature, and its penetrating and vivifying power over others. My last intercourse with _him_ was a letter from _her_, hailing in his name the hope of seeing me at Montreux, in Switzerland, whither I was going in the expectation of finding them. The letter broke off in the middle, and ended with the news, calamitous to me, as to all who knew him, of his death. At the time when I visited them at Manchester, he had accepted some Professorship in the then newly established Owen's College.] WOODSLEY HOUSE, Leeds. I think, my dear Hal, your wish that I might see more of Mr. Scott and his family is likely to be realized. To my great pleasure, I received a note from him the other day, telling me that there was a general desire in Manchester to have the "Midsummer Night's Dream" given with Mendelssohn's music. He wrote of this to me, expressing his hope that it might be done, and that so I might be brought to them again; adding the kind and cordial words, "All here love you"--which expression touched and gratified me deeply; and I hope that the reading may take place, and that I shall have the privilege of a few days' more intercourse with that man. The name of the noble woman whose impulse of humanity so overcame all self-considerations, of whom he told me, was Miss Coutts-Trotter. [Nursing a person who was in a state of collapse in the last stage of cholera, she had sought to bring back the dying woman's vitality by embracing her closely, and breathing on her mouth her own breath of life and love.] ... I can tell you of no other publications of Mr. Scott. It is the despair of his wife, sisters, friends, and admirers that so few of his good words have been preserved. But in these days of printing and publishing, proclaiming and producing, I am beginning to have rather a sympathy with those who withhold, than with those who utter, all their convictions.... I have always held that what people could put forth from them in any kind was less valuable than what they could not--what they were compelled to retain--the reserve force of their mind and nature; and thinking this, as I do, more and more, I regret less and less such instances as this of Mr. Scott's apparently circumscribed sphere, by the non-publication of his lectures and discourses. He is daily teaching a body of young men; and to such of them as are able to receive his teaching, he will bequeath some measure of his spirit. It is doubtless a pleasure, and a help too, to read the good books of good men; but there are many good men who write good books, and he is among the few who cannot. He has suffered from ill health, particularly difficulties in the head; and though his gift of extemporaneous speech is remarkable, he cannot compose for printing without labor of the brain which is injurious to him. In this he also resembles Dr. Follen, of whom he reminds me, who wrote little, and published less. I do not know anything of Miss Muloch--that, I think, is the name of the writer whose book you mention as having notices of my uncle and aunt introduced into it.... Publicity is the safest of all protections, as in some sense freedom is also. Women, I suppose, will find this out, as the people are finding it out; but in the beginning of their working out their newly discovered theories into rational practice, people in general, and women in particular, will do some wonderful things. The women especially, having for the most part had hitherto little positive or practical knowledge of life, will be apt "to make all earth amazed" with the first performances of various kinds of their new experience; but it is all in the day's work of the good old world, which is ordained to see reasonable and good men and women upon its ancient, ever-blooming surface, in greater numbers henceforward than hitherto: but the beginnings are strange.... Yours ever, FANNY. 2, PARK PLACE, HALIWELL LANE, MANCHESTER. MY DEAREST HAL, At the conclusion of my reading yesterday evening, letters were put into my hands containing no fewer than six offers of new engagements; and, situated as I am, I cannot reject this money. I have endeavored, in answering these invitations, to get the readings all as close to each other as possible, and I now think that I may get off about the 22d; but the same sort of interruption to my plans may occur again, and thus I may be delayed, though I have got my passport and have even written to bespeak rooms at an hotel.... My dearest Hal, you have written to me three days running, and good part of each of your letters is disquisition on _Calvinism_.... Thus I have here lying by my side nine pages of your handwriting. I have just swallowed my dinner, after travelling from London, and sit down to discharge part of my debt, and in half an hour (I look at the watch, and it says ten minutes) I must go and dress myself for my reading, and here still will be the nine pages unanswered to-morrow morning, when I must set off for Manchester. You talk of the logic of my mind, my dear friend, but my mind has no logic whatever; and in so far as that is concerned, Calvinism need look for as little help as hindrance from me. I do not believe I can _think_; and from the difficulty, not to say impossibility, I find in doing so, I don't think I would if I could; and if that is not logical, neither is that most admirable of all chains of reasoning, "Je n'aime pas les épinards," etc. There, now, here comes my maid to interrupt me, and there's an end of epistolary correspondence; I must go and dress. Now it is to-morrow morning, dear Hal, and until the breakfast comes I can talk a few more words with you.... But don't you know that one reason why I appear to you to have positive mental results, is because I have no mental processes? I never think; for, as a lawyer would say, whenever I do, it seems to me as if there was no proposition (a few arithmetical and scientific ones excepted _perhaps_, like two and two are four) which does not admit of its own reverse. I don't say this is so, but it seems so to me; and whenever I attempt to put the notions that float through my brain, on which I float comfortably enough over infinite abysses of inconclusion, into precise form and shape, there is not one of them that does not seem to be quite controvertible; nor did I ever utter or assume a position of which I felt most assured while uttering it, without perceiving almost immediately that it was assailable on many sides. This is extremely disagreeable to me; the labor necessary to establish any mental or moral proposition simply on intellectual grounds, appears to me so great that I hate the very idea of it, and then I hate myself for my laziness, and wonder if some "judgment" does not await wits that will not work because work is tiresome. But if I appear to you to have strong convictions, it is because I have strong mental and moral impulses, instincts, intuitions, and never allow myself to weaken them by that most debilitating process, long-continued questioning, leading to no result. You ask me what book I read now to put me to sleep--why, Murray's "Handbook for France;" ditto, for Savoy, Switzerland, and Piedmont; ditto, for the North of Italy, and the foreign "Bradshaw." These furnish my lullaby now-a-nights. I read yesterday, in the railroad carriage, a little story translated from the French by Lady (Lucy) Duff Gordon, with which I was greatly touched and delighted. It costs one shilling, and is called "The Village Doctor," and is one of those pale green volumes headed, "Reading for Travellers," to be found on all the railroad bookstands. I thought it charming, and a most powerful appeal to the imagination in behalf of Roman Catholicism. I have already told you what route I intend to take, and I think we shall be a week or ten days going from Paris to Turin, coasting all the way from Marseilles, as I wish to do. I do not read at Manchester to-day, but Hallé, who conducts the music, wishes me to attend a rehearsal, which, of course, I am anxious to do at his request. On Monday I read the "Midsummer Night's Dream," and on Tuesday "Macbeth," at Mr. Scott's desire. To-morrow I shall, I hope, hear Mr. Scott read and comment again on the Bible, and I am looking forward with great pleasure to being with him and Mrs. Scott again. No doubt there are several more direct ways of getting to Nice than coasting round, as I propose doing, but I wish to see that Mediterranean shore, and have no desire to travel hard.... Adelaide Procter [the daughter of my friends was to be my companion in this journey] has no enthusiasm whatever for me; she does not know me at all, and I do not know her at all well; and I do not think, when we know each other more, that she will like me any better. Her character and intellectual gifts, and the delicate state of her health, all make her an object of interest to me.... I love and respect Mr. Procter very much; and her mother, who is one of the kindest-hearted persons possible, has always been so good to me, that I am too glad to have the opportunity of doing anything to oblige them. I am going to Turin because, as they have entrusted their daughter to me, I will not leave her until I see her safe in the house to which she is going; I owe that small service to the child of her parent.... Dear Harriet, if you will come to Switzerland this summer, nothing but some insuperable impediment shall prevent my meeting you there. If you are "old and stiff," I am _fat, stuffy, puffy, and old_; and you are not of such proportions as to break a mule's back, whereas if I got on one I should expect it to cast itself and me down the first convenient precipice, only to avoid carrying me to the next. I spent Thursday evening with Mrs. Jameson; she had a whole heap of people at her house, and among them the American minister and his niece--Philadelphians.... I do not pity Mrs. Jameson very much in her relations with Lady Byron. I never thought theirs a real attachment, but a connection made up of all sorts of motives, which was sure not to hold water long, and never to hold it after it had once begun to leak. It was an instance of one of those relationships which are made to _wear out_, and as it always appeared so to me, I have no great sympathy with either party in this foreseen result. I pity Mrs. Jameson more because she is mortified than because she is grieved, and I pity Lady Byron because she is more afraid of mortifying than of giving her pain. It is all very _uncomfortable_; but real sorrow has as little to do with it now as real love ever had.... I am writing to you at Mr. Scott's, where I arrived yesterday afternoon, the beginning of my letter having been written in London, the middle at Bradford, and the end here. It is Sunday afternoon: our morning service is over. I am sorry to say I find both Mr. and Mrs. Scott quite unwell, the former with one of those constitutional headaches from which he has suffered so much for many years. They incapacitate him for conversation or any mental exertion, and I am a great loser by it, as well as grieved for his illness.... Farewell. Ever as ever yours, FANNY. [Lucy Austin, the clever and handsome daughter of a cleverer and handsomer mother--Mrs. John Austin, wife of the eminent lawyer and writer--excited a great deal of admiration, as the wife of Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, in the London society of my day. Loss of health compelled her to pass the last years of her life in the East; and the letters she wrote during her sojourn there are not only full of charm and interest, but bear witness to a widespread personal influence over the native population among whom she lived, the result of her humane benevolence towards, and kindly sympathy for, them. One or two amusing incidents occurred with regard to my reading of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" at Manchester. The gentleman who had the management of the performance wrote to me offering me forty pounds for my share of it--a very liberal price, which I declined, my price for one of my readings being invariably _twenty_ pounds. At the end of the performance one of the gentlemen of the committee came to pay me my salary, which having done, he expressed himself, in his own behalf and that of his fellow-managers, greatly obliged to me for the liberality I had exhibited (honesty, it seems to me) in not accepting double my usual terms when they offered it to me. "And," said he, drawing a five-pound note from his pocket-book, "I really--we really--if you would--if you could--allow us to offer you five pounds in addition----" The gentleman's voice died away, and he seemed to be becoming nervous, under the effect of the steadfast seriousness with which, in spite of the greatest inclination to burst out laughing, I listened to this strange proposal. The five-pound note fluttered a little between his finger and thumb, and for one moment I had a diabolical temptation to twitch it from him and throw it into the fire. This prompting of Satan, however, I womanfully resisted, and merely civilly declined the gratuity; and the gentleman left me with profuse acknowledgments of the service I had rendered them and my "extreme liberality." My friend Charles Hallé, coming in just at this moment, was thrown into fits of laughter at the transaction, and my astonishment at it. Hallé was a friend of ours, an admirable musician, and a most amiable man, and one of the best masters of our modern day. His style was more remarkable for sensibility, delicacy, and refinement, than for power or brilliancy of execution; but I preferred his rendering of Beethoven to that of all the other virtuosi I ever heard; and some of the hours of greatest musical enjoyment I have had in my life I owe to him, when he and his friend Joachim, playing almost, as it seemed, as much for their own delight as ours, enchanted a small circle of enthusiastic and grateful listeners, gathered round them in my sister's drawing-room. Mr. Scott's comment upon my reading gave me great pleasure. "It was good," he said, "from beginning to end; but you _are_ Theseus." Oddly enough, a similar compliment was paid me in the same words at the end of a reading that I gave for the Working Men's Institute in Brighton, when my friend, Mr. R----, kindly complimenting me on the performance, said, "It was all delightful: but you _are_ Henry V.," and whatever difference of opinion may have existed among my critics as to my rendering the tragic and comic characters of Shakespeare's plays, I think the heroic ones were those in which I ought to have succeeded best, for they were undoubtedly those with which I had most sympathy.] FULFORD, YORK, Saturday, 3d. MY DEAREST HAL, I am amused at your gasping anxiety to be told where I am going, as if I was about to depart into some non-postal region, where letter of yours should never reach me more, instead of spending the next week in Edinburgh, which surely you did know.... My dearest Hal, J---- W---- has just come into my room, bringing the news of the Emperor of Russia's death. It has seized me quite hysterically, and the idea of the possible immediate cessation of carnage and desolation, and war and wickedness (in that peculiar shape), has shaken me inexpressibly, and I am shocked at the tears of joy that are raining from my eyes, so that I can't see the paper on which I am writing to you; and if I can thus weep my thanksgivings for the news of this man's death, who have no dear son, or brother, or husband on that murderous Crimean soil, think of the shout of rejoicing which will be his only dirge throughout France and England. I am shocked at the exclamation of gratitude which escaped my lips when I heard the announcement. Poor human soul, how terrible that its sudden summons from its heavy and difficult responsibilities should thus be hailed by any other human creature! and yet how many will draw a long breath, as of a great deliverance, at this news! I can hardly write at all, my hand shakes so, and I cannot think of anything else; and yet I had purposed to send dear Dorothy some account of her family here, who are all well and most kind to me. I will wait a while.... DEAREST DOROTHY, I sit here in this pleasant room [I was in Miss Wilson's home], the prospect from which is improved by the rising of the river, which presents the appearance of a lake. The snowdrops hang their white clusters above the brown mould of the garden beds, and watery rays of sunshine slant shyly across the meadows: the whole is very sweet and peaceful, and I was enjoying it extremely, when the report of this imperial death broke like a peal of thunder over it all, as unexpectedly as terribly. To-morrow I am to go and hear afternoon service at the minster, which I have never seen. Everything is done for my pleasure and satisfaction that can be thought of, and I feel very grateful for it. The thought of the old love and friendship between my dead kindred and the former owners of this house makes the place pleasant with a saddish pleasantness to me. Dear Dorothy, I wish you were here; I write you a very affectionate kiss, and am Yours, FANNY. GEORGE HOTEL, BANGOR, Monday, 20th. MY DEAREST HAL, If you had given way to your impulse of accompanying us to Wales, I do not think you could have returned under three days, or that even by that time you could in any degree have recovered from the effect of our to-day's passage. Every creature on board was sick except M---- and myself.... "A quelque chose malheur est bon," and the indisposition I was suffering all yesterday preserved me from the lesser evil of sea-sickness. This was my experience the last time I crossed the Atlantic, when my voyage was preceded by a week of serious illness, and during the whole passage I did not suffer from sea-sickness.... On our arrival here, we found that the excellent Miss Roberts [mistress of the charming hotel at Bangor] had treated us exactly as the last time; _i.e._, "A party were just finishing dinner in our sitting-room. She was very sorry, very sorry indeed; but it would be ready for us in less than a quarter of an hour;" and we were thrust provisionally into another, where letters, books, workboxes, india-rubber shoes, and smoking-caps attested that we had no business, and suggested that their owners were in all probability the "party" finishing off their dinner in our bespoken apartment, which gave me an inclination to toss all the things in the room about, and poke the smoking-caps into the india-rubber shoes; but I didn't. What innumerable temptations I do resist! I assured Miss Roberts I was very ill-tempered, and proceeded to make assurance doubly sure by blowing her up sky-high, to which she merely replied with a Welsh "Eh! come si ha da far?" and declared that if I was in her place I should do just the same, which excited my wrath to a pitch of fury. We had some lunch, and then set off to the quarries. The afternoon was bright and beautiful, and we were charmed with the drive and all we saw, M---- never ceasing to exclaim with fervent satisfaction at the comfortable, cheerful, healthy, well-to-do appearance of the people and their habitations--a most striking and suggestive contrast to all we had seen in poor Ireland, certainly.... We have just done dinner, and M---- is fast asleep on the sofa, with "Pilgrim's Progress" in her arms. My head aches, and my nerves twitch with fatigue and pain, but I am better than I was yesterday. The trains from this place are very inconvenient. The one we have to go by starts from here at nine, and does not reach London till half-past seven in the evening, so we shall have a wearisome day of it.... Give my kindest love to dear Mrs. Taylor and "the girls." I shall think of them with infinite anxiety, and pray, "whenever I remember to be holy," that this dreadful war may now soon come to a close, and they be spared further anguish. [Colonel Richard Taylor, Miss S----'s nephew, was with the army in the Crimea.] I am ever most affectionately yours, FANNY. BATH, Monday, December 9th. MY DEAREST HAL, ... You cannot think how forlorn I feel, walking in and out of our room here without farewell or greeting from you; and yet the place where you have been with me has a remembered presence of your affectionate companionship that makes it pleasant, compared to those where I go for the first time and have no such friendly association to cheer me. My disposition, as you know, is averse to all strangeness, and takes little delight in novelty; and the wandering life I lead compels me to both, forbidding all custom and the comfortable feeling of habit and use, which make me loath to leave a place where I have stayed only three days, for another where I have never stayed at all. I was not very happy at Oxford. The beautiful place impressed me sadly; but that was because I was very unwell and sad while I was there. The weather was horrible; a dark greasy fog pervaded the sky the whole time. The roads were so muddy as to render riding odious, and the streets so slimy that walking was really dangerous as well as disagreeable. Still, I saw some things with which I was much charmed, and have no doubt that, if I could but have had an hour's daylight, I should have been delighted with the place altogether. E---- S---- came down from London on Thursday morning, and took me to see the fine collection of drawings by Raphael and Michael Angelo at the Taylor Institute, and I spent three hours there in a state of great enjoyment. I wandered in ignorant wonderment through the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum, with A---- M----, who seemed quite as little familiar with the learned treasures of the place as myself. He took me to see his own college, Christ Church, with which, especially the great dining-hall, I was enchanted; and with the fine avenue at the back of the colleges, and the tower and cloisters of Magdalen. I have no doubt I should enjoy another visit to Oxford very much; but I was miserable while I was there, and could not do justice to the beauty of the place. The inn where I stayed was dirty and uncomfortable, and dearer than any I have yet stayed at. My sitting-room was dingy and dark, and I was glad when I came into this large light sitting-room of ours again, out of which, however, they have removed the piano--a loss I have not thought it worth while to replace, as I go to Cheltenham on Wednesday afternoon.... You ask what I would sell my "English Tragedy" for. Why, anything anybody would give me for it. It cannot be acted, and nobody reads plays nowadays--small blame to them.... Ever as ever yours, FANNY. CHELTENHAM, Thursday, 12th. MY DEAREST HAL, I found your loving greeting on my arrival here yesterday evening. I am troubled at your account of yourself.... What _things_ these bodies of ours are! I sometimes think that, when we lay them down in the earth, we shall have taken leave of all our sinfulness; and yet there are sins of the soul that do not lodge in the flesh, though the greater proportion of our sins, I think, do: and when I reflect how little control we have over our physical circumstances, what with inherited disease and infirmity, and infirmity and disease incurred through the ignorant misguidance of others during our youth, and our own ignorant misdirection afterwards, I think the miseries we reap are punishment enough for much consequent sin; and that, once freed from the "body of this death," we shall cease to be subject to sin in anything like the same degree.... It is very muddy underfoot; but if the sky does not fall, I shall ride out on my old post-horse at twelve o'clock. Certainly your question, as to where the wise men are who are to encounter the difficulties of legislation for this country next spring, was an exclamation--a shriek--and not an interrogation, addressed to _me_ at any rate; for though I suppose God's quiver is never empty of arrows, and that some _are_ always found to do His work, it may be that saving this country from a gradual decline of greatness and decay of prosperity may not be work for which He has appointed hands, and which therefore will not be done.... I declined being in the room we formerly occupied in this house, because I feared, now the days are so much shorter, that it would be inconveniently dark. I am in a charming light room, with three windows down to the ground, and a bewitching paper of pale green, with slender gold rods running up it, all wound round with various colored convolvuli. It's one of the prettiest papers I ever saw, and makes me very happy. You know how subject I am even to such an influence as that of a ridiculous wall-paper.... I have had no conversation with Mr. Churchill; but, in spite of my requesting him not to be at the trouble of moving the piano into my present sitting-room, as I am here for so short a time, I find it installed here this morning. He certainly is the black swan of hotel-keepers; and how kind and indulgent people are to me everywhere!... My young devotee, Miss A----, acquiesced very cordially in all my physical prescriptions for mental health, and did not seem to take at all amiss my plunging her hysterical enthusiasm first into perspirations, and then into cold baths. Her maid has been with me this morning, with lovely fresh flowers--a bunch of delicious Persian lilac, and two flower-pots full of various mosses, smelling so fragrantly of mere earthy freshness that no perfume ever surpassed it. The only other greeting she sent me was some pretty lines of Victor Hugo's, with which I was unacquainted, and which I send you, not for their singular inappropriateness as applied to me, but for their graceful turn: "Tu es comme l'oiseau posé pour un instant Sur des rameaux trop frêles, Que sent ployer la branche, et qui chante pourtant Sachant qu'il a des ailes;" which I translate impromptu thus: Thou art like the bird that alights, and sings Though the frail spray bends, for he knows he has wings. God bless you, my dear. Love to dear Dorothy. Ever as ever yours, FANNY. WORCESTER, Tuesday, 17th. MY DEAREST HAL, Those pretty French lines I sent you are by Victor Hugo, a man of great genius, but almost the most exaggerated writer of the exaggerated modern school of French style. Some of his poems, in spite of this, are fine and charming; and, indeed, there is not much better French to be found than the prose of some of the French writers of novels and essays. Madame George Sand, Merimée, Ste. Beuve, write with admirable simplicity and force. I sent my young adorer back, in return for her quatrain, Millevoye's lines on the withered leaf--a far more appropriate image of my peregrinations. These, no doubt, you know, ending with four pretty lines-- "Je vais où va toute chose, Sans me plaindre, ou m'inquiéter Où va la feuille de rose, Et la feuille de laurier." ... You ask after my audiences. At Bath the same singular-looking gentleman, who is beautiful as well as singular looking, and wonderfully like my uncle John, came and sat at my last morning reading in the same conspicuous place. He is a helpless invalid, and was wheeled in his chair through my private room, to the place which he occupied near my reading-stage. His name is C----, and he and his wife were intimate friends of John Kemble's, and sent to beg I would see them after the reading. As I had to start immediately for Cheltenham, this was impossible, which I was very sorry for, as I should like to have spoken to that beautiful face. You impress upon me the value of the blessing of health, and I think I estimate it duly; for although I said it mattered little how I was, I meant that, isolated as I am, my ill health would affect and afflict fewer persons than that of some one who had bonds and ties of one sort and another.... My work goes on without interruption, and I think with little variation in my mode of performing it; and I make efforts of this kind, sometimes under such circumstances of physical suffering and weakness, that I am almost hard-heartedly incredulous about the difficulty of doing _anything_ that one _has to do_--which is not very reasonable either, for the force of will, the nervous energy, which carries one through such efforts, depends itself on physical conditions, which vary in different temperaments, and in the same temperament at different times. The first day of my arrival in Cheltenham I received a note from Miss A----'s mother--a very touching expression of thanks for what she calls my kindness to her child, full of anxiety about the training and guiding of her mind and character, accepting with much gratitude my offer of personal acquaintance with her daughter (personal acquaintance is an excellent antidote to enthusiasms), whom she brought herself the next day to see me.... In our conversation I insisted much on the importance of physical training, and commended to her, after the highest of all help (without which, indeed, none other can avail), systematic and regular exercise, and systematic and sedulous occupation, both followed as a positive duty; all possible sedatives for the mind and imagination; and the utmost attention and care to all the physical functions. I gave her the wisdom which I have bought; but she will buy her own, or I am much mistaken.... I went on Sunday to the cathedral to hear afternoon service, but was late, and did not get within the choir, but sat on a chair in a lonely corner of the transept, and followed the service from without the pale. Yesterday, at my usual hour for exercise, I went to walk by the river; but rain came on, and I finished my walk under the cloisters, which rang from end to end with the shrill shouts of a parcel of school-boys, let out for their noon-day recess. Last night the weather was fearful, a perfect storm of wind and rain, so that, though my audience was small, I was agreeably surprised to find I had any at all. I have not seen the letter you refer to in the _Times_, but think it very likely Charles Greville should write such a one, as I heard him say he should give the public a piece of his mind on the subject, and he occasionally does write in the _Times_, and his views are precisely what you describe those of "Carolus" to be. Good-bye, dear. I have a _bundle_ of violets from you this morning, for which many thanks. Love to dear Dorothy. Ever as ever yours, FANNY. 18, ORCHARD STREET, December 7th. I have no patience with letters at all, my dear Hal. I am conscious half the time I write that I don't say clearly what I mean, and when I get your answers, I have that disagreeable conviction confirmed. Perhaps it is just as well, however; for the sort of feverish impatience I have very often while writing, because of the insufficiency of the process to express, as rapidly and distinctly as I wish, my thoughts, is so excessive, as to be childish. I am content, henceforth, to answer you to the best of my _circumstances_ (for it is not to the best of my ability, really) on any subject you please. It is enough that my words are of use to you, and God knows it signifies nothing at all that I cannot conceive how they should be so. You have misunderstood me, or I misexpressed myself, with regard to the ground of my objecting to write upon the subjects we have lately discussed in our letters. I do not think it irreverent to advert to the highest subjects at any time. That which is most profoundly serious to me, is always very near my thoughts--so much so that it mingles constantly with them and my words in a manner rather startling and shocking, I think, to people whose minds are parcelled out into distinct and detached divisions--pigeon-holes, as it were--for the sacred and profane, and whose seriousness never comes near their mirth. This is not at all the case with me, with whom they are apt to run into each other very frequently; seriousness is perhaps more habitual to my mind than folly, but my laughter and jests are not very remotely allied to my deepest convictions. My instincts of vital truth being a very essential part of me, _must_ go with me to the playhouse, rehearsals, and performances, and all the intermediate time of various occupations, so that it is not my "veneration" which is shocked at the superficial mode in which I have handled these themes, while writing of them to you, but my "conscientiousness," which suggests the whole time that such matters should not be spoken of without sufficient previous process of reflection, and that it is behaving irreverently to _anything_ that requires consideration to talk of it crudely without any. If the sincerest and most strenuous mental application can hardly enable us to arrive at glimpses of the truth upon those subjects, there is an impertinent levity in uttering mere _notions_ about them which have been submitted to no such test. You do _think_, and though you come to no conclusions, are perfectly entitled to utter your _non_-conclusiveness; but I have a cowardly dread of the labor of thinking steadily and consecutively upon these difficult subjects, and I have certainly not at present the proper leisure or opportunities for doing so, and therefore but for your last letter I should say it was a _shame_ to speak upon them. But since the vague suggestions which arise in my mind upon these only important matters comfort and are of any use to you, then, my beloved friend, they have a value and virtue, and I shall no longer feel reluctant to utter them. I have written this last page since my return from Covent Garden Theatre, where I have been enacting the dying scene of Queen Katharine, and doing what I am as sorry for as I can be for anything of that kind. At the conclusion of my performance the audience called for me, but I was seized with a perfect nervous terror at the idea of going on, and left the house as quickly as possible. All the other actors will be called for, and will go on, and I shall incur unpleasant comments and probably have very untrue motives attributed to me for having, as it must appear, ungraciously withdrawn myself from the public call. This does not trouble me very deeply, but I am sorry for it because I am afraid it will be misinterpreted and noticed, and considered disrespectful, which it was not.... Give my dear love to Dorothy. I hope to be with you on the 3d of January. I am ever as ever yours, FANNY. 18, ORCHARD STREET, Tuesday, 8th. Now I must lump my answer to you, my dearest Hal--a thing that I hate doing; but here are three unanswered letters of yours on my table, and I shall never get through the payment of them if one letter may not do for the three, for every day brings fresh claims of this sort, and I feel a kind of smothering sensation as they accumulate round me, such as might attend one's gradually sinking into a well: what though Truth were at the bottom--if one was drowned before one got to her?... Send the pamphlet on "Bread" to Lenox, and write to Elizabeth Sedgwick about it--that is pure humanity, and I see you do not think I shall copy the recipe and measurements correctly. (It's pouring with rain, and thundering as loud as it knows how in England).... My spirits are fair enough, though the first evening I spent alone here, after I came back, tried them a little, and I had a cowardly impulse to rush in next door [my friends the Miss Hamiltons, Mrs. Fitzhugh's sisters, were my neighbors] to be with some friendly human beings; but I reflected that this would never do--those who are alone must learn to be lonely.... This was the only _black_ hour I have had since my return to London.... I have finished the first volume of Grote's "History of Greece." O ye gods, ye beautiful gods of Greece, that ever ye should have lived to become such immortal bores through the meritorious labors of an eminent English historian! Thank Heaven, I have done with what has hitherto been always the most attractive part of history to me--its legendary and poetical prologue (I hate the history of my dear native land the moment the Commons begin to vote subsidies), and I do not think I ever before rejoiced in passing from tradition to matter-of-fact in an historical work. I have no doubt, now we have come down from Olympus, I shall enjoy Mr. Grote's great work much more. I have read through Morier's "Hadji Baba in England," while eating my dinner, in order not to eat too fast, a precaution I learned years ago while eating my lonely dinners at Butler Place day after day. (Of course Grote was too heavy as sauce for eating.) At other seasons I have read through another number of the _Dublin Magazine_, and during my hair-combings continue to enchant myself with "Wilhelm Meister." I am reading the "Wanderjahr," having finished the "Lehrjahr." I never read the former in German before; it is altogether a wonderful book. I practise before breakfast, and I have drawn for two hours every day lately. I have received and returned visits, and when my daily exercise takes its place again among my occupations, my time will be full, and I hope to bless God for my days, even now.... This answers you as to my spirits.... I had a letter from E---- yesterday, desiring me to forward my book to them, and talking of still remaining where they are, as long as the heat is endurable and the children continue well. I had a note from Lady Duff Gordon yesterday, who is just returned from Rome, where she saw my sister frequently and intimately; and she seems to think Adelaide very tolerably resigned to remain where she is, especially as she has found a cupboard in her palazzo, which has so delighted her that she is content to abide where such things are rare and she has one, rather than return home where they are common and she might have many. In the mean time, seats in the next Parliament are, it seems, to go begging, and Charles Greville has written to E---- again to come over and stand.... I disapprove of this incessant urging E---- to return, especially as the Grevilles only want him to become a British legislator in order that she may open a pleasant house in London and amuse them.... You ask me what I shall do with regard to America. If I act there, I shall do so upon the plan I started with here; _i.e._, a nightly certainty, to be paid nightly: it is what the managers send to offer me, and is, without doubt, the safest, if not the most profitable plan.... I am diverted with your rage at Liston [the eminent surgeon under whose care I had been]. I must say, I wish he had been a little more attentive to me professionally.... My singing neighbors--I suppose lodgers for the season--have departed, or, at any rate, become silent; I hear them no more, and make all my own music, which I prefer, though sometimes of an evening, when I am not singing, the lonely silence round me is rather oppressive. But my evenings are short; I dine at seven, and go to bed at ten; and in spite of my endeavors to achieve a better frame of mind, I do look with positive joy at my bed, where, lying down, the day will not only be past, but forgotten.... It is difficult for me not to rejoice when each day ends.... Dear Hal, I dined with the Horace Wilsons, and in the evening my father came there. He said Miss Cottin, with whom he was to have dined, was ill, and had put him off; that he had only come up from Brighton the day before, and was going back to-morrow--to-day, _i.e._; that he was not well, but that Brighton agreed with him, and that he should steam about from Brighton to Havre and Dieppe and Guernsey and Jersey, as that process suits him better than abiding on dry land.... ORCHARD STREET, Thursday, June 10th. Of course, dear Harriet, I know that the officials of our public charities cannot be thrown into paroxysms of pity by every case of misery brought before them; they would soon cease to be relieving officers, and have to be relieved themselves. But "there is reason in roasting of eggs," whatever that may mean: our forefathers knew, and so did Touchstone, for he talks of "an ill-roasted egg, done all o' one side." I assure you when I went to the workhouse to see after that wretched young girl who was taken up for sleeping in the park because she had nowhere else to sleep in, though I cried like a Magdalene, and talked like a magpie, I felt as if I was running my head against a stone wall all the time I appealed to the authorities to save her from utter ruin. The only impression I seemed to make upon them was that of surprise that any one should take to heart in such wise the case of some one not belonging to them. Perhaps the worthy overseer thought me her sister in another sense from that in which I am so, from the vehemence with which I urged upon him the imperative duty of snatching so young a creature from the doom to which she seemed inevitably delivered over. All their answers reminded me of Mephistopheles' reply to Faust's frantic pity for Gretchen, "She is not the first." Now to answer your last question. I do not intend to cut the manager of the Princess's Theatre; but I do not intend either to make any application to him. If he offers me a reasonable weekly engagement, I will take it, and make him a curtsey; if he does not, I will do without it, and live as I best may on what I have already earned, and what I can earn in the provinces, till the spring.... C---- came up from Bath to London with me, and after talking politics, art, and literature, began upon religion, which, not being controversially disposed, I declined, commending him to the study of the newspaper, and, curling myself up in one of those charming long seats of the Great Western railroad coaches, went to sleep, and so accomplished the latter part of my journey, in spite of that dangerous proximity, an unconverted heterodox Protestant. Farewell, my dearest Hal. I am ever as ever yours, FANNY. 18, ORCHARD STREET, December 10th. DEAREST HAL, ... I had a horrible day yesterday, from which I am not yet recovered this morning. It wound up by the shock of hearing of Liston's death. There was something in my last intercourse with him that made this unexpected intelligence very painful; and then his wonderful strength, his great, noble frame, that seemed to promise so long and vigorous a hold on life, made his sudden death very shocking. When I met him last in the park, he told me he was very ill, and had been spitting up a quart of blood after walking twenty-five miles, and that there was something all wrong with his throat; in spite of which, I was greatly shaken by the news of his death, which was occasioned by aneurism in the throat. I am marking "Wilhelm Meister" for you; it is a book that interests me almost more than any other I could name; it is very painful, and I know nothing comparable to the conception and execution of Mignon. The whole book is so wise, so life-like, so true, and so merciless in its truth, that it is like life itself, endured by a stoic, an illustration of what existence would be to a thoughtful mind without faith in God--that faith which alone can bear us undespairing over the earth, where the mere doom of inevitable change would be enough to fill the human soul with amazement and anguish. Goethe's books always make me lay a terrified and aching hold on my religious faith; they show me, even as life itself does, the need of steadfast belief in something better, if one would not lie down and die from the mere sense of what has been endured, what is endured, and what must be endured. I forgot to tell you that I have had proposals again from the Norwich manager, and from Bath and Bristol; and yesterday the Princess's Theatre potentate called upon me; but upon my telling him that I should prefer transacting my arrangements with him in writing rather than _vivâ voce_, he took himself off.... God bless you, dear. Give my dear love to Dorothy. Yours ever, FANNY. 18, ORCHARD STREET, December 11th, 1847. MY DEAR HAL, I do not feel sure, from the tenor of your letter, that you do not wish to have my dog Hero boarded at Jenny Wade's; if you do, he shall go there. You are a far better judge than I am of the propriety of keeping a well-fed dog among your starving people. That they themselves would do so, I can believe; for they are impulsive and improvident, and more alive to sentiments of kindliness and generosity than to the dictates of common sense and prudence, or of principles of justice. Hero has been used to luxury, both in his lodging and board; but human hearts have to do without their food, and shall not his dog's body? I am fond of him, poor fellow, and would fain have him kindly cared for.... I do not consider your parallel a just one--between the bestowing of existence upon flies and the withholding immortality from a portion of the human race, except, indeed, that both may be exercises of arbitrary will and power. It is perfectly true that the clay has no right to say to the Potter, "Wherefore hast Thou fashioned me thus?" or "Why am I a man, and not a beast?" But as regards the Creator's dealings with the human race, inscrutable as His designs are to mortal intelligence, the moral nature of man demands certain conditions in the conditions of his Maker, higher and better than his own; and the idea of a partial immortality seems to me repugnant to the highest human conception (and we have none other) of God's mercy and justice, and that simply because all men, no matter how little advanced in the scale, appear to have some notion of _a_ Divinity and a Deity of some sort, to possess a _germ_ of spiritual progress capable of development beyond the term and opportunities afforded by this existence; and if, as I believe, the progressive nature belong to all, then it seems to me a moral inconsistency to allow its accomplishment only to a few. If you say that whole nations and races formerly and now, and innumerable individuals in our own Christian communities, hardly achieve a single step in this onward career of moral development, I should reply that the progress of the most advanced is but comparative, and far from great, and that chiefly on this account the belief in a future existence appears rational, indeed the only rational mode of accounting for our achieving so much and so little--our advancing so far and no further here. The boon of mere physical existence is great, but if there were none greater, we should not surely possess faculties which suggest that to make some of His moral and rational children immortal, and others not, was not in accordance with the perfect goodness and justice of our Father. This life, good as He pronounced it to be, and as it surely is, would not be worth enjoying but for those nobler faculties that reach beyond it, and even here lay hold of the infinite conception of another after death. To have given these capabilities partially, or rather their fulfilment unequally, seems to me a discord in the divine harmony of that supreme Government, the inscrutability of which does not prevent one seeing and believing, beyond sight, that it is perfectly _good_. To have bestowed the idea of immortality upon some and not others of his children, seems to me impossible in our Father; and since (no matter how faint in degree or unworthy in kind) this idea appears to be recognized as universal among men, the fulfilment of it only to some favored few seems still more incredible, since 'tis a _yearning_ towards Him felt by all His human creatures--a capacity, no matter how little or erroneously developed, possessed by all. Admitting God's absolute power over matter, there surely is a moral law which _He_ cannot infringe, for it is Himself; and though I do not know what He can do with the creatures He has made, I know He cannot do Wrong; and if you tell me that my wrong may be His right, I can only reply to that, _He is my Right_, the only true, real, absolute Right, of which I have any conception, and that to propose that which seems to me wrong as an attribute or proceeding of His seems to me nonsense.... Of course, a good beginning is an especially good thing in education; but I think we are apt to place too much faith, upon the whole, in what we can do with children's minds and souls. Perhaps it is well we should have this faith, or we might do less than we ought, whereas we not unfrequently do a good deal that is without result that we can perceive; nevertheless, the world goes on, and becomes by slow degrees wiser and better.... I met Macready while I was riding to-day; and though I could not stop to say much to him, I told him that I particularly wished to act with him. He has been told, I understand, that I have positively refused to do so; and though his acquaintance with me is slight, I should feel grateful to him if he would believe this, in spite of what representations to the contrary he might have heard. He said that my honesty and truth were known to him, though he had had but little intercourse with me, and that he entirely believed what I said. I was glad of this accidental opportunity of saying this to him, as I would not have sought him for the especial purpose. Good-bye, my dear. I am ever yours affectionately, FANNY. BANNISTERS, SOUTHAMPTON, Thursday, 16th. MY DEAREST HAL, ... Mrs. Fitzhugh does not appear to me in her usual vivacious state of mind, and I am afraid I shall not contribute much to her enlivenment, being rather out of spirits myself, and, for the first time in my life, finding Bannisters melancholy.... Walking up a small back street from Southampton the other day, I saw a little child of about five years old standing at a poor mean kind of pastry-cook's window, looking, with eyes of poignant longing, at some baked apples, stale buns, etc. I stopped and asked him if he wished very much for some of those things. He said yes, he wished very much for some baked apples for his _poor little brother who was sick_. I wish you could have seen the little creature's face when I gave him money to buy what he wanted, and he carried off his baked apples in his arms; that look of profound desire for the sake of his brother, on the poor little childish face has haunted me. I went to see his people, and found them poor and ill, in much distress; and the mother, looking at her youngest child, a sickly, wasted, miserable little object, lamented bitterly that she did not belong to such and such associations, for then, "if it should please God to take the child, she should have five pounds to bury it" (I wonder if these wretches are never killed for the sake of their burial money?); "but now she hadn't so much as would buy a decent rag of mourning"--a useless solicitude, it seemed to me, who think mourning attire a superfluity in all classes. I have had a letter from the Leamington manager, desiring me to act there, which I will do, some time or other. I have a riding-habit of my own, and need not hire one at Hastings; but I shall be glad to hire a horse while I am with you, as, you know, I do not mind riding alone.... I feel intensely stupid, which makes me think I must be ill (admire, I beg, the conceit of that inference), as I have no other symptoms of indisposition. Farewell. Give my love to Dorothy. Ever yours, FANNY. BANNISTERS, SOUTHAMPTON, Friday, December 17th. I have spoken with even more than my usual carelessness and inaccuracy upon the subject of my readiness to comply with other people's wishes, but I seriously think one ought to comply with a request of _anybody's_ that was not an impertinent or improper one. I suppose everybody is inclined to fulfil the wishes of persons they love.... But I am not given to the "small attentions," _les petits soins_ of affection, and therefore am always particularly glad to know of any special desire of a friend's that I can comply with; a special wish, too, is a saving of trouble, like the questions in your letters which are equivalent to wishes in another way, and indicate the particular thing you want to know.... I have been out of spirits and much depressed during the first days of my stay at Bannisters, but this gloom passing off, and I am resuming my more habitual buoyancy of temper.... BANNISTERS, December 22d. If you don't promise me good, I mean wholesome, food, when I come to St. Leonard's, I won't stay with you a minute. I have, for some years past, considered that there was an important deficiency in my human nature, which instead of consisting, like that of most people, of three elements, is wanting in what I should call the middle link between its lowest and highest extremities. Thus, for some time now, I have felt intimately convinced that I had senses and a soul, but no heart; but I have now further come to the conclusion that I have neither sense, soul, nor heart, and am, indeed, nothing but a stomach.... Now, don't retort upon me with starving populations, in and out of poor-houses; and your grand national starving experiment in Ireland; neither try to make me adopt it when I come to St. Leonard's, for I won't.... You will be glad to hear that poor old Mrs. Fitzhugh is better these two or three last days, and, except for the weakness and irritation in her eyes, is tolerably well and comfortable; and I, having recovered from the blue devils, am able to amuse her a little better than I did when first I came. I am glad you mentioned that your comment on my health was meant for _fun_. A man sat by me in Edinburgh at dinner one day, and asked me if I had ever read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," which frightened me into an indigestion; and when I told Mr. Combe of it, he gave a sad Scotch laugh, like a postman's knock, "Ha! ha! just like Farquharson's dry humor!" You say that, as far as my own constitution is concerned, you believe my theories are right. Pray, my dear, did I ever attempt to meddle with your constitution? Permit me to say that the hygienic faith I profess has this in common with my other persuasions, that I am no propagandist, and neither seek nor desire proselytes. No, my dear friend, it is the orthodox medicine-takers, not the heterodox medicine-haters, who are always thrusting their pill-boxes and physic-bottles into their friends' bodies, and dragging or driving their souls to heaven or hell. If my physical doctrine saves my body, and my religious doctrine my soul, alive, it is all I ask of it; and you, and all other of my fellow-creatures, I deliver over to your own devices, to dose, drug, and "oh, fie!" yourselves and each other, according to your own convictions and consciences. Ever yours, FANNY. 18, ORCHARD STREET, December 28th. MY DEAREST HAL, I would rather have the "garret" looking towards the sea than the "bedroom" looking over houses, provided I can have a fire in said garret; and pray, since I can have my choice of the two rooms, may I inquire why the one that I do not occupy may not be appropriated to Hayes's use? It seems to me that if there are two empty rooms for me to choose from, I may likewise hire them both if I choose, and give one to my maid, and keep whichever I like best for myself. _Che ti pare, figlia mia?_ Have the goodness, if you can, to take both the vacant rooms for me, and I will inhabit the garret, if, as I said before, it is susceptible of a fire. I left Mrs. Fitzhugh a little more quiet and composed, in spite of her having just received the news of Lord Harrowby's being at the point of death.... She has had much to try her in the melancholy events at Sandon, and she persists in looking over a whole collection of old letters, among which she found the other day a miniature of her boy, Henry, the sailor who died, which she had forgotten that she possessed; and she comes down from this most trying task of retrospection in a state of nerves so lamentable that no ingenuity of affection, or utmost desire to cheer and relieve her, can suggest a sufficiently soothing process for that purpose. She cannot be amused at all now by anything that does not excite her, and if she is, over-excited she suffers cruelly from it. Thus, the reading of "Jane Eyre," which, while I continued it, kept her in a state of extreme expectation and interest, appeared to me, upon the whole, afterwards, to have affected her very unfavorably.... I will bring you Charles Greville's book about your most painful country, and some music.... Good-bye, dearest Hal. My affectionate love to dear Dorothy. Ever as ever yours, FANNY. 18, ORCHARD STREET. ... You ask me for my impression of Déjazet, and the piece I went to see her in; and here they are. The piece in which she came out was called "Vert Vert." You remember, no doubt, Gresset's poem about the poor parrot, so called; well, instead of a bird, they make this Vert Vert a young boy of sixteen, brought up in a girls' convent, and taken out for a week, during which he goes to Nevers, falls in with garrison officers, makes love to actresses, sups and gets tipsy at the mess, and, in short, "gets ideas" of all sorts, with which he returns again to his convent. If you can conceive this part, acted to the life by a woman, who moves with more complete _disinvoltura_ in her men's clothes than most men do, you may imagine something of the personal exhibition at which we assisted. As for me, my eyes and mouth opened wider and wider, not so much at the French actress, as at the well-born, well-bred English audience, who, women as well as men, were in a perfect ecstasy of amusement and admiration. I certainly never saw more admirable acting, but neither did I ever see such uncompromising personal exposure and such perfect effrontery of demeanor. I do not think even ballet-dancers more indecent than Mademoiselle Déjazet, for their revelations of their limbs and shapes are partial and momentary, while hers were abiding and entire through the whole of her performance, which she acted in tight-fitting knee-breeches and silk stockings; nor did I ever see such an unflinching representation of unmitigated audacity of carriage, look, and manner, in any male or female, on or off the stage.... She always wears men's clothes, and is seldom seen without a cigar in her mouth. She is extremely witty, and famous for her powers of conversation and pungent repartees. She is plain, and has a disagreeable harsh shrill voice in speaking; her figure is thin, but straight, and well made, and her carriage and movements as graceful as they are free and unembarrassed; her singing voice is sweet, and her singing charming, and her spirit and talent as an actress incomparable. But if I had not seen it, I should not have believed that so impudent a performance would have been tolerated here: tolerated it not only was, but applauded with enthusiasm; and Mademoiselle Déjazet carries the town before her, being the least decent actress of the most indecent pieces I ever saw. Good-bye. Give my love to Dorothy. Ever yours, FANNY. [Offenbach's burlesque Operas were still in the future.] 29, KING STREET, ST. JAMES'S, January 14th. I have not heard again from Bath, and so have answered your two questions, dearest Hal, and will tell you what little I have to tell of my installation in my new lodging here. I read the _Times_, _studiously_, all the way up to town, and was alone in my railroad carriage. As soon as we reached King Street, I sent Hayes off to Orchard Street, to see for letters, cards, etc. On entering my room (you will remember the upper front room, where we visited Lady W---- together), I saw a beautiful white hyacinth, standing in the window, and knew directly that Emily had sent it to me. I found, too, a most kind and affectionate letter from her.... Fanny Wilson and Mrs. Mitchell had called while I was away, and two gentlemen who had not left their names--probably the Grevilles.... I don't like either my room or my furniture, I am sorry to say; but I shall get attached to both in a couple of days.... At a little after four, Henry Greville called and stayed some time, telling me as usual all manner of gossip--among other things that his brother Charles was supposed to be _the author of Jane Eyre_! I wonder by whom? Lord Ellesmere's gout is better, and they have been able to get him down to Hatchford--their place near Weybridge. Henry Greville complained bitterly of Adelaide's not writing to him about their new house in Eaton Place, which she wants him to get papered and prepared for them--a job he is very willing to undertake, provided she will send him detailed and specific instructions, which he is now waiting for in vain, and in great disgust at her laziness.... I worked at my translation of "Mary Stuart" till bedtime.... It is impossible to say how much I miss you and dear Dorothy, and how chilled to the marrow I felt when I had left the warm and kind atmosphere of your affectionate companionship.... However, an additional oppressive sense of my loneliness was the price I was sure to pay for my week's happy fellowship with you and Dorothy. And, after all, it was worth the price. I wrote this much yesterday, dear Hal; and yesterday is over, and has carried with it my cowardly fit of despondency, and I am already back in the harness of my usual lonely life, and feel the galling on the sore places of my spirit less; ... and every hour will bring occupation and business (such as they are, as Hamlet very contemptuously observes), and I shall have something to do--if not to think of.... I have heard from Norwich, and find I shall have less to prepare than I expected for two nights, Friday and Saturday. I shall act at Yarmouth, and repeat what I play at Norwich. Mrs. Jameson has taken rooms in this house, I find, and comes here to-night, and I shall be very glad of some of her company.... Certainly London, much as I hate it, agrees better with me than St. Leonard's; either the air or the water there are bad for me. I am much better than when I was there.... God bless you. Kiss your Good Angel for me--how much I love and revere her, and how I rejoice that you have such an inestimable friend and companion! I have been very happy with you, my dear and good and kind friends. Ever yours, FANNY. 29 KING STREET, ST. JAMES'S, Saturday, January 15th. I dined at home yesterday, dear Hal, and spent the evening in reading "Vanity Fair." It is extremely clever, but hitherto I do not like it very much. I began it at Bannisters last Winter, and then I did not like it, wonderfully clever as I thought it. Lord Ellesmere says it is better than anything of the kind (novels of manners and morals) since Fielding; but as far as I have yet gone in it, it seems to me to have one very disagreeable quality--the most prominent people in it are thorough worldlings, and though their selfishnesses, and meannesses, and dirtinesses, and pettinesses, are admirably portrayed--to the very life, indeed--I do not much rejoice in their company. It is only within the last year that I have been able to _get through_ "Gil Blas," for the same reason; and though I did get through, I never got _over_ the odiousness of the people I lived with during the four volumes of his experiences of life. Is not Shakespeare _true_ to human nature? Why does he never disgust one with it? Why does one feel comparatively clean in spirit after living with his creatures? Some of them are as bad as real men and women ever were, but some of them are as good as real men and women ever are; and one does not lose one's respect for one's kind while reading what he writes of it; and his coarse utterances, the speech of his time, hurt one comparatively little in the midst of his noble and sweet thoughts.... I am going with Henry Greville to Drury Lane to-night, and perhaps he will eat his dinner here. He has a perfect mania for playhouses, and cannot keep out of them, and I would as lief spend my evening in hearing pretty music as alone here.... I drove up and down Regent Street three times in vain to find your identical cutler, Mr. Kingsbury: perhaps he has left off business, and some one else has taken his shop. _So_ what shall I do with your scissors? Do you think if I talk to them they will be sharpened?... I have not heard again from Bath, and have seen nobody but Fanny Wilson, with whom I dine to-morrow, and Mrs. Mitchell's two boys.... I shall get through my packing very well. Hayes is greatly improved, and really _begins_ now to be useful to me. Thus we most of us begin only just as we come to the _end_ and leave off. I was driving about all yesterday, doing commissions; to-day the sun shines, and I am going to wade in the mud for my health. God bless you. Kiss dear Dorothy for me. Ever yours, FANNY. NORWICH, Wednesday, January 20th. I have found your cutler, Kingsbury; and very glad I was to find him, for I hate not being able to execute a commission exactly as I am desired to do.... When I said that people never love others better than themselves, I did not mean _more_, but in a better way than they love themselves. I mean that those who are conscientious in their self-regard will be conscientious in their regard for others, and that it takes good people to make good friends; and I do not consider this a "paradox of mine," as you uncivilly style it. It is a _conviction_ of mine, and I feel sure that you agree with it, whatever your first impression of my meaning may have been when I said that people never loved others better than themselves (_i.e._, with a better kind of love). I know that very unprincipled people are capable of affection, and their affection partakes of their want of principle: people have committed crimes for the sake of the love they bore their wives, mistresses (oftener), and children; and half the meannesses, pettinesses, and selfishnesses of which society is full, have their source in unprincipled affection as much as in unprincipled self-love. I had already taken to my King Street lodging when I left it for this place. You know I have a horror of new places and a facility in getting over it, which is a double disadvantage in this wandering life of mine; for I am perpetually undergoing the process of feeling miserable and lonely in a new place, and more miserable and lonely still when I leave it. The room I have here is gloomy, but opens into my bedroom, which is comfortable, and I shall soon attain the easy liking of habit for it. Mrs. ----, dear Harriet, is without tact, and learns nothing, which is one reason why, in spite of her many good qualities and accomplishments, I cannot get on with her. I breakfasted with her on Sunday morning, and she abused A---- to me--not violently, of course, but very foolishly. She is wanting in perception, and is perpetually committing sins of bad taste, which provoke people--and me "much more than reason." I do not suppose I shall see enough of her to admit of her "drying me up" (as the Italians say for boring), but I always find it difficult to get on with her, even for a short time. There is an element of _ungenuineness_ about her, I believe quite involuntary; ... and it does not so much consist in telling stories, though I believe she would do that on proper occasions, like everybody else (but you, who never would know which were proper occasions), as in a crooked or indirect moral vision, an incapacity for distinguishing what is straight from what is not, which affects me very unpleasantly. On Saturday evening I went to Drury Lane, with Henry and Charles Greville, the latter having invited himself to join us. I spent a rather dolorous three hours hearing indifferent music, indifferently sung, and admiring compassionately the mental condition of such a man as my friend Henry, who must needs divert himself with such an entertainment, having, moreover, taste enough to know what is really good, and yet persuading himself that this was not bad, only because to him anything is better than spending an evening quietly alone at home.... On the other hand, several things struck me a good deal. The music of the opera was poor, but it was not worse than much of Donizetti's music, and it was composed by an Englishman. It was put together with considerable skill and cleverness, but was far less agreeable than the poorest Italian music of the same order; and it was well executed, by a good orchestra, chiefly composed of English musicians. The principal singers were all English, and some of them had fine voices, and though they seldom used them well, they did so occasionally; and, upon the whole, did not sing much worse than Italian performers of the same class would have done. The choruses and concerted pieces, also all given by English people, were well executed, though stupid and tiresome in themselves; and certainly the progress our people have made in music in my time, to which the whole opera testified, is very great. The audience was very numerous, and though the galleries were crowded, and it is Christmas-time, and the after-piece was the pantomime, there was not the slightest noise, or riot, or disturbance, even among "the gods," and the pieces in the opera which were encored, were redemanded in the polite fashion of the Queen's Theatre, by a prolonged, gentle clapping, without a single shout or shriek of "Hangcor!" or "Brayvo!" This is a wonderful change within my recollection, for I remember when, during the run of a pantomime, the galleries presented a scene of scandalous riot and confusion; bottles were handed about, men sat in their shirt-sleeves, and the shouting, shrieking, bawling, squalling, and roaring were such as to convert the performance of the first piece into mere dumb show. All this is well, and testifies to an improved civilization, and not to a mere desire to ape those above them in society; for that could hardly suffice to persuade these Drury Lane audiences that they are amused by a tiresome piece tiresomely acted, and tedious musical strains, of which they cannot carry away a single phrase, which sets nobody's foot tapping or head bobbing with rhythmical sympathy, being all but devoid of melody. I am very fond of music, but I would rather have sat out the poorest play than that imitation opera; the scenery, dresses, decorations, etc., were all very good, and testified to the much more cultivated taste of the times in all these matters. On Sunday I dined with the Horace Wilsons, whom I had not seen for some time, and for whom I have a very great regard, ... Returning home, I stopped at dear old Miss Cottin's.... I am much attached to her, and think, next to my own dear Aunt Dall, she is one of the sweetest and most unselfish creatures I have ever known, and love her accordingly.... I left London for this place on Monday morning, and having a sulky deliberate cab-driver, arrived at the station just five minutes after the train had departed. This kept me waiting from 11.30 till 3.30, during which time Hayes, thinking I should be hungry, went out privately, and coming back with a paper of biscuits, pointed out a raspberry tart at the bottom of it, and said, "Here is a little tart I have got on purpose for you." Was not that courtly and kind of her? I act here till Thursday. Friday and Saturday I act at Yarmouth; and I shall return to town on Sunday, unless the Vice-Chancellor should allow the manager to open the Cambridge Theatre, which is not generally allowed during term; if he should, I shall act there on Monday night, and only return to town Tuesday morning. I have promised Mrs. Grote to go down to the Beeches on Saturday, 29th, and shall only stay there till Monday, 31st. This is all I know of myself at present, except that I am Affectionately yours, FANNY. DEAR DOROTHY, Here is my love with my pen and ink, which I flatter myself are as wretchedly bad as those of any gentlewoman in the universe, and St. Leonard's. You may be impertinent to Hal; she is only a bully, and will give in if you try: if you don't like to try, as you are meek and lowly, I'll try for you, when I come down, if you'll give me your power-of-attorney and instructions, without which I don't suppose I should know how to be impertinent. Farewell, dearest Dorothy. I love you entirely for your own sake; I don't like mixing up matters, and thank God for you, for Harriet's sake, as often as I think of you both. BEGUN AT NORWICH, FINISHED AT YARMOUTH, Friday, 21st. I do but poorly at Norwich, my dearest Hal, in body and estate, having a wretched influenza, sore throat, sore chest, and cold in my head, through which I am obliged to stand bare-necked and bare-armed, bare-headed and almost bare-footed (for the thin silk stockings and satin shoes are a poor protection), on the stage, to houses, I am sorry to say, as thin as my stockings; so that the money return for all this fatigue, discomfort, and expense is but inconsiderable, _i.e._ by comparison, for undoubtedly it is a fair harvest for such grain as I sow. My mind rather thrives upon this not too prosperous condition of my body and estate, inasmuch as I naturally make some effort to be courageous and cheerful, and therefore do better in that respect than when I was cheerful and needed no courage, while you were spoiling me at St. Leonard's with all your love for me, and Dorothy with all her love for you. In half an hour I leave this place for Yarmouth, where I act to-night and to-morrow. The manager has made an arrangement with me to act at his theatres at Lynn and Cambridge next week, so that instead of returning to London the day after to-morrow, I shall not do so until Friday, 28th.... We have dismal weather, snow on the ground, and blackness in the skies. My poor Hayes has got the influenza too, and goes hacking and snivelling at my heels like an unpleasant echo. I shall be thankful for both our sakes when our winter work is over, for the exposure is very great; and though, of course, she has much less of it than I have, she bears it worse, catches colds oftener, and keeps them longer than I do.... I should, I believe, find it very difficult indeed to be economical, and yet I suppose that if I felt the duty and necessity of it I should be more so than I am. The saving of money without any special motive for it does not appear to me desirable, any more than self-denial without a sufficient motive--and I do not call mere mortification such--appears to me reasonable. I do not feel called upon to curtail the comforts of my daily life, for in some respects it is always miserable, and in many respects often inevitably very uncomfortable; and while I am laboring to spare sacrifice and disgrace to others, I do not see any very strong motive for not applying a sufficient portion of the money I work so hard for, to make my wandering and homeless life as endurable as I can.... Your mode of living is without pretension, and without expenditure for mere appearances; and I feel certain that appearances, and not the positive and necessary comforts of life, such as sufficient firing and food, are the heaviest expenses of gentlefolks.... If the life is more than meat or raiment, which I quite agree to, meat and raiment are more than platters and trimmings; and it is the style that half the time necessitates the starvation.... Now I am at Yarmouth; though t'other side the page I was at Norwich. The earth is white, the sea is black, the sky gray, and everything most melancholy. I act here to-night, and to-morrow and on Sunday go on to Lynn, where I act Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday; and Thursday at Cambridge. On Friday I go back to town, and on Saturday to Mrs. Grote's. I am in just such a little room as those we used to pass in walking along the Parade at St. Leonard's--a small ground-floor room, about sixteen feet square, the side facing the sea, one large bow-window in three compartments; just such a gravel terrace before it as the one we walked up and down together; and the very same sea, dark, neutral-tinted, with its frothing edge of white, as if it was foaming at the mouth in a black convulsion, that your eyes look upon from your window. It is in some respects exactly like St. Leonard's, and again as much the reverse as sad loneliness is to loving and delightful companionship. I have a sort of lost-child feeling whenever I go to a strange place, that very few people who know me would give me credit for; but that's because they don't know me. God bless you, dear. Kiss dear Dorothy for me. I am ever yours, FANNY. YARMOUTH, 22d. My very dear and most sententious friend, I never _do_ run the time of my departure for railroad trains "to the chances of free streets and fast-driving cabmen;" I always allow amply for all accidents, as I have a greater horror of being hurried and jostled even than of being too late. But my driver, the day I left town, was, I think, inexperienced as well as sulky. He was very young, and though I was too ignorant of city localities to direct him positively, my recollection of the route which I had traversed before seemed to me to indicate that he did not take the most direct way. You ask me what I think of E----'s note, and if it seems "wonderfully aristocratic" to me. Aristocratic after the English fashion, which, thank God, is far from being a very genuine fashion--their "airs" being for the most part _adulterated_ by the good, sound, practical common sense of the race, as their blood is _polluted_ with the wholesome, vigorous, handsome, intelligent vital fluid of the classes below them. No real aristocrat would have mentioned Miss ----'s maiden name as if she was a woman of family--(_née_--_geborne_; that was a delightful German woman who said she wasn't _geborne_ at all)--for Miss ----, being only a banker's daughter, was, of course "nobody." The real aristocratic principle is not--I say again, thank God!--often to be found among us islanders of Britain. In Austria, where the Countess Z---- and the Princess E---- are looked upon as the earth under the feet of the Vienna nobility, the one being Lord S----'s daughter and the other Lord J----'s, they have a better notion of the principle of the question. There were only four families in all the British peerage who could have furnished their daughter with the requisite number of quarterings for one of those Austrian alliances. In folly, as in wisdom, a principle is at least consistent; but that the aristocratic pretensions of our upper class can never be: for our gentry is of more ancient date in a great many instances, and our nobles are, fortunately for themselves and us, a mixed race, admitting to the temporary fellowship of social companionship and the permanent alliance of matrimony, wealth, influence, beauty, and talent from every grade beneath them; therefore they are fit to endure, and will endure longer than any other European aristocracy, in spite of Prince Puckler Muskau's epigram against the most "mushroom of nobilities." The "airs" they do give themselves are, therefore, very droll, whereas the similar pretensions of an Austrian _crème de la crème_ are comprehensible and consistent--folly without a flaw, and rather admirable in its kind as a specimen of human absurdity.... I have the honor of being slightly acquainted with E----'s portrait painter. He is a Scotch gentleman, of very great merit as an artist. He was in Rome the winter I was there, and I met him in society, and saw several of his pictures. He was rather injured artistically, I think, by living with mad lords and silly ladies who used to pet and spoil him, which sort of thing damages our artists, who become bitten with the "aristocratic" mania, and destroy themselves as fine workmen in their desire to become fine gentlemen. There was a story in Rome about Lady C---- and the German princess, Lady D----, going one day to Mr. ----'s studio and finding his fire out, falling down on their own fair knees, and with their own fair hands kindling it again for him. After this, how could he paint anything less than a countess? Jesting apart, however, my dear Hal, the terms Mr. ---- asks are very high; and though he is a very elegant and graceful portrait-painter, I would rather, upon the whole, sit to Richmond, whose chalk drawings are the same price, and whose style is as good and more vigorous. You ask me why Mrs. ----, who is undoubtedly a clever woman, is also undoubtedly a silly one? If I wished to be saucy, which I never do and never am, I should tell you, being an Irishwoman, that it was because she was Irish, and, therefore, capable of a sort of intellectual bull; but, unluckily, though ingenious, this is not true. The sort of ability or abilities, to which we give the ill-defined name of "cleverness," is entirely distinct from common sense, judgment, discretion; so distinct as to be almost their opposite. I think a clever woman requires quite an unusual portion of the above qualities not to be silly, _because_ she is clever. This may sound paradoxical, but if you think it worth examining, you will find it true. I am very cold and very comfortless in these horrible theatres, and shall be glad to get back to King Street, and as soon as I am there will take measures about my readings, which I think I had better begin in earnest with. There are no rocks on the beach here, like that pretty little reef that runs right out before your windows, but three miles from the shore there is a fatal stretch of sand where wrecks are frequent, and all along which ominous white clouds are springing up from the inky surface of the wintry sea, like warning ghosts. It is very dreary and dismal looking; but, nevertheless, as I have no rehearsal, I am going out to walk. Kiss Dorothy for me. I am yours and hers most affectionately, FANNY. I have had another foolish note from Lady ---- about "Jane Eyre"--the universal theme of conversation and correspondence--in which, speaking of herself, she says that she is "_dished and done for, and gone to the dogs_;" and then accuses the writer of "Jane Eyre" of not knowing how ladies and gentlemen talk--which I think, too; but the above expressions are a peculiar example of refined conventional language, which perhaps the author of that very remarkable book would have hesitated to ascribe to a lady--or a gentleman. BIRNHAM BEECHES, Sunday, March 20th, and KING STREET, Friday, February 1st, 1848. Now I have two long letters of yours to answer, and my own opinion is that they will not be answered until I get to the Beeches, and have a few hours' breathing-time, for I am just now setting off for Cambridge, where I act to-night. To-morrow I travel to Bury St. Edmund's, and act there the same night; and Friday I shall just get to London in time for my dinner, and the next morning I go down to Birnham.... The air of St. Leonard's, though you call it cold and sharp, was mild compared with the raw, sunless climate I have since _enjoyed_ at Lynn and Yarmouth; a bracing climate always suits me better than a relaxing one.... I cannot, however, agree with you that there is more "excitement" in rehearsing every morning, and sitting in a dull, dirty, hired room, and acting that everlasting "Hunchback" every evening, than in being your mounted escort to Bex Hill and Fairlight church, and reading to you either "Mary Stuart" or "Jane Eyre." I am glad to see that L---- and I agree about what always seems to me the most improbable part of the latter very remarkable book. I am slow in determining in my own mind the course that other women would pursue in exceptionally difficult circumstances; many of them would doubtless display an amount of principle of which I should be quite incapable; and so I am glad that L---- thinks, as I do, that Jane Eyre's safest course would have been to have left Thornfield without meeting her lover's despair. Fever at the gates of Ardgillan, my dear Hal, must indeed make you anxious; but as your family have moved thence, I suppose they will not return while there is any danger to be apprehended from doing so. And now, dear Hal, from the Beeches, where I arrived yesterday afternoon, and am now writing to you.... I have really kept both cold and cough down wonderfully, considering the horrible weather and exposure I have gone through travelling, and in those damp barns of theatres. Hayes will certainly not recover as soon as I do, for she has all the aversion of her class to physic and spare diet.... Charles Greville is here, and I asked him your question, if he had ever published any other book but the one upon Ireland you are reading. He said no. He has, however, written pamphlets and newspaper articles of considerable ability upon political subjects. I have been taking a long walk, and will now resume my letter to you. I perceive I have brought Charles Greville and his book into the middle of what I was telling you about those poor young Norwich actors. A very pretty and charming niece of my dear friend, Mr. Harness, is married and living within a short distance of Lynn, and as I had not time to stay with her now, I have promised to go back into Norfolk to visit her, and at the same time I have promised to act a night for these poor people if they can get their manager's leave for me to do so. My dear Hal, this letter seems destined to pass its unfinished existence on the railroads. I am now at this present moment finishing it in my King Street lodging, to which I returned yesterday afternoon, Mrs. Grote being seized in the morning with one of her attacks of neuralgia, for which she is obliged to take such a quantity of morphine that she is generally in a state of stupor for four and twenty to thirty hours. The other guests departed in the morning, and I in the afternoon, after giving her medicine to her, and seeing her gradually grow stupid under its effect. Poor woman, she is a wretched sufferer, and I think these attacks of acute pain in her head answerable for some of the singularity of her demeanor and conversation, which are sometimes all but unaccountably eccentric. You ask me if I saw anything on that bitter cold journey, as I went along, to interest me. You know I am extremely fond of the act of travelling: being carried through new country excites one's curiosity and stimulates one's powers of observation very agreeably, even when nothing especially beautiful or noteworthy presents itself in the landscape. I had never seen the east counties of England before, and am glad to have become acquainted with their aspect, though it is certainly not what is usually called picturesque. The country between Norwich and Yarmouth is like the ugliest parts of Holland, swampy and barren; the fens of Lincolnshire flat and uninteresting, though admirably drained, cultivated, and fertile. Ely Cathedral, of which I only saw the outside, is magnificent, and the most perfect view of it is the one from the railroad, as one comes from Lynn. Lynn itself is a picturesque and curious old town, full of remains of ancient monastic buildings. The railroad terminus is situated in a property formerly part of a Carthusian convent, and the wheelwrights' and blacksmiths' and carpenters' cottages are built partly in the old monkish cells, of which two low ranges remain round a space now covered with sleepers, and huge chains, and iron rails, and all the modern materials of steam travel. Cambridge, of course, I saw nothing of. On the road between it and Bury St. Edmund's one passes over Newmarket heath, the aspect of which is striking, apart from its "associations." Bury St. Edmund's--which is famous, as you know, for its beautiful old churches and relics of monastic greatness--I saw nothing of, but was most kindly and hospitably sheltered by Mr. Donne, who, being now the father of sons, is living in Bury in order to educate them at the school where he and my brothers were as boys under Dr. Malkin. [William Bodham Donne, my brother John's school and college mate, for more than fifty years of this changeful life the unchanged, dear, and devoted friend of me and mine--accomplished scholar, elegant writer, man of exquisite and refined taste, and such a _gentleman_ that my sister always said he was the _original_ of the hero of Boccaccio's story of the "Falcon."] God bless you, my dear. I have a pain in my chest, and bad cough, which don't prevent my being Yours most truly, FANNY. 29, KING STREET, Thursday, 3d. It is no longer the bitter cold morning on which you asked me how I was, and now I cannot for the life of me remember how or where I was on that said 26th. Oh, it was last Wednesday, and I was travelling from Lynn to Cambridge, and I was pretty well, and had a pleasant railroad trip, the gentlemen in the railroad carriage with me being intelligent and agreeable men, and one of them well acquainted with my brother John, and all his Cambridge contemporaries. Though it was cold, too, the sun shone, and threw long streaks of brightness across the fens of Lincolnshire, producing effects on the unfrequent and in themselves unpicturesque farm-houses, with their groups of wintry skeleton-trees exactly like those in the Dutch pictures, which are, for the most part, representations of just such landscapes. Mitchell sent me yesterday a box at the French theatre for a morning performance of the "Antigone," with Mendelssohn's choruses. Previous to the performance of the Greek drama, they played, very inappropriately it seems to me, his music of the "Midsummer Night's Dream," and the effect of it upon my nerves was such that, though screened by the curtain of the box, and my sobs drowned by the orchestra, I thought I should have been obliged to leave the theatre. It is the first time that I have heard a note of Mendelssohn's music since his death. How thankful I am I did not attempt that reading at the Palace! What should I have done there, thus convulsed with pain and sorrow, in the midst of those strange people, and the courtly conventions of their condition! Oh, what a bitter, bitter loss to the world, and all who loved him, has been the death of that bright and amiable great genius! The Greek play was given in the true Grecian fashion, and was interesting and curious as a spectacle. The French literal translation of the grand old tragedy seemed at once stilted and bald, and yet I perceived and felt through it the power of the ancient solemn Greek spell; and though strange and puppet-like in its outward form, I was impressed by its stern and tragic simplicity. It is, however, merely an archæological curiosity, chiefly interesting as a reproduction of the times to which it belongs. To modern spectators, unless they are poets or antiquarians, I should think it must be dull, and so I find it is considered, in spite of Mendelssohn's fine music, which, indeed, is so well allied in spirit to the old tragedy, that to most listeners I dare say it has something of the dreamy dreariness of the drama itself. Mrs. Jameson was with me, and it was chiefly on her account that I did not give way to my impulse to leave the theatre. Good-bye. God bless you, my dear. Ever yours, FANNY. [The foregoing letter refers to my having declined to read the "Antigone" at Buckingham Palace, under the following circumstances. My father was desired to do so, but his very serious deafness made his reading anything to which there was an occasional accompaniment of music difficult to him, and he excused himself; at the same time, unfortunately for me, he suggested that I should be applied to to read the play. Accordingly, I received a message upon the subject, but was obliged to decline the honor of reading at the Palace, for reasons which had not occurred to my father when he answered for my accepting the task he had been unable to undertake. I had never yet read at all in public, and to make my first experiment of my powers before the queen, and under circumstances calculated to increase my natural nervousness and embarrassment, seemed hardly respectful to her, and almost impossible to me. Then, for my first attempt of the kind, to select a play accompanied by Mendelssohn's music, of which I had not heard one bar since the shock of his death, was to incur the almost certain risk of breaking down in an uncontrollable paroxysm of distress, and perhaps being unable to finish my performance. What I endured at the St. James's Theatre, on the occasion I have spoken of in this letter, confirms me in my conviction that I couldn't have attempted what was proposed to me with a reasonable chance of being able to fulfil my task. I was told afterwards that I had been guilty of "disloyal disobedience to a royal command,"--a severe sentence, which I do not think I had deserved, and found it painful to bear.] KING STREET, Saturday, February 9th, 1848. Mrs. Jameson is no longer in the house with me, dearest Hal. She went away the other day from the theatre, where we were hearing Mendelssohn's "Antigone" together, and will probably not return for some time; when she does, I shall most likely be out of town. I saw Mitchell yesterday, and he entirely declines to have anything whatever to do with my readings--_ainsi me voilà bien!_ I cried like a baby the whole of the day afterwards; of course my nerves were out of order, or I should have chosen some less rubbishy cause among the various excellent reasons for tears I have to select from. Mr. Harness and Charles and Henry Greville came to see me in the course of the day. The latter rather bullied me, said I behaved like a child: and so I certainly did; but, oh, my dear Hal, if you knew how little these, my most intimate friends, know about me, and how much more able and fit they think me to fight and struggle for myself than I am! They are all very kind in suggesting many things: Henry Greville is urgent with me to undertake the speculation of giving readings at my own risk--hiring a room, and sending out advertisements, etc.; but this I will not do, as I am willing' to work hard for very small gains, but not to jeopardize any portion of the small gains for which I have worked hard. Am I right in your opinion and that of dear Dorothy? In the mean time, I have written off to the Secretary of the Collegiate Institution at Liverpool, who proposed to me last year to give readings there, and have told him that I shall be glad to do so now if it still suits the purposes of the Institution. He, however, may have changed his mind, as Mitchell has done, and in that case I must sit down and eat my present savings, and thank God that I have savings for the present to eat.... Dear old Rogers came yesterday, and sat with me some time; and talking over my various difficulties with me, said I had much better go and live with him, and take care of his house for him. It's a pretty house, but I'm afraid it would be no sinecure to be his housekeeper.... How _is_ your poor knees and wrists, and all your rheumatical fastenings and hinges, and Dorothy's _intérieur_? I hope she is not tyrannizing over you with unnecessary questions and inquiries, which merely serve to trammel your free-will, by asking you where you have been walking, or if it rained while you were out. I send you a kiss, which I beg you will give each other for me, or otherwise divide without quarrelling, and believe me Very affectionately yours, FANNY. 29, KING STREET. ... Oh yes, my dear Hal, I hear abundance of discussion of the present distracted aspect of public affairs, abroad and at home; but for the most part the opinions that I hear, and the counsels that are suggested to meet the evils of the times, seem to me as much indications of the faithlessness and folly of men, as the great movements of nations are of the faithfulness and wisdom of God. Still, when I hear clever, practical politicians talk, I always listen with keen interest; for the details in which they seem to me too much absorbed, are a corrective to my generalizing tendency on all such subjects. Moral principles are the _true_ political laws (mere abstract truisms, as they are held, and accordingly overlooked, by _working_ statesmen) by which the social world is kept in cohesion, just as the physical world is kept in equilibrium by the attracting and repelling forces that control its elements. You ask me how many letters I am in your debt. When I shall have finished this, only one. I have worked very hard this past week to keep your claims down, but have only just now got my head above water with you. There was nothing to like at Lynn. The weather was gloomy and cold, and I was only there two days. There seemed to be a good many curious remains of antiquity in and about the town--old churches, houses, gateways, and porches--but I had no leisure to look at these, and indeed the weather was almost too severe to admit of standing about sight-seeing, even under the warmest zeal for instruction. I did not find the sea air make me sleep at Lynn, and incline to think that it is you, more than the climate that affects me so soporifically at St. Leonard's. God bless you, dear. Your affectionate, FANNY. 29, KING STREET, ST. JAMES'S. I do not know how right I am in saying Lady ---- married because she was jilted, inasmuch as of my own personal knowledge I do not _know_ it; but that she was much attached to Lord ----, whose father would not permit the marriage, I have heard repeatedly from people who knew both the families; and Rogers, who was very intimate with hers, told me that he considered her marrying as she did the result of mere disappointment, saying, "She could not have the man she loved, so she gave herself to the man who loved her." So much in explanation of my rather rash statement about that most beautiful lady I ever saw. I have seen a good many handsome people, but there was a modesty, grace, and dignity, and an expression of deep latent sentiment in that woman's countenance, that, combined with her straight nymph-like figure, and the sort of chastity that characterized her whole person and appearance, fulfilled my ideal of female beauty. You will perhaps wonder at my use of the word "chastity," as applied merely to a style of beauty; but "chaste" is the word that describes it properly. Of all the Venuses of antique art, the Venus of Milo, that noble and keenly intellectual goddess of beauty, is the only one that I admire. The light, straight-limbed Artemis is lovelier to me than the round soft sleepy Aphrodite; and it was to the character of her figure, and the contour of her head and face, that I applied the expression "chaste" in speaking of Lady ----. Her sister, who is thought handsomer, and is a lovely creature (and morally and mentally as worthy of that epithet as physically), has not this severely sweet expression, or sweetly stern, if you prefer it, though this implies a shade of volition, which falsifies the application of it. This is what I especially admire in Lady ----, who adds to that faultless Greek outline, which in its integrity and justness of proportion seems the type of truth, an eye whose color deepens, and a fine-textured cheek, where the blood visibly mantles with the mere emotion of speaking and being listened to. The first time I met her was at a dinner-party at Miss Berry's, before her marriage. She sat by Landseer, and her great admiration for him, and enthusiastic devotion to his fine art, in which she was herself a proficient, lent an interest to their conversation, which exhibited itself in her beautiful face in a manner that I have never forgotten.... You bid me tell you how I am in mind, body, and estate. My mind is in a tolerably wholesome frame, my body not so well, having a cold and cough hanging about it, and suffering a good deal of pain the last few days. My estate is so far flourishing that I brought back a tolerable wage and earnings from my eastern expedition, and so shall not have to sell out any of my small funded property for my daily bread yet a while. You say that tact is not necessarily insincerity. No, I suppose not: I must say I suppose, because I have never known anybody, eminently gifted with tact, who appeared to me perfectly sincere. I am told that the woman I have just been writing about, Lady C----, of whom my personal knowledge is too slight to judge how far she deserves the report, never departs from the truth; and yet is so gentle, good, and considerate, that she never wounds anybody's feelings. If this is so, it deserves a higher title than tact, and appears to me a great attainment in the prime grace of Christianity. I have always believed that where love--charity--abounded, truth might, and could, and would abound without offence. Which of the great French divines said, "Quand on n'est point dans les bornes de la charité, on n'est bientôt plus dans celles de la vérité"? It sounds like Fénélon, but I believe it is Bossuet. Tact always appears to me a sort of moral elegance, an accomplishment, rather than a virtue; dexterity, as it were, doing the work of sensibility and benevolence. I think it likely that Mitchell will call in the course of the morning, and I may still possibly make some arrangement with him about my readings.... I have had a pressing invitation from Mrs. Mitchell, who is staying at Brighton with her boys, to go down there and visit her. It would be very nice if I could go thence to 18, Marina, St. Leonard's, and pay a visit to some other friends of mine. Your lodgings will, however, I fear, be full; and then, too, you may not want me, and it is as well not to be too forward in offering one's self to one's dearest friends, for fear of the French "Thank you," which with them, civil folk that they are, means, "No, they'd rather not." With us, it would imply, "Yes, gratefully;" otherwise, it is, "Thank you for nothing." Kiss Dorothy for me. Ever as ever yours, FANNY. 29, KING STREET, Sunday, 5th. I am afraid my pretty plot of coming to you is at an end, and I am afraid all my chances of coming to you are at an end. I wrote you yesterday that I was beginning to be doubtful about my further engagements in London, and was indeed discouraged and troubled at the aspect of my affairs. This morning, however, comes an express from M----, beginning a new negotiation with me, and wanting me to open with Macready at his theatre on the 21st of this month, to act four weeks, and then renew the engagement for four weeks more.... I do not wish to depart from the terms I have asked, but am extremely glad of the offer, and hope he will agree to them. I think it probable that he will, because my engagement with Macready has been so much talked about, and he has himself applied to me three several times about it. This puts an end to all visiting prospects, for Brighton or St. Leonard's, and in March you will be leaving the latter place. This is a sad disappointment, but perhaps Mr. M---- will not, after all, give me my terms, and I ought to be sorrier for that, but I shan't.... I had a visit the other morning from Mr. Blackett--John Blackett. I don't know if I have spoken of him to you. I met him at Mrs. Mitchell's in Scotland, while I was staying with her at Carolside, and liked him very much. He is a great friend of Dr. Hampden's and of Stanley, Arnold's biographer. He brought me, the other day, a volume of sermons by Stanley, of which I have just read the first, and have been delighted with it. How surely does such a spirit as Arnold's beget its own fit successors!... I think I have not read anything, since his own Life, that has given me the same deep satisfaction that these sermons of his pupil have.... That music of Mendelssohn's had a horrid effect upon my nerves; I mean the emotion and distress it caused me. I suffered a great deal of pain, and was quite unwell for several days after it. Will it not be a pity if I can't come and be spoilt any more by you and Dorothy at St. Leonard's? It was so pleasant and good for you. Ever as ever yours, FANNY. KING STREET, Monday, 7th. I do very, very well this morning, my dear Hal: this is in answer to your affectionate inquiry of the 1st; but if you wanted to know then, of course you will want to know just as much now.... My time at the Beeches was not very pleasant to me. The weather was horrible, cold, wet, and dismal; the house is wretchedly uncomfortable; and Mrs. Grote always keeps me in a rather nervous state of breathless apprehension as to what she may say or do next. I cannot talk much, either to her or Charles Greville; neither of them understands a word that I say. Her utter _unusualness_ perplexes me, and his ingrain worldliness provokes me; but I listened with great pleasure to some political talk between Charles Greville, Mr. Grote, and the Italian patriot, Prandi. You know that, fond as I am of talking, I like listening better, when I can hear what I think worth listening to. I was delighted with their clear, practical, comprehensive, and liberal views of the whole state of Europe, especially Italy, so interesting in her present half-roused attitude of returning national vitality. They talked a great deal, too, upon the West India sugar question; and I listened with interest to all they said, struck the whole time with their entirely ignoring the deepest sources whence national troubles and their remedies flow, of which the wisest working politicians and statesmen take apparently (very foolishly) little heed; I suppose they do not acknowledge them, which is why their government and statescraft is so apt to be mere temporary empirical expediency. I had a very full and lively audience at Cambridge, and remarked with especial satisfaction a young man sitting in the stage box with one of the sweetest countenances I ever saw. I sincerely hope, for his beauty's sake, that he was amused. He reminded me of the line in King John, describing the young gentlemen in the English army--the lads "with ladies' faces and fierce dragons' spleens." They were very attentive, and very enthusiastic, and I was very well pleased with them, and I hope they were with me.... There is nothing in the supernatural part of "Jane Eyre" that disturbs me at all; on the contrary, I believe in it. I mean, there is nothing in my mode of thinking and feeling that denies the possibility of such a circumstance as Jane Eyre hearing her distant lover call upon her name. I have often thought that the power of intense love might very well work just such a miracle as that. God bless you, dear. Kiss dearest Dorothy for me, and believe me Ever yours, FANNY. 29, KING STREET, Tuesday, 8th. Yesterday I had plenty of questions to answer in my letter to you; to-day I have not one.... My beloved friend, I know that if your power to serve me equalled your desire to do so, I should be borne in the arms of angels, "lest at any time I struck my foot against a stone." But do not, my dearest Harriet, let your love for me forget that faith without which we could neither bear our own trials nor the trials of those we love. "In the great hand of God we all stand," and are fitly cared for by Him, our Father. I should be much ashamed of the sudden flood of cowardice that overwhelmed me two days ago at the difficult and cheerless prospect before me, but that it was, I am sure, the result of nervous disorder, and the jarring I got the other day from that dreadful Antigone. You know I seldom waste time in blaming myself, and tarry but a brief space in the idle disconsolateness of repentance. I must try to be less weak, and less troubled about my prospects. I wrote you yesterday of the proposal I had received from Mr. Maddox. He made no offer of terms. I have heard nothing further from him, and augur ill from his silence. I suppose he will not pay me what I ask, and thinks it useless to offer me less. I shall be very sorry for this; but if I find it so, will apply to Mr. Webster, or some other manager, for employment; and if I fail with them, must make a desperate effort about my readings. But for my sister's entreaty that I would remain here till she returns from Italy, and my own great desire to see her again, I would _confront_ the winter passage across the Atlantic, in hopes of finding work in America, and living without using up the little I have already gathered together. But I cannot bear to go before she comes to England.... I was surprised by a visit from Lord Hardwicke yesterday; it is years since I have seen him. I knew and liked him formerly, as Captain Yorke. He is as blunt and plain-spoken as ever, and retains his sailor-like manner in spite of his earldom, which he hadn't when I met him last.... Henry Greville is coming to tea with me this evening, and I promised to read him my translation of "Mary Stuart." I hope he may like it as well as you did. Lady Dacre was here this afternoon; she has been dreadfully ill, and looks an old woman now, for the first time, at eighty--that is not too soon to begin. I think I shall take Mr. Maddox's last offer, and if so, dear Hal, farewell to my visit to St. Leonard's. But I am of the poor author's mind, "Qu'il faut bien qu'on vive," and do not suppose that you will answer me _à la Voltaire_, "Ma foi, je n'en vois pas la nécessité." It is very odd that it should seem so natural to one to live, and so strange to die, since it is what everybody does. The fact is, habit is the strongest thing in the world; and living is simply the oldest habit we have, and so the strongest. Good-bye, my dear, and believe me Respectfully yours, FANNY. KING STREET, St. James's, Thursday, 10th. ... Mr. Maddox comes here, and worries my life out with haggling and bargaining, but has not yet agreed to any terms, and I am half distracted with all the various advice tendered me.... In the mean time, I am much comforted about my readings; for I received yesterday morning a very courteous letter from the Secretary of the Collegiate Institution at Liverpool, offering me twenty guineas a night if I would go down and read there six nights at the end of March. This I shall be thankful to do, if my engagement at the Princess's Theatre falls through, and if it does not I shall hope to be able to accept the Liverpool invitation later in the season. I have had a visit, too, from one of the directors of the Highgate Institute, to beg I would go and read there. They cannot afford to give me more than ten guineas a night, the institute being a small and not very rich one; but of course I do not expect to be paid for reading as I am for acting, and therefore, whenever I can, shall accept the Highgate offer. These various proposals have put me in heart once more about the possible success of this reading experiment, and I am altogether much comforted at seeing that employment is not likely to fail me, which I was beginning to fear it might.... Of course, if I apply for engagements to managers, I must expect to take their terms, not to make my own--for beggars must not be choosers, as I learnt long ago; and when I solicit an engagement, I must be prepared to sell myself cheap--and I will. If Maddox won't pay me what I ask, and Webster won't have me at any price, I shall come to you and Dorothy, who, I "reckon," will take me on my own terms: which in these my days of professional humiliation (not personal humility, you know), is quite kind of you. Yours ever, FANNY. KING STREET, Friday, 28th. MY DEAREST HAL, You will be glad to hear that Mr. Maddox has at length come into my terms.... For the next two months this is some anxiety off my mind, and I trust will be off yours for me; and the last two days have shown me that my chance of getting employment, either acting or reading, is likely to last--at any rate till my sister returns, when I shall probably stay with her till my departure for America.... I am most thankful that the depression and discouragement under which I succumbed for a while has been thus speedily relieved. It is a curious sensation to have a certain consciousness of power (which I have, though perhaps it is quite a mistaken notion), and at the same time of absolute helplessness. It seems to me as if I had some sort of strength, and yet I feel totally incapable of coping with the small difficulties of circumstance under which it is oppressed; it's like a sort of wide-awake nightmare. I suppose it's because I am a woman that I am so idiotic and incompetent to help myself. But when one thinks of it, what a piteous page in the history of human experience is the baffling and defeat of real genius by the mere weight of necessity, the bare exigencies of existence, the need to live from day to day. Think of Beethoven dying, and saying to Hummel, with that most wonderful assertion of his own great gifts, "Pourtant, Hummel, j'avois du génie!"--such transcendent genius as it was too! such pure and perfect and high and deep inspiration! which had, nevertheless, not defended him from the tyranny of poverty, and the petty cares of living, all his life. Is it not well that people of great genius are always _proud as well as humble_, and that the consciousness of their own nobility spreads, as it were, the wings of an angel between them and all the baseness and barrenness through which they are often compelled to wade up to the lips? Whenever I think of Burns, my heart tightens itself, to use a French expression, for a most painful _physical emotion_. Do you know Schiller's exquisite poem of the "Division of the Earth"? I will send you a translation, if you do not--a rough one I made of it when it was one of my German lessons. My version is harsh and poor enough, but the thoughts are preserved, and _the_ thought is worthy of that noble poet.... 29, KING STREET, Saturday, 12th. MY DEAREST HAL, How many pleasant things I might lament over _if_ I might! I shall not see St. Leonard's again with you. Emily has misunderstood in saying that my engagement at the Princess Theatre does not begin till the 27th; it begins on the 21st, next Monday week, and I shall only just have time to get my wardrobe ready and study Desdemona and Cordelia, which I am asked to play, and re-learn the music of Ophelia, which I have quite forgotten.... I have an engagement offered me in Dublin, and it is rather provoking that I cannot accept it now, for this, I believe, is the height of the gay season there. As it is, I fear I shall not be able to go over there till May; but perhaps then you will go with me, or be there, and that will be some compensation for the less money I shall make. It's curious all these engagements offering now within these few days: to be sure, it never rains but it pours, so that accounts for it philosophically. Did I tell you what a nice long visit I had from Thackeray the other day? Oh, have you read that "Vanity Fair" of his? It is wonderful! He was a schoolfellow of my brother John's, you know, and is a very old friend of mine, but I had not seen him for some time. I wrote to ask him for his autograph for Henry Greville, and he wrote me an extremely kind note, and came himself after it, and sat with me a very long time, and was delightful. Lady Charlotte Greville, who has just removed into a beautiful new house she has arranged for herself, wrote to say she was coming to town immediately, and hoped I would give my first London reading in her drawing-room. Was not that nice and kind and good-natured of her, dear old lady? But of course I declined, at any rate for the present, as I mean to exhaust my natural enemies, the managers, before I have recourse to my friends, in any way whatever. Kiss Dorothy for me, and don't let her break your spirit with inquisitorial and vexatious supervision of your actions. A timely resistance to friendly tyranny is a great saving of trouble. Good-bye, you bad dear. I am yours ever, FANNY. [I wish to record a slight anecdote of my friend William Thackeray, which illustrates his great kindness and amiability, his _sweetness_ of temper and disposition. I met him at Miss Berry's at dinner, a few days before he began his course of lectures on the English essayists, and he asked me to come and hear him, and told me he was so nervous about it, that he was afraid he should break down. I had an engagement which prevented my hearing his first lecture, but I promised him to go and see him at his room before he began it, to cheer him. He was to lecture at Willis Rooms, in the same room where I read, and going thither before the time for his beginning, found him standing like a forlorn disconsolate giant in the middle of the room, gazing about him. "Oh, Lord," he exclaimed, as he shook hands with me, "I'm sick at my stomach with fright." I spoke some words of encouragement to him, and was going away, but he held my hand, like a scared child, crying, "Oh, don't leave me!" "But," said I, "Thackeray, you mustn't stand here. Your audience are beginning to come in," and I drew him from the middle of his chairs and benches, which were beginning to be occupied, into the retiring-room adjoining the lecture-room, my own readings having made me perfectly familiar with both. Here he began pacing up and down, literally wringing his hands in nervous distress. "Now," said I, "what shall I do? Shall I stay with you till you begin, or shall I go, and leave you alone to collect yourself?" "Oh," he said, "if I could only get at that confounded thing" (his lecture), "to have a last look at it!" "Where is it?" said I. "Oh, in the next room on the reading-desk." "Well," said I, "if you don't like to go in and get it, I'll fetch it for you." And remembering well the position of my reading-table, which had been close to the door of the retiring-room, I darted in, hoping to snatch the manuscript without attracting the attention of the audience, with which the room was already nearly full. I had been used to deliver my reading seated, at a very low table, but my friend Thackeray gave his lectures standing, and had had a reading-desk placed on the platform, adapted to his own very tall stature, so that when I came to get his manuscript it was almost above my head. Though rather disconcerted, I was determined not to go back without it, and so made a half jump, and a clutch at the book, when every leaf of it (they were not fastened together), came fluttering separately down about me. I hardly know what I did, but I think I must have gone nearly on all-fours, in my agony to gather up the scattered leaves, and retreating with them, held them out in dismay to poor Thackeray, crying, "Oh, look, look, what a dreadful thing I have done!" "My dear soul," said he, "you couldn't have done better for me. I have just a quarter of an hour to wait here, and it will take me about that to page this again, and it's the best thing in the world that could have happened." With which infinite kindness he comforted me, for I was all but crying, at having, as I thought, increased his distress and troubles. So I left him, to give the first of that brilliant course of literary historical essays with which he enchanted and instructed countless audiences in England and America. The last time I saw Thackeray, was at a dinner at my dear friend, Mr. Harness'. As we were about to seat ourselves at table, I being between Mr. Harness and Thackeray, his daughter Annie (now Mrs. Ritchie) was going to place herself on the other side of her father. "No, no," said our dear host, "that will not do. I cannot have the daughter next the father." And Miss Thackeray was invited to take another place. She had just published her story, "The History of Elizabeth," in which she showed herself to have inherited some of the fine elements of her father's literary genius. As we sat down, I said to him, "But it appears very evident, I think, that the daughter _is_ to be _next_ to the father." He looked at me for a moment with a beaming face, and then said, "Do you know, I have never read a word of that thing?" "Oh," cried I, "Thackeray! Why don't you? It is excellent! It would give you so much pleasure!" "My dear lady, I couldn't, I couldn't!" said he with tears in his eyes. "It would _tear my guts out_!"--which powerful English description of extreme emotion would have startled me less in French or Italian; "Cela m'arracherait les entrailles," or "mi sois-cerelbero." In the evening, he talked back to our early times, and my coming out at Covent Garden, and how, "We all of us," said he (and what a noble company of young brains and hearts they were!), "were in love with you, and had your portrait by Lawrence in our rooms"--which made me laugh and cry, and abuse him for tantalizing me with the ghost of a declaration at that late hour of both our days. And so we parted, and I never met him again. On his way home that evening, his daughter told me that he had spoken kind compassionate words of commendation of me. I have kept them in grateful remembrance. Fine genius! and tender gentle heart! the classic writer of the keenest and truest satire of the social vices of our day; the master of English style, as powerful and pure as that of the best models, whose works he has so admirably illustrated. "Vanity Fair" will, I suppose, be always considered Thackeray's masterpiece--though everybody loves, beyond all his other portraits, the exquisite one of Colonel Newcome--but it seems to me that "Esmond" is a more extraordinary literary feat than any other of his works--except, indeed, "Lyndon of Barry Lyndon," which is even a more remarkable production of the same order.] KING STREET, Monday, 14th. If you begin your letter with such questions as "What do you think of me?" I do not know any reason in life why my answer should ever have an end, even within the liberal limits of the two pages which you extort from me daily. That is a question I cannot answer; although, I must say, I should have expected from you rather more of that constancy and consistency (a male rather than a female quality, however), which, having determined on a certain course as best, does not lament having abided by it when the issue appears unprosperous. I think women are seldom of a sufficiently determined mind to make their opinion or resolution itself their consolation under defeat. They are more liable to mental as well as moral misgivings and regrets than men, and an unfortunate result easily induces them to repent a course they deliberately adopted. _Sole vales Veritas_ is the motto upon a little pencil-case contained in the small work-case Emily has given me. She had it engraved on the seal, and though it is not altogether so congenial a motto to me as Arnold and Robertson's Christian device "Forward!" (and is moreover axiomatic rather than hortatory), I use it partly for her sake, and partly because it is undeniable. Pilate wished to know what is truth--or rather pretended that he did--and I have a very general conviction that "What is truth?" is the speech of Pilate to this day; _i.e._, of those who know, but will not do, what they know to be right. It is very seldom, indeed, that the mind earnestly desires a conviction, strives for one, prays for one, and labors to attain one, that it does not acquire what, to all intents and purposes, _is_ truth for that individual soul. God's perfect and absolute Truth remedies in a thousand ways the defectiveness of the partial truth that we arrive at; and so that the _endeavor_ after truth be true, the highest result of all is reached, _truth towards God_, though, humanly speaking, the mental result may be a failure. What _absolute truth_ is, my dearest Hal, you will certainly not know before you die, and possibly not then. In the mean time, I take it, you have, or may have if you will, that which will serve your turn. At any rate, I have--which is not at all the same thing--but that don't signify. I am very glad I was welcome in Bedford Place, and that Miss ---- was good enough to be pleased with me. There is great goodness in her voice and manner, and to have kept her face unwrinkled and her hair unblanched till the present age (as it is no result of selfish insensibility in her), bespeaks a virtuous life, and sweet serene temper. I wonder more women to whom their good looks are precious, do not ponder upon the _beauty_ of holiness.... I have not heard from Adelaide or E---- for some time, but of them, that they and the children are well; that she is in good looks, and admirable voice; that their house is the pleasantest in Rome, and their parties _the_ thing to which everybody is anxious to be admitted: so all is prosperous and pleasant with them. I have told you of her nice new house in Eaton Place. It is in a considerable state of forwardness, the bedrooms being all papered, and the drawing-rooms nearly painted. Henry Greville has had it all done for her, and in very good taste; the grates are all up, and I should think in another fortnight they might take possession if they were here. I have read more of Stanley's sermons, and am struck with their resemblance, in tone and spirit, to that book of my friend Mr. Furness, which I do not know if I ever gave you to read, called, "Jesus and His Biographers." Stanley's sermons are excellent, but they seem to me curiously unorthodox. There is an inletting of new views upon the subject of the Christian Revelation, against which the Protestantism of the Church of England--in many respects illogical and anomalous, as it appears to its opponents--will have to fight a hard and difficult battle. Lady Ellesmere was absolutely in despair about the bill for admitting the Jews to Parliament, and had influence enough with Lord Ellesmere to make him vote against it. This is sad enough; but she is so excellent that her influence over him, in one case where it is bad is good in a great many others.... God bless you, my dear. Give my love to Dorothy: I am both yours, but yours most particularly, FANNY. P.S. My course with regard to my engagement at the Princess Theatre was determined by my father's opinion, and confirmed by the advice of all my friends who spoke to me upon the subject--Emily, Harness, the Grevilles, and others; and all that Mr. Maddox said in his various conversations with me upon the subject, enabled the best experienced among us to form a very fair idea of what he could afford to give, and what I was justified in asking. 29, KING STREET, Friday, February 18th, 1848. I have been this morning to a rehearsal of Macbeth, at which Macready did not attend; so that in point of fact, as far as I was concerned, it was _nil_. He is, I believe, finishing some country engagements, and I suppose had not returned to town. I have another rehearsal to-morrow, at which it is to be hoped he will attend, as otherwise my being there is really quite a work of supererogation. My men friends--among whom I include my father--one and all, did what I think women would not have done. The minute Mr. Maddox agreed to the terms I had demanded, they lamented bitterly (even my dear Mr. Harness--who is a good man) that I had not stood out for higher ones, feeling quite sure I should have got them. Now, this I think quite as contemptible, and a great deal more dishonest, than the womanly process (Emily's and yours) of lamenting that I had not taken less than I had demanded, because you feared my doing so had broken off the negotiation altogether. I think, upon the whole, it behooves people to know what they mean, and to abide by it, without either weak regrets at an ill result, or selfish ones that it is not better than what one had made up one's mind to--when it seems that it might have been so. I do wish people would learn to be like my aunt's cook, and "stand upon their own bottom, with fortitude and similarity." (A woman that Mrs. Siddons was engaging as cook, replied to the question, "Can you make pastry?" "Well, no, ma'am--not exactly to say, the very finest of pastry. I can make plain puddings and pies, but--I am not a professed puff pastry cook, and I think it best to say so, as every one should stand upon their own bottom, with fortitude and similarity, I think.") I act Lady Macbeth on Monday, on Wednesday Queen Katharine, and on Friday Desdemona, for the first time in my life. I have a beautiful and correct dress for her (you know I always liked my clothes), for which, nevertheless, I expect to be much exclaimed against, as our actresses have always thought proper to dress her in white satin. I have arrayed her in black (the only habit of the noble Venetian ladies) and gold, in a dress that looks like one of Titian's pictures. That smothering scene, my dear Harriet, is most extremely horrible, and like nothing in the world but the catastrophe of poor Madame de Praslin. I think I shall make a desperate fight of it, for I feel horribly at the idea of being murdered in my bed. The Desdemonas that I have seen, on the English stage, have always appeared to me to acquiesce with wonderful equanimity in their assassination. On the Italian stage they run for their lives round their bedroom, Pasta in the opera (and Salvini in the tragedy, I believe), clutching them finally by the hair of the head, and then murdering them. The bedgown in which I had arrayed Desdemona for the night would hardly have admitted of this flight round the stage; besides that, Shakespeare's text gives no hint of any such attempted escape on poor Desdemona's part; but I did think I should like not to be murdered, and therefore, at the last, got up on my knees on my bed, and threw my arms tight round Othello's neck (having previously warned Mr. Macready, and begged his pardon for the liberty), that being my notion of the poor creature's last appeal for mercy. What do you think of our fine ladies amusing themselves with giving parties, at which they, and their guests, take chloroform as a pastime? Lady Castlereagh set the example, and was describing to me her sensations under the process. I told her how imprudent and wrong I thought such experiments, and mentioned to her the lecture Brand gave upon the subject, in which the poor little guinea-pig, who underwent his illustrations for the benefit of the audience, died on the table during the lecture; to which she replied, "Oh yes; that she knew that, _for she was present_." Can you conceive, after such a spectacle, trying similar experiments upon one's ignorant self? Is it not very brave? or is it only idiotical?... I have been making a desperate struggle, _giving my reasons_ (four pages of them--think of it!) to the committee of the Liverpool Institution, to induce them to let me read Shakespeare _straight through_ to them; at least, each play I read, divided into two readings, and with only the omissions required by modern manners: but I fear they will not let me. I shall be grievously disappointed.... Was there ever such a to-do as that woman Lola Montez is kicking up? Everybody is turning Catholic as fast as possible, and the good Churchwomen are every way in despair. They already see their sons all circumcised, and their daughters refusing to eat ham, and their brothers and husbands confessing the Real Presence. The lady members of the Established Church, especially the more serious ones, are in great tribulation at all that is going on. Lady Ellesmere is desperate at the Jews coming into Parliament, and Lord Ellesmere has voted against them. He, poor man, has been, within the last few days, all but at death's door with the gout, and perhaps near finding out how different, or _in_different, these differences _really_ are. It is wonderful to hear everybody talk. Good-bye. I am yours and Dorothy's Most respectfully, FANNY. [My first intention in undertaking my readings from Shakespeare was to make, as far as possible, of each play a thorough study in its entireness; such as a stage representation cannot, for obvious reasons, be. The dramatic effect, which of course suffers in the mere delivery from a reading-desk, would, I hoped, be in some measure compensated for by the possibility of retaining the whole beauty of the plays as poetical compositions. I very soon, however, found my project of making my readings "studies of Shakespeare" for the public quite illusory. To do so would have required that I should take two, and sometimes three, evenings to the delivery of one play; a circumstance which would have rendered it necessary for the same audience, if they wished to hear it, to attend two and three consecutive readings; and in many other respects I found the plan quite incompatible with the demand of the public, which was for a dramatic entertainment, and not for a course of literary instruction. My father had found it expedient, in this mode of illustrating Shakespeare, to make one play the subject of each reading; taking two hours for the performance, and dividing the piece as fairly as possible in two parts; retaining the whole _story_ of the play, and so much only of the wisdom and beauty bestowed on its development by the author, as could be kept well within the two hours' delivery, and make the reading resemble as nearly as possible, in dramatic effect, the already garbled and coarsely mutilated stage plays the general public are alone familiar with. I was grievously disappointed, but could not help myself. In Germany I should have had no such difficulty; but the German public is willing to take its amusements in earnest. The readings were to be my livelihood, and I had to adapt them to the audiences who paid for them-- "For those who live to please, must please to live." I gladly availed myself of my father's reading version of the plays, and read those he had delivered, cut and prepared for the purpose according to that. When I came to cut and prepare for reading the much greater number which I read, and he did not, I found the task a very difficult one; and was struck with the judgment and taste with which my father had performed it. I do not think it possible to have adapted these compositions better or more successfully to the purposes for which he required them. But I was determined, at least, not to limit my repertory to the few most theatrically popular of Shakespeare's dramas, but to include in my course _all_ Shakespeare's plays that it was possible to read with any hope of attracting or interesting an audience. My father had limited his range to a few of the most frequently acted plays. I delivered the following twenty-four: King Lear, Macbeth, Cymbeline, King John, Richard II., two parts of Henry IV., Henry V., Richard III., Henry VIII., Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, The Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Midsummer Night's Dream, Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Tempest. These plays I read invariably through once before repeating any of them; partly to make such of them as are seldom or never acted, familiar to the public, by delivering them alternately with those better known; and partly to avoid, what I much dreaded, becoming mechanical or hackneyed myself in their delivery by perpetual repetition of the same pieces, and so losing any portion of the inspiration of my text by constant iteration of those garbled versions of it, from which so much of its nobler and finer elements are of hard necessity omitted in such a process as my reading of them. I persisted in this system for my own "soul's sake," and not to debase my work more than was inevitable, to the very considerable detriment of my gains. The public _always_ came in goodly numbers to hear "Macbeth," "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet," and "The Merchant of Venice;" and Mendelssohn's exquisite music, made an accompaniment to the reading of the "Midsummer Night's Dream," rendered that a peculiarly popular performance. But to _all_ the other plays the audiences were considerably less numerous, and to some few of them I often had but few listeners. Mr. Mitchell, who for a considerable length of time _farmed_ my readings, protested bitterly against this system, which involved, of course, less profits than he might have made by repeating only the most popular plays; and my own agents, when I was reading on my own account, did not fail to represent to me that I was what they called sacrificing my interests, _i.e._ my receipts, to this plan of operations; but man does not live by bread alone, and for more than twenty years that I followed the trade of a wandering rhapsodist, I never consciously sacrificed my sense of what was due to my work, for the sake of what I could make by it. I have wished, and hoped, and prayed, that I might be able to use my small gift _dutifully_; and to my own profound feeling of the _virtue_ of these noble works, have owed whatever power I found to interpret them. My great reward has been, passing a large portion of my life in familiar intercourse with that greatest and best English mind and heart, and living almost daily in that world above the world, into which he lifted me. One inspiration alone could have been purer or higher; and to that, my earthly master's work, done as well as it was in me to do it, often helped, and from it, never hindered me.] 29, KING STREET, Saturday, February 19th. _Imprimis_, will you and Dorothy fasten your dinner-napkins with these things, or rings, which I have made for you? for my imagination is sick with the memory of those bits of strings you use. I have made these too short, and so have been obliged to put strings to them, having originally intended them to be complete rounds; but my needle performances are always ill-managed and untidy, and as such I commend these to your indulgent acceptance. I wrought at them those bitter evenings that I spent in those barns of theatres in Norfolk, where the occupation contributed to entertain the warmth of my heart, which was all the heat I had to keep me alive.... I must tell you rather a droll observation of the worthy Hayes. When I explained to her that I had made those worsted bands to fasten your dinner-napkins, for which you had nothing but strings, she said, "Dear me! I wonder at that! And Miss S---- seemed so fond of clever, curious contrivances, for everything." I screamed with delight when she said that, for hadn't I cursed that "curious contrivance" of an inkstand you gave me (Dorothy cursed hers too, no doubt, after her own blessed fashion)? and didn't I curse that execrable "curious contrivance" of a taper you gave me at St. Leonard's, with which I was so enchanted _before I used it_, and which wasted me by its own small fire every time I did use it, and for the final burning out of which I was so thankful? But are not Hayes's comments on your character comical? I am sorry to say I have not the same dressing-room I had before at the Princess's Theatre. Mr. Macready is quite too great a man to give it up to anybody, and my attiring apartment now is up a steep flight of stairs, which is a great discomfort to me on several grounds, for I fear the call-boy will hardly come so far out of his way to summon me, and I shall have to sit in the greenroom, which, however, I won't, if I can by any means avoid it; but the proximity of the other room to the stage, and its being on the same level with it, was a great advantage. I am going to dine with Lady Grey (the Countess, widow of _the_ Lord Grey), and after that to the opera with Henry Greville and Alfred Potocki, who have a box, and have given me a ticket, which I am very glad of. I had a three hours' rehearsal this morning, and Macready was there. As far as I could judge, he was less unfair in his mode of acting than I had been led to expect. To be sure, at night, he may stand two yards behind me while I am speaking to him, as I am told he often does. He is not courteous or pleasant, or even well-bred; remains seated while one is standing talking to him; and a discussion having arisen as to the situation of a table, which he wished on the stage, and I wished removed, he exhibited considerable irritability and ill-humor. He is unnecessarily violent in acting, which I had always heard, and congratulated myself that in Lady Macbeth, I could not possibly suffer from this; but was much astonished and dismayed when at the exclamation, "Bring forth men-children only," he seized me ferociously by the wrist, and compelled me to make a demivolte, or pirouette, such as I think that lady did surely never perform before, under the influence of her husband's admiration. God bless you, dear, Ever yours, FANNY. [I have always had a cordial esteem and respect for Mr. Macready's character, which has been increased by reading the record he has himself left of his life. Of his merits as an actor, I had not a very high opinion, though in one or two parts he was excellent, and in the majority of the tragical ones he assumed, better than his contemporaries, my father, Charles Young, and Charles Kean. He was disqualified for sentimental tragedy by his appearance, and he was without comic power of any kind. _Parts_ of his Macbeth, Lear, Othello, and King John, were powerful and striking, but his want of musical ear made his delivery of Shakespeare's blank-verse defective, and painful to persons better endowed in that respect. It may have been his consciousness of his imperfect declamation of blank-verse that induced him to adopt what his admirers called the natural style of speaking it; which was simply chopping it up into prose--a method easily followed by speakers who have never learned the difference between the two, and that blank-verse demands the same care and method that music does, and when not uttered with due regard to its artificial construction, and rules of rhythm and measure, is precisely as faulty as music sung out of time. The school of "natural speaking" reached its climax, I presume, in the performance of a charming young actress, of whose delivery of the poetry of Portia it was said in high commendation, by her admirers, that she gave the blank verse so _naturally_ that it was impossible to tell that it was not _prose_. What she did with Shakespeare's _prose_ in the part these judicious critics did not mention. Mr. Macready's eye was as sensitive and cultivated as his ear was the reverse. He had a painter's feeling for color and grouping and scenic effect; was always picturesque in his appearance, dress, attitudes, and movements; and all the pieces that were put upon the stage under his supervision were admirable for the appropriate harmony of the scenery, decorations, dresses, and whole effect; they were carefully accurate, and extremely beautiful. "Acis and Galatea," as produced under his direction, was one of the most exquisite dramatic spectacles I ever saw, in spite of the despair to which he reduced the chorus and ballet nymphs by rigorously forbidding all padding, bustle, crinoline, or other artificial adjunct to their natural graces, in the severely simple classical costume of the Greek mythological opera. Mr. Macready's great parts were Virginius, in Knowles's play of that name; Werner, in Lord Byron's romantic drama; and Rob Roy, in the melodrama taken from Scott's novel. These were original performances, in which nobody has surpassed or equalled him; genuine artistic creations, which, more than his rendering of Shakespeare's characters, entitled him to his reputation as a great actor. He was unpopular in the profession, his temper was irritable, and his want of consideration for the persons working with him strange in a man of so many fine qualities. His artistic vanity and selfishness were unworthy of a gentleman, and rendered him an object of dislike and dread to those who were compelled to encounter them. He was quite aware of this himself, for once, when he came to see me, while the negotiation was pending about my engagement to act with him, he alluded to his own unpopularity, said he was sure I had heard all sorts of disagreeable stories about him, but assured me, laughing, that "the devil was not nearly so black as he was painted." It was quite impossible for me to tell Mr. Macready that I had heard he was _pleasant_ to act with, remembering, as I did while he spoke to me, the various accounts I had received of actors whose eyes had been all but thrust out by his furious fighting in Macbeth; of others nearly throttled in his paternal vengeance on Appius Claudius; of actresses whose arms had been almost wrenched out of their sockets, and who had been bruised black and blue, buffeted alike by his rage and his tenderness. One special story I thought of, and was dying to tell him, of one pretty and spirited young woman, who had said, "I am told Mr. Macready, in such a part, gets hold of one's head, and holds it in chancery under his arm, while he speaks a long speech, at the end of which he releases one, more dead than alive, from his embrace; but I shall put so many pins in my hair, and stick them in in such a fashion, that if he takes me by the head, he will have to let me instantly go again." My personal experience of Macready's stage temper was not so bad as this, though he began by an act of unwarrantable selfishness in our performance of "Macbeth." From time immemorial, the banquet scene in "Macbeth" has been arranged after one invariable fashion: the royal dais and throne, with the steps leading up to it, holds the middle of the stage, sufficiently far back to allow of two long tables, at which the guests are seated on each side, in front of it, leaving between them ample space for Macbeth's scene with Banquo's ghost, and Lady Macbeth's repeated rapid descents from the dais and return to it, in her vehement expostulations with him, and her courteous invitations to the occupants of both the tables to "feed, and regard him not." Accustomed to this arrangement of the stage, which I never saw different anywhere in all my life for this scene, I was much astonished and annoyed to find, at my first rehearsal, a long banqueting-table set immediately at the foot of the steps in front of the dais, which rendered all but impossible my rapid rushing down to the front of the stage, in my terrified and indignant appeals to Macbeth, and my sweeping back to my place, addressing on my way my compliments to the tables on either side. It was as much as I could do to pass between the bottom of the throne steps and the end of the transverse table in front of them; my train was in danger of catching its legs and my legs, and throwing it down and me down, and the whole thing was absolutely ruinous to the proper performance of my share of the scene. If such a table had been in any such place in Glamis Castle on that occasion, when Macbeth was seized with his remorseful frenzies, his wife would have jumped over or overturned it to get at him. All my remonstrances, however, were in vain. Mr. Macready persisted in his determination to have the stage arranged solely with reference to himself, and I was obliged to satisfy myself with a woman's vengeance, a snappish speech, by at last saying that, since it was evident Mr. Macready's Macbeth depended upon where a table stood, I must contrive that my Lady Macbeth should not do so. But in that scene it undoubtedly did. As I had been prepared for this sort of thing in Macready, it didn't surprise me; but what did was a conversation I had with him about "Othello," when he expressed his astonishment at my being willing to play Desdemona; "For," said he, "there is absolutely nothing to be done with it, nothing: nobody can produce any effect in it; and really, Emilia's last scene can be made a great deal more of. I could understand your playing that, but not Desdemona, out of which nothing really can be made." "But," said I, "Mr. Macready, it is Shakespeare, and no character of Shakespeare's is beneath my acceptance. I would play Maria in 'Twelfth Night' to-morrow, if I were asked to do so." Whereupon he shrugged his shoulders, and muttered something about "all that being very fine, no doubt," but evidently didn't believe me; and as I should have given him credit for my own feeling with regard to any character in Shakespeare's plays, I was as much surprised at his thinking I should refuse to act any one of them as I was at his coarse and merely technical acting estimate of that exquisite Desdemona, of which, according to him, "nothing could be made;" _i.e._, no violent stage effect could be produced. Is not Shakespeare's refusing to let Desdemona sully her lips with the coarse epithet of reproach with which her husband brands her, and which no lady in England of his day would have hesitated a moment to use, a wonderful touch of delicacy? Macready certainly was aware of the feeling of his fellow-actors about his violence and want of personal self-control on the stage; for as he stood at the side scene by me, in the last act of "King Lear," ready to rush on with me, his Cordelia, dead in his arms, he made various prefatory and preparatory excuses to me, deprecating beforehand my annoyance at being dragged and pulled about after his usual fashion, saying that necessarily the scene was a disagreeable one for the "poor corpse." I had no very agreeable anticipation of it myself, and therefore could only answer, "Some one must play it with you, Mr. Macready, and I feel sure that you will make it as little distressing to me as you can;" which I really believe he intended to do, and thought he did.] I have received this morning from Liverpool, in answer to my letter about my readings, a very earnest request that I would give _lectures_ upon Shakespeare. This I have declined doing, not having either the requisite knowledge or ability nor the necessary time properly to prepare a careful analysis of the smallest portion of such over-brimming subjects as those plays. I should like to study again Hazlitt's and Coleridge's comments upon Shakespeare; the former I used to think excellent. Mrs. Grote herself wrote those stanzas upon Mendelssohn which you saw in the _Spectator_. She urged me vehemently, while I was with her at the Beeches, to do something of the kind; but I could not. She then showed me her verses, which please me better now than they did then; for then the painful association of his former existence in that place, and the excitement of his beautiful music, which she plays extremely well, had affected my imagination and feelings so much that I should have found it very difficult to be satisfied with any poetical tribute to him that was not of the very highest order. She and I walked together to the spot in the beautiful woodland where he had lain down to rest, and where she wishes to erect a monument; and I cannot tell you how profoundly I was touched, as we stood silently there, while the great heavy drops, melting in the winter evening's sunshine, fell from the boughs of the beech-trees like slow tears upon the spot where he had lain. I have read more of Stanley's "Sermons," and quite agree with you in the difference you draw between them and Mr. Furness's book; the spirit of both is kindred.... I don't know anything about the income-tax. I am getting frightfully behind the times, having read no _Times_ for a long time; but as regards income-tax, or any other tax, there is no telling how long one may be free from such galls in America. If they indulge in a few more such national diversions as this war in Mexico, they will have to pay for their whistle, in some shape or other, and in more shapes than one. It is deplorable to hear the despondency of all public and political men that I see, with regard to the condition of the country. With the Tories, one has long been familiar with their cries that "the sky is falling:" but now the Liberals, at least those who all their lives have been professing Liberals, seem to think "the sky is falling" too; and their lamentable misgivings are really sad to listen to. I dined on Saturday at Lady Grey's, with the whole Grey family. Lord Dacre, and all of them, spoke of Cobden and Bright as of another Danton and Mirabeau, likened their corn-law league, and peace protests, to the first measures of the first leaders of the French Revolution; and predicted with woful headshakings a similar end to their proceedings. I do not know whether this is an injustice to the individuals in question, but it seems to me an injustice to the whole people of England collectively, and to their own class, the aristocracy of England, which has incurred no such retribution, but which has invariably furnished liberal and devoted leaders to every step of popular progress--their own father an eminent instance of devotion to it. Such misgivings seem to me, too, quite unjust to the powerful, enlightened, and wealthy class which forms the sound body of our sound-hearted nation: and equally unjust to those below it, in whom, in spite of much vice and more ignorance, of poverty and degradation, the elements of evil do not exist in the degree and with the virulence that spawned that hideous mob of murderers who became at last the only government of revolutionary France. The antecedent causes have not existed here for such results; and it is an insult to the whole English people to prophesy thus of it. [Lord Dacre, because of his devotion to the agricultural interest, as he conceives it, and being himself a great practical farmer, seemed to me at once, at the time of the repeal of the corn laws, to renounce his Liberalism; and though one of the most enlightened, generous, and broad-minded politicians I have ever known, _till then_, to become suddenly timid, faithless, and almost selfish, in his fear of the consequences of Sir Robert Peel's measures.] What a fine thing faith in God is, even when one's own individual interests must perish, even though the temporary interests of one's country may appear threatened with adversity! What an _uncommonly_ fine thing it is under such circumstances to do right, and to be able to believe in right doing!... As I listened to the persons by whom I was surrounded, and considered their position and circumstances--their forks and spoons, their very good dinner, and all their etceteras of luxury and enjoyment,--I thought that, having all they have, if they had faith in God and in their fellow-creatures besides, they would have the portion of those who have none of the good things of this world--they would have too much. Will the days ever come when men will see that _Christ_ believed in humanity as none of His followers has ever done since; that _He_, knowing its infirmity better than any other, trusted in its capacity for good more than any other? We are constantly told that people can't be taught this, and can't learn that, and can't do t'other; and _He_ taught them nothing short of absolute perfection: "Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect." Are we to suppose He did not mean what he said? "I must eat my dinner," as Caliban says, and, therefore, farewell. I am ever yours, FANNY. P.S.--I did not impart these sentiments of mine to my fellow-guests at Lady Grey's, but kept them in my bosom, and went to the opera, and saw little Marie Taglioni dance, in a way that clearly shows that she is _la nièce de sa tante_, and stands in that wonderful dancer's shoes. KING STREET, Wednesday, 23d, 1848. The staircase I have to go up to my dressing-room at the Princess's Theatre is one with which you are unacquainted, my dearest Hal, for it is quite in another part of the house, beyond the green-room, and before you come to the stage.... Not only had I this inconvenient distance and height to go, but the dressing-room appointed for me had not even a fireplace in it; at this I remonstrated, and am now accommodated decently in a room with a fire, though in the same inconvenient position as regards the stage.... Mr. Maddox assured me that Macready poisoned every place he went into, to such a degree, with musk and perfumes, that if he were to give up his room to me I should not be able to breathe in it. With my passion for perfumes, this, however, did not appear to me so certain; but the room I now have answers my purpose quite well enough.... Macready is not pleasant to act with, as he keeps no specific time for his exits or entrances, comes on while one is in the middle of a soliloquy, and goes off while one is in the middle of a speech to him. He growls and prowls, and roams and foams, about the stage, in every direction, like a tiger in his cage, so that I never know on what side of me he means to be; and keeps up a perpetual snarling and grumbling like the aforesaid tiger, so that I never feel quite sure that he _has done_, and that it is my turn to speak. I do not think fifty pounds a night would hire me to play another engagement with him; but I only say, I don't think,--fifty pounds a night is a consideration, four times a week, and I have not forgotten the French proverb, "Il ne faut pas dire, fontaine jamais de ton eau je ne boirai." I do not know how Desdemona might have affected me under other circumstances, but my only feeling about acting it with Mr. Macready is dread of his personal violence. I quail at the idea of his laying hold of me in those terrible passionate scenes; for in "Macbeth" he pinched me black and blue, and almost tore the point lace from my head. I am sure my little finger will be rebroken, and as for that smothering in bed, "Heaven have mercy upon me!" as poor Desdemona says. If that foolish creature wouldn't persist in _talking_ long after she has been smothered and stabbed to death, one might escape by the off side of the bed, and leave the bolster to be questioned by Emilia, and apostrophized by Othello; but she will uplift her testimony after death to her husband's amiable treatment of her, and even the bolster wouldn't be stupid enough for that. Did it ever occur to you what a witness to Othello's agony in murdering his wretched wife his inefficient clumsiness in the process was--his half smothering, his half stabbing her? _That_ man not to be able to kill _that_ woman outright, with one hand on her throat, or one stroke of his dagger, how tortured he must have been, to have bungled so at his work! I wish I was with you and Dorothy at St. Leonard's, instead of struggling here for my life--livelihood, at any rate--with Macready; but that's foolish. He can't _touch_ me to-night, that's one comfort, for I am Queen Katharine. Farewell, believe me Ever yours most respectfully, FANNY. [It was lucky for me, under the circumstances, that my notion of Queen Katharine's relations with Cardinal Wolsey were different from those of a lady whom I saw in the part, who at the end of the scene where he finds her working among her women affably gave him her hand. Katharine of Arragon would have been more likely (though not likely) to give him her foot.] KING STREET, Friday, 23d. DEAR HAL, ... I had heard a very good summary of D'Israeli's speech from Lord Dacre, the day I dined at Lady Grey's, and know why he said Cobden was like Robespierre. Here's goodly work in Paris now! What wonderful difficult people to teach those French are! However, their lesson will, of course, be set them over and over again, till they've learnt it. Henry Greville had a letter from Adelaide the day before yesterday, in which she says that the people had risen _en masse_ at Rome, and, with the Princes Borghese and Corsini at their head, had gone to the Quirinal, and demanded of the pope that no ecclesiastic (himself, I suppose, excepted) should have any office in the government, and the pope _had consented_. She gave a most comical account of the King of Naples, who, it seems, during the late troubles walked up and down his room, wringing his hands, and apostrophizing a figure of the Virgin with "Madonna mia! Madonna mia! ma che imbroglio che m'ha fatto quel Vicario del figlio tuo!" Isn't that funny? In a letter posted this morning I have told you my general impression of Macready's Macbeth. It is generally good,--better than good in parts,--but nowhere very extraordinary. It is a fair, but not a fine, performance of the part. I cannot believe that he is purposely unjust to his fellow-actors: but he is so absorbed in himself and his own effects as to be absolutely regardless of them; which, of course, is just as bad for them, though the _guilt_ of his selfishness must be according to its being deliberate or unconscious. I played the first scene in Lady Macbeth fairly well; the rest hardly tolerably, I think. Macready's stage arrangements destroyed any possible effect of mine in the banquet scene, and his strange demeanor disturbed and distracted me all through the play. The terrible, great invocation to the powers of evil, with which Lady Macbeth's part opens, was the only thing of mine that was good in the whole performance. Dear Harriet, I have no time to prepare lectures on Shakespeare, and it makes me smile, a grim, verjuice smile, when you, sitting quietly down there at St. Leonard's, propose to me such an addition to my present work. I have been three hours and a half at rehearsal to-day; to-morrow I act a new part; this evening I try on all my new dresses; Saturday I shall be three hours at rehearsal again; and, meantime, I must study to recover Ophelia and her songs, which I have almost forgotten. A commentary upon Shakespeare deserves rather more leisure and quiet thought than I can now bestow upon it; even such an inadequate one as I am capable of would require much preparatory study, had I the ability which the theme demands, and which no amount of leisure Of study would give me.... I have been in a state of miserable nervousness for the last two days--in terror during my whole performance of Queen Katharine, lest I should forget the words, and yet, while laboring to fix all my attention upon them, distracted with the constant recurrence of _bits_ of Desdemona to my mind, which I fancied I was not perfect in, and then _bits_ of Ophelia's songs, which I had forgotten, and have been trying to recover. The mere apprehension of having to sing that music turns me dead sick whenever I think of it; in short, a perfect nightmare of fright present and future, through which I have had to act every night, _tant bien que mal_, but naturally _bien plus mal que bien_.... I do really believe, as my dear German master used to insist, that people can _prevent themselves_ from going mad. My dearest Harriet, Arnold believed in eternal damnation; and those who do so must have one very desperate corner in their mind--which, however, reserved for the wicked in the next world, must, I should think, sometimes throw lurid reflections over people and things in this. Whoever can conceive that idea has certainly touched the bottom of despair. "Lasciate ogni speme voi ch'entrate;" and I do not see why those who despair of their fellow-creatures in the next world should not do so in this. I can do neither--believe in hell hereafter, or a preparation for it here. I am sorry to say that, yesterday, Mr. Ellis, who sat by me at dinner at Lady Castlereagh's, said that the poorer class in this country was about to be worse off, presently, than it had been yet; and hoped the example of this new uprising in Paris would not be poisonous to them. It is sad to think how much, how many suffer; but by the mode of talking and going on of those who are well off and do not suffer, in England, it seems to me as if the condition of the poor must become such as to threaten them with imminent peril, before they will alter either their way of talking or of going on. Poor people all! but the rich are poorest, for they have something to lose and everything to fear, which is the reverse of the case of the poor. My staircase at the theatre troubles me but little, and I do not sit in the green-room, which would have troubled me much more. My rehearsal of Desdemona tried me severely, for I was frightened to death of Macready, and the horror of the play itself took such hold of me that at the end I could hardly stand for shaking, or speak for crying; and Macready seemed quite mollified by my condition, and promised not to rebreak my little finger, _if he could remember it_. He lets down the bed-curtains before he smothers me, and, as the drapery conceals the murderous struggle, and therefore he need not cover my head at all, I hope I shall escape alive. Please tell dear Dorothy that Miss ---- called here the day before yesterday, and left Miss B----'s songs for me. They are difficult, beyond the comprehension and execution of any but a very good musician; they show real genius, and a taste imbued with the inspiration of the great masters, Handel and Beethoven. The only one of them that I could sing is the only one that is in the least commonplace, "The Bonnet Blue;" the others are beyond my powers, but I shall get my sister to sing them for me. They are very remarkable as the compositions of so young a woman. Did she write the words as well as the music of "The Spirit of Delight"? [The musical compositions here referred to were those of Miss Laura Barker, afterwards Mrs. Tom Taylor, a member of a singularly gifted family, whose father and sisters were all born artists, with various and uncommon natural endowments, cultivated and developed to the highest degree, in the seclusion of a country parsonage.] ... I wish it was "bedtime, Hal," and I was smothered and over! God bless you, dear. Ever yours, FANNY. KING STREET, Friday, February 28th. DEAR HAL, ... I got through Desdemona very well, as far as my personal safety was concerned; for though I fell on the stage in real hysterics at the end of one of those horrible scenes with Othello, Macready was more considerate than I had expected, did not rebreak my little finger, and did not really smother me in bed. I played the part fairly well, and wish you had seen it. I was tolerably satisfied with it myself, which, you know, I am not often, with my own theatrical performances.... Faith in God, according to my understanding of it, my dearest Hal, implies faith in man; and have we not good need of both just now? You can well imagine the state of perturbation and excitement London is in with these Parisian events. The universal cry and question is, "What is the news?" People run from house to house to gather the latest intelligence. The streets are filled with bawling paper-vendors, amidst whose indistinct vociferations the attractively appalling words, "Revolution! Republic! Massacre! Bloodshed!" are alone distinguishable. The loss of Saturday night's packet between Calais and Dover, besides the horror of the event itself, is doubly distressing from the intense anxiety felt to receive intelligence of how matters are going on. Thus far yesterday, dear Hal; but as every hour brings intelligence that contradicts that of the hour before, it is now known that the small boat, going from the shore to the packet, was capsized and lost, and not the steamer itself. Henry Greville belongs to the party of Terrorists, and believes the worst of the worst rumors: but I have just seen his mother, and Lady Charlotte says that Charles is almost enthusiastic in his admiration of the conduct of the French people _hitherto_; but then there is never any knowing exactly how long any fashion, frenzied or temperate, moral or material, may last in France. In the mean time, the condition of that unfortunate Royal Family is worthy of all compassion, especially the women, who are involved in the retributions of the folly or wickedness of the men they belong to. It is not known where the Duchesse de Nemours is. Her husband has arrived safely here with one of the children; but neither he nor any one else knows what has become of his wife and the other two children. Of the Duchesse d'Orléans and her two babies nothing is known; and Lady Normanby wrote a letter to the Queen, saying that Louis Philippe and the Queen of France were in safety, but, as her letter would be sure to be opened, she could say no more. Only think of the Princesse Clémentine making her escape from France on board the same packet with her brother, the Duc de Nemours, and neither of them knowing the other was on the same vessel! The suddenness of the whole catastrophe makes it seem like some outrageously impossible dream. What a troubled dream must that king and queen's life seem to them, beginning and ending in such national convulsions!... I really believe Macready cannot help being as odious as he is on the stage. He very nearly made me faint last night in "Macbeth," with crushing my broken finger, and, by way of apology, merely coolly observed that he really could not answer for himself in such a scene, and that I ought to wear a splint; and truly, if I act much more with him, I think I shall require several splints, for several broken limbs. I have been rehearsing "Hamlet" with him this morning for three hours. I do not mind his tiresome particularity on the stage, for, though it all goes to making himself the only object of everything and everybody, he works very hard, and is zealous, and conscientious, and laborious in his duty, which is a merit in itself. But I think it is rather _mean_ (as the children say) of him to refuse to act in such plays as "King John," "Much Ado about Nothing," which are pieces of his own too, to oblige me; whilst I have studied expressly for him Desdemona, Ophelia, and Cordelia, parts quite out of my line, merely that his plays may be strengthened by my name. Moreover, he has not scrupled to ask me to study new parts, in plays which have been either written expressly only for him, or cut down to suit his peculiar requisitions. This, however, I have declined doing. Anything of Shakespeare's I will act with and for him, because anything of Shakespeare's is good enough, and too good, for me.... I shall have a nausea of fright till after I have done singing in Ophelia to-morrow night. Ever yours, FANNY. KING STREET, Tuesday, March 7th, 1848. Indeed, my dear Hal, I was not satisfied, but profoundly dissatisfied, with my singing in Ophelia; but am thankful to say that I did not sing out of tune, which I dreaded doing, from the miserable nervousness I felt about it. I am entirely misplaced in the character, and can do nothing with it that might not be better done by almost any younger woman with a sweet voice and that order of fair beauty which one cannot separate from one's idea of Ophelia. I have read Stanley's sermon on St. Peter, and am enchanted with it, and more than ever struck with the resemblance, in its general spirit, and even in actual passages, to my friend Mr. Furness's book. The notes and commentary upon the sermon are the part of Stanley's work that show more erudition and literary power than Mr. Furness's treatise contained, but the manner and matter of the writers shows close kindred when treating of the same subjects. We overflow here with anecdotes of the hairbreadth escapes of the French fugitives. Guizot and Madame de Liéven, his dear friend and evil genius, arrived both in London on the same day, having travelled from Paris in the same railroad train as far as Amiens; she with the painter Roberts, passing as his wife, and Guizot so disguised that she did not recognize him, and would not believe Lord Holland when he called upon her on Saturday and told her that Guizot had arrived like herself, and by the same train, the day before. Hotels and private houses are thronged with French and English tumbling over, a perfect stampede, from the other side of the Channel. Lady Dufferin, who during her long stay in Paris made many French friends, is exercising hospitality to the tune of having thirty people in her house in Brook Street. Charles Greville showed me on Saturday a capital letter of Lord Clarendon's upon the subject of his kingdom [he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at this time], and the probable and possible effects of this French Revolution on your quiet, orderly, well-principled countrymen. He also showed me a letter he had received from E---- from Rome, in which, I think, the account of the pope is that of a man being carried off his legs by the popular exigencies, which he _cannot_ resist and at the same time remain pope--the head of the priestly Roman Catholic Government. Yesterday came news that _Metternich had resigned_. If this is true, the forward step Italy is about to take need not, please God! be made in blood and violent social upheaving. I do pray that this news may be true, for it will probably avert a fire-and-sword revolution in the Milanese, and all through Lombardy, in which Piedmont would sympathize too warmly for its own peace and quiet. Austria, thus deserted by the presiding genius of her hitherto Italian policy, Metternich, will perhaps hesitate to enforce its threatened opposition to the changes which she might have sold at the cost of many lives, but would not have averted, though she overran Italy from end to end with war and desolation. This retreat of the great political powers of darkness before the advance of freedom in Italy seems to me like a personal happiness to myself. I rejoice unspeakably in it. It is quite another matter in France. It will be another matter here, whenever our turn to be turned upside down or inside out comes. In Italy the people are rising against foreign tyranny, to get rid of foreign dominion, and to get rightful possession of the government of their own country. In France the revolution against power is past, but that against property is yet to come. As for us, our revolt against iniquitous power ended with the final expulsion of the Stuarts; but we have sundry details of that wholesale business yet to finish, and there will be here some sort of _property_ revolution, in some mode or other, yet. The crying sin of modern Christian civilization, the monstrous inequalities in the means of existence, will yet be dealt with by us English, among whom it is more flagrant than anywhere else on earth. It is the one revolution of which our social system seems to me to stand in need, the last that can be directly affected, if not effected, by legislative action upon the tenure of land, the whole system of proprietorship of the soil, the spread of education, and the extension of the franchise: and, as we are the richest and the poorest people in the world, as the extremes of rampant luxury and crawling poverty are wider asunder here than anywhere else on earth, the force must be great--I pray God it may be gradual--that draws those opposite ends of the social scale into more humane nearness. I cannot believe that any violent convulsions will attend inevitable necessary change here; for, in spite of the selfish passions of both rich and poor, our people do fear God, more, I think, than any other European nation, and recognize a law of duty; and there is good sense and good principle enough in all classes, I believe, to meet even radical change with firmness and temperance. The noble body politic of England is surely yet so sound and healthy and vigorous as to go through any crisis for the cure of any local disease, any partial decay, without danger to the whole; though not, perhaps, without difficulty and suffering both to classes and individuals. God is over all, and I do not believe that one of the most Christian of nations will perish in the attempt to follow the last of Christ's commandments, "Love one another." I am painfully impressed with what constantly seems to me the short-sightedness of the clever worldly-wise people I hear talking upon these subjects, and the deep despondence of those who see a great cloud looming up over the land. Our narrow room and redundant population make any sudden violent political movement dangerous, perhaps; but I have faith in the general wholesome spirit of our people, their good sense and good principle. I have the same admiration for and confidence in our national character that I have in the institutions of the United States. God keep this precious England safe!... I am ever yours most truly, FANNY. KING STREET, Wednesday, March 8th, 1848. My little finger has recovered from Macready. It is gradually getting much better, but he certainly did it an injury. With regard to his "relenting," he is, I am told, quite uncommonly gracious and considerate to me.... I was told by a friend of mine who was at "Hamlet" the other evening, that in the closet scene with his mother he had literally knocked the poor woman down who was playing the Queen. I thought this an incredible exaggeration, and asked her afterwards if it was true, and she said so true that she was bruised all across her breast with the blow he had given her; that, happening to take his hand at a moment when he did not wish her to do so, he had struck her violently and knocked her literally down; so I suppose I may consider it "relenting" that he never yet has knocked me down.... We are quite lively now in London with riots of our own--a more exciting process than merely reading of our neighbors' across the Channel. Last night a mob, in its playful progress though this street, broke the peaceful windows of this house. There have been great meetings in Trafalgar Square these two last evenings, in which the people threw stones about, and made a noise, but that was all they did by all accounts. They have smashed sundry windows, and the annoyance and apprehension occasioned by their passage wherever they go is very great. Nothing serious, however, has yet occurred; and I suppose, if the necessity for calling out the military can be avoided, nothing serious will occur. But if these disorderly meetings increase in number and frequency the police will not be sufficient to moderate and disperse them, and the troops will have to be called out, and we shall have terrible mischief, for our soldiers will not fraternize with the London mob, the idea of duty--of which the French soldiers or civilians have but a meagre allowance (glory, honor, anything else you please, in abundance)--being the _one_ idea in the head of an English soldier and of most English civilians, thank God! The riots in Glasgow have been very serious; the population of that city, especially the women, struck me as the most savage and brutal looking I had ever seen in this country; and I remember frequently, while I was there, thinking what a terrible mob the lowest class of its inhabitants would make. Metternich's resignation, of which I wrote you yesterday, is, alas! uncertain. I had rejoiced at it for the sake of that beautiful Italy, and all her political martyrs past and to come. Good-bye, God bless you. I shall go and see some of those great mobs of ours. It must be a curious and interesting spectacle. Believe me ever yours, FANNY. KING STREET, Saturday and Sunday, March 11th and 12th, 1848. DEAREST HAL, The "uses of adversity," which are assuredly often "sweet," should help to reconcile us both to our own sorrows and those which are sometimes harder to bear, the sorrows of those we love.... I have not yet been able to accomplish my intention of seeing anything of our great political mobs; and they are now beginning to subside, having been rather _rackets_ than riots in their demonstrations, I am happy to say, and therefore not very curious or interesting in any point of view. But there is to be a very large meeting at Kennington on Monday, and Alfred Potocki said he would take me to it, but as I have to act that night I am afraid it would be hardly conscientious to run the risk of an accidental blow from a brickbat that might disable me for my work, which is my duty, though, I confess, it is a great temptation. My friend, Comte Potocki, is young and tall and strong and active, but I would a great deal rather have paid a policeman to look after me, as I did when I went to see a fire, than have depended upon the care of a gentleman who would feel himself hampered by having me to care for. After all, I shall probably give it up, and not go.... My father tells me he has definitely renounced all idea of reading again, so I took heart of grace to ask him to lend me the plays he read from, to mark mine by. The copy he used is a Hanmer, in six large quarto volumes, and belongs to Lane, the artist, who has very kindly lent it to me. My father's marks are most elaborate, but the plays are cruelly sacrificed to the exigencies of the performance--as much maimed, I think, as they are for stage representation. My father has executed this inevitable mangling process with extreme good judgment and taste; but it gives me the heart-ache, for all that. But he was _timed_, and that impatiently, by audiences who would barely sit two hours in their places, and required that the plays should be compressed into the measure of their intellectual _short_-suffering capacity. However, it was at the Palace that he had to _compress_ or rather _compel_ the five acts of "Cymbeline" into a reading of three quarters of an hour: and how he performed that feat is still incomprehensible to me.... Everything is black and sad enough as far as I can see, but, thank God, I cannot see far, and every day has four-and-twenty hours, and in every minute of every hour live countless seeds of invisible events. I heard a very good sermon to-day upon Christian liberty, and have been reading Stanley's sermon upon St. Paul, which made my heart burn within me.... I am reading an immensely thick book by Gioberti, one of the Italian reformers, a devout and eloquent Catholic priest, and it enchants me. Good-bye, my dear. I am ever yours, FANNY. KING STREET, Wednesday, 16th, 1848. Of course you have heard of the murder of the soldier by that poor girl in the park. I have heard nothing more special about it, and have not seen the newspapers lately, so you probably know more about it than I do. Emily tells me this morning that there were some excellent observations upon the circumstance, either in the _Examiner_ or _Spectator_. It will be long before women are justly dealt with by the social or civil codes of Christian communities to which they belong, longer still before they are righteously dealt with by the individuals to whom they belong; but it will not be _for ever_. With the world's progress that reform will come, too; though I believe it will be the very last before the millennium. I hope this poor unfortunate will be recommended to the Queen's mercy, and escape hanging, unless, as might be just possible, she prefers depending on a gibbet to the tender mercies of Christian society--especially its women--towards a woman who, after being seduced by a man, murdered him. Did I never tell you of that unhappy creature in New York, who was in the same situation, except that the villain she stabbed did not die, who was tried and acquitted, and who found a shelter in Charles Sedgwick's house, and who, when the despairing devil of all her former miseries took possession of her, used to be thrown into paroxysms of insane anguish, during which Elizabeth [Mrs. Charles Sedgwick] used to sit by her and watch her, and comfort her and sing to her, till she fell exhausted with misery into sleep? That poor woman used to remind me of my children's nurse.... I receive frequent complaints, not from you only, that I do not write sufficiently in detail about myself. It is on that account that I am always so glad to be _asked questions_, because they remind me of what my friends specially desire to know about me when otherwise I should be apt to write to them about what interested me, rather than what I was doing or saying, and the things and people that surround me, which I do not always find interesting. You do just the same; your letters are very often indeed discussions upon matters of abstract speculation rather than tidings of yourself,--your doing, being, or suffering,--and I have not objected to this in you, though it has given me a deal of trouble in answering you, because I like people to go their own way in everything; moreover, unless I am reminded by questions of what _is happening to me_, it interests me so little that I should probably forget to mention it.... If my faith, dearest Hal, depended upon my knowledge of the means by which the results in which I have faith will be achieved, I should have some cause for despondency. Do you suppose I imagine that the sudden violence of a national convulsion will make people Christians who are not so?... My answer to all your questions as to how momentous changes for the better are to be brought about in public affairs, in popular institutions, in governments, can only be--I do not know. I believe in them, nevertheless, for I believe in God's law, and in Christ's teaching of it, and the obviously ordained progress of the human race. True it is that Christ's teaching, ruling in every man's heart, can only be the distant climax of this progress; but when that does so rule, all other "governments" will be unnecessary: but though we are far enough off from that yet, we are nearer than we ever yet have been; and until that has become the supreme government of the world, changes must go on perpetually in our temporary and imperfect institutions, by which the onward movement is accelerated, at what speed who can tell? It seems to me that the geological growth of our earth has been rapid, compared to the moral growth of our race; but so it is apparently ordained. Individual goodness is _the_ great power of all,--societies, organizations, combinations, institutions, laws, governments, act from the surface downwards far less efficaciously than from the _root upwards_, and what it does _is done_. Comparatively cheap forms of government are among the most obvious and reasonable changes to be desired in Europe; but you mistake me if you suppose I am looking for instantaneous Utopias born out of national uproar and confusion. But as long as the love of God is not a sufficiently powerful motive with the nations of the earth to make them seek to know and do His will, revolution, outrage, carnage, fear, and suffering are, I suppose, the spurs that are to goad them on to _bettering_ themselves; and so national agonies seem to me like individual sorrows--dispensations sent to work improvement. Fourierism was received with extreme enthusiasm in New England, where various societies have been formed upon the plan of Fourier's suggestions, and this not by the poor or lower classes, but by the voluntary association of the rich with the poor in communities where all worldly goods were in common, and labor, too, so foolishly fairly in common that delicately bred and highly educated women took their turn to stand all day at the wash-tub, for the benefit of the society, though surely not of their shirts. I have conversed much in America with disciples of this school, but am of opinion, in spite of their zeal, that no such scheme of social improvement will be found successful, and that this violent precipitating one's self from the sphere in which one is placed in the scale of civilization is not what is wanted, but much rather the full performance of our several duties at the post where we each of us stand and have been providentially placed. The old English catechism of Christian obligation taught us that we were to do our duty in that state of life into which it had pleased God to call us--and if we did, there would be small need of revolutions. In America these social experiments were perfectly disinterested and undertaken for the sake of moral good results; for where they were tried, there was neither excessive wealth nor poverty to suggest them, and the excellent and intelligent people thus brought together by pure zeal for social improvement disagreed and grumbled with each other, were so perfectly and uncomfortably unsuccessful in their experiments that their whole scheme collapsed, and dissolved into the older social disorders from which they had thought to raise themselves and others.... MY DEAR HAL, ... I do not see why a much greater subdivision of land would not be beneficial in England. Of course, if to the example of America you retort all its singular and advantageous conditions, I have nothing to say; but how about Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland? where small proprietorship appears to result in prosperity both to the land and its cultivators. I do not believe that the tenure of land will long continue what it is here, nor do I believe, in spite of the warlike notes of preparation from all sides of the Continent just now, that the day of great standing armies can last much longer--neither in France nor England, surely, can the people consent much longer to be taxed as they are for military purposes.... I told you of my having found, in the theatre at Norwich, a couple of young people whose position had interested me much. They were very poor, but gentlefolks, and sorely as they needed money, I could not offer it to them, so I promised to go down to Lynn, and act for them whenever they could obtain their manager's leave to have me.... And on Saturday, the 18th, I shall go down to Mrs. H----'s, my dear friend Harness's niece, who lives within seven miles of Lynn, and visit her, while I do what I can for them. Ever yours, FANNY. BILNEY, NEAR LYNN, NORFOLK, Monday, March 20th, 1848. MY DEAREST HARRIET, I may or may not be very nervous on the occasion of my Saturday's reading at Highgate. [It was the first I ever gave--a mere experiment to test my powers for the purpose; was in a small room, and before an audience in which were some of my intimate friends.] It will probably depend upon whether I am tolerably well or not, but I trust I shall not annoy you, my dear, if you are with me.... Did I tell you that I met Mr. Swinton at Lady Castlereagh's the other evening, and that he very amiably invited me to go and see his pictures before they went to the exhibition?--so perhaps we may see them together when we come to town. I had an application from an artist the other day, who is painting a picture from "Macbeth," to sit for his Lady for him; and I have undertaken to do so, which is a bore, and therefore very good-natured of me.... This place itself is pretty, though the country round it is not. The weather is cold and rainy and uncomfortable, and I shall be almost glad to get back to London, and to see you. "Now, isn't that strange?" as Benedick says. I am afraid, moreover, that my errand here, which will cost me both trouble and money, will not answer too well to the poor people I wish to serve. Only think of their manager making them _pay_ for the use of the theatre at a rate that will swallow up the best part of what I can bring into it for them. Isn't it a shame?... This is an out-of-the-way part of the world enough, as I think you will allow, when I tell you that _one_ policeman suffices for _three_ parishes, and that his authority is oftenest required to reclaim wandering poultry. Moreover, the curate, who does duty in both this and the adjoining parish for sixty pounds a year, preaches against his patron, whose pew is immediately under the pulpit, designating him by the general exemplary and illustrative title of the "abandoned profligate." The latter thus vaguely indicated individual is a middle-aged widower of perhaps not immaculate morals, but who, as lord of the manor and chief landed proprietor in these parts, is allowed to be charitable and kind enough,--which, however, will not, I am afraid, save him--at least in the opinion of his clergyman. The country people are remarkably ignorant, unenlightened, _unpolitical_, unpoetical rustics, but remarkably well off, paying only three pounds a year for excellent four-roomed cottages, having abundance of cheap and good food, and various rights of common, and privileges which help to make them comfortable. It is an astonishingly sleepy and quiet sort of community and neighborhood, and this is a pretty place, on the edge of a wild common, with fine clumps of fir-wood about it, and a picturesquely _colored_ district of heath, gorse, broom, and pine growth, extending just far enough round the grounds to make one believe one was in a pretty country. As I hear no more of the present French Revolution down here, I am reading Lamartine's ("Les Girondins") account of their first one. It's just like reading to-day's Paris newspaper. Ever yours, FANNY. You will be glad to hear that, after encountering every possible let and hindrance from their amiable manager, and being made by him to pay _ten pounds_ for the use of the theatre, company, gas, etc, my poor young fellow-actors, for whose sake I came down here, will have cleared a sum that will be an immense help to poor folk living upon £2 a week. I was delighted with having been able to serve them much better than I had feared I might. People's comparative earnings make me reflect. I have been grumbling not a little at my weekly earnings. Thackeray, for that wonderful book, "Vanity Fair," gets £60 a month; the curate who preached to us on Sunday and does duty in two parishes has £60 a year. Perpend! Good-bye, my dear. Believe me ever yours, FANNY. PORTSMOUTH, Wednesday. DEAR T----, What a marvellous era in the world's history is this we are living in! Kings, princes, and potentates flying dismayed to the right and left, and nation after nation rising up, demanding a freedom which God knows how few of them seem capable of using. The last month in Europe has been like the breathless reading of the most exciting novel, and every day and hour almost teems with events that surpass in suddenness and importance all that has gone before. The Austrians will not give up Italy without a struggle, and I suppose through that channel the floodgates will be thrown open that will deluge all Europe with blood. Is not the position of the Emperor of Russia awful in its singularity--the solitary despot of the civilized world? The great body of the Austrian empire is falling asunder, and all its limbs standing up, separate national bodies. Hungary, Bohemia, Poland will again have individual existence, and the King of Prussia will be undoubtedly hereafter the head of a huge German Confederacy. In the mean time, I am sure you will rejoice that Metternich was mistaken, and that "it," as he was pleased to designate the existing state of Europe, did not even, as he said it would, "last his time." Our country is wonderful; I mean this, my blessed England receiving into her bosom the exiled minister and dethroned King of France, and the detested Crown Prince of Prussia, with the dispassionate hospitality of a general house of refuge for ruined royalties. The spirit and temper of this English people is noble in its steadfastness: with much of national grievance to redress and burdens to throw off, the long habit of comparative freedom, and the innately loyal and conservative character of the nation, have produced a popular feeling that at this time of universal disturbance is most striking in its deliberate adherence to established right and good order. Alone of all the thrones in Europe, that of our excellent queen and her admirable consort stands unshaken; alone of all the political constitutions, that of the country they govern is threatened with no fatal convulsion: in the midst of the failing credit and disturbed financial interests of the Continent, our funds have been gradually advancing in value, and our public credit rises as the aspect of affairs becomes more and more involved and threatening abroad. Ireland is our weak point, and, as we have to _atone_ there for cruelty, and injustice, and neglect, too long persisted in, that will be the quarter from which we shall receive our share of the national judgments which are being executed all over the world. A short time ago I saw an admirable letter of Lord Clarendon's, who is now Lord Lieutenant; but though he has hitherto conducted his most difficult government with great ability, there is so much real evil in the condition of the Irish that, combined with their folly, their ignorance, and the wickedness of their instigators, I do not think it possible that the summer will pass over without that wretched country again becoming the theatre of anarchy and turbulent resistance to authority. My brother-in-law has returned from Rome, and my sister will follow him as soon as the weather will admit of her crossing the Alps with her babies. All his property is in the French funds, that seems an insecure security nowadays.... In England we shall have an extended right of suffrage, a smaller army, a cheaper government, reduced taxation, and some modification of the land tenure,--change, but no revolution, and no fits, I think. This people deserve freedom, for they alone, and you, descended from them, have shown that they know what it means. Considerable changes we shall have, but the wisdom and wealth of our middle classes is a feature in our social existence without European parallel; it is the salvation of the country. I know you hate crossed writing, so good-bye. I am afraid these fantastic French fools will bring Republicanism into contempt. France seems to be threatened with national bankruptcy, _et puis--alors--vous verrez_. Always affectionately yours, F. A. B. COLCHESTER. I came from Yarmouth to-day, having lodged there in a strange old inn that belonged, in our Republican days, to Judge Bradshaw; in one room of which, they say, Cromwell signed Charles I.'s death-warrant; but this, I think, is a mistake. He is said, however to have lived much in the house, which, at that time, belonged to the Bradshaw family. The house is of a much earlier date, though, than that, and was once, undoubtedly, a royal residence; for in a fine old oak room, the carved panelling of which was as black as ebony, the ceiling was all wrought with the roses and the _fleur-de-lys_. The kitchen and bar-room were both made out of an old banqueting-hall, immensely lofty, and with a very fine carved ceiling, and stone-mullioned windows, of capital style and preservation. The staircase was one of those precious, broad, easy-graded ascents, up which you could almost take a carriage, with a fine heavy oak baluster; and on the upper floor three good-sized rooms made out of one, with another elaborately carved ceiling. It was really a most curious and picturesque place, and is now the "Star Inn" at Yarmouth, and will doubtless become gradually changed and modernized and pulled to pieces, till both its remaining fine old characteristics and its traditions are lost--as, in good measure, they already are, for, as I said before, the house bears traces of having been a royal residence long before Cromwell's time.... The older English country-houses are full of quaint and picturesque relics of former times; but I think there is a cruel indifference sometimes to their preservation; _e.g._, think of the Norwich people allowing the house of Sir Thomas Browne to be dismantled of all its wood-carving, which was sent up to London and sold in morsels, I suppose, to the Jews in Wardour Street. Yours affectionately, FANNY. PORTSMOUTH, Friday, March 31st, 1848. I did not walk on my arrival in Portsmouth, dear Hal, but dined. The day was very beautiful all along, and I enjoyed as much of it as my assiduous study of the _Times_ newspaper would allow. I am glad you saw Mitchell, because now you can conceive what a funny colloquy that was of mine with him, about the price of the seats at my readings. [Mr. Mitchell, court bookseller, queen's publisher, box-letter to the nobility, general undertaker of pleasures and amusements for the fashionable great world of London, was my manager and paymaster throughout all my public reading career in England.] In making the preliminary arrangements for them he had, in my opinion, put the prices too high, demanding ten shillings for them. When I said they were not worth two, and certainly ought not to be charged more than five, he replied, with much feeling for the British aristocracy, whom he idolized, and whom he thought fit on this occasion to designate, collectively, under the title of my friend Lord Lansdowne, that he couldn't think of insulting him by making him pay only five shillings to hear me read. I wonder why poor dear Lord Lansdowne can't be asked five shillings? I would have charged him, and all the smaller and greater nobility of the realm, half a crown, and been rather ashamed of the pennyworth they got for it. But a thing is worth what it will fetch, and no one knows that better than Mr. Mitchell. I should think any sensible being would prefer paying half a crown to the honor and glory of disbursing twice that sum for a two-hours' reading--even by me, even of Shakespeare. I wish, while you were in personal connection with my manager Mitchell, you had remonstrated with him about those ridiculous dandified advertisements. You might have expressed my dislike of such fopperies, and perhaps saved me a few shillings in pink and blue and yellow note-paper; though it really almost seems a pity to interfere with the elegancies of poor Mitchell, who is nothing if not elegant. However, I wish he would not be so at my expense, who have no particle of that exquisite quality in my whole composition, and find the grovelling one of avarice growing daily upon me. I have already had a letter from Henry Greville this morning, telling me the result of _two_ interviews _he_ has had with Mitchell about the readings; also--which interests me far more than my own interests--of the utter routing of the Austrians in the Milanese--hurrah!--also of his determination to buy the house in Eaton Place.... Adelaide must come home by sea, for it is impossible that she should travel either through France or Germany without incurring the risk of much annoyance, if nothing worse. The S---- in the dragoon regiment in Dublin is E----'s younger brother.... Ever yours, FANNY. BANNISTERS, Tuesday, 14th, 1848. Liston's [the eminent surgeon] death shocked me very much, and I felt very certain that he was himself aware of his own condition. I observed, during my intercourse with him latterly, a listless melancholy in his manner, a circumstance that puzzled me a good deal in contrast with his powerful frame, and vigorous appearance, and blunt, offhand manner. I think I understand now, and can compassionate certain expressions in his last note to me, which, when I received it, made a painful and unfavorable impression upon me. I suppose he did not believe in a future state of existence, and have no doubt that, latterly, he had a distinct anticipation of his own impending annihilation. His great strength and magnificent physical structure, of course, suggested no such apprehension to persons who knew nothing of his malady [Liston died of aneurism in the throat], but when I saw him last he told me he was much more ill than I was; that he had been spitting up a quantity of blood, and was "all wrong." ... I cannot take your thanks, my dear Hal, about "Wilhelm Meister." ... I never offer anything to any one; neither would I willingly, when asked for it, withhold anything from any one. I believe the only difference that I really make between my "_friends_" and my "_fellow-creatures_" is one of pure sentiment: I love the former, and am completely indifferent to the latter, but I would _do_ as much for the latter as for the former. My marks in "Wilhelm Meister" will not, as you expect, "explain themselves," for the passages that I admire for their artistic literary beauty, their keen worldly wisdom, their profound insight, and noble truth, as well as those which charm me only by their brilliant execution, and those which command my whole, my entire feeling of sympathy, are all alike indicated by the one straight line down the side of the text. I think, however, you will distinguish what I agree with from what I only admire. It is a wonderful book, and its most striking characteristic to me is its absolute moral, dispassionate impartiality. Outward loveliness of the material universe, inward ugliness of human nature in its various distortions; the wisdom and the foolishness of man's aims, and the modes of pursuing them; the passions of the senses, the affections of the heart, the aspirations of the soul; the fine metaphysical experiences of the transcendental religionists; the semi-sensual, outward piety of the half-idolatrous Roman Catholic; the great and the little, the shallow and the deep of humanity in this its stage of action and development,--are delineated with the most perfect apparent indifference of sentiment, combined with the most perfect accuracy of observation. He pleads no cause of man or thing, and the absence of all indication of human sympathy is very painful to me in his book. It is only because God is represented as a Being of perfect love that we can endure the idea of Him as also a Being of perfect knowledge. Goethe, as I believe I have told you, always reminds me of Ariel, a creature whose nature--_super_human through power and knowledge of various kinds--is _under_-human in other respects (love and the capacity of sympathy), and was therefore subject to the nobler moral nature of Prospero. Activity seems to be the only principle which Goethe advocates, activity and earnestness--especially in self-culture,--and in this last quality, which he sublimely advocates, I find the only _comfortable_ element in his wonderful writings. _He_ is _in_human, not superhuman. God bless you. Good-bye. Ever yours, FANNY. KING STREET, St. James, Friday, 17th. MY DEAREST HAL, I cannot be making arrangements for going over to Dublin so far ahead as the 22d of May, for by that time Dublin may have been swallowed up by Young Ireland. Your theory of my reading elegant extracts from Shakespeare is very pretty, but absolutely nothing to the purpose for my purpose.... All that is _merely_ especially beautiful is sedulously cut out in my reading version, in order to preserve the skeleton of the story; because the audiences that I shall address are not familiar with the plays, and what they want is as much as possible of the excitement of a dramatic entertainment to be obtained without entering the doors of a theatre.... You forget to what a number of people Lambs and Bullocks give their names; Hog, which, by the bye, is spelt Hogge, has by no means the pre-eminence in that honor. I saw Lady Lansdowne the other day, who said the ministers were extremely anxious about Ireland, and that the demonstrations with regard to St. Patrick's day kept them in a state of great alarm. Lord Lansdowne is tolerably well just now, but has been quite ill; and Lord John Russell is so ill and worn out that they say he will be obliged to resign: in which case I suppose Lord Lansdowne would be premier. The position of people at the head of governments in this year of grace is certainly not enviable. D'Israeli said, last night, he couldn't see why Dublin should not be burnt to the ground; that he could understand the use of London, or even of Paris, but that the _use_ of Dublin was a mystery. I suggested its being the spring and source and fountain-head of Guinness's stout, but I don't think he considered even that a sufficient _raison d'être_ for your troublesome capital, or porter an equivalent for the ten righteous men who might save a city. Thackeray tells a comical story of having received a letter from his father-in-law in Paris, urging him by all means to send over his daughter there, and indeed go over himself, for that the frightful riots in England, especially those in London, Trafalgar Square, Kennington, etc., must of course make it a most undesirable residence; and that they would find Paris a much safer and quieter one: which reminds me of the equally earnest entreaties of my dear American friends that I should hasten to remove my poor pennies from the perilous guardianship of the Bank of England and convert them with all despatch to the safe-keeping of American securities! I have been going out a good deal during the last three weeks, and mean to continue to do so while I am in London, partly because, as I am about to go away, I wish to see as much as I can of its pleasant and remarkable society, and partly, too, from a motive of _policy_, though I hate it almost as much as Sir Andrew Aguecheek did. I mean to read in London before I leave it, and a great many of my fine lady and gentlemen acquaintances will come and hear me, provided I don't give them time to forget my existence, but keep them well in mind of it by duly presenting myself amongst them. "Out of sight, out of mind," is necessarily the motto of all societies, and considerations of interest more than pleasure often induce our artists and literary men to produce themselves in the world lest they should be forgotten by it. Nor, indeed, is this merely the calculation of those who expect any profit from society; the very pleasure-hunters themselves find that they must not get thrown out, or withdraw for a moment, or disappear below the surface for an instant, for if they do the mad tide goes over them, and they are neither asked for, nor looked for, called for, nor thought of, "Qui quitte sa place la perd," and there is nothing so easy as to be forgotten.... Besides all this, now that my departure from England approaches, I feel as if I had enjoyed and profited too little by the intercourse of all the clever people I live among, and whose conversation you know I take considerable pleasure in. I begin now, in listening, as I did last night, to D'Israeli and Milnes and Carlyle, and E----'s artist friend, Mr. Swinton, to remember that these are bright lights in one of the brightest intellectual centres in Europe, and that I am within their sphere but for a time.... I called at the Milmans' yesterday, and found Mrs. Austin there, whom I listened to, almost without drawing breath, for an hour. She has just returned from Paris, where she lived with all the leading political people of the day, and she says she feels as if she had been looking at a battle-field strewn with her acquaintances. Her account of all that is going on is most interesting, knowing as she does all the principal actors and sufferers in these events, personally and intimately. To-day the report is that the Bank of France has suspended payment. The ruin of the Rothschilds is not true, though they are great losers by these catastrophes. The Provisional Government has very wisely and wittily devised, as a means of raising money, to lay a tax of six hundred francs a year upon everybody who _keeps more than one servant_! Can folly go beyond that? Henry Greville showed me yesterday a letter he had received from Paris from Count Pahlen, saying that, though the guillotine was not yet erected, the reign of terror had virtually commenced; for that the pusillanimous dread that kept the whole nation in awe of a handful of pickpockets could be described as nothing else. I am much concerned about E----'s fortune, the whole of which is, I believe, lodged in French funds. All property there must be in terrible jeopardy, I fear. Lady G---- F---- went to Claremont two days ago, and says that Louis Philippe's deportment is that of a servant out of place. She did not add, "Pas de bonne maison." ... Ever yours, FANNY. [On the famous 10th of April, the day of the great Chartist meeting, I drove from King Street to Westminster Bridge in the morning, before the monster demonstration took place; and though the shops were shut and the streets deserted, everything was perfectly quiet and orderly, and nothing that _appeared_ indicated the political disturbance with which the city was threatened--the dread of which induced people, as far as the Regent's Park from the Houses of Parliament, to pack up their valuables and plate, etc., and prepare for instant flight from London. In the evening, my friends would hardly believe my peaceful progress down Whitehall, and I heard two striking incidents, among the day's smaller occurrences: that Prince Louis Napoleon had enrolled himself among the special constables for the preservation of peace and order; and that M. Guizot, standing where men of every grade, from dandies to draymen, were flocking to accept the same service of public preservation, kept exclaiming, with tears in his eyes, "Oh, le brave peuple! le brave peuple!"--a contrast certainly to his Parisian barricaders. In the summer of 1848 I returned to America, where my great good fortune in the success of my public readings soon enabled me to realize my long-cherished hope of purchasing a small cottage and a few acres of land in the beautiful and beloved neighborhood of Lenox.] THE END. INDEX ADELAIDE, Queen Dowager, 335, 340, 341 Albert, Prince, 321, 324, 341 Alexis, his mesmeric powers, 228 Alfieri, 21 Allen, Dr., 62 Alvanley, Lord, 74 America, character of Americans, 4; no _poor_, 6; servants in, 8; society in, 26; climate, 33; travel between and England, 39; scenery, 42; expression of faces in, 51; medical treatment in, 82; overwork of Americans, 91; medicinal waters in, 96; bathing in, 97; railroads in, 104; the Dismal Swamp, 108; the "place where a place was intended to be," 109; American decorum, 110; corduroy, 112; North Carolina natives, 116; tobacco-chewing, 116; a North Carolina "Colonel," 117; slavery on Butler's Island, 136; its influence on the whites, 137; hotels, 151; 4th of July in Philadelphia, 152; equality in, 152; health in, 167; "carrying on" financially, 176; Irish servants in, 184, 195; presidential election, 204; war with England, 206; the credit system in, 288; divorces in, 292; slavery in, 307; a story of slavery, 370; society, 403; public spirit, 405; an American on America, 415; contrasted with Italy, 466; spirit of conformity, 550 Amistad, 185; history of, 186 Anne the nurse, on the Rhine, 256; at Bowood, 273; objects to be waited on, 275, 279, 296, 297, 321; her views of presentation, 325 Appleton, Miss, 18, 101, 228 Ardgillan Castle, 13 Arkwrights, 251, 493, 495 Arnold, 420, 424; his influence, 425; his opinions, 430; life of, 432, 434, 444; character of his pupils, 446, 448; his "letters," 452, 453, 619, 645 Ashburton, Lady, 219, 281 Ashburton, Lord, 360, 372, 380 Ashley, Lord, 444 Austen, Charles, 281 Austin, Lucy, 578 Austin, Mrs., 3, 578, 666 BABBAGE, 273 Bach, 262 Balzac, 255; "Recherche de l'Absolu," 451 Banian, Mrs., 271 Barker, Laura, 646 Beaumont, Mr., 183 Beaumont, Mrs. Wentworth, carrying a contested election, 183 Becker, Dr., magnetized, 231 Bedford, Duchess of, 303, 304, 339 Bedford, Duke of, 303, 360, 514 Beecher, Lady, 77 Beethoven, 265, 623 Bendermann, 269 Benedict, 373 Bentley, 337 Berkeley, Craven, 312 Berkeley, Earl of, his encounter with a highwayman, 316 Berkeley, Frederick, 312 Berkeley, Grantley, 312 Berkeley, Henry, 310, 312, 313 Berkeley, Lady, 308; her story, 310, 349, 369 Berkeley, Lady Mary, 313, 369 Berkeley, Lord, 311 Berkeley, Morton, 313; the contents of his pockets, 314 Bernhardt, Sarah, 246 Berry, Miss, 295, 356, 373, 419, 443, 458; declining health, 499; 518, 617, 625 Berrys, The Miss, 45, 64 Bessborough, Lord, 501 Biddle, Nicholas, 289, 299 Blackett, John, 619 Bohn, 371 Borghese, Prince, 644 Bossuet, 618 Brackenbury, Mr., 555 Bradshaw, Judge, 660 Brand, Hon. Thomas, 526, 631 Brand, Mrs., 526 Bremer, Frederica, 444 Bright, 206, 640 Brougham, Lord, 549 Browne, Sir Thomas, 39, 661 Browning, 373, 447 Bruce, Mrs., 421 Brunel, 273 Buccleuch, Duchess of, 356 Bulteel, Lady Elizabeth, 516 Bunn, Mr., 367, 426 Bunsen, Baron, 431, 432, 434; his character, 445; on Arnold, 448 Bunsen, Mrs., 467 Butler's Island, 134, 135, 152, 157, 169 Byng, Frederick, 62, 360, 373, 380, 554 Byron, Lady, 3, 165, 577 Byron, Lord, 21 CALCRAFT, Mr., 494 Caliban, 569 Callcott, Lady, 366 Callcott, Mr., 330 Calvinism, 575 Camp, Vincent de, 317 Canterbury, Lord, 284 Carlisle, Lord, 502 Carlyle, on "Mathilde," 291; 573, 666 Carolside, 519, 520, 521, 524 Castlereagh, Lady, 631, 645, 657 Cavendish, Miss Susan, 526 Celeste, Mademoiselle, 559 Cerito, 193, 211 Chambers Brothers, "Vestiges of Creation" attributed to, 546 Channing, 24; preaching, 28; anecdote of, 29; on slavery, 30, 180; sermon on sorrow, 187; letters from England, 355; death, 363; book, 376, 380, 419, 564 Charlemont, Lady, 380 Charlemont, Lord, 380 Charles I., 660 Charleston, 122 Charlotte, Queen, 311 Chester, Harry, 421 Chesterfield, Lord, 439 Child, Mrs. Lydia, 324, 338, 355 Chopin, 193, 262, 264, 265 Chorley, 52; his play, 165, 212, 241, 259, 269, 375; veneration for Dr. Follen, 420, 438, 447, 455; takes charge of papers, 460, 483, 492 Chorley, Mrs., 221 Churchill, Mr., 584 Clairvoyance, "I see it, but I don't believe it," 229 Clarendon, Lord, 640, 660 Clayton, Captain, the highwayman, 317 Clémentine, Princesse, 647 Cobden, 640, 643 Codrington, Sir Edward, 419, 421, 436 Coleman, Mr., 437 Coles, Sir Francis, 329 Combe, Dr., 21, 354, 521 Combe, Mr., 47; the "Constitution of Man," 102; thinks Mrs. Kemble improved, 162, 167, 194; magnetism, 230, 232, 252; on martyrdom, 326, 354, 459, 460, 530, 532, 539; his fanaticism, 540, 542; on "Vestiges of Creation," 543, 546; "dry humor," 597 Combe, Mrs., 47, 102, 162, 194, 230, 252, 354, 525, 530, 532; her beauty, 539, 540, 542 Cooper, James, 95 Cooper, Mrs., 374 Cork, Lady, 48, 52 Correggio, 376 Corsini, Prince, 644 Coster, Mr., 353 Cottin, Miss, 259, 279, 455, 591, 605 Coutts, 283 Coutts-Trotter, Miss, 574 Craven, 502 Cromwell, 660 Crow, Mrs., her book, 230; her insanity, 232 Cumberland, Duke of, 269 Cunard, Mr., 383 DACRE, Lady, 45; letters to, 57, 63, 76, 101, 142, 149, 160; letters to, 161, 175, 198, 248, 249, 280, 323; letters to, 356, 360, 361, 362; her advice, 363; letters to, 365, 366, 377, 378, 380, 381, 386, 392, 401, 414, 428, 432, 438; her illness, 438; letters to, 488, 491, 494, 514; letters to, 525; invitation from, 548, 554, 622 Dacre, Lord, 45; on contested elections, 183, 248, 250, 252, 281, 338, 356, 362, 378, 380, 415; on war, 429, 438, 446, 640, 641, 643 Dalhousie, Lord, 65 Darner, Mrs. Dawson, 380, 519 Dantan, 368 Darien, 130 Déjazet, 329, 342, 598, 599 De Quincey, 415 Dessauer, 209; _Elle m'a compris!_ 212, 265, 326 De Tocqueville, 209 Dévy, Madame, 327, 334, 337 Dickens, 107, 305, 318; his opinion of America, 359, 380 Dietrichstein, Madame de, 487 Disraeli. _See_ Israeli, D'. Donne, William Bodham, 612 Douro, Lady, 295 Dryden, 376 Dufferin, Lady, 502, 649 Dumas, Alexandre, 337 Duncombe, Thomas, 315 Dundas, Mr., 281 EDISTO, 127 Egerton, Francis, 227, 248, 251, 272, 325, 329, 330, 334, 356; on Arnold, 448 Egerton, Lady Francis, 162, 420, 446; on Arnold, 448 Eliot, George, 50, 53 Ellesmere, Lady, 45, 73, 244, 448, 629, 631 Ellesmere, Lord, 45, 448, 501, 600, 601, 629, 631 Ellis, Mr., 645 Ellsler, Fanny, 191, 193, 194; Mrs. Grote befriends her, 210; her genius, 211; her child, 213, 241, 246, 372 Empson, 381, 419 Enclos, Ninon de l', 54 Eresby, Lords Willoughby de, 304 Essex, Lady, 436, 514 Este, Mademoiselle d', 295, 303, 304; her character, 333; 335, 337; her claims, 338; _her_ queen, 341; her marriage, 344 Everett, Edward, 325, 381 F., LETTER TO, 385 Farquharson, 597 Fay, Theodore, 48 Fénélon, 564, 618 Fergusson, Sir Adam, 527 Fishing, "Fishing bery good fun, when de fish him bite," 146; American fish, 155 Fitzhardinge, Lord, 310, 312 Fitzhugh, Emily, 10; letters to, 12, 13, 55, 84, 133, 139, 145, 161, 308, 319, 373; letter to, 420; her marks, 430, 496, 508, 512, 600, 629 Fitzhugh, Mr., 51; his illness, 177, 536 Fitzhugh, Mrs., 51, 308, 319, 475, 477, 508, 535, 536, 589, 595; her health, 597; depression, 598 Foley, Lord, 356 Follen, Dr., his death, 180; his history and character, 182; sermon on, 187, 364, 419, 574 Follen, Mrs., 364 Follenius, Carl, 181 Forbes, John, 160 Forster, Mr. John, 496, 501 Foster, a _séance_ with, 235 Fourier, 655 Fowler, Dr., 271 Fox, Miss, 281 Francis, Lady, 221, 274, 276; presents Mrs. Kemble, 324; 325, 327, 349 Francis, Lord, 276 Frezzolini, 325 Frost, Mr., 560 Fuller, Margaret, 17 Fullerton, Lady Georgiana, 541 Furness, Mr., anti-slavery sermons, 388; 403, 629, 640, 648 GARCIA, Pauline, 207 Gaskell, Mrs., 568 Gensius, 211 Genz, Frederic von, 211 George III., 311 Georgia, condition of, 103; slavery in, 203; journal of residence in, 159, 203, 205 Gibbon, 173 Gibson, 193 Gioberti, 653 Glück, 213 Goethe, Madame von, 3 Goethe, Wolfgang von, 12, 15, 33, 77; "Wilhelm Meister," 589, 592, 663 Good, the murderer, 310 Gordon, Lady Lucy Duff, 576, 578, 590 Gordon, Sir Alexander Duff, 578 Grant, Sarah, 459 Grant, William, 450 Granville, Dr., 51 Grazia, 51 Green, Mr., 368 Gregory, William, 231 Gresset, 599 Greville, Algernon, 298 Greville, Charles, 61, 74; his character, 216; his "Memoirs," 217; 218, 226; at a _séance_, 235; 273, 274, 281, 283, 301; his mention of Queen Adelaide, 344; 360; letter to, 376; 381, 423, 431; on Arnold, 448; his book, 458, 461, 483; on a future life, 498, 499; character, 514; 549, 558; letter to the _Times_, 587; and Parliament, 590; 598; supposed the author of "Jane Eyre," 602, 603; writings on Ireland, 611; 615; on politics, 620; 629, 647, 649 Greville, Henry, 239, 329, 335, 423, 436; on painting, 475, 483; goes to Manchester, 485, 487; as an amateur actor, 496, 501, 502; his criticism, 508; character, 514; 529, 541, 543; and Rachel, 548; 558, 600; his mania for playhouses, 602, 603; on readings, 615, 622, 624; house-furnishing, 629; 635, 647, 662, 666 Greville, Lady Charlotte, 625, 647 Grey, Countess, 528 Grey, Lady, 228, 366, 402, 526, 554, 635, 640, 643 Grey, Lord, 338, 516, 635 Griffith, Mrs., 74 Grisi, 48, 49; description of, 50; 211, 325, 377, 475 Grote, George, 209, 218, 241, 373, 444; "History of Greece," 589; on politics, 620 Grote, Mrs., a _Grotesque_ passage, 208; her talents, 209; befriends Mlle. Ellsler, 210; _Malbrook s'en va t'en guerre_, 212; takes charge of Fanny Ellsler's child, 213; her opinion of d'Orsay, 213; her illness, 217; engrosses Jenny Lind, 217; her interest in politics, 218; "It is political," 219; her appearance, 219; language, 220; dress, 220; "the gentleman in the white muslin gown," 221; 241, 246, 351, 352, 353, 373; beasterly wind, 373; 423, 424, 425, 427, 434, 444, 522; her sufferings, 611; her _unusualness_, 620; verses, 639 Guercino, 376 Guildford, Lord, 519 Guizot, 649, 667 Gunter, 373 HAL�VY, 217 Hall, Miss, 369, 374, 391 Hallam, 65, 381 Hallé, Charles, 265, 577, 579 Hamilton, Miss, 308, 424 Hamilton, Mr., 535 Hamiltons, The Miss, 589 Hampden, Dr., 619 Hanmer, 653 Hanover, King of, 269 Happy Valley, a, 19 Hardwicke, Lord, 621 Harness, Rev. William, "taking it out in corns," 65; 90, 161, 164, 296, 297; his character, 298; 352, 353, 373, 419, 548, 555, 611, 615, 626, 629, 630, 657 Hatherton, Lady, 48, 52 Hawtrey, Dr., 563, 570 Hawtrey, Stephen, 570 Hayes, Bridget, 506, 507, 516, 531, 567, 605, 606, 611, 634 Hayward, 21 Hazlitt, 639 Head, Sir Francis, 53 Herbert, George, 566 Hero, 567, 571, 593 Hesse-Darmstadt, Duke of, 269 Hibbard, Mr., 440 Hibbard, Mrs., 440 Holland, Dr., 423 Holland House, 60 Holland, Lady, at Rogers', 59; her jelly, 62; her temper, 63; travelling by land, 273; 430; her last days, 441; her will, 441 Holland, Lord, 59, 60, 649 Hook, Theodore, 398 Horner, Francis, 379, 420, 573 Howick, Lord, 460 Hugo, Victor, 22, 501, 585 Hume, 234 Humphreys, Mrs., 535 Hunt, Leigh, his play, 190 INGLIS, Sir Robert, 381 Insects, bugs, 33; bees, 35; ants, 35; fire-flies, 36; beetles, 36; flies, 36; mosquitoes, 37; spiders, 37; potato bugs, 37 Invitation to Hayti, 569 Irving, Edward, 21, 573 Israeli, D', 643, 665, 666 JAMESON, Mrs., letters to, 1, 15, 18, 47, 51, 74, 75, 83, 92, 94, 97, 100, 103, 138, 146; her book, 151; letter to, 164; her book on Canada, 172; letters to, 190; 289, 291, 323; letters to, 412, 423, 429; a horrid story, 449; Adelaide Kemble's likeness, 450; Mrs. Siddons' Memoir, 450; her character, 454; Mrs. Siddons' Memoir, 459; 563; relations with Lady Byron, 577; 601, 614, 615 Jay, Mr., his book, 185 Jay, Mrs., 271 Jeffrey, Sydney Smith on, 215; 380 Jeffreys, 530, 553, 566 Joachim, 579 Joan of Arc, 396 KEAN, Charles, 636 Keeleys, 559 Kemble, Adelaide, "Aunt Dall," 605 Kemble, Adelaide, daughter of Charles, 47, 51, 59; pressed flowers, 60; going upon the stage, 87, 98; her genius, 99; 101, 139; first appearance, 146; in Turkey, 197; at Palermo, 199; first concert, 209; 211; 219; her success, 222, 223, 226, 227; at a _séance_, 235; 241; at Covent Garden, 248, 250; her first public performance, 259, 267; her success in London, 270; her character, 292, 306; "die Tine," 321; 323, 325; declines to sing at the Italian Opera-House, 325; in Dublin, 328; 330, 331, 332, 336; her engagement, 338, 346; her "Helen," 351; 353; her marriage, 354; sings "Norma" for the last time, 357; 361, 366, 367, 368, 373, 374; compared with other artists, 377; 418, 429, 444; her health, 452; song written by, 456; 462, 507, 521, 529; acquaintance with Mendelssohn, 544; American spirit of conformity, 549; 590; house in London, 600; her return, 621; her house, 628; letter from Italy, 643 Kemble, Charles, farewell to the stage, 46; 48, 139, 143; vase presented to, 177; return to the stage, 196; 197; illness, 205; sympathetic theory of convalescence, 206; 208, 223, 252; losses by the United States Bank, 270; 294, 299, 304; resumes the management of Covent Garden, 309, 322, 361; his loss at Covent Garden, 365; his illness, 365, 367, 369; 371, 372, 373, 375, 418, 419, 421, 423, 432, 433, 435, 443, 444, 450; debating the route, 455; 458; his deafness, 462; on the Continent, 472; gives up readings, 519; declines to read "Antigone," 614; 632; compared with Macready, 636; 653 Kemble, Mrs. Charles, story of a miniature, 195; her acquaintance with Captain Clayton, 317 Kemble, Frances Ann, on marriage, 1, 70; her first Fourth of July in America, 4; fresh butter, 6; her servants, 8; her journal, 11; double entry, 11; her portrait, 13, 85; portrait as _Beatrice_, 13; her opinion of slavery, 16; riding, 20; study of the Bible, 21, 24; treatise on slavery, 21; fear, 25; on emancipation, 29, 31; babies and authorship, 33; gardening, 33; _bugs_, 33; bees, 35; ants, 35; slavery, 35, 41, 185, 203; fire-flies, 36; beetles, 36; flies, 36; disappointment at not going South, 40; complexion, 42; voyage to England, 43; the death-vision, 44; London society, 45, 665; waiting for a vessel, 56; voyage to America, 67; on Christianity, 71; on members of the Convention, 73; her "English Tragedy," 72, 73, 103: disease an invention, 77; defence of Providence, 79; illness of her child, 82; on time, 84; scorpions, 88; birth of her child, 92; on dying, 92; on letter-writing, 95; on singularity, 98; death of her mother, 102; going to Georgia, 103; travelling with children, 105; "they always washes two at a time," 107; a North Carolina toilet, 112; on labor, 114; a night journey, 119; a day's rest, 120; the dread of singularity, 123; the Charleston negroes, 125; Margery's observations on Southerners, 126; incidents of the voyage to Savannah, 129; voyage to Darien, 130; the outer bound of creation, 130; welcome home, 131; a lively sense of benefits to come, 133; first visit to the sick house, 133; "O Lord a mercy! sure this is never I," 136; "What for you work, Missus?" 137; education of children, 143, 179; manifold avocations, 147; her house, 147; the Menai bridge, 148; reading prayers to the slaves, 148; Georgia journal, 159; the Stafford House appeal, 159; "A Fool's Errand," 160; Pharisaism of early risers, 161; a dumb child, 162; her "bumps," 162; her play, 165; the future life, 166, 498, 547; the teaching of experience, 168; Forester, 171; loneliness, 174; on sorrow, 187; beginning to die, 188; on reason in education, 189; on authorship, 190; on sponsorship, 195; jealous of her parts, 199; on steamships, 201; answering questions, 202; Georgia journal, its publication, 203; not allowed to return to Georgia, 205; English ignorance of slavery, 205; individual atmosphere, 207; declines to meet Mlle. Ellsler, 213; visits to Mrs. Grote, 209-221; on education, 221; on daguerreotypes, 222, 224, 225; a whirl of excitement, 226; mesmeric experience, 230-240; as Jezebel, 239; at Bannisters, 247; run away with, 251; a beautiful brute, 251; on lace-making, 254; travel in Germany, 255; at Ehrenbreitstein, 257; Schneider, 258; a happy woman, 274; exercise of agony, 279; answering letters, 283, 284; on sudden death, 286; Poor things--all of us! 287; on self-condemnation, 290; the horrors, 308; leaping in a carriage, 316; on difference of nationality, 319; her presentation, 320, 324; the spirit of martyrdom, 326; on dress, 327, 531; on earning money, 330; her return to America, 332; visits Queen Adelaide, 341; on married women's rights, 344, 422; sequel to "The Stranger," 345; her child's illness, 350; acting "The Hunchback," 349; her feeling toward America, 358; leaving England, 361; the secret of helping people, 375; receptions, 373; 379; sea-sickness, 381; a lawyer's bill, 385; on the condition of Ireland, 387; anti-slavery preaching, 388; at Yellow Springs, 388, 393; love, 397; _consciously unconscious_, 398; "The Memory of the Past," 399; 400; health, 401, 586; changes in England, 402; the nonsense of equality, 405; a volume of poems, 406; lodging-house insecurity, 408; Duchess of Ormond, 409; Icarus, 412; her consolations, 414; studying mathematics, 415; her favorite horse, 417; return to England, 418; stability of things spiritual, 421; requests for her influence, 426; advice, 427; on beauty, 433; "Beaver hats," 435; the Church service, 442; going to Italy, 445; deathbed utterances, 447; her idea of Eve, 451; her verses, 452; Genesis, 453; nervousness, 455; "content," 456; truth to be spoken, 456; journey to Italy, 457, 458; adversity, 461; her journal, 463; Rome, 463; living below pitch, 468; amusement, 469; lies, 471; equality between the sexes, 472; her journal, 473; returns to the stage, 474; at the dentist's, 478; laughter, 472; her journal, Manchester, 480; engagement in Dublin, 483; her play, 483; conversation versus correspondence, 486; appearance at Manchester, 488; at Birmingham, 494; refused permission to act for charity, 497; appearance at Liverpool, 499; on reading, 505; on government, 506; "Hints to Religion," 509; at Bath, 509; on consistency, 516; method of reading Shakespeare, 534; on phrenology, 537; on "Vestiges of Creation," 543; the Shakespearian celebration, 545; on "Vestiges of Creation," 546; "Psyche," 548; lionizing an American, 549; the ocean, 550; Shakespeare, 552; immortality, 552; taking ether, 553; an unfortunate, 555; something _that could not lie_, 557; a broken finger, 557; "A Year of Consolation," 559; a little outcast, 559; night, 562; reading at Eton, 563; partial immortality, 564, 593; the idea of God, 564; human and divine goodness, 566; dogmanity, 567; "Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time," 568; "Realities," 568; emancipation and freedom, 569; at Eton, 570; freedom a protection, 574; Calvinism, 575; at Manchester--a gratuity, 578; comments on readings, 579; death of the Emperor of Russia, 580; at Oxford, 582; "What _things_ these bodies are," 583; at Bath, 585; "an antidote to enthusiasm," 586; reverence, 587; officers of charities, 591; 593; burial money, 596; proselyting, 597; "Vanity Fair," 601; love and self-love, 602; improvement in manners, 604; economy, 606; at Yarmouth, 605; the aristocratic principle, 608; cleverness _versus_ judgment, 609; reading "Antigone," 614; morality and politics, 616; a beautiful woman, 617; tact and sincerity, 618; genius and helplessness, 623; a ghost of a declaration, 627; constancy, 627; What is truth? 628; "fortitude and similarity," 630; reading Shakespeare, 632; playing with Macready, 637; future punishment, 645; in Othello, 645; on the French Revolution, 47; as Ophelia, 648; political changes in England, 650; forms of government, 655; Fourierism, 655; subdivision of land, 656; a first reading, 657; a benefit for young actors, 656, 657, 658; the political situation, 659; the "Star Inn," 661; the great Chartist meeting, 667; return to America, 667; success of readings, 667 Kemble, Henry, 487, 493 Kemble, Mrs. John, Sr., 195, 345 Kemble, John, censorship given to, 183; editorship of the _Review_, 183; 195, 240, 291, 331, 337, 424; on Arnold, 431; Lady Holland's bequest, 441; his character, 481; his book, 482; 508, 585, 612, 613, 624 Kemble, Natalia, 291 Kenyon, 447 King, Lady Dashwood, 219 Kinglake, 436 King's Chapel, 28 Kingsbury, Mr., 602 Kingsley, Charles, 37 Kitchener, Dr., 9 Klopstock, 153, 283 Knowles, Mr., 475, 489 Knowles, Sheridan, 329 Kock, Paul de, 298, 300, 302 Kotzebue, 345 LABLACHE, 217 Labouchère, Mr., 501 Lamartine, 35, 658 Lamb, Charles, 283 Landseer, 63, 617 Lane, 225, 240, 653 Lansdowne, Lady, 45, 54, 270, 356, 664 Lansdowne, Lord, 45, 54, 270, 275, 277, 282, 296, 298, 662, 665 Lawrence, 439 Leader, 209 Legget, 186 Leighton, Sir Frederick, 239 Leinster, Duke of, 333 Lenox, no poor in, 7; no beer in, 7; laborers in, 8; its scenery, 100, 158 Lewis, Dr., his attempt to magnetize, 231 Lexington, The, burning of, 187 Liberalism, 48 Liebig, 504, 508, 510 Liège, 253 Liéven, Madame de, 649 Lincoln, Abraham, 160 Lind, Jenny, 209; engrossed by Mrs. Grote, 217; 444, 518, 519, 522 Lindsay, Lady Charlotte, 45, 62, 295, 356, 373, 419, 518 Liquor, 7, _note_. Liston, 206, 590, 592, 662 Liszt, 209, 241, 259; his tour in Germany, 261; his seven-leagued-boot style, 262; his career, 263; jealousy of Thalberg, 264; 269, 321 Lockhart, 419 London Assurance, 223 London, riots in, 651, 652, 667 London society, 45, 48, 665 Londonderry, Lady, 320, 323, 340 Longfellow, Fanny, 553 Longfellow, H. W., 18, 61 Longfellow, Mrs., 101, 228 Louis Napoleon, 667 Louis Philippe, 647, 666 Lovelace, Lady, 165 Lumley, 325 Luzzy, Mademoiselle de, 520 MACAULAY, 65, 273, 281; his discourse, 282; 371 Macdonald, Sir John, 243 Mackenzie, 370, 372 Mackintosh, Mrs. Robert, 18, 101 Mackintosh, Sir James, 500 Macready, 103, 143, 172, 407, 409, 501, 556, 595, 619, 629, 631; his manners, 635; his character, 636; his stage temper, 637; in Macbeth, 638; his violence, 642, 648; his selfishness, 644; in Othello, 645, 646; in Hamlet, 651 Macready, Mrs., 423 Maddox, 621, 622, 633, 629, 630, 642 Magnetism, 228-240 Mair, Lizzie, 424, 529, 530, 531, 533 Mair, Major, 525, 531; solitary confinement, 533 Malibran, 48, 87, 100, 207, 267, 377 Malkin, Arthur, 500, 541 Manzoni, "Ode to Napoleon," 571 Marcet, Mrs., 510 Margery, her successor, 178; her proselyting spirit, 178; her illness, 410 Mario, discharged, 325 Marlowe, 21 Marryatt, 176 Martineau, Miss, 3; in Philadelphia, 10; 16; her books, 52; "Deerbrook," 53, 65; her book on America, 80; 503, 50, 505 Mason, Charles, 497, 500, 502, 508, 510, 511, 514, 515 Masson, Miss, 373 Maulay, Lord de, 514 Maurice, 573 Maxse, "Go along Maxse," 315 Mays, Dr., 503 Mease, Dr., 13 Melbourne, Lord, 448 Melgund, Lady, 519 Mendelssohn, 209, 210, 262, 265, 375; his death, 543, 544; 573; his "Antigone," 613; 639 Mercadante, 293 Merimée, 585 Mesmerism, 228-240 Metternich, 649, 652, 659 Metternich, Madame de, 264 Millevoye, 585 Milman, 419, 427, 442, 666 Milman, Mrs., "You know one never means what one says," 442; 666 Milnes, Monckton, 434, 447, 666 Mitchell, Mr., 519; reading Shakespeare, 534; 613, 615, 618, 634; price of readings, 661 Mitchell, Mrs., 513, 519, 520, 521; character, 522; 527; opinions, 527; children, 529; dress, 531; 536, 539, 600, 602, 618, 619 Molesworth, Sir William, 209 Montague, Mr. and Mrs. Basil, 52, 521 Montez, Lola, 631 Moody, surrenders his watch, 317 Moore, 271, 273; "dat little dentleman," 277; 281 Mordaunt, Miss, 555 Morier, 589 Morley, Lady, 45, 63, 65, 66; bereavements, 554; truth-speaking, 554; "a mermaid," 554; her predecessor, 555; shows her house, 555 Morley, Lord, 555 Morpeth, Lord, 305, 318, 359, 401 Moscheles, 262, 265 Mott, Lucretia, 162, 307 Moxon, Edward, 477, 479, 483 Mozart, 264, 306 Mulliner, Mrs., 529, 530, 532, 553, 571, 572 Muloch, Miss, 574 Murray, Charles, 162 Murray, Lady Augusta, 338 Murray, Mr., 530 Muskau, Prince Puckler, 608 Mussy, Dr. Gueneau de, 501 NAPLES, King of, 644 Nemours, Duc de, 647 Nemours, Duchess de, 647 Nisbett, Mrs., 555 Normanby, Lady, 647 Normanby, Lord, 222, 284 Norton, Mrs. Charles, 169 Novello, Clara, 377 O'CONNELL, 302 Orleans, Duchesse d', 647 O'Sullivan, John, 401, 410, 427, 432 O'Sullivan, Mrs., 423 PAHLEN, Count, 666 Palmerston, Lady, Lady Holland's bequest, 442 Panizzi, 371 Parker, Theodore, 568 Pasta, 48, 49, 50, 87, 100, 261, 377, 631 Paton, Miss, 377 Patterson, Mary, 459 Peel, Sir Robert, 305, 460, 641 Persiani, 207 Philadelphia, Riots in, 412, 416 Philips, Secretary, 520 Pigott, Dick, 240 Planchette, 236-238 Potocki, Alfred, 485, 487, 635, 652, 653 Prandi, 620 Praslin, Duc de, 520 Praslin, Duchesse de, 519 Praslin, Madame de, 630 Prescott, 172 Procter, Adelaide, 577 Procters, 52, 227, 373, 434, 435, 436, 447, 455, 456, 460, 521, 577 Prussia, King of, 295, 296 Public Schools in England, 276 Pulaski, The, loss of, 95 QUINCEY, De. _See_ De Quincey. RACHEL, 50, 228, 241; her appearance, 243; her genius, 244; her tenderness, 246, 518, 548 Rackeman, Frederick, 193 Radley, Mr., 496 Rainsforth, Miss, 330 Raphael, his "Eve," 451 Reeve, Henry, 447 Revel, Count Adrien de, 521, 527, 528 Revel, Emily de, 521 Richmond, 609 Richmond, Duchess of, 303, 339 Richter, 228 Ristori, 246 Ritchie, Mrs., 626 Roberts, 649 Roberts, Miss, 581 Robertson, 562 Rocca, 345 Roebuck, 209 Rogers, 45, 58, 59; "the kindest heart and the unkindest tongue," 65; "_young_ poetry," 66; visits Mrs. Grote, his sarcastic temper, 213; "Publish it!" 215; 222, 271, 273; lines by, 277; 281; "What I was saying will keep!" 281; 373, 381, 425, 427; much altered, 429; on Arnold, 431; 433; reading Sydney Smith's letters, 434; 436; on Lady Holland, 441; 444, 460; his generosity, 478; loss of memory, 554; 615 Roman Reforms, 542 Romilly, Edward, 510 Romilly, Sir Samuel, 192 Ros, Lord de, cheats at cards, 73 Rossini, 378 Rothschild, Baroness Louis, 281 Rubinstein, 262 Russell, Lord John, Lady Holland's bequest, 441, 460, 665 Russia, Emperor of, 580 Ruthven, Lady, 531 Rutland, Duke of, 281, 300, 319, 338, 340 SALE, Lady, 64 Salisbury, Lord, 273 Salvini, 631 Sand, George, 291, 300, 449, 585 Sandon, Lord, 444 Saunders, his miniature from memory, 194 Savannah, 129 Savonarola, 326 Scarborough, Lord, character of, 440 Schiller, 396, 624 Schroeder-Devrient, 100 Schubert, 264 Scott, John Alexander, 572, 573, 574, 577; "You _are_ Theseus," 579 Sedgwick, Catherine, 11, 22, 32, 47, 74, 91, 92, 101, 103, 104, 146; visits England, 149, 150, 154, 162; 188, 200, 228; her book, 253; 255, 266, 271, 353; letter from, 363; her visit to an asylum, 364; letter from, 370; 470, 491, 505 Sedgwick, Charles, 505, 567, 654 Sedgwick, Elizabeth (Mrs. Charles), 151, 172, 185, 309, 324, 338, 355, 383, 589, 654 Sedgwick, Theodore, letters to, 168, 185, 192; 270; letters to, 304, 318, 353, 358, 370, 371, 392, 395, 399, 400, 404, 406, 407, 410, 659 Sedgwicks, 154, 161, 198, 200, 407, 423, 520, 548 Senior, William Nassau, 216, 218; his journal, 219; 443, 446 Sévigné, Madame de, 61 Seymour, Captain, 329, 349 Shaftesbury, Lord, 159 Shakers, The, 19 Siddons, Cecilia, 47 Siddons, George, 335, 455 Siddons, Harry, 450 Siddons, Mrs. Harry, 233; memoir of, 450, 454, 459; 525 Siddons, Mrs. Sarah, 55, 331 Slavery, 16, 21; plan of emancipation, 29, 31; pecuniary aspect of, 140; a slave's burial, 140; the slaves' sense of their condition, 141; discussions on, 144; in Georgia, 203; English ignorance of, 205 Smith, Adam, 597 Smith, Bobus, 430 Smith, Dr., 55 Smith, Gerrit, 307 Smith, Sydney, 35, 45; the "poticary," 53; 58, 59; his drollery, 63; "as a canon should live," 64; sale by auction, 64; the "bore contradictor," 65; his dream, 65; the "departed" poet, 67; 176, 208, 209; Grota, 213; his letters, 214; Jeffrey's visit to, 215; his dissimilar son, 215; it isn't _the_ Rogers, 215; 220, 240, 282, 323, 325, 334, 379, 380, 381; his petition, 391; 409; on Horner, 420; his death, 430; on Rogers, 434; his daughter, 440; "Gooseberry," 553; 573 Smith, Wyndham, the "Assassin," 215; Nebuchadnezzar, 216 Somerville, Mrs., 88, 472 Sontag, 217, 377 Staël, Madame de, 79, 345 Stafford, Marquis of, 276 Stage, The, its influence, 48 Stanley, Dean, 444, 619, 629, 640, 648, 653 Steamships, 89 Ste. Beuve, 585 Stephens, 302 Stepney, Lady, 380 St. Leger, Barry, 295, 521 St. Leger, Harriet, letters to, 8, 12, 20; 22; letters to, 23, 26, 29, 31, 33, 38, 40, 46, 54, 56, 67, 69, 71, 78, 81, 85, 89, 92, 95, 99, 102, 104, 119, 135, 143, 147, 150, 152, 153, 154, 158, 162, 166, 169, 170, 173, 177, 180, 183, 188, 192, 194, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 206, 208, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 240, 242, 243, 247, 248, 249, 252, 253, 255, 266, 268; in London, 270; letters to, 271, 274, 277, 280, 282, 284, 288, 290, 292, 294, 296, 299, 300, 302, 306, 307, 319, 322, 324, 327, 330, 332, 335, 336, 344, 348, 350, 352; visits Mrs. Kemble, 354; letters to, 354, 356, 367, 368, 369, 372, 374, 379, 381, 383, 387, 388, 398, 403, 407, 408, 414, 416, 421, 422, 424, 426, 429, 433, 434, 435, 436, 438, 439, 441, 443, 445, 449, 450, 452, 453, 455, 456, 459, 460, 461, 462, 465, 468, 472, 475; her flagellatory recipe, 475; her absurdity, 476; her reasonableness, 476; letters to, 478, 481, 482, 484, 485, 489, 492, 493, 495, 499, 503, 504, 507, 511, 512, 515, 516, 518, 521, 526, 527, 528, 530, 532, 533, 535, 536, 539, 540, 541, 543, 544, 548, 550, 553, 556, 558, 563, 566, 570, 572, 573, 575, 580, 581, 582, 583, 585, 587, 589, 591, 592, 593, 595, 596, 598, 600, 601, 606, 607, 610, 613, 616, 617, 619, 620, 621, 622, 623, 624, 627, 629, 634, 642, 643, 646, 648, 651, 652, 656, 661, 664 Stowe, Mrs. Beecher, 159 Strangford, Lord, 283 St. Simon's Island, 145, 152, 155; houses on, 156 Stuart, Mary, 520 Sullivan, Miss Barbarina, 525 Sullivan, Mrs., her illness, 142; her death, 150 Sullivan, Rev. Frederick, 392 Sully, 13, 80, 85, 92; the queen's picture, 139 Sumner, Charles, 423, 428, 430 Sussex, Duke of, 338 Sutherland, Duchess of, 159; concert at her house, 241; 335, 342, 346 Swinton, Mr., 657, 666 TAGLIONI, Maria, 193, 211 Taglioni, Marie, _niece of above_, 642 Talfourd, Judge, 35, 443 Talma, 349 Tankerville, Lady, 60 Taunton, Lord, 501 Taylor, Colonel, 468, 582 Taylor, Jeremy, 21 Taylor, Mrs., 10 Taylor, Mrs. Tom, 646 Thackeray, Annie, 626 Thackeray, Mary Anne, 227, 240, 259, 267, 563 Thackeray. William M., 159, 624; his first lecture, 625; the daughter next the father, 626; his works, 627; a comical story, 665 Thalberg, 209, 262; patronized by Madame de Metternich, 264; compared with Liszt, 265 Titchfield, Lord, 367, 368, 381 Tocqueville, De. _See_ De Tocqueville. Toryism, 48 Townsend, C. H., 228 Trelawney, 4, 86, 209, 227 Truro, Lord Chancellor, 344 Twiss, Amelia, 438 Twiss, Horace, 45, 366 UNGHER, Madame, 293 United States Bank, 270, 289, 299 VALLETORT, Lady, 54 Van Buren, 186; his reëlection, 198 Viardot, Madame, 209 Victoria, Queen, 52; her first appearance before Parliament, 54; her coronation, 98; 296, 297, 301; presentation to, 319, 324, 327, 341 Viry, Count Charles de, 521 Viry, Emily de, 513, 521, 526, 527, 529 WAELCKER, 182, 219 Wagner, 264 Wallack, James, 489 Warren, Mr., 563 Weber, 264 Webster, 392, 621 Wellington, Duke of, 295, 297, 299, 301, 549 Westmacott, 273, 281, 360 Westmoreland, Lady, 297, 301 Whately, Archbishop, his book, 276; 278, 431 Whewell, Dr., 329 Whewell, Mrs., 329 William, King, 52 Willoughby, Lady, 303 Willoughby, Lord, 339 Wilmington, 120 Wilson, Dr., 206, 459 Wilson, Dorothy, 22; letter to, 25; 30, 38; her illness, 180, 189; improved health, 197; 200; letters to, 429, 432; 523; letters to, 580, 605 Wilson, Fanny, 600, 602 Wilson, Horace, 301; declines to act, 329; opinion of "The Stranger," 346; 349, 356, 410, 455, 591, 605 Wilton, Lord, 487 Winchelsea, Countess of, 339 Winchelsea, Lady, 303 Winchelsea, Lord, 303 Woman's Rights, 17 Woman's Suffrage, 183 Women, their health, 23; their education, 25 Wordsworth, 66 YORKE, Captain, 622 Young, Charles, 227, 243, 381, 636 _In UNIFORM STYLE._ RECORDS OF A GIRLHOOD. RECORDS OF LATER LIFE. -->_Slips for Librarians to paste on Catalogue Cards._ N. B.--Take out carefully, leaving about quarter of an inch at the back. To do otherwise would, in some cases, release other leaves. KEMBLE, FRANCES ANN. RECORDS OF LATER LIFE. By FRANCES ANN KEMBLE. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1882. Large 12mo, pp. 676. RECORDS OF LATER LIFE. By FRANCES ANN KEMBLE. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1882, Large 12mo, pp. 676. AUTOBIOGRAPHY. RECORDS OF LATER LIFE. By FRANCES ANN KEMBLE. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1882. Large 12mo, pp. 676. {Transcriber's note: The following typographical errors have been corrected: no lady in Philadelphia who then had such an attendant (changed from atttendant) and carefully tended suburban district (changed from surburban) Lord and Lady Lansdowne (changed from Landsdowne) equipments of the northern villages (changed from equpiments) At the mouth of the Altamaha (changed from the the mouth) dark-leaved, wide-spreading oaks (changed from wide-speading) moulder away for want of use (changed from waut) the neighborhood of Burnham Beeches (changed from Burnam) how long do you think it took Nebuchadnezzar (changed from thing) I know your sister is vastly clever (changed from vasly) my determination to defeat his endeavor (changed from endeaver) the recollection of the last happy days I spent here (changed from recollectien) his marvellous facility and strength (changed from facilty) what the French call _saissant_ (changed from saisssant) saluting the approach of some greatness or other (changed from appoach) letters will occasionally come _to_ heaven (changed from occasionly) that vague love of excitement (changed from excitemen) working heart's ease into Emily's canvas (changed from heart'seas) abused by the Opposition, but that is of course (changed from couse) about six hours (changed from abour) and of course he persevered (changed from coure) is a frequent speculation with me (changed from ma) men are capable of recognizing (changed from ment) To-morrow, at three o'clock (changed from To morrow) I think I have really done my duty (changed from thing) all their time to mere amusement (changed from amusememt) deprecate our meeting to part again (changed from out) I take it there is nothing (changed from their) kept her in a state of extreme expectation (changed from expectatation) the requisite number of quarterings (changed from requsite) I really believe he intended to do, and thought he did.] (closing square bracket added) The following were changed in the index for consistency with the main text: Buccleuch, Duchess of (changed from Buccleugh) Crow, Mrs., her book (changed from Crowe) her opinion of d'Orsay (changed from D'Orsay) deathbed utterances (changed from death-bed) "Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time," (changed from Natur-hath) Liéven, Madame de (changed from Lièven) Mussy, Dr. Gueneau de (changed from Musseau) Normanby, Lord (changed from Normanbury) Whately, Archbishop, his book (changed from Whateley) No changes have been made to the following: if you allude to the mechanical process of caligraphy (possible error for calligraphy) Lamartine's "Pélérinage" (possible error for Pèlerinage) a gipsy complexion doesn't signify (possible error for gypsy) a sort of ecstacy of imbecility (possible error for ecstasy) Je suis méchante, ma chére (possible error for chère) et voila! (possible error for voilà) Malbrook s'en vat' en guerre (possible error for va t'en or va-t-en) de corps et a'âne (possible error for d'âme) the attack itself is not matter of doubt (possible error for not a) Balzac's "Récherche de l'Absolu," (possible error for Recherche) Rome, Trinita dei Monti. (possible error for Trinità) as the French say, _à peds joints_ (possible error for pieds) stay some days with her at Soltram (possible error for Saltram) (or rather _vice versa_) (possible error for versâ) _à la Voltaire_ (possible error for là) "mi sois-cerelbero." (possible error for mi sviscererebbe) she gave the blank verse so _naturally_ (possible error for blank-verse) } 
450	----	SUSAN LENOX: HER FALL AND RISE by David Graham Phillips Volume I WITH A PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON 1917 DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS A TRIBUTE Even now I cannot realize that he is dead, and often in the city streets--on Fifth Avenue in particular--I find myself glancing ahead for a glimpse of the tall, boyish, familiar figure--experience once again a flash of the old happy expectancy. I have lived in many lands, and have known men. I never knew a finer man than Graham Phillips. His were the clearest, bluest, most honest eyes I ever saw--eyes that scorned untruth--eyes that penetrated all sham. In repose his handsome features were a trifle stern--and the magic of his smile was the more wonderful--such a sunny, youthful, engaging smile. His mere presence in a room was exhilarating. It seemed to freshen the very air with a keen sweetness almost pungent. He was tall, spare, leisurely, iron-strong; yet figure, features and bearing were delightfully boyish. Men liked him, women liked him when he liked them. He was the most honest man I ever knew, clean in mind, clean-cut in body, a little over-serious perhaps, except when among intimates; a little prone to hoist the burdens of the world on his young shoulders. His was a knightly mind; a paladin character. But he could unbend, and the memory of such hours with him--hours that can never be again--hurts more keenly than the memory of calmer and more sober moments. We agreed in many matters, he and I; in many we differed. To me it was a greater honor to differ in opinion with such a man than to find an entire synod of my own mind. Because--and of course this is the opinion of one man and worth no more than that--I have always thought that Graham Phillips was head and shoulders above us all in his profession. He was to have been really great. He is--by his last book, "Susan Lenox." Not that, when he sometimes discussed the writing of it with me, I was in sympathy with it. I was not. We always were truthful to each other. But when a giant molds a lump of clay into tremendous masses, lesser men become confused by the huge contours, the vast distances, the terrific spaces, the majestic scope of the ensemble. So I. But he went on about his business. I do not know what the public may think of "Susan Lenox." I scarcely know what I think. It is a terrible book--terrible and true and beautiful. Under the depths there are unspeakable things that writhe. His plumb-line touches them and they squirm. He bends his head from the clouds to do it. Is it worth doing? I don't know. But this I do know--that within the range of all fiction of all lands and of all times no character has so overwhelmed me as the character of Susan Lenox. She is as real as life and as unreal. She is Life. Hers was the concentrated nobility of Heaven and Hell. And the divinity of the one and the tragedy of the other. For she had known both--this girl--the most pathetic, the most human, the most honest character ever drawn by an American writer. In the presence of his last work, so overwhelming, so stupendous, we lesser men are left at a loss. Its magnitude demands the perspective that time only can lend it. Its dignity and austerity and its pitiless truth impose upon us that honest and intelligent silence which even the quickest minds concede is necessary before an honest verdict. Truth was his goddess; he wrought honestly and only for her. He is dead, but he is to have his day in court. And whatever the verdict, if it be a true one, were he living he would rest content. ROBERT W. CHAMBERS. BEFORE THE CURTAIN A few years ago, as to the most important and most interesting subject in the world, the relations of the sexes, an author had to choose between silence and telling those distorted truths beside which plain lying seems almost white and quite harmless. And as no author could afford to be silent on the subject that underlies all subjects, our literature, in so far as it attempted to deal with the most vital phases of human nature, was beneath contempt. The authors who knew they were lying sank almost as low as the nasty-nice purveyors of fake idealism and candied pruriency who fancied they were writing the truth. Now it almost seems that the day of lying conscious and unconscious is about run. "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." There are three ways of dealing with the sex relations of men and women--two wrong and one right. For lack of more accurate names the two wrong ways may be called respectively the Anglo-Saxon and the Continental. Both are in essence processes of spicing up and coloring up perfectly innocuous facts of nature to make them poisonously attractive to perverted palates. The wishy-washy literature and the wishy-washy morality on which it is based are not one stage more--or less--rotten than the libertine literature and the libertine morality on which it is based. So far as degrading effect is concerned, the "pure, sweet" story or play, false to nature, false to true morality, propagandist of indecent emotions disguised as idealism, need yield nothing to the so-called "strong" story. Both pander to different forms of the same diseased craving for the unnatural. Both produce moral atrophy. The one tends to encourage the shallow and unthinking in ignorance of life and so causes them to suffer the merciless penalties of ignorance. The other tends to miseducate the shallow and unthinking, to give them a ruinously false notion of the delights of vice. The Anglo-Saxon "morality" is like a nude figure salaciously draped; the Continental "strength" is like a nude figure salaciously distorted. The Anglo-Saxon article reeks the stench of disinfectants; the Continental reeks the stench of degenerate perfume. The Continental shouts "Hypocrisy!" at the Anglo-Saxon; the Anglo-Saxon shouts "Filthiness!" at the Continental. Both are right; they are twin sisters of the same horrid mother. And an author of either allegiance has to have many a redeeming grace of style, of character drawing, of philosophy, to gain him tolerance in a clean mind. There is the third and right way of dealing with the sex relations of men and women. That is the way of simple candor and naturalness. Treat the sex question as you would any other question. Don't treat it reverently; don't treat it rakishly. Treat it naturally. Don't insult your intelligence and lower your moral tone by thinking about either the decency or the indecency of matters that are familiar, undeniable, and unchangeable facts of life. Don't look on woman as mere female, but as human being. Remember that she has a mind and a heart as well as a body. In a sentence, don't join in the prurient clamor of "purity" hypocrites and "strong" libertines that exaggerates and distorts the most commonplace, if the most important feature of life. Let us try to be as sensible about sex as we are trying to be about all the other phenomena of the universe in this more enlightened day. Nothing so sweetens a sin or so delights a sinner as getting big-eyed about it and him. Those of us who are naughty aren't nearly so naughty as we like to think; nor are those of us who are nice nearly so nice. Our virtues and our failings are--perhaps to an unsuspected degree--the result of the circumstances in which we are placed. The way to improve individuals is to improve these circumstances; and the way to start at improving the circumstances is by looking honestly and fearlessly at things as they are. We must know our world and ourselves before we can know what should be kept and what changed. And the beginning of this wisdom is in seeing sex relations rationally. Until that fundamental matter is brought under the sway of good common sense, improvement in other directions will be slow indeed. Let us stop lying--to others--to ourselves. D.G.P. July, 1908. SUSAN LENOX CHAPTER I "THE child's dead," said Nora, the nurse. It was the upstairs sitting-room in one of the pretentious houses of Sutherland, oldest and most charming of the towns on the Indiana bank of the Ohio. The two big windows were open; their limp and listless draperies showed that there was not the least motion in the stifling humid air of the July afternoon. At the center of the room stood an oblong table; over it were neatly spread several thicknesses of white cotton cloth; naked upon them lay the body of a newborn girl baby. At one side of the table nearer the window stood Nora. Hers were the hard features and corrugated skin popularly regarded as the result of a life of toil, but in fact the result of a life of defiance to the laws of health. As additional penalties for that same self-indulgence she had an enormous bust and hips, thin face and arms, hollow, sinew-striped neck. The young man, blond and smooth faced, at the other side of the table and facing the light, was Doctor Stevens, a recently graduated pupil of the famous Schulze of Saint Christopher who as much as any other one man is responsible for the rejection of hocus-pocus and the injection of common sense into American medicine. For upwards of an hour young Stevens, coat off and shirt sleeves rolled to his shoulders, had been toiling with the lifeless form on the table. He had tried everything his training, his reading and his experience suggested--all the more or less familiar devices similar to those indicated for cases of drowning. Nora had watched him, at first with interest and hope, then with interest alone, finally with swiftly deepening disapproval, as her compressed lips and angry eyes plainly revealed. It seemed to her his effort was degenerating into sacrilege, into defiance of an obvious decree of the Almighty. However, she had not ventured to speak until the young man, with a muttered ejaculation suspiciously like an imprecation, straightened his stocky figure and began to mop the sweat from his face, hands and bared arms. When she saw that her verdict had not been heard, she repeated it more emphatically. "The child's dead," said she, "as I told you from the set-out." She made the sign of the cross on her forehead and bosom, while her fat, dry lips moved in a "Hail, Mary." The young man did not rouse from his reverie. He continued to gaze with a baffled expression at the tiny form, so like a whimsical caricature of humanity. He showed that he had heard the woman's remark by saying, to himself rather than to her, "Dead? What's that? Merely another name for ignorance." But the current of his thought did not swerve. It held to the one course: What would his master, the dauntless, the infinitely resourceful Schulze, do if he were confronted by this intolerable obstacle of a perfect machine refusing to do its duty and pump vital force through an eagerly waiting body? "He'd _make_ it go, I'd bet my life," the young man muttered. "I'm ashamed of myself." As if the reproach were just the spur his courage and his intelligence had needed, his face suddenly glowed with the upshooting fire of an inspiration. He thrust the big white handkerchief into his hip pocket, laid one large strong hand upon the small, beautifully arched chest of the baby. Nora, roused by his expression even more than by his gesture, gave an exclamation of horror. "Don't touch it again," she cried, between entreaty and command. "You've done all you can--and more." Stevens was not listening. "Such a fine baby, too," he said, hesitating--the old woman mistakenly fancied it was her words that made him pause. "I feel no good at all," he went on, as if reasoning with himself, "no good at all, losing both the mother and the child." "_She_ didn't want to live," replied Nora. Her glances stole somewhat fearfully toward the door of the adjoining room--the bedroom where the mother lay dead. "There wasn't nothing but disgrace ahead for both of them. Everybody'll be glad." "Such a fine baby," muttered the abstracted young doctor. "Love-children always is," said Nora. She was looking sadly and tenderly down at the tiny, symmetrical form--symmetrical to her and the doctor's expert eyes. "Such a deep chest," she sighed. "Such pretty hands and feet. A real love-child." There she glanced nervously at the doctor; it was meet and proper and pious to speak well of the dead, but she felt she might be going rather far for a "good woman." "I'll try it," cried the young man in a resolute tone. "It can't do any harm, and----" Without finishing his sentence he laid hold of the body by the ankles, swung it clear of the table. As Nora saw it dangling head downwards like a dressed suckling pig on a butcher's hook she vented a scream and darted round the table to stop by main force this revolting desecration of the dead. Stevens called out sternly: "Mind your business, Nora! Push the table against the wall and get out of the way. I want all the room there is." "Oh, Doctor--for the blessed Jesus' sake----" "Push back that table!" Nora shrank before his fierce eyes. She thought his exertions, his disappointment and the heat had combined to topple him over into insanity. She retreated toward the farther of the open windows. With a curse at her stupidity Stevens kicked over the table, used his foot vigorously in thrusting it to the wall. "Now!" exclaimed he, taking his stand in the center of the room and gauging the distance of ceiling, floor and walls. Nora, her back against the window frame, her fingers sunk in her big loose bosom, stared petrified. Stevens, like an athlete swinging an indian club, whirled the body round and round his head, at the full length of his powerful arms. More and more rapidly he swung it, until his breath came and went in gasps and the sweat was trickling in streams down his face and neck. Round and round between ceiling and floor whirled the naked body of the baby--round and round for minutes that seemed hours to the horrified nurse--round and round with all the strength and speed the young man could put forth--round and round until the room was a blur before his throbbing eyes, until his expression became fully as demoniac as Nora had been fancying it. Just as she was recovering from her paralysis of horror and was about to fly shrieking from the room she was halted by a sound that made her draw in air until her bosom swelled as if it would burst its gingham prison. She craned eagerly toward Stevens. He was whirling the body more furiously than ever. "Was that you?" asked Nora hoarsely. "Or was it----" She paused, listened. The sound came again--the sound of a drowning person fighting for breath. "It's--it's----" muttered Nora. "What is it, Doctor?" "Life!" panted Stevens, triumph in his glistening, streaming face. "Life!" He continued to whirl the little form, but not so rapidly or so vigorously. And now the sound was louder, or, rather, less faint, less uncertain--was a cry--was the cry of a living thing. "She's alive--alive!" shrieked the woman, and in time with his movements she swayed to and fro from side to side, laughing, weeping, wringing her hands, patting her bosom, her cheeks. She stretched out her arms. "My prayers are answered!" she cried. "Don't kill her, you brute! Give her to me. You shan't treat a baby that way." The unheeding doctor kept on whirling until the cry was continuous, a low but lusty wail of angry protest. Then he stopped, caught the baby up in both arms, burst out laughing. "You little minx!" he said--or, rather, gasped--a tenderness quite maternal in his eyes. "But I got you! Nora, the table." Nora righted the table, spread and smoothed the cloths, extended her scrawny eager arms for the baby. Stevens with a jerk of the head motioned her aside, laid the baby on the table. He felt for the pulse at its wrist, bent to listen at the heart. Quite useless. That strong, rising howl of helpless fury was proof enough. Her majesty the baby was mad through and through--therefore alive through and through. "Grand heart action!" said the young man. He stood aloof, hands on his hips, head at a proud angle. "You never saw a healthier specimen. It'll be many a year, bar accidents, before she's that near death again." But it was Nora's turn not to hear. She was soothing and swaddling the outraged baby. "There--there!" she crooned. "Nora'll take care of you. The bad man shan't come near my little precious--no, the wicked man shan't touch her again." The bedroom door opened. At the slight noise superstitious Nora paled, shriveled within her green and white checked gingham. She slowly turned her head as if on this day of miracles she expected yet another--the resurrection of the resurrected baby's mother, "poor Miss Lorella." But Lorella Lenox was forever tranquil in the sleep that engulfed her and the sorrows in which she had been entangled by an impetuous, trusting heart. The apparition in the doorway was commonplace--the mistress of the house, Lorella's elder and married sister Fanny--neither fair nor dark, neither tall nor short, neither thin nor fat, neither pretty nor homely, neither stupid nor bright, neither neat nor dowdy--one of that multitude of excellent, unobtrusive human beings who make the restful stretches in a world of agitations--and who respond to the impetus of circumstance as unresistingly as cloud to wind. As the wail of the child smote upon Fanny's ears she lifted her head, startled, and cried out sharply, "What's that?" "We've saved the baby, Mrs. Warham," replied the young doctor, beaming on her through his glasses. "Oh!" said Mrs. Warham. And she abruptly seated herself on the big chintz-covered sofa beside the door. "And it's a lovely child," pleaded Nora. Her woman's instinct guided her straight to the secret of the conflict raging behind Mrs. Warham's unhappy face. "The finest girl in the world," cried Stevens, well-meaning but tactless. "Girl!" exclaimed Fanny, starting up from the sofa. "Is it a _girl_?" Nora nodded. The young man looked downcast; he was realizing the practical side of his victory for science--the consequences to the girl child, to all the relatives. "A girl!" moaned Fanny, sinking to the sofa again. "God have mercy on us!" Louder and angrier rose the wail. Fanny, after a brief struggle with herself, hurried to the table, looked down at the tiny helplessness. Her face softened. She had been a mother four times. Only one had lived--her fair little two-year-old Ruth--and she would never have any more children. The tears glistened in her eyes. "What ails you, Nora Mulvey?" she demanded. "Why aren't you 'tending to this poor little creature?" Nora sprang into action, but she wrapped the baby herself. The doctor in deep embarrassment withdrew to the farther window. She fussed over the baby lingeringly, but finally resigned it to the nurse. "Take it into the bathroom," she said, "where everything's ready to feed it--though I never dreamed----" As Nora was about to depart, she detained her. "Let me look at it again." The nurse understood that Fanny Warham was searching for evidence of the mysterious but suspected paternity whose secret Lorella, with true Lenox obstinacy, had guarded to the end. The two women scanned the features. A man would at a glance have abandoned hope of discovering anything from a chart so vague and confused as that wrinkled, twisted, swollen face of the newborn. Not so a woman. Said Nora: "She seems to me to favor the Lenoxes. But I think--I _kind_ o' think--I see a _trace_ of--of----" There she halted, waiting for encouragement. "Of Galt?" suggested Fanny, in an undertone. "Of Galt," assented Nora, her tone equally discreet. "That nose is Galt-like and the set of the ears--and a kind of something to the neck and shoulders." "Maybe so," said Fanny doubtfully. She shook her head drearily, sighed. "What's the use? Lorella's gone. And this morning General Galt came down to see my husband with a letter he'd got from Jimmie. Jimmie denies it. Perhaps so. Again, perhaps the General wrote him to write that, and threatened him if he didn't. But what's the use? We'll never know." And they never did. When young Stevens was leaving, George Warham waylaid him at the front gate, separated from the spacious old creeper-clad house by long lawns and an avenue of elms. "I hear the child's going to live," said he anxiously. "I've never seen anything more alive," replied Stevens. Warham stared gloomily at the ground. He was evidently ashamed of his feelings, yet convinced that they were human and natural. A moment's silence between the men, then Stevens put his hand on the gate latch. "Did--did--my wife----" began Warham. "Did she say what she calculated to do?" "Not a word, George." After a silence. "You know how fond she is of babies." "Yes, I know," replied Warham. "Fanny is a true woman if ever there was one." With a certain defiance, "And Lorella--she was a sweet, womanly girl!" "As sweet and good as she was pretty," replied Stevens heartily. "The way she kept her mouth shut about that hound, whoever he is!" Warham's Roman face grew savage, revealed in startling apparition a stubborn cruelty of which there was not a trace upon the surface. "If I ever catch the ---- ---- I'll fill him full of holes." "He'd be lynched--_whoever_ he is," said Stevens. "That's right!" cried Warham. "This is the North, but it's near enough to Kentucky to know what to do with a wretch of that sort." His face became calmer. "That poor little baby! He'll have a hard row to hoe." Stevens flushed a guilty red. "It's--it's--a girl," he stammered. Warham stared. "A _girl_!" he cried. Then his face reddened and in a furious tone he burst out: "Now don't that beat the devil for luck!. . . A girl! Good Lord--a girl!" "Nobody in this town'll blame her," consoled Stevens. "You know better than that, Bob! A girl! Why, it's downright wicked. . . I wonder what Fanny allows to do?" He showed what fear was in his mind by wheeling savagely on Stevens with a stormy, "We can't keep her--we simply can't!" "What's to become of her?" protested Stevens gently. Warham made a wild vague gesture with both arms. "Damn if I know! I've got to look out for my own daughter. I won't have it. Damn it, I won't have it!" Stevens lifted the gate latch. "Well---- "Good-by, George. I'll look in again this evening." And knowing the moral ideas of the town, all he could muster by way of encouragement was a half-hearted "Don't borrow trouble." But Warham did not hear. He was moving up the tanbark walk toward the house, muttering to himself. When Fanny, unable longer to conceal Lorella's plight, had told him, pity and affection for his sweet sister-in-law who had made her home with them for five years had triumphed over his principles. He had himself arranged for Fanny to hide Lorella in New York until she could safely return. But just as the sisters were about to set out, Lorella, low in body and in mind, fell ill. Then George--and Fanny, too--had striven with her to give them the name of her betrayer, that he might be compelled to do her justice. Lorella refused. "I told him," she said, "and he--I never want to see him again." They pleaded the disgrace to them, but she replied that he would not marry her even if she would marry him; and she held to her refusal with the firmness for which the Lenoxes were famous. They suspected Jimmie Galt, because he had been about the most attentive of the young men until two or three months before, and because he had abruptly departed for Europe to study architecture. Lorella denied that it was he. "If you kill him," she said to Warham, "you kill an innocent man." Warham was so exasperated by her obstinacy that he was at first for taking her at her offer and letting her go away. But Fanny would not hear of it, and he acquiesced. Now--"This child must be sent away off somewhere, and never be heard of again," he said to himself. "If it'd been a boy, perhaps it might have got along. But a girl---- "There's nothing can be done to make things right for a girl that's got no father and no name." The subject did not come up between him and his wife until about a week after Lorella's funeral. But he was thinking of nothing else. At his big grocery store--wholesale and retail--he sat morosely in his office, brooding over the disgrace and the danger of deeper disgrace--for he saw what a hold the baby already had upon his wife. He was ashamed to appear in the streets; he knew what was going on behind the sympathetic faces, heard the whisperings as if they had been trumpetings. And he was as much afraid of his own soft heart as of his wife's. But for the sake of his daughter he must be firm and just. One morning, as he was leaving the house after breakfast, he turned back and said abruptly: "Fan, don't you think you'd better send the baby away and get it over with?" "No," said his wife unhesitatingly--and he knew his worst suspicion was correct. "I've made up my mind to keep her." "It isn't fair to Ruth." "Send it away--where?" "Anywhere. Get it adopted in Chicago--Cincinnati--Louisville." "Lorella's baby?" "When she and Ruth grow up--what then?" "People ain't so low as some think." "'The sins of the parents are visited on the children unto----'" "I don't care," interrupted Fanny. "I love her. I'm going to keep her. Wait here a minute." When she came back she had the baby in her arms. "Just look," she said softly. George frowned, tried not to look, but was soon drawn and held by the sweet, fresh, blooming face, so smooth, so winning, so innocent. "And think how she was sent back to life--from beyond the grave. It must have been for some purpose." Warham groaned, "Oh, Lord, I don't know _what_ to do! But--it ain't fair to our Ruth." "I don't see it that way. . . . Kiss her, George." Warham kissed one of the soft cheeks, swelling like a ripening apple. The baby opened wide a pair of wonderful dark eyes, threw up its chubby arms and laughed--such a laugh!. . . There was no more talk of sending her away. CHAPTER II NOT quite seventeen years later, on a fine June morning, Ruth Warham issued hastily from the house and started down the long tanbark walk from the front veranda to the street gate. She was now nineteen--nearer twenty--and a very pretty young woman, indeed. She had grown up one of those small slender blondes, exquisite and doll-like, who cannot help seeming fresh and sweet, whatever the truth about them, without or within. This morning she had on a new summer dress of a blue that matched her eyes and harmonized with her coloring. She was looking her best, and she had the satisfying, confidence-giving sense that it was so. Like most of the unattached girls of small towns, she was always dreaming of the handsome stranger who would fall in love--the thrilling, love-story kind of love at first sight. The weather plays a conspicuous part in the romancings of youth; she felt that this was precisely the kind of day fate would be most likely to select for the meeting. Just before dressing she had been reading about the wonderful _him_--in Robert Chambers' latest story--and she had spent full fifteen minutes of blissful reverie over the accompanying Fisher illustration. Now she was issuing hopefully forth, as hopefully as if adventure were the rule and order of life in Sutherland, instead of a desperate monotony made the harder to bear by the glory of its scenery. She had got only far enough from the house to be visible to the second-story windows when a young voice called: "Ruthie! Aren't you going to wait for me?" Ruth halted; an expression anything but harmonious with the pretty blue costume stormed across her face. "I won't have her along!" she muttered. "I simply won't!" She turned slowly and, as she turned, effaced every trace of temper with a dexterity which might have given an onlooker a poorer opinion of her character than perhaps the facts as to human nature justify. The countenance she presently revealed to those upper windows was sunny and sweet. No one was visible; but the horizontal slats in one of the only closed pair of shutters and a vague suggestion of movement rather than form behind them gave the impression that a woman, not far enough dressed to risk being seen from the street, was hidden there. Evidently Ruth knew, for it was toward this window that she directed her gaze and the remark: "Can't wait, dear. I'm in a great hurry. Mamma wants the silk right away and I've got to match it." "But I'll be only a minute," pleaded the voice--a much more interesting, more musical voice than Ruth's rather shrill and thin high soprano. "No--I'll meet you up at papa's store." "All right." Ruth resumed her journey. She smiled to herself. "That means," said she, half aloud, "I'll steer clear of the store this morning." But as she was leaving the gate into the wide, shady, sleepy street, who should come driving past in a village cart but Lottie Wright! And Lottie reined her pony in to the sidewalk and in the shade of a symmetrical walnut tree proceeded to invite Ruth to a dance--a long story, as Lottie had to tell all about it, the decorations, the favors, the food, who would be there, what she was going to wear, and so on and on. Ruth was intensely interested but kept remembering something that caused her to glance uneasily from time to time up the tanbark walk under the arching boughs toward the house. Even if she had not been interested, she would hardly have ventured to break off; Lottie Wright was the only daughter of the richest man in Sutherland and, therefore, social arbiter to the younger set. Lottie stopped abruptly, said: "Well, I really must get on. And there's your cousin coming down the walk. I know you've been waiting for her." Ruth tried to keep in countenance, but a blush of shame and a frown of irritation came in spite of her. "I'm sorry I can't ask Susie, too," pursued Lottie, in a voice of hypocritical regret. "But there are to be exactly eighteen couples--and I couldn't." "Of course not," said Ruth heartily. "Susan'll understand." "I wouldn't for the world do anything to hurt her feelings," continued Lottie with the self-complacent righteousness of a deacon telling the congregation how good "grace" has made him. Her prominent commonplace brown eyes were gazing up the walk, an expression distressingly like envious anger in them. She had a thick, pudgy face, an oily skin, an outcropping of dull red pimples on the chin. Many women can indulge their passion for sweets at meals and sweets between meals without serious injury--to complexion; Lottie Wright, unluckily, couldn't. "I feel sorry for Susie," she went on, in the ludicrous patronizing tone that needs no describing to anyone acquainted with any fashionable set anywhere from China to Peru. "And I think the way you all treat her is simply beautiful. But, then, everybody feels sorry for her and tries to be kind. She knows--about herself, I mean--doesn't she, Ruthie?" "I guess so," replied Ruth, almost hanging her head in her mortification. "She's very good and sweet." "Indeed, she is," said Lottie. "And father says she's far and away the prettiest girl in town." With this parting shot, which struck precisely where she had aimed, Lottie gathered up the reins and drove on, calling out a friendly "Hello, Susie dearie," to Susan Lenox, who, on her purposely lagging way from the house, had nearly reached the gate. "What a nasty thing Lottie Wright is!" exclaimed Ruth to her cousin. "She has a mean tongue," admitted Susan, tall and slim and straight, with glorious dark hair and a skin healthily pallid and as smooth as clear. "But she's got a good heart. She gives a lot away to poor people." "Because she likes to patronize and be kowtowed to," retorted Ruth. "She's mean, I tell you." Then, with a vicious gleam in the blue eyes that hinted a deeper and less presentable motive for the telling, she added: "Why, she's not going to ask you to her party." Susan was obviously unmoved. "She has the right to ask whom she pleases. And"--she laughed--"if I were giving a party I'd not want to ask her--though I might do it for fear she'd feel left out." "Don't you feel--left out?" Susan shook her head. "I seem not to care much about going to parties lately. The boys don't like to dance with me, and I get tired of sitting the dances out." This touched Ruth's impulsively generous heart and woman's easy tears filled her eyes; her cousin's remark was so pathetic, the more pathetic because its pathos was absolutely unconscious. Ruth shot a pitying glance at Susan, but the instant she saw the loveliness of the features upon which that expression of unconsciousness lay like innocence upon a bed of roses, the pity vanished from her eyes to be replaced by a disfiguring envy as hateful as an evil emotion can be at nineteen. Susan still lacked nearly a month of seventeen, but she seemed older than Ruth because her mind and her body had developed beyond her years--or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say beyond the average of growth at seventeen. Also, her personality was stronger, far more definite. Ruth tried to believe herself the cleverer and the more beautiful, at times with a certain success. But as she happened to be a shrewd young person--an inheritance from the Warhams--she was haunted by misgivings--and worse. Those whose vanity never suffers from these torments will, of course, condemn her; but whoever has known the pain of having to concede superiority to someone with whom she or he--is constantly contrasted will not be altogether without sympathy for Ruth in her struggles, often vain struggles, against the mortal sin of jealousy. The truth is, Susan was beyond question the beauty of Sutherland. Her eyes, very dark at birth, had changed to a soft, dreamy violet-gray. Hair and coloring, lashes and eyebrows remained dark; thus her eyes and the intense red of her lips had that vicinage of contrast which is necessary to distinction. To look at her was to be at once fascinated by those violet-gray eyes--by their color, by their clearness, by their regard of calm, grave inquiry, by their mystery not untouched by a certain sadness. She had a thick abundance of wavy hair, not so long as Ruth's golden braids, but growing beautifully instead of thinly about her low brow, about her delicately modeled ears, and at the back of her exquisite neck. Her slim nose departed enough from the classic line to prevent the suggestion of monotony that is in all purely classic faces. Her nostrils had the sensitiveness that more than any other outward sign indicates the imaginative temperament. Her chin and throat--to look at them was to know where her lover would choose to kiss her first. When she smiled her large even teeth were dazzling. And the smile itself was exceedingly sweet and winning, with the violet-gray eyes casting over it that seriousness verging on sadness which is the natural outlook of a highly intelligent nature. For while stupid vain people are suspicious and easily offended, only the intelligent are truly sensitive--keenly susceptible to all sensations. The dull ear is suspicious; the acute ear is sensitive. The intense red of her lips, at times so vivid that it seemed artificial, and their sinuous, sensitive curve indicated a temperament that was frankly proclaimed in her figure--sensuous, graceful, slender--the figure of girlhood in its perfection and of perfect womanhood, too--like those tropical flowers that look innocent and young and fresh, yet stir in the beholder passionate longings and visions. Her walk was worthy of face and figure--free and firm and graceful, the small head carried proudly without haughtiness. This physical beauty had as an aureole to illuminate it and to set it off a manner that was wholly devoid of mannerisms--of those that men and women think out and exhibit to give added charm to themselves--tricks of cuteness, as lisp and baby stare; tricks of dignity, as grave brow and body always carried rigidly erect; tricks of sweetness and kindliness, as the ever ready smile and the warm handclasp. Susan, the interested in the world about her, Susan, the self-unconscious, had none of these tricks. She was at all times her own self. Beauty is anything but rare, likewise intelligence. But this quality of naturalness is the greatest of all qualities. It made Susan Lenox unique. It was not strange--nor inexcusable that the girls and their parents had begun to pity Susan as soon as this beauty developed and this personality had begun to exhale its delicious perfume. It was but natural that they should start the whole town to "being kind to the poor thing." And it was equally the matter of course that they should have achieved their object--should have impressed the conventional masculine mind of the town with such a sense of the "poor thing's" social isolation and "impossibility" that the boys ceased to be her eagerly admiring friends, were afraid to be alone with her, to ask her to dance. Women are conventional as a business; but with men conventionality is a groveling superstition. The youths of Sutherland longed for, sighed for the alluring, sweet, bright Susan; but they dared not, with all the women saying "Poor thing! What a pity a nice man can't afford to have anything to do with her!" It was an interesting typical example of the profound snobbishness of the male character. Rarely, after Susan was sixteen, did any of the boys venture to ask her to dance and so give himself the joy of encircling that lovely form of hers; yet from babyhood her fascination for the male sex, regardless of age or temperament, had been uncanny--"naturally, she being a love-child," said the old women. And from fourteen on, it grew steadily. It would be difficult for one who has not lived in a small town to understand exactly the kind of isolation to which Sutherland consigned the girl without her realizing it, without their fully realizing it themselves. Everyone was friendly with her. A stranger would not have noticed any difference in the treatment of her and of her cousin Ruth. Yet not one of the young men would have thought of marrying her, would have regarded her as his equal or the equal of his sisters. She went to all the general entertainments. She was invited to all the houses when failure to invite her would have seemed pointed--but only then. She did not think much about herself; she was fond of study--fonder of reading--fondest, perhaps, of making dresses and hats, especially for Ruth, whom she thought much prettier than herself. Thus, she was only vaguely, subconsciously conscious of there being something peculiar and mysterious in her lot. This isolation, rather than her dominant quality of self-effacing consideration for others, was the chief cause of the extraordinary innocence of her mind. No servant, no girl, no audacious boy ever ventured to raise with her any question remotely touching on sex. All those questions seemed to Puritan Sutherland in any circumstances highly indelicate; in relation to Susan they seemed worse than indelicate, dreadful though the thought was that there could be anything worse than indelicacy. At fifteen she remained as unaware of even the existence of the mysteries of sex as she had been at birth. Nothing definite enough to arouse her curiosity had ever been said in her hearing; and such references to those matters as she found in her reading passed her by, as any matter of which he has not the beginnings of knowledge will fail to arrest the attention of any reader. It was generally assumed that she knew all about her origin, that someone had, some time or other, told her. Even her Aunt Fanny thought so, thought she was hiding the knowledge deep in her heart, explained in that way her content with the solitude of books and sewing. Susan was the worst possible influence in Ruth's life. Our character is ourself, is born with us, clings to us as the flesh to our bones, persists unchanged until we die. But upon the circumstances that surround us depends what part of our character shall show itself. Ruth was born with perhaps something more than the normal tendency to be envious and petty. But these qualities might never have shown themselves conspicuously had there been no Susan for her to envy. The very qualities that made Susan lovable reacted upon the pretty, pert blond cousin to make her the more unlovable. Again and again, when she and Susan were about to start out together, and Susan would appear in beauty and grace of person and dress, Ruth would excuse herself, would fly to her room to lock herself in and weep and rage and hate. And at the high school, when Susan scored in a recitation or in some dramatic entertainment, Ruth would sit with bitten lip and surging bosom, pale with jealousy. Susan's isolation, the way the boys avoided having with her the friendly relations that spring up naturally among young people these gave Ruth a partial revenge. But Susan, seemingly unconscious, rising sweetly and serenely above all pettiness-- Ruth's hatred deepened, though she hid it from everyone, almost from herself. And she depended more and more utterly upon Susan to select her clothes for her, to dress her, to make her look well; for Susan had taste and Ruth had not. On that bright June morning as the cousins went up Main Street together, Susan gave herself over to the delight of sun and air and of the flowering gardens before the attractive houses they were passing; Ruth, with the day quite dark for her, all its joys gone, was fighting against a hatred of her cousin so vicious that it made her afraid. "I'll have no chance at all," her angry heart was saying, "so long as Susie's around, keeping everybody reminded of the family shame." And that was a truth she could not downface, mean and ungenerous though thinking it might be. The worst of all was that Susan, in a simple white dress and an almost untrimmed white straw hat with a graceful curve to its brim and set at the right angle upon that wavy dark hair, was making the beauty of her short blond cousin dim and somehow common. At the corner of Maple Street Ruth's self-control reached its limit. She halted, took the sample of silk from her glove. There was not a hint of her feelings in her countenance, for shame and the desire to seem to be better than she was were fast making her an adept in hypocrisy. "You go ahead and match it for mamma," said she. "I've got to run in and see Bessie Andrews." "But I promised Uncle George I'd come and help him with the monthly bills," objected Susan. "You can do both. It'll take you only a minute. If mother had known you were going uptown, she'd never have trusted _me_." And Ruth had tucked the sample in Susan's belt and was hurrying out Maple Street. There was nothing for Susan to do but go on alone. Two squares, and she was passing the show place of Sutherland, the home of the Wrights. She paused to regale herself with a glance into the grove of magnificent elms with lawns and bright gardens beyond--for the Wright place filled the entire square between Broad and Myrtle Streets and from Main to Monroe. She was starting on when she saw among the trees a young man in striped flannels. At the same instant he saw her. "Hel-_lo_, Susie!" he cried. "I was thinking about you." Susan halted. "When did you get back, Sam?" she asked. "I heard you were going to stay on in the East all summer." After they had shaken hands across the hedge that came almost to their shoulders, Susan began to move on. Sam kept pace with her on his side of the carefully trimmed boxwood barrier. "I'm going back East in about two weeks," said he. "It's awfully dull here after Yale. I just blew in--haven't seen Lottie or father yet. Coming to Lottie's party?" "No," said Susan. "Why not?" Susan laughed merrily. "The best reason in the world. Lottie has only invited just so many couples." "I'll see about that," cried Sam. "You'll be asked all right, all right." "No," said Susan. She was one of those whose way of saying no gives its full meaning and intent. "I'll not be asked, thank you--and I'll not go if I am." By this time they were at the gate. He opened it, came out into the street. He was a tallish, athletic youth, dark, and pleasing enough of feature to be called handsome. He was dressed with a great deal of style of the efflorescent kind called sophomoric. He was a Sophomore at Yale. But that was not so largely responsible for his self-complacent expression as the deference he had got from babyhood through being heir apparent to the Wright fortune. He had a sophisticated way of inspecting Susan's charms of figure no less than charms of face that might have made a disagreeable impression upon an experienced onlooker. There is a time for feeling without knowing why one feels; and that period ought not to have been passed for young Wright for many a year. "My, but you're looking fine, Susie!" exclaimed he. "I haven't seen anyone that could hold a candle to you even in the East." Susan laughed and blushed with pleasure. "Go on," said she with raillery. "I love it." "Come in and sit under the trees and I'll fill all the time you'll give me." This reminded her. "I must hurry uptown," she said. "Good-by." "Hold on!" cried he. "What have you got to do?" He happened to glance down the street. "Isn't that Ruth coming?" "So it is," said Susan. "I guess Bessie Andrews wasn't at home." Sam waved at Ruth and called, "Hello! Glad to see you." Ruth was all sweetness and smiles. She and her mother--quite privately and with nothing openly said on either side--had canvassed Sam as a "possibility." There had been keen disappointment at the news that he was not coming home for the long vacation. "How are you, Sam?" said she, as they shook hands. "My, Susie, _doesn't_ he look New York?" Sam tried to conceal that he was swelling with pride. "Oh, this is nothing," said he deprecatingly. Ruth's heart was a-flutter. The Fisher picture of the Chambers love-maker, thought she, might almost be a photograph of Sam. She was glad she had obeyed the mysterious impulse to make a toilette of unusual elegance that morning. How get rid of Susan? "_I_'ll take the sample, Susie," said she. "Then you won't have to keep father waiting." Susie gave up the sample. Her face was no longer so bright and interested. "Oh, drop it," cried Sam. "Come in--both of you. I'll telephone for Joe Andrews and we'll take a drive--or anything you like." He was looking at Susan. "Can't do it," replied Susan. "I promised Uncle George." "Oh, bother!" urged Sam. "Telephone him. It'll be all right--won't it, Ruth?" "You don't know Susie," said Ruth, with a queer, strained laugh. "She'd rather die than break a promise." "I must go," Susan now said. "Good-by." "Come on, Ruth," cried Sam. "Let's walk uptown with her." "And you can help match the silk," said Ruth. "Not for me," replied young Wright. Then to Susan, "What've _you_ got to do? Maybe it's something I could help at." "No. It's for Uncle George and me." "Well, I'll go as far as the store. Then--we'll see." They were now in the business part of Main Street, were at Wilson's dry goods store. "You might find it here," suggested the innocent Susan to her cousin. Ruth colored, veiled her eyes to hide their flash. "I've got to go to the store first--to get some money," she hastily improvised. Sam had been walking between the two girls. He now changed to the outside and, so, put himself next Susan alone, put Susan between him and Ruth. The maneuver seemed to be a mere politeness, but Ruth knew better. What fate had intended as her lucky day was being changed into unlucky by this cousin of hers. Ruth walked sullenly along, hot tears in her eyes and a choke in her throat, as she listened to Sam's flatterings of her cousin, and to Susan's laughing, delighted replies. She tried to gather herself together, to think up something funny or at least interesting with which to break into the _tête-à-tête_ and draw Sam to herself. She could think nothing but envious, hateful thoughts. At the doors of Warham and Company, wholesale and retail grocers, the three halted. "I guess I'll go to Vandermark's," said Ruth. "I really don't need money. Come on, Sam." "No--I'm going back home. I ought to see Lottie and father. My, but it's dull in this town!" "Well, so long," said Susan. She nodded, sparkling of hair and skin and eyes, and went into the store. Sam and Ruth watched her as she walked down the broad aisle between the counters. From the store came a mingling of odors of fruit, of spices, of freshly ground coffee. "Susan's an awful pretty girl, isn't she?" declared Sam with rude enthusiasm. "Indeed she is," replied Ruth as heartily--and with an honest if discouraged effort to feel enthusiastic. "What a figure! And she has such a good walk. Most women walk horribly." "Come on to Vandermark's with me and I'll stroll back with you," offered Ruth. Sam was still gazing into the store where, far to the rear, Susan could be seen; the graceful head, the gently swelling bust, the soft lines of the white dress, the pretty ankles revealed by the short skirt--there was, indeed, a profile worth a man's looking at on a fine June day. Ruth's eyes were upon Sam, handsome, dressed in the Eastern fashion, an ideal lover. "Come on, Sam," urged Ruth. "No, thanks," he replied absently. "I'll go back. Good luck!" And not glancing at her, he lifted his straw hat with its band of Yale blue and set out. Ruth moved slowly and disconsolately in the opposite direction. She was ashamed of her thoughts; but shame never yet withheld anybody from being human in thought. As she turned to enter Vandermark's she glanced down the street. There was Sam, returned and going into her father's store. She hesitated, could devise no plan of action, hurried into the dry goods store. Sinclair, the head salesman and the beau of Sutherland, was an especial friend of hers. The tall, slender, hungry-looking young man, devoured with ambition for speedy wealth, had no mind to neglect so easy an aid to that ambition as nature gave him in making him a lady-charmer. He had resolved to marry either Lottie Wright or Ruth Warham--Ruth preferred, because, while Lottie would have many times more money, her skin made her a stiff dose for a young man brought up to the American tradition that the face is the woman. But that morning Sinclair exerted his charms in vain. Ruth was in a hurry, was distinctly rude, cut short what in other circumstances would have been a prolonged and delightful flirtation by tossing the sample on the counter and asking him to do the matching for her and to send the silk right away. Which said, she fairly bolted from the store. She arrived barely in time. Young Wright was issuing from Warham and Company. He smiled friendly enough, but Ruth knew where his thoughts were. "Get what you wanted?" inquired he, and went on to explain: "I came back to find out if you and Susie were to be at home this evening. Thought I'd call." Ruth paled with angry dismay. She was going to a party at the Sinclairs'--one to which Susan was not invited. "Aren't you going to Sinclairs'?" said she. "I was. But I thought I'd rather call. Perhaps I'll go there later." He was coming to call on Susan! All the way down Main Street to the Wright place Ruth fought against her mood of angry and depressed silence, tried to make the best of her chance to impress Sam. But Sam was absent and humiliatingly near to curt. He halted at his father's gate. She halted also, searched the grounds with anxious eyes for sign of Lottie that would give her the excuse for entering. "So long," said Sam. "Do come to Sinclairs' early. You always did dance so well." "Oh, dancing bores me," said the blasé Sophomore. "But I'll be round before the shindy's over. I've got to take Lot home." He lifted the hat again with what both he and Ruth regarded as a gesture of most elegant carelessness. Ruth strolled reluctantly on, feeling as if her toilet had been splashed or crushed. As she entered the front door her mother, in a wrapper and curl papers, appeared at the head of the stairs. "Why!" cried she. "Where's the silk? It's for your dress tonight, you know." "It'll be along," was Ruth's answer, her tone dreary, her lip quivering. "I met Sam Wright." "Oh!" exclaimed her mother. "He's back, is he?" Ruth did not reply. She came on up the stairs, went into the sitting-room--the room where Doctor Stevens seventeen years before had torn the baby Susan from the very claws of death. She flung herself down, buried her head in her arms upon that same table. She burst into a storm of tears. "Why, dearie dear," cried her mother, "whatever is the matter?" "It's wicked and hateful," sobbed the girl, "but---- Oh, mamma, I _hate_ Susan! She was along, and Sam hardly noticed me, and he's coming here this evening to call." "But you'll be at Sinclairs'!" exclaimed Mrs. Warham. "Not Susan," sobbed Ruth. "He wants to see only her." The members of the Second Presbyterian Church, of which Fanny Warham was about the most exemplary and assiduous female member, would hardly have recognized the face encircled by that triple row of curl-papered locks, shinily plastered with quince-seed liquor. She was at woman's second critical age, and the strange emotions working in her mind--of whose disorder no one had an inkling--were upon the surface now. She ventured this freedom of facial expression because her daughter's face was hid. She did not speak. She laid a tender defending hand for an instant upon her daughter's shoulder--like the caress of love and encouragement the lioness gives her cub as she is about to give battle for it. Then she left the room. She did not know what to do, but she knew she must and would do something. CHAPTER III THE telephone was downstairs, in the rear end of the hall which divided the lower floor into two equal parts. But hardly had Mrs. Warham given the Sinclairs' number to the exchange girl when Ruth called from the head of the stairs: "What're you doing there, mamma?" "I'll tell Mrs. Sinclair you're sick and can't come. Then I'll send Susan in your place." "Don't!" cried Ruth, in an agitated, angry voice. "Ring off--quick!" "Now, Ruth, let me----" "Ring off!" ordered Ruth. "You mustn't do that. You'll have the whole town talking about how I'm throwing myself at Sam's head--and that I'm jealous of Susan." Mrs. Warham said, "Never mind" into the telephone sender and hung up the receiver. She was frightened, but not convinced. Hers was a slow, old-fashioned mind, and to it the scheme it had worked out seemed a model of skillful duplicity. But Ruth, of the younger and subtler generation, realized instantly how transparent the thing was. Mrs. Warham was abashed but not angered by her daughter's curt contempt. "It's the only way I can think of," said she. "And I still don't see----" "Of course you don't," cut in Ruth, ruffled by the perilously narrow escape from being the laughing stock of the town. "People aren't as big fools as they used to be, mamma. They don't believe nowadays everything that's told them. There isn't anybody that doesn't know I'm never sick. No--we'll have to----" She reflected a moment, pausing halfway down the stairs, while her mother watched her swollen and tear-stained face. "We might send Susan away for the evening," suggested the mother. "Yes," assented the daughter. "Papa could take her with him for a drive to North Sutherland--to see the Provosts. Then Sam'd come straight on to the Sinclairs'." "I'll call up your father." "No!" cried Ruth, stamping her foot. "Call up Mr. Provost, and tell him papa's coming. Then you can talk with papa when he gets home to dinner." "But maybe----" "If that doesn't work out we can do something else this afternoon." The mother and the daughter avoided each other's eyes. Both felt mean and small, guilty toward Susan; but neither was for that reason disposed to draw back. As Mrs. Warham was trying the new dress on her daughter, she said: "Anyhow, Sam'd be wasting time on Susan. He'd hang round her for no good. She'd simply get talked about. The poor child can't be lively or smile but what people begin to wonder if she's going the way of--of Lorella." "That's so," agreed Ruth, and both felt better. "Was Aunt Lorella _very_ pretty, mamma?" "Lovely!" replied Fanny, and her eyes grew tender, for she had adored Lorella. "You never saw such a complexion--like Susan's, only snow-white." Nervously and hastily, "Most as fine as yours, Ruthie." Ruth gazed complacently into the mirror. "I'm glad I'm fair, and not big," said she. "Yes, indeed! I like the womanly woman. And so do men." "Don't you think we ought to send Susan away to visit somewhere?" asked Ruth at the next opportunity for talk the fitting gave. "It's getting more and more--pointed--the way people act. And she's so sweet and good, I'd hate to have her feelings hurt." In a burst of generosity, "She's the most considerate human being I ever knew. She'd give up anything rather than see someone else put out. She's too much that way." "We can't be too much that way," said Mrs. Warham in mechanical Christian reproof. "Oh, I know," retorted Ruth, "that's all very well for church and Sundays. But I guess if you want to get along you've got to look out for Number One. . . . Yes, she ought to visit somewhere." "I've been trying to think," said her mother. "She couldn't go any place but your Uncle Zeke's. But it's so lonesome out there I haven't the heart to send her. Besides, she wouldn't know what to make of it." "What'd father say?" "That's another thing." Mrs. Warham had latterly grown jealous--not without reason--of her husband's partiality for Susan. Ruth sighed. "Oh, dear!" cried she. "I don't know what to do. How's she ever going to get married!" "If she'd only been a boy!" said Mrs. Warham, on her knees, taking the unevenness out of the front of the skirt. "A girl has to suffer for her mother's sins." Ruth made no reply. She smiled to herself--the comment of the younger generation upon the older. Sin it might have been; but, worse than that, it was a stupidity--to let a man make a fool of her. Lorella must have been a poor weak-minded creature. By dinner time Ruth had completely soothed and smoothed her vanity. Sam had been caught by Susan simply because he had seen Susan before he saw her. All that would be necessary was a good chance at him, and he would never look at Susan again. He had been in the East, where the admired type was her own--refined, ladylike, the woman of the dainty appearance and manners and tastes. A brief undisturbed exposure to her charms and Susan would seem coarse and countrified to him. There was no denying that Susan had style, but it was fully effective only when applied to a sunny fairy-like beauty such as hers. But at midday, when Susan came in with Warham, Ruth's jealousy opened all her inward-bleeding wounds again. Susan's merry eyes, her laughing mouth, her funny way of saying even commonplace things--how could quiet, unobtrusive, ladylike charms such as Ruth's have a chance if Susan were about? She waited, silent and anxious, while her mother was having the talk with her father in the sitting-room. Warham, mere man, was amused by his wife's scheming. "Don't put yourself out, Fanny," said he. "If the boy wants Ruth and she wants him, why, well and good. But you'll only make a mess interfering. Let the young people alone." "I'm surprised, George Warham," cried Fanny, "that you can show so little sense and heart." "To hear you talk, I'd think marriage was a business, like groceries." Mrs. Warham thought it was, in a sense. But she would never have dared say so aloud, even to her husband--or, rather, especially to her husband. In matters of men and women he was thoroughly innocent, with the simplicity of the old-time man of the small town and the country; he fancied that, while in grocery matters and the like the world was full of guile, in matters of the heart it was idyllic, Arcadian, with never a thought of duplicity, except among a few obviously wicked and designing people. "I guess we both want to see Ruth married well," was all she could venture. "I'd rather the girls stayed with us," declared Warham. "I'd hate to give them up." "Of course," hastily agreed Fanny. "Still--it's the regular order of nature." "Oh, Ruth'll marry--only too soon," said Warham. "And marry well. I'm not so sure, though, that marrying any of old Wright's breed would be marrying what ought to be called well. Money isn't everything--not by a long sight--though, of course, it's comfortable." "I never heard anything against Sam," protested Mrs. Warham. "You've heard what I've heard--that he's wild and loose. But then you women like that in a man." "We've got to put up with it, you mean," cried Fanny, indignant. "Women like it," persisted Warham. "And I guess Sam's only sowing the usual wild oats, getting ready to settle. No, mother, you let Ruth alone. If she wants him, she'll get him--she or Susan." Mrs. Warham compressed her lips and lowered her eyes. Ruth or Susan--as if it didn't matter which! "Susan isn't _ours_," she could not refrain from saying. "Indeed, she is!" retorted George warmly. "Why, she couldn't be more our own----" "Yes, certainly," interrupted Fanny. She moved toward the door. She saw that without revealing her entire scheme--hers and Ruth's--she could make no headway with George. And if she did reveal it he would sternly veto it. So she gave up that direction. She went upstairs; George took his hat from the front hall rack and pushed open the screen door. As he appeared on the veranda Susan was picking dead leaves from one of the hanging baskets; Ruth, seated in the hammock, hands in lap, her whole attitude intensely still, was watching her with narrowed eyes. "What's this I hear," cried Warham, laughing, "about you two girls setting your caps for Sam Wright?" And his good-humored brown eyes glanced at Ruth, passed on to Susan's wealth of wavy dark hair and long, rounded form, and lingered there. Ruth lowered her eyes and compressed her lips, a trick she had borrowed from her mother along with the peculiarities of her mother's disposition that it fitted. Susan flung a laughing glance over her shoulder at her uncle. "Not Ruth," said she. "Only me. I saw him first, so he's mine. He's coming to see me this evening." "So I hear. Well, the moon's full and your aunt and I'll not interrupt--at least not till ten o'clock. No callers on a child like you after ten." "Oh, I don't think I'll be able to hold him that long." "Don't you fret, Brownie. But I mustn't make you vain. Coming along to the store?" "No. Tomorrow," said Susan. "I can finish in the morning. I'm going to wear my white dress with embroidery, and it's got to be pressed--and that means I must do it myself." "Poor Sam! And I suppose, when he calls, you'll come down as if you'd put on any old thing and didn't care whether he came or not. And you'll have primped for an hour--and he, too--shaving and combing and trying different ties." Susan sparkled at the idea of a young man, and _such_ a young man, taking trouble for her. Ruth, pale, kept her eyes down and her lips compressed. She was picturing the gallant appearance the young Sophomore from Yale, away off in the gorgeous fashionable East, would make as he came in at that gate yonder and up the walk and seated himself on the veranda--with Susan! Evidently her mother had failed; Susan was not to be taken away. When Warham departed down the walk Ruth rose; she could not bear being alone with her triumphant rival--triumphant because unconscious. She knew that to get Sam to herself all she would have to do would be to hint to Susan, the generous, what she wanted. But pride forbade that. As her hand was on the knob of the screen door, Susan said: "Why don't you like Sam?" "Oh, I think he's stuck-up. He's been spoiled in the East." "Why, I don't see any sign of it." "You were too flattered by his talking to you," said Ruth, with a sweet-sour little laugh--an asp of a sneer hid in a basket of flowers. Susan felt the sting; but, seeing only the flowers, did not dream whence it had come. "It _was_ nice, wasn't it?" said she, gayly. "Maybe you're right about him, but I can't help liking him. You must admit he's handsome." "He has a bad look in his eyes," replied Ruth. Such rage against Susan was swelling within her that it seemed to her she would faint if she did not release at least part of it. "You want to look out for him, Susie," said she, calmly and evenly. "You don't want to take what he says seriously." "Of course not," said Susan, quite honestly, though she, no more than the next human being, could avoid taking seriously whatever was pleasantly flattering. "He'd never think of marrying you." Ruth trembled before and after delivering this venomous shaft. "Marrying!" cried Susan, again quite honestly. "Why, I'm only seventeen." Ruth drew a breath of relief. The shaft had glanced off the armor of innocence without making the faintest dent. She rushed into the house. She did not dare trust herself with her cousin. What might the demon within her tempt her to say next? "Come up, Ruth!" called her mother. "The dress is ready for the last try-on. I think it's going to hang beautifully." Ruth dragged herself up the stairs, lagged into the sitting-room, gazed at the dress with a scowl. "What did father say?" she asked. "It's no use trying to do anything with your father." Ruth flung herself in a corner of the sofa. "The only thing I can think of," said her mother, humbly and timidly, "is phone the Sinclairs as I originally set out to do." "And have the whole town laughing at me. . . . Oh, what do I care, anyhow!" "Arthur Sinclair's taller and a sight handsomer. Right in the face, Sam's as plain as Dick's hatband. His looks is all clothes and polish--and mighty poor polish, I think. Arthur's got rise in him, too, while Sam--well, I don't know what'd become of him if old Wright lost his money." But Arthur, a mere promise, seemed poor indeed beside Sam, the actually arrived. To marry Sam would be to step at once into grandeur; to marry Arthur would mean years of struggle. Besides, Arthur was heavy, at least seemed heavy to light Ruth, while Sam was her ideal of gay elegance. "I _detest_ Arthur Sinclair," she now announced. "You can get Sam if you want him," said her mother confidently. "One evening with a mere child like Susie isn't going to amount to much." Ruth winced. "Do you suppose I don't know that?" cried she. "What makes me so mad is his impudence--coming here to see her when he wouldn't marry her or take her any place. It's insulting to us all." "Oh, I don't think it's as bad as all that, Ruthie," soothed her mother, too simple-minded to accept immediately this clever subtlety of self-deception. "You know this town--how people talk. Why, his sister----" and she related their conversation at the gate that morning. "You ought to have sat on her hard, Ruth," said Mrs. Warham, with dangerously sparkling eyes. "No matter what we may think privately, it gives people a low opinion of us to----" "Don't I know that!" shrilled Ruth. She began to weep. "I'm ashamed of myself." "But we must try the dress on." Mrs. Warham spread the skirt, using herself as form. "Isn't it too lovely!" Ruth dried her eyes as she gazed. The dress was indeed lovely. But her pleasure in it was shadowed by the remembrance that most of the loveliness was due to Susan's suggestions. Still, she tried it on, and felt better. She would linger until Sam came, would exhibit herself to him; and surely he would not tarry long with Susan. This project improved the situation greatly. She began her toilet for the evening at once, though it was only three o'clock. Susan finished her pressing and started to dress at five--because she knew Ruth would be appealing to her to come in and help put the finishing touches to the toilet for the party. And, sure enough, at half-past five, before she had nearly finished, Ruth, with a sneaking humility, begged her to come "for half a minute--if you don't mind--and have got time." Susan did Ruth's hair over, made her change to another color of stockings and slippers, put the dress on her, did nearly an hour's refitting and redraping. Both were late for supper; and after supper Susan had to make certain final amendments to the wonderful toilet, and then get herself ready. So it was Ruth alone who went down when Sam Wright came. "My, but you do look all to the good, Ruth!" cried Sam. And his eyes no less than his tone showed that he meant it. He hadn't realized what a soft white neck the blond cousin had, or how perfectly her shoulders rounded into her slim arms. As Ruth moved to depart, he said: "Don't be in such a rush. Wait till Susie finishes her primping and comes down." "She had to help me," said Ruth, with a righteousness she could justly plume herself upon. "That's why she's late. No, I must get along." She was wise enough to resist the temptation to improve upon an already splendid impression. "Come as soon as you can." "I'll be there in a few minutes," Sam assured her convincingly. "Save some dances for me." Ruth went away happy. At the gate she glanced furtively back. Sam was looking after her. She marched down the street with light step. "I must wear low-necked dresses more in the evenings," she said to herself. "It's foolish for a girl to hide a good neck." Sam, at the edge of the veranda, regretting his promise to call on Susan, was roused by her voice: "Did you ever see anything as lovely as Ruth?" Sam's regret vanished the instant he looked at her, and the greedy expression came into his sensual, confident young face. "She's a corker," said he. "But I'm content to be where I am." Susan's dress was not cut out in the neck, was simply of the collarless kind girls of her age wear. It revealed the smooth, voluptuous yet slender column of her throat. And her arms, bare to just above the elbows, were exquisite. But Susan's fascination did not lie in any or in all of her charms, but in that subtlety of magnetism which account for all the sensational phenomena of the relations of men and women. She was a clever girl--clever beyond her years, perhaps--though in this day seventeen is not far from fully developed womanhood. But even had she been silly, men would have been glad to linger on and on under the spell of the sex call which nature had subtly woven into the texture of her voice, into the glance of her eyes, into the delicate emanations of her skin. They talked of all manner of things--games and college East and West--the wonders of New York--the weather, finally. Sam was every moment of the time puzzling how to bring up the one subject that interested both above all others, that interested him to the exclusion of all others. He was an ardent student of the game of man and woman, had made considerable progress at it--remarkable progress, in view of his bare twenty years. He had devised as many "openings" as an expert chess player. None seemed to fit this difficult case how to make love to a girl of his own class whom his conventional, socially ambitious nature forbade him to consider marrying. As he observed her in the moonlight, he said to himself: "I've got to look out or I'll make a damn fool of myself with her." For his heady passion was fast getting the better of those prudent instincts he had inherited from a father who almost breathed by calculation. While he was still struggling for an "opening," Susan eager to help him but not knowing how, there came from the far interior of the house three distant raps. "Gracious!" exclaimed Susan. "That's Uncle George. It must be ten o'clock." With frank regret, "I'm so sorry. I thought it was early." "Yes, it did seem as if I'd just come," said Sam. Her shy innocence was contagious. He felt an awkward country lout. "Well, I suppose I must go." "But you'll come again--sometime?" she asked wistfully. It was her first real beau--the first that had interested her--and what a dream lover of a beau he looked, standing before her in that wonderful light! "Come? Rather!" exclaimed he in a tone of enthusiasm that could not but flatter her into a sort of intoxication. "I'd have hard work staying away. But Ruth--she'll always be here." "Oh, she goes out a lot--and I don't." "Will you telephone me--next time she's to be out?" "Yes," agreed she with a hesitation that was explained when she added: "But don't think you've got to come. . . . Oh, I must go in!" "Good night--Susie." Sam held out his hand. She took it with a queer reluctance. She felt nervous, afraid, as if there were something uncanny lurking somewhere in those moonlight shadows. She gently tried to draw her hand away, but he would not let her. She made a faint struggle, then yielded. It was so wonderful, the sense of the touch of his hand. "Susie!" he said hoarsely. And she knew he felt as she did. Before she realized it his arms were round her, and his lips had met hers. "You drive me crazy," he whispered. Both were trembling; she had become quite cold--her cheeks, her hand, her body even. "You mustn't," she murmured, drawing gently away. "You set me crazy," he repeated. "Do you--love me--a little?" "Oh, I must go!" she pleaded. Tears were glistening in her long dark lashes. The sight of them maddened him. "Do you--Susie?" he pleaded. "I'm--I'm--very young," she stammered. "Yes--yes--I know," he assented eagerly. "But not too young to love, Susie? No. Because you do--don't you?" The moonlit world seemed a fairyland. "Yes," she said softly. "I guess so. I must go. I must." And moved beyond her power to control herself, she broke from his detaining hand and fled into the house. She darted up to her room, paused in the middle of the floor, her hands clasped over her wildly beating heart. When she could move she threw open the shutters and went out on the balcony. She leaned against the window frame and gazed up at the stars, instinctively seeking the companionship of the infinite. Curiously enough, she thought little about Sam. She was awed and wonderstruck before the strange mysterious event within her, the opening up, the flowering of her soul. These vast emotions, where did they come from? What were they? Why did she long to burst into laughter, to burst into tears? Why did she do neither, but simply stand motionless, with the stars blazing and reeling in the sky and her heart beating like mad and her blood surging and ebbing? Was this--love? Yes--it must be love. Oh, how wonderful love was--and how sad--and how happy beyond all laughter--and how sweet! She felt an enormous tenderness for everybody and for everything, for all the world--an overwhelming sense of beauty and goodness. Her lips were moving. She was amazed to find she was repeating the one prayer she knew, the one Aunt Fanny had taught her in babyhood. Why should she find herself praying? Love--love love! She was a woman and she loved! So this was what it meant to be a woman; it meant to love! She was roused by the sound of Ruth saying good night to someone at the gate, invisible because of the intervening foliage. Why, it must be dreadfully late. The Dipper had moved away round to the south, and the heat of the day was all gone, and the air was full of the cool, scented breath of leaves and flowers and grass. Ruth's lights shone out upon the balcony. Susan turned to slip into her own room. But Ruth heard, called out peevishly: "Who's there?" "Only me," cried Susan. She longed to go in and embrace Ruth, and kiss her. She would have liked to ask Ruth to let her sleep with her, but she felt Ruth wouldn't understand. "What are you doing out there?" demanded Ruth. "It's 'way after one." "Oh--dear--I must go to bed," cried Susan. Ruth's voice somehow seemed to be knocking and tumbling her new dream-world. "What time did Sam Wright leave here?" asked Ruth. She was standing in her window now. Susan saw that her face looked tired and worn, almost homely. "At ten," she replied. "Uncle George knocked on the banister." "Are you sure it was ten?" said Ruth sharply. "I guess so. Yes--it was ten. Why?" "Oh--nothing." "Was he at Sinclairs'?" "He came as it was over. He and Lottie brought me home." Ruth was eyeing her cousin evilly. "How did you two get on?" Susan flushed from head to foot. "Oh--so-so," she answered, in an uncertain voice. "I don't know why he didn't come to Sinclairs'," snapped Ruth. Susan flushed again--a delicious warmth from head to foot. She knew why. So he, too, had been dreaming alone. Love! Love! "What are you smiling at?" cried Ruth crossly. "Was I smiling?. . . Do you want me to help you undress?" "No," was the curt answer. "Good night." "Please let me unhook it, at least," urged Susan, following Ruth into her room. Ruth submitted. "Did you have a good time?" asked Susan. "Of course," snapped Ruth. "What made you think I didn't?" "Don't be a silly, dear. I didn't think so." "I had an awful time--awful!" Ruth began to sob, turned fiercely on Susan. "Leave me alone!" she cried. "I hate to have you touch me." The dress was, of course, entirely unfastened in the back. "You had a quarrel with Arthur?" asked Susan with sympathy. "But you know he can't keep away from you. Tomorrow----" "Be careful, Susan, how you let Sam Wright hang around you," cried Ruth, with blazing eyes and trembling lips. "You be careful--that's all I've got to say." "Why, what do you mean?" asked Susan wonderingly. "Be careful! He'd never think for a minute of marrying you." The words meant nothing to Susan; but the tone stabbed into her heart. "Why not?" she said. Ruth looked at her cousin, hung her head in shame. "Go--go!" she begged. "Please go. I'm a bad girl--bad--_bad_! Go!" And, crying hysterically, she pushed amazed Susan through the connecting door, closed and bolted it. CHAPTER IV WHEN Fanny Warham was young her mother--compelled by her father--roused--"routed out"--the children at half-past six on week days and at seven on Sundays for prayers and breakfast, no matter what time they had gone to bed the night before. The horror of this made such an impression upon her that she never permitted Ruth and Susan to be awakened; always they slept until they had "had their sleep out." Regularity was no doubt an excellent thing for health and for moral discipline; but the best rule could be carried to foolish extremes. Until the last year Mrs. Warham had made her two girls live a life of the strictest simplicity and regularity, with the result that they were the most amazingly, soundly, healthy girls in Sutherland. And the regimen still held, except when they had company in the evening or went out--and Mrs. Warham saw to it that there was not too much of that sort of thing. In all her life thus far Susan had never slept less than ten hours, rarely less than twelve. It lacked less than a minute of ten o'clock the morning after Sam's call when Susan's eyes opened upon her simple, pale-gray bedroom, neat and fresh. She looked sleepily at the little clock on the night stand. "Mercy me!" she cried. And her bare feet were on the floor and she was stretching her lithe young body, weak from the relaxation of her profound sleep. She heard someone stirring in Ruth's room; instantly Ruth's remark, "He'd never think for a minute of marrying you," popped into her head. It still meant nothing to her. She could not have explained why it came back or why she fell to puzzling over it as if it held some mysterious meaning. Perhaps the reason was that from early childhood there had been accumulating in some dusky chamber of her mind stray happenings and remarks, all baring upon the unsuspected secret of her birth and the unsuspected strangeness of her position in the world where everyone else was definitely placed and ticketed. She was wondering about Ruth's queer hysterical outburst, evidently the result of a quarrel with Arthur Sinclair. "I guess Ruth cares more for him than she lets on," thought she. This love that had come to her so suddenly and miraculously made her alert for signs of love elsewhere. She went to the bolted connecting door; she could not remember when it had ever been bolted before, and she felt forlorn and shut out. "Ruth!" she called. "Is that you?" A brief silence, then a faint "Yes." "May I come in?" "You'd better take your bath and get downstairs." This reminded her that she was hungry. She gathered her underclothes together, and with the bundle in her arms darted across the hall into the bathroom. The cold water acted as champagne promises to act but doesn't. She felt giddy with health and happiness. And the bright sun was flooding the bathroom, and the odors from the big bed of hyacinths in the side lawn scented the warm breeze from the open window. When she dashed back to her room she was singing, and her singing voice was as charming as her speaking voice promised. A few minutes and her hair had gone up in careless grace and she was clad in a fresh dress of tan linen, full in the blouse. This, with her tan stockings and tan slippers and the radiant youth of her face, gave her a look of utter cleanness and freshness that was exceedingly good to see. "I'm ready," she called. There was no answer; doubtless Ruth had already descended. She rushed downstairs and into the dining-room. No one was at the little table set in one of the windows in readiness for the late breakfasters. Molly came, bringing cocoa, a cereal, hot biscuit and crab-apple preserves, all attractively arranged on a large tray. "I didn't bring much, Miss Susie," she apologized. "It's so late, and I don't want you to spoil your dinner. We're going to have the grandest chicken that ever came out of an egg." Susan surveyed the tray with delighted eyes. "That's plenty," she said, "if you don't talk too much about the chicken. Where's Ruth?" "She ain't coming down. She's got a headache. It was that salad for supper over to Sinclairs' last night. Salad ain't fit for a dog to eat, nohow--that's _my_ opinion. And at night--it's sure to bust your face out or give you the headache or both." Susan ate with her usual enthusiasm, thinking the while of Sam and wondering how she could contrive to see him. She remembered her promise to her uncle. She had not eaten nearly so much as she wanted. But up she sprang and in fifteen minutes was on her way to the store. She had seen neither Ruth nor her aunt. "_He_'ll be waiting for me to pass," she thought. And she was not disappointed. There he stood, at the footpath gate into his father's place. He had arrayed himself in a blue and white flannel suit, white hat and shoes; a big expensive-looking cigarette adorned his lips. The Martins, the Delevans, the Castles and the Bowens, neighbors across the way, were watching him admiringly through the meshes of lace window curtains. She expected that he would come forward eagerly. Instead, he continued to lean indolently on the gate, as if unaware of her approach. And when she was close at hand, his bow and smile were, so it seemed to her, almost coldly polite. Into her eyes came a confused, hurt expression. "Susie--sweetheart," he said, the voice in as astonishing contrast as the words to his air of friendly indifference. "They're watching us from the windows all around here." "Oh--yes," assented she, as if she understood. But she didn't. In Sutherland the young people were not so mindful of gossip, which it was impossible to escape, anyhow. Still--off there in the East, no doubt, they had more refined ways; without a doubt, whatever Sam did was the correct thing. "Do you still care as you did last night?" he asked. The effect of his words upon her was so obvious that he glanced nervously round. It was delightful to be able to evoke a love like this; but he did wish others weren't looking. "I'm going to Uncle's store," she said. "I'm late." "I'll walk part of the way with you," he volunteered, and they started on. "That--that kiss," he stammered. "I can feel it yet." She blushed deeply, happily. Her beauty made him tingle. "So can I," she said. They walked in silence several squares. "When will I see you again?" he asked. "Tonight?" "Yes--do come down. But--Ruth'll be there. I believe Artie Sinclair's coming." "Oh, that counter-jumper?" She looked at him in surprise. "He's an awfully nice fellow," said she. "About the nicest in town." "Of course," replied Sam elaborately. "I beg your pardon. They think differently about those things in the East." "What thing?" "No matter." Sam, whose secret dream was to marry some fashionable Eastern woman and cut a dash in Fifth Avenue life, had no intention of explaining what was what to one who would not understand, would not approve, and would be made auspicious of him. "I suppose Ruth and Sinclair'll pair off and give us a chance." "You'll come?" "Right after din--supper, I mean. In the East we have dinner in the evening." "Isn't that queer!" exclaimed Susan. But she was thinking of the joys in store for her at the close of the day. "I must go back now," said Sam. Far up the street he saw his sister's pony cart coming. "You might as well walk to the store." It seemed to her that they both had ever so much to say to each other, and had said nothing. "No. I can't go any further. Good-by--that is, till tonight." He was red and stammering. As they shook hands emotion made them speechless. He stumbled awkwardly as he turned to leave, became still more hotly self-conscious when he saw the grin on the faces of the group of loungers at a packing case near the curb. Susan did not see the loafers, did not see anything distinctly. Her feet sought the uneven brick sidewalk uncertainly, and the blood was pouring into her cheeks, was steaming in her brain, making a red mist before her eyes. She was glad he had left her. The joy of being with him was so keen that it was pain. Now she could breathe freely and could dream--dream--dream. She made blunder after blunder in working over the accounts with her uncle, and he began to tease her. "You sure are in love, Brownie," declared he. Her painful but happy blush delighted him. "Tell me all about it?" She shook her head, bending it low to hide her color. "No?. . . Sometime?" She nodded. She was glancing shyly and merrily at him now. "Well, some hold that first love's best. Maybe so. But it seems to me any time's good enough. Still--the first time's mighty fine eh?" He sighed. "My, but it's good to be young!" And he patted her thick wavy hair. It did not leak out until supper that Sam was coming. Warham said to Susan, "While Ruth's looking out for Artie, you and I'll have a game or so of chess, Brownie." Susan colored violently. "What?" laughed Warham. "Are _you_ going to have a beau too?" Susan felt two pairs of feminine eyes pounce--hostile eyes, savagely curious. She paled with fright as queer, as unprecedented, as those hostile glances. It seemed to her that she had done or was about to do something criminal. She could not speak. An awful silence, then her aunt--she no longer seemed her loving aunt--asked in an ominous voice: "Is someone coming to see you, Susan?" "Sam Wright"--stammered Susan--"I saw him this morning--he was at their gate--and he said--I think he's coming." A dead silence--Warham silent because he was eating, but the two others not for that reason. Susan felt horribly guilty, and for no reason. "I'd have spoken of it before," she said, "but there didn't seem to be any chance." She had the instinct of fine shy nature to veil the soul; she found it hard to speak of anything as sacred as this love of hers and whatever related to it. "I can't allow this, Susie," said her aunt, with lips tightly drawn against the teeth. "You are too young." "Oh, come now, mother," cried Warham, good-humoredly. "That's foolishness. Let the young folks have a good time. You didn't think you were too young at Susie's age." "You don't understand, George," said Fanny after she had given him a private frown. Susie's gaze was on the tablecloth. "I can't permit Sam to come here to see Susie." Ruth's eyes were down also. About her lips was a twitching that meant a struggle to hide a pleased smile. "I've no objection to Susie's having boys of her own age come to see her," continued Mrs. Warham in the same precise, restrained manner. "But Sam is too old." "Now, mother----" Mrs. Warham met his eyes steadily. "I must protect my sister's child, George," she said. At last she had found what she felt was a just reason for keeping Sam away from Susan, so her tone was honest and strong. Warham lowered his gaze. He understood. "Oh--as you think best, Fan; I didn't mean to interfere," said he awkwardly. He turned on Susan with his affection in his eyes. "Well, Brownie, it looks like chess with your old uncle, doesn't it?" Susan's bosom was swelling, her lip trembling. "I--I----" she began. She choked back the sobs, faltered out: "I don't think I could, Uncle," and rushed from the room. There was an uncomfortable pause. Then Warham said, "I must say, Fan, I think--if you had to do it--you might have spared the girl's feelings." Mrs. Warham felt miserable about it also. "Susie took me by surprise," she apologized. Then, defiantly, "And what else can I do? You know he doesn't come for any good." Warham stared in amazement. "Now, what does _that_ mean?" he demanded. "You know very well what it means," retorted his wife. Her tone made him understand. He reddened, and with too blustering anger brought his fist down on the table. "Susan's our daughter. She's Ruth's sister." Ruth pushed back her chair and stood up. Her expression made her look much older than she was. "I wish you could induce the rest of the town to think that, papa," said she. "It'd make my position less painful." And she, too, left the room. "What's she talking about?" asked Warham. "It's true, George," replied Fanny with trembling lip. "It's all my fault--insisting on keeping her. I might have known!" "I think you and Ruth must be crazy. I've seen no sign." "Have you seen any of the boys calling on Susan since she shot up from a child to a girl? Haven't you noticed she isn't invited any more except when it can't be avoided?" Warham's face was fiery with rage. He looked helplessly, furiously about. But he said nothing. To fight public sentiment would be like trying to thrust back with one's fists an oncreeping fog. Finally he cried, "It's too outrageous to talk about." "If I only knew what to do!" moaned Fanny. A long silence, while Warham was grasping the fullness of the meaning, the frightful meaning, in these revelations so astounding to him. At last he said: "Does _she_ realize?" "I guess so . . . I don't know . . . I don't believe she does. She's the most innocent child that ever grew up." "If I had a chance, I'd sell out and move away." "Where?" said his wife. "Where would people accept--her?" Warham became suddenly angry again. "I don't believe it!" he cried, his look and tone contradicting his words. "You've been making a mountain out of a molehill." And he strode from the room, flung on his hat and went for a walk. As Mrs. Warham came from the dining-room a few minutes later, Ruth appeared in the side veranda doorway. "I think I'll telephone Arthur to come tomorrow evening instead," said she. "He'd not like it, with Sam here too." "That would be better," assented her mother. "Yes, I'd telephone him if I were you." Thus it came about that Susan, descending the stairs to the library to get a book, heard Ruth say into the telephone in her sweetest voice, "Yes--tomorrow evening, Arthur. Some others are coming--the Wrights. You'd have to talk to Lottie . . . I don't blame you. . . . Tomorrow evening, then. So sorry. Good-by." The girl on the stairway stopped short, shrank against the wall. A moment, and she hastily reascended, entered her room, closed the door. Love had awakened the woman; and the woman was not so unsuspecting, so easily deceived as the child had been. She understood what her cousin and her aunt were about; they were trying to take her lover from her! She understood her aunt's looks and tones, her cousin's temper and hysteria. She sat down upon the floor and cried with a breaking heart. The injustice of it! The meanness of it! The wickedness of a world where even her sweet cousin, even her loving aunt were wicked! She sat there on the floor a long time, abandoned to the misery of a first shattered illusion, a misery the more cruel because never before had either cousin or aunt said or done anything to cause her real pain. The sound of voices coming through the open window from below made her start up and go out on the balcony. She leaned over the rail. She could not see the veranda for the masses of creeper, but the voices were now quite plain in the stillness. Ruth's voice gay and incessant. Presently a man's voice _his_--and laughing! Then his voice speaking--then the two voices mingled--both talking at once, so eager were they! Her lover--and Ruth was stealing him from her! Oh, the baseness, the treachery! And her aunt was helping!. . . Sore of heart, utterly forlorn, she sat in the balcony hammock, aching with love and jealousy. Every now and then she ran in and looked at the clock. He was staying on and on, though he must have learned she was not coming down. She heard her uncle and aunt come up to bed. Now the piano in the parlor was going. First it was Ruth singing one of her pretty love songs in that clear small voice of hers. Then Sam played and sang--how his voice thrilled her! Again it was Ruthie singing--"Sweet Dream Faces"--Susan began to sob afresh. She could see Ruth at the piano, how beautiful she looked--and that song--it would be impossible for him not to be impressed. She felt the jealousy of despair. . . . Ten o'clock--half-past--eleven o'clock! She heard them at the edge of the veranda--so, at last he was going. She was able to hear their words now: "You'll be up for the tennis in the morning?" he was saying. "At ten," replied Ruth. "Of course Susie's asked, too," he said--and his voice sounded careless, not at all earnest. "Certainly," was her cousin's reply. "But I'm not sure she can come." It was all the girl at the balcony rail could do to refrain from crying out a protest. But Sam was saying to Ruth: "Well--good night. Haven't had so much fun in a long time. May I come again?" "If you don't, I'll think you were bored." "Bored!" He laughed. "That's too ridiculous. See you in the morning. Good night. . . . Give my love to Susie, and tell her I was sorry not to see her." Susan was all in a glow as her cousin answered, "I'll tell her." doubtless Sam didn't note it, but Susan heard the constraint, the hypocrisy in that sweet voice. She watched him stroll down to the gate under the arch of boughs dimly lit by the moon. She stretched her arms passionately toward him. Then she went in to go to bed. But at the sound of Ruth humming gayly in the next room, she realized that she could not sleep with her heart full of evil thoughts. She must have it out with her cousin. She knocked on the still bolted door. "What is it?" asked Ruth coldly. "Let me in," answered Susan. "I've got to see you." "Go to bed, Susie. It's late." "You must let me in." The bolt shot back. "All right. And please unhook my dress--there's a dear." Susan opened the door, stood on the threshold, all her dark passion in her face. "Ruth!" she cried. Ruth had turned her back, in readiness for the service the need of which had alone caused her to unbolt the door. At that swift, fierce ejaculation she started, wheeled round. At sight of that wild anger she paled. "Why, Susie!" she gasped. "I've found you out!" raged Susan. "You're trying to steal him from me--you and Aunt Fanny. It isn't fair! I'll not stand it!" "What _are_ you talking about?" cried Ruth. "You must have lost your senses." "I'll not stand it," Susan repeated, advancing threateningly "He loves me and I love him." Ruth laughed. "You foolish girl! Why, he cares nothing about you. The idea of your having your head turned by a little politeness!" "He loves me he told me so. And I love him. I told him so. He's mine! You shan't take him from me!" "He told you he loved you?" Ruth's eyes were gleaming and her voice was shrill with hate. "He told you _that_?" "Yes--he did!" "I don't believe you." "We love each other," cried the dark girl. "He came to see _me_. You've got Arthur Sinclair. You shan't take him away!" The two girls, shaking with fury, were facing each other, were looking into each other's eyes. "If Sam Wright told you he loved you," said Ruth, with the icy deliberateness of a cold-hearted anger, "he was trying to--to make a fool of you. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. _We_'re trying to save you." "He and I are engaged!" declared Susan. "You shan't take him--and you can't! He _loves_ me!" "Engaged!" jeered Ruth. "Engaged!" she laughed, pretending not to believe, yet believing. She was beside herself with jealous anger. "Yes--we'll save you from yourself. You're like your mother. You'd disgrace us--as she did." "Don't you dare talk that way, Ruth Warham. It's false--_false_! My mother is dead--and you're a wicked girl." "It's time you knew the truth," said Ruth softly. Her eyes were half shut now and sparkling devilishly. "You haven't got any name. You haven't got any father. And no man of any position would marry you. As for Sam----" She laughed contemptuously. "Do you suppose Sam Wright would marry a girl without a name?" Susan had shrunk against the door jamb. She understood only dimly, but things understood dimly are worse than things that are clear. "Me?" she muttered. "Me? Oh, Ruth, you don't mean that." "It's true," said Ruth, calmly. "And the sooner you realize it the less likely you are to go the way your mother did." Susan stood as if petrified. "If Sam Wright comes hanging round you any more, you'll know how to treat him," Ruth went on. "You'll appreciate that he hasn't any respect for you--that he thinks you're someone to be trifled with. And if he talked engagement, it was only a pretense. Do you understand?" The girl leaning in the doorway gazed into vacancy. After a while she answered dully, "I guess so." Ruth began to fuss with the things on her bureau. Susan went into her room, sat on the edge of the bed. A few minutes, and Ruth, somewhat cooled down and not a little frightened, entered. She looked uneasily at the motionless figure. Finally she said, "Susie!" No answer. More sharply, "Susie!" "Yes," said Susan, without moving. "You understand that I told you for your own good? And you'll not say anything to mother or father? They feel terribly about it, and don't want it ever mentioned. You won't let on that you know?" "I'll not tell," said Susan. "You know we're fond of you--and want to do everything for you?" No answer. "It wasn't true--what you said about Sam's making love to you?" "That's all over. I don't want to talk about it." "You're not angry with me, Susie? I admit I was angry, but it was best for you to know--wasn't it?" "Yes," said Susan. "You're not angry with me?" "No." Ruth, still more uneasy, turned back into her own room because there was nothing else to do. She did not shut the door between. When she was in her nightgown she glanced in at her cousin. The girl was sitting on the edge of the bed in the same position. "It's after midnight," said Ruth. "You'd better get undressed." Susan moved a little. "I will," she said. Ruth went to bed and soon fell asleep. After an hour or so she awakened. Light was streaming through the open connecting door. She ran to it, looked in. Susan's clothes were in a heap beside the bed. Susan herself, with the pillows propping her, was staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. It was impossible for Ruth to realize any part of the effect upon her cousin of a thing she herself had known for years and had taken always as a matter of course; she simply felt mildly sorry for unfortunate Susan. "Susie, dear," she said gently, "do you want me to turn out the light?" "Yes," said Susan. Ruth switched off the light and went back to bed, better content. She felt that now Susan would stop her staring and would go to sleep. Sam's call had been very satisfactory. Ruth felt she had shown off to the best advantage, felt that he admired her, would come to see _her_ next time. And now that she had so arranged it that Susan would avoid him, everything would turn out as she wished. "I'll use Arthur to make him jealous after a while--and then--I'll have things my own way." As she fell asleep she was selecting the rooms Sam and she would occupy in the big Wright mansion--"when we're not in the East or in Europe." CHAPTER V RUTH had forgotten to close her shutters, so toward seven o'clock the light which had been beating against her eyelids for three hours succeeded in lifting them. She stretched herself and yawned noisily. Susan appeared in the connecting doorway. "Are you awake?" she said softly. "What time is it?" asked Ruth, too lazy to turn over and look at her clock. "Ten to seven." "Do close my shutters for me. I'll sleep an hour or two." She hazily made out the figure in the doorway. "You're dressed, aren't you?" she inquired sleepily. "Yes," replied Susan. "I've been waiting for you to wake." Something in the tone made Ruth forget about sleep and rub her fingers over her eyes to clear them for a view of her cousin. Susan seemed about as usual--perhaps a little serious, but then she had the habit of strange moods of seriousness. "What did you want?" said Ruth. Susan came into the room, sat at the foot of the bed--there was room, as the bed was long and Ruth short. "I want you to tell me what my mother did." "Did?" echoed Ruth feebly. "Did, to disgrace you and--me." "Oh, I couldn't explain--not in a few words. I'm so sleepy. Don't bother about it, Susan." And she thrust her head deeper into the pillow. "Close the shutters." "Then I'll have to ask Aunt Fanny--or Uncle George or everybody--till I find out." "But you mustn't do that," protested Ruth, flinging herself from left to right impatiently. "What is it you want to know?" "About my mother--and what she did. And why I have no father--why I'm not like you--and the other girls." "Oh--it's nothing. I can't explain. Don't bother about it. It's no use. It can't be helped. And it doesn't really matter." "I've been thinking," said Susan. "I understand a great many things I didn't know I'd noticed--ever since I was a baby. But what I don't understand----" She drew a long breath, a cautious breath, as if there were danger of awakening a pain. "What I don't understand is--why. And--you must tell me all about it. . . . Was my mother bad?" "Not exactly bad," Ruth answered uncertainly. "But she did one thing that was wicked--at least that a woman never can be forgiven for, if it's found out." "Did she--did she take something that didn't belong to her?" "No--nothing like that. No, she was, they say, as nice and sweet as she could be--except---- She wasn't married to your father." Susan sat in a brown study. "I can't understand," she said at last. "Why--she _must_ have been married, or--or--there wouldn't have been me." Ruth smiled uneasily. "Not at all. Don't you really understand?" Susan shook her head. "He--he betrayed her--and left her--and then everybody knew because you came." Susan's violet-gray eyes rested a grave, inquiring glance upon her cousin's face. "But if he betrayed her---- What does 'betray' mean? Doesn't it mean he promised to marry her and didn't?" "Something like that," said Ruth. "Yes--something like that." "Then _he_ was the disgrace," said the dark cousin, after reflecting. "No--you're not telling me, Ruth. _What_ did my mother do?" "She had you without being married." Again Susan sat in silence, trying to puzzle it out. Ruth lifted herself, put the pillows behind her back. "You don't understand--anything--do you? Well, I'll try to explain--though I don't know much about it." And hesitatingly, choosing words she thought fitted to those innocent ears, hunting about for expressions she thought comprehensible to that innocent mind, Ruth explained the relations of the sexes--an inaccurate, often absurd, explanation, for she herself knew only what she had picked up from other girls--the fantastic hodgepodge of pruriency, physiology and sheer nonsense which under our system of education distorts and either alarms or inflames the imaginations of girls and boys where the clean, simple truth would at least enlighten them. Susan listened with increasing amazement. "Well, do you understand?" Ruth ended. "How we come into the world--and what marriage means?" "I don't believe it," declared Susan. "It's--awful!" And she shivered with disgust. "I tell you it's true," insisted Ruth. "I thought it was awful when I first heard--when Lottie Wright took me out in their orchard, where nobody could listen, and told me what their cook had told her. But I've got kind of used to it." "But it--it's so, then; my mother did marry my father," said Susan. "No. She let him betray her. And when a woman lets a man betray her without being married by the preacher or somebody, why, she's ruined forever." "But doesn't marriage mean where two people promise to love each other and then betray each other?" "If they're married, it isn't betraying," explained Ruth. "If they're not, it is betraying." Susan reflected, nodded slowly. "I guess I understand. But don't you see it was my father who was the disgrace? He was the one that promised to marry and didn't." "How foolish you are!" cried Ruth. "I never knew you to be stupid." "But isn't it so?" persisted Susan. "Yes--in a way," her cousin admitted. "Only--the woman must keep herself pure until the ceremony has been performed." "But if he said so to her, wasn't that saying so to God just as much as if the preacher had been there?" "No, it wasn't," said Ruth with irritation. "And it's wicked to think such things. All I know is, God says a woman must be married before she--before she has any children. And your mother wasn't." Susan shook her head. "I guess you don't understand any better than I do--really." "No, I don't," confessed Ruth. "But I'd like to see any man more than kiss me or put his arm round me without our having been married." "But," urged Susan, "if he kissed you, wouldn't that be like marriage?" "Some say so," admitted Ruth. "But I'm not so strict. A little kissing and that often leads a man to propose." Susan reflected again. "It all sounds low and sneaking to me," was her final verdict. "I don't want to have anything to do with it. But I'm sure my mother was a good woman. It wasn't her fault if she was lied to, when she loved and believed. And anybody who blames her is low and bad. I'm glad I haven't got any father, if fathers have to be made to promise before everybody or else they'll not keep their word." "Well, I'll not argue about it," said Ruth. "I'm telling you the way things are. The woman has to take _all_ the blame." Susan lifted her head haughtily. "I'd be glad to be blamed by anybody who was wicked enough to be that unjust. I'd not have anything to do with such people." "Then you'd live alone." "No, I shouldn't. There are lots of people who are good and----" "That's wicked, Susan," interrupted Ruth. "All good people think as I tell you they do." "Do Aunt Fanny and Uncle George blame my mother?" "Of course. How could they help it, when she----" Ruth was checked by the gathering lightnings in those violet-gray eyes. "But," pursued Susan, after a pause, "even if they were wicked enough to blame my mother, they couldn't blame me." "Of course not," declared Ruth warmly. "Hasn't everybody always been sweet and kind to you?" "But last night you said----" Ruth hid her face. "I'm ashamed of what I said last night," she murmured. "I've got, Oh, such a _nasty_ disposition, Susie." "But what you said--wasn't it so?" Ruth turned away her head. Susan drew a long sigh, so quietly that Ruth could not have heard. "You understand," Ruth said gently, "everybody feels sorry for you and----" Susan frowned stormily, "They'd better feel sorry for themselves." "Oh, Susie, dear," cried Ruth, impulsively catching her hand, "we all love you, and mother and father and I--we'll stand up for you through everything----" "Don't you _dare_ feel sorry for me!" Susan cried, wrenching her hand away. Ruth's eyes filled with tears. "You can't blame us because everybody---- You know, God says, 'The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children----'" "I'm done with everybody," cried Susan, rising and lifting her proud head, "I'm done with God." Ruth gave a low scream and shuddered. Susan looked round defiantly, as if she expected a bolt from the blue to come hurtling through the open window. But the sky remained serene, and the quiet, scented breeze continued to play with the lace curtains, and the birds on the balcony did not suspend their chattering courtship. This lack of immediate effect from her declaration of war upon man and God was encouraging. The last of the crushed, cowed feeling Ruth had inspired the night before disappeared. With a soul haughtily plumed and looking defiance from the violet-gray eyes, Susan left her cousin and betook herself down to breakfast. In common with most children, she had always dreamed of a mysterious fate for herself, different from the commonplace routine around her. Ruth's revelations, far from daunting her, far from making her feel like cringing before the world in gratitude for its tolerance of her bar sinister, seemed a fascinatingly tragic confirmation of her romantic longings and beliefs. No doubt it was the difference from the common lot that had attracted Sam to her; and this difference would make their love wholly unlike the commonplace Sutherland wooing and wedding. Yes, hers had been a mysterious fate, and would continue to be. Nora, an old woman now, had often related in her presence how Doctor Stevens had brought her to life when she lay apparently, indeed really, dead upon the upstairs sitting-room table--Doctor Stevens and Nora's own prayers. An extraordinary birth, in defiance of the laws of God and man; an extraordinary resurrection, in defiance of the laws of nature--yes, hers would be a life superbly different from the common. And when she and Sam married, how gracious and forgiving she would be to all those bad-hearted people; how she would shame them for their evil thoughts against her mother and herself! The Susan Lenox who sat alone at the little table in the dining-room window, eating bread and butter and honey in the comb, was apparently the same Susan Lenox who had taken three meals a day in that room all those years--was, indeed, actually the same, for character is not an overnight creation. Yet it was an amazingly different Susan Lenox, too. The first crisis had come; she had been put to the test; and she had not collapsed in weakness but had stood erect in strength. After breakfast she went down Main Street and at Crooked Creek Avenue took the turning for the cemetery. She sought the Warham plot, on the western slope near the quiet brook. There was a clump of cedars at each corner of the plot; near the largest of them were three little graves--the three dead children of George and Fanny. In the shadow of the clump and nearest the brook was a fourth grave apart and, to the girl, now thrillingly mysterious: LORELLA LENOX BORN MAY 9, 1859 DIED JULY 17, 1879 Twenty years old! Susan's tears scalded her eyes. Only a little older than her cousin Ruth was now--Ruth who often seemed to her, and to everybody, younger than herself. "And she was good--I know she was good!" thought Susan. "_He_ was bad, and the people who took his part against her were bad. But _she_ was good!" She started as Sam's voice, gay and light, sounded directly behind her. "What are you doing in a graveyard?" cried he. "How did you find me?" she asked, paling and flushing and paling again. "I've been following you ever since you left home." He might have added that he did not try to overtake her until they were where people would be least likely to see. "Whose graves are those?" he went on, cutting across a plot and stepping on several graves to join her. She was gazing at her mothers simple headstone. His glance followed hers, he read. "Oh--beg pardon," he said confusedly. "I didn't see." She turned her serious gaze from the headstone to his face, which her young imagination transfigured. "You know--about her?" she asked. "I--I--I've heard," he confessed. "But--Susie, it doesn't amount to anything. It happened a long time ago--and everybody's forgotten--and----" His stammering falsehoods died away before her steady look. "How did you find out?" "Someone just told me," replied she. "And they said you'd never respect or marry a girl who had no father. No--don't deny--please! I didn't believe it--not after what we had said to each other." Sam, red and shifting uneasily, could not even keep his downcast eyes upon the same spot of ground. "You see," she went on, sweet and grave, "they don't understand what love means--do they?" "I guess not," muttered he, completely unnerved. Why, how seriously the girl had taken him and his words--such a few words and not at all definite! No, he decided, it was the kiss. He had heard of girls so innocent that they thought a kiss meant the same as being married. He got himself together as well as he could and looked at her. "But, Susie," he said, "you're too young for anything definite--and I'm not halfway through college." "I understand," said she. "But you need not be afraid I'll change." She was so sweet, so magnetic, so compelling that in spite of the frowns of prudence he seized her hand. At her touch he flung prudence to the winds. "I love you," he cried; and putting his arm around her, he tried to kiss her. She gently but strongly repulsed him. "Why not, dear?" he pleaded. "You love me--don't you?" "Yes," she replied, her honest eyes shining upon his. "But we must wait until we're married. I don't care so much for the others, but I'd not want Uncle George to feel I had disgraced him." "Why, there's no harm in a kiss," pleaded he. "Kissing you is--different," she replied. "It's--it's--marriage." He understood her innocence that frankly assumed marriage where a sophisticated girl would, in the guilt of designing thoughts, have shrunk in shame from however vaguely suggesting such a thing. He realized to the full his peril. "I'm a damn fool," he said to himself, "to hang about her. But somehow I can't help it--I can't!" And the truth was, he loved her as much as a boy of his age is capable of loving, and he would have gone on and married her but for the snobbishness smeared on him by the provincialism of the small town and burned in by the toadyism of his fashionable college set. As he looked at her he saw beauty beyond any he had ever seen elsewhere and a sweetness and honesty that made him ashamed before her. "No, I couldn't harm her," he told himself. "I'm not such a dog as that. But there's no harm in loving her and kissing her and making her as happy as it's right to be." "Don't be mean, Susan," he begged, tears in his eyes. "If you love me, you'll let me kiss you." And she yielded, and the shock of the kiss set both to trembling. It appealed to his vanity, it heightened his own agitations to see how pale she had grown and how her rounded bosom rose and fell in the wild tumult of her emotions. "Oh, I can't do without seeing you," she cried. "And Aunt Fanny has forbidden me." "I thought so!" exclaimed he. "I did what I could last night to throw them off the track. If Ruth had only known what I was thinking about all the time. Where were you?" "Upstairs--on the balcony." "I felt it," he declared. "And when she sang love songs I could hardly keep from rushing up to you. Susie, we _must_ see each other." "I can come here, almost any day." "But people'd soon find out--and they'd say all sorts of things. And your uncle and aunt would hear." There was no disputing anything so obvious. "Couldn't you come down tonight, after the others are in bed and the house is quiet?" he suggested. She hesitated before the deception, though she felt that her family had forfeited the right to control her. But love, being the supreme necessity, conquered. "For a few minutes," she conceded. She had been absorbed; but his eyes, kept alert by his conventional soul, had seen several people at a distance observing without seeming to do so. "We must separate," he now said. "You see, Susie, we mustn't be gossiped about. You know how determined they are to keep us apart." "Yes--yes," she eagerly agreed. "Will you go first, or shall I?" "You go--the way you came. I'll jump the brook down where it's narrow and cut across and into our place by the back way. What time tonight?" "Arthur's coming," reflected Susie aloud. "Ruth'll not let him stay late. She'll be sleepy and will go straight to bed. About half past ten. If I'm not on the front veranda--no, the side veranda--by eleven, you'll know something has prevented." "But you'll surely come?" "I'll come." And it both thrilled and alarmed him to see how much in earnest she was. But he looked love into her loving eyes and went away, too intoxicated to care whither this adventure was leading him. At dinner she felt she was no longer a part of this family. Were they not all pitying and looking down on her in their hearts? She was like a deformed person who has always imagined the consideration he has had was natural and equal, and suddenly discovers that it is pity for his deformity. She now acutely felt her aunt's, her cousin's, dislike; and her uncle's gentleness was not less galling. In her softly rounded youthful face there was revealed definitely for the first time an underlying expression of strength, of what is often confused with its feeble counterfeit, obstinacy--that power to resist circumstances which makes the unusual and the firm character. The young mobility of her features suggested the easy swaying of the baby sapling in the gentlest breeze. Singularly at variance with it was this expression of tenacity. Such an expression in the face of the young infallibly forecasts an agitated and agitating life. It seemed amazingly out of place in Susan because theretofore she had never been put to the test in any but unnoted trifles and so had given the impression that she was as docile as she was fearful of giving annoyance or pain and indifferent to having her own way. Those who have this temperament of strength encased in gentleness are invariably misunderstood. When they assert themselves, though they are in the particular instance wholly right, they are regarded as wholly and outrageously wrong. Life deals hardly with them, punishes them for the mistaken notion of themselves they have through forbearance and gentleness of heart permitted an unobservant world to form. Susan spent the afternoon on the balcony before her window, reading and sewing--or, rather, dreaming over first a book, then a dress. When she entered the dining-room at supper time the others were already seated. She saw instantly that something had occurred--something ominous for her. Mrs. Warham gave her a penetrating, severe look and lowered her eyes; Ruth was gazing sullenly at her plate. Warham's glance was stern and reproachful. She took her place opposite Ruth, and the meal was eaten in silence. Ruth left the table first. Next Mrs. Warham rose and saying, "Susan, when you've finished, I wish to see you in the sitting-room upstairs," swept in solemn dignity from the room. Susan rose at once to follow. As she was passing her uncle he put out his hand and detained her. "I hope it was only a foolish girl's piece of nonsense," said he with an attempt at his wonted kindliness. "And I know it won't occur again. But when your aunt says things you won't like to hear, remember that you brought this on yourself and that she loves you as we all do and is thinking only of your good." "What is it, Uncle George?" cried Susan, amazed. "What have I done?" Warham looked sternly grieved. "Brownie," he reproached, "you mustn't deceive. Go to your aunt." She found her aunt seated stiffly in the living-room, her hands folded upon her stomach. So gradual had been the crucial middle-life change in Fanny that no one had noted it. This evening Susan, become morbidly acute, suddenly realized the contrast between the severe, uncertain-tempered aunt of today and the amiable, altogether and always gentle aunt of two years before. "What is it, aunt?" she said, feeling as if she were before a stranger and an enemy. "The whole town is talking about your disgraceful doings this morning," Ruth's mother replied in a hard voice. The color leaped in Susan's cheeks. "Yesterday I forbade you to see Sam Wright again. And already you disobey." "I did not say I would not see him again," replied Susan. "I thought you were an honest, obedient girl," cried Fanny, the high shrill notes in her voice rasping upon the sensitive, the now morbidly sensitive, Susan. "Instead--you slip away from the house and meet a young man--and permit him to take _liberties_ with you." Susan braced herself. "I did not go to the cemetery to meet him," she replied; and that new or, rather, newly revived tenacity was strong in her eyes, in the set of her sweet mouth. "He saw me on the way and followed. I did let him kiss me--once. But I had the right to." "You have disgraced yourself--and us all." "We are going to be married." "I don't want to hear such foolish talk!" cried Mrs. Warham violently. "If you had any sense, you'd know better." "He and I do not feel as you do about my mother," said the girl with quiet dignity. Mrs. Warham shivered before this fling. "Who told you?" she demanded. "It doesn't matter; I know." "Well, miss, since you know, then I can tell you that your uncle and I realize you're going the way your mother went. And the whole town thinks you've gone already. They're all saying, 'I told you so! I told you so! Like her mother!'" Mrs. Warham was weeping hysterical tears of fury. "The whole town! And it'll reflect on my Ruth. Oh, you miserable girl! Whatever possessed me to take pity on you!" Susan's hands clutched until the nails sunk into the palms. She shut her teeth together, turned to fly. "Wait!" commanded Mrs. Warham. "Wait, I tell you!" Susan halted in the doorway, but did not turn. "Your uncle and I have talked it over." "Oh!" cried Susan. Mrs. Warham's eyes glistened. "Yes, he has wakened up at last. There's one thing he isn't soft about----" "You've turned him against me!" cried the girl despairingly. "You mean _you_ have turned him against you," retorted her aunt. "Anyhow, you can't wheedle him this time. He's as bent as I am. And you must promise us that you won't see Sam again." A pause. Then Susan said, "I can't." "Then we'll send you away to your Uncle Zeke's. It's quiet out there and you'll have a chance to think things over. And I reckon he'll watch you. He's never forgiven your mother. Now, will you promise?" "No," said Susan calmly. "You have wicked thoughts about my mother, and you are being wicked to me--you and Ruth. Oh, I understand!" "Don't you dare stand there and lie that way!" raved Mrs. Warham. "I'll give you tonight to think about it. If you don't promise, you leave this house. Your uncle has been weak where you were concerned, but this caper of yours has brought him to his senses. We'll not have you a loose character--and your cousin's life spoiled by it. First thing we know, no respectable man'll marry her, either." From between the girl's shut teeth issued a cry. She darted across the hall, locked herself in her room. CHAPTER VI SAM did not wait until Arthur Sinclair left, but, all ardor and impatience, stole in at the Warhams' front gate at ten o'clock. He dropped to the grass behind a clump of lilacs, and to calm his nerves and to make the time pass more quickly, smoked a cigarette, keeping its lighted end carefully hidden in the hollow of his hand. He was not twenty feet away, was seeing and hearing, when Arthur kissed Ruth good night. He laughed to himself. "How disappointed she looked last night when she saw I wasn't going to do that!" What a charmer Susie must be when the thought of her made the idea of kissing as pretty a girl as Ruth uninteresting, almost distasteful! Sinclair departed; the lights in parlor and hall went out; presently light appeared through the chinks in some of the second-story shutters. Then followed three-quarters of an hour of increasing tension. The tension would have been even greater had he seen the young lady going leisurely about her preparations for bed. For Ruth was of the orderly, precise women who are created to foster the virtue of patience in those about them. It took her nearly as long to dress for bed as for a party. She did her hair up in curl papers with the utmost care; she washed and rinsed and greased her face and neck and gave them a thorough massage. She shook out and carefully hung or folded or put to air each separate garment. She examined her silk stockings for holes, found one, darned it with a neatness rivaling that of a _stoppeur_. She removed from her dressing table and put away in drawers everything that was out of place. She closed each drawer tightly, closed and locked the closets, looked under the bed, turned off the lights over the dressing table. She completed her toilet with a slow washing of her teeth, a long spraying of her throat, and a deliberate, thoroughgoing dripping of boracic acid into each eye to keep and improve its clearness and brilliancy. She sat on the bed, reflected on what she had done, to assure herself that nothing had been omitted. After a slow look around she drew off her bedroom slippers, set them carefully side by side near the head of the bed. She folded her nightgown neatly about her legs, thrust them down into the bed. Again she looked slowly, searchingly, about the room to make absolutely sure she had forgotten nothing, had put everything in perfect order. Once in bed, she hated to get out; yet if she should recall any omission, however slight, she would be unable to sleep until she had corrected it. Finally, sure as fallible humanity can be, she turned out the last light, lay down--went instantly to sleep. It was hardly a quarter of an hour after the vanishing of that last ray when Sam, standing now with heart beating fast and a lump of expectancy, perhaps of trepidation, too, in his throat, saw a figure issue from the front door and move round to the side veranda. He made a detour on the lawn, so as to keep out of view both from house and street, came up to the veranda, called to her softly. "Can you get over the rail?" asked she in the same low tone. "Let's go back to the summer house," urged he. "No. Come up here," she insisted. "Be careful. The windows above are open." He climbed the rail noiselessly and made an impetuous move for her hand. She drew back. "No, Sam dear," she said. "I know it's foolish. But I've an instinct against it--and we mustn't." She spoke so gently that he persisted and pleaded. It was some time before he realized how much firmness there was under her gentleness. She was so afraid of making him cross; yet he also saw that she would withstand at any cost. He placed himself beside her on the wicker lounge, sitting close, his cheek almost against hers, that they might hear each other without speaking above a whisper. After one of those silences which are the peculiar delight of lovers, she drew a long breath and said: "I've got to go away, Sam. I shan't see you again for a long time." "They heard about this morning? They're sending you away?" "No--I'm going. They feel that I'm a disgrace and a drag. So I can't stay." "But--you've _got_ to stay!" protested Sam. In wild alarm he suspected she was preparing to make him elope with her--and he did not know to what length of folly his infatuation might whirl him. "You've no place to go," he urged. "I'll find a place," said she. "You mustn't--you mustn't, Susie! Why, you're only seventeen--and have no experience." "I'll _get_ experience," said she. "Nothing could be so bad as staying here. Can't you see that?" He could not. Like so many of the children of the rich, he had no trace of over-nice sense of self-respect, having been lying and toadying all his life to a father who used the power of his wealth at home no less, rather more, than abroad. But he vaguely realized what delicacy of feeling lay behind her statement of her position; and he did not dare express his real opinion. He returned to the main point. "You've simply got to put up with it for the present, Susie," he insisted. "But, then, of course, you're not serious." "Yes. I am going." "You'll think it over, and see I'm right, dear." "I'm going tonight." "Tonight!" he cried. "Sh-h!" Sam looked apprehensively around. Both breathed softly and listened with straining ears. His exclamation had not been loud, but the silence was profound. "I guess nobody heard," he finally whispered. "You mustn't go, Susie." He caught her hand and held it. "I love you, and I forbid it." "I _must_ go, dear," answered she. "I've decided to take the midnight boat for Cincinnati." In the half darkness he gazed in stupefaction at her--this girl of only seventeen calmly resolving upon and planning an adventure so daring, so impossible. As he had been born and bred in that western country where the very children have more independence than the carefully tamed grown people of the East, he ought to have been prepared for almost anything. But his father had undermined his courage and independence; also his year in the East had given him somewhat different ideas of women. Susan's announcement seemed incredible. He was gathering himself for pouring out a fresh protest when it flashed through his mind--Why not? She would go to Cincinnati. He could follow in a few days or a week--and then-- Well, at least they would be free and could have many happy days together. "Why, how could you get to Cincinnati?" he said. "You haven't any money." "I've a twenty-dollar gold piece Uncle gave me as a keepsake. And I've got seventeen dollars in other money, and several dollars in change," explained she. "I've got two hundred and forty-three dollars and fifty cents in the bank, but I can't get that--not now. They'll send it to me when I find a place and am settled and let them know." "You can't do it, Susie! You can't and you mustn't." "If you knew what they said to me! Oh, I _couldn't_ stay, Sam. I've got some of my clothes--a little bundle behind the front door. As soon as I'm settled I'll let you know." A silence, then he, hesitatingly, "Don't you--do you--hadn't I better go with you?" She thrilled at this generosity, this new proof of love. But she said: "No, I wouldn't let you do that. They'd blame you. And I want them to know it's all my own doing." "You're right, Susie," said the young man, relieved and emphatic. "If I went with you, it'd only get both of us into deeper trouble." Again silence, with Sam feeling a kind of awe as he studied the resolute, mysterious profile of the girl, which he could now see clearly. At last he said: "And after you get there, Susie--what will you do?" "Find a boarding house, and then look for a place." "What kind of a place?" "In a store--or making dresses--or any kind of sewing. Or I could do housework." The sex impulse is prolific of generous impulses. He, sitting so close to her and breathing in through his skin the emanations of her young magnetism, was moved to the depths by the picture her words conjured. This beautiful girl, a mere child, born and bred in the lady class, wandering away penniless and alone, to be a prey to the world's buffetings which, severe enough in reality, seem savage beyond endurance to the children of wealth. As he pictured it his heart impulsively expanded. It was at his lips to offer to marry her. But his real self--and one's real self is vastly different from one's impulses--his real self forbade the words passage. Not even the sex impulse, intoxicating him as it then was, could dethrone snobbish calculation. He was young; so while he did not speak, he felt ashamed of himself for not speaking. He felt that she must be expecting him to speak, that she had the right to expect it. He drew a little away from her, and kept silent. "The time will soon pass," said she absently. "The time? Then you intend to come back?" "I mean the time until you're through college and we can be together." She spoke as one speaks of a dream as to which one has never a doubt but that it will come true. It was so preposterous, this idea that he would marry her, especially after she had been a servant or God knows what for several years--it was so absurd that he burst into a sweat of nervous terror. And he hastily drew further away. She felt the change, for she was of those who are born sensitive. But she was far too young and inexperienced to have learned to interpret aright the subtle warning of the nerves. "You are displeased with me?" she asked timidly. "No--Oh, no, Susie," he stammered. "I--I was thinking. Do put off going for a day or two. There's no need of hurrying." But she felt that by disobeying her aunt and coming down to see him she had forfeited the right to shelter under that roof. "I can't go back," said she. "There's a reason." She would not tell him the reason; it would make him feel as if he were to blame. "When I get a place in Cincinnati," she went on, "I'll write to you." "Not here," he objected. "That wouldn't do at all. No, send me a line to the Gibson House in Cincinnati, giving me your address." "The Gibson House," she repeated. "I'll not forget that name. Gibson House." "Send it as soon as you get a place. I may be in Cincinnati soon. But this is all nonsense. You're not going. You'd be afraid." She laughed softly. "You don't know me. Now that I've got to go, I'm glad." And he realized that she was not talking to give herself courage, that her words were literally true. This made him admire her, and fear her, too. There must be something wild and unwomanly in her nature. "I guess she inherits it from her mother--and perhaps her father, whoever he was." Probably she was simply doing a little early what she'd have been sure to do sooner or later, no matter what had happened. On the whole, it was just as well that she was going. "I can take her on East in the fall. As soon as she has a little knowledge of the world she'll not expect me to marry her. She can get something to do. I'll help her." And now he felt in conceit with himself again--felt that he was going to be a good, generous friend to her. "Perhaps you'll be better off--once you get started," said he. "I don't see how I could be worse off. What is there here for _me_?" He wondered at the good sense of this from a mere child. It was most unlikely that any man of the class she had been brought up in would marry her; and how could she endure marriage with a man of the class in which she might possibly find a husband? As for reputation-- She, an illegitimate child, never could have a reputation, at least not so long as she had her looks. After supper, to kill time, he had dropped in at Willett's drug store, where the young fellows loafed and gossiped in the evenings; all the time he was there the conversation had been made up of sly digs and hints about graveyard trysts, each thrust causing the kind of laughter that is the wake of the prurient and the obscene. Yes, she was right. There could be "nothing in it" for her in Sutherland. He was filled with pity for her. "Poor child! What a shame!" There must be something wrong with a world that permitted such iniquities. The clock struck twelve. "You must go," she said. "Sometimes the boat comes as early as half-past." And she stood up. As he faced her the generous impulse surged again. He caught her in his arms, she not resisting. He kissed her again and again, murmuring disconnected words of endearment and fighting back the offer to marry her. "I mustn't! I mustn't!" he said to himself. "What'd become of us?" If his passions had been as virgin, as inexperienced, as hers, no power could have held him from going with her and marrying her. But experience had taught him the abysmal difference between before and after; and he found strength to be sensible, even in the height of his passionate longing for her. She clasped her arms about his neck. "Oh, my dear love!" she murmured. "I'd do anything for you. I feel that you love me as I love you." "Yes--yes." And he pressed his lips to hers. An instant and she drew away, shaking and panting. He tried to clasp her again, but she would not have it. "I can't stand it!" he murmured. "I must go with you--I must!" "No!" she replied. "It wouldn't do unless we were really married." Wistfully, "And we can't be that yet--can we? There isn't any way?" His passion cooled instantly. "There isn't any way," he said regretfully. "I'd not dare tell my father." "Yes, we must wait till you're of age, and have your education, and are free. Then----" She drew a long breath, looked at him with a brave smile. The large moon was shining upon them. "We'll think of that, and not let ourselves be unhappy--won't we?" "Yes," he said. "But I must go." "I forgot for the minute. Good-by, dearest." She put up her lips. He kissed her, but without passion now. "You might go with me as far as the wharf," she suggested. "No--someone might see--and that would ruin everything. I'd like to--I'd----" "It wouldn't do," she interrupted. "I wouldn't let you come." With sudden agitation she kissed him--he felt that her lips were cold. He pressed her hands--they, too, were cold. "Good-by, my darling," he murmured, vaulted lightly over the rail and disappeared in the deep shadows of the shrubbery. When he was clear of the grounds he paused to light a cigarette. His hand was shaking so that the match almost dropped from his fingers. "I've been making a damn fool of myself," he said half aloud. "A double damn fool! I've got to stop that talk about marrying, somehow--or keep away from her. But I can't keep away. I _must_ have her! Why in the devil can't she realize that a man in my position couldn't marry her? If it wasn't for this marrying talk, I'd make her happy. I've simply got to stop this marrying talk. It gets worse and worse." Her calmness deceived her into thinking herself perfectly sane and sober, perfectly aware of what she was about. She had left her hat and her bundle behind the door. She put on the hat in the darkness of the hall with steady fingers, took up the well-filled shawl strap and went forth, closing the door behind her. In the morning they would find the door unlocked but that would not cause much talk, as Sutherland people were all rather careless about locking up. They would not knock at the door of her room until noon, perhaps. Then they would find on the pincushion the letter she had written to her uncle, saying good-by and explaining that she had decided to remove forever the taint of her mother and herself from their house and their lives--a somewhat theatrical letter, modeled upon Ouida, whom she thought the greatest writer that had ever lived, Victor Hugo and two or three poets perhaps excepted. Her bundle was not light, but she hardly felt it as she moved swiftly through the deserted, moonlit streets toward the river. The wharf boat for the Cincinnati and Louisville mail steamers was anchored at the foot of Pine Street. On the levee before it were piled the boxes, bags, cases, crates, barrels to be loaded upon the "up boat." She was descending the gentle slope toward this mass of freight when her blood tingled at a deep, hoarse, mournful whistle from far away; she knew it was the up boat, rounding the bend and sighting the town. The sound echoed musically back and forth between the Kentucky and the Indiana bluffs, died lingeringly away. Again the whistle boomed, again the dark forest-clad steeps sent the echoes to and fro across the broad silver river. And now she could see the steamer, at the bend--a dark mass picked out with brilliant dots of light; the big funnels, the two thick pennants of black smoke. And she could hear the faint pleasant stroke of the paddles of the big side wheels upon the water. At the wharf boat there had not been a sign of life. But with the dying away of the second whistle lights--the lights of lanterns--appeared on the levee close to the water's edge and on the wharf boat itself. And, behind her, the doors of the Sutherland Hotel opened and its office lit up, in preparation for any chance arrivals. She turned abruptly out of the beaten path down the gravel levee, made for the lower and darker end of the wharf boat. There would be Sutherland people going up the river. But they would be more than prompt; everyone came early to boats and trains to begin the sweet draught of the excitement of journeying. So she would wait in the darkness and go aboard when the steamer was about to draw in its planks. At the upper end of the wharf boat there was the broad gangway to the levee for passengers and freight; at the lower and dark and deserted end a narrow beam extended from boat to shore, to hold the boat steady. Susan, balancing herself with her bundle, went up to the beam, sat down upon a low stanchion in the darkness where she could see the river. Louder and louder grew the regular musical beat of engine and paddle. The searchlight on the forward deck of the _General Lytle_, after peering uncertainly, suspiciously, at the entire levee, and at the river, and at the Kentucky shore, abruptly focused upon the wharf boat. The _General Lytle_ now seemed a blaze of lights--from lower deck, from saloon deck, from pilot house deck, and forward and astern. A hundred interesting sounds came from her--tinkling of bells, calls from deck to deck, whistling, creaking of pulleys, lowing of cattle, grunting of swine, plaint of agitated sheep, the resigned cluckings of many chickens. Along the rail of the middle or saloon deck were seated a few passengers who had not yet gone to bed. On the lower deck was a swarm of black roustabouts, their sooty animal faces, their uncannily contrasting white teeth and eyeballs, their strange and varied rags lit up by the torches blazing where a gangplank lay ready for running out. And high and clear in the lovely June night sailed the moon, spreading a faint benign light upon hills and shores and glistening river, upon the graceful, stately mail steamer, now advancing majestically upon the wharf boat. Susan watched all, saw all, with quick beating heart and quivering interest. It was the first time that her life had been visited by the fascinating sense of event, real event. The tall, proud, impetuous child-woman, standing in the semi-darkness beside her bundle, was about to cast her stake upon the table in a bold game with Destiny. Her eyes shone with the wonderful expression that is seen only when courage gazes into the bright face of danger. The steamer touched the edge of the wharf-boat with gentle care; the wharf-boat swayed and groaned. Even as the gangplanks were pushing out, the ragged, fantastic roustabouts, with wild, savage, hilarious cries, ran and jumped and scrambled to the wharf-boat like a band of escaping lunatics and darted down its shore planks to pounce upon the piles of freight. The mate, at the steamer edge to superintend the loading, and the wharf master on the levee beside the freight released each a hoarse torrent of profanity to spur on the yelling, laughing roustabouts, more brute than man. Torches flared; cow and sheep, pig and chicken, uttered each its own cry of dissatisfaction or dismay; the mate and wharf master cursed because it was the custom to curse; the roustabouts rushed ashore empty-handed, came filing back, stooping under their burdens. It was a scene of animation, of excitement, savage, grotesque, fascinating. Susan, trembling a little, so tense were her nerves, waited until the last struggling roustabouts were staggering on the boat, until the deep whistle sounded, warning of approaching departure. Then she took up her bundle and put herself in the line of roustabouts, between a half-naked negro, black as coal and bearing a small barrel of beer, and a half-naked mulatto bearing a bundle of loud-smelling untanned skins. "Get out of the way, lady!" yelled the mate, eagerly seizing upon a new text for his denunciations. "Get out of the way, you black hellions! Let the lady pass! Look out, lady! You damned sons of hell, what're you about! I'll rip out your bowels----" Susan fled across the deck and darted up the stairs to the saloon. The steamer was all white without except the black metal work. Within--that is, in the long saloon out of which the cabins opened to right and left and in which the meals were served at extension tables--there was the palatial splendor of white and gilt. At the forward end near the main entrance was the office. Susan, peering in from the darkness of the deck, saw that the way was clear. The Sutherland passengers had been accommodated. She entered, put her bundle down, faced the clerk behind the desk. "Why, howdy, Miss Lenox," said he genially, beginning to twist his narrow, carefully attended blond mustache. "Any of the folks with you?" She remembered his face but not his name. She remembered him as one of the "river characters" regarded as outcast by the Christian respectability of Sutherland. But she who could not but be polite to everybody smiled pleasantly, though she did not like his expression as he looked at her. "No, I'm alone," said she. "Oh--your friends are going to meet you at the wharf in the morning," said he, content with his own explanation. "Just sign here, please." And, as she wrote, he went on: "I've got one room left. Ain't that lucky? It's a nice one, too. You'll be very comfortable. Everybody at home well? I ain't been in Sutherland for nigh ten years. Every week or so I think I will, and then somehow I don't. Here's your key--number 34 right-hand side, well down toward the far end, yonder. Two dollars, please. Thank you--exactly right. Hope you sleep well." "Thank you," said Susan. She turned away with the key which was thrust through one end of a stick about a foot long, to make it too bulky for absent-minded passengers to pocket. She took up her bundle, walked down the long saloon with its gilt decorations, its crystal chandeliers, its double array of small doors, each numbered. The clerk looked after her, admiration of the fine curve of her shoulders, back, and hips written plain upon his insignificant features. And it was a free admiration he would not have dared show had she not been a daughter of illegitimacy--a girl whose mother's "looseness" raised pleasing if scandalous suggestions and even possibilities in the mind of every man with a carnal eye. And not unnaturally. To think of her was to think of the circumstances surrounding her coming into the world; and to think of those circumstances was to think of immorality. Susan, all unconscious of that polluted and impudent gaze, was soon standing before the narrow door numbered 34, as she barely made out, for the lamps in the saloon chandeliers were turned low. She unlocked it, entered the small clean stateroom and deposited her bundle on the floor. With just a glance at her quarters she hurried to the opposite door--the one giving upon the promenade. She opened it, stepped out, crossed the deserted deck and stood at the rail. The _General Lytle_ was drawing slowly away from the wharf-boat. As that part of the promenade happened to be sheltered from the steamer's lights, she was seeing the panorama of Sutherland--its long stretch of shaded waterfront, its cupolas and steeples, the wide leafy streets leading straight from the river by a gentle slope to the base of the dark towering bluffs behind the town--all sleeping in peace and beauty in the soft light of the moon. That farthest cupola to the left--it was the Number Two engine house, and the third place from it was her uncle's house. Slowly the steamer, now in mid-stream, drew away from the town. One by one the familiar landmarks--the packing house, the soap factory, the Geiss brewery, the tall chimney of the pumping station, the shorn top of Reservoir Hill--slipped ghostlily away to the southwest. The sobs choked up into her throat and the tears rained from her eyes. They all pitied and looked down on her there; still, it had been home the only home she ever had known or ever would know. And until these last few frightful days, how happy she had been there! For the first time she felt desolate, weak, afraid. But not daunted. It is strange to see in strong human character the strength and the weakness, two flat contradictions, existing side by side and making weak what seems so strong and making strong what seems so weak. However, human character is a tangle of inconsistencies, as disorderly and inchoate as the tangible and visible parts of nature. Susan felt weak, but not the kind of weakness that skulks. And there lay the difference, the abysmal difference, between courage and cowardice. Courage has full as much fear as cowardice, often more; but it has a something else that cowardice has not. It trembles and shivers but goes forward. Wiping her eyes she went back to her own cabin. She had neglected closing its other door, the one from the saloon. The clerk was standing smirking in the doorway. "You must be going away for quite some time," said he. And he fixed upon her as greedy and impudent eyes as ever looked from a common face. It was his battle glance. Guileful women, bent on trimming him for anything from a piece of plated jewelry to a saucer of ice cream, had led him to believe that before it walls of virtue tottered and fell like Jericho's before the trumpets of Joshua. "It makes me a little homesick to see the old town disappear," hastily explained Susan, recovering herself. The instant anyone was watching, her emotions always hid. "Wouldn't you like to sit out on deck a while?" pursued the clerk, bringing up a winning smile to reinforce the fetching stare. The idea was attractive, for she did not feel like sleep. It would be fine to sit out in the open, watch the moon and the stars, the mysterious banks gliding swiftly by, and new vistas always widening out ahead. But not with this puny, sandy little "river character," not with anybody that night. "No," replied she. "I think I'll go to bed." She had hesitated--and that was enough to give him encouragement. "Now, do come," he urged. "You don't know how nice it is. And they say I'm mighty good company." "No, thanks." Susan nodded a pleasant dismissal. The clerk lingered. "Can't I help you in some way? Wouldn't you like me to get you something?" "No--nothing." "Going to visit in Cincinnati? I know the town from A to Izzard. It's a lot of fun over the Rhine. I've had mighty good times there--the kind a pretty, lively girl like you would take to." "When do we get to Cincinnati?" "About eight--maybe half-past seven. Depends on the landings we have to make, and the freight." "Then I'll not have much time for sleep," said Susan. "Good night." And no more realizing the coldness of her manner than the reason for his hanging about, she faced him, hand on the door to close it. "You ain't a bit friendly," wheedled he. "I'm sorry you think so. Good night--and thank you." And he could not but withdraw his form from the door. She closed it and forgot him. And she did not dream she had passed through one of those perilous adventures incident to a female traveling alone--adventures that even in the telling frighten ladies whose nervousness for their safety seems to increase in direct proportion to the degree of tranquillity their charms create in the male bosom. She decided it would be unwise regularly to undress; the boat might catch fire or blow up or something. She took off skirt, hat and ties, loosened her waist, and lay upon the lower of the two plain, hard little berths. The throb of the engines, the beat of the huge paddles, made the whole boat tremble and shiver. Faintly up from below came the sound of quarrels over crap-shooting, of banjos and singing--from the roustabouts amusing themselves between landings. She thought she would not be able to sleep in these novel and exciting surroundings. She had hardly composed herself before she lost consciousness, to sleep on and on dreamlessly, without motion. CHAPTER VII SHE was awakened by a crash so uproarious that she sat bolt upright before she had her eyes open. Her head struck stunningly against the bottom of the upper berth. This further confused her thoughts. She leaped from the bed, caught up her slippers, reached for her opened-up bundle. The crash was still billowing through the boat; she now recognized it as a great gong sounding for breakfast. She sat down on the bed and rubbed her head and laughed merrily. "I _am_ a greenhorn!" she said. "Another minute and I'd have had the whole boat laughing at me." She felt rested and hungry--ravenously hungry. She tucked in her blouse, washed as well as she could in the tiny bowl on the little washstand. Then before the cloudy watermarked mirror she arranged her scarcely mussed hair. A charming vision of fresh young loveliness, strong, erect, healthy, bright of eye and of cheek, she made as, after a furtive look up and down the saloon, she stepped from her door a very few minutes after the crash of that gong. With much scuffling and bustling the passengers, most of them country people, were hurrying into places at the tables which now had their extension leaves and were covered with coarse white tablecloths and with dishes of nicked stoneware, white, indeed, but shabbily so. But Susan's young eyes were not critical. To her it all seemed fine, with the rich flavor of adventure. A more experienced traveler might have been filled with gloomy foreboding by the quality of the odor from the cooking. She found it delightful and sympathized with the unrestrained eagerness of the homely country faces about her, with the children beating their spoons on their empty plates. The colored waiters presently began to stream in, each wearing a soiled white jacket, each bearing aloft a huge tray on which were stacked filled dishes and steaming cups. Colored people have a keen instinct for class. One of the waiters happened to note her, advanced bowing and smiling with that good-humored, unservile courtesy which is the peculiar possession of the Americanized colored race. He flourished her into a chair with a "Good morning, miss. It's going to be a fine day." And as soon as she was seated he began to form round her plate a large inclosing arc of side dishes--fried fish, fried steak, fried egg, fried potatoes, wheat cakes, canned peaches, a cup of coffee. He drew toward her a can of syrup, a pitcher of cream, and a bowl of granulated sugar. "Anything else?" said he, with a show of teeth white and sound. "No--nothing. Thank you so much." Her smile stimulated him to further courtesies. "Some likes the yeggs biled. Shall I change 'em?" "No. I like them this way." She was so hungry that the idea of taking away a certainty on the chance of getting something out of sight and not yet cooked did not attract her. "Perhaps--a little better piece of steak?" "No--this looks fine." Her enthusiasm was not mere politeness. "I clean forgot your hot biscuits." And away he darted. When he came back with a heaping plate of hot biscuits, Sally Lunn and cornbread, she was eating as heartily as any of her neighbors. It seemed to her that never had she tasted such grand food as this served in the white and gold saloon with strangeness and interest all about her and the delightful sense of motion--motion into the fascinating golden unknown. The men at the table were eating with their knives; each had one protecting forearm and hand cast round his arc of small dishes as if to ward off probable attempt at seizure. And they swallowed as if the boat were afire. The women ate more daintily, as became members of the finer sex on public exhibition. They were wearing fingerless net gloves, and their little fingers stood straight out in that gesture which every truly elegant woman deems necessary if the food is to be daintily and artistically conveyed to her lips. The children mussed and gormed themselves, their dishes, the tablecloth. Susan loved it all. Her eyes sparkled. She ate everything, and regretted that lack of capacity made it impossible for her to yield to the entreaties of her waiter that she "have a little more." She rose, went into the nearest passageway between saloon and promenade, stealthily took a ten-cent piece from her pocketbook. She called her waiter and gave it to him. She was blushing deeply, frightened lest this the first tip she had ever given or seen given be misunderstood and refused. "I'm so much obliged," she said. "You were very nice." The waiter bowed like a prince, always with his simple, friendly smile; the tip disappeared under his apron. "Nobody could help being nice to you, lady." She thanked him again and went to the promenade. It seemed to her that they had almost arrived. Along shore stretched a continuous line of houses--pretty houses with gardens. There were electric cars. Nearer the river lay several parallel lines of railway track along which train after train was speeding, some of them short trains of ordinary day coaches, others long trains made up in part of coaches grander and more beautiful than any she had ever seen. She knew they must be the parlor and dining and sleeping cars she had read about. And now they were in the midst of a fleet of steamers and barges, and far ahead loomed the first of Cincinnati's big suspension bridges, pictures of which she had many a time gazed at in wonder. There was a mingling of strange loud noises--whistles, engines, on the water, on shore; there was a multitude of what seemed to her feverish activities--she who had not been out of quiet Sutherland since she was a baby too young to note things. The river, the shores, grew more and more crowded. Susan's eyes darted from one new object to another; and eagerly though she looked she felt she was missing more than she saw. "Why, Susan Lenox!" exclaimed a voice almost in her ear. She closed her teeth upon a cry; suddenly she was back from wonderland to herself. She turned to face dumpy, dressy Mrs. Waterbury and her husband with the glossy kinky ringlets and the long wavy mustache. "How do you do?" she stammered. "We didn't know you were aboard," said Mrs. Waterbury, a silly, duck-legged woman looking proudly uncomfortable in her bead-trimmed black silk. "Yes--I'm--I'm here," confessed Susan. "Going to the city to visit?" "Yes," said Susan. She hesitated, then repeated, "Yes." "What elegant breakfasts they do serve on these boats! I suppose your friends'll meet you. But Mort and I'll look after you till they come." "Oh, it isn't necessary," protested Susan. The steamer was passing under the bridge. There were cities on both shores--huge masses of dingy brick, streets filled with motion of every kind--always motion, incessant motion, and change. "We're about there, aren't we?" she asked. "The wharf's up beyond the second bridge--the Covington Bridge," explained Waterbury with the air of the old experienced globe-trotter. "There's a third one, further up, but you can't see it for the smoke." And he went on and on, volubly airing his intimate knowledge of the great city which he visited once a year for two or three days to buy goods. He ended with a scornful, "My, but Cincinnati's a dirty place!" Dirty it might be, but Susan loved it, dirt and all. The smoke, the grime somehow seemed part of it, one of its charms, one of the things that made it different from, and superior to, monotonous country and country town. She edged away from the Waterburys, hid in her stateroom watching the panorama through the curtained glass of her promenade deck door. She was completely carried away. The city! So, this was the city! And her dreams of travel, of new sights, new faces, were beginning to come true. She forgot herself, forgot what she had left behind, forgot what she was to face. All her power of thought and feeling was used up in absorbing these unfolding wonders. And when the June sun suddenly pierced the heavy clouds of fog and smoke, she clasped her hands and gasped, "Lovely! Oh, how lovely!" And now the steamer was at the huge wharf-boat, in shape like the one at Sutherland, but in comparative size like the real Noah's Ark beside a toy ark. And from the whole tremendous scene rose an enormous clamor, the stentorian voice of the city. That voice is discordant and terrifying to many. To Susan, on that day, it was the most splendid burst of music. "Awake--awake!" it cried. "Awake, and _live!_" She opened her door that she might hear it better--rattle and rumble and roar, shriek of whistle, clang of bell. And the people!--Thousands on thousands hurrying hither and yon, like bees in a hive. "Awake awake, and live!" The noises from the saloon reminded her that the journey was ended, that she must leave the boat. And she did not know where to go--she and her bundle. She waited until she saw the Waterburys, along with the other passengers, moving up the levee. Then she issued forth--by the promenade deck door so that she would not pass the office. But at the head of the companionway, in the forward part of the deck, there the clerk stood, looking even pettier and more offensive by daylight. She thought to slip by him. But he stopped stroking his mustache and called out to her, "Haven't your friends come?" She frowned, angry in her nervousness. "I shall get on very well," she said curtly. Then she repented, smiled politely, added, "Thank you." "I'll put you in a carriage," he offered, hastening down the stairs to join her. She did not know what to say or do. She walked silently beside him, he carrying her bundle. They crossed the wharf-boat. A line of dilapidated looking carriages was drawn up near the end of the gangplank. The sight of them, the remembrance of what she had heard of the expensiveness of city carriages, nerved her to desperation. "Give me my things, please," she said. "I think I'll walk." "Where do you want to go?" The question took her breath away. With a quickness that amazed her, her lips uttered, "The Gibson House." "Oh! That's a right smart piece. But you can take a car. I'll walk with you to the car. There's a line a couple of squares up that goes almost by the door. You know it isn't far from Fourth Street." She was now in a flutter of terror. She went stumbling along beside him, not hearing a word of his voluble and flirtatious talk. They were in the midst of the mad rush and confusion. The noises, no longer mingled but individual, smote savagely upon her ears, startling her, making her look dazedly round as if expecting death to swoop upon her. At the corner of Fourth Street the clerk halted. He was clear out of humor with her, so dumb, so unappreciative. "There'll be a car along soon," said he sourly. "You needn't wait," said she timidly. "Thank you again." "You can't miss it. Good-by." And he lifted his hat--"tipped" it, rather--for he would not have wasted a full lift upon such a female. She gave a gasp of relief when he departed; then a gasp of terror--for upon the opposite corner stood the Waterburys. The globe-trotter and his wife were so dazed by the city that they did not see her, though in their helpless glancing round they looked straight at her. She hastily ran into a drug store on the corner. A young man in shirt sleeves held up by pink garters, and with oily black hair carefully parted and plastered, put down a pestle and mortar and came forward. He had kind brown eyes, but there was something wrong with the lower part of his face. Susan did not dare look to see what it was, lest he should think her unfeeling. He was behind the counter. Susan saw the soda fountain. As if by inspiration, she said, "Some chocolate soda, please." "Ice cream?" asked the young man in a peculiar voice, like that of one who has a harelip. "Please," said Susan. And then she saw the sign, "Ice Cream, ten cents," and wished she hadn't. The young man mixed the soda, put in a liberal helping of ice cream, set it before her with a spoon in it, rested the knuckles of his brown hairy hands on the counter and said: "It _is_ hot." "Yes, indeed," assented Susan. "I wonder where I could leave my bundle for a while. I'm a stranger and I want to look for a boarding house." "You might leave it here with me," said the young man. "That's about our biggest line of trade--that and postage stamps and telephone--_and_ the directory. "He laughed heartily. Susan did not see why; she did not like the sound, either, for the young man's deformity of lower jaw deformed his laughter as well as his speech. However, she smiled politely and ate and drank her soda slowly. "I'll be glad to take care of your bundle," the young man said presently. "Ever been here before?" "No," said Susan. "That is, not since I was about four years old." "I was four," said the young man, "when a horse stepped on my mouth in the street." "My, how dreadful!" exclaimed Susan. "You can see some of the scar yet," the young man assured her, and he pointed to his curiously sunken mouth. "The doctors said it was the most remarkable case of the kind on record," continued he proudly. "That was what led me into the medical line. You don't seem to have your boarding house picked." "I was going to look in the papers." "That's dangerous--especially for a young lady. Some of them boarding houses--well, they're no better'n they ought to be." "I don't suppose you know of any?" "My aunt keeps one. And she's got a vacancy, it being summer." "I'm afraid it'd be too expensive for me," said Susan, to feel her way. The young man was much flattered. But he said, "Oh, it ain't so toppy. I think you could make a deal with her for five per." Susan looked inquiring. "Five a week--room and board." "I might stand that," said Susan reflectively. Then, deciding for complete confidence, "I'm looking for work, too." "What line?" "Oh, I never tried anything. I thought maybe dressmaking or millinery." "Mighty poor season for jobs. The times are bad, anyhow." He was looking at her with kindly curiosity. "If I was you, I'd go back home--and wait." Susan shrank within herself. "I can't do that," she said. The young man thought awhile, then said: "If you should go to my aunt's, you can say Mr. Ellison sent you. No, that ain't me. It's the boss. You see, a respectable boarding house asks for references." Susan colored deeply and her gaze slowly sank. "I didn't know that," she murmured. "Don't be afraid. Aunt Kate ain't so particular--leastways, not in summer when things is slow. And I know you're quiet." By the time the soda was finished, the young man--who said his name was Robert Wylie--had written on the back of Ellison's business card in a Spencerian hand: "Mrs. Kate Wylie, 347 West Sixth Street." He explained that Susan was to walk up two squares and take the car going west; the conductor would let her off at the right place. "You'd better leave your things here," said Mr. Wylie, holding up the card so that they could admire his penmanship together. "You may not hit it off with Aunt Kate. Don't think you've got to stay there just because of me." "I'm sure I'll like it," Susan declared confidently. Her spirits were high; she felt that she was in a strong run of luck. Wylie lifted her package over the counter and went to the door with her to point out the direction. "This is Fourth. The next up is Fifth. The next wide one is Sixth--and you can read it on the lamp-post, too." "Isn't that convenient!" exclaimed Susan. "What a lovely city this is!" "There's worse," said Mr. Wylie, not to seem vain of his native town. They shook hands most friendly and she set out in the direction he had indicated. She was much upset by the many vehicles and the confusion, but she did her best to seem at ease and at home. She watched a girl walking ahead of her--a shopgirl who seemed well-dressed and stylish, especially about the hat and hair. Susan tried to walk like her. "I suppose I look and act greener than I really am," thought she. "But I'll keep my eyes open and catch on." And in this, as in all her thoughts and actions since leaving, she showed confidence not because she was conceited, but because she had not the remotest notion what she was actually attempting. How many of us get credit for courage as we walk unconcerned through perils, or essay and conquer great obstacles, when in truth we are not courageous but simply unaware! As a rule knowledge is power or, rather, a source of power, but there are times when ignorance is a power and knowledge a weakness. If Susan had known, she might perhaps have stayed at home and submitted and, with crushed spirit, might have sunk under the sense of shame and degradation. But she did not know; so Columbus before his sailors or Caesar at the Rubicon among his soldiers did not seem more tranquil than she really was. Wylie, who suspected in the direction of the truth, wondered at her. "She's game, she is," he muttered again and again that morning. "What a nerve for a kid--and a lady, too!" She found the right corner and the right car without further adventure; and the conductor assured her that he would set her down before the very door of the address on the card. It was an open car with few passengers. She took the middle of the long seat nearest the rear platform and looked about her like one in a happy dream. On and on and yet on they went. With every square they passed more people, so it seemed to her, than there were in all Sutherland. And what huge stores! And what wonderful displays of things to wear! Where would the people be found to buy such quantities, and where would they get the money to pay? How many restaurants and saloons! Why, everybody must be eating and drinking all the time. And at each corner she looked up and down the cross streets, and there were more and ever more magnificent buildings, throngs upon throngs of people. Was there no end to it? This was Sixth Street, still Sixth Street, as she saw at the corner lamp-posts. Then there must be five more such streets between this and the river; and she could see, up the cross streets, that the city was even vaster in the direction of the hills. And there were all these cross streets! It was stupefying--overwhelming--incredible. She began to be nervous, they were going so far. She glanced anxiously at the conductor. He was watching her interestedly, understood her glance, answered it with a reassuring nod. He called out: "I'm looking out for you, miss. I've got you on my mind. Don't you fret." She gave him a bright smile of relief. They were passing through a double row of what seemed to her stately residences, and there were few people on the sidewalks. The air, too, was clearer, though the walls were grimy and also the grass in the occasional tiny front yards. But the curtains at the windows looked clean and fresh, and so did the better class of people among those on the sidewalk. It delighted her to see so many well-dressed women, wearing their clothes with an air which she told herself she must acquire. She was startled by the conductor's calling out: "Now, miss!" She rose as he rang the bell and was ready to get off when the car stopped, for she was eager to cause him as little trouble as possible. "The house is right straight before you," said the conductor. "The number's in the transom." She thanked him, descended, was on the sidewalk before Mrs. Wylie's. She looked at the house and her heart sank. She thought of the small sum in her purse; it was most unlikely that such a house as this would harbor her. For here was a grand stone stairway ascending to a deep stone portico, and within it great doors, bigger than those of the Wright mansion, the palace of Sutherland. However, she recalled the humble appearance and mode of speech of her friend the drug clerk and plucked up the courage to ascend and to ring. A slattern, colored maid opened the door. At the first glance within, at the first whiff of the interior air, Susan felt more at ease. For she was seeing what even her bedazzled eyes recognized as cheap dowdiness, and the smell that assailed her nostrils was that of a house badly and poorly kept--the smell of cheap food and bad butter cooking, of cats, of undusted rooms, of various unrecognizable kinds of staleness. She stood in the center of the big dingy parlor, gazing round at the grimed chromos until Mrs. Wylie entered--a thin middle-aged woman with small brown eyes set wide apart, a perpetual frown, and a chin so long and so projected that she was almost jimber-jawed. While Susan explained stammeringly what she had come for, Mrs. Wylie eyed her with increasing disfavor. When Susan had finished, she unlocked her lips for the first time to say: "The room's took." "Oh!" cried Susan in dismay. The telephone rang in the back parlor. Mrs. Wylie excused herself to answer. After a few words she closed the doors between. She was gone fully five minutes; to Susan it seemed an hour. She came back, saying: "I've been talking to my nephew. He called up. Well, I reckon you can have the room. It ain't my custom to take in ladies as young as you. But you seem to be all right. Your parents allowed you to come?" "I haven't any," replied Susan. "I'm here to find a place and support myself." Mrs. Wylie continued to eye her dubiously. "Well, I have no wish to pry into your affairs. 'Mind your own business,' that's my rule." She spoke with defiance, as if the contrary were being asserted by some invisible person who might appear and gain hearing and belief. She went on: "If Mr. Ellison wants it, why I suppose it's all right. But you can't stay out later'n ten o'clock." "I shan't go out at all of nights," said Susan eagerly. "You _look_ quiet," said Mrs. Wylie, with the air of adding that appearances were rarely other than deceptive. "Oh, I _am_ quiet," declared Susan. It puzzled her, this recurrence of the suggestion of noisiness. "I can't allow much company--none in your room." "There won't be any company." She blushed deeply. "That is, a--a young man from our town--he may call once. But he'll be off for the East right away." Mrs. Wylie reflected on this, Susan the while standing uneasily, dreading lest decision would be against her. Finally Mrs. Wylie said: "Robert says you want the five-dollar room. I'll show it to you." They ascended two flights through increasing shabbiness. On the third floor at the rear was a room--a mere continuation of the narrow hall, partitioned off. It contained a small folding bed, a small table, a tiny bureau, a washstand hardly as large as that in the cabin on the boat, a row of hooks with a curtain of flowered chintz before them, a kitchen chair, a chromo of "Awake and Asleep," a torn and dirty rag carpet. The odor of the room, stale, damp, verging on moldy, seemed the fitting exhalation from such an assemblage of forbidding objects. "It's a nice, comfortable room," said Mrs. Wylie aggressively. "I couldn't afford to give it and two meals for five dollars except till the first of September. After that it's eight." "I'll be glad to stay, if you'll let me," said Susan. Mrs. Wylie's suspicion, so plain in those repellent eyes, took all the courage out of her. The great adventure seemed rapidly to be losing its charms. She could not think of herself as content or anything but sad and depressed in such surroundings as these. How much better it would be if she could live out in the open, out where it was attractive! "I suppose you've got some baggage," said Mrs. Wylie, as if she rather expected to hear that she had not. "I left it at the drug store," explained Susan. "Your trunk?" Susan started nervously at that explosive exclamation. "I--I haven't got a trunk--only a few things in a shawl strap." "Well, I never!" Mrs. Wylie tossed her head, clucked her tongue disgustedly against the roof of her mouth. "But I suppose if Mr. Ellison says so, why you can stay." "Thank you," said Susan humbly. Even if it would not have been basest ingratitude to betray her friend, Mr. Wylie, still she would not have had the courage to confess the truth about Mr. Ellison and so get herself ordered into the street. "I--I think I'll go for my things." "The custom is to pay in advance," said Mrs. Wylie sharply. "Oh, yes--of course," stammered Susan. She seated herself on the wooden chair and opened out her purse. She found the five among her few bills, extended it with trembling fingers toward Mrs. Wylie. At the same time she lifted her eyes. The woman's expression as she bored into the pocketbook terrified her. Never before had she seen the savage greediness that is bred in the city among the people who fight against fearful odds to maintain their respectability and to save themselves from the ever threatened drop to the despised working class. "Thank you," said Mrs. Wylie, taking the bill as if she were conferring a favor upon Susan. "I make everybody pay promptly. The first of the week or out they go! I used to be easy and I came near going down." "Oh, I shouldn't stay a minute if I couldn't pay," said the girl. "I'm going to look for something right away." "Well, I don't want to discourage you, but there's a great many out of work. Still, I suppose you'll be able to wheedle some man into giving you a job. But I warn you I'm very particular about morals. If I see any signs----" Mrs. Wylie did not finish her sentence. Any words would have been weaker than her look. Susan colored and trembled. Not at the poisonous hint as to how money could be got to keep on paying for that room, for the hint passed wide of Susan. She was agitated by the thought: if Mrs. Wylie should learn that she was not respectable! If Mrs. Wylie should learn that she was nameless--was born in disgrace so deep that, no matter how good she might be, she would yet be classed with the wicked. "I'm down like a thousand of brick on any woman that is at all loose with the men," continued the landlady. "I never could understand how any woman could so far forget herself." And the woman whom the men had all her life been helping to their uttermost not to "forget herself" looked sharp suspicion and envy at Susan, the lovely. Why are women of the Mrs. Wylie sort so swift to suspect? Can it be that in some secret chamber of their never assailed hearts there lurks a longing--a feeling as to what they would do if they had the chance? Mrs. Wylie continued, "I hope you have strict Christian principles?" "I was brought up Presbyterian," said Susan anxiously. She was far from sure that in Cincinnati and by its Mrs. Wylies Presbyterian would be regarded as Christian. "There's your kind of a church a few squares from here," was all Mrs. Wylie deigned to reply. Susan suspected a sneer at Presbyterianism in her accent. "That'll be nice," she murmured. She was eager to escape. "I'll go for my things." "You can walk down and take the Fourth Street car," suggested her landlady. "Then you can watch out and not miss the store. The conductors are very impudent and forgetful." Susan escaped from the house as speedily as her flying feet would take her down the two flights. In the street once more, her spirits rose. She went south to Fourth Street, decided to walk instead of taking a car. She now found herself in much more impressive surroundings than before, and realized that Sixth Street was really one of the minor streets. The further uptown she went, the more excited she became. After the district of stately mansions with wonderful carriages driving up and away and women dressed like those in the illustrated story papers, came splendid shops and hotels, finer than Susan had believed there were anywhere in the world. And most of the people--the crowds on crowds of people!--looked prosperous and cheerful and so delightfully citified! She wondered why so many of the men stared at her. She assumed it must be something rural in her appearance though that ought to have set the women to staring, too. But she thought little about this, so absorbed was she in seeing all the new things. She walked slowly, pausing to inspect the shop windows--the gorgeous dresses and hats and jewelry, the thousand costly things scattered in careless profusion. And the crowds! How secure she felt among these multitudes of strangers, not one of them knowing or suspecting her secret of shame! She no longer had the sense of being outcast, branded. When she had gone so far that it seemed to her she certainly must have missed the drug store, carefully though she had inspected each corner as she went, she decided that she must stop someone of this hurrying throng and inquire the way. While she was still screwing her courage to this boldness, she espied the sign and hastened joyfully across the street. She and Wylie welcomed each other like old friends. He was delighted when he learned that she had taken the room. "You won't mind Aunt Kate after a while," said he. "She's sour and nosey, but she's honest and respectable--and that's the main thing just now with you. And I think you'll get a job all right. Aunt Kate's got a lady friend that's head saleslady at Shillito's. She'll know of something." Wylie was so kind and so hopeful that Susan felt already settled. As soon as customers came in, she took her parcel and went, Wylie saying, "I'll drop round after supper and see how things are getting on." She took the Sixth Street car back, and felt like an old resident. She was critical of Sixth Street now, and of the women she had been admiring there less than two hours before--critical of their manners and of their dress. The exterior of the boarding house no longer awed her. She was getting a point of view--as she proudly realized. By the time Sam came--and surely that wouldn't be many days--she would be quite transformed. She mounted the steps and was about to ring when Mrs. Wylie herself, with stormy brow and snapping eyes, opened the door. "Go into the parlor," she jerked out from between her unpleasant-looking receding teeth. Susan gave her a glance of frightened wonder and obeyed. CHAPTER VIII AT the threshold her bundles dropped to the floor and all color fled from her face. Before her stood her Uncle George and Sam Wright and his father. The two elderly men were glowering at her; Sam, white as his shirt and limp, was hanging his head. "So, miss!--You've got back, eh?" cried her uncle in a tone she would not have believed could come from him. As quickly as fear had seized her she now shook it off. "Yes, Uncle," she said calmly, meeting his angry eyes without flinching. And back came that expression of resolution--of stubbornness we call it when it is the flag of opposition to _our_ will. "What'd have become of you," demanded her uncle, "if I hadn't found out early this morning, and got after Sam here and choked the truth out of him?" Susan gazed at Sam; but he was such a pitiful figure, so mean and frightened, that she glanced quickly back to her uncle. She said: "But he didn't know where I was." "Don't lie to me," cried Warham. "It won't do you any good, any more than his lying kept us from finding you. We came on the train and saw the Waterburys in the street and they'd seen you go into the drug store. We'd have caught you there if we'd been a few minutes sooner, but we drove, and got here in time. Now, tell me, Susan"--and his voice was cruelly harsh--"all about what's been going on between you and Sam." She gazed fearlessly and was silent. "Speak up!" commanded Sam's father. "Yes--and no lies," said her uncle. "I don't know what you mean," Susan at last answered--truthfully enough, yet to gain time, too. "You can't play that game any longer," cried Warham. "You did make a fool of me, but my eyes are open. Your aunt's right about you." "Oh, Uncle George!" said the girl, a sob in her voice. But he gazed pitilessly--gazed at the woman he was now abhorring as the treacherous, fallen, unsexed daughter of fallen Lorella. "Speak out. Crying won't help you. What have you and this fellow been up to? You disgrace!" Susan shrank and shivered, but answered steadfastly, "That's between him and me, Uncle." Warham gave a snort of fury, turned to the elder Wright. "You see, Wright," cried he. "It's as my wife and I told you. Your boy's lying. We'll send the landlady out for a preacher and marry them." "Hold on, George," objected Wright soothingly. "I agreed to that only if there'd been something wrong. I'm not satisfied yet." He turned to Susan, said in his gruff, blunt way: "Susan, have you been loose with my boy here?" "Loose?" said Susan wonderingly. Sam roused himself. "Tell them it isn't so, Susan," he pleaded, and his voice was little better than a whine of terror. "Your uncle's going to kill me and my father'll kick me out." Susan's heart grew sick as she looked at him--looked furtively, for she was ashamed to see him so abject. "If you mean did I let him kiss me," she said to Mr. Wright, "why, I did. We kissed several times. But we had the right to. We were engaged." Sam turned on his father in an agony of terror. "That isn't true!" he cried. "I swear it isn't, father. We aren't engaged. I only made love to her a little, as a fellow does to lots of girls." Susan looked at him with wide, horrified eyes. "Sam!" she exclaimed breathlessly. "Sam!" Sam's eyes dropped, but he managed to turn his face in her direction. The situation was too serious for him; he did not dare to indulge in such vanities as manhood or manly appearance. "That's the truth, Susan," he said sullenly. "_You_ talked a lot about marrying but _I_ never thought of such a thing." "But--you said--you loved me." "I didn't mean anything by it." There fell a silence that was interrupted by Mr. Wright. "You see there's nothing in it, Warham. I'll take my boy and go." "Not by a damn sight!" cried Warham. "He's got to marry her. Susan, did Sam promise to marry you?" "When he got through college," replied Susan. "I thought so! And he persuaded you to run away." "No," said Susan. "He----" "I say yes," stormed her uncle. "Don't lie!" "Warham! Warham!" remonstrated Mr. Wright. "Don't browbeat the girl." "He begged me not to go," said Susan. "You lying fool!" shouted her uncle. Then to Wright, "If he did ask her to stay it was because he was afraid it would all come out--just as it has." "I never promised to marry her!" whined Sam. "Honest to God, father, I never did. Honest to God, Mr. Warham! You know that's so, Susan. It was you that did all the marrying talk." "Yes," she said slowly. "Yes, I believe it was." She looked dazedly at the three men. "I supposed he meant marriage because--" her voice faltered, but she steadied it and went on--"because we loved each other." "I knew it!" cried her uncle. "You hear, Wright? She admits he betrayed her." Susan remembered the horrible part of her cousin's sex revelations. "Oh, no!" she cried. "I wouldn't have let him do that--even if he had wanted to. No--not even if we'd been married." "You see, Warham!" cried Mr. Wright, in triumph. "I see a liar!" was Warham's furious answer. "She's trying to defend him and make out a case for herself." "I am telling the truth," said Susan. Warham gazed unbelievingly at her, speechless with fury. Mr. Wright took his silk hat from the corner of the piano. "I'm satisfied they're innocent," said he. "So I'll take my boy and go." "Not if I know it!" retorted Warham. "He's got to marry her." "But the girl says she's pure, says he never spoke of marriage, says he begged her not to run away. Be reasonable, Warham." "For a good Christian," sneered he at Wright, "you're mighty easily convinced by a flimsy lie. In your heart you know the boy has wronged her and that she's shielding him, just as----" There Warham checked himself; it would be anything but timely to remind Wright of the character of the girl's mother. "I'll admit," said Mr. Wright smoothly, "that I wasn't overanxious for my boy's marriage with a girl whose mother was--unfortunate. But if your charge had been true, Warham, I'd have made the boy do her justice, she being only seventeen. Come, Sam." Sam slunk toward the door. Warham stared fiercely at the elder Wright. "And you call yourself a Christian!" he sneered. At the door--Sam had already disappeared--Mr. Wright paused to say, "I'm going to give Sam a discipline he'll remember. The girl's only been foolish. Don't be harsh with her." "You damned hypocrite!" shouted Warham. "I might have known what to expect from a man who cut the wages of his hands to pay his church subscription." But Wright was far too crafty to be drawn. He went on pushing Sam before him. As the outer door closed behind them Mrs. Wylie appeared. "I want you both to get out of my house as quick as you can," she snapped. "My boarders'll be coming to dinner in a few minutes." Warham took his straw hat from the floor beside the chair behind him. "I've nothing to do with this girl here. Good day, madam." And he strode out of the house, slamming the door behind him. Mrs. Wylie looked at Susan with storming face and bosom. Susan did not see. She was gazing into space, her face blanched. "Clear out!" cried Mrs. Wylie. And she ran to the outer door and opened it. "How dare you come into a respectable house!" She wished to be so wildly angry that she would forget the five dollars which she, as a professing Christian in full church standing, would have to pay back if she remembered. "Clear out this minute!" she cried shrilly. "If you don't, I'll throw your bundle into the street and you after it." Susan took up the bundle mechanically, slowly went out on the stoop. The door closed with a slam behind her. She descended the steps, walked a few yards up the street, paused at the edge of the curb and looked dazedly about. Her uncle stood beside her. "Now where are you going?" he said roughly. Susan shook her head. "I suppose," he went on, "I've got to look after you. You shan't disgrace my daughter any further." Susan simply looked at him, her eyes unseeing, her brain swept clean of thought by the cyclone that had destroyed all her dreams and hopes. She was not horrified by his accusations; such things had little meaning for one practically in complete ignorance of sex relations. Besides, the miserable fiasco of her romantic love left her with a feeling of abasement, of degradation little different from that which overwhelms a woman who believes her virtue is her all and finds herself betrayed and abandoned. She now felt indeed the outcast, looked down upon by all the world. "If you hadn't lied," he fumed on, "you'd have been his wife and a respectable woman." The girl shivered. "Instead, you're a disgrace. Everybody in Sutherland'll know you've gone the way your mother went." "Go away," said the girl piteously. "Let me alone." "Alone? What will become of you?" He addressed the question to himself, not to her. "It doesn't matter," was her reply in a dreary tone. "I've been betrayed, as my mother was. It doesn't matter what----" "I knew it!" cried Warham, with no notion of what the girl meant by the word "betrayed." "Why didn't you confess the truth while he was here and his father was ready to marry him to you? I knew you'd been loose with him, as your Aunt Fanny said." "But I wasn't," said Susan. "I wouldn't do such a thing." "There you go, lying again!" "It doesn't matter," said she. "All I want is for you to go away." "You do?" sneered he. "And then what? I've got to think of Ruthie." He snatched the bundle from her hand. "Come on! I must do all I can to keep the disgrace to my family down. As for you, you don't deserve anything but the gutter, where you'd sink if I left you. Your aunt's right. You're rotten. You were born rotten. You're your mother's own brat." "Yes, I am," she cried. "And I'm proud of it!" She turned from him, was walking rapidly away. "Come with me!" ordered Warham, following and seizing her by the arm. "No," said Susan, wrenching herself free. "Then I'll call a policeman and have you locked up." Uncle and niece stood regarding each other, hatred and contempt in his gaze, hatred and fear in hers. "You're a child in law--though, God knows, you're anything but a child in fact. Come along with me. You've got to. I'm going to see that you're put out of harm's way." "You wouldn't take me back to Sutherland!" she cried. He laughed savagely. "I guess not! You'll not show your face there again--though I've no doubt you'd be brazen enough to brass it out. No--you can't pollute my home again." "I can't go back to Sutherland!" "You shan't, I say. You ran off because you had disgraced yourself." "No!" cried Susan. "No!" "Don't lie to me! Don't speak to me. I'll see what I can do to hide this mess. Come along!" Susan looked helplessly round the street, saw nothing, not even eager, curious faces pressed against many a window pane, saw only a desolate waste. Then she walked along beside her uncle, both of them silent, he carrying her bundle, she tightly clutching her little purse. Perhaps the most amazing, the most stunning, of all the blows fate had thus suddenly showered upon her was this transformation of her uncle from gentleness to ferocity. But many a far older and far wiser woman than seventeen-year-old Susan has failed to understand how it is with the man who does not regard woman as a fellow human being. To such she is either an object of adoration, a quintessence of purity and innocence, or less than the dust, sheer filth. Warham's anger was no gust. He was simply the average man of small intelligence, great vanity, and abject snobbishness or terror of public opinion. There could be but one reason for the flight of Lorella's daughter--rottenness. The only point to consider now was how to save the imperiled family standing, how to protect his own daughter, whom his good nature and his wife's weakness had thus endangered. The one thing that could have appeased his hatred of Susan would have been her marriage to Sam Wright. Then he would have--not, indeed, forgiven or reinstated her--but tolerated her. It is the dominance of such ideas as his that makes for woman the slavery she discovers beneath her queenly sway if she happens to do something deeply displeasing to her masculine subject and adorer. They went to the Central Station. The O. and M. express which connected with the train on the branch line to Sutherland would not leave until a quarter past two. It was only a few minutes past one. Warham led the way into the station restaurant; with a curt nod he indicated a seat at one of the small tables, and dropped into the opposite seat. He ordered beefsteak and fried potatoes, coffee and apple pie. "Sit still!" he said to her roughly and rose to go out to buy a paper. The girl sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes upon them. She looked utterly, pitifully tired. A moment and he came back to resume his seat and read the paper. When the waiter flopped down the steak and the dish of greasily fried potatoes before his plate, he stuffed the paper in his pocket, cut a slice of the steak and put it on the plate. The waiter noisily exchanged it for the empty plate before Susan. Warham cut two slices of the steak for himself, took a liberal helping of the potatoes, pushed the dish toward her. "Do you want the coffee now, or with the pie?" asked the waiter. "Now," said Warham. "Coffee for the young lady, too?" Warham scowled at her. "Coffee?" he demanded. She did not answer; she did not hear. "Yes, she wants coffee," said Warham. "Hustle it!" "Yes, sir." And the waiter bustled away with a great deal of motion that created a deceptive impression of speed. Warham was helping himself to steak again when the coffee came a suspicious-looking liquid diffusing an odor of staleness reheated again and again, an under odor of metal pot not too frequently scoured. Warham glanced at Susan's plate. She had not disturbed the knife and fork on either side of it. "Eat!" he commanded. And when she gave no sign of having heard, he repeatedly sharply, "Eat, I tell you." She started, nervously took up the knife and fork, cut a morsel off the slice of steak. When she lifted it to her lips, she suddenly put it back in the plate. "I can't," she said. "You've got to," ordered he. "I won't have you acting this way." "I can't," she repeated monotonously. "I feel sick." Nature had luckily so made her that it was impossible for her to swallow when her nerves were upset or when she was tired; thus, she would not have the physical woes that aggravate and prolong mental disturbance if food is taken at times when it instantly turns to poison. He repeated his order in a still more savage tone. She put her elbows on the table, rested her head wearily upon her hands, shook her head. He desisted. When he had eaten all of the steak, except the fat and the gristly tail, and nearly all the potatoes, the waiter took the used dishes away and brought two generous slices of apple pie and set down one before each. With the pie went a cube of American cream or "rat-trap" cheese. Warham ate his own pie and cheese; then, as she had not touched hers, he reached for it and ate it also. Now he was watching the clock and, between liftings of laden fork to his mouth, verifying the clock's opinion of the hour by his own watch. He called for the bill, paid it, gave the waiter five cents--a concession to the tipping custom of the effete city which, judging by the waiter's expression, might as well not have been made. Still, Warham had not made it with an idea of promoting good feeling between himself and the waiter, but simply to show that he knew the city and its ways. He took up the shawl strap, said, "Come on" in the voice which he deemed worthy of the fallen creature he must, through Christian duty and worldly prudence, for the time associate with. She rose and followed him to the ticket office. He had the return half of his own ticket. When she heard him ask for a ticket to North Sutherland she shivered. She knew that her destination was his brother Zeke's farm. From Cincinnati to North Vernon, where they were to change cars, he sat beside her without speech. At North Vernon, where they had to occupy a bench outside the squat and squalid station for nearly two hours, he sat beside her without speech. And without a single word on either side they journeyed in the poking, no-sooner-well-started-than-stopping accommodation train southbound. Several Sutherland people were aboard. He nodded surlily to those who spoke to him. He read an Indianapolis paper which he had bought at North Vernon. All the way she gazed unseeingly out over the fair June landscape of rolling or hilly fields ripening in the sun. At North Sutherland he bade her follow him to a dilapidated barn a few yards from the railway tracks, where was displayed a homemade sign--"V. Goslin. Livery and Sale Stable." There was dickering and a final compromise on four dollars where the proprietor had demanded five and Warham had declared two fifty liberal. A surrey was hitched with two horses. Warham opened the awkward door to the rear seat and ordered Susan to jump in. She obeyed; he put the bundle on the floor beside her. He sat with the driver--the proprietor himself. The horses set off at a round pace over the smooth turnpike. It was evening, and a beautiful coolness issued from the woods on either side. They skimmed over the long level stretches; they climbed hills, they raced down into valleys. Warham and the ragged, rawboned old proprietor kept up a kind of conversation--about crops and politics, about the ownership, value, and fertility of the farms they were passing. Susan sat quiet, motionless most of the time. The last daylight faded; the stars came out; the road wound in and out, up and down, amid cool dark silence and mysterious fascinating shadows. The moon appeared above the tree tops straight ahead--a big moon, with a lower arc of the rim clipped off. The turnpike ended; they were making equally rapid progress over the dirt road which was in perfect condition as there had been no rain for several days. The beat of the flying hoofs was soft now; the two men's voices, fell into a lower key; the moon marked out the line of the road clearly, made strange spectral minglings of light and darkness in the woods, glorified the open fields and gave the occasional groups of farm buildings an ancient beauty and dignity. The girl slept. At nine o'clock the twenty-mile drive ended in a long, slow climb up a road so washed out, so full of holes and bowlders, that it was no road at all but simply a weather-beaten hillside. A mile of this, with the liveryman's curses--"dod rot it" and "gosh dang it" and similar modifications of profanity for Christian use and for the presence of "the sex"--ringing out at every step. Susan soon awakened, rather because the surrey was pitching so wildly than because of Goslin's denunciations. A brief level stretch and they stopped for Warham to open the outer gate into his brother Zeke's big farm. A quarter of a mile through wheat to the tops of the wheels and they reached the second gate. A descent into a valley, a crossing of a creek, an ascent of a steep hill, and they were at the third gate--between pasture and barnyard. Now they came into view of the house, set upon a slope where a spring bubbled out. The house was white and a white picket fence cut off its lawn from the barnyard. A dog with a deep voice began to bark. They drove up to the front gate and stopped. The dog barked in a frenzy of rage, and they heard his straining and jerking at his chain. A clump of cedars brooded to the right of the house; their trunks were whitewashed up to the lowest branches. The house had a high stoop with wooden steps. As Warham descended and hallooed, there came a fierce tugging at the front door from the inside. But the front door was not in the habit of being opened, and stoutly resisted. The assault grew more strenuous; the door gave way and a tall thin farmer appeared. "Hello, Zeke," called George. He opened the surrey door. "Get down," he said to the girl, at the same time taking her bundle. He set it on the horse block beside the gate, took out his pocketbook and paid over the four dollars. "Good-by, Vic," said he pleasantly. "That's a good team you've got." "Not so coarse," said Vic. "Good-by, Mr. Warham." And off he drove. Zeke Warham had now descended the steps and was opening the front gate, which was evidently as unaccustomed to use as the front door. "Howdy, George," said he. "Ain't that Susie you've got with you?" Like George, Zeke had had an elementary education. But he had married an ignorant woman, and had lived so long among his farm hands and tenants that he used their mode of speech. "Yes, it's Susie," said George, shaking hands with his brother. "Howdy, Susie," said Zeke, shaking hands with her. "I see you've got your things with you. Come to stay awhile?" George interrupted. "Susan, go up on the porch and take your bundle." The girl took up the shawl strap and went to the front door. She leaned upon the railing of the stoop and watched the two men standing at the gate. George was talking to his brother in a low tone. Occasionally the brother uttered an ejaculation. She could not hear; their heads were so turned that she could not see their faces. The moon made it almost as bright as day. From the pasture woods came a low, sweet chorus of night life--frogs and insects and occasionally a night bird. From the orchard to the left and the clover fields beyond came a wonderful scented breeze. She heard a step in the hall; her Aunt Sallie appeared--a comfortable, voluble woman, a hard worker and a harder eater and showing it in thin hair and wrinkled face. "Why, Susie Lenox, ain't that you?" she exclaimed. "Yes, Aunt," said Susan. Her aunt kissed her, diffusing that earthy odor which is the basis of the smell of country persons. At various hours of the day this odor would be modified with the smell of cow stables, of chickens, of cooking, according to immediate occupation. But whatever other smell there was, the earthy smell persisted. And it was the smell of the house, too. "Who's at the gate with your Uncle Zeke?" inquired Sallie. "Ain't it George?" "Yes," said Susan. "Why don't he come in?" She raised her voice. "George, ain't you coming in?" "Howdy, Sallie," called George. "You take the girl in. Zeke and I'll be along." "Some business, I reckon," said her aunt to Susan. "Come on. Have you had supper?" "No," said Susan. She was hungry now. The splendid health of the girl that had calmed her torment of soul into a dull ache was clamoring for food--food to enable her body to carry her strong and enduring through whatever might befall. "I'll set something out for you," said Sallie. "Come right in. You might leave your bundle here by the parlor door. We'll put you in the upstairs room." They passed the front stairway, went back through the hall, through the big low-ceilinged living-room with its vast fireplace now covered for the warm season by a screen of flowered wallpaper. They were in the plain old dining-room with its smaller fireplace and its big old-fashioned cupboards built into the wall on either side of the projecting chimney-piece. "There ain't much," resumed Sallie. "But I reckon you kin make out." On the gayly patterned table cover she set an array of substantial plates and glasses. From various cupboards in dining-room and adjoining kitchen she assembled a glass pitcher of sweet milk, a glass pitcher of buttermilk, a plate of cold cornbread, a platter of cold fried chicken, a dish of golden butter, a pan of cold fried potatoes, a jar of preserved crab apples and another of peach butter. Susan watched with hungry eyes. She was thinking of nothing but food now. Her aunt looked at her and smiled. "My, but you're shootin' up!" she exclaimed, admiring the girl's tall, straight figure. "And you don't seem to get stringy and bony like so many, but keep nice and round. Do set down." "I--I think I'll wait until Uncle George comes." "Nothing of the kind!" She pushed a wooden chair before one of the two plates she had laid. "I see you've still got that lovely skin. And how tasty you dress! Now, do set!" Susan seated herself. "Pitch right in, child," urged Sallie. "How's yer aunt and her Ruth?" "They're--they're well, thank you." "Do eat!" "No," said Susan. "I'll wait for Uncle." "Never mind your manners. I know you're starved." Then seeing that the girl would not eat, she said, "Well, I'll go fetch him." But Susan stopped her. "Please please don't," she entreated. Sallie stared to oppose; then, arrested by the intense, appealing expression in those violet-gray eyes, so beautifully shaded by dark lashes and brows, she kept silent, bustled aimlessly about, boiling with suddenly aroused curiosity. It was nearly half an hour by the big square wooden clock on the chimney-piece when Susan heard the steps of her two uncles. Her hunger fled; the deathly sickness surged up again. She trembled, grew ghastly in the yellow lamplight. Her hands clutched each other in her lap. "Why, Susie!" cried her aunt. "Whatever is the matter of you!" The girl lifted her eyes to her aunt's face the eyes of a wounded, suffering, horribly suffering animal. She rose, rushed out of the door into the yard, flung herself down on the grass. But still she could not get the relief of tears. After a while she sat up and listened. She heard faintly the voices of her uncle and his relatives. Presently her aunt came out to her. She hid her face in her arm and waited for the new harshness to strike. "Get up and come in, Susie." The voice was kind, was pitying--not with the pity that galls, but with the pity of one who understands and feels and is also human, the pity that soothes. At least to this woman she was not outcast. The girl flung herself down again and sobbed--poured out upon the bosom of our mother earth all the torrents of tears that had been damming up within her. And Sallie knelt beside her and patted her now and then, with a "That's right. Cry it out, sweetie." When tears and sobs subsided Sallie lifted her up, walked to the house with her arm round her. "Do you feel better?" "Some," admitted Susan. "The men folks have went. So we kin be comfortable. After you've et, you'll feel still better." George Warham had made a notable inroad upon the food and drink. But there was an abundance left. Susan began with a hesitating sipping at a glass of milk and nibbling at one of the generous cubes of old-fashioned cornbread. Soon she was busy. It delighted Sallie to see her eat. She pressed the preserves, the chicken, the cornbread upon her. "I haven't eaten since early this morning," apologized the girl. "That means a big hole to fill," observed Sallie. "Try this buttermilk." But Susan could hold no more. "I reckon you're pretty well tired out," observed Sallie. "I'll help you straighten up," said Susan, rising. "No. Let me take you up to bed--while the men's still outside." Susan did not insist. They returned through the empty sitting-room and along the hall. Aunt Sallie took the bundle, and they ascended to the spare bedroom. Sallie showed her into the front room--a damp, earthy odor; a wallpaper with countless reproductions of two little brown girls in a brown swing under a brown tree; a lofty bed, white and tomb-like; some preposterous artificial flowers under glass on chimney-piece and table; three bright chromos on the walls; "God Bless Our Home" in pink, blue and yellow worsted over the door. "I'll run down and put the things away," said her aunt. "Then I'll come back." Susan put her bundle on the sofa, opened it, found nightgown and toilet articles on top. She looked uncertainly about, rapidly undressed, got into the nightgown. "I'll turn down the bed and lie on it until Auntie comes," she said to herself. The bed was delightfully cool; the shuck mattress made soft crackling sounds under her and gave out a soothing odor of the fields. Hardly had her head touched the pillow when she fell sound asleep. In a few minutes her aunt came hurrying in, stopped short at sight of that lovely childlike face with the lamplight full upon it. One of Susan's tapering arms was flung round her dark wavy hair. Sallie Warham smiled gently. "Bless the baby" she said half aloud. Then her smile faded and a look of sadness and pity came. "Poor child!" she murmured. "The Warham men's hard. But then all the men's hard. Poor child." And gently she kissed the girl's flushed cheek. "And she never had no mother, nor nothing." She sighed, gradually lowered the flame of the little old glass lamp, blew it out, and went noiselessly from the room, closing the door behind her. CHAPTER IX SUSAN sat up in bed suddenly, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. It was broad day, and the birds were making a mighty clamor. She gazed round, astonished that it was not her own room. Then she remembered. But it was as a child remembers; for when we have the sense of perfect physical well-being we cannot but see our misfortunes with the child's sense of unreality--and Susan had not only health but youth, was still in the child stage of the period between childhood and womanhood. She lay down again, with the feeling that so long as she could stay in that comfortable bed, with the world shut out, just so long would all be well with her. Soon, however, the restlessness of all nature under the stimulus and heat of that brilliant day communicated itself to her vigorous young body. For repose and inaction are as foreign to healthy life as death itself, of which they are the symptoms; and if ever there was an intense and vivid life, Susan had it. She got up and dressed, and leaned from the window, watching the two-horse reaper in the wheat fields across the hollow of the pasture, and listening to its faint musical whirr. The cows which had just been milked were moving sedately through the gate into the pasture, where the bull, under a tree, was placidly awaiting them. A boy, in huge straw hat and a blue cotton shirt and linsey woolsey trousers rolled high upon his brown bare legs, was escorting the herd. Her aunt in fresh, blue, checked calico came in. "Wouldn't you like some breakfast?" said she. And Susan read in her manner that the men were out of the way. "No, I don't feel hungry," Susan replied. She thought this was true; but when she was at the table she ate almost as heartily as she had the night before. As Susan ate she gazed out into the back yard of the house, where chickens of all sizes, colors and ages were peering and picking about. Through the fence of the kitchen garden she saw Lew, the farm hand, digging potatoes. There were ripening beans on tall poles, and in the farther part the forming heads of cabbages, the sprouting melon vines, the beautiful fresh green of the just springing garden corn. The window through which she was looking was framed in morning glories and hollyhocks, and over by the garden gate were on the one side a clump of elders, on the other the hardy graceful stalks of gaudily spreading sunflowers. Bees flew in and out, and one lighted upon the dish of honey in the comb that went so well with the hot biscuit. She rose and wandered out among the chickens, to pick up little fluffy youngsters one after another, and caress them, to look in the henhouse itself, where several hens were sitting with the pensive expression that accompanies the laying of eggs. She thought of those other hens, less conventional, who ran away to lay in secret places in the weeds, to accumulate a store against the time when the setting instinct should possess them. She thought of those cannier, less docile hens and laughed. She opened a gate into the barnyard, intending to go to the barn for a look at the horses, taking in the duck pond and perhaps the pigs on the way. Her Uncle George's voice arrested her. "Susan," he cried. "Come here." She turned and looked wistfully at him. The same harsh, unforgiving countenance--mean with anger and petty thoughts. As she moved hesitatingly toward him he said, "You are not to go out of the yard." And he reëntered the house. What a mysterious cruel world! Could it be the same world she had lived in so happily all the years until a few days ago--the same she had always found "God's beautiful world," full of gentleness and kindness? And why had it changed? What was this sin that after a long sleep in her mother's grave had risen to poison everyone against her? And why had it risen? It was all beyond her. She strolled wretchedly within bounds, with a foreboding of impending evil. She watched Lew in the garden; she got her aunt to let her help with the churning--drive the dasher monotonously up and down until the butter came; then she helped work the butter, helped gather the vegetables for dinner, did everything and anything to keep herself from thinking. Toward eleven o'clock her Uncle Zeke appeared in the dining-room, called his wife from the kitchen. Susan felt that at last something was to happen. After a long time her aunt returned; there were all the evidences of weeping in her face. "You'd better go to your room and straighten it up," she said without looking at the girl. "The thing has aired long enough, I reckon. . . . And you'd better stay up there till I call you." Susan had finished the room, was about to unpack the heavy-laden shawl strap and shake the wrinkles out of the skirts, folded away for two days now. She heard the sound of a horse's hoofs, went to the window. A young man whom she recognized as one of her Uncle Zeke's tenants was hitching to the horse block a well-set-up young mare drawing a species of broad-seated breaking sulky. He had a handsome common face, a wavy black mustache. She remembered that his name was Ferguson--Jeb Ferguson, and that he was working on shares what was known as "the creek-bottom farm," which began about a mile and a half away, straight down the pasture hollow. He glanced up at the window, raised his black slouch hat, and nodded with the self-conscious, self-assured grin of the desired of women. She tried to return this salute with a pleasant smile. He entered the gate and she heard his boots upon the front steps. Now away across the hollow another figure appeared--a man on horseback coming through the wheat fields. He was riding toward the farther gate of the pasture at a leisurely dignified pace. She had only made out that he had abundant whiskers when the sound of a step upon the stairs caused her to turn. As that step came nearer her heart beat more and more wildly. Her wide eyes fixed upon the open door of the room. It was her Uncle George. "Sit down," he said as he reached the threshold. "I want to talk to you." She seated herself, with hands folded in her lap. Her head was aching from the beat of the blood in her temples. "Zeke and I have talked it over," said Warham. "And we've decided that the only thing to do with you is to get you settled. So in a few minutes now you're going to be married." Her lack of expression showed that she did not understand. In fact, she could only feel--feel the cruel, contemptuous anger of that voice which all her days before had caressed her. "We've picked out a good husband for you," Warham continued. "It's Jeb Ferguson." Susan quivered. "I--I don't want to," she said. "It ain't a question of what you want," retorted Warham roughly. He was twenty-four hours and a night's sleep away from his first fierce outblazing of fury--away from the influence of his wife and his daughter. If it had not been for his brother Zeke, narrow and cold, the event might have been different. But Zeke was there to keep his "sense of duty" strong. And that he might nerve himself and hide and put down any tendency to be a "soft-hearted fool"--a tendency that threatened to grow as he looked at the girl--the child--he assumed the roughest manner he could muster. "It ain't a question of what you want," he repeated. "It's a question of what's got to be done, to save my family and you, too--from disgrace. We ain't going to have any more bastards in this family." The word meant nothing to the girl. But the sound of it, as her uncle pronounced it, made her feel as though the blood were drying up in her veins. "We ain't going to take any chances," pursued Warham, less roughly; for now that he had looked the situation full and frankly in the face, he had no nerve to brace himself. The necessity of what he was prepared to do and to make her do was too obvious. "Ferguson's here, and Zeke saw the preacher we sent for riding in from the main road. So I've come to tell you. If you'd like to fix up a little, why your Aunt Sallie'll be here in a minute. You want to pray God to make you a good wife. And you ought to be thankful you have sensible relations to step in and save you from yourself." Susan tried to speak; her voice died in her throat. She made another effort. "I don't want to," she said. "Then what do you want to do--tell me that!" exclaimed her uncle, rough again. For her manner was very moving, the more so because there was none of the usual appeal to pity and to mercy. She was silent. "There isn't anything else for you to do." "I want to--to stay here." "Do you think Zeke'd harbor you--when you're about certain to up and disgrace us as your mother did?" "I haven't done anything wrong," said the girl dully. "Don't you dare lie about that!" "I've seen Ruth do the same with Artie Sinclair--and all the girls with different boys." "You miserable girl!" cried her uncle. "I never heard it was so dreadful to let a boy kiss you." "Don't pretend to be innocent. You know the difference between that and what you did!" Susan realized that when she had kissed Sam she had really loved him. Perhaps that was the fatal difference. And her mother--the sin there had been that she really loved while the man hadn't. Yes, it must be so. Ruth's explanation of these mysteries had been different; but then Ruth had also admitted that she knew little about the matter--and Susan most doubted the part that Ruth had assured her was certainly true. "I didn't know," said Susan to her uncle. "Nobody ever told me. I thought we were engaged." "A good woman don't need to be told," retorted Warham. "But I'm not going to argue with you. You've got to marry." "I couldn't do that," said the girl. "No, I couldn't." "You'll either take him or you go back to Sutherland and I'll have you locked up in the jail till you can be sent to the House of Correction. You can take your choice." Susan sat looking at her slim brown hands and interlacing her long fingers. The jail! The House of Correction was dreadful enough, for though she had never seen it she had heard what it was for, what kind of boys and girls lived there. But the jail--she had seen the jail, back behind the courthouse, with its air of mystery and of horror. Not Hell itself seemed such a frightful thing as that jail. "Well--which do you choose?" said her uncle in a sharp voice. The girl shivered. "I don't care what happens to me," she said, and her voice was dull and sullen and hard. "And it doesn't much matter," sneered Warham. Every time he looked at her his anger flamed again at the outrage to his love, his trust, his honor, and the impending danger of more illegitimacy. "Marrying Jeb will give you a chance to reform and be a good woman. He understands--so you needn't be afraid of what he'll find out." "I don't care what happens to me," the girl repeated in the same monotonous voice. Warham rose. "I'll send your Aunt Sallie," said he. "And when I call, she'll bring you down." The girl's silence, her non-resistance the awful expression of her still features--made him uneasy. He went to the window instead of to the door. He glanced furtively at her; but he might have glanced openly as there wasn't the least danger of meeting her eyes. "You're marrying about as well as you could have hoped to, anyhow--better, probably," he observed, in an argumentative, defensive tone. "Zeke says Jeb's about the likeliest young fellow he knows--a likelier fellow than either Zeke or I was at his age. I've given him two thousand dollars in cash. That ought to start you off well." And he went out without venturing another look at her. Her youth and helplessness, her stony misery, were again making it harder for him to hold himself to what he and the fanatic Zeke had decided to be his duty as a Christian, as a father, as a guardian. Besides, he did not dare face his wife and his daughter until the whole business was settled respectably and finally. His sister-in-law was waiting in the next room. As soon as his descent cleared the way she hurried in. From the threshold she glanced at the girl; what she saw sent her hurrying out to recompose herself. But the instant she again saw that expression of mute and dazed despair the tears fought for release. The effort to suppress outward signs of pity made her plain fat face grotesque. She could not speak. With a corner of her apron she wiped imaginary dust from the glass bells that protected the artificial flowers. The poor child! And all for no fault of hers--and because she had been born out of wedlock. But then, the old woman reflected, was it not one of the most familiar of God's mysterious ways that people were punished most severely of all for the things that weren't their fault--for being born in shame, or in bad or low families, or sickly, or for being stupid or ugly or ignorant? She envied Zeke--his unwavering belief in religion. She believed, but her tender heart was always leading her into doubts. She at last got some sort of control over her voice. "It'll turn out for the best," she said, with her back to Susan. "It don't make much difference nohow who a woman marries, so long as he's steady and a good provider. Jeb seems to be a nice feller. He's better looking than your Uncle George was before he went to town and married a Lenox and got sleeked up. And Jeb ain't near so close as some. That's a lot in a husband." And in a kind of hysteria, bred of fear of silence just then, she rattled on, telling how this man lay awake o' nights thinking how to skin a flea for its hide and tallow, how that one had said only a fool would pay over a quarter for a new hat for his wife---- "Will it be long?" asked the girl. "I'll go down and see," said Mrs. Warham, glad of a real excuse for leaving the room. She began to cry as soon as she was in the hall. Two sparrows lit upon the window sill near Susan and screamed and pecked at each other in a mock fight. She watched them; but her shiver at the faint sound of her aunt's returning step far away down the stairs showed where her attention was. When Zeke's wife entered she was standing and said: "Is it time?" "Come on, honey. Now don't be afraid." Susan advanced with a firm step, preceded her aunt down the stairs. The black slouch hat and the straw of dignified cut were side by side on the shiny hall table. The parlor door was open; the rarely used showroom gave forth an earthy, moldy odor like that of a disturbed grave. Its shutters, for the first time in perhaps a year, were open; the mud daubers that had built in the crevices between shutters and sills, fancying they would never be disturbed, were buzzing crossly about their ruined homes. The four men were seated, each with his legs crossed, and each wearing the funereal expression befitting a solemn occasion. Susan did not lift her eyes. The profusely whiskered man seated on the haircloth sofa smoothed his black alpaca coat, reset the black tie deep hid by his beard, rose and advanced with a clerical smile whose real kindliness took somewhat from its offensive unction. "This is the young lady, is it?" said he, reaching for Susan's rising but listless hand. "She is indeed a _young_ lady!" The two Warham men stood, shifting uneasily from leg to leg and rubbing their faces from time to time. Sallie Warham was standing also, her big unhealthy face twitching fantastically. Jeb alone was seated--chair tilted back, hands in trousers pockets, a bucolic grin of embarrassment giving an expression of pain to his common features. A strained silence, then Zeke Warham said: "I reckon we might as well go ahead." The preacher took a small black-bound book from the inside pocket of his limp and dusty coat, cleared his throat, turned over the pages. That rustling, the creaking of his collar on his overstarched shirt band, and the buzzing of the mud daubers round the windows were the only sounds. The preacher found the place, cleared his throat again. "Mr. Ferguson----" Jeb, tall, spare, sallow, rose awkwardly. "--You and Miss Lenox will take your places here----" and he indicated a position before him. Susan was already in place; Jeb shuffled up to stand at her left. Sallie Warham hid her face in her apron. The preacher cleared his throat vigorously, began--"Dearly beloved"--and so on and on. When he put the questions to Susan and Jeb he told them what answer was expected, and they obeyed him, Jeb muttering, Susan with a mere, movement of the lips. When he had finished--a matter of less than three minutes--he shook hands warmly first with Susan, then with Jeb. "Live in the fear of the Lord," he said. "That's all that's necessary." Sallie put down her apron. Her face was haggard and gray. She kissed Susan tenderly, then led her from the room. They went upstairs to the bedroom. "Do you want to stay to dinner?" she asked in the hoarse undertone of funeral occasions. "Or would you rather go right away?" "I'd rather go," said the girl. "You set down and make yourself comfortable. I'll hook up your shawl strap." Susan sat by the window, her hands in her lap. The hand with the new circlet of gold on it was uppermost. Sallie busied herself with the bundle; abruptly she threw her apron over her face, knelt by the bed and sobbed and uttered inarticulate moans. The girl made no sound, did not move, looked unseeingly at her inert hands. A few moments and Sallie set to work again. She soon had the bundle ready, brought Susan's hat, put it on. "It's so hot, I reckon you'll carry your jacket. I ain't seen as pretty a blue dress as this--yet it's plain-like, too." She went to the top of the stairs. "She wants to go, Jeb," she called loudly. "You'd better get the sulky ready." The answer from below was the heavy thump of Jeb's boots on the oilcloth covering of the hall floor. Susan, from the window, dully watched the young farmer unhitch the mare and lead her up in front of the gate. "Come on, honey," said Aunt Sallie, taking up the bundle. The girl--she seemed a child now--followed her. On the front stoop were George and his brother and the preacher. The men made room for them to pass. Sallie opened the gate; Susan went out. "You'll have to hold the bundle," said Sallie. Susan mounted to the seat, took the bundle on her knees. Jeb, who had the lines, left the mare's head and got up beside his bride. "Good day, all," he said, nodding at the men on the stoop. "Good day, Mrs. Warham." "Come and see us real soon," said Sallie. Her fat chin was quivering; her tired-looking, washed-out eyes gazed mournfully at the girl who was acting and looking as if she were walking in her sleep. "Good day, all," repeated Jeb, and again he made the clucking sound. "Good-by and God bless you," said the preacher. His nostrils were luxuriously sniffing the air which bore to them odors of cookery. The mare set out. Susan's gaze rested immovably upon the heavy bundle in her lap. As the road was in wretched repair, Jeb's whole attention was upon his driving. At the gate between barnyard and pasture he said, "You hold the lines while I get down." Susan's fingers closed mechanically upon the strips of leather. Jeb led the mare through the gate, closed it, resumed his seat. This time the mare went on without exacting the clucking sound. They were following the rocky road along the wester hillside of the pasture hollow. As they slowly made their way among the deep ruts and bowlders, from frequent moistenings of the lips and throats, noises, and twitchings of body and hands, it was evident that the young farmer was getting ready for conversation. The struggle at last broke surface with, "Zeke Warham don't waste no time road patchin'--does he?" Susan did not answer. Jeb studied her out of the corner of his eye, the first time a fairly good bit of roadway permitted. He could make nothing of her face except that it was about the prettiest he had ever seen. Plainly she was not eager to get acquainted; still, acquainted they must get. So he tried again: "My sister Keziah--she keeps house for me--she'll be mighty surprised when I turn up with a wife. I didn't let on to her what I was about, nary a word." He laughed and looked expectantly at the girl. Her expression was unchanged. Jeb again devoted himself to his driving. "No, I didn't let on," he presently resumed. "Fact is, I wan't sure myself till I seed you at the winder." He smiled flirtatiously at her. "Then I decided to go ahead. I dunno, but I somehow kinder allow you and me'll hit it off purty well--don't you?" Susan tried to speak. She found that she could not--that she had nothing to say. "You're the kind of a girl I always had my mind set on," pursued Jeb, who was an expert love-maker. "I like a smooth skin and pouty lips that looks as if they wanted to be kissed." He took the reins in one hand, put his arm round her, clumsily found her lips with his. She shrank slightly, then submitted. But Jeb somehow felt no inclination to kiss her again. After a moment he let his arm drop away from her waist and took the reins in both hands with an elaborate pretense that the bad road compelled it. A long silence, then he tried again: "It's cool and nice under these here trees, ain't it?" "Yes," she said. "I ain't saw you out here for several years now. How long has it been?" "Three summers ago." "You must 'a' growed some. I don't seem to recollect you. You like the country?" "Yes." "Sho! You're just sayin' that. You want to live in town. Well, so do I. And as soon as I get things settled a little I'm goin' to take what I've got and the two thousand from your Uncle George and open up a livery stable in town." Susan's strange eyes turned upon him. "In Sutherland?" she asked breathlessly. "Right in Sutherland," replied he complacently. "I think I'll buy Jake Antle's place in Jefferson Street." Susan was blanched and trembling. "Oh, no," she cried. "You mustn't do that!" Jeb laughed. "You see if I don't. And we'll live in style, and you can keep a gal and stay dolled up all the time. Oh, I know how to treat you." "I want to stay in the country," cried Susan. "I hate Sutherland." "Now, don't you be afraid," soothed Jeb. "When people see you've got a husband and money they'll not be down on you no more. They'll forget all about your maw--and they won't know nothin' about the other thing. You treat me right and I'll treat you right. I'm not one to rake up the past. There ain't arry bit of meanness about me!" "But you'll let me stay here in the country?" pleaded Susan. Her imagination was torturing her with pictures of herself in Sutherland and the people craning and whispering and mocking. "You go where I go," replied Jeb. "A woman's place is with her man. And I'll knock anybody down that looks cockeyed at you." "Oh!" murmured Susan, sinking back against the support. "Don't you fret, Susie," ordered Jeb, confident and patronizing. "You do what I say and everything'll be all right. That's the way to get along with me and get nice clothes--do what I say. With them that crosses me I'm mighty ugly. But you ain't a-goin' to cross me. . . . Now, about the house. I reckon I'd better send Keziah off right away. You kin cook?" "A--a little," said Susan. Jeb looked relieved. "Then she'd be in the way. Two women about always fights--and Keziah's got the Ferguson temper. She's afraid of me, but now and then she fergits and has a tantrum." Jeb looked at her with a smile and a frown. "Perk up a little," he more than half ordered. "I don't want Keziah jeerin' at me." Susan made a pitiful effort to smile. He eyed it sourly, grunted, gave the mare a cut with the whip that caused her to leap forward in a gallop. "Whoa!" he yelled. "Whoa--damn you!" And he sawed cruelly at her mouth until she quieted down. A turning and they were before a shallow story-and-a-half frame house which squatted like an old roadside beggar behind a weather-beaten picket fence. The sagging shingle roof sloped abruptly; there were four little windows downstairs and two smaller upstairs. The door was in the center of the house; a weedy path led from its crooked step, between two patches of weedy grass, to the gate in the fence. "Whoa!" shouted Jeb, with the double purpose of stopping the mare and informing the house of his arrival. Then to Susan: "You git down and I'll drive round to the barn yonder." He nodded toward a dilapidated clapboard structure, small and mean, set between a dirty lopsided straw heap and a manure heap. "Go right in and make yourself at home. Tell Keziah who you air. I'll be along, soon as I unhitch and feed the mare." Susan was staring stupidly at the house--at her new home. "Git down," he said sharply. "You don't act as if your hearin' or your manners was much to brag on." He felt awkward and embarrassed with this delicately bred, lovely child-woman in the, to him, wonderfully fine and fashionable dress. To hide his nervousness and to brave it out, he took the only way he knew, the only way shy people usually know--the way of gruffness. It was not a ferocious gruffness for a man of his kind; but it seemed so to her who had been used to gentleness only, until these last few days. His grammar, his untrained voice, his rough clothes, the odor of stale sweat and farm labor he exhaled, made him horrible to her--though she only vaguely knew why she felt so wretched and why her body shrank from him. She stepped down from the sulky, almost falling in her dizziness and blindness. Jeb touched the mare with the whip and she was alone before the house--a sweet forlorn figure, childish, utterly out of place in those surroundings. On the threshold, in faded and patched calico, stood a tall gaunt woman with a family likeness to Jeb. She had thin shiny black hair, a hard brown skin, high cheekbones and snapping black eyes. When her thin lips parted she showed on the left side of the mouth three large and glittering gold teeth that in the contrast made their gray, not too clean neighbors seem white. "Howdy!" she called in a tone of hostility. Susan tried in vain to respond. She stood gazing. "What d'ye want?" "He he told me to go in," faltered Susan. She had no sense of reality. It was a dream--only a dream--and she would awaken in her own clean pretty pale-gray bedroom with Ruth gayly calling her to come down to breakfast. "Who are you?" demanded Keziah--for at a glance it was the sister. "I'm--I'm Susan Lenox." "Oh--Zeke Warham's niece. Come right in." And Keziah looked as if she were about to bite and claw. Susan pushed open the latchless gate, went up the short path to the doorstep. "I think I'll wait till he comes," she said. "No. Come in and sit down, Miss Lenox." And Keziah drew a rush-bottomed rocking chair toward the doorway. Susan was looking at the interior. The lower floor of the house was divided into three small rooms. This central room was obviously the parlor--the calico-covered sofa, the center table, the two dingy chromos, and a battered cottage organ made that certain. On the floor was a rag carpet; on the walls, torn and dirty paper, with huge weather stains marking where water had leaked from the roof down the supporting beams. Keziah scowled at Susan's frank expression of repulsion for the surroundings. Susan seated herself on the edge of the chair, put her bundle beside her. "I allow you'll stay to dinner," said Keziah. "Yes," replied Susan. "Then I'll go put on some more to cook." "Oh, no--please don't--I couldn't eat anything--really, I couldn't." The girl spoke hysterically. Just then Jeb came round the house and appeared in the doorway. He grinned and winked at Susan, looked at his sister. "Well, Keziah," said he, "what d'ye think of her?" "She says she's going to stay to dinner," observed Keziah, trying to maintain the veneer of manners she had put on for company. The young man laughed loudly. "That's a good one--that is!" he cried, nodding and winking at Susan. "So you ain't tole her? Well, Keziah, I've been and gone and got married. And there _she_ is." "Shut up--you fool!" said Keziah. And she looked apologetically at their guest. But the expression of Susan's face made her catch her breath. "For the Lord's sake!" she ejaculated. "She ain't married _you!_" "Why not?" demanded Jeb. "Ain't this a free country? Ain't I as good as anybody?" Keziah blew out her breath in a great gust and seated herself on the tattered calico cover of the sofa. Susan grew deathly white. Her hands trembled. Then she sat quiet upon the edge of the old rush-bottomed chair. There was a terrible silence, broken by Jeb's saying loudly and fiercely, "Keziah, you go get the dinner. Then you pack your duds and clear out for Uncle Bob's." Keziah stared at the bride, rose and went to the rear door. "I'm goin' now," she answered. "The dinner's ready except for putting on the table." Through the flimsy partitions they heard her mounting the uncarpeted stairs, hustling about upon an uncarpeted floor above, and presently descending. "I'll hoof it," she said, reappearing in the doorway. "I'll send for my things this afternoon." Jeb, not caring to provoke the "Ferguson temper," said nothing. "As for this here marryin'," continued Keziah, "I never allowed you'd fall so low as to take a baby, and a bastard at that." She whirled away. Jeb flung his hat on the table, flung himself on the sofa. "Well--that's settled," said he. "You kin get the dinner. It's all in there." And he jerked his head toward the door in the partition to the left. Susan got up, moved toward the indicated door. Jeb laughed. "Don't you think you might take off your hat and stay awhile?" said he. She removed her hat, put it on top of the bundle which she left on the floor beside the rocking chair. She went into the kitchen dining-room. It was a squalid room, its ceiling and walls smoke-stained from the cracked and never polished stove in the corner. The air was foul with the strong old onions stewing on the stove. In a skillet slices of pork were frying. On the back of the stove stood a pan of mashed potatoes and a tin coffeepot. On the stained flowered cloth which covered the table in the middle of the room had been laid coarse, cracked dishes and discolored steel knives and forks with black wooden handles. Susan, half fainting, dropped into a chair by one of the open windows. A multitude of fat flies from the stable were running and crawling everywhere, were buzzing about her head. She was aroused by Jeb's voice: "Why, what the--the damnation! You've fell asleep!" She started up. "In a minute!" she muttered, nervously. And somehow, with Jeb's eyes on her from the doorway, she got the evil-smelling messes from the stove into table dishes from the shelves and then on the table, where the flies descended upon them in troops of scores and hundreds. Jeb, in his shirt sleeves now, sat down and fell to. She sat opposite him, her hands in her lap. He used his knife in preference to his fork, leaping the blade high, packing the food firmly upon it with fork or fingers, then thrusting it into his mouth. He ate voraciously, smacking his lips, breathing hard, now and then eructing with frank energy and satisfaction. "My stummick's gassy right smart this year," he observed after a huge gulp of coffee. "Some says the heavy rains last spring put gas into everything, but I dunno. Maybe it's Keziah's cooking. I hope you'll do better. Why, you ain't eatin' nothin'!" "I'm not hungry," said Susan. Then, as he frowned suspiciously, "I had a late breakfast." He laughed. "And the marrying, too," he suggested with a flirtatious nod and wink. "Women's always upset by them kind of things." When he had filled himself he pushed his chair back. "I'll set with you while you wash up," said he. "But you'd better take off them Sunday duds. You'll find some calikers that belonged to maw in a box under the bed in our room." He laughed and winked at her. "That's the one on t'other side of the settin'-room. Yes--that's our'n!" And he winked again. The girl, ghastly white, her great eyes staring like a sleepwalker's, rose and stood resting one hand on the back of the chair to steady her. Jeb drew a cigar from his waistcoat pocket and lighted it. "Usually," said he, "I take a pipe or a chaw. But this bein' a weddin' day----" He laughed and winked again, rose, took her in his arms and kissed her. She made a feeble gesture of thrusting him away. Her head reeled, her stomach turned. She got away as soon as he would release her, crossed the sitting-room and entered the tiny dingy bedroom. The windows were down and the bed had not yet been made. The odor was nauseating--the staleness left by a not too clean sleeper who abhors fresh air. Susan saw the box under the bed, knelt to draw it out. But instead she buried her face in her hands, burst into wild sobs. "Oh, God," she prayed, "stop punishing me. I didn't mean to do wrong--and I'm sure my mother didn't, either. Stop, for Thy Son's sake, amen." Now surely she would wake. God must answer that prayer. She dared not take her palms from her eyes. Suddenly she felt herself caught from behind. She gave a wild scream and sprang up. Jeb was looking at her with eyes that filled her with a fear more awful than the fear of death. "Don't!" she cried. "Don't!" "Never mind, hon," said he in a voice that was terrible just because it was soft. "It's only your husband. My, but you're purty!" And he seized her. She fought. He crushed her. He kissed her with great slobbering smacks and gnawed at the flesh of her neck with teeth that craved to bite. "Oh, Mr. Ferguson, for pity's sake!" she wailed. Then she opened her mouth wide as one gasping for breath where there is no air; and pushing at him with all her strength she vented a series of maniac shrieks. CHAPTER X LATE that afternoon Jeb returned to the house after several hours of uneasy, aimless pottering about at barn and woodshed. He stumped and stamped around the kitchen, then in the sitting-room, finally he mustered the courage to look into the bedroom, from which he had slunk like a criminal three hours before. There she lay, apparently in the same position. Her waxen color and her absolute stillness added fear to his sense of guilt--a guilt against which he protested, because he felt he had simply done what God and man expected of him. He stood in the low doorway for some time, stood there peering and craning until his fear grew so great that he could no longer put off ending or confirming it. "Sleepin'?" said he in a hoarse undertone. She did not reply; she did not move. He could not see that she was breathing. "It'll soon be time to git supper," he went on--not because he was thinking of supper but because he was desperately clutching for something that must draw a reply from her--if she could reply. "Want me to clean up the dinner and put the supper things on?" She made a feeble effort to rise, sank back again. He drew an audible sigh of relief; at least she was not what her color had suggested. In fact, she was morbidly conscious. The instant she had heard him at the outer door she had begun to shiver and shake, and not until he moved toward the bedroom door did she become quiet. Then a calm had come into her nerves and her flesh--the calm that descends upon the brave when the peril actually faces. As he stood there her eyes were closed, but the smell of him--beneath the earthy odor of his clothing the odor of the bodies of those who eat strong, coarse food--stole into her nostrils, into her nerves. Her whole body sickened and shrank--for to her now that odor meant marriage--and she would not have believed Hell contained or Heaven permitted such a thing as was marriage. She understood now why the Bible always talked of man as a vile creature born in sin. Jeb was stealthily watching her ghastly face, her limp body. "Feelin' sickish?" he asked. A slight movement of the head in assent. "I kin ride over to Beecamp and fetch Doc Christie." Another and negative shake of the head, more determined. The pale lips murmured, "No--no, thank you." She was not hating him. He existed for her only as a symbol, in this hideous dream called life, that was coiled like a snake about her and was befouling her and stinging her to death. "Don't you bother 'bout supper," said he with gruff, shamefaced generosity. "I'll look out for myself, this onct." He withdrew to the kitchen, where she heard him clattering dishes and pans. Daylight waned to twilight, twilight to dusk, to darkness. She did not think; she did not feel, except an occasional dull pang from some bodily bruise. Her soul, her mind, were absolutely numb. Suddenly a radiance beat upon her eyes. All in an instant, before the lifting of her eyelids, soul and body became exquisitely acute; for she thought it was he come again, with a lamp. She looked; it was the moon whose beams struck full in at the uncurtained window and bathed her face in their mild brightness. She closed her eyes again and presently fell asleep--the utter relaxed sleep of a child that is worn out with pain, when nature turns gentle nurse and sets about healing and soothing as only nature can. When she awoke it was with a scream. No, she was not dreaming; there was an odor in the room--his odor, with that of a saloon added to it. After cooking and eating supper he had taken the jug from its concealment behind the woodbox and had proceeded to cheer his drooped spirits. The more he drank the better content he was with himself, with his conduct, and the clearer became his conviction that the girl was simply playing woman's familiar game of dainty modesty. A proper game it was too; only a man must not pay attention to it unless he wished his woman to despise him. When this conviction reached the point of action he put away the jug, washed the glass, ate a liberal mouthful of the left-over stewed onions, as he would not for worlds have his bride catch him tippling. He put out the lamp and went to the bedroom, chuckling to himself like a man about to play a particularly clever and extremely good-humored practical joke. His preparations for the night were, as always, extremely simple merely a flinging off of his outer clothes and, in summer, his socks. From time to time he cast an admiring amorous glance at the lovely childlike face in the full moonlight. As he was about to stretch himself on the bed beside her he happened to note that she was dressed as when she came. That stylish, Sundayish dress was already too much mussed and wrinkled. He leaned over to wake her with a kiss. It was then that she started up with a scream. "Oh--oh--my God!" she exclaimed, passing her hand over her brow and staring at him with crazed, anguished eyes. "It's jest me," said he. "Thought you'd want to git ready fur bed, like as not." "No, thank you, no," she stammered, drawing away toward the inner side of the bed. "Please I want to be as I am." "Now, don't put on, sweetness," he wheedled. "You know you're married and 'ave got to git used to it." He laid his hand on her arm. She had intended to obey, since that was the law of God and man and since in all the world there was no other place for her, nameless and outcast. But at his touch she clenched her teeth, cried: "No--Mr. Ferguson--please--_please_ let me be." "Now, hon," he pleaded, seizing her with strong gentleness. "There ain't no call to be skittish. We're married, you know." She wrenched herself free. He seized her again. "What's the use of puttin' on? I know all about you. You little no-name," he cursed, when her teeth sank into his hand. For an instant, at that reminder of her degradation, her indelible shame that made her of the low and the vile, she collapsed in weakness. Then with new and fierce strength she fought again. When she had exhausted herself utterly she relaxed, fell to sobbing and moaning, feebly trying to shelter her face from his gluttonous and odorous kisses. And upon the scene the moon shone in all that beauty which from time immemorial has filled the hearts of lovers with ecstasy and of devotees with prayer. They lay quietly side by side; he fell into a profound sleep. He was full upon his back, his broad chest heaving in the gray cotton undershirt, his mouth wide open with its upper fringe of hair in disarray and agitated by his breath. Soon he began to snore, a deafening clamor that set some loose object in the dark part of the room to vibrating with a tapping sound. Susan stealthily raised herself upon her elbow, looked at him. There was neither horror nor fear in her haggard face but only eagerness to be sure he would not awaken. She, inch by inch, more softly than a cat, climbed over the low footboard, was standing on the floor. One silent step at a time, with eyes never from his face so clear in the moonlight, she made her way toward the door. The snoring stopped--and her heart stopped with it. He gasped, gurgled, gave a snort, and sat up. "What--which----" he ejaculated. Then he saw her near the door. "Hello--whar ye goin'?" "I thought I'd undress," she lied, calmly and smoothly. "Oh--that's right." And he lay down. She stood in the darkness, making now and then a faint sound suggestive of undressing. The snoring began again--soft, then deep, then the steady, uproarious intake with the fierce whistling exhalation. She went into the sitting-room, felt round in the darkness, swift and noiseless. On the sofa she found her bundle, tore it open. By feeling alone she snatched her sailor hat, a few handkerchiefs, two stockings, a collar her fingers chanced upon and a toothbrush. She darted to the front door, was outside, was gliding down the path, out through the gate into the road. To the left would be the way she had come. She ran to the right, with never a backward glance--ran with all the speed in her lithe young body, ran with all the energy of her fear and horror and resolve to die rather than be taken. For a few hundred yards the road lay between open fields. But after that it entered a wood. And in that dimness she felt the first beginnings of a sense of freedom. Half a mile and open fields again, with a small house on the right, a road southeastward on the left. That would be away from her Uncle Zeke's and also away from Sutherland, which lay twenty miles to the southwest. When she would be followed Jeb would not think of this direction until he had exhausted the other two. She walked, she ran, she rested; she walked and ran and walked again. The moon ascended to the zenith, crossed the levels of the upper sky, went down in the west; a long bar of dusky gray outlined a cloud low upon the horizon in the northeast. She was on the verge of collapse. Her skin, the inside of her mouth, were hot and dry. She had to walk along at snail's pace or her heart would begin to beat as if it were about to burst and the blood would choke up into the veins of her throat to suffocate her. A terrible pain came in her side--came and went--came and stayed. She had passed turning after turning, to the right, to the left--crossroads leading away in all directions. She had kept to the main road because she did not wish to lose time, perhaps return upon her path, in the confusion of the darkness. Now she began to look about her at the country. It was still the hills as round Zeke Warham's--the hills of southeastern Indiana. But they were steeper and higher, for she was moving toward the river. There was less open ground, more and denser undergrowth and forest. She felt that she was in a wilderness, was safe. Night still lay too thick upon the landscape for her to distinguish anything but outlines. She sat down on the ruined and crumbling panel of a zigzag fence to rest and to wait for light. She listened; a profound hush. She was alone, all alone. How far had she come? She could not guess; but she knew that she had done well. She would have been amazed if she had known how well. All the years of her life, thanks to Mrs. Warham's good sense about health, she had been steadily adding to the vitality and strength that were hers by inheritance. Thus, the response to this first demand upon them had been almost inevitable. It augured well for the future, if the future should draw her into hardships. She knew she had gone far and in what was left of the night and with what was left of her strength she would put such a distance between her and them that they would never believe she had got so far, even should they seek in this direction. She was supporting her head upon her hands, her elbows upon her knees. Her eyes closed, her head nodded; she fought against the impulse, but she slept. When she straightened up with a start it was broad day. The birds must have finished their morning song, for there was only happy, comfortable chirping in the branches above her. She rose stiffly. Her legs, her whole body, ached; and her feet were burning and blistered. But she struck out resolutely. After she had gone halfway down a long steep hill, she had to turn back because she had left her only possessions. It was a weary climb, and her heart quaked with terror. But no one appeared, and at last she was once more at the ruins of the fence panel. There lay her sailor hat, the handkerchiefs, wrapped round the toothbrush, the collar--and two stockings, one black, the other brown. And where was her purse? Not there, certainly. She glanced round in swift alarm. No one. Yet she had been absolutely sure she had taken her purse from the sitting-room table when she came upon it, feeling about in the dark. She had forgotten it; she was without a cent! But she had no time to waste in self-reproaches or forebodings. Though the stockings would be of no use to her, she took them along because to leave them was to leave a trail. She hastened down the hill. At the bottom ran a deep creek--without a bridge. The road was now a mere cowpath which only the stoutest vehicles or a horseman would adventure. To her left ran an even wilder trail, following the downward course of the creek. She turned out of the road, entered the trail. She came to a place where the bowlders over which the creek foamed and splashed as it hurried southeastward were big and numerous enough to make a crossing. She took it, went slowly on down the other bank. There was no sign of human intrusion. Steeply on either side rose a hill, strewn with huge bowlders, many of them large as large houses. The sun filtered through the foliage to make a bright pattern upon the carpet of last year's leaves. The birds twittered and chirped; the creek hummed its drowsy, soothing melody. She was wretchedly weary, and Oh, so hungry! A little further, and two of the great bowlders, tumbled down from the steeps, had cut off part of the creek, had formed a pool which their seamed and pitted and fern-adorned walls hid from all observation except that of the birds and the squirrels in the boughs. At once she thought how refreshed she would be if she could bathe in those cool waters. She looked round, stepped in between the bowlders. She peered out; she listened. She was safe; she drew back into her little inclosure. There was a small dry shelf of rock. She hurried off her clothes, stood a moment in the delicious warmth of the sunshine, stepped into the pool. She would have liked to splash about; but she dared make no sound that could be heard above the noise of the water. Luckily the creek was just there rather loud, as it was expressing its extreme annoyance over the stolid impudence of the interrupting bowlders. While she was waiting for the sun to dry her she looked at her underclothes. She simply could not put them on as they were. She knelt at the edge of the shelf and rinsed them out as well as she could. Then she spread them on the thick tufts of overhanging fern where the hot sun would get full swing at them. The brown stocking of the two mismates she had brought along almost matched the pair she was wearing. As there was a hole in the toe of one of them, she discarded it, and so had one fresh stocking. She dried her feet thoroughly with the stocking she was discarding. Then she put her corsets and her dress directly upon her body. She could not afford to wait until the underclothes dried; she would carry them until she found for herself a more remote and better hiding place where she could await nightfall. She stuffed the stocking with the hole deep into a cleft in the rock and laid a small stone upon it so that it was concealed. Here where there were no traces, no reminders of the human race which had cast her out and pursued her with torture of body and soul, here in the wilderness her spirits were going up, and her young eyes were looking hopefully round and forward. The up-piling horrors of those two days and their hideous climax seemed a dream which the sun had scattered. Hopefully! That blessed inexperience and sheer imagination of youth enabling it to hope in a large, vague way when to hope for any definite and real thing would be impossible. She cleaned her tan low shoes with branches of fern and grass, put them on. It is impossible to account for the peculiarities of physical vanity. Probably no one was ever born who had not physical vanity of some kind; Susan's was her feet and ankles. Not her eyes, nor her hair, nor her contour, nor her skin, nor her figure, though any or all of these might well have been her pleasure. Of them she never thought in the way of pride or vanity. But of her feet and ankles she was both proud and vain--in a reserved, wholly unobtrusive way, be it said, so quietly that she had passed unsuspected. There was reason for this shy, secret self-satisfaction, so amusing in one otherwise self-unconscious. Her feet were beautifully formed and the curves of her instep and ankle were beautiful. She gave more attention now to the look of her shoes and of her stockings than to all the rest of this difficult woodland toilet. She then put on the sailor hat, fastened the collar to her garter, slipped the handkerchiefs into the legs of her stockings. Carrying her underclothes, ready to roll them into a ball should she meet anyone, she resumed her journey into that rocky wilderness. She was sore, she had pains that were the memories of the worst horrors of her hideous dream, but up in her strong, healthy body, up through her strong young soul, surged joy of freedom and joy of hope. Compared with what her lot had been until such a few brief days before, this lot of friendless wanderer in the wilderness was dark indeed. But she was comparing it with the monstrous dream from which it was the awakening. She was almost happy--and madly hungry. An enormous bowlder, high above her and firmly fixed in the spine of the hill, invited as a place where she could see without being seen, could hide securely until darkness came again. She climbed to the base of it, found that she might reach the top by stepping from ledge to ledge with the aid of the trees growing so close around it that some of their boughs seemed rooted in its weather-dented cliffs. She dragged herself upward the fifty or sixty feet, glad of the difficulties because they would make any pursuer feel certain she had not gone that way. After perhaps an hour she came upon a flat surface where soil had formed, where grass and wild flowers and several little trees gave shade and a place to sleep. And from her eyrie she commanded a vast sweep of country--hills and valleys, fields, creeks, here and there lonely farmhouses, and far away to the east the glint of the river! To the river! That was her destination. And somehow it would be kind, would take her where she would never, never dream those frightful dreams again! She went to the side of the bowlder opposite that which she had climbed. She drew back hastily, ready to cry with vexation. It was not nearly so high or so steep; and on the slope of the hill a short distance away was set a little farmhouse, with smoke curling up from its rough stone chimney. She dropped to all fours in the tall grass and moved cautiously toward the edge. Flat upon her breast, she worked her way to the edge and looked down. A faintly lined path led from the house through a gate in a zigzag fence and up to the base of her fortress. The rock had so crumbled on that side that a sort of path extended clear up to the top. But her alarm quieted somewhat when she noted how the path was grass-grown. As nearly as she could judge it was about five o'clock. So that smoke meant breakfast! Her eyes fixed hungrily upon the thin column of violet vapor mounting straight into the still morning air. When smoke rose in that fashion, she remembered, it was sure sign of clear weather. And then the thought came, "What if it had been raining!" She simply could not have got away. As she interestedly watched the little house and its yard she saw hurrying through the burdock and dog fennel toward the base of her rock a determined looking hen. Susan laughed silently, it was so obvious that the hen was on a pressing and secret business errand. But almost immediately her attention was distracted to observing the movements of a human being she could obscurely make out through one of the windows just back of the chimney. Soon she saw that it was a woman, cleaning up a kitchen after breakfast--the early breakfast of the farmhouse in summer. What had they had for breakfast? She sniffed the air. "I think I can smell ham and cornbread," she said aloud, and laughed, partly at the absurdity of her fancy, chiefly at the idea of such attractive food. She aggravated her hunger by letting her imagination loose upon the glorious possibilities. A stealthy fluttering brought her glance back to the point where the hen had disappeared. The hen reappeared, hastened down the path and through the weeds, and rejoined the flock in the yard with an air which seemed to say, "No, indeed, I've been right here all the time." "Now, what was she up to?" wondered Susan, and the answer came to her. Eggs! A nest hidden somewhere near or in the base of the rock! Could she get down to that nest without being seen from the house or from any other part of the region below? She drew back from the edge, crawled through the grass to the place where the path, if path it could be called, reached the top. She was delighted to find that it made the ascent through a wide cleft and not along the outside. She let herself down cautiously as the footway was crumbling and rotten and slippery with grass. At the lower end of the cleft she peered out. Trees and bushes--plenty of them, a thick shield between her and the valleys. She moved slowly downward; a misstep might send her through the boughs to the hillside forty feet below. She had gone up and down several times before her hunger-sharpened eyes caught the gleam of white through the ferns growing thickly out of the moist mossy cracks which everywhere seamed the wall. She pushed the ferns aside. There was the nest, the length of her forearm into the dim seclusion of a deep hole. She felt round, found the egg that was warm. And as she drew it out she laughed softly and said half aloud: "Breakfast is ready!" No, not quite ready. Hooking one arm round the bough of a tree that shot up from the hillside to the height of the rock and beyond, she pressed her foot firmly against the protecting root of an ancient vine of poison ivy. Thus ensconced, she had free hands; and she proceeded to remove the thin shell of the egg piece by piece. She had difficulty in restraining herself until the end. At last she put the whole egg into her mouth. And never had she tasted anything so good. But one egg was only an appetizer. She reached in again. She did not wish to despoil the meritorious hen unnecessarily, so she held the egg up in her inclosing fingers and looked through it, as she had often seen the cook do at home. She was not sure, but the inside seemed muddy. She laid it to one side, tried another. It was clear and she ate it as she had eaten the first. She laid aside the third, the fourth, and the fifth. The sixth seemed all right--but was not. Fortunately she had not been certain enough to feel justified in putting the whole egg into her mouth before tasting it. The taste, however, was enough to make her reflect that perhaps on the whole two eggs were sufficient for breakfast, especially as there would be at least dinner and supper before she could go further. As she did not wish to risk another descent, she continued to sort out the eggs. She found four that were, or seemed to be, all right. The thirteen that looked doubtful or worse when tested by the light she restored with the greatest care. It was an interesting illustration of the rare quality of consideration which at that period of her life dominated her character. She put the four eggs in the bosom of her blouse and climbed up to her eyrie. All at once she felt the delicious languor of body and mind which is Nature's forewarning that she is about to put us to sleep, whether we will or no. She lost all anxiety about safety, looked hastily around for a bed. She found just the place in a corner of the little tableland where the grass grew tall and thick. She took from her bosom the four eggs--her dinner and supper--and put them between the roots of a tree with a cover of broad leaves over them to keep them cool. She pulled grass to make a pillow, took off her collar and laid herself down to sleep. And that day's sun did not shine upon a prettier sight than this soundly and sweetly sleeping girl, with her oval face suffused by a gentle flush, with her rounded young shoulders just moving the bosom of her gray silk blouse, with her slim, graceful legs curled up to the edge of her carefully smoothed blue serge skirt. You would have said never a care, much less a sorrow, had shadowed her dawning life. And that is what it means to be young--and free from the curse of self-pity, and ignorant of life's saddest truth, that future and past are not two contrasts; one is surely bright and the other is sober, but they are parts of a continuous fabric woven of the same threads and into the same patterns from beginning to end. When she awoke, beautifully rested, her eyes clear and soft, the shadows which had been long toward the southwest were long, though not so long, toward the southeast. She sat up and smiled; it was so fine to be free! And her woes had not in the least shaken that serene optimism which is youth's most delightful if most dangerous possession. She crawled through the grass to the edge of the rock and looked out through the screening leaves of the dense undergrowth. There was no smoke from the chimney of the house. The woman, in a blue calico, was sitting on the back doorstep knitting. Farther away, in fields here and there, a few men--not a dozen in all--were at work. From a barnyard at the far edge of the western horizon came the faint sound of a steam thresher, and she thought she could see the men at work around it, but this might have been illusion. It was a serene and lovely panorama of summer and country. Last of all her eyes sought the glimpse of distant river. She ate two of her four eggs, put on the underclothes which were now thoroughly sun-dried, shook out and rebraided her hair. Then she cast about for some way to pass the time. She explored the whole top of the rock, but that did not use up more than fifteen minutes, as it was so small that every part was visible from every other part. However, she found a great many wild flowers and gathered a huge bouquet of the audacious colors of nature's gardens, so common yet so effective. She did a little botanizing--anything to occupy her mind and keep it from the ugly visions and fears. But all too soon she had exhausted the resources of her hiding place. She looked down into the valley to the north--the valley through which she had come. She might go down there and roam; it would be something to do, and her young impatience of restraint was making her so restless that she felt she could not endure the confines of that little rock. It had seemed huge; a brief experience of freedom, a few hours between her and the night's horrors and terrors, and it had shrunk to a tiny prison cell. Surely she would run no risk in journeying through that trackless wilderness; she need not be idle, she could hasten her destiny by following the creek in its lonely wanderings, which must sooner or later bring it to the river. The river! She was about to get the two remaining eggs and abandon her stronghold when it occurred to her that she would do well to take a last look all around. She went back to the side of the rock facing the house. The woman had suspended knitting and was gazing intently across the hollow to the west, where the road from the north entered the landscape. Susan turned her eyes in that direction. Two horsemen at a gallop were moving southward. The girl was well screened, but instinctively she drew still further back behind the bushes--but not so far that the two on horseback, riding so eagerly, were out of her view. The road dipped into the hollow. the galloping horsemen disappeared with it. Susan shifted her gaze to the point on the brow of the hill where the road reappeared. She was quivering in every nerve. When they came into view again she would know. The place she was watching swam before her eyes. Suddenly the two, still at a gallop, rose upon the crest of the hill. Jeb and her Uncle Zeke! Her vision cleared, her nerve steadied. They did not draw rein until they were at the road gate of the little house. The woman rose, put down her knitting in the seat of her stiff, rush-bottomed rocker, advanced to the fence. The air was still, but Susan could not hear a sound, though she craned forward and strained her ears to the uttermost. She shrank as if she had been struck when the three began to gaze up at the rock--to gaze, it seemed to her, at the very spot where she was standing. Was her screen less thick than she thought? Had they seen--if not her, perhaps part of her dress? Wildly her heart beat as Jeb dismounted from his horse the mare behind which she had made her wedding journey--and stood in the gateway, talking with the woman and looking toward the top of the rock. Zeke Warham turned his horse and began to ride slowly away. He got as far as the brow of the hill, with Jeb still in the gateway, hesitating. Then Susan heard: "Hold on, Mr. Warham. I reckon you're right." Warham halted his horse, Jeb remounted and joined him. As the woman returned toward the back doorstep, the two men rode at a walk down into the hollow. When they reappeared it was on the road by which they had come. And the girl knew the pursuit in that direction--the right direction--was over. Trembling and with a fluttering in her breast like the flapping of a bird's wings, she sank to the ground. Presently she burst into a passion of tears. Without knowing why, she tore off the wedding ring which until then she had forgotten, and flung it out among the treetops. A few minutes, and she dried her eyes and stood up. The two horsemen were leaving the landscape at the point at which they had entered it. The girl would not have known, would have been frightened by, her own face had she seen it as she watched them go out of her sight--out of her life. She did not understand herself, for she was at that age when one is no more conscious of the forces locked up within his unexplored and untested character than the dynamite cartridge is of its secrets of power and terror. CHAPTER XI SHE felt free to go now. She walked toward the place where she had left the eggs. It was on the side of the rock overlooking the creek. As she knelt to remove the leaves, she heard from far below a man's voice singing. She leaned forward and glanced down at the creek. In a moment appeared a young man with a fishing rod and a bag slung over his shoulder. His gray and white striped flannel trousers were rolled to his knees. His fair skin and the fair hair waving about his forehead were exposed by the flapping-brimmed straw hat set upon the back of his head. His voice, a strong and manly tenor, was sending up those steeps a song she had never heard before--a song in Italian. She had not seen what he looked like when she remembered herself and hastily fell back from view. She dropped to the grass and crawled out toward the ledge. When she showed her face it so happened that he was looking straight at her. "Hello!" he shouted. "That you, Nell?" Susan drew back, her blood in a tumult. From below, after a brief silence, came a burst of laughter. She waited a long time, then through a shield of bunches of grass looked again. The young man was gone. She wished that he had resumed his song, for she thought she had never heard one so beautiful. Because she did not feel safe in descending until he was well out of the way, and because she was so comfortable lying there in the afternoon sunshine watching the birds and listening to them, she continued on there, glancing now and then at where the creek entered and where it left her range of vision, to make sure that no one else should come and catch her. Suddenly sounded a voice from somewhere behind her: "Hey, Nell! I'm coming!" She sprang to her feet, faced about; and Crusoe was not more agitated when he saw the print of the naked foot on his island's strand. The straw hat with the flapping brim was just lifting above the edge of the rock at the opposite side, where the path was. She could not escape; the shelf offered no hiding place. Now the young man was stepping to the level, panting loudly. "Gee, what a climb for a hot day!" he cried. "Where are you?" With that he was looking at Susan, less than twenty yards away and drawn up defiantly. He stared, took off his hat. He had close-cropped wavy hair and eyes as gray as Susan's own, but it was a blue-gray instead of violet. His skin was fair, too, and his expression intelligent and sympathetic. In spite of his hat, and his blue cotton shirt, and trousers rolled high on bare sunburned legs, there was nothing of the yokel about him. "I beg your pardon," he exclaimed half humorously. "I thought it was my cousin Nell." "No," said Susan, disarmed by his courtesy and by the frank engaging manner of it. "I didn't mean to intrude." He showed white teeth in a broad smile. "I see from your face that this is your private domain." "Oh, no--not at all," stammered Susan. "Yes, I insist," replied he. "Will you let me stay and rest a minute? I ran round the rock and climbed pretty fast." "Yes--do," said Susan. The young man sat on the grass near where he had appeared, and crossed his long legs. The girl, much embarrassed, looked uneasily about. "Perhaps you'd sit, too?" suggested he, after eyeing her in a friendly way that could not cause offense and somehow did not cause any great uneasiness. Susan hesitated, went to the shadow of a little tree not far from him. He was fanning his flushed face with his hat. The collar of his shirt was open; below, where the tan ended abruptly, his skin was beautifully white. Now that she had been discovered, it was as well to be pleasant, she reasoned. "It's a fine day," she observed with a grown-up gravity that much amused him. "Not for fishing," said he. "I caught nothing. You are a stranger in these parts?" Susan colored and a look of terror flitted into her eyes. "Yes," she admitted. "I'm--I'm passing through." The young man had all he could do to conceal his amusement. Susan flushed deeply again, not because she saw his expression, for she was not looking at him, but because her remark seemed to her absurd and likely to rouse suspicion. "I suppose you came up here to see the view," said the man. He glanced round. "It _is_ pretty good. You're not visiting down Brooksburg way, by any chance?" "No," replied Susan, rather composedly and determined to change the subject. "What was that song I heard you singing?" "Oh--you heard, did you?" laughed he. "It's the Duke's song from 'Rigoletto.'" "That's an opera, isn't it--like 'Trovatore'?" "Yes--an Italian opera. Same author." "It's a beautiful song." It was evident that she longed to ask him to sing it. She felt at ease with him; he was so unaffected and simple, was one of those people who seem to be at home wherever they are. "Do you sing?" he inquired. "Not really," replied she. "Neither do I. So if you'll sing to me, I'll sing to you." Susan looked round in alarm. "Oh, dear, no--please don't," she cried. "Why not?" he asked curiously. "There isn't a soul about." "I know--but--really, you mustn't." "Very well," said he, seeing that her nervousness was not at all from being asked to sing. They sat quietly, she gazing off at the horizon, he fanning himself and studying her lovely young face. He was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five and a close observer would have suspected him of an unusual amount of experience, even for a good-looking, expansive youth of that age. He broke the long silence. "I'm a newspaper man from Cincinnati. I'm on the _Commercial_ there. My name's Roderick Spenser. My father's Clayton Spenser, down at Brooksburg"--he pointed to the southeast--"beyond that hill there, on the river. I'm here on my vacation." And he halted, looking at her expectantly. It seemed to her that there was in courtesy no escape without a return biographical sketch. She hung her head, twisted her tapering fingers in her lap, and looked childishly embarrassed and unhappy. Another long silence; again he broke it. "You'll pardon my saying so, but--you're very young, aren't you?" "Not so--so _terribly_ young. I'm almost seventeen," replied she, glancing this way and that, as if thinking of flight. "You look like a child, yet you don't," he went on, and his frank, honest voice calmed her. "You've had some painful experience, I'd say." She nodded, her eyes down. A pause, then he: "Honest, now--aren't you--running away?" She lifted her eyes to his piteously. "Please don't ask me," she said. "I shouldn't think of it," replied he, with a gentleness in his persistence that made her feel still more like trusting him, "if it wasn't that---- "Well, this world isn't the easiest sort of a place. Lots of rough stretches in the road. I've struck several and I've always been glad when somebody has given me a lift. And I want to pass it on--if you'll let me. It's something we owe each other--don't you think?" The words were fine enough; but it was the voice in which he said them that went to her heart. She covered her face with her hands and released her pent emotions. He took a package of tobacco and a sheaf of papers from his trousers pocket, rolled and lighted a cigarette. After a while she dried her eyes, looked at him shamefacedly. But he was all understanding and sympathy. "Now you feel better, don't you?" "Much," said she. And she laughed. "I guess I'm more upset than I let myself realize." "Sorry you left home?" "I haven't any home," answered she simply. "And I wouldn't go back alive to the place I came from." There was a quality in the energy she put into her words that made him thoughtful. He counseled with the end of his cigarette. Finally he inquired: "Where are you bound for?" "I don't know exactly," confessed she, as if it were a small matter. He shook his head. "I see you haven't the faintest notion what you're up against." "Oh, I'll get along. I'm strong, and I can learn." He looked at her critically and rather sadly. "Yes--you are strong," said he. "But I wonder if you're strong enough." "I never was sick in my life." "I don't mean that. . . . I'm not sure I know just what I do mean." "Is it very hard to get to Chicago?" inquired she. "It's easier to get to Cincinnati." She shook her head positively. "It wouldn't do for me to go there." "Oh, you come from Cincinnati?" "No--but I--I've been there." "Oh, they caught you and brought you back?" She nodded. This young man must be very smart to understand so quickly. "How much money have you got?" he asked abruptly. But his fear that she would think him impertinent came of an underestimate of her innocence. "I haven't got any," replied she. "I forgot my purse. It had thirty dollars in it." At once he recognized the absolute child; only utter inexperience of the world could speak of so small a sum so respectfully. "I don't understand at all," said he. "How long have you been here?" "All day. I got here early this morning." "And you haven't had anything to eat!" "Oh, yes! I found some eggs. I've got two left." Two eggs--and no money and no friends--and a woman. Yet she was facing the future hopefully! He smiled, with tears in his eyes. "You mustn't tell anybody you saw me," she went on. "No matter what they say, don't think you ought to tell on me." He looked at her, she at him. When he had satisfied himself he smiled most reassuringly. "I'll not," was his answer, and now she _knew_ she could trust him. She drew a breath of relief, and went on as if talking with an old friend. "I've got to get a long ways from here. As soon as it's dark I'm going." "Where?" "Toward the river." And her eyes lit. "The river? What's there?" "I don't know," said she triumphantly. But he understood. He had the spirit of adventure himself--one could see it at a glance--the spirit that instinctively shuns yesterday and all its works and wings eagerly into tomorrow, unknown, different, new--therefore better. But this girl, this child-woman--or was she rather woman-child?--penniless, with nothing but two eggs between her and starvation, alone, without plans, without experience-- What would become of her?. . . "Aren't you--afraid?" he asked. "Of what?" she inquired calmly. It was the mere unconscious audacity of ignorance, yet he saw in her now--not fancied he saw, but saw--a certain strength of soul, both courage and tenacity. No, she might suffer, sink--but she would die fighting, and she would not be afraid. And he admired and envied her. "Oh, I'll get along somehow," she assured him in the same self-reliant tone. Suddenly she felt it would no longer give her the horrors to speak of what she had been through. "I'm not very old," said she, and hers was the face of a woman now. "But I've learned a great deal." "You are sure you are not making a mistake in--in--running away?" "I couldn't do anything else," replied she. "I'm all alone in the world. There's no one--except---- "I hadn't done anything, and they said I had disgraced them--and they----" Her voice faltered, her eyes sank, the color flooded into her face. "They gave me to a man--and he--I had hardly seen him before--he----" She tried but could not pronounce the dreadful word. "Married, you mean?" said the young man gently. The girl shuddered. "Yes," she answered. "And I ran away." So strange, so startling, so moving was the expression of her face that he could not speak for a moment. A chill crept over him as he watched her wide eyes gazing into vacancy. What vision of horror was she seeing, he wondered. To rouse her he spoke the first words he could assemble: "When was this?" The vision seemed slowly to fade and she looked at him in astonishment. "Why, it was last night!" she said, as if dazed by the discovery. "Only last night!" "Last night! Then you haven't got far." "No. But I must. I will. And I'm not afraid of anything except of being taken back." "But you don't realize what may be--probably is--waiting for you--at the river--and beyond." "Nothing could be so bad," said she. The words were nothing, but the tone and the expression that accompanied them somehow convinced him beyond a doubt. "You'll let me help you?" She debated. "You might bring me something to eat--mightn't you? The eggs'll do for supper. But there's tomorrow. I don't want to be seen till I get a long ways off." He rose at once. "Yes, I'll bring you something to eat." He took a knockabout watch from the breast pocket of his shirt. "It's now four o'clock. I've got three miles to walk. I'll ride back and hitch the horse down the creek--a little ways down, so it won't attract attention to your place up here. I'll be back in about an hour and a half. . . . Maybe I'll think of something that'll help. Can I bring you anything else? "No. That is--I'd like a little piece of soap." "And a towel?" he suggested. "I could take care of a towel," agreed she. "I'll send it back to you when I get settled." "Good heavens!" He laughed at her simplicity. "What an honest child you are!" He put out his hand, and she took it with charming friendliness. "Good-by. I'll hurry." "I'm so glad you caught me," said she. Then, apologetically, "I don't want to be any trouble. I hate to be troublesome. I've never let anybody wait on me." "I don't know when I've had as much pleasure as this is giving me." And he made a bow that hid its seriousness behind a smile of good-humored raillery. She watched him descend with a sinking heart. The rock--the world--her life, seemed empty now. He had reminded her that there were human beings with good hearts. But--perhaps if he knew, his kindness would turn also. . . . No, she decided not. Men like him, women like Aunt Sallie--they did not believe those dreadful, wicked ideas that people said God had ordained. Still--if he knew about her birth--branded outcast--he might change. She must not really hope for anything much until she was far, far away in a wholly new world where there would be a wholly new sort of people, of a kind she had never met. But she was sure they would welcome her, and give her a chance. She returned to the tree against which she had been sitting, for there she could look at the place his big frame had pressed down in the tall grass, and could see him in it, and could recall his friendly eyes and voice, and could keep herself assured she had not been dreaming. He was a citified man, like Sam--but how different! A man with a heart like his would never marry a woman--no, never! He couldn't be a brute like that. Still, perhaps nice men married because it was supposed to be the right thing to do, and was the only way to have children without people thinking you a disgrace and slighting the children--and then marrying made brutes of them. No wonder her uncles could treat her so. They were men who had married. Afar off she heard the manly voice singing the song from "Rigoletto." She sprang up and listened, with eyes softly shining and head a little on one side. The song ended; her heart beat fast. It was not many minutes before she, watching at the end of the path, saw him appear at the bottom of the huge cleft. And the look in his eyes, the merry smile about his expressive mouth, delighted her. "I'm so glad to see you!" she cried. Over his shoulder was flung his fishing bag, and it bulged. "Don't be scared by the size of my pack," he called up, as he climbed. "We're going to have supper together--if you'll let me stay. Then you can take as much or as little as you like of what's left." Arrived at the top, he halted for a long breath. They stood facing each other. "My, what a tall girl you are for your age!" said he admiringly. She laughed up at him. "I'll be as tall as you when I get my growth." She was so lovely that he could scarcely refrain from telling her so. It seemed to him, however, it would be taking an unfair advantage to say that sort of thing when she was in a way at his mercy. "Where shall we spread the table?" said he. "I'm hungry as the horseleech's daughter. And you--why, you must be starved. I'm afraid I didn't bring what you like. But I did the best I could. I raided the pantry, took everything that was portable." He had set down the bag and had loosened its strings. First he took out a tablecloth. She laughed. "Gracious! How stylish we shall be!" "I didn't bring napkins. We can use the corners of the cloth." He had two knives, two forks, and a big spoon rolled up in the cloth, and a saltcellar. "Now, here's my triumph!" he cried, drawing from the bag a pair of roasted chickens. Next came a jar of quince jelly; next, a paper bag with cold potatoes and cold string beans in it. Then he fished out a huge square of cornbread and a loaf of salt-rising bread, a pound of butter-- "What will your folks say?" exclaimed she, in dismay. He laughed. "They always have thought I was crazy, ever since I went to college and then to the city instead of farming." And out of the bag came a big glass jar of milk. "I forgot to bring a glass!" he apologized. Then he suspended unpacking to open the jar. "Why, you must be half-dead with thirst, up here all day with not a drop of water." And he held out the jar to her. "Drink hearty!" he cried. The milk was rich and cold; she drank nearly a fourth of it before she could wrest the jar away from her lips. "My, but that was good!" she remarked. He had enjoyed watching her drink. "Surely you haven't got anything else in that bag?" "Not much," replied he. "Here's a towel, wrapped round the soap. And here are three cakes of chocolate. You could live four or five days on them, if you were put to it. So whatever else you leave, don't leave them. And--Oh, yes, here's a calico slip and a sunbonnet, and a paper of pins. And that's all." "What are they for?" "I thought you might put them on--the slip over your dress--and you wouldn't look quite so--so out of place--if anybody should see you." "What a fine idea!" cried Susan, shaking out the slip delightedly. He was spreading the supper on the tablecloth. He carved one of the chickens, opened the jelly, placed the bread and vegetables and butter. "Now!" he cried. "Let's get busy." And he set her an example she was not slow to follow. The sun had slipped down behind the hills of the northwest horizon. The birds were tuning for their evening song. A breeze sprang up and coquetted with the strays of her wavy dark hair. And they sat cross-legged on the grass on opposite sides of the tablecloth and joked and laughed and ate, and ate and laughed and joked until the stars began to appear in the vast paling opal of the sky. They had chosen the center of the grassy platform for their banquet; thus, from where they sat only the tops of trees and the sky were to be seen. And after they had finished she leaned on her elbow and listened while he, smoking his cigarette, told her of his life as a newspaper man in Cincinnati. The twilight faded into dusk, the dusk into a scarlet darkness. "When the moon comes up we'll start," said he. "You can ride behind me on the horse part of the way, anyhow." The shadow of the parting, the ending of this happiness, fell upon her. How lonely it would be when he was gone! "I haven't told you my name," she said. "I've told you mine Roderick Spenser--with an _s_, not a _c_." "I remember," said she. "I'll never forget. . . . Mine's Susan Lenox." "What was it--before----" He halted. "Before what?" His silence set her to thinking. "Oh!" she exclaimed, in a tone that made him curse his stupidity in reminding her. "My name's Susan Lenox--and always will be. It was my mother's name." She hesitated, decided for frankness at any cost, for his kindness forbade her to deceive him in any way. Proudly, "My mother never let any man marry her. They say she was disgraced, but I understand now. _She_ wouldn't stoop to let any man marry her." Spenser puzzled over this, but could make nothing of it. He felt that he ought not to inquire further. He saw her anxious eyes, her expression of one keyed up and waiting for a verdict. "I'd have only to look at you to know your mother was a fine woman," said he. Then, to escape from the neighborhood of the dangerous riddle, "Now, about your--your going," he began. "I've been thinking what to do." "You'll help me?" said she, to dispel her last doubt--a very faint doubt, for his words and his way of uttering them had dispelled her real anxiety. "Help you?" cried he heartily. "All I can. I've got a scheme to propose to you. You say you can't take the mail boat?" "They know me. I--I'm from Sutherland." "You trust me--don't you?" "Indeed I do." "Now listen to me--as if I were your brother. Will you?" "Yes." "I'm going to take you to Cincinnati with me. I'm going to put you in my boarding house as my sister. And I'm going to get you a position. Then--you can start in for yourself." "But that'll be a great lot of trouble, won't it?" "Not any more than friends of mine took for me when I was starting out." Then, as she continued silent, "What are you thinking? I can't see your face in this starlight." "I was thinking how good you are," she said simply. He laughed uneasily. "I'm not often accused of that," he replied. "I'm like most people--a mixture of good and bad--and not very strong either way. I'm afraid I'm mostly impulse that winks out. But--the question is, how to get you to Cincinnati. It's simply impossible for me to go tonight. I can't take you home for the night. I don't trust my people. They'd not think I was good--or you, either. And while usually they'd be right--both ways--this is an exception." This idea of an exception seemed to amuse him. He went on, "I don't dare leave you at any farmhouse in the neighborhood. If I did, you could be traced." "No--no," she cried, alarmed at the very suggestion. "I mustn't be seen by anybody." "We'll go straight to the river, and I'll get a boat and row you across to Kentucky--over to Carrollton. There's a little hotel. I can leave you----" "No--not Carrollton," she interrupted. "My uncle sells goods there, and they know him. And if anything is in the Sutherland papers about me, why, they'd know." "Not with you in that slip and sunbonnet. I'll make up a story--about our wagon breaking down and that I've got to walk back into the hills to get another before we can go on. And--it's the only plan that's at all possible." Obviously he was right; but she would not consent. By adroit questioning he found that her objection was dislike of being so much trouble to him. "That's too ridiculous," cried he. "Why, I wouldn't have missed this adventure for anything in the world." His manner was convincing enough, but she did not give in until moonrise came without her having thought of any other plan. He was to be Bob Peters, she his sister Kate, and they were to hail from a farm in the Kentucky hills back of Milton. They practiced the dialect of the region and found that they could talk it well enough to pass the test of a few sentences They packed the fishing bag; she wrapped the two eggs in paper and put them in the empty milk bottle. They descended by the path--a slow journey in the darkness of that side of the rock, as there were many dangers, including the danger of making a noise that might be heard by some restless person at the house. After half an hour they were safely at the base of the rock; they skirted it, went down to the creek, found the horse tied where he had left it. With her seated sideways behind him and holding on by an arm half round his waist, they made a merry but not very speedy advance toward the river, keeping as nearly due south as the breaks in the hills permitted. After a while he asked: "Do you ever think of the stage?" "I've never seen a real stage play," said she. "But I want to--and I will, the first chance I get." "I meant, did you ever think of going on the stage?" "No." So daring a flight would have been impossible for a baby imagination in the cage of the respectable-family-in-a-small-town. "It's one of my dreams to write plays," he went on. "Wouldn't it be queer if some day I wrote plays for you to act in?" When one's fancy is as free as was Susan's then, it takes any direction chance may suggest. Susan's fancy instantly winged along this fascinating route. "I've given recitations at school, and in the plays we used to have they let me take the best parts--that is--until--until a year or so ago." He noted the hesitation, had an instinct against asking why there had come a time when she no longer got good parts. "I'm sure you could learn to act," declared he. "And you'll be sure of it, too, after you've seen the people who do it." "Oh, I don't believe I could," said she, in rebuke to her own mounting self-confidence. Then, suddenly remembering her birth-brand of shame and overwhelmed by it, "No, I can't hope to be to be anything much. They wouldn't have--_me_." "I know how you feel," replied he, all unaware of the real reason for this deep humility. "When I first struck town I felt that way. It seemed to me I couldn't hope ever to line up with the clever people they had there. But I soon saw there was nothing in that idea. The fact is, everywhere in the world there's a lot more things to do than people who can do them. Most of those who get to the top--where did they start? Where we're starting." She was immensely flattered by that "we" and grateful for it. But she held to her original opinion. "There wouldn't be a chance for me," said she. "They wouldn't have me." "Oh, I understand," said he and he fancied he did. He laughed gayly at the idea that in the theater anyone would care who she was--what kind of past she had had--or present either, for that matter. Said he, "You needn't worry. On the stage they don't ask any questions--any questions except 'Can you act? Can you get it over? Can you get the hand?'" Then this stage, it was the world she had dreamed of--the world where there lived a wholly new kind of people--people who could make room for her. She thrilled, and her heart beat wildly. In a strangely quiet, intense voice, she said: "I want to try. I'm sure I'll get along there. I'll work--Oh, so hard. I'll do _anything!_" "That's the talk," cried he. "You've got the stuff in you." She said little the rest of the journey. Her mind was busy with the idea he had by merest accident given her. If he could have looked in upon her thoughts, he would have been amazed and not a little alarmed by the ferment he had set up. Where they reached the river the bank was mud and thick willows, the haunt of incredible armies of mosquitoes. "It's a mystery to me," cried he, "why these fiends live in lonely places far away from blood, when they're so mad about it." After some searching he found a clear stretch of sandy gravel where she would be not too uncomfortable while he was gone for a boat. He left the horse with her and walked upstream in the direction of Brooksburg. As he had warned her that he might be gone a long time, he knew she would not be alarmed for him--and she had already proved that timidity about herself was not in her nature. But he was alarmed for her--this girl alone in that lonely darkness--with light enough to make her visible to any prowler. About an hour after he left her he returned in a rowboat he had borrowed at the water mill. He hitched the horse in the deep shadow of the break in the bank. She got into the boat, put on the slip and the sunbonnet, put her sailor hat in the bag. They pushed off and he began the long hard row across and upstream. The moon was high now and was still near enough to its full glory to pour a flood of beautiful light upon the broad river--the lovely Ohio at its loveliest part. "Won't you sing?" he asked. And without hesitation she began one of the simple familiar love songs that were all the music to which the Sutherland girls had access. She sang softly, in a deep sweet voice, sweeter even than her speaking voice. She had the sunbonnet in her lap; the moon shone full upon her face. And it seemed to him that he was in a dream; there was nowhere a suggestion of reality--not of its prose, not even of its poetry. Only in the land no waking eye has seen could such a thing be. The low sweet voice sang of love, the oars clicked rhythmically in the locks and clove the water with musical splash; the river, between its steep hills, shone in the moonlight, with a breeze like a friendly spirit moving upon its surface. He urged her, and she sang another song, and another. She sighed when she saw the red lantern on the Carrollton wharf; and he, turning his head and seeing, echoed her sigh. "The first chance, you must sing me that song," she said. "From 'Rigoletto'? I will. But--it tells how fickle women are--'like a feather in the wind.'. . . They aren't all like that, though--don't you think so?" "Sometimes I think everybody's like a feather in the wind," replied she. "About love--and everything." He laughed. "Except those people who are where there isn't any wind." CHAPTER XII FOR some time Spenser had been rowing well in toward the Kentucky shore, to avoid the swift current of the Kentucky River which rushes into the Ohio at Carrollton. A few yards below its mouth, in the quiet stretch of backwater along shore, lay the wharf-boat, little more than a landing stage. The hotel was but a hundred feet away, at the top of the steep levee. It was midnight, so everyone in the village had long been asleep. After several minutes of thunderous hammering Roderick succeeded in drawing to the door a barefooted man with a candle in his huge, knotted hand--a man of great stature, amazingly lean and long of leg, with a monstrous head thatched and fronted with coarse, yellow-brown hair. He had on a dirty cotton shirt and dirty cotton trousers--a night dress that served equally well for the day. His feet were flat and thick and were hideous with corns and bunions. Susan had early been made a critical observer of feet by the unusual symmetry of her own. She had seen few feet that were fit to be seen; but never, she thought, had she seen an exhibition so repellent. "What t'hell----" he began. Then, discovering Susan, he growled, "Beg pardon, miss." Roderick explained--that is, told the prearranged story. The man pointed to a grimy register on the office desk, and Roderick set down the fishing bag and wrote in a cramped, scrawly hand, "Kate Peters, Milton, Ky." The man looked at it through his screen of hair and beard, said, "Come on, ma'am." "Just a minute," said Roderick, and he drew "Kate" aside and said to her in a low tone: "I'll be back sometime tomorrow, and then we'll start at once. But--to provide against everything--don't be alarmed if I don't come. You'll know I couldn't help it. And wait." Susan nodded, looking at him with trustful, grateful eyes. "And," he went on hurriedly, "I'll leave this with you, to take care of. It's yours as much as mine." She saw that it was a pocketbook, instinctively put her hands behind her. "Don't be silly," he said, with good-humored impatience. "You'll probably not need it. If you do, you'll need it bad. And you'll pay me back when you get your place." He caught one of her hands and put the pocketbook in it. As his argument was unanswerable, she did not resist further. She uttered not a word of thanks, but simply looked at him, her eyes swimming and about her mouth a quiver that meant a great deal in her. Impulsively and with flaming cheek he kissed her on the cheek. "So long, sis," he said loudly, and strode into the night. Susan did not flush; she paled. She gazed after him with some such expression as a man lost in a cave might have as he watches the flickering out of his only light. "This way, ma'am," said the hotel man sourly, taking up the fishing bag. She started, followed him up the noisy stairs to a plain, neat country bedroom. "The price of this here's one fifty a day," said he. "We've got 'em as low as a dollar." "I'll take a dollar one, please," said Susan. The man hesitated. "Well," he finally snarled, "business is slack jes' now. Seein' as you're a lady, you kin have this here un fur a dollar." "Oh, thank you--but if the price is more----" "The other rooms ain't fit fur a lady," said the hotel man. Then he grinned a very human humorous grin that straightway made him much less repulsive. "Anyhow, them two durn boys of mine an' their cousins is asleep in 'em. I'd as lief rout out a nest of hornets. I'll leave you the candle." As soon as he had gone Susan put out the light, ran to the window. She saw the rowboat and Spenser, a black spot far out on the river, almost gone from view to the southwest. Hastily she lighted the candle again, stood at the window and waved a white cover she snatched from the table. She thought she saw one of the oars go up and flourish, but she could not be sure. She watched until the boat vanished in the darkness at the bend. She found the soap in the bag and took a slow but thorough bath in the washbowl. Then she unbraided her hair, combed it out as well as she could with her fingers, rubbed it thoroughly with a towel and braided it again. She put on the calico slip as a nightdress, knelt down to say her prayers. But instead of prayers there came flooding into her mind memories of where she had been last night, of the horrors, of the agonies of body and soul. She rose from her knees, put out the light, stood again at the window. In after years she always looked back upon that hour as the one that definitely marked the end of girlhood, of the thoughts and beliefs which go with the sheltered life, and the beginning of womanhood, of self-reliance and of the hardiness--so near akin to hardness--the hardiness that must come into the character before a man or a woman is fit to give and take in the combat of life. The bed was coarse, but white and clean. She fell asleep instantly and did not awaken until, after the vague, gradually louder sound of hammering on the door, she heard a female voice warning her that breakfast was "put nigh over an' done." She got up, partly drew on one stocking, then without taking it off tumbled over against the pillow and was asleep. When she came to herself again, the lay of the shadows told her it must be after twelve o'clock. She dressed, packed her serge suit in the bag with the sailor hat, smoothed out the pink calico slip and put it on. For more than a year she had worn her hair in a braid doubled upon itself and tied with a bow at the back of her neck. She decided that if she would part it, plait it in two braids and bring them round her head, she would look older. She tried this and was much pleased with the result. She thought the new style not only more grown-up, but also more becoming. The pink slip, too, seemed to her a success. It came almost to her ankles and its strings enabled her to make it look something like a dress. Carrying the pink sunbonnet, down she went in search of something to eat. The hall was full of smoke and its air seemed greasy with the odor of frying. She found that dinner was about to be served. A girl in blue calico skirt and food-smeared, sweat-discolored blue jersey ushered her to one of the tables in the dining-room. "There's a gentleman comin'," said she. "I'll set him down with you. He won't bite, I don't reckon, and there ain't no use mussin' up two tables." There was no protesting against two such arguments; so Susan presently had opposite her a fattish man with long oily hair and a face like that of a fallen and dissipated preacher. She recognized him at once as one of those wanderers who visit small towns with cheap shows or selling patent medicines and doing juggling tricks on the street corners in the flare of a gasoline lamp. She eyed him furtively until he caught her at it--he being about the same business himself. Thereafter she kept her eyes steadily upon the tablecloth, patched and worn thin with much washing. Soon the plate of each was encircled by the familiar arc of side dishes containing assorted and not very appetizing messes--fried steak, watery peas, stringy beans, soggy turnips, lumpy mashed potatoes, a perilous-looking chicken stew, cornbread with streaks of baking soda in it. But neither of the diners was critical, and the dinner was eaten with an enthusiasm which the best rarely inspires. With the prunes and dried-apple pie, the stranger expanded. "Warm day, miss," he ventured. "Yes, it is a little warm," said Susan. She ventured a direct look at him. Above the pleasant, kindly eyes there was a brow so unusually well shaped that it arrested even her young and untrained attention. Whatever the man's character or station, there could be no question as to his intelligence. "The flies are very bothersome," continued he. "But nothing like Australia. There the flies have to be picked off, and they're big, and they bite--take a piece right out of you. The natives used to laugh at us when we were in the ring and would try to brush, em away." The stranger had the pleasant, easy manner of one who through custom of all kinds of people and all varieties of fortune, has learned to be patient and good-humored--to take the day and the hour as the seasoned gambler takes the cards that are dealt him. Susan said nothing; but she had listened politely. The man went on amusing himself with his own conversation. "I was in the show business then. Clown was my line, but I was rotten at it--simply rotten. I'm still in the show business--different line, though. I've got a show of my own. If you're going to be in town perhaps you'll come to see us tonight. Our boat's anchored down next to the wharf. You can see it from the windows. Come, and bring your folks." "Thank you," said Susan--she had for gotten her role and its accent. "But I'm afraid we'll not be here." There was an expression in the stranger's face--a puzzled, curious expression, not impertinent, rather covert--an expression that made her uneasy. It warned her that this man saw she was not what she seemed to be, that he was trying to peer into her secret. His brown eyes were kind enough, but alarmingly keen. With only half her pie eaten, she excused herself and hastened to her room. At the threshold she remembered the pocketbook Spenser had given her. She had left it by the fishing bag on the table. There was the bag but not the pocketbook. "I must have put it in the bag," she said aloud, and the sound and the tone of her voice frightened her. She searched the bag, then the room which had not yet been straightened up. She shook out the bed covers, looked in all the drawers, under the bed, went over the contents of the bag again. The pocketbook was gone--stolen. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands in her lap, and stared at the place where she had last seen the pocketbook--_his_ pocketbook, which he had asked her to take care of. How could she face him! What would he think of her, so untrustworthy! What a return for his kindness! She felt weak--so weak that she lay down. The food she had taken turned to poison and her head ached fiercely. What could she do? To speak to the proprietor would be to cause a great commotion, to attract attention to herself--and how would that help to bring back the stolen pocketbook, taken perhaps by the proprietor himself? She recalled that as she hurried through the office from the dining-room he had a queer shifting expression, gave her a wheedling, cringing good morning not at all in keeping with the character he had shown the night before. The slovenly girl came to do the room; Susan sent her away, sat by the window gazing out over the river and downstream. He would soon be here; the thought made her long to fly and hide. He had been all generosity; and this was her way of appreciating it! They sent for her to come down to supper. She refused, saying she was not feeling well. She searched the room, the bag, again and again. She would rest a few minutes, then up she would spring and tear everything out. Then back to the window to sit and stare at the river over which the evening shadows were beginning to gather. Once, as she was sitting there, she happened to see the gaudily painted and decorated show boat. A man--the stranger of the dinner table--was standing on the forward end, smoking a cigar. She saw that he was observing her, realized he could have seen her stirring feverishly about her room. A woman came out of the cabin and joined him. As soon as his attention was distracted she closed her shutters. And there she sat alone, with the hours dragging their wretched minutes slowly away. That was one of those nights upon which anyone who has had them--and who has not?--looks back with wonder at how they ever lived, how they ever came to an end. She slept a little toward dawn--for youth and health will not let the most despairing heart suffer in sleeplessness. Her headache went, but the misery of soul which had been a maddening pain settled down into a throbbing ache. She feared he would come; she feared he would not come. The servants tried to persuade her to take breakfast. She could not have swallowed food; she would not have dared take food for which she could not pay. What would they do with her if he did not come? She searched the room again, hoping against hope, a hundred times fancying she felt the purse under some other things, each time suffering sickening disappointment. Toward noon the servant came knocking. "A letter for you, ma'am." Susan rushed to the door, seized the letter, tore it open, read: When I got back to the horse and started to mount, he kicked me and broke my leg. You can go on south to the L. and N. and take a train to Cincinnati. When you find a boarding house send your address to me at the office. I'll come in a few weeks. I'd write more but I can't. Don't worry. Everything'll come out right. You are brave and sensible, and I _back you to win_. With the unsigned letter crumpled in her hands she sat at the window with scarcely a motion until noon. She then went down to the show boat. Several people--men and women--were on the forward end, quarreling. She looked only at her acquaintance. His face was swollen and his eyes bloodshot, but he still wore the air of easy and patient good-humor. She said, standing on the shore, "Could I speak to you a minute?" "Certainly, ma'am," replies he, lifting his dingy straw hat with gaudy, stained band. He came down the broad plank to the shore. "Why, what's the matter?" This in a sympathetic tone. "Will you lend me two dollars and take me along to work it out?" she asked. He eyed her keenly. "For the hotel bill?" he inquired, the cigar tucked away in the corner of his mouth. She nodded. "He didn't show up?" "He broke his leg." "Oh!" The tone was politely sympathetic, but incredulous. He eyed her critically, thoughtfully. "Can you sing?" he finally asked. "A little." His hands were deep in the pockets of his baggy light trousers. He drew one of them out with a two-dollar bill in it. "Go and pay him and bring your things. We're about to push off." "Thank you," said the girl in the same stolid way. She returned to the hotel, brought the bag down from her room, stood at the office desk. The servant came. "Mr. Gumpus has jes' stepped out," said she. "Here is the money for my room." And Susan laid the two-dollar bill on the register. "Ain't you goin' to wait fur yer--yer brother?" "He's not coming," replied the girl. "So--I'll go. Good-by." "Good-by. It's awful, bein' took sick away from home." "Thank you," said Susan. "Good-by." The girl's homely, ignorant face twisted in a grin. But Susan did not see, would have been indifferent had she seen. Since she accepted the war earth and heaven had declared against her, she had ceased from the little thought she had once given to what was thought of her by those of whom she thought not at all. She went down to the show boat. The plank had been taken in. Her acquaintance was waiting for her, helped her to the deck, jumped aboard himself, and was instantly busy helping to guide the boat out into mid-stream. Susan looked back at the hotel. Mr. Gumpus was in the doorway, amusement in every line of his ugly face. Beside him stood the slovenly servant. She was crying--the more human second thought of a heart not altogether corrupted by the sordid hardness of her lot. How can faith in the human race falter when one considers how much heart it has in spite of all it suffers in the struggle upward through the dense fogs of ignorance upward, toward the truth, toward the light of which it never ceases to dream and to hope? Susan stood in the same place, with her bag beside her, until her acquaintance came. "Now," said he, comfortably, as he lighted a fresh cigar, "we'll float pleasantly along. I guess you and I had better get acquainted. What is your name?" Susan flushed. "Kate Peters is the name I gave at the hotel. That'll do, won't it?" "Never in the world!" replied he. "You must have a good catchy name. Say--er--er----" He rolled his cigar slowly, looking thoughtfully toward the willows thick and green along the Indiana shore. "Say--well, say--Lorna--Lorna--Lorna Sackville! That's a winner. Lorna Sackville!--A stroke of genius! Don't you think so?" "Yes," said Susan. "It doesn't matter." "But it does," remonstrated he. "You are an artist, now, and an artist's name should always arouse pleasing and romantic anticipations. It's like the odor that heralds the dish. You must remember, my dear, that you have stepped out of the world of dull reality into the world of ideals, of dreams." The sound of two harsh voices, one male, the other female, came from within the cabin--oaths, reproaches. Her acquaintance laughed. "That's one on me--eh? Still, what I say is true--or at least ought to be. By the way, this is the Burlingham Floating Palace of Thespians, floating temple to the histrionic art. I am Burlingham--Robert Burlingham." He smiled, extended his hand. "Glad to meet you, Miss Lorna Sackville--don't forget!" She could not but reflect a smile so genuine, so good-humored. "We'll go in and meet the others--your fellow stars--for this is an all-star aggregation." Over the broad entrance to the cabin was a chintz curtain strung upon a wire. Burlingham drew this aside. Susan was looking into a room about thirty feet long, about twelve feet wide, and a scant six feet high. Across it with an aisle between were narrow wooden benches with backs. At the opposite end was a stage, with the curtain up and a portable stove occupying the center. At the stove a woman in a chemise and underskirt, with slippers on her bare feet, was toiling over several pots and pans with fork and spoon. At the edge of the stage, with legs swinging, sat another woman, in a blue sailor suit neither fresh nor notably clean but somehow coquettish. Two men in flannel shirts were seated, one on each of the front benches, with their backs to her. As Burlingham went down the aisle ahead of her, he called out: "Ladies and gentlemen, I wish to present the latest valuable addition to our company--Miss Lorna Sackville, the renowned ballad singer." The two men turned lazily and stared at Susan, each with an arm hanging over the back of the bench. Burlingham looked at the woman bent over the stove--a fat, middle-aged woman with thin, taffy-yellow hair done sleekly over a big rat in front and made into a huge coil behind with the aid of one or more false braids. She had a fat face, a broad expanse of unpleasant-looking, elderly bosom, big, shapeless white arms. Her contour was almost gone. Her teeth were a curious mixture of natural, gold, and porcelain. "Miss Anstruther--Miss Sackville," called Burlingham. "Miss Sackville, Miss Violet Anstruther." Miss Anstruther and Susan exchanged bows--Susan's timid and frightened, Miss Anstruther's accompanied by a hostile stare and a hardening of the fat, decaying face. "Miss Connemora--Miss Sackville." Burlingham was looking at the younger woman--she who sat on the edge of the little stage. She, too, was a blond, but her hair had taken to the chemical somewhat less reluctantly than had Miss Anstruther's, with the result that Miss Connemora's looked golden. Her face--of the baby type must have been softly pretty at one time--not so very distant. Now lines were coming and the hard look that is inevitable with dyed hair. Also her once fine teeth were rapidly going off, as half a dozen gold fillings in front proclaimed. At Susan's appealing look and smile Miss Connemora nodded not unfriendly. "Good God, Bob," said she to Burlingham with a laugh, "are you going to get the bunch of us pinched for child-stealing?" Burlingham started to laugh, suddenly checked himself, looked uneasily and keenly at Susan. "Oh, it's all right," he said with a wave of the hand. But his tone belied his words. He puffed twice at his cigar, then introduced the men--Elbert Eshwell and Gregory Tempest--two of the kind clearly if inelegantly placed by the phrase, "greasy hamfats." Mr. Eshwell's black-dyed hair was smoothly brushed down from a central part, Mr. Tempest's iron-gray hair was greasily wild--a disarray of romantic ringlets. Eshwell was inclined to fat; Tempest was gaunt and had the hollow, burning eye that bespeaks the sentimental ass. "Now, Miss Sackville," said Burlingham, "we'll go on the forward deck and canvass the situation. What for dinner, Vi?" "Same old rot," retorted Miss Anstruther, wiping the sweat from her face and shoulders with a towel that served also as a dishcloth. "Pork and beans--potatoes--peach pie." "Cheer up," said Burlingham. "After tomorrow we'll do better." "That's been the cry ever since we started," snapped Violet. "For God's sake, shut up, Vi," groaned Eshwell. "You're always kicking." The cabin was not quite the full width of the broad house boat. Along the outside, between each wall and the edge, there was room for one person to pass from forward deck to rear. From the cabin roof, over the rear deck, into the water extended a big rudder oar. When Susan, following Burlingham, reached the rear deck, she saw the man at this oar--a fat, amiable-looking rascal, in linsey woolsey and a blue checked shirt open over his chest and revealing a mat of curly gray hair. Burlingham hailed him as Pat--his only known name. But Susan had only a glance for him and no ear at all for the chaffing between him and the actor-manager. She was gazing at the Indiana shore, at a tiny village snuggled among trees and ripened fields close to the water's edge. She knew it was Brooksburg. She remembered the long covered bridge which they had crossed--Spenser and she, on the horse. To the north of the town, on a knoll, stood a large red brick house trimmed with white veranda and balconies--far and away the most pretentious house in the landscape. Before the door was a horse and buggy. She could make out that there were several people on the front veranda, one of them a man in black--the doctor, no doubt. Sobs choked up into her throat. She turned quickly away that Burlingham might not see. And under her breath she said, "Good-by, dear. Forgive me--forgive me." CHAPTER XIII WOMAN'S worktable, a rocking chair and another with a swayback that made it fairly comfortable for lounging gave the rear deck the air of an outdoor sitting-room, which indeed it was. Burlingham, after a comprehensive glance at the panorama of summer and fruitfulness through which they were drifting, sprawled himself in the swayback chair, indicating to Susan that she was to face him in the rocker. "Sit down, my dear," said he. "And tell me you are at least eighteen and are not running away from home. You heard what Miss Connemora said." "I'm not running away from home," replied Susan, blushing violently because she was evading as to the more important fact. "I don't know anything about you, and I don't want to know," pursued Burlingham, alarmed by the evidences of a dangerous tendency to candor. "I've no desire to have my own past dug into, and turn about's fair play. You came to me to get an engagement. I took you. Understand?" Susan nodded. "You said you could sing--that is, a little." "A very little," said the girl. "Enough, no doubt. That has been our weak point--lack of a ballad singer. Know any ballads?--Not fancy ones. Nothing fancy! We cater to the plain people, and the plain people only like the best--that is, the simplest--the things that reach for the heartstrings with ten strong fingers. You don't happen to know 'I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight'?" "No--Ruth sings that," replied Susan, and colored violently. Burlingham ignored the slip. "'Blue Alsatian Mountains'?" "Yes. But that's very old." "Exactly. Nothing is of any use to the stage until it's very old. Audiences at theaters don't want to _hear_ anything they don't already know by heart. They've come to _see_, not to hear. So it annoys them to have to try to hear. Do you understand that?" "No," confessed Susan. "I'm sorry. But I'll think about it, and try to understand it." She thought she was showing her inability to do what was expected of her in paying back the two dollars. "Don't bother," said Burlingham. "Pat!" "Yes, boss," said the man at the oar, without looking or removing his pipe. "Get your fiddle." Pat tied the oar fast and went forward along the roof of the cabin. While he was gone Burlingham explained, "A frightful souse, Pat--almost equal to Eshwell and far the superior of Tempest or Vi--that is, of Tempest. But he's steady enough for our purposes, as a rule. He's the pilot, the orchestra, the man-of-all-work, the bill distributor. Oh, he's a wonder. Graduate of Trinity College, Dublin--yeggman--panhandler--barrel-house bum--genius, nearly. Has drunk as much booze as there is water in this river----" Pat was back beside the handle of the oar, with a violin. Burlingham suggested to Susan that she'd better stand while she sang, "and if you've any tendency to stage fright, remember it's your bread and butter to get through well. You'll not bother about your audience." Susan found this thought a potent strengthener--then and afterward. With surprisingly little embarrassment she stood before her good-natured, sympathetic employer, and while Pat scraped out an accompaniment sang the pathetic story of the "maiden young and fair" and the "stranger in the spring" who "lingered near the fountains just to hear the maiden sing," and how he departed after winning her love, and how "she will never see the stranger where the fountains fall again--adé, adé, adé." Her voice was deliciously young and had the pathetic quality that is never absent from anything which has enduring charm for us. Tears were in Burlingham's voice--tears for the fate of the maiden, tears of response to the haunting pathos of Susan's sweet contralto, tears of joy at the acquisition of such a "number" for his program. As her voice died away he beat his plump hands together enthusiastically. "She'll do--eh, Pat? She'll set the hay-tossers crazy!" Susan's heart was beating fast from nervousness. She sat down. Burlingham sprang up and put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her. He laughed at her shrinking. "Don't mind, my dear," he cried. "It's one of our ways. Now, what others do you know?" She tried to recall, and with his assistance finally did discover that she possessed a repertoire of "good old stale ones," consisting of "Coming Thro' the Rye," "Suwanee River," "Annie Laurie" and "Kathleen Mavourneen." She knew many other songs, but either Pat could not play them or Burlingham declared them "above the head of Reub the rotter." "Those five are quite enough," said Burlingham. "Two regulars, two encores, with a third in case of emergency. After dinner Miss Anstruther and I'll fit you out with a costume. You'll make a hit at Sutherland tonight." "Sutherland!" exclaimed Susan, suddenly pale. "I can't sing there--really, I can't." Burlingham made a significant gesture toward Pat at the oar above them, and winked at her. "You'll not have stage fright, my dear. You'll pull through." Susan understood that nothing more was to be said before Pat. Soon Burlingham told him to tie the oar again and retire to the cabin. "I'll stand watch," said he. "I want to talk business with Miss Sackville." When Pat had gone, Burlingham gave her a sympathetic look. "No confidences, mind you, my dear," he warned. "All I want to know is that it isn't stage fright that's keeping you off the program at Sutherland." "No," replied the girl. "It isn't stage fright. I'm--I'm sorry I can't begin right away to earn the money to pay you back. But--I can't." "Not even in a velvet and spangle costume--Low neck, short sleeves, with blond wig and paint and powder? You'll not know yourself, my dear--really." "I couldn't," said Susan. "I'd not be able to open my lips." "Very well. That's settled." It was evident that Burlingham was deeply disappointed. "We were going to try to make a killing at Sutherland." He sighed. "However, let that pass. If you can't, you can't." "I'm afraid you're angry with me," cried she. "I--angry!" He laughed. "I've not been angry in ten years. I'm such a _damn_, damn fool that with all the knocks life's given me I haven't learned much. But at least I've learned not to get angry. No, I understand, my dear--and will save you for the next town below." He leaned forward and gave her hands a fatherly pat as they lay in her lap. "Don't give it a second thought," he said. "We've got the whole length of the river before us." Susan showed her gratitude in her face better far than she could have expressed it in words. The two sat silent. When she saw his eyes upon her with that look of smiling wonder in them, she said, "You mustn't think I've done anything dreadful. I haven't--really, I haven't." He laughed heartily. "And if you had, you'd not need to hang your head in this company, my dear. We're all people who have _lived_--and life isn't exactly a class meeting with the elders taking turns at praying and the organ wheezing out gospel hymns. No, we've all been up against it most of our lives--which means we've done the best we could oftener than we've had the chance to do what we ought." He gave her one of his keen looks, nodded: "I like you. . . . What do they tell oftenest when they're talking about how you were as a baby?" Susan did not puzzle over the queerness of this abrupt question. She fell to searching her memory diligently for an answer. "I'm not sure, but I think they speak oftenest of how I never used to like anybody to take my hand and help me along, even when I was barely able to walk. They say I always insisted on trudging along by myself." Burlingham nodded, slapped his knee. "I can believe it," he cried. "I always ask everybody that question to see whether I've sited 'em up right. I rather think I hit you off to a T--as you faced me at dinner yesterday in the hotel. Speaking of dinner--let's go sit in on the one I smell." They returned to the cabin where, to make a table, a board had been swung between the backs of the second and third benches from the front on the left side of the aisle. Thus the three men sat on the front bench with their legs thrust through between seat and back, while the three women sat in dignity and comfort on the fourth bench. Susan thought the dinner by no means justified Miss Anstruther's pessimism. It was good in itself, and the better for being in this happy-go-lucky way, in this happy-go-lucky company. Once they got started, all the grouchiness disappeared. Susan, young and optimistic and determined to be pleased, soon became accustomed to the looks of her new companions--that matter of mere exterior about which we shallow surface-skimmers make such a mighty fuss, though in the test situations of life, great and small, it amounts to precious little. They were all human beings, and the girl was unspoiled, did not think of them as failures, half-wolves, of no social position, of no standing in the respectable world. She still had much of the natural democracy of children, and she admired these new friends who knew so much more than she did, who had lived, had suffered, had come away from horrible battles covered with wounds, the scars of which they would bear into the grave--battles they had lost; yet they had not given up, but had lived on, smiling, courageous, kind of heart. It was their kind hearts that most impressed her--their kind taking in of her whom those she loved had cast out--her, the unknown stranger, helpless and ignorant. And what Spenser had told her about the stage and its people made her almost believe that they would not cast her out, though they knew the dreadful truth about her birth. Tempest told a story that was "broad." While the others laughed, Susan gazed at him with a puzzled expression. She wished to be polite, to please, to enjoy. But what that story meant she could not fathom. Miss Anstruther jeered at her. "Look at the innocent," she cried. "Shut up, Vi," retorted Miss Connemora. "It's no use for us to try to be anything but what we are. Still, let the baby alone." "Yes--let her alone," said Burlingham. "It'll soak in soon enough," Miss Connemora went on. "No use rubbing it in." "What?" said Susan, thinking to show her desire to be friendly, to be one of them. "Dirt," said Burlingham dryly. "And don't ask any more questions." When the three women had cleared away the dinner and had stowed the dishes in one of the many cubbyholes along the sides of the cabin, the three men got ready for a nap. Susan was delighted to see them drop to the tops of the backs of the seats three berths which fitted snugly into the walls when not in use. She saw now that there were five others of the same kind, and that there was a contrivance of wires and curtains by which each berth could be shut off to itself. She had a thrilling sense of being in a kind of Swiss Family Robinson storybook come to life. She unpacked her bag, contributed the food in it to the common store, spread out her serge suit which Miss Anstruther offered to press and insisted on pressing, though Susan protested she could do it herself quite well. "You'll want to put it on for the arrival at Sutherland," said Mabel Connemora. "No," replied Susan nervously. "Not till tomorrow." She saw the curious look in all their eyes at sight of that dress, so different from the calico she was wearing. Mabel took her out on the forward deck where there was an awning and a good breeze. They sat there, Mabel talking, Susan gazing rapt at land and water and at the actress, and listening as to a fairy story--for the actress had lived through many and strange experiences in the ten years since she left her father's roof in Columbia, South Carolina. Susan listened and absorbed as a dry sponge dropped into a pail of water. At her leisure she would think it all out, would understand, would learn. "Now, tell _me_ about _your_self," said Mabel when she had exhausted all the reminiscences she could recall at the moment--all that were fit for a "baby's" ears. "I will, some time," said Susan, who was ready for the question. "But I can't--not yet." "It seems to me you're very innocent," said Mabel, "even for a well-brought-up girl. _I_ was well brought up, too. I wish to God my mother had told me a few things. But no--not a thing." "What do you mean?" inquired Susan. That set the actress to probing the girl's innocence--what she knew and what she did not. It had been many a day since Miss Connemora had had so much pleasure. "Well!" she finally said. "I never would have believed it--though I know these things are so. Now I'm going to teach you. Innocence may be a good thing for respectable women who are going to marry and settle down with a good husband to look after them. But it won't do at all--not at all, my dear!--for a woman who works--who has to meet men in their own world and on their own terms. It's hard enough to get along, if you know. If you don't--when you're knocked down, you stay knocked down." "Yes--I want to learn," said Susan eagerly. "I want to know--_everything!_" "You're not going back?" Mabel pointed toward the shore, to a home on a hillside, with a woman sewing on the front steps and children racing about the yard. "Back to that sort of thing?" "No," replied Susan. "I've got nothing to go back to." "Nonsense!" "Nothing," repeated Susan in the same simple, final way. "I'm an outcast." The ready tears sprang to Mabel's dissipated but still bright eyes. Susan's unconscious pathos was so touching. "Then I'll educate you. Now don't get horrified or scandalized at me. When you feel that way, remember that Mabel Connemora didn't make the world, but God. At least, so they say--though personally I feel as if the devil had charge of things, and the only god was in us poor human creatures fighting to be decent. I tell you, men and women ain't bad--not so damn bad--excuse me; they will slip out. No, it's the things that happen to them or what they're afraid'll happen--it's those things that compel them to be bad--and get them in the way of being bad--hard to each other, and to hate and to lie and to do all sorts of things." The show boat drifted placidly down with the current of the broad Ohio. Now it moved toward the left bank and now toward the right, as the current was deflected by the bends--the beautiful curves that divided the river into a series of lovely, lake-like reaches, each with its emerald oval of hills and rolling valleys where harvests were ripening. And in the shadow of the awning Susan heard from those pretty, coarse lips, in language softened indeed but still far from refined, about all there is to know concerning the causes and consequences of the eternal struggle that rages round sex. To make her tale vivid, Mabel illustrated it by the story of her own life from girlhood to the present hour. And she omitted no detail necessary to enforce the lesson in life. A few days before Susan would not have believed, would not have understood. Now she both believed and understood. And nothing that Mabel told her--not the worst of the possibilities in the world in which she was adventuring--burned deep enough to penetrate beyond the wound she had already received and to give her a fresh sensation of pain and horror. "You don't seem to be horrified," said Mabel. Susan shook her head. "No," she said. "I feel--somehow I feel better." Mabel eyed her curiously--had a sense of a mystery of suffering which she dared not try to explore. She said: "Better? That's queer. You don't take it at all as I thought you would." Said Susan: "I had about made up my mind it was all bad. I see that maybe it isn't." "Oh, the world isn't such a bad place--in lots of ways. You'll get a heap of fun out of it if you don't take things or yourself seriously. I wish to God I'd had somebody to tell me, instead of having to spell it out, a letter at a time. I've got just two pieces of advice to give you." And she stopped speaking and gazed away toward the shore with a look that seemed to be piercing the hills. "Please do," urged Susan, when Mabel's long mood of abstraction tried her patience. "Oh--yes--two pieces of advice. The first is, don't drink. There's nothing to it--and it'll play hell--excuse me--it'll spoil your looks and your health and give you a woozy head when you most need a steady one. Don't drink--that's the first advice." "I won't," said Susan. "Oh, yes, you will. But remember my advice all the same. The second is, don't sell your body to get a living, unless you've got to." "I couldn't do that," said the girl. Mabel laughed queerly. "Oh, yes, you could--and will. But remember my advice. Don't sell your body because it seems to be the easy way to make a living. I know most women get their living that way." "Oh--no--no, indeed!" protested Susan. "What a child you are!" laughed Mabel. "What's marriage but that?. . . Believe your Aunt Betsy, it's the poorest way to make a living that ever was invented--marriage or the other thing. Sometimes you'll be tempted to. You're pretty, and you'll find yourself up against it with no way out. You'll have to give in for a time, no doubt. The men run things in this world, and they'll compel it--one way or another. But fight back to your feet again. If I'd taken my own advice, my name would be on every dead wall in New York in letters two feet high. Instead----" She laughed, without much bitterness. "And why? All because I never learned to stand alone. I've even supported men--to have something to lean on! How's that for a poor fool?" There Violet Anstruther called her. She rose. "You won't take my advice," she said by way of conclusion. "Nobody'll take advice. Nobody can. We ain't made that way. But don't forget what I've said. And when you've wobbled way off maybe it'll give you something to steer back by." Susan sat on there, deep in the deepest of those brown studies that had been characteristic of her from early childhood. Often--perhaps most often--abstraction means only mental fogginess. But Susan happened to be of those who can concentrate--can think things out. And that afternoon, oblivious of the beauty around her, even unconscious of where she was, she studied the world of reality--that world whose existence, even the part of it lying within ourselves, we all try to ignore or to evade or to deny, and get soundly punished for our folly. Taking advantage of the floods of light Mabel Connemora had let in upon her--full light where there had been a dimness that was equal to darkness--she drew from the closets of memory and examined all the incidents of her life--all that were typical or for other reasons important. One who comes for the first time into new surroundings sees more, learns more about them in a brief period than has been seen and known by those who have lived there always. After a few hours of recalling and reconstructing Susan Lenox understood Sutherland probably better than she would have understood it had she lived a long eventless life there. And is not every Sutherland the world in miniature? She also understood her own position--why the world of respectability had cast her out as soon as she emerged from childhood--why she could not have hoped for the lot to which other girls looked forward--why she belonged with the outcasts, in a world apart--and must live her life there. She felt that she could not hope to be respected, loved, married. She must work out her destiny along other lines. She understood it all, more clearly than would have been expected of her. And it is important to note that she faced her future without repining or self-pity, without either joy or despondency. She would go on; she would do as best she could. And nothing that might befall could equal what she had suffered in the throes of the casting out. Burlingham roused her from her long reverie. He evidently had come straight from his nap--stocking feet, shirt open at the collar, trousers sagging and face shiny with the sweat that accumulates during sleep on a hot day. "Round that bend ahead of us is Sutherland," said he, pointing forward. Up she started in alarm. "Now, don't get fractious," cried he cheerfully. "We'll not touch shore for an hour, at least. And nobody's allowed aboard. You can keep to the cabin. I'll see that you're not bothered." "And--this evening?" "You can keep to the dressing-room until the show's over and the people've gone ashore. And tomorrow morning, bright and early, we'll be off. I promised Pat a day for a drunk at Sutherland. He'll have to postpone it. I'll give him three at Jeffersonville, instead." Susan put on her sunbonnet as soon as the show boat rounded the bend above town. Thus she felt safe in staying on deck and watching the town drift by. She did not begin to think of going into the cabin until Pat was working the boat in toward the landing a square above the old familiar wharf-boat. "What day is this?" she asked Eshwell. "Saturday." Only Saturday! And last Monday--less than five days ago--she had left this town for her Cincinnati adventure. She felt as if months, years, had passed. The town seemed strange to her, and she recalled the landmarks as if she were revisiting in age the scenes of youth. How small the town seemed, after Cincinnati! And how squat! Then---- She saw the cupola of the schoolhouse. Its rooms, the playgrounds flashed before her mind's eye--the teachers she had liked--those she had feared--the face of her uncle, so kind and loving--that same face, with hate and contempt in it---- She hurried into the cabin, tears blinding her eyes, her throat choked with sobs. The Burlingham Floating Palace of Thespians tied up against the float of Bill Phibbs's boathouse--a privilege for which Burlingham had to pay two dollars. Pat went ashore with a sack of handbills to litter through the town. Burlingham followed, to visit the offices of the two evening newspapers and by "handing them out a line of smooth talk"--the one art whereof he was master--to get free advertising. Also there were groceries to buy and odds and ends of elastic, fancy crêpe, paper muslin and the like for repairing the shabby costumes. The others remained on board, Eshwell and Tempest to guard the boat against the swarms of boys darting and swooping and chattering like a huge flock of impudent English sparrows. An additional--and the chief--reason for Burlingham's keeping the two actors close was that Eshwell was a drunkard and Tempest a gambler. Neither could be trusted where there was the least temptation. Each despised the other's vice and despised the other for being slave to it. Burlingham could trust Eshwell to watch Tempest, could trust Tempest to watch Eshwell. Susan helped Mabel with the small and early supper--cold chicken and ham, fried potatoes and coffee. Afterward all dressed in the cabin. Some of the curtains for dividing off the berths were drawn, out of respect to Susan not yet broken to the ways of a mode of life which made privacy and personal modesty impossible--and when any human custom becomes impossible, it does not take human beings long to discover that it is also foolish and useless. The women had to provide for a change of costumes. As the dressing-room behind the stage was only a narrow space between the back drop and the forward wall of the cabin, dressing in it was impossible, so Mabel and Vi put on a costume of tights, and over it a dress. Susan was invited to remain and help. The making-up of the faces interested her; she was amazed by the transformation of Mabel into youthful loveliness, with a dairy maid's bloom in place of her pallid pastiness. On the other hand, make-up seemed to bring out the horrors of Miss Anstruther's big, fat, yet hollow face, and to create other and worse horrors--as if in covering her face it somehow uncovered her soul. When the two women stripped and got into their tights, Susan with polite modesty turned away. However, catching sight of Miss Anstruther in the mirror that had been hung up under one of the side lamps, she was so fascinated that she gazed furtively at her by that indirect way. Violet happened to see, laughed. "Look at the baby's shocked face, Mabel," she cried. But she was mistaken. It was sheer horror that held Susan's gaze upon Violet's incredible hips and thighs, violently obtruded by the close-reefed corset. Mabel had a slender figure, the waist too short and the legs too nearly of the same girth from hip to ankle, but for all that, attractive. Susan had never before seen a woman in tights without any sort of skirt. "You would show up well in those things," Violet said to her, "that is, for a thin woman. The men don't care much for thinness." "Not the clodhoppers and roustabouts that come to see us," retorted Mabel. "The more a woman looks like a cow or a sow, the better they like it. They don't believe it's female unless it looks like what they're used to in the barnyard and the cattle pen." Miss Anstruther was not in the least offended. She paraded, jauntily switching her great hips and laughing. "Jealous!" she teased. "You poor little broomstick." Burlingham was in a white flannel suit that looked well enough in those dim lights. The make-up gave him an air of rakish youth. Eshwell had got himself into an ordinary sack suit. Tempest was in the tattered and dirty finery of a seventeenth-century courtier. The paint and black made Eshwell's face fat and comic; it gave Tempest distinction, made his hollow blazing eyes brilliant and large. All traces of habitation were effaced from the "auditorium"; the lamps were lighted, a ticket box was set up on the rear deck and an iron bar was thrown half across the rear entrance to the cabin, that only one person at a time might be able to pass. The curtain was let down--a gaudy smear of a garden scene in a French palace in the eighteenth century. Pat, the orchestra, put on a dress coat and vest and a "dickey"; the coat had white celluloid cuffs pinned in the sleeves at the wrists. As it was still fully an hour and a half from dark, Susan hid on the stage; when it should be time for the curtain to go up she would retreat to the dressing-room. Through a peephole in the curtain she admired the auditorium; and it did look surprisingly well by lamplight, with the smutches and faded spots on its bright paint softened or concealed. "How many will it hold?" she asked Mabel, who was walking up and down, carrying her long train. "A hundred and twenty comfortably," replied Miss Connemora. "A hundred and fifty crowded. It has held as high as thirty dollars, but we'll be lucky if we get fifteen tonight." Susan glanced round at her. She was smoking a cigarette, handling it like a man. Susan's expression was so curious that Mabel laughed. Susan, distressed, cried: "I'm sorry if--if I was impolite." "Oh, you couldn't be impolite," said Mabel. "You've got that to learn, too--and mighty important it is. We all smoke. Why not? We got out of cigarettes, but Bob bought a stock this afternoon." Susan turned to the peephole. Pat, ready to take tickets, was "barking" vigorously in the direction of shore, addressing a crowd which Susan of course could not see. Whenever he paused for breath, Burlingham leaned from the box and took it up, pouring out a stream of eulogies of his show in that easy, lightly cynical voice of his. And the audience straggled in--young fellows and their girls, roughs from along the river front, farmers in town for a day's sport. Susan did not see a single familiar face, and she had supposed she knew, by sight at least, everyone in Sutherland. From fear lest she should see someone she knew, her mind changed to longing. At last she was rewarded. Down the aisle swaggered Redney King, son of the washerwoman, a big hulking bully who used to tease her by pulling her hair during recess and by kicking at her shins when they happened to be next each other in the class standing in long line against the wall of the schoolroom for recitation. From her security she smiled at Redney as representative of all she loved in the old town. And now the four members of the company on the stage and in the dressing-room lost their ease and contemptuous indifference. They had been talking sneeringly about "yokels" and "jays" and "slum bums." They dropped all that, as there spread over them the mysterious spell of the crowd. As individuals the provincials in those seats were ridiculous; as a mass they were an audience, an object of fear and awe. Mabel was almost in tears; Violet talked rapidly, with excited gestures and nervous adjustments of various parts of her toilet. The two men paced about, Eshwell trembling, Tempest with sheer fright in his rolling eyes. They wet their dry lips with dry tongues. Each again and again asked the other anxiously how he was looking and paced away without waiting for the answer. The suspense and nervous terror took hold of Susan; she stood in the corner of the dressing-room, pressing herself close against the wall, her fingers tightly interlocked and hot and cold tremors chasing up and down her body. Burlingham left the box and combined Pat's duties with his own--a small matter, as the audience was seated and a guard at the door was necessary only to keep the loafers on shore from rushing in free. Pat advanced to the little space reserved before the stage, sat down and fell to tuning his violin with all the noise he could make, to create the illusion of a full orchestra. Miss Anstruther appeared in one of the forward side doors of the auditorium, very dignified in her black satin (paper muslin) dress, with many and sparkling hair and neck ornaments and rings that seemed alight. She bowed to the audience, pulled a little old cottage organ from under the stage and seated herself at it. After the overture, a pause. Susan, peeping through a hole in the drop, saw the curtain go up, drew a long breath of terror as the audience was revealed beyond the row of footlights, beyond the big, befrizzled blond head of Violet and the drink-seared face of Pat. From the rear of the auditorium came Burlingham's smooth-flowing, faintly amused voice, announcing the beginning of the performance "a delightful feast throughout, ladies and gentlemen, amusing yet elevating, ever moral yet with none of the depressing sadness of puritanism. For, ladies and gentlemen, while we are pious, we are not puritan. The first number is a monologue, 'The Mad Prince,' by that eminent artist, Gregory Tempest. He has delivered it before vast audiences amid thunders of applause." Susan thrilled as Tempest strode forth--Tempest transformed by the footlights and by her young imagination into a true king most wonderfully and romantically bereft of reason by the woes that had assailed him in horrid phalanxes. If anyone had pointed out to her that Tempest's awful voice was simply cheap ranting, or that her own woes had been as terrible as any that had ever visited a king, or that when people go mad it is never from grief but from insides unromantically addled by foolish eating and drinking--if anyone had attempted then and there to educate the girl, how angry it would have made her, how she would have hated that well-meaning person for spoiling her illusion! The spell of the stage seized her with Tempest's first line, first elegant despairing gesture. It held her through Burlingham and Anstruther's "sketch" of a matrimonial quarrel, through Connemora and Eshwell's "delicious symphonic romanticism" of a lovers' quarrel and making up, through Tempest's recitation of "Lasca," dying to shield her cowboy lover from the hoofs of the stampeded herd. How the tears did stream from Susan's eyes, as Tempest wailed out those last lines: But I wonder why I do not care for the things that are like the things that were? Can it be that half my heart lies buried there, in Texas down by the Rio Grande? She saw the little grave in the desert and the vast blue sky and the buzzard sailing lazily to and fro, and it seemed to her that Tempest himself had inspired such a love, had lost a sweetheart in just that way. No wonder he looked gaunt and hollow-eyed and sallow. The last part of the performance was Holy Land and comic pictures thrown from the rear on a sheet substituted for the drop. As Burlingham had to work the magic lantern from the dressing-room (while Tempest, in a kind of monk's robe, used his voice and elocutionary powers in describing the pictures, now lugubriously and now in "lighter vein"), Susan was forced to retreat to the forward deck and missed that part of the show. But she watched Burlingham shifting the slides and altering the forms of the lenses, and was in another way as much thrilled and spellbound as by the acting. Nor did the spell vanish when, with the audience gone, they all sat down to a late supper, and made coarse jests and mocked at their own doings and at the people who had applauded. Susan did not hear. She felt proud that she was permitted in so distinguished a company. Every disagreeable impression vanished. How could she have thought these geniuses common and cheap! How had she dared apply to them the standards of the people, the dull, commonplace people, among whom she had been brought up! If she could only qualify for membership in this galaxy! The thought made her feel like a worm aspiring to be a star. Tempest, whom she had liked least, now filled her with admiration. She saw the tragedy of his life plain and sad upon his features. She could not look at him without her heart's contracting in an ache. It was not long before Mr. Tempest, who believed himself a lady-killer, noted the ingenuous look in the young girl's face, and began to pose. And it was hardly three bites of a ham sandwich thereafter when Mabel Connemora noted Tempest's shootings of his cuffs and rumplings of his oily ringlets and rollings of his hollow eyes. And at the sight Miss Mabel's bright eyes became bad and her tongue shot satire at him. But Susan did not observe this. After supper they went straightway to bed. Burlingham drew the curtains round the berth let down for Susan. The others indulged in no such prudery on so hot a night. They put out the lamps and got ready for bed and into it by the dim light trickling in through the big rear doorway and the two small side doorways forward. To help on the circulation of air Pat raised the stage curtain and drop, and opened the little door forward. Each sleeper had a small netting suspended over him from the ceiling; without that netting the dense swarms of savage mosquitoes would have made sleep impossible. As it was, the loud singing of these baffled thousands kept Susan awake. After a while, to calm her brain, excited by the evenings thronging impressions and by the new--or, rather, reviewed--ambitions born of them, Susan rose and went softly out on deck, in her nightgown of calico slip. Because of the breeze the mosquitoes did not trouble her there, and she stood a long time watching the town's few faint lights--watching the stars, the thronging stars of the Milky Way--dreaming--dreaming--dreaming. Yesterday had almost faded from her, for youth lives only in tomorrow--youth in tomorrow, age in yesterday, and none of us in today which is all we really have. And she, with her wonderful health of body meaning youth as long as it lasted, she would certainly be young until she was very old--would keep her youth--her dreams--her living always in tomorrow. She was dreaming of her first real tomorrow, now. She would work hard at this wonderful profession--_her_ profession!--would be humble and attentive; and surely the day must come when she too would feel upon her heart the intoxicating beat of those magic waves of applause! Susan, more excited than ever, slipped softly into the cabin and stole into her curtained berth. Like the soughing of the storm above the whimper of the tortured leaves the stentorian snorings of two of the sleepers resounded above the noise of the mosquitoes. She had hardly extended herself in her close little bed when she heard a stealthy step, saw one of her curtains drawn aside. "Who is it?" she whispered, unsuspiciously, for she could see only a vague form darkening the space between the parted curtains. The answer came in a hoarse undertone: "Ye dainty little darling!" She sat up, struck out madly, screamed at the top of her lungs. The curtains fell back into place, the snoring stopped. Susan, all in a sweat and a shiver, lay quiet. Hoarse whispering; then in Burlingham's voice stern and gruff--"Get back to your bed and let her alone, you rolling-eyed----" The sentence ended with as foul a spatter of filth as man can fling at man. Silence again, and after a few minutes the two snores resumed their bass accompaniment to the falsetto of the mosquito chorus. Susan got a little troubled sleep, was wide awake when Violet came saying, "If you want to bathe, I'll bring you a bucket of water and you can put up your berth and do it behind your curtains." Susan thanked her and got a most refreshing bath. When she looked out the men were on deck, Violet was getting breakfast, and Connemora was combing her short, thinning, yellow hair before a mirror hung up near one of the forward doors. In the mirror Connemora saw her, smiled and nodded. "You can fix your hair here," said she. "I'm about done. You can use my brush." And when Susan was busy at the mirror, Mabel lounged on a seat near by smoking a before-breakfast cigarette. "I wish to God I had your hair," said she. "I never did have such a wonderful crop of grass on the knoll, and the way it up and drops out in bunches every now and then sets me crazy. It won't be long before I'll be down to Vi's three hairs and a half. You haven't seen her without her wigs? Well, don't, if you happen to be feeling a bit off. How Burlingham can--" There she stopped, blew out a volume of smoke, grinned half amusedly, half in sympathy with the innocence she was protecting--or, rather, was initiating by cautious degrees. "Who was it raised the row last night?" she inquired. "I don't know," said Susan, her face hid by the mass of wavy hair she was brushing forward from roots to ends. "You don't? I guess you've got a kind of idea, though." No answer from the girl. "Well, it doesn't matter. It isn't your fault." Mabel smoked reflectively. "I'm not jealous of _him_--a woman never is. It's the idea of another woman's getting away with her property, whether she wants it or not--_that's_ what sets her mad-spot to humming. No, I don't give a--a cigarette butt--for that greasy bum actor. But I've always got to have somebody." She laughed. "The idea of his thinking _you'd_ have _him_! What peacocks men are!" Susan understood. The fact of this sort of thing was no longer a mystery to her. But the why of the fact--that seemed more amazing than ever. Now that she had discovered that her notion of love being incorporeal was as fanciful as Santa Claus, she could not conceive why it should be at all. As she was bringing round the braids for the new coiffure she had adopted she said to Mabel: "You--love him?" "I?" Mabel laughed immoderately. "You can have him, if you want him." Susan shuddered. "Oh, no," she said. "I suppose he's very nice--and really he's quite a wonderful actor. But I--I don't care for men." Mabel laughed again--curt, bitter. "Wait," she said. Susan shook her head, with youth's positiveness. "What's caring got to do with it?" pursued Mabel, ignoring the headshake. "I've been about quite a bit, and I've yet to see anybody that really cared for anybody else. We care for ourselves. But a man needs a woman, and a woman needs a man. They call it loving. They might as well call eating loving. Ask Burly." CHAPTER XIV AT breakfast Tempest was precisely as usual, and so were the others. Nor was there effort or any sort of pretense in this. We understand only that to which we are accustomed; the man of peace is amazed by the veteran's nonchalance in presence of danger and horror, of wound and death. To these river wanderers, veterans in the unconventional life, where the unusual is the usual, the unexpected the expected, whatever might happen was the matter of course, to be dealt with and dismissed. Susan naturally took her cue from them. When Tempest said something to her in the course of the careless conversation round the breakfast table, she answered--and had no sense of constraint. Thus, an incident that in other surroundings would have been in some way harmful through receiving the exaggeration of undue emphasis, caused less stir than the five huge and fiery mosquito bites Eshwell had got in the night. And Susan unconsciously absorbed one of those lessons in the science and art of living that have decisive weight in shaping our destinies. For intelligent living is in large part learning to ignore the unprofitable that one may concentrate upon the profitable. Burlingham announced that they would cast off and float down to Bethlehem. There was a chorus of protests. "Why, we ought to stay here a week!" cried Miss Anstruther. "We certainly caught on last night." "Didn't we take in seventeen dollars?" demanded Eshwell. "We can't do better than that anywhere." "Who's managing this show?" asked Burlingham in his suave but effective way. "I think I know what I'm about." He met their grumblings with the utmost good-humor and remained inflexible. Susan listened with eyes down and burning cheeks. She knew Burlingham was "leaving the best cow unmilked," as Connemora put it, because he wished to protect her. She told him so when they were alone on the forward deck a little later, as the boat was floating round the bend below Sutherland. "Yes," he admitted. "I've great hopes from your ballads. I want to get you on." He looked round casually, saw that no one was looking, drew a peculiarly folded copy of the _Sutherland Courier_ from his pocket. "Besides"--said he, holding out the paper--"read that." Susan read: George Warham, Esq., requests us to announce that he has increased the reward for information as to the whereabouts of Mrs. Susan Ferguson, his young niece, nee Susan Lenox, to one thousand dollars. There are grave fears that the estimable and lovely young lady, who disappeared from her husband's farm the night of her marriage, has, doubtless in a moment of insanity, ended her life. We hope not. Susan lifted her gaze from this paragraph, after she had read it until the words ran together in a blur. She found Burlingham looking at her. Said he: "As I told you before, I don't want to know anything. But when I read that, it occurred to me, if some of the others saw it they might think it was you--and might do a dirty trick." He sighed, with a cynical little smile. "I was tempted, myself. A thousand is quite a bunch. You don't know--not yet--how a chance to make some money--any old way--compels a man--or a woman--when money's as scarce and as useful as it is in this world. As you get along, you'll notice, my dear, that the people who get moral goose flesh at the shady doings of others are always people who haven't ever really been up against it. I don't know why I didn't----" He shrugged his shoulders. "Now, my dear, you're in on the secret of why I haven't got up in the world." He smiled cheerfully. "But I may yet. The game's far from over." She realized that he had indeed made an enormous sacrifice for her; for, though very ignorant about money, a thousand dollars seemed a fortune. She had no words; she looked away toward the emerald shore, and her eyes filled and her lip quivered. How much goodness there was in the world--how much generosity and affection! "I'm not sure," he went on, "that you oughtn't to go back. But it's your own business. I've a kind of feeling you know what you're about." "No matter what happens to me," said she, "I'll never regret what I've done. I'd kill myself before I'd spend another day with the man they made me marry." "Well--I'm not fond of dying," observed Burlingham, in the light, jovial tone that would most quickly soothe her agitation, "but I think I'd take my chances with the worms rather than with the dry rot of a backwoods farm. You may not get your meals so regular out in the world, but you certainly do live. Yes--that backwoods life, for anybody with a spark of spunk, is simply being dead and knowing it." He tore the _Courier_ into six pieces, flung them over the side. "None of the others saw the paper," said he. "So--Miss Lorna Sackville is perfectly safe." He patted her on the shoulder. "And she owes me a thousand and two dollars." "I'll pay--if you'll be patient," said the girl, taking his jest gravely. "It's a good gamble," said he. Then he laughed. "I guess that had something to do with my virtue. There's always a practical reason--always." But the girl was not hearing his philosophies. Once more she was overwhelmed and stupefied by the events that had dashed in, upon, and over her like swift succeeding billows that give the swimmer no pause for breath or for clearing the eyes. "No--you're not dreaming," said Burlingham, laughing at her expression. "At least, no more than we all are. Sometimes I suspect the whole damn shooting-match is nothing but a dream. Well, it's a pretty good one eh?" And she agreed with him, as she thought how smoothly and agreeably they were drifting into the unknown, full of the most fascinating possibilities. How attractive this life was, how much at home she felt among these people, and if anyone should tell him about her birth or about how she had been degraded by Ferguson, it wouldn't in the least affect their feeling toward her, she was sure. "When do--do you--try me?" she asked. "Tomorrow night, at Bethlehem--a bum little town for us. We'll stay there a couple of days. I want you to get used to appearing." He nodded at her encouragingly. "You've got stuff in you, real stuff. Don't you doubt it. Get self-confidence--conceit, if you please. Nobody arrives anywhere without it. You want to feel that you can do what you want to do. A fool's conceit is that he's it already. A sensible man's conceit is that he can be it, if he'll only work hard and in the right way. See?" "I--I think I do," said the girl. "I'm not sure." Burlingham smoked his cigar in silence. When he spoke, it was with eyes carefully averted. "There's another subject the spirit moves me to talk to you about. That's the one Miss Connemora opened up with you yesterday." As Susan moved uneasily, "Now, don't get scared. I'm not letting the woman business bother me much nowadays. All I think of is how to get on my feet again. I want to have a theater on Broadway before the old black-flagger overtakes my craft and makes me walk the plank and jump out into the Big Guess. So you needn't think I'm going to worry you. I'm not." "Oh, I didn't think----" "You ought to have, though," interrupted he. "A man like me is a rare exception. I'm a rare exception to my ordinary self, to be quite honest. It'll be best for you always to assume that every man you run across is looking for just one thing. You know what?" Susan, the flush gone from her cheeks, nodded. "I suppose Connemora has put you wise. But there are some things even she don't know about that subject. Now, I want you to listen to your grandfather. Remember what he says. And think it over until you understand it." "I will," said Susan. "In the life you've come out of, virtue in a woman's everything. She's got to be virtuous, or at least to have the reputation of it--or she's nothing. You understand that?" "Yes," said Susan. "I understand that--now." "Very well. Now in the life you're going into, virtue in a woman is nothing--no more than it is in a man anywhere. The woman who makes a career becomes like the man who makes a career. How is it with a man? Some are virtuous, others are not. But no man lets virtue bother him and nobody bothers about his virtue. That's the way it is with a woman who cuts loose from the conventional life of society and home and all that. She is virtuous or not, as she happens to incline. Her real interest in herself, her real value, lies in another direction. If it doesn't, if she continues to be agitated about her virtue as if it were all there is to her--then the sooner she hikes back to respectability, to the conventional routine, why the better for her. She'll never make a career, any more than she could drive an automobile through a crowded street and at the same time keep a big picture hat on straight. Do you follow me?" "I'm not sure," said the girl. "I'll have to think about it." "That's right. Don't misunderstand. I'm not talking for or against virtue. I'm simply talking practical life, and all I mean is that you won't get on there by your virtue, and you won't get on by your lack of virtue. Now for my advice." Susan's look of unconscious admiration and attention was the subtlest flattery. Its frank, ingenuous showing of her implicit trust in him so impressed him with his responsibility that he hesitated before he said: "Never forget this, and don't stop thinking about it until you understand it: Make men _as_ men incidental in your life, precisely as men who amount to anything make women _as_ women incidental." Her first sensation was obviously disappointing. She had expected something far more impressive. Said she: "I don't care anything about men." "Be sensible! How are you to know now what you care about and what you don't?" was Burlingham's laughing rebuke. "And in the line you've taken--the stage--with your emotions always being stirred up, with your thoughts always hovering round the relations of men and women--for that's the only subject of plays and music, and with opportunity thrusting at you as it never thrusts at conventional people you'll probably soon find you care a great deal about men. But don't ever let your emotions hinder or hurt or destroy you. Use them to help you. I guess I'm shooting pretty far over that young head of yours, ain't I?" "Not so very far," said the girl. "Anyhow, I'll remember." "If you live big enough and long enough, you'll go through three stages. The first is the one you're in now. They've always taught you without realizing it, and so you think that only the strong can afford to do right. You think doing right makes the ordinary person, like yourself, easy prey for those who do wrong. You think that good people--if they're really good--have to wait until they get to Heaven before they get a chance." "Isn't that so?" "No. But you'll not realize it until you pass into the second stage. There, you'll think you see that only the strong can afford to do wrong. You'll think that everyone, except the strong, gets it in the neck if he or she does anything out of the way. You'll think you're being punished for your sins, and that, if you had behaved yourself, you'd have got on much better. That's the stage that's coming; and what you go through with there--how you come out of the fight--will decide your fate--show whether or not you've got the real stuff in you. Do you understand?" Susan shook her head. "I thought not. You haven't lived long enough yet. Well, I'll finish, anyhow." "I'll remember," said Susan. "I'll think about it until I do understand." "I hope so. The weather and the scenery make me feel like philosophizing. Finally, if you come through the second stage all right, you'll enter the third stage. There, you'll see that you were right at first when you thought only the strong could afford to do right. And you'll see that you were right in the second stage when you thought only the strong could afford to do wrong. For you'll have learned that only the strong can afford to act at all, and that they can do right or wrong as they please _because they are strong_." "Then you don't believe in right, at all!" exclaimed the girl, much depressed, but whether for the right or for her friend she could not have told. "Now, who said that?" Demanded he, amused. "What _did_ I say? Why--if you want to do right, be strong or you'll be crushed; and if you want to do wrong, take care again to be strong--or you'll be crushed. My moral is, be strong! In this world the good weaklings and the bad weaklings had better lie low, hide in the tall grass. The strong inherit the earth." They were silent a long time, she thinking, he observing her with sad tenderness. At last he said: "You are a nice sweet girl--well brought up. But that means badly brought up for the life you've got to lead--the life you've got to learn to lead." "I'm beginning to see that," said the girl. Her gravity made him feel like laughing, and brought the tears to his eyes. The laughter he suppressed. "You're going to fight your way up to what's called the triumphant class--the people on top--they have all the success, all the money, all the good times. Well, the things you've been taught--at church--in the Sunday School--in the nice storybooks you've read--those things are all for the triumphant class, or for people working meekly along in 'the station to which God has appointed them' and handing over their earnings to their betters. But those nice moral things you believe in--they don't apply to people like you--fighting their way up from the meek working class to the triumphant class. You won't believe me now--won't understand thoroughly. But soon you'll see. Once you've climbed up among the successful people you can afford to indulge--in moderation--in practicing the good old moralities. Any dirty work you may need done you can hire done and pretend not to know about it. But while you're climbing, no Golden Rule and no turning of the cheek. Tooth and claw then--not sheathed but naked--not by proxy but in your own person." "But you're not like that," said the girl. "The more fool I," repeated he. She was surprised that she understood so much of what he had said--childlike wonder at her wise old heart, made wise almost in a night--a wedding night. When Burlingham lapsed into silence, laughing at himself for having talked so far over the "kiddie's" head, she sat puzzling out what he had said. The world seemed horribly vast and forbidding, and the sky, so blue and bright, seemed far, far away. She sighed profoundly. "I am so weak," she murmured. "I am so ignorant." Burlingham nodded and winked. "Yes, but you'll grow," said be. "I back you to win." The color poured into her cheeks, and she burst into tears. Burlingham thought he understood; for once his shrewdness went far astray. Excusably, since he could not know that he had used the same phrase that had closed Spenser's letter to her. Late in the afternoon, when the heat had abated somewhat and they were floating pleasantly along with the washing gently a-flutter from lines on the roof of the auditorium, Burlingham put Eshwell at the rudder and with Pat and the violin rehearsed her. "The main thing, the only thing to worry about," explained he, "is beginning right." She was standing in the center of the stage, he on the floor of the auditorium beside the seated orchestra. "That means," he went on, "you've simply got to learn to come in right. We'll practice that for a while." She went to the wings--where there was barely space for her to conceal herself by squeezing tightly against the wall. At the signal from him she walked out. As she had the utmost confidence in his kindness, and as she was always too deeply interested in what she and others were doing to be uncomfortably self-conscious, she was not embarrassed, and thought she made the crossing and took her stand very well. He nodded approvingly. "But," said he, "there's a difference between a stage walk and walking anywhere else--or standing. Nothing is natural on the stage. If it were it would look unnatural, because the stage itself is artificial and whatever is there must be in harmony with it. So everything must be done unnaturally in such a way that it _seems_ natural. Just as a picture boat looks natural though it's painted on a flat surface. Now I'll illustrate." He gave her his hand to help her jump down; then he climbed to the stage. He went to the wings and walked out. As he came he called her attention to how he poised his body, how he advanced so that there would be from the auditorium no unsightly view of crossing legs, how he arranged hands, arms, shoulders, legs, head, feet for an attitude of complete rest. He repeated his illustration again and again, Susan watching and listening with open-eyed wonder and admiration. She had never dreamed that so simple a matter could be so complex. When he got her up beside him and went through it with her, she soon became as used to the new motions as a beginner at the piano to stretching an octave. But it was only after more than an hour's practice that she moved him to say: "That'll do for a beginning. Now, we'll sing." She tried "Suwanee River" first and went through it fairly well, singing to him as he stood back at the rear door. He was enthusiastic--cunning Burlingham, who knew so well how to get the best out of everyone! "Mighty good--eh, Pat? Yes, mighty good. You've got something better than a great voice, my dear. You've got magnetism. The same thing that made me engage you the minute you asked me is going to make you--well, go a long ways--a _long_ ways. Now, we'll try 'The Last Rose of Summer.'" She sang even better. And this improvement continued through the other four songs of her repertoire. His confidence in her was contagious; it was so evident that he really did believe in her. And Pat, too, wagged his head in a way that made her feel good about herself. Then Burlingham called in the others whom he had sent to the forward deck. Before them the girl went all to pieces. She made her entrance badly, she sang worse. And the worse she sang, the worse she felt and the worse her next attempt was. At last, with nerves unstrung, she broke down and sobbed. Burlingham climbed up to pat her on the shoulder. "That's the best sign yet," said he. "It shows you've got temperament. Yes--you've got the stuff in you." He quieted her, interested her in the purely mechanical part of what she was doing. "Don't think of who you're doing it before, or of how you're doing it, but only of getting through each step and each note. If your head's full of that, you'll have no room for fright." And she was ready to try again. When she finished the last notes of "Suwanee River," there was an outburst of hearty applause. And the sound that pleased her most was Tempest's rich rhetorical "Bravo!" As a man she abhorred him; but she respected the artist. And in unconsciously drawing this distinction she gave proof of yet another quality that was to count heavily in the coming days. Artist he was not. But she thought him an artist. A girl or boy without the intelligence that can develop into flower and fruit would have seen and felt only Tempest, the odious personality. Burlingham did not let her off until she was ready to drop with exhaustion. And after supper, when they were floating slowly on, well out of the channel where they might be run down by some passing steamer with a flint-hearted captain or pilot, she had to go at it again. She went to bed early, and she slept without a motion or a break until the odor of the cooking breakfast awakened her. When she came out, her face was bright for the first time. She was smiling, laughing, chatting, was delighted with everything and everybody. Even the thought of Roderick Spenser laid up with a broken leg recurred less often and less vividly. It seemed to her that the leg must be about well. The imagination of healthy youth is reluctant to admit ideas of gloom in any circumstances. In circumstances of excitement and adventure, such as Susan's at that time, it flatly refuses to admit them. They were at anchor before a little town sprawled upon the fields between hills and river edge. A few loafers were chewing tobacco and inspecting the show boat from the shady side of a pile of lumber. Pat had already gone forth with the bundle of handbills; he was not only waking up the town, but touring the country in horse and buggy, was agitating the farmers--for the show boat was to stay at least two nights at Bethlehem. "And we ought to do pretty well," said Burlingham. "The wheat's about all threshed, and there's a kind of lull. The hayseeds aren't so dead tired at night. A couple of weeks ago we couldn't have got half a house by paying for it." As the afternoon wore away and the sun disappeared behind the hills to the southwest, Susan's spirits oozed. Burlingham and the others--deliberately--paid no attention to her, acted as if no great, universe-stirring event were impending. Immediately after supper Burlingham said: "Now, Vi, get busy and put her into her harness. Make her a work of art." Never was there a finer display of unselfishness than in their eagerness to help her succeed, in their intense nervous anxiety lest she should not make a hit. The bad in human nature, as Mabel Connemora had said, is indeed almost entirely if not entirely the result of the compulsion of circumstances; the good is the natural outcropping of normal instincts, and resumes control whenever circumstances permit. These wandering players had suffered too much not to have the keenest and gentlest sympathy. Susan looked on Tempest as a wicked man; yet she could not but be touched by his almost hysterical excitement over her debut, when the near approach of the hour made it impossible for his emotional temperament longer to hide its agitation. Every one of them gave or loaned her a talisman--Tempest, a bit of rabbit's foot; Anstruther, a ring that had twice saved her from drowning (at least, it had been on her finger each time); Connemora, a hunchback's tooth on a faded velvet string; Pat, a penny which happened to be of the date of her birth year (the presence of the penny was regarded by all as a most encouraging sign); Eshwell loaned her a miniature silver bug he wore on his watch chain; Burlingham's contribution was a large buckeye----"Ever since I've had that, I've never been without at least the price of a meal in my pocket." They had got together for her a kind of evening dress, a pale blue chiffon-like drapery that left her lovely arms and shoulders bare and clung softly to the lines of her figure. They did her hair up in a graceful sweep from the brow and a simple coil behind. She looked like a woman, yet like a child dressed as a woman, too, for there was as always that exuberant vitality which made each of the hairs of her head seem individual, electric. The rouge gave her color, enhanced into splendor the brilliance of her violet-gray eyes--eyes so intensely colored and so admirably framed that they were noted by the least observant. When Anstruther had put the last touches to her toilet and paraded her to the others, there was a chorus of enthusiasm. The men no less than the women viewed her with the professional eye. "Didn't I tell you all?" cried Burlingham, as they looked her up and down like a group of connoisseurs inspecting a statue. "Wasn't I right?" "'It is the dawn, and Juliet is the east,'" orated Tempest in rich, romantic tones. "A damn shame to waste her on these yaps," said Eshwell. Connemora embraced her with tearful eyes. "And as sweet as you are lovely, you dear!" she cried. "You simply can't help winning." The two women thought her greatest charms were her form and her feet and ankles. The men insisted that her charm of charms was her eyes. And certainly, much could be said for that view. Susan's violet-gray eyes, growing grayer when she was thoughtful, growing deeper and clearer and softer shining violet when her emotions were touched--Susan's eyes were undoubtedly unusual even in a race in which homely eyes are the exception. When it was her turn and she emerged into the glare of the footlights, she came to a full stop and an awful wave of weakness leaped up through legs and body to blind her eyes and crash upon her brain. She shook her head, lifted it high like a swimmer shaking off a wave. Her gaze leaped in terror across the blackness of the auditorium with its thick-strewn round white disks of human faces, sought the eyes of Burlingham standing in full view in the center of the rear doorway--where he had told her to look for him. She heard Pat playing the last of the opening chords; Burlingham lifted his hand like a leader's baton. And naturally and sweetly the notes, the words of the old darkey song of longing for home began to float out through the stillness. She did not take her gaze from Burlingham. She sang her best, sang to please him, to show him how she appreciated what he had done for her. And when she finished and bowed, the outburst of applause unnerved her, sent her dizzy and almost staggering into the wings. "Splendid! Splendid!" cried Mabel, and Anstruther embraced her, and Tempest and Eshwell kissed her hands. They all joined in pushing her out again for the encore--"Blue Alsatian Mountains." She did not sing quite so steadily, but got through in good form, the tremolo of nervousness in her voice adding to the wailing pathos of the song's refrain: Adé, adé, adé, such dreams must pass away, But the Blue Alsatian Mountains seem to watch and wait alway. The crowd clapped, stamped, whistled, shouted; but Burlingham defied it. "The lady will sing again later," he cried. "The next number on the regular program is," etc., etc. The crowd yelled; Burlingham stood firm, and up went the curtain on Eshwell and Connemora's sketch. It got no applause. Nor did any other numbers on the program. The contrast between the others and the beauty of the girl, her delicate sweetness, her vital youth, her freshness of the early morning flower, was inevitable. The crowd could think only of her. The quality of magnetism aside, she had sung neither very well nor very badly. But had she sung badly, still her beauty would have won her the same triumph. When she came on for her second number with a cloud-like azure chiffon flung carelessly over her dark hair as a scarf, Spanish fashion, she received a stirring welcome. It frightened her, so that Pat had to begin four times before her voice faintly took up the tune. Again Burlingham's encouraging, confident gaze, flung across the gap between them like a strong rescuing hand, strengthened her to her task. This time he let the crowd have two encores--and the show was over; for the astute manager, seeing how the girl had caught on, had moved her second number to the end. Burlingham lingered in the entrance to the auditorium to feast himself on the comments of the crowd as it passed out. When he went back he had to search for the girl, found her all in a heap in a chair at the outer edge of the forward deck. She was sobbing piteously. "Well, for God's sake!" cried he. "Is _this_ the way you take it!" She lifted her head. "Did I do very badly?" she asked. "You swept 'em off their big hulking feet," replied he. "When you didn't come, I thought I'd disappointed you." "I'll bet my hand there never was such a hit made in a river show boat--and they've graduated some of the swells of the profession. We'll play here a week to crowded houses--matinées every day, too. And this is a two-night stand usually. I must find some more songs." He slapped his thigh. "The very thing!" he cried. "We'll ring in some hymns. 'Rock of Ages,' say--and 'Jesus, Lover of my Soul'--and you can get 'em off in a churchy kind of costume something like a surplice. That'll knock 'em stiff. And Anstruther can dope out the accompaniments on that wheezer. What d'you think?" "Whatever you want," said the girl. "Oh, I am so glad!" "I don't see how you got through so well," said he. "I didn't dare fail," replied Susan. "If I had, I couldn't have faced you." And by the light of the waning moon he saw the passionate gratitude of her sensitive young face. "Oh--I've done nothing," said he, wiping the tears from his eyes--for he had his full share of the impulsive, sentimental temperament of his profession. "Pure selfishness." Susan gazed at him with eyes of the pure deep violet of strongest feeling. "_I_ know what you did," she said in a low voice. "And--I'd die for you." Burlingham had to use his handkerchief in dealing with his eyes now. "This business has given me hysterics," said he with a queer attempt at a laugh. Then, after a moment, "God bless you, little girl. You wait here a moment. I'll see how supper's getting on." He wished to go ahead of her, for he had a shrewd suspicion as to the state of mind of the rest of the company. And he was right. There they sat in the litter of peanut hulls, popcorn, and fruit skins which the audience had left. On every countenance was jealous gloom. "What's wrong?" inquired Burlingham in his cheerful derisive way. "You are a nice bunch, you are!" They shifted uneasily. Mabel snapped out, "Where's the infant prodigy? Is she so stuck on herself already that she won't associate with us?" "You grown-up babies," mocked Burlingham. "I found her out there crying in darkness because she thought she'd failed. Now you go bring her in, Conny. As for the rest of you, I'm disgusted. Here we've hit on something that'll land us in Easy Street, and you're all filled up with poison." They were ashamed of themselves. Burlingham had brought back to them vividly the girl's simplicity and sweetness that had won their hearts, even the hearts of the women in whom jealousy of her young beauty would have been more than excusable. Anstruther began to get out the supper dishes and Mabel slipped away toward the forward deck. "When the child comes in," pursued Burlingham, "I want to see you people looking and acting human." "We are a lot of damn fools," admitted Eshwell. "That's why we're bum actors instead of doing well at some respectable business." And his jealousy went the way of Violet's and Mabel's. Pat began to remember that he had shared in the triumph--where would she have been without his violin work? But Tempest remained somber. In his case better nature was having a particularly hard time of it. His vanity had got savage wounds from the hoots and the "Oh, bite it off, hamfat," which had greeted his impressive lecture on the magic lantern pictures. He eyed Burlingham glumly. He exonerated the girl, but not Burlingham. He was convinced that the manager, in a spirit of mean revenge, had put up a job on him. It simply could not be in the ordinary course that any audience, without some sly trickery of prompting from an old expert of theatrical "double-crossing," would be impatient for a mere chit of an amateur when it might listen to his rich, mellow eloquence. Susan came shyly--and at the first glance into her face her associates despised themselves for their pettiness. It is impossible for envy and jealousy and hatred to stand before the light of such a nature as Susan's. Away from her these very human friends of hers might hate her--but in her presence they could not resist the charm of her sincerity. Everyone's spirits went up with the supper. It was Pat who said to Burlingham, "Bob, we're going to let the pullet in on the profits equally, aren't we?" "Sure," replied Burlingham. "Anybody kicking?" The others protested enthusiastically except Tempest, who shot a glance of fiery scorn at Burlingham over a fork laden with potato salad. "Then--you're elected, Miss Sackville," said Burlingham. Susan's puzzled eyes demanded an explanation. "Just this," said he. "We divide equally at the end of the trip all we've raked in, after the rent of the boat and expenses are taken off. You get your equal share exactly as if you started with us." "But that wouldn't be fair," protested the girl. "I must pay what I owe you first." "She means two dollars she borrowed of me at Carrollton," explained Burlingham. And they all laughed uproariously. "I'll only take what's fair," said the girl. "I vote we give it all to her," rolled out Tempest in tragedy's tone for classic satire. Before Mabel could hurl at him the probably coarse retort she instantly got her lips ready to make, Burlingham's cool, peace-compelling tones broke in: "Miss Sackville's right. She must get only what's fair. She shares equally from tonight on--less two dollars." Susan nodded delightedly. She did not know--and the others did not at the excited moment recall--that the company was to date eleven dollars less well off than when it started from the headwaters of the Ohio in early June. But Burlingham knew, and that was the cause of the quiet grin to which he treated himself. CHAPTER XV BURLINGHAM had lived too long, too actively, and too intelligently to have left any of his large, original stock of the optimism that had so often shipwrecked his career in spite of his talents and his energy. Out of the bitterness of experience he used to say, "A young optimist is a young fool. An old optimist is an old ass. A fool may learn, an ass can't." And again, "An optimist steams through the fog, taking it for granted everything's all right. A pessimist steams ahead too, but he gets ready for trouble." However, he was wise enough to keep his private misgivings and reservations from his associates; the leaders of the human race always talk optimism and think pessimism. He had told the company that Susan was sure to make a go; and after she had made a go, he announced the beginning of a season of triumph. But he was surprised when his prediction came true and they had to turn people away from the next afternoon's performance. He began to believe they really could stay a week, and hired a man to fill the streets of New Washington and other inland villages and towns of the county with a handbill headlining Susan. The news of the lovely young ballad singer in the show boat at Bethlehem spread, as interesting news ever does, and down came the people to see and hear, and to go away exclaiming. Bethlehem, the sleepy, showed that it could wake when there was anything worth waking for. Burlingham put on the hymns in the middle of the week, and even the clergy sent their families. Every morning Susan, either with Mabel or with Burlingham, or with both, took a long walk into the country. It was Burlingham, by the way, who taught her the necessity of regular and methodical long walks for the preservation of her health. When she returned there was always a crowd lounging about the landing waiting to gape at her and whisper. It was intoxicating to her, this delicious draught of the heady wine of fame; and Burlingham was not unprepared for the evidences that she thought pretty well of herself, felt that she had arrived. He laughed to himself indulgently. "Let the kiddie enjoy herself," thought he. "She needs the self-confidence now to give her a good foundation to stand on. Then when she finds out what a false alarm this jay excitement was, she'll not be swept clean away into despair." The chief element in her happiness, he of course knew nothing about. Until this success--which she, having no basis for comparison, could not but exaggerate--she had been crushed and abused more deeply than she had dared admit to herself by her birth which made all the world scorn her and by the series of calamities climaxing in that afternoon and night of horror at Ferguson's. This success--it seemed to her to give her the right to have been born, the right to live on and hold up her head without effort after Ferguson. "I'll show them all, before I get through," she said to herself over and over again. "They'll be proud of me. Ruth will be boasting to everyone that I'm her cousin. And Sam Wright--he'll wonder that he ever dared touch such a famous, great woman." She only half believed this herself, for she had much common sense and small self-confidence. But pretending that she believed it all gave her the most delicious pleasure. Burlingham took such frank joy in her innocent vanity--so far as he understood it and so far as she exhibited it--that the others were good-humored about it too--all the others except Tempest, whom conceit and defeat had long since soured through and through. A tithe of Susan's success would have made him unbearable, for like most human beings he had a vanity that was Atlantosaurian on starvation rations and would have filled the whole earth if it had been fed a few crumbs. Small wonder that we are ever eagerly on the alert for signs of vanity in others; we are seeking the curious comfort there is in the feeling that others have our own weakness to a more ridiculous degree. Tempest twitched to jeer openly at Susan, whose exhibition was really timid and modest and not merely excusable but justifiable. But he dared go no further than holding haughtily aloof and casting vaguely into the air ever and anon a tragic sneer. Susan would not have understood if she had seen, and did not see. She was treading the heights, her eyes upon the sky. She held grave consultation with Burlingham, with Violet, with Mabel, about improving her part. She took it all very, very seriously--and Burlingham was glad of that. "Yes, she does take herself seriously," he admitted to Anstruther. "But that won't do any harm as she's so young, and as she takes her work seriously, too. The trouble about taking oneself seriously is it stops growth. She hasn't got that form of it." "Not yet," said Violet. "She'll wake from her little dream, poor child, long before the fatal stage." And he heaved a sigh for his own lost illusions--those illusions that had cost him so dear. Burlingham had intended to make at least one stop before Jeffersonville, the first large town on the way down. But Susan's capacities as a house-filler decided him for pushing straight for it. "We'll go where there's a big population to be drawn on," said he. But he did not say that in the back of his head there was forming a plan to take a small theater at Jeffersonville if the girl made a hit there. Eshwell, to whom he was talking, looked glum. "She's going pretty good with these greenies," observed he. "But I've my doubts whether city people'll care for anything so milk-like." Burlingham had his doubts, too; but he retorted warmly: "Don't you believe it, Eshie. City's an outside. Underneath, there's still the simple, honest, grassy-green heart of the country." Eshwell laughed. "So you've stopped jeering at jays. You've forgotten what a lot of tightwads and petty swindlers they are. Well, I don't blame you. Now that they're giving down to us so freely, I feel better about them myself. It's a pity we can't lower the rest of the program to the level of their intellectuals." Burlingham was not tactless enough to disturb Eshwell's consoling notion that while Susan was appreciated by these ignorant country-jakes, the rest of the company were too subtle and refined in their art. "That's a good idea," replied he. "I'll try to get together some simple slop. Perhaps a melodrama, a good hot one, would go--eh?" After ten days the receipts began to drop. On the fifteenth day there was only a handful at the matinée, and in the evening half the benches were empty. "About milked dry," said Burlingham at the late supper. "We'll move on in the morning." This pleased everyone. Susan saw visions of bigger triumphs; the others felt that they were going where dramatic talent, not to say genius, would be at least not entirely unappreciated. So the company was at its liveliest next morning as the mosquito-infested willows of the Bethlehem shore slowly dropped away. They had made an unusually early start, for the river would be more and more crowded as they neared the three close-set cities--Louisville, Jeffersonville, and New Albany, and the helpless little show boat must give the steamers no excuse for not seeing her. All day--a long, dreamy, summer day--they drifted lazily downstream, and, except Tempest, all grew gayer and more gay. Burlingham had announced that there were three hundred and seventy-eight dollars in the japanned tin box he kept shut up in his bag. At dusk a tug, for three dollars, nosed them into a wharf which adjoined the thickly populated labor quarter of Jeffersonville. Susan was awakened by a scream. Even as she opened her eyes a dark cloud, a dull suffocating terrifying pain, descended upon her. When she again became conscious, she was lying upon a mass of canvas on the levee with three strange men bending over her. She sat up, instinctively caught together the front of the nightdress she had bought in Bethlehem the second day there. Then she looked wildly from face to face. "You're all right, ma'am," said one of the men. "Not a scratch--only stunned." "What was it?" said the girl. "Where are they?" As she spoke, she saw Burlingham in his nightshirt propped against a big blue oil barrel. He was staring stupidly at the ground. And now she noted the others scattered about the levee, each with a group around him or her. "What was it?" she repeated. "A tug butted its tow of barges into you," said someone. "Crushed your boat like an eggshell." Burlingham staggered to his feet, stared round, saw her. "Thank God!" he cried. "Anyone drowned? Anyone hurt?" "All saved--no bones broken," someone responded. "And the boat?" "Gone down. Nothing left of her but splinters. The barges were full of coal and building stone." "The box!" suddenly shouted Burlingham. "The box!" "What kind of a box?" asked a boy with lean, dirty, and much scratched bare legs. "A little black tin box like they keep money in?" "That's it. Where is it?" "It's all right," said the boy. "One of your people, a black actor-looking fellow----" "Tempest," interjected Burlingham. "Go on." "He dressed on the wharf and he had the box." "Where is he?" "He said he was going for a doctor. Last I seed of him he was up to the corner yonder. He was movin' fast." Burlingham gave a kind of groan. Susan read in his face his fear, his suspicion--the suspicion he was ashamed of himself for having. She noted vaguely that he talked with the policeman aside for a few minutes, after which the policeman went up the levee. Burlingham rejoined his companions and took command. The first thing was to get dressed as well as might be from such of the trunks as had been knocked out of the cabin by the barge and had been picked up. They were all dazed. Even Burlingham could not realize just what had occurred. They called to one another more or less humorous remarks while they were dressing behind piles of boxes, crates, barrels and sacks in the wharf-boat. And they laughed gayly when they assembled. Susan made the best appearance, for her blue serge suit had been taken out dry when she herself was lifted from the sinking wreck; the nightgown served as a blouse. Mabel's trunk had been saved. Violet could wear none of her things, as they were many sizes too small, so she appeared in a property skirt of black paper muslin, a black velvet property basque, a pair of shoes belonging to Tempest. Burlingham and Eshwell made a fairly respectable showing in clothing from Tempest's trunk. Their own trunks had gone down. "Why, where's Tempest?" asked Eshwell. "He'll be back in a few minutes," replied Burlingham. "In fact, he ought to be back now." His glance happened to meet Susan's; he hastily shifted his eyes. "Where's the box?" asked Violet. "Tempest's taking care of it," was the manager's answer. "Tempest!" exclaimed Mabel. Her shrewd, dissipated eyes contracted with suspicion. "Anybody got any money?" inquired Eshwell, as he fished in his pockets. No one had a cent. Eshwell searched Tempest's trunk, found a two-dollar bill and a one wrapped round a silver dollar and wadded in among some ragged underclothes. Susan heard Burlingham mutter "Wonder how he happened to overlook that!" But no one else heard. "Well, we might have breakfast," suggested Mabel. They went out on the water deck of the wharf-boat, looked down at the splinters of the wreck lying in the deep yellow river. "Come on," said Burlingham, and he led the way up the levee. There was no attempt at jauntiness; they all realized now. "How about Tempest?" said Eshwell, stopping short halfway up. "Tempest--hell!" retorted Mabel. "Come on." "What do you mean?" cried Violet, whose left eye was almost closed by a bruise. "We'll not see him again. Come on." "Bob!" shrieked Violet at Burlingham. "Do you hear that?" "Yes," said he. "Keep calm, and come on." "Aren't you going to _do_ anything?" she screamed, seizing him by the coat tail. "You must, damn it--you must!" "I got the policeman to telephone headquarters," said Burlingham. "What else can be done? Come on." And a moment later the bedraggled and dejected company filed into a cheap levee restaurant. "Bring some coffee," Burlingham said to the waiter. Then to the others, "Does anybody want anything else?" No one spoke. "Coffee's all," he said to the waiter. It came, and they drank it in silence, each one's brain busy with the disaster from the standpoint of his own resulting ruin. Susan glanced furtively at each face in turn. She could not think of her own fate, there was such despair in the faces of these others. Mabel looked like an old woman. As for Violet, every feature of her homeliness, her coarseness, her dissipated premature old age stood forth in all its horror. Susan's heart contracted and her flesh crept as she glanced quickly away. But she still saw, and it was many a week before she ceased to see whenever Violet's name came into her mind. Burlingham, too, looked old and broken. Eshwell and Pat, neither of whom had ever had the smallest taste of success, were stolid, like cornered curs taking their beating and waiting in silence for the blows to stop. "Here, Eshie," said the manager, "take care of the three dollars." And he handed him the bills. "I'll pay for the coffee and keep the change. I'm going down to the owners of that tug and see what I can do." When he had paid they followed him out. At the curbstone he said, "Keep together somewhere round the wharf-boat. So long." He lifted the battered hat he was wearing, smiled at Susan. "Cheer up, Miss Sackville. We'll down 'em yet!" And away he went--a strange figure, his burly frame squeezed into a dingy old frock suit from among Tempest's costumes. A dreary two hours, the last half-hour in a drizzling rain from which the narrow eaves of the now closed and locked wharf-boat sheltered them only a little. "There he comes!" cried Susan; and sure enough, Burlingham separated from the crowd streaming along the street at the top of the levee, and began to descend the slope toward them. They concentrated on his face, hoping to get some indication of what to expect; but he never permitted his face to betray his mind. He strode up the plank and joined them. "Tempest come?" he asked. "Tempest!" cried Mabel. "Haven't I told you he's jumped? Don't you suppose _I_ know him?" "And you brought him into the company," raged Violet. "Burlingham didn't want to take him. He looked the fool and jackass he is. Why didn't you warn us he was a rotten thief, too?" "Wasn't it for shoplifting you served six months in Joliet?" retorted Mabel. "You lie--you streetwalker!" screamed Violet. "Ladies! Ladies!" said Eshwell. "That's what _I_ say," observed Pat. "I'm no lady," replied Mabel. "I'm an actress." "An actress--he-he!" jeered Violet. "An actress!" "Shut up, all of you," commanded Burlingham. "I've got some money. I settled for cash." "How much?" cried Mabel and Violet in the same breath, their quarrel not merely finished but forgotten. "Three hundred dollars." "For the boat and all?" demanded Eshwell. "Why, Bob----" "They think it was for boat and all," interrupted Burlingham with his cynical smile. "They set out to bully and cheat me. They knew I couldn't get justice. So I let 'em believe I owned the boat--and I've got fifty apiece for us." "Sixty," said Violet. "Fifty. There are six of us." "You don't count in this little Jonah here, do you?" cried Violet, scowling evilly at Susan. "No--no--don't count me in," begged Susan. "I didn't lose anything." Mabel pinched her arm. "You're right, Mr. Burlingham," said she. "Miss Sackville ought to share. We're all in the same box." "Miss Sackville will share," said Burlingham. "There's going to be no skunking about this, as long as I'm in charge." Eshwell and Pat sided with Violet. While the rain streamed, the five, with Susan a horrified onlooker, fought on and on about the division of the money. Their voices grew louder. They hurled the most frightful epithets at one another. Violet seized Mabel by the hair, and the men interfered, all but coming to blows themselves in the mêlée. The wharfmaster rushed from his office, drove them off to the levee. They continued to yell and curse, even Burlingham losing control of himself and releasing all there was of the tough and the blackguard in his nature. Two policemen came, calmed them with threat of arrest. At last Burlingham took from his pocket one at a time three small rolls of bills. He flung one at each of the three who were opposing his division. "Take that, you dirty curs," he said. "And be glad I'm giving you anything at all. Most managers wouldn't have come back. Come on, Miss Sackville. Come on, Mabel." And the two followed him up the levee, leaving the others counting their shares. At the street corner they went into a general store where Burlingham bought two ninety-eight-cent umbrellas. He gave Mabel one, held the other over Susan and himself as they walked along. "Well, ladies," said he, "we begin life again. A clean slate, a fresh start--as if nothing had ever happened." Susan looked at him to try to give him a grateful and sympathetic smile. She was surprised to see that, so far as she could judge, he had really meant the words he had spoken. "Yes, I mean it," said he. "Always look at life as it is--as a game. With every deal, whether you win or lose, your stake grows--for your stake's your wits, and you add to 'em by learning something with each deal. What are you going to do, Mabel?" "Get some clothes. The water wrecked mine and this rain has finished my hat." "We'll go together," said Burlingham. They took a car for Louisville, descended before a department store. Burlingham had to fit himself from the skin out; Mabel had underclothes, needed a hat, a dress, summer shoes. Susan needed underclothes, shoes, a hat, for she was bareheaded. They arranged to meet at the first entrance down the side street; Burlingham gave Susan and Mabel each their fifty dollars and went his way. When they met again in an hour and a half, they burst into smiles of delight. Burlingham had transformed himself into a jaunty, fashionable young middle-aged man, with an air of success achieved and prosperity assured. He had put the fine finishing touch to his transformation by getting a haircut and a shave. Mabel looked like a showy chorus girl, in a striped blue and white linen suit, a big beflowered hat, and a fluffy blouse of white chiffon. Susan had resisted Mabel's entreaties, had got a plain, sensible linen blouse of a kind that on a pinch might be washed out and worn without ironing. Her new hat was a simple blue sailor with a dark blue band that matched her dress. "I spent thirty-six dollars," said Burlingham. "I only spent twenty-two," declared Mabel. "And this child here only parted with seven of her dollars. I had no idea she was so thrifty." "And now--what?" said Burlingham. "I'm going round to see a friend of mine," replied Mabel. "She's on the stage, too. There's sure to be something doing at the summer places. Maybe I can ring Miss Sackville in. There ought to be a good living in those eyes of hers and those feet and ankles. I'm sure I can put her next to something." "Then you can give her your address," said Burlingham. "Why, she's going with me," cried Mabel. "You don't suppose I'd leave the child adrift?" "No, she's going with me to a boarding house I'll find for her," said Burlingham. Into Mabel's face flashed the expression of the suspicion such a statement would at once arouse in a mind trained as hers had been. Burlingham's look drove the expression out of her face, and suspicion at least into the background. "She's not going with your friend," said Burlingham, a hint of sternness in his voice. "That's best--isn't it?" Miss Connemora's eyes dropped. "Yes, I guess it is," replied she. "Well--I turn down this way." "We'll keep on and go out Chestnut Street," said Burlingham. "You can write to her--or to me--care of the General Delivery." "That's best. You may hear from Tempest. You can write me there, too." Mabel was constrained and embarrassed. "Good-by, Miss Sackville." Susan embraced and kissed her. Mabel began to weep. "Oh, it's all so sudden--and frightful," she said. "Do try to be good, Lorna. You can trust Bob." She looked earnestly, appealingly, at him. "Yes, I'm sure you can. And--he's right about me. Good-by." She hurried away, not before Susan had seen the tears falling from her kind, fast-fading eyes. Susan stood looking after her. And for the first time the truth about the catastrophe came to her. She turned to Burlingham. "How brave you are!" she cried. "Oh, what'd be the use in dropping down and howling like a dog?" replied he. "That wouldn't bring the boat back. It wouldn't get me a job." "And you shared equally, when you lost the most of all." They were walking on. "The boat was mine, too," said he in a dry reflective tone. "I told 'em it wasn't when we started out because I wanted to get a good share for rent and so on, without any kicking from anybody." The loss did not appeal to her; it was the lie he had told. She felt her confidence shaking. "You didn't mean to--to----" she faltered, stopped. "To cheat them?" suggested he. "Yes, I did. So--to sort of balance things up I divided equally all I got from the tug people. What're you looking so unhappy about?" "I wish you hadn't told me," she said miserably. "I don't see why you did." "Because I don't want you making me into a saint. I'm like the rest you see about in pants, cheating and lying, with or without pretending to themselves that they're honest. Don't trust anybody, my dear. The sooner you get over the habit, the sooner you'll cease to tempt people to be hypocrites. All the serious trouble I've ever got into has come through trusting or being trusted." He looked gravely at her, burst out laughing at her perplexed, alarmed expression. "Oh, Lord, it isn't as bad as all that," said he. "The rain's stopped. Let's have breakfast. Then--a new deal--with everything to gain and nothing to lose. It's a great advantage to be in a position where you've got nothing to lose!" CHAPTER XVI BURLINGHAM found for her a comfortable room in a flat in West Chestnut Street--a respectable middle-class neighborhood with three churches in full view and the spires of two others visible over the housetops. Her landlady was Mrs. Redding, a simple-hearted, deaf old widow with bright kind eyes beaming guilelessness through steel-framed spectacles. Mrs. Redding had only recently been reduced to the necessity of letting a room. She stated her moderate price--seven dollars a week for room and board--as if she expected to be arrested for attempted extortion. "I give good meals," she hastened to add. "I do the cooking myself--and buy the best. I'm no hand for canned stuff. As for that there cold storage, it's no better'n slow poison, and not so terrible slow at that. Anything your daughter wants I'll give her." "She's not my daughter," said Burlingham, and it was his turn to be red and flustered. "I'm simply looking after her, as she's alone in the world. I'm going to live somewhere else. But I'll come here for meals, if you're willing, ma'am." "I--I'd have to make that extry, I'm afraid," pleaded Mrs. Redding. "Rather!" exclaimed Burlingham. "I eat like a pair of Percherons." "How much did you calculate to pay?" inquired the widow. Her one effort at price fixing, though entirely successful, had exhausted her courage. Burlingham was clear out of his class in those idyllic days of protector of innocence. He proceeded to be more than honest. "Oh, say five a week." "Gracious! That's too much," protested she. "I hate to charge a body for food, somehow. It don't seem to be accordin' to what God tells us. But I don't see no way out." "I'll come for five not a cent less," insisted Burlingham. "I want to feel free to eat as much as I like." And it was so arranged. Away he went to look up his acquaintances, while Susan sat listening to the widow and trying to convince her that she and Mr. Burlingham didn't want and couldn't possibly eat all the things she suggested as suitable for a nice supper. Susan had been learning rapidly since she joined the theatrical profession. She saw why this fine old woman was getting poorer steadily, was arranging to spend her last years in an almshouse. What a queer world it was! What a strange way for a good God to order things! The better you were, the worse off you were. No doubt it was Burlingham's lifelong goodness of heart as shown in his generosity to her, that had kept him down. It was the same way with her dead mother--she had been loving and trusting, had given generously without thought of self, with generous confidence in the man she loved--and had paid with reputation and life. She compelled Burlingham to take what was left of her fifty dollars. "You wouldn't like to make me feel mean," was the argument she used. "I must put in what I've got--the same as you do. Now, isn't that fair?" And as he was dead broke and had been unable to borrow, he did not oppose vigorously. She assumed that after a day or two spent in getting his bearings he would take her with him as he went looking. When she suggested it, he promptly vetoed it. "That isn't the way business is done in the profession," said he. "The star--you're the star--keeps in the background, and her manager--that's me does the hustling." She had every reason for believing this; but as the days passed with no results, sitting about waiting began to get upon her nerves. Mrs. Redding had the remnant of her dead husband's library, and he had been a man of broad taste in literature. But Susan, ardent reader though she was, could not often lose herself in books now. She was too impatient for realities, too anxious about them. Burlingham remained equable, neither hopeful nor gloomy; he made her feel that he was strong, and it gave her strength. Thus she was not depressed when on the last day of their week he said: "I think we'd better push on to Cincinnati tomorrow. There's nothing here, and we've got to get placed before our cash gives out. In Cincinnati there are a dozen places to one in this snide town." The idea of going to Cincinnati gave her a qualm of fear; but it passed away when she considered how she had dropped out of the world. "They think I'm dead," she reflected. "Anyhow, I'd never be looked for among the kind of people I'm in with now." The past with which she had broken seemed so far away and so dim to her that she could not but feel it must seem so to those who knew her in her former life. She had such a sense of her own insignificance, now that she knew something of the vastness and business of the world, that she was without a suspicion of the huge scandal and excitement her disappearance had caused in Sutherland. To Cincinnati they went next day by the L. and N. and took two tiny rooms in the dingy old Walnut Street House, at a special rate--five dollars a week for the two, as a concession to the profession. "We'll eat in cheap restaurants and spread our capital out," said Burlingham. "I want you to get placed _right_, not just placed." He bought a box of blacking and a brush, instructed her in the subtle art of making a front--an art whereof he was past master, as Susan had long since learned. "Never let yourself look poor or act poor, until you simply have to throw up the sponge," said he. "The world judges by appearances. Put your first money and your last into clothes. And never--never--tell a hard-luck story. Always seem to be doing well and comfortably looking out for a chance to do better. The whole world runs from seedy people and whimperers." "Am I--that way?" she asked nervously. "Not a bit," declared he. "The day you came up to me in Carrollton I knew you were playing in the hardest kind of hard luck because of what I had happened to see and hear--and guess. But you weren't looking for pity--and that was what I liked. And it made me feel you had the stuff in you. I'd not waste breath teaching a whiner or a cheap skate. You couldn't be cheap if you tried. The reason I talk to you about these things is so you'll learn to put the artistic touches by instinct into what you do." "You've taken too much trouble for me," said the girl. "Don't you believe it, my dear," laughed he. "If I can do with you what I hope--I've an instinct that if I win out for you, I'll come into my own at last." "You've taught me a lot," said she. "I wonder," replied he. "That is, I wonder how much you've learned. Perhaps enough to keep you--not to keep from being knocked down by fate, but to get on your feet afterward. I hope so--I hope so." They dropped coffee, bought milk by the bottle, he smuggling it to their rooms disguised as a roll of newspapers. They carried in rolls also, and cut down their restaurant meals to supper which they got for twenty-five cents apiece at a bakery restaurant in Seventh Street. There is a way of resorting to these little economies--a snobbish, self-despairing way--that makes them sordid and makes the person indulging in them sink lower and lower. But Burlingham could not have taken that way. He was the adventurer born, was a hardy seasoned campaigner who had never looked on life in the snob's way, had never felt the impulse to apologize for his defeats or to grow haughty over his successes. Susan was an apt pupil; and for the career that lay before her his instructions were invaluable. He was teaching her how to keep the craft afloat and shipshape through the worst weather that can sweep the sea of life. "How do you make yourself look always neat and clean?" he asked. She confessed: "I wash out my things at night and hang them on the inside of the shutters to dry. They're ready to wear again in the morning." "Getting on!" cried he, full of admiration. "They simply can't down us, and they might as well give up trying." "But I don't look neat," sighed she. "I can't iron." "No--that's the devil of it," laughed he. He pulled aside his waistcoat and she saw he was wearing a dickey. "And my cuffs are pinned in," he said. "I have to be careful about raising and lowering my arms." "Can't I wash out some things for you?" she said, then hurried on to put it more strongly. "Yes, give them to me when we get back to the hotel." "It does help a man to feel he's clean underneath. And we've got nothing to waste on laundries." "I wish I hadn't spent that fifteen cents to have my heels straightened and new steels put in them." She had sat in a cobbler's while this repair to the part of her person she was most insistent upon had been effected. He laughed. "A good investment, that," said he. "I've been noticing how you always look nice about the feet. Keep it up. The surest sign of a sloven and a failure, of a moral, mental, and physical no-good is down-at-the-heel. Always keep your heels straight, Lorna." And never had he given her a piece of advice more to her liking. She thought she knew now why she had always been so particular about her boots and shoes, her slippers and her stockings. He had given her a new confidence in herself--in a strength within her somewhere beneath the weakness she was always seeing and feeling. Not until she thought it out afterward did she realize what they were passing through, what frightful days of failure he was enduring. He acted like the steady-nerved gambler at life that he was. He was not one of those more or less weak losers who have to make desperate efforts to conceal a fainting heart. His heart was not fainting. He simply played calmly on, feeling that the next throw was as likely to be for as against him. She kept close to her room, walking about there--she had never been much of a sitter--thinking, practicing the new songs he had got for her--character songs in which he trained her as well as he could without music or costume or any of the accessories. He also had an idea for a church scene, with her in a choir boy's costume, singing the most moving of the simple religious songs to organ music. She from time to time urged him to take her on the rounds with him. But he stood firm, giving always the same reason of the custom in the profession. Gradually, perhaps by some form of that curious process of infiltration that goes on between two minds long in intimate contact, the conviction came to her that the reason he alleged was not his real reason; but as she had absolute confidence in him she felt that there was some good reason or he would not keep her in the background--and that his silence about it must be respected. So she tried to hide from him how weary and heartsick inaction was making her, how hard it was for her to stay alone so many hours each day. As he watched her closely, it soon dawned on him that something was wrong, and after a day or so he worked out the explanation. He found a remedy--the reading room of the public library where she could make herself almost content the whole day long. He began to have a haggard look, and she saw he was sick, was keeping up his strength with whisky. "It's only this infernal summer cold I caught in the smashup," he explained. "I can't shake it, but neither can it get me down. I'd not dare fall sick. What'd become of _us_?" She knew that "us" meant only herself. Her mind had been aging rapidly in those long periods of unbroken reflection. To develop a human being, leave him or her alone most of the time; it is too much company, too little time to digest and assimilate, that keep us thoughtless and unformed until life is half over. She astonished him by suddenly announcing one evening: "I am a drag on you. I'm going to take a place in a store." He affected an indignation so artistic that it ought to have been convincing. "I'm ashamed of you!" he cried. "I see you're losing your nerve." This was ingenious, but it did not succeed. "You can't deceive me any longer," was her steady answer. "Tell me honest--couldn't you have got something to do long ago, if it hadn't been for trying to do something for me?" "Sure," replied he, too canny to deny the obvious. "But what has that to do with it? If I'd had a living offer, I'd have taken it. But at my age a man doesn't dare take certain kinds of places. It'd settle him for life. And I'm playing for a really big stake and I'll win. When I get what I want for you, we'll make as much money a month as I could make a year. Trust me, my dear." It was plausible; and her "loss of nerve" was visibly aggravating his condition--the twitching of hands and face, the terrifying brightness of his eyes, of the color in the deep hollows under his cheek bones. But she felt that she must persist. "How much money have we got?" she asked. "Oh--a great deal enough." "You must play square with me," said she. "I'm not a baby, but a woman--and your partner." "Don't worry me, child. We'll talk about it tomorrow." "How much? You've no right to hide things from me. You--hurt me." "Eleven dollars and eighty cents--when this bill for supper's paid and the waitress tipped." "I'll try for a place in a store," said she. "Don't talk that way or think that way," cried he angrily. "There's where so many people fail in life. They don't stick to their game. I wish to God I'd had sense enough to break straight for Chicago or New York. But it's too late now. What I lack is nerve--nerve to do the big, bold things my brains show me I ought." His distress was so obvious that she let the subject drop. That night she lay awake as she had fallen into the habit of doing. But instead of purposeless, rambling thoughts, she was trying definitely to plan a search for work. Toward three in the morning she heard him tossing and muttering--for the wall between their rooms was merely plastered laths covered with paper. She tried his door; it was locked. She knocked, got no answer but incoherent ravings. She roused the office, and the night porter forced the door. Burlingham's gas was lighted; he was sitting up in bed--a haggard, disheveled, insane man, raving on and on--names of men and women she had never heard--oaths, disjointed sentences. "Brain fever, I reckon," said the porter. "I'll call a doctor." In a few minutes Susan was gladdened by the sight of a young man wearing the familiar pointed beard and bearing the familiar black bag. He made a careful examination, asked her many questions, finally said: "Your father has typhoid, I fear. He must be taken to a hospital." "But we have very little money," said Susan. "I understand," replied the doctor, marveling at the calmness of one so young. "The hospital I mean is free. I'll send for an ambulance." While they were waiting beside Burlingham, whom the doctor had drugged into unconsciousness with a hypodermic, Susan said: "Can I go to the hospital and take care of him?" "No," replied the doctor. "You can only call and inquire how he is, until he's well enough to see you." "And how long will that be?" "I can't say." He hadn't the courage to tell her it would be three weeks at least, perhaps six or seven. He got leave of the ambulance surgeon for Susan to ride to the hospital, and he went along himself. As the ambulance sped through the dimly lighted streets with clanging bell and heavy pounding of the horse's hoofs on the granite pavement, Susan knelt beside Burlingham, holding one of his hot hands. She was remembering how she had said that she would die for him--and here it was he that was dying for her. And her heart was heavy with a load of guilt, the heaviest she was ever to feel in her life. She could not know how misfortune is really the lot of human beings; it seemed to her that a special curse attended her, striking down all who befriended her. They dashed up to great open doors of the hospital. Burlingham was lifted, was carried swiftly into the receiving room. Susan with tearless eyes bent over, embraced him lingeringly, kissed his fiery brow, his wasted cheeks. One of the surgeons in white duck touched her on the arm. "We can't delay," he said. "No indeed," she replied, instantly drawing back. She watched the stretcher on wheels go noiselessly down the corridor toward the elevator and when it was gone she still continued to look. "You can come at any hour to inquire," said the young doctor who had accompanied her. "Now we'll go into the office and have the slip made out." They entered a small room, divided unequally by a barrier desk; behind it stood a lean, coffee-sallowed young man with a scrawny neck displayed to the uttermost by a standing collar scarcely taller than the band of a shirt. He directed at Susan one of those obtrusively shrewd glances which shallow people practice and affect to create the impression that they have a genius for character reading. He drew a pad of blank forms toward him, wiped a pen on the mat into which his mouse-colored hair was roached above his right temple. "Well, miss, what's the patient's name?" "Robert Burlingham." "Age?" "I don't know." "About what?" "I--I don't know. I guess he isn't very young. But I don't know." "Put down forty, Sim," said the doctor. "Very well, Doctor Hamilton." Then to Susan: "Color white, I suppose. Nativity?" Susan recalled that she had heard him speak of Liverpool as his birthplace. "English," said she. "Profession?" "Actor." "Residence?" "He hasn't any. It was sunk at Jeffersonville. We stop at the Walnut Street House." "Walnut Street House. Was he married or single?" "Single." Then she recalled some of the disconnected ravings. "I--I--don't know." "Single," said the clerk. "No, I guess I'll put it widower. Next friend or relative?" "I am." "Daughter. First name?" "I am not his daughter." "Oh, niece. Full name, please." "I am no relation--just his--his friend." Sim the clerk looked up sharply. Hamilton reddened, glowered at him. "I understand," said Sim, leering at her. And in a tone that reeked insinuation which quite escaped her, he went on, "We'll put your name down. What is it?" "Lorna Sackville." "You don't look English--not at all the English style of beauty, eh--Doctor?" "That's all, Miss Sackville," said Hamilton, with a scowl at the clerk. Susan and he went out into Twelfth Street. Hamilton from time to time stole a glance of sympathy and inquiry into the sad young face, as he and she walked eastward together. "He's a strong man and sure to pull through," said the doctor. "Are you alone at the hotel?" "I've nobody but him in the world," replied she. "I was about to venture to advise that you go to a boarding house," pursued the young man. "Thank you. I'll see." "There's one opposite the hospital--a reasonable place." "I've got to go to work," said the girl, to herself rather than to him. "Oh, you have a position." Susan did not reply, and he assumed that she had. "If you don't mind, I'd like to call and see--Mr. Burlingham. The physicians at the hospital are perfectly competent, as good as there are in the city. But I'm not very busy, and I'd be glad to go." "We haven't any money," said the girl. "And I don't know when we shall have. I don't want to deceive you." "I understand perfectly," said the young man, looking at her with interested but respectful eyes. "I'm poor, myself, and have just started." "Will they treat him well, when he's got no money?" "As well as if he paid." "And you will go and see that everything's all right?" "It'll be a pleasure." Under a gas lamp he took out a card and gave it to her. She thanked him and put it in the bosom of her blouse where lay all the money they had--the eleven dollars and eighty cents. They walked to the hotel, as cars were few at that hour. He did all the talking--assurances that her "father" could not fail to get well, that typhoid wasn't anything like the serious disease it used to be, and that he probably had a light form of it. The girl listened, but her heart could not grow less heavy. As he was leaving her at the hotel door, he hesitated, then asked if she wouldn't let him call and take her to the hospital the next morning, or, rather, later that same morning. She accepted, she hoped that, if he were with her, she gratefully; would be admitted to see Burlingham and could assure herself that he was well taken care of. The night porter tried to detain her for a little chat. "Well," said he, "it's a good hospital--for you folks with money. Of course, for us poor people it's different. You couldn't hire _me_ to go there." Susan turned upon him. "Why not?" she asked. "Oh, if a man's poor, or can't pay for nice quarters, they treat him any old way. Yes, they're good doctors and all that. But they're like everybody else. They don't give a darn for poor people. But your uncle'll be all right there." For the first time in her life Susan did not close her eyes in sleep. The young doctor was so moved by her worn appearance that he impulsively said: "Have you some troubles you've said nothing about? Please don't hesitate to tell me." "Oh, you needn't worry about me," replied she. "I simply didn't sleep--that's all. Do they treat charity patients badly at the hospital?" "Certainly not," declared he earnestly. "Of course, a charity patient can't have a room to himself. But that's no disadvantage." "How much is a room?" "The cheapest are ten dollars a week. That includes private attendance--a little better nursing than the public patients get--perhaps. But, really--Miss Sackville----" "He must have a room," said Susan. "You are sure you can afford it? The difference isn't----" "He must have a room." She held out a ten-dollar bill--ten dollars of the eleven dollars and eighty cents. "This'll pay for the first week. You fix it, won't you?" Young Doctor Hamilton hesitatingly took the money. "You are quite, quite sure, Miss Sackville?--Quite sure you can afford this extravagance--for it is an extravagance." "He must have the best we can afford," evaded she. She waited in the office while Hamilton went up. When he came down after perhaps half an hour, he had an air of cheerfulness. "Everything going nicely," said he. Susan's violet-gray eyes gazed straight into his brown eyes; and the brown eyes dropped. "You are not telling me the truth," said she. "I'm not denying he's a very sick man," protested Hamilton. "Is he----" She could not pronounce the word. "Nothing like that--believe me, nothing. He has the chances all with him." And Susan tried to believe. "He will have a room?" "He has a room. That's why I was so long. And I'm glad he has--for, to be perfectly honest, the attendance--not the treatment, but the attendance--is much better for private patients." Susan was looking at the floor. Presently she drew a long breath, rose. "Well, I must be going," said she. And she went to the street, he accompanying her. "If you're going back to the hotel," said he, "I'm walking that way." "No, I've got to go this way," replied she, looking up Elm Street. He saw she wished to be alone, and left her with the promise to see Burlingham again that afternoon and let her know at the hotel how he was getting on. He went east, she north. At the first corner she stopped, glanced back to make sure he was not following. From her bosom she drew four business cards. She had taken the papers from the pockets of Burlingham's clothes and from the drawer of the table in his room, to put them all together for safety; she had found these cards, the addresses of theatrical agents. As she looked at them, she remembered Burlingham's having said that Blynn--Maurice Blynn, at Vine and Ninth Streets--might give them something at one of the "over the Rhine" music halls, as a last resort. She noted the address, put away the cards and walked on, looking about for a policeman. Soon she came to a bridge over a muddy stream--a little river, she thought at first, then remembered that it must be the canal--the Rhine, as it was called, because the city's huge German population lived beyond it, keeping up the customs and even the language of the fatherland. She stood on the bridge, watching the repulsive waters from which arose the stench of sewage; watching canal boats dragged drearily by mules with harness-worn hides; followed with her melancholy eyes the course of the canal under bridge after bridge, through a lane of dirty, noisy factories pouring out from lofty chimneys immense clouds of black smoke. It ought to have been a bright summer day, but the sun shone palely through the dense clouds; a sticky, sooty moisture saturated the air, formed a skin of oily black ooze over everything exposed to it. A policeman, a big German, with stupid honest face, brutal yet kindly, came lounging along. "I beg your pardon," said Susan, "but would you mind telling me where--" she had forgotten the address, fumbled in her bosom for the cards, showed him Blynn's card--"how I can get to this?" The policeman nodded as he read the address. "Keep on this way, lady"--he pointed his baton south--"until you've passed four streets. At the fifth street turn east. Go one--two--three--four--five streets east. Understand?" "Yes, thank you," said the girl with the politeness of deep gratitude. "You'll be at Vine. You'll see the name on the street lamp. Blynn's on the southwest corner. Think you can find it?" "I'm sure I can." "I'm going that way," continued the policeman. "But you'd better walk ahead. If you walked with me, they'd think you was pinched--and we'd have a crowd after us." And he laughed with much shaking of his fat, tightly belted body. Susan contrived to force a smile, though the suggestion of such a disgraceful scene made her shudder. "Thank you so much. I'm sure I'll find it." And she hastened on, eager to put distance between herself and that awkward company. "Don't mention it, lady," the policeman called after her, tapping his baton on the rim of his helmet, as a mark of elegant courtesy. She was not at ease until, looking back, she no longer saw the bluecoat for the intervening crowds. After several slight mistakes in the way, she descried ahead of her a large sign painted on the wall of a three-story brick building: MAURICE BLYNN, THEATRICAL AGENT ALL KINDS OF TALENT PLACED AND SUPPLIED After some investigation she discovered back of the saloon which occupied the street floor a grimy and uneven wooden staircase leading to the upper stories. At the first floor she came face to face with a door on the glass of which was painted the same announcement she had read from the wall. She knocked timidly, then louder. A shrill voice came from the interior: "The door's open. Come in." She turned the knob and entered a small, low-ceilinged room whose general grime was streaked here and there with smears of soot. It contained a small wooden table at which sprawled a freckled and undernourished office boy, and a wooden bench where fretted a woman obviously of "the profession." She was dressed in masses of dirty white furbelows. On her head reared a big hat, above an incredible quantity of yellow hair; on the hat were badly put together plumes of badly curled ostrich feathers. Beneath her skirt was visible one of her feet; it was large and fat, was thrust into a tiny slipper with high heel ending under the arch of the foot. The face of the actress was young and pertly pretty, but worn, overpainted, overpowdered and underwashed. She eyed Susan insolently. "Want to see the boss?" said the boy. "If you please," murmured Susan. "Business?" "I'm looking for a--for a place." The boy examined her carefully. "Appointment?" "No, sir," replied the girl. "Well--he'll see you, anyhow," said the boy, rising. The mass of plumes and yellow bangs and furbelows on the bench became violently agitated. "I'm first," cried the actress. "Oh, you sit tight, Mame," jeered the boy. He opened a solid door behind him. Through the crack Susan saw busily writing at a table desk a bald, fat man with a pasty skin and a veined and bulbous nose. "Lady to see you," said the boy in a tone loud enough for both Susan and the actress to hear. "Who? What name?" snapped the man, not ceasing or looking up. "She's young, and a queen," said the boy. "Shall I show her in?" "Yep." The actress started up. "Mr. Blynn----" she began in a loud, threatening, elocutionary voice. "'Lo, Mame," said Blynn, still busy. "No time to see you. Nothing doing. So long." "But, Mr. Blynn----" "Bite it off, Mame," ordered the boy. "Walk in, miss." Susan, deeply colored from sympathy with the humiliated actress and from nervousness in those forbidding and ominous surroundings, entered the private office. The boy closed the door behind her. The pen scratched on. Presently the man said: "Well, my dear, what's your name?" With the last word, the face lifted and Susan saw a seamed and pitted skin, small pale blue eyes showing the white, or rather the bloodshot yellow all round the iris, a heavy mouth and jaw, thick lips; the lower lip protruded and was decorated with a blue-black spot like a blood boil, as if to indicate where the incessant cigar usually rested. At first glance into Susan's sweet, young face the small eyes sparkled and danced, traveled on to the curves of her form. "Do sit down, my dear," said he in a grotesquely wheedling voice. She took the chair close to him as it was the only one in the little room. "What can I do for you? My, how fresh and pretty you are!" "Mr. Burlingham----" began Susan. "Oh--you're the girl Bob was talking about." He smiled and nodded at her. "No wonder he kept you out of sight." He inventoried her charms again with his sensual, confident glance. "Bob certainly has got good taste." "He's in the hospital," said Susan desperately. "So I've come to get a place if you can find me one." "Hospital? I'm sorry to hear that." And Mr. Blynn's tones had that accent of deep sympathy which get a man or woman without further evidence credit for being "kind-hearted whatever else he is." "Yes, he's very ill--with typhoid," said the girl. "I must do something right away to help him." "That's fine--fine," said Mr. Blynn in the same effective tone. "I see you're as sweet as you are pretty. Yes--that's fine--fine!" And the moisture was in the little eyes. "Well, I think I can do something for you. I _must_ do something for you. Had much experience?--Professional, I mean." Mr. Blynn laughed at his, to Susan, mysterious joke. Susan smiled faintly in polite response. He rubbed his hands and smacked his lips, the small eyes dancing. The moisture had vanished. "Oh, yes, I can place you, if you can do anything at all," he went on. "I'd 'a' done it long ago, if Bob had let me see you. But he was too foxy. He ought to be ashamed of himself, standing in the way of your getting on, just out of jealousy. Sing or dance--or both?" "I can sing a little, I think," said Susan. "Now, that's modest. Ever worn tights?" Susan shook her head, a piteous look in her violet-gray eyes. "Oh, you'll soon get used to that. And mighty well you'll look in 'em, I'll bet, eh? Where did Bob get you? And when?" Before she could answer, he went on, "Let's see, I've got a date for this evening, but I'll put it off. And she's a peach, too. So you see what a hit you've made with me. We'll have a nice little dinner at the Hotel du Rhine and talk things over." "Couldn't I go to work right away?" asked the girl. "Sure. I'll have you put on at Schaumer's tomorrow night----" He looked shrewdly, laughingly, at her, with contracted eyelids. "_If_ everything goes well. Before I do anything for you, I have to see what you can do for me." And he nodded and smacked his lips. "Oh, we'll have a lovely little dinner!" He looked expectantly at her. "You certainly are a queen! What a dainty little hand!" He reached out one of his hands--puffy as if it had been poisoned, very white, with stubby fingers. Susan reluctantly yielded her hand to his close, mushy embrace. "No rings. That's a shame, petty----" He was talking as if to a baby.--"That'll have to be fixed--yes, it will, my little sweetie. My, how nice and fresh you are!" And his great nostrils, repulsively hairy within, deeply pitted without, sniffed as if over an odorous flower. Susan drew her hand away. "What will they give me?" she asked. "How greedy it is!" he wheedled. "Well, you'll get plenty--plenty." "How much?" said the girl. "Is it a salary?" "Of course, there's the regular salary. But that won't amount to much. You know how those things are." "How much?" "Oh, say a dollar a night--until you make a hit." "Six dollars a week." "Seven. This is a Sunday town. Sunday's the big day. You'll have Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday matinées, but they don't pay for them." "Seven dollars a week." And the hospital wanted ten. "Couldn't I get--about fifteen--or fourteen? I think I could do on fourteen." "Rather! I was talking only of the salary. You'll make a good many times fifteen--if you play your cards right. It's true Schaumer draws only a beer crowd. But as soon as the word flies round that _you_'re there, the boys with the boodle'll flock in. Oh, you'll wear the sparklers all right, pet." Rather slowly it was penetrating to Susan what Mr. Blynn had in mind. "I'd--I'd rather take a regular salary," said she. "I must have ten a week for him. I can live any old way." "Oh, come off!" cried Mr. Blynn with a wink. "What's your game? Anyhow, don't play it on me. You understand that you can't get something for nothing. It's all very well to love your friend and be true to him. But he can't expect--he'll not ask you to queer yourself. That sort of thing don't go in the profession. . . . Come now, I'm willing to set you on your feet, give you a good start, if you'll play fair with me--show appreciation. Will you or won't you?" "You mean----" began Susan, and paused there, looking at him with grave questioning eyes. His own eyes shifted. "Yes, I mean that. I'm a business man, not a sentimentalist. I don't want love. I've got no time for it. But when it comes to giving a girl of the right sort a square deal and a good time, why you'll find I'm as good as there is going." He reached for her hands again, his empty, flabby chin bags quivering. "I want to help Bob, and I want to help you." She rose slowly, pushing her chair back. She understood now why Burlingham had kept her in the background, why his quest had been vain, why it had fretted him into mortal illness. "I--couldn't do that," she said. "I'm sorry, but I couldn't." He looked at her in a puzzled way. "You belong to Bob, don't you?" "No." "You mean you're straight--a good girl?" "Yes." He was half inclined to believe her, so impressive was her quiet natural way, in favorable contrast to the noisy protests of women posing as virtuous. "Well--if that's so--why you'd better drop out of the profession--and get away from Bob Burlingham." "Can't I have a place without--what you said?" "Not as pretty a girl as you. And if they ain't pretty the public don't want 'em." Susan went to the door leading into the office. "No--the other door," said Blynn hastily. He did not wish the office boy to read his defeat in Susan's countenance. He got up himself, opened the door into the hall. Susan passed out. "Think it over," said he, eyes and mouth full of longing. "Come round in a day or two, and we'll have another talk." "Thank you," said Susan. She felt no anger against him. She felt about him as she had about Jeb Ferguson. It was not his fault; it was simply the way life was lived--part of the general misery and horror of the established order--like marriage and the rest of it. "I'll treat you white," urged Blynn, tenderly. "I've got a soft heart--that's why I'll never get rich. Any of the others'd ask more and give less." She looked at him with an expression that haunted him for several hours. "Thank you. Good-by," she said, and went down the narrow, rickety stairs--and out into the confused maze of streets full of strangers. CHAPTER XVII AT the hotel again; she went to Burlingham's room, gathered his belongings--his suit, his well-worn, twice-tapped shoes, his one extra suit of underclothes, a soiled shirt, two dickeys and cuffs, his whisk broom, toothbrush, a box of blacking, the blacking brush. She made the package as compact as she could--it was still a formidable bundle both for size and weight--and carried it into her room. Then she rolled into a small parcel her own possessions--two blouses, an undervest, a pair of stockings, a nightgown--reminder of Bethlehem and her brief sip at the cup of success--a few toilet articles. With the two bundles she descended to the office. "I came to say," she said calmly to the clerk, "that we have no money to pay what we owe. Mr. Burlingham is at the hospital--very sick with typhoid. Here is a dollar and eighty cents. You can have that, but I'd like to keep it, as it's all we've got." The clerk called the manager, and to him Susan repeated. She used almost the same words; she spoke in the same calm, monotonous way. When she finished, the manager, a small, brisk man with a large brisk beard, said: "No. Keep the money. I'd like to ask you to stay on. But we run this place for a class of people who haven't much at best and keep wobbling back and forth across the line. If I broke my rule----" He made a furious gesture, looked at the girl angrily--holding her responsible for his being in a position where he must do violence to every decent instinct--"My God, miss, I've got a wife and children to look after. If I ran my hotel on sympathy, what'd become of them?" "I wouldn't take anything I couldn't pay for," said Susan. "As soon as I earn some money----" "Don't worry about that," interrupted the manager. He saw now that he was dealing with one who would in no circumstances become troublesome; he went on in an easier tone: "You can stay till the house fills up." "Could you give me a place to wait on table and clean up rooms--or help cook?" "No, I don't need anybody. The town's full of people out of work. You can't ask me to turn away----" "Please--I didn't know," cried the girl. "Anyhow, I couldn't give but twelve a month and board," continued the manager. "And the work--for a lady like you----" A lady! She dropped her gaze in confusion. If he knew about her birth! "I'll do anything. I'm not a lady," said she. "But I've got to have at least ten a week in cash." "No such place here." The manager was glad to find the fault of uppish ideas in this girl who was making it hard for him to be business-like. "No such place anywhere for a beginner." "I must have it," said the girl. "I don't want to discourage you, but----" He was speaking less curtly, for her expression made him suspect why she was bent upon that particular amount. "I hope you'll succeed. Only--don't be depressed if you're disappointed." She smiled gravely at him; he bowed, avoiding her eyes. She took up her bundles and went out into Walnut Street. He moved a few steps in obedience to an impulse to follow her, to give her counsel and warning, to offer to help her about the larger bundle. But he checked himself with the frown of his own not too prosperous affairs. It was the hottest part of the day, and her way lay along unshaded streets. As she had eaten nothing since the night before, she felt faint. Her face was ghastly when she entered the office of the hospital and left Burlingham's parcel. The clerk at the desk told her that Burlingham was in the same condition--"and there'll be probably no change one way or the other for several days." She returned to the street, wandered aimlessly about. She knew she ought to eat something, but the idea of food revolted her. She was fighting the temptation to go to the _Commercial_ office, Roderick Spenser's office. She had not a suspicion that his kindness might have been impulse, long since repented of, perhaps repented of as soon as he was away from her. She felt that if she went to him he would help her. "But I mustn't do it," she said to herself. "Not after what I did." No, she must not see him until she could pay him back. Also, and deeper, there was a feeling that there was a curse upon her; had not everyone who befriended her come to grief? She must not draw anyone else into trouble, must not tangle others in the meshes of her misfortunes. She did not reason this out, of course; but the feeling was not the less strong because the reasons for it were vague in her mind. And there was nothing vague about the resolve to which she finally came--that she would fight her battle herself. Her unheeding wanderings led her after an hour or so to a big department store. Crowds of shoppers, mussy, hot, and cross, were pushing rudely in and out of the doors. She entered, approached a well-dressed, bareheaded old gentleman, whom she rightly placed as floorwalker, inquired of him: "Where do they ask for work?" She had been attracted to him because his was the one face within view not suggesting temper or at least bad humor. It was more than pleasant, it was benign. He inclined toward Susan with an air that invited confidence and application for balm for a wounded spirit. The instant the nature of her inquiry penetrated through his pose to the man himself, there was a swift change to lofty disdain--the familiar attitude of workers toward fellow-workers of what they regard as a lower class. Evidently he resented her having beguiled him by the false air of young lady into wasting upon her, mere servility like himself, a display reserved exclusively for patrons. It was Susan's first experience of this snobbishness; it at once humbled her into the dust. She had been put in her place, and that place was not among people worthy of civil treatment. A girl of his own class would have flashed at him, probably would have "jawed" him. Susan meekly submitted; she was once more reminded that she was an outcast, one for whom the respectable world had no place. He made some sort of reply to her question, in the tone the usher of a fashionable church would use to a stranger obviously not in the same set as the habitués. She heard the tone, but not the words; she turned away to seek the street again. She wandered on--through the labyrinth of streets, through the crowds on crowds of strangers. Ten dollars a week! She knew little about wages, but enough to realize the hopelessness of her quest. Ten dollars a week--and her own keep beside. The faces of the crowds pushing past her and jostling her made her heartsick. So much sickness, and harassment, and discontent--so much unhappiness! Surely all these sad hearts ought to be kind to each other. Yet they were not; each soul went selfishly alone, thinking only of its own burden. She walked on and on, thinking, in this disconnected way characteristic of a good intelligence that has not yet developed order and sequence, a theory of life and a purpose. It had always been her habit to walk about rather than to sit, whether indoors or out. She could think better when in motion physically. When she was so tired that she began to feel weak, she saw a shaded square, with benches under the trees. She entered, sat down to rest. She might apply to the young doctor. But, no. He was poor--and what chance was there of her ever making the money to pay back? No, she could not take alms; than alms there was no lower way of getting money. She might return to Mr. Blynn and accept his offer. The man in all his physical horror rose before her. No, she could not do that. At least, not yet. She could entertain the idea as a possibility now. She remembered her wedding--the afternoon, the night. Yes, Blynn's offer involved nothing so horrible as that--and she had lived through that. It would be cowardice, treachery, to shrink from anything that should prove necessary in doing the square thing by the man who had done so much for her. She had said she would die for Burlingham; she owed even that to him, if her death would help him. Had she then meant nothing but mere lying words of pretended gratitude? But Blynn was always there; something else might turn up, and her dollar and eighty cents would last another day or so, and the ten dollars were not due for six days. No, she would not go to Blynn; she would wait, would take his advice--"think it over." A man was walking up and down the shaded alley, passing and repassing the bench where she sat. She observed him, saw that he was watching her. He was a young man--a very young man--of middle height, strongly built. He had crisp, short dark hair, a darkish skin, amiable blue-gray eyes, pleasing features. She decided that he was of good family, was home from some college on vacation. He was wearing a silk shirt, striped flannel trousers, a thin serge coat of an attractive shade of blue. She liked his looks, liked the way he dressed. It pleased her that such a man should be interested in her; he had a frank and friendly air, and her sad young heart was horribly lonely. She pretended not to notice him; but after a while he walked up to her, lifting his straw hat. "Good afternoon," said he. When he showed his strong sharp teeth in an amiable smile, she thought of Sam Wright--only this man was not weak and mean looking, like her last and truest memory picture of Sam--indeed, the only one she had not lost. "Good afternoon," replied she politely. For in spite of Burlingham's explanations and cautionings she was still the small-town girl, unsuspicious toward courtesy from strange men. Also, she longed for someone to talk with. It had been weeks since she had talked with anyone nearer than Burlingham to her own age and breeding. "Won't you have lunch with me?" he asked. "I hate to eat alone." She, faint from hunger, simply could not help obvious hesitation before saying, "I don't think I care for any." "You haven't had yours--have you?" "No." "May I sit down?" She moved along the bench to indicate that he might, without definitely committing herself. He sat, took off his hat. He had a clean, fresh look about the neck that pleased her. She was weary of seeing grimy, sweaty people, and of smelling them. Also, except the young doctor, since Roderick Spenser left her at Carrolltown she had talked with no one of her own age and class--the class in which she had been brought up, the class that, after making her one of itself, had cast her out forever with its mark of shame upon her. Its mark of shame--burning and stinging again as she sat beside this young man! "You're sad about something?" suggested he, himself nearly as embarrassed as she. "My friend's ill. He's got typhoid." "That is bad. But he'll get all right. They always cure typhoid, nowadays--if it's taken in time and the nursing's good. Everything depends on the nursing. I had it a couple of years ago, and pulled through easily." Susan brightened. He spoke so confidently that the appeal to her young credulity toward good news and the hopeful, cheerful thing was irresistible. "Oh, yes--he'll be over it soon," the young man went on, "especially if he's in a hospital where they've got the facilities for taking care of sick people. Where is he?" "In the hospital--up that way." She moved her head vaguely in the direction of the northwest. "Oh, yes. It's a good one--for the pay patients. I suppose for the poor devils that can't pay"--he glanced with careless sympathy at the dozen or so tramps on benches nearby--"it's like all the rest of 'em--like the whole world, for that matter. It must be awful not to have money enough to get on with, I mean. I'm talking about men." He smiled cheerfully. "With a woman--if she's pretty--it's different, of course." The girl was so agitated that she did not notice the sly, if shy, hint in the remark and its accompanying glance. Said she: "But it's a good hospital if you pay?" "None better. Maybe it's good straight through. I've only heard the servants' talk--and servants are such liars. Still--I'd not want to trust myself to a hospital unless I could pay. I guess the common people have good reason for their horror of free wards. Nothing free is ever good." The girl's face suddenly and startlingly grew almost hard, so fierce was the resolve that formed within her. The money must be got--_must!_--and would. She would try every way she could think of between now and to-morrow; then--if she failed she would go to Blynn. The young man was saying: "You're a stranger in town?" "I was with a theatrical company on a show boat. It sank." His embarrassment vanished. She saw, but she did not understand that it was because he thought he had "placed" her--and that her place was where he had hoped. "You _are_ up against it!" said he. "Come have some lunch. You'll feel better." The good sense of this was unanswerable. Susan hesitated no longer, wondered why she had hesitated at first. "Well--I guess I will." And she rose with a frank, childlike alacrity that amused him immensely. "You don't look it, but you've been about some--haven't you?" "Rather," replied she. "I somehow thought you knew a thing or two." They walked west to Race Street. They were about the same height. Her costume might have been fresher, might have suggested to an expert eye the passed-on clothes of a richer relative; but her carriage and the fine look of skin and hair and features made the defects of dress unimportant. She seemed of his class--of the class comfortable, well educated, and well-bred. If she had been more experienced, she would have seen that he was satisfied with her appearance despite the curious looking little package, and would have been flattered. As it was, her interest was absorbed in things apart from herself. He talked about the town--the amusements, the good times to be had at the over-the-Rhine beer halls, at the hilltop gardens, at the dances in the pavilion out at the Zoo. He drew a lively and charming picture, one that appealed to her healthy youth, to her unsatisfied curiosity, to her passionate desire to live the gay, free city life of which the small town reads and dreams. "You and I can go round together, can't we? I haven't got much, but I'll not try to take your time for nothing, of course. That wouldn't be square. I'm sure you'll have no cause to complain. What do you say?" "Maybe," replied the girl, all at once absent-minded. Her brain was wildly busy with some ideas started there by his significant words, by his flirtatious glances at her, by his way of touching her whenever he could make opportunity. Evidently there was an alternative to Blynn. "You like a good time, don't you?" said he. "Rather!" exclaimed she, the violet eyes suddenly very violet indeed and sparkling. Her spirits had suddenly soared. She was acting like one of her age. With that blessed happy hopefulness of healthy youth, she had put aside her sorrows--not because she was frivolous but for the best of all reasons, because she was young and superbly vital. Said she: "I'm crazy about dancing--and music." "I only needed to look at your feet--and ankles--to know that," ventured he the "ankles" being especially audacious. She was pleased, and in youth's foolish way tried to hide her pleasure by saying, "My feet aren't exactly small." "I should say not!" protested he with energy. "Little feet would look like the mischief on a girl as tall as you are. Yes, we can have a lot of fun." They went into a large restaurant with fly fans speeding. Susan thought it very grand--and it was the grandest restaurant she had ever been in. They sat down--in a delightfully cool place by a window looking out on a little plot of green with a colladium, a fountain, some oleanders in full and fragrant bloom; the young man ordered, with an ease that fascinated her, an elaborate lunch--soup, a chicken, with salad, ice cream, and fresh peaches. Susan had a menu in her hand and as he ordered she noted the prices. She was dazzled by his extravagance--dazzled and frightened--and, in a curious, vague, unnerving way, fascinated. Money--the thing she must have for Burlingham in whose case "everything depended on the nursing." In the brief time this boy and she had been together, he, without making an effort to impress, had given her the feeling that he was of the best city class, that he knew the world--the high world. Thus, she felt that she must be careful not to show her "greenness." She would have liked to protest against his extravagance, but she ventured only the timid remonstrance, "Oh, I'm not a bit hungry." She thought she was speaking the truth, for the ideas whirling so fast that they were dim quite took away the sense of hunger. But when the food came she discovered that she was, on the contrary, ravenous--and she ate with rising spirits, with a feeling of content and hope. He had urged her to drink wine or beer, but she refused to take anything but a glass of milk; and he ended by taking milk himself. He was looking more and more boldly and ardently into her eyes, and she received his glances smilingly. She felt thoroughly at ease and at home, as if she were back once more among her own sort of people--with some element of disagreeable constraint left out. Since she was an outcast, she need not bother about the small restraints the girls felt compelled to put upon themselves in the company of boys. Nobody respected a "bastard," as they called her when they spoke frankly. So with nothing to lose she could at least get what pleasure there was in freedom. She liked it, having this handsome, well-dressed young man making love to her in this grand restaurant where things were so good to eat and so excitingly expensive. He would not regard her as fit to associate with his respectable mother and sisters. In the casts of respectability, her place was with Jeb Ferguson! She was better off, clear of the whole unjust and horrible business of respectable life, clear of it and free, frankly in the outcast class. She had not realized--and she did not realize--that association with the players of the show boat had made any especial change in her; in fact, it had loosened to the sloughing point the whole skin of her conventional training--that surface skin which seems part of the very essence of our being until something happens to force us to shed it. Crises, catastrophes, may scratch that skin, or cut clear through it; but only the gentle, steady, everywhere-acting prying-loose of day and night association can change it from a skin to a loose envelope ready to be shed at any moment. "What are you going to do?" asked the young man, when the acquaintance had become a friendship--which was before the peaches and ice cream were served. "I don't know," said the girl, with the secretive instinct of self-reliance hiding the unhappiness his abrupt question set to throbbing again. "Honestly, I've never met anyone that was so congenial. But maybe you don't feel that way?" "Then again maybe I do," rejoined she, forcing a merry smile. His face flushed with embarrassment, but his eyes grew more ardent as he said: "What were you looking for, when I saw you in Garfield Place?" "Was that Garfield Place?" she asked, in evasion. "Yes." And he insisted, "What were you looking for?" "What were _you_ looking for?" "For a pretty girl." They both laughed. "And I've found her. I'm suited if you are. . . . Don't look so serious. You haven't answered my question." "I'm looking for work." He smiled as if it were a joke. "You mean for a place on the stage. That isn't work. _You_ couldn't work. I can see that at a glance." "Why not?" "Oh, you haven't been brought up to that kind of life. You'd hate it in every way. And they don't pay women anything for work. My father employs a lot of them. Most of his girls live at home. That keeps the wages down, and the others have to piece out with"--he smiled--"one thing and another." Susan sat gazing straight before her. "I've not had much experience," she finally said, thoughtfully. "I guess I don't know what I'm about." The young man leaned toward her, his face flushing with earnestness. "You don't know how pretty you are. I wish my father wasn't so close with me. I'd not let you ever speak of work again--even on the stage. What good times we could have!" "I must be going," said she, rising. Her whole body was alternately hot and cold. In her brain, less vague now, were the ideas Mabel Connemora had opened up for her. "Oh, bother!" exclaimed he. "Sit down a minute. You misunderstood me. I don't mean I'm flat broke." Susan hastily reseated herself, showing her confusion. "I wasn't thinking of that." "Then--what were you thinking of?" "I don't know," she replied--truthfully, for she could not have put into words anything definite about the struggle raging in her like a battle in a fog. "I often don't exactly know what I'm thinking about. I somehow can't--can't fit it together--yet." "Do you suppose," he went on, as if she had not spoken, "do you suppose I don't understand? I know you can't afford to let me take your time for nothing. . . . Don't you like me a little?" She looked at him with grave friendliness. "Yes." Then, seized with a terror which her habitual manner of calm concealed from him, she rose again. "Why shouldn't it be me as well as another?. . . At least sit down till I pay the bill." She seated herself, stared at her plate. "Now what are you thinking about?" he asked. "I don't know exactly. Nothing much." The waiter brought the bill. The young man merely glanced at the total, drew a small roll of money from his trousers pocket, put a five-dollar note on the tray with the bill. Susan's eyes opened wide when the waiter returned with only two quarters and a dime. She glanced furtively at the young man, to see if he, too, was not disconcerted. He waved the tray carelessly aside; the waiter said "Thank you," in a matter-of-course way, dropped the sixty cents into his pocket. The waiter's tip was by itself almost as much as she had ever seen paid out for a meal for two persons. "Now, where shall we go?" asked the young man. Susan did not lift her eyes. He leaned toward her, took her hand. "You're different from the sort a fellow usually finds," said he. "And I'm--I'm crazy about you. Let's go," said he. Susan took her bundle, followed him. She glanced up the street and down. She had an impulse to say she must go away alone; it was not strong enough to frame a sentence, much less express her thought. She was seeing queer, vivid, apparently disconnected visions--Burlingham, sick unto death, on the stretcher in the hospital reception room--Blynn of the hideous face and loose, repulsive body--the contemptuous old gentleman in the shop--odds and ends of the things Mabel Connemora had told her--the roll of bills the young man had taken from his pocket when he paid--Jeb Ferguson in the climax of the horrors of that wedding day and night. They went to Garfield Place, turned west, paused after a block or so at a little frame house set somewhat back from the street. The young man, who had been as silent as she--but nervous instead of preoccupied--opened the gate in the picket fence. "This is a first-class quiet place," said he, embarrassed but trying to appear at ease. Susan hesitated. She must somehow nerve herself to speak of money, to say to him that she needed ten dollars--that she must have it. If she did not speak--if she got nothing for Mr. Burlingham--or almost nothing--and probably men didn't give women much--if she were going with him--to endure again the horrors and the degradation she had suffered from Mr. Ferguson--if it should be in vain! This nice young man didn't suggest Mr. Ferguson in any way. But there was such a mystery about men--they had a way of changing so--Sam Wright--Uncle George even Mr. Ferguson hadn't seemed capable of torturing a helpless girl for no reason at all---- "We can't stand here," the young man was saying. She tried to speak about the ten dollars. She simply could not force out the words. With brain in a whirl, with blood beating suffocatingly into her throat and lungs, but giving no outward sign of agitation, she entered the gate. There was a low, old-fashioned porch along the side of the house, with an awning curiously placed at the end toward the street. When they ascended the steps under the awning, they were screened from the street. The young man pulled a knob. A bell within tinkled faintly; Susan started, shivered. But the young man, looking straight at the door, did not see. A colored girl with a pleasant, welcoming face opened, stood aside for them to enter. He went straight up the stairs directly ahead, and Susan followed. At the threshold the trembling girl looked round in terror. She expected to see a place like that foul, close little farm bedroom--for it seemed to her that at such times men must seek some dreadful place--vile, dim, fitting. She was in a small, attractively furnished room, with a bow window looking upon the yard and the street. The furniture reminded her of her own room at her uncle's in Sutherland, except that the brass bed was far finer. He closed the door and locked it. As he advanced toward her he said: "_What_ are you seeing? Please don't look like that." Persuasively, "You weren't thinking of me--were you?" "No--Oh, no," replied she, passing her hand over her eyes to try to drive away the vision of Ferguson. "You look as if you expected to be murdered. Do you want to go?" She forced herself to seem calm. "What a coward I am!" she said to herself. "If I could only die for him, instead of this. But I can't. And I _must_ get money for him." To the young man she said: "No. I--I--want to stay." Late in the afternoon, when they were once more in the street, he said. "I'd ask you to go to dinner with me, but I haven't enough money." She stopped short. An awful look came into her face. "Don't be alarmed," cried he, hurried and nervous, and blushing furiously. "I put the--the present for you in that funny little bundle of yours, under one of the folds of the nightgown or whatever it is you've got wrapped on the outside. I didn't like to hand it to you. I've a feeling somehow that you're not regularly--that kind." "Was it--ten dollars?" she said, and for all he could see she was absolutely calm. "Yes," replied he, with a look of relief followed by a smile of amused tenderness. "I can't make you out," he went on. "You're a queer one. You've had a look in your eyes all afternoon--well, if I hadn't been sure you were experienced, you'd almost have frightened me away." "Yes, I've had experience. The--the worst," said the girl. "You--you attract me awfully; you've got--well, everything that's nice about a woman--and at the same time, there's something in your eyes---- Are you very fond of your friend?" "He's all I've got in the world." "I suppose it's his being sick that makes you look and act so queer?" "I don't know what's the matter with me," she said slowly. "I--don't know." "I want to see you again--soon. What's your address?" "I haven't any. I've got to look for a place to live." "Well, you can give me the place you did live. I'll write you there, Lorna. You didn't ask me my name when I asked you yours. You've hardly said anything. Are you always quiet like this?" "No--not always. At Least, I haven't been." "No. You weren't, part of the time this afternoon--at the restaurant. Tell me, what are you thinking about all the time? You're very secretive. Why don't you tell me? Don't you know I like you?" "I don't know," said the girl in a slow dazed way. "I--don't--know." "I wouldn't take your time for nothing," he went on, after a pause. "My father doesn't give me much money, but I think I'll have some more day after tomorrow. Can I see you then?" "I don't know." He laughed. "You said that before. Day after tomorrow afternoon--in the same place. No matter if it's raining. I'll be there first--at three. Will you come?" "If I can." She made a movement to go. But still he detained her. He colored high again, in the struggle between the impulses of his generous youth and the fear of being absurd with a girl he had picked up in the street. He looked at her searchingly, wistfully. "I know it's your life, but--I hate to think of it," he went on. "You're far too nice. I don't see how you happened to be in--in this line. Still, what else is there for a girl, when she's up against it? I've often thought of those things--and I don't feel about them as most people do. . . . I'm curious about you. You'll pardon me, won't you? I'm afraid I'll fall in love with you, if I see you often. You won't fail to come day after tomorrow?" "If I can." "Don't you want to see me again?" She did not speak or lift her eyes. "You like me, don't you?" Still no answer. "You don't want to be questioned?" "No," said the girl. "Where are you going now?" "To the hospital." "May I walk up there with you? I live in Clifton. I can go home that way." "I'd rather you didn't." "Then--good-by--till day after tomorrow at three." He put out his hand; he had to reach for hers and take it. "You're not--not angry with me?" "No." His eyes lingered tenderly upon her. "You are _so_ sweet! You don't know how I want to kiss you. Are you sorry to go--sorry to leave me--just a little?. . . I forgot. You don't like to be questioned. Well, good-by, dear." "Good-by," she said; and still without lifting her gaze from the ground she turned away, walked slowly westward. She had not reached the next street to the north when she suddenly felt that if she did not sit she would drop. She lifted her eyes for an instant to glance furtively round. She saw a house with stone steps leading up to the front doors; there was a "for rent" sign in one of the close-shuttered parlor windows. She seated herself, supported the upper part of her weary body by resting her elbows on her knees. Her bundle had rolled to the sidewalk at her feet. A passing man picked it up, handed it to her, with a polite bow. She looked at him vaguely, took the bundle as if she were not sure it was hers. "Heat been too much for you, miss?" asked the man. She shook her head. He lingered, talking volubly--about the weather--then about how cool it was on the hilltops. "We might go up to the Bellevue," he finally suggested, "if you've nothing better to do." "No, thank you," she said. "I'll go anywhere you like. I've got a little money that I don't care to keep." She shook her head. "I don't mean anything bad," he hastened to suggest--because that would bring up the subject in discussable form. "I can't go with you," said the girl drearily. "Don't bother me, please." "Oh--excuse me." And the man went on. Susan turned the bundle over in her lap, thrust her fingers slowly and deliberately into the fold of the soiled blouse which was on the outside. She drew out the money. A ten and two fives. Enough to keep his room at the hospital for two weeks. No, for she must live, herself. Enough to give him a room one week longer and to enable her to live two weeks at least. . . . And day after tomorrow--more. Perhaps, soon--enough to see him through the typhoid. She put the money in her bosom, rose and went on toward the hospital. She no longer felt weary, and the sensation of a wound that might ache if she were not so numb passed away. A clerk she had not seen before was at the barrier desk. "I came to ask how Mr. Burlingham is," said she. The clerk yawned, drew a large book toward him. "Burlingham--B--Bu--Bur----" he said half to himself, turning over the leaves. "Yes--here he is." He looked at her. "You his daughter?" "No, I'm a friend." "Oh--then--he died at five o'clock--an hour ago." He looked up--saw her eyes--only her eyes. They were a deep violet now, large, shining with tragic softness--like the eyes of an angel that has lost its birthright through no fault of its own. He turned hastily away, awed, terrified, ashamed of himself. CHAPTER XVIII THE next thing she knew, she felt herself seized strongly by the arm. She gazed round in a dazed way. She was in the street--how she got there she had no idea. The grip on her arm--it was the young doctor, Hamilton. "I called you twice," explained he, "but you didn't hear." "He is dead," said she. Hamilton had a clear view of her face now. There was not a trace of the child left. He saw her eyes--quiet, lonely, violet stars. "You must go and rest quietly," he said with gentleness. "You are worn out." Susan took from her bosom the twenty dollars, handed it to him. "It belongs to him," said she. "Give it to them, to bury him." And she started on. "Where are you going?" asked the young man. Susan stopped, looked vaguely at him. "Good-by," she said. "You've been very kind." "You've found a boarding place?" "Oh, I'm all right." "You want to see him?" "No. Then he'll always be alive to me." "You had better keep this money. The city will take care of the funeral." "It belong to him. I couldn't keep it for myself. I must be going." "Shan't I see you again?" "I'll not trouble you." "Let me walk with you as far as your place." "I'm not feeling--just right. If you don't mind--please--I'd rather be alone." "I don't mean to intrude, but----" "I'm all right," said the girl. "Don't worry about me." "But you are too young----" "I've been married. . . . Thank you, but--good-by." He could think of no further excuse for detaining her. Her manner disquieted him, yet it seemed composed and natural. Probably she had run away from a good home, was now sobered and chastened, was eager to separate herself from the mess she had got into and return to her own sort of people. It struck him as heartless that she should go away in this fashion; but on second thought, he could not associate heartlessness with her. Also, he saw how there might be something in what she had said about not wishing to have to think of her friend as dead. He stood watching her straight narrow young figure until it was lost to view in the crowd of people going home from work. Susan went down Elm Street to Garfield Place, seated herself on one of the benches. She was within sight of the unobtrusive little house with the awnings; but she did not realize it. She had no sense of her surroundings, of the passing of time, felt no grief, no sensation of any kind. She simply sat, her little bundle in her lap, her hands folded upon it. A man in uniform paused before her. "Closing-up time," he said, sharply but in the impartial official way. "I'm going to lock the gates." She looked at him. In a softer, apologetic tone, he said, "I've got to lock the gates. That's the law, miss." She did not clearly understand, but rose and went out into Race Street. She walked slowly along, not knowing or caring where. She walked--walked--walked. Sometimes her way lay through crowded streets, again through streets deserted. Now she was stumbling over the uneven sidewalks of a poor quarter; again it was the smooth flagstones of the shopping or wholesale districts. Several times she saw the river with its multitude of boats great and small; several times she crossed the canal. Twice she turned back because the street was mounting the hills behind the city--the hills with the cars swiftly ascending and descending the inclined planes, and at the crests gayly lighted pavilions where crowds were drinking and dancing. Occasionally some man spoke to her, but desisted as she walked straight on, apparently not hearing. She rested from time to time, on a stoop or on a barrel or box left out by some shopkeeper, or leaning upon the rail of a canal bridge. She was walking with a purpose--to try to scatter the dense fog that had rolled in and enveloped her mind, and then to try to think. She sat, or rather dropped, down from sheer fatigue, in that cool hour which precedes the dawn. It happened to be the steps of a church. She fell into a doze, was startled back to consciousness by the deep boom of the bell in the steeple; it made the stone vibrate under her. One--two--three--four! Toward the east there shone a flush of light, not yet strong enough to dim the stars. The sky above her was clear. The pall of smoke rolled away. The air felt clean and fresh, even had in it a reminiscence of the green fields whence it had come. She began to revive, like a sleeper shaking off drowsiness and the spell of a bad dream and looking forward to the new day. The fog that had swathed and stupefied her brain seemed to have lifted. At her heart there was numbness and a dull throbbing, an ache; but her mind was clear and her body felt intensely, hopelessly alive and ready, clamorously ready, for food. A movement across the narrow street attracted her attention. A cellar door was rising--thrust upward by the shoulders of a man. It fell full open with a resounding crash, the man revealed by the light from beneath--a white blouse, a white cap. Toward her wafted the delicious odor of baking bread. She rose, hesitated only an instant, crossed the street directly toward the baker who had come up to the surface for cool air. "I am hungry," said she to him. "Can't you let me have something to eat?" The man--he had a large, smooth, florid face eyed her in amused astonishment. "Where'd you jump from?" he demanded. "I was resting on the church steps over there. The smell came to me and--I couldn't stand it. I can pay." "Oh, that's all right," said the man, with a strong German accent. "Come down." And he descended the steps, she following. It was a large and lofty cellar, paved with cement; floor, ceilings, walls, were whitened with flour. There were long clean tables for rolling the dough; big wooden bowls; farther back, the ovens and several bakers at work adding to the huge piles of loaves the huge baskets of rolls. Susan's eyes glistened; her white teeth showed in a delightful smile of hunger about to be satisfied. "Do you want bread or rolls?" asked the German. Then without waiting for her to answer, "I guess some of the 'sweet rolls,' we call 'em, would about suit a lady." "Yes--the sweet rolls," said the girl. The baker fumbled about behind a lot of empty baskets, found a sewing basket, filled it with small rolls--some crescent in shape, some like lady fingers, some oval, some almost like biscuit, all with pulverized sugar powdered on them thick as a frosting. He set the little basket upon an empty kneading table. "Wait yet a minute," he commanded, and bustled up a flight of stairs. He reappeared with a bottle of milk and a piece of fresh butter. He put these beside the basket of rolls, drew a stool up before them. "How's that?" asked he, his hands on his hips, his head on one side, and his big jolly face beaming upon her. "Pretty good, don't it!" Susan was laughing with pleasure. He pointed to the place well down in the bottle of milk where the cream ended. "That's the way it should be always--not so!" said he. She nodded. Then he shook the bottle to remix the separated cream and milk. "So!" he cried. Then--"_Ach, dummer Esel!_" he muttered, striking his brow a resounding thwack with the flat of his hand. "A knife!" And he hastened to repair that omission. Susan sat at the table, took one of the fresh rolls, spread butter upon it. The day will never come for her when she cannot distinctly remember the first bite of the little sweet buttered roll, eaten in that air perfumed with the aroma of baking bread. The milk was as fine as it promised to be she drank it from the bottle. The German watched her a while, then beckoned to his fellow workmen. They stood round, reveling in the joyful sight of this pretty hungry girl eating so happily and so heartily. "The pie," whispered one workman to another. They brought a small freshly baked peach pie, light and crisp and brown. Susan's beautiful eyes danced. "But," she said to her first friend among the bakers, "I'm afraid I can't afford it." At this there was a loud chorus of laughter. "Eat it," said her friend. And when she had finished her rolls and butter, she did eat it. "I never tasted a pie like that," declared she. "And I like pies and can make them too." Once more they laughed, as if she had said the wittiest thing in the world. As the last mouthful of the pie was disappearing, her friend said, "Another!" "Goodness, no!" cried the girl. "I couldn't eat a bite more." "But it's an apple pie." And he brought it, holding it on his big florid fat hand and turning it round to show her its full beauty. She sighed regretfully. "I simply can't," she said. "How much is what I've had?" Her friend frowned. "Vot you take me for--hey?" demanded he, with a terrible frown--so terrible he felt it to be that, fearing he had frightened her, he burst out laughing, to reassure. "Oh, but I must pay," she pleaded. "I didn't come begging." "Not a cent!" said her friend firmly. "I'm the boss. I won't take it." She insisted until she saw she was hurting his feelings. Then she tried to thank him; but he would not listen to that, either. "Good-by--good-by," he said gruffly. "I must get to work once." But she understood, and went with a light heart up into the world again. He stood waist deep in the cellar, she hesitated upon the sidewalk. "Good-by," she said, with swimming eyes. "You don't know how good you've been to me." "All right. Luck!" He waved his hand, half turned his back on her and looked intently up the street, his eyes blinking. She went down the street, turned the first corner, dropped on a doorstep and sobbed and cried, out of the fullness of her heart. When she rose to go on again, she felt stronger and gentler than she had felt since her troubles began with the quarrel over Sam Wright. A little further on she came upon a florist's shop in front of which a wagon was unloading the supply of flowers for the day's trade. She paused to look at the roses and carnations, the lilies and dahlias, the violets and verbenas and geraniums. The fast brightening air was scented with delicate odors. She was attracted to a small geranium with many buds and two full-blown crimson flowers. "How much for that?" she asked a young man who seemed to be in charge. He eyed her shrewdly. "Well, I reckon about fifteen cents," replied he. She took from her bosom the dollar bill wrapped round the eighty cents, gave him what he had asked. "No, you needn't tie it up," said she, as he moved to take it into the store. She went back to the bakeshop. The cellar door was open, but no one was in sight. Stooping down, she called: "Mr. Baker! Mr. Baker!" The big smooth face appeared below. She set the plant down on the top step. "For you," she said, and hurried away. On a passing street car she saw the sign "Eden Park." She had heard of it--of its beauties, of the wonderful museum there. She took the next car of the same line. A few minutes, and it was being drawn up the inclined plane toward the lofty hilltops. She had thought the air pure below. She was suddenly lifted through a dense vapor--the cloud that always lies over the lower part of the city. A moment, and she was above the cloud, was being carried through the wide, clean tree-lined avenue of a beautiful suburb. On either side, lawns and gardens and charming houses, a hush brooding over them. Behind these walls, in comfortable beds, amid the surroundings that come to mind with the word "home," lay many girls such as she--happy, secure, sheltered. Girls like herself. A wave of homesickness swept over her, daunting her for a little while. But she fought it down, watched what was going on around her. "I mustn't look back--I mustn't! Nothing there for me." At the main gateway of the park she descended. There indeed was the, to her, vast building containing the treasures of art; but she had not come for that. She struck into the first by-path, sought out a grassy slope thickly studded with bushes, and laid herself down. She spread her skirts carefully so as not to muss them. She put her bundle under her head. When she awoke the moon was shining upon her face--shining from a starry sky! She sat up, looked round in wonder. Yes--it was night again--very still, very beautiful, and warm, with the air fragrant and soft. She felt intensely awake, entirely rested--and full of hope. It was as if during that long dreamless sleep her whole being had been renewed and magically borne away from the lands of shadow and pain where it had been wandering, to a land of bright promise. Oh, youth, youth, that bears so lightly the burden of the past, that faces so confidently the mystery of the future! She listened--heard a faint sound that moved her to investigate. Peering through the dense bushes, she discovered on the grass in the shadow of the next clump, a ragged, dirty man and woman, both sound asleep and snoring gently. She watched them spellbound. The man's face was deeply shaded by his battered straw hat. But she could see the woman's face plainly--the thin, white hair, the sunken eyes and mouth, the skeleton look of old features over which the dry skin of age is tightly drawn. She gazed until the man, moving in his sleep, kicked out furiously and uttered a curse. She drew back, crawled away until she had put several clumps of bushes between her and the pair. Then she sped down and up the slopes and did not stop until she was where she could see, far below, the friendly lights of the city blinking at her through the smoky mist. She had forgotten her bundle! She did not know how to find the place where she had left it; and, had she known, she would not have dared return. This loss, however, troubled her little. Not in vain had she dwelt with the philosopher Burlingham. She seated herself on a bench and made herself comfortable. But she no longer needed sleep. She was awake--wide awake--in every atom of her vigorous young body. The minutes dragged. She was impatient for the dawn to give the signal for the future to roll up its curtain. She would have gone down into the city to walk about but she was now afraid the police would take her in--and that probably would mean going to a reformatory, for she could not give a satisfactory account of herself. True, her older way of wearing her hair and some slight but telling changes in her dress had made her look less the child. But she could not hope to pass for a woman full grown. The moon set; the starlight was after a long, long time succeeded by the dawn of waking birds, and of waking city, too--for up from below rose an ever louder roar like a rising storm. In her restless rovings, she came upon a fountain; she joined the birds making a toilet in its basin, and patterned after them--washed her face and hands, dried them on a handkerchief she by great good luck had put into her stocking, smoothed her hair, her dress. And still the sense of unreality persisted, cast its friendly spell over this child-woman suddenly caught up from the quietest of quiet lives and whirled into a dizzy vortex of strange events without parallel, or similitude even, in anything she had ever known. If anyone had suddenly asked her who she was and she had tried to recall, she would have felt as if trying to remember a dream. Sutherland--a faint, faint dream, and the show boat also. Spenser--a romantic dream--or a first installment of a love-story read in some stray magazine. Burlingham--the theatrical agent--the young man of the previous afternoon--the news of the death that left her quite alone--all a dream, a tumbled, jumbled dream, all passed with the night and the awakening. In her youth and perfect health, refreshed by the long sleep, gladdened by the bright new day, she was as irresponsible as the merry birds chattering and flinging the water about at the opposite side of the fountain's basin. She was now glad she had lost her bundle. Without it her hands were free both hands free to take whatever might offer next. And she was eager to see what that would be, and hopeful about it--no--more than hopeful, confident. Burlingham, aided by those highly favorable surroundings of the show boat, and of the vagabond life thereafter, had developed in her that gambler's spirit which had enabled him to play year after year of losing hands with unabating courage--the spirit that animates all the brave souls whose deeds awe the docile, conventional, craven masses of mankind. Leisurely as a truant she tramped back toward the city, pausing to observe anything that chanced to catch her eye. At the moment of her discovery of the difference between her and most girls there had begun a cleavage between her and the social system. And now she felt as if she were of one race and the rest of the world of another and hostile race. She did not realize it, but she had taken the first great step along the path that leads to distinction or destruction. For the world either obeys or tramples into dust those who, in whatever way, have a lot apart from the common. She was free from the bonds of convention--free to soar or to sink. Her way toward the city lay along a slowly descending street that had been, not so very long before, a country road. Block after block there were grassy fields intersected by streets, as if city had attempted a conquest of country and had abandoned it. Again the vacant lots were disfigured with the ruins of a shanty or by dreary dump heaps. For long stretches the way was built up only on one side. The houses were for the most part tenement with small and unprosperous shops or saloons on the ground floor. Toward the foot of the hill, where the line of tenements was continuous on either side, she saw a sign "Restaurant" projecting over the sidewalk. When she reached it, she paused and looked in. A narrow window and a narrow open door gave a full view of the tiny room with its two rows of plain tables. Near the window was a small counter with a case containing cakes and pies and rolls. With back to the window sat a pretty towheaded girl of about her own age, reading. Susan, close to the window, saw that the book was Owen Meredith's "Lucile," one of her own favorites. She could even read the words: The ways they are many and wide, and seldom are two ways the same. She entered. The girl glanced up, with eyes slowly changing from far-away dreaminess to present and practical--pleasant blue eyes with lashes and brows of the same color as the thick, neatly done yellowish hair. "Could I get a glass of milk and a roll?" asked Susan, a modest demand, indeed, on behalf of a growing girl's appetite twenty-four hours unsatisfied. The blonde girl smiled, showing a clean mouth with excellent teeth. "We sell the milk for five cents, the rolls three for a nickel." "Then I'll take milk and three rolls," said Susan. "May I sit at a table? I'll not spoil it." "Sure. Sit down. That's what the tables are for." And the girl closed the book, putting a chromo card in it to mark her place, and stirred about to serve the customer. Susan took the table nearest the door, took the seat facing the light. The girl set before her a plate, a knife and fork, a little form of butter, a tall glass of milk, and three small rolls in a large saucer. "You're up and out early?" she said to Susan. On one of those inexplicable impulses of frankness Susan replied: "I've been sleeping in the park." The girl had made the remark merely to be polite and was turning away. As Susan's reply penetrated to her inattentive mind she looked sharply at her, eyes opening wonderingly. "Did you get lost? Are you a stranger in town? Why didn't you ask someone to take you in?" The girl reflected, realized. "That's so," said she. "I never thought of it before. . . . Yes, that is so! It must be dreadful not to have any place to go." She gazed at Susan with admiring eyes. "Weren't you afraid--up in the park?" "No," replied Susan. "I hadn't anything anybody'd want to steal." "But some man might have----" The girl left it to Susan's imagination to finish the sentence. "I hadn't anything to steal," repeated Susan, with a kind of cynical melancholy remotely suggestive of Mabel Connemora. The restaurant girl retired behind the counter to reflect, while Susan began upon her meager breakfast with the deliberation of one who must coax a little to go a great ways. Presently the girl said: "Where are you going to sleep tonight?" "Oh, that's a long ways off," replied the apt pupil of the happy-go-lucky houseboat show. "I'll find a place, I guess." The girl looked thoughtfully toward the street. "I was wondering," she said after a while, "what I'd do if I was to find myself out in the street, with no money and nowhere to go. . . . Are you looking for something to do?" "Do you know of anything?" asked Susan interested at once. "Nothing worth while. There's a box factory down on the next square. But only a girl that lives at home can work there. Pa says the day's coming when women'll be like men--work at everything and get the same wages. But it isn't so now. A girl's got to get married." Such a strange expression came over Susan's face that the waitress looked apologetic and hastened to explain herself: "I don't much mind the idea of getting married," said she. "Only--I'm afraid I can never get the kind of a man I'd want. The boys round here leave school before the girls, so the girls are better educated. And then they feel above the boys of their own class--except those boys that're beginning to get up in the world--and those kind of boys want some girl who's above them and can help them up. It's dreadful to be above the people you know and not good enough for the people you'd like to know." Susan was not impressed; she could not understand why the waitress spoke with so much feeling. "Well," said she, pausing before beginning on the last roll, "I don't care so long as I find something to do." "There's another thing," complained the waitress. "If you work in a store, you can't get wages enough to live on; and you learn things, and want to live better and better all the time. It makes you miserable. And you can't marry the men who work at nice refined labor because they don't make enough to marry on. And if you work in a factory or as a servant, why all but the commonest kind of men look down on you. You may get wages enough to live on, but you can't marry or get up in the world." "You're very ambitious, aren't you?" "Indeed I am. I don't want to be in the working class." She was leaning over the counter now, and her blond face was expressing deep discontent and scorn. "I _hate_ working people. All of them who have any sense look down on themselves and wish they could get something respectable to do." "Oh, you don't mean that," protested Susan. "Any kind of work's respectable if it's honest." "_You_ can say that," retorted the girl. "_You_ don't belong in our class. You were brought up different. You are a _lady_." Susan shrank and grew crimson. The other girl did not see. She went on crossly: "Upper-class people always talk about how fine it is to be an honest workingman. But that's all rot. Let 'em try it a while. And pa says it'll never be straightened out till everybody has to work." "What--what does your father do?" "He was a cabinetmaker. Then one of the other men tipped over a big chest and his right hand was crushed--smashed to pieces, so he wasn't able to work any more. But he's mighty smart in his brains. It's the kind you can't make any money out of. He has read most everything. The trouble with pa was he had too much heart. He wasn't mean enough to try and get ahead of the other workmen, and rise to be a boss over them, and grind them down to make money for the proprietor. So he stayed on at the bench--he was a first-class cabinetmaker. The better a man is as a workman, and the nicer he is as a man, the harder it is for him to get up. Pa was too good at his trade--and too soft-hearted. Won't you have another glass of milk?" "No--thank you," said Susan. She was still hungry, but it alarmed her to think of taking more than ten cents from her hoard. "Are you going to ask for work at the box factory?" "I'm afraid they wouldn't take me. I don't know how to make boxes." "Oh, that's nothing," assured the restaurant girl. "It's the easiest kind of work. But then an educated person can pick up most any trade in a few days, well enough to get along. They'll make you a paster, at first." "How much does that pay?" "He'll offer you two fifty a week, but you must make him give you three. That's right for beginners. Then, if you stay on and work hard, you'll be raised to four after six months. The highest pay's five." "Three dollars," said Susan. "How much can I rent a room for?" The restaurant girl looked at her pityingly. "Oh, you can't afford a room. You'll have to club in with three other girls and take a room together, and cook your meals yourselves, turn about." Susan tried not to show how gloomy this prospect seemed. "I'll try," said she. She paid the ten cents; her new acquaintance went with her to the door, pointed out the huge bare wooden building displaying in great letters "J. C. Matson, Paper Boxes." "You apply at the office," said the waitress. "There'll be a fat black-complected man in his shirt with his suspenders let down off his shoulders. He'll be fresh with you. He used to be a working man himself, so he hasn't any respect for working people. But he doesn't mean any harm. He isn't like a good many; he lets his girls alone." Susan had not got far when the waitress came running after her. "Won't you come back and let me know how you made out?" she asked, a little embarrassed. "I hope you don't think I'm fresh." "I'll be glad to come," Susan assured her. And their eyes met in a friendly glance. "If you don't find a place to go, why not come in with me? I've got only a very little bit of a room, but it's as big and a lot cleaner than any you'll find with the factory girls." "But I haven't any money," said Susan regretfully. "And I couldn't take anything without paying." "You could pay two dollars and a half a week and eat in with us. We couldn't afford to give you much for that, but it'd be better than what you'd get the other way." "But you can't afford to do that." The restaurant girl's mind was aroused, was working fast and well. "You can help in the restaurant of evenings," she promptly replied. "I'll tell ma you're so pretty you'll draw trade. And I'll explain that you used to go to school with me--and have lost your father and mother. My name's Etta Brashear." "Mine's--Lorna Sackville," said Susan, blushing. "I'll come after a while, and we'll talk about what to do. I may not get a place." "Oh, you'll get it. He has hard work finding girls. Factories usually pay more than stores, because the work's more looked down on--though Lord knows it's hard to think how anything could be more looked down on than a saleslady." "I don't see why you bother about those things. What do they matter?" "Why, everybody bothers about them. But you don't understand. You were born a lady, and you'll always feel you've got social standing, and people'll feel that way too." "But I wasn't," said Susan earnestly. "Indeed, I wasn't. I was born--a--a nobody. I can't tell you, but I'm just nobody. I haven't even got a name." Etta, as romantic as the next young girl, was only the more fascinated by the now thrillingly mysterious stranger--so pretty, so sweet, with such beautiful manners and strangely outcast no doubt from some family of "high folks." "You'll be sure to come? You won't disappoint me?" Susan kissed Etta. Etta embraced Susan, her cheeks flushed, her eyes brilliant. "'I've taken an awful fancy to you," she said. "I haven't ever had an intimate lady friend. I don't care for the girls round here. They're so fresh and common. Ma brought me up refined; she's not like the ordinary working-class woman." It hurt Susan deeply--why, she could not have quite explained--to hear Etta talk in this fashion. And in spite of herself her tone was less friendly as she said, "I'll come when I find out." CHAPTER XIX IN the office of the factory Susan found the man Etta described. He was seated, or, rather, was sprawled before an open and overflowing rolltop desk, his collar and cuffs off, and his coat and waistcoat also. His feet--broad, thick feet with knots at the great toe joints bulging his shoes--were hoisted upon the leaf of the desk. Susan's charms of person and manners so wrought upon him that, during the exchange of preliminary questions and answers, he slowly took down first one foot then the other, and readjusted his once muscular but now loose and pudgy body into a less loaferish posture. He was as unconscious as she of the cause and meaning of these movements. Had he awakened to what he was doing he would probably have been angered against himself and against her; and the direction of Susan Lenox's life would certainly have been changed. Those who fancy the human animal is in the custody of some conscious and predetermining destiny think with their vanity rather than with their intelligence. A careful look at any day or even hour of any life reveals the inevitable influence of sheer accidents, most of them trivial. And these accidents, often the most trivial, most powerfully determine not only the direction but also the degree and kind of force--what characteristics shall develop and what shall dwindle. "You seem to have a nut on you," said the box manufacturer at the end of the examination. "I'll start you at three." Susan, thus suddenly "placed" in the world and ticketed with a real value, was so profoundly excited that she could not even make a stammering attempt at expressing gratitude. "Do your work well," continued Matson, "and you'll have a good steady job with me till you get some nice young fellow to support you. Stand the boys off. Don't let 'em touch you till you're engaged--and not much then till the preacher's said the word." "Thank you," said Susan, trying to look grave. She was fascinated by his curious habit of scratching himself as he talked--head, ribs, arm, legs, the backs of his red hairy hands. "Stand 'em off," pursued the box-maker, scratching his ribs and nodding his huge head vigorously. "That's the way my wife got me. It's pull Dick pull devil with the gals and the boys. And the gal that's stiff with the men gets a home, while her that ain't goes to the streets. I always gives my gals a word of good advice. And many a one I've saved. There's mighty few preachers does as much good as me. When can you go to work?" Susan reflected. With heightened color and a slight stammer she said, "I've got something to do this afternoon, if you'll let me. Can I come in the morning?" "Seven sharp. We take off a cent a minute up to a quarter of an hour. If you're later than that, you get docked for the day. And no excuses. I didn't climb to the top from spittoon cleaner in a saloon fifteen years ago by being an easy mark for my hands." "I'll come at seven in the morning," said Susan. "Do you live far?" "I'm going to live just up the street." "That's right. It adds ten cents a day to your wages--the ten you'll save in carfare. Sixty cents a week!" And Matson beamed and scratched as if he felt he had done a generous act. "Who are you livin' with? Respectable, I hope." "With Miss Brashear--I think." "Oh, yes--Tom Brashear's gal. They're nice people. Tom's an honest fellow--used to make good money till he had his hard luck. Him and me used to work together. But he never could seem to learn that it ain't workin' for yourself but makin' others work for you that climbs a man up. I never was much as a worker. I was always thinkin' out ways of makin' people work for me. And here I am at the top. And where's Tom? Well--run along now--what's your name?" "Lorna Sackville." "Lorny." He burst into a loud guffaw. "Lord, what a name! Sounds like a theayter. Seven sharp, Lorny. So long." Susan nodded with laughing eyes, thanked him and departed. She glanced up the street, saw Etta standing in the door of the restaurant. Etta did not move from her own doorway, though she was showing every sign of anxiety and impatience. "I can't leave even for a minute so near the dinner hour," she explained when Susan came, "or I'd, a' been outside the factory. And ma's got to stick to the kitchen. I see you got a job. How much?" "Three," replied Susan. "He must have offered it to you," said Etta, laughing. "I thought about it after you were gone and I knew you'd take whatever he said first. Oh, I've been so scared something'd happen. I do want you as my lady friend. Was he fresh?" "Not a bit. He was--very nice." "Well, he ought to be nice--as pa says, getting richer and richer, and driving the girls he robs to marry men they hate or to pick up a living in the gutter." Susan felt that she owed her benefactor a strong protest. "Maybe I'm foolish," said she, "but I'm awful glad he's got that place and can give me work." Etta was neither convinced nor abashed. "You don't understand things in our class," replied she. "Pa says it was the kind of grateful thinking and talking you've just done that's made him poor in his old age. He says you've either got to whip or be whipped, rob or be robbed--and that the really good honest people are the fools who take the losing side. But he says, too, he'd rather be a fool and a failure than stoop to stamping on his fellow-beings and robbing them. And I guess he's right"--there Etta laughed--"though I'll admit I'd hate to be tempted with a chance to get up by stepping on somebody." She sighed. "And sometimes I can't help wishing pa had done some tramping and stamping. Why not? That's all most people are fit for--to be tramped and stamped on. Now, don't look so shocked. You don't understand. Wait till you've been at work a while." Susan changed the subject. "I'm going to work at seven in the morning. . . . I might as well have gone today. I had a kind of an engagement I thought I was going to keep, but I've about decided I won't." Etta watched with awe and delight the mysterious look in Susan's suddenly flushed face and abstracted eyes. After a time she ventured to interrupt with: "You'll try living with us?" "If you're quite sure--did you talk to your mother?" "Mother'll be crazy about you. She wants anything that'll make me more contented. Oh, I do get so lonesome!" Mrs. Brashear, a spare woman, much bent by monotonous work--which, however, had not bent her courage or her cheerfulness--made Susan feel at home immediately in the little flat. The tenement was of rather a superior class. But to Susan it seemed full of noisome smells, and she was offended by the halls littered with evidences of the uncleanness of the tenants. She did not then realize that the apparent superior cleanness and neatness of the better-off classes was really in large part only affected, that their secluded back doors and back ways gave them opportunity to hide their uncivilized habits from the world that saw only the front. However, once inside the Brashear flat, she had an instant rise of spirits. "Isn't this nice?" exclaimed she as Etta showed her, at a glance from the sitting-room, the five small but scrupulously clean rooms. "I'll like it here!" Etta reddened, glanced at her for signs of mockery, saw that she was in earnest. "I'm afraid it's better to look at than to live in," she began, then decided against saying anything discouraging. "It seems cramped to us," said she, "after the house we had till a couple of years ago. I guess we'll make out, somehow." The family paid twenty dollars a month for the flat. The restaurant earned twelve to fifteen a week; and the son, Ashbel, stocky, powerful and stupid, had a steady job as porter at ten a week. He gave his mother seven, as he had a room to himself and an enormous appetite. He talked of getting married; if he did marry, the family finances would be in disorder. But his girl had high ideas, being the daughter of a grocer who fancied himself still an independent merchant though he was in fact the even more poorly paid selling agent of the various food products trusts. She had fixed twenty a week as the least on which she would marry; his prospects of any such raise were--luckily for his family--extremely remote; for he had nothing but physical strength to sell, and the price of physical strength alone was going down, under immigrant competition, not only in actual wages like any other form of wage labor, but also in nominal wages. Altogether, the Brashears were in excellent shape for a tenement family, were better off than upwards of ninety per cent of the families of prosperous and typical Cincinnati. While it was true that old Tom Brashear drank, it was also true that he carefully limited himself to two dollars a week. While it was true that he could not work at his trade and apparently did little but sit round and talk--usually high above his audience--nevertheless he was the actual head of the family and its chief bread-winner. It was his savings that were invested in the restaurant; he bought the supplies and was shrewd and intelligent about that vitally important department of the business--the department whose mismanagement in domestic economy is, next to drink, the main cause of failure and pauperism, of sickness, of premature disability, of those profound discouragements that lead to despair. Also, old Brashear had the sagacity and the nagging habit that are necessary to keeping people and things up to the mark. He had ideas--practical ideas as well as ideals--far above his station. But for him the housekeeping would have been in the familiar tenement fashion of slovenliness and filth, and the family would have been neat only on Sundays, and only on the surface then. Because he had the habit of speaking of himself as useless, as done for, as a drag, as one lingering on when he ought to be dead, his family and all the neighborhood thought of him in that way. Although intelligence, indeed, virtue of every kind, is expected of tenement house people--and is needed by them beyond any other condition of humanity--they are unfortunately merely human, are tainted of all human weaknesses. They lack, for instance, discrimination. So, it never occurred to them that Tom Brashear was the sole reason why the Brashears lived better than any of the other families and yielded less to the ferocious and incessant downward pressure. But for one thing the Brashears would have been going up in the world. That thing was old Tom's honesty. The restaurant gave good food and honest measure. Therefore, the margin of profit was narrow--too narrow. He knew what was the matter. He mocked at himself for being "such a weak fool" when everybody else with the opportunity and the intelligence was getting on by yielding to the compulsion of the iron rule of dishonesty in business. But he remained honest--therefore, remained in the working class, instead of rising among its exploiters. "If I didn't drink, I'd kill myself," said old Tom to Susan, when he came to know her well and to feel that from her he could get not the mere blind admiration the family gave him but understanding and sympathy. "Whenever anybody in the working class has any imagination," he explained, "he either kicks his way out of it into capitalist or into criminal--or else he takes to drink. I ain't mean enough to be either a capitalist or a criminal. So, I've got to drink." Susan only too soon began to appreciate from her own experience what he meant. In the first few days the novelty pleased her, made her think she was going to be contented. The new friends and acquaintances, different from any she had known, the new sights, the new way of living--all this interested her, even when it shocked one or many of her senses and sensibilities. But the novelty of folding and pasting boxes, of the queer new kind of girls who worked with her, hardly survived into the second week. She saw that she was among a people where the highest known standard--the mode of life regarded by them as the acme of elegance and bliss--the best they could conceive was far, far below what she had been brought up to believe the scantest necessities of respectable and civilized living. She saw this life from the inside now--as the comfortable classes never permit themselves to see it if they can avoid. She saw that to be a contented working girl, to look forward to the prospect of being a workingman's wife, a tenement housekeeper and mother, a woman must have been born to it--and born with little brains--must have been educated for it, and for nothing else. Etta was bitterly discontented; yet after all it was a vague endurable discontent. She had simply heard of and dreamed of and from afar off--chiefly through novels and poems and the theater--had glimpsed a life that was broader, that had comfort and luxury, people with refined habits and manners. Susan had not merely heard of such a life; she had lived it--it, and no other. Always of the thoughtful temperament, she had been rapidly developed first by Burlingham and now by Tom Brashear--had been taught not only how to think but also how to gather the things to think about. With a few exceptions the girls at the factory were woefully unclean about their persons. Susan did not blame them; she only wondered at Etta the more, and grew to admire her--and the father who held the whole family up to the mark. For, in spite of the difficulties of getting clean, without bathtub, without any but the crudest and cheapest appliances for cleanliness, without any leisure time, Etta kept herself in perfect order. The show boat and the quarters at the hotel had been trying to Susan. But they had seemed an adventure, a temporary, passing phase, a sort of somewhat prolonged camping-out lark. Now, she was settled down, to live, apparently for the rest of her life, with none of the comforts, with few of the decencies. What Etta and her people, using all their imagination, would have pictured as the pinnacle of luxury would have been for Susan a small and imperfect part of what she had been bred to regard as "living decently." She suspected that but for Etta's example she would be yielding, at least in the matter of cleanliness, when the struggle against dirt was so unequal, was thankless. Discouragement became her frequent mood; she wondered if the time would not come when it would be her fixed habit, as it was with all but a handful of those about her. Sometimes she and Etta walked in the quarter at the top of the hill where lived the families of prosperous merchants--establishments a little larger, a little more pretentious than her Uncle George's in Sutherland, but on the whole much like it--the houses of the solid middle class which fancies itself grandly luxurious where it is in fact merely comfortable in a crude unimaginative way. Susan was one of those who are born with the instinct and mental bent for luxurious comfort; also, she had the accompanying peculiar talent for assimilating ideas about food and dress and surroundings from books and magazines, from the study of well-dressed people in the street, from glances into luxurious interiors through windows or open doors as she passed by. She saw with even quicker and more intelligently critical eyes the new thing, the good idea, the improvement on what she already knew. Etta's excitement over these commonplace rich people amused her. She herself, on the wings of her daring young fancy, could soar into a realm of luxury, of beauty and exquisite comfort, that made these self-complacent mansions seem very ordinary indeed. It was no drag upon her fancy, but the reverse, that she was sharing a narrow bed and a narrow room in a humble and tiny tenement flat. On one of these walks Etta confided to her the only romance of her life therefore the real cause of her deep discontent. It was a young man from one of these houses--a flirtation lasting about a year. She assured Susan it was altogether innocent. Susan--perhaps chiefly because Etta protested so insistently about her unsullied purity--had her doubts. "Then," said Etta, "when I saw that he didn't care anything about me except in one way--I didn't see him any more. I--I've been sorry ever since." Susan did not offer the hoped-for sympathy. She was silent. "Did you ever have anything like that happen to you?" inquired Etta. "Yes," said Susan. "Something like that." "And what did you do?" "I didn't want to see him any more." "Why?" "I don't know--exactly. "And you like him?" "I think I would have liked him." "You're sorry you stopped?" "Sometimes," replied she, hesitatingly. She was beginning to be afraid that she would soon be sorry all the time. Every day the war within burst forth afresh. She reproached herself for her growing hatred of her life. Ought she not to be grateful that she had so much--that she was not one of a squalid quartette in a foul, vermin-infested back bedroom--infested instead of only occasionally visited--that she was not a streetwalker, diseased, prowling in all weathers, the prey of the coarse humors of contemptuous and usually drunken beasts; that she was not living where everyone about her would, by pity or out of spitefulness, tear open the wounds of that hideous brand which had been put upon her at birth? Above all, she ought to be thankful that she was not Jeb Ferguson's wife. But her efforts to make herself resigned and contented, to kill her doubts as to the goodness of "goodness," were not successful. She had Tom Brashear's "ungrateful" nature--the nature that will not let a man or a woman stay in the class of hewers of wood and drawers of water but drives him or her out of it--and up or down. "You're one of those that things happen to," the old cabinetmaker said to her on a September evening, as they sat on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. The tenements had discharged their swarms into the hot street, and there was that lively panorama of dirt and disease and depravity which is fascinating--to unaccustomed eyes. "Yes," said Tom, "things'll happen to you." "What--for instance?" she asked. "God only knows. You'll up and do something some day. You're settin' here just to grow wings. Some day--swish!--and off you'll soar. It's a pity you was born female. Still--there's a lot of females that gets up. Come to think of it, I guess sex don't matter. It's havin' the soul--and mighty few of either sex has it." "Oh, I'm like everybody else," said the girl with an impatient sigh. "I dream, but--it doesn't come to anything." "No, you ain't like everybody else," retorted he, with a positive shake of his finely shaped head, thatched superbly with white hair. "You ain't afraid, for instance. That's the principal sign of a great soul, I guess." "Oh, but I _am_ afraid," cried Susan. "I've only lately found out what a coward I am." "You think you are," said the cabinetmaker. "There's them that's afraid to do, and don't do. Then there's them that's afraid to do, but goes ahead and does anyhow. That's you. I don't know where you came from--oh, I heard Etta's accountin' for you to her ma, but that's neither here nor there. I don't know where you come from, and I don't know where you're going. But--you ain't afraid--and you have imagination--and those two signs means something doing." Susan shook her head dejectedly; it had been a cruelly hard day at the factory and the odors from the girls working on either side of her had all but overwhelmed her. Old Tom nodded with stronger emphasis. "You're too young, yet," he said. "And not licked into shape. But wait a while. You'll get there." Susan hoped so, but doubted it. There was no time to work at these large problems of destiny when the daily grind was so compelling, so wearing, when the problems of bare food, clothing and shelter took all there was in her. For example, there was the matter of clothes. She had come with only what she was wearing. She gave the Brashears every Saturday two dollars and a half of her three and was ashamed of herself for taking so much for so little, when she learned about the cost of living and how different was the food the Brashears had from that of any other family in those quarters! As soon as she had saved four dollars from her wages--it took nearly two months--she bought the necessary materials and made herself two plain outer skirts, three blouses and three pairs of drawers. Chemises and corset covers she could not afford. She bought a pair of shoes for a dollar, two pairs of stockings for thirty cents, a corset for eighty cents, an umbrella for half a dollar, two underwaists for a quarter. She bought an untrimmed hat for thirty-five cents and trimmed it with the cleaned ribbon from her summer sailor and a left over bit of skirt material. She also made herself a jacket that had to serve as wrap too--and the materials for this took the surplus of her wages for another month. The cold weather had come, and she had to walk fast when she was in the open air not to be chilled to the bone. Her Aunt Fanny had been one of those women, not too common in America, who understand and practice genuine economy in the household--not the shabby stinginess that passes for economy but the laying out of money to the best advantage that comes only when one knows values. This training stood Susan in good stead now. It saved her from disaster--from disintegration. She and Etta did some washing every night, hanging the things on the fire escape to dry. In this way she was able to be clean; but in appearance she looked as poor as she was. She found a cobbler who kept her shoes in fair order for a few cents; but nothing was right about them soon--except that they were not down at the heel. She could recall how she had often wondered why the poor girls at Sutherland showed so little taste, looked so dowdy. She wondered at her own stupidity, at the narrowness of an education, such as hers had been, an education that left her ignorant of the conditions of life as it was lived by all but a lucky few of her fellow beings. How few the lucky! What an amazing world--what a strange creation the human race! How was it possible that the lucky few, among whom she had been born and bred, should know so little, really nothing, about the lot of the vast mass of their fellows, living all around them, close up against them? "If I had only known!" she thought. And then she reflected that, if she had known, pleasure would have been impossible. She could see her bureau drawers, her closets at home. She had thought herself not any too well off. Now, how luxurious, how stuffed with shameful, wasteful unnecessaries those drawers and closets seemed! And merely to keep herself in underclothes that were at least not in tatters she had to spend every cent over and above her board. If she had had to pay carfare ten cents a day, sixty cents a week!--as did many of the girls who lived at home, she would have been ruined. She understood now why every girl without a family back of her, and without good prospect of marriage, was revolving the idea of becoming a streetwalker--not as a hope, but as a fear. As she learned to observe more closely, she found good reasons for suspecting that from time to time the girls who became too hard pressed relieved the tension by taking to the streets on Saturday and Sunday nights. She read in the _Commercial_ one noon--Mr. Matson sometimes left his paper where she could glance through it--she read an article on working girls, how they were seduced to lives of shame--by love of _finery_! Then she read that those who did not fall were restrained by religion and innate purity. There she laughed--bitterly. Fear of disease, fear of maternity, yes. But where was this religion? Who but the dullest fools in the throes of that bare and tortured life ever thought of God? As for the purity--what about the obscene talk that made her shudder because of its sheer filthy stupidity?--what about the frank shamelessness of the efforts to lure their "steadies" into speedy matrimony by using every charm of caress and of person to inflame passion without satisfying it? She had thought she knew about the relations of the sexes when she came to live and work in that tenement quarter. Soon her knowledge had seemed ignorance beside the knowledge of the very babies. It was a sad, sad puzzle. If one ought to be good--chaste and clean in mind and body--then, why was there the most tremendous pressure on all but a few to make them as foul as the surroundings in which they were compelled to live? If it was wiser to be good, then why were most people imprisoned in a life from which they could escape only by being bad? What was this thing comfortable people had set up as good, anyhow--and what was bad? She found no answer. How could God condemn anyone for anything they did in the torments of the hell that life revealed itself to her as being, after a few weeks of its moral, mental and physical horrors? Etta's father was right; those who realized what life really was and what it might be, those who were sensitive took to drink or went to pieces some other way, if they were gentle, and if they were cruel, committed any brutality, any crime to try to escape. In former days Susan thought well of charity, as she had been taught. Old Tom Brashear gave her a different point of view. One day he insulted and drove from the tenement some pious charitable people who had come down from the fashionable hilltop to be good and gracious to their "less fashionable fellow-beings." After they had gone he explained his harshness to Susan: "That's the only way you can make them slicked-up brutes feel," said he, "they're so thick in the hide and satisfied with themselves. What do they come here for! To do good! Yes--to themselves. To make themselves feel how generous and sweet they was. Well, they'd better go home and read their Russia-leather covered Bibles. They'd find out that when God wanted to really do something for man, he didn't have himself created a king, or a plutocrat, or a fat, slimy church deacon in a fashionable church. No, he had himself born a bastard in a manger." Susan shivered, for the truth thus put sounded like sacrilege. Then a glow--a glow of pride and of hope--swept through her. "If you ever get up into another class," went on old Tom, "don't come hangin' round the common people you'll be livin' off of and helpin' to grind down; stick to your own class. That's the only place anybody can do any good--any real helpin' and lovin', man to man, and woman to woman. If you want to help anybody that's down, pull him up into your class first. Stick to your class. You'll find plenty to do there." "What, for instance?" asked Susan. She understood a little of what he had in mind, but was still puzzled. "Them stall-fed fakers I just threw out," the old man went on. "They come here, actin' as if this was the Middle Ages and the lord of the castle was doin' a fine thing when he went down among the low peasants who'd been made by God to work for the lords. But this ain't the Middle Ages. What's the truth about it?" "I don't know," confessed Susan. "Why, the big lower class is poor because the little upper class takes away from 'em and eats up all they toil and slave to make. Oh, it ain't the upper class's fault. They do it because they're ignorant more'n because they're bad, just as what goes on down here is ignorance more'n badness. But they do it, all the same. And they're ignorant and need to be told. Supposin' you saw a big girl out yonder in the street beatin' her baby sister. What would you do? Would you go and hold out little pieces of candy to the baby and say how sorry you was for her? Or would you first grab hold of that big sister and throw her away from beatin' of the baby?" "I see," said Susan. "That's it exactly," exclaimed the old man, in triumph. "And I say to them pious charity fakers, 'Git the hell out of here where you can't do no good. Git back to yer own class that makes all this misery, makes it faster'n all the religion and charity in the world could help it. Git back to yer own class and work with them, and teach them and make them stop robbin' and beatin' the baby.'" "Yes," said the girl, "you are right. I see it now. But, Mr. Brashear, they meant well." "The hell they did," retorted the old man. "If they'd, a' had love in their hearts, they'd have seen the truth. Love's one of the greatest teachers in the world. If they'd, a' meant well, they'd, a' been goin' round teachin' and preachin' and prayin' at their friends and fathers and brothers, the plutocrats. They'd never 'a' come down here, pretendin' they was doin' good, killin' one bedbug out of ten million and offerin' one pair of good pants where a hundred thousand pairs is needed. They'd better go read about themselves in their Bible--what Jesus says. He knew 'em. _He_ belonged to _us_--and _they_ crucified him." The horrors of that by no means lowest tenement region, its horrors for a girl bred as Susan had been! Horrors moral, horrors mental, horrors physical--above all, the physical horrors; for, worse to her than the dull wits and the lack of education, worse than vile speech and gesture, was the hopeless battle against dirt, against the vermin that could crawl everywhere--and did. She envied the ignorant and the insensible their lack of consciousness of their own plight--like the disemboweled horse that eats tranquilly on. At first she had thought her unhappiness came from her having been used to better things, that if she had been born to this life she would have been content, gay at times. Soon she learned that laughter does not always mean mirth; that the ignorant do not lack the power to suffer simply because they lack the power to appreciate; that the diseases, the bent bodies, the harrowed faces, the drunkenness, quarreling, fighting, were safer guides to the real conditions of these people than their occasional guffaws and fits of horseplay. A woman from the hilltop came in a carriage to see about a servant. On her way through the hall she cried out: "Gracious! Why don't these lazy creatures clean up, when soap costs so little and water nothing at all!" Susan heard, was moved to face her fiercely, but restrained herself. Of what use? How could the woman understand, if she heard, "But, you fool, where are we to get the time to clean up?--and where the courage?--and would soap enough to clean up and keep clean cost so little, when every penny means a drop of blood?" "If they only couldn't drink so much!" said Susan to Tom. "What, then?" retorted he. "Why, pretty soon wages'd be cut faster than they was when street carfares went down from ten cents to five. Whenever the workin' people arrange to live cheaper and to try to save something, down goes wages. No, they might as well drink. It helps 'em bear it and winds 'em up sooner. I tell you, it ain't the workin' people's fault--it's the bosses, now. It's the system--the system. A new form of slavery, this here wage system--and it's got to go--like the slaveholder that looked so copper-riveted and Bible-backed in its day." That idea of "the system" was beyond Susan. But not what her eyes saw, and her ears heard, and her nose smelled, and her sense of touch shrank from. No ambition and no reason for ambition. No real knowledge, and no chance to get any--neither the leisure nor the money nor the teachers. No hope, and no reason for hope. No God--and no reason for a God. Ideas beyond her years, beyond her comprehension, were stirring in her brain, were making her grave and thoughtful. She was accumulating a store of knowledge about life; she was groping for the clew to its mystery, for the missing fact or facts which would enable her to solve the puzzle, to see what its lessons were for her. Sometimes her heavy heart told her that the mystery was plain and the lesson easy--hopelessness. For of all the sadness about her, of all the tragedies so sordid and unromantic, the most tragic was the hopelessness. It would be impossible to conceive people worse off; it would be impossible to conceive _these_ people better off. They were such a multitude that only they could save themselves--and they had no intelligence to appreciate, no desire to impel. If their miseries--miseries to which they had fallen heir at birth--had made them what they were, it was also true that they were what they were--hopeless, down to the babies playing in the filth. An unscalable cliff; at the top, in pleasant lands, lived the comfortable classes; at the bottom lived the masses--and while many came whirling down from the top, how few found their way up! On a Saturday night Ashbel came home with the news that his wages had been cut to seven dollars. And the restaurant had been paying steadily less as the hard times grew harder and the cost of unadulterated and wholesome food mounted higher and higher. As the family sat silent and stupefied, old Tom looked up from his paper, fixed his keen, mocking eyes on Susan. "I see, here," said he, "that _we_ are so rich that they want to raise the President's salary so as he can entertain _decently_--and to build palaces at foreign courts so as our representatives'll live worthy of _us_!" CHAPTER XX ON Monday at the lunch hour--or, rather, half-hour--Susan ventured in to see the boss. Matson had too recently sprung from the working class and was too ignorant of everything outside his business to have made radical changes in his habits. He smoked five-cent cigars instead of "twofurs"; he ate larger quantities of food, did not stint himself in beer or in treating his friends in the evenings down at Wielert's beer garden. Also he wore a somewhat better quality of clothing; but he looked precisely what he was. Like all the working class above the pauper line, he made a Sunday toilet, the chief features of which were the weekly bath and the weekly clean white shirt. Thus, it being only Monday morning, he was looking notably clean when Susan entered--and was morally wound up to a higher key than he would be as the week wore on. At sight of her his feet on the leaf of the desk wavered, then became inert; it would not do to put on manners with any of the "hands." Thanks to the bath, he was not exuding his usual odor that comes from bolting much strong, cheap food. "Well, Lorny--what's the kick?" inquired he with his amiable grin. His rise in the world never for an instant ceased to be a source of delight to him; it--and a perfect digestion--kept him in a good humor all the time. "I want to know," stammered Susan, "if you can't give me a little more money." He laughed, eyeing her approvingly. Her clothing was that of the working girl; but in her face was the look never found in those born to the modern form of slavery-wage servitude. If he had been "cultured" he might have compared her to an enslaved princess, though in fact that expression of her courageous violet-gray eyes and sensitive mouth could never have been in the face of princess bred to the enslaving routine of the most conventional of conventional lives; it could come only from sheer erectness of spirit, the exclusive birthright of the sons and daughters of democracy. "More money!" he chuckled. "You _have_ got a nerve!--when factories are shutting down everywhere and working people are tramping the streets in droves." "I do about one-fourth more than the best hands you've got," replied Susan, made audacious by necessity. "And I'll agree to throw in my lunch time." "Let me see, how much do you get?" "Three dollars." "And you aren't living at home. You must have a hard time. Not much over for diamonds, eh? You want to hustle round and get married, Lorny. Looks don't last long when a gal works. But you're holdin' out better'n them that gads and dances all night." "I help at the restaurant in the evening to piece out my board. I'm pretty tired when I get a chance to go to bed." "I'll bet!. . . So, you want more money. I've been watchin' you. I watch all my gals--I have to, to keep weedin' out the fast ones. I won't have no bad examples in _my_ place! As soon as I ketch a gal livin' beyond her wages I give her the bounce." Susan lowered her eyes and her cheeks burned--not because Matson was frankly discussing the frivolous subject of sex. Another girl might have affected the air of distressed modesty, but it would have been affectation, pure and simple, as in those regions all were used to hearing the frankest, vilest things--and we do not blush at what we are used to hearing. Still, the tenement female sex is as full of affectation as is the sex elsewhere. But, Susan, the curiously self-unconscious, was incapable of affectation. Her indignation arose from her sense of the hideous injustice of Matson's discharging girls for doing what his meager wages all but compelled. "Yes, I've been watching you," he went on, "with a kind of a sort of a notion of makin' you a forelady. That'd mean six dollars a week. But you ain't fit. You've got the brains--plenty of 'em. But you wouldn't be of no use to me as forelady." "Why not?" asked Susan. Six dollars a week! Affluence! Wealth! Matson took his feet down, relit his cigar and swung himself into an oracular attitude. "I'll show you. What's manufacturin'? Right down at the bottom, I mean." He looked hard at the girl. She looked receptively at him. "Why, it's gettin' work out of the hands. New ideas is nothin'. You can steal 'em the minute the other fellow uses 'em. No, it's all in gettin' work out of the hands." Susan's expression suggested one who sees light and wishes to see more of it. He proceeded: "You work for me--for instance, now, if every day you make stuff there's a profit of five dollars on, I get five dollars out of you. If I can push you to make stuff there's a profit of six dollars on, I get six dollars--a dollar more. Clear extra gain, isn't it? Now multiply a dollar by the number of hands, and you'll see what it amounts to." "I see," said Susan, nodding thoughtfully. "Well! How did I get up? Because as a foreman I knew how to work the hands. I knew how to get those extra dollars. And how do I keep up? Because I hire forepeople that get work out of the hands." Susan understood. But her expression was a comment that was not missed by the shrewd Matson. "Now, listen to me, Lorny. I want to give you a plain straight talk because I'd like to see you climb. Ever since you've been here I've been laughin' to myself over the way your forelady--she's a fox, she is!--makes you the pacemaker for the other girls. She squeezes at least twenty-five cents a day over what she used to out of each hand in your room because you're above the rest of them dirty, shiftless muttonheads." Susan flushed at this fling at her fellow-workers. "Dirty, shiftless muttonheads," repeated Matson. "Ain't I right? Ain't they dirty? Ain't they shiftless--so no-account that if they wasn't watched every minute they'd lay down--and let me and the factory that supports 'em go to rack and ruin? And ain't they muttonheads? Do you ever find any of 'em saying or doing a sensible thing?" Susan could not deny. She could think of excuses--perfect excuses. But the facts were about as he brutally put it. "Oh, I know 'em. I've dealt with 'em all my life," pursued the box manufacturer. "Now, Lorny, you ought to be a forelady. You've got to toughen up and stop bein' so polite and helpful and all that. You'll _never_ get on if you don't toughen up. Business is business. Be as sentimental as you like away from business, and after you've clum to the top. But not _in_ business or while you're kickin' and scratchin' and clawin' your way up." Susan shook her head slowly. She felt painfully young and inexperienced and unfit for the ferocious struggle called life. She felt deathly sick. "Of course it's a hard world," said Matson with a wave of his cigar. "But did I make it?" "No," admitted Susan, as his eyes demanded a reply. "Sure not," said he. "And how's anybody to get up in it? Is there any other way but by kickin' and stampin', eh?" "None that I see," conceded Susan reluctantly. "None that is," declared he. "Them that says there's other ways either lies or don't know nothin' about the practical game. Well, then!" Matson puffed triumphantly at the cigar. "Such bein' the case--and as long as the crowd down below's got to be kicked in the face by them that's on the way up, why shouldn't I do the kickin'--which is goin' to be done anyhow--instead of gettin' kicked? Ain't that sense?" "Yes," admitted Susan. She sighed. "Yes," she repeated. "Well--toughen up. Meanwhile, I'll raise you, to spur the others on. I'll give you four a week." And he cut short her thanks with an "Oh, don't mention it. I'm only doin' what's square--what helps me as well as you. I want to encourage you. You don't belong down among them cattle. Toughen up, Lorny. A girl with a bank account gets the pick of the beaux." And he nodded a dismissal. Matson, and his hands, bosses and workers, brutal, brutalizing each other more and more as they acted and reacted upon each other. Where would it end? She was in dire need of underclothes. Her undershirts were full of holes from the rubbing of her cheap, rough corset; her drawers and stockings were patched in several places--in fact, she could not have worn the stockings had not her skirt now been well below her shoetops. Also, her shoes, in spite of the money she had spent upon them, were about to burst round the edges of the soles. But she would not longer accept from the Brashears what she regarded as charity. "You more than pay your share, what with the work you do," protested Mrs. Brashear. "I'll not refuse the extra dollar because I've simply got to take it. But I don't want to pertend." The restaurant receipts began to fall with the increasing hardness of the times among the working people. Soon it was down to practically no profit at all--that is, nothing toward the rent. Tom Brashear was forced to abandon his policy of honesty, to do as all the other purveyors were doing--to buy cheap stuff and to cheapen it still further. He broke abruptly with his tradition and his past. It aged him horribly all in a few weeks--but, at least, ruin was put off. Mrs. Brashear had to draw twenty of the sixty-three dollars which were in the savings bank against sickness. Funerals would be taken care of by the burial insurance; each member of the family, including Susan, had a policy. But sickness had to have its special fund; and it was frequently drawn upon, as the Brashears knew no more than their neighbors about hygiene, and were constantly catching the colds of foolish exposure or indigestion and letting them develop into fevers, bad attacks of rheumatism, stomach trouble, backache all regarded by them as by their neighbors as a necessary part of the routine of life. Those tenement people had no more notion of self-restraint than had the "better classes" whose self-indulgences maintain the vast army of doctors and druggists. The only thing that saved Susan from all but an occasional cold or sore throat from wet feet was eating little through being unable to accustom herself to the fare that was the best the Brashears could now afford--cheap food in cheap lard, coarse and poisonous sugar, vilely adulterated coffee, doctored meat and vegetables--the food which the poor in their ignorance buy--and for which they in their helplessness pay actually higher prices than do intelligent well-to-do people for the better qualities. And not only were the times hard, but the winter also. Snow--sleet--rain--thaw--slush--noisome, disease-laden vapor--and, of course, sickness everywhere--with occasional relief in death, relief for the one who died, relief for the living freed from just so much of the burden. The sickness on every hand appalled Susan. Surely, she said to old Brashear, the like had never been before; on the contrary, said he, the amount of illness and death was, if anything, less than usual because the hard times gave people less for eating and drinking. These ghastly creatures crawling toward the hospital or borne out on stretchers to the ambulance--these yet ghastlier creatures tottering feebly homeward, discharged as cured--these corpses of men, of women, of boys and girls, of babies--oh, how many corpses of babies!--these corpses borne away for burial, usually to the public burying ground--all these stricken ones in the battle ever waging, with curses, with hoarse loud laughter, with shrieks and moans, with dull, drawn faces and jaws set--all these stricken ones were but the ordinary losses of the battle! "And in the churches," said old Tom Brashear, "they preach the goodness and mercy of God. And in the papers they talk about how rich and prosperous we are." "I don't care to live! It is too horrible," cried the girl. "Oh, you mustn't take things so to heart," counseled he. "Us that live this life can't afford to take it to heart. Leave that to them who come down here from the good houses and look on us for a minute and enjoy themselves with a little weepin' and sighin' as if it was in the theater." "It seems worse every, day," she said. "I try to fool myself, because I've got to stay and----" "Oh, no, you haven't," interrupted he. Susan looked at him with a startled expression. It seemed to her that the old man had seen into her secret heart where was daily raging the struggle against taking the only way out open to a girl in her circumstances. It seemed to her he was hinting that she ought to take that way. If any such idea was in his mind, he did not dare put it into words. He simply repeated: "You won't stay. You'll pull out." "How?" she asked. "Somehow. When the way opens you'll see it, and take it." There had long since sprung up between these two a sympathy, a mutual understanding beyond any necessity of expression in words or looks. She had never had this feeling for anyone, not even for Burlingham. This feeling for each other had been like that of a father and daughter who love each other without either understanding the other very well or feeling the need of a sympathetic understanding. There was a strong resemblance between Burlingham and old Tom. Both belonged to the familiar philosopher type. But, unlike the actor-manager, the old cabinetmaker had lived his philosophy, and a very gentle and tolerant philosophy it was. After she had looked her request for light upon what way she was to take, they sat silent, neither looking at the other, yet each seeing the other with the eye of the mind. She said: "I may not dare take it." "You won't have no choice," replied he. "You'll have to take it. And you'll get away from here. And you mustn't ever come back--or look back. Forget all this misery. Rememberin' won't do us no good. It'd only weaken you." "I shan't ever forget," cried the girl. "You must," said the old man firmly. He added, "And you will. You'll have too much else to think about--too much that has to be attended to." As the first of the year approached and the small shopkeepers of the tenements, like the big ones elsewhere, were casting up the year's balances and learning how far toward or beyond the verge of ruin the hard times had brought them, the sound of the fire engines--and of the ambulances--became a familiar part of the daily and nightly noises of the district. Desperate shopkeepers, careless of their neighbors' lives and property in fiercely striving for themselves and their families--workingmen out of a job and deep in debt--landlords with too heavy interest falling due--all these were trying to save themselves or to lengthen the time the fact of ruin could be kept secret by setting fire to their shops or their flats. The Brashears had been burned out twice in their wandering tenement house life; so old Tom was sleeping little; was constantly prowling about the halls of all the tenements in that row and into the cellars. He told Susan the open secret of the meaning of most of these fires. And after he had cursed the fire fiends, he apologized for them. "It's the curse of the system," explained he. "It's all the curse of the system. These here storekeepers and the farmers the same way--they think they're independent, but really they're nothin' but fooled slaves of the big blood suckers for the upper class. But these here little storekeepers, they're tryin' to escape. How does a man escape? Why, by gettin' some hands together to work for him so that he can take it out of their wages. When you get together enough to hire help--that's when you pass out of slavery into the master class--master of slaves." Susan nodded understandingly. "Now, how can these little storekeepers like me get together enough to begin to hire slaves? By a hundred tricks, every one of them wicked and mean. By skimpin' and slavin' themselves and their families, by sellin' short weight, by sellin' rotten food, by sellin' poison, by burnin' to get the insurance. And, at last, if they don't die or get caught and jailed, they get together the money to branch out and hire help, and begin to get prosperous out of the blood of their help. These here arson fellows--they're on the first rung of the ladder of success. You heard about that beautiful ladder in Sunday school, didn't you?" "Yes," said Susan, "that and a great many other lies about God and man." Susan had all along had great difficulty in getting sleep because of the incessant and discordant noises of the district. The unhappy people added to their own misery by disturbing each other's rest--and no small part of the bad health everywhere prevailing was due to this inability of anybody to get proper sleep because somebody was always singing or quarreling, shouting or stamping about. But Susan, being young and as yet untroubled by the indigestion that openly or secretly preyed upon everyone else, did at last grow somewhat used to noise, did contrive to get five or six hours of broken sleep. With the epidemic of fires she was once more restless and wakeful. Every day came news of fire somewhere in the tenement districts of the city, with one or more, perhaps a dozen, roasted to death, or horribly burned. A few weeks, however, and even that peril became so familiar that she slept like the rest. There were too many actualities of discomfort, of misery, to harass her all day long every time her mind wandered from her work. One night she was awakened by a scream. She leaped from bed to find the room filling with smoke and the street bright as day, but with a flickering evil light. Etta was screaming, Ashbel was bawling and roaring like a tortured bull. Susan, completely dazed by the uproar, seized Etta and dragged her into the hall. There were Mr. and Mrs. Brashear, he in his nightdress of drawers and undershirt, she in the short flannel petticoat and sacque in which she always slept. Ashbel burst out of his room, kicking the door down instead of turning the knob. "Lorny," cried old Tom, "you take mother and Etta to the escape." And he rushed at his powerful, stupid son and began to strike him in the face with his one good fist, shrieking, "Shut up, you damn fool! Shut up!" Dragging Etta and pushing Mrs. Brashear, Susan moved toward the end of the hall where the fire escape passed their windows. All the way down, the landings were littered with bedding, pots, pans, drying clothes, fire wood, boxes, all manner of rubbish, the overflow of the crowded little flats. Over these obstructions and down the ladders were falling and stumbling men, women, children, babies, in all degrees of nudity--for many of the big families that slept in one room with windows tight shut so that the stove heat would not escape and be wasted when fuel was so dear, slept stark naked. Susan contrived to get Etta and the old woman to the street; not far behind them came Tom and Ashbel, the son's face bleeding from the blows his father had struck to quiet him. It was a penetrating cold night, with an icy drizzle falling. The street was filled with engines, hose, all manner of ruined household effects, firemen shouting, the tenement people huddling this way and that, barefooted, nearly or quite naked, silent, stupefied. Nobody had saved anything worth while. The entire block was ablaze, was burning as if it had been saturated with coal oil. "The owner's done this," said old Tom. "I heard he was in trouble. But though he's a church member and what they call a philanthropist, I hardly thought he'd stoop to hirin' this done. If anybody's caught, it'll be some fellow that don't know who he did it for." About a hundred families were homeless in the street. Half a dozen patrol wagons and five ambulances were taking the people away to shelter, women and babies first. It was an hour--an hour of standing in the street, with bare feet on the ice, under the ankle-deep slush--before old Tom and his wife got their turn to be taken. Then Susan and Etta and Ashbel, escorted by a policeman, set out for the station house. As they walked along, someone called out to the policeman: "Anybody killed at the fire, officer?" "Six jumped and was smashed," replied the policeman. "I seen three dead babies. But they won't know for several days how many it'll total." And all her life long, whenever Susan Lenox heard the clang of a fire engine, there arose before her the memory picture of that fire, in all the horror of detail. A fire bell to her meant wretched families flung into the night, shrieks of mangled and dying, moans of babies with life oozing from their blue lips, columns of smoke ascending through icy, soaking air, and a vast glare of wicked light with flame demons leaping for joy in the measureless woe over which they were presiding. As the little party was passing the fire lines, Ashbel's foot slipped on a freezing ooze of blood and slush, and he fell sprawling upon a human body battered and trampled until it was like an overturned basket of butcher's odds and ends. The station house was eleven long squares away. But before they started for it they were already at the lowest depth of physical wretchedness which human nerves can register; thus, they arrived simply a little more numb. The big room, heated by a huge, red-hot stove to the point where the sweat starts, was crowded with abject and pitiful human specimens. Even Susan, the most sensitive person there, gazed about with stolid eyes. The nakedness of unsightly bodies, gross with fat or wasted to emaciation, the dirtiness of limbs and torsos long, long unwashed, the foul steam from it all and from the water-soaked rags, the groans of some, the silent, staring misery of others, and, most horrible of all, the laughter of those who yielded like animals to the momentary sense of physical well-being as the heat thawed them out--these sights and sounds together made up a truly infernal picture. And, like all the tragedies of abject poverty, it was wholly devoid of that dignity which is necessary to excite the deep pity of respect, was sordid and squalid, moved the sensitive to turn away in loathing rather than to advance with brotherly sympathy and love. Ashbel, his animal instinct roused by the sight of the stove, thrust the throng aside rudely as he pushed straight for the radiating center. Etta and Susan followed in his wake. The fierce heat soon roused them to the sense of their plight. Ashbel began to curse, Etta to weep. Susan's mind was staring, without hope but also without despair, at the walls of the trap in which they were all caught--was seeking the spot where they could begin to burrow through and escape. Beds and covers were gathered in by the police from everywhere in that district, were ranged upon the floor of the four rooms. The men were put in the cells downstairs; the women and the children got the cots. Susan and Etta lay upon the same mattress, a horse blanket over them. Etta slept; Susan, wide awake, lived in brain and nerves the heart-breaking scenes through which she had passed numb and stolid. About six o'clock a breakfast of coffee, milk and bread was served. It was evident that the police did not know what to do with these outcasts who had nothing and no place to go--for practically all were out of work when the blow came. Ashbel demanded shoes, pants and a coat. "I've got to get to my job," shouted he, "or else I'll lose it. Then where in the hell'd we be!" His blustering angered the sergeant, who finally told him if he did not quiet down he would be locked in a cell. Susan interrupted, explained the situation, got Ashbel the necessary clothes and freed Etta and herself of his worse than useless presence. At Susan's suggestion such other men as had jobs were also fitted out after a fashion and sent away. "You can take the addresses of their families if you send them anywhere during the day, and these men can come back here and find out where they've gone----" this was the plan she proposed to the captain, and he adopted it. As soon as the morning papers were about the city, aid of every kind began to pour in, with the result that before noon many of the families were better established than they had been before the fire. Susan and Etta got some clothing, enough to keep them warm on their way through the streets to the hospital to which Brashear and his wife had been taken. Mrs. Brashear had died in the ambulance--of heart disease, the doctors said, but Susan felt it was really of the sense that to go on living was impossible. And fond of her though she was, she could not but be relieved that there was one less factor in the unsolvable problem. "She's better, off" she said to Etta in the effort to console. But Etta needed no consolation. "Ever so much better off," she promptly assented. "Mother hasn't cared about living since we had to give up our little home and become tenement house people. And she was right." As to Brashear, they learned that he was ill; but they did not learn until evening that he was dying of pneumonia. The two girls and Ashbel were admitted to the ward where he lay--one of a long line of sufferers in bare, clean little beds. Screens were drawn round his bed because he was dying. He had been suffering torments from the savage assaults of the pneumonia; but the pain had passed away now, so he said, though the dreadful sound of his breathing made Susan's heart flutter and her whole body quiver. "Do you want a preacher or a priest?" asked the nurse. "Neither," replied the old man in gasps and whispers. "If there is a God he'll never let anybody from this hell of a world into his presence. They might tell him the truth about himself." "Oh, father, father!" pleaded Etta, and Ashbel burst into a fit of hysterical and terrified crying. The old man turned his dying eyes on Susan. He rested a few minutes, fixing her gaze upon his with a hypnotic stare. Then he began again: "You've got somethin' more'n a turnip on your shoulders. Listen to me. There was a man named Jesus once"--gasp--gasp--"You've heard about him, but you don't know about him"--gasp--gasp--"I'll tell you--listen. He was a low fellow--a workin' man--same trade as mine--born without a father--born in a horse trough--in a stable"--gasp--gasp-- Susan leaned forward. "Born without a father," she murmured, her eyes suddenly bright. "That's him. Listen"--gasp--gasp--gasp--"He was a big feller--big brain--big heart--the biggest man that ever lived"--gasp--gasp--gasp--gas--"And he looked at this here hell of a world from the outside, he being an outcast and a low-down common workingman. And he _saw_--he did---- "Yes, he saw!"--gasp--gasp--gasp--"And he said all men were brothers--and that they'd find it out some day. He saw that this world was put together for the strong and the cruel--that they could win out--and make the rest of us work for 'em for what they chose to give--like they work a poor ignorant horse for his feed and stall in a dirty stable----"gasp--gasp--gasp-- "For the strong and the cruel," said Susan. "And this feller Jesus--he set round the saloons and such places--publicans, they called 'em"--gasp--gasp--gasp--"And he says to all the poor ignorant slaves and such cattle, he says, 'You're all brothers. Love one another'"--gasp--gasp--gasp--" 'Love one another,' he says, 'and learn to help each other and stand up for each other,' he says, 'and hate war and fightin' and money grabbin'----'"gasp--gasp--gasp--"'Peace on earth,' he says, 'Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free'--and he saw there'd be a time"--the old man raised himself on one elbow--"Yes, by God--there _will_ be!--a time when men'll learn not to be beasts and'll be men--_men_, little gal!" "Men," echoed Susan, her eyes shining, her bosom heaving. "It ain't sense and it ain't right that everything should be for the few--for them with brains--and that the rest--the millions--should be tramped down just because they ain't so cruel or so 'cute'--they and their children tramped down in the dirt. And that feller Jesus saw it." "Yes--yes," cried Susan. "He saw it." "I'll tell you what he was," said old Tom in a hoarse whisper. "He wasn't no god. He was bigger'n that--bigger'n that, little gal! He was the first _man_ that ever lived. He said, 'Give the weak a chance so as they kin git strong.' He says----" The dying man fell back exhausted. His eyes rolled wildly, closed; his mouth twitched, fell wide open; there came from his throat a sound Susan had never heard before, but she knew what it was, what it meant. Etta and Ashbel were overwhelmed afresh by the disgrace of having their parents buried in Potter's Field--for the insurance money went for debts. They did not understand when Susan said, "I think your father'd have liked to feel that he was going to be buried there--because then he'll be with--with his Friend. You know, _He_ was buried in Potter's Field." However, their grief was shortlived; there is no time in the lives of working people for such luxuries as grief--no more time than there is at sea when all are toiling to keep afloat the storm-racked sinking ship and one sailor is swept overboard. In comfortable lives a bereavement is a contrast; in the lives of the wretched it is but one more in the assailing army of woes. Etta took a job at the box factory at three dollars a week; she and Susan and Ashbel moved into two small rooms in a flat in a tenement opposite the factory--a cheaper and therefore lower house than the one that had burned. They bought on the installment plan nine dollars' worth of furniture--the scant minimum of necessities. They calculated that, by careful saving, they could pay off the debt in a year or so--unless one or the other fell ill or lost work. "That means," said Etta, eyeing their flimsy and all but downright worthless purchases, "that means we'll still be paying when this furniture'll be gone to pieces and fit only for kindling." "It's the best we can do," replied Susan. "Maybe one of us'll get a better job." "_You_ could, I'm sure, if you had the clothes," said Etta. "But not in those rags." "If I had the clothes? Where?" "At Shillito's or one of the other department stores. They'd give us both places in one of the men's departments. They like pretty girls for those places--if they're not giddy and don't waste time flirting but use flirtation to sell goods. But what's the sense in talking about it? You haven't got the clothes. A saleslady's got to be counter-dressed. She can look as bad as she pleases round the skirt and the feet. But from the waist up she has to look natty, if she wants wages." Susan had seen these girls; she understood now why they looked as if they were the put together upper and lower halves of two different persons. She recalled that, even though they went into other business, they still retained the habit, wore toilets that were counterbuilt. She revolved the problem of getting one of these toilets and of securing a store job. But she soon saw it was hopeless, for the time. Every cent the three had was needed to keep from starving and freezing. Also--though she did not realize it--her young enthusiasm was steadily being sapped by the life she was leading. It may have been this rather than natural gentleness--or perhaps it was as much the one as the other--that kept Susan from taking Matson's advice and hardening herself into a forelady. The ruddy glow under her skin had given place to, the roundness of her form had gone, and its pallor; beauty remained only because she had a figure which not even emaciation could have deprived of lines of alluring grace. But she was no longer quite so straight, and her hair, which it was a sheer impossibility to care for, was losing its soft vitality. She was still pretty, but not the beauty she had been when she was ejected from the class in which she was bred. However, she gave the change in herself little thought; it was the rapid decline of Etta's prettiness and freshness that worried her most. Not many weeks after the fire and the deeper plunge, she began to be annoyed by Ashbel. In his clumsy, clownish way he was making advances to her. Several times he tried to kiss her. Once, when Etta was out, he opened the door of the room where she was taking a bath in a washtub she had borrowed of the janitress, leered in at her and very reluctantly obeyed her sharp order to close the door. She had long known that he was in reality very different from the silent restrained person fear of his father made him seem to be. But she thought even the reality was far above the rest of the young men growing up among those degrading influences. The intrusion into her room was on a Sunday; on the following Sunday he came back as soon as Etta went out. "Look here, Lorny," said he, with blustering tone and gesture, "I want to have a plain talk with you. I'm sick and tired of this. There's got to be a change." "Sick of what?" asked Susan. "Of the way you stand me off." He plumped himself sullenly down on the edge of hers and Etta's bed. "I can't afford to get married. I've got to stick by you two." "It strikes me, Ashbel, we all need each other. Who'd marry you on seven a week?" She laughed good-humoredly. "Anyhow, _you_ wouldn't support a wife. It takes the hardest kind of work to get your share of the expenses out of you. You always try to beat us down to letting you off with two fifty a week." "That's about all Etta pays." "It's about all she gets. And _I_ pay three fifty--and she and I do all the work--and give you two meals and a lunch to take with you--and you've got a room alone--and your mending done. I guess you know when you're well off." "But I ain't well off," he cried. "I'm a grown-up man--and I've got to have a woman." Susan had become used to tenement conditions. She said, practically, "Well--there's your left over four dollars a week." "Huh!" retorted he. "Think I'm goin' to run any risks? I'm no fool. I take care of my health." "Well--don't bother me with your troubles--at least, troubles of that sort." "Yes, but I will!" shouted he, in one of those sudden furies that seize upon the stupid ignorant. "You needn't act so nifty with me. I'm as good as you are. I'm willing to marry you." "No, thanks," said Susan. "I'm not free to marry--even if I would." "Oh--you ain't?" For an instant his curiosity, as she thus laid a hand upon the curtain over her past, distracted his uncertain attention. But her expression, reserved, cold, maddeningly reminding him of a class distinction of which he was as sensitively conscious as she was unconscious--her expression brought him back with a jerk. "Then you'll have to live with me, anyhow. I can't stand it, and I'm not goin' to. If you want me to stay on here, and help out, you've got to treat me right. Other fellows that do as I'm doing get treated right. And I've got to be, too--or I'll clear out." And he squirmed, and waggled his head and slapped and rubbed his heavy, powerful legs. "Why, Ashbel," said Susan, patting him on the shoulder. "You and I are like brother and sister. You might as well talk this way to Etta." He gave her a brazen look, uttered a laugh that was like the flinging out of a bucket of filth. "Why not? Other fellows that have to support the family and can't afford to marry gets took care of." Susan shrank away. But Ashbel did not notice it. "It ain't a question of Etta," he went on. "There's you--and I don't need to look nowhere else." Susan had long since lost power to be shocked by any revelation of the doings of people lashed out of all civilized feelings by the incessant brutal whips of poverty and driven back to the state of nature. She had never happened to hear definitely of this habit--even custom--of incestuous relations; now that she heard, she instantly accepted it as something of which she had really known for some time. At any rate, she had no sense of shock. She felt no horror, no deep disgust, simply the distaste into which her original sense of horror had been thinned down by constant contact with poverty's conditions--just as filth no longer made her shudder, so long as it did not touch her own person. "You'd better go and chase yourself round the square a few times," said she, turning away and taking up some mending. "You see, there ain't no way out of it," pursued he, with an insinuating grin. Susan gave him a steady, straight look. "Don't ever speak of it again," said she quietly. "You ought to be ashamed--and you will be when you think it over." He laughed loudly. "I've thought it over. I mean what I say. If you don't do the square thing by me, you drive me out." He came hulking up to her, tried to catch her in his big powerful arms. She put the table between him and her. He kicked it aside and came on. She saw that her move had given him a false impression--a notion that she was afraid of him, was coquetting with him. She opened the door leading into the front part of the flat where the Quinlan family lived. "If you don't behave yourself, I'll call Mr. Quinlan," said she, not the least bluster or fear or nervousness in her tone. "What'd be the use? He'd only laugh. Why, the same thing's going on in their family." "Still, he'd lynch you if I told him what _you_ were trying to do." Even Ashbel saw this familiar truth of human nature. The fact that Quinlan was guilty himself, far from staying him from meting out savage justice to another, would make him the more relentless and eager. "All right," said he. "Then you want me to git out?" "I want you to behave yourself and stay on. Go take a walk, Ashbel." And Ashbel went. But his expression was not reassuring; Susan feared he had no intention of accepting his defeat. However, she reasoned that numbskull though he was, he yet had wit enough to realize how greatly to his disadvantage any change he could make would be. She did not speak of the matter to Etta, who was therefore taken completely by surprise when Ashbel, after a silent supper that evening, burst out with his grievance: "I'm going to pack up," said he. "I've found a place where I'll be treated right." He looked haughtily at Susan. "And the daughter's a good looker, too. She's got some weight on her. She ain't like a washed out string." Etta understood at once. "What a low-down thing you are!" she cried. "Just like the rest of these filthy tenement house animals. I thought _you_ had some pride." "Oh, shut up!" bawled Ashbel. "You're not such a much. What're we, anyhow, to put on airs? We're as common as dirt--yes, and that sniffy lady friend of yours, too. Where'd she come from, anyhow? Some dung pile, I'll bet." He went into his room, reappeared with his few belongings done into a bundle. "So long," said he, stalking toward the hall door. Etta burst into tears, caught him by the arm. "You ain't goin', are you, Ashy?" cried she. "Bet your life. Let me loose." And he shook her off. "I'm not goin' to be saddled with two women that ain't got no gratitude." "My God, Lorna!" wailed Etta. "Talk to him. Make him stay." Susan shook her head, went to the window and gazed into the snowy dreary prospect of tenement house yards. Ashbel, who had been hesitating through hope, vented a jeering laugh. "Ain't she the insultin'est, airiest lady!" sneered he. "Well, so long." "But, Ashy, you haven't paid for last week yet," pleaded Etta, clinging to his arm. "You kin have my share of the furniture for that." "The furniture! Oh, my God!" shrieked Etta, releasing him to throw out her arms in despair. "How'll we pay for the furniture if you go?" "Ask your high and mighty lady friend," said her brother. And he opened the door, passed into the hall, slammed it behind him. Susan waited a moment for Etta to speak, then turned to see what she was doing. She had dropped into one of the flimsy chairs, was staring into vacancy. "We'll have to give up these rooms right away," said Susan. Etta roused herself, looked at her friend. And Susan saw what Etta had not the courage to express--that she blamed her for not having "made the best of it" and kept Ashbel. And Susan was by no means sure that the reproach in Etta's eyes and heart were not justified. "I couldn't do it, Etta," she said with a faint suggestion of apology. "Men are that way," said Etta sullenly. "Oh, I don't blame him," protested Susan. "I understand. But--I can't do it, Etta--I simply can't!" "No," said Etta. "You couldn't. I could, but you couldn't. I'm not as far down as Ashbel. I'm betwixt and between; so I can understand you both." "You go and make up with him and let me look after myself. I'll get along." Etta shook her head. "No," said she without any show of sentiment, but like one stating an unalterable fact. "I've got to stay on with you. I can't live without you. I don't want to go down. I want to go up." "Up!" Susan smiled bitterly. Silence fell between them, and Susan planned for the new conditions. She did not speak until Etta said, "What ever will we do?" "We've got to give up the furniture. Thank goodness, we've paid only two-fifty on it." "Yes, _it's_ got to go," said Etta. "And we've got to pay Mrs. Quinlan the six we owe her and get out tonight. We'll go up to the top floor--up to Mrs. Cassatt. She takes sleepers. Then--we'll see." An hour later they had moved; for Mrs. Quinlan was able to find two lodgers to take the rooms at once. They were established with Mrs. Cassatt, had a foul and foul-smelling bed and one-half of her back room; the other half barely contained two even dirtier and more malodorous cots, in one of which slept Mrs. Cassatt's sixteen-year-old daughter Kate, in the other her fourteen-year-old son Dan. For these new quarters and the right to cook their food on the Cassatt stove the girls agreed to pay three dollars and a half a week--which left them three dollars and a half a week for food and clothing--and for recreation and for the exercise of the virtue of thrift which the comfortable so assiduously urge upon the poor. CHAPTER XXI EACH girl now had with her at all times everything she possessed in the world--a toothbrush, a cake of castile soap, the little money left out of the week's wages, these three items in the pocket of her one skirt, a cheap dark blue cloth much wrinkled and patched; a twenty-five cent felt hat, Susan's adorned with a blue ribbon, Etta's with a bunch of faded roses; a blue cotton blouse patched under the arms with stuff of a different shade; an old misshapen corset that cost forty-nine cents in a bargain sale; a suit of gray shoddy-and-wool underwear; a pair of fifteen-cent stockings, Susan's brown, Etta's black; a pair of worn and torn ties, scuffed and down at the heel, bought for a dollar and nine cents; a dirt-stained dark blue jacket, Susan's lacking one button, Etta's lacking three and having a patch under the right arm. Yet they often laughed and joked with each other, with their fellow-workers. You might have said their hearts were light; for so eager are we to believe our fellow-beings comfortable, a smile of poverty's face convinces us straightway that it is as happy as we, if not happier. There would have been to their mirth a little more than mere surface and youthful ability to find some jest in the most crushing tragedy if only they could have kept themselves clean. The lack of sufficient food was a severe trial, for both had voracious appetites; Etta was tormented by visions of quantity, Susan by visions of quality as well as of quantity. But only at meal times, or when they had to omit a meal entirely, were they keenly distressed by the food question. The cold was a still severer trial; but it was warm in the factory and it was warm in Mrs. Cassatt's flat, whose windows were never opened from closing in of winter until spring came round. The inability to keep clean was the trial of trials. From her beginning at the box factory the physical uncleanness of the other girls had made Susan suffer keenly. And her suffering can be understood only by a clean person who has been through the same ordeal. She knew that her fellow-workers were not to blame. She even envied them the ignorance and the insensibility that enabled them to bear what, she was convinced, could never be changed. She wondered sometimes at the strength and grip of the religious belief among the girls--even, or, rather, especially, among those who had strayed from virtue into the path their priests and preachers and rabbis told them was the most sinful of all strayings. But she also saw many signs that religion was fast losing its hold. One day a Lutheran girl, Emma Schmeltz, said during a Monday morning lunch talk: "Well, anyhow, I believe it's all a probation, and everything'll be made right hereafter. _I_ believe my religion, I do. Yes, we'll be rewarded in the hereafter." Becky--Rebecca Lichtenspiel--laughed, as did most of the girls. Said Becky: "And there ain't no hereafter. Did you ever see a corpse? Ain't they the dead ones! Don't talk to me about no hereafter." Everybody laughed. But this was a Monday morning conversation, high above the average of the girls' talk in intelligence and liveliness. Their minds had been stimulated by the Sunday rest from the dreary and degenerating drudgery of "honest toil." It was the physical contacts that most preyed upon Susan. She was too gentle, too considerate to show her feelings; in her determined and successful effort to conceal them she at times went to the opposite extreme and not only endured but even courted contacts that were little short of loathsome. Tongue could not tell what she suffered through the persistent affectionateness of Letty Southard, a sweet and pretty young girl of wretchedly poor family who developed an enormous liking for her. Letty, dirty and clad in noisome undergarments beneath soiled rags and patches, was always hugging and kissing her--and not to have submitted would have been to stab poor Letty to the heart and humiliate all the other girls. So no one, not even Etta, suspected what she was going through. From her coming to the factory in the morning, to hang her hat and jacket in the only possible place, along with the soiled and smelling and often vermin-infected wraps of the others--from early morning until she left at night she was forced into contacts to which custom never in the least blunted her. However, so long as she had a home with the Brashears there was the nightly respite. But now-- There was little water, and only a cracked and filthy basin to wash in. There was no chance to do laundry work; for their underclothes must be used as night clothes also. To wash their hair was impossible. "Does my hair smell as bad as yours?" said Etta. "You needn't think yours is clean because it doesn't show the dirt like mine." "Does my hair smell as bad as the rest of the girls'?" said Susan. "Not quite," was Etta's consoling reply. By making desperate efforts they contrived partially to wash their bodies once a week, not without interruptions of privacy--to which, however, they soon grew accustomed. In spite of efforts which were literally heroic, they could not always keep free from parasites; for the whole tenement and all persons and things in it were infected--and how could it be otherwise where no one had time or money or any effective means whatsoever to combat nature's inflexible determination to breed wherever there is a breeding spot? The last traces of civilization were slipping from the two girls; they were sinking to a state of nature. Even personal pride, powerful in Susan and strong in Etta through Susan's example, was deserting them. They no longer minded Dan's sleeping in their room. They saw him, his father, the other members of the family in all stages of nudity and at the most private acts; and they were seen by the Cassatts in the same way. To avoid this was impossible, as impossible as to avoid the parasites swarming in the bed, in the woodwork, in cracks of ceiling, walls, floor. The Cassatts were an example of how much the people who live in the sheltered and more or less sunny nooks owe to their shelter and how little to their own boasted superiority of mind and soul. They had been a high class artisan family until a few months before. The hard times struck them a series of quick, savage blows, such as are commonplace enough under our social system, intricate because a crude jumble of makeshifts, and easily disordered because intricate. They were swept without a breathing pause down to the bottom. Those who have always been accustomed to prosperity have no reserve of experience or courage to enable them to recuperate from sudden and extreme adversity. In an amazingly short time the Cassatts had become demoralized--a familiar illustration of how civilization is merely a wafer-thin veneer over most human beings as yet. Over how many is it more? They fought after a fashion; they fought valiantly. But how would it have been possible not steadily to yield ground against such a pitiless, powerful foe as poverty? The man had taken to drink, to blunt outraged self-respect and to numb his despair before the spectacle of his family's downfall. Mrs. Cassatt was as poor a manager as the average woman in whatever walk of life, thanks to the habit of educating woman in the most slipshod fashion, if at all, in any other part of the business but sex-trickery. Thus she was helpless before the tenement conditions. She gave up, went soddenly about in rags with an incredibly greasy and usually dangling tail of hair. "Why don't you tie up that tail, ma?" said the son Dan, who had ideas about neatness. "What's the use?" said Mrs. Cassatt. "What's the use of _anything_?" "Ma don't want to look stylish and stuck up," said the daughter. Mrs. Cassatt's haunting terror was lest someone who had known them in the days of their prosperity with a decently furnished little house of their own should run into one of the family now. Kate, the sixteen-year-old had a place as saleslady in a big shop in Fifth, Street; her six dollars a week was the family's entire steady income. She had formerly possessed a good deal of finery for a girl in her position, though really not much more than the daughter of the average prosperous artisan or small shopkeeper expects, and is expected, to have. Being at the shop where finery was all the talk and sight and thought from opening until closing had developed in her a greedy taste for luxury. She pilfered from the stocks of goods within her reach and exchanged her stealings for the stealings of girls who happened to be able to get things more to her liking or need. But now that the family savings--bank account was exhausted, all these pilferings had to go at once to the pawnshop. Kate grew more and more ill-tempered as the family sank. Formerly she had been noted for her amiability, for her vanity easily pleased with a careless compliment from no matter whom--a jocose, half-drunken ash man, half-jeering, half-admiring from his cart seat quite as satisfactory as anybody. But poverty was bringing out in her all those meanest and most selfish and most brutish instincts--those primal instincts of human nature that civilization has slowly been subjecting to the process of atrophy which has lost us such other primal attributes as, for example, prehensile toes and a covering of hair. "Well, I for one don't have to stay in this slop barrel," Kate was always saying. "Some fine morning I'll turn up missing--and you'll see me in my own turnout." She was torturing her mother and father with the dread that she would leave the family in the lurch and enter a house of prostitution. She recounted with the utmost detail how the madam of a house in Longworth Street came from time to time to her counter in the perfumery and soap department--and urged her to "stop making a fool of yourself and come get good money for your looks before you lose 'em drudging behind a counter." The idea grew less abhorrent, took on allurement as the degradation of tenement life ate out respect for conventional restraints--for modesty, for virtue, for cleanness of speech, and the rest. More and more boldly Kate was announcing that she wasn't going to be a fool much longer. Dan, the fourteen-year-old boy, had attracted the attention of what Cassatt called "a fancy lady" who lived two floors below them. She made sometimes as much as nine or ten dollars a week and slept all day or lounged comfortably about in showy, tawdry stuff that in those surroundings seemed elegant luxury. She was caught by the boy's young beauty and strength, and was rapidly training him in every vice and was fitting him to become a professional seducer and "lover." Said Mrs. Cassatt in one of her noisy wailing appeals to Dan: "You better keep away from that there soiled dove. They tell me she's a thief--has done time--has robbed drunken men in dark hallways." Dan laughed impudently. "She's a cute one. What diff does it make how she gets the goods as long as she gets it?" Mrs. Cassatt confided to everybody that she was afraid the woman would make a thief of her boy--and there was no disputing the justice of her forebodings. Foul smells and sights everywhere, and foul language; no privacy, no possibility of modesty where all must do all in the same room: vermin, parasites, bad food vilely cooked--in the midst of these and a multitude of similar ills how was it possible to maintain a human standard, even if one had by chance acquired a knowledge of what constituted a human standard? The Cassatts were sinking into the slime in which their neighbors were already wallowing. But there was this difference. For the Cassatts it was a descent; for many of their neighbors it was an ascent--for the immigrants notably, who had been worse off in their European homes; in this land not yet completely in the grip of the capitalist or wage system they were now getting the first notions of decency and development, the first views and hope of rising in the world. The Cassatts, though they had always lived too near the slime to be nauseated by it, still found it disagreeable and in spots disgusting. Their neighbors-- One of the chief reasons why these people were rising so slowly where they were rising at all was that the slime seemed to them natural, and to try to get clean of it seemed rather a foolish, finicky waste of time and effort. People who have come up--by accident, or by their own force, or by the force of some at once shrewd and brutal member of the family--have to be far and long from the slums before they lose the sense that in conforming to the decencies of life they are making absurd effeminate concessions. When they go to buy a toothbrush they blush and stammer. "Look at Lorna and Etta," Mrs. Cassatt was always saying to Kate. "Well, I see 'em," Kate would reply. "And I don't see much." "Ain't you ashamed of yourself!" cried the mother. "Them two lives straight and decent. And you're better off than they are." "Don't preach to me, ma," sneered Kate. "When I get ready I'll--stop making a damn fool of myself." But the example of the two girls was not without its effect. They, struggling on in chastity against appalling odds, became the models, not only to Mrs. Cassatt, but all the mothers of that row held up to their daughters. The mothers--all of them by observation, not a few by experience--knew what the "fancy lady's" life really meant. And they strove mightily to keep their daughters from it. Not through religion or moral feeling, though many pretended--perhaps fancied--that this was their reason; but through the plainest kind of practical sense--the kind that in the broad determines the actions of human beings of whatever class, however lofty the idealistic pretenses may be. These mothers knew that the profession of the pariah meant a short life and a wretched one, meant disease, lower and ever lower wages, the scale swiftly descending, meant all the miseries of respectability plus a heavy burden of miseries of its own. There were many other girls besides Susan and Etta holding up their heads--girls with prospects of matrimony, girls with fairly good wages, girls with fathers and brothers at work and able to provide a home. But Susan and Etta were peculiarly valuable as examples because they were making the fight alone and unaided. Thus, they were watched closely. In those neighborhoods everyone knows everyone's else business down to how the last cent is got and spent. If either girl had appeared in a new pair of shoes, a new hat, a new garment of any kind, at once the report would have sped that the wearer had taken a turn in the streets. And the scandal would have been justified; for where could either have respectably got the money for the smallest and cheapest addition to her toilet? Matson, too, proudly pointed them out as giving the lie to the talk about working girls not getting living wages, to the muttering against him and his fellow employers as practically procurers for the pavement and the dive, for the charity hospital's most dreadful wards, for the Morgue's most piteous boxes and slabs. As their strength declined, as their miseries ate in and in, the two girls ceased talking together; they used to chatter much of the time like two birds on a leafy, sunny bough. Now they walked, ate their scanty, repulsive meals, dressed, worked, all in silence. When their eyes met both glanced guiltily away, each fearing the other would discover the thought she was revolving--the thought of the streets. They slept badly--Etta sometimes, Susan every night. For a long time after she came to the tenements she had not slept well, despite her youth and the dull toil that wore her out each day. But after many months she had grown somewhat used to the noisiness--to fretting babies, to wailing children, the mixed ale parties, the quarrelings of the ill and the drunk, the incessant restlessness wherever people are huddled so close together that repose is impossible. And she had gradually acquired the habit of sleeping well--that is, well for the tenement region where no one ever gets the rest without which health is impossible. Now sleeplessness came again--hours on hours of listening to the hateful and maddening discords of densely crowded humanity, hours on hours of thinking--thinking--in the hopeless circles like those of a caged animal, treading with soft swift step round and round, nose to the iron wall, eyes gleaming with despairing pain. One Saturday evening after a supper of scorched cornmeal which had been none too fresh when they got it at the swindling grocer's on the street floor, Etta put on the tattered, patched old skirt at which she had been toiling. "I can't make it fit to wear," said she. "It's too far gone; I think"--her eyelids fluttered--"I'll go see some of the girls." Susan, who was darning--seated on the one chair--yes, it had once been a chair--did not look up or speak. Etta put on her hat--slowly. Then, with a stealthy glance at Susan, she moved slidingly toward the door. As she reached it Susan's hands dropped to her lap; so tense were Etta's nerves that the gesture made her startle. "Etta!" said Susan in an appealing voice. Etta's hand dropped from the knob. "Well--what is it, Lorna?" she asked in a low, nervous tone. "Look at me, dear." Etta tried to obey, could not. "Don't do it--yet," said Susan. "Wait--a few more days." "Wait for what?" "I don't know. But--wait." "You get four, I get only three--and there's no chance of a raise. I work slower instead of faster. I'm going to be discharged soon. I'm in rags underneath. . . . I've got to go before I get sick--and won't have anything to--to sell." Susan did not reply. She stared at the remains of a cheap stocking in her lap. Yes, there was no doubt about it, Etta's health was going. Etta was strong, but she had no such store of strength to draw upon as had accumulated for Susan during the seventeen years of simple, regular life in healthful surroundings. A little while and Etta would be ill--would, perhaps--probably--almost certainly--die-- Dan Cassatt came in at the other door, sat on the edge of his bed and changed his trousers for what he was pleased to imagine a less disreputable pair. Midway the boy stopped and eyed Susan's bare leg and foot, a grin of pleasure and amusement on his precociously and viciously mature face. "My, but you keep clean," he cried. "And you've got a mighty pretty foot. Minnie's is ugly as hell." Minnie was the "fancy lady" on the floor below--"my skirt," he called her. Susan evidently did not hear his compliment. Dan completed his "sporting toilet" with a sleeking down of his long greasy hair, took himself away to his girl. Susan was watching a bug crawl down the wall toward their bed with its stained and malodorous covers of rag. Etta was still standing by the door motionless. She sighed, once more put her hand on the knob. Susan's voice came again. "You've never been out, have you?" "No," replied Etta. Susan began to put on her stocking. "I'll go," said she. "I'll go--instead." "No!" cried Etta, sobbing. "It don't matter about me. I'm bound to be sucked under. You've got a chance to pull through." "Not a ghost of a chance," answered Susan. "I'll go. You've never been." "I know, but----" "You've never been," continued Susan, fastening her shoe with its ragged string. "You've never been. Well--I have." "You!" exclaimed Etta, horrified though unbelieving. "Oh, no, you haven't." "Yes," said Susan. "And worse." "And worse?" repeated Etta. "Is that what the look I sometimes see in your eyes--when you don't know anyone's seeing--is that what it means?" "I suppose so. I'll go. You stay here." "And you--out there!" "It doesn't mean much to me." Etta looked at her with eyes as devoted as a dog's. "Then we'll go together," she said. Susan, pinning on her weather-stained hat, reflected. "Very well," she said finally. "There's nothing lower than this." They said no more; they went out into the clear, cold winter night, out under the brilliant stars. Several handsome theater buses were passing on their way from the fashionable suburb to the theater. Etta looked at them, at the splendid horses, at the men in top hats and fur coats--clean looking, fine looking, amiable looking men--at the beautiful fur wraps of the delicate women--what complexions!--what lovely hair!--what jewels! Etta, her heart bursting, her throat choking, glanced at Susan to see whether she too was observing. But Susan's eyes were on the tenement they had just left. "What are you looking at--so queer?" asked Etta. "I was thinking that we'll not come back here." Etta started. "Not come back _home!_" Susan gave a strange short laugh. "Home!. . . No, we'll not come back home. There's no use doing things halfway. We've made the plunge. We'll go--the limit." Etta shivered. She admired the courage, but it terrified her. "There's something--something--awful about you, Lorna," she said. "You've changed till you're like a different person from what you were when you came to the restaurant. Sometimes--that look in your eyes--well, it takes my breath away." "It takes _my_ breath away, too. Come on." At the foot of the hill they took the shortest route for Vine Street, the highway of the city's night life. Though they were so young and walked briskly, their impoverished blood was not vigorous enough to produce a reaction against the sharp wind of the zero night which nosed through their few thin garments and bit into their bodies as if they were naked. They came to a vast department store. Each of its great show-windows, flooded with light, was a fascinating display of clothing for women upon wax models--costly jackets and cloaks of wonderful furs, white, brown, gray, rich and glossy black; underclothes fine and soft, with ribbons and flounces and laces; silk stockings and graceful shoes and slippers; dresses for street, for ball, for afternoon, dresses with form, with lines, dresses elegantly plain, dresses richly embroidered. Despite the cold the two girls lingered, going from window to window, their freezing faces pinched and purple, their eyes gazing hungrily. "Now that we've tried 'em all on," said Susan with a short and bitter laugh, "let's dress in our dirty rags again and go." "Oh, I couldn't imagine myself in any of those things--could you?" cried Etta. "Yes," answered Susan. "And better." "You were brought up to have those things, I know." Susan shook her head. "But I'm going to have them." "When?" said Etta, scenting romance. "Soon?" "As soon as I learn," was Susan's absent, unsatisfactory reply. Etta had gone back to her own misery and the contrasts to it. "I get mad through and through," she cried, "when I think how all those things go to some women--women that never did work and never could. And they get them because they happen to belong to rich fathers and husbands or whoever protects them. It isn't fair! It makes me crazy!" Susan gave a disdainful shrug. "What's the use of that kind of talk!" said she. "No use at all. The thing is, _we_ haven't got what we want, and we've got to _get_ it--and so we've got to _learn_ how." "I can't think of anything but the cold," said Etta. "My God, how cold I am! There isn't anything I wouldn't do to get warm. There isn't anything anybody wouldn't do to get warm, if they were as cold as this. It's all very well for warm people to talk----" "Oh, I'm sick of all the lying and faking, anyhow. Do you believe in hell, Lorna?" "Not in a hot one," said Susan. Soon they struck into Vine Street, bright as day almost, and lined with beer halls, concert gardens, restaurants. Through the glass fronts crowds of men and women were visible--contented faces, well-fed bodies, food on the tables or inviting-looking drink. Along the sidewalk poured an eager throng, all the conspicuous faces in it notable for the expectancy of pleasure in the eyes. "Isn't this different!" exclaimed Etta. "My God, how cold I am--and how warm everybody else is but us!" The sights, the sounds of laughter, of gay music, acted upon her like an intoxicant. She tossed her head in a reckless gesture. "I don't care what becomes of me," said she. "I'm ready for anything except dirt and starvation." Nevertheless, they hurried down Vine Street, avoiding the glances of the men and behaving as if they were two working girls in a rush to get home. As they walked, Susan, to delude herself into believing that she was not hesitating, with fainting courage talked incessantly to Etta--told her the things Mabel Connemora had explained to her--about how a woman could, and must, take care of her health, if she were not to be swept under like the great mass of the ignorant, careless women of the pariah class. Susan was astonished that she remembered all the actress had told her--remembered it easily, as if she had often thought of it, had used the knowledge habitually. They arrived at Fountain Square, tired from the long walk. They were both relieved and depressed that nothing had happened. "We might go round the fountain and then back," suggested Susan. They made the tour less rapidly but still keeping their heads and their glances timidly down. They were numb with the cold now. To the sharp agony had succeeded an ache like the steady grinding pain of rheumatism. Etta broke the silence with, "Maybe we ought to go into a house." "A house! Oh--you mean a--a sporting house." At that time professional prostitution had not become widespread among the working class; stationary or falling wages, advancing cost of food and developing demand for comfort and luxury had as yet only begun to produce their inevitable results. Thus, prostitution as an industry was in the main segregated in certain streets and certain houses and the prostitutes were a distinct class. "You haven't been?" inquired Etta. "No," said Susan. "Dan Cassatt and Kate told me about those places," Etta went on. "Kate says they're fine and the girls make fifty and sometimes a hundred dollars a week, and have everything--servants to wait on them, good food, bathrooms, lovely clothes, and can drive out. But I--I think I'd stay in the house." "I want to be my own boss," said Susan. "There's another side than what Kate says," continued Etta as consecutively as her chattering teeth would permit. "She heard from a madam that wants her to come. But Dan heard from Minnie--she used to be in one--and she says the girls are slaves, that they're treated like dogs and have to take anything. She says it's something dreadful the way men act--even the gentlemen. She says the madam fixes things so that every girl always owes her money and don't own a stitch to her back, and so couldn't leave if she wanted to." "That sounds more like the truth," said Susan. "But we may _have_ to go," pleaded Etta. "It's awful cold--and if we went, at least we'd have a warm place. If we wanted to leave, why, we couldn't be any worse off for clothes than we are." Susan had no answer for this argument. They went several squares up Vine Street in silence. Then Etta burst out again: "I'm frozen through and through, Lorna, and I'm dead tired--and hungry. The wind's cutting the flesh off my bones. What in the hell does it matter what becomes of us? Let's get warm, for God's sake. Let's go to a house. They're in Longworth Street--the best ones." And she came to a halt, forcing Susan to halt also. It happened to be the corner of Eighth Street. Susan saw the iron fence, the leafless trees of Garfield Place. "Let's go down this way," said she. "I had luck here once." "Luck!" said Etta, her curiosity triumphant over all. Susan's answer was a strange laugh. Ahead of them, a woman warmly and showily dressed was sauntering along. "That's one of them," said Etta. "Let's see how _she_ does it. We've got to learn quick. I can't stand this cold much longer." The two girls, their rags fluttering about their miserable bodies, kept a few feet behind the woman, watched her with hollow eyes of envy and fear. Tears of anguish from the cold were streaming down their cheeks. Soon a man alone--a youngish man with a lurching step--came along. They heard the woman say, "Hello, dear. Don't be in a hurry." He tried to lurch past her, but she seized him by the lapel of his overcoat. "Lemme go," said he. "You're old enough to be a grandmother, you old hag." Susan and Etta halted and, watching so interestedly that they forgot themselves, heard her laugh at his insult, heard her say wheedlingly, "Come along, dearie, I'll treat you right. You're the kind of a lively, joky fellow I like." "Go to hell, gran'ma," said the man, roughly shaking her off and lurching on toward the two girls. He stopped before them, eyed them by the light of the big electric lamp, grinned good-naturedly. "What've we got here?" said he. "This looks better." The woman rushed toward the girls, pouring out a stream of vileness. "You git out of here!" she shrilled. "You chippies git off my beat. I'll have you pinched--I will!" "Shut up!" cried the drunken man, lifting his fist. "I'll have _you_ pinched. Let these ladies alone, they're friends of mine. Do you want me to call the cop?" The woman glanced toward the corner where a policeman was standing, twirling his club. She turned away, cursing horribly. The man laughed. "Dirty old hag--isn't she?" said he. "Don't look so scared, birdies." He caught them each by an arm, stared woozily at Etta. "You're a good little looker, you are. Come along with me. There's three in it." "I--I can't leave my lady friend," Etta succeeded in chattering. "Please really I can't." "Your lady friend?" He turned his drunken head in Susan's direction, squinted at her. He was rather good-looking. "Oh--she means _you_. Fact is, I'm so soused I thought I was seein' double. Why, _you're_ a peach. I'll take you." And he released his hold on Etta to seize her. "Come right along, my lovey-dovey dear." Susan drew away; she was looking at him with terror and repulsion. The icy blast swept down the street, sawed into her flesh savagely. "I'll give _you_ five," said the drunken man. "Come along." He grabbed her arm, waved his other hand at Etta. "So long, blondie. 'Nother time. Good luck." Susan heard Etta's gasp of horror. She wrenched herself free again. "I guess I'd better go with him," said she to Etta. Etta began to sob. "Oh, Lorna!" she moaned. "It's awful." "You go into the restaurant on the corner and get something to eat, and wait for me. We can afford to spend the money. And you'll be warm there." "Here! Here!" cried the tipsy man. "What're you two whispering about? Come along, skinny. No offense. I like 'em slim." And he made coarse and pointed remarks about the sluggishness of fat women, laughing loudly at his own wit. The two girls did not hear. The wind straight from the Arctic was plying its hideous lash upon their defenseless bodies. "Come on, lovey!" cried the man. "Let's go in out of the cold." "Oh, Lorna! You can't go with a drunken man! I'll--I'll take him. I can stand it better'n you. You can go when there's a gentleman----" "You don't know," said Susan. "Didn't I tell you I'd been through the worst?" "Are you coming?" broke in the man, shaking his head to scatter the clouds over his sight. The cold was lashing Susan's body; and she was seeing the tenement she had left--the vermin crawling, the filth everywhere, the meal bugs in the rotting corn meal--and Jeb Ferguson. "Wait in the restaurant," said she to Etta. "Didn't I tell you I'm a nobody. This is what's expected of me." The wind clawed and tore at her quivering flesh. "It's cold, Etta. Go get warm. Good-by." She yielded to the tipsy man's tugging at her arm. Etta stood as if paralyzed, watching the two move slowly westward. But cold soon triumphed over horror. She retraced her steps toward Vine Street. At the corner stood an elderly man with an iron-gray beard. She merely glanced at him in passing, and so was startled when he said in a low voice: "Go back the way you came. I'll join you." She glanced at him again, saw a gleam in his eyes that assured her she had not imagined the request. Trembling and all at once hot, she kept on across the street. But instead of going into the restaurant she walked past it and east through dark Eighth Street. A few yards, and she heard a quiet step behind her. A few yards more, and the lights of Vine Street threw a man's shadow upon the sidewalk beside her. From sheer fright she halted. The man faced her--a man old enough to be her father, a most respectable, clean looking man with a certain churchly though hardly clerical air about him. "Good evening, miss," said he. "Good evening," she faltered. "I'm a stranger--in town to buy goods and have a little fun," stammered he with a grotesque attempt to be easy and familiar. "I thought maybe you could help me." A little fun! Etta's lips opened, but no words came. The cold was digging its needle-knives into flesh, into bone, into nerve. Through the man's thick beard and mustache came the gleam of large teeth, the twisting of thick raw lips. A little fun! "Would it," continued the man, nervously, "would it be very dear?" "I--I don't know," faltered Etta. "I could afford--say--" he looked at her dress--"say--two dollars." "I--I" And again Etta could get no further. "The room'd be a dollar," pleaded the man. "That'd make it three." "I--I--can't," burst out Etta, hysterical. "Oh, please let me alone. I--I'm a good girl, but I do need money. But I--I can't. Oh, for God's sake--I'm so cold--so cold!" The man was much embarrassed. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said feelingly. "That's right--keep your virtue. Go home to your parents." He was at ease now; his voice was greasy and his words sleek with the unction of an elder. "I thought you were a soiled dove. I'm glad you spoke out--glad for my sake as well as your own. I've got a daughter about your age. Go home, my dear, and stay a good girl. I know it's hard sometimes; but never give up your purity--never!" And he lifted his square-topped hard hat and turned away. Suddenly Etta felt again the fury of the winter night and icy wind. As that wind flapped her thin skirt and tortured her flesh, she cried, "Wait--please. I was just--just fooling." The man had halted, but he was looking at her uncertainly. Etta put her hand on his arm and smiled pertly up at him--smiled as she had seen other street girls smile in the days when she despised them. "I'll go--if you'll give me three." "I--I don't think I care to go now. You sort of put me out of the humor." "Well--two, then." She gave a reckless laugh. "God, how cold it is! Anybody'd go to hell to get warm a night like this." "You are a very pretty girl," said the man. He was warmly dressed; his was not the thin blood of poverty. He could not have appreciated what she was feeling. "You're sure you want to go? You're sure it's your--your business?" "Yes. I'm strange in this part of town. Do you know a place?" An hour later Etta went into the appointed restaurant. Her eyes searched anxiously for Susan, but did not find her. She inquired at the counter. No one had asked there for a young lady. This both relieved her and increased her nervousness; Susan had not come and gone--but would she come? Etta was so hungry that she could hold out no longer. She sat at a table near the door and took up the large sheet on which was printed the bill of fare. She was almost alone in the place, as it was between dinner and supper. She read the bill thoroughly, then ordered black bean soup, a sirloin steak and German fried potatoes. This, she had calculated, would cost altogether a dollar; undoubtedly an extravagance, but everything at that restaurant seemed dear in comparison with the prices to which she had been used, and she felt horribly empty. She ordered the soup, to stay her while the steak was broiling. As soon as the waiter set down bread and butter she began upon it greedily. As the soup came, in walked Susan--calm and self-possessed, Etta saw at first glance. "I've been so frightened. You'll have a plate of soup?" asked Etta, trying to look and speak in unconcerned fashion. "No, thank you," replied Susan, seating herself opposite. "There's a steak coming--a good-sized one, the waiter said it'd be." "Very well." Susan spoke indifferently. "Aren't you hungry?" "I don't know. I'll see." Susan was gazing straight ahead. Her eyes were distinctly gray--gray and as hard as Susan Lenox's eyes could be. "What're you thinking about?" "I don't know," she laughed queerly. "Was--it--dreadful?" A pause, then: "Nothing is going to be dreadful to me any more. It's all in the game, as Mr. Burlingham used to say." "Burlingham--who's he?" It was Etta's first faint clew toward that mysterious past of Susan's into which she longed to peer. "Oh--a man I knew. He's dead." A long pause, Etta watching Susan's unreadable face. At last she said: "You don't seem a bit excited." Susan came back to the present. "Don't I? Your soup's getting cold." Etta ate several spoonfuls, then said with an embarrassed attempt at a laugh, "I--I went, too." Susan slowly turned upon Etta her gaze--the gaze of eyes softening, becoming violet. Etta's eyes dropped and the color flooded into her fair skin. "He was an old man--forty or maybe fifty," she explained nervously. "He gave me two dollars. I nearly didn't get him. I lost my nerve and told him I was good and was only starting because I needed money." "Never whine," said Susan. "It's no use. Take what comes, and wait for a winning hand." Etta looked at her in a puzzled way. "How queer you talk! Not a bit like yourself. You sound so much older. . . . And your eyes--they don't look natural at all." Indeed they looked supernatural. The last trace of gray was gone. They were of the purest, deepest violet, luminous, mysterious, with that awe-inspiring expression of utter aloneness. But as Etta spoke the expression changed. The gray came back and with it a glance of irony. Said she: "Oh--nonsense! I'm all right." "I didn't mind nearly as much as I thought I would. Yes, I'll get used to it." "You mustn't," said Susan. "But I've got to." "We've got to do it, but we haven't got to get used to it," replied Susan. Etta was still puzzling at this when the dinner now came--a fine, thick broiled steak, the best steak Susan had ever seen, and the best food Etta had ever seen. They had happened upon one of those famous Cincinnati chop houses where in plain surroundings the highest quality of plain food is served. "You _are_ hungry, aren't you, Lorna?" said Etta. "Yes--I'm hungry," declared Susan. "Cut it--quick." "Draught beer or bottled?" asked the waiter. "Bring us draught beer," said Etta. "I haven't tasted beer since our restaurant burned." "I never tasted it," said Susan. "But I'll try it tonight." Etta cut two thick slices from the steak, put them on Susan's plate with some of the beautifully browned fried potatoes. "Gracious, they have good things to eat here!" she exclaimed. Then she cut two thick slices for herself, and filled her mouth. Her eyes glistened, the color came into her pale cheeks. "Isn't it _grand_!" she cried, when there was room for words to pass out. "Grand," agreed Susan, a marvelous change of expression in her face also. The beer came. Etta drank a quarter of the tall glass at once. Susan tasted, rather liked the fresh bitter-sweet odor and flavor. "Is it--very intoxicating?" she inquired. "If you drink enough," said Etta. "But not one glass." Susan took quite a drink. "I feel a lot less tired already," declared she. "Me too," said Etta. "My, what a meal! I never had anything like this in my life. When I think what we've been through! Lorna, will it _last_?" "We mustn't think about that," said Susan. "Tell me what happened to you." "Nothing. He gave me the money, that was all." "Then we've got seven dollars--seven dollars and twenty cents, with what we brought away from home with us." "Seven dollars--and twenty cents," repeated Susan thoughtfully. Then a queer smile played around the corners of her mouth. "Seven dollars--that's a week's wages for both of us at Matson's." "But I'd go back to honest work tomorrow--if I could find a good job," Etta said eagerly--too eagerly. "Wouldn't you, Lorna?" "I don't know," replied Susan. She had the inability to make pretenses, either to others or to herself, which characterizes stupid people and also the large, simple natures. "Oh, you can't mean that!" protested Etta. Instead of replying Susan began to talk of what to do next. "We must find a place to sleep, and we must buy a few things to make a better appearance." "I don't dare spend anything yet," said Etta. "I've got only my two dollars. Not that when this meal's paid for." "We're going to share even," said Susan. "As long as either has anything, it belongs to both." The tears welled from Etta's eyes. "You are too good, Lorna! You mustn't be. It isn't the way to get on. Anyhow, I can't accept anything from you. You wouldn't take anything from me." "We've got to help each other up," insisted Susan. "We share even--and let's not talk any more about it. Now, what shall we get? How much ought we to lay out?" The waiter here interrupted. "Beg pardon, young ladies," said he. "Over yonder, at the table four down, there's a couple of gents that'd like to join you. I seen one of 'em flash quite a roll, and they acts too like easy spenders." As Susan was facing that way, she examined them. They were young men, rather blond, with smooth faces, good-natured eyes and mouths; they were well dressed--one, the handsomer, notably so. Susan merely glanced; both men at once smiled at her with an unimpertinent audacity that probably came out of the champagne bottle in a silver bucket of ice on their table. "Shall I tell 'em to come over?" said the waiter. "Yes," replied Susan. She was calm, but Etta twitched with nervousness, saying, "I wish I'd had your experience. I wish we didn't look so dreadful--me especially. _I_'m not pretty enough to stand out against these awful clothes." The two men were pushing eagerly toward them, the taller and less handsome slightly in advance. He said, his eyes upon Susan, "We were lonesome, and you looked a little that way too. We're much obliged." He glanced at the waiter. "Another bottle of the same." "I don't want anything to drink," said Susan. "Nor I," chimed in Etta. "No, thank you." The young man waved the waiter away with, "Get it for my friend and me, then." He smiled agreeably at Susan. "You won't mind my friend and me drinking?" "Oh, no." "And maybe you'll change your mind," said the shorter man to Etta. "You see, if we all drink, we'll get acquainted faster. Don't you like champagne?" "I never tasted it," Etta confessed. "Neither did I," admitted Susan. "You're sure to like it," said the taller man to Susan--his friend presently addressed him as John. "Nothing equal to it for making friends. I like it for itself, and I like it for the friends it has made me." Champagne was not one of the commonplaces of that modest chop house. So the waiter opened the bottle with much ceremony. Susan and Etta startled when the cork popped ceilingward in the way that in such places is still regarded as fashionable. They watched with interested eyes the pouring of the beautiful pale amber liquid, were fascinated when they saw how the bubbles surged upward incessantly, imprisoned joys thronging to escape. And after the first glass, the four began to have the kindliest feelings for each other. Sorrow and shame, poverty and foreboding, took wings unto themselves and flew away. The girls felt deliciously warm and contented, and thought the young men charming--a splendid change from the coarse, badly dressed youths of the tenement, with their ignorant speech and rough, misshapen hands. They were ashamed of their own hands, were painfully self-conscious whenever lifting the glass to the lips brought them into view. Etta's hands in fact were not so badly spoiled as might have been expected, considering her long years of rough work; the nails were in fairly good condition and the skin was rougher to the touch than to the sight. Susan's hands had not really been spoiled as yet. She had been proud of them and had taken care of them; still, they were not the hands of a lady, but of a working girl. The young men had gentlemen's hands--strong, evidently exercised only at sports, not at degrading and deforming toil. The shorter and handsomer youth, who answered to the name of Fatty, for obvious but not too obvious reasons, addressed himself to Etta. John--who, it came out, was a Chicagoan, visiting Fatty--fell to Susan. The champagne made him voluble; he was soon telling all about himself--a senior at Ann Arbor, as was Fatty also; he intended to be a lawyer; he was fond of a good, time was fond of the girls--liked girls who were gay rather than respectable ones--"because with the prim girls you have to quit just as the fun ought really to begin." After two glasses Susan, warned by a slight dizziness, stopped drinking; Etta followed her example. But the boys kept on, ordered a second bottle. "This is the fourth we've had tonight," said Fatty proudly when it came. "Don't it make you dizzy?" asked Etta. "Not a bit," Fatty assured her. But she noticed that his tongue now swung trippingly loose. "You haven't been at--at this--long, have you?" inquired John of Susan. "Not long," replied she. Etta, somewhat giddied, overheard and put in, "We began tonight. We got tired of starving and freezing." John looked deepest sympathy into Susan's calm violet-gray eyes. "I don't blame you," said he. "A woman does have a--a hades of a time!" "We were going out to buy some clothes when you came," proceeded Etta. "We're in an awful state." "I wondered how two girls with faces like yours," said John, "came to be dressed so--so differently. That was what first attracted us." Then, as Etta and Fatty were absorbed in each other, he went on to Susan: "And your eyes--I mustn't forget them. You certainly have got a beautiful face. And your mouth--so sweet and sad--but, what a lovely, _lovely_ smile!" At this Susan smiled still more broadly with pleasure. "I'm glad you're pleased," said she. "Why, if you were dressed up---- "You're not a working girl by birth, are you?" "I wish I had been," said Susan. "Oh, I think a girl's got as good a right as a man to have a good time," lied John. "Don't say things you don't believe," said Susan. "It isn't necessary." "I can hand that back to you. You weren't frank, yourself, when you said you wished you'd been born in the class of your friend--and of my friend Fatty, too." Susan's laugh was confession. The champagne was dancing in her blood. She said with a reckless toss of the head: "I was born nothing. So I'm free to become anything I please--anything except respectable." Here Fatty broke in. "I'll tell you what let's do. Let's all go shopping. We can help you girls select your things." Susan laughed. "We're going to buy about three dollars' worth. There won't be any selecting. We'll simply take the cheapest." "Then--let's go shopping," said John, "and you two girls can help Fatty and me select clothes for you." "That's the talk!" cried Fatty. And he summoned the waiter. "The bill," said he in the manner of a man who likes to enjoy the servility of servants. "We hadn't paid for our supper," said Susan. "How much was it, Etta?" "A dollar twenty-five." "We're going to pay for that," said Fatty. "What d'ye take us for?" "Oh, no. We must pay it," said Susan. "Don't be foolish. Of course I'll pay." "No," said Susan quietly, ignoring Etta's wink. And from her bosom she took a crumpled five-dollar bill. "I should say you _were_ new," laughed John. "You don't even know where to carry your money yet." And they all laughed, Susan and Etta because they felt gay and assumed the joke whatever it was must be a good one. Then John laid his hand over hers and said, "Put your money away." Susan looked straight at him. "I can't allow it," she said. "I'm not that poor--yet." John colored. "I beg your pardon," he said. And when the bill came he compelled Fatty to let her pay a dollar and a quarter of it out of her crumpled five. The two girls were fascinated by the large roll of bills--fives, tens, twenties--which Fatty took from his trousers pocket. They stared open-eyed when he laid a twenty on the waiter's plate along with Susan's five. And it frightened them when he, after handing Susan her change, had left only a two-dollar bill, four silver quarters and a dime. He gave the silver to the waiter. "Was that for a tip?" asked Susan. "Yes," said Fatty. "I always give about ten per cent of the bill unless it runs over ten dollars. In that case--a quarter a person as a rule. Of course, if the bill was very large, I'd give more." He was showing his amusement at her inquisitiveness. "I wanted to know," explained she. "I'm very ignorant, and I've got to learn." "That's right," said John, admiringly--with a touch of condescension. "Don't be afraid to confess ignorance." "I'm not," replied Susan. "I used to be afraid of not being respectable and that was all. Now, I haven't any fear at all." "You are a queer one!" exclaimed John. "You oughtn't to be in this life." "Where then?" asked she. "I don't know," he confessed. "Neither do I." Her expression suddenly was absent, with a quaint, slight smile hovering about her lips. She looked at him merrily. "You see, it's got to be something that isn't respectable." "What _do_ you mean?" demanded he. Her answer was a laugh. Fatty declared it too cold to chase about afoot--"Anyhow, it's late--nearly eleven, and unless we're quick all the stores'll be closed." The waiter called them a carriage; its driver promised to take them to a shop that didn't close till midnight on Saturdays. Said Fatty, as they drove away: "Well, I suppose, Etta, you'll say you've never been in a carriage before." "Oh, yes, I have," cried Etta. "Twice--at funerals." This made everyone laugh--this and the champagne and the air which no longer seemed cruel to the girls but stimulating, a grateful change from the close warmth of the room. As the boys were smoking cigarettes, they had the windows down. The faces of both girls were flushed and lively, and their cheeks seemed already to have filled out. The four made so much noise that the crowds on the sidewalk were looking at them--looking smilingly, delighted by the sight of such gayety. Susan was even gayer than Etta. She sang, she took a puff at John's cigarette; then laughed loudly when he seized and kissed her, laughed again as she kissed him; and she and John fell into each other's arms and laughed uproariously as they saw Fatty and Etta embracing. The driver kept his promise; eleven o'clock found them bursting into Sternberg's, over the Rhine--a famous department store for Germans of all classes. They had an hour, and they made good use of it. Etta was for yielding to Fatty's generous urgings and buying right and left. But Susan would not have it. She told the men what she and Etta would take--a simple complete outfit, and no more. Etta wanted furs and finery. Susan kept her to plain, serviceable things. Only once did she yield. When Etta and Fatty begged to be allowed a big showy hat, Susan yielded--but gave John leave to buy her only the simplest of simple hats. "You needn't tell _me_ any yarns about your birth and breeding," said he in a low tone so that Etta should not hear. But that subject did not interest Susan. "Let's forget it," said she, almost curtly. "I've cut out the past--and the future. Today's enough for me." "And for me, too," protested he. "I hope you're having as good fun as I am." "This is the first time I've really laughed in nearly a year," said she. "You don't know what it means to be poor and hungry and cold--worst of all, cold." "You unhappy child," said John tenderly. But Susan was laughing again, and making jokes about a wonderful German party dress all covered with beads and lace and ruffles and embroidery. When they reached the shoe department, Susan asked John to take Fatty away. He understood that she was ashamed of their patched and holed stockings, and hastened to obey. They were making these their last purchases when the big bell rang for the closing. "I'm glad these poor tired shopgirls and clerks are set free," said John. It was one of those well-meaning but worthless commonplaces of word-kindness that get for their utterance perhaps exaggerated credit for "good heart." Susan, conscience-stricken, halted. "And I never once thought of them!" she exclaimed. "It just shows." "Shows what?" "Oh, nothing. Come on. I must forget that, for I can't be happy again till I do. I understand now why the comfortable people can be happy. They keep from knowing or they make themselves forget." "Why not?" said John. "What's the use in being miserable about things that can't be helped?" "No use at all," replied the girl. She laughed. "I've forgotten." The carriage was so filled with their bundles that they had some difficulty in making room for themselves--finally accomplished it by each girl sitting on her young man's lap. They drove to a quietly placed, scrupulously clean little hotel overlooking Lincoln Park. "We're going to take rooms here and dress," explained Fatty. "Then we'll wander out and have some supper." By this time Susan and Etta had lost all sense of strangeness. The spirit of adventure was rampant in them as in a dreaming child. And the life they had been living--what they had seen and heard and grown accustomed to--made it easy for them to strike out at once and briskly in the new road, so different from the dreary and cruel path along which they had been plodding. They stood laughing and joking in the parlor while the boys registered; then the four went up to two small but comfortable and fascinatingly clean rooms with a large bathroom between. "Fatty and I will go down to the bar while you two dress," said John. "Not on your life!" exclaimed Fatty. "We'll have the bar brought up to us." But John, fortified by Susan's look of gratitude for his tactfulness, whispered to his friend--what Susan could easily guess. And Fatty said, "Oh, I never thought of it. Yes, we'll give 'em a chance. Don't be long, girls." "Thank you," said Susan to John. "That's all right. Take your time." Susan locked the hall door behind the two men. She rushed to the bathroom, turned on the hot water. "Oh, Etta!" she cried, tears in her eyes, a hysterical sob in her throat. "A bathtub again!" Etta too was enthusiastic; but she had not that intense hysterical joy which Susan felt--a joy that can be appreciated only by a person who, clean by instinct and by lifelong habit, has been shut out from thorough cleanliness for long months of dirt and foul odors and cold. It was no easy matter to become clean again after all those months. But there was plenty of soap and brushes and towels, and at last the thing was accomplished. Then they tore open the bundles and arrayed themselves in the fresh new underclothes, in the simple attractive costumes of jacket, blouse and skirt. Susan had returned to her class, and had brought Etta with her. "What shall we do with these?" asked Etta, pointing disdainfully with the toe of her new boot to the scatter of the garments they had cast off. Susan looked down at it in horror. She could not believe that _she_ had been wearing such stuff--that it was the clothing of all her associates of the past six months--was the kind of attire in which most of her fellow-beings went about the beautiful earth, She shuddered. "Isn't life dreadful?" she cried. And she kicked together the tattered, patched, stained trash, kicked it on to a large piece of heavy wrapping paper she had spread out upon the floor. Thus, without touching her discarded self, she got it wrapped up and bound with a strong string. She rang for the maid, gave her a quarter and pointed to the bundle. "Please take that and throw it away," she said. When the maid was gone Etta said: "I'm mighty glad to have it out of the room." "Out of the room?" cried Susan. "Out of my heart. Out of my life." They put on their hats, admired themselves in the mirror, and descended--Susan remembering halfway that they had left the lights on and going back to turn them off. The door boy summoned the two young men to the parlor. They entered and exclaimed in real amazement. For they were facing two extremely pretty young women, one dark, the other fair. The two faces were wreathed in pleased and grateful smiles. "Don't we look nice?" demanded Etta. "Nice!" cried Fatty. "We sure did draw a pair of first prizes--didn't we, Johnny?" John did not reply. He was gazing at Susan. Etta had young beauty but it was of the commonplace kind. In Susan's face and carriage there was far more than beauty. "Where _did_ you come from?" said John to her in an undertone. "And _where_ are you going?" "Out to supper, I hope," laughed she. "Your eyes change--don't they? I thought they were violet. Now I see they're gray--gray as can be." CHAPTER XXII AT lunch, well toward the middle of the following afternoon, Fatty--his proper name was August Gulick--said: "John and I don't start for Ann Arbor until a week from today. That means seven clear days. A lot can be done in that time, with a little intelligent hustling. What do you say, girls? Do you stick to us?" "As long as you'll let us," said Etta, who was delighting Gulick with her frank and wondering and grateful appreciation of his munificence. Never before had his own private opinion of himself received such a flatteringly sweeping indorsement--from anyone who happened to impress him as worth while. In the last phrase lies the explanation of her success through a policy that is always dangerous and usually a failure. So it was settled that with the quiet little hotel as headquarters the four would spend a week in exploring Cincinnati as a pleasure ground. Gulick knew the town thoroughly. His father was a brewer whose name was on many a huge beer wagon drawn about those streets by showy Clydesdales. Also he had plenty of money; and, while Redmond--for his friend was the son of Redmond, well known as a lawyer-politician in Chicago--had nothing like so much as Gulick, still he had enough to make a passable pretense at keeping up his end. For Etta and Susan the city had meant shabby to filthy tenements, toil and weariness and sorrow. There was opened to their ravished young eyes "the city"--what reveals itself to the pleasure-seeker with pocket well filled--what we usually think of when we pronounce its name, forgetting what its reality is for all but a favored few of those within its borders. It was a week of music and of laughter--music especially--music whenever they ate or drank, music to dance by, music in the beer gardens where they spent the early evenings, music at the road houses where they arrived in sleighs after the dances to have supper--unless you choose to call it breakfast. You would have said that Susan had slipped out of the tenement life as she had out of its garments, that she had retained not a trace of it even in memory. But--in those days began her habit of never passing a beggar without giving something. Within three or four days this life brought a truly amazing transformation in the two girls. You would not have recognized in them the pale and wan and ragged outcasts of only the Saturday night before. "Aren't you happy?" said Etta to Susan, in one of the few moments they were alone. "But I don't need to ask. I didn't know you could be so gay." "I had forgotten how to laugh," replied Susan. "I suppose I ought to be ashamed," pursued Etta. "Why?" inquired Susan. "Oh, you know why. You know how people'd talk if they knew." "What people?" said Susan. "Anyone who's willing to give you anything?" "No," admitted Etta. "But----" There she halted. Susan went on: "I don't propose to be bothered by the other kind. They wouldn't do anything for me if they could except sneer and condemn." "Still, you know it isn't right, what we're doing." "I know it isn't cold--or hunger--or rags and dirt--and bugs," replied Susan. Those few words were enough to conjure even to Etta's duller fancy the whole picture to its last detail of loathsome squalor. Into Etta's face came a dazed expression. "Was that really _us_, Lorna?" "No," said Susan with a certain fierceness. "It was a dream. But we must take care not to have that dream again." "I'd forgotten how cold I was," said Etta; "hadn't you?" "No," said Susan, "I hadn't forgotten anything." "Yes, I suppose it was all worse for you than for me. _You_ used to be a lady." "Don't talk nonsense," said Susan. "I don't regret what I'm doing," Etta now declared. "It was Gus that made me think about it." She looked somewhat sheepish as she went on to explain. "I had a little too much to drink last night. And when Gus and I were alone, I cried--for no reason except the drink. He asked me why and I had to say something, and it popped into my head to say I was ashamed of the life I was leading. As things turned out, I'm glad I said it. He was awfully impressed." "Of course," said Susan. "You never saw anything like it," continued Etta with an expression suggesting a feeling that she ought to be ashamed but could not help being amused. "He acted differently right away. Why don't you try it on John?" "What for?" "Oh, it'll make him--make him have more--more respect for you." "Perhaps," said Susan indifferently. "Don't you want John to--to respect you?" "I've been too busy having a good time to think much about him--or about anything. I'm tired of thinking. I want to rest. Last night was the first time in my life I danced as much as I wanted to." "Don't you like John?" "Certainly." "He does know a lot, doesn't he? He's like you. He reads and and thinks--and---- He's away ahead of Fatty except---- You don't mind my having the man with the most money?" "Not in the least," laughed Susan. "Money's another thing I'm glad to rest from thinking about." "But this'll last only a few days longer. And--If you managed John Redmond right, Lorna----" "Now--you must not try to make me think." "Lorna--are you _really_ happy?" "Can't you see I am?" "Yes--when we're all together. But when--when you're alone with him----" Susan's expression stopped her. It was a laughing expression; and yet-- Said Susan: "I am happy, dear--very happy. I eat and drink and sleep--and I am, oh, so glad to be alive." "_Isn't_ it good to be alive!--if you've got plenty," exclaimed Etta. "I never knew before. _This_ is the dream, Lorna--and I think I'll kill myself if I have to wake." On Saturday afternoon the four were in one of the rooms discussing where the farewell dinner should be held and what they would eat and drink. Etta called Susan into the other room and shut the door between. "Fatty wants me to go along with him and live in Detroit," said she, blurting it out as if confessing a crime. "Isn't that splendid!" cried Susan, kissing her. "I thought he would. He fell in love with you at first sight." "That's what he says. But, Lorna--I--I don't know _what_ to do!" "_Do_? Why, go. What else is there? Go, of course." "Oh, no, Lorna," protested Etta. "I couldn't leave you. I couldn't get along without you." "But you must go. Don't you love him?" Etta began to weep. "That's the worst of it. I do love him so! And I think he loves me--and might marry me and make me a good woman again. . . . You mustn't ever tell John or anybody about that--that dreadful man I went with--will you, dear?" "What do you take me for?" said Susan. "I've told Fatty I was a good girl until I met him. You haven't told John about yourself?" Susan shook her head. "I suppose not. You're so secretive. You really think I ought to go?" "I know it." Etta was offended by Susan's positive, practical tone. "I don't believe you care." "Yes, I care," said Susan. "But you're right to follow the man you love. Besides, there's nothing so good in sight here." "What'll _you_ do? Oh, I can't go, Lorna!" "Now, Etta," said Susan calmly, "don't talk nonsense. I'll get along all right." "You come to Detroit. You could find a job there, and we could live together." "Would Fatty like that?" Etta flushed and glanced away. Young Gulick had soon decided that Susan was the stronger--therefore, the less "womanly"--of the two girls, and must be the evil influence over her whom he had appeared just in time to save. When he said this to Etta, she protested--not very vigorously, because she wished him to think her really almost innocent. She wasn't _quite_ easy in her mind as to whether she had been loyal to Lorna. But, being normally human, she soon _almost_ convinced herself that but for Lorna she never would have made the awful venture. Anyhow, since it would help her with Gulick and wouldn't do Lorna the least mite of harm, why not let him think he was right? Said Susan: "Hasn't he been talking to you about getting away from--from all this?" "But I don't care," cried Etta, moved to an outburst of frankness by her sense of security in Susan's loyalty and generosity. "He doesn't understand. Men are fools about women. He thinks he likes in me what I haven't got at all. As a matter of fact if I had been what he made me tell him I was, why we'd never have met--or got acquainted in the way that makes us so fond of each other. And I owe it all to you, Lorna. I don't care what he says, Lorna--or does. I want you." "Can't go," said Susan, not conscious--yet not unaware, either--of the curious mixture of heart and art in Etta's outburst of apparent eagerness to risk everything for love of her. "Can't possibly go. I've made other plans. The thing for you is to be straight--get some kind of a job in Detroit--make Fatty marry you--quick!" "He would, but his father'd throw him out." "Not if you were an honest working girl." "But----" Etta was silent and reflective for a moment. "Men are so queer," she finally said. "If I'd been an honest working girl he'd never have noticed me. It's because I am what I am that I've been able to get acquainted with him and fascinate him. And he feels it's a sporty thing to do--to marry a fast girl. If I was to settle down to work, be a regular working girl--why, I'm afraid he--he'd stop loving me. Then, too, he likes to believe he's rescuing me from a life of shame. I've watched him close. I understand him." "No doubt," said Susan drily. "Oh, I know you think I'm deceitful. But a woman's got to be, with a man. And I care a lot about him--aside from the fact that he can make me comfortable and--and protect me from--from the streets. If you cared for a man-- No, I guess you wouldn't. You oughtn't to be so--so _honest_, Lorna. It'll always do you up." Susan laughed, shrugged her shoulders. "I am what I am," said she. "I can't be any different. If I tried, I'd only fail worse." "You don't love John--do you?" "I like him." "Then you wouldn't have to do _much_ pretending," urged Etta. "And what does a little pretending amount to?" "That's what I say to myself," replied Susan thoughtfully. "It isn't nearly as bad as--as what we started out to do." Susan laughed at Etta's little hypocrisy for her respectability's comfort. "As what we did--and are doing," corrected she. Burlingham had taught her that it only makes things worse and more difficult to lie to oneself about them. "John's crazy about you. But he hasn't money enough to ask you to come along. And----" Etta hesitated, eyed Susan doubtfully. "You're _sure_ you don't love him?" "No. I couldn't love him any more than--than I could hate him." Susan's strange look drifted across her features. "It's very queer, how I feel toward men. But--I don't love him and I shan't pretend. I want to, but somehow--I can't." Etta felt that she could give herself the pleasure of unburdening herself of a secret. "Then I may as well tell you, he's engaged to a girl he thinks he ought to marry." "I suspected so." "And you don't mind?" inquired Etta, unable to read Susan's queer expression. "Except for him--and her--a little," replied Susan. "I guess that's why I haven't liked him better--haven't trusted him at all." "Aren't men dreadful! And he is so nice in many ways. . . . Lorna----" Etta was weeping again. "I can't go--I can't. I mustn't leave you." "Don't be absurd. You've simply got to do it." "And I do love him," said Etta, calmed again by Susan's calmness. "And if he married me--Oh, how grateful I'd be!" "I should say!" exclaimed Susan. She kissed Etta and petted her. "And he'll have a mighty good wife." "Do you think I can marry him?" "If you love him--and don't worry about catching him." Etta shook her head in rejection of this piece of idealistic advice. "But a girl's got to be shrewd. You ought to be more so, Lorna." "That depends on what a girl wants," said Susan, absently. "Upon what she wants," she repeated. "What do _you_ want?" inquired Etta curiously. "I don't know," Susan answered slowly. "I wish I knew what was going on in your head!" exclaimed Etta. "So do I," said Susan, smiling. "Do you really mind my going? Really--honestly?" There wasn't a flaw in Susan's look or tone. "If you tried to stay with me, I'd run away from you." "And if I do get him, I can help you. Once he's mine----" Etta rounded out her sentence with an expression of countenance which it was well her adoring rescuer did not see. Not that it lacked womanliness; "womanly" is the word that most exactly describes it--and always will exactly describe such expressions--and the thoughts behind--so long as men compel women to be just women, under penalty of refusing them support if they are not so. Redmond came in, and Etta left him alone with Susan. "Well, has Etta told you?" he asked. "Yes," replied the girl. She looked at him--simply a look, but the violet-gray eyes had an unusual seeming of seeing into minds and hearts, an expression that was perhaps the more disquieting because it was sympathetic rather than critical. His glance shifted. He was a notably handsome young fellow--too young for any display of character in his face, or for any development of it beyond the amiable, free and easy lover of a jolly good time that is the type repeated over and over again among the youth of the comfortable classes that send their sons to college. "Are you going with her?" he asked. "No," said Susan. Redmond's face fell. "I hoped you liked me a little better than that," said he. "It isn't a question of you." "But it's a question of _you_ with me," he cried. "I'm in love with you, Lorna. I'm--I'm tempted to say all sorts of crazy things that I think but haven't the courage to act on." He kneeled down beside her, put his arms round her waist. "I'm crazy about you, Lorna. . . . Tell me---- Were you---- Had you been--before we met?" "Yes," said Susan. "Why don't you deny it?" he exclaimed. "Why don't you fool me, as Etta fooled Gus?" "Etta's story is different from mine," said Susan. "She's had no experience at all, compared to me." "I don't believe it," declared he. "I know she's been stuffing Fatty, has made him think that you led her away. But I can soon knock those silly ideas out of his silly head----" "It's the truth," interrupted Susan, calmly. "No matter. You could be a good woman." Impulsively, "If you'll settle down and be a good woman, I'll marry you." Susan smiled gently. "And ruin your prospects?" "I don't care for prospects beside you. You _are_ a good woman--inside. The better I know you the less like a fast woman you are. Won't you go to work, Lorna, and wait for me?" Her smile had a little mockery in it now--perhaps to hide from him how deeply she was moved. "No matter what else I did, I'd not wait for you, Johnny. You'd never come. You're not a Johnny-on-the-spot." "You think I'm weak--don't you?" he said. Then, as she did not answer, "Well, I am. But I love you, all the same." For the first time he felt that he had touched her heart. The tears sprang to her eyes, which were not at all gray now but all violet, as was their wont when she was deeply moved. She laid her hands on his shoulders. "Oh, it's so good to be loved!" she murmured. He put his arms around her, and for the moment she rested there, content--yes, content, as many a woman who needed love less and craved it less has been content just with being loved, when to make herself content she has had to ignore and forget the personality of the man who was doing the loving--and the kind of love it was. Said he: "Don't you love me a little enough to be a good woman and wait till I set up in the law?" She let herself play with the idea, to prolong this novel feeling of content. She asked, "How long will that be?" "I'll be admitted in two years. I'll soon have a practice. My father's got influence." Susan looked at him sadly, slowly shook her head. "Two years--and then several years more. And I working in a factory--or behind a counter--from dawn till after dark--poor, hungry--half-naked--wearing my heart out--wearing my body away----" She drew away from him, laughed. "I was fooling, John--about marrying. I liked to hear you say those things. I couldn't marry you if I would. I'm married already." "_You_!" She nodded. "Tell me about it--won't you?" She looked at him in astonishment, so amazing seemed the idea that she could tell anyone that experience. It would be like voluntarily showing a hideous, repulsive scar or wound, for sometimes it was scar, and sometimes open wound, and always the thing that made whatever befell her endurable by comparison. She did not answer his appeal for her confidence but went on, "Anyhow, nothing could induce me to go to work again. You don't realize what work means--the only sort of work I can get to do. It's--it's selling both body and soul. I prefer----" He kissed her to stop her from finishing her sentence. "Don't--please," he pleaded. "You don't understand. In this life you'll soon grow hard and coarse and lose your beauty and your health--and become a moral and physical wreck." She reflected, the grave expression in her eyes--the expression that gave whoever saw it the feeling of dread as before impending tragedy. "Yes--I suppose so," she said. "But---- Any sooner than as a working girl living in a dirty hole in a tenement? No--not so soon. And in this life I've got a chance if I'm careful of my health and--and don't let things touch _me_. In that other--there's no chance--none!" "What chance have you got in this life?" "I don't know exactly. I'm very ignorant yet. At worst, it's simply that I've got no chance in either life--and this life is more comfortable." "Comfortable! With men you don't like--frightful men----" "Were you ever cold?" asked Susan. But it made no impression upon him who had no conception of the cold that knows not how it is ever to get warm again. He rushed on: "Lorna, my God!" He caught hold of her and strained her to his breast. "You are lovely and sweet! It's frightful--you in this life." Her expression made the sobs choke up into his throat. She said quietly: "Not worse than dirt and vermin and freezing cold and long, long, dull--oh, _so_ dull hours of working among human beings that don't ever wash--because they can't." She pushed him gently away. "You don't understand. You haven't been through it. Comfortable people talk like fools about those things. . . . Do you remember my hands that first evening?" He reddened and his eyes shifted. "I'm absurdly sensitive about a woman's hands," he muttered. She laughed at him. "Oh, I saw--how you couldn't bear to look at them--how they made you shiver. Well, the hands were nothing--_nothing_!--beside what you didn't see." "Lorna, do you love someone else?" His eyes demanded an honest answer, and it seemed to her his feeling for her deserved it. But she could not put the answer into words. She lowered her gaze. "Then why----" he began impetuously. But there he halted, for he knew she would not lift the veil over herself, over her past. "I'm very, very fond of you," she said with depressing friendliness. Then with a sweet laugh, "You ought to be glad I'm not able to take you at your word. And you will be glad soon." She sighed. "What a good time we've had!" "If I only had a decent allowance, like Fatty!" he groaned. "No use talking about that. It's best for us to separate best for us both. You've been good to me--you'll never know how good. And I can't play you a mean trick. I wish I could be selfish enough to do it, but I can't." "You don't love me. That's the reason." "Maybe it is. Yes, I guess that's why I've got the courage to be square with you. Anyhow, John, you can't afford to care for me. And if I cared for you, and put off the parting--why it'd only put off what I've got to go through with before----" She did not finish; her eyes became dreamy. "Before what?" he asked. "I don't know," she said, returning with a sigh. "Something I see--yet don't see in the darkness, ahead of me." "I can't make you out," cried he. Her expression moved him to the same awe she inspired in Etta--a feeling that gave both of them the sense of having known her better, of having been more intimate with her when they first met her than they ever had been since or ever would be again. When Redmond embraced and kissed her for the last time, he was in another and less sympathetic mood, was busy with his own wounds to vanity and perhaps to heart. He thought her heartless--good and sweet and friendly, but without sentiment. She refused to help him make a scene; she refused to say she would write to him, and asked him not to write to her. "You know we'll probably see each other soon." "Not till the long vacation--not till nearly July." "Only three months." "Oh, if you look at it that way!" said he, piqued and sullen. Girls had always been more than kind, more than eager, when he had shown interest. Etta, leaving on a later train, was even more depressed about Susan's heart. She wept hysterically, wished Susan to do the same; but Susan stood out firmly against a scene, and would not have it that Etta was shamefully deserting her, as Etta tearfully accused herself. "You're going to be happy," she said. "And I'm not so selfish as to be wretched about it. And don't you worry a minute on my account. I'm better off in every way than I've ever been. I'll get on all right." "I know you gave up John to help me with August. I know you mean to break off everything. Oh, Lorna, you mustn't--you mustn't." "Don't talk nonsense," was Susan's unsatisfactory reply. When it came down to the last embrace and the last kiss, Etta did feel through Susan's lips and close encircling arms a something that dried up her hysterical tears and filled her heart with an awful aching. It did not last long. No matter how wildly shallow waters are stirred, they soon calm and murmur placidly on again. The three who had left her would have been amazed could they have seen her a few minutes after Etta's train rolled out of the Union Station. The difference between strong natures and weak is not that the strong are free from cowardice and faint-heartedness, from doubt and foreboding, from love and affection, but that they do not stay down when they are crushed down, stagger up and on. Susan hurried to the room they had helped her find the day before--a room in a house where no questions were asked or answered. She locked herself in and gave way to the agonies of her loneliness. And when her grief had exhausted her, she lay upon the bed staring at the wall with eyes that looked as though her soul had emptied itself through them of all that makes life endurable, even of hope. For the first time in her life she thought of suicide--not suicide the vague possibility, not suicide the remote way of escape, but suicide the close and intimate friend, the healer of all woes, the solace of all griefs--suicide, the speedy, accurate solver of the worst problem destiny can put to man. She saw her pocketbook on the floor where she had dropped it. "I'll wait till my money's gone," thought she. Then she remembered Etta--how gentle and loving she was, how utterly she gave herself--for Susan was still far from the profound knowledge of character that enables us to disregard outward signs in measuring actualities. "If I really weren't harder than Etta," her thoughts ran on reproachfully, "I'd not wait until the money went. I'd kill myself now, and have it over with." The truth was that if the position of the two girls had been reversed and Susan had loved Gulick as intensely as Etta professed and believed she loved him, still Susan would have given him up rather than have left Etta alone. And she would have done it without any sense of sacrifice. And it must be admitted that, whether or not there are those who deserve credit for doing right, certainly those who do right simply because they cannot do otherwise--the only trustworthy people--deserve no credit for it. She counted her money--twenty-three dollars in bills, and some change. Redmond had given her fifty dollars each time they had gone shopping, and had made her keep the balance--his indirect way of adjusting the financial side. Twenty-three dollars meant perhaps two weeks' living. Well, she would live those two weeks decently and comfortably and then--bid life adieu unless something turned up--for back to the streets she would not go. With Etta gone, with not a friend anywhere on earth, life was not worth the price she had paid for Etta and herself to the drunken man. Her streak of good fortune in meeting Redmond had given her no illusions; from Mabel Connemora, from what she herself had heard and seen--and experienced--she knew the street woman's life, and she could not live that life for herself alone. She could talk about it to Redmond tranquilly. She could think about it in the abstract, could see how other women did it, and how those who had intelligence might well survive and lift themselves up in it. But do it she could not. So she resolved upon suicide, firmly believing in her own resolve. And she was not one to deceive herself or to shrink from anything whatsoever. Except the insane, only the young make these resolves and act upon them; for the young have not yet learned to value life, have not yet fallen under life's sinister spell that makes human beings cling more firmly and more cravenly to it as they grow older. The young must have something--some hope, however fanatic and false--to live for. They will not tarry just to live. And in that hour Susan had lost hope. She took off her street dress and opened her trunk to get a wrapper and bedroom slippers. As she lifted the lid, she saw an envelope addressed "Lorna"; she remembered that Redmond had locked and strapped the trunk. She tore the end from the envelope, looked in. Some folded bills; nothing more. She sat on the floor and counted two twenties, five tens, two fives--a hundred dollars! She looked dazedly at the money--gave a cry of delight--sprang to her feet, with a change like the startling shift from night to day in the tropics. "I can pay!" she cried. "I can pay!" Bubbling over with smiles and with little laughs, gay as even champagne and the release from the vile prison of the slums had made her, she with eager hands took from the trunk her best clothes--the jacket and skirt of dark gray check she had bought for thirty dollars at Shillito's and had had altered to her figure and her taste; the blouse of good quality linen with rather a fancy collar; the gray leather belt with a big oxidized silver buckle; her only pair of silk stockings; the pair of high-heeled patent leather shoes--the large black hat with a gray feather curling attractively round and over its brim. The hat had cost only fourteen dollars because she had put it together herself; if she had bought it made, she would have paid not less than thirty dollars. All these things she carefully unpacked and carefully laid out. Then she thoroughly brushed her hair and did it up in a graceful pompadour that would go well with the hat. She washed away the traces of her outburst of grief, went over her finger nails, now almost recovered from the disasters incident to the life of manual labor. She went on to complete her toilet, all with the same attention to detail--a sure indication, in one so young, of a desire to please some specific person. When she had the hat set at the satisfactory angle and the veil wound upon it and draped over her fresh young face coquettishly, she took from her slender store of gloves a fresh gray pair and, as she put them on, stood before the glass examining herself. There was now not a trace of the tenement working girl of a week and a day before. Here was beauty in bloom, fresh and alluring from head to narrow, well-booted feet. More than a hint of a fine color sense--that vital quality, if fashion, the conventional, is to be refined and individualized into style, the rare--more than a hint of color sense showed in the harmony of the pearl gray in the big feather, the pearl gray in the collar of the blouse, and the pearl white of her skin. Susan had indeed returned to her own class. She had left it, a small-town girl with more than a suggestion of the child in eyes and mouth; she had returned to it, a young woman of the city, with that look in her face which only experience can give--experience that has resulted in growth. She locked all her possessions away in her trunk--all but her money; that she put in her stockings--seventy-five dollars well down in the right leg, the rest of the bills well down in the left leg; the two dollars or so in change was all she intrusted to the pocketbook she carried. She cast a coquettish glance down at her charmingly arrayed feet--a harmless glance of coquetry that will be condemned by those whose physical vanity happens to center elsewhere. After this glance she dropped her skirts--and was ready. By this time dusk had fallen, and it was nearly six o'clock. As she came out of the house she glanced toward the west--the instinctive gesture of people who live in rainy climates. Her face brightened; she saw an omen in the long broad streak of reddened evening sky. CHAPTER XXIII SHE went down to Fourth Street, along it to Race, to the _Commercial_ building. At the entrance to the corridor at the far side of which were elevator and stairway, she paused and considered. She turned into the business office. "Is Mr. Roderick Spenser here?" she asked of a heavily built, gray-bearded man in the respectable black of the old-fashioned financial employee, showing the sobriety and stolidity of his character in his dress. "He works upstairs," replied the old man, beaming approvingly upon the pretty, stylish young woman. "Is he there now?" "I'll telephone." He went into the rear office, presently returned with the news that Mr. Spenser had that moment left, was probably on his way down in the elevator. "And you'll catch him if you go to the office entrance right away." Susan, the inexperienced in the city ways of men with women, did not appreciate what a tribute to her charms and to her character, as revealed in the honest, grave eyes, was the old man's unhesitating assumption that Spenser would wish to see her. She lost no time in retracing her steps. As she reached the office entrance she saw at the other end of the long hall two young men coming out of the elevator. After the habit of youth, she had rehearsed speech and manner for this meeting; but at sight of him she was straightway trembling so that she feared she would be unable to speak at all. The entrance light was dim, but as he glanced at her in passing he saw her looking at him and his hand moved toward his hat. His face had not changed--the same frank, careless expression, the same sympathetic, understanding look out of the eyes. But he was the city man in dress now--notably the city man. "Mr. Spenser," said she shyly. He halted; his companion went on. He lifted his hat, looked inquiringly at her--the look of the enthusiast and connoisseur on the subject of pretty women, when he finds a new specimen worthy of his attention. "Don't you know me?" His expression of puzzled and flirtatious politeness gradually cleared away. The lighting up of his eyes, the smile round his mouth delighted her; and she grew radiant when he exclaimed eagerly, "Why, it's the little girl of the rock again! How you've grown--in a year--less than a year!" "Yes, I suppose I have," said she, thinking of it for the first time. Then, to show him at once what a good excuse she had for intruding again, she hastened to add, "I've come to pay you that money you loaned me." He burst out laughing, drew her into the corridor where the light was brighter. "And you've gone back to your husband," he said--she noted the quick, sharp change in his voice. "Why do you think that?" she said. The way his eyes lingered upon the charming details toilet that indicated anything but poverty might of a have given her a simple explanation. He offered another. "I can't explain. It's your different expression--a kind of experienced look." The color flamed and flared in Susan's face. "You are--happy?" he asked. "I've not seen--him," evaded she. "Ever since I left Carrollton I've been wandering about." "Wandering about?" he repeated absently, his eyes busy with her appearance. "And now," she went on, nervous and hurried, "I'm here in town--for a while." "Then I may come to see you?" "I'd be glad. I'm alone in a furnished room I've taken--out near Lincoln Park." "Alone! You don't mean you're still wandering?" "Still wandering." He laughed. "Well, it certainly is doing you no harm. The reverse." An embarrassed pause, then he said with returning politeness: "Maybe you'll dine with me this evening?" She beamed. "I've been hoping you'd ask me." "It won't be as good as the one on the rock." "There never will be another dinner like that," declared she. "Your leg is well?" Her question took him by surprise. In his interest and wonder as to the new mystery of this mysterious young person he had not recalled the excuses he made for dropping out of the entanglement in which his impulses had put him. The color poured into his face. "Ages ago," he replied, hurriedly. "I'd have forgotten it, if it hadn't been for you. I've never been able to get you out of my head." And as a matter of truth she had finally dislodged his cousin Nell--without lingering long or vividly herself. Young Mr. Spenser was too busy and too self-absorbed a man to bother long about any one flower in a world that was one vast field abloom with open-petaled flowers. "Nor I you," said she, as pleased as he had expected, and showing it with a candor that made her look almost the child he had last seen. "You see, I owed you that money, and I wanted to pay it." "Oh--_that_ was all!" exclaimed he, half jokingly. "Wait here a minute." And he went to the door, looked up and down the street, then darted across it and disappeared into the St. Nicholas Hotel. He was not gone more than half a minute. "I had to see Bayne and tell him," he explained when he was with her again. "I was to have dined with him and some others--over in the café. Instead, you and I will dine upstairs. You won't mind my not being dressed?" It seemed to her he was dressed well enough for any occasion. "I'd rather you had on the flannel trousers rolled up to your knees," said she. "But I can imagine them." "What a dinner that was!" cried he. "And the ride afterward," with an effort at ease that escaped her bedazzled eyes. "Why didn't you ever write?" He expected her to say that she did not know his address, and was ready with protests and excuses. But she replied: "I didn't have the money to pay what I owed you." They were crossing Fourth Street and ascending the steps to the hotel. "Then, too--afterward--when I got to know a little more about life I----Oh, no matter. Really, the money was the only reason." But he had stopped short. In a tone so correctly sincere that a suspicious person might perhaps have doubted the sincerity of the man using it, he said: "What was in your mind? What did you think? What did you--suspect me of? For I see in that honest, telltale face of yours that it was a suspicion." "I didn't blame you," protested the girl, "even if it was so. I thought maybe you got to thinking it over--and--didn't want to be bothered with anyone so troublesome as I had made myself." "How _could_ you suspect _me_ of such a thing?" "Oh, I really didn't," declared she, with all the earnestness of a generous nature, for she read into his heightened color and averted eyes the feelings she herself would have had before an unjust suspicion. "It was merely an idea. And I didn't blame you--not in the least. It would have been the sensible----" Next thing, this child-woman, this mysterious mind of mixed precocity and innocence, would be showing that she had guessed a Cousin Nell. "You are far too modest," interrupted he with a flirtatious smile. "You didn't realize how strong an impression you made. No, I really broke my leg. Don't you suppose I knew the twenty-five in the pocketbook wouldn't carry you far?" He saw--and naturally misunderstood--her sudden change of expression as he spoke of the amount. He went on apologetically, "I intended to bring more when I came. I was afraid to put money in the note for fear it'd never be delivered, if I did. And didn't I tell you to write--and didn't I give you my address here? Would I have done that, if I hadn't meant to stand by you?" Susan was convinced, was shamed by these smooth, plausible assertions and explanations. "Your father's house--it's a big brick, with stone trimmings, standing all alone outside the little town--isn't it?" Spenser was again coloring deeply. "Yes," admitted he uneasily. But Susan didn't notice. "I saw the doctor--and your family--on the veranda," she said. He was now so nervous that she could not but observe it. "They gave out that it was only a sprain," said he, "because I told them I didn't want it known. I didn't want the people at the office to know I was going to be laid up so long. I was afraid I'd lose my job." "I didn't hear anything about it," said she. "I only saw as I was going by on a boat." He looked disconcerted--but not to her eyes. "Well--it's far in the past now," said he. "Let's forget--all but the fun." "Yes--all but the fun." Then very sweetly, "But I'll never forget what I owe you. Not the money--not that, hardly at all--but what you did for me. It made me able to go on." "Don't speak of it," cried he, flushed and shamefaced. "I didn't do half what I ought." Like most human beings he was aware of his more obvious--if less dangerous--faults and weaknesses. He liked to be called generous, but always had qualms when so called because he knew he was in fact of the familiar type classed as generous only because human beings are so artless in their judgments as to human nature that they cannot see that quick impulses quickly die. The only deep truth is that there are no generous natures but just natures--and they are rarely classed as generous because their slowly formed resolves have the air of prudence and calculation. In the hotel she went to the dressing-room, took twenty-five dollars from the money in her stocking. As soon as they were seated in the restaurant she handed it to him. "But this makes it you who are having me to dinner--and more," he protested. "If you knew what a weight it's been on me, you'd not talk that way," said she. Her tone compelled him to accept her view of the matter. He laughed and put the money in his waistcoat pocket, saying: "Then I'll still owe you a dinner." During the past week she had been absorbing as only a young woman with a good mind and a determination to learn the business of living can absorb. The lessons before her had been the life that is lived in cities by those who have money to spend and experience in spending it; she had learned out of all proportion to opportunity. At a glance she realized that she was now in a place far superior to the Bohemian resorts which had seemed to her inexperience the best possible. From earliest childhood she had shown the delicate sense of good taste and of luxury that always goes with a practical imagination--practical as distinguished from the idealistic kind of imagination that is vague, erratic, and fond of the dreams which neither could nor should come true. And the reading she had done--the novels, the memoirs, the books of travel, the fashion and home magazines--had made deep and distinct impressions upon her, had prepared her--as they have prepared thousands of Americans in secluded towns and rural regions where luxury and even comfort are very crude indeed--for the possible rise of fortune that is the universal American dream and hope. She felt these new surroundings exquisitely--the subdued coloring, the softened lights, the thick carpets, the quiet elegance and comfort of the furniture. She noted the good manners of the well-trained waiter; she listened admiringly and memorizingly as Spenser ordered the dinner--a dinner of French good taste--small but fine oysters, a thick soup, a guinea hen _en casserole_, a fruit salad, fresh strawberry ice cream, dry champagne. She saw that Spenser knew what he was about, and she was delighted with him and proud to be with him and glad that he had tastes like her own--that is, tastes such as she proposed to learn to have. Of the men she had known or known about he seemed to her far and away the best. It isn't necessary to explain into what an attitude of mind and heart this feeling of his high superiority immediately put her--certainly not for the enlightenment of any woman. "What are you thinking?" he asked--the question that was so often thrust at her because, when she thought intensely, there was a curiosity-compelling expression in her eyes. "Oh--about all this," replied she. "I like this sort of thing so much. I never had it in my life, yet now that I see it I feel as if I were part of it, as if it must belong to me." Her eyes met his sympathetic gaze. "You understand, don't you?" He nodded. "And I was wondering"--she laughed, as if she expected even him to laugh at her--"I was wondering how long it would be before I should possess it. Do you think I'm crazy?" He shook his head. "I've got that same feeling," said he. "I'm poor--don't dare do this often--have all I can manage in keeping myself decently. Yet I have a conviction that I shall--shall win. Don't think I'm dreaming of being rich--not at all. I--I don't care much about that if I did go into business. But I want all my surroundings to be right." Her eyes gleamed. "And you'll get it. And so shall I. I know it sounds improbable and absurd for me to say that about myself. But--I know it." "I believe you," said he. "You've got the look in your face--in your eyes. . . . I've never seen anyone improve as you have in this less than a year." She smiled as she thought in what surroundings she had apparently spent practically all that time. "If you could have seen me!" she said. "Yes, I was learning and I know it. I led a sort of double life. I----" she hesitated, gave up trying to explain. She had not the words and phrases, the clear-cut ideas, to express that inner life led by people who have real imagination. With most human beings their immediate visible surroundings determine their life; with the imaginative few their horizon is always the whole wide world. She sighed, "But I'm ignorant. I don't know how or where to take hold." "I can't help you there, yet," said he. "When we know each other better, then I'll know. Not that you need me to tell you. You'll find out for yourself. One always does." She glanced round the attractive room again, then looked at him with narrowed eyelids. "Only a few hours ago I was thinking of suicide. How absurd it seems now!--I'll never do that again. At least, I've learned how to profit by a lesson. Mr. Burlingham taught me that." "Who's he?" "That's a long story. I don't feel like telling about it now." But the mere suggestion had opened certain doors in her memory and crowds of sad and bitter thoughts came trooping in. "Are you in some sort of trouble?" said he, instantly leaning toward her across the table and all aglow with the impulsive sympathy that kindles in impressionable natures as quickly as fire in dry grass. Such natures are as perfect conductors of emotion as platinum is of heat--instantly absorbing it, instantly throwing it off, to return to their normal and metallic chill--and capacity for receptiveness. "Anything you can tell me about?" "Oh, no--nothing especial," replied she. "Just loneliness and a feeling of--of discouragement." Strongly, "Just a mood. I'm never really discouraged. Something always turns up." "Please tell me what happened after I left you at that wretched hotel." "I can't," she said. "At least, not now." "There is----" He looked sympathetically at her, as if to assure her that he would understand, no matter what she might confess. "There is--someone?" "No. I'm all alone. I'm--free." It was not in the least degree an instinct for deception that made her then convey an impression of there having been no one. She was simply obeying her innate reticence that was part of her unusual self-unconsciousness. "And you're not worried about--about money matters?" he asked. "You see, I'm enough older and more experienced to give me excuse for asking. Besides, unless a woman has money, she doesn't find it easy to get on." "I've enough for the present," she assured him, and the stimulus of the champagne made her look--and feel--much more self-confident than she really was. "More than I've ever had before. So I'm not worried. When anyone has been through what I have they aren't so scared about the future." He looked the admiration he felt--and there was not a little of the enthusiasm of the champagne both in the look and in the admiration--"I see you've already learned to play the game without losing your nerve." "I begin to hope so," said she. "Yes--you've got the signs of success in your face. Curious about those signs. Once you learn to know them, you never miss in sizing up people." The dinner had come. Both were hungry, and it was as good a dinner as the discussion about it between Spenser and the waiter had forecast. As they ate the well-cooked, well-served food and drank the delicately flavored champagne, mellow as the gorgeous autumn its color suggested, there diffused through them an extraordinary feeling of quiet intense happiness--happiness of mind and body. Her face took on a new and finer beauty; into his face came a tenderness that was most becoming to its rather rugged features. And he had not talked with her long before he discovered that he was facing not a child, not a child-woman, but a woman grown, one who could understand and appreciate the things men and women of experience say and do. "I've always been expecting to hear from you every day since we separated," he said--and he was honestly believing it now. "I've had a feeling that you hadn't forgotten me. It didn't seem possible I could feel so strongly unless there was real sympathy between us." "I came as soon as I could." He reflected in silence a moment, then in a tone that made her heart leap and her blood tingle, he said: "You say you're free?" "Free as air. Only--I couldn't fly far." He hesitated on an instinct of prudence, then ventured. "Far as New York?" "What is the railroad fare?" "Oh, about twenty-five dollars--with sleeper." "Yes--I can fly that far." "Do you mean to say you've no ties of any kind?" "None. Not one." Her eyes opened wide and her nostrils dilated. "Free!" "You love it--don't you?" "Don't you?" "Above everything!" he exclaimed. "Only the free _live_." She lifted her head higher in a graceful, attractive gesture of confidence and happiness. "Well--I am ready to live." "I'm afraid you don't realize," he said hesitatingly. "People wouldn't understand. You've your reputation to think of, you know." She looked straight at him. "No--not even that. I'm even free from reputation." Then, as his face saddened and his eyes glistened with sympathy, "You needn't pity me. See where it's brought me." "You're a strong swimmer--aren't you?" he said tenderly. "But then there isn't any safe and easy crossing to the isles of freedom. It's no wonder most people don't get further than gazing and longing." "Probably I shouldn't," confessed Susan, "if I hadn't been thrown into the water. It was a case of swim or drown." "But most who try are drowned--nearly all the women." "Oh, I guess there are more survive than is generally supposed. So much lying is done about that sort of thing." "What a shrewd young lady it is! At any rate, you have reached the islands." "But I'm not queen of them yet," she reminded him. "I'm only a poor, naked, out-of-breath castaway lying on the beach." He laughed appreciatively. Very clever, this extremely pretty young woman. "Yes--you'll win. You'll be queen." He lifted his champagne glass and watched the little bubbles pushing gayly and swiftly upward. "So--you've cast over your reputation." "I told you I had reached the beach naked." A reckless light in her eyes now. "Fact is, I had none to start with. Anybody has a reason for starting--or for being started. That was mine, I guess." "I've often thought about that matter of reputation--in a man or a woman--if they're trying to make the bold, strong swim. To care about one's reputation means fear of what the world says. It's important to care about one's character--for without character no one ever got anywhere worth getting to. But it's very, very dangerous to be afraid for one's reputation. And--I hate to admit it, because I'm hopelessly conventional at bottom, but it's true--reputation--fear of what the world says--has sunk more swimmers, has wrecked more characters than it ever helped. So--the strongest and best swimmers swim naked." Susan was looking thoughtfully at him over the rim of her glass. She took a sip of the champagne, said: "If I hadn't been quite naked, I'd have sunk--I'd have been at the bottom--with the fishes----" "Don't!" he cried. "Thank God, you did whatever you've done--yes, I mean that--whatever you've done, since it enabled you to swim on." He added, "And I know it wasn't anything bad--anything unwomanly." "I did the best I could--nothing I'm ashamed of--or proud of either. Just--what I had to do." "But you ought to be proud that you arrived." "No--only glad," said she. "So--so _frightfully_ glad!" In any event, their friendship was bound to flourish; aided by that dinner and that wine it sprang up into an intimacy, a feeling of mutual trust and of sympathy at every point. Like all women she admired strength in a man above everything else. She delighted in the thick obstinate growth of his fair hair, in the breadth of the line of his eyebrows, in the aggressive thrust of his large nose and long jawbone. She saw in the way his mouth closed evidence of a will against which opposition would dash about as dangerously as an egg against a stone wall. There was no question of his having those birthmarks of success about which he talked. She saw them--saw nothing of the less obtrusive--but not less important--marks of weakness which might have enabled an expert in the reading of faces to reach some rather depressing conclusion as to the nature and the degree of that success. Finally, he burst out with, "Yes, I've made up my mind. I'll do it! I'm going to New York. I've been fooling away the last five years here learning a lot, but still idling--drinking--amusing myself in all kinds of ways. And about a month ago--one night, as I was rolling home toward dawn--through a driving sleet storm--do you remember a line in 'Paradise Lost'" "I never read it," interrupted Susan. "Well--it's where the devils have been kicked out of Heaven and are lying in agony flat on the burning lake--and Satan rises up--and marches haughtily out among them--and calls out, 'Awake! Arise! Or forever more be damned!' That's what has happened to me several times in my life. When I was a boy, idling about the farm and wasting myself, that voice came to me--'Awake! Arise! Or forever more be damned!' And I got a move on me, and insisted on going to college. Again--at college--I became a dawdler--poker--drink--dances--all the rest of it. And suddenly that voice roared in my ears, made me jump like a rabbit when a gun goes off. And last month it came again. I went to work--finished a play I've been pottering over for three years. But somehow I couldn't find the--the--whatever I needed--to make me break away. Well--_you've_ given me that. I'll resign from the _Commercial_ and with all I've got in the world--three hundred dollars and a trunk full of good clothes, I'll break into Broadway." Susan had listened with bright eyes and quickened breath, as intoxicated and as convinced as was he by his eloquence. "Isn't that splendid!" she exclaimed in a low voice. "And you?" he said meaningly. "I?" she replied, fearing she was misunderstanding. "Will you go?" "Do you want me?" she asked, low and breathlessly. With a reluctance which suggested--but not to her--that his generosity was winning a hard-fought battle with his vanity, he replied: "I need you. I doubt if I'd dare, without you to back me up." "I've got a trunk full of fairly good clothes and about a hundred dollars. But I haven't got any play--or any art--or any trade even. Of course, I'll go." Then she hastily added, "I'll not be a drag on you. I pay my own way." "But you mustn't be suspicious in your independence," he warned her. "You mustn't forget that I'm older than you and more experienced and that it's far easier for a man to get money than for a woman." "To get it without lowering himself?" "Ah!" he exclaimed, looking strangely at her. "You mean, without bowing to some boss? Without selling his soul? I had no idea you were so much of a woman when I met you that day." "I wasn't--then," replied she. "And I didn't know where I'd got till we began to talk this evening." "And you're very young!" "Oh, but I've been going to a school where they make you learn fast." "Indeed I do need you." He touched his glass to hers. "On to Broadway!" he cried. "Broadway!" echoed she, radiant. "Together--eh?" She nodded. But as she drank the toast a tear splashed into her glass. She was remembering how some mysterious instinct had restrained her from going with John Redmond, though it seemed the only sane thing to do. What if she had disobeyed that instinct! And then--through her mind in swift ghostly march--past trailed the persons and events of the days just gone--just gone, yet seeming as far away as a former life in another world. Redmond and Gulick--Etta--yes, Etta, too--all past and gone--forever gone---- "What are you thinking about?" She shook her head and the spectral procession vanished into the glooms of memory's vistas. "Thinking?--of yesterday. I don't understand myself--how I shake off and forget what's past. Nothing seems real to me but the future." "Not even the present?" said he with a smile. "Not even the present," she answered with grave candor. "Nothing seems to touch me--the real me. It's like--like looking out of the window of the train at the landscape running by. I'm a traveler passing through. I wonder if it'll always be that way. I wonder if I'll ever arrive where I'll feel that I belong." "I think so--and soon." But she did not respond to his confident smile. "I--I hope so," she said with sad, wistful sweetness. "Then again--aren't there some people who don't belong anywhere--aren't allowed to settle down and be happy, but have to keep going--on and on--until----" "Until they pass out into the dark," he finished for her. "Yes." He looked at her in a wondering uneasy way. "You do suggest that kind," said he. "But," smilingly, to hide his earnestness, "I'll try to detain you." "Please do," she said. "I don't want to go on--alone." He dropped into silence, puzzled and in a way awed by the mystery enveloping her--a mystery of aloofness and stoniness, of complete separation from the contact of the world--the mystery that incloses all whose real life is lived deep within themselves. CHAPTER XXIV LIKE days later, on the Eastern Express, they were not so confident as they had been over the St. Nicholas champagne. As confident about the remoter future, it was that annoying little stretch near at hand which gave them secret uneasiness. There had been nothing but dreaming and sentimentalizing in those four days--and that disquietingly suggested the soldier who with an impressive flourish highly resolves to give battle, then sheathes his sword and goes away to a revel. Also, like all idlers, they had spent money--far more money than total net cash resources of less than five hundred dollars warranted. "We've spent an awful lot of money," said Susan. She was quick to see the faint frown, the warning that she was on dangerous ground. Said he: "Do you regret?" "No, indeed--no!" cried she, eager to have that cloud vanish, but honest too. She no more than he regretted a single moment of the dreaming and love-making, a single penny of the eighty and odd dollars that had enabled them fittingly to embower their romance, to twine myrtle in their hair and to provide Cupid's torch-bowls with fragrant incense. Still--with the battle not begun, there gaped that deep, wide hollow in the war chest. Spenser's newspaper connection got them passes over one of the cheaper lines to New York--and he tried to console himself by setting this down as a saving of forty dollars against the eighty dollars of the debit item. But he couldn't altogether forget that they would have traveled on passes, anyhow. He was not regretting that he had indulged in the extravagance of a stateroom--but he couldn't deny that it was an extravagance. However, he had only to look at her to feel that he had done altogether well in providing for her the best, and to believe that he could face with courage any fate so long as he had her at his side. "Yes, I can face anything with you," he said. "What I feel for you is the real thing. The real thing, at last." She had no disposition to inquire curiously into this. Her reply was a flash of a smile that was like a flash of glorious light upon the crest of a wave surging straight from her happy heart. They were opposite each other at breakfast in the restaurant car. He delighted in her frank delight in the novelty of travel--swift and luxurious travel. He had never been East before, himself, but he had had experience of sleepers and diners; she had not, and every moment she was getting some new sensation. She especially enjoyed this sitting at breakfast with the express train rushing smoothly along through the mountains--the first mountains either had seen. At times they were so intensely happy that they laughed with tears in their eyes and touched hands across the table to get from physical contact the reassurances of reality. "How good to eat everything is!" she exclaimed. "You'll think me very greedy, I'm afraid. But if you'd eaten the stuff I have since we dined on the rock!" They were always going back to the rock, and neither wearied of recalling and reminding each other of the smallest details. It seemed to them that everything, even the least happening, at that sacred spot must be remembered, must be recorded indelibly in the book of their romance. "I'm glad we were happy together in such circumstances," she went on. "It was a test--wasn't it, Rod?" "If two people don't love each other enough to be happy anywhere, they could be happy nowhere," declared he. "So, we'll not mind being very, very careful about spending money in New York," she ventured--for she was again bringing up the subject she had been privately revolving ever since they had formed the partnership. In her wanderings with Burlingham, in her sojourn in the tenements, she had learned a great deal about the care and spending of money--had developed that instinct for forehandedness which nature has implanted in all normal women along with the maternal instinct--and as a necessary supplement to it. This instinct is more or less futile in most women because they are more or less ignorant of the realities as to wise and foolish expenditure. But it is found in the most extravagant women no less than in the most absurdly and meanly stingy. "Of course, we must be careful," assented Rod. "But I can't let you be uncomfortable." "Now, dear," she remonstrated, "you mustn't treat me that way. I'm better fitted for hardship than you. I'd mind it less." He laughed; she looked so fine and delicate, with her transparent skin and her curves of figure, he felt that anything so nearly perfect could not but easily be spoiled. And there he showed how little he appreciated her iron strength, her almost exhaustless endurance. He fancied he was the stronger because he could have crushed her in his muscular arms. But exposures, privations, dissipations that would have done for a muscularly stronger man than he would have left no trace upon her after a few days of rest and sleep. "It's the truth," she insisted. "I could prove it, but I shan't. I don't want to remember vividly. Rod, we _must_ live cheaply in New York until you sell a play and I have a place in some company." "Yes," he conceded. "But, Susie, not too cheap. A cheap way of living makes a cheap man--gives a man a cheap outlook on life. Besides, don't forget--if the worst comes to the worst, I can always get a job on a newspaper." She would not have let him see how uneasy this remark made her. However, she could not permit it to pass without notice. Said she a little nervously: "But you've made up your mind to devote yourself to plays--to stand or fall by that." He remembered how he had thrilled her and himself with brave talk about the necessity of concentrating, of selecting a goal and moving relentlessly for it, letting nothing halt him or turn him aside. For his years Rod Spenser was as wise in the philosophy of success as Burlingham or Tom Brashear. But he had done that brave and wise talking before he loved her as he now did--before he realized how love can be in itself an achievement and a possession so great that other ambitions dwarf beside it. True, away back in his facile, fickle mind, behind the region where self-excuse and somebody-else-always-to-blame reigned supreme, a something--the something that had set the marks of success so strongly upon his face--was whispering to him the real reason for his now revolving a New York newspaper job. Real reasons as distinguished from alleged reasons and imagined reasons, from the reasons self-deception invents and vanity gives out--real reasons are always interesting and worth noting. What was Rod's? Not his love for her; nothing so superior, so superhuman as that. No, it was weak and wobbly misgivings as to his own ability to get on independently, the misgivings that menace every man who has never worked for himself but has always drawn pay--the misgivings that paralyze most men and keep them wage or salary slaves all their lives. Rod was no better pleased at this sly, unwelcome revelation of his real self to himself than the next human being is in similar circumstances. The whispering was hastily suppressed; love for her, desire that she should be comfortable--those must be the real reasons. But he must be careful lest she, the sensitive, should begin to brood over a fear that she was already weakening him and would become a drag upon him--the fear that, he knew, would take shape in his own mind if things began to go badly. "You may be sure, dearest," he said, "I'll do nothing that won't help me on." He tapped his forehead with his finger. "This is a machine for making plays. Everything that's put into it will be grist for it." She was impressed but not convinced. He had made his point about concentration too clear to her intelligence. She persisted: "But you said if you took a place on a newspaper it would make you fight less hard." "I say a lot of things," he interrupted laughingly. "Don't be frightened about me. What I'm most afraid of is that you'll desert me. _That_ would be a real knock-out blow." He said this smilingly; but she could not bear jokes on that one subject. "What do you mean, Rod?" "Now, don't look so funereal, Susie. I simply meant that I hate to think of your going on the stage--or at anything else. I want you to help _me_. Selfish, isn't it? But, dear heart, if I could feel that the plays were _ours_, that we were both concentrated on the one career--darling. To love each other, to work together--not separately but together--don't you understand?" Her expression showed that she understood, but was not at all in sympathy. "I've got to earn my living, Rod," she objected. "I shan't care anything about what I'll be doing. I'll do it simply to keep from being a burden to you----" "A burden, Susie! You! Why, you're my wings that enable me to fly. It's selfish, but I want all of you. Don't you think, dear, that if it were possible, it would be better for you to make us a home and hold the fort while I go out to give battle to managers--and bind up my wounds when I come back--and send me out the next day well again? Don't you think we ought to concentrate?" The picture appealed to her. All she wanted in life now was his success. "But," she objected, "it's useless to talk of that until we get on our feet--perfectly useless." "It's true," he admitted with a sigh. "And until we do, we must be economical." "What a persistent lady it is," laughed he. "I wish I were like that." In the evening's gathering dusk the train steamed into Jersey City; and Spenser and Susan Lenox, with the adventurer's mingling hope and dread, confidence and doubt, courage and fear, followed the crowd down the long platform under the vast train shed, went through the huge thronged waiting-room and aboard the giant ferryboat which filled both with astonishment because of its size and luxuriousness. "I am a jay!" said she. "I can hardly keep my mouth from dropping open." "You haven't any the advantage of me," he assured her. "Are you trembling all over?" "Yes," she admitted. "And my heart's like lead. I suppose there are thousands on thousands like us, from all over the country--who come here every day--feeling as we do." "Let's go out on the front deck--where we can see it." They went out on the upper front deck and, leaning against the forward gates, with their traveling bags at their feet, they stood dumb before the most astounding and most splendid scene in the civilized world. It was not quite dark yet; the air was almost July hot, as one of those prematurely warm days New York so often has in March. The sky, a soft and delicate blue shading into opal and crimson behind them, displayed a bright crescent moon as it arched over the fairyland in the dusk before them. Straight ahead, across the broad, swift, sparkling river--the broadest water Susan had ever seen--rose the mighty, the majestic city. It rose direct from the water. Endless stretches of ethereal-looking structure, reaching higher and higher, in masses like mountain ranges, in peaks, in towers and domes. And millions of lights, like fairy lamps, like resplendent jewels, gave the city a glory beyond that of the stars thronging the heavens on a clear summer night. They looked toward the north; on and on, to the far horizon's edge stretched the broad river and the lovely city that seemed the newborn offspring of the waves; on and on, the myriad lights, in masses, in festoons, in great gleaming globes of fire from towers rising higher than Susan's and Rod's native hills. They looked to the south. There, too, rose city, mile after mile, and then beyond it the expanse of the bay; and everywhere the lights, the beautiful, soft, starlike lights, shedding a radiance as of heaven itself over the whole scene. Majesty and strength and beauty. "I love it!" murmured the girl. "Already I love it." "I never dreamed it was like this," said Roderick, in an awed tone. "The City of the Stars," said she, in the caressing tone in which a lover speaks the name of the beloved. They moved closer together and clasped hands and gazed as if they feared the whole thing--river and magic city and their own selves--would fade away and vanish forever. Susan clutched Rod in terror as she saw the vision suddenly begin to move, to advance toward her, like apparitions in a dream before they vanish. Then she exclaimed, "Why, we are moving!" The big ferryboat, swift, steady as land, noiseless, had got under way. Upon them from the direction of the distant and hidden sea blew a cool, fresh breeze. Never before had either smelled that perfume, strong and keen and clean, which comes straight from the unbreathed air of the ocean to bathe New York, to put life and hope and health into its people. Rod and Susan turned their faces southward toward this breeze, drank in great draughts of it. They saw a colossal statue, vivid as life in the dusk, in the hand at the end of the high-flung arm a torch which sent a blaze of light streaming out over land and water. "That must be Liberty," said Roderick. Susan slipped her arm through his. She was quivering with excitement and joy. "Rod--Rod!" she murmured. "It's the isles of freedom. Kiss me." And he bent and kissed her, and his cheek felt the tears upon hers. He reached for her hand, with an instinct to strengthen her. But when he had it within his its firm and vital grasp sent a thrill of strength through him. A few minutes, and they paused at the exit from the ferry house. They almost shrank back, so dazed and helpless did they feel before the staggering billows of noise that swept savagely down upon them--roar and crash, shriek and snort; the air was shuddering with it, the ground quaking. The beauty had vanished--the beauty that was not the city but a glamour to lure them into the city's grasp; now that city stood revealed as a monster about to seize and devour them. "God!" He shouted in her ear. "Isn't this _frightful!_" She was recovering more quickly than he. The faces she saw reassured her. They were human faces; and while they were eager and restless, as if the souls behind them sought that which never could be found, they were sane and kind faces, too. Where others of her own race lived, and lived without fear, she, too, could hope to survive. And already she, who had loved this mighty offspring of the sea and the sky at first glance, saw and felt another magic--the magic of the peopled solitude. In this vast, this endless solitude she and he would be free. They could do as they pleased, live as they pleased, without thought of the opinion of others. Here she could forget the bestial horrors of marriage; here she would fear no scornful pointing at her birth-brand of shame. She and Rod could be poor without shame; they could make their fight in the grateful darkness of obscurity. "Scared?" he asked. "Not a bit," was her prompt answer. "I love it more than ever." "Well, it frightens me a little. I feel helpless--lost in the noise and the crowd. How can I do anything here!" "Others have. Others do." "Yes--yes! That's so. We must take hold!" And he selected a cabman from the shouting swarm. "We want to go, with two trunks, to the Hotel St. Denis," said he. "All right, sir! Gimme the checks, please." Spenser was about to hand them over when Susan said in an undertone, "You haven't asked the price." Spenser hastened to repair this important omission. "Ten dollars," replied the cabman as if ten dollars were some such trifle as ten cents. Spenser laughed at the first experience of the famous New York habit of talking in a faint careless way of large sums of money--other people's money. "You did save us a swat," he said to Susan, and beckoned another man. The upshot of a long and arduous discussion, noisy and profane, was that they got the carriage for six dollars--a price which the policeman who had been drawn into the discussion vouched for as reasonable. Spenser knew it was too high, knew the policeman would get a dollar or so of the profit, but he was weary of the wrangle; and he would not listen to Susan's suggestion that they have the trunks sent by the express company and themselves go in a street car for ten cents. At the hotel they got a large comfortable room and a bath for four dollars a day. Spenser insisted it was cheap; Susan showed her alarm--less than an hour in New York and ten dollars gone, not to speak of she did not know how much change. For Roderick had been scattering tips with what is for some mysterious reason called "a princely hand," though princes know too well the value of money and have too many extravagant tastes ever to go far in sheer throwing away. They had dinner in the restaurant of the hotel and set out to explore the land they purposed to subdue and to possess. They walked up Broadway to Fourteenth, missed their way in the dazzle and glare of south Union Square, discovered the wandering highway again after some searching. After the long, rather quiet stretch between Union Square and Thirty-fourth Street they found themselves at the very heart of the city's night life. They gazed in wonder upon the elevated road with its trains thundering by high above them. They crossed Greeley Square and stood entranced before the spectacle--a street bright as day with electric signs of every color, shape and size; sidewalks jammed with people, most of them dressed with as much pretense to fashion as the few best in Cincinnati; one theater after another, and at Forty-second Street theaters in every direction. Surely--surely--there would be small difficulty in placing his play when there were so many theaters, all eager for plays. They debated going to the theater, decided against it, as they were tired from the journey and the excitement of crowding new sensations. "I've never been to a real theater in my life," said Susan. "I want to be fresh the first time I go." "Yes," cried Rod. "That's right. Tomorrow night. That _will_ be an experience!" And they read the illuminated signs, inspected the show windows, and slowly strolled back toward the hotel. As they were recrossing Union Square, Spenser said, "Have you noticed how many street girls there are? We must have passed a thousand. Isn't it frightful?" "Yes," said Susan. Rod made a gesture of disgust, and said with feeling, "How low a woman must have sunk before she could take to that life!" "Yes," said Susan. "So low that there couldn't possibly be left any shred of feeling or decency anywhere in her." Susan did not reply. "It's not a question of morals, but of sensibility," pursued he. "Some day I'm going to write a play or a story about it. A woman with anything to her, who had to choose between that life and death, wouldn't hesitate an instant. She couldn't. A streetwalker!" And again he made that gesture of disgust. "Before you write," said Susan, in a queer, quiet voice, "you'll find out all about it. Maybe some of these girls--most of them--all of them--are still human beings. It's not fair to judge people unless you know. And it's so easy to say that someone else ought to die rather than do this or that." "You can't imagine yourself doing such a thing," urged he. Susan hesitated, then--"Yes," she said. Her tone irritated him. "Oh, nonsense! You don't know what you're talking about." "Yes," said Susan. "Susie!" he exclaimed, looking reprovingly at her. She met his eyes without flinching. "Yes," she said. "I have." He stopped short and his expression set her bosom to heaving. But her gaze was steady upon his. "Why did you tell me!" he cried. "Oh, it isn't so--it can't be. You don't mean exactly that." "Yes, I do," said she. "Don't tell me! I don't want to know." And he strode on, she keeping beside him. "I can't let you believe me different from what I am," replied she. "Not you. I supposed you guessed." "Now I'll always think of it--whenever I look at you. . . . I simply can't believe it. . . . You spoke of it as if you weren't ashamed." "I'm not ashamed," she said. "Not before you. There isn't anything I've done that I wouldn't be willing to have you know. I'd have told you, except that I didn't want to recall it. You know that nobody can live without getting dirty. The thing is to want to be clean--and to try to get clean afterward--isn't it?" "Yes," he admitted, as if he had not been hearing. "I wish you hadn't told me. I'll always see it and feel it when I look at you." "I want you to," said she. "I couldn't love you as I do if I hadn't gone through a great deal." "But it must have left its stains upon you," said he. Again he stopped short in the street, faced her at the curb, with the crowd hurrying by and jostling them. "Tell me about it!" he commanded. She shook her head. "I couldn't." To have told would have been like tearing open closed and healed wounds. Also it would have seemed whining--and she had utter contempt for whining. "I'll answer any question, but I can't just go on and tell." "You deliberately went and did--that?" "Yes." "Haven't you any excuse, any defense?" She might have told him about Burlingham dying and the need of money to save him. She might have told him about Etta--her health going--her mind made up to take to the streets, with no one to look after her. She might have made it all a moving and a true tale--of self-sacrifice for the two people who had done most for her. But it was not in her simple honest nature to try to shift blame. So all she said was: "No, Rod." "And you didn't want to kill yourself first?" "No. I wanted to live. I was dirty--and I wanted to be clean. I was hungry--and I wanted food. I was cold--that was the worst. I was cold, and I wanted to get warm. And--I had been married--but I couldn't tell even you about that--except--after a woman's been through what I went through then, nothing in life has any real terror or horror for her." He looked at her long. "I don't understand," he finally said. "Come on. Let's go back to the hotel." She walked beside him, making no attempt to break his gloomy silence. They went up to their room and she sat on the lounge by the window. He lit a cigarette and half sat, half lay, upon the bed. After a long time he said with a bitter laugh, "And I was so sure you were a good woman!" "I don't feel bad," she ventured timidly. "Am I?" "Do you mean to tell me," he cried, sitting up, "that you don't think anything of those things?" "Life can be so hard and cruel, can make one do so many----" "But don't you realize that what you've done is the very worst thing a woman can do?" "No," said she. "I don't. . . . I'm sorry you didn't understand. I thought you did--not the details, but in a general sort of way. I didn't mean to deceive you. That would have seemed to me much worse than anything I did." "I might have known! I might have known!" he cried--rather theatrically, though sincerely withal--for Mr. Spenser was a diligent worker with the tools of the play-making trade. "I learned who you were as soon as I got home the night I left you in Carrolton. They had been telephoning about you to the village. So I knew about you." "About my mother?" asked she. "Is that what you mean?" "Oh, you need not look so ashamed," said he, graciously, pityingly. "I am not ashamed," said she. But she did not tell him that her look came from an awful fear that he was about to make her ashamed of him. "No, I suppose you aren't," he went on, incensed by this further evidence of her lack of a good woman's instincts. "I really ought not to blame you. You were born wrong--born with the moral sense left out." "Yes, I suppose so," said she, wearily. "If only you had lied to me--told me the one lie!" cried he. "Then you wouldn't have destroyed my illusion. You wouldn't have killed my love." She grew deathly white; that was all. "I don't mean that I don't love you still," he hurried on. "But not in the same way. That's killed forever." "Are there different ways of loving?" she asked. "How can I give you the love of respect and trust--now?" "Don't you trust me--any more?" "I couldn't. I simply couldn't. It was hard enough before on account of your birth. But now---- Trust a woman who had been a--a--I can't speak the word. Trust you? You don't understand a man." "No, I don't." She looked round drearily. Everything in ruins. Alone again. Outcast. Nowhere to go but the streets--the life that seemed the only one for such as she. "I don't understand people at all. . . . Do you want me to go?" She had risen as she asked this. He was beside her instantly. "Go!" he cried. "Why I couldn't get along without you." "Then you love me as I love you," Said she, putting her arms round him. "And that's all I want. I don't want what you call respect. I couldn't ever have hoped to get that, being born as I was--could I? Anyhow, it doesn't seem to me to amount to much. I can't help it, Rod--that's the way I feel. So just love me--do with me whatever you will, so long as it makes you happy. And I don't need to be trusted. I couldn't think of anybody but you." He felt sure of her again, reascended to the peak of the moral mountain. "You understand, we can never get married. We can never have any children." "I don't mind. I didn't expect that. We can _love_--can't we?" He took her face between his hands. "What an exquisite face it is," he said, "soft and smooth! And what clear, honest eyes! Where is _it?_ Where _is_ it? It _must_ be there!" "What, Rod?" "The--the dirt." She did not wince, but there came into her young face a deeper pathos--and a wan, deprecating, pleading smile. She said: "Maybe love has washed it away--if it was there. It never seemed to touch me--any more than the dirt when I had to clean up my room." "You mustn't talk that way. Why you are perfectly calm! You don't cry or feel repentant. You don't seem to care." "It's so--so past--and dead. I feel as if it were another person. And it was, Rod!" He shook his head, frowning. "Let's not talk about it," he said harshly. "If only I could stop thinking about it!" She effaced herself as far as she could, living in the same room with him. She avoided the least show of the tenderness she felt, of the longing to have her wounds soothed. She lay awake the whole night, suffering, now and then timidly and softly caressing him when she was sure that he slept. In the morning she pretended to be asleep, let him call her twice before she showed that she was awake. A furtive glance at him confirmed the impression his voice had given. Behind her pale, unrevealing face there was the agonized throb of an aching heart, but she had the confidence of her honest, utter love; he would surely soften, would surely forgive. As for herself--she had, through loving and feeling that she was loved, almost lost the sense of the unreality of past and present that made her feel quite detached and apart from the life she was leading, from the events in which she was taking part, from the persons most intimately associated with her. Now that sense of isolation, of the mere spectator or the traveler gazing from the windows of the hurrying train--that sense returned. But she fought against the feeling it gave her. That evening they went to the theater--to see Modjeska in "Magda." Susan had never been in a real theater. The only approach to a playhouse in Sutherland was Masonic Hall. It had a sort of stage at one end where from time to time wandering players gave poor performances of poor plays or a minstrel show or a low vaudeville. But none of the best people of Sutherland went--at least, none of the women. The notion was strong in Sutherland that the theater was of the Devil--not so strong as in the days before they began to tolerate amateur theatricals, but still vigorous enough to give Susan now, as she sat in the big, brilliant auditorium, a pleasing sense that she, an outcast, was at last comfortably at home. Usually the first sight of anything one has dreamed about is pitifully disappointing. Neither nature nor life can build so splendidly as a vivid fancy. But Susan, in some sort prepared for the shortcomings of the stage, was not disappointed. From rise to fall of curtain she was so fascinated, so absolutely absorbed, that she quite forgot her surroundings, even Rod. And between the acts she could not talk for thinking. Rod, deceived by her silence, was chagrined. He had been looking forward to a great happiness for himself in seeing her happy, and much profit from the study of the viewpoint of an absolutely fresh mind. It wasn't until they were leaving the theater that he got an inkling of the true state of affairs with her. "Let's go to supper," said he. "If you don't mind," replied she, "I'd rather go home. I'm very tired." "You were sound asleep this morning. So you must have slept well," said he sarcastically. "It's the play," said she. "_Why_ didn't you like it?" he asked, irritated. She looked at him in wonder. "Like what? The play?" She drew a long breath. "I feel as if it had almost killed me." He understood when they were in their room and she could hardly undress before falling into a sleep so relaxed, so profound, that it made him a little uneasy. It seemed to him the exhaustion of a child worn out with the excitement of a spectacle. And her failure to go into ecstasies the next day led him further into the same error. "Modjeska is very good as _Magda_," said he, carelessly, as one talking without expecting to be understood. "But they say there's an Italian woman--Duse--who is the real thing." Modjeska--Duse--Susan seemed indeed not to understand. "I hated her father," she said. "He didn't deserve to have such a wonderful daughter." Spenser had begun to laugh with her first sentence. At the second he frowned, said bitterly: "I might have known! You get it all wrong. I suppose you sympathize with _Magda_?" "I worshiped her," said Susan, her voice low and tremulous with the intensity of her feeling. Roderick laughed bitterly. "Naturally," he said. "You can't understand." An obvious case, thought he. She was indeed one of those instances of absolute lack of moral sense. Just as some people have the misfortune to be born without arms or without legs, so others are doomed to live bereft of a moral sense. A sweet disposition, a beautiful body, but no soul; not a stained soul, but no soul at all. And his whole mental attitude toward her changed; or, rather, it was changed by the iron compulsion of his prejudice. The only change in his physical attitude--that is, in his treatment of her--was in the direction of bolder passion. of complete casting aside of all the restraint a conventional respecter of conventional womanhood feels toward a woman whom he respects. So, naturally, Susan, eager to love and to be loved, and easily confusing the not easily distinguished spiritual and physical, was reassured. Once in a while a look or a phrase from him gave her vague uneasiness; but on the whole she felt that, in addition to clear conscience from straightforwardness, she had a further reason for being glad Chance had forced upon her the alternative of telling him or lying. She did not inquire into the realities beneath the surface of their life--neither into what he thought of her, nor into what she thought of him--thought in the bottom of her heart. She continued to fight against, to ignore, her feeling of aloneness, her feeling of impending departure. She was aided in this by her anxiety about their finances. In his efforts to place his play he was spending what were for them large sums of money--treating this man and that to dinners, to suppers--inviting men to lunch with him at expensive Broadway restaurants. She assumed that all this was necessary; he said so, and he must know. He was equally open-handed when they were alone, insisting on ordering the more expensive dishes, on having suppers they really did not need and drink which she knew she would be better off without--and, she suspected, he also. It simply was not in him, she saw, to be careful about money. She liked it, as a trait, for to her as to all the young and the unthinking carelessness about money seems a sure, perhaps the surest, sign of generosity--when in fact the two qualities are in no way related. Character is not a collection of ignorant impulses but a solidly woven fabric of deliberate purposes. Carelessness about anything most often indicates a tendency to carelessness about everything. She admired his openhanded way of scattering; she wouldn't have admired it in herself, would have thought it dishonest and selfish. But Rod was different. _He_ had the "artistic temperament," while she was a commonplace nobody, who ought to be--and was--grateful to him for allowing her to stay on and for making such use of her as he saw fit. Still, even as she admired, she saw danger, grave danger, a disturbingly short distance ahead. He described to her the difficulties he was having in getting to managers, in having his play read, and the absurdity of the reasons given for turning it down. He made light of all these; the next manager would see, would give him a big advance, would put the play on--and then, Easy Street! But experience had already killed what little optimism there was in her temperament--and there had not been much, because George Warham was a successful man in his line, and successful men do not create or permit optimistic atmosphere even in their houses. Nor had she forgotten Burlingham's lectures on the subject with illustrations from his own spoiled career; she understood it all now--and everything else he had given her to store up in her memory that retained everything. With that philippic against optimism in mind, she felt what Spenser was rushing toward. She made such inquiries about work for herself as her inexperience and limited opportunities permitted. She asked, she begged him, to let her try to get a place. He angrily ordered her to put any such notion out of her head. After a time she nerved herself again to speak. Then he frankly showed her why he was refusing. "No," said he peremptorily, "I couldn't trust you in those temptations. You must stay where I can guard you." A woman who had deliberately taken to the streets--why, she thought nothing of virtue; she would be having lovers with the utmost indifference; and while she was not a liar yet--"at least, I think not"--how long would that last? With virtue gone, virtue the foundation of woman's character--the rest could no more stand than a house set on sand. "As long as you want me to love you, you've got to stay with me," he declared. "If you persist, I'll know you're simply looking for a chance to go back to your old ways." And though she continued to think and cautiously to inquire about work she said no more to him. She spent not a penny, discouraged him from throwing money away--as much as she could without irritating him--and waited for the cataclysm. Waited not in gloom and tears but as normal healthy youth awaits any adversity not definitely scheduled for an hour close at hand. It would be far indeed from the truth to picture Susan as ever for long a melancholy figure to the eye or even wholly melancholy within. Her intelligence and her too sympathetic heart were together a strong force for sadness in her life, as they cannot but be in any life. In this world, to understand and to sympathize is to be saddened. But there was in her a force stronger than either or both. She had superb health. It made her beautiful, strong body happy; and that physical happiness brought her up quickly out of any depths--made her gay in spite of herself, caused her to enjoy even when she felt that it was "almost like hard-heartedness to be happy." She loved the sun and in this city where the sun shone almost all the days, sparkling gloriously upon the tiny salt particles filling the air and making it delicious to breathe and upon the skin--in this City of the Sun as she called it, she was gay even when she was heavy-hearted. Thus, she was no repellent, aggravating companion to Rod as she awaited the cataclysm. It came in the third week. He spent the entire day away from her, toward midnight he returned, flushed with liquor. She had gone to bed. "Get up and dress," said he with an irritability toward her which she had no difficulty in seeing was really directed at himself. "I'm hungry--and thirsty. We're going out for some supper." "Come kiss me first," said she, stretching out her arms. Several times this device had shifted his purpose from spending money on the needless and expensive suppers. He laughed. "Not a kiss. We're going to have one final blow-out. I start to work tomorrow. I've taken a place on the _Herald_--on space, guaranty of twenty-five a week, good chance to average fifty or sixty." He said this hurriedly, carelessly, gayly--guiltily. She showed then and there what a surpassing wise young woman she was, for she did not exclaim or remind him of his high resolve to do or die as a playwright. "I'll be ready in a minute," was all she said. She dressed swiftly, he lounging on the sofa and watching her. He loved to watch her dress, she did it so gracefully, and the motions brought out latent charms of her supple figure. "You're not so sure-fingered tonight as usual," said he. "I never saw you make so many blunders--and you've got one stocking on wrong side out." She smiled into the glass at him. "The skirt'll cover that. I guess I was sleepy." "Never saw your eyes more wide-awake. What're you thinking about?" "About supper," declared she. "I'm hungry. I didn't feel like eating alone." "I can't be here always," said he crossly--and she knew he was suspecting what she really must be thinking. "I wasn't complaining," replied she sweetly. "You know I understand about business." "Yes, I know," said he, with his air of generosity that always made her feel grateful. "I always feel perfectly free about you." "I should say!" laughed she. "You know I don't care what happens so long as you succeed." Since their talk in Broadway that first evening in New York she had instinctively never said "we." When they were at the table at Rector's and he had taken a few more drinks, he became voluble and plausible on the subject of the trifling importance of his setback as a playwright. It was the worst possible time of year; the managers were stocked up; his play would have to be rewritten to suit some particular star; a place on a newspaper, especially such an influential paper as the _Herald_, would be of use to him in interesting managers. She listened and looked convinced, and strove to convince herself that she believed. But there was no gray in her eyes, only the deepest hue of violets. Next day they took a suite of two rooms and a bath in a pretentious old house in West Forty-fourth Street near Long Acre Square. She insisted that she preferred another much sunnier and quieter suite with no bath but only a stationary washstand; it was to be had for ten dollars a week. But he laughed at her as too economical in her ideas, and decided for the eighteen-dollar rooms. Also he went with her to buy clothes, made her spend nearly a hundred dollars where she would have spent less than twenty-five. "I prefer to make most of my things," declared she. "And I've all the time in the world." He would not have it. In her leisure time she must read and amuse herself and keep herself up to the mark, especially physically. "I'm proud of your looks," said he. "They belong to me, don't they? Well, take care of my property, Miss." She looked at him vaguely--a look of distance, of parting, of pain. Then she flung herself into his arms with a hysterical cry--and shut her eyes tight against the beckoning figure calling her away. "No! No!" she murmured. "I belong here--_here!_" "What are you saying?" he asked. "Nothing--nothing," she replied. CHAPTER XXV AT the hotel they had been Mr. and Mrs. Spenser. When they moved, he tried to devise some way round this; but it was necessary that they have his address at the office, and Mrs. Pershall with the glistening old-fashioned false teeth who kept the furnished-room house was not one in whose withered bosom it would be wise to raise a suspicion as to respectability. Only in a strenuously respectable house would he live; in the other sort, what might not untrustworthy Susan be up to? So Mr. and Mrs. Spenser they remained, and the truth was suspected by only a few of their acquaintances, was known by two or three of his intimates whom he told in those bursts of confidence to which voluble, careless men are given--and for which they in resolute self-excuse unjustly blame strong drink. One of his favorite remarks to her--sometimes made laughingly, again ironically, again angrily, again insultingly, was in this strain: "Your face is demure enough. But you look too damned attractive about those beautiful feet of yours to be respectable at heart--and trustable." That matter of her untrustworthiness had become a fixed idea with him. The more he concentrated upon her physical loveliness, the more he revolved the dangers, the possibilities of unfaithfulness; for a physical infatuation is always jealous. His work on the _Herald_ made close guarding out of the question. The best he could do was to pop in unexpectedly upon her from time to time, to rummage through her belongings, to check up her statements as to her goings and comings by questioning the servants and, most important of all, each day to put her through searching and skillfully planned cross-examination. She had to tell him everything she did--every little thing--and he calculated the time, to make sure she had not found half an hour or so in which to deceive him. If she had sewed, he must look at the sewing; if she had read, he must know how many pages and must hear a summary of what those pages contained. As she would not and could not deceive him in any matter, however small, she was compelled to give over a plan quietly to look for work and to fit herself for some occupation that would pay a living wage--if there were such for a beginning woman worker. At first he was covert in this detective work, being ashamed of his own suspicions. But as he drank, as he associated again with the same sort of people who had wasted his time in Cincinnati, he rapidly became franker and more inquisitorial. And she dreaded to see the look she knew would come into his eyes, the cruel tightening of his mouth, if in her confusion and eagerness she should happen not instantly to satisfy the doubt behind each question. He tormented her; he tormented himself. She suffered from humiliation; but she suffered more because she saw how his suspicions were torturing him. And in her humility and helplessness and inexperience, she felt no sense of right to resist, no impulse to resist. And she forced herself to look on his spasms of jealousy as the occasional storms which occur even in the best climates. She reminded herself that she was secure of his love, secure in his love; and in her sad mood she reproached herself for not being content when at bottom everything was all right. After what she had been through, to be sad because the man she loved loved her too well! It was absurd, ungrateful. He pried into every nook and corner of her being with that ingenious and tireless persistence human beings reserve for searches for what they do not wish to find. At last he contrived to find, or to imagine he had found, something that justified his labors and vindicated his disbelief in her. They were walking in Fifth Avenue one afternoon, at the hour when there is the greatest press of equipages whose expensively and showily dressed occupants are industriously engaged in the occupation of imagining they are doing something when in fact they are doing nothing. What a world! What a grotesque confusing of motion and progress! What fantastic delusions that one is busy when one is merely occupied! They were between Forty-sixth Street and Forty-seventh, on the west side, when a small victoria drew up at the curb and a woman descended and crossed the sidewalk before them to look at the display in a milliner's window. Susan gave her the swift, seeing glance which one woman always gives another--the glance of competitors at each other's offerings. Instead of glancing away, Susan stopped short and gazed. Forgetting Rod, she herself went up to the millinery display that she might have a fuller view of the woman who had fascinated her. "What's the matter?" cried Spenser. "Come on. You don't want any of those hats." But Susan insisted that she must see, made him linger until the woman returned to her carriage and drove away. She said to Rod: "Did you see her?" "Yes. Rather pretty--nothing to scream about." "But her _style!_" cried Susan. "Oh, she was nicely dressed--in a quiet way. You'll see thousands a lot more exciting after you've been about in this town a while." "I've seen scores of beautifully dressed women here--and in Cincinnati, too," replied Susan. "But that woman--she was _perfect_. And that's a thing I've never seen before." "I'm glad you have such quiet tastes--quiet and inexpensive." "Inexpensive!" exclaimed Susan. "I don't dare think how much that woman's clothes cost. You only glanced at her, Rod, you didn't _look_. If you had, you'd have seen. Everything she wore was just right." Susan's eyes were brilliant. "Oh, it was wonderful! The colors--the fit--the style--the making--every big and little thing. She was a work of art, Rod! That's the first woman I've seen in my life that I through and through envied." Rod's look was interested now. "You like that sort of thing a lot?" he inquired with affected carelessness. "Every woman does," replied she, unsuspicious. "But I care--well, not for merely fine clothes. But for the--the kind that show what sort of person is in them." She sighed. "I wonder if I'll ever learn--and have money enough to carry out. It'll take so much--so much!" She laughed. "I've got terribly extravagant ideas. But don't be alarmed--I keep them chained up." He was eying her unpleasantly. Suddenly she became confused. He thought it was because she was seeing and understanding his look and was frightened at his having caught her at last. In fact, it was because it all at once struck her that what she had innocently and carelessly said sounded like a hint or a reproach to him. He sneered: "So you're crazy about finery--eh?" "Oh, Rod!" she cried. "You know I didn't mean it that way. I long for and dream about a whole lot of beautiful things, but nothing else in the world's in the same class with--with what we've got." "You needn't try to excuse yourself," said he in a tone that silenced her. She wished she had not seen the woman who had thus put a cloud over their afternoon's happiness. But long after she had forgotten his queerness about what she said, she continued to remember that "perfect" woman--to see every detail of her exquisite toilet, so rare in a world where expensive-looking finery is regarded as the chief factor in the art of dress. How much she would have to learn before she could hope to dress like that!--learn not merely about dress but about the whole artistic side of life. For that woman had happened to cross Susan's vision at just the right moment--in development and in mood--to reveal to her clearly a world into which she had never penetrated--a world of which she had vaguely dreamed as she read novels of life in the lands beyond the seas, the life of palaces and pictures and statuary, of opera and theater, of equipages and servants and food and clothing of rare quality. She had rather thought such a life did not exist outside of novels and dreams. What she had seen of New York--the profuse, the gigantic but also the undiscriminating--had tended to strengthen the suspicion. But this woman proved her mistaken. Our great forward strides are made unconsciously, are the results of apparently trivial, often unnoted impulses. Susan, like all our race, had always had vague secret dreams of ambition--so vague thus far that she never thought of them as impelling purposes in her life. Her first long forward stride toward changing these dreams from the vague to the definite was when Rod, before her on the horse on the way to Brooksburg, talked over his shoulder to her of the stage and made her feel that it was the life for her, the only life open to her where a woman could hope to be judged as human being instead of as mere instrument of sex. Her second long forward movement toward sharply defined ambition dated from the sight of the woman of the milliner's window--the woman who epitomized to Susan the whole art side of life that always gives its highest expression in some personal achievement--the perfect toilet, the perfect painting or sculpture, the perfect novel or play. But Rod saw in her enthusiasm only evidence of a concealed longing for the money to indulge extravagant whims. With his narrowing interest in women--narrowed now almost to sex--his contempt for them as to their minds and their hearts was so far advancing that he hardly took the trouble to veil it with remnants of courtesy. If Susan had clearly understood--even if she had let herself understand what her increasing knowledge might have enabled her to understand--she would have hated him in spite of the hold gratitude and habit had given him upon her loyal nature--and despite the fact that she had, as far as she could see, no alternative to living with him but the tenements or the streets. One day in midsummer she chanced to go into the Hotel Astor to buy a magazine. As she had not been there before she made a wrong turning and was forced to cross one of the restaurants. In a far corner, half hidden by a group of palms, she saw Rod at a small table with a strikingly pretty woman whose expression and dress and manner most energetically proclaimed the actress. The woman was leaning toward him, was touching his hand and looking into his eyes with that show of enthusiasm which raises doubts of sincerity in an experienced man and sets him to keeping an eye or a hand--or both--upon his money. Real emotion, even a professional expert at display of emotion, is rarely so adept at exhibiting itself. It may have been jealousy that guided her to this swift judgment upon the character of the emotion correctly and charmingly expressing itself. If so, jealousy was for once a trustworthy guide. She turned swiftly and escaped unseen. The idea of trapping him, of confronting him, never occurred to her. She felt ashamed and self-reproachful that she had seen. Instead of the anger that fires a vain woman, whether she cares about a man or not, there came a profound humiliation. She had in some way fallen short; she had not given him all he needed; it must be that she hadn't it to give, since she had given him all she had. He must not know--he must not! For if he knew he might dislike her, might leave her--and she dared not think what life would be without him, her only source of companionship and affection, her only means of support. She was puzzled that her discovery, not of his treachery--he had so broken her spirit with his suspicions and his insulting questions that she did not regard herself as of the rank and dignity that has the right to exact fidelity--but of his no longer caring enough to be content with her alone, had not stunned her with amazement. She did not realize how completely the instinct that he was estranged from her had prepared her for the thing that always accompanies estrangement. Between the perfect accord, that is, the never realized ideal for a man and a woman living together, and the intolerable discord that means complete repulse there is a vast range of states of feeling imperceptibly shading into each other. Most couples constantly move along this range, now toward the one extreme, now toward the other. As human kings are not given to self-analysis, and usually wander into grotesque error whenever they attempt it, no couple knows precisely where it is upon the range, until something crucial happens to compel them to know. Susan and Rod had begun as all couples begin--with an imaginary ideal accord based upon their ignorance of each other and their misunderstanding of what qualities they thought they understood in each other. The delusion of accord vanished that first evening in New York. What remained? What came in the place? They knew no more about that than does the next couple. They were simply "living along." A crisis, drawing them close together or flinging them forever apart or forcing them to live together, he frankly as keeper and she frankly as kept, might come any day, any hour. Again it might never come. After a few weeks the matter that had been out of her mind accidentally and indirectly came to the surface in a chance remark. She said: "Sometimes I half believe a man could be untrue to a woman, even though he loved her." She did not appreciate the bearings of her remark until it was spoken. With a sensation of terror lest the dreaded crisis might be about to burst, she felt his quick, nervous glance. She breathed freely again when she felt his reassurance and relief as she successfully withstood. "Certainly," he said with elaborate carelessness. "Men are a rotten, promiscuous lot. That's why it's necessary for a woman to be good and straight." All this time his cross-examination had grown in severity. Evidently he was fearing that she might be having a recurrence of the moral disease which was fatal in womankind, though only mild indiscretion in a man, if not positively a virtue, an evidence of possessing a normal masculine nature. Her mind began curiously--sadly--to revolve the occasional presents--of money, of books, of things to wear--which he gave, always quite unexpectedly. At first unconsciously, but soon consciously, she began to associate these gifts, given always in an embarrassed, shamefaced way, with certain small but significant indications of his having strayed. And it was not long before she understood; she was receiving his expiations for his indiscretions. Like an honest man and a loyal--masculinely loyal--lover he was squaring accounts. She never read the books she owed to these twinges; it was thus that she got her aversion to Thackeray--one of his "expiations" was a set of Thackeray. The things to wear she contrived never to use. The conscience money she either spent upon him or put back into his pocket a little at a time, sure that he, the most careless of men about money, would never detect her. His work forced him to keep irregular hours; thus she could pretend to herself that his absences were certainly because of office duty. Still, whenever he was gone overnight, she became unhappy--not the crying kind of unhappiness; to that she was little given--but the kind that lies awake and aches and with morbid vivid fancy paints the scenes suspicion suggests, and stares at them not in anger but in despair. She was always urging herself to content herself with what she was getting. She recalled and lived again the things she had forgotten while Roderick was wholly hers--the penalties of the birth brand of shame--her wedding night--the miseries of the last period of her wanderings with Burlingham--her tenement days--the dirt, the nakedness, the brutal degradation, the vermin, the savage cold. And the instant he returned, no matter how low-spirited she had been, she was at once gay, often deliriously gay--until soon his awakened suspicion as to what she had been up to in his absence quieted her. There was little forcing or pretense in this gayety; it bubbled and sparkled from the strong swift current of her healthy passionate young life which, suspended in the icy clutch of fear when he was away from her, flowed as freely as the brooks in spring as soon as she realized that she still had him. Did she really love him? She believed she did. Was she right? Love is of many degrees--and kinds. And strange and confused beyond untangling is the mixture of motives and ideas in the mind of any human being as to any other being with whom his or her relations are many sided. Anyone who had not been roughly seized by destiny and forced to fight desperately weaponless might have found it difficult to understand how this intelligent, high-spirited girl could be so reasonable--coarsely practical, many people would have said. A brave soul--truly brave with the unconscious courage that lives heroically without any taint of heroics--such a soul learns to accept the facts of life, to make the best of things, to be grateful for whatever sunshine may be and not to shriek and gesticulate at storm. Suffering had given this sapling of a girl the strong fiber that enables a tree to push majestically up toward the open sky. Because she did not cry out was no sign that she was not hurt; and because she did not wither and die of her wounds was only proof of her strength of soul. The weak wail and the weak succumb; the strong persist--and a world of wailers and weaklings calls them hard, insensible, coarse. Spenser was fond of exhibiting to his men friends--to some of them--this treasure to which he always returned the more enamoured for his vagary and its opportunity of comparison. Women he would not permit. In general, he held that all women, the respectable no less than the other kind, put mischief in each other's heads and egged each other on to carry out the mischief already there in embryo. In particular, he would have felt that he was committing a gross breach of the proprieties, not to say the decencies, had he introduced a woman of Susan's origin, history and present status to the wives and sisters of his friends; and, for reasons which it was not necessary even to pretend to conceal from her, he forbade her having anything to do with the kinds of woman who would not have minded, had they known all about her. Thus, her only acquaintances, her only associates, were certain carefully selected men. He asked to dinner or to the theater or to supper at Jack's or Rector's only such men as he could trust. And trustworthy meant physically unattractive. Having small and dwindling belief in the mentality of women, and no belief whatever in mentality as a force in the relations of the sexes, he was satisfied to have about her any man, however clever, provided he was absolutely devoid of physical charm. The friend who came oftenest was Drumley, an editorial writer who had been his chum at college and had got him the place on the _Herald_. Drumley he would have trusted alone with her on a desert island; for several reasons, all of his personal convenience, it pleased him that Susan liked Drumley and was glad of his company, no matter how often he came or how long he stayed. Drumley was an emaciated Kentucky giant with grotesquely sloping shoulders which not all the ingenious padding of his tailor could appreciably mitigate. His spare legs were bowed in the calves. His skin looked rough and tough, like sandpaper and emery board. The thought of touching his face gave one the same sensation as a too deeply cut nail. His neck was thin and long, and he wore a low collar--through that interesting passion of the vain for seeing a defect in themselves as a charm and calling attention to it. The lower part of his sallow face suggested weakness--the weakness so often seen in the faces of professional men, and explaining why they chose passive instead of active careers. His forehead was really fine, but the development of the rest of the cranium above the protuberant little ears was not altogether satisfying to a claim of mental powers. Drumley was a good sort--not so much through positive virtue as through the timidity which too often accounts for goodness, that is, for the meek conformity which passes as goodness. He was an insatiable reader, had incredible stores of knowledge; and as he had a large vocabulary and a ready speech he could dole out of those reservoirs an agreeable treacle of commonplace philosophy or comment--thus he had an ideal equipment for editorial writing. He was absolutely without physical magnetism. The most he could ever expect from any woman was respect; and that woman would have had to be foolish enough not to realize that there is as abysmal a difference between knowledge and mentality as there is between reputation and character. Susan liked him because he knew so much. She had developed still further her innate passion for educating herself. She now wanted to know all about everything. He told her what to read, set her in the way to discovering and acquiring the art of reading--an art he was himself capable of acquiring only in its rudiments--an art the existence of which is entirely unsuspected by most persons who regard themselves and are regarded as readers. He knew the histories and biographies that are most amusing and least shallow and mendacious. He instructed her in the great playwrights and novelists and poets, and gave--as his own--the reasons for their greatness assigned by the world's foremost critical writers. He showed her what scientific books to read--those that do not bore and do not hide the simple fascinating facts about the universe under pretentious, college-professor phraseology. He was a pedant, but his pedantry was disguised, therefore mitigated by his having associated with men of the world instead of with the pale and pompous capons of the student's closet. His favorite topic was beauty and ugliness--and his abhorrence for anyone who was not good to look at. As he talked this subject, his hearers were nervous and embarrassed. He was a drastic cure for physical vanity. If this man could so far deceive himself that he thought himself handsome, who in all the world could be sure he or she was not the victim of the same incredible delusion? It was this hallucination of physical beauty that caused Rod to regard him as the safest of the safe. For it made him pitiful and ridiculous. At first he came only with Spenser. Afterward, Spenser used to send him to dine with Susan and to spend the evenings with her when he himself had to be--or wished to be elsewhere. When she was with Drumley he knew she was not "up to any of her old tricks." Drumley fell in love with her; but, as in his experience the female sex was coldly chaste, he never developed even the slight hope necessary to start in a man's mind the idea of treachery to his friend about a woman. Whenever Drumley heard that a woman other than the brazenly out and out disreputables was "loose" or was inclined that way, he indignantly denied it as a libel upon the empedestaled sex. If proofs beyond dispute were furnished, he raved against the man with all the venom of the unsuccessful hating the successful for their success. He had been sought of women, of course, for he had a comfortable and secure position and money put by. But the serious women who had set snares for him for the sake of a home had not attracted him; as for the better looking and livelier women who had come a-courting with alimony in view, they had unwisely chosen the method of approach that caused him to set them down as nothing but professional loose characters. Thus his high ideal of feminine beauty and his lofty notion of his own deserts, on the one hand, and his reverence for womanly propriety, on the other hand, had kept his charms and his income unshared. Toward the end of Spenser's first year on the _Herald_--it was early summer--he fell into a melancholy so profound and so prolonged that Susan became alarmed. She was used to his having those fits of the blues that are a part of the nervous, morbidly sensitive nature and in the unhealthfulness of an irregular and dissipated life recur at brief intervals. He spent more and more time with her, became as ardent as in their first days together, with an added desperation of passionate clinging that touched her to the depths. She had early learned to ignore his moods, to avoid sympathy which aggravates, and to meet his blues with a vigorous counterirritant of liveliness. After watching the course of this acute attack for more than a month, she decided that at the first opportunity she would try to find out from Drumley what the cause was. Perhaps she could cure him if she were not working in the dark. One June evening Drumley came to take her to dinner at the Casino in Central Park. She hesitated. She still liked Drumley's mind; but latterly he had fallen into the way of gazing furtively, with a repulsive tremulousness of his loose eyelids, at her form and at her ankles--especially at her ankles--especially at her ankles. This furtive debauch gave her a shivery sense of intrusion. She distinctly liked the candid, even the not too coarse, glances of the usual man. But not this shy peeping. However, as there were books she particularly wished to talk about with him, she accepted. It was an excursion of which she was fond. They strolled along Seventh Avenue to the Park, entered and followed the lovely walk, quiet and green and odorous, to the Mall. They sauntered in the fading light up the broad Mall, with its roof of boughs of majestic trees, with its pale blue vistas of well-kept lawns. At the steps leading to the Casino they paused to delight in the profusely blooming wistaria and to gaze away northward into and over what seemed an endless forest with towers and cupolas of castle and fortress and cathedral rising serene and graceful here and there above the sea of green. There was the sound of tinkling fountains, the musical chink-chink of harness chains of elegant equipages; on the Mall hundreds of children were playing furiously, to enjoy to the uttermost the last few moments before being snatched away to bed--and the birds were in the same hysterical state as they got ready for their evening song. The air was saturated with the fresh odors of spring and early summer flowers. Susan, walking beside the homely Drumley, was a charming and stylish figure of girlish womanhood. The year and three months in New York had wrought the same transformations in her that are so noticeable whenever an intelligent and observant woman with taste for the luxuries is dipped in the magic of city life. She had grown, was now perhaps a shade above the medium height for women, looked even taller because of the slenderness of her arms, of her neck, of the lines of her figure. There was a deeper melancholy in her violet-gray eyes. Experience had increased the allure of her wide, beautifully curved mouth. They took a table under the trees, with beds of blooming flowers on either hand. Drumley ordered the sort of dinner she liked, and a bottle of champagne and a bottle of fine burgundy to make his favorite drink--champagne and burgundy, half and half. He was running to poetry that evening--Keats and Swinburne. Finally, after some hesitation, he produced a poem by Dowson--"I ran across it today. It's the only thing of his worth while, I believe--and it's so fine that Swinburne must have been sore when he read it because he hadn't thought to write it himself. Its moral tone is not high, but it's so beautiful, Mrs. Susan, that I'll venture to show it to you. It comes nearer to expressing what men mean by the man sort of constancy than anything I ever read. Listen to this: "I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, But when the feast is finished, and the lamps expire, Then falls thy shadow, Cynara!--the night is thine; And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire; I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion." Susan took the paper, read the four stanzas several times, handed it back to him without a word. "Don't you think it fine?" asked he, a little uneasily--he was always uneasy with a woman when the conversation touched the relations of the sexes--uneasy lest he might say or might have said something to send a shiver through her delicate modesty. "Fine," Susan echoed absently. "And true. . . . I suppose it is the best a woman can expect--to be the one he returns to. And--isn't that enough?" "You are very different from any woman I ever met," said Drumley. "Very different from what you were last fall--wonderfully different. But you were different then, too." "I'd have been a strange sort of person if it weren't so. I've led a different life. I've learned--because I've had to learn." "You've been through a great deal--suffered a great deal for one of your age?" Susan shrugged her shoulders slightly. She had her impulses to confide, but she had yet to meet the person who seriously tempted her to yield to them. Not even Rod; no, least of all Rod. "You are--happy?" "Happy--and more. I'm content." The reply was the truth, as she saw the truth. Perhaps it was also the absolute truth; for when a woman has the best she has ever actually possessed, and when she knows there is nowhere else on earth for her, she is likely to be content. Their destiny of subordination has made philosophers of women. Drumley seemed to be debating how to disclose something he had in mind. But after several glances at the sweet, delicate face of the girl, he gave it over. In the subdued light from the shaded candles on their table, she looked more child-like than he had ever seen. Perhaps her big pale-blue hat and graceful pale-blue summer dress had something to do with it, also. "How old are you?" he asked abruptly. "Nearly nineteen." "I feel like saying, 'So much!'--and also 'So little!' How long have you been married?" "Why all these questions?" demanded she, smiling. He colored with embarrassment. "I didn't mean to be impertinent," said he. "It isn't impertinence--is it?--to ask a woman how long she's been married." But she did not go on to tell him; instead, she pretended to have her attention distracted by a very old man and a very young girl behaving in most lover-like fashion, the girl outdoing the man in enthusiastic determination to convince. She was elegantly and badly dressed in new clothes--and she seemed as new to that kind of clothes as those particular clothes were new to her. After dinner they walked down through the Park by the way they had come; it did not look like the same scene now, with the moonlight upon it, with soft shadows everywhere and in every shadow a pair of lovers. They had nearly reached the entrance when Drumley said: "Let's sit on this bench here. I want to have a serious talk with you." Susan seated herself and waited. He lit a cigar with the deliberation of one who is striving to gain time. The bench happened to be one of those that are divided by iron arms into individual seats. He sat with a compartment between them. The moonbeams struck across his profile as he turned it toward her; they shone full upon her face. He looked, hastily glanced away. With a gruffness as if the evening mist had got into his throat he said: "Let's take another bench." "Why?" objected she. "I like this beautiful light." He rose. "Please let me have my way." And he led her to a bench across which a tree threw a deep shadow; as they sat there, neither could see the other's face except in dimmest outline. After a brief silence he began: "You love Rod--don't you?" She laughed happily. "Above everything on earth?" "Or in heaven." "You'd do anything to have him succeed?" "No one could prevent his succeeding. He's got it in him. It's bound to come out." "So I'd have said--until a year ago--that is, about a year ago." As her face turned quickly toward him, he turned profile to her. "What do you mean?" said she, quickly, almost imperiously. "Yes--I mean _you_," replied he. "You mean you think I'm hindering him?" When Drumley's voice finally came, it was funereally solemn. "You are dragging him down. You are killing his ambition." "You don't understand," she protested with painful expression. "If you did, you wouldn't say that." "You mean because he is not true to you?" "Isn't he?" said she, loyally trying to pretend surprise. "If that's so, you've no right to tell me--you, his friend. If it isn't, you----" "In either case I'd be beneath contempt--unless I knew that you knew already. Oh, I've known a long time that you knew--ever since the night you looked away when he absent-mindedly pulled a woman's veil and gloves out of his pocket. I've watched you since then, and I know." "You are a very dear friend, Mr. Drumley," said she. "But you must not talk of him to me." "I must," he replied. And he hastened to make the self-fooled hypocrite's familiar move to the safety of duty's skirts. "It would be a crime to keep silent." She rose. "I can't listen. It may be your duty to speak. It's my duty to refuse to hear." "He is overwhelmed with debt. He is about to lose his position. It is all because he is degraded--because he feels he is entangled in an intrigue with a woman he is ashamed to love--a woman he has struggled in vain to put out of his heart." Susan, suddenly weak, had seated herself again. From his first words she had been prey to an internal struggle--her heart fighting against understanding things about her relations with Rod, about his feeling toward her, which she had long been contriving to hide from herself. When Drumley began she knew that the end of self-deception was at hand--if she let him speak. But the instant he had spoken, the struggle ended. If he had tried to stop she would have compelled him to go on. "That woman is you," he continued in the same solemn measured way. "Rod will not marry you. He cannot leave you. And you are dragging him down. You are young. You don't know that passionate love is a man's worst enemy. It satisfies his ambition--why struggle when one already has attained the climax of desire? It saps his strength, takes from him the energy without which achievement is impossible. Passion dies poisoned of its own sweets. But passionate love kills--at least, it kills the man. If you did not love him, I'd not be talking to you now. But you do love him. So I say, you are killing him. . . . Don't think he has told me----" "I know he didn't," she interrupted curtly. "He does not whine." She hadn't a doubt of the truth of her loyal defense. And Drumley could not have raised a doubt, even if she had been seeing the expression of his face. His long practice of the modern editorial art of clearness and brevity and compact statement had enabled him to put into those few sentences more than another might have been unable to express in hours of explanation and appeal. And the ideas were not new to her. Rod had often talked them in a general way and she had thought much about them. Until now she had never seen how they applied to Rod and herself. But she was seeing and feeling it now so acutely that if she had tried to speak or to move she could not have done so. After a long pause, Drumley said: "Do you comprehend what I mean?" She was silent--so it was certain that she comprehended. "But you don't believe?. . . He began to borrow money almost immediately on his arrival here last summer. He has been borrowing ever since--from everybody and anybody. He owes now, as nearly as I can find out, upwards of three thousand dollars." Susan made a slight but sharp movement. "You don't believe me?" "Yes. Go on." "He has it in him, I'm confident, to write plays--strong plays. Does he ever write except ephemeral space stuff for the paper?" "No." "And he never will so long as he has you to go home to. He lives beyond his means because he will have you in comfortable surroundings and dressed to stimulate his passion. If he would marry you, it might be a little better--though still he would never amount to anything as long as his love lasted--the kind of love you inspire. But he will never marry you. I learned that from what I know of his ideas and from what I've observed as to your relations--not from anything he ever said about you." If Susan had been of the suspicious temperament, or if she had been a few years older, the manner of this second protest might have set her to thinking how unlike Drumley, the inexpert in matters of love and passion, it was to analyze thus and to form such judgments. And thence she might have gone on to consider that Drumley's speeches sounded strangely like paraphrases of Spenser's eloquent outbursts when he "got going." But she had not a suspicion. Besides, her whole being was concentrated upon the idea Drumley was trying to put into words. She asked: "Why are you telling me?" "Because I love him," replied Drumley with feeling. "We're about the same age, but he's been like my son ever since we struck up a friendship in the first term of Freshman year." "Is that your only reason?" "On my honor." And so firmly did he believe it, he bore her scrutiny as she peered into his face through the dimness. She drew back. "Yes," she said in a low voice, half to herself. "Yes, I believe it is." There was silence for a long time, then she asked quietly: "What do you think I ought to do?" "Leave him--if you love him," replied Drumley. "What else can you do?. . . Stay on and complete his ruin?" "And if I go--what?" "Oh, you can do any one of many things. You can----" "I mean--what about him?" "He will be like a crazy man for a while. He'll make that a fresh excuse for keeping on as he's going now. Then he'll brace up, and I'll be watching over him, and I'll put him to work in the right direction. He can't be saved, he can't even be kept afloat as long as you are with him, or within reach. With you gone out of his life--his strength will return, his self-respect can be roused. I've seen the same thing in other cases again and again. I could tell you any number of stories of----" "He does not care for me?" "In _one_ way, a great deal. But you're like drink, like a drug to him. It is strange that a woman such as you, devoted, single-hearted, utterly loving, should be an influence for bad. But it's true of wives also. The best wives are often the worst. The philosophers are right. A man needs tranquillity at home." "I understand," said she. "I understand--perfectly." And her voice was unemotional, as always when she was so deeply moved that she dared not release anything lest all should be released. She was like a seated statue. The moon had moved so that it shone upon her face. He was astonished by its placid calm. He had expected her to rave and weep, to protest and plead--before denouncing him and bidding him mind his own business. Instead, she was making it clear that after all she did not care about Roderick; probably she was wondering what would become of her, now that her love was ruined. Well, wasn't it natural? Wasn't it altogether to her credit--wasn't it additional proof that she was a fine pure woman? How could she have continued deeply to care for a man scandalously untrue, and drunk much of the time? Certainly, it was in no way her fault that Rod made her the object and the victim of the only kind of so-called love of which he was capable. No doubt one reason he was untrue to her was that she was too pure for his debauched fancy. Thus reasoned Drumley with that mingling of truth and error characteristic of those who speculate about matters of which they have small and unfixed experience. "About yourself," he proceeded. "I have a choice of professions for you--one with a company on the road--on the southern circuit--with good prospects of advancement. I know, from what I have seen of you, and from talks we have had, that you would do well on the stage. But the life might offend your sensibilities. I should hesitate to recommend it to a delicate, fine-fibered woman like you. The other position is a clerkship in a business office in Philadelphia--with an increase as soon as you learn stenography and typewriting. It is respectable. It is sheltered. It doesn't offer anything brilliant. But except the stage and literature, nothing brilliant offers for a woman. Literature is out of the question, I think--certainly for the present. The stage isn't really a place for a woman of lady-like instincts. So I should recommend the office position." She remained silent. "While my main purpose in talking to you," he continued, "was to try to save him, I can honestly say that it was hardly less my intention to save you. But for that, I'd not have had the courage to speak. He is on the way down. He's dragging you with him. What future have you with him? You would go on down and down, as low as he should sink and lower. You've completely merged yourself in him--which might do very well if you were his wife and a good influence in his life or a mere negation like most wives. But in the circumstances it means ruin to you. Don't you see that?" "What did you say?" "I was talking about you--your future your----" "Oh, I shall do well enough." She rose. "I must be going." Her short, indifferent dismissal of what was his real object in speaking--though he did not permit himself to know it--cut him to the quick. He felt a sickening and to him inexplicable sense of defeat and disgrace. Because he must talk to distract his mind from himself, he began afresh by saying: "You'll think it over?" "I am thinking it over. . . . I wonder that----" With the fingers of one hand she smoothed her glove on the fingers of the other--"I wonder that I didn't think of it long ago. I ought to have thought of it. I ought to have seen." "I can't tell you how I hate to have been the----" "Please don't say any more," she requested in a tone that made it impossible for a man so timid as he to disobey. Neither spoke until they were in Fifty-ninth Street; then he, unable to stand the strain of a silent walk of fifteen blocks, suggested that they take the car down. She assented. In the car the stronger light enabled him to see that she was pale in a way quite different from her usual clear, healthy pallor, that there was an unfamiliar look about her mouth and her eyes--a look of strain, of repression, of resolve. These signs and the contrast of her mute motionlessness with her usual vivacity of speech and expression and gesture made him uneasy. "I'd advise," said he, "that you reflect on it all carefully and consult with me before you do anything--if you think you ought to do anything." She made no reply. At the door of the house he had to reach for her hand, and her answer to his good night was a vague absent echo of the word. "I've only done what I saw was my duty," said he, appealingly. "Yes, I suppose so. I must go in." "And you'll talk with me before you----" The door had closed behind her; she had not known he was speaking. When Spenser came, about two hours later, and turned on the light in their bedroom, she was in the bed, apparently asleep. He stood staring with theatric self-consciousness at himself in the glass for several minutes, then sat down before the bureau and pulled out the third drawer--where he kept collars, ties, handkerchiefs, gloves and a pistol concealed under the handkerchiefs. With the awful solemnity of the youth who takes himself--and the theater--seriously he lifted the pistol, eyed it critically, turning it this way and that as if interested in the reflections of light from the bright cylinder and barrel at different angles. He laid it noiselessly back, covered it over with the handkerchiefs, sat with his fingers resting on the edge of the drawer. Presently he moved uneasily, as a man--on the stage or in its amusing imitation called civilized life among the self-conscious classes--moves when he feels that someone is behind him in a "crucial moment." He slowly turned round. She had shifted her position so that her face was now toward him. But her eyes were closed and her face was tranquil. Still, he hoped she had seen the little episode of the pistol, which he thought fine and impressive. With his arm on the back of the chair and supporting that resolute-looking chin of his, he stared at her face from under his thick eyebrows, so thick that although they were almost as fair as his hair they seemed dark. After a while her eyelids fluttered and lifted to disclose eyes that startled him, so intense, so sleepless were they. "Kiss me," she said, in her usual sweet, tender way--a little shyness, much of passion's sparkle and allure. "Kiss me." "I've often thought," said he, "what would I do if I should go smash, reach the end of my string? Would I kill you before taking myself off? Or would that be cowardly?" She had not a doubt that he meant this melodramatic twaddle. It did not seem twaddle or melodramatic to her--or, for that matter, to him. She clasped him more closely. "What's the matter, dear?" she asked, her head on his breast. "Oh, I've had a row at the _Herald_, and have quit. But I'll get another place tomorrow." "Of course. I wish you'd fix up that play the way Drumley suggested." "Maybe I shall. We'll see." "Anything else wrong?" "Only the same old trouble. I love you too much. Too damn much," he added in a tone not intended for her ears. "Weak fool--that's what I am. Weak fool. I've got _you_, anyhow. Haven't I?" "Yes," she said. "I'd do anything for you--anything." "As long as I keep my eyes on you," said he, half mockingly. "I'm weak, but you're weaker. Aren't you?" "I guess so. I don't know." And she drew a long breath, nestled into his arms, and upon his breast, with her perfumed hair drowsing his senses. He soon slept; when he awoke, toward noon, he did not disturb her. He shaved and bathed and dressed, and was about to go out when she called him. "Oh, I thought you were asleep," said he. "I can't wait for you to get breakfast. I must get a move on." "Still blue?" "No, indeed." But his face was not convincing. "So long, pet." "Aren't you going to kiss me good-by?" He laughed tenderly, yet in bitter self-mockery too. "And waste an hour or so? Not much. What a siren you are!" She put her hand over her face quickly. "Now, perhaps I can risk one kiss." He bent over her; his lips touched her hair. She stretched out her hand, laid it against his cheek. "Dearest," she murmured. "I must go." "Just a minute. No, don't look at me. Turn your face so that I can see your profile--so!" She had turned his head with a hand that gently caressed as it pushed. "I like that view best. Yes, you are strong and brave. You will succeed! No--I'll not keep you a minute." She kissed his hand, rested her head for an instant on his lap as he sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly flung herself to the far side of the bed, with her face toward the wall. "Go to sleep again, lazy!" cried he. "I'll try to be home about dinner-time. See that you behave today! Good lord, how hard it is to leave you! Having you makes nothing else seem worth while. Good-by!" And he was off. She started to a sitting posture, listened to the faint sound of his descending footsteps. She darted to the window, leaned out, watched him until he rounded the corner into Broadway. Then she dropped down with elbows on the window sill and hands pressing her cheeks; she stared unseeingly at the opposite house, at a gilt cage with a canary hopping and chirping within. And once more she thought all the thoughts that had filled her mind in the sleepless hours of that night and morning. Her eyes shifted in color from pure gray to pure violet--back and forth, as emotion or thought dominated her mind. She made herself coffee in the French machine, heated the milk she brought every day from the dairy, drank her _café au lait_ slowly, reading the newspaper advertisements for "help wanted--female"--a habit she had formed when she first came to New York and had never altogether dropped. When she finished her coffee she took the scissors and cut out several of the demands for help. She bathed and dressed. She moved through the routine of life--precisely as we all do, whatever may be in our minds and hearts. She went out, crossed Long Acre and entered the shop of a dealer in women's cast-off clothes. She reappeared in the street presently with a fat, sloppy looking woman in black. She took her to the rooms, offered for sale her entire wardrobe except the dress she had on and one other, the simply trimmed sailor upon her head, the ties on her feet and one pair of boots and a few small articles. After long haggling the woman made a final price--ninety-five dollars for things, most of them almost new, which had cost upwards of seven hundred. Susan accepted the offer; she knew she could do no better. The woman departed, returned with a porter and several huge sweets of wrapping paper. The two made three bundles of the purchases; the money was paid over; they and Susan's wardrobe departed. Next, Susan packed in the traveling bag she had brought from Cincinnati the between seasons dress of brown serge she had withheld, and some such collection of bare necessities as she had taken with her when she left George Warham's. Into the bag she put the pistol from under Spenser's handkerchiefs in the third bureau drawer. When all was ready, she sent for the maid to straighten the rooms. While the maid was at work, she wrote this note: DEAREST--Mr. Drumley will tell you why I have gone. You will find some money under your handkerchiefs in the bureau. When you are on your feet again, I may come--if you want me. It won't be any use for you to look for me. I ought to have gone before, but I was selfish and blind. Good-by, dear love--I wasn't so bad as you always suspected. I was true to you, and for the sake of what you have been to me and done for me I couldn't be so ungrateful as not to go. Don't worry about me. I shall get on. And so will you. It's best for us both. Good-by, dear heart--I was true to you. Good-by. She sealed this note, addressed it, fastened it over the mantel in the sitting-room where they always put notes for each other. And after she had looked in each drawer and in the closet at all his clothing, and had kissed the pillow on which his head had lain, she took her bag and went. She had left for him the ninety-five dollars and also eleven dollars of the money she had in her purse. She took with her two five-dollar bills and a dollar and forty cents in change. The violet waned in her eyes, and in its stead came the gray of thought and action. ********THE END OF VOLUME I******* SUSAN LENOX: HER FALL AND RISE by David Graham Phillips Volume II WITH A PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON 1917 CHAPTER I SUSAN'S impulse was toward the stage. It had become a definite ambition with her, the stronger because Spenser's jealousy and suspicion had forced her to keep it a secret, to pretend to herself that she had no thought but going on indefinitely as his obedient and devoted mistress. The hardiest and best growths are the growths inward--where they have sun and air from without. She had been at the theater several times every week, and had studied the performances at a point of view very different from that of the audience. It was there to be amused; she was there to learn. Spenser and such of his friends as he would let meet her talked plays and acting most of the time. He had forbidden her to have women friends. "Men don't demoralize women; women demoralize each other," was one of his axioms. But such women as she had a bowing acquaintance with were all on the stage--in comic operas or musical farces. She was much alone; that meant many hours every day which could not but be spent by a mind like hers in reading and in thinking. Only those who have observed the difference aloneness makes in mental development, where there is a good mind, can appreciate how rapidly, how broadly, Susan expanded. She read plays more than any other kind of literature. She did not read them casually but was always thinking how they would act. She was soon making in imagination stage scenes out of dramatic chapters in novels as she read. More and more clearly the characters of play and novel took shape and substance before the eyes of her fancy. But the stage was clearly out of the question. While the idea of a stage career had been dominant, she had thought in other directions, also. Every Sunday, indeed almost every day, she found in the newspapers articles on the subject of work for women. "Why do you waste time on that stuff?" said Drumley, when he discovered her taste for it. "Oh, a woman never can tell what may happen," replied she. "She'll never learn anything from those fool articles," answered he. "You ought to hear the people who get them up laughing about them. I see now why they are printed. It's good for circulation, catches the women--even women like you." However, she persisted in reading. But never did she find an article that contained a really practical suggestion--that is, one applying to the case of a woman who had to live on what she made at the start, who was without experience and without a family to help her. All around her had been women who were making their way; but few indeed of them--even of those regarded as successful--were getting along without outside aid of some kind. So when she read or thought or inquired about work for women, she was sometimes amused and oftener made unhappy by the truth as to the conditions, that when a common worker rises it is almost always by the helping hand of a man, and rarely indeed a generous hand--a painful and shameful truth which a society resolved at any cost to think well of itself fiercely conceals from itself and hypocritically lies about. She felt now that there was hope in only one direction--hope of occupation that would enable her to live in physical, moral and mental decency. She must find some employment where she could as decently as might be realize upon her physical assets. The stage would be best--but the stage was impossible, at least for the time. Later on she would try for it; there was in her mind not a doubt of that, for unsuspected of any who knew her there lay, beneath her sweet and gentle exterior, beneath her appearance of having been created especially for love and laughter and sympathy, tenacity of purpose and daring of ambition that were--rarely--hinted at the surface in her moments of abstraction. However, just now the stage was impossible. Spenser would find her immediately. She must go into another part of town, must work at something that touched his life at no point. She had often been told that her figure would be one of her chief assets as a player. And ready-made clothes fitted her with very slight alterations--showing that she had a model figure. The advertisements she had cut out were for cloak models. Within an hour after she left Forty-fourth Street, she found at Jeffries and Jonas, in Broadway a few doors below Houston, a vacancy that had not yet been filled--though as a rule all the help needed was got from the throng of applicants waiting when the store opened. "Come up to my office," said Jeffries, who happened to be near the door as she entered. "We'll see how you shape up. We want something extra--something dainty and catchy." He was a short thick man, with flat feet, a flat face and an almost bald head. In his flat nostrils, in the hollows of his great forward bent ears and on the lobes were bunches of coarse, stiff gray hairs. His eyebrows bristled; his small, sly brown eyes twinkled with good nature and with sensuality. His skin had the pallor that suggests kidney trouble. His words issued from his thick mouth as if he were tasting each beforehand--and liked the flavor. He led Susan into his private office, closed the door, took a tape measure from his desk. "Now, my dear," said he, eyeing her form gluttonously, "we'll size you up--eh? You're exactly the build I like." And under the pretense of taking her measurements, he fumbled and felt, pinched and stroked every part of her person, laughing and chuckling the while. "My, but you are sweet! And so firm! What flesh! Solid--solid! Mighty healthy! You are a good girl--eh?" "I am a married woman." "But you've got no ring." "I've never worn a ring." "Well--well! I believe that is one of the new wrinkles, but I don't approve. I'm an old-fashioned family man. Let me see again. Now, don't mind a poor old man like me, my dear. I've got a wife--the best woman in the world, and I've never been untrue to her. A look over the fence occasionally--but not an inch out of the pasture. Don't stiffen yourself like that. I can't judge, when you do. Not too much hips--neither sides nor back. Fine! Fine! And the thigh slender--yes--quite lovely, my dear. Thick thighs spoil the hang of garments. Yes--yes--a splendid figure. I'll bet the bosom is a corker--fine skin and nice ladylike size. You can have the place." "What does it pay?" she asked. "Ten dollars, to start with. Splendid wages. _I_ started on two fifty. But I forgot--you don't know the business?" "No--nothing about it," was her innocent, honest answer. "Ah--well, then--nine dollars--eh?" Susan hesitated. "You can make quite a neat little bunch on the outside--_you_ can. We cater only to the best trade, and the buyers who come to us are big easy spenders. But I'm supposed to know nothing about that. You'll find out from the other girls." He chuckled. "Oh, it's a nice soft life except for a few weeks along at this part of the year--and again in winter. Well--ten dollars, then." Susan accepted. It was more than she had expected to get; it was less than she could hope to live on in New York in anything approaching the manner a person of any refinement or tastes or customs of comfort regards as merely decent. She must descend again to the tenements, must resume the fight against that physical degradation which sooner or later imposes--upon those _descending_ to it--a degradation of mind and heart deeper, more saturating, more putrefying than any that ever originated from within. Not so long as her figure lasted was she the worse off for not knowing a trade. Jeffries was telling the truth; she would be getting splendid wages, not merely for a beginner but for any woman of the working class. Except in rare occasional instances wages and salaries for women were kept down below the standard of decency by woman's peculiar position--by such conditions as that most women took up work as a temporary makeshift or to piece out a family's earnings, and that almost any woman could supplement--and so many did supplement--their earnings at labor with as large or larger earnings in the stealthy shameful way. Where was there a trade that would bring a girl ten dollars a week at the start? Even if she were a semi-professional, a stenographer and typewriter, it would take expertness and long service to lift her up to such wages. Thanks to her figure--to its chancing to please old Jeffries' taste--she was better off than all but a few working women, than all but a few workingmen. She was of the labor aristocracy; and if she had been one of a family of workers she would have been counted an enviable favorite of fortune. Unfortunately, she was alone unfortunately for herself, not at all from the standpoint of the tenement class she was now joining. Among them she would be a person who could afford the luxuries of life as life reveals itself to the tenements. "Tomorrow morning at seven o'clock," said Jeffries. "You have lost your husband?" "Yes." "I saw you'd had great grief. No insurance, I judge? Well--you will find another--maybe a rich one. No--you'll not have to sleep alone long, my dear." And he patted her on the shoulder, gave her a parting fumble of shoulders and arms. She was able to muster a grateful smile; for she felt a rare kindness of heart under the familiar animalism to which good-looking, well-formed women who go about much unescorted soon grow accustomed. Also, experience had taught her that, as things go with girls of the working class, his treatment was courteous, considerate, chivalrous almost. With men in absolute control of all kinds of work, with women stimulating the sex appetite by openly or covertly using their charms as female to assist them in the cruel struggle for existence--what was to be expected? Her way to the elevator took her along aisles lined with tables, hidden under masses of cloaks, jackets, dresses and materials for making them. They exuded the odors of the factory--faint yet pungent odors that brought up before her visions of huge, badly ventilated rooms, where women aged or ageing swiftly were toiling hour after hour monotonously--spending half of each day in buying the right to eat and sleep unhealthily. The odors--or, rather, the visions they evoked--made her sick at heart. For the moment she came from under the spell of her peculiar trait--her power to do without whimper or vain gesture of revolt the inevitable thing, whatever it was. She paused to steady herself, half leaning against a lofty up-piling of winter cloaks. A girl, young at first glance, not nearly so young thereafter, suddenly appeared before her--a girl whose hair had the sheen of burnished brass and whose soft smooth skin was of that frog-belly whiteness which suggests an inheritance of some bleaching and blistering disease. She had small regular features, eyes that at once suggested looseness, good-natured yet mercenary too. She was dressed in the sleek tight-fitting trying-on robe of the professional model, and her figure was superb in its firm luxuriousness. "Sick?" asked the girl with real kindliness. "No--only dizzy for the moment." "I suppose you've had a hard day." "It might have been easier," Susan replied, attempting a smile. "It's no fun, looking for a job. But you've caught on?" "Yes. He took me." "I made a bet with myself that he would when I saw you go in." The girl laughed agreeably. "He picked you for Gideon." "What department is that?" The girl laughed again, with a cynical squinting of the eyes. "Oh, Gideon's our biggest customer. He buys for the largest house in Chicago." "I'm looking for a place to live," said Susan. "Some place in this part of town." "How much do you want to spend?" "I'm to have ten a week. So I can't afford more than twelve or fourteen a month for rent, can I?" "If you happen to have to live on the ten," was the reply with a sly, merry smile. "It's all I've got." Again the girl laughed, the good-humored mercenary eyes twinkling rakishly. "Well--you can't get much for fourteen a month." "I don't care, so long as it's clean." "Gee, you're reasonable, ain't you?" cried the girl. "Clean! I pay fourteen a week, and all kinds of things come through the cracks from the other apartments. You must be a stranger to little old New York--bugtown, a lady friend of mine calls it. Alone?" "Yes." "Um--" The girl shook her head dubiously. "Rents are mighty steep in New York, and going up all the time. You see, the rich people that own the lands and houses here need a lot of money in their business. You've got either to take a room or part of one in with some tenement family, respectable but noisy and dirty and not at all refined, or else you've got to live in a house where everything goes. You want to live respectable, I judge?" "Yes." "That's the way with me. Do what you please, _I_ say, but for _God's sake_, don't make yourself _common!_ You'll want to be free to have your gentlemen friends come--and at the same time a room you'll not be ashamed for 'em to see on account of dirt and smells and common people around." "I shan't want to see anyone in my room." The young woman winced, then went on with hasty enthusiasm. "I knew you were refined the minute I looked at you. I think you might get a room in the house of a lady friend of mine--Mrs. Tucker, up in Clinton Place near University Place--an elegant neighborhood--that is, the north side of the street. The south side's kind o' low, on account of dagoes having moved in there. They live like vermin--but then all tenement people do." "They've got to," said Susan. "Yes, that's a fact. Ain't it awful? I'll write down the name and address of my lady friend. I'm Miss Mary Hinkle." "My name is Lorna Sackville," said Susan, in response to the expectant look of Miss Hinkle. "My, what a swell name! You've been sick, haven't you?" "No, I'm never sick." "Me too. My mother taught me to stop eating as soon as I felt bad, and not to eat again till I was all right." "I do that, too," said Susan. "Is it good for the health?" "It starves the doctors. You've never worked before?" "Oh, yes--I've worked in a factory." Miss Hinkle looked disappointed. Then she gave Susan a side glance of incredulity. "I'd never, a' thought it. But I can see you weren't brought up to that. I'll write the address." And she went back through the showroom, presently to reappear with a card which she gave Susan. "You'll find Mrs. Tucker a perfect lady--too much a lady to get on. I tell her she'll go to ruin--and she will." Susan thanked Miss Hinkle and departed. A few minutes' walk brought her to the old, high-stooped, brown-stone where Mrs. Tucker lived. The dents, scratches and old paint scales on the door, the dust-streaked windows, the slovenly hang of the imitation lace window curtains proclaimed the cheap middle-class lodging or boarding house of the humblest grade. Respectable undoubtedly; for the fitfully prosperous offenders against laws and morals insist upon better accommodations. Susan's heart sank. She saw that once more she was clinging at the edge of the precipice. And what hope was there that she would get back to firm ground? Certainly not by "honest labor." Back to the tenement! "Yes, I'm on the way back," she said to herself. However, she pulled the loose bell-knob and was admitted to a dingy, dusty hallway by a maid so redolent of stale perspiration that it was noticeable even in the hall's strong saturation of smells of cheap cookery. The parlor furniture was rapidly going to pieces; the chromos and prints hung crazily awry; dust lay thick upon the center table, upon the chimney-piece, upon the picture frames, upon the carving in the rickety old chairs. Only by standing did Susan avoid service as a dust rag. It was typical of the profound discouragement that blights or blasts all but a small area of our modern civilization--a discouragement due in part to ignorance--but not at all to the cause usually assigned--to "natural shiftlessness." It is chiefly due to an unconscious instinctive feeling of the hopelessness of the average lot. While Susan explained to Mrs. Tucker how she had come and what she could afford, she examined her with results far from disagreeable. One glance into that homely wrinkled face was enough to convince anyone of her goodness of heart--and to Susan in those days of aloneness, of uncertainty, of the feeling of hopelessness, goodness of heart seemed the supreme charm. Such a woman as a landlady, and a landlady in New York, was pathetically absurd. Even to still rather simple-minded Susan she seemed an invitation to the swindler, to the sponger with the hard-luck story, to the sinking who clutch about desperately and drag down with them everyone who permits them to get a hold. "I've only got one room," said Mrs. Tucker. "That's not any too nice. I did rather calculate to get five a week for it, but you are the kind I like to have in the house. So if you want it I'll let it to you for fourteen a month. And I do hope you'll pay as steady as you can. There's so many in such hard lines that I have a tough time with my rent. I've got to pay my rent, you know." "I'll go as soon as I can't pay," replied Susan. The landlady's apologetic tone made her sick at heart, as a sensitive human being must ever feel in the presence of a fellow-being doomed to disaster. "Thank you," said Mrs. Tucker gratefully. "I do wish----" She checked herself. "No, I don't mean that. They do the best they can--and I'll botch along somehow. I look at the bright side of things." The incurable optimism of the smile accompanying these words moved Susan, abnormally bruised and tender of heart that morning, almost to tears. A woman with her own way to make, and always looking at the bright side! "How long have you had this house?" "Only five months. My husband died a year ago. I had to give up our little business six months after his death. Such a nice little stationery store, but I couldn't seem to refuse credit or to collect bills. Then I came here. This looks like losing, too. But I'm sure I'll come out all right. The Lord will provide, as the Good Book says. I don't have no trouble keeping the house full. Only they don't seem to pay. You want to see your room?" She and Susan ascended three flights to the top story--to a closet of a room at the back. The walls were newly and brightly papered. The sloping roof of the house made one wall a ceiling also, and in this two small windows were set. The furniture was a tiny bed, white and clean as to its linen, a table, two chairs, a small washstand with a little bowl and a less pitcher, a soap dish and a mug. Along one wall ran a row of hooks. On the floor was an old and incredibly dirty carpet, mitigated by a strip of clean matting which ran from the door, between washstand and bed, to one of the windows. Susan glanced round--a glance was enough to enable her to see all--all that was there, all that the things there implied. Back to the tenement life! She shuddered. "It ain't much," said Mrs. Tucker. "But usually rooms like these rents for five a week." The sun had heated the roof scorching hot; the air of this room, immediately underneath, was like that of a cellar where a furnace is in full blast. But Susan knew she was indeed in luck. "It's clean and nice here," said she to Mrs. Tucker, "and I'm much obliged to you for being so reasonable with me." And to clinch the bargain she then and there paid half a month's rent. "I'll give you the rest when my week at the store's up." "No hurry," said Mrs. Tucker who was handling the money and looking at it with glistening grateful eyes. "Us poor folks oughtn't to be hard on each other--though, Lord knows, if we was, I reckon we'd not be quite so poor. It's them that has the streak of hard in 'em what gets on. But the Bible teaches us that's what to expect in a world of sin. I suppose you want to go now and have your trunk sent?" "This is all I've got," said Susan, indicating her bag on the table. Into Mrs. Tucker's face came a look of terror that made Susan realize in an instant how hard-pressed she must be. It was the kind of look that comes into the eyes of the deer brought down by the dogs when it sees the hunter coming up. "But I've a good place," Susan hastened to say. "I get ten a week. And as I told you before, when I can't pay I'll go right away." "I've lost so much in bad debts," explained the landlady humbly. "I don't seem to see which way to turn." Then she brightened. "It'll all come out for the best. I work hard and I try to do right by everybody." "I'm sure it will," said Susan believingly. Often her confidence in the moral ideals trained into her from childhood had been sorely tried. But never had she permitted herself more than a hasty, ashamed doubt that the only way to get on was to work and to practice the Golden Rule. Everyone who was prosperous attributed his prosperity to the steadfast following of that way; as for those who were not prosperous, they were either lazy or bad-hearted, or would have been even worse off had they been less faithful to the creed that was best policy as well as best for peace of mind and heart. In trying to be as inexpensive to Spenser as she could contrive, and also because of her passion for improving herself, Susan had explored far into the almost unknown art of living, on its shamefully neglected material side. She had cultivated the habit of spending much time about her purchases of every kind--had spent time intelligently in saving money intelligently. She had gone from shop to shop, comparing values and prices. She had studied quality in food and in clothing, and thus she had discovered what enormous sums are wasted through ignorance--wasted by poor even more lavishly than by rich or well-to-do, because the shops where the poor dealt had absolutely no check on their rapacity through the occasional canny customer. She had learned the fundamental truth of the material art of living; only when a good thing happens to be cheap is a cheap thing good. Spenser, cross-examining her as to how she passed the days, found out about this education she was acquiring. It amused him. "A waste of time!" he used to say. "Pay what they ask, and don't bother your head with such petty matters." He might have suspected and accused her of being stingy had not her generosity been about the most obvious and incessant trait of her character. She was now reduced to an income below what life can be decently maintained upon--the life of a city-dweller with normal tastes for cleanliness and healthfulness. She proceeded without delay to put her invaluable education into use. She must fill her mind with the present and with the future. She must not glance back. She must ignore her wounds--their aches, their clamorous throbs. She took off her clothes, as soon as Mrs. Tucker left her alone, brushed them and hung them up, put on the thin wrapper she had brought in her bag. The fierce heat of the little packing-case of a room became less unendurable; also, she was saving the clothes from useless wear. She sat down at the table and with pencil and paper planned her budget. Of the ten dollars a week, three dollars and thirty cents must be subtracted for rent--for shelter. This left six dollars and seventy cents for the other two necessaries, food and clothing--there must be no incidental expenses since there was no money to meet them. She could not afford to provide for carfare on stormy days; a rain coat, overshoes and umbrella, more expensive at the outset, were incomparably cheaper in the long run. Her washing and ironing she would of course do for herself in the evenings and on Sundays. Of the two items which the six dollars and seventy cents must cover, food came first in importance. How little could she live on? That stifling hot room! She was as wet as if she had come undried from a bath. She had thought she could never feel anything but love for the sun of her City of the Sun. But this undreamed-of heat--like the cruel caresses of a too impetuous lover-- How little could she live on? Dividing her total of six dollars and seventy cents by seven, she found that she had ninety-five cents a day. She would soon have to buy clothes, however scrupulous care she might take of those she possessed. It was modest indeed to estimate fifteen dollars for clothes before October. That meant she must save fifteen dollars in the remaining three weeks of June, in July, August and September--in one hundred and ten days. She must save about fifteen cents a day. And out of that she must buy soap and tooth powder, outer and under clothes, perhaps a hat and a pair of shoes. Thus she could spend for food not more than eighty cents a day, as much less as was consistent with buying the best quality--for she had learned by bitter experience the ravages poor quality food makes in health and looks, had learned why girls of the working class go to pieces swiftly after eighteen. She must fight to keep health--sick she did not dare be. She must fight to keep looks--her figure was her income. Eighty cents a day. The outlook was not so gloomy. A cup of cocoa in the morning--made at home of the best cocoa, the kind that did not overheat the blood and disorder the skin--it would cost her less than ten cents. She would carry lunch with her to the store. In the evening she would cook a chop or something of that kind on the gas stove she would buy. Some days she would be able to save twenty or even twenty-five cents toward clothing and the like. Whatever else happened, she was resolved never again to sink to dirt and rags. Never again!--never! She had passed through that experience once without loss of self-respect only because it was by way of education. To go through it again would be yielding ground in the fight--the fight for a destiny worth while which some latent but mighty instinct within her never permitted her to forget. She sat at the table, with the shutters closed against the fiery light of the summer afternoon sun. That hideous unacceptable heat! With eyelids drooped--deep and dark were the circles round them--she listened to the roar of the city, a savage sound like the clamor of a multitude of famished wild beasts. A city like the City of Destruction in "Pilgrim's Progress"--a city where of all the millions, but a few thousands were moving toward or keeping in the sunlight of civilization. The rest, the swarms of the cheap boarding houses, cheap lodging houses, tenements--these myriads were squirming in darkness and squalor, ignorant and never to be less ignorant, ill fed and never to be better fed, clothed in pitiful absurd rags or shoddy vulgar attempts at finery, and never to be better clothed. She would not be of those! She would struggle on, would sink only to mount. She would work; she would try to do as nearly right as she could. And in the end she must triumph. She would get at least a good part of what her soul craved, of what her mind craved, of what her heart craved. The heat of this tenement room! The heat to which poverty was exposed naked and bound! Would not anyone be justified in doing anything--yes, _anything_--to escape from this fiend? CHAPTER II ELLEN, the maid, slept across the hall from Susan, in a closet so dirty that no one could have risked in it any article of clothing with the least pretension to cleanness. It was no better, no worse than the lodgings of more than two hundred thousand New Yorkers. Its one narrow opening, beside the door, gave upon a shaft whose odors were so foul that she kept the window closed, preferring heat like the inside of a steaming pan to the only available "outside air." This in a civilized city where hundreds of dogs with jeweled collars slept in luxurious rooms on downiest beds and had servants to wait upon them! The morning after Susan's coming, Ellen woke her, as they had arranged, at a quarter before five. The night before, Susan had brought up from the basement a large bucket of water; for she had made up her mind, to take a bath every day, at least until the cold weather set in and rendered such a luxury impossible. With this water and what she had in her little pitcher, Susan contrived to freshen herself up. She had bought a gas stove and some indispensable utensils for three dollars and seventeen cents in a Fourteenth Street store, a pound of cocoa for seventy cents and ten cents' worth of rolls--three rolls, well baked, of first quality flour and with about as good butter and other things put into the dough as one can expect in bread not made at home. These purchases had reduced her cash to forty-three cents--and she ought to buy without delay a clock with an alarm attachment. And pay day--Saturday--was two days away. She made a cup of cocoa, drank it slowly, eating one of the rolls--all in the same methodical way like a machine that continues to revolve after the power has been shut off. It was then, even more than during her first evening alone, even more than when she from time to time startled out of troubled sleep--it was then, as she forced down her lonely breakfast, that she most missed Rod. When she had finished, she completed her toilet. The final glance at herself in the little mirror was depressing. She looked fresh for her new surroundings and for her new class. But in comparison with what she usually looked, already there was a distinct, an ominous falling off. "I'm glad Rod never saw me looking like this," she said aloud drearily. Taking a roll for lunch, she issued forth at half-past six. The hour and three-quarters she had allowed for dressing and breakfasting had been none too much. In the coolness and comparative quiet she went down University Place and across Washington Square under the old trees, all alive with song and breeze and flashes of early morning light. She was soon in Broadway's deep canyon, was drifting absently along in the stream of cross, mussy-looking workers pushing southward. Her heart ached, her brain throbbed. It was horrible, this loneliness; and every one of the wounds where she had severed the ties with Spenser was bleeding. She was astonished to find herself before the building whose upper floors were occupied by Jeffries and Jonas. How had she got there? Where had she crossed Broadway? "Good morning, Miss Sackville." It was Miss Hinkle, just arriving. Her eyes were heavy, and there were the criss-cross lines under them that tell a story to the expert in the different effects of different kinds of dissipation. Miss Hinkle was showing her age--and she was "no spring chicken." Susan returned her greeting, gazing at her with the dazed eyes and puzzled smile of an awakening sleeper. "I'll show you the ropes," said Miss Hinkle, as they climbed the two flights of stairs. "You'll find the job dead easy. They're mighty nice people to work for, Mr. Jeffries especially. Not easy fruit, of course, but nice for people that have got on. You didn't sleep well?" "Yes--I think so." "I didn't have a chance to drop round last night. I was out with one of the buyers. How do you like Mrs. Tucker?" "She's very good, isn't she?" "She'll never get along. She works hard, too--but not for herself. In this world you have to look out for Number One. I had a swell dinner last night. Lobster--I love lobster--and elegant champagne--up to Murray's--such a refined place--all fountains and mirrors--really quite artistic. And my gentleman friend was so nice and respectful. You know, we have to go out with the buyers when they ask us. It helps the house sell goods. And we have to be careful not to offend them." Miss Hinkle's tone in the last remark was so significant that Susan looked at her--and, looking, understood. "Sometimes," pursued Miss Hinkle, eyes carefully averted, "sometimes a new girl goes out with an important customer and he gets fresh and she kicks and complains to Mr. Jeffries--or Mr. Jonas--or Mr. Ratney, the head man. They always sympathize with her--but--well, I've noticed that somehow she soon loses her job." "What do you do when--when a customer annoys you?" "I!" Miss Hinkle laughed with some embarrassment. "Oh, I do the best I can." A swift glance of the cynical, laughing, "fast" eyes at Susan and away. "The best I can--for the house--and for myself. . . . I talk to you because I know you're a lady and because I don't want to see you thrown down. A woman that's living quietly at home--like a lady--she can be squeamish. But out in the world a woman can't afford to be--no, nor a man, neither. You don't find this set down in the books, and they don't preach it in the churches--leastways they didn't when I used to go to church. But it's true, all the same." They were a few minutes early; so Miss Hinkle continued the conversation while they waited for the opening of the room where Susan would be outfitted for her work. "I called you Miss Sackville," said she, "but you've been married--haven't you?" "Yes." "I can always tell--or at least I can see whether a woman's had experience or not. Well, I've never been regularly married, and I don't expect to, unless something pretty good offers. Think I'd marry one of these rotten little clerks?" Miss Hinkle answered her own question with a scornful sniff. "They can hardly make a living for themselves. And a man who amounts to anything, he wants a refined lady to help him on up, not a working girl. Of course, there're exceptions. But as a rule a girl in our position either has to stay single or marry beneath her--marry some mechanic or such like. Well, I ain't so lazy, or so crazy about being supported, that I'd sink to be cook and slop-carrier--and worse--for a carpenter or a bricklayer. Going out with the buyers--the gentlemanly ones--has spoiled my taste. I can't stand a coarse man--coarse dress and hands and manners. Can you?" Susan turned hastily away, so that her face was hidden from Miss Hinkle. "I'll bet you wasn't married to a coarse man." "I'd rather not talk about myself," said Susan with an effort. "It's not pleasant." Her manner of checking Miss Hinkle's friendly curiosity did not give offense; it excited the experienced working woman's sympathy. She went on: "Well, I feel sorry for any woman that has to work. Of course most women do--and at worse than anything in the stores and factories. As between being a drudge to some dirty common laborer like most women are, and working in a factory even, give me the factory. Yes, give me a job as a pot slinger even, low as that is. Oh, I _hate_ working people! I love refinement. Up to Murray's last night I sat there, eating my lobster and drinking my wine, and I pretended I was a lady--and, my, how happy I was!" The stockroom now opened. Susan, with the help of Miss Hinkle and the stock keeper, dressed in one of the tight-fitting satin slips that revealed every curve and line of her form, made every motion however slight, every breath she drew, a gesture of sensuousness. As she looked at herself in a long glass in one of the show-parlors, her face did not reflect the admiration frankly displayed upon the faces of the two other women. That satin slip seemed to have a moral quality, an immoral character. It made her feel naked--no, as if she were naked and being peeped at through a crack or keyhole. "You'll soon get used to it," Miss Hinkle assured her. "And you'll learn to show off the dresses and cloaks to the best advantage." She laughed her insinuating little laugh again, amused, cynical, reckless. "You know, the buyers are men. Gee, what awful jay things we work off on them, sometimes! They can't see the dress for the figure. And you've got such a refined figure, Miss Sackville--the kind I'd be crazy about if I was a man. But I must say----" here she eyed herself in the glass complacently--"most men prefer a figure like mine. Don't they, Miss Simmons?" The stock keeper shook her fat shoulders in a gesture of indifferent disdain. "They take whatever's handiest--that's _my_ experience." About half-past nine the first customer appeared--Mr. Gideon, it happened to be. He was making the rounds of the big wholesale houses in search of stock for the huge Chicago department store that paid him fifteen thousand a year and expenses. He had been contemptuous of the offerings of Jeffries and Jonas for the winter season, had praised with enthusiasm the models of their principal rival, Icklemeier, Schwartz and Company. They were undecided whether he was really thinking of deserting them or was feeling for lower prices. Mr. Jeffries bustled into the room where Susan stood waiting; his flat face quivered with excitement. "Gid's come!" he said in a hoarse whisper. "Everybody get busy. We'll try Miss Sackville on him." And he himself assisted while they tricked out Susan in an afternoon costume of pale gray, putting on her head a big pale gray hat with harmonizing feathers. The model was offered in all colors and also in a modified form that permitted its use for either afternoon or evening. Susan had received her instructions, so when she was dressed, she was ready to sweep into Gideon's presence with languid majesty. Jeffries' eyes glistened as he noted her walk. "She looks as if she really was a lady!" exclaimed he. "I wish I could make my daughters move around on their trotters like that." Gideon was enthroned in an easy chair, smoking a cigar. He was a spare man of perhaps forty-five, with no intention of abandoning the pretensions to youth for many a year. In dress he was as spick and span as a tailor at the trade's annual convention. But he had evidently been "going some" for several days; the sour, worn, haggard face rising above his elegantly fitting collar suggested a moth-eaten jaguar that has been for weeks on short rations or none. "What's the matter?" he snapped, as the door began to open. "I don't like to be kept waiting." In swept Susan; and Jeffries, rubbing his thick hands, said fawningly, "But I think, Mr. Gideon, you'll say it was worth waiting for." Gideon's angry, arrogant eyes softened at first glimpse of Susan. "Um!" he grunted, some such sound as the jaguar aforesaid would make when the first chunk of food hurtled through the bars and landed on his paws. He sat with cigar poised between his long white fingers while Susan walked up and down before him, displaying the dress at all angles, Jeffries expatiating upon it the while. "Don't talk so damn much, Jeff!" he commanded with the insolence of a customer containing possibilities of large profit. "I judge for myself. I'm not a damn fool." "I should say not," cried Jeffries, laughing the merchant's laugh for a customer's pleasantry. "But I can't help talking about it, Gid, it's so lovely!" Jeffries' shrewd eyes leaped for joy when Gideon got up from his chair and, under pretense of examining the garment, investigated Susan's figure. As his gentle, insinuating hands traveled over her, his eyes sought hers. "Excuse me," said Jeffries. "I'll see that they get the other things ready." And out he went, winking at Mary Hinkle to follow him--an unnecessary gesture as she was already on her way to the door. Gideon understood as well as did they why they left. "I don't think I've seen you before, my dear," said he to Susan. "I came only this morning," replied she. "I like to know everybody I deal with. We must get better acquainted. You've got the best figure in the business--the very best." "Thank you," said Susan with a grave, distant smile. "Got a date for dinner tonight?" inquired he; and, assuming that everything would yield precedence to him, he did not wait for a reply, but went on, "Tell me your address. I'll send a cab for you at seven o'clock." "Thank you," said Susan, "but I can't go." Gideon smiled. "Oh, don't be shy. Of course you'll go. Ask Jeffries. He'll tell you it's all right." "There are reasons why I'd rather not be seen in the restaurants." "That's even better. I'll come in the cab myself and we'll go to a quiet place." His eyes smiled insinuatingly at her. Now that she looked at him more carefully he was unusually attractive for a man of his type--had strength and intelligence in his features, had a suggestion of mastery, of one used to obedience, in his voice. His teeth were even and sound, his lips firm yet not too thin. "Come," said he persuasively. "I'll not eat you up--" with a gay and gracious smile--"at least I'll try not to." Susan remembered what Miss Hinkle had told her. She saw that she must either accept the invitation or give up her position. She said: "Very well," and gave him her address. Back came Jeffries and Miss Hinkle carrying the first of the wraps. Gideon waved them away. "You've shown 'em to me before," said he. "I don't want to see 'em again. Give me the evening gowns." Susan withdrew, soon to appear in a dress that left her arms and neck bare. Gideon could not get enough of this. Jeffries kept her walking up and down until she was ready to drop with weariness of the monotony, of the distasteful play of Gideon's fiery glance upon her arms and shoulders and throat. Gideon tried to draw her into conversation, but she would--indeed could--go no further than direct answers to his direct questions. "Never mind," said he to her in an undertone. "I'll cheer you up this evening. I think I know how to order a dinner." Her instant conquest of the difficult and valuable Gideon so elated Jeffries that he piled the work on her. He used her with every important buyer who came that day. The temperature was up in the high nineties, the hot moist air stood stagnant as a barnyard pool; the winter models were cruelly hot and heavy. All day long, with a pause of half an hour to eat her roll and drink a glass of water, Susan walked up and down the show parlors weighted with dresses and cloaks, furs for arctic weather. The other girls, even those doing almost nothing, were all but prostrated. It was little short of intolerable, this struggle to gain the "honest, self-respecting living by honest work" that there was so much talk about. Toward five o'clock her nerves abruptly and completely gave way, and she fainted--for the first time in her life. At once the whole establishment was in an uproar. Jeffries cursed himself loudly for his shortsightedness, for his overestimating her young strength. "She'll look like hell this evening," he wailed, wringing his hands like a distracted peasant woman. "Maybe she won't be able to go out at all." She soon came round. They brought her whiskey, and afterward tea and sandwiches. And with the power of quick recuperation that is the most fascinating miracle of healthy youth, she not only showed no sign of her breakdown but looked much better. And she felt better. We shall some day understand why it is that if a severe physical blow follows upon a mental blow, recovery from the physical blow is always accompanied by a relief of the mental strain. Susan came out of her fit of faintness and exhaustion with a different point of view--as if time had been long at work softening her, grief. Spenser seemed part of the present no longer, but of the past--a past far more remote than yesterday. Mary Hinkle sat with her as she drank the tea. "Did you make a date with Gid?" inquired she. Her tone let Susan know that the question had been prompted by Jeffries. "He asked me to dine with him, and I said I would." "Have you got a nice dress--dinner dress, I mean?" "The linen one I'm wearing is all. My other dress is for cooler weather." "Then I'll give you one out of stock--I mean I'll borrow one for you. This dinner's a house affair, you know--to get Gid's order. It'll be worth thousands to them." "There wouldn't be anything to fit me on such short notice," said Susan, casting about for an excuse for not wearing borrowed finery. "Why, you've got a model figure. I'll pick you out a white dress--and a black and white hat. I know 'em all, and I know one that'll make you look simply lovely." Susan did not protest. She was profoundly indifferent to what happened to her. Life seemed a show in which she had no part, and at which she sat a listless spectator. A few minutes, and in puffed Jeffries, solicitous as a fussy old bird with a new family. "You're a lot better, ain't you?" cried he, before he had looked at her. "Oh, yes, you'll be all right. And you'll have a lovely time with Mr. Gideon. He's a perfect gentleman--knows how to treat a lady. . . . The minute I laid eyes on you I said to myself, said I, 'Jeffries, she's a mascot.' And you are, my dear. You'll get us the order. But you mustn't talk business with him, you understand?" "Yes," said Susan, wearily. "He's a gentleman, you know, and it don't do to mix business and social pleasures. You string him along quiet and ladylike and elegant, as if there wasn't any such things as cloaks or dresses in the world. He'll understand all right. . . . If you land the order, my dear, I'll see that you get a nice present. A nice dress--the one we're going to lend you--if he gives us a slice. The dress and twenty-five in cash, if he gives us all. How's that?" "Thank you," said Susan. "I'll do my best." "You'll land it. You'll land it. I feel as if we had it with his O. K. on it." Susan shivered. "Don't--don't count on me too much," she said hesitatingly. "I'm not in very good spirits, I'm sorry to say." "A little pressed for money?" Jeffries hesitated, made an effort, blurted out what was for him, the business man, a giddy generosity. "On your way out, stop at the cashier's. He'll give you this week's pay in advance." Jeffries hesitated, decided against dangerous liberality. "Not ten, you understand, but say six. You see, you won't have been with us a full week." And he hurried away, frightened by his prodigality, by these hysterical impulses that were rushing him far from the course of sound business sense. "As Jones says, I'm a generous old fool," he muttered. "My soft heart'll ruin me yet." Jeffries sent Mary Hinkle home with Susan to carry the dress and hat, to help her make a toilet and to "start her off right." In the hour before they left the store there was offered a typical illustration of why and how "business" is able to suspend the normal moral sense and to substitute for it a highly ingenious counterfeit of supreme moral obligation to it. The hysterical Jeffries had infected the entire personnel with his excitement, with the sense that a great battle was impending and that the cause of the house, which was the cause of everyone who drew pay from it, had been intrusted to the young recruit with the fascinating figure and the sweet, sad face. And Susan's sensitive nature was soon vibrating in response to this feeling. It terrified her that she, the inexperienced, had such grave responsibility. It made her heart heavy to think of probable failure, when the house had been so good to her, had taken her in, had given her unusual wages, had made it possible for her to get a start in life, had intrusted to her its cause, its chance to retrieve a bad season and to protect its employees instead of discharging a lot of them. "Have you got long white gloves?" asked Mary Hinkle, as they walked up Broadway, she carrying the dress and Susan the hat box. "Only a few pairs of short ones." "You must have long white gloves--and a pair of white stockings." "I can't afford them." "Oh, Jeffries told me to ask you--and to go to work and buy them if you hadn't." They stopped at Wanamaker's. Susan was about to pay, when Mary stopped her. "If you pay," said she, "maybe you'll get your money back from the house, and maybe you won't. If I pay, they'll not make a kick on giving it back to me." The dress Mary had selected was a simple white batiste, cut out at the neck prettily, and with the elbow sleeves that were then the fashion. "Your arms and throat are lovely," said Mary. "And your hands are mighty nice, too--that's why I'm sure you've never been a real working girl--leastways, not for a long time. When you get to the restaurant and draw off your gloves in a slow, careless, ladylike kind of way, and put your elbows on the table--my, how he will take on!" Mary looked at her with an intense but not at all malignant envy. "If you don't land high, it'll be because you're a fool. And you ain't that." "I'm afraid I am," replied Susan. "Yes, I guess I'm what's called a fool--what probably is a fool." "You want to look out then," warned Miss Hinkle. "You want to go to work and get over that. Beauty don't count, unless a girl's got shrewdness. The streets are full of beauties sellin' out for a bare living. They thought they couldn't help winning, and they got left, and the plain girls who had to hustle and manage have passed them. Go to Del's or Rector's or the Waldorf or the Madrid or any of those high-toned places, and see the women with the swell clothes and jewelry! The married ones, and the other kind, both. Are they raving tearing beauties? Not often. . . . The trouble with me is I've been too good-hearted and too soft about being flattered. I was too good looking, and a small easy living came too easy. You--I'd say you were--that you had brains but were shy about using them. What's the good of having them? Might as well be a boob. Then, too, you've got to go to work and look out about being too refined. The refined, nice ones goes the lowest--if they get pushed--and this is a pushing world. You'll get pushed just as far as you'll let 'em. Take it from me. I've been down the line." Susan's low spirits sank lower. These disagreeable truths--for observation and experience made her fear they were truths--filled her with despondency. What was the matter with life? As between the morality she had been taught and the practical morality of this world upon which she had been cast, which was the right? How "take hold"? How avert the impending disaster? What of the "good" should--_must_--she throw away? What should--_must_--she cling to? Mary Hinkle was shocked by the poor little room. "This is no place for a lady!" cried she. "But it won't last long--not after tonight, if you play your cards halfway right." "I'm very well satisfied," said Susan. "If I can only keep this!" She felt no interest in the toilet until the dress and hat were unpacked and laid out upon the bed. At sight of them her eyes became a keen and lively gray--never violet for that kind of emotion--and there surged up the love of finery that dwells in every normal woman--and in every normal man--that is put there by a heredity dating back through the ages to the very beginning of conscious life--and does not leave them until life gives up the battle and prepares to vacate before death. Ellen, the maid, passing the door, saw and entered to add her ecstatic exclamations to the excitement. Down she ran to bring Mrs. Tucker, who no sooner beheld the glory displayed upon the humble bed than she too was in a turmoil. Susan dressed with the aid of three maids as interested and eager as ever robed a queen for coronation. Ellen brought hot water and a larger bowl. Mrs. Tucker wished to lend a highly scented toilet soap she used when she put on gala attire; but Susan insisted upon her own plain soap. They all helped her bathe; they helped her select the best underclothes from her small store. Susan would put on her own stockings; but Ellen got one foot into one of the slippers and Mrs. Tucker looked after the other foot. "Ain't they lovely?" said Ellen to Mrs. Tucker, as they knelt together at their task. "I never see such feet. Not a lump on 'em, but like feet in a picture." "It takes a mighty good leg to look good in a white stocking," observed Mary. "But yours is so nice and long and slim that they'd stand most anything." Mrs. Tucker and Ellen stood by with no interference save suggestion and comment, while Mary, who at one time worked for a hairdresser, did Susan's thick dark hair. Susan would permit no elaborations, much to Miss Hinkle's regret. But the three agreed that she was right when the simple sweep of the vital blue-black hair was finished in a loose and graceful knot at the back, and Susan's small, healthily pallid face looked its loveliest, with the violet-gray eyes soft and sweet and serious. Mrs. Tucker brought the hat from the bed, and Susan put it on--a large black straw of a most becoming shape with two pure white plumes curling round the crown and a third, not so long, rising gracefully from the big buckle where the three plumes met. And now came the putting on of the dress. With as much care as if they were handling a rare and fragile vase, Mary and Mrs. Tucker held the dress for Susan to step into it. Ellen kept her petticoat in place while the other two escorted the dress up Susan's form. Then the three worked together at hooking and smoothing. Susan washed her hands again, refused to let Mrs. Tucker run and bring powder, produced from a drawer some prepared chalk and with it safeguarded her nose against shine; she tucked the powder rag into her stocking. Last of all the gloves went on and a small handkerchief was thrust into the palm of the left glove. "How do I look?" asked Susan. "Lovely"--"Fine"--"Just grand," exclaimed the three maids. "I feel awfully dressed up," said she. "And it's so hot!" "You must go right downstairs where it's cool and you won't get wilted," cried Mrs. Tucker. "Hold your skirts close on the way. The steps and walls ain't none too clean." In the bathroom downstairs there was a long mirror built into the wall, a relic of the old house's long departed youth of grandeur. As the tenant--Mr. Jessop--was out, Mrs. Tucker led the way into it. There Susan had the first satisfactory look at herself. She knew she was a pretty woman; she would have been weak-minded had she not known it. But she was amazed at herself. A touch here and there, a sinuous shifting of the body within the garments, and the suggestion of "dressed up" vanished before the reflected eyes of her agitated assistants, who did not know what had happened but only saw the results. She hardly knew the tall beautiful woman of fashion gazing at her from the mirror. Could it be that this was her hair?--these eyes hers--and the mouth and nose and the skin? Was this long slender figure her very own? What an astounding difference clothes did make! Never before had Susan worn anything nearly so fine. "This is the way I ought to look all the time," thought she. "And this is the way I _will_ look!" Only better--much better. Already her true eye was seeing the defects, the chances for improvement--how the hat could be re-bent and re-trimmed to adapt it to her features, how the dress could be altered to make it more tasteful, more effective in subtly attracting attention to her figure. "How much do you suppose the dress cost, Miss Hinkle?" asked Ellen--the question Mrs. Tucker had been dying to put but had refrained from putting lest it should sound unrefined. "It costs ninety wholesale," said Miss Hinkle. "That'd mean a hundred and twenty-five--a hundred and fifty, maybe if you was to try to buy it in a department store. And the hat--well, Lichtenstein'd ask fifty or sixty for it and never turn a hair." "Gosh--ee?" exclaimed Ellen. "Did you ever hear the like?" "I'm not surprised," said Mrs. Tucker, who in fact was flabbergasted. "Well--it's worth the money to them that can afford to buy it. The good Lord put everything on earth to be used, I reckon. And Miss Sackville is the build for things like that. Now it'd be foolish on me, with a stomach and sitter that won't let no skirt hang fit to look at." The bell rang. The excitement died from Susan's face, leaving it pale and cold. A wave of nausea swept through her. Ellen peeped out, Mrs. Tucker and Miss Hinkle listening with anxious faces. "It's him!" whispered Ellen, "and there's a taxi, too." It was decided that Ellen should go to the door, that as she opened it Susan should come carelessly from the back room and advance along the hall. And this program was carried out with the result that as Gideon said, "Is Miss Sackville here?" Miss Sackville appeared before his widening, wondering, admiring eyes. He was dressed in the extreme of fashion and costliness in good taste; while it would have been impossible for him to look distinguished, he did look what he was--a prosperous business man with prospects. He came perfumed and rustling. But he felt completely outclassed--until he reminded himself that for all her brave show of fashionable lady she was only a model while he was a fifteen-thousand-a-year man on the way to a partnership. "Don't you think we might dine on the veranda at Sherry's?" suggested he. "It'd be cool there." At sight of him she had nerved herself, had keyed herself up toward recklessness. She was in for it. She would put it through. No futile cowardly shrinking and whimpering! Why not try to get whatever pleasure there was a chance for? But--Sherry's--was it safe? Yes, almost any of the Fifth Avenue places--except the Waldorf, possibly--was safe enough. The circuit of Spenser and his friends lay in the more Bohemian Broadway district. He had taken her to Sherry's only once, to see as part of a New York education the Sunday night crowd of fashionable people. "If you like," said she. Gideon beamed. He would be able to show off his prize! As they drove away Susan glanced at the front parlor windows, saw the curtains agitated, felt the three friendly, excited faces palpitating. She leaned from the cab window, waved her hand, smiled. The three faces instantly appeared and immediately hid again lest Gideon should see. But Gideon was too busy planning conversation. He knew Miss Sackville was "as common as the rest of 'em--and an old hand at the business, no doubt." But he simply could not abruptly break through the barrier; he must squirm through gradually. "That's a swell outfit you've got on," he began. "Yes," replied Susan with her usual candor. "Miss Hinkle borrowed it out of the stock for me to wear." Gideon was confused. He knew how she had got the hat and dress, but he expected her to make a pretense. He couldn't understand her not doing it. Such candor--any kind of candor--wasn't in the game of men and women as women had played it in his experience. The women--all sorts of women--lied and faked at their business just as men did in the business of buying and selling goods. And her voice--and her way of speaking--they made him feel more than ever out of his class. He must get something to drink as soon as it could be served; that would put him at his ease. Yes--a drink--that would set him up again. And a drink for her--that would bring her down from this queer new kind of high horse. "I guess she must be a top notcher--the real thing, come down in the world--and not out of the near silks. But she'll be all right after a drink. One drink of liquor makes the whole world kin." That last thought reminded him of his own cleverness and he attacked the situation afresh. But the conversation as they drove up the avenue was on the whole constrained and intermittent--chiefly about the weather. Susan was observing--and feeling--and enjoying. Up bubbled her young spirits perpetually renewed by her healthy, vital youth of body. She was seeing her beloved City of the Sun again. As they turned out of the avenue for Sherry's main entrance Susan realized that she was in Forty-fourth Street. The street where she and Spenser had lived!--had lived only yesterday. No--not yesterday--impossible! Her eyes closed and she leaned back in the cab. Gideon was waiting to help her alight. He saw that something was wrong; it stood out obviously in her ghastly face. He feared the carriage men round the entrance would "catch on" to the fact that he was escorting a girl so unused to swell surroundings that she was ready to faint with fright. "Don't be foolish," he said sharply. Susan revived herself, descended, and with head bent low and trembling body entered the restaurant. In the agitation of getting a table and settling at it Gideon forgot for the moment her sickly pallor. He began to order at once, not consulting her--for he prided himself on his knowledge of cookery and assumed that she knew nothing about it. "Have a cocktail?" asked he. "Yes, of course you will. You need it bad and you need it quick." She said she preferred sherry. She had intended to drink nothing, but she must have aid in conquering her faintness and overwhelming depression. Gideon took a dry martini; ordered a second for himself when the first came, and had them both down before she finished her sherry. "I've ordered champagne," said he. "I suppose you like sweet champagne. Most ladies do, but I can't stand seeing it served even." "No--I like it very dry," said Susan. Gideon glinted his eyes gayly at her, showed his white jaguar teeth. "So you're acquainted with fizz, are you?" He was feeling his absurd notion of inequality in her favor dissipate as the fumes of the cocktails rose straight and strong from his empty stomach to his brain. "Do you know, I've a sort of feeling that we're going to like each other a lot. I think we make a handsome couple--eh--what's your first name?" "Lorna." "Lorna, then. My name's Ed, but everybody calls me Gid." As soon as the melon was served, he ordered the champagne opened. "To our better acquaintance," said he, lifting his glass toward her. "Thank you," said she, in a suffocated voice, touching her glass to her lips. He was too polite to speak, even in banter, of what he thought was the real cause of her politeness and silence. But he must end this state of overwhelmedness at grand surroundings. Said he: "You're kind o' shy, aren't you, Lorna? Or is that your game?" "I don't know. You've had a very interesting life, haven't you? Won't you tell me about it?" "Oh--just ordinary," replied he, with a proper show of modesty. And straightway, as Susan had hoped, he launched into a minute account of himself--the familiar story of the energetic, aggressive man twisting and kicking his way up from two or three dollars a week. Susan seemed interested, but her mind refused to occupy itself with a narrative so commonplace. After Rod and his friends this boastful business man was dull and tedious. Whenever he laughed at an account of his superior craft--how he had bluffed this man, how he had euchered that one--she smiled. And so in one more case the common masculine delusion that women listen to them on the subject of themselves, with interest and admiration as profound as their own, was not impaired. "But," he wound up, "I've stayed plain Ed Gideon. I never have let prosperity swell _my_ head. And anyone that knows me'll tell you I'm a regular fool for generosity with those that come at me right. . . . I've always been a favorite with the ladies." As he was pausing for comment from her, she said, "I can believe it." The word "generosity" kept echoing in her mind. Generosity--generosity. How much talk there was about it! Everyone was forever praising himself for his generosity, was reciting acts of the most obvious selfishness in proof. Was there any such thing in the whole world as real generosity? "They like a generous man," pursued Gid. "I'm tight in business--I can see a dollar as far as the next man and chase it as hard and grab it as tight. But when it comes to the ladies, why, I'm open-handed. If they treat me right, I treat them right." Then, fearing that he had tactlessly raised a doubt of his invincibility, he hastily added, "But they always do treat me right." While he had been talking on and on, Susan had been appealing to the champagne to help her quiet her aching heart. She resolutely set her thoughts to wandering among the couples at the other tables in that subdued softening light--the beautifully dressed women listening to their male companions with close attention--were they too being bored by such trash by way of talk? Were they too simply listening because it is the man who pays, because it is the man who must be conciliated and put in a good humor with himself, if dinners and dresses and jewels are to be bought? That tenement attic--that hot moist workroom--poverty--privation--"honest work's" dread rewards---- "Now, what kind of a man would you say I was?" Gideon was inquiring. "How do you mean?" replied Susan, with the dexterity at vagueness that habitually self-veiling people acquire as an instinct. "Why, as a man. How do I compare with the other men you've known?" And he "shot" his cuffs with a gesture of careless elegance that his cuff links might assist in the picture of the "swell dresser" he felt he was posing. "Oh--you--you're--very different." "I _am_ different," swelled Gideon. "You see, it's this way----" And he was off again into another eulogy of himself; it carried them through the dinner and two quarts of champagne. He was much annoyed that she did not take advantage of the pointed opportunity he gave her to note the total of the bill; he was even uncertain whether she had noted that he gave the waiter a dollar. He rustled and snapped it before laying it upon the tray, but her eyes looked vague. "Well," said he, after a comfortable pull at an expensive-looking cigar, "sixteen seventy-five is quite a lively little peel-off for a dinner for only two. But it was worth it, don't you think?" "It was a splendid dinner," said Susan truthfully. Gideon beamed in intoxicated good humor. "I knew you'd like it. Nothing pleases me better than to take a nice girl who isn't as well off as I am out and blow her off to a crackerjack dinner. Now, you may have thought a dollar was too much to tip the waiter?" "A dollar is--a dollar, isn't it?" said Susan. Gideon laughed. "I used to think so. And most men wouldn't give that much to a waiter. But I feel sorry for poor devils who don't happen to be as lucky or as brainy as I am. What do you say to a turn in the Park? We'll take a hansom, and kind of jog along. And we'll stop at the Casino and at Gabe's for a drink." "I have to get up so early," began Susan. "Oh, that's all right." He slowly winked at her. "You'll not have to bump the bumps for being late tomorrow--if you treat _me_ right." He carried his liquor easily. Only in his eyes and in his ever more slippery smile that would slide about his face did he show that he had been drinking. He helped her into a hansom with a flourish and, overruling her protests, bade the driver go to the Casino. Once under way she was glad; her hot skin and her weary heart were grateful for the air blowing down the avenue from the Park's expanse of green. When Gideon attempted to put his arm around her, she moved close into the corner and went on talking so calmly about calm subjects that he did not insist. But when he had tossed down a drink of whiskey at the Casino and they resumed the drive along the moonlit, shady roads, he tried again. "Please," said she, "don't spoil a delightful evening." "Now look here, my dear--haven't I treated you right?" "Indeed you have, Mr. Gideon." "Oh, don't be so damned formal. Forget the difference between our positions. Tomorrow I'm going to place a big order with your house, if you treat me right. I'm dead stuck on you--and that's a God's fact. You've taken me clean off my feet. I'm thinking of doing a lot for you." Susan was silent. "What do you say to throwing up your job and coming to Chicago with me? How much do you get?" "Ten." "Why, _you_ can't live on that." "I've lived on less--much less." "Do you like it?" "Naturally not." "You want to get on--don't you?" "I must." "You're down in the heart about something. Love?" Susan was silent. "Cut love out. Cut it out, my dear. That ain't the way to get on. Love's a good consolation prize, if you ain't going to get anywhere, and know you ain't. And it's a good first prize after you've arrived and can afford the luxuries of life. But for a man--or a woman--that's pushing up, it's sheer ruination! Cut it out!" "I am cutting it out," said Susan. "But that takes time." "Not if you've got sense. The way to cut anything out is--cut it out!--a quick slash--just cut. If you make a dozen little slashes, each of them hurts as much as the one big slash--and the dozen hurt twelve times as much--bleed twelve times as much--put off the cure a lot more than twelve times as long." He had Susan's attention for the first time. "Do you know why women don't get on?" "Tell me," said she. "That's what I want to hear." "Because they don't play the game under the rules. Now, what does a man do? Why, he stakes everything he's got--does whatever's necessary, don't stop at _nothing_ to help him get there. How is it with women? Some try to be virtuous--when their bodies are their best assets. God! I wish I'd 'a' had your looks and your advantages as a woman to help me. I'd be a millionaire this minute, with a house facing this Park and a yacht and all the rest of it. A woman that's squeamish about her virtue can't hope to win--unless she's in a position to make a good marriage. As for the loose ones, they are as big fools as the virtuous ones. The virtuous ones lock away their best asset; the loose ones throw it away. Neither one _use_ it. Do you follow me?" "I think so." Susan was listening with a mind made abnormally acute by the champagne she had freely drunk. The coarse bluntness and directness of the man did not offend her. It made what he said the more effective, producing a rude arresting effect upon her nerves. It made the man himself seem more of a person. Susan was beginning to have a kind of respect for him, to change her first opinion that he was merely a vulgar, pushing commonplace. "Never thought of that before?" "Yes--I've thought of it. But----" She paused. "But--what?" "Oh, nothing." "Never mind. Some womanish heart nonsense, I suppose. Do you see the application of what I've said to you and me?" "Go on." She was leaning forward, her elbows on the closed doors of the hansom, her eyes gazing dreamily into the moonlit dimness of the cool woods through which they were driving. "You don't want to stick at ten per?" "No." "It'll be less in a little while. Models don't last. The work's too hard." "I can see that." "And anyhow it means tenement house." "Yes. Tenement house." "Well--what then? What's your plan?" "I haven't any." "Haven't a plan--yet want to get on! Is that good sense? Did ever anybody get anywhere without a plan?" "I'm willing to work. I'm going to work. I _am_ working." "Work, of course. Nobody can keep alive without working. You might as well say you're going to breathe and eat--Work don't amount to anything, for getting on. It's the kind of work--working in a certain direction--working with a plan." "I've got a plan. But I can't begin at it just yet." "Will it take money?" "Some." "Have you got it?" "No," replied Susan. "I'll have to get it." "As an honest working girl?" said he with good-humored irony. Susan laughed. "It does sound ridiculous, doesn't it?" said she. "Here's another thing that maybe you haven't counted in. Looking as you do, do you suppose men that run things'll let you get past without paying toll? Not on your life, my dear. If you was ugly, you might after several years get twenty or twenty-five by working hard--unless you lost your figure first. But the men won't let a good looker rise that way. Do you follow me?" "Yes." "I'm not talking theory. I'm talking life. Take you and me for example. I can help you--help you a lot. In fact I can put you on your feet. And I'm willing. If you was a man and I liked you and wanted to help you, I'd make you help me, too. I'd make you do a lot of things for me--maybe some of 'em not so very nice--maybe some of 'em downright dirty. And you'd do 'em, as all young fellows, struggling up, have to. But you're a woman. So I'm willing to make easier terms. But I can't help you with you not showing any appreciation. That wouldn't be good business--would it?--to get no return but, 'Oh, thank you so much, Mr. Gideon. So sweet of you. I'll remember you in my prayers.' Would that be sensible?" "No," said Susan. "Well, then! If I do you a good turn, you've got to do me a good turn--not one that I don't want done, but one I do want done. Ain't I right? Do you follow me?" "I follow you." Some vague accent in Susan's voice made him feel dissatisfied with her response. "I hope you do," he said sharply. "What I'm saying is dresses on your back and dollars in your pocket--and getting on in the world--if you work it right." "Getting on in the world," said Susan, pensively. "I suppose that's a sneer." "Oh, no. I was only thinking." "About love being all a woman needs to make her happy, I suppose?" "No. Love is--Well, it isn't happiness." "Because you let it run you, instead of you running it. Eh?" "Perhaps." "Sure! Now, let me tell you, Lorna dear. Comfort and luxury, money in bank, property, a good solid position--_that's_ the foundation. Build on _that_ and you'll build solid. Build on love and sentiment and you're building upside down. You're putting the gingerbread where the rock ought to be. Follow me?" "I see what you mean." He tried to find her hand. "What do you say?" "I'll think of it." "Well, think quick, my dear. Opportunity doesn't wait round in anybody's outside office . . . Maybe you don't trust me--don't think I'll deliver the goods?" "No. I think you're honest." "You're right I am. I do what I say I'll do. That's why I've got on. That's why I'll keep on getting on. Let's drive to a hotel." She turned her head and looked at him for the first time since he began his discourse on making one's way in the world. Her look was calm, inquiring--would have been chilling to a man of sensibility--that is, of sensibility toward an unconquered woman. "I want to give your people that order, and I want to help you." "I want them to get the order. I don't care about the rest," she replied dully. "Put it any way you like." Again he tried to embrace her. She resisted firmly. "Wait," said she. "Let me think." They drove the rest of the way to the upper end of the Park in silence. He ordered the driver to turn. He said to her; "Well, do you get the sack or does the house get the order?" She was silent. "Shall I drive you home or shall we stop at Gabe's for a drink?" "Could I have champagne?" said she. "Anything you like if you choose right." "I haven't any choice," said she. He laughed, put his arm around her, kissed her unresponsive but unresisting lips. "You're right, you haven't," said he. "It's a fine sign that you have the sense to see it. Oh, you'll get on. You don't let trifles stand in your way." CHAPTER III AT the lunch hour the next day Mary Hinkle knocked at the garret in Clinton Place. Getting no answer, she opened the door. At the table close to the window was Susan in a nightgown, her hair in disorder as if she had begun to arrange it and had stopped halfway. Her eyes turned listlessly in Mary's direction--dull eyes, gray, heavily circled. "You didn't answer, Miss Sackville. So I thought I'd come in and leave a note," explained Mary. Her glance was avoiding Susan's. "Come for the dress and hat?" said Susan. "There they are." And she indicated the undisturbed bed whereon hat and dress were carelessly flung. "My, but it's hot in this room!" exclaimed Mary. "You must move up to my place. There's a room and bath vacant--only seven per." Susan seemed not to hear. She was looking dully at her hands upon the table before her. "Mr. Jeffries sent me to ask you how you were. He was worried because you didn't come." With a change of voice, "Mr. Gideon telephoned down the order a while ago. Mr. Jeffries says you are to keep the dress and hat." "No," said Susan. "Take them away with you." "Aren't you coming down this afternoon?" "No," replied Susan. "I've quit." "Quit?" cried Miss Hinkle. Her expression gradually shifted from astonishment to pleased understanding. "Oh, I see! You've got something better." "No. But I'll find something." Mary studied the situation, using Susan's expressionless face as a guide. After a time she seemed to get from it a clew. With the air of friendly experience bent on aiding helpless inexperience she pushed aside the dress and made room for herself on the bed. "Don't be a fool, Miss Sackville," said she. "If you don't like that sort of thing--you know what I mean--why, you can live six months--maybe a year--on the reputation of what you've done and their hope that you'll weaken down and do it again. That'll give you time to look round and find something else. For pity's sake, don't turn yourself loose without a job. You got your place so easy that you think you can get one any old time. There's where you're wrong. Believe me, you played in luck--and luck don't come round often. I know what I'm talking about. So I say, don't be a fool!" "I am a fool," said Susan. "Well--get over it. And don't waste any time about it, either." "I can't go back," said Susan stolidly. "I can't face them." "Face who?" cried Mary. "Business is business. Everybody understands that. All the people down there are crazy about you now. You got the house a hundred-thousand-dollar order. You don't _suppose_ anybody in business bothers about how an order's got--do you?" "It's the way _I_ feel--not the way _they_ feel." "As for the women down there--of course, there's some that pretend they won't do that sort of thing. Look at 'em--at their faces and figures--and you'll see why they don't. Of course a girl keeps straight when there's nothing in not being straight--leastways, unless she's a fool. She knows that if the best she can do is marry a fellow of her own class, why she'd only get left if she played any tricks with them cheap skates that have to get married or go without because they're too poor to pay for anything--and by marrying can get that and a cook and a washwoman and mender besides--and maybe, too, somebody who can go out and work if they're laid up sick. But if a girl sees a chance to get on----don't be a fool, Miss Sackville." Susan listened with a smile that barely disturbed the stolid calm of her features. "I'm not going back," she said. Mary Hinkle was silenced by the quiet finality of her voice. Studying that delicate face, she felt, behind its pallid impassiveness, behind the refusal to return, a reason she could not comprehend. She dimly realized that she would respect it if she could understand it; for she suspected it had its origin somewhere in Susan's "refined ladylike nature." She knew that once in a while among the women she was acquainted with there did happen one who preferred death in any form of misery to leading a lax life--and indisputable facts had convinced her that not always were these women "just stupid ignorant fools." She herself possessed no such refinement of nerves or of whatever it was. She had been brought up in a loose family and in a loose neighborhood. She was in the habit of making all sorts of pretenses, because that was the custom, while being candid about such matters was regarded as bad form. She was not fooled by these pretenses in other girls, though they often did fool each other. In Susan, she instinctively felt, it was not pretense. It was something or other else--it was a dangerous reality. She liked Susan; in her intelligence and physical charm were the possibilities of getting far up in the world; it seemed a pity that she was thus handicapped. Still, perhaps Susan would stumble upon some worth while man who, attempting to possess her without marriage and failing, would pay the heavy price. There was always that chance--a small chance, smaller even than finding by loose living a worth while man who would marry you because you happened exactly to suit him--to give him enough only to make him feel that he wanted more. Still, Susan was unusually attractive, and luck sometimes did come a poor person's way--sometimes. "I'm overdue back," said Mary. "You want me to tell 'em that?" "Yes." "You'll have hard work finding a job at anything like as much as ten per. I've got two trades, and I couldn't at either one." "I don't expect to find it." "Then what are you going to do?" "Take what I can get--until I've been made hard enough--or strong enough--or whatever it is--to stop being a fool." This indication of latent good sense relieved Miss Hinkle. "I'll tell 'em you may be down tomorrow. Think it over for another day." Susan shook her head. "They'll have to get somebody else." And, as Miss Hinkle reached the threshold, "Wait till I do the dress up. You'll take it for me?" "Why send the things back?" urged Mary. "They belong to you. God knows you earned 'em." Susan, standing now, looked down at the finery. "So I did. I'll keep them," said she. "They'd pawn for something." "With your looks they'd wear for a heap more. But keep 'em, anyhow. And I'll not tell Jeffries you've quit. It'll do no harm to hold your job open a day or so." "As you like," said Susan, to end the discussion. "But I have quit." "No matter. After you've had something to eat, you'll feel different." And Miss Hinkle nodded brightly and departed. Susan resumed her seat at the bare wobbly little table, resumed her listless attitude. She did not move until Ellen came in, holding out a note and saying, "A boy from your store brung this--here." "Thank you," said Susan, taking the note. In it she found a twenty-dollar bill and a five. On the sheet of paper round it was scrawled: Take the day off. Here's your commission. We'll raise your pay in a few weeks, L. L. J. So Mary Hinkle had told them either that she was quitting or that she was thinking of quitting, and they wished her to stay, had used the means they believed she could not resist. In a dreary way this amused her. As if she cared whether or not life was kept in this worthless body of hers, in her tired heart, in her disgusted mind! Then she dropped back into listlessness. When she was aroused again it was by Gideon, completely filling the small doorway. "Hello, my dear!" cried he cheerfully. "Mind my smoking?" Susan slowly turned her head toward him, surveyed him with an expression but one removed from the blank look she would have had if there had been no one before her. "I'm feeling fine today," pursued Gideon, advancing a step and so bringing himself about halfway to the table. "Had a couple of pick-me-ups and a fat breakfast. How are you?" "I'm always well." "Thought you seemed a little seedy." His shrewd sensual eyes were exploring the openings in her nightdress. "You'll be mighty glad to get out of this hole. Gosh! It's hot. Don't see how you stand it. I'm a law abiding citizen but I must say I'd turn criminal before I'd put up with this." In the underworld from which Gideon had sprung--the underworld where welters the overwhelming mass of the human race--there are three main types. There are the hopeless and spiritless--the mass--who welter passively on, breeding and dying. There are the spirited who also possess both shrewdness and calculation; they push upward by hook and by crook, always mindful of the futility of the struggle of the petty criminal of the slums against the police and the law; they arrive and found the aristocracies of the future. The third is the criminal class. It is also made up of the spirited--but the spirited who, having little shrewdness and no calculation--that is, no ability to foresee and measure consequences--wage clumsy war upon society and pay the penalty of their fatuity in lives of wretchedness even more wretched than the common lot. Gideon belonged to the second class--the class that pushes upward without getting into jail; he was a fair representative of this type, neither its best nor its worst, but about midway of its range between arrogant, all-dominating plutocrat and shystering merchant or lawyer or politician who barely escapes the criminal class. "You don't ask me to sit down, dearie," he went on facetiously. "But I'm not so mad that I won't do it." He took the seat Miss Hinkle had cleared on the bed. His glance wandered disgustedly from object to object in the crowded yet bare attic. He caught a whiff of the odor from across the hall--from the fresh-air shaft--and hastily gave several puffs at his cigar to saturate his surroundings with its perfume. Susan acted as if she were alone in the room. She had not even drawn together her nightgown. "I phoned your store about you," resumed Gideon. "They said you hadn't showed up--wouldn't till tomorrow. So I came round here and your landlady sent me up. I want to take you for a drive this afternoon. We can dine up to Claremont or farther, if you like." "No, thanks," said Susan. "I can't go." "Upty-tupty!" cried Gideon. "What's the lady so sour about?" "I'm not sour." "Then why won't you go?" "I can't." "But we'll have a chance to talk over what I'm going to do for you." "You've kept your word," said Susan. "That was only part. Besides, I'd have given your house the order, anyhow." Susan's eyes suddenly lighted up. "You would?" she cried. "Well--a part of it. Not so much, of course. But I never let pleasure interfere with business. Nobody that does ever gets very far." Her expression made him hasten to explain--without being conscious why. "I said--_part_ of the order, my dear. They owe to you about half of what they'll make off me. . . . What's that money on the table? Your commission?" "Yes." "Twenty-five? Um!" Gideon laughed. "Well, I suppose it's as generous as I'd be, in the same circumstances. Encourage your employees, but don't swell-head 'em--that's the good rule. I've seen many a promising young chap ruined by a raise of pay. . . . Now, about you and me." Gideon took a roll of bills from his trousers pocket, counted off five twenties, tossed them on the table. "There!" One of the bills in falling touched Susan's hand. She jerked the hand away as if the bill had been afire. She took all five of them, folded them, held them out to him. "The house has paid me," said she. "That's honest," said he, nodding approvingly. "I like it. But in your case it don't apply." These two, thus facing a practical situation, revealed an important, overlooked truth about human morals. Humanity divides broadly into three classes: the arrived; those who will never arrive and will never try; those in a state of flux, attempting and either failing or succeeding. The arrived and the inert together preach and to a certain extent practice an idealistic system of morality that interferes with them in no way. It does not interfere with the arrived because they have no need to infringe it, except for amusement; it does not interfere with the inert, but rather helps them to bear their lot by giving them a cheering notion that their insignificance is due to their goodness. This idealistic system receives the homage of lip service from the third and struggling section of mankind, but no more, for in practice it would hamper them at every turn in their efforts to fight their way up. Susan was, at that stage of her career, a candidate for membership in the struggling class. Her heart was set firmly against the unwritten, unspoken, even unwhispered code of practical morality which dominates the struggling class. But life had at least taught her the folly of intolerance. So when Gideon talked in terms of that practical morality, she listened without offense; and she talked to him in terms of it because to talk the idealistic morality in which she had been bred and before which she bowed the knee in sincere belief would have been simply to excite his laughter at her innocence and his contempt for her folly. "I feel that I've been paid," said she. "I did it for the house--because I owed it to them." "Only for the house?" said he with insinuating tenderness. He took and pressed the fingers extended with the money in them. "Only for the house," she repeated, a hard note in her voice. And her fingers slipped away, leaving the money in his hand. "At least, I suppose it must have been for the house," she added, reflectively, talking to herself aloud. "Why did I do it? I don't know. I don't know. They say one always has a reason for what one does. But I often can't find any reason for things I do--that, for instance. I simply did it because it seemed to me not to matter much what _I_ did with myself, and they wanted the order so badly." Then she happened to become conscious of his presence and to see a look of uneasiness, self-complacence, as if he were thinking that he quite understood this puzzle. She disconcerted him with what vain men call a cruel snub. "But whatever the reason, it certainly couldn't have been you," said she. "Now, look here, Lorna," protested Gideon, the beginnings of anger in his tone. "That's not the way to talk if you want to get on." She eyed him with an expression which would have raised a suspicion that he was repulsive in a man less self-confident, less indifferent to what the human beings he used for pleasure or profit thought of him. "To say nothing of what I can do for you, there's the matter of future orders. I order twice a year--in big lots always." "I've quit down there." "Oh! Somebody else has given you something good--eh? _That's_ why you're cocky." "No." "Then why've you quit?" "I wish you could tell me. I don't understand. But--I've done it." Gideon puzzled with this a moment, decided that it was beyond him and unimportant, anyhow. He blew out a cloud of smoke, stretched his legs and took up the main subject. "I was about to say, I've got a place for you. I'd like to take you to Chicago, but there's a Mrs. G.--as dear, sweet, good a soul as ever lived--just what a man wants at home with the children and to make things respectable. I wouldn't grieve her for worlds. But I can't live without a little fun--and Mrs. G. is a bit slow for me. . . . Still, it's no use talking about having you out there. She ought to be able to understand that an active man needs two women. One for the quiet side of his nature, the other for the lively side. Sometimes I think she--like a lot of wives--wouldn't object if it wasn't that she was afraid the other lady would get me away altogether and she'd be left stranded." "Naturally," said Susan. "Not at all!" cried he. "Don't you get any such notion in that lovely little head of yours, my dear. You women don't understand honor--a man's sense of honor." "Naturally," repeated Susan. He gave a glance of short disapproval. Her voice was not to his liking. "Let's drop Mrs. G. out of this," said he. "As I was saying, I've arranged for you to take a place here--easy work--something to occupy you--and I'll foot the bills over and above----" He stopped short or, rather, was stopped by the peculiar smile Susan had turned upon him. Before it he slowly reddened, and his eyes reluctantly shifted. He had roused her from listlessness, from indifference. The poisons in her blood were burned up by the fresh, swiftly flowing currents set in motion by his words, by the helpfulness of his expression, of his presence. She became again the intensely healthy, therefore intensely alive, therefore energetic and undaunted Susan Lenox, who, when still a child, had not hesitated to fly from home, from everyone she knew, into an unknown world. "What are you smiling at me that way for?" demanded he in a tone of extreme irritation. "So you look on me as your mistress?" And never in all her life had her eyes been so gray--the gray of cruelest irony. "Now what's the use discussing those things? You know the world. You're a sensible woman." Susan made closer and more secure the large loose coil of her hair, rose and leaned against the table. "You don't understand. You couldn't. I'm not one of those respectable women, like your Mrs. G., who belong to men. And I'm not one of the other kind who also throw in their souls with their bodies for good measure. Do _you_ think you had _me?_" She laughed with maddening gentle mockery, went on: "I don't hate you. I don't despise you even. You mean well. But the sight of you makes me sick. It makes me feel as I do when I think of a dirty tenement I used to have to live in, and of the things that I used to have to let crawl over me. So I want to forget you as soon as I can--and that will be soon after you get out of my sight." Her blazing eyes startled him. Her voice, not lifted above its usual quiet tones, enraged him. "You--you!" he cried. "You must be crazy, to talk to _me_ like that!" She nodded. "Yes--crazy," said she with the same quiet intensity. "For I know what kind of a beast you are--a clean, good-natured beast, but still a beast. And how could you understand?" He had got upon his feet. He looked as if he were going to strike her. She made a slight gesture toward the door. He felt at a hopeless disadvantage with her--with this woman who did not raise her voice, did not need to raise it to express the uttermost of any passion. His jagged teeth gleamed through his mustache; his shrewd little eyes snapped like an angry rat's. He fumbled about through the steam of his insane rage for adequate insults--in vain. He rushed from the room and bolted downstairs. Within an hour Susan was out, looking for work. There could be no turning back now. Until she went with Gideon it had been as if her dead were still unburied and in the house. Now---- Never again could she even indulge in dreams of going to Rod. That part of her life was finished with all the finality of the closed grave. Grief--yes. But the same sort of grief as when a loved one, after a long and painful illness, finds relief in death. Her love for Rod had been stricken of a mortal illness the night of their arrival in New York. After lingering for a year between life and death, after a long death agony, it had expired. The end came--these matters of the exact moment of inevitable events are unimportant but have a certain melancholy interest--the end came when she made choice where there was no choice, in the cab with Gideon. For better or for worse she was free. She was ready to begin her career. CHAPTER IV AFTER a few days, when she was viewing her situation in a calmer, more normal mood with the practical feminine eye, she regretted that she had refused Gideon's money. She was proud of that within herself which had impelled and compelled her to refuse it; but she wished she had it. Taking it, she felt, would have added nothing to her humiliation in her own sight; and for what he thought of her, one way or the other, she cared not a pin. It is one of the familiar curiosities of human inconsistency which is at bottom so completely consistent, that she did not regret having refused his far more valuable offer to aid her. She did not regret even during those few next days of disheartening search for work. We often read how purpose can be so powerful that it compels. No doubt if Susan's purpose had been to get temporary relief--or, perhaps, had it been to get permanent relief by weaving a sex spell--she would in that desperate mood have been able to compel. Unfortunately she was not seeking to be a pauper or a parasite; she was trying to find steady employment at living wages--that is, at wages above the market value for female and for most male--labor. And that sort of purpose cannot compel. Our civilization overflows with charity--which is simply willingness to hand back to labor as generous gracious alms a small part of the loot from the just wages of labor. But of real help--just wages for honest labor--there is little, for real help would disarrange the system, would abolish the upper classes. She had some faint hopes in the direction of millinery and dressmaking, the things for which she felt she had distinct talent. She was soon disabused. There was nothing for her, and could be nothing until after several years of doubtful apprenticeship in the trades to which any female person seeking employment to piece out an income instinctively turned first and offered herself at the employer's own price. Day after day, from the first moment of the industrial day until its end, she hunted--wearily, yet unweariedly--with resolve living on after the death of hope. She answered advertisements; despite the obviously sensible warnings of the working girls she talked with she even consulted and took lists from the religious and charitable organizations, patronized by those whose enthusiasm about honest work had never been cooled by doing or trying to do any of it, and managed by those who, beginning as workers, had made all haste to escape from it into positions where they could live by talking about it and lying about it--saying the things comfortable people subscribe to philanthropies to hear. There was work, plenty of it. But not at decent wages, and not leading to wages that could be earned without viciously wronging those under her in an executive position. But even in those cases the prospect of promotion was vague and remote, with illness and failing strength and poor food, worse clothing and lodgings, as certainties straightway. At some places she was refused with the first glance at her. No good-looking girls wanted; even though they behaved themselves and attracted customers, the customers lost sight of matters of merchandise in the all-absorbing matter of sex. In offices a good-looking girl upset discipline, caused the place to degenerate into a deer-haunt in the mating season. No place did she find offering more than four dollars a week, except where the dress requirements made the nominally higher wages even less. Everywhere women's wages were based upon the assumption that women either lived at home or made the principal part of their incomes by prostitution, disguised or frank. In fact, all wages even the wages of men except in a few trades--were too small for an independent support. There had to be a family--and the whole family had to work--and even then the joint income was not enough for decency. She had no family or friends to help her--at least, no friends except those as poor as herself, and she could not commit the crime of adding to their miseries. She had less than ten dollars left. She must get to work at once--and what she earned must supply her with all. A note came from Jeffries--a curt request that she call--curt to disguise the eagerness to have her back. She tore it up. She did not even debate the matter. It was one of her significant qualities that she never had the inclination, apparently lacked the power, to turn back once she had turned away. Mary Hinkle came, urged her. Susan listened in silence, merely shook her head for answer, changed the subject. In the entrance to the lofts of a tall Broadway building she saw a placard: "Experienced hands at fancy ready-to-wear hat trimming wanted." She climbed three steep flights and was in a large, low-ceilinged room where perhaps seventy-five girls were at work. She paused in the doorway long enough to observe the kind of work--a purely mechanical process of stitching a few trimmings in exactly the same way upon a cheap hat frame. Then she went to an open window in a glass partition and asked employment of a young Jew with an incredibly long nose thrusting from the midst of a pimply face which seemed merely its too small base. "Experienced?" asked the young man. "I can do what those girls are doing." With intelligent eyes he glanced at her face, then let his glance rove contemptuously over the room full of workers. "I should hope so," said he. "Forty cents a dozen. Want to try it?" "When may I go to work?" "Right away. Write your name here." Susan signed her name to what she saw at a glance was some sort of contract. She knew it contained nothing to her advantage, much to her disadvantage. But she did not care. She had to have work--something, anything that would stop the waste of her slender capital. And within fifteen minutes she was seated in the midst of the sweating, almost nauseatingly odorous women of all ages, was toiling away at the simple task of making an ugly hat frame still more ugly by the addition of a bit of tawdry cotton ribbon, a buckle, and a bunch of absurdly artificial flowers. She was soon able to calculate roughly what she could make in six days. She thought she could do two dozen of the hats a day; and twelve dozen hats at forty cents the dozen would mean four dollars and eighty cents a week! Four dollars and eighty cents! Less than she had planned to set aside for food alone, out of her ten dollars as a model. Next her on the right sat a middle-aged woman, grossly fat, repulsively shapeless, piteously homely--one of those luckless human beings who are foredoomed from the outset never to know any of the great joys of life the joys that come through our power to attract our fellow-beings. As this woman stitched away, squinting through the steel-framed spectacles set upon her snub nose, Susan saw that she had not even good health to mitigate her lot, for her color was pasty and on her dirty skin lay blotches of dull red. Except a very young girl here and there all the women had poor or bad skins. And Susan was not made disdainful by the odor which is far worse than that of any lower animal, however dirty, because the human animal must wear clothing. She had lived in wretchedness in a tenement; she knew that this odor was an inevitable part of tenement life when one has neither the time nor the means to be clean. Poor food, foul air, broken sleep--bad health, disease, unsightly faces, repulsive bodies! No wonder the common people looked almost like another race in contrast with their brothers and sisters of the comfortable classes. Another race! The race into which she would soon be reborn under the black magic of poverty! As she glanced and reflected on what she saw, viewed it in the light of her experience, her fingers slackened, and she could speed them up only in spurts. "If I stay here," thought she, "in a few weeks I shall be like these others. No matter how hard I may fight, I'll be dragged down." As impossible to escape the common lot as for a swimmer alone in mid-ocean to keep up indefinitely whether long or brief, the struggle could have but, the one end--to be sunk in, merged in, the ocean. It took no great amount of vanity for her to realize that she was in every way the superior of all those around her--in every way except one. What did she lack? Why was it that with her superior intelligence, her superior skill both of mind and of body, she could be thus dragged down and held far below her natural level? Why could she not lift herself up among the sort of people with whom she belonged--or even make a beginning toward lifting herself up? Why could she not take hold? What did she lack? What must she acquire--or what get rid of? At lunch time she walked with the ugly woman up and down the first side street above the building in which the factory was located. She ate a roll she bought from a pushcart man, the woman munched an apple with her few remnants of teeth. "Most of the girls is always kicking," said the woman. "But I'm mighty satisfied. I get enough to eat and to wear, and I've got a bed to sleep in--and what else is there in life for anybody, rich or poor?" "There's something to be said for that," replied Susan, marveling to find in this piteous creature the only case of thorough content she had ever seen. "I make my four to five per," continued the woman. "And I've got only myself. Thank God, I was never fool enough to marry. It's marrying that drags us poor people down and makes us miserable. Some says to me, 'Ain't you lonesome?' And I says to them, says I, 'Why, I'm used to being alone. I don't want anything else.' If they was all like me, they'd not be fightin' and drinkin' and makin' bad worse. The bosses always likes to give me work. They say I'm a model worker, and I'm proud to say they're right. I'm mighty grateful to the bosses that provide for the like of us. What'd we do without 'em? That's what _I_'d like to know." She had pitied this woman because she could never hope to experience any of the great joys of life. What a waste of pity, she now thought. She had overlooked the joy of joys--delusions. This woman was secure for life against unhappiness. A few days, and Susan was herself regarded as a model worker. She turned out hats so rapidly that the forewoman, urged on by Mr. Himberg, the proprietor, began to nag at the other girls. And presently a notice of general reduction to thirty-five cents a dozen was posted. There had been a union; it had won a strike two years before--and then had been broken up by shrewd employing of detectives who had got themselves elected officers. With the union out of the way, there was no check upon the bosses in their natural and lawful effort to get that profit which is the most high god of our civilization. A few of the youngest and most spirited girls--those from families containing several workers--indignantly quit. A few others murmured, but stayed on. The mass dumbly accepted the extra twist in the screw of the mighty press that was slowly squeezing them to death. Neither to them nor to Susan herself did it happen to occur that she was the cause of the general increase of hardship and misery. However, to have blamed her would have been as foolish and as unjust as to blame any other individual. The system ordained it all. Oppression and oppressed were both equally its helpless instruments. No wonder all the vast beneficent discoveries of science that ought to have made the whole human race healthy, long-lived and prosperous, are barely able to save the race from swift decay and destruction under the ravages of this modern system of labor worse than slavery--for under slavery the slave, being property whose loss could not be made good without expense, was protected in life and in health. Susan soon discovered that she had miscalculated her earning power. She had been deceived by her swiftness in the first days, before the monotony of her task had begun to wear her down. Her first week's earnings were only four dollars and thirty cents. This in her freshness, and in the busiest season when wages were at the highest point. In the room next hers--the same, perhaps a little dingier--lived a man. Like herself he had no trade--that is, none protected by a powerful union and by the still more powerful--in fact, the only powerful shield--requirements of health and strength and a certain grade of intelligence that together act rigidly to exclude most men and so to keep wages from dropping to the neighborhood of the line of pauperism. He was the most industrious and, in his small way, the most resourceful of men. He was insurance agent, toilet soap agent, piano tuner, giver of piano lessons, seller of pianos and of music on commission. He worked fourteen and sixteen hours a day. He made nominally about twelve to fifteen a week. Actually--because of the poverty of his customers and his too sympathetic nature he made five to six a week--the most any working person could hope for unless in one of the few favored trades. Barely enough to keep body and soul together. And why should capital that needs so much for fine houses and wines and servants and automobiles and culture and charity and the other luxuries--why should capital pay more when so many were competing for the privilege of being allowed to work? She gave up her room at Mrs. Tucker's--after she had spent several evenings walking the streets and observing and thinking about the miseries of the fast women of the only class she could hope to enter. "A woman," she decided, "can't even earn a decent living that way unless she has the money to make the right sort of a start. 'To him that hath shall be given; from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.' Gideon was my chance and I threw it away." Still, she did not regret. Of all the horrors the most repellent seemed to her to be dependence upon some one man who could take it away at his whim. She disregarded the advice of the other girls and made the rounds of the religious and charitable homes for working girls. She believed she could endure perhaps better than could girls with more false pride, with more awe of snobbish conventionalities--at least she could try to endure--the superciliousness, the patronizing airs, the petty restraints and oppressions, the nauseating smugness, the constant prying and peeping, the hypocritical lectures, the heavy doses of smug morality. She felt that she could bear with almost any annoyances and humiliations to be in clean surroundings and to get food that was at least not so rotten that the eye could see it and the nose smell it. But she found all the homes full, with long waiting lists, filled for the most part, so the working girls said, with professional objects of charity. Thus she had no opportunity to judge for herself whether there was any truth in the prejudice of the girls against these few and feeble attempts to mitigate the miseries of a vast and ever vaster multitude of girls. Adding together all the accommodations offered by all the homes of every description, there was a total that might possibly have provided for the homeless girls of a dozen factories or sweatshops--and the number of homeless girls was more than a quarter of a million, was increasing at the rate of more than a hundred a day. Charity is so trifling a force that it can, and should be, disregarded. It serves no _good_ useful service. It enables comfortable people to delude themselves that all that can be done is being done to mitigate the misfortunes which the poor bring upon themselves. It obscures the truth that modern civilization has been perverted into a huge manufacturing of decrepitude and disease, of poverty and prostitution. The reason we talk so much and listen so eagerly when our magnificent benevolences are the subject is that we do not wish to be disturbed--and that we dearly love the tickling sensation in our vanity of generosity. Susan was compelled to the common lot--the lot that will be the common lot as long as there are people to be made, by taking advantage of human necessities, to force men and women and children to degrade themselves into machines as wage-slaves. At two dollars a week, double what her income justified--she rented a room in a tenement flat in Bleecker street. It was a closet of a room whose thin, dirt-adorned walls were no protection against sound or vermin, not giving even privacy from prying eyes. She might have done a little better had she been willing to share room and bed with one or more girls, but not enough better to compensate for what that would have meant. The young Jew with the nose so impossible that it elevated his countenance from commonplace ugliness to weird distinction had taken a friendly fancy to her. He was Julius Bam, nephew of the proprietor. In her third week he offered her the forewoman's place. "You've got a few brains in your head," said he. "Miss Tuohy's a boob. Take the job and you'll push up. We'll start you at five per." Susan thanked him but declined. "What's the use of my taking a job I couldn't keep more than a day or two?" explained she. "I haven't it in me to boss people." "Then you've got to get it, or you're done for," said he. "Nobody ever gets anywhere until he's making others work for him." It was the advice she had got from Matson, the paper box manufacturer in Cincinnati. It was the lesson she found in all prosperity on every hand. Make others work for you--and the harder you made them work the more prosperous you were--provided, of course, you kept all or nearly all the profits of their harder toil. Obvious common sense. But how could she goad these unfortunates, force their clumsy fingers to move faster, make their long and weary day longer and wearier--with nothing for them as the result but duller brain, clumsier fingers, more wretched bodies? She realized why those above lost all patience with them, treated them with contempt. Only as one of them could any intelligent, energetic human being have any sympathy for them, stupid and incompetent from birth, made ever more and more stupid and incapable by the degrading lives they led. She could scarcely conceal her repulsion for their dirty bodies, their stained and rotting clothing saturated with stale sweat, their coarse flesh reeking coarse food smells. She could not listen to their conversation, so vulgar, so inane. Yet she felt herself--for the time--one of them, and her heart bled for them. And while she knew that only their dullness of wit and ignorance kept them from climbing up and stamping and trampling full as savagely and cruelly as did those on top, still the fact remained that they were not stamping and trampling. As she was turning in some work, Miss Tuohy said abruptly: "You don't belong here. You ought to go back." Susan started, and her heart beat wildly. She was going to lose her job! The forelady saw, and instantly understood. "I don't mean that," she said. "You can stay as long as you like--as long as your health lasts. But isn't there somebody somewhere--_anybody_--you can go to and ask them to help you out of this?" "No--there's no one," said she. "That can't be true," insisted the forelady. "Everybody has somebody--or can get somebody--that is, anyone who looks like you. I wouldn't suggest such a thing to a fool. But _you_ could keep your head. There isn't any other way, and you might as well make up your mind to it." To confide is one of the all but universal longings--perhaps needs--of human nature. Susan's honest, sympathetic eyes, her look and her habit of reticence, were always attracting confidences from such unexpected sources as hard, forbidding Miss Tuohy. Susan was not much surprised when Miss Tuohy went on to say: "I was spoiled when I was still a kid--by getting to know well a man who was above my class. I had tastes that way, and he appealed to them. After him I couldn't marry the sort of man that wanted me. Then my looks went--like a flash--it often happens that way with us Irish girls. But I can get on. I know how to deal with these people--and _you_ never could learn. You'd treat 'em like ladies and they'd treat you as easy fruit. Yes, I get along all right, and I'm happy--away from here." Susan's sympathetic glance of inquiry gave the necessary encouragement. "It's a baby," Miss Tuohy explained--and Susan knew it was for the baby's sake that this good heart had hardened itself to the dirty work of forelady. Her eyes shifted as she said, "A child of my sister's--dead in Ireland. How I do love that baby----" They were interrupted and it so happened that the confidence was never resumed and finished. But Miss Tuohy had made her point with Susan--had set her to thinking less indefinitely. "I _must_ take hold!" Susan kept saying to herself. The phrase was always echoing in her brain. But how?--_how?_ And to that question she could find no answer. Every morning she bought a one-cent paper whose big circulation was in large part due to its want ads--its daily section of closely printed columns of advertisements of help wanted and situations wanted. Susan read the columns diligently. At first they acted upon her like an intoxicant, filling her not merely with hope but with confident belief that soon she would be in a situation where the pay was good and the work agreeable, or at least not disagreeable. But after a few weeks she ceased from reading. Why? Because she answered the advertisements, scores of them, more than a hundred, before she saw through the trick and gave up. She found that throughout New York all the attractive or even tolerable places were filled by girls helped by their families or in other ways, girls working at less than living wages because they did not have to rely upon their wages for their support. And those help wanted advertisements were simply appeals for more girls of that sort--for cheaper girls; or they were inserted by employment agencies, masquerading in the newspaper as employers and lying in wait to swindle working girls by getting a fee in exchange for a false promise of good work at high wages; or they were the nets flung out by crafty employers who speeded and starved their slaves, and wished to recruit fresh relays to replace those that had quit in exhaustion or in despair. "Why do you always read the want ads?" she said to Lany Ricardo, who spent all her spare time at those advertisements in two papers she bought and one she borrowed every day. "Did you ever get anything good, or hear of anybody that did?" "Oh, my, no," replied Lany with a laugh. "I read for the same reason that all the rest do. It's a kind of dope. You read and then you dream about the places--how grand they are and how well off you'll be. But nobody'd be fool enough to answer one of 'em unless she was out of a job and had to get another and didn't care how rotten it was. No, it's just dope--like buyin' policy numbers or lottery tickets. You know you won't git a prize, but you have a lot of fun dreaming about it." As Susan walked up and down at the lunch hour, she talked with workers, both men and women, in all sorts of employment. Some were doing a little better than she; others--the most--were worse off chiefly because her education, her developed intelligence, enabled her to ward off savage blows--such as illness from rotten food--against which their ignorance made them defenseless. Whenever she heard a story of someone's getting on, how grotesquely different it was from the stories she used to get out of the Sunday school library and dream over! These almost actualities of getting on had nothing in them about honesty and virtue. According to them it was always some sort of meanness or trickery; and the particular meanness or tricks were, in these practical schools of success in session at each lunch hour, related in detail as lessons in how to get on. If the success under discussion was a woman's, it was always how her boss or employer had "got stuck on her" and had given her an easier job with good pay so that she could wear clothes more agreeable to his eyes and to his touch. Now and then it was a wonderful dazzling success--some girl had got her rich employer so "dead crazy" about her that he had taken her away from work altogether and had set her up in a flat with a servant and a "swell trap"; there was even talk of marriage. Was it true? Were the Sunday school books through and through lies--ridiculous, misleading lies, wicked lies--wicked because they hid the shameful truth that ought to be proclaimed from the housetops? Susan was not sure. Perhaps envy twisted somewhat these tales of rare occasional successes told by the workers to each other. But certain it was that, wherever she had the opportunity to see for herself, success came only by hardness of heart, by tricks and cheats. Certain it was also that the general belief among the workers was that success could be got in those ways only--and this belief made the falsehood, if it was a falsehood, or the partial truth, if it was a twisted truth, full as poisonous as if it had been true throughout. Also, if the thing were not true, how came it that everyone in practical life believed it to be so--how came it that everyone who talked in praise of honesty and virtue looked, as he talked, as if he were canting and half expected to be laughed at? All about her as badly off as she, or worse off. Yet none so unhappy as she--not even the worse off. In fact, the worse off as the better off were not so deeply wretched. Because they had never in all their lives known the decencies of life clean lodgings, clean clothing, food fit to eat, leisure and the means of enjoying leisure. And Susan had known all these things. When she realized why her companions in misery, so feeble in self-restraint, were able to endure patiently and for the most part even cheerfully, how careful she was never to say or to suggest anything that might put ideas of what life might be, of what it was for the comfortable few, into the minds of these girls who never had known and could only be made wretched by knowing! How fortunate for them, she thought, that they had gone to schools where they met only their own kind! How fortunate that the devouring monster of industry had snatched them away from school before their minds had been awakened to the realities of life! How fortunate that their imaginations were too dull and too heavy to be touched by the sights of luxury they saw in the streets or by what they read in the newspapers and in the cheap novels! To them, as she soon realized, their world seemed the only world, and the world that lived in comfort seemed a vague unreality, as must seem whatever does not come into our own experience. One lunch hour an apostle of discontent preaching some kind of politics or other held forth on the corner above the shop. Susan paused to listen. She had heard only a few words when she was incensed to the depths of her heart against him. He ought to be stopped by the police, this scoundrel trying to make these people unhappy by awakening them to the misery and degradation of their lot! He looked like an honest, earnest man. No doubt he fancied that he was in some way doing good. These people who were always trying to do the poor good--they ought all to be suppressed! If someone could tell them how to cease to be poor, that would indeed be good. But such a thing would be impossible. In Sutherland, where the best off hadn't so painfully much more than the worst off, and where everybody but the idle and the drunken, and even they most of the time, had enough to eat, and a decent place to sleep, and some kind of Sunday clothes--in Sutherland the poverty was less than in Cincinnati, infinitely less than in this vast and incredibly rich New York where in certain districts wealth, enormous wealth, was piled up and up. So evidently the presence of riches did not help poverty but seemed to increase it. No, the disease was miserable, thought Susan. For most of the human race, disease and bad food and vile beds in dingy holes and days of fierce, poorly paid toil--that was the law of this hell of a world. And to escape from that hideous tyranny, you must be hard, you must trample, you must rob, you must cease to be human. The apostle of discontent insisted that the law could be changed, that the tyranny could be abolished. She listened, but he did not convince her. He sounded vague and dreamy--as fantastically false in his new way as she had found the Sunday school books to be. She passed on. She continued to pay out a cent each day for the newspaper. She no longer bothered with the want ads. Pipe dreaming did not attract her; she was too fiercely bent upon escape, actual escape, to waste time in dreaming of ways of escape that she never could realize. She read the paper because, if she could not live in the world but was battered down in its dark and foul and crowded cellar, she at least wished to know what was going on up in the light and air. She found every day news of great doings, of wonderful rises, of rich rewards for industry and thrift, of abounding prosperity and of opportunity fairly forcing itself into acceptance. But all this applied only to the few so strangely and so luckily chosen, while the mass was rejected. For that mass, from earliest childhood until death, there was only toil in squalor--squalid food, squalid clothing, squalid shelter. And when she read one day--in an obscure paragraph in her newspaper--that the income of the average American family was less than twelve dollars a week--less than two dollars and a half a week for each individual--she realized that what she was seeing and living was not New York and Cincinnati, but was the common lot, country wide, no doubt world wide. "_Must_ take hold!" her mind cried incessantly to her shrinking heart. "Somehow--anyhow--take hold!--must--must--_must!_" Those tenement houses! Those tenement streets! Everywhere wandering through the crowds the lonely old women--holding up to the girls the mirror of time and saying: "Look at my misery! Look at my disease-blasted body. Look at my toil-bent form and toil-wrecked hands. Look at my masses of wrinkles, at my rags, at my leaky and rotten shoes. Think of my aloneness--not a friend--feared and cast off by my relatives because they are afraid they will have to give me food and lodgings. Look at me--think of my life--and know that I am _you_ as you will be a few years from now whether you work as a slave to the machine or as a slave to the passions of one or of many men. I am _you_. Not one in a hundred thousand escape my fate except by death." "Somehow--anyhow--I must take hold," cried Susan to her swooning heart. When her capital had dwindled to three dollars Mrs. Tucker appeared. Her face was so beaming bright that Susan, despite her being clad in garments on which a pawnshop would advance nothing, fancied she had come with good news. "Now that I'm rid of that there house," said she, "I'll begin to perk up. I ain't got nothing left to worry me. I'm ready for whatever blessings the dear Master'll provide. My pastor tells me I'm the finest example of Christian fortitude he ever Saw. But"--and Mrs. Tucker spoke with genuine modesty--"I tell him I don't deserve no credit for leaning on the Lord. If I can trust Him in death, why not in life?" "You've got a place? The church has----" "Bless you, no," cried Mrs. Tucker. "Would I burden 'em with myself, when there's so many that has to be looked after? No, I go direct to the Lord." "What are you going to do? What place have you got?" "None as yet. But He'll provide something--something better'n I deserve." Susan had to turn away, to hide her pity--and her disappointment. Not only was she not to be helped, but also she must help another. "You might get a job at the hat factory," said she. Mrs. Tucker was delighted. "I knew it!" she cried. "Don't you see how He looks after me?" Susan persuaded Miss Tuohy to take Mrs. Tucker on. She could truthfully recommend the old woman as a hard worker. They moved into a room in a tenement in South Fifth Avenue. Susan read in the paper about a model tenement and went to try for what was described as real luxury in comfort and cleanliness. She found that sort of tenements filled with middle-class families on their way down in the world and making their last stand against rising rents and rising prices. The model tenement rents were far, far beyond her ability to pay. She might as well think of moving to the Waldorf. She and Mrs. Tucker had to be content with a dark room on the fifth floor, opening on a damp air shaft whose odor was so foul that in comparison the Clinton Place shaft was as the pure breath of the open sky. For this shelter--more than one-half the free and proud citizens of prosperous America dwelling in cities occupy its like, or worse they paid three dollars a week--a dollar and a half apiece. They washed their underclothing at night, slept while it was drying. And Susan, who could not bring herself to imitate the other girls and wear a blouse of dark color that was not to be washed, rose at four to do the necessary ironing. They did their own cooking. It was no longer possible for Susan to buy quality and content herself with small quantity. However small the quantity of food she could get along on, it must be of poor quality--for good quality was beyond her means. It maddened her to see the better class of working girls. Their fairly good clothing, their evidences of some comfort at home, seemed to mock at her as a poor fool who was being beaten down because she had not wit enough to get on. She knew these girls were either supporting themselves in part by prostitution or were held up by their families, by the pooling of the earnings of several persons. Left to themselves, to their own earnings at work, they would be no better off than she, or at best so little better off that the difference was unimportant. If to live decently in New York took an income of fifteen dollars a week, what did it matter whether one got five or ten or twelve? Any wages below fifteen meant a steady downward drag--meant exposure to the dirt and poison of poverty tenements--meant the steady decline of the power of resistance, the steady oozing away of self-respect, of the courage and hope that give the power to rise. To have less than the fifteen dollars absolutely necessary for decent surroundings, decent clothing, decent food--that meant one was drowning. What matter whether the death of the soul was quick, or slow, whether the waters of destruction were twenty feet deep or twenty thousand? Mrs. Reardon, the servant woman on the top floor, was evicted and Susan and Mrs. Tucker took her in. She protested that she could sleep on the floor, that she had done so a large part of her life--that she preferred it to most beds. But Susan made her up a kind of bed in the corner. They would not let her pay anything. She had rheumatism horribly, some kind of lung trouble, and the almost universal and repulsive catarrh that preys upon working people. Her hair had dwindled to a meager wisp. This she wound into a hard little knot and fastened with an imitation tortoise-shell comb, huge, high, and broken, set with large pieces of glass cut like diamonds. Her teeth were all gone and her cheeks almost met in her mouth. One day, when Mrs. Tucker and Mrs. Reardon were exchanging eulogies upon the goodness of God to them, Susan shocked them by harshly ordering them to be silent. "If God hears you," she said, "He'll think you're mocking Him. Anyhow, I can't stand any more of it. Hereafter do your talking of that kind when I'm not here." Another day Mrs. Reardon told about her sister. The sister had worked in a factory where some sort of poison that had a rotting effect on the human body was used in the manufacture. Like a series of others the sister caught the disease. But instead of rotting out a spot, a few fingers, or part of the face, it had eaten away the whole of her lower jaw so that she had to prepare her food for swallowing by first pressing it with her fingers against her upper teeth. Used as Susan was to hearing horrors in this region where disease and accident preyed upon every family, she fled from the room and walked shuddering about the streets--the streets with their incessant march past of blighted and blasted, of maimed and crippled and worm-eaten. Until that day Susan had been about as unobservant of the obvious things as is the rest of the race. On that day she for the first time noticed the crowd in the street, with mind alert to signs of the ravages of accident and disease. Hardly a sound body, hardly one that was not piteously and hideously marked. When she returned--and she did not stay out long--Mrs. Tucker was alone. Said she: "Mrs. Reardon says the rotten jaw was sent on her sister as a punishment for marrying a Protestant, she being a Catholic. How ignorant some people is! Of course, the good Lord sent the judgment on her for being a Catholic at all." "Mrs. Tucker," said Susan, "did you ever hear of Nero?" "He burned up Rome--and he burned up the Christian martyrs," said Mrs. Tucker. "I had a good schooling. Besides, sermons is highly educating." "Well," said Susan, "if I had a choice of living under Nero or of living under that God you and Mrs. Reardon talk about, I'd take Nero and be thankful and happy." Mrs. Tucker would have fled if she could have afforded it. As it was all she ventured was a sigh and lips moving in prayer. On a Friday in late October, at the lunch hour, Susan was walking up and down the sunny side of Broadway. It was the first distinctly cool day of the autumn; there had been a heavy downpour of rain all morning, but the New York sun that is ever struggling to shine and is successful on all but an occasional day was tearing up and scattering the clouds with the aid of a sharp north wind blowing down the deep canyon. She was wearing her summer dress still--old and dingy but clean. That look of neatness about the feet--that charm of a well-shaped foot and a well-turned ankle properly set off--had disappeared--with her the surest sign of the extreme of desperate poverty. Her shoes were much scuffed, were even slightly down at the heel; her sailor hat would have looked only the worse had it had a fresh ribbon on its crown. This first hint of winter had stung her fast numbing faculties into unusual activity. She was remembering the misery of the cold in Cincinnati--the misery that had driven her into prostitution as a drunken driver's lash makes the frenzied horse rush he cares not where in his desire to escape. This wind of Broadway--this first warning of winter--it was hissing in her ears: "Take hold! Winter is coming! Take hold!" Summer and winter--fiery heat and brutal cold. Like the devils in the poem, the poor--the masses, all but a few of the human race--were hurried from fire to ice, to vary their torment and to make it always exquisite. To shelter herself for a moment she paused at a spot that happened to be protected to the south by a projecting sidewalk sign. She was facing, with only a tantalizing sheet of glass between, a display of winter underclothes on wax figures. To show them off more effectively the sides and the back of the window were mirrors. Susan's gaze traveled past the figures to a person she saw standing at full length before her. "Who is that pale, stooped girl?" she thought. "How dreary and sad she looks! How hard she is fighting to make her clothes look decent, when they aren't! She must be something like me--only much worse off." And then she realized that she was gazing at her own image, was pitying her own self. The room she and Mrs. Tucker and the old scrubwoman occupied was so dark, even with its one little gas jet lighted, that she was able to get only a faint look at herself in the little cracked and water-marked mirror over its filthy washstand--filthy because the dirt was so ground in that only floods of water and bars of soap could have cleaned down to its original surface. She was having a clear look at herself for the first time in three months. She shrank in horror, yet gazed on fascinated. Why, her physical charm had gone gone, leaving hardly a trace! Those dull, hollow eyes--that thin and almost ghastly face--the emaciated form--the once attractive hair now looking poor and stringy because it could not be washed properly--above all, the sad, bitter expression about the mouth. Those pale lips! Her lips had been from childhood one of her conspicuous and most tempting beauties; and as the sex side of her nature had developed they had bloomed into wonderful freshness and vividness of form and color. Now---- Those pale, pale lips! They seemed to form a sort of climax of tragedy to the melancholy of her face. She gazed on and on. She noted every detail. How she had fallen! Indeed, a fallen woman! These others had been born to the conditions that were destroying her; they were no worse off, in many cases better off. But she, born to comfort and custom of intelligent educated associations and associates---- A fallen woman! Honest work! Even if it were true that this honest work was a sort of probation through which one rose to better things--even if this were true, could it be denied that only a few at best could rise, that the most--including all the sensitive, and most of the children--must wallow on, must perish? Oh, the lies, the lies about honest work! Rosa Mohr, a girl of her own age who worked in the same room, joined her. "Admiring yourself?" she said laughing. "Well, I don't blame you. You _are_ pretty." Susan at first thought Rosa was mocking her. But the tone and expression were sincere. "It won't last long," Rosa went on. "I wasn't so bad myself when I quit the high school and took a job because father lost his business and his health. He got in the way of one of those trusts. So of course they handed it to him good and hard. But he wasn't a squealer. He always said they'd done only what he'd been doing himself if he'd had the chance. I always think of what papa used to say when I hear people carrying on about how wicked this or that somebody else is." "Are you going to stay on--at this life?" asked Susan, still looking at her own image. "I guess so. What else is there? . . . I've got a steady. We'll get married as soon as he has a raise to twelve per. But I'll not be any better off. My beau's too stupid ever to make much. If you see me ten years from now I'll probably be a fat, sloppy old thing, warming a window sill or slouching about in dirty rags." "Isn't there any way to--to escape?" "It does look as though there ought to be--doesn't it? But I've thought and thought, and _I_ can't see it--and I'm pretty near straight Jew. They say things are better than they used to be, and I guess they are. But not enough better to help me any. Perhaps my children--_if_ I'm fool enough to have any--perhaps they'll get a chance. . . . But I wouldn't gamble on it." Susan was still looking at her rags--at her pale lips--was avoiding meeting her own eyes. "Why not try the streets?" "Nothing in it," said Rosa, practically. "I did try it for a while and quit. Lots of the girls do, and only the fools stay at it. Once in a while there's a girl who's lucky and gets a lover that's kind to her or a husband that can make good. But that's luck. For one that wins out, a thousand lose." "Luck?" said Susan. Rosa laughed. "You're right. It's something else besides luck. The trouble is a girl loses her head--falls in love--supports a man--takes to drink--don't look out for her health--wastes her money. Still--where's the girl with head enough to get on where there's so many temptations?" "But there's no chance at all, keeping straight, you say." "The other thing's worse. The street girls--of our class, I mean--don't average as much as we do. And it's an awful business in winter. And they spend so much time in station houses and over on the Island. And, gosh! how the men do treat them! You haven't any idea. You wouldn't believe the horrible things the girls have to do to earn their money--a quarter or half a dollar--and maybe the men don't pay them even that. A girl tries to get her money in advance, but often she doesn't. And as they have to dress better than we do, and live where they can clean up a little, they 'most starve. Oh, that life's hell." Susan had turned away from her image, was looking at Rosa. "As for the fast houses----" Rosa shuddered--"I was in one for a week. I ran away--it was the only way I could escape. I'd never tell any human being what I went through in that house. . . . Never!" She watched Susan's fine sympathetic face, and in a burst of confidence said: "One night the landlady sent me up with seventeen men. And she kept the seventeen dollars I made, and took away from me half a dollar one drunken longshoreman gave me as a present. She said I owed it for board and clothes. In those houses, high and low, the girls always owes the madam. They haven't a stitch of their own to their backs." The two girls stood facing each other, each looking past the other into the wind-swept canyon of Broadway--the majestic vista of lofty buildings, symbols of wealth and luxury so abundant that it flaunted itself, overflowed in gaudy extravagance. Finally Susan said: "Do you ever think of killing yourself?" "I thought I would," replied the other girl. "But I guess I wouldn't have. Everybody knows there's no hope, yet they keep on hopin'. And I've got pretty good health yet, and once in a while I have some fun. You ought to go to dances--and drink. You wouldn't be blue _all_ the time, then." "If it wasn't for the sun," said Susan. "The sun?" inquired Rosa. "Where I came from," explained Susan, "it rained a great deal, and the sky was covered so much of the time. But here in New York there is so much sun. I love the sun. I get desperate--then out comes the sun, and I say to myself, 'Well, I guess I can go on a while longer, with the sun to help me.'" "I hadn't thought of it," said Rosa, "but the sun is a help." That indefatigable New York sun! It was like Susan's own courage. It fought the clouds whenever clouds dared to appear and contest its right to shine upon the City of the Sun, and hardly a day was so stormy that for a moment at least the sun did not burst through for a look at its beloved. For weeks Susan had eaten almost nothing. During her previous sojourn in the slums--the slums of Cincinnati, though they were not classed as slums--the food had seemed revolting. But she was less discriminating then. The only food she could afford now--the food that is the best obtainable for a majority of the inhabitants of any city--was simply impossible for her. She ate only when she could endure no longer. This starvation no doubt saved her from illness; but at the same time it drained her strength. Her vitality had been going down, a little each day--lower and lower. The poverty which had infuriated her at first was now acting upon her like a soothing poison. The reason she had not risen to revolt was this slow and subtle poison that explains the inertia of the tenement poor from babyhood. To be spirited one must have health or a nervous system diseased in some of the ways that cause constant irritation. The disease called poverty is not an irritant, but an anesthetic. If Susan had been born to that life, her naturally vivacious temperament would have made her gay in unconscious wretchedness; as it was, she knew her own misery and suffered from it keenly--at times hideously--yet was rapidly losing the power to revolt. Perhaps it was the wind--yes, it must have been the wind with its threat of winter--that roused her sluggish blood, that whipped thought into action. Anything--anything would be right, if it promised escape. Right--wrong! Hypocritical words for comfortable people! That Friday night, after her supper of half-cooked corn meal and tea, she went instantly to work at washing out clothes. Mrs. Tucker spent the evening gossiping with the janitress, came in about midnight. As usual she was full to the brim with news of misery--of jobs lost, abandoned wives, of abused children, of poisoning from rotten "fresh" food or from "embalmed" stuff in cans, of sickness and yet more sickness, of maiming accidents, of death--news that is the commonplace of tenement life. She loved to tell these tales with all the harrowing particulars and to find in each some evidence of the goodness of God to herself. Often Susan could let her run on and on without listening. But not that night. She resisted the impulse to bid her be silent, left the room and stood at the hall window. When she returned Mrs. Tucker was in bed, was snoring in a tranquillity that was the reverse of contagious. With her habitual cheerfulness she had adapted herself to her changed condition without fretting. She had become as ragged and as dirty as her neighbors; she so wrought upon Susan's sensibilities, blunted though they were, that the girl would have been unable to sleep in the same bed if she had not always been tired to exhaustion when she lay down. But for that matter only exhaustion could have kept her asleep in that vermin-infested hole. Even the fiercest swarms of the insects that flew or ran or crawled and bit, even the filthy mice squeaking as they played upon the covers or ran over the faces of the sleepers, did not often rouse her. While Mrs. Tucker snored, Susan worked on, getting every piece of at all fit clothing in her meager wardrobe into the best possible condition. She did not once glance at the face of the noisy sleeper--a face homely enough in Mrs. Tucker's waking hours, hideous now with the mouth open and a few scattered rotten teeth exposed, and the dark yellow-blue of the unhealthy gums and tongue. At dawn Mrs. Tucker awoke with a snort and a start. She rubbed her eyes with her dirty and twisted and wrinkled fingers--the nails were worn and broken, turned up as if warped at the edges, blackened with dirt and bruisings. "Why, are you up already?" she said to Susan. "I've not been to bed," replied the girl. The woman stretched herself, sat up, thrust her thick, stockinged legs over the side of the bed. She slept in all her clothing but her skirt, waist, and shoes. She kneeled down upon the bare, sprung, and slanting floor, said a prayer, arose with a beaming face. "It's nice and warm in the room. How I do dread the winter, the cold weather--though no doubt we'll make out all right! Everything always does turn out well for me. The Lord takes care of me. I must make me a cup of tea." "I've made it," said Susan. The tea was frightful stuff--not tea at all, but cheap adulterants colored poisonously. Everything they got was of the same quality; yet the prices they paid for the tiny quantities they were able to buy at any one time were at a rate that would have bought the finest quality at the most expensive grocery in New York. "Wonder why Mrs. Reardon don't come?" said Mrs. Tucker. Mrs. Reardon had as her only work a one night job at scrubbing. "She ought to have come an hour ago." "Her rheumatism was bad when she started," said Susan. "I guess she worked slow." When Mrs. Tucker had finished her second cup she put on her shoes, overskirt and waist, made a few passes at her hair. She was ready to go to work. Susan looked at her, murmured: "An honest, God-fearing working woman!" "Huh?" said Mrs. Tucker. "Nothing," replied Susan who would not have permitted her to hear. It would be cruel to put such ideas before one doomed beyond hope. Susan was utterly tired, but even the strong craving for a stimulant could not draw that tea past her lips. She ate a piece of dry bread, washed her face, neck, and hands. It was time to start for the factory. That day--Saturday--was a half-holiday. Susan drew her week's earnings--four dollars and ten cents--and came home. Mrs. Tucker, who had drawn--"thanks to the Lord"--three dollars and a quarter, was with her. The janitress halted them as they passed and told them that Mrs. Reardon was dead. She looked like another scrubwoman, living down the street, who was known always to carry a sum of money in her dress pocket, the banks being untrustworthy. Mrs. Reardon, passing along in the dusk of the early morning, had been hit on the head with a blackjack. The one blow had killed her. Violence, tragedy of all kinds, were too commonplace in that neighborhood to cause more than a slight ripple. An old scrubwoman would have had to die in some peculiarly awful way to receive the flattery of agitating an agitated street. Mrs. Reardon had died what was really almost a natural death. So the faint disturbance of the terrors of life had long since disappeared. The body was at the Morgue, of course. "We'll go up, right away," said Mrs. Tucker. "I've something to do that can't be put, off," replied Susan. "I don't like for anyone as young as you to be so hard," reproached Mrs. Tucker. "Is it hard," said Susan, "to see that death isn't nearly so terrible as life? She's safe and at peace. I've got to _live_." Mrs. Tucker, eager for an emotional and religious opportunity, hastened away. Susan went at her wardrobe ironing, darning, fixing buttonholes, hooks and eyes. She drew a bucket of water from the tap in the hall and proceeded to wash her hair with soap; she rinsed it, dried it as well as she could with their one small, thin towel, left it hanging free for the air to finish the job. It had rained all the night before--the second heavy rain in two months. But at dawn the rain had ceased, and the clouds had fled before the sun that rules almost undisputed nine months of the year and wars valiantly to rule the other three months--not altogether in vain. A few golden strays found their way into that cavelike room and had been helping her wonderfully. She bathed herself and scrubbed herself from head to foot. She manicured her nails, got her hands and feet into fairly good condition. She put on her best underclothes, her one remaining pair of undarned stockings, the pair of ties she had been saving against an emergency. And once more she had the charm upon which she most prided herself--the charm of an attractive look about the feet and ankles. She then took up the dark-blue hat frame--one of a lot of "seconds"--she had bought for thirty-five cents at a bargain sale, trimmed it with a broad dark-blue ribbon for which she had paid sixty cents. She was well pleased--and justly so--with the result. The trimmed hat might well have cost ten or fifteen dollars--for the largest part of the price of a woman's hat is usually the taste of the arrangement of the trimming. By this time her hair was dry. She did it up with a care she had not had time to give it in many a week. She put on the dark-blue serge skirt of the between seasons dress she had brought with her from Forty-fourth Street; she had not worn it at all. With the feeble aid of the mirror that distorted her image into grotesqueness, she put on her hat with the care that important detail of a woman's toilet always deserves. She completed her toilet with her one good and unworn blouse--plain white, the yoke gracefully pointed--and with a blue neck piece she had been saving. She made a bundle of all her clothing that was fit for anything--including the unworn batiste dress Jeffries and Jonas had given her. And into it she put the pistol she had brought away from Forty-fourth Street. She made a separate bundle of the Jeffries and Jonas hat with its valuable plumes. With the two bundles she descended and went to a pawnshop in Houston Street, to which she had made several visits. A dirty-looking man with a short beard fluffy and thick like a yellow hen's tail lurked behind the counter in the dark little shop. She put her bundles on the counter, opened them. "How much can I get for these things?" she asked. The man examined every piece minutely. "There's really nothing here but the summer dress and the hat," said he. "And they're out of style. I can't give you more than four dollars for the lot--and one for the pistol which is good but old style now. Five dollars. How'll you have it?" Susan folded the things and tied up the bundles. "Sorry to have troubled you," she said, taking one in either hand. "How much did you expect to get, lady?" asked the pawnbroker. "Twenty-five dollars." He laughed, turned toward the back of the shop. As she reached the door he called from his desk at which he seemed about to seat himself, "I might squeeze you out ten dollars." "The plumes on the hat will sell for thirty dollars," said Susan. "You know as well as I do that ostrich feathers have gone up." The man slowly advanced. "I hate to see a customer go away unsatisfied," said he. "I'll give you twenty dollars." "Not a cent less than twenty-five. At the next place I'll ask thirty--and get it." "I never can stand out against a lady. Give me the stuff." Susan put it on the counter again. Said she: "I don't blame you for trying to do me. You're right to try to buy your way out of hell." The pawnbroker reflected, could not understand this subtlety, went behind his counter. He produced a key from his pocket, unlocked a drawer underneath and took out a large tin box. With another key from another pocket he unlocked this, threw back the lid revealing a disorder of papers. From the depths he fished a paper bag. This contained a roll of bills. He gave Susan a twenty and a five, both covered with dirt so thickly that she could scarcely make out the denominations. "You'll have to give me cleaner money than this," said she. "You are a fine lady," grumbled he. But he found cleaner bills. She turned to her room. At sight of her Mrs. Tucker burst out laughing with delight. "My, but you do look like old times!" cried she. "How neat and tasty you are! I suppose it's no need to ask if you're going to church?" "No," said Susan. "I've got nothing to give, and I don't beg." "Well, I ain't going there myself, lately--somehow. They got so they weren't very cordial--or maybe it was me thinking that way because I wasn't dressed up like. Still I do wish you was more religious. But you'll come to it, for you're naturally a good girl. And when you do, the Lord'll give you a more contented heart. Not that you complain. I never knew anybody, especially a young person, that took things so quiet. . . . It can't be you're going to a dance?" "No," said Susan. "I'm going to leave--go back uptown." Mrs. Tucker plumped down upon the bed. "Leave for good?" she gasped. "I've got Nelly Lemayer to take my place here, if you want her," said Susan. "Here is my share of the rent for next week and half a dollar for the extra gas I've burned last night and today." "And Mrs. Reardon gone, too!" sobbed Mrs. Tucker, suddenly remembering the old scrubwoman whom both had forgotten. "And up to that there Morgue they wouldn't let me see her except where the light was so poor that I couldn't rightly swear it was her. How brutal everybody is to the poor! If they didn't have the Lord, what would become of them! And you leaving me all alone!" The sobs rose into hysteria. Susan stood impassive. She had seen again and again how faint the breeze that would throw those shallow waters into commotion and how soon they were tranquil again. It was by observing Mrs. Tucker that she first learned an important unrecognized truth about human nature that amiable, easily sympathetic and habitually good-humored people are invariably hard of heart. In this parting she had no sense of loss, none of the melancholy that often oppresses us when we separate from someone to whom we are indifferent yet feel bound by the tie of misfortunes borne together. Mrs. Tucker, fallen into the habits of their surroundings, was for her simply part of them. And she was glad she was leaving them--forever, she hoped. _Christian_, fleeing the City of Destruction, had no sterner mandate to flight than her instinct was suddenly urging upon her. When Mrs. Tucker saw that her tears were not appreciated, she decided that they were unnecessary. She dried her eyes and said: "Anyhow, I reckon Mrs. Reardon's taking-off was a mercy." "She's better dead," said Susan. She had abhorred the old woman, even as she pitied and sheltered her. She had a way of fawning and cringing and flattering--no doubt in well meaning attempt to show gratitude--but it was unendurable to Susan. And now that she was dead and gone, there was no call for further pretenses. "You ain't going right away?" said Mrs. Tucker. "Yes," said Susan. "You ought to stay to supper." Supper! That revolting food! "No, I must go right away," replied Susan. "Well, you'll come to see me. And maybe you'll be back with us. You might go farther and do worse. On my way from the morgue I dropped in to see a lady friend on the East Side. I guess the good Lord has abandoned the East Side, there being nothing there but Catholics and Jews, and no true religion. It's dreadful the way things is over there--the girls are taking to the streets in droves. My lady friend was telling me that some of the mothers is sending their little girls out streetwalking, and some's even taking out them that's too young to be trusted to go alone. And no money in it, at that. And food and clothing prices going up and up. Meat and vegetables two and three times what they was a few years ago. And rents!" Mrs. Tucker threw up her hands. "I must be going," said Susan. "Good-by." She put out her hand, but Mrs. Tucker insisted on kissing her. She crossed Washington Square, beautiful in the soft evening light, and went up Fifth Avenue. She felt that she was breathing the air of a different world as she walked along the broad clean sidewalk with the handsome old houses on either side, with carriages and automobiles speeding past, with clean, happy-faced, well dressed human beings in sight everywhere. It was like coming out of the dank darkness of Dismal Swamp into smiling fields with a pure, star-spangled sky above. She was free--free! It might be for but a moment; still it was freedom, infinitely sweet because of past slavery and because of the fear of slavery closing in again. She had abandoned the old toilet articles. She had only the clothes she was wearing, the thirty-one dollars divided between her stockings, and the two-dollar bill stuffed into the palm of her left glove. She had walked but a few hundred feet. She had advanced into a region no more prosperous to the eye than that she had been working in every day. Yet she had changed her world--because she had changed her point of view. The strata that form society lie in roughly parallel lines one above the other. The flow of all forms of the currents of life is horizontally along these strata, never vertically from one stratum to another. These strata, lying apparently in contact, one upon another, are in fact abysmally separated. There is not--and in the nature of things never can be any genuine human sympathy between any two strata. We _sympathize_ in our own stratum, or class; toward other strata--other classes--our attitude is necessarily a looking up or a looking down. Susan, a bit of flotsam, ascending, descending, ascending across the social layers--belonging nowhere having attachments, not sympathies, a real settled lot nowhere--Susan was once more upward bound. At the corner of Fourteenth Street there was a shop with large mirrors in the show windows. She paused to examine herself. She found she had no reason to be disturbed about her appearance. Her dress and hat looked well; her hair was satisfactory; the sharp air had brought some life to the pallor of her cheeks, and the release from the slums had restored some of the light to her eyes. "Why did I stay there so long?" she demanded of herself. Then, "How have I suddenly got the courage to leave?" She had no answer to either question. Nor did she care for an answer. She was not even especially interested in what was about to happen to her. The moment she found herself above Twenty-third Street and in the old familiar surroundings, she felt an irresistible longing to hear about Rod Spenser. She was like one who has been on a far journey, leaving behind him everything that has been life to him; he dismisses it all because he must, until he finds himself again in his own country, in his old surroundings. She went into the Hoffman House and at the public telephone got the _Herald_ office. "Is Mr. Drumley there?" "No," was the reply. "He's gone to Europe." "Did Mr. Spenser go with him?" "Mr. Spenser isn't here--hasn't been for a long time. He's abroad too. Who is this?" "Thank you," said Susan, hanging up the receiver. She drew a deep breath of relief. She left the hotel by the women's entrance in Broadway. It was six o'clock. The sky was clear--a typical New York sky with air that intoxicated blowing from it--air of the sea--air of the depths of heaven. A crescent moon glittered above the Diana on the Garden tower. It was Saturday night and Broadway was thronged--with men eager to spend in pleasure part of the week's wages or salary they had just drawn; with women sparkling-eyed and odorous of perfumes and eager to help the men. The air was sharp--was the ocean air of New York at its delicious best. And the slim, slightly stooped girl with the earnest violet-gray eyes and the sad bitter mouth from whose lips the once brilliant color had now fled was ready for whatever might come. She paused at the corner, and gazed up brilliantly lighted Broadway. "Now!" she said half aloud and, like an expert swimmer adventuring the rapids, she advanced into the swift-moving crowd of the highway of New York's gayety. CHAPTER V AT the corner of Twenty-sixth Street a man put himself squarely across her path. She was attracted by the twinkle in his good-natured eyes. He was a youngish man, had the stoutness of indulgence in a fondness for eating and drinking--but the stoutness was still well within the bounds of decency. His clothing bore out the suggestion of his self-assured way of stopping her--the suggestion of a confidence-giving prosperity. "You look as if you needed a drink, too," said he. "How about it, lady with the lovely feet?" For the first time in her life she was feeling on an equality with man. She gave him the same candidly measuring glance that man gives man. She saw good-nature, audacity without impudence--at least not the common sort of impudence. She smiled merrily, glad of the chance to show her delight that she was once more back in civilization after the long sojourn in the prison workshops where it is manufactured. She said: "A drink? Thank you--yes." "That's a superior quality of smile you've got there," said he. "That, and those nice slim feet of yours ought to win for you anywhere. Let's go to the Martin." "Down University Place?" The stout young man pointed his slender cane across the street. "You must have been away." "Yes," said the girl. "I've been--dead." "I'd like to try that myself--if I could be sure of coming to life in little old New York." And he looked round with laughing eyes as if the lights, the crowds, the champagne-like air intoxicated him. At the first break in the thunderous torrent of traffic they crossed Broadway and went in at the Twenty-sixth Street entrance. The restaurant, to the left, was empty. Its little tables were ready, however, for the throng of diners soon to come. Susan had difficulty in restraining herself. She was almost delirious with delight. She was agitated almost to tears by the freshness, the sparkle in the glow of the red-shaded candles, in the colors and odors of the flowers decorating every table. While she had been down there all this had been up here--waiting for her! Why had she stayed down there? But then, why had she gone? What folly, what madness! To suffer such horrors for no reason--beyond some vague, clinging remnant of a superstition--or had it been just plain insanity? "Yes, I've been crazy--out of my head. The break with--Rod--upset my mind." Her companion took her into the café to the right. He seated her on one of the leather benches not far from the door, seated himself in a chair opposite; there was a narrow marble-topped table between them. On Susan's right sat a too conspicuously dressed but somehow important looking actress; on her left, a shopkeeper's fat wife. Opposite each woman sat the sort of man one would expect to find with her. The face of the actress's man interested her. It was a long pale face, the mouth weary, in the eyes a strange hot fire of intense enthusiasm. He was young--and old--and neither. Evidently he had lived every minute of every year of his perhaps forty years. He was wearing a quiet suit of blue and his necktie was of a darker shade of the same color. His clothes were draped upon his good figure with a certain fascinating distinction. He was smoking an unusually long and thick cigarette. The slender strong white hand he raised and lowered was the hand of an artist. He might be a bad man, a very bad man--his face had an expression of freedom, of experience, that made such an idea as conventionality in connection with him ridiculous. But however bad he might be, Susan felt sure it would be an artistic kind of badness, without vulgarity. He might have reached the stage at which morality ceases to be a conviction, a matter of conscience, and becomes a matter of preference, of tastes--and he surely had good taste in conduct no less than in dress and manner. The woman with him evidently wished to convince him that she loved him, to convince those about her that they were lovers; the man evidently knew exactly what she had in mind--for he was polite, attentive, indifferent, and--Susan suspected--secretly amused. Susan's escort leaned toward her and said in a low tone, "The two at the next table--the woman's Mary Rigsdall, the actress, and the man's Brent, the fellow who writes plays." Then in a less cautious tone, "What are you drinking?" "What are _you_ drinking?" asked Susan, still covertly watching Brent. "You are going to dine with me?" "I've no engagement." "Then let's have Martinis--and I'll go get a table and order dinner while the waiter's bringing them." When Susan was alone, she gazed round the crowded café, at the scores of interesting faces--thrillingly interesting to her after her long sojourn among countenances merely expressing crude elemental appetites if anything at all beyond toil, anxiety, privation, and bad health. These were the faces of the triumphant class--of those who had wealth or were getting it, fame or were striving for it, of those born to or acquiring position of some sort among the few thousands who lord it over the millions. These were the people among whom she belonged. Why was she having such a savage struggle to attain it? Then, all in an instant the truth she had been so long groping for in vain flung itself at her. None of these women, none of the women of the prosperous classes would be there but for the assistance and protection of the men. She marveled at her stupidity in not having seen the obvious thing clearly long ago. The successful women won their success by disposing of their persons to advantage--by getting the favor of some man of ability. Therefore, she, a woman, must adopt that same policy if she was to have a chance at the things worth while in life. She must make the best bargain--or series of bargains--she could. And as her necessities were pressing she must lose no time. She understood now the instinct that had forced her to fly from South Fifth Avenue, that had overruled her hesitation and had compelled her to accept the good-natured, prosperous man's invitation. . . . There was no other way open to her. She must not evade that fact; she must accept it. Other ways there might be--for other women. But not for her, the outcast without friends or family, the woman alone, with no one to lean upon or to give her anything except in exchange for what she had to offer that was marketable. She must make the bargain she could, not waste time in the folly of awaiting a bargain to her liking. Since she was living in the world and wished to continue to live there, she must accept the world's terms. To be sad or angry either one because the world did not offer her as attractive terms as it apparently offered many other women--the happy and respected wives and mothers of the prosperous classes, for instance--to rail against that was silly and stupid, was unworthy of her intelligence. She would do as best she could, and move along, keeping her eyes open; and perhaps some day a chance for much better terms might offer--for the best--for such terms as that famous actress there had got. She looked at Mary Rigsdall. An expression in her interesting face--the latent rather than the surface expression--set Susan to wondering whether, if she knew Rigsdall's _whole_ story--or any woman's whole story--she might not see that the world was not bargaining so hardly with her, after all. Or any man's whole story. There her eyes shifted to Rigsdall's companion, the famous playwright of whom she had so often heard Rod and his friends talk. She was startled to find that his gaze was upon her--an all-seeing look that penetrated to the very core of her being. He either did not note or cared nothing about her color of embarrassment. He regarded her steadily until, so she felt, he had seen precisely what she was, had become intimately acquainted with her. Then he looked away. It chagrined her that his eyes did not again turn in her direction; she felt that he had catalogued her as not worth while. She listened to the conversation of the two. The woman did the talking, and her subject was herself--her ability as an actress, her conception of some part she either was about to play or was hoping to play. Susan, too young to have acquired more than the rudiments of the difficult art of character study, even had she had especial talent for it--which she had not--Susan decided that the famous Rigsdall was as shallow and vain as Rod had said all stage people were. The waiter brought the cocktails and her stout young companion came back, beaming at the thought of the dinner he had painstakingly ordered. As he reached the table he jerked his head in self-approval. "It'll be a good one," said he. "Saturday night dinner--and after--means a lot to me. I work hard all week. Saturday nights I cut loose. Sundays I sleep and get ready to scramble again on Monday for the dollars." He seated himself, leaned toward her with elevated glass. "What name?" inquired he. "Susan." "That's a good old-fashioned name. Makes me see the hollyhocks, and the hens scratching for worms. Mine's Howland. Billy Howland. I came from Maryland . . . and I'm mighty glad I did. I wouldn't be from anywhere else for worlds, and I wouldn't be there for worlds. Where do you hail from?" "The West," said Susan. "Well, the men in your particular corner out yonder must be a pretty poor lot to have let you leave. I spotted you for mine the minute I saw you--Susan. I hope you're not as quiet as your name. Another cocktail?" "Thanks." "Like to drink?" "I'm going to do more of it hereafter." "Been laying low for a while--eh?" "Very low," said Susan. Her eyes were sparkling now; the cocktail had begun to stir her long languid blood. "Live with your family?" "I haven't any. I'm free." "On the stage?" "I'm thinking of going on." "And meanwhile?" "Meanwhile--whatever comes." Billy Howland's face was radiant. "I had a date tonight and the lady threw me down. One of those drummer's wives that take in washing to add to the family income while hubby's flirting round the country. This hubby came home unexpectedly. I'm glad he did." He beamed with such whole-souled good-nature that Susan laughed. "Thanks. Same to you," said she. "Hope you're going to do a lot of that laughing," said he. "It's the best I've heard--such a quiet, gay sound. I sure do have the best luck. Until five years ago there was nothing doing for Billy--hall bedroom--Wheeling stogies--one shirt and two pairs of cuffs a week--not enough to buy a lady an ice-cream soda. All at once--bang! The hoodoo busted, and everything that arrived was for William C. Howland. Better get aboard." "Here I am." "Hold on tight. I pay no attention to the speed laws, and round the corners on two wheels. Do you like good things to eat?" "I haven't eaten for six months." "You must have been out home. Ah!--There's the man to tell us dinner's ready." They finished the second cocktail. Susan was pleased to note that Brent was again looking at her; and she thought--though she suspected it might be the cocktail--that there was a question in his look--a question about her which he had been unable to answer to his satisfaction. When she and Howland were at one of the small tables against the wall in the restaurant, she said to him: "You know Mr. Brent?" "The play man? Lord, no. I'm a plain business dub. He wouldn't bother with me. You like that sort of man?" "I want to get on the stage, if I can," was Susan's diplomatic reply. "Well--let's have dinner first. I've ordered champagne, but if you prefer something else----" "Champagne is what I want. I hope it's very dry." Howland's eyes gazed tenderly at her. "I do like a woman who knows the difference between champagne and carbonated sirup. I think you and I've got a lot of tastes in common. I like eating--so do you. I like drinking--so do you. I like a good time--so do you. You're a little bit thin for my taste, but you'll fatten up. I wonder what makes your lips so pale." "I'd hate to remind myself by telling you," said Susan. The restaurant was filling. Most of the men and women were in evening dress. Each arriving woman brought with her a new exhibition of extravagance in costume, diffused a new variety of powerful perfume. The orchestra in the balcony was playing waltzes and the liveliest Hungarian music and the most sensuous strains from Italy and France and Spain. And before her was food!--food again!--not horrible stuff unfit for beasts, worse than was fed to beasts, but human food--good things, well cooked and well served. To have seen her, to have seen the expression of her eyes, without knowing her history and without having lived as she had lived, would have been to think her a glutton. Her spirits giddied toward the ecstatic. She began to talk--commenting on the people about her--the one subject she could venture with her companion. As she talked and drank, he ate and drank, stuffing and gorging himself, but with a frankness of gluttony that delighted her. She found she could not eat much, but she liked to see eating; she who had so long been seeing only poverty, bolting wretched food and drinking the vilest kinds of whiskey and beer, of alleged coffee and tea--she reveled in Howland's exhibition. She must learn to live altogether in her senses, never to think except about an appetite. Where could she find a better teacher? . . . They drank two quarts of champagne, and with the coffee she took _crême de menthe_ and he brandy. And as the sensuous temperament that springs from intense vitality reasserted itself, the opportunity before her lost all its repellent features, became the bright, vivid countenance of lusty youth, irradiating the joy of living. "I hear there's a lively ball up at Terrace Garden," said he. "Want to go?" "That'll be fine!" cried she. She saw it would have taken nearly all the money she possessed to have paid that bill. About four weeks' wages for one dinner! Thousands of families living for two weeks on what she and he had consumed in two hours! She reached for her half empty champagne glass, emptied it. She must forget all those things! "I've played the fool once. I've learned my lesson. Surely I'll never do it again." As she drank, her eyes chanced upon the clock. Half-past ten. Mrs. Tucker had probably just fallen asleep. And Mrs. Reardon was going out to scrub--going out limping and groaning with rheumatism. No, Mrs. Reardon was lying up at the morgue dead, her one chance to live lost forever. Dead! Yet better off than Mrs. Tucker lying alive. Susan could see her--the seamed and broken and dirty old remnant of a face--could see the vermin--and the mice could hear the snoring--the angry grunt and turning over as the insects---- "I want another drink--right away," she cried. "Sure!" said Howland. "I need one more, too." They drove in a taxi to Terrace Garden, he holding her in his arms and kissing her with an intoxicated man's enthusiasm. "You certainly are sweet," said he. "The wine on your breath is like flowers. Gosh, but I'm glad that husband came home! Like me a little?" "I'm so happy, I feel like standing up and screaming," declared she. "Good idea," cried he. Whereupon he released a war whoop and they both went off into a fit of hysterical laughter. When it subsided he said, "I sized you up as a live wire the minute I saw you. But you're even better than I thought. What are you in such a good humor about?" "You couldn't understand if I told you," replied she. "You'd have to go and live where I've been living--live there as long as I have." "Convent?" "Worse. Worse than a jail." The ball proved as lively as they hoped. A select company from the Tenderloin was attending, and the regulars were all of the gayest crowd among the sons and daughters of artisans and small merchants up and down the East Side. Not a few of the women were extremely pretty. All, or almost all, were young, and those who on inspection proved to be older than eighteen or twenty were acting younger than the youngest. Everyone had been drinking freely, and continued to drink. The orchestra played continuously. The air was giddy with laughter and song. Couples hugged and kissed in corners, and finally openly on the dancing floor. For a while Susan and Howland danced together. But soon they made friends with the crowd and danced with whoever was nearest. Toward three in the morning it flashed upon her that she had not even seen him for many a dance. She looked round--searched for him--got a blond-bearded man in evening dress to assist her. "The last seen of your stout friend," this man finally reported, "he was driving away in a cab with a large lady from Broadway. He was asleep, but I guess she wasn't." A sober thought winked into her whirling brain--he had warned her to hold on tight, and she had lost her head--and her opportunity. A bad start--a foolishly bad start. But out winked the glimpse of sobriety and Susan laughed. "That's the last I'll ever see of _him_," said she. This seemed to give Blond-Beard no regrets. Said he: "Let's you and I have a little supper. I'd call it breakfast, only then we couldn't have champagne." And they had supper--six at the table, all uproarious, Susan with difficulty restrained from a skirt dance on the table up and down among the dishes and bottles. It was nearly five o'clock when she and Blond-Beard helped each other toward a cab. "What's your address?" said he. "The same as yours," replied she drowsily. Late that afternoon she established herself in a room with a bath in West Twenty-ninth Street not far from Broadway. The exterior of the house was dingy and down-at-the-heel. But the interior was new and scrupulously clean. Several other young women lived there alone also, none quite so well installed as Susan, who had the only private bath and was paying twelve dollars a week. The landlady, frizzled and peroxide, explained--without adding anything to what she already knew--that she could have "privileges," but cautioned her against noise. "I can't stand for it," said she. "First offense--out you go. This house is for ladies, and only gentlemen that know how to conduct themselves as a gentleman should with a lady are allowed to come here." Susan paid a week in advance, reducing to thirty-one dollars her capital which Blond-Beard had increased to forty-three. The young lady who lived at the other end of the hall smiled at her, when both happened to glance from their open doors at the same time. Susan invited her to call and she immediately advanced along the hall in the blue silk kimono she was wearing over her nightgown. "My name's Ida Driscoll," said she, showing a double row of charming white teeth--her chief positive claim to beauty. She was short, was plump about the shoulders but slender in the hips. Her reddish brown hair was neatly done over a big rat, and was so spread that its thinness was hidden well enough to deceive masculine eyes. Nor would a man have observed that one of her white round shoulders was full two inches higher than the other. Her skin was good, her features small and irregular, her eyes shrewd but kindly. "My name's"--Susan hesitated--"Lorna Sackville." "I guess Lorna and Ida'll be enough for us to bother to remember," laughed Miss Driscoll. "The rest's liable to change. You've just come, haven't you?" "About an hour ago. I've got only a toothbrush, a comb, a washrag and a cake of soap. I bought them on my way here." "Baggage lost--eh?" said Ida, amused. "No," admitted Susan. "I'm beginning an entire new deal." "I'll lend you a nightgown. I'm too short for my other things to fit you." "Oh, I can get along. What's good for a headache? I'm nearly crazy with it." "Wine?" "Yes." "Wait a minute." Ida, with bedroom slippers clattering, hurried back to her room, returned with a bottle of bromo seltzer and in the bathroom fixed Susan a dose. "You'll feel all right in half an hour or so. Gee, but you're swell--with your own bathroom." Susan shrugged her shoulders and laughed. Ida shook her head gravely. "You ought to save your money. I do." "Later--perhaps. Just now--I _must_ have a fling." Ida seemed to understand. She went on to say: "I was in millinery. But in this town there's nothing in anything unless you have capital or a backer. I got tired of working for five per, with ten or fifteen as the top notch. So I quit, kissed my folks up in Harlem good-by and came down to look about. As soon as I've saved enough I'm going to start a business. That'll be about a couple of years--maybe sooner, if I find an angel." "I'm thinking of the stage." "Cut it out!" cried Ida. "It's on the bum. There's more money and less worry in straight sporting--if you keep respectable. Of course, there's nothing in out and out sporting." "Oh, I haven't decided on anything. My head is better." "Sure! If the dose I gave you don't knock it you can get one at the drug store two blocks up Sixth Avenue that'll do the trick. Got a dinner date?" "No. I haven't anything on hand." "I think you and I might work together," said Ida. "You're thin and tallish. I'm short and fattish. We'd catch 'em coming and going." "That sounds good," said Susan. "You're new to--to the business?" "In a way--yes." "I thought so. We all soon get a kind of a professional look. You haven't got it. Still, so many dead respectable women imitate nowadays, and paint and use loud perfumes, that sporting women aren't nearly so noticeable. Seems to me the men's tastes even for what they want at home are getting louder and louder all the time. They hate anything that looks slow. And in our business it's harder and harder to please them--except the yaps from the little towns and the college boys. A woman has to be up to snuff if she gets on. If she looks what she is, men won't have her--nor if she is what she looks." Susan had not lived where every form of viciousness is openly discussed and practiced, without having learned the things necessary to a full understanding of Ida's technical phrases and references. The liveliness that had come with the departure of the headache vanished. To change the subject she invited Ida to dine with her. "What's the use of your spending money in a restaurant?" objected Ida. "You eat with me in my room. I always cook myself something when I ain't asked out by some one of my gentleman friends. I can cook you a chop and warm up a can of French peas and some dandy tea biscuits I bought yesterday." Susan accepted the invitation, promising that when she was established she would reciprocate. As it was about six, they arranged to have the dinner at seven, Susan to dress in the meantime. The headache had now gone, even to that last heaviness which seems to be an ominous threat of a return. When she was alone, she threw off her clothes, filled the big bathtub with water as hot as she could stand it. Into this she gently lowered herself until she was able to relax and recline without discomfort. Then she stood up and with the soap and washrag gave herself the most thorough scrubbing of her life. Time after time she soaped and rubbed and scrubbed, and dipped herself in the hot water. When she felt that she had restored her body to some where near her ideal of cleanness, she let the water run out and refilled the tub with even hotter water. In this she lay luxuriously, reveling in the magnificent sensations of warmth and utter cleanliness. Her eyes closed; a delicious languor stole over her and through her, soothing every nerve. She slept. She was awakened by Ida, who had entered after knocking and calling at the outer door in vain. Susan slowly opened her eyes, gazed at Ida with a soft dreamy smile. "You don't know what this means. It seems to me I was never quite so comfortable or so happy in my life." "It's a shame to disturb you," said Ida. "But dinner's ready. Don't stop to dress first. I'll bring you a kimono." Susan turned on the cold water, and the bath rapidly changed from warm to icy. When she had indulged in the sense of cold as delightful in its way as the sense of warmth, she rubbed her glowing skin with a rough towel until she was rose-red from head to foot. Then she put on stockings, shoes and the pink kimono Ida had brought, and ran along the hall to dinner. As she entered Ida's room, Ida exclaimed, "How sweet and pretty you do look! You sure ought to make a hit!" "I feel like a human being for the first time in--it seems years--ages--to me." "You've got a swell color--except your lips. Have they always been pale like that?" "No." "I thought not. It don't seem to fit in with your style. You ought to touch 'em up. You look too serious and innocent, anyhow. They make a rouge now that'll stick through everything--eating, drinking--anything." Susan regarded herself critically in the glass. "I'll see," she said. The odor of the cooking chops thrilled Susan like music. She drew a chair up to the table, sat in happy-go-lucky fashion, and attacked the chop, the hot biscuit, and the peas, with an enthusiasm that inspired Ida to imitation. "You know how to cook a chop," she said to Ida. "And anybody who can cook a chop right can cook. Cooking's like playing the piano. If you can do the simple things perfectly, you're ready to do anything." "Wait till I have a flat of my own," said Ida. "I'll show you what eating means. And I'll have it, too, before very long. Maybe we'll live together. I was to a fortune teller's yesterday. That's the only way I waste money. I go to fortune tellers nearly every day. But then all the girls do. You get your money's worth in excitement and hope, whether there's anything in it or not. Well, the fortune teller she said I was to meet a dark, slender person who was to change the whole course of my life--that all my troubles would roll away--and that if any more came, they'd roll away, too. My, but she did give me a swell fortune, and only fifty cents! I'll take you to her." Ida made black coffee and the two girls, profoundly contented, drank it and talked with that buoyant cheerfulness which bubbles up in youth on the slightest pretext. In this case the pretext was anything but slight, for both girls had health as well as youth, had that freedom from harassing responsibility which is the chief charm of every form of unconventional life. And Susan was still in the first flush of the joy of escape from the noisome prison whose poisons had been corroding her, soul and body. No, poison is not a just comparison; what poison in civilization parallels, or even approaches, in squalor, in vileness of food and air, in wretchedness of shelter and clothing, the tenement life that is really the typical life of the city? From time to time Susan, suffused with the happiness that is too deep for laughter, too deep for tears even, gazed round like a dreamer at those cheerful comfortable surroundings and drew a long breath--stealthily, as if she feared she would awaken and be again in South Fifth Avenue, of rags and filth, of hideous toil without hope. "You'd better save your money to put in the millinery business with me," Ida advised. "I can show you how to make a lot. Sometimes I clear as high as a hundred a week, and I don't often fall below seventy-five. So many girls go about this business in a no account way, instead of being regular and business-like." Susan strove to hide the feelings aroused by this practical statement of what lay before her. Those feelings filled her with misgiving. Was the lesson still unlearned? Obviously Ida was right; there must be plan, calculation, a definite line laid out and held to, or there could not but be failure and disaster. And yet--Susan's flesh quivered and shrank away. She struggled against it, but she could not conquer it. Experience had apparently been in vain; her character had remained unchanged. . . . She must compel herself. She must do what she had to do; she must not ruin everything by imitating the people of the tenements with their fatal habit of living from day to day only, and taking no thought for the morrow except fatuously to hope and dream that all would be well. While she was fighting with herself, Ida had been talking on--the same subject. When Susan heard again, Ida was saying: "Now, take me, for instance. I don't smoke or drink. There's nothing in either one--especially drink. Of course sometimes a girl's got to drink. A man watches her too close for her to dodge out. But usually you can make him think you're as full as he is, when you really are cold sober." "Do the men always drink when they--come with--with--us?" asked Susan. "Most always. They come because they want to turn themselves loose. That's why a girl's got to be careful not to make a man feel nervous or shy. A respectable woman's game is to be modest and innocent. With us, the opposite. They're both games; one's just as good as the other." "I don't think I could get along at all--at this," confessed Susan with an effort, "unless I drank too much--so that I was reckless and didn't care what happened." Ida looked directly into her eyes; Susan's glance fell and a flush mounted. After a pause Ida went on: "A girl does feel that way at first. A girl that marries as most of them do--because the old ones are pushing her out of the nest and she's got no place else to go--she feels the same way till she hardens to it. Of course, you've got to get broke into any business." "Go on," said Susan eagerly. "You are so sensible. You must teach me." "Common sense is a thing you don't often hear--especially about getting on in the world. But, as I was saying--one of my gentlemen friends is a lawyer--such a nice fellow--so liberal. Gives me a present of twenty or twenty-five extra, you understand--every time he makes a killing downtown. He asked me once how I felt when I started in; and when I told him, he said, 'That's exactly the way I felt the first time I won a case for a client I knew was a dirty rascal and in the wrong. But now--I take that sort of thing as easy as you do.' He says the thing is to get on, no matter how, and that one way's as good as another. And he's mighty right. You soon learn that in little old New York, where you've got to have the money or you get the laugh and the foot--the swift, hard kick. Clean up after you've arrived, he says--and don't try to keep clean while you're working--and don't stop for baths and things while you're at the job." Susan was listening with every faculty she possessed. "He says he talks the other sort of thing--the dope--the fake stuff--just as the rest of the hustlers do. He says it's necessary in order to keep the people fooled--that if they got wise to the real way to succeed, then there'd be nobody to rob and get rich off of. Oh, he's got it right. He's a smart one." The sad, bitter expression was strong in Susan's face. After a pause, Ida went on: "If a girl's an ignorant fool or squeamish, she don't get up in this business any more than in any other. But if she keeps a cool head, and don't take lovers unless they pay their way, and don't drink, why she can keep her self-respect and not have to take to the streets." Susan lifted her head eagerly. "Don't have to take to the streets?" she echoed. "Certainly not," declared Ida. "I very seldom let a man pick me up after dark--unless he looks mighty good. I go out in the daytime. I pretend I'm an actress out of a job for the time being, or a forelady in a big shop who's taking a day or so off, or a respectable girl living with her parents. I put a lot of money into clothes--quiet, ladylike clothes. Mighty good investment. If you ain't got clothes in New York you can't do any kind of business. I go where a nice class of men hangs out, and I never act bold, but just flirt timidly, as so many respectable girls or semi-respectables do. But when a girl plays that game, she has to be careful not to make a man think he ain't expected to pay. The town's choked full of men on the lookout for what they call love--which means, for something cheap or, better still, free. Men are just crazy about themselves. Nothing easier than to fool 'em--and nothing's harder than to make 'em think you ain't stuck on 'em. I tell you, a girl in our life has a chance to learn men. They turn themselves inside out to us." Susan, silent, her thoughts flowing like a mill race, helped Ida with the dishes. Then they dressed and went together for a walk. It being Sunday evening, the streets were quiet. They sauntered up Fifth Avenue as far as Fifty-ninth Street and back. Ida's calm and sensible demeanor gave Susan much needed courage every time a man spoke to them. None of these men happened to be up to Ida's standard, which was high. "No use wasting time on snide people," explained she. "We don't want drinks and a gush of loose talk, and I saw at a glance that was all those chappies were good for." They returned home at half-past nine without adventure. Toward midnight one of Ida's regulars called and Susan was free to go to bed. She slept hardly at all. Ever before her mind hovered a nameless, shapeless horror. And when she slept she dreamed of her wedding night, woke herself screaming, "Please, Mr. Ferguson--please!" Ida had three chief sources of revenue. The best was five men--her "regular gentleman friends"--who called by appointment from time to time. These paid her ten dollars apiece, and occasionally gave her presents of money or jewelry--nothing that amounted to much. From them she averaged about thirty-five dollars a week. Her second source was a Mrs. Thurston who kept in West Fifty-sixth Street near Ninth Avenue a furnished-room house of the sort that is on the official--and also the "revenue"--lists of the police and the anti-vice societies. This lady had a list of girls and married women upon whom she could call. Gentlemen using her house for rendezvous were sometimes disappointed by the ladies with whom they were intriguing. Again a gentleman grew a little weary of his perhaps too respectable or too sincerely loving ladylove and appealed to Mrs. Thurston. She kept her list of availables most select and passed them off as women of good position willing to supplement a small income, or to punish stingy husbands or fathers and at the same time get the money they needed for dress and bridge, for matinées and lunches. Mrs. Thurston insisted--and Ida was inclined to believe--that there were genuine cases of this kind on the list. "It's mighty hard for women with expensive tastes and small means to keep straight in New York," said she to Susan. "It costs so much to live, and there are so many ways to spend money. And they always have rich lady friends who set an extravagant pace. They've got to dress--and to kind of keep up their end. So--" Ida laughed, went on: "Besides the city women are getting so they like a little sporty novelty as much as their brothers and husbands and fathers do. Oh, I'm not ashamed of my business any more. We're as good as the others, and we're not hypocrites. As my lawyer friend says, everybody's got to make a _good_ living, and good livings can't be made on the ways that used to be called on the level--they're called damfool ways now." Ida's third source of income was to her the most attractive because it had such a large gambling element in it. This was her flirtations as a respectable woman in search of lively amusement and having to take care not to be caught. There are women of all kinds who delight in deceiving men because it gives them a sweet stealthy sense of superiority to the condescending sex. In women of the Ida class this pleasure becomes as much a passion as it is in the respectable woman whom her husband tries to enslave. With Susan, another woman and one in need of education, Ida was simple and scrupulously truthful. But it would have been impossible for a man to get truth as to anything from her. She amused herself inventing plausible romantic stories about herself that she might enjoy the gullibility of the boastfully superior and patronizing male. She was devoid of sentiment, even of passion. Yet at times she affected both in the most extreme fashion. And afterward, with peals of laughter, she would describe to Susan how the man had acted, what an ass she had made of him. "Men despise us," she said. "But it's nothing to the way I despise them. The best of them are rotten beasts when they show themselves as they are. And they haven't any mercy on us. It's too ridiculous. Men despise a man who is virtuous and a woman who isn't. What rot!" She deceived the "regulars" without taking the trouble to remember her deceptions. They caught her lying so often that she knew they thought her untruthful through and through. But this only gave her an opportunity for additional pleasure--the pleasure of inventing lies that they would believe in spite of their distrust of her. "Anyhow," said she, "haven't you noticed the liars everybody's on to are always believed and truthful people are doubted?" Upon the men with whom she flirted, she practiced the highly colored romances it would have been useless to try upon the regulars. Her greatest triumph at this game was a hard luck story she had told so effectively that the man had given her two hundred dollars. Most of her romances turned about her own ruin. As a matter of fact, she had told Susan the exact truth when she said she had taken up her mode of life deliberately; she had grown weary and impatient of the increasing poverty of a family which, like so many of the artisan and small merchant and professional classes in this day of concentrating wealth and spreading tastes for comfort and luxury, was on its way down from comfort toward or through the tenements. She was a type of the recruits that are swelling the prostitute class in ever larger numbers and are driving the prostitutes of the tenement class toward starvation--where they once dominated the profession even to its highest ranks, even to the fashionable _cocotes_ who prey upon the second generation of the rich. But Ida never told her lovers her plain and commonplace tale of yielding to the irresistible pressure of economic forces. She had made men weep at her recital of her wrongs. It had even brought her offers of marriage--none, however, worth accepting. "I'd be a boob to marry a man with less than fifteen or twenty thousand a year, wouldn't I?" said she. "Why, two of the married men who come to see me regularly give me more than they give their wives for pin money. And in a few years I'll be having my own respectable business, with ten thousand income--maybe more--and as well thought of as the next woman." Ida's dream was a house in the country, a fine flat in town, a husband in some "refined" profession and children at high-class schools. "And I'll get there, don't you doubt it!" exclaimed she. "Others have--of course, you don't know about them--they've looked out for that. Yes, lots of others have--but--well, just you watch your sister Ida." And Susan felt that she would indeed arrive. Already she had seen that there was no difficulty such as she had once imagined about recrossing the line to respectability. The only real problem in that matter was how to get together enough to make the crossing worth while--for what was there in respectability without money, in a day when respectability had ceased to mean anything but money? Ida wished to take her to Mrs. Thurston and get her a favored place on the list. Susan thanked her, but said, "Not yet--not quite yet." Ida suggested that they go out together as two young married women whose husbands had gone on the road. Susan put her off from day to day. Ida finally offered to introduce her to one of the regulars: "He's a nice fellow--knows how to treat a lady in a gentlemanly way. Not a bit coarse or familiar." Susan would not permit this generosity. And all this time her funds were sinking. She had paid a second week's rent, had bought cooking apparatus, some food supplies, some necessary clothing. She was down to a five-dollar bill and a little change. "Look here, Lorna," said Ida, between remonstrance and exasperation, "when _are_ you going to start in?" Susan looked fixedly at her, said with a slow smile, "When I can't hold out another minute." Ida tossed her head angrily. "You've got brains--more than I have," she cried. "You've got every advantage for catching rich men--even a rich husband. You're educated. You speak and act and look refined. Why you could pretend to be a howling fashionable swell. You've got all the points. But what have you got 'em for? Not to use that's certain." "You can't be as disgusted with me as I am." "If you're going to do a thing, why, _do_ it!" "That's what I tell myself. But--I can't make a move." Ida gave a gesture of despair. "I don't see what's to become of you. And you could do _so_ well! . . . Let me phone Mr. Sterling. I told him about you. He's anxious to meet you. He's fond of books--like you. You'd like him. He'd give up a lot to you, because you're classier than I am." Susan threw her arms round Ida and kissed her. "Don't bother about me," she said. "I've got to act in my own foolish, stupid way. I'm like a child going to school. I've got to learn a certain amount before I'm ready to do whatever it is I'm going to do. And until I learn it, I can't do much of anything. I thought I had learned in the last few months. I see I haven't." "Do listen to sense, Lorna," pleaded Ida. "If you wait till the last minute, you'll get left. The time to get the money's when you have money. And I've a feeling that you're not particularly flush." "I'll do the best I can. And I can't move till I'm ready." Meanwhile she continued to search for work--work that would enable her to live _decently_, wages less degrading than the wages of shame. In a newspaper she read an advertisement of a theatrical agency. Advertisements of all kinds read well; those of theatrical agencies read--like the fairy tales that they were. However, she found in this particular offering of dazzling careers and salaries a peculiar phrasing that decided her to break the rule she had made after having investigated scores of this sort of offers. Rod was abroad; anyhow, enough time had elapsed. One of the most impressive features of the effect of New York--meaning by "New York" only that small but significant portion of the four millions that thinks--at least, after a fashion, and acts, instead of being mere passive tools of whatever happens to turn up--the most familiar notable effect of this New York is the speedy distinction in the newcomer of those illusions and delusions about life and about human nature, about good and evil, that are for so many people the most precious and the only endurable and beautiful thing in the world. New York, destroyer of delusions and cherished hypocrisies and pretenses, therefore makes the broadly intelligent of its citizens hardy, makes the others hard--and between the hardy and hard, between sense and cynicism, yawns a gulf like that between Absalom and Dives. Susan, a New Yorker now, had got the habit--in thought, at least--of seeing things with somewhat less distortion from the actual. She no longer exaggerated the importance of the Rod-Susan episode. She saw that in New York, where life is crowded with events, everything in one's life, except death, becomes incident, becomes episode, where in regions offering less to think about each rare happening took on an aspect of vast importance. The Rod-Susan love adventure, she now saw, was not what it would have seemed--therefore, would have been--in Sutherland, but was mere episode of a New York life, giving its light and shade to a certain small part of the long, variedly patterned fabric of her life, and of his, not determining the whole. She saw that it was simply like a bend in the river, giving a new turn to current and course but not changing the river itself, and soon left far behind and succeeded by other bends giving each its equal or greater turn to the stream. Rod had passed from her life, and she from his life. Thus she was free to begin her real career--the stage--if she could. She went to the suite of offices tenanted by Mr. Josiah Ransome. She was ushered in to Ransome himself, instead of halting with underlings. She owed this favor to advantages which her lack of vanity and of self-consciousness prevented her from surmising. Ransome--smooth, curly, comfortable looking--received her with a delicate blending of the paternal and the gallant. After he had inspected her exterior with flattering attentiveness and had investigated her qualifications with a thoroughness that was convincing of sincerity he said: "Most satisfactory! I can make you an exceptional assurance. If you register with me, I can guarantee you not less than twenty-five a week." Susan hesitated long and asked many questions before she finally--with reluctance paid the five dollars. She felt ashamed of her distrust, but might perhaps have persisted in it had not Mr. Ransome said: "I don't blame you for hesitating, my dear young lady. And if I could I'd put you on my list without payment. But you can see how unbusiness-like that would be. I am a substantial, old-established concern. You--no doubt you are perfectly reliable. But I have been fooled so many times. I must not let myself forget that after all I know nothing about you." As soon as Susan had paid he gave her a list of vaudeville and musical comedy houses where girls were wanted. "You can't fail to suit one of them," said he. "If not, come back here and get your money." After two weary days of canvassing she went back to Ransome. He was just leaving. But he smiled genially, opened his desk and seated himself. "At your service," said he. "What luck?" "None," replied Susan. "I couldn't live on the wages they offered at the musical comedy places, even if I could get placed." "And the vaudeville people?" "When I said I could only sing and not dance, they looked discouraged. When I said I had no costumes they turned me down." "Excellent!" cried Ransome. "You mustn't be so easily beaten. You must take dancing lessons--perhaps a few singing lessons, too. And you must get some costumes." "But that means several hundred dollars." "Three or four hundred," said Ransome airily. "A matter of a few weeks." "But I haven't anything like that," said Susan. "I haven't so much as----" "I comprehend perfectly," interrupted Ransome. She interested him, this unusual looking girl, with her attractive mingling of youth and experience. Her charm that tempted people to give her at once the frankest confidences, moved him to go out of his way to help her. "You haven't the money," he went on. "You must have it. So--I promised to place you, and I will. I don't usually go so far in assisting my clients. It's not often necessary--and where it's necessary it's usually imprudent. However--I'll give you the address of a flat where there is a lady--a trustworthy, square sort, despite her--her profession. She will put you in the way of getting on a sound financial basis." Ransome spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, like a man stating a simple business proposition. Susan understood. She rose. Her expression was neither shock nor indignation; but it was none the less a negative. "It's the regular thing, my dear," urged Ransome. "To make a start, to get in right, you can't afford to be squeamish. The way I suggest is the simplest and most direct of several that all involve the same thing. And the surest. You look steady-headed--self-reliant. You look sensible----" Susan smiled rather forlornly. "But I'm not," said she. "Not yet." Ransome regarded her with a sympathy which she felt was genuine. "I'm sorry, my dear. I've done the best I can for you. You may think it a very poor best--and it is. But"--he shrugged his shoulders--"I didn't make this world and its conditions for living. I may say also that I'm not the responsible party--the party in charge. However----" To her amazement he held out a five-dollar bill. "Here's your fee back." He laughed at her expression. "Oh, I'm not a robber," said he. "I only wish I could serve you. I didn't think you were so--" his eyes twinkled--"so unreasonable, let us say. Among those who don't know anything about life there's an impression that my sort of people are in the business of dragging women down. Perhaps one of us occasionally does as bad--about a millionth part as bad--as the average employer of labor who skims his profits from the lifeblood of his employees. But as a rule we folks merely take those that are falling and help them to light easy--or even to get up again." Susan felt ashamed to take her money. But he pressed it on her. "You'll need it," said he. "I know how it is with a girl alone and trying to get a start. Perhaps later on you'll be more in the mood where I can help you." "Perhaps," said Susan. "But I hope not. It'll take uncommon luck to pull you through--and I hope you'll have it." "Thank you," said Susan. He took her hand, pressed it friendlily--and she felt that he was a man with real good in him, more good than many who would have shrunk from him in horror. She was waiting for a thrust from fate. But fate, disappointing as usual, would not thrust. It seemed bent on the malicious pleasure of compelling her to degrade herself deliberately and with calculation, like a woman marrying for support a man who refuses to permit her to decorate with any artificial floral concealments of faked-up sentiment the sordid truth as to what she is about. She searched within herself in vain for the scruple or sentiment or timidity or whatever it was that held her back from the course that was plainly inevitable. She had got down to the naked fundamentals of decency and indecency that are deep hidden by, and for most of us under, hypocrisies of conventionality. She had found out that a decent woman was one who respected her body and her soul, that an indecent woman was one who did not, and that marriage rites or the absence of them, the absence of financial or equivalent consideration, or its presence, or its extent or its form, were all irrelevant non-essentials. Yet--she hesitated, knowing the while that she was risking a greater degradation, and a stupid and fatal folly to boot, by shrinking from the best course open to her--unless it were better to take a dose of poison and end it all. She probably would have done that had she not been so utterly healthy, therefore overflowing with passionate love of life. Except in fiction suicide and health do not go together, however superhumanly sensitive the sore beset hero or heroine. Susan was sensitive enough; whenever she did things incompatible with our false and hypocritical and unscientific notions of sensitiveness, allowances should be made for her because of her superb and dauntless health. If her physical condition had been morbid, her conduct might have been, would have been, very different. She was still hesitating when Saturday night came round again--swiftly despite long disheartening days, and wakeful awful nights. In the morning her rent would be due. She had a dollar and forty-five cents. After dinner alone a pretense at dinner--she wandered the streets of the old Tenderloin until midnight. An icy rain was falling. Rains such as this--any rains except showers--were rare in the City of the Sun. That rain by itself was enough to make her downhearted. She walked with head down and umbrella close to her shoulders. No one spoke to her. She returned dripping; she had all but ruined her one dress. She went to bed, but not to sleep. About nine--early for that house she rose, drank a cup of coffee and ate part of a roll. Her little stove and such other things as could not be taken along she rolled into a bundle, marked it, "For Ida." On a scrap of paper she wrote this note: Don't think I'm ungrateful, please. I'm going without saying good-by because I'm afraid if I saw you, you'd be generous enough to put up for me, and I'd be weak enough to accept. And if I did that, I'd never be able to get strong or even to hold my head up. So--good-by. I'll learn sooner or later--learn how to live. I hope it won't be too long--and that the teacher won't be too hard on me. Yes, I'll learn, and I'll buy fine hats at your grand millinery store yet. Don't forget me altogether. She tucked this note into the bundle and laid it against the door behind which Ida and one of her regulars were sleeping peacefully. The odor of Ida's powerful perfume came through the cracks in the door; Susan drew it eagerly into her nostrils, sobbed softly, turned away, It was one of the perfumes classed as immoral; to Susan it was the aroma of a friendship as noble, as disinterested, as generous, as human sympathy had ever breathed upon human woe. With her few personal possessions in a package she descended the stairs unnoticed, went out into the rain. At the corner of Sixth Avenue she paused, looked up and down the street. It was almost deserted. Now and then a streetwalker, roused early by a lover with perhaps a family waiting for him, hurried by, looking piteous in the daylight which showed up false and dyed hair, the layers of paint, the sad tawdriness of battered finery from the cheapest bargain troughs. Susan went slowly up Sixth Avenue. Two blocks, and she saw a girl enter the side door of a saloon across the way. She crossed the street, pushed in at the same door, went on to a small sitting-room with blinds drawn, with round tables, on every table a match stand. It was one of those places where streetwalkers rest their weary legs between strolls, and sit for company on rainy or snowy nights, and take shy men for sociability-breeding drinks and for the preliminary bargaining. The air of the room was strong with stale liquor and tobacco, the lingering aroma of the night's vanished revels. In the far corner sat the girl she had followed; a glass of raw whiskey and another of water stood on the table before her. Susan seated herself near the door and when the swollen-faced, surly bartender came, ordered whiskey. She poured herself a drink--filled the glass to the brim. She drank it in two gulps, set the empty glass down. She shivered like an animal as it is hit in the head with a poleax. The mechanism of life staggered, hesitated, went on with a sudden leaping acceleration of pace. Susan tapped her glass against the matchstand. The bartender came. "Another," said she. The man stared at her. "The--hell!" he ejaculated. "You must be afraid o' catchin' cold. Or maybe you're looking for the menagerie?" Susan laughed and so did the girl in the corner. "Won't you have a drink with me?" asked Susan. "That's very kind of you," replied the girl, in the manner of one eager to show that she, too, is a perfect lady in every respect, used to the ways of the best society. She moved to a chair at Susan's table. She and Susan inventoried each other. Susan saw a mere child--hardly eighteen--possibly not seventeen--but much worn by drink and irregular living--evidently one of those who rush into the fast woman's life with the idea that it is a career of gayety--and do not find out their error until looks and health are gone. Susan drank her second drink in three gulps, several minutes apart. The girl was explaining in a thin, common voice, childish yet cracked, that she had come there seeking a certain lady friend because she had an extra man and needed a side partner. "Suppose you come with me," she suggested. "It's good money, I think. Want to get next?" "When I've had another drink," said Susan. Her eyes were gorgeously brilliant. She had felt almost as reckless several times before; but never had she felt this devil-may-care eagerness to see what the turn of the next card would bring. "You'll take one?" "Sure. I feel like the devil. Been bumming round all night. My lady friend that I had with me--a regular lady friend--she was suddenly took ill. Appendicitis complicated with d.t.'s the ambulance guy said. The boys are waiting for me to come back, so's we can go on. They've got some swell rooms in a hotel up in Forty-second Street. Let's get a move on." The bartender served the third drink and Susan paid for them, the other girl insisting on paying for the one she was having when Susan came. Susan's head was whirling. Her spirits were spiraling up and up. Her pale lips were wreathed in a reckless smile. She felt courageous for adventure--any adventure. Her capital had now sunk to three quarters and a five-cent piece. They issued forth, talking without saying anything, laughing without knowing or caring why. Life was a joke--a coarse, broad joke--but amusing if one drank enough to blunt any refinement of sensibility. And what was sensibility but a kind of snobbishness? And what more absurd than snobbishness in an outcast? "That's good whiskey they had, back there," said Susan. "Good? Yes--if you don't care what you say." "If you don't want to care what you say or do," explained Susan. "Oh, all booze is good for that," said the girl. CHAPTER VI THEY went through to Broadway and there stood waiting for a car, each under her own umbrella. "Holy Gee!" cried Susan's new acquaintance. "Ain't this rain a soaker?" It was coming in sheets, bent and torn and driven horizontally by the wind. The umbrella, sheltering the head somewhat, gave a wholly false impression of protection. Both girls were soon sopping wet. But they were more than cheerful about it; the whiskey made them indifferent to external ills as they warmed themselves by its bright fire. At that time a famous and much envied, admired and respected "captain of industry," having looted the street-car systems, was preparing to loot them over again by the familiar trickery of the receivership and the reorganization. The masses of the people were too ignorant to know what was going on; the classes were too busy, each man of each of them, about his own personal schemes for graft of one kind and another. Thus, the street-car service was a joke and a disgrace. However, after four or five minutes a north-bound car appeared. "But it won't stop," cried Susan. "It's jammed." "That's why it will stop," replied her new acquaintance. "You don't suppose a New York conductor'd miss a chance to put his passengers more on the bum than ever?" She was right, at least as to the main point; and the conductor with much free handling of their waists and shoulders added them to the dripping, straining press of passengers, enduring the discomforts the captain of industry put upon them with more patience than cattle would have exhibited in like circumstances. All the way up Broadway the new acquaintance enlivened herself and Susan and the men they were squeezed in among by her loud gay sallies which her young prettiness made seem witty. And certainly she did have an amazing and amusing acquaintance with the slang at the moment current. The worn look had vanished, her rounded girlhood freshness had returned. As for Susan, you would hardly have recognized her as the same person who had issued from the house in Twenty-ninth Street less than an hour before. Indeed, it was not the same person. Drink nervifies every character; here it transformed, suppressing the characteristics that seemed, perhaps were, essential in her normal state, and causing to bloom in sudden audacity of color and form the passions and gayeties at other times subdued by her intelligence and her sensitiveness. Her brilliant glance moved about the car full as boldly as her companion's. But there was this difference: Her companion gazed straight into the eyes of the men; Susan's glance shot past above or just below their eyes. As they left the car at Forty-second Street the other girl gave her short skirt a dexterous upward flirt that exhibited her legs almost to the hips. Susan saw that they were well shaped legs, surprisingly plump from the calves upward, considering the slightness of her figure above the waist. "I always do that when I leave a car," said the girl. "Sometimes it starts something on the trail. You forgot your package--back in the saloon!" "Then I didn't forget much," laughed Susan. It appealed to her, the idea of entering the new life empty-handed. The hotel was one that must have been of the first class in its day--not a distant day, for the expansion of New York in craving for showy luxury has been as sudden as the miraculous upward thrust of a steel skyscraper. It had now sunk to relying upon the trade of those who came in off Broadway for a few minutes. It was dingy and dirty; the walls and plastering were peeling; the servants were slovenly and fresh. The girl nodded to the evil-looking man behind the desk, who said: "Hello, Miss Maud. Just in time. The boys were sending out for some others." "They've got a nerve!" laughed Maud. And she led Susan down a rather long corridor to a door with the letter B upon it. Maud explained: "This is the swellest suite in the house parlor, bedroom, bath." She flung open the door, disclosing a sitting-room in disorder with two young men partly dressed, seated at a small table on which were bottles, siphons, matches, remains of sandwiches, boxes of cigarettes--a chaotic jumble of implements to dissipation giving forth a powerful, stale odor. Maud burst into a stream of picturesque profanity which set the two men to laughing. Susan had paused on the threshold. The shock of this scene had for the moment arrested the triumphant march of the alcohol through blood and nerve and brain. "Oh, bite it off!" cried the darker of the two men to Maud, "and have a drink. Ain't you ashamed to speak so free before your innocent young lady friend?" He grinned at Susan. "What Sunday school do you hail from?" inquired he. The other young man was also looking at Susan; and it was an arresting and somewhat compelling gaze. She saw that he was tall and well set up. As he was dressed only in trousers and a pale blue silk undershirt, the strength of his shoulders, back and arms was in full evidence. His figure was like that of the wonderful young prize-fighters she had admired at moving picture shows to which Drumley had taken her. He had a singularly handsome face, blond yet remotely suggesting Italian. He smiled at Susan and she thought she had never seen teeth more beautiful--pearl-white, regular, even. His eyes were large and sensuous; smiling though they were, Susan was ill at ease--for in them there shone the same untamed, uncontrolled ferocity that one sees in the eyes of a wild beast. His youth, his good looks, his charm made the sinister savagery hinted in the smile the more disconcerting. He poured whiskey from a bottle into each of the two tall glasses, filled them up with seltzer, extended one toward Susan. "Shut the door, Queenie," he said to her in a pleasant tone that subtly mingled mockery and admiration. "And let's drink to love." "Didn't I do well for you, Freddie?" cried Maud. "She's my long-sought affinity," declared Freddie with the same attractive mingling of jest and flattery. Susan closed the door, accepted the glass, laughed into his eyes. The whiskey was once more asserting its power. She took about half the drink before she set the glass down. The young man said, "Your name's Queenie, mine's Freddie." He came to her, holding her gaze fast by the piercing look from his handsome eyes. He put his arms round her and kissed her full upon the pale, laughing lips. His eyes were still smiling in pleasant mockery; yet his kiss burned and stung, and the grip of his arm round her shoulders made her vaguely afraid. Her smile died away. The grave, searching, wondering expression reappeared in the violet-gray eyes for a moment. "You're all right," said he. "Except those pale lips. You're going to be my girl. That means, if you ever try to get away from me unless I let you go--I'll kill you--or worse." And he laughed as if he had made the best joke in the world. But she saw in his eyes a sparkle that seemed to her to have something of the malignance of the angry serpent's. She hastily finished her drink. Maud was jerking off her clothes, crying, "I want to get out of these nasty wet rags." The steam heat was full on; the sitting-room, the whole suite, was intensely warm. Maud hung her skirt over the back of a chair close to the radiator, took off her shoes and stockings and put them to dry also. In her chemise she curled herself on a chair, lit a cigarette and poured a drink. Her feet were not bad, but neither were they notably good; she tucked them out of sight. She looked at Susan. "Get off those wet things," urged she, "or you'll take your death." "In a minute," said Susan, but not convincingly. Freddie forced another drink and a cigarette upon her. As a girl at home in Sutherland, she had several times--she and Ruth--smoked cigarettes in secrecy, to try the new London and New York fashion, announced in the newspapers and the novels. So the cigarette did not make her uncomfortable. "Look at the way she's holding it?" cried Maud, and she and the men burst out laughing. Susan laughed also and, Freddie helping, practiced a less inexpert manner. Jim, the dark young man with the sullen heavy countenance, rang for more sandwiches and another bottle of whiskey. Susan continued to drink but ate nothing. "Have a sandwich," said Freddie. "I'm not hungry." "Well, they say that to eat and drink means to die of paresis, while to only drink means dying of delirium tremens. I guess you're right. I'd prefer the d.t.'s. It's quicker and livelier." Jim sang a ribald song with some amusing comedy business. Maud told several stories whose only claim to point lay in their frankness about things not usually spoken. "Don't you tell any more, Maudie," advised Freddie. "Why is it that a woman never takes up a story until every man on earth has heard it at least twice?" The sandwiches disappeared, the second bottle of whiskey ran low. Maud told story after story of how she had played this man and that for a sucker--was as full of such tales and as joyous and self-pleased over them as an honest salesman telling his delighted, respectable, pew-holding employer how he has "stuck" this customer and that for a "fancy" price. Presently Maud again noticed that Susan was in her wet clothes and cried out about it. Susan pretended to start to undress. Freddie and Jim suddenly seized her. She struggled, half laughing; the whiskey was sending into her brain dizzying clouds. She struggled more fiercely. But it was in vain. "Gee, you _have_ got a prize, Freddie!" exclaimed Jim at last, angry. "A regular tartar!" "A damn handsome one," retorted Freddie. "She's even got feet." Susan, amid the laughter of the others, darted for the bedroom. Cowering in a corner, trying to cover herself, she ordered Freddie to leave her. He laughed, seized her in his iron grip. She struck at him, bit him in the shoulder. He gave a cry of pain and drove a savage blow into her cheek. Then he buried his fingers in her throat and the gleam of his eyes made her soul quail. "Don't kill me!" she cried, in the clutch of cowardice for the first time. It was not death that she feared but the phantom of things worse than death that can be conjured to the imagination by the fury of a personality which is utterly reckless and utterly cruel. "Don't kill me!" she shrieked. "What the hell are you doing?" shouted Jim from the other room. "Shut that door," replied Freddie. "I'm going to attend to my lady friend." As the door slammed, he dragged Susan by the throat and one arm to the bed, flung her down. "I saw you were a high stepper the minute I looked at you," said he, in a pleasant, cooing voice that sent the chills up and down her spine. "I knew you'd have to be broke. Well, the sooner it's done, the sooner we'll get along nicely." His blue eyes were laughing into hers. With the utmost deliberation he gripped her throat with one hand and with the other began to slap her, each blow at his full strength. Her attempts to scream were only gasps. Quickly the agony of his brutality drove her into unconsciousness. Long after she had ceased to feel pain, she continued to feel the impact of those blows, and dully heard her own deep groans. When she came to her senses, she was lying sprawled upon the far side of the bed. Her head was aching wildly; her body was stiff and sore; her face felt as if it were swollen to many times its normal size. In misery she dragged herself up and stood on the floor. She went to the bureau and stared at herself in the glass. Her face was indeed swollen, but not to actual disfigurement. Under her left eye there was a small cut from which the blood had oozed to smear and dry upon her left cheek. Upon her throat were faint bluish finger marks. The damage was not nearly so great as her throbbing nerves reported--the damage to her body. But--her soul--it was a crushed, trampled, degraded thing, lying prone and bleeding to death. "Shall I kill myself?" she thought. And the answer came in a fierce protest and refusal from every nerve of her intensely vital youth. She looked straight into her own eyes--without horror, without shame, without fear. "You are as low as the lowest," she said to her image--not to herself but to her image; for herself seemed spectator merely of that body and soul aching and bleeding and degraded. It was the beginning of self-consciousness with her--a curious kind of self-consciousness--her real self, aloof and far removed, observing calmly, critically, impersonally the adventures of her body and the rest of her surface self. She turned round to look again at the man who had outraged them. His eyes were open and he was gazing dreamily at her, as smiling and innocent as a child. When their eyes met, his smile broadened until he was showing his beautiful teeth. "You _are_ a beauty!" said he. "Go into the other room and get me a cigarette." She continued to look fixedly at him. Without change of expression he said gently, "Do you want another lesson in manners?" She went to the door, opened it, entered the sitting-room. The other two had pulled open a folding bed and were lying in it, Jim's head on Maud's bosom, her arms round his neck. Both were asleep. His black beard had grown out enough to give his face a dirty and devilish expression. Maud looked far more youthful and much prettier than when she was awake. Susan put a cigarette between her lips, lit it, carried a box of cigarettes and a stand of matches in to Freddie. "Light one for me," said he. She obeyed, held it to his lips. "Kiss me, first." Her pale lips compressed. "Kiss me," he repeated, far down in his eyes the vicious gleam of that boundlessly ferocious cruelty which is mothered not by rage but by pleasure. She kissed him on the cheek. "On the lips," he commanded. Their lips met, and it was to her as if a hot flame, terrible yet thrilling, swept round and embraced her whole body. "Do you love me?" he asked tenderly. She was silent. "You love me?" he asked commandingly. "You can call it that if you like." "I knew you would. I understand women. The way to make a woman love is to make her afraid." She gazed at him. "I am not afraid," she said. He laughed. "Oh, yes. That's why you do what I say--and always will." "No," replied she. "I don't do it because I am afraid, but because I want to live." "I should think! . . . You'll be all right in a day or so," said he, after inspecting her bruises. "Now, I'll explain to you what good friends we're going to be." He propped himself in an attitude of lazy grace, puffed at his cigarette in silence for a moment, as if arranging what he had to say. At last he began: "I haven't any regular business. I wasn't born to work. Only damn fools work--and the clever man waits till they've got something, then he takes it away from 'em. You don't want to work, either." "I haven't been able to make a living at it," said the girl. She was sitting cross-legged, a cover draped around her. "You're too pretty and too clever. Besides, as you say, you couldn't make a living at it--not what's a living for a woman brought up as you've been. No, you can't work. So we're going to be partners." "No," said Susan. "I'm going to dress now and go away." Freddie laughed. "Don't be a fool. Didn't I say we were to be partners? . . . You want to keep on at the sporting business, don't you?" Hers was the silence of assent. "Well--a woman--especially a young one like you--is no good unless she has someone--some man--behind her. Married or single, respectable or lively, working or sporting--N. G. without a man. A woman alone doesn't amount to any more than a rich man's son." There had been nothing in Susan's experience to enable her to dispute this. "Now, I'm going to stand behind you. I'll see that you don't get pinched, and get you out if you do. I'll see that you get the best the city's got if you're sick--and so on. I've got a pull with the organization. I'm one of Finnegan's lieutenants. Some day--when I'm older and have served my apprenticeship--I'll pull off something good. Meanwhile--I manage to live. I always have managed it--and I never did a stroke of real work since I was a kid--and never shall. God was mighty good to me when he put a few brains in this nut of mine." He settled his head comfortably in the pillow and smiled at his own thoughts. In spite of herself Susan had been not only interested but attracted. It is impossible for any human being to contemplate mystery in any form without being fascinated. And here was the profoundest mystery she had ever seen. He talked well, and his mode of talking was that of education, of refinement even. An extraordinary man, certainly--and in what a strange way! "Yes," said he presently, looking at her with his gentle, friendly smile. "We'll be partners. I'll protect you and we'll divide what you make." What a strange creature! Had he--this kindly handsome youth--done that frightful thing? No--no. It was another instance of the unreality of the outward life. _He_ had not done it, any more than she--her real self--had suffered it. Her reply to his restatement of the partnership was: "No, thank you. I want nothing to do with it." "You're dead slow," said he, with mild and patient persuasion. "How would you get along at your business in this town if you didn't have a backer? Why, you'd be taking turns at the Island and the gutter within six months. You'd be giving all your money to some rotten cop or fly cop who couldn't protect you, at that. Or you'd work the street for some cheap cadet who'd beat you up oftener than he'd beat up the men who welched on you." "I'll look out for myself," persisted she. "Bless the baby!" exclaimed he, immensely amused. "How lucky that you found me! I'm going to take care of you in spite of yourself. Not for nothing, of course. You wouldn't value me if you got me for nothing. I'm going to help you, and you're going to help me. You need me, and I need you. Why do you suppose I took the trouble to tame you? What _you_ want doesn't go. It's what _I_ want." He let her reflect on this a while. Then he went on: "You don't understand about fellows like Jim and me--though Jim's a small potato beside me, as you'll soon find out. Suppose you didn't obey orders--just as I do what Finnegan tells me--just as Finnegan does what the big shout down below says? Suppose you didn't obey--what then?" "I don't know," confessed Susan. "Well, it's time you learned. We'll say, you act stubborn. You dress and say good-by to me and start out. Do you think I'm wicked enough to let you make a fool of yourself? Well, I'm not. You won't get outside the door before your good angel here will get busy. I'll be telephoning to a fly cop of this district. And what'll he do? Why, about the time you are halfway down the block, he'll pinch you. He'll take you to the station house. And in Police Court tomorrow the Judge'll give you a week on the Island for being a streetwalker." Susan shivered. She instinctively glanced toward the window. The rain was still falling, changing the City of the Sun into a city of desolation. It looked as though it would never see the sun again--and her life looked that way, also. Freddie was smiling pleasantly. He went on: "You do your little stretch on the Island. When your time's up I send you word where to report to me. We'll say you don't come. The minute you set foot on the streets again alone, back to the Island you go. . . . Now, do you understand, Queenie?" And he laughed and pulled her over and kissed her and smoothed her hair. "You're a very superior article--you are," he murmured. "I'm stuck on you." Susan did not resist. She did not care what happened to her. The more intelligent a trapped animal is, the less resistance it offers, once it realizes. Helpless--absolutely helpless. No money--no friends. No escape but death. The sun was shining. Outside lay the vast world; across the street on a flagpole fluttered the banner of freedom. Freedom! Was there any such thing anywhere? Perhaps if one had plenty of money--or powerful friends. But not for her, any more than for the masses whose fate of squalid and stupid slavery she was trying to escape. Not for her; so long as she was helpless she would simply move from one land of slavery to another. Helpless! To struggle would not be courageous, but merely absurd. "If you don't believe me, ask Maud," said Freddie. "I don't want you to get into trouble. As I told you, I'm stuck on you." With his cigarette gracefully loose between those almost too beautifully formed lips of his and with one of his strong smooth white arms about his head, he looked at her, an expression of content with himself, of admiration for her in his handsome eyes. "You don't realize your good luck. But you will when you find how many girls are crazy to get on the good side of me. This is a great old town, and nobody amounts to anything in it unless he's got a pull or is next to somebody else that has." Susan's slow reflective nod showed that this statement explained, or seemed to explain, certain mysteries of life that had been puzzling her. "You've got a lot in you," continued he. "That's my opinion, and I'm a fair judge of yearlings. You're liable to land somewhere some day when you've struck your gait. . . . If I had the mon I'd be tempted to set you up in a flat and keep you all to myself. But I can't afford it. It takes a lot of cash to keep me going. . . . You'll do well. You won't have to bother with any but classy gents. I'll see that the cops put you wise when there's anyone round throwing his money away. And I can help you, myself. I've got quite a line of friends among the rich chappies from Fifth Avenue. And I always let my girls get the benefit of it." My girls! Susan's mind, recovering now from its daze, seized upon this phrase. And soon she had fathomed how these two young men came to be so luxuriously dressed, so well supplied with money. She had heard of this system under which the girls in the streets were exploited as thoroughly as the girls in the houses. In all the earth was there anyone who was suffered to do for himself or herself without there being a powerful idle someone else to take away all the proceeds but a bare living? Helpless! Helpless! "How many girls have you?" she asked. "Jealous already!" And he laughed and blew a cloud of smoke into her face. She took the quarters he directed--a plain clean room two flights up at seven dollars a week, in a furnished room house on West Forty-third Street near Eighth Avenue. She was but a few blocks from where she and Rod had lived. New York--to a degree unrivaled among the cities of the world--illustrates in the isolated lives of its never isolated inhabitants how little relationship there is between space and actualities of distance. Wherever on earth there are as many as two human beings, one may see an instance of the truth. That an infinity of spiritual solitude can stretch uncrossable even between two locked in each other's loving arms! But New York's solitudes, its separations, extend to the surface things. Susan had no sense of the apparent nearness of her former abode. Her life again lay in the same streets; but there again came the sense of strangeness which only one who has lived in New York could appreciate. The streets were the same; but to her they seemed as the streets of another city, because she was now seeing in them none of the things she used to see, was seeing instead kinds of people, aspects of human beings, modes of feeling and acting and existing of which she used to have not the faintest knowledge. There were as many worlds as kinds of people. Thus, though we all talk to each other as if about the same world, each of us is thinking of his own kind of world, the only one he sees. And that is why there can never be sympathy and understanding among the children of men until there is some approach to resemblance in their various lots; for the lot determines the man. The house was filled with women of her own kind. They were allowed all privileges. There was neither bath nor stationary washstand, but the landlady supplied tin tubs on request. "Oh, Mr. Palmer's recommendation," said she; "I'll give you two days to pay. My terms are in advance. But Mr. Palmer's a dear friend of mine." She was a short woman with a monstrous bust and almost no hips. Her thin hair was dyed and frizzled, and her voice sounded as if it found its way out of her fat lips after a long struggle to pass through the fat of her throat and chest. Her second chin lay upon her bosom in a soft swollen bag that seemed to be suspended from her ears. Her eyes were hard and evil, of a brownish gray. She affected suavity and elaborate politeness; but if the least thing disturbed her, she became red and coarse of voice and vile of language. The vile language and the nature of her business and her private life aside, she would have compared favorably with anyone in the class of those who deal--as merchants, as landlords, as boarding-house keepers--with the desperately different classes of uncertain income. She was reputed rich. They said she stayed on in business to avoid lonesomeness and to keep in touch with all that was going on in the life that had been hers from girlhood. "And she's a mixer," said Maud to Susan. In response to Susan's look of inquiry, she went on to explain, "A mixer's a white woman that keeps a colored man." Maud laughed at Susan's expression of horror. "You are a greenie," she mocked. "Why, it's all the rage. Nearly all the girls do--from the headliners that are kept by the young Fifth Avenue millionaires down to nine out of ten of the girls of our set that you see in Broadway. No, I'm not lying. It's the truth. _I_ don't do it--at least, not yet. I may get round to it." After the talk with Maud about the realities of life as it is lived by several hundred thousand of the inhabitants of Manhattan Island Susan had not the least disposition to test by defiance the truth of Freddie Palmer's plain statement as to his powers and her duties. He had told her to go to work that very Sunday evening, and Jim had ordered Maud to call for her and to initiate her. And at half-past seven Maud came. At once she inspected Susan's swollen face. "Might be a bit worse," she said. "With a veil on, no one'd notice it." "But I haven't a veil," said Susan. "I've got mine with me--pinned to my garter. I haven't been home since this afternoon." And Maud produced it. "But I can't wear a veil at night," objected Susan. "Why not?" said Maud. "Lots of the girls do. A veil's a dandy hider. Besides, even where a girl's got nothing to hide and has a face that's all to the good, still it's not a bad idea to wear a veil. Men like what they can't see. One of the ugliest girls I know makes a lot of money--all with her veil. She fixes up her figure something grand. Then she puts on that veil--one of the kind you think you can see a face through but you really can't. And she never lifts it till the 'come on' has given up his cash. Then----" Maud laughed. "Gee, but she has had some hot run-ins after she hoists her curtain!" "Why don't you wear a veil all the time?" asked Susan. Maud tossed her head. "What do you take me for? I've got too good an opinion of my looks for that." Susan put on the veil. It was not of the kind that is a disguise. Still, diaphanous though it seemed, it concealed astonishingly the swelling in Susan's face. Obviously, then, it must at least haze the features, would do something toward blurring the marks that go to make identity. "I shall always wear a veil," said Susan. "Oh, I don't know," deprecated Maud. "I think you're quite pretty--though a little too proper and serious looking to suit some tastes." Susan had removed veil and hat, was letting down her hair. "What are you doing that for?" cried Maud impatiently. "We're late now and----" "I don't like the way my hair's done," cried Susan. "Why, it was all right--real swell--good as a hairdresser could have done." But Susan went on at her task. Ever since she came East she had worn it in a braid looped at the back of her head. She proceeded to change this radically. With Maud forgetting to be impatient in admiration of her swift fingers she made a coiffure much more elaborate--wide waves out from her temples and a big round loose knot behind. She was well content with the result--especially when she got the veil on again and it was assisting in the change. "What do you think?" she said to Maud when she was ready. "My, but you look different!" exclaimed Maud. "A lot dressier--and sportier. More--more Broadway." "That's it--Broadway," said Susan. She had always avoided looking like Broadway. Now, she would take the opposite tack. Not loud toilets--for they would defeat her purpose. Not loud but--just common. "But," added Maud, "you do look swell about the feet. Where _do_ you get your shoes? No, I guess it's the feet." As they sallied forth Maud said, "First, I'll show you our hotel." And they went to a Raines Law hotel in Forty-second Street near Eighth Avenue. "The proprietor's a heeler of Finnegan's. I guess Freddie comes in for some rake-off. He gives us twenty-five cents of every dollar the man spends," explained she. "And if the man opens wine we get two dollars on every bottle. The best way is to stay behind when the man goes and collect right away. That avoids rows--though they'd hardly dare cheat you, being as you're on Freddie's staff. Freddie's got a big pull. He's way up at the top. I wish to God I had him instead of Jim. Freddie's giving up fast. They say he's got some things a lot better'n this now, and that he's likely to quit this and turn respectable. You ought to treat me mighty white, seeing what I done for you. I've put you in right--and that's everything in this here life." Susan looked all round--looked along the streets stretching away with their morning suggestion of freedom to fly, freedom to escape--helpless! "Can't I get a drink?" asked she. There was a strained look in her eyes, a significant nervousness of the lips and hands. "I must have a drink." "Of course. Max has been on a vacation, but I hear he's back. When I introduce you, he'll probably set 'em up. But I wouldn't drink if I were you till I went off duty." "I must have a drink," replied Susan. "It'll get you down. It got me down. I used to have a fine sucker--gave me a hundred a week and paid my flat rent. But I had nothing else to do, so I took to drinking, and I got so reckless that I let him catch me with my lover that time. But I had to have somebody to spend the money on. Anyhow, it's no fun having a John." "A John?" said Susan. "What's that?" "You are an innocent----!" laughed Maud. "A John's a sucker--a fellow that keeps a girl. Well, it'd be no fun to have a John unless you fooled him--would it?" They now entered the side door of the hotel and ascended the stairs. A dyspeptic looking man with a red nose that stood out the more strongly for the sallowness of his skin and the smallness of his sunken brown eyes had his hands spread upon the office desk and was leaning on his stiff arms. "Hello, Max," said Maud in a fresh, condescending way. "How's business?" "Slow. Always slack on Sundays. How goes it with you, Maudie?" "So--so. I manage to pick up a living in spite of the damn chippies. I don't see why the hell they don't go into the business regular and make something out of it, instead of loving free. I'm down on a girl that's neither the one thing nor the other. This is my lady friend, Miss Queenie." She turned laughingly to Susan. "I never asked your last name." "Brown." "My, what a strange name!" cried Maud. Then, as the proprietor laughed with the heartiness of tradesman at good customer's jest, she said, "Going to set 'em up, Max?" He pressed a button and rang a bell loudly. The responding waiter departed with orders for a whiskey and two lithias. Maud explained to Susan: "Max used to be a prize-fighter. He was middleweight champion." "I've been a lot of things in my days," said Max with pride. "So I've heard," joked Maud. "They say they've got your picture at headquarters." "That's neither here nor there," said Max surlily. "Don't get too flip." Susan drank her whiskey as soon as it came, and the glow rushed to her ghastly face. Said Max with great politeness: "You're having a little neuralgia, ain't you? I see your face is swhole some." "Yes," said Susan. "Neuralgia." Maud laughed hilariously. Susan herself had ceased to brood over the incident. In conventional lives, visited but rarely by perilous storms, by disaster, such an event would be what is called concise. But in life as it is lived by the masses of the people--life in which awful disease, death, maiming, eviction, fire, violent event of any and every kind, is part of the daily routine in that life of the masses there is no time for lingering upon the weathered storm or for bothering about and repairing its ravages. Those who live the comparatively languid, the sheltered life should not use their own standards of what is delicate and refined, what is conspicuous and strong, when they judge their fellow beings as differently situated. Nevertheless, they do--with the result that we find the puny mud lark criticizing the eagle battling with the hurricane. When Susan and Maud were in the street again, Susan declared that she must have another drink. "I can't offer to pay for one for you," said she to Maud. "I've almost no money. And I must spend what I've got for whiskey before I--can--can--start in." Maud began to laugh, looked at Susan, and was almost crying instead. "I can lend you a fiver," she said. "Life's hell--ain't it? My father used to have a good business--tobacco. The trust took it away from him--and then he drank--and mother, she drank, too. And one day he beat her so she died--and he ran away. Oh, it's all awful! But I've stopped caring. I'm stuck on Jim--and another little fellow he don't know about. For God's sake don't tell him or he'd have me pinched for doing business free. I get full every night and raise old Nick. Sometimes I hate Jim. I've tried to kill him twice when I was loaded. But a girl's got to have a backer with a pull. And Jim lets me keep a bigger share of what I make than some fellows. Freddie's pretty good too, they say--except when he's losing on the races or gets stuck on some actress that's too classy to be shanghaied--like you was--and that makes him cough up." Maud went on to disclose that Jim usually let her have all she made above thirty dollars a week, and in hard weeks had sometimes let her beg off with fifteen. Said she: "I can generally count on about fifteen or twenty for myself. Us girls that has backers make a lot more money than the girls that hasn't. They're always getting pinched too--though they're careful never to speak first to a man. _We_ can go right up and brace men with the cops looking on. A cop that'd touch us would get broke--unless we got too gay or robbed somebody with a pull. But none of our class of girls do any robbing. There's nothing in it. You get caught sooner or later, and then you're down and out." While Susan was having two more drinks Maud talked about Freddie. She seemed to know little about him, though he was evidently one of the conspicuous figures. He had started in the lower East Side--had been leader of one of those gangs that infest tenement districts--the young men who refuse to submit to the common lot of stupid and badly paid toil and try to fight their way out by the quick methods of violence instead of the slower but surer methods of robbing the poor through a store of some kind. These gangs were thieves, blackmailers, kidnapers of young girls for houses of prostitution, repeaters. Most of them graduated into habitual jailbirds, a few--the cleverest--became saloon-keepers and politicians and high-class professional gamblers and race track men. Freddie, Maud explained, was not much over twenty-five, yet was already well up toward the place where successful gang leaders crossed over into the respectable class--that is, grafted in "big figures." He was a great reader, said Maud, and had taken courses at some college. "They say he and his gang used to kill somebody nearly every night. Then he got a lot of money out of one of his jobs--some say it was a bank robbery and some say they killed a miner who was drunk with a big roll on him. Anyhow, Freddie got next to Finnegan--he's worth several millions that he made out of policy shops and poolrooms, and contracts and such political things. So he's in right--and he's got the brains. He's a good one for working out schemes for making people work hard and bring him their money. And everybody's afraid of him because he won't stop at nothing and is too slick to get caught." Maud broke off abruptly and rose, warned by the glazed look in Susan's eyes. Susan was so far gone that she had difficulty in not staggering and did not dare speak lest her uncertain tongue should betray her. Maud walked her up and down the block several times to give the fresh air a chance, then led her up to a man who had looked at them in passing and had paused to look back. "Want to go have a good time, sweetheart?" said Maud to the man. He was well dressed, middle-aged, with a full beard and spectacles, looked as if he might be a banker, or perhaps a professor in some college. "How much?" asked he. "Five for a little while. Come along, sporty. Take me or my lady friend." "How much for both of you?" "Ten. We don't cut rates. Take us both, dearie. I know a hotel where it'd be all right." "No. I guess I'll take your lady friend." He had been peering at Susan through his glasses. "And if she treats me well, I'll take her again. You're sure you're all right? I'm a married man." "We've both been home visiting for a month, and walking the chalk. My, but ma's strict! We got back tonight," said Maud glibly. "Go ahead, Queenie. I'll be chasing up and down here, waiting." In a lower tone: "Get through with him quick. Strike him for five more after you get the first five. He's a blob." When Susan came slinking through the office of the hotel in the wake of the man two hours later, Maud sprang from the little parlor. "How much did you get?" she asked in an undertone. Susan looked nervously at the back of the man who was descending the stairway to the street. "He said he'd pay me next time," she said. "I didn't know what to do. He was polite and----" Maud seized her by the arm. "Come along!" she cried. As she passed the desk she said to the clerk, "A dirty bilker! Tryin' to kiss his way out!" "Give him hell," said the clerk. Maud, still gripping Susan, overtook the man at the sidewalk. "What do you mean by not paying my lady friend?" she shouted. "Get out!" said the man in a low tone, with an uneasy glance round. "If you annoy me I'll call the police." "If you don't cough up mighty damn quick," cried Maud so loudly that several passers-by stopped, "I'll do the calling myself, you bum, and have you pinched for insulting two respectable working girls." And she planted herself squarely before him. Susan drew back into the shadow of the wall. Up stepped Max, who happened to be standing outside his place. "What's the row about?" he demanded. "These women are trying to blackmail me," said the man, sidling away. Maud seized him by the arm. "Will you cough up or shall I scream?" she cried. "Stand out of the way, girls," said Max savagely, "and let me take a crack at the----." The man dived into his pocket, produced a bill, thrust it toward Susan. Maud saw that it was a five. "That's only five," she cried. "Where's the other five?" "Five was the bargain," whined the man. "Do you want me to push in your blinkers, you damned old bilk, you?" cried Max, seizing him violently by the arm. The man visited his pocket again, found another five, extended the two. Maud seized them. "Now, clear out!" said Max. "I hate to let you go without a swift kick in the pants." Maud pressed the money on Susan and thanked Max. Said Max, "Don't forget to tell Freddie what I done for his girl." "She'll tell him, all right," Maud assured him. As the girls went east through Forty-second Street, Susan said, "I'm afraid that man'll lay for us." "Lay for us," laughed Maud. "He'll run like a cat afire if he ever sights us again." "I feel queer and faint," said Susan. "I must have a drink." "Well--I'll go with you. But I've got to get busy. I want a couple of days off this week for my little fellow, so I must hustle. You let that dirty dog keep you too long. Half an hour's plenty enough. Always make 'em cough up in advance, then hustle 'em through. And don't listen to their guff about wanting to see you again if you treat 'em right. There's nothing in it." They went into a restaurant bar near Broadway. Susan took two drinks of whiskey raw in rapid succession; Maud took one drink--a green mint with ice. "While you was fooling away time with that thief," said she, "I had two men--got five from one, three from the other. The five-dollar man took a three-dollar room--that was seventy-five for me. The three-dollar man wouldn't stand for more than a dollar room--so I got only a quarter there. But he set 'em up to two rounds of drinks--a quarter more for me. So I cleared nine twenty-five. And you'd 'a' got only your twenty-five cents commission on the room if it hadn't been for me. You forgot to collect your commission. Well, you can get it next time. Only I wouldn't _ask_ for it, Max was so nice in helping out. He'll give you the quarter." When Susan had taken her second stiff drink, her eyes were sparkling and she was laughing recklessly. "I want a cigarette," she said. "You feel bully, don't you?" "I'm ready for anything," declared she giddily. "I don't give a damn. I'm over the line. I--_don't_--give--a--damn!" "I used to hate the men I went up with," said Maud, "but now I hardly look at their faces. You'll soon be that way. Then you'll only drink for fun. Drink--and dope--they are about the only fun we have--them and caring about some fellow." "How many girls has Freddie got?" "Search me. Not many that he'd speak to himself. Jim's his wardman--does his collecting for him. Freddie's above most of the men in this business. The others are about like Jim--tough straight through, but Freddie's a kind of a pullman. The other men-even Jim--hate him for being such a snare and being able to hide it that he's in such a low business. They'd have done him up long ago, if they could. But he's to wise for them. That's why they have to do what he says. I tell you, you're in right, for sure. You'll have Freddie eating out of your hand, if you play a cool hand." Susan ordered another drink and a package of Egyptian cigarettes. "They don't allow ladies to smoke in here," said Maud. "We'll go to the washroom." And in the washroom they took a few hasty puffs before sallying forth again. Usually Sunday night was dull, all the men having spent their spare money the night before, and it being a bad night for married men to make excuses for getting away from home. Maud explained that, except "out-of-towners," the married men were the chief support of their profession--"and most of the cornhuskers are married men, too." But Susan had the novice's luck. When she and Maud met Maud's "little gentleman friend" Harry Tucker at midnight and went to Considine's for supper, Susan had taken in "presents" and commissions twenty-nine dollars and a half. Maud had not done so badly, herself; her net receipts were twenty-two fifty. She would not let Susan pay any part of the supper bill, but gave Harry the necessary money. "Here's a five," said she, pressing the bill into his hand, "and keep the change." And she looked at him with loving eyes of longing. He was a pretty, common-looking fellow, a mere boy, who clerked in a haberdashery in the neighborhood. As he got only six dollars a week and had to give five to his mother who sewed, he could not afford to spend money on Maud, and she neither expected nor wished it. When she picked him up, he like most of his fellow-clerks had no decent clothing but the suit he had to have to "make a front" at the store. Maud had outfitted him from the skin with the cheap but showy stuff exhibited for just such purposes in the Broadway windows. She explained confidentially to Susan: "It makes me sort of feel that I own him. Then, too, in love there oughtn't to be any money. If he paid, I'd be as cold to him as I am to the rest. The only reason I like Jim at all is I like a good beating once in a while. It's exciting. Jim--he treats me like the dirt under his feet. And that's what we are--dirt under the men's feet. Every woman knows it, when it comes to a showdown between her and a man. As my pop used to say, the world was made for men, not for women. Still, our graft ain't so bum, at that--if we work it right." Freddie called on Susan about noon the next day. She was still in bed. He was dressed in the extreme of fashion, was wearing a chinchilla-lined coat. He looked the idle, sportively inclined son of some rich man in the Fifth Avenue district. He was having an affair with a much admired young actress--was engaged in it rather as a matter of vanity and for the fashionable half-world associations into which it introduced him rather than from any present interest in the lady. He stood watching Susan with a peculiar expression--one he might perhaps have found it hard to define himself. He bent over her and carelessly brushed her ear with his lips. "How did your royal highness make out?" inquired he. "The money's in the top bureau drawer," replied she, the covers up to her eyes and her eyes closed. He went to the bureau, opened the drawer, with his gloved hands counted the money. As he counted his eyes had a look in them that was strangely like jealous rage. He kept his back toward her for some time after he had crossed to look at the money. When he spoke it was to say: "Not bad. And when you get dressed up a bit and lose your stage fright, you'll do a smashing business. I'll not take my share of this. I had a good run with the cards last night. Anyhow, you've got to pay your rent and buy some clothes. I've got to invest something in my new property. It's badly run down. You'll get busy again tonight, of course. Never lay off, lady, unless the weather's bad. You'll find you won't average more than twenty good business days a month in summer and fall, and only about ten in winter and spring, when it's cold and often lots of bad weather in the afternoons and evenings. That means hustle." No sign from Susan. He sat on the bed and pulled the covers away from her face. "What are you so grouchy about, pet?" he inquired, chucking her under the chin. "Nothing." "Too much booze, I'll bet. Well, sleep your grouch off. I've got a date with Finnegan. The election's coming on, and I have to work--lining up the vote and getting the repeaters ready. It all means good money for me. Look out about the booze, lady. It'll float you into trouble--trouble with me, I mean." And he patted her bare shoulders, laughed gently, went to the door. He paused there, struggled with an impulse to turn--departed. CHAPTER VII BUT she did not "look out about the booze." Each morning she awoke in a state of depression so horrible that she wondered why she could not bring herself to plan suicide. Why was it? Her marriage? Yes--and she paid it its customary tribute of a shudder. Yes, her marriage had made all things thereafter possible. But what else? Lack of courage? Lack of self-respect? Was it not always assumed that a woman in her position, if she had a grain of decent instinct, would rush eagerly upon death? Was she so much worse than others? Or was what everybody said about these things--everybody who had experience--was it false, like nearly everything else she had been taught? She did not understand; she only knew that hope was as strong within her as health itself--and that she did not want to die--and that at present she was helpless. One evening the man she was with--a good-looking and unusually interesting young chap--suddenly said: "What a heart action you have got! Let me listen to that again." "Is it all wrong?" asked Susan, as he pressed his ear against her chest. "You ask that as if you rather hoped it was." "I do--and I don't." "Well," said he, after listening for a third time, "you'll never die of heart trouble. I never heard a heart with such a grand action--like a big, powerful pump, built to last forever. You're never ill, are you?" "Not thus far." "And you'll have a hard time making yourself ill. Health? Why, your health must be perfect. Let me see." And he proceeded to thump and press upon her chest with an expertness that proclaimed the student of medicine. He was all interest and enthusiasm, took a pencil and, spreading a sheet upon her chest over her heart, drew its outlines. "There!" he cried. "What is it?" asked Susan. "I don't understand." The young man drew a second and much smaller heart within the outline of hers. "This," he explained, "is about the size of an ordinary heart. You can see for yourself that yours is fully one-fourth bigger than the normal." "What of it?" said Susan. "Why, health and strength--and vitality--courage--hope--all one-fourth above the ordinary allowance. Yes, more than a fourth. I envy you. You ought to live long, stay young until you're very old--and get pretty much anything you please. You don't belong to this life. Some accident, I guess. Every once in a while I run across a case something like yours. You'll go back where you belong. This is a dip, not a drop." "You sound like a fortune-teller." She was smiling mockingly. But in truth she had never in all her life heard words that thrilled her so, that heartened her so. "I am. A scientific fortune-teller. And what that kind says comes true, barring accidents. As you're not ignorant and careless this life of yours isn't physiologically bad. On the contrary, you're out in the open air much of the time and get the splendid exercise of walking--a much more healthful life, in the essential ways, than respectable women lead. They're always stuffing, and rumping it. They never move if they can help. No, nothing can stop you but death--unless you're far less intelligent than you look. Oh, yes--death and one other thing." "Drink." And he looked shrewdly at her. But drink she must. And each day, as soon as she dressed and was out in the street, she began to drink, and kept it up until she had driven off the depression and had got herself into the mood of recklessness in which she found a certain sardonic pleasure in outraging her own sensibilities. There is a stage in a drinking career when the man or the woman becomes depraved and ugly as soon as the liquor takes effect. But she was far from this advanced stage. Her disposition was, if anything, more sweet and generous when she was under the influence of liquor. The whiskey--she almost always drank whiskey--seemed to act directly and only upon the nerves that ached and throbbed when she was sober, the nerves that made the life she was leading seem loathsome beyond the power of habit to accustom. With these nerves stupefied, her natural gayety asserted itself, and a fondness for quiet and subtle mockery--her indulgence in it did not make her popular with vain men sufficiently acute to catch her meaning. By observation and practice she was soon able to measure the exact amount of liquor that was necessary to produce the proper state of intoxication at the hour for going "on duty." That gayety of hers was of the surface only. Behind it her real self remained indifferent or somber or sardonic, according to her mood of the day. And she had the sense of being in the grasp of a hideous, fascinating nightmare, of being dragged through some dreadful probation from which she would presently emerge to ascend to the position she would have earned by her desperate fortitude. The past--unreal. The present--a waking dream. But the future--ah, the future! He has not candidly explored far beneath the surface of things who does not know the strange allure, charm even, that many loathsome things possess. And drink is peculiarly fitted to bring out this perverse quality--drink that blurs all the conventionalities, even those built up into moral ideas by centuries and ages of unbroken custom. The human animal, for all its pretenses of inflexibility, is almost infinitely adaptable--that is why it has risen in several million years of evolution from about the humblest rank in the mammalian family to overlordship of the universe. Still, it is doubtful if, without drink to help her, a girl of Susan's intelligence and temperament would have been apt to endure. She would probably have chosen the alternative--death. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of girls, at least her equals in sensibility, are caught in the same calamity every year, tens of thousands, ever more and more as our civilization transforms under the pressure of industrialism, are caught in the similar calamities of soul-destroying toil. And only the few survive who have perfect health and abounding vitality. Susan's iron strength enabled her to live; but it was drink that enabled her to endure. Beyond question one of the greatest blessings that could now be conferred upon the race would be to cure it of the drink evil. But at the same time, if drink were taken away before the causes of drink were removed, there would be an appalling increase in suicide--in insanity, in the general total of human misery. For while drink retards the growth of intelligent effort to end the stupidities in the social system, does it not also help men and women to bear the consequences of those stupidities? Our crude and undeveloped new civilization, strapping men and women and children to the machines and squeezing all the energy out of them, all the capacity for vital life, casts them aside as soon as they are useless but long before they are dead. How unutterably wretched they would be without drink to give them illusions! Susan grew fond of cigarettes, fond of whiskey; to the rest she after a few weeks became numb--no new or strange phenomenon in a world where people with a cancer or other hideous running sore or some gross and frightful deformity of fat or excrescence are seen laughing, joining freely and comfortably in the company of the unafflicted. In her affliction Susan at least saw only those affected like herself--and that helped not a little, helped the whiskey to confuse and distort her outlook upon life. The old Cartesian formula--"I think, therefore I am"--would come nearer to expressing a truth, were it reversed--"I am, therefore I think." Our characters are compressed, and our thoughts bent by our environment. And most of us are unconscious of our slavery because our environment remains unchanged from birth until death, and so seems the whole universe to us. In spite of her life, in spite of all she did to disguise herself, there persisted in her face--even when she was dazed or giddied or stupefied with drink--the expression of the woman on the right side of the line. Whether it was something in her character, whether it was not rather due to superiority of breeding and intelligence, would be difficult to say. However, there was the _different_ look that irritated many of the other girls, interfered with her business and made her feel a hypocrite. She heard so much about the paleness of her lips that she decided to end that comment by using paint--the durable kind Ida had recommended. When her lips flamed carmine, a strange and striking effect resulted. The sad sweet pensiveness of her eyes--the pallor of her clear skin--then, that splash of bright red, artificial, bold, defiant--the contrast of the combination seemed somehow to tell the story of her life her past no less than her present. And when her beauty began to come back--for, hard though her life was, it was a life of good food, of plenty of sleep, of much open air; so it put no such strain upon her as had the life of the factory and the tenement--when her beauty came back, the effect of that contrast of scarlet splash against the sad purity of pallid cheeks and violet-gray eyes became a mark of individuality, of distinction. It was not long before Susan would have as soon thought of issuing forth with her body uncovered as with her lips unrouged. She turned away from men who sought her a second time. She was difficult to find, she went on "duty" only enough days each week to earn a low average of what was expected from the girls by their protectors. Yet she got many unexpected presents--and so had money to lend to the other girls, who soon learned how "easy" she was. Maud, sometimes at her own prompting, sometimes prompted by Jim, who was prompted by Freddie--warned her every few days that she was skating on the thinnest of ice. But she went her way. Not until she accompanied a girl to an opium joint to discover whether dope had the merits claimed for it as a deadener of pain and a producer of happiness--not until then did Freddie come in person. "I hear," said he and she wondered whether he had heard from Max or from loose-tongued Maud--"that you come into the hotel so drunk that men sometimes leave you right away again--go without paying you." "I must drink," said Susan. "You must _stop_ drink," retorted he, amiable in his terrible way. "If you don't, I'll have you pinched and sent up. That'll bring you to your senses." "I must drink," said Susan. "Then I must have you pinched," said he with his mocking laugh. "Don't be a fool," he went on. "You can make money enough to soon buy the right sort of clothes so that I can afford to be seen with you. I'd like to take you out once in a while and give you a swell time. But what'd we look like together--with you in those cheap things out of bargain troughs? Not that you don't look well--for you do. But the rest of you isn't up to your feet and to the look in your face. The whole thing's got to be right before a lady can sit opposite _me_ in Murray's or Rector's." "All I ask is to be let alone," said Susan. "That isn't playing square--and you've got to play square. What I want is to set you up in a nice parlor trade--chaps from the college and the swell clubs and hotels. But I can't do anything for you as long as you drink this way. You'll have to stay on the streets." "That's where I want to stay." "Well, there's something to be said for the streets," Freddie admitted. "If a woman don't intend to make sporting her life business, she don't want to get up among the swells of the profession, where she'd become known and find it hard to sidestep. Still, even in the street you ought to make a hundred, easy--and not go with any man that doesn't suit you." "Any man that doesn't suit me," said Susan. And, after a pause, she said it again: "Any man that doesn't suit me." The young man, with his shrewdness of the street-graduate and his sensitiveness of the Italian, gave her an understanding glance. "You look as if you couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry. I'd try to laugh if I was you." She had laughed as he spoke. Freddie nodded approval. "That sounded good to me. You're getting broken in. Don't take yourself so seriously. After all, what are you doing? Why, learning to live like a man." She found this new point of view interesting--and true, too. Like a man--like all men, except possibly a few--not enough exceptions to change the rule. Like a man; getting herself hardened up to the point where she could take part in the cruel struggle on equal terms with the men. It wasn't their difference of body any more than it was their difference of dress that handicapped women; it was the idea behind skirt and sex--and she was getting rid of that. . . . The theory was admirable; but it helped her not at all in practice. She continued to keep to the darkness, to wait in the deep doorways, so far as she could in her "business hours," and to repulse advances in the day time or in public places--and to drink. She did not go again to the opium joint, and she resisted the nightly offers of girls and their "gentlemen friends" to try cocaine in its various forms. "Dope," she saw, was the medicine of despair. And she was far from despair. Had she not youth? Had she not health and intelligence and good looks? Some day she would have finished her apprenticeship. Then--the career! Freddie let her alone for nearly a month, though she was earning less than fifty dollars a week--which meant only thirty for him. He had never "collected" from her directly, but always through Jim; and she had now learned enough of the methods of the system of which she was one of the thousands of slaves to appreciate that she was treated by Jim with unique consideration. Not only by the surly and brutal Jim, but also by the police who oppressed in petty ways wherever they dared because they hated Freddie's system which took away from them a part of the graft they regarded as rightfully theirs. Yes, rightfully theirs. And anyone disposed to be critical of police morality--or of Freddie Palmer morality--in this matter of graft would do well to pause and consider the source of his own income before he waxes too eloquent and too virtuous. Graft is one of those general words that mean everything and nothing. What is graft and what is honest income? Just where shall we draw the line between rightful exploitation of our fellow-beings through their necessities and their ignorance of their helplessness, and wrongful exploitation? Do attempts to draw that line resolve down to making virtuous whatever I may appropriate and vicious whatever is appropriated in ways other than mine? And if so are not the police and the Palmers entitled to their day in the moral court no less than the tariff-baron and market-cornerer, the herder and driver of wage slaves, the retail artists in cold storage filth, short weight and shoddy goods? However, "we must draw the line somewhere" or there will be no such thing as morality under our social system. So why not draw it at anything the other fellow does to make money. In adopting this simple rule, we not only preserve the moralities from destruction but also establish our own virtue and the other fellow's villainy. Truly, never is the human race so delightfully, so unconsciously, amusing as when it discusses right and wrong. When she saw Freddie again, he was far from sober. He showed it by his way of beginning. Said he: "I've got to hand you a line of rough talk, Queenie. I took on this jag for your especial benefit," said he. "I'm a fool about you and you take advantage of it. That's bad for both of us. . . . You're drinking as much as ever?" "More," replied she. "It takes more and more." "How can you expect to get on?" cried he, exasperated. "As I told you, I couldn't make a cent if I didn't drink." Freddie stared moodily at her, then at the floor--they were in her room. Finally he said: "You get the best class of men. I put my swell friends on to where you go slipping by, up and down in the shadow--and it's all they can do to find you. The best class of men--men all the swell respectable girls in town are crazy to hook up with--those of 'em that ain't married already. If you're good enough for those chaps they ought to be good enough for you. Yet some of 'em complain to me that they get thrown down--and others kick because you were too full--and, damn it, you act so queer that you scare 'em away. What am I to do about it?" She was silent. "I want you to promise me you'll take a brace." No answer. "You won't promise?" "No--because I don't intend to. I'm doing the best I can." "You think I'm a good thing. You think I'll take anything off you, because I'm stuck on you--and appreciate that you ain't on the same level with the rest of these heifers. Well--I'll not let any woman con me. I never have. I never will. And I'll make you realize that you're not square with me. I'll let you get a taste of life as it is when a girl hasn't got a friend with a pull." "As you please," said Susan indifferently. "I don't in the least care what happens to me." "We'll see about that," cried he, enraged. "I'll give you a week to brace up in." The look he shot at her by way of finish to his sentence was menacing enough. But she was not disturbed; these signs of anger tended to confirm her in her sense of security from him. For it was wholly unlike the Freddie Palmer the rest of the world knew, to act in this irresolute and stormy way. She knew that Palmer, in his fashion, cared for her--better still, liked her--liked to talk with her, liked to show--and to develop--the aspiring side of his interesting, unusual nature for her benefit. A week passed, during which she did not see him. But she heard that he was losing on both the cards and the horses and was drinking wildly. A week--ten days--then---- One night, as she came out of a saloon a block or so down Seventh Avenue from Forty-second, a fly cop seized her by the arm. "Come along," said he roughly. "You're drinking and soliciting. I've got to clear the streets of some of these tarts. It's got so decent people can't move without falling over 'em." Susan had not lived in the tenement districts where the ignorance and the helplessness and the lack of a voice that can make itself heard among the ruling classes make the sway of the police absolute and therefore tyrannical--she had not lived there without getting something of that dread and horror of the police which to people of the upper classes seems childish or evidence of secret criminal hankerings. And this nervousness had latterly been increased to terror by what she had learned from her fellow-outcasts--the hideous tales of oppression, of robbery, of bodily and moral degradation. But all this terror had been purely fanciful, as any emotion not of experience proves to be when experience evokes the reality. At that touch, at the sound of those rough words--at that _reality_ of the terror she had imagined from the days when she went to work at Matson's and to live with the Brashears, she straightway lost consciousness. When her senses returned she was in a cell, lying on a wooden bench. There must have been some sort of wild struggle; for her clothes were muddy, her hat was crushed into shapelessness, her veil was so torn that she had difficulty in arranging it to act as any sort of concealment. Though she had no mirror at which to discover the consolation, she need have had no fear of being recognized, so distorted were all her features by the frightful paroxysms of grief that swept and ravaged her body that night. She fainted again when they led her out to put her in the wagon. She fainted a third time when she heard her name--"Queenie Brown"--bellowed out by the court officer. They shook her into consciousness, led her to the court-room. She was conscious of a stifling heat, of a curious crowd staring at her with eyes which seemed to bore red hot holes into her flesh. As she stood before the judge, with head limp upon her bosom, she heard in her ear a rough voice bawling, "You're discharged. The judge says don't come here again." And she was pushed through an iron gate. She walked unsteadily up the aisle, between two masses of those burning-eyed human monsters. She felt the cold outside air like a vast drench of icy water flung upon her. If it had been raining, she might have gone toward the river. But than that day New York had never been more radiantly the City of the Sun. How she got home she never knew, but late in the afternoon she realized that she was in her own room. Hour after hour she lay upon the bed, body and mind inert. Helpless--no escape--no courage to live--yet no wish to die. How much longer would it last? Surely the waking from this dream must come soon. About noon the next day Freddie came. "I let you off easy," said he, sitting on the bed upon which she was lying dressed as when she came in the day before. "Have you been drinking again?" "No," she muttered. "Well--don't. Next time, a week on the Island. . . . Did you hear?" "Yes." "Don't turn me against you. I'd hate to have to make an awful example of you." "I must drink," she repeated in the same stolid way. He abruptly but without shock lifted her to a sitting position. His arm held her body up; her head was thrown back and her face was looking calmly at him. She realized that he had been drinking--drinking hard. Her eyes met his terrible eyes without flinching. He kissed her full upon the lips. With her open palm she struck him across the cheek, bringing the red fierily to its smooth fair surface. The devil leaped into his eyes, the devil of cruelty and lust. He smiled softly and wickedly. "I see you've forgotten the lesson I gave you three months ago. You've got to be taught to be afraid all over again." "I _am_ not afraid," said she. "I _was_ not afraid. You can't make me afraid." "We'll see," murmured he. And his fingers began to caress her round smooth throat. "If you ever strike me again," she said quietly, "I'll kill you." His eyes flinched for an instant--long enough to let her know his innermost secret. "I want you--I want _you_--damn you," he said, between his clinched teeth. "You're the first one I couldn't get. There's something in you I can't get!" "That's _me_," she replied. "You hate me, don't you?" "No." "Then you love me?" "No. I care nothing about you." He let her drop back to the bed, went to the window, stood looking out moodily. After a while he said without turning: "My mother kept a book shop--on the lower East Side. She brought me up at home. At home!" And he laughed sardonically. "She hated me because I looked like my father." Silence, then he spoke again: "You've never been to my flat. I've got a swell place. I want to cut out this part of the game. I can get along without it. You're going to move in with me, and stop this street business. I make good money. You can have everything you want." "I prefer to keep on as I am." "What's the difference? Aren't you mine whenever I want you?" "I prefer to be free." "_Free!_ Why, you're not free. Can't I send you to the Island any time I feel like it--just as I can the other girls?" "Yes--you can do that. But I'm free, all the same." "No more than the other girls." "Yes." "What do you mean?" "Unless you understand, I couldn't make you see it," she said. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, doing up her hair, which had partly fallen down. "I think you do understand." "What in the hell do you want, anyhow?" he demanded. "If I knew--do you suppose I'd be here?" He watched her with baffled, longing eyes. "What is it," he muttered, "that's so damn peculiar about you?" It was the question every shrewd observant person who saw her put to himself in one way or another; and there was excellent reason why this should have been. Life has a certain set of molds--lawyer, financier, gambler, preacher, fashionable woman, prostitute, domestic woman, laborer, clerk, and so on through a not extensive list of familiar types with which we all soon become acquainted. And to one or another of these patterns life fits each of us as we grow up. Not one in ten thousand glances into human faces is arrested because it has lit upon a personality that cannot be immediately located, measured, accounted for. The reason for this sterility of variety which soon makes the world rather monotonous to the seeing eye is that few of us are born with any considerable amount of personality, and what little we have is speedily suppressed by a system of training which is throughout based upon an abhorrence of originality. We obey the law of nature--and nature so abhors variety that, whenever a variation from a type happens, she tries to kill it, and, that failing, reproduces it a myriad times to make it a type. When an original man or woman appears and all the strenuous effort to suppress him or her fails, straightway spring up a thousand imitators and copiers, and the individuality is lost in the school, the fashion, the craze. We have not the courage to be ourselves, even where there is anything in us that might be developed into something distinctive enough to win us the rank of real identity. Individuality--distinction--where it does exist, almost never shows until experience brings it out--just as up to a certain stage the embryo of any animal is like that of every other animal, though there is latent in it the most positive assertion of race and sex, of family, type, and so on. Susan had from childhood possessed certain qualities of physical beauty, of spiritedness, of facility in mind and body--the not uncommon characteristic of the child that is the flower of passionate love. But now there was beginning to show in her a radical difference from the rest of the crowd pouring through the streets of the city. It made the quicker observers in the passing throng turn the head for a second and wondering glance. Most of them assumed they had been stirred by her superiority of face and figure. But striking faces and figures of the various comely types are frequent in the streets of New York and of several other American cities. The truth was that they were interested by her expression--an elusive expression telling of a soul that was being moved to its depths by experience which usually finds and molds mere passive material. This expression was as evident in her mouth as in her eyes, in her profile as in her full face. And as she sat there on the edge of the bed twisting up her thick dark hair, it was this expression that disconcerted Freddie Palmer, for the first time in all his contemptuous dealings with the female sex. In his eyes was a ferocious desire to seize her and again try to conquer and to possess. She had become almost unconscious of his presence. He startled her by suddenly crying, "Oh, you go to hell!" and flinging from the room, crashing the door shut behind him. Maud had grown tired of the haberdasher's clerk and his presumptions upon her frank fondness which he wholly misunderstood. She had dropped him for a rough looking waiter-singer in a basement drinking place. He was beating her and taking all the money she had for herself, and was spending it on another woman, much older than Maud and homely--and Maud knew, and complained of him bitterly to everyone but himself. She was no longer hanging round Susan persistently, having been discouraged by the failure of her attempts at intimacy with a girl who spent nearly all her spare time at reading or at plays and concerts. Maud was now chumming with a woman who preyed upon the patrons of a big Broadway hotel--she picked them up near the entrance, robbed them, and when they asked the hotel detectives to help them get back their stolen money, the detectives, who divided with her, frightened them off by saying she was a mulatto and would compel them to make a public appearance against her in open court. This woman, older and harder than most of the girls, though of quiet and refined appearance and manner, was rapidly dragging Maud down. Also, Maud's looks were going because she ate irregularly all kinds of trash, and late every night ate herself full to bursting and drank herself drunk to stupefaction. Susan's first horror of the men she met--men of all classes--was rapidly modified into an inconsistent, therefore characteristically human, mingling of horror and tolerance. Nobody, nothing, was either good or bad, but all veered like weathercocks in the shifting wind. She decided that people were steadily good only where their lot happened to be cast in a place in which the good wind held steadily, and that those who were usually bad simply had the misfortune to have to live where the prevailing winds were bad. For instance, there was the handsome, well educated, well mannered young prize-fighter, Ned Ballou, who was Estelle's "friend." Ballou, big and gentle and as incapable of bad humor as of constancy or of honesty about money matters, fought under the name of Joe Geary and was known as Upper Cut Joe because usually, in the third round, never later than the fifth, he gave the knockout to his opponent by a cruelly swift and savage uppercut. He had educated himself marvelously well. But he had been brought up among thieves and had by some curious freak never learned to know what a moral sense was, which is one--and a not unattractive--step deeper down than those who know what a moral sense is but never use it. At supper in Gaffney's he related to Susan and Estelle how he had won his greatest victory--the victory of Terry the Cyclone, that had lifted him up into the class of secure money-makers. He told how he always tried to "rattle" his opponent by talking to him, by pouring out in an undertone a stream of gibes, jeers, insults. The afternoon of the fight Terry's first-born had died, but the money for the funeral expenses and to save the wife from the horrors and dangers of the free wards had to be earned. Joe Geary knew that he must win this fight or drop into the working or the criminal class. Terry was a "hard one"; so circumstances compelled, those desperate measures which great men, from financiers and generals down to prize-fighters, do not shrink from else they would not be great, but small. As soon as he was facing Terry in the ring--Joe so he related with pride in his cleverness--began to "guy"--"Well, you Irish fake--so the kid's dead--eh? Who was its pa, say?--the dirty little bastard--or does the wife know which one it was----" and so on. And Terry, insane with grief and fury, fought wild--and Joe became a champion. As she listened Susan grew cold with horror and with hate. Estelle said: "Tell the rest of it, Joe." "Oh, that was nothing," replied he. When he strolled away to talk with some friends Estelle told "the rest" that was "nothing." The championship secure, Joe had paid all Terry's bills, had supported Terry and his wife for a year, had relapsed into old habits and "pulled off a job" of safe-cracking because, the prize-fighting happening to pay poorly, he would have had a default on the payments for a month or so. He was caught, did a year on the Island before his "pull" could get him out. And all the time he was in the "pen" he so arranged it with his friends that the invalid Terry and his invalid wife did not suffer. And all this he had done not because he had a sense of owing Terry, but because he was of the "set" in which it is the custom to help anybody who happens to need it, and aid begun becomes an obligation to "see it through." It was an extreme case of the moral chaos about her--the chaos she had begun to discover when she caught her aunt and Ruth conspiring to take Sam away from her. What a world! If only these shifting, usually evil winds of circumstance could be made to blow good! A few evenings after the arrest Maud came for Susan, persuaded her to go out. They dined at about the only good restaurant where unescorted women were served after nightfall. Afterward they went "on duty." It was fine overhead and the air was cold and bracing--one of those marvelous New York winter nights which have the tonic of both sea and mountains and an exhilaration, in addition, from the intense bright-burning life of the mighty city. For more than a week there had been a steady downpour of snow, sleet and finally rain. Thus, the women of the streets had been doing almost no business. There was not much money in sitting in drinking halls and the back rooms of saloons and picking up occasional men; the best trade was the men who would not venture to show themselves in such frankly disreputable places, but picked out women in the crowded streets and followed them to quiet dark places to make the arrangements--men stimulated by good dinners, or, later on, in the evening, those who left parties of elegant respectability after theater or opera. On this first night of business weather in nearly two weeks the streets were crowded with women and girls. They were desperately hard up and they made open dashes for every man they could get at. All classes were made equally bold--the shop and factory and office and theater girls with wages too small for what they regarded as a decent living; the women with young children to support and educate; the protected professional regulars; the miserable creatures who had to get along as best they could without protection, and were prey to every blackmailing officer of an anti-vice society and to every policeman and fly-cop not above levying upon women who were "too low to be allowed to live, anyhow." Out from all kinds of shelters swarmed the women who were demonstrating how prostitution flourishes and tends to spread to every class of society whenever education develops tastes beyond the earning power of their possessors. And with clothes and food to buy, rent to pay, dependents to support, these women, so many days hampered in the one way that was open to them to get money, made the most piteous appeals to the men. Not tearful appeals, not appeals to sympathy or even to charity, but to passion. They sought in every way to excite. They exhibited their carefully gotten-up legs; they made indecent gestures; they said the vilest things; they offered the vilest inducements; they lowered their prices down and down. And such men as did not order them off with disdain, listened with laughter, made jokes at which the wretched creatures laughed as gayly as if they were not mad with anxiety and were not hating these men who were holding on to that which they must have to live. "Too many out tonight," said Maud as they walked their beat--Forty-second between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. "I knew it would be this way. Let's go in here and get warm." They went into the back room of a saloon where perhaps half a dozen women were already seated, some of them gray with the cold against which their thin showy garments were no protection. Susan and Maud sat at a table in a corner; Maud broke her rule and drank whiskey with Susan. After they had taken perhaps half a dozen drinks, Maud grew really confidential. She always, even in her soberest moments, seemed to be telling everything she knew; but Susan had learned that there were in her many deep secrets, some of which not even liquor could unlock. "I'm going to tell you something," she now said to Susan. "You must promise not to give me away." "Don't tell me," replied Susan. She was used to being flattered--or victimized, according to the point of view--with confidences. She assumed Maud was about to confess some secret about her own self, as she had the almost universal habit of never thinking of anyone else. "Don't tell me," said she. "I'm tired of being used to air awful secrets. It makes me feel like a tenement wash line." "This is about you," said Maud. "If it's ever found out that I put you wise, Jim'll have me killed. Yes--killed." Susan, reckless by this time, laughed. "Oh, trash!" she said. "No trash at all," insisted Maud. "When you know this town through and through you'll know that murder's something that can be arranged as easy as buying a drink. What risk is there in making one of _us_ 'disappear'? None in the world. I always feel that Jim'll have me killed some day--unless I go crazy sometime and kill him. He's stuck on me--or, at least, he's jealous of me--and if he ever found out I had a lover--somebody--anybody that didn't pay--why, it'd be all up with me. Little Maud would go on the grill." She ordered and slowly drank another whiskey before she recalled what she had set out to confide. By way of a fresh start she said, "What do you think of Freddie?" "I don't know," replied Susan. And it was the truth. Her instinctive belief in a modified kind of fatalism made her judgments of people--even of those who caused her to suffer--singularly free from personal bitterness. Freddie, a mere instrument of destiny, had his good side, his human side, she knew. At his worst he was no worse than the others, And aside from his queer magnetism, there was a certain force in him that compelled her admiration; at least he was not one of the petty instruments of destiny. He had in him the same quality she felt gestating within herself. "I don't know what to think," she repeated. Maud had been reflecting while Susan was casting about, as she had many a time before, for her real opinion of her master who was in turn the slave of Finnegan, who was in his turn the slave of somebody higher up, she didn't exactly know who--or why--or the why of any of it--or the why of the grotesque savage purposeless doings of destiny in general. Maud now burst out: "I don't care. I'm going to put you wise if I die for it." "Don't," said Susan. "I don't want to know." "But I've _got_ to tell you. Do you know what Freddie's going to do?" Susan smiled disdainfully. "I don't care. You mustn't tell me--when you've been drinking this way----" "Finnegan's police judge is a man named Bennett. As soon as Bennett comes back to Jefferson Market Police Court, Freddie's going to have you sent up for three months." Susan's glass was on the way to her lips. She set it down again. The drunken old wreck of an entertainer at the piano in the corner was bellowing out his favorite song--"I Am the King of the Vikings." Susan began to hum the air. "It's gospel," cried Maud, thinking Susan did not believe her. "He's a queer one, is Freddie. They're all afraid of him. You'd think he was a coward, the way he bullies women and that. But somehow he ain't--not a bit. He'll be a big man in the organization some day, they all say. He never lets up till he gets square. And he thinks you're not square--after all he's done for you." "Perhaps not--as he looks at it," said Susan. "And Jim says he's crazy in love with you, and that he wants to put you where other men can't see you and where maybe he can get over caring about you. That's the real reason. He's a queer devil. But then all men are though none quite like Freddie." "So I'm to go to the Island for three months," said Susan reflectively. "You don't seem to care. It's plain you never was there. . . . And you've got to go. There's no way out of it--unless you skip to another city. And if you did you never could come back here. Freddie'd see that you got yours as soon as you landed." Susan sat looking at her glass. Maud watched her in astonishment. "You're as queer as Freddie," said she at length. "I never feel as if I was acquainted with you--not really. I never had a lady friend like that before. You don't seem to be a bit excited about what Freddie's going to do. Are you in love with him?" Susan lifted strange, smiling eyes to Maud's curious gaze. "I--in _love_--with a _man_," she said slowly. And then she laughed. "Don't laugh that way," cried Maud. "It gives me the creeps. What are you going to do?" "What can I do?" "Nothing." "Then if there's nothing to do, I'll no nothing." "Go to the Island for three months?" Susan shrugged her shoulders. "I haven't gone yet." She rose. "It's too stuffy and smelly in here," said she. "Let's move out." "No. I'll wait. I promised to meet a gentleman friend here. You'll not tell that I tipped you off?" "You'd not have told me if you hadn't known I wouldn't." "That's so. But--why don't you make it up with Freddie?" "I couldn't do that." "He's dead in love. I'm sure you could." Again Susan's eyes became strange. "I'm sure I couldn't. Good night." She got as far as the door, came back. "Thank you for telling me." "Oh, that's all right," murmured the girl. She was embarrassed by Susan's manner. She was frightened by Susan's eyes. "You ain't going to----" There she halted. "What?" "To jump off? Kill yourself?" "Hardly," said Susan. "I've got a lot to do before I die." She went directly home. Palmer was lying on the bed, a cigarette between his lips, a newspaper under his feet to prevent his boots from spoiling the spread--one of the many small indications of the prudence, thrift and calculation that underlay the almost insane recklessness of his surface character, and that would save him from living as the fool lives and dying as the fool dies. "I thought you wouldn't slop round in these streets long," said he, as she paused upon the threshold. "So I waited." She went to the bureau, unlocked the top drawer, took the ten-dollar bill she had under some undershirts there, put it in her right stocking where there were already a five and a two. She locked the drawer, tossed the key into an open box of hairpins. She moved toward the door. "Where are you going?" asked he, still staring at the ceiling. "Out. I've made almost nothing this week." "Sit down. I want to talk to you." She hesitated, seated herself on a chair near the bed. He frowned at her. "You've been drinking?" "Yes." "I've been drinking myself, but I've got a nose like a hunting dog. What do you do it for?" "What's the use of explaining? You'd not understand." "Perhaps I would. I'm one-fourth Italian--and they understand everything. . . . You're fond of reading, aren't you?" "It passes the time." "While I was waiting for you I glanced at your new books--Emerson--Dickens--Zola." He was looking toward the row of paper backs that filled almost the whole length of the mantel. "I must read them. I always like your books. You spend nearly as much time reading as I do--and you don't need it, for you've got a good education. What do you read for? To amuse yourself?" "No." "To get away from yourself?" "No." "Then why?" persisted he. "To find out about myself." He thought a moment, turned his face toward her. "You _are_ clever!" he said admiringly. "What's your game?" "My game?" "What are you aiming for? You've got too much sense not to be aiming for something." She looked at him; the expression that marked her as a person peculiar and apart was glowing in her eyes like a bed of red-hot coals covered with ashes. "What?" he repeated. "To get strong," replied she. "Women are born weak and bred weaker. I've got to get over being a woman. For there isn't any place in this world for a woman except under the shelter of some man. And I don't want that." The underlying strength of her features abruptly came into view. "And I won't have it," she added. He laughed. "But the men'll never let _you_ be anything but a woman." "We'll see," said she, smiling. The strong look had vanished into the soft contour of her beautiful youth. "Personally, I like you better when you've been drinking," he went on. "You're sad when you're sober. As you drink you liven up." "When I get over being sad if I'm sober, when I learn to take things as they come, just like a man--a strong man, then I'll be----" She stopped. "Be what?" "Ready." "Ready for what?" "How do I know?" He swung himself to a sitting position. "Meanwhile, you're coming to live with me. I've been fighting against it, but I give up. I need you. You're the one I've been looking for. Pack your traps. I'll call a cab and we'll go over to my flat. Then we'll go to Rector's and celebrate." She shook her head. "I'm sorry, but I can't." "Why not?" "I told you. There's something in me that won't let me." He rose, walked to her very deliberately. He took one of her hands from her lap, drew her to her feet, put his hands strongly on her shoulders. "You belong to me," he said, his lips smiling charmingly, but the devil in the gleam of his eyes and in the glistening of his beautiful, cruel teeth. "Pack up." "You know that I won't." He slowly crushed her in his arms, slowly pressed his lips upon hers. A low scream issued from her lips and she seized him by the throat with both hands, one hand over the other, and thrust him backward. He reeled, fell upon his back on the bed; she fell with him, clung to him--like a bull dog--not as if she would not, but as if she could not, let go. He clutched at her fingers; failing to dislodge them, he tried to thrust his thumbs into her eyes. But she seized his right thumb between her teeth and bit into it until they almost met. And at the same time her knees ground into his abdomen. He choked, gurgled, grew dark red, then gray, then a faint blackish blue, lay limp under her. But she did not relax until the blue of his face had deepened to black and his eyes began to bulge from their sockets. At those signs that he was beyond doubt unconscious, she cautiously relaxed her fingers. She unclenched her teeth; his arm, which had been held up by the thumb she was biting, dropped heavily. She stood over him, her eyes blazing insanely at him. She snatched out her hatpin, flung his coat and waistcoat from over his chest, felt for his heart. With the murderous eight inches of that slender steel poniard poised for the drive, she began to sob, flung the weapon away, took his face between her hands and kissed him. "You fiend! You fiend!" she sobbed. She changed to her plainest dress. Leaving the blood-stained blouse on the bed beside him where she had flung it down after tearing it off, she turned out the light, darted down stairs and into the street. At Times Square she took the Subway for the Bowery. To change one's world, one need not travel far in New York; the ocean is not so wide as is the gap between the Tenderloin and the lower East Side. CHAPTER VIII SHE had thought of escape daily, hourly almost, for nearly five months. She had advanced not an inch toward it; but she never for an instant lost hope. She believed in her destiny, felt with all the strength of her health and vitality that she had not yet found her place in the world, that she would find it, and that it would be high. Now--she was compelled to escape, and this with only seventeen dollars and in the little time that would elapse before Palmer returned to consciousness and started in pursuit, bent upon cruel and complete revenge. She changed to an express train at the Grand Central Subway station, left the express on impulse at Fourteenth Street, took a local to Astor Place, there ascended to the street. She was far indeed from the Tenderloin, in a region not visited by the people she knew. As for Freddie, he never went below Fourteenth Street, hated the lower East Side, avoided anyone from that region of his early days, now shrouded in a mystery that would not be dispelled with his consent. Freddie would not think of searching for her there; and soon he would believe she was dead--drowned, and at the bottom of river or bay. As she stepped from the exit of the underground, she saw in the square before her, under the Sunset Cox statue, a Salvation Army corps holding a meeting. She heard a cry from the center of the crowd: "The wages of sin is death!" She drifted into the fringe of the crowd and glanced at the little group of exhorters and musicians. The woman who was preaching had taken the life of the streets as her text. Well fed and well clad and certain of a clean room to sleep in--certain of a good living, she was painting the moral horrors of the street life. "The wages of sin is death!" she shouted. She caught Susan's eye, saw the cynical-bitter smile round her lips. For Susan had the feeling that, unsuspected by the upper classes, animates the masses as to clergy and charity workers of all kinds--much the same feeling one would have toward the robber's messenger who came bringing from his master as a loving gift some worthless trifle from the stolen goods. Not from clergy, not from charity worker, not from the life of the poor as they take what is given them with hypocritical cringe and tear of thanks, will the upper classes get the truth as to what is thought of them by the masses in this day of awakening intelligence and slow heaving of crusts so long firm that they have come to be regarded as bed-rock of social foundation. Cried the woman, in response to Susan's satirical look: "You mock at that, my lovely young sister. Your lips are painted, and they sneer. But you know I'm right--yes, you show in your eyes that you know it in your aching heart! The wages of sin is _death!_ Isn't that so, sister?" Susan shook her head. "Speak the truth, sister! God is watching you. The wages of sin is _death!_" "The wages of weakness is death," retorted Susan. "But--the wages of sin--well, it's sometimes a house in Fifth Avenue." And then she shrank away before the approving laughter of the little crowd and hurried across into Eighth Street. In the deep shadow of the front of Cooper Union she paused, as the meaning of her own impulsive words came to her. The wages of sin! And what was sin, the supreme sin, but weakness? It was exactly as Burlingham had explained. He had said that, whether for good or for evil, really to live one must be strong. Strong! What a good teacher he had been--one of the rare kind that not only said things interestingly but also said them so that you never forgot. How badly she had learned! She strolled on through Eighth Street, across Third Avenue and into Second Avenue. It was ten o'clock. The effects of the liquor she had drunk had worn away. In so much wandering she had acquired the habit of closing up an episode of life as a traveler puts behind him the railway journey at its end. She was less than half an hour from her life in the Tenderloin; it was as completely in her past as it would ever be. The cards had once more been shuffled; a new deal was on. A new deal. What? To fly to another city--that meant another Palmer, or the miseries of the unprotected woman of the streets, or slavery to the madman of what the French with cruel irony call a _maison de joie_. To return to work---- What was open to her, educated as the comfortable classes educate their women? Work meant the tenements. She loathed the fast life, but not as she loathed vermin-infected tenements. To toil all day at a monotonous task, the same task every day and all day long! To sleep at night with Tucker and the vermin! To her notion the sights and sounds and smells and personal contacts of the tenements were no less vicious; were--for her at least--far more degrading than anything in the Tenderloin and its like. And there she got money to buy whiskey that whirled her almost endurably, sometimes even gayly, over the worst things--money to buy hours, whole days of respite that could be spent in books, in dreams and plannings, in the freedom of a clean and comfortable room, or at the theater or concert. There were degrees in horror; she was paying a hateful price, but not so hateful as she had paid when she worked. The wages of shame were not so hard earned as the wages of toil, were larger, brought her many of the things she craved. The wages of toil brought her nothing but the right to bare existence in filth and depravity and darkness. Also, she felt that if she were tied down to some dull and exhausting employment, she would be settled and done for. In a few years she would be an old woman, with less wages or flung out diseased or maimed--to live on and on like hundreds of wretched old creatures adrift everywhere in the tenement streets. No, work had nothing to offer her except "respectability." And what a mocking was "respectability," in rags and filth! Besides, what had _she_, the outcast born, to do with this respectability? No--not work--never again. So long as she was roving about, there was hope and chance somehow to break through into the triumphant class that ruled the world, that did the things worth while--wore the good clothes, lived in the good houses, ate the good food, basked in the sunshine of art. Either she would soar above respectability, or she would remain beneath it. Respectability might be an excellent thing; surely there must be some merit in a thing about which there was so much talk, after which there was so much hankering, and to which there was such desperate clinging. But as a sole possession, as a sole ambition, it seemed thin and poor and even pitiful. She had emancipated herself from its tyranny; she would not resume the yoke. Among so many lacks of the good things of life its good would not be missed. Perhaps, when she had got a few other of the good things she might try to add it to them--or might find herself able to get comfortably along without it, as had George Eliot and Aspasia, George Sand and Duse and Bernhardt and so many of the world's company of self-elected women members of the triumphant class. A new deal! And a new deal meant at least even chance for good luck. As she drifted down the west side of Second Avenue, her thoughts so absorbed her that she was oblivious of the slushy sidewalk, even of the crossings where one had to pick one's way as through a shallow creek with stepping stones here and there. There were many women alone, as in every other avenue and every frequented cross street throughout the city--women made eager to desperation by the long stretch of impossible weather. Every passing man was hailed, sometimes boldly, sometimes softly. Again and again that grotesque phrase "Let's go have a good time" fell upon the ears. After several blocks, when her absent-mindedness had got her legs wet to the knees in the shallow shiny slush, she was roused by the sound of music--an orchestra playing and playing well a lively Hungarian dance. She was standing before the winter garden from which the sounds came. As she opened the door she was greeted by a rush of warm air pleasantly scented with fresh tobacco smoke, the odors of spiced drinks and of food, pastry predominating. Some of the tables were covered ready for those who would wish to eat; but many of them were for the drinkers. The large, low-ceilinged room was comfortably filled. There were but a few women and they seemed to be wives or sweethearts. Susan was about to retreat when a waiter--one of those Austrians whose heads end abruptly an inch or so above the eyebrows and whose chins soon shade off into neck--advanced smilingly with a polite, "We serve ladies without escorts." She chose a table that had several other vacant tables round it. On the recommendation of the waiter she ordered a "burning devil"; he assured her she would find it delicious and the very thing for a cold slushy night. At the far end of the room on a low platform sat the orchestra. A man in an evening suit many sizes too large for him sang in a strong, not disagreeable tenor a German song that drew loud applause at the end of each stanza. The "burning devil" came--an almost black mixture in a large heavy glass. The waiter touched a match to it, and it was at once wreathed in pale flickering flames that hovered like butterflies, now rising as if to float away, now lightly descending to flit over the surface of the liquid or to dance along the edge of the glass. "What shall I do with it?" said Susan. "Wait till it goes out," said the waiter. "Then drink, as you would anything else." And he was off to attend to the wants of a group of card players a few feet away. Susan touched her finger to the glass, when the flame suddenly vanished. She found it was not too hot to drink, touched her lips to it. The taste, sweetish, suggestive of coffee and of brandy and of burnt sugar, was agreeable. She slowly sipped it, delighting in the sensation of warmth, of comfort, of well being that speedily diffused through her. The waiter came to receive her thanks for his advice. She said to him: "Do you have women sing, too?" "Oh, yes--when we can find a good-looker with a voice. Our customers know music." "I wonder if I could get a trial?" The waiter was interested at once. "Perhaps. You sing?" "I have sung on the stage." "I'll ask the boss." He went to the counter near the door where stood a short thick-set Jew of the East European snub-nosed type in earnest conversation with a seated blonde woman. She showed that skill at clinging to youth which among the lower middle and lower classes pretty clearly indicates at least some experience at the fast life. For only in the upper and upper middle class does a respectable woman venture thus to advertise so suspicious a guest within as a desire to be agreeable in the sight of men. Susan watched the waiter as he spoke to the proprietor, saw the proprietor's impatient shake of the head, sent out a wave of gratitude from her heart when her waiter friend persisted, compelled the proprietor to look toward her. She affected an air of unconsciousness; in fact, she was posing as if before a camera. Her heart leaped when out of the corner of her eye she saw the proprietor coming with the waiter. The two paused at her table, and the proprietor said in a sharp, impatient voice: "Well, lady--what is it?" "I want a trial as a singer." The proprietor was scanning her features and her figure which was well displayed by the tight-fitting jacket. The result seemed satisfactory, for in a voice oily with the softening influence of feminine charm upon male, he said: "You've had experience?" "Yes--a lot of it. But I haven't sung in about two years." "Sing German?" "Only ballads in English. But I can learn anything." "English'll do--_if_ you can _sing_. What costume do you wear?" And the proprietor seated himself and motioned the waiter away. "I have no costume. As I told you, I've not been singing lately." "We've got one that might fit--a short blue silk skirt--low neck and blue stockings. Slippers too, but they might be tight--I forget the number." "I did wear threes. But I've done a great deal of walking. I wear a five now." Susan thrust out a foot and ankle, for she knew that despite the overshoe they were good to look at. The proprietor nodded approvingly and there was the note of personal interest in his voice as he said: "They can try your voice tomorrow morning. Come at ten o'clock." "If you decide to try me, what pay will I get?" The proprietor smiled slyly. "Oh, we don't pay anything to the singers. That man who sang--he gets his board here. He works in a factory as a bookkeeper in the daytime. Lots of theatrical and musical people come here. If a man or a girl can do any stunt worth while, there's a chance." "I'd have to have something more than board," said Susan. The proprietor frowned down at his stubby fingers whose black and cracked nails were drumming on the table. "Well--I might give you a bed. There's a place I could put one in my daughter's room. She sings and dances over at Louis Blanc's garden in Third Avenue. Yes, I could put you there. But--no privileges, you understand." "Certainly. . . . I'll decide tomorrow. Maybe you'll not want me." "Oh, yes--if you can sing at all. Your looks'd please my customers." Seeing the dubious expression in Susan's face, he went on, "When I say 'no privilege' I mean only about the room. Of course, it's none of my business what you do outside. Lots of well fixed gents comes here. My girls have all had good luck. I've been open two years, and in that time one of my singers got an elegant delicatessen owner to keep her." "Really," said Susan, in the tone that was plainly expected of her. "Yes--an _elegant_ gentleman. I'd not be surprised if he married her. And another married an electrician that cops out forty a week. You'll find it a splendid chance to make nice friends--good spenders. And I'm a practical man." "I suppose there isn't any work I could do in the daytime?" "Not here." "Perhaps----" "Not nowhere, so far as I know. That is, work you'd care to do. The factories and stores is hard on a woman, and she don't get much. And besides they ain't very classy to my notion. Of course, if a woman ain't got looks or sense or any tone to her, if she's satisfied to live in a bum tenement and marry some dub that can't make nothing, why, that's different. But you look like a woman that had been used to something and wanted to get somewhere. I wouldn't have let _my_ daughter go into no such low, foolish life." She had intended to ask about a place to stop for the night. She now decided that the suggestion that she was homeless might possibly impair her chances. After some further conversation--the proprietor repeating what he had already said, and repeating it in about the same language--she paid the waiter fifteen cents for the drink and a tip of five cents out of the change she had in her purse, and departed. It had clouded over, and a misty, dismal rain was trickling through the saturated air to add to the messiness of the churn of cold slush. Susan went on down Second Avenue. On a corner near its lower end she saw a Raines Law hotel with awnings, indicating that it was not merely a blind to give a saloon a hotel license but was actually open for business. She went into the "family" entrance of the saloon, was alone in a small clean sitting-room with a sliding window between it and the bar. A tough but not unpleasant young face appeared at the window. It was the bartender. "Evening, cutie," said he. "What'll you have?" "Some rye whiskey," replied Susan. "May I smoke a cigarette here?" "Sure, go as far as you like. Ten-cent whiskey--or fifteen?" "Fifteen--unless it's out of the same bottle as the ten." "Call it ten--seeing as you are a lady. I've got a soft heart for you ladies. I've got a wife in the business, myself." When he came in at the door with the drink, a young man followed him--a good-looking, darkish youth, well dressed in a ready made suit of the best sort. At second glance Susan saw that he was at least partly of Jewish blood, enough to elevate his face above the rather dull type which predominates among clerks and merchants of the Christian races. He had small, shifty eyes, an attractive smile, a manner of assurance bordering on insolence. He dropped into a chair at Susan's table with a, "You don't mind having a drink on me." As Susan had no money to spare, she acquiesced. She said to the bartender, "I want to get a room here--a plain room. How much?" "Maybe this gent'll help you out," said the bartender with a grin and a wink. "He's got money to burn--and burns it." The bartender withdrew. The young man struck a match and held it for her to light the cigarette she took from her purse. Then he lit one himself. "Next time try one of mine," said he. "I get 'em of a fellow that makes for the swellest uptown houses. But I get 'em ten cents a package instead of forty. I haven't seen you down here before. What a good skin you've got! It's been a long time since I've seen a skin as fine as that, except on a baby now and then. And that shape of yours is all right, too. I suppose it's the real goods?" With that he leaned across the table and put his hand upon her bosom. She drew back indifferently. "You don't give anything for nothing--eh?" laughed he. "Been in the business long?" "It seems long." "It ain't what it used to be. The competition's getting to be something fierce. Looks as if all the respectable girls and most of the married women were coming out to look for a little extra money. Well--why not?" Susan shrugged her shoulders. "Why not?" echoed she carelessly. She did not look forward with pleasure to being alone. The man was clean and well dressed, and had an unusual amount of personal charm that softened his impertinence of manner. Evidently he has the habit of success with women. She much preferred him sitting with her to her own depressing society. So she accepted his invitation. She took one of his cigarettes, and it was as good as he had said. He rattled on, mingling frank coarse compliments with talk about "the business" from a standpoint so practical that she began to suspect he was somehow in it himself. He clearly belonged to those more intelligent children of the upper class tenement people, the children who are too bright and too well educated to become working men and working women like their parents; they refuse to do any kind of manual labor, as it could never in the most favorable circumstances pay well enough to give them the higher comforts they crave, the expensive comforts which every merchant is insistently and temptingly thrusting at a public for the most part too poor to buy; so these cleverer children of the working class develop into shyster lawyers, politicians, sports, prostitutes, unless chance throws into their way some respectable means of getting money. Vaguely she wondered--without caring to question or guess what particular form of activity this young man had taken in avoiding monotonous work at small pay. After her second drink came she found that she did not want it. She felt tired and sleepy and wished to get her wet stockings off and to dry her skirt which, for all her careful holding up, had not escaped the fate of whatever was exposed to that abominable night. "I'm going along with you," said the young man as she rose. "Here's to our better acquaintance." "Thanks, but I want to be alone," replied she affably. And, not to seem unappreciative of his courtesy, she took a small drink from her glass. It tasted very queer. She glanced suspiciously at the young man. Her legs grew suddenly and strangely heavy. Her heart began to beat violently, and a black fog seemed to be closing in upon her eyes. Through it she saw the youth grinning sardonically. And instantly she knew. "What a fool I am!" she thought. She had been trapped by another form of the slave system. This man was a recruiting sergeant for houses of prostitution--was one of the "cadets." They search the tenement districts for good-looking girls and young women. They hang about the street corners, flirting. They attend the balls where go the young people of the lower middle class and upper lower class. They learn to make love seductively; they understand how to tempt a girl's longing for finery, for an easier life, her dream of a husband above her class in looks and in earning power. And for each recruit "broken in" and hardened to the point of willingness to go into a sporting house, they get from the proprietor ten to twenty-five dollars according to her youth and beauty. Susan knew all about the system, had heard stories of it from the lips of girls who had been embarked through it--embarked a little sooner than they would have embarked under the lash of want, or of that other and almost equally compelling brute, desire for the comforts and luxuries that mean decent living. Susan knew; yet here she was, because of an unguarded moment, and because of a sense of security through experience--here she was, succumbing to knockout drops as easily as the most innocent child lured away from its mother's door to get a saucer of ice cream! She tried to rise, to scream, though she knew any such effort was futile. With a gasp and a sigh her head fell forward and she was unconscious. She awakened in a small, rather dingy room. She was lying on her back with only stockings on. Beyond the foot of the bed was a little bureau at which a man, back full to her, stood in trousers and shirt sleeves tying his necktie. She saw that he was a rough looking man, coarsely dressed--an artisan or small shop-keeper. Used as she was to the profound indifference of men of all classes and degrees of education and intelligence to what the woman thought--used as she was to this sensual selfishness which men at least in part conceal from their respectable wives, Susan felt a horror of this man who had not minded her unconsciousness. Her head was aching so fiercely that she had not the courage to move. Presently the man turned toward her a kindly, bearded face. But she was used to the man of general good character who with little shame and no hesitation became beast before her, the free woman. "Hello, pretty!" cried he, genially. "Slept off your jag, have you?" He was putting on his coat and waistcoat. He took from the waistcoat pocket a dollar bill. "You're a peach," said he. "I'll come again, next time my old lady goes off guard." He made the bill into a pellet, dropped it on her breast. "A little present for you. Put it in your stocking and don't let the madam grab it." With a groan Susan lifted herself to a sitting position, drew the spread about her--a gesture of instinct rather than of conscious modesty. "They drugged me and brought me here," said she. "I want you to help me get out." "Good Lord!" cried the man, instantly all a-quiver with nervousness. "I'm a married man. I don't want to get mixed up in this." And out of the room he bolted, closing the door behind him. Susan smiled at herself satirically. After all her experience, to make this silly appeal--she who knew men! "I must be getting feeble-minded," thought she. Then---- Her clothes! With a glance she swept the little room. No closet! Her own clothes gone! On the chair beside the bed a fast-house parlor dress of pink cotton silk, and a kind of abbreviated chemise. The stockings on her legs were not her own, but were of pink cotton, silk finished. A pair of pink satin slippers stood on the floor beside the two galvanized iron wash basins. The door opened and a burly man, dressed in cheap ready-made clothes but with an air of authority and prosperity, was smiling at her. "The madam told me to walk right in and make myself at home," said he. "Yes, you're up to her account of you. Only she said you were dead drunk and would probably be asleep. Now, honey, you treat me right and I'll treat you right." "Get out of here!" cried Susan. "I'm going to leave this house. They drugged me and brought me here." "Oh, come now. I've got nothing to do with your quarrels with the landlady. Cut those fairy tales out. You treat me right and----" A few minutes later in came the madam. Susan, exhausted, sick, lay inert in the middle of the bed. She fixed her gaze upon the eyes looking through the hideous mask of paint and powder partially concealing the madam's face. "Well, are you going to be a good girl now?" said the madam. "I want to sleep," said Susan. "All right, my dear." She saw and snatched the five-dollar bill from the pillow. "It'll go toward paying your board and for the parlor dress. God, but you was drunk when they brought you up from the bar!" "When was that?" asked Susan. "About midnight. It's nearly four now. We've shut the house for the night. You're in a first-rate house, my dear, and if you behave yourself, you'll make money--a lot more than you ever could at a dive like Zeist's. If you don't behave well, we'll teach you how. This building belongs to one of the big men in politics, and he looks after my interests--and he ought to, considering the rent I pay--five hundred a month--for the three upper floors. The bar's let separate. Would you like a nice drink?" "No," said Susan. Trapped! Hopelessly trapped! And she would never escape until, diseased, her looks gone, ruined in body and soul, she was cast out into the hospital and the gutter. "As I was saying," ventured the madam, "you might as well settle down quietly." "I'm very well satisfied," said Susan. "I suppose you'll give me a square deal on what I make." She laughed quietly as if secretly amused at something. "In fact, I know you will," she added in a tone of amused confidence. "As soon as you've paid up your twenty-five a week for room and board and the fifty for the parlor dress----" Susan interrupted her with a laugh. "Oh, come off," said she. "I'll not stand for that. I'll go back to Jim Finnegan." The old woman's eyes pounced for her face instantly. "Do you know Finnegan?" "I'm his girl," said Susan carelessly. She stretched herself and yawned. "I got mad at him and started out for some fun. He's a regular damn fool about me. But I'm sick of him. Anything but a jealous man! And spied on everywhere I go. How much can I make here?" "Ain't you from Zeist's?" demanded the madam. Her voice was quivering with fright. She did not dare believe the girl; she did not dare disbelieve her. "Zeist's? What's that?" said Susan indifferently. "The joint two blocks down. Hasn't Joe Bishop had you in there for a couple of months?" Susan yawned. "Lord, how my head does ache! Who's Joe Bishop? I'm dead to the world. I must have had an awful jag!" She turned on her side, drew the spread over her. "I want to sleep. So long!" "Didn't you run away from home with Joe Bishop?" demanded the madam shrilly. "And didn't he put you to work for Zeist?" "Who's Joe Bishop? Where's Zeist's?" Susan said, cross and yawning. "I've been with Jim about a year. He took me off the street. I was broke in five years ago." The madam gave a kind of howl. "And that Joe Bishop got twenty-five off me!" she screamed. "And you're Finnegan's girl, and he'll make trouble for me." "He's got a nasty streak in him," said Susan, drowsily. "He put me on the Island once for a little side trip I made." She laughed, yawned. "But he sent and got me out in two days--and gave me a present of a hundred. It's funny how a man'll make a fool of himself about a woman. Put out the light." "No, I won't put out the light," shrieked the madam. "You can't work here. I'm going to telephone Jim Finnegan to come and get you." Susan started up angrily, as if she were half-crazed by drink. "If you do, you old hag," she cried, "I'll tell him you doped me and set these men on me. I'll tell him about Joe Bishop. And Jim'll send the whole bunch of you to the pen. I'll not go back to him till I get good and ready. And that means, I won't go back at all, no matter what he offers me." She began to cry in a maudlin way. "I hate him. I'm tired of living as if I was back in the convent." The madam stood, heaving to and fro and blowing like a chained elephant. "I don't know what to do," she whined. "I wish Joe Bishop was in hell." "I'm going to get out of here," shrieked Susan, raving and blazing again and waving her arms. "You don't know a good thing when you get it. What kind of a bum joint is this, anyway? Where's my clothes? They must be dry by this time." "Yes--yes--they're dry, my dear," whined the madam. "I'll bring 'em to you." And out she waddled, returning in a moment with her arms full of the clothing. She found Susan in the bed and nestling comfortably into the pillows. "Here are your clothes," she cried. "No--I want to sleep," was Susan's answer in a cross, drowsy tone. "I think I'll stay. You won't telephone Jim. But when he finds me, I'll tell him to go to the devil." "For God's sake!" wailed the madam. "I can't let you work here. You don't want to ruin me, do you?" Susan sat up, rubbed her eyes, yawned, brushed her hair back, put a sly, smiling look into her face. "How much'll you give me to go?" she asked. "Where's the fifteen that was in my stocking?" "I've got it for you," said the madam. "How much did I make tonight?" "There was three at five apiece." Three!--not only the two, but a third while she lay in a dead stupor. Susan shivered. "Your share's four dollars," continued the madam. "Is that all!" cried Susan, jeering. "A bum joint! Oh, there's my five the man gave me as a present." "Yes--yes," quavered the madam. "And another man gave me a dollar." She looked round. "Where the devil is it?" She found it in a fold of the spread. "Then you owe me twenty altogether, counting the money I had on me." She yawned. "I don't want to go!" she protested, pausing halfway in taking off the second pink stocking. Then she laughed. "Lord, what hell Jim will raise if he finds I spent the night working in this house. Why is it that, as soon as men begin to care for a woman, they get prim about her?" "Do get dressed, dear," wheedled the madam. "I don't see why I should go at this time of night," objected Susan pettishly. "What'll you give me if I go?" The madam uttered a groan. "You say you paid Joe Bishop twenty-five----" "I'll kill him!" shrieked the madam. "He's ruined me--ruined me!" "Oh, he's all right," said Susan cheerfully. "I like him. He's a pretty little fellow. I'll not give him away to Jim." "Joe was dead stuck on you," cried the madam eagerly. "I might 'a' knowed he hadn't seen you before. I had to pay him the twenty-five right away, to get him out of the house and let me put you to work. He wanted to stay on." Susan shivered, laughed to hide it. "Well, I'll go for twenty-five." "Twenty-five!" shrieked the madam. "You'll get it back from Joe." "Maybe I won't. He's a dog--a dirty dog." "I think I told Joe about Jim," said Susan reflectively. "I was awful gabby downstairs. Yes--I told him." And her lowered eyes gleamed with satisfaction when the madam cried out: "You did! And after that he brought you here! He's got it in for me. But I'll ruin him! I'll tear him up!" Susan dressed with the utmost deliberation, the madam urging her to make haste. After some argument, Susan yielded to the madam's pleadings and contented herself with the twenty dollars. The madam herself escorted Susan down to the outside door and slathered her with sweetness and politeness. The rain had stopped again. Susan went up Second Avenue slowly. Two blocks from the dive from which she had escaped, she sank down on a stoop and fainted. CHAPTER IX THE dash of cold rain drops upon her face and the chill of moisture soaking through her clothing revived her. Throughout the whole range of life, whenever we resist we suffer. As Susan dragged her aching, cold wet body up from that stoop, it seemed to her that each time she resisted the penalty grew heavier. Could she have been more wretched had she remained in that dive? From her first rebellion that drove her out of her uncle's house had she ever bettered herself by resisting? She had gone from bad to worse, from worse to worst. Worst? "This _must_ be the worst!" she thought. "Surely there can be no lower depth than where I am now." And then she shuddered and her soul reeled. Had she not thought this at each shelf of the precipice down which she had been falling? "Has it a bottom? Is there no bottom?" Wet through, tired through, she put up her umbrella and forced herself feebly along. "Where am I going? Why do I not kill myself? What is it that drives me on and on?" There came no direct answer to that last question. But up from those deep vast reservoirs of vitality that seemed sufficient whatever the drain upon them--up from those reservoirs welled strength and that unfaltering will to live which breathes upon the corpse of hope and quickens it. And she had a sense of an invisible being, a power that had her in charge, a destiny, walking beside her, holding up her drooping strength, compelling her toward some goal hidden in the fog and the storm. At Eighth Street she turned west; at Third Avenue she paused, waiting for chance to direct her. Was it not like the maliciousness of fate that in the city whose rarely interrupted reign of joyous sunshine made her call it the city of the Sun her critical turn of chance should have fallen in foul weather? Evidently fate was resolved on a thorough test of her endurance. In the open square, near the Peter Cooper statue, stood a huge all-night lunch wagon. She moved toward it, for she suddenly felt hungry. It was drawn to the curb; a short flight of ladder steps led to an interior attractive to sight and smell. She halted at the foot of the steps and looked in. The only occupant was the man in charge. In a white coat he was leaning upon the counter, reading a newspaper which lay flat upon it. His bent head was extensively and roughly thatched with black hair so thick that to draw a comb through it would have been all but impossible. As Susan let down her umbrella and began to ascend, he lifted his head and gave her a full view of a humorous young face, bushy of eyebrows and mustache and darkly stained by his beard, close shaven though it was. He looked like a Spaniard or an Italian, but he was a black Irishman, one of the West coasters who recall in their eyes and coloring the wrecking of the Armada. "Good morning, lady," said he. "Breakfast or supper?" "Both," replied Susan. "I'm starved." The air was gratefully warm in the little restaurant on wheels. The dominant odor was of hot coffee; but that aroma was carried to a still higher delight by a suggestion of pastry. "The best thing I've got," said the restaurant man, "is hot corn beef hash. It's so good I hate to let any of it go. You can have griddle cakes, too--and coffee, of course." "Very well," said Susan. She was ascending upon a wave of reaction from the events of the night. Her headache had gone. The rain beating upon the roof seemed musical to her now, in this warm shelter with its certainty of the food she craved. The young man was busy at the shiny, compact stove; the odors of the good things she was presently to have grew stronger and stronger, stimulating her hunger, bringing joy to her heart and a smile to her eyes. She wondered at herself. After what she had passed through, how could she feel thus happy--yes, positively happy? It seemed to her this was an indication of a lack in her somewhere--of seriousness, of sensibility, of she knew not what. She ought to be ashamed of that lack. But she was not ashamed. She was shedding her troubles like a child--or like a philosopher. "Do you like hash?" inquired the restaurant man over his shoulder. "Just as you're making it," said she. "Dry but not too dry. Brown but not too brown." "You don't think you'd like a poached egg on top of it?" "Exactly what I want!" "It isn't everybody that can poach an egg," said the restaurant man. "And it isn't every egg that can be poached. Now, my eggs are the real thing. And I can poach 'em so you'd think they was done with one of them poaching machines. I don't have 'em with the yellow on a slab of white. I do it so that the white's all round the yellow, like in the shell. And I keep 'em tender, too. Did you say one egg or a pair?" "Two," said Susan. The dishes were thick, but clean and whole. The hash--"dry but not too dry, brown but not too brown"--was artistically arranged on its platter, and the two eggs that adorned its top were precisely as he had promised. The coffee, boiled with the milk, was real coffee, too. When the restaurant man had set these things before her, as she sat expectant on a stool, he viewed his handiwork with admiring eyes. "Delmonico couldn't beat it," said he. "No, nor Oscar, neither. That'll take the tired look out of your face, lady, and bring the beauty back." Susan ate slowly, listening to the music of the beating rain. It was like an oasis, a restful halt between two stretches of desert journey; she wished to make it as long as possible. Only those who live exposed to life's buffetings ever learn to enjoy to the full the great little pleasures of life--the halcyon pauses in the storms--the few bright rays through the break in the clouds, the joy of food after hunger, of a bath after days of privation, of a jest or a smiling face or a kind word or deed after darkness and bitterness and contempt. She saw the restaurant man's eyes on her, a curious expression in them. "What's the matter?" she inquired. "I was thinking," said he, "how miserable you must have been to be so happy now." "Oh, I guess none of us has any too easy a time," said she. "But it's mighty hard on women. I used to think different, before I had bad luck and got down to tending this lunch wagon. But now I understand about a lot of things. It's all very well for comfortable people to talk about what a man or a woman ought to do and oughtn't to do. But let 'em be slammed up against it. They'd sing a different song--wouldn't they?" "Quite different," said Susan. The man waved a griddle spoon. "I tell you, we do what we've got to do. Yes--the thieves and--and--all of us. Some's used for foundations and some for roofing and some for inside fancy work and some for outside wall. And some's used for the rubbish heap. But all's used. They do what they've got to do. I was a great hand at worrying what I was going to be used for. But I don't bother about it any more." He began to pour the griddle cake dough. "I think I'll get there, though," said he doggedly, as if he expected to be derided for vanity. "You will," said Susan. "I'm twenty-nine. But I've been being got ready for something. They don't chip away at a stone as they have at me without intending to make some use of it." "No, indeed," said the girl, hope and faith welling up in her own heart. "And what's more, I've stood the chipping. I ain't become rubbish; I'm still a good stone. That's promising, ain't it?" "It's a sure sign," declared Susan. Sure for herself, no less than for him. The restaurant man took from under the counter several well-worn schoolbooks. He held them up, looked at Susan and winked. "Good business--eh?" She laughed and nodded. He put the books back under the counter, finished the cakes and served them. As he gave her more butter he said: "It ain't the best butter--not by a long shot. But it's good--as good as you get on the average farm--or better. Did you ever eat the best butter?" "I don't know. I've had some that was very good." "Eighty cents a pound?" "Mercy, no," exclaimed Susan. "Awful price, isn't it? But worth the money--yes, sir! Some time when you've got a little change to spare, go get half a pound at one of the swell groceries or dairies. And the best milk, too. Twelve cents a quart. Wait till I get money. I'll show 'em how to live. I was born in a tenement. Never had nothing. Rags to wear, and food one notch above a garbage barrel." "I know," said Susan. "But even as a boy I wanted the high-class things. It's wanting the best that makes a man push his way up." Another customer came--a keeper of a butcher shop, on his way to market. Susan finished the cakes, paid the forty cents and prepared to depart. "I'm looking for a hotel," said she to the restaurant man, "one where they'll take me in at this time, but one that's safe not a dive." "Right across the square there's a Salvation Army shelter--very good--clean. I Don't know of any other place for a lady." "There's a hotel on the next corner," put in the butcher, suspending the violent smacking and sipping which attended his taking rolls and coffee. "It ain't neither the one thing nor the other. It's clean and cheap, and they'll let you behave if you want to." "That's all I ask," said the girl. "Thank you." And she departed, after an exchange of friendly glances with the restaurant man. "I feel lots better," said she. "It was a good breakfast," replied he. "That was only part. Good luck!" "Same to you, lady. Call again. Try my chops." At the corner the butcher had indicated Susan found the usual Raines Law hotel, adjunct to a saloon and open to all comers, however "transient." But she took the butcher's word for it, engaged a dollar-and-a-half room from the half-asleep clerk, was shown to it by a colored bellboy who did not bother to wake up. It was a nice little room with barely space enough for a bed, a bureau, a stationary washstand, a chair and a small radiator. As she undressed by the light of a sad gray dawn, she examined her dress to see how far it needed repair and how far it might be repaired. She had worn away from Forty-third Street her cheapest dress because it happened to be of an inconspicuous blue. It was one of those suits that look fairly well at a glance on the wax figure in the department store window, that lose their bloom as quickly as a country bride, and at the fourth or fifth wearing begin to make frank and sweeping confession of the cheapness of every bit of the material and labor that went into them. These suits are typical of all that poverty compels upon the poor, all that they in their ignorance and inexperience of values accept without complaint, fancying they are getting money's worth and never dreaming they are more extravagant than the most prodigal of the rich. However, as their poverty gives them no choice, their ignorance saves them from futilities of angry discontent. Susan had bought this dress because she had to have another dress and could not afford to spend more than twelve dollars, and it had been marked down from twenty-five. She had worn it in fair weather and had contrived to keep it looking pretty well. But this rain had finished it quite. Thereafter, until she could get another dress, she must expect to be classed as poor and seedy--therefore, on the way toward deeper poverty--therefore, an object of pity and of prey. If she went into a shop, she would be treated insultingly by the shopgirls, despising her as a poor creature like themselves. If a man approached her, he would calculate upon getting her very cheap because a girl in such a costume could not have been in the habit of receiving any great sum. And if she went with him, he would treat her with far less consideration than if she had been about the same business in smarter attire. She spread the dress on bureau and chair, smoothing it, wiping the mud stains from it. She washed out her stockings at the stationary stand, got them as dry as her remarkably strong hands could wring them, hung them on a rung of the chair near the hot little radiator. She cleaned her boots and overshoes with an old newspaper she found in a drawer, and wet at the washstand. She took her hat to pieces and made it over into something that looked almost fresh enough to be new. Then, ready for bed, she got the office of the hotel on the telephone and left a call for half-past nine o'clock--three hours and a half away. When she was throwing up the window, she glanced into the street. The rain had once more ceased. Through the gray dimness the men and women, boys and girls, on the way to the factories and shops for the day's work, were streaming past in funereal procession. Some of the young ones were lively. But the mass was sullen and dreary. Bodies wrecked or rapidly wrecking by ignorance of hygiene, by the foul air and foul food of the tenements, by the monotonous toil of factory and shop--mindless toil--toil that took away mind and put in its place a distaste for all improvement--toil of the factories that distorted the body and enveloped the soul in sodden stupidity--toil of the shops that meant breathing bad air all day long, meant stooped shoulders and varicose veins in the legs and the arches of the insteps broken down, meant dull eyes, bad skin, female complaints, meant the breeding of desires for the luxury the shops display, the breeding of envy and servility toward those able to buy these luxuries. Susan lingered, fascinated by this exhibit of the price to the many of civilization for the few. Work? Never! Not any more than she would. "Work" in a dive! Work--either branch of it, factory and shop or dive meant the sale of all the body and all the soul; her profession--at least as she practiced it--meant that perhaps she could buy with part of body and part of soul the privilege of keeping the rest of both for her own self. If she had stayed on at work from the beginning in Cincinnati, where would she be now? Living in some stinking tenement hole, with hope dead. And how would she be looking? As dull of eye as the rest, as pasty and mottled of skin, as ready for any chance disease. Work? Never! Never! "Not at anything that'd degrade me more than this life. Yes--more." And she lifted her head defiantly. To her hunger Life was thus far offering only a plate of rotten apples; it was difficult to choose among them--but there was choice. She was awakened by the telephone bell; and it kept on ringing until she got up and spoke to the office through the sender. Never had she so craved sleep; and her mental and physical contentment of three hours and a half before had been succeeded by headache, a general soreness, a horrible attack of the blues. She grew somewhat better, however, as she washed first in hot water, then in cold at the stationary stand which was quite as efficient if not so luxurious as a bathtub. She dressed in a rush, but not so hurriedly that she failed to make the best toilet the circumstances permitted. Her hair went up unusually well; the dress did not look so badly as she had feared it would. "As it's a nasty day," she reflected, "it won't do me so much damage. My hat and my boots will make them give me the benefit of the doubt and think I'm saving my good clothes." She passed through the office at five minutes to ten. When she reached Lange's winter garden, its clock said ten minutes past ten, but she knew it must be fast. Only one of the four musicians had arrived--the man who played the drums, cymbals, triangle and xylophone--a fat, discouraged old man who knew how easily he could be replaced. Neither Lange nor his wife had come; her original friend, the Austrian waiter, was wiping off tables and cleaning match stands. He welcomed her with a smile of delight that showed how few teeth remained in the front of his mouth and how deeply yellow they were. But Susan saw only his eyes--and the kind heart that looked through them. "Maybe you haven't had breakfast already?" he suggested. "I'm not hungry, thank you." "Perhaps some coffee--yes?" Susan thought the coffee would make her feel better. So he brought it--Vienna fashion--an open china pot full of strong, deliciously aromatic black coffee, a jug of milk with whipped white of egg on top, a basket of small sweet rolls powdered with sugar and caraway seed. She ate one of the rolls, drank the coffee. Before she had finished, the waiter stood beaming before her and said: "A cigarette--yes?" "Oh, no," replied Susan, a little sadly. "But yes," urged he. "It isn't against the rules. The boss's wife smokes. Many ladies who come here do--real ladies. It is the custom in Europe. Why not?" And he produced a box of cigarettes and put it on the table. Susan lit one of them and once more with supreme physical content came a cheerfulness that put color and sprightliness into the flowers of hope. And the sun had won its battle with the storm; the storm was in retreat. Sunshine was streaming in at the windows, into her heart. The waiter paused in his work now and then to enjoy himself in contemplating the charming picture she made. She was thinking of what the wagon restaurant man had said. Yes, Life had been chipping away at her; but she had remained good stone, had not become rubbish. About half-past ten Lange came down from his flat which was overhead. He inspected her by daylight and finding that his electric light impressions were not delusion was highly pleased with her. He refused to allow her to pay for the coffee. "Johann!" he called, and the leader of the orchestra approached and made a respectful bow to his employer. He had a solemn pompous air and the usual pompadour. He and Susan plunged into the music question, found that the only song they both knew was Tosti's "Good Bye." "That'll do to try," said Lange. "Begin!" And after a little tuning and voice testing, Susan sang the "Good Bye" with full orchestra accompaniment. It was not good; it was not even pretty good; but it was not bad. "You'll do all right," said Lange. "You can stay. Now, you and Johann fix up some songs and get ready for tonight." And he turned away to buy supplies for restaurant and bar. Johann, deeply sentimental by nature, was much pleased with Susan's contralto. "You do not know how to sing," said he. "You sing in your throat and you've got all the faults of parlor singers. But the voice is there--and much expressiveness--much temperament. Also, you have intelligence--and that will make a very little voice go a great way." Before proceeding any further with the rehearsal, he took Susan up to a shop where sheet music was sold and they selected three simple songs: "Gipsy Queen," "Star of My Life" and "Love in Dreams." They were to try "Gipsy Queen" that night, with "Good Bye" and, if the applause should compel, "Suwanee River." When they were back at the restaurant Susan seated herself in a quiet corner and proceeded to learn the words of the song and to get some notion of the tune. She had lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Lange and Katy, whose hair was very golden indeed and whose voice and manner proclaimed the Bowery and its vaudeville stage. She began by being grand with Susan, but had far too good a heart and far too sensible a nature to keep up long. It takes more vanity, more solemn stupidity and more leisure than plain people have time for, to maintain the force of fake dignity. Before lunch was over it was Katy and Lorna; and Katy was distressed that her duties at the theater made it impossible for her to stay and help Lorna with the song. At the afternoon rehearsal Susan distinguished herself. To permit business in the restaurant and the rehearsal at the same time, there was a curtain to divide the big room into two unequal parts. When Susan sang her song through for the first time complete, the men smoking and drinking on the other side of the curtain burst into applause. Johann shook hands with Susan, shook hands again, kissed her hand, patted her shoulder. But in the evening things did not go so well. Susan, badly frightened, got away from the orchestra, lagged when it speeded to catch up with her. She made a pretty and engaging figure in the costume, low in the neck and ending at the knees. Her face and shoulders, her arms and legs, the lines of her slender, rounded body made a success. But they barely saved her from being laughed at. When she finished, there was no applause so no necessity for an encore. She ran upstairs, and, with nerves all a-quiver, hid herself in the little room she and Katy were to share. Until she failed she did not realize how much she had staked upon this venture. But now she knew; and it seemed to her that her only future was the streets. Again her chance had come; again she had thrown it away. If there were anything in her--anything but mere vain hopes--that could not have occurred. In her plight anyone with a spark of the divinity that achieves success would have scored. "I belong in the streets," said she. Before dinner she had gone out and had bought a ninety-five cent night-dress and some toilet articles. These she now bundled together again. She changed to her street dress; she stole down the stairs. She was out at the side door, she was flying through the side street toward the Bowery. "Hi!" shouted someone behind her. "Where you going?" And overtaking her came her staunch friend Albert, the waiter. Feeling that she must need sympathy and encouragement, he had slipped away from his duties to go up to her. He had reached the hall in time to see what she was about and had darted bareheaded after her. "Where you going?" he repeated, excitedly. A crowd began to gather. "Oh, good-by," she cried. "I'm getting out before I'm told to go--that's all. I made a failure. Thank you, Albert." She put out her hand; she was still moving and looking in the direction of the Bowery. "Now you mustn't be foolish,", said he, holding on tightly to her hand. "The boss says it's all right. Tomorrow you do better." "I'd never dare try again." "Tomorrow makes everything all right. You mustn't act like a baby. The first time Katy tried, they yelled her off the stage. Now she gets eleven a week. Come back right away with me. The boss'd be mad if you won't. You ain't acting right, Miss Lorna. I didn't think you was such a fool." He had her attention now. Unmindful of the little crowd they had gathered, they stood there discussing until to save Albert from pneumonia she returned with him. He saw her started up the stairs, then ventured to take his eye off her long enough to put his head into the winter garden and send a waiter for Lange. He stood guard until Lange came and was on his way to her. The next evening, a Saturday, before a crowded house she sang well, as well as she had ever sung in her life--sang well enough to give her beauty of face and figure, her sweetness, her charm the opportunity to win a success. She had to come back and sing "Suwanee River." She had to come for a second encore; and, flushed with her victory over her timidity, she sang Tosti's sad cry of everlasting farewell with all the tenderness there was in her. That song exactly fitted her passionate, melancholy voice; its words harmonized with the deep sadness that was her real self, that is the real self of every sensitive soul this world has ever tried with its exquisite torments for flesh and spirit. The tears that cannot be shed were in her voice, in her face, as she stood there, with her violet-gray eyes straining into vacancy. But the men and the women shed tears; and when she moved, breaking the spell of silence, they not only applauded, they cheered. The news quickly spread that at Lange's there was a girl singer worth hearing and still more worth looking at. And Lange had his opportunity to arrive. But several things stood in his way, things a man of far more intelligence would have found it hard to overcome. Like nearly all saloon-keepers, he was serf to a brewery; and the particular brewery whose beer his mortgage compelled him to push did not make a beer that could be pushed. People complained that it had a disagreeably bitter aftertaste. In the second place, Mrs. Lange was a born sitter. She had married to rest--and she was resting. She was always piled upon a chair. Thus, she was not an aid but a hindrance, an encourager of the help in laziness and slovenliness. Again, the cooking was distinctly bad; the only really good thing the house served was coffee, and that was good only in the mornings. Finally, Lange was a saver by nature and not a spreader. He could hold tightly to any money he closed his stubby fingers upon; he did not know how to plant money and make it grow, but only how to hoard. Thus it came to pass that, after the first spurt, the business fell back to about where it had been before Susan came. Albert, the Austrian waiter, explained to Susan why it was that her popularity did the house apparently so little good--explained with truth where she suspected kind-hearted plotting, that she had arrested its latterly swift-downward slide. She was glad to hear what he had to say, as it was most pleasant to her vanity; but she could not get over the depression of the central fact--she was not making the sort of business to justify asking Lange for more than board and lodging; she was not in the way of making the money that was each day more necessary, as her little store dwindled. The question of getting money to live on is usually dismissed in a princely way by writers about human life. It is in reality, except with the few rich, the ever-present question--as ever-present as the necessity of breathing--and it is not, like breathing, a matter settled automatically. It dominates thought; it determines action. To leave it out of account ever, in writing a human history, is to misrepresent and distort as utterly as would a portrait painter who neglected to give his subject eyes, or a head, even. With the overwhelming mass of us, money is at all times all our lives long the paramount question--for to be without it is destruction worse than death, and we are almost all perilously near to being without it. Thus, airily to pass judgment upon men and women as to their doings in getting money for necessaries, for what the compulsion of custom and habit has made necessaries to them--airily to judge them for their doings in such dire straits is like sitting calmly on shore and criticizing the conduct of passengers and sailors in a storm-beset sinking ship. It is one of the favorite pastimes of the comfortable classes; it makes an excellent impression as to one's virtue upon one's audience; it gives us a pleasing sense of superior delicacy and humor. But it is none the less mean and ridiculous. Instead of condemnation, the world needs to bestir itself to remove the stupid and cruel creatures that make evil conduct necessary; for can anyone, not a prig, say that the small part of the human race that does well does so because it is naturally better than the large part that does ill? Spring was slow in opening. Susan's one dress was in a deplorable state. The lining hung in rags. The never good material was stretched out of shape, was frayed and worn gray in spots, was beyond being made up as presentable by the most careful pressing and cleaning. She had been forced to buy a hat, shoes, underclothes. She had only three dollars and a few cents left, and she simply did not dare lay it all out in dress materials. Yet, less than all would not be enough; all would not be enough. Lange had from time to time more than hinted at the opportunities she was having as a public singer in his hall. But Susan, for all her experience, had remained one of those upon whom such opportunities must be thrust if they are to be accepted. So long as she had food and shelter, she could not make advances; she could not even go so far as passive acquiescence. She knew she was again violating the fundamental canon of success; whatever one's business, do it thoroughly if at all. But she could not overcome her temperament which had at this feeble and false opportunity at once resented itself. She knew perfectly that therein was the whole cause of her failure to make the success she ought to have made when she came up from the tenements, and again when she fell into the clutches of Freddie Palmer. But it is one thing to know; it is another thing to do. Susan ignored the attempts of the men; she pretended not to understand Lange when they set him on to intercede with her for them. She saw that she was once more drifting to disaster--and that she had not long to drift. She was exasperated against herself; she was disgusted with herself. But she drifted on. Growing seedier looking every day, she waited, defying the plain teachings of experience. She even thought seriously of going to work. But the situation in that direction remained unchanged. She was seeing things, the reasons for things, more clearly now, as experience developed her mind. She felt that to get on in respectability she ought to have been either more or less educated. If she had been used from birth to conditions but a step removed from savagery, she might have been content with what offered, might even have felt that she was rising. Or if she had been bred to a good trade, and educated only to the point where her small earnings could have satisfied her desires, then she might have got along in respectability. But she had been bred a "lady"; a Chinese woman whose feet have been bound from babyhood until her fifteenth or sixteenth year--how long it would be, after her feet were freed, before she could learn to walk at all!--and would she ever be able to learn to walk well? What is luxury for one is squalor for another; what is elevation for one degrades another. In respectability she could not earn what was barest necessity for her--what she was now getting at Lange's--decent shelter, passable food. Ejected from her own class that shelters its women and brings them up in unfitness for the unsheltered life, she was dropping as all such women must and do drop--was going down, down, down--striking on this ledge and that, and rebounding to resume her ever downward course. She saw her own plight only too vividly. Those whose outward and inward lives are wide apart get a strong sense of dual personality. It was thus with Susan. There were times when she could not believe in the reality of her external life. She often glanced through the columns on columns, pages on pages of "want ads" in the papers--not with the idea of answering them, for she had served her apprenticeship at that, but simply to force herself to realize vividly just how matters stood with her. Those columns and pages of closely printed offerings of work! Dreary tasks, all of them--tasks devoid of interest, of personal sense of usefulness, tasks simply to keep degrading soul in degenerating body, tasks performed in filthy factories, in foul-smelling workrooms and shops, in unhealthful surroundings. And this, throughout civilization, was the "honest work" so praised--by all who don't do it, but live pleasantly by making others do it. Wasn't there something in the ideas of Etta's father, old Tom Brashear? Couldn't sensible, really loving people devise some way of making most tasks less repulsive, of lessening the burdens of those tasks that couldn't be anything but repulsive? Was this stupid system, so cruel, so crushing, and producing at the top such absurd results as flashy, insolent autos and silly palaces and overfed, overdressed women, and dogs in jeweled collars, and babies of wealth brought up by low menials--was this system really the best? "If they'd stop canting about 'honest work' they might begin to get somewhere." In the effort to prevent her downward drop from beginning again she searched all the occupations open to her. She could not find one that would not have meant only the most visionary prospect of some slight remote advancement, and the certain and speedy destruction of what she now realized was her chief asset and hope--her personal appearance. And she resolved that she would not even endanger it ever again. The largest part of the little capital she took away from Forty-third Street had gone to a dentist who put in several fillings of her back teeth. She had learned to value every charm--hair, teeth, eyes, skin, figure, hands. She watched over them all, because she felt that when her day finally came--and come it would, she never allowed long to doubt--she must be ready to enter fully into her own. Her day! The day when fate should change the life her outward self would be compelled to live, would bring it into harmony with the life of inward self--the self she could control. Katy had struck up a friendship at once profitable and sentimental with her stage manager. She often stayed out all night. On one of these nights Susan, alone in the tiny room and asleep, was roused by feeling hands upon her. She started up half awake and screamed. "Sh!" came in Lange's voice. "It's me." Susan had latterly observed sly attempts on his part to make advances without his wife and daughter's suspecting; but she had thought her way of quietly ignoring was effective. "You must go," she whispered. "Mrs. Lange must have heard." "I had to come," said he hoarsely, a mere voice in the darkness. "I can't hold out no longer without you, Lorna." "Go--go," urged Susan. But it was too late. In the doorway, candle in hand, appeared Mrs. Lange. Despite her efforts at "dressiness" she was in her best hour homely and nearly shapeless. In night dress and released from corsets she was hideous and monstrous. "I thought so!" she shrieked. "I thought so!" "I heard a burglar, mother," whined Lange, an abject and guilty figure. "Shut your mouth, you loafer!" shrieked Mrs. Lange. And she turned to Susan. "You gutter hussy, get on your clothes and clear out!" "But--Mrs. Lange----" began Susan. "Clear out!" she shouted, opening the outer hall. "Dress mighty damn quick and clear out!" "Mother, you'll wake the people upstairs," pleaded Lange--and Susan had never before realized how afraid of his wife the little man was. "For God's sake, listen to sense." "After I've thrown you--into the streets," cried his wife, beside herself with jealous fury. "Get dressed, I tell you!" she shouted at Susan. And the girl hurried into her clothes, making no further attempt to speak. She knew that to plead and to explain would be useless; even if Mrs. Lange believed, still she would drive from the house the temptation to her husband. Lange, in a quaking, cowardly whine, begged his wife to be sensible and believe his burglar story. But with each half-dozen words he uttered, she interrupted to hurl obscene epithets at him or at Susan. The tenants of the upstairs flats came down. She told her wrongs to a dozen half-clad men, women and children; they took her side at once, and with the women leading showered vile insults upon Susan. The uproar was rising, rising. Lange cowered in a corner, crying bitterly like a whipped child. Susan, only partly dressed, caught up her hat and rushed into the hall. Several women struck at her as she passed. She stumbled on the stairs, almost fell headlong. With the most frightful words in tenement house vocabulary pursuing her she fled into the street, and did not pause until she was within a few yards of the Bowery. There she sat down on a doorstep and, half-crazed by the horror of her sudden downfall, laced her shoes and buttoned her blouse and put on her hat with fumbling, shaking fingers. It had all happened so quickly that she would have thought she was dreaming but for the cold night air and the dingy waste of the Bowery with the streetwalkers and drunken bums strolling along under the elevated tracks. She had trifled with the opportunity too long. It had flown in disgust, dislodging her as it took flight. If she would be over nice and critical, would hesitate to take the only upward path fate saw fit to offer, then--let her seek the bottom! Susan peered down, and shuddered. She went into the saloon at the corner, into the little back room. She poured down drink after drink of the frightful poison sold as whiskey with the permission of a government owned by every interest that can make big money out of a race of free men and so can afford to pay big bribes. It is characteristic of this poison of the saloon of the tenement quarter that it produces in anyone who drinks it a species of quick insanity, of immediate degeneration--a desire to commit crime, to do degraded acts. Within an hour of Susan's being thrown into the streets, no one would have recognized her. She had been drinking, had been treating the two faded but young and decently dressed streetwalkers who sat at another table. The three, fired and maddened by the poison, were amusing themselves and two young men as recklessly intoxicated as they. Susan, in an attitude she had seen often enough but had never dreamed of taking, was laughing wildly at a coarse song, was standing up, skirts caught high and body swaying in drunken rhythm as she led the chorus. When the barkeeper announced closing time, one of the young men said to her: "Which way?" "To hell," laughed she. "I've been thrown out everywhere else. Want to go along?" "I'll never desert a perfect lady," replied he. CHAPTER X SHE was like one who has fallen bleeding and broken into a cave; who after a time gathers himself together and crawls toward a faint and far distant gleam of light; who suddenly sees the light no more and at the same instant lurches forward and down into a deeper chasm. Occasionally sheer exhaustion of nerves made it impossible for her to drink herself again into apathy before the effects of the last doses of the poison had worn off. In these intervals of partial awakening--she never permitted them to lengthen out, as such sensation as she had was of one falling--falling--through empty space--with whirling brain and strange sounds in the ears and strange distorted sights or hallucinations before the eyes--falling down--down--whither?--to how great a depth?--or was there no bottom, but simply presently a plunging on down into the black of death's bottomless oblivion? Drink--always drink. Yet in every other way she took care of her health--a strange mingling of prudence and subtle hope with recklessness and frank despair. All her refinement, baffled in the moral ways, concentrated upon the physical. She would be neat and well dressed; she would not let herself be seized of the diseases on the pariah in those regions--the diseases through dirt and ignorance and indifference. In the regions she now frequented recklessness was the keynote. There was the hilarity of the doomed; there was the cynical or stolid indifference to heat or cold, to rain or shine, to rags, to filth, to jail, to ejection for nonpayment of rent, to insult of word or blow. The fire engines--the ambulance--the patrol wagon--the city dead wagon--these were all ever passing and repassing through those swarming streets. It was the vastest, the most populous tenement area of the city. Its inhabitants represented the common lot--for it is the common lot of the overwhelming mass of mankind to live near to nakedness, to shelterlessness, to starvation, without ever being quite naked or quite roofless or quite starved. The masses are eager for the necessities; the classes are eager for the comforts and luxuries. The masses are ignorant; the classes are intelligent--or, at least, shrewd. The unconscious and inevitable exploitation of the masses by the classes automatically and of necessity stops just short of the catastrophe point--for the masses must have enough to give them the strength to work and reproduce. To go down through the social system as had Susan from her original place well up among the classes is like descending from the beautiful dining room of the palace where the meat is served in taste and refinement upon costly dishes by well mannered servants to attractively dressed people--descending along the various stages of the preparation of the meat, at each stage less of refinement and more of coarseness, until one at last arrives at the slaughter pen. The shambles, stinking and reeking blood and filth! The shambles, with hideous groan or shriek, or more hideous silent look of agony! The shambles of society where the beauty and grace and charm of civilization are created out of noisome sweat and savage toil, out of the health and strength of men and women and children, out of their ground up bodies, out of their ground up souls. Susan knew those regions well. She had no theories about them, no resentment against the fortunate classes, no notion that any other or better system might be possible, any other or better life for the masses. She simply accepted life as she found it, lived it as best she could. Throughout the masses of mankind life is sustained by illusions--illusions of a better lot tomorrow, illusions of a heaven beyond a grave, where the nightmare, life in the body, will end and the reality, life in the spirit, will begin. She could not join the throngs moving toward church and synagogue to indulge in their dream that the present was a dream from which death would be a joyful awakening. She alternately pitied and envied them. She had her own dream that this dream, the present, would end in a joyful awakening to success and freedom and light and beauty. She admitted to herself that the dream was probably an illusion, like that of the pious throngs. But she was as unreasonably tenacious of her dream as they were of theirs. She dreamed it because she was a human being--and to be human means to hope, and to hope means to dream of a brighter future here or hereafter, or both here and hereafter. The earth is peopled with dreamers; she was but one of them. The last thought of despair as the black earth closes is a hope, perhaps the most colossal of hope's delusions, that there will be escape in the grave. There is the time when we hope and know it and believe in it. There is the time when we hope and know it but have ceased to believe in it. There is the time when we hope, believing that we have altogether ceased to hope. That time had come for Susan. She seemed to think about the present. She moved about like a sleepwalker. What women did she know--what men? She only dimly remembered from day to day--from hour to hour. Blurred faces passed before her, blurred voices sounded in her ears, blurred personalities touched hers. It was like the jostling of a huge crowd in night streets. A vague sense of buffetings--of rude contacts--of momentary sensations of pain, of shame, of disgust, all blunted and soon forgotten. In estimating suffering, physical or mental, to fail to take into account a more important factor--the merciful paralysis or partial paralysis of any center of sensibility--that is insistently assaulted. She no longer had headaches or nausea after drinking deeply. And where formerly it had taken many stiff doses of liquor to get her into the state of recklessness or of indifference, she was now able to put herself into the mood in which life was endurable with two or three drinks, often with only one. The most marked change was that never by any chance did she become gay; the sky over her life was steadily gray--gray or black, to gray again--never lighter. How far she had fallen! But swift descent or gradual, she had adapted herself--had, in fact, learned by much experience of disaster to mitigate the calamities, to have something to keep a certain deep-lying self of selfs intact--unaffected by what she had been forced to undergo. It seemed to her that if she could get the chance--or could cure herself of the blindness which was always preventing her from seeing and seizing the chance that doubtless offered again and again--she could shed the surface her mode of life had formed over her and would find underneath a new real surface, stronger, sightly, better able to bear--like the skin that forms beneath the healing wound. In these tenements, as in all tenements of all degrees, she and the others of her class were fiercely resented by the heads of families where there was any hope left to impel a striving upward. She had the best furnished room in the tenement. She was the best dressed woman--a marked and instantly recognizable figure because of her neat and finer clothes. Her profession kept alive and active the instincts for care of the person that either did not exist or were momentary and feeble in the respectable women. The slovenliness, the scurrilousness of even the wives and daughters of the well-to-do and the rich of that region would not have been tolerated in any but the lowest strata of her profession, hardly even in those sought by men of the laboring class. Also, the deep horror of disease, which her intelligence never for an instant permitted to relax its hold, made her particular and careful when in other circumstances drink might have reduced her to squalor. She spent all her leisure time--for she no longer read--in the care of her person. She was watched with frightened, yet longing and curious, eyes by all the girls who were at work. The mothers hated her; many of them spat upon the ground after she had passed. It was a heart-breaking struggle, that of these mothers to save their daughters, not from prostitution, not from living with men outside marriage, not from moral danger, but from the practical danger, the danger of bringing into the world children with no father to help feed and clothe them. In the opinion of these people--an opinion often frankly expressed, rarely concealed with any but the thinnest hypocrisy--the life of prostitution was not so bad. Did the life of virtue offer any attractive alternative? Whether a woman was "bad" or "good," she must live in travail and die in squalor to be buried in or near the Potter's Field. But if the girl still living at home were not "good," that would mean a baby to be taken care of, would mean the girl herself not a contributor to the family support but a double burden. And if she went into prostitution, would her family get the benefit? No. The mothers made little effort to save their sons; they concentrated on the daughters. It was pitiful to see how in their ignorance they were unaware of the strongest forces working against them. The talk of all this motley humanity--of "good" no less than "bad" women, of steady workingmen, of political heelers, thieves and bums and runners for dives--was frankly, often hideously, obscene. The jammed together way of living made modesty impossible, or scantest decency--made the pictures of it among the aspiring few, usually for the benefit of religion or charitable visitors, a pitiful, grotesque hypocrisy. Indeed, the prostitute class was the highest in this respect. The streetwalkers, those who prospered, had better masters, learned something about the pleasures and charms of privacy, also had more leisure in which to think, in however crude a way, about the refinements of life, and more money with which to practice those refinements. The boys from the earliest age were on terms of licentious freedom with the girls. The favorite children's games, often played in the open street with the elders looking on and laughing, were sex games. The very babies used foul language--that is, used the language they learned both at home and in the street. It was primitive man; Susan was at the foundation of the world. To speak of the conditions there as a product of civilization is to show ignorance of the history of our race, is to fancy that we are civilized today, when in fact we are--historically--in a turbulent and painful period of transition from a better yesterday toward a tomorrow in which life will be worth living as it never has been before in all the ages of duration. In this today of movement toward civilization which began with the discovery of iron and will end when we shall have discovered how to use for the benefit of all the main forces of nature--in this today of agitation incident to journeying, we are in some respects better off, in other respects worse off, than the race was ten or fifteen thousand years ago. We have lost much of the freedom that was ours before the rise of governments and ruling classes; we have gained much--not so much as the ignorant and the unthinking and the uneducated imagine, but still much. In the end we which means the masses of us--will gain infinitely. But gain or loss has not been in so-called morality. There is not a virtue that has not existed from time ages before record. Not a vice which is shallowly called "effete" or the "product of over-civilization," but originated before man was man. To speak of the conditions in which Susan Lenox now lived as savagery is to misuse the word. Every transitional stage is accompanied by a disintegration. Savagery was a settled state in which every man and every woman had his or her fixed position, settled duties and rights. With the downfall of savagery with the beginning of the journey toward that hope of tomorrow, civilization, everything in the relations of men with men and men with women, became unsettled. Such social systems as the world has known since have all been makeshift and temporary--like our social systems of today, like the moral and extinct codes rising and sinking in power over a vast multitude of emigrants moving from a distant abandoned home toward a distant promised land and forced to live as best they can in the interval. In the historic day's journey of perhaps fifteen thousand years our present time is but a brief second. In that second there has come a breaking up of the makeshift organization which long served the working multitudes fairly well. The result is an anarchy in which the strong oppress the weak, in which the masses are being crushed by the burdens imposed upon them by the classes. And in that particular part of the human race en route into which fate had flung Susan Lenox conditions not of savagery but of primitive chaos were prevailing. A large part of the population lived off the unhappy workers by prostitution, by thieving, by petty swindling, by politics, by the various devices in coarse, crude and small imitation of the devices employed by the ruling classes. And these petty parasites imitated the big parasites in their ways of spending their dubiously got gains. To have a "good time" was the ideal here as in idle Fifth Avenue; and the notions of a "good time" in vogue in the two opposite quarters differed in degree rather than in kind. Nothing to think about but the appetites and their vices. Nothing to hope for but the next carouse. Susan had brought down with her from above one desire unknown to her associates and neighbors--the desire to forget. If she could only forget! If the poison would not wear off at times! She could not quite forget. And to be unable to forget is to remember--and to remember is to long--and to long is to hope. Several times she heard of Freddie Palmer. Twice she chanced upon his name in the newspaper--an incidental reference to him in connection with local politics. The other times were when men talking together in the drinking places frequented by both sexes spoke of him as a minor power in the organization. Each time she got a sense of her remoteness, of her security. Once she passed in Grand Street a detective she had often seen with him in Considine's at Broadway and Forty-second. The "bull" looked sharply at her. Her heart stood still. But he went on without recognizing her. The sharp glance had been simply that official expression of see-all and know-all which is mere formality, part of the official livery, otherwise meaningless. However, it is not to that detective's discredit that he failed to recognize her. She had adapted herself to her changed surroundings. Because she was of a different and higher class, and because she picked and chose her company, even when drink had beclouded her senses and instinct alone remained on drowsy guard, she prospered despite her indifference. For that region had its aristocracy of rich merchants, tenement-owners, politicians whose sons, close imitators of the uptown aristocracies in manners and dress, spent money freely in the amusements that attract nearly all young men everywhere. Susan made almost as much as she could have made in the more renowned quarters of the town. And presently she was able to move into a tenement which, except for two workingmen's families of a better class, was given over entirely to fast women. It was much better kept, much cleaner, much better furnished than the tenements for workers chiefly; they could not afford decencies, much less luxuries. All that sort of thing was, for the neighborhood, concentrated in the saloons, the dance halls, the fast houses and the fast flats. Her walks in Grand Street and the Bowery, repelling and capricious though she was with her alternating moods of cold moroseness and sardonic and mocking gayety, were bringing her in a good sum of money for that region. Sometimes as much as twenty dollars a week, rarely less than twelve or fifteen. And despite her drinking and her freehandedness with her fellow-professionals less fortunate and with the street beggars and for tenement charities, she had in her stockings a capital of thirty-one dollars. She avoided the tough places, the hang-outs of the gangs. She rarely went alone into the streets at night--and the afternoons were, luckily, best for business as well as for safety. She made no friends and therefore no enemies. Without meaning to do so and without realizing that she did so, she held herself aloof without haughtiness through sense of loneliness, not at all through sense of superiority. Had it not been for her scarlet lips, a far more marked sign in that region than anywhere uptown, she would have passed in the street for a more or less respectable woman--not thoroughly respectable; she was too well dressed, too intelligently cared for to seem the good working girl. On one of the few nights when she lingered in the little back room of the saloon a few doors away at the corner, as she entered the dark passageway of the tenement, strong fingers closed upon her throat and she was borne to the floor. She knew at once that she was in the clutch of one of those terrors of tenement fast women, the lobbygows--men who live by lying in wait in the darkness to seize and rob the lonely, friendless fast woman. She struggled--and she was anything but weak. But not a sound could escape from her tight-pressed throat. Soon she became unconscious. One of the workingmen, returning drunk from the meeting of the union, in the corner saloon, stumbled over her, gave her a kick in his anger. This roused her; she uttered a faint cry. "Thought it was a man," mumbled he, dragging her to a sitting position. He struck a match. "Oh--it's you! Don't make any noise. If my old woman came out, she'd kill us both." "Never mind me," said Susan. "I was only stunned." "Oh, I thought it was the booze. They say you hit it something fierce." "No--a lobbygow." And she felt for her stockings. They were torn away from her garters. Her bosom also was bare, for the lobbygow had searched there, also. "How much did he get?" "About thirty-five." "The hell he did! Want me to call a cop?" "No," replied Susan, who was on her feet again. "What's the use?" "Those damn cops!" cursed the workingman. "They'd probably pinch you--or both of us. Ten to one the lobbygows divide with them." "I didn't mean that," said Susan. The police were most friendly and most kind to her. She was understanding the ways of the world better now, and appreciated that the police themselves were part of the same vast system of tyranny and robbery that was compelling her. The police made her pay because they dared not refuse to be collectors. They bound whom the mysterious invisible power compelled them to bind; they loosed whom that same power bade them loose. She had no quarrel with the police, who protected her from far worse oppressions and oppressors than that to which they subjected her. And if they tolerated lobbygows and divided with them, it was because the overshadowing power ordained it so. "Needn't be afraid I'll blow to the cop," said the drunken artisan. "You can damn the cops all you please to me. They make New York worse than Russia." "I guess they do the best they can--like everybody else," said the girl wearily. "I'll help you upstairs." "No, thank you," said she. Not that she did not need help; but she wished no disagreeable scene with the workingman's wife who might open the door as they passed his family's flat. She went upstairs, the man waiting below until she should be safe--and out of the way. She staggered into her room, tottered to the bed, fell upon it. A girl named Clara, who lived across the hall, was sitting in a rocking-chair in a nightgown, reading a Bertha Clay novel and smoking a cigarette. She glanced up, was arrested by the strange look in Susan's eyes. "Hello--been hitting the pipe, I see," said she. "Down in Gussie's room?" "No. A lobbygow," said Susan. "Did he get much?" "About thirty-five." "The ----!" cried Clara. "I'll bet it was Gussie's fellow. I've suspected him. Him and her stay in, hitting the pipe all the time. That costs money, and she hasn't been out for I don't know how long. Let's go down there and raise hell." "What's the use?" said Susan. "You ought to 'a' put it in the savings bank. That's what I do--when I have anything. Then, when I'm robbed, they only get what I've just made. Last time, they didn't get nothing--but me." And she laughed. Her teeth were good in front, but out on one side and beginning to be discolored on the other. "How long had you been saving?" "Nearly six months." "Gee! _Isn't_ that hell!" Presently she laughed. "Six months' work and only thirty-five to show for it. Guess you're about as poor at hiving it up as I am. I give it to that loafer I live with. You give it away to anybody that wants a stake. Well--what's the diff? It all goes." "Give me a cigarette," said Susan, sitting up and inspecting the bruises on her bosom and legs. "And get that bottle of whiskey from under the soiled clothes in the bottom of the washstand." "It _is_ something to celebrate, isn't it?" said Clara. "My fellow's gone to his club tonight, so I didn't go out. I never do any more, unless he's there to hang round and see that I ain't done up. You'll have to get a fellow. You'll have to come to it, as I'm always telling you. They're expensive, but they're company--anybody you can count on for shining up, even if it is for what they can get out of you, is better than not having nobody nowhere. And they keep off bums and lobbygows and scare the bilkers into coughing up." "Not for me," replied Susan. The greater the catastrophe, the longer the time before it is fully realized. Susan's loss of the money that represented so much of savage if momentary horror, and so much of unconscious hope this calamity did not overwhelm her for several days. Then she yielded for the first time to the lure of opium. She had listened longingly to the descriptions of the delights as girls and men told; for practically all of them smoked--or took cocaine. But to Clara's or Gussie's invitations to join the happy band of dreamers, she had always replied, "Not yet. I'm saving that." Now, however, she felt that the time had come. Hope in this world she had none. Before the black adventure, why not try the world of blissful unreality to which it gave entrance? Why leave life until she had exhausted all it put within her reach? She went to Gussie's room at midnight and flung herself down in a wrapper upon a couch opposite a sallow, delicate young man. His great dark eyes were gazing unseeingly at her, were perhaps using her as an outline sketch from which his imagination could picture a beauty of loveliness beyond human. Gussie taught her how to prepare the little ball of opium, how to put it on the pipe and draw in its fumes. Her system was so well prepared for it by the poisons she had drunk that she had satisfactory results from the outset. And she entered upon the happiest period of her life thus far. All the hideousness of her profession disappeared under the gorgeous draperies of the imagination. Opium's magic transformed the vile, the obscene, into the lofty, the romantic, the exalted. The world she had been accustomed to regard as real ceased to be even the blur the poisonous liquors had made of it, became a vague, distant thing seen in a dream. Her opium world became the vivid reality. The life she had been leading had made her extremely thin, had hardened and dulled her eyes, had given her that sad, shuddering expression of the face upon which have beaten a thousand mercenary and lustful kisses. The opium soon changed all this. Her skin, always tending toward pallor, became of the dead amber-white of old ivory. Her thinness took on an ethereal transparency that gave charm even to her slight stoop. Her face became dreamy, exalted, rapt; and her violet-gray eyes looked from it like the vents of poetical fires burning without ceasing upon an altar to the god of dreams. Never had she been so beautiful; never had she been so happy--not with the coarser happiness of dancing eye and laughing lip, but with the ecstasy of soul that is like the shimmers of a tranquil sea quivering rhythmically under the caresses of moonlight. In her descent she had now reached that long narrow shelf along which she would walk so long as health and looks should last--unless some accident should topple her off on the one side into suicide or on the other side into the criminal prostitute class. And such accidents were likely to happen. Still there was a fair chance of her keeping her balance until loss of looks and loss of health--the end of the shelf--should drop her abruptly to the very bottom. She could guess what was there. Every day she saw about the streets, most wretched and most forlorn of its wretched and forlorn things, the solitary old women, bent and twisted, wrapped in rotting rags, picking papers and tobacco from the gutters and burrowing in garbage barrels, seeking somehow to get the drink or the dope that changed hell into heaven for them. Despite liquor and opium and the degradations of the street-woman's life she walked that narrow ledge with curious steadiness. She was unconscious of the cause. Indeed, self-consciousness had never been one of her traits. The cause is interesting. In our egotism, in our shame of what we ignorantly regard as the lowliness of our origin we are always seeking alleged lofty spiritual explanations of our doings, and overlook the actual, quite simple real reason. One of the strongest factors in Susan's holding herself together in face of overwhelming odds, was the nearly seventeen years of early training her Aunt Fanny Warham had given her in orderly and systematic ways--a place for everything and everything in its place; a time for everything and everything at its time, neatness, scrupulous cleanliness, no neglecting of any of the small, yet large, matters that conserve the body. Susan had not been so apt a pupil of Fanny Warham's as was Ruth, because Susan had not Ruth's nature of the old-maidish, cut-and-dried conventional. But during the whole fundamentally formative period of her life Susan Lenox had been trained to order and system, and they had become part of her being, beyond the power of drink and opium and prostitution to disintegrate them until the general break-up should come. In all her wanderings every man or woman or girl she had met who was not rapidly breaking up, but was offering more or less resistance to the assaults of bad habits, was one who like herself had acquired in childhood strong good habits to oppose the bad habits and to fight them with. An enemy must be met with his own weapons or stronger. The strongest weapons that can be given a human animal for combating the destructive forces of the struggle for existence are not good sentiments or good principles or even pious or moral practices--for, bad habits can make short work of all these--but are good habits in the practical, material matters of life. They operate automatically, they apply to all the multitude of small, every day; semi-unconscious actions of the daily routine. They preserve the _morale_. And not morality but morals is the warp of character--the part which, once destroyed or even frayed, cannot be restored. Susan, unconsciously and tenaciously practicing her early training in order and system whenever she could and wherever she could, had an enormous advantage over the mass of the girls, both respectable and fast. And while their evidence was always toward "going to pieces" her tendency was always to repair and to put off the break-up. One June evening she was looking through the better class of dance halls and drinking resorts for Clara, to get her to go up to Gussie's for a smoke. She opened a door she had never happened to enter before--a dingy door with the glass frosted. Just inside there was a fetid little bar; view of the rest of the room was cut off by a screen from behind which came the sound of a tuneless old piano. She knew Clara would not be in such a den, but out of curiosity she glanced round the screen. She was seeing a low-ceilinged room, the walls almost dripping with the dirt of many and many a hard year. In a corner was the piano, battered, about to fall to pieces, its ancient and horrid voice cracked by the liquor which had been poured into it by facetious drunkards. At the keyboard sat an old hunchback, broken-jawed, dressed in slimy rags, his one eye instantly fixed upon her with a lecherous expression that made her shiver as it compelled her to imagine the embrace he was evidently imagining. His filthy fingers were pounding out a waltz. About the floor were tottering in the measure of the waltz a score of dreadful old women. They were in calico. They had each a little biscuit knot of white hair firmly upon the crown of the head. From their bleached, seamed old faces gleamed the longings or the torments of all the passions they could no longer either inspire or satisfy. They were one time prostitutes, one time young, perhaps pretty women, now descending to death--still prostitutes in heart and mind but compelled to live as scrub women, cleaners of all manner of loathsome messes in dives after the drunkards had passed on. They were now enjoying the reward of their toil, the pleasures of which they dreamed and to which they looked forward as they dragged their stiff old knees along the floors in the wake of the brush and the cloth. They were drinking biting poisons from tin cups--for those hands quivering with palsy could not be trusted with glass-dancing with drunken, disease-swollen or twisted legs--venting from ghastly toothless mouths strange cries of merriment that sounded like shrieks of damned souls at the licking of quenchless flames. Susan stood rooted to the threshold of that frightful scene--that vision of the future toward which she was hurrying. A few years--a very few years--and, unless she should have passed through the Morgue, here she would be, abandoning her body to abominations beyond belief at the hands of degenerate oriental sailors to get a few pennies for the privileges of this dance hall. And she would laugh, as did these, would enjoy as did these, would revel in the filth her senses had been trained to find sweet. "No! No!" she protested. "I'd kill myself first!" And then she cowered again, as the thought came that she probably would not, any more than these had killed themselves. The descent would be gradual--no matter how swift, still gradual. Only the insane put an end to life. Yes--she would come here some day. She leaned against the wall, her throat contracting in a fit of nausea. She grew cold all over; her teeth chattered. She tried in vain to tear her gaze from the spectacle; some invisible power seemed to be holding her head in a vise, thrusting her struggling eyelids violently open. There were several men, dead drunk, asleep in old wooden chairs against the wall. One of these men was so near her that she could have touched him. His clothing was such an assortment of rags slimy and greasy as one sometimes sees upon the top of a filled garbage barrel to add its horrors of odor of long unwashed humanity to the stenches from vegetable decay. His wreck of a hard hat had fallen from his head as it dropped forward in drunken sleep. Something in the shape of the head made her concentrate upon this man. She gave a sharp cry, stretched out her hand, touched the man's shoulder. "Rod!" she cried. "Rod!" The head slowly lifted, and the bleary, blowsy wreck of Roderick Spenser's handsome face was turned stupidly toward her. Into his gray eyes slowly came a gleam of recognition. Then she saw the red of shame burst into his hollow cheeks, and the head quickly drooped. She shook him. "Rod! It's _you!_" "Get the hell out," he mumbled. "I want to sleep." "You know me," she said. "I see the color in your face. Oh, Rod--you needn't be ashamed before _me_." She felt him quiver under her fingers pressing upon his shoulder. But he pretended to snore. "Rod," she pleaded, "I want you to come along with me. I can't do you any harm now." The hunchback had stopped playing. The old women were crowding round Spenser and her, were peering at them, with eyes eager and ears a-cock for romance--for nowhere on this earth do the stars shine so sweetly as down between the precipices of shame to the black floor of the slum's abyss. Spenser, stooped and shaking, rose abruptly, thrust Susan aside with a sweep of the arm that made her reel, bolted into the street. She recovered her balance and amid hoarse croakings of "That's right, honey! Don't give him up!" followed the shambling, swaying figure. He was too utterly drunk to go far; soon down he sank, a heap of rags and filth, against a stoop. She bent over him, saw he was beyond rousing, straightened and looked about her. Two honest looking young Jews stopped. "Won't you help me get him home?" she said to them. "Sure!" replied they in chorus. And, with no outward sign of the disgust they must have felt at the contact, they lifted up the sot, in such fantastic contrast to Susan's clean and even stylish appearance, and bore him along, trying to make him seem less the helpless whiskey-soaked dead weight. They dragged him up the two flights of stairs and, as she pushed back the door, deposited him on the floor. She assured them they could do nothing more, thanked them, and they departed. Clara appeared in her doorway. "God Almighty, Lorna!" she cried. "_What_ have you got there? How'd it get in?" "You've been advising me to take a fellow," said Susan. "Well--here he is." Clara looked at her as if she thought her crazed by drink or dope. "I'll call the janitor and have him thrown out." "No, he's my lover," said Susan. "Will you help me clean him up?" Clara, looking at Spenser's face now, saw those signs which not the hardest of the world's hard uses can cut or tear away. "Oh!" she said, in a tone of sympathy. "He _is_ down, isn't he? But he'll pull round all right." She went into her room to take off her street clothes and to get herself into garments as suitable as she possessed for one of those noisome tasks that are done a dozen times a day by the bath nurses in the receiving department of a charity hospital. When she returned, Susan too was in her chemise and ready to begin the search for the man, if man there was left deep buried in that muck. While Susan took off the stinking and rotten rags, and flung them into the hall, Clara went to the bathroom they and Mollie shared, and filled the tub with water as hot as her hand could bear. With her foot Susan pushed the rags along the hall floor and into the garbage closet. Then she and Clara lifted the emaciated, dirt-streaked, filth-smeared body, carried it to the bathroom, let it down into the water. There were at hand plenty of those strong, specially prepared soaps and other disinfectants constantly used by the women of their kind who still cling to cleanliness and health. With these they attacked him, not as if he were a human being, but as if he were some inanimate object that must be scoured before it could be used. Again and again they let out the water, black, full of dead and dying vermin; again and again they rinsed him, attacked him afresh. Their task grew less and less repulsive as the man gradually appeared, a young man with a soft skin, a well-formed body, unusually good hands and feet, a distinguished face despite its savage wounds from dissipation, hardly the less handsome for the now fair and crisp beard which gave it a look of more years than Spenser had lived. If Spenser recovered consciousness--and it seems hardly possible that he did not--he was careful to conceal the fact. He remained limp, inert, apparently in a stupor. They gave him one final scrubbing, one final rinsing, one final thorough inspection. "Now, he's all right," declared Clara. "What shall we do with him?" "Put him to bed," said Susan. They had already dried him off in the empty tub. They now rubbed him down with a rough towel, lifted him, Susan taking the shoulders, Clara the legs, and put him in Susan's bed. Clara ran to her room, brought one of the two nightshirts she kept for her fellow. When they had him in this and with a sheet over him, they cleaned and straightened the bathroom, then lit cigarettes and sat down to rest and to admire the work of their hands. "Who is he?" asked Clara. "A man I used to know," said Susan. Like all the girls in that life with a real story to tell, she never told about her past self. Never tell? They never even remember if drink and drugs will do their duty. "I don't blame you for loving him," said Clara. "Somehow, the lower a man sinks the more a woman loves him. It's the other way with men. But then men don't know what love is. And a woman don't really know till she's been through the mill." "I don't love him," said Susan. "Same thing," replied the practical Clara, with a wave of the bare arm at the end of which smoked the cigarette. "What're you going to do with him?" "I don't know," confessed Susan. She was not a little uneasy at the thought of his awakening. Would he despise her more than ever now--fly from her back to his filth? Would he let her try to help him? And she looked at the face which had been, in that other life so long, long ago, dearer to her than any face her eyes had ever rested upon; a sob started deep down within her, found its slow and painful way upward, shaking her whole body and coming from between her clenched teeth in a groan. She forgot all she had suffered from Rod--forgot the truth about him which she had slowly puzzled out after she left him and as experience enabled her to understand actions she had not understood at the time. She forgot it all. That past--that far, dear, dead past! Again she was a simple, innocent girl upon the high rock, eating that wonderful dinner. Again the evening light faded, stars and moon came out, and she felt the first sweet stirring of love for him. She could hear his voice, the light, clear, entrancing melody of the Duke's song-- La Donna è mobile Qua penna al vento-- She burst into tears--tears that drenched her soul as the rain drenches the blasted desert and makes the things that could live in beauty stir deep in its bosom. And Clara, sobbing in sympathy, kissed her and stole away, softly closing the door. "If a man die, shall he live again?" asked the old Arabian philosopher. If a woman die, shall she live again?. . . Shall not that which dies in weakness live again in strength?. . . Looking at him, as he lay there sleeping so quietly, her being surged with the heaving of high longings and hopes. If _they_ could only live again! Here they were, together, at the lowest depth, at the rock bottom of life. If they could build on that rock, build upon the very foundation of the world, then would they indeed build in strength! Then, nothing could destroy--nothing!. . . If they could live again! If they could build! She had something to live for--something to fight for. Into her eyes came a new light; into her soul came peace and strength. Something to live for--someone to redeem. CHAPTER XI SHE fell asleep, her head resting upon her hand, her elbow on the arm of the chair. She awoke with a shiver; she opened her eyes to find him gazing at her. The eyes of both shifted instantly. "Wouldn't you like some whiskey?" she asked. "Thanks," replied he, and his unchanged voice reminded her vividly of his old self, obscured by the beard and by the dissipated look. She took the bottle from its concealment in the locked washstand drawer, poured him out a large drink. When she came back where he could see the whiskey in the glass, his eyes glistened and he raised himself first on his elbow, then to a sitting position. His shaking hand reached out eagerly and his expectant lips quivered. He gulped the whiskey down. "Thank you," he said, gazing longingly at the bottle as he held the empty glass toward her. "More?" "I _would_ like a little more," said he gratefully. Again she poured him a large drink, and again he gulped it down. "That's strong stuff," said he. "But then they sell strong stuff in this part of town. The other kind tastes weak to me now." He dropped back against the pillows. She poured herself a drink. Halfway to her lips the glass halted. "I've got to stop that," thought she, "if I'm going to do anything for him or for myself." And she poured the whiskey back and put the bottle away. The whole incident took less than five seconds. It did not occur that she was essaying and achieving the heroic, that she had in that instant revealed her right to her dream of a career high above the common lot. "Don't _you_ drink?" said he. "I've decided to cut it out," replied she carelessly. "There's nothing in it." "I couldn't live without it--and wouldn't." "It _is_ a comfort when one's on the way down," said she. "But I'm going to try the other direction--for a change." She held a box of cigarettes toward him. He took one, then she; she held the lighted match for him, lit her own cigarette, let the flame of the match burn on, she absently watching it. "Look out! You'll burn yourself!" cried he. She started, threw the match into the slop jar. "How do you feel?" inquired she. "Like the devil," he answered. "But then I haven't known what it was to feel any other way for several months except when I couldn't feel at all." A long silence, both smoking, he thinking, she furtively watching him. "You haven't changed so much," he finally said. "At least, not on the outside." "More on the outside than on the inside," said she. "The inside doesn't change much. There I'm almost as I was that day on the big rock. And I guess you are, too--aren't you?" "The devil I am! I've grown hard and bitter." "That's all outside," declared she. "That's the shell--like the scab that stays over the sore spot till it heals." "Sore spot? I'm nothing but sore spots. I've been treated like a dog." And he proceeded to talk about the only subject that interested him--himself. He spoke in a defensive way, as if replying to something she had said or thought. "I've not got down in the world without damn good excuse. I wrote several plays, and they were tried out of town. But we never could get into New York. I think Brent was jealous of me, and his influence kept me from a hearing. I know it sounds conceited, but I'm sure I'm right." "Brent?" said she, in a queer voice. "Oh, I think you must be mistaken. He doesn't look like a man who could do petty mean things. No, I'm sure he's not petty." "Do you know him?" cried Spenser, in an irritated tone. "No. But--someone pointed him out to me once--a long time ago--one night in the Martin. And then--you'll remember--there used to be a great deal of talk about him when we lived in Forty-third Street. You admired him tremendously." "Well, he's responsible," said Spenser, sullenly. "The men on top are always trampling down those who are trying to climb up. He had it in for me. One of my friends who thought he was a decent chap gave him my best play to read. He returned it with some phrases about its showing talent--one of those phrases that don't mean a damn thing. And a few weeks ago--" Spenser raised himself excitedly--"the thieving hound produced a play that was a clean steal from mine. I'd be laughed at if I protested or sued. But I _know_, curse him!" He fell back shaking so violently that his cigarette dropped to the sheet. Susan picked it up, handed it to him. He eyed her with angry suspicion. "You don't believe me, do you?" he demanded. "I don't know anything about it," replied she. "Anyhow, what does it matter? The man I met on that show boat--the Mr. Burlingham I've often talked about--he used to say that the dog that stopped to lick his scratches never caught up with the prey." He flung himself angrily in the bed. "You never did have any heart--any sympathy. But who has? Even Drumley went back on me--let 'em put a roast of my last play in the _Herald_--a telegraphed roast from New Haven--said it was a dead failure. And who wrote it? Why, some newspaper correspondent in the pay of the _Syndicate_--and that means Brent. And of course it was a dead failure. So--I gave up--and here I am. . . . This your room?" "Yes." "Where's this nightshirt come from?" "It belongs to the friend of the girl across the hall." He laughed sneeringly. "The hell it does!" mocked he. "I understand perfectly. I want my clothes." "No one is coming," said Susan. "There's no one to come." He was looking round the comfortable little room that was the talk of the whole tenement and was stirring wives and fast women alike to "do a little fixing up." Said he: "A nice little nest you've made for him. You always were good at that." "I've made it for myself," said she. "I never bring men here." "I want my clothes," cried he. "I haven't sunk that low, you----!" The word he used did not greatly disturb Susan. The shell she had formed over herself could ward off brutal contacts of languages no less than of the other kinds. It did, however, shock her a little to hear Rod Spenser use a word so crude. "Give me my clothes," he ordered, waving his fists in a fierce, feeble gesture. "They were torn all to pieces. I threw them away. I'll get you some more in the morning." He dropped back again, a scowl upon his face. "I've got no money--not a damn cent. I did half a day's work on the docks and made enough to quiet me last night." He raised himself. "I can work again. Give me my clothes!" "They're gone," said Susan. "They were completely used up." This brought back apparently anything but dim memory of what his plight had been. "How'd I happen to get so clean?" "Clara and I washed you off a little. You had fallen down." He lay silent a few minutes, then said in a hesitating, ashamed tone, "My troubles have made me a boor. I beg your pardon. You've been tremendously kind to me." "Oh, it wasn't much. Don't you feel sleepy?" "Not a bit." He dragged himself from the bed. "But _you_ do. I must go." She laughed in the friendliest way. "You can't. You haven't any clothes." He passed his hand over his face and coughed violently, she holding his head and supporting his emaciated shoulders. After several minutes of coughing and gagging, gasping and groaning and spitting, he was relieved by the spasm and lay down again. When he got his breath, he said--with rest between words--"I'd ask you to send for the ambulance, but if the doctors catch me, they'll lock me away. I've got consumption. Oh, I'll soon be out of it." Susan sat silent. She did not dare look at him lest he should see the pity and horror in her eyes. "They'll find a cure for it," pursued he. "But not till the day after I'm gone. That is the way my luck runs. Still, I don't see why I should care to stay--and I don't! Have you any more of that whiskey?" Susan brought out the bottle again, gave him the last of the whiskey--a large drink. He sat up, sipping it to make it last. He noted the long row of books on the shelf fastened along the wall beside the bed, the books and magazines on the table. Said he: "As fond of reading as ever, I see?" "Fonder," said she. "It takes me out of myself." "I suppose you read the sort of stuff you really like, now--not the things you used to read to make old Drumley think you were cultured and intellectual." "No--the same sort," replied she, unruffled by his contemptuous, unjust fling. "Trash bores me." "Come to think of it, I guess you did have pretty good taste in books." But he was interested in himself, like all invalids; and, like them, he fancied his own intense interest could not but be shared by everyone. He talked on and on of himself, after the manner of failures--told of his wrongs, of how friends had betrayed him, of the jealousies and enmities his talents had provoked. Susan was used to these hard-luck stories, was used to analyzing them. With the aid of what she had worked out as to his character after she left him, she had no difficulty in seeing that he was deceiving himself, was excusing himself. But after all she had lived through, after all she had discovered about human frailty, especially in herself, she was not able to criticize, much less condemn, anybody. Her doubts merely set her to wondering whether he might not also be self-deceived as to his disease. "Why do you think you've got consumption?" asked she. "I was examined at the free dispensary up in Second Avenue the other day. I've suspected what was the matter for several months. They told me I was right." "But the doctors are always making mistakes. I'd not give up if I were you." "Do you suppose I would if I had anything to live for?" "I was thinking about that a while ago--while you were asleep." "Oh, I'm all in. That's a cinch." "So am I," said she. "And as we've nothing to lose and no hope, why, trying to do something won't make us any worse off. . . . We've both struck the bottom. We can't go any lower." She leaned forward and, with her earnest eyes fixed upon him, said, "Rod--why not try--together?" He closed his eyes. "I'm afraid I can't be of much use to you," she went on. "But you can help me. And helping me will make you help yourself. I can't get up alone. I've tried. No doubt it's my fault. I guess I'm one of those women that aren't hard enough or self-confident enough to do what's necessary unless I've got some man to make me do it. Perhaps I'd get the--the strength or whatever it is, when I was much older. But by that time in my case--I guess it'd be too late. Won't you help me, Rod?" He turned his head away, without opening his eyes. "You've helped me many times--beginning with the first day we met." "Don't," he said. "I went back on you. I did sprain my ankle, but I could have come." "That wasn't anything," replied she. "You had already done a thousand times more than you needed to do." His hand wandered along the cover in her direction. She touched it. Their hands clasped. "I lied about where I got the money yesterday. I didn't work. I begged. Three of us--from the saloon they call the Owl's Chute--two Yale men--one of them had been a judge--and I. We've been begging for a week. We were going out on the road in a few days--to rob. Then--I saw you--in that old women's dance hall--the Venusberg, they call it." "You've come down here for me, Rod. You'll take me back? You'll save me from the Venusberg?" "I couldn't save anybody. Susie, at bottom I'm N. G. I always was--and I knew it. Weak--vain. But you! If you hadn't been a woman--and such a sweet, considerate one you'd have never got down here." "Such a fool," corrected Susan. "But, once I get up, I'll not be so again. I'll fight under the rules, instead of acting in the silly way they teach us as children." "Don't say those hard things, Susie!" "Aren't they true?" "Yes, but I can't bear to hear them from a woman. . . . I told you that you hadn't changed. But after I'd looked at you a while I saw that you have. You've got a terrible look in your eyes--wonderful and terrible. You had something of that look as a child--the first time I saw you." "The day after my marriage," said the girl, tearing her face away. "It was there then," he went on. "But now--it's--it's heartbreaking, Susie when your face is in repose." "I've gone through a fire that has burned up every bit of me that can burn," said she. "I've been wondering if what's left isn't strong enough to do something with. I believe so--if you'll help me." "Help you? I--help anybody? Don't mock me, Susie." "I don't know about anybody else," said she sweetly and gently, "but I do know about me." "No use--too late. I've lost my nerve." He began to sob. "It's because I'm unstrung," explained he. "Don't think I'm a poor contemptible fool of a whiner. . . . Yes, I _am_ a whiner! Susie, I ought to have been the woman and you the man. Weak--weak--weak!" She turned the gas low, bent over him, kissed his brow, caressed him. "Let's do the best we can," she murmured. He put his arm round her. "I wonder if there _is_ any hope," he said. "No--there couldn't be." "Let's not hope," pleaded she. "Let's just do the best we can." "What--for instance?" "You know the theater people. You might write a little play--a sketch--and you and I could act it in one of the ten-cent houses." "That's not a bad idea!" exclaimed he. "A little comedy--about fifteen or twenty minutes." And he cast about for a plot, found the beginnings of one the ancient but ever acceptable commonplace of a jealous quarrel between two lovers--"I'll lay the scene in Fifth Avenue--there's nothing low life likes so much as high life." He sketched, she suggested. They planned until broad day, then fell asleep, she half sitting up, his head pillowed upon her lap. She was awakened by a sense of a parching and suffocating heat. She started up with the idea of fire in her drowsy mind. But a glance at him revealed the real cause. His face was fiery red, and from his lips came rambling sentences, muttered, whispered, that indicated the delirium of a high fever. She had first seen it when she and the night porter broke into Burlingham's room in the Walnut Street House, in Cincinnati. She had seen it many a time since; for, while she herself had never been ill, she had been surrounded by illness all the time, and the commonest form of it was one of these fevers, outraged nature's frenzied rise against the ever denser swarms of enemies from without which the slums sent to attack her. Susan ran across the hall and roused Clara, who would watch while she went for a doctor. "You'd better get Einstein in Grand Street," Clara advised. "Why not Sacci?" asked Susan. "Our doctor doesn't know anything but the one thing--and he doesn't like to take other kinds of cases. No, get Einstein. . . . You know, he's like all of them--he won't come unless you pay in advance." "How much?" asked Susan. "Three dollars. I'll lend you if----" "No--I've got it." She had eleven dollars and sixty cents in the world. Einstein pronounced it a case of typhoid. "You must get him to the hospital at once." Susan and Clara looked at each other in terror. To them, as to the masses everywhere, the hospital meant almost certain death; for they assumed--and they had heard again and again accusations which warranted it--that the public hospital doctors and nurses treated their patients with neglect always, with downright inhumanity often. Not a day passed without their hearing some story of hospital outrage upon poverty, without their seeing someone--usually some child--who was paying a heavy penalty for having been in the charity wards. Einstein understood their expression. "Nonsense!" said he gruffly. "You girls look too sensible to believe those silly lies." Susan looked at him steadily. His eyes shifted. "Of course, the pay service _is_ better," said he in a strikingly different tone. "How much would it be at a pay hospital?" asked Susan. "Twenty-five a week including my services," said Doctor Einstein. "But you can't afford that." "Will he get the best treatment for that?" "The very best. As good as if he were Rockefeller or the big chap uptown." "In advance, I suppose?" "Would we ever get our money out of people if we didn't get it in advance? We've got to live just the same as any other class." "I understand," said the girl. "I don't blame you. I don't blame anybody for anything." She said to Clara, "Can you lend me twenty?" "Sure. Come in and get it." When she and Susan were in the hall beyond Einstein's hearing, she went on: "I've got the twenty and you're welcome to it. But--Lorna hadn't you better----" "In the same sort of a case, what'd _you_ do?" interrupted Susan. Clara laughed. "Oh--of course." And she gave Susan a roll of much soiled bills--a five, the rest ones and twos. "I can get the ambulance to take him free," said Einstein. "That'll save you five for a carriage." She accepted this offer. And when the ambulance went, with Spenser burning and raving in the tightly wrapped blankets, Susan followed in a street car to see with her own eyes that he was properly installed. It was arranged that she could visit him at any hour and stay as long as she liked. She returned to the tenement, to find the sentiment of the entire neighborhood changed toward her. Not loss of money, not loss of work, not dispossession nor fire nor death is the supreme calamity among the poor, but sickness. It is their most frequent visitor--sickness in all its many frightful forms--rheumatism and consumption, cancer and typhoid and the rest of the monsters. Yet never do the poor grow accustomed or hardened. And at the sight of the ambulance the neighborhood had been instantly stirred. When the reason for its coming got about, Susan became the object of universal sympathy and respect. She was not sending her friend to be neglected and killed at a charity hospital; she was paying twenty-five a week that he might have a chance for life--twenty-five dollars a week! The neighbors felt that her high purpose justified any means she might be compelled to employ in getting the money. Women who had scowled and spat as she walked by, spoke friendlily to her and wiped their eyes with their filthy skirts, and prayed in church and synagogue that she might prosper until her man was well and the old debt paid. Clara went from group to group, relating the whole story, and the tears flowed at each recital. Money they had none to give; but what they had they gave with that generosity which suddenly transfigures rags and filth and makes foul and distorted bodies lift in the full dignity of membership in the human family. Everywhere in those streets were seen the ravages of disease--rheumatism and rickets and goiter, wen and tumors and cancer, children with only one arm or one leg, twisted spines, sunken chests, distorted hips, scrofulous eyes and necks, all the sad markings of poverty's supreme misery, the ferocious penalties of ignorance, stupidity and want. But Susan's burden of sorrow was not on this account overlooked. Rafferty, who kept the saloon at the corner and was chief lieutenant to O'Frayne, the District Leader, sent for her and handed her a twenty. "That may help some," said he. Susan hesitated--gave it back. "Thank you," said she, "and perhaps later I'll have to get it from you. But I don't want to get into debt. I already owe twenty." "This ain't debt," explained Rafferty. "Take it and forget it." "I couldn't do that," said the girl. "But maybe you'll lend it to me, if I need it in a week or so?" "Sure," said the puzzled saloon man--liquor store man, he preferred to be called, or politician. "Any amount you want." As she went away he looked after her, saying to his barkeeper: "What do you think of that, Terry? I offered her a twenty and she sidestepped." Terry's brother had got drunk a few days before, had killed a woman and was on his way to the chair. Terry scowled at the boss and said: "She's got a right to, ain't she? Don't she earn her money honest, without harmin' anybody but herself? There ain't many that can say that--not any that runs factories and stores and holds their noses up as if they smelt their own sins, damn 'em!" "She's a nice girl," said Rafferty, sauntering away. He was a broad, tolerant and good-humored man; he made allowances for an employee whose brother was in for murder. Susan had little time to spend at the hospital. She must now earn fifty dollars a week--nearly double the amount she had been averaging. She must pay the twenty-five dollars for Spenser, the ten dollars for her lodgings. Then there was the seven dollars which must be handed to the police captain's "wardman" in the darkness of some entry every Thursday night. She had been paying the patrolman three dollars a week to keep him in a good humor, and two dollars to the janitor's wife; she might risk cutting out these items for the time, as both janitor's wife and policeman were sympathetic. But on the closest figuring, fifty a week would barely meet her absolute necessities--would give her but seven a week for food and other expenses and nothing toward repaying Clara. Fifty dollars a week! She might have a better chance to make it could she go back to the Broadway-Fifth Avenue district. But however vague other impressions from the life about her might have been, there had been branded into her a deep and terrible fear of the police an omnipotence as cruel as destiny itself--indeed, the visible form of that sinister god at present. Once in the pariah class, once with a "police record," and a man or woman would have to scale the steeps of respectability up to a far loftier height than Susan ever dreamed of again reaching, before that malign and relentless power would abandon its tyranny. She did not dare risk adventuring a part of town where she had no "pull" and where, even should she by chance escape arrest, Freddie Palmer would hear of her; would certainly revenge himself by having her arrested and made an example of. In the Grand Street district she must stay, and she must "stop the nonsense" and "play the game"--must be business-like. She went to see the "wardman," O'Ryan, who under the guise of being a plain clothes man or detective, collected and turned in to the captain, who took his "bit" and passed up the rest, all the money levied upon saloons, dives, procuresses, dealers in unlawful goods of any kind from opium and cocaine to girls for "hock shops." O'Ryan was a huge brute of a man, his great hard face bearing the scars of battles against pistol, knife, bludgeon and fist. He was a sour and savage brute, hated and feared by everyone for his tyrannies over the helpless poor and the helpless outcast class. He had primitive masculine notions as to feminine virtue, intact despite the latter day general disposition to concede toleration and even a certain respectability to prostitutes. But by some chance which she and the other girls did not understand he treated Susan with the utmost consideration, made the gangs appreciate that if they annoyed her or tried to drag her into the net of tribute in which they had enmeshed most of the girls worth while, he would regard it as a personal defiance to himself. Susan waited in the back room of the saloon nearest O'Ryan's lodgings and sent a boy to ask him to come. The boy came back with the astonishing message that she was to come to O'Ryan's flat. Susan was so doubtful that she paused to ask the janitress about it. "It's all right," said the janitress. "Since his wife died three years ago him and his baby lives alone. There's his old mother but she's gone out. He's always at home when he ain't on duty. He takes care of the baby himself, though it howls all the time something awful." Susan ascended, found the big policeman in his shirt sleeves, trying to soothe the most hideous monstrosity she had ever seen--a misshapen, hairy animal looking like a monkey, like a rat, like half a dozen repulsive animals, and not at all like a human being. The thing was clawing and growling and grinding its teeth. At sight of Susan it fixed malevolent eyes on her and began to snap its teeth at her. "Don't mind him," said O'Ryan. "He's only acting up queer." Susan sat not daring to look at the thing lest she should show her aversion, and not knowing how to state her business when the thing was so clamorous, so fiendishly uproarious. After a time O'Ryan succeeded in quieting it. He seemed to think some explanation was necessary. He began abruptly, his gaze tenderly on the awful creature, his child, lying quiet now in his arms: "My wife--she died some time ago--died when the baby here was born." "You spend a good deal of time with it," said Susan. "All I can spare from my job. I'm afraid to trust him to anybody, he being kind of different. Then, too, I _like_ to take care of him. You see, it's all I've got to remember _her_ by. I'm kind o' tryin' to do what _she'd_ want did." His lips quivered. He looked at his monstrous child. "Yes, I _like_ settin' here, thinkin'--and takin' care of him." This brute of a slave driver, this cruel tyrant over the poor and the helpless--yet, thus tender and gentle--thus capable of the enormous sacrifice of a great, pure love! "_You've_ got a way of lookin' out of the eyes that's like her," he went on--and Susan had the secret of his strange forbearance toward her. "I suppose you've come about being let off on the assessment?" Already he knew the whole story of Rod and the hospital. "Yes--that's why I'm bothering you," said she. "You needn't pay but five-fifty. I can only let you off a dollar and a half--my bit and the captain's. We pass the rest on up--and we don't dare let you off." "Oh, I can make the money," Susan said hastily. "Thank you, Mr. O'Ryan, but I don't want to get anyone into trouble." "We've got the right to knock off one dollar and a half," said O'Ryan. "But if we let you off the other, the word would get up to--to wherever the graft goes--and they'd send down along the line, to have merry hell raised with us. The whole thing's done systematic, and they won't take no excuses, won't allow no breaks in the system nowhere. You can see for yourself--it'd go to smash if they did." "Somebody must get a lot of money," said Susan. "Oh, it's dribbled out--and as you go higher up, I don't suppose them that gets it knows where it comes from. The whole world's nothing but graft, anyhow. Sorry I can't let you off." The thing in his lap had recovered strength for a fresh fit of malevolence. It was tearing at its hairy, hideous face with its claws and was howling and shrieking, the big father gently trying to soothe it--for _her_ sake. Susan got away quickly. She halted in the deserted hall and gave way to a spasm of dry sobbing--an overflow of all the emotions that had been accumulating within her. In this world of noxious and repulsive weeds, what sudden startling upshooting of what beautiful flowers! Flowers where you would expect to find the most noisome weeds of all, and vilest weeds where you would expect to find flowers. What a world! However--the fifty a week must be got--and she must be business-like. Most of the girls who took to the streets came direct from the tenements of New York, of the foreign cities or of the factory towns of New England. And the world over, tenement house life is an excellent school for the life of the streets. It prevents modesty from developing; it familiarizes the eye, the ear, the nerves, to all that is brutal; it takes away from a girl every feeling that might act as a restraining influence except fear--fear of maternity, of disease, of prison. Thus, practically all the other girls had the advantage over Susan. Soon after they definitely abandoned respectability and appeared in the streets frankly members of the profession, they became bold and rapacious. They had an instinctive feeling that their business was as reputable as any other, more reputable than many held in high repute, that it would be most reputable if it paid better and were less uncertain. They respected themselves for all things, talk to the contrary in the search for the sympathy and pity most human beings crave. They despised the men as utterly as the men despised them. They bargained as shamelessly as the men. Even those who did not steal still felt that stealing was justifiable; for, in the streets the sex impulse shows stripped of all disguise, shows as a brutal male appetite, and the female feels that her yielding to it entitles her to all she can compel and cozen and crib. Susan had been unfitted for her profession--as for all active, unsheltered life--by her early training. The point of view given us in our childhood remains our point of view as to all the essentials of life to the end. Reason, experience, the influence of contact with many phases of the world, may change us seemingly, but the under-instinct remains unchanged. Thus, Susan had never lost, and never would lose her original repugnance; not even drink had ever given her the courage to approach men or to bargain with them. Her shame was a false shame, like most of the shame in the world--a lack of courage, not a lack of desire--and, however we may pretend, there can be no virtue in abstinence merely through cowardice. Still, if there be merit in shrinking, even when the cruelest necessities were goading, that merit was hers in full measure. As a matter of reason and sense, she admitted that the girls who respected themselves and practiced their profession like merchants of other kinds were right, were doing what she ought to do. Anyhow, it was absurd to practice a profession half-heartedly. To play your game, whatever it might be, for all there was in it--that was the obvious first principle of success. Yet--she remained laggard and squeamish. What she had been unable to do for herself, to save herself from squalor, from hunger, from cold, she was now able to do for the sake of another--to help the man who had enabled her to escape from that marriage, more hideous than anything she had endured since, or ever could be called upon to endure--to save him from certain neglect and probable death in the "charity" hospital. Not by merely tolerating the not too impossible men who joined her without sign from her, and not by merely accepting what they gave, could fifty dollars a week be made. She must dress herself in franker avowal of her profession, must look as expensive as her limited stock of clothing, supplemented by her own taste, would permit. She must flirt, must bargain, must ask for presents, must make herself agreeable, must resort to the crude female arts--which, however, are subtle enough to convince the self-enchanted male even in face of the discouraging fact of the mercenary arrangement. She must crush down her repugnance, must be active, not simply passive--must get the extra dollars by stimulating male appetites, instead of simply permitting them to satisfy themselves. She must seem rather the eager mistress than the reluctant and impatient wife. And she did abruptly change her manner. There was in her, as her life had shown, a power of endurance, an ability to sacrifice herself in order to do the thing that seemed necessary, and to do it without shuffling or whining. Whatever else her career had done for her, it undoubtedly had strengthened this part of her nature. And now the result of her training showed. With her superior intelligence for the first time free to make the best of her opportunities, she abruptly became equal to the most consummate of her sisters in that long line of her sister-panders to male appetites which extends from the bought wife or mistress or fiancee of the rich grandee down all the social ranks to the wife or street girl cozening for a tipsy day-laborer's earnings on a Saturday night and the work girl teasing her "steady company" toward matrimony on the park bench or in the dark entry of the tenement. She was able to pay Clara back in less than ten days. In Spenser's second week at the hospital she had him moved to better quarters and better attendance at thirty dollars a week. Although she had never got rid of her most unprofessional habit of choosing and rejecting, there had been times when need forced her into straits where her lot seemed to her almost as low as that of the slave-like wives of the tenements, made her almost think she would be nearly as well off were she the wife, companion, butt, servant and general vent to some one dull and distasteful provider of a poor living. But now she no longer felt either degraded or heart sick and heart weary. And when he passed the worst crisis her spirits began to return. And when Roderick should be well, and the sketch written--and an engagement got--Ah, then! Life indeed--life, at last! Was it this hope that gave her the strength to fight down and conquer the craving for opium? Or was it the necessity of keeping her wits and of saving every cent? Or was it because the opium habit, like the drink habit, like every other habit, is a matter of a temperament far more than it is a matter of an appetite--and that she had the appetite but not the temperament? No doubt this had its part in the quick and complete victory. At any rate, fight and conquer she did. The strongest interest always wins. She had an interest stronger than love of opium--an interest that substituted itself for opium and for drink and supplanted them. Life indeed--life, at last! In his third week Rod began to round toward health. Einstein observed from the nurse's charts that Susan's visits were having an unfavorably exciting effect. He showed her the readings of temperature and pulse, and forbade her to stay longer than five minutes at each of her two daily visits. Also, she must not bring up any topic beyond the sickroom itself. One day Spenser greeted her with, "I'll feel better, now that I've got this off my mind." He held out to her a letter. "Take that to George Fitzalan. He's an old friend of mine--one I've done a lot for and never asked any favors of. He may be able to give you something fairly good, right away." Susan glanced penetratingly at him, saw he had been brooding over the source of the money that was being spent upon him. "Very well," said she, "I'll go as soon as I can." "Go this afternoon," said he with an invalid's fretfulness. "And when you come this evening you can tell me how you got on." "Very well. This afternoon. But you know, Rod, there's not a ghost of a chance." "I tell you Fitzalan's my friend. He's got some gratitude. He'll _do_ something." "I don't want you to get into a mood where you'll be awfully depressed if I should fail." "But you'll not fail." It was evident that Spenser, untaught by experience and flattered into exaggerating his importance by the solicitude and deference of doctors and nurses to a paying invalid, had restored to favor his ancient enemy--optimism, the certain destroyer of any man who does not shake it off. She went away, depressed and worried. When she should come back with the only possible news, what would be the effect upon him--and he still in a critical stage? As the afternoon must be given to business, she decided to go straight uptown, hoping to catch Fitzalan before he went out to lunch. And twenty minutes after making this decision she was sitting in the anteroom of a suite of theatrical offices in the Empire Theater building. The girl in attendance had, as usual, all the airs little people assume when they are in close, if menial, relations with a person who, being important to them, therefore fills their whole small horizon. She deigned to take in Susan's name and the letter. Susan seated herself at the long table and with the seeming of calmness that always veiled her in her hours of greatest agitation, turned over the pages of the theatrical journals and magazines spread about in quantity. After perhaps ten silent and uninterrupted minutes a man hurried in from the outside hall, strode toward the frosted glass door marked "Private." With his hand reaching for the knob he halted, made an impatient gesture, plumped himself down at the long table--at its distant opposite end. With a sweep of the arm he cleared a space wherein he proceeded to spread papers from his pocket and to scribble upon them furiously. When Susan happened to glance at him, his head was bent so low and his straw hat was tilted so far forward that she could not see his face. She observed that he was dressed attractively in an extremely light summer suit of homespun; his hands were large and strong and ruddy--the hands of an artist, in good health. Her glance returned to the magazine. After a few minutes she looked up. She was startled to find that the man was giving her a curious, searching inspection--and that he was Brent, the playwright--the same fascinating face, keen, cynical, amused--the same seeing eyes, that, in the Cafe Martin long ago, had made her feel as if she were being read to her most secret thought. She dropped her glance. His voice made her start. "It's been a long time since I've seen you," he was saying. She looked up, not believing it possible he was addressing her. But his gaze was upon her. Thus, she had not been mistaken in thinking she had seen recognition in his eyes. "Yes," she said, with a faint smile. "A longer time for you than for me," said he. "A good deal has happened to me," she admitted. "Are you on the stage?" "No. Not yet." The girl entered by way of the private door. "Miss Lenox--this way, please." She saw Brent, became instantly all smiles and bows. "Oh--Mr. Fitzalan doesn't know you're here, Mr. Brent," she cried. Then, to Susan, "Wait a minute." She was about to reënter the private office when Brent stopped her with, "Let Miss Lenox go in first. I don't wish to see Mr. Fitzalan yet." And he stood up, took off his hat, bowed gravely to Susan, said, "I'm glad to have seen you again." Susan, with some color forced into her old-ivory skin by nervousness and amazement, went into the presence of Fitzalan. As the now obsequious girl closed the door behind her, she found herself facing a youngish man with a remnant of hair that was little more than fuzz on the top of his head. His features were sharp, aggressive, rather hard. He might have sat for the typical successful American young man of forty--so much younger in New York than is forty elsewhere in the United States--and so much older. He looked at Susan with a pleasant sympathetic smile. "So," said he, "you're taking care of poor Spenser, are you? Tell him I'll try to run down to see him. I wish I could do something for him--something worth while, I mean. But--his request---- "Really, I've nothing of the kind. I couldn't possibly place you--at least, not at present--perhaps, later on----" "I understand," interrupted Susan. "He's very ill. It would help him greatly if you would write him a few lines, saying you'll give me a place at the first vacancy, but that it may not be soon. I'll not trouble you again. I want the letter simply to carry him over the crisis." Fitzalan hesitated, rubbed his fuzzy crown with his jeweled hand. "Tell him that," he said, finally. "I'm rather careful about writing letters. . . . Yes, say to him what you suggested, as if it was from me." "The letter will make all the difference between his believing and not believing," urged Susan. "He has great admiration and liking for you--thinks you would do anything for him." Fitzalan frowned; she saw that her insistence had roused--or, rather, had strengthened--suspicion. "Really--you must excuse me. What I've heard about him the past year has not---- "But, no matter, I can't do it. You'll let me know how he's getting on? Good day." And he gave her that polite yet positive nod of dismissal which is a necessary part of the equipment of men of affairs, constantly beset as they are and ever engaged in the battle to save their chief asset, time, from being wasted. Susan looked at him--a straight glance from gray eyes, a slight smile hovering about her scarlet lips. He reddened, fussed with the papers before him on the desk from which he had not risen. She opened the door, closed it behind her. Brent was seated with his back full to her and was busy with his scribbling. She passed him, went on to the outer door. She was waiting for his voice; she knew it would come. "Miss Lenox!" As she turned he was advancing. His figure, tall and slim and straight, had the ease of movement which proclaims the man who has been everywhere and so is at home anywhere. He held out a card. "I wish to see you on business. You can come at three this afternoon?" "Yes," said Susan. "Thanks," said he, bowing and returning to the table. She went on into the hall, the card between her fingers. At the elevator, she stood staring at the name--Robert Brent--as if it were an inscription in a forgotten language. She was so absorbed, so dazed that she did not ring the bell. The car happened to stop at that floor; she entered as if it were dark. And, in the street, she wandered many blocks down Broadway before she realized where she was. She left the elevated and walked eastward through Grand Street. She was filled with a new and profound dissatisfaction. She felt like one awakening from a hypnotic trance. The surroundings, inanimate and animate, that had become endurable through custom abruptly resumed their original aspect of squalor and ugliness of repulsion and tragedy. A stranger--the ordinary, unobservant, feebly imaginative person, going along those streets would have seen nothing but tawdriness and poverty. Susan, experienced, imaginative, saw _all_--saw what another would have seen only after it was pointed out, and even then but dimly. And that day her vision was no longer staled and deadened by familiarity, but with vision fresh and with nerves acute. The men--the women--and, saddest, most tragic of all, the children! When she entered her room her reawakened sensitiveness, the keener for its long repose, for the enormous unconscious absorption of impressions of the life about her--this morbid sensitiveness of the soul a-clash with its environment reached its climax. As she threw open the door, she shrank back before the odor--the powerful, sensual, sweet odor of chypre so effective in covering the bad smells that came up from other flats and from the noisome back yards. The room itself was neat and clean and plain, with not a few evidences of her personal taste--in the blending of colors, in the selection of framed photographs on the walls. The one she especially liked was the largest--a nude woman lying at full length, her head supported by her arm, her face gazing straight out of the picture, upon it a baffling expression--of sadness, of cynicism, of amusement perhaps, of experience, yet of innocence. It hung upon the wall opposite the door. When she saw this picture in the department store, she felt at once a sympathy between that woman and herself, felt she was for the first time seeing another soul like her own, one that would have understood her strange sense of innocence in the midst of her own defiled and depraved self--a core of unsullied nature. Everyone else in the world would have mocked at this notion of a something within--a true self to which all that seemed to be her own self was as external as her clothing; this woman of the photograph would understand. So, there she hung--Susan's one prized possession. The question of dressing for this interview with Brent was most important. Susan gave it much thought before she began to dress, changed her mind again and again in the course of dressing. Through all her vicissitudes she had never lost her interest in the art of dress or her skill at it--and despite the unfavorable surroundings she had steadily improved; any woman anywhere would instantly have recognized her as one of those few favored and envied women who know how to get together a toilet. She finally chose the simplest of the half dozen summer dresses she had made for herself--a plain white lawn, with a short skirt. It gave her an appearance of extreme youth, despite her height and the slight stoop in her shoulders--a mere drooping that harmonized touchingly with the young yet weary expression of her face. To go with the dress she had a large hat of black rough straw with a very little white trimming on it. With this large black hat bewitchingly set upon her gracefully-done dark wavy hair, her sad, dreamy eyes, her pallid skin, her sweet-bitter mouth with its rouged lips seemed to her to show at their best. She felt that nothing was quite so effective for her skin as a white dress. In other colors--though she did not realize--the woman of bought kisses showed more distinctly--never brazenly as in most of the girls, but still unmistakably. In white she took on a glamour of melancholy--and the human countenance is capable of no expression so universally appealing as the look of melancholy that suggests the sadness underlying all life, the pain that pays for pleasure, the pain that pays and gets no pleasure, the sorrow of the passing of all things, the faint foreshadow of the doom awaiting us all. She washed the rouge from her lips, studied the effect in the glass. "No," she said aloud, "without it I feel like a hypocrite--and I don't look half so well." And she put the rouge on again--the scarlet dash drawn startlingly across her strange, pallid face. CHAPTER XII AT three that afternoon she stood in the vestibule of Brent's small house in Park Avenue overlooking the oblong of green between East Thirty-seventh Street and East Thirty-eighth. A most reputable looking Englishman in evening dress opened the door; from her reading and her theater-going she knew that this was a butler. He bowed her in. The entire lower floor was given to an entrance hall, done in plain black walnut, almost lofty of ceiling, and with a grand stairway leading to the upper part of the house. There was a huge fireplace to the right; a mirror filled the entire back wall; a broad low seat ran all round the room. In one corner, an enormous urn of dark pottery; in another corner, a suit of armor, the helmet, the breastplate and the gauntlets set with gold of ancient lackluster. The butler left her there and ascended the polished but dead-finished stairway noiselessly. Susan had never before been in so grand a room. The best private house she had ever seen was Wright's in Sutherland; and while everybody else in Sutherland thought it magnificent, she had felt that there was something wrong, what she had not known. The grandiose New York hotels and restaurants were more showy and more pretentious far than this interior of Brent's. But her unerring instinct of those born with good taste knew at first view of them that they were simply costly; there were beautiful things in them, fine carvings and paintings and tapestries, but personality was lacking. And without personality there can be no unity; without unity there can be no harmony--and without harmony, no beauty. Looking round her now, she had her first deep draught of esthetic delight in interior decoration. She loved this quiet dignity, this large simplicity--nothing that obtruded, nothing that jarred, everything on the same scale of dark coloring and large size. She admired the way the mirror, without pretense of being anything but a mirror, enhanced the spaciousness of the room and doubled the pleasure it gave by offering another and different view of it. Last of all Susan caught sight of herself--a slim, slightly stooped figure, its white dress and its big black hat with white trimmings making it stand out strongly against the rather somber background. In a curiously impersonal way her own sad, wistful face interested her. A human being's face is a summary of his career. No man can realize at a thought what he is, can epitomize in just proportion what has been made of him by experience of the multitude of moments of which life is composed. But in some moods and in some lights we do get such an all-comprehending view of ourselves in looking at our own faces. As she had instinctively felt, there was a world of meaning in the contrast between her pensive brow above melancholy eyes and the blood-red line of her rouged lips. The butler descended. "Mr. Brent is in his library, on the fourth floor," said he. "Will you kindly step this way, ma'am?" Instead of indicating the stairway, he went to the panel next the chimney piece. She saw that it was a hidden door admitting to an elevator. She entered; the door closed; the elevator ascended rapidly. When it came to a stop the door opened and she was facing Brent. "Thank you for coming," said he, with almost formal courtesy. For all her sudden shyness, she cast a quick but seeing look round. It was an overcast day; the soft floods of liquid light--the beautiful light of her beloved City of the Sun--poured into the big room through an enormous window of clear glass which formed the entire north wall. Round the other walls from floor almost to lofty ceiling were books in solid rows; not books with ornamental bindings, but books for use, books that had been and were being used. By way of furniture there were an immense lounge, wide and long and deep, facing the left chimney piece, an immense table desk facing the north light, three great chairs with tall backs, one behind the table, one near the end of the table, the third in the corner farthest from the window; a grand piano, open, with music upon its rack, and a long carved seat at its keyboard. The huge window had a broad sill upon which was built a generous window garden fresh and lively with bright flowers. The woodwork, the ceiling, the furniture were of mahogany. The master of this splendid simplicity was dressed in a blue house suit of some summer material like linen. He was smoking a cigarette, and offered her one from the great carved wood box filled with them on the table desk. "Thanks," said she. And when she had lighted it and was seated facing him as he sat at his desk, she felt almost at her ease. After all, while his gaze was penetrating, it was also understanding; we do not mind being unmasked if the unmasker at once hails us as brother. Brent's eyes seemed to say to her, "Human!--like me." She smoked and let her gaze wander from her books to window garden, from window garden to piano. "You play?" said he. "A very little. Enough for accompaniments to simple songs." "You sing?" "Simple songs. I've had but a few lessons from a small-town teacher." "Let me hear." She went to the piano, laid her cigarette in a tray ready beside the music rack. She gave him the "Gipsy Queen," which she liked because it expressed her own passion of revolt against restraints of every conventional kind and her love for the open air and open sky. He somehow took away all feeling of embarrassment; she felt so strongly that he understood and was big enough not to have it anywhere in him to laugh at anything sincere. When she finished she resumed her cigarette and returned to the chair near his. "It's as I thought," said he. "Your voice can be trained--to speak, I mean. I don't know as to its singing value. . . . Have you good health?" "I never have even colds. Yes, I'm strong." "You'll need it." "I have needed it," said she. Into her face came the sad, bitter expression with its curious relief of a faint cynical smile. He leaned back in his chair and looked at her through a cloud of smoke. She saw that his eyes were not gray, as she had thought, but brown, a hazel brown with points of light sparkling in the irises and taking away all the suggestion of weakness and sentimentality that makes pure brown eyes unsatisfactory in a man. He said slowly: "When I saw you--in the Martin--you were on the way down. You went, I see." She nodded. "I'm still there." "You like it? You wish to stay?" She shook her head smilingly. "No, but I can stay if it's necessary. I've discovered that I've got the health and the nerves for anything." "That's a great discovery. . . . Well, you'll soon be on your way up. . . . Do you wish to know why I spoke to you this morning?--Why I remembered you?" "Why?" "Because of the expression of your eyes--when your face is in repose." She felt no shyness--and no sense of necessity of responding to a compliment, for his tone forbade any thought of flattery. She lowered her gaze to conceal the thoughts his words brought--the memories of the things that had caused her eyes to look as Rod and now Brent said. "Such an expression," the playwright went on, "must mean character. I am sick and tired of the vanity of these actresses who can act just enough never to be able to learn to act well. I'm going to try an experiment with you. I've tried it several times but--No matter. I'm not discouraged. I never give up. . . . Can you stand being alone?" "I spend most of my time alone. I prefer it." "I thought so. Yes--you'll do. Only the few who can stand being alone ever get anywhere. Everything worth while is done alone. The big battle--it isn't fought in the field, but by the man sitting alone in his tent, working it all out. The bridge--the tunnel through the great mountains--the railway--the huge business enterprise--all done by the man alone, thinking, plotting to the last detail. It's the same way with the novel, the picture, the statue, the play--writing it, acting it--all done by someone alone, shut in with his imagination and his tools. I saw that you were one of the lonely ones. All you need is a chance. You'd surely get it, sooner or later. Perhaps I can bring it a little sooner. . . . How much do you need to live on?" "I must have fifty dollars a week--if I go on at--as I am now. If you wish to take all my time--then, forty." He smiled in a puzzled way. "The police," she explained. "I need ten----" "Certainly--certainly," cried he. "I understand--perfectly. How stupid of me! I'll want all your time. So it's to be forty dollars a week. When can you begin?" Susan reflected. "I can't go into anything that'll mean a long time," she said. "I'm waiting for a man--a friend of mine to get well. Then we're going to do something together." Brent made an impatient gesture. "An actor? Well, I suppose I can get him something to do. But I don't want you to be under the influence of any of these absurd creatures who think they know what acting is--when they merely know how to dress themselves in different suits of clothes, and strut themselves about the stage. They'd rather die than give up their own feeble, foolish little identities. I'll see that your actor friend is taken care of, but you must keep away from him--for the time at least." "He's all I've got. He's an old friend." "You--care for him?" "I used to. And lately I found him again--after we had been separated a long time. We're going to help each other up." "Oh--he's down and out oh? Why?" "Drink--and hard luck." "Not hard luck. That helps a man. It has helped you. It has made you what you are." "What am I?" asked Susan. Brent smiled mysteriously. "That's what we're going to find out," said he. "There's no human being who has ever had a future unless he or she had a past--and the severer the past the more splendid the future." Susan was attending with all her senses. This man was putting into words her own inarticulate instincts. "A past," he went on in his sharp, dogmatic way, "either breaks or makes. You go into the crucible a mere ore, a possibility. You come out slag or steel." He was standing now, looking down at her with quizzical eyes. "You're about due to leave the pot," said he. "And I've hopes that you're steel. If not----" He shrugged his shoulders--"You'll have had forty a week for your time, and I'll have gained useful experience." Susan gazed at him as if she doubted her eyes and ears. "What do you want me to do?" she presently inquired. "Learn the art of acting--which consists of two parts. First, you must learn to act--thousands of the profession do that. Second, you must learn not to act--and so far I know there aren't a dozen in the whole world who've got that far along. I've written a play I think well of. I want to have it done properly--it, and several other plays I intend to write. I'm going to give you a chance to become famous--better still, great." Susan looked at him incredulously. "Do you know who I am?" she asked at last. "Certainly." Her eyes lowered, the faintest tinge of red changed the amber-white pallor of her cheeks, her bosom rose and fell quickly. "I don't mean," he went on, "that I know any of the details of your experience. I only know the results as they are written in your face. The details are unimportant. When I say I know who you are, I mean I know that you are a woman who has suffered, whose heart has been broken by suffering, but not her spirit. Of where you came from or how you've lived, I know nothing. And it's none of my business--no more than it's the public's business where _I_ came from and how I've learned to write plays." Well, whether he was guessing any part of the truth or all of it, certainly what she had said about the police and now this sweeping statement of his attitude toward her freed her of the necessity of disclosing herself. She eagerly tried to dismiss the thoughts that had been making her most uneasy. She said: "You think I can learn to act?" "That, of course," replied he. "Any intelligent person can learn to act--and also most persons who have no more intelligence in their heads than they have in their feet. I'll guarantee you some sort of career. What I'm interested to find out is whether you can learn _not_ to act. I believe you can. But----" He laughed in self-mockery. "I've made several absurd mistakes in that direction. . . . You have led a life in which most women become the cheapest sort of liars--worse liars even than is the usual respectable person, because they haven't the restraint of fearing loss of reputation. Why is it you have not become a liar?" Susan laughed. "I'm sure I don't know. Perhaps because lying is such a tax on the memory. May I have another cigarette?" He held the match for her. "You don't paint--except your lips," he went on, "though you have no color. And you don't wear cheap finery. And while you use a strong scent, it's not one of the cheap and nasty kind--it's sensual without being slimy. And you don't use the kind of words one always hears in your circle." Susan looked immensely relieved. "Then you _do_ know who I am!" she cried. "You didn't suppose I thought you fresh from a fashionable boarding school, did you? I'd hardly look there for an actress who could act. You've got experience--experience--experience--written all over your face--sadly, satirically, scornfully, gayly, bitterly. And what I want is experience--not merely having been through things, but having been through them understandingly. You'll help me in my experiment?" He looked astonished, then irritated, when the girl, instead of accepting eagerly, drew back in her chair and seemed to be debating. His irritation showed still more plainly when she finally said: "That depends on him. And he--he thinks you don't like him." "What's his name?" said Brent in his abrupt, intense fashion. "What's his name?" "Spenser--Roderick Spenser." Brent looked vague. "He used to be on the _Herald_. He writes plays." "Oh--yes. I remember. He's a weak fool." Susan abruptly straightened, an ominous look in eyes and brow. Brent made an impatient gesture. "Beg pardon. Why be sensitive about him? Obviously because you know I'm right. I said fool, not ass. He's clever, but ridiculously vain. I don't dislike him. I don't care anything about him--or about anybody else in the world. No man does who amounts to anything. With a career it's as Jesus said--leave father and mother, husband and wife--land, ox everything--and follow it." "What for?" said Susan. "To save your soul! To be a somebody; to be strong. To be able to give to anybody and everybody--whatever they need. To be happy." "Are you happy?" "No," he admitted. "But I'm growing in that direction. . . . Don't waste yourself on Stevens--I beg pardon, Spenser. You're bigger than that. He's a small man with large dreams--a hopeless misfit. Small dreams for small men; large dreams for--" he laughed--"you and me--our sort." Susan echoed his laugh, but faint-heartedly. "I've watched your name in the papers," she said, sincerely unconscious of flattery. "I've seen you grow more and more famous. But--if there had been anything in me, would I have gone down and down?" "How old are you?" "About twenty-one." "Only twenty-one and that look in your face! Magnificent! I don't believe I'm to be disappointed this time. You ask why you've gone down! You haven't. You've gone _through_." "Down," she insisted, sadly. "Nonsense! The soot'll rub off the steel." She lifted her head eagerly. Her own secret thought put into words. "You can't make steel without soot and dirt. You can't make anything without dirt. That's why the nice, prim, silly world's full of cabinets exhibiting little chips of raw material polished up neatly in one or two spots. That's why there are so few men and women--and those few have had to make themselves, or are made by accident. You're an accident, I suppose. The women who amount to anything usually are. The last actress I tried to do anything with might have become a somebody if it hadn't been for one thing: She had a hankering for respectability--a yearning to be a society person--to be thought well of by society people. It did for her." "I'll not sink on that rock," said Susan cheerfully. "No secret longing for social position?" "None. Even if I would, I couldn't." "That's one heavy handicap out of the way. But I'll not let myself begin to hope until I find out whether you've got incurable and unteachable vanity. If you have--then, no hope. If you haven't--there's a fighting chance." "You forget my compact," Susan reminded him. "Oh--the lover--Spenser." Brent reflected, strolled to the big window, his hands deep in his pockets. Susan took advantage of his back to give way to her own feelings of utter amazement and incredulity. She certainly was not dreaming. And the man gazing out at the window was certainly flesh and blood--a great man, if voluble and eccentric. Perhaps to act and speak as one pleased was one of the signs of greatness, one of its perquisites. Was he amusing himself with her? Was he perchance taken with her physically and employing these extraordinary methods as ways of approach? She had seen many peculiarities of sex-approach in men--some grotesque, many terrible, all beyond comprehension. Was this another such? He wheeled suddenly, surprised her eyes upon him. He burst out laughing, and she felt that he had read her thoughts. However, he merely said: "Have you anything to suggest--about Spenser?" "I can't even tell him of your offer now. He's very ill--and sensitive about you." "About me? How ridiculous! I'm always coming across men I don't know who are full of venom toward me. I suppose he thinks I crowded him. No matter. You're sure you're not fancying yourself in love with him?" "No, I am not in love with him. He has changed--and so have I." He smiled at her. "Especially in the last hour?" he suggested. "I had changed before that. I had been changing right along. But I didn't realize it fully until you talked with me--no, until after you gave me your card this morning." "You saw a chance--a hope--eh?" She nodded. "And at once became all nerves and courage. . . . As to Spenser--I'll have some play carpenter sent to collaborate with him and set him up in the play business. You know it's a business as well as an art. And the chromos sell better than the oil paintings--except the finest ones. It's my chromos that have earned me the means and the leisure to try oils." "He'd never consent. He's very proud." "Vain, you mean. Pride will consent to anything as a means to an end. It's vanity that's squeamish and haughty. He needn't know." "But I couldn't discuss any change with him until he's much better." "I'll send the play carpenter to him--get Fitzalan to send one of his carpenters." Brent smiled. "You don't think _he_'ll hang back because of the compact, do you?" Susan flushed painfully. "No," she admitted in a low voice. Brent was still smiling at her, and the smile was cynical. But his tone soothed where his words would have wounded, as he went on: "A man of his sort--an average, 'there-are-two-kinds-of-women, good-and-bad' sort of man--has but one use for a woman of your sort." "I know that," said Susan. "Do you mind it?" "Not much. I'd not mind it at all if I felt that I was somebody." Brent put his hand on her shoulder. "You'll do, Miss Lenox," he said with quiet heartiness. "You may not be so big a somebody as you and I would like. But you'll count as one, all right." She looked at him with intense appeal in her eyes. "Why?" she said earnestly. "_Why_ do you do this?" He smiled gravely down at her--as gravely as Brent could smile--with the quizzical suggestion never absent from his handsome face, so full of life and intelligence. "I've been observing your uneasiness," said he. "Now listen. It would be impossible for you to judge me, to understand me. You are young and as yet small. I am forty, and have lived twenty-five of my forty years intensely. So, don't fall into the error of shallow people and size me up by your own foolish little standards. Do you see what I mean?" Susan's candid face revealed her guilt. "Yes," said she, rather humbly. "I see you do understand," said he. "And that's a good sign. Most people, hearing what I said, would have disregarded it as merely my vanity, would have gone on with their silly judging, would have set me down as a conceited ass who by some accident had got a reputation. But to proceed--I have not chosen you on impulse. Long and patient study has made me able to judge character by the face, as a horse dealer can judge horses by looking at them. I don't need to read every line of a book to know whether it's wise or foolish, worth while or not. I don't need to know a human being for years or for hours or for minutes even, before I can measure certain things. I measured you. It's like astronomy. An astronomer wants to get the orbit of a star. He takes its position twice--and from the two observations he can calculate the orbit to the inch. I've got three observations of your orbit. Enough--and to spare." "I shan't misunderstand again," said Susan. "One thing more," insisted Brent. "In our relations, we are to be not man and woman, but master and pupil. I shan't waste your time with any--other matters." It was Susan's turn to laugh. "That's your polite way of warning me not to waste any of your time with--other matters." "Precisely," conceded he. "A man in my position--a man in any sort of position, for that matter--is much annoyed by women trying to use their sex with him. I wished to make it clear at the outset that----" "That I could gain nothing by neglecting the trade of actress for the trade of woman," interrupted Susan. "I understand perfectly." He put out his hand. "I see that at least we'll get on together. I'll have Fitzalan send the carpenter to your friend at once." "Today!" exclaimed Susan, in surprise and delight. "Why not?" He arranged paper and pen. "Sit here and write Spenser's address, and your own. Your salary begins with today. I'll have my secretary mail you a check. And as soon as I can see you again, I'll send you a telegram. Meanwhile--" He rummaged among a lot of paper bound plays on the table "Here's 'Cavalleria Rusticana.' Read it with a view to yourself as either _Santuzzao_ or _Lola_. Study her first entrance--what you would do with it. Don't be frightened. I expect nothing from you--nothing whatever. I'm glad you know nothing about acting. You'll have the less to unlearn." They had been moving towards the elevator. He shook hands again and, after adjusting the mechanism for the descent, closed the door. As it was closing she saw in his expression that his mind had already dismissed her for some one of the many other matters that crowded his life. CHAPTER XIII THE Susan Lenox who left Delancey Street at half past two that afternoon to call upon Robert Brent was not the Susan Lenox who returned to Delancey Street at half-past five. A man is wandering, lost in a cave, is groping this way and that in absolute darkness, with flagging hope and fainting strength--has reached the point where he wonders at his own folly in keeping on moving--is persuading himself that the sensible thing would be to lie down and give up. He sees a gleam of light. Is it a reality? Is it an illusion--one more of the illusions that have lured him on and on? He does not know; but instantly a fire sweeps through him, warming his dying strength into vigor. So it was with Susan. The pariah class--the real pariah class--does not consist of merely the women formally put beyond the pale for violations of conventional morality and the men with the brand of thief or gambler upon them. Our social, our industrial system has made it far vaster. It includes almost the whole population--all those who sell body or brain or soul in an uncertain market for uncertain hire, to gain the day's food and clothing, the night's shelter. This vast mass floats hither and yon on the tides and currents of destiny. Now it halts, resting sluggishly in a dead calm; again it moves, sometimes slowly, sometimes under the lash of tempest. But it is ever the same vast inertia, with no particle of it possessing an aim beyond keeping afloat and alive. Susan had been an atom, a spray of weed, in this Sargasso Sea. If you observe a huge, unwieldy crowd so closely packed that nothing can be done with it and it can do nothing with itself, you will note three different types. There are the entirely inert--and they make up most of the crowd. They do not resist; they helplessly move this way and that as the chance waves of motion prompt. Of this type is the overwhelming majority of the human race. Here and there in the mass you will see examples of a second type. These are individuals who are restive and resentful under the sense of helplessness and impotence. They struggle now gently, now furiously. They thrust backward or forward or to one side. They thresh about. But nothing comes of their efforts beyond a brief agitation, soon dying away in ripples. The inertia of the mass and their own lack of purpose conquer them. Occasionally one of these grows so angry and so violent that the surrounding inertia quickens into purpose--the purpose of making an end of this agitation which is serving only to increase the general discomfort. And the agitator is trampled down, disappears, perhaps silently, perhaps with groan or shriek. Continue to look at this crowd, so pitiful, so terrible, such a melancholy waste of incalculable power--continue to observe and you may chance upon an example of the third type. You are likely at first to confuse the third type with the second, for they seem to be much alike. Here and there, of the resentful strugglers, will be one whose resentment is intelligent. He struggles, but it is not aimless struggle. He has seen or suspected in a definite direction a point where he would be more or less free, perhaps entirely free. He realizes how he is hemmed in, realizes how difficult, how dangerous, will be his endeavor to get to that point. And he proceeds to try to minimize or overcome the difficulties, the dangers. He struggles now gently, now earnestly, now violently--but always toward his fixed objective. He is driven back, to one side, is almost overwhelmed. He causes commotions that threaten to engulf him, and must pause or retreat until they have calmed. You may have to watch him long before you discover that, where other strugglers have been aimless, he aims and resolves. And little by little he gains, makes progress toward his goal--and once in a long while one such reaches that goal. It is triumph, success. Susan, young, inexperienced, dazed; now too despondent, now too hopeful; now too gentle and again too infuriated--Susan had been alternating between inertia and purposeless struggle. Brent had given her the thing she lacked--had given her a definite, concrete, tangible purpose. He had shown her the place where, if she should arrive, she might be free of that hideous slavery of the miserable mass; and he had inspired her with the hope that she could reach it. And that was the Susan Lenox who came back to the little room in Delancey Street at half-past five. Curiously, while she was thinking much about Brent, she was thinking even more about Burlingham--about their long talks on the show boat and in their wanderings in Louisville and Cincinnati. His philosophy, his teachings--the wisdom he had, but was unable to apply--began to come back to her. It was not strange that she should remember it, for she had admired him intensely and had listened to his every word, and she was then at the time when the memory takes its clearest and strongest impressions. The strangeness lay in the suddenness with which Burlingham, so long dead, suddenly came to life, changed from a sad and tender memory to a vivid possibility, advising her, helping her, urging her on. Clara, dressed to go to dinner with her lover, was waiting to arrange about their meeting to make together the usual rounds in the evening. "I've got an hour before I'm due at the hospital," said Susan. "Let's go down to Kelly's for a drink." While they were going and as they sat in the clean little back room of Kelly's well ordered and select corner saloon, Clara gave her all the news she had gathered in an afternoon of visits among their acquaintances--how, because of a neighborhood complaint, there was to be a fake raid on Gussie's opium joint at midnight; that Mazie had caught a frightful fever; and that Nettie was dying in Governeur of the stab in the stomach her lover had given her at a ball three nights before; that the police had raised the tariff for sporting houses, and would collect seventy-five and a hundred a month protection money where the charge had been twenty-five and fifty--the plea was that the reformers, just elected and hoping for one term only, were compelling a larger fund from vice than the old steady year-in-and-year-out ruling crowd. "And they may raise _us_ to fifteen a week," said Clara, "though I doubt it. They'll not cut off their nose to spite their face. If they raised the rate for the streets they'd drive two-thirds of the girls back to the factories and sweat shops. You're not listening, Lorna. What's up?" "Nothing." "Your fellow's not had a relapse?" "No--nothing." "Need some money? I can lend you ten. I did have twenty, but I gave Sallie and that little Jew girl who's her side partner ten for the bail bondsman. They got pinched last night for not paying up to the police. They've gone crazy about that prize fighter--at least, he thinks he is--that Joe O'Mara, and they're giving him every cent they make. It's funny about Sallie. She's a Catholic and goes to mass regular. And she keeps straight on Sunday--no money'll tempt her--I've seen it tried. Do you want the ten?" "No. I've got plenty." "We must look in at that Jolly Rovers' ball tonight. There'll be a lot of fellows with money there. "We can sure pull off something pretty good. Anyhow, we'll have fun. But you don't care for the dances. Well, they are a waste of time. And because the men pay for a few bum drinks and dance with a girl, they don't want to give up anything more. How's she to live, I want to know?" "Would you like to get out of this, Clara?" interrupted Susan, coming out of her absent-mindedness. "Would I! But what's the use of talking?" "But I mean, would you _really?_" "Oh--if there was something better. But is there? I don't see how I'd be as well off, respectable. As I said to the rescue woman, what is there in it for a 'reclaimed' girl, as they call it? When they ask a man to reform they can offer him something--and he can go on up and up. But not for girls. Nothing doing but charity and pity and the second table and the back door. I can make more money at this and have a better time, as long as my looks last. And I've turned down already a couple of chances to marry--men that wouldn't have looked at me if I'd been in a store or a factory or living out. I may marry." "Don't do that," said Susan. "Marriage makes brutes of men, and slaves of women." "You speak as if you knew." "I do," said Susan, in a tone that forbade question. "I ain't exactly stuck on the idea myself," pursued Clara. "And if I don't, why when my looks are gone, where am I worse off than I'd be at the same age as a working girl? If I have to get a job then, I can get it--and I'll not be broken down like the respectable women at thirty--those that work or those that slop round boozing and neglecting their children while their husbands work. Of course, there's chances against you in this business. But so there is in every business. Suppose I worked in a factory and lost a leg in the machinery, like that girl of Mantell, the bricklayer's? Suppose I get an awful disease--to hear some people talk you'd think there wasn't any chances of death or horrible diseases at respectable work. Why, how could anybody be worse off than if they got lung trouble and boils as big as your fist like those girls over in the tobacco factory?" "You needn't tell me about work," said Susan. "The streets are full of wrecks from work--and the hospitals--and the graveyard over on the Island. You can always go to that slavery. But I mean a respectable life, with everything better." "Has one of those swell women from uptown been after you?" "No. This isn't a pious pipe dream." "You sound like it. One of them swell silk smarties got at me when I was in the hospital with the fever. She was a bird--she was. She handed me a line of grand talk, and I, being sort of weak with sickness, took it in. Well, when she got right down to business, what did she want me to do? Be a dressmaker or a lady's maid. Me work twelve, fourteen, God knows how many hours--be too tired to have any fun--travel round with dead ones--be a doormat for a lot of cheap people that are tryin' to make out they ain't human like the rest of us. _Me!_ And when I said, 'No, thank you,' what do you think?" "Did she offer to get you a good home in the country?" said Susan. "That was it. The _country!_ The nerve of her! But I called her bluff, all right, all right. I says to her, 'Are you going to the country to live?' And she reared at _me_ daring to question _her_, and said she wasn't. 'You'd find it dead slow, wouldn't you?' says I. And she kind o' laughed and looked almost human. 'Then,' says I, 'no more am I going to the country. I'll take my chances in little old New York,' I says." "I should think so!" exclaimed Susan. "I'd like to be respectable, if I could afford it. But there's nothing in that game for poor girls unless they haven't got no looks to sell and have to sell the rest of themselves for some factory boss to get rich off of while they get poorer and weaker every day. And when they say 'God' to me, I say, 'Who's he? He must be somebody that lives up on Fifth Avenue. We ain't seen him down our way.'" "I mean, go on the stage," resumed Susan. "I wouldn't mind, if I could get in right. Everything in this world depends on getting in right. I was born four flights up in a tenement, and I've been in wrong ever since." "I was in wrong from the beginning, too," said Susan, thoughtfully. "In wrong--that's it exactly." Clara's eyes again became eager with the hope of a peep into the mystery of Susan's origin. But Susan went on, "Yes, I've always been in wrong. Always." "Oh, no," declared Clara. "You've got education--and manners--and ladylike instincts. I'm at home here. I was never so well off in my life. I'm, you might say, on my way up in the world. Most of us girls are--like the fellow that ain't got nothing to eat or no place to sleep and gets into jail--he's better off, ain't he? But you--you don't belong here at all." "I belong anywhere--and everywhere--and nowhere," said Susan. "Yes, I belong here. I've got a chance uptown. If it pans out, I'll let you in." Clara looked at her wistfully. Clara had a wicked temper when she was in liquor, and had the ordinary human proneness to lying, to mischievous gossip, and to utter laziness. The life she led, compelling cleanliness and neatness and a certain amount of thrift under penalty of instant ruin, had done her much good in saving her from going to pieces and becoming the ordinary sloven and drag on the energies of some man. "Lorna," she now said, "I do believe you like me a little." "More than that," Susan assured her. "You've saved me from being hard-hearted. I must go to the hospital. So long!" "How about this evening?" asked Clara. "I'm staying in. I've got something to do." "Well--I may be home early--unless I go to the ball." Susan was refused admittance at the hospital. Spenser, they said, had received a caller, had taxed his strength enough for the day. Nor would it be worth while to return in the morning. The same caller was coming again. Spenser had said she was to come in the afternoon. She received this cheerfully, yet not without a certain sense of hurt--which, however, did not last long. When she was admitted to Spenser the following afternoon, she faced him guiltily--for the thoughts Brent had set to bubbling and boiling in her. And her guilt showed in the tone of her greeting, in the reluctance and forced intensity of her kiss and embrace. She had compressed into the five most receptive years of a human being's life an experience that was, for one of her intelligence and education, equal to many times five years of ordinary life. And this experience had developed her instinct for concealing her deep feelings into a fixed habit. But it had not made her a liar--had not robbed her of her fundamental courage and self-respect which made her shrink in disdain from deceiving anyone who seemed to her to have the right to frankness. Spenser, she felt as always, had that right--this, though he had not been frank with her; still, that was a matter for his own conscience and did not affect her conscience as to what was courageous and honorable toward him. So, had he been observing, he must have seen that something was wrong. But he was far too excited about his own affairs to note her. "My luck's turned!" cried he, after kissing her with enthusiasm. "Fitzalan has sent Jack Sperry to me, and we're to collaborate on a play. I told you Fitz was the real thing." Susan turned hastily away to hide her telltale face. "Who's Sperry?" asked she, to gain time for self-control. "Oh, He's a play-smith--and a bear at it. He has knocked together half a dozen successes. He'll supply the trade experience that I lack, and Fitzalan will be sure to put on our piece." "You're a lot better--aren't you?" "Better? I'm almost well." He certainly had made a sudden stride toward health. By way of doing something progressive he had had a shave, and that had restored the look of youth to his face--or, rather, had uncovered it. A strong, handsome face it was--much handsomer than Brent's--and with the subtle, moral weakness of optimistic vanity well concealed. Yes, much handsomer than Brent's, which wasn't really handsome at all--yet was superbly handsomer, also--the handsomeness that comes from being through and through a somebody. She saw again why she had cared for Rod so deeply; but she also saw why she could not care again, at least not in that same absorbed, self-effacing way. Physical attraction--yes. And a certain remnant of the feeling of comradeship, too. But never again utter belief, worshipful admiration--or any other degree of belief or admiration beyond the mild and critical. She herself had grown. Also, Brent's penetrating and just analysis of Spenser had put clearly before her precisely what he was--precisely what she herself had been vaguely thinking of him. As he talked on and on of Sperry's visit and the new projects, she listened, looking at his character in the light Brent had turned upon it--Brent who had in a few brief moments turned such floods of light upon so many things she had been seeing dimly or not at all. Moderate prosperity and moderate adversity bring out the best there is in a man; the extreme of either brings out his worst. The actual man is the best there is in him, and not the worst, but it is one of the tragedies of life that those who have once seen his worst ever afterward have sense of it chiefly, and cannot return to the feeling they had for him when his worst was undreamed of. "I'm not in love with Brent," thought Susan. "But having known him, I can't ever any more care for Rod. He seems small beside Brent--and he _is_ small." Spenser in his optimistic dreaming aloud had reached a point where it was necessary to assign Susan a role in his dazzling career. "You'll not have to go on the stage," said he. "I'll look out for you. By next week Sperry and I will have got together a scenario for the play and when Sperry reads it to Fitzalan we'll get an advance of at least five hundred. So you and I will take a nice room and bath uptown--as a starter--and we'll be happy again--happier than before." "No, I'm going to support myself," said Susan promptly. "Trash!" cried Spenser, smiling tenderly at her. "Do you suppose I'd allow you to mix up in stage life? You've forgotten how jealous I am of you. You don't know what I've suffered since I've been here sick, brooding over what you're doing, to----" She laid her fingers on his lips. "What's the use of fretting about anything that has to be?" said she, smilingly. "I'm going to support myself. You may as well make up your mind to it." "Plenty of time to argue that out," said he, and his tone forecast his verdict on the arguing. And he changed the subject by saying, "I see you still cling to your fad of looking fascinating about the feet. That was one of the reasons I never could trust you. A girl with as charming feet and ankles as you have, and so much pride in getting them up well, simply cannot be trustworthy." He laughed. "No, you were made to be taken care of, my dear." She did not press the matter. She had taken her stand; that was enough for the present. After an hour with him, she went home to get herself something to eat on her gas stove. Spenser's confidence in the future did not move her even to the extent of laying out half a dollar on a restaurant dinner. Women have the habit of believing in the optimistic outpourings of egotistical men, and often hasten men along the road to ruin by proclaiming this belief and acting upon it. But not intelligent women of experience; that sort of woman, by checking optimistic husbands, fathers, sons, lovers, has even put off ruin--sometimes until death has had the chance to save the optimist from the inevitable consequence of his folly. When she finished her chop and vegetable, instead of lighting a cigarette and lingering over a cup of black coffee she quickly straightened up and began upon the play Brent had given her. She had read it several times the night before, and again and again during the day. But not until now did she feel sufficiently calmed down from her agitations of thought and emotion to attack the play understandingly. Thanks to defective education the most enlightened of us go through life much like a dim-sighted man who has no spectacles. Almost the whole of the wonderful panorama of the universe is unseen by us, or, if seen, is but partially understood or absurdly misunderstood. When it comes to the subtler things, the things of science and art, rarely indeed is there anyone who has the necessary training to get more than the crudest, most imperfect pleasure from them. What little training we have is so limping that it spoils the charm of mystery with which savage ignorance invests the universe from blade of grass to star, and does not put in place of that broken charm the profounder and loftier joy of understanding. To take for illustration the most widely diffused of all the higher arts and sciences, reading: How many so-called "educated" people can read understandingly even a novel, the form of literature designed to make the least demand upon the mind? People say they have read, but, when questioned, they show that they have got merely a glimmering of the real action, the faintest hint of style and characterization, have perhaps noted some stray epigram which they quote with evidently faulty grasp of its meaning. When the thing read is a play, almost no one can get from it a coherent notion of what it is about. Most of us have nothing that can justly be called imagination; our early training at home and at school killed in the shoot that finest plant of the mind's garden. So there is no ability to fill in the picture which the dramatic author draws in outline. Susan had not seen "Cavalleria Rusticana" either as play or as opera. But when she and Spenser were together in Forty-fourth Street, she had read plays and had dreamed over them; the talk had been almost altogether of plays--of writing plays, of constructing scenes, of productions, of acting, of all the many aspects of the theater. Spenser read scenes to her, got her to help him with criticism, and she was present when he went over his work with Drumley, Riggs, Townsend and the others. Thus, reading a play was no untried art to her. She read "Cavalleria" through slowly, taking about an hour to it. She saw now why Brent had given it to her as the primer lesson--the simple, elemental story of a peasant girl's ruin under promise of marriage; of her lover's wearying of one who had only crude physical charm; of his being attracted by a young married woman, gay as well as pretty, offering the security in intrigue that an unmarried woman could not offer. Such a play is at once the easiest and the hardest to act--the easiest because every audience understands it perfectly and supplies unconsciously almost any defect in the acting; the hardest because any actor with the education necessary to acting well finds it next to impossible to divest himself or herself of the sophistications of education and get back to the elemental animal. _Santuzza_ or _Lola_? Susan debated. _Santuzza_ was the big and easy part; _Lola_, the smaller part, was of the kind that is usually neglected. But Susan saw possibilities in the character of the woman who won _Turiddu_ away--the triumphant woman. The two women represented the two kinds of love--the love that is serious, the love that is light. And experience had taught her why it is that human nature soon tires of intensity, turns to frivolity. She felt that, if she could act, she would try to show that not _Turiddu's_ fickleness nor his contempt of the woman who had yielded, but _Santuzza's_ sad intensity and _Lola's_ butterfly gayety had cost _Santuzza_ her lover and her lover his life. So, it was not _Santuzza's_ but _Lola's_ first entrance that she studied. In the next morning's mail, under cover addressed "Miss Susan Lenox, care of Miss Lorna Sackville," as she had written it for Brent, came the promised check for forty dollars. It was signed John P. Garvey, Secretary, and was inclosed with a note bearing the same signature: DEAR MADAM: Herewith I send you a check for forty dollars for the first week's salary under your arrangement with Mr. Brent. No receipt is necessary. Until further notice a check for the same amount will be mailed you each Thursday. Unless you receive notice to the contrary, please call as before, at three o'clock next Wednesday. It made her nervous to think of those five days before she should see Brent. He had assured her he would expect nothing from her; but she felt she must be able to show him that she had not been wasting her time--his time, the time for which he was paying nearly six dollars a day. She must work every waking hour, except the two hours each day at the hospital. She recalled what Brent had said about the advantage of being contented alone--and how everything worth doing must be done in solitude. She had never thought about her own feelings as to company and solitude, as it was not her habit to think about herself. But now she realized how solitary she had been, and how it had bred in her habits of thinking and reading--and how valuable these habits would be to her in her work. There was Rod, for example. He hated being alone, must have someone around even when he was writing; and he had no taste for order or system. She understood why it was so hard for him to stick at anything, to put anything through to the finish. With her fondness for being alone, with her passion for reading and thinking about what she read, surely she ought soon to begin to accomplish something--if there was any ability in her. She found Rod in higher spirits. Several ideas for his play had come to him; he already saw it acted, successful, drawing crowded houses, bringing him in anywhere from five hundred to a thousand a week. She was not troubled hunting for things to talk about with him--she, who could think of but one thing and that a secret from him. He talked his play, a steady stream with not a seeing glance at her or a question about her. She watched the little clock at the side of the bed. At the end of an hour to the minute, she interrupted him in the middle of a sentence. "I must go now," said she, rising. "Sit down," he cried. "You can stay all day. The doctor says it will do me good to have you to talk with. And Sperry isn't coming until tomorrow." "I can't do it," said she. "I must go." He misunderstood her avoiding glance. "Now, Susie--sit down there," commanded he. "We've got plenty of money. You--you needn't bother about it any more." "We're not settled yet," said she. "Until we are, I'd not dare take the risk." She was subtly adroit by chance, not by design. "Risk!" exclaimed he angrily. "There's no risk. I've as good as got the advance money. Sit down." She hesitated. "Don't be angry," pleaded she in a voice that faltered. "But I must go." Into his eyes came the gleam of distrust and jealousy. "Look at me," he ordered. With some difficulty she forced her eyes to meet his. "Have you got a lover?" "No." "Then where do you get the money we're living on?" He counted on her being too humiliated to answer in words. Instead of the hanging head and burning cheeks he saw clear, steady eyes, heard a calm, gentle and dignified voice say: "In the streets." His eyes dropped and a look of abject shame made his face pitiable. "Good Heavens," he muttered. "How low we are!" "We've been doing the best we could," said she simply. "Isn't there any decency anywhere in you?" he flashed out, eagerly seizing the chance to forget his own shame in contemplating her greater degradation. She looked out of the window. There was something terrible in the calmness of her profile. She finally said in an even, pensive voice: "You have been intimate with a great many women, Rod. But you have never got acquainted with a single one." He laughed good-humoredly. "Oh, yes, I have. I've learned that 'every woman is at heart a rake,' as Mr. Jingle Pope says." She looked at him again, her face now curiously lighted by her slow faint smile. "Perhaps they showed you only what they thought you'd be able to appreciate," she suggested. He took this as evidence of her being jealous of him. "Tell me, Susan, did you leave me--in Forty-fourth Street--because you thought or heard I wasn't true to you?" "What did Drumley tell you?" "I asked him, as you said in your note. He told me he knew no reason." So Drumley had decided it was best Rod should not know why she left. Well, perhaps--probably--Drumley was right. But there was no reason why he shouldn't know the truth now. "I left," said she, "because I saw we were bad for each other." This amused him. She saw that he did not believe. It wounded her, but she smiled carelessly. Her smile encouraged him to say: "I couldn't quite make up my mind whether the reason was jealousy or because you had the soul of a shameless woman. You see, I know human nature, and I know that a woman who once crosses the line never crosses back. I'll always have to watch you, my dear. But somehow I like it. I guess you have--you and I have--a rotten streak in us. We were brought up too strictly. That always makes one either too firm or too loose. I used to think I liked good women. But I don't. They bore me. That shows I'm rotten." "Or that your idea of what's good is--is mistaken." "You don't pretend that _you_ haven't done wrong?" cried Rod. "I might have done worse," replied she. "I might have wronged others. No, Rod, I can't honestly say I've ever felt wicked." "Why, what brought you here?" She reflected a moment, then smiled. "Two things brought me down," said she. "In the first place, I wasn't raised right. I was raised as a lady instead of as a human being. So I didn't know how to meet the conditions of life. In the second place--" her smile returned, broadened--"I was too--too what's called 'good.'" "Pity about you!" mocked he. "Being what's called good is all very well if you're independent or if you've got a husband or a father to do life's dirty work for you--or, perhaps, if you happen to be in some profession like preaching or teaching--though I don't believe the so-called 'goodness' would let you get very far even as a preacher. In most lines, to practice what we're taught as children would be to go to the bottom like a stone. You know this is a hard world, Rod. It's full of men and women fighting desperately for food and clothes and a roof to cover them--fighting each other. And to get on you've got to have the courage and the indifference to your fellow beings that'll enable you to do it." "There's a lot of truth in that," admitted Spenser. "If I'd not been such a 'good fellow,' as they call it--a fellow everybody liked--if I'd been like Brent, for instance--Brent, who never would have any friends, who never would do anything for anybody but himself, who hadn't a thought except for his career--why, I'd be where he is." It was at the tip of Susan's tongue to say, "Yes--strong--able to help others--able to do things worth while." But she did not speak. Rod went on: "I'm not going to be a fool any longer. I'm going to be too busy to have friends or to help people or to do anything but push my own interests." Susan, indifferent to being thus wholly misunderstood, was again moving toward the door. "I'll be back this evening, as usual," said she. Spenser's face became hard and lowering: "You're going to stay here now, or you're not coming back," said he. "You can take your choice. Do you want me to know you've got the soul of a streetwalker?" She stood at the foot of the bed, gazing at the wall above his head. "I must earn our expenses until we're safe," said she, once more telling a literal truth that was yet a complete deception. "Why do you fret me?" exclaimed he. "Do you want me to be sick again?" "Suppose you didn't get the advance right away," urged she. "I tell you I shall get it! And I won't have you--do as you are doing. If you go, you go for keeps." She seated herself. "Do you want me to read or take dictation?" His face expressed the satisfaction small people find in small successes at asserting authority. "Don't be angry," said he. "I'm acting for your good. I'm saving you from yourself." "I'm not angry," replied she, her strange eyes resting upon him. He shifted uncomfortably. "Now what does that look mean?" he demanded with an uneasy laugh. She smiled, shrugged her shoulders. Sperry--small and thin, a weather-beaten, wooden face suggesting Mr. Punch, sly keen eyes, theater in every tone and gesture Sperry pushed the scenario hastily to completion and was so successful with Fitzalan that on Sunday afternoon he brought two hundred and fifty dollars, Spenser's half of the advance money. "Didn't I tell you!" said Spenser to Susan, in triumph. "We'll move at once. Go pack your traps and put them in a carriage, and by the time you're back here Sperry and the nurses will have me ready." It was about three when Susan got to her room. Clara heard her come in and soon appeared, bare feet in mules, hair hanging every which way. Despite the softening effect of the white nightdress and of the framing of abundant hair, her face was hard and coarse. She had been drunk on liquor and on opium the night before, and the effects were wearing off. As she was only twenty years old, the hard coarse look would withdraw before youth in a few hours; it was there only temporarily as a foreshadowing of what Clara would look like in five years or so. "Hello, Lorna," said she. "Gee, what a bun my fellow and I had on last night! Did you hear us scrapping when we came in about five o'clock?" "No," replied Susan. "I was up late and had a lot to do, and was kept at the hospital all day. I guess I must have fallen asleep." "He gave me an awful beating," pursued Clara. "But I got one good crack at him with a bottle." She laughed. "I don't think he'll be doing much flirting till his cheek heals up. He looks a sight!" She opened her nightdress and showed Susan a deep blue-black mark on her left breast. "I wonder if I'll get cancer from that?" said she. "It'd be just my rotten luck. I've heard of several cases of it lately, and my father kicked my mother there, and she got cancer. Lord, how she did suffer!" Susan shivered, turned her eyes away. Her blood surged with joy that she had once more climbed up out of this deep, dark wallow where the masses of her fellow beings weltered in darkness and drunkenness and disease--was up among the favored ones who, while they could not entirely escape the great ills of life, at least had the intelligence and the means to mitigate them. How fortunate that few of these unhappy ones had the imagination to realize their own wretchedness! "I don't care what becomes of me," Clara was saying. "What is there in it for me? I can have a good time only as long as my looks last--and that's true of every woman, ain't it? What's a woman but a body? Ain't I right?" "That's why I'm going to stop being a woman as soon as ever I can," said Susan. "Why, you're packing up!" cried Clara. "Yes. My friend's well enough to be moved. We're going to live uptown." "Right away?" "This afternoon." Clara dropped into a chair and began to weep. "I'll miss you something fierce!" sobbed she. "You're the only friend in the world I give a damn for, or that gives a damn for me. I wish to God I was like you. You don't need anybody." "Oh, yes, I do, dear," cried Susan. "But, I mean, you don't lean on anybody. I don't mean you're hard-hearted--for you ain't. You've pulled me and a dozen other girls out of the hole lots of times. But you're independent. Can't you take me along? I can drop that bum across the hall. I don't give a hoot for him. But a girl's got to make believe she cares for somebody or she'd blow her brains out." "I can't take you along, but I'm going to come for you as soon as I'm on my feet," said Susan. "I've got to get up myself first. I've learned at least that much." "Oh, you'll forget all about _me_." "No," said Susan. And Clara knew that she would not. Moaned Clara, "I'm not fit to go. I'm only a common streetwalker. You belong up there. You're going back to your own. But I belong here. I wish to God I was like most of the people down here, and didn't have any sense. No wonder you used to drink so! I'm getting that way, too. The only people that don't hit the booze hard down here are the muttonheads who don't know nothing and can't learn nothing. . . . I used to be contented. But somehow, being with you so much has made me dissatisfied." "That means you're on your way up," said Susan, busy with her packing. "It would, if I had sense enough. Oh, it's torment to have sense enough to see, and not sense enough to do!" "I'll come for you soon," said Susan. "You're going up with me." Clara watched her for some time in silence. "You're sure you're going to win?" said she, at last. "Sure," replied Susan. "Oh, you can't be as sure as that." "Yes, but I can," laughed she. "I'm done with foolishness. I've made up my mind to get up in the world--_with_ my self-respect if possible; if not, then without it. I'm going to have everything--money, comfort, luxury, pleasure. Everything!" And she dropped a folded skirt emphatically upon the pile she had been making, and gave a short, sharp nod. "I was taught a lot of things when I was little--things about being sweet and unselfish and all that. They'd be fine, if the world was Heaven. But it isn't." "Not exactly," said Clara. "Maybe they're fine, if you want to get to Heaven," continued Susan. "But I'm not trying to get to Heaven. I'm trying to live on earth. I don't like the game, and I don't like its rules. But--it's the only game, and I can't change the rules. So I'm going to follow them--at least, until I get what I want." "Do you mean to say you've got any respect for yourself?" said Clara. "_I_ haven't. And I don't see how any girl in our line can have." "I thought I hadn't," was Susan's reply, "until I talked with--with someone I met the other day. If you slipped and fell in the mud--or were thrown into it--you wouldn't say, 'I'm dirty through and through. I can never get clean again'--would you?" "But that's different," objected Clara. "Not a bit," declared Susan. "If you look around this world, you'll see that everybody who ever moved about at all has slipped and fallen in the mud--or has been pushed in." "Mostly pushed in." "Mostly pushed in," assented Susan. "And those that have good sense get up as soon as they can, and wash as much of the mud off as'll come off--maybe all--and go on. The fools--they worry about the mud. But not I--not any more!. . . And not you, my dear--when I get you uptown." Clara was now looking on Susan's departure as a dawn of good luck for herself. She took a headache powder, telephoned for a carriage, and helped carry down the two big packages that contained all Susan's possessions worth moving. And they kissed each other good-by with smiling faces. Susan did not give Clara, the loose-tongued, her new address; nor did Clara, conscious of her own weakness, ask for it. "Don't put yourself out about me," cried Clara in farewell. "Get a good tight grip yourself, first." "That's advice I need," answered Susan. "Good-by. Soon--_soon!_" The carriage had to move slowly through those narrow tenement streets, so thronged were they with the people swarmed from hot little rooms into the open to try to get a little air that did not threaten to burn and choke as it entered the lungs. Susan's nostrils were filled with the stenches of animal and vegetable decay--stenches descending in heavy clouds from the open windows of the flats and from the fire escapes crowded with all manner of rubbish; stenches from the rotting, brimful garbage cans; stenches from the groceries and butcher shops and bakeries where the poorest qualities of food were exposed to the contamination of swarms of disgusting fat flies, of mangy, vermin-harassed children and cats and dogs; stenches from the never washed human bodies, clad in filthy garments and drawn out of shape by disease and toil. Sore eyes, scrofula, withered arm or leg, sagged shoulder, hip out of joint--There, crawling along the sidewalk, was the boy whose legs had been cut off by the street car; and the stumps were horribly ulcered. And there at the basement window drooled and cackled the fat idiot girl whose mother sacrificed everything always to dress her freshly in pink. What a world!--where a few people such a very few!--lived in health and comfort and cleanliness--and the millions lived in disease and squalor, ignorant, untouched of civilization save to wear its cast-off clothes and to eat its castaway food and to live in its dark noisome cellars!--And to toil unceasingly to make for others the good things of which they had none themselves! It made her heartsick--the sadder because nothing could be done about it. Stay and help? As well stay to put out a conflagration barehanded and alone. As the carriage reached wider Second Avenue, the horses broke into a trot. Susan drew a long breath of the purer air--then shuddered as she saw the corner where the dive into which the cadet had lured her flaunted its telltale awnings. Lower still her spirits sank when she was passing, a few blocks further on, the music hall. There, too, she had had a chance, had let hope blaze high. And she was going forward--into--the region where she had been a slave to Freddie Palmer--no, to the system of which he was a slave no less than she---- "I _must_ be strong! I _must!_" Susan said to herself, and there was desperation in the gleam of her eyes, in the set of her chin. "This time I will fight! And I feel at last that I can." But her spirits soared no more that day. CHAPTER XIV SPERRY had chosen for "Mr. and Mrs. Spenser" the second floor rear of a house on the south side of West Forty-fifth Street a few doors off Sixth Avenue. It was furnished as a sitting-room--elegant in red plush, with oil paintings on the walls, a fringed red silk-plush dado fastened to the mantelpiece with bright brass-headed tacks, elaborate imitation lace throws on the sofa and chairs, and an imposing piece that might have been a cabinet organ or a pianola or a roll-top desk but was in fact a comfortable folding bed. There was a marble stationary washstand behind the hand-embroidered screen in the corner, near one of the two windows. Through a deep clothes closet was a small but satisfactory bathroom. "And it's warm in winter," said Mrs. Norris, the landlady, to Susan. "Don't you hate a cold bathroom?" Susan declared that she did. "There's only one thing I hate worse," said Mrs. Norris, "and that's cold coffee." She had one of those large faces which look bald because the frame of hair does not begin until unusually far back. At fifty, when her hair would be thin, Mrs. Norris would be homely; but at thirty she was handsome in a bold, strong way. Her hair was always carefully done, her good figure beautifully corseted. It was said she was not married to Mr. Norris--because New York likes to believe that people are living together without being married, because Mr. Norris came and went irregularly, and because Mrs. Norris was so particular about her toilet--and everyone knows that when a woman has the man with whom she's satisfied securely fastened, she shows her content or her virtuous indifference to other men--or her laziness--by neglecting her hair and her hips and dressing in any old thing any which way. Whatever the truth as to Mrs. Norris's domestic life, she carried herself strictly and insisted upon keeping her house as respectable as can reasonably be expected in a large city. That is, everyone in it was quiet, was of steady and sedate habit, was backed by references. Not until Sperry had thoroughly qualified as a responsible person did Mrs. Norris accept his assurances as to the Spensers and consent to receive them. Downtown the apartment houses that admit persons of loose character are usually more expensive because that class of tenants have more and expect more than ordinary working people. Uptown the custom is the reverse; to get into a respectable house you must pay more. The Spensers had to pay fourteen a week for their quarters--and they were getting a real bargain, Mrs. Norris having a weakness for literature and art where they were respectable and paid regularly. "What's left of the two hundred and fifty will not last long," said Spenser to Susan, when they were established and alone. "But we'll have another five hundred as soon as the play's done, and that'll be in less than a month. We're to begin tomorrow. In less than two months the play'll be on and the royalties will be coming in. I wonder how much I owe the doctor and the hospital." "That's settled," said Susan. He glanced at her with a frown. "How much was it? You had no right to pay!" "You couldn't have got either doctor or room without payment in advance." She spoke tranquilly, with a quiet assurance of manner that was new in her, the nervous and sensitive about causing displeasure in others. She added, "Don't be cross, Rod. You know it's only pretense." "Don't you believe anybody has any decency?" demanded he. "It depends on what you mean by decency," replied she. "But why talk of the past? Let's forget it." "I would that I could!" exclaimed he. She laughed at his heroics. "Put that in your play," said she. "But this isn't the melodrama of the stage. It's the farce comedy of life." "How you have changed! Has all the sweetness, all the womanliness, gone out of your character?" She showed how little she was impressed. "I've learned to take terrible things--really terrible things--without making a fuss--or feeling like making a fuss. You can't expect me to get excited over mere staginess. They're fond of fake emotions up in this part of town. But down where I've been so long the real horrors come too thick and fast for there to be any time to fake." He continued to frown, presently came out of a deep study to say, "Susie, I see I've got to have a serious talk with you." "Wait till you're well, my dear," said she. "I'm afraid I'll not be very sympathetic with your seriousness." "No--today. I'm not an invalid. And our relations worry me, whenever I think of them." He observed her as she sat with hands loosely clasped in her lap; there was an inscrutable look upon her delicate face, upon the clear-cut features so attractively framed by her thick dark hair, brown in some lights, black in others. "Well?" said she. "To begin, I want you to stop rouging your lips. It's the only sign of--of what you were. I'd a little rather you didn't smoke. But as respectable women smoke nowadays, why I don't seriously object. And when you get more clothes, get quieter ones. Not that you dress loudly or in bad taste----" "Thank you," murmured Susan. "What did you say?" "I didn't mean to interrupt. Go on." "I admire the way you dress, but it makes me jealous. I want you to have nice clothes for the house. I like things that show your neck and suggest your form. But I don't want you attracting men's eyes and their loose thoughts, in the street. . . . And I don't want you to look so damnably alluring about the feet. That's your best trick--and your worst. Why are you smiling--in that fashion?" "You talk to me as if I were your wife." He gazed at her with an expression that was as affectionate as it was generous--and it was most generous. "Well, you may be some day--if you keep straight. And I think you will." The artificial red of her lips greatly helped to make her sweetly smiling face the perfection of gentle irony. "And you?" said she. "You know perfectly well it's different about a man." "I know nothing of the sort," replied she. "Among certain kinds of people that is the rule. But I'm not of those kinds. I'm trying to make my way in the world, exactly like a man. So I've got to be free from the rules that may be all very well for ladies. A woman can't fight with her hands tied, any more than a man can--and you know what happens to the men who allow themselves to be tied; they're poor downtrodden creatures working hard at small pay for the men who fight with their hands free." "I've taken you out of the unprotected woman class, my dear," he reminded her. "You're mine, now, and you're going back where you belong." "Back to the cage it's taken me so long to learn to do without?" She shook her head. "No, Rod--I couldn't possibly do it--not if I wanted to. . . . You've got several false ideas about me. You'll have to get rid of them, if we're to get along." "For instance?" "In the first place, don't delude yourself with the notion that I'd marry you. I don't know whether the man I was forced to marry is dead or whether he's got a divorce. I don't care. No matter how free I was I shouldn't marry you." He smiled complacently. She noted it without irritation. Truly, small indeed is the heat of any kind that can be got from the warmed-up ashes of a burnt-out passion. She went easily on: "You have nothing to offer me--neither love nor money. And a woman--unless she's a poor excuse--insists on one or the other. You and I fancied we loved each other for a while. We don't fool ourselves in that way now. At least I don't, though I believe you do imagine I'm in love with you." "You wouldn't be here if you weren't." "Put that out of your head, Rod. It'll only breed trouble. I don't like to say these things to you, but you compel me to. I learned long ago how foolish it is to put off unpleasant things that will have to be faced in the end. The longer they're put off the worse the final reckoning is. Most of my troubles have come through my being too weak or good-natured--or whatever it was--to act as my good sense told me. I'm not going to make that mistake any more. And I'm going to start the new deal with absolute frankness with you. I am not in love with you." "I know you better than you know yourself," said he. "For a little while after I found you again I did have a return of the old feeling--or something like it. But it soon passed. I couldn't love you. I know you too well." He struggled hard with his temper, as his vanity lashed at it. She saw, struggled with her old sensitiveness about inflicting even necessary pain upon others, went on: "I simply like you, Rod--and that's all. We're well acquainted. You're physically attractive to me--not wildly so, but enough--more than any other man--probably more than most husbands are to their wives--or most wives to their husbands. So as long as you treat me well and don't wander off to other women, I'm more than willing to stay on here." "Really!" said he, in an intensely sarcastic tone. "Really!" "Now--keep your temper," she warned. "Didn't I keep mine when you were handing me that impertinent talk about how I should dress and the rest of it? No--let me finish. In the second place and in conclusion, my dear Rod, I'm not going to live off you. I'll pay my half of the room. I'll pay for my own clothes--and rouge for my lips. I'll buy and cook what we eat in the room; you'll pay when we go to a restaurant. I believe that's all." "Are you quite sure?" inquired he with much satire. "Yes, I think so. Except--if you don't like my terms, I'm ready to leave at once." "And go back to the streets, I suppose?" jeered he. "If it were necessary--yes. So long as I've got my youth and my health, I'll do precisely as I please. I've no craving for respectability--not the slightest. I--I----" She tried to speak of her birth, that secret shame of which she was ashamed. She had been thinking that Brent's big fine way of looking at things had cured her of this bitterness. She found that it had not--as yet. So she went on, "I'd prefer your friendship to your ill will--much prefer it, as you're the only person I can look to for what a man can do for a woman, and as I like you. But if I have to take tyranny along with the friendship--" she looked at him quietly and her tones were almost tender, almost appealing--"then, it's good-by, Rod." She had silenced him, for he saw in her eyes, much more gray than violet though the suggestion of violet was there, that she meant precisely what she said. He was astonished, almost dazed by the change in her. This woman grown was not the Susie who had left him. No--and yet---- She had left him, hadn't she? That showed a character completely hidden from him, perhaps the character he was now seeing. He asked--and there was no sarcasm and a great deal of uneasiness in his tone: "How do you expect to make a living?" "I've got a place at forty dollars a week." "Forty dollars a week! You!" He scowled savagely at her. "There's only one thing anyone would pay you forty a week for." "That's what I'd have said," rejoined she. "But it seems not to be true. My luck may not last, but while it lasts, I'll have forty a week." "I don't believe you," said he, with the angry bluntness of jealousy. "Then you want me to go?" inquired she, with a certain melancholy but without any weakness. He ignored her question. He demanded: "Who's giving it to you?" "Brent." Spenser leaned from the bed toward her in his excitement. "_Robert_ Brent?" he cried. "Yes. I'm to have a part in one of his plays." Spenser laughed harshly. "What rot! You're his mistress." "It wouldn't be strange for you to think I'd accept that position for so little, but you must know a man of his sort wouldn't have so cheap a mistress." "It's simply absurd." "He is to train me himself." "You never told me you knew him." "I don't." "Who got you the job?" "He saw me in Fitzalan's office the day you sent me there. He asked me to call, and when I went he made me the offer." "Absolute rot. What reason did he give?" "He said I looked as if I had the temperament he was in search of." "You must take me for a fool." "Why should I lie to you?" "God knows. Why do women lie to men all the time? For the pleasure of fooling them." "Oh, no. To get money, Rod--the best reason in the world, it being rather hard for a woman to make money by working for it." "The man's in love with you!" "I wish he were," said Susan, laughing. "I'd not be here, my dear--you may be sure of that. And I'd not content myself with forty a week. Oh, you don't know what tastes I've got! Wait till I turn myself loose." "Well--you can--in a few months," said Spenser. Even as he had been protesting his disbelief in her story, his manner toward her had been growing more respectful--a change that at once hurt and amused her with its cynical suggestions, and also pleased her, giving her a confidence-breeding sense of a new value in herself. Rod went on, with a kind of shamefaced mingling of jest and earnest: "You stick by me, Susie, old girl, and the time'll come when I'll be able to give you more than Brent." "I hope so," said Susan. He eyed her sharply. "I feel like a fool believing such a fairy story as you've been telling me. Yet I do." "That's good," laughed she. "Now I can stay. If you hadn't believed me, I'd have had to go. And I don't want to do that--not yet." His eyes flinched. "Not yet? What does that mean?" "It means I'm content to stay, at present. Who can answer for tomorrow?" Her eyes lit up mockingly. "For instance--you. Today you think you're going to be true to me don't you? Yet tomorrow--or as soon as you get strength and street clothes, I may catch you in some restaurant telling some girl she's the one you've been getting ready for." He laughed, but not heartily. Sperry came, and Susan went to buy at a department store a complete outfit for Rod, who still had only nightshirts. As she had often bought for him in the old days, she felt she would have no difficulty in fitting him nearly enough, with her accurate eye supplementing the measurements she had taken. When she got back home two hours and a half later, bringing her purchases in a cab, Sperry had gone and Rod was asleep. She sat in the bathroom, with the gas lighted, and worked at "Cavalleria" until she heard him calling. He had awakened in high good-humor. "That was an awful raking you gave me before Sperry came," began he. "But it did me good. A man gets so in the habit of ordering women about that it becomes second nature to him. You've made it clear to me that I've even less control over you than you have over me. So, dear, I'm going to be humble and try to give satisfaction, as servants say." "You'd better," laughed Susan. "At least, until you get on your feet again." "You say we don't love each other," Rod went on, a becoming brightness in his strong face. "Well--maybe so. But--we suit each other--don't we?" "That's why I want to stay," said Susan, sitting on the bed and laying her hand caressingly upon his. "I could stand it to go, for I've been trained to stand anything--everything. But I'd hate it." He put his arm round her, drew her against his breast. "Aren't you happy here?" he murmured. "Happier than any place else in the world," replied she softly. After a while she got a small dinner for their two selves on the gas stove she had brought with her and had set up in the bathroom. As they ate, she cross-legged on the bed opposite him, they beamed contentedly at each other. "Do you remember the dinner we had at the St. Nicholas in Cincinnati?" asked she. "It wasn't as good as this," declared he. "Not nearly so well cooked. You could make a fortune as a cook. But then you do everything well." "Even to rouging my lips?" "Oh, forget it!" laughed he. "I'm an ass. There's a wonderful fascination in the contrast between the dash of scarlet and the pallor of that clear, lovely skin of yours." Her eyes danced. "You are getting well!" she exclaimed. "I'm sorry I bought you clothes. I'll be uneasy every time you're out." "You can trust me. I see I've got to hustle to keep my job with you. Well, thank God, your friend Brent's old enough to be your father." "Is he?" cried Susan. "Do you know, I never thought of his age." "Yes, he's forty at least--more. Are you sure he isn't after _you_, Susie?" "He warned me that if I annoyed him in that way he'd discharge me." "Do you like him?" "I--don't--know" was Susan's slow, reflective answer. "I'm--afraid of him--a little." Both became silent. Finally Rod said, with an impatient shake of the head, "Let's not think of him." "Let's try on your new clothes," cried Susan. And when the dishes were cleared away they had a grand time trying on the things she had bought. It was amazing how near she had come to fitting him. "You ought to feel flattered," said she. "Only a labor of love could have turned out so well." He turned abruptly from admiring his new suit in the glass and caught her in his arms. "You do love me--you do!" he cried. "No woman would have done all you've done for me, if she didn't." For answer, Susan kissed him passionately; and as her body trembled with the sudden upheaval of emotions long dormant or indulged only in debased, hateful ways, she burst into tears. She knew, even in that moment of passion, that she did not love him; but not love itself can move the heart more deeply than gratitude and her bruised heart was so grateful for his words and tones and gestures of affection! Wednesday afternoon, on the way to Brent's house, she glanced up at the clock in the corner tower of the Grand Central Station. It lacked five minutes of three. She walked slowly, timed herself so accurately that, as the butler opened the door, a cathedral chime hidden somewhere in the upper interior boomed the hour musically. The man took her direct to the elevator, and when it stopped at the top floor, Brent himself opened the door, as before. He was dismissing a short fat man whom Susan placed as a manager, and a tall, slim, and most fashionably dressed woman with a beautiful insincere face--anyone would have at once declared her an actress, probably a star. The woman gave Susan a searching, feminine look which changed swiftly to superciliousness. Both the man and the woman were loath to go, evidently had not finished what they had come to say. But Brent, in his abrupt but courteous way, said: "Tomorrow at four, then. As you see, my next appointment has begun." And he had them in the elevator with the door closed. He turned upon Susan the gaze that seemed to take in everything. "You are in better spirits, I see," said he. "I'm sorry to have interrupted," said she. "I could have waited." "But _I_ couldn't," replied he. "Some day you'll discover that your time is valuable, and that to waste it is far sillier than if you were to walk along throwing your money into the gutter. Time ought to be used like money--spent generously but intelligently." He talked rapidly on, with his manner as full of unexpressed and inexpressible intensity as the voice of the violin, with his frank egotism that had no suggestion of vanity or conceit. "Because I systematize my time, I'm never in a hurry, never at a loss for time to give to whatever I wish. I didn't refuse to keep you waiting for your sake but for my own. Now the next hour belongs to you and me--and we'll forget about time--as, if we were dining in a restaurant, we'd not think of the bill till it was presented. What did you do with the play?" Susan could only look at him helplessly. He laughed, handed her a cigarette, rose to light a match for her. "Settle yourself comfortably," said he, "and say what's in your head." With hands deep in the trousers of his house suit, he paced up and down the long room, the cigarette loose between his lips. Whenever she saw his front face she was reassured; but whenever she saw his profile, her nerves trembled--for in the profile there was an expression of almost ferocious resolution, of tragic sadness, of the sternness that spares not. The full face was kind, if keen; was sympathetic--was the man as nature had made him. The profile was the great man--the man his career had made. And Susan knew that the profile was master. "Which part did you like _Santuzza_ or _Lola_?" "_Lola_," replied she. He paused, looked at her quickly. Why?" "Oh, I don't sympathize with the woman--or the man--who's deserted. I pity, but I can't help seeing it's her or his own fault. _Lola_ explains why. Wouldn't you rather laugh than cry? _Santuzza_ may have been attractive in the moments of passion, but how she must have bored _Turiddu_ the rest of the time! She was so intense, so serious--so vain and selfish." "Vain and selfish? That's interesting." He walked up and down several times, then turned on her abruptly. "Well--go on," he said. "I'm waiting to hear why she was vain and selfish." "Isn't it vain for a woman to think a man ought to be crazy about her all the time because he once has been? Isn't it selfish for her to want him to be true to her because it gives _her_ pleasure, even though she knows it doesn't give _him_ pleasure?" "Men and women are all vain and selfish in love," said he. "But the women are meaner than the men," replied she, "because they're more ignorant and narrow-minded." He was regarding her with an expression that made her uneasy. "But that isn't in the play--none of it," said he. "Well, it ought to be," replied she. "_Santuzza_ is the old-fashioned conventional heroine. I used to like them--until I had lived a little, myself. She isn't true to life. But in _Lola_----" "Yes--what about _Lola_?" he demanded. "Oh, she wasn't a heroine, either. She was just human--taking happiness when it offered. And her gayety--and her capriciousness. A man will always break away from a solemn, intense woman to get that sort of sunshine." "Yes--yes--go on," said Brent. "And her sour, serious, solemn husband explains why wives are untrue to their husbands. At least, it seems so to me." He was walking up and down again. Every trace of indolence, of relaxation, was gone from his gait and from his features. His mind was evidently working like an engine at full speed. Suddenly he halted. "You've given me a big idea," said he. "I'll throw away the play I was working on. I'll do your play." Susan laughed--pleased, yet a little afraid he was kinder than she deserved. "What I said was only common sense--what my experience has taught me." "That's all that genius is, my dear," replied he. "As soon as we're born, our eyes are operated on so that we shall never see anything as it is. The geniuses are those who either escape the operation or are reëndowed with true sight by experience." He nodded approvingly at her. "You're going to be a person--or, rather, you're going to show you're a person. But that comes later. You thought of _Lola_ as your part?" "I tried to. But I don't know anything about acting except what I've seen and the talk I've heard." "As I said the other day, that means you've little to learn. Now--as to _Lola's_ entrance." "Oh, I thought of a lot of things to do--to show that she, too, loved _Turiddu_ and that she had as much right to love--and to be loved--as _Santuzza_ had. _Santuzza_ had had her chance, and had failed." Brent was highly amused. "You seem to forget that _Lola_ was a married woman--and that if _Santuzza_ didn't get a husband she'd be the mother of a fatherless child." Never had he seen in her face such a charm of sweet melancholy as at that moment. "I suppose the way I was born and the life I've led make me think less of those things than most people do," replied she. "I was talking about natural hearts--what people think inside--the way they act when they have courage." "When they have courage," Brent repeated reflectively. "But who has courage?" "A great many people are compelled to have it," said she. "I never had it until I got enough money to be independent." "I never had it," said Susan, "until I had no money." He leaned against the big table, folded his arms on his chest, looked at her with eyes that made her feel absolutely at ease with him. Said he: "You have known what it was to have no money--none?" Susan nodded. "And no friends--no place to sleep--worse off than _Robinson Crusoe_ when the waves threw him on the island. I had to--to suck my own blood to keep alive." "You smile as you say that," said he. "If I hadn't learned to smile over such things," she answered, "I'd have been dead long ago." He seated himself opposite her. He asked: "Why didn't you kill yourself?" "I was afraid." "Of the hereafter?" "Oh no. Of missing the coming true of my dreams about life." "Love?" "That--and more. Just love wouldn't satisfy me. I want to see the world--to know the world--and to be somebody. I want to try _everything_." She laughed gayly--a sudden fascinating vanishing of the melancholy of eyes and mouth, a sudden flashing out of young beauty. "I've been down about as deep as one can go. I want to explore in the other direction." "Yes--yes," said Brent, absently. "You must see it all." He remained for some time in a profound reverie, she as unconscious of the passing of time as he for if he had his thoughts, she had his face to study. Try as she would, she could not associate the idea of age with him--any age. He seemed simply a grown man. And the more closely she studied him the greater her awe became. He knew so much; he understood so well. She could not imagine him swept away by any of the petty emotions--the vanities, the jealousies, the small rages, the small passions and loves that made up the petty days of the small creatures who inhabit the world and call it theirs. Could he fall in love? Had he been in love? Yes--he must have been in love many times--for many women must have taken trouble to please a man so well worth while, and he must have passed from one woman to another as his whims or his tastes changed. Could he ever care about her--as a woman? Did he think her worn out as a physical woman? Or would he realize that body is nothing by itself; that unless the soul enters it, it is cold and meaningless and worthless--like the electric bulb when the filament is dark and the beautiful, hot, brilliant and intensely living current is not in it? Could she love him? Could she ever feel equal and at ease, through and through, with a man so superior? "You'd better study the part of _Lola_--learn the lines," said he, when he had finished his reflecting. "Then--this day week at the same hour--we will begin. We will work all afternoon--we will dine together--go to some theater where I can illustrate what I mean. Beginning with next Wednesday that will be the program every day until further notice." "Until you see whether you can do anything with me or not?" "Just so. You are living with Spenser?" "Yes." Susan could have wished his tone less matter-of-fact. "How is he getting on?" "He and Sperry are doing a play for Fitzalan." "Really? That's good. He has talent. If he'll learn of Sperry and talk less and work more, and steadily, he'll make a lot of money. You are not tied to him in any way?" "No--not now that he's prospering. Except, of course, that I'm fond of him." He shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, everybody must have somebody. You've not seen this house. I'll show it to you, as we've still fifteen minutes." A luxurious house it was--filled with things curious and, some of them, beautiful--things gathered in excursions through Europe, Susan assumed. The only absolutely simple room was his bedroom, big and bare and so arranged that he could sleep practically out of doors. She saw servants--two men besides the butler, several women. But the house was a bachelor's house, with not a trace of feminine influence. And evidently he cared nothing about it but lived entirely in that wonderful world which so awed Susan--the world he had created within himself, the world of which she had alluring glimpses through his eyes, through his tones and gestures even. Small people strive to make, and do make, impression of themselves by laboring to show what they know and think. But the person of the larger kind makes no such effort. In everything Brent said and did and wore, in all his movements, gestures, expressions, there was the unmistakable hallmark of the man worth while. The social life has banished simplicity from even the most savage tribe. Indeed, savages, filled with superstitions, their every movement the result of some notion of proper ceremonial, are the most complex of all the human kind. The effort toward simplicity is not a movement back to nature, for there savage and lower animal are completely enslaved by custom and instinct; it is a movement upward toward the freedom of thought and action of which our best intelligence has given us a conception and for which it has given us a longing. Never had Susan met so simple a man; and never had she seen one so far from all the silly ostentations of rudeness, of unattractive dress, of eccentric or coarse speech wherewith the cheap sort of man strives to proclaim himself individual and free. With her instinct for recognizing the best at first sight, Susan at once understood. And she was like one who has been stumbling about searching for the right road, and has it suddenly shown to him. She fairly darted along this right road. She was immediately busy, noting the mistakes in her own ideas of manners and dress, of good and bad taste. She realized how much she had to learn. But this did not discourage her. For she realized at the same time that she could learn--and his obvious belief in her as a possibility was most encouraging. When he bade her good-by at the front door and it closed behind her, she was all at once so tired that it seemed to her she would then and there sink down through sheer fatigue and fall asleep. For no physical exercise so quickly and utterly exhausts as real brain exercise--thinking, studying, learning with all the concentrated intensity of a thoroughbred in the last quarter of the mile race. CHAPTER XV SPENSER had time and thought for his play only. He no longer tormented himself with jealousy of the abilities and income and fame of Brent and the other successful writers for the stage; was not he about to equal them, probably to surpass them? As a rule, none of the mean emotions is able to thrive--unless it has the noxious vapors from disappointment and failure to feed upon. Spenser, in spirits and in hope again, was content with himself. Jealousy of Brent about Susan had been born of dissatisfaction with himself as a failure and envy of Brent as a success; it died with that dissatisfaction and that envy. His vanity assured him that while there might be possibly--ways in which he was not without rivals, certainly where women were concerned he simply could not be equaled; the woman he wanted he could have--and he could hold her as long as he wished. The idea that Susan would give a sentimental thought to a man "old enough to be her father"--Brent was forty-one--was too preposterous to present itself to his mind. She loved the handsome, fascinating, youthful Roderick Spenser; she would soon be crazy about him. Rarely does it occur to a man to wonder what a woman is thinking. During courtship very young men attribute intellect and qualities of mystery and awe to the woman they love. But after men get an insight into the mind of woman and discover how trivial are the matters that of necessity usually engage it, they become skeptical about feminine mentality; they would as soon think of speculating on what profundities fill the brain of the kitten playing with a ball as of seeking a solution of the mystery behind a woman's fits of abstraction. However, there was in Susan's face, especially in her eyes, an expression so unusual, so arresting that Spenser, self-centered and convinced of woman's intellectual deficiency though he was, did sometimes inquire what she was thinking about. He asked this question at breakfast the morning after that second visit to Brent. "Was I thinking?" she countered. "You certainly were not listening. You haven't a notion what I was talking about." "About your play." "Of course. You know I talk nothing else," laughed he. "I must bore you horribly." "No, indeed," protested she. "No, I suppose not. You're not bored because you don't listen." He was cheerful about it. He talked merely to arrange his thoughts, not because he expected Susan to understand matters far above one whom nature had fashioned and experience had trained to minister satisfyingly to the physical and sentimental needs of man. He assumed that she was as worshipful before his intellect as in the old days. He would have been even more amazed than enraged had he known that she regarded his play as mediocre claptrap, false to life, fit only for the unthinking, sloppily sentimental crowd that could not see the truth about even their own lives, their own thoughts and actions. "There you go again!" cried he, a few minutes later. "What _are_ you thinking about? I forgot to ask how you got on with Brent. Poor chap--he's had several failures in the past year. He must be horribly cut up. They say he's written out. What does he think he's trying to get at with you?" "Acting, as I told you," replied Susan. She felt ashamed for him, making this pitiable exhibition of patronizing a great man. "Sperry tells me he has had that twist in his brain for a long time--that he has tried out a dozen girls or more--drops them after a few weeks or months. He has a regular system about it--runs away abroad, stops the pay after a month or so." "Well, the forty a week's clear gain while it lasts," said Susan. She tried to speak lightly. But she felt hurt and uncomfortable. There had crept into her mind one of those disagreeable ideas that skurry into some dusky corner to hide, and reappear from time to time making every fit of the blues so much the sadder and aggravating despondency toward despair. "Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that _you_ wouldn't succeed," Spenser hastened to apologize with more or less real kindliness. "Sperry says Brent has some good ideas about acting. So, you'll learn something--maybe enough to enable me to put you in a good position--if Brent gets tired and if you still want to be independent, as you call it." "I hope so," said Susan absently. Spenser was no more absorbed in his career than she in hers; only, she realized how useless it would be to try to talk it to him--that he would not give her so much as ears in an attitude of polite attention. If he could have looked into her head that morning and seen what thoughts were distracting her from hearing about the great play, he would have been more amused and disgusted than ever with feminine frivolity of mind and incapacity in serious matters. For, it so happened that at the moment Susan was concentrating on a new dress. He would have laughed in the face of anyone saying to him that this new dress was for Susan in the pursuit of her scheme of life quite as weighty a matter, quite as worthy of the most careful attention, as was his play for him. Yet that would have been the literal truth. Primarily man's appeal is to the ear, woman's to the eye--the reason, by the way, why the theater--preeminently the place to _see_--tends to be dominated by woman. Susan had made up her mind not only that she would rapidly improve herself in every way, but also how she would go about the improving. She saw that, for a woman at least, dress is as much the prime essential as an arresting show window for a dealer in articles that display well. She knew she was far from the goal of which she dreamed--the position where she would no longer be a woman primarily but a personage. Dress would not merely increase her physical attractiveness; it would achieve the far more important end of gaining her a large measure of consideration. She felt that Brent, even Brent, dealer in actualities and not to be fooled by pretenses, would in spite of himself change his opinion of her if she went to him dressed less like a middle class working girl, more like the woman of the upper classes. At best, using all the advantages she had, she felt there was small enough chance of her holding his interest; for she could not make herself believe that he was not deceiving himself about her. However, to strengthen herself in every way with him was obviously the wisest effort she could make. So, she must have a new dress for the next meeting, one which would make him better pleased to take her out to dinner. True, if she came in rags, he would not be disturbed--for he had nothing of the snob in him. But at the same time, if she came dressed like a woman of his own class, he would be impressed. "He's a man, if he is a genius," reasoned she. Vital though the matter was, she calculated that she did not dare spend more than twenty-five dollars on this toilet. She must put by some of her forty a week; Brent might give her up at any time, and she must not be in the position of having to choose immediately between submitting to the slavery of the kept woman as Spenser's dependent and submitting to the costly and dangerous and repulsive freedom of the woman of the streets. Thus, to lay out twenty-five dollars on a single costume was a wild extravagance. She thought it over from every point of view; she decided that she must take the risk. Late in the afternoon she walked for an hour in Fifth Avenue. After some hesitation she ventured into the waiting- and dressing-rooms of several fashionable hotels. She was in search of ideas for the dress, which must be in the prevailing fashion. She had far too good sense and good taste to attempt to be wholly original in dress; she knew that the woman who understands her business does not try to create a fashion but uses the changing and capricious fashion as the means to express a constant and consistent style of her own. She appreciated her limitations in such matters--how far she as yet was from the knowledge necessary to forming a permanent and self-expressive style. She was prepared to be most cautious in giving play to an individual taste so imperfectly educated as hers had necessarily been. She felt that she had the natural instinct for the best and could recognize it on sight--an instinct without which no one can go a step forward in any of the arts. She had long since learned to discriminate among the vast masses of offering, most of them tasteless or commonplace, to select the rare and few things that have merit. Thus, she had always stood out in the tawdrily or drearily or fussily dressed throngs, had been a pleasure to the eyes even of those who did not know why they were pleased. On that momentous day, she finally saw a woman dressed in admirable taste who was wearing a costume simple enough for her to venture to think of copying the main points. She walked several blocks a few yards behind this woman, then hurried ahead of her, turned and walked toward her to inspect the front of the dress. She repeated this several times between the St. Regis and Sherry's. The woman soon realized, as women always do, what the girl in the shirtwaist and short skirt was about. But she happened to be a good-natured person, and smiled pleasantly at Susan, and got in return a smile she probably did not soon forget. The next morning Susan went shopping. She had it in mind to get the materials for a costume of a certain delicate shade of violet. A dress of that shade, and a big hat trimmed in tulle to match or to harmonize, with a bunch of silk violets fastened in the tulle in a certain way. Susan knew she had good looks, knew what was becoming to her darkly and softly fringed violet eyes, pallid skin, to her rather tall figure, slender, not voluptuous yet suggesting voluptuousness. She could see herself in that violet costume. But when she began to look at materials she hesitated. The violet would be beautiful; but it was not a wise investment for a girl with few clothes, with but one best dress. She did not give it up definitely, however, until she came upon a sixteen-yard remnant of soft gray China crêpe. Gray was a really serviceable color for the best dress of a girl of small means. And this remnant, certainly enough for a dress, could be had for ten dollars, where violet China crêpe of the shade she wanted would cost her a dollar a yard. She took the remnant. She went to the millinery department and bought a large hat frame. It was of a good shape and she saw how it could be bent to suit her face. She paid fifty cents for this, and two dollars and seventy cents for four yards of gray tulle. She found that silk flowers were beyond her means; so she took a bunch of presentable looking violets of the cheaper kind at two dollars and a half. She happened to pass a counter whereon were displayed bargains in big buckles and similar odds and ends of steel and enamel. She fairly pounced upon a handsome gray buckle with violet enamel, which cost but eighty-nine cents. For a pair of gray suede ties she paid two dollars; for a pair of gray silk stockings, ninety cents. These matters, with some gray silk net for the collar, gray silk for a belt, linings and the like, made her total bill twenty-three dollars and sixty-seven cents. She returned home content and studied "Cavalleria" until her purchases arrived. Spenser was out now, was working all day and in the evenings at Sperry's office high up in the Times Building. So, Susan had freedom for her dressmaking operations. To get them off her mind that she might work uninterruptedly at learning _Lola's_ part in "Cavalleria," she toiled all Saturday, far into Sunday morning, was astir before Spenser waked, finished the dress soon after breakfast and the hat by the middle of the afternoon. When Spenser returned from Sperry's office to take her to dinner, she was arrayed. For the first time he saw her in fashionable attire and it was really fashionable, for despite all her disadvantages she, who had real and rare capacity for learning, had educated herself well in the chief business of woman the man-catcher in her years in New York. He stood rooted to the threshold. It would have justified a vanity less vigorous than Susan or any other normal human being possessed, to excite such a look as was in his eyes. He drew a long breath by way of breaking the spell over speech. "You are _beautiful!_" he exclaimed. And his eyes traveled from the bewitching hat, set upon her head coquettishly yet without audacity, to the soft crêpe dress, its round collar showing her perfect throat, its graceful lines subtly revealing her alluring figure, to the feet that men always admired, whatever else of beauty or charm they might fail to realize. "How you have grown!" he ejaculated. Then, "How did you do it?" "By all but breaking myself." "It's worth whatever it cost. If I had a dress suit, we'd go to Sherry's or the Waldorf. I'm willing to go, without the dress suit." "No. I've got everything ready for dinner at home." "Then, why on earth did you dress? To give me a treat?" "Oh, I hate to go out in a dress I've never worn. And a woman has to wear a hat a good many times before she knows how." "What a lot of fuss you women do make about clothes." "You seem to like it, all the same." "Of course. But it's a trifle." "It has got many women a good provider for life. And not paying attention to dress or not knowing how has made most of the old maids. Are those things trifles?" Spenser laughed and shifted his ground without any sense of having been pressed to do so. "Men are fools where women are concerned." "Or women are wise where men are concerned." "I guess they do know their business--some of them," he confessed. "Still, it's a silly business, you must admit." "Nothing is silly that's successful," said Susan. "Depends on what you mean by success," argued he. "Success is getting what you want." "Provided one wants what's worth while," said he. "And what's worth while?" rejoined she. "Why, whatever one happens to want." To avoid any possible mischance to the _grande toilette_ he served the dinner and did the dangerous part of the clearing up. They went to the theater, Rod enjoying even more than she the very considerable admiration she got. When she was putting the dress away carefully that night, Rod inquired when he was to be treated again. "Oh--I don't know," replied she. "Not soon." She was too wise to tell him that the dress would not be worn again until Brent was to see it. The hat she took out of the closet from time to time and experimented with it, reshaping the brim, studying the different effects of different angles. It delighted Spenser to catch her at this "foolishness"; he felt so superior, and with his incurable delusion of the shallow that dress is an end, not merely a means, he felt more confident than ever of being able to hold her when he should have the money to buy her what her frivolous and feminine nature evidently craved beyond all else in the world. But---- When he bought a ready-to-wear evening suit, he made more stir about it than had Susan about her costume--this, when dress to him was altogether an end in itself and not a shrewd and useful means. He spent more time in admiring himself in it before the mirror, and looked at it, and at himself in it, with far more admiration and no criticism at all. Susan noted this--and after the manner of women who are wise or indifferent--or both--she made no comment. At the studio floor of Brent's house the door of the elevator was opened for Susan by a small young man with a notably large head, bald and bulging. His big smooth face had the expression of extreme amiability that usually goes with weakness and timidity. "I am Mr. Brent's secretary, Mr. Garvey," he explained. And Susan--made as accurate as quick in her judgments of character by the opportunities and the necessities of her experience--saw that she had before her one of those nice feeble folk who either get the shelter of some strong personality as a bird hides from the storm in the thick branches of a great tree or are tossed and torn and ruined by life and exist miserably until rescued by death. She knew the type well; it had been the dominant type in her surroundings ever since she left Sutherland. Indeed, is it not the dominant type in the whole ill-equipped, sore-tried human race? And does it not usually fail of recognition because so many of us who are in fact weak, look--and feel--strong because we are sheltered by inherited money or by powerful friends or relatives or by chance lodgment in a nook unvisited of the high winds of life in the open? Susan liked Garvey at once; they exchanged smiles and were friends. She glanced round the room. At the huge open window Brent, his back to her, was talking earnestly to a big hatchet-faced man with a black beard. Even as Susan glanced Brent closed the interview; with an emphatic gesture of fist into palm he exclaimed, "And that's final. Good-by." The two men came toward her, both bowed, the hatchet-faced man entered the elevator and was gone. Brent extended his hand with a smile. "You evidently didn't come to work today," said he with a careless, fleeting glance at the _grande toilette_. "But we are prepared against such tricks. Garvey, take her down to the rear dressing-room and have the maid lay her out a simple costume." To Susan, "Be as quick as you can." And he seated himself at his desk and was reading and signing letters. Susan, crestfallen, followed Garvey down the stairway. She had confidently expected that he would show some appreciation of her toilette. She knew she had never in her life looked so well. In the long glass in the dressing-room, while Garvey was gone to send the maid, she inspected herself again. Yes--never anything like so well. And Brent had noted her appearance only to condemn it. She was always telling herself that she wished him to regard her as a working woman, a pupil in stagecraft. But now that she had proof that he did so regard her, she was depressed, resentful. However, this did not last long. While she was changing to linen skirt and shirtwaist, she began to laugh at herself. How absurd she had been, thinking to impress this man who had known so many beautiful women, who must have been satiated long ago with beauty--she thinking to create a sensation in such a man, with a simple little costume of her own crude devising. She reappeared in the studio, laughter in her eyes and upon her lips. Brent apparently did not glance at her; yet he said, "What's amusing you?" She confessed all, on one of her frequent impulses to candor--those impulses characteristic both of weak natures unable to exercise self-restraint and of strong natures, indifferent to petty criticism and misunderstanding, and absent from vain mediocrity, which always has itself--that is, appearances--on its mind. She described in amusing detail how she had planned and got together the costume how foolish his reception of it had made her feel. "I've no doubt you guessed what was in my head," concluded she. "You see everything." "I did notice that you were looking unusually well, and that you felt considerably set up over it," said he. "But why not? Vanity's an excellent thing. Like everything else it's got to be used, not misused. It can help us to learn instead of preventing." "I had an excuse for dressing up," she reminded him. "You said we were to dine together. I thought you wouldn't want there to be too much contrast between us. Next time I'll be more sensible." "Dress as you like for the present," said he. "You can always change here. Later on dress will be one of the main things, of course. But not now. Have you learned the part?" And they began. She saw at the far end of the room a platform about the height of a stage. He explained that Garvey, with the book of the play, would take the other parts in _Lola's_ scenes, and sent them both to the stage. "Don't be nervous," Garvey said to her in an undertone. "He doesn't expect anything of you. This is simply to get started." But she could not suppress the trembling in her legs and arms, the hysterical contractions of her throat. However, she did contrive to go through the part--Garvey prompting. She knew she was ridiculous; she could not carry out a single one of the ideas of "business" which had come to her as she studied; she was awkward, inarticulate, panic-stricken. "Rotten!" exclaimed Brent, when she had finished. "Couldn't be worse therefore, couldn't be better." She dropped to a chair and sobbed hysterically. "That's right--cry it out," said Brent. "Leave us alone, Garvey." Brent walked up and down smoking until she lifted her head and glanced at him with a pathetic smile. "Take a cigarette," he suggested. "We'll talk it over. Now, we've got something to talk about." She found relief from her embarrassment in the cigarette. "You can laugh at me now," she said. "I shan't mind. In fact, I didn't mind, though I thought I did. If I had, I'd not have let you see me cry." "Don't think I'm discouraged," said Brent. "The reverse. You showed that you have nerve a very different matter from impudence. Impudence fails when it's most needed. Nerve makes one hang on, regardless. In such a panic as yours was, the average girl would have funked absolutely. You stuck it out. Now, you and I will try _Lola's_ first entrance. No, don't throw away your cigarette. _Lola_ might well come in smoking a cigarette." She did better. What Burlingham had once thoroughly drilled into her now stood her in good stead, and Brent's sympathy and enthusiasm gave her the stimulating sense that he and she were working together. They spent the afternoon on the one thing--_Lola_ coming on, singing her gay song, her halt at sight of _Santuzza_ and _Turiddu_, her look at _Santuzza_, at _Turiddu_, her greeting for each. They tried it twenty different ways. They discussed what would have been in the minds of all three. They built up "business" for _Lola_, and for the two others to increase the significance of _Lola's_ actions. "As I've already told you," said he, "anyone with a voice and a movable body can learn to act. There's no question about your becoming a good actress. But it'll be some time before I can tell whether you can be what I hope--an actress who shows no sign that she's acting." Susan showed the alarm she felt. "I'm afraid you'll find at the end that you've been wasting your time," said she. "Put it straight out of your head," replied he. "I never waste time. To live is to learn. Already you've given me a new play--don't forget that. In a month I'll have it ready for us to use. Besides, in teaching you I teach myself. Hungry?" "No--that is, yes. I hadn't thought of it, but I'm starved." "This sort of thing gives one an appetite like a field hand." He accompanied her to the door of the rear dressing-room on the floor below. "Go down to the reception room when you're ready," said he, as he left her to go on to his own suite to change his clothes. "I'll be there." The maid came immediately, drew a bath for her, afterward helped her to dress. It was Susan's first experience with a maid, her first realization how much time and trouble one saves oneself if free from the routine, menial things. And then and there a maid was set down upon her secret list of the luxurious comforts to which she would treat herself--_when?_ The craving for luxury is always a part, usually a powerful part, of an ambitious temperament. Ambition is simply a variously manifested and variously directed impulse toward improvement--a discomfort so keen that it compels effort to change to a position less uncomfortable. There had never been a time when luxury had not attracted her. At the slightest opportunity she had always pushed out for luxuries--for better food, better clothing, more agreeable surroundings. Even in her worst hours of discouragement she had not really relaxed in the struggle against rags and dirt. And when moral horror had been blunted by custom and drink, physical horror had remained acute. For, human nature being a development upward through the physical to the spiritual, when a process of degeneration sets in, the topmost layers, the spiritual, wear away first--then those in which the spiritual is a larger ingredient than the material--then those in which the material is the larger--and last of all those that are purely material. As life educated her, as her intelligence and her knowledge grew, her appreciation of luxury had grown apace and her desire for it. With most human beings, the imagination is a heavy bird of feeble wing; it flies low, seeing only the things of the earth. When they describe heaven, it has houses of marble and streets of gold. Their pretense to sight of higher things is either sheer pretense or sight at second hand. Susan was of the few whose fancy can soar. She saw the earthy things; she saw the things of the upper regions also. And she saw the lower region from the altitudes of the higher--and in their perspective. As she and Brent stood together on the sidewalk before his house, about to enter his big limousine, his smile told her that he had read her thought--her desire for such an automobile as her very own. "I can't help it," said she. "It's my nature to want these things." "And to want them intelligently," said he. "Everybody wants, but only the few want intelligently--and they get. The three worst things in the world are sickness, poverty and obscurity. Your splendid health safeguards you against sickness. Your looks and your brains can carry you far away from the other two. Your one danger is of yielding to the temptation to become the wife or the mistress of some rich man. The prospect of several years of heart-breaking hard work isn't wildly attractive at twenty-two." "You don't know me," said Susan--but the boast was uttered under her breath. The auto rushed up to Delmonico's entrance, came to a halt abruptly yet gently. The attentiveness of the personnel, the staring and whispering of the people in the palm room showed how well known Brent was. There were several women--handsome women of what is called the New York type, though it certainly does not represent the average New York woman, who is poorly dressed in flimsy ready-made clothes and has the mottled skin that indicates bad food and too little sleep. These handsome women were dressed beautifully as well as expensively, in models got in--not from--Paris. One of them smiled sweetly at Brent, who responded, so Susan thought, rather formally. She felt dowdy in her home-made dress. All her pride in it vanished; she saw only its defects. And the gracefully careless manner of these women--the manners of those who feel sure of themselves--made her feel "green" and out of place. She was disgusted with the folly that had caused her to thrill with pleasure when his order to his chauffeur at his door told her she was actually to be taken to one of the restaurants in which she had wished to exhibit herself with him. She heartily wished she had insisted on going where she would have been as well dressed and as much at home as anyone there. She lifted her eyes, to distract her mind from these depressing sensations. Brent was looking at her with that amused, mocking yet sympathetic expression which was most characteristic of him. She blushed furiously. He laughed. "No, I'm not ashamed of your homemade dress," said he. "I don't care what is thought of me by people who don't give me any money. And, anyhow, you are easily the most unusual looking and the most tastefully dressed woman here. The rest of these women are doomed for life to commonplace obscurity. You---- "We'll see your name in letters of fire on the Broadway temples of fame." "I know you're half laughing at me," said Susan. "But I feel a little better." "Then I'm accomplishing my object. Let's not think about ourselves. That makes life narrow. Let's keep the thoughts on our work--on the big splendid dreams that come to us and invite us to labor and to dare." And as they lingered over the satisfactory dinner he had ordered, they talked of acting--of the different roles of "Cavalleria" as types of fundamental instincts and actions--of how best to express those meanings--how to fill out the skeletons of the dramatist into personalities actual and vivid. Susan forgot where she was, forgot to be reserved with him. In her and Rod's happiest days she had never been free from the constraint of his and her own sense of his great superiority. With Brent, such trifles of the petty personal disappeared. And she talked more naturally than she had since a girl at her uncle's at Sutherland. She was amazed by the fountain that had suddenly gushed forth in her mind at the conjuring of Brent's sympathy. She did not recognize herself in this person so open to ideas, so eager to learn, so clear in the expression of her thoughts. Not since the Burlingham days had she spent so long a time with a man in absolute unconsciousness of sex. They were interrupted by the intrusion of a fashionable young man with the expression of assurance which comes from the possession of wealth and the knowledge that money will buy practically everything and everybody. Brent received him so coldly that, after a smooth sentence or two, he took himself off stammering and in confusion. "I suppose," said Brent when he was gone, "that young ass hoped I would introduce him to you and invite him to sit. But you'll be tempted often enough in the next few years by rich men without my helping to put temptation in your way," "I've never been troubled thus far," laughed Susan. "But you will, now. You have developed to the point where everyone will soon be seeing what it took expert eyes to see heretofore." "If I am tempted," said Susan, "do you think I'll be able to resist?" "I don't know," confessed Brent. "You have a strong sense of honesty, and that'll keep you at work with me for a while. Then---- "If you have it in you to be great, you'll go on. If you're merely the ordinary woman, a little more intelligent, you'll probably--sell out. All the advice I have to offer is, don't sell cheap. As you're not hampered by respectability or by inexperience, you needn't." He reflected a moment, then added, "And if you ever do decide that you don't care to go on with a career, tell me frankly. I may be able to help you in the other direction." "Thank you," said Susan, her strange eyes fixed upon him. "Why do you put so much gratitude in your tone and in your eyes?" asked he. "I didn't put it there," she answered. "It--just came. And I was grateful because--well, I'm human, you know, and it was good to feel--that--that----" "Go on," said he, as she hesitated. "I'm afraid you'll misunderstand." "What does it matter, if I do?" "Well--you've acted toward me as if I were a mere machine that you were experimenting with." "And so you are." "I understand that. But when you offered to help me, if I happened to want to do something different from what you want me to do, it made me feel that you thought of me as a human being, too." The expression of his unseeing eyes puzzled her. She became much embarrassed when he said, "Are you dissatisfied with Spenser? Do you want to change lovers? Are you revolving me as a possibility?" "I haven't forgotten what you said," she protested. "But a few words from me wouldn't change you from a woman into a sexless ambition." An expression of wistful sadness crept into the violet-gray eyes, in contrast to the bravely smiling lips. She was thinking of her birth that had condemned her to that farmer Ferguson, full as much as of the life of the streets, when she said: "I know that a man like you wouldn't care for a woman of my sort." "If I were you," said he gently, "I'd not say those things about myself. Saying them encourages you to think them. And thinking them gives you a false point of view. You must learn to appreciate that you're not a sheltered woman, with reputation for virtue as your one asset, the thing that'll enable you to get some man to undertake your support. You are dealing with the world as a man deals with it. You must demand and insist that the world deal with you on that basis." There came a wonderful look of courage and hope into the eyes of Lorella's daughter. "And the world will," he went on. "At least, the only part of it that's important to you--or really important in any way. The matter of your virtue or lack of it is of no more importance than is my virtue or lack of it." "Do you _really_ believe that way?" asked Susan, earnestly. "It doesn't in the least matter whether I do or not," laughed he. "Don't bother about what I think--what anyone thinks--of you. The point here, as always, is that you believe it, yourself. There's no reason why a woman who is making a career should not be virtuous. She will probably not get far if she isn't more or less so. Dissipation doesn't help man or woman, especially the ruinous dissipation of license in passion. On the other hand, no woman can ever hope to make a career who persists in narrowing and cheapening herself with the notion that her virtue is her all. She'll not amount to much as a worker in the fields of action." Susan reflected, sighed. "It's very, very hard to get rid of one's sex." "It's impossible," declared he. "Don't try. But don't let it worry you, either." "Everyone can't be as strong as you are--so absorbed in a career that they care for nothing else." This amused him. With forearms on the edge of the table he turned his cigarette slowly round between his fingers, watching the smoke curl up from it. She observed that there was more than a light sprinkle of gray in his thick, carefully brushed hair. She was filled with curiosity as to the thoughts just then in that marvelous brain of his; nor did it lessen her curiosity to know that never would those thoughts be revealed to her. What women had he loved? What women had loved him? What follies had he committed? From how many sources he must have gathered his knowledge of human nature of--woman nature! And no doubt he was still gathering. What woman was it now? When he lifted his glance from the cigarette, it was to call the waiter and get the bill. "I've a supper engagement," he said, "and it's nearly eleven o'clock." "Eleven o'clock!" she exclaimed. "Times does fly--doesn't it?--when a man and a woman, each an unexplored mystery to the other, are dining alone and talking about themselves." "It was my fault," said Susan. His quizzical eyes looked into hers--uncomfortably far. She flushed. "You make me feel guiltier than I am," she protested, under cover of laughing glance and tone of raillery. "Guilty? Of what?" "You think I've been trying to--to 'encourage' you," replied she frankly. "And why shouldn't you, if you feel so inclined?" laughed he. "That doesn't compel me to be--encouraged." "Honestly I haven't," said she, the contents of seriousness still in the gay wrapper of raillery. "At least not any more than----" "You know, a woman feels bound to 'encourage' a man who piques her by seeming--difficult." "Naturally, you'd not have objected to baptizing the new hat and dress with my heart's blood." She could not have helped laughing with him. "Unfortunately for you--or rather for the new toilette--my poor heart was bled dry long, long ago. I'm a busy man, too--busy and a little tired." "I deserve it all," said she. "I've brought it on myself. And I'm not a bit sorry I started the subject. I've found out you're quite human--and that'll help me to work better." They separated with the smiling faces of those who have added an evening altogether pleasant to memory's store of the past's happy hours--that roomy storehouse which is all too empty even where the life has been what is counted happy. He insisted on sending her home in his auto, himself taking a taxi to the Players' where the supper was given. The moment she was alone for the short ride home, her gayety evaporated like a delicious but unstable perfume. Why? Perhaps it was the sight of the girls on the stroll. Had she really been one of them?--and only a few days ago? Impossible! Not she not the real self . . . and perhaps she would be back there with them before long. No--never, never, in any circumstances!. . . She had said, "Never!" the first time she escaped from the tenements, yet she had gone back. . . were any of those girls strolling along--were, again, any of them Freddie Palmer's? At the thought she shivered and quailed. She had not thought of him, except casually, in many months. What if he should see her, should still feel vengeful--he who never forgot or forgave--who would dare anything! And she would be defenseless against him. . . . She remembered what she had last read about him in the newspaper. He had risen in the world, was no longer in the criminal class apparently, had moved to the class of semi-criminal wholly respectable contractor-politician. No, he had long since forgotten her, vindictive Italian though he was. The auto set her down at home. Her tremors about Freddie departed; but the depression remained. She felt physically as if she had been sitting all evening in a stuffy room with a dull company after a heavy, badly selected dinner. She fell easy prey to one of those fits of the blues to which all imaginative young people are at least occasional victims, and by which those cursed and hampered with the optimistic temperament are haunted and harassed and all but or quite undone. She had a sense of failure, of having made a bad impression. She feared he, recalling and reinspecting what she had said, would get the idea that she was not in earnest, was merely looking for a lover--for a chance to lead a life of luxurious irresponsibility. Would it not be natural for him, who knew women well, to assume from her mistakenly candid remarks, that she was like the rest of the women, both the respectable and the free? Why should he believe in her, when she did not altogether believe in herself but suspected herself of a secret hankering after something more immediate, more easy and more secure than the stage career? The longer she thought of it the clearer it seemed to her to be that she had once more fallen victim to too much hope, too much optimism, too much and too ready belief in her fellow-beings--she who had suffered so much from these follies, and had tried so hard to school herself against them. She fought this mood of depression--fought alone, for Spenser did not notice and she would not annoy him. She slept little that night; she felt that she could not hope for peace until she had seen Brent again. CHAPTER XVI TOWARD half-past ten the next day, a few minutes after Rod left for the theater, she was in the bathroom cleaning the coffee machine. There came a knock at the door of the sitting-room bedroom. Into such disorder had her mood of depression worried her nerves that she dropped the coffee machine into the washbowl and jumped as if she were seeing a ghost. Several dire calamities took vague shape in her mind, then the image of Freddie Palmer, smiling sweetly, cruelly. She wavered only a moment, went to the door, and after a brief hesitation that still further depressed her about herself she opened it. The maid--a good-natured sloven who had become devoted to Susan because she gave her liberal fees and made her no extra work--was standing there, in an attitude of suppressed excitement. Susan laughed, for this maid was a born agitator, a person who is always trying to find a thrill or to put a thrill into the most trivial event. "What is it now, Annie?" Susan asked. "Mr. Spenser--he's gone, hasn't he?" "Yes--a quarter of an hour ago." Annie drew a breath of deep relief. "I was sure he had went," said she, producing from under her apron a note. "I saw it was in a gentleman's writing, so I didn't come up with it till he was out of the way, though the boy brought it a little after nine." "Oh, bother!" exclaimed Susan, taking the note. "Well, Mrs. Spenser, I've had my lesson," replied Annie, apologetic but firm. "When I first came to New York, green as the grass that grows along the edge of the spring, what does I do but go to work and take up a note to a lady when her husband was there! Next thing I knew he went to work and hauled her round the floor by the hair and skinned out--yes, beat it for good. And my madam says to me, 'Annie, you're fired. Never give a note to a lady when her gent is by or to a gent when his lady's by. That's the first rule of life in gay New York.' And you can bet I never have since--nor never will." Susan had glanced at the address on the note, had recognized the handwriting of Brent's secretary. Her heart had straightway sunk as if the foreboding of calamity had been realized. As she stood there uncertainly, Annie seized the opportunity to run on and on. Susan now said absently, "Thank you. Very well," and closed the door. It was a minute or so before she tore open the envelope with an impatient gesture and read: DEAR MRS. SPENSER: Mr. Brent requests me to ask you not to come until further notice. It may be sometime before he will be free to resume. Yours truly, JOHN C. GARVEY. It was a fair specimen of Garvey's official style, with which she had become acquainted--the style of the secretary who has learned by experience not to use frills or flourishes but to convey his message in the fewest and clearest words. Had it been a skillfully worded insult Susan, in this mood of depression and distorted mental vision, could not have received it differently. She dropped to a chair at the table and stared at the five lines of neat handwriting until her eyes became circled and her face almost haggard. Precisely as Rod had described! After a long, long time she crumpled the paper and let it fall into the waste-basket. Then she walked up and down the room--presently drifted into the bathroom and resumed cleaning the coffee machine. Every few moments she would pause in the task--and in her dressing afterwards--would be seized by the fear, the horror of again being thrust into that hideous underworld. What was between her and it, to save her from being flung back into its degradation? Two men on neither of whom she could rely. Brent might drop her at any time--perhaps had already dropped her. As for Rod--vain, capricious, faithless, certain to become an unendurable tyrant if he got her in his power--Rod was even less of a necessity than Brent. What a dangerous situation was hers! How slender her chances of escape from another catastrophe. She leaned against wall or table and was shaken by violent fits of shuddering. She felt herself slipping--slipping. It was all she could do to refrain from crying out. In those moments, no trace of the self-possessed Susan the world always saw. Her fancy went mad and ran wild. She quivered under the actuality of coarse contacts--Mrs. Tucker in bed with her--the men who had bought her body for an hour--the vermin of the tenements--the brutal hands of policemen. Then with an exclamation of impatience or of anger she would shake herself together and go resolutely on--only again to relapse. "Because I so suddenly cut off the liquor and the opium," she said. It was the obvious and the complete explanation. But her heart was like lead, and her sky like ink. This note, the day after having tried her out as a possibility for the stage and as a woman. She stared down at the crumpled note in the wast-basket. That note--it was herself. He had crumpled her up and thrown her into the waste-basket, where she no doubt belonged. It was nearly noon before she, dressed with unconscious care, stood in the street doorway looking about uncertainly as if she did not know which way to turn. She finally moved in the direction of the theater where Rod's play was rehearsing. She had gone to none of the rehearsals because Rod had requested it. "I want you to see it as a total surprise the first night," explained he. "That'll give you more pleasure, and also it will make your criticism more valuable to us." And she had acquiesced, not displeased to have all her time for her own affairs. But now she, dazed, stunned almost, convinced that it was all over for her with Brent, instinctively turned to Rod to get human help--not to ask for it, but in the hope that somehow he would divine and would say or do something that would make the way ahead a little less forbidding--something that would hearten her for the few first steps, anyhow. She turned back several times--now, because she feared Rod wouldn't like her coming; again because her experience--enlightened good sense--told her that Rod would--could--not help her, that her sole reliance was herself. But in the end, driven by one of those spasms of terror lest the underworld should be about to engulf her again, she stood at the stage door. As she was about to negotiate the surly looking man on guard within, Sperry came rushing down the long dark passageway. He was brushing past her when he saw who it was. "Too late!" he cried. "Rehearsal's over." "I didn't come to the rehearsal," explained Susan. "I thought perhaps Rod would be going to lunch." "So he is. Go straight back. You'll find him on the stage. I'll join you if you'll wait a minute or so." And Sperry hurried on into the street. Susan advanced along the passageway cautiously as it was but one remove from pitch dark. Perhaps fifty feet, and she came to a cross passage. As she hesitated, a door at the far end of it opened and she caught a glimpse of a dressing-room and, in the space made by the partly opened door, a woman half-dressed--an attractive glimpse. The woman--who seemed young--was not looking down the passage, but into the room. She was laughing in the way a woman laughs only when it is for a man, for _the_ man--and was saying, "Now, Rod, you must go, and give me a chance to finish dressing." A man's arm--Rod's arm--reached across the opening in the doorway. A hand--Susan recognized Rod's well-shaped hand--was laid strongly yet tenderly upon the pretty bare arm of the struggling, laughing young woman--and the door closed--and the passage was soot-dark again. All this a matter of less than five seconds. Susan, ashamed at having caught him, frightened lest she should be found where she had no business to be, fled back along the main passage and jerked open the street door. She ran squarely into Sperry. "I--I beg your pardon," stammered he. "I was in such a rush--I ought to have been thinking where I was going. Did I hurt you?" This last most anxiously. "I'm so sorry----" "It's nothing--nothing," laughed Susan. "You are the one that's hurt." And in fact she had knocked Sperry breathless. "You don't look anything like so strong," gasped he. "Oh, my appearance is deceptive--in a lot of ways." For instance, he could have got from her face just then no hint of the agony of fear torturing her--fear of the drop into the underworld. "Find Rod?" asked he. "He wasn't on the stage. So--I came out again." "Wait here," said Sperry. "I'll hunt him up." "Oh, no--please don't. I stopped on impulse. I'll not bother him." She smiled mischievously. "I might be interrupting." Sperry promptly reddened. She had no difficulty in reading what was in his mind--that her remark had reminded him of Rod's "affair," and he was cursing himself for having been so stupid as to forget it for the moment and put his partner in danger of detection. "I--I guess he's gone," stammered Sperry. "Lord, but that was a knock you gave me! Better come to lunch with me." Susan hesitated, a wistful, forlorn look in her eyes. "Do you really want me?" asked she. "Come right along," said Sperry in a tone that left no doubt of his sincerity. "We'll go to the Knickerbocker and have something good to eat." "Oh, no--a quieter place," urged Susan. Sperry laughed. "You mean less expensive. There's one of the great big differences between you and the make-believe ladies one bumps into in this part of town. _You_ don't like to be troublesome or expensive. But we'll go to the Knickerbocker. I feel 'way down today, and I intended to treat myself. You don't look any too gay-hearted yourself." "I'll admit I don't like the way the cards are running," said Susan. "But--they'll run better--sooner or later." "Sure!" cried Sperry. "You needn't worry about the play. That's all right. How I envy women!" "Why?" "Oh--you have Rod between you and the fight. While I--I've got to look out for myself." "So have I," said Susan. "So has everyone, for that matter." "Believe me, Mrs. Spenser," cried Sperry, earnestly, "you can count on Rod. No matter what----" "Please!" protested Susan. "I count on nobody. I learned long ago not to lean." "Well, leaning isn't exactly a safe position," Sperry admitted. "There never was a perfectly reliable crutch. Tell me your troubles." Susan smilingly shook her head. "That'd be leaning. . . . No, thank you. I've got to think it out for myself. I believed I had arranged for a career for myself. It seems to have gone to pieces That's all. Something else will turn up--after lunch." "Not a doubt in the world," replied he confidently. "Meanwhile--there's Rod." Susan's laugh of raillery made him blush guiltily. "Yes," said she, "there's Rod." She laughed again, merrily. "There's Rod--but where is there?" "You're the only woman in the world he has any real liking for," said Sperry, earnest and sincere. "Don't you ever doubt that, Mrs. Spenser." When they were seated in the café and he had ordered, he excused himself and Susan saw him make his way to a table where sat Fitzalan and another man who looked as if he too had to do with the stage. It was apparent that Fitzalan was excited about something; his lips, his arms, his head were in incessant motion. Susan noted that he had picked up many of Brent's mannerisms; she had got the habit of noting this imitativeness in men--and in women, too--from having seen in the old days how Rod took on the tricks of speech, manner, expression, thought even, of whatever man he happened at the time to be admiring. May it not have been this trait of Rod's that gave her the clue to his character, when she was thinking him over, after the separation? Sperry was gone nearly ten minutes. He came, full of apologies. "Fitz held on to me while he roasted Brent. You've heard of Brent, of course?" "Yes," said Susan. "Fitz has been seeing him off. And he says it's----" Susan glanced quickly at him. "Off?" she said. "To Europe." Susan had paused in removing her left glove. Rod's description of Brent's way of sidestepping--Rod's description to the last detail. Her hands fluttered uncertainly--fluttering fingers like a flock of birds flushed and confused by the bang of the gun. "And Fitz says----" "For Europe," said Susan. She was drawing her fingers slowly one by one from the fingers of her glove. "Yes. He sailed, it seems, on impulse barely time to climb aboard. Fitz always lays everything to a woman. He says Brent has been mixed up for a year or so with---- Oh, it doesn't matter. I oughtn't to repeat those things. I don't believe 'em--on principle. Every man--or woman--who amounts to anything has scandal talked about him or her all the time. Good Lord! If Robert Brent bothered with half the affairs that are credited to him, he'd have no time or strength--not to speak of brains--to do plays." "I guess even the busiest man manages to fit a woman in somehow," observed Susan. "A woman or so." Sperry laughed. "I guess yes," said he. "But as to Brent, most of the scandal about him is due to a fad of his--hunting for an undeveloped female genius who----" "I've heard of that," interrupted Susan. "The service is dreadfully slow here. How long is it since you ordered?" "Twenty minutes--and here comes our waiter." And then, being one of those who must finish whatever they have begun, he went on. "Well, it's true Brent does pick up and drop a good many ladies of one kind and another. And naturally, every one of them is good-looking and clever or he'd not start in. But--you may laugh at me if you like--I think he's strictly business with all of them. He'd have got into trouble if he hadn't been. And Fitz admits this one woman--she's a society woman--is the only one there's any real basis for talk about in connection with Brent." Susan had several times lifted a spoonful of soup to her lips and had every time lowered it untasted. "And Brent's mighty decent to those he tries and has to give up. I know of one woman he carried on his pay roll for nearly two years----" "Let's drop Mr. Brent," cried Susan. "Tell me about--about the play." "Rod must be giving you an overdose of that." "I've not seen much of him lately. How was the rehearsal?" "Fair--fair." And Sperry forgot Brent and talked on and on about the play, not checking himself until the coffee was served. He had not observed that Susan was eating nothing. Neither had he observed that she was not listening; but there was excuse for this oversight, as she had set her expression at absorbed attention before withdrawing within herself to think--and to suffer. She came to the surface again when Sperry, complaining of the way the leading lady was doing her part, said: "No wonder Brent drops one after another. Women aren't worth much as workers. Their real mind's always occupied with the search for a man to support 'em." "Not always," cried Susan, quivering with sudden pain. "Oh, no, Mr. Sperry--not always." "Yes--there are exceptions," said Sperry, not noting how he had wounded her. "But--well, I never happened to run across one." "Can you blame them?" mocked Susan. She was ashamed that she had been stung into crying out. "To be honest--no," said Sperry. "I suspect I'd throw up the sponge and sell out if I had anything a lady with cash wanted to buy. I only _suspect_ myself. But I _know_ most men would. No, I don't blame the ladies. Why not have a nice easy time? Only one short life--and then--the worms." She was struggling with the re-aroused insane terror of a fall back to the depths whence she had once more just come--and she felt that, if she fell again, it would mean the very end of hope. It must have been instinct or accident, for it certainly was not any prompting from her calm expression, that moved him to say: "Now, tell me _your_ troubles. I've told you mine. . . . You surely must have some?" Susan forced a successful smile of raillery. "None to speak of," evaded she. When she reached home there was a telegram--from Brent: Compelled to sail suddenly. Shall be back in a few weeks. Don't mind this annoying interruption. R. B. A very few minutes after she read these words, she was at work on the play. But--a very few minutes thereafter she was sitting with the play in her lap, eyes gazing into the black and menacing future. The misgivings of the night before had been fed and fattened into despairing certainties by the events of the day. The sun was shining, never more brightly; but it was not the light of her City of the Sun. She stayed in all afternoon and all evening. During those hours before she put out the light and shut herself away in the dark a score of Susans, every one different from every other, had been seen upon the little theater of that lodging house parlor-bedroom. There had been a hopeful Susan, a sad but resolved Susan, a strong Susan, a weak Susan; there had been Susans who could not have shed a tear; there had been Susans who shed many tears--some of them Susans all bitterness, others Susans all humility and self-reproach. Any spectator would have been puzzled by this shifting of personality. Susan herself was completely confused. She sought for her real self among this multitude so contradictory. Each successive one seemed the reality; yet none persisted. When we look in at our own souls, it is like looking into a many-sided room lined with mirrors. We see reflections--re-reflections--views at all angles--but we cannot distinguish the soul itself among all these counterfeits, all real yet all false because partial. "What shall I do? What can I do? What will I do?"--that was her last cry as the day ended. And it was her first cry as her weary brain awakened for the new day. At the end of the week came the regular check with a note from Garvey--less machine-like, more human. He apologized for not having called, said one thing and another had prevented, and now illness of a near relative compelled him to leave town for a few days, but as soon as he came back he would immediately call. It seemed to Susan that there could be but one reason why he should call--the reason that would make a timid, soft-hearted man such as he put off a personal interview as long as he could find excuses. She flushed hot with rage and shame as she reflected on her position. Garvey pitying her! She straightway sat down and wrote: DEAR MR. GARVEY: Do not send me any more checks until Mr. Brent comes back and I have seen him. I am in doubt whether I shall be able to go on with the work he and I had arranged. She signed this "Susan Lenox" and dispatched it. At once she felt better in spite of the fact that she had, with characteristic and fatal folly, her good sense warned her, cut herself off from all the income in sight or in prospect. She had debated sending back the check, but had decided that if she did she might give the impression of pique or anger. No, she would give him every chance to withdraw from a bargain with which he was not content; and he would get the idea that it was she who was ending the arrangement, would therefore feel no sense of responsibility for her. She would save her pride; she would spare his feelings. She was taking counsel of Burlingham these days--was recalling the lesson he had taught her, was getting his aid in deciding her course. Burlingham protested vehemently against this sending back of the check; but she let her pride, her aversion to being an object of pity, overrule him. A few days more, and she was so desperate, so harassed that she altogether lost confidence in her own judgment. While outwardly she seemed to be the same as always with Rod, she had a feeling of utter alienation. Still, there was no one else to whom she could turn. Should she put the facts before him and ask his opinion? Her intelligence said no; her heart said perhaps. While she was hesitating, he decided for her. One morning at breakfast he stopped talking about himself long enough to ask carelessly: "About you and Brent--he's gone away. What are you doing?" "Nothing," said she. "Going to take that business up again, when he comes back?" "I don't know." "I wouldn't count on it, if I were you. . . . You're so sensitive that I've hesitated to say anything. But I think that chap was looking for trouble, and when he found you were already engaged, why, he made up his mind to drop it." "Do you think so?" said Susan indifferently. "More coffee?" "Yes--a little. If my play's as good as your coffee---- That's enough, thanks. . . . Do you still draw your--your----" His tone as he cast about for a fit word made her flush scarlet. "No--I stopped it until we begin work again." He did not conceal his thorough satisfaction. "That's right!" he cried. "The only cloud on our happiness is gone. You know, a man doesn't like that sort of thing." "I know," said Susan drily. And she understood why that very night he for the first time asked her to supper after the rehearsal with Sperry and Constance Francklyn, the leading lady, with whom he was having one of those affairs which as he declared to Sperry were "absolutely necessary to a man of genius to keep him freshened up--to keep the fire burning brightly." He had carefully coached Miss Francklyn to play the part of unsuspected "understudy"--Susan saw that before they had been seated in Jack's ten minutes. And she also saw that he was himself resolved to conduct himself "like a gentleman." But after he had taken two or three highballs, Susan was forced to engage deeply in conversation with the exasperated and alarmed Sperry to avoid seeing how madly Rod and Constance were flirting. She, however, did contrive to see nothing--at least, the other three were convinced that she had not seen. When they were back in their rooms, Rod--whether through pretense or through sidetracked amorousness or from simple intoxication--became more demonstrative than he had been for a long time. "No, there's nobody like you," he declared. "Even if I wandered I'd always come back to you." "Really?" said Susan with careless irony. "That's good. No, I can unhook my blouse." "I do believe you're growing cold." "I don't feel like being messed with tonight." "Oh, very well," said he sulkily. Then, forgetting his ill humor after a few minutes of watching her graceful movements and gestures as she took off her dress and made her beautiful hair ready for the night, he burst out in a very different tone: "You don't know how glad I am that you're dependent on me again. You'll not be difficult any more." A moment's silence, then Susan, with a queer little laugh, "Men don't in the least mind--do they?" "Mind what?" "Being loved for money." There was a world of sarcasm in her accent on that word loved. "Oh, nonsense. You don't understand yourself," declared he with large confidence. "Women never grow up. They're like babies--and babies, you know, love the person that feeds them." "And dogs--and cats--and birds--and all the lower orders." She took a book and sat in a wrapper under the light. "Come to bed--please, dear," pleaded he. "No, I'll read a while." And she held the book before her until he was asleep. Then she sat a long time, her elbows on her knees, her chin supported by her hands, her gaze fixed upon his face--the face of the man who was her master now. She must please him, must accept what treatment he saw fit to give, must rein in her ambitions to suit the uncertain gait and staying power of his ability to achieve. She could not leave him; he could leave her when he might feel so inclined. Her master--capricious, tyrannical, a drunkard. Her sole reliance--and the first condition of his protection was that she should not try to do for herself. A dependent, condemned to become even more dependent. CHAPTER XVII SHE now spent a large part of every day in wandering, like a derelict, drifting aimlessly this way or that, up into the Park or along Fifth Avenue. She gazed intently into shop windows, apparently inspecting carefully all the articles on display; but she passed on, unconscious of having seen anything. If she sat at home with a book she rarely turned a page, though her gaze was fastened upon the print as if she were absorbingly interested. What was she feeling? The coarse contacts of street life and tenement life--the choice between monstrous defilements from human beings and monstrous defilements from filth and vermin. What was she seeing? The old women of the slums--the forlorn, aloof figures of shattered health and looks--creeping along the gutters, dancing in the barrel houses, sleeping on the floor in some vile hole in the wall--sleeping the sleep from which one awakes bitten by mice and bugs, and swarming with lice. She had entire confidence in Brent's judgment. Brent must have discovered that she was without talent for the stage--for if he had thought she had the least talent, would he not in his kindness have arranged or offered some sort of place in some theater or other? Since she had no stage talent--then--what should she do? What _could_ she do? And so her mind wandered as aimlessly as her wandering steps. And never before had the sweet melancholy of her eyes been so moving. But, though she did not realize it, there was a highly significant difference between this mood of profound discouragement and all the other similar moods that had accompanied and accelerated her downward plunges. Every time theretofore, she had been cowed by the crushing mandate of destiny--had made no struggle against it beyond the futile threshings about of aimless youth. This time she lost neither strength nor courage. She was no longer a child; she was no longer mere human flotsam and jetsam. She did not know which way to turn; but she did know, with all the certainty of a dauntless will, that she would turn some way--and that it would not be a way leading back to the marshes and caves of the underworld. She wandered--she wandered aimlessly; but not for an instant did she cease to keep watch for the right direction--the direction that would be the best available in the circumstances. She did not know or greatly care which way it led, so long as it did not lead back whence she had come. In all her excursions she had--not consciously but by instinct--kept away from her old beat. Indeed, except in the company of Spenser or Sperry she had never ventured into the neighborhood of Long Acre. But one day she was deflected by chance at the Forty-second Street corner of Fifth Avenue and drifted westward, pausing at each book stall to stare at the titles of the bargain offerings in literature. As she stood at one of these stalls near Sixth Avenue, she became conscious that two men were pressing against her, one on either side. She moved back and started on her way. One of the men was standing before her. She lifted her eyes, was looking into the cruel smiling eyes of a man with a big black mustache and the jaws of a prizefighter. His smile broadened. "I thought it was you, Queenie," said he. "Delighted to see you." She recognized him as a fly cop who had been one of Freddie Palmer's handy men. She fell back a step and the other man--she knew him instantly as also a policeman--lined up beside him of the black mustache. Both men were laughing. "We've been on the lookout for you a long time, Queenie," said the other. "There's a friend of yours that wants to see you mighty bad." Susan glanced from one to the other, her face pale but calm, in contrast to her heart where was all the fear and horror of the police which long and savage experience had bred. She turned away without speaking and started toward Sixth Avenue. "Now, what d'ye think of that?" said Black Mustache to his "side kick." "I thought she was too much of a lady to cut an old friend. Guess we'd better run her in, Pete." "That's right," assented Pete. "Then we can keep her safe till F. P. can get the hooks on her." Black Mustache laughed, laid his hand on her arm. "You'll come along quietly," said he. "You don't want to make a scene. You always was a perfect lady." She drew her arm away. "I am a married woman--living with my husband." Black Mustache laughed. "Think of that, Pete! And she soliciting us. That'll be good news for your loving husband. Come along, Queenie. Your record's against you. Everybody'll know you've dropped back to your old ways." "I am going to my husband," said she quietly. "You had better not annoy me." Pete looked uneasy, but Black Mustache's sinister face became more resolute. "If you wanted to live respectable, why did you solicit us two? Come along--or do you want me and Pete to take you by the arms?" "Very well," said she. "I'll go." She knew the police, knew that Palmer's lieutenant would act as he said--and she also knew what her "record" would do toward carrying through the plot. She walked in the direction of the station house, the two plain clothes men dropping a few feet behind and rejoining her only when they reached the steps between the two green lamps. In this way they avoided collecting a crowd at their heels. As she advanced to the desk, the sergeant yawning over the blotter glanced up. "Bless my soul!" cried he, all interest at once. "If it ain't F. P.'s Queenie!" "And up to her old tricks, sergeant," said Black Mustache. "She solicited me and Pete." Susan was looking the sergeant straight in the eyes. "I am a married woman," said she. "I live with my husband. I was looking at some books in Forty-second Street when these two came up and arrested me." The sergeant quailed, glanced at Pete who was guiltily hanging his head--glanced at Black Mustache. There he got the support he was seeking. "What's your husband's name?" demanded Black Mustache roughly. "What's your address?" And Rod's play coming on the next night but one! She shrank, collected herself. "I am not going to drag him into this, if I can help it," said she. "I give you a chance to keep yourselves out of trouble." She was gazing calmly at the sergeant again. "You know these men are not telling the truth. You know they've brought me here because of Freddie Palmer. My husband knows all about my past. He will stand by me. But I wish to spare him." The sergeant's uncertain manner alarmed Black Mustache. "She's putting up a good, bluff" scoffed he. "The truth is she ain't got no husband. She'd not have solicited us if she was living decent." "You hear what the officer says," said the sergeant, taking the tone of great kindness. "You'll have to give your name and address--and I'll leave it to the judge to decide between you and the officers." He took up his pen. "What's your name?" Susan, weak and trembling, was clutching the iron rail before the desk--the rail worn smooth by the nervous hands of ten thousand of the social system's sick or crippled victims. "Come--what's your name?" jeered Black Mustache. Susan did not answer. "Put her down Queenie Brown," cried he, triumphantly. The sergeant wrote. Then he said: "Age?" No answer from Susan. Black Mustache answered for her: "About twenty-two now." "She don't look it," said the sergeant, almost at ease once more. "But brunettes stands the racket better'n blondes. Native parents?" No answer. "Native. You don't look Irish or Dutch or Dago--though you might have a dash of the Spinnitch or the Frog-eaters. Ever arrested before?" No answer from the girl, standing rigid at the bar. Black Mustache said: "At least oncet, to my knowledge. I run her in myself." "Oh, she's got a record?" exclaimed the sergeant, now wholly at ease. "Why the hell didn't you say so?" "I thought you remembered. You took her pedigree." "I do recollect now," said the sergeant. "Take my advice, Queenie, and drop that bluff about the officers lying. Swallow your medicine--plead guilty--and you'll get off with a fine. If you lie about the police, the judge'll soak it to you. It happens to be a good judge--a friend of Freddie's." Then to the policemen: "Take her along to court, boys, and get back here as soon as you can." "I want her locked up," objected Black Mustache. "I want F. P. to see her. I've got to hunt for him." "Can't do it," said the sergeant. "If she makes a yell about police oppression, our holding on to her would look bad. No, put her through." Susan now straightened herself and spoke. "I shan't make any complaint," said she. "Anything rather than court. I can't stand that. Keep me here." "Not on your life!" cried the sergeant. "That's a trick. She'd have a good case against us." "F. P.'ll raise the devil if----" began Black Mustache. "Then hunt him up right away. To court she's got to go. I don't want to get broke." The two men fell afoul each other with curse and abuse. They were in no way embarrassed by the presence of Susan. Her "record" made her of no account either as a woman or as a witness. Soon each was so well pleased with the verbal wounds he had dealt the other that their anger evaporated. The upshot of the hideous controversy was that Black Mustache said: "You take her to court, Pete. I'll hunt up F. P. Keep her till the last." In after days she could recall starting for the street car with the officer, Pete; then memory was a blank until she was sitting in a stuffy room with a prison odor--the anteroom to the court. She and Pete were alone. He was walking nervously up and down pulling his little fair mustache. It must have been that she had retained throughout the impassive features which, however stormy it was within, gave her an air of strength and calm. Otherwise Pete would not presently have halted before her to say in a low, agitated voice: "If you can make trouble for us, don't do it. I've got a wife, and three babies--one come only last week--and my old mother paralyzed. You know how it is with us fellows--that we've got to do what them higher up says or be broke." Susan made no reply. "And F. P.--he's right up next the big fellows nowadays. What he says goes. You can see for yourself how much chance against him there'd be for a common low-down cop." She was still silent, not through anger as he imagined but because she had no sense of the reality of what was happening. The officer, who had lost his nerve, looked at her a moment, in his animal eyes a humble pleading look; then he gave a groan and turned away. "Oh, hell!" he muttered. Again her memory ceased to record until--the door swung open; she shivered, thinking it was the summons to court. Instead, there stood Freddie Palmer. The instant she looked into his face she became as calm and strong as her impassive expression had been falsely making her seem. Behind him was Black Mustache, his face ghastly, sullen, cowed. Palmer made a jerky motion of head and arm. Pete went; and the door closed and she was alone with him. "I've seen the Judge and you're free," said Freddie. She stood and began to adjust her hat and veil. "I'll have those filthy curs kicked off the force." She was looking tranquilly at him. "You don't believe me? You think I ordered it done?" She shrugged her shoulders. "No matter," she said. "It's undone now. I'm much obliged. It's more than I expected." "You don't believe me--and I don't blame you. You think I'm making some sort of grandstand play." "You haven't changed--at least not much." "I'll admit, when you left I was wild and did tell 'em to take you in as soon as they found you. But that was a long time ago. And I never meant them to disturb a woman who was living respectably with her husband. There may have been--yes, there was a time when I'd have done that--and worse. But not any more. You say I haven't changed. Well, you're wrong. In some ways I have. I'm climbing up, as I always told you I would--and as a man gets up he sees things differently. At least, he acts differently. I don't do _that_ kind of dirty work, any more." "I'm glad to hear it," murmured Susan for lack of anything else to say. He was as handsome as ever, she saw--had the same charm of manner--a charm owing not a little of its potency to the impression he made of the man who would dare as far as any man, and then go on to dare a step farther--the step from which all but the rare, utterly unafraid man shrinks. His look at her could not but appeal to her vanity as woman, and to her woman's craving for being loved; at the same time it agitated her with specters of the days of her slavery to him. He said: "_You_'ve changed--a lot. And all to the good. The only sign is rouge on your lips and that isn't really a sign nowadays. But then you never did look the professional--and you weren't." His eyes were appealingly tender as he gazed at her sweet, pensive face, with its violet-gray eyes full of mystery and sorrow and longing. And the clear pallor of her skin, and the slender yet voluptuous lines of her form suggested a pale, beautiful rose, most delicate of flowers yet about the hardiest. "So--you've married and settled down?" "No," replied Susan. "Neither the one nor the other." "Why, you told----" "I'm supposed to be a married woman." "Why didn't you give your name and address at the police station?" said he. "They'd have let you go at once." "Yes, I know," replied she. "But the newspapers would probably have published it. So--I couldn't. As it is I've been worrying for fear I'd be recognized, and the man would get a write-up." "That was square," said he. "Yes, it'd have been a dirty trick to drag him in." It was the matter-of-course to both of them that she should have protected her "friend." She had simply obeyed about the most stringent and least often violated article in the moral code of the world of outcasts. If Freddie's worst enemy in that world had murdered him, Freddie would have used his last breath in shielding him from the common foe, the law. "If you're not married to him, you're free," said Freddie with a sudden new kind of interest in her. "I told you I should always be free." They remained facing each other a moment. When she moved to go, he said: "I see you've still got your taste in dress--only more so." She smiled faintly, glanced at his clothing. He was dressed with real fashion. He looked Fifth Avenue at its best, and his expression bore out the appearance of the well-bred man of fortune. "I can return the compliment," said she. "And you too have improved." At a glance all the old fear of him had gone beyond the possibility of return. For she instantly realized that, like all those who give up war upon society and come in and surrender, he was enormously agitated about his new status, was impressed by the conventionalities to a degree that made him almost weak and mildly absurd. He was saying: "I don't think of anything else but improving--in every way. And the higher I get the higher I want to go. . . . That was a dreadful thing I did to you. I wasn't to blame. It was part of the system. A man's got to do at every stage whatever's necessary. But I don't expect you to appreciate that. I know you'll never forgive me." "I'm used to men doing dreadful things." "_You_ don't do them." "Oh, I was brought up badly--badly for the game, I mean. But I'm doing better, and I shall do still better. I can't abolish the system. I can't stand out against it--and live. So, I'm yielding--in my own foolish fashion." "You don't lay up against me the--the--you know what I mean?" The question surprised her, so far as it aroused any emotion. She answered indifferently: "I don't lay anything up against anybody. What's the use? I guess we all do the best we can--the best the system'll let us." And she was speaking the exact truth. She did not reason out the causes of a state of mind so alien to the experiences of the comfortable classes that they could not understand it, would therefore see in it hardness of heart. In fact, the heart has nothing to do with this attitude in those who are exposed to the full force of the cruel buffetings of the storms that incessantly sweep the wild and wintry sea of active life. They lose the sense of the personal. Where they yield to anger and revenge upon the instrument the blow fate has used it to inflict, the resentment is momentary. The mood of personal vengeance is characteristic of stupid people leading uneventful lives--of comfortable classes, of remote rural districts. She again moved to go, this time putting out her hand with a smile. He said, with an awkwardness most significant in one so supple of mind and manner: "I want to talk to you. I've got something to propose--something that'll interest you. Will you give me--say, about an hour?" She debated, then smiled. "You will have me arrested if I refuse?" He flushed scarlet. "You're giving me what's coming to me," said he. "The reason--one reason--I've got on so well is that I've never been a liar." "No--you never were that." "You, too. It's always a sign of bravery, and bravery's the one thing I respect. Yes, what I said I'd do always I did. That's the only way to get on in politics--and the crookeder the politics the more careful a man has to be about acting on the level. I can borrow a hundred thousand dollars without signing a paper--and that's more than the crooks in Wall Street can do--the biggest and best of them. So, when I told you how things were with me about you, I was on the level." "I know it," said Susan. "Where shall we go? I can't ask you to come home with me." "We might go to tea somewhere----" Susan laughed outright. Tea! Freddie Palmer proposing tea! What a changed hooligan--how ridiculously changed! The other Freddie Palmer--the real one--the fascinating repelling mixture of all the barbaric virtues and vices must still be there. But how carefully hidden--and what strong provocation would be needed to bring that savage to the surface again. The Italian in him, that was carrying him so far so cleverly, enabled him instantly to understand her amusement. He echoed her laugh. Said he: "You've no idea the kind of people I'm traveling with--not political swells, but the real thing. What do you say to the Brevoort?" She hesitated. "You needn't be worried about being seen with me, no matter how high you're flying," he hastened to say. "I always did keep myself in good condition for the rise. Nothing's known about me or ever will be." The girl was smiling at him again. "I wasn't thinking of those things," said she. "I've never been to the Brevoort." "It's quiet and respectable." Susan's eyes twinkled. "I'm glad it's respectable," said she. "Are you quite sure _you_ can afford to be seen with _me?_ It's true they don't make the fuss about right and wrong side of the line that they did a few years ago. They've gotten a metropolitan morality. Still--I'm not respectable and never shall be." "Don't be too hasty about that," protested he, gravely. "But wait till you hear my proposition." As they walked through West Ninth Street she noted that there was more of a physical change in him than she had seen at first glance. He was less athletic, heavier of form and his face was fuller. "You don't keep in as good training as you used," said she. "It's those infernal automobiles," cried he. "They're death to figure--to health, for that matter. But I've got the habit, and I don't suppose I'll ever break myself of it. I've taken on twenty pounds in the past year, and I've got myself so upset that the doctor has ordered me abroad to take a cure. Then there's champagne. I can't let that alone, either, though I know it's plain poison." And when they were in the restaurant of the Brevoort he insisted on ordering champagne--and left her for a moment to telephone for his automobile. It amused her to see a man so masterful thus pettily enslaved. She laughed at him, and he again denounced himself as a weak fool. "Money and luxury are too much for me. They are for everybody. I'm not as strong willed as I used to be," he said. "And it makes me uneasy. That's another reason for my proposition." "Well--let's hear it," said she. "I happen to be in a position where I'm fond of hearing propositions--even if I have no intention of accepting." She was watching him narrowly. The Freddie Palmer he was showing to her was a surprising but perfectly logical development of a side of his character with which she had been familiar in the old days; she was watching for that other side--the sinister and cruel side. "But first," he went on, "I must tell you a little about myself. I think I told you once about my mother and father?" "I remember," said Susan. "Well, honestly, do you wonder that I was what I used to be?" "No," she answered. "I wonder that you are what you _seem_ to be." "What I come pretty near being," cried he. "The part that's more or less put on today is going to be the real thing tomorrow. That's the way it is with life--you put on a thing, and gradually learn to wear it. And--I want you to help me." There fell silence between them, he gazing at his glass of champagne, turning it round and round between his long white fingers and watching the bubbles throng riotously up from the bottom. "Yes," he said thoughtfully, "I want you to help me. I've been waiting for you. I knew you'd turn up again." He laughed. "I've been true to you in a way--a man's way. I've hunted the town for women who suggested you--a poor sort of makeshift--but--I had to do something." "What were you going to tell me?" Her tone was business-like. He did not resent it, but straightway acquiesced. "I'll plunge right in. I've been, as you know, a bad one--bad all my life. I was born bad. You know about my mother and father. One of my sisters died in a disreputable resort. The other--well, the last I heard of her, she was doing time in an English pen. I've got a brother--he's a degenerate. Well!--not to linger over rotten smells, I was the only one of the family that had brains. I soon saw that everybody who gets on in the world is bad--which simply means doing disturbing things of one kind and another. And I saw that the ordinary crooks let their badness run their brains, while the get-on kind of people let their brains run their badness. You can be rotten--and sink lower and lower every day. Or you can gratify your natural taste for rottenness and at the same time get up in the world. I made up my mind to do the rotten things that get a man money and power." "Respectability," said Susan. "Respectability exactly. So I set out to improve my brains. I went to night school and read and studied. And I didn't stay a private in the gang of toughs. I had the brains to be leader, but the leader's got to be a fighter too. I took up boxing and made good in the ring. I got to be leader. Then I pushed my way up where I thought out the dirty work for the others to do, and I stayed under cover and made 'em bring the big share of the profits to me. And they did it because I had the brains to think out jobs that paid well and that could be pulled off without getting pinched--at least, not always getting pinched." Palmer sipped his champagne, looked at her to see if she was appreciative. "I thought you'd understand," said he. "I needn't go into details. You remember about the women?" "Yes, I remember," said Susan. "That was one step in the ladder up?" "It got me the money to make my first play for respectability. I couldn't have got it any other way. I had extravagant tastes--and the leader has to be always giving up to help this fellow and that out of the hole. And I never did have luck with the cards and the horses." "Why did you want to be respectable?" she asked. "Because that's the best graft," explained he. "It means the most money, and the most influence. The coyotes that raid the sheep fold don't get the big share--though they may get a good deal. No, it's the shepherds and the owners that pull off the most. I've been leader of coyotes. I'm graduating into shepherd and proprietor." "I see," said Susan. "You make it beautifully clear." He bowed and smiled. "Thank you, kindly. Then, I'll go on. I'm deep in the contracting business now. I've got a pot of money put away. I've cut out the cards--except a little gentlemen's game now and then, to help me on with the right kind of people. Horses, the same way. I've got my political pull copper-riveted. It's as good with the Republicans as with Democrats, and as good with the reform crowd as with either. My next move is to cut loose from the gang. I've put a lot of lieutenants between me and them, instead of dealing with them direct. I'm putting in several more fellows I'm not ashamed to be seen with in Delmonico's." "What's become of Jim?" asked Susan. "Dead--a kike shot him all to pieces in a joint in Seventh Avenue about a month ago. As I was saying, how do these big multi-millionaires do the trick? They don't tell somebody to go steal what they happen to want. They tell somebody they want it, and that somebody else tells somebody else to get it, and that somebody else passes the word along until it reaches the poor devils who must steal it or lose their jobs. I studied it all out, and I've framed up my game the same way. Nowadays, every dollar that comes to me has been thoroughly cleaned long before it drops into my pocket. But you're wondering where _you_ come in." "Women are only interested in what's coming to them," said Susan. "Sensible men are the same way. The men who aren't--they work for wages and salaries. If you're going to live off of other people, as women and the rich do, you've got to stand steady, day and night, for Number One. And now, here's where _you_ come in. You've no objection to being respectable?" "I've no objection to not being disreputable." "That's the right way to put it," he promptly agreed. "Respectable, you know, doesn't mean anything but appearances. People who are really respectable, who let it strike in, instead of keeping it on the outside where it belongs--they soon get poor and drop down and out." Palmer's revelation of himself and of a philosophy which life as it had revealed itself to her was incessantly urging her to adopt so grappled her attention that she altogether forgot herself. A man on his way to the scaffold who suddenly sees and feels a cataclysm rocking the world about him forgets his own plight. Unconsciously he was epitomizing, unconsciously she was learning, the whole story of the progress of the race upward from beast toward intellect--the brutal and bloody building of the highway from the caves of darkness toward the peaks of light. The source from which springs, and ever has sprung, the cruelty of man toward man is the struggle of the ambition of the few who see and insist upon better conditions, with the inertia and incompetence of the many who have little sight and less imagination. Ambition must use the inert mass--must persuade it, if possible, must compel it by trick or force if persuasion fails. But Palmer and Susan Lenox were, naturally, not seeing the thing in the broad but only as it applied to themselves. "I've read a whole lot of history and biography," Freddie went on, "and I've thought about what I read and about what's going on around me. I tell you the world's full of cant. The people who get there don't act on what is always preached. The preaching isn't all lies--at least, I think not. But it doesn't fit the facts a man or a woman has got to meet." "I realized that long ago," said Susan. "There's a saying that you can't touch pitch without being defiled. Well--you can't build without touching pitch--at least not in a world where money's king and where those with brains have to live off of those without brains by making 'em work and showing 'em what to work at. It's a hell of a world, but _I_ didn't get it up." "And we've got to live in it," said she, "and get out of it the things we want and need." "That's the talk!" cried Palmer. "I see you're 'on.' Now--to make a long story short--you and I can get what we want. We can help each other. You were better born than I am--you've had a better training in manners and dress and all the classy sort of things. I've got the money--and brains enough to learn with--and I can help you in various ways. So--I propose that we go up together." "We've got--pasts," said Susan. "Who hasn't that amounts to anything? Mighty few. No one that's made his own pile, I'll bet you. I'm in a position to do favors for people--the people we'd need. And I'll get in a position to do more and more. As long as they can make something out of us--or hope to--do you suppose they'll nose into our pasts and root things up that'd injure them as much as us?" "It would be an interesting game, wouldn't it?" said Susan. She was reflectively observing the handsome, earnest face before her--an incarnation of intelligent ambition, a Freddie Palmer who was somehow divesting himself of himself--was growing up--away from the rotten soil that had nourished him--up into the air--was growing strongly--yes, splendidly! "And we've got everything to gain and nothing to lose," pursued he. "We'd not be adventurers, you see. Adventurers are people who haven't any money and are looking round to try to steal it. We'd have money. So, we'd be building solid, right on the rock." The handsome young man--the strongest, the most intelligent, the most purposeful she had ever met, except possibly Brent--looked at her with an admiring tenderness that moved her, the forlorn derelict adrift on the vast, lonely, treacherous sea. "The reason I've waited for you to invite you in on this scheme is that I tried you out and I found that you belong to the mighty few people who do what they say they'll do, good bargain or bad. It'd never occur to you to shuffle out of trying to keep your word." "It hasn't--so far," said Susan. "Well--that's the only sort of thing worth talking about as morality. Believe me, for I've been through the whole game from chimney pots to cellar floor." "There's another thing, too," said the girl. "What's that?" "Not to injure anyone else." Palmer shook his head positively. "It's believing that and acting on it that has kept you down in spite of your brains and looks." "That I shall never do," said the girl. "It may be weakness--I guess it is weakness. But--I draw the line there." "But I'm not proposing that you injure anyone--or proposing to do it myself. As I said, I've got up where I can afford to be good and kind and all that. And I'm willing to jump you up over the stretch of the climb that can't be crossed without being--well, anything but good and kind." She was reflecting. "You'll never get over that stretch by yourself. It'll always turn you back." "Just what do you propose?" she asked. It gave her pleasure to see the keen delight her question, with its implication of hope, aroused in him. Said he: "That we go to Europe together and stay over there several years--as long as you like as long as it's necessary. Stay till our pasts have disappeared--work ourselves in with the right sort of people. You say you're not married?" "Not to the man I'm with." "To somebody else?" "I don't know. I was." "Well--that'll be looked into and straightened out. And then we'll quietly marry." Susan laughed. "You're too fast," said she. "I'll admit I'm interested. I've been looking for a road--one that doesn't lead toward where we've come from. And this is the first road that has offered. But I haven't agreed to go in with you yet--haven't even begun to think it over. And if I did agree--which I probably won't--why, still I'd not be willing to marry. That's a serious matter. I'd want to be very, very sure I was satisfied." Palmer nodded, with a return of the look of admiration. "I understand. You don't promise until you intend to stick, and once you've promised all hell couldn't change you." "Another thing--very unfortunate, too. It looks to me as if I'd be dependent on you for money." Freddie's eyes wavered. "Oh, we'd never quarrel about that," said he with an attempt at careless confidence. "No," replied she quietly. "For the best of reasons. I'd not consider going into any arrangement where I'd be dependent on a man for money. I've had my experience. I've learned my lesson. If I lived with you several years in the sort of style you've suggested--no, not several years but a few months--you'd have me absolutely at your mercy. You'd thought of that, hadn't you?" His smile was confession. "I'd develop tastes for luxuries and they'd become necessities." Susan shook her head. "No--that would be foolish--very foolish." He was watching her so keenly that his expression was covert suspicion. "What do you suggest?" he asked. "Not what you suspect," replied she, amused. "I'm not making a play for a gift of a fortune. I haven't anything to suggest." There was a long silence, he turning his glass slowly and from time to time taking a little of the champagne thoughtfully. She observed him with a quizzical expression. It was apparent to her that he was debating whether he would be making a fool of himself if he offered her an independence outright. Finally she said: "Don't worry, Freddie. I'd not take it, even if you screwed yourself up to the point of offering it." He glanced up quickly and guiltily. "Why not?" he said. "You'd be practically my wife. I can trust you. You've had experience, so you can't blame me for hesitating. Money puts the devil in anybody who gets it--man or woman. But I'll trust you----" he laughed--"since I've got to." "No. The most I'd take would be a salary. I'd be a sort of companion." "Anything you like," cried he. This last suspicion born of a life of intimate dealings with his fellow-beings took flight. "It'd have to be a big salary because you'd have to dress and act the part. What do you say? Is it a go?" "Oh, I can't decide now." "When?" She reflected. "I can tell you in a week." He hesitated, said, "All right--a week." She rose to go. "I've warned you the chances are against my accepting." "That's because you haven't looked the ground over," replied he, rising. Then, after a nervous moment, "Is the--is the----" He stopped short. "Go on," said she. "We must be frank with each other." "If the idea of living with me is--is disagreeable----" And again he stopped, greatly embarrassed--an amazing indication of the state of mind of such a man as he--of the depth of his infatuation, of his respect, of his new-sprung awe of conventionality. "I hadn't given it a thought," replied she. "Women are not especially sensitive about that sort of thing." "They're supposed to be. And I rather thought you were." She laughed mockingly. "No more than other women," said she. "Look how they marry for a home--or money--or social position--and such men! And look how they live with men year after year, hating them. Men never could do that." "Don't you believe it," replied he. "They can, and they do. The kept man--in and out of marriage--is quite a feature of life in our chaste little village." Susan looked amused. "Well--why not?" said she. "Everybody's simply got to have money nowadays." "And working for it is slow and mighty uncertain." Her face clouded. She was seeing the sad wretched past from filthy tenement to foul workshop. She said: "Where shall I send you word?" "I've an apartment at Sherry's now." "Then--a week from today." She put out her hand. He took it, and she marveled as she felt a tremor in that steady hand of his. But his voice was resolutely careless as he said, "So long. Don't forget how much I want or need you. And if you do forget that, think of the advantages--seeing the world with plenty of money--and all the rest of it. Where'll you get such another chance? You'll not be fool enough to refuse." She smiled, said as she went, "You may remember I used to be something of a fool." "But that was some time ago. You've learned a lot since then--surely." "We'll see. I've become--I think--a good deal of a--of a New Yorker." "That means frank about doing what the rest of the world does under a stack of lies. It's a lovely world, isn't it?" "If I had made it," laughed Susan, "I'd not own up to the fact." She laughed; but she was seeing the old women of the slums--was seeing them as one sees in the magic mirror the vision of one's future self. And on the way home she said to herself, "It was a good thing that I was arrested today. It reminded me. It warned me. But for it, I might have gone on to make a fool of myself." And she recalled how it had been one of Burlingham's favorite maxims that everything is for the best, for those who know how to use it. CHAPTER XVIII SHE wrote Garvey asking an appointment. The reply should have come the next day or the next day but one at the farthest; for Garvey had been trained by Brent to the supreme courtesy of promptness. It did not come until the fourth day; before she opened it Susan knew about what she would read--the stupidly obvious attempt to put off facing her--the cowardice of a kind-hearted, weak fellow. She really had her answer--was left without a doubt for hope to perch upon. But she wrote again, insisting so sharply that he came the following day. His large, tell-tale face was a restatement of what she had read in his delay and between the lines of his note. He was effusively friendly with a sort of mortuary suggestion, like one bearing condolences, that tickled her sense of humor, far though her heart was from mirth. "Something has happened," began she, "that makes it necessary for me to know when Mr. Brent is coming back." "Really, Mrs. Spencer----" "Miss Lenox," she corrected. "Yes--Miss Lenox, I beg your pardon. But really--in my position--I know nothing of Mr. Brent's plans--and if I did, I'd not be at liberty to speak of them. I have written him what you wrote me about the check--and--and--that is all." "Mr. Garvey, is he ever--has he----" Susan, desperate, burst out with more than she intended to say: "I care nothing about it, one way or the other. If Mr. Brent is politely hinting that I won't do, I've a right to know it. I have a chance at something else. Can't you tell me?" "I don't know anything about it--honestly I don't, Miss Lenox," cried he, swearing profusely. "You put an accent on the 'know,'" said Susan. "You suspect that I'm right, don't you?" "I've no ground for suspecting--that is--no, I haven't. He said nothing to me--nothing. But he never does. He's very peculiar and uncertain . . . and I don't understand him at all." "Isn't this his usual way with the failures--his way of letting them down easily?" Susan's manner was certainly light and cheerful, an assurance that he need have no fear of hysterics or despair or any sort of scene trying to a soft heart. But Garvey could take but the one view of the favor or disfavor of the god of his universe. He looked at her like a dog that is getting a whipping from a friend. "Now, Miss Lenox, you've no right to put me in this painful----" "That's true," said Susan, done since she had got what she sought. "I shan't say another word. When Mr. Brent comes back, will you tell him I sent for you to ask you to thank him for me--and say to him that I found something else for which I hope I'm better suited?" "I'm so glad," said Garvey, hysterically. "I'm delighted. And I'm sure he will be, too. For I'm sure he liked you, personally--and I must say I was surprised when he went. But I must not say that sort of thing. Indeed, I know nothing, Miss Lenox--I assure you----" "And please tell him," interrupted Susan, "that I'd have written him myself, only I don't want to bother him." "Oh, no--no, indeed. Not that, Miss Lenox. I'm so sorry. But I'm only the secretary. I can't say anything." It was some time before Susan could get rid of him, though he was eager to be gone. He hung in the doorway, ejaculating disconnectedly, dropping and picking up his hat, perspiring profusely, shaking hands again and again, and so exciting her pity for his misery of the good-hearted weak that she was for the moment forgetful of her own plight. Long before he went, he had greatly increased her already strong belief in Brent's generosity of character--for, thought she, he'd have got another secretary if he hadn't been too kind to turn adrift so helpless and foolish a creature. Well--he should have no trouble in getting rid of her. She was seeing little of Spenser and they were saying almost nothing to each other. When he came at night, always very late, she was in bed and pretended sleep. When he awoke, she got breakfast in silence; they read the newspapers as they ate. And he could not spare the time to come to dinner. As the decisive moment drew near, his fears dried up his confident volubility. He changed his mind and insisted on her coming to the theater for the final rehearsals. But "Shattered Lives" was not the sort of play she cared for, and she was wearied by the profane and tedious wranglings of the stage director and the authors, by the stupidity of the actors who had to be told every little intonation and gesture again and again. The agitation, the labor seemed grotesquely out of proportion to the triviality of the matter at issue. At the first night she sat in a box from which Spenser, in a high fever and twitching with nervousness, watched the play, gliding out just before the lights were turned up for the intermission. The play went better than she had expected, and the enthusiasm of the audience convinced her that it was a success before the fall of the curtain on the second act. With the applause that greeted the chief climax--the end of the third act--Spenser, Sperry and Fitzalan were convinced. All three responded to curtain calls. Susan had never seen Spenser so handsome, and she admired the calmness and the cleverness of his brief speech of thanks. That line of footlights between them gave her a new point of view on him, made her realize how being so close to his weaknesses had obscured for her his strong qualities--for, unfortunately, while a man's public life is determined wholly by his strong qualities, his intimate life depends wholly on his weaknesses. She was as fond of him as she had ever been; but it was impossible for her to feel any thrill approaching love. Why? She looked at his fine face and manly figure; she recalled how many good qualities he had. Why had she ceased to love him? She thought perhaps some mystery of physical lack of sympathy was in part responsible; then there was the fact that she could not trust him. With many women, trust is not necessary to love; on the contrary, distrust inflames love. It happened not to be so with Susan Lenox. "I do not love him. I can never love him again. And when he uses his power over me, I shall begin to dislike him." The lost illusion! The dead love! If she could call it back to life! But no--there it lay, coffined, the gray of death upon its features. Her heart ached. After the play Fitzalan took the authors and the leading lady, Constance Francklyn, and Miss Lenox to supper in a private room at Rector's. This was Miss Francklyn's first trial in a leading part. She had small ability as an actress, having never risen beyond the primer stage of mere posing and declamation in which so many players are halted by their vanity--the universal human vanity that is content with small triumphs, or with purely imaginary triumphs. But she had a notable figure of the lank, serpentine kind and a bad, sensual face that harmonized with it. Especially in artificial light she had an uncanny allure of the elemental, the wild animal in the jungle. With every disposition and effort to use her physical charms to further herself she would not have been still struggling at twenty-eight, had she had so much as a thimbleful of intelligence. "Several times," said Sperry to Susan as they crossed Long Acre together on the way to Rector's, "yes, at least half a dozen times to my knowledge, Constance had had success right in her hands. And every time she has gone crazy about some cheap actor or sport and has thrown it away." "But she'll get on now," said Susan. "Perhaps," was Sperry's doubting reply. "Of course, she's got no brains. But it doesn't take brains to act--that is, to act well enough for cheap machine-made plays like this. And nowadays playwrights have learned that it's useless to try to get actors who can act. They try to write parts that are actor-proof." "You don't like your play?" said Susan. "Like it? I love it. Isn't it going to bring me in a pot of money? But as a play"--Sperry laughed. "I know Spenser thinks it's great, but--there's only one of us who can write plays, and that's Brent. It takes a clever man to write a clever play. But it takes a genius to write a clever play that'll draw the damn fools who buy theater seats. And Robert Brent now and then does the trick. How are you getting on with your ambition for a career?" Susan glanced nervously at him. The question, coming upon the heels of talk about Brent, filled her with alarm lest Rod had broken his promise and had betrayed her confidence. But Sperry's expression showed that she was probably mistaken. "My ambition?" said she. "Oh--I've given it up." "The thought of work was too much for you--eh?" Susan shrugged her shoulders. A sardonic grin flitted over Sperry's Punch-like face. "The more I see of women, the less I think of 'em," said he. "But I suppose the men'd be lazy and worthless too, if nature had given 'em anything that'd sell or rent. . . . Somehow I'm disappointed in _you_, though." That ended the conversation until they were sitting down at the table. Then Sperry said: "Are you offended by my frankness a while ago?" "No," replied Susan. "The contrary. Some day your saying that may help me." "It's quite true, there's something about you--a look--a manner--it makes one feel you could do things if you tried." "I'm afraid that 'something' is a fraud," said she. No doubt it was that something that had misled Brent--that had always deceived her about herself. No, she must not think herself a self-deceived dreamer. Even if it was so, still she must not think it. She must say to herself over and over again "Brent or no Brent, I shall get on--I shall get on" until she had silenced the last disheartening doubt. Miss Francklyn, with Fitzalan on her left and Spenser on her right, was seated opposite Susan. About the time the third bottle was being emptied the attempts of Spenser and Constance to conceal from her their doings became absurd. Long before the supper was over there had been thrust at her all manner of proofs that Spenser was again untrue, that he was whirling madly in one of those cyclonic infatuations which soon wore him out and left him to return contritely to her. Sperry admired Susan's manners as displayed in her unruffled serenity--an admiration which she did not in the least deserve. She was in fact as deeply interested as she seemed in his discussion of plays and acting, illustrated by Brent's latest production. By the time the party broke up, Susan had in spite of herself collected a formidable array of incriminating evidence, including the stealing of one of Constance's jeweled show garters by Spenser under cover of the tablecloth and a swift kiss in the hall when Constance went out for a moment and Spenser presently suspended his drunken praises of himself as a dramatist, and appointed himself a committee to see what had become of her. At the door of the restaurant, Spenser said: "Susan, you and Miss Francklyn take a taxicab. She'll drop you at our place on her way home. Fitz and Sperry and I want one more drink." "Not for me," said Sperry savagely, with a scowl at Constance. But Fitzalan, whose arm Susan had seen Rod press, remained silent. "Come on, my dear," cried Miss Francklyn, smiling sweet insolent treachery into Susan's face. Susan smiled sweetly back at her. As she was leaving the taxicab in Forty-fifth Street, she said: "Send Rod home by noon, won't you? And don't tell him I know." Miss Francklyn, who had been drinking greedily, began to cry. Susan laughed. "Don't be a silly," she urged. "If I'm not upset, why should you be? And how could I blame you two for getting crazy about each other? I wouldn't spoil it for worlds. I want to help it on." "Don't you love him--really?" cried Constance, face and voice full of the most thrilling theatricalism. "I'm very fond of him," replied Susan. "We're old, old friends. But as to love--I'm where you'll be a few months from now." Miss Francklyn dried her eyes. "Isn't it the devil!" she exclaimed. "Why _can't_ it last?" "Why, indeed," said Susan. "Good night--and don't forget to send him by twelve o'clock." And she hurried up the steps without waiting for a reply. She felt that the time for action had again come--that critical moment which she had so often in the past seen come and had let pass unheeded. He was in love with another woman; he was prosperous, assured of a good income for a long time, though he wrote no more successes. No need to consider him. For herself, then--what? Clearly, there could be no future for her with Rod. Clearly, she must go. Must go--must take the only road that offered. Up before her--as in every mood of deep depression--rose the vision of the old women of the slums--the solitary, bent, broken forms, clad in rags, feet wrapped in rags--shuffling along in the gutters, peering and poking among filth, among garbage, to get together stuff to sell for the price of a drink. The old women of the tenements, the old women of the gutters, the old women drunk and dancing as the lecherous-eyed hunchback played the piano. She must not this time wait and hesitate and hope; this time she must take the road that offered--and since it must be taken she must advance along it as if of all possible roads it was the only one she would have freely chosen. Yet after she had written and sent off the note to Palmer, a deep sadness enveloped her--a grief, not for Rod, but for the association, the intimacy, their life together, its sorrows and storms perhaps more than the pleasures and the joys. When she left him before, she had gone sustained by the feeling that she was doing it for him, was doing a duty. Now, she was going merely to save herself, to further herself. Life, life in that great and hard school of practical living, New York, had given her the necessary hardiness to go, aided by Rod's unfaithfulness and growing uncongeniality. But not while she lived could she ever learn to be hard. She would do what she must--she was no longer a fool. But she could not help sighing and crying a little as she did it. It was not many minutes after noon when Spenser came. He looked so sheepish and uncomfortable that Susan thought Constance had told him. But his opening sentence of apology was: "I took too many nightcaps and Fitz had to lug me home with him." "Really?" said Susan. "How disappointed Constance must have been!" Spenser was not a good liar. His face twisted and twitched so that Susan laughed outright. "Why, you look like a caught married man," cried she. "You forget we're both free." "Whatever put that crazy notion in your head--about Miss Francklyn?" demanded he. "When you take me or anyone for that big a fool, Rod, you only show how foolish you yourself are," said she with the utmost good humor. "The best way to find out how much sense a person has is to see what kind of lies he thinks'll deceive another person." "Now--don't get jealous, Susie," soothed he. "You know how a man is." The tone was correctly contrite, but Susan felt underneath the confidence that he would be forgiven--the confidence of the egotist giddied by a triumph. Said she: "Don't you think mine's a strange way of acting jealous?" "But you're a strange woman." Susan looked at him thoughtfully. "Yes, I suppose I am," said she. "And you'll think me stranger when I tell you what I'm going to do." He started up in a panic. And the fear in his eyes pleased her, at the same time that it made her wince. She nodded slowly. "Yes, Rod--I'm leaving." "I'll drop Constance," cried he. "I'll have her put out of the company." "No--go on with her till you've got enough--or she has." "I've got enough, this minute," declared he with convincing energy and passion. "You must know, dearest, that to me Constance--all the women I've ever seen--aren't worth your little finger. You're all that they are, and a whole lot more besides." He seized her in his arms. "You wouldn't leave me--you couldn't! You understand how men are--how they get these fits of craziness about a pair of eyes or a figure or some trick of voice or manner. But that doesn't affect the man's heart. I love you, Susan. I adore you." She did not let him see how sincerely he had touched her. Her eyes were of their deepest violet, but he had never learned that sign. She smiled mockingly; the fingers that caressed his hair were trembling. "We've tided each other over, Rod. The play's a success. You're all right again--and so am I. Now's the time to part." "Is it Brent, Susie?" "I quit him last week." "There's no one else. You're going because of Constance!" She did not deny. "You're free and so am I," said she practically. "I'm going. So--let's part sensibly. Don't make a silly scene." She knew how to deal with him--how to control him through his vanity. He drew away from her, chilled and sullen. "If you can live through it, I guess I can," said he. "You're making a damn fool of yourself--leaving a man that's fond of you--and leaving when he's successful." "I always was a fool, you know," said she. She had decided against explaining to him and so opening up endless and vain argument. It was enough that she saw it was impossible to build upon or with him, saw the necessity of trying elsewhere--unless she would risk--no, invite--finding herself after a few months, or years, back among the drift, back in the underworld. He gazed at her as she stood smiling gently at him--smiling to help her hide the ache at her heart, the terror before the vision of the old women of the tenement gutters, earning the wages, not of sin, not of vice, not of stupidity, but of indecision, of over-hopefulness--of weakness. Here was the kind of smile that hurts worse than tears, that takes the place of tears and sobs and moans. But he who had never understood her did not understand her now. Her smile infuriated his vanity. "You can _laugh!_" he sneered. "Well--go to the filth where you belong! You were born for it." And he flung out of the room, went noisily down the stairs. She heard the front door's distant slam; it seemed to drop her into a chair. She sat there all crouched together until the clock on the mantel struck two. This roused her hastily to gather into her trunk such of her belongings as she had not already packed. She sent for a cab. The man of all work carried down the trunk and put it on the box. Dressed in a simple blue costume as if for traveling, she entered the cab and gave the order to drive to the Grand Central Station. At the corner she changed the order and was presently entering the Beaux Arts restaurant where she had asked Freddie to meet her. He was there, smoking calmly and waiting. At sight of her he rose. "You'll have lunch?" said he. "No, thanks." "A small bottle of champagne?" "Yes--I'm rather tired." He ordered the champagne. "And," said he, "it'll be the real thing--which mighty few New Yorkers get even at the best places." When it came he sent the waiter away and filled the glasses himself. He touched the brim of his glass to the bottom of hers. "To the new deal," said he. She smiled and nodded, and emptied the glass. Suddenly it came to her why she felt so differently toward him. She saw the subtle, yet radical change that always transforms a man of force of character when his position in the world notably changes. This man before her, so slightly different in physical characteristics from the man she had fled, was wholly different in expression. "When shall we sail?" asked he. "Tomorrow?" "First--there's the question of money," said she. He was much amused. "Still worrying about your independence." "No," replied she. "I've been thinking it out, and I don't feel any anxiety about that. I've changed my scheme of life. I'm going to be sensible and practice what life has taught me. It seems there's only one way for a woman to get up. Through some man." Freddie nodded. "By marriage or otherwise, but always through a man." "So I've discovered," continued she. "So, I'm going to play the game. And I think I can win now. With the aid of what I'll learn and with the chances I'll have, I can keep my feeling of independence. You see, if you and I don't get on well together, I'll be able to look out for myself. Something'll turn up." "Or--_somebody_--eh?" "Or somebody." "That's candid." "Don't you want me to be candid? But even if you don't, I've got to be." "Yes--truth--especially disagreeable truth--is your long suit," said he. "Not that I'm kicking. I'm glad you went straight at the money question. We can settle it and never think of it again. And neither of us will be plotting to take advantage of the other, or fretting for fear the other is plotting. Sometimes I think nearly all the trouble in this world comes through failure to have a clear understanding about money matters." Susan nodded. Said she thoughtfully, "I guess that's why I came--one of the main reasons. You are wonderfully sensible and decent about money." "And the other chap isn't?" "Oh, yes--and no. He likes to make a woman feel dependent. He thinks--but that doesn't matter. He's all right." "Now--for our understanding with each other," said Palmer. "You can have whatever you want. The other day you said you wanted some sort of a salary. But if you've changed----" "No--that's what I want." "So much a year?" "So much a week," replied she. "I want to feel, and I want you to feel, that we can call it off at any time on seven days' notice." "But that isn't what I want," said he--and she, watching him closely if furtively, saw the strong lines deepen round his mouth. She hesitated. She was seeing the old woman's dance hall, was hearing the piano as the hunchback played and the old horrors reeled about, making their palsy rhythmic. She was seeing this, yet she dared. "Then you don't want me," said she, so quietly that he could not have suspected her agitation. Never had her habit of concealing her emotion been so useful to her. He sat frowning at his glass--debating. Finally he said: "I explained the other day what I was aiming for. Such an arrangement as you suggest wouldn't help. You see that?" "It's all I can do--at present," replied she firmly. And she was now ready to stand or fall by that decision. She had always accepted the other previous terms--or whatever terms fate offered. Result--each time, disaster. She must make no more fatal blunders. This time, her own terms or not at all. He was silent a long time. She knew she had convinced him that her terms were final. So, his delay could only mean that he was debating whether to accept or to go his way and leave her to go hers. At last he laughed and said: "You've become a true New Yorker. You know how to drive a hard bargain." He looked at her admiringly. "You certainly have got courage. I happen to know a lot about your affairs. I've ways of finding out things. And I know you'd not be here if you hadn't broken with the other fellow first. So, if I turned your proposition down you'd be up against it--wouldn't you?" "Yes," said she. "But--I won't in any circumstances tie myself. I must be free." "You're right," said he. "And I'll risk your sticking. I'm a good gambler." "If I were bound, but didn't want to stay, would I be of much use?" "Of no use. You can quit on seven minutes' notice, instead of seven days." "And you, also," said she. Laughingly they shook hands. She began to like him in a new and more promising way. Here was a man, who at least was cast in a big mold. Nothing small and cheap about him--and Brent had made small cheap men forever intolerable to her. Yes, here was a man of the big sort; and a big man couldn't possibly be a bad man. No matter how many bad things he might do, he would still be himself, at least, a scorner of the pettiness and sneakiness and cowardice inseparable from villainy. "And now," said he, "let's settle the last detail. How much a week? How would five hundred strike you?" "That's more than twelve times the largest salary I ever got. It's many times as much as I made in the----" "No matter," he hastily interposed. "It's the least you can hold down the job on. You've got to spend money--for clothes and so on." "Two hundred is the most I can take," said she. "It's the outside limit." He insisted, but she remained firm. "I will not accustom myself to much more than I see any prospect of getting elsewhere," explained she. "Perhaps later on I'll ask for an increase--later on, when I see how things are going and what my prospects elsewhere would be. But I must begin modestly." "Well, let it go at two hundred for the present. I'll deposit a year's salary in a bank, and you can draw against it. Is that satisfactory? You don't want me to hand you two hundred dollars every Saturday, do you?" "No. That would get on my nerves," said she. "Now--it's all settled. When shall we sail?" "There's a girl I've got to look up before I go." "Maud? You needn't bother about her. She's married to a piker from up the state--a shoe manufacturer. She's got a baby, and is fat enough to make two or three like what she used to be." "No, not Maud. One you don't know." "I hoped we could sail tomorrow. Why not take a taxi and go after her now?" "It may be a long search." "She's a----?" He did not need to finish his sentence in order to make himself understood. Susan nodded. "Oh, let her----" "I promised," interrupted she. "Then--of course." Freddie drew from his trousers pocket a huge roll of bills. Susan smiled at this proof that he still retained the universal habit of gamblers, politicians and similar loose characters of large income, precariously derived. He counted off three hundreds and four fifties and held them out to her. "Let me in on it," said he. Susan took the money without hesitation. She was used to these careless generosities of the men of that class--generosities passing with them and with the unthinking for evidences of goodness of heart, when in fact no generosity has any significance whatever beyond selfish vanity unless it is a sacrifice of necessities--real necessities. "I don't think I'll need money," said she. "But I may." "You've got a trunk and a bag on the cab outside," he went on. "I've told them at Sherry's that I'm to be married." Susan flushed. She hastily lowered her eyes. But she need not have feared lest he should suspect the cause of the blush . . . a strange, absurd resentment of the idea that she could be married to Freddie Palmer. Live with him--yes. But marry--now that it was thus squarely presented to her, she found it unthinkable. She did not pause to analyze this feeling, indeed could not have analyzed it, had she tried. It was, however, a most interesting illustration of how she had been educated at last to look upon questions of sex as a man looks on them. She was like the man who openly takes a mistress whom he in no circumstances would elevate to the position of wife. "So," he proceeded, "you might as well move in at Sherry's." "No," objected she. "Let's not begin the new deal until we sail." The wisdom of this was obvious. "Then we'll take your things over to the Manhattan Hotel," said he. "And we'll start the search from there." But after registering at the Manhattan as Susan Lenox, she started out alone. She would not let him look in upon any part of her life which she could keep veiled. CHAPTER XIX SHE left the taxicab at the corner of Grand Street and the Bowery, and plunged into her former haunts afoot. Once again she had it forced upon her how meaningless in the life history are the words "time" and "space." She was now hardly any distance, as measurements go, from her present world, and she had lived here only a yesterday or so ago. Yet what an infinity yawned between! At the Delancey Street apartment house there was already a new janitress, and the kinds of shops on the ground floor had changed. Only after two hours of going up and down stairs, of knocking at doors, of questioning and cross-questioning, did she discover that Clara had moved to Allen Street, to the tenement in which Susan herself had for a few weeks lived--those vague, besotted weeks of despair. When we go out into the streets with bereavement in mind, we see nothing but people dressed in mourning. And a similar thing occurs, whatever the emotion that oppresses us. It would not have been strange if Susan, on the way to Allen Street afoot, had seen only women of the streets, for they swarm in every great thoroughfare of our industrial cities. They used to come out only at night. But with the passing of the feeling against them that existed when they were a rare, unfamiliar, mysteriously terrible minor feature of life, they issue forth boldly by day, like all the other classes, making a living as best they can. But on that day Susan felt as if she were seeing only the broken down and cast-out creatures of the class--the old women, old in body rather than in years, picking in the gutters, fumbling in the garbage barrels, poking and peering everywhere for odds and ends that might pile up into the price of a glass of the poison sold in the barrel houses. The old women--the hideous, lonely old women--and the diseased, crippled children, worse off than the cats and the dogs, for cat and dog were not compelled to wear filth-soaked rags. Prosperous, civilized New York! A group of these children were playing some rough game, in imitation of their elders, that was causing several to howl with pain. She heard a woman, being shown about by a settlement worker or some such person, say: "Really, not at all badly dressed--for street games. I must confess I don't see signs of the misery they talk so much about." A wave of fury passed through Susan. She felt like striking the woman full in her vain, supercilious, patronizing face--striking her and saying: "You smug liar! What if you had to wear such clothes on that fat, overfed body of yours! You'd realize then how filthy they are!" She gazed in horror at the Allen Street house. Was it possible that _she_ had lived there? In the filthy doorway sat a child eating a dill pickle--a scrawny, ragged little girl with much of her hair eaten out by the mange. She recalled this little girl as the formerly pretty and lively youngster, the daughter of the janitress. She went past the child without disturbing her, knocked at the janitress' door. It presently opened, disclosing in a small and foul room four prematurely old women, all in the family way, two with babies in arms. One of these was the janitress. Though she was not a Jewess, she was wearing one of the wigs assumed by orthodox Jewish women when they marry. She stared at Susan with not a sign of recognition. "I am looking for Miss Clara," said Susan. The janitress debated, shifted her baby from one arm to the other, glanced inquiringly at the other women. They shook their heads; she looked at Susan and shook her head. "There ain't a Clara," said she. "Perhaps she's took another name?" "Perhaps," conceded Susan. And she described Clara and the various dresses she had had. At the account of one with flounces on the skirts and lace puffs in the sleeves, the youngest of the women showed a gleam of intelligence. "You mean the girl with the cancer of the breast," said she. Susan remembered. She could not articulate; she nodded. "Oh, yes," said the janitress. "She had the third floor back, and was always kicking because Mrs. Pfister kept a guinea pig for her rheumatism and the smell came through." "Has she gone?" asked Susan. "Couple of weeks." "Where?" The janitress shrugged her shoulders. The other women shrugged their shoulders. Said the janitress: "Her feller stopped coming. The cancer got awful bad. I've saw a good many--they're quite plentiful down this way. I never see a worse'n hers. She didn't have no money. Up to the hospital they tried a new cure on her that made her gallopin' worse. The day before I was going to have to go to work and put her out--she left." "Can't you give me any idea?" urged Susan. "She didn't take her things," said the janitress meaningly. "Not a stitch." "The--the river?" The janitress shrugged her shoulders. "She always said she would, and I guess----" Again the fat, stooped shoulders lifted and lowered. "She was most crazy with pain." There was a moment's silence, then Susan murmured, "Thank you," and went back to the hall. The house was exhaling a frightful stench--the odor of cheap kerosene, of things that passed there for food, of animals human and lower, of death and decay. On her way out she dropped a dollar into the lap of the little girl with the mange. A parrot was shrieking from an upper window. On the topmost fire escape was a row of geraniums blooming sturdily. Her taxicab had moved up the street, pushed out of place by a hearse--a white hearse, with polished mountings, the horses caparisoned in white netting, and tossing white plumes. A baby's funeral--this mockery of a ride in state after a brief life of squalor. It was summer, and the babies were dying like lambs in the shambles. In winter the grown people were slaughtered; in summer the children. Across the street, a few doors up, the city dead wagon was taking away another body--in a plain pine box--to the Potter's Field where find their way for the final rest one in every ten of the people of the rich and splendid city of New York. Susan hurried into her cab. "Drive fast," she said. When she came back to sense of her surroundings she was flying up wide and airy Fifth Avenue with gorgeous sunshine bathing its palaces, with wealth and fashion and ease all about her. Her dear City of the Sun! But it hurt her now, was hateful to look upon. She closed her eyes; her life in the slums, her life when she was sharing the lot that is really the lot of the human race as a race, passed before her--its sights and sounds and odors, its hideous heat, its still more hideous cold, its contacts and associations, its dirt and disease and degradation. And through the roar of the city there came to her a sound, faint yet intense--like the still, small voice the prophet heard--but not the voice of God, rather the voice of the multitude of aching hearts, aching in hopeless poverty--hearts of men, of women, of children---- The children! The multitudes of children with hearts that no sooner begin to beat than they begin to ache. She opened her eyes to shut out these sights and that sound of heartache. She gazed round, drew a long breath of relief. She had almost been afraid to look round lest she should find that her escape had been only a dream. And now the road she had chosen--or, rather, the only road she could take--the road with Freddie Palmer--seemed attractive, even dazzling. What she could not like, she would ignore--and how easily she, after her experience, could do that! What she could not ignore she would tolerate would compel herself to like. Poor Clara!--Happy Clara!--better off in the dregs of the river than she had ever been in the dregs of New York. She shuddered. Then, as so often, the sense of the grotesque thrust in, as out of place as jester in cap and bells at a bier--and she smiled sardonically. "Why," thought she, "in being squeamish about Freddie I'm showing that I'm more respectable than the respectable women. There's hardly one of them that doesn't swallow worse doses with less excuse or no excuse at all--and without so much as a wry face." CHAPTER XX IN the ten days on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, as the passenger list declared them, planned the early stages of their campaign. They must keep to themselves, must make no acquaintances, no social entanglements of any kind, until they had effected the exterior transformation which was to be the first stride--and a very long one, they felt--toward the conquest of the world that commands all the other worlds. Several men aboard knew Palmer slightly--knew him vaguely as a big politician and contractor. They had a hazy notion that he was reputed to have been a thug and a grafter. But New Yorkers have few prejudices except against guilelessness and failure. They are well aware that the wisest of the wise Hebrew race was never more sagacious than when he observed that "he who hasteth to be rich shall not be innocent." They are too well used to unsavory pasts to bother much about that kind of odor; and where in the civilized world--or in that which is not civilized--is there an odor from reputation--or character--whose edge is not taken off by the strong, sweet, hypnotic perfume of money? Also, Palmer's appearance gave the lie direct to any scandal about him. It could not be--it simply could not be--that a man of such splendid physical build, a man with a countenance so handsome, had ever been a low, wicked fellow! Does not the devil always at once exhibit his hoofs, horns, tail and malevolent smile, that all men may know who and what he is? A frank, manly young leader of men--that was the writing on his countenance. And his Italian blood put into his good looks an ancient and aristocratic delicacy that made it incredible that he was of low origin. He spoke good English, he dressed quietly; he did not eat with his knife; he did not retire behind a napkin to pick his teeth, but attended to them openly, if necessity compelled--and splendid teeth they were, set in a wide, clean mouth, notably attractive for a man's. No, Freddie Palmer's past would not give him any trouble whatever; in a few years it would be forgotten, would be romanced about as the heroic struggles of a typical American rising from poverty. "Thank God," said Freddie, "I had sense enough not to get a jail smell on me!" Susan colored painfully--and Palmer, the sensitive, colored also. But he had the tact that does not try to repair a blunder by making a worse one; he pretended not to see Susan's crimson flush. _Her_ past would not be an easy matter--if it should ever rise to face her publicly. Therefore it must not rise till Freddie and she were within the walls of the world they purposed to enter by stealth, and had got themselves well intrenched. Then she would be Susan Lenox of Sutherland, Indiana, who had come to New York to study for the stage and, after many trials from all of which she had emerged with unspotted virtue, whatever vicious calumny might in envy say, had captured the heart and the name of the handsome, rich young contractor. There would be nasty rumors, dreadful stories, perhaps. But in these loose and cynical days, with the women more and more audacious and independent, with the universal craving for luxury beyond the reach of laboriously earned incomes, with marriage decaying in city life among the better classes--in these easy-going days, who was not suspected, hinted about, attacked? And the very atrociousness of the stories would prevent their being believed. One glance at Susan would be enough to make doubters laugh at their doubts. The familiar types of fast women of all degrees come from the poorest kinds of farms and from the tenements. In America, practically not until the panics and collapses of recent years which have tumbled another and better section of the middle class into the abyss of the underworld--not until then did there appear in the city streets and houses of ill repute any considerable number of girls from good early surroundings. Before that time, the clamor for luxury--the luxury that civilization makes as much a necessity as food--had been satisfied more or less by the incomes of the middle class; and any girl of that class, with physical charm and shrewdness enough to gain a living as outcast woman, was either supported at home or got a husband able to give her at least enough of what her tastes craved to keep her in the ranks of the reputable. Thus Susan's beauty of refinement, her speech and manner of the lady, made absurd any suggestion that she could ever have been a fallen woman. The crimson splash of her rouged lips did not suggest the _cocotte_, but the lady with a dash of gayety in her temperament. This, because of the sweet, sensitive seriousness of her small, pallid face with its earnest violet-gray eyes and its frame of abundant dark hair, simply and gracefully arranged. She was of the advance guard of a type which the swift downfall of the middle class, the increasing intelligence and restlessness and love of luxury among women, and the decay of formal religion with its exactions of chastity as woman's one diamond-fine jewel, are now making familiar in every city. The demand for the luxurious comfort which the educated regard as merely decent existence is far outstripping the demand for, and the education of, women in lucrative occupations other than prostitution. Luckily Susan had not been arrested under her own name; there existed no court record which could be brought forward as proof by some nosing newspaper. Susan herself marveled that there was not more trace of her underworld experience in her face and in her mind. She could not account for it. Yet the matter was simple enough to one viewing it from the outside. It is what we think, what we feel about ourselves, that makes up our expression of body and soul. And never in her lowest hour had her soul struck its flag and surrendered to the idea that she was a fallen creature. She had a temperament that estimated her acts not as right and wrong but as necessity. Men, all the rest of the world, might regard her as nothing but sex symbol; she regarded herself as an intelligence. And the filth slipped from her and could not soak in to change the texture of her being. She had no more the feeling or air of the _cocotte_ than has the married woman who lives with her husband for a living. Her expression, her way of looking at her fellow beings and of meeting their looks, was that of the woman of the world who is for whatever reason above that slavery to opinion, that fear of being thought bold or forward which causes women of the usual run to be sensitive about staring or being stared at. Sometimes--in _cocottes_, in stage women, in fashionable women--this expression is self-conscious, or supercilious. It was not so with Susan, for she had little self-consciousness and no snobbishness at all. It merely gave the charm of worldly experience and expertness to a beauty which, without it, might have been too melancholy. Susan, become by sheer compulsion philosopher about the vagaries of fat, did not fret over possible future dangers. She dismissed them and put all her intelligence and energy to the business in hand--to learning and to helping Palmer learn the ways of that world which includes all worlds. Toward the end of the voyage she said to him: "About my salary--or allowance--or whatever it is---- I've been thinking things over. I've made up my mind to save some money. My only chance is that salary. Have you any objection to my saving it--as much of it as I can?" He laughed. "Tuck away anything and everything you can lay your hands on," said he. "I'm not one of those fools who try to hold women by being close and small with them. I'd not want you about if you were of the sort that could be held that way." "No--I'll put by only from my salary," said she. "I admit I've no right to do that. But I've become sensible enough to realize that I mustn't ever risk being out again with no money. It has got on my mind so that I'd not be able to think of much else for worrying--unless I had at least a little." "Do you want me to make you independent?" "No," replied she. "Whatever you gave me I'd have to give back if we separated." "_That_ isn't the way to get on, my dear," said he. "It's the best I can do--as yet," replied she. "And it's quite an advance on what I was. Yes, I _am_ learning--slowly." "Save all your salary, then," said Freddie. "When you buy anything charge it, and I'll attend to the bill." Her expression told him that he had never made a shrewder move in his life. He knew he had made himself secure against losing her; for he knew what a force gratitude was in her character. Her mind was now free--free for the educational business in hand. She appreciated that he had less to learn than she. Civilization, the science and art of living, of extracting all possible good from the few swift years of life, has been--since the downfall of woman from hardship, ten or fifteen thousand years ago--the creation of the man almost entirely. Until recently among the higher races such small development of the intelligence of woman as her seclusion and servitude permitted was sporadic and exotic. Nothing intelligent was expected of her--and it is only under the compulsion of peremptory demand that any human being ever is roused from the natural sluggishness. But civilization, created _by_ man, was created _for_ woman. Woman has to learn how to be the civilized being which man has ordained that she shall be--how to use for man's comfort and pleasure the ingenuities and the graces he has invented. It is easy for a man to pick up the habits, tastes, manners and dress of male citizens of the world, if he has as keen eyes and as discriminating taste as had Palmer, clever descendant of the supple Italian. But to become a female citizen of the world is not so easy. For Susan to learn to be an example of the highest civilization, from her inmost thoughts to the outermost penumbra of her surroundings--that would be for her a labor of love, but still a labor. As her vanity was of the kind that centers on the advantages she actually had, instead of being the more familiar kind that centers upon non-existent charms of mind and person, her task was possible of accomplishment--for those who are sincerely willing to learn, who sincerely know wherein they lack, can learn, can be taught. As she had given these matters of civilization intelligent thought she knew where to begin--at the humble, material foundation, despised and neglected by those who talk most loudly about civilization, art, culture, and so on. They aspire to the clouds and the stars at once--and arrive nowhere except in talk and pretense and flaunting of ill-fitting borrowed plumage. They flap their gaudy artificial wings; there is motion, but no ascent. Susan wished to build--and build solidly. She began with the so-called trifles. When they had been at Naples a week Palmer said: "Don't you think we'd better push on to Paris?" "I can't go before Saturday," replied she. "I've got several fittings yet." "It's pretty dull here for me--with you spending so much time in the shops. I suppose the women's shops are good"--hesitatingly--"but I've heard those in Paris are better." "The shops here are rotten. Italian women have no taste in dress. And the Paris shops are the best in the world." "Then let's clear out," cried he. "I'm bored to death. But I didn't like to say anything, you seemed so busy." "I am busy. And--can you stand it three days more?" "But you'll only have to throw away the stuff you buy here. Why buy so much?" "I'm not buying much. Two ready-to-wear Paris dresses--models they call them--and two hats." Palmer looked alarmed. "Why, at that rate," protested he, "it'll take you all winter to get together your winter clothes, and no time left to wear 'em." "You don't understand," said she. "If you want to be treated right in a shop--be shown the best things--have your orders attended to, you've got to come looking as if you knew what the best is. I'm getting ready to make a good first impression on the dressmakers and milliners in Paris." "Oh, you'll have the money, and that'll make 'em step round." "Don't you believe it," replied she. "All the money in the world won't get you _fashionable_ clothes at the most fashionable place. It'll only get you _costly_ clothes." "Maybe that's so for women's things. It isn't for men's." "I'm not sure of that. When we get to Paris, we'll see. But certainly it's true for women. If I went to the places in the rue de la Paix dressed as I am now, it'd take several years to convince them that I knew what I wanted and wouldn't be satisfied with anything but the latest and best. So I'm having these miserable dressmakers fit those dresses on me until they're absolutely perfect. It's wearing me out, but I'll be glad I did it." Palmer had profound respect for her as a woman who knew what she was about. So he settled himself patiently and passed the time investigating the famous Neapolitan political machine with the aid of an interpreter guide whom he hired by the day. He was enthusiastic over the dresses and the hats when Susan at last had them at the hotel and showed herself to him in them. They certainly did work an amazing change in her. They were the first real Paris models she had ever worn. "Maybe it's because I never thought much about women's clothes before," said Freddie, "but those things seem to be the best ever. How they do show up your complexion and your figure! And I hadn't any idea your hair was as grand as all that. I'm a little afraid of you. We've got to get acquainted all over again. These clothes of mine look pretty poor, don't they? Yet I paid all kinds of money for 'em at the best place in Fifth Avenue." He examined her from all points of view, going round and round her, getting her to walk up and down to give him the full effect of her slender yet voluptuous figure in that beautifully fitted coat and skirt. He felt that his dreams were beginning to come true. "We'll do the trick!" cried he. "Don't you think about money when you're buying clothes. It's a joy to give up for clothes for you. You make 'em look like something." "Wait till I've shopped a few weeks in Paris," said Susan. "Let's start tonight," cried he. "I'll telegraph to the Ritz for rooms." When she began to dress in her old clothes for the journey, he protested. "Throw all these things away," he urged. "Wear one of the new dresses and hats." "But they're not exactly suitable for traveling." "People'll think you lost your baggage. I don't want ever to see you again looking any way except as you ought to look." "No, I must take care of those clothes," said she firmly. "It'll be weeks before I can get anything in Paris, and I must keep up a good front." He continued to argue with her until it occurred to him that as his own clothes were not what they should be, he and she would look much better matched if she dressed as she wished. He had not been so much in jest as he thought when he said to her that they would have to get acquainted all over again. Those new clothes of hers brought out startlingly--so clearly that even his vanity was made uneasy--the subtle yet profound difference of class between them. He had always felt this difference, and in the old days it had given him many a savage impulse to degrade her, to put her beneath him as a punishment for his feeling that she was above him. Now he had his ambition too close at heart to wish to rob her of her chief distinction; he was disturbed about it, though, and looked forward to Paris with uneasiness. "You must help me get my things," said he. "I'd be glad to," said she. "And you must be frank with me, and tell me where I fall short of the best of the women we see." He laughed. The idea that he could help her seemed fantastic. He could not understand it--how this girl who had been brought up in a jay town away out West, who had never had what might be called a real chance to get in the know in New York, could so quickly pass him who had been born and bred in New York, had spent the last ten years in cultivating style and all the other luxurious tastes. He did not like to linger on this puzzle; the more he worked at it, the farther away from him Susan seemed to get. Yet the puzzle would not let him drop it. They came in at the Gare de Lyon in the middle of a beautiful October afternoon. Usually, from late September or earlier until May or later, Paris has about the vilest climate that curses a civilized city. It is one of the bitterest ironies of fate that a people so passionately fond of the sun, of the outdoors, should be doomed for two-thirds of the year to live under leaden, icily leaking skies with rarely a ray of real sunshine. And nothing so well illustrates the exuberant vitality, the dauntless spirit of the French people, as the way they have built in preparation for the enjoyment of every bit of the light and warmth of any chance ray of sunshine. That year it so fell that the winter rains did not close in until late, and Paris reveled in a long autumn of almost New York perfection. Susan and Palmer drove to the Ritz through Paris, the lovely, the gay. "This is the real thing--isn't it?" said he, thrilled into speech by that spectacle so inspiring to all who have the joy of life in their veins--the Place de l'Opéra late on a bright afternoon. "It's the first thing I've ever seen that was equal to what I had dreamed about it," replied she. They had chosen the Ritz as their campaign headquarters because they had learned that it was the most fashionable hotel in Paris--which meant in the world. There were hotels more grand, the interpreter-guide at Naples had said; there were hotels more exclusive. There were even hotels more comfortable. "But for fashion," said he, "it is the summit. There you see the most beautiful ladies, most beautifully dressed. There you see the elegant world at tea and at dinner." At first glance they were somewhat disappointed in the quiet, unostentatious general rooms. The suite assigned them--at a hundred and twenty francs a day--was comfortable, was the most comfortable assemblage of rooms either had ever seen. But there was nothing imposing. This impression did not last long, however. They had been misled by their American passion for looks. They soon discovered that the guide at Naples had told the literal truth. They went down for tea in the garden, which was filled as the day was summer warm. Neither spoke as they sat under a striped awning umbrella, she with tea untasted before her, he with a glass of whiskey and soda he did not lift from the little table. Their eyes and their thoughts were too busy for speech; one cannot talk when one is thinking. About them were people of the world of which neither had before had any but a distant glimpse. They heard English, American, French, Italian. They saw men and women with that air which no one can define yet everyone knows on sight--the assurance without impertinence, the politeness without formality, the simplicity that is more complex than the most elaborate ornamentation of dress or speech or manner. Susan and Freddie lingered until the departure of the last couple--a plainly dressed man whose clothes on inspection revealed marvels of fineness and harmonious color; a quietly dressed woman whose costume from tip of plume to tip of suede slipper was a revelation of how fine a fine art the toilet can be made. "Well--we're right in it, for sure," said Freddie, dropping to a sofa in their suite and lighting a cigarette. "Yes," said Susan, with a sigh. "In it--but not of it." "I almost lost my nerve as I sat there. And for the life of me I can't tell why." "Those people know how," replied Susan. "Well--what they've learned we can learn." "Sure," said he energetically. "It's going to take a lot of practice--a lot of time. But I'm game." His expression, its suggestion of helplessness and appeal, was a clear confession of a feeling that she was his superior. "We're both of us ignorant," she hastened to say. "But when we get our bearings--in a day or two--we'll be all right." "Let's have dinner up here in the sitting-room. I haven't got the nerve to face that gang again today" "Nonsense!" laughed she. "We mustn't give way to our feelings--not for a minute. There'll be a lot of people as badly off as we are. I saw some this afternoon--and from the way the waiters treated them, I know they had money or something. Put on your evening suit, and you'll be all right. I'm the one that hasn't anything to wear. But I've got to go and study the styles. I must begin to learn what to wear and now to wear it. We've come to the right place, Freddie. Cheer up!" He felt better when he was in evening clothes which made him handsome indeed, bringing out all his refinement of feature and coloring. He was almost cheerful when Susan came into the sitting-room in the pale gray of her two new toilettes. It might be, as she insisted, that she was not dressed properly for fashionable dining; but there would be no more delicate, no more lady-like loveliness. He quite recovered his nerve when they faced the company that had terrified him in prospect. He saw many commonplace looking people, not a few who were downright dowdy. And presently he had the satisfaction of realizing that not only Susan but he also was getting admiring attention. He no longer floundered panic-stricken; his feet touched bottom and he felt foolish about his sensations of a few minutes before. After all, the world over, dining in a restaurant is nothing but dining in a restaurant. The waiter and the head waiter spoke English, were gracefully, tactfully, polite; and as he ordered he found his self-confidence returning with the surging rush of a turned tide on a low shore. The food was wonderful, and the champagne, "English taste," was the best he had ever drunk. Halfway through dinner both he and Susan were in the happiest frame of mind. The other people were drinking too, were emerging from caste into humanness. Women gazed languorously and longingly at the handsome young American; men sent stealthy or open smiles of adoration at Susan whenever Freddie's eyes were safely averted. But Susan was more careful than a woman of the world to which she aspired would have been; she ignored the glances and without difficulty assumed the air of wife. "I don't believe we'll have any trouble getting acquainted with these people," said Freddie. "We don't want to, yet," replied she. "Oh, I feel we'll soon be ready for them," said he. "Yes--that," said she. "But that amounts to nothing. This isn't to be merely a matter of clothes and acquaintances--at least, not with me." "What then?" inquired he. "Oh--we'll see as we get our bearings." She could not have put into words the plans she was forming--plans for educating and in every way developing him and herself. She was not sure at what she was aiming, but only of the direction. She had no idea how far she could go herself--or how far he would consent to go. The wise course was just to work along from day to day--keeping the direction. "All right. I'll do as you say. You've got this game sized up better than I." Is there any other people that works as hard as do the Parisians? Other peoples work with their bodies; but the Parisians, all classes and masses too, press both mind and body into service. Other peoples, if they think at all, think how to avoid work; the Parisians think incessantly, always, how to provide themselves with more to do. Other peoples drink to stupefy themselves lest peradventure in a leisure moment they might be seized of a thought; Parisians drink to stimulate themselves, to try to think more rapidly, to attract ideas that might not enter and engage a sober and therefore somewhat sluggish brain. Other peoples meet a new idea as if it were a mortal foe; the Parisians as if it were a long-lost friend. Other peoples are agitated chiefly, each man or woman, about themselves; the Parisians are full of their work, their surroundings, bother little about themselves except as means to what they regard as the end and aim of life--to make the world each moment as different as possible from what it was the moment before, to transform the crass and sordid universe of things with the magic of ideas. Being intelligent, they prefer good to evil; but they have God's own horror of that which is neither good nor evil, and spew it out of their mouths. At the moment of the arrival of Susan and Palmer the world that labors at amusing itself was pausing in Paris on its way from the pleasures of sea and mountains to the pleasures of the Riviera and Egypt. And as the weather held fine, day after day the streets, the cafés, the restaurants, offered the young adventurers an incessant dazzling panorama of all they had come abroad to seek. A week passed before Susan permitted herself to enter any of the shops where she intended to buy dresses, hats and the other and lesser paraphernalia of the woman of fashion. "I mustn't go until I've seen," said she. "I'd yield to the temptation to buy and would regret it." And Freddie, seeing her point, restrained his impatience for making radical changes in himself and in her. The fourth day of their stay at Paris he realized that he would buy, and would wish to buy, none of the things that had tempted him the first and second days. Secure in the obscurity of the crowd of strangers, he was losing his extreme nervousness about himself. That sort of emotion is most characteristic of Americans and gets them the reputation for profound snobbishness. In fact, it is not snobbishness at all. In no country on earth is ignorance in such universal disrepute as in America. The American, eager to learn, eager to be abreast of the foremost, is terrified into embarrassment and awe when he finds himself in surroundings where are things that he feels he ought to know about--while a stupid fellow, in such circumstances, is calmly content with himself, wholly unaware of his own deficiencies. Susan let full two weeks pass before she, with much hesitation, gave her first order toward the outfit on which Palmer insisted upon her spending not less than five thousand dollars. Palmer had been going to the shops with her. She warned him it would make prices higher if she appeared with a prosperous looking man; but he wanted occupation and everything concerning her fascinated him now. His ignorance of the details of feminine dress was giving place rapidly to a knowledge which he thought profound--and it was profound, for a man. She would not permit him to go with her to order, however, or to fittings. All she would tell him in advance about this first dress was that it was for evening wear and that its color was green. "But not a greeny green," said she. "I understand. A green something like the tint in your skin at the nape of your neck." "Perhaps," admitted she. "Yes." "We'll go to the opera the evening it comes home. I'll have my new evening outfit from Charvet's by that time." It was about ten days after this conversation that she told him she had had a final fitting, had ordered the dress sent home. He was instantly all excitement and rushed away to engage a good box for the opera. With her assistance he had got evening clothes that sent through his whole being a glow of self-confidence--for he knew that in those clothes, he looked what he was striving to be. They were to dine at seven. He dressed early and went into their sitting-room. He was afraid he would spoil his pleasure of complete surprise by catching a glimpse of the _grande toilette_ before it was finished. At a quarter past seven Susan put her head into the sitting-room--only her head. At sight of his anxious face, his tense manner, she burst out laughing. It seemed, and was, grotesque that one so imperturbable of surface should be so upset. "Can you stand the strain another quarter of an hour?" said she. "Don't hurry," he urged. "Take all the time you want. Do the thing up right." He rose and came toward her with one hand behind him. "You said the dress was green, didn't you?" "Yes." "Well--here's something you may be able to fit in somewhere." And he brought the concealed hand into view and held a jewel box toward her. She reached a bare arm through the crack in the door and took it. The box, the arm, the head disappeared. Presently there was a low cry of delight that thrilled him. The face reappeared. "Oh--Freddie!" she exclaimed, radiant. "You must have spent a fortune on them." "No. Twelve thousand--that's all. It was a bargain. Go on dressing. We'll talk about it afterward." And he gently pushed her head back--getting a kiss in the palm of his hand--and drew the door to. Ten minutes later the door opened part way again. "Brace yourself," she called laughingly. "I'm coming." A breathless pause and the door swung wide. He stared with eyes amazed and bewitched. There is no more describing the effects of a harmonious combination of exquisite dress and exquisite woman than there is reproducing in words the magic and the thrill of sunrise or sunset, of moonlight's fanciful amorous play, or of starry sky. As the girl stood there, her eyes starlike with excitement, her lips crimson and sensuous against the clear old-ivory pallor of her small face in its frame of glorious dark hair, it seemed to him that her soul, more beautiful counterpart of herself, had come from its dwelling place within and was hovering about her body like an aureole. Round her lovely throat was the string of emeralds. Her shoulders were bare and also her bosom, over nearly half its soft, girlish swell. And draped in light and clinging grace about her slender, sensuous form was the most wonderful garment he had ever seen. The great French designers of dresses and hats and materials have a genius for taking an idea--a pure poetical abstraction--and materializing it, making it visible and tangible without destroying its spirituality. This dress of Susan's did not suggest matter any more than the bar of music suggests the rosined string that has given birth to it. She was carrying the train and a pair of long gloves in one hand. The skirt, thus drawn back, revealed her slim, narrow foot, a slender slipper of pale green satin, a charming instep with a rosiness shimmering through the gossamer web of pale green silk, the outline of a long, slender leg whose perfection was guaranteed by the beauty of her bare arm. His expression changed slowly from bedazzlement to the nearest approach to the old slumbrous, smiling wickedness she had seen since they started. And her sensitive instinct understood; it was the menace of an insane jealousy, sprung from fear--fear of losing her. The look vanished, and once again he was Freddie Palmer the delighted, the generous and almost romantically considerate, because everything was going as he wished. "No wonder I went crazy about you," he said. "Then you're not disappointed?" He came to her, unclasped the emeralds, stood off and viewed her again. "No--you mustn't wear them," said he. "Oh!" she cried, protesting. "They're the best of all." "Not tonight," said he. "They look cheap. They spoil the effect of your neck and shoulders. Another time, when you're not quite so wonderful, but not tonight." As she could not see herself as he saw her, she pleaded for the jewels. She loved jewels and these were the first she had ever had, except two modest little birthday rings she had left in Sutherland. But he led her to the long mirror and convinced her that he was right. When they descended to the dining-room, they caused a stir. It does not take much to make fashionable people stare; but it does take something to make a whole room full of them quiet so far toward silence that the discreet and refined handling of dishes in a restaurant like the Ritz sounds like a vulgar clatter. Susan and Palmer congratulated themselves that they had been at the hotel long enough to become acclimated and so could act as if they were unconscious of the sensation they were creating. When they finished dinner, they found all the little tables in the long corridor between the restaurant and the entrance taken by people lingering over coffee to get another and closer view. And the men who looked at her sweet dreaming violet-gray eyes said she was innocent; those who looked at her crimson lips said she was gay; those who saw both eyes and lips said she was innocent--as yet. A few very dim-sighted, and very wise, retained their reason sufficiently to say that nothing could be told about a woman from her looks--especially an American woman. She put on the magnificent cloak, white silk, ermine lined, which he had seen at Paquin's and had insisted on buying. And they were off for the opera in the aristocratic looking auto he was taking by the week. She had a second triumph at the opera--was the center that drew all glasses the instant the lights went up for the intermission. There were a few minutes when her head was quite turned, when it seemed to her that she had arrived very near to the highest goal of human ambition--said goal being the one achieved and so self-complacently occupied by these luxurious, fashionable people who were paying her the tribute of interest and admiration. Were not these people at the top of the heap? Was she not among them, of them, by right of excellence in the things that made them, distinguished them? Ambition, drunk and heavy with luxury, flies sluggishly and low. And her ambition was--for the moment--in danger of that fate. During the last intermission the door of their box opened. At once Palmer sprang up and advanced with beaming face and extended hand to welcome the caller. "Hello, Brent, I _am_ glad to see you! I want to introduce you to Mrs. Palmer"--that name pronounced with the unconscious pride of the possessor of _the_ jewel. Brent bowed. Susan forced a smile. "We," Palmer hastened on, "are on a sort of postponed honeymoon. I didn't announce the marriage--didn't want to have my friends out of pocket for presents. Besides, they'd have sent us stuff fit only to furnish out a saloon or a hotel--and we'd have had to use it or hurt their feelings. My wife's a Western girl--from Indiana. She came on to study for the stage. But"--he laughed delightedly--"I persuaded her to change her mind." "You are from the West?" said Brent in the formal tone one uses in addressing a new acquaintance. "So am I. But that's more years ago than you could count. I live in New York--when I don't live here or in the Riviera." The moment had passed when Susan could, without creating an impossible scene, admit and compel Brent to admit that they knew each other. What did it matter? Was it not best to ignore the past? Probably Brent had done this deliberately, assuming that she was beginning a new life with a clean slate. "Been here long?" said Brent to Palmer. As he and Palmer talked, she contrasted the two men. Palmer was much the younger, much the handsomer. Yet in the comparison Brent had the advantage. He looked as if he amounted to a great deal, as if he had lived and had understood life as the other man could not. The physical difference between them was somewhat the difference between look of lion and look of tiger. Brent looked strong; Palmer, dangerous. She could not imagine either man failing of a purpose he had set his heart upon. She could not imagine Brent reaching for it in any but an open, direct, daring way. She knew that the descendant of the supple Italians, the graduate of the street schools of stealth and fraud, would not care to have anything unless he got it by skill at subtlety. She noted their dress. Brent was wearing his clothes in that elegantly careless way which it was one of Freddie's dreams--one of the vain ones--to attain. Brent's voice was much more virile, was almost harsh, and in pronouncing some words made the nerves tingle with a sensation of mingled irritation and pleasure. Freddie's voice was manly enough, but soft and dangerous, suggestive of hidden danger. She compared the two men, as she knew them. She wondered how they would seem to a complete stranger. Palmer, she thought, would be able to attract almost any woman he might want; it seemed to her that a woman Brent wanted would feel rather helpless before the onset he would make. It irritated her, this untimely intrusion of Brent who had the curious quality of making all other men seem less in the comparison. Not that he assumed anything, or forced comparisons; on the contrary, no man could have insisted less upon himself. Not that he compelled or caused the transfer of all interest to himself. Simply that, with him there, she felt less hopeful of Palmer, less confident of his ability to become what he seemed--and go beyond it. There are occasional men who have this same quality that Susan was just then feeling in Brent--men whom women never love yet who make it impossible for them to begin to love or to continue to love the other men within their range. She was not glad to see him. She did not conceal it. Yet she knew that he would linger--and that she would not oppose. She would have liked to say to him: "You lost belief in me and dropped me. I have begun to make a life for myself. Let me alone. Do not upset me--do not force me to see what I must not see if I am to be happy. Go away, and give me a chance." But we do not say these frank, childlike things except in moments of closest intimacy--and certainly there was no suggestion of intimacy, no invitation to it, but the reverse, in the man facing her at the front of the box. "Then you are to be in Paris some time?" said Brent, addressing her. "I think so," said Susan. "Sure," cried Palmer. "This is the town the world revolves round. I felt like singing 'Home, Sweet Home' as we drove from the station." "I like it better than any place on earth," said Brent. "Better even than New York. I've never been quite able to forgive New York for some of the things it made me suffer before it gave me what I wanted." "I, too," said Freddie. "My wife can't understand that. She doesn't know the side of life we know. I'm going to smoke a cigarette. I'll leave you here, old man, to entertain her." When he disappeared, Susan looked out over the house with an expression of apparent abstraction. Brent--she was conscious--studied her with those seeing eyes--hazel eyes with not a bit of the sentimentality and weakness of brown in them. "You and Palmer know no one here?" "Not a soul." "I'll be glad to introduce some of my acquaintances to you--French people of the artistic set. They speak English. And you'll soon be learning French." "I intend to learn as soon as I've finished my fall shopping." "You are not coming back to America?" "Not for a long time." "Then you will find my friends useful." She turned her eyes upon his. "You are very kind," said she. "But I'd rather--we'd rather--not meet anyone just yet." His eyes met hers calmly. It was impossible to tell whether he understood or not. After a few seconds he glanced out over the house. "That is a beautiful dress," said he. "You have real taste, if you'll permit me to say so. I was one of those who were struck dumb with admiration at the Ritz tonight." "It's the first grand dress I ever possessed," said she. "You love dresses--and jewels--and luxury?" "As a starving man loves food." "Then you are happy?" "Perfectly so--for the first time in my life." "It is a kind of ecstasy--isn't it? I remember how it was with me. I had always been poor--I worked my way through prep school and college. And I wanted _all_ the luxuries. The more I had to endure--the worse food and clothing and lodgings--the madder I became about them, until I couldn't think of anything but getting the money to buy them. When I got it, I gorged myself. . . . It's a pity the starving man can't keep on loving food--keep on being always starving and always having his hunger satisfied." "Ah, but he can." He smiled mysteriously. "You think so, now. Wait till you are gorged." She laughed. "You don't know! I could never get enough--never!" His smile became even more mysterious. As he looked away, his profile presented itself to her view--an outline of sheer strength, of tragic sadness--the profile of those who have dreamed and dared and suffered. But the smile, saying no to her confident assertion, still lingered. "Never!" she repeated. She must compel that smile to take away its disquieting negation, its relentless prophecy of the end of her happiness. She must convince him that he had come back in vain, that he could not disturb her. "You don't suggest to me the woman who can be content with just people and just things. You will always insist on luxury. But you will demand more." He looked at her again. "And you will get it," he added, in a tone that sent a wave through her nerves. Her glance fell. Palmer came in, bringing an odor of cologne and of fresh cigarette fumes. Brent rose. Palmer laid a detaining hand on his shoulder. "Do stay on, Brent, and go to supper with us." "I was about to ask you to supper with me. Have you been to the Abbaye?" "No. We haven't got round to that yet. Is it lively?" "And the food's the best in Paris. You'll come?" Brent was looking at Susan. Palmer, not yet educated in the smaller--and important--refinements of politeness, did not wait for her reply or think that she should be consulted. "Certainly," said he. "On condition that you dine with us tomorrow night." "Very well," agreed Brent. And he excused himself to take leave of his friends. "Just tell your chauffeur to go to the Abbaye--he'll know," he said as he bowed over Susan's hand. "I'll be waiting. I wish to be there ahead and make sure of a table." As the door of the box closed upon him Freddie burst out with that enthusiasm we feel for one who is in a position to render us good service and is showing a disposition to do so. "I've known him for years," said he, "and he's the real thing. He used to spend a lot of time in a saloon I used to keep in Allen Street." "Allen Street?" ejaculated Susan, shivering. "I was twenty-two then. He used to want to study types, as he called it. And I gathered in types for him--though really my place was for the swell crooks and their ladies. How long ago that seems--and how far away!" "Another life," said Susan. "That's a fact. This is my second time on earth. _Our_ second time. I tell you it's fighting for a foothold that makes men and women the wretches they are. Nowadays, I couldn't hurt a fly--could you? But then you never were cruel. That's why you stayed down so long." Susan smiled into the darkness of the auditorium--the curtain was up, and they were talking in undertones. She said, as she smiled: "I'll never go down and stay down for that reason again." Her tone arrested his attention; but he could make nothing of it or of her expression, though her face was clear enough in the reflection from the footlights. "Anyhow, Brent and I are old pals," continued he, "though we haven't seen so much of each other since he made a hit with the plays. He always used to predict I'd get to the top and be respectable. Now that it's come true, he'll help me. He'll introduce us, if we work it right." "But we don't want that yet," protested Susan. "You're ready and so am I," declared Palmer in the tone she knew had the full strength of his will back of it. Faint angry hissing from the stalls silenced them, but as soon as they were in the auto Susan resumed. "I have told Mr. Brent we don't want to meet his friends yet." "Now what the hell did you do that for?" demanded Freddie. It was the first time she had crossed him; it was the first time he had been reminiscent of the Freddie she used to know. "Because," said she evenly, "I will not meet people under false pretenses." "What rot!" "I will not do it," replied she in the same quiet way. He assumed that she meant only one of the false pretenses--the one that seemed the least to her. He said: "Then we'll draw up and sign a marriage contract and date it a couple of years ago, before the new marriage law was passed to save rich men's drunken sons from common law wives." "I am already married," said Susan. "To a farmer out in Indiana." Freddie laughed. "Well, I'll be damned! You! You!" He looked at her ermine-lined cloak and laughed again. "An Indiana farmer!" Then he suddenly sobered. "Come to think of it," said he, "that's the first thing you ever told me about your past." "Or anybody else," said Susan. Her body was quivering, for we remember the past events with the sensations they made upon us at the time. She could smell that little room in the farmhouse. Allen Street and all the rest of her life in the underworld had for her something of the vagueness of dreams--not only now but also while she was living that life. But not Ferguson, not the night when her innocent soul was ravished as a wolf rips up and munches a bleating lamb. No vagueness of dreams about that, but a reality to make her shudder and reel whenever she thought of it--a reality vivider now that she was a woman grown in experiences and understanding. "He's probably dead--or divorced you long ago." "I do not know." "I can find out--without stirring things up. What was his name?" "Ferguson." "What was his first name?" She tried to recall. "I think--it was Jim. Yes, it was Jim." She fancied she could hear the voice of that ferocious sister snapping out that name in the miserable little coop of a general room in that hot, foul, farm cottage. "Where did he live?" "His farm was at the edge of Zeke Warham's place--not far from Beecamp, in Jefferson County." She lapsed into silence, seemed to be watching the gay night streets of the Montmartre district--the cafés, the music halls, the sidewalk shows, the throngs of people every man and woman of them with his or her own individual variation upon the fascinating, covertly terrible face of the Paris mob. "What are you thinking about?" he asked, when a remark brought no answer. "The past," said she. "And the future." "Well--we'll find out in a few days that your farmer's got no claim on you--and we'll attend to that marriage contract and everything'll be all right." "Do you want to marry me?" she asked, turning on him suddenly. "We're as good as married already," replied he. "Your tone sounds as if _you_ didn't want to marry _me_." And he laughed at the absurdity of such an idea. "I don't know whether I do or not," said she slowly. He laid a gentle strong hand on her knee. Gentle though it was, she felt its strength through the thickness of her cloak. "When the time comes," said he in the soft voice with the menace hidden in it, "you'll know whether you do or don't. You'll know you _do_--Queenie." The auto was at the curb before the Abbaye. And on the steps, in furs and a top hat, stood the tall, experienced looking, cynical looking playwright. Susan's eyes met his, he lifted his hat, formal, polite. "I'll bet he's got the best table in the place," said Palmer, before opening the door, "and I'll bet it cost him a bunch." CHAPTER XXI BRENT had an apartment in the rue de Rivoli, near the Hotel Meurice and high enough to command the whole Tuileries garden. From his balcony he could see to the east the ancient courts of the Louvre, to the south the varied, harmonious façades of the Quay d'Orsay with the domes and spires of the Left Bank behind, to the west the Obélisque, the long broad reaches of the Champs Elysées with the Arc de Triomphe at the boundary of the horizon. On that balcony, with the tides of traffic far below, one had a sense of being at the heart of the world, past, present, and to come. Brent liked to feel at home wherever he was; it enabled him to go tranquilly to work within a few minutes after his arrival, no matter how far he had journeyed or how long he had been away. So he regarded it as an economy, an essential to good work, to keep up the house in New York, a villa in Petite Afrique, with the Mediterranean washing its garden wall, this apartment at Paris; and a telegram a week in advance would reserve him the same quarters in the quietest part of hotels at Luzerne, at St. Moritz and at Biarritz. Susan admired, as he explained his scheme of life to her and Palmer when they visited his apartment. Always profound tranquillity in the midst of intense activity. He could shut his door and he as in a desert; he could open it, and the most interesting of the sensations created by the actions and reactions of the whole human race were straightway beating upon his senses. As she listened, she looked about, her eyes taking in impressions to be studied at leisure. These quarters of his in Paris were fundamentally different from those in New York, were the expression of a different side of his personality. It was plain that he loved them, that they came nearer to expressing his real--that is, his inmost--self. "Though I work harder in Paris than in New York," he explained, "I have more leisure because it is all one kind of work--writing--at which I'm never interrupted. So I have time to make surroundings for myself. No one has time for surroundings in New York." She observed that of the scores of pictures on the walls, tables, shelves of the three rooms they were shown, every one was a face--faces of all nationalities, all ages, all conditions--faces happy and faces tragic, faces homely, faces beautiful, faces irradiating the fascination of those abnormal developments of character, good and bad, which give the composite countenance of the human race its distinction, as the characteristics themselves give it intensities of light and shade. She saw angels, beautiful and ugly, devils beautiful and ugly. When she began to notice this peculiarity of those rooms, she was simply interested. What an amazing collection! How much time and thought it must have taken! How he must have searched--and what an instinct he had for finding the unusual, the significant! As she sat there and then strolled about and then sat again, her interest rose into a feverish excitement. It was as if the ghosts of all these personalities, not one of them commonplace, were moving through the rooms, were pressing upon her. She understood why Brent had them there--that they were as necessary to him as cadavers and skeletons and physiological charts to an anatomist. But they oppressed, suffocated her; she went out on the balcony and watched the effects of the light from the setting sun upon and around the enormously magnified Arc. "You don't like my rooms," said Brent. "They fascinate me," replied she. "But I'd have to get used to these friends of yours. You made their acquaintance one or a few at a time. It's very upsetting, being introduced to all at once." She felt Brent's gaze upon her--that unfathomable look which made her uneasy, yet was somehow satisfying, too. He said, after a while, "Palmer is to give me his photograph. Will you give me yours?" He was smiling. "Both of you belong in my gallery." "Of course she will," said Palmer, coming out on the balcony and standing beside her. "I want her to have some taken right away--in the evening dress she wore to the Opera last week. And she must have her portrait painted." "When we are settled," said Susan. "I've no time for anything now but shopping." They had come to inspect the apartment above Brent's, and had decided to take it; Susan saw possibilities of making it over into the sort of environment of which she had dreamed. In novels the descriptions of interiors, which weary most readers, interested her more than story or characters. In her days of abject poverty she used these word paintings to construct for herself a room, suites of rooms, a whole house, to replace, when her physical eyes closed and her eyes of fancy opened wide, the squalid and nauseous cell to which poverty condemned her. In the streets she would sometimes pause before a shop window display of interior furnishings; a beautiful table or chair, a design in wall or floor covering had caught her eyes, had set her to dreaming--dreaming on and on--she in dingy skirt and leaky shoes. Now--the chance to realize her dreams had come. Palmer had got acquainted with some high-class sports, American, French and English, at an American bar in the rue Volney. He was spending his afternoons and some of his evenings with them--in the evenings winning large sums from them at cards at which he was now as lucky as at everything else. Palmer, pleased by Brent's manner toward Susan--formal politeness, indifference to sex--was glad to have him go about with her. Also Palmer was one of those men who not merely imagine they read human nature but actually can read it. He _knew_ he could trust Susan. And it had been his habit--as it is the habit of all successful men--to trust human beings, each one up to his capacity for resisting temptation to treachery. "Brent doesn't care for women--as women," said he. "He never did. Don't you think he's queer?" "He's different," replied Susan. "He doesn't care much for people--to have them as intimates. I understand why. Love and friendship bore one--or fail one--and are unsatisfactory--and disturbing. But if one centers one's life about things--books, pictures, art, a career--why, one is never bored or betrayed. He has solved the secret of happiness, I think." "Do you think a woman could fall in love with him?" he asked, with an air of the accidental and casual. "If you mean, could I fall in love with him," said she, "I should say no. I think it would either amuse or annoy him to find that a woman cared about him." "Amuse him most of all," said Palmer. "He knows the ladies--that they love us men for what we can give them." "Did you ever hear of anyone, man or woman, who cared about a person who couldn't give them anything?" Freddie's laugh was admission that he thought her right. "The way to get on in politics," observed he, "is to show men that it's to their best interest to support you. And that's the way to get on in everything else--including love." Susan knew that this was the truth about life, as it appeared to her also. But she could not divest herself of the human aversion to hearing the cold, practical truth. She wanted sugar coating on the pill, even though she knew the sugar made the medicine much less effective, often neutralized it altogether. Thus Palmer's brutally frank cynicism got upon her nerves, whereas Brent's equally frank cynicism attracted her because it was not brutal. Both men saw that life was a coarse practical joke. Palmer put the stress on the coarseness, Brent upon the humor. Brent recommended and introduced to her a friend of his, a young French Jew named Gourdain, an architect on the way up to celebrity. "You will like his ideas and he will like yours," said Brent. She had acquiesced in his insistent friendship for Palmer and her, but she had not lowered by an inch the barrier of her reserve toward him. His speech and actions at all times, whether Palmer was there or not; suggested that he respected the barrier, regarded it as even higher and thicker than it was. Nevertheless she felt that he really regarded the barrier as non-existent. She said: "But I've never told you my ideas." "I can guess what they are. Your surroundings will simply be an extension of your dress." She would not have let him see--she would not have admitted to herself--how profoundly the subtle compliment pleased her. Because a man's or a woman's intimate personal taste is good it by no means follows that he or she will build or decorate or furnish a house well. In matters of taste, the greater does not necessarily include the less, nor does the less imply the greater. Perhaps Susan would have shown she did not deserve Brent's compliment, would have failed ignominiously in that first essay of hers, had she not found a Gourdain, sympathetic, able to put into the concrete the rather vague ideas she had evolved in her dreaming. An architect is like a milliner or a dressmaker. He supplies the model, product of his own individual taste. The person who employs him must remold that form into an expression of his own personality--for people who deliberately live in surroundings that are not part of themselves are on the same low level with those who utter only borrowed ideas. That is the object and the aim of civilization--to encourage and to compel each individual to be frankly himself--herself. That is the profound meaning of freedom. The world owes more to bad morals and to bad taste that are spontaneous than to all the docile conformity to the standards of morals and of taste, however good. Truth--which simply means an increase of harmony, a decrease of discord, between the internal man and his environment--truth is a product, usually a byproduct, of a ferment of action. Gourdain--chiefly, no doubt, because Susan's beauty of face and figure and dress fascinated him--was more eager to bring out her individuality than to show off his own talents. He took endless pains with her, taught her the technical knowledge and vocabulary that would enable her to express herself, then carried out her ideas religiously. "You are right, _mon ami_," said he to Brent. "She is an orchid, and of a rare species. She has a glorious imagination, like a bird of paradise balancing itself into an azure sky, with every plume raining color and brilliancy." "Somewhat exaggerated," was Susan's pleased, laughing comment when Brent told her. "Somewhat," said Brent. "But my friend Gourdain is stark mad about women's dressing well. That lilac dress you had on yesterday did for him. He _was_ your servant; he _is_ your slave." Abruptly--for no apparent cause, as was often the case--Susan had that sickening sense of the unreality of her luxurious present, of being about to awaken in Vine Street with Etta--or in the filthy bed with old Mrs. Tucker. Absently she glanced down at her foot, holding it out as if for inspection. She saw Brent's look of amusement at her seeming vanity. "I was looking to see if my shoes were leaky," she explained. A subtle change came over his face. He understood instantly. "Have you ever been--cold?" she asked, looking at him strangely. "One cold February--cold and damp--I had no underclothes--and no overcoat." "And dirty beds--filthy rooms--filthy people?" "A ten-cent lodging house with a tramp for bedfellow." They were looking at each other, with the perfect understanding and sympathy that can come only to two people of the same fiber who have braved the same storms. Each glanced hastily away. Her enthusiasm for doing the apartment was due full as much to the fact that it gave her definitely directed occupation as to its congeniality. That early training of hers from Aunt Fanny Warham had made it forever impossible for her in any circumstances to become the typical luxuriously sheltered woman, whether legally or illegally kept--the lie-abed woman, the woman who dresses only to go out and show off, the woman who wastes her life in petty, piffling trifles--without purpose, without order or system, without morals or personal self-respect. She had never lost the systematic instinct--the instinct to use time instead of wasting it--that Fanny Warham had implanted in her during the years that determine character. Not for a moment, even without distinctly definite aim, was she in danger of the creeping paralysis that is epidemic among the rich, enfeebling and slowing down mental and physical activity. She had a regular life; she read, she walked in the Bois; she made the best of each day. And when this definite thing to accomplish offered, she did not have to learn how to work before she could begin the work itself. All this was nothing new to Gourdain. He was born and bred in a country where intelligent discipline is the rule and the lack of it the rare exception--among all classes--even among the women of the well-to-do classes. The finished apartment was a disappointment to Palmer. Its effects were too quiet, too restrained. Within certain small limits, those of the man of unusual intelligence but no marked originality, he had excellent taste--or, perhaps, excellent ability to recognize good taste. But in the large he yearned for the grandiose. He loved the gaudy with which the rich surround themselves because good taste forbids them to talk of their wealth and such surroundings do the talking for them and do it more effectively. He would have preferred even a vulgar glitter to the unobtrusiveness of those rooms. But he knew that Susan was right, and he was a very human arrant coward about admitting that he had bad taste. "This is beautiful--exquisite," said he, with feigned enthusiasm. "I'm afraid, though, it'll be above their heads." "What do you mean?" inquired Susan. Palmer felt her restrained irritation, hastened to explain. "I mean the people who'll come here. They can't appreciate it. You have to look twice to appreciate this--and people, the best of 'em, look only once and a mighty blind look it is." But Susan was not deceived. "You must tell me what changes you want," said she. Her momentary irritation had vanished. Since Freddie was paying, Freddie must have what suited him. "Oh, I've got nothing to suggest. Now that I've been studying it out, I couldn't allow you to make any changes. It does grow on one, doesn't it, Brent?" "It will be the talk of Paris," replied Brent. The playwright's tone settled the matter for Palmer. He was content. Said he: "Thank God she hasn't put in any of those dirty old tapestry rags--and the banged up, broken furniture and the patched crockery." At the same time she had produced an effect of long tenancy. There was nothing that glittered, nothing with the offensive sheen of the brand new. There was in that delicately toned atmosphere one suggestion which gave the same impression as the artificial crimson of her lips in contrast with the pallor of her skin and the sweet thoughtful melancholy of her eyes. This suggestion came from an all-pervading odor of a heavy, languorously sweet, sensuous perfume--the same that Susan herself used. She had it made at a perfumer's in the faubourg St. Honoré by mixing in a certain proportion several of the heaviest and most clinging of the familiar perfumes. "You don't like my perfume?" she said to Brent one day. He was in the library, was inspecting her _selections_ of books. Instead of answering her question, he said: "How did you find out so much about books? How did you find time to read so many?" "One always finds time for what one likes." "Not always," said he. "I had a hard stretch once--just after I struck New York. I was a waiter for two months. Working people don't find time for reading--and such things." "That was one reason why I gave up work," said she. "That--and the dirt--and the poor wages--and the hopelessness--and a few other reasons," said he. "Why don't you like the perfume I use?" "Why do you say that?" "You made a queer face as you came into the drawing-room." "Do _you_ like it?" "What a queer question!" she said. "No other man would have asked it." "The obvious," said he, shrugging his shoulders. "I couldn't help knowing you didn't like it." "Then why should I use it?" His glance drifted slowly away from hers. He lit a cigarette with much attention to detail. "Why should I use perfume I don't like?" persisted she. "What's the use of going into that?" said he. "But I do like it--in a way," she went on after a pause. "It is--it seems to me the odor of myself." "Yes--it is," he admitted. She laughed. "Yet you made a wry face." "I did." "At the odor?" "At the odor." "Do you think I ought to change to another perfume?" "You know I do not. It's the odor of your soul. It is different at different times--sometimes inspiringly sweet as the incense of heaven, as my metaphoric friend Gourdain would say--sometimes as deadly sweet as the odors of the drugs men take to drag them to hell--sometimes repulsively sweet, making one heart sick for pure, clean smell-less air yet without the courage to seek it. Your perfume is many things, but always--always strong and tenacious and individual." A flush had overspread the pallor of her skin; her long dark lashes hid her eyes. "You have never been in love," he went on. "So you told me once before." It was the first time either had referred to their New York acquaintance. "You did not believe me then. But you do now?" "For me there is no such thing as love," replied she. "I understand affection--I have felt it. I understand passion. It is a strong force in my life--perhaps the strongest." "No," said he, quiet but positive. "Perhaps not," replied she carelessly, and went on, with her more than manlike candor, and in her manner of saying the most startling things in the calmest way: "I understand what is called love--feebleness looking up to strength or strength pitying feebleness. I understand because I've felt both those things. But love--two equal people united perfectly, merged into a third person who is neither yet is both--that I have not felt. I've dreamed it. I've imagined it--in some moments of passion. But"--she laughed and shrugged her shoulders and waved the hand with the cigarette between its fingers--"I have not felt it and I shall not feel it. I remain I." She paused, considered, added, "And I prefer that." "You are strong," said he, absent and reflective. "Yes, you are strong." "I don't know," replied she. "Sometimes I think so. Again----" She shook her head doubtfully. "You would be dead if you were not. As strong in soul as in body." "Probably," admitted she. "Anyhow, I am sure I shall always be--alone. I shall visit--I shall linger on my threshold and talk. Perhaps I shall wander in perfumed gardens and dream of comradeship. But I shall return _chez moi_." He rose--sighed--laughed--at her and at himself. "Don't delay too long," said he. "Delay?" "Your career." "My career? Why, I am in the full swing of it. I'm at work in the only profession I'm fit for." "The profession of woman?" "Yes--the profession of female." He winced--and at this sign, if she did not ask herself what pleased her, she did not ask herself why. He said sharply, "I don't like that." "But _you_ have only to _hear_ it. Think of poor me who have to _live_ it." "Have to? No," said he. "Surely you're not suggesting that I drop back into the laboring classes! No, thank you. If you knew, you'd not say anything so stupid." "I do know, and I was not suggesting that. Under this capitalistic system the whole working class is degraded. They call what they do 'work,' but that word ought to be reserved for what a man does when he exercises mind and body usefully. What the working class is condemned to by capitalism is not work but toil." "The toil of a slave," said Susan. "It's shallow twaddle or sheer want to talk about the dignity and beauty of labor under this system," he went on. "It is ugly and degrading. The fools or hypocrites who talk that way ought to be forced to join the gangs of slaves at their tasks in factory and mine and shop, in the fields and the streets. And even the easier and better paid tasks, even what the capitalists themselves do--those things aren't dignified and beautiful. Capitalism divides all men except those of one class--the class to which I luckily belong--divides all other men into three unlovely classes--slave owners, slave drivers and slaves. But you're not interested in those questions." "In wage slavery? No. I wish to forget about it. Any alternative to being a wage slave or a slave driver--or a slave owner. Any alternative." "You don't appreciate your own good fortune," said he. "Most human beings--all but a very few--have to be in the slave classes, in one way or another. They have to submit to the repulsive drudgery, with no advancement except to slave driver. As for women--if they have to work, what can they do but sell themselves into slavery to the machines, to the capitalists? But you--you needn't do that. Nature endowed you with talent--unusual talent, I believe. How lucky you are! How superior to the great mass of your fellow beings who must slave or starve, because they have no talent!" "Talent?--I?" said Susan. "For what, pray?" "For the stage." She looked amused. "You evidently don't think me vain--or you'd not venture that jest." "For the stage," he repeated. "Thanks," said she drily, "but I'll not appeal from your verdict." "My verdict? What do you mean?" "I prefer to talk of something else," said she coldly, offended by his unaccountable disregard of her feelings. "This is bewildering," said he. And his manner certainly fitted the words. "That I should have understood? Perhaps I shouldn't--at least, not so quickly--if I hadn't heard how often you have been disappointed, and how hard it has been for you to get rid of some of those you tried and found wanting." "Believe me--I was not disappointed in you." He spoke earnestly, apparently with sincerity. "The contrary. Your throwing it all up was one of the shocks of my life." She laughed mockingly--to hide her sensitiveness. "One of the shocks of my life," he repeated. She was looking at him curiously--wondering why he was thus uncandid. "It puzzled me," he went on. "I've been lingering on here, trying to solve the puzzle. And the more I've seen of you the less I understand. Why did you do it? How could _you_ do it?" He was walking up and down the room in a characteristic pose--hands clasped behind his back as if to keep them quiet, body erect, head powerfully thrust forward. He halted abruptly and wheeled to face her. "Do you mean to tell me you didn't get tired of work and drop it for--" he waved his arm to indicate her luxurious surroundings--"for this?" No sign of her agitation showed at the surface. But she felt she was not concealing herself from him. He resumed his march, presently to halt and wheel again upon her. But before he could speak, she stopped him. "I don't wish to hear any more," said she, the strange look in her eyes. It was all she could do to hide the wild burst of emotion that had followed her discovery. Then she had not been without a chance for a real career! She might have been free, might have belonged to herself---- "It is not too late," cried he. "That's why I'm here." "It is too late," she said. "It is not too late," repeated he, harshly, in his way that swept aside opposition. "I shall get you back." Triumphantly, "The puzzle is solved!" She faced him with a look of defiant negation. "That ocean I crossed--it's as narrow as the East River into which I thought of throwing myself many a time--it's as narrow as the East River beside the ocean between what I am and what I was. And I'll never go back. Never!" She repeated the "never" quietly, under her breath. His eyes looked as if they, without missing an essential detail, had swept the whole of that to which she would never go back. He said: "Go back? No, indeed. Who's asking you to go back? Not I. I'm not _asking_ you to go anywhere. I'm simply saying that you will--_must_--go forward. If you were in love, perhaps not. But you aren't in love. I know from experience how men and women care for each other--how they form these relationships. They find each other convenient and comfortable. But they care only for themselves. Especially young people. One must live quite a while to discover that thinking about oneself is living in a stuffy little cage with only a little light, through slats in the top that give no view. . . . It's an unnatural life for you. It can't last. You--centering upon yourself--upon comfort and convenience. Absurd!" "I have chosen," said she. "No--you can't do it," he went on, as if she had not spoken. "_You_ can't spend your life at dresses and millinery, at chattering about art, at thinking about eating and drinking--at being passively amused--at attending to your hair and skin and figure. You may think so, but in reality you are getting ready for _me_ . . . for your career. You are simply educating yourself. I shall have you back." She held the cigarette to her lips, inhaled the smoke deeply, exhaled it slowly. "I will tell you why," he went on, as if he were answering a protest. "Every one of us has an individuality of some sort. And in spite of everything and anything, except death or hopeless disease, that individuality will insist upon expressing itself." "Mine is expressing itself," said she with a light smile--the smile of a light woman. "You can't rest in this present life of yours. Your individuality is too strong. It will have its way--and for all your mocking smiling, you know I am right. I understand how you were tempted into it----" She opened her lips--changed her mind and stopped her lips with her cigarette. "I don't blame you--and it was just as well. This life has taught you--will teach you--will advance you in your career. . . . Tell me, what gave you the idea that I was disappointed?" She tossed her cigarette into the big ash tray. "As I told you, it is too late." She rose and looked at him with a strange, sweet smile. "I've got any quantity of faults," said she. "But there's one I haven't got. I don't whine." "You don't whine," assented he, "and you don't lie--and you don't shirk. Men and women have been canonized for less. I understand that for some reason you can't talk about----" "Then why do you continue to press me?" said she, a little coldly. He accepted the rebuke with a bow. "Nevertheless," said he, with raillery to carry off his persistence, "I shall get you. If not sooner, then when the specter of an obscure--perhaps poor--old age begins to agitate the rich hangings of youth's banquet hall." "That'll be a good many years yet," mocked she. And from her lovely young face flashed the radiant defiance of her perfect youth and health. "Years that pass quickly," retorted he, unmoved. She was still radiant, still smiling, but once more she was seeing the hideous old women of the tenements. Into her nostrils stole the stench of the foul den in which she had slept with Mrs. Tucker and Mrs. Reardon--and she was hearing the hunchback of the dive playing for the drunken dancing old cronies, with their tin cups of whiskey. No danger of that now? How little she was saving of her salary from Palmer! She could not "work" men--she simply could not. She would never put by enough to be independent and every day her tastes for luxury had firmer hold upon her. No danger? As much danger as ever--a danger postponed but certain to threaten some day--and then, a fall from a greater height--a certain fall. She was hearing the battered, shattered piano of the dive. "For pity's sake Mrs. Palmer!" cried Brent, in a low voice. She started. The beautiful room, the environment of luxury and taste and comfort came back. Gourdain interrupted and then Palmer. The four went to the Cafe Anglais for dinner. Brent announced that he was going to the Riviera soon to join a party of friends. "I wish you would visit me later," said he, with a glance that included them all and rested, as courtesy required, upon Susan. "There's room in my villa--barely room." "We've not really settled here," said Susan. "And we've taken up French seriously." "The weather's frightful," said Palmer, with a meaning glance at her. "I think we ought to go." But her expression showed that she had no intention of going, no sympathy with Palmer's desire to use this excellent, easy ladder of Brent's offering to make the ascent into secure respectability. "Next winter, then," said Brent, who was observing her. "Or--in the early spring, perhaps." "Oh, we may change our minds and come," Palmer suggested eagerly. "I'm going to try to persuade my wife." "Come if you can," said Brent cordially. "I'll have no one stopping with me." When they were alone, Palmer sent his valet away and fussed about impatiently until Susan's maid had unhooked her dress and had got her ready for bed. As the maid began the long process of giving her hair a thorough brushing, he said, "Please let her go, Susan. I want to tell you something." "She does not know a word of English." "But these French are so clever that they understand perfectly with their eyes." Susan sent the maid to bed and sat in a dressing gown brushing her hair. It was long enough to reach to the middle of her back and to cover her bosom. It was very thick and wavy. Now that the scarlet was washed from her lips for the night, her eyes shone soft and clear with no relief for their almost tragic melancholy. He was looking at her in profile. Her expression was stern as well as sad--the soul of a woman who has suffered and has been made strong, if not hard. "I got a letter from my lawyers today," he began. "It was about that marriage. I'll read." At the word "marriage," she halted the regular stroke of the brush. Her eyes gazed into the mirror of the dressing table through her reflection deep into her life, deep into the vistas of memory. As he unfolded the letter, she leaned back in the low chair, let her hands drop to her lap. "'As the inclosed documents show,'" he read, "'we have learned and have legally verified that Jeb--not James--Ferguson divorced his wife Susan Lenox about a year after their marriage, on the ground of desertion; and two years later he fell through the floor of an old bridge near Brooksburg and was killed.'" The old bridge--she was feeling its loose flooring sag and shift under the cautious hoofs of the horse. She was seeing Rod Spenser on the horse, behind him a girl, hardly more than a child--under the starry sky exchanging confidences--talking of their futures. "So, you see, you are free," said Palmer. "I went round to an American lawyer's office this afternoon, and borrowed an old legal form book. And I've copied out this form----" She was hardly conscious of his laying papers on the table before her. "It's valid, as I've fixed things. The lawyer gave me some paper. It has a watermark five years old. I've dated back two years--quite enough. So when we've signed, the marriage never could be contested--not even by ourselves." He took the papers from the table, laid them in her lap. She started. "What were you saying?" she asked. "What's this?" "What were you thinking about?" said he. "I wasn't thinking," she answered, with her slow sweet smile of self-concealment. "I was feeling--living--the past. I was watching the procession." He nodded understandingly. "That's a kind of time-wasting that can easily be overdone." "Easily," she agreed. "Still, there's the lesson. I have to remind myself of it often--always, when there's anything that has to be decided." "I've written out two of the forms," said he. "We sign both. You keep one, I the other. Why not sign now?" She read the form--the agreement to take each other as lawful husband and wife and to regard the contract as in all respects binding and legal. "Do you understand it?" laughed he nervously, for her manner was disquieting. "Perfectly." "You stared at the paper as if it were a puzzle." "It is," said she. "Come into the library and we'll sign and have it over with." She laid the papers on the dressing table, took up her brush, drew it slowly over her hair several times. "Wake up," cried he, good humoredly. "Come on into the library." And he went to the threshold. She continued brushing her hair. "I can't sign," said she. There was the complete absence of emotion that caused her to be misunderstood always by those who did not know her peculiarities. No one could have suspected the vision of the old women of the dive before her eyes, the sound of the hunchback's piano in her ears, the smell of foul liquors and foul bodies and foul breaths in her nostrils. Yet she repeated: "No--I can't sign." He returned to his chair, seated himself, a slight cloud on his brow, a wicked smile on his lips. "Now what the devil!" said he gently, a jeer in his quiet voice. "What's all this about?" "I can't marry you," said she. "I wish to live on as we are." "But if we do that we can't get up where we want to go." "I don't wish to know anyone but interesting men of the sort that does things--and women of my own sort. Those people have no interest in conventionalities." "That's not the crowd we set out to conquer," said he. "You seem to have forgotten." "It's you who have forgotten," replied she. "Yes--yes--I know," he hastened to say. "I wasn't accusing you of breaking your agreement. You've lived up to it--and more. But, Susan, the people you care about don't especially interest me. Brent--yes. He's a man of the world as well as one of the artistic chaps. But the others--they're beyond me. I admit it's all fine, and I'm glad you go in for it. But the only crowd that's congenial to me is the crowd that we've got to be married to get in with." She saw his point--saw it more clearly than did he. To him the world of fashion and luxurious amusement seemed the only world worth while. He accepted the scheme of things as he found it, had the conventional ambitions--to make in succession the familiar goals of the conventional human success--power, wealth, social position. It was impossible for him to get any other idea of a successful life, of ambitions worthy a man's labor. It was evidence of the excellence of his mind that he was able to tolerate the idea of the possibility of there being another mode of success worth while. "I'm helping you in your ambitions--in doing what you think is worth while," said he. "Don't you think you owe it to me to help me in mine?" He saw the slight change of expression that told him how deeply he had touched her. "If I don't go in for the high society game," he went on, "I'll have nothing to do. I'll be adrift--gambling, drinking, yawning about and going to pieces. A man's got to have something to work for--and he can't work unless it seems to him worth doing." She was staring into the mirror, her elbows on the table, her chin upon her interlaced fingers. It would be difficult to say how much of his gentleness to her was due to her physical charm for him, and how much to his respect for her mind and her character. He himself would have said that his weakness was altogether the result of the spell her physical charm cast over him. But it is probable that the other element was the stronger. "You'll not be selfish, Susan?" urged he. "You'll give me a square deal." "Yes--I see that it does look selfish," said she. "A little while ago I'd not have been able to see any deeper than the looks of it. Freddie, there are some things no one has a right to ask of another, and no one has a right to grant." The ugliness of his character was becoming less easy to control. This girl whom he had picked up, practically out of the gutter, and had heaped generosities upon, was trying his patience too far. But he said, rather amiably: "Certainly I'm not asking any such thing of you in asking you to become a respectable married woman, the wife of a rich man." "Yes--you are, Freddie," replied she gently. "If I married you, I'd be signing an agreement to lead your life, to give up my own--an agreement to become a sort of woman I've no desire to be and no interest in being; to give up trying to become the only sort of woman I think is worth while. When we were discussing my coming with you, you made this same proposal in another form. I refused it then. And I refuse it now. It's harder to refuse now, but I'm stronger." "Stronger, thanks to the money you've got from me--the money and the rest of it," sneered he. "Haven't I earned all I've got?" said she, so calmly that he did not realize how the charge of ingratitude, unjust though it was, had struck into her. "You have changed!" said he. "You're getting as hard as the rest of us. So it's all a matter of money, of give and take--is it? None of the generosity and sentiment you used to be full of? You've simply been using me." "It can be put that way," replied she. "And no doubt you honestly see it that way. But I've got to see my own interest and my own right, Freddie. I've learned at last that I mustn't trust to anyone else to look after them for me." "Are you riding for a fall--Queenie?" At "Queenie" she smiled faintly. "I'm riding the way I always have," answered she. "It has carried me down. But--it has brought me up again." She looked at him with eyes that appealed, without yielding. "And I'll ride that way to the end--up or down," said she. "I can't help it." "Then you want to break with me?" he asked--and he began to look dangerous. "No," replied she. "I want to go on as we are. . . . I'll not be interfering in your social ambitions, in any way. Over here it'll help you to have a mistress who--" she saw her image in the glass, threw him an arch glance--"who isn't altogether unattractive won't it? And if you found you could go higher by marrying some woman of the grand world--why, you'd be free to do it." He had a way of looking at her that gave her--and himself--the sense of a delirious embrace. He looked at her so, now. He said: "You take advantage of my being crazy about you--_damn_ you!" "Heaven knows," laughed she, "I need every advantage I can find." He touched her--the lightest kind of touch. It carried the sense of embrace in his look still more giddily upward. "Queenie!" he said softly. She smiled at him through half closed eyes that with a gentle and shy frankness confessed the secret of his attraction for her. There was, however, more of strength than of passion in her face as a whole. Said she: "We're getting on well--as we are aren't we? I can meet the most amusing and interesting people--my sort of people. You can go with the people and to the places you like and you'll not be bound. If you should take a notion to marry some woman with a big position--you'd not have to regret being tied to--Queenie." "But--I want you--I want you," said he. "I've got to have you." "As long as you like," said she. "But on terms I can accept--always on terms I can accept. Never on any others--never! I can't help it. I can yield everything but that." Where she was concerned he was the primitive man only. The higher his passion rose, the stronger became his desire for absolute possession. When she spoke of terms--of the limitations upon his possession of her--she transformed his passion into fury. He eyed her wickedly, abruptly demanded: "When did you decide to make this kick-up?" "I don't know. Simply--when you asked me to sign, I found I couldn't." "You don't expect _me_ to believe that." "It's the truth." She resumed brushing her hair. "Look at me!" She turned her face toward him, met his gaze. "Have you fallen in love with that young Jew?" "Gourdain? No." "Have you a crazy notion that your looks'll get you a better husband? A big fortune or a title?" "I haven't thought about a husband. Haven't I told you I wish to be free?" "But that doesn't mean anything." "It might," said she absently. "How?" "I don't know. If one is always free--one is ready for--whatever comes. Anyhow, I must be free--no matter what it costs." "I see you're bent on dropping back into the dirt I picked you out of." "Even that," she said. "I must be free." "Haven't you any desire to be respectable--decent?" "I guess not," confessed she. "What is there in that direction for me?" "A woman doesn't stay young and good-looking long." "No." She smiled faintly. "But does she get old and ugly any slower for being married?" He rose and stood over her, looked smiling danger down at her. She leaned back in her chair to meet his eyes without constraint. "You're trying to play me a trick," said he. "But you're not going to get away with the goods. I'm astonished that you are so rotten ungrateful." "Because I'm not for sale?" "Queenie balking at selling herself," he jeered. "And what's the least you ever did sell for?" "A half-dollar, I think. No--two drinks of whiskey one cold night. But what I sold was no more myself than--than the coat I'd pawned and drunk up before I did it." The plain calm way in which she said this made it so terrible that he winced and turned away. "We have seen hell--haven't we?" he muttered. He turned toward her with genuine passion of feeling. "Susan," he cried, "don't be a fool. Let's push our luck, now that things are coming our way. We need each other--we want to stay together--don't we?" "_I_ want to stay. I'm happy." "Then--let's put the record straight." "Let's keep it straight," replied she earnestly. "Don't ask me to go where I don't belong. For I can't, Freddie--honestly, I can't." A pause. Then, "You will!" said he, not in blustering fury, but in that cool and smiling malevolence which had made him the terror of his associates from his boyhood days among the petty thieves and pickpockets of Grand Street. He laid his hand gently on her shoulder. "You hear me. I say you will." She looked straight at him. "Not if you kill me," she said. She rose to face him at his own height. "I've bought my freedom with my body and with my heart and with my soul. It's all I've got. I shall keep it." He measured her strength with an expert eye. He knew that he was beaten. He laughed lightly and went into his dressing-room. CHAPTER XXII THEY met the next morning with no sign in the manner of either that there had been a drawn battle, that there was an armed truce. She knew that he, like herself, was thinking of nothing else. But until he had devised some way of certainly conquering her he would wait, and watch, and pretend that he was satisfied with matters as they were. The longer she reflected the less uneasy she became--as to immediate danger. In Paris the methods of violence he might have been tempted to try in New York were out of the question. What remained? He must realize that threats to expose her would be futile; also, he must feel vulnerable, himself, to that kind of attack--a feeling that would act as a restraint, even though he might appreciate that she was the sort of person who could not in any circumstances resort to it. He had not upon her a single one of the holds a husband has upon a wife. True, he could break with her. But she must appreciate how easy it would now be for her in this capital of the idle rich to find some other man glad to "protect" a woman so expert at gratifying man's vanity of being known as the proprietor of a beautiful and fashionable woman. She had discovered how, in the aristocracy of European wealth, an admired mistress was as much a necessary part of the grandeur of great nobles, great financiers, great manufacturers, or merchants, as wife, as heir, as palace, as equipage, as chef, as train of secretaries and courtiers. She knew how deeply it would cut, to find himself without his show piece that made him the envied of men and the desired of women. Also, she knew that she had an even stronger hold upon him--that she appealed to him as no other woman ever had, that she had become for him a tenacious habit. She was not afraid that he would break with her. But she could not feel secure; in former days she had seen too far into the mazes of that Italian mind of his, she knew too well how patient, how relentless, how unforgetting he was. She would have taken murder into account as more than a possibility but for his intense and intelligent selfishness; he would not risk his life or his liberty; he would not deprive himself of his keenest pleasure. He was resourceful; but in the circumstances what resources were there for him to draw upon? When he began to press upon her more money than ever, and to buy her costly jewelry, she felt still further reassured. Evidently he had been unable to think out any practicable scheme; evidently he was, for the time, taking the course of appeal to her generous instincts, of making her more and more dependent upon his liberality. Well--was he not right? Love might fail; passion might wane; conscience, aiding self-interest with its usual servility, might overcome the instincts of gratitude. But what power could overcome the loyalty resting upon money interest? No power but that of a longer purse than his. As she was not in the mood to make pretenses about herself to herself, she smiled at this cynical self-measuring. "But I shan't despise myself for being so material," said she to herself, "until I find a _genuine_ case of a woman, respectable or otherwise, who has known poverty and escaped from it, and has then voluntarily given up wealth to go back to it. I should not stay on with him if he were distasteful to me. And that's more than most women can honestly say. Perhaps even I should not stay on if it were not for a silly, weak feeling of obligation--but I can't be sure of that." She had seen too much of men and women preening upon noble disinterested motives when in fact their real motives were the most calculatingly selfish; she preferred doing herself less than justice rather than more. She had fifty-five thousand francs on deposit at Munroe's--all her very own. She had almost two hundred thousand francs' worth of jewels, which she would be justified in keeping--at least, she hoped she would think so--should there come a break with Freddie. Yet in spite of this substantial prosperity--or was it because of this prosperity?--she abruptly began again to be haunted by the old visions, by warnings of the dangers that beset any human being who has not that paying trade or profession which makes him or her independent--gives him or her the only unassailable independence. The end with Freddie might be far away. But end, she saw, there would be the day when he would somehow get her in his power and so would drive her to leave him. For she could not again become a slave. Extreme youth, utter inexperience, no knowledge of real freedom--these had enabled her to endure in former days. But she was wholly different now. She could not sink back. Steadily she was growing less and less able to take orders from anyone. This full-grown passion for freedom, this intolerance of the least restraint--how dangerous, if she should find herself in a position where she would have to put up with the caprices of some man or drop down and down! What real, secure support had she? None. Her building was without solid foundations. Her struggle with Freddie was a revelation and a warning. There were days when, driving about in her luxurious car, she could do nothing but search among the crowds in the streets for the lonely old women in rags, picking and peering along the refuse of the cafés--weazened, warped figures swathed in rags, creeping along, mumbling to themselves, lips folded in and in over toothless gums. One day Brent saw again the look she often could not keep from her face when that vision of the dance hall in the slums was horrifying her. He said impulsively: "What is it? Tell me--what is it, Susan?" It was the first and the last time he ever called her by her only personal name. He flushed deeply. To cover his confusion--and her own--she said in her most frivolous way: "I was thinking that if I am ever rich I shall have more pairs of shoes and stockings and take care of more orphans than anyone else in the world." "A purpose! At last a purpose!" laughed he. "Now you will go to work." Through Gourdain she got a French teacher--and her first woman friend. The young widow he recommended, a Madame Clélie Délière, was the most attractive woman she had ever known. She had all the best French characteristics--a good heart, a lively mind, was imaginative yet sensible, had good taste in all things. Like most of the attractive French women, she was not beautiful, but had that which is of far greater importance--charm. She knew not a word of English, and it was perhaps Susan's chief incentive toward working hard at French that she could not really be friends with this fascinating person until she learned to speak her language. Palmer--partly by nature, partly through early experience in the polyglot tenement district of New York--had more aptitude for language than had Susan. But he had been lazy about acquiring French in a city where English is spoken almost universally. With the coming of young Madame Délière to live in the apartment, he became interested. It was not a month after her coming when you might have seen at one of the fashionable gay restaurants any evening a party of four--Gourdain was the fourth--talking French almost volubly. Palmer's accent was better than Susan's. She could not--and felt she never could--get the accent of the trans-Alleghany region out of her voice--and so long as that remained she would not speak good French. "But don't let that trouble you," said Clélie. "Your voice is your greatest charm. It is so honest and so human. Of the Americans I have met, I have liked only those with that same tone in their voices." "But _I_ haven't that accent," said Freddie with raillery. Madame Clélie laughed. "No--and I do not like you," retorted she. "No one ever did. You do not wish to be liked. You wish to be feared." Her lively brown eyes sparkled and the big white teeth in her generous mouth glistened. "You wish to be feared--and you _are_ feared, Monsieur Freddie." "It takes a clever woman to know how to flatter with the truth," said he. "Everybody always has been afraid of me--and is--except, of course, my wife." He was always talking of "my wife" now. The subject so completely possessed his mind that he aired it unconsciously. When she was not around he boasted of "my wife's" skill in the art of dress, of "my wife's" taste, of "my wife's" shrewdness in getting her money's worth. When she was there, he was using the favorite phrase "my wife" this--"my wife" that--"my wife" the other--until it so got on her nerves that she began to wait for it and to wince whenever it came--never a wait of many minutes. At first she thought he was doing this deliberately either to annoy her or in pursuance of some secret deep design. But she soon saw that he was not aware of his inability to keep off the subject or of his obsession for that phrase representing the thing he was intensely wishing and willing--"chiefly," she thought, "because it is something he cannot have." She was amazed at his display of such a weakness. It gave her the chance to learn an important truth about human nature--that self-indulgence soon destroys the strongest nature--and she was witness to how rapidly an inflexible will disintegrates if incessantly applied to an impossibility. When a strong arrogant man, unbalanced by long and successful self-indulgence, hurls himself at an obstruction, either the obstruction yields or the man is destroyed. One morning early in February, as she was descending from her auto in front of the apartment house, she saw Brent in the doorway. Never had he looked so young or so well. His color was fine, his face had become almost boyish; upon his skin and in his eyes was that gloss of perfect health which until these latter days of scientific hygiene was rarely seen after twenty-five in a woman or after thirty in a man. She gathered in all, to the smallest detail--such as the color of his shirt--with a single quick glance. She knew that he had seen her before she saw him--that he had been observing her. Her happiest friendliest smile made her small face bewitching as she advanced with outstretched hand. "When did you come?" she asked. "About an hour ago." "From the Riviera?" "No, indeed. From St. Moritz--and skating and skiing and tobogganing. I rather hoped I looked it. Doing those things in that air--it's being born again." "I felt well till I saw you," said she. "Now I feel dingy and half sick." He laughed, his glance sweeping her from hat to boots. Certainly his eyes could not have found a more entrancing sight. She was wearing a beautiful dress of golden brown cloth, sable hat, short coat and muff, brown suede boots laced high upon her long slender calves. And when she had descended from the perfect little limousine made to order for her, he had seen a ravishing flutter of lingerie of pale violet silk. The sharp air had brought no color to her cheeks to interfere with the abrupt and fascinating contrast of their pallor with the long crimson bow of her mouth. But her skin seemed transparent and had the clearness of health itself. Everything about her, every least detail, was of Parisian perfection. "Probably there are not in the world," said he, "so many as a dozen women so well put together as you are. No, not half a dozen. Few women carry the art of dress to the point of genius." "I see they had only frumps at St. Moritz this season," laughed she. But he would not be turned aside. "Most of the well dressed women stop short with being simply frivolous in spending so much time at less than perfection--like the army of poets who write pretty good verse, or the swarm of singers who sing pretty well. I've heard of you many times this winter. You are the talk of Paris." She laughed with frank delight. It was indeed a pleasure to discover that her pains had not been in vain. "It is always the outsider who comes to the great city to show it its own resources," he went on. "I knew you were going to do this. Still happy?" "Oh, yes." But he had taken her by surprise. A faint shadow flitted across her face. "Not so happy, I see." "You see too much. Won't you lunch with us? We'll have it in about half an hour." He accepted promptly and they went up together. His glance traveled round the drawing-room; and she knew he had noted all the changes she had made on better acquaintance with her surroundings and wider knowledge of interior furnishing. She saw that he approved, and it increased her good humor. "Are you hurrying through Paris on your way to somewhere else?" she asked. "No, I stop here--I think--until I sail for America." "And that will be soon?" "Perhaps not until July. I have no plans. I've finished a play a woman suggested to me some time ago. And I'm waiting." A gleam of understanding came into her eyes. There was controlled interest in her voice as she inquired: "When is it to be produced?" "When the woman who suggested it is ready to act in it." "Do I by any chance know her?" "You used to know her. You will know her again." She shook her head slowly, a pensive smile hovering about her eyes and lips. "No--not again. I have changed." "We do not change," said he. "We move, but we do not change. You are the same character you were when you came into the world. And what you were then, that you will be when the curtain falls on the climax of your last act. Your circumstances will change--and your clothes--and your face, hair, figure--but not _you_." "Do you believe that?" "I _know_ it." She nodded slowly, the violet-gray eyes pensive. "Birds in the strong wind--that's what we are. Driven this way or that--or quite beaten down. But the wind doesn't change sparrow to eagle--or eagle to gull--does it?" She had removed her coat and was seated on an oval lounge gazing into the open fire. He was standing before it, looking taller and stronger than ever, in a gray lounging suit. A cigarette depended loosely from the corner of his mouth. He said abruptly: "How are you getting on with your acting?" She glanced in surprise. "Gourdain," Brent explained. "He had to talk to somebody about how wonderful you are. So he took to writing me--two huge letters a week--all about you." "I'm fond of him. And he's fond of Clélie. She's my----" "I know all," he interrupted. "The tie between them is their fondness for you. Tell me about the acting." "Oh--Clélie and I have been going to the theater every few days--to help me with French. She is mad about acting, and there's nothing I like better." "Also, _you_ simply have to have occupation." She nodded. "I wasn't brought up to fit me for an idler. When I was a child I was taught to keep busy--not at nothing, but at something. Freddie's a lot better at it than I." "Naturally," said Brent. "You had a home, with order and a system--an old-fashioned American home. He--well, he hadn't." "Clélie and I go at our make-believe acting quite seriously. We have to--if we're to fool ourselves that it's an occupation." "Why this anxiety to prove to me that you're not really serious?" Susan laughed mockingly for answer, and went on: "You should see us do the two wives in 'L'Enigme'--or mother and daughter in that diary scene in 'L'Autre Danger'!" "I must. . . . When are you going to resume your career?" She rose, strolled toward an open door at one end of the salon, closed it--strolled toward the door into the hall, glanced out, returned without having closed it. She then said: "Could I study here in Paris?" Triumph gleamed in his eyes. "Yes. Boudrin--a splendid teacher--speaks English. He--and I--can teach you." "Tell me what I'd have to do." "We would coach you for a small part in some play that's to be produced here." "In French?" "I'll have an American girl written into a farce. Enough to get you used to the stage--to give you practice in what he'll teach you--the trade side of the art." "And then?" "And then we shall spend the summer learning your part in my play. Two or three weeks of company rehearsals in New York in September. In October--your name out over the Long Acre Theater in letters of fire." "Could that be done?" "Even if you had little talent, less intelligence, and no experience. Properly taught, the trade part of every art is easy. Teachers make it hard partly because they're dull, chiefly because there'd be small money for them if they taught quickly, and only the essentials. No, journeyman acting's no harder to learn than bricklaying or carpentering. And in America--everywhere in the world but a few theaters in Paris and Vienna--there is nothing seen but journeyman acting. The art is in its infancy as an art. It even has not yet been emancipated from the swaddling clothes of declamation. Yes, you can do well by the autumn. And if you develop what I think you have in you, you can leap with one bound into fame. In America or England, mind you--because there the acting is all poor to 'pretty good'." "You are sure it could be done? No--I don't mean that. I mean, is there really a chance--any chance--for me to make my own living? A real living?" "I guarantee," said Brent. She changed from seriousness to a mocking kind of gayety--that is, to a seriousness so profound that she would not show it. And she said: "You see I simply must banish my old women--and that hunchback and his piano. They get on my nerves." He smiled humorously at her. But behind the smile his gaze--grave, sympathetic--pierced into her soul, seeking the meaning he knew she would never put into words. At the sound of voices in the hall she said: "We'll talk of this again." At lunch that day she, for the first time in many a week, listened without irritation while Freddie poured forth his unending praise of "my wife." As Brent knew them intimately, Freddie felt free to expatiate upon all the details of domestic economy that chanced to be his theme, with the exquisite lunch as a text. He told Brent how Susan had made a study of that branch of the art of living; how she had explored the unrivaled Parisian markets and groceries and shops that dealt in specialties; how she had developed their breakfasts, dinners, and lunches to works of art. It is impossible for anyone, however stupid, to stop long in Paris without beginning to idealize the material side of life--for the French, who build solidly, first idealize food, clothing, and shelter, before going on to take up the higher side of life--as a sane man builds his foundation before his first story, and so on, putting the observation tower on last of all, instead of making an ass of himself trying to hang his tower to the stars. Our idealization goes forward haltingly and hypocritically because we try to build from the stars down, instead of from the ground up. The place to seek the ideal is in the homely, the commonplace, and the necessary. An ideal that does not spring deep-rooted from the soil of practical life may be a topic for a sermon or a novel or for idle conversation among silly and pretentious people. But what use has it in a world that must _live_, and must be taught to live? Freddie was unaware that he was describing a further development of Susan--a course she was taking in the university of experience--she who had passed through its common school, its high school, its college. To him her clever housekeeping offered simply another instance of her cleverness in general. His discourse was in bad taste. But its bad taste was tolerable because he was interesting--food, like sex, being one of those universal subjects that command and hold the attention of all mankind. He rose to no mean height of eloquence in describing their dinner of the evening before--the game soup that brought to him visions of a hunting excursion he had once made into the wilds of Canada; the way the _barbue_ was cooked and served; the incredible duck--and the salad! Clélie interrupted to describe that salad as like a breath of summer air from fields and limpid brooks. He declared that the cheese--which Susan had found in a shop in the Marche St. Honoré--was more wonderful than the most wonderful _petit Suisse_. "And the coffee!" he exclaimed. "But you'll see in a few minutes. We have _coffee_ here." "_Quelle histoire!_" exclaimed Brent, when Freddie had concluded. And he looked at Susan with the ironic, quizzical gleam in his eyes. She colored. "I am learning to live," said she. "That's what we're on earth for--isn't it?" "To learn to live--and then, to live," replied he. She laughed. "Ah, that comes a little later." "Not much later," rejoined he, "or there's no time left for it." It was Freddie who, after lunch, urged Susan and Clélie to "show Brent what you can do at acting." "Yes--by all means," said Brent with enthusiasm. And they gave--in one end of the salon which was well suited for it--the scene between mother and daughter over the stolen diary, in "L'Autre Danger." Brent said little when they finished, so little that Palmer was visibly annoyed. But Susan, who was acquainted with his modes of expression, felt a deep glow of satisfaction. She had no delusions about her attempts; she understood perfectly that they were simply crude attempts. She knew she had done well--for her--and she knew he appreciated her improvement. "That would have gone fine--with costumes and scenery--eh?" demanded Freddie of Brent. "Yes," said Brent absently. "Yes--that is--Yes." Freddie was dissatisfied with this lack of enthusiasm. He went on insistently: "I think she ought to go on the stage--she and Madame Clélie, too." "Yes," said Brent, between inquiry and reflection. "What do _you_ think?" "I don't think she ought," replied Brent. "I think she _must_." He turned to Susan. "Would you like it?" Susan hesitated. Freddie said--rather lamely, "Of course she would. For my part, I wish she would." "Then I will," said Susan quietly. Palmer looked astounded. He had not dreamed she would assent. He knew her tones--knew that the particular tone meant finality. "You're joking," cried he, with an uneasy laugh. "Why, you wouldn't stand the work for a week. It's hard work--isn't it, Brent?" "About the hardest," said Brent. "And she's got practically everything still to learn." "Shall we try, Clélie?" said Susan. Young Madame Délière was pale with eagerness. "Ah--but that would be worth while!" cried she. "Then it's settled," said Susan. To Brent: "We'll make the arrangements at once--today." Freddie was looking at her with a dazed expression. His glance presently drifted from her face to the fire, to rest there thoughtfully as he smoked his cigar. He took no part in the conversation that followed. Presently he left the room without excusing himself. When Clélie seated herself at the piano to wander vaguely from one piece of music to another, Brent joined Susan at the fire and said in English: "Palmer is furious." "I saw," said she. "I am afraid. For--I know him." She looked calmly at him. "But I am not." "Then you do not know him." The strangest smile flitted across her face. After a pause Brent said: "Are you married to him?" Again the calm steady look. Then: "That is none of your business." "I thought you were not," said Brent, as if she had answered his question with a clear negative. He added, "You know I'd not have asked if it had been 'none of my business.'" "What do you mean?" "If you had been his wife, I could not have gone on. I've all the reverence for a home of the man who has never had one. I'd not take part in a home-breaking. But--since you are free----" "I shall never be anything else but free. It's because I wish to make sure of my freedom that I'm going into this." Palmer appeared in the doorway. That night the four and Gourdain dined together, went to the theater and afterward to supper at the Cafe de Paris. Gourdain and young Madame Délière formed an interesting, unusually attractive exhibit of the parasitism that is as inevitable to the rich as fleas to a dog. Gourdain was a superior man, Clélie a superior woman. There was nothing of the sycophant, or even of the courtier, about either. Yet they already had in their faces that subtle indication of the dependent that is found in all professional people who habitually work for and associate with the rich only. They had no sense of dependence; they were not dependents, for they gave more than value received. Yet so corrupting is the atmosphere about rich people that Gourdain, who had other rich clients, no less than Clélie who got her whole living from Palmer, was at a glance in the flea class and not in the dog class. Brent looked for signs of the same thing in Susan's face. The signs should have been there; but they were not. "Not yet," thought he. "And never will be now." Palmer's abstraction and constraint were in sharp contrast to the gayety of the others. Susan drank almost nothing. Her spirits were soaring so high that she did not dare stimulate them with champagne. The Cafe de Paris is one of the places where the respectable go to watch _les autres_ and to catch a real gayety by contagion of a gayety that is mechanical and altogether as unreal as play-acting. There is something fantastic about the official temples of Venus; the pleasure-makers are so serious under their masks and the pleasure-getters so quaintly dazzled and deluded. That is, Venus's temples are like those of so many other religions in reverence among men--disbelief and solemn humbuggery at the altar; belief that would rather die than be undeceived, in the pews. Palmer scarcely took his eyes from Susan's face. It amused and pleased her to see how uneasy this made Brent--and how her own laughter and jests aggravated his uneasiness to the point where he was almost showing it. She glanced round that brilliant room filled with men and women, each of them carrying underneath the placidity of stiff evening shirt or the scantiness of audacious evening gown the most fascinating emotions and secrets--love and hate and jealousy, cold and monstrous habits and desires, ruin impending or stealthily advancing, fortune giddying to a gorgeous climax, disease and shame and fear--yet only signs of love and laughter and lightness of heart visible. And she wondered whether at any other table there was gathered so curious an assemblage of pasts and presents and futures as at the one over which Freddie Palmer was presiding somberly. . . . Then her thoughts took another turn. She fell to noting how each man was accompanied by a woman--a gorgeously dressed woman, a woman revealing, proclaiming, in every line, in every movement, that she was thus elaborately and beautifully toiletted to please man, to appeal to his senses, to gain his gracious approval. It was the world in miniature; it was an illustration of the position of woman--of her own position. Favorite; pet. Not the equal of man, but an appetizer, a dessert. She glanced at herself in the glass, mocked her own radiant beauty of face and form and dress. Not really a full human being; merely a decoration. No more; and no worse off than most of the women everywhere, the favorites licensed or unlicensed of law and religion. But just as badly off, and just as insecure. Free! No rest, no full breath until freedom had been won! At any cost, by straight way or devious--free! "Let's go home," said she abruptly. "I've had enough of this." She was in a dressing gown, all ready for bed and reading, when Palmer came into her sitting-room. She was smoking, her gaze upon her book. Her thick dark hair was braided close to her small head. There was delicate lace on her nightgown, showing above the wadded satin collar of the dressing gown. He dropped heavily into a chair. "If anyone had told me a year ago that a skirt could make a damn fool of me," said he bitterly, "I'd have laughed in his face. Yet--here I am! How nicely I did drop into your trap today--about the acting!" "Trap?" "Oh, I admit I built and baited and set it, myself--ass that I was! But it was your trap--yours and Brent's, all the same. . . . A skirt--and not a clean one, at that." She lowered the book to her lap, took the cigarette from between her lips, looked at him. "Why not be reasonable, Freddie?" said she calmly. Language had long since lost its power to impress her. "Why irritate yourself and annoy me simply because I won't let you tyrannize over me? You know you can't treat me as if I were your property. I'm not your wife, and I don't have to be your mistress." "Getting ready to break with me eh?" "If I wished to go, I'd tell you--and go." "You'd give me the shake, would you?--without the slightest regard for all I've done for you!" She refused to argue that again. "I hope I've outgrown doing weak gentle things through cowardice and pretending it's through goodness of heart." "You've gotten hard--like stone." "Like you--somewhat." And after a moment she added, "Anything that's strong is hard--isn't it? Can a man or a woman get anywhere without being able to be what you call 'hard' and what I call 'strong'?" "Where do _you_ want to get?" demanded he. She disregarded his question, to finish saying what was in her mind--what she was saying rather to give herself a clear look at her own thoughts and purposes than to enlighten him about them. "I'm not a sheltered woman," pursued she. "I've got no one to save me from the consequences of doing nice, sweet, womanly things." "You've got me," said he angrily. "But why lean if I'm strong enough to stand alone? Why weaken myself just to gratify your mania for owning and bossing? But let me finish what I was saying. I never got any quarter because I was a woman. No woman does, as a matter of fact; and in the end, the more she uses her sex to help her shirk, the worse her punishment is. But in my case---- "I was brought up to play the weak female, to use my sex as my shield. And that was taken from me and--I needn't tell _you_ how I was taught to give and take like a man--no, not like a man--for no man ever has to endure what a woman goes through if she is thrown on the world. Still, I'm not whining. Now that it's all over I'm the better for what I've been through. I've learned to use all a man's weapons and in addition I've got a woman's." "As long as your looks last," sneered he. "That will be longer than yours," said she pleasantly, "if you keep on with the automobiles and the champagne. And when my looks are gone, my woman's weapons. . . "Why, I'll still have the man's weapons left--shan't I?--knowledge, and the ability to use it." His expression of impotent fury mingled with compelled admiration and respect made his face about as unpleasant to look at as she had ever seen it. But she liked to look. His confession of her strength made her feel stronger. The sense of strength was a new sensation with her--new and delicious. Nor could the feeling that she was being somewhat cruel restrain her from enjoying it. "I have never asked quarter," she went on. "I never shall. If fate gets me down, as it has many a time, why I'll he able to take my medicine without weeping or whining. I've never asked pity. I've never asked charity. That's why I'm here, Freddie--in this apartment, instead of in a filthy tenement attic--and in these clothes instead of in rags--and with you respecting me, instead of kicking me toward the gutter. Isn't that so?" He was silent. "Isn't it so?" she insisted. "Yes," he admitted. And his handsome eyes looked the love so near to hate that fills a strong man for a strong woman when they clash and he cannot conquer. "No wonder I'm a fool about you," he muttered. "I don't purpose that any man or woman shall use me," she went on, "in exchange for merely a few flatteries. I insist that if they use me, they must let me use them. I shan't be mean about it, but I shan't be altogether a fool, either. And what is a woman but a fool when she lets men use her for nothing but being called sweet and loving and womanly? Unless that's the best she can do, poor thing!" "You needn't sneer at respectable women." "I don't," replied she. "I've no sneers for anybody. I've discovered a great truth, Freddie the deep-down equality of all human beings--all of them birds in the same wind and battling with it each as best he can. As for myself--with money, with a career that interests me, with position that'll give me any acquaintances and friends that are congenial, I don't care what is said of me." As her plan unfolded itself fully to his understanding, which needed only a hint to enable it to grasp all, he forgot his rage for a moment in his interest and admiration. Said he: "You've used me. Now you're going to use Brent--eh? Well--what will you give _him_ in exchange?" "He wants someone to act certain parts in certain plays." "Is that _all_ he wants?" "He hasn't asked anything else." "And if he did?" "Don't be absurd. You know Brent." "He's not in love with you," assented Palmer. "He doesn't want you that way. There's some woman somewhere, I've heard--and he doesn't care about anybody but her." He was speaking in a careless, casual way, watching her out of the corner of his eye. And she, taken off guard, betrayed in her features the secret that was a secret even from herself. He sprang up with a bound, sprang at her, caught her up out of her chair, the fingers of one hand clasping her throat. "I thought so!" he hissed. "You love him--damn you! You love him! You'd better look out, both of you!" There came a knock at the door between her bedroom and that of Madame Clélie. Palmer released her, stood panting, with furious eyes on the door from which the sound had come. Susan called, "It's all right, Clélie, for the present." Then she said to Palmer, "I told Clélie to knock if she ever heard voices in this room--or any sound she didn't understand." She reseated herself, began to massage her throat where his fingers had clutched it. "It's fortunate my skin doesn't mar easily," she went on. "What were you saying?" "I know the truth now. You love Brent. That's the milk in the cocoanut." She reflected on this, apparently with perfect tranquillity, apparently with no memory of his furious threat against her and against Brent. She said: "Perhaps I was simply piqued because there's another woman." "You are jealous." "I guess I was--a little." "You admit that you love him, you----" He checked himself on the first hissing breath of the foul epithet. She said tranquilly: "Jealousy doesn't mean love. We're jealous in all sorts of ways--and of all sorts of things." "Well--_he_ cares nothing about _you_." "Nothing." "And never will. He'd despise a woman who had been----" "Don't hesitate. Say it. I'm used to hearing it, Freddie--and to being it. And not 'had been' but 'is.' I still am, you know." "You're not!" he cried. "And never were--and never could be--for some unknown reason, God knows why." She shrugged her shoulders, lit another cigarette. He went on: "You can't get it out of your head that because he's interested in you he's more or less stuck on you. That's the way with women. The truth is, he wants you merely to act in his plays." "And I want that, too." "You think I'm going to stand quietly by and let this thing go on--do you?" She showed not the faintest sign of nervousness at this repetition, more carefully veiled, of his threat against her--and against Brent. She chose the only hopeful course; she went at him boldly and directly. Said she with amused carelessness: "Why not? He doesn't want me. Even if I love him, I'm not giving him anything you want." "How do you know what I want?" cried he, confused by this unexpected way of meeting his attack. "You think I'm simply a brute--with no fine instincts or feelings----" She interrupted him with a laugh. "Don't be absurd, Freddie," said she. "You know perfectly well you and I don't call out the finer feelings in each other. If either of us wanted that sort of thing, we'd have to look elsewhere." "You mean Brent--eh?" She laughed with convincing derision. "What nonsense!" She put her arms round his neck, and her lips close to his. The violet-gray eyes were half closed, the perfume of the smooth amber-white skin, of the thick, wavy, dark hair, was in his nostrils. And in a languorous murmur she soothed his subjection to a deep sleep with, "As long as you give me what I want from you, and I give you what you want from me why should we wrangle?" And with a smile he acquiesced. She felt that she had ended the frightful danger--to Brent rather than to herself--that suddenly threatened from those wicked eyes of Palmer's. But it might easily come again. She did not dare relax her efforts, for in the succeeding days she saw that he was like one annoyed by a constant pricking from a pin hidden in the clothing and searched for in vain. He was no longer jealous of Brent. But while he didn't know what was troubling him, he did know that he was uncomfortable. CHAPTER XXIII IN but one important respect was Brent's original plan modified. Instead of getting her stage experience in France, Susan joined a London company making one of those dreary, weary, cheap and trashy tours of the smaller cities of the provinces with half a dozen plays by Jones, Pinero, and Shaw. Clélie stayed in London, toiling at the language, determined to be ready to take the small part of French maid in Brent's play in the fall. Brent and Palmer accompanied Susan; and every day for several hours Brent and the stage manager--his real name was Thomas Boil and his professional name was Herbert Streathern--coached the patient but most unhappy Susan line by line, word by word, gesture by gesture, in the little parts she was playing. Palmer traveled with them, making a pretense of interest that ill concealed his boredom and irritation. This for three weeks; then he began to make trips to London to amuse himself with the sports, amateur and professional, with whom he easily made friends--some of them men in a position to be useful to him socially later on. He had not spoken of those social ambitions of his since Susan refused to go that way with him--but she knew he had them in mind as strongly as ever. He was the sort of man who must have an objective, and what other objective could there be for him who cared for and believed in the conventional ambitions and triumphs only--the successes that made the respectable world gape and grovel and envy? "You'll not stick at this long," he said to Susan. "I'm frightfully depressed," she admitted. "It's tiresome--and hard--and so hideously uncomfortable! And I've lost all sense of art or profession. Acting seems to be nothing but a trade, and a poor, cheap one at that." He was not surprised, but was much encouraged by this candid account of her state of mind. Said he: "It's my private opinion that only your obstinacy keeps you from giving it up straight off. Surely you must see it's nonsense. Drop it and come along--and be comfortable and happy. Why be obstinate? There's nothing in it." "Perhaps it _is_ obstinacy," said she. "I like to think it's something else." "Drop it. You want to. You know you do." "I want to, but I can't," replied she. He recognized the tone, the expression of the eyes, the sudden showing of strength through the soft, young contour. And he desisted. Never again could there be comfort, much less happiness, until she had tried out her reawakened ambition. She had given up all that had been occupying her since she left America with Freddie; she had abandoned herself to a life of toil. Certainly nothing could have been more tedious, more tormenting to sensitive nerves, than the schooling through which Brent was putting her. Its childishness revolted her and angered her. Experience had long since lowered very considerably the point at which her naturally sweet disposition ceased to be sweet--a process through which every good-tempered person must pass unless he or she is to be crushed and cast aside as a failure. There were days, many of them, when it took all her good sense, all her fundamental faith in Brent, to restrain her from an outbreak. Streathern regarded Brent as a crank, and had to call into service all his humility as a poor Englishman toward a rich man to keep from showing his contempt. And Brent seemed to be--indeed was--testing her forbearance to the uttermost. He offered not the slightest explanation of his method. He simply ordered her blindly to pursue the course he marked out. She was sorely tempted to ask, to demand, explanations. But there stood out a quality in Brent that made her resolve ooze away, as soon as she faced him. Of one thing she was confident. Any lingering suspicions Freddie might have had of Brent's interest in her as a woman, or even of her being interested in him as a man, must have been killed beyond resurrection. Freddie showed that he would have hated Brent, would have burst out against him, for the unhuman, inhuman way he was treating her, had it not been that Brent was so admirably serving his design to have her finally and forever disgusted and done with the stage. Finally there came a performance in which the audience--the gallery part of it--"booed" her--not the play, not the other players, but her and no other. Brent came along, apparently by accident, as she made her exit. He halted before her and scanned her countenance with those all-seeing eyes of his. Said he: "You heard them?" "Of course," replied she. "That was for you," said he and he said it with an absence of sympathy that made it brutal. "For only me," said she--frivolously. "You seem not to mind." "Certainly I mind. I'm not made of wood or stone." "Don't you think you'd better give it up?" She looked at him with a steely light from the violet eyes, a light that had never been there before. "Give up?" said she. "Not even if you give me up. This thing has got to be put through." He simply nodded. "All right," he said. "It will be." "That booing--it almost struck me dead. When it didn't, I for the first time felt sure I was going to win." He nodded again, gave her one of his quick expressive, fleeting glances that somehow made her forget and forgive everything and feel fresh and eager to start in again. He said: "When the booing began and you didn't break down and run off the stage, I knew that what I hoped and believed about you was true." Streathern joined them. His large, soft eyes were full of sympathetic tears. He was so moved that he braved Brent. He said to Susan: "It wasn't your fault, Miss Lenox. You were doing exactly as Mr. Brent ordered, when the booing broke out." "Exactly," said Brent. Streathern regarded him with a certain nervousness and veiled pity. Streathern had been brought into contact with many great men. He had found them, each and every one, with this same streak of wild folly, this habit of doing things that were to him obviously useless and ridiculous. It was a profound mystery to him why such men succeeded while he himself who never did such things remained in obscurity. The only explanation was the abysmal stupidity, ignorance, and folly of the masses of mankind. What a harbor of refuge that reflection has ever been for mediocrity's shattered and sinking vanity! Yet the one indisputable fact about the great geniuses of long ago is that in their own country and age "the common people heard them gladly." Streathern could not now close his mouth upon one last appeal on behalf of the clever and lovely and so amiable victim of Brent's mania. "I say, Mr. Brent," pleaded he, "don't you think--Really now, if you'll permit a chap not without experience to say so--Don't you think that by drilling her so much and so--so _beastly_ minutely--you're making her wooden--machine-like?" "I hope so," said Brent, in a tone that sent Streathern scurrying away to a place where he could express himself unseen and unheard. In her fifth week she began to improve. She felt at home on the stage; she felt at home in her part, whatever it happened to be. She was giving what could really be called a performance. Streathern, when he was sure Brent could not hear, congratulated her. "It's wonderfully plucky of you, my dear," said he, "quite amazingly plucky--to get yourself together and go straight ahead, in spite of what your American friend has been doing to you." "In spite of it." cried Susan. "Why, don't you see that it's because of what he's been doing? I felt it, all the time. I see it now." "Oh, really--do you think so?" said Streathern. His tone made it a polite and extremely discreet way of telling her he thought she had become as mad as Brent. She did not try to explain to him why she was improving. In that week she advanced by long strides, and Brent was radiant. "Now we'll teach you scales," said he. "We'll teach you the mechanics of expressing every variety of emotion. Then we'll be ready to study a strong part." She had known in the broad from the outset what Brent was trying to accomplish--that he was giving her the trade side of the art, was giving it to her quickly and systematically. But she did not appreciate how profoundly right he was until she was "learning scales." Then she understood why most so called "professional" performances are amateurish, haphazard, without any precision. She was learning to posture, and to utter every emotion so accurately that any spectator would recognize it at once. "And in time your voice and your body," said Brent, "will become as much your servants as are Paderewski's ten fingers. He doesn't rely upon any such rot as inspiration. Nor does any master of any art. A mind can be inspired but not a body. It must be taught. You must first have a perfect instrument. Then, if you are a genius, your genius, having a perfect instrument to work with, will produce perfect results. To ignore or to neglect the mechanics of an art is to hamper or to kill inspiration. Geniuses--a few--and they not the greatest--have been too lazy to train their instruments. But anyone who is merely talented dares not take the risk. And you--we'd better assume--are merely talented." Streathern, who had a deserved reputation as a coach, was disgusted with Brent's degradation of an art. As openly as he dared, he warned Susan against the danger of becoming a mere machine--a puppet, responding stiffly to the pulling of strings. But Susan had got over her momentary irritation against Brent, her doubt of his judgment in her particular case. She ignored Streathern's advice that she should be natural, that she should let her own temperament dictate variations on his cut and dried formulae for expression. She continued to do as she was bid. "If you are _not_ a natural born actress," said Brent, "at least you will be a good one--so good that most critics will call you great. And if you _are_ a natural born genius at acting, you will soon put color in the cheeks of these dolls I'm giving you--and ease into their bodies--and nerves and muscles and blood in place of the strings." In the seventh week he abruptly took her out of the company and up to London to have each day an hour of singing, an hour of dancing, and an hour of fencing. "You'll ruin her health," protested Freddie. "You're making her work like a ditch digger." Brent replied, "If she hasn't the health, she's got to abandon the career. If she has health, this training will give it steadiness and solidity. If there's a weakness anywhere, it'll show itself and can be remedied." And he piled the work on her, dictated her hours of sleep, her hours for rest and for walking, her diet--and little he gave her to eat. When he had her thoroughly broken to his regimen, he announced that business compelled his going immediately to America. "I shall be back in a month," said he. "I think I'll run over with you," said Palmer. "Do you mind, Susan?" "Clélie and I shall get on very well," she replied. She would be glad to have both out of the way that she might give her whole mind to the only thing that now interested her. For the first time she was experiencing the highest joy that comes to mortals, the only joy that endures and grows and defies all the calamities of circumstances--the joy of work congenial and developing. "Yes--come along," said Brent to Palmer. "Here you'll be tempting her to break the rules." He added, "Not that you would succeed. She understands what it all means, now--and nothing could stop her. That's why I feel free to leave her." "Yes, I understand," said Susan. She was gazing away into space; at sight of her expression Freddie turned hastily away. On a Saturday morning Susan and Clélie, after waiting on the platform at Euston Station until the long, crowded train for Liverpool and the _Lusitania_ disappeared, went back to the lodgings in Half Moon Street with a sudden sense of the vastness of London, of its loneliness and dreariness, of its awkward inhospitality to the stranger under its pall of foggy smoke. Susan was thinking of Brent's last words: She had said, "I'll try to deserve all the pains you've taken, Mr. Brent." "Yes, I have done a lot for you," he had replied. "I've put you beyond the reach of any of the calamities of life--beyond the need of any of its consolations. Don't forget that if the steamer goes down with all on board." And then she had looked at him--and as Freddie's back was half turned, she hoped he had not seen--in fact, she was sure he had not, or she would not have dared. And Brent--had returned her look with his usual quizzical smile; but she had learned how to see through that mask. Then--she had submitted to Freddie's energetic embrace--had given her hand to Brent--"Good-by," she had said; and "Good luck," he. Beyond the reach of _any_ of the calamities? Beyond the need of _any_ of the consolations? Yes--it was almost literally true. She felt the big interest--the career--growing up within her, and expanding, and already overstepping all other interests and emotions. Brent had left her and Clélie more to do than could be done; thus they had no time to bother either about the absent or about themselves. Looking back in after years on the days that Freddie was away, Susan could recall that from time to time she would find her mind wandering, as if groping in the darkness of its own cellars or closets for a lost thought, a missing link in some chain of thought. This even awakened her several times in the night--made her leap from sleep into acute and painful consciousness as if she had recalled and instantly forgotten some startling and terrible thing. And when Freddie unexpectedly came--having taken passage on the _Lusitania_ for the return voyage, after only six nights and five days in New York--she was astonished by her delight at seeing him, and by the kind of delight it was. For it rather seemed a sort of relief, as from a heavy burden of anxiety. "Why didn't you wait and come with Brent?" asked she. "Couldn't stand it," replied he. "I've grown clear away from New York--at least from the only New York I know. I don't like the boys any more. They bore me. They--offend me. And I know if I stayed on a few days they'd begin to suspect. No, it isn't Europe. It's--you. You're responsible for the change in me." He was speaking entirely of the internal change, which indeed was great. For while he was still fond of all kinds of sporting, it was not in his former crude way; he had even become something of a connoisseur of pictures and was cultivating a respect for the purity of the English language that made him wince at Susan's and Brent's slang. But when he spoke thus frankly and feelingly of the change in him, Susan looked at him--and, not having seen him in two weeks and three days, she really saw him for the first time in many a month. She could not think of the internal change he spoke of for noting the external change. He had grown at least fifty pounds heavier than he had been when they came abroad. In one way this was an improvement; it gave him a dignity, an air of consequence in place of the boyish good looks of the days before the automobile and before the effects of high living began to show. But it made of him a different man in Susan's eyes--a man who now seemed almost a stranger to her. "Yes, you _have_ changed," replied she absently. And she went and examined herself in a mirror. "You, too," said Freddie. "You don't look older--as I do. But--there's a--a--I can't describe it." Susan could not see it. "I'm just the same," she insisted. Palmer laughed. "You can't judge about yourself. But all this excitement--and studying--and thinking--and God knows what---- You're not at all the woman I came abroad with." The subject seemed to be making both uncomfortable; they dropped it. Women are bred to attach enormous importance to their physical selves--so much so that many women have no other sense of self-respect, and regard themselves as possessing the entirety of virtue if they have chastity or can pretend to have it. The life Susan had led upsets all this and forces a woman either utterly to despise herself, even as she is despised of men, or to discard the sex measure of feminine self-respect as ridiculously inadequate, and to seek some other measure. Susan had sought this other measure, and had found it. She was, therefore, not a little surprised to find--after Freddie had been back three or four days--that he was arousing in her the same sensations which a strange man intimately about would have aroused in her in the long past girlhood of innocence. It was not physical repulsion; it was not a sense of immorality. It was a kind of shyness, a feeling of violated modesty. She felt herself blushing if he came into the room when she was dressing. As soon as she awakened in the morning she sprang from bed beside him and hastened into her dressing-room and closed the door, resisting an impulse to lock it. Apparently the feeling of physical modesty which she had thought dead, killed to the last root, was not dead, was once more stirring toward life. "What are you blushing about?" asked he, when she, passing through the bedroom, came suddenly upon him, very scantily dressed. She laughed confusedly and beat a hurried retreat. She began to revolve the idea of separate bedrooms; she resolved that when they moved again she would arrange it on some pretext--and she was looking about for a new place on the plea that their quarters in Half Moon Street were too cramped. All this close upon his return, for it was before the end of the first week that she, taking a shower bath one morning, saw the door of the bathroom opening to admit him, and cried out sharply: "Close that door!" "It's I," Freddie called, to make himself heard above the noise of the water. "Shut off that water and listen." She shut off the water, but instead of listening, she said, nervous but determined: "Please close the door. I'll be out directly." "Listen, I tell you," he cried, and she now noticed that his voice was curiously, arrestingly, shrill. "Brent--has been hurt--badly hurt." She was dripping wet. She thrust her arms into her bathrobe, flung wide the partly open door. He was standing there, a newspaper in his trembling hand. "This is a dispatch from New York--dated yesterday," he began. "Listen," and he read: "During an attempt to rob the house of Mr. Robert Brent, the distinguished playwright, early this morning, Mr. Brent was set upon and stabbed in a dozen places, his butler, James Fourget, was wounded, perhaps mortally, and his secretary, Mr. J. C. Garvey, was knocked insensible. The thieves made their escape. The police have several clues. Mr. Brent is hovering between life and death, with the chances against him." Susan, leaning with all her weight against the door jamb, saw Palmer's white face going away from her, heard his agitated voice less and less distinctly--fell to the floor with a crash and knew no more. When she came to, she was lying in the bed; about it or near it were Palmer, her maid, his valet, Clélie, several strangers. Her glance turned to Freddie's face and she looked into his eyes amid a profound silence. She saw in those eyes only intense anxiety and intense affection. He said: "What is it, dear? You are all right. Only a fainting spell." "Was that true?" she asked. "Yes, but he'll pull through. The surgeons save everybody nowadays. I've cabled his secretary, Garvey, and to my lawyers. We'll have an answer soon. I've sent out for all the papers." "She must not be agitated," interposed a medical looking man with stupid brown eyes and a thin brown beard sparsely veiling his gaunt and pasty face. "Nonsense!" said Palmer, curtly. "My wife is not an invalid. Our closest friend has been almost killed. To keep the news from her would be to make her sick." Susan closed her eyes. "Thank you," she murmured. "Send them all away--except Clélie. . . . Leave me alone with Clélie." Pushing the others before him, Freddie moved toward the door into the hall. At the threshold he paused to say: "Shall I bring the papers when they come?" She hesitated. "No," she answered without opening her eyes. "Send them in. I want to read them, myself." She lay quiet, Clélie stroking her brow. From time to time a shudder passed over her. When, in answer to a knock, Clélie took in the bundle of newspapers, she sat up in bed and read the meager dispatches. The long accounts were made long by the addition of facts about Brent's life. The short accounts added nothing to what she already knew. When she had read all, she sank back among the pillows and closed her eyes. A long, long silence in the room. Then a soft knock at the door. Clélie left the bedside to answer it, returned to say: "Mr. Freddie wishes to come in with a telegram." Susan started up wildly. Her eyes were wide and staring--a look of horror. "No--no!" she cried. Then she compressed her lips, passed her hand slowly over her brow. "Yes--tell him to come in." Her gaze was upon the door until it opened, leaped to his face, to his eyes, the instant he appeared. He was smiling--hopefully, but not gayly. "Garvey says"--and he read from a slip of paper in his hand--" 'None of the wounds necessarily mortal. Doctors refuse to commit themselves, but I believe he has a good chance.'" He extended the cablegram that she might read for herself, and said, "He'll win, my dear. He has luck, and lucky people always win in big things." Her gaze did not leave his face. One would have said that she had not heard, that she was still seeking what she had admitted him to learn. He sat down where Clélie had been, and said: "There's only one thing for us to do, and that is to go over at once." She closed her eyes. A baffled, puzzled expression was upon her deathly pale face. "We can sail on the _Mauretania_ Saturday," continued he. "I've telephoned and there are good rooms." She turned her face away. "Don't you feel equal to going?" "As you say, we must." "The trip can't do you any harm." His forced composure abruptly vanished and he cried out hysterically: "Good God! It's incredible." Then he got himself in hand again, and went on: "No wonder it bowled you out. I had my anxiety about you to break the shock. But you---- How do you feel now?" "I'm going to dress." "I'll send you in some brandy." He bent and kissed her. A shudder convulsed her--a shudder visible even through the covers. But he seemed not to note it, and went on: "I didn't realize how fond I was of Brent until I saw that thing in the paper. I almost fainted, myself. I gave Clélie a horrible scare." "I thought you were having an attack," said Clélie. "My husband looked exactly as you did when he died that way." Susan's strange eyes were gazing intently at him--the searching, baffled, persistently seeking look. She closed them as he turned from the bed. When she and Clélie were alone and she was dressing, she said: "Freddie gave you a scare?" "I was at breakfast," replied Clélie, "was pouring my coffee. He came into the room in his bathrobe--took up the papers from the table opened to the foreign news as he always does. I happened to be looking at him"--Clélie flushed--"he is very handsome in that robe--and all at once he dropped the paper--grew white--staggered and fell into a chair. Exactly like my husband." Susan, seated at her dressing-table, was staring absently out of the window. She shook her head impatiently, drew a long breath, went on with her toilet. CHAPTER XXIV A FEW minutes before the dinner hour she came into the drawing room. Palmer and Madame Délière were already there, near the fire which the unseasonable but by no means unusual coolness of the London summer evening made extremely comfortable--and, for Americans, necessary. Palmer stood with his back to the blaze, moodily smoking a cigarette. That evening his now almost huge form looked more degenerated than usual by the fat of high living and much automobiling. His fleshy face, handsome still and of a refined type, bore the traces of anxious sorrow. Clélie, sitting at the corner of the fireplace and absently turning the leaves of an illustrated French magazine, had in her own way an air as funereal as Freddie's. As Susan entered, they glanced at her. Palmer uttered and half suppressed an ejaculation of amazement. Susan was dressed as for opera or ball--one of her best evening dresses, the greatest care in arranging her hair and the details of her toilette. Never had she been more beautiful. Her mode of life since she came abroad with Palmer, the thoughts that had been filling her brain and giving direction to her life since she accepted Brent as her guide and Brent's plans as her career, had combined to give her air of distinction the touch of the extraordinary--the touch that characterizes the comparatively few human beings who live the life above and apart from that of the common run--the life illuminated by imagination. At a glance one sees that they are not of the eaters, drinkers, sleepers, and seekers after the shallow easy pleasures money provides ready-made. They shine by their own light; the rest of mankind shines either by light reflected from them or not at all. Looking at her that evening as she came into the comfortable, old-fashioned English room, with its somewhat heavy but undeniably dignified furniture and draperies, the least observant could not have said that she was in gala attire because she was in gala mood. Beneath the calm of her surface expression lay something widely different. Her face, slim and therefore almost beyond the reach of the attacks of time and worry, was of the type to which a haggard expression is becoming. Her eyes, large and dreamy, seemed to be seeing visions of unutterable sadness, and the scarlet streak of her mouth seemed to emphasize their pathos. She looked young, very young; yet there was also upon her features the stamp of experience, the experience of suffering. She did not notice the two by the fire, but went to the piano at the far end of the room and stood gazing out into the lovely twilight of the garden. Freddie, who saw only the costume, said in an undertone to Clélie, "What sort of freak is this?" Said Madame Délière: "An uncle of mine lost his wife. They were young and he loved her to distraction. Between her death and the funeral he scandalized everybody by talking incessantly of the most trivial details--the cards, the mourning, the flowers, his own clothes. But the night of the funeral he killed himself." Palmer winced as if Clélie had struck him. Then an expression of terror, of fear, came into his eyes. "You don't think she'd do that?" he muttered hoarsely. "Certainly not," replied the young Frenchwoman. "I was simply trying to explain her. She dressed because she was unconscious of what she was doing. Real sorrow doesn't think about appearances." Then with quick tact she added: "Why should she kill herself? Monsieur Brent is getting well. Also, while she's a devoted friend of his, she doesn't love him, but you." "I'm all upset," said Palmer, in confused apology. He gazed fixedly at Susan--a straight, slim figure with the carriage and the poise of head that indicate self-confidence and pride. As he gazed Madame Clélie watched him with fascinated eyes. It was both thrilling and terrifying to see such love as he was revealing--a love more dangerous than hate. Palmer noted that he was observed, abruptly turned to face the fire. A servant opened the doors into the dining-room, Madame Délière rose. "Come, Susan," said she. Susan looked at her with unseeing eyes. "Dinner is served." "I do not care for dinner," said Susan, seating herself at the piano. "Oh, but you----" "Let her alone," said Freddie, curtly. "You and I will go in." Susan, alone, dropped listless hands into her lap. How long she sat there motionless and with mind a blank she did not know. She was aroused by a sound in the hall--in the direction of the outer door of their apartment. She started up, instantly all alive and alert, and glided swiftly in the direction of the sound. A servant met her at the threshold. He had a cablegram on a tray. "For Mr. Palmer," said he. But she, not hearing, took the envelope and tore it open. At a sweep her eyes took in the unevenly typewritten words: Brent died at half past two this afternoon. GARVEY. She gazed wonderingly at the servant, reread the cablegram. The servant said: "Shall I take it to Mr. Palmer, ma'am?" "No. That is all, thanks," replied she. And she walked slowly across the room to the fire. She shivered, adjusted one of the shoulder straps of her low-cut pale green dress. She read the cablegram a third time, laid it gently, thoughtfully, upon the mantel. "Brent died at half past two this afternoon." Died. Yes, there was no mistaking the meaning of those words. She knew that the message was true. But she did not feel it. She was seeing Brent as he had been when they said good-by. And it would take something more than a mere message to make her feel that the Brent so vividly alive, so redolent of life, of activity, of energy, of plans and projects, the Brent of health and strength, had ceased to be. "Brent died at half past two this afternoon." Except in the great crises we all act with a certain theatricalism, do the thing books and plays and the example of others have taught us to do. But in the great crises we do as we feel. Susan knew that Brent was dead. If he had meant less to her, she would have shrieked or fainted or burst into wild sobs. But not when he was her whole future. She _knew_ he was dead, but she did not _believe_ it. So she stood staring at the flames, and wondering why, when she knew such a frightful thing, she should remain calm. When she had heard that he was injured, she had felt, now she did not feel at all. Her body, her brain, went serenely on in their routine. The part of her that was her very self--had it died, and not Brent? She turned her back to the fire, gazed toward the opposite wall. In a mirror there she saw the reflection of Palmer, at table in the adjoining room. A servant was holding a dish at his left and he was helping himself. She observed his every motion, observed his fattened body, his round and large face, the forming roll of fat at the back of his neck. All at once she grew cold--cold as she had not been since the night she and Etta Brashear walked the streets of Cincinnati. The ache of this cold, like the cold of death, was an agony. She shook from head to foot. She turned toward the mantel again, looked at the cablegram. But she did not take it in her hands. She could see--in the air, before her eyes--in clear, sharp lettering--"Brent died at half past two this afternoon. Garvey." The sensation of cold faded into a sensation of approaching numbness. She went into the hall--to her own rooms. In the dressing-room her maid, Clemence, was putting away the afternoon things she had taken off. She stood at the dressing table, unclasping the string of pearls. She said to Clemence tranquilly: "Please pack in the small trunk with the broad stripes three of my plainest street dresses--some underclothes--the things for a journey--only necessaries. Some very warm things, please, Clemence, I've suffered from cold, and I can't bear the idea of it. And please telephone to the--to the Cecil for a room and bath. When you have finished I shall pay you what I owe and a month's wages extra. I cannot afford to keep you any longer." "But, madame"--Clemence fluttered in agitation--"Madame promised to take me to America." "Telephone for the rooms for Miss Susan Lenox," said Susan. She was rapidly taking off her dress. "If I took you to America I should have to let you go as soon as we landed." "But, madame--" Clemence advanced to assist her. "Please pack the trunk," said Susan. "I am leaving here at once." "I prefer to go to America, even if madame----" "Very well. I'll take you. But you understand?" "Perfectly, madame----" A sound of hurrying footsteps and Palmer was at the threshold. His eyes were wild, his face distorted. His hair, usually carefully arranged over the rapidly growing bald spot above his brow, was disarranged in a manner that would have been ludicrous but for the terrible expression of his face. "Go!" he said harshly to the maid; and he stood fretting the knob until she hastened out and gave him the chance to close the door. Susan, calm and apparently unconscious of his presence, went on with her rapid change of costume. He lit a cigarette with fingers trembling, dropped heavily into a chair near the door. She, seated on the floor, was putting on boots. When she had finished one and was beginning on the other he said stolidly: "You think I did it"--not a question but an assertion. "I know it," replied she. She was so seated that he was seeing her in profile. "Yes--I did," he went on. He settled himself more deeply in the chair, crossed his leg. "And I am glad that I did." She kept on at lacing the boot. There was nothing in her expression to indicate emotion, or even that she heard. "I did it," continued he, "because I had the right. He invited it. He knew me--knew what to expect. I suppose he decided that you were worth taking the risk. It's strange what fools men--all men--we men--are about women. . . . Yes, he knew it. He didn't blame me." She stopped lacing the boot, turned so that she could look at him. "Do you remember his talking about me one day?" he went on, meeting her gaze naturally. "He said I was a survival of the Middle Ages--had a medieval Italian mind--said I would do anything to gain my end--and would have a clear conscience about it. Do you remember?" "Yes." "But you don't see why I had the right to kill him?" A shiver passed over her. She turned away again, began again to lace the boot--but now her fingers were uncertain. "I'll explain," pursued he. "You and I were getting along fine. He had had his chance with you and had lost it. Well, he comes over here--looks us up--puts himself between you and me--proceeds to take you away from me. Not in a square manly way but under the pretense of giving you a career. He made you restless--dissatisfied. He got you away from me. Isn't that so?" She was sitting motionless now. Palmer went on in the same harsh, jerky way: "Now, nobody in the world--not even you--knew me better than Brent did. He knew what to expect--if I caught on to what was doing. And I guess he knew I would be pretty sure to catch on." "He never said a word to me that you couldn't have heard," said Susan. "Of course not," retorted Palmer. "That isn't the question. It don't matter whether he wanted you for himself or for his plays. The point is that he took you away from me--he, my friend--and did it by stealth. You can't deny that." "He offered me a chance for a career--that was all," said she. "He never asked for my love--or showed any interest in it. I gave him that." He laughed--his old-time, gentle, sweet, wicked laugh. He said: "Well--it'd have been better for him if you hadn't. All it did for him was to cost him his life." Up she sprang. "Don't say that!" she cried passionately--so passionately that her whole body shook. "Do you suppose I don't know it? I know that I killed him. But I don't feel that he's dead. If I did, I'd not be able to live. But I can't! I can't! For me he is as much alive as ever." "Try to think that--if it pleases you," sneered Palmer. "The fact remains that it was _you_ who killed him." Again she shivered. "Yes," she said, "I killed him." "And that's why I hate you," Palmer went on, calm and deliberate--except his eyes; they were terrible. "A few minutes ago--when I was exulting that he would probably die--just then I found that opened cable on the mantel. Do you know what it did to me? It made me hate you. When I read it----" Freddie puffed at his cigarette in silence. She dropped weakly to the chair at the dressing table. "Curse it!" he burst out. "I loved him. Yes, I was crazy about him--and am still. I'm glad I killed him. I'd do it again. I had to do it. He owed me his life. But that doesn't make me forgive _you_." A long silence. Her fingers wandered among the articles spread upon the dressing table. He said: "You're getting ready to leave?" "I'm going to a hotel at once." "Well, you needn't. I'm leaving. You're done with me. But I'm done with you." He rose, bent upon her his wicked glance, sneering and cruel. "You never want to see me again. No more do I ever want to see you again. I wish to God I never had seen you. You cost me the only friend I ever had that I cared about. And what's a woman beside a friend--a _man_ friend? You've made a fool of me, as a woman always does of a man--always, by God! If she loves him, she destroys him. If she doesn't love him, he destroys himself." Susan covered her face with her bare arms and sank down at the dressing table. "For pity's sake," she cried brokenly, "spare me--spare me!" He seized her roughly by the shoulder. "Just flesh!" he said. "Beautiful flesh--but just female. And look what a fool you've made of me--and the best man in the world dead--over yonder! Spare you? Oh, you'll pull through all right. You'll pull through everything and anything--and come out stronger and better looking and better off. Spare you! Hell! I'd have killed you instead of him if I'd known I was going to hate you after I'd done the other thing. I'd do it yet--you dirty skirt!" He jerked her unresisting form to its feet, gazed at her like an insane fiend. With a sob he seized her in his arms, crushed her against his breast, sunk his fingers deep into her hair, kissed it, grinding his teeth as he kissed. "I hate you, damn you--and I love you!" He flung her back into the chair--out of his life. "You'll never see me again!" And he fled from the room--from the house. CHAPTER XXV THE big ship issued from the Mersey into ugly waters--into the weather that at all seasons haunts and curses the coasts of Northern Europe. From Saturday until Wednesday Susan and Madame Délière had true Atlantic seas and skies; and the ship leaped and shivered and crashed along like a brave cavalryman in the rear of a rout--fighting and flying, flying and fighting. Four days of hours whose every waking second lagged to record itself in a distinct pang of physical wretchedness; four days in which all emotions not physical were suspended, in which even the will to live, most tenacious of primal instincts in a sane human being, yielded somewhat to the general lassitude and disgust. Yet for Susan Lenox four most fortunate days; for in them she underwent a mental change that enabled her to emerge delivered of the strain that threatened at every moment to cause a snap. On the fifth day her mind, crutched by her resuming body, took up again its normal routine. She began to dress herself, to eat, to exercise--the mechanical things first, as always--then to think. The grief that had numbed her seemed to have been left behind in England where it had suddenly struck her down--England far away and vague across those immense and infuriated waters, like the gulf of death between two incarnations. No doubt that grief was awaiting her at the other shores; no doubt there she would feel that Brent was gone. But she would be better able to bear the discovery. The body can be accustomed to the deadliest poisons, so that they become harmless--even useful--even a necessary aid to life. In the same way the mind can grow accustomed to the cruelest calamities, tolerate them, use them to attain a strength and power the hot-housed soul never gets. When a human being is abruptly plunged into an unnatural unconsciousness by mental or physical catastrophes, the greatest care is taken that the awakening to normal life again be slow, gradual, without shock. Otherwise the return would mean death or insanity or lifelong affliction with radical weakness. It may be that this sea voyage with its four days of agitations that lowered Susan's physical life to a harmony of wretchedness with her mental plight, and the succeeding days of gradual calming and restoration, acted upon her to save her from disaster. There will be those readers of her story who, judging her, perhaps, by themselves--as revealed in their judgments, rather than in their professions--will think it was quite unnecessary to awaken her gradually; they will declare her a hard-hearted person, caring deeply about no one but herself, or one of those curiosities of human nature that are interested only in things, not at all in persons, even in themselves. There may also be those who will see in her a soft and gentle heart for which her intelligence finally taught her to construct a shield--more or less effective--against buffetings which would have destroyed or, worse still, maimed her. These will feel that the sea voyage, the sea change, suspending the normal human life, the life on land, tided her over a crisis that otherwise must have been disastrous. However this may be--and who dares claim the definite knowledge of the mazes of human character and motive to be positive about the matter?--however it may be, on Thursday afternoon they steamed along a tranquil and glistening sea into the splendor and majesty of New York Harbor. And Susan was again her calm, sweet self, as the violet-gray eyes gazing pensively from the small, strongly-featured face plainly showed. Herself again, with the wound--deepest if not cruelest of her many wounds--covered and with its poison under control. She was ready again to begin to live--ready to fulfill our only certain mission on this earth, for we are not here to succumb and to die, but to adapt ourselves and live. And those who laud the succumbers and the diers--yea, even the blessed martyrs of sundry and divers fleeting issues usually delusions--may be paying ill-deserved tribute to vanity, obstinacy, lack of useful common sense, passion for futile and untimely agitation--or sheer cowardice. Truth--and what is truth but right living?--truth needs no martyrs; and the world needs not martyrs, not corpses rotting in unmarked or monumented graves, but intelligent men and women, healthy in body and mind, capable of leading the human race as fast as it is able to go in the direction of the best truth to which it is able at that time to aspire. As the ship cleared Quarantine Susan stood on the main deck well forward, with Madame Clélie beside her. And up within her, defying all rebuke, surged the hope that cannot die in strong souls living in healthy bodies. She had a momentary sense of shame, born of the feeling that it is basest, most heartless selfishness to live, to respond to the caress of keen air upon healthy skin, of glorious light upon healthy eyes, when there are others shut out and shut away from these joys forever. Then she said to herself, "But no one need apologize for being alive and for hoping. I must try to justify him for all he did for me." A few miles of beautiful water highway between circling shores of green, and afar off through the mist Madame Clélie's fascinated eyes beheld a city of enchantment. It appeared and disappeared, reappeared only to disappear again, as its veil of azure mist was blown into thick or thin folds by the light breeze. One moment the Frenchwoman would think there was nothing ahead but more and ever more of the bay glittering in the summer sunlight. The next moment she would see again that city--or was it a mirage of a city?--towers, mighty walls, domes rising mass above mass, summit above summit, into the very heavens from the water's edge where there was a fringe of green. Surely the vision must be real; yet how could tiny man out of earth and upon earth rear in such enchantment of line and color those enormous masses, those peak-like piercings of the sky? "Is that--_it?_" she asked in an awed undertone. Susan nodded. She, too, was gazing spellbound. Her beloved City of the Sun. "But it is beautiful--beautiful beyond belief. And I have always heard that New York was ugly." "It is beautiful--and ugly--both beyond belief!" replied Susan. "No wonder you love it!" "Yes--I love it. I have loved it from the first moment I saw it. I've never stopped loving it--not even----" She did not finish her sentence but gazed dreamily at the city appearing and disappearing in its veils of thin, luminous mist. Her thoughts traveled again the journey of her life in New York. When she spoke again, it was to say: "Yes--when I first saw it--that spring evening--I called it my City of the Stars, then, for I didn't know that it belonged to the sun-- Yes, that spring evening I was happier than I ever had been--or ever shall be again." "But you will be happy again dear," said Clélie, tenderly pressing her arm. A faint sad smile--sad but still a smile--made Susan's beautiful face lovely. "Yes, I shall be happy--not in those ways--but happy, for I shall be busy. . . . No, I don't take the tragic view of life--not at all. And as I've known misery, I don't try to hold to it." "Leave that," said Clélie, "to those who have known only the comfortable make-believe miseries that rustle in crêpe and shed tears--whenever there's anyone by to see." "Like the beggars who begin to whine and exhibit their aggravated sores as soon as a possible giver comes into view," said Susan. "I've learned to accept what comes, and to try to make the best of it, whatever it is. . . . I say I've learned. But have I? Does one ever change? I guess I was born that sort of philosopher." She recalled how she put the Warhams out of her life as soon as she discovered what they really meant to her and she to them--how she had put Jeb Ferguson out of her life--how she had conquered the grief and desolation of the loss of Burlingham--how she had survived Etta's going away without her--the inner meaning of her episodes with Rod--with Freddie Palmer---- And now this last supreme test--with her soul rising up and gathering itself together and lifting its head in strength---- "Yes, I was born to make the best of things," she repeated. "Then you were born lucky," sighed Clélie, who was of those who must lean if they would not fall and lie where they fell. Susan gave a curious little laugh--with no mirth, with a great deal of mockery. "Do you know, I never thought so before, but I believe you're right," said she. Again she laughed in that queer way. "If you knew my life you'd think I was joking. But I'm not. The fact that I've survived and am what I am proves I was born lucky." Her tone changed, her expression became unreadable. "If it's lucky to be born able to live. And if that isn't luck, what is?" She thought how Brent said she was born lucky because she had the talent that enables one to rise above the sordidness of that capitalism he so often denounced--the sordidness of the lot of its slaves, the sordidness of the lot of its masters. Brent! If it were he leaning beside her--if he and she were coming up the bay toward the City of the Sun! A billow of heartsick desolation surged over her. Alone--always alone. And still alone. And always to be alone. Garvey came aboard when the gangway was run out. He was in black wherever black could be displayed. But the grief shadowing his large, simple countenance had the stamp of the genuine. And it was genuine, of the most approved enervating kind. He had done nothing but grieve since his master's death--had left unattended all the matters the man he loved and grieved for would have wished put in order. Is it out of charity for the weakness of human nature and that we may think as well as possible of it--is that why we admire and praise most enthusiastically the kind of love and the kind of friendship and the kind of grief that manifest themselves in obstreperous feeling and wordiness, with no strength left for any attempt to _do?_ As Garvey greeted them the tears filled Clélie's eyes and she turned away. But Susan gazed at him steadily; in her eyes there were no tears, but a look that made Garvey choke back sobs and bend his head to hide his expression. What he saw--or felt--behind her calmness filled him with awe, with a kind of terror. But he did not recognize what he saw as grief; it did not resemble any grief he had felt or had heard about. "He made a will just before he died," he said to Susan. "He left everything to you." Then she had not been mistaken. He had loved her, even as she loved him. She turned and walked quickly from them. She hastened into her cabin, closed the door and flung herself across the bed. And for the first time she gave way. In that storm her soul was like a little land bird in the clutch of a sea hurricane. She did not understand herself. She still had no sense that he was dead; yet had his dead body been lying there in her arms she could not have been more shaken by paroxysms of grief, without tears or sobs--grief that vents itself in shrieks and peals of horrible laughter-like screams--she smothered them in the pillows in which she buried her face. Clélie came, opened the door, glanced in, closed it. An hour passed--an hour and a half. Then Susan appeared on deck--amber-white pallor, calm, beautiful, the fashionable woman in traveling dress. "I never before saw you with your lips not rouged!" exclaimed Clélie. "You will never see them rouged again," said Susan. "But it makes you look older." "Not so old as I am," replied she. And she busied herself about the details of the landing and the customs, waving aside Garvey and his eager urgings that she sit quietly and leave everything to him. In the carriage, on the way to the hotel, she roused herself from her apparently tranquil reverie and broke the strained silence by saying: "How much shall I have?" The question was merely the protruding end of a train of thought years long and pursued all that time with scarcely an interruption. It seemed abrupt; to Garvey it sounded brutal. Off his guard, he showed in flooding color and staring eye how profoundly it shocked him. Susan saw, but she did not explain; she was not keeping accounts in emotion with the world. She waited patiently. After a long pause he said in a tone that contained as much of rebuke as so mild a dependent dared express: "He left about thirty thousand a year, Miss Lenox." The exultant light that leaped to Susan's eye horrified him. It even disturbed Clélie, though she better understood Susan's nature and was not nearly so reverent as Garvey of the hypocrisies of conventionality. But Susan had long since lost the last trace of awe of the opinion of others. She was not seeking to convey an impression of grief. Grief was too real to her. She would as soon have burst out with voluble confession of the secret of her love for Brent. She saw what Garvey was thinking; but she was not concerned. She continued to be herself--natural and simple. And there was no reason why she should conceal as a thing to be ashamed of the fact that Brent had accomplished the purpose he intended, had filled her with honest exultation--not with delight merely, not with triumph, but with that stronger and deeper joy which the unhoped for pardon brings to the condemned man. She must live on. The thought of suicide, of any form of giving up--the thought that instantly possesses the weak and the diseased--could not find lodgment in that young, healthy body and mind of hers. She must live on; and suddenly she discovered that she could live _free!_ Not after years of doubtful struggles, of reverses, of success so hardly won that she was left exhausted. But now--at once--_free!_ The heavy shackles had been stricken off at a blow. She was free--forever free! Free, forever free, from the wolves of poverty and shame, of want and rags and filth, the wolves that had been pursuing her with swift, hideous padded stride, the wolves that more than once had dragged her down and torn and trampled her, and lapped her blood. Free to enter of her own right the world worth living in, the world from which all but a few are shut out, the world which only a few of those privileged to enter know how to enjoy. Free to live the life worth while the life of leisure to work, instead of slaving to make leisure and luxury and comfort for others. Free to achieve something beside food, clothing, and shelter. Free to live as _she_ pleased, instead of for the pleasure of a master or masters. Free--free--free! The ecstasy of it surged up in her, for the moment possessing her and submerging even thought of how she had been freed. She who had never acquired the habit of hypocrisy frankly exulted in countenance exultant beyond laughter. She could conceal her feelings, could refrain from expressing. But if she expressed at all, it must be her true self--what she honestly felt. Garvey hung his head in shame. He would not have believed Susan could be so unfeeling. He would not let his eyes see the painful sight. He would try to forget, would deny to himself that he had seen. For to his shallow, conventional nature Susan's expression could only mean delight in wealth, in the opportunity that now offered to idle and to luxuriate in the dead man's money, to realize the crude dreamings of those lesser minds whose initial impulses toward growth have been stifled by the routine our social system imposes upon all but the few with the strength to persist individual. Free! She tried to summon the haunting vision of the old women with the tin cups of whisky reeling and staggering in time to the hunchback's playing. She could remember every detail, but these memories would not assemble even into a vivid picture and the picture would have been far enough from the horror of actuality in the vision she formerly could not banish. As a menace, as a prophecy, the old women and the hunchback and the strumming piano had gone forever. Free--secure, independent--free! After a long silence Garvey ventured stammeringly: "He said to me--he asked me to request--he didn't make it a condition--just a wish--a hope, Miss Lenox--that if you could, and felt it strongly enough----" "Wished what?" said Susan, with a sharp impatience that showed how her nerves were unstrung. "That you'd go on--go on with the plays--with the acting." The violet eyes expressed wonder. "Go on?" she inquired, "Go on?" Then in a tone that made Clélie sob and Garvey's eyes fill she said: "What else is there to live for, now?" "I'm--I'm glad for his sake," stammered Garvey. He was disconcerted by her smile. She made no other answer--aloud. For _his_ sake! For her own sake, rather. What other life had she but the life _he_ had given her? "And he knew I would," she said to herself. "He said that merely to let me know he left me entirely free. How like him, to do that!" At the hotel she shut herself in; she saw no one, not even Clélie, for nearly a week. Then--she went to work--and worked like a reincarnation of Brent. She inquired for Sperry, found that he and Rod had separated as they no longer needed each other; she went into a sort of partnership with Sperry for the production of Brent's plays--he, an excellent coach as well as stage director, helping her to finish her formal education for the stage. She played with success half a dozen of the already produced Brent plays. At the beginning of her second season she appeared in what has become her most famous part--_Roxy_ in Brent's last play, "The Scandal." With the opening night her career of triumph began. Even the critics--therefore, not unnaturally, suspicious of an actress who was so beautiful, so beautifully dressed, so well supported, and so well outfitted with actor-proof plays even the critics conceded her ability. She was worthy of the great character Brent had created--the wayward, many-sided, ever gay _Roxy Grandon_. When, at the first night of "The Scandal," the audience lingered, cheering Brent's picture thrown upon a drop, cheering Susan, calling her out again and again, refusing to leave the theater until it was announced that she could answer no more calls, as she had gone home--when she was thus finally and firmly established in her own right--she said to Sperry: "Will you see to it that every sketch of me that appears tomorrow says that I am the natural daughter of Lorella Lenox?" Sperry's Punch-like face reddened. "I've been ashamed of that fact," she went on. "It has made me ashamed to be alive in the bottom of my heart." "Absurd," said Sperry. "Exactly," replied Susan. "Absurd. Even stronger than my shame about it has been my shame that I could be so small as to feel ashamed of it. Now--tonight" she was still in her dressing-room. As she paused they heard the faint faraway thunders of the applause of the lingering audience--"Listen!" she cried. "I am ashamed no longer. Sperry, _Ich bin ein Ich!_" "I should say," laughed he. "All you have to say is 'Susan Lenox' and you answer all questions." "At last I'm proud of it," she went on. "I've justified myself. I've justified my mother. I am proud of her, and she would be proud of me. So see that it's done, Sperry." "Sure," said he. "You're right." He took her hand and kissed it. She laughed, patted him on the shoulder, kissed him on both cheeks in friendly, sisterly fashion. He had just gone when a card was brought to her--"Dr. Robert Stevens"--with "Sutherland, Indiana," penciled underneath. Instantly she remembered, and had him brought to her--the man who had rescued her from death at her birth. He proved to be a quiet, elderly gentleman, subdued and aged beyond his fifty-five years by the monotonous life of the drowsy old town. He approached with a manner of embarrassed respect and deference, stammering old-fashioned compliments. But Susan was the simple, unaffected girl again, so natural that he soon felt as much at ease as with one of his patients in Sutherland. She took him away in her car to her apartment for supper with her and Clélie, who was in the company, and Sperry. She kept him hour after hour, questioning him about everyone and everything in the old town, drawing him out, insisting upon more and more details. The morning papers were brought and they read the accounts of play and author and players. For once there was not a dissent; all the critics agreed that it was a great performance of a great play. And Susan made Sperry read aloud the finest and the longest of the accounts of Brent himself--his life, his death, his work, his lasting fame now peculiarly assured because in Susan Lenox there had been found a competent interpreter of his genius. After the reading there fell silence. Susan, her pallid face and her luminous, inquiring violet eyes inscrutable, sat gazing into vacancy. At last Doctor Stevens moved uneasily and rose to go. Susan roused herself, accompanied him to the adjoining room. Said the old doctor. "I've told you about everybody. But you've told me nothing about the most interesting Sutherlander of all--yourself." Susan looked at him. And he saw the wound hidden from all the world--the wound she hid from herself as much of the time as she could. He, the doctor, the professional confessor, had seen such wounds often; in all the world there is hardly a heart without one. He said: "Since sorrow is the common lot, I wonder that men can be so selfish or so unthinking as not to help each other in every way to its consolations. Poor creatures that we are--wandering in the dark, fighting desperately, not knowing friend from foe!" "But I am glad that you saved me," said she. "You have the consolations--success--fame--honor." "There is no consolation," replied she in her grave sweet way. "I had the best. I--lost him. I shall spend my life in flying from myself." After a pause she went on: "I shall never speak to anyone as I have spoken to you. You will understand all. I had the best--the man who could have given me all a woman seeks from a man--love, companionship, sympathy, the shelter of strong arms. I had that. I have lost it. So----" A long pause. Then she added: "Usually life is almost tasteless to me. Again--for an hour or two it is a little less so--until I remember what I have lost. Then--the taste is very bitter--very bitter." And she turned away. She is a famous actress, reputed great. Some day she will be indeed great--when she has the stage experience and the years. Except for Clélie, she is alone. Not that there have been no friendships in her life. There have even been passions. With men and women of her vigor and vitality, passion is inevitable. But those she admits find that she has little to give, and they go away, she making no effort to detain them; or she finds that she has nothing to give, and sends them away as gently as may be. She has the reputation of caring for nothing but her art--and for the great establishment for orphans up the Hudson, into which about all her earnings go. The establishment is named for Brent and is dedicated to her mother. Is she happy? I do not know. I do not think she knows. Probably she is--as long as she can avoid pausing to think whether she is or not. What better happiness can intelligent mortal have, or hope for? Certainly she is triumphant, is lifted high above the storms that tortured her girlhood and early youth, the sordid woes that make life an unrelieved tragedy of calamity threatened and calamity realized for the masses of mankind. The last time I saw her---- It was a few evenings ago, and she was crossing the sidewalk before her house toward the big limousine that was to take her to the theater. She is still young; she looked even younger than she is. Her dress had the same exquisite quality that made her the talk of Paris in the days of her sojourn there. But it is not her dress that most interests me, nor the luxury and perfection of all her surroundings. It is not even her beauty--that is, the whole of her beauty. Everything and every being that is individual in appearance has some one quality, trait, characteristic, which stands out above all the rest to make a climax of interest and charm. With the rose it is its perfume; with the bird, perhaps the scarlet or snowy feathers upon its breast. Among human beings who have the rare divine dower of clear individuality the crown and cap of distinction differs. In her--for me, at least--the consummate fascination is not in her eyes, though I am moved by the soft glory of their light, nor in the lovely oval contour of her sweet, healthily pallid face. No, it is in her mouth--sensitive, strong yet gentle, suggestive of all the passion and suffering and striving that have built up her life. Her mouth--the curve of it--I think it is, that sends from time to time the mysterious thrill through her audiences. And I imagine those who know her best look always first at those strangely pale lips, curved in a way that suggests bitterness melting into sympathy, sadness changing into mirth--a way that seems to say: "I have suffered--but, see! I have stood fast!" Can a life teach any deeper lesson, give any higher inspiration? As I was saying, the last time I saw her she was about to enter her automobile. I halted and watched the graceful movements with which she took her seat and gathered the robes about her. And then I noted her profile, by the light of the big lamps guarding her door. You know that profile? You have seen its same expression in every profile of successful man or woman who ever lived. Yes, she may be happy--doubtless is more happy than unhappy. But--I do not envy her--or any other of the sons and daughters of men who is blessed--and cursed--with imagination. And Freddie--and Rod--and Etta--and the people of Sutherland--and all the rest who passed through her life and out? What does it matter? Some went up, some down--not without reason, but, alas! not for reason of desert. For the judgments of fate are, for the most part, not unlike blows from a lunatic striking out in the dark; if they land where they should, it is rarely and by sheer chance. Ruth's parents are dead; she is married to Sam Wright. He lost his father's money in wheat speculation in Chicago--in one of the most successful of the plutocracy's constantly recurring raids upon the hoardings of the middle class. They live in a little house in one of the back streets of Sutherland and he is head clerk in Arthur Sinclair's store--a position he owes to the fact that Sinclair is his rich brother-in-law. Ruth has children and she is happier in them than she realizes or than her discontented face and voice suggest. Etta is fat and contented, the mother of many, and fond of her fat, fussy August, the rich brewer. John Redmond--a congressman, a possession of the Beef Trust, I believe--but not so highly prized a possession as was his abler father. Freddie? I saw him a year ago at the races at Auteuil. He is huge and loose and coarse, is in the way soon to die of Bright's disease, I suspect. There was a woman with him--very pretty, very _chic_. I saw no other woman similarly placed whose eyes held so assiduously, and without ever a wandering flutter, to the face of the man who was paying. But Freddie never noticed her. He chewed savagely at his cigar, looking about the while for things to grumble at or to curse. Rod? He is still writing indifferent plays with varying success. He long since wearied of Constance Francklyn, but she clings to him and, as she is a steady moneymaker, he tolerates her. Brent? He is statelily ensconced up at Woodlawn. Susan has never been to his grave--there. His grave in her heart--she avoids that too, when she can. But there are times--there always will be times---- If you doubt it, look at her profile. Yes, she has learned to live. But--she has paid the price.